The funeral took place on 9 March. It was a cold, dry, grey day of late winter. The sun did not appear. Frost was heavy.29 The crowds were dense. Short journeys in the capital took several hours. The authorities were caught between wanting to be legitimated by association with his memory and ensuring the preservation of order on the streets. The Imperial regime had become intensely unpopular when thousands of spectators were accidentally trampled to death on Khodynka Field on the day of Nicholas II’s coronation. It would not do to allow a repetition of such an event with the passing of Joseph the Terrible.
Any other outcome than a peaceful ceremony would have sent out the message that Stalin’s successors were unable to rule the country: they had to prove themselves men of steel like the deceased Leader. The catafalque at the Hall of Columns had a side-curtain proclaiming ‘Proletarians of All Countries, Unite!’ Only Stalin’s head and shoulders were left visible. His eyes were closed. Strong searchlights were trained on him. Official photographers were recurrently permitted to approach and record the occasion. Orchestras played. A female choir, dressed in black, sang dirges. At 10.30 a.m. the Party Presidium entered to the accompaniment of the USSR state hymn. Malenkov led the way, partnered by China’s representative Chou En-lai. A gun carriage bore the coffin out of the Hall of Columns up the slope to Red Square where the newly redesignated Lenin–Stalin Mausoleum awaited it. The corpse was removed from the gun carriage and transferred to a bier outside the building. Presidium members and honoured guests moved to the top of the Mausoleum.30 Across Red Square an enormous crowd had assembled. Microphones and amplifiers had been set up to enable all to hear the ceremony. Wreaths were piled high. (The composer Sergei Prokofiev had died on the same day as Stalin and his mourners found the shops empty of flowers because everyone had rushed to pay their respects to the Leader.) The passing of a political era was being marked.
Detachments of the Soviet Army marched across Red Square. The MVD as usual organised security behind the crowd barriers. Military orchestras played the conventional dirges. Hundreds of thousands of Muscovites turned out to pay their last respects; and unlike on May Day or 7 November, when their work-organisations directly compelled them to take part in such ceremonies, the popular eagerness to be present on the historic day was unmistakable.
There were three eulogies. Malenkov, Molotov and Beria gave them from the top of the Mausoleum. Those in proximity to the speakers could detect differences among them: only Molotov’s face betrayed sincere grief. Beria spoke with a brusque dryness (and was later rebuked for this by his wife Nina).31 Molotov’s prominence indicated to the politically well informed that tremors were already making themselves felt at the apex of Soviet politics: the corpse of Stalin had hardly cooled before his former leading accomplice had been readmitted to the ruling group. Foreign visitors were not confined to communists. Veteran communist leaders Chou En-lai, Palmiro Togliatti, Dolores Ibárurri and Maurice Thorez had pride of place; but others at the ceremony included Italian socialist leader Pietro Nenni. Condolences poured into Moscow from foreign governments. Stalin’s old negotiating rivals Churchill and Truman sent condolences. Newspapers in the communist countries stressed that the tallest giant of history was no more. In the West the reaction of the press was more diverse. Yet although his crimes against humanity were recorded, few editors wished to leave the occasion unaccompanied by reference to his part in the economic transformation of his country and the victory over the Third Reich. This was a gentler fate than he deserved.
The world communist movement, however, did not question his services to humanity. He who had ordered the construction of the Lenin Mausoleum was about to join the founder of the Soviet Union in death. The embalmers completed their work. His corpse had been gutted and soaked in the liquid whose ingredients remained a secret. A glass cabinet had been commissioned. The internal layout of the rectangular granite structure was rearranged while masons changed its name to the Lenin–Stalin Mausoleum. Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhughashvili, known to history as Stalin, was laid to rest.
55. AFTER STALIN
A tidal wave of reforms crashed over Stalin’s policies in the USSR in the first week of March 1953. His successors were posthumously opposing him after decades of obedience. No member of the Party Presidium favoured the total conservation of his legacy; even communist conservatives like Molotov and Kaganovich approved some sort of innovation. Changes frustrated by Stalin at last became possible. Yet debate did not flood out into society. It was not allowed to. The last thing the ascendant party leaders wanted was to let ordinary Soviet citizens, or even the lower functionaries of the state, influence what was decided in the Kremlin.
Molotov and Kaganovich could not prevent the reform projects of Malenkov, Beria and Khrushchëv. Malenkov wanted to increase payments to collective farms so as to boost agricultural production; he also favoured giving priority to light-industrial investment. Khrushchëv wished to plough up virgin lands in the USSR and end the decades-old uncertainty about supplies of bread. Malenkov and Beria were committed to making overtures to the USA for peaceful coexistence: they feared that the Cold War might turn into a disaster for humanity. Beria desired a rapprochement with Yugoslavia; he also aimed to withdraw privileges for Russians in the USSR and to widen the limits of cultural self-expression. Malenkov, Beria and Khrushchëv agreed that public life should be conducted on a less violent and arbitrary basis than under Stalin. They supported the release of political convicts from the labour camps. Quietly they restrained the official media from delivering the customary grandiose eulogies to Stalin. If his policies were to be replaced, it no longer made sense to go on treating him as a demigod.
The Party Presidium handled his physical legacy with caution. When Lenin had died in 1924, Stalin became the custodian of his writings and decided what should be published and what withheld from view. He published his own Foundations of Leninism. He sought legitimacy for whatever he was doing by reference to the works of Lenin. Stalin’s successors knew this. Sanctioned by the Party Central Committee on 5 March 1953,1 they commandeered his book collection and distributed most of it anonymously to various public libraries. Only a few hundred books were left with the Institute of Marxism–Leninism. Many of his letters and telegrams were incinerated and most drafts of his articles and books disappeared.2 The last edition of his collected works was suspended incomplete.3