The Atlantic and Its Enemies (17 page)

Under the nuclear umbrella, wars of this sort developed the surreal quality that George Orwell had foreseen in
Nineteen Eighty-Four
. A stalemate, in horrible terrain and terrible weather, went on and on, punctuated by offensives that got nowhere and were probably not really meant to get anywhere. Meanwhile, American air power was used, and wrecked much of North Korea, though of course without affecting the Chinese bases. Stalin could sit back and rub his hands with glee at the discomfiture of America, and Mao could rejoice in the return of China as a military power: a very far cry from the days of yore, when the junks of the imperial navy had been smashed to matchsticks and the ports of the Mandate of Heaven had been grabbed by foreigners selling opium.

An effort, also surreal, was made at peace. At Panmunjom, between the front lines, teams of negotiators haggled for two years, while the war went on outside the barbed wire and the huts. Thousands of the Chinese and North Korean prisoners did not want to be repatriated at all, but the Communist side insisted, expecting that American public opinion (which had turned against the war) would eventually rebel. Delaying tactics were used: there were a few deluded souls in Chinese prisons who volunteered to stay there (they trickled back, crestfallen, decades later) and various well-meaning Western scientists, including Joseph Needham, were deployed to accuse the Americans (wrongly) of biological warfare.

This slow-moving but murderous farce went on until the Americans started to use nuclear language. Ostentatious test flights went ahead; the new President, Dwight D. Eisenhower, visited Korea late in 1952, and used harsh language. The threat of the bomb was real enough, but the key moment came in March, when Stalin died. His successors had had enough of direct confrontation, and sent peaceable messages to the West. In Korea, finally, on 27 July 1953, on an Indian proposal, a ceasefire was proclaimed at Panmunjom. ‘Only the provisional is lasting,’ says the French proverb, and so it proved, again in surreal circumstances, the armistice negotiation teams remaining in their huts, decades in, decades out, thereafter, while North Korea became the weirdest country on the globe, and South Korea became an extraordinary first-world success story. The Korean War ended, where it had begun, on the 38th Parallel, with hundreds of thousands of dead on the side of the South and the Americans, and millions on the side of the North and the Chinese. But it had a side-effect, not foreseen by Stalin. The Korean War created Europe.

6

The World at the Death of Stalin

When the dictator’s death was announced, his subjects reacted first as if stunned, and then with mass hysteria. A great silence is reported to have fallen almost everywhere in the huge empire that he had dominated, from Rostock on the Baltic to Vladivostok, ten time zones away. Stalin had been in the tradition of despots who had ruled Eurasia, the most recent of whom had been Genghiz Khan and Tamerlane, threatening the Balkans, Persia, China, one sign of their capital a pyramid of skulls. Stalin had their type of absolute power since 1929, but with modern methods of communication, and the USSR had been convulsed. The old peasantry had been destroyed, 40 million of them crammed into towns and cities in a few years, many other millions starved to death or deported, and the rest living a scratch existence. A vast industrial machinery had been set in place, then there had been more millions of deaths in the course of political troubles, the ‘Purges’. Then had come the Second World War, another near 9 million deaths in the armed forces alone, and no-one knows how many further civilian millions. In 1945 had come the great victory over Nazi Germany, with Soviet troops conquering Berlin. Russians, for generations looked down on by Germans as backward and lazy, now saw tens of thousands of these same Germans marching through the streets of Moscow as prisoners, some of them losing control of their bowels in fear. Later on, seven elaborate skyscrapers went up in the capital, built by the captive German labourers, who were regarded as better bricklayers than ever the Russian natives would be. (In 1953, 3 million of these prisoners of war were still working, as forced labour; of the 90,000 men who had surrendered at Stalingrad, only 9,000 ever managed to return.) Then, in 1949, Communism made another enormous demonstration of its strength. The Soviet Union exploded its first bomb. In China, after a long civil war, Mao Tsetung defeated the antiCommunist Nationalists, and came to Moscow to celebrate, to get his orders. So too at intervals did some Mátyás Rákosi or Klement Gottwald from Budapest or Prague, fresh from some intra-Party knifing, their capitals grimly Stalinized. In the whole empire, factory chimneys fumed, proclaiming forced industrialization; in southern Russia there had been cannibalism; in places there were still shadowy guerrilla wars. But Stalin had not just survived Hitler; he had turned Russia into a superpower, her capital the centre of a hemispheric empire.

It was Stalin’s seventieth birthday, 21 December. In the preceding months, there had been endless tributes in the newspapers. Stalin was certainly a well-read man, but he claimed to dominate whole ranges of scholarship - even, at the time of the battle of Stalingrad, contributing an article to a zoological journal about a particular rock-fish that his rival, Trotsky, had apparently discovered (in Turkish exile). Now, scholars, artists, intellectuals, writers praised and imitated him: you had to open any article, more or less regardless of subject, with quotations from Stalin and Lenin. On 21 December Stalin’s face was shown on an enormous balloon above the Kremlin, and there were parades throughout the country, with floats to glorify ‘the greatest genius of all times and nations’. That evening, in the Bolshoy Theatre, there was a grand gala. On stage was a huge portrait of Stalin, and in front sat the leaders of Communism: Mao Tsetung, fresh from his triumph; leaders of the various countries that the USSR had taken in 1944-5 in central Europe, including a bearded and weaselly little German, Walter Ulbricht; a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, ‘passionate’ Dolores Ibárruri, who had been the chief mouthpiece of the defeated left-wing side (her granddaughter in time became Russian interpreter for the king of Spain); and a small troop of hard faces from western Europe. The British, with a tiny Communist Party, were hardly represented (though, in 1953, for the funeral, a rich Communist-sympathizing London barrister, John Platts-Mills, did manage to attend, in his private aircraft), but the French were slavish and the Italians flattered. In the auditorium sat thousands of delegates, carefully ranked, with the senior families in the front rows, and, as first to enter, the family of Lavrenti Beria, who ran the security empire, with the millions of slaving prisoners. It was he who had stamped the Soviet atom bomb out of the ground, partly with internment camps,
sharashki
, where nuclear physicists worked as convicts. Speeches were then made, for hours on end, and a rising star was Nikita Khrushchev, whom Stalin had promoted (he was seated on the left, Mao Tsetung on the right). Khrushchev’s speech ended with: ‘Glory to our dear father, our wise teacher, to the brilliant leader of the Party of the Soviet people and of the workers of the entire world, Comrade Stalin!’

Stalin had sunk monstrously into the consciousness and subconsciousness of the world, or at any rate the part of the world that he dominated. For eight years, since the end of the Second World War, his picture had been everywhere, huge statues had gone up to him, and secret-police chiefs all through the empire were kept vigilant at the idea that he might make a telephone call to them in the middle of the night - for his own working hours were strange. In the end, they killed him.

In 1953 Stalin was seventy-three and age was showing. The suspiciousness grew, and when his physical health seemed to be weakening, suspicion caused him to have his own doctors arrested, imprisoned, tortured to make them confess that there was a medical plot afoot. Then came signs that he was planning another culling of chief subordinates - Beria especially. In the 1930s, he had killed off three quarters of the Central Committee, along with much of the senior military establishment and then, for good measure, the chief of security who had organized it all. Now, the senior men could read the telltale signs that the old man was meditating another great purge. On the face of things, he could still be affable and welcoming, and on the night of 28 February/1 March he did stage one of his dinner parties, at which he liked people to get drunk (on one occasion a British ambassador had to be carried out). He told the servants not to wake him: he was usually around by midday in any event. But on 1 March, no. The bewildered staff did not know what to do, and, again because of the suspiciousness, there was no chief domestic secretary to take any responsibility; he had been carted off months before. The servants, with the 1,500 security guards posted all around, waited. A light finally did go on, at about six o’clock, in the quarters he had chosen for the night (out of suspicion, he changed his bedroom regularly, to foil would-be assassins). Then nothing more. Finally, since a document had arrived for him to read, a maid was sent into Stalin’s room. She found him on the floor, obviously victim of a stroke. He could hardly move or speak: only the terrible, malignant eyes had life in them.

Still no-one was prepared to take responsibility: the servants, the ministers they telephoned; only Beria could react. He told them to remain silent about the stroke, and arrived that night. The system being so strange, Stalin had remained for ten hours or so without medical attention, and now they had to go and ask his chief doctor in the special prison what he would advise. Beria himself at first told the guards to go, that Stalin was ‘sleeping’, and by the time doctors arrived, Stalin had been unattended for twelve hours. Did Beria do this deliberately? Stalin’s drunken son burst in, on 3 March, shrieked that they had killed him, and according to Molotov, Beria said as much: ‘I did away with him, I saved you all.’ As the old man slid into and out of coma, Beria did not bother to hide his hatred; by 3 March the doctors pronounced that there was no hope, and death came two days later, with a final scene that his daughter remembered:

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 . . . He suddenly lifted his hand as though he were pointing to something above and bringing down a curse on us all

• the old housekeeper in hysterics, on her knees the while, as members of the Party executive came and went, and Beria, at the end, hardly able to control his glee.

Between themselves, before Stalin died, they managed to cobble together an agreement to take over the government, without any immediate fuss, and Beria emerged as the main man, with the Ministry of the Interior, to which would be attached the Ministry of State Security. Division of these two had been one of the signs that Stalin intended to strip Beria of his full powers, whittle him down and then eliminate him. In the same way, the new men reversed an arrangement that Stalin had made, to expand the size of the Party’s leading body, the ‘Praesidium’ (the old Politburo), to twenty-five as against an original ten. The ten older members would have been swamped by the new ones - an obvious way in which the old man could prepare to get rid of them. With at least some agreement, the new leaders were prepared to let the people know, at last, of Stalin’s death. The body was embalmed and laid out, and crowds upon crowds came to see it. Pandemonium followed, and hundreds of people were crushed to death in the middle of Moscow.

What were the new leaders to do? They were themselves Stalinists, involved in all of his doings, with hardly a scruple to be detected. The one with the worst record was obviously enough Beria, and the others had every reason to fear the power that he could use against them: one of the first things that he had done, when Stalin began to die, was to go and remove top-secret documents from the dictator’s desk. What did they contain? Already, said Khrushchev in his memoirs, his colleagues were wary, with little signs to each other of apprehension as to what Beria might do. They apportioned the various offices among themselves, and Khrushchev got what seemed to be the least of them - he was one among eight other secretaries of the Central Committee - while Georgy Malenkov took Stalin’s seat as head of the Council of Ministers. In the system, and the problem grew more complicated without a dictator, offices sometimes lacked the power that their names should have meant. Did the Party govern, and what was the role of the State in that event? And which part of the Party really had the power - the police or security element, later known as the KGB? These questions came up as soon as Stalin had died, and a struggle for power duly commenced.

However, to start with, there was a somewhat strange business. The Stalin tyranny began to be whittled down, and elements of liberalization came in. People started to come back from the huge prison camp network. Some, when arrested, had had the kind of acute intelligence that Communism fostered - a matter of survival, to guess what to do - and had confessed to crimes that were manifestly ridiculous. Thus, the director of the Leningrad Zoo had confessed that he had staged ballet rehearsals outside the cages so as to drive the monkeys mad. Any commission looking into ‘crimes’ would of course at once spot a preposterous one, and release the man. But there were other pieces of relaxation that touched on the two central themes of Soviet history from then onwards. These had to do with the non-Russian peoples on the one side, and relations with Germany on the other. Both themes now came up, and it was a measure of the strangeness of the system that the liberalizer, in both, was Beria, the man of Terror whom his colleages feared. However, given that this was a system in which information was very carefully doled out or distorted, the secret police were the agency best able to know what was going on, through a huge network of spies, and experts on various foreign countries. Beria knew well enough that the country was poor, sometimes famished, living in often disgusting conditions. Oppression at home and abroad cost an enormous amount, distorting production. Liberalization would solve some of this. Half of the USSR’s population consisted of non-Russians, and these had generally been run, tyrannically, through Russian Communists. In the Ukraine, where there had still been nationalist partisans fighting in the forests until very recently, Russians, not Ukrainians, had been trusted and in the Caucasus, the Baltic, Central Asia, it had been much the same. Whole peoples had been transported, in any event - the Chechens, for instance, to far-off Kazakhstan, along with the Tatars of the Crimea, who lost half of their population in the process (the Chechens, once they arrived, decided to reintroduce polygamy, so that their population could be restored). Now, Beria allowed some non-Russian Communists to take over, locally. Even in 1953 it caused head-shaking in Moscow. Stalin had survived Hitler’s attack largely because he put himself at the head of a Russian national movement, as distinct from a Communist one. What would happen if loyal Russians were now displaced by slippery Georgians and, worse still, Central Asians, who would use their power to instal their brothers and their cousins and their uncles through some hidden tribal or even sectarian network? Playing off the nationalities against Moscow was dangerous; in the end it brought down the USSR. There were pre-echoes of that in Beria’s post-Stalin months.