potential traitors before they had time to act. He did not trust Jews at all, and they were, in the main, eliminated from leading positions in the satellite states, and from influential ones in Moscow, though the Budapest ones had an adhesive quality, and he sacrificed some gentiles instead. Paranoia of an extreme kind reigned, but Stalin was untouchable, had knees knocking, and his nominees, while secretly hating the system, could only wait for his death.
Such was the position on 5 March 1953. Beria, with understanding from Georgy Malenkov, now moved into the vacuum, took charge of things, and had a strategy of his own. In the first place, Stalin’s crude challenges to the West had left no room for the divisions within it. We now know, for instance, that the Americans were not really using West Germany as a tool against the USSR: up to 1950, they regarded Bonn as a provisional solution, and one that had been forced upon them; they still used the machinery set up at Potsdam. But then had come the Korean War, and in 1952 Eisenhower was elected President on a strongly anti-Soviet platform: he seemed even to be saying that the USA should make use of its then enormous superiority in nuclear weapons. The Germans themselves were divided, and the one argument that Adenauer could always use was that East Germany was a tyrannically run place — no advertisement for life under ‘socialism’. The new leaders were clearly anxious to soften the line, and various things followed from this — on 27 March a limited amnesty (10,000 people, including Molotov’s Jewish wife); on 4 April, release of the imprisoned doctors of the ‘plot’; on 10 June, dropping of Soviet claims against Turkey; in June, resumption of relations with Yugoslavia and even Israel; in the same period, the Chinese at last made the vital concession in Korea, with an armistice declared in July. In fact, on 19 March the new leaders, including the true Stalinist Molotov, agreed that the Korean War must be stopped, and the Chinese foreign minister, Chou En-lai, got his orders to that effect on 21 March, in Moscow.
To all of this there was a nuclear background: the USSR was weak in that respect, and needed respite from Stalin’s warring, his turning every neighbour into an enemy. The essential question remained Germany, and here there were divisions, with Molotov following the Party line, to the effect that a Communist East Germany was a necessity. Beria had other ideas, and probably regarded the Party with contempt. Why not try a new tactic altogether: prepare to get rid of East Germany, Walter Ulbricht and all, in exchange for a Germany that would collaborate economically and politically? Such was the model of Rapallo, the Italian town where, in 1922, the USSR and Republican Germany, bizarrely represented by elderly homosexuals in pyjamas, had entered upon semi-alliance. Then, the two countries, isolated, made an agreement that even included considerable German help for Soviet industry and for that matter Soviet help for the German military. A normal and parliamentary Germany, detached from the West? A sort of Finland? And if it meant getting rid of little Ulbricht, why not?
Of course, in the then Soviet system, such things were not written down, and when eventually ‘revelations’ from the archives emerged, they did not really reveal anything more than would have been known to readers of the
On 2 June the Soviet Note said the East German leadership should, ‘to make the present political situation more healthy and to consolidate our position in Germany and the international arena, act over the German question such as to create a united, democratic, peaceful and independent Germany’. This was referred to as a ‘new course’ and there was to be some liberalization in East Germany; some of the ‘construction of socialism’ measures were to be cancelled, and the Soviet Control Commission would be replaced by a civilian, Vladimir Semyonov, political adviser to the Control Commission, a member of the NKVD and close to Beria. He was to replace Ulbricht with more pliable figures — Rudolf Herrnstadt, editor of the Party newspaper, and Wilhelm Zaisser, head of East German security, also close to Beria. After all, even East German Communists were sometimes uncomfortable with being hated and lied to. At the same time reparations were ended, and the Soviet firms set up to exploit East Germany were disbanded. Beria was in effect giving some sense to the Stalin Note of March 1952 — not intending full-scale Communization of Germany but, instead, looking for co-operation or ‘Finlandization’. From 2 to 4 June there was a conference at Berlin, ‘the new course’ being explained to Ulbricht. He went ahead with some concessions as far as small trade and farmers were concerned, and he released a few hundred political prisoners, but he did nothing to lessen the load on the industrial workers. His goal was a Communist Germany. That had been the whole purpose of his life, and he probably had some sort of encouragement from within Moscow. Ulbricht knew how the system worked. He resisted the pressure, and instead launched a ‘provocation’ (meaning, in Continental and Communist parlance, an action designed to produce its opposite). He decreed at once, in mid-May, that each worker must produce 10 per cent more, while rations went down — equivalent to a drop in wages and an increase in hours worked. The provocation duly provoked trouble. On 16 June there were demonstrations in the very centre of ‘the construction of socialism’, by builders working on the grotesque Stalin-Allee. Did Beria’s enemies stage a provocation, to discredit ‘the new course’ and Beria, in collusion with Ulbricht and Pieck, who had been trotting in and out of Soviet offices? Or were the demonstrations just what they purported to be, a rising against exploitation? On 17 June the unrest spread, with workers in the big factories in other centres of industry joining in. That day, the Soviet authorities declared martial law and sent in tanks; some 200 people were killed. The whole episode gave the West, and West Germany in particular, excellent propaganda.
It also discredited Beria. A conspiracy now grew against him, and it was inspired by Nikita Khrushchev. He had the very useful talent, in that system, of threatening no-one. He had risen through the Party, some of the time as manager of Moscow (where he tore down many old buildings). He was fat and piggy-eyedly jovial, and had a rustic air: his colleagues wrote him off as second-rate. When they agreed on the post-Stalin arrangements, their idea was to return to the days when the secretary of the Central Committee was just a technician, drowning in files. But Stalin himself had used that administrative post to great effect, because the other men in the Politburo ignored him while they fought among themselves; he controlled appointments to this or that Party function, and knew who was who. Khrushchev also knew how to do this, promoting men who would later be very useful allies. Meanwhile, given the fear of Beria that existed among the others, there was some response to Khrushchev’s prompting when he told them that Beria must be overthrown. The Berlin affair gave him a very good excuse. He had another useful ally. The war hero Marshall Georgy Zhukov had been sidelined by Stalin, and the successors brought him back as deputy defence minister: that meant troops on their side. The plotters were careful never to talk openly, there being informants or ‘bugs’ all around; they behaved towards Beria as if all were normal, even chaffing him about his spies, and in Khrushchev’s case accepting lifts in his car.
On 26 June a meeting of the Praesidium of the Council of Ministers had been called by Malenkov, who had been left in the chair. He was programmed to say at some stage that Party matters should be discussed, and that Beria’s office needed to be rationalized. Beria’s men were sitting outside the room as usual, and they had to be neutralized: that was done by Zhukov’s men, who had had weapons smuggled in. Beria arrived (as usual) self- important and late, with a briefcase. Malenkov opened up, questioning Beria’s role, and when Beria opened the briefcase, intending to take out papers, the conspirators feared that he would produce a gun and called in Zhukov’s men. They arrested him and, when dusk fell, smuggled him out of the Kremlin, wrapped in a carpet. He went off to a military prison, where he was soon joined by his closest collaborators, the torturer Viktor Abakumov especially. Written pleas, hysterical in tone, went out from the cells to Malenkov, but after a secret trial Beria was executed the following December. His crimes were publicly denounced by his ex-colleagues. Indirectly, he was taking the blame for what Stalin had done, and they were distancing themselves as best they could from the tyrant: Communism was to have a human face.
Khrushchev, the least regarded of these colleagues, did indeed have a human face, though pachydermic, and he was now asserting himself. In appearance, Malenkov had the chief role, but he had been Beria’s associate, and the next stage was for him to be eliminated. Yet again, Khrushchev was underestimated: he now became, in
