burst upon Russia. Its specific political meaning will be discussed later — here we are concerned only with its bearing upon the moral crisis of Stalinism.
It is not certain whether or to what extent Stalin himself was responsible for the frame-up. But, regardless of this, in the eyes of Russia and of the world Stalinism reduced itself to a ghastly absurdity through this incident. It committed moral suicide even before the physical death of its author. The official revelations about the ‘plot’ looked like an attempt to re-enact in Moscow the Witches' Sabbath of the 1930's. As has been pointed out before, the purge trials of the 1930's could not be repeated in the Russia of the early 1950's without ruining the regime, the economy, and the morale of the country. A repetition would have clashed so obviously with Russia's interests and frame of mind that a reaction against it, unthinkable earlier, had to come.
The untamed nationalism of recent years was also driven to a self-destructive extreme during the campaign about the doctors' plot. The tale about the anti-Soviet conspiracy of world Jewry had the flavour of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and of the concoctions of Goebbels's Ministry of Propaganda. It provided grist to the mills of those anti-communists who had always maintained that there was no difference between Stalinism and Nazism and now argued that the inherent kinship of the two was ‘bound’ to make Stalinism adopt the tenets of racial hatred and anti-Semitism. The argument was superficial and fallacious: it ignored the socialist background of Soviet Russia and the contradictions in the educational influence of Stalinism.
A government which ordered the printing of the works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin in millions of copies, which included these works in the obligatory educational
Before embracing racialism and anti-Semitism any Soviet government would first have to ban the works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, that is to say to destroy its own birth certificate and ideological title deeds. As Stalinism had not done this, its last scandal served only to underline its own decomposition and to prepare a revulsion against it.
CHAPTER SEVEN
MALENKOV AND HIS ROLE
Malenkov's government took the initiative of reform already in the first weeks of its existence. In doing so it may have acted under popular pressure; but the pressure was not apparent. It was not the ‘voice of the people’ that made Stalin's successors act as they did, for that voice could not be heard. Malenkov's government seemed rather to have guessed the hopes and expectations that were in the people's mind. If any voices did in fact demand reform, they came from the bureaucracy itself or rather from its uppermost stratum.
As representative of that stratum Malenkov came to the fore and to all intents and purposes assumed the succession.
Who is Georgi Maximilianovich Malenkov?
His previous career strongly suggested that he was merely Stalin's shadow, with no political personality of his own.
Almost nothing significant is known about his background, upbringing, and early days. His origins are wrapped in the same obscurity in which Stalin's once were. Like Stalin, he hails from a border zone between Europe and Asia, from the Urals. There may be a hint of non-Russian descent in his patronymic: Maximilian is hardly the name of a ‘pure’ Russian. In his late teens Malenkov joined the Red Army and the party, and he was a junior political commissar during the civil war in Turkestan. In the early and middle 1920's he studied at the Moscow Institute of Technology.
The Institute, like all other academic establishments in the capital, was astir with inner party controversy. Trotsky had appealed to young communists, especially to students, against the triumvirate of Stalin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev, and warned the young party men about the danger of a ‘political degeneration’ of the ruling group. The appeal did not fail to evoke response. Trotsky had ardent followers among the communist students. The anti- Trotskyists listened to Bukharin rather than to Stalin, whose theoretical argumentation was uninspiring and pedestrian. It seems that Malenkov, like Zhdanov, his supposed rival in later years, was one of the very few students who took their cue direct from Stalin's General Secretariat.
In his more mature years Malenkov became a member of that Secretariat, the hub of the organization through which Stalin ruled the country. There Malenkov studied the technology of monolithic government. In the course of many years he carefully assimilated Stalin's manner of dealing with men and situations, his administrative methods, and even his mannerisms. Like his master, he shunned great theoretical conceptions of policy and public debates about them. He learned the art of empirical policy-making in a narrow, closely knit group of leaders who viewed ideas primarily from the angle of administrative necessity or convenience.
The ideas often clashed with professed principles and with what the party propagandists were saying. Stalin's policy always had two aspects: one was esoteric, occult; the other was exoteric, designed for mass consumption. His secretaries had to master both aspects, and never confuse them in their own minds. The exoteric aspect might appear baffling, incoherent, even downright stupid. But the
In the late 1930's Malenkov was already in charge of the party ‘cadres’. It was his responsibility to assign ‘the right man to the right job’ at every turn of policy. On Stalin's behalf, he already held the party in his hands and wielded much greater influence than did the members of the Politbureau who on ceremonial occasions appeared at the Lenin Mausoleum by Stalin's side. As early as 1939 Malenkov brought about the dismissal of Mrs. Molotov from a Ministerial post — he had attacked her publicly for mismanaging her department. His position was becoming similar to that which Stalin had held under Lenin. But to keep his influence and to enlarge it, Malenkov had to behave towards Stalin with the utmost discretion and modesty and to show no sign of vacillation, let alone of independence. Only as Stalin's shadow could he continue to gather power in his own hands.
He had taken over the management of the ‘cadres’ at the time of the great purges, when most of the old party personnel was destroyed or demoted and vacancies had to be filled with new men. The keymen in the party machine of the late 1930’s and 1940's were therefore ‘Malenkov men’. In this respect Malenkov's position was already stronger than Stalin's in the early and middle 1920's, because at that time Stalin had still to eliminate his opponents from the party machine and to fill the decisive posts with his minions.
Stalin deliberately fashioned Malenkov's career so that it should appear as similar to his own as possible. He seemed bent on forming Malenkov in his own image, and he projected, as it were, certain landmarks of his own life into the life of Malenkov. He gave Malenkov the same assignments with which he himself had been entrusted by Lenin. During the Second World War he sent Malenkov to the same critical front-line areas that he himself had inspected in the civil war, including Stalingrad, his old Tsaritsyn. The Tsaritsyn episode of 1918 had been vested by Stalin's hagiographers with so much symbolic significance and with so great a halo that, in the eyes of people brought up in the Stalin cult, Malenkov's mission to Stalingrad at once transferred to him the glories of the young Stalin. In truth, Malenkov's merits as the political commissar responsible for the battle of Stalingrad were more serious and real than the merits which Stalin claimed for himself in connection with the defence of Tsaritsyn in 1918.
Little can be said about the supposed rivalry between Malenkov and Zhdanov in later years. Unlike Malenkov, Zhdanov had the ambitions of the intellectual and the theoretician; and this difference in their outlook may have led to a rivalry faintly, but only very faintly, reminiscent of that between Stalin and Trotsky. Being in charge of the party organization in Leningrad, Zhdanov was somewhat removed from the levers of power at the centre, and his chances against Malenkov were hardly serious. After Zhdanov's death, Malenkov's ascendancy was secure, but he still had to contend against the old Stalin guard headed by Molotov, who could claim seniority in the party hierarchy. Stalin himself had apparently overridden this claim when, at the Nineteenth Congress of the party,
