Political Realignments 1135In Yugoslavia, Communist leader Tito refused to permit Soviet domina
tion of his multinational country. In 1948, Tito broke with the Soviet
Union. Over the next decades, Yugoslavia received millions of dollars in
Western aid. The Yugoslav economy remained “mixed” in the sense that
the private sector coexisted with state planning. Workers were permitted
more self-administration through workers’ councils or committees. In the
1950s, the collectivization of agriculture, which had begun after the war,
was abandoned, with farmers retaking their old plots. Yugoslavia’s economy
improved, despite shortages and great inequalities among its six republics.
In the Soviet Union, Stalin had emerged from the war with his authority
within the Communist Party unchallenged and with enormous prestige. But
weakened by arteriosclerosis, Stalin’s paranoia became virtually psychotic as
he ordered more purges in the name of the Communist Party. The ruthless
Lavrenty Beria (1899-1953), head of the omnipresent secret police, used a
gold-plated phone to order arrests. Between 1948 and 1952, some promi
nent Jewish intellectuals and artists were tried and executed or simply disap
peared, targeted because some were believed to have had contacts with the
West. In 1953, Stalin died. Beria’s subsequent arrest, trial, and execution
signaled an end to the Stalinist period.
The Soviet Union entered a period of “collective leadership,” a concept
that had been abandoned during Stalin’s personal dictatorship. Decisions
were made by the fourteen members of the Presidium (a permanent execu
tive committee) of the Communist Party, which included Georgy Malenkov
(1902-1988), a pragmatist who had been trained as an engineer and who
believed that Stalin’s dictatorship had hampered the Soviet economy. Mean
while, the coarse, rotund Nikita Khrushchev (1894—1971), the son of a
miner in a family of peasants, advanced within the Communist Party. He was
part of a “technocratic” faction, but he was also a successful party organizer.
In 1955, Khrushchev, with support from within the Soviet bureaucracy, won
the upper hand in his struggle with Malenkov for power. While maintaining
an emphasis on heavy industry, Khrushchev also concentrated on planning
and investing in Soviet agriculture, a sector that had never recovered from
the effects of forced collectivization. He understood that the production of
consumer goods would have to take a more prominent place in economic
planning. The quality of life for most Soviet citizens began to improve gradu
ally, although not as fast as that of highly placed Communist Party members,
who sported cars and comfortable country houses.
The Soviet people were largely unaware of the power struggles fought
in secrecy within the Kremlin. Like Western “sovietologists”—specialists
who studied the Soviet Union—they could only chart the waxing and wan
ing of party leaders’ authority by their ranking or the omission of their
names on official lists, or by their placement among the gray heads on the
giant reviewing stand in Red Square during the annual May Day military
parade.