Alongside these tales of dysfunction in the countryside, Stalin’s mail in late 1952 contained eloquent accounts of empty store shelves in cities. In early November the vozhd took notice of a letter from V. F. Deikina, the party secretary for a railway station in Riazan Oblast. She wrote:
It is now October, and here we have to wait in line for black bread, and sometimes you can’t get any at all, and workers are saying so many unpleasant words and they don’t believe what’s written [in newspapers] and say that we’re being deceived.… I’ll stick to the facts since there’s not enough paper to describe it all and send it in a letter.
1. You have to stand in line for black bread.
2. You can’t get white bread at all.
3. There’s neither butter nor vegetable oil.
4. There’s no meat in the stores.
5. There’s no sausage.
6. There are no groats of any kind.
7. There’s no macaroni or other flour products.
8. There’s no sugar.
9. There are no potatoes in the stores.
10. There is no milk or other dairy products.
11. There is no form of animal fat (lard, etc.).…
I’m not a slanderer and I’m not being spiteful; I’m writing the bitter truth, but that’s the way it is.… The local leadership gets everything illegally, under the table, so to speak; their underlings deliver everything to their apartments. For them the people can do as they please; that’s not their concern.… I am asking for a commission to be sent to bring the guilty to justice, to teach the right people how to plan for needs. Otherwise, those with full bellies don’t believe the hungry.111
Despite its critical tone, this letter was entirely politically “correct.” Deikina was trying to combat the deficiencies and abuses of local officials who did not know how to properly “plan for needs.” The letter did not delve into the causes of the lack of food in the country. This was the sort of letter Stalin could like. Averky Aristov, recently appointed as the Central Committee secretary in charge of local party organizations, was sent to investigate. On 17 November 1952 Stalin held a meeting of Central Committee secretaries in his office. As Aristov recounted several years later, Stalin asked him to deliver his findings. Aristov reported that for a long time there had been shortages of bread, cooking oil, and other food items in Riazan Oblast. Stalin grew furious and ordered that the oblast party secretary be removed from his post. Aristov and others present tried to intercede on behalf of the officials from Riazan. Things were no different, they explained, in many other regions, including Ukraine, the country’s “bread basket.”112
Following the meeting, Riazan Oblast was allocated food from government supplies. Such measures, of course, did not solve the problem. The country’s leadership was again faced with the task of salvaging the agricultural sector. Under the pressure of circumstances, Stalin agreed to review proposals to raise the price paid by the state for livestock produced by kolkhozes. At stake was the fundamental question of whether peasants deserved to be compensated for their labor. The exceptionally low “purchase price” paid to kolkhozniks barely masked the fact that everything they produced for the state was basically being confiscated. Growing food was tremendously unprofitable, and those who grew it had no incentive to produce more.
In December 1952 a commission headed by Nikita Khrushchev was established to draft a resolution raising livestock purchase prices.113 After working for several weeks, the commission wound up provoking Stalin’s displeasure. The vozhd was highly suspicious of attempts to change the existing system for pumping resources out of the countryside. To the dismay of his comrades, who had agreed on an increase in livestock prices, Stalin proposed significantly increasing taxes on the peasantry. Anastas Mikoyan later recalled Stalin’s reasoning: “What is a peasant? He’ll turn over his extra hen and that’s an end to it.”114 Khrushchev and his politically seasoned colleagues on the commission chose the safest course of action. They bided their time. The Soviet leaders would shield themselves from Stalin’s anger while they waited for his death. When it finally came, the overdue agricultural reforms were put in place immediately and on a larger scale than initially planned. Stalin’s heirs raised procurement prices and lowered taxes on peasants. Although the deep-rooted flaws in the kolkhoz system were preserved, these measures had a positive effect. For the first time in many decades the peasants were given relief, and some improvement in agricultural production was achieved.
Reducing the financial burden on the countryside inevitably came with a reduction in extravagant spending on major infrastructure projects. Just a few days after Stalin’s death, on 10 March 1953, the chairman of Gosplan presented the new head of the Soviet government, Georgy Malenkov, a report on major construction projects that were “behind schedule for completion.”115 The report stated that it was being presented at Malenkov’s request. Members of the top leadership were apparently losing no time in implementing the changes they had been constrained from making while the vozhd was alive. They quickly halted many of Stalin’s ambitious projects, including the construction of canals, hydroelectrical systems, and rail lines through difficult terrain. Investment in the military was also reduced.116 The funds thus freed up could now be put toward dealing with the severe crises in agriculture and social welfare. The Stalinist industrialization system, enabled by the population’s low living standard and by the exploitation of the countryside as if it were an internal colony, could now be gradually dismantled.
These decisions were adopted and realized with unprecedented speed in the months following Stalin’s death. The new leaders’ decisiveness clearly shows that it was specifically Stalin who was the main obstacle to transformation for long years. Until the very end, the dictator’s personal political and economic modus operandi remained extraordinarily conservative and protective. His death opened the door to innovations that were long overdue.
At the end of his life, Stalin was at the pinnacle of his power. His authority was unassailable and not under threat from any source. But he did not feel that way. Like other dictators, he never stopped fighting for power and never quite trusted his subjects. The methods he used in his never-ending battle for power were universal and simple. They included the elimination of any potential threat from within his inner circle, unrelenting oversight of the secret police, the encouragement of competition and mutual control among the various components of government, and the mobilization of society against perceived enemies both internal and external.
After destroying the Leningraders, Stalin began adjusting the balance of power within the Politburo, creating counterweights to the growing influence of Malenkov and Beria. In 1949 he brought Ukrainian party chief Khrushchev to Moscow and made him a Central Committee secretary and head of Moscow’s party organization. Soon afterward he began to actively promote Bulganin, who had faithfully served him as defense minister. In April 1950, on Stalin’s suggestion, Bulganin was appointed first deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers. For a while this promotion gave Bulganin privileged access to the vozhd. Soon, however, Stalin became disenchanted with his protégé and stripped him of his authority. This happened without particular acrimony. Bulganin remained a member of the top leadership. A period of relative equilibrium among key Politburo members set in, but it was just the calm before the storm.
An important factor in Stalin’s last battle for power was his declining health. Lightening his workload by relinquishing certain duties or gradually handing over power to subordinates was out of the question. Instead, the weakening vozhd consolidated his dictatorship with enviable energy, compensating for reduced vigor with combativeness. Fierce blows were leveled against the most vulnerable points in the hierarchy of power. The first involved yet another wave of arrests at the Ministry of State Security, over which Stalin never ceased to keep tight control. In July 1951, based on the usual assortment of trumped-up charges and incriminating denunciations, Stalin ordered the arrest of state security minister Viktor Abakumov, who quite recently had been a favorite. The party functionary Semen Ignatiev was appointed in his place. Abakumov’s arrest predictably opened the door to a large-scale purge of the ministry.