All those associated with Stalin’s care were quickly discharged, and most were sent out of Moscow.[418]
Immediately after Stalin’s death, a meeting of the Presidium was held. Beria proposed Malenkov as President of the Council of Ministers, and Malenkov proposed Beria as Vice-President and Minister of Internal Affairs and State Security.
The first actions of the new regime included the arrest of N Proskrebychev, Stalin’s secretary, who was sent to the small village of his birth and kept under MGB (Ministry for State Security) surveillance and house arrest.[419] M D Ryumin, who had led the inquiry into Zhdanov’s death, was arrested and shot in 1954.
Brent and Naumov state that ‘within a week’ of Stalin’s funeral a review of the ‘Doctors’ Plot’ case was ordered, and all of the accused were released and exonerated. All those involved with the Jewish Antifascism Committee were also exonerated.[420]
Beria aimed to re-orientate the direction the USSR, which would have led to its implosion decades before that was achieved by Gorbachev.[421] Thaddeus Wittlin states that from 1951 Beria was advocating a return to the free market along the lines of Lenin’s New Economic Policy. He also opposed Stalin’s Russification policy that sought to create a unified Soviet culture among the disparate peoples of the USSR.[422] Beria’s foreign policy objectives were to move closer to the West and to restore relations with Tito’s Yugoslavia.[423] He also sought to detach East Germany from the Soviet bloc and inaugurate a free market economy there. Stalin’s suspicions of Beria were well justified.
Although Khrushchev became Party General Secretary, this was a position of lesser importance to that of Beria, who was the real power.
The Soviet bloc could clearly not survive Beria’s regime, and one might well ask whether he was an agent of those interests◦– both within and outside the Soviet bloc◦– that Stalin had fought since 1928? Certainly his policies suggest this. The Army moved and disarmed the NKVD troops in Moscow under Beria’s command. Pravda announced Beria’s arrest on July 10 1953, for ‘criminal activities against the Party and the State’. In December it was announced that Beria and six accomplices, ‘in the pay of foreign intelligence agencies [had been] conspiring for many years to seize power in the Soviet Union and restore capitalism’. Beria was tried by a special tribunal[424] and he and his subordinates were executed on December 23 1953.
Despite what appears to have been Khrushchev’s role in Stalin’s death, and his famous repudiation of Stalinism, under his leadership the Soviet bloc did not succumb by radically deviating from Stalin’s path in the way Beria sought. The Soviet bloc remained the main obstacle to American-plutocratic hegemony until succumbing to pressures from within and without. While we today live under a de facto one-world government, if it had not been for Stalin’s obstructionism we would likely have succumbed to a de jure one-world state over six decades previously.
VII
The USSR After Stalin’s Death
Despite what appears to be Khrushchev’s complicity in the death of Stalin, possibly because of little or no options in the face of Beria’s power, Beria’s succession to leadership was very short-lived. Khrushchev with his secret address to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956 seemed to be about to embark on a new course and he is generally credited with the ‘de-Stalinization’ of the Soviet bloc. Yet, until the assumption of Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet bloc, especially spanning the regimes from Khrushchev to Brezhnev, remained as nationalistically intransigent toward US globalism and cultural decay as it was under Stalin. Also notable was the Soviet bloc’s continued opposition to Israel and to World Zionism.
There had always been a conflict between Zionist Jews and secularist Jews in the socialist movements throughout the world. Secularist or ‘apostate’ Jews believed that the best means of combating ‘anti-Semitism’ was for Jews to abandon their separate ethnic identity and assimilate into a new world socialist society. Zionists to the contrary regarded assimilation as ethnic suicide and held that anti-Semitism could never be eliminated from Gentile societies. Their best course was therefore to separate. Into this mix there was an influential element that combined Zionism and socialism. Moses Hess, who had an early influence on Karl Marx, was a leading proponent of both Zionism and Socialism[425].
However, Karl Marx was a secularist Jew who was antagonistic towards what he considered to be the ‘Jewish spirit’ in capitalism. Given his own money-grubbing mentality, this might have been no more than psychological project. Nonetheless, he believed that Jews needed ‘emancipating’ from their preoccupation with money, writing:
Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist. … The god of the Jews has become secularized and has become the god of the world. The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew. His god is only an illusory bill of exchange. The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general. What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money. Very well then! Emancipation from huckstering and money, consequently from practical, real Judaism, would be the self-emancipation of our time[426].
Antagonism towards Jew was of long duration in Russia[427] and was the primary reason why so many Jews entered the revolutionary movements to overthrow the Czar. Russian anti-Semitism manifested organisationally in The Black Hundred who opposed capitalism as much as socialism, and perceived them as equally Jewish[428].
Stalin, in his fight for leadership, was up against a large number of veteran Jewish Bolsheviks, Trotsky being the principal enemy, as we have seen. Although originally supporting the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, this was primarily a means by which the USSR could destabilise the Middle East and head-off Anglo-American and other rival influences in the region. It was a matter of realpolitik, of which Stalin was a master, not sympathy towards Zionism. The question of the loyalty of Jews in the USSR and wider Soviet bloc after World War II became a further factor in Stalin’s antagonism towards Jewish interests, as their loyalties were divided with the establishment of Israel. Hence, in Stalinism the old Czarist suspicion of Jews was revived as a State policy with a justification that Marx himself had condemned the ‘Jewish spirit’ of capitalism and that there had been a conflict of interests, even among Jews themselves, between Zionism, Socialism and Socialist-Zionism going back to before the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.
421
K R Bolton, ‘Mikhail Gorbachev: Globalist Super-Star’, Foreign Policy Journal, April 3 2011, http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2011/04/03/mikhail-gorbachev-globalist-super-star/
422
Thaddeus Wittlin, Commissar: The Life and Death of Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 354.
424
On the Crimes and Anti-Party, Anti-Government Activities of Beria, Plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, July 2-7 1953.
425
Shlomo Avineri, Moses Hess: Prophet of Communism and Zionism (New York University, 1985).
426
Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question, 1844. www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/
427
Walter Laqueur, The Black Hundred: The Rise of the Extreme Right in Russia, (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993).