One day in the Public Library, a few of us were standing on the staircase, talking. Somebody said: ‘Why has there been such a long delay in the convocation of the Nineteenth Party Congress? Surely it is an infringement of the Party rules!’ Since the Eighteenth Party Congress [in 1939] well over five years had gone by [the Nineteenth Congress was not convened until 1952] and this seemed to us to be against the principles of Party democracy [which had called for a Congress every year between 1917 and 1925 and would guarantee one every five years between 1956 and 1986]. Then this girl said: ‘Stalin must know best!’ I looked at her and thought: ‘That’s it!’ For me she ceased to exist as a human being.*
The group began to read beyond the literature they were offered in classes. Not unlike the later dissidents, they were trying to discern a ‘moral code’, as Liudmila puts it, ‘by which we might live more honestly, without dissimulation, in a society whose basic principles negated any moral code’.
From Marx we learned about Dante, whose motto he quotes: ‘Follow your own path and let the others talk.’ We often discussed this and came to the conclusion that, though it is impossible to ignore the opinions of others completely, one should generally try to follow one’s own path, without compromising one’s principles or conforming to the crowd.13
Stalin was quick to rule out any idea of political reform. In his first major speech of the post-war era, on 9 February 1946, he made it clear that there would be no relaxation of the Soviet system. Speaking against the backdrop of mounting Cold War tensions, Stalin called for renewed discipline and sacrifices on the part of the Soviet people to recover from the damage of the war and prepare for the next global conflict, which the capitalist system was bound to bring about (‘as long as capitalism exists there will be wars and the Soviet Union must be prepared’). Stalin ordered his subordinates to deliver ‘a strong blow’ against any talk of democracy, even before such talk had become widespread. Censorship was tightened, particularly in regard to memoirs of the war, in which the collective experience tended to prompt ideas of reform.14 The NKVD was strengthened and reorganized as two separate bureaucracies in March 1946: the MVD was henceforth to control domestic security and the Gulag system; while the MGB (the forerunner of the KGB) was placed in charge of counter-intelligence and foreign intelligence, although since the regime’s enemies were
Immediately after the end of the war, Stalin launched a new purge of the army and the Party leadership, where rival power-centres, formed by groups perceived as ‘liberal’ reformers, had emerged as a challenge to his personal authority. Stalin’s first priority was to cut down the top army leaders, who enjoyed enormous popularity as a result of the victory of 1945 and, in the case of Marshal Zhukov, had become the focus of the people’s hopes for reform.* The MGB began to monitor the telephone conversations of senior military commanders. A file was kept on Zhukov, whose grandeur had reached intolerable proportions. As the military administrator of the Soviet zone of occupation in Germany, Zhukov had given a press conference in Berlin, at which he claimed the lion’s share of the credit for the Soviet victory. Denounced by Stalin for his boastfulness, Zhukov was recalled to Moscow, summoned before the Military Council and condemned by Politburo members as a Bonapartist threat to the Soviet state (all but one of the generals at the meeting spoke up in defence of the marshal). On Stalin’s orders, Zhukov was demoted to commander of the Odessa Military District; he was later sent to an obscure posting in the Urals (it could have been much worse, for there were rumours that Zhukov had been plotting a military coup against Stalin). Zhukov’s name vanished from the Soviet press. He was written out of Soviet accounts of the Great Patriotic War, which portrayed Stalin as the sole architect of victory. Other popular military heroes shared a similar fate: Marshal Antonov, the former Chief of Staff, was exiled to the command of the Transcaucasian Military District; the names of Rokossovsky, Konev, Voronov, Vatutin and many others were erased from the public record of the war; and several senior commanders were executed or imprisoned on trumped-up treason charges between 1946 and 1948.16
Stalin also turned against the Party leadership of Leningrad, a city with a strong sense of independence from Moscow and a vibrant literary culture rooted in the European values of the nineteenth century, which made it a stronghold of the intelligentsia’s reform hopes. Leningrad’s Party leaders were neither liberals nor democrats: they were technocrats who believed in the rationalization of the Soviet system. During the war, a number of them had risen to senior positions in Moscow, largely due to the powerful patronage of Andrei Zhdanov, the former Party boss of Leningrad. In the post-war years, Zhdanov was in charge of the Party apparatus and oversaw ideological matters as well as foreign policy. By the time he died of a heart attack in 1948, the Politburo contained a disproportionate number of Leningraders, including two, Nikolai Voznesensky and Aleksei Kuznetsov, who were widely seen as potential successors to Stalin. Like his brother Aleksandr, Rector of Leningrad University, Nikolai Voznesensky was a political economist. He was young, dynamic and good-looking. As the Director of Gosplan, Voznesensky had been the mastermind behind the planning of the Soviet war economy. After 1945, he looked for ways to rationalize the reconstruction of Soviet industry, embracing many ideas from the NEP,* which had done so much to revitalize the country after the destruction of the Civil War. Kuznetsov was the Central Committee secretary in charge of security affairs, but he was better known as a military hero from the siege of Leningrad, which was the main reason for his popularity in Leningrad, as well as a source of constant irritation to Stalin.
In 1949, Stalin sent Grigorii Malenkov, the head of the Party Secretariat and a bitter enemy of Voznesensky and Kuznetsov, to inspect the work of the Leningrad Party organization. The pretext of Malenkov’s visit was to investigate allegations of fixed elections by the district Party committees, but his real purpose was to break the city’s power-base. The first target was the Museum of the Defence of Leningrad, whose exposition presented the history of the siege as a collective act of heroism by the city’s people largely independent of the Party’s leadership. The Museum was closed down and its leaders arrested. The Museum’s invaluable depository of personal documents and recollections was destroyed, as if to erase all memory of the city’s independence and bravery. Then, in August 1949, Kuznetsov and Voznesensky were arrested, along with several other independent-minded Leningrad officials, including the rector of the university, in what became known as the ‘Leningrad Affair’. Accused of various trumped-up charges, from spying for Britain to debauchery, Voznesensky and the others were found guilty in a secret trial and shot on the same day in October 1950.
The post-war political clampdown was matched by a return to the austerity of the planned economy. As Stalin warned in his 9 February 1946 speech, there could be no relaxation in a situation of international tension. A new Five Year Plan was introduced that year. Huge building projects were drawn up for the restoration of the country’s infrastructure. The fantastic targets set for industrial production could only be fulfilled by a workforce of Stakhanovites. Soviet propaganda cajoled the population to brace itself for one more period of sacrifice, sweetening its message with the usual promise that hard work would be rewarded with cheap consumer goods. However, for most of the population, there was little reason for faith in such promises. Rising prices on the few available basic household goods were deflating real wages. To deal with the problem of inflation the regime introduced a currency reform in 1947, exchanging old for new money at a rate of ten to one, which drastically reduced the spending power of the rural population, in particular. It wiped out peasant savings from the market sale of garden vegetables and handicrafts during the war, when there had been a relaxation of restrictions against petty trade.17
Forced labour played an increasingly important part in the post-war Soviet economy, according to a policy dictated by Stalin and his ‘kitchen cabinet’ of advisers. With the ending of the war the pool of unpaid labour available for exploitation by the state grew enormously. Apart from Gulag prisoners and labour army conscripts, there were 2 million German POWs, and about another million from other Axis nationalities, who were mostly used for timber-felling, mining and construction, although those with skills were employed occasionally in Soviet industry. In some factories German POWs were so integral to production that detention camps were built on the factory grounds and officials tried to block the prisoners’ repatriation to Germany. The Gulag population also grew, despite the release of many prisoners in the amnesty of 1945; the camps took in well over a million new prisoners between 1945 and 1950, largely as a result of the mass arrest of ‘nationalists’ (Ukrainians, Poles, Belorussians, Latvians,
