revolution and the Soviet state. With the war over,
how could the harshness of communist rule from
above continue to be justified? The hostile West
was painted in the blackest colours.
While Stalin lived he ensured that no one else
had a power base to rival his. Even so, the Soviet
Union was not a monolithic society. Stalin could
intervene arbitrarily, but control lower down the
scale had to be left to others, to Beria’s secret
police and to the tens of thousands of func-
tionaries in the police, party and governmental
apparatus who administered the Soviet republics.
By changing his top henchmen, killing suspects
and those who showed any signs of independ-
ence, by filling the prison camps of the Gulag and
by promoting for a time those he trusted, Stalin’s
hold remained unshakeable to his dying day.
As Stalin’s health deteriorated after the war,
political repression became more fierce. News-
papers and magazines parroted the party view. In
science, drama, history, literature, art, even in
music, the party line had to be followed. Stalin
shortly before his death was preparing another
great purge to safeguard his power and to maintain
the system. The Doctor’s Plot was unveiled in
January 1953. It had strong (and popular) anti-
Semitic overtones. The startling public announce-
ment was made that nine doctors, all but two
Jewish, who had looked after top Soviet leaders,
had been arrested a few weeks earlier and had con-
fessed to murdering Zhdanov and other members
of the Soviet elite; they were accused of having
acted on orders from Israeli Zionists and the
American and British secret services. Jews in
prominent positions were particular targets of the
thousands of arrests that followed. How little
decades of loyalty to Stalin counted was evidenced
by the arrest of Foreign Minister Molotov’s wife,
who was Jewish. Fortunately for many, Stalin suf-
fered a stroke and died in his dacha on 5 March
1953, the scared Politburo members tiptoeing to
his room, when they heard, to make sure he was
really dead.
The leader who had shaped Russia’s destinies
for good and evil had unexpectedly gone. Despite
his crimes, Stalin was widely admired as one of the
Soviet Union’s greatest men, second only to
Lenin – Lenin’s ‘comrade-in-arms’, ‘the standard
bearer of his genius and his cause’, as the eulogies
after his death declared. He had ruled the Soviet
Union with an iron fist, responsible for the deaths
of millions but also for gigantic material achieve-
ments. Men and women in their prime of life,
indeed everyone under the age of forty-five, had
known no adult life except under Stalin. The
Soviet Union had become powerful and respected
in the world and, during the Great Patriotic War,
which was the central event of their lives, Stalin
had saved his country from defeat and had then
presided over the victory of the Red Army and its
final entry into Berlin. There followed an unprece-
dented expansion of Soviet power, and even a
small but steady improvement in living standards
from 1948 to his death. He dwarfed those Soviet
political leaders who survived him. And even they,
as Khrushchev recalls, dreaded what seemed an
uncertain future without him, although the
shadow of his terror was lifted from their lives.
The Russia Stalin had helped to shape and had
now left behind was a state stifled by bureaucracy
without the safeguards of civil liberties, where all
apparatchiks, whether in politics or industry,
uncritically obeyed the orders of superiors. The
system made each individual play for safety, shel-
tering under the decision of the man above rather
than risking personal initiative. What mattered was
who would cover you, look after you and provide
you with the advantages and bribes earned by per-
forming a service for the system. Corruption was
endemic. The command economy was firmly
established with all its inefficiencies, which became
glaringly obvious thirty years after Stalin’s death.
Stalin shamelessly exploited the vested interests he
had created. In the Kremlin those who served him
had to pander to his whims and adapt to his erratic
lifestyle of working into the small hours, drinking
or watching his favourite films. His popular image
was that of the benevolent father of his people, the
fount of all wisdom, whose actions, like those of a
demi-god, could not always be comprehended by
ordinary mortals.
Stalin never officially designated a successor. In
his lifetime he had to appear irreplaceable. In this
respect, history seemed to be repeating itself.
Lenin, the father of the Soviet Union, had had
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THE RISE OF KHRUSHCHEV 471
