Stalin: A Biography

He got over such concerns. He was not going to alter policies merely because most citizens, after a gruelling war, were hungry and destitute. He was confident that he could continue to impose a state budget that minimised attention to popular well-being. Politburo members soon understood this. If they wanted to influence the programme of party and government, they had to be wary about how they presented their ideas to the Leader — and sometimes they overestimated his level of tolerance. Several ideas were put into public discussion after 1945. Politburo members had to do this with caution if they were to survive not just politically but also in a physical sense. But they were also useless to Stalin if they failed to offer a strategic view on the USSR’s difficulties. He demanded this of his subordinates; they were not allowed merely to administer existing policies. Stalin had a talent for getting them to reveal what was in their minds. This was not very difficult since he had the power of life and death over them. At the same time they knew this and yet had to pretend to him and to themselves that they did not. While Stalin remained alive, they had to play the game according to his rules.

Several of them — Beria, Malenkov and Khrushchëv — later showed an understanding that the degree of the regime’s repressiveness was counter-productive. There was an economic aspect to this. When the annual accounts were drawn up, it became crystal-clear that the Gulag forced-labour system cost the state more than it earned in revenues; and monetary incentives began to be introduced to raise productivity in the camps.¹⁰ This was hardly surprising. The wretches who worked with inadequate food and medical care in Siberia and northern Russia did not operate with the efficiency of free men and women. In order to hold them captive, moreover, a vast legion of administrators, guards, railwaymen and secretaries was required. This system of unofficial slavery was not the most cost-effective way to obtain timber, gold and uranium. But nobody could afford to say this directly to the Leader for fear of joining the slave-gangs. But the truth of the Gulag was known in the supreme ruling group.

Other parts of Stalin’s programme also gnawed at the minds of several Politburo members. Malenkov was later to espouse the cause of light industry; he especially advocated the need to increase industry’s commitment to the production of consumer goods. Beria was subsequently concerned that official policy continued to offend those who did not belong to the Russian nation; he also objected to the extreme controls over cultural self-expression. Khrushchëv, with his sense of the rudimentary requirements of most citizens, felt that agrarian reform was vital. About foreign policy it was even more dangerous to express an opinion; and after the initial debate about the chances of the world communist movement Stalin clamped down: it remained for leading Soviet politicians on Stalin’s death — again it was Beria and Malenkov — to insist that a Third World War would be a disaster for the human race. Beneath the surface of official politics there was appreciation that something had to change. Several Politburo members understood that the rigidities of Marxism–Leninism–Stalinism after the war provided no permanent solution. Things had to change not only for the good of the members of the Politburo but also in order to conserve the power and prestige of the USSR.

While Stalin lived, however, his policies were unchallengeable. He was not completely inflexible and some wartime ‘compromises’ remained in place. He did not abandon the wartime understanding with the Russian Orthodox Church. Those churches which had been reopened in the war continued to function, and the Patriarch agreed to act as unofficial ambassador for the ‘peace policy’ of the Soviet government — and the Russian Orthodox Church avidly occupied buildings which had previously belonged to other Christian denominations.