The Penguin History of Modern Russia

measures.

Stalin and his subordinates still talked about the eventual realization of communism, reaffirming that ‘the state will not last forever’.²⁰ But how to create a communist society was not a question under consideration. Far from it. The specific aspirations of the Soviet working class no longer figured prominently in Soviet propaganda. Workers in the rest of the world were called upon to engage in revolutionary struggle, but not in the USSR. At home the main requirement was for patriotism. Stalin implicitly laid down this line even in his Marxism and Questions of Linguistics. For example, he stressed the need to reject the notion that language was the product of class-based factors. This notion had conventionally been propagated by communist zealots who declared that words and grammar were the product of the social imperatives of the ruling class of a given society. Stalin instead wanted Soviet schoolchildren to admire the poetry of the nineteenth-century writer Alexander Pushkin without regard to his aristocratic background. Patriotism was to count for more than class.²¹

Here Stalin was clarifying the doctrines of communist conservatism prominent in his thought immediately before the Second World War. As ruler and theorist he wished to emphasize that no transformation in the Soviet order was going to happen in the foreseeable future. The attitudes, policies and practices of the post-war period were meant to endure for many more years.

Nowhere was this more obvious than in the discussions in 1950–51 among 240 leading scholars about a projected official textbook on political economy. Dauntlessly many of the 240 participants took issue with the premisses of current state policy.²² Stalin entered the debate in 1952 by producing yet another booklet, The Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR. He laid down that the objective ‘laws’ of economics could not be ignored by governmental planners and that there were limits on what was achievable by human will. This was a rebuff to S. G. Strumilin, who had been among his scholarly supporters at the end of the 1920s. On the other hand, Stalin offered no hope for the relaxation of economic policy. Taking issue with L. D. Yaroshenko, he argued that the primacy of capital goods in industrial planning was unalterable; and he reprimanded V. G. Venzher and A. V. Sanina for proposing the selling-off of the state-owned agricultural machinery to kolkhozes.²³

Stalin made no mention of topics such as the party, the government, elections, relations between classes, participation, international communism, authority or terror. On a single great subject he was expansive: global capitalism. He began by declaring that the economies of war-beaten Germany and Japan would soon recover. This accurate prediction was accompanied by a prognosis which has proved awry: namely that after communism’s victory in China, the market for global capitalism would be too limited for capitalist countries to be able to expand their economies. According to Stalin, the result would be yet another world war among the major non-communist powers, and he reaffirmed Lenin’s thesis on the inevitable recurrence of such wars so long as capitalist imperialism endured. Stalin repeated that the most acute danger of a Third World War occurring lay in rivalry between one capitalist coalition and another and not between communism and capitalism.²⁴

His plan was to go on and compose a broader work; but it is unlikely that he would have tugged such a work out of the rut worn by his previous writings. Stalin had accommodated his thought to the kind of Soviet state that already existed. He ruled over this state, but needed also to rule through it.

And so relations among the various public bodies by the late 1940s were entering a stable period by the measure of the past two decades. In order to indicate that revolutionary disturbance would not recur in the institutional framework, Stalin in 1946 renamed the People’s Commissariats as Ministries. He also ordered that the Red Army should henceforward be called the Soviet Army. This emphasis on continuity with the pre-revolutionary state was reinforced artistically. In 1948 the octocentenary of Moscow’s foundation was celebrated, and a statue of the medieval patriot Prince Dolgoruki was commissioned for erection on Gorki Street. Dolgoruki’s stern visage and muscular limbs gave monumental expression to Stalin’s vision of Soviet statehood.²⁵ Architects abetted the process. The power and dignity of the USSR acquired visible form in the vast granite buildings, topped by fairy-castle decorations. Six of them were constructed in central Moscow. A seventh was added in Warsaw, as if to emphasize Poland’s inclusion in the Soviet imperial domain.

And yet Stalin could not afford to allow institutional stabilization to be carried too far. As he well understood, his despotism required him periodically to re-agitate the elements in the Soviet order. In the post-war years there remained much to worry him. Those vertical clienteles and horizontal local groups were an object of continuing concern. So, too, was the fact that each of the great organizations of state was developing its own corporate identity. Soviet Army officers, like their predecessors in the tsarist forces, had begun to see themselves almost as a separate caste. The same phenomenon — albeit to a lesser degree — was visible in the economic ministries, the security police and the party.

Furthermore, the indoctrination of administrative, professional and intellectual functionaries was far from satisfactorily achieved. Some of them had ideas which sat uncomfortably alongside Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism and which came from a variety of sources. People were influenced by folk customs and by stories and memories recounted within families. Military veterans had had a glimpse of a different way of life abroad — and their conclusions were often to the USSR’s discredit. Many others continued to be motivated by national and religious traditions. Even officially-approved publications could give rise to un-Stalinist thoughts. Scientific textbooks propounded rules of investigation and validation at variance with Stalin’s claim that Marxism was based on premisses of eternal verity. Despite the heavy censorship exercised by Glavlit, moreover, citizens could glean unorthodox ideas from the approved Russian literary classics: Pushkin’s poems and Tolstoy’s novels teemed with discussions about religion, philosophy, nationhood and — last but not least — politics.

How well Stalin was acquainted with this information is unknown; but certainly he acted to rearrange the pattern of Soviet politics. His despotic will was undiminished. When his personal physician V. N. Vinogradov advised him to run down his official duties on grounds of failing health, Stalin had him arrested. Stalin did not want others to know that he was no longer up to the job. He also turned against the chief of his bodyguards N. S. Vlasik and his personal assistant A. N. Poskrebyshev. His isolation increased. He rarely saw his beloved daughter Svetlana and had not remarried since his second wife’s death in 1932. Stalin trusted nobody.

As his suspicions grew, so too did his anti-Semitic tendencies. Several other Kremlin physicians were arrested in 1952 after being denounced by a certain Lidya Timashuk. Most of the thirteen detainees in this Doctors’ Plot had Jewish names and the tirades in the press against the ‘assassins in white coats’ produced an anti-Semitic hysteria. Individual Jews were subjected to verbal abuse by their neighbours throughout the country. It made no difference that many of them no longer practised their religion: the fact that their passports recorded them as Jewish made it easy for their persecutors to identify them. Meanwhile Stalin was giving confidential consideration to a scheme to round up all Jews and force them to live in the Jewish Autonomous Region established in eastern Siberia. Polina Zhemchuzhina, Molotov’s Jewish wife, was brought back from a camp and re-interrogated. The prospects for Soviet Jewry grew very bleak.

Nevertheless Jews were not Stalin’s sole intended victims. The treatment of Zhemchuzhina raised the question how long it might be before Politburo member Molotov, too, would share her fate. Stalin also appeared to be planning to move against past and present leaders of the Soviet security organs. Beria was a notable potential target. In 1951, arrests had begun of party and governmental officials of Mingrelian origin. Mingrelians are an ethnic division of the Georgian nation, and the fact that Beria was their most famous son was not coincidental. A bloody purge of some kind was in the offing even though its exact nature and scale remained unclear. Almost certainly something broader than the Leningrad purge of 1949 was in Stalin’s mind. The shadow cast over Molotov and Beria might well eventually reach many other persons at the apex of the Soviet state. It cannot be excluded that his ultimate purpose was to conduct yet another great bloody purge of personnel in government, party, army and police.

Probably his exact purposes will never be discovered. Certainly he did not confide them to the Nineteenth Party Congress in October 1952. The biggest event was the change of name from the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Stalin left it to Malenkov to give the Central Committee report; and the contributions not only by Malenkov but also by everyone else emphasized that Stalin’s wise leadership had their unanimous approval and gratitude. Apparently not the slightest disagreement on policy existed in the Kremlin.

Yet while offering obeisance to the officially-tabled resolutions, Stalin’s associates used indirect language to indicate their respective differences of opinion. Malenkov wanted greater attention to be paid to light-industrial investment and to the development of intensive methods of agriculture. Beria highlighted the desirability of treating