25.3 The Last Years of Stalin

The end of World War Two found the Soviet Union an exhausted giant. The war in Europe had been fought largely on its soil. Some twenty million of its citizens had died as victims of the German invasion and occupation and in the liberation of their country from the Nazi invader. Millions more had been displaced as refugees. The nation's economic base had been devastated by the war. West of the Urals, cities, factories, mines, power plants, and transportation systems lay in ruins. Farmlands and millions of livestock in the Ukraine and western agricultural regions had been destroyed. To many observers in the West, the job of Soviet reconstruction seemed a formidable impossibility.

The Soviet Union in 1945 may have been an exhausted giant, but it was a powerful one. The victorious Soviet armies occupied all of Eastern Europe, half of Germany and Austria, parts of Chinese Manchuria, and northern Korea. Together with the Western Allies, the USSR would be a factor in reshaping the postwar world. The Communist regime of Josef Stalin had not only survived the war but had gained both strength and prestige through its directing the Soviet war effort. Western political observers expressed concern. With the fascist dictatorships destroyed, the Soviet Union had become the most powerful and potentially dangerous totalitarian regime on earth.

There are two Soviet stories in the immediate postwar era. One is international and is of the developing Cold War relationship between the Soviet Union and the United States. The other is domestic and centers on the last years of Stalin's dictatorship. Although the two cannot be cleanly separated, the latter is the focus of this reading.

Economic reconstruction was the first priority of the Soviet government now that the war was over. Much to Stalin's indignation the United States had ended its Lend-Lease aid and did not seem willing to extend financial credit to the USSR. Soviet officials in the occupied zones of Germany and Manchuria were ordered to dismantle and ship home what industrial facilities and machinery could be used to help the recovery. The economies of the Communist-dominated Eastern European countries were regulated to benefit the Soviet economy.

The fourth five-year plan was initiated in 1946 and a fifth in 1951. As with the previous plans, the fourth predictably emphasized the development of heavy industry and defense. Consumer goods would have to wait as the Soviet Union strove to rebuild for the socialist future. Not only would the future depend on massive reconstruction but also on the need to maintain a strong military establishment. Because of the growing hostility of the United States and its allies, the strategic needs of the Soviet Union included maintaining a huge standing army in Eastern Europe and developing a nuclear arsenal. The hardship of heavy work for long hours at low pay continued, prompted by official propaganda and enforced by the security police.

Stalin's regime continued to become increasingly totalitarian and seemingly paranoid. Suspicious and distrustful, Stalin seemed to close himself off from his people and even from his comrades in the Presidium (as the Party Politburo had been renamed). He rarely appeared in public. The head of the security police, Lavrenti Beria, was given extensive independent authority to protect the regime from its enemies. Treason and conspiracies were seen everywhere, and the Soviet Union became a police state that moved on the momentum of state-sanctioned terror. Thousands of alleged counterrevolutionaries were arrested, summarily tried by police courts, and sent to the gulag (the system of prison labor camps). In addition to writers, artists, and other intellectuals, scientists, and various "political" enemies, the victims included repatriated Soviet soldiers who had committed "treason" by allowing themselves to have been captured by the Germans.

A vicious anti-Semitic propaganda attack was launched against Soviet Jews. Several prominent Jewish intellectuals and scientists were arrested and convicted through the "show trial" process used a decade earlier. In early 1953 Stalin announced discovery of an alleged conspiracy by Jewish doctors to poison him and other top officials. The "Doctors' Plot" seemed to signal the beginning of a state-sanctioned pogrom reminiscent of the czarist attacks on Russian Jews in the nineteenth century. A wider and more brutal attack on Soviet Jews was averted by Stalin's death later that March.

Stalin's last years witnessed not only the intensification of repression but also the intent to mold further the USSR in Stalin's image. The "Cult of Personality" that had been cultivated in the 1930s was now bolstered by the reputation of Stalin's brilliant strategic leadership during the war. The mere thought of Stalin was said to be enough to overcome problems, restore self-confidence, and inspire harder work. Literature and the arts all had to conform to the prescribed models of "socialist realism" and portray the genius of Stalin and Soviet achievement. History was rewritten to show the great accomplishments of human technology as Soviet innovations. In a bizarre "scientific" theory given Stalin's approval, the "new Soviet man" was heralded as a biological phenomenon. Communism, therefore, was not only social-economic but genetic as well.

As preposterous as Stalin's cult of personality might have been perceived in the West, the United States and its allies saw Stalin as a very dangerous threat. The totalitarian power through which Stalin ruled the USSR was seen as a dark force that could enable the Soviets to enslave all of Europe and the world. In both Europe and East Asia, Stalin seemed bent on confrontation. Millions of Soviet troops were stationed in Eastern Europe within easy striking distance of the Western democracies. These same troops enabled Moscow-oriented communists to take control of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania, and Bulgaria. Mao Zedong, the new Communist leader of China, traveled to Moscow to seek Soviet friendship and technical assistance. Communist guerrillas threatened French control in Indochina. Communists were firmly entrenched in East Germany and North Korea. There were crises of confrontation with the United States over Iran, Turkey, and Berlin. In 1949 the USSR successfully tested an atomic bomb. From 1950 to 1953 Stalin challenged the Western Allies by proxy through the Korean War. In 1947 the Communist International (Comintern) was revived under a new name, The Communist Information Bureau (Cominform). The primary purpose of the Cominform was to tighten Soviet hegemony over Eastern Europe, a reaction to the newly-announced Marshall Plan. Beyond Europe, the Cominform would likewise continue the functions of the former Comintern whereby Moscow would provide direction for the international Communist movement. The perception in the West that all the world's Communists were controlled by a dangerously paranoid demagogue isolated in the Kremlin gave Stalin a reputation that was believed real and menacing.

By early 1953 it was clear that the 74-year-old Stalin's health was rapidly deteriorating. The question of succession was again being quietly contemplated and the secret maneuvering for power had cautiously begun. The major contenders were from the younger generation of Party leaders that had risen to positions of influence following the purges. Closest to Stalin by this time were Presidium members Georgi Malenkov, Nikita Khrushchev, Lavrenti Beria, and Nikolai Bulganin. None had the prestige to step in as Stalin's natural successor so observers anticipated a temporary collective leadership until one emerged supreme. Three were seen as the most likely successors. Malenkov, as Party Secretary and Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers, was close to Stalin and seemed his personal favorite. As head of the security police system, the ambitious Beria had tremendous power and was feared and distrusted by the others. Khrushchev, seen as shrewd and manipulative, had built his reputation as Party boss of the Ukraine and as Stalin's expert on agriculture.

On March 5, 1953, Stalin died. So reclusive had he become that the announcement of his death came as a sudden shock to the Soviet people. Yet throughout the Soviet Union there was an overall feeling that, regardless of what might follow, a momentous weight had been lifted from Soviet shoulders. Malenkov succeeded briefly as both Party chief and premier, but his supremacy was based on the support of the other Presidium leaders and proved temporary.

For over a quarter of a century the people of the Soviet Union had known no other leader but Josef Stalin. Emerging from Lenin's shadow as a backstage revolutionary, he had built a base of support within the Party from which to challenge and defeat Trotsky for leadership. Through the collectivization of agriculture and the five-year plans, he had transformed the USSR into a major industrial power. During World War Two he had led his people to victory over the German invader and "liberated" half of Europe from the scourge of Nazism. Following the war he presided over Soviet reconstruction and the emergence of the Soviet Union as a major world power. His achievements and accomplishments, however, were made at great expense. The ideological ideals of a Communist commonwealth were replaced by the reality of a brutal totalitarian dictatorship. Individual thought and enterprise were subverted and destroyed by forced conformity and centralized economic planning. The ideals of Marx and Lenin were replaced by the cult of Stalin, the great and indispensable leader. Those who did not work hard enough, criticized, or opposed the system were mercilessly purged, exiled to forced labor, or executed. The anticipation of a better future was replaced by the terror of the police state. Built on the graves of his millions of victims, the legacy of Josef Stalin lay like a great crushing weight on the Soviet people and spirit. The weight was so pervasive that it would be years before his successors dared to challenge the past and move the USSR in new directions. Even then, the basic structure of the Stalinist system would remain in place.

Sources for the Last Years of Stalin

Ambrose, Stephen. Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy since 1938. New York: Penguin, 1991.

Applebaum, Anne. Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe. New York: Anchor, 2012.

Brinton, Crane et al. A History of Civilization. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1960.

Gaddis, John Lewis. The Cold War: A New History. New York: Penguin, 2005.

Gilbert, Felix. The End of the European Era, 1890 to the Present. New York: Norton, 1970.

Kennan, George F. Russia and the West Under Lenin and Stalin. Boston: Little, Brown, 1961.

Khrushchev, Nikita. Khrushchev Remembers. Boston: Little, Brown, 1974.

---. Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament. Boston: Little, Brown, 1974.

Kissinger, Henry. Diplomacy. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994.

Langer, William L, ed. An Encyclopedia of World History. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968.

---. Western Civilization. New York: Harper, 1968.

Medvedev, Roy. Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism. New York: Knopf, 1972.

Nettl, J. P. The Soviet Achievement. Norwich, Britain: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1967.

Palmer, Robert R. et al. A History of the Modern World. Boston: McGraw Hill, 2002.

Paterson, Thomas et al. American Foreign Policy: A History Since 1900. Lexington, MA: Heath, 1991.

Taubman, William. Khrushchev: The Man and His Era. New York: Norton, 2003.

Valiant, Janet and John Richards. From Russia to USSR: A Narrative and Documentary History.

Wellesley Hills, MA: Independent School Press, 1985.

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Image of Stalin is from the New Yorker, February 1, 2016 issue.

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