Stalin: A Biography

No one was safe. The Party Central Committee at Stalin’s request promoted Voznesenski, a Leningrader, to the Politburo in February 1947. But Stalin at the same time elevated Nikolai Bulganin to membership: he did not want a Leningrad group to enjoy unrivalled power at the centre. Indeed he never let a new balance rest for long. Agitation of the scales was a feature of his rule, and he was most unlikely to keep Zhdanov as his permanent favourite. Molotov and Mikoyan, however, faded from view. Invited to eat with Stalin in Myussery in 1948, they were hurt by a little scene involving Poskrëbyshev. In the middle of the meal, Poskrëbyshev suddenly turned to Stalin and said: ‘Comrade Stalin, while you’ve been on vacation down here in the south, Molotov and Mikoyan in Moscow have been organising a plot against you.’¹⁰ The two accused understood that Stalin had stage-managed the scene; and when they protested their innocence, Stalin accepted their protestations. But they never came back into his favour. According to Mikoyan, Stalin’s ‘capriciousness’ became evident only from the last years of the war. Mikoyan fooled himself. He failed to recall that Stalin in power had always revelled in arbitrary methods. The difference was that Mikoyan, after a career of enjoying Stalin’s favour, had only recently become a victim of them.

If Mikoyan had a point, it was that Stalin from the last years of the war began to act more oddly than ever towards his entourage in social surroundings. They had been fearful of him before 1941. They had never been able to predict whether they might be picked on by him and arrested. But as victory in the war approached and Stalin resumed convivial behaviour, he enjoyed toying with their feelings. They thought this a sign of deterioration rather than the gradual extension of an existing trend. They were political survivors but unsophisticated psychologists despite their expertise in handling his moods over several decades.

Kremlin politics began to favour Malenkov and Beria when, in August 1948, Zhdanov died after lengthy treatment in a clinic. Plagued by alcoholism and cardiac disease, he had been poorly for years. But a rumour spread that his doctors had killed him. One of the clinic’s medical officers, Lidia Timashuk, filed complaints about the shoddy treatment he had received. Although Stalin’s office received the dossier on Zhdanov, no action followed — he may not in fact have scrutinised it at the time. He had anyway ceased to show favour towards Zhdanov for some months, and now he empowered Malenkov and Beria to follow up his death with an investigation of the political situation in Leningrad. Malenkov, a baby-faced and overweight apparatchik with a terrifying record in the Great Terror, claimed to find evidence of a conspiracy aimed at Stalin and the Kremlin. Stalin was sufficiently convinced that the Leningraders had been insubordinate in policy to sanction a massive political purge throughout the city’s party and government leadership. Executions followed in 1950. Malenkov returned to the Kremlin as Stalin’s favourite for the next few years.

Not all Leningrad politicians had associated themselves with Zhdanov’s quest for a widening of the party’s political functions. But many had done so, and the city had a reputation for harbouring those who retained a commitment to the party’s importance, to ideology and to the curbing of technocratic tendencies in the vast apparatus of the Council of Ministers.¹¹ Lined up against Zhdanov had been Malenkov and Beria, who advocated greater latitude for the ministries to take up the task of economic regeneration. In the mandatory opaque language they stressed a preference for putting specialists in charge of affairs. Expertise rather than ideology should predominate. The division between the two sides was not entirely clear-cut. Beria and Malenkov did not advocate the party’s removal from the country’s administration. Both were also associated with the organs of repression even though Beria ceased being the leader of the security organs from 1945. To some extent their opinions reflected the interests of the institutions they currently headed — and this had been true also for Zhdanov. But a dispute of intrinsic importance had divided them. Stalin would have to resolve it somehow.