Stalin: A Biography

Not that Stalin and his central subordinates controlled everything. They concentrated on restoring authority over those sectors of state and society where authority had prevailed before 1941. Sometimes, but not always, this involved a shift in the content of policy. Yet this hardly makes it sensible to call this a period of ‘high Stalinism’ even though several Western scholars have liked to claim that the post-war years were unique. In fact Stalin’s actions were mostly reactionary: he was reverting the Soviet order to the template he had more or less imposed before Operation Barbarossa. Yet society in Russia and its borderlands had never been completely regulated by the Kremlin. The old amalgam of regimentation and chaos persisted. Several groups in society were more overt in asserting their wishes than before the war. Most obvious, of course, were the partisans in the newly annexed territories in the west of the USSR. The Gulag too was no longer quiescent. The arrest of Ukrainian and Baltic dissenters introduced into the labour camps an intransigent element, sustained by religious faith and national pride, which had hardly been noticed in the Gulag complex before the war.

If a totalitarian state could not stop protests and strikes in its detention zones, something was wrong — and several of the Kremlin leaders were aware of this even if they kept the knowledge secret from Stalin. The unrest in the Gulag happened despite the intensification of repressive campaigns. Even in the more established parts of the USSR there were aspects of belief and behaviour which remained stubbornly unamenable to political manipulation. The coercive agencies in the war had concentrated their efforts on eradicating defeatism. Yet many people, especially youngsters, simply wanted to get on with their personal lives without the state’s interference. Western music and, in some instances, even Western clothes fashions were adopted by young people.¹⁸ The alienation of Muscovite students in particular was pronounced. And skilled workers also refused to be gulled by official propaganda; they knew their value to industrial enterprises which were under instructions to raise production sharply. Labour discipline, no longer backed by legal sanctions as severe as in the pre-war years, was seldom enforceable.

It was dangerous to present Stalin with reports on phenomena which he might blame on the person who was reporting. His associates censored themselves in communication with him.¹⁹ He ruled through the institutions and appointees he himself had put in place. He never visited a factory, farm or shop in the post-war years (apart from a trip to a market in Sukhum; this had also been no different in the 1930s).²⁰ He received no visitors from outside the political milieu except for the brief sojourn of his childhood friends at one of his Black Sea dachas.²¹ He experienced the USSR and the world communist movement on paper in the form of decrees, reports and denunciations. He could not know everything.

Stalin’s inability to eradicate apathy, chaos and disobedience continued. His was the primary responsibility for the decision to deliver a blow against popular aspirations to some permanent relaxation of the Soviet order. Assumptions that changes would be put in hand at the end of the war were crudely disappointed. The question arises of whether the life of workers, kolkhozniks and administrators would have been radically different if Stalin had died at the moment of military victory. The answer can only be guessed at, but it is difficult to see how such a regime could have remained in power if it had failed to continue to apply severe repression. The ruin of cities, villages and whole economic sectors placed a vast burden on the state budget. Things were made worse by security concerns. The race to develop nuclear weaponry was bound to be extremely costly for the Soviet Union. Although friendly diplomatic relations with the USA and even American financial assistance could have alleviated the situation, the essential problem would have remained: society below the level of the central and local elites was therefore likely to be asked to shoulder the burden in the form of a delay in improving living conditions — and without the Gulag and the security police agencies this was a situation which could not have been maintained.²²