The Penguin History of Modern Russia

both sides were killed in 1952–3.

But how had the USSR and the USA allowed themselves to come so close to direct armed collision so soon after a world war in which they had been each other’s indispensable allies? The apologists for either side put the respective cases robustly. Indeed it took no great skill to present the actions of either of them as having been responsible for the onset of the Cold War. The Americans had acted precipitately. They formed a separate state in western Germany; they flaunted the possession of their nuclear weaponry; they built up Japan as an ally and established the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The Soviet Union had also behaved provocatively. It had terrorized Eastern Europe, delayed its withdrawal from Iran and supported Kim Il-Sung. Each successive crisis left the two sides ever more intransigent in their postures towards each other. Clashes between American and Soviet diplomats became normal over every matter of global politics.

Yet it would have taken little short of a miracle to avoid a Cold War. The USSR and the USA were states with diametrically-opposite interests. Both states, indeed, aimed to expand their global power and were not too scrupulous about the methods used. They also had opposing ideologies. Each thought the principles of human betterment were on its side. Each was armed to the teeth. Each operated in an environment of considerable ignorance about the politicians and society of the other side. So was the balance of responsibility equal? No, because the USSR depended much more directly than its rival upon militarism, terror and injustice to get its way. There was as much financial blandishment and political persuasion as manipulativeness and force at work in the American domination of Western Europe. But manipulativeness and force, involving systematic savagery, was the predominant method of the USSR in Eastern Europe.

The USSR and Eastern Europe were an armed camp confronting the Western Allies. The USSR itself was an armed camp charged with maintaining the subjugation of Eastern Europe. In the USSR, the Soviet political order applied the most brutal repression to its society. Stalin’s domestic order was inescapably militaristic; and only by maintaining such a posture in its foreign relations could it contrive to justify and conserve its power at home. Stalin expected to find trouble in the world and was not averse to seeking it out.

16 The Despot and his Masks

Stalin could not dominate by terror alone. Needing the support of the elites in the government, the party, the army and the security police, he systematically sought favour among them. The privileges and power of functionaries were confirmed and the dignity of institutions was enhanced. By keeping the gulf between the rulers and the ruled, Stalin hoped to prevent the outbreak of popular opposition. What is more, he tried to increase his specific appeal to ethnic Russians by reinforcing a form of Russian nationalism alongside Marxism-Leninism; and Stalin cultivated his image as a leader whose position at the helm of the Soviet state was vital for the country’s military security and economic development.

Such measures could delay a crisis for the regime; they were not a permanent solution. In any case Stalin did not adhere to the measures consistently. He was far too suspicious of his associates and the country’s elites to provide them with the entirely stable circumstances that would have alleviated the strains in politics, the economy and society. His health deteriorated after the Second World War. His holidays in Abkhazia became longer, and he sustained his efforts much more concentratedly in international relations than in domestic policy. But he could intervene whenever he wanted in any public deliberations. If an open debate took place on any big topic, it was because he had given permission. If a problem developed without reaction by central government and party authorities, it was either because Stalin did not think it very important or did not think it amenable to solution. He remained the dictator.

He so much avoided flamboyance that he refrained from giving a single major speech in the period between mid-April 1948 and October 1952. At first he declined the title of Generalissimus pressed upon him by Politburo colleagues. In a characteristic reference to himself in the third person, he wondered aloud: ‘Do you want comrade Stalin to assume the rank of Generalissimus? Why does comrade Stalin need this? Comrade Stalin doesn’t need this.’¹

But assume it he did, and he would have been angry if the torrents of praise had dried up. His name appeared as an authority in books on everything from politics and culture to the natural sciences. The Soviet state hymn, which he had commissioned in the war, contained the line: ‘Stalin brought us up.’ In the film The Fall of Berlin he was played by an actor with luridly ginger hair and a plastic mask who received the gratitude of a multinational crowd which joyfully chanted: ‘Thank you, Stalin!’ By 1954, 706 million copies of Stalin’s works had been published.² In 1949 a parade was held in Red Square to celebrate his seventieth birthday and his facial image was projected into the evening sky over the Kremlin. His official biography came out in a second edition, which he had had amended so as to enhance the account of his derring-do under Nicholas II. His height was exaggerated in newsreels by clever camera work. The pockmarks on his face were airbrushed away. This perfect ‘Stalin’ was everywhere while the real Stalin hid himself from view.

Among the peoples of the USSR he strained to identify himself with the ethnic Russians. In private he talked in his native tongue with those of his intimates who were Georgian; and even his deceased wife Nadezhda Allilueva had Georgian ancestors.³ He ran his supper parties like a Georgian host (although most such hosts would not have thrown tomatoes at his guests as Stalin did).⁴ But publicly his origins embarrassed him after a war which had intensified the self-awareness and pride of Russians; and his biography referred just once to his own father’s nationality.⁵ Stalin placed the Russian nation on a pedestal: ‘Among all peoples of our country it is the leading people.’⁶ Official favour for things Russian went beyond precedent. The lexicographers were told to remove foreign loan-words from the dictionaries. For instance, the Latin-American tango was renamed ‘the slow dance’.⁷ The history of nineteenth-century science was ransacked and — glory be! — it was found that practically every major invention from the bicycle to the television had been the brainchild of an ethnic Russian.

Simultaneously the Soviet authorities re-barricaded the USSR from alien influences. Polina Zhemchuzhina, Molotov’s wife, was imprisoned for greeting the Israeli emissary Golda Meir too warmly. The poet Boris Pasternak was terrified when the Russian-born British philosopher, Isaiah Berlin, then serving as a diplomat in Moscow, paid him a visit at home. Stalin expressed the following opinion to Nikita Khrushchev: ‘We should never allow a foreigner to fly across the Soviet Union.’⁸ After the war, Kliment Voroshilov placed a ban on the reporting of Canadian ice-hockey results.⁹ Great Russia always had to be the world’s champion nation. A propaganda campaign was initiated to stress that there should be no ‘bowing down’ before the achievements and potentiality of the West.

All national groups suffered, but some suffered more than others. The cultures of Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians — who had only recently been re-conquered — were ravaged. The same occurred to the Romanian- speaking Moldavians; in their case even their language was emasculated: first it was equipped with a Cyrillic alphabet and then its vocabulary compulsorily acquired loan-words from Russian so as to distinguish it strongly from Romanian.¹⁰ The Ukrainian language was decreasingly taught to Ukrainian-speaking children in the RSFSR.¹¹ More sinister still was the experience of a philologist who was imprisoned simply for stating that some Finno-Ugric languages had more declensions than Russian. Historiography became ever more imperialist. Shamil, the leader of the nineteenth-century rebellion in the North Caucasus against tsarism, was depicted unequivocally as a reactionary figure. Anyone dead or alive who since time immemorial had opposed the Russian state was prone to be denounced.¹²

The nationality which underwent the greatest trauma were the Jews. The Anti-Fascist Jewish Committee was closed down without explanation, and its leader and outstanding Yiddish singer Solomon Mikhoels was murdered in a car crash on Stalin’s orders. Several prominent Soviet politicians who happened to be Jewish, such as Semen Lozovski, disappeared into prison.

Stalin, starting with his article on the national question in 1913, refused to describe the Jews as a nation since, unlike the Ukrainians or Armenians, they did not inhabit a particular historic territory. In 1934 he sought to give them a territory of their own by establishing a ‘Jewish Autonomous Region’ in Birobidzhan and asking for volunteers to populate it. But Birobidzhan lay in one of the coldest regions of eastern Siberia. Little enthusiasm was invoked by the project, and after the war there was tentative talk about turning Crimea instead into a Jewish