It was a measure of Stalin's unimpeachable authority that there were no open challenges to his rule over these last months. At the same time, Stalin was unable to take any of the thrusts of his anti-oligarchic strategy as far as he may have wished. Thus, for example, the organisation of the Central Committee Presidium Bureau, the equivalent of which Stalin had dominated for over twenty years, was made part of Khrushchev's brief, and, in a further break with tradition, it was resolved that, in Stalin's absence, the cabinet could be chaired by Malenkov, Khrushchev or Bulganin.[94] Stalin also appears to have dispensed with the services of his long-standing aide and the head of the special sector, Aleksandr Poskrebyshev, a month or so before his death.[95] The second prong of Stalin's strategy, the excommunication of Molotov and Mikoyan, also appears to have had limited success. Stalin's displeasure towards Mikoyan and Molotov had virtually no bearing on the attitudes of other top leaders towards the two, who were covertly told of leadership meetings and quickly reassumed their positions once Stalin died.[96] Third, despite the frenzied and bigoted atmosphere it created, the purge implications of the Doctors' Plot should not be overstated. Unlike the Great Terror in the 1930s, which had been supported in public by all top Politburo leaders, this campaign was waged by secondary functionaries, mostly from the Central Committee apparatus, and did not receive a public endorsement from any of Stalin's inner circle.[97]Equally, claims that the regime planned to hold public show trials, or to deport Jews to special camps in the east, much as other ethnic minorities had been 'cleansed' and relocated during the war, now appear to be misplaced.[98]
It appears that in Stalin's last months his poor health and declining energy had begun to take their toll. Certainly, whatever plans Stalin had in store for his colleagues and for the country's Jews were cut short by a sudden deterioration in his health. On 1 March 1953 Stalin, unusually, did not call on his staff. When, late that evening, the assistant warden of the dacha brought in the post, he found Stalin lying on the floor. On their arrival the following morning Stalin's physicians diagnosed a brain haemorrhage, and the next day they informed the ruling group that the leader had no hope of recovery. By 8.00 p.m. on 5 March, while Stalin was technically still alive (he died at 9.50 p.m.), the ruling group had convened a joint session of the Presidium and of the Central Committee.[99]Notwithstanding the turmoil of Stalin's last months, the leadership would rely on the collegial decision-making structures and mutual understandings forged in the proceding years, to see itself through the uncertainties of the early post-Stalin transition.
Conclusion
The entrenchment of Stalin's dictatorship was a multi-stage process in which oligarchic tendencies were persistently represented. By the end of the 1920s a fully-fledged Stalinist faction had been formed, yet there were still strong elements of collective rule. At this stage Stalin still had to accommodate the cut and thrust of high-level bureaucratic politics and to win colleagues onto his side. Any semblance of resistance was only crushed with the purges of the late 1930s which left the Politburo and Central Committee, newly infused with a young cohort of Stalin appointees, as institutionally malleable bodies subject to the dictator's whims. For Stalin the leadership system of the late 1930s represented the high-water mark of dictatorship, an ideal to which the leader would strive to return in later years.
At the height of his powers, in March 1939 Stalin declared to the Eighteenth Party Congress that 'there is no doubt that we will not use again the method of the mass purge'. Although we are unlikely ever to know whether Stalin seriously intended to keep his pledge, there are indications from the postwar years that Stalin recognised the benefits of relative equilibrium within the political system. Despite the devastating personal consequences for those involved, the Leningrad Affair of 1949 was the only occasion after the 1930s in which high-ranking politicians lost their lives, and the purges of the personal networks which accompanied it were relatively confined in scope. Equally, when, in the early 1950s, oligarchic tendencies began to set in and to constrain Stalin's leadership, as they had in the early 1930s, the anti-oligarchic strategy pursued by Stalin was far less bloody or robust than it had been when Stalin had broken the back of the 1930s collective leadership, fifteen years before.
The latter phase of Stalin's life has sometimes been depicted as a time of Stalin's mental decline and of the system's institutional disarray.[100] In fact from the second phase ofthe war on, we find evidence ofinstitutional consolidation. As for Stalin himself, we see a rationalisation of his own commitments, as the leader shed a variety of secondary duties and focused on a narrow range of core activities. As Stalin grew older and his powers waned, he was forced to relinquish even more of these. It is in the Doctors' Plot that we find, distilled to their essence, the two irreducible functions that Stalin could never let go of. In this final, desperate, lunge he turned to repression and ideology in order to counter oligarchical forces which, despite his own supreme dictatorial powers, would never quite go away.
The Khrushchev period, 1953-1964
WILLIAM TAUBMAN
The Twentieth Congress ofthe Soviet Communist Party convened on 14 February 1956 in the Great Kremlin Palace. On 25 February, the day the congress was slated to end, Soviet delegates attended an unscheduled secret session at which their leader, Nikita Khrushchev, talked for nearly four hours with one intermission. His speech was a devastating attack on Joseph Stalin. Stalin was guilty of 'a grave abuse of power'. During his reign 'mass arrests and deportation of thousands and thousands of people, and execution without trial or normal investigation, created insecurity, fear, and even desperation'. Stalinist charges of counter-revolutionary crimes had been 'absurd, wild and contrary to common sense'. Innocent people had confessed to such crimes 'because of physical methods of pressure, torture, reducing them to unconsciousness, depriving them of judgement, taking away their human dignity'. Stalin himself had been personally responsible for all this: he 'personally called in the interrogator, gave him instructions, and told him which methods to use, methods that were simple - to beat, beat and once again, beat'. 'Honest and innocent Communists' had been tortured and killed. Khrushchev assailed Stalin for incompetent wartime leadership, for 'monstrous' deportations of whole Caucasian peoples, for a 'mania of greatness', and 'nauseatingly false' adulation and self-adulation.1
Khrushchev's indictment was neither complete nor unalloyed. The Stalin he portrayed had been a paragon until the mid- 1930s. Although oppositionists had not deserved 'physical annihilation', they had been 'ideological and political enemies'. Khrushchev not only spared Lenin and the Soviet regime itself, he glorified them, but his speech stunned his audience. Many in the hall
This chapter draws extensively on my book, Khrushchev: The Man and his Era (New York: Norton, 2003).
1 'O kul'te lichnosti i ego posledstviiakh: doklad pervogo sekretaria TsK KPSS tov. Khrushcheva N. S. XX s"ezdu Kommunisticheskoi partii Sovetskogo Soiuza', in Izvestiia TsK kpss 3 (1989): 131,133,144-5,149,154-5.
were unreconstructed Stalinists. Others, who had secretly feared and hated Stalin, could not believe his successor secretly shared their view. The speech was met with 'a deathly silence', Vladimir Semichastnyi, who would later become Khrushchev's KGB chief, recalled. 'We didn't look at each other as we came down from the balcony,' remembered Aleksandr Yakovlev, then a minor Central Committee functionary, and later Mikhail Gorbachev's collaborator in perestroika, 'whether from shame or shock or from the simple unexpectedness of it.'[101]
95
RGANI f. 2,op. 1,d. 65, ll. 26,28-9; RGASPI f. 83,op. 1,d. 7, ll. 75-6 cf. 73; N. S. Khrushchev,
96
Anastas Mikoyan,
97
This was a point made by Adam Ulam,
98
See Samson Madieveski, '1953: La Deportation des Juifs Sovietiques etait-elle pro- grammee',
101
Semichastnyi's recollection in 'Taina zakrytogo doklada',