An essay in universal history

20. THE SUCCESSORS OF STALIN

Jean-François Revel writes: “In their first communiqué, on March 6, 1953, Stalin’s successors declared their support for a policy that could guarantee ‘the prevention of any kind of disorder and panic.’ Why those two words? A month and a half earlier, the Eisenhower-Dulles team had come to office in Washington brandishing the rollback policy they had proclaimed during the election campaign. Stalin’s heirs did not know much about the ‘imperialists’ facing them, and they had forgotten Lenin’s observations on the ‘deaf-mutes’ in the West. Except for Molotov, they had had almost no personal contact with Western political figures. But they did know how fragile the situation was within the Soviet system, including its satellites. They readily perceived how disadvantaged they were by the conjunction of three factors:

1. 
   the overall balance of power favored the West;
   
2. 
   the new team in the White House was calling for a rollback of communism;
   
3. 
   Stalin’s death had created a situation of weakness in the Communist sphere, both at the party summit (as witness the trial and execution of First Deputy Premier Lavrenty P. Beria) and among the subject peoples (the East German uprising in June 1953).”²⁴²
   

In fact, there was one successor who, as head of the KGB, knew the fragility of the Soviet empire well – Beria. He it was who now came to take first place in the system - temporarily. And it was he who probably initiated the “tidal wave of reforms”, in Robert Service’s words, that “crashed over Stalin’s policies in the USSR in the first week of March 1953. His successors were posthumously opposing him after decades of obedience. No member of the Party Presidium favoured the total conservation of his legacy; even communist conservatives like Molotov and Kaganovich approved some sort of innovation. Changes frustrated by Stalin at last became possible. Yet debate did not flood out into society. It was not allowed to. The last thing the ascendant party leaders wanted was to let ordinary Soviet citizens, or even the lower functionaries of the state, influence what was decided in the Kremlin.

“Molotov and Kaganovich could not prevent the reform projects of Malenkov, Beria and Khruschev. Malenkov wanted to increase payments to collective farms so as to boost agricultural production [the peasants had starved since the war]; he also favoured giving priority to light-industrial investment. Khruschev wished to plough up virgin lands in the USSR and end the decades-old uncertainty about supplies of bread. Malenkov and Beria were committed to making overtures to the USA for peaceful coexistence; they feared that the Cold War might turn into a disaster for humanity. Beria desired a rapprochement with Yugoslavia; he also aimed to withdraw privileges for Russians in the USSR and to widen the limits of cultural self-expression. Malenkov, Beria and Khruschev agreed that public life should be conducted on a less violent and arbitrary basis than under Stalin. They supported the release of political convicts from the labour camps. Quietly they restrained the official media from delivering the customary grandiose eulogies to Stalin. If his policies were to be replaced, it no longer made sense to go on treating him as a demigod…”²⁴³
However, reversing the work of “the greatest genius of all times and all nations” is not so easy. In July, 1953 Malenkov proposed unmasking the cult of personality. But he was supported only by Khruschev…²⁴⁴
Certainly, ordinary citizens did not suddenly feel a noticeable access of kindness and mercy from their rulers. On May 16, 1954 there began the biggest rebellion of GULAG prisoners in the history of the Soviet concentration camps. For forty days the prisoners – of all nationalities, but especially Ukrainians – held out. However, on June 26 the NKVD regained control of “Steplag” with the aid of the Red Army and T-34 tanks. Between 500 and 700 prisoners were killed.
Again, in September, 1954, during military exercises in Orenburg province under the direction of Marshal Zhukov, an atomic bomb was dropped, causing 43,000 military and 10,000 civilian deaths.²⁴⁵ Of course, there were casualties also from western atomic tests. But the callousness of the Soviets – who kept this incident a strict secret for many years – was unequalled.
Nor, in spite of references to “coexistence” with the capitalist world – a phrase neither Lenin nor Stalin would ever have used – did the successors of Stalin hint at a renunciation of their faith. “If someone believes,” said Khruschev in 1955, “that our smiles involve abandonment of the teaching of Marx, Engels and Lenin, he deceives himself poorly. Those who wait for that must wait until a shrimp learns to whistle…”²⁴⁶
Nevertheless it was undeniable that a diminution of revolutionary ardour was taking place. And then the critical event took place: at the 20^th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in February, 1956, Khruschev read his secret speech exposing Stalin: “We are concerned with a question which has immense importance for the party now and for the future – with how the cult of the person of Stalin has been gradually growing, the cult which became at a certain specific stage the source of a whole series of grave perversions of party principles, of party democracy, of revolutionary legality…”
Andrei Zubov writes that this event was “absolutely unprecedented, not only in the Soviet Union, but in the whole communist world movement. Because the main, axial figure of the whole communist movement supported by the Soviet Union (over there, there was another, Trotskyite movement), was, of course, Stalin. Stalin was its centre and essence. His methods of rule, his attitude to men, to the world – it was against all that this people with communist views throughout the world – in China, in Europe, and in Latin America, not to speak of the Soviet Union – measured themselves. And the condemnation of Stalin – for the first time, the demonstration of his crimes (almost exclusively with regard to members of the party – the repressions after 17^th Congress of the Bolshevik Party, the “Leningrad Affair” of 1948) – this information completely blew people’s minds. Very many did not believe it. Others said that it was a provocation. A third group condemned Khruschev and said that he was a traitor to the cause of communism. And of course those who had previously had a negative attitude to Stalin or had suffered at his hands were in raptures.
“But to some degree clever people had noticed this process even earlier. In fact, the process of destalinization began with the death of Stalin – precisely in March, 1953. Because at first Beria, and then, after Beria’s overthrow, Malenkov and Khruschev began the process of the gradual release of people from the camps, the gradual improvement of the people’s situation in agriculture, the peasant collective-farmers, a relaxation in censorship – and stopped inflating Stalin’s cult of personality literally from the first days. Stalin had not yet been buried, but they already said: that’s enough, we must not have all these improbable panegyrics, these incredible verses, and they passed to the day-to-day affairs of state construction. Clever people noticed that Stalin’s closest colleagues absolutely were not intending to sing hosannas to Stalin as they themselves had sung them until the last day of his life. Naturally, the case of the Jewish doctors was cut short, as were many other cases. 1956 was both unexpected and expected for those who had a good understanding of the Muscovite political kitchen.
“How was destalinization carried out, and was it superficial? Of course it was not superficial. Yes, monuments were pulled down – that was very important; Stalin was thrown out of the mausoleum – that also was important. But much more important was what they said: under Stalin terrible crimes were carried out. And many people were rehabilitated posthumously. Most of these people were condemned according to article 58 as having acted ‘in a hostile manner’ (as spies, conspirators, terrorists) against Soviet power. A huge number of people killed by Stalin were rehabilitated, and those few who survived were rehabilitated in their lifetime, and a mass of people returned. In spite of Khruschev’s fantastic mistakes, in spite of the fact that he himself was just such a murderer and criminal as Stalin – both in the Ukraine and in Moscow, - a huge number of people of that generation were grateful to him for liberating, justifying and returning the repressed from exile. And in general the epoch of total repressions then came to an end…”²⁴⁷
But there were still rebellions… Significantly, the most serious of them took place, not in the Union itself, but in the Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe, where Soviet slavery was still a relatively new experience. “In June 1953,” writes Revel, “the people of East Germany rose against the occupying power, but the West failed to seize the opportunity to insist on peace-treaty negotiations that would have ended the dangerous division of Germany, still one of the Soviet Union’s principal means of blackmailing the United States and Europe. At the time, no Western government had yet officially recognized the East German Communist government.
“In the summer and fall of 1956, the Polish people rose; we let the Soviets arrange matters their way, by bouncing Bierut and replacing him with Wladyslaw Gomulka. Instead of acting like indifferent spectators, the West could have dusted off promises made at Yalta – the real ones – committing Stalin to organize free elections in Poland. The balance of power, then high favourable to the United States, would have made such a demand eminently realistic and, we must insist, in no way ‘imperialistic’; it would in fact have been the moral thing to do, in support of a people’s right of self-determination and in the interests of that peace that the Polish tragedy in the heart of Europe has continually threatened in the twenty-five years since then.
“Shortly after the Polish October came a new explostion, the even more widespread and more violent uprising of the Hungarian people, directly challenging the Soviet presence there and communism itself, without prompting from the West. With Moscow’s gent, the Stalinist Erno Gero, swept out of power, the most popular man in the country, the only one available in that time of disintegrating power structure, was old Communist Imre Nagy, a former Premier who had been ousted a year earlier. The only program he could come up with was a sort of neutralization of Hungary on the Austrian model approved the year before, which would have taken the country out of the Soviet bloc. A mere flip of the finger by the West could have been decisive then. Caught off balance, with their guard down, the Soviets were ging condemned throughout the world, and they were at a strategic disadvantage. Had the West overcome its irresolution and formulated its demands, it would not even have had to use its military power. Why, after all, was Khrshchev so frightened? Why did he fell a need to cover himself with Mao Tse-tung’s ‘authorization’, and why did he consult secretly with Tito? Why did he hesitate so long before moving, sending in his tanks only when he was sure the West would merely boo the play without interrupting the performance?”²⁴⁸
Unfortunately, however, the West was distracted by the Suez crisis… The Hungarian revolution under Imre Nagy in 1956, and its ruthless suppression by the Soviets, showed that the relaxation of total repression introduced by Stalin’s successors by no means meant freedom. There was a red line that could not crossed; and when Nagy’s government tried to withdraw Hungary from the Warsaw Pact, the line had been crossed and Soviet tanks bloodily restored the status quo ante. However, Hungary was important in that it brought to an end the illusion entertained by many Western and Eastern European intellectuals that there could be a “good” Marxism that was not Stalinist. Among these were the historian François Furet in France and Leszek Kołakowski in Poland.²⁴⁹
This beginning of a shift in intellectual opinion would bear fruit in the Prague Spring of 1968 and the Solidarity Movement in Poland in the 1980s.
On August 13, 1961, in the course of a single night, the East Germans built a wall between East and West Berlin to stem the huge outflow of people from East to West. The West was caught napping, and did not respond, except verbally. This was a worrying precedent, because at a time when the West still enjoyed military superiority over the East, it failed to take the minimum measures – for example, sending a few tanks to disperse the civilian builders of the wall – that would have prevented this fragrant violation of the four-power treaties over Berlin. President Kennedy’s coming to Berlin and calling himself a Berliner hardly reversed what was an obvious triumph of Communist intelligence over Capitalist cowardice. And it could be argued that it was this display of Western pusillanimity – a precursor of the shameful appeasement of Soviet aggression in the 1970s - that encouraged Khruschev to initiate the far more dangerous Cuban crisis the next year…²⁵⁰
Meanwhile, in the Union itself all seemed peace and quiet on the surface. There were some rebellions, but until the late 1960s and outside the camps these were more about terrible living conditions than protests against the regime itself or its ideology. Thus in Novocherkassk on June 2, 1962 there were major demonstrations by workers against the authorities because of very sharp rises in prices on milk and meat and empty shelves in the shops. The tanks were brought in, and according to official statistics, 26 people were killed and 87 wounded, while many others were sent to the camps. In fact, the casualties were probably much higher, and when the authorities failed to scrub out all the blood stains in the main square it was asphalted over and dances on it were organized – so that the young people “could drive evil thoughts away from themselves”.²⁵¹
In the same year, the journal Novy Mir published One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a description of life in the camps that led many in the West to think that a “thaw” in Soviet censorship was taking place. However, as Jean-François Revel writes, “it is the purest self-deception to note that Khrushchev, while ‘wiping a tear from his eye’, authorized the publication of Ivan Denisovich in 1962 unless we add the corrective note that the book was later officially declared harmful in the USSR and its publication repudiated as an error, one of the consequences of ‘voluntarism in literature’ (everything Khrushchev did would later be condemned in a bloc as ‘voluntarism’ and ‘subjectivism’); the offending edition of Novy Mir was removed from Communist libraries, and Soviet ‘newspapers’ were forbidden to mention its title…”²⁵²