The Soviet Union of 1945 emerged from the war diminished in population and material resources but enlarged in strategic position. It was now one of the two superpowers of the post-1945 world, with a continental empire stretching from the Elbe to the Pacific, a war-tested army of about eleven million men, an unmatched prestige as the principal victor over Nazi Germany, and an extensive sphere of influence in Eastern Europe that would be consolidated over the next three years into a series of formally independent but politically subordinate Communist states. The 1945-1948 period saw the establishment of Communist regimes in Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Albania (Yugoslavia was a Communist state but was not a Soviet satellite; its independent course is covered in Volume IV). The eastern bloc was, by 1948, a coherent geopolitical unit. The Cold War — the term was popularised by Bernard Baruch in April 1947 — had begun.
Late Stalinism
The seven years between the end of the war and Stalin's death (1945–1953) are usually called Late Stalinism, and were a period of consolidation rather than transformation. The major political features of the period were the rapid reconstruction of the destroyed western Soviet provinces (largely accomplished by 1950 in industrial output, although the demographic and housing damage took longer); the development of the Soviet nuclear weapons programme under Lavrenti Beria's direction (the first Soviet atomic test, code-named First Lightning, occurred on the 29th of August 1949, ending the American nuclear monopoly); the Berlin Blockade of June 1948 – May 1949 (the first major Cold War crisis, resolved by the Western airlift); the Korean War of June 1950 – July 1953 (in which the Soviets armed and trained the North Korean and Chinese forces and provided air cover, but did not openly engage); and a renewed wave of internal repression directed particularly at Jewish Soviet citizens, returnees from German captivity, and the surviving Old Bolsheviks who had escaped the Terror.
The post-war repression was substantial but smaller in absolute numbers than the 1937–1938 Terror. The principal episodes were the Leningrad Affair of 1949–1950 (the destruction of the Leningrad party leadership; about two hundred officials and family members executed or imprisoned), the campaign against "rootless cosmopolitans" of 1949 (an antisemitic press campaign that targeted prominent Jewish writers, artists, and scientists; many were arrested, several were shot, the Yiddish-language Soviet cultural infrastructure was substantially destroyed), and the so-called Doctors' Plot of January 1953 — a public accusation that prominent Kremlin physicians (most of them Jewish) had murdered senior Soviet officials. The Doctors' Plot may have been the opening move of a renewed mass purge; its development was interrupted by Stalin's death and the case was officially closed in April 1953 with the published acknowledgement that the charges had been fabricated.
The death of Stalin
Joseph Stalin died at his dacha at Kuntsevo outside Moscow on the 5th of March 1953, four days after suffering a major stroke at the end of a long evening of drinking with four of his senior colleagues (Beria, Khrushchev, Bulganin, Malenkov). The circumstances of his death have been variously suspected, with some scholars (Jonathan Brent, Vladimir Naumov in their 2003 study) arguing that Beria may have engineered or accelerated the death. What is not in dispute is the medical reality of a major cerebrovascular event in a seventy-four-year-old chronic hypertensive heavy drinker. He was succeeded by a brief period of collective leadership (Malenkov as premier, Beria as security chief, Khrushchev as senior party secretary, Molotov as foreign minister). The collective leadership was unstable. Within a year, Khrushchev had emerged as the dominant figure.
The first political act of the new leadership was the destruction of Beria. In June 1953, Beria was arrested at a Presidium meeting (the operation was personally led by Marshal Zhukov, who had been kept ready in an antechamber), accused of conspiracy and treason, tried in secret, and shot on the 23rd of December 1953. The execution of Beria was carried out without the formal show-trial proceedings of the 1930s — a small but important indication that the political culture of the post-Stalin leadership would, at least at the top, replace mass terror with managed elite politics. No Politburo member would be executed by the Soviet state after Beria.
The Secret Speech
The decisive political moment of the post-Stalin period was Khrushchev's speech to a closed session of the Twentieth Party Congress on the night of the 24th-25th of February 1956 — the so-called Secret Speech (On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences). The speech catalogued, in unsparing detail, Stalin's responsibility for the purges of the 1930s, the deportations of national minorities, the false accusations and confessions, the failures of military preparation in 1941, and the post-war repressions. It declined to address the collectivisation famines, the wider Terror operations, or any criticism of Soviet ideological foundations as such. It was nevertheless, for its audience and the subsequent Soviet political class, a fundamental rupture with the previous quarter-century. The text was distributed within the Soviet party and (illicitly) reached the West within months; the Soviet Union did not officially publish it until 1989.
The political consequences were immediate. In Eastern Europe, the speech triggered de-Stalinisation campaigns of varying intensity — most consequentially in Hungary, where the new Imre Nagy government attempted to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact in October-November 1956 and was suppressed by Soviet invasion (the Hungarian Uprising of November 1956 killed about 2,500 Hungarians and forced about 200,000 into emigration; Nagy was executed in 1958). In China, the speech alienated Mao Zedong, who interpreted it as an attack on Communist leadership in general and on the Stalin model that he was, by this date, the principal living defender of. The Sino-Soviet rift that would dominate the 1960s and 1970s began in 1956.
Sputnik and the space race
The single most prestigious Soviet technical achievement of the Khrushchev period was the space programme. Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite, was launched on the 4th of October 1957. Sputnik 2 (with the dog Laika, the first living creature in orbit, who did not survive) followed in November. Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space on the 12th of April 1961, completing one orbit aboard Vostok 1. Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space in June 1963. Alexei Leonov performed the first spacewalk in March 1965. The Soviet lead in the space race was substantial through the mid-1960s; the United States overtook it only with the Apollo programme of 1968-1972.
The space programme had a dual character: it was both a real scientific and engineering achievement (the work of Sergei Korolev and his design bureau OKB-1 produced rocketry systems still in use today; the Soyuz launcher of 1966 has the longest operational record of any orbital launcher) and a major piece of Cold War propaganda. The propaganda value was substantial. The achievement was real.
Cuba
The Khrushchev period's most dangerous moment was the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. Khrushchev's decision to install Soviet medium-range nuclear missiles in Cuba — announced in October by American aerial reconnaissance, with a Soviet shipment of missiles still en route — produced a thirteen-day crisis that nearly resulted in nuclear war. The crisis was resolved by a public American agreement not to invade Cuba and a private American agreement to withdraw similar missiles from Turkey, in exchange for the removal of the Soviet missiles. Khrushchev was, in retrospect, judged by his Politburo colleagues to have handled the crisis badly — the gain (a Cuban guarantee) was incommensurate with the risk (general nuclear war). It was one of several factors in his removal from power.
On the 14th of October 1964, Khrushchev was summoned from his Black Sea vacation to Moscow, where the Presidium voted to remove him from his positions on grounds of "advancing age and deteriorating health" — the standard euphemism for political dismissal. He was succeeded by Leonid Brezhnev as first secretary of the party and Alexei Kosygin as premier. Khrushchev retired to a state dacha outside Moscow, where he wrote unpublished memoirs (smuggled to the West in 1970 and published as Khrushchev Remembers) and died in September 1971. He was the only Soviet leader between Lenin and Yeltsin to leave office alive and not in a coffin. The next eighteen years of Soviet politics were unusually stable, and are the subject of the next chapter.
End of Chapter VI