Yet he would not have been human if warmer feelings had not occasionally suffused him. At the spectacular ceremonies he puffed out his chest. The stream of foreign dignitaries coming to Moscow at the end of the Second World War caught the sense of his mood. On such occasions he let pride take precedence over concern. Stalin, the Red Army and the USSR had won the war against a terrible enemy. As usual he compared current conditions with those which had prevailed under his admired predecessor. This was obvious from what he said to Yugoslav visitors:13
Lenin in his time did not dream of the correlation of forces which we have attained in this war. Lenin reckoned with the fact that everyone was going to attack us, and it would be good if any distant country, for example America, might remain neutral. But it’s now turned out that one group of the bourgeoisie went to war against us and another was on our side. Lenin previously did not think that it was possible to remain in alliance with one wing of the bourgeoisie and fight with another. This is what we’ve achieved…
Stalin was proud that he had gone one stage further than Lenin had thought possible. Whereas Lenin had hoped to preserve the Soviet state by keeping it out of inter-capitalist military conflicts and letting the great capitalist powers fight each other, Stalin had turned the USSR into a great power in its own right. Such was its strength that the USA and the United Kingdom had been obliged to seek its assistance.
How long, however, would the alliance hold after the end of hostilities with Germany and Japan? On this, Stalin was quietly definite when he met a Polish communist delegation:14
Rumours of war are being put about extremely intensively by our enemies.
The English [sic] and Americans are using their agents to spread rumours to scare the peoples of those countries whose politics they don’t like. Neither we nor the Anglo-Americans can presently start a war. Everyone’s fed up with war. Moreover, there are no war aims. We aren’t getting ready to attack England and America, and they’re not risking it either. No war is possible for at least the next twenty years.
Despite what he said in public about the warmongering tendencies of the Western Allies, he expected a lengthy period of peace from 1945. The Soviet Union and the states friendly to it in eastern Europe would not have an easy time. Devastation by war and the complications of postwar consolidation would exert the minds and energy of the communist movement for many years. But the USSR was secure in its fortress.
For many, especially those who were unaware of Stalin’s homicidal activities, there would have been no Soviet victory in the Second World War but for his contribution — and perhaps Germany would permanently have bestridden the back of the European continent. In the USSR, too, the acclaim for him had intensified although it would be wrong to think that the exact degree of approval for him is ascertainable. Nor would it be right to assume that most citizens had uncomplicated feelings about him. Throughout the war he had held back from identifying himself with specific political and social policies. He had made that mistake during agricultural collectivisation in the late 1920s, and the self-distancing manoeuvre of ‘Dizzy with Success’ had not succeeded in saving him from the peasantry’s opprobrium. Quite who was responsible for the avoidable horrors of Soviet wartime measures was therefore not clear to everyone. Millions of citizens were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt: they wanted a relaxation of the regime and assumed that this would come about as the war came to an end.
Stalin was more widely loved than he had any right to expect. In his more relaxed moods he liked to compare himself with the Allied leaders. His qualities, he told others, included ‘intelligence, analysis, calculation’. Churchill, Roosevelt and others were different: ‘They — the bourgeois leaders — are resentful and vengeful. One ought to keep feelings under control; if feelings are allowed to get the upper hand, you’ll lose.’15 This was rich coming from the lips of a Leader whose own violent sensitivities were extreme. But Stalin was in no mood for self-criticism. In a confidential meeting with Bulgarian communists he derided Churchill for failing to anticipate his defeat in the British parliamentary elections in July 1945 — and Churchill, according to Molotov, was the foreign politician whom Stalin respected the most. The conclusion was obvious: Stalin had become convinced of his own genius. He was master of a superpower beginning to fulfil its destiny. His name was as glorious as the victory being celebrated by the communist party and the Red Army. World renown had settled upon the cobbler’s son from Gori.
PART FIVE
The Imperator
45. DELIVERING THE BLOW
Stalin’s mind was a stopped clock. There was no chance in 1945 that he would satisfy popular yearnings for reform. His assumptions about policy had hardened like stalactites. He knew what he was doing. If he had relaxed the regime, he would have imperilled his personal supremacy. This consideration counted more for him than evidence that his mode of rule undermined the objective of durable economic competitiveness and political dynamism. Stalin thought strictly within the frame of his worldview and operational assumptions. The habits of despotism had anaesthetised him to human suffering. The man who digested a daily multitude of facts disregarded information he found uncongenial.
Only his death or drastic physical incapacitation might have moved the mechanisms towards reform. He might easily have died in the first half of October 1945 when the condition of his heart gave him problems.1 The years were catching up with him. He had had patches of ill health since the Revolution, and the Second World War had levied a heavy toll. At the age of sixty-six he was long past his physical prime. His cardiac problem was kept a state secret and he took a two-month vacation;2 but this had been nothing unusual for him in the inter-war years. Not even the members of his entourage were initiated into the details of his condition — they were simply left to surmise that he was suffering from an illness of passing significance. Apart from his physician Vladimir Vinogradov, no one had an inkling of the medical prognosis. Politburo members knew they had to desist from any display of inquisitiveness. It would have been dangerous for Stalin to think they were aware of his growing frailty. He would instantly have suspected that a coup against him was in the offing. He needed only a scintilla of doubt about individuals to flash in his mind before consigning them to the security police.
Despite his bodily decline, he could go on ruling the USSR through the existing institutions, personnel and procedures. Stalin’s personal supremacy rested upon the maintenance of the one-party dictatorship. Ideocracy and terror remained indispensable instruments of his despotism — and he never wavered in his determination to sustain it. He did not retreat from his intentions towards the wider world and aimed at a further strengthening of the USSR’s position as a great power. He reinforced Soviet hegemony over countries on the western borders: the zone of Europe conquered by the Red Army was to be held tightly within his grasp; and opportunities were to be sought to extend the USSR’s influence in Asia. Having won the war against the Third Reich, Stalin did not intend to lose the peace to the Western Allies. At a meeting with his intimates, he ordered them ‘to deliver a strong blow’ against any suggestion of the desirability of ‘democracy’ in the USSR.3 In Stalin’s opinion, democratic aspirations in Soviet society were the unfortunate consequence of co-operation with the USA and the United Kingdom from 1941. Western politicians after 1917 had feared the spread of the revolutionary bacillus from Russia; Stalin from 1945 dreaded his USSR becoming afflicted with counter-revolutionary infections: parliaments and markets to his mind were the diseased products of the capitalist order which had to be stopped from leaching their poison into his country.