Russia After Stalin

by Deutscher Isaac

On the face of it, the fall of Beria might be seen as a necessary stage in Russia's democratic evolution; and thus Malenkov has vaguely presented it. The chief accusation he levelled against Beria was that Beria had conspired to place the political police above party and government and thus to block the road of reform. Beria, so Malenkov stated, carried out the recent reforms only because he had to: these reforms having been decided on the joint initiative of the Central Committee and the Praesidium, Beria pretended to carry them out loyally, while in fact he obstructed their execution. As if to confirm this version, the Central Committee restated its criticism of the Stalin cult, its opposition to the adulation of any Leader, and its determination to secure ‘collective leadership’, free debate, and the rule of law.

If this were all, one might indeed see the downfall of Beria as a further stage in Russia's revulsion against Stalinism. But this is not all.

What is ominous in this grim affair is, of course, not Beria's downfall but the manner in which it was brought about. He was denounced as a traitor and enemy of the party and the people, and as an agent of foreign imperialism who aimed at the restoration of capitalism. This is the ‘classical’ ‘amalgam’ of the Stalinist purges of the 1930's. Thus, the re-enactment of the Witches' Sabbath, which failed to come off in January, appears to have begun after all, with Beria, instead of the Kremlin doctors, hovering ‘through the fog and filthy air’.

The reproduction of the ‘amalgam’ of the 1930's makes a mockery of the claim of the ruling group that it defended the principle of collective leadership against Beria. That principle implies unhampered expression of political differences within the leading group and ultimately within the party as a whole. But who will dare to speak his mind freely when he has reason to fear that for this he may be denounced as traitor and foreign agent? The Stalinist amalgam rules out free discussion and consequently ‘collective leadership’.

If it was possible to see a promise of democratic regeneration in Russia after Stalin's death, this was so in part because denunciations of this sort had disappeared — they had become rare even during Stalin's last years. The many high officials demoted between March and June were not labelled foreign agents, spies, or adherents of capitalism. They were charged with concocting false accusations, abusing power, imposing policies of Russification, and so on. These were plausible charges, self-explanatory within a certain political context, and fitting in with the circumstances in which the dismissed men, whether guilty or not, had operated. The charges were made in a moderate and sober language in which there was no hint of a witch hunt. In contrast to this, the accusations levelled against Beria were full of irrational, demonological overtones; and the world was asked to believe that the man who had been in charge of Russia's domestic security during the Second World War was an agent of foreign imperialism.

The meaning of the Beria affair emerges even more conclusively from the fact that his fall became the signal for a new drive against the ‘nationalisms’ of the Georgians, Ukrainians, and other non-Russian nationalities. It was no sheer coincidence that during the ‘liberal spring’ Great Russian chauvinism was kept in check and the need was proclaimed to give more scope to the aspirations and demands of the non-Russian Republics.

Policy towards the smaller nations is the most sensitive barometer of the general atmosphere of the Soviet Union. Liberalization means less central control and more autonomy for non-Russians. Police rule implies strict centralization; and its tightening usually leads to a drive against the ‘bourgeois’ nationalisms of the outlying Republics.

Between March and June the talk was, characteristically, against operating the bogy of ‘ alleged bourgeois nationalisms’ in the non-Russian provinces. In what seemed a long overdue act of historical justice the Russifiers were dismissed from office in Tiflis and Kiev.

It should perhaps be recalled that the Stalin era began precisely with a struggle against the ‘nationalist deviationists’ in Georgia and the Ukraine. It was on this subject that Lenin, mortally ill, wrote his last, great, angry, and stirring letter to the party. (The author has read the full text of this letter which has remained unpublished till this day.) In it Lenin expressed the sense of shame and even of personal guilt which Stalin's drive against the ‘nationalist deviationists’ had aroused in him. He warned the party against the Great Russian chauvinism of the Soviet bureaucracy and of Stalin in particular, against the barbarous violence of that ‘truly Russian Great Bully’, who, evoking the need for strict central government, would oppress, insult, and humiliate the non-Russian nationalities. Lenin passionately argued that it would be a thousand times better for the Soviet Republic even to forgo somead vantages of centralized government than ‘to deliver the smaller nationalities into the hands of the Great Russian Bully’.

There was therefore a curious historical symmetry in the circumstance that immediately after Stalin's death the Georgian and Ukrainian issues reappeared on the agenda and that this time an attempt was made to tarne the ‘truly Russian Great Bully’.