Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

At the end of the war, Stalin’s rule in Russia was as firmly established as it had ever been. He was head of the government as well as leader of the Communist Party, with the army completely subordinate to his will. The army played only a small role in the domestic politics of the country, but Stalin had shown his power over it in the Great Purge of 1937 when he had destroyed at least 5,000 of its officers on falsified charges of disloyalty. The survivors were under close scrutiny both from secret police units established, for security reasons, throughout its organization and from the party commissars attached to its major units. The secret police, under the Ministry of State Security, was a state within a state, with its own armed forces, including armored divisions and completely autonomous air units. It controlled millions of prisoners and slave laborers, large industrial enterprises, and wide territories (chiefly in northern Asia). Stalin was exempt from the authority of these secret police and, at the same time, had his own secret police powers within the party organization, because the party statutes of 1934 (prepared by Lazar Kaganovich) had given him an independent police apparatus for use ‘within the party; this was controlled from his personal secretariat under Lieutenant General A. N. Poskrebyshev.

The party, like the police, had units (originally called “cells”) in almost every industrial enterprise, in many collective farms, in residential neighborhoods, and rose thence, in a hierarchy of cities, regions, provinces, and nations, parallel to the governmental system.

Stalin nullified possible opposition by encouraging division and rivalry not only among the diverse hierarchies of power radiating downward from his own position in government, in party, army, police, and economic life, but also within each hierarchy, by encouraging the ambitious to seek to rise, step by step, through vacancies created by his periodic purges. These purges not only opened the way upward for younger and more ruthless men, but served as justifications for Stalin’s growing paranoia.

Within the party the purges of 1924-1929 had eliminated, usually by death, most of the “Old Bolsheviks” (those who had been party members before the 1917 Revolution). In 1929-1934, using a new and younger group, Stalin had killed 10,000,000 Russians (his own estimate) in the drive to establish collective farms. The second great purge of 1934-1939 had killed off a large part of the Stalinists who had assisted Stalin’s rise to power and about 5,000 officers of the armed forces. The third great purge, which was shaping up at the end of 1952, was intended to eliminate the rest of the Stalinists who had come to positions of power, in succession to the Old Bolsheviks, in 1929-1935. They were already a dwindling group, from Stalin’s insatiable thirst for blood, as can be seen by examining the fate of the members of the Seventeenth Party Congress of 1934, the congress which first raised Khrushchev and Lavrenti Beria to the Central Committee. Of the 1,966 delegates to that Seventeenth Congress, if 108 were arrested for “antirevolutionary crimes” in sequel to the assassination of S. M. Kirov (party leader in Leningrad), which Stalin himself had arranged in December 1934. Of the 139 members and alternates elected to the Central Committee by that congress of 1934, 98 (or 70 percent) were arrested and shot. Among the survivors were Kaganovich, Vyacheslav Molotov, Georgi Malenkov, Beria, Anastas Mikoyan, K. Voroshilov, and Khrushchev. The new purge of 1953 was apparently aimed at some or most of these survivors.

This terror was made worse by the fact that it did not originate only from Stalin, although it undoubtedly required his acquiescence to proceed very far. Such acquiescence could often be obtained by his top subordinates, for the autocrat undoubtedly appreciated those who were prepared to demonstrate their complete ruthlessness in his service. At the end of the war, Khrushchev, although not yet near the top of the pile, had shown more bloodthirsty ruthlessness combined with more groveling obsequiousness to Stalin than anyone else in Russia.

At the war’s end the top trio in the gang were Stalin, Malenkov, and Andrei Zhdanov. The last pair hated each other. Malenkov in 1945-1946 was the most active figure in the government, especially as chairman of the Committee for the Rehabilitation of Liberated Areas, and chairman of the committee in charge of dismantling German industry for reparations. Large-scale bungling in the administration of reparations gave Zhdanov the opportunity he wished. Through Mikoyan, he instigated an attack on Malenkov’s handling of reparations, and recommended that dismantling be replaced by the setting up of Soviet-owned corporations to take over German industry in Germany to make goods for the Soviet Union. As a consequence of this failure, Malenkov (with his associates) was demoted from several of his posts for about a year (June 1947-June 1948). Immediately after his rehabilitation, Zhdanov died mysteriously, and his chief supporters were arrested and shot (the so-called “Leningrad Case”).

In the meantime, Khrushchev was deeply involved in the effort to restore the collective farms, which had suffered great attrition during the war, and the more difficult task of bringing them under party control. In view of the ruthless way in which the collective farms had been established in 1928-1934, it was not surprising that neither the farms nor the party were popular with the peasants. Both were quietly sabotaged in ways which could neither be observed nor prevented, especially as party members and the secret police were both rare in rural districts. Evidence for such sabotage could be seen in the constant failure of the agricultural section of the economy to fulfill quotas or expectations, in the fact that the peasants produced four times as much (in yield per unit areas) on their small personal plots of ground as they did on the wide acreage of the collective farms, and in the fact that farm animals in 1953 were well below the figures for 1928 (while cows were 13 percent fewer than in 1916), despite a population increase of 25 percent from 1928 to 1953. Moreover, in the confusion of the war, at least 15 million acres of land belonging to the collective farms had been diverted to peasants’ private plots, while millions of peasants on the collective farms were living in inefficient semi-idleness.

Early in 1950 Khrushchev returned from twelve years of party butchery in the Ukraine and took over the agricultural problem. His solution, totally unworkable, was to move more vigorously in the Stalinist direction of increased centralization. He wished to merge the collective farms into increasingly large units and to work the peasants in increasingly large “work brigades,” in order to bring them under the control of the few Communist Party members to be found in the countryside. A party cell required three members as a minimum, and in 1950 a substantial fraction of the existing collective farms had no party cells at all, while the majority had cells of less than six members each.

In two years, by merging collective farms, Khrushchev reduced the total number of such units from 252,000 to 94,800, but 18,000 still had no party cells, while only 5,000 had cells with over 25 members. Khrushchev wanted to carry the process of concentration even further by destroying the existing villages and centralizing the peasants in large urban settlements (so-called “agro-towns”). In such towns they would be remote from their small private plots, would not spend so much time on them, and would be escorted in large gangs out to work each day on the collective fields. This fantastic scheme was blocked by Beria and Molotov in 1951.

Another scheme, which may have been associated with Khrushchev, was vetoed by Stalin in 1952. This would have distributed the personnel and machinery of the rural Machine Tractor Stations (MTS) among the collective farms, thus, at one strike, increasing the locally available party members from their personnel to build up rural party cells and making available, at short notice, necessary farm machinery. This suggestion was blocked by Stalin as a step backward from Socialism. In its place, he suggested that the peasant’s incentive to work on his private plot to produce for sale in the private market be destroyed at one blow by forbidding the peasant access to any market, or even to money, by forcing him to dispose of all his surplus produce, on a barter basis, to the state.