A major drawback of one-man rule is that when the leader elevates someone whose ideas are outdated and wrong, the errors multiply and become difficult to correct. For example, Stalin backed the work of the scientist Trofim Lysenko and had done so since the 1930s. Lysenko’s promise was that he would be able to revolutionize crop yields and lead an agricultural revolution. When his findings were disproven and he fought back, Stalin and later Khrushchev supported him because they were attracted by the idea of a miracle in farming that would put them ahead of the West. What made Lysenko such a menace to the scientific establishment was that he was a clever lobbyist who had Stalin’s ear.
The Lysenko “affair” demonstrates how blindly Stalin could hold on to the “truths” he felt were crucial to his modernization schemes. It also shows how cruelly he could reject someone who crossed him, even if that person was someone “special” like Andrei Zhdanov.
Already prominent in the ruling elite since the late 1930s, after the war Zhdanov was elevated to greater prominence when Stalin put him in charge of straightening out the Soviet intelligentsia. Abroad he gave stern lectures to the Eastern European Communist parties as the keynote speaker at the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform) meetings in 1947 and 1948. Stalin also liked Andrei’s son Yuri, a twenty-eight-year-old whom he put in charge of the Agitprop (propaganda) Science Section. The dictator thought the young Yuri a perfect match for his daughter, Svetlana, and expected they would marry in 1949. However, in 1948 it came to Yuri’s attention that a number of important scientists doubted the work of none other than Lysenko, one of the dictator’s favorites. The young Zhdanov gave a speech on April 10 to propaganda workers, in which he seriously criticized Lysenko, who was nearby, heard for himself, and then complained to Stalin. On May 28 the dictator, who still believed in the promise of the quack scientist, ordered the Zhdanovs, father and son, as well as others involved, to the Kremlin. Stalin was angry with Yuri but excused him because of his youth. Andrei Zhdanov, who was suffering from serious health problems, got a dressing-down. On August 31, 1948, he died in a hospital under what people believed were “mysterious circumstances.”19
Although some thought Beria had poisoned him, medical doctor Lidia Timashuk wrote to the head of Stalin’s bodyguard, General Nikolai Vlasik, and alleged that the doctors who treated Zhdanov were to blame. That information percolated through the system like slow-acting venom and, as we will see later, in 1952 culminated in a national uproar about an alleged doctors’ plot to kill Soviet leaders.20
Stalin called for a special session of the Agricultural Academy in August 1948 to discuss Lysenko’s claims and those of the geneticists. Lysenko, who had been president of the academy for ten years, filled the hall and list of speakers with his supporters. Of the fifty-six papers given at the big event, the great majority were on his side. Among other things, they said the geneticists were bourgeois and were “kowtowing to the West”—the very sin Andrei Zhdanov was ferociously fighting. That Lysenko would come out on top was a foregone conclusion, but Stalin went through the motions of consulting the experts.21 He had blurted out to Yuri Zhdanov that “our entire agricultural future depends on Lysenko.”22 It was simply impossible for him to take back such an endorsement. Not until years after Stalin’s death would Lysenko finally be rejected and modern genetics be supported in the Soviet Union.
Another favorite among the elite who rose to the top, only to fall from grace, was Nikolai Voznesensky. He was a trained economist and had served loyally in the important position of chairman of Gosplan since 1938. Moreover, he was the author of The War Economy of the USSR in the Great Patriotic War (1947), which was widely reviewed and crowned with a Stalin Prize, first class. Many thought that if Zhdanov was not to be Stalin’s successor, then it would be Voznesensky. Stalin, who fancied that socialist economics was his own area of special expertise, might have resented his old comrade or been concerned about him as a possible successor. The Master said he liked how the commissar expressed his opinions firmly and would not compromise with the others, though precisely such traits created enemies among the inner circle.23
To the extent that we can make sense of Voznesensky’s fall from grace, his fateful “transgressions” began in Leningrad. There, from January 10 to 20, 1949, regional leaders on their own initiative sponsored an all-Russian wholesale fair. Although they had asked native son Voznesensky to act as patron for the event, he had declined. The organizers also had links to other national figures from the city, among them Aleksei Kuznetsov, secretary of the Central Committee. Many considered the young and good-looking Kuznetsov a star, and he also was mentioned as a possible successor to Stalin. Some senior administrators in Moscow, however, expressed mild concern that holding such a fair should have been cleared by the Council of Ministers.
Stalin heard about this and was sufficiently upset to convene a Politburo meeting on February 12 to interview the local and regional organizers of the fair. When they were condemned, Voznesensky tried to distance himself from the group by saying that he had turned down its offer to act as a “patron.” Three days later Kuznetsov and his “co-conspirators” were dismissed from office. Voznesensky was given a reprimand for not informing the Central Committee either about the “antiparty” fair or the request that he act as its patron.
To make matters worse, his rivals Beria and Malenkov spread word that something was amiss in Gosplan, the agency that he led and that was in charge of planning and coordinating the economy, setting and meeting quotas. The suspicion was raised that Gosplan might be fudging the figures, when in fact growth rates were lower than expected and reported. At any rate, Stalin slowly became convinced that Voznesensky was dishonest and had “masked the real state of affairs” in the economy. That charge, on top of his association with what looked like an emerging Leningrad faction in the party, soon had fatal consequences.
On March 5, in spite of years of faithful service, Voznesensky was dismissed from his important post and soon also dropped from the Politburo. The police arrested more people and found further damning evidence until, on October 27, they took him into custody. Along with four other suspects, he was mercilessly interrogated for months, tried in secret in September 1950, and shot. Altogether, sixty-nine of the accused and 145 relatives were punished, with twenty-three of them executed, and arrests continued into 1952. This “Leningrad Affair” was unique for the postwar years in taking down a member of the Politburo. The administration of Gosplan was also purged, with many being dismissed, demoted, or transferred, rather than executed.24
Stalin had got it into his head that these people represented threats to his rule. The Great Terror of the 1930s might well have “unnerved” him, or he may have been “wary of embarking on a new round of bloodletting on such a scale.”25 Realistically, in the postwar years he no longer needed show trials because the climate of insecurity was already widespread and easily supplemented with press campaigns and in other ways. Moreover, police control over the country was more professionalized and extensive than it was in the 1930s, so that left Stalin free to exercise his tyranny more subtly.