The ideas often clashed with professed principles and with what the party propagandists were saying. Stalin's policy always had two aspects: one was esoteric, occult; the other was exoteric, designed for mass consumption. His secretaries had to master both aspects, and never confuse them in their own minds. The exoteric aspect might appear baffling, incoherent, even downright stupid. But the illuminati knew what Stalin was aiming at at any particular moment; and the most initiated operated the enormous machinery of the party from the General Secretariat.
In the late 1930's Malenkov was already in charge of the party ‘cadres’. It was his responsibility to assign ‘the right man to the right job’ at every turn of policy. On Stalin's behalf, he already held the party in his hands and wielded much greater influence than did the members of the Politbureau who on ceremonial occasions appeared at the Lenin Mausoleum by Stalin's side. As early as 1939 Malenkov brought about the dismissal of Mrs. Molotov from a Ministerial post — he had attacked her publicly for mismanaging her department. His position was becoming similar to that which Stalin had held under Lenin. But to keep his influence and to enlarge it, Malenkov had to behave towards Stalin with the utmost discretion and modesty and to show no sign of vacillation, let alone of independence. Only as Stalin's shadow could he continue to gather power in his own hands.
He had taken over the management of the ‘cadres’ at the time of the great purges, when most of the old party personnel was destroyed or demoted and vacancies had to be filled with new men. The keymen in the party machine of the late 1930’s and 1940's were therefore ‘Malenkov men’. In this respect Malenkov's position was already stronger than Stalin's in the early and middle 1920's, because at that time Stalin had still to eliminate his opponents from the party machine and to fill the decisive posts with his minions.
Stalin deliberately fashioned Malenkov's career so that it should appear as similar to his own as possible. He seemed bent on forming Malenkov in his own image, and he projected, as it were, certain landmarks of his own life into the life of Malenkov. He gave Malenkov the same assignments with which he himself had been entrusted by Lenin. During the Second World War he sent Malenkov to the same critical front-line areas that he himself had inspected in the civil war, including Stalingrad, his old Tsaritsyn. The Tsaritsyn episode of 1918 had been vested by Stalin's hagiographers with so much symbolic significance and with so great a halo that, in the eyes of people brought up in the Stalin cult, Malenkov's mission to Stalingrad at once transferred to him the glories of the young Stalin. In truth, Malenkov's merits as the political commissar responsible for the battle of Stalingrad were more serious and real than the merits which Stalin claimed for himself in connection with the defence of Tsaritsyn in 1918.
Little can be said about the supposed rivalry between Malenkov and Zhdanov in later years. Unlike Malenkov, Zhdanov had the ambitions of the intellectual and the theoretician; and this difference in their outlook may have led to a rivalry faintly, but only very faintly, reminiscent of that between Stalin and Trotsky. Being in charge of the party organization in Leningrad, Zhdanov was somewhat removed from the levers of power at the centre, and his chances against Malenkov were hardly serious. After Zhdanov's death, Malenkov's ascendancy was secure, but he still had to contend against the old Stalin guard headed by Molotov, who could claim seniority in the party hierarchy. Stalin himself had apparently overridden this claim when, at the Nineteenth Congress of the party, in October 1952, he conspicuously threw his mantle over Malenkov's shoulders and let Malenkov make on behalf of the Central Committee the report which used to be made by Lenin and afterwards by Stalin.
But was Malenkov nothing more than Stalin's political projection?
He has certainly been the product of Stalinism and of Stalinism alone. But in his personality the diverse elements of Stalinism, progressive and retrogressive, seem to be in conflict. It is possible that in his mind the vital demands of the new Soviet society and State revolted against the primitive magic and the bureaucratic rigidity of Stalinism. Not only the people but even the bureaucracy, or perhaps especially the bureaucracy, felt acutely the need for rationalization in all spheres of national life, in the working of the administration, in the running of the economy, in the relation between the rulers and the ruled, and in the conduct of foreign policy.
Malenkov's first moves, made since his assumption of power, seem to have gone halfway to meet that need. He has come to the fore in the role of the rationalizer striving to put in order the Stalinist legacy and to disentangle its great assets from its heavy liabilities.
The prerequisite for this is a break with the ecclesiastical outlook of Stalinism, with those scholastic-bureaucratic habits of thought and action which had ensnared, the party and clogged the whole machinery of government. It may be a sign of the time that Stalin's successor is one who has received his education at a Technological Institute, not at a Theological Seminary. During the industrial revolution Malenkov was certainly more in his element than his master could have been. His task in 1941-2 was to organize the disrupted Soviet industry for the mass production of tanks. Stalin's assignment at a comparable critical juncture, in 1918, was to requisition grain from the peasants of the Kuban and to transport it to starving Moscow. Each of these assignments was of the utmost importance in its time. But the difference between them reflects the distance which separated two epochs and two generations. In 1918 the survival of the Soviet regime depended on the most primitive economic devices; in 1942 it could be secured only by the work of an enormous and up-to-date industrial organization. If the style of the man offers any clue to his character, then Malenkov's manner is free from the incongruities and the canonical undertones characteristic of Stalin. It is more business-like, clear, and modern, although at times it seems even flatter than Stalin's style.
Stalin was a slave to his own past, to his old heresy hunts and blood feuds. He could do nothing to disavow any part of his record. He approached every new task with an eye on his past performances. In the 1930's he had to justify the Stalin of the 1920's; and in the 1940's and 1950's he still had to justify the Stalin of the 1930's.
He carried the terrible burden of responsibility for the great purges; and he made the whole of Russia share the burden with him. He could do nothing that might throw on those purges retrospectively a light different from that in which he wanted Russia to see them; and any breath of freedom threatened to make Russia see them in a different light.
In the meantime there has grown up a new generation whom Stalin's blood feuds leave indifferent, even if it accepts the Stalinist version of them. The men and women who have entered public life in the last fifteen years know that before their entry a devastating storm had raged in party and State; but they know next to nothing about the issues that were at stake. The independent-minded among them desire nothing more than to think out new problems on their merits, paying no regard to the requirements of an orthodoxy based on past controversies and struggles. Most often they do not even comprehend those requirements, and because of this they have sometimes unwittingly come into conflict with the Stalinist orthodoxy.
In his early fifties, Malenkov stands halfway between the Old Stalin Guard and this new generation. The past has a claim on him, but the claim is not so heavy as to make him unresponsive to the needs of the present. He was implicated in every phase of Stalinism: in the struggle against the oppositions, in the process of collectivization, in the great purges, and in the recent heresy hunts. But in the worst phases he was involved only as a subordinate, not as an initiator; and so he may, up to a point, disclaim responsibility for them. On the other hand, he has owed too much to Stalinism and has himself been too much its product to be able to break away from it openly. He can only sneak away from Stalinism.