When Stalin was struck down by serious illness, Politburo members took turns at his bedside (or perhaps in an adjoining room). Once it was apparent that his condition was terminal, they turned to political matters. Most of them were already nurturing schemes and began manoeuvring for positions and allies. Whatever the outcome of these shifting combinations, the new rulers were inheriting a regime that belonged to a different – past – age. Changes began almost at once, and initially isolated measures soon gave way to successive waves of reform.
We shall discuss these reforms below. But for now it is important to appreciate that Stalin’s disappearance opened various valves in the system, making it possible to form a leadership group capable of reviving the regime. Those at the top can all be characterized as ‘Stalinists’, so it is scarcely surprising that one of their first steps was the classically Stalinist deed of eliminating one of their number – Beria – as well as a significant number of secret police officials, who were shot or imprisoned on the basis of a tissue of hastily concocted, incoherent charges.
This affair is in part explained by the sequence of events. Stalin died on 5 March 1953. The same day, a session of the Central Committee plenum, the Council of Ministers and the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet decreed that the MGB (Ministry of State Security) and the MVD (Ministry of Internal Affairs) should once again be fused into one MVD, to be headed by Beria, who was also appointed Deputy Prime Minister. These decisions were made official by the Supreme Soviet on 15 March. That day, the Council of Ministers appointed people close to Beria and Malenkov to various posts: Kruglov, Kobulov and Serov became Beria’s first deputies, Maslennikov was made MVD deputy minister, and all of them were named members of the MVD collegium (an internal consultative council present in every ministry). The precise whys and wherefores of these appointments remain obscure. But the fact is that Beria, under the auspices of his putative ally, Prime Minister Malenkov, retained a key role in government and kept a grip on the whole repressive apparatus and its military formations, totalling more than a million people.
Something in this rapid sequence must have alarmed Khrushchev. It is not clear to me how he managed to persuade Malenkov to dump his associate, but Beria was arrested on 26 June 1953 during a Politburo meeting and arrests of other MVD officials followed. It was decided to dismantle the ministry’s industrial structures, and its extra-judicial ‘special concilium’ was abolished on 1 September. Further changes ensued.
However, the real story of Beria and co.’s misdeeds was not made public. Moreover, no one would have believed it. Instead, citizens were served up a classically Stalinist concoction. There is no way of knowing whether Beria really intended to eliminate all or some of his colleagues. Moreover, most – even all – of the leaders in post had signed or consigned orders for the execution of innocent people and thus risked being implicated. A single top leader – unquestionably a dangerous one – and some lesser figures thus paid for the crimes of all the other Stalinists, who had not yet stated what they thought about the whole bloody past. One fact nevertheless stands out: the nightmarish ‘investigations’, the fake accusations, and the trials currently in progress – notably the notorious ‘doctors’ plot’ – were halted overnight. The victims were fully rehabilitated and the doctors returned to their positions in the Kremlin. Further rehabilitations and releases soon began, with less fanfare.
This was a clear signal that something significant was afoot. Il’ia Ehrenburg was to refer to these changes as ‘the thaw’ in a novel of that title, even though the leadership still contained figures who would remain faithful to Stalin, and utterly unrepentant about the past, for the rest of their lives. When, in 1956, Nikita Khrushchev launched his sensational attack on Stalin at the Twentieth Party Congress, Soviet society, and especially the intelligentsia, understood that the days of Stalinist show trials and arbitrary arrests and executions had gone for good. Yet the thaw was not initiated by that congress: its participants were as surprised as everyone else and the many Stalinists among them were in a state of shock. No one had anticipated such a bombshell – and so soon. The Stalinist riposte came a year later: assured of a majority in the Presidium, they attempted a palace coup against Khrushchev. But it was thwarted by an alliance between the military and a majority of Central Committee members; Khrushchev remained in power and consolidated his position. What happened next was unheard of: no death sentences – no prison sentences even – were pronounced against the plotters. They were simply relieved of their positions. One of them – Voroshilov – was even pardoned and retained a ceremonial post.
All this – and more that we have not mentioned – was quite unprecedented and remained the rule in the political class under Khrushchev and after his removal. Another decisive change occurred, which for the most part historians have not stressed sufficiently: imprisonment of countless people accused of ‘counter-revolutionary crimes’ ceased. The notion even disappeared from the criminal code, to be replaced by ‘crimes against the state’, directed at oppositional activities. Political opposition continued to be repressed, but (as we shall see) the repression was henceforth on a quite different scale and less brutal. Now – and this was not insignificant – the accused actually had to do something before being charged. Those who suffered repression certainly paid a heavy price, and comparisons with the past were small consolation, yet the fact remains that the changes in penal policy were meaningful. To engage in protest was no longer a suicidal step; people survived their sentences. Some public and confidential channels existed for protesting against the arbitrary use of power.
We can now turn to a survey of deeper systemic changes. These were ushered in by government policy, but also created by spontaneous transformations in Soviet reality. They concern the triad of social ‘militarization–criminalization–mobilization’ characteristic of the Stalinist regime.
Under the broad heading of changes in the prison system, we must mention the dismantling of a core component of the previous regime: the Gulag – a system of forced labour that we described above as being in an advanced state of decay. It lasted for twenty years. Yet many speak as if it had always existed, while others fail to register its disappearance. The reform began in earnest from 1954 onwards, although some key structures had been abolished the year before. Of crucial importance was the dismantling, already noted, of the MVD’s economic—industrial complex, which was the essential element in the Gulag’s forced-labour empire. With the transfer to civilian ministries of most of its industrial agencies (road and rail construction, forestry, mining, etc.), this sinister repressive complex, deeply interested in a constant supply of unpaid labour, was significantly reduced. The labour force no longer consisted in slaves, but in paid workers enjoying the protections afforded by the labour code, which was substantially amended at the same time. With this large-scale ‘expropriation’ of the MVD went a step-by-step transformation of the whole Gulag structure into a reformed prison system with a new name, followed by a reduction in the number of inmates in the camps (now called ‘colonies’, ‘prisons’ and ‘deportee settlements’). The number of detainees in these various institutions (excluding prisons) fell from 5,223,000 on 1 January 1953 to 997,000 on 1 January 1959; the figure for ‘counter-revolutionaries’ dropped from 580,000 to 11,000. From the early 1960s onwards, arbitrary persecution ceased to be widespread.