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agents.

The NSM must be replicated in Eastern Europe. The ‘peaceful path’

to socialism had come to nothing in France, Italy and Finland; and the civil

war had been lost in Greece.

By the middle of 1947, Molotov and Zhdanov

were advising allies in Eastern Europe to ‘strengthen the class struggle’, that

is, stamp out difference that could become dangerous deviation, entailing a

turn towards imperialism.

On 5 June 1947 US Secretary of State George Marshall outlined the European

Recovery Program. Just two days before the Paris meeting on the plan was

to commence, Soviet ambassadors in Eastern Europe delivered the message

from Moscow demanding its allies stay away from Paris.

If in 1945 and 1946,

Soviet embassies in Eastern Europe had active contacts with non-Communist

political parties, then by the second half of 1947, these had all but stopped, and

completely ended by 1948. Election results in Poland, Romania and Hungary in

1947 were openly falsiﬁed. All police forces in Eastern Europe slipped under the

control of Moscow’s Communist allies. In September 1947, the Cominform

was established, an international institution designed to ensure conformity

with the Soviet model.

How to explain the self-defeating policies of Stalin in Eastern Europe? Self-

defeating in the near term, as they accelerated Western unity before an appar-

ent Soviet threat; in the medium term, as popular support for its allies was very

thin; and in the long term, as the Soviet-subsidised alliance stood as evidence of

Soviet expansionism. At Yalta in February 1945 Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt

agreed that East European governments should be ‘free, and friendly towards

the Soviet Union’. This was an oxymoron. Freely elected governments would

not choose friendship with Moscow and Moscow’s idea of friendship necessi-

tated forms of government that were not free. Some twenty-ﬁve years after

Yalta, Molotov reminisced that Poland should have been ‘independent, but

not hostile. But they tried to impose a bourgeois government, which natu-

rally would have been an agent of imperialism and hostile towards the Soviet

Union’.

11 Volokitina, ‘Nakanune: novye realii’, p. 53; and Volokitina, Murashko and Noskova,

‘K chitateliu’, in Volokitina et al., Moskva i vostochnaia evropa,p.20.

12 Murashko and Noskova, ‘Sovetskii faktor’, p. 92.

13 Volokitina, ‘Stalin i smena strategicheskogo kursa’, p. 17. The authors identify the period

from 1945 to 1947 as a time of tolerance of difference. Volokitina et al., Moskva i vostochnaia

evropa.

14 Danilov and Pyzhikov, Rozhdenie sverkhderzhavy,pp.45–9.

15 Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War (Cambridge,

Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 110.

16 Felix Chuev, Molotov Remembers: Inside Kremlin Politics (Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993), p. 54.

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Moscow’s foreign policy, 1945–2000: identities, institutions and interests

Here is captured the connection between the NSM, fear of difference, and

Soviet foreign policy. Stalinist identity politics implied that any non-socialist

government in Eastern Europe would be naturally hostile to the Soviet Union

and an ally of the most hostile imperialist Other – the US. Just as the bourgeoisie

or landlords at home were dangerous deviants allied with foreign capitalists,

so too any deviant governments in Eastern Europe. As Soviet fear of difference

becoming bourgeois degeneration increased at home, fears of the threat from

the US correspondingly increased, and then so too did the belief that allies

must be as similar to the NSM as possible. This helps explain the connection

between orthodoxy at home, increased threat abroad and increasing demands

on allies in Eastern Europe to become more Stalinist.

The mixed Soviet strategy of formal co-operation with its wartime allies

and sympathy for the emergence of new socialist allies abroad was evident

in policy towards the Chinese civil war.

In August 1945, Moscow signed a

treaty of friendship and alliance with Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist Chinese

against Japan. This was the legal foundation for the presence of Soviet forces

in Port Arthur and Dalian, gave Moscow control over Manchurian railroads

and gave Outer Mongolia independence. Soviet military aid to Mao’s army

in and through Manchuria did not end, however, and when Soviet forces

withdrew from China in the spring of 1946, they left this territory to Mao’s

forces. As late as April 1947 Molotov was assuring Secretary of State Marshall

of a continued Soviet commitment to the August 1945 agreement with the

Guomindang.

But by October 1947, the Soviet Union transferred to the Red

Army enough materiel to equip 600,000 soldiers.

Stalin later admitted to

the Yugoslav Communist Miloslav Djilas that he had mistakenly advised Mao

to continue co-operating with Chiang Kai-shek, rather than push for armed

victory.

Stalinism’s two camps at home and abroad, 1947–53

The dangerous deviants in these last years of high Stalinism – slavish wor-

shippers of all things Western, rootless cosmopolitans and wreckers and

17 For Germany, see Naimark, The Russians in Germany.

18 Niu Jun, ‘The Origins of the Sino-Soviet Alliance’, in O. A. Westad (ed.), Brothers in Arms:

The Rise and Fall of the Sino-Soviet Alliance, 1945–1 963 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University

Press, 1998), pp. 52–60.

19 Ibid., p. 61.

20 Sergei N. Goncharov, John W. Lewis and Xue Litai, Uncertain Partners: Stalin, Mao, and

the Korean War (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993), pp. 14, 74.

21 Ibid., p. 24.

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saboteurs – shared one feature. They were all accomplices of the West in

overthrowing socialism in the Soviet Union. Zhdanovshchina had already con-

demned as deviant the failure to extol the virtues of the NSM in all cultural

products. But kowtowing to the West was associated with disdain for Russian

and Soviet achievements, and an unpatriotic preference for life in the West.

The ofﬁcial launch of this campaign came a month after the Marshall Plan

was announced.

It was accompanied by a new ofﬁcial celebration of Russia,

punctuated by Moscow’s 800th birthday party in September 1947.

After the murder of the director of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in

January 1948, a campaign against the Jewish intelligentsia ensued. The Union

of Jewish Writers was closed, Jews were purged from political and cultural

institutions and works in Yiddish were banned. The accusation was that ‘some’

Jews had become a ﬁfth column allied with US and British intelligence. Just as

the campaign had seemingly lapsed, it was revived in May 1952 with the public

trial of those implicated in the ‘Anti-Fascist Committee Affair’, and then, in

the winter of 1952–3, with the announcement of the ‘Doctors’ Plot’, which

only ended with Stalin’s death. Other campaigns, in Georgia and Estonia, for

example, connected local nationalism to an alliance with the West. In the

‘Leningrad Affair’, in which that party organisation was purged of ‘saboteurs

and wreckers’, from 1949 to 1952, the vulnerability of even the highest ranks

of the party to the allure of the West was revealed.

The danger expected from difference was reﬂected in institutional modiﬁca-

tions. In October 1949, the police, or militsia, was removed from the Ministry

of Internal Affairs (MVD) and shifted to the MGB. In July 1952, the Coun-

cil of Ministers drafted an order to move all censorship responsibilities from

local control to the MGB, as well.

The making of foreign-policy decisions

remained tightly centralised around Stalin himself, Zhdanov, Molotov, Andrei

Vyshinsky, who replaced Molotov in 1949, and Anastas Mikoyan. After 1948, the

Presidium rarely met.

East European Communist elites continued to have

institutionalised channels of communication with their Moscow colleagues.

22 Zubkova, Russia after the War,p.119.

23 Anatolii M. Beda, Sovetskaia politicheskaia kul’tura cherez prizmu MVD (Moscow: Mosgo-

rarkhiv, 2002), pp. 32–7.

24 Ibid., pp. 35–6; Murashko and Noskova, ‘Repressii kak element vnutripartiinoi bor’by za

vlast’’, in Volokitina et al., Moskva i vostochnaia evropa’, p. 547; and Zubkova, Russia after

the War,pp.132–6.

25 Beda, Sovetskaia politicheskaia kul’tura,p.38, and Zubkova, Russia after the War,p.129.

26 Taubman, Khrushchev,p.329; Zubok and Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War,

pp. 76–87; and Zubkova, ‘Rivalry with Malenkov’, in William Taubman, Sergei

Khrushchev and Abbott Gleason (eds.), Nikita Khrushchev (New Haven: Yale Univer-

sity Press, 2000), pp. 71–2.

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Moscow’s foreign policy, 1945–2000: identities, institutions and interests

Soviet participation in East European decision-making was as institutionalised

as Moscow’s participation in obkom decision-making at home.

East Europeans frequently appealed to the Soviet embassy to reverse deci-

sions made by their own governments. Local elites competed to provide

Moscow with compromising material (kompromat) on each other, hoping to

gain Moscow’s favour against local rivals. Accusations tracked perfectly with

the kinds of dangerous deviance being rooted out in the Soviet Union. The

Soviet leadership had its own channels of veriﬁcation, as well: its embassies,

MVD, MGB, the Cominform and members of ofﬁcial Soviet delegations.

East European allies adopted institutional forms to look like Soviet ones,

right down to the number of members on the Central Committee (CC) Pre-

sidium, or number and names of CC departments.

MGB advisers would

often take over the handling of local interrogations and ‘affairs’, establishing

which charges were appropriate and which confessions should be coerced.

All of this was done to ensure that the kinds of deviations revealed in, say,

the ‘Rajk Affair’, would correspond to the particular deviation prevailing in

Moscow.

Soviet interests in Eastern Europe did not change from 1945 to 1953: regimes

friendly to Moscow. But how Soviets understood what constituted friendly

changed dramatically. Replications of the Soviet Union were now necessary.

The Soviet need for similarity squandered genuine post-war support for the

Soviet Union in Eastern Europe. Soviet practices there pushed the West to

unite against it, forgetting about any German threat, and displaced Eastern

European memories about Soviet liberation with apprehensions of the Soviets

as occupiers. Especially in Poland and Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union was

regarded as protection against Germany into 1947. But by 1948, both the Min-

istry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) and the CC were reporting less sympathy for

Moscow, ‘even among progressive parts of the population’ in Czechoslovakia

and Bulgaria. In January 1949, a poll in Slovakia showed that 36 per cent of

those asked would prefer a war between the US and Soviet Union in which

the US emerged victorious, versus 20 per cent who favoured a Soviet victory.

27 T. Pokivailova, ‘Moskva i ustanovlenie monopolii kompartii na informatsiiu na rubezhe

40–50-x godov’, in Volokitina et al., Moskva i vostochnaia evropa,pp.324–41; Volokitina,

‘Oformlenie i funktsionirovanie novogo mekhanizma gosudarstvennoi vlasti’, in Volok-

itina et al., Moskva i vostochnaia evropa,pp.232–42, 284; and Volokitina, Murashko and

Noskova, ‘K chitateliu’, p. 11.

28 Murashko and Noskova, ‘Institut Sovetskikh sovetnikov’, pp. 619–22; and Murashko and

Noskova, ‘Repressii – instrument podavleniia politicheskoi oppozitsii’, in Volokitina

et al., Moskva i vostochnaia evropa,p.450.

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The poll was broken down by class, and only the working class narrowly

supported a Soviet victory (by 35–32 per cent).

Yugoslavia’s Tito was doubly deviant, manifesting independence in both

foreign and domestic matters. His territorial ambitions alarmed Moscow. It

feared other East European allies might mimic Tito’s behaviour, and that Tito

might use the Cominform as an institutional vehicle to spread his heresy.

Tito’s popularity in other East European countries was well known to Soviet

political elites.

Stalin and Molotov deemed Yugoslavia’s behaviour adventur-

istic, as it threatened to unite the US and Britain against Moscow.

Moscow

withdrew its advisers from Yugoslavia in March 1948, following up with a

letter of excommunication distributed to all Cominform members.

Tito’s

codename within the CC was changed from Eagle (Orel) to Vulture (Stervy-

atnik).

To Moscow’s alarm, other East European Communist parties, with

the exception of Hungary’s, did not immediately support either Moscow’s

letter or the subsequent June 1948 Cominform resolution repeating Moscow’s

charges. The Romanian, Czech, Bulgarian and Polish Communist parties had

to be prodded to hold meetings to discuss and approve the Soviet position.

The problem was not only with Communist elites, but also with average folk

on the street, who, it was reported back to Moscow, ‘see Tito as a hero worthy

of imitation’.

As Volokitina and her co-authors put it, a ‘new stage in the history of the

region’ began in 1948: ‘the hot phase of Sovietisation’.

The Soviet continuum

from difference to danger was evident in East European identity relations.

Rudolf Sl

ansk

y, for example, was initially charged with a ‘nationalist devia-

tion’, permitting Czechoslovakia to embark upon a ‘special path to socialism’

which ignored the universality of the Soviet model. This then threatened the

‘restoration of capitalism’ in the republic, which in turn would have turned

29 Murashko and Noskova, ‘Sovetskii faktor’, pp. 73–7; and Volokitina, ‘Stalin i smena

strategicheskogo kursa’, p. 20.

30 Zubok and Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War,pp.129–35.

31 Murashko and Noskova, ‘Sovetskoe rukovodstvo i politicheskie protsessy T. Kostova i

L. Raika’, in I. V. Gaiduk, N. I. Yegorova and A. O. Chubar’ian (eds.), Stalinskoe desiatiletie

kholodnoi voiny: fakty i gipotezy (Moscow: Nauka, 1999), p. 24.

32 Volokitina, ‘Stalin i smena strategicheskogo kursa’, p. 19.

33 Adibekov, Kominform i poslevoennaia evropa, 100–2; and Pokivailova, ‘Moskva i ustanovle-

nie monopolii’, pp. 349–52.

34 Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield (New York: Basic

Books, 1999), p. 356.

35 Murashko and Noskova, ‘Repressii kak element’, pp. 498–50; and Volokitina, ‘Nakanune:

novye realii’, pp. 54–5.

36 Volokitina et al., ‘K chitateliu’, p. 5.

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Czechoslovakia over to ‘the English and American imperialists’.

A Soviet

consulate in Hungary approvingly reported the renaming of hundreds of sites

for Lenin, Stalin, Molotov, the Red Army and Gorky, as well as the introduction

of Russian language study. The works of Akhmatova, Zoshchenko and other

‘disgraced’ Soviet authors were removed from Hungarian libraries.

Hungarian party elites told their Soviet counterparts that there was too

much Jewish inﬂuence in their ranks. But in early 1950, the anti-cosmopolitan

campaign had lulled, and so Hungarian reports were ignored. Less than two

years later, however, as the Soviet trials in the ‘Anti-Fascist Committee Affair’

got under way, Hungarian and Czech Communists were instructed to unmask

their own cosmopolitan ﬁfth columns.

Just as attention to Western art, cul-

ture and science was being regarded at home as dangerous, Soviet ofﬁcials

reported that Western culture was exerting too much inﬂuence in Eastern

Europe. In July 1949, the Soviet Union requested the closure of all Western

culture and information centres in Eastern Europe, as well as the reduction

of tourism and exchanges to a minimum. The allure of the West was related

directly to the vulnerability of socialism in these countries.

Purges also followed Soviet procedures. As Stalin wrote to Hungarian party

leader M

aty

as R

akosi in September 1949: ‘I think that Rajk must be executed,

since the people will not understand any other sentence.’ And so he was, two

weeks later.

Moscow measured the effectiveness of campaigns in Eastern

Europe as it had in the Soviet Union: by the numbers. Soviets monitored

how many people were arrested, purged and executed, recommending more

‘vigilance’ if too few affairs were being pursued.

The ‘liberal paciﬁstic’ atti-

tude of Czech comrades was criticised because too many Czech deviants were

allowed to emigrate, rather than be incarcerated or executed. Just as political

prisoners in the Soviet Union were dragooned into slave labour to build the

White Sea canal, Romanian deviants worked on ‘socialist projects’, such as

the Danube–Black Sea canal.

Stalinist fear of difference importing imperialist danger dominated relations

with Eastern Europe. But relations with China were not fraught with a fear

37 Murashko and Noskova, ‘Repressii kak element’, p. 561. See also Murashko and Noskova,

‘Sovetskii faktor’, pp. 93–103.

38 Pokivailova, ‘Moskva i ustanovlenie monopolii’, pp. 322–3 and 336–8.

39 Murashko and Noskova, ‘Repressii kak element’, pp. 547–52; and Danilov and Pyzhikov,

Rozhdenie sverkhderzhavy,pp.54–5.

40 Pokivailova, ‘Moskva i ustanovlenie monopolii’, pp. 325–31.

41 Quoted in Murashko and Noskova, ‘Repressii kak element’, p. 527.

42 Volokitina, ‘Istochniki formirovaniia’, p. 157; and Murashko and Noskova, ‘Institut Sovet-

skikh sovetnikov’, p. 627.

43 Murashko and Noskova, ‘Repressii – instrument podavleniia’, pp. 440–7.

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of difference, but were the external projection of the Stalinist hierarchy of

centre and periphery, modernity and pre-modernity. China was the Soviet

Union’s oldest little brother, a revolutionary comrade-in-arms who aspired

to become just like its elder and better. In the summer of 1949 Stalin met

six times in Moscow with Liu Shaoqi, one of Mao’s closest colleagues. At

one meeting, Liu presented a six-hour report on China’s political realities in

which China was repeatedly described as on the road to becoming the Soviet

Union. On Stalin’s personal copy are a dozen ‘Da!’s written in Stalin’s hand

after passages that acknowledge China’s subordinate position.

During these

meetings an international division of revolutionary labour emerged. Stalin

delegated to China leadership of the anti-colonial movements of Asia, while

reserving for Moscow overall leadership of the world Communist movement,

including Eastern Europe, and the working-classes of modern North America

and Western Europe. China would be the surrogate vanguard for revolutions

in places like Vietnam and Indonesia, while the Soviet Union would be China’s

vanguard. Mao agreed to this hierarchy in his December 1949 meeting with

Stalin in Moscow.

This division of labour got its ﬁrst serious test in Korea. A month after Mao

left Moscow, North Korea’s leader, Kim Il-Sung, arrived with promises of a

quick victory in a short war against South Korea. Stalin agreed to provide

the necessary military assistance, but told Kim that no Soviet forces would

ﬁght, even if the US did intervene, but that China would. In June 1950, North

Korea attacked with initial success. But the US-led counter-attack had, by late

September, resulted in US forces approaching the Chinese border. On 1 Octo-

ber, Kim sent a telegram to Stalin warning of a North Korean collapse. Zhou

En-lai visited Stalin in Sochi a week later where Stalin suggested that China

could demonstrate its identity as vanguard of the Asian national liberation

movement (NLM) by saving North Korea. Stalin told Zhou En-lai that it was

China’s war, but the Soviet Union would provide military equipment and

ﬁghter pilots.

During Mao’s only meetings with Stalin, the February 1950 treaty of alliance

was signed, promising vast quantities of Soviet economic and military aid,

44 In Jun, ‘Origins of the Sino-Soviet Alliance’, p. 305. The original is in APRF, f. 45,o1,

d. 328.

45 Goncharov, Lewis and Litai, Uncertain Partners,pp.46–74; Chen Jian, Mao’s China and the

Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), pp. 50 and 120;IlyaV.

Gaiduk, Confronting Vietnam: Soviet Policy towards the Indochina Conﬂict (Stanford, Calif.:

Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 2.

46 Goncharov, Lewis and Litai, Uncertain Partners,pp.137–44 and 188–95; Zubok and Ple-

shakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War,pp.62–8; Chen Jian, Mao’s China,pp.121–55;and

Danilov and Pyzhikov, Rozhdenie sverkhderzhavy,pp.65–6.

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Moscow’s foreign policy, 1945–2000: identities, institutions and interests

along with an alliance against the US and Japan. At the same time, however,

Mao had to swallow what he later called ‘two bitter pills’: continued Soviet

control over Port Arthur and the Manchurian railroad, and a secret agreement

to keep foreigners and foreign investment, other than Soviet, out of Manchuria

and Xinjiang.

Soviet relations with China also revealed relative Soviet indifference towards

NLMs. At Chinese behest Ho Chi Minh arrived secretly (a Soviet condition)

in Moscow while Mao was there. In his only meeting with Stalin, Ho was

advised to work through China, and not through the Soviet Union directly.

While China recognised the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) with

great fanfare on 18 January 1950, the Soviet Union did not recognise Hanoi for

two weeks, and then most quietly. Moreover, contacts with Ho were handled

through the French Communist Party, reﬂecting the Eurocentrism of Stalin’s

foreign policy more generally.

The politics of identity between the Soviet Union and its Chinese allies

worked differently from the way it did in Eastern Europe. Increasing Soviet

intolerance of difference resulted in purges, arrests and executions and the

assumption of power in Eastern Europe of Communists with close associations

with patrons in the Kremlin. Mao,on the other hand, independently and enthu-

siastically promoted the adoption of the Soviet model in China. At the March

1949 Chinese Communist Party (CCP) plenum, Mao stated so explicitly.

Moscow found itself with a very close ally in its struggle against deviation.

Difference at home: allies abroad, 1953–6

Stalin’s death buried the NSM. The ‘us versus them’ binarisation of the world

was replaced by a continuum of difference, with a broad contested middle

ground between the NSM and its dangerous deviant Other, including the

possibility of being neither us nor them. The possibility of a ‘private’ self

appeared, an individual personality unconnected to the public performance

of being Soviet, socialist or Communist. The recognition of the possibility of

irrelevant and innocuous difference entailed as well the acknowledgement of

fallibility, of the possibility that errors might be made by even good Soviets.

Tolerance for both mistakes and difference spoke of a new level of security

and conﬁdence felt by the post-Stalin generation of political elites in Moscow.

47 Goncharov, Lewis and Litai, Uncertain Partners,pp.85–126.

48 Chen Jian, Mao’s China,p.121; Goncharov, Lewis and Litai, Uncertain Partners,pp.107–8;

and Gaiduk, Confronting Vietnam,p.3.

49 Goncharov, Lewis and Litai, Uncertain Partners,p.45.

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This said, two important elements of the Stalinist identity of the Soviet

Union remained: hierarchy and the Russian nation. The Soviet Union remained

the apex and the centre of the world communist community, and the teleo-

logical endpoint for all modern humanity. Within the Soviet Union, Russia

remained the vanguard for all other republics and peoples, with Central Asians

deemed the most peripheral and needful of a vanguard in Russia and Moscow.

The Russian nation remained the surrogate nation for a putatively suprana-

tional Soviet man.

The political manifestations of these identity shifts in March 1953 were

dramatic and almost instantaneous. Within a month, 1.2 million prisoners

were amnestied and both the Doctors’ Plot and Mingrelian Affair were publicly

declared over and mistaken. Within months, Ilya Ehrenburg’s novel The Thaw

was published and Zoshchenko was readmitted to the Writers’ Union. All

victims of the Leningrad Affair were publicly rehabilitated within a year of

Stalin’s funeral. In December 1954, the Second Writers’ Congress was held,

the ﬁrst since 1938, at which all the issues of Soviet identity were debated

publicly for ﬁve days. In September 1955, Molotov was forced to write a public

recantation in the pages of the single most important theoretical publication

of the CPSU, Kommunist, in which he admitted socialism had already been built

in the Soviet Union, not just had its foundations laid, and so the Soviet system

was far more secure than he had hitherto acknowledged. The capstone to

the period was the Twentieth Party Congress in February 1956, where Stalin’s

excesses were revealed and publicly condemned.

The boundaries of permissible difference were revealed in Budapest in

November 1956, and were reﬂected back into Soviet society. But there was

no turning back. Molotov persistently struggled against difference, but he,

too, was defeated, at the June 1957 CC plenum devoted to the removal of the

‘anti-party group’. The next thirty years witnessed a continual contestation of

the boundaries of permissible deviation from the Soviet model at home.

50 Ted Hopf, Social Construction of International Politics (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University

Press, 2002), pp. 39–82;Zubkova,Russia after the War, 169–72; Nancy Condee, ‘Cultural

Codes of the Thaw’, in Taubman, Khrushchev and Gleason, Khrushchev,pp.160–76;and

Robert English, Russia and the Idea of the West (New York: Columbia University Press,

2000), p. 85.

51 Taubman, Khrushchev,pp.246–52; Sergei Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation

of a Superpower (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), pp. 31–5;

Zubkova, Russia after the War,pp.154–66; and James Richter, Khrushchev’s Double Bind:

International Pressures and Domestic Coalition Politics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University

Press, 1994), pp. 31–73.

52 Zubkova, Russia after the War,pp.189–98; ‘SSSR: Narody i sud’by’, Voennye Arkhivy

Rossii 1 (1993): 247–59; Iurii Aksiutin, ‘Popular Responses to Khrushchev’, in Taub-

man, Khrushchev and Gleason, Khrushchev,p.193; ‘Plenum TsK KPSS Iiun’ 1957 goda’,

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Moscow’s foreign policy, 1945–2000: identities, institutions and interests

In this initial period after Stalin’s death, institutionalisation of a discourse

of difference did not occur as much as Stalinism was de-institutionalised. Just

one day after Stalin’s death, for example, the MVD and MGB were merged,

so the police were again being supervised by those responsible for internal

law and order, not for ﬁnding foreign agents. A year later, the MGB and its

intelligence functions were severed from the MVD, so the Stalinist conception

of criminality as being connected to a foreign threat was deprived of its insti-

tutionalised power.

Only two weeks later, the Gulag was transferred from

the MVD to the Ministry of Justice.

With Georgii Malenkov’s demotion in

January 1955, Khrushchev packed the CC with his proponents.

This strategy

paid off in the June 1957 CC meeting that removed Molotov, Malenkov, Lazar

Kaganovich and Dmitrii Shepilov.

New institutional carriers for the discourse of difference emerged in society

more broadly. The custom of readers writing letters to editors of newspapers

and magazines became so widespread that media outlets competed for them.

The intelligentsia as a social stratum was revived in strength and conﬁdence,

making editorial boards of journals and the meetings and directorates of their

ofﬁcial organisations platforms for advancing the boundaries of differenceboth

in everyday discussions and in mass publications.

With regard to foreign policy, the death of Stalin disrupted the institu-

tionalised relationships between East European Communist leaders and their

allies in Moscow. And the growing tolerance of difference put them on inse-

cure discursive footing. The abolition of the Cominform in April 1956 was the

ofﬁcial end to institutionalised compulsion to adhere to a single Soviet model

of socialism.

The new discourse of difference changed Soviet interests in other countries

in the world. East Europeans could be good allies without reproducing the

Soviet model in detail. NLMs could be good allies just by not being allied with

the imperialist West. Russian success at home as vanguard for Central Asia gave

Moscow conﬁdence that the Soviet Union could be a surrogate vanguard for

dozens of countries trying to become independent of colonial rule. The Soviet

Union ofﬁcially recognised many roads to socialism, including electoral ones.

The recognition of difference was also reﬂected in relations with the West.

The realisation that the US was not the West and that European states, in

Istoricheskii Arkhiv 3 (1993): 73; ‘Posledniaia “Antipartiinaia” Gruppa. Stenograﬁcheskii’,

21; ‘Posledniaia “Antipartiinaia Gruppa”’, pp. 33–4; Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev, 203;

Taubman, Khrushchev,pp.301–7; and ‘Vengriia, Aprel’-Oktiabr’ 1956’, Istoricheskii Arkhiv

4 (1993): 113.

53 Beda, Sovetskaia politicheskaia kul’tura,pp.45–7. 54 Taubman, Khrushchev,p.246.

55 Chuev, Molotov Remembers,p.351. 56 Zubkova, Russia after the War,p.161.

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