Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (89 page)

Such a change in the balance was all the more serious in that another unintended consequence of the Korean probe was a fundamental acceleration in rearmament. Although the Czech and Berlin crises pushed America into a collective security system, it was Korea which provoked the permanent arms-race. Truman had taken the decision to build the H-bomb in January 1950 but until the North Koreans started a hot war he was finding great difficulty in getting through Congress the funding for the
NSC
-68 programme. Defence spending in the fiscal year 1950 was only $17.7 billion. Korea revolutionized the Congressional and national attitude to defence: defence allocations jumped to $44 billion in fiscal 1952 and passed the $50 billion watershed the following year. The increases made possible the development of tactical nuclear weapons, four extra divisions for Germany, the rapid construction of overseas air-bases, a world-wide deployment of the Strategic Air Command, a nuclear carrier fleet and mobile conventional capability.
⁷⁸
By February 1951 American aircraft production was back to its peak 1944 level. America’s allies also rearmed and the remilitarization of Germany became a reality. If the Cold War began over Poland it reached maturity over Korea and embraced the whole world. In effect, Stalin had polarized the earth.

If Stalin had not intended to conjure up legions against himself, he cannot have regretted that his empire and its satellites were now divided from the rest of the world by an abyss of fear and suspicion. It was he who built the Iron Curtain; and it was notable that the empire had an inner iron curtain, which ran along the Soviet frontier and protected it against the bacillus of Western ideas even from the satellites themselves. Stalin hated ‘Westerners’ in the same way Hitler hated Jews, using the same term: ‘cosmopolitanism’. This explains the extraordinary thoroughness and venom with which, in 1945–6, he destroyed or isolated in camps all those who had been in contact with non-Soviet ideas: not only prisoners of war but serving officers, technicians, journalists and party members whose wartime duties had taken them abroad. The number of foreigners permitted to visit, let alone live in, Russia was reduced to an inescapable minimum, and their contacts limited to those employed by the government and secret police. All other Russians learnt from experience that even the most innocent and casual contact with a foreigner risked engulfment in the Gulag.

Any hopes raised by victory that the vast industries created to secure it would now be used to produce some modest improvement in the life of a nation which had suffered 20 million dead and unparalleled privations, were dashed on 9 February 1946 when Stalin announced that three and possibly four more five-year plans,
centred on heavy industry, would be required to increase Soviet strength and prepare it for what he grimly termed ‘all contingencies’. It was clear he intended to put the entire nation under the harrow yet again and his servile Politburo colleague Andrei Zhdanov was detailed to conduct a campaign, reaching into every aspect of Russian life, to fight apoliticization and instil active commitment by fear.
⁷⁹
Intellectuals of all kinds were put under pressure. The witch-hunt was launched on 14 August 1946, characteristically in Leningrad, which Stalin hated all his life as passionately as Hitler hated Vienna. Objects of the first attack were the journals
Zvezda
and
Leningrad
, the poetess Anna Akhmatova, the humourist Mikhail Zoshchenko. But it soon spread to all the arts. Aleksandr Fadaev, who got the Stalin Prize for his 1946 war novel,
The Young Guard
, was forced to rewrite it on strict party lines in 1947. Muradelli was denounced for his opera
The Great Friendship.
The hunt focused on Shostakovich’s Ninth Symphony; terrified, he promptly wrote an ode lauding Stalin’s forestry plan. It switched to Khachaturian’s Piano Concerto; he changed his style completely. Then it turned on Eisenstein, whose film
Ivan the Terrible
was criticized for belittling its subject. In June 1947 it was the turn of the philosophers, where the failings of G.F.Aleksandrov’s
History of West European Philosophy
served as pretext for a purge. In economics, Jeno Varga’s book describing capitalist economies in the war served the same purpose. From 1948 on, theoretical physics, cosmology, chemistry, genetics, medicine, psychology and cybernetics were all systematically raked over. Relativity theory was condemned, not (as in Nazi Germany) because Einstein was a Jew but for equally irrelevant reasons: Marx had said the universe was infinite, and Einstein had got some ideas from Mach, who had been proscribed by Lenin. Behind this lay Stalin’s suspicion of any ideas remotely associated with Western or bourgeois values. He was running what the Chinese Communists were later to term a Cultural Revolution, an attempt to change fundamental human attitudes over the whole range of knowledge by the use of naked police power.
⁸⁰

Thousands of intellectuals lost their jobs. Thousands more went into the camps. Their places were taken by creatures still more pliable, cranks and frauds. Soviet biology fell into the hands of the fanatical eccentric T.D.Lysenko, who preached a theory of inherited acquired characteristics and what he termed ‘vernalization’, the transformation of wheat into rye, pines into firs and so on: essentially medieval stuff. Stalin was fascinated. He edited in advance Lysenko’s presidential address of 31 July 1948 to the Academy of Agricultural Science, which launched the witch-hunt in biology (Lysenko used to show to visitors a copy with corrections in Stalin’s hand).
⁸¹
Scientific genetics was savaged as a ‘bourgeois pseudo-science’, ‘anti-Marxist’, leading to
‘sabotage’ of the Soviet economy: those who practised it had their laboratories closed down. Glorying in the reign of terror was another agricultural quack, V.R.Williams. In medicine, a woman called O.B. Lepeshinskaya preached that old age could be postponed by bicarbonate of soda enemas – an idea that briefly appealed to Stalin. In linguistics, N.Y.Marr argued that all human speech could be reduced to four basic elements:
sal, ber, yon
and
rosh.
⁸²
Stalin wallowed luxuriously in the oily cultural waters he had stirred, sometimes extracting its weird denizens for a brief moment of fame before wringing their necks. On 20 June 1950 he published in
Pravda
a 10,000-word article called ‘Marxism and Linguistic Problems’, a real collector’s piece. Usually, however, he left it to others to wield the pen on his behalf.
Pravda
wrote:

If you meet with difficulties in your work, or suddenly doubt your abilities, think of him – of Stalin – and you will find the confidence you need. If you feel tired in an hour when you should not, think of him – of Stalin – and your work will go well. If you are seeking a correct decision, think of him – of Stalin – and you will find that decision.
⁸³

Stalin stage-managed his own apotheosis, as the embodiment of human wisdom, in the
Great Soviet Encyclopedia
, which was published from 1949 onwards. It was full of gems. The historical section on ‘motor cars’ began: in 1751–2, Leonty Shamshugenkov, a peasant in the Nizhny-Novgorod province, constructed a self-propelled vehicle operated by two men.’ Stalin enjoyed editing the passages dealing with his own merits and achievements. How the ex-seminarist must have chuckled when he put up Leonid Leonov, a leading novelist who was supposed to be Christian, to propose in
Pravda
that a new calendar should be based, not on Christ’s birth-date, but Stalin’s! Black humour always jostled with monomania for possession of the cavity in Stalin’s spirit. He rewrote the official
Short Biography of Stalin
, putting in the sentence: ‘Stalin never allowed his work to be marred by the slightest hint of vanity, conceit or self-adulation.’
⁸⁴

In 1948–9 Stalin’s anti-Westernism took more specific form in anti-Semitism. He had always hated Jews; he often told anti-Semitic jokes. Khrushchev said he encouraged factory workers to beat up their Jewish colleagues.
⁸⁵
Stalin’s last spasm of anti-Semitic fury was provoked when the arrival of Golda Meir to open Israel’s first Moscow embassy was greeted with a modest display of Jewish enthusiasm. Yiddish publications were immediately banned. Wall Street bankers in Soviet cartoons suddenly sported ‘Jewish’ features. The Jewish actor Mikhoels was murdered in a fake car accident. Other prominent Jews vanished into the camps. Those with Russified
names had their ‘real’ Jewish names printed in the press, an old Nazi technique. The campaign was run by tame Jews, a characteristic touch. It was mixed up in Stalin’s mind with his unremitting search for enemies, real or imaginary, within the party. Zhdanov, having served his purpose, disappeared through a trap-door after the Tito fiasco. His followers were hounded down in 1949, during the so-called ‘Leningrad affair’, another witch-hunt against the detested city. Beria and Malenkov supplied the evidence for the purge which was carried out in secret, over 1,000 being shot.
⁸⁶
The dead included the Politburo’s top planner, N.A.Voznesensky, and A.A.Kuznetsov, Secretary of the Central Committee. To be Jewish was to expect arrest and death at any moment; but no one’s life was safe. Marshal Zhukov had been sacked and sent to the provinces in 1946, for being too popular, and once there he kept his head down. In 1949 Stalin arrested Molotov’s wife, Polina, and packed her off to Kazakhstan. She was Jewish and was accused of ‘Zionist conspiracies’; but the real reason may have been her former friendship with Stalin’s wife Nadya. He also sent to prison the wife of Kalinin, the Soviet Head of State. There were other cases of wife-persecution, one of the old man’s last pleasures.
⁸⁷
He hated the fact that so many of his relatives wished to marry Jews, and refused to meet five out of his eight grandchildren.

By the second half of 1952, by which time he was manufacturing nuclear weapons at top speed, Stalin was seeing Jewish-tinged conspiracies everywhere. The top organs of the state had virtually ceased to function. The real work was done at lugubrious supper-parties in his Kuntsevo villa, where Stalin gave verbal orders, often on the spur of the moment, to whoever happened to be there, exactly as Hitler had done. He was now an elderly man, with a pockmarked face, yellowing eyes, discoloured teeth, ‘an old battle-scarred tiger’, as one American visitor called him, sniffing danger everywhere. He and Beria wove about everyone in Moscow a new web of electronic surveillance. That summer a bug was found in the US Great Seal in the Ambassador’s house, what Kennan described as ‘for that day a fantastically advanced bit of applied electronics’.
⁸⁸
But the signs are that the web was closing round Beria too; and this would be natural for Stalin always destroyed his secret police killers in the end – and he now thought Beria was a Jew.
⁸⁹
Certain unmistakable signs surrounding the nineteenth Party Congress, in October 1952, indicated a new terror was about to burst upon the heads of Stalin’s senior colleagues. Khrushchev later claimed that Molotov, Mikoyan and Voroshilov were among the destined victims.
⁹⁰

The storm broke on 4 November, when Jewish doctors attached to the Kremlin were arrested. Among other crimes they were accused of murdering Zhdanov. Their ‘confessions’ were to serve as the basis for
fresh arrests and trials, as from 1934 on. Ordering their interrogation, Stalin shouted: ‘Beat, beat and beat again!’ He told the security chief, Ignatov, that if he could not get full admissions, ‘We will shorten you by a head.’ Circulating copies of the preliminary confessions to enemies, Stalin said: ‘What will happen without me? The country will perish because you do not know how to recognize enemies.’
⁹¹
He was now completely self-isolated. He even had his last crony, his butler Vlasik, a security police general, arrested as a spy. His food was analysed in a laboratory before he would touch it. He thought the air in his house might be poisoned by a deadly vapour mentioned in the Yagoda trial in 1938. All this is curiously reminiscent of Hitler’s last years.

Stalin had completely lost touch with the normal world. His daughter said he talked in terms of 1917 prices, and his salary envelopes piled up unopened in his desk (from which they mysteriously vanished at his death). When she visited him on 21 December 1952, she found him sick, refusing to let any doctor near him, and dosing himself with iodine. His personal physician for the last twenty years, he thought, had been a British spy all the time, and was now literally in chains.
⁹²
Stalin had always doodled drawings of wolves during meetings. Now the brutes obsessed him. On 17 February 1953, he told the last non-Communist visitor, K.P.S.Menon, how he dealt with his enemies: ‘A Russian peasant who sees a wolf doesn’t need to be told what the wolf intends to do – he knows! – so he doesn’t try to tame the wolf, or argue or waste time – he kills it!’
⁹³
The stroke came a fortnight later on 2 March, leaving Stalin speechless. His daughter said that his death on 5 March was ‘difficult and terrible’, his last gesture being to lift his left hand as if to curse, or to ward off something.
⁹⁴
As Lenin went to eternity raving of electricity, so Stalin departed to the howling of imaginary wolves. In the bewildered crowd-movements that followed, according to the poet Yevtushenko, Beria’s men killed hundreds of people by improvising as crush-barriers their
MVD
lorries, whose sides dripped with blood.
⁹⁵