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Despite its critical tone, this letter was entirely politically “correct.” Deikina was trying to combat the deficiencies and abuses of local officials who did not know how to properly “plan for needs.” The letter did not delve into the causes of the lack of food in the country. This was the sort of letter Stalin could like. Averky Aristov, recently appointed as the Central Committee secretary in charge of local party organizations, was sent to investigate. On 17 November 1952 Stalin held a meeting of Central Committee secretaries in his office. As Aristov recounted several years later, Stalin asked him to deliver his findings. Aristov reported that for a long time there had been shortages of bread, cooking oil, and other food items in Riazan Oblast. Stalin grew furious and ordered that the oblast party secretary be removed from his post. Aristov and others present tried to intercede on behalf of the officials from Riazan. Things were no different, they explained, in many other regions, including Ukraine, the country’s “bread basket.”
112
Following the meeting, Riazan Oblast was allocated food from government supplies. Such measures, of course, did not solve the problem. The country’s leadership was again faced with the task of salvaging the agricultural sector. Under the pressure of circumstances, Stalin agreed to review proposals to raise the price paid by the state for livestock produced by kolkhozes. At stake was the fundamental question of whether peasants deserved to be compensated for their labor. The exceptionally low “purchase price” paid to kolkhozniks barely masked the fact that everything they produced for the state was basically being confiscated. Growing food was tremendously unprofitable, and those who grew it had no incentive to produce more.
In December 1952 a commission headed by Nikita Khrushchev was established to draft a resolution raising livestock purchase prices.
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After working for several weeks, the commission wound up provoking Stalin’s displeasure. The
vozhd
was highly suspicious of attempts to change the existing system for pumping resources out of the countryside. To the dismay of his comrades, who had agreed on an increase in livestock prices, Stalin proposed significantly increasing taxes on the peasantry. Anastas Mikoyan later recalled Stalin’s reasoning: “What is a peasant? He’ll turn over his extra hen and that’s an end to it.”
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Khrushchev and his politically seasoned colleagues on the commission chose the safest course of action. They bided their time. The Soviet leaders would shield themselves from Stalin’s anger while they waited for his death. When it finally came, the overdue agricultural reforms were put in place immediately and on a larger scale than initially planned. Stalin’s heirs raised procurement prices and lowered taxes on peasants. Although the deep-rooted flaws in the kolkhoz system were preserved, these measures had a positive effect. For the first time in many decades the peasants were given relief, and some improvement in agricultural production was achieved.
Reducing the financial burden on the countryside inevitably came with a reduction in extravagant spending on major infrastructure projects. Just a few days after Stalin’s death, on 10 March 1953, the chairman of Gosplan presented the new head of the Soviet government, Georgy Malenkov, a report on major construction projects that were “behind schedule for completion.”
115
The report stated that it was being presented at Malenkov’s request. Members of the top leadership were apparently losing no time in implementing the changes they had been constrained from making while the
vozhd
was alive. They quickly halted many of Stalin’s ambitious projects, including the construction of canals, hydroelectrical systems, and rail lines through difficult terrain. Investment in the military was also reduced.
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The funds thus freed up could now be put toward dealing with the severe crises in agriculture and social welfare. The Stalinist industrialization system, enabled by the population’s low living standard and by the exploitation of the countryside as if it were an internal colony, could now be gradually dismantled.
These decisions were adopted and realized with unprecedented speed in the months following Stalin’s death. The new leaders’ decisiveness clearly shows that it was specifically Stalin who was the main obstacle to transformation for long years. Until the very end, the dictator’s personal political and economic modus operandi remained extraordinarily conservative and protective. His death opened the door to innovations that were long overdue.
THE DEATH THROES OF THE DICTATORSHIP
At the end of his life, Stalin was at the pinnacle of his power. His authority was unassailable and not under threat from any source. But he did not feel that way. Like other dictators, he never stopped fighting for power and never quite trusted his subjects. The methods he used in his never-ending battle for power were universal and simple. They included the elimination of any potential threat from within his inner circle, unrelenting oversight of the secret police, the encouragement of competition and mutual control among the various components of government, and the mobilization of society against perceived enemies both internal and external.
After destroying the Leningraders, Stalin began adjusting the balance of power within the Politburo, creating counterweights to the growing influence of Malenkov and Beria. In 1949 he brought Ukrainian party chief Khrushchev to Moscow and made him a Central Committee secretary and head of Moscow’s party organization. Soon afterward he began to actively promote Bulganin, who had faithfully served him as defense minister. In April 1950, on Stalin’s suggestion, Bulganin was appointed first deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers. For a while this promotion gave Bulganin privileged access to the
vozhd
. Soon, however, Stalin became disenchanted with his protégé and stripped him of his authority. This happened without particular acrimony. Bulganin remained a member of the top leadership. A period of relative equilibrium among key Politburo members set in, but it was just the calm before the storm.
An important factor in Stalin’s last battle for power was his declining health. Lightening his workload by relinquishing certain duties or gradually handing over power to subordinates was out of the question. Instead, the weakening
vozhd
consolidated his dictatorship with enviable energy, compensating for reduced vigor with combativeness. Fierce blows were leveled against the most vulnerable points in the hierarchy of power. The first involved yet another wave of arrests at the Ministry of State Security, over which Stalin never ceased to keep tight control. In July 1951, based on the usual assortment of trumped-up charges and incriminating denunciations, Stalin ordered the arrest of state security minister Viktor Abakumov, who quite recently had been a favorite. The party functionary Semen Ignatiev was appointed in his place. Abakumov’s arrest predictably opened the door to a large-scale purge of the ministry.
Having terrified the chekists, Stalin left for a vacation of more than four months. While in the south, he continued to keep a close eye on state security. The inventory of materials sent to Stalin between 11 August and 21 December 1951 includes more than 160 Ministry of State Security memoranda and reports. He also received an indeterminable number of coded telegrams from the ministry, as well as Politburo and Council of Ministers resolutions having to do with state security.
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In October Stalin summoned Ignatiev to the south and ordered him to “kick all the Jews out” of the ministry. When Ignatiev naively asked, “Where to?” Stalin explained to the inexperienced minister: “I’m not saying you should throw them out onto the street. Lock them up and let them stay in prison.”
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Ignatiev turned out to be a quick learner. Mortally terrified, he obediently launched a series of arrests and fabricated cases having to do with a “Zionist plot” within his ministry. For Stalin, extending his campaign of state anti-Semitism to state security was a perfectly logical step. Jews, members of a suspect nation and potential henchmen of world imperialism, could not be allowed to work in the regime’s most sacred realm. The next targets were just as logical. Immediately after state security, Stalin initiated purges against highly placed functionaries in several branches of the party-state apparat.
The next round of repression was also orchestrated from his dacha in the south. In September 1951 he received a visit from Georgia’s minister for state security, Nikolai Rukhadze. As Rukhadze testified under interrogation after his arrest, Stalin made some general comments at the dinner table about the dominance of Mingrelians (Megrels) in Georgia; he noted that Beria was a Mingrelian and was giving patronage to this group.
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This comment was the first hint at the target of the next campaign: Georgian officials and their patron. Soon after Rukhadze’s visit, the head of Stalin’s security team, Nikolai Vlasik, reported to the
vozhd
that people were complaining about having to pay bribes to enter Georgian colleges and universities. That this information fit perfectly with Stalin’s new focus is hardly surprising. Vlasik, who had spent a good portion of his life by Stalin’s side, had developed a keen sense of his moods and a talent for telling him what he wanted to hear. He could tell that Stalin was thirsting for blood and sought out the compromising materials that would help satisfy his boss’s craving. Rukhadze was assigned to look into Vlasik’s allegations.
On 29 October 1951, Rukhadze reported to Stalin that the bribery charges mostly could not be confirmed.
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This made no difference. Stalin had decided on a purge in Georgia, and it was only a matter of time before he invented a pretext for it. On 3 November he telephoned Rukhadze and asked him for information about patronage by Georgia’s second party secretary, Mikhail Baramiia, the former procurator of the city of Sukhumi, who had been accused of taking bribes. Rukhadze did as he was told, preparing a document suggesting that Baramiia had protected Mingrelian officials guilty of crimes.
121
The case was handled expeditiously. With Stalin’s active involvement, sweeping repression was unleashed in Georgia. Many of the republic’s leaders, including Baramiia, were arrested. More than eleven thousand people were deported to remote areas of the Soviet Union.
122
The Mingrelian and Leningrad Affairs largely followed the same template. Both started with accusations of abuse of power and political protectionism
(shefstvo),
quickly followed by the arrest and torture of disgraced officials, leading to fabricated evidence of “anti-Soviet” and “espionage” organizations. As in Leningrad, here too Stalin targeted a specific clan of Soviet officials with ties to influential members of the country’s leadership—in this case Beria.
123
Whether to make a mockery of him or simply teach him a lesson in humility, Stalin assigned Beria to hold a plenum of Georgia’s Central Committee in 1952, at which he was forced to expose his former clients and feign shock and anger at their behavior. Undoubtedly Beria saw the purge in Georgia as a personal threat. Immediately after Stalin’s death he managed to put a stop to the Mingrelian Affair and had its targets freed and returned to senior positions.
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Beria weathered the storm. Like many before him, however, he emerged with a renewed sense of the fragility of his political and physical existence. Stalin apparently had his sights on more important targets. The first shot was fired after the Nineteenth Party Congress, which convened in October 1952 after a thirteen-year break. Instead of giving the keynote speech, Stalin limited his appearance at the congress to a brief closing statement. It was as if he was saving his diminishing strength for the main event: the plenum of the newly elected Central Committee, which immediately followed the congress. The plenum would determine the makeup of the party’s top governing bodies, most important the Politburo. The election was expected to be a mere formality. Members of the Central Committee usually voted for the candidates proposed from on high without wasting their breath on discussion. But in this case Stalin caught everyone by surprise and introduced some surprising changes.
His main innovation was the abolition of the Politburo and the creation of two new bodies. The first, which formally replaced the Politburo, was called the Presidium of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
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Whereas the Politburo had included nine members with full voting rights and two candidate members, the new Presidium was much larger, comprising twenty-five full members and eleven candidate members. The expansion would add younger and relatively unknown party leaders, giving Stalin an even freer hand in regard to his older comrades. The political essence of the reorganization was summed up, probably correctly, by Anastas Mikoyan: “Since the makeup of the Presidium was so broad, if needed, the disappearance of Presidium members out of favor with Stalin would not be so noticeable. If between congresses five or six people disappeared out of twenty-five, that would look like an insignificant change. If, on the other hand, five or six people out of nine Politburo members disappeared, that would be more noticeable.”
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This was exactly the sort of apprehension Stalin needed to keep the will of the old guard and potential heirs in check. Not satisfied with the threat implicit in the expanded Central Committee Presidium, Stalin continued his psychological warfare. His next proposal—the creation of a nine-member bureau to serve as the Presidium leadership—was just as unexpected. In principle, the Presidium Bureau made sense. The unwieldy Presidium would hardly be capable of efficient decision making. But Stalin, as he had often done, could of course create a narrow leadership group without formal approval by the Central Committee plenum. The true purpose of this toying with democracy became immediately clear once he disclosed his proposed candidates for the bureau. It turned out that he did not feel it was possible for him to nominate two of his oldest associates—Molotov and Mikoyan—for membership. To add insult to injury, he topped off this announcement by giving the two a public tongue-lashing.