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

On the whole, Khrushchev’s achievements as agricultural leader were far from successful, but this did not injure his reputation with Stalin, who recognized his personal devotion and energy and saw that his efforts were directed toward increasing party control in the countryside rather than the desirable, but clearly less important, goal of increased production. As a mark of this favor, at the Nineteenth Party Congress in October 1952, Khrushchev presented the report on the new party rules and saw one of his supporters, A. B. Aristov, take over charge of all personnel appointments in the wide-spaced party network. Both of these developments were at the expense of Malenkov, the nominal head for party matters, but the latter was more than compensated by the privilege of taking Stalin’s place as the chief party speaker (in an eight-hour speech) at the congress.

As this congress of October 1952 assembled and dispersed, Stalin was already laying the groundwork for his third great purge of the party. No one, except perhaps Beria, could guess who was a target for elimination, but the rumors and hints from Stalin’s personal secretariat made it appear that every one of the Old Guard of Stalinists should fear the worst. From October 1952 onward, these chief associates of Stalin lived in mounting terror. Like gangsters of the Capone era, they did not dare go to their homes at night, ventured nowhere without personal bodyguards, and carried weapons on their persons. Beria remained dominant until November 1952, because Moscow was garrisoned by secret police divisions, the Kremlin guard was entirely in his control, and no one else was allowed to bring weapons into that enclave.

Stalin moved with his customary skill, steadily dispersing and diluting the authority of the Old Guard: the number of ministries was increased, the Politburo ceased to meet, its ten members were dissolved into a large Presidium of thirty-six, and the Old Guard were shifted from operating ministries to posts without portfolios: Molotov from Foreign Affairs, Kaganovich from Heavy Industry, Nikolai Bulganin from Defense, Mikoyan from Trade. The last of these shifts, in November 1952, was the replacement of Beria as minister of state security by S. D. Ignatiev. By that time, Poskrebyshev and his assistant, Mikhail Ryumin, were already preparing the frame-up of Beria. This was the so-called “doctor’s plot,” a fabrication which pretended that Zhdanov and other leaders had been poisoned by a group of Kremlin doctors, mostly Jewish, who were, with Beria’s knowledge, about to carry out a similar elimination of other leaders, including high military officers. Under torture so severe that two of the nine doctors died, the rest gave confessions.

At this point, just when the purge was to begin, Stalin died, possibly from a series of strokes, on March 5, 1953. Within six hours, the physician in charge of Stalin’s last few days; Stalin’s son, Vasily, who commanded the air force of the Moscow Military District; Poskrebyshev, and the commanders of the Kremlin, the city, and the local military district all disappeared. Beria was recalled from semi-exile to lead the merged ministries of Interior and State Security, and the administrative changes since October 1952 were undone: the large Presidium was replaced by the previous smaller Politburo of ten men; the number of ministers was reduced from 55 to 25; and the inner Cabinet was cut from fourteen to five. Most significantly, the Old Guard, which Stalin had been slowly moving away from the levers of power, were, at his death, quickly moved back to the center. Malenkov was made secretary of the party and premier of the government with five deputy premiers: Beria, Molotov, Bulganin, Kaganovich, and Mikoyan. Each of these was restored to his previous ministry, while Voroshilov became chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. Marshal Zhukov was recalled from rural exile to be first deputy to Bulganin in the Defense Ministry, and Khrushchev, with no major post, was made chairman of Stalin’s funeral obsequies. Under his care, the deceased autocrat’s body was placed, with the reverence becoming a demigod, alongside that of Lenin, in the shrine overlooking Red Square. Then, “at Premier Malenkov’s request,” Khrushchev took over one of his two posts, that of secretary of the party. It was a fateful change.

During Stalin’s rule, the autocrat had held both chief positions, in the state and in the party. Now, a week after the despot’s death, the universal distaste for any revival of his power compelled Malenkov to yield up one of the positions to Khrushchev. We do not know why he decided to keep the premiership and give up the secretaryship of the party. Indeed, we do not know if he had any choice, but it may have seemed from the evidence of Stalin’s later years that the premiership was a more significant post than the secretary’s. It was not; certainly it was not in the hands of a tactician such as Khrushchev. During the next five years, in a struggle for power whose details are still concealed, Khrushchev rose from the secretary’s post to be supreme autocrat, eliminating in the process all other possible claimants to power. The process by which he succeeded Stalin was almost a repetition of that by which Stalin had succeeded Lenin. In each case, the ultimately successful contender was the least prominent of a group of contenders; in each case this victor used the post of secretary of the party as the chief weapon in his upward rise; in each case, this rise was achieved by a series of chess moves in which the most powerful rival contenders were eliminated, one by one, in a series of shifts, beginning with the most dangerous (in one case Trotsky, in the later case Beria). And in both, this whole process was done under a pretense of “collective leadership.”

Immediately after Stalin’s death, the “collective leadership” was headed by a triumvirate of Malenkov, Beria, and Molotov. Malenkov supported a policy of relaxation, with increased emphasis on production of consumers’ goods and rising standards of living, as well as increased efforts to avoid any international crisis which might lead to war; Beria supported a “thaw” in internal matters, with large-scale amnesties for political prisoners as well as rehabilitation of those already liquidated, at home and in the satellite states; Molotov continued to insist on the “hard” policies associated with Stalin, full emphasis on heavy industry, no relaxation of the domestic tyranny, and continued pressure in the Cold War with the West.

Wild rumors, especially among the satellites, and some relaxation, at Beria’s behest, in East Germany gave rise to false hopes among the workers there. On June 16, 1953, these workers rose up against the Communist government in East Berlin. After a day of hesitation, these uprisings were crushed with the full power of the Soviet occupation armored divisions. Using this event as an excuse, the leaders in the Kremlin suddenly arrested Beria and shot him with six of his aides (either immediately or in December, depending on the version of these events).

The overthrow of the master of terror was supported by the regular army, whose chief leaders were present in the next room, armed with smuggled machine guns, when the showdown between Beria and his colleagues occurred in the Kremlin conference room. Beria apparently suspected nothing, and set down his briefcase, in which he had a pistol hidden. During the conference, while one leader distracted his attention another removed the pistol from the briefcase. Beria was then told he was under arrest. He dived for his briefcase, found his pistol gone, and looked up into the muzzle of his own gun. He was at once turned over to the army officers in the next room. These had already moved four divisions of their forces into Moscow to replace the usual secret police forces guarding the city. This use of the army to settle the personal struggle in the Kremlin is the chief factor which was different in Khrushchev’s rise to power from the earlier rise to power of Stalin in 1924-1929. There can be little doubt that the introduction of this new factor was due to Khrushchev and that his secret speech denouncing Stalin in February 1956 was part of his payoff to the armed forces for their role in the process.