Moving forward on the Kremlin’s political and international agenda in the early 1950s, Soviet military advisers “carried out preparatory work for the unification of the armies of Eastern Europe into a single military-political bloc.” Thus they paved the way for the creation of the Warsaw Pact Treaty Organization in 1955.
In China after Korea, Mao proclaimed a great victory because his army had fought the capitalist West to a standstill. The Korean War allowed him to consolidate Communist control and also to promote the new China’s image in the world.55 During that war, more than a third of China’s budget was devoted to defense needs. In December 1952, Mao asked for still more deliveries of military goods in preparation for an expected UN attack. He wanted such large quantities that Stalin felt it was beyond the capability of the Soviet Union to supply them all.56
The Chinese persisted in their demands. They were especially interested in getting the atomic bomb and kept putting pressure on Stalin to provide the secrets, but to no avail. In 1956, however, Nikita Khrushchev, the new man in the Kremlin, consented to Soviet cooperation with China’s development of its nuclear energy program for peaceful purposes. He hoped thereby to win over Mao and gain his support in the post-Stalin power struggle. In spite of a breakdown in Sino-Soviet relations and after a long struggle, on October 16, 1964, the Chinese had their first atomic bomb test.57
The results of the Korean War on the ground, in terms of population dislocation and death, were catastrophic. The full toll will never be known. Some estimates of the number of Koreans killed—most of them civilians—run into the millions. Although the Chinese used three million men in the war and claimed that 152,000 were killed, Soviet sources put the death figure at a million.58 The Soviet Union was barely involved in the fighting and registered a total of 315 deaths, most of them attached to the air force.59 Secretary of State Acheson reported that the United States suffered 33,600 killed in action and a casualty total of 142,000.60 Other nations fought in Korea for the UN, of whose forces 3,063 were killed, including 1,263 from the British Commonwealth: Australia, Britain, Canada, and New Zealand.61 The United States could have learned from the war to avoid another entanglement looming on the horizon in Vietnam.62
Kim Il Sung emerged from the war fortified in power. He created a personality cult that in its sheer idolatry easily topped those of Stalin and Mao, and he combined Communism with various Korean religious traditions. The version of Stalinism he adopted was more rigid than the original, and in time Kim would suspect both the post-Stalinist Soviet Union and China of not being Communist enough. Before he died in 1994, he groomed his son Kim Jong Il as his successor. The deprivation and poverty of the people, especially when compared to prosperous South Korea, was caused in no small part because father and son devoted vast sums to defense spending.63
CHAPTER 20
New Waves of Stalinization
Stalin had once favored a “national” approach to Communism, albeit one under the direction of the Kremlin. This way of seeing things, however, allowed for a degree of flexibility that could undermine Moscow’s authority. As the Soviet empire firmed up its grip on Eastern Europe, opportunities were opened up for disciples on the periphery to settle scores with opponents and, for example, without specific instructions from Moscow, to push the churches out of the schools and to nationalize education. Still, in the changing international climate, especially following the break with Tito and Yugoslavia in 1948, the possibility that other European followers might also embark on a “special path” to socialism struck a note of alarm to Stalin’s ears.
At the very moment the Soviet dictator was tightening the screws on the Red Empire, he was venting his own phobias, most notably his anti-Semitism, which had simmered beneath the surface since the war, both in the USSR and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. Now it became more prominent and, in varying degrees, entangled in the Stalinization process that marked the last years of the dictator’s rule.
STALINISTS’ FLIRTATION WITH ANTI-SEMITISM
The USSR, in May 1948, was the first country to recognize the new state of Israel de jure. The Kremlin hoped to make political inroads in the Middle East, and Stalin encouraged the Eastern Europeans to follow suit. From the Soviet perspective, however, it was not a happy turn of events that Israel almost immediately looked to the United States for solidarity and support. Even more threatening was the powerful symbolic significance of a Jewish homeland. The very existence of the new Israel sparked the nationalist sentiment of Soviet Jews.1
Stalin’s stated position—as well as long-standing official Soviet policy—on anti-Semitism was indicated as far back as 1931, when the Jewish News Agency in the United States asked his opinion about it. He said that such prejudice was completely inappropriate for the Communist movement because its updated version “acted like a lightning rod for the exploiters, absorbing the blows aimed at capitalism by the workers. Anti-Semitism is dangerous for the working people, a false path that leads them astray and into the jungle.” He insisted that blaming the Jews was “an extreme form of chauvinism” and “the most dangerous vestige of cannibalism.”2
Nevertheless, the clear-cut condemnation of anti-Semitism began to change and, as we noted in Chapter 10, Soviet authorities played down the victimization of the Jews at the hands of the Nazis and did not tolerate any attempt by organizations or individuals to sanctify the memory of the Holocaust. Stalin and his henchmen then became concerned that their own Jewish population was becoming too “nationalistic.” Mikhail Suslov, of the foreign affairs department of the Central Committee, wrote Molotov on January 7, 1947, to explain that steps had to be taken against the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAFC): “With the end of the war the activities of the Committee are becoming more nationalist, Zionist, it objectively contributes to strengthening the Jewish reactionary bourgeois-nationalist movement abroad and triggers nationalist, Zionist sentiment among the Jewish population of the USSR.”3
However, the JAFC had a heroic past and could not simply be erased as if it had never existed. Founded in April 1942, its membership list reads like a Who’s Who of the Jews in the country. Its stated and laudable goal was “to mobilize the Jewish masses of all countries for the active struggle against fascism and to obtain the greatest possible support for the Soviet Union and the Red Army, which is carrying the heaviest burden in the struggle.”4 The committee president was the director of the Yiddish theater, Solomon Mikhoels, a famed holder of the Lenin Prize. Among other services, he and others traveled to the United States, England, and Canada in 1943, visiting dozens of cities to raise funds and support for the Soviet cause.
Their sympathetic reception led Mikhoels and the JAFC to hope that a homeland for the Jews could be found in the Soviet Crimea. In the summer of 1946, Mikhoels contacted Molotov’s Jewish wife, Polina Zhemchuzhina and asked her to intercede with higher authorities. When she could offer no encouragement, he thought an appeal to Stalin’s daughter might work, for she had married Grigori Morozov, who was Jewish. However, before any meeting took place with Svetlana, their marriage failed, largely because of her father’s displeasure at the Jewish identity of his son-in-law. The background story was that unless she left Morozov, Stalin would have him arrested.5