suspicion.
No sooner had Zhukov led the victory parade on Red Square and completed Allied military negotiations with Eisenhower and Montgomery in Berlin than he was pulled out of the limelight. Stalin had plenty of compromising material against him. The security agencies reported to the Kremlin that Zhukov had stolen a trainload of loot from Germany. The list was enormous, including 3,420 silks, 323 furs, 60 gilt-framed pictures, 29 bronze statues and a grand piano.26 This was established custom in the Red occupying forces. Practically every commander could have been arraigned on similar charges. Stalin played with the idea of a trial but in June 1946 limited himself to relegating the victor of Kursk and Berlin to the Odessa Military District (from which he was in turn dismissed in February 1947).
The security agencies too came under suspicion. Here Stalin’s method was different. Beria in peacetime, unlike Zhukov, was too useful to discard. Yet it suited Stalin to replace him in the leadership of the police. Beria knew too much and had too many clients whom he had appointed to office. Stalin therefore put Beria in charge of the Soviet atom-bomb project and introduced younger men to the Ministry of State Security (MGB) and to the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD). The appointee to the MVD in December 1945 was Sergei Kruglov, and Alexei Kuznetsov was given oversight over security matters on the Politburo’s behalf; Viktor Abakumov became head of the MGB in May 1946. Although continuity of administrative leadership was desirable in theory, Stalin’s higher demand was his inviolable personal power. A police chief who settled into office could pose an acute danger to him, especially since the MGB had uniformed forces which could be deployed in the normal course of events. Stalin also retained his own parallel security agency in the form of the Special Department. He relied heavily on Poskrebyshev to keep him apprised of anything important to his interests. He also ensured that his bodyguard chief Vlasik should be beholden to himself and to no one else. This was a police state where the ruler held his police in permanent mistrust.
Yet his simultaneous reliance on the MGB and MVD was intense. Without their operational efficiency it would have been difficult to reduce the standing of the Soviet Army leadership. The Soviet budget continued to allocate massive resources to the security agencies. The Gulag still produced a crucial proportion of the country’s diamonds, gold and timber, and the uranium mines were developed after 1945 with convict labour. Indeed Stalin’s reliance on the security agencies grew as he reinforced policies which frustrated the hopes of most citizens for political and economic relaxation. Coercion of society was hugely important.
Yet not even Stalin projected a future for the USSR when the MGB and MVD would be the effective government. The Council of Ministers retained that function. The increasing complexity of the economy required specialist knowledge lacking in the security agencies. The Council of Ministers also sought to free itself from excessive tutelage by party bodies: a technocratic imperative was pursued by several leading political figures. This was an old discussion that had exercised Stalin’s mind throughout the 1930s. As previously, he moved between two solutions. One was to give way to the ministerial lobby and put a stop to the party’s interference. This was the orientation espoused especially by Georgi Malenkov. The other solution was to extend and strengthen the powers of the party, if not to the pitch of the late 1920s then at least to the detriment of the Council of Ministers in the 1940s. Among the advocates of this orientation was Andrei Zhdanov. Stalin in the early years after the Second World War leaned positively in the direction of Zhdanov. But then Zhdanov fell into disfavour, and he began to give backing to Malenkov.27
The arguments, from a structural viewpoint, were finely poised. Zhdanov and his friends could indicate that the Council of Ministers, left to itself, could not guarantee Stalinist ideological rectitude. Without this, the October Revolution was undermined and the rationale of the USSR’s existence was ruined. The Soviet Union could not survive on technocratic impulses alone. Yet the other side of the debate had an equally strong case. The USSR functioned in a world of intense military and economic competition. If party doctrinaires held the whip hand over ministerial specialists, the country’s capacity to match the USA and its capitalist allies would be reduced. Pettifogging tutelage by the party would tie one of the Soviet Union’s hands behind its back in a contest which placed the West at an advantage.
Stalin did not need to be persuaded that the USSR had to become more competitive or that ideological indoctrination and political control were important. His state could do without neither government nor party; and even when he gave preference to one of them over the other, he omitted to make the choice a definitive one. The institutional tension worked to his personal advantage. By locking the two bodies in rivalry, he strengthened his position as arbiter. But this in turn meant that he had to settle for a lower level of administrative efficiency that he would otherwise have liked. He started from the premise that each institution pursued its interests at the expense of others. Persistent rivalries led to systematic obstruction. The tangled competences of government, party and police produce a thicket of bureaucratic paperwork which slowed down the processes of deliberation and implementation. Dynamism was introduced when Stalin himself gave a direct order or when he allowed an influential group of subordinates to pursue a desired initiative. But Stalin knew he could not know everything. The network of central institutional bodies worked well to maintain his despotism; it was less effective in facilitating flexible, efficient rulership. Stalin paid a price for his despotism.
49. POLICIES AND PURGES
Stalin did not confine his Kremlin political activity to manipulating the existing central structures and playing the leading politicians off against each other. There had to be constant deliberation on policies in the dangerous post-war years. The external and internal situation was always in flux and Stalin could not cope without consulting his fellow leaders. He had to accept that limits existed to what he could learn about the world by his solitary efforts. Nor could he safely rely exclusively on his own judgement. It was pragmatic to sanction a degree of diversity of opinion among his subordinates before fixing policy. Disagreements among the leaders were not only inevitable: they were also desirable. There was no secret about this; Politburo members understood how they were being manipulated. But they also saw that if they failed to take a position when affairs were under discussion, Stalin might decide that they were no longer of any use to him. At the same time they had to avoid saying anything which would annoy him. Short of assassinating him, they remained at his mercy — and his scrupulous attention to the details of his personal security made it highly unlikely that an attempt on his life would be successful.
Stalin’s leading associates were in any case simultaneously occupied with the discharge of their institutional duties. Immense responsibility fell to each of them and their power and privileges were at least some compensation for the subjugated condition of their work. They were also motivated by patriotic zeal and, in some cases, ideological commitment. They had operated under Stalin’s control for years. It is hardly a surprise that he continued dominating and exploiting them just as they did their own subordinates.
And so Stalin frequently shuffled the pack of the leadership as individuals won or lost his trust in the battles he permitted over policy. One leader he demoted soon after the war was Vyacheslav Molotov. Alongside Kaganovich and Mikoyan, Molotov was his longest-serving subordinate. Initially all seemed well. When Stalin went south on vacation in October 1945, he left the foursome of Molotov, Beria, Mikoyan and Malenkov in charge of the Kremlin.1 But almost certainly he was looking for a pretext to attack Molotov, and the incident over the publication of excerpts of Churchill’s speeches gave him what he wanted. Stalin may have resented Molotov’s wartime fame as well as his popularity as an ethnic Russian. The British press must have made the situation still worse by speculating that Molotov was flexing his muscles to assume power.2 The beneficiaries of the demise of Molotov were Malenkov and Beria, who in March 1946 were promoted — at a rare Party Central Committee plenum — to full membership of the Politburo, and Malenkov’s name came after Stalin’s in the composition of the Orgburo and Secretariat.3 Molotov was not sacked as Minister of External Affairs until March 1949 but his time as Stalin’s deputy had already ceased.
Yet although Stalin was resentful and suspicious, even he did not yet wish to get rid entirely of Molotov. When Trygve Lie, Secretary-General of the United Nations Organisation, visited Stalin in Moscow in May 1950, Stalin
