Stalin: A Biography

The Leningrad Affair was the first blood-purge of the communist political elite since 1938. The deportations, arrests and executions after the Second World War had been aimed at specific social categories, especially leading figures in public and economic life in the newly annexed Baltic states. Stalin had also put returning prisoners-of-war to forced labour in the camps of the Gulag. But the incarceration of the Leningraders was different because the victims belonged to the highest echelons of officialdom in the USSR. This time he did not bother with show trials. Hundreds of party and government functionaries were thrown into prison and shot. Among them were Politburo member Nikolai Voznesenski, Central Committee Secretary Alexei Kuznetsov, RSFSR Prime Minister Mikhail Rodionov and Leningrad Party First Secretary Pëtr Popkov.

Although Stalin did not disclose his motives, those of Malenkov and Beria may easily be guessed. They had always resented Zhdanov’s authority and his political clientele in Leningrad. Soviet public life was a snake pit and Malenkov and Beria were two of its anacondas. Their opportunity to suffocate Zhdanov’s associates had arrived. But why did Stalin agree? Probably he had come to resent the way that Voznesenski had spoken up against him in wartime; Voznesenski was also the only Politburo member to write a best-selling book after the war. It may well be that his growing status as a politician irritated Stalin just as Zhukov had annoyed him as a commander. At any rate when Voznesenski was discovered to have mislaid important Gosplan data, there was a chance for Malenkov, who had always hated him personally,¹² to accuse him of irresponsible and even traitorous behaviour.¹³ Voznesenski was also found to have withheld information on discrepancies between state economic plans and the real economic situation. Straight-talking Voznesenski was shown to be a deceiver. Although everyone in the political leadership was deceitful, Voznesenski had had the ill luck to be discovered. To Stalin’s mind, a Politburo member could commit no fouler offence than fail to be honest with him.

Others in Leningrad had also offended Stalin. The leadership in Leningrad, ‘hero-city’ in the Great Patriotic War, had cultivated local patriotism. Capital of the Russian Empire since the reign of Peter the Great, it remained a rival to Moscow after the transfer of the seat of government to Moscow in March 1918. Leningrad’s inhabitants thought they had survived the German onslaught more by their own determination than by assistance from the Kremlin. The city was starting to seem like Russia’s capital in a Soviet multinational state — the USSR — based in Moscow.

The leadership of party and government in the city had begun to give signs of overstepping the limits Stalin had approved.¹⁴ Much as he liked to incorporate the national pride of Russians in doctrine and policy, he never lost his concern about the possible growth of nationalism among them. The Leningrad political elite failed to comprehend the rules of the situation. Kuznetsov had organised a retail fair in Leningrad for all parts of the RSFSR without the Kremlin’s permission and Rodionov had called for a special ‘Bureau for the RSFSR’.¹⁵ Voznesenski had not worked in Leningrad since before the war; but Stalin sensed a nationalist streak in him and told Mikoyan: ‘For him not only the Georgians and Armenians but even the Ukrainians aren’t real people.’¹⁶ Furthermore, the Leningraders, including Zhdanov, had enthused about the Yugoslavs after the Second World War. Tito and the Yugoslavs advocated a more radical communisation of eastern Europe.¹⁷ Stalin had not demurred at the time; but when he and Tito fell out, Zhdanov’s known inclination — even if it had had Stalin’s endorsement at the time — may have made him suspect that the USSR’s ‘second capital’ was a nest of treachery. Voznesenski had been highly favoured in wartime, and Kuznetsov in 1948 had even been mentioned by Stalin as his possible successor.¹⁸

Stalin was not really threatened by them. No Leningrad leader was demonstrably eager to promote a Russian nationalist cause. The only serious source of worry was that they sought to dig autonomous foundations for the RSFSR within the USSR. But always extremely wary, Stalin left nothing to chance. The Leningraders were arrested, interrogated and shot. They had not been a cohesive group with a uniform and agreed programme; and some of them — notably Politburo member and Gosplan Chairman Voznesenski — had interests which conflicted with Zhdanov’s emphasis on the virtues of the party. But enough of them were in agreement in the political discussions after the war for them to be regarded as a potential orientation inside the supreme ruling coterie.¹⁹