Europe in the Age of The Cold War,1945–75625new repression was conducted by his senior lieutenant,
Georgi Malenkov, and the head of his secret police,
Lavrenti Beria. It did not match the Great Terror of the
1930s, but it took a terrifying toll, especially on Soviet
cultural life, where writers and filmmakers were promi-
nent victims. The purges then moved through the mili-
tary, the bureaucracy, and the Communist Party.
Anti-Semitism was a common feature of the purges.
This culminated in the so-called Doctors’ Plot of 1952
when Stalin accused Jewish physicians in the Kremlin
of poisoning Soviet leaders.
When Stalin died of a cerebral hemorrhage in early
1953, Malenkov and Beria claimed power. Despite the
idealistic constitution of 1936, the USSR had no formal
system for the transfer of power. Senior leaders feared
that the rule of Malenkov or Beria meant continued ter-
ror. The army arrested and shot Beria on a charge of
“plotting to restore Capitalism”; his secret police was
reorganized as the KGB. Malenkov was dismissed from
office, but to show that Stalinism had ended, he was
merely sentenced to end his career as the manager of a
hydroelectric plant in provincial Kazakhstan.
After a period of “collective leadership,” Nikita
Khrushchev emerged as Stalin’s successor. Khrushchev,
the son of a Ukrainian miner, had joined the Commu-
nist Party as an illiterate worker in 1918. He rose rapidly
under Stalin’s regime and participated in some of its
crimes during the 1930s, but his dictatorship differed
from Stalinist bloodletting. At the Communist Party
Congress of 1956, Khrushchev announced a program of
change and openly attacked Stalin. He denounced “the
crimes of the Stalin era,” and, as symbols of destalin-
izaion, Khrushchev removed Stalin’s body from public
display and renamed Stalingrad as Volgograd. Three
years later, at another party congress, he made his fa-
mous call for relaxed economic controls and peaceful
coexistence with the West. Westerners were startled by
Khrushchev’s crude style. For many, the enduring image
of Nikita Khrushchev was a fat man in a rumpled suit,
banging his shoe on a podium and shouting. Soviet dis-
sidents still faced harassment and the gulagunder
Khrushchev, and when he fell in 1964, the Soviet Union
remained a dictatorship. However, Khrushchev had
taken the first steps toward the age of détente.
Great Britain: Clement Attlee and the
Birth of the Welfare State
In contrast to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union,
postwar Western Europe experienced the recovery of
parliamentary democracy. Britain, France, the Benelux
countries, Italy, the Scandinavian states, and even the
reunited zones of western Germany were stable democ-
racies by the 1950s. Spain and Portugal kept their pre-
war autocratic governments, but these fell after the
death of Franco (1975) and Salazar (1970). The post-
war Western democracies were more than mere restora-
tions, however, and several governments expanded the
European definition of democracy.
Postwar Britain led the evolution of European
democracy by founding the modern welfare state. The
British electorate rejected Winston Churchill’s conser-
vative government in 1945 (much as the French had re-
jected Clemenceau after World War I or the Russians
would reject Gorbachev after the revolutions of 1989),
giving the Tories only 39.9 percent of the vote in par-
liamentary elections. The new prime minister, Clement
Attlee, received an overwhelming majority in Parlia-
ment (393–213) with which to enact socialist plans for
a welfare state. Attlee had been born to an upper-class
family and sensitized to the needs of the poor through
social work in the East End of London. After World
War I he became a lecturer at the London School of
Economics, a nondogmatic socialist, and a leading
Labour M.P. His government planned a new British
democracy based on two broad policies: (1) the adop-
tion of welfare legislation by which the state provided
all citizens with basic services “from the cradle to the
grave” and (2) the “nationalization of leading elements”
of the British economy, on the theory that state profits
would pay for welfare services. Attlee’s welfare program
derived from an idealistic wartime plan, the Beveridge
Report of 1942, which called for government insurance
to protect the nation. The Beveridge Report laid the
basis for the National Health Act (1946) and the Na-
tional Insurance Act (1946), laws that promised “a na-
tional minimum standard of subsistence” to everyone.
In return for a regular payroll deduction, all citizens re-
ceived sick leave benefits, retirement pensions, mater-
nity benefits, unemployment compensation, widow’s
and orphan’s allowances, and medical care. One of the
first reforms of the welfare state was a program to pro-
vide British schoolchildren (many of whom had poor
nutrition from years of privation) with free milk at
school, and this image did much to popularize the wel-
fare state (see illustration 31.3). Beveridge, Attlee, and
the minister for health and housing, Aneurin Bevan,
gave Western Europe the model for a democratic wel-
fare state.
The Labour government also carried out the sec-
ond half of its program, the nationalization of key in-