Stalin’s heirs completely dismantled the governmental structure he had put together during his final months of life. The expanded Central Committee Presidium created on Stalin’s orders in October 1952 was abolished with the stroke of a pen. The Central Committee’s Presidium Bureau was proclaimed to have a new membership: Molotov and Mikoyan were added, and the young protégés whom Stalin had made part of the expanded Presidium were expelled from its ranks. In essence this upset meant a return, under a new name, to the collective leadership that had once existed as the Politburo. Stalin’s title of chairman of the Council of Ministers was given to Malenkov. This title did not mean, however, that Malenkov was recognized as Stalin’s heir or that he possessed Stalin’s powers. The new system was designed to include numerous counterpoises that would protect against the appearance of a new tyrant. Malenkov, unlike Stalin, did not simultaneously hold the post of Central Committee secretary; that post was given to Khrushchev. The men designated as Malenkov’s first deputies—Beria, Molotov, Bulganin, and Kaganovich—were in no way his juniors within the nomenklatura system. This reshuffling created a balance and satisfied the interests of all the members of the top leadership. Later, none of the participants in the reorganization recalled any controversy or rancor.
This new arrangement was formally approved by the oligarchs at a joint meeting of the Central Committee plenum, the Council of Ministers, and the Supreme Soviet Presidium on 5 March 1953. Soviet dignitaries gathered in a hall of the Grand Kremlin Palace. One participant, the writer Konstantin Simonov, left the following description of the ceremony’s atmosphere:
I arrived long before the appointed time, about forty minutes early, but more than half of the participants had already gathered in the hall, and ten minutes later everyone was there. Maybe two or three people arrived less than a half hour before the start. There were several hundred people there, almost all acquainted with one another … sitting in total silence and waiting for the start. We were sitting side by side, shoulder to shoulder; we saw one another, but nobody said a word to anyone else.… Until the very start it was so quiet in the hall that if I had not sat in that silence for forty minutes myself, I would never have believed that three hundred people sitting so tightly packed could keep quiet like that.7
Finally the members of the presidium that was about to be voted into existence appeared. The entire event lasted forty minutes, from 8:00 to 8:40 p.m. The resolutions that the top leadership had already agreed on were, as usual, obediently approved. The Stalin factor was dealt with simply and elegantly. He was deprived of the top posts of chairman of the government and secretary of the Central Committee and then formally included in the Central Committee Presidium. From now on, whatever his physical fate, Stalin’s political future and his comrades’ liberation from his tyrannical powers were faits accomplis. As Simonov remarked, “There was a sense that right there, in the Presidium, people were freed from something that had been weighing them down, that had bound them.”8
Stalin endured this formal deprivation of power for only one hour. At 9:50 p.m. he died. His death was agonizing, as if in confirmation of the folk wisdom that only the righteous are granted an easy death. His daughter Svetlana, who spent her father’s final days by his side, recalled:
The death agony was horrible. He literally choked to death as we watched. At what seemed like the very last moment he suddenly opened his eyes and cast a glance over everyone in the room. It was a terrible glance, insane or perhaps angry and full of the fear of death and the unfamiliar faces of the doctors bent over him. The glance swept over everyone in a second. Then something incomprehensible and awesome happened that to this day I can’t forget and don’t understand. He suddenly lifted his left hand as though he were pointing to something above and bringing down a curse on us all. The gesture was incomprehensible and full of menace, and no one could say to whom or at what it might be directed. The next moment, after a final effort, the spirit wrenched itself free of the flesh.9
Stalin’s comrades did not linger at his bedside. A half-hour later, at 10:25 p.m., they were already back in his Kremlin office, several kilometers away.10 All the main matters of state had been resolved. What remained were the funeral arrangements. The new leaders created a commission to handle these arrangements and appointed Khrushchev to head it. They also adopted a decision to place the sarcophagus with Stalin’s embalmed body in Lenin’s mausoleum. State security and the propaganda apparat were given their orders. The editor-in-chief of Pravda, Dmitry Shepilov, spent ten minutes at this meeting. One deeply symbolic detail impressed him the most: “The chair Stalin had occupied as chairman for thirty years was empty; nobody sat in it.”11
For a while, the Soviet leaders were genuinely equal and united in their determination to prevent the emergence of another tyrant. After what they had endured under Stalin, they were ready to do away with the system of terror, even if that entailed some undesirable political consequences. By 3 April 1953, after the appropriate preparations, the Central Committee Presidium resolved to “fully rehabilitate and release from custody the doctors and members of their families arrested in association with the so-called Case of the Wrecker-Doctors.” Thirty-seven people were freed. The state security officers who “particularly applied themselves in the fabrication of this provocational case” were to be brought to justice.12 The next day this resolution was announced in the newspapers, occasioning a variety of responses and a certain consternation among the vozhd’s most ardent supporters. Other political cases in which the collective leadership had a personal interest were quietly subjected to a quick review. Molotov’s wife was released from prison. Kaganovich’s brother, who had taken his own life on the eve of the war after charges of wrecking, was pronounced innocent. The Mingrelian Affair, which had cast a shadow on Beria’s reputation, was also reviewed. Many other prominent victims of political repression were set free or posthumously rehabilitated. After taking care of their own, Stalin’s heirs began to grant relative freedom to the rest of the country. They were driven in this direction not only by conscience, but also by the growing crisis that had already been apparent under Stalin. The death of the man who had been unwilling to entertain any talk of change opened the door to reforms to be implemented with amazing speed and decisiveness.
Two pillars of the dictatorship—state security and the Gulag—were significantly reformed. One symbol of this reform was a Ministry of Internal Affairs order, dated 4 April 1953, banning the use of torture against arrestees. The order recognized the problem of “arrests of innocent Soviet citizens” and “the widespread use of various means of torture: the brutal beating of arrestees; the round-the-clock use of handcuffs behind the back, in isolated cases for several months; long-term sleep deprivation; and locking up unclothed arrestees in cold punishment cells, etc.” Threatening harsh punishment of anyone who violated the order, the ministry’s leadership demanded that torture chambers be closed in prisons and that the implements of torture be destroyed.13 When the order was read out loud to all state security operatives, it must have made quite an impression. These reforms continued into the spring and summer of 1953, bringing major changes to the camp system. A mass amnesty announced for those convicted of non-political crimes cut the inmate population in half. Many factories and construction projects that were still using a prisoner work force and being overseen by the ministry were shut down or transferred to the economic ministries.14 A large-scale effort to rehabilitate the victims of Stalinist terror lay in the near future.