Stalin: A Biography

A tidal wave of reforms crashed over Stalin’s policies in the USSR in the first week of March 1953. His successors were posthumously opposing him after decades of obedience. No member of the Party Presidium favoured the total conservation of his legacy; even communist conservatives like Molotov and Kaganovich approved some sort of innovation. Changes frustrated by Stalin at last became possible. Yet debate did not flood out into society. It was not allowed to. The last thing the ascendant party leaders wanted was to let ordinary Soviet citizens, or even the lower functionaries of the state, influence what was decided in the Kremlin.

Molotov and Kaganovich could not prevent the reform projects of Malenkov, Beria and Khrushchëv. Malenkov wanted to increase payments to collective farms so as to boost agricultural production; he also favoured giving priority to light-industrial investment. Khrushchëv wished to plough up virgin lands in the USSR and end the decades-old uncertainty about supplies of bread. Malenkov and Beria were committed to making overtures to the USA for peaceful coexistence: they feared that the Cold War might turn into a disaster for humanity. Beria desired a rapprochement with Yugoslavia; he also aimed to withdraw privileges for Russians in the USSR and to widen the limits of cultural self-expression. Malenkov, Beria and Khrushchëv agreed that public life should be conducted on a less violent and arbitrary basis than under Stalin. They supported the release of political convicts from the labour camps. Quietly they restrained the official media from delivering the customary grandiose eulogies to Stalin. If his policies were to be replaced, it no longer made sense to go on treating him as a demigod.

The Party Presidium handled his physical legacy with caution. When Lenin had died in 1924, Stalin became the custodian of his writings and decided what should be published and what withheld from view. He published his own Foundations of Leninism. He sought legitimacy for whatever he was doing by reference to the works of Lenin. Stalin’s successors knew this. Sanctioned by the Party Central Committee on 5 March 1953,¹ they commandeered his book collection and distributed most of it anonymously to various public libraries. Only a few hundred books were left with the Institute of Marxism–Leninism. Many of his letters and telegrams were incinerated and most drafts of his articles and books disappeared.² The last edition of his collected works was suspended incomplete.³

Stalin’s desk at the Blizhnyaya dacha held disturbing secrets. It contained three sheets of paper which he had hidden beneath a newspaper inside a drawer. One was a note from Tito:⁴

Stalin: stop sending people to kill me. We’ve already captured five of them, one of them with a bomb and another with a rifle… If you don’t stop sending killers, I’ll send one to Moscow, and I won’t have to send a second.

Thus did one gangster write to another. No one else had stood up to Stalin like this; perhaps this is why he kept the note. He had also conserved the last thing written to him by Bukharin: ‘Koba, why is my death necessary for you?’ Had Stalin wanted a frisson of satisfaction when re-reading it? (It cannot be believed that some distorted feeling of attachment to Bukharin lingered with him.) The third item was the letter dictated by Lenin on 5 March 1922 containing the demand for Stalin to apologise to Krupskaya for his verbal abuse of her. It was his last message from Lenin and it was the most wounding. He would not have conserved it in the desk unless it had echoed round the caverns of his mind.

The party leaders kept the three items a secret. But they changed public discourse after Stalin’s death and Pravda restrained its praise of him. Articles criticised the ‘cult of the individual’. Although these were laden with citations of Stalin’s works, it took no feat of memory to recall that his cult had been the most grandiose in history. While fresh policies were being discussed in the Party Presidium, Beria celebrated his return to the leadership of the Ministry of Internal Affairs by collecting tape recordings of Stalin’s conversations with the police agencies. The tapes proved that Stalin was plotting terror to the end. Beria arranged for Central Committee members to read the transcripts.⁵