Stalin: A Biography

The reformers faced a dilemma: if they advertised any abandonment of Stalin’s legacy, there would be a questioning of their legitimate claim to rule; but if they were slow to alter some policies they might meet trouble for ignoring the discontents of society. There was a further difficulty. Stalin was revered by many of those people — and there were millions of them — who had hated his repressions. The despot still exercised his spell in death. Reformers had to be seen behaving firmly and competently. Signs of panic might ignite a challenge to the whole Soviet order. The majority in the Presidium sought to alter Stalin’s policies without expressly criticising him.⁶ At Party Central Committee meetings they merely alluded to Stalin’s unpredictability and capriciousness in his last years. This happened at the plenum in July 1953 after Beria’s arrest on the trumped-up charge of being a British intelligence agent. Really the leadership feared that Beria was lusting after his own personal supremacy as well as planning reforms which seemed excessively radical. It was Beria, not Stalin, who was held responsible for the past crimes and abuses, and he was executed in December 1953.⁷

Stalin’s family experienced an abrupt change in circumstances. His daughter Svetlana sensibly changed her surname. As a student she had been known as Svetlana Stalina but after his death she called herself Svetlana Allilueva.⁸ By bowing low before her father’s successors, she saved herself from trouble. Vasili Stalin was incapable of such an adjustment. He was notorious for drunken party-going and debauchery. His father virtually disowned him, but only after the Leader’s death was Vasili called to account and arrested for rowdiness and misuse of public funds. His days of privilege were at an end.

The Ministry of Internal Affairs was brought under the party’s control after the fall of Beria. The limits on cultural expression continued to be widened. Malenkov and Khrushchëv carried on promoting reforms while competing for personal supremacy. Prices paid for the harvest to collective farms were raised. The virgin soil of Kazakhstan was ploughed up to increase the volume of agricultural production. A rapprochement took place with Tito’s Yugoslavia. Overtures were made to the USA for a lessening of international tensions. The Korean War was brought to a close. Discussions at the Central Committee became less governed by the need to show unequivocal support for every action of the Party Presidium. Although the USSR remained a one-party dictatorship, the atmosphere of general fear had been lightened. The rivalry between Malenkov and Khrushchëv kept growing. Beria had been feared equally for his reformist radicalism and his personal ruthlessness. Malenkov lacked his panache and Khrushchëv, benefiting from his reputation as the conqueror of Beria, emerged as the supreme leader in the Presidium within a couple of years.

At his instigation a commission examined material on the purges of the Stalin period. Khrushchëv, while searching for damaging evidence about Malenkov, also had a larger agenda. Several Party Presidium members objected to any further reforms. To secure his ascendancy Khrushchëv raised the Stalin question at the Twentieth Party Congress in February 1956. When comments were made about the danger of destabilising the Soviet order, he retorted: ‘If we don’t tell the truth at the Congress, we’ll still be forced to tell the truth at some time in the future. And then we won’t be the people making the speeches. No, instead we’ll be the people under investigation!’⁹ At a closed session of the Congress he denounced Stalin as a monstrous individual who had sent thousands to their deaths and broken with Leninist traditions in leadership and policy. The charge sheet was not a comprehensive one. Khrushchëv focused his report on Stalin’s activity from Kirov’s death in 1934 onwards. He avoided criticism of the basic political and economic structures set up in the late 1920s, and he said nothing about the terror conducted by Stalin in the Civil War and the First Five-Year Plan. Wanting to ingratiate himself with current party and governmental officials, he gave the impression that their predecessors had been the main victims of the Great Terror of 1937–8.