On the home front after the war, the primacy of Marxist ideology was harshly reasserted. Stalin's chief ideological hatchet man, Audrey Zhdanov, a secretary of the Central Committee, began a reign of terror in the Soviet artistic and intellectual world; foreign achievements were derided, and the primacy of Russians as inventors and pioneers in practically every field was asserted. The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee set up during the war was dissolved, and its leader, the actor and theatrical producer Solomon Mikhoels, was murdered by the MGB (Ministry of State Security). "Rootless cosmopolitans" with Jewish names, mostly critics and playwrights, were attacked in a new propaganda drive, and many were arrested. In August 1952 came the secret "Crimean Case", in which leading Yiddish writers and others were executed. In 1951 a purge began in Georgia, directed against the closest followers of Lavrenty Beria, formerly Stalin's Commissar for Internal Affairs and himself responsible for purging many of Stalin's opponents during the Second World War. His followers were jailed in the "Mingrelian Affair", which was still being processed when Stalin died; it seems also to have been linked to the Jewish "plotters". Hopes for domestic relaxation, widely aroused in the Soviet Union during the war, were thus sadly disappointed.
The Cold War and Stalin's Final Years
Following the surrender of Nazi Germany in May 1945 the uneasy wartime alliance between the Allies and the Soviets began to unravel. This developed into the so-called Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies. The rivalry that developed between the two blocs was waged on political, economic, and propaganda fronts, and had only limited recourse to weapons.
By 1948 the Soviets had installed left-wing governments in the countries of Eastern Europe that had been liberated by the Red Army. The Americans and the British feared the permanent Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and the threat of Soviet-influenced communist parties coming to power in the democracies of western Europe. The Soviets, on the other hand, were determined to maintain control of Eastern Europe in order to safeguard against any possible renewed threat from Germany, and they were intent on spreading communism worldwide, largely for ideological reasons. The Cold War had solidified by 1947-8, when US aid provided under the Marshall Plan to western Europe had brought those countries under American influence and the Soviets had installed openly communist regimes in Eastern Europe.
In 1948 the defection from the Soviet camp of Yugoslavia under the leadership of Marshal Tito struck a severe blow to world communism as a Stalin-dominated monolith. To prevent other client states from following Tito's example, Stalin instigated local show trials, manipulated like those of the purges of the 1930s in Russia, in which satellite communist leaders confessed to Titoism (the revisionist form of communism practised by Tito); many were executed.
The Cold War reached its peak in 1948-53. In this period the Soviets unsuccessfully blockaded the western-held sectors of West Berlin (1948-9); the United States and its European allies formed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a unified military command to resist the Soviet presence in Europe (1949); the Soviets exploded their first atomic warhead (1949), thus ending the American monopoly on the atomic bomb; the Chinese communists came to power in mainland China (1949); and the Soviet-supported communist government of North Korea invaded US- supported South Korea in 1950, setting off an indecisive Korean War that lasted until 1953. Stalin died in that year, and the burden of continuing the Cold War was a legacy he left to his successors.
Stalin arguably made a greater impact on the lives of more individuals than any other figure in history. While the destruction and misery he unleashed are undeniable, he achieved the industrialization of a country which, when he assumed complete control in 1928, was still notably backward by comparison with the leading industrial nations of the world. By 1937, after less than a decade's rule, he had increased the Soviet Union's total industrial output to the point where it was surpassed only by that of the United States. This, coupled with the Soviet Union's major role in defeating Hitler in the Second World War, helped to establish the USSR as the world's second most powerful industrial and military unit after the United States.
Stalin's particular brilliance was, however, narrowly specialized and confined within the single crucial area of creative political manipulation, where he remains unsurpassed. He was tlie first to recognize the potential of bureaucratic power. By interlinking various levels of authority - the Communist Party, ministries, legislative bodies, trade unions, political police, and armed forces, among others - he was able to weld together a power base that gave him a quarter of a century's virtually unchallenged rule.
3
POST-STALIN RUSSIA TO THE FALL OF COMMUNISM, 1953-91
The Khrushchev Era, 1953-64
The power struggle for leadership that followed Joseph Stalin's death in 1953 was won by Nikita Khrushchev. His landmark decisions in foreign policy and domestic programmes markedly changed the direction of the Soviet Union, bringing detente with the West and a relaxation of rigid controls within the country,
NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV (1894-1971)
Soviet leader
The son of a miner, Khrushchev joined the Communist Party in 1918. In 1934 he was elected to its Central Committee, and in 1935 he became first secretary of the Moscow party organization. He participated in Joseph Stalin's purges of party leaders. In 1938 he became head of the Ukrainian party and in 1939 was made a member
of the Politburo. After Stalin's death in 1953, he emerged from a bitter power struggle as the party's first secretary, and Nikolay Butganin became premier.
In i955. on his first trip outside the Soviet Union, Khrushchev showed his flexibility and the brash, extraverted style of diplomacy that would become his trademark. At the 20th Party Congress in 1956, he delivered a secret speech denouncing Stalin for his "intolerance, his brutality, his abuse of power". Thousands of political prisoners were released. Poland and Hungary used de-Stalinidation to reform their regimes: Khrushchev allowed the Poles relative freedom, but he crushed the Hungarian Revolution by force (1956) when Imre Nagy attempted to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact.
Opposition within the party crystallized in 1957, but Khrushchev secured the dismissal of his enemies and in 1958 assumed the premiership himself. Asserting a doctrine of peaceful coexistence with capitalist nations, he toured the United States in 1959, but a planned Paris summit with President Eisenhower in I960 was cancelled after the U-2 Affair, when the Soviet Union shot down a US reconnaissance plane. In 1962 Khrushchev attempted to place Soviet missiles in Cuba; in the ensuing Cuban missile crisis he retreated. Ideological differences and the signing of the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty (1963) led to a split with the Chinese, Agricultural failures that necessitated importation of wheat from the West, the China quarrel, and his often arbitrary administrative methods led to his forced retirement in 1964.
Khrushchev, who rose under Stalin as an agricultural specialist, was a Russian who had grown up in Ukraine. During his reign Ukrainians prospered in Moscow. He took it for granted that Russians had a natural right to instruct less fortunate nationals. This was especially evident in the non- Slavic republics of the USSR and in eastern and south-eastern Europe. His nationality policies reversed the repressive policies of Stalin. He grasped the nettle of the deported nationalities and rehabilitated almost all of them; the accusations of disloyalty made against them by Stalin were declared to be false. This allowed many nationalities to return to their homelands within Russia, the Volga Germans being a notable exception. (Their lands had been occupied by Russians who, fearing competition from the Germans, opposed their return.) The Crimean Tatars were similarly not allowed to return to their home territory. Their situation was complicated by the fact that Russians and Ukrainians had replaced them in the Crimea, and in 1954 Khrushchev made Ukraine a present of the Crimea. Khrushchev abided by the nationality theory that suggested that all Soviet national groups would come closer together and eventually coalesce; the Russians, of course, would be the dominant group. The theory was profoundly wrong. There was in fact a flowering of national cultures during Khrushchev's administration, as well as an expansion of technical and cultural elites.