At that mainspring Malenkov's government struck a telling blow when it ordered the arrest of the officials who had been in charge of the investigation into the ‘doctors' plot’, and when it publicly exposed the criminal manner in which they had extorted their ‘evidence’.
Officials who had the extraction of ‘confessions’ on their conscience must have read with a shudder the communique about the release of the Kremlin physicians. The shudder must have been felt in every dark office of the political police throughout Russia. Every man, high and low, in the service must have wondered whether, if he ever again tried to extort confessions, he would not be made to pay for it with his head or at least his freedom. The masters of terror were themselves terrified, and the mass of the Soviet people must have been thrilled by the mere thought that henceforth they might be free to defend their rights against their persecutors. Malenkov's government explicitly assured them of this.
It was as if a long, severe, cruel political winter was over, a Siberian winter which had lasted for more than two decades. Spring was in the air; and, politically, the whole of Russia seemed to be clearing the snow from her doorsteps in those memorable April days.
Great historical changes in the climate of a country sometimes show themselves more directly in ordinary scenes of daily life than in the official documents, public statements and pompous editorials, from which an unimaginative historian will one day construe a dead picture of those days. The official documents and even — who would have supposed it? — the editorials of Pravda made exciting reading. But they conveyed little in comparison, for instance, with this description of a seemingly trivial street incident given by Mr. Knudson, one of a group of American journalists who visited Moscow early in April.
‘To the amazement of Western nationals in Moscow and the Russians themselves, the Americans were allowed to use their cameras freely.’ Under the Stalinist obsession with secrecy this was unthinkable. Yet the ban on the use of cameras was not rescinded. Mr. Knudson himself was stopped in Moscow by a policeman when he was taking photographs and was asked to produce his passport. ‘I left my passport at the hotel, and as the policeman tried to talk to me in Russian a large crowd gathered. One of the Russians was a woman who spoke English. I told her I was one of the visiting newspaper men. "Let him go. He is an American,” she told the policeman. And he did.’ (The Manchester Guardian, 10 April 1953.)
This little scene in which a policeman, disregarding his standing orders and instructions, did what a woman from the crowd told him to do, sums up the new mood.
But can Malenkov's government afford to destroy the mainspring of the terror? Dare he throw out of gear the whole machinery of terror?
Malenkov almost certainly intends to tame rather than to undo the political police. It is always difficult and dangerous for any dictatorial regime to try to liberalize itself. Popular grievances pent up in previous years may be so intense and bitter that, once the floodgates are thrown open, the grievances may overflow and threaten all groups associated with the previous regime, including the reformers.
The reformers may then take fright, shrink from the consequences of their own liberal gestures, and surrender to the adherents of the terror.
Up to the middle of April 1953 no sign of such a development had become visible. However, popular reaction against the old terror may assume a less direct, less political character. It may show itself in a spontaneous slackening of social discipline, in particular of labour discipline; a slackening which could disturb the national economy and the rhythm of its work. The government might then feel tempted, or be driven, to curtail the freedoms it had just granted. An inclination to show the strong arm once again would not be surprising in men trained in the Stalin school of government. Malenkov and his associates are still half sub-merged in their Stalinist past even though they attempt to escape from it.
Nor is it certain that Malenkov's government is quite aware of the far-reaching implications of its own deeds.
Under the amnesty civil rights have been restored to the survivors of the great purges. They may be a mere handful, but they will speak of their experiences and record them. Some may even take courage and ask for an open and formal revision of their cases. Whether they do so or not, history has in any case already begun a great revision of the purge trials. Russia's mind has been set in motion. When the people are told that the political police trumped up charges and forced defendants to confess imaginary crimes, disturbing questions must begin to stir in many minds:
Was the case of the Kremlin doctors exceptional? Were the previous trials not also based on frame-ups? Were Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Radek, Tukhachevsky, Rykov, and so many other former heroes of the revolution really guilty of the crimes attributed to them? Were they spies, terrorists, traitors? Or did they die as martyrs? Should not perhaps their ashes too be interred in the Pantheon? Should not the remains of Trotsky be brought back from remote Mexico and laid to rest there? Should not the archives be thrown open to reveal the whole inner story of the past and fix the responsibility for its horrors?
Such doubts will now inevitably, though perhaps slowly, invade the minds of the intelligentsia and the workers.
Malenkov's government may be anxious to put an end to the misdeeds of the political police and to restore the constitutional rights of the people. But it also has a vested interest in preventing or delaying a historic revision of the old purges. It wishes to manage the present more rationally, but it can have no desire to throw a rational light on the past, in which all its members were implicated, some more and others less. (Vyshinsky, the chief prosecutor in all purge trials and the detestable author of the worst frame-ups, still represents Malenkov's government at the United Nations.)
It is even doubtful whether the government can afford to give a fair trial to the officials charged with fabricating the ‘doctors' plot’. Such a trial might lead to most embarrassing revelations. The defendants might plead mitigating circumstances and point to accomplices and instigators higher up. They might try to explain a few curious details of the fabrication and wittingly or unwittingly bring to light deeper cleavages in the State which have perhaps not yet been overcome.
If, to avoid such embarrassing consequences, the trial were to be staged in the familiar style, with set speeches and confessions, then its result would be merely to make scapegoats of a few officials, to reduce to a mockery Malenkov's assurances about the new era of constitutional rights, and to restore the arbitrary powers of the political police. It would therefore not be surprising if, to escape the dilemma, the government either avoided a public trial altogether or under some pretext delayed it indefinitely.
In any case it is still possible that a new gust of cold Siberian wind will nip the first shoots of reform, and that the hopeful opening of a new era will be followed by disillusionment.
Once again the phantoms of 1855 and 1861 may return to the Russian scene.
When Alexander II initiated the ‘liberal era’ even the most extreme opponents of Tsardom acclaimed him with enthusiasm. Herzen and Chernyshevsky, the two leaders of radical and revolutionary opinion, hailed the Emancipator. The new era was no mere wishful dream. Russian peasants were serfs no longer. Censorship practically ceased, although it was not formally abolished. Restrictions on the freedom of movement of Russian subjects, especially the ban on travelling abroad which had been enforced by Nicholas I, were declared null and void. Every kind of official abuse was exposed, and the old reactionary civil cervice was disgraced. In one of his first proclamations Alexander stated in words not very different from those that Malenkov has now used: ‘May Russia's internal welfare be established and perfected; may justice and mercy reign in her Law Courts.’