The ruling Communist elites across Eastern Europe saw Stalin’s death as a calamity. He had been their parties’ protector and greatest supporter, “the very embodiment of their highest dreams, the hero they had come to revere, the symbol of their vigor, passion, and boundless enthusiasm.”56 They all endorsed the Soviet model and a noncapitalist, collectivist future and, like Stalin, used this great “final goal” of socialism as justification for the sacrifice of individual rights and the commission of the most terrible crimes. Although by the time he died, Stalin had this part of the Red Empire firmly under control, he dared not make any real attempt to realize the early Bolshevik vision of turning the states of Central and Eastern Europe into republics within the USSR.57 Such a move would have provoked a backlash and would have created more tensions in the expanded Soviet Union than even Stalin might have managed. He was content to bind them to Moscow with treaties of friendship and mutual cooperation. The embrace would endure for close to fifty years.
Epilogue
The USSR in the immediate postwar years exhibited enormous energy, having gained confidence and territory by winning the Second World War. Not only did the Red Empire reclaim “lost territories” such as the Baltic states and western Ukraine, but Stalin saw to it that regimes based on Communism, and more or less taking orders from Moscow, were established all the way to Berlin. There were barely missed opportunities to plant the Red flag in parts of Iran and Turkey, perhaps also in Greece, Italy, and France. The door to Germany was opened, and to Asia as well. If the West had left Stalin and his entourage to their own devices, there is no telling how far the Communist cause might have advanced.
At the same time, the fundamental flaws in the foundation of the Red Empire were already showing. Stalin’s heavy-handed methods alienated true believers in Yugoslavia, and he sowed seeds of discord in China. Although the Soviet Union was unquestionably a superpower, it had underlying economic weaknesses that became more apparent over time. Worse still, Stalinism was unable to tolerate freedom of thought and expression and so could not tap the full energies and involvement of the people.
Stalin’s heirs, lacking his iron will and revolutionary militancy, papered over these basic faults. If the Soviet system became less totalitarian than it had been in its bloodiest days, it remained a Communist dictatorship. Those who governed from the Kremlin continued to believe that Communism was the wave of the future. Although they faced a structurally different world in the Cold War they had inherited from Stalin, none of them had the slightest intention of loosening their grip on the Red Empire.
Indeed, the new Soviet leaders carried on Stalin’s foreign policy, refused to be seen as “soft” on the West, and innovated insofar as they made a more concerted effort to reach out to the third world than Stalin had done. His rigid Marxism decreed that every society had to pass through the modern or bourgeois stage of economic development before the social situation would be ripe for a Soviet-style revolution. He had counseled Mao and the Chinese Communists to slow down, even after their revolution succeeded in 1949. Elsewhere around the globe, Stalin was prepared to give moderate encouragement to revolutionary movements, yet he saw their main role as siding with the Soviet Union in the Cold War.
Two months after Stalin’s death, Moscow agreed to increase and sustain substantial aid to China. “It was a massive attempt at stamping Soviet socialism in China—in every department of every ministry, in every large factory, in every city, army, or university there were Soviet advisors, specialists, or experts” to help China’s modernization.1 Thus, even without Stalin, the Cold War continued, more or less along the same track. In time the USSR ran up more defense costs than it could sustain, the Red Empire in Eastern Europe never paid for itself, and additionally client states like Vietnam and Cuba drained away billions each year.2
The immediate need at home, after Stalin’s sudden departure, was to carry on the business of governing, and on March 8, 1953, a new collective leadership was formed, with Georgi Malenkov in charge of the government and the party, Molotov in foreign affairs, Beria in security, and Bulganin in control of the army. By a strange irony, it was Beria, Stalin’s blood-spattered enforcer, who took the first steps to make the regime appear less brutal. Already on March 6 he shuffled the security apparatus and began the process of handing over the vast Gulag system to the Justice Ministry.3
On March 26 he sent the Presidium an amnesty proposal that was, without intending it, an astonishing condemnation of Stalinism. Beria said there were 2,526,402 prisoners in work camps and colonies. Of them, 221,435 were regarded as the “most dangerous state criminals” (spies, terrorists, Trotskyites, nationalists, etc.), and they were not going anywhere. He wanted to free some of the others, namely those sentenced to serve less than five years, offenders younger than eighteen, pregnant women, and women with children under the age of ten. In total around one million prisoners would be released.4
The first news of the changes afoot was published in Pravda on April 4. Under the still-misleading headline “Soviet Socialist Law Is Inviolable,” it reported a review of the Doctors’ Plot. It turned out that the arrests were “without legal foundation” and that testimony had been obtained by “means not permitted under Soviet law.” The physicians were released and errant police officials blamed for it all.5
Beria’s rivals for power did not applaud his efforts to moderate the Stalinist system. A group headed by Khrushchev had him arrested on June 26, and he was later tried and executed. The release of the Gulag prisoners continued mainly because, as everyone in the Kremlin knew, the camps were becoming too costly and a political liability to the regime. Still, the USSR continued to be almost as repressive as it had ever been.
Those remaining in the camps, overlooked by the amnesty or excluded, like political prisoners, found the conditions more intolerable than ever, and during the spring of 1953, protests, strikes, and even rebellions involved tens of thousands of prisoners. The authorities fought back with armed troops and tanks and in some places killed hundreds.6 This resistance, coupled with the unprofitability of the camps, induced the release of still more prisoners. They would wait expectantly for months, only to be abruptly told that they would be leaving within hours and were left to find their way home. Many died along the way, in desperation committed suicide, or engaged in a criminal act in order to be rearrested. Most were physically or psychologically maimed and found it difficult to adjust to life on the outside.7
Nikita Khrushchev’s famous speech to the Twentieth Party Congress on February 24, 1956, sent tremors through the entire Communist movement because he addressed the “cult of personality” and some of the crimes of the Stalinist era. Above all, Khrushchev wanted to rescue Communism, to explain away “excesses,” and return to mythologized “Leninist principles.” Remarkably enough, far from distancing himself and the regime from Stalin’s ideas, policies, and practices, he defended the dead leader’s use of forced collectivization, the war on the kulaks, and even lauded him for destroying Trotsky. Khrushchev actually ridiculed what he labeled Nikolai Bukharin’s “cotton-dress industrialization,” with its promise of more consumer goods. Instead he praised Stalin’s five-year plans, without which, according to Khrushchev, “we would not now have a powerful heavy industry, we would not have collective farms, and find ourselves disarmed and weak in a capitalist encirclement.”8