Stalin: A Biography

Stalin also persisted with the ideological favour shown to the Russians in wartime. This was obvious in historical textbooks. Before 1941 it was still acceptable to show respect for those who resisted the expansion of the Russian Empire. Shamil, the Moslem cleric who fought the armies of Nicholas I and Alexander II in Dagestan and Chechnya, was given his due as an anti-tsarist hero. After the Second World War his reputation was consistently blackened. Indeed each and every figure in the pre-revolutionary past who had failed to welcome the armies of the tsars was condemned as reactionary. Russia had allegedly brought culture, enlightenment and order to its borderlands. The treatment of Shamil was a litmus test of the development of policy on the national question. So too was the visual symbolism of the urban landscape. For the octocentenary celebration of Moscow’s foundation in September 1947, Stalin commissioned a statue of Prince Yuri Dolgoruki for erection on Gorki Street. Its chain-mailed muscularity was designed to induce awe at the greatness of medieval Muscovy.¹¹ Stalin’s toast to the Russian nation on 24 May 1945 had been no fleeting fancy.

Even the limits of cultural expression were as wide as they had been in the war. In the arts and scholarship the situation remained marginally freer than before the Great Patriotic War. The composer Shostakovich and the poet Akhmatova still wrote pieces for public performance. Scholars, too, went on benefiting from a working environment which was less stringent than before the war.

The level of material provision for Soviet citizens continued to exercise the minds of Stalin and his government; they remained cognisant of the high level of expectations among the peoples of the USSR once the war had been won. Initially Stalin did not plan for an economy of shortage. Although he imposed heavy control over politics, he still aimed to expand the supply of food and industrial products through the retail trade. Several governmental decrees confirmed this purpose in 1946–8.¹² There was much talk about stimulating the production and distribution of consumer goods, and it was recognised that some reorganisation of commercial structures would be needed.¹³ For this to happen there also had to be an end to wartime inflation. In December 1947 party and government abruptly announced a devaluation of the ruble. The savings of citizens were automatically reduced to a tenth of what they had been. A decree was passed in the same month to terminate the ration-book system: Soviet citizens had to buy what they could with the rubles in their pocket or under their mattress.¹⁴

The USSR was not the only state to take drastic action for post-war economic regeneration. Yet few governments behaved with so little regard for the difficulties posed for consumers. Announcements were made suddenly and without warning. Stalin had always ruled that way. He expected ‘the people’ to accept docilely what he demanded. Although he irritated millions of citizens by devaluing the currency, he scarcely induced their ruination: the reason they had had so much money was that they could not find the goods to spend it on. His own savings were depreciated by the devaluation decree; but he had never been a materialistic man. Unopened pay-packets were found at his Blizhnyaya dacha when he died. What mattered to Stalin was not wealth but power. In any case he and his close subordinates were protected by the network of special shops from any untoward financial effects. Stalin had for a long time intimidated those reporting to him into playing down news of hardship. It was in 1947 that a terrible famine occurred across Ukraine. Khrushchëv had to deal with it as party boss in Kiev. While appealing to the Kremlin for assistance, he was careful lest Stalin should conclude that he had gone soft. Stalin therefore did not hear how bad the situation was.¹⁵

Yet even Khrushchëv’s cautious words got him into trouble: ‘Stalin sent me the rudest, most insulting telegram which said I was a suspect person: I was writing memoranda to try and show that Ukraine could not fulfil its state procurement [quotas], and I was requesting an outrageous amount of ration-cards to feed people.’¹⁶ Stalin was not responsible for the drought that had ruined the 1946 harvest. But he remained the founder and director of the collective-farm system and his ferocious rejection of the request for aid to Ukraine makes him culpable for the deaths of millions of people in the famine of the late 1940s. Cases of cannibalism occurred. The experience seared itself into Khrushchëv’s consciousness. He had come to understand the idiotic brutality of the Soviet economic order. Stalin was incapable of such a reaction. Like Lenin, he hated any sign of what he regarded as sentimentality; and both Lenin and Stalin tended in the first instance to assume that any reports of rural hardship were the product of peasants tricking urban authorities into indulging them.¹⁷