the non-Russians more carefully. After propounding his agricultural schemes, Khrushchev declared that every party member should display ‘vigilance’: a conventional code-word for support of political repression. A careful reader of the
Only at the Central Committee elected by the Congress did Stalin at last reveal his impatience. Firstly he asked to resign as Central Committee Secretary. Malenkov was chairing the session and turned white with dread lest the Central Committee members failed spontaneously to rise to their feet to deny Stalin his request. Luckily for him, they did.26
Then Stalin gave an impromptu address. Still speaking of his weariness, he gave the impression that he knew this might be the last speech he made. In particular, he rambled through his memories of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918: ‘And what about Lenin? Just you read again what he said and what he wrote at that time. He let out a roar at that time, in so incredibly grievous a situation; he thundered, he was scared of no one. Thundered, he did.’ In almost the same breath Stalin considered his own career. While almost begging the Central Committee to compare him favourably with Lenin, he also wanted to appear as the party’s modest and dutiful leader. ‘Once this task has been entrusted to me,’ he declared, ‘I carry it through. But not in such a way that it’s accredited only to me. I’ve not been brought up that way.’27
This was a man anticipating his obituary. Stalin, too, wanted to be remembered as a leader of courage and foresight, a leader who thundered. These were not the characteristics which immediately sprang to mind among those who knew him at close quarters: he had not been notably brave, foresightful or devoid in vanity.
Weary or not, Stalin continued to pose a deadly threat to his colleagues. Halfway through his Central Committee address he suddenly accused Molotov and Mikoyan of political cowardice.28 They rejected his criticisms as tactfully as they could in the circumstances, and the topic was dropped. Nevertheless Central Committee members had been shocked by the episode. Many of them concluded that Stalin wanted at the very least to prevent these two veteran leaders from succeeding him. This impression was strengthened by other moves he made at the Central Committee plenum. For example, he redesignated the Politburo as a Presidium and increased the number of its members to twenty-five. The sinister aspect of the change was that Stalin simultaneously secured the appointment of a seven-person Bureau of the Presidium which, by involving mainly the younger leaders, would allow him to drop the veterans at a convenient moment in the future.
Several central politicians already had reason to expect to be arrested before he collapsed in his dacha at Kuntsevo on 1 March 1953. The sudden, secret nature of his indisposition gave rise to rumours that someone, perhaps Beria, had ordered some skulduggery. Certainly Beria and fellow Politburo members took an unconscionably long time to make a serious attempt to resuscitate Stalin over the next few days.29 The kindest interpretation is that they were too afraid to intervene in decisions on his medical care. Finding him on the floor of his bedroom, they dithered as to what to do with his body; and after doctors pronounced him definitely dead on 5 March, there was much weeping over his passing. Their Boss had entranced as well as horrified them.
Their grief was shared in homes and on the streets after the radio announcement was made on 6 March. Stalin’s funeral took place on Red Square three days later. Foreign statesmen attended as Molotov, Malenkov and Beria pronounced eulogies to the deceased dictator. Molotov, despite having a wife held in prison on Stalin’s orders, was visibly distraught. Malenkov was better composed. But Beria in private dropped all pretence of respect for Stalin and cursed his memory. After the speeches, Stalin’s corpse, embalmed by experts from the same institute as had developed the technique for Lenin, was displayed in what was renamed as the Lenin-Stalin Mausoleum. A silence was meant to descend over Moscow. But such was the crowd in the nearby streets that a commotion broke out. The pressure of bodies led to dozens of fatalities. From under the glass the chemically-treated corpse could still terminate innocent lives.
And so Stalin’s accomplices came into a disturbing inheritance. It is true that the Soviet Union was still a superpower. It dominated Eastern Europe. It had the world’s second largest industrial capacity; its population was literate and acquiescent. The armed forces, the security organs, the party and the ministries of government were calmly able to confront their duties. If Soviet leaders were going to face trouble in 1953, it would arise only because they had grossly mishandled opinion among the elites or fallen out irretrievably among themselves — and the leaders could at least take consolation from the fact that Stalin’s death had pre-empted the immediate possibility of a massive purge that would lead to the deaths of leaders, their cliental groups and perhaps millions of other people.
Yet enormous problems had been bequeathed by him, and not the least of them was agricultural. Malenkov had asserted at the Nineteenth Party Congress that wheat production had recovered to the level of 1940 and that the country’s grain problem had been solved ‘definitively and forever’. This was nonsense. The statistics were a wild exaggeration of reality since they were based upon what was known as the ‘biological yield’. This was a calculation derived from observations of the crop before it was harvested. Subsequent loss of grain in fact often occurred through bad weather; and it always took place because the harvest was stored so badly. Furthermore, whole regions of Russia had fallen out of cultivation. The kolkhozniki were under-paid and over-taxed, and the demographic structure of countless villages was distorted by the exodus of most able-bodied men and the young of both sexes. The neglect of rural problems could not be allowed to persist.
Even the forced-labour system presented difficulty. Discontent was on the rise in the prisons, camps, colonies and ‘special settlements’ where 5.5 million prisoners were still held.30 A rebellion in Kolyma in 1949 was followed by another near Krasnoyarsk in 1951 and yet others in Labytnangi and Ozerlag in 1952.31 Permanent quiescence in the Gulag could no longer be taken for granted.
At the same time it was questionable whether the ‘free’ industrial sector could continue as previously. Workers were too afraid to go on strike, but resented their conditions of labour, their low wages and poor diet and housing. There was little that administrators could do to make them more conscientious; and the administrators themselves were constrained by patterns of organization inimical to honesty and independent thought. Wasteful methods of production persisted in factories, mines and other enterprises. Stalin, furthermore, had rejected advice to invest substantially in chemical industries or in natural gas. His projections had become extremely inflexible. Capital goods in general and armaments in particular were given reinforced priority: expenditure on the armed forces, their weaponry and equipment, was forty-five per cent more in 1952 than two years earlier. This was a great strain upon the Soviet budget and was not indefinitely sustainable.
National problems, too, had accumulated. Acute, lasting embitterment had been caused by Stalin’s deportations of nationalities during and after the Second World War; and the elevation of the prestige of the Russians above the other peoples of the USSR also caused lasting offence. Science and culture, too, were subjected to excessive supervision. Not only writers and scientists but also teachers, engineers, lawyers and managers worked in fear. Initiative from below was thwarted. The disgruntlement among administrative, professional and intellectual groups was intensifying. They especially wanted to work without fear of imprisonment. Only terror at the punitive repercussions held them back from complaining publicly.
All in all, Stalin’s system of rule was not at its most effective when dealing with an increasingly complex society. The government, the party, the army and the security police — at metropolitan as well as local levels — were run on principles of the most rigid hierarchy. The scope for constructive consultation and collaboration had been severely reduced. The Soviet state as a whole was vastly over-centralized. Policies were decided by a tiny group of leaders, and the danger that they might blunder was acute. The leadership itself was subject to permanent intimidation; none of its members could fail to be mindful of the power of the security organs. For years the various Politburo members had taken objection to official policies but never dared to express themselves openly. Stalin had scared them rigid. In short, there was too much fear and too little trust for such a system to endure indefinitely.
The world outside was also dangerous. East European nations resented their subjugation to the Soviet Union. The USA and its allies in NATO had no intention of rescuing them from this position; but resistance to further communist expansion was a firm objective. The Korean War was a suppurating sore in relations between the USSR and the USA.
These were among the problems left behind by Stalin. They existed in every area of public life: politics, economy, ethnic relations, culture, security and continental and global power. And they complicated and aggravated
