Suny R.G. (ed.) The Cambridge History of Russia, Volume 3: The Twentieth Century

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

yoram gorlizki and oleg khlevniuk

Stalin’s word carried more weight than did that of any general or ordinary

Politburo member. When the high command (Stavka) was established on the

second day of the war, and the commissar of defence, General Timoshenko,

was appointed its head, none of the nine Politburo members who served on it

‘showed any intention of taking orders from the commissar’.

It was only later,

on 19 July, when Stalin himself became commissar of defence, and then on 8

August, when he became supreme commander-in-chief of the Soviet armed

forces, that the Stavka gained genuine authority.

Despite a profusion of new bodies, such as the GKO and the Stavka, there

were important continuities with pre-war structures. While the GKO was

given overall command of the war effort, and it was directly modelled on

the Council of Workers’ and Peasants’ Defence from the civil war, it was

a pre-eminently civilian body. With all its members from the Politburo, the

GKO was, in key respects, the direct successor to the Politburo’s ‘ruling circle’,

whose membership and operating norms Stalin had shaped in the preceding

years. Setting up the GKO gave formal cover for Stalin’s civilian ruling circle

to exercise unlimited powers as a ‘war cabinet’. These included the authority

to reorganise the armed forces, to take charge of military production, to

undertake personnel changes, and to control the agencies of repression.

At the same time, the GKO epitomised the versatility of the Soviet sys-

tem in adjusting to conditions of crisis. Under the GKO the mode of gov-

ernance over subordinate bodies shifted with remarkable speed to an emer-

gency regime.

Under this system procedures were simpliﬁed in the extreme.

‘Meetings of the GKO in the usual sense of the term – that is, with deﬁnite

agendas, secretaries and protocols – did not take place. Procedures for reach-

ing agreement with [other agencies] were reduced to a minimum,’ recalled

General Khrulev.

Given the overlap in membership between the GKO, the

Politburo and Sovnarkom, it was not always apparent in what capacity a

meeting had been convened, nor on whose authority a resolution had been

passed.

In addition to heading the Politburo and Sovnarkom, Stalin chaired meet-

ings of the GKO and the Stavka, acted as commissar of defence and, as of

31 N. G. Kuznetsov, cited in A. A. Pechenkin, ‘Gosudarstvennyi komitet oborony v 1941

godu’, Otechestvennaia istoriia 4–5 (1994): 134–5.

32 See Sanford R. Lieberman, ‘Crisis Management in the USSR: Wartime System of Admin-

istration and Control’, in Susan Linz (ed.), The Impact of World War II on the Soviet Union

(Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Allanhead, 1985). The term ‘emergency regime’ comes from

John Barber and Mark Harrison, The Soviet Home Front 1941–1945: A Social and Economic

History of the USSR in World War II (London: Longman, 1991), pp. 197–200.

33 A. V. Khrulev. ‘Stanovlenie strategicheskogotyla v Velikoi Otechestvennoi voine’,Voenno-

istoricheskii zhurnal 6 (1961): 66; cited in Lieberman, ‘Crisis Management’, p. 61.

256

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

Stalin and his circle

14 September 1942, led a new key GKO Transport Committee. The extraor-

dinary burdens on Stalin left him with no choice but to completely let go of

certain leadership functions on which he had earlier kept half an eye. The

main beneﬁciaries of this process of delegation were Stalin’s companions on

the GKO, who were now given full and unqualiﬁed charge of whole sectors of

the war effort. Thus members of the GKO were entrusted with the authority

to convene meetings and to arrive at decisions of importance under their own

steam, without reference to the overburdened leader.

The emergency regime, consisting of plenipotentiaries, ad hoc committees

and very high levels of autonomy for GKO members, was particularly well

suited to the early phase of the war. Yet while well adapted to a situation of

crisis, this system of decision-making was far from effective over the long term.

In many areas, the conversion of the economy to munitions production was

carried too far, as a result of which by 1942 it was the dwindling stocks of coal,

oil, iron and steel, rather than limited munitions capacity, which had become

the key factor constraining the Soviet war effort.

Greater co-ordination was

required to rectify these imbalances. A big step in this direction was achieved

on 8 December 1942 with the formation of a GKO Operations bureau, and with

the reconstitution, also on that day, of the Sovnarkom bureau which took up

responsibility for considering economic plans and the state budget, as well as

for overseeing the work of economic commissariats not under the jurisdiction

of the GKO bureau. As the war progressed, the authority and status of both

bureaux grew.

It is signiﬁcant that Stalin played no part on either bureau. As the war

unfolded, the delegation of powers to GKO members and the emergence of

a more balanced and co-ordinated system of economic decision-making was

matched by a narrowing of Stalin’s commitments, which focused increasingly

on military issues and foreign affairs. Further, as Stalin’s grasp of military mat-

ters improved, the obstinacy he had displayed in the early stages of the war gave

way to a certain pragmatism. From the spring of 1942 Stalin removed incom-

petent cronies such as Voroshilov and Budennyi as well as political appointees

such as Kulik and Mekhlis on whom he had relied earlier. In October 1942 Stalin

also abolished political commissars – political appointees who shadowed mil-

itary leaders at the front – and he became more willing to defer matters of

strategic leadership to a group of senior military ﬁgures on the Stavka. Further,

34 Barber and Harrison, The Soviet Home Front,pp.132, 136.

35 Thus on 16 May 1944 Beria, the head of the GKO bureau, was made deputy chair of GKO

and three days later, on 19 May 1944 the bureau’s jurisdiction was widened from 14 to 21

commissariats and its responsibilities enhanced.

257

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

yoram gorlizki and oleg khlevniuk

whereas in the ﬁrst months of the war virtually every bungled operation had

resulted in executions, Stalin was now willing to heed the advice of top military

aides in sparing the lives of commanders in the ﬁeld.

The war had caught Stalin off guard and highlighted the ﬂaws of the one-

sided form of government he had fashioned in the preceding years. At the same

time,the waralsoshowedhow mutuallyinterdependent Stalin’sleadershipwas

with the social and administrative system which had formed in the 1930s. In the

early days of the conﬂict, Stalin’s deputies saw that they needed Stalin and the

cult whichsurrounded him to boost morale and to co-ordinatethe higher ranks

of Soviet ofﬁcialdom. For his part, in the guise of the State Defence Committee,

Stalin was able to keep his ruling circle and informal modes of decision-making

similar to those he had installed before the war. The one major difference

was that, with the advent of an ‘emergency regime’, Stalin was compelled to

hand over total responsibility for certain spheres to his deputies. Originally

constituted on an informal basis, this delegation of powers was formalised

with the establishment of the GKO and Sovnarkom bureaux in December

1942. It was this relatively decentralised system of wartime governance which

lasted until the effective end of hostilities in May 1945.

Post-war dictatorship

During the war Stalin had delegated large swaths of authority to his deputies

and set aside ideological differences with his coalition partners. Soon, however,

a souring of relations with the West would bring a swift end to the relaxation

of the war years. In a programmatic speech to voters of 9 February 1946, Stalin

once again highlighted the need to strengthen the sinews of national power,

most notably heavy industry. The laying out of long-term plan priorities was

accompanied by a newly belligerent rhetoric in which Stalin sought, to quote

one commentator, to transform the post-war period ‘into a new prewar period’

in which a ‘postulated external danger [was] the primary fact of national life

and the internal policies of the government [were] a compulsive response to

it’.

This return to the ideological matrix of the pre-waryears was matched by a

much harsher and less accommodating approach to his Politburo companions.

Here too, the leader clawed back the discretion he had ceded during the war

and, in a series of attacks, resurrected the relations of strict subservience and

control which had predominated in the late 1930s.

36 See Gor’kov, Gosudarstvennyi Komitet,pp.81–4.

37 Robert C. Tucker, The Soviet Political Mind (New York: Norton, 1971), pp. 91, 89 (italics

in the original).

258

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

Stalin and his circle

On 4 September 1945 the GKO was dissolved and a month later Stalin left

Moscow for his ﬁrst major break from the capital in almost a decade, leaving

affairs of state in the hands of a ‘quartet’ consisting of Molotov, Malenkov, Beria

and Mikoyan. While in Sochi the leader closely followed events in Moscow,

receiving betweentwentyand thirty documents a day, and became increasingly

dismayed by what he regarded as the ‘independent’ political line being pursued

by Molotov in relations with the Western powers.Matters reached a head at the

beginning of December, when Stalin launched a vicious assault on Molotov:

‘None of us has the right to change the course of our policies unilaterally,’

Stalin argued. ‘But Molotov has accorded himself this right. Why, and on

what grounds?’ ‘I can no longer regard this comrade as my ﬁrst deputy,’ Stalin

concluded. Stalin sent the message to the other members of the quartet – but

not to Molotov – and asked that they read it out to him. On 7 December the

triumvirate reported: ‘We summoned Molotov and read out your telegram in

full. After some hesitation Molotov admitted that he had made many mistakes

but he regarded the lack of trust in him as unjust, and shed some tears.’ On

the same day Molotov sent his own reply to Stalin. ‘Your ciphered message

is ﬁlled with deep distrust towards me, both as a Bolshevik and as a person,

which I take as a most serious party warning for all my further work. I shall

try through deeds to regain your trust, in which every honest Bolshevik sees

not only personal trust, but also the trust of the party, which is dearer to me

than my own life.’

To resurrect the relations of strict subordination of the immediate pre-war

years, Stalin visited attacks of similar severity on each member of his quartet.

Mikoyan’s apology, which Stalin extracted from him in the autumn of 1946,

would prove to be quite typical: ‘Of course neither I nor others’, Mikoyan

conceded, ‘can frame questions quite like you. I shall devote all my energy so

that I may learn from you how to work correctly. I shall do all I can to draw

the lessons from your stern criticism, so that it is turned to good use in my

further work under your fatherly guidance.’

At the same time, given their qualities either as revolutionary symbols or

as hard-working administrators – it was for these reasons that they were in

the ruling circle to begin with – Stalin was reluctant to dispense with the

services of any member of the quartet altogether. Instead, he sought to curb

38 RGASPI f. 558,op.11,d.99, ll. 95, 120.

39 See Yoram Gorlizki and Oleg Khlevniuk, Cold Peace: Stalin and the Soviet Ruling Circle,

1945–1953 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 19–29.

40 RGASPI f. 558,op.11,d.765, ll. 113–14.

259

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

yoram gorlizki and oleg khlevniuk

the independence they had gained during the war and to bring about a return

to the status quo ante of the ﬁrst post-purge years.

The personal subjugation of Stalin’s close circle was accompanied by a

reorganisation of the country’s top decision-making bodies. Within the Polit-

buro itself, Stalin soon re-established the intrinsically ﬂuid and patrimonial

arrangements of the late 1930s. Convening the Politburo as an informally con-

stituted ‘ruling group’ offered Stalin several advantages. Apart from arranging

its meetings as and when he wished, Stalin could bypass the tedious pro-

cedure for having members formally elected by the Central Committee. It

was, for example, nearly ﬁve months before Voznesenskii’s election as a full

member of the Politburo, that Stalin dictated a Politburo resolution that the

‘sextet [i.e. the ruling group] add to its roster the chair of Gosplan [the State

Planning Commission], comrade Voznesenskii, so that it now be known as

the septet’.

Often, admission to the ruling group was not accompanied by

any formal resolutions as such. Without any ofﬁcial decision to go by, it is

only indirectly that we may infer that Kaganovich was admitted to it on his

return to Moscow from Kiev in December 1947, so that the ‘septet’ became an

‘octet’, and that Bulganin joined in February 1948, swelling the group into a

‘novenary’.

As much as it suited Stalin to have relatively informal arrangements at the

very highest levels, he and his colleagues did not lose sight of the need for

effective administration lower down. Thus the relatively rule-less activity of

a Politburo dominated by him went hand in hand with greater institution-

alisation elsewhere, most notably at the Council of Ministers (Sovmin), the

successor to Sovnarkom. Particularly important in this respect was a resolu-

tion of 8 February 1947 ‘On the Organisation of the Council of Ministers’,

which laid out a clear division of labour between the Politburo and Sovmin in

which the former, led by Stalin, was accorded the right to consider all matters

of a ‘political’ nature, such as governmental appointments, issues relating to

defence, foreign policy and internal security, while Sovmin, without Stalin,

was expected to deal with all mainstream economic issues and matters of

everyday governmental administration. The February resolution also marked

the consolidation of a new supra-ministerial order at Sovmin, consisting of a

hierarchy of sectoral committees attended by specialists which met at regular

intervals and complied with clearly established procedures.

41 O.V. Khlevniuk et al. (eds.), PolitburoTsK VKP(b) iSovetMinistrovSSSR 1945–1953 (Moscow:

Rosspen, 2002), p. 38.

42 See Yoram Gorlizki, ‘Ordinary Stalinism: The Council of Ministers and the Soviet Neo-

patrimonial State, 1945–1953’, Journal of Modern History 74, 4 (Dec. 2002): 705–15.

260

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

Stalin and his circle

In the post-war period Stalin thus operated through two committees: the

Politburo, over which he almost always presided, and the main bureau of

the Council of Ministers, which nearly always convened without him. The

combination of Stalin’s highly personalised leadership, as represented by the

Politburo, and the technocratic features of Sovmin, allowed Stalin to marry

personal-autocratic features of rule with modern committee-based decision-

making.

The consolidation of two key features of the early post-war period – the

tightening of Stalin’s grip over his deputies and the establishment of a split

system of leadership committees – was not an entirely smooth or continu-

ous affair. One ﬂashpoint which would disﬁgure the leadership system was a

purge, orchestrated by Stalin, whichwould come to be knownas the Leningrad

Affair.

Its immediate trigger was a scandal surrounding a seemingly innocu-

ous all-Russian wholesale fair held in Leningrad from 10 to 20 January 1949.

When it emerged that proper authorisation for the fair had not been granted,

the three leaders who had organised the fair, M. I. Rodionov, P. S. Popkov

and the Central Committee secretary, A. A. Kuznetsov, all of whom had

long-running ties to the city, were taken to task. To stave off allegations of

his own links with this group, the Politburo member Voznesenskii, him-

self from Leningrad, admitted to Stalin that the previous year Popkov had

approached Voznesenskii with a request that the latter act as a ‘patron’ of

Leningrad. This revelation was to have disastrous consequences, for the idea

that any leader other than Stalin could exercise ‘patronage’ over a territory

was entirely anathema to the dictator. On 15 February Kuznetsov, along with

Popkov and Rodionov, were dismissed, and Vosnesenskii was given a stern

warning.

One factor which may have fuelled the Leningrad Affair was the existence

of two loose groupings within the leadership, one consisting of natives of

the city associated with the deceased former Leningrad ﬁrst secretary, Andrei

Zhdanov, and the other headed by two thrusting young Politburo leaders,

Malenkov and Beria.

There is little evidence, however, that any member of

either group aimed to have their adversaries killed. Ever conscious of Stalin’s

volatile state of mind, both groups knew that a fresh round of bloodletting

at the very highest levels could easily swerve out of control and claim other

43 See Robert Conquest, Power and Policy in the USSR (London: Macmillan, 1961), ch.5;and

Gorlizki and Khlevniuk, Cold Peace,pp.79–89.

44 For a different interpretation which emphasises the ideological and policy differences

between these groups, see Werner G. Hahn, Postwar Soviet Politics: The Fall of Zhdanov

and the Defeat of Moderation, 1946–53 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982).

261

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

yoram gorlizki and oleg khlevniuk

victims, not least themselves. The key role in taking this affair over the edge

and turning it into a mini blood-purge would belong to Stalin.

Although Voznesenskii had earned a reprieve in February, his dismissal

would follow shortly afterwards. As a member of the younger generation of

Politburo leaders, Voznesenskii, who had seen no revolutionary service and

whose symbolic worth was limited, had been promoted and retained by Stalin

solely on the basis of his organisational talents and reliability. As the head of

Gosplan, Vosnesenskii’s main assignment was to provide the political lead-

ership under Stalin with accurate information on the economy. When Stalin

discovered, towards the end of February, that Voznesenskii had deliberately

massaged economic statistics, his retribution was swift. On 5 March Vosnesen-

skii was dismissed as chair of Gosplan and two days later he was forced out of

the Politburo.

For some time, Stalin vacillated over what to do with Vosnesenskii. After

several months the latter’s fate was sealed when he was charged with losing

secret documents. In a last-ditch attempt to earn Stalin’s forgiveness Voznesen-

skii pleaded in a letter: ‘I appeal to the Central Committee and to you, comrade

Stalin, and beg you to pardon me . . . and to believe that you are dealing with a

man who has learned his lesson . . .’

Waving aside this appeal, on 11 Septem-

ber 1949 the Politburo conﬁrmed a recommendation of the Commission of

Party Control to have Voznesenskii expelled from the Central Committee and

to hand him over for trial.

On 27 October 1949 Voznesenskii was arrested

and joined Kuznetsov and the others, who had been detained earlier that sum-

mer. Following a year of conﬁnement and interrogations Voznesenskii and

the other ‘Leningraders’ were convicted at a secret trial in September 1950 and

executed on 1 October.

In selecting his victim and moment of retribution Stalin was often quite

unpredictable, and, accordingly, he could turn virtually any untoward circum-

stance into a pretext for punishment. We cannot be certain about what tipped

the balance in this instance. It is clear, however, that a number of established

Stalinist norms had been violated. The strict hierarchy of decision-making

had been ﬂouted and there appeared to be evidence that a Moscow-based

network of senior leaders had exercised patronage over regional clients in

Leningrad. For his part, Voznesenskii had violated his assignment, which

involved providingaccurate statistics to the Politburo. At the same time, despite

the potential, frequentlyrealisedinthe 1930s, forever-expandingnetworksto be

45 APRF f. 3,op.54,d.26, ll. 78–91. 46 RGASPI f. 17,op.163,d.1530,l.154.

262

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

Stalin and his circle

implicated in such a purge, the scope of the Leningrad Affair would prove to

be surprisingly narrow.

Last years

After the drama of 1949, the next two years were a period of relative calm and

moderation within the leadership, as the ageing dictator spent an increasing

amount of time in the south. On this basis the higher leadership began to

consolidate and to lay the foundations of collective rule. While Stalin was

out of the capital, issues within the Politburo’s brief were discussed at meet-

ings of a Stalin-less ruling group, known as the ‘septet’, which operated as

a collective decision-making body. At its sessions questions appear to have

been properly debated and authentic fact-ﬁnding commissions were set up for

supplementary investigation of contentious issues. Indeed, the septet’s work

methods when Stalin was away began to approximate the pattern of Politburo

decision-making which had prevailed prior to the establishment of a full-blown

dictatorship.

Arguably of greater signiﬁcance were the regular meetings of the supreme

governmental agency in this period, the Bureau of the Presidium of the Council

of Ministers.At the time of its foundation on 7 April 1950 the bureau consisted of

ﬁve members, Bulganin, Beria, Kaganovich, Mikoyan and Molotov, who were

joined by a sixth member, Malenkov, in mid-April, and by a seventh, Nikita

Khrushchev, who began attending its meetings on 2 September 1950. While the

bureau consisted entirely of members of the Politburo’s ruling group, unlike

the Politburo it never met with Stalin, not even when Stalin was in Moscow.

At the same time, the bureau convened very regularly, normally once a week.

Thus the ruling group of the Politburo had regular opportunities to meet

without Stalin and outside the very framework of the Politburo in order to

discuss issues of national importance within a committee structure with a

clear membership, well-deﬁned procedures and set agendas. These meetings

afforded an embryonic collective leadership the opportunity to meet regularly

and to forge a set of mutual understandings.

There are indications that in his last year Stalin settled on what might be

termed an anti-oligarchic strategy aimed at undercutting the relatively stable

and independent system of collective leadership which had taken hold over

the previous two years, especially at the Council of Ministers. Stalin’s strategy

consisted of three elements. First, in December 1951 Stalin ﬁnally called a party

congress, which convened the following October. The congress afforded Stalin

a convenient pretext for loosening the ties of senior Politburo members to the

263

yoram gorlizki and oleg khlevniuk

Council of Ministers and for focusing attention instead on a new Central

Committee Presidium Bureau, which would meet under him. The second

prong of Stalin’s anti-oligarchic strategy was an onslaught on two Politburo

veterans, Molotov and Mikoyan, who were left out of the Central Committee

Bureau. As on earlier occasions, for example in 1941 and 1945, Stalin reserved his

most stinging attack for Molotov. At the post-congress plenum, making explicit

reference to the events of autumn 1945 described earlier, Stalin openly accused

Molotov of cowardice, capitulationism and, critically, of personal betrayal.

These accusations were all the more astounding for the fact that they ran

against the widely held perception of Molotov as Stalin’s mostdevotedfollower.

The third and boldest element of Stalin’s anti-oligarchic strategy was the

fabrication of a notional ‘conspiracy’ by a group of mostly Jewish doctors to

murder members of the Soviet leadership. ‘Jewish nationalists’, Stalin told a

session of the Presidium on 1 December 1952, ‘believe that their nation has

been saved by the United States (there they can become rich, bourgeois and

so on). They believe they are obliged to the Americans. Among the doctors

there are many Jewish nationalists.’

On 13 January 1953 the national daily,

Pravda, published a TASS bulletin, originally dictated by Stalin, and a lead edi-

torial, commissioned and heavily edited by him, on the activities of a group

of ‘doctor-wreckers’ most of whom, it claimed, were the tools of an ‘inter-

national Jewish Zionist organisation’.

The publication ushered in a frenzied

nationwide campaign with heavy anti-Semitic overtones and led to yet more

arrests.

Concocting the Doctors’ Plot served a dual purpose. First, it demonstrated

Stalin’s undiminished control of the secret police, a factor which continued to

underpin his control of Politburo colleagues. The plot, secondly, was designed

to prevent Stalin’s fellow leaders from lapsing into a ‘spirit of geopolitical com-

placency’.

Paradoxically the USSR’s achievements over the previous decade,

which included its defeat of Nazi Germany, the acquisition of a ring of buffer

states in Eastern Europe and the testing of the atom bomb in 1949, had pre-

sented Stalin with a problem, namely the view, seemingly widely held by other

members of the leadership, that the country’s new-found strength and secu-

rity could enable it to relax and to focus on domestic issues. The Doctors’

Plot was, to quote Robert Tucker, ‘Stalin’s desperate attempt to dramatise the

postulated persistence of the capitalist encirclement’.

47 Malyshev, ‘Dnevnik narkoma’, pp. 140–1. 48 RGASPI f. 558,op.11,d.157, ll. 29–33.

49 The phrase is from Tucker, Soviet Political Mind,p.95.

50 Ibid., pp. 95–6. Also see Khlevniuk et al., Politburo TsK VKP(b) i Sovet Ministrov SSSR

1945–1953,p.393.

264

Stalin and his circle

It was a measure of Stalin’s unimpeachable authority that there were no

open challenges to his rule over these last months. At the same time, Stalin

was unable to take any of the thrusts of his anti-oligarchic strategy as far

as he may have wished. Thus, for example, the organisation of the Central

Committee Presidium Bureau, the equivalent of which Stalin had dominated

for over twenty years, was made part of Khrushchev’s brief, and, in a further

break with tradition, it was resolved that, in Stalin’s absence, the cabinet could

be chaired by Malenkov, Khrushchev or Bulganin.

Stalin also appears to have

dispensed with the services of his long-standing aide and the head of the special

sector, Aleksandr Poskrebyshev, a month or so before his death.

The second

prong of Stalin’s strategy, the excommunication of Molotov and Mikoyan,

also appears to have had limited success. Stalin’s displeasure towards Mikoyan

and Molotov had virtually no bearing on the attitudes of other top leaders

towards the two, who were covertly told of leadership meetings and quickly

reassumed their positions once Stalin died.

Third, despite the frenzied and

bigoted atmosphere it created, the purge implications of the Doctors’ Plot

should not be overstated. Unlike the Great Terror in the 1930s, which had been

supported in public by all top Politburo leaders, this campaign was waged

by secondary functionaries, mostly from the Central Committee apparatus,

and did not receive a public endorsement from any of Stalin’s inner circle.

Equally, claims that the regime planned to hold public show trials, or to deport

Jews to special camps in the east, much as other ethnic minorities had been

‘cleansed’ and relocated during the war, now appear to be misplaced.

It appears that in Stalin’s last months his poor health and declining energy

had begun to take their toll. Certainly, whatever plans Stalin had in store for his

colleagues and for the country’s Jews were cut short by a sudden deterioration

in his health. On 1 March 1953 Stalin, unusually, did not call on his staff. When,

late that evening, the assistant warden of the dacha brought in the post, he

found Stalin lying on the ﬂoor. On their arrival the following morning Stalin’s

physicians diagnosed a brain haemorrhage, and the next day they informed the

51 APRF f. 3,op.22,d.12,l.3.

52 RGANI f. 2,op.1,d.65, ll. 26, 28–9; RGASPI f. 83,op.1,d.7, ll. 75–6 cf. 73; N. S. Khrushchev,

Vospominaniia (Moscow: Moskovskie novosti, 1999), vol. ii,pp.109–10.

53 Anastas Mikoyan, Tak bylo (Moscow: Vagrius, 1999), pp. 557–8. Also see G. V.

Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika Stalina (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, 2001),

pp. 683–85.

54 This was a point made by Adam Ulam, Stalin: The Man and his Era (New York, Viking,

1974), p. 738.

55 See Samson Madieveski, ‘1953:LaD

eportation des Juifs Sovi

etiques

etait-elle pro-

gramm

ee’, Cahiers du Monde russe et sovi

etique, 41, 4 (2000): 563–67; and Kostyrchenko,

Tainaia politika,pp.676–7.

265