If Mikoyan had a point, it was that Stalin from the last years of the war began to act more oddly than ever towards his entourage in social surroundings. They had been fearful of him before 1941. They had never been able to predict whether they might be picked on by him and arrested. But as victory in the war approached and Stalin resumed convivial behaviour, he enjoyed toying with their feelings. They thought this a sign of deterioration rather than the gradual extension of an existing trend. They were political survivors but unsophisticated psychologists despite their expertise in handling his moods over several decades.
Kremlin politics began to favour Malenkov and Beria when, in August 1948, Zhdanov died after lengthy treatment in a clinic. Plagued by alcoholism and cardiac disease, he had been poorly for years. But a rumour spread that his doctors had killed him. One of the clinic’s medical officers, Lidia Timashuk, filed complaints about the shoddy treatment he had received. Although Stalin’s office received the dossier on Zhdanov, no action followed — he may not in fact have scrutinised it at the time. He had anyway ceased to show favour towards Zhdanov for some months, and now he empowered Malenkov and Beria to follow up his death with an investigation of the political situation in Leningrad. Malenkov, a baby-faced and overweight apparatchik with a terrifying record in the Great Terror, claimed to find evidence of a conspiracy aimed at Stalin and the Kremlin. Stalin was sufficiently convinced that the Leningraders had been insubordinate in policy to sanction a massive political purge throughout the city’s party and government leadership. Executions followed in 1950. Malenkov returned to the Kremlin as Stalin’s favourite for the next few years.
Not all Leningrad politicians had associated themselves with Zhdanov’s quest for a widening of the party’s political functions. But many had done so, and the city had a reputation for harbouring those who retained a commitment to the party’s importance, to ideology and to the curbing of technocratic tendencies in the vast apparatus of the Council of Ministers.11 Lined up against Zhdanov had been Malenkov and Beria, who advocated greater latitude for the ministries to take up the task of economic regeneration. In the mandatory opaque language they stressed a preference for putting specialists in charge of affairs. Expertise rather than ideology should predominate. The division between the two sides was not entirely clear-cut. Beria and Malenkov did not advocate the party’s removal from the country’s administration. Both were also associated with the organs of repression even though Beria ceased being the leader of the security organs from 1945. To some extent their opinions reflected the interests of the institutions they currently headed — and this had been true also for Zhdanov. But a dispute of intrinsic importance had divided them. Stalin would have to resolve it somehow.
The Leningrad Affair was the first blood-purge of the communist political elite since 1938. The deportations, arrests and executions after the Second World War had been aimed at specific social categories, especially leading figures in public and economic life in the newly annexed Baltic states. Stalin had also put returning prisoners-of-war to forced labour in the camps of the Gulag. But the incarceration of the Leningraders was different because the victims belonged to the highest echelons of officialdom in the USSR. This time he did not bother with show trials. Hundreds of party and government functionaries were thrown into prison and shot. Among them were Politburo member Nikolai Voznesenski, Central Committee Secretary Alexei Kuznetsov, RSFSR Prime Minister Mikhail Rodionov and Leningrad Party First Secretary Pëtr Popkov.
Although Stalin did not disclose his motives, those of Malenkov and Beria may easily be guessed. They had always resented Zhdanov’s authority and his political clientele in Leningrad. Soviet public life was a snake pit and Malenkov and Beria were two of its anacondas. Their opportunity to suffocate Zhdanov’s associates had arrived. But why did Stalin agree? Probably he had come to resent the way that Voznesenski had spoken up against him in wartime; Voznesenski was also the only Politburo member to write a best-selling book after the war. It may well be that his growing status as a politician irritated Stalin just as Zhukov had annoyed him as a commander. At any rate when Voznesenski was discovered to have mislaid important Gosplan data, there was a chance for Malenkov, who had always hated him personally,12 to accuse him of irresponsible and even traitorous behaviour.13 Voznesenski was also found to have withheld information on discrepancies between state economic plans and the real economic situation. Straight-talking Voznesenski was shown to be a deceiver. Although everyone in the political leadership was deceitful, Voznesenski had had the ill luck to be discovered. To Stalin’s mind, a Politburo member could commit no fouler offence than fail to be honest with him.
Others in Leningrad had also offended Stalin. The leadership in Leningrad, ‘hero-city’ in the Great Patriotic War, had cultivated local patriotism. Capital of the Russian Empire since the reign of Peter the Great, it remained a rival to Moscow after the transfer of the seat of government to Moscow in March 1918. Leningrad’s inhabitants thought they had survived the German onslaught more by their own determination than by assistance from the Kremlin. The city was starting to seem like Russia’s capital in a Soviet multinational state — the USSR — based in Moscow.
The leadership of party and government in the city had begun to give signs of overstepping the limits Stalin had approved.14 Much as he liked to incorporate the national pride of Russians in doctrine and policy, he never lost his concern about the possible growth of nationalism among them. The Leningrad political elite failed to comprehend the rules of the situation. Kuznetsov had organised a retail fair in Leningrad for all parts of the RSFSR without the Kremlin’s permission and Rodionov had called for a special ‘Bureau for the RSFSR’.15 Voznesenski had not worked in Leningrad since before the war; but Stalin sensed a nationalist streak in him and told Mikoyan: ‘For him not only the Georgians and Armenians but even the Ukrainians aren’t real people.’16 Furthermore, the Leningraders, including Zhdanov, had enthused about the Yugoslavs after the Second World War. Tito and the Yugoslavs advocated a more radical communisation of eastern Europe.17 Stalin had not demurred at the time; but when he and Tito fell out, Zhdanov’s known inclination — even if it had had Stalin’s endorsement at the time — may have made him suspect that the USSR’s ‘second capital’ was a nest of treachery. Voznesenski had been highly favoured in wartime, and Kuznetsov in 1948 had even been mentioned by Stalin as his possible successor.18