Although Voznesenskii had earned a reprieve in February, his dismissal would follow shortly afterwards. As a member of the younger generation of Politburo leaders, Voznesenskii, who had seen no revolutionary service and whose symbolic worth was limited, had been promoted and retained by Stalin solely on the basis of his organisational talents and reliability. As the head of Gosplan, Vosnesenskii's main assignment was to provide the political leadership under Stalin with accurate information on the economy. When Stalin discovered, towards the end of February, that Voznesenskii had deliberately massaged economic statistics, his retribution was swift. On 5 March Vosnesen- skii was dismissed as chair of Gosplan and two days later he was forced out of the Politburo.
For some time, Stalin vacillated over what to do with Vosnesenskii. After several months the latter's fate was sealed when he was charged with losing secret documents. In a last-ditch attempt to earn Stalin's forgiveness Voznesen- skii pleaded in a letter: 'I appeal to the Central Committee and to you, comrade Stalin, and beg you to pardon me ... and to believe that you are dealing with a man who has learned his lesson .. .'[89] Waving aside this appeal, on 11 September 1949 the Politburo confirmed a recommendation of the Commission of Party Control to have Voznesenskii expelled from the Central Committee and to hand him over for trial.46 On 27 October 1949 Voznesenskii was arrested and joined Kuznetsov and the others, who had been detained earlier that summer. Following a year of confinement and interrogations Voznesenskii and the other 'Leningraders' were convicted at a secret trial in September 1950 and executed on 1 October.
In selecting his victim and moment of retribution Stalin was often quite unpredictable, and, accordingly, he could turn virtually any untoward circumstance into a pretext for punishment. We cannot be certain about what tipped the balance in this instance. It is clear, however, that a number of established Stalinist norms had been violated. The strict hierarchy of decision-making had been flouted and there appeared to be evidence that a Moscow-based network of senior leaders had exercised patronage over regional clients in Leningrad. For his part, Voznesenskii had violated his assignment, which involvedproviding accurate statistics to the Politburo. At the same time, despite the potential, frequently realised in the 1930s, for ever-expanding networks to be implicated in such a purge, the scope of the Leningrad Affair would prove to be surprisingly narrow.
Last years
After the drama of 1949, the next two years were a period of relative calm and moderation within the leadership, as the ageing dictator spent an increasing amount of time in the south. On this basis the higher leadership began to consolidate and to lay the foundations of collective rule. While Stalin was out of the capital, issues within the Politburo's brief were discussed at meetings of a Stalin-less ruling group, known as the 'septet', which operated as a collective decision-making body. At its sessions questions appear to have been properly debated and authentic fact-finding commissions were set up for supplementary investigation of contentious issues. Indeed, the septet's work methods when Stalin was away began to approximate the pattern of Politburo decision-making which had prevailed prior to the establishment of a full-blown dictatorship.
Arguably of greater significance were the regular meetings of the supreme governmental agency in this period, the Bureau ofthe Presidium ofthe Council of Ministers. At the time of its foundation on 7 April 1950 the bureau consisted of five members, Bulganin, Beria, Kaganovich, Mikoyan and Molotov, who were joined by a sixth member, Malenkov, in mid-April, and by a seventh, Nikita Khrushchev, who began attending its meetings on 2 September 1950. While the bureau consisted entirely of members of the Politburo's ruling group, unlike the Politburo it never met with Stalin, not even when Stalin was in Moscow. At the same time, the bureau convened very regularly, normally once a week. Thus the ruling group of the Politburo had regular opportunities to meet without Stalin and outside the very framework of the Politburo in order to discuss issues of national importance within a committee structure with a clear membership, well-defined procedures and set agendas. These meetings afforded an embryonic collective leadership the opportunity to meet regularly and to forge a set of mutual understandings.
There are indications that in his last year Stalin settled on what might be termed an anti-oligarchic strategy aimed at undercutting the relatively stable and independent system of collective leadership which had taken hold over the previous two years, especially at the Council of Ministers. Stalin's strategy consisted of three elements. First, in December 1951 Stalin finally called a party congress, which convened the following October. The congress afforded Stalin a convenient pretext for loosening the ties of senior Politburo members to the
Council of Ministers and for focusing attention instead on a new Central Committee Presidium Bureau, which would meet under him. The second prong of Stalin's anti-oligarchic strategy was an onslaught on two Politburo veterans, Molotov and Mikoyan, who were left out of the Central Committee Bureau. As on earlier occasions, for example in 1941 and 1945, Stalin reserved his most stinging attackfor Molotov. At the post-congress plenum, making explicit reference to the events of autumn 1945 described earlier, Stalin openly accused Molotov of cowardice, capitulationism and, critically, of personal betrayal. These accusations were all the more astounding for the fact that they ran against the widely heldperception of Molotov as Stalin's most devoted follower.
The third and boldest element of Stalin's anti-oligarchic strategy was the fabrication of a notional 'conspiracy' by a group of mostly Jewish doctors to murder members of the Soviet leadership. 'Jewish nationalists', Stalin told a session of the Presidium on 1 December 1952, 'believe that their nation has been saved by the United States (there they can become rich, bourgeois and so on). They believe they are obliged to the Americans. Among the doctors there are many Jewish nationalists.'[90] On 13 January 1953 the national daily, Pravda, published a TASS bulletin, originally dictated by Stalin, and a lead editorial, commissioned and heavily edited by him, on the activities of a group of 'doctor-wreckers' most of whom, it claimed, were the tools of an 'international Jewish Zionist organisation'.[91] The publication ushered in a frenzied nationwide campaign with heavy anti-Semitic overtones and led to yet more arrests.
Concocting the Doctors' Plot served a dual purpose. First, it demonstrated Stalin's undiminished control of the secret police, a factor which continued to underpin his control of Politburo colleagues. The plot, secondly, was designed to prevent Stalin's fellow leaders from lapsing into a 'spirit of geopolitical complacency'.[92] Paradoxically the USSR's achievements over the previous decade, which included its defeat of Nazi Germany, the acquisition of a ring of buffer states in Eastern Europe and the testing of the atom bomb in 1949, had presented Stalin with a problem, namely the view, seemingly widely held by other members of the leadership, that the country's new-found strength and security could enable it to relax and to focus on domestic issues. The Doctors' Plot was, to quote Robert Tucker, 'Stalin's desperate attempt to dramatise the postulated persistence of the capitalist encirclement'.[93]
92
50 Ibid., pp. 95-6. Also see Khlevniuk et al.,