Unlike their predecessors, however, the Belinskys of contemporary Russia, if they exist, can be only reformers, not revolutionaries. They can aim only at improving and cleansing the existing social order, not at overthrowing it. That the main trend of Soviet anti-Stalinism was reformist could be seen even in the distorting mirror of recent emigre writings. Some time ago the Russian emigre Press reported that by far the most numerous party among post-war Russian refugees was one which described itself as the ‘Lenin Party’ and advocated a return to the democratic origins of the Bolshevik revolution. Hostile correspondents who reported this pointed out with some alarm that ‘at least a good half’ of the mass of refugees belonged to that party, although it had no periodicals and no organization, and although its adherents in the camps for displaced persons lived in constant terror of being denounced either to Soviet or to Western ‘security organs’.
The ‘Lenin legend’ is surviving the Stalin cult, although the latter cynically exploited and abused it for its own purposes. It is difficult to define the implications of this fact. Leninism is subject to widely differing interpretations; and it may be held that the slogan about a ‘return to Lenin’ is unreaclass="underline" history rarely, if ever, returns to its starting-point. But what the slogan sums up is a yearning for regeneration of ‘Soviet democracy’ and a desire to reform the present order, not to overthrow it.
The strength of the ‘Lenin legend’ may be judged from many indications. We can cite here one other instance which seems as convincing as it is strange. It will be remembered that during the Second World War the Soviet General A. Vlasov, taken prisoner by the Nazis, later fought on the German side and commanded a Russian army formed of prisoners of war. After the war Vlasov was handed over to Soviet military authorities and executed as a traitor. Recently a book on Vlasov was published by a Russian emigre who was Vlasov's adjutant and was by his side when the Nazis conducted him from a prison camp to Berlin. The author describes that on the way Vlasov argued thus with the German officers who were escorting him: ‘I want to give you my advice on how to overthrow Stalin. This can be done only with the help of Lenin.’ There was, Vlasov said, only one way of gaining the confidence of the Soviet people, and this was to tell them that Stalin had distorted and falsified Lenin's teaching, and that the time had come to restore the true Leninist republic of workers and peasants. ‘We ought to tell the people that we are going to begin anew where the great Lenin left off — if Lenin had been alive everything would have been different.’
It is difficult to imagine a scene of greater bathos than this, in which a Soviet general, setting his foot on the slippery road of treason, pleaded with the Nazis that they should appeal to the Russian people in the name of Lenin. Vlasov hated the Stalin regime and allowed himself to be carried away by this hatred. The Nazis were willing to use him, but, of course, his advice sounded to them like the raving of a disordered mind. No anti-communist power could risk conjuring up the spirit of Lenin. Nevertheless there was a great truth behind Vlasov's grotesque pleading: The hope of a renascence of the revolution has never been extinguished in the Soviet people, and it has been kept alive by remote memories of the Leninist period. This hope still remains an imponderable and most vital factor in the political climate of Russia.
Significantly during Stalin's last months there re-sounded throughout Russia a warning against those who argued that now, when Russia was no longer the only
communist country in the world, the old ways and habits of Stalinism had become outdated. With one foot in the grave, Stalin heard his lieutenants raising the alarm about the recurrence of ‘Bukharinist and Trotskyist deviations’ in the party. And Stalin himself, in his last published letters, had to rebuke young Soviet economists for a relapse into these long-suppressed heresies.
At that late stage, barely two months before Stalin's death, the story about the ‘plot’ of the Kremlin doctors burst upon Russia. Its specific political meaning will be discussed later — here we are concerned only with its bearing upon the moral crisis of Stalinism.
It is not certain whether or to what extent Stalin himself was responsible for the frame-up. But, regardless of this, in the eyes of Russia and of the world Stalinism reduced itself to a ghastly absurdity through this incident. It committed moral suicide even before the physical death of its author. The official revelations about the ‘plot’ looked like an attempt to re-enact in Moscow the Witches' Sabbath of the 1930's. As has been pointed out before, the purge trials of the 1930's could not be repeated in the Russia of the early 1950's without ruining the regime, the economy, and the morale of the country. A repetition would have clashed so obviously with Russia's interests and frame of mind that a reaction against it, unthinkable earlier, had to come.
The untamed nationalism of recent years was also driven to a self-destructive extreme during the campaign about the doctors' plot. The tale about the anti-Soviet conspiracy of world Jewry had the flavour of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and of the concoctions of Goebbels's Ministry of Propaganda. It provided grist to the mills of those anti-communists who had always maintained that there was no difference between Stalinism and Nazism and now argued that the inherent kinship of the two was ‘bound’ to make Stalinism adopt the tenets of racial hatred and anti-Semitism. The argument was superficial and fallacious: it ignored the socialist background of Soviet Russia and the contradictions in the educational influence of Stalinism.
A government which ordered the printing of the works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin in millions of copies, which included these works in the obligatory educational curriculum and forced them into the hands of adult citizens, could not walk the road to which ‘the doctors' plot’ pointed. It could afford to make tactical twists and turns, including the bargain with Hitler in 1939, as long as it could excuse its actions by reference to the needs of national defence. It could exploit episodically and allusively even anti-Semitic prejudice, as it did during the great purges. But it could not strike openly at the very roots of its own ideology. It could debase Marxian internationalism; it could combine it ambiguously with nationalist self-adulation; but it could not attack it directly and frontally.
Before embracing racialism and anti-Semitism any Soviet government would first have to ban the works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, that is to say to destroy its own birth certificate and ideological title deeds. As Stalinism had not done this, its last scandal served only to underline its own decomposition and to prepare a revulsion against it.
CHAPTER SEVEN
MALENKOV AND HIS ROLE
Malenkov's government took the initiative of reform already in the first weeks of its existence. In doing so it may have acted under popular pressure; but the pressure was not apparent. It was not the ‘voice of the people’ that made Stalin's successors act as they did, for that voice could not be heard. Malenkov's government seemed rather to have guessed the hopes and expectations that were in the people's mind. If any voices did in fact demand reform, they came from the bureaucracy itself or rather from its uppermost stratum.
As representative of that stratum Malenkov came to the fore and to all intents and purposes assumed the succession.
Who is Georgi Maximilianovich Malenkov?
His previous career strongly suggested that he was merely Stalin's shadow, with no political personality of his own.