Stalin and His Hangmen (69 page)

Only the hardbitten like the critic Viktor Shklovsky – his brother, a priest, had been shot – had an inkling of what Stalin would do: ‘Victory will give us nothing good… Our regime has always been the most cynical of any that have ever existed; the anti-Semitism of the communist party is just delightful… I have no hope of the allies exerting any beneficial influence. They will be declared imperialists the moment peace talks begin.’ Even a conformist like Aleksei Tolstoi feared that ‘when war comes to its completion we shall still have to fight our allies for the partition and remaking of Europe.’ The novelist Sergei Golubov was equally grim:

Any kind of changes for the better, any freedom of thought, of artistic creation is out of the question for us, for we have the inertia of power, of an order which has been established for all time. The authorities are incapable, even if they wanted to, of the slightest concessions in public life or the collective farms, the economy, for that might make a crack into which all the dissatisfaction that has piled up would gush.

Like many writers, Golubov was overwhelmed by poverty: ‘Where else, except in the USSR, can a writer be asked such a crazy question as: “Are you suffering from malnutrition?” A writer can be gratified with a sack of potatoes or a pair of trousers.’

By summer 1944, optimism was fading. Books were not passing the censor; writers were being reprimanded by cretinous party officials. Kornei Chukovsky, the translator and much-loved children’s poet from Leningrad, complained of

the most terrible centralization of literature, its subordination to the tasks of the Soviet empire… I am living in an anti-democratic country, in the country of despotism… The dependence of our press today has led to the silence of talents and the squawk of the sycophants… With the fall of the Nazi despotism, the world of democracy will find itself facing our Soviet despotism.

Stalin and Merkulov cracked down on the self-assertion of intellectuals as mercilessly as they had on the national identity of the Chechens or Crimean Tatars. Merkulov announced that all writers who had expressed rebellious opinions were being ‘worked on’. The monthly journals, their main outlet and source of income, were brought to heel. Stricter editors were installed. Writers and film directors were told to produce epics showing Stalin’s wise and heroic conduct of the war.

Stalin’s younger acolytes Georgi Malenkov and Andrei Zhdanov, relatively well-educated members of the Politbiuro, were told they had to restore order in the arts. The Leningrad journal
Zvezda (Star)
annoyed them most. Leningrad, despite its authoritarian rule by Andrei Zhdanov, nurtured the illusion that its extraordinary suffering during the war entitled it to speak more freely. The poetry in
Zvezda
spoke too much of the realities of war: ‘bridges made of frozen corpses’, ‘a rotten scum of bile and anguish’, tuberculosis and prostitution. Contributors failed to see that the alliance with America was over and continued being conciliatory to religion and the bourgeoisie. Nikolai Aseev, otherwise a Stalinist
poet, had written to the Americans: ‘You have an Abraham, we have a Joseph… let’s make a new Bible.’

The self-esteem of the intelligentsia and of the Red Army’s generals had to be crushed; Stalin was preoccupied with preventing his satraps getting above themselves. Beria, Abakumov, Molotov and Malenkov all found their freedom of action and their certainty of power curtailed. Stalin had got all he wanted from the Allies in Potsdam in summer 1945 and had quickly joined the war against Japan in August, but in that same month everything changed with the American detonation of two atom bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Arguably, these bombs saved many more lives than they took. Not only were the Americans spared the loss of life that an invasion of Japan would have cost, but, having lost the atomic race, the Soviets could no longer contemplate overwhelming the smaller forces of the British and Americans in Europe and realizing Lenin and Trotsky’s dream of a Soviet Union from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

Stalin had not had a break nor seen the Caucasus since the autumn of 1936. On 9 October 1945 he left Moscow for Sochi and stayed so low and so long that rumours began to spread that he was ill, that Molotov would take over the reigns of power. Now nearly sixty-seven and suffering from arteriosclerosis, Stalin was exhausted. He had summaries of British and American newspaper reports of his health sent to him in Sochi; he was both irritated and amused by the speculation but held out until mid-December before returning to Moscow.

TEN
The Gratification of Cruelty

Our Ninika has aged,

His hero’s shoulders have failed him.

How did this desolate grey hair

Break an iron strength?

Sozeli (I. Jughashvili)

Senescence

The last seven years of Stalin’s life and rule are distinguished by a process of petrifaction, a hardening of the arteries at all levels. For all that he tinkered with the organization of party and government, the changes were more in nomenclature than in reality. While new henchmen were promoted, the old, for the most part, were retained. Stalin’s main concern was to establish his power structure in a perpetual state of balance and counter-balance, and his technique was to stimulate mutual jealousy and suspicion, and an overriding fear of himself, among his underlings. As 1947 approached, the suspicion and fear grew; every year ending in a 7 marked ten years since the revolution. In 1927 Stalin had jettisoned Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev and made the party overwhelmingly Stalinist; in 1937 he had launched the Great Terror; in 1947 his hangmen expected a new purge.

Yet Stalin was now a less energetic man, less able to see his measures through to the end. His memory began to let him down and the post-war world demanded far more attention than even the most paranoiac workaholic could devote. In the 1930s foreign policy had been a matter of balancing Germany against western Europe and keeping an eye on Japan. Now America and NATO were a hostile bloc; the Chinese revolution and the Korean War demanded massive Soviet involvement; the disintegration of the French and British colonial empires was creating instability around the world while eastern Europe had to be incorporated into a new Soviet empire; and the USSR, its morale, its economic, agricultural and industrial might severely damaged by war, had to be reconstructed.

Stalin thus had to delegate, but he simultaneously immersed himself in areas that were esoteric for him including linguistics and biology, interfering simultaneously in favour of a dogmatic Marxist approach that defied all modern science but also in favour of pragmatic common sense. Similarly, in politics, Stalin pursued both a consistent doctrinaire line of vindictive repression and a logical pragmatic one of flexible incentives.
His decisions and policies were not motivated by the desire to achieve the best or the most efficient outcome. He wanted to paralyse opposing views by limited support and limited condemnation of both sides, so that neither the fanatical Marxist nor the pragmatic realist would dominate in any field. That paralysis of Soviet thought and initiative which would eventually bring about the downfall of the USSR was Stalin’s way of disabling the succession. His henchmen understood this; they hedged their bets and quietly tried to build their own power bases.

Exploding the Bomb

Stalin returned from his long holiday on the Black Sea to Moscow in December 1945. On 1 December, still in Sochi, he had received a letter from his daughter Svetlana, to whom he had uncharacteristically sent a box of mandarins. ‘I’m very, very glad you’re well and resting well, because Muscovites, unused to your absence, have begun to circulate rumours that you are very gravely ill.’
¹
Svetlana continued: ‘the last six weeks bandits and hooligans have started robbing and killing Muscovites horribly’. Stalin was sure that without him chaos threatened. He was yet more contemptuous of his underlings. Stalin reassembled the mechanics of power. Kalinin, the head of state, was dying; his replacement Shvernik, who had headed the trade unions, was even more of a cipher. Since 1941, Stalin had headed all three branches of power: the legislature, on the Supreme Soviet, as Shvernik’s puppet master, the party as general secretary and Politbiuro dictator and the executive as chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars. He began to look for more malleable acolytes. War had required technocrats like Beria and Malenkov; after the war, Stalin sought ideologists to restore a totalitarian state.

Pre-war henchmen were demoted: Kaganovich was moved down from transport to building materials, Marshal Voroshilov became the Soviet overlord of Hungary. While Stalin had been on holiday he had delegated power to Beria, Malenkov, Mikoyan and Molotov. In December 1945 Molotov’s star fell. Stalin telegraphed his four commissars from Sochi:

5 December: I warned Molotov on the telephone that the Foreign Commissariat’s press department was wrong to pass
The Daily Herald
’s reports from Moscow setting out all sorts of fantasies and slanderous thoughts about our government, about the relations between members of the government and about Stalin. Molotov answered me that he thought foreign correspondents ought to be treated more liberally… Yet today I read a report… in the
New York Times
… in a still coarser form…

6 December: I consider your telegram completely unsatisfactory. It is the result of the naivety of three of you and the sleight of hand of the fourth, i.e., Molotov… None of us had the right to decide on his own matters involving a change in our policy. But Molotov did usurp that right. Why, on what basis? Is it not because libellous slanders are part of his work plan?… I have become convinced that Molotov does not value very much the interests of our state and the prestige of our government as long as he can get popularity in certain foreign circles. I can no longer consider such a comrade to be my first deputy.
²

Beria, Malenkov and Mikoyan read the telegram aloud to Molotov. They reported: ‘We summoned Molotov… after some thought he said that he had made a whole pile of mistakes but thinks this mistrust unfair, there were tears in his eyes.’

Molotov had angered Stalin by failing to secure a Soviet veto in the allied consultative commission on the future of Japan; in London he had let France and China have a say in peace treaties with Germany’s allies. Molotov was banished to New York, as envoy ‘Mr Nyet’ to the United Nations. Mikoyan also incurred Stalin’s wrath for failing to report on the new harbours and rich fishing grounds of the newly acquired Kurile Islands.

In March 1946 the Supreme Soviet renamed commissariats ministries. Stalin told the Council of Ministers, ‘A people’s commissar… reflects a period of unstablized system, the period of civil war, of revolutionary break-up etc., etc… The war has proved our social system is very strong… it is appropriate to change from people’s commissar to minister. The people will understand this easily because there is a plague of commissars.’
³

Whether commissar or minister, any pretext – rain falling after fine weather was forecast – sufficed for Stalin to abuse his underlings. These bouts of anger did not always have the fatal outcomes of 1937 or 1938 but they shook men once confident of their hold on power.

Malenkov was unseated. The pretext was a letter sent to Stalin by his surviving legitimate son Vasili, a drunken hooligan promoted to air force commander. Other pilots had paid with their lives for telling Stalin that Soviet aircraft were ‘flying coffins’; Vasili, although his father detested him, spoke freely about the Yak-9 fighter and its crashes. Stalin knew that half the 80,000 Soviet aircraft lost in the war had crashed due to mechanical failure. Abakumov also fed Stalin statistics comparing the deadly exploits of the Luftwaffe with the Soviet air force’s failures. Stalin dismissed Aleksei Shakhurin, minister for the aviation industry, within days of his return to Moscow and in spring had Abakumov arrest him together with Marshal of Aviation Aleksandr Novikov. They spent seven years in gaol.

A Politbiuro resolution on 4 May 1946 pointed at the real culprit:

1. To confirm that comrade Malenkov, as the boss of the aviation industry responsible for certifying aircraft and for the air force, is morally answerable for the appalling failings which have been uncovered in the work of these departments (producing and certifying sub-standard aircraft), that he, knowing of these appalling failings, failed to make the Central Committee aware of them.