mixed feelings about his possible successor and
appeared to leave an unfillable vacuum, but the
leadership was nevertheless replaced by three
Bolshevik leaders before Stalin emerged as dicta-
tor and eliminated his rivals. After Stalin’s death
a collective leadership again emerged; not one of
these once loyal henchmen of Stalin’s day was
powerful enough to oust his rivals immediately.
Power depended on the support of the other
leading Bolsheviks, as well as on the backing of a
constituency, the will not of the people of course,
but of the government in terms of the adminis-
tration and economic and industrial management
of the state, or of the party which had once con-
stituted the supreme constituency, or of the sep-
arately organised secret police, its armed units and
prison regimes which controlled a labour force of
several millions. Finally there existed the con-
stituency of the Red Army command; though its
broader political ambitions were carefully con-
trolled by the party its support was important to
any aspirant to power.
Stalin had dominated Russia without using any
one channel of control exclusively, so that at the
time of his death it was uncertain where power
lay, or rather how it was distributed in the
absence of an autocratic final arbiter. Georgi
Malenkov had presented the main report to the
party Congress in October 1952, which was pos-
sibly Stalin’s way of indicating that he was his
choice as successor. Beria, as secret police chief,
had served Stalin faithfully and ruthlessly, too
ruthlessly for the other claimants not to fear him.
Molotov had seen long service since the revolu-
tion of 1917 and had held important offices,
including that of an unsmiling unbending foreign
minister. Finally Nikita Khrushchev had served
Stalin loyally in the party during and after the war,
accommodating himself to Stalin’s purges.
Malenkov was unable to establish himself as sole
leader. But the struggle for power was hidden
from the outside world. The premiership, or lead-
ership of the government, was assumed by
Malenkov. Khrushchev became secretary of the
Central Committee of the party. Other leading
communists gained control of the different min-
istries which their Stalinist experience appeared to
entitle them to: Molotov foreign affairs, Bulganin
defence and Beria interior and security. These
three were members of the Politburo, which also
included Khrushchev, Kaganovich, Mikoyan,
Voroshilov and two others, and was presided over
by Malenkov. The first outcome of the power
struggle was that Beria was isolated. Only a few
weeks after being accorded an honoured place as
a pallbearer of Stalin’s coffin, Beria was secretly
arrested, tried and shot. The first public aware-
ness of his fall was his omission from a news
report about leading communists attending a per-
formance at the Bolshoi Theatre. This became the
stuff on which a new political science came to be
built, Kremlinology. The inner workings of the
Politburo remained shrouded in secrecy before
the Gorbachev era, so Kremlinologists had to
make do with more oblique indications of con-
flict and changes in the distribution of power: the
line-up of leaders at the May Day parade, the pri-
orities evident at receptions, disappearances from
view, an absence due to a ‘cold’.
During the months that followed Stalin’s
death several important changes occurred. The
party recovered step by step its former pre-
eminence. Stalin’s personal dictatorship, it was
now claimed, had distorted the correct line laid
down by Lenin. What was being affirmed was the
eternal validity of communist ideology. The con-
demnation of Stalin’s rule, by Khrushchev, did
not indicate at this stage a loss of faith in com-
munism itself.
In the spring and summer of 1953 the collec-
tive leadership’s first priority was to maintain
control. The army had been a powerful ally
against Beria and, if the terror machine was not
to be relied on to the same extent as before,
control might better be established by conces-
sions. A cautious beginning was made of releas-
ing some of the tens of thousands who had been
falsely imprisoned. Malenkov lowered prices and
allowed more resources to be devoted to con-
sumer goods. To ease food shortages, the peas-
ants were promised a better deal, prices paid by
the state for agricultural produce were increased
and taxes reduced. Khrushchev took charge of the
agriculture – the key to better living standards –
and launched the development of the ‘virgin
lands’, a vast scheme to grow grain on lands in