The Penguin History of Modern Russia

each other. It is true that the Soviet order was not on the verge of collapse. But if several of these problems were not tackled within the next few years, a fundamental crisis would occur. Stalin’s legatees were justified in feeling nervous, and knew that the next few months would be a period of great trial for them. The uncontainable surge of crowds on to the streets of Red Square as he was laid to rest alongside Lenin in the joint Lenin-Stalin Mausoleum had been a warning to his successors about the passions lurking under society’s calm surface. This was the first act of self-assertion by the people since the inception of Stalin’s dictatorship. It was by no means clear how the Kremlin leaders would respond to the challenge.

17 ‘De-Stalinization’ (1953–1961)

The people, however, had only a brief walk-on role in the drama. The major parts were jealously grabbed by Stalin’s veteran associates, who wanted to consolidate their positions of power as individuals and to preserve the compound of the Soviet order. Their common goals were to maintain the one-party, one-ideology state, to expand its economy, to control all public institutions and their personnel, to mobilize the rest of society, to secure the Soviet Union’s domination of Eastern Europe and to expand communist influence around the world. And several of these veterans were convinced that such goals were unattainable unless a reform programme were quickly to be implemented.

There was dispute about this, but at first it did not matter because all the veteran leaders had a transcendent interest in securing their power at the expense of the younger rivals whom Stalin had promoted to high office. The veterans agreed tactics before convoking a combined meeting of the Council of Ministers, the USSR Supreme Soviet and the Party Central Committee on 6 March 1953. They had already decided among themselves on the size and composition of the various leading political bodies. In particular, they arranged a decrease in the number of members of the Presidium of the Central Committee from twenty-five to ten. The purpose of this was to remove the younger leaders from the Presidium and reduce their authority. Among the older figures who asserted themselves were the three leaders — Molotov, Mikoyan and Beria — who had appeared likely to be arrested before Stalin’s death.

Malenkov benefited most from the new division of posts. He was appointed as both Chairman of the Council of Ministers and Party Central Committee Secretary. His Deputy Chairmen in the Council of Ministers were to be Beria and Molotov. Beria was to lead the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD), and this institution was merged with the Ministry of State Security (MGB) into an enlarged MVD. Molotov was promoted to Minister of Foreign Affairs and Khrushchev kept his post as Party Central Committee Secretary. They were ruthless, ambitious men, but at the time there seemed little to stop Malenkov from becoming the dominant leader in succession to Stalin.

While outward loyalty was shown to Stalin’s memory, his policies were already undergoing reconsideration. Malenkov wanted quieter relations with the West; he also favoured the boosting of industrial consumer-goods production and the intensification of agricultural techniques. Beria agreed with this and went further by demanding that concessions be made to the non-Russians in terms of political appointments in the USSR and that a lighter grip should be maintained in Eastern Europe (and secretly he resumed contact with Tito in Yugoslavia). Malenkov, Beria and Khrushchev backed a curtailment of the security police’s arbitrariness. Khrushchev’s particular priority was agriculture, and he urged the ploughing up of virgin lands in Kazakhstan as a cheap way to raise output rapidly. Only a couple of Presidium members, Molotov and Kaganovich, opposed reform. The dynamism in the central political leadership belonged to Malenkov, Beria and Khrushchev.¹

Beria organized an exhibition for Central Committee members where tapes of Stalin’s conversations with the security police were played. Stalin’s guilt in arresting innocent officials was established.² The general public had no access to the exhibition; but when the MVD announced that the accused professors in the Doctors’ Plot had been freed, it was evident that the Soviet supreme leadership wished to attenuate its reliance on terror. Articles appeared in Pravda proclaiming that the masses rather than single leaders made history. Marxism-Leninism was stated to be hostile to any ‘cult of the individual’ and to favour ‘collective leadership’. The barely disguised object of such commentary was Stalin.

Simultaneously the main reformers were locked in struggle about the rest of their reforms. On 14 March, Malenkov was compelled to choose between his respective posts in party and government. He stepped down as Central Committee Secretary, calculating that his job as Chairman of the Council of Ministers held the greater political authority. This handed the Central Committee Secretariat into the keeping of Khrushchev, who thereby acquired an incentive to strengthen the party’s authority. At the time, however, the thoughts of most leaders were preoccupied not with Khrushchev but with Beria, who embodied a double threat to all of them. First, his radical plans for reform endangered the interests of influential institutions and could even have destabilized the entire Soviet order; second, his position in the MVD gave him the capacity to deal violently with any political rivals. Beria was a complex politician. But most of his colleagues did not ponder his complexities: they simply feared him.

The reforming projects of Beria came thick and fast. He also obtained republican-level appointments in both the MVD and the communist party for his nominees; and when he introduced MVD troops to Moscow to deal with a mass outbreak of larceny (caused by his release of thousands of petty criminals from the Gulag camps!), Khrushchev and others guessed that Beria was about to use the troops to carry out a coup d’etat. They were not willing to wait to see whether their speculation was correct: Beria’s past career marked him out as a danger to everyone.

Khrushchev has left us his account of what happened next. Not unexpectedly, he appears as the hero of the drama. Apparently Khrushchev first cajoled Malenkov into joining a plot against Beria, and Voroshilov wept with relief when told of their plans. Mikoyan had his doubts but went along with the rest of the Party Presidium. On 26 June the Presidium met in the Kremlin. Khrushchev had arranged for Marshals Zhukov and Moskalenko to hide outside the door until an agreed signal for them to burst in and grab Beria. If Beria had a fault as a potential single leader, it was over-confidence. He was taken by surprise, bundled into the back of a car and held in military custody. Army commanders enthusiastically took possession of their past tormentor-in-chief. Party officials, too, were delighted at the news. Both central and local politicians felt relief that an incubus had been removed from Soviet politics.

A Central Committee plenum was held on 2 July, where Beria’s actions as head of the security police were denounced. Khrushchev’s proposal for the MVD to be placed directly under the party’s control was given warm sanction. Party officials could no longer be arrested except with permission of the party committee to which they belonged. Beria himself was accused of having been an anti-Bolshevik agent in the Civil War (which may have been true) and a British agent after the Second World War (which was nonsense). From prison he mewled to Malenkov that Khrushchev had tricked the Presidium.³ But he also acknowledged his many abuses of political power and admitted to having raped young girls. Once arrested, Beria was never very likely to emerge alive. In December 1953 he was convicted in camera and shot.

The process was rich in ironies. For the movement away from Stalin’s legacy had been engineered by typically Stalinist tactics: Beria’s judicial sentence was imposed in advance by politicians and the allegation that he was a British spy was a Stalin-style fatuity. Nevertheless the times were a-changing. The first drastic adjustment of institutional relationships since the 1930s took place as the communist party fully subordinated the state’s policing agencies to itself. A few months later, in March 1954, the gigantic Ministry of Internal Affairs was broken up into two institutions. One was still to be called the MVD and was to deal with problems of ordinary criminality and civil disorder; the other would be the Committee of State Security (KGB): as its name suggested, it was charged with the protection of the USSR’s internal and external security. No doubt the Presidium calculated that any resultant rivalry between the MVD and the KGB would render the police agencies easier to control.

Such changes were the product of decisions taken at the apex of the Soviet political system: the party leaders wanted no interference in their claim to govern. Most citizens followed developments warily. There were no illicit posters, no strikes, no demonstrations. Fear of retribution remained pervasive. Only in the camps, where the inmates had nothing left to lose, was a challenge thrown down to the authorities. In Norilsk and Vorkuta there were uprisings which were suppressed only by the introduction of armed troops who mowed down the defenceless rebels with tanks and machine guns.⁴ Yet the uprisings had some effect inasmuch as discipline in the camps