and only a very few clandestine dissentient groups were formed. These consisted mainly of students, who were quickly arrested. In any case, such students were committed to a purer version of Leninism than Stalin espoused: the communist dictatorship had lasted so long that young rebels framed their ideas in Marxist-Leninist categories. Lenin, the planner of dictatorship and terror, was misunderstood by such students as a libertarian. The groups anyway failed to move beyond a preliminary discussion of their ideas before being caught and arrested by the security police.
Most other citizens who detested Stalin were grumblers rather than insurrectionaries. Police phone-tappers recorded the following conversation between General Rybalchenko and General Gordov:
Rybalchenko: So this is the life that has begun: you just lie down and die! Pray God that there won’t be another poor harvest.
Gordov: But where will the harvest come from? You need to sow something for that!
Rybalchenko: The winter wheat has been a failure, of course. And yet Stalin has travelled by train. Surely he must have looked out of the window? Absolutely everyone says openly how everyone is discontented with life. On the trains, in fact everywhere, it’s what everyone’s saying.14
This loose talk led to their arrest. But no matter how many persons were caught in this way, the resentment against the regime persisted. A local party secretary, P. M. Yemelyanov, gave this confidential warning: ‘There are going to be revolts and uprisings, and the workers will say: “What were we fighting for?” ’15 Even Stalin seemed to feel the need to choose his words with circumspection. In a speech on 24 May 1945 he acknowledged that society had had every right in mid-1941 ‘to say to the Government: you have not justified our expectations; get out of here altogether and we shall install another government which will conclude a peace with Germany’.16
Yet this was a long way from being a fulsome confession. On the contrary, he was inculpating the Soviet government as if he himself had not led that government. Nor did he relent in his practical campaigns of mass repression. Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldavia, western Ukraine were subjected to a resumed quota of deportations. Those persons who had collaborated with the German occupying forces were imprisoned, and the Soviet security forces hunted down ‘bandits’ and ‘kulaks’.17 The arrests were not confined to overt opponents. Prominent among the victims were also persons guilty of no other crime than the fact that they belonged to the political, economic and cultural elites of the local nationality. According to the police files, 142,000 citizens of the three formerly independent Baltic states were deported in 1945–9. Most of the deportees were dispatched to ‘special settlements’ in the Russian far north, Siberia and Kazakhstan.18
This meant that Russians, too, came to learn of Stalin’s continued application of terror even though the violence was at its most intense outside the RSFSR in the USSR’s ‘borderlands’. Many gained such knowledge still more directly if they happened to have had relatives taken prisoner by the Wehrmacht. Vlasov, the Russian Liberation Army leader, fell into Soviet captivity and was hanged. His soldiers were either shot or sent to labour camps, usually for terms of between fifteen and twenty-five years.19 But Stalin did not restrict himself to military renegades. The infamous Order No. 270 that defined as a traitor anyone taken captive by the Germans had not been repealed. Emaciated by their suffering in Hitler’s concentration camps, 2,775,700 former Red Army soldiers were taken into Soviet custody upon their repatriation. After being interrogated by the Department of Verification-Filtration Camps, about half of them were transferred into the Gulag system.20
The usual pressure to guarantee a supply of inmates to the forced-labour camps had been intensified by Stalin’s predictable decision to catch up with the Americans and British in nuclear-bomb capacity.21 He had put Beria in charge of the bomb research project, commanding him to build testing-sites, to assemble scientists (including captured Germans), to collect American secrets by means of the Soviet spy network, to discover and mine the necessary natural resources. Hundreds of thousands of Gulag prisoners were deployed in the secret quest for uranium.22
The technology of war had changed, and Stalin’s simple response was to want the USSR to stay abreast of the transformation. Yet even Stalin perceived that several major political and economic questions did not offer easy answers. Debate was allowed in his inner circle of leaders about the difficulties; academics and journalists were also allowed, within prescribed limits, to offer their opinions to the leadership in books, journals and newspapers. Such deliberations, especially in 1945–7, were lively enough to strengthen the hope among some of the participants that Stalin might be contemplating a permanent softening of his political style. These were, as the last tsar had said in 1895 about projects for reform, ‘senseless dreams’. The one-party, one-ideology state; the retention of the peoples of the USSR and Eastern Europe under Soviet imperial control; the Stalinist personal dictatorship: these basic features of the compound of the Soviet order as modified in the course of Stalin’s rule were held firmly beyond the scope of permissible discussion.
Yet some questions of immense importance had to be kept under collective review: even Stalin did not trust himself to anticipate everything. In foreign policy, he felt nervous about the USA’s ambitions. Potential flashpoints in Soviet-American relations existed not only in Japan, China and Iran but also in Europe. The Soviet leadership had to decide whether to support revolutionary movements in France, Italy and Greece. Jeno Varga, Director of the Institute of the World Economy and World Politics, urged caution and argued that a parliamentary road to communism was in any case a realistic possibility in Western Europe. By contrast, Politburo member Zhdanov argued that revolutionary movements should be encouraged wherever they might arise — and he warmed to the Yugoslav communist leaders who criticized the slowness of the political and economic changes being imposed by communist parties elsewhere in Eastern Europe.23
Issues at home were equally vexatious. The problems of state organization that had arisen in the 1930s remained unresolved. The party’s role was yet again controversial and this time the protagonists were Zhdanov and Malenkov. Zhdanov wished to restore the party’s role in selecting governmental cadres and in mobilizing society whereas Malenkov opposed an increase in the party’s authority and wished to keep the party organized along the lines of branches of the economy.24 Their dispute was only in part a competition to become Stalin’s prime adjutant. It was also the result of the inherent structural tensions within the one-party state.
This was not the only dissension in the Soviet political leadership. On industry, there was severe disagreement about regional policy. At first it was the Politburo’s policy to accelerate the development of Siberia and central Asia; but Molotov and Voznesenski apparently preferred to concentrate resources in the traditional European manufacturing regions where the costs of production were smaller and where the population was greater. And while the priority for capital-goods production was fixed, the precise proportion of expenditure to be left for the requirements of civilian consumers was contentious. Mikoyan advocated the boosting of light-industrial production. On agriculture, Khrushchev felt the collective farms were too small and called for amalgamations that would lead to the establishment of ‘agrotowns’. Andreev argued the opposite, proposing the division of each farm’s work-force into several groups (or ‘links’) that would take responsibility for particular tasks.25
The agenda for deliberations at the highest level was therefore large. Its major items included the following: the military and diplomatic competition with the USA; the security of Soviet frontiers; Eastern Europe; the communist movement in Western Europe; industrial planning and investment; agricultural organization; the scope of national and cultural self-expression. Decision-making was complicated because the various items intersected with each other. And this was not a static situation: the post-war world was in rapid flux.
Soviet politicians operated in an environment that was exceedingly unsettling. Molotov, Zhdanov, Malenkov, Khrushchev, Voznesenski and Beria had to compete for Stalin’s approval. After the war it was Zhdanov who was his favourite. Zhdanov returned to the Central Committee Secretariat in Moscow in 1946. He brought with him the prestige of a leader who had spent time in Leningrad while it was under siege by the Germans. Malenkov’s career went into eclipse. But Zhdanov, sodden with drink, died in August 1948. An alliance was formed between Malenkov and Beria. Together they plotted the demise of Zhdanov’s proteges. Practically the entire Leningrad and Gorki party leadership was executed in 1949. Even Politburo member and native Leningrader Voznesenski, who had argued against some of Zhdanov’s proposals, was incarcerated. Voznesenski was shot in 1950. Civilian political struggle was resuming its bloody pre-war characteristics.
Zhdanov’s scheme for a resurgent communist party was abandoned and the authority of the economic agencies of the government was confirmed. The USSR was still a one-party state; but the party as such did not rule it. The Politburo rarely met. No Party Congress was held after the war until 1952. The party was pushed back into the role proposed for it by Kaganovich in the mid-1930s: it was meant to supervise the implementation of policy, not to initiate it and certainly not to interfere in the detailed operation of governmental bodies. The infrequency of meetings of the party’s supreme bodies — the Congress, the Central Committee and the Politburo — meant that
