MALENKOV AND HIS ROLE
Malenkov's government took the initiative of reform already in the first weeks of its existence. In doing so it may have acted under popular pressure; but the pressure was not apparent. It was not the ‘voice of the people’ that made Stalin's successors act as they did, for that voice could not be heard. Malenkov's government seemed rather to have guessed the hopes and expectations that were in the people's mind. If any voices did in fact demand reform, they came from the bureaucracy itself or rather from its uppermost stratum.
As representative of that stratum Malenkov came to the fore and to all intents and purposes assumed the succession.
Who is Georgi Maximilianovich Malenkov?
His previous career strongly suggested that he was merely Stalin's shadow, with no political personality of his own.
Almost nothing significant is known about his background, upbringing, and early days. His origins are wrapped in the same obscurity in which Stalin's once were. Like Stalin, he hails from a border zone between Europe and Asia, from the Urals. There may be a hint of non-Russian descent in his patronymic: Maximilian is hardly the name of a ‘pure’ Russian. In his late teens Malenkov joined the Red Army and the party, and he was a junior political commissar during the civil war in Turkestan. In the early and middle 1920's he studied at the Moscow Institute of Technology.
The Institute, like all other academic establishments in the capital, was astir with inner party controversy. Trotsky had appealed to young communists, especially to students, against the triumvirate of Stalin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev, and warned the young party men about the danger of a ‘political degeneration’ of the ruling group. The appeal did not fail to evoke response. Trotsky had ardent followers among the communist students. The anti-Trotskyists listened to Bukharin rather than to Stalin, whose theoretical argumentation was uninspiring and pedestrian. It seems that Malenkov, like Zhdanov, his supposed rival in later years, was one of the very few students who took their cue direct from Stalin's General Secretariat.
In his more mature years Malenkov became a member of that Secretariat, the hub of the organization through which Stalin ruled the country. There Malenkov studied the technology of monolithic government. In the course of many years he carefully assimilated Stalin's manner of dealing with men and situations, his administrative methods, and even his mannerisms. Like his master, he shunned great theoretical conceptions of policy and public debates about them. He learned the art of empirical policy-making in a narrow, closely knit group of leaders who viewed ideas primarily from the angle of administrative necessity or convenience.
The ideas often clashed with professed principles and with what the party propagandists were saying. Stalin's policy always had two aspects: one was esoteric, occult; the other was exoteric, designed for mass consumption. His secretaries had to master both aspects, and never confuse them in their own minds. The exoteric aspect might appear baffling, incoherent, even downright stupid. But the illuminati knew what Stalin was aiming at at any particular moment; and the most initiated operated the enormous machinery of the party from the General Secretariat.
In the late 1930's Malenkov was already in charge of the party ‘cadres’. It was his responsibility to assign ‘the right man to the right job’ at every turn of policy. On Stalin's behalf, he already held the party in his hands and wielded much greater influence than did the members of the Politbureau who on ceremonial occasions appeared at the Lenin Mausoleum by Stalin's side. As early as 1939 Malenkov brought about the dismissal of Mrs. Molotov from a Ministerial post — he had attacked her publicly for mismanaging her department. His position was becoming similar to that which Stalin had held under Lenin. But to keep his influence and to enlarge it, Malenkov had to behave towards Stalin with the utmost discretion and modesty and to show no sign of vacillation, let alone of independence. Only as Stalin's shadow could he continue to gather power in his own hands.
He had taken over the management of the ‘cadres’ at the time of the great purges, when most of the old party personnel was destroyed or demoted and vacancies had to be filled with new men. The keymen in the party machine of the late 1930’s and 1940's were therefore ‘Malenkov men’. In this respect Malenkov's position was already stronger than Stalin's in the early and middle 1920's, because at that time Stalin had still to eliminate his opponents from the party machine and to fill the decisive posts with his minions.
Stalin deliberately fashioned Malenkov's career so that it should appear as similar to his own as possible. He seemed bent on forming Malenkov in his own image, and he projected, as it were, certain landmarks of his own life into the life of Malenkov. He gave Malenkov the same assignments with which he himself had been entrusted by Lenin. During the Second World War he sent Malenkov to the same critical front-line areas that he himself had inspected in the civil war, including Stalingrad, his old Tsaritsyn. The Tsaritsyn episode of 1918 had been vested by Stalin's hagiographers with so much symbolic significance and with so great a halo that, in the eyes of people brought up in the Stalin cult, Malenkov's mission to Stalingrad at once transferred to him the glories of the young Stalin. In truth, Malenkov's merits as the political commissar responsible for the battle of Stalingrad were more serious and real than the merits which Stalin claimed for himself in connection with the defence of Tsaritsyn in 1918.
Little can be said about the supposed rivalry between Malenkov and Zhdanov in later years. Unlike Malenkov, Zhdanov had the ambitions of the intellectual and the theoretician; and this difference in their outlook may have led to a rivalry faintly, but only very faintly, reminiscent of that between Stalin and Trotsky. Being in charge of the party organization in Leningrad, Zhdanov was somewhat removed from the levers of power at the centre, and his chances against Malenkov were hardly serious. After Zhdanov's death, Malenkov's ascendancy was secure, but he still had to contend against the old Stalin guard headed by Molotov, who could claim seniority in the party hierarchy. Stalin himself had apparently overridden this claim when, at the Nineteenth Congress of the party, in October 1952, he conspicuously threw his mantle over Malenkov's shoulders and let Malenkov make on behalf of the Central Committee the report which used to be made by Lenin and afterwards by Stalin.
But was Malenkov nothing more than Stalin's political projection?
He has certainly been the product of Stalinism and of Stalinism alone. But in his personality the diverse elements of Stalinism, progressive and retrogressive, seem to be in conflict. It is possible that in his mind the vital demands of the new Soviet society and State revolted against the primitive magic and the bureaucratic rigidity of Stalinism. Not only the people but even the bureaucracy, or perhaps especially the bureaucracy, felt acutely the need for rationalization in all spheres of national life, in the working of the administration, in the running of the economy, in the relation between the rulers and the ruled, and in the conduct of foreign policy.
Malenkov's first moves, made since his assumption of power, seem to have gone halfway to meet that need. He has come to the fore in the role of the rationalizer striving to put in order the Stalinist legacy and to disentangle its great assets from its heavy liabilities.
The prerequisite for this is a break with the ecclesiastical outlook of Stalinism, with those scholastic-bureaucratic habits of thought and action which had ensnared, the party and clogged the whole machinery of government. It may be a sign of the time that Stalin's successor is one who has received his education at a Technological Institute, not at a Theological Seminary. During the industrial revolution Malenkov was certainly more in his element than his master could have been. His task in 1941-2 was to organize the disrupted Soviet industry for the mass production of tanks. Stalin's assignment at a comparable critical juncture, in 1918, was to requisition grain from the peasants of the Kuban and to transport it to starving Moscow. Each of these assignments was of the utmost importance in its time. But the difference between them reflects the distance which separated two epochs and two generations. In 1918 the survival of the Soviet regime depended on the most primitive economic devices; in 1942 it could be secured only by the work of an enormous and up-to-date industrial organization. If the style of the man offers any clue to his character, then Malenkov's manner is free from the incongruities and the canonical undertones characteristic of Stalin. It is more business-like, clear, and modern, although at times it seems even flatter than Stalin's style.
Stalin was a slave to his own past, to his old heresy hunts and blood feuds. He could do nothing to disavow any part of his record. He approached every new task with an eye on his past performances. In the 1930's he had to justify the Stalin of the 1920's; and in the 1940's and 1950's he still had to justify the Stalin of the 1930's.
He carried the terrible burden of responsibility for the great purges; and he made the whole of Russia share the burden with him. He could do nothing that might throw on those purges retrospectively a light different from that in which he wanted Russia to see them; and any breath of freedom threatened to make Russia see them in a different light.
In the meantime there has grown up a new generation whom Stalin's blood feuds leave indifferent, even if it accepts the Stalinist version of them. The men and women who have entered public life in the last fifteen years know that before their entry a devastating storm had raged in party and State; but they know next to nothing about the issues that were at stake. The independent-minded among them desire nothing more than to think out new problems on their merits, paying no regard to the requirements of an orthodoxy based on past controversies and struggles. Most often they do not even comprehend those requirements, and because of this they have sometimes unwittingly come into conflict with the Stalinist orthodoxy.
In his early fifties, Malenkov stands halfway between the Old Stalin Guard and this new generation. The past has a claim on him, but the claim is not so heavy as to make him unresponsive to the needs of the present. He was implicated in every phase of Stalinism: in the struggle against the oppositions, in the process of collectivization, in the great purges, and in the recent heresy hunts. But in the worst phases he was involved only as a subordinate, not as an initiator; and so he may, up to a point, disclaim responsibility for them. On the other hand, he has owed too much to Stalinism and has himself been too much its product to be able to break away from it openly. He can only sneak away from Stalinism.
His behaviour raises the question: What was his genuine attitude towards Stalinism while Stalin was alive? Was he the zealous and devoted coadjutor he acted? Or did he act his part with carefully concealed mental reservations?
Both assumptions may be true, but each would apply to a different time. Among Stalin's closest supporters and friends there were some who had at first given him their full backing because his policies — socialism in one country, industrialization, and collectivization — had genuinely appealed to them; and Stalin had seemed the right man to give eflfect to those policies. They had not expected him to become the destroyer of the Old Leninist Guard and the whimsical and cruel autocrat of later years.
When they realized whither he had been leading them it was too late to withdraw. Those who tried to do so perished together with Stalin's old adversaries. Others suppressed their qualms, pretended to be in complete agreement with Stalin, and acted as he wished them to act. A man of great political ambition, seeing that all opposition was quixotic, might so manoeuvre as to place himself in a position of influence, and gain a limited freedom to act according to his own prindples, or, at any rate, to contribute effectively to the progressive aspects of Stalin's policy. If he was, like Malenkov, young enough to survive Stalin, such a man could even hope that one day he would be able to use his influence to undo some of the things done under Stalin, and perhaps even to bring back to the Soviet State the humane socialist spirit of its early days. There was in the Stalinist lingo a special term for such men: dvurushniki, the double-faced. Was Malenkov perhaps a dvurushnik?
This may be too charitable an interpretation of his behaviour under Stalin. It is more probable that until very late in the day he had no mental reservations at all, and that he was indeed, as the world had known him, the most devoted and fanatical of Stalin's assistants. All the more remarkable would his conduct then appear after Stalin's death, for it would underline the fact that Russia's urge to shake off the worst of Stalinism had become so strong that it compelled Stalin's arch-devotee to become the liquidator of the Stalin era.
An analogy to this situation may be found in what happened in Russia during the last years of the reign of Nicholas I, the Iron Tsar (1825-55), and during the first years of his successor Alexander II (1855-81).
Nicholas I was the most tyrannical of the Tsars of the nineteenth century. The last period of his reign, writes an historian of Russia, ‘was one of complete suffocation’. The universities were placed under the strictest police surveillance. The teaching of some subjects was completely forbidden. Philosophy could be taught only as part of Divinity. Even the most loyal Slavophiles were savagely persecuted. Newspapers were forbidden to report new inventions until it was officially declared that they were useful. A special commission examined all music to ensure that no conspiratorial code was concealed in it. The censorship banned expressions like ‘forces of nature’ or ‘the movement of ideas’. But the greatest crime of all was to discuss the main social problem agitating Russia — the peasants' serfdom. The Tsar was determined to preserve serfdom intact.
Under Nicholas I ‘hypocrisy permeated Russian society from top to bottom’, writes another historian. The Tsar set the example. When a Siberian governor proposed capital punishment for a gang of criminals, the Tsar commented on the governor's report: ‘The death penalty has been, thank God, abolished in Russia; and it is not for me to restore it. Let every one of the bandits be given 12,000 lashes.’ (The strongest man could not survive more than 3,000 strokes.) All affairs of State were wrapped in deep secrecy. The budget was never published; only the Tsar and a few Ministers knew its contents. It was a grave offence for any official to divulge even the most trivial fact. Herzen was banished from Petersburg because in a letter to his father he described an incident in the street in which a policeman killed a passer-by. ‘It was this hypocrisy… which made the reign of Nicholas I peculiarly oppressive… When Nicholas died even his closest collaborators realized the necessity for a change.’ But to the end the Tsar repeated: ‘My successor may do as he pleases; for myself I cannot change.’
‘My successor may do as he pleases; for myself I cannot change’ might have been Stalin's last dictum as well.
That Alexander II would bring about any change in his father's system of government was as little expected as it was in our day that Malenkov would in any way depart from Stalinism. The new Tsar had been greatly attached and entirely loyal to his father, although it was believed that his tutor had inculcated a more liberal spirit. Alexander shared his father's narrow conservatism and barrack-square tastes. As heir-presumptive he had taken a prominent part in framing the most repressive measures. On several occasions he defended the interests of the serf-owners even more zealously than Nicholas. ‘In the most reactionary period of the reign, after 1848, Alexander was almost prepared to go further than Nicholas.’
Yet no sooner had Alexander ascended the throne than he initiated a series of quasi-liberal reforms and began to prepare for the abolition of serfdom. When the dismayed nobility implored him to keep to his father's ways, Alexander replied: ‘It is better to abolish serfdom from above than to wait till it begins to abolish itself from below.’
No immediate threat of a revolution from below was appnaret, however. There were no effective, articulate centres of opposition capable of leadership in such a revolution. The broad classes of Russian society were not ready for political action: they were prepared to go on living under autocratic rule. Accustomed to leave all political initiative to the Imperial Court, they continued to place all their hopes on the Court. But these hopes were clear and insistent enough to impel the new Tsar on the road of reform. Abolition of serfdom became a national necessity — for under the old system Russia's economic and social life was sinking into a morass of irrationality. The supreme need of the time harnessed to its service the man who as heir presumptive seemed firmly to have set his face against it.
The analogy between the Russia of 1855 and that of 1953 is made here with all necessary reservations and with appreciation of the differences in the social background and in Russia's position in the world. The epoch of Nicholas I was one of economic and social stagnation, although it was also characterized by an intense, largely latent, movement of ideas within a very narrow circle of the intelligentsia. The Stalin epoch was one of unprecedented economic and social progress. Despite the abolition of serfdom, the Russia of Alexander II was also stagnant economically, which is not likely to be the case with Russia after Stalin.
Yet, within limits, the similarities between the two periods are undeniable. By the end of the Stalin era Russian society was so accustomed to leaving all political initiative to its rulers that it had become incapable of independent action. Reform could be initiated only from above, from inside the ruling group. As one analyses Malenkov's first moves, one can almost hear him pleading in the inner circle of the Kremlin: Better to abolish the worst features of Stalinism from above than to wait until they are abolished from below.