Life and Times of Andrei Zhdanov, 1896-1948 9780773571730

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th e lif e a nd times o f a n d r e i z h da n ov, 1896–1948

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f o re i g n p ol i cy, se c u r i t y, a n d s trategic s tud ies Editors: Alex Macleod and Charles-Philippe David The Foreign Policy, Security, and Strategic Studies Series seeks to promote analysis of the transformation and adaptation of foreign and security policies in the post–Cold War era. The series welcomes manuscripts offering innovative interpretations or new theoretical approaches to these questions, whether dealing with specific strategic or policy issues or with the evolving concept of security itself. m o n o g r a p hs Canada, Latin America, and the New Internationalism A Foreign Policy Analysis, 1968–1990 Brian J.R. Stevenson Power vs. Prudence Why Nations Forgo Nuclear Weapons T.V. Paul From Peacekeeping to Peacemaking Canada’s Response to the Yugoslav Crisis Nicholas Gammer Canadian Policy toward Krushchev’s Soviet Union Jamie Glazov The Revolution in Military Affairs Implications for Canada and NATO Elinor Sloan Inauspicious Beginnings Principal Powers and International Security Institutions after the Cold War, 1989–1999 Edited by Onnig Beylerian and Jacques Lévesque co l l e ct i o n s NATO

Enlargement, Russia, and European Security Edited by Charles-Philippe David and Jacques Lévesque

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The Life and Times of Andrei Zhdanov, 1896–1948 k e e s b o t e r b lo em

The Centre for Security and Foreign Policy Studies and The Raoul-Dandurand Chair of Strategic and Diplomatic Studies McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston · London · Ithaca

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© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2004 isbn 0-7735-2666-8 Legal deposit first quarter 2004 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Funding has also been received from Nipissing University. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (bpidp) for our publishing activities.

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Boterbloem, Kees, 1962– The life and times of Andrei Zhdanov, 1896–1948 / Kees Boterbloem. Includes bibliographical references. isbn 0-7735-2666-8 1. Zhdanov, Andrei Aleksandrovich, 1896–1948. 2. Politicians – Soviet Union – Biography. 3. Soviet Union – Politics and government – 1936–1953. 4. Soviet Union – Cultural policy. I. Title. dk268.z48b67 2004

947.084′2′092

Typeset in 10/12 Baskerville by True to Type

c2003–905459–4

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Contents

Acknowledgments / vii Archival Annotation, Foreign Terms, Transcription, and Glossary / ix Preface / xi Introduction: Stalin’s Accomplice / 3 1 Youth, 1896–1918 / 11 2 Rise of a Bolshevik Chieftain, 1918–1924 / 27 3 Proconsul of Nizhnii Novgorod, 1924–1929 / 51 4 The Great Turn, 1929–1934 / 79 5 Moscow and Leningrad, 1934–1936 / 105 6 Purification, 1937–1939 / 145 7 Dragon’s Teeth, 1939–1941 / 183 8 Dragon Harvest, 1941–1945 / 225 9 The Prodigal Son Returns, 1945–1946 / 253 10 The Selfless Fighter Succumbs, 1947–1948 / 289 Epilogue: Myths, the Man, and a Legacy in Limbo / 335 Notes / 345 Bibliography / 525 Index / 565

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Contents

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Acknowledgments

I am very grateful to the following people and institutes without whom this work would never have been completed in its current form (as well as to those I may have omitted because of an imperfect memory): the staff of the Hoover Institute’s Archives at Stanford University; the employees at the Party Archives of Nizhnii Novgorod, St Petersburg, and Tver’, and of rgaspi, garf, and rgani in Moscow; the McLennan Library of McGill University; the staff of the European Reading Room at the Library of Congress; the United States National Archives; the Petro Jacyk Centre and Robarts Library at the University of Toronto; the Russian State Library in Moscow; Indiana University’s Main Library at its Bloomington campus; the Mid-West Russian History Workshop; Dr Jeffrey Veidlinger, Dr Hiroaki Kuromiya, Dr Toivo Raun, Dr David Ransel, and Dr Ben Eklof, all of Indiana University at Bloomington; Dr Daniel Kaiser and Dr Todd Armstrong of Grinnell College, Iowa; Dr Peter Solomon, Dr Robert Johnson, Dr Lynn Viola, Dr Susan Gross Solomon, and Jean Levesque of the Centre for Russian and Eastern European Studies at the University of Toronto; Dr Vasilis Vourkoutiotis of St Petersburg and Toronto; Ms. Dasha Krutous of St Petersburg; Dr Peter Kenez of the University of California at Santa Cruz; Dr Serhyi Yekelchyk of the University of Victoria; Dr Bohdan Harasymiw of the University of Calgary; Dr Paul Robinson of the University of Hull, England; Dr Tom Ewing of Virginia Tech University; Dr Martin van den Heuvel, emeritus of the University of Amsterdam’s Oost-Europa Instituut; Dr Marc Jansen of the University of Amsterdam; Dr Martin Rady and Ms Barbara Wyllie as well as the anonymous

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reviewers at the Slavic and East European Review; Dr Gust Olson and Dr Edward Mozejko and the anonymous readers at the Canadian Slavonic Papers; Dr Valentin Boss and Dr Steven Usitalo of McGill University; Dr Norman Pereira of Dalhousie University; Dr Jan Foitzik and Dr Carola Tischler in Berlin; Dr Bruce Adams of the University of Louisville; Dr Ben Whisenhunt of the College of DuPage; Dr Vladimir D. Esakov, Dr Andrei N. Sakharov, and Dr Liudmila P. Kolodnikova of the Institute of History at the Russian Academy of Sciences; Dr Elena S. Levina in Moscow; Dr Iurii A. Zhdanov in Rostov-na-Donu; Nipissing University’s Research Council; my history colleagues as well as Dr Wayne Borody and Dr Murat Tuncali at Nipissing University; Dr Philip Cercone and Dr John Zucchi of McGill-Queen’s University Press; Dr Mark Cortiula of the University of Sydney; Dr Jeff McNairn of Queen’s University; Dr Alison Falby of Trent University; Les Luka and Blythe Malloy in Toronto; Ben, Jean-Pierre, and Elisabeth Jacq’motte in Washington, dc; Michiel van Nieuwland in Utrecht; Mrs Johanna Boterbloem-van Bockhoven and Klaas-Jan Boterbloem in Haarlem. Last but not least, Dr Susan Mooney of the University of South Florida, Tampa, deserves most credit for making this a better book. That it has remained imperfect is entirely due to me.

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Preface

ix

Archival Annotation, Foreign Terms, Transcription, and Glossary

Archival documents deposited in a number of Russian archives are referred to in the following manner. Sources originating in Moscow’s rgaspi (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial’noi i politicheskoi istorii; Russian State Archive of Social and Political History) are indicated in the notes by omission. Archival references to, for example, fond (collection) 77, opis’ (subdivision) 2, delo (file) 87 at rgaspi are abbreviated to 77/2/87. Specific list (page) numbers will be indicated by l. (for the singular “list”) or ll. (for the plural “listy”), sometimes followed by ob. (obratno: verso). Other archives are indicated in the endnotes by abbreviations of their full name. Documents in the Tsentral’nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv istoriko-politicheskikh dokumentov Sankt Peterburga (Central State Archive of Historical-Political Documents of St Petersburg) are indicated as tsgaipd; those in the Gosudarstvennyi obshchestvennopoliticheskii arkhiv Nizhegorodskoi oblasti (State Social-Political Archive of Nizhnii Novgorod Province) as gopano; those in Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv noveishei istorii (Russian State Archive of the Most Recent History, in Moscow) as rgani; and those in Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv rossiiskoi federatsii (State Archive of the Russian Federation (in Moscow)) as garf in the references. Reference notes to newspaper articles in Tverskaia Pravda and Nizhegorodskaia kommuna begin with TP or NK, followed by the date of the issue and the page on which the item appeared; likewise with Pravda articles. Such references are not listed in the bibliography. The transcription of Russian names and terms that is used in the

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following pages is a modified version of the Library of Congress style. Thus Voznesensky instead of Voznesenskii, Politburo instead of Politbiuro, but Tver’, oblast’, or obkombiuro for names and terms that are not in common usage in English (see the glossary for the meaning of Soviet-Russian terms). Some frequently occurring words are abbreviated, emulating Soviet bureaucratic style. In presenting Russian quotations translated from archival documents, I follow closely the style and orthography of the original. I capitalize the term “Communist” if referring to the Soviet state or the Communist parties after 1917; I use the lower case only when referring abstractly to a society of equals. Translations of non-English-language works are my own. Dates follow the Old Style calendar until the calendar was changed by 1 February 1918; any dates thereafter follow the New Style of time reckoning. Some frequently occurring words are sometimes abbreviated: For this, and for explanation of recurrent Russian terms, see the Glossary. Russian(-Soviet) terms are indicated by italics the first time they appear in the text, and if they recur are explained in the Glossary.

gloss a ry Agitprop Aktiv

Apparatchik

assr Bolsheviks

Central Committee (cc) cc dfp cc Orgbiuro

Agitation and propaganda “Active.” Those who are active as Communist Party members or as sympathizers of the Communist cause in enlightening, organizing, or mobilizing those outside the Party behind the banner of communism and the Soviet Fatherland/Motherland Party functionary of central, provincial, or district Party committee or government apparatus. The term is usually pejorative. Autonomous Socialist Soviet Republic Left-wing faction of Russian Social Democratic Workers Party (1903–17); since August 1917 a separate political party, also known as Communists. Leading body of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks). Officially elected by Party congresses. cc Department of Foreign Policy (see cc ovp). Organizational bureau of the cc (1919–52); subordinate to the cc Politburo.

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cc Orginstruktor Personnel department of cc in the 1920s. Department cc orpo Otdel’ rukovodiashchikh partiinnykh organov: cc Department of Leading Party Organs personnel department, one of the successors of the Orgraspred department. cc Orgraspred After the 1924 merger of the Uchraspred and Department Orginstruktor departments, this cc department was responsible for personnel within the apparatus. cc ovp Otdel vneshei politiki: cc Department of Foreign Policy. cc Politburo Political Bureau of cc: since 1919 the highest decision-making body in the Communist party. cc Secretariat Central administrative office of the cc; established in 1919 to handle most paperwork going in and out of the Central Committee, Politburo, and Orgburo. Central Control Checking organ of the Party. In 1934 succeeded Commission by the Party Control Commission. (ccc) Central Executive Executive Committee of the Supreme Soviet Committee (cec) before 1937: its chairman was the official head of state of the Soviet Union. Cheka Name for Soviet secret police, 1917–22. Vserossiiskaia chrezvychainaia komissiia po bor’be s kontr-revoliutsiei i sabotazhem (All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for the Struggle with Counterrevolution and Sabotage). Chekist Name for secret-police officer. Chinovnik Pejorative term for a tsarist bureaucrat. Cominform Communist Information Bureau. Comintern Communist International, or Third International of Workers’ Parties, founded in 1919 in Moscow and dissolved in 1943. Dacha Country house. Dekulakization Elimination of the richest peasants from villages as part of the collectivization of agriculture after 1929. Diamat Dialectical materialism, with istmat (historical materialism), entailing the study of Marx’s, Engels’s, and Lenin’s key works, eventually

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Duma Edinonachal’e

Ezhovshchina

Fil’tratsiia

Gensek Glasnost’

Glavlit gko

Gorispolkom Gorkom Gosplan gpu Great Terror Great Turn

Guberniia Gubkom gugb

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obligatory for Soviet citizens within almost any type of formal education. Prerevolutionary Russian parliament. The same word was used for a city council. One-person management, reintroduced in factories especially in 1929 as collective management was deemed ineffective. Literally, “the Ezhov Thing” (the ending “-shchina” is untranslatable into English but conveys something pejorative in Russian); the name given to the height of Great Terror from 1936–38, when N.I. Ezhov was People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs. Screening process by nkvd in search of alleged “traitors” or collaborators among Soviet prisoners of war and forced labourers upon return to Soviet Union after World War ii. Short for General’nyi sekretar’, General Secretary of the Communist Party, that is, Stalin. “Openness,” greater frankness and disclosure about problems and shortcomings in the Soviet Union, a policy that was part of M.S. Gorbachev’s New Thinking. Chief Administration for Literary Affairs, responsible for censorship. Gosudarstvennyi Komitet Oborony. State Defence Council, the highest decision-making body during Second World War. In 1940–41, the abbreviation gko (Glavnyi Komitet Oborony) was used for Main Defence Council, successor to the ko. Executive committee of city/town soviet. City/town committee of the Communist party. State Planning Committee. See ogpu. See Ezhovshchina. (Velikii Perelom) The great transformation of the Soviet economy and society embarked on in 1929. Until 1929, province. Provincial committee of the Communist party (until 1929). Glavnoe Upravlenie Gosudartsvennoi Bezopasnosti:

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gulag

guppka

Gymnasium Ideinost’

Intelligentsia (s. intelligent)

Instruktor Istmat Khutor Knizhki ko Kolkhoz (pl. kolkhozy) Kolkhoznik Kolkhoznitsa Komsomol

kpd Krai Kraikombiuro Kulak

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Main Directorate of State Security within nkvd. Main administration of labour camps under the nkvd/mvd. The term is often used to mean the entire concentration-camp complex under Stalin. Glavnoe Upravlenie Politicheskoi Propagandy Krasnoi Armii: Main Direction of Political Propaganda for the Red Army. See Realschule. The expression of proper ideas, seen by the Communist leadership as one of three key components of socialist realism in art and literature. Russian intellectuals who before 1917 opposed the tsar’s regime; after 1917, the name was often given to those (then usually identified as Soviet intelligentsia) who had completed, at a minimum, secondary education and who were seen to form a kind of separate stratum within Soviet society. See also partiinye intelligenty. cc official who explains and checks the execution of cc decrees. See Diamat. Russian name used for individual farmer, often living on a homestead outside the village. Little notebooks, used by Stalin’s lieutenants to write down instructions. Komitet oborony: ussr Defence Committee, successor to sto from 1937 to 1940. Collective farm (kollektivnoe khoziaistvo). Officially owned by agricultural collective (artel’). Male collective-farm worker. Female collective-farm worker. All-Union Leninist Communist Youth League (vlksm). The age of entry varied during Soviet history, but the minimum age was usually around fifteen. Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands: German Communist Party. Administrative division of ussr, usually of greater size than an oblast’. Leading body of krai Party. See obkombiuro. Literally, “fist.” a pejorative term meaning “rich

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Kul’turnyi

Lishentsy

lko lvo Mensheviks mgb mid Militsiia mts mvd Narkom Narod Narodnoe Opolchenie Narodnost’

nep

New Regime

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peasant,” “capitalist peasant” in the precollectivization village who, according to the Communist idea of class relations in the village, was alleged to exploit his poorer neighbours. The label was often given to anyone opposed to collectivization. In Stalin’s time, “kul’turnyi” a combination of “civilized,” or “of good breeding,” with a tinge of ascetism, egalitarianism, and collectivism. People who, because they had been too wealthy, or compromised by political activity or social background, were deprived of the right to vote after October 1917. Leningradskii komitet oborony: Leningrad Defence Council. Leningradskii voennyi okrug: Leningrad Military District. Moderate wing of rsdlp. Ministerstvo Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti – from 1946 until 1953, Ministry of State Security. Ministerstvo Inostrannykh Del: From 1946, Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Regular police. Machine Tractor Station. Ministerstvo Vnutrennykh Del: From 1946, Ministry of Internal Affairs. People’s Commissar. People, as in German “Volk” or Spanish “pueblo.” See Opolchenie. “Popular” spirit, seen by Communist leadership as one of three key components of socialist realism in art and literature. New Economic Policy, introduced in 1921 at the Tenth Party Congress. It allowed a measure of domestic private trade and ownership and permitted peasantry to work and sell their products for personal profit. Came to an end in 1929 with the Great Turn (Velikii Perelom). Term for the Communist Regime in the Soviet Union; counterpart of the Old Regime (Ancien Régime).

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Nizhegorodskaia (feminine) or Nizhegorodskii (masculine) nkgb nkvd

nkid Nomenklatura

Obkom

Obkombiuro

Oblast’ Oblispolkom ogpu Okrug Old Belief/ Old Believers

Opolchenie Opros

orpo oso

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The Russian contraction of Nizhnii Novgorod when used as an adjective.

Narodnyi Kommissariat Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti: People’s Commissariat of State Security. Narodnyi Komissariat Vnutrennykh Del:People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs often used as a term for secret police. Narodnyi Komissariat Inostrannykh Del: People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs. System of appointments by which the Politburo, Central Committee, and lower Party committees appoint people to responsible posts in Party, government, unions, secret police, Komsomol, industry, agriculture, etc. Provincial committee of the Communist party, officially elected by the provincial Party congress but in practice selected by the Central Committee Secretariat. Highest policy-making body of the provincial Party, officially elected by the obkom membership from its own number but in practice selected by the Central Committee Secretariat. Province (sometimes translated in English as “region”). Provincial executive committee of soviets, in other words, the official provincial government. (Unified) State Political Administration, name of the secret police between 1922 and 1934. district, subdivision of krai or oblast’. Russian Orthodox Christians who refused to accept changes in church ceremony in the seventeenth century and left it to form their own sect. Wartime defence force consisting of civilian volunteers. Survey, usually meaning a vote by a Party or state body conducted without the body’s meeting in plenary session, by having aides collect the votes from the membership. See cc orpo. Osobye soveshchanie: Special Board. nkvd/mvd

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court dealing with cases of counterrevolutionary activity, sabotage, or treason. After 1923, special top-secret Politburo materials.

Osobaia papka (pl. osobye papki) oss Office of Strategic Services (us government), forerunner of the cia. Pan Polish feudal lord, nobleman. Partiinost’ Showing the correct Party spirit, seen by Communist leadership as one of three key components of socialist realism in art and literature. Partiinye Soviet intellectuals strongly supportive of Commuintelligenty nist party rule, either pro-Party fellow travellers or Party members. Party Control See Central Control Commission. Commission People’s From 1917 to 1946, name for government minisCommissar (pc) ter in the Soviet Union. See also Sovnarkom. People’s Ministry from 1917 to 1946. See also Sovnarkom. Commissariat Peredvizhniki The Wanderers: a nineteenth-century group of painters of whom Ilya Repin is the most famous example. Politburo See cc Politburo. Profintern International Communist Organization of Trade Unions. Proletkul’t An organization of Soviet artists who attempted to create a purely proletarian art after the revolution, untainted by any bourgeois influence. Raiispolkom Executive committee of district soviet, i.e., official government of raion. Raikom District committee of the Communist party. Apart from the members of the raikomburo, most of its membership was, in practice, selected by the obkom secretariat. Raikomburo Highest policy-making body of a district (raion), officially elected from the raikom membership, but in practice selected by the Central Committee Secretariat. Raion District. Realschule Based on the German example, a tsarist secondary school with classes in Russian language and literature, other modern languages, sciences, and religion. It was distinct from the gymnasium in its

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Red

rsfsr rsdlp (rsdwp) sed samozvanets Skhod smersh Soviet

Soviet Control Commission Sovkhoz Sovmin

Sovminbiuro Sovnarkom

spd Spetsy

sr

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focus on more practical subjects and lack of classical languages; it was not intended to be a preparatory school for university. Colour adopted by Communists in struggle against their opponents (as in Red Army, Red Terror, Reds); during the Civil War, opponents were labelled White in contrast. Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic. Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party (Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party). Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands: (EastGerman) Socialist Unity Party. Pretender; someone who calls himself tsar. Traditional Russian village meeting. (Smert’ shpionam: Death to spies) Wartime Soviet military counterintelligence. Council (of workers’, soldiers’, sailors’, or peasant deputies). At all different levels, the official representation of the Soviet population, since 1936 universally elected by the entire population. See Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate. Sovetskoe khoziaistvo: State farm. Much less prevalent than kolkhoz before Stalin’s death. Sovet ministrov: Since 1946, the Council of Ministers, official government of the Soviet Union, appointed by the ussr Supreme Soviet. A sort of inner cabinet of Sovmin. From 1917 to 1946, Council of People’s Commissars, official government of the Soviet Union, appointed by the Congress of Soviets or the Supreme Soviet. Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands: German Social-Democratic Party. Non-Party specialists, usually having enjoyed a prerevolutionary or foreign education in their specialty. Socialist-Revolutionary/Revolutionaries. The Socialist-Revolutionary Party was a non-Marxist socialist party, mainly (but not exclusively) defending the rights of the peasantry. They were the most popular party in the elections for the Constituent Assembly in November 1917, but

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Stakhanovite

State Defence Council Stavka sto

Supreme Soviet Svodka Troika

Trudoden’ (pl. trudodni) Uglanovschina Uchraspred

Uezd ussr vaskhnil

vkp(b)

vlksm vsnkh

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after some of them had briefly served in the government, the srs were outlawed during the Civil War. Exemplary worker who regularly overfulfilled the targets that he or she was supposed to meet according to the plan. See gko. Red Army’s General Headquarters during the Second World War. Sovet Truda i Oborony: An economic body dating from the Civil War intended to channel the economy towards defence production; sto was replaced in 1937 by the Defence Committee (ko). Its competence overlapped with Gosplan, vsnkh, and several People’s Commissariats. Highest council (soviet), official parliament of the Soviet Union. Report. Special judicial board composed of three members, one of the main instruments for carrying out the Great Purge. “Workday credit” on collective farm. The “Uglanov period” in Nizhnii Novgorod; compare to Ezhovshchina or Zhdanovshchina. In the early 1920s, the cc’s registration and allocation section, a kind of personnel department, in which in 1922 the nomenklatura system of appointments was developed. Merged in 1924 with the cc Orginstruktor Department to become the Orgraspred department. Pre-1929 district. Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Vsesoiuznaia akademiia sel’skokhoziaistvennykh nauk im. Lenina: All-Union Lenin Academy of Agricultural Science. Vsesoiuznaia Kommunisticheskaia Partiia (bolsheviki): All-Union Communist Party (bolsheviks): Official name of the Communist party of the Soviet Union from 1918 to 1952. See Komsomol. Vsesoiuznyi Sovet Narodnogo Khoziaistva: All-

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vso

Volost’ Votchina

Vozhd’ (pl. vozhdy) White(s) Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate

Zemstvo

Zhdanovschina

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Union Council of the Economy, set up in late 1917 to manage industry, particularly the nationalized large factories. Voennyi Soviet Oborony: Military Council for the Defence of the City of Leningrad, briefly existing in late August 1941. Title of pre-1929 administrative district, subdivision of guberniia. Patrimony, land held in private ownership by Muscovite nobility (as opposed to conditional tenure). Boss, usually meaning Stalin when capitalized. See Red. People’s Commissariat that served as checking organ and auditing body, inspecting the execution of government decrees and the operation of state organizations. It later became the Soviet Control Commission and the Ministry of Soviet Control. Prerevolutionary administrative body concerned with local affairs, such as the building of bridges, roads, and canals, as well as fire fighting, health care, and education. “The Zhdanov Thing,” or “the Zhdanov period” (compare Ezhovshchina). While the word was never used in official Soviet discourse, it became the label often given to the ideological offensive of 1946 to 1948, when Zhdanov engaged in a public attack on those in the arts whose work had supposedly shown too little Communist spirit.

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This book aims at filling a gap in the historiography of the Soviet Union. Because of certain events after his death, no book-length biography of Andrei Aleksandrovich Zhdanov (1896–1948) has ever appeared in any language, including Russian.1 Zhdanov, though an unsavoury character, was too significant a political figure during the 1930s and 1940s to have been thus neglected. Following the story of one man’s life, particularly of an important political leader, presents insights into the history of Russia and the Soviet Union that other books on social, economic, cultural, or political history might disregard, especially the role of the personality in history. Ironically, the Soviet Union provides us with one of the strongest counts to Marx’s thesis that individuals play an ephemeral role in steering the forces of history; for without Vladimir Ilyich Lenin the Bolsheviks would neither have gained nor maintained power in 1917 and 1918. And without Iosif Stalin millions of people might have lived rather than died in the meat-grinder of collectivization, “de-kulakization,” the Great Terror, ethnic deportation, murder of prisoners of war, and an inhumane military strategy during World War ii. There was no particular need for the crude and ill-conceived project of herding peasants into collective farms between 1929 and 1931. Nor was there a cogent reason to step up the pace of industrialization in 1928–29. And no argument can justify the murder of hundreds of thousands of potential political opponents in 1937–38. These are but three crucial decisions for which Stalin, first and foremost, was personally responsible in this highly personalized political system. His main accomplices in making his devastating resolutions were a small group of men that

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included Andrei Zhdanov, who thus left his own imprint on the course of Soviet history. I have used a wide range of sources in writing this book, among which are many newly declassified documents that have become available in Russia since the late 1980s. Papers relevant to Zhdanov’s life are mainly kept at rgaspi and rgani in Moscow, although some documents can be now perused in the West, for instance at Stanford University in California, Cambridge University in England, and the Library of Congress.2 A few items were culled from the collection held at garf in Moscow. The accessible documents of the Central Committee’s Secretariat, Orgbiuro, and Politburo in these archives and the papers in Zhdanov’s personal archive3 make it possible to reconstruct key aspects of Zhdanov’s work, such as his preparation of important resolutions issued in the name of the Central Committee (cc) and Soviet government in his capacity as cc secretary (handwritten versions of some decrees and of some of his more notorious speeches are available in the archives).4 Material on his leadership of the Leningrad party can be found as well in those Moscow repositories, although his role in Leningrad can be traced more comprehensively at tsgaipd5, which is accessible to researchers only with difficulty. I have traced an earlier part of Zhdanov’s career in documents kept in the provincial state archive, gopano, in Nizhnii Novgorod and at tsgaipd. Among other primary sources, I used the provincial papers of Tver’ and Nizhnii Novgorod and the national newspaper Pravda as well as published memoirs and diaries of several protagonists in Soviet history.6 Primary sources relevant to a life of Zhdanov are thus plentiful and extremely varied, but some crucial documents and entire archival collections are kept under lock and key, or are only accessible to a select number of Russian researchers. In Moscow alone, for instance, the archives of the secret police,7 Foreign Affairs ministry, Defence ministry, and the president of the Russian Federation may all contain evidence of Zhdanov’s moves.8 Other documents may have disappeared in several waves of destruction of papers, so that blank spots can only be filled in by cautious use of circumstantial evidence and the logic of inference.9 Furthermore, unravelling the mechanism by which documents were collected or acquired by the many archives is difficult. When various relevant materials are scattered throughout a number of archives, some of which are inaccessible, it may be impossible to reconstruct precisely the manner in which certain decisions were made. Moreover, from at least the 1920s onward the initiative for certain decisions was conveyed verbally at infrequent (and usually unrecorded) Politburo sessions, at sessions of its special commissions, or even at late-night dinners at Stalin’s dacha (particularly after 1945).10 A kind of private short-hand record of

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authoritative statements made by Stalin during such meetings was maintained by people like Zhdanov, L.M. Kaganovich, or Georgi Malenkov in their pocket-notebooks. Yet for the researcher, deciphering their handwriting and interpreting the notes are daunting tasks.11 Some things appear to be missing from Zhdanov’s personal files. Fond 77 contains one or two lengthy private letters that he wrote as a teenager to relatives and many letters he received that postdate the Revolution, but no further private letters written by him after 1917 (while one expects that at least some recipients would donate Zhdanov’s personal letters to his files, none can be found in it).12 Post1917 documents authored or edited by Zhdanov in fond 77 are almost always related to his professional political life. This void has complicated the search for Zhdanov’s personality, for which personal correspondence would have provided a rich source. How should we explain the gap? Zhdanov was adept at keeping his cards close to his chest and he was savvy enough to recognize that leaving a trail of his genuine convictions and intimate thoughts in private letters, diaries, or memoirs was dangerous in those most lethal of times. Furthermore, after 1917 he was usually swamped with work and may not have found much time to correspond with his family or write a diary. It nevertheless stands to reason that he wrote some letters to his wife, sisters, or son, all of which likely remain in the possession of the latter, who has yet to share with the outside world any such papers in his possession. If crucial documents of this kind exist, it is to be hoped that researchers in future will gain permission to investigate them and thus be able to adjust my estimation of Zhdanov’s motivations as a politician. We still await the opening of a number of archives and access to others has become more cumbersome in the last few years. Nevertheless, researchers have been treated to a wealth of recently published annotated document collections in Russian that reduce some of the time spent on archival researches. Though my research has benefited from some of the material that has become available, I have kept in mind Stephen Kotkin’s sobering warning that even if formerly inaccessible archives can aid us in telling the Soviet story, we should resist the temptation to rely on documents to the exclusion of other sources.13 Thus, for example, in reconstructing Zhdanov’s life and career from his birth to 1918, I combined the archival material in fond 77 of rgaspi with secondary works by S.B. Borisov and others, the published reminiscences of his son, Iurii Andreevich Zhdanov, my interview with Iurii in July 2000 in Rostov-on-the-Don, and my general understanding of the prerevolutionary era.14 A few words about this interview seem in order, for testimony such as his is inevitably limited by a fiercely personal perspective and bias.

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When I met Iurii Andreevich Zhdanov, he turned out to be a man of remarkable vitality and energy. At eighty-one he still worked full time, heading a centre of institutes of higher education of the Northern Caucasus region of Russia, a job he had taken up after a long tenure as rector of the State University of Rostov. He is an extremely versatile intellectual, by training a biochemist, with various other talents, one of which is writing poetry.15 Iurii, resembling his father, has a keen sense of humour, and he is well mannered and friendly upon acquaintance. Russians would call him kul’turnyi.16 Despite his affability, it was obvious that he managed our interview in a deliberate manner, smoothing out or passing over any negative aspects of his father’s activities. Indeed, even though I had come prepared with a number of questions, I had little chance to field them systematically, since Iurii Andreevich set out on what almost became a monologue right from the start of our exchange. Many of the topics he covered echoed the contents of the one article he has published on his father, indicating an oft-rehearsed story about things past.17 In tone Iurii Andreevich’s worship of his father was remarkably similar to the eulogies written by the sons of Lavrenti Beria, Malenkov, and Nikita Khrushchev about their fathers.18 To be fair, I had told Iurii Andreevich that my main aim in interviewing him was to learn about his father’s personality rather than his political actions. Despite its limitations, the interview was valuable, particularly in helping me to understand the domestic environment in which Andrei Zhdanov grew up, his behaviour as a husband and father, and the cultural, philosophical, and literary frames of reference that informed his political actions besides the ideas of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin. In searching for Zhdanov the private man, one is otherwise almost exclusively limited to some scattered remarks in the memoirs of Svetlana Stalin, who was once married to Iurii Zhdanov. Beyond published and unpublished archival documents, I have incorporated information from many sources – memoirs, diaries, newspaper articles, the interview with Iurii Zhdanov, obituaries, photographs, films, paintings, interviews; scholarly and non-scholarly monographs, papers, and articles on Soviet history in five languages; general works of philosophy, history, historiography, sociology, and literary criticism; Soviet-era books, brochures, and articles on history, philosophy, politics, economics, ideology, and culture; the writings of Lenin, Stalin, Leon Trotsky, Nikolai Bukharin, Grigorii Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, and Zhdanov himself; collections of political decrees, fiction, satirical works, encyclopedias; and my discussions with a number of specialists in the field of Soviet and Russian studies and other academics.

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Introduction

th e lif e a nd times o f a n d r e i z h da n ov, 1896–1948

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Partner in Crime

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i n tro d uc t io n Stalin’s Accomplice And I know that when all the necessary research is completed, when all the facts are gathered, and when they are confirmed by the necessary documents, the people who were responsible for these evil deeds will have to answer for them, if only before their descendants. Dmitrii Shostakovich1 People who know as little as possible are easier to lead. Zhdanov, Suslov, and their students occupied themselves with this “minimum.” Dmitrii Volkogonov2

At the height of his career, Andrei Aleksandrovich Zhdanov (1896– 1948) was seen in the West as the heir apparent of Soviet leader Iosif Stalin.3 Although more contractor than architect, Zhdanov was one of the great builders of the Soviet edifice. While the German Sovietologist Boris Meissner exaggerated in 1952 when he labelled Zhdanov the most important builder, after Stalin, of the Soviet empire and of “Soviet patriotism,” it is undeniable that Zhdanov made a key contribution to the creation of the Stalinist autocracy.4 In highly politicized societies, such as Nazi Germany or the ussr, in which citizens have to profess publicly (and sometimes privately) their loyalty to the reigning political ideals that legitimize the rule of the political leadership, the role of chief ideologist, which Zhdanov held for several years, is perhaps the most important after that of leader.5 But Zhdanov’s political role stretched further than ideological chief alone and can be seen as a Soviet composite of Hitler’s lieutenants Josef Goebbels, the propaganda chief, and Rudolf Hess or Martin Bormann, the Nazi party’s highest bureaucrats.6 In 1934 Andrei Zhdanov suddenly became a high-ranking Soviet leader – at least it seemed sudden to contemporary Western observers. Equally abruptly anything more than an occasional oblique reference to him disappeared soon after his death.7 Zhdanov’s career often resembles that of Sergei Mironovich Kirov; but while the name Kirov evokes today a world-famous ballet ensemble, Zhdanov is largely unknown in both the Western world and in Russia.8 Biographies of Hitler, Stalin, and even Mao are legion. In the case of the Nazi leader-

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ship, biographies of Hitler’s lieutenants are equally numerous.9 Scholarly biographies of “Stalin’s Men,” as Roy Medvedev has dubbed them, began to appear in the 1990s, but even now they are few.10 Derek Watson has written on Viacheslav Molotov’s premiership before World War ii and Amy Knight on secret-police chief Lavrentii Beria and on Kirov, while Arkady Vaksberg’s biography of the abominable lawyer Andrei Vyshinsky was translated some years ago, as was Oleg Khlevniuk’s work on Sergo Ordzhonikidze.11 Before the advent of glasnost’, Roy Medvedev gave us brief portraits of Molotov, Georgii Malenkov, Lazar Kaganovich, Klim Voroshilov, Anastas Mikoyan, and Mikhail Suslov, which had to be based primarily on oral testimony and whatever published sources were available.12 Because of his career after Stalin’s death, many biographies of Nikita Khrushchev have been published, although none are based on exhaustive archival research.13 But on Zhdanov nothing of substance has ever appeared, neither in Western languages nor, remarkably, in Russian, even though certain papers in his personal archive incontrovertibly indicate that a hagiographical biography was prepared even before his death.14 Since the early 1990s historians of the Soviet Union have begun the enormous work of charting the evolution of the first Communist state from November 1917 until August 1991 on the basis of archival documents that are slowly being declassified. In recent years, many works have been published on the basis of these newly available sources. In addition, memoirs that could not be published in Soviet times have appeared, as have works based on interviews with eyewitnesses of what went on under Stalin and even Lenin.15 Together with the aid of many outstanding analytical works that had been published in the West prior to the collapse of the Soviet regime (in terms of Soviet political history relatively little of scholarly value was published in the Soviet Union between the late 1920s and 1987), the picture of Soviet history that can be conjured up is no longer monochromatic or tentative, although many blanks remain. Particularly in biographies of Stalin, recently published correspondence, and discussions of different aspects of Soviet history one finds bits and pieces about the people who surrounded Stalin and helped him build the Soviet edifice. Nevertheless, those supporting figures usually remain vague.16 Even if the apparatchiks ruled by Stalin and his men followed their orders imperfectly, as many scholars have shown, the Soviet regime was one in which a very few men made key decisions. For fourteen years Zhdanov was one of them, while during the preceding decade he had been actively involved as a regional leader in the enormous transformation of the “first socialist state.” This biography therefore contributes to a more profound understanding of such projects as Soviet

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collectivization and industrialization, the Great Purge of 1936–38, the ruthless conduct of the war by the Soviet leadership, the postwar reimposition of ideological orthodoxy inside the ussr, and the beginnings of the Cold War.17

Andrei Zhdanov grew up in a nurturing, comparatively wealthy, and enlightened environment in late tsarist Russia. He loved nature and believed in man’s innate goodness. Throughout his life, Zhdanov remained a believer in the abstract ideal of supreme social justice and ultimate human dignity, sharing this faith with so many others during the last century.18 His desire was the establishment of a communist earthly paradise inhabited by enlightened, holistic, altruistic individuals.19 His fault was that he dedicated his life to Lenin’s and Stalin’s naive and simplistic road to achieving that ideal in a place that, even judged by their own Marxist standards, was “unripe” for its application. Peter Sloterdijk’s insightful words about Lenin – “Here was an absolute will to revolution in search of a halfway suitable theory, and when it became evident that the theory was not really appropriate … a compulsion to falsify, reinterpret, and distort arose out of the determination to apply it” – can typify Zhdanov just as well.20 Zhdanov, like Lenin, became increasingly cynical in his pursuit of a socialist Eden. It is impossible to assess precisely where Lenin’s, Stalin’s, or Zhdanov’s cynicism ended and (misguided) sincerity took over. The select group handpicked by Stalin to lead the country seemed to believe that what they did was good, guided by a version of the cliché “no pain, no gain,” even if they engaged in Orwellian “double speak,” saying one thing in public and something quite different among themselves. And it is impossible to establish exactly which of Zhdanov’s statements express his sincerely held beliefs. Public dissembling and codified consensus were common to all Communist bosses once the Party seized power in 1917. Zhdanov and the others used certain ritualized formulae in their articles and speeches, a hybridized style derived from Marx, Lenin, and increasingly, from the middle of the 1920s, Stalin. Yet despite our uncertainty about Zhdanov’s sincere commitment to the cause, he never seems to have doubted his “career choice” or the Party’s ideals from the moment he chose to become a professional politician, somewhere in the autumn of 1917. Like Stalin, Zhdanov can be seen first and foremost as a politician.21 From the age of twenty-one until his death, his life was politics, and even his wife, son, and sisters, when employed, were occupied with political work.

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Before 1914 it appeared that the carnage of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, had taught the “civilized” Europeans the absurdity of waging a lethal struggle to impose monolithic convictions upon their fellow human beings.22 The twentieth century showed how quickly a secular, rational, and humanistic environment could evolve into one in which ruthless politicians and the ideas they propagated led people to kill a new lot of heretics. Of course, this return to barbarity did not occur in a vacuum. An empire such as that of Tsar Nicholas ii, torn apart by seething class antagonism, social injustice, the dislocation of early industrialization, rural overpopulation, and burgeoning nationalism, was far removed from the sphere of the Western middle class at the fin de siècle. Thus, the brutality of the Soviet regime can be partially explained by its historical inheritance: Russia’s belated socio-economic modernization and its tradition of autocratic government, which then combined with the devastating effect of the First World War. Had Lenin and Stalin not capitalized on these conditions, however, the Soviet Union would not have come into being, nor would it have metamorphosed into an emblematic “evil empire.” Western intellectuals in the 1930s already emphasized the similarity between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, the relative synchronicity and proximity of their development making such comparisons tempting.23 In the early days of the Cold War, the two regimes were grouped together as prime examples of totalitarian states, despite their ideological differences.24 “Totalitarian” regimes – that is, regimes that have established total control over their subjects’ deeds and thoughts – of course only exist in fiction, as in the work of Zamyatin, Huxley, Orwell, or Atwood.25 A totalitarian political system in which a regime’s control over all aspects of human life (including human thought) is absolute can only be an idealtypus in the Weberian sense.26 But there have been modern dictatorships that have engaged in the wholesale demonization and subsequent annihilation of massive numbers of “others,” of “internal enemies,” on the basis of race, religion, or class, and of these Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union were the pioneers. While Zhdanov and Stalin never succeeded in controlling their subjects’ thoughts or brainwashing them into accepting the slavish role of loyal worker bees, they did try to turn their subjects into flesh-and-blood copies of the ideal collective farmer and factory worker as represented in the oversized sculptures of Vera Mukhina (1889–1953), whose work one can still see in Moscow. Stalin’s and Zhdanov’s efforts yielded some results; for until the very final days of the empire, many among the Soviet peoples maintained a belief in the legitimacy of their political and socioeconomic system and its superiority over the tsarist

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empire and contemporary Western systems.27 Most Soviet citizens were quite patriotic, supporting their country’s relative egalitarianism, rejecting private enterprise and religion, and appreciating their welfare system, job security, and free health care.28 Obviously, no one actually became a prototypical new Soviet woman or man, liberated from false consciousness and alienation. Indeed, the Soviet experiment makes abundantly clear how Marxism-Leninism was fatally mistaken in asserting the possibility of creating a Homo sovieticus, a “harmonious being … a New Man without antagonistic tension.”29

The structure of this book is chronological, a form that seems most appropriate to a presentation of someone’s life. I have organized the narrative around the “traditional” breaking points of Soviet history – the Bolshevik coup and the outbreak of civil war; Lenin’s death; the Great Turn of 1929–30; the Seventeenth Party Congress; the Great Terror; the outbreak of the Second World War in Europe; the German invasion of the ussr; victory in Europe; the beginning of the Cold War – which seems especially fitting because of a symmetry between shifts in Zhdanov’s personal fortune and these watersheds. Since the last years of Zhdanov’s life are so rich in crucial events and developments, I have extended the postwar period over two chapters. It is remarkable how often the turning points in Zhdanov’s life coincide with major upheavals within Soviet (Russian) history. Chapter 1 (“Youth”) tells how, in 1917–18, the twenty-one-year-old Zhdanov had just been given his army commission when the February Revolution broke out. By throwing in his lot with the eventual winner of the struggle for the tsar’s mantle, he had already become a local political boss by early 1918. The second chapter (“Rise of a Bolshevik Chieftain”) follows Zhdanov from July 1918 in Ekaterinburg, where the last tsar and his family were executed, through the Civil War to his establishment as a Bolshevik chief of regional stature. Later, as the “Proconsul of Nizhnii Novgorod” (chapter 3), Zhdanov began to ingratiate himself with Stalin. With the onset of the Five-Year Plan and the collectivization of agriculture in 1928–29, Zhdanov’s personal fortune kept pace with the grand developments affecting the Soviet Union. He survived his involvement in implementing the Great Turn towards modernization (chapter 4) and was transferred to Moscow in 1934. The fifth chapter (“Moscow and Leningrad”) concentrates on his work as junior secretary of the Central Committee (cc) of the AllUnion Communist Party in Moscow and as Leningrad chief beginning in December 1934 after his predecessor, Kirov, was assassinated. These positions allowed Zhdanov to display his theoretical talents and his

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unrivalled ability to anticipate Stalin’s wishes regarding matters of ideology, express key ideas following Stalin’s logic, and execute Stalin’s guidelines in political matters, particularly in the realm of ideology and culture. In chapters 5 and 6 (“Purification”) we see Zhdanov consistently boosting his public profile and proving his reliability to Stalin between 1934 and 1939. Zhdanov manipulated the Party’s blood purge of 1937–38 to promote his stature, afterwards becoming head of the Party’s agitation-and-propaganda section. Proof of his promotion from journeyman to master was his first (and last) major address to a Party congress in early 1939. As chapter 7 (“Dragon Teeth”) describes, a period of intimate collaboration with Stalin now began. This close working relationship was broken off in June 1941, only to resume in December 1945. By 1939 Zhdanov had acquired the status achieved earlier by Molotov, and towards 1941 he even outflanked the more senior Stalinists Voroshilov, Kalinin, Andrei Andreev, and Kaganovich.30 Stalin engineered a rejuvenation of the leadership on the eve of the German invasion of the Soviet Union.31 Thus Beria, Malenkov, Khrushchev, and Nikolai Bulganin had been promoted to the highest echelons by 1939, but none of these Young Turks seemed as important as Zhdanov. Stalin showed a strong affection for Zhdanov, who became a kind of surrogate son for the Vozhd’. As Molotov said to Feliks Chuev: “After Kirov he [Stalin] loved Zhdanov before all,” and “Stalin appreciated Zhdanov more than anyone else. He simply was splendidly inclined toward him.”32 Zhdanov’s wartime career, his stint in Finland, and his return to Moscow are covered in chapters 8 and 9. The years 1946-48 have been dubbed the period of the Zhdanovshchina, as Zhdanov’s influence seemed to surpass everyone else’s in Stalin’s environment in a manner comparable to Ezhov’s ascendancy during the Great Terror. While the vicious tone of this immediate postwar period did great psychological damage to Zoshchenko, Akhmatova, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, and other Russian artists and thinkers, at least those under attack by Stalin’s cardinal of ideology “did not lose their lives.”33 Soon after Zhdanov’s death in 1948 Bernard Pares wrote that “two candidates for leadership [had been] in training – one, Vyacheslav Molotov, for the country, and one, Andrei Zhdanov, for the Party. The more important of the two was the second.”34 Zhdanov’s final years and his strange political departure and death are the subject of “The Selfless Fighter Succumbs” (chapter 10). An epilogue is in order, for Zhdanov’s story does not end with his death. I will briefly touch upon the circumstances surrounding the arrest of people who had been closely associated with him in Moscow, Leningrad, and Gor’kii in the

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Leningrad Affair.35 The book concludes with an assessment of Zhdanov’s political career, his accomplishments, and his failures. Since others have presented interesting psychological – or sociological – portraits of Stalin, and since this book is not about Stalin but about Zhdanov, I will not delve into the apparent emotional attachment of Stalin to Zhdanov. Suffice it to propose that there was a a symbolic paternal-filial quality that occasionally informed the relationship fantasmatically from both sides. Throughout Stalin’s career as political leader, Stalin often resembles the pater familias of an extended family of competing brothers and sons, possibly reflecting his Georgian culture.36 This biography necessarily explores the plausible but not well documented role of political intrigue in Zhdanov’s career. The rivalry between Stalin’s lieutenants has generally been overrated as a dynamic force in Soviet politics, as I will argue in the latter half of the book. Several Western scholars have gone so far as to label Zhdanov a moderate among Soviet leaders, whereas others consider him a hawk who managed to leave a strong personal imprint on postwar policies. Both groups of historians offer generalized statements on the basis of very limited evidence.37 Ultimately, it seems, the mistaken hypothesis of the pervasive impact on Soviet policy of a rivalry between Georgii Malenkov and Andrei Zhdanov originates with speculations by the Menshevik emigré Boris Nicolaevsky.38 Admittedly, Malenkov and Zhdanov were hardly close friends. Yet in Stalin’s time, no one strove for an excessively intimate friendship with a fellow leader, since such intimacy provoked the boss’s suspicion.39 Before Stalin was increasingly sidelined by the deteriorating state of his health after 1950, he left little room for political initiatives by his lieutenants or “personal vendettas” fought out among his courtiers.40 Stalin outlined in some detail the political course before and after the war. Competition between his comrades-in-arms, reined in by his own heavy hand, was far less pronounced than it has been made out to be in various works dealing with the immediate postwar period in Soviet history.41 Zhdanov absorbed himself in the Stalinist mindset. After his transfer to Moscow in 1934, he became well nigh Stalin’s ideal political partner. He showed an almost unerring talent for anticipating Stalin’s preferences and negotiated obstacles in a manner that usually increased Stalin’s delight with his favourite. Such favour gave Zhdanov a qualified autonomy after his transfer to Moscow, just as Stalin’s patronage gave other lieutenants similar qualified agency. But it was Stalin who initiated most of the important policies attributed to Zhdanov. Certainly, Stalin’s power was not unlimited, but most of the

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limitations on his power derived from the fact that no single human being has the capacity to control a vast and ever-increasing bureaucratic apparatus and a population of more than 160 million spread out over one-sixth of the Earth’s landmass. Stalin’s power was not limited by any real agency among his lieutenants. Indeed, the opportunities to subvert, ignore, or even oppose Stalin became rather greater the further one was removed from him, whether physically or within the hierarchy. Since Zhdanov publicly presented several of what were in reality Stalin’s ideas and projects, it is tempting to portray him as their creator or inventor, but this is nevertheless erroneous.42 The life of Andrei Zhdanov was inextricably linked with the political history in which he participated. Zhdanov helped to mould important political developments in the Stalinist era, while his life was reciprocally moulded by the highly politicized context of the first thirty years of the Soviet Union’s existence. By evaluating the life of this “selfless fighter” for communism, the reader may be able to appreciate better this formative period of Soviet history and the distribution and use of power in the evolving Soviet system. I invite the reader now to embark on a comparable assessment of the weight and worth of one man’s life and observe the adroitness with which Andrei Zhdanov lived and worked within the Soviet power structure.

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1 Youth, 1896–19181 Like many weak people who take something upon their shoulders that is contrary to their nature, he became a fanatic dogmatic, attempting to find guidance and reassure himself. Svetlana Allilueva2

c h ildho o d Andrei Zhdanov was born on 14 February 1896 in the town of Mariupol’ on the shores of the Sea of Azov in Ekaterinoslav guberniia. He was the youngest child and only son of thirty-five-year-old Aleksandr Alekseevich Zhdanov, a school inspector in the region,3 whose father had been a rural priest, and Ekaterina Pavlovna Gorskaia, daughter of a Russian noble family. Two of her ancestors had been rectors of the same academy where her husband defended his master’s thesis, and one of them had been a member of the Holy Synod, the governing body of the Orthodox church. Ekaterina Pavlovna was an uncommonly well educated woman for the times. She had trained as a classical pianist.4 Much of the early rearing of Andrei, however, fell to an illiterate nanny, as was the custom among the Russian elite. Andrei’s birth had been a difficult one, but while Ekaterina had no more children after him, she eventually recovered enough to occupy herself with the education of her four children, particularly developing their musical talents. Andrei learned to play the piano and the Russian accordion (garmonika), sang in a choir, and mastered certain individual opera parts.5 He was thus destined to become the pianist at Stalin’s soirées of the 1930s and 1940s. Although Andrei’s father was a fairly well positioned tsarist bureaucrat, and despite the considerable status of Ekaterina’s family, the Zhdanovs appear not to have been wealthy. Aleksandr Alekseevich, who had received the degree of Master of Theology in 1891 at the Moscow Theological (Dukhovnaia) Academy, was probably the first Zhdanov who had

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risen above the social stratum of the parish priest. No records show that the Zhdanovs owned anything like a country estate (as families of means, such as Lenin’s, often did). Still, although they usually lived in rented dwellings, the Zhdanovs were much better off than the great majority of Russians and decidedly middle class, not just in terms of their economic status but also in terms of their manners and cultural taste.6 In 1897 the Zhdanov family relocated to the regional capital, Ekaterinoslav (today Dnipropetrovsk in Ukraine). In the 1890s the city boomed as a centre of industrialization in that part of the tsar’s empire, located strategically between the iron-ore mines of Krivoi Rog to the west and the coal fields of the Donets Basin to the east. Connected to both areas by railroad, metallurgical and engineering industries had quickly been founded in Ekaterinoslav. Its population was growing exponentially. The immigrants consisted mainly of ethnic or cultural Russians and Jews, for at this stage of Russian industrialization, the Ukrainians were primarily rural.7 Pogroms and other forms of social unrest were a fairly common phenomenon in the volatile circumstances of towns such as Ekaterinoslav, which were filled with uprooted people adjusting to city life.8 The Zhdanovs hid Jewish neighbours when pogroms broke out in Ekaterinoslav in the late 1890s.9 After a brief stint as director of a teachers’ college at Preslav in the Tauride guberniia, Aleksandr Zhdanov was transferred in 1901 to faraway Korcheva, a small town in Tver’ guberniia.10 His relocation to Korcheva may have been the result of a clash with tsarist authorities.11 Those involved in education, whether as teachers or students, in early-twentieth-century Russia tended to be critical of the regime, and the Zhdanovs were no exception. Among their acquaintances were such people as Anna Ivanovna Pospelova, a teacher in the Korcheva district and the aunt of a later editor of Pravda, Petr Nikolaevich Pospelov (1898–1979).12 One of Andrei’s godfathers in Mariupol’ had been an archpriest, but in the second half of the 1890s his father grew disenchanted with autocracy, Orthodoxy, and the political status quo prevailing in Russia. One can suggest several reasons for this.13 Aleksandr read the Russian critics from V.G. Belinskii onward and personally witnessed the dire conditions of Russia’s emerging industrial working class in Ekaterinoslav and the abuse to which Russia’s Jews, the authorities’ favourite scapegoats, were subject. Then, too, he may have been snubbed by the establishment as a social climber who had married above his station. Though dissatisfied with the state of affairs in the Russian monarchy and despite his transfer, Aleksandr and Ekaterina never became the monarchy’s overt polit-

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ical opponents. There is no evidence of any revolutionary activity by either in 1905, and Aleksandr was buried in an Orthodox ceremony in 1909.14 In Korcheva, a small administrative centre, Andrei spent much of his childhood in and around a modest rented wooden house.15 Although the weather of Central Russia is far less pleasant than the comparatively mild climate of Southern Ukraine, the Tver’ region had its advantages for the Zhdanovs. They were living in the heartland of Russia, and Tver’, a relatively large and modernizing city, was situated on the Nikolaevskii railway connecting Moscow and St Petersburg. In another implicit criticism of the tsarist regime, Ekaterina Pavlovna and Aleksandr Alekseevich decided to school their children themselves in Korcheva.16 Aleksandr Alekseevich Zhdanov was well equipped to give his children a broadly based education. He had defended his master’s dissertation on the Book of Revelation, read at least a handful languages, and studied Russian folklore.17 During the 1930s and 1940s, besides showing off the musical skill he had learned from his mother, Andrei Zhdanov paraded before Stalin his sense of humour and ability to deliver Russian chastushki (roughly, a Russian version of the limerick), many of which he had gathered during during his youth and young adulthood in Tver’ and Nizhnii Novgorod, following his father’s example.18 As an adult, Andrei Zhdanov displayed a sharp sensibility in appraising (and lampooning) other people, knew how to ingratiate himself, and was extremely willing to please – talents he had acquired while growing up.19 Each spring the damp weather affected the health of Aleksandr Alekseevich in Korcheva. He developed a debilitating rheumatism of the joints, accompanied by heart disease. In March 1909, a mere fortyeight years old, he caught pneumonia during one of his inspection trips and died when the illness was complicated by an apparent heart attack.20 The next year Ekaterina Zhdanova moved the family to Tver’, where she enrolled two of her daughters in the local girls’ gymnasium and her son in the local realschule.21 To enter the third form, Andrei had to sit a special entry examination in August 1910, which he passed without difficulty. The family was clearly less well off after the death of the father. The Zhdanovs made ends meet on a state pension and exemptions such as the waiver of school fees because of the late Aleksandr’s government service. Andrei earned some additional money as a tutor of younger children. The impecunious state of his family appears to have contributed to the adolescent Andrei’s growing resentment of the tsarist authorities.22 Exposure to regimented public schooling must have been a profound shock for the fourteen-year-old Zhdanov. Academically he

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soon excelled and continued to do so throughout his four years at the school. But his affective skills were severely tested outside of the safe confines of his parental home when, for the first time in his life, he was surrounded by boys inside and outside the classroom. His status as a kind of ward of the government would have enhanced his insecurity. Andrei’s school was probably as much a hotbed of political unrest as Tver’s boys’ gymnasium.23 Keen to be accepted, the impressionable boy joined the bandwagon of political radicalism. The roots of his turn to Marxist social democracy probably should be located in his school years. To begin with, he may have shared with his classmates a sense of inferiority about his school. Although he was among the few Russian boys who attended a secondary school at this time – and a realschule was considered to be an educational establishment of high quality – it was second best to the gymnasia, which were institutes attended by the children of the tsarist elite. More than eighty years later, Andrei Zhdanov’s son suggested that a feeling of being second best informed his father’s Weltanschauung, which may have found its origins in the crucial formative years when Andrei was entering his adolescence. On the outside looking in, Andrei came to resent elitism and social privilege, expressing as an adult a “hostility toward the cult of aesthetics, the style of the salon, aristocratism, decadence and modernism.”24 He took pride in calling himself a “plebeian of the soul” rather than an “aristocrat of the soul.” In his years at secondary school, Zhdanov’s initially unpolished disaffection with the world evolved into more defined political convictions. The hatred and resentment cultivated by Marxism appealed not just intellectually but emotionally to many young Russians.25 One could suggest in Zhdanov’s case that Marxism’s ironclad certainties were particularly attractive to a boy who had lost his adored father at a crucial age and was barred from entering the elite.26 By August 1914 Zhdanov had joined one of the two Marxist youth groups active in Tver’, thus entering a trial period in preparation for full membership of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party (rsdlp). His group was led by A.I. Krinitskii (1894–1938) and included M.S. Chudov (1893–1937).27 The Tver’ native I.M. Moskvin (1890–1937), who grew up in a civil-service family and had attended the boys’ gymnasium, may have been a key tutor for the circle. Most members of Krinitskii’s group were young intellectuals and former students of the gymnasium, the realschule, or the Orthodox seminary in the city, but Chudov, a native of the town of Bezhetsk, was an actual factory worker. There was a parallel group that included future Supreme Soviet secretary A.F. Gorkin (1897–1988) and P.N. Pospelov.

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th e f irs t wo r l d wa r Andrei Zhdanov graduated top of his class on the eve of World War I. Nevertheless, since only a gymnasium diploma gained one automatic entry to institutes of postsecondary education, Zhdanov needed to complete another preparatory term from the fall of 1914 to the spring of 1915. His decision to continue his education may have been prompted by the exemption it promised from military training and service. He duly received a dispensation, for a generous five years, at the outbreak of the war.28 In the summer of 1915 the tsarist armed forces wavered in an endless retreat and their chances for victory looked slim. Even an honourable peace seemed achievable only through a prolonged and bloody struggle. In late summer the nineteen-year-old Zhdanov moved to Moscow, entering the Petrovsko-Razumovskii Agricultural Academy as well as enrolling as a part-time student at a commercial college.29 Besides testifying to his willingness to work, his enrolment at both schools indicates that, not long before his twentieth birthday, Andrei Zhdanov was in search of his calling, or that he was at least hedging his bets. He toyed with the idea of becoming a physical geographer or biologist, towards which his study of agronomy was a first step.30 At the commercial college, meanwhile, in the economics department, Zhdanov studied law, economic history, political science, and also (Orthodox) religion, which may have been an obligatory course.31 After a few weeks of classes, Andrei Zhdanov made a key decision. In November 1915 he formally entered the ranks of the rsdlp.32 His choice of the Social-Democrats (sd) was cemented by his growing resentment toward the Socialist-Revolutionaries (sr), by far the most popular party among his fellow students, and their apparent attempts to recruit him.33 Whether he immediately sympathized with the Bolshevik faction of the Social-Democrats is moot. After February 1917 many of his associates in the Tver’ chapter of the Party became ranking Bolsheviks, but in 1915 Lenin’s followers were in some disarray, confused about Lenin’s call from abroad for the transformation of the global war into an international class war. Key leaders inside Russia were in prison or had been exiled to Siberia for their political opposition prior to the war or antiwar stand in the summer of 1914. Others previously sympathetic to Lenin had taken a patriotic stand in the war. Indeed, despite his clear choice for the Marxists, when Zhdanov was finally called up for army service in July 1916 he showed no strong objections to joining the colours.

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Although equipped with an underground pseudonym (Iurii), Zhdanov’s political actions before his call-up were limited largely to visits to some senior Party members in Tver’, even if he later he claimed that he had “worked as a propagandist” in 1915–16.34 Although in the course of the summer of 1916 he was positively identified as a Social-Democrat by the authorities and fell from then on under the occasional surveillance of the tsarist secret police, his politics did not cause him to be expelled from his colleges. If he had been considered a dangerous political activist, he would have been arrested rather than mobilized in the spring of 1916. He may even have been elected as a member of the leading body of the Tver’ rsdlp in 1916, but like the Party’s committees elsewhere during the war, the Tver’ chapter was, in Schapiro’s words, “disorganized, intermittent, and not very effective.”35 Still, labour unrest was on the rise in Tver’ as the war stretched on, with a strike recorded at the large Rabushinskii textile factory in 1916.36 Labour activism was linked with a Social-Democratic movement in Tver’ that had a comparatively long history. In the 1860s the city boasted some of the first modern textile factories in Russia, and its population neared one hundred thousand at the outbreak of World War I.37 Albeit second tier, Tver’s Social-Democratic organization was relatively important, as evidenced by its fostering of several future Communist party bosses. Zhdanov’s connection to them aided his political career after the Revolution. By 1916 service evasion grew more difficult as a result of the army’s acute personnel shortages.38 Without any apparent protest, Zhdanov halted his studies and became a draftee. More than thirty years later, Sokolov, a friend of his youth, claimed that Zhdanov had believed at the time that as junior officer (the rank that awaited him once his training was complete) he would be in a marvellous position to conduct “Bolshevik work among the soldiers.” Yet one wonders whether Zhdanov ever said anything of the kind to his Tver’ comrades in 1916 and, if he had, whether he was sincere.39 He underwent training first in Tsaritsyn (Volgograd), then in Tbilisi, Georgia, where, on the eve of the February Revolution, which saw the overthrow of the tsar, he ended his preparation as praporshchik (ensign). After a few days of furlough to visit his family in Tver’, Zhdanov travelled to the little town of Shadrinsk, just behind the Ural Mountains in Siberia, where he had been assigned to the 139th Infantry reserve regiment.40 Zhdanov was one of the few Bolshevik leaders under Stalin who could have made a career in the rigidly structured society of Russia’s Old Regime if it had survived World War I. He came from a

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respectable background, he was well educated and involved in postsecondary studies, and he had been trained as an army officer. Indeed, he joined the rsdlp in 1915, as we have seen, but most known Social-Democrats (including members of the Duma who were moderate members of the rsdlp) were left alone by the tsarist authorities after the initial arrest of the five Bolshevik Duma members in 1914, since their Party’s organization appeared “decimated and disorganized.”41

r evolu t io n In February 1917 Shadrinsk was a small town with no more than twenty-five thousand inhabitants in Perm guberniia on the Iset’ River, 150 kilometres north-west of Kurgan and connected by railroad with Ekaterinburg.42 Ensign Zhdanov did not expect to spend much more than a few weeks there. The 139th, a reserve regiment, was probably preparing for dispatch to the Persian Front east of the Caspian Sea when news arrived of the revolutionary events in Petrograd in late February and the abdication of the tsar on 1 March 1917.43 In the provincial backwater of Shadrinsk Andrei Zhdanov found his destiny, professionally and personally, though the unassuming setting could hardly have seemed a promising stage for his first steps as a professional politician.44 Despite Shadrinsk’s modest regional significance in 1917–18 and Zhdanov’s furtive departure from it within half a year after “his” Bolshevik coup, the Short Course, the bible of the Communist movement in the 1930s and 1940s, made a point of mentioning his magnificent revolutionary work in the town.45 Commissioned on 10 February, Ensign Zhdanov resumed his activities in left-wing politics. His radical posture was not exceptional for a young officer, inasmuch as the traditional castelike officer corps resented the upstart call-ups who had replaced the wartime casualties in the course of the war.46 The moment, however, when he cast in his lot with the Bolsheviks to the exclusion of all other Social-Democrats was still some months away.47 In the late winter of 1917 Zhdanov considered himself more a Social-Democrat than a Bolshevik. The distinction between the different factions was blurred everywhere in Russia before Lenin’s arrival in Petrograd in April 1917. Even until August the Bolsheviks remained officially part of the rsdlp.48 Though Andrei Zhdanov was unlikely to have been a declared Bolshevik in the late winter of 1917, his choice for the “maximalist wing” of the SocialDemocrats thereafter fit well with his personality. The apparent indecision of the Menshevik leadership in the central and peripheral soviets and in the Provisional Government during 1917 convinced Zhdanov,

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like many of his comrades in Tver’, to side with the faction led by the resolute Lenin.49 In late March, one month after the unrest had begun in Petrograd, Zhdanov was elected member of a government commission that was to conduct meetings in Shadrinsk to explain to the local population what had happened in the capital. He was probably nominated because he boasted the right credentials – an army commission and membership in the Social-Democratic party, even though he was extremely young (judging by a photo made in 1917 he looked even younger than his twenty-one years). Despite his youthful looks, he evidently impressed both soldiers and workers from the start of his political activities in Shadrinsk. Although he knew far fewer languages than his father, he probably shared his father’s heightened linguistic sensitivity and he had a way with words. His public speaking could already hold a crowd in 1917.50 Later in his career, depending on the audience he was addressing and its mood, he veered adroitly in his speeches between erudition, measured crudeness, and humour. On 15 April 1917, in a local newspaper Andrei Zhdanov published his first article, “The Work of Dark Forces,” a diatribe against “counterrevolutionary elements.”51 Perfectly in tune with the moment, Zhdanov presented a theme that had been quite successful in galvanizing the revolutionary mood in Petrograd and elsewhere.52 Warning of nefarious foes of the Revolution, he played to his audience’s fear of losing its newly gained political rights. Such public scaremongering would become one of his specialties as a Soviet leader. Meanwhile, little if any antirevolutionary activity had materialized in Shadrinsk. As almost everywhere in Russia in the first few months after February, enthusiasm for the Revolution (however vaguely imagined) and rejection of the former regime were almost universal in the town. Indeed, the establishment of the “explanatory commission” in late March indicates that, although the Shadrinsk public had a confused understanding of what had occurred in European Russia, it was benevolently disposed towards the changes. In the provinces events developed more slowly than in the centre of European Russia. It was only on 22 May that the first local soviet of soldiers’ and workers’ deputies gathered. Organized by Zhdanov and others,53 it is not clear whether or not Zhdanov was elected its chair, but he was given the honour of opening its first meeting. Despite the apparent prestige commanded by the young ensign, the “Bolshevik” representatives Udintsev and Zhdanov were in the minority in the executive committee elected by the soviet.

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Zhdanov’s Bolshevik political convictions were not yet well defined; they certainly confused the Shadrinsk public. On 29 June the local newspaper, Iset’, published a short article announcing that a chapter of the party of “socialists-internationalists” had been organized in the town. Its executive (biuro) was chaired by Andrei Zhdanov. The name of Zhdanov’s group as reported by Iset’ reminds one of the MenshevikInternationalist group headed by Lenin’s opponent Iulii Osipovich Martov (1870–1924) in Petrograd, who often sided with the Bolsheviks when voting in the Petrograd soviet or in the Central Executive Committee elected by the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets.54 Possibly for tactical reasons, therefore, Zhdanov may have organized a local chapter of the rsdlp that joined those sympathetic to Martov’s position with those sympathetic to Lenin’s. Crucial here was that Bolsheviks and Menshevik-Internationalists called for immediate peace. By late June the desire for peace had become all the more pronounced among the soldiers. The Provisional Government had ordered an offensive on the western front that had had disastrous consequences for Russian military positions and, particularly, for Russian morale. Zhdanov’s main audience was his own regiment garrisoned in Shadrinsk. The key issue for the soldiers was peace (or how to avoid a dispatch to the front) and there was little practical difference in this matter between the standpoints of Lenin’s and Martov’s groups. The “peace party” was winning terrain among the troops. From July onward more soldiers joined the ranks of the Bolsheviks proper, but their numbers were still modest, reaching no more than twenty in Shadrinsk by midsummer.55 Finally, when everywhere in Russia authorities loyal to the Provisional Government conducted an anti-Bolshevik offensive, suspecting Lenin’s followers of having attempted a putsch in early July, the army dismissed Zhdanov in the same month for his political activism. The turn to the right faltered quickly, and the Bolsheviks re-emerged stronger than ever after July. In the wake of the July-August Party Congress (which officially marked the departure of the Bolsheviks from the rsdlp), the Shadrinsk Bolsheviks elected a town committee (gorkom) on 30 August from their burgeoning number. Zhdanov became the committee chair.

t h e t wiligh t of th e o l d r e g ime Although in his later years Andrei Zhdanov maintained that he had been a “Godless” Bolshevik since 1915, his atheist convictions did not stop him from marrying a local girl, Zinaida Aleksandrovna

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Kondrat’eva, in a church wedding in September 1917.56 Zinaida and Andrei, both just in their twenties, were henceforth each other’s closest companions. Their belated “honeymoon” consisted of travelling just ahead of the moving front in the Urals during the Civil War, from about June 1918 to June 1919. By the early winter of 1918–19 Zinaida was pregnant. In the summer of 1919 she gave birth in Tver’ to their only child, Iurii, named after his father’s underground alias.57 In the 1940s Zinaida struck her daughter-inlaw, Svetlana Allilueva (Stalina), as bossy, vulgar, and acquisitive, but Svetlana’s then husband Iurii Zhdanov considered his mother well educated (Zinaida had completed the eight-year curriculum at the women’s gymnasium in Shadrinsk in 1915) and capable of serving as an intellectual sounding board for his father, discussing wideranging political matters with him. Zinaida became an active Bolshevik, working after the Civil War in the soviet apparatus in Nizhnii Novgorod and teaching at the Higher Party School in Moscow. In her professional activities and relationship with her husband, she reminds one of Lenin’s wife, N.K. Krupskaya. Both women contributed to the cause in a self-effacing manner, and Zinaida Aleksandrovna dedicated herself primarily to the well-being of her husband and son. In part to announce his marriage to his mother and sisters, Zhdanov visited Tver’ briefly in early October 1917.58 Here he probably met his old comrades Krinitskii and Pospelov, who, as Bolshevik leaders (Krinitskii headed the Party’s city organization), had by then become members of the executive committee of the city’s soviet of workers’ deputies. Bolsheviks were numerous in the Tver’ soviet on the eve of the October Revolution.59 Zhdanov was back in Shadrinsk before the Bolshevik insurrection in Petrograd began. Because the town’s telegraph was out of order, the first news of the coup arrived only towards 1 November. As elsewhere in the country, sharply negative reactions to the insurrection outnumbered positive ones. Backed by the local Socialist-Revolutionary party organization’s moderate wing, the town’s civil servants went on strike. But Shadrinsk’s Bolshevik organization, though small (it likely had fewer than one hundred members), seemed to be in a strong position to emulate the actions of their comrades in Petrograd, since it was centred around the armed force of the 139th Regiment.60 Any attempt to declare the town Bolshevik, however, appeared premature to the cautious Zhdanov. The situation became confused when, one or two days after the news from Petrograd had arrived, the looting of the local wine storage led to a bacchanalia lasting for days or maybe weeks, during which people died from

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alcohol poisoning or from injuries sustained during drunken brawls. The moderate Socialist-Revolutionary N.V. Zdobnov, chair of the town council (duma), organized a committee to restore order, which Zhdanov joined as one of his deputies. Zhdanov’s collaboration was crucial for the moderate leaders in their attempts to restore order, since he was both leader of the local Bolsheviks and a man who commanded authority among the garrisoned soldiers.61 In the middle of November, when the drunken disruptions began to calm down, elections were held for the All-Russian Constituent Assembly, which led in Shadrinsk, as in many other places, to a victory for the local sr candidate.62 Ignoring the election results, most Russian towns were captured by Bolsheviks towards the end of the year, and in Shadrinsk, too, pressure mounted to take over the town in the name of the New Regime. But Zhdanov and his comrades continued to hesitate. On 3 January the Bolsheviks acquired a majority in local elections for the town’s soviet. Actual control over the town government, however, was only obtained three weeks later. Within this transitory period, Zhdanov, who already headed the town’s Bolsheviks, was elected the Party’s chair of the entire Shadrinsk uezd as well.63

sh adr insk’s b olsh e v ik s w in and lose p ow e r With the help of a machine gun and some twenty Red Guards who had arrived from Ekaterinburg, the Bolsheviks took over the government of Shadrinsk during the night of 24–25 January 1918. They secured the town’s post office and telegraph station, while Zhdanov may personally have led the capture of the local printing press. The timing of the coup was chosen to coincide with the opening of a joint meeting of the different soviets of workers, soldiers, and peasants of the Shadrinsk district. The morning after, in a speech “on the current situation,” Zhdanov addressed this local congress of soviets. Following the good Leninist example, he depicted the dispersed Constituent Assembly as far less democratic than soviet democracy, immediately threatened to arrest those resisting the New Regime as well as the leaders of several other political parties in the town, and ordered the closure of its moderate Socialist-Revolutinary paper.64 The meeting ratified all measures undertaken by the insurrectionists. The manner of taking power was almost a carbon copy of the successful coup led by Lenin and Trotsky in Petrograd in October 1917. A united uezd executive committee of soviets was elected, chaired by Zhdanov, but it was not yet

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exclusively Bolshevik. Some “Left” Socialist-Revolutionaries became members, and, possibly, some Mensheviks or Anarchists.65 Shadrinsk’s Bolshevik party was growing rapidly. By early spring it had around five hundred members, more than tripling its size after November 1917. After the coup its leader, Zhdanov, opted to take the portfolio of agriculture. In a rural region such as that of Shadrinsk land was undoubtedly the most pressing issue, of much greater importance than the issues of peace (which appeared imminent since an armistice with the Central Powers was in force, while the front was far away) or workers’ control of factories. In addition, Zhdanov had enjoyed some theoretical preparation in agricultural issues as a student of the Petrovsko-Razumovskii Academy. Although the Left sr in the uezd executive may have hoped that Zhdanov might bungle the land issue, the Bolsheviks used this key post to rally the peasantry – the great majority of the regional population – behind them.66 Apart from Zhdanov’s involvement with agriculture and his leadership of the local Bolsheviks, he also joined the editorial board of the workers’ and peasants’ paper, Krest’ianin i rabochii. About two weeks after the coup, he published in this paper his first serious foray as a Bolshevik theorist. “Once More about the Intelligentsia” addressed the intelligentsia’s role in postrevolutionary society, a topic that remained close to his heart all his life.67 Following a fairly straightforward Marxist line, he discussed the dilemma of the Russian intelligentsia confronted with the Bolshevik revolution. Zhdanov argued that, although previously those engaged in intellectual exploits and cultural matters had been slaves of the capitalist bourgeoisie and had strengthened its domination and exploitation, in the new circumstances the intelligentsia was faced with a clear choice: to take a position for or against the workers and peasants. To support them (as the author obviously did) would mean to give the formerly downtrodden knowledge and understanding, thus preparing them for their radiant future as masters of the world. On 25 March 1918, the district soviet abolished private landownership.68 In the wake of this highly popular measure, the poor and landless peasants received the usufruct of land previously in the possession of people who did not cultivate it themselves. The other side of the coin was that land had been nationalized and thus had legally become the property of the state. It could be redistributed by the government at will, but the peasants did not ponder this new ambiguity of ownership as long as they could occupy the land of aristocratic, middle-class, or monastic landowners. For the time being, the popularity of commissar Zhdanov and his Party was high.

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In early May, when the Bolsheviks were becoming embroiled in a civil war, the uezd organization of the Russian Communist party (Bolsheviks) re-elected Andrei Zhdanov as its chair. Within a month after his re-election, Zhdanov mysteriously vanished after giving a speech that called for a defence against the approaching Czechoslovak troops and “White-Guard bands.”69 Resurfacing in Ekaterinburg, Zhdanov sent an apologetic letter to the Shadrinsk Communists (who had been forced to go underground) on 12 June 1918.70 In the letter he claimed that “many general and personal circumstances” had forced him to leave town, one of which was his appointment as a regional organizer of the new Red Army, particularly entrusted with political, cultural, and educational matters concerning the troops.71 He expressed concern that, despite his exemplary record of work in revolutionary and soviet organizations since February 1917, “several [Shadrinsk] comrades will understand my departure wrongly as the flight of a worker from a responsible post at a difficult moment.”72 The letter suggests either that Zhdanov left Shadrinsk in order to receive authorization for his transfer ex post factum in Ekaterinburg from the military committee of the Urals’soviet gubispolkom, his superiors in the Soviet government’s hierarchy, or that he kept the orders for his transfer secret from his Shadrinsk comrades until he left for Ekaterinburg. Within days after Zhdanov’s strange flight, Shadrinsk’s defence collapsed under the surging anti-Bolshevik forces.

zh da nov ’s revolu t io n a ry yo u t h Andrei Zhdanov’s early revolutionary career was far from heroic, though an edited version of his activities was mentioned in the Short Course in 1938. It may be that, before October 1917, young Zhdanov took some risks in Shadrinsk by remaining a Bolshevik adherent. But in 1917 any such danger was slight in a sleepy provincial backwater. Indeed, even after Shadrinsk received word of the Bolshevik coup in European Russia, Zhdanov joined an sr-led local committee that restored order in Shadrinsk after the winestore looting. He began to prepare for a local takeover of power only after the Bolsheviks had been in power for more than two months west of the Urals, where they had dispersed the Constituent Assembly, muzzled the press, and prohibited most political parties. Shadrinsk fell into “soviet” hands without much resistance in late January 1918, but the Communists held the town only until Soviet rule collapsed everywhere in Siberia five months later. The peace of Brest-Litovsk, the departure of the Left srs from the Council of People’s Commissars in Moscow, and the

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Czechoslovak revolt along the Siberian railroad all led the former tsarist empire into a civil war in which the Bolsheviks fought tooth and nail to survive. The war was nearly over before the Red Army recovered most western Siberian cities. At the beginning of the struggle for Bolshevik survival, Andrei Zhdanov was hardly a model of courageous leadership. One can understand that a twenty-two-year-old man who has just been married might be unwilling to risk his life in a ferocious mortal conflagration. But politics came before personal affairs in the Bolshevik view of the world. In A People’s Tragedy, Figes remarks that Party members were “expected to lead from the front.”73 We might seriously doubt that some higher authority in Ekaterinburg called Zhdanov away in the spring of 1918. His apologetic, highly defensive letter to his Shadrinsk comrades suggests that, even if he did get officially transferred, it was largely at his own repeated request; indeed, permission might have been granted retroactively. Zhdanov, in short, seems furtively to have abandoned the organization that he had built up in the previous fifteen months. It was shattered in the early summer of 1918, when Shadrinsk fell into the hands of the Bolsheviks’ opponents. One can find in Zhdanov’s early biography a number of sins against puritan Bolshevik standards. He had a suspicious class background, and his father actually had a master’s degree in theology. Coupled with the evidence that Zhdanov had married in the Church in 1917, the details of his family life could be construed as fatal flaws, if need be.74 Moreover, he had been a tsarist officer and had shown dubious hesitation when the Bolsheviks had established themselves in Russia. Lastly, he may have fled his responsibility as a local Party leader in June 1918, another serious transgression. The circumstances of his youth made Zhdanov into a person with character traits that endeared him later to Stalin. Zhdanov’s Marxistinspired rejection of all things “bourgeois” in his teenage years was connected with the sharp deterioration of his living conditions resulting from the death of his father. Without noble status or substantial means, unable to attend the gymnasium and therefore university, the insecure adolescent felt second rate and could therefore identify easily with the downtrodden in the Revolution. As his article “The Work of Dark Forces” indicates, Zhdanov early on combined an ironclad Marxist faith with a capacity to demonize the Other. Throughout his adult life, he showed an ability to deliver an emotional appeal to the primal human urge towards violence that engulfed Russia as much during the Civil War as it did in the 1930s. But as long as the Bolshevik movement lacked a determined and self-confident leader, as it did

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until Lenin’s arrival in Petrograd in April 1917, Zhdanov’s Marxist convictions still were as steadfast as a romantic adolescent’s whimsy. His belief in Marxism solidified once he became aware, during the course of 1917, that the Bolsheviks under Lenin represented resolute certainty. During the 1920s Stalin’s pose of uncompromising steeliness was similarly attractive to Andrei Zhdanov. Zhdanov was of a different breed than most of his future colleagues in Stalin’s circle. His classical music training, his education, and his manners set him apart from the rough-and-ready masculine Stalinist clique. His refinement and courteous sensitivity may have been the partial consequence of growing up in an environment dominated by women. Later, too, he felt comfortable around his wife and her sisters; in the 1940s Svetlana Allilueva had the impression of a household dominated by Zinaida Aleksandrovna and her sisters. Still, while Zhdanov’s speeches of the 1930s and 1940s as Central Committee secretary and Leningrad chief and his post-1917 papers in general make sporadic reference to women’s issues, he never became a champion of women’s emancipation or liberation. For the Bolsheviks and for the Stalinists, socialism took priority over feminism. As a member of the intelligentsia, Zhdanov was well equipped to expound in public on ideological and cultural conformity on behalf of the leadership. As his academic success at the realschule and his simultaneous enrolment in two colleges show, he developed as a youth a rigorous work ethic that differed decidedly from that of the “Oblomovite,” an indolent Russian “superfluous man” typified by the protagonist of A.I. Goncharov’s nineteenth-century classic Oblomov.75 He shared this industriousness with Stalin himself and the other lieutenants. The early days of Zhdanov’s political career reveal another quality that proved to be of immense value in the following decades: the man was an opportunistic survivor and cautious to the point of cowardice. As a young adult, he hedged his bets by pursuing a postsecondary education that would have prepared him for a prestigious well-paid profession. Once he started drilling for a war that was waged with dwindling enthusiasm by the Russian soldiers, he happily identified with their desire for peace and, as a junior officer, succeeded in becoming the soldiers’ mouthpiece in Shadrinsk. Prioritizing his personal safety and political career, he moved to Ekaterinburg, the Bolshevik centre of the Urals. He thus saved his skin and remained connected to the Bolshevik heartland during the Civil War. Remaining at Shadrinsk might have been braver but would likely have cost his and his wife’s lives, as was the common fate of those captured by the other side in those violent times. Once he returned to Tver’ in 1919, he made use

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of a network established in his youth. Together with Gorkin, Krinitskii, Moskvin, Chudov, and Pospelov, Andrei Zhdanov was to move high up the ladder. Lastly, Zhdanov seems to have developed a precocious talent for judging opportunely the mood and wishes of groups of people and of individuals, a sensibility that also endeared him to Stalin.

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2 Rise of a Bolshevik Chieftain, 1918–1924 Like many weak people who take something upon their shoulders that is contrary to their nature, he became a fanatic dogmatic, attempting to find guidance and reassure himself. Svetlana Allilueva2

c ivil wa r Between July 1918 and May 1919, Zhdanov was forced into three more hasty departures before the White forces. After arriving in Ekaterinburg in June 1918, however, the fugitive quickly recovered from his panic at Shadrinsk . The city, one of the largest in the Urals and an industrial centre, was then the headquarters of the Bolshevik military authorities in the region. Although he was now assigned to the Red Army, which was organized to defend the New Regime against its opponents during this summer, Andrei Zhdanov never actually fought during the Civil War. Documentary sources indicate that as “inspectororganizer” and “agitation-propaganda worker,” he was primarily occupied with organizing army units and working on recruits’ morale, which meant preventing them from deserting by means other than the threat of the firing squad.1 Zhdanov’s superior was Filip Goloshchekin (1876–1941), the military commissar for the Ural region and highest-ranking Bolshevik in Ekaterinburg. Six weeks into Zhdanov’s sojourn there, with White forces approaching the city, Goloshchekin ordered the execution of the former tsar, his family, and their servants, who had been transported from Siberia to Ekaterinburg so as not to fall into the hands of the opposing forces and become a rallying point for the Bolsheviks’ foes.2 It is unlikely that Zhdanov had much to do with the episode, but he would have known of the murder of the ex-autocrat and his entourage.3 Besides the murder of the tsar and his relatives, other acts of brutality

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and mass executions by the Reds occurred in the city and its environs in July 1918.4 There is no evidence to suggest Zhdanov’s involvement in such violence. On the basis of his character and subsequent behaviour, one may suspect that he tried to avoid committing atrocities himself. It is unlikely, in that merciless struggle, that he succeeded. After the murder of the Romanovs on July 17, a week passed before the Bolsheviks abandoned the city, after which it fell into the hands of the Czechoslovaks on 1 August.5 Zhdanov retreated with the Red Army in the direction of the Bolshevik-controlled city of Perm, which he reached by September. In Perm he worked for the agitation bureau of the Ural military commissariat as head of agitation courses for the army, exhorting raw troops to hold fast against the White onslaught. His attempts at “transforming peasants into proletarians” failed comprehensively, since the fall of Perm on 24 December 1918 was largely due to massive defections by Red troops. Anti-Bolshevik sentiment in the Urals surfaced in part as a reaction to the Red Terror, the merciless treatment of real and alleged Bolshevik enemies, which began in the summer of 1918.6 From Perm the Reds moved south to Ufa, the capital of Bashkiria (today Bashkortostan). Zhdanov’s personal papers indicate that he arrived there around 1 January 1919, just after its capture by the Red Army from the Czechoslovaks.7 His assignment during the few weeks he spent at Ufa was as far removed as possible from preparing conscripts for combat or leading them in battle. He headed a six-manstrong cultural-enlightenment section subordinate to the Ufa provincial military commissariat. Now he taught soldiers basic reading and writing, together with a bare minimum of politics.8 It was a very different job from directly preparing the troops for battle, a task at which he had failed so palpably. Advancing White forces under the supreme command of Admiral Kolchak forced Zhdanov to flee anew. By midMarch the Bolsheviks had left Ufa too.9 In April 1919 Andrei Zhdanov was allowed by the Central Committee of the Russian Communist party to leave for Tver’. At first perhaps his leave was intended as a temporary furlough, but by June his transfer became permanent.10 Ironically, in what almost appeared to be a trade-off, his old acquaintance A.F. Gorkin, chairman of the provincial executive of the Tver’ soviets (gubispolkom), was assigned to the Red Army.11 From March to June 1919, more than sixty percent of the Party membership in the province of Tver’ joined Gorkin in departing for the front, but Zhdanov stayed in the Tver’ region until the end of the Civil War in 1920.12 Health problems may have kept him in Tver’. Since in future crises (particularly, but not exclusively, in wartime) he also preferred conducting affairs from a safe distance, one may specu-

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late that he subtly manoeuvred to avoid reassignment to the front. Though he had a talent for bellicose rhetoric, Zhdanov remained a dilettante in military matters; throughout most of his life he seems to have recognized this but for a brief spell on the eve and during the early days of the Second World War when, it seems, he may have convinced himself that he was something of a military strategist after all. After an arduous trip in the chaotic circumstances of the Civil War, Zhdanov arrived in Tver’ in May 1919. Considered a battle-hardened veteran, the military commissariat of Tver’ guberniia entrusted him with agitation and propaganda work among recruits for the Red Army, a job he had gained experience with in Ekaterinburg and Perm. Zhdanov’s speeches remained as ineffective as they had been in the Urals: in the course of 1919 Tver’ guberniia (as was the case elsewhere) witnessed widespread desertion and refusals to join the colours. Peasants, increasingly angry at grain requisitions and other forms of taxation, expressed their discontent in an unwillingness to fight for a regime that was not theirs.13 In some parts of the region, peasants resorted to assassinating Communist activists. Soon Zhdanov’s military involvement was reduced to delivering a few lectures to locally mobilized Red Cavalry (which he kept up until the end of 1920). Neither in World War i, the Civil War, nor World War ii did Andrei Zhdanov engage in actual combat.14 Zhdanov did not like the sight of violence and he functioned better in times of peace, despite his belligerent posturing. Although he had been an unequivocal failure as a soldier, his military experience between 1916 and 1920 left an imprint on Zhdanov’s subsequent behaviour. The Civil War was a similarly defining moment for many other leaders with whom Zhdanov collaborated closely in the 1930s and 1940s. As Orlando Figes has argued: “Nothing did more to shape the ruling attitudes of the Bolsheviks than the experience of the civil war. The image and self-identity of the Soviet regime was based on the mythology of a new order born out of armed struggle against the old; and … this foundation cult of the civil war became a vital mythological propaganda weapon of the Stalinist regime with its constant demands on the Soviet people to display the same heroic spirit, the same discipline and self-sacrifice, as they had shown in the civil war.”15 Zhdanov demonstrated a taste for military style and warrior mythology in words and deeds for the rest of his life. Like Stalin and others, and in keeping with the Soviet Union’s militaristic codifications, he continued to dress in a semimilitary tunic with boots, to work tirelessly for the cause, and, if he considered it necessary, to rule by force and decree as if under martial law. If propaganda did not work (and he had seen its limitations in motivating people in 1918 and 1919), he

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was more than willing to turn to coercion by violent means, even if he stayed personally remote from its practical application.

at h ome in t v e r ’ In June 1919 the fifth provincial congress of soviets met in Tver’. The congress came at a time when the provincial Communist party was in a precarious situation.16 Fewer than one-third of the congress delegates were Party members, although Communist ranks were reinforced by about ten percent by the presence of “sympathizers.” Partially in reaction to the army-service mobilization of trade-union members, strikes had erupted at the city’s textile factories.17 Disease, scarcity, and hunger were rampant. At the congress, Communist opponents (Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks) attempted to overthrow the Bolshevik political dictatorship in the province, but the Communists ultimately prevailed.18 Unrest began to abate towards September when the Communist authorities abandoned the attempt to mobilize factory workers, increased rations for the families of Red Army soldiers, and had the security police, or Cheka,19 sometimes ruthlessly suppress peasant revolts.20 Even into the fall, however, Cheka operatives arrested thousands of army deserters every week in the province of Tver’.21 By July 1919 the Communist party’s provincial committee (gubkom) formed an organizational bureau, headed by Zhdanov (who had apparently recovered from his war wounds), to rationalize the Party’s political work.22 This type of work suited Zhdanov much better than his military assignments. Apart from organizational work in the Party’s leadership and lecturing to Communists and Red Army soldiers, Zhdanov wrote for the provincial newspaper Tverskaia Pravda.23 He honed his skills as an orator, speaking to audiences larger than he had ever before addressed. In early September a crowd of hundreds in Tver’s main square listened to his explanation of a “Day of Soviet Propaganda.” In the same month he was called upon to show his command of Marxism before an audience of artists of the local Proletkul’t movement, on which occasion he explained the relationship between the 1918 constitution of the Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic (rsfsr) and the aims of the international workers’ movement. And in the next month, his ability to adapt his oratory to different audiences was tested again with a public speech addressing railroad workers on the “Party week” that was in progress. His public appearances contributed to the enrolment of new members of the Communist party in this membership drive.24 Towards October 1919 Zhdanov was appointed assistant editor of

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Tverskaia Pravda.25 Like his public speaking, writing for the paper helped him master the specifics of Bolshevik discourse. He learned the appropriate manner of expression so well during these formative years that, after 1934, he became one of the very few people at Stalin’s side who helped forge the rhetoric of official discourse in the Soviet Union.26 In the second half of the 1920s, many of Zhdanov’s former newspaper colleagues from Tver’ became journalists whose influence extended throughout the Soviet Union. They included Petr Pospelov and Boris Polevoi, the pseudonym of novelist B.N. Kampov (1908–81).27 Zhdanov dabbled in creative writing in those years, but considered his poems and epigrams unworthy of printing.28 He told a good joke and drew decent caricatures, according to his friend A.D. Sokolov. The fate of the Red Army and the entire Bolshevik Regime hung in the balance during the height of the drive of General Denikin’s White Army towards Moscow in September and October of 1919.29 Zhdanov’s career was going well at this time. Benefiting from his acquaintance with a number of ranking Party members in Tver’, he was appointed to the high position of deputy Party secretary and coopted into the gubkom’s membership, thus becoming one of the dozen most important political leaders of the province.30 While the White threat to Red positions diminished in November, Zhdanov aided in the organization of the sixth provincial Party conference. The conference delegates duly elected him officially to the gubkom. Of the more than one hundred people present (representing probably less than five thousand members in total), almost ninety percent endorsed him, thus ranking him third in popularity in Tver’s provincial Party leadership.31 His renown derived from his public visibility; he continued to write regularly for the paper and spoke often in public.32 This popularity eventually translated into his election to the recently formed gubkombiuro, the highest Party body in the province, in the late winter of 1920.33 The biuro had in fact been created on Zhdanov’s suggestion, in which he had followed the Central Committee’s example: in March 1919 it had for the first time elected a Politburo composed of its most senior members. By early 1920 a Bolshevik victory in the Civil War was in sight, but the inhabitants of Tver’ guberniia were plagued by disease and famine.34 In late February 1920 the next provincial Party conference, now representing more than ten thousand Communists, gathered in Tver’.35 The conference elected Zhdanov as a voting delegate to the All-Russian Ninth Party Congress, held in late March and early April 1920 in Moscow. Attending this congress was his first taste of national (all-Russian) politics. Provincial Party secretary I.A. Nevskii (1895–

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1938), head of the delegation from Tver’ and a member of the Central Executive Committee of soviets, may have introduced Zhdanov to some of the Communist chiefs, such as Sovnarkom chairman Lenin or the head of the Comintern, G.E. Zinoviev (1883–1936), but it is unlikely that they took much notice of him.36 On a local scale, though, the twenty-four-year-old Zhdanov had become one of the highest-placed leaders of the province in Tver. In recognition of this fact, he was elected a member of the Central Executive Committee of Russian soviets in July 1920. He combined the post with his membership of the gubispolkom, his deputy gubkom secretaryship, gubkombiuro membership, his leadership over the gubkom agitation-propaganda department and the Party’s gubkom cooperatives’ section, and his duties as a teacher of political economy at the Red Army’s cavalry training school.37 His stature is underlined by the fact that he was given a telephone line both at home and at work, a rarity in those days. The perquisites and benefits he enjoyed, although initially fairly negligible, were not available to those outside the Party and soviet leadership.38 But wearing so many hats (which was common for most middle-level Party leaders) amounted to a tremendous workload. Some of it was needlessly increased by the wild growth of state and Party bureaucracy, which already affected the New Regime in those early years and caused a confusing overlap of the tasks and responsibilities of many Party and state organs. In addition, efficiency would not have increased when leaders such as Zhdanov had to dash from meeting to meeting. The Party’s gubkombiuro alone met fifty-six times between September 1920 and March 1921 (ten times per month), while the entire provincial Party committee held eighteen plenary sessions (three per month), and biuro and plena discussed 476 issues, almost three issues per day on average.39 It was at this time that Zhdanov began to develop the feverish work rhythm that he tried to maintain for the rest of his life. The strain of managing such a workload led to periodic exhaustion and illness. In Tver’ province, the general interest in politics had dwindled severely by the latter half of 1920; in those months with only ten percent of the city’s soviet membership regularly attended its meetings.40 But within the select elite of the Communist party a heated discussion erupted on the role of trade unions within the Soviet political system. In September Zhdanov delivered one of the main speeches at the eighth provincial Party conference in Tver’.41 He supported Lenin and Stalin’s idea (the “Platform of the Ten”) that trade unions should be independent on paper but wholly subordinate to the Party in effect, a compromise between Trotsky’s advocacy of trade unions that were openly and officially under Party control and the view of an opposing

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group that trade unions should be independent from the Party, formally and informally. In late January 1921, Andrei Zhdanov persuaded a gathering of district and provincial Party leaders to take his postion on the issue.42 But the discussion continued, an indication that the mid-level leaders did not yet control their Party cells as fully as they would later.43 On 8 February 1921 an intense debate on the proper role of the trade unions dominated a Party conference of Tver’s city organization. Central Committee member Nikolai Bukharin (1888–1938) made an appearance in support of the Trotskyite platform, while Solomon Lozovskii (1878–1952), a ranking member of the Profintern, spoke on behalf of Lenin’s position. Very few conference delegates supported the idea of greater union independence. Lenin’s platform was supported by 649 delegates and rejected by ninety-four, while nineteen chose to abstain. Lozovskii, supported by Nevskii and Zhdanov, carried the day.44 At the ninth guberniia Party conference, which immediately followed the city conference, a discussion of the trade-union issue was cut short after delegates, polled at the outset on their support for the various platforms, gave the LeninZinoviev platform more than three-quarters of the vote.45 By early 1921 Zhdanov had relinquished some of his leadership positions to Civil War veterans who had returned home from the front. Before the ninth guberniia Party conference, he appears to have been ranked fifth in the internal pecking order, behind, for instance, Nevskii and Gorkin (who had returned from his various army assignments). Despite his defence of the Leninist platform, at the end of the meeting Zhdanov only placed fourteenth in the elections for the twenty full and candidate members of the guberniia Party committee, receiving the support of fewer than half the delegates, barely enough to allow him to keep his voting rights within the committee.46 The equally youthful trio of Gorkin, Chudov, and Pospelov, Zhdanov’s acquaintances from the Marxist reading groups of 1913–14, polled far better than he did. More irksome still, he was not among the eleven delegates chosen to go to the Tenth Party Congress in March 1921.47 In these still reasonably free Party elections, Zhdanov, who had headed the provincial government since the late summer of 1920, was apparently blamed for his heavy-handed conduct of the trade-union discussion, as well as for his failure to relieve starvation, disease, and workers’ unemployment.48 His reputation had been further damaged by the continued rebellious activity of the Socialist-Revolutionary party in the province and the frequent eruption of peasant revolts. In fact, on the very eve of the conference, “bandits” had succeeded in assassinating a member of the guberniia government. Indeed, when the Kronshtadt Revolt erupted in early March, a strike broke out at the

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province’s most important textile mill and the province was temporarily placed under martial law.49 Zhdanov had failed to calm the disorder in his domain, a record hardly mitigated by any distinction he earned during the Civil War. The end of the Civil War and the suppression of the peasant uprisings after the Tenth Party Congress marked the beginning of a more peaceful time in Soviet Russia. The transition was reflected in a more rational division of labour among the provincial leaders in Tver’. At the ninth provincial Party conference, Zhdanov had lost his position in the Party’s gubkombiuro.50 When Party leader Nevskii was transferred elsewhere, his successor was Gorkin rather than Zhdanov. Instead of Party assignments, Zhdanov was given government work in the soviet executive. In April 1921 he travelled through the provincial countryside explaining to lower-level soviet officials and peasants that the practice of forced requisitioning of agricultural products was to be replaced by a tax in kind.51 He chaired a provincial conference of cooperatives in June, in which month he was also appointed head of the newly organized provincial planning committee.52 His comeback was well under way by then. In the fall of 1921 he was appointed deputy chair of the gubispolkom and re-entered the gubkombiuro.53 At that point, however, Zhdanov faced a new threat: the Central Committee announced that there was to be a purge within all Party organizations.54 Such scrutiny of the credentials of Party members was not the first of its kind, but because it was taking place in comparatively tranquil times, the purge could be conducted with greater thoroughness.55 While Zhdanov had survived earlier, more perfunctory purges, the new cleansing was more systematic. Its declared aim was to rid the Party of bureaucrats, particularly the former tsarist chinovniki, and “petty-bourgeois” elements, and to scrutinize former members of other parties who had joined the Communist ranks.56 It was to be a public affair, with the names of those investigated by the purge commission published in Tverskaia Pravda. People who submitted compromising material about Party members were guaranteed anonymity unless their statements proved false. The purge committee consisted initially of Tarakanov, the chair, who was soon replaced by K.M. Seniushkin, whose place as a regular committee member was taken by Zhdanov’s childhood acquaintance P.N. Pospelov. The fourth member was A.D. Sokolov, another life-long friend. Zhdanov was almost invulnerable to any attack, therefore, and thus saved from too many awkward questions regarding his social background (not only had his father been a bourgeois but he had also been educated as a theologian) and church marriage.57 In the autobiography required by the purge committee, Zhdanov nevertheless preferred to replace his

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father’s Master of Theology with a Master of Philosophy. The deceit was either ignored or went unnoticed. While his past was being investigated, Zhdanov and the other provincial leaders busied themselves resurrecting the devastated provincial economy. Tver’ guberniia was spared the famine that raged further down the Volga, but thanks to army mobilizations and shortages in the towns that had forced many to return to their ancestral homes in the villages, its industrial labour force was almost halved by 1921.58 A guberniia economic council (a kind of VSNKh on scale) was organized in which Zhdanov, as head of the guberniia planning committee, played a prominent role. He officially convoked a meeting of the council to find ways to jumpstart heavy industry in the province.59 A subsequent economic conference, which opened on 16 September, was remarkable for the youth of the provincial leaders, men who as teenagers had belonged to Marxist reading groups in the province. Neither Zhdanov nor Gorkin, who as gubkom secretary presented the general contours of the New Economic Policy (nep)60 nor trade-union representative Pospelov, who spoke on the nep and organized labour, nor Sokolov, who discussed the nep’s consequences for agriculture, nor gubispolkom and economic council chair Chudov, who outlined the role of provincial economic councils, had reached thirty years of age.61 After this gathering, the gubispolkom met in a plenary session.62 There Zhdanov further detailed the structure of the province’s economic organization in light of the nep. He proposed the introduction of economic councils subordinate to the provincial council at volost’, uezd, and even factory levels. From Zhdanov’s cumbersome description of this system of councils as reported in Tverskaia Pravda, it is clear that, while the Communist party was engaged in purging its own apparatus of bureaucrats, new bureaucratic bodies continued to be established outside of it, increasing rather than decreasing the number of clerks working for the authorities.63 On the evening before the economic conference opened, it had been the provincial leadership’s turn to be questioned by the purge commission before an audience of hundreds of factory workers in the “Great Proletarian Theatre” of the Morozov textile plant in Tver’.64 With Zhdanov appeared other local bosses such as Gorkin, Chudov, Pospelov, Sokolov, P.G. Petrovskii (1899–1941), Cheka chief P.P. Gromov, and more than one hudred other Party officials. The meeting lasted until deep into the night; some of those being examined were asked dozens of questions. Ultimately, however, most came off lightly, for the audience cannot have given more than four minutes on average to each person’s credentials. Much later, Sokolov, a member of the purge commission, wrote that Zhdanov sustained no criticism

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during the examination. The Morozov textile workers were solidly behind him.65 In reality, the exercise was something of a staged performance, for none of the members of the gubkombiuro or the gubispolkom leadership was attacked. Evidently covering for each other, Sokolov wrote a positive recommendation for Zhdanov, compensating his friend’s dubious social background by emphasizing his “underground” record. In his turn, Zhdanov vouched for Chudov, who was then his immediate superior.66 But soon a broader purge commission was struck, consisting of some thirty-nine Communists (including Zhdanov), to continue the screening.67 When Zhdanov was asked to explain his marriage in the Russian Orthodox church in September 1917, his feeble excuse that he had thus, on his in-laws’ request, tried to procure a state pension for his wife in case of his death in battle was deemed satisfactory.68 The threat posed by his questionable class background and suspect attitude towards religion had thus been parried, but the details about his past had been duly registered and filed by higher Party organs. Henceforth he countered any suspicion about his record by appearing more proletarian than the proletarians and more atheist than the atheists. Zhdanov and the other leaders pulled the strings during this purge, which continued until December 1921, when its result was announced at the tenth provincial Party conference.69 He and his friends covered for each other as longtime allies and they continued to do so for many years.70 In 1936–38, however, during the greatest purge of all, their strong bonds of loyalty often dissolved in desperate attempts to save one’s own skin at any price. For many who did not belong to the “in crowd,” the purge had serious consequences. Its most prominent victim had been Cheka chief Petr Petrovich Gromov, who was exposed as a former tsarist army cadet who had even fought the Bolsheviks in Moscow in November 1917.71 After his unmasking, he was executed on the orders of Russian secret police chief F.E. Dzerzhinskii (1877–1926). Along with Gromov, seven uezd soviet ispolkom chairs, three uezd Party secretaries, and five military commissars were exposed as unwanted aliens who had wormed their way into the Party. Of note was the exclusion of the gubispolkom secretary I.M. Smirnov and of one Sviriuev, a Cheka operative whose key sin was having served as an ensign in the tsarist army, a troubling parallel for Zhdanov to ponder.72 Ultimately, thirty percent of the membership of the provincial Party organization was excluded for various sins in the autumn of 1921. Conversely, a few dozen former Socialist-Revolutionaries, Mensheviks, and anarchists were allowed to stay in the Party. The tenth guberniia Party conference also heralded the return to full prominence of Zhdanov, who was

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elected with Pospelov, Sokolov, and a few others to the enlarged gubkombiuro. More importantly, Zhdanov soon succeeded Chudov as chair of the gubispolkom. In turn, Chudov took over from Gorkin as the Party’s gubkom secretary.73 As usual, Zhdanov’s workload was enormous. He met three times a week with the presidium of the gubispolkom and chaired a weekly plenary session of the gubispolkom that was combined with a meeting of the provincial economic council, which met twice a week.74 On Saturday nights the planning committee met, on Friday nights the gubkom met in plenary session, once a week there were meetings with the aktiv (Party activists), and on Thursdays his Party cell gathered. Zhdanov had little time to do other work. On most days except Friday (preparatory) work had to be finishwd by 1:00 pm (11:00 am on Wednesdays), when a meeting began. Usually meetings were held in the evenings as well. The only free day was Sunday. Anastas Mikoian (1895–1978), who at the time occupied the same level as Zhdanov within the hierarchy but in another region, asked in his memoirs, “What did we do during those rare evenings, when there were no sessions or meetings?” He answered, as Zhdanov would have, “Of course, work: we wrote articles for [the local newspaper], [and] thought over plans and theses for upcoming reports and presentations.”75 After briefly heading the government of Tver’ province as chair of the provincial executive committee of soviets, Zhdanov was relieved of his duties and called to Moscow by the Central Committee (more precisely, by Uchraspred or the Orgbiuro, or both) in June 1922.76 It is difficult to appreciate his ostensible demotion from second-incommand in Tver’ to second-tier leader in Nizhnii Novgorod, the eventual outcome of this recall. Zhdanov spent several months in Moscow during the summer of 1922. His son believes that his father fell severely ill around that time with scarlet fever (the disease permanently damaged his heart).77 Perhaps the Central Committee intended to aid his recovery by relieving him of some of his many responsibilities in Tver’.

t r a ns fe r It was Lenin himself who initiated the policy of rotating of leading cadres from post to post around the country, which increased their dependence on the Party’s central organs. As Figes points out, the regular rotation “merely widened the distance between the leaders and rank and file and thus weakened the accountability of the former. It also increased Stalin’s private patronage.”78 Because it was hard to adjust to new places and people, frequent transfers were difficult to

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handle. One of his predecessors, A.I. Mikoian, had conducted a running battle with the local leaders of Nizhnii’s Party organization. Was Zhdanov’s transfer provoked by something more than concerns about his health or the regular rotation mechanism whereby it was his turn to move? Was there an attempt to dissolve a “corrupt local clique” in Tver’?79 The Stalinist faction in Moscow eventually concluded that Tver’ yielded reliable cadres, but it stands to reason that around 1922 the newly minted general secretary of the Communist party, Stalin, and his sidekick L.M. Kaganovich did not trust Gorkin, Zhdanov, or Pospelov. Trust came later, when the three were coopted into the highest leadership circles.80 Perhaps doubts about the twenty-six-yearold Zhdanov’s leadership in Tver’ played a role. It is likelier, however, that Zhdanov’s transfer was positively motivated. He may have been recommended to Kaganovich, for example, by someone like I.M. Moskvin, who worked in high positions in the central apparatus throughout the 1920s and knew Zhdanov from before the First World War.81 In 1922 Lazar Kaganovich, the new chief of the Central Committee’s organizational-instruction (Orginstruktor) department,82 began at Stalin’s behest a reshuffling of the Party leadership in all localities as well as in his own department. Kaganovich particularly selected those who could be counted on to support the “General Line” (before 1929, the “moderate” policy of the cc’s majority, usually guided by Stalin).83 At this point, key members of the Politburo, Zinoviev, L.B. Kamenev (1883–1936), Bukharin, A.I. Rykov (1881–1938), M.P. Tomskii (1880–1936), and Stalin began to disagree with Trotsky, whose supporters were harassed and eventually removed from leading posts. Radzinsky suggests plausibly that the reports of cc inspectors to Kaganovich determined “the future of a local leader [for] Kaganovich’s department was … given the right to appoint local Party officials on the spot. Provincial Party organizations were now entirely in [Stalin]’s hands. Kaganovich set about the gigantic task of installing the right people, checking up on their loyalty, generally shaking up Party officialdom. In less than a year forty-three secretaries of guberniya Party organizations … were checked and confirmed.”84 Lazar Kaganovich was instrumental in organizing Zhdanov’s transfer to Nizhnii Novgorod.85 One can deduce that Kaganovich, after examining the credentials and personality of the young man from Tver’ in the middle of 1922, gave Zhdanov a cautiously positive endorsement. But Kaganovich wanted to test him before reappointing him to a post as high as, or even higher than, the one he had occupied in Tver’. Kaganovich and his aides may have ordered Zhdanov to hone some of his political skills before sending him on to

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Nizhnii Novgorod, which would explain why he spent virtually the entire summer of 1922 in Moscow. After his arrival in Nizhnii, then, Zhdanov was further evaluated on the basis of his success in restoring and maintaining order within the restless Party organization of the Sormovo machine-building plant. Because he performed the task adequately, he was quickly promoted to a post of much greater scope. The road to the top echelon was fraught with difficulties still, but the transfer to Nizhnii Novgorod was a stroke of luck for Zhdanov.86 Nizhnii had strong Bolshevik credentials as the city of the writer Maksim Gor’kii (1868–1936) and the revolutionary icon Iakov Sverdlov (1885–1919).87 In addition to these legendary figures, V.M. Molotov (1890–1986), three of the four Kaganovich brothers, and the later Politburo members V.Ia. Chubar’ (1891–1939), Mikoian, and N.A. Bulganin (1895–1975) had been, or were, local Bolshevik chieftains.88 Zhdanov had therefore been transferred from one incubator for the future Stalinist leadership to another. Anastas Mikoian had been first (“responsible”) secretary of Nizhnii’s Party organization from early 1921 until May 1922.89 Like his predecessor Molotov (who had failed to bridle the local Bolsheviks and had been called back to Moscow within half a year), Mikoian had run into obstructionist tactics by the local Communists but had been able slowly to rein in their independence and bring Nizhnii’s Party chapter under stricter cc control.90 After Mikoian had been transferred, it was left to N.A. Uglanov (1886–1937) to further discipline Nizhnii’s Communists.91 As head of the organizational department of the Leningrad gubkom Uglanov, a Party member since 1907, had earlier run afoul of Zinoviev, the Leningrad Party chief. Mikoian remembered that the humourless and nervous Uglanov stood on shaky political ground, but the two got along well enough during the transition period.92 The local chauvinism of Nizhnii’s Party had largely been suppressed by Mikoian during his tenure, though Zhdanov, seen as another emissary from Moscow, was viewed with a lingering scepticism when he arrived in Nizhnii in the fall of 1922. Thanks to Mikoian’s and Uglanov’s activities, the membership of the Communist party in Nizhnii Novgorod had fallen in line behind the cc, but the political mood of Nizhnii’s factory workers in general remained a matter of concern to the Central Committee. On 4 September 1922, the cc Uchraspred decided, after hearing a report by Nikolai Kubiak,93 to dispatch Zhdanov sooner than anticipated (uskorit’ pereezd) to Nizhnii Novgorod to help the local Party organization deal with the restless mood of Nizhnii’s proletariat.94 Zhdanov started out as a Party organizer at the famous transport-machinebuilding Red Sormovo plant, where the workers proved volatile on

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several occasions during the early 1920s.95 On 10 August 1922, the Politburo discussed the problem of Menshevik agitation in workers’ neighbourhoods in several industrial cities, of which the Sormovo neighbourhood of Nizhnii Novgorod was listed first. The Politburo’s involvement suggests that the leadership of the Communist party viewed unrest in the quarters that housed the Sormovo workers as a question of “all-Union” (Sovietwide) concern. It also suggests that Zhdanov’s dispatch to Nizhii need not be seen as a demotion. He would now have to prove himself worthy of the central leadership’s trust by inculcating in the Sormovo workers greater loyalty to the Bolsheviks.96 Following up on the work performed by Mikoian and Uglanov, Zhdanov was to marshall Nizhnii’s restless working class behind the Russian Communist party. Andrei Zhdanov himself must have worried that his transfer opened the way to a longer-term demotion; for if his post at Sormovo became permanent, it would mean a step down from his leading role in Tver’. Even if his Moscow bosses had assured him before his departure that his stint at Sormovo was temporary, his self-confidence was dented and his early days in Nizhnii hardly helped him to overcome his anxiety. On 15 October, the fourteenth Nizhnii Novgorod guberniia Party conference opened, and Zhdanov was not even given the honorary recognition of election to the conference presidium.97 As a member of the city district’s Party committee, Zhdanov briefly adressed the meeting, calling for a review of the work of the soviets at all levels, similar to the review he had conducted in Tver’.98 His words made no noticeable impression on the delegates, who at the end of the conference did not elect him as a full gubkom member but merely as the fourteenth of fifteen alternate members. In other words, the delegates implicitly ranked him about thirty-fifth in importance in the hierachy of Nizhnii’s Communist party chapter.99 Meanwhile in Moscow, Lenin had just been removed from the epicentre of political control, having suffered his first major stroke. Stalin’s drive to mould the Party’s apparatus into his personal tool was only a few months old. For the time being, he and his aides allowed a semblance of local autonomy to survive within the Party. Thus, they allowed the electoral snubbing in Nizhnii Novgorod of a promising recruit. Furthermore, they likely viewed such apparent lack of local support as a useful warning to Zhdanov. He would become all the more reliant on Moscow’s support. In Kaganovich’s eyes Zhdanov was hardly number thirty-five in Nizhnii. Provided that he dealt well with the Sormovo workers, he could anticipate a rapid promotion. While he was surely conscious of this political backing, he could not bank on the unconditional support of Kaganovich and his aides, nor could he

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bet in the fall of 1922 that Stalin and Kaganovich would remain in control of the Party apparatus.

nizh nii novg o r o d To Zhdanov’s relief and good fortune, Sormovo was tranquil in the four months that he worked there.100 He proved to the cc that he had the talent to communicate directly with shopfloor workers and was not merely a capable (if detached) administrator as he had been in Tver’. In 1922 the Communist party brass (particularly the proletarian autodidact Lazar Kaganovich) still attempted to take its role as vanguard of the proletariat seriously. Leaders had to be able to relate to their constituents, the factory workers. On 30 November 1922, on the eve of a gubkom plenary session, the Party’s gubkombiuro (Uglanov, Petrov, Ter, Gus’kov, Komissarov) met in Nizhnii Novgorod.101 On its agenda was the selection of a new head of the gubkom’s agitprop department. Uglanov nominated Zhdanov, while Ter preferred M.N. Liadov (1872–1947).102 Petrov supported the candidature of Zhdanov and objected to Liadov, noting that, considering the latter’s advancing age, it was potentially hazardous to burden him with more responsibilities. The quintet then agreed that Zhdanov should be nominated as the new propaganda chief before the gubkom plenum. This was, on the surface, a startlingly quick promotion of someone who, in the previous month, had barely been elected to the gubkom. Clearly, higher authorities than Nizhnii’s Communist leadership had been involved in the decision. When Zhdanov was presented to a plenary session of the Party’s guberniia committee in the next few days, his candidacy was questioned by one of its members, Iulii M. Kaganovich (1892–1962),103 whose brother Lazar was head of the cc’s Orginstruktor department. Iulii objected to appointing someone with Zhdanov’s social background to the post. He argued that adding Zhdanov would make the gubkombiuro a bastion of intelligenty rather than of shopfloor workers. Kaganovich suggested replacing Zhdanov with the head of the metalworkers’ trade-union local, Kozelev. The latter, however, was not convincing as a true proletarian; even Kaganovich labelled him a “halfworker”(polurabochii). Kozelev spoke against his own candidature by singing Zhdanov’s praises as an active Party member since before 1917. From the incomplete minutes of this session, it appears as though another Kaganovich brother, Mikhail Moiseevich (1888–1941), had been mentioned in an earlier discussion as an alternative candidate for the agitprop post.104 One gubkom member suggested that the cc had sent Zhdanov to Sormovo as a penalty and

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questioned Zhdanov’s candidature on that basis. Secretary Uglanov defended Zhdanov against all comers.105 Uglanov was a far more senior Party boss than Iulii Kaganovich, and as a full cc member, even outstripped Lazar Kaganovich in stature. In the final vote, with the exception of Iulii Kaganovich, all members of the committee supported Zhdanov’s membership of the gubkombiuro and his appointment as head of the gubkom’s agitprop department.106 Iulii Kaganovich’s opposition to Zhdanov demands some explanation. By objecting to Zhdanov’s promotion, Iulii ostensibly attempted to subvert his brother Lazar’s efforts to bring peripheral Party organizations under stricter control of the cc Secretariat. Mikoian’s and Uglanov’s work had tempered the Nizhnii’s Communists’ independent spirit and hostility to outsiders. But that defiant attitude had not altogether disappeared by late 1922 and Iulii Kaganovich, ironically, appeared to be its strongest spokesman in voicing opposition to the double promotion of Moscow’s man to gubkombiuro membership and head of agitprop. Surprisingly, Zhdanov and Iulii proceeded to work together without apparent discord for a dozen years in Nizhnii Novgorod, Zhdanov always occupying the more senior position. Such an outcome begs the question whether the Kaganovich brothers, Zhdanov, and Uglanov were not in collusion.107 Zhdanov had been appointed in September 1922 to a Party organization in which he patently lacked a network of friends and acquaintances. The gubkom committee elections in October proved that he had remained a virtual unknown in whom few were willing to place their trust. Iulii Kaganovich’s protest provided a pretext whereby guberniia committee members could become better acquainted with Zhdanov by discussing at some length his solid revolutionary credentials.

agitat ion a nd pr o pa g a n da The new member of the gubkombiuro immediately set out to investigate the state of agitprop in Nizhnii guberniia and produced a thoroughly researched, and thoroughly unremarkable, report about it.108 After his appointment, Zhdanov began to write in the provincial newspaper Nizhegorodskaia kommuna and in the local propaganda journal Kommunist on diverse topics, such as the foundation of the ussr, and spoke in person to provincial propagandists as well.109 But his responsibilities already exceeded those of agitprop head, since as biuro member he regularly attended the plenary and biuro meetings of the Party’s gubkom. Zhdanov was involved with agitprop throughout his political career.110 The term “agitprop” evolved through Bolshevik (Commu-

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nist) usage. Lenin saw agitation and propaganda as distinct: agitation explained the revolutionary cause to the workers by using concrete incidents; propaganda elucidated the broader contours of the struggle for Communist Eden.111 Matthew Lenoe points out that agitation was in theory understood to be short term and concrete, appealing to emotions, while propaganda was a more rational technique, entailing a longer-term and more detailed explanation of the cause.112 But eventually agitation and propaganda merged in Communist discourse. Despite their belief in the primacy of materialist forces in history, the Communists, as one political scientist noted half a century ago, religiously observed Lenin’s advocacy of “propaganda, defined broadly as ranging from agitation to political education, [as] the means of transmission, the essential link of expression, at once highly rigid and infinitely flexible, which continually enlightens the masses, prepares them, leads them gradually to join the vanguard in understanding and eventually in action.”113 In the 1920s agitprop, lacking precise definition, stood for easily digestible versions of complicated theoretical concepts (which were at first primarily Marxist), but even then agitprop may not have appealed much to the average worker or peasant. Thus Communist agitprop often deteriorated into simplistic Marxist slogans that by the 1930s increasingly came to include more traditional Russian concepts. Andrei Zhdanov possessed the necessary rhetorical skills to translate and relay the message persuasively to the Soviet “masses.” During the early years of Soviet Russia’s existence, his education, his underground and revolutionary experience, and his political role in the Red Army sufficiently prepared him to head propaganda work at the provincial level. At the top of the political ladder, erudite leaders like Trotsky or Bukharin were removed in the second half of the 1920s. Thus, room was made for the Zhdanovs of Russia, hardly stellar Marxist theoreticians but still better educated than many of the plodding troopers who surrounded Stalin. Moreover, candidates such as Zhdanov could boast of practical experience at lower Party ranks in presenting communism’s purpose and ideals to the worthy masses. As a result of the great transformation embarked upon in 1929 by the Soviet leaders, propaganda became all-encompassing, touching upon every aspect of Soviet life.114 By the 1940s, an outside observer noted that, “were we to think of propaganda as any effort designed to influence our views or tastes … we would come closer to approximating the Russian conception of the word. But … we would have to extend our definition to include all educational efforts in the schools, theaters, movie houses, libraries, museums and amusement parks. Finally, we would have to regard propaganda not as an insidious effort

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to mislead us but as a method of improving our minds, morals, and culture. In short, for the Kremlin, propaganda is enlightenment – the source of wisdom and culture.”115 Indeed, Communist agitprop was partially a version of the middleclass project to bring education, culture, and civilization to the masses. Before October 1917 Lenin intended to use agitation and propaganda to show the downtrodden the unadorned truth of their oppression by their exploiters and the inevitability of a Red future. But propaganda lost much of its educational meaning because of its cynical use by Fascists and Nazis and its post-1917 corruption by Lenin and Stalin and their Soviet followers, including Zhdanov. Thus, propaganda has become a wholly pejorative term, associated with the idea of mass manipulation, Orwellian doublespeak, and brainwashing. Zhdanov’s personal contribution to the degradation of the term was not inconsiderable, as we shall see.

intellectual i n fl u e n c e s In March 1923 more than two hundred delegates, representing slightly more than eight thousand Party members and candidates, met at the fifteenth guberniia Party conference in Nizhnii Novgorod.116 The Nizhnii Party organization was almost one and a half times the size of Smolensk province’s Party chapter and nearly double the size of Tver’s.117 Yet the Nizhnii branch remained small compared to the total Soviet Party membership, much of which was concentrated in Moscow and Petrograd and stood at almost five hundred thousand in 1923.118 Nizhnii’s Communists were young (as the Party tended to be elsewhere): more than half of those who gathered in March 1923 were not yet forty. Perhaps even for them, however, the upstart Zhdanov appeared too green. He did not receive the customary applause from the audience when his name was called out as the fifth of fifteen people “elected” to the conference presidium.119 Zhdanov’s role was nevertheless substantial during the proceedings of the four-day meeting. He reported on behalf of the gubkom to the conference about agitprop, addressed the shoddy state of cultural education among industrial workers, and even discussed the Regime’s taxation policy in the countryside.120 Although he was now an elected member of the twenty-fiveperson guberniia committee with the right to vote, he was dispatched to the impending Twelfth Party Congress in Moscow merely with a consultative vote. He remained the public whipping boy of the two local Kaganovich brothers, for it had been M.M. Kaganovich (who was soon appointed head of the guberniia’s economic council) who had convinced delegates to dispatch Komissarov with voting rights to the Con-

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gress rather than Zhdanov.121 Nevertheless, Zhdanov’s stature as one of the highest provincial chiefs was confirmed by these elections.122 Andrei Zhdanov was one of more than eight hundred delegates at the Twelfth Party Congress in April 1923 in Moscow, the first to occur without Lenin, whose health was declining fast. This was Zhdanov’s second Party congress.123 Once again, heated debates erupted, especially regarding the status of Georgia within the ussr. Some delegates attacked the high-handed leadership displayed in Lenin’s absence by the troika of Zinoviev (who had attended Nizhnii’s recent Party conference124), Kamenev, and Stalin. A strike broke out at Nizhnii province’s Vyksa works during the Congress, further evidence of the labour unrest that continued to trouble the region.125 After Zhdanov’s return to Nizhnii in late April, he briefly participated in the work of the gubkombiuro, but was then incapacitated by a prolonged bout of illness.126 Frequently plagued by ill health, Zhdanov took fairly long leaves throughout his life to recover from his ailments and work-related stress as he did now. His preferred destination was the Caucasus, the mountainous region that had captivated him when he was training as an army cadet in Tbilisi in 1916.127 Iurii Zhdanov remembered how wonderfully well his father communicated with the Caucasian people, who by their passionate nature were akin to Andrei Zhdanov. In Iurii’s poetic thinking, this (stereotypical) Caucasian passion resembled a sort of essentialist French esprit with which his excitable father felt an affinity. Andrei Zhdanov’s French taste was also expressed in his admiration for Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Holbach, and La Mettrie.128 This quintet of Enlightenment philosophes was congenial to a Communist chief like Zhdanov. As resolute atheists and among the most radical of the major Enlightenment thinkers, Holbach and La Mettrie were favourites of most Bolsheviks; Diderot’s positions on religion and tyranny were similarly radical and therefore popular among Communist leaders. The trio’s works provided ample justification for the overthrow of traditional religion and monarchy. Rousseau’s idea of the “General Will” was harnessed to justify dictatorship by those who embody the “People’s Will” or recognize it (as the Bolshevik leaders thought they did). Meanwhile, Voltaire often seems a cynic (as does Holbach), disdainful of the mob, who prefers the absolute rule of the wise despot over the democracy of the ignorant multitude. A reader like Zhdanov could distill from Voltaire a justification for dictatorship by the Communist party (and especially its leadership) and perhaps even for its ruthless treatment of its many victims. Another important trait of Zhdanov’s thinking derived from an Enlightenment-inspired belief in human progress.129 Russian social

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democrats maintained an unmitigated confidence in the human capacity to acquire full “power of nature” in a naive positivist “Victorian” manner that had been abandoned by most Western and Russian intellectuals even before 1914.130 Peter Gay remarks incisively that such faith in progress led to the phenomenal expansion of the size of nineteenth-century “governmental institutions … aimed at [achieving] … human control over many of the new problems triggered by urbanization and industrialization.”131 This explains something of the comparable mechanism that produced the extraordinary growth of the state apparatus (both Party and government) fostered by Lenin, Stalin, and Zhdanov in the Soviet Union. Beyond a selective reading of Enlightenment thinkers, Zhdanov was intellectually formed by nineteenth-century culture and philosophy.132 Among Russian writers, he was fond of the satirist M.E. SaltykovShchedrin (1828–89) and the now-forgotten Aleksei Konstantinovich Tolstoi (1817–75), especially his long epic poem History of the Russian State (Istoriia gosudarstvo rossiiskogo) in which the poet depicts all the tsars in a satiric-ironic manner.133 Zhdanov had an acerbic sense of humour, as his son underlined, and apparently recognized a similar biting sense of humour in the Soviet parodist and satirist A.G. Arkhangel’skii (1889–1938). Stalin shared Zhdanov’s sense of humour; it was one reason why he liked Zhdanov.134 Zhdanov’s taste in the arts was traditional, based on classical ideals and nineteenthcentury realism and irony.135 He was a prude and a homophobe in the Victorian style. When in 1936 Zhdanov read André Gide’s critical account of his travels in the ussr, he indignantly wrote in the margins that Gide was a defender of homosexuals, as if it were somehow relevant.136 In 1946 the work of the overtly homosexual Jean Genet was held up as an example by Zhdanov of the decadent, immoral opposite of the pure “realist” literature that was to be produced by Soviet writers. Zhdanov could pass off a crude remark in a polished manner in public, but in general he cultivated a kul’turnyi demeanor. Well read and well mannered, he was a good conversationalist who put great stock in education, formal or not. Though short tempered and no stranger to the use of coarse language, in public Zhdanov avoided unbecoming speech, mindful of his mission to bring enlightenment and civilization to the Soviet masses.137

unrest By mid-July 1923 Zhdanov was back at work, after recuperating in the Caucasus for more than two months, In his absence A.I. Muralov (1886–1937) had been appointed chair of the guberniia executive

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committee of soviets (provincial government chief). Muralov was Zhdanov’s right-hand man from 1924 to 1928.138 Zhdanov’s first task after his return was to supervise a meeting of the provincial SocialRevolutionary organization, which was only allowed to gather in order to dissolve itself. Together with Zapol’skii, chief of the gpu, Zhdanov set about suppressing what little Menshevik activity there was in the province. Zhdanov’s dismantling of both political parties duly followed cc guidelines issued in reaction to recurring labour unrest in the country, which also affected the Nizhnii region.139 On 23 July a session of the gubkombiuro was dedicated to the suppression of strikes that had erupted in the province’s most significant factories.140 A few days after the meeting, the Sormovo works struck as well. The strike there preoccupied the biuro in late July and August 1923; after a brief interlude, a new strike broke out at the plant in late August.141 By 2 August the Sormovo strike was on the table at the Politburo in Moscow.142 It was not until the end of September that the unrest at the Sormovo plant had abated sufficiently for the gubkombiuro to embark on a strategy to ensure tranquility at the works. Following a plan advocated by Zhdanov at a biuro session a month earlier, 260 of the workers who had been involved in anti-Communist agitation and protests were fired, along with five Mensheviks who had been identified in the troubles.143 Zhdanov thus showed a ruthless bent towards “anti-Soviet elements.” This was not yet the 1930s; dismissed workers were not arrested, it seems, but in a period of high unemployment, losing a job meant hard times. In November the cc Orgbiuro, with Molotov in the chair, discussed the situation at Sormovo. It praised Nizhnii’s gubkom for its success in quelling the unrest but wanted the plant’s Party organization to increase in numbers and, by raising the political literacy of the workers, in quality.144 Zhdanov’s decisive moves in the summer of 1923 proved his toughness to the central leadership, and he escaped blame for the ultimately flawed nature of his efforts at Sormovo in the autumn of 1922, which were implicitly criticized by the second part of the Orgbiuro’s evaluation of the Sormovo situation. For the first time in September 1923, Zhdanov signed gubkombiuro protocols as Nizhnii’s most senior leader, in the temporary absence of Uglanov and Gus’kov.145 His position in Nizhnii Novgorod was now comparable to the job he had left in Tver’ the previous year. In effect he had begun training for the position of first (responsible) Party secretary, by then the most important political post in the Soviet province, easily outstripping the post of gubispolkom chair.146 On 7 October he delivered a speech on the international situation and its consequences for the ussr, focusing on the hyperinflation that engulfed Germany at the time.147 Iurii Zhdanov recalled how, as good Marxists, his parents

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regularly discussed international events during the 1920s.148 They read numerous and diverse newspapers at home. Iurii sampled some of these publications, and he often listened to his parents’ discussions, becoming well versed in global politics even as a boy.149 Its Marxist origins aside, Andrei Zhdanov’s interest in the outside world may have been driven by a desire for eventual promotion to an even higher post in Moscow. A career at all-Union level demanded a good grounding in international affairs. In late 1923 the rift between Trotsky and the other Politburo members began to resonate in the Nizhnii organization. On 16 December Party activists from the city districts of Nizhnii Novgorod met to listen to resolutions put forth by Zhdanov supporting the General Line and by Ishchenko supporting Trotsky’s demands for open discussion and an end to the dictatorship over the Party by Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Stalin.150 At that meeting and at a similar meeting a week later, ninety-five percent of those present voted to support the trio and condemn Trotsky and his adherents.151 In January 1924 Zhdanov signed an open letter published in Pravda criticizing Trotsky.152 In the same month, the Thirteenth Party Conference in Moscow condemned Trotsky and his supporters as “petty bourgeois” deviants.153 Within weeks, the intense Party polemics were momentarily halted by the news of Lenin’s death.

t r ots k y it e s Zhdanov, Uglanov, Muralov, and the other leaders must have breathed a sigh of relief when gpu reports informed them that Lenin’s death had been generally mourned rather than celebrated by those they ruled.154 Zhdanov actively encouraged the cult of Lenin in Nizhnii province (in Moscow Stalin was the main architect of the cult), deifying the fallen leader in the provincial newspaper on 27 January.155 He also authored the local call for the “Lenin Enrolment” of five thousand new “truly proletarian” Party members, which Nizhegorodskaia kommuna published on 30 January. The battle with Trotsky resumed in the ensuing days. Zhdanov explained to the members of the Party organization of Nizhnii Novgorod’s city district that Trotsky and the “Forty-Six” (high-ranking Communists who had announced in the previous autumn their agreement with Trotsky’s criticism of the Party leadership) had sinned by opposing the New Economic Policy and forming an illegal faction (Party rules had prohibited the formation of factions since 1921). Furthermore, Trotsky and his supporters consisted for the most part of Communists who had lived in exile abroad before 1917, contrary to those supporting the General Line who had

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earned their stripes at home in the arduous struggle of the underground movement.156 During the next couple of months, Zhdanov observed his usual routine, writing articles, speaking in public, reading reports, and preparing for or attending meetings of the leading bodies of the guberniia Party organization.157 By April 1924 Zhdanov had made such a favourable impression on the cc secretariat that it inquired of the gubkombiuro whether it was willing to release Zhdanov for work in the cc apparatus in Moscow. Uglanov and the others managed to convince the cc Orgraspred department that Zhdanov was still needed in Nizhnii.158 When the sixteenth guberniia Party conference was held in May 1924, Zhdanov no longer reported on agitprop but on work in the countryside, evidence that he had moved to second spot in the local hierachy behind Uglanov.159 Zhdanov’s role as Uglanov’s deputy was confirmed by his election as fourth member of the conference’s presidium, after the usual two honourary cc representatives and Uglanov.160 He also reported in the newspaper on the conference proceedings.161 At the end of May Zhdanov represented the Nizhnii organization as a voting delegate at the Thirteenth Party Congress, where, as a member of two commissions, one on agitation and propaganda and one on work in the countryside, he played a more responsible role than at earlier congresses.162 On 20 August 1924 a Central Committee plenum elected Uglanov as one of the cc secretaries and an Orgbiuro member, and he was given the leadership of the Moscow Party organization. Stalin remembered how Uglanov had clashed with Zinoviev when both men worked in Leningrad; Uglanov was thus used as a pawn in the growing intrigue that Stalin masterminded against Zinoviev and Kamenev. A groomed Zhdanov now succeeded Uglanov in Nizhnii Novgorod.163

a rising sta r It is evident that, as he rose within the Party after October 1917, Zhdanov was aided by patronage or mutual-protection networks.164 The ties between Zhdanov and many Stalinist stalwarts clearly originated during the Civil War and its aftermath. Several Bolshevik leaders connected with Tver’ or Nizhnii Novgorod rose swiftly in the ranks in those years, even if Politburo candidate-members Chubar’ and Uglanov (linked to Nizhnii) and cc members Chudov and Moskvin (who had connections with Tver’) later fell victim to the Great Terror in the 1930s. But an impressive list of high-ranking survivors of the Terror had held posts in, or had personal ties with, those two guberniias.

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Molotov, L.M. Kaganovich, Mikoian, and Bulganin, had been local chieftains in Nizhnii Novgorod. A.A. Andreev (1895–1971), another surviving Politburo member, had some connection with Nizhnii during the early 1920s.165 M.I. Kalinin (1875–1946), the all-Soviet Village Elder, was a native of Tver’ province. Gorkin and Pospelov, alumni of the Tver’ Party organization of the early 1920s, became respectively secretary of the Supreme Soviet and secretary of the Central Committee. Iu. M. Kaganovich was one of the very few Party gubkom secretaries or gubispolkom chairs who survived the Great Terror. The political power of Communist bosses derived substantially from personal bonds. Zhdanov’s early career as a Bolshevik chieftain depended on his networking. The importance of the “family circle” at the highest level is brought home by the fact that in 1935 (after the deaths of Kirov and Kuibyshev, and at the time when Zhdanov became an alternate Politburo member), six out of ten full Politburo members had had demonstrable ties with Nizhnii Novgorod or Tver’ guberniias during the early years of the Bolshevik Regime: only Stalin, K.E. Voroshilov (1881–1969), G.K. Ordzhonikidze (1886–1937), and S.V. Kosior (1889–1939) did not. Of the six connected with Tver’ or Nizhnii, only one, Chubar’, whose ties with Nizhnii Novgorod were slender, was executed in the Great Terror. Thus, the rise of Andrei Zhdanov within the regime’s hierarchy from 1922 onward was aided to a considerable degree by his fellowship in clans he joined in Tver’ and Nizhnii. Nonetheless, such affiliation did not automatically earn political points with Stalin. While Kaganovich, Molotov, Mikoian, Kalinin, Andreev, and Zhdanov managed to survive the 1930s, they usually proved powerless to protect their friends in subordinate posts. More often than not these leaders, afraid of provoking Stalin’s ire or suspicion, did not even try to rescue their associates, but preferred instead to applaud the Vozhd’s cruel decisions. After Zhdanov’s appointment as provincial secretary, he could not afford to make serious political errors or fully trust in his excellent connections. As provincial boss, he was to be tried and tested for another decade before he was deemed ready to move to a higher post in Moscow. He consistently had to try to propitiate those above him, particularly Stalin. If Zhdanov had not continued to play his cards right, his career or his life might have ended abruptly – as Uglanov’s or Chudov’s lives ended in 1937.

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3 The Proconsul of Nizhnii Novgorod, 1924–1929 We caught up and overtook the advanced capitalist countries in terms of the establishment of a new political structure, the Soviet structure. That is good. But that is little. In order to attain the final victory of socialism in our country, we still need to catch up and overtake those countries as well in technicaleconomic relations. Either we accomplish that, or they will shatter us. Stalin1

nizh nii novg o r o d : communis t party a n d sov ie t so c ie t y In August 1924 Andrei Zhdanov became chief of a Party organization that was much larger than the one he had left in Tver’ two year previously, even if Nizhnii’s Party chapter remained significantly smaller than the giant Moscow and Leningrad branches of the Russian Communist party.2 The guberniia Party had almost sixteen thousand full and candidate members when Zhdanov became its helmsman. More than half of the members were at the candidate stage and consisted mainly of recruits from the Lenin Enrolment.3 The provincial Communist Youth League (Komsomol) counted eighteen thousand members. Thus, Communists and members of the Komsomol accounted for slightly more than one percent of the three million inhabitants of Nizhnii guberniia.4 This was rather a small vanguard to lead the construction of a socialist society. The provincial capital, Nizhnii Novgorod, was an old Russian city located at the junction of the Oka and Volga rivers, 450 kilometres east of Moscow.5 The city was considerably larger than Tver’ and had more industry. It was also a transport hub for shipping along the rivers, the principal commodities being grain traditionally, but by the 1920s oil as well. Nizhnii Novgorod was an ancient trading centre, and its annual fair had been the most famous in Russia before 1917. The fair

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had not been staged during the Civil War, but it had been resurrected at the time of Zhdanov’s arrival. The goods traded at the fair were primarily the products of small-scale, often private, artisans; such craftspeople were judged to be capitalist entrepreneurs by the end of the decade and the fair was abolished in the “socialist offensive” in 1930.6 Within the dualistic Soviet system of rule, in which a hierarchy of Party bodies ran parallel to the pyramid of soviets, the Party took precedence over the soviets. Nonetheless, first provincial Party secretary Zhdanov was not yet the all-powerful potentate that first Party secretaries became in the course of the next five years. In 1924 the highest authoritative administrative organ in the province was the Communist party’s gubkombiuro. Biuro members shared power with the OGPU chief (if he was not a biuro member already).7 Biuro membership in most provincial organizations increased during the 1920s (Tver’ had three members in 1919, while Nizhnii had five in 1922 and seventeen in 1929), but within the biuro an inner nucleus, led by the first Party secretary, consolidated power. Thanks to Stalin’s reliance on the Party apparatus in his struggle for preeminence during the 1920s, the power of republican and provincial first Party secretaries grew at the expense of soviet and trade-union bosses within the regions, while the ogpu chiefs and second Party secretaries or secretaries of the larger cities within the republic or province lost terrain to the highest regional Party chiefs during the 1920s.8 Zhdanov succeeded Uglanov at a felicitous moment, for the province was entering a period of relative calm and recovery after the turmoil of war, revolution, civil war, and economic ruin. When Zhdanov spoke in December 1926 to the eighth Party conference of the city of Nizhnii Novgorod, what were in many ways the most tranquil and stable couple of years of Zhdanov’s entire political life were coming to a close and the thirty-year-old identified economic indicators that promised an even better future.9 The city’s industry (almost entirely state owned) grew from 1924 to 1926 by one hundred percent, and the level of industrial production in 1926 surpassed that of 1913 by twenty-eight percent, despite such problems as a high degree of absenteeism among workers. New branches (electricity generation, radio manufacturing10) were indicative of increasing industrial modernization. In agriculture, the sowing area surpassed that of 1913, the use of mechanized equipment such as tractors and milk machines was spreading, and horses and bovines increased in number. Economic rebuilding after the Civil War had thus been moderately successful, but the Soviet regime was beginning to face a stark choice between complacency with the modest gains or a renewed surge to build a modern communist Eden.11 Towards 1929 the choice was

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made in favour of action: this was hardly a surprise, given that the Marxist philosophy of history mandated that proletarian socialism would surpass middle-class capitalism politically, socially, economically, culturally, and technologically. During the 1920s the Soviet Union lagged behind all major industrialized countries (the United States, Great Britain, Germany, France, and Japan) in technological and economic development.12 If the Soviet Union failed to “catch up and overtake the West,” as Stalin vehemently reiterated in November 1928, the West would destroy it.13 Although the worst devastation of the First World War, Revolution, and Civil War had been overcome by the middle of the 1920s, Nizhnii province was far from a proletarian paradise. About ten percent of those identifying themselves as factory workers were unemployed. Most working-class families had one breadwinner whose income was barely sufficient to make ends meet. Wages were often not paid on time. Seventy percent of workers lived in small rented apartments or spartan factory dormitories, while only half enjoyed the use of electricity in their lodgings. Those who had work, according to an ogpu report of June 1924, spent eighty percent of their income on food, clothing, and housing, a trend that nevertheless compared well with the Civil War years, when seventy percent of household income was spent on food alone.14 In April 1926 Zhdanov requested that the Politburo in Moscow award money to alleviate the severe housing shortage among Nizhnii’s workers.15 The average living space per person was 4.75 square meters, which was half the norm suggested by the Soviet government. Some people had to walk more than ten kilometres every day to reach their workplace. Lack of proper sanitation and ignorance about its importance led to poor standards of domestic hygiene, which in turn enabled the spread of diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis, dysentery, and typhoid fever. Housing circumstances would not improve, prompting Zhdanov to request increased subsidies to help out two years later.16 In general, the ogpu, which supplied Zhdanov with frequent reports on the populace’s disposition towards its rulers, considered the workers’ political mood satisfactory in the mid-1920s. Nizhnii’s proletarians attended orchestrated demonstrations and participated in meetings and campaigns when called upon.17 Most workers (ninety-two percent) were unionized in the Party-controlled trade unions and refrained from strikes, while factory committees (originally intended as organs of worker self-management but by then also converted to another control mechanism for the regime) were collaborating closely with the Communist party and had a strong Communist representation: thirty-three

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percent of their members were in the Party. The Social-Revolutionaries in the province had disbanded in 1923, and the Mensheviks in 1924. Sporadically, workers objected to antireligious measures, such as the closing of churches, but their cries of protest hardly resembled a sustained opposition to the Communist regime. Drunkenness was the proletariat’s greatest social problem. Urban workers appeared reasonably content (although there was an expectation of better times ahead) and professed their loyalty to the Regime, but the influence of the Party and the soviets in the countryside was far more tenuous.18 Two-thirds of the Party membership and more than half of Komsomol membership came from the urban working class. With more than seventy-five percent of the provincial population living in the country by 1924, Communists and Komsomols were a rarity in the villages.19 By the summer of 1924 the ogpu was still combating roaming bandit groups. Other acts of open hostility to the Regime erupted in the countryside as well.20 Peasants distilled their own hard liquor, thereby shunning the expensive stateproduced vodka. During the celebration of traditional holidays, villagers habitually threatened Party members and soviet officials. Peasants resented the obligation to pay taxes (usually in kind) for which they received little in return. Throughout the 1920s peasant prosperity grew, judging by the steadily increasing number of those who had to pay higher levies on their agricultural production. Peasant resentment against taxation grew apace. In addition, peasants who had reached a certain level of prosperity were labelled “kulaks” by Party and state bureaucrats, a pejorative name for richer peasants who were considered to be class enemies (since acquiring private wealth was equated with capitalist endeavour). Yet apart from the loss of one’s voting rights for the soviets, such stigmatization had little consequence before 1929. These “(petty) bourgeois rural entrepreneurs” were politically somewhat inactive, and few agitated consistently against the Communists and the soviets.21 Indeed, most peasants were politically apathetic. Only a minority participated in elections for the local soviets.22 Most peasants remained religious, and rural illiteracy was slow to disappear, despite literacy campaigns. The villagers observed their time-honoured customs. Gender relations remained largely the same, although the treatment of women by their menfolk may have worsened, since traditional religious morality imposed by the Orthodox church (or Islamic law in the case of some of the ethnic minorities in Nizhnii guberniia) had lost some of its tempering force.23 In Russian regions as far north as Nizhnii province, many peasants worked on the side as craftsmen or left the village to find seasonal work in the cities. Somehow they negotiated the formidable red tape

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involved in getting working papers in a city.24 We saw, meanwhile, how agricultural production recovered from the disasters of the poor harvests and grain requisitioning of War Communism. But since crops and dairy products fetched low prices and prosperous peasants faced higher taxation, the peasants were hardly keen to produce great surpluses. These disincentives combined with an adherence to a tradition of self-sufficiency: many peasants were lukewarm to the idea of experimenting with soil improvement (with the help of crops like clover), sophisticated crop rotation, cooperatives, careful seed selection, or the use of better tools. To farm as an individual khutor, outside the traditional village community, promised greater personal profit but entailed much greater risks and was usually discouraged not just by apprehension about its hazardous nature but also by the village skhod.25 The more prosperous peasants (re-)established their authoritative positions in their communities in the region, which sometimes, long before collectivization, prompted their poorer neighbours to denounce them as anti-Soviet “kulaks” to local authorities (the police or village soviets). Before 1929 state officials showed considerable restraint in acting upon such charges, but the denunciation of neighbours testified to the existence of social conflict in the village of the 1920s. The Regime translated this antagonism into a scheme of four peasant groups, rich, middle, poor, and landless, a caricature of the intricate social differentiation of the village. A generational conflict between rural youth (often young Red Army veterans) and their elders was also brewing.26 Appealing to the younger generation in the drive to collectivize, Communist authorities tried to exploit this discord to uproot the traditional social cohesion of the village. In May 1927 the ogpu reported to Zhdanov that some “kulaks” had “become more active.” Apparently, certain wealthier peasants were intensifying their intimidation of poorer neighbours and their criticism of the political discrimination against peasants (whose vote counted for less than that of workers in soviet elections).27 Some kulaks compared the current situation unfavourably to life under the tsar. They protested high tax assessments, and their discontent was further fuelled by the arbitary nature in which state officials struck the names of putatively richer peasants and other pariahs from the voting lists for the regularly staged soviet elections.28 The general attitude of these lishentsy in the villages (and towns) towards Soviet power was hostile. Before 1929 the peasants remained defiant towards the Soviet Regime. In turn, the “proletarian vanguard” was not particularly well disposed towards the “idiocy of rural life” and grew increasingly frustrated with the regime’s lack of control over the wayward countryside.29

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While the middle class and aristocracy were deemed former classes that were destined to disappear, the somewhat ill defined intelligentsia was the last social group the Communists distinguished as having the right to continue to exist in nascent Soviet (socialist) society. In a manner Zhdanov had indicated in his 1918 article, a distinction was made between the “traditional” intelligentsia, another group that was expected to wither away, and the new Soviet intelligentsia. Under the latter rubric fell Party officials as well as pro-Communist artists, engineers, and others who had completed at least more than primary education. In April 1927 Zhdanov received a report from the ogpu head, Zagvozdin30 on the mood of diverse sections of the province’s intelligentsia (in this case professors, students, monarchists, former SocialRevolutionaries, and Kadets) during the first months of the year.31 Soon after he read the report, Zhdanov gave a speech before the gubkom plenum condemning the highly ambiguous attitude of university professors towards “Soviet power” and accusing them of taking desperate measures to gain political influence.32 Although Zhdanov caricaturized their behaviour, some professors did protest the preferential treatment given to students of proletarian background, the vydvizhentsy, and blamed the government for destroying the Old Regime’s system of academically rigorous secondary schools, particularly the gymnasia.33 Zhdanov would come around to their point of view in the following years but often only after such academic critics had been persecuted and even murdered during the “Cultural Revolution” of 1928–32. Zhdanov had questioned the loyalty of the intelligentsiia since his time in Shadrinsk. Ten years later, his criticism of Nizhnii’s university faculty showed that he had not shed his suspicion. Some doubts sprang from a more immediate cause – the general Soviet offensive against bourgeois “specialists” that had begun to unfold. When Zagvozdin in April 1927 summed up the mood of professors, agricultural engineers, or industrial managers as harmless, his conclusions failed to convince Zhdanov, who demanded a new report.34 In an overbearing attempt to distance himself from any connection with traditional Russian intelligentsia, Zhdanov maintained an implacable stand towards the very group to which he belonged according to the Communist analysis of Soviet society. He remained keenly aware that his own social background might be a political liability. Zhdanov’s former ties with Orthodox Christianity were another blemish on his record, and he kept a watchful eye on religious activities in the province, occasionally sanctioning the deportation of priests.35 An ogpu svodka claimed in May of 1927 that the Russian Orthodox church remained far more popular than the Soviet-inspired

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“Living Orthodox Church,” which had a mere seventeen places of worship compared to the more than thirteen hundred traditional Orthodox churches.36 Some religious mystics wandered the countryside in traditional Russian style. A monk who tried to pass himself off as the former tsar, a samozvanets, was arrested in the spring of 1927 and sentenced to three years in the prison camp on the Solovki islands in the White Sea. It was not just adherence to the traditions of Orthodoxy that dismayed Zhdanov. In Nizhnii guberniia Islamic believers amounted to at least one hundred thousand, in the number of people who attended mosques.37 Widespread, too, was the Old Belief in all its manifestations, with more than thirty thousand adherents.38 It was particularly strong among artisans. Other Christian sects counted more than 63,000 believers. If religion, as Marx maintained, was “the opium of the people,” the addiction was widespread. Even during the second half of the 1920s, Zhdanov’s realm remained a largely rural society faithful to traditional cultural, social, and economic habits. For peasants, workers, and intelligentsia, the three composite parts of Soviet society in Nizhnii, tremendous changes were in the works towards 1930. Albeit transformed in terms of quality and quantity, all three groups survived Stalin’s Great Turn. Such was not the case for the representatives of middle class and aristocracy, “kulaks,” the traditional intelligentsia, priests, the Nepmen (those who had struck it rich after the Civil War), and independent artisans. Private enterprise was brought to a halt, while non-Party intellectuals, priests, wealthy peasants, and former landowners were exiled, jailed, or executed.39

communis t o p p o sit io n In addition to guiding the socio-economic development of his province, Andrei Zhdanov added to his formidable workload by politicking within the Communist party. The 1920s were the years of the protracted struggle for Lenin’s succession.40 Even before he was made responsible secretary of Nizhnii Novgorod guberniia, Zhdanov had become a minor figure within a decidedly Stalinist group of Party leaders. In 1924, besides Stalin, that group included Voroshilov, L.M. Kaganovich, Molotov, Mikoian, Andreev, Ordzhonikidze, Kirov, and Kalinin at the Central Committee level. It was supported by local factions, such as the more junior former Tver’ clan of Chudov, Gorkin, Pospelov, and Zhdanov. The first tier was to enter the Politburo, the latter the Central Committee of the Communist Party during the 1920s. As noted earlier, Zhdanov led the struggle at Nizhnii Novgorod for Stalin’s General Line against the Trotskyites, the followers of

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Zinoviev and Kamenev, the “United Opposition” (of Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and their supporters), and, finally, of the “Right Deviation” of Bukharin, Rykov, Tomskii, and Uglanov. He forged a reliable Stalinist political machine in the process. Zhdanov had opened the attack on the Trotskyites at the local Nizhnii level during the autumn of 1923. It was a task he performed with all the zeal of the ambitious sycophant. Perhaps the epitome of the provincial Soviet bureaucrat, Zhdanov was offended by Trotsky’s criticism of the increasing size and power of the bureaucratic apparatus of the Regime. His career had been launched in earnest in 1919, far behind the front line, and was based on his capacity for hard work in the office and the careful cultivation of personal and political ties with those who mattered in a kind of mutual protection racket. Trotsky noted at the time how “theoreticians” among the Party’s elite were replaced by “organizers.”41 Despite Zhdanov’s involvement with ideology and propaganda, he knew that he was an organizer, not a theoretician. Offended by this scathing criticism and keen to ingratiate himself with the Stalinist faction, he fought the “Trotskyites” fanatically during the 1920s. Lenin’s death in January 1924 caused a brief lull in the struggle between Trotsky and the troika of Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Stalin, but in April the conflict resumed with Stalin’s attack on Trotsky during a lecture at the Sverdlov Communist Academy in Moscow.42 Aleksei Rykov and Matvei Shkiriatov, both supporting the troika, attended Nizhnii’s sixteenth provincial Party conference in May 1924 to gauge the mood and, if necessary, aid in suppressing any Trotskyite disturbances.43 We saw earlier how Zhdanov’s “election” as first secretary of the gubkom in the summer of 1924 was the consequence of Uglanov’s transfer to Moscow to strengthen the anti-Trotsky faction there.44 In late November 1924 Central Committee secretary Molotov visited Nizhnii Novgorod to condemn Trotsky’s newly published Lessons of October before a crowd of 560 gubkom members and Party activists.45 The attacks on Trotsky now included wholesale censure for his past sins, such as his dissent from the majority of the leadership over the Brest-Litovsk peace negotiations in 1918 and his position on the tradeunion controversy of 1920–21. In Molotov’s speech of November 1924, he explicitly objected to Trotsky’s “non-Bolshevik past.”46 Zhdanov and others dutifully followed Molotov’s line on that and other occasions in the following weeks.47 In early January 1925, for example, Zhdanov vilified Trotsky before the Sormovo workers.48 Trotsky’s position was irreparably damaged at a plenary session of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission49 (ccc) in Moscow in the third week of January 1925. Illness prevented the

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architect of the October Revolution in Petrograd and of the Civil War victory to attend the meeting, at which he was dismissed as the supreme commander of the Soviet armed forces.50 A couple of weeks later at Nizhnii’s seventeenth guberniia Party conference Trotsky and his followers had more salt rubbed into their wounds.51 A formidable Stalinist phalanx guided the conference proceedings. The guest of honour, Lazar Kaganovich, reported on behalf of the Central Committee. Also present were his brothers Mikhail, who belonged to Nizhnii’s gubkombiuro, and Iulii, who headed the Party organization of Nizhnii’s city district. Two promising Young Turks who became famous in Soviet annals were at the conference as well: a local army commander by the name of I.S. Konev (1897–1973), and the new agitation-and-propaganda boss of Sormovo district, A.S. Shcherbakov (1901–45).52 At the Fourteenth Party Conference held in April 1925, Zinoviev and Kamenev began to quarrel with the Party’s top echelon, which was led by Stalin.53 Although there was little more at issue than the next phase in Stalin’s drive to eliminate his rivals for Lenin’s mantle, the conflict was expressed in disagreements about the correct direction of policy. While differences about foreign strategy (especially of the Communist International) played a minor role, the main discord was about domestic policy. Stalin and his key ally Bukharin preferred to continue the policy of “concessions toward the peasantry,” while Zinoviev and Kamenev advocated higher taxes for peasants to help the state pay for its industrialization drive. The rift between the two groups widened during the following months. Zinoviev and Kamenev’s clan was always at a disadvantage, since its support was largely limited to parts of the Leningrad and Moscow Party chapters (the Party leadership in most other regions and provinces had been carefully selected by Stalin and Kaganovich). At the eighteenth Nizhnii Novgorod guberniia Party conference in early December, the Nizhnii organization, in the presence of candidate Politburo member Ian Rudzutak, “condemned the slanderous forays of the representatives of the ‘New Opposition’ at the [recently held] Leningrad guberniia Party conference which had accused the Nizhegorodskii gubkom of kulak deviation.”54 This was the Nizhnii Communists’ response to Zinoviev and his allies (who controlled the Leningrad Party organization) who were making a desperate last stand against the General Line. But Zinoviev and Kamenev’s star had eclipsed. They were pilloried at the stormy proceedings of the Fourteenth Party Congress in the second half of December 1925. Using his command over the Party’s appointment system, Stalin had packed the Congress with his followers, who went loudly after his rivals. In a crucial vote, fewer than one-

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fifth of the delegates abstained or supported Zinoviev and Kamenev.55 Aiding in their fall, delegate Zhdanov spoke out against the Zinovievites, defending the nep and the General Line.56 He lauded Bukharin as one of the Party’s best theoreticians.57 Zhdanov’s speech must have pleased Stalin. As a reward, but undoubtedly also because Zhdanov led a rather important Party organization, he was elected for the first time as a nonvoting Central Committee member. The cc consisted of 106 voting members and forty-three alternates. His election made Zhdanov one of the most powerful people in the Soviet Union.58 In April 1926 Andrei Zhdanov visited Moscow to participate in a cc plenary session in which Trotsky and particularly Kamenev (the opposition had joined forces) were again taken to task. Zhdanov relished the opportunity to criticize Trotsky in front of this authoritative audience.59 In the weeks after the plenum, Zhdanov summarized the opposition’s mistakes before select audiences in Nizhnii province.60 By early May he was back in Moscow, where his name was written for the first time in the logbook of visitors to Stalin in his office. On that occasion, however, Zhdanov waited in vain to be called in by the Party’s General Secretary.61 Perhaps the two did meet in Moscow, but Zhdanov’s fruitless visit to the waiting-room indicates that Stalin still considered him to be a bit player. At that stage Stalin let associates such as Kaganovich, Rudzutak, and Molotov deal with the Zhdanovs in his retinue. Party politics remained at the forefront for the remainder of the year. In July another combined cc and ccc plenary meeting saw the leaders of the United Opposition make a final futile attempt to convince the Party’s elite of the merit of their views on Party democracy, the nep, and the correct international strategy.62 Zinoviev, Trotsky, and Kamenev warned against the wild growth of bureaucracy, citing again the example of Nizhnii Novgorod (as they had done in December 1925). But Zhdanov and Nizhnii stood for moderate policies and a continuation of the nep in 1925–26. This was what most cc members wanted, even if some had their doubts about Stalin’s growing power.63 As a result, the cc expelled Zinoviev from the Politburo in July 1926, followed by Kamenev and Trotsky in October, on the eve of the Fifteenth Party Conference.64 Few Communists in Nizhnii supported the United Opposition. Throughout the struggle for succession and the difficult years of the First Five-Year Plan, Nizhnii’s chapter hardly wavered at all in its support of Stalin. By the mid-1920s the guberniia committee and lower Party committees had been brought under control. Zhdanov and his gubkombiuro comrades had replaced the troublemakers (those who had once opposed Molotov, Mikoian, Uglanov, or Zhdanov himself in his early days) with more pliant characters.65

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Zhdanov ran a tight ship. The incidence in 1926 of local Party members, Komsomols, or sympathizers speaking out on behalf of Trotsky or the others was low. In the autumn some students of the town of Vyksa’s Pedagogical Academy attempted to rally support for the United Opposition and distributed writings by its leaders.66 The local Party committee and Nizhnii’s guberniia committee easily suppressed the dissenting voices. In December 1926, at a city Party conference in Nizhnii, Zhdanov proudly remarked that in his fiefdom support for the Opposition amounted to a mere handful of misguided people.67 But it was not just Zhdanov’s skill at appointing placemen that explains the low popularity of Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Trotsky among Nizhnii’s Communist officials. The Opposition’s politics represented for the Nizhnii Communists a disturbingly radical point of view. The troika seemed to fight a rearguard battle in an attempt to realize farfetched ideas of world revolution against Stalin’s pragmatic realpolitik. Outside Moscow and Leningrad, their personalities, programs, and activities were depicted by Stalin’s supporters as outlandish and peripheral. Moreover, many Party members did not understand the theoretical subtleties of the debate. In this regard, according to A.V. Sokolov, “the disagreement in terms of ideas between the ‘rights’ and the ‘lefts’ had for the overwhelming number of Party members a secondary importance. Their basic mass, as numerous documents testify, … poorly found its way in [understanding] the essence of theoretical disagreements among the political leaders, while stronger response was elicited by changes in current affairs. The efforts of the opposition to openly influence public opinion met with insuperable obstacles.”68 The troika and especially Trotsky seemed sore losers and annoying perennial troublemakers. The Opposition also failed because its leaders lacked personal popularity outside their former bastions of Moscow, Leningrad, or the army. Among Nizhnii’s Party brass, Trotsky and Zinoviev had no more than one illustrious backer (about whom more below), while Aleksandr Muralov, head of the guberniia soviets, parted ways with his brother Nikolai over the latter’s support of Trotsky. Meanwhile, ordinary folk understood and cared little about the Party’s occasionally noisy power struggles. Although the Party expended considerable effort on propaganda in 1920s Soviet Russia, its effects were ephemeral until the Regime’s mobilization of virtually all of the Soviet population in forging a new society around 1930. Kershaw suggests that propaganda works best when it “builds upon already existing values and mentalities.”69 As revolutionaries, the Communists adhered to a set of beliefs that were alien to the great mass of the Soviet

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population – the peasantry. The gap between the ideals of Soviet Communists and the world view of the Soviet people needed to narrow significantly, which happened dramatically during the upheaval of collectivization, rapid industrialization, and their aftermath.

private l ife Andrei Zhdanov began to take frequent vacations in the Caucasus during the 1920s. He often had to recover from bouts of sheer exhaustion brought on by his tremendous workload and the poor health that had plagued him since his heart troubles had begun.70 His young son Iurii saw little of him in Nizhnii; Zhdanov worked day and night, rarely coming home before 10:00 or 11:00 pm.71 His wife and son often stayed up to share a late supper with him.72 Both parents doted on Iurii, who enjoyed the first-class education reserved for the offspring of the Communist elite.73 Increasingly, Zhdanov and his family became far more affluent than their fellow citizens. Their wealth was not expressed in money, but in such things as Iurii’s education, Zhdanov’s considerable personal library, a maid, a car with a driver, expert medical care, and trips to the exclusive resorts of the Northern Caucasus and Black Sea coast.74 In 1927 Zhdanov’s sister Elena died at the age of thirty.75 Only one year his senior, she had been close to him, personally and politically, since for several years Elena, together with their sister Anna, had been a driver in the carpool of the Central Executive Committee of the soviets in Moscow.76 Zhdanov maintained a close relationship with his other sister Tat’iana as well. These women and his wife were all committed Communists by then. They contributed to the cause by working at different levels of the soviet and Party apparatus in Nizhnii Novgorod and Moscow. The Zhdanovs were thus united by bonds that went beyond mere familial affection.

c louds gat h e r in g In the course of 1927 economic problems sharpened in the Soviet Union. There were growing shortages of bread and other consumer goods such as cotton cloth or footwear, while in Nizhnii province unemployment in the towns began to rise.77 In Nizhnii Novgorod, hundreds of people queued in front of shops.78 The central leadership in Moscow, overcome by exaggerated fears of an invasion, spent more of its revenue on the defence industry and the army than on the production of consumer goods. As rumours of war spread people began to hoard, thus worsening the economic situation. The regime con-

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comitantly tightened its control over the diffusion of information of foreign origin, allowing only the highest-ranking leaders of the Communist party access to White emigré journals and newspapers fom January 1927 onward.79 In March 1927 Zhdanov once again denounced Trotsky before a plenary meeting of the gubkom.80 In this attack, however, he conveyed to his audience a subtle change in the policies of the General Line. Incongruously, Trotsky, who had been one of the most vociferous advocates of a policy that would benefit the factory proletariat, was now accused by Zhdanov of supporting the peasants. Zhdanov was preparing the ground for a sharp reversal of policy regarding the peasantry. Yet Trotsky’s influence had not quite been extinguished. In June 1927 A.G. Ishchenko (1895–1937), the union boss of the Russian water-transport workers and a friend of Trotsky’s, delivered a defiant but hopeless protest in support of the “Left” Opposition. At a regional congress of the Nizhnii Novgorod trade-union local of water-transport workers, Ishchenko attacked the cc’s policies on wages and on measures for the protection of labour.81 In response, the gubkom vehemently condemned Ishchenko for distributing his criticism, in a blatant violation of Party discipline, among non-Party Volga barge haulers. In the fall of 1927 the Central Control Commission discussed Ishchenko’s case on several occasions.82 Perhaps because Ishchenko was a popular figure and the barge haulers were seen as archetypical proletarians, the Politburo decided in October to transfer him to other work rather than have him undergo more severe punishment.83 The nature of Ishchenko’s criticism shows how Trotsky and his sympathizers tried to align themselves with “real” proletarians, thereby challenging the moderate cc majority that followed Stalin and Bukharin. Accusations that they had betrayed the working class hit a sore spot, and Stalin and those close to him sensed an urgent need to boost their popularity among disgruntled workers, some of whom had indeed begun to wonder what the wonderful proletarian revolution had actually done for them. Stalin’s clan eventually abandoned its policy of appeasing the Soviet peasantry, a move that, in hindsight, seemed to vindicate the United Opposition’s criticism. But the Leftist ringleaders were not forgiven and only those among them who eventually repented of their sins before the Party were welcomed back into its ranks, receiving minor posts within Party or government. Ishchenko’s transfer occurred literally on the eve of the cc and ccc plenum that decided on the expulsion of Trotsky and Zinoviev from the Central Committee in October 1927.84 Initially the United Opposition did not waver and refused to apologize for bringing their

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disagreements with the Party’s majority into the open. Accordingly, in November further sanctions were issued against the two leaders excluding both from the Party and demoting some of their supporters.85 While Trotsky stubbornly refused to apologize for his alleged errors, Zinoviev and Kamenev recanted their views before the Fifteenth Party Congress at the end of the year.86 There Zhdanov delivered an oblique speech about the nefarious ways of the Opposition but was not rewarded by election as full cc member at the end of the Congress. A few weeks after the the Fifteenth Party Congress, Stalin himself ventured into Siberia to observe the difficulties that hindered delivery of agricultural produce to the state’s collection agencies.87 This visit marked a radical turning point in the policy of the regime towards the countryside, home to the vast majority of the Soviet population in 1928. Stalin did not like what he saw, read, and heard and concluded that the moment had come to stop accommodating the peasantry. The shape of the new strategy was thrashed out among the leaders in the course of the next two years. The ultimate solution, rapid full-scale collectivization, was not decided upon until the late autumn of 1929.88 In Nizhnii, meanwhile, agricultural production met the expectation of the planning organizations. In the winter of 1928, the chair of the gubispolkom, A.I. Muralov (1886–1937), was promoted to Deputy People’s Commissar of Agriculture of the Russian Republic, a clear indication that, although Stalin’s displeasure regarding the general state of agriculture was profound, his and others’ estimation of the agricultural production of Nizhnii province was positive at that time.89 Indeed, Muralov did not suffer any ill effects from the recent attack on his older brother Nikolai (1877–1937), who had been condemned as a member of the United Opposition in December 1927.90 The transfer of Aleksandr Muralov to Moscow increased Zhdanov’s political clout, since it removed from Nizhnii’s political leadership a rival who had served in the second-most important post in the political structure of Nizhnii guberniia since 1923, thus longer than Zhdanov had served as first secretary of the Party organization. For a few weeks after Muralov’s promotion, the seat of provincial government chief remained vacant. In late February the Politburo, prompted by the Orgbiuro, discussed by means of a survey (opros) the appointment of a new chair.91 The bosses in Moscow appointed N.I. Pakhomov (1890–1938), who had been deputy secretary of the All-Union Central Executive Committee of Soviets since 1926.92 In April 1928 the cc and ccc held a plenary sesson, soon after which it became apparent that a tougher Union line to overcome the problems with the grain supply had been put in place.93 At a special meeting in

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Moscow to discuss the unsatisfactory grain procurements,94 cc secretary Molotov ridiculed Pakhomov for the cavalier attitude of the Nizhnii leadership towards grain deliveries, which had now begun to fall short.95 The outline of the new political course began to appear, but it took a further eighteen months to assume a concrete shape. In most cities food rationing was imposed in late 1928. Despite the introduction of a ration-card system in the first months of 1929, long queues formed throughout the year in front of shops because of shortages of meat, milk, butter, fish, potatoes, and other products.96 The reversal of the conciliatory stance of the New Economic Policy did not just affect agriculture. By the early spring of 1928, the Party began to censure technological specialists and industrial managers. In mid-March the Politburo discussed the alleged sabotage by foreign and Soviet engineers of the Shakhty mines in the Donbas region. The issue was then placed on the agenda of the joint cc/ccc meeting held in the second week of April.97 In May the Shakhty Trial opened in Moscow. The proceedings of the trial, which were published throughout the Soviet Union, announced to the Soviet public that industrial production rates were expected to increase drastically; that the freedom of managers and technical specialists was to be curtailed, and that a much stricter labour discipline was to be enforced. Criticism of the gross abuse of power by the corrupt leadership of the Smolensk Communists was published in the press at the same time as the reports on the opening of the Shakhty Trial, publicly underlining the leadership’s general tightening of the reins.98 In late May 1928 Zhdanov used two occasions to inform the lower Party echelons in the province about the central leadership’s recent correction of the political direction. On 27 May he appeared at a Sormovo district Party conference. Sormovo workers had been among the most restless in the province in the first half of the 1920s, but they were now a willing audience for Zhdanov’s message of distrust towards managers and spetsy, a harder line regarding the peasantry, and the fight against corrupt Party bosses.99 Zhdanov noted ominously that peasant obstruction and the Shakhty case indicated that the class enemy was alive and continuing its putrid struggle. In his speech Zhdanov announced the Regime’s other new policy, that of unleashing a “cultural revolution.”100 Enjoyment of literature, films, concerts, exhibitions of the plastic arts, and political schooling were to enrich the daily lives of Soviet citizens, while traditional bad habits observed even by Party members, such as collective drinking binges, were to end. Zhdanov emphasized the important role that was to be played by the Komsomol in the changes occurring in the Soviet Union. He encouraged generational conflict (which, come the early

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1930s, almost resulted in a generational war) by saying that “the struggle for the cleanliness of our ideas, the struggle for the youth has to take an important place at the moment; it is necessary to develop within the Komsomol a critical relationship toward the older generation [and] its shortcomings in its way of life and being.”101 Such stress on the energy and enthusiasm of youth came naturally to a thirty-two-year-old leader. Four days later, Zhdanov was even more blunt about the new course. In a speech to a local organization102 he belaboured the point that sustained hard work was of extreme importance in transforming the country.103 Great numbers of villagers were streaming into the cities in search of jobs in industry; most of them were unfamiliar with the regimented workday of the factory. Communists were called upon to lead the newcomers by example. Zhdanov then warned of the various dangers that threatened the Communist dictatorship in the socialist offensive that was unfolding: Comrades! The Shakhty Case opened a new page in the life of our party. The Shakhty Case showed us how it is necessary to check [industrial] enterprises. The class struggle with the bourgeoisie is becoming much sharper; it is now conducted in different disguises. The kulak has started to raise his head and has begun to damage us in agriculture. This is most dangerous above all in that they have engaged in a decisive battle in our weakest fields … science, culture, and technology. The bourgeoisie and the kulak in all kinds of ways try to oppose and wreck our grain procurements, try to oppose our industry; the Shakhty Case with particular sharpness showed the latter. A part of engineering-technical personnel slowed the speed of our industrial development. The engineers tried to destroy our industry, … awaited an intervention … awaited their old masters. … One needs to pay more attention to the way of living and being of the communist. The Shakhty … and Smolensk Cases uncovered a number of moments of decomposition of several parts of our party – drinking, dissipation, the [ab]use of one’s position. The petty-bourgeois milieu exerts an influence on some communists: they show a desire to dress in a chic way, to go on a binge at will. There are types of communists-chinovniks who are at work from nine to three; after three nothing happens. Until now our party has looked inadequately at the way of living, at the personal behaviour of … communist[s].104

young s tal in ist In the second half of the 1920s Zhdanov began to visit Moscow more frequently on official business. From the time of his first election as a Central Committee candidate member in 1925, he regularly attended cc plenary sessions. But he was still a long way from playing a signifi-

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cant role in steering policy in the Soviet Union. Because of the cc’s increasing size (and the fact that a growing share of its membership lived far from Moscow), the committee in its full complement met only a few times each year.105 Otherwise, Stalin and the other leaders made the great majority of policy decisions in the Orgbiuro, and especially the Politburo. The Politburo based its decisions on reports by cc departments, individual cc members, People’s Commissars, Sovnarkom, lower-level Party or state functionaries (such as diplomats or ogpu chiefs), and recommendations from smaller meetings by Politburo commissions, cc commissions, or by the cc Secretariat and its departments on specific issues, like the session led by Molotov on grain procurements, which Pakhomov attended. Thus, in June 1928, several days before the opening of a cc plenum, Zhdanov, together with central economic leaders – Rudzutak, V.V. Kuibyshev (1888–1935), Tomskii – People’s Commissar of Enlightenment A.V. Lunacharskii, and two others discussed before the Politburo the allotment of teenagers within the educational system and in the economy.106 Around the same time he participated in a Politburo commission led by Molotov on schooling at higher technical-education institutes. The commission prepared the speech Molotov delivered on the issue at the plenum and drafted its resolutions, which mandated better training of young specialists, who were to be largely recruited from the ranks of “real” proletarians.107 At this July cc plenum, Stalin proposed intensified exploitation of the peasantry in order to aid the stepped-up industrialization mandated by the proposed Five-Year Plan, the introduction of which had been deliberated since late 1927, and which now began to acquire a more concrete form.108 He urged an offensive against the peasantry, as well as collectivization of agriculture to generate funds for industrialization. The contours of the Plan, and especially the coercion of peasants that Stalin now advocated, led to a rift with the moderate group of leaders around Bukharin, who included Uglanov.109 Policy at home thus took a “leftist” turn, and international Communism followed suit at the Sixth Comintern Congress in the summer of 1928, when the international Communist organization abandoned the strategy of a tactical alliance with more moderate left-wing parties (a move that had been predetermined at the July cc plenum as well).110 The specific outlines of the Plan remained hazy for months (its concrete targets were continuously adjusted throughout 1929), but it was becoming clear that Stalin wanted the Plan’s main aim to be a radical economic transformation of the Soviet Union. Zhdanov, as his remarks regarding the Shakthy Trial make clear, was in full support of the unfolding of this socialist offensive even before the July meeting of the Central Committee.

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In late September 1928, Pravda editor Bukharin published “Notes of an Economist” in this all-Union newspaper, bringing the conflict between the Rightists and the General Line into the open.111 Two months later Uglanov was dismissed as Moscow Party secretary in the first of a series of blows sustained by the adherents of the “Right Deviation.”112 At the next cc plenum on 23 November, Zhdanov spoke in response to Molotov’s report on the recruiting of factory workers and the growth of the Party.113 Although Uglanov was repeatedly pilloried by other speakers, Zhdanov denounced the “Right Deviation” but avoided mentioning the name of his former superior. Instead he called for a sharp increase in the number of collective farms and an intensified Party effort in the class struggle against the kulaks. The November plenum of 1928 resolved to step up the membership campaign to recruit both shopfloor workers, those who were still involved in the production process (rather than those who had become Party bureaucrats), and poor and landless peasants. It was also announced that the Party would be purged of “alien” elements and ”bureaucratized” types.114 Zhdanov, otherwise not much visible in the 1928–29 cc meetings that eventually condemned the Rightists (Bukharin, Rykov, Tomskii, Uglanov), was deliberately selected to speak at the November 1928 meeting, as soon as Uglanov came under attack.115 Zhdanov had to convey to the cc that Nizhnii’s organization had broken with the heretical policies supported by its former chief.

on t h e eve of t h e g r e at t u r n Before 1929 the Communist party was a small elite organization that ruled a population that was largely neutral and apathetic towards the regime, sometimes antagonistic. In the late 1920s Zhdanov continued to receive reports of widespread hostility to the Communist authorities, despite sporadic persecution of outspoken “counterrevolutionaries.” On 1 January 1929 the ogpu sent him a report portraying the rural intelligentsia as having a “decadent and defeatist mood and a lack of belief in the internal possibilities and strength to build up the country.”116 This negative attitude was stirred up by “alien” elements among the intelligentsia (in the document, the quoted passage is underlined in pencil, likely by Zhdanov himself). Further, the report noted that the supply crisis that affected the countryside led to a “peasant-kulak” mood among rural teachers, who complained about the pressure applied to the kulaks, the taxation policy, and the requisitioning of agricultural products in the villages.117 The ogpu suggested that drinking binges, hooliganism, and “moral misbehaviour”

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were customary among teachers. Doctors, too, were guilty of antiSoviet moods, anti-Soviet agitation, and even anti-Semitic statements. But among the peasants themselves, incidents of protest and resistance to Soviet power or grain requisitions were isolated in early 1929118 and consisted of minor gestures such as peasants mocking the Soviet flag or spreading rumours that all the good grain was sent abroad. Provoked by the Communists themselves, the peasants’ relatively tranquil lives were uprooted before the year was out. The Communist party grew tremendously from early 1929 until the mid-1930s.119 Its bolstered membership helped the Party to solidify its power in town and country alike. The influx of recruits combined with an increase in the geographical size of Nizhnii region to create a much larger proletarian vanguard for Zhdanov to rule during the early 1930s. By January 1929 preparations were underway for an administrative territorial reorganization of the Soviet Union. The division of Russia into guberniias, which dated from the time of Catherine the Great, was to be abolished. The move was inspired by the idea that the amalgamation of several provinces into fewer large ones would reduce the size and cost of the bureaucracy.120 It was the first of a series of futile territorial reorganizations that only came to a halt in the 1960s, when most provinces were restored to something resembling their dimensions in tsarist times.121 The reorganization had important consequences for Zhdanov and other provincial leaders in the early 1930s, since leading a much larger territory – and the number of regions within the rsfsr was more than halved – translated into enhanced status within the Party. The Politburo seemed to have harboured few doubts about appointing Zhdanov as Party chief of the larger Nizhnii region. On 3 January 1929 the gubispolkom boss, Pakhomov, attended a Politburo session in Moscow to discuss the redrawing of the map.122 He hurried back to Nizhnii to inform his colleagues about the result of the consultations, which were then relayed to the twenty-first (and last) Nizhegorodskaia guberniia Party conference held on 3–11 January 1929. The guberniia was going to be dissolved and reincarnated as an oblast’ (eventually it was labelled a krai).123 Soon after the conference, Zhdanov himself departed for further discussion of the borders of the new region with the Politburo.124 By mid-February the Politburo discussed the composition of the coordinating transition body that was to prepare the organization of the region of which Nizhnii Novgorod was to be the administrative centre.125 The last guberniia Party conference showed Zhdanov at his best, fulminating against a new enemy within the Party, this time from the right of the political spectrum.126 His sophistry equalled Stalin’s:

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And some last remarks regarding the Uglanovshchina. If by this is understood the period of work of the Nizhnii Novgorod Party organization under Uglanov, then I believe, that for this “Uglanovshchina” we, together with you, carry responsibility before the cc, but we consider work [then accomplished] by [the Party’s] organization as honest, as it was in agreement with the decisions of the Party’s cc. … We did not find as … gubkom anything criminal or unworthy in having contact with Com[rade] Uglanov as cc and Moscow Party Committee secretary. I do not think that there was an order in the Party to the extent that we could never maintain contact with a person such as a Party secretary, and we do not see anything reprehensible in the fact that such a tie existed. We would not have been vozhdy [bosses] of the working class, we would not be leaders, but petty bourgeois and philistines, if we would subordinate the general cause to please personal contacts. When Com[rade] Uglanov doubted, the [Nizhnii Novgorod Party] organization stood for the defence of the general line of the Party in a way that our Party organization needs to behave also in future, and those people who consider our organization and Party as a votchina [fief] of individual vozhdy are deeply mistaken. As if there could be a situation, that [the Party’s] organization in the course of four years only survived because [its] leader Uglanov watched over it. Our Party would be bad, if it would be led by various leaders [in such a manner]. The time is past when we had different princes, when in Leningrad sat Zinoviev, in Moscow Kamenev, when all went tiptoeing…127

Zhdanov’s remarks are revealing despite the cunning spin he tried to place upon the relationship between Nizhnii’s Communists and Uglanov. Like the other hardline Stalinists, Zhdanov maintained friendly relations with Uglanov, a candidate Politburo member and the chief of the Moscow Party since 1925, almost until his disgrace in the autumn of 1928. Zhdanov’s harsh critique of someone who was after all still cc secretary and who remained People’s Commissar of Labour and a cc member until 1930 betrayed excessive anxiety about his erstwhile bond with Uglanov.128 Zhdanov was thus defending his Party organization and himself. Trotsky and other “Left” Oppositionists had on at least two previous occasions attacked the Nizhnii organization for its friendliness towards the peasantry and in 1927 Ishchenko had complained that the Nizhnii bosses had not given the archproletarian Volga boatmen their proper due. In the fall of 1928 and the winter of 1929, Bukharin and Uglanov wanted to continue such conciliatory policies towards the peasants. Like Stalin in Moscow, Zhdanov had to convince his audience that it was now time to begin the construction of socialism in earnest and discard this benevolent attitude towards the countryside. Some con-

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ference delegates may have noticed the shrill nature of Zhdanov’s condemnation of Uglanov and wondered privately whether Zhdanov or Stalin and his circle in Moscow were not slightly hypocritical. But Zhdanov’s command over his Party machine discouraged most Communists in the guberniia from defending Bukharin or Uglanov in the course of 1929. Noteworthy as well in Zhdanov’s speech is his defensiveness about informal patronage networks in the Communist party. The inconsistent denial of Uglanov’s role as suzerain who had entrusted his fief to the vassal Zhdanov is too conspicuous. Later, the unfolding of the 1936–38 purge was testimony to Stalin and his circle’s paranoia about such networks. In the wake of the arrest and conviction of each ranking leader in those years, a whole group of putative followers was destroyed on the basis of their past or present association with their patron. Ironically, of course, Stalin himself cultivated several of those networks and rewarded their unconditional obedience and slavish loyalty to him.

a new r e g io n Administrative reorganization and condemnation of the “Right Deviation” were accompanied by a confused and tentative implementation of the Five-Year Plan during the first half of 1929. Although the Plan was supposed to have to come into force in October 1928, its targets continually became more ambitious thereafter.129 Industry’s new planning targets were discussed at a united plenum of the gubkom and guberniia control commission from 27 February to 3 March.130 Staging such ostentatiously frank discussions maintained the pretence of collaborative decision making in economic planning, but much of the talk was scripted and gubkom members decided little in terms of concrete policy by 1929. Such gatherings became ritualized events expressing enthusiastic support for ever more ambitious industrial plans and ever higher levels of industrial production. The actual dayto-day running of the economy became the domain of the gubkom’s biuro, which was to work within the framework laid down by the cc (Politburo), the People’s Commissariats, Gosplan, or vsnkh. For example, the most famous construction project of the First Five Year Plan in the region, an automobile plant, was the subject of a Politburo session attended by Pakhomov in early April.131 Over the signature of Zhdanov, an enthusiastic telegram was published in Nizhegorodskaia kommuna announcing that the soil was going to be broken for an automobile factory that was going to be constructed in Nizhnii on 5 April 1929.132

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Those who remained sceptical about the feasibility of Stalin’s grandiose projects were reduced to irrelevance. On 28 February a closed session of the gubkom plenum condemned Tomsky, Rykov, and Bukharin for their attack on Stalin and the adherents of the General Line.133 Particular exception was taken by Nizhnii’s Communists to the trio’s accusation that Stalin and company wanted to establish a “feudal-serf regime.” Considering the patronage networks and the imminent imposition of collectivization, the allegation was not altogether outlandish. The offensive against the Right continued in the next months and Zhdanov busied himself as an itinerant spokesman for the new course. In mid-March Zhdanov spoke in Izhevsk before the central committee of the Udmurtia assr (soon to be part of the Nizhnii Novgorod krai) on the situation within the Party.134 He took a swipe at the now-exiled Trotsky, but his main theme was the danger of “Right Deviation.” Zhdanov explained how Bukharin, Tomskii, Rykov, and Uglanov were wrong to fear a rupture in relations between the authorities and the middle peasants, who were supposedly alienated by the state’s trading policy and the growing collectivization movement. Zhdanov denied that the new course amounted to quasi-Trotskyism, as the Rightists maintained. But one had to suffer from amnesia not to see the resemblance between Zhdanov’s thesis that the kulaks were class enemies who could not become socialists in a peaceful transition and similar Trotskyite positions that Zhdanov had only recently denounced. In the second half of April Zhdanov attended the Sixteenth Party Conference in Moscow, which was preceded by a week-long cc and ccc meeting heralding the beginning of the end for Rykov, Bukharin, and Tomskii as Party leaders.135 Zhdanov was elected to the conference presidium with forty-nine others; he edited the resolution on the economic plan and chaired some of the sessions, a sign that his star was still rising.136 The Conference ratified the goals of the Five-Year Plan for rapid economic development of the Soviet Union and ordered a general purge of the Party, the first since 1921.137 As the representative from Nizhnii, it was Pakhomov rather than Zhdanov who spoke on the Plan. Pakhomov focused in a general way on transport routes and the complications of the merger of territorial divisions rather than on specific ramificiations of the Plan for the Nizhnii region.138 The fate of the kulak was a central topic at the Conference.139 Many still argued for the kulak’s inclusion in the collective farm, in opposition to what Zhdanov had already stated in Izhevsk, that the kulak was unfit to be a member of the new socialist society.140 For the time being the consequences to be drawn from this radical postulate remained

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unarticulated, but those supportive of a cautious policy in the countryside were defeated at the Conference.141 The Central Committee in effect forbade kulaks from joining the collective farms.142 On 21 May a Sovnarkom decree followed, defining in broad terms the concept of “kulak.”143 Zhdanov’s words in Izhevsk, rather than prophetic, were indicative of how, long before “de-kulakization” became official policy, Stalin’s in-crowd (on the fringe of which Zhdanov had now arrived) had already decided on instigating and executing a ruthless class war in the village. For the Stalinists, it now became a question of preparing the ground for the extreme brutality of the winter of 1929–30. A first step was the defeat of Bukharin in the spring of 1929. A slew of measures followed to help identify the kulak, to defile him in propaganda, and then eliminate him in actuality. The Party forged other weapons to aid the upcoming socialist offensive. On June 5 the cc decreed that churches were to be closed in an “organized manner.” For the first time, the Council of Labour and Defence (STO) called for the organization of Machine Tractor Stations (mts) that would aid the mechanization of farm labour.144 Three weeks later the Politburo decided to deploy convicts held in ogpu-administered camps as forced labour, in preparation for a large influx of inmates.145 Collectivization may have looked enticing on paper to the Party leaders. One important motive in forcing the peasants to enter collective farms was that it would be easier for the authorities to collect crops, dairy products, or meat from the peasants. Pooling equipment, farm animals, and labour and amalgamating small plots into large stretches of collectively tended land suggested a far more efficient manner of agricultural organization. Aided by machinery rented from the mts, hired agronomists, and natural and artificial fertilizers that could all be paid for from the farms’ collective income (which would far outstrip that of individual homesteads), collective farms promised much higher production levels. In addition, it was believed that the peasants would gradually shed their selfish, individualistic outlook once they had experienced the benefits of working as members of egalitarian collectives. But Communist frustration with the peasants was evident in the merciless implementation of collectivization. Forced to make concessions in 1920 and 1921 when the peasants rose in revolt against grain requisitioning, the Party had consistently failed to discipline them. Grain collection had once more proven difficult in 1927 and 1928. The Stalinists decided in 1929 that the time was propitious for bridling the peasant. But whereas collectivization succeeded in breaking peasant defiance of the Communist authorities, it had utterly failed to create a new socialist tiller of the land by the time

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it had been completed in the mid-1930s. Agricultural production remained low throughout Soviet history, and with few exceptions villagers rarely showed any appetite at all for collective farming. They usually preferred leaving for the city rather than trying to make socialist agriculture viable. From the very beginnings of all-out collectivization, peasants proved reluctant to abandon individual farming and join the collectives. By 1 June 1929, 2.5 percent of peasant households in the new krai of Nizhnii Novgorod had been collectivized, which was below the level of collectivization in the Russian Republic and the Soviet Union.146 At the end of June in order to speed things up, local soviets in the Russian Republic were allowed to put further pressure on peasants who failed to deliver to the authorities the obligatory quotas of agricultural products. The soviets were given permission in extreme cases to expropriate the property of peasants identified as kulaks.147 In 1929, the Rightist leaders having been disarmed, the Party itself underwent the purge ordained at the April Party Conference to shed their supporters.148 Ranking bosses were selected to help in the process. In June Zhdanov, acting as a ccc emissary and member of the auditing commission of the Party purge, was dispatched to the Kurgan region in the Urals.149 For the first time since 1918 he visited his old stomping ground around Shadrinsk. Zhdanov was able to use some of his old acquaintances to facilitate the cleansing of the ranks there. He may have managed to remove some people who reminded him uncomfortably of his flight eleven years earlier. Stalin now began to take a strong interest in Zhdanov. On 12 July 1929, for the first time on his own, Zhdanov met Stalin in his Kremlin office.150 Volkogonov’s portrayal of the meeting rendered below has verisimilitude:151 Stalin had noticed Zhdanov a long while ago. Of course, much about him the vozhd’ got to know later, when the young secretary of the party’s Nizhegorod gubkom became a (candidate) member of the cc in 1925. In 1929 Stalin invited the secretary of the Gor’kii kraikom of the party (the city toward this point in time had already been renamed) to meet with him in the Kremlin. The thirty-three-year-old brawny fellow made a good impression on the gensek. He asked about the situation in Gor’kii, about the mood of the people, about how they reacted in the city to the expulsion of Trotsky, his exclusion from the party and the exile of a great number of his followers … Zhdanov … in short form, and sensibly, reported on everything, estimating with optimism the perspectives of the collective-farm movement in the krai and … the efforts of the bolsheviks of the krai organization to fulfill the Five-Year Plan before time. They said goodbye. Stalin noted down something in his enigmatic notebook.

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Smart eyes, intelligent, did not ask for anything, as is usual in these cases (machinery, people, additional investments). The estimate by the young secretary of the prospects of the kolkhoz movement and the necessity of the stepped-up development of industry surprisingly agreed with what Stalin himself thought about it.152

Volkogonov aptly notes the finely tuned sensory antenna that Zhdanov used for “reading Stalin’s mind” (and that of others) and his talent for saying what he believed his interlocutor preferred to hear. Zhdanov quickly noted someone’s flaws, which he could depict with irony, and liked to write down infelicitous turns of phrase used by speakers at cc meetings so that he and Stalin could have a good laugh about their linguistic blunders.153 Zhdanov thus endeared himself to the Vozhd’ in a way that few, if any, of his colleagues did. Later, after his transfer to Moscow in 1934, Zhdanov was able to divine the objective of Stalin’s political moves and word the essence of his political intentions more accurately than almost anyone who was close to the Boss. He owed this ability not to some gift of telepathy but to his meticulous preparation for any eventuality and his great sensibility.154 Long before his meeting with Stalin in July 1929, Zhdanov had come to understand the direction of Stalin’s policy aims by asking Stalin’s intimates about them, especially his own acquaintances among Stalin’s crowd, such as Molotov and Kaganovich. Zhdanov seems to have realized early on the extremes to which Stalin was willing to go to reach his goals. Thus, as early as March Zhdanov had called for a kind of “liquidation of the kulaks as a class.” At the July meeting he said what Stalin wanted to hear, flattering the latter’s vanity about the accuracy of his political analysis of the moment, and thus helped to further solidify Stalin’s plans for a great turn of events. Zhdanov had made all the right noises and could not hide his elation about the meeting. After his return to the Nizhnii region, he took the opportunity at least twice in July to mention the meeting in his speeches, once in Viatka, which had been added to his fief, and another time in familiar Sormovo, during Party conferences preceding the first conference of the newly organized Nizhnii Novgorod krai. In both speeches, Zhdanov outlined the promise and danger of industrialization, collectivization, and the cultural revolution, noting that the Regime’s modernization project was threatened by specialists in the towns and by the Church, kulak, and “hooligan” in the village.155 These enemies all used sabotage as their method, as the Shakhty Trial had indicated. His tone, however, was idealistic and optimistic, emblematic of the confident mood among the Stalinists, untempered as yet by the reality of implementing their ambitious plans.156 On 27

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July at the Sormovo works, Zhdanov announced that the cc Orgbiuro had increased planning targets in a number of economic sectors on the basis of the results of the Five-Year Plan’s first year.157 He announced a vsnkh deadline for the construction of the automobile plant within fifteen months. After it began production, he promised, Nizhnii would be known as the Soviet Detroit. His words about the reorganization of farming and the offensive against the kulak already sounded more belligerent than in Viatka. From 5 to 10 August, the first Party conference of Nizhnii Novgorod krai was held. The new krai was physically as large as a medium-sized European country, its territory amounting to 280,000 square kilometres, but it had only 7.5 million inhabitants.158 The krai Party had 50,819 members and the local Komsomol approximately 100,000, while the trade unions boasted of a membership of some 500,000 workers and employees.159 Bolshevik custom had first secretary Zhdanov opening the meeting. On the evening of 5 August he spoke, buoyantly hailing the radiant future: Our first krai conference gathers at a moment of great class movements, both inside and outside the country. It meets at the great turning point of our struggle. Our conference meets at a time when inside the country we have already started the reconstruction of the economy on a new socialist fundament, through a fast tempo of industrialization, which we will fulfill with all the exertion [necessary], remembering that our fastest independence, our fastest liberation from dependence on foreign states … [the] fastest building of socialism in our country, [and the] fastest construction of a socialist society in the ussr depend on the pace of our industrialization. We have begun the task of catching up and overtaking the leading capitalist countries in technical terms. We will realize this task through the expansion of our industry, we will realize this task through the conversion of our agriculture. We execute the most grandiose program of socialist reconstruction in our country, the five-year plan of the economy of the Soviet Union, which will be fulfilled through the will of our Party with the active support … of the toiling masses …160

He went on to warn of the obstacles: Comrades, … our Party has begun uprooting the roots of capitalism in the countryside. Our industrial heights, industrial achievements on one side, the extraordinary backwardness of agriculture on the other, [and] finally the general aims and tasks of the construction of socialism in all of the country demand that we take on such a retooling, such a reconstruction, the fundamental conversion of our countryside as our fighting cause. …Comrades, on the road to the uprooting of [traditional] roots, socialism meets the rabid

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opposition of class enemies. Socialism appears at a moment when the Nepman in the city and the kulak in the village and all wreckers of production, like in the Shakhty Affair, and other numerous counterrevolutionary wreckers, conduct rabid opposition to our offensive. This resistance by hesitant and bourgeois elements in our country is passed on to the waverers among the petty bourgeois elements, who are a majority in our country …161

Given this situation, the Right Deviation was considered by Stalin and Zhdanov as the main danger, for it played into the hands of the “class enemies.”162 The suppression of the “counterrevolutionary wrecking,” Zhdanov implied, would make the numerous “petty bourgeois waverers” (by whom he mainly meant peasants) come over to the side of the Party. What this suppression might entail remained vague. After the conference, the first kraikom plenum (it had just over 150 voting and nonvoting members in total) elected a biuro. Its seventeenperson membership included Zhdanov, A.K. Lepa (1896–38), Pakhomov, Zashibaev, A.Ia. Stoliar (1901–1938), Komissarov, and E.K. Pramnek (1899–1938); among its seven candidate members was ogpu chief Reshetov.163 Zhdanov was elected first secretary. Despite this apparent show of inner-party democracy, it was really the Politburo’s confirmation of the composition of the kraikombiuro and the selection of its secretaries on the basis of materials submitted to it by the cc Orgbiuro that mattered.164 The heady developments of the previous months had taken their toll on Zhdanov. Even though it was clear that more momentous changes were in the offing and that a prolonged absence was not opportune, he was granted a two-month holiday by the kraikombiuro just after the conference to recover from an unspecified illness.165 It is likely that before he took his holidays, he visited the cc Secretariat in Moscow to discuss the staffing of the kraikombiuro (thus helping to inform the Politburo confirmation of late August). After his return in the fall, he received the opportunity to make his mark as a public speaker to an all-Union audience in addressing a plenum of the Komsomol in Moscow on the labour and education of working-class youth.166 The Party’s militancy in industry continued to mount, while the leadership’s desire for ever-increasing production levels led to the imposition of regimentation. On 7 September the cc introduced one-person management in factories.167 According to new targets set by Gosplan in the autumn, Nizhnii krai was to increase metal production by 880 percent, compared to the production levels of 1927–28, by the end of the Five-Year Plan!168 During the First Five-Year Plan foundations were laid for seventy-nine new factories and workshops in the krai.169

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In implementing collectivization, Nizhnii krai enjoyed some dispensation, for it was defined as a “consumer” region (it consumed more agricultural products than it produced), from which no great surplus was to be expected in the near future. By 1 October collectivization levels had edged up to include four precent of peasant households. This was only half of the total rate reached in the Russian Republic.170 In October the Regime undertook its first experiments with coercive methods in organizing collective farms. With Zhdanov still on holiday, the kraikomburo authorized the krai procuracy and gpu to organize a number of show trials of the worst of the “kulak terrorists”; the show trials were inspired by a Politburo resolution of 3 October against such offenders.171 Violence begot violence. In November krai authorities registered some 1,375 cases of either economic or counterrevolutionary crimes (often refusals to comply with the increasing grain quotas that were requisitioned), while acts of “terror” committed by kulaks reached sixteen.172 From behind his desk, Andrei Zhdanov led the disastrous herding of the peasantry into collective farms in Nizhnii Novgorod krai in subsequent months. Despite its comprehensive economic failure, his guidance of collectivization in the region earned him additional stripes in his rise through the Party’s ranks.

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4 The Great Turn, 1929–1934 They did learn. They paid a heavy price for it. But they did learn.1

revolution f r o m a b ov e We will never know to what extent the Stalinists really believed in 1929 and 1930 that their country was exposed to the “clear and present danger” of a capitalist invasion, but, as before, they publicly professed to believe that the world’s first socialist country was threatened by implacably hostile foreign powers. In this way, Stalin justified his crude project to make the ussr economically self-sufficient by stepping up the pace of industrialization and collectivizing agriculture. The concomitant goal of these economic policies was the realization of a Marxist utopia.2 Stalin’s minions, such as Zhdanov, doggedly pursued this profound socioeconomic and cultural transformation, even when its aims proved exceedingly difficult or even impossible to accomplish in the early 1930s. Meanwhile, it caused a staggering upheaval in most people’s lives. In the short term, profound suffering and hardship were the fate of millions. The last third of Zhdanov’s career in Nizhnii was absorbed by his guidance of this socialist offensive in the krai. He performed as indifferently as the bosses of other regions in steering the “Revolution from Above” (as the era of the Great Turn has been called) and was shunned as a result by a dismayed Stalin for more than a year. By 1934, however, Zhdanov’s ingratiating manner and unwavering support of the Vozhd’ had returned him to Stalin’s favour. In early November 1929 Zhdanov, back from his holidays, addressed a united plenum of Nizhnii Novgorod’s kraikom and krai control

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commission on the theme of self-criticism.3 It was an unusually rambling speech,4 as the forty-odd pages of the transcript show. In part the confused quality of the address reflects Zhdanov’s puzzlement at the mixed messages he had received from Moscow. At the time of the Nizhnii Party plenum the manner and timing of all-out collectivization was still under discussion among the bosses. A few days after the plenary session, on the anniversary of the October Revolution, Pravda published Stalin’s “Year of the Great Turn,” which called for an increased tempo of collectivization.5 In this way, the Boss of bosses made unequivocally clear that the Soviet Union had entered an era of epochal change. Though usually occupied with implementing the agricultural and industrial plans in Nizhnii, Zhdanov helped to a certain degree to develop the strategy of the “Great Turn” in Moscow. Immediately after the anniversary of the Revolution, Zhdanov and other Nizhnii leaders participated in a cc plenum.6 The die was cast here. On 24 November Zhdanov chose a sympathetic setting, a meeting of the Party activists of Nizhnii’s industrial districts and the neighbouring cities of Dzherzhinsk (Rastiapino) and Balakhna, to report on the momentous changes upon which the cc had decided.7 Full-scale collectivization was to begin.8 He depicted its long-term purpose as a decisive step towards the formation of a society of plenty for all. But, as we saw, the short-term agenda for collectivization stressed the moulding of a recalcitrant peasantry into collectively organized producers engaged in the process of building socialism. The expectation was that the more rational organization of agricultural production into collective farms would increase the state’s intake of agricultural products, so that more grain and other crops could be sold abroad and the country’s rapidly growing industrial centres fed with the revenues thereby earned.9 The levels of collectivization reached throughout the Soviet Union by early March 1930 exceeded those called for at the November cc plenum. Local enthusiasm in organizing the collective farms led to collectivization levels that, at least on paper, soon defied the most optimistic expectations of the Central Committee in Moscow.10 On 5 December the Politburo formed a commission to guide all-out collectivization and develop strategies to “dekulakize” the countryside.11 One of its eight subcommissions, chaired by K.Ia. Bauman (1892–1937), worked out a policy to deal with the kulaks.12 It distinguished three categories of kulaks, all of whom were all to be removed from their villages. Another subcommission, under G.N. Kaminskii, set targets for the completion of full collectivization. When in early December only six percent of the peasant households in Nizhnii Novgorod krai belonged to a collective farm, Zhdanov and Nizhnii’s

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kraikombiuro instigated a radical acceleration.13 They designated certain raions to accomplish full collectivization within the next few months. Kaminskii’s commission then tried to harness this enthusiasm by mandating full collectivization of the peasants of the entire Nizhnii Novgorod krai “only” by the spring of 1932.14 Despite such guidelines, collectivization levels doubled, tripled, and quadrupled in Nizhnii towards mid-December and doubled once more in the next two months, embracing nearly half of all peasant households in early March. On 13 December Nizhegorodskaia kommuna published a call to factory workers to volunteer their help in setting up the collective farms. There followed an article by Zhdanov on 15 December describing the new policy as a giant leap towards earthly paradise.15 On that day, according to statistics of the People’s Commissariat of Agriculture, while three or four of the 126 total districts of the krai approached a fifty percent level of collectivization, in almost ninety percent of krai raions fewer than fifteen percent of households were collectivized.16 At another kraikom plenum meeting of 15–20 December, it was decreed that collectivization had to be complete by the spring of 1932 as determined by the Kaminskii subcommission.17 Collectivization was not the only focus of Nizhnii’s administration. The kraikom plenum also discussed industry. The plans for factory production and the building of new plants grew ever more ambitious. Provincial government chief Pakhomov illustrated the staggering increase of the planning targets for the First Five-Year Plan when he announced that “we project a total capital investment in industry … in this year [that is, from 1 October 1929] of 200 million rubles or a growth percentage compared to the former year [approximately, October 1928 to October 1929] which amounts to … 250 percent, in gross production we project instead of the 580 million rubles that we have achieved in [the previous] year, 829 million rubles, that is a 43 percent growth compared to the previous year. If we compare this growth to the average indicator for the Union, we see that the average growth for the Union is 32 percent and our average 43 percent.”18 Pakhomov followed this delirious exposé with an outline of the plans to collectivize agriculture fully in the krai within less than three years. He warned that “terrorist acts” by desperate anti-Soviet kulak elements were on the increase and would continue to rise as a result of the great pace of kolkhoz organization.19 The rapid and frequent changes in the goals of the Great Turn caused increasing bewilderment as evidenced in the plenum speech by kraikombiuro member Zashibaev. He disclosed the chaotic effect on the Sormovo works of the high pace at which planned targets had been appreciated upwards in previous months. The plans for the

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expansion of the works and its production growth had been altered eleven times during 1929.20 Later during the plenum, Party Control Commission representative N.M. Os’mov (1891–1962) reiterated Zashibaev’s points about the havoc created by the continual changes at Sormovo. Os’mov cited mistakes made elsewhere, too, as in Izhevsk, where a new factory hall had been built for which no purpose existed. He suggested that factory managers (who in September had been formally released from control by trade-union and Party representatives in running their enterprises) were inclined to rely excessively on old specialists in developing plans for the reconstruction and expansion of their enterprises.21 The managers should instead place their trust in the slowly growing contingent of new specialists, who had been shaped under Soviet rule, and about whose qualifications Os’mov was rather too confident, as became clear in subsequent years. Os’mov ended his speech by criticizing the deficient living conditions of most city dwellers. He remarked how in his recently finished apartment building no water-heaters had been installed and how the capital Nizhnii Novgorod had precious few food canteens, launderettes, toy stores, or places to store perishable foodstuffs. When Zhdanov spoke to the krai committee on 17 December, he reverted one last time to the optimistic rhetoric of 1929, stressing the momentous quality of the transformation the country had embarked upon.22 He hinted that the term to complete full-scale collectivization could be further shortened since the krai was not solely a “consumer” region but contained some territories that had been labelled “production” districts. These were obligated to generate a bountiful surplus as soon as possible.23 Some of the impending problems with the operation of the collective farms were foreshadowed in Zhdanov’s remarks about the fire-sale of cattle conducted by peasants before they entered the collectives – many peasants naively believed that the collective farm would provide them with new animals and mechanical draught power. Zhdanov portrayed such actions as inspired by kulaks and some of the surviving adherents of the Right Deviation. The narod needed to be more on their guard against sabotage by class enemies. This warning subsequently became a standard refrain in most of Zhdanov’s major speeches. He distinguished different enemies at different times, but there was never a moment during the 1930s when, in Zhdanov’s view, there was not some kind of enemy preying on the honest Soviet citizen.24 On 19 December Zhdanov took the stage again at the plenum, starting with a tribute to the ogpu, the Soviet secret police, which was celebrating its twelfth anniversary. Zhdanov told his audience that ogpu officials had a great role to play in the Great Turn.25 Back on

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the theme of collectivization, Zhdanov warned that the peasants themselves would have to provide most of the means to organize the collective farms. The special subsidies previously given to the few kolkhozy that existed before the fall of 1929 would be discontinued.26 He promised that whatever funds could be found in the krai’s budget would be earmarked for the purchase of tractors, combines, and other agricultural machinery, but he implied that little money was at hand. Zhdanov emphasized the importance of the Party’s supervision over the kolkhoz movement’s leadership. To organize spring sowing, the Party would dispatch some three to four thousand Communists to the countryside. Zhdanov’s words reflected a Central Committee letter of the previous day ordering the dispatch of twenty-five thousand skilled workers into the countryside to serve as chairs, deputy chairs, or to occupy other leading positions on the collective farms.27 Ultimately, eight hundred industrial workers would be delegated by the krai authorities of Nizhnii Novgorod to join this movement of the “twenty-five-thousand.”28 The plenum concluded its deliberations by setting up a kraikom commission to guide collectivization further. Although not made chair, Zhdanov, together with second Party secretary Pramnek, kraispolkom chair Pakhomov, and twenty other chiefs, was included.29 Zhdanov was sent to Moscow by his fellow biuro members on 23 December to discuss the state of Volga shipping with “the Politburo.”30 Once in Moscow, he likely investigated the exact aims and parameters of collectivization as they then were. By 30 December he had returned to Nizhnii, fortified by Stalin’s recent announcement to the All-Union Conference of Marxist Agrarians that “liquidation of the kulaks as a class” was a necessity.31 Consequentially, confiscation of property (including animals and tools), eviction, and arrest became the lot of hundreds of thousands of villagers stigmatized as kulaks. Those classified as middle, poor, or landless peasants received the movable and immovable property of their formerly better off neighbours for use in the newly founded collective. In Nizhnii Zhdanov was the conduit for the directives that emanated at a furious pace from the central leadership in Moscow.32 During the first two months of 1930, the Party’s top body continued to issue a slate of decrees (presented as Central Committee, Sovnarkom, or Central Executive Committee decisions) fine-tuning collectivization and the liquidation of the kulaks, and addressing related issues such as the attack on organized religion and the treatment of national minorities.33 Regarding the latter issues, Nizhnii’s kraikombiuro, prodded on by the central leadership, ordered large-scale closure of houses of religious worship to accompany collectivization in the krai.34 In December

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1929 and January 1930, Zhdanov dedicated some of his time to the delicate issue of relations between the Communist authorities and the minority ethnic groups in krai districts where non-Russians formed the majority.35 In such areas there were few indigenous cadres to impose collectivization, and the Russians leading the drive had to be careful of ethnic sensibilities. Keeping up the momentum in the latter half of January, Zhdanov addressed district Party secretaries on various aspects of all-out collectivization, emphasizing the Communists’ important role in guiding the farms.36 Meanwhile, trusted local Party leaders were dispatched to organize the arrest and deportation of the kulaks and their families.37 Zhdanov addressed these delegates on 27 January.38 A secret cc resolution of 30 January set down statistical terms for dekulakization, placing the all-Union average of households defined as kulak at 3.5 percent.39 On the same day, Zhdanov spoke to the Nizhnii kraikombiuro about the “liquidation of the kulaks as a class.”40 He disingenuously criticized the practice of making peasants enter collective farms by the use of force, threats, and demagoguery.41 His remarks indicate how the borders between reality, fantasy, and cynicism had become blurred in the minds of the Party leadership; for practice belied the theory, and all-out rapid collectivization could only be achieved by coercion. Most peasants preferred the bird-in-hand of their own homestead to the chimera of a radiant future promised by Communist agitators. A model kolkhoz charter was published in the press on 6 February, but it remained too vague to convince most peasants of the great promise of the collective farm.42 Use of force by the Party, soviets, and ogpu became virtually universal in Nizhnii Novgorod. The krai chief of police, Reshetov, attended a special ogpu meeting in Moscow on 30 January dedicated to planning the liquidation of the kulaks. The meeting institutionalized violent coercion by establishing extrajudicial bodies called “troikas.” The troikas were supposed to deal with “category-one” kulaks, those who were to be arrested and sent to labour camps.43 Armed detachments led by the ogpu were dispatched to areas where the secret police anticipated the greatest resistance to dekulakization, a ruthless process bent on removing community leaders from their villages. The kulaks’ fate was abysmal: hundreds of thousands were rounded up in all parts of the country and dispatched, usually in boxcars, to remote and inhospitable regions from which few ever returned to their native villages. Those who resisted were executed or sent to concentration camps. By eliminating the peasants’ elite, the Soviet authorities succeeded in depriving most rural communities of the people who were most capable of organizing resistance and voicing rural protest against

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Communist policies. Even so, the theory and practice of collectivization often met with sullen resistance from those who remained behind in the villages. Following cc guidelines, the kraikombiuro issued a first decree to dekulakize systematically on 5 February.44 A seven-man kraikom commission that included Zhdanov, Pakhomov, Reshetov, and army commander Straumit met several times to discuss the liquidation of the kulaks, closure of churches, and suppression of artisanal endeavours that were now, as noted earlier, viewed as capitalist entrepreneurship.45 On 10 February the kraikombiuro agreed to authorize what came to be called “exaggerations and deviations from the Party line in collectivization.”46 Under Point 7 of the protocol of the meeting, the record reads thus: “Noting that, fundamentally, [since] the Party organization of the krai has already neared fulfilling the quantitative tasks regarding collectivization of the December plenum of the kraikom, it is proposed to the Party organizations not to limit themselves to the planned tasks, [but] to continue to develop the cause of massive collectivization, [and] by all means to strengthen the quality of the collective farms and to concentrate attention on the collection of seed funds, on socialization [likely both of some tools and certain farm animals] and on the internal organization in the kolkhozy.”47 The krai bosses were intoxicated with the apparent success of the collectivization drive. As Jan Foitzik has remarked, the Soviet leadership came to understand reality through a form of wishful thinking.48 In the course of the 1930s, Stalin and his minions became less and less inclined to amend this fictive view of the life of their subjects. The Stalinists mistook desired results for actual outcomes and liked to believe that resolutions had been discharged to the letter when they had actually been executed in an incomplete and flawed manner, if at all. Figes and Kolonitskii add how the language of the leadership created something called “kolkhozniki,” one of several “social and political identities [that] were cultural constructions rather than reflections of reality.”49 Well before the Great Turn, however, Stalin himself and those with him at the very top, including Zhdanov, considered the use of force a standard part of politics, justified if the means served the end of the Communist utopia. At least to a degree, the Soviet leaders believed such ruthlessness would ultimately benefit mankind. They turned a blind eye to human suffering or blamed others for it. Written pleas for mercy were usually cast aside; often, they remained unread. Soviet leaders rarely visited the areas in their charge. Zhdanov became an allpowerful dictator of his realm who remained remote from his subjects. His inaccessibility contributed to a growing cult of Zhdanov in Nizhnii,

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a trend that was evident, for instance, in the publication of some of his speeches in individual booklets that were sold around the krai.50 Collectivization metamorphosed Zhdanov’s personality and his methods of rule. The Bolsheviks had been ruthless during the Civil War, but there were attenuating circumstances; any civil war is a bitter struggle for political and personal survival. It was a different matter, however, justifying the extremely brutal treatment of people, largely imagined as opponents, during collectivization. Once he had embarked on this orgy of brutality, Zhdanov did not look back. Indeed, an unflinching ability to order limitless acts of cruelty in the name of the cause became a litmus test for any Stalinist leader. We may agree with Bukharin, who is supposed to have remarked that “collectivization … [led to] deep changes in the psychological outlook of those Communists who participated in this campaign, and, instead of going mad, became professional bureaucrats for whom terror was henceforth a normal method of administration, and obedience to any order from above a higher virtue.”51 While bosses like Zhdanov could keep a fastidious distance from the barbarous process in the villages, the Party and Komsomol representatives and secret-police operatives who actually carried out collectivization and dekulakization (and later, the purges of the Great Terror) were likely more accustomed to acting violently, even if the atrocities they committed represented a quantum leap for them as well.52 Russian peasant society was traditionally brutal (as most premodern rural societies tend to be), and cruelty had been much in evidence during the First World War and the Civil War. The collectivizers, too, were often blind to the inhumanity of their actions because of their unconditional belief in the Communist utopia.53

cla ss warfare, sov ie t st y l e In the winter of 1930, thousands of peasants designated as kulaks were persecuted on the instigation of the regional authorities in Nizhnii krai. On 12 February the krai bosses presented kraikom members with some preliminary results on the operation. In agreement with the central leadership in Moscow, Nizhnii’s bosses had classified five thousand kulak families as belonging to category one, which entailed the arrest of the heads of household and banishment of their families to the northern part of the Russian Republic. They had placed a further eight thousand to ten thousand kulak families in the second category, condemning the entire family to exile outside of their native province.54 Probably because within three weeks the Politburo called an abrupt halt to the campaign, the orgy of arrests that ensued never quite reached the levels

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projected in mid-February. In 1930 and 1931, approximately 9,250 Nizhegorodskii families were exiled: 5,200 of them were sent to the Ural region, 2,500 to the Northern (Severnyi) krai and 50 to Kazakhstan, while 1,500 were exiled within their own krai.55 In the last week of March the central ogpu leadership attempted to bring order to the chaotic conduct of the internal exile of thirdcategory kulaks.56 In Nizhnii Novgorod krai, four districts had been selected to receive these people. Most were employed in felling timber in an area far removed from railroads and with a very low population density. Kulak families earmarked for this kind of deportation had to have at least two able-bodied members. An ogpu kommandant aided by two or three policemen supervised the three villages in which the kulaks were settled. Although the ogpu’s central leadership generally bemoaned the unsystematic treatment of this sort of kulak in other areas, it was fairly content with their deportation in Nizhnii krai. But the ogpu chiefs did worry about one part of the operation in Nizhnii krai: 3,566 people who had been designated as belonging to this third category during 1930 were still awaiting deportation to a remote area within the krai by December of that year.

t h e h ead sp in s By 20 February 1930 the central leadership was already concerned with the massive scope of collectivization and dekulakization.57 Although a first caution issued by the cc had little effect, it made more insistent attempts in the following days to slow down the momentum. On 21 February Zhdanov participated in a Moscow meeting of leaders of “consumer” regions. The regional leaders ended up condemning the excessive use of force in collectivization and dekulakization.58 Zhdanov joined a commission headed by Molotov that began to draft a cc resolution tempering the pace of collectivization in consumer regions.59 Concomitantly, another commission, headed by S.I. Syrtsov (1893–1937), lowered dekulakization targets. On 25 February it advised the Politburo to issue a cc decree capping the number of category-one families in Nizhnii Novgorod krai at three thousand and the number of category-two families at two thousand, until greater order was established.60 In reaction to the cc decrees, prepared by the Molotov and Syrtsov commissions, the Nizhnii kraikombiuro ordered lower-level Party committees on 26 February not to permit dekulakization of former Red Civil War veterans, unless the men had actively conducted themselves as kulaks and resisted collectivization (for example, by participating in counterrevolutionary groups).61 As in other regions throughout the ussr, Zhdanov and his

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subordinates had outdone themselves in herding peasants into collective farms. By 1 March collectivization levels in the krai encompassed forty-eight percent of peasant households, more than twice the number planned in December.62 On the next day, however, the drive towards collectivization of all Soviet peasant households was put in reverse with the publication of Stalin’s editorial “Dizzy with Success” in Pravda.63 According to the statistical-information sector of the kraikom, collectivization numbers dropped from 48.2 percent on 1 March, to 46.6 percent on 10 March, 37.2 percent on 20 March, and 13.1 percent on 20 April.64 Stalin’s article and the subsequent Politburo (disguised as cc, Sovnarkom, and cec) resolutions had been provoked by a level of resistance to the collective farms that had grown to dangerous proportions. Moreover, dairy and meat production had fallen precipitously, while the prospects for a decent harvest had been damaged by the disruption caused by the momentous events of the first months of 1930. In July 1930 the ogpu reported food shortages in several rural districts of Nizhnii krai.65 With its northern location, inclement weather, and poor soil, Nizhnii was traditionally a region in which high crop yields were uncommon. It had therefore been defined as a “consumer region” by Soviet planning authorities. In addition to animal husbandry, Nizhnii focused mainly on the cultivation of rye, oats, and flax, but it had never been able to feed its own population adequately, and collective farms did nothing to change this. The Soviet peasantry had neither meekly nor uniformly accepted collectivization. According to ogpu reports, in February and March literally millions protested in various ways throughout the Soviet countryside.66 Altogether, the ogpu registered 643 “acts of terror” in Nizhnii krai during 1930, most of them occurring in the first four months of the year.67 About half of these acts involved violence, including murder, directed primarily against kolkhozniks, activists, and Party representatives, or employees of the lower levels of the soviet apparatus. In only about fifty percent of the cases was the violence committed by people positively identified as “kulaks.” Other acts of protest involved arson and the wilful destruction of kolkhozy or soviet (government) buildings. Besides “terrorism,” the krai’s police registered 326 mass protests and 124 incidents of the distribution of anti-Soviet pamphlets in 1930 (the pamphleteering ceased almost completely after the month of June).68 Altogether, the number of people sentenced in 1930 by special ogpu troikas was thirty times the number in 1929.69 On 12 March 1930, Zhdanov espoused the new Party line at a meeting of Party activists. He proclaimed that collectivization had

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gotten out of hand and quoted Stalin’s critical observation that “heads were spinning” among collectivizers.70 Party, soviet, and ogpu officials had often arrested the “wrong” kind of peasant, violating the rule that no more than five percent of peasant households could fall within the kulak bracket. In some areas of the krai, more than thirty percent of villagers had been fingered as kulaks and duly persecuted.71 Speaking before an audience that was somewhat bewildered about the leaders’ sudden change of course, Zhdanov elaborated on how one kulak was not like the other, pointing at the three categories of kulak that had been distinguished by the cc.72 He condemned the methods used to suppress religion as being too crude and antagonistic to too many people. He reproached the zealots for treating chickens, rabbits, and other small animals as collective property.73 Zhdanov levelled similar criticism about excesses in early April in a lengthy report to a plenum of the kraikom and krai control commission, the first since the memorable December meeting.74 Following Stalin’s lead, Zhdanov and the other provincial bosses shifted the blame for the chaos onto their enthusiastic subordinates, absolving themselves in the process.75 Zhdanov published only one article in the local press between 22 December and 7 March.76 He realized in Nizhnii krai that little personal advantage could be gained from too close an association with such startling acts of coercive intimidation, a recipe he would follow again in Leningrad during the Terror. It was better to pull the strings from above and maintain an innocent image. In this he copied Stalin himself, a consummate politician who never admitted publicly to the enormous scale of his brutality. After World War ii, in the presence of Zhdanov and Molotov, Stalin noted to the writers Fadeev, Gorbatov, and Simonov that “you have to understand that we cannot always officially express that which we would like to say.”77 Lying and dissembling were part of the job.78 In March Zhdanov ventured out of his lair in the provincial capital to check up on the situation on the ground in the Arzamas okrug. His reaction to what he observed was devious and crude. In kraikombiuro meetings, he demanded the execution by firing squad of the “worst exaggerators.” Ultimately, nothing was done beyond the dismissal of 160 people from Party and government posts for their overenthusiasm. On 26 April, accompanied by other provincial first secretaries, Zhdanov paid a visit to Stalin in his Kremlin office.79 Their discussion concentrated on the failure of the first attempt at rapid all-out collectivization. A different strategy was now adopted that gave far-reaching preferential treatment to kolkhozy over individual homesteads.80 In particular, lower levies were imposed on their production. Meanwhile,

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the terms under which peasants sould withdraw from the collective became increasingly disadvantageous, ultimately causing them to return. In the next years, however, coercion was never entirely abandoned for these milder forms of persuasion.

cras h indus t r ia l iz at io n The kraikom leadership focused on collectivization and dekulakization in the winter months of 1930. But it did not lose sight of the other key component of the Great Turn, industrialization. Prompted by the ogpu and its chief, Reshetov, the kraikombiuro ordered coercive measures to deal with “wrecking” in industry.81 The highest leadership had decided that managers’, engineers’, and even workers’ fears for their personal safety and that of their relatives could be used as an important labour incentive. Thus, from the time of the Shakhty Trial onwards, the security police came to excel in unearthing conspiracies. “Wrecking,” meanwhile, was a simplistic explanation for the staggering difficulties generated by the breakneck pace of industrialization as mandated by the central planners. The real problems confronting Nizhnii’s leadership in this area were typical for the time. The building of new factories or the expansion of old ones was undermined by design flaws, bureaucratic red tape, insufficiency of building materials, and a lack of skilled workers and engineering and technical expertise.82 The problems were exacerbated by the workers’ antipathy towards desperately needed foreign specialists who, when available, were reduced to the status of consultants and supervisors. Not surprisingly, the most prestigious industrial construction project in the krai during the First Five-Year Plan, that of the automobile plant, made less progress than anticipated. It was only in May 1930 that the first spade went into the ground.83 Thereafter, construction of these Molotov works was hindered by a host of problems: the project lacked workhands, building materials, construction machinery, an electricity supply, means of transport, and expertise in using and operating the available imported machinery.84 In order to cover up for the shortfalls, industrial managers often exaggerated production numbers, which were then triumphantly published in local papers. On 2 April Molotov, cc secretary, and Stetskii, head of the cc Agitprop department, sent a letter to Nizhnii and other regional capitals in the ussr warning editors of newspapers at the central, krai, and okrug levels against such uncritical acceptance of record figures and ordering them to check carefully reports of incidents of plan overfulfilment, unsubstantiated “record numbers,” hollow plans, and imaginary high-production speeds.85 The letter

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was not the first of its kind. Much of the great Plan’s alleged success amounted to a Potemkin village. In June 1930, in a lengthy speech at the second krai Party conference, Zhdanov took stock of the first half year of the Great Turn. He announced that the fundamental economic task posed at the previous conference in August 1929 had been successfully accomplished.86 The krai had become an “industrial-agrarian region” instead of an “agrarian-industrial” one. In using these terms, Zhdanov was announcing that industrial production had outstripped the value of agriculture in the krai’s economic indicators. As a provincial Party secretary, his performance was judged by the success of the entire provincial economy in fulfilling the Five-Year Plan, and as the official local leader of the proletariat, Zhdanov focused his presentation far more intensively on the industrial component of the Great Turn’s economic policy than on collectivization of agriculture.87 No matter how much the statistics were embellished, there was some reason to gloat over the industrial expansion in Nizhnii krai. Nizhnii’s industrial growth overshadowed the agricultural debacle. From 1929 onward, heavy machinery, river barges, tanks, chemicals, and, eventually, passenger cars and trucks were manufactured in ever greater number in the region’s burgeoning plants. Within the previous ten months, the production of heavy industry (capital goods) had increased almost threefold (aided by the eighty-six percent of total state investment that had gone to this sector of industry), unemployment had disappeared, while the ranks of the proletariat (urban factory workers) had swelled from 118,000 to 138,000 in the krai.88 That was about all the praise Zhdanov had for the krai’s economy in his conference address of June 1930. He went on to lament the lag of agriculture and the persistent “cultural backwardness,” even if these phenomena were not unique to Nizhnii Novgorod krai. While a cultural revolution had begun, he noted that sixty percent of adults in the region remained illiterate, surpassing the rsfsr average by by four percent.89 The economic, cultural, and social “backwardness” of the krai’s national minorities (of which Chuvash, Mordovians, and Udmurtians were the most numerous) was especially acute, as Zhdanov remarked at the end of his report.90 In industry, the krai’s problems included an unreliable energy supply, insufficient production of construction materials, inferior transport connections, and retarded development of the forestry industry.91 Factory workers’ wages were not paid on time.92 Zhdanov omitted altogether any mention of the industrial workforce’s appalling living conditions. For instance, city apartments often lacked running water and sewerage. In the towns average floorspace per household member rarely surpassed

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four square meters, while many younger workers slept in bunkbeds in army-style barracks.93 This situation did not change fundamentally until after the Second World War. Zhdanov reflected in his speech of June 1930 how many officials had become “dizzy with success” during the early months of collectivization.94 He recognized a few mishaps for which the kraikom (-biuro) carried some responsibility, such as its premature decree to organize more sophisticated collective farms and its ill-conceived order to have the Votsk oblast’ aim for full collectivization within eighteen months. But he absolved himself and his partners in the biuro from most of the blame, instead attributing the setbacks to the machinations of assorted class enemies, such as kulaks and adherents of the former Left and Right opposition.95 He advised Party and soviet activists to intensify their efforts to overcome the general lack of enthusiasm for the Communist cause among the collective farmers. Although the Communist party’s ranks swelled from 50,900 in August 1929 to 60,487 in June 1930, a mere 5,000 of total membership were kolkhoznik.96

promot io n Upon the conclusion of the June krai conference, Zhdanov travelled to Moscow. On 15 June he attended a Politburo meeting, after which he stayed on in the city, awaiting the opening of the Sixteenth Party Congress on 26 June.97 He spent his time lobbying on behalf of his fief with all manner of central organs, such as Gosplan, vsnkh, People’s Commissariats, and various Central Committee departments. He also met with old friends who were working in Moscow as well as with his sister Anna. Above all, he tried to keep abreast of the political direction mapped out by Stalin and his closest collaborators. Zhdanov showed, throughout most of his career, a remarkable aptitude for correctly interpreting the Party line. Talking with acquaintances, listening to his superiors in the hierarchy, and observing the behaviour of those connected with the highest leaders honed his understanding of the current line followed by the Central Committee and enabled him to anticipate any future change in its policies. The Sixteenth Party Congress presented Zhdanov with another milestone in his career, since at its conclusion he was elected as a full member of the Central Committee.98 Given his patchy record in realizing the lofty plans of the Great Turn, this promotion may appear surprising; on the other hand, Nizhnii krai had performed as well as most other administrative subdivisions of the ussr. By that point, furthermore, a successful career depended more on belonging to the right

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team than on leading one’s fief in accomplishing positive economic results (although outright failure could obviously affect one’s political fortune). Zhdanov’s enhanced status was further underlined when he reported on his fief at the first postcongress Politburo meeting on 15 July.99 Five days later the Politburo confirmed Zhdanov as first and Erich Pramnek as second Party secretary of the Nizhnii Novgorod krai.100 In August Zhdanov took his customary holiday, this time for only a month. But problems at the Sormovo works forced him to leave late for his vacation, while the need to supervise a new wave of collectivization (reports indicate that the level may have fallen to a mere five percent of households by August) probably made him return early.101 The ambitious expansion of the Sormovo machine-building works had not gone smoothly.102 Concern about the development of the works prompted the Politburo to send a commission to Sormovo headed by A.I. Krinitskii, Deputy People’s Commissar of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate, a body that checked on the execution of Party and state decrees, and an old acquaintance of Zhdanov’s.103 The commission’s report led to a decision to have second krai secretary Pramnek take over the plant officially, as temporary head of its Party organization. Krinitskii’s visit did not constitute a happy reunion of old friends, since his inspection likely damaged Zhdanov’s reputation in Moscow. He paid his former teenage friend back in kind a few years later. Within the provincial leadership, the first secretary of the Party organization of the early 1930s had considerably more power than his counterpart in the 1920s, but Zhdanov had to reckon with outside supervision and sporadic interference in his affairs, as the activities of the Krinitskii commission indicate. While his tenure remained conditional, he wielded considerable power as long as he showed loyalty and deference to Stalin and his policies and the krai’s economy worked reasonably according to plan.104 As Zhdanov was drawn deeper into the discussion of all-Union politics in the Soviet capital, it became simpler to express proper fealty to his superiors.105 In December 1930 he spoke at some length at a combined cc and ccc plenum in Moscow.106

a ngui sh The autumn of 1930 saw a renewed wave of collectivization in the Soviet Union. This time the methods of coercion were more subtle, and economic incentives were more prominently emphasized, especially the lower level of taxation placed on collective-farm production. But the peasants’ slaughter of their own dairy cattle intensified once more in the fall, a sign that those who returned to the kolkhozy

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despised the idea of sharing that particular part of their movable property.107 And, as Zhdanov phrased it, “the influence of the kulak” remained a danger.108 The authorities continued to take repressive measures against households labelled as kulak. In other areas of the economy, the authorities persecuted recalcitrants and those identified as class enemies. Crime levels rose in response to the widespread shortages and chaos that often prevailed in the towns. Death sentences were liberally handed down by special and regular courts.109 In the first week of January 1931, Zhdanov presented a plenary session of the krai’s Party committee with his appreciation of the first year of the Great Turn.110 His speech was doubtless informed by Moscow’s instructions of the last two weeks of 1930. It constituted one of the rare occasions when Zhdanov betrayed some personal anxiety in public. His diatribe was chaotic, an ironic reflection of the disarray and frustration of the first year of the Great Turn. Zhdanov presented a solution (which followed Stalin’s guidelines) to the country’s intense industrial woes : Communists were to supervise the work of “old” specialists more closely.111 Zhdanov worried that the specialists might prove treacherous if they were left to their own devices; their devious machinations had been unmasked, after all, during the ogpu investigations of the putative Industrial party (Prompartiia) and the Labour Peasant party (Trudovia krest’ianskaia partiia)in Moscow and elsewhere. He also noted the discovery that the Mensheviks had been reorganizing as well.112 These were signs (according to Moscow’s official analysis) of the intensifying class struggle that combined with the growing threat of a Polish and possibly Romanian invasion.113 Trotskyism, Right Opportunism, and the recently unmasked opposition group of S.I. Syrtsov (1893–1937) and V.V. Lominadze (1897–1935) had all been defeated, but Zhdanov warned of further devious plotters, who had their “agency within the party” in the form of the “Right” and “Right-Left” deviation, and who engaged in “double-dealing.”114 Thus, Zhdanov flirted with self-contradiction (which probably went largely unnoticed) in his rambling speech of January 1931. At one point, his spirits seemed buoyed by the tremendous worsening of the world economic crisis throughout 1930 for which capitalist governments appeared to have no solution. Indeed, he expanded on the theme of a global crisis in capitalism as a rhetorical strategy to make his audience feel better about the Soviets’ own lack of success.115 He then suggested that collectivization had solved the Soviet Union’s grain-supply problems thanks to the high volume of grain deliveries from the collective farms to the state. He admitted, however, that the picture was not really as rosy with regard to animal husbandry and demanded, preposterously, that the problem be solved in 1931.116 He

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undermined his own claim about the great success of collectivization when he conceded later in the speech that only about twelve percent of households had been collectivized.117 He added that there was a dearth of educated cadres in agriculture, since more than half of the agronomists had been unmasked as wreckers, followers of the alleged Labour Peasant party leader Kondrat’ev and his ilk.118 The problem of “kulak” resistance had not been solved either, Zhdanov admitted, but he assured the kulaks that their opposition was to no avail.119 While the growth in the number of kolkhozy had been almost negligible, factories had hardly fared better, as Zhdanov tacitly admitted the plenary kraikom session of January 1931. At least, urban unemployment had been replaced by a labour shortage in industry.120 Zhdanov felt obliged to point to the stoppages in production caused by problems that ranged from an irregular supply of metal ore to a lack of fuel for factory machinery.121 He presented one alternative remedy to the close surveillance of specialists at this point: the extremely careful handling of raw materials. His remarks indicated that during his recent visit to Moscow he had not been successful in enlisting aid for his industries. Plans were far from being fulfilled in rail and water transport and in industry.122 The payment of wages in most branches of industry and transport was delayed for months.123 Construction of the automobile plant, the flagship project of the plan, proceeded sluggishly, a delay that Zhdanov attributed to a great fluctuation in the labour force at the site.124 Having outlined the failure of industry and agriculture to realize their economic plans, Zhdanov condemned the malfunctioning distribution network, for which in the main he blamed saboteurs.125 Their perfidious activity allegedly resulted in shortages of bread, sugar, meat, and milk.126 Unable to offer much in the way of solace, Zhdanov sounded more like a utopian socialist than a pragmatic materialist Marxist. He dwelled on the future, in which the “Cultural Revolution” would end illiteracy and give everyone a general education. He expressed boundless optimism and faith in Komsomols and Young Pioneers.127 Zhdanov praised the Pioneers for informing the authorities about the anti-Soviet behaviour of numerous adults, thereby following in the footsteps of Pavlik Morozov, whose denunciation of his father was viewed as a hopeful sign that the young were growing into the new Soviet men and women envisioned by Lenin and Stalin.128 It is clear from Zhdanov’s speech of early 1931 that the optimism of 1929 had ebbed away after the egregious plans had been put into effect in 1930. His words had lost their shine, and his listing of negative phenomena outdid any positive messages that he tried to convey

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to his audience. His own enthusiasm had ebbed as well, and disappointment and fatigue pervaded his account. The struggle to make a new society was proving much harder than anticipated. Rather than acknowledging that the difficulties were eloquent testimony to the folly of the planning targets devised in 1929 for agriculture and industry, he accused shadowy enemies and “wreckers” of sabotage.

crisis In late January 1931, one day before a meeting of the Politburo, Zhdanov met Stalin tête-á-tête. Stalin appears to have asked Zhdanov to draw up a plan regarding the further treatment of the kulaks.129 Exactly one month later, with Zhdanov attending, the Politburo discussed a decree regarding the fate of those to be dekulakized “in response to a request [about this] by Zhdanov.”130 Zhdanov’s draft was informed by the labour shortage affecting industry and mining. Accepted in broad outline by the Politburo, the decree led to a new wave of massive kulak deportations in Nizhnii krai and elsewhere. Many deportees were forced to mine metal ore in the harshest conditions, both natural and man-made.131 In 1931 some 40,314 Nizhnii krai natives (8,700 “kulak” families), more people than in 1930, suffered exile and ended up doing this type of trying work.132 Violent protests occasionally erupted in the krai in 1931 against the Regime’s representatives and its collective farms. Assaults on rural activists were registered at more than fifteen percent of collective farms. The authorities reacted with their own violence. In the spring of that year a corrective labour camp was organized in the krai that would hold thousands of convicts during the next years.133 Deportations of the kulaks and the arrest of those who opposed the establishment of collective farms were a stern persuasion for the rest of the peasantry to return to the collective farms they had abandoned the previous year.134 The collectivization level more than tripled between October 1930 and August 1931, even though by the beginning of the latter month still fewer than half of peasant households in the krai were collectivized.135 Judging from the proceedings at a Nizhnii kraikom plenum in June 1931, Zhdanov had recovered from his desperation of January. Continuing to make reassuring visits to the Holy of Holies in Moscow during the first half of the year, he received some key assignments.136 Apart from the project to streamline the treatment of the kulaks, he was appointed plenipotentiary of the cc and Sovnarkom for oil shipments (on domestic waterways), a concern that took up much of his time in the second half of 1931.137 Zhdanov was in Stalin’s good

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books, and Stalin remained the uncontested Soviet leader, showing no hesitation about the chosen path.138 Thus, in June 1931 Zhdanov felt comfortable enough to take a backseat in Nizhnii and have his deputies (for such they appear to have become) deliver the three main reports to the kraikom plenum: on the fluctuation of the labour force, the forest industry, and the communal economy of the krai.139 When he spoke in response to the reports, he neatly brought all “debated” issues under a common denominator, that of material well-being. The workers needed to be provided with better housing, municipal services (baths, electricity, water) and higher and regularly paid wages, so that they would not habitually switch employers.140 Zhdanov’s solutions betray optimistic naivety; for the causes of labour fluctuation were rather more complicated and material comfort and higher real wages would only become a reality by the 1950s.141 It indicates once again how the Communists habitually underestimated the difficulty of implementing their plans and attempted simplistic solutions to complex problems. In the days after the June meeting, Zhdanov travelled to Moscow to attend a cc plenary session and participate in a Politburo session.142 It is likely that he stayed in Moscow for the rest of June, since he was involved late in the month in a discussion in the cc’s apparatus about peat harvesting in the krai.143 Throughout the second half of 1931 Zhdanov was a frequent guest at Politburo meetings and met Stalin several times in his Kremlin office.144 Kraikom secretary Pramnek and kraiispolkom chair Pakhomov handled matters in Nizhnii while Zhdanov concentrated on oil transport. Zhdanov also discussed with the Politburo the progress of the construction of the Molotov automobile works in Nizhnii.145 Finally, in January 1932 (the last year of the Five-Year Plan, which by then had been mandated to be completed in four years), the first cars rolled out of the factory.146 But later in 1932 continued production problems provoked a visit (not the first one) by Politburo member Sergo Ordzhonikidze, the People’s Commissar of Heavy Industry.147 Meanwhile, Nizhnii Novgorod’s housing shortage became even more acute as workers arrived in search of employment at the new industrial plants and expanding old ones.148 The housing problem was so grave that the Politburo involved itself in the matter in November and December of 1931. Despite his unassailable position in Nizhnii, Zhdanov’s star was on the wane throughout much of 1932 and 1933.149 He received no further all-Union assignments, and his most intense communications with Moscow in those two years took place during the late winter and spring of 1932, when he visited Stalin, attended three sessions of the Politburo, and participated in the Seventeenth Party Conference in

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February, where he delivered a speech on the Second Five-Year Plan.150 Stalin, Molotov, Kaganovich, Kirov, and the other Politburo members were absorbed by the profound economic crisis, with its potentially explosive political ramifications, that overtook the country in the course of 1932. The crisis led to an upsurge in protests, even from hitherto loyal Stalinists, to the policies of the leadership. The Zhdanovs, whose loyalty was never in doubt, could be safely ignored for a while.151 Meanwhile, Zhdanov was preoccupied with economic matters in his own fief throughout the first half of 1932.152 A shortage of seed for spring sowing in the krai ended up on the Politburo table, indicating the acute nature of agricultural problems.153 By March 1932 the ogpu noted signs of starvation in Nizhnii’s countryside.154 In the same month, a new campaign for vigilance and Party spirit was kicked off in Nizhnii krai in reaction to the uncovering of a case of corruption, nepotism, drunkenness, possible rape, and general abuse of power among Party members and Young Communists in a railway settlement. The Party investigated some three dozen Party members and Komsomols who had been in collusion, and their ringleader, one Smirnov, was tried by the courts.155 The attack on corruption was part of another all-Union campaign to break up “family circles” within Party and state. These mutual-protection networks encouraged major cover-ups and were widespread; Zhdanov compared the Nizhnii case to similar ones in Smolensk, Sochi, and Astrakhan.156 Ultimately, the discovery of such clusters at lower levels was one cause for a new Party purge in 1933.157 From 1936 to 1938, many networks were totally eliminated. But political survival in the Soviet Union relied of necessity on a degree of networking. Stalin himself had once built his own clan to his great advantage in the political struggle of the 1920s. “Family circles” inevitably returned after the Great Terror.158

a sla p on the w r ist The lack of unequivocal economic triumphs during the First Five-Year Plan (and this even Stalin was forced to recognize by then even if he had denied or ignored a lot of the bad news earlier) vexed the Party’s leadership in the centre and the periphery in the summer of 1932. Anxiety about the halting economic progress and the burden of his routinely enormous workload caused Zhdanov to fall seriously ill once more and he went on a six-week medical leave at the end of June.159 In Moscow, the Ryutin Platform surfaced, confronting Stalin with Party members who depicted “his” revolution as a grandiose failure and called for his removal as leader.160 More bad news reached the

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Politburo about the same time: grain deliveries to the state collecting agencies in the Ukraine and Kazakhstan consistently fell short. Stalin attributed the shortfalls to deliberate sabotage. He was on a short fuse that summer, becoming enraged about news that an unreliable supply of sheet metal affected the production of automobiles in Nizhnii and Moscow.161 On 7 August a law was introduced on the theft of “socialist” property, ordaining draconian penalties for minor offences, such as the filching of a few ears of grain. Within five months more than fifty thousand people were convicted in the Russian Republic alone for violating this law and more than two thousand of them were executed.162 The effects of the law strained the Soviet Union’s penal facilities once more to the extreme. In August alone, 3,462 inmates were packed into a corrective labour colony built for eight hundred in Nizhnii Novgorod.163 On 13 August Pravda published a letter claiming that the leadership of a collective farm in Nizhnii Novgorod krai had stolen property from its own kolkhoz with impunity.164 The letter meant to outline a typical case that called for the strict application of the law of 7 August, but the choice of the krai was not accidental, for the occurrence of the crime was partially blamed on the cavalier attitude of the krai’s leadership. Given his recent absence, Zhdanov must have blamed himself in part for this public reprimand.165 He responded with a speech to a kraikom plenum in late August 1932 that was highly critical of the poor performance of collective farming, which he had just witnessed in a hastily organized tour of the autonomous republic of the Chuvash.166 Zhdanov’s career was sagging. In September 1932 he was received by Stalin in his Kremlin office,167 his last visit to those hallowed premises for sixteenth months.168 He fell sick again and was not at his post in Nizhnii during October and November 1932. The hypersensitive Zhdanov was probably made ill by the criticism of Nizhnii’s economic woes in August and September.169 Zhdanov remained out of favour with Stalin throughout much of 1933. This was the first of three serious career setbacks that occurred in the 1930s and 1940s. Neither in 1932–33 nor in 1941, however, was Zhdanov completely disowned. In 1932 Stalin gave him the opportunity to redeem himself by retaining him as Nizhnii’s boss. Occasionally, Stalin had Zhdanov invited to Politburo meetings, and he also attended cc plena.170 While a terrible famine was spreading in Ukraine and Kazakhstan, Nizhnii Novgorod celebrated a change of name. On 7 October 1932 it became Gor’kii in honour of the world-renowned writer who had once lived in the city.171 In fact, Gor’kii krai’s population, having escaped the famine, had real reason to celebrate that fall, though it

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was unaware of it (the famine of 1932–33 remained a secret closely guarded by the Soviet leadership). Unlike Ukraine, Kazakhstan, or the Cossack regions of southern Russia, the region’s inhabitants were not suspected of sabotaging grain collections on nationalistic grounds. Of themselves, the krai’s grain procurements were decent in the autumn of 1932, thanks to several factors. Gor’kii’s agriculture was less concentrated on cereal crops than the southern regions, which suffered terribly in 1932 and 1933. It was spared a drought similar to what those areas underwent during the summer of 1932, while a considerable part of its agricultural output was produced by non-collectivized peasants. Thus, by 16 December 1932 Zhdanov could already boast of his fief’s fulfilment of the plan for grain procurements by 100.2 percent.172 By contrast, in most branches of industrial production, including car manufacturing, the targets of the First Five-Year Plan, supposedly completed in four years by early 1933, had not been reached in the krai.173 Meanwhile, heightened anxiety about the spreading famine in Ukraine, southern Russia, and Kazakhstan drove Nizhnii’s kraikom and kraiispolkom to issue two resolutions concentrating on procurements of agricultural products other than grain.174 In January 1933 Zhdanov attended a cc and ccc plenary session in Moscow, where a worried Stalin declared that the class struggle was sharpening the closer one neared socialism.175 In Zhdanov’s subsequent public utterances, he followed Stalin’s cues, warning against complacency regarding kulaks and agents and abettors of the class enemy, who, increasingly under threat, would flail ever more wildly.176 Some of these “kulak, criminal, and antisocial elements” may have despaired at the introduction in the last days of 1932 of internal passports by the cec and Sovnarkom. Thereby the leadership tried to halt the uncontrolled migration from the villages to urban settlements and the unchecked movement of people between towns. The internalpassport regime was meant to stabilize the extreme fluctuation of the labour force at many construction projects and enterprises that had expanded as part of the Plan and redress the shortage of workhands threatening the collective farms.177 The First Five-Year Plan was officially completed by early 1933. But despite contemporary and subsequent utterances about its tremendous success in reaching high production targets and the end it had brought to the exploitation of man by man, the plan left much to be desired.178 Stalin’s dismay about Nizhnii’s car plant in the summer of 1932 was one example. Even this project, on which the krai’s leadership and central bodies had expended so much time, energy, and funds since 1928, had turned out to be less than an unequivocal triumph of socialist planning.179 As elsewhere in the Soviet Union, the

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workers’ standard of living in Gor’kii’s cities had taken a turn for the worse, and the collective farms continued to operate far less efficiently than had been expected.180 In April 1933 Zhdanov remarked to an audience of local Party leaders that lackadaisical trade-union employees and “opportunistic attitudes” exposed by “degenerate” managers led to the persistence of tardy payment of wages to workers and to the general scarcity of goods and services available to them.181 In the autumn of 1932 and the winter of 1932–33, the Gor’kii krai leadership took the usual coercive measures to remedy this situation. The courts tried more than one hundred people for these various defects; most defendants received minor jail sentences. Crime, however, flourished as a result of the dislocation resulting from the Great Turn and the general scarcity.182 By May 1933 some of the economic crisis that had engulfed the country since the beginning of collectivization and, particularly, since the summer of 1932 began to abate. Stalin and Molotov, the Sovnarkom chair, dispatched a letter to the regional Party organizations that brought an end to the merciless treatment of alleged “hostile elements” in the countryside. Although the letter still permitted Gor’kii krai to deport up to five hundred peasant families, the mass arrests of “enemies” were pared down, since, according to the leaders of Party and government, any serious resistance by the class enemy had been crushed.183 Apparently, dekulakization, the law of 7 August, and, for the worst offenders, a deliberately intensified famine had all sufficiently browbeaten the Soviet rural populace into obedience.184 Years later, in August 1942, Stalin told Churchill that the stuggle with the kulaks had lasted four years, which suggests that, in hindsight, he believed that the struggle had been won in the course of 1933.185 With the worst of the economic crisis passed and statistics showing improvement in almost all sectors of the krai’s economy, Zhdanov returned to national prominence. On the radio he spoke about the socialist competition movement between similar factories in different regions in late August.186 In August and September 1933, after a hiatus of almost a year, he attended a couple of Politburo meetings, the first one together with his deputy Pakhomov, the second one alone.187 Suddenly, after his career had stalled for a couple of years, events took a drastic turn for the better in Zhdanov’s life (though his health continued to bother him; he left on an extended holiday midway through October, only returning to Nizhnii in December).188 Grain procurements proceeded smoothly, and the kolkhoz spring sowing was reasonably well coordinated.189 The collective farms, however imperfectly, finally began to operate with a semblance of order. In early January 1934 the cec Presidium awarded Gor’kii krai

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the highly coveted Order of Lenin for its success in agriculture.190 This boosted the spirit of the krai leadership as they prepared for the fourth krai Party conference. On 15 January Zhdanov gave the opening report at the conference; on 22 January he delivered its concluding remarks.191 His club was the third largest Russian Party organization by 1934: the conference delegates represented almost 57,000 Communists, at a time when the Soviet Communist party had a combined full and candidate membership of 2.7 million.192 On 26 January the Seventeenth All-Union Party Congress opened in Moscow.193 This “Congress of Victors” ratified the Second Five-Year Plan’s targets.194 Three days into its proceedings, Zhdanov reported on his Gor’kii fief. He spoke as a regional leader, following the tone of others, heaping lavish praise upon Stalin, “the greatest man of our era,” for his brilliant guidance … of our party and the working class.” In all Zhdanov mentioned Stalin more than a dozen times.195 He also claimed fantastic economic “victories” that had supposedly been achieved since the Sixteenth Party Congress in 1930.196 He emphasized the enormous leap made in the krai’s machine-building industry and the production of machine tools, cars, boats, and airplanes.197 This, he promised, was only the beginning. The krai, too, had become an agricultural producer, exporting meat, grain, vegetables, and flax to other regions and cities. In the second part of his speech he admitted that many of the passenger cars produced by the Molotov works had been defective, but this he partially blamed on the complicated assembly process, in which a total of fifty-seven factories throughout the Soviet Union were involved at some stage.198 He likewise noted problems with meat production and flax cultivation. And in his city, there still was much “dirt, lack of comfort, and lack of cultured life (nekul’turnost’).”199 But he ended with an optimistic prediction, that “united around the party’s cc, around our great, wise, and beloved leader comrade Stalin, we will arrive in three and a half years at the [next] party congress already as advanced toilers of the classless socialist society.”200 Applause duly followed. During the Congress, Zhdanov travelled briefly to Nizhnii to lead a meeting of the kraikombiuro on 5 February.201 Behind the scenes at the Congress, likely unbeknownst to him until the very last moment,202 discussions went on between S.M. Kirov and the other Politburo members, who requested that Kirov move from Leningrad to Moscow to focus full time on his work as one of three cc secretaries.203 Kirov managed to persuade his colleagues that he still had some unfinished business in Leningrad to which he needed to dedicate considerable time and would therefore be only sporadically available to work in Moscow. This left a position open in Moscow. Zhdanov

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was abruptly invited at the very end of the Congress to exchange Nizhnii for Moscow and become the fourth cc secretary after Stalin, Kaganovich, and Kirov.204 In Nizhnii itself, through a formal decision of the kraikombiuro (in a highly irregular procedure), followed by a kraikom plenum, Pramnek and Stoliar were promoted to first and second secretaries.205 Zhdanov read his farewell speech to the Party organization which had “made” him on 21 February 1934.206 He ended his speech by “promising to give all his strength to the cause of the Party, to the cause of Stalin,” a promise he would keep for the next fifteen years.207 Unswerving faithfulness was one of his main talents, as his dozen years in Nizhnii had already attested.

wh y zh da n ov ? After his transfer to Moscow (and later in Leningrad), Zhdanov rekindled his acquaintance with many former comrades from Tver’ and Nizhnii. In the latter half of the 1930s some of them rose to great heights in the Party’s hierarchy, while others, various high-ups among them, fell victim to the Great Terror. Among the Nizhnii comrades Zhdanov encountered in Moscow were M.M. Kaganovich, A.S. Shcherbakov, P.F. Iudin (1899–1968), who had once headed a gubkom department, M.I. Rodionov (1907–50), who had joined the Party as a Komsomol in the settlement of Lyskovo in 1929, and N.S. Patolichev (1908–89), who had joined the Party in the town of Dzerzhinsk as a Komsomol in 1928.208 I.S. Konev became a celebrated wartime commander. While Iulii Kaganovich, promoted to head the oblast’ during the Great Terror, disappeared from view towards 1940, he was never persecuted for political crimes. Conversely, Pramnek, Stoliar, Aleksandr Muralov, Zashibaev, Lepa, and Pakhomov did not survive the purges, suggesting that one-time acquaintance or friendship with Zhdanov was not a guarantee of survival. Still, between 1935 and 1940 the attrition rate among Zhdanov’s former associates from Tver’ and Nizhnii was below that of the general extermination level of party-state bosses, which amounted to at least two out of three. The workings of a loosely operating patronage network in Stalin’s time become even more apparent if we recognize again how (future) Politburo members Molotov, Lazar Kaganovich, Bulganin, and Mikoian had all enjoyed a spell as local leaders at Nizhnii before Zhdanov arrived there in 1922. Even more than the Tver’ Party chapter, that of Nizhnii Novgorod was an incubator of future Soviet Party and state leaders.209 Andrei Zhdanov had not yet reached thirty when he succeeded Uglanov as head of Nizhnii’s Party organization. After 1924 he benefited

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from the growing power and prestige that came to be associated with the post of regional Party chief. In addition, when Nizhnii Novgorod guberniia became an administrative territory of a much larger geographical size with many more inhabitants in 1929, he was again selected to lead it. His ability at running Nizhnii’s Party undoubtedly endeared him to Stalin. Altogether, with the exception of the Trotskyite Ishchenko, Nizhnii Novgorod’s Party did not waver in its support of Stalin during his struggle for power in the 1920s, and Zhdanov was an eager supporter of the Great Turn. Zhdanov was an important figure as Nizhnii’s boss during the momentous changes in industry and agriculture in 1929 and 1930 and he neared entry to Stalin’s Inner Circle. But by early 1932 he had almost completely disappeared from the Union-wide limelight, and his career might have taken a turn for the worse if he had exposed himself to further opprobrium for paltry economic results. Stalin blamed Zhdanov and other provincial bosses for the disappointing outcome of the First Five-Year Plan, most targets of which had not been reached by early 1933. But when in the Soviet Union as a whole an economic crisis developed in the autumn of 1932 and Stalin’s authority was challenged by Ryutin’s platform, Gor’kii was an oasis of peace from which some good news filtered through to Moscow. Thanks to this economic recovery, Zhdanov redeemed himself in late 1932 and throughout 1933. By the end of 1933 economic improvements became more clearly visible throughout the Soviet Union. An unprotesting loyal member of the right team, Zhdanov had been sitting on the substitute bench for a while. But now he was called onto the field.

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5 Moscow and Leningrad, 1934–1936 Around him a rabble of thin-necked leaders – Fawning half-men for him to play with. They whinny, purr or whine As he prates and points a finger … Osip Mandelshtam1

wh y zh da n ov ( ii) ? The first nine months of Zhdanov’s career as an all-Union leader in Moscow stand in sharp contrast to the subsequent four years when he divided his time between Moscow and Leningrad. On 1 December 1934 in Leningrad a process began that culminated in the bloodbath of 1937 and 1938. But even in 1935 and 1936, the city was already witnessing the arrest, sentencing, deportation, imprisonment, or execution of thousands upon thousands of its inhabitants. This chapter will begin by outlining what in hindsight seemed to be the almost unbearable lightness of 1934, given the darkness of the following two years. Andrei Zhdanov did not blink when he, together with others, helped destroy hundreds of thousands of lives between December 1934 and December 1938.2 But Zhdanov’s work during those years was not solely destructive. First, he joined the Comintern leadership in 1935, when it was trying to stop the rising tide of right-wing extremism in Europe. Second, Zhdanov participated in the Stakhanovist attempt to inspire renewed enthusiasm in the Soviet working class (1935–36). Third, he expended much energy on transforming both general and political education within the Soviet Union in various capacities. And lastly, he devoted much of his time to preparing his country as far as possible for the ever growing threat of war. But Zhdanov was never solely motivated by altruistic concern for the welfare of his subjects and the workers of

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the world or by ideological zeal: he always put his personal survival first. Thus he was prepared to engage unhesitatingly in the bloody excess of the Great Terror.3 Zhdanov’s transfer catapulted him into the heart of cc and Politburo affairs, the centre of power in the Soviet Union. The leading cc secretaries after the 1934 Congress were Stalin and L.M. Kaganovich, who was concomitantly Party Control Commission chief. Zhdanov was to fill in for Kirov during his absences in Leningrad, but in some respects he also replaced P.P. Postyshev (1887–1939), who had been dispatched to monitor Ukraine and had altogether lost his position as secretary of the All-Union Party cc (although he had been promoted to nonvoting Politburo member). Zhdanov became a de facto member of the (in theory) almighty Politburo as a result of his position as cc secretary (even though he had been “elected” neither as candidate nor full member of this body). He was to be the third most regular visitor to Stalin’s office in 1934, which was at first more a consequence of his job than a sign of special favour with Stalin.4 But already in 1934, when Stalin was away from Moscow, Zhdanov substituted for him as head of the Communist party of the Soviet Union. Since Zhdanov had been a relatively minor player before the winter of 1934, this sudden prominence needs some explanation. Why was Zhdanov selected at the Seventeenth Party Congress to become Stalin’s stand-in? There is a longstanding legend, for which there is inconclusive evidence, that Stalin preferred aides around him who had compromised themselves in some way, particulary politically, in the past. Kalinin and Rudzutak, for example, may have denounced fellow revolutionaries to the tsarist secret police. Although the threat to expose them may have “kept them honest,” in Stalin’s eyes, their lack of resolve under pressure as exemplified by their betrayal of their comrades before 1917 may also have made Stalin suspicious about their ultimate loyalty when put to the test (as in the expected war). Kalinin became a largely ceremonial figure and Rudzutak was disposed of in the Great Terror.5 Among others who had questionable credentials according to the prevailing Bolshevik standards were Kirov, who had written for a liberal paper in the Northern Caucausus before 1917; A.Ia. Vyshinskii (1883–1954), who had been a Menshevik; Beria, who may have worked for the Azeri nationalists; Khrushchev and Andreev, who had both been tainted by a brief flirtation with Trotskyism; and Malenkov, who as a teenager lived for a while in White territory during the Civil War. Zhdanov, too, had less than a spotless past. But Molotov, Kaganovich, or Voroshilov do not seem to fit this pattern, which suggests that Stalin did not just select those with a dubious past.

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Luck, or perhaps lack of competition, played its part in Zhdanov’s sudden promotion. Higher-ranking Stalinists of long standing (such as Premier Molotov, Gosplan chief Kuibyshev, industrialization boss Ordzhonikidze, deputy premier and sto chief Rudzutak, deputy premier and transport commissar Andreev, Ukrainian cc secretaries Kosior and Postyshev, army chief Voroshilov, foreign and domestic trade commissar Mikoian, deputy premier and sto deputy chief Chubar’, Soviet president Kalinin, and Moscow boss Khrushchev – all of whom were either full or alternate members of the Politburo) were already performing other key tasks in 1934 and were therefore unavailable. Some of the younger leaders promoted around 1930 had committed serious errors (Syrtsov), or had not acquitted themselves convincingly enough of their responsibilities as Soviet leaders (Bauman).6 Stalin could have considered people like N.I. Ezhov (1895–1940) or G.M. Malenkov (1902–88) as candidates for the post of cc secretary, but even though Ezhov’s and Malenkov’s stars were rising quickly, they were less well known than Zhdanov, who had occasionally appeared on an all-Russian stage in previous years and had for a decade shown his ability in heading a significant province (and was thus also easier to accept by a not quite subdued Central Committee7). But there were some candidates for the position who boasted credentials similar to Zhdanov’s. At the Seventeenth Party Congress, Stalin, Kirov, Molotov, Voroshilov, or Kaganovich may have considered the candidacies of trade-union boss N.M. Shvernik (1888–1970), agricultural chief Ia.A. Iakovlev (1896–1938), foreign minister M.M. Litvinov (1876–1951), Georgian (Trans-Caucasian) boss L.P. Beria (1899–1953), Siberian secretary R.M. Eikhe (1890–1940), or the Party secretaries of similarly large regional organizations such as B.P. Sheboldaev (1895–1937), I.M. Vareikis (1894–1938), or I.P. Rumiantsev (1886–1937). Five of these men were purged in subsequent years, however, which indicates that Stalin’s displeasure with them probably predated 1937 by a few years. The surviving three went on to have strikingly different careers: Shvernik (like Kalinin) became a kind of ceremonial figure as head of the trade unions (and, after 1946, head of state of the Soviet Union); Litvinov was a diplomat pur sang; and Beria became a formidable player as nkvd chief and, subsequently, vice-premier. In 1934, however, the latter was too new as a local boss and too much associated with his previous job as police chief of the Trans-Caucasus to have made a credible candidate for Zhdanov’s post. Thus, it appears that Zhdanov was the best man at least by default. But his appointment as cc secretary was also informed by his suitability for the job. Zhdanov’s son, who worked himself for more than

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five years in the cc apparatus in Stalin’s time and thus knew something about the criteria used in the selection of apparatchiks, explained that his father was chosen largely because of his talent as a public speaker and the managerial talent he had shown in Gor’kii.8 Andrei Zhdanov had made himself noticed by his oratory at important Party meetings. His work in guiding the “socialist construction” of the First Five-Year Plan and the more impressive results of the beginning of the Second Five-Year Plan in Gor’kii province had been considerable. Among other things, he had watched over the completion of the automobile and radio-receiver plants and expansion of the Sormovo works in Gor’kii itself, the building of a strategically crucial chemical plant (it would be responsible for much of Soviet chemical production during World War ii) in nearby Dzerzhinsk, and the construction of numerous other factories in the city of Gor’kii and in smaller provincial towns. In 1933 Gor’kii krai had done very well in agriculture, for which it had been given a prize. A semblance of competence helped Zhdanov to make a good impression on his superiors. Stalin thought he recognized in Zhdanov a hard worker who knew how to get results. The Vozhd’ liked aides who were diligent and exacting, two traits he believed were somewhat scarce among Russians.9 Even though Zhdanov’s work ethic and track record as provincial governor would have appealed to Stalin, the Vozhd’ had been peeved at the lack of progress in Nizhnii (Gor’kii) krai in 1932. And now that Zhdanov had arrived in the cc Secretariat, Stalin would still want to see what Zhdanov was capable of in a position of much greater responsibility. Stalin knew that Zhdanov’s physical frailty presented one potential problem (ever since the Revolution the Politburo kept close watch over the health of the cc membership). Would he be able to hold up under the great strain of a cc secretary’s job? One quality that had sustained Zhdanov during the previous fifteen years now came back into play. Through his intricate understanding of the unwritten rules of the political game in the Communist party and Soviet state, he avoided the fate of Bauman, Postyshev, and others.10 Perhaps what most attracted Stalin to individuals like Zhdanov, Khrushchev, Malenkov, and Bulganin was that they seemed perfectly malleable and unconditionally loyal.11 To the dictator, Zhdanov seemed an obedient but nevertheless intelligent tool. Zhdanov was less likely to annoy Stalin by showing an independent spirit than those who had already been in the leadership before 1934. Working at the centre, Zhdanov soon confirmed Stalin’s positive impression of him.12

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th e tas k s of the se c r e ta ry Zhdanov, then, was catapulted onto the All-Union stage in the winter of 1934. On 10 February 1934, the plenum of the new cc elected at the Congress met for the first time and reorganized the cc Secretariat into seven departments (agriculture, industry, transport, planningfinance-trade, political-administrative, leading Party organs, culture and Leninist propaganda), the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute, and two (current affairs and special) sectors.13 The four cc secretaries each supervised several of these subdivisions, although the exact division of responsibility among the secretaries was not immediately delineated. Key political decisions made in the Soviet Union were based on cc departmental reports, which then arrived at the cc Secretariat. In principle, the secretaries and department heads were to meet as the “Secretariat” on a biweekly basis during the 1930s (and after World War ii) to discuss and edit drafts of decisions submitted by the different departments. Often, guests were invited to listen in, participate in discussions, or present briefs about specific items. At the same time, other materials were submitted to the cc Orgbiuro, without its ever being clear when issues were supposed to be the concern of either Orgbiuro or Secretariat exclusively, or of both (cc secretaries chaired the meetings of both bodies). The final draft agreed on by the Orgbiuro or Secretariat would then be passed on to the Politburo of the Party’s Central Committee, its highest ruling body, although minor decisions could be made by the Orgbiuro and Secretariat themselves.14 Both Orgbiuro and Politburo, like the Secretariat, usually invited assorted guests to their meetings to help elucidate certain items on the agenda. It is not exactly clear to us, anymore than it was to Stalin’s lieutenants and lower-level bureaucrats, how certain less-sensitive issues were permitted to bypass the Politburo and could be decided by Party and state bodies or individual politicians. Many decisions were made by the three or four Central Committee secretaries (individually or together), Politburo commissions, the first secretary (Stalin) and premier (Molotov), or the cc Orgbiuro, cc Secretariat, the Council of People’s Commissars, Gosplan, sto, and Central Executive Committee of soviets (from 1937, called the Supreme Soviet) without seeking formal Politburo ratification.15 Meanwhile, most Politburo decrees were formalized as decisions made by a lower authoritative body, from the Party’s cc to the Sovnarkom. Most decrees and decisions were announced to a predetermined audience that was usually smaller than the Soviet population in its entirety. After the mid-1930s, only very few

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of the thousands of Politburo decisions were published in the Soviet press. Party and state apparatus workers, up to and including those who reported to the five or six highest bosses, were regularly faced with the question whether a decision would be considered minor and could be made without soliciting the opinion of their superiors. An issue that at one point appeared innocent and uncontroversial could on a whim become key, after which subordinates might be subject to severe sanctions. Even Stalin’s cronies had to ponder carefully whether or not to submit a certain issue to Stalin. In 1948, for example, Zhdanov, habitually cautious in the extreme, for once misread Stalin’s mind, underestimating the importance of what appeared a rather trivial issue that had been entirely handled by one of his subordinates. In the course of the 1930s, the Politburo increasingly used the opros as a way of voting on proposals. This usually meant that Stalin’s personal aide, A.N. Poskrebyshev (1891–1965), either by phone or in person, asked the other Politburo members for their opinions on a given issue.16 Formal discussion by the Politburo’s full complement thus became infrequent. Many members of the Politburo knew Stalin’s opinion on an issue before they cast their vote, so that unanimity generally prevailed when a vote was recorded. The Politburo thus became in the second half of the 1930s a rubber-stamp parliament. In reality a handful or fewer leaders made key decisions, and Stalin’s opinion was always decisive.17 Nonetheless, Stalin did solicit other opinions, particularly those of his trusted sidekicks and of specialists in various fields, such as defence, foreign affairs, the economy, and ideology, as the stream of people visiting his Kremlin office who spent hours with him there indicates.18 Zhdanov, Molotov, and others – armed with file folders and all equipped, it seems, with little notebooks in which they wrote down new initiatives that were either thought up by Stalin on his own or that resulted from discussion between Stalin and his regular visitors – did at least function as sounding boards for the Boss.19 Ranking Politburo members (and, particularly during war, military commanders), when invited to do so, presented their points of view on current issues. The manner in which Stalin solicited advice from his half-dozen or so political lieutenants brings to mind Robespierre’s relations with his closest aides at the height of the Terror during the French Revolution.20 Unlike the French Terrorist, though, Stalin did not allow any substantial proposals to be issued in the name of the leadership before personally inspecting the formulation of his ideas by his lieutenants. For his interlocutors, it was difficult to gauge what degree of opposition Stalin found acceptable (or desirable) in the discussions at Politburo

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sessions or in his Kremlin office. There is evidence that during the war Stalin was willing to defer to army commanders in making certain strategic decisions (in which he proved wiser than Hitler). But in times of peace, when Stalin was not faced with such an acute struggle for the survival of his state (such as in 1934–41 and 1944–48 when Zhdanov worked most closely with him), Stalin was rather less tolerant of original thought.21 The limits of Stalin’s autocracy are particularly hard to assess because several of his men (sometimes vicariously through their sons) have embellished their roles in claiming credit for the “positive” accomplishments of the 1930s and 1940s.22 One is led to surmise, however, from their use of the omnipresent notebooks, that the lieutenants tried to suppress any urge to interpret Stalin’s proposals too creatively. They assiduously recorded Stalin’s designs in these booklets, thus avoiding possible memory lapses or misinterpretations of his words that might have cost them dearly. There is otherwise little evidence that they suggested original initiatives. Stalin’s intolerance for independent thought is reflected in the composition of the Politburo in 1934. The fourteen other candidate and full members did not harbour ambitions to become MarxistLeninist theoreticians in the manner of Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Bukharin, or Stalin himself. Stalin decided to take ideological matters into his own hands for the time being. Much of the work was rather humdrum (such as checking up on the personnel of the extremely large culture-propaganda bureaucracy) in which he had little sustained interest. Stalin realized that he needed a trustworthy aide in this fundamental area of the leadership. From the early 1930s, he auditioned several of his closest colleagues as his lieutenant in the ideological field. But few men fit the profile of a pliable and obedient, albeit intelligent and erudite, crony. Kaganovich (at the Writer’s Congress in 1934) and Andreev (from early 1935 to about 1937) were probably briefly tested but did not meet Stalin’s expectations. Kirov, whose education and experience as a journalist made him the most likely candidate as ideological assistant, died late in 1934. Zhdanov’s first try-outs at the Writers’ Congress and during a joint vacation with Stalin and Kirov in 1934 satisfied Stalin sufficiently to select him as his chief of staff for ideological matters. Zhdanov did not really fill this role, however, until the summer of 1938: his work in Leningrad and during the Great Purge occupied him before that time. In fact, during his first months in Moscow in 1934, Andrei Zhdanov hardly touched agitprop.23 Prior to his promotion, he had dealt with ideological matters, but largely in his early career. After 1924 he had

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worked as a kind of chief executive officer of a vast enterprise in Nizhnii Novgorod rather than as a theoretician. Iurii Andreevich Zhdanov noted that later, on occasion, his father would privately express exasperation at being selected so frequently to handle ideological matters. Andrei Zhdanov preferred the practical management he had provided in Nizhnii.24

lea r ning on t h e jo b In his first weeks as cc secretary, Zhdanov acquainted himself with current files and his working environment on Old Square in Moscow where the Secretariat of the Central Committee was formally located (although Stalin, the most senior secretary since 1922, hardly visited its premises anymore), a mere five-minute walk from the Kremlin.25 On 17 February Zhdanov met for the first time as cc secretary with his elder colleague in the Kremlin. Different from most of the several hundred meetings between the two that would take place in Stalin’s office from then on, this first conference was brief, a perfunctory five minutes in which Stalin possibly handed him some more materials dealing with current affairs. Two days later Zhdanov spent four and a half hours in Stalin’s office. Although not a member of that august body, Zhdanov participated in a Politburo meeting the next day.26 He hurried afterwards to the railway station for a last trip to Gor’kii where he formally took leave of its Party organization. I noted earlier that the division of tasks among the four cc secretaries was not immediately apparent. In the course of March, when he visited Stalin’s office a dozen times (exchanges amounting to a total of almost forty-eight hours), Zhdanov’s own tasks crystallized.27 On 7 March at an Orgbiuro meeting, Zhdanov was appointed to chair various subcommittees. One of these examined the number of employees in the bureaucracy of obkoms and kraikoms, and another studied the function of instructors of lower Party committees, issues with which he had practical experience.28 A few days later, he was assigned the supervision of agricultural matters, replacing Kaganovich.29 Zhdanov’s responsibilities extended further, from the labour conditions of medical personnel to educational reform, the defence industry, the condition of the exchange between countryside and procurement agencies, and, for a few months, transport.30 But it is also evident from his presence in Stalin’s office during visits by army commanders, diplomats, jurists, police, or trade officials that his tasks were not limited to those categories.31 Already then he was training to become an understudy to Stalin and Kaganovich – in other words, capable of dealing with all matters that came to the Secretariat’s attention.

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Zhdanov’s first public appearance as Party secretary occurred on 2 April, when he met with collective farmers in the cc Secretariat’s agricultural department. Most of these kolkhozniks were exemplary “shock-workers” (those whose productivity far outstripped the norms mandated by the authorities) of cattle farming.32 Zhdanov’s rather elaborate questioning of the farmers betrayed his unfamiliarity with the general state of animal husbandry in the country, a sign that he was still getting accustomed to some of his tasks. In April a Politburo meeting added him to an ad hoc commission on animal husbandry, led by Kuibyshev, that attempted to establish reliable statistics on its size. The issue had led to a quarrel between Pravda editor L.Z. Mekhlis (1889–1953) and the chief statistician of the Soviet Union, Osinskii (Obolenskii) (1887–1938), whose estimate of the number of Soviet livestock was so low that it upset the leadership.33 After the crisis of 1932–33 had been overcome, Stalin and his entourage liked to imagine a rural idyll of flourishing kolkhozy. Obolenskii’s sobering numbers burst the bubble. It was probably during the ensuing row that Zhdanov met Nikolai A. Voznesensky (1903–50), a man who became one of his closest friends and who stood by him to the end. Then a young member of the Soviet Control Commission, Voznesensky first became Zhdanov’s economic assistant in Leningrad, and then one of Kuibyshev’s successors at Gosplan.34 The quarrel was resolved in favour of Mekhlis (who had been supported by Voznesensky), a staunch Stalinist.35 In May Zhdanov was appointed chair of a standing Politburo commission that sanctioned foreign trips for Soviet citizens.36 That permission to travel abroad could only be granted by the highest authorities reflects the growing xenophobia among Soviet leaders. Soon, the Stalinists’ suspicion of foreign-intelligence activities led to accusations of espionage during the Moscow Trials. This paranoia briefly abated during the wartime collaboration with the Western Allies but returned with a vengeance and reached its morbid height towards the end of Zhdanov’s life.37 On 15 May the Politburo appointed Zhdanov chair of the organizational commission preparing the first congress of Soviet writers.38 He also joined around this date another commission, on new history textbooks for all levels of Soviet education.39 The teaching of history at Soviet schools had been a hotly debated topic in recent months – for some years it had not been taught at all – and Zhdanov involved himself increasingly in the issue. The reintroduction of history into the school curriculum was connected with the increasing emphasis on “Soviet patriotism,” as Maureen Perrie notes.40 This inward-looking chauvinism was linked with the growing distrust of the outside world.

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On 1 May Zhdanov stood on top of the Lenin Mausoleum in Red Square to celebrate International Labour Day.41 He was in the illustrious company of Stalin, Molotov, Kalinin, Ordzhonikidze, Voroshilov, Bukharin, and the Bulgarian Communist Georgii Dimitrov, hero of the trial of the Reichstag fire of 1933 and a future Comintern chief. On that day Dimitrov had difficulty identifying Zhdanov in his diary, which indicates how little known Zhdanov still was.

h oliday s, h istory, a n d c u lt u r e In June 1934 the cc secretaries’ tasks were again redistributed. Zhdanov was to “curate” the agriculture department, the planning, finance, and trade department, the political-administrative department, the department responsible for leading Party organs, the current affairs sector, and the cc itself, while Stalin supervised the Politburo, the special sector, and the departments of culture and propaganda.42 Kaganovich chaired the Orgbiuro and the Commission of Party Control and oversaw the transport and industry departments43 and the Communist Youth League. Kirov was excused from any supervisory role because of his continued work in Leningrad. Throughout June and the first half of July, Zhdanov visited Stalin on average every other day in his office. In the middle of June, Zhdanov participated in two Politburo meetings, while at the end of the month a cc plenary session met in Moscow, mainly concentrating on agriculture. Zhdanov’s role here was pivotal because of his responsibilities in the Secretariat.44 In late July Stalin left for the Caucasus, returning to Moscow only at the very end of October.45 By this time, Stalin had begun to ignore the custom of having the Politburo in its full complement discuss key issues: the highest Party body met a mere five times between 15 July and 25 December 1934.46 The processing of the “remarks” on history textbooks for Soviet schools is one example of this manner of ruling the country, which violated Party rules and Communist ruling tradition. By early August Kirov and Zhdanov had joined Stalin in the Caucasus.47 During this “holiday” the three hammered out proposals for new history textbooks to be used at Soviet schools; the proposals were sent to Moscow and submitted to the rest of the Politburo membership on 14 August.48 The failure of Soviet secondary and higher education to foster a properly trained elite for their modernizing society had become obvious during the cultural revolution, when Soviet specialists had proven woefully inadequate as substitutes for those who had received training in tsarist times (and had often been dismissed in the socialist offensive). As a result, educational reform,

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both in terms of school organization and curriculum, was a central focus in 1934.49 Within the general curriculum, Stalin decided to move away from the educational experiments and abstract theories taught before 1934 and head towards the teaching of the “proper” version of history.50 Eventually, Stalin and advisors such as Zhdanov concluded that a historical narrative combining a simplified Marxism with a pronounced pride in Russia’s past would marshal the loyalty of the general population better than the arcane subjectmatter that had replaced history instruction before 1934. Zhdanov supervised the writing and diffusion of canonical versions of the past in textbooks for schools, for the history of the Party (the Short Course of 1938), and for the history of philosophy (Aleksandrov’s 1946 History of Western Philosophy). He orchestrated the organization of a more rigorously academic system of general education (1935–36) and of political education (1938–39, 1946).51 Zhdanov’s assignments in this area are one of the strongest signs of Stalin’s approval, since the study of history has been a key endeavour for any historical materialist since Marx. But even here Zhdanov was not indispensable to Stalin. During the Second World War, a row broke out among historians about the nature of Russian history in which Shcherbakov and Malenkov became involved. Zhdanov felt obliged to give his verdict from afar, but in 1943–44 he did not belong to the Inner Circle (rukovodiashchee iadro) surrounding Stalin, and his views were largely ignored.52 The joint vacation of 1934, meanwhile, was likely Stalin’s first real test of Zhdanov’s intellectual mettle, and the junior cc secretary was unable to relax, even when he was joined by his son Iurii, who sixty-six years later remembered those days vividly. Iurii witnessed an extremely cordial relationship between the three cc secretaries and, though a mere fourteen-year-old, never noticed any hint of Stalin’s putative plans to rid himself of Kirov.53 By mid-August Andrei Zhdanov had returned to Moscow armed with instructions about his role at the First Soviet Writers’ Congress scheduled to open on 17 August. Zhdanov had been assigned to deliver the welcoming words on behalf of the Party’s Central Committee.54 It is erroneous to ascribe an important creative role to Zhdanov in the preparation of this Congress. The end of aesthetic experimentation and the beginning of strict regimentation of the Soviet arts dated from at least 1931.55 Stalin had pondered the idea of a union of all Soviet writers when Zhdanov was chief in Nizhnii and seldom visited Moscow.56 In the months subsequent to the Congress, Zhdanov would monitor literary affairs, but Kirov’s disappearance and Zhdanov’s transfer to Leningrad reshuffled the responsibilities

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among the secretaries and broke off Zhdanov’s involvement with literature and the arts until 1938.57 From late 1934 onwards, Stalin once more took direct personal control over such matters. For more pedestrian issues, he could rely on people of lesser stature in the hierarchy, such as Platon Kerzhentsev (1881–1940), head of the Committee for Artistic Affairs, who overshadowed an old acquaintance of Zhdanov’s, the first secretary of the newly established Writers’ Union, Aleksandr Shcherbakov (who had become a senior worker in the cc apparatus by 1934).58 Nevertheless, the Writers’ Congress was given enormous attention in the national press and thus gave Zhdanov his first genuine opportunity to present himself publicly as an All-Union leader. In the mind of the Soviet public and of foreign observers, he remained associated ever after with culture.59 The Congress itself became notorious for its acceptance of the official writing style known as “Socialist Realism,” following the principles of ideinost’, narodnost’, and partiinost’.60 The introduction of Socialist Realism heralded an attack on most literary experiments and the suppression of any genuine creativity and inspiration. A typical Socialist Realist work depicts supposedly true-to-life protagonists in wooden language, positive people’s heroes inspired and guided by the Communist party, who always triumph over reactionary or counterrevolutionary opponents and class enemies. Socialist Realism is characterized by a remarkably prudish, rather Victorian tone.61 Its didactic aim is to raise the masses to enlightenment and civilization, selfless sacrifice, and loyalty to party and state.62 Zhdanov’s speech at the Congress, which had been carefully edited by Stalin, emphasized the boundless virile optimism that had been part of the official discourse permeating Soviet society since late 1929.63 In Zhdanov’s subsequent meetings with writers, he continued to stress the necessity of portraying “socialist reality” in a positive light. Most attempts to write a satisfactory standard artistic account of Soviet life misfired, however, and the icon of Socialist Realism remained Gor’kii’s Mother, published in the 1900s.64 The Congress lasted two full weeks, and Zhdanov couriered daily reports about its proceedings to Stalin at his holiday resort.65 Under the auspices of the Congress, a Writers’ Union was formed. It guaranteed its members a comfortable life with all kind of perquisites. But many delegates came to a tragic end in the next few years. Ultimately, 180 of the total of 597 delegates were persecuted in the Great Terror, including one-third of the Union bosses elected at the Congress.66

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pa rt y s t eward and pa rt y e missa ry Zhdanov’s stature now reached dizzying heights. Although he was neither candidate nor full member of the Politburo, he ran the Politburo’s affairs for several weeks in August and September in the absence of Stalin and Kaganovich from Moscow.67 His stewardship of the ussr ended in the last week of September, when he went on a “business-trip” (kommandirovka) to Stalingrad krai. In the late summer of 1934, grain collections once again fell short of the plan, which led to the issue of a sharply worded cc and Sovnarkom decree on 31 August, signed by Stalin and Molotov.68 This was followed by the dispatch of almost all ranking Soviet leaders, including Zhdanov, to the periphery. In Stalingrad Zhdanov added force to the cc and Sovnarkom resolution.69 Before delivering a keynote speech to the local Party leadership, Zhdanov visited the region’s countryside; among other things, he inspected a few Machine Tractor Stations (mts). He paid a visit to the tractor plant and other factories in the krai’s capital and inspected the city’s river port on the Volga.70 Three days into his trip, at a meeting of the Stalingrad kraikom, he analyzed the krai’s difficulties with grain procurements and underlined the key role of the krai’s leading Party organizations in solving these problems.71 In an awkward attempt to present matters in their broader context, Zhdanov noted that grain formed one of the basic goods produced by the Soviet state, and that even the recent entry of the Soviet Union into the League of Nations (which had happened on 18 September72) could not defend a grainless state against external and internal enemies. His admonitions relied on the background of the famine of 1932–33 as well: ”Finally, our [mts] political departments [established in early 1933] arose from the difficulties of the grain-procurement campaign of 1932, as a result of the sabotage of grain procurements, in reaction to the passionate class struggle, and in response to the opposition that was shown to us at the end of 1933 in a number of districts in the Soviet Union. That’s why, it seems to me, to raise the question in 1934 about grain before one of the responsible Party organizations [may be] embarrassing, but still necessary.”73 Zhdanov then argued that the region’s problems in meeting delivery targets were due in significant measure to enemy activity.74 Enemy plotting was all the more dangerous because the kolkhoznik had yet to be won over to the Soviet side. Such enemies and half-enemies needed to be “liquidated.” The categorical quality of Zhdanov’s conclusions indicate that he had come equipped with a preconceived theory about what ailed the procurements, rather than basing his

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address on any exhaustive inspection of the local situation, for which his three-day sojourn had been too short in any event. On 27 September, Zhdanov presented a second major speech in Stalingrad, this time before the smaller gathering of the Stalingrad kraikombiuro.75 He compared his former fief in Gor’kii positively with the Stalingrad region (Moscow and Gor’kii krai had received awards in 1934 for their agricultural success).76 He recalled how everything was checked and double-checked by the authorities in Gor’kii krai and how during the last few months of every year an enormous amount of repair work was performed in the countryside so that, by the beginning of winter, a lot of the farming inventory was ready for the following spring. His boasting lends credence to Iurii Zhdanov’s suggestion that his father was selected to become cc secretary by Stalin in February 1934 in part because of his relative competence in organizing Gor’kii’s agriculture.77 Zhdanov’s words in Stalingrad about the Gor’kii krai also underline another aspect of his work habits that had impressed Stalin. By indefatigably following up on decisions in an effort to make sure that measures that had been decreed were actually implemented, he was hardly ever presented with unpleasant surprises. Soviet leaders regularly emphasized to their subordinates the necessity of translating orders into practice. After his return to Moscow in late September, Zhdanov continued to serve as Stalin’s deputy. By the second half of October Kaganovich took over.78 Stalin only felt obliged to return to Moscow at the very end of that month. The Boss had been absent from Moscow for three months but had been informed of anything that mattered and had made long-distance decisions.79 The length of his sojourn shows, however, that he was not particularly agitated about the political or economic situation within the Soviet Union or about any foreign threat and was (or grew) confident about leaving day-to-day affairs to his deputies, including the recently recruited Zhdanov. Upon Stalin’s return, Zhdanov resumed his regular meetings with the Vozhd’ in the latter’s office and often joined him at meals in the Kremlin canteen as well. Only one Politburo meeting was staged in November while preparations were in full swing for a cc plenum that was held at the end of the month.80 First of all, the leadership worried about railroad accidents that regularly interrupted the shipping of freight.81 Zhdanov chaired a meeting on 10 November 1934 of those managing railroad transport in the country. But the bosses fretted even more about the shortages suffered by large cities resulting from the irregular supply of agricultural produce. In mid-November Zhdanov was appointed head of a Politburo commission investigating

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the unsatisfactory supply of foodstuffs to the cities. The various deliberations led to the abolition of ration cards for basic foodstuffs on 1 January 1935 in order to overcome supply problems, which, for a few years, led to a marginally better provisioning of the cities. Lastly, the cc plenum addressed the general state of agriculture.82 One last sign of a modest relaxation of political vigilance (which was to be reversed two short days after the plenum’s conclusion) was the cc’s abolition of the mts political departments. The gesture was not an unequivocal sign of the leadership’s sudden trust of the peasants: “deputy directors for political affairs” were maintained on the stations. But the worst economic dislocation of the First Five-Year Plan seemed to be history. Collectivization was nearing completion in most regions, and industry began to show much better results.83 Stalin’s behaviour towards Zhdanov throughout 1934, together with the great variety and importance of assignments allocated to him (which could not have been delegated without Stalin’s fiat), show Stalin’s burgeoning confidence in the talents of the new cc secretary. Indeed, Stalin seemed delighted with his new protégé. Part of that pleasure was informed by the general optimism, which Stalin shared with the Party brass, that a corner had been turned, that the greatest difficulties in starting socialist construction were over. Zhdanov could thank his lucky stars for arriving in Moscow in 1934, virtually the only year of the Soviet 1930s that did not see widespread social, economic, or political turmoil. When this mood changed acutely on 1 December 1934, Stalin did not lose his strong liking for Zhdanov, but formally kept him on as cc secretary, even when Zhdanov was assigned to clean the Augean stables of Leningrad.

kir ov’s mu r d e r In view of the brutal nature of subsequent events, the association between Leningrad and Zhdanov was appropriately born in blood. From 1 December 1934, when Sergei Kirov was assassinated by Leonid Nikolaev in the Smol’nyi, Zhdanov’s connection with Leningrad was attended by a massive death toll. Zhdanov was among the first to discuss Kirov’s assassination with Stalin in the Moscow Kremlin.84 They quickly agreed on an unforgiving law against terrorist acts that was issued in name of the Central Executive Committee on 3 December but made retroactively applicable to 1 December 1934.85 Early in the morning of 2 December 1934, Zhdanov, Stalin, Voroshilov, Molotov, People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs G.G. Iagoda (1891–1938), Deputy Party Control Commission boss Ezhov, Komsomol chief A.V. Kosarev (1903–39), Moscow chief Khrushchev,

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Kremlin bodyguard chief K.V. Pauker (1893–1937), nkvd employee V.E. Tsesarskii (1895–1940), deputy ussr state prosecutor Vyshinsky, and their aides arrived by train in Leningrad.86 Zhdanov, Stalin, Molotov, and Voroshilov first headed for the Sverdlov hospital to view Kirov’s body. Then they visited Kirov’s widow and ended up in the Smol’nyi, the Leningrad Party headquarters. By 10:00 am a government commission had met to organize the funeral: in attendance were Zhdanov, second Leningrad Party secretary M.S. Chudov, Zhdanov’s old acquaintance, Khrushchev, Iagoda, Pauker, third Leningrad secretary A.I. Ugarov (1900–39), obkombiuro member Petr Alekseev (1892–1937), gorispolkom chair I.F. Kodatskii (1893–1937), oblis-polkom chair P.I. Struppe (1889–1937), and several Leningrad raikom secretaries.87 Later that day in the Smol’nyi, Stalin, Voroshilov, Zhdanov, Molotov, Iagoda, Chudov, Kodatskii, Leningrad nkvd chief F.D. Medved’ (1890–1937), and Ezhov interrogated Kirov’s assassin, Leonid Nikolaev.88 There was little or no evidence that anyone but the killer was involved in the crime, but such a simple explanation would not do for the Soviet leaders. Their dismay with the lax security prevailing inside the Smol’ny prompted them, on 10 December, to replace Medved’ with L.M. Zakovskii (1894–1938).89 On 16 December Zinoviev and Kamenev were arrested on charges of inspiring the murder. By late December, the Military Collegium of the ussr Supreme Court sentenced fourteen people to death who had been accused of organizing the Kirov murder with Nikolaev.90 Within two and a half months after the assassination, the nkvd arrested 843 people in Leningrad as part of the alleged conspiracy that had planned the murder.91 Zhdanov already seems to have been chosen as Kirov’s successor in the hours following the assassination. Zhdanov and the team that had descended upon Leningrad on December 2 returned to Moscow with Kirov’s body late in the next day.92 For an entire week in Moscow, Zhdanov visited Stalin daily in lengthy meetings.93 Beyond security matters, the meetings thrashed out the issue of how Zhdanov was to divide his time between his work in Moscow as cc secretary and his responsibilities as head of the Leningrad Party organization.94 The Leningrad Communists were to be intensely scrutinized as Stalin professed to believe that the murder showed how covert foes of Kirov, and thus of himself, were legion.95 Stalin’s choice of Zhdanov as Kirov’s successor in Leningrad appears supremely sensible in the circumstances, as Zhdanov had long-term experience in leading a large provincial Party organization. This junior colleague, too, had never had anything to do with the Leningrad province before and could thus be relied upon to take an

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objective look and engage in a clean sweep if the political mood of Party and government officials proved dubious. One practical advantage recommended Zhdanov to Stalin for the position of Leningrad chief. Kirov’s Party deputy, Mikhail Chudov, had once vouched for Zhdanov’s credentials in Tver’ during the 1921 Party purge. Chudov could familiarize Zhdanov with Leningrad. Zhdanov knew his old friend well enough to judge whether Chudov had grown complacent or had fallen prey to particularistic sentiments. Stalin typically suspected people of harbouring divided loyalties, identifying too much with the cause of Leningrad rather than with the Party as a whole.96 Owing to his distrust of Leningraders, he ordered a complete overhaul of Leningrad’s Party chapter on three occasions – in 1926, 1936–38, and 1949–50. On 15 December 1934, then, Leningrad’s obkom and gorkom in a unified plenum formally confirmed Zhdanov as their first secretary.97 In his maiden speech, Zhdanov focused on the cc plenum of late November 1934, emphasizing the significance of the abolition of ration cards.98

b os s of len in g r a d In Leningrad, Zhdanov’s office was located immediately to the right of the staircase on the second floor of the Smol’nyi Institute, headquarters of the Bolsheviks in October 1917.99 One entered through a waiting-room where a receptionist was stationed. Zhdanov’s personal secretary, who had his own office on the other side of the waitingroom, received guests before they met with with his boss. Zhdanov was directly connected by phone with Moscow and, during the war, with the different front headquarters near Leningrad. Like Stalin he kept late hours, receiving people sometimes at midnight. Zhdanov’s transfer to Leningrad entailed adjustments at the top. While Zhdanov was acquainting himself with Leningrad, the cc elected him candidate Politburo member, essentially to replace Kirov, on 1 February 1935.100 Zhdanov had thus formally arrived in the Holy of Holies, the Politburo, and was now officially licensed to discuss (though not vote on) most important decisions made in the Soviet Union.101 Owing to his transfer to Leningrad, however, Zhdanov collaborated far less intensively with Stalin after December 1934.102 Only towards 1937 did he appear more often in Moscow again. Because of his prolonged absences, the cc Secretariat was reorganized in the late winter of 1935. Ezhov was appointed cc secretary as well as chief of the Commission for Party Control, Andreev was made cc secretary, too, and Khrushchev succeeded Kaganovich as first secretary of the Moscow

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oblast’.103 As several of Zhdanov’s responsibilities were reassigned to Kaganovich, Ezhov, and Andreev, few of Zhdanov’s tasks in Moscow carried great importance until he began to prepare a keynote speech for the 1937 February-March cc plenum. On 20 April 1935, Zhdanov was ordered by Politburo decree to work no more than one-third of the month in Moscow.104 Almost two years later to the day, the Politburo decided that Zhdanov was to alternate one month of work in Leningrad with one month in Moscow. In 1937 and 1938 he spent about four times as much time in the capital as in 1935 and 1936.105 Zhdanov dedicated most of his first couple of years as Leningrad boss to sorting the wheat from the chaff in city and province in general and within the local Communist party in particular. In 1935 Zhdanov’s office in the Smol’nyi received an avalanche of letters, one thousand per month on average; the correspondence increased in subsequent years.106 Most letters were petitions from Leningraders to redress nonpolitical injustices. Zhdanov read very little of this mail, lacking the time and means to help petitioners.107 Letter writing was one of the few avenues open to Soviet citizens to express grievances, but the sheer volume of mail also suggests a growing (or re-emerging) belief in the superhuman qualities of political leaders, a belief that provided solace to mere mortals.108 Similarly, Hitler’s sacred aura remained intact for many Germans, as Kershaw argues, despite their resentment of the abuse of power by Nazi functionaries.109 Zhdanov’s reserved political and administrative style was different from Kirov’s, who had been a far more visible and approachable leader. The new chief was inclined to run matters from behind his desk; he delegated tasks and refrained from the personal visits to factories, institutions, schools, and shops that Kirov had undertaken.110 In general, most Soviet leaders reduced their public appearances after Kirov’s assassination. That strange event and its stranger aftermath rekindled an acute sense of insecurity.111 In addition, Zhdanov spent an increasing amount of time away from Leningrad to take care of his duties as cc secretary. But his aloofness was also informed by a deliberate effort to manufacture a leadership cult. Copying Stalin’s behaviour helped Zhdanov to build his own mystique. In Leningrad, Stalin’s cult was accompanied by a modest but growing cult of his lieutenant.112 Throughout his ten years as Leningrad boss, Zhdanov kept residences and offices in both Leningrad and Moscow.113 Iurii noted that his father “lived like a nomad” after he succeeded Kirov, shuttling between his quarters in Leningrad’s Smol’nyi and Moscow’s Kremlin, only rarely working out of a dacha that was available to him on

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Kamennyi Island near Leningrad.114 From May 1937, Zhdanov also used a country house near Moscow that had previously belonged to Rudzutak.115 In the early 1930s the Soviet elite was materially well off compared to the average Soviet citizen.116 Zhdanov could freely pursue his pastimes. He continued to add to his extensive library, for example, much like a member of the prerevolutionary Russian intelligentsia, as his son later recalled.117 He and his family always enjoyed holidays either in the Caucasus or on the “Soviet Riviera,” the eastern coast of the Black Sea, where Zhdanov proved an accomplished sailor.118

leningrad pr ov in c e In the middle of the 1930s, Leningrad province was much larger than it is today. Including the Pskov and Novgorod regions, the province bordered both Estonia and Latvia and stretched all the way northward along the Finnish-Soviet border to Murmansk and the Kola Peninsula on the White Sea and Barents Sea.119 Eventually, in the course of the 1930s the Soviet leadership divided the megaprovinces created in 1929 into smaller territories, for it was difficult for provincial leaders to exercise effective control over such vast regions. In 1935 Leningrad province had as much land surface as Sweden and about the same population. The oblast’ counted 6,831,743 inhabitants in the census of January 1937.120 The capital, Leningrad, officially had 2,814,474 inhabitants, making it the Soviet Union’s second largest city and the world’s seventh largest.121 Some half a million people in the city worked in larger factories that produced goods ranging widely from textiles to arms. As elsewhere in the Soviet Union, the urban population was growing at the expense of the countryside during the 1930s. By 1939 about half of the provincial population lived in towns.122 Leningrad’s economic profile had changed less drastically than that of other Soviet cities in the wake of Stalinist industrialization, since many of its large enterprises predated the 1917 Revolution. Although a considerable metropolis, it appeared to decline in size and cultural importance relative to Moscow.123 In the months immediately prior to his succession of Kirov, Zhdanov had supervised the transfer to Moscow of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, the apex of the pursuit of scholarship and scientific endeavour in the ussr, a move that underlined Leningrad’s secondary status.124 Even though large-scale industry had grown exponentially since 1929, many people in Leningrad province, as elsewhere in northwestern Russia, continued to find at least partial employment as artisans.125 Agricultural pursuits had traditionally earned insufficient returns

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(certainly in terms of grain yields) to provide adequately for the peasants. Leningrad, however, provided a sizable market for handicrafts. Apart from artisanry, the fishing and forest industries provided welcome additions to peasant incomes, even after collectivization. As in the upper Volga region of Gor’kii, collectivization in the Leningrad region had been comparably slow, nearing seventy percent of farms by the time of Zhdanov’s arrival in December 1934.126 Under his lead, and aided by the 1935 introduction of the new standardized Kolkhoz Charter (which brought greater clarity to the organization of the collective farms and promised better remuneration and rights for collective farmers), nine out of ten peasant households were collectivized by the fall of 1936. This portrait of the Leningrad region would not be complete without an overview of some of its social and economic problems. As elsewhere in the Soviet Union, collective farms existed in squalor in Leningrad province.127 The Soviet Union suffered from appallingly high infant mortality, and throughout the 1930s the rates in rural areas surpassed the rates of the 1920s in the oblast’.128 In the cities, too, life was hard. The death rate of infants in the larger cities of the Russian Republic such as Leningrad reverted to nineteenth-century levels.129 Wages were low, queues omnipresent, and goods in short supply, while housing was cramped in all oblast’ towns throughout the 1930s.130 The roads were in an appalling state, as Zhdanov himself publicly admitted on several occasions, hindering the provisioning of the city’s shops and factories.131 Although the abolition on 1 January 1935 of the rationing of bread and a number of other products was hailed as a milestone on the way to the society of plenty, the repeal led initially to a fall in real wages for most households in Leningrad, because the price of bread rose faster than the slight wage increase introduced to compensate for it.132 The worst deficiencies and deprivations caused by the First Five-Year Plan had been overcome by the time Zhdanov arrived in Leningrad, but Sarah Davies has nevertheless called 1935 a “dismal year” for urban dwellers.133 And in 1936 Leningrad province witnessed more deaths than births.134 The turbulent events of the second half of the 1930s brought few economic changes to Leningrad oblast’. The disruption caused by the Terror hindered economic output in 1937 and 1938.135 Severe shortages of consumer goods (and the reintroduction of ration cards) recurred as a result of the preparations for war (and the outbreak of the Winter War).136 Economic problems continued to plague the ussr in 1940. Gosplan reported to the Sovnarkom and the cc that labour discipline had improved in that year and the fluctuation of the labour

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force had fallen thanks to the imposition of (draconian) laws.137 But the planning bureau also explained that several branches of light industry and of the chemical industry had decreased their production compared to 1939, while in many sectors of the capital-goods industry production fell short of targets despite some growth. The harvest was good in 1940, but as in the good years of 1933–34 and 1937, the problems with animal husbandry continued. No different from any other year during the previous decade, shortages of consumer goods were common, while wages were paid often after delay. It is thus evident that Zhdanov’s subjects in Leningrad and its province suffered great hardship during the 1930s, and throughout Zhdanov’s tenure as one of the senior leaders of the Soviet Union, the average Soviet citizen remained usually worse off than in the lean 1920s.138 It is difficult to imagine that people could actually bear some of these living conditions, but tolerance can be aided by ignorance. Owing to censorship and propaganda, the Soviet people were largely unable to compare their life with life in other societies. It is true to a significant extent that “an individual living in the Stalinist system could not conceivably formulate a notion of himself independent of the program promulgated by the Bolshevik state.”139 Poverty appeared to be shared equally by everyone (the luxuries enjoyed by the bosses were carefully concealed), while few townsfolk, most of whom were “urbanized peasants,” could remember a better life in the past. For city dwellers, some of the cultural amenities available to them (theatres, concert halls), as well as such services as running water, electricity, and sewerage, seemed like extravagances compared to the Spartan conditions of village life, of which many had personal experience.140 During the 1930s, many people were not yet disillusioned by the regular postponement of a radiant future as their counterparts would be in later decades. People’s willingness to make sacrifices remained considerable. Still, we would be mistaken to assume that all folk living in such destitution accepted their living conditions uncritically, as Sarah Davies has clearly shown.141 The record of the Communist Regime shows a sustained indifference to the well-being of the Soviet people. Not all of the scarcity, however, was the result of Communist mismanagement of the Soviet economy. After all, by the second half of the 1930s the winds of war began to pick up. The Soviet Union, still suffering the consequences of the First World War and the Civil War, was drawn deeper into preparatios for a new world war. The leadership steeply increased defence expenditure. But Stalin’s (and Zhdanov’s) stubborn denial of the likelihood of a German invasion tragically wasted much of the Soviet people’s earlier efforts to modernize their country. In the event, the

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German attack of 1941 took people by surprise. In economic terms, the lack of coordinated and efficient military resistance in the first months of the war destroyed more than the equivalent of all that had been accomplished during the 1930s, while the human cost reached absurd proportions. The devastation inflicted upon the Soviet Union by the war was felt long after Stalin’s death.

pers ecut io n s One increasingly important part of Zhdanov’s task as Leningrad boss was to oversee the hunt for alleged anti-Soviet or counterrevolutionary conspirators, spies, terrorists, and saboteurs along with the perpetrators of actual crimes. In early 1935, nkvd Special Judicial Boards (OSO) sentenced ever-widening circles of alleged political opponents of the regime. Accused political criminals were also sentenced in the mid1930s by a judicial troika of the highest provincial political leaders, which at some point included Zhdanov.142 The shady conspiracy that threatened the Soviet Union from within was given clearer contours in a letter of 18 January 1935 sent by the cc but largely authored by Stalin. The letter emphasized the alleged involvement of a Leningrad Centre of Zinovievites.143 By 26 January the Politburo had exiled to Northern Siberia and Yakutia 663 supposed supporters of Zinoviev, while concomitantly 325 assorted other “opponents” were shipped out of Leningrad, all of them having been Party members at some point or other.144 Similar harsh actions followed throughout the union. Within the Party, too, the scrutiny of questionable elements was stepped up. Zhdanov informed the Leningrad Party organization early in 1935 that, in the weeks after Kirov’s murder, 7,274 Communists, many of whom were labelled “counterrevolutionary Zinovievites,” had been purged.145 In an account published in late March, Zhdanov warned the combined obkom and gorkom of Leningrad that Trotskyites and others had used complacent and lax Party members to worm their way into the Party.146 Apart from the offensive against all those (ex-) Communists suspected of sedition, the regime also embarked on a policy to rid the major cities of other deviants, including common criminals. On 27 February, on Zhdanov’s and Zakovskii’s cue, the Leningrad nkvd issued an order to arrest and banish counterrevolutionary elements from Leningrad and its suburban districts.147 It decreed that five thousand “former people” and their families were to be expelled from Leningrad. Almost half of those detained were executed rather than exiled, sentenced by a Special Board of the Leningrad nkvd. Upon the operation’s completion, Zakovskii sent a report to the

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nkvd central leadership and to obkom secretaries Zhdanov, Chudov, and Ugarov. The local nkvd chief noted how most detainees had been apprehended because of their prerevolutionary social status or their work for the tsarist judicial organs.148 Rather than being connected to the assault on the former Communist bosses, this wave of arrests affected people suspected of disloyalty in case war or another grave crisis enveloped the country, from oppositionists to former Mensheviks, Socialist-Revolutionaries, Kadets, Octobrists, Whites, monarchists, priests, and nobles. Zakovskii’s report noted the amount of former princes, counts, and barons among those arrested, few of whom could have been realistically suspected of having any connection with the Jewish Bolshevik leaders Zinoviev and Kamenev (and thus of contributing to the alleged plot to murder Kirov). Indeed, several of the accused had been found to possess “pogromanti-soviet” literature.149 Different strains of (potentially) subversive elements can therefore be identified in Leningrad’s wave of arrests of early 1935. The operations appear to have been dress rehearsals for the comprehensive attempt of 1937–38 to rid the entire country of “enemies,” whether supposed political opponents, real criminals, or those stigmatized by their ethnicity or (prerevolutionary) social background.150 In an apparent paradox, the offensive to remove common criminals and political enemies from the city was accompanied by a propaganda campaign announcing that the forthcoming new Soviet constitution would restore voting rights to lishentsy and would no longer value factory workers’ votes more than others’ votes in soviet elections.151 Arresting “former people” while removing barriers discriminating against their (formal) civil rights as happened in 1935–36 appears schizophrenic, but when seen from Zhdanov’s personal perspective, the state of affairs was not wholly without logic. Zhdanov had belonged to the “wrong” class before October 1917, even though he was then too young to have engaged in any exploitation of the downtrodden. During the early 1920s on occasion he hid the damning truth about his middle-class roots and twice was attacked because of this privileged background (in Tver’ in September 1921 and again in Nizhnii in 1922). His stalwart loyalty to the Stalinist cause, though, had more than made up for his ancestry by the mid-1930s. His case was proof that redemption could be achieved by people born to the wrong class, though in reality few succeeded in lifting the stigma from themselves as he had to escape arrest. For the next two and a half years (until July 1937), Stalin’s regime alternated populist measures (for instance, emphasizing equal electoral rights for everyone and raising the possibility of contested

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elections) with increased politicial persecution of certain groups, and amnesties for jailed and exiled people with arrests of newly minted enemies.152 In another ostentatious step towards greater civil rights for Soviet citizens, the regime had introduced a new kolkhoz model charter in mid-February 1935, which seemed to promise a less-arbitrary relationship between authorities and collective farmers.153 In the middle of the summer of 1935, the Politburo reduced some of the sentences of peasants convicted during collectivization, while a number of former kulaks received “full” civil rights (even though they were not permitted to return to their ancestral villages).154 Thieves convicted for stealing public property and sentenced according to the law of 7 August 1932 were also pardoned. By and large, the Stalinists seem to have tried to make a distinction between inveterate criminals and alleged political enemies on the one hand, and a rather disparate group of minor offenders on the other. This latter group included people who had been driven by destitution to petty theft or had been unfortunate enough to be on the receiving end of the authorities’ ruthless conduct of collectivization. They were now pardoned if they had redeemed themselves through exemplary behaviour in jail, camp, or place of exile. The sudden clemency, however, did not bring Stalin and his lieutenants much popularity among the rural population, whom they particularly wanted to appease.155 In early June 1935, Zhdanov officially received the Order of Lenin from the cec Presidium for his outstanding services to the Communist cause.156 While in Moscow, he attended a dinner given in honour of the Czechoslovak foreign minister, Eduard Benes, whose country had recently become a military ally of the ussr.157 Zhdanov’s invitation was a sign of his growing prominence as a leader and his greater involvement in foreign affairs. In those days, the Old Bolshevik, A.S. Enukidze (1877–1937), a former cec secretary, was excluded from the Party by a cc plenary session. Censorship was intensified, too, when the works of Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and other Old Bolsheviks were removed from public libraries.158 On 19 June Pravda published Zhdanov’s remarks (of a few days earlier) before a Party gathering in Leningrad about the recent fall of Enukidze. The latter’s misdeeds, Zhdanov stated, showed “once again that our placidity and complacency had been the main obstacle hindering the unmasking of the intrigues of the class enemy.”159 Zhdanov squarely accused the “Zinovievites and Kamenevites,” as “sworn enemies of the working class,” of responsibility for Kirov’s assassination.160

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While Zhdanov does not appear to have played a direct role in the fall of Enukidze, he was a key spokesman in a related campaign that criticized sloppy record keeping within the Party.161 Zhdanov had already warned local Party chiefs in Leningrad in late March that hostile elements had used such sloppiness to infiltrate Communist ranks. In June the Politburo assigned Zhdanov the job of investigating personally the malpractices plaguing the record keeping of the Saratov Party organization, which had been condemned in a cc resolution on 23 June.162 On 29 June Zhdanov travelled from Moscow to the mid-Volga region.163 After he had completed his local research (which resembled his investigations in the Stalingrad region in the previous year) and tried out some of his criticism on lower-level Party organizations, his visit reached its climax in a Saratov Party kraikom meeting from 5 to 7 July.164 Zhdanov connected the sloppiness in screening the credentials and record keeping of Party members with Kirov’s murder; as he pointed out, Leonid Nikolaev had also owned a Party card. Furthermore, during the search of Nikolaev’s apartment in Leningrad after Kirov’s death, a number of membership cards that he had held “in reserve” had been found.165 The state of record keeping and the poor execution of the Party purge that had commenced in 1933 was not the only shortcoming Zhdanov noticed in Saratov. He explored new themes that he recycled on future occasions. He faulted the Saratov Party, for example, for its “dictatorial” leadership (its head was A.I. Krinitskii166) and its overemphasis on economic work to the detriment of purely Party work, such as educating cadres or agitprop.167 Zhdanov pounded on the theme of criticism and self-criticism. As there was no opposition party in the country, he argued, the interplay of criticism and self-criticism within Party bodies was key in moving the country forward. In the Politburo and cc, Zhdanov remarked, Stalin himself had developed this device into a useful tool for uncovering errors.168 During Zhdanov’s intervention in Saratov, he sent a telegram to Stalin proposing improvements to the Saratov organization.169 These included a number of official reprimands, dismissals, and personnel changes. Krinitskii, the kraikom’s first Party secretary, was to be named head of the Saratov gorkom as well. Thus acquiring even more powers, he was offered a chance to turn things around. A week after the conclusion of the Saratov meetings, an edited version of Zhdanov’s report and concluding words was published as a brochure in the Soviet Union in a print-run of one hundred thousand copies.170 Zhdanov thus enhanced his public stature. Meanwhile, the arrest of hundreds of Saratov Communists in the following months was kept under wraps.171

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ed uc ation, c omint ern, a n d c o n st it u t io n Busy summer weeks followed Zhdanov’s return from Saratov, when he shuttled back and forth between Moscow and Leningrad. His agenda included studying and discussing a plan for the reconstruction of Leningrad. The plan was more modest than the grandiose designs for the modernization of Moscow, which stood to reduce Leningrad further to the status of second city of the land.172 Although already appointed in February 1935 to the constitutional commission, Zhdanov only now engaged earnestly in the drafting of the new constitution. He chaired the subcommittee on education from July 1935 to June 1936.173 In the cc Secretariat and constitutional subcommission, Zhdanov concentrated on educational reform, particularly of the curriculum at all levels of schooling.174 General and political education, and the state of scholarship and science, had been made part of Zhdanov’s portfolio because he was one of the very few Stalinists who had attended academically solid secondary and postsecondary educational institutions before 1917. The former seminarian Stalin and the former college student Zhdanov grudgingly began to recognize some merits of the prerevolutionary educational system. By 1935 much of the old intelligentsia had disappeared or been destroyed. The new people who had replaced the intelligentsia in the economy, political bureaucracy, or educational institutions proved woefully unprepared. Many of those stand-ins were “practicians” with little formal education. Others were the product of the chaotic educational experiments of the first fifteen years of Soviet rule.175 The failures of the First Five-Year Plan could be attributed in part to the low level of education of many of the enthusiasts who brought little else to the table but their zeal to transform a largely preindustrial society into a modern one. The practicians’ and autodidacts’ inadequacies in managing an increasingly complex modern society were noticeable even in the direct environment of Stalin and Zhdanov. Kaganovich and Voroshilov commended themselves to Stalin as political associates by their unswerving loyalty and, if necessary, boundless cruelty, but little else. They were useful for certain tasks, but it was difficult to run the country while relying largely on such uneducated types.176 Three related trends emerged in educational policy in the course of the 1930s. The principle of education for all (rather than for those with the right proletarian credentials) was introduced, the quality of education itself improved dramatically, and Stalin began to promote several better-educated people to leading positions, such as Malenkov, Beria, and Voznesensky. With Zhdanov’s active involve-

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ment, Soviet schools were standardized during the mid-1930s and returned to a level of academic rigour closer to that of the Old Regime.177 By the end of 1935, the rule that only those having a proper working-class background could enter higher educational facilities was abolished. This policy shift was part not just of the effort to improve the academic level of Soviet education but also of the general move to end the stigmatization of former classes.178 In terms of political erudition, too, the Party took measures in the mid1930s to fortify the ideological armour of its aspiring middle-level officials.179 In the summer of 1935, Zhdanov’s time was also taken up by the Seventh Congress of the Communist International (Comintern) held in Moscow from 25 July to 21 August.180 Zhdanov had honed his knowledge of foreign cultures (predominantly Western) since his youth in Tver’, but he had never been able to show off his aptitude prior to his transfer to Moscow. The Congress was an excellent opportunity for Zhdanov to make his mark as a specialist in this policy field. Although he had little experience in foreign affairs and had never even been abroad, he passed another test with flying colours in Stalin’s eyes. Stalin had wanted to streamline the Comintern’s operation and strengthen its leadership since at least the spring of 1934.181 By 1935 Georgii Dimitrov, the famous defendant of the Reichstag fire trial, was one pawn that Stalin used, and Zhdanov another, eventually replacing Comintern veterans Piatnitskii (1882–1938) and Knorin (1890–1938). Zhdanov was duly elected as a full member of the Comintern’s executive committee for the Soviet Communist party at the end of the Congress, sharing the honour with a select company of other Soviet citizens: Stalin, Ezhov, veteran Comintern operative D.Z. Manuilskii (1883–1959), and secret-police officer M.A. Trilliser, also known by the pseudonym Moskvin (1883–1941).182 From the summer of 1935 Zhdanov functioned as Stalin’s trusted aide in communications with the international Communist movement.183 In 1935 the threat of a major European war dramatically increased. Italy invaded Abyssinia, while Hitler took back the Saar area and began to rearm in earnest.184 The belligerent rhetoric of the right-wing dictators had led not only to the Soviet Union’s entry into the League of Nations in September 1934 but also, in December of that year, to the establishment of bilateral Soviet-French and Soviet-Czechoslovak pacts, which in May 1935 became military alliances.185 In response, the Comintern Congress announced a change in the tactics of European Communist parties. Instead of opposing any alliance with other leftwing parties, they were now to seek, whenever possible, a “United

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Front” coalition with more moderate progressive parties in an effort to preserve parliamentary democracy against the threat from the right.186 Andrei Zhdanov was forced to leave the Comintern Congress temporarily for a trip to the north of his Leningrad fief. He was accompanied by Politburo member and People’s Commissar of trade Mikoian. During this two-week excursion in August, Zhdanov spoke before the Murmansk and Karelian Party organizations, both subordinate to that of Leningrad province, and visited ships’ wharves, the Baltic-White Sea Canal, hydroelectric stations, hospitals, schools, factories, and mines.187 Mikoian was probably there to inspect the development of Murmansk as a naval and trading port.188 Zhdanov returned to Moscow for the closing session of the Comintern Congress; then he settled back in Leningrad. The reconstruction of the city and the economic prospects for 1936 were the focal topics of discussion among the highest leaders of the oblast’ at a joint session of the Leningrad soviet ispolkom and Party gorkom on 26 August, and in Zhdanov’s Smol’nyi office on 29 August.189

s takh anov ism In September 1935 Zhdanov went on holiday.190 In his absence, a major industrial enterprise, a ships’ wharf, was named after him, the first of a series of honours that continued until 1950.191 Meanwhile, there was a wave of reports throughout the Soviet Union of manual labourers who, following the model of Aleksei Stakhanov, the record Donbass miner, surpassed standard production levels by enormous margins. The Stakhanov movement seemed to offer the leadership the advantage of improving labour productivity at little cost; for while these “shock-workers” received both monetary and nonmonetary rewards for their efforts, they forced the minimum level of individual production rates of the majority to go up.192 Some young and ambitious Stakhanovites were coopted into the privileged Soviet elite.193 Many workers joined the movement at first, caught up in an almost psychotic outburst of enthusiasm to build socialism. The opportunity to escape from dismal living conditions and low wages was obviously part of the appeal. The Stakhanov movement in Leningrad mushroomed in October and, for a while, became Zhdanov’s main focus upon his return from holiday.194 Between October 10 and 15 the number of Stakhanovites in the city increased thirty times, and every factory had its Stakhanovites by early November.195 Soon, too, Stakhanovites were identified among railroad workers, lumberjacks, and flax farmers in Leningrad oblast’.196 On 21 October Zhdanov and the Leningrad

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“obkom” (presumably its ranking members) met with the Leningrad Stakhanovites.197 In the next days, Zhdanov called publicly for a further widening of the movement to include collective farmers as well.198 In their public praises of the movement, Leningrad Party leaders linked the movement with the concomitant purge and lack of vigilance and deliberate obstinacy that had been criticized throughout 1935. Thus Zhdanov noted in October: There are not a few … in Leningrad as well, who reckon that it is not necessary to support the Stakhanov movement. Bureaucratic elements on the side of the economic, trade-union, and party organizations consider the Stakhanov movement, firstly, a bothersome affair, as it is necessary to increase supplies and so on. Several argue that first we have to increase supplies and then we can develop the Stakhanov movement. Others maintain that if we develop the Stakhanov movement, it will be necessary to increase the financial plan [promfinplan] of this or that plant, as if there were something bad in that [but] it is very good if enterprises have the possibility to use all their reserves. A third group does not just decline to help, but also impedes the thing, calls the Stakhanovites self-seekers, people who chase easy money ... There are such people and they are enemies of the working class and of the Party. There are other people who relate to the Stakhanovite movement in such a way that, if a man overfulfills his norm, they occupy themselves with “hairdressers’ work” – they lower the wage rate, they bring up the norms, although there is an entirely firm decision by the Party and a decree of the pc [People’s Commisar] of Heavy Industry not to change any norms until 1 May 1936. These people, who clearly want to equalize and bring down everyone to the same level, do not want production shock-workers ... These people, too, are not our friends. These people are either bureaucrats rotten to the core, or direct enemies of the working class. Comrades, the Stakhanov movement, the labour of advanced people who break the usual norms, the usual methods of production, leads to overfulfilment of the norms, to the introduction of rationalizing measures, to the organization of the working place, and to a better use of working time. Those are the fundamental principles of the Stakhanov movement.199

Some days later, at the biuro of the Leningrad city committee, Zhdanov again criticized attempts by managers and trade union officials to heighten production norms. Zhdanov referred to his former chief in Nizhnii Novgorod, Uglanov, calling attempts to hold fast to an egalitarian payment scale (uranilovka) an “inveterate, half-menshevik, old People’s Commissariat of Labour, Uglanovite tradition.”200 Uglanov was a wholly marginal figure by 1935, working in a minor function in Siberia.201 Zhdanov’s extreme caution surfaced here. The

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further he established an ideological distance between himself and Uglanov, the less likely it was that he could be found guilty by association with Uglanov in the approaching witchhunt. The Stakhanovite movement also highlighted the positive by appealing to the strong residue of energetic selfless enthusiasm for a collective purpose in the Soviet Union. At the first general rally of Leningrad Stakhanovites on 25 October, long standing ovations resounded. The workers heartily applauded Zhdanov, themselves, and, of course, Stalin, “the great teacher, leader, and organizer of the new victory” (presumably over the stagnant old production levels).202 In midNovember, the campaign was the topic of attention on a national scale, when the first All-Union Conference of Stakhanovites was staged. Zhdanov delivered on this occasion a speech entitled “The Stakhanovites: The Real Bolsheviks of Production.”203 It was subsequently published as a brochure in a print run doubling that of his addresses in Saratov, a sign of the further growth in his stature as a ranking Soviet leader.204 Despite the Unionwide fervour, the consequences of the Stakhanov movement for industrial production were ambiguous. In Leningrad, for example, it led to a “disorganization of production, an increase in norms and dissaffection among the other workers,” as at the Kirov works, the most renowned of the large industrial plants in the city.205 By April 1936, Leningrad’s obkom was obliged to condemn the “serious errors” made in implementing the movement. Stakhanovism was not to be the magic potion for the Soviet economy. The movement was superseded by a campaign emphasizing the nefarious activities in industry of wreckers and saboteurs during the Great Terror.206 Their purge partly reflected the leadership’s great disappointment in the lack of sustained high production levels that the Stakhanov movement had promised in its early days. Zhdanov had already identified obstinate bureaucrats as enemies in October 1935. Held responsible for Stakhanovism’s failure, they were sacrificed in 1937–38. In November and December of 1935, in addition to his duties in Leningrad and Moscow and his preoccupation with the Stakhanovite movement, Zhdanov was preparing for a cc Plenum called for late December. Stakhanovism was on the agenda, as was the conduct of the screening of the Party membership that had commenced in 1933 and now had finally concluded, about which Party Control Committee chief N.I. Ezhov reported.207 The results of the purge (which had stretched out over almost three years) were judged to have been unsatisfactory and a new cleansing (euphemistically called an “exchange of Party documents”) began.

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Zhdanov helped to edit both reports, since he was intimately acquainted with both Stakhanovism and the purging because of his activities during 1935. In the winter months of 1936, Zhdanov discussed in Leningrad how the Party purge had failed to identify some putative enemies in the ranks.208 In the light of later events, his tone was remarkably mild. Sloppy work methods were seen as the main cause for these errors, but he noted that the lack of political education of Party officials also made it difficult for them to recognize the bad apples in their ranks.

c onstit ution an d c o n sp ir acy A new public uproar, this time in cultural affairs, broke out in late January 1936. Stalin, Molotov, Mikoian, and Zhdanov attended the opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, by Dmitrii Shostakovich (1906–75), and their disapproval prompted an assault on the artistic freedom of Soviet composers.209 The unsettling modernity of the opera offended the Stalinists’ personal taste, but they were even more concerned with its effect on Soviet audiences. The Soviet writers had been tamed by the 1934 Congress and their union, but Stalin had become obsessed with all forms of art by the mid-1930s. Stalin saw “formalism,” which was how most surviving experimentation – from symbolism to cubism to futurism – in the plastic arts, literature, or the theatre was now labelled, could be construed as criticism of his rigorously ordered socialist society. Stalin designated Platon Kerzhentsev as his watchdog in artistic matters.210 Zhdanov was then only tangentially involved in All-Union cultural issues, which remained the domain of Stalin, Shcherbakov, Kerzhentsev, and the fading star of People’s Commissar of Enlightenment, A.S. Bubnov (1884–1938). Before late 1938, only Zhdanov’s work in the fields of history and education connected him with cultural affairs. In late January 1936, the Unionwide press published the remarks of August 1934 by Stalin, Kirov, and Zhdanov on history textbooks. Concomitantly, Zhdanov was appointed chair of a cc and Sovnarkom committee to review such textbooks.211 This was an educational rather than aesthetic issue and was linked to his assignment as general curator of educational change. In his own fief, Zhdanov did explicate cultural policy. On 9 February he analysed before a meeting of the Leningrad obkom the state of culture in general, and especially in the countryside, taking the opportunity to attack Lady MacBeth of Mtsensk.212 Otherwise, during the first half of 1936, Zhdanov settled into a certain routine, concentrating on the Leningrad Party organization, agriculture, education, the constitution, and particularly the new Party purge.213 The arts could wait.

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Around the time of the June 1936 plenum, Zhdanov’s first deputy, Mikhail Chudov, moved to Moscow to lead the All-Union Organization of Cooperative Manufacturing (Vsekopromsovet).214 He was replaced by A.S. Shcherbakov, another old acquaintance of Zhdanov’s, who was released from his work as head of the cc cultural-enlightenment department. Chudov’s virtual demotion and his subsequent grim fate suggest that Zhdanov was suspicious of him after Kirov’s death. Zhdanov kept busy grooming his own team. Nikolai Voznesensky’s rise to the very top was boosted by a stint in Leningrad in 1936.215 From 1 to 4 June 1936, a cc plenary session discussed the project for the new constitution, agriculture, and the Party purges, issues on which Zhdanov had worked intensively in the previous period.216 The cc ratified the project for the new constitution. On 11 July the Presidium of the ussr cec (the official parliament), after listening to the report by Stalin as the chair of the constitutional committee, accepted the text of the constitutional draft and ordered its publication.217 On 25 November an all-Union congress of soviets officially ratified the blueprint. Despite a public “discussion” of the project that took the form of a debate, the text of the constitution remained virtually unaltered after the cc’s ratification in early June.218 One can plausibly argue that the underlying aim of the all-Union discussion of the constitutional draft was to function as a gauge to measure the mood of the country. The public constitutional discussion of the second half of 1936 reminds us of the meaningless deliberations of Catherine the Great’s Legislative Commission of the 1760s.219 Stalin and his closest comrades used the popular response to the proposed basic laws to tally frustration with the abuse of power, lack of competence, and complacency of local Party and government bureaucrats.220 Within the Communist party, criticism of the imperfections in the Party’s purge mechanism became harsh in the course of 1936. On 8 June Zhdanov reported to members of the Party organization for the city of Leningrad about the cc plenum and the “exchange of Party cards,” the new Party purge that had been ordained by the cc plenum of December 1935.221 It had led to the expulsion of sixteen thousand members from the provincial organization, a formidable number for a campaign that was not yet half a year old. But Zhdanov, echoing Stalin’s words at the cc plenum, pointed out that not all TrotskyiteZinovievite counterrevolutionary gangs had been unmasked. And since these enemies were being cornered, he warned, they could resort to desperate measures such as acts of terror. A few days after this gorkom meeting, the Leningrad obkom met in full session. It

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recorded Chudov’s replacement by Shcherbakov, while Zhdanov reported on the customarily bleak state of agriculture and on the purge.222 Altogether, it is clear that the stage was being set for the Stalinists’ announcement of the ultimate betrayal of the cause by the Old Bolsheviks, led by Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev. Reports of a widespread anti-Soviet conspiracy was countered in the newspapers by the bosses’ optimistic and happy mien on public occasions, such as their meeting with the polar aviators Chkalov, Baidukov, and Beliakov on July 24 and a host of visits in August by Zhdanov and others to military, civilian, and cultural events.223 It appears that Zhdanov around this time was not yet fully inducted into the mysteries of Stalin’s fantastic plot that led to the Moscow Trials and the Great Terror. The general direction of Stalin’s plans became obvious when, in late July, the Central Committee sent the letter “On the Terrorist Activities of the Trotskyite-Zinovievite Counter-Revolutionary Bloc” to Party and government leaders around the country.224 The letter announced the existence of a nefarious plot by former Bolshevik leaders who had thrown in their lot with the evil bourgeois world. The conspiracy was led from abroad by Trotsky, while inside the Soviet Union, the traitors Zinoviev, Kamenev, and fourteen others had ultimately been behind the murder of Kirov, which was to have been the first of a series of assassinations of the current leaders. It was alleged that one of the accused, N. Lur’e, had failed to murder Zhdanov in Leningrad during the annual May Day parade in 1936.225 Only a few people in Stalin’s direct surroundings contributed to the outline of the story presented by the three major public show trials, and before September 1936 Zhdanov was not one of them. It may be surmised that, before the opening of the Zinoviev-Kamenev trial in August 1936, Stalin showed his script to a few intimates; if his plan became known prematurely, it could backfire on him. Once the process of the purges had been set in motion, he had entrapped the other Politburo members. There was no return for them after they had agreed to sacrifice Zinoviev, Kamenev, and the others. Zhdanov and the other Stalinists realized that protesting the credibility of the accusations amounted to a vote of no confidence in Stalin. Since they did not declare Stalin a madman, liar, or slanderer, they went on pretending that the conspiracy was real. By November 1937, Stalin felt confident enough about the veracity of his scenario to tell the incredulous Dimitrov that in the previous summer the oppositionists had planned to stage an armed raid on the Politburo in the Kremlin but had been too indecisive to put the plan into motion.226

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After conjuring up the plot, Stalin worked on the story of the first show trial with a select group, including nkvd chief Iagoda, Party Control Committee boss and cc secretary Ezhov, State Prosecutor Vyshinskii and the chief justice of the Military Tribunal of the Supreme Court, Ulrikh.227 Under Stalin’s guidance, Iagoda instructed the nkvd interrogators about the kind of confessions needed from the defendants (and how to extract those confessions); Ezhov drafted a more detailed narrative of the conspiracy and the political conclusions that were to be drawn from the case (and supervised the others on Stalin’s behalf); Vyshinskii synthesized the plot to make a plausible case for the prosecution; and Ulrikh was told when to interject and prevent any unscripted forays by the accused.228 When the script had been written, some other Politburo members and lower-level faithful seemed to have been drawn in as accomplices.229 In Zhdanov’s case, his involvement in mapping the course of the purges began in earnest in September 1936 when Stalin and he spent a month together in Sochi. Stalin invented the plot and presented the main outlines according to which it was to develop.230 The trials (and the subsequent immortalization of the conspiracy in the Short Course) can be seen in a macabre manner as the creative masterpiece of Stalin’s political career. Although astute observers of the trials, such as Trotsky himself, showed that not all of the facts added up, evidence of Stalin’s skill may be seen in the fact that few people noticed such errors, particularly inside the Soviet Union.231 Many of its inhabitants, conditioned by then to think in terms of conspiracies, appeared to have been at least half convinced that the confessions pointed at a genuine plot. Though Zhdanov’s role in the direct preparation and organization of the show trials was slight, he dutifully helped to diffuse the conspirational myth. Nor can he be said to have behaved like a dove once the process was set in motion. He attached his name to certain notorious moments in the campaign. The replacement of Iagoda by Ezhov was prompted by a telegram sent by Stalin and Zhdanov from Sochi to the Politburo in Moscow, for instance.232 Thereafter, Zhdanov partnered Stalin more directly in implementing this massacre.

t h e fir st moscow t r ia l and its cons e q u e n c e s On 10 August 1936 Zhdanov delivered some brief remarks to the Lengorkombiuro, the dozen or so men heading Leningrad, about the significance of the upcoming Zinoviev-Kamenev trial.233 The biuro then agreed to call a plenum of the gorkom on 19 August, supposedly

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to discuss the results of the exchange of Party cards, enemy activity in agitprop work (particularly in cultural and scientific affairs),234 and Stakhanovism in light industry. Under the guise of another discussion on the exchange of Party documents, Zhdanov instructed the wider body of the Party committee of the city of Leningrad on the ruthless line that was to be taken in view of the confessions by the accused.235 Similar meetings explaining the suddenly lethal attack on the former oppositionists took place simultaneously in other regional Party organizations.236 The Stalinists ordered a new intensive Unionwide search to unmask hidden Trotskyites and Zinovievites and to arrest those who had been expelled from the Party. The trial of Zinoviev, Kamenev, and the other fourteen (all supposed Leftists conspiring with Trotsky) took place from 19 to 24 August.237 On 22 August, the day when the Leningrad gorkombiuro, chaired by Zhdanov, met to gauge the local reaction to the trial, a “Right” oppositionist, M.P. Tomskii, committed suicide. This former head of the trade unions had been somewhat incongruously linked to the “Leftists” during the trial.238 On 25 August the “sixteen” were executed immediately after the judges sentenced them all to death.239 In early September Zhdanov joined Stalin in Sochi.240 During the month that the two vacationed together, Stalin finetuned the roadmap for the murderous campaign that was to follow, using Zhdanov as a sounding board. On 25 September Zhdanov and Stalin sent the telegram mentioned above from Sochi to the Politburo members in Moscow about recent shortcomings in the nkvd.241 Iagoda needed to be replaced by Ezhov as nkvd commissar because the security police had been four years late in unmasking the conspiracy exposed by the trial and by subsequent interrogations of those the accused had implicated as participants in the conspiracy. The year 1932 had been particularly grim for Stalin, and it was also sufficiently distant to make the development of a widespread conspirational network seem credible.242 Between 1932 and September 1936, the followers of Piatakov, Zinoviev, and Kamenev would have had a credible amount of time to infiltrate every nook and cranny of the Soviet Union. It thus was made to appear that such a pervasive organization could not be weeded out overnight and that the Zinoviev trial had only exposed the tip of the iceberg. The day after the receipt of the telegram the Politburo dutifully replaced Iagoda with Ezhov.243 Thus, from September 1936 onwards, Zhdanov played a pivotal role in the purge’s proceedings.244 On Stalin’s instructions (very likely issued at the time of the Sochi vacation), Zhdanov was working

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out plans that fall of how to hold Party bosses accountable to the rank-and-file Communists on the periphery. This work was linked to his involvement in developing a strategy intended to win support for Communist party candidates in the vote planned in 1937 for the Supreme Soviet (the body that replaced the cec according to the new constitution). Even though the VKP(b) remained the only political party allowed within the Soviet Union, the Communists nonetheless sought to win the approval of the general population in those, possibly contested, elections for the new Soviet parliament. Both projects appear to have been inspired by Stalin’s and others’ idea that the Party and soviet bureaucracy, seen as a complacent and recalcitrant lot, needed to be shaken up by various methods, including the arrest and execution of individual bureaucrats. By February 1937 Zhdanov presented to the Party a plan by which rank-and-file members could hold their superiors accountable.245 What would be a murderous cleansing of Party ranks was disguised in its early stages as an ostentatious campaign of democratization of which Zhdanov was the spokesman. Ultimately circumstances forced some amendments to the plans to create a sham democracy that could be wholly manipulated by the Stalinists. In the early autumn of 1937, at the height of the purge, Stalin and his accomplices decided that contested parliamentary elections were too risky a proposition.246 Only carefully scrutinized single candidates stood for election in the wards. Meanwhile, within the Communist party the novelty of control from below over those higher up never really became the practice, except for a brief spell from the spring of 1937 to the spring of 1938 during which pent-up frustrations among the rank-and-file were expressed in denunciations of their superiors (who were then purged in batches).247 Over the long term, such agency of the lower ranks, even though it kept local Party bosses on their toes, was too unpredictable for the likes of Stalin, Zhdanov, and the other chiefs. Indeed, the orgy of denunciations under duress by arrested Party members and Soviet citizens that ensued from the nkvd’s efforts to unearth ever-widening conspiracy networks led to a few too many victims of the purge by 1938. This explains the recurring attack on overzealous purgers that began with the criticism of Postyshev in January 1938.248 During 1938 nkvd officials went overboard in their attempts to arrest people in positions of political or economic responsibility, even those who had recently been promoted to such posts and could hardly be suspected of harbouring anti-Stalinist sentiments. The purge comprehensively eliminated what the Stalinists believed were hostile elements and entrenched bureaucratic potentates inside and

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outside of the Communist party throughout the Soviet Union, but by 1938 it struck in far too indiscriminate a manner. Stalin decided in November 1938, therefore, that the Terror had accomplished its goal. Conveniently, in view of the “overfulfillment of the plan” by the nkvd, he could blame its operatives for exaggerated zeal when ending the campaign.

t h e sta lin c o n st it u t io n On 11 October 1936 Zhdanov participated in a Politburo meeting, one of the few that were called in the second half of the 1930s when Stalin began to decide most matters with a smaller group of intimates.249 Though he was not always part of Stalin’s leading nucleus, their second joint holiday indicates Stalin’s growing reliance on Zhdanov. Besides the usual affairs that occupied Zhdanov as boss of Leningrad, cc secretary, and, in practice, full Politburo member, he worked in the autumn on tasks Stalin had assigned to him in Sochi.250 The Politburo, even though it now met infrequently, continued to decide formally on a host of issues, usually more than three thousand per year.251 These decisions ranged from matters of life and death to almost trivial items. Even in the hectic fall of 1938 they included the pricing of milk in Moscow and Leningrad or the maximum quantity of vegetables that could be bought by consumers in the two capitals.252 Zhdanov did not formally enjoy the right to vote on Politburo issues until 1939, but his written approval on many of the sheets submitted to the Politburo directly ordering the death sentence for people arrested in 1937–38 indicates that, by 1937, he was usually considered a regular member of this highest body of the Communist party.253 Between 20 and 28 October in Leningrad, Zhdanov discussed with raikom secretaries, secretaries of the Party committees of industrial enterprises, and the city’s gorkom and obkom membership the renewed acceptance of members into the Party that was to begin on November 1.254 He now praised the conduct of the campaign of the exchange of Party documents in the city of Leningrad’s Party organization, since “nests of inveterate enemies of the people had been uncovered and destroyed.”255 Although a final reckoning was in the works with Piatakov, Radek, and likely Bukharin as well as some of their associates, Zhdanov’s words here seem to indicate at that point that the future victims of the purge were projected in the tens of thousands rather than the actual 700,000 who would be executed in 1937–38.256 Indeed, contrasting Zhdanov’s utterances of late October, arrests continued throughout the fall.257

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During much of November 1936, Zhdanov and the other leaders were preoccupied with the preparations for the Extraordinary Eighth All-Union Congress of soviets which was to accept the new constitution.258 The meeting was planned as one big self-congratulatory fest, and Zhdanov would be one of the speakers. On 25 November the Congress opened with a speech by Stalin.259 Zhdanov spoke on the twentyninth of the month on “the Victory of Socialism and the Flourishing of Soviet Democracy.”260 Two days later, his speech was printed in Pravda. In the speech, as chief representative of the region that bordered on Finland and the Baltic countries, he remarked at length on the pressure the Nazi regime applied there.261 Zhdanov cautioned “states such as Finland … if they succumbed to the blandishments of political adventurers and allowed fascist armies to pass through their territories, they would live to regret it.”262 The first signs of the eventual Soviet reannexation of the Balticum may be discovered in these words. Of course, Zhdanov’s speech addressed the main theme of the meeting, the new constitution. His opening words were those of a sycophant: “The opinion of the brilliant Stalin, as the miraculous inspirer, [and] all the results of the struggle of the toilers of our Soviet Union are collected in our new Stalinist constitution. Every letter of the new law, every word of the [previously delivered] remarkable report by comrade Stalin fulfills the toilers of our country with a feeling of the greatest pride and happiness for themselves, for our global-historical achievements, for the highest and honoured right, although it has not been writ [sic] down in our Constitution, [this] right to build and triumph under the lead of the great Stalin! (Applause.)”263 Zhdanov joined Stalin in recognizing that, in recent years, industrial production had increased seven times, thus proving socialism’s superiority over capitalism.264 Zhdanov and Stalin ignored the fact that even if such quantitive growth had occurred, it had not translated into a qualitative improvement in the lives of Soviet citizens. In an attempt to underline Soviet achievements, Zhdanov referred to the recently made Modern Times, by Charlie Chaplin, presenting the film as an apt portrayal of the enslaved position of the workers in the capitalist world in the United States, and adding that workers in Germany fared even worse.265 Zhdanov presented Chaplin’s work as a documentary film about capitalism rather than as a satirical motion picture. Meanwhile, he failed to note the workers’ gaping lack of freedom in the land of the Soviets. In the ussr, it was not the invisible hand of cruel market forces that was responsible for the workers’ enslaved position but the Zhdanovs who ruled the country. Despite

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the opening of the Moscow metro in those days, the poverty of the average Soviet citizen was much greater than that of most Americans during the Depression.266 The Soviet people’s lack of freedom was hardly compensated by any material well-being. In the winter of 1936–37, faminelike circumstances plagued the countryside of Leningrad oblast’.267 Everywhere in the province shortages of consumer goods were rampant in early 1937, and the popular mood was sullen. As provincial leader Zhdanov could hardly be proud of this lamentable state of affairs. In the spring of 1937 Stalin and his partners-in-crime attempted to divert the general frustration towards individual Party leaders at all levels of the hierachy. But the persecution of those scapegoats would not improve matters. In September 1938, for example, when the Terror was beginning to wind down, the Leningrad militsiia reported that queues for clothes, shoes, and cloth numbered close to six thousand people in the centre of the city.268 During the December 1936 soviet congress and the cc plenum that was held on 4 and 7 December near the conclusion of the Congress (on 5 December the extraordinary Congress approved the “Stalin Constitution”),269 Zhdanov frequently met with Stalin. He sat near the Boss during the Congress and the plenary session, visited him in his Kremlin office, and even joined Stalin (with Molotov, Andreev, Kaganovich, Mikoian, and Ordzhonikidze) on the afternoon of 7 December at a confrontation, either in the Lubianka central prison or in the cc buildings nearby, between the arrested Piatakov and Bukharin, who was still at liberty.270 In the evening, the second and last session of the cc plenum decided to leave Bukharin and Rykov alone.271 Their respite was brief. Zhdanov concluded his Moscow sojourn by giving instructions on the writing of a new school textbook on the history of the ussr.272 David Brandenberger notes that Zhdanov, in a memorandum that he sent at the time to education commissar Bubnov, suggested a new historiographical perception of the tsarist empire. Its subjugation of nonRussians had been a “lesser evil” rather than an alternative subjugation by other hegemonists.273 If Zhdanov had invented this concept himself, which is moot, it was certainly one of his more original theoretical forays.274 Since the new thesis stood Lenin’s appreciation of the tsarist regime as “a prisonhouse of nations” on its head, however, Zhdanov can only have introduced it with Stalin’s permission. Zhdanov continued to supervise the project for an elementary-school history textbook in subsequent months.275 Back in Leningrad by 11 December, Zhdanov reprimanded Petr Abramov, who headed the Party organization of Murmansk, a chapter

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still subordinate to the Leningrad leadership.276 Abramov seemed one of the prototypical petty tyrants who had often been criticized by the population in the national discussion about the constitution. Zhdanov singled him out again at the February-March 1937 plenum of the cc for his dictatorial behaviour. In the subsequent bonanza of the election of Party committees in the spring of 1937, most bosses of Abramov’s type perished when the lower ranks held them accountable for their job performance.

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6 Purification, 1937–1939 That was when the ones who smiled Were the dead, glad to be at rest And like a useless appendage, Leningrad Swung from its prisons. Anna Akhmatova, Requiem1 The real member of the People is only he who supports the rule of the Party … those who work against its rule are automatically excluded from the People: they [become] the “enemies of the People.” Slavoj Zizek2

zh danov a nd th e g r e at t e r r o r Before September 1936 Zhdanov had played no significant role in scripting the grotesque plan to rid the land of its myriad foes. The Moscow Trials provided the public justification for this “purification,” “cleansing,” or “purge” (chistka). We can only approximate the reactions of Zhdanov and some of the other Politburo members to the show trials’ fantastic narrative of a huge conspiracy. Zhdanov was an otherwise well-informed rational man with a decent education. Why did he unreservedly support Stalin’s bloody reckoning with the alleged conspirators of an all-pervasive underground organization that, despite its enormous size, had succeeded in carrying out only one murder (Kirov’s, on 1 December 1934)? Several motives underpinned Zhdanov’s resolute participation in, and defence of, the Great Terror. Cowardice and fear were among them. Very few high-level leaders protested,3 and Zhdanov was an utterly cautious man to begin with. Calculated political cynicism was another element. Zhdanov adhered to the utilitarian Leninist morality that any means at all was justified by the end of a radiant future of communism. Stalin supposedly said, in reference to the butchery of the Great Purge, “When wood is chopped, chips fly,” a Russian equivalent of the English saying that “you cannot make an omelette without

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breaking eggs.” This mindset transformed the persecution of many victims known to be innocent of any wrongdoing to acceptable “collateral damage,” as we might call it today. In Stalin’s office in 1937–38, Zhdanov cosigned his name on long lists proposing the death sentence for thousands upon thousands of people. Sanctioning the liquidation of masses of middle and high-level officials and their appointees, Zhdanov, Stalin, Molotov, and the others radically ended the defiance of the centre of which they suspected the bureaucrats to be guilty. The destruction of these officials concomitantly served to deter future Party and state bosses in the periphery from defying the leadership. Paradoxically, Zhdanov’s unswerving belief in the ultimate truth of Stalin’s way also played its role. Zhdanov was convinced that he and his comrades led the first country in the world to achieve a proletarian revolution. Even though the first battle had been won, the struggle was still on. They sought to destabilize foreign countries by aiding pro-Communist movements and fomenting social and political unrest. Following Marx’s predictions of the violent struggle between bourgeois and proletarian forces, the Soviet leaders seriously feared that foreign governments (and the capitalists who backed them) engaged in efforts to pay them back in kind, doing their utmost to destroy the Soviet Union. In Molotov’s conversations with Chuev after his retirement, he vehemently attacked what he believed to be Khrushchev’s and Brezhnev’s cardinal ideological error of believing that socialism (let alone communism) could be created inside of the ussr (or the Soviet bloc) before the global proletarian revolution had triumphed.4 Molotov’s reflections are emblematic of the worldview of the Stalinists in the 1930s. Their revolution was unfinished, and victory could not be won without terror and violence, as Marx and Lenin had taught them. The events of 1937 were thus another “legitimate” stage of the lethal struggle the regime was fighting against its opponents, another chapter in the justified brutality of the Red Terror, the suppression of the Tambov and Kronshtadt rebellions in 1921, collectivization and dekulakization, and the relentless assault on organized religion. Stalin and the Stalinists also believed that it was essential to rid the country of a fifth column of potential traitors, even if that meant killing a number of wholly innocent people in the process.5 We may ponder Iurii Zhdanov’s statement that his mother professed her disbelief in the guilt of some of those arrested during the purges.6 Somewhere during these years, Zinaida Aleksandrovna is said to have exclaimed to Iurii that, if some of those accused were truly guilty, then so was she. The remark, as well as the manner in which

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it was conveyed to me, can be interpreted in several ways. Certainly, Comintern boss Georgii Dimitrov had kindred doubts about the veracity of the plots.7 If there is any truth to Iurii’s story, and if, as they usually did, husband and wife agreed on the issue, it shows Andrei Zhdanov to be either deviously apt at dissembling before Stalin and decidedly opportunistic in his support of the Great Purge, or in agreement with a hidden agenda of ridding the country of any potential opponent.The list of people suspected of fickle loyalty (and who does not have pangs of doubt about their political leaders?) was long and thus explains (to some degree) the staggering scope of the Terror. Even though nkvd officers committed excesses in implementing the Terror, the vastness of the Purge was primarily the result of an effort to destroy comprehensively any possible opposition and guarantee the survival of the Soviet project even in a time of grave crisis, such as war. Like the other Stalinists, Andrei Zhdanov may have been sceptical about the existence of a powerful TrotskyiteZinovievite organization that from “the leading political and organizational detachment of the international bourgeoisie” had by 1936 metamorphosed into a widespread conspiracy of “foreign agents, spies, subversives, and wreckers representing the fascist bourgeoisie of Europe.”8 But he had cause to worry about the many aggrieved people in the Soviet Union who could be rallied by the former opposition to rise up against Stalin’s Regime in a time of crisis. Zhdanov owed his stellar career to Stalin and cannot have had any illusions about his future under another leader. Should, in case of war, a new Communist leadership take over (let alone a nonCommunist regime), whether led by Trotsky, Zinoviev, or Bukharin, Zhdanov would be killed, just as Stalin and he now liquidated their former rivals. And the Great Terror succeeded in this aim, for even in the darkest days of the early stages of the German invasion, no credible political alternative to the Stalinists was available to take over the leadership of the Soviet Union’s defence. By virtue of the magnitude attained by the purge of half-hearted and non-Stalinists in 1937 and 1938, the Terror disciplined not just the Communist Party but also a still often restless and volatile society overall, “which had lost its belief in the goals of the revolution.”9 Here too the purge succeeded, for surprisingly few Soviet citizens seriously pondered the replacement of Stalin, Zhdanov, and the others when they blundered by ignoring the clear signs of an imminent German attack and subsequently bungled a host of defensive operations in 1941 and 1942. This chapter charts Zhdanov’s role as the massacre unfolded. The

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enormous turnover of personnel it caused presented Zhdanov with a new uplifting task upon its completion in the autumn of 1938: to train politically a party that was almost entirely led by neophytes who hardly remembered the heroic days of the underground movement and the October Revolution.

“party demo c r acy” At the end of January 1937, the trial of the “United TrotskyiteZinovievite Centre” was staged in Moscow. Among other things, the accused – G.E. Piatakov (1890–1937), K.B. Radek (1885–1939), and others – were convicted again of plotting Zhdanov’s murder.10 The second Moscow trial coincided with Zhdanov’s growing criticism of close collaborators in Leningrad, such as Petr Abramov and the head of its city soviet, I.F. Kodatskii. Zhdanov complained to the obkombiuro on 27 January how the gorkom was forced to take on a great number of economic questions, which we consider wrong and abnormal, especially now, when it is demanded from us that the Party organization in earnest turns to Party issues, issues of political leadership. You know the Central Committee’s decision regarding Rostov, where Sheboldaev was removed for the dulling of political vigilance and for prioritizing economic issues to the detriment of Party-political ones. Roughly the same events unfolded in Kiev, where Postyshev and Il’in were released [from their job] for the clogging up of the apparatus with Trotskyites and for the dulling of vigilance … In these circumstances, and especially in light of the new Constitution, the great shortcomings of the work of [our] soviet’s presidium have become even more serious.11

Having accused Kodatskii of failing to delegate work, thus causing the city soviet’s presidium to cease working as a collective, and of emphasizing current events at the expense of longer-term developments, Zhdanov demanded his resignation.12 He noted in jest that he did not, of course, call for the execution of Kodatskii (who was present) or his condemnation by all Party organizations, for the soviet chairman’s cardinal sin was merely one of passivity regarding enemy activity within the government apparatus.13 But Kodatskii’s execution was stayed only for a brief spell: after serving in the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry in Moscow he was arrested and shot in the second half of the year. In his censure of Kodatskii, Zhdanov merely repeated parts of the criticism to which Boris Sheboldaev had been exposed on 31 December 1936 in Stalin’s office in the Kremlin.14 It was then that

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the gist of Zhdanov’s attack had been scripted. Sheboldaev had for some years been head of the Northern Caucasus krai’s Party. In early January 1937, cc secretary Andreev and the chief of the cc personnel department, G.M. Malenkov, had presented on behalf of the “Central Committee” Sheboldaev’s shortcomings to the latter’s Party organization in Rostov-on-the-Don.15 A few days later, Stalin himself authored a telegram sent to Kiev that scolded Postyshev harshly for his failed leadership. The criticism of Kodatskii, Sheboldaev, and Postyshev was uniform: since they had been distracted by minor issues that they had been unwilling to delegate to their subordinates, they had been blind to the much larger issue of the Trotskyite conspiracy infiltrating the Party. All three were reprimanded for their dictatorial style, an accusation that at the February-March cc plenum was linked by Zhdanov to a call for accountability among Party officials (of course, the accusation was disingenuous, for Kodatskii, as head of Leningrad’s soviet executive, reported to the region’s first Party secretary Andrei Zhdanov). At the cc plenum, Zhdanov returned to the criticism of Postyshev’s and Sheboldaev’s habit of coopting people into leading Party posts instead of having them elected by Party conferences or committees at the various levels (in what was, in reality, a sham vote).16 Because Zhdanov was guilty himself of cooptation in Leningrad, he refrained altogether from levelling such an accusation against Kodatskii in January 1937, but cooptation was another issue that he raised at the cc plenum the next month. During the meeting of the Leningrad obkombiuro in January 1937 at which the Kodatskii case was discussed, the head of the city Party committee’s industrial-transport department, I.P. Svetikov (1894–1937?), was condemned much more categorically than Kodatskii.17 Compromised by his acquaintance with arrested alleged oppositionists, Svetikov was “under investigation of the nkvd” (which meant that he was in prison). This rounding up by the secret police of hitherto trusted middling Party leaders was in lockstep with developments in regional Party organizations elsewhere in the Soviet Union. During 1937 and 1938, Zhdanov spent far more time than previously in Moscow, at the centre of the political maelstrom that was engulfing the Soviet Union.18 By early February he was in Moscow preparing the major cc session called for the end of the month. He visited Stalin’s office three times in four days between the fifth and the eighth, and on 18 February he was among the first leaders (with Stalin, Molotov, and Ezhov) to enter the apartment of Ordzhonikidze immediately after the industrial tsar had killed

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himself.19 The plenary cc gathering was postponed for four days until 23 February because of Ordzhonikidze’s death. Including guests, its sessions were attended on average by some 350 people.20 The Central Committee’s first item of business was the BukharinRykov case. The two “Rightists,” who were present at the session, were now accused by Ezhov of plotting with those convicted at the previous Moscow Trials.21 Stalin and Ezhov had finished the script of the narrative that would be presented to the outside world. Under Trotsky’s leadership and in league with foreign powers, all former “oppositionists” had been linked in one gigantic plot that aimed at restoring capitalism in the Soviet Union. During the first days of the cc meeting, Zhdanov did not participate in the collective assault on Rykov and Bukharin for their odious role in the conspiracy; he may have had to concentrate on his own major speech.22 The attack was led by cc secretaries and Politburo members Ezhov, Mikoian, Andreev, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Postyshev, Kosior, and Molotov, along with Party Control Commission deputy chief Shkiriatov. The accused tried to defend themselves in vain. The plenary discussion of the Bukharin-Rykov case concluded with Ezhov summing up the lessons to be drawn from it. On 27 February Zhdanov was appointed to a large commission deciding on further steps to be taken against Bukharin and Rykov, but he seems to have remained silent during its deliberations as well.23 On 26 February Zhdanov delivered his report on internal Party “democracy” and the preparation of Inner-Party and all-Union soviet elections.24 The cc members discussed the speech that evening and again the next day, until Zhdanov summed up on the evening of the twenty-seventh.25 These were tremendously busy days, and Zhdanov’s absence from the discussions about Bukharin and Rykov is understandable.26 Zhdanov’s speech focused especially on the accountability of Party bosses to their local organizations and the vanguard function of the Communist party before the rest of Soviet society in anticipation of the Supreme Soviet elections at the end of the year. The Party should educate the general populace and lead by example by staging model elections for its own committees. Zhdanov began by praising the new constitution and the increased democracy it promised for the masses.27 But he noted that the Bukharin-Rykov case had shown that the Bolshevik dictatorship could not just rely on peaceful means of persuasion and education alone. The capitalist encirclement of the ussr demanded a continued important role for the secret-police organs. Zhdanov warned against hostile candidates in the upcoming elections, pointing to the anti-Soviet movements that had begun to

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make noise after the constitution had come into force in December, “abusing” its provisions. He then suggested that the Party should meticulously apply the principles of democratic centralism and criticism and self-criticism in its own spring elections as an example to those who would be participating in the election campaigns for the Supreme Soviet later that year. Previously, the Communist party had set an unsatisfactory example, in that elections for Party committees had not abided by the Party’s statute regulations. Violations of the elective principle laid down in its rules (such as the coopting of committee members) had aided enemy elements in infiltrating the leading Party organs. For example, in the raikoms and gorkoms of Leningrad province, Zhdanov confessed in an exemplary moment of self-criticism, some 17.2 per cent of the membership had been coopted. A sign of rather hasty drafting, the speech did not balance very well the essence of his arguments with pertinent examples. Thus he confused bureaucratic bumbling with the concept of “inner-party democracy”: “In general, for example, the question of whether members of a party committee’s buro received materials for the discussion at the gathering is not unimportant. That is also part of the question about inner-party democracy (Kosior: And when they received it.) Did they receive them a day before or were they distributed at the meeting itself? That is also a question of the guarantee of inner-party democracy.”28 In a further stab at greater accountability of Party and state officials, Zhdanov denounced dictatorial behaviour in the management of soviet institutions and state enterprises. He decried as a violation of collective leadership the operation of treugol’niki,29 groups consisting of factory or institutional managers, the local secretary of the Party committee, and the chief of the local trade union branch that ran affairs at most enterprises and factories.30 Because they replaced the full complement of elected trade union and Party committees in making key decisions, such practices led to what Zhdanov called “familyness” (semeistvennost’). Stalin interjected at this juncture to correct Zhdanov, suggesting that the term sgovor (collusion) was more appropriate. Zhdanov hastened to agree, adding that such practices occurred in order to make it more difficult for the workers and employees to hold the firm’s leadership accountable. Towards the end of his speech Zhdanov proposed that, because serious violations of the elective principle in Party organizations had been all too common, Party committees were to be elected anew before the end of April, beginning with primary organizations and ending with krai and oblast’ committees and the Central Committees

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of the Communist parties of the (non-Russian) Soviet republics.31 He stressed that it would henceforth be necessary, in agreement with Party rules, to observe strictly the mandated terms of Party organizations, which meant holding elections no fewer than once in every one and a half years at all levels. Zhdanov summed up the discussion of his report the next evening. He neatly connected his censure of cooptation (and the rapid overturn of cadres that seemed to engender the practice) with “proposals of [Comrade] Stalin to let every leader, from low to high, have two deputies … a radical solution to the question of the fluctuation of cadres.”32 The cc then came up with seven resolutions on the basis of Zhdanov’s report and their discussion of it. Chiefly, they reiterated the need for strict observance of the electoral principle for leading Party bodies at all levels; underlined the mandatory scrutiny of the records of candidates standing for committee membership before the elections at Party conferences; and decreed the use of a secret ballot.33 Between April and mid-June 1937, everywhere in the Soviet Union elections were held in primary Party organizations, raikoms, gorkoms, and obkoms, following Zhdanov’s recipe of late February. The elections led to a high turnover of Party committee memberships at different levels. Only forty-eight per cent of the pre-election membership was re-elected in Party committees, although re-election to Party committee posts became more common the higher one stood in the hierarchy.34 Zhdanov’s report at the February-March cc plenum encouraged subordinates to eliminate their superiors during these spring conferences by accusing them of violating Party rules, behaving dictatorially, and engaging in nepotism, or of being compromised by a dubious past. Zhdanov’s December 1936 attack on Petr Abramov had been a political object lesson for the conference delegates of the spring of 1937 on how to conduct the vilification of those bosses. Although for the leadership this was a populist move by which it gained great support from the Party “masses,” it was primarily a way for that very leadership to engineer the fall of a great number of middle-level and lower-level Party bosses in whom the Stalinists had lost confidence. Many of the removals were directly manipulated by the cc through its appointment system and its personnel department.35 Almost without a single exception, those dismissed in this manner wound up in nkvd jails and ended their lives before an nkvd firing squad in the course of 1937 and 1938. Though his was the one major speech reported in some detail in the press, Sheila Fitzpatrick points out rightfully that Zhdanov’s address must have been the least interesting to the plenum’s par-

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ticipants, who were preoccupied with the gathering clouds of the purge.36 After Zhdanov’s closing words, Kaganovich and Molotov delivered reports to the plenum on sabotage and “wrecking” in the Soviet economy. On 2 March the cc resolved on the basis of the pair’s reports: [The reasons] that the Trotskyite wreckers, deviants and spies during the course of a number of years could conduct their base, subversive work and were not unmasked are: a) The narrow-minded attitude of a significant part of economic workers, engineers, communists-technicians, their apoliticalness, their locking into narrowly economic tasks, their tearing away from from party-political tasks, and as a result of all that – political myopia. b) The absence of bol’shevik verification of workers and the weak work on political education of economic-technical cadres. [c]) The absence of bol’shevik vigilance, self-satisfaction, philistine placidity, attempts “to live quietly,” a “liberal” attitude towards shortcomings at work, the weak development of criticism and self-criticism, [leading to] poor work, accidents, and breakdowns. [d]) The bureaucratic perversion of the principle of one-man management led to the situation [whereby] many economic leaders think of themselves on the basis of one-man management as completely free from control of the public opinion of the masses and of rank-and-file economic workers [etc].37

These first four points all echo the language used in the criticism of Sheboldaev, Postyshev, and Kodatskii two months earlier. Within a few months, such lack of vigilance among Party, government, and economic officials was construed as deliberate, part of the plot to destroy the Communist Regime that had spread to every corner of the Soviet Union. The plenary session continued with a discussion of the shortcomings of the nkvd under Iagoda.38 The former boss listened to a devastating attack on his lack of vigilance. On 3 March Leningrad nkvd boss Leonid Zakovskii negatively contrasted Iagoda’s passivity with Zhdanov’s exemplary behaviour in uprooting the anti-Soviet plot.39 In the plenary meeting’s final days, Stalin moved to the forefront, starting on the evening of 3 March with his report on the nkvd. Two days later, he summarized the conclusions of all discussions and presented the appropriate lessons that were to be learned from the mistakes.40 He cautioned against being overly zealous in the offensive against those guilty of laxity. While Stalin thus seemed conciliatory and moderate, his subsequent actions belied his words. He destroyed the

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country’s elite in stages in 1937 and 1938 rather than all at once, thereby preventing the development of a concerted resistance. Stalin’s plans for this comprehensive massacre were likely ready by March, inasmuch as in his closing words he supported Zhdanov’s proposal of electing two deputies for each secretary of a Party organization at every level (prior to that, in most city-district or rural-district organizations [raikoms] a lone second secretary had functioned next to the first secretary, and at lower levels there was usually no deputy at all). Stalin justified this proposal by pointing to the advanced age of many incumbents. Since most lower-level Party leaders were younger than fifty in 1937, we may conclude that it was not their age but their impending arrest that made it necessary to ready their replacements.41 Stalin further betrayed something of his hidden agenda when he stated that, while in theory most “Trotskyites-Zinovievites” had already been identified and a majority placed under arrest, a recruiting ground had now been created for “new oppositionists,” consisting of those former Party members who felt slighted by their unjustified exclusions. Upon the conclusion of plenum, Zhdanov left Moscow for Leningrad.42 There he reported on 15 March 1937 to a meeting of Party activists about the cc meeting’s proceedings, but he was less than candid, disclosing virtually nothing about the criticism of the failures of the secret police under Iagoda, a top-secret issue.43 On 22 April Stalin, Ezhov, Voroshilov, Molotov, and water-transport specialist Zhdanov visited the just-completed Moskva-Volga Canal, a supposed triumph of socialist construction.44 Much of the work had been done by convicts, particularly alleged kulaks, and it was in fact a triumph of the secret police’s concentration-camp empire, accomplished apparently in spite of Iagoda’s incompetence. Zhdanov’s presence at the inauguration was a sign of his public worth.45

a milita ry p l o t Because Stalin, Molotov, Ezhov and some of the other ranking chiefs were dedicating their time increasingly to the purge, Zhdanov began to cover for them in Moscow.46 But Leningrad could not do without his leadership yet.47 A full Politburo meeting on 16 April resolved that Zhdanov was to work alternately one month in Leningrad and one month in Moscow, starting in May.48 This same meeting appointed Zhdanov head of a Politburo commission that would develop courses to improve the educational levels of the Party’s cadres, particularly secretaries of Party committees. cc members Pospelov, Knorin, and Iaroslavskii prepared a new Party history (suggested by Stalin, who had

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supplied its periodization), which was to serve as course textbook.49 Its completion was postponed by the bewildering developments in the next sixteen months, which saw many potential protagonists of the Party history come to grief. V.G. Knorin (1890–1938), head of the Institute of Party History at the Institute of Red Professors, was one of the victims.50 Altogether, Zhdanov played a marginal role in writing the book; it was primarily the work of Pospelov and Iaroslavskii under Stalin’s supervision.51 That winter of 1937 Zhdanov was entrusted with editing the textbook on the history of the Soviet Union drafted by a team led by A.V. Shestakov.52 Shestakov’s book was intended as a first foray into history for Soviet children aged seven to ten, but the job of editing it was not beneath Stalin and Zhdanov, who apparently agreed about the great importance of moulding impressionable minds of any age.53 As the historians Brandenberger and Dubrovsky have noted, Zhdanov demanded from the writers a “russocentric orientation and strong interest in state building and legitimacy.”54 In subsequent years, Zhdanov continued to voice such a Russianist line, although this advocacy traced back to Stalin’s wishes.55 Maureen Perrie has linked this plausibly to the growing foreign threat of the second half of the 1930s.56 The idea had to be propagated that the creation of the Russian state and its incorporation of non-Russian nations had been a progressive development and that the Soviet state was even more worth defending since it was socialist. Early in January 1937 Zhdanov had addressed a meeting of the Leningrad Military District’s staff on the proper recruitment of Red Army cadres, the use of arms, and the inculcation of discipline.57 Between 1920 and 1937, Zhdanov monitored arms production as Nizhnii and Leningrad chief or as cc secretary but had stayed away from direct interference in the military matters. From 1937 until 1945, however, Zhdanov oversaw the Soviet Armed Forces in various capacities, when at one time or other he was councillor on the Leningrad Military District and Defence Committee of the Soviet Union, Politburo curator of the navy, and, ultimately, military councillor of the Leningrad Front. Nonetheless, he never gave the impression of having any profound insight into military matters. Zhdanov had a paltry military track record after his completion of the officers’ training school in 1916–17. He was not alone, for those men who had earned distinction in the Civil War (and who survived the Red Army purges of 1937–38), such as marshals Voroshilov or Budennyi, often proved incompetent on issues of modern warfare in 1939–40 or after 22 June 1941. His appointment as candidate member of the newly created ussr

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Defence Committee (ko) on 27 April confirmed Zhdanov’s elevation to the top of the Soviet power structure.58 While this committee changed its name (albeit not its function) on several occasions before 22 June 1941, Zhdanov usually remained a member and thus participated at the highest level in decisions regarding the country’s allocation of resources to defence and military production. But it is not quite clear how frequently the ko met before June 1941. Subordinate to the Politburo in practice, it left purely military-strategic issues to the army’s and navy’s Main Military Councils, while attempting to improve communication and coordination between the armed forces, navy, People’s Commissariats, and defence industry. The ko’s creation is another example of how striving for greater efficiency and coordination led to a further increase of bureaucracy and, ultimately, less efficiency. Stalin seems often to have used such commissions, councils, and committees (not just regarding defensive matters) rather whimsically, having them remain inactive for long stretches of time and then suddenly revive them if he saw some use for them. Zhdanov’s appointment to the ko came at a time when the military’s internal affairs were moving to centre stage in the Soviet Union. In May the Soviet press announced that a conspiracy had been discovered within the army. Growing numbers of army commanders were arrested in connection with this plot. The sudden arrest of candidate Politburo member Ian Rudzutak as an alleged plotter must have sent a shudder down the spine of other Politburo members.59 While many more officers were detained in late May, Zhdanov was in Leningrad attending the city’s Party conference, which had been called in response to the March cc decrees on new elections.60 In an apparent attempt to justify the mushrooming arrests while prompting the delegates to engage in a hysterical search for foes within Party ranks, his second speech at the conference was saturated with a persecution mania regarding the omnipresence of enemies.61 At the end of the conference, the delegates elected a new city committee the candidates for which they had carefully scrutinized in previous days, for once experiencing the freedom to question candidates for the committee in earnest (but for a few favourites protected by Zhdanov). Usually, those who failed to get re-elected soon joined other detainees in Leningrad’s main prison, the Kresty, or were transferred to the Moscow prisons if accused of belonging to some of the bigger conspiracies that were now discovered by the nkvd.62 Most gorkom members elected in May 1937, meanwhile, were themselves arrested within the next year and a half. The one leader who survived the onslaught was its instigator, Andrei Zhdanov.

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In early June, Zhdanov joined the other Politburo members in an expanded meeting of the Military Council63 under the People’s Commissariat of Defence.64 At issue was the treason of Rudzutak and several army commanders. On 2 June Stalin delivered what amounted to a public prosecutor’s speech to the gathering.65 He noted that more than three hundred members of the conspiracy were already under arrest. One week after the meeting concluded, the most senior army commanders who had been apprehended received the death penalty in a closed trial (with the exception of its political chief Gamarnik, who had committed suicide).66 On the eve of the commanders’ oneday trial, Stalin had a telegram sent to the regions, asking local Party organizations to stage meetings to explain the case against the commanders, which arrived in Leningrad in the midst of the sixth oblast’ Party conference.67 Ultimately, eighty per cent of members of the Military Council itself were executed.68 On 10 June, the day before the officers’ trial, Zhdanov concluded in an extraordinarily long speech the discussion of the obkom’s report at the sixth oblast’ Party conference in Leningrad.69 The oblast’ conference was the most important regional meeting in Leningrad province at which the uninhibited criticism ordained at the February-March cc session was put into practice, and the recriminations had been flying fast and furiously for almost four days.70 Zhdanov connected the growing number of arrests of unmasked enemies in the region with Soviet security: “Comrades, it is clear from all the reactions[,] from all the [evidence] that we have heard that a heavy loss was suffered by us [affecting] both Leningrad’s industry and agriculture[,] by those wrecking, spying, diversant groups of enemies of the people, who were active among us in Leningrad. I have to say, that Leningrad, [as discovered] by our Leningrad nkvd, that Leningrad was […] a special target, [for] Leningrad, as is known, is located in a special position in strategic terms.”71 The wave of paranoia now reached its pinnacle. Many average Party members, including conference delegates listening to Zhdanov in June 1937 Leningrad, at least half-believed in the pervasive, perfidious activities of enemies of various colours. Stalin’s narrative about the plots seemed far less fantastic to them than it may seem to us. Soviet Communists had been conditioned to a siege mentality since the early days of their Party’s existence. In the Civil War, the Bolshevik leadership and propaganda continuously decried the help the Whites received from foreign countries. Since then, Stalin’s oft-repeated warnings, emphasized in Soviet propaganda, of the capitalist encirclement all pointed to relentless attempts by foreign enemies to destroy the “world’s first socialist state.”72 In this

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closed society, it was plausible for Communists to believe that Leningrad, a major port located near Estonia and Finland, had been infested by capitalist spies. Party members could be persuaded that the implacably hostile capitalist world had struck an alliance with the spiteful political losers of the struggle for Lenin’s succession during the 1920s and their leader in exile, Trotsky. Communists took pride in the triumph of the socialist planned economy introduced in the Soviet Union under Stalin’s wise guidance, and in the prosperity, full employment, defensive strength, and sense of purpose of their country. The ussr appeared as a beacon for proletarians and oppressed peoples worldwide, particularly in those years of global economic depression. Many Communists were willing to see Kirov’s murder as the first step in a capitalist offensive, while acts of sabotage by capitalist hirelings plausibly explained such phenomena as the numerous industrial accidents or agricultural shortfalls of recent years – and such explanations could conveniently absolve the Party members themselves of responsibility. The army command included many a former tsarist officer, and it was common knowledge among Communists that the Soviet military had engaged in intensive military collaboration with the Germans since the Treaty of Rapallo was signed in 1922.73 That some officers might have changed sides did not seem too far-fetched. In sum, Stalin’s tale of conspiracy made enough sense to an audience that had no counterevidence or broader perspective.74 Many Party members and Soviet citizens outside the Party could be persuaded that, supported by foreign powers, such desperate characters as Zinoviev, Piatakov, Bukharin, and Marshal M.N. Tukhachevsky would prepare a coup to restore capitalism. Defeating such a formidable conspiracy would demand intense and sustained efforts and vigilance. According to this line of reasoning, those who slacked off in screening Party members were involved in criminal negligence. Indeed, they likely ignored their responsibilities deliberately. On 13 June Zhdanov delivered his concluding speech at the Leningrad oblast’ conference.75 Together with Stalin’s other lieutenants, Zhdanov participated in a full Politburo meeting two days later in the Kremlin. Now the Stalinists took stock of both the military purge and the frank criticism that had occurred during the conferences of the district, city, and regional or republican Party organizations in April, May, and June. In the army, arrests multiplied, ultimately amounting to tens of thousands of officers being tried and certain ranks being decimated. In the Party organizations, growing numbers of local bosses fell under a cloud.76

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Concentrating almost solely on the widening purge, Zhdanov frequented Stalin’s office and participated in two Politburo meetings and another week-long cc plenum between mid-June and the end of the month.77 Rogovin suggests convincingly that the main point in holding the plenum was for Ezhov to give his explanation of the purge.78 Stalin himself attacked the former Leningrad Party leaders Chudov, Kodatskii, and Struppe.79 The purification process widened again and began to affect people outside of the Party. On 3 July the Politburo sent a telegram to regional organizations ordering comprehensive sanctions against former kulaks who had returned to their homes (many had recently completed five-year sentences in exile or camp that had been handed to them in 1931–32) and against criminals.80 The Politburo claimed that such ex-convicts were in great number guilty of anti-Soviet and other activities and were to be tried by adhoc judicial troikas, newly organized in the republics and provinces. Soon foreigners residing in the ussr were also subject to repression.81 The magnitude of the operation was hidden from the Soviet public, and even within the Party the specifics remained unknown to anyone but the highest Party leaders. Thus when Zhdanov reported on 4 July on the results of the cc plenum in a lengthy speech to a meeting of Leningrad’s Party aktiv, it was only at the end that he mentioned that the cc had removed a number of its members as abetters of enemies or enemies themselves.82 He annouced that, according to the confessions of the unmasked enemy Komarov, Leningrad Party leaders had in 1929 formed a secret “reserve centre” of Rightists who were opposed to industrialization and collectivization and supportive of Great Russian nationalism.83

t h e t error at it s h e ig h t The Stalinists camouflaged the scope and intensity of the purges within and outside the Party by publicly emphasizing positive developments. In Zhdanov’s longer speeches, for example, such as the one he gave on 4 July 1937, he usually spent less than a quarter of his time on the theme of the purge. Instead, his audience was treated to descriptions of the tremendous accomplishments of the Communists and the Soviet population at large. He particularly saluted the democratic promise of the elections for the Supreme Soviet.84 From early 1937 to the cc plenum in October, of that year, Zhdanov and other leaders seemed to hint that those elections might be contested between several candidates in the electoral districts. Zhdanov warned about the

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possibility of hard-fought election battles between pro-regime candidates and competitors.85 In the light of past practice and Bolshevik habits, it seems extremely unlikely that Stalin would ever have permitted contested elections in which any hostile candidates could stand. Only one political party had been allowed to exist in the Soviet Union since the first half of the 1920s, and political dissent had been ruthlessly suppressed since the Civil War. During 1937, political opponents of the regime were arrested and tried in growing numbers. The October cc plenum ended any uncertainty regarding this public flirtation with democratic procedure.86 It decided to allow only one candidate per district to stand for the Supreme Soviet election in December. During the month of July, the Great Terror entered it bloodiest phase when the Politburo appointed troikas in all provinces and republics. These bodies, a kind of emergency court, consisted of the local first or second Party secretary, the head of the local government for the area or its highest state prosecutor, and its nkvd chief. The troikas handed out death or labour-camp sentences to inveterate criminals and a variety of political opponents of the regime on the basis of lists submitted to the troikas by the nkvd.87 At the end of the month, Ezhov dispatched to regional nkvd branches his notorious Order No. 00447, targetting for arrest ex-kulaks, Socialist-Revolutionaries, and members of nationalist parties, criminals, Whites, sectarians, and religious leaders.88 Though Ezhov’s order did not mention ex-Communists explicitly, the categories became blurred because concomitantly the campaign widened to purge regional Communist leaders and their retinue. For example, suspects accused of plotting a “feudal revolution” in the Soviet Union with the former first Party secretary of Kalinin and Voronezh provinces, M.E. Mikhailov, were indicted as White Guardists or kulaks even if only recently they had been highranking Communist party members.89 Order No. 00447 supplied (Politburo-mandated) arrest quotas for all regions and republics of the Soviet Union and specified how many of the detainees were to receive the death penalty and how many should “merely” be dispatched to concentration camps.90 The order magnanimously gave local nkvd branches the right to request even higher numbers.91 Regional nkvd departments usually overfulfilled the plan, for which they retroactively received Politburo permission. At least 250,000 people were arrested because of Order No. 00447; at least 72,000 of those arrested were sentenced to death.92 The victims still represented only one-tenth of the approximately 700,000 people shot in 1937 and 1938.93

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On 16 July V.N. Garin, the deputy head of the Leningrad oblast’ nkvd, sent a telegram to all lower-level nkvd chiefs in the province telling them to prepare for mass arrests of former kulaks, criminals, and other hostile elements who were “active” anti-Soviet elements.94 On 30 July a troika was established by the Politburo to conduct the wave of arrests in Leningrad oblast’. It consisted of Lev Zakovskii, second obkom secretary Petr Ivanovich Smorodin (1897–1939) as Party representative, and Boris Pavlovich Pozern (1882–1939), the regional prosecutor.95 Arrests based on Order No.00447 began in Leningrad on 5 August 1937.96 The arrest quota for Leningrad oblast’ was established at four thousand people for the first category, which warranted the death sentence, and ten thousand for the second category, which warranted terms in prison or labour camps.97 But as elsewhere the quotas were overfulfilled: more people were arrested because of the zeal of the Leningrad nkvd. Family members of the prosecuted were exiled from Moscow, Leningrad, and other major cities; later, many of those family members were arrested themselves.98 From 9 August 1937 until 30 June 1938, Pozern signed 465 lists by which he sentenced 20,594 people to execution by firing squad, including his own housekeeper.99 Smorodin condemned 3,076 people to death inside a month. Some estimates of the number of people who were “repressed” in the Leningrad region from 1935 through 1938 go as high as 90,000, while a very modest estimate for 1935–40 puts the figure at 68,000 arrests.100 Several of Zhdanov’s older acquaintances from Nizhnii were appointed to the troikas in the summer of 1937 (Pramnek, Shcherbakov, Iu. Kaganovich, Zagvozdin, and Lepa), but Zhdanov himself, together with Stalin, Molotov, Voroshilov, and L. Kaganovich, concentrated on the general coordination of the arrests.101 In 1937–38, this quintet (and a few others) methodically ratified the death sentence for thousands of suspects whose names, on hundreds of sheets, were submitted to them by Ezhov.102 Zhdanov did not become a member of any of the Leningrad troikas that operated in 1937 and 1938.103 But the arrest of any important leader, particularly a Communist, had to be sanctioned by the obkombiuro, often meaning Zhdanov alone in those days. Thus, Zhdanov personally signed the arrest warrants for at least 879 Leningraders in 1937–38.104 In the interrogation rooms of Liteinyi 4, the nkvd’s Leningrad headquarters, detainees under duress confessed to secret-police investigators a variety of hideous crimes, such as plotting Zhdanov’s murder.105 Usually, little if any material evidence was adduced in the courts, but the judges convicted and sentenced the accused regardless,

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trying to meet the conviction quotas as mandated by the Politburo and nkvd.106 Most convictions were entirely based on the transcript of confessions by the accused and the testimony of other suspects or witnesses. While confessions by the accused were usually the only “evidence” used by the courts to convict them in speedy trials (of ten minutes or less), it is not clear why the authorities felt that they were obliged to observe this one legality. They could have executed their putative foes just as well without it. Towards the end of the summer, in order to sustain the ritualized public indignation that had accompanied the two major show trials and the arrest of the army chiefs, the authorities staged public trials in the Leningrad region. Their proceedings were published in Leningrad’s local papers in early September.107 During meetings held at institutions and factories the public expressed its anger with the main plotters. The Politburo regularly dispatched high-level emissaries to remove unmasked regional bosses and their adherents on the spot. Different from the mild treatment of Sheboldaev in Rostov in January, the tandem of Andreev and Malenkov especially busied itself removing regional leaders in republican, krai, and oblast’ capitals during the summer and autumn of 1937 and the winter of 1937–38. They often orchestrated their actions with the nkvd officials who travelled in their retinue and organized the immediate arrest of the fallen bosses. In mid-July, Malenkov personally interrogated detained Party and nkvd bosses in Saratov, among whom was Krinitskii.108 Meanwhile, frantic transfers of local bosses to other regions occurred all over the Soviet Union to fill the gaps left by the arrests.109 Similarly, Politburo and cc members initiated arrests within central organizations and institutions in Moscow, as had happened already to the army and nkvd. From 21 to 28 August, at a plenum of the Komsomol Central Committee held in Moscow, Kaganovich, Andreev, Zhdanov, and Malenkov condemned the Komsomol leadership for lack of vigilance in unmasking enemies of the people within their organization.110 Dozens of Komsomol leaders were duly arrested between August 1937 and the end of 1938.

zh da nov p u r g e s In the course of September, Zhdanov began to prepare for his one and only trip as Stalin’s terrorist missus dominicus in the provinces.111 The trip took Zhdanov to the mid-Volga region and the southern foothills of the Ural mountains, an area in which he had travelled during the Civil War.112 In the last week of September, after attend-

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ing a Party meeting at the Kirov works113 in Leningrad, Zhdanov travelled first to Kazan, the capital of the Tatar Autonomous Republic. Here his condemnation of the leadership’s lack of vigilance translated into the arrest of most of its members in subsequent weeks.114 Altogether hundreds of heads rolled in Kazan during and after his visit.115 In early July the Politburo had transferred Zhdanov’s old acquaintance A.F. Gorkin, Orenburg province’s first Party secretary, to Moscow.116 Gorkin had been appointed secretary of the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee and thus became Soviet president Kalinin’s right-hand man.117 In Orenburg, Gorkin had overseen the first round of the Terror within the Party in April 1937 with a roundup of “Trotskyites” who included some Party bosses and an exceptionally high number of factory directors. A month later the first Rightists were apprehended. They were mainly accused of wrecking agriculture and engaging in nefarious activities in the oblispolkom and other government offices.118 Fifteen hundred people had been executed for supposed connections with a right-wing military Japanese Cossack organization led by a former gubispolkom chief. Meanwhile, among other categories of persecuted people, 860 “bandits” had been executed. From April to September 1937, a total of some 7,500 people were arrested by the local nkvd.119 Orenburg’s troika, appointed after Gorkin’s departure in July,120 had contributed to this number. Order No. 00447 permitted the troika, led by ad interim first Party secretary A.Kh. Mitrofanov (1879–1937?),121 to shoot 1,200 “kulaks” and 520 “criminals,” sentence more than 3,000 unreliable elements to labour camps, and exile the families of all three groups.122 By late September the troika had not quite met its quota yet, for 3,290 people had been arrested, of whom 1,650 had been sentenced to death, while some 1,400 were still awaiting trial.123 On 29 September Zhdanov spoke to the obkom members in Orenburg. He depicted this “hesitant” conduct of the purge by Mitrofanov and his fellow obkombiuro members as indicative of their political bankruptcy and demanded their dismissal.124 Strictly speaking, Zhdanov was correct in lambasting them for failing to meet the arrest plan, but his harsh stance further intimidated an already cowering audience: except for Gorkin, all predecessors of Mitrofanov and his colleagues on the biuro had already been arrested in previous months.125 Orenburg’s Party committee immediately dismissed Mitrofanov and the others, excluded them from the Party, and sent them on to the nkvd. Zhdanov sent telegrams to Stalin calling for the arrest of other suspects.126 The Politburo replied by ratifying the arrest of 598 people who fell under suspicion in the wake of Zhdanov’s visit.

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Zhdanov announced in his concluding remarks to the obkom plenum that he would ask the cc to look into Gorkin’s conduct.127 Here Zhdanov was dissembling in an effort to avoid any appearance that his friend was in reality immune from investigation. Gorkin’s promotion predated Zhdanov’s trip by several months, and appointment to such a high post was impossible without Stalin’s personal patronage. Zhdanov completed his trip by travelling to the neighbouring Bashkir Autonomous Republic. On 29 September, in anticipation of his visit, the Politburo had ordered that the republic’s first and second Party secretaries be dismissed.128 This order was kept a secret from the Bashkir Communists until the Zhdanov-led plenum of their obkom in Ufa from 4 to 6 October.129 Much as he had in Kazan and Orenburg, Zhdanov observed in his keynote speech to the obkom that a whole nest of counterrevolutionaries had been discovered among the Bashkir Party leadership. Their sins ran the gamut from secret adherence to Islam to support for atheist Trotskyism. Matters took a dramatic turn at the meeting when the first and second secretaries, Bykin and Isanchurin, were dismissed by the obkom members and “directly grabbed in the hall” by nkvd agents.130 Bykin and Isanchurin, as well as Bykin’s wife, were shot. Measures taken after Zhdanov’s visit to destroy this counterrevolutionary anti-Soviet plot included the arrest of some 342 people on the Politburo’s orders.131 Zhdanov’s mission concluded on 6 October. He had successfully passed another test assigned by Stalin. Probably to Zhdanov’s relief, the trip was an exception; he preferred to keep his distance from such nasty business. But in this as in other instances, the benefits he reaped from contributing to the cause outweighed the costs to his peace of mind. As a rule, Zhdanov evaded direct supervision of the practical implementation of the Terror in his Leningrad organization. He orchestrated, together with Stalin, Molotov, Ezhov, and Voroshilov, its general course from a distance. The signing of Ezhov’s sheets of suspects in Stalin’s office became almost an abstract act. By contrast, Kaganovich, Andreev, or Malenkov were dispatched more than once to oversee personally the destruction of one team of regional leaders and their replacement by another.132 Both in Leningrad and Moscow, Zhdanov’s role in the Terror was that of the supreme bureaucratic arbitrator. Upon his return from Ufa, he vetted Leningrad district Party secretaries who had been tainted by their association with unmasked enemies such as Struppe, Chudov, or P.L. Nizovstev (1897–1937?).133 A typed list drawn up in the fall of 1937 survives in Zhdanov’s personal papers. On it he indi-

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cated, on the basis of his own suspicions and a brief profile of the raion Party secretaries provided by his aides, whether they were to be kept or dismissed. Zhdanov decided on the secretaries’ life or death by writing either the verb sniat’ (dismiss) on the form, which meant dismissal, arrest, and execution, or utverdit’ (confirm), which allowed the secretary to survive another day.134 Meanwhile, some people benefited from the purges, among them a significant contingent of bosses such as Gorkin who were or had been associated with Zhdanov. On 5 October the Politburo appointed P.N. Pospelov deputy chief of the Agitprop cc department.135 From a total of some one hundred regional Party leaders since 1936, Iu.M. Kaganovich, Zhdanov and Khrushchev were the only three who were still standing in 1939.136 At the end of the purge, Gorkin was the secretary of the Supreme Soviet, Shcherbakov had surfaced as chief of the Moscow Party, while Nikolai Voznesensky and Aleksei Kosygin (another protégé) had been promoted to important jobs in Moscow. The Leningrad organization had become something of an incubator for future all-Union leaders, testimony to Stalin’s belief that those who had been tutored by Zhdanov were usually reliable collaborators.137 On 2 January 1938, Zhdanov spoke at the cc Orgbiuro on a report of the Gor’kii obkom about the state of the Party there.138 Zhdanov thus exercised patronage, or what in Soviet-speak was called shefstvo, over his former bastion as well. Participants in the discussion included the fierce Terrorist Andreev and, for the Gor’kii Party organization, Iu. Kaganovich. The Gor’kii Party was spared the severe criticism several other regional Party leaderships sustained later in the month.139 But association with Zhdanov was no guarantee of survival. More of his former political associates died than lived, as the deaths during the Terror of Krinitskii, Chudov, Lepa, Ugarov, Struppe, Pozern, Smorodin, Nevskii, Pakhomov, Aleksandr Muralov, and Pramnek make evident. The dark fate of those former friends of Zhdanov’s should not blind us to the fact that the real tragedy of the Great Terror lies especially in the massacre of non-Communists who presented no threat to the survival of Stalin’s regime. In 1937–38, at least 1.7 million Soviet citizens were arrested and sentenced to death or lengthy terms in labour camps from which few ever returned and which none survived in good health.140 The Great Terror extended well beyond the Party: Communists remained a minority among its victims. After Zhdanov’s return to Moscow in October 1937, he visited Stalin almost daily.141 Prepared by the inner core of the Politburo and cc Secretariat (Stalin, Ezhov, Kaganovich, Molotov, Voroshilov, Zhdanov,

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Mikoian, and Andreev) on 10 and 11 October, another cc plenum was held on 11 and 12 October. Stalin announced on this occasion that some twenty-four cc members and alternate members had been unmasked as enemies. As far as possible their places were filled with candidate members.142 The cc also explicitly decided not to allow contested elections for the Supreme Soviet.143 Nikolai Ezhov was elected candidate Politburo member by the participants, which was perhaps symbolic of the fact that the autumn of 1937 was the acme of the Great Terror.144 Meanwhile, the Stalinists took further measures to mould a conformist Soviet public. On 21 October the cc Orgburo decided to expand and develop the existing system of censorship by introducing more newspaper censors at central and local levels. This strategy was instigated by Lev Mekhlis, chief of the cc department of press and publishing.145 In the following months, raikoms, obkoms, gorkoms, and ccs of national Communist parties appointed near to two thousand censors. A cult of secrecy had always been observed in the Communist party and Soviet government. In the second half of the 1930s, the growing threat of war reduced what little openness remained.146 People accused of leaking information were punished in the Terror, while, apart from the most superficial data, almost any information about the operation of the Communist party, the Soviet government, the Red Army, or the ussr’s economy and society was being classified. In January 1938 Zhdanov complained in the Supreme Soviet about the activities of the consular staff of foreign legations in Leningrad. But by June 1938 he noted in a self-congratulatory manner that, “if we are to judge from the information of the foreign press, which earlier appeared to have a great amount of knowledge about the affairs of the ussr, it is remarkable, how the enemies of the ussr got to know less, and hardly know a damn anymore. This has to be because there are fewer spies.”147 On 22 October Zhdanov presented an update of the campaign to a united plenum of the Leningrad obkom and gorkom.148 He announced somewhat euphemistically how “the obkom and gorkom biuro place before the plenum the discussion and confirmation of the removal of several obkom members, about whom the obkom and gorkom biuro received compromising material about their ties with enemies or about political deeds that prevent them from remaining in the leading staff of the Leningrad organization.”149 Among the ten people excluded from the obkom was a former Komsomol secretary.150 A.A. Kuznetsov (1905–50), who was to be Zhdanov’s protégé for the next ten years, was officially promoted to

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second obkom secretary.151 Soon, too, the head of the Leningrad regional planning agency, N.A. Voznesensky (1903–50), was appointed vice-chair of ussr Gosplan.152 Another famous leader who made quick promotion in Leningrad during those months was A.N. Kosygin.153 Zhdanov spent much of November 1937 in Moscow, where he met Stalin often. In that month he and Stalin sanctioned the execution of 229 former leaders of the Party, state, and army.154 In early December, Zhdanov frequented Stalin’s office again. Together and on their own they focused on the Terror and the ensuing personnel changes (between June 1937 and January 1938 the cc membership was halved).155 They also monitored preparations for the Supreme Soviet elections, which were in full swing by late November.156 After this long spell in Moscow, Zhdanov returned to Leningrad where, on 9 December, he delivered an election speech in the city’s Volodarskii district, a famous working-class neighbourhood for which he was standing candidate. He followed this with another election speech the next day. Apart from boasting of the usual accomplishments of the Soviet regime such as tremendous economic growth, its tremendous military strength, its ultrademocratic constitution, and its care for the welfare of all its subjects, he denounced Soviet enemies within (TrotskyitesBukharinites) and outside. The two speeches were printed in a brochure, one hundred thousand copies of which had already been distributed on the day of the elections. Zhdanov was praised on the radio and elsewhere as a candidate for the Supreme Soviet.157 On 12 December he was duly elected by close to one hundred per cent of the voters.158 A week later Zhdanov was again in the Kremlin visiting Stalin. On 20 December Zhdanov joined the official celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the Cheka-ogpu-nkvd in the Bol’shoi Theatre, an appropriate event considering that body’s virtual omnipresence in Soviet society in those days.159 Leningrad nkvd chief Zakovskii was transferred to Moscow in mid-January and was succeeded by M.I. Litvin (1892–1938).160 As a result, on 15 February the Politburo changed the composition of the troika conducting the purge in Leningrad, appointing Litvin chair (with Garin as his alternate), and maintaining second obkom secretary A.A. Kuznetsov and regional state prosecutor Pozern.161 Both Litvin and Zakovskii eventually fell under suspicion of incompetence in conducting the purge; the latter was executed by firing squad in 1938 and the former committed suicide in November 1938.162 Thus, while the nkvd was praised, its personnel proved as susceptible to arrest as others in 1937–38.

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pa r lia mentary and o t h e r sp e e c h e s January 1938 was filled with preparations for the first meeting of the newly elected Soviet parliament. Since most cc members were in Moscow to attend the ussr Supreme Soviet meeting, the Politburo simultaneously staged a cc plenum.163 Its agenda included not just the Supreme Soviet meeting itself, but also mistakes made by Party organizations concerning expulsions from the Party. A certain fatigue with the purge began to emerge. During the five days before the Supreme Soviet session and the cc plenum, Zhdanov visited Stalin daily in his office, usually for ninety–minute spells.164 The august Party body met on 11, 14, 18, and 20 January in sessions staggered around the Supreme Soviet gatherings. The cc now condemned the overzealous and mechanistic purging of Party ranks. Malenkov, head of the cc personnel department, noted that 65,000 out of 100,000 excluded Communists in 1937 had appealed their exclusion.165 Pavel Postyshev, formerly cc secretary and deputy chief of the Ukrainian Party who had been transferred to Kuibyshev region, was cited for having ordered the indiscriminate arrest of every senior official in the Party and state hierarchy of his fief. Postyshev was replaced by Khrushchev as candidate member on the Politburo and was soon placed under arrest.166 The first session of the ussr Supreme Soviet opened on 12 January 1938.167 As one of the first to address this Soviet rubber-stamp parliament, Zhdanov spoke on points of order regarding the conduct of its meetings. The next day, on the recommendation of delegate L.P. Beria, the first secretary of the Georgian Party organization, Zhdanov was elected chair of the Commission for Foreign Affairs of the Supreme Soviet’s Council of the Union (its “Lower House”).168 As head of the Foreign Affairs Commission, he now enjoyed the formal right to question Narkomindel (the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs) and its commissar, Litvinov.169 While the Supreme Soviet was a Potemkin village keeping up the pretence of democracy in the Soviet Union, Zhdanov’s election reflected the growth of his involvement in foreign policy. Disturbed by the increased sabre-rattling of the Germans, Italians, and Japanese, the Stalinists gave more and more of their time to international affairs. On 17 January the delegates elected a presidium of the Supreme Soviet, consisting of Kalinin, Gorkin, one representative of each of the eleven Soviet republics, and twenty-four others, among whom were Zhdanov, Beria, Iu.M. Kaganovich, Komsomol chief A.V. Kosarev (1903–39), Lenin’s widow Krupskaya, Malenkov, Stalin, A.I. Ugarov (1900–39), Khrushchev, and Shkiriatov.170 On the same day, Zhdanov

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read a speech to the Supreme Soviet, its script agreed to with Stalin and his intimates long before.171 Exuding the atmosphere of the purge, the speech had three main themes. Beginning with foreign affairs, Zhdanov noted the conduct of espionage by employees of foreign consulates in his satrapy of Leningrad. His diatribe against spying seems a coded reference to the arrest of great numbers of residents belonging to “diaspora nations” (Poles, Estonians, Germans, Finns, Latvians) in Leningrad in August, September, and October of 1937.172 Second, Zhdanov continued his criticism of shortcomings in the Water Transport commissariat. On that point he likely functioned as the leadership’s voice, since in the Soviet public mind he was associated with river transport as former boss of Gor’kii.173 In his last point, he attacked the Committee on Artistic Affairs under the Sovnarkom and its head, Kerzhentsev.174 Zhdanov noted that Kerzhentsev’s committee had allowed theatre productions in Moscow that did not meet the proper standard of classical or Soviet plays. Zhdanov justified the recent closure of V. Meierkhol’d (Meyerhold)’s theatre by labelling its performances alien to Soviet art. Soon Kerzhentsev was dismissed as head of the Committee for the Arts. Unlike the aged Meyerhold (1874–1940), who may have been tortured to death, Kerzhentsev died in 1940 of natural causes and was honoured with a Pravda obituary.175 Zhdanov was given the honour of delivering a more substantial keynote address in the Bol’shoi Theatre a few days later to commemorate Lenin’s death.176 On that occasion, he emphasized that the new Soviet constitution, as opposed to capitalist and, especially, fascist ones, guaranteed the equality of race, class, and gender.177 But after underlining this theoretically high standard of social justice, he justified the neglect in recent times of formal judicial due process: Particularly the year 1937, present[s itself as a] wholly educative lesson. 1937 was the year of the destruction of the Trotskyite, Bukharinite, and other kinds of spies, agents and diversants, who had forced their way into our Party, who stole their way into the ranks of the fighting proletariat. 1937 was the year when, in addition to our achievements in the fields of the economy and culture, in the field of the building of the Red Army, in the field of the building of peaceful relations with other states, we the Communist party, the Bol’sheviks, under the lead of c[omrade] stalin, accomplished still another momentous feat, that is, the mastery of the ways and methods of the struggle with bourgeois espionage, with their agencies in our ranks. … Com[rade] stalin, who always taught and teaches us that we cannot forget about capitalist encirclement, that we cannot forget that the capitalist encirclement sends and will send any kind of scoundrel into our ranks;

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[he] gave us, our Party an object-lesson on how to organize vigilance in reality, how to smash successfully all those blackguards, who stole into our Party – in a two-faced manner and who tried to hack it down and grab it from the inside, who sold out to foreign capitalism, who betrayed our motherland, who tried to reintroduce in our country the capitalism of the nobles, who tried to return the working class and peasantry to oppression and exploitation.178

But the “destruction of the blackguards” was far from over. It seems as if on several occasions in the course of 1938 Stalin intended to halt the purge but then allowed it to regain force. Thus on 31 January nkvd commissar Ezhov issued a guideline for arrest quotas of anti-Soviet elements, kulaks, and criminals in the different Soviet administrative regions, additional to Order No. 00447.179 He mandated the apprehending of a minimum of 57,000 people, of whom 48,000 were to be executed. Those numbers were exceeded by all local nkvd sections before a pause was called on 29 August 1938. Foreigners who had sought refuge in the ussr were also further persecuted.180 In line with the January cc plenum, Zhdanov condemned overenthusiastic Party exclusions in certain districts at a meeting in February of the Leningrad gorkombiuro. His criticism did not stop obkom and gorkom members from being expelled, as is obvious from a united obkom and gorkom plenum of 19 February.181 There was no noticeable drop in arrests, and several of Zhdanov’s former close collaborators were arrested and shot in 1938 and early 1939, such as A.I. Ugarov, Zhdanov’s deputy as city Party chief from 1934 to 1938.182 From 2 to 13 March, the last Moscow trial, that of the Rightists-Trotskyites (who included Bukharin, former premier Rykov, and Iagoda), was staged.183 On 13 March the accused were given the death penalty for their treasonous activities. Perhaps Stalin boasted of his foresight in destroying these potential leaders of a wartime fifth column when Zhdanov visited him, for the chances of war had increased on that very day as a result of the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria to the Third Reich. The ussr reacted by further readying its defence. On 21 April 1938 the Politburo made Zhdanov a member of the Main Military Council of the Navy.184 Since a large component of the Soviet navy was stationed in Kronshtadt, Zhdanov seemed the logical choice among top leaders to be curator of naval affairs. The frequent reshuffling of the responsibilities among the cc secretaries and Politburo members led to confusion among the Soviet public about who was responsible for what. Particularly in the hectic

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years 1937 and 1938, when, except for Stalin, the cc secretaries (Kaganovich, Andreev, Zhdanov, Ezhov) often fully concentrated on implementing the purge, all these men functioned as jacks of all trades. Improvisation often overrode any previously agreed assignment of certain policy areas.185 Thus, before August-September 1938, Zhdanov dealt with culture or foreign policy, but usually on an ad hoc basis. In cultural affairs Stalin’s cronies trod gingerly, for they realized that the arts was one of Stalin’s favourite domains. In mid-March, for example, when Zhdanov received a denunciatory letter by the editor of Literaturnaia gazeta, O. Voitinskaia, on the lamentable state of affairs in the Writers’ Union, he forwarded the letter to Molotov, Andreev, and Kaganovich, adding an oblique note that the letter was “undoubtedly” interesting.186 A few days later, the cc secretaries finally clarified whose assignment the letter was (probably during meetings in Stalin’s office). Andreev and Zhdanov were given the task of restoring order in the Writers’ Union. On 25 and 27 March and 8 April, cc secretaries Zhdanov and Andreev met with a number of writers to discuss their union’s shortcomings.187 As elsewhere, arrests among writers had been common in Leningrad in 1937 and the first quarter of 1938, a state of affairs that had contributed to the irresponsible behaviour of union officials about which Voitinskaia complained. By April 1938 five secretaries of the Leningrad branch of the Writers’ Union had been arrested and almost one-third of the total membership had been unmasked as enemies, from Trotskyite-Zinovievites to anarchists, Socialist-Revolutionaries of the left and right, children of formerly wealthy “capitalists” and tsarist admirals, foreign agents, or simply people who had visited foreign countries rather too often.188 The censorship organs were similarly vetted for terrorists, wreckers, and anti-Soviet elements.189 In mid-April Zhdanov twice addressed a joint plenary session of the Leningrad gorkom and obkom, once on the enrolment of new Party members that had resumed in November 1937, and the next day on the continuing problems in agriculture, the Achilles heel of the Soviet economy.190 This time, Zhdanov told his audience that agriculture had suffered from wreckers in Leningrad’s leadership such as Chudov and Kodatskii. Perhaps Zhdanov convinced those of his listeners who knew little about the countryside that sabotage by the great number of plotters who had been unmasked in the previous year had caused the decline in horses, the poor dairy yields of the socialized herds of cattle (especially compared to the kolkhozniks’ private cows), or the failure of flax production to meet its targets. Most of his audience would have known, however, that the peasants’

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resentment of the collective farms remained widespread in the Soviet countryside. The theoretical advantage of pooling human and material resources by collectivization continued to be undermined by such defects as lack of expertise among farm directors and lack of availability of machinery on the farms.191 Incapable of providing solace for such defects in the short term, the Party emphasized changing the kolkhozniks’ attitude, since little else was available to the authorities in attempting to improve agricultural results. A mere day after the obkom plenum, therefore, the Politburo resolved “to allow the Lenobkom … to have the special troika [add] additionally [to] the first category 1,500 kulaks, srs and recidivists-criminals.”192 Zhdanov prepared a somewhat less rigorous measure to stimulate enthusiasm for the collective sector of agriculture: a joint cc and Sovnarkom resolution increasing the taxes and other fees levied upon individual peasants. This resolution was issued within days after the April Party meeting in Leningrad.193 In May and June 1938, Zhdanov spent considerable time at Party conferences of the city and province of Leningrad, which took place over the course of three weeks.194 His deputy for the city, A.A. Kuznetsov, who was also a member of the local troika, presented the main report to the first meeting, the city conference, while Zhdanov listened benevolently to his protégé. Kuznetsov summed up the reasons for the ferocity of the purge. In Leningrad enemies had appeared in the city soviet, its departments, in education, in healthcare, in the trading system, in the food distribution system, and in the trade unions. A very high number of party raion committees in the city of Leningrad turned out to be in the hands of enemies of the people. For their counterrevolutionary purposes, the enemies of the people in Leningrad united with mensheviks, srs and other representatives of hostile parties, and also maintained and used narrow ties with all kind of nationalist fascist formations. For example, in Leningrad an sr centre was discovered, a large sr organization, connected in its counterrevolutionary work with the Moscow centre. This sr organization had its armed cells within key enterprises of the city. [It] was connected through D’iakov with the rightists. A large nationalist fascist Latvian organization was discovered, also with a centre, to which Struppe, Irklis, Prede, Voltsit and others belonged. That organization was connected in its counterrevolutionary work with the rightists through Irklis and Struppe. The rightist-trotskyite organization discovered in Leningrad put forward its tentacles into the komsomol organization, too, recruiting for its organization a group of leading komsomol workers. It posed as its basic task the separation of the komsomol from the party. That organization of the komsomol … was

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led by the former secretaries Vashel’, Utkin, Shvetsov, Savel’ev, Kumchenok, and others. We rigorously purged our city, our party organization of those enemies of the people: 82 people from the party apparatus were dismissed and unmasked as enemies of the people. More than 1,700 people were excluded from the party.195

A master narrative of a conspiracy that had penetrated all walks of Soviet life had been polished, so that all alleged plotters had been connected with each other. But Kuznetsov’s numbers on the arrests were far too low. For years to come understatement was the strategy for covering up the massive size of the campaign. When Soviet authorities “admitted” to the cleansing of 1937–38, they spoke of a fraction of the actual number. On 28 May Zhdanov summed up the results of the Party’s attack on enemies before the conference.196 He called the previous year one “of the utter defeat and rooting out of the enemies of the people, bandits, spies, and agents of foreign intelligence, who had penetrated into our ranks.”197 When he accused those allegedly recruited by foreign intelligence of trying to separate Leningrad from the rest of the Soviet Union, he made palpable the growing Soviet hostility towards an assortment of supposedly predatory foreign countries (Finland, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Germany).198 Zhdanov’s point concurrently reflected the Stalinist suspicion that Leningrad’s resentment of the centre remained a danger. Zhdanov was always extraordinarily cautious to avoid giving Stalin any impression that he encouraged a particularist spirit, as Zinoviev had tried to do during the 1920s, in Leningrad. After the purges, Zhdanov maintained the image of himself as a “Moscow” man rather than a “Leningrad” man. Resolutely subordinating the interests of Leningrad to those of Moscow did not improve his anemic popularity in the city. With his pro-Moscow line and aloof leadership style, Zhdanov was never liked by Leningraders as much as Zinoviev and Kirov had been, or Kuznetsov was later to be, even though he led the city longer than any of those three. As the purge began to abate, its story was made to fit in the definitive master text of the Party history that was being written by Pospelov and Iaroslavskii. In March Zhdanov discussed the first draft, while in April Stalin ordered an addendum referring to the “unmasking” of former Party leaders as enemies after Kirov’s assassination.199 The main outline of the history was thus ready almost half a year before the Short Course’s publication in September 1938. In his speech of 3 June at the end of the city Party conference in Leningrad, Zhdanov

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foreshadowed the plot of the textbook on Party history by connecting all the various enemy groups with each other and with foreign countries and placing the origins of the plot in 1927 when Trotsky formed an illegal faction and platform within the Party opposing the “General Line.”200 Almost a week later, the Seventh Party Conference of Leningrad region listened as Zhdanov delivered the main report on the activities of the Party’s oblast’ committee.201 He repeated the story of the modest but significant purge as narrated by Kuznetsov and himself at the city conference. In addition, Zhdanov noted that “the fundamental question now is the question about the [ideological] education of the cadres, the question about how to teach the new people in Leninist, Stalinist manner how to decide problems … of how they are politically grounded.”202 In this manner Zhdanov prepared his audience for the next necessary step: to forge a monolithic body out of the reborn Communist party. The Stalinists’ effort to prepare dogmatic scripture to guide Party members had stepped into high gear. Any recollection of the rivalries after Lenin’s death was to be filtered through a prism that turned Stalin into a semidivine hero slaying the evil villains trying to lead Soviet people, Communists, and the socialist revolution to their destruction. Some of the Party officials who had conducted the purge were now sacrificed. They may have known too much, or perhaps the leadership required new scapegoats to blame for the excesses of the massacre. B.P. Pozern had already been forced on leave from his position as regional state prosecutor during the city conference. By way of written notes (on 1 and 10 June), he twice pleaded with Zhdanov to be reassigned, but the Politburo dismissed Pozern from his functions on 15 June, at the end of the provincial Party conference.203 Soon he was under arrest.

th e

SHO R T C OU R S E

July 1938 saw Zhdanov working mainly in Moscow, usually in his office at the cc Secretariat and regularly participating in or chairing Orgbiuro and Secretariat sessions.204 During this month, he was elected chair of the newly elected rsfsr Supreme Soviet and thus became ceremonial head of state of the Russian Republic, another sinecure similar to his post of foreign-policy commission chair of the ussr Supreme Soviet’s lower house. With Stalin and the others, Zhdanov was preoccupied with foreign affairs and winding down the Terror.205 In August the Politburo officially appointed Stalin’s Georgian compatriot Lavrenti Beria as first substitute of Ezhov in preparation for the

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end of the purge.206 But its definitive end was still some months away. In September and October, hundreds of people continued to be sentenced by the special judicial bodies in Leningrad.207 Foreign matters increasingly claimed centre stage. In August 1938 Zhdanov was appointed together with Ezhov, Litvinov, and Leningrad nkvd chief Litvin to a Politburo commission (struck on the instigation of Molotov and Mikoian) to investigate the political and economic agreements in existence with Finland.208 Litvin had initiated the process by pointing out the “disadvantageous nature” of the existing Soviet agreements with Finland, which, he alleged, facilitated Finnish espionage.On 20 August, for the first time in his life, Zhdanov went abroad, travelling secretly to Prague to discuss with the Czechoslovak Communist party its position towards the conflict between Czechoslovakia and Hitler’s Germany.209 Zhdanov advocated in Prague a unitedfront policy of all left-wing forces, such as Communists had adopted in Spain and France in 1936. But when he suggested that Hitler’s aggression could ultimately create the preconditions for Communism’s European triumph, he betrayed the possibility of an opportunistic switch in Soviet foreign policy. Igor Lukes provides a portrait of Zhdanov’s role as Marxist prophet at the meeting: “Zhdanov assured his audience that the concept of ‘the second wave of proletarian revolutions’ was to be taken seriously and that the current political situation in Czechoslovakia gave the cpc [Czechoslovak Communist Party] a means with which it could accelerate the wave’s arrival. ‘Hitler’s attack upon Czechoslovakia will be the beginning of the end of the fascist rule,’ Zhdanov predicted, ‘but also of the bourgeois system of exploitation in this country.’ The Czechoslovak people would at first fight side-by-side with the Red Army against the Third Reich. Then, under the leadership of the cpc, they would liberate themselves from their bourgeoisie.”210 By 1948 Czechoslovakia had indeed passed through a decade-long ordeal from Nazi occupation to sovietization. Upon Zhdanov’s return from his two-day visit to the Czechoslovak capital, he focused his attention on reorganizing the cc agitation and propaganda apparatus and having it lead the “ideological education” of the new cadres who had made fast promotion during the Terror, and of the Communist party and Soviet public in general. The cc Agitprop (Kul’tprop) department had been headed for most of the 1930s by A.I. Stetskii (1896–1938), but he had been arrested, tried, and executed in the summer of 1938, sharing this fate with several other chiefs of related cc departments.211 Mapped out by Stalin, Zhdanov, Molotov, Petr Pospelov, and Emel’ian Iaroslavskii in September, Agitprop was now placed into the forefront of Party

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policy.212 From 8 to 17 September, during daily meetings in Stalin’s office, this team put the finishing touches on the new canonical text, History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks), Short Course.213 The book’s first chapter appeared on 9 September in Pravda.214 In the next days, more chapters followed; the series concluded with the publication of the last chapter on 19 September. On that day, the Politburo resolved to have six million Russian-language copies in book form printed as its first edition.215 Its price was a steal, equal to the official price of one and half litres of milk in Moscow and Leningrad in the winter of 1939.216 The red book was one consumer product for which one seldom had to stand in line. Before Stalin’s death, the Short Course was reprinted 301 times in Russian alone, amounting to the issue of a total of 42,816,000 copies within fifteen years.217 In sharp contrast to this bountiful food for thought, the Politburo decreed, in October 1938, a maximum quantity of retail vegetables per customer in Moscow and Leningrad shops: five kilograms of potatoes, two kilograms of cabbage, and one each of beets, carrots, onions, and cucumbers.218 For the next fifteen years, the Short Course was to be the fundamental text on the great accomplishments of the Soviet Communist party under the lead of its two founding fathers, Lenin and Stalin. The Stalinist faithful in the Kremlin had eliminated most key witnesses who could remember that the establishment of the Bolshevik regime from October 1917 onward had not been the work primarily of Lenin and Stalin alone. Now, in 1938, it was time to disseminate a new version of the past and inculcate into the Soviet population and Communist party a single ideology that deified Stalin as the living fount of wisdom and presented a hybrid of egalitarian ideals, Marxism, and patriotism.219 Stalin assigned Zhdanov in 1938 the ideological portfolio because of his comparatively high level of education, his prior experience in educational reform, and, perhaps, his aesthetic taste and cultural refinement, for culture was now wholly subordinated to ideology.220 Fellow Politburo members such as Andreev, Kalinin, Voroshilov, and Kaganovich had had less than four years of formal education, while other men like Khrushchev had upgraded a meagre basic education with adult courses at a 1920s workers’ college, a kind of vocational school providing some general education and a good dose of politics.221 Altogether, the entire cc membership of the late 1930s and 1940s had received fairly modest educations, not unlike the majority of the Soviet population, of whom fewer than five per cent had completed secondary education.222 In short, Zhdanov had scarcely any rivals for this key assignment.

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Half a year after his assignment to the ideological portfolio, Zhdanov explained to the Eighteenth Party Congress that “our whole work of building socialism, our whole educational work, is designed to remould the minds of men. That is what our Party exists for, that is why we strove for and achieved the victory of socialism, that is why we are undertaking the tasks of communist development – to remould people, their ego … that communists are born free of all prejudices and absolutely require no re-education, this is nothing but an idealistic and schematic view of people.”223 The Short Course was seen as one cornerstone of that “remoulding.” The book functioned as the basis of Soviet agitation and propaganda. But its promise of the radiant socialist future remained lifeless and never captivated the imagination of most people living under Communist rule. Dominic Lieven suggests plausibly that “there were powerful human emotional and religious yearnings to which Marxism-Leninism had no response.”224 The rational didactic Short Course clearly did not appeal to transcendental values, although it did not lack an emotional tone in some of its more vituperative passages. Zhdanov’s role was to lead the new propaganda offensive on the basis of the book rather than to serve as editor of its text.225 Zhdanov, Molotov, Pospelov, Iaroslavskii, and Stalin dedicated much time during the September 1938 meetings in Stalin’s office to developing a strategy for the diffusion of the Short Course. From 28 September to 1 October Zhdanov chaired a meeting of Party propagandists at cc headquarters. Stalin, reporting on the key significance of the book,226 maintained at the meeting that it could be studied profitably on an individual basis, but, in practice, its level of abstraction proved too challenging for most Party officials (who were a target audience for the textbook) and Soviet citizens.227 Even though the Short Course simplified the Party’s history (and amply misrepresented Stalin’s role and that of his enemies) many parts were difficult to understand, particularly its fourth chapter, which discussed dialectical materialism. Part of the Short Course’s version of Soviet history deified Stalin. The leadership cults of contemporary Italy and Germany seem to have been the models, with some appeal to traditional Russian adoration of the tsar. Soviet veneration of Stalin did not take hold as quickly as Hitler worship did in Germany after January 1933. Soviet means of mass communication were less sophisticated, Stalin’s successes were modest in the first years of his rule, and Stalin, for various reasons, lacked Hitler’s charisma. But by 1938 reverence for the Vozhd’ certainly had become an “integratory force” (Kershaw’s term), not merely

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within the Communist party and global Communist movement but also within the entire Soviet system of rule.228 Widespread study of the Short Course and eventual victory in the war strengthened the Stalinist “myth.”229 Indeed, Stalin’s cult substituted for the Communist ideal of a classless society of plenty, whose achievement was constantly postponed. Similarly, the Hitler myth in Germany covered for the increasing transparency of “objective contradictions in the social aspirations of Nazism.”230 Zhdanov’s role was important in the diffusion of the Stalin myth. He was part of an orchestra in which, by September 1938, he had become first violin. Besides rallying the population behind its great benefactors, Stalin and the Party, the Short Course was intended to buoy patriotic pride in the tremendous accomplishments of the first socialist state. The Soviet Union’s leadership had to prepare its military forces, economy, and population for war. This goal became all the more pressing with the conclusion of the Munich Agreement between Hitler, Mussolini, Chamberlain, and Daladier on 29 September 1938. By then, the Terror had gone far beyond its general aim of liquidating all potential opponents of Stalin. It became imperative for the Stalinists to halt the purges as the arrests had begun to sap, among other things, the country’s economic strength and military capacity. In October and November the Politburo pondered various ways to end the purge. A key Politburo meeting took place from 10 to 12 October, for which Zhdanov had prepared a resolution of prodigious length on the use of the Short Course in propaganda and agitation.231 The Politburo appointed Zhdanov to head a commission to prepare a cc decree on the new shape of Party propaganda in connection with the book’s publication.232 At the same meeting, a commission consisting of Beria, Vyshinskii, Rychkov, and Malenkov with Ezhov himself as chair was struck to investigate the unsatisfactory situation within the nkvd.233 The end of Ezhov’s rule as chief of the secret police had come into sight. On 29 October Zhdanov spoke on behalf of the Central Committee on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the Komsomol in the Bol’shoi Theatre.234 Critical rather than celebratory, he accused the Young Communist leadership of behaving arrogantly. This defect had led it to make serious errors, particularly in failing to unmask enemies in its ranks.235 For the first time, Zhdanov called for an end to the persistent negative attitude towards the intelligentsia, because a new intelligentsia had been born, consisting largely of children of workers and peasants.236 The new Soviet people of workers, peasants, and intelligentsia was no longer divided by class antagonism and would be spiritually nourished on the Short Course. This sacred text contained the

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fundamental truth about the heroic and ultimately victorious struggle that had led to the harmonious present. Towards the second week of November, the “Ezhov commission” issued conclusions that were damning to its own chair.237 On 15 November the Sovnarkom and cc dissolved all troikas, and two days later mass arrests were forbidden by cc secretary Stalin and Sovnarkom chairman Molotov on the basis of a formal Politburo decision after discussions that included Zhdanov.238 Then, on 24 November, Ezhov “request[ed] the Politburo to remove [him]” as nkvd chief.239 His dismissal was followed by more dismissals of others at lower levels of the secret police.240 In Leningrad, M.I. Litvin shot himself just before midnight on 12 November, probably forewarned of an imminent visit at his home of nkvd operatives dispatched from Moscow.241 The Politburo appointed the Georgian S.A. Goglidze (1901–1953) to Litvin’s vacant post on the next day.242 Goglidze, a member of Beria’s coterie, began his tenure as Leningrad nkvd boss by arresting five of Litvin’s closest collaborators, who were all given the death penalty.243 By early 1939 more than one hundred officials of Leningrad’s regional nkvd had been found guilty of exaggerated zeal in 1937–38, although they were not all penalized for their abuses.244 The decision to halt mass arrests came in time for some, but not for all, of the 12,330 people who were held in Leningrad prisons on 17 November.245 It is unclear how many people were released in late 1938 and early 1939 from jails or camps as a result of the procuracy’s reviews of a number of cases. Most judicial reviews were more time consuming than the nkvd investigations and trials that had led to the conviction of the accused, and it seems that as many detainees may have been executed as were released in the months after Ezhov’s dismissal. Even after 17 November 1938, no one was allowed to feel too smug. While much of the curtailment of the Terror and the nkvd remained under wraps, the public atmosphere still reeked of purge fumes. A sweep of the Komsomol leadership made it clear that at any moment a pretext could be found for having anyone, high or low, arrested. From 19 to 22 November a plenum of the Komsomol cc was held at which Zhdanov took centre stage, concentrating on an attack on Komsomol chief Aleksandr Kosarev.246 Molotov, Zhdanov, Andreev, and Malenkov heckled literally hundreds of times as Kosarev and other disgraced Komsomol leaders attempted to defend themselves.247 Their fate had been predetermined, and even before the session had ended several Young Communist leaders were carted off to the dungeons of the nkvd. As a kind of lugubrious award, Zhdanov was formally appointed cc secretary supervising the Komsomol.248

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This operation alerted Party members that the mid-November moves to curtail the purges did not mean immunity from arrest. The Soviet population in general was similarly intimidated by a government decree of 28 December threatening harsh disciplinary measures for misbehaviour on the job.249 This law introduced the use of labour books in which one’s employment record would be recorded in order to reduce fluctuation in the labour force. But since labour discipline did not improve, the Stalinists introduced ever harsher penalties in the next years. The Great Terror cast a long shadow over the subsequent history of the Soviet Union. Until Stalin’s death in 1953, the memory of the purges struck fear into almost any political, governmental, or economic leader and was kept alive through the occasional arrest, or wave of arrests, as in the 1949–50 “Leningrad Affair.”250 It was clear to Stalin and his cronies, though, that a repetition of arrests on the scale reached in 1937–38 would harm the business of governing, defending, and developing their country. Those officials promoted during the Terror, except for a number who proved incompetent or treacherous at the time of the German invasion and occupation of 1941–42, were generally given a semblance of personal security and immunity from arrest. Thus, towards 1950 many became entrenched (at times corrupt) bureaucrats just like their predecessors who had been exterminated in 1936–38. The Soviet leadership, from Stalin to Gorbachev, never resolved the question how to keep their officials honest without turning to extreme coercion. Deftly distancing himself from too prominent or immediate an involvement in the Great Terror, Andrei Zhdanov managed to create the impression that he had little to do with the Terror’s unfolding. He did this so effectively that some Western historians have suggested that he was a moderate among radicals.251 But his sending of thousands to execution or to labour camps by ratifying their arrests on long lists submitted to him and the other Stalinists, and his destructive work in Kazan, Orenburg, Ufa, and towards the Komsomol chiefs leave no doubt that Andrei Zhdanov was one of Stalin’s main accomplices in this mass murder.

new ch all e n g e s Zhdanov and Stalin participated in a kind of impromptu Politburo session (probably with some of its membership) on 14 November. It finalized the cc decree on the significance of the Short Course for the Party’s propaganda on the basis of the work of the Zhdanov-led Politburo commission that had been struck in October.252 Pravda

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published the cc resolution on 15 November 1938, which, additionally, included the establishment of a Higher School of MarxismLeninism under the cc.253 On 21 November, the cc Agitprop department was merged with the cc press and propaganda section into one “directorate” or “administration” (upravlenie).254 Zhdanov would be its head, for the time being, which gave him sole supervision among cc secretaries and Politburo members (Stalin, of course, always excepted) over agitprop, culture, and ideology.255 Zhdanov’s responsibilities further included the Comintern, which fell under a special section of the Agitprop directorate.256 Despite a formal structure that made Glavlit subject to the Sovnarkom, Zhdanov also oversaw this organ of censorship.257 On 2 and 3 December, after a prolonged absence from Leningrad, Zhdanov led a meeting of the Leningrad Party aktiv in its discussion of the cc resolution on the task of propaganda in connection with the publication of the Short Course.258 But he spent hardly more than a week in Leningrad, for Zhdanov by 13 December had already returned to Moscow, where foreign and domestic affairs alike demanded his attention.259 On 19 December Stalin, Molotov, Zhdanov, and Voroshilov met the Main Naval Council in the Kremlin.260 Here plans to transfer the Soviet Pacific trading port from Vladivostok to Nakhodka were discussed for the first time. On 23 December Zhdanov attended a meeting on the new tasks for Pravda journalists in terms of agitation and propaganda.261 He drafted a plan for further restructuring of the cc Agitprop directorate in December and early January, and his blueprint was ratified by the Orgbiuro on 14 January 1939.262 In frequent meetings during the second half of December 1938 and the first half of January 1939, Stalin, Zhdanov, Molotov, Kaganovich, Voroshilov, Malenkov, Beria, and Mikoian took stock, assessing the consequences of the bloodshed of the previous two years but also looking to the future, particularly the growing international tension in Europe and East Asia.263 This Inner Circle of Stalinists was increasingly joined by the various People’s Commissars of defence industries and by economic planners. They did not yet perceive an acute threat of allout war (as opposed to the limited military engagements with the Japanese that were already taking place), but they ordered ever higher outlays for defence production. A new party with a new past had risen like a phoenix from the ashes of the Communist party of 1934. The Party’s new chapter, which began with the Short Course and the end of the purges, would be marked by a Party Congress, the first since 1934, for which intense preparations began in January. From 13 to 26 January 1939, Zhdanov

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worked, along with Malenkov and others, on the new Party Statute that was to be presented at Eighteenth Party Congress in March.264 On 29 January, a Politburo meeting discussed the drafts of the keynote reports for the upcoming congress.265 On 31 January, by way of the by then usual survey of the opinions of its members, the Politburo accepted the corrected version of the report by Zhdanov on the new Party Statute and ordered the theses to be published in the press.266 Zhdanov report’s on Party rules and Molotov’s report outlining the theses of the Third Five-Year Plan were not only to be printed but also discussed at Party meetings in another stab at appearing democratic. Only towards the second half of February did Zhdanov return to Leningrad. There, at the eighth Party conference for Leningrad oblast’ held jointly with the sixth Party conference for the city, he delivered the main report on the obkom and gorkom activities since the conference of June 1938, concentrating on the main issues on the agenda of the upcoming Party Congress.267 In his concluding remarks, Zhdanov argued that the German-led Axis powers, for the time being, were being more aggressive towards their capitalist competitors to the West than towards the ussr.268 War, indeed, was only months away.

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7 Dragon’s Teeth, 1939–1941 Like many weak people who take something upon their shoulders that is contrary to their nature, he became a fanatic dogmatic, attempting to find guidance and reassure himself. Svetlana Allilueva2

war prepa r at io n s From its inception, the Bolshevik party had cultivated a siege mentality whose roots can be traced from the Marxist idea of the class struggle, to the Party’s illegal existence under the tsar for most of the period before 1917, the assault on the Party by the Provisional Government of the summer of 1917, and the Party’s narrow escape during the Civil War, when it had been attacked from all corners. After Lenin’s death in 1924, a Marxist-based image of the capitalist outside world poised to invade the Soviet Union had been maintained. The notion of implacable foreign hostility was inculcated by Soviet propaganda into Communists and non-Communists alike. The Party’s distrust of the outside world and exaggerated belief in insidious plans to destroy the Communist regime had contributed to the spy mania of the purges. In the summer of 1939, the American John Scott noted that “Moscow was intense and strained, not over the international situation, but with the struggle to live, to get into streetcars, into stores, and then to the counter to get food; to make each pay envelope last till the next. It was a tenseness which has been characteristic of Russia ever since the first time I went there, in 1932.”1 By continually stressing the foreign threat, the Soviet leaders had been preparing the general population and the Communist party for war for two decades. But the preparation was in some ways akin to crying wolf, so that when imagined foes finally became real, many Soviet citizens

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were caught off guard. Even though the highest leadership had been warned by a host of sources of an imminent German invasion, it too had apparently been numbed by its own incessant warnings of foreign predators. The Soviet Union’s economic modernization during the 1930s may ultimately have saved the country from defeat by the Nazi-led forces. Nonetheless, much of the considerable Soviet military machine was destroyed in the early days, weeks, and months of the war as Soviet defenders, with their poorly trained and inexperienced officers, were caught by surprise and subordinated to a supreme command that continued to overestimate the strength of its forces, thereby wasting numerous lives and much equipment. In the spring of 1941, some of Stalin’s closest advisors, notably Beria and Admiral Kuznetsov, were sceptical about Hitler’s promise of adherence to the nonaggression pact of 1939, but Zhdanov was not among them. Indeed, Andrei Zhdanov never showed more hubris than in the two and a half years preceding 22 June 1941. He was one of Stalin’s closest companions, he had helped steer Party and country through the epochal events of the previous decade, and he had advised on the strategy to keep the Soviet Union out of the European war that commenced on 1 September 1939. Stalin and his closest confidants during that period, Molotov and Zhdanov, seemed engulfed in a sense of infallibility.2 But the Stalinists were pragmatic enough not to count on a successful outcome of diplomatic negotiations nor on a peaceful compromise of any duration. They thus switched military preparations into a higher gear from 1939 onward. Sober estimates of the state’s expenditure on defence show an increase from 25.6 per cent of the total budget in 1939 to 32.6 per cent in 1940 and to 43.4 per cent in 1941.3 Such spending visited even greater shortages on the Soviet population than before 1939.4 Great haste and lack of foresight characterized the retooling of Leningrad’s provincial industry for purposes of defence. In order for Soviet troops to occupy eastern Poland in 1939, many industrial workers were called up for service in the Red Army. But there were no skilled workers to replace them. Meanwhile, the “habitual” problem of supplying city factories with electricity caused stoppages.5 After the Soviet Union declared war on Finland, the problems worsened. The flow of transportation was often interrupted and production levels dropped, even in industries that manufactured goods for the war effort.6 Queues for consumer goods grew in length, and civilians and soldiers alike suffered from poor provisioning.7 The soldiers’ deprivation was evident when they occupied eastern Poland in September 1939: Soviet troops gorged on the

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limited goods they found in the shops of what was one of the poorest areas of East-Central Europe.8 The Soviet Union itself was plagued by a steep rise in the crime rate, which in Leningrad ballooned from 8,571 registered crimes in 1938 to 13,740 in 1939.9 This rise testifies both to the end of the purges and to the growing discontent with shortages. In the fall of 1939 a few government measures, such as the expanded opening of special shops for service men, nkvd employees, and essential workers (those in energy supply and transport), brought relief to select groups. But most people had no access to such special services.10 In the spring of 1939, sometimes accompanied by Zhdanov, General Kiril Meretskov, the new commander of the Leningrad Military District, thoroughly inspected the part of Leningrad bordering on Finland.11 On the basis of his reconnaissance Meretskov proposed that, to conduct an effective modern war against the Finns, a wholesale modernization of the region’s transport infrastructure was necessary.12 Zhdanov and Stalin supported Meretskov’s proposals: roads were paved and track was laid from the end of spring onward. Nevertheless, few projects were completed by the fall, leading to military setbacks in the Winter War. After March 1940 Soviet defence was sometimes more undermined than strengthened by military reforms introduced in response to the poor showing during the Winter War. For example, the Stalinist politicians and the senior army commanders made a key error in abandoning an older line of fortifications for a new line located more to the west after the annexation of new territories from Bessarabia to Finland during the spring and summer of 1940. By June 1941 the older line had not been fully dismantled and the new one was far from ready. By incessantly reassigning senior officers within the central command as well as frantically transferring commanding officers from the periphery to the centre and vice versa, the leadership further undermined defensive preparedness, as it did by making similarly harried personnel moves of incumbents of leading posts in Party and government.

th e eigh t eenth pa rt y c o n g r e ss On 21 January 1939, the Politburo asked the People’s Commissariats involved in arms’ production to compose lists of key machine tools and other equipment that could be bought on credit from Germany.13 This was an early sign that the Soviet leadership seriously considered a rapprochement with Germany. The Munich agreement of September 1938 had isolated the Soviet Union in Europe by voiding the existing

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Soviet treaties with France and Czechoslovakia. For Stalin, it was time to probe whether Hitler’s bite was as bad as his bark. Subtly, the Soviet public was being softened towards a possible acceptance of a treaty with Germany, which until then had been the focus of public vilification as the incarnation of all of capitalism’s worst traits. On 3 March, at the Leningrad Party conference held in preparation for the Eighteenth Party Congress, Zhdanov argued that even if the Axis powers behaved more aggressively than their capitalist competitors to the West, it was hardly worth making a distinction between “fascist” and “democratic” capitalists since both were inveterate foes of the workers’ state.14 On 10 March, two days after a last preparatory meeting of the main lieutenants with Stalin in Moscow, the Eighteenth Party Congress opened.15 The Party’s size had hardly increased since the last Congress. Forming the leading echelon in a country of 170 million, 2.5 million Communists were represented by 1,569 delegates with voting privileges, and 466 representatives without a vote.16 Their uncontested leader, Stalin, delivered the main report of the Central Committee on the opening day of the Congress. He emphasized the ussr’s isolation and the hostility of both capitalist camps towards the Soviet Union, but he also touched upon his country’s willingness to improve diplomatic relations with all other nations.17 This amounted to a cautious invitation to Hitler. Stalin’s overtures towards the Germans became even more heartfelt when, on 15 March, in the middle of the Congress, German armies invaded Bohemia and Moravia. Precisely a week later, when the newly elected Central Committee met in its first plenary session upon conclusion of the Congress, Lithuania surrendered the Klaipeda (Memel) region to Germany. On 18 March, Zhdanov delivered his keynote report on organizational changes in the Party apparatus and the new Party rules. The opportunity was a tremendous honour, for it was one of three main reports presented to the delegates of the Eighteenth Party Congress, the other two being those delivered by Sovnarkom chairman Molotov and by first Party secretary Stalin. Thus, having become known to the Communist party’s leaders in 1934 and to the Soviet population in 1938, Andrei Zhdanov was finally introduced to the world as a Soviet leader. In his speech, he argued that the exploitative classes had been eliminated in the ussr in the previous years of “socialist construction.”18 Workers, peasants, and intelligentsia had fundamentally changed, therefore, and a new intelligentsia had arisen. This new group was composed of yesterday’s workers and peasants and the children of today’s workers and peasants; therefore the exclusionary criteria dating from 1922 that were applied to those requesting Party

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membership should be abolished. Because of this fundamental change in the composition of Soviet society, the methods of the mass purge were now no longer useful. Zhdanov emphasized the condemnation by the cc plenums of February-March 1937 and January 1938 of “formal and thoughtless-bureaucratic attitudes towards the question of the fate of Party members.”19 He nevertheless called for a continuation of vigorous efforts to eradicate “masked enemies who have wormed their way into our ranks.”20 When he compared expulsion to execution by firing squad, the supreme penalty for misconduct in the army, his speech deviously referred to the lethal consequences of loss of Party membership.21 If we analyse the evolution over the next couple of years of the Leningrad organization’s membership, we can see that Zhdanov’s advocacy of the increased entry into the Party of peasants and intellectuals did have some effect. By January 1941, in the city of Leningrad almost 70 per cent of Party members claimed a proletarian background, which represented a decline from January 1937, when more than 80 per cent of the city’s Party organization had claimed such antecedents.22 But long after 1939 a personal connection with the shopfloor (even vicariously through one’s parents) remained a point of proud distinction for most Party members. Collectivization and the Terror had placed a renewed emphasis on proletarian roots as a point of legitimacy. Despite Zhdanov’s claim that the stigma of previously suspect middle-class, meshchanin (“petty-bourgeois”), “kulak,” or noble background had been removed, few Communists ever laid claim to such origins. Testifying as well to the impact of repeated Party purges was the fact that in 1940 only 1.7 per cent (about 2000 people) of Communist members in the city of Leningrad had joined the Party before 1918.23 Zhdanov’s address had been carefully edited not just by himself but by Stalin (and others) as well. His particular oratorical talents nevertheless surface occasionally in his words to the Congress. He showed his acerbic humour when he discussed the errors made during the purges of the previous years, eliciting waves of laughter from his audience.24 When calling on his audience to monitor their fellow Party members, “studying them in all their connections and manifestations,” he hinted at a skill in which both he and Stalin excelled.25 In the report, Zhdanov outlined the ongoing restructuring of the Party organization through the creation of two key cc directorates (administrations), one for Cadres (personnel) and one for Agitprop.26 Agitprop concentrated on all ideological matters, including cultural affairs. Zhdanov expounded Agitprop’s key role in diffusing the Short Course gospel. As formal head of the Agitprop directorate, Zhdanov

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had by then been deputized by G.F. Aleksandrov (1908–61), a former lecturer in the history of philosophy at the Moscow Institute of History, Philosophy, and Literature and head of the publishing department of the Comintern.27 Zhdanov and Stalin laid down the main outlines of cultural policy, but they trusted Aleksandrov with the day-to-day management of the arts. In the first months of 1939 Stalin, Zhdanov, and Molotov met regularly with cultural bosses such as S.S. Dukel’skii (1892–1960), former nkvd man and head of Sovnarkom’s Film Committee, or the chiefs of the Writers’ Union, A.A. Fadeev (1901–56) and P.A. Pavlenko (1899–1951).28 In mid-May several issues concerning the Agitprop administration were thrashed out, such as the composition of the new editorial board of the theoretical journal Bol’shevik, which included M.B. Mitin (1901–87), P.F. Iudin (1899–1968), Aleksandrov, Voznesensky, Pospelov, Shcherbakov, and L.F. Il’ichev (1906–90).29 Mark Mitin and Pavel Iudin had taken the lead in defending Stalin’s theoretical and philosophical positions since the early 1930s. In 1930 they had coauthored in Pravda an article on the new tasks in MarxistLeninist philosophy, which had been inspired and sponsored by Stalin. In turn, Stalin had rewarded them with leading positions in the Communist Academy and the Institute of Red Professors, and they occupied other high posts in subsequent years.30 From 1931 to 1944, Mitin edited another theoretical journal, Pod znamenem marksizma (Under the Banner of Marxism), and from 1939 to 1944 he was also director of the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute under the cc.31 Iudin began his career in the Nizhnii Party organization under Zhdanov’s auspices.32 In the first half of the 1930s, Iudin was the deputy for cultural affairs to A.I. Stetskii, head of the cc culture and propaganda department. By 1932 he was also director of the Institute of Red Professors, a position he retained until the dissolution of the institute in 1938, after which he was appointed director of the Institute of Philosophy of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, a post he occupied until 1944. Meanwhile, from 1937 to 1947, he headed the United State Publishers of the rsfsr. Iudin already frequented Stalin’s office before the war. The trio of Mitin, Iudin, and Aleksandrov, all three philosophers by training, were part of an editorial team that from 1940 onward published a history of philosophy in book form that was never completed.33 Enjoying Stalin’s personal patronage, Mitin and Iudin appear to have been able to voice dissenting opinions regarding culture, ideology, and philosophy and commit serious professional errors (such as

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mismanaging funds) without suffering retribution. It is not always clear (and probably was not always clear to their colleagues in the ideological field) on which occasions each or both functioned as Stalin’s mouthpiece and on which they acted (semi-) independently. Though each endured various waves of criticism, they both remained favourites of Stalin and could thus even dissent from Stalin’s cronies, including Zhdanov. Georgii Malenkov, former head of the Department of Leading Party Organs and a new cc secretary, was appointed head of the Cadres directorate. Five smaller departments remained separate from those two huge key administrations.34 Similar changes in the Party apparatus were introduced at lower levels of the hierarchy. Zhdanov’s speech and theses on the new rules, said to be “in principle accepted by the Politbiuro” and accepted by the congress without amendments, were published for public consumption in a separate brochure in an edition of three million copies.35 Apart from a few reports of his speeches in Pravda, the brochure was to be Zhdanov’s most widely diffused work within the Soviet Union. But his all-Union stature was dwarfed by Stalin’s: for example, twenty million printed copies were ordered of Stalin’s speech to the Eighth Congress of Soviets of December 1936.36 The final chapter of the Eighteenth Party Congress, the elections for the new cc, were preceded by a discussion of the flaws of certain surviving members of the old cc elected in 1934. Citing the man’s alcoholism, Stalin spoke out against the re-election of Ezhov.37 Neither Ezhov nor his ex-deputy M.P. Frinovskii, then People’s Commissar of the Navy, were re-elected.38 The new cc’s customary post-congress plenary session elected Stalin, Zhdanov, Molotov, Kaganovich, Voroshilov, Kalinin, Mikoian, Andreev, and Khrushchev as full Politburo members, with Shvernik and Beria as alternates.39 The cc Orgbiuro consisted of Stalin, Andreev, Zhdanov, Kaganovich, Malenkov, Shvernik, Lev Mekhlis (head of the army’s political branch), N.A. Mikhailov (Komsomol chief), and Shcherbakov (chief of the Moscow Party organization). Stalin, Zhdanov, Andreev, and Malenkov became cc secretaries. Apart from Stalin, Zhdanov was the only member of all three bodies: he now outranked everyone in the Party and state hierarchy except Stalin and Molotov. It was clear that Zhdanov had entered Stalin’s Inner Circle.40 Only Molotov (premier and people’s Commissar for foreign affairs), Voroshilov (People’s Commissar for defence), and Mikoian (People’s Commissar for foreign and domestic trade) were in Stalin’s office more often than Zhdanov in the summer of 1939, when most of the

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discussion focused on the paramount issues of foreign affairs and defence.41 Stalin relied heavily on Zhdanov in running the Communist party’s affairs. Zhdanov, Malenkov, and Andreev seem to have split the chairing of sessions of the Orgbiuro and Secretariat, the most important bodies after the Politburo. The three prepared drafts of resolutions that were edited in Stalin’s office, and they shared supervision of the regional Party organizations (in Zhdanov’s case that included the Comintern, on the eve of war).42 Personnel was largely Malenkov’s domain, while political education and ideology were more Zhdanov’s territory.43 Andreev would often be distracted by his role as head of the Party Control Commission, while as cc secretary he focused on agricultural issues (Zhdanov was much less involved in agriculture after the Eighteenth Party Congress). Of course, the members of the Stalinist Inner Circle were distracted from their routine tasks by the necessity of reacting to newly emerging situations, especially developments abroad from the spring of 1939 onwards. The highest Party and state bodies continued to issue resolutions in which the top leaders were assigned tasks that were fairly narrowly circumscribed, but the needs of the moment often overrode such job descriptions.44 From the late 1930s onwards, Politburo commissions (ad hoc or not) were struck less often than before, but individual Politburo members continued to be regularly sent “na kommandirovke,” “on business trips,” to deal personally with acute issues in outlying regions, of which Zhdanov’s trips to Saratov, Ufa, Orenburg, and Prague are examples.45 In other words, emergencies often overrode any formal distribution of responsibilities. It is thus not always clear how to evaluate the role of a political body or the importance of an assignment among the varied tasks of the individual leaders. For example, in March 1941 the Biuro of the Sovnarkom was created, which to function, at least on paper, as a kind of inner cabinet, but a few months later it was superseded by the State Defence Committee because of the emergency of the war. After the war this biuro was formally restored, but it seems to have concentrated on fairly routine government issues.46 An extremely narrow group of people made all the important decisions in the huge Soviet Union and, after the war, in its empire abroad as well. Therefore, the Stalinists continually searched for efficiency and a redivision of tasks so that key individual leaders did not collapse under the weight of their overwhelming responsibilities. No matter how hard they tried to direct and detect everything, inevitably many matters escaped their attention. The enormity of Stalin’s task of singlehandedly ruling the Soviet Union (and its satellites) also explains Stalin’s preference for hard workers like Zhdanov. In practice, then,

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important decisions were made by a small group of people among whom Stalin had the last word.47

t h e sov iet fa r e a st Immediately following the March Congress, Zhdanov met Stalin often in the Kremlin, mainly to discuss matters of defence.48 In July 1938 fighting had broken out between Japanese and Soviet troops not far from Vladivostok.49 The Soviet Union and Japan had concluded a truce in the early fall but the situation remained tense as the Japanese occupied more and more Chinese territory and the Soviets tacitly supported the Chinese Nationalist-Communist alliance against Japan.50 In late March, an emergency session of the Main Council of Naval Affairs was held on the eve of a trip to the easternmost part of the ussr by a high-level military-naval delegation under the aegis of Zhdanov and the first deputy People’s Commissar of the Navy, N.G. Kuznetsov.51 The visit’s purpose was to inspect the position and strength of the Soviet Pacific Fleet. Zhdanov was the Politburo member who occupied himself most frequently with naval affairs, even if he made important decisions in this area only after consultation with Stalin and, often, Molotov.52 Nikolai Kuznetsov recalls in his memoirs that Molotov and Zhdanov were not much help to him, since each happily changed his opinion if it turned out to differ from Stalin’s.53 In this way, they repeatedly broke their promise to support the admiral. Kuznetsov relates that, although Zhdanov could not and did not take any decisions independently, many matters nevertheless depended on him since he was the liaison with Stalin, and he could judge whether something occurred in the proper spirit of Stalin’s wishes.54 By 1939, according to Kuznetsov, around Stalin “already a thick shell had formed of toadies and sycophants, who hindered useful people trying to reach [Stalin].” 55 While Zhdanov was part of this clique, he was at the same time a key figure for Kuznetsov as a conduit to Stalin.56 From 28 March to 26 April Zhdanov and Kuznetsov undertook their tour of the Soviet Far East, travelling with their retinue by train from Moscow to Vladivostok.57 The local Party boss, N.M. Pegov (1905–91), later recalled that Zhdanov inspected the city’s industries, the naval vessels of the Pacific Fleet, and the border.58 He addressed a meeting of the regional Party aktiv, once more expressing anti-Western sentiments and xenophobia, following Stalin’s cue at the Party Congress.59 On board a minesweeper, the company also made an overseas trip from Vladivostok to Nakhodka and back. Nakhodka was found to be suitable for use as a trading port, and the group decided in principle

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that Vladivostok’s naval port should be moved to this more defendable area, further away from the Japanese threat.60 During the trip Zhdanov and Kuznetsov were visited by an old acquaintance of Kuznetsov’s, a submarine captain who had been imprisoned in 1938 but saved from almost certain death because of the changing of the guard at the nkvd in November and December of that year.61 The captain had been rehabilitated after his release, but he was still seeking redress for the rough treatment he had received. In a palpably uncomfortable response, Zhdanov washed his hands of the case by blaming Ezhov for the captain’s maltreatment. Zhdanov made it clear to Kuznetsov and his friend that he would refuse to order any further investigation. Upon Zhdanov and Kuznetsov’s return to Moscow in late April, a “PB meeting” was held in the Kremlin to which they reported on their trip to the Far East.62 It was formally decided that Nakhodka would be developed as the new trading port. Kuznetsov was appointed to be the new People’s Commissar of the Navy, apparently with Zhdanov’s blessing. The next day, Hitler cancelled the 1934 nonagression pact with Poland as a result of the German-Polish conflict over Danzig and the Corridor. Upon the release of this news, Zhdanov visited Stalin in the Kremlin for a meeting that lasted for more than five hours and ended at 3.00 am.63 It seems likely that a new foreign-policy strategy was particularly at issue. Within days the Russian-Jewish People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs, Maxim Litvinov, was replaced by the Sovnarkom chair, Molotov, in a move that was accompanied by a flurry of dismissals of other Soviet diplomats.64 On 11 May, in the second largest Soviet newspaper, Izvestiia, an anonymous article on the international situation (K mezhdunarodnomu polozheniiu) announced a new Soviet policy towards Germany. The author was Stalin, but Molotov and Zhdanov had likely helped edit it the day before in Stalin’s office.65 While this article accompanied intensified Soviet diplomatic overtures to reach a rapprochement with Nazi Germany, Soviet troops clashed anew with the Japanese near Khalkyn Gol in the Far East.66

diplomatic ma n o e u v r e s Shortly after the Izvestiia article appeared, Stalin and Zhdanov began to prepare for another cc plenum that opened on 21 May. Its agenda included the usual agricultural issues, the creation of a new Party Control Commission under the cc, a report by Molotov on the progress of negotiations with England and France to conclude a pact, regulations for the elections to local soviets, and an impending

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session of the Supreme Soviet, opening on 25 May.67 In agriculture, Stalin suggested an attack on the ten per cent of kolkhozniks who were “lazy types and speculators,” while the cc decided upon another offensive against recalcitrant peasants, too many of whom evaded work on the collective farms and stubbornly attempted to work as individual farmers.68 Molotov expressed indignation with the British attempt to use the Soviet Union as the defender of the independence of Poland, Romania, and other countries without offering anything in return. He accused his predecessor Litvinov of having been too willing to accommodate the British.69 The main purpose of Molotov’s report was to soften up the cc for the possibility of an impending diplomatic revolution. A few days later, in like manner, the new foreign minister tenderized the Supreme Soviet and consequently when his parliamentary speech was published in the press, the Soviet public.70 In the late spring and summer of 1939, the few essential players (Molotov, Mikoian, Voroshilov, Beria, Zhdanov, Stalin, occasionally Kaganovich and Malenkov) who dealt with foreign policy mapped a course to persuade the Germans to come to an agreement.71 Because of Soviet diplomatic aims pursued between 1939 and June 1941 and again in 1944 and 1945, one can surmise that Stalin and the other five or six leaders aimed in their foreign-policy strategy at regaining tsarist Russia’s western borders, while preferring to reduce the size of Finland and Poland rather than annexing them. But they wanted Finland, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, as well as a Romania bereft of “Bessarabia,” to fall within the Soviet sphere of influence. The three Baltic states were to be incorporated as Soviet republics within the ussr. Inasmuch as after March 1939 the Western Allies stood for the continued full sovereignty and territorial integrity of Poland, France and Britain refused to consider Polish territorial concessions to the ussr as they bargained with the Soviets that summer; nor would they consider applying pressure to the Polish government on behalf of the ussr. This deadlock worsened an already poor relationship, since the Soviets compared Allied obstinacy regarding Poland to their willingness to sign on to the Munich Agreement in 1938. Thus, after the British guarantee to Poland of April 1939, the conclusion of an alliance between the Western Allies and the ussr against Nazi Germany was unlikely. Zhdanov’s article in Pravda in June 1939 has been used as evidence that he in particular was fond of the idea of a rapprochement with Germany. But this was the line of the day of all Stalinists. The Inner Circle had agreed on the article prior to its publication: it was a further attempt to warn the British and French

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and to persuade the Soviet public that, in the view of the ussr, Germany wasn’t much worse than the Western democracies after all.72 From the general perspective of the Soviet leaders, of course, capitalists were capitalists, whether or not they camouflaged their activities with a quasi-democratic form of government, free trade unions, and a free press as they did in the Western countries. For the key trait defining such countries was the unabated brutal exploitation of labour by the market. Certainly, Hitler had punished the German Communists harshly from 1933 onward, but the French, British, and Americans had sent men, arms, and supplies to the White forces during the Russian Civil War; to add insult to injury, the French had concluded the Munich Agreement in violation of a defensive alliance with the ussr that was a mere three years old. Stalin and his lieutenants saw an opportunity emerge in the course of 1939 to exploit the rising antagonism within the capitalist world. If a Soviet treaty with Hitler triggered a war between Germany and the Western democracies, it was all the better for humanity. A first world war between the imperialist countries had led to the Russian Revolution. A second worldwide conflagration was bound to lead to major gains on the road to the ultimate Communist victory.73 It was this Leninist war logic, and not Stalin’s sudden discovery of kinship with a fellow dictator, that conditioned the Stalinists’ strategic thinking.74 On 8 June Stalin sent a note to the German government stating that any agreements would have to depend on German willingness to supply the Soviet Union with scarce goods.75 Hitler was not to buy Soviet neutrality cheaply.

b iolog y In late June Zhdanov, as supervisor of Agitprop (and therefore Soviet science’s overseer), was confronted with an issue that eventually came back to haunt him politically and personally with fatal consequences. A group of biologists who supported the renowned Soviet geneticist Nikolai Vavilov (1887–1941) sought Zhdanov’s aid in Vavilov’s conflict with a former student, Trofim Lysenko (1898–1976), who denied the validity of the genetic theories of Gregor Mendel and his followers.76 In Lysenko’s theories, plants acquired traits by adapting to their natural environment rather than inheriting them (Lysenko thus maintained that it was possible to grow citrus fruit in the open within the Arctic Circle).77 But Zhdanov was consumed by the tense international situation and did not interfere when in October 1939 Mark

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Mitin came down on the side of Lysenko in this discussion among Soviet biologists.78 In mid-October 1940, Zhdanov revisited the controversy when he denied a request by University of Leningrad biologists to outlaw classic (“reactionary”) genetics and to mandate exclusive adherence by all Soviet biologists to the Michurin-Lysenko theory of genetics.79 He explained his position by arguing sensibly that scientific debates could not be settled by political decrees, although he expressed support for the Lysenkoists, who were to enjoy more aid for their research than “reactionary science.” Mild as it was, Zhdanov’s scepsis regarding the Lysenkoists’ debating methods was potentially dangerous to his standing in the leadership, since it was known (as Mitin’s actions of 1939 made abundantly clear) that Stalin was fond of Lysenko, who was a kind of emblematic “proletarian” scientist whose ideas promised man’s greater mastery over nature. Indeed, it is not impossible that Zhdanov personally admired Vavilov, but this did not save Vavilov from incarceration and death by starvation or exposure in his cell in 1941.80 The conflict between the biologists did not end with Vavilov’s death, since his supporters courageously continued to express their belief in genetics. Until 1946, the Soviet Union was preoccupied with the war and the conflict between the two camps of biologists lay dormant. Stalin’s support of Lysenko indicated that ultimately the conflict could only be resolved in one way, as Zhdanov understood. When the conflict erupted anew, it nevertheless pulled the rug from underneath him in a manner he had not anticipated.

on th e br in k At the end of June 1939, Zhdanov spent most of his working days at Stalin’s side.81 Zhdanov’s article on the international situation in the 29 June edition of Pravda, “The English and French Governments Do Not Want an Equal Agreement with the ussr,” was not the “personal opinion” of a member of the highest leadership who was dissenting from the general opinion of his peers.82 Prior to its publication, the Stalinists had agreed that the op-ed page was a good place to criticize French and British tactics in negotiating an alliance with the ussr and signal Soviet willingness to the Germans to come to an accord.83 Signing the article as a deputy of the ussr Supreme Soviet, Zhdanov wrote that the English and French governments did not want to conclude a treaty between equals with the Soviet Union.84 Zhdanov’s signature as parliamentary deputy was probably intended to appeal to the British and French public opinion since it implied

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that the Soviet Union, too, had a genuine parliamentary system in which members of parliament could express opinions that disagreed with the general consensus of their Party’s leadership.85 Obviously, that this public criticism was signed by Zhdanov was significant to a perceptive reader. Even within the official government of the Soviet Union, in which, more or less, the Supreme Soviet was the legislature and the Council of People’s Commissars the executive, Zhdanov had an important position as chair of the Supreme Soviet’s Council of the Union’s Foreign Affairs Commission.86 The Germans could read in the article a clear expression of Soviet readiness to negotiate with them. The imminence of war was now felt more acutely by the Inner Circle. B.M. Shaposhnikov (1882–1945), the army’s chief of staff, began to join the Stalinists more frequently in their gatherings in Stalin’s office in early July.87 When Zhdanov returned to Leningrad in mid-July, he inspected by ship the Baltic naval defence positions in the Finnish Gulf.88 Zhdanov and the naval officers who accompanied him discussed the benefits of gaining territorial concessions from Finland, and ways to inflict a military defeat upon Finland if the Finnish government refused to surrender the region near Viipuri (Vyborg). Upon completion of the trip, Admiral Kuznetsov and Zhdanov travelled to Moscow to inform Stalin of their observations.89 On 1 August the Stalinists conveyed to the German government an official Soviet interest in a treaty through diplomatic channels.90 On 12 August the long-awaited negotiations about an alliance between Soviet, French, and British delegations began in Russia. When Molotov met Ambassador Schulenburg of Germany on 17 August, he expressed anew the Soviet leadership’s interest not merely in a nonaggression pact but in a broader agreement with Germany. On the same day, Zhdanov, Stalin, Molotov, Shvernik, Kalinin, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, and Mikoian, in a quasi-Politburo meeting in the Kremlin, discussed negotiation strategy and prospects.91 The following day, underlining Soviet military resolve, the Politburo appeared in almost full complement at the Aviation Day Airshow at the airforce base in Tushino near Moscow. Meanwhile Molotov handed Schulenburg a blueprint for a nonaggression pact in which the proposed resolution of foreign-policy issues in East-Central Europe was potentially satisfactory to both the Soviet Union and Germany.92 On or around 19 August, before a select group of Stalin’s intimate collaborators, the Vozhd’ outlined the contents of Molotov’s proposals to Germany and the benefits to the Soviet Union should they be accepted.93 Stalin’s justification for a German pact reflects his wishful and somewhat overconfident thinking. 94 Germany, he

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explained, had been asked to concede to the Soviet Union what it wanted in the Baltic countries and Bessarabia and to allow the Soviet sphere of influence to extend over Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria (the question of Yugoslavia was left open for the time being). Stalin proposed that a war between the imperialists over Poland created the opportunity for Communist parties in other countries to take power. The only danger was a quick defeat of Germany, for then, Stalin noted, a strengthened France and Britain might occupy Germany and thus prevent the establishment of a Communist regime there. If, on the other hand, Germany lost the war with the West after protracted fighting, Germany would undoubtedly be sovietized, according to Stalin (who appears to have been thinking of a repetition of the crisis of 1918–19 in Germany, but this time with a Communist victory as its outcome). The task was thus to try to prolong the imperialists’ war. By guaranteeing Soviet neutrality to Hitler, the Soviets were helping the Germans to withstand the Western allies in a war of attrition that would benefit those standing on the sidelines. Certainly, the opposite scenario of a German victory presented itself as a danger to the Soviet Union, but according to Stalin, it was not as imminent as “some” argued (hinting here at the demoted Litvinov). After all, Germany would come out of the war exhausted and preoccupied with keeping France and Britain subjugated, and thus incapable of attacking the ussr for the next ten years. From the point of view of improving the strategic position of the Soviet Union in the northwest, a Soviet-German treaty forced the isolated Finns to agree to move the Finnish-Soviet border westward and would reduce Estonia to the status of a Soviet vassal, on whose territory the Soviet military and navy would have a free hand. Since this was a world that had not yet witnessed the German blitzkrieg, and since any quick victories by Germany over the Western allies were hard to conceive of, Stalin’s reasoning seemed supremely sensible to his indulgent cronies. On 23 August, the Soviet Union signed a nonaggression pact with Germany. The pact contained a secret codicil allowing the Soviets to do as they pleased with most of the Baltic region and gave them additional rights to Eastern Poland and Romanian Bessarabia.95 The next day, the Politburo called an extraordinary session of the Supreme Soviet for the next week in order to explain the pact to the world and then ratify it (the secret codicil partitioning East-Central Europe remained under wraps).96 Molotov’s presentation of this diplomatic revolution was carefully prepared in the next few days by Stalin, Molotov, Zhdanov, and a few others and delivered to the Supreme

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Soviet on 31 August.97 Despite these efforts and the cautious hints at a possible pact with Germany issued by the leadership since May, most Soviet citizens appear to have been as stunned as world opinion by the new alliance.98

wa r in eu r o p e Nazi Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939. The Soviet leaders reacted with a partial mobilization of reservists and a call-up of recruits born in the years 1918 to 1921 inclusive, while the Soviet population “laid in reserves.”99 Zhdanov met Stalin in his office almost daily during September, and usually a variety of military commanders joined them.100 The Politburo ordered the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs and nkvd to systematize quickly the available information about Poland, which they submitted to Zhdanov who concentrated on facilitating the coordination of the imminent sovietization of eastern Poland and drafted a keynote article for Pravda to justify the move to the Soviet public and the outside world.101 During the evening and night of 7 to 8 September, Zhdanov visited Stalin twice in Kremlin, once with the military chiefs, and once accompanied by Dimitrov, Manuilskii, and Molotov. On this second visit, Stalin justified the pact with Germany to the Comintern executives, following the arguments he had presented to the Politburo on 19 August.102 Soviet military preparations for laying claim to its share of the Eastern European spoils as outlined in the secret clause of the treaty with Germany shifted into a higher gear. On 12 September Stalin received – besides the usual cast of visitors (Molotov, Zhdanov, Beria, Malenkov, Voroshilov) – Belorussian and Ukrainian Party bosses Ponomarenko and Khrushchev, as well as L.R. Korniets (1901–69) head of the Ukrainian Council of People’s Commissars, and the official Ukrainian president, A.A. Kiselev (1880–?).103 The meeting finalized both the text of Zhdanov’s article and the manner in which to incorporate eastern Poland into the Soviet Union. On 14 September Zhdanov’s editorial was anonymously published in Pravda.104 It depicted the Poles as large landowners who had exploited Ukrainian and Belorussian peasants, which followed exactly Stalin’s cue as expressed in his discussion with Dimitrov, Zhdanov, and others on the night of 7–8 September.105 Three days later, the Red Army began its virtually unopposed “liberation” of Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia from the “Polish yoke.”106 Polish resistance was light, for Poland’s army had become thoroughly demoralized in its futile opposition to the German blitz.

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A week after that, Soviet-Estonian “negotiations” opened.107 The Leningrad District Military Council ordered naval and land units to prepare for an attack on Estonia. The official Soviet-German agreement that was signed on 28 September fine-tuned the MolotovRibbentrop Pact of 23 August and wiped Poland off the map. On the same day, the intimidated Estonian government signed a pact of mutual military aid with the Soviet Union.108 The Estonians surrendered military bases to the Soviet armed forces, which received the right to station a maximum of twenty-five thousand troops on Estonian soil (ten thousand more soldiers than were in the entire Estonian land forces). Latvia and Lithuania were exposed to growing Soviet diplomatic pressure as well and ultimately acceded to similar treaties.109 On 1 October the Politburo resolved to incorporate Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia fully into the Soviet Ukrainian and Soviet Belorussian Republics.110 Any enthusiasm about Soviet “liberation” there was tempered by widespread arrests of suspected Soviet foes.111 Also on 1 October, the Politburo created a commission to decide on the treatment of Polish pows, chaired by Zhdanov, whose main assistants were nkvd-chief Beria and Orgbiuro member Mekhlis, head of the political administration of the Red Army.112 Already on the next day the commission issued a project for a set of cc resolutions, mainly based on Beria’s and Mekhlis’s suggestions, and on 3 October the plan was ratified by the Politburo. Polish captives born in “western” Ukraine and Belorussia were allowed to return home with the exception of twenty-five thousand who were dispatched to aid the construction of a road between NovgorodVolynskii and L’vov. Those who were natives of the “German part” of Poland were to be held in special camps until negotiations with Germany about their return home were completed. But all officers, policemen, and other employees of security forces were assigned to special camps. The fate of the these men was gruesome. On 5 March 1940, the Politburoby means of a survey vote, agreed with Beria’s proposal to execute most Polish officers in Soviet captivity.113 Around 10 April 1940, nkvd squads massacred approximately fifteen thousand captive Polish officers in Mednoe (near Kalinin/ Tver’), Katyn (near Smolensk), and Starobelsk (near Kharkiv). Zhdanov thus became guilty of what were legally defined as war crimes at the Nuremberg trials in 1945 (although at that point the Katyn massacre was cynically pinned by the Soviet prosecutors on the Nazis). In October 1939, too, Zhdanov aided in the official “unification” of Western Belorussia and Ukraine with the ussr by helping to prepare

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hastily organized elections for the Supreme Soviet in those regions.114 In one pre-election address (which may only have been published in written form and not delivered as a speech) on behalf of the “Committee for the organization of the elections of the Ukrainian Popular Assembly,” Zhdanov portrayed the occupation of Western Ukraine as a liberation from the yoke of the ultranationalist feudal Polish nobility, in line with his September Pravda article.115 On 22 October the Soviets staged elections in Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia.116 More than ninety per cent of voters officially cast their ballots – for the single candidates who stood in their wards. On 26 October the elected popular assemblies of Western Ukraine and of Western Belorussia met, immediately calling for the incorporation of their territories into the Soviet Union.117 On 1 and 2 November the Supreme Soviet formally merged Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia with the Ukrainian and Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republics, adding about twelve million inhabitants to ussr, perhaps one-third of whom were ethnically and culturally Polish.118 Meanwhile, on the ground in these territories, the Soviet occupation was accompanied by “spontaneous bloodshed” committed by Ukrainians and Belarusyn against Poles and occasionally Jews. The Red Army sometimes stood aside but at other times instigated some of this supposedly justified class war of (Eastern Slavic) “rural proletarians” against (Polish and sometimes Jewish) “bourgeoisie and landowners.”119 Thus, largely ethnically oriented prejudices were given legitimacy as expressions of the class struggle, a justification insinuated in Zhdanov’s Pravda article and subsequent speeches.120 The cost of the Soviet “liberation” of these territories is underlined by a credible estimate that, from September 1939 to June 1941, the number of deaths caused by occupational forces (army and nkvd) were higher in Soviet-occupied eastern Poland than in German-occupied western Poland.121 While the Soviet authorities rigorously conducted their own Anschluss in Eastern Poland and the Baltic countries submitted to Soviet demands, the Finns, whose country fell within the Soviet sphere of influence under the terms of the secret codicil of the NaziSoviet Pact, proved a nuisance to the Soviet bosses. On 12 October talks failed in Moscow between the Finnish leadership and Stalin and Molotov about territorial concessions to improve the strategic position of the Soviet Union on its northwestern flank.122 The Finnish goverment ordered a general mobilization in reaction to the mounting Soviet pressure.123 The Stalinists were caught off guard. Zhdanov hastily left for Leningrad to gauge the state of preparedness of the Soviet armed forces in the region.124 He returned

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to Moscow on 16 October. Two days later the first Soviet units entered the Baltic countries to prepare their new bases.125 Assured of a better strategic position as a result of these gains, and convinced that any war between the Soviet Union and Finland could only be a short and victorious one, Stalin and Molotov met again with Finnish representatives in Moscow from 23 to 25 October but failed once more to intimidate the Finns.126 On 29 October, when the Soviet preparations for an attack on Finland neared completion, the Military Council of Leningrad District (which included Zhdanov) submitted a strategic plan to defeat Finnish land and sea forces to Voroshilov, the People’s Commissar of defence, who gave it his blessing.127 On 1 November Stalin met the military commanders who would be responsible for the Finnish front if war broke out.128 Subsequent to this meeting, Zhdanov met with Stalin for two hours in one of their usual late-night conclaves. Assured during these meetings of the promising outlook of the military option, Molotov and Stalin made a final attempt to force the Finns to accept a diplomatic solution during the next few days.129 While these discussions occurred, the military commanders of the North-Western Front attended another small Politburo meeting.130 On 9 November the defiant Finnish delegation left Moscow for the last time.131 Zhdanov then returned to Leningrad.132 On 14 November he criticized the district’s army commanders for having insufficient intelligence about Finnish defensive strategy, a deficiency that did indeed harm the Soviet offensive in the early months of the Winter War.133 The next day, after an overnight trip on the Red Arrow express train from Leningrad to Moscow, Zhdanov, Molotov, the Finnish Comintern official Otto Kuusinen (1881–1964), and Voroshilov spent seven hours in Stalins’s office.134 Among the topics they discussed were the formation of an alternative Communist government for Finland and the creation of an army detachment made up of Soviet citizens of Finno-Karelian ethnicity, indicating that the Stalinists planned to make Finland a Soviet satellite.135 In Moscow during the ensuing fortnight, Stalin, Voroshilov, and the highest army commanders finalized the military operation against Finland.136 In constant communication with Stalin and Voroshilov, Zhdanov prepared from Leningrad for the invasion of Finland, visiting the terrain to assess its difficulties and organizing Finno-Karelian detachments with Otto Kuusinen.137 In a transparent imitation of Hitlerite tactics, the Soviet government announced on 27 November that a Finnish artillery battery had fired at a Red Army unit.138 If there was any firing, it had

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been carried out by the Red Army in a provocative gesture resembling the incident staged by Nazi Germany at Gleiwitz in Poland.139 On 30 November the Soviet Union declared war on Finland. Under the aegis of the supreme military command of the Main Military Council (consisting of Stalin, Voroshilov, Shaposhnikov, and N.G. Kuznetsov, often assisted by Molotov in an unofficial role), the Leningrad Military District commanders, headed by Meretskov, ordered four Soviet armies to attack Finnish border positions.140 Zhdanov, as chief of the regional military council, functioned as Meretskov’s main local political advisor.141 Though in late December Meretskov’s initial “army group” was reorganized and renamed the North-Western Front, with Timoshenko replacing Meretskov, Zhdanov continued in this post until the end of the Soviet-Finnish war.142 He was forced to spend most of the winter months in Leningrad as the plenipotentiary of the Inner Circle.143 It was the first time since 1936 that he had stayed for such a long time in his province. While Voroshilov was singled out after the war as the main culprit of the Soviet armed forces’ poor performance, Zhdanov escaped blame and actually received another Order of the Red Banner.144 Although there is to date little evidence that Zhdanov contributed meaningfully to the ultimate defeat of the Finns, the good impression that he somehow made lingered until June 1941. He thus became the only possible choice for the position of highest political leader in the northwest theatre when the Nazi-led coalition invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. The definitive terms and objectives of Zhdanov’s activities in the military command structure in the impending war had been agreed on during his sole visit to Stalin in the second half of November, three days prior to the outbreak of war.145 Zhdanov was to inculcate into the ranks and the nearby hinterland the idea that the war was being fought for a just cause. He was an old hand at this, having done similar work during the Civil War. But any improvements he made in morale were ultimately negated by the lackadaisical military preparation that resulted from Soviet underestimation of the Finnish resistance. On the day after hostilities broke out, an official announcement was made in Moscow that Otto Kuusinen had formed a government of a new Finnish Democratic Republic (which became known as the Terijoki government), following the blueprint decided upon two weeks earlier in Stalin’s office.146 Zhdanov made his way to Moscow to celebrate the proclamation of this Communist government, and to attend with Stalin, Molotov, and Voroshilov the signing of a Mutual Assistance and Friendship Pact between this nascent government and the ussr on 2 December.147 Zhdanov’s presence was required as he was seen as

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the future superintendent of relations between the Soviet Union and its new satellite. Immediately after the signing, he returned to Leningrad. The Western reaction to the Soviet attack was one of shock. Within days, the League of Nations excluded the Soviet Union from its number.148 The ussr now formally joined the ranks of the aggressors, Germany, Italy, and Japan. But despite the League’s moral indignation, little tangible Western aid was offered to the Finns. The Finns resisted tenaciously nevertheless. They organized their defensive lines well, taking advantage of the adverse climatic conditions for which they had been well prepared. The narrow width of the Karelian isthmus between the Gulf of Finland and Lake Ladoga also played into Finnish strategy. Perhaps the Stalinists should have learned some lessons from the poor behaviour, dress, discipline, and equipment of their own soldiers who had trampled over eastern Poland a few months earlier.149 A careful evaluation might have shown the Soviet leaders that their army was far from ready for warfare in the dead of winter. The Soviet army suffered from “poor command and control; a willingness to use tactics that wasted soldiers’ lives ... an inefficient employment of technology; inadequate coordination of the various units that took part in the war; and the lack of preparation for winter combat.”150 Indeed, in letters to Zhdanov written during the first weeks of fighting with Finland, soldiers themselves reported their lack of battle readiness, poor equipment, and the incompetence of their superiors.151 The officers’ inexperience was the result of the liquidation of almost the entire core of experienced higher commanders in the Terror. In mid-December the lack of military progress may have sparked a kind of war-scare among the Leningraders.152 Towards the end of the month, the Leningrad gorkom met to discuss a report by nkvd chief Goglidze on the rise of crime in 1939. The report noted that disorder had especially increased since the beginning of the war with Finland.153 The city’s authorities decided on tougher measures to use against arrested offenders. They also decided to stage show trials against hooligans, introduce a curfew for children, augment parental liability, and add more patrols at railroad-stops. Finally, on 8 February, the Soviet armed forces mounted a decisive attack that broke the Finnish line of defence.154 On 29 February the Finnish government agreed to armistice negotiations on the basis of Soviet demands that fell far short of a reduction in Finnish independence, which had been the original Soviet aim in early December 1939. Following Stalin’s guidelines, Zhdanov, Molotov, and army commander A.M. Vasilevskii (1895–1977) negotiated the terms of the

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peace treaty with the Finns in Moscow.155 Having dutifully reported the results to his boss on the previous day, Zhdanov took his place among the signatories of the peace treaty of 12 March.156 This had not been the easy victory the Stalinists had anticipated. Ultimately, some 65,384 Soviet soldiers died in the Finnish campaign, 19,610 went missing in action, and a quarter-million were wounded, according to one very low estimate.157 The benefit of the Winter War for the Soviet Union was limited to moving the Soviet-Finnish border further away from Leningrad, thus making it more difficult to bottle up the Soviet Baltic Fleet at the mouth of the Gulf of Finland. The significance of this gain was lost in any case with the acquisition of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, which gave the Soviet navy access to the alternative ports of Tallinn and Riga. Nor could it compensate for the tremendous loss of face suffered by the Soviet Union. Because the Soviet military lacked sufficiently experienced officers at all levels, it could barely win battles that should have been formalities.158 The army’s weaponry had not performed up to standard. Soldiers had been poorly drilled and badly trained for battle in the far north. Despite the Soviet troops’ being accustomed to a harsh climate, they had been remarkably badly dressed for winter conditions near the Arctic Circle so that frostbite and death by exposure had been widespread. One could also conclude, of course, that Stalin’s decision to declare war on Finland on the eve of winter, regardless of numerical superiority, had been utterly foolish. Owing to this embarassing military performance, Hitler’s contempt for the Bolshevik Untermenschen dramatically increased. In late 1940, when Hitler decided that the time was ripe for an attack on the Soviet Union, he was disdainful of the possibility of serious Soviet resistance. Moreover, the Finns, equally unimpressed, began to search for an alliance with Germany in order to recover the losses sustained in March 1940.159 The year 1940 was difficult economically for the Soviet Union. The Winter War had exposed the dramatic shortcomings of the Red Army, so the state spent half of its income that year on defence. Although labour discipline improved and fluctuation of the labour force decreased thanks to the measures taken by the authorities in the course of the year, several branches of light industry and the chemical industry produced less than in 1939. Production grew in many areas of heavy industry, but there too plans were not met.160 While the 1940 harvest was good, animal husbandry continued to disappoint in terms of dairy and meat production. Thus shortages remained common, while payment of wages was often badly delayed.

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Throughout the second half of March, Zhdanov participated at numerous meetings in Stalin’s office with military brass to evaluate the Soviet forces’ performance during the Winter War.161 When in April Hitler showed how a modern army could conquer a large northern country like Norway in a short war, the urgency of a drastic overhaul of the Soviet military was brought home to the Stalinists and Soviet military commanders. In the late summer of 1939, Stalin, Molotov, and Zhdanov had convinced themselves that, for the time being, Hitler had iced his earlier plans to subjugate the Eastern Slav Untermenschen and had come to terms with the existence of the “JewishBolshevik” Soviet regime. But the Soviet leaders had not discounted the possibility of a capitalist attack. Moreover, the trio recognized that, after the Finnish fiasco, any foreign power could be tempted to call the Soviet bluff. On 25 March the Politburo created a commission headed by Timoshenko, with Zhdanov, Meretskov, Leningrad obkom second secretary T.F. Shtykov (1907–64), political army commander A.I. Zaporozhets (1899–1959) and Odessa District commander F.A. Parusinov as its members.162 With a ten-day deadline, their mandate was to outline the talents and suitability for swift promotion from batallion level upwards of all leading commanders and political workers. On 26 March, preceded by the usual discussion of agricultural problems (on this occasion, procurements were at stake), a cc plenary session discussed the Finnish disaster.163 In a staged exercise in self-criticism, People’s Commissar of Defence Voroshilov presented the military lessons learned from the disaster, a performance orchestrated by Stalin, who had assigned much of the blame to his former Civil War mate.164 Besides Voroshilov’s self-castigation, military intelligence was singled out for its failure to provide a proper picture of the potential difficulties of the Finnish campaign. This echoed Zhdanov’s warnings on the eve of the war, so he tacitly received credit for his early diagnosis of the problem. While the report condemned the military leadership, it praised the actions of Stalin, Andreev, Malenkov, and Mikoian in righting some of the early wrongs in the campaign, in a classic Stalinist move to shift the blame.165 The troops’ morale was depicted as being good throughout the war, another point scored by Zhdanov.166 No one except Stalin was mentioned by name very often, but under one point of the report’s conclusions, praise was explicitly heaped on Zhdanov: “3. An exceptionally large, even gigantic labour was assigned to the Party organization of Leningrad. Throughout the entire period of the war the whole of labouring Leningrad presented itself as the nearby active hinterland of the military front. The workers of all

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plants, factories and railroads were prepared to do everything possible and even impossible in order to aid, [and] lighten the struggle of our warriors at the front, and in effect accomplished much … All this great and useful work was led by com. Zhdanov.167” Incongruously, then, the fiasco of the Finnish War only strengthened Andrei Zhdanov’s status. In the course of April 1940, Zhdanov joined another Politburo commission (with Malenkov and Voznesensky) that investigated the defence ministry in the light of the poor military performance in the Finnish war.168 The book on the Winter War was closed on 7 May with Timoshenko’s succession of Voroshilov as People’s Commissar of Defence. Voroshilov, for his part, became deputy prime minister.169

t h e sov iet izatio n o f e sto n ia Between 20 and 24 April, Zhdanov led a joint Party conference for Leningrad oblast’ and city.170 His opening speech was brief, since he was preoccupied with developments of greater importance, such as editing the first-of-May appeal of the Comintern prepared by its leaders Dimitrov and Manuilskii.171 Leningrad’s affairs were becoming secondary to Zhdanov’s other responsibilities.172 Meanwhile, Nazi Germany capitalized on the tranquillity on its eastern flank that had set in after Poland’s defeat. After Germany’s speedy conquest of Denmark and Norway during April 1940, Hitler’s armies invaded the Low Countries and France. It would take less than six weeks to bring the four countries to their knees. Italy, already master of Albania, also declared war on France. The Soviet Union was becoming isolated on the European continent. Some of the remaining independent countries were sympathetic to the Germans (Spain, Bulgaria, Finland), while others (Romania, Hungary) went so far as to conclude formal alliances with the Axis countries. Those countries resisting the German-Italian hegemony were conquered in the first half of 1941 (Yugoslavia, Greece). In May 1940 the Soviet bosses and their military commanders anxiously observed the swift German advance in the West.173 Stalin stood in need of advice, for contrary to his earlier expectations, the two capitalist camps were not engaged in a mutually exhausting war.174 The struggle between the Western democracies and Nazi Germany seemed to have ended with a resounding German victory that had cost the Nazis little in terms of men and materiel and earned them formidable economic potential and self-confidence. On 26 May a formal Politburo meeting was called, when it had become clear that not even the French army was capable of offering much resistance to the Wehr-

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macht.175 The Politburo membership and a select group of invitees discussed the best manner to pursue relations with Germany in the light of the sudden Axis dominance over Europe. The new priority for the Stalinists was averting war with Germany for as long as possible, for the Soviet armed forces were far from ready to fight the experienced German war machine. In early June, during frequent and often long meetings in Stalin’s office, the Inner Circle analysed the various causes and consequences of the startling Nazi rout of the French defence.176 They decided to convert the Baltic states into Soviet republics. This formal annexation had to be completed before the Germans had mopped up in France – in other words, before they were able to object seriously to this rather radical interpretation of the secret clause in the nonaggression pact of August 1939. On 14 June a Soviet ultimatum was issued to Lithuania to allow further stationing of Soviet troops, followed two days later by a similar ultimatum to Estonia and Latvia.177 In the early hours of 17 June, Molotov called Estonian ambassador August Rei in Moscow to announce that Soviet troops would cross the Soviet-Estonian border at 5:00 a.m..178 Molotov added that Zhdanov would be dispatched to Tallin to discuss a new government with Estonian president Konstantin Päts. Within the next few hours, the Red Army marched virtually unopposed into the Baltic countries and took up the military positions the Soviet leadership had demanded for its forces.179 Zhdanov, armed with Stalin’s instructions, left for Estonia. Zhdanov’s dispatch to Tallinn may appear to have been a demotion of sorts, since concomitantly the second-tier bosses Vyshinskii and Dekanozov were sent to Latvia and Lithuania. But any such conclusion is false.180 It was sensible to send Zhdanov to Estonia: he had personally inspected the Finnish Gulf at sea in the previous year, he had been chief of the precariously located Leningrad region for a long time (including during the Winter War), and he was a member of the Leningrad District Military Council. He had to consider a potential advance on the city by enemy forces from both Finland and the south-west, partially by way of Estonia. Now he was acquainted with the conditions of the terrain, explored the best strategic position for Soviet army units, and determined the local population’s willingness to help in case the likely foe, the Nazi armies, advanced into Estonia by land or sea. Indeed, Zhdanov’s mission was another sign of Stalin’s weighty trust in his man and in Stalin’s belief in Zhdanov’s versatile talents. Zhdanov’s brief was both military and political, for he was also dispatched to Estonia to guide the formation of an Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic, which proceeded in the second half of June and

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throughout much of July 1940.181 Zhdanov easily brushed aside Päts, who had attempted in vain to gather German support against the threatening Soviet occupation.182 Stalin’s proconsul selected a new government made up of formerly underground left-wing intellectuals and obscure members of the previously forbidden Communist Party of Estonia.183 Back in Moscow on 28 June, starting at midnight, a quasiPolitburo session listened to Zhdanov, Dekanozov, and Vyshinskii report on the progress of the incorporation of the Baltic states into the Soviet Union and discussed the region’s future course.184 Though pro-Soviet sentiment was slight in all three Baltic countries, the Estonians were arguably the least enthusiastic, given that, at the time of the Soviet annexation, the illegal Communist Party of Estonia had a mere 120 members.185 Zhdanov initiated a membership drive that led to a tenfold increase in the Party’s ranks within half a year.186 In July rigged elections led to a huge Communist majority in the legislature of all three countries. Carefully orchestrated demonstrations demanding incorporation into the ussr followed the vote.187 On 18 July Zhdanov confidently greeted the Estonian demonstrators in Tallinn from the balcony of the Soviet legation.188 Three days later the Estonian parliament proclaimed the country a soviet socialist republic.189 On 22 July, with Zhdanov looking on, Premier-elect Johannes Vares proposed in the Estonian parliament that the Estonian ssr apply for membership in the Soviet Union.190 Lesser gods than Zhdanov took care of the details of the transformation of independent Estonia into a Soviet republic.191 Any social, political, or religious organization that was not under Communist control was forbidden, and most higher-level civil servants were dismissed.192 The nkvd deported thousands of alleged anti-Soviet elements in a drive that reached a curious height only days before the German attack in 1941.193 Whether by carrot or stick, the Soviets did not win the Estonians over to their cause, even though Vares told Zhdanov in the summer of 1940 that the Estonian workers, peasants, and intelligentsia welcomed the Red Army’s defence against the German threat.194 One eloquent expression of Estonian resistance was the procurement by Soviet agencies in 1940 of only half the amount of grain that Estonian farmers had brought to market in the previous year, when the country had still been independent.195

def enc e a nd cult u r a l mat t e r s On 24 July 1940, the Defence Committee was reorganized into the Main Defence Committee (GKO) by the cc and Sovnarkom by a decree signed by Stalin and Molotov.196 Timoshenko was appointed chair of

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the gko, while the members, in order of their standing, were Zhdanov, Kulik, Shaposhnikov, Budennyi, Meretskov, Malenkov, Mekhlis, Ia.V. Smushkevich (1902–41), G.K. Zhukov (1896–1974), and D.G. Pavlov (1897–1941). Zhdanov and Malenkov were the two wholly civilian members on this body, and the listing of Zhdanov’s name immediately after that of the People’s Commissar of Defence indicates Stalin’s belief that the former tsarist ensign had become a formidable military expert. In about a year, Zhdanov proved Stalin terribly wrong. In the early months after the German invasion, Zhdanov failed to apply anything of what he had learned in 1940 about Estonian conditions to the effort to organize a solid Soviet defensive line, which made it easier for the German forces to rout the Soviet defenders of Estonia in August 1941. Stalin’s trust in both Zhdanov’s and Voroshilov’s military expertise is mysterious. The most cursory inspection of Zhdanov’s tsarist, Civil War, or Winter War record should have told Stalin that Zhdanov had never shown any talent for military affairs, while Voroshilov had recently failed to coordinate the Soviet offensive during the Winter War in anything close to a competent manner. But on the eve of the Second World War, Stalin still had an inflated idea of his own qualities as military strategist, accompanied by an overestimation of the military talents of those surrounding him. Zhdanov, who may have had a more modest view of his own military talents, was chastised both by Stalin and by the disastrous events of the early months of the war, after which he limited himself largely to noncombat issues, leaving the actual conduct of the fighting to the real military professionals. While Zhdanov was occupied in Estonia in the summer of 1940, the Supreme Soviet issued a harsh law on 26 June that increased the length of the work day and week and prohibited voluntary departure from jobs.197 The heavy sanctions mandated by this law reflect the atmosphere of crisis that had overtaken the country’s leadership, which came down hard on anyone construed as “sabotaging” the preparations for war. Sarah Davies notes that in the course of the next eight months almost 150,000 residents of Leningrad were sentenced for violations of this decree.198 Other measures to stimulate production and save on expenditures followed in the fall. On 2 October tuition fees were introduced for higher education and a system of state labour reserves (orgnabor) was set up, an annual call-up of hundreds of thousands of youths from age fourteen to seventeen for training in special production-oriented schools.199 Many Soviet children before the war received fewer than seven years of formal schooling and entered the labour force before reaching the age of fourteen.200 The state labour reserves aimed at grooming them into skilled workers.

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From 29 to 31 July, in advance of a Supreme Soviet meeting that ratified the annexation of the Baltic countries, a cc plenum met in Moscow to discuss the harvest and agricultural procurements, the early effect of the Supreme Soviet decree of 26 June, the formation of a People’s Commissariat of State Control, and foreign policy (an agenda item that was not announced in the press in order to keep up the appearance of stoic calm about the German successes).201 From 1 to 6 August, the Seventh Session of the ussr Supreme Soviet followed.202 The session’s most important piece of business was Prime Minister Molotov’s speech on 1 August: he proposed the merger of the Baltic states as well as the “Moldavian ssr” (Romanian Bessarabia) with the ussr in the following days. The threat of an imminent attack by Germany on the ussr diminished in the course of August 1940. It became obvious that, for the time being, the Germans were focused on the unfolding Battle of Britain. In the autumn, weather and terrain conditions in Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine turn much of the soil into endless acres of deep mud in which heavy machines and equipment sink away; even the self-assured German commanders were expected to pay heed to such conditions. By mid-August, the Soviet leadership convinced itself that a German invasion was not imminent and returned to domestic issues that had lain dormant since the previous summer. On 14 August Zhdanov met Stalin in his office for a round of defence deliberations, the last such meeting for several months.203 Zhdanov let cultural affairs take priority over military matters, absenting himself from military manoeuvres in the Leningrad Military District in early September.204 After taking over Agitprop in the fall of 1938, Zhdanov had eclipsed the other lieutenants as Stalin’s cultural deputy. Formally, Agitprop took care of most “spiritual” matters within the Party’s machinery. But after launching the Short Course and ending the Terror, the Eighteenth Party Congress and the lead-up to (and outbreak of) the European war had prevented both Stalin and Zhdanov from continuing the drive to control the arts that had begun in earnest with the Writers’ Congress in 1934. Under Stalin’s guidance, the drive to attain monolithic cultural conformity resumed during the last week of August 1940.205 On 24 August the Politburo added Zhdanov to its prerelease film censorship commission.206 In a move likely designed to allow Zhdanov to focus on the big picture rather than the details of culture and ideology (for he remained a fixture in Stalin’s proximity whenever cultural affairs were discussed), Zhdanov relinquished the direct leadership of the

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cc Directorate of Propaganda and Agitation, which was taken over by G.F. Aleksandrov on 6 September.207 Flanked by Zhdanov in his office whenever he received cultural bureaucrats and artists, Stalin concentrated on the “cultural front” in September.208 On 9 September Zhdanov chaired a meeting with Soviet writers at the cc headquarters on Staraia Ploshchad. The meeting was also attended by Party secretaries Stalin, Malenkov, Andreev, and cc department and section heads and deputies Poskrebyshev, Pospelov, Polikarpov, and Aleksandrov, Comintern journalist Solomon Lozovskii, and the head of Soviet film I.G. Bol’shakov (1902–80). On that occasion, Stalin personally criticized a screenplay by A. Avdeenko.209 Zhdanov’s words to the gathering emphasized the Party’s mandatory control over culture.210 In the days after the meeting with the writers, Stalin voiced his displeasure with contemporary writers’ depictions of Soviet reality. On 16 September the cc Orgbiuro, including Stalin, saw Leonid Leonov’s play The Blizzard (Metel’).211 Two days later, a Politburo decision called the play ideologically hostile and slanderous of Soviet reality and threatened M.B. Khrapchenko (1904–86), chief of the Arts Committee under Sovnarkom, with serious consequences if he ever allowed the staging of such a disgraceful play again. Leonov’s depiction of the ostracism of children of “former” people in contemporary Soviet society, even if they were themselves otherwise upstanding Soviet citizens, revealed the uncomfortable reality behind the myth that discrimination on the basis of one’s social background had ended with the introduction of the 1936 constitution.212 Another target of the cultural campaign of the late summer of 1940 was the work of the highly acclaimed Leningrad poet Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966), who had resolutely refused to adjust her work to the Socialist-Realist norms ordained by the Writers’ Congress of 1934. In the summer of 1940, just after a new selection of her work had been published, lower-level Party bureaucrats denounced her for her apolitical stance.213 Akhmatova’s obstinacy combined with other signs of independence emanating from the Leningrad artistic community – the work of Mikhail Zoshchenko (1895–1958) was found especially defective – to rile Zhdanov, who, in his double capacity as Stalin’s cultural pointman and Leningrad chief was especially upset with such defiance.214 He was furious that Akhmatova’s work had been published and ordered Agitprop boss Aleksandrov, and his deputy, Polikarpov, to find out how it could have been allowed to occur. In his note to the two bureaucrats, Zhdanov described Akhmatova’s poetry as “fornication with prayer in honour of God,” a convoluted phrase he

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would recycle more than five years later.215 On 29 October the cc Secretariat issued the directive “On the publication of poems by Akhmatova,” which took her collection out of circulation.216 Akhmatova and Zoshchenko escaped further harm because the cultural campaign ended rather abruptly towards November. Zhdanov, however, continued to harbour a strong resentment towards both writers that ultimately found public expression when he pilloried their work in 1946. On 26 September 1940 the state of Soviet art and literature was discussed at the last formal meeting of the Politburo to be held before the German invasion.217 In October Zhdanov and his Agitprop minions prepared a cc decree on the flawed operation of the Presidium of the Writers’ Union. The draft held the Presidium accountable for supporting Avdeenko’s filmscript and for allowing several dubious theatre productions.218 But the decree was shelved and only minor sanctions were issued to castigate the Union leadership. The most important of these was the Union’s loss of control over its “literary fund” (from which the writers were paid for their work), which passed to the Committee for Artistic Affairs. In the fall of 1940 and spring of 1941, Zhdanov also worked intermittently on a decree on shortcomings in cinematography, but it too was shelved. This aborted ideological offensive on culture was a dress rehearsal for the campaigns of 1946–48, when Stalin and Zhdanov returned to some of the key points of this earlier campaign. Several of the same writers and artists who were criticized in 1940, such as Akhmatova and Zoshchenko, were targeted again in 1946. The September 1940 campaign never had enough time to mature, for the threat of war soon preoccupied the leaders again.219 After the war, when they had more time, Stalin, Zhdanov, and the lesser ideological and cultural bosses organized and designed a more coherent and sustained campaign to regiment culture. Like its postwar counterpart, the campaign of 1940 was part of the long-term effort to create a type of culture to serve the new Soviet society and to “engineer” a new Soviet person.220 In this sociocultural project, the leadership excelled at criticizing artists and writers rather than inspiring or helping them to produce great works. The only art and literature from the Stalinist era that can enthrall us today are precisely those works that flaunted the stifling guidelines of Socialist Realism (Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, Akhmatova’s Requiem, Pasternak’s Dr Zhivago, Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible, the compositions of Shostakovich and Prokofiev). With the exception of the twentiethcentury medium of film, Socialist Realism essentially ordered the Soviet artist and writer to imitate stale nineteenth-century models,

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from the peredvizhniki in painting to Gor’kii’s lesser works in literature, and has failed to stand the test of time.

wa r ga me s The anxiety of the Soviet leaders increased again at the end of September 1940, by which time it had become clear that a German attempt at landing in the United Kingdom was not in the offing. Meanwhile, Japan, Italy, and Germany had strengthened their alliance, and the Germans concluded military pacts with the Finns and Romanians. The Stalinists were thus faced with a shift in focus from West to East in German foreign policy. In early October Zhdanov often joined Stalin in meetings with various generals, admirals, and various People’s Commissars involved in defence industries.221 Despite his presence at these strategic discussions, Zhdanov was not privy to all relevant documentation on defence and foreign affairs, for he was not a regular recipient of the so-called special files regarding such matters.222 This demands some explanation. On the one hand, from the fall of 1938 until June 1941, Zhdanov was one of Stalin’s most trusted advisors and collaborators and was consulted regularly for his opinion on defence issues and foreign affairs. Thus, Stalin usually brought Zhdanov in on important decisions. Nonetheless, the Vozhd’ declined to acquaint Zhdanov or anyone else in his immediate surroundings with everything that came to his attention (Molotov appears to have been closest to the position of all-knowing confidant during most of Stalin’s one-man rule). This was not just the result of Stalin’s strategy never to show all his cards, even to his closest “friends.” All of the chiefs were burdened with an enormous workload that forced a kind of division of labour between Molotov, Zhdanov, Beria, Mikoian, and the others, with Stalin taking care of the overall coordination.223 In January 1941 Stalin explained to a fairly complete Politburo the work method at the top by noting that the absence of meetings improved the efficiency of the decisionmaking process. Key decisions could be made quickly in “separate” meetings that looked at materials prepared by Zhdanov or Malenkov (whom Stalin then considered, in other words, the key Party secretaries).224 One of the areas of Soviet policy in which Stalin involved Zhdanov sporadically rather than regularly were secret-police matters. At some point in 1940 Zhdanov received a request by an anonymous group of employees of the ussr State prosecutor’s office to help them liberate “hundreds of thousands” of innocently convicted people who had been victims of “Ezhov’s gang.”225 The petitioners noted how State

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Prosecutor M.I. Pankrat’ev (1901–74), Vyshinskii’s successor, did not stand up to nkvd chief Beria, who deliberately stalled the appeal process in “questionable” cases. The petitioners suggested that, instead of the special nkvd board, the state procuracy should revise sentences. Zhdanov (or one of his subordinates) underlined some points in the letter but then sat on it and, finally, relegated it to his personal archive on 4 November. Perhaps his decision to refrain from making a move against Beria was facilitated by the fact that Pankrat’ev had lost his position already in July.226 In the middle of the autumn of 1940, the Soviet leadership made one more attempt to appease the Germans. On 12 and 13 November Molotov visited Berlin to adjust the agreement with Hitler about the division of spheres of influence in Europe.227 Molotov’s enormous demands (based on Stalin’s desires) showed an unrealistic appreciation of the international prestige of the Soviet Union at the time. Though the Russian’s presumptuousness surprised Hitler, he was unfazed. Within a month he ordered his commanders to work out a full-fledged plan to invade the Soviet Union in the spring of 1941. A week after Molotov’s Berlin conversations, a united plenum of the Leningrad obkom and gorkom listened as Zhdanov boasted that the Soviet leadership continued to strengthen the position of socialism by staying aloof from the armed conflict in Europe. This insistence on the benefits deriving from the Soviet Union’s skillful diplomatic manoeuvring sounded a trifle shrill.228 The closer Barbarossa came, the more the Soviet leaders admired their own “impregnable fortress.” While Stalin, Molotov, and Zhdanov erred in predicting the timing of the German attack, they at least half-believed in the inevitability of an attack, and their fear increased in the fall of 1940. In early December 1940, Party organizations of the armed forces in the different military districts of the Soviet Union met in conferences dedicated to maintaining ideological alertness.229 In the middle of December an all-Union Party Conference was called for February 1941.230 Zhdanov ended the year 1940 attending a week-long meeting of more than 270 Red Army commanders and political leaders who concentrated on the likely scenarios of a future war involving the Soviet Union.231 John Erickson suggests that Zhdanov followed “intently and purposefully” these “study sessions” and was the sole senior political boss to do so.232 In the first two weeks of January 1941, the General Staff practised war games simulating battles between the ussr and the German Reich.233 As a member of the Main Defence Council, Zhdanov served both as a liaison, maintaining the link between the military and the civil-

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ian leaderships, and as the armed forces’ ideological supervisor.234 In this latter capacity, he received a report on the lack of mental preparedness for war among Red Army soldiers in January 1941 from the chief of the army’s Main Direction of Political Propaganda, A.I. Zaporozhets (1899–1959). The report was the upshot of meetings held by the army’s Party branches of a month before.235 Zaporozhets suggested that the international pacifist campaign conducted by the Soviet Union undermined the belligerence of the reserves in particular; army propagandists proved incapable of igniting a fighting spirit. Newspapers wrote too little about the possibility of war, too few patriotic songs were sung, no films realistically portrayed a modern war, radio broadcasts lacked the proper military tone, and few writers depicted modern warfare in their works. Zaporozhets believed that the Soviet population underestimated its potential enemies. If war broke out, the Red Army would be at a distinct disadvantage because, despite the existence of several schools teaching foreign languages, most soldiers knew neither the enemy’s languages nor anything else about him. Soviet education did not ready young men and women for battle, and it even failed to familiarize the pupils with the natural surroundings outside their own cities. Finally, many reserves were in poor physical shape. Zaporozhets intimated that only long-term solutions could bring significant change. Zhdanov apparently agreed, as he voiced Zaporozhets’s analysis of the soldiers’ frame of mind as his own in February.236 The Soviet bosses did not have sufficient time to attempt any successful transformation of this supposedly deficient fighting spirit, despite stepped-up efforts in subsequent months.237 But even during the incessant series of defeats in the first months of war, the soldiers’ morale proved remarkably resilient, when a fervent desire to defend their motherland combined with their outrage at the Germans’ brutal behaviour. As liaison, Zhdanov negotiated the army’s need for weapons with the managers of military industry. At the beginning of 1941, on Stalin’s orders, Zhdanov crudely settled a row between army commander G.I. Kulik (1890–1950) and People’s Commissar of Armaments Boris Vannikov (1897–1962).238 These two quarrelled about the practicality of producing a tank mounted with a huge 107-mm cannon, the construction of which was Kulik’s idea. Vannikov opposed building such unwieldy machines (the oversized cannon would prevent the tanks from moving with any agility) and he criticized Zhdanov for supporting Kulik. At the end of the only meeting of a Politburo commission struck to solve this issue, Zhdanov dismissed Vannikov from the commission and reported his “insubordination” to Stalin. On 6 April

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1941 a new Politburo commission chaired by Zhdanov recommended, after some deliberations, producing tanks armed with the 107-mm gun. By early June Vannikov had been tortured in prison by nkvd investigators. But during the early days of the war, production of the 107-mm tank was quietly cancelled, and Vannikov was released and appointed People’s Commissar of Ammunitions. This striking example shows that Zhdanov could take strong exception to subordinates who contradicted him. Often, his shouting and swearing proved enough to intimidate them.239 Zhdanov showed his less-destructive side when, on 11 January 1941, he informed film director Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948) and script writer Lev Sheinin that the film they were making about the prerevolutionary Beilis Affair in Kiev was undesirable and suggested that they produce a film about Ivan the Terrible instead.240 Zhdanov furnished the main concept of the film about the tsar, who was one of Stalin’s historical heroes, and who had recently been restored as a positive figure in Russian history. Stalin, Ivan’s admirer, had likely coached his lieutenant before his meeting with the filmmakers. Much later, in September 1942, Eisenstein received Stalin’s personal blessing for the screenplay and production commenced. Defence matters absorbed most of Zhdanov’s time in those months. On 14 January the Stalinist bosses listened to Timoshenko report in Stalin’s office on the results of the General Staff’s war games.241 The report led to the replacement of Meretskov by Zhukov as chief of staff. In February and March 1941, Military Council member Zhdanov supervised the dismantling and transfer of fortifications located along the pre-September 1939 Soviet borders to the newly acquired Soviet territory further to the west. Army units were also redeployed closer to the new borders.242 Zhdanov and Stalin seem to have believed that there was plenty of time to relocate the line of defence.243 Unfortunately, the decision to do so came far too late. Much of the artillery, for example, was not in position by 22 June 1941. The Soviet leaders tried to improve their country’s security by an administrative reorganization of the secret police in the winter of 1941. On 3 February, in the name of the Politburo an unnamed “cc secretary” (which usually meant Stalin) split the nkvd into an nkvd and an NKGB.244 On 8 February the Sovnarkom and cc transferred the departments that conducted the struggle with espionage, counterrevolution, diversion, wrecking, and sundry anti-Soviet phenomena of the former GUGB section of the nkvd to the authority of the People’s Commissariats of Defence and Navy.245 Once again, although this bureaucratic reorganization was intended to aid Soviet defence, it

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turned out to hinder the efficacy of Soviet intelligence, since war broke out before the sections had been realigned. Zhdanov led a Leningrad obkom plenum on 7 and 8 February in anticipation of the Eighteenth Party Conference (staged from 15 to 21 February). He joined Stalin daily in the Kremlin to prepare for the Conference.246 By Stalin’s decree, the Conference highlighted younger Party leaders, those who had come to the fore during the 1930s as result of the combined effect of collectivization, industrialization, and the purges.247 Of the almost six hundred delegates, threequarters were under the age of forty.248 The level of education of the delegates had improved over previous meetings. The fact that onequarter were professional engineers by trade partially resulted from the focus of the Conference: managerial efficiency within the Party and state bureaucracy and in the economy.249 The six-day Conference was the last time Zhdanov attended so sizable a gathering of Party prominents. Like an elder statesman, Zhdanov stayed in the wings at the Conference. Yet he had really only “arrived” himself two years earlier. He did not deliver a report but gave a short opening speech and chaired the meeting during its first three days.250 His protégés A.A. Kuznetsov, A.S. Shcherbakov, A.N. Kosygin, and the director of the Leningrad Kirov works, I.M. Zal’tsman (1905–88), all addressed the meeting, and N.A. Voznesensky delivered one of two key reports (G.M. Malenkov was the other main speaker).251 At the Conference’s end, a number of army and navy commanders were added to the cc, a sign of the government’s continued emphasis on defence, although in effect foreign affairs and defence had been largely ignored during its proceedings.252 Six full cc members were demoted to candidate membership and fifteen candidates were excluded.253 These dismissals amounted largely to retribution for failing job performance, but in a deviation from previous years, those who lost their seats on the cc escaped further punishment.254 Voznesensky, Shcherbakov, and Malenkov became candidate-members of the Politburo.255 As typically happened in the last prewar years, the Party meeting was followed by a session of the ussr Supreme Soviet, which continued into March.256 The public silence there about foreign policy was deafening. The Party conference and Supreme Soviet meeting both tried to convey a lack of concern about the threat of war, perhaps in a strange attempt to outbluff the Nazis. But Soviet German policy at the time appeared confused and contradictory, for the leadership also undertook all kinds of moves in secret and in public to show the Nazis the Soviet goodwill. One such friendly move was the Stalinists’ preparation to dissolve

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the Comintern, a favourite bugbear of Hitler’s and Mussolini’s. For them, the Comintern gave credence to the idea of an international subversive Communist organization trying to overthrow their New Order. On 27 February Zhdanov, Malenkov, and Andreev met with Dimitrov in the offices of the cc Secretariat. They ordered a new Comintern line regarding the international solidarity and unity of the global Communist movement, which was to allow Communist parties elsewhere more flexibility to adjust to the conditions in the different countries in which they operated.257 Many Communist parties could no longer communicate with Moscow because they had been prohibited by their own governments or were living a shady existence under German occupation. Such parties were of little use to the Soviet leadership in furthering the Soviet cause and they were costly, since Moscow continued subsidizing foreign parties whenever possible. And indeed, for several Communist parties in Europe, it was preferable to join the resistance against oppressive home-made right-wing regimes or German occupiers, as their neutral stance had cost them the support of many of their members and Communist sympathizers. Since 1939, communism had lost much credit because of Moscow’s rapprochement with Nazism; some of its integrity might be regained by finally taking a firm stand against the various rightwing regimes. Despite such rhetoric, Zhdanov seemed rather more intent on placating the Nazis than subverting them. A couple of months later, on 20 April, in the presence of Dimitrov and the entire Politburo except Beria, Stalin announced that, in order to give more freedom to manoeuvre to national Communist parties, the time had come to dissolve the Comintern.258 Three weeks after this, Dimitrov and several other Comintern leaders met with Zhdanov in his office on Staraia Ploshchad to draw up a plan for the dissolution of the Communist International.259 Zhdanov justified the Comintern’s end by hinting that it encouraged a “rootless cosmopolitanism,” supposedly alien to “proletarian internationalism.” Here we find an early sign of the use of a concept that gained currency in the postwar ideological offensive and went back to the “reemergence of the Russians” in the Soviet Union of the 1930s.260 Zhdanov’s utterances of February and May 1941 seem to forecast a more loosely organized centre of international Communist coordination to replace the Comintern; eventually, in 1947, the Cominform was founded in an attempt to fit the bill.261 After the May 1941 meeting between Zhdanov and the Comintern executive, however, discussions about a transition among the Comintern executive stopped.262 Thus, by the spring of 1941 the Inner Circle had begun to dismantle the Comintern. Before the dissolution could be

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completed, however, war broke out. When the Comintern was finally dissolved in 1943, it was to please the United Kingdom and United States rather than the Nazis.

on t h e e v e In early March, Bulgaria signed on to the Axis, while German troops deployed in both Romania and Bulgaria in reaction to the mounting defeats of the Italian forces in Greece. Yugoslavia briefly joined the Axis in late March but then declared itself neutral again after an anglophile coup. In another inconsistent move, since it was bound to anger the Germans, the Soviet Union signed a friendship treaty with the Yugoslav government on 5 April. The next day, German armed forces invaded both Yugoslavia and Greece. Zhdanov told Dimitrov at the time that the leadership condemned the German invasion of Yugoslavia and Greece but that no concrete consequences followed from this since it wanted to maintain the German alliance.263 The Soviet leadership continued to observe a generally neutral anti-imperialist position, neither pro-German nor proBritish. To mollify the Nazis, Zhdanov instructed Dimitrov not to issue any Comintern slogans for the May Day celebration.264 On 9 April the Council of Defence was reorganized by the cc and Sovnarkom. Zhdanov was now made deputy chair.265 Its five-man membership (Voroshilov chaired; the other three members were Stalin, N.G. Kuznetsov, and Timoshenko) dedicated itself to the intensification of war preparations.266 Steps were taken to prepare for war accompanied by desperate diplomatic moves to avoid it. On 13 April the global strategic position of the Soviet Union underwent a drastic improvement with the signing of the Soviet-Japanese Non-Aggression Pact in Moscow.267 Back in Leningrad, Zhdanov greeted the annual May Day parade on Leningrad’s Palace Square in the company of P.S. Popkov, A.A. Kuznetsov, and Ia. F. Kapustin (1904–50).268 The strain of Zhdanov’s responsibility for a multitude of tasks began to tell. A photo taken on that day shows a bloated-looking man who had visibly aged. Harrison Salisbury, then stationed in Russia, remembered Zhdanov as a “darkhaired man with brown eyes and, in his early years, considerable physical attraction. But as with many Soviet functionaries the ceaseless hours of work (often at night because of Stalin’s habit of keeping late evening hours), the lack of physical exercise, the multitude of ceremonial banquets took their toll. By the eve of the war Zhdanov was overweight, pasty-faced and prey to severe asthmatic attacks. He was a chain smoker, lighting one Belomor after the other until the pepelnitsa [ashtray] on his desk was cluttered with stubs.”269

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Rather than for war, the forty-five-year-old Leningrad helmsman was ready for a holiday in the spring of 1941. On 4 May a Politburo decision reshuffled the responsibilities of the Inner Circle. Stalin replaced Molotov as chair of the Sovnarkom. Zhdanov was explicitly appointed second secretary and deputy to Stalin in the cc Secretariat and replaced as overseer of the Agitprop directorate by Shcherbakov, who was promoted to cc secretary.270 Shcherbakov also continued as chief of the Moscow obkom and gorkom. This redivision of tasks was prompted by the fact that Stalin, as Soviet premier, spent most of his time now on defence and foreignpolicy matters, leaving the Party’s business more than ever to Zhdanov. Both Malenkov and Zhdanov were added by the Politburo to the government “cabinet,” the Sovnarkombiuro, on 30 May.271 The 4 May shuffle was another stab at delineating the responsibilities of the leaders.272 Stalin and Molotov were preoccupied by foreign policy, and in becoming premier Stalin’s formal role was clarified for foreign consumption. Undoubtedly, Stalin’s entry into the Sovnarkom increased the importance of government organs at the expense of Party organization, although it is hard to assess how much the balance tilted.273 Zhdanov received some approving recognition through his confirmation as Stalin’s stand-in for Party affairs, and his replacement by his old friend Shcherbakov as supervisor of Agitprop released him from some of his more onerous duties. It may well be, too, that the key leaders (Stalin, Molotov, Zhdanov, possibly now Malenkov and Beria, too) had decided that Agitprop had been sufficiently restructured by Zhdanov during the previous two and a half years and could now be safely left in the trusted hands of Shcherbakov and Aleksandrov and the latter’s team; there is evidence, too, that in June Shcherbakov continued to defer to Zhdanov in key Agitprop matters. Zhdanov’s position in the Soviet power structure appears formidable on the eve of the war. Apart from his post as the Party’s Number Two and his membership in the Sovnarkombiuro, he was surrounded by a number of clients. Two people whom he had mentored in Leningrad and with whom he had been connected before 1935 had reached the highest levels: Voznesensky and Shcherbakov. The Leningraders Aleksei Kosygin and Aleksei Kuznetsov were cc members. Zhdanov had close ties with the secretary of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, Gorkin, Pravda editor Pospelov, and Admiral Kuznetsov. Most crucial of all, of course, was his relationship with Stalin. On 5 May Stalin delivered an address to the graduating class of the Military Academy in Moscow.274 Zhdanov listened as Stalin spoke of Soviet preparations for an aggressive war, indicating a new emphasis in

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Soviet foreign and defence policy.275 For the first time since August 1939 at a large though selective event, Stalin argued that Nazi Germany was the most likely Soviet foe in war. Stalin was hoping that war would not break out in 1941 since Soviet preparations were far from complete, particularly for the offensive war that was deemed preferable by Soviet strategists.276 During the next weeks the consequences of Stalin’s address for Soviet civilian and military agitprop were further worked out by Zhdanov, Shcherbakov, Aleksandrov, Zaporozhets, and Malenkov.277 Zhdanov’s first public airing of the stronger anti-German line came on 14 and 15 May when he addressed people working in Soviet film.278 The ideological bosses condemned the ideas and values depicted in recent films, using a version of the criticism of the Avdeenko script of the year before.279 Quality, not quantity, was said to be important, a new emphasis informed by Stalin’s recent move to reduce the number of films produced annually. Incongruously, Zhdanov also used the occasion to explain to this audience that a propitious moment had arrived to “extend the front of socialism,” as the recent annexations of the western territories by the ussr indicated.280 On the military front, the situation remained worrisome. On 17 May Zhukov, Timoshenko, and Zhdanov submitted a report to the rest of the highest leadership assessing the state of the army during the winter exercises of 1941.281 The report depicted a low morale and officers unprepared for a “modern” war.282 Meanwhile, the report’s long gestation (the exercises had ended more than four months earlier) indicates that a mistaken sense of calm, or apathy incurred by panic, or profound psychological denial permeated the highest circles of the Soviet Union. The only civilian or military leader who dared to express serious doubts about the general complacency regarding the growing German threat was the People’s Commissar of the Navy, Admiral N.G. Kuznetsov, who in May called a meeting, attended by Zhdanov, of the Main Naval Council.283 Kuznetsov wanted to relocate ships of the Baltic fleet from Libava (Liepaja) to Riga, from where they could more easily sail out and would be further away from German naval bases, aircraft, or invading troops in case war broke out. Although Zhdanov was by then involved in designing the subtly stronger anti-German ideological tone, he refrained from supporting Kuznetsov’s prudent proposals. While the Stalinists refused to place the armed forces on high alert, they were frantically restructuring the highest ruling bodies, with the formal responsibilities of individual leaders waxing and waning. Dissatisfied with the state of military equipment and arms, the Politburo abolished the Council of Defence on 30 May and replaced it with a Commission for Military and Naval Affairs under the Sovnarkombiuro,

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chaired by Stalin, with Voznesensky deputizing, and Voroshilov, Zhdanov, and Malenkov as the other members.284 The Main Military Council under the Defence Commissariat, which had a purely militarystrategic function, met on 4 June to discuss the military and political situation.285 Zhdanov chaired and delivered the main report, discussing Soviet military and foreign policy.286 He outlined the future direction of propaganda to be conducted by guppka. Zhdanov stated that “[the Soviet Union had become] stronger, and […]can pose more active questions. The wars with Poland and Finland were not defensive wars. We have already entered the path of an offensive policy.”287 Zhdanov reiterated the new ideological line here, while in the Agitprop directorate, on the orders of Zhdanov and Shcherbakov, a cc resolution was prepared on the future tasks of propaganda in general as well.288 These guidelines simply echoed Stalin’s own announcement in early May of the beginning of a new line towards Germany, the new foe, and the European war.289 The absence of concerted moves to bring the country to a state of full military alert in the next weeks show the continued complacency among the Soviet Union’s leaders regarding a possible German invasion. Admiral Kuznetsov, who saw a lot of Mikoian and Zhdanov, wrote how both stubbornly stuck to a line of strict neutrality in that period.290 In Kuznetsov’s opinion, Stalin and his cronies did not believe in the possibility of a German attack because in their wisdom they had concluded that Hitler’s strategic thought was modelled after Bismarck’s. Thus, Hitler never wanted to fight a war on two fronts. Kuznetsov adds that Stalin, Zhdanov, and Mikoian may have believed that the 1941 strategic situation remained similar to that of 1939 and 1940. In those years any German plan to invade the ussr had indeed been considered as reckless audacity by Hitler and his generals because of their entanglement with Poland, Britain, France, and so on. But the situation in 1941 was rather different from the German perspective, even if Yugoslavia and Greece had temporarily distracted them. The Soviet leadership’s sense of confidence about the impossibility of an imminent war is highlighted by the permission given by the Politburo on 10 June to Zhdanov to take a one-and-a-half-month holiday in Sochi, in order to recuperate from general exhaustion and illness.291 Were an offensive war being prepared or a defensive war expected, his fellow leaders would hardly have given the virtual head of the Party such a long vacation.292 Indeed, Stalin himself added two weeks to the month suggested by the Kremlin doctors as necessary for Zhdanov’s recovery. We have seen how intensively Zhdanov had been involved with matters of defence. If he had believed that war was imminent, he would have opted for a shortened recovery period, even if he

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was ill, in Central Russia or possibly the Leningrad region. And his illness was not extremely serious, for the Politburo decided that Zhdanov was not to leave for the Black Sea until 19 June, once he had taken care of unfinished business.293 On 14 June Izvestiia announced that there was no truth to the rumour of imminent war between Germany and the Soviet Union.294 But in fact German, Romanian, Hungarian, and Finnish soldiers, joined by troops volunteering from German-occupied Europe, Spain, and Portugal, were amassing on the Soviet borders for a crusade against Bolshevism. They were accompanied by tanks, artillery, armed personnel carriers, lorries, motorcycles, airplanes, and ships in quantities never seen before. The invasion of the ussr had been carefully mapped by the experienced German General Staff. The greatest trump-card of the Nazi-led forces, however, was their opponents’ astonishing surprise when the attack finally came, on 22 June 1941. Despite such advantages, Operation Barbarossa was foolhardy. But for the poor Soviet military preparation, it is unlikely that the Germans would have penetrated as far as they did into Soviet territory. Not all of the immense suffering inflicted on their subjects by the Germans can be blamed on the errors of Stalin, Zhdanov, and the other key figures at the top. They may even deserve some credit for transforming the Soviet Union at an accelerated pace into a semi-industrial country during the 1930s. Through the sheer size of its industry, the Soviet Union could bounce back after absorbing the tremendous blows of the first months of the German advance. Perhaps, too, the tight regimentation of Soviet society and its economy enabled a concerted and sustained defensive effort. But the question remains what might have happened if Stalin had ordered the German Communist Party to collaborate with the German Social-Democrats between 1930 and 1933; if he had not signed the Non-Aggression Pact in 1939; or, perhaps most pertinently, if he had taken seriously the many warnings about German intentions that had begun to reach him months before the invasion itself.295 Those dragon’s teeth became a dragon harvest on 22 June 1941. Boarding the train for the Caucasus a few days earlier, Andrei Zhdanov could look back on what appeared to be astonishing personal success in the last few years. Even when his reputation had been endangered, as during the Winter War, he had weathered the storm remarkably well compared to others involved in the debacle. He had reduced Estonia to a Soviet republic with ease. He had solidified his position as Stalin’s stand-in boss of the Communist party and was one of Stalin’s two most trusted advisors, as the speech of March 1939 at the Eighteenth Party Congress had made evident and as the May 1941

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shuffle had confirmed. The country that Zhdanov had helped to build had successfully stayed out of the European war for almost two years. Much work needed to be done, since war in the near future remained possible even if by the second week of June 1941 the Nazis seemed to have missed another chance for an invasion of a country as large as the Soviet Union with its unforgiving climate and terrain. Hitler would surely not attack so late in the year, the Stalinists thought. Zhdanov perhaps mused about how, once returned from his holidays, he would tackle the challenge of improving army morale, defensive fortifications, strategic plans, and industrial production for the military. In his comfortable compartment, Zhdanov might have looked confidently to a future in which, after his recovery, he would help to ready army and country for a war that the Soviet Union, rather than Germany, might even initiate, in 1942.

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8 Dragon Harvest, 1941–1945 How could it happen, that our sacred Red Army surrendered a number of towns and districts to the fascist armies? Stalin1

sov iet m o r a l e Although Andrei Zhdanov formally lost neither his cc secretaryship nor his Politburo membership, he did not belong to the core Soviet leadership during the “Great Patriotic War,” as Soviet political discourse and historiography labelled World War ii. Unlike a number a number of military commanders in particular, Zhdanov escaped severe punishment for his errors in the summer of 1941, when Leningrad narrowly escaped German capture. Zhdanov deferred to the generals in military matters after his disastrous involvement during the early stages of the fighting. As civilian head of a city that held out with great tenacity until the Germans finally retreated, he returned to Moscow in 1945 with some restored credibility. Although he reaped the benefits of this successful defence of Leningrad, it came at a ghastly price, much higher than necessary, for which cost Zhdanov carried considerable responsibility. As I pointed out in the last chapter, the terrible sufferings of the Soviet people during the war might have been lessened had their leaders behaved differently. But it was especially the dragon’s teeth of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact that turned into a dragon harvest for the Soviet leaders. It had allowed Nazi Germany’s armed forces to become a formidable military machine backed by almost all of continental Europe’s economy. How Stalin could have ignored the warnings about a German invasion throughout the spring of 1941 remains inexplicable. Andrei Zhdanov had helped both in preparing the ground for the

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pact and in cultivating the resulting mood of smugness throughout the subsequent twenty months. On 21 June 1941, while Zhdanov travelled to his holiday destination, his old acquaintance Kiril Meretskov was appointed supreme military commander of the Leningrad Military District.2 By the time the general arrived in Leningrad the next day, war had broken out. The organization of the region’s defence in the first days of war fell to a District council, made up of gorkom secretary A.A. Kuznetsov, obkom secretary T.F. Shtykov, Meretskov, army political administration chief N.N. Klement’ev (1897–1954), and chief of staff D.N. Nikishev. But a series of leading bodies would quickly succeed each other until some stability was finally found in September.3 In a strange turn of events, Meretskov was removed from his command over the Leningrad district on 23 June, recalled to Moscow, arrested by the nkgb-nkvd, interrogated under torture, and confined in the Lubianka jail for more than two months. He was then released and returned to the Leningrad front in September.4 He had been arrested as a member of the same fictitious conspiracy for which former People’s Commissar for Armaments Vannikov was already in jail. The Stalinists’ persistent fear of conspiracy kept a number of valuable military experts in prison during the first months of the war. In Moscow, after the leadership had overcome its disbelief about the German treachery, one of its first responses to the war resembled that in Leningrad, for the Stalinists decided to implement an administrative reorganization, specifically of the military command, with the Sovnarkom and cc introducing a general headquarters, the Stavka.5 Its first chair was Timoshenko, People’s Commissar for Defence, and it consisted further of Chief of Staff General Georgii Zhukov, Stalin, Molotov, Marshal Voroshilov, Marshal Budennyi, and Admiral Kuznetsov. Although absent, Zhdanov was appointed one of its “permanent advisors” together with Kaganovich, Beria, Malenkov, Mekhlis, and several commanders, including Meretskov, but the role of permanent advisor to the Stavka was done away with in subsequent weeks.6 Meanwhile, Zhdanov returned to Moscow from the south on 24 June, when he briefly met Stalin, Molotov, and several others in the Kremlin.7 Having handed over some of his files to the other cc secretaries who were to stay in Moscow (Andreev, Malenkov, Shcherbakov), he immediately left for Leningrad, thereby ending in practice his stint as official deputy Party boss. His hasty departure for Leningrad, although based in part on his supposed military expertise regarding the theatre, was remarkable. Zhdanov’s volunteering (or at least immediately agreeing)8 to remove himself from Moscow shows a

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self-effacing modesty and eagerness to please Stalin; from a purely political point of view, after all, it was a mistake to leave the centre at such a time of crisis. It would be five years before Zhdanov became second-in-command of the Party again. Of course, in June 1941 Zhdanov could not foresee that the war would pin him down in Leningrad for so long, and his appointment as permanent advisor to the Stavka indicates that he was expected to be only temporarily or intermittently in Leningrad. On 26 June the Finns declared war on the ussr, and the successful German-Finnish advance towards the city made Leningrad a key focus of the Soviet defence in the late summer and early fall. When Zhdanov did not impress the membership of the State Defence Committee in leading this defence, his political standing dropped precipitously, and any thoughts of recalling him to Moscow evaporated, even after it became clear that Leningrad was unlikely to fall. In the northern sector of the front, German forces had already crossed the Western Dvina on 26 June.9 Soviet military fortunes reached a low after a week of fighting, when the central part of the Soviet defence almost collapsed. In reaction, Stalin lost his poise for a few days, from 29 June to 1 July.10 On June 30, in the midst of his personal crisis, the State Defence Council (gko) was created, on which Stalin joined Molotov, Voroshilov, Malenkov, and Beria.11 The next day, mirroring the central organization, a Defence Council was formed in Leningrad (lko), consisting of Zhdanov, Party secretaries Kuznetsov and Shtykov, oblispolkom chair N.V. Solov’ev, and gorispolkom chair Popkov.12 The lko replaced the defence council of the early days of the war. The gko maintained contact with Leningrad usually through the special phoneline for the highest leaders, the vertushka, although sometimes telegrams were dispatched.13 On 3 July Stalin delivered his first public wartime speech on the radio.14 The radio reception in Leningrad was poor and several parts of the speech were incomprehensible to listeners.15 Stalin justified the 1939 pact with Hitler on the grounds that it had gained the Soviet Union precious time.16 Many received Stalin’s words with hostility; they felt that they had been caught unawares by the outbreak of war. Nonetheless, in spite of the initial lack of enthusiasm and considerable resentment, the majority of the Russians in Leningrad and elsewhere decided to resist the Germans, which ultimately allowed Stalin’s regime to survive. Wartime propaganda, which was more accommodating towards Russian traditions (including the Orthodox religion), sentimental attachment to the Fatherland (Otechestvo) or Motherland (Rodina), fear of the security organs, and German brutality all

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contributed to the determination of the great majority of soldiers and civilians in defending their city and country.17 The Nazis fought savagely. Soviet prisoners of war were horribly treated by their captors. On 8 July Hitler ordered the execution of all Jews and Communists on the Eastern Front upon capture.18 On 17 July the Gestapo recommended the killing of pows who were deemed to be “dangerous.”19 Mass executions of civilians accompanied the German advance. The Nazis’ systematic extermination of Jews in Europe began with the invasion of the Soviet Union and the work of the ss Einsatzgruppen. This type of ghastly conduct presented the Germans at first with military advantages, for it led to massive flight by the horrified civilian population in the direction of what they hoped were safe havens such as Leningrad, thus hindering the Soviet defence. But Nazi brutality proved counterproductive, because it steeled the resolve of Soviet civilians and soldiers and supplied a critical reason to fight for Stalin. Even though Stalin regained his composure in early July, Soviet civilian leaders and military commanders were prone to bouts of panic under the impact of the seemingly endless series of defeats. The Soviet authorities tried their customary crude methods to restore order, but Stalin’s orders to execute central-front commander Dmitrii Pavlov and other high-ranking officers and the constant reorganization of the fronts failed to stop the German juggernaut.20 On 10 July the gko created a joint command for each of three theatres of defence, or Main Directions. The command of the North-Western Direction (made up out of the Northern and North-Western fronts) consisted of Voroshilov as commander-in-chief (he now departed for Leningrad), Zhdanov as member of the Military Council, and General M.V. Zakharov as chief of staff.21

or ganizing t h e h in t e r l a n d On 29 June in Leningrad authorities introduced a limited curfew and ordered sending the city’s children to the rear, a process conducted at snail’s pace.22 In July and August the evacuation of both people and industrial plant proceeded far too slowly because of ongoing overweening faith in the capacity of the Soviet lines to stop the Germans long before they could reach the city.23 This delusional attitude is illustrated by the dispatch in July of many evacuees precisely in the directions from which the Germans soon approached the city.24 On 8 July, in order to expedite the evacuation, the Leningrad oblispolkom created an Evacuation Commission, but large evacuations from the city did not begin in earnest until the middle of August.25 Some Soviet

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and post-Soviet works maintain that one-sixth of Leningrad’s 3.1 million people had been evacuated before the Germans completed their encirclement on 8 September, leaving slightly more than 2.5 million people within the blockaded city.26 But a Western historian, Léon Gouré, has calculated that no more than about 170,000 would have managed to leave the city by train before all rail traffic was halted at the end of August. He believes that an additional 40,000 at most may have managed to leave by other means of transport during the first week of September.27 After the war, Soviet authorities remained reluctant to issue any precise information about the number of deaths during the Leningrad famine, for which their negligent predecessors (and the future longtime Soviet premier Aleksei Kosygin) had been partially responsible. The figure of about half a million evacuees may have included thousands of people who did not actually get away and died in the city during the fall and winter of 1941–42. In late June Leningrad’s civilians (men between the ages of sixteen and fifty and women between sixteen and forty-five) were ordered to dig trenches and antitank ditches, place barbed wire, lay mines, and build pillboxes.28 For three hours a day after work or school, the Leningraders laboured on these fortifications; pensioners and homemakers toiled for eight hours a day on the lines. A four-day break was decreed after every seven days, but few took it. On 4 July the lko ordered the city’s raikoms to concentrate on military issues, and in subsequent days, under the personal supervision of raikom Party secretaries, opolchenie units were formed by men aged eighteen to fifty, who were exempt from normal army service.29 Some 160,000 workers volunteered ultimately for these opolchenie units, out of which ten divisions were formed.30 Badly trained, armed, and organized, they proved to be cannon fodder.31 While desertion among these units was higher than among regular army units, very few of the home-guard troops survived their first month of fighting.32 The Stavka’s and gko’s reshuffling of the command structure did not prevent German tank divisions from breaching Soviet defensive lines with ease. On 4 July the first German units reached the territory of Leningrad oblast.33Wehrmacht Army Group Nord captured Riga and Pskov before mid-July, leading to a panicky visit by Zhdanov and Voroshilov to Novgorod on 12 July in an effort to shore up the defence organization and soldiers’ resolve.34 For a moment, a hastily organized Soviet counteroffensive slowed down the German advance.35 In midJuly, the two bosses of the North-Western Direction ordered the formation of “partisan” units (istribitel’nye polki) out of the home-guard volunteers. Some fifteen thousand were sent behind German lines to

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sabotage communication and supply lines, blow up bridges, or lay mines, again at great loss of life and without much success.36 It would have been wiser at that point to avoid wasting manpower and instead concentrate the defence by withdrawing from positions close to Leningrad, but Zhdanov and Voroshilov were incapable of appraising the situation soberly.37 Both underestimated the pace of the German advance, and they often resorted to outdated tactics used during the Russian civil war. When news arrived in Leningrad on 14 July that German units were a mere two hundred kilometres south of the city, Voroshilov and Zhdanov bitterly criticized the behaviour of the troops on the NorthWestern Front.38 Accustomed since 1929 to viewing force as the most effective way of getting results, the two Politburo members threatened the death penalty for unauthorized departure from the front.39 Despite this decree, nkvd troops (who functioned as military police) arrested almost five hundred thousand Soviet deserters, spies, saboteurs, and traitors during the war.40 For at least two years, special nkvd units operated just behind the front lines to stop fleeing soldiers. Altogether almost one million Soviet soldiers were convicted of various crimes, of whom four hundred thousand were sentenced to serve in the notorious punitive batallions whose units were often decimated in battle. On 18 July the Leningrad chiefs introduced rationing in the city.41 On 22 July the gko ordered kolkhozniks to destroy crops on farmland that was on the verge of falling to the enemy.42 Such scorched-earth tactics made life difficult for the German forces, but the strategy also contributed to the shortages that tormented Leningrad that autumn and winter. Stalin met Zhdanov and Voroshilov in Moscow on 30 July, sharply criticizing both for their ineffective command of the NorthWestern Direction.43 It was the first of a series of reprimands that Stalin delivered to Zhdanov in the second half of 1941.

embattl e d On 8 August, after a pause of several days, the German offensive in the direction of Leningrad resumed.44 In the eastern sector of the front it was slowed down by a second Soviet counteroffensive near Staraia Russa, but the Soviet defensive lines in the Baltic area collapsed.45 Voroshilov, Zhdanov, and their military subordinates responded by executing several officers whom they held responsible for letting the Germans through.46 On 20 August, at a meeting of the Leningrad Party aktiv, a panicky Zhdanov admitted that the military situation had grown utterly precarious. He announced that female volunteers were

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officially allowed to join the opolchenie and warned that the nkvd was permitted to ignore the formalities of peacetime to maintain discipline and seek out traitors.47 Voroshilov spoke at the same meeting on the purely military state of affairs. On the same day, Zhdanov and Voroshilov signed a special appeal to rally the troops defending the city.48 An appeal to the civilian population to hold firm, signed by Zhdanov, Voroshilov, and Popkov, was published in the local newspapers the following day.49 Vannikov recalls in his memoirs how in those days Stalin cursed Zhdanov and Kulik for the poor state of Soviet artillery and tanks, indicating Stalin’s general dismay with Zhdanov.50 In addition to the sheer military incompetence and insubordination of which Stalin accused Zhdanov several times in July, August, and September, Zhdanov was a poor leader of the civilian front in the early days of war. He had failed Stalin, but, more importantly, he had failed the Leningraders. His responsibility was great for the appalling suffering that awaited them. First of all, the organization of the evacuation of civilians had been completely bungled through his irresponsible complacency about the grave military developments. He was thus partially responsible for the hundreds of thousands of famine-related deaths of those trapped in the city.51 Second, he had failed to organize the fortification of the city in timely fashion.52 Third, it was at least partially his fault that inadequate supplies had been stored in the city.53 In addition, several authors suggest that Zhdanov hardly contributed to the city’s defence once the siege had begun. This last point, however, is moot. While he evidently maintained his aloof manner of the pre-war era, Mikoian exaggerates in stating that Zhdanov merely fulfilled a “ceremonial” (protokol’nyi) function.54 On 20 August Zhdanov and Voroshilov set up a special Military Council for the Defence of the city of Leningrad (vso), to which they assigned supervision of the construction of fortifications, military training of the population, production of weapons, and deployment of workers’ battalions. But they themselves did not join the vso.55 Stalin flew into a rage when he heard of these steps, as Zhdanov and Voroshilov had taken them without consulting him.56 Stalin’s anger was informed by acute anxiety, since Soviet forces in the area seemed incapable of stopping the German advance upon the city. On 22 August in a long-distance call to Zhdanov and Voroshilov, Stalin explained that the absence from the vso of the two highest leaders in Leningrad might be read as a sign that they had given up on the city and were on the verge of abandoning it.57 In addition, Stalin heavily criticized Voroshilov and Zhdanov for failing to coordinate the city’s defence. On Stalin’s orders, they joined the vso on 24

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August, but the gko’s measures to shore up Leningrad’s defence did not stop there.58 Moscow nkvd chief P.N. Kubatkin was dispatched to take over the Leningrad nkvd.59 In the city, the nkvd rigorously enforced a state of emergency, which involved a general curfew from 10:00 p.m. to 5:00 a.m.60 After capturing Kingisepp (on the old Soviet-Estonian border) and Novgorod on 16 August, the German forces broke through the unfinished line of defence at Luga on 22 August.61 Part of the railroad connecting Leningrad and Moscow had now fallen into German hands. By 28 August Soviet forces abandoned Tallinn. The day before, the gko had abolished the North-Western Direction command, “effectively ending Voroshilov’s and Zhdanov’s satrapy over military affairs at Leningrad.”62 On 28 August gko members Molotov, Malenkov, and Beria, together with Aleksei Kosygin (who had been given overall responsibility for Soviet supplies in the early days of the hostilities), Admiral Kuznetsov, airforce commander P.F. Zhigarev (1900–63), and the army’s main artillery specialist N.N. Voronov (1899–1968), arrived after a difficult trip in Leningrad, to help Voroshilov and Zhdanov in organizing the city’s defence.63 Kosygin noted how the “city’s leadership … had not understood the danger threatening Leningrad, and had not worried about the evacuation of inhabitants and industry.”64 The team seems to have begun with a general inspection of the state of affairs: Molotov, perhaps together with Kosygin, looked at the industrial plants and the government; Kosygin checked transport and communication routes; Malenkov scrutinized the Party organization and Beria the nkvd; and the three soldiers checked their respective branches of the Soviet armed forces and navy.65 This commission then rationalized the different bodies leading the defence of the city.66 The vso was abolished on 29 August and replaced by the Military Council of the Leningrad Front, directly subordinate to the gko, with Voroshilov as military commander, General M.M. Popov as its chief of staff, and Zhdanov, Aleksei Kuznetsov, Klement’ev, and Admiral I.S. Isakov (1894–1967) as the other members.67 The council’s functions overlapped so much with those of the lko that the latter body silently passed into oblivion as well. At lower levels, the different city raions had their own defence councils, made up of Party, government, nkvd, and military chiefs.68 Already after a day of inspections and deliberations, Molotov, Malenkov, and Zhdanov sent a message to Stalin suggesting that the oblast’ be cleansed of 96,000 people of “German and Finnish” origin.69 Beria issued an order to his underlings to increase the number of people to be deported from the region to 132,000, which

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proved impossible to execute since by 30 August the city’s eastern railway connection had also been cut off.70 Nevertheless, 11,000 “Germans” were deported before the German-Finnish encirclement of Leningrad was completed. The nkvd continued as far as possible to remove “diaspora nationals” from the city, as well as “socially alien” and “criminal” elements, throughout the rest of 1941 and much of 1942. By October 1942, a total of 130,000 people from all three categories had been deported to the Soviet interior. In the perilous situation of early September, a small Nazi fifth column emerged,71 reinforced by a handful of actual German agents, but most were easily detected. The treatment of political opponents or criminals such as burglars or robbers remained merciless.72 Remarkably, the Leningrad nkvd found sufficient time in the fall of 1941 to concoct a fictitious conspiracy similar to those of pre-war days.73 A rise in crime was engendered by the spread of the shortages that soon led to famine.74 According to Leningrad’s wartime supply chief, denunciations of ration-card fraud were common throughout the blockade, but acts of humanity and compassion outstripped the denunciations even during the worst of the famine.75 On 29 August Stalin, contemptuously bypassing Zhdanov and Voroshilov, sent another angry telegram to Kuznetsov, Molotov, and Malenkov in Leningrad, in which Marshal Voroshilov and General Popov in particular were attacked for their poor organization of the defence.76 The next day German troops reached the Neva River, and cut the railway connecting Leningrad with the rest of the ussr.77 The Moscow emissaries had arrived too late to prevent the city’s virtual encirclement, though it is unlikely that they could have done much better if they had arrived on the spot any earlier. A son of Georgii Malenkov maintains that Zhdanov in those days was “going to pieces, unshaven, drunk.”78 This seems unlikely, although his nerves were frayed by the German threat, Stalin’s anger, and the postponement of the rest cure he had been prescribed by his doctors in June.79 Nevertheless, the Moscow delegation may have helped to slow the German advance to a crawl, even if a further “900 days” of siege followed. 80 The Muscovites departed in the first days of September, leaving civilian matters again in the hands of Zhdanov. If the city had fallen, he would have been a political corpse, even if he had managed to escape death or capture by the Germans. While fortune smiled on him again, the Leningraders he was responsible for awaited a terrible fate.81 On 2 September rations were reduced once again in the city.82 The people’s run on the shops had already emptied the shelves in every

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store.83 On 6 September gorispolkom chief Popkov asked the gko for the first time for immediate delivery of food supplies.84 On 7 September the Germans, who were so confident of victory in this sector of the front that they had already begun to transfer some units to support their Moscow offensive, succeeded in driving a wedge through the Soviet lines and reached Lake Ladoga.85 By 8 September, with the fall of Shlissel’burg, Leningrad’s supply line was reduced to the waterway across Lake Ladoga.86 German aerial bombardments on 8 September, using incendiary bombs, destroyed a large proportion of the city’s food supplies at the Badaev warehouses.87 Its impact on the supply situation was severe, though probably not decisive, even if the warehouses’ destruction intensified the problem of insufficient reserves.88 The first signs of famine may already have become apparent by the middle of September.89 On 4 September Axis artillery began shelling buildings in the city itself; the first air raid followed two days later.90 German bombing was fierce in September but began to taper off fairly soon. A decent performance by the Soviet air defence and airforce limited the effect of German aerial bombardments. Moreover, the Germans did not deploy a large airforce at Leningrad, which Hitler had designated a secondary front on the day of the first German air raids.91 Ultimately some twenty thousand people were wounded and five thousand killed as a result of shelling and bombing in the course of the war.92 These are not inconsiderable numbers, but they pale against the number of famine victims. Materially, the Nazi siege caused significant destruction. Later, in 1944, Leningrad mayor P.S. Popkov reckoned that some 2.5 million square metres of city housing were destroyed in the war through artillery fire and bombardments.93 According to the then prevailing Soviet standards of four square metres of housing to which each urban resident was entitled, this destruction translates into the loss of one-fifth of the housing for the pre-war population. Even if Hitler no longer gave priority to the capture of Leningrad, a German breakthrough remained possible throughout most of September, certainly in the panicky opinion of Zhdanov, Kuznetsov, Voroshilov, and the other bosses, who initiated steps around 8 September to blow up the city in case of German capture.94 Perhaps it was these actions that provoked Stalin, Molotov, Malenkov, and Beria to dispatch a telegram to Zhdanov and Voroshilov in Leningrad, which read: “Your behaviour, manifesting itself in your informing us about our loss of one or other location, but usually not accompanied by any word about which sort of measures you have taken in order to finally halt the loss of cities and settlements, disturbs us. Thus you informed

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us very chaotically about the loss of Shlissel’burg. Will there be an end to the losses? Maybe you have already decided to surrender Leningrad?95 … Can one then hope for some kind of improvement at the front, or will Kulik’s aid also be rendered null, as the colossal aid of the kv tanks was reduced to zero? We demand from you that you inform us two to three times per day about the situation at the front and about the measures that you have taken.”96 Shlissel’burg’s fall and renewed fear of Leningrad’s surrender made an incensed Stalin replace his Civil War friend Voroshilov as commander of the Leningrad front with Georgii Zhukov on 9 September.97 Zhukov ultimately became the most famous Soviet commander of World War II, but in the late summer of 1941 his reputation still had to be made.98 Unlike Voroshilov, however, Zhukov was a professional soldier and had shown himself to be a fairly capable strategist in reorganizing the Soviet defence of the central front after its initial collapse in late June. Immediately preceding Zhukov’s arrival, Kiril Meretskov had also returned to the north-western theatre. The defence of Leningrad may have been facilitated by Hitler’s decision to focus elsewhere, but the Führer still desired its total destruction.99 Zhukov’s, Meretskov’s, and Zhdanov’s command helped to keep the city in Soviet hands. The first two months of warfare taught Zhdanov that it was wise to defer to the army commanders in any strictly military questions that came before the front’s military council.100 Part of Zhdanov’s role on the council was to observe the other members on Stalin’s behalf. Generals Zhukov, Meretskov, and Govorov remember Zhdanov in their censored memoirs as polite, well behaved, and a good listener who did not pull rank.101 His leadership over civilian affairs (supplies, arms production, the home guard) succeeded in keeping the war effort going despite the terrible hardships suffered by the Leningraders. The Party’s political monopoly and tightly disciplined organization proved useful during the siege, while a fairly efficient leadership team emerged under Zhdanov’s stewardship.102 The civilian membership of the Military Council was now made up of Zhdanov, Aleksei Kuznetsov, Shtykov, Kapustin, Solov’ev, and Popkov, but usually only Zhdanov and Zhukov (as the highest military officer) signed any orders in its name.103 Upon Zhukov’s arrival during the night of 10–11 September, he immediately discussed the defence of the city with Zhdanov, A.A. Kuznetsov, and Admiral Isakov. 104 Zhukov’s manner, though brusque and cruel, contributed to the successful defence of the city in September.105 Zhukov and Zhdanov ordered the immediate execution of deserters.106 Soviet troops showed no pity in mowing

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down, on Stalin’s direct orders, captured Russian civilians whom German soldiers pushed in front of them as a kind of living shield.107 The German advance ground to a halt in mid-September.108 Confidence grew correspondingly among the Soviet military in the second half of the month, as evidenced in an Order of the Day signed by Zhukov and Zhdanov on 25 September.109 The turnaround had come at tremendous cost. The military losses in the defence of Leningrad from 10 July to 30 September are estimated at 214,078 missing in action (either dead or unaccounted for) and 130,848 wounded out of a total of 517,000 troops that fought in this period at the front.110 Meanwhile, many of the call-ups who left in summer and fall for the front were replaced in the labour force by twelve- and thirteen year-old boys, fourteen-year-old girls, adult women, and pensioners.111 By 5 October it was obvious to the Stavka that the Germans and their allies had abandoned any immediate plan to storm Leningrad and had dug in.112 This was a Soviet victory of sorts, for, as David Glantz notes, “at Leningrad the concept of blitzkrieg failed for the first time in the Second World War.”113 Stalin even ordered the transfer from Leningrad of some industrial plant and technicians to shore up the defence of the centre.114 The Germans had shifted the thrust of their attack towards Moscow and Zhukov was recalled to the capital.115 He was succeeded in the Leningrad theatre by M.S. Khozin (1896–1979), an officer of no great name or fame.116 Henceforth the fronts to the north and south of Leningrad remained virtually stagnant until January 1943.117 While the military was breathing somewhat more freely despite the great losses it had sustained, the civilian situation worsened. On 12 September city authorities calculated that, at the current level of rationing, food supplies would last no longer than two months.118 Although the rations were steadily reduced, they remained far too high, for the bosses continued to expect an imminent breakthrough in the blockade.119 By mid-October, civilian morale was kept up by slogans and little else. The supplies that entered the city slowed to a trickle after the German capture of Tikhvin on 9 November.120 Between 10 November and 30 December Soviet forces fought a bloody battle near Tikhvin preventing the complete isolation of Leningrad.121 A special three-hundred-kilometre road far above the front line was built in November to connect Lake Ladoga with the Soviet hinterland, but for weeks it proved virtually useless once the lake began to ice over after 15 November.122 Until it was completely frozen, the embattled city could only be supplied by air. In midNovember a further cut in rations was ordained, just when the first

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deaths by starvation were registered.123 Some eleven thousand people may already have succumbed to hunger in November. On 20 November rations were established at an absolute minimum.124 The lowest rations of the entire war were in force in Leningrad from 20 November to 25 December 1941, amounting to 250 grams of bread a day for workers and 125 grams for white-collar employees, dependents, and children.125 The survivors later noted that this “bread” hardly deserved the name.126 Apart from the tiny rations and dubious provenance of the bread, cards were often not honoured because stores had entirely run out of supplies.127 People queued for hours in terrible cold.128 Sales clerks and shop managers cheated, and customers engaged occasionally in brutal attempts to acquire more than their rations’ worth of food. As of mid-November, people sold and ate the “sweet earth” of the burned-down Badaev storehouses. This was soil found amongst the ruins mixed with some of the melted sugar it had once stored.129 Cats and dogs were eaten. In response to the growing incidence of cannibalism, the authorities (A. Kuznetsov, Kubatkin, and others) organized special police units to shoot anyone who was found to have eaten human flesh.130 Cannibalism apparently occurred in the city’s jails, too.131 In general, men usually died first, for they had less body fat than women.132 Death from starvation was accompanied by death from scurvy.133 The extreme cold weather was a major factor in that winter’s sufferings.134 A lack of fuel severely limited heating for private or public purposes.135 Running water and electricity were no longer available in most apartments, and public transport had ceased to operate by mid-autumn.136 Hope was revived among the survivors when Lake Ladoga froze sufficiently by 22 November for motorized transports to cross it.137 This “Road to Life” became famous, but it did not save the hundreds of thousands who died before the next spring. The death toll was already considerable in November 1941, but the famine killed five times as many people in the next month.138

th e famine ’s to l l Militarily, Leningrad had become a front of second importance not just for Hitler but for Stalin, too. The Vozhd’ decided to launch a counteroffensive near Moscow in early December. On the orders of Malenkov and Mekhlis, in preparation for the Battle for Moscow, cannon, shells, and machine guns were transported by airplane from Leningrad to Moscow in the first days of December.139 The Stavka’s optimism about a possible rout of the Germans of Army Group Centre

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was ill founded because the Soviet armed forces that were thrown into battle near Moscow were poorly prepared. The even weaker armies of the Leningrad front were ordered to go on the offensive as well in a decision of even more irresponsible audacity. Nevertheless, in the early days of the Soviet counteroffensive near Moscow, some success was achieved on the north-western sector of the front, when Soviet forces retook Tikhvin on 9 or 10 December.140 This shortened the route used to supply Leningrad on the eastern side of the lake, even if the supply convoys travelling across the lake continued to lose people and supplies through poor weather conditions, defective machinery, and German bombing.141 In mid-December, while the German armies along their entire eastern front had taken up defensive positions, Zhdanov was able to travel from Leningrad to Moscow for his first meeting with Stalin since June.142 Stalin, Malenkov, Zhdanov, chief-of-staff Shaposhnikov, and the commanders of the north-western front, Khozin and Meretskov, discussed splitting the front near Leningrad into two fronts, the Volkhov, commanded by Meretskov, and the Leningrad, commanded by Khozin and Zhdanov together.143 Likely buoyed by the victory at Tikhvin, the Stavka ordered the Leningrad and Volkhov fronts and the forces north of Leningrad to continue the offensive to break through the blockade. Soviet forces proved inadequate, however, to sustain the offensive, which was halted by the end of the year. After meeting Stalin, Zhdanov returned almost immediately to the Northwest. He remained an outcast from the Inner Circle. Kosygin recalled later how Zhdanov’s relations with Stalin were strained around this time.144 With the recovery of Tikhvin food supplies increased and were more regularly delivered to Leningrad. Accordingly, the Leningrad chiefs announced on 25 December an increase of rations.145 The strain on the limited food stocks began to lessen because of the high death toll. Demand was also eased by a more organized evacuation of Leningrad citizens over the frozen lake, which began on 22 January.146 Until 22 April, half a million people left the besieged city. Evacuation of civilians continued throughout the year, perhaps reaching almost one million people by late 1942.147 On 26 January the Leningrad gorispolkom issued a decree edited by Zhdanov on cleanliness and order in the besieged town, particularly aiming at the burial of bodies that had been left behind in private homes and on the streets.148 A semblance of normalcy returned in the following weeks.149 By the middle of March, the first trams began to run again.150 Although late January 1942 saw the first steps towards salvation for many Leningraders, more than one hundred thousand residents probably died of famine in that month.151 Only in the middle of Feb-

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ruary did the death toll begin to decline. In the city’s cemeteries alone, 1.1 million people were buried between July 1941 and July 1942 (many others were buried in improvised graves or died during evacuation outside city limits).152 For 1942 the mortality rate reached 389.8 per one thousand citizens, superseding by five times the high death rate in the city in the hungry year 1919.153 On 2 April 2 nkvd chief Kubatkin estimated a total of about 275,000 deaths for the period from January to March 1942.154 Meanwhile, measures to stop petty crime in the city remained merciless. A.A. Kuznetsov noted in April 1942 that the authorities had people shot for the theft of half a pound of bread.155 The number of Leningraders sentenced to death by military tribunals between June 1941 and the summer of 1943 reached many thousands.156 On 6 April 6 Zhdanov edited a decision of gorkomburo and gorispolkom that called for the organization of special canteens for emaciated Leningraders.157 In mid-April 1942 Leningrad may have had a mere 1.1 million inhabitants left, less than half of its population in September 1941. Only in April 1942 did the survivors find the strength to engage in a major clean-up of the city to rid it, particularly, of thousands of corpses.158 While some deaths by starvation were recorded even in June, the civilian population had overcome the worst by April.159 Things had “normalized” to some extent by spring, and surviving families managed to insure themselves somewhat against future shortages by cultivating their own plots or collective plots planted within city parks and other available areas.160

zh da nov ’s l ife Meanwhile, Zhdanov and the other Leningrad bosses lived in rarefied luxury during the siege. Rations in the Smol’nyi Institute were lavish in comparison to those of ordinary civilians and included hamburgers and pirozhki.161 Zhdanov was supplied with bliny and flown-in peaches and he may have had a cow at his disposal.162 In the midst of the famine, some bosses even held parties, such as one that was thrown to celebrate Popkov’s birthday.163 The same Popkov had no qualms about throwing out stale white bread in January 1942, while the population lived on its daily ration of 125 grams of rough dark bread. Still, the leaders’ callous disregard for the plight of the Leningraders may be exaggerated in some accounts. Moreover, while the leaders had sufficient food, their health suffered for want of sleep, so overworked were they and subject to great stress.164 The leadership usually slept in the Smol’nyi’s bombshelter.165 The Smol’nyi’s premises were the nerve centre of the defence: “In the Smol’nyi itself, as in

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peaceful times, people-less corridors, silence. The building and the front yard leading to it are covered by a gigantic camouflage net. From above it obviously appears like a park. On the approaches are trenches, machine-gun nests, tanks. And on the Neva, before the building of the Smol’nyi … waits a … vessel [equipped with cannon] in armed preparedness.”166 Zinaida Aleksandrovna Zhdanova had stayed behind in Moscow in June 1941 and only joined her husband in January 1942. After that, she did not leave the city for any long spell until January 1944.167 Their son Iurii Zhdanov, a university science student when war broke out, was called up in September 1941 for army service.168 Since he knew German, he was assigned to a section that spread propaganda among enemy forces. He seldom visited Leningrad throughout the siege.169 From time to time, Iurii saw his father in Moscow, as in May 1942, but he was mostly with his army unit, ending the war in Vienna and Belgrade. The American journalist Harrison Salisbury witnessed Zhdanov’s demeanour in the autumn of 1941: [Zhdanov] seemed very, very tired… [His] asthma was much worse. His breath came in sharp, uneven gulps. His heavy face was puffed with fatigue and only his dark eyes glowed. [He hardly slept, but he did at least enjoy a military ration, consisting of:] a pound or more of bread a day plus a bowl of meat or fish soup and possibly a little cereal or kasha [and …] a lump or two of sugar to suck with [his] tea. [The leaders] lost weight on this diet, but did not become emaciated, and none of the principal commanders or Party chiefs fell victim to dystrophy. But their physical strength was exhausted, their nerves were frayed, and most of them suffered permanent damage to their heart and circulatory systems. Zhdanov, more than some of the others, showed visible signs of fatigue, exhaustion and nervous debilitation.170

Zhdanov had missed out out on his health-cure in June and July of 1941, and his heart condition deteriorated during the siege. He also suffered from the relentless pressure exerted by “Moscow” throughout the autumn of 1941.171 A curious telephone conversation of 1 December 1941 between Stalin and Molotov in Moscow and Zhdanov and General Khozin in Leningrad testifies to Zhdanov’s continued dread of Stalin in the first months of the siege. Stalin and Molotov ridiculed Zhdanov for initially trying to avoid coming to the phone, preferring to communicate through Khozin. They wondered ironically whether “perhaps com[rade] Zhdanov forgot about Moscow and the Muscovites who could aid Leningrad[?] One might think that Leningrad headed by

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com[rade] Zhdanov is not located in the ussr but somewhere on an island in the Pacific…”172 The last line was an unambiguous reminder that Zhdanov had to continue to watch his step, since Stalin was repeating the mocking analogy he had used in his criticism of Zhdanov and Voroshilov on 22 August.173 Zhdanov’s health suffered from all this stress. In late January 1942 he had a bout of influenza, from which he recovered only slowly.174 On 1 February he was prescribed “vitamin juice” to have with his Borzhomi (mineral water) when he was on the mend. Despite his health problems, Zhdanov tried to get the city up and running using the extremely limited means at his disposal. Solving problems with energy or the water supply in the city’s housing complexes and factories, overcoming the lack of raw materials, spare parts, fuel, and machinery that plagued industry, or dealing with traffic jams in transport: all these were matters he could manage as a result of his pre-war experience in governing Tver’, Nizhnii Novgorod, and Leningrad itself.175 In 1942 and 1943, Zhdanov followed the routine of a typical obkom secretary with respect to civilian matters. In this sphere he was aided by the obkom apparatus and by A.A. Kuznetsov, Popkov, and the other chiefs ruling the city, most of whom had been hand-picked by Zhdanov before the war.176 The exception among them was Kubatkin, Beria’s (and Stalin’s) representative. Obviously, Zhdanov was monitored by the members of the gko and by Stalin personally, who called Zhdanov or one of the other members of the Leningrad Military Council on a special phone line once a day on average before the military tide turned in early 1943. But besides Zhdanov’s leadership over civilian matters, he participated in the Smolnyi in most military operations as a member of the different front commands. Even though he left purely military-strategic moves to the military commanders – Zhukov, Khozin, Meretskov, or Govorov – and mainly functioned as an advisor at front headquarters, Zhdanov appears to have been constantly present when important decisions were pondered. Wearing two hats, each heavy with responsibility, amounted to an unbelievable workload. Perhaps one should be surprised that the sickly Zhdanov did not collapse altogether. Zhdanov was often ill. During most of April 1942 he was out of commission with bronchitis.177 In July he fell sick for the third time during 1942, when an intense migraine followed by a bout of influenza combined with bad news about the German rout of the Second Shock Army of Vlasov to bring him low.178 The doctors interpreted Zhdanov’s sleepwalking as a sign that he was plagued by a turbulent unconscious. When ailing, he left matters military and civilian to Aleksei Kuznetsov, Shtykov, and Generals Khozin, Meretskov, or Govorov. The frequency

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of his absence through illness contributed to the mistaken impression that he was irrelevant to the city’s defence.

s ta lemat e a nd bre a k t h r o u g h The northern part of the Soviet-Nazi front remained virtually immobile until 1943 despite sometimes heavy battles.179 From January to April 1942, a Soviet offensive to unite the Leningrad and Volkhov fronts and restore the railway connection with Moscow failed. It had been prepared in haste on Stalin’s orders. “From the very start,” as David Glantz notes, “the attacking forces suffered from acute and persistent ammunition and fuel shortages, the unavailability of reserves necessary to exploit success, and congenitally poor command and control and coordination of forces.”180 From March until July the Second Soviet Shock Army commanded by General Andrei Vlasov tried to break out of a German encirclement near Volkhov.181 In July Vlasov surrendered; in a strange twist, he ultimately became the commander of a German-supported Russian Liberation Army. The Stavka’s December 1941 decision to split the front was rescinded on 21 April, when it created a united Leningrad front out of the Volkhov and Leningrad fronts.182 Six weeks later, in the first days of June, the united Leningrad front was split into Leningrad and Volkhov fronts again, after the combined front under Khozin’s command had failed to improve Soviet positions. Khozin was relieved from his assignment.183 His deputy commander since April, L.A. Govorov, received the military command in Leningrad and Meretskov was again made commander of the Volkhov front. In June 1942, for the first time in half a year, Zhdanov visited Moscow to attend a meeting of the Supreme Soviet. On 17 June he visited Stalin in the Kremlin.184 This time the visit had a purpose other than the warfare itself, for the next day Zhdanov delivered a speech to the Supreme Soviet on the ongoing siege of Leningrad and the ratification of the treaty of alliance between the ussr and Great Britain.185 For someone who had been away from any foreign-policy issues for a year, assigning Zhdanov to explicate the treaty appeared odd. It was Stalin’s way of extending an olive branch to his former favourite (after all, Zhdanov had not formally relinquished the chair of his parliamentary foreign-policy commission). Zhdanov could now rehabilitate himself in the public eye by associating himself with a British alliance, thus sweeping under the carpet his earlier pre-war advocacy of a German alliance. Stalin granted him another audience on the next day.186 Stalin likely appreciated Zhdanov’s role in the steadfast defence of the ussr’s second city, and appears to have for-

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given Zhdanov his mistakes. On 20 June Zhdanov spent some time in his own office at the Central Committee building, where he found three hours to converse with Dimitrov about the international situation, and to report proudly on Leningrad’s defence to the Comintern leader.187 Dimitrov describes an optimistic and vivacious Zhdanov who had been able to forget the dark days of the previous fall and winter. Zhdanov’s joyous mood was a sign of his great relief at Stalin’s forgiveness. After this meeting, Zhdanov flew back to Leningrad again.188 The central and northern parts of the Soviet-German front remained fairly stable throughout the summer. But the military setbacks of previous months, the defeat of Leningrad’s Second Shock Army in July, and Leningrad’s continuing precarious supply situation made Zhdanov, Aleksei Kuznetsov, and the gko decide to organize a further evacuation of civilians. On 6 July an expanded session of the city’s Party committee listened to Zhdanov discuss the strengthening of Leningrad’s defence.189 He announced the evacuation of some industrial plant and inhabitants incapable of work. Zhdanov warned that, although the enemy was no longer capable of an attack along the Soviet-German front, the Germans were strong enough to execute smaller offensives in certain sectors, and Leningrad might be an ideal target from that perspective, for it was still almost encircled.190 By mid-August, 300,000 Leningraders had been transferred eastwards; several hundred thousand additional evacuees may have gone that way during the rest of the year, a move that at least prevented the recurrence of famine in the next winter.191 In Moscow, the leadership’s anxiety rose upon learning of new Soviet defeats in the South during the summer of 1942. Order No. 00227 issued on 28 July by People’s Commissar of Defence Stalin made unauthorized retreat a treasonous act punishable by death by firing squad.192 The Soviet armed forces in the south had their backs against the wall in any event. Eventually, their desperate defence at Stalingrad would definitively reverse military fortune in the war. Perhaps in part because the defensive lines surrounding Leningrad were improved in the course of 1942, a minor Nazi-led offensive (including troops of the Spanish Blue Division) that put pressure on the Soviet lines from late July until September was unsuccessful; a Soviet counteroffensive from August to October was similarly futile.193 By early October, it was clear to the Soviet commanders in the North that the forces opposing them remained too strong.194 Still, the German losses had been high, and the German commanders concluded that any further forward move on their part in the fall was out of the question. In late November, Soviet

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commanders Govorov and Meretskov began to concoct a plan to break through the German bridgehead that separated their two fronts on the south-east side of Lake Ladoga near Shlissel’burg.195 The plan was called Operation Iskra (Spark) after Lenin’s earlytwentieth-century journal, symbolically referring to the spark beginning the fire that destroys the foe. To discuss Iskra and the general political and military situation, Zhdanov and the front commanders joined Stalin, Molotov, Malenkov, Beria, and the high military command in Moscow on 30 November and 1 December.196 By that point, the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad had been surrounded by Soviet units. The tide had turned. In early January, one of the architects of the victory at Stalingrad (where the battle was not quite over), Georgii Zhukov, was dispatched to the Volkhov front to prepare for the Soviet offensive in this sector. Zhdanov and Govorov travelled from Leningrad to the Volkhov front’s headquarters to coordinate the breakthrough attempt with Zhukov and Meretskov.197 On 12 January 1943, the Soviet offensive to end the encirclement of Leningrad began.198 The proclamation announcing the beginning of the offensive to the troops, signed by Zhdanov, Govorov, Shtykov, Solov’ev, and chief of staff D.N. Gusev (1894–1957), bragged patriotically: “For the seventeenth month the fascist horde stands at the gates of Leningrad, besieging our dear [rodnoi] city. Any kind of vile and shameful battle method was used by the enemy in order to break the Leningrad defenders’ will to resist, to break their belligerent spirit and to attain his goals. But the enemy miscalculated also this time. Neither bombardments, nor artillery fire, nor hunger, nor cold, nor all those sufferings, torments and deprivations, to which the fascist barbarians subjected and subject Leningrad, broke the resolve of Leningrad’s defenders, the true sons of our Soviet native land [otchizna], determined until their last breath to keep Leningrad out of the enemy’s hands.”199 By 18 January the Volkhov and Leningrad fronts had linked up.200 The offensive lasted until 30 January. It had been the fifth attempt to end the overland blockade, after those of September 1941, October 1941, January to April 1942, and mid-August to early October 1942. While the blockade had been broken, however, the battle for Leningrad raged until the following January.201 In the winter of 1943, Zhdanov suffered from a renewed bout of illness.202 A medical check-up in late March is testimony to Zhdanov’s poor state of health.203 His doctors were concerned with his habit of smoking thirty-five papirosy per day, which contributed to high blood pressure affecting the proper functioning of his lungs

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and liver, especially when he fell ill. The medical report registered that the left side of his heart was enlarged, and the blood supply to his heart muscle was occasionally insufficient. The doctors prescribed a diet and lots of bedrest, which temporarily improved his feeble physical condition. But it was impossible for Zhdanov to limit his workload to six to eight hours a day, spend his leisure time in the comfort of his country house breathing in healthy doses of fresh air, and reduce his smoking to seven to ten cigarettes a day. Neither during the war nor after it did Zhdanov ever manage to observe such a health regimen. A month after the examination he suffered from another ailment, pains in his appendix, although for once his complaints disappeared quickly.204 Other bouts of illness followed in August and October.205 In 1943 Zhdanov seldom involved himself in issues that went beyond the war and local government in Leningrad, but he did sign the decree disbanding the Comintern on 15 May as one of the Comintern Presidium’s members.206 At the time Zhdanov was the only Soviet Politburo member besides Stalin who sat on its Presidium, which included most Communist leaders of the postwar Soviet satellites, as well as the French Communist boss Thorez, the Italian leader Togliatti, and Otto Kuusinen. Although, during the first two years of the war, Zhdanov’s involvement with the International had been limited to his meeting with Dimitrov in June 1942, his personal acquaintance with all of the organization’s leaders made him the logical choice among the Soviet leaders to become involved in a coordinating organization of leading European Communist parties in the immediate postwar period. Zhdanov resumed more pronouncedly his role in monitoring the international Communist movement in 1944. In July a cc Department of International Relations was formed (largely staffed with former Comintern employees and headed by Dimitrov) with which Zhdanov was the key liaison figure.207 It functioned until December 1945, when the Politburo decided to replace it with a cc Foreign Policy department. On 17 May 1943, Zhdanov delivered one of his rare wartime speeches in Leningrad to the Party’s aktiv. His theme was the “decisive phase of the war” and the effort needed to guarantee the continuation of the German retreat.208 He warned that a storming of the city remained within the realm of possibility, particularly because in previous months German soldiers had replaced the (apparently less formidable) Slovaks and Spaniards at the front. On 3 June, though, the situation was considered safe enough to honour the recipients of the medal “for the defence of Leningrad,” who included Zhdanov,209 in

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the city itself. And by July Leningrad’s obkombiuro, under Zhdanov’s lead, was able to focus on the organization of the harvest and agricultural procurements. In December 1943, for the first time in eight months, he was among several visitors to Stalin’s Kremlin office.210 During his fairly lengthy December stay in Moscow, Zhdanov twice met Edvard Benes, by then Czechoslovak president, in whose honour formal dinners were held.211

moscow mat t e r s The military tide had turned against the Nazi armed forces during 1943, but they beat a very slow retreat in the Baltic area even after they had been definitively been forced out of the environs of Leningrad in the early months of 1944. On 11 January 1944, at a session of the Leningrad front’s Military Council, Govorov and Zhdanov outlined the impending offensive that would finally force back the Germans from the approaches to the city.212 The Soviet armies were on the offensive from 14 January to 1 March 1944. On 22 January the Germans fired their last grenade at the city, the day after Soviet troops had finally recaptured all of the Moscow-Leningrad railroad.213 The Red Army pushed the German army group Nord back towards the Baltic states, but German units still put up a ferocious battle virtually until the end of the war.214 On 26 January Govorov, A.A. Kuznetsov, Solov’ev, Gusev, and Zhdanov signed a proclamation formally announcing the end of the blockade.215 In an odd romantic image, Zhdanov depicted the city as looking like a “wounded knight.”216 On 21 February the presidium of the Supreme Soviet awarded the Leningrad chief the Order of Suvorov, first class, for his outstanding leadership of military operations.217 Perhaps Zhdanov’s medieval reference, as well as his reception of the Order of Suvorov (named after a tsarist general of the Napoleonic era), were signs of how the war witnessed a reassertion of Russian tradition and culture, the heritage trend that had emerged in the second half of the 1930s.218 Meanwhile, on 27 January 1944, in the absence of Zhdanov and A.A. Kuznetsov, a brief cc plenum was staged which agreed to introduce the new Soviet national hymn, which had a more Russian theme.219 Russian chauvinism fuelled the war morale.220 On the eve of the decisive attack on the German lines near Leningrad, a new tone was struck with the announcement by its gorispolkom that a host of historical names had been restored to streets, squares, and avenues.221 Like the other Stalinists, Zhdanov played his part in the new emphasis on Russian traditions in the wartime Soviet Union.222 This came naturally to

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him, for he had only travelled abroad, briefly, in 1938 and he had never seen (nor was he ever to see) Western Europe. In his youth, he had been steeped in Russian culture, tradition, and history and his cultural taste was predominantly Russocentric, even if he read Marx or felt an affinity with French Enlightenment thinkers. While fond of certain aspects of French culture, his outlook was that of a quintessential Russian Marxist, not of a cosmopolitan (in the general sense of the word) revolutionary such as Trotsky or Lenin, or, within the terminology of an older Russian tradition, more that of a Slavophile than a Westernizer. The “correct balance” between Great Russian nationalism and proletarian or Soviet internationalism was difficult to strike, not just for Zhdanov personally but for the Soviet leadership in general. Several discussions held in the cc Secretariat in 1944 testify to this conundrum of meshing the leading role of the Russians within the Soviet Union and its “Friendship of the Peoples” metaphor.223 In the spring of 1944, Zhdanov stood aside from an acrimonious discussion among Soviet philosophers and Agitprop officials that led to the condemnation and demotion of the overly pro-Hegelian Mark Mitin and Pavel Iudin.224 Zhdanov became involved when Soviet historians who continued to observe a more traditional internationalist interpretation of the past clashed with those who, guided by Agitprop chief Aleksandrov, began to emphasize the past achievements of Russians at the expense of all other Soviet ethnic groups.225 With Stalin’s permission, Zhdanov diluted the sharply nationalistic Russian criticism of the work of A.M. Pankratova (1897–1957) by Aleksandrov and a group of historians who backed him, charting a historiographical direction that endeavoured to avoid both an overly positive appreciation of the tsarist empire and Russian expansion and absolute condemnation of Russian history.226 Pankratova, Mitin, Iudin, and Pospelov had been colleagues in the early 1930s at the Institute of Red Professors, and Pankratova was the main editor of a book on Kazakh history published in 1943.227 But when Pankratova went on to diffuse the message among historians that she had successfully defeated the “Russian nationalists,” several of whom stood higher in the Soviet political hierarchy than she did, she was dismissed as deputy head of the Academy of Sciences’ Institute of History in September 1944.228 Thanks to Zhdanov’s defence of her and Stalin’s protection, Pankratova, like Mitin and Iudin, avoided any harsher punishment than this bureaucratic demotion. In the meantime, while Zhdanov produced several drafts, no official cc decree was published on the proper historiographical line.229

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The delicate balance between pro-Russian policy and the pretence of a bond of equal nations as represented in the Soviet constitution was again at issue in Zhdanov’s report, completed in August (or early September) 1944,230 criticizing Bol’shevik, the outstanding ideological journal in the Soviet Union after the closure in the previous year of Pod znamenem marksizma. Zhdanov condemned Bol’shevik’s shortcomings in the field of theory and its too narrowly pro-Russian treatment of history. While Zhdanov objected to the tendency to overstress the role of outstanding Russian figures or the Russian people, he also condemned the historiographical theory that Scandinavians had created the first Eastern Slav state (the Normanist theory), as well as another theory that held that this Eastern Slav civilization had been Ukrainian.231 Zhdanov went as far as to attack Friedrich Engels for his contention that the Ukrainians and Belarusyn had been helped rather than hindered by their unification with Lithuania and consequent exposure to the more “progressive” Lithuanian culture.232 He suggested the appointment to Bol’shevik’s editorial board of Aleksandrov, N.A. Voznesensky, A.M. Egolin, Iovchuk, Kruzhkov, Pospelov, Shcherbakov, Mitin, and Iudin.233 Zhdanov’s nominations were accepted wholesale although he had had no formal role in ideology since May 1941. One can thus surmise that Stalin continued to value Zhdanov as an ideological expert. Other signs later confirmed that Zhdanov’s return as ideological chief was in the works by the late summer of 1944, and that Zhdanov’s permanent return to Moscow was only a matter of time.234 Throughout 1944 and most of 1945, however, Zhdanov was not often in Moscow and could only intermittently turn to cultural or ideological affairs, a domain over which Malenkov or Shcherbakov remained Stalin’s official bailiffs.235

f inlan d Finally, Leningrad had returned sufficiently to normal by April 1944 for the city’s obkom and gorkom to stage a plenary session, the first one since the beginning of war.236 Zhdanov outlined the planned rebuilding of the city, warning that it stood in danger of losing its industrial profile, a development that had become more likely because of the extensive loss of skilled workers and material damage caused by the war.237 His speech to the crowd of Leningrad chiefs constituted one of his last substantial ones as their leader. He ultimately left Leningrad in January 1945.238 Although the Finnish government, in search of a separate peace with the Soviet Union, rejected the onerous terms of the Soviet peace proposal several times, an eventual Finnish surrender seemed

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inevitable.239 Zhdanov continued to serve as a member of the Leningrad front’s Military Council, and he involved himself with the preparation of the decisive blow that would take the Finns out of the war. He helped Stalin to draft the settlement that was to be reached with the defeated Finns.240 On 10 June 1944, a new Soviet offensive began against the Finnish positions (some of which were reinforced by German units) to the north-west of Leningrad. Already on 20 June the key town of Viipuri (Vyborg) fell into Soviet hands.241 The Soviet offensive slowed after the fall of Vyborg, even if most of Karelia and the territory between Lakes Ladoga and Onega were occupied in July and August.242 In mid-August Zhdanov discussed the restoration of the Soviet Regime in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania with several ethnic Baltic Communists and with Stalin in Moscow.243 Commander-in-Chief Mannerheim, who had succeeded Ryti as Finnish president a month earlier, ended the German-Finnish alliance in early September. On 13 September, the Politburo appointed Zhdanov as main Soviet negotiator in seeking an accommodation with Finland.244 After five days of negotiation in Moscow, the terms of an armistice with Finland were agreed on 19 September, and Zhdanov as plenipotentiary of the British and Soviet governments signed a truce with the Finnish government.245 The terms of the armistice were harsh for the Finns: not only did they have to pay reparations and return to the March 1940 borders but they lost the Porkkala Peninsula near Helsinki. Four days later, a Soviet Allied Control Commission (sacc), chaired by Zhdanov, was organized in Finland.246 The sacc had a large bureaucracy, eventually made up of 241 military and thirty-nine civilians divided among seven branches. Housed in Helsinki, the sacc enjoyed full diplomatic privileges. As its chair, Andrei Zhdanov flew into Helsinki on 5 October and was immediately upon arrival briefed by his deputies.247 The Finns had anticipated Zhdanov’s arrival with trepidation because of his notorious role in Estonia in 1940, and because of Finnish participation in the Leningrad siege and the Winter War.248 Zhdanov tried indeed to make it appear that the Red Army would occupy Finland if the Finns did not comply with the terms of the truce.249 In reality, however, Soviet military deployment precluded occupation since Red Army units stationed in the North had been drastically reduced after the armistice. In the early days of the sacc operation, the Soviets were particularly keen on receiving Finnish reparation payments, which were the only ones paid to the ussr in the winter of 1944–45.250 To guarantee an uninterrupted flow of Finnish payments and goods, Zhdanov was generally cautious in his discussions with the Finns. His prudence was further informed by Soviet fears that, in a variation on recent events in Hungary, Finnish

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fascists, aided by German forces, might take over from the Mannerheim government.251 Zhdanov showed significant diplomatic savvy, using a carrot-andstick strategy to force the Finnish government do the Soviets’ bidding. Part of his diplomatic subtlety stemmed from direct instructions by Stalin, Molotov, and, at least on one occasion, Beria and Dekanozov, the deputy foreign minister.252 Despite his mild-mannered attitude towards the Finns (and British),253 before his Soviet colleagues in Helsinki he took an unforgiving pose towards the supposedly treasonous Ingermanlanders, whom the Finns had evacuated far behind the lines once they and the Germans had occupied their region in the early months of the war (many of them ultimately escaped repatriation). Zhdanov likewise blamed Soviet pows for the military debacle of 1941 for which he had been, more than almost anyone else, responsible himself.254 The pows were investigated by the nkvd once they returned to Soviet territory, and many were sentenced to terms in Soviet labour camps. Finland was never “sovietized” like the countries of East-Central Europe. There were several reasons for this. In the Winter War, the Finns had fought with great determination to avoid the fate of their defenceless East-Central European counterparts, who had Soviet hegemony imposed on them from early 1946 onward. Under the terms of the armistice and then the peace settlement of 1947, the Soviets received military bases, territorial concessions that dramatically improved the Soviet strategic position, and a regular supply of scarce goods to aid its war effort and help it recover from war damage. In exchange, the Soviet Union was willing to allow Finland a fairly large measure of self-determination. In addition, during Zhdanov’s tenure as head of the sacc, Finnish troops fought the German units in the northern half of their country, somewhat redeeming Finland’s guilt for participating in the war on the Axis side. Soviet leniency towards the Finns also exemplified the strong Soviet desire of that period to maintain the wartime bond between the Western Allies and themselves.255 Thus, for once Zhdanov behaved like a firm-handed moderate, but this was entirely the result of Stalin’s and Molotov’s orders. Finland was left with a remarkable measure of independence.256 During his time in Helsinki, Zhdanov supported and supervised the resurrection of the Finnish Communist party and the formation of a coalition between it and other left-wing political parties. Known as the Democratic Alliance of the Finnish People, the coalition was reasonably successful in the first postwar elections.257 Zhdanov’s Comintern experience with the Popular Front governments of the 1930s was of use here. Some of the Soviet reluctance to make Finland into a Soviet

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dependency even surprised the Finnish Communist party. In the winter of 1945, Zhdanov advocated to the Finnish Communists a strategy of slowly taking control of politics (through elections) and the economy (through trade unions and nationalization of industry), but to combine such moves with a kind of pacifist patriotism, stressing particularly the use of anti-war slogans after the imminent German surrender.258 Finland, he added, was not yet ripe for Communist revolution.

zh danov’s wa r As it was during the Civil War, Zhdanov’s record during the Second World War was unimpressive and even shameful. On the favourable side, one could point to his role in restoring the city of Leningrad from the worst of havoc once the Leningrad front had stabilized and the famine had passed. Likewise, he showed himself a fairly accomplished diplomat in Helsinki in 1944 and 1945. But such positive achievements are negated by his failure to contribute anything worthwhile to the city’s defence before September 1941, when he seems to have been conspicuous for his panic rather than his resolve. Although it is moot who carries most responsibility for the lack of stores in the city in the late summer of 1941, Zhdanov cannot escape all blame for this debacle, which played an important role in causing the devastating famine. He clung for far too long to the fantasy that the Germans and Finns would never be able to surround the city and was grossly negligent in checking the supply situation, which was ultimately his responsibility as the city’s boss. Stalin, too, was unimpressed with his favourite’s performance during the first six months of the war, and he let Zhdanov feel his wrath. But Stalin allowed Zhdanov to recover in Leningrad, evidence of the Vozhd’s sometimes remarkable forgiveness towards his intimate “friends” in general and his fondness for Zhdanov especially. Zhdanov’s wartime forays on the Unionwide stage, publicly (in 1942 at the Supreme Soviet or as Comintern chief) and as Party secretary (in 1944), were sporadic, nevertheless, and his status was that of a secondtier boss in early 1945. At that time, it was far from clear that Andrei Zhdanov, former chief of Leningrad and virtual Soviet ambassador to Finland, would return as one of Stalin’s closest confidants after the Second World War ended in Europe in May 1945. The Soviet Union was victorious in the Second World War, but its triumph came at an unbelievably high cost. The war ruined most of the western Soviet Union, from Murmansk to Groznyi; postwar reconstruction was long drawn out because of the utter devastation of this

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huge area. Recovery was further impeded because between twenty million and twenty-seven million Soviet citizens, many of whom were young people in their prime, had died in the war. But postwar recovery was impeded further because the Stalinists became embroiled in a rapidly sharpening conflict with their Western wartime allies. Many of the resources that could have been spent on rebuilding the country in the postwar period went instead to the enormously costly and wasteful arms race with the United States and its allies.

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9 The Prodigal Son Returns, 1945–1946 The members of Stalin’s Politburo behaved in various ways during sessions. Molotov was always concentrated, only making occasional notes. Voroshilov appeared apathetic, coming to life only when Stalin spoke. Beria rarely took part in the discussion other than to answer Stalin’s questions, and remained inert, except occasionally when he would suddenly seize his briefcase and search for papers. Malenkov was all ears, always ready with facts and figures. Voznesensky, Bulganin and Zhdanov took part when the discussion touched on their own area of responsibility. Kalinin almost always remained totally silent, as did Andreyev and Shvernik. Always ready with opinions of their own were Kaganovich, Khrushchev and Mikoyan. Dmitrii Volkogonov1 For them, sentimental storytelling fiction, music one could remember and sing at first hearing … were quite enough. Peter Gay2

ret urn to pr o min e n c e The Soviet political system had begun to set before 1941, and the Second World War did not change much about the way the Stalinists ruled their subjects. But, far more so than in the 1930s, foreign affairs were central to the deliberations of the Soviet leaders after May 1945.3 Furthermore, the postwar ideological and cultural campaigns that Stalin and his companions unleashed espoused “Great Russian chauvinism” to a far greater extent than the pre-war hype surrounding the release of the Short Course; the message of the campaigns stands in diametric opposition to the internationalist emphasis of the “cultural revolution” of 1928–32.4 Nineteen forty five marked as much of a transition for Andrei Zhdanov as it did for the Soviet Union. Zhdanov began the year in Helsinki as a second-rate political figure and ended it in Moscow,

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restored to his pre-war status as Stalin’s right-hand man whose portfolio focused on ideology and culture. During the Second World War, Stalin had tried out Malenkov and Shcherbakov as cultural and ideological grand viziers but the former in particular had failed to impress Stalin in this role. When Agitprop head Shcherbakov died in May 1945, Zhdanov’s return as ideological leader became virtually inevitable. In this light, Zhdanov’s tentative forays into history, philosophy, and art in 1944 functioned as rehearsals for his return as cultural mouthpiece.5 In Stalin’s view, Zhdanov was the lieutenant with the right experience, education, and aesthetic to rekindle and complete the process of creating ideal Communists and Soviet citizens. The cultural campaigns of the immediate postwar period have been labelled Zhdanovshchina, the meaning of which varies. A pejorative term, it literally means the “Zhdanov thing” and is analogous to the use of Ezhovshchina for the years of the Great Terror from 1936–38, or of Bironovshchina for a period of supposed oppression, led by Count Bühren (Biron) of nobles (particularly of Russian extraction) opposed to Tsarina Anna Ioannovna’s policies in tsarist Russia in the 1730s. Though commonly used by Soviet intellectuals and dissidents as well as Western scholars, the Soviet authorities themselves never used the term. It usually connotes renewed pressure upon artists to adhere faithfully to the socialist-realist tenets of a “truthful depiction of reality,” featuring positive heroes, Party spirit, ideinost’ and narodnost’ as outlined by Maxim Gor’kii and Andrei Zhdanov at the Writers’ Congress in August 1934, combined with a growing emphasis on the achievements of Russian science and culture.6 The Zhdanovshchina eventually contended that Russians rather than Westerners had been responsible for many scientific breakthroughs and had created much that was aesthetically worthwhile in this world. The postwar campaigns reiterated the condemnation of experimentation with form, artistic introspection, a preoccupation with the emotional turmoil of the individual, and reinforced sexual prudery in the arts. Zhdanov’s utterances in 1946, too, show a pathological sensitivity to any criticism in literature or film of Soviet society by the Soviets themselves. I use the term Zhdanovshchina since it has become conventional to do so, even if Romanovskii is correct in suggesting Stalin rather than Zhdanov as the mastermind behind the campaign.7 Stalin had indeed masterminded the domestic postwar campaigns and the decrees on literature, film, and theatre repertory, and the condemnation of formalism in music.8 In most cases after the war, Stalin took the initiative in browbeating all groups of artists, scientists, or scholars. Upon Zhdanov’s return to the Inner Circle in Moscow in late 1945, he began to play an extraordinarily visible role as deputy to

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Stalin, a basic reason why his name rather than Stalin’s was linked to the postwar cultural campaigns then, and even today. Only a few political leaders after 1929 were ever allowed to shine next to Stalin’s star in a comparable manner: Molotov (1929–47), Ezhov (1936–38), and lastly, Malenkov (1949–53). But alone among them, Zhdanov was allowed to speak extensively on theoretical, ideological, and cultural issues, which were otherwise Stalin’s exclusive monopoly. Stalin’s great fondness for Zhdanov should not lead to the erroneous conclusion that Zhdanov drew his own plans either in opposition to Stalin or as kind of free agent independent of Stalin, upon whose ideas a delightfully surprised Stalin put his stamp of approval.9 Kostyrchenko cites a remark by Molotov’s wife that testifies to the perception among the lieutenants about the division of power: in 1946 Polina Zhemchuzhina-Molotova, a high-ranking Party member herself, told the actor Mikhoels that Stalin alone wielded all might in the ussr; neither Zhdanov nor Malenkov had any substantial autonomous power.10 Although Zhdanov had considerable authority as head of the vast bureaucratic apparatus of the postwar Central Committee, it was derivative, wholly dependent on Stalin’s continued patronage.11 Andrei Zhdanov concentrated on supervising ideology, culture, and science after his return to Moscow in 1945. Stalin assigned Zhdanov the task of rekindling the ideological course that originated in the 1930s as if the war had not happened.12 While the cultural campaigns were trumpeted to the outside world, Zhdanov and the Central Committee’s Agitprop administration conducted a wider ideological offensive that remained largely hidden from the public (especially Western) eye. Connected with it was another postwar policy that was reinforced (rather than resurrected) after the war of which Zhdanov was the spokesman, the “cult of secrecy,” although this campaign only genuinely began in 1947 (and will thus be discussed in the next chapter).13 As with the cultural offensive and its effect on Soviet arts, the ideological and vigilance campaigns left a long-term imprint on Soviet society, though all three were connected both in their origins and their effects and cannot always be easily disentangled. The cultural, ideological, and xenophobic campaigns set the tone for forty subsequent years of the production of artistic kitsch,14 of learning diamat and istmat by rote, and of extreme reluctance, or even outright fear, among Soviet citizens and bureaucrats to associate with (Western) foreigners and things foreign in the Soviet Union. Immediately after the war, Stalin discovered among certain intellectuals, artists, and scientists the hope and expectation that they might have greater room to express heterodox ideas and enjoy international collaboration and freer communication between the Soviet world and

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abroad.15 The dictator’s response was to close off his empire hermetically.16 The “creative intelligentsia” (including scientists and scholars) was bought off with an array of privileges, from lucrative Stalin Prizes to country houses, resort holidays, and excellent medical care.17 The general Soviet citizenry’s acquiescence with this ideological and security crackdown was won fairly easily. People longed for tranquillity after the drama of the past four (or fifteen or thirty) years.18 Even if the Stalinists’ domestic policy made concessions to popular traditions, they were minor, such as the reaffirmation of traditional gender differences by ending coeducation (in 1943) and emphasizing the importance of family and domestic life centred around the mother.19 Likewise, the authorities sometimes turned a blind eye to semilegal private endeavours by their subjects, who tried to capitalize on the widespread demand for products and services that the Regime failed to provide.20 Stalin’s illness in the fall of 1945 postponed the Soviet Union’s transition from wartime to peace. Thus, he appeared to allow the more lenient ideological line of the war years to continue. After Stalin’s return to Moscow at the very end of 1945, restoring the ideological hard line proved cumbersome because of the size of the Party and state apparatus and the difficulty of finding the right personnel for the crackdown. Some people who had shown great ability in leading the Soviet Union in war were of much less use to Stalin in peacetime. The dictator preferred compliant characters around him. To quell displays of initiative, he had several outspoken wartime military commanders demoted or even arrested in the spring of 1946.21 From March 1946 onwards, Stalin with Zhdanov as his main aide began the drive to restore ideological conformity in earnest, although they were still tinkering with the methods for delivering their message while at the same time refining its contents. In response to the quick unravelling of the wartime alliance, they stressed from early 1947 virulent anti-Western ideas. By the summer of 1947, the ideological mould had hardened to a shape that left a lasting imprint on Soviet mentality. In late 1945 Stalin needed not just an ideological and cultural deputy but also someone to keep both Malenkov and Beria on their toes, particularly upon Shcherbakov’s death.22 Similarly, after Zhdanov’s death in 1948 Stalin needed a new counterweight, for which he ultimately recalled Khrushchev to Moscow from Kiev.23 In the last years before his death, Zhdanov seems to have had allies in Kuznetsov and Voznesensky, and the latter may have been Andrei Zhdanov’s closest friend in the leadership.24 Historians have made too much of the conduct of actual postwar debates and rivalries between different factions or patronage networks.25 The “survivors” in Stalin’s environment were loath to attract any suspicion of group formation or

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of undermining his power. Zhdanov wanted to please Stalin and perform well under his aegis, but he had no ambition to succeed him.26 Like Molotov, Zhdanov was someone who could not imagine life without Stalin and considered himself vastly inferior to his idol.27 The Vozhd’ himself, however, was fond of manipulating one lieutenant against another and stimulating their mutual envy and suspicion.28 Roughly speaking, in the 1920s and 1930s Stalin favoured Molotov, Kaganovich, and Voroshilov, and, briefly, Ezhov. Zhdanov and Beria replaced Ezhov and, to some degree, Kaganovich in Stalin’s good books in the late 1930s. During the war, Stalin took a shine to Malenkov and Shcherbakov, in particular. After the war, Zhdanov and Molotov were Stalin’s closest confidants, but Malenkov and Khrushchev replaced them in the late 1940s. The Stalinists watched each other closely, for “the relationships between [Stalin’s lieutenants] were never marked by honesty and trust, [but] rather by suspicion and competition, which was, by the way, characteristic of all of Stalin’s circle and was cultivated by him.”29 Stalin berated them all periodically, often before their peers (or had them scold an errant colleague), particularly when a lieutenant had failed to fulfill a task or showed too much independence. Thus Stalin criticized Molotov in the autumn of 1945 and Mikoian in September 1946 (or Zhdanov and Voroshilov in August and September of 1941).30 Although the Vozhd’ displayed remarkable resilience, Stalin was an old and ailing man after his return to Moscow in late 1945, and his reliance particularly on Molotov and Zhdanov resulted from need and habit.31 Zhdanov had always been a pleasing sycophant, diligently writing Stalin’s orders and remarks down with a little pencil in his small pocket notebooks.32 The habit of entering in these knizhki Stalin’s demands, remarks, and suggestions was not unique to Zhdanov.33 There was a practical point to it, for Stalin dictated decisions or policy guidelines to his lieutenants in this way. They had to work out these guidelines and make them into coherent and comprehensive policies, or write out the decisions in full. After they had done so, they submitted their work to Stalin who edited the draft for the final version that was then formally released in the name of any (or several) of the highest Soviet political bodies. One of Stalin’s greatest talents, it has recently been argued, was that of editor – of books, articles, resolutions, plans, policies, or speeches drafted by others.34 Before he dispatched his underlings somewhere, such as when he sent Molotov to Berlin in 1940, Voroshilov to discuss an alliance with the British and French in Moscow in 1939, or Zhdanov and Malenkov to Poland in 1947 or Romania in 1948, Stalin refined his initial suggestions from the detailed drafts that his minions had subsequently worked out.35

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t h e life of a d ip l o mat Around New Year’s Eve 1945, Zhdanov spent about two weeks in Moscow. Together with Stalin and several army commanders, he mapped the future course of the war in the Arctic, where German units continued to resist, while receiving instructions for his discussions with the Finnish government and evaluating the impending official leadership transition in Leningrad. Zhdanov looked into some ongoing affairs at the cc Secretariat and celebrated the arrival of the new year both in his own and Stalin’s Kremlin quarters.36 From 15 to 17 January Zhdanov attended the Leningrad obkom plenum where A.A. Kuznetsov officially replaced him as leader of the province. As it says somewhat dryly in his personal papers, Zhdanov left the Leningrad party organization because of his increased workload in the cc, where he was to “occupy himself with ideology and MarxistLeninist theory.”37 The day after the plenum concluded, Zhdanov met with Finnish president Carl Mannerheim in Helsinki.38 Zhdanov positively received Mannerheim’s proposal to start a discussion inside Finland about military cooperation with the ussr.39 Yet Molotov, upon being informed of this by wire, furiously observed that encouraging such initiatives went beyond Zhdanov’s mandate and ordered him to stop. He added that Zhdanov had shown himself to his hosts as a naive and overfriendly negotiator, unaware of certain diplomatic complications. In a follow-up meeting with the Finnish leader in the next days, Zhdanov meticulously executed Molotov’s instructions to reject Mannerheim’s suggestion of proposals for a military pact with the ussr on the grounds that the Finnish government had not yet been recognized by either the Soviet Union or the Western Allies.40 Zhdanov was made to understand that Stalin and Molotov were opposed to far-reaching involvement in Finnish domestic policy.41 The duo was preparing for the Yalta Conference and did not want to face accusations of infringing upon other countries’ sovereignty. Even in early 1945, Finland was expendable in the eyes of the Soviet leaders. Conversely, at Yalta, Stalin and Molotov were far less flexible about Poland’s government.42 Zhdanov was to some extent expected to defer in diplomatic matters to Molotov, the diplomatic “expert” among the Inner Circle. Nonetheless, Molotov’s imperious tone with Zhdanov in supervising these negotiations shows that the foreign minister ranked significantly higher than Zhdanov in the hierarchy in early 1945. Although Zhdanov was probably the best prepared among the Soviet leaders to negotiate with the Finns, given his knowledge of local geography and

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his earlier dealings with them, as Soviet plenipotentiary he was hardly more than a subordinate diplomat, a policy executor rather than a policy maker.43 Zhdanov seemed cultivated and fairly pleasant to the Finns and British whom he met, as the American journalist John Scott found out when he visited Helsinki in 1946 to gather information about Zhdanov: They find him a plump, well-manicured, neatly dressed little (5 ft. 6 in.) man with just the faintest touch of perfume about him and a fondness for white wine and dewberry cordial. He has nice manners, except (the British note) that his tea-drinking is noisy… Zhdanov has the usual Politburo allotment of Kremlin apartment, suburban dacha and Caucasus villa. With his wife, widowed daughter [sic] and son, he favors the apartment. Even in the coldest Moscow winter, Zhdanov (unlike most Russians) sleeps with his window open and tries vainly to keep his weight down by starting the day with 15 minutes of calisthenics. His favorite recreation is gorodki, a mixture of bowling and shuffleboard, which Lenin also liked. Kremlin dwellers have their own gorodki club; in its recent tournament Zhdanov placed second to Stalin’s chauffeur Khvostov.44

Scott noted that Zhdanov suffered from heart problems and drank only in moderation, and that he liked Tchaikovsky, Mozart, and the “modern novel.”45 The shortness of stature, Scott added, Zhdanov shared with Molotov, Mikoian, Dekanozov, Vyshinskii, and Stalin himself.46 Several memoirs and historical accounts draw attention to a possible drinking problem.47 When Zhdanov’s health continued to deteriorate after June 1941, the effect on a sick man of moderate or even sparing drinking may have appeared to others as behaviour resulting from uncontrollable imbibing.48 Such susceptibility perhaps explains the impression Zhdanov made on Mikoian and Khrushchev, if indeed their portrayal is accurate.49 In his last years, Zhdanov’s doctors ordered him not to touch alcohol any more (and he may have obeyed, for in the wartime reports on his health, no mention was made that his problems were linked to alcohol consumption). Nevertheless, Zhdanov frequently attended the notorious endless informal dinners at Stalin’s dacha, where it may have been hard to abstain.50 In his own tastes Zhdanov was old-fashioned and something of a parvenu.51 His preferences in recreation, decoration, and pastimes were conservative and ordinary, somewhat Biedermeier. Gorodki, perfume, Tchaikovsky, and nineteenth-century literature tie in with the description by Stalin’s daughter of his Kremlin apartment, “with its

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vases, antimacassars, and worthless still lifes on the walls…vulgar and totally lacking in taste.”52 Inasmuch as Andrei and Zinaida had a most standard Russian-Soviet marriage in which she was the homemaker, the interior decorating would have been more Zinaida’s doing. Nevertheless, Zhdanov’s taste was decidely common. He preferred digestible art, music, and literature with the correct message decrying social injustice.53 Hauser explains why, given the utilitarian function of Soviet arts, Zhdanov with his personal preference for art of the mid-nineteenth century and earlier was such a perfect fit for Stalin as his cultural “pope”: In Soviet Russia [art] is regarded wholly as a means to an end. This utilitarianism is, of course, conditioned above all by the need to place all available means in the service of communist reconstruction and to exterminate the aestheticism of bourgeois culture, which, with its “l’art pour l’art,” its contemplative and quietistic attitude to life, implies the greatest possible danger for the social revolution. It is the awareness of this danger that makes it impossible for the architects of communist cultural policy to do justice to the artistic developments of the last hundred years and it is the denial of this development which makes their views on art so old-fashioned. They would prefer to put back the historical standing of art to the level of the [French] July monarchy, and it is not only in the novel that they have in mind the realism of the middle of the last century, in the other arts, particularly in painting, they encourage the same tendency.54

vic tory c elebrat io n s in mo sc ow Zhdanov’s visits to Moscow remained sporadic in the last months of the Second World War in Europe. He appears to have been debriefed and received instructions there in late February, when Finnish parliamentary elections were nearing.55 In March Zhdanov returned to Helsinki to monitor the vote. The left did well, but the combined forces of the Social Democrats and Communists, almost equal in strength, fell two seats short of an absolute majority.56 Zhdanov advocated the creation of a “Democratic Bloc” of Communists, Social Democrats, and the Agrarian party, a kind of forerunner to the coalitions that would later be formed in the East-Central European People’s Democracies.57 But although Finland in this respect was something of a test-case, the Soviets stopped short of imposing upon the Finns a socialized economy or the political dictatorship of a leftwing Communist-dominated bloc. In the Finnish case, the Soviet leadership condoned the creation of a reasonably free “United-Front”

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coalition. In the spring of 1945 it seemed willing to grant comparable leeway to coalition governments in other European countries that became part of their sphere of influence at war’s end. Perhaps Stalin and Molotov hoped that their apparent tolerance of political plurality would persuade the Anglo-Americans to offer them continued economic aid.58 While Finland largely escaped the Soviet stranglehold, Stalin abandoned this tolerant attitude elsewhere when relations with the West soured. In late April 1945 Zhdanov returned to Moscow for a session of the ussr Supreme Soviet.59 While the Soviet Union involved itself briefly in the war against Japan, v-e Day (8 May 1945) meant the real end of the war for most Soviet inhabitants. The death toll had been enormous: nearly twenty-seven million Soviet citizens may have been killed (of whom three-quarters were men), or fifteen percent of the pre-war population.60 The toll was so embarassingly high that in Stalin’s lifetime the pretence was maintained that fewer than ten million Soviet citizens had perished. The effect of the war had been profound in other ways. The country had suffered massive material damage. Most public buildings, factories, urban apartments, roads, bridges, collective farms, crops, and livestock had been obliterated in its European territory west of Moscow and as far north as Leningrad to the northwest and the Caucasus mountains to the south. While during the war tens of millions of Soviet citizens lived for a while under German rule, more than ten million survivors had seen battle against the Nazi-led forces.61 The celebrations of v-e Day among Stalin’s Inner Circle were somewhat spoiled by the death of Zhdanov’s old ally and friend Shcherbakov on 10 May, the apparent result of work-related stress and alcoholism.62 The career paths of Shcherbakov and Zhdanov had been intertwined in many ways. During the war, Shcherbakov had surpassed Zhdanov in terms of political power. Shcherbakov’s roles as cc secretary, head of the army’s political administration propaganda, curator of the cc Agitprop directorate, Moscow Party chief, and alternate Politburo member had placed him at the epicentre of the Soviet war effort in Moscow. Zhdanov was one of the prominent Party bosses who signed their names to Shcherbakov’s obituary in Partiinoe stroitel’stvo; he was listed tenth, after Stalin, Molotov, Kalinin, Voroshilov, Beria, Malenkov, Mikoian, Kaganovich, and Khrushchev (it had become customary in official publications to list the names of the leaders according to their place in the political pecking order).63 The victory celebrations soon resumed and lasted through most of May and June. Zhdanov attended the Kremlin reception held in honour of the military commanders on 24 May, opened the sixth

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session of the Russian Republic’s Supreme Soviet on 5 June, and was present at the opening of the ussr Supreme Soviet, which issued a demobilization decree on 22 June.64 The climax of the festive season came on 24 June with Stalin, Zhdanov, and others greeting the victorious troops from the top of Lenin’s Mausoleum in Red Square. Jeffrey Brooks has aptly observed that in this victory parade, “Stalin and his cronies, who had tragically misjudged the Nazi threat, were shown to owe citizens nothing, while the populace owed them everything.”65 At the May Kremlin reception, Stalin gave a toast to the Russian people, whom he portrayed as first among the Soviet nations who had defeated the Germans.66 His words signalled the postwar continuation of the chauvinistic Russification policy that originated in the 1930s. He also spoke in those days of the tremendous importance of the average Soviet citizens, complimenting the essential “cogs in the wheel” of the war machine without whom the struggle could not have been won. Stalin betrayed with his words his disregard for the life of the individual.67 The man who had won a war over the dead bodies of so many compatriots was awarded the historically prestigious title of “generalissimus” for his brilliant military exploits.68 Among others, Stalin shared the title with the Russian heroes Kutuzov and Suvorov, and, oddly, the Spanish dictator Franco. Colonel-General Zhdanov was meanwhile getting used to work at the cc Secretariat to which he was soon able to give his undivided attention.69 Some ideological issues were pending, such as the proper historiographical line to establish on Russian history.70 Zhdanov met with Stalin in his Kremlin office only three times in May and June of 1945, at a time when Stalin was preparing himself for the Potsdam conference.71 Zhdanov, not a participant at the meetings in Teheran or Yalta and almost wholly inexperienced at dealing with unsavoury capitalists, was never considered as a potential member of the Soviet team. Stalin’s trepidation about discussions with us president Harry Truman and the British prime ministers Winston Churchill and then Clement Attlee increased during his train-ride to Germany when on 16 July his secret police informed him that the first atomic bomb had been exploded successfully in New Mexico. Truman waited for more than a week before telling Stalin about the nuclear test.72 Because he already knew about the detonation, the Soviet dictator reacted stoically when the American president informed him about the blast, although his attitude also reflected uncertainty about the bomb’s significance. Until then, Soviet research into an atomic device had been tentative.73 What certainly did not please Stalin was that the British and Americans had never invited the Soviet Union to participate in

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the Manhattan Project, their successful push to develop and produce an atomic bomb before the Germans did. And Stalin easily bore a grudge. The Potsdam Conference, which lasted from 17 July to 2 August, failed to resolve most of the key issues regarding the postwar peace settlement in Europe. There were other signs of heightened antagonism besides the bomb, especially the strong disgreements about the postwar settlement in Germany and Poland. Such issues would soon escalate into the Cold War between the former allies. The Big Three at least found common ground in the imminent Soviet declaration of war on Japan. Soviet troops moved into Manchuria and other parts of East Asia on 8 August, two days after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and one day before Nagasaki was hit. The war with Japan was brief and localized and thus did not halt the effort to return to normalcy inside the ussr.74 But any doubt about the force of the new American superweapon was overcome by the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On 20 August the gko responded by organizing a heavy-weight special committee chaired by Beria to build a Soviet bomb.75 In subsequent years much of the limited state revenues available went into the bomb project and depressed the Soviet standard of living virtually until Stalin’s death in 1953.76 On 19 August 1945, Pravda announced that the cc and the Sovnarkom had ordered Gosplan to design a Fourth Five-Year Plan for the period from 1946 to 1950 inclusive.77 The plan heavily favoured capital-goods industry (including the secret bomb project), while only one-tenth of the funds spent on industry went to the production of consumer goods.78 The outlay needed for the burgeoning arms race and the atomic project added to the host of difficulties that confronted the Soviet regime and population in the early postwar years, such as economic devastation; the need to devote significant financial and material means on the pivotal resurrection of urban-type population centres and industrial enterprises; the shortage of cadres (especially in rural locations); the misharvest of basic productive crops, which occurred over a number of years in Central Asia and Kazakhstan, in the southern regions of Ukraine and the Central Black Earth Region, in Western Siberia and in the Far East; natural calamities (earthquakes, severe rainstorms and the floods caused by them, heavy snows, and so on); the loss of cattle to malnutrition and illness; the increased mortality of the population caused by the famine in the postwar year of 1946 and by injuries received during the war, and the death of people in those undeclared wars that were being waged [in] the Baltic region, in the western regions of Ukraine and Belorussia et cetera.79

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In a radio broadcast on 2 September, Stalin personally announced the surrender of Japan. Significantly, he hailed the victory over Japan as a belated revenge for the Russian defeat in the Russo-Japanese War, continuing thereby the theme of the Russianness of the ussr.80 The end of the wartime emergency was underlined when, on 4 September, the State Defence Committee was dissolved.81 Its disappearance meant a strengthening of Zhdanov’s position among the leaders, since he had never been a core member of the gko. Now power once again derived from Stalin’s favour, Politburo membership, high rank within Sovnarkom or Gosplan, or holding the position of cc secretary. Somewhere in the course of September, Stalin suffered a mild stroke.82 After treatment in Moscow, he departed for Sochi. There he was able to meet us envoy Averell Harriman on 24 October.83 Though convalescing at the Black Sea (he only returned to his Kremlin office in mid-December), Stalin kept a close watch on events in Moscow, the Soviet Union, and the rest of the world, “receiving daily twenty to thirty documents on domestic and foreign policy, among which were many intelligence denunciations from different sources, including regular mgb [sic] reports on conversations in the diplomatic corps.”84 The sacc remained among Zhdanov’s responsibilities in the summer and autumn of 1945. In July and August, he drafted a sacc resolution obliging the Finnish government to deal with its war criminals expeditiously.85 Zhdanov once more went to Helsinki in November 1945. There he pressured the justice minister, Urho Kekkonen and prime minister Juho Kusti Paasikivi, into organizing a public trial of Finnish war criminals; the main suspects were sentenced by late February 1946. In the autumn of 1945, Zhdanov prepared the ground for his permanent successor in Helsinki. During the next thirty months, it was more the Finnish Communist party than the country of Finland on which Zhdanov concentrated.86 The moment had finally arrived for Zhdanov to be formally restored to the centre of policy making in the Soviet Union. On 26 December Zhdanov was back in the Soviet capital, and he attended the first postwar Politburo meeting three days later.87 The meeting created a foreign-policy committee consisting of Zhdanov, Stalin, Molotov, Beria, Mikoian, and Malenkov.88 Ominously for Malenkov, who as a Politburo member supervised the commissariat, the People’s Commissar of the Aviation Industry, A.I. Shakhurin (1904–75), was dismissed for the production of defective military planes.89 The Politburo resolved, too, to replace the cc Department of International Information with a cc Department of Foreign Policy (dfp).90 M.A. Suslov (1902–82) was appointed its chief. His department was to prepare and check cadres designated for work in the field of foreign relations and

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to maintain relations with Communist parties and other workers’ organizations abroad. Even though Suslov reported to Zhdanov, the latter was not privy to all the strategic material on foreign affairs coming to the attention of the leadership, as in the case of the Soviet conflict with the Western allies over Iran in 1945 and 1946.91 Immediately after the war, when Stalin was inclined to work through the normal diplomatic route in negotiations with the Western Allies, Molotov and nkid (mid) took precedence over the cc dfp regarding foreign affairs. But the dfp increased its stature towards 1948.92 When diplomatic negotiations attained fewer and fewer Soviet aims in global affairs, it became likelier that other tools would be used to serve Soviet interests abroad, such as the Soviet Communist party’s leadership over the European and global Communist movement. Soviet relations with foreign Communists were concentrated in the cc’s dfp, so that Suslov’s department eventually began to rival the mid in importance.93 Mikhail Andreevich Suslov was Zhdanov’s successor as ideological chief. The grey cardinal, as he was later nicknamed, may have been Zhdanov’s protégé prior to 1946, but Suslov hedged his bets carefully once he entered the cc’s highest levels, realizing that it was Stalin, not Zhdanov, who really pulled the strings. In 1947 Suslov was appointed cc secretary, a post that he held until his death thirty-five years later, setting the service record.94 In another noteworthy Politburo decision of late December 1945, Beria was replaced as nkvd People’s Commissar by S.N. Kruglov (1907–77).95 Soon Beria’s crony Merkulov was replaced at the mgb by V.S. Abakumov (1908–54).96 Even if Kruglov’s appointment was primarily intended to enable his predecessor to concentrate on the Soviet atomic-bomb project, Beria’s removal from the day-to-day operation of the secret-police ministries diminished his stature within Stalin’s Inner Circle. Stalin likewise cut down to size the other key gko members during the second half of the 1940s (although Beria and Malenkov had both returned to positions of prominence by 1949). Thus, in late 1945, while the position of Stalin’s wartime associates was being eroded, Zhdanov’s star was ascending.97 The pre-war frequency of Zhdanov’s visits to Stalin resumed in January 1946.98 Zhdanov was now actively preparing himself for his role as cultural and ideological steward. On 23 January Stalin, Zhdanov, Malenkov, Voznesensky, Mikoian, and Beria met the cultural, educational, and ideological bosses Aleksandrov, Khrapchenko, Polikarpov, Kaftanov and Bol’shakov.99 But as before the war, Zhdanov received various tasks. Two days later, Zhdanov participated in a meeting of almost an hour with the physicist I.V. Kurchatov.100 Afterwards, Stalin, Beria, Molotov, Voznesensky, Malenkov, Mikoian and

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Zhdanov remained behind in Stalin’s Kremlin office for two hours to discuss the development of the Soviet bomb. Zhdanov’s involvement in the bomb project remained sporadic; it was usually supervised by Stalin, Molotov, and Beria.101 Any key decisions, of course, always involved Stalin at some stage. In the first couple of days of February, Zhdanov, Molotov, and Malenkov visited Stalin in his office to discuss with Walter Ulbricht his request to form a socialist unity party in the Soviet zone of occupation in Germany.102 Ulbricht, a trusted Comintern acquaintance from the prewar period, was given the green light to merge the spd and kpd into the sed in the eastern zone.

ch illy win d s A noisy election campaign for the ussr Supreme Soviet reached fever pitch in early February 1946. Zhdanov stood candidate for the same Volodarskii working-class district in Leningrad as in the previous elections of 1937. His speech to the voters of this raion on 6 February was published as a separate brochure within two days of its delivery.103 The publication of the pre-election speeches in Partiinoe stroitel’stvo (Party Construction) shows that Zhdanov’s comeback was progressing: his speech was published in eighth spot, ahead of Malenkov’s and Voznesensky’s. In his election address, Zhdanov portrayed Stalin as the genius-architect of victory.104 He extolled the glorious triumph over “fascism” and as yet betrayed only the faintest flicker of annoyance with certain “elements” in Great Britain and the United States.105 In some spheres amicable contact between Soviet citizens and Westerners had been fairly common during the war (far more so than before June 1941), especially among the scientific communities of the Big Three – Britain, the us, and the ussr.106 But the alliance now began to unravel at increasing speed, catching many scientists by surprise. The growing problems between the wartime allies were more apparent in Stalin’s election address of 9 February than in Zhdanov’s speeches of the previous days.107 Within ten days of Stalin’s address, a policy analyst at the American embassy in Moscow, George Kennan, dispatched his celebrated “Long Telegram” to Washington, in which he outlined Soviet aims and desires in foreign policy and stressed the Soviet leaders’ general lack of good faith and good will in negotiations with the West.108 The Soviet general elections of 10 February, meanwhile, resulted in the unanimous endorsement of the bloc of Communists and non-Party Bolsheviks by the Soviet population.109 In the autumn of 1945 and winter of 1946, Stalin did not just reduce the power of his former gko partners but, irritated by their

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boldness, rebuked the highest military commanders. In mid-February Zhdanov, who seems to have regained a loosely defined supervisory role over the navy, attended with Mikoian a meeting at the People’s Commissariat of the Navy dedicated to Stalin’s proposal to split the Baltic Fleet into two.110 Admiral Kuznetsov, People’s Commissar of the Navy, apparently still believed that he could protest Stalin’s designs as freely as he had occasionally done during the war.111 Kuznetsov told the two Politburo members that he objected to the division of the fleet, and he went over their heads by visiting Stalin the next day to reiterate his objections. Stalin not only rejected Kuznetsov’s criticism but decided that the kind of brazen behaviour he and several other ranking officers displayed had to stop. Both Admiral Kuznetsov and the formidable Marshal Zhukov were made to understand in harsh manner that Stalin would not tolerate defiance by his officers in peacetime. The first of two courts that tried Kuznetsov in 1948 was, to a great degree, the brainchild of Andrei Zhdanov.

tigh tening th e ide o l o g ic a l sc r e w s On 26 February 1946 Andrei Zhdanov turned fifty. On his birthday, he received from the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet a second Order of Lenin as a reward for his “outstanding services before the Party and the Soviet people.”112 Around his birthday, preparations were underway for the opening session of the newly elected Supreme Soviet and a concomitant cc plenum. There were very few cc plenums in Stalin’s last years, and the plenum of 11, 14, and 18 March limited itself mainly to “organizational questions.”113 On 5 March, just before the gatherings of the Central Committee and Soviet parliament, former British prime minister Winston Churchill spoke in Fulton, Missouri, in the presence of American president Harry Truman.114 In what became a canonical Cold War speech, Churchill depicted a European continent divided by an iron curtain behind which the peoples of EastCentral Europe were held in Soviet bondage. Ironically, Churchill’s diatribe contributed to the swift return to the Communist siege mentality of the 1930s, for the Soviet leadership saw Churchill’s speech as the announcement by the Western Allies of a definitive break with the Soviet Union.115 Stalin replied to Churchill’s speech by intensifying efforts to forge a formidable monolithic entity of the Soviet Union and its new dependencies in East-Central Europe.116 Although some sectors of the Soviet population had shown themselves to be “treacherous,” the people had stood firm, in the main, against the “ultra-capitalist” Nazis in the Great Patriotic War. Some of the narod’s zealous defence of their motherland

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could be attributed to the patriotic attitude inculcated before June 1941 by Agitprop under the aegis of Zhdanov. Now, in March 1946, a new propaganda offensive seemed imperative to mobilize the Soviet people behind their leaders in the growing conflict between East and West. Zhdanov’s return as ideological boss was cemented.117 The cc plenum in March replaced the mortally ill chairman of the ussr Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, Mikhail Kalinin, with Nikolai Shvernik.118 The plenum agreed, too, to the renaming of the Sovnarkom to the less radical sounding Council of Ministers (Sovmin).119 Meanwhile, on 12 March Zhdanov and the other cc members attended the first meeting of the ussr Supreme Soviet in its second incarnation.120 The meeting lasted a full week.121 The Soviet parliament formally ratified various personnel changes. Zhdanov left his position as chair of the Commission for Foreign Affairs of the Council of the Union and was elected speaker of this “lower house.”122 Stalin was officially reappointed premier.123 Because there had been a wild growth in the number of ministries over the years, a kind of inner cabinet was created out of two smaller bodies that already had been informally responsible for most key government decisions (those that did not need the stamp of approval of the cc, Politburo, or, in practice, Stalin).124 Instead, out of the two operative biuros of the Sovnarkom, a single Sovminbiuro was formed, headed by Beria, with Kosygin and Voznesensky as his deputies. The cc plenum, a brief affair even on the three days it met, concluded by making Malenkov and Beria full Politburo members, while Stalin, Malenkov, Zhdanov, A.A. Kuznetsov, and Moscow chief G.M. Popov (1906–68) were (re)-elected as cc secretaries.125 Malenkov still took precedence over Zhdanov in the hierarchy, because he had now gained both Politburo membership and was informally confirmed as Stalin’s first deputy for the Party. This “second” secretary was quite important since Stalin was often preoccupied with government business in his role as prime minister (the distinction between Stalin’s tasks as Party leader and as premier was not in practice clear-cut, since he made many a decision, somewhat whimsically, as one or the other). The cc also officially elected a new Orgbiuro membership:126 joining existing members Stalin, Malenkov, Zhdanov, Mikhailov, and Mekhlis were A.A. Kuznetsov, Popov, Bulganin, N.S. Patolichev (1908–89), V.M. Andrianov (1902–78), Aleksandrov, N.N. Shatalin (1904–84), V.V. Kuznetsov, M.A. Rodionov, and Suslov.127 In the last days of the Supreme Soviet’s session and just after it concluded, Zhdanov and Stalin were polishing a cc resolution, released on 27 March, outlining “the tasks of agitation and propaganda in connection with the new Five-Year Plan and the restoration and develop-

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ment of the ussr economy for 1946–50.”128 At the same time Zhdanov, Malenkov, Aleksei Kuznetsov, and Popov worked on a redistribution of tasks among the cc secretaries and a reorganization of the cc apparatus, outlines for which were presented at a Politburo meeting on 13 April.129 The Secretariat maintained its two directorates (Agitprop and Cadres), but at first it was to gain only two other departments (Organization-Instruction and Foreign Policy). Malenkov was to chair Orgbiuro meetings, but he lost control over the Cadres directorate, which he had headed since 1939. In the latter position, Malenkov was replaced by Zhdanov’s Leningrad friend Aleksei Kuznetsov, who was also to chair Secretariat meetings.130 Kuznetsov thus became one of the most senior Party leaders. His elevation was not unlike Zhdanov’s in 1934. If Kuznetsov’s job performance was satisfactory, he would be entrenched in the highest echelons. At first Kuznetsov did well, so much so that in 1948 Stalin briefly considered making him his ultimate successor as Party chief.131 Also on 13 April, the Politburo restored the Agitprop directorate to Andrei Zhdanov, though G.F. Aleksandrov remained its official head.132 As overseer, Zhdanov appears to have replaced Malenkov who, in his turn, had functioned as Shcherbakov’s replacement since May 1945.133 Zhdanov’s responsibilities at the directorate were defined more precisely than before the war. He was to supervise the work of Party and soviet organizations in the field of propaganda and agitation, a job that encompassed press, publishing, film,134 radio, the Soviet news agency, art, as well as oral agitation and propaganda.135 Zhdanov also regained supervision over Suslov’s foreign-policy department. Thus, Zhdanov resumed his pre-war role, while Kuznetsov’s appointment made Zhdanov perhaps even more powerful than in 1939–41.136 But while the explicit (re)assignment of the tasks of cc secretaries and Politburo members undoubtedly established guidelines and demarcated responsibilities, the demarcations were often ignored in practice, partly because even in the Soviet Union politics was often about reacting to unexpected situations, rather than initiating policy. On Stalin’s orders, Aleksei Kuznetsov and Zhdanov now went to work to accentuate the vanguard role of the Party within the Soviet political system.137 During the spring of 1946 they began to expand the control exerted by the cc apparatus. This process concluded at the 1947 plenum with the acceptance by the cc of Zhdanov’s suggestion, of an enlarged role for the cc Cadres administration. The Party’s precedence over government was once again emphasized. As Agitprop supervisor, Zhdanov concurrently led the campaign towards greater ideological orthodoxy. Soon Aleksandrov and

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Zhdanov issued a slate of measures to begin the ideological offensive. Within days of the April Politburo meeting, the bosses met with the Agitprop directorate’s senior employees (its total labour force numbered in the thousands) to announce a new ideological course.138 One pertinent reason for Agitprop’s ideological offensive was the enormous renewal of Party membership during the war. Most new Communists were Red Army soldiers who had become members under dispensation from the peacetime rules, thus exempting them from the usual testing of political literacy.139 The principle of “careful selection of new cadres” that Zhdanov had prescribed at the Eighteenth Party Congress, ignored during most of the war, was now restored.140 When the postwar ideological and security campaigns reached fever pitch in mid-1947, the Party decided to slow down membership intake significantly, leading to a drop in membership during 1948 when members were purged for not having become more politically savvy in response to the initiatives that Agitprop undertook after April 1946.141 Political education was seen as crucial in the lean postwar years not just because of the questionable ideological training of wartime recruits or the growing East-West conflict but also because the regime had little to offer to its citizens in terms of rewards for their work in rebuilding their devastated country and maintaining its defensive strength. Agitprop had to inculcate selfless enthusiasm for the radiant future, which, in the 1940s just as in the 1930s, had to compensate for the lack of material incentives. On 18 April Zhdanov chaired the first postwar meeting of the Agitprop directorate that had been reassigned to him five days before.142 He outlined the unsatisfactory state of propaganda and somewhat incongruously singled out literary criticism as published in the literary journals and in Pravda as a prime example. Although educating the mass of new Party members appeared more pertinent, his foray into literary criticism directly reflected Stalin’s whim.143 Zhdanov explained Stalin’s view that the state of literary criticism was emblematic of general ideological shortcomings: “Comrade Stalin questioned literature, and the condition of areas such as the cinema, theatres, art, literature. Comrade Stalin demanded that we, the Directorate of Propaganda, have to organize the criticism, that is, the Directorate of Propaganda also needs to become the leading organ that should bring order to literary criticism.”144 Zhdanov further lambasted those literary journals that were published under the direct supervision of the Writers’ Union (Novyi Mir and Zvezda were singled out).145 Some speakers at the meeting, such as the propaganda worker Kovalev, conceded that the efficacy of propaganda was diminished by the modest educational level of many workers at the higher levels of

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the Party hierarchy in the periphery and in Moscow.146 He added that “if one speaks of the rank-and-file Communists, then the majority of them is still not capable of studying the Short Course. People from the milieu of workers [and] peasants cannot study the Short Course[;] they require political literacy, and political literacy one has to supply.”147 Kovalev thus underlined the persistent chasm between the educated elite and the great majority of Soviet citizens who had enjoyed less than seven years of formal education.148 To such people, understanding without help even the fairly simplistic materialism that was supplied in Stalin’s Party history was a daunting task. The disjointed utterances at this meeting show a lack of clarity about its purpose among the participants. Was Agitprop to prioritize the unsatisfactory performance of the creative intelligentsia in enlightening the masses, or was it to address the flawed readiness of the masses to receive the pearls of wisdom supplied by Party ideologists, the Short Course, and partiinye intelligenty in the arts? Stalin and Zhdanov themselves were likely confused about the aims. The political philosophy of Marx and Lenin taught them, on the one hand, that the intelligentsia would fall in line behind the proletarian masses when it realized the truth of their cause (as it was already said to have done according to the 1936 Constitution and the 1939 Party statute). But it would also act as their guide or vanguard (as it had in the prerevolutionary days, on the basis of Lenin’s idea that workers spontaneously developed a trade-union mentality).149 Would the Stalinists therefore benefit more from enlightening the masses (leaving the intelligentsia to follow automatically) by straightforward political education (learning the classics from some key works by Lenin, Stalin’s biography,150 or the Short Course)? Or was it better to rally the intelligentsia (and, in the arts, have it expose the principles of ideinost’, partiinost’, and narodnost’ more emphatically) behind which the workers would fall in line? The rather surprising amount of time and energy spent by the Party leaders in disciplining the creative intelligentsiia after 1945 indicates that they believed that intellectuals and artists had a crucial role to play in guiding the masses to the promised land of Communism, even if the Stalinists also expended great effort on the ideological training of broader layers of Soviet society, particularly of the general Communist party membership. Perhaps part of the leaders’ confusion was due to their tacit realization that the audience for their propaganda accepted certain parts of it readily but ignored or even rejected other elements, independent of the manner in which the Regime tried to inculcate its political axioms.151 How did one determine which method was more efficacious in moulding modern Soviet citizens and exemplary Party members?

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At the end of the meeting, Zhdanov set a deadline of about three months for the Agitprop directorate’s employees to submit proposals for improving ideological orthodoxy; the proposals were then to be discussed by the Orgbiuro.152 That the deadline was met was somewhat unusual. A comprehensive way to address the failing role of the arts crystallized by August, when Zhdanov chaired an Orgbiuro meeting attended by artists, Agitprop apparatchiks, and Stalin himself.

ma lenkov Meanwhile, Georgii Malenkov’s political star dimmed. In early April he was still chairing sessions of the Orgbiuro, but the arrest of Soviet airforce commander A.A. Novikov on 23 April further weakened his position.153 Other members of the Military Council of the Airforce, of which Malenkov was a leading member, were by then already under arrest; under interrogation (which involved torture), they began to denounce Malenkov as a co-conspirator in efforts to sabotage Soviet aircraft.154 Some high-level apparatchiki of the cc Cadres directorate were arrested in connection with the case.155 On 4 May, at a Politburo meeting, Malenkov was released from his job as cc secretary, primarily on the grounds of sloppy supervision over the airforce and the aircraft industry, which had resulted in the building of defective airplanes.156 But this was far from full political disgrace. Malenkov was still part of the Politburo and Orgbiuro (which he chaired until August) and remained a frequent visitor to Stalin‘s office.157 By his moves against Malenkov, Stalin showed everyone who was boss.158 One by one he cut his wartime political aides down to size, as he did with various army, navy, and airforce commanders as well;159 hence the demotion of G.K. Zhukov and the arrest of Novikov, both of whom had dared to reflect critically in private conversations on some of Stalin’s wartime military decisions.160 Judging from Aleksei Kuznetsov’s speech before Cadres directorate employees in July 1947, in which he lamented the preponderance of “technocrats” among them, Malenkov may also have been held responsible for a certain political flabbiness prevalent among his appointees in the directorate.161 Kuznetsov tried to replace these appointees with people with a solid “political education.” From the spring of 1946 onwards, Stalin believed that the times called for sophisticated ideological zealots. Kuznetsov and Zhdanov diligently tried to find or forge such Communist crusaders, but as the timing of Kuznetsov’s speech indicates, fifteen months after Malenkov had been removed as head of cadres, it proved difficult to find them. On 6 May a “cc plenum” ratified Malenkov’s removal from the

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Secretariat.162 Until August Malenkov remained usual chair of the Orgbiuro, while Zhdanov and Kuznetsov alternated as chairs of the Secretariat’s meetings.163 During the spring and summer of 1946, Zhdanov worked on a more orderly operation of both Orgbiuro and Secretariat and tried to define the distinction between the two organs.164 He also attempted to strengthen compliance with cc decrees by having Party and state institutions report regularly to the cc Secretariat , transforming the cc’s Organizational-Instructional department into a new cc directorate to check Party organs. In August N.S. Patolichev, an old acquaintance of Zhdanov’s, was promoted from department head to chief of this new directorate (in May Patolichev had already replaced Malenkov as cc secretary).165 The enmity between Malenkov and Zhdanov probably began here, in the spring of 1946.166 Malenkov resented being replaced by Zhdanov. The latter’s position as one of Stalin’s two closest collaborators (together with Molotov) seemed unassailable for the next two years.167 T.F. Shtykov, one of the very few of Zhdanov’s wartime colleagues in Leningrad to survive the “Leningrad Affair,” explained in June 1957: When the [cc] decision was made [in August 1946] and [Malenkov] went from the Central Committee to the Soviet of Ministers, what do you think, did Malenkov calm down? No, he dreamed the whole time of returning to the cc. He returned. But when he returned, he returned not to work honestly in the Central Committee of the party, he decided to get revenge. Why? Because Zhdanov was from Leningrad, Kuznetsov was from Leningrad, a group of other workers was from Leningrad, a number of obkom secretaries was from Leningrad. That was not to the liking of Malenkov. Com. Khrushchev said that Com. Stalin trusted Kuznetsov. I met Kuznetsov many times, and he told me, that he had been given the task of monitoring the organs. That did not please Malenkov and Beria, and they [went after him].168

The Politburo session of 4 May at which Malenkov was dismissed as cc secretary was the same one at which V.N. Merkulov was replaced as mgb minister by V.S. Abakumov, further undermining Beria’s influence over the security organs, though informally he retained a kind of supervisory function, which he had to share with Stalin and, in 1947–48, with Kuznetsov).169 During the war Abakumov had headed military counterintelligence, known as smersh, and had thus worked directly under the People’s Commissar of Defence, Stalin. In the spring of 1946, Beria and Malenkov now found themselves in an alliance of malcontents. Meanwhile, Zhdanov began his attempt to mould the minds of

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Communists and non-Communists in earnest. On 18 May the cc resolved to organize an all-Union socialist competition to fulfill and over-fulfill the Five-Year Plan, which laid the onus for the reconstruction of socialist society primarily on selfless enthusiasm.170 On 27 May the cc Secretariat issued a resolution, prepared by the Agitprop directorate, on army veterans. The Communist authorities tried to buy their loyalty or acquiesence by mandating their employment in jobs, at least equal to the posts they had occupied before they had been mobilized.171 On 3 June a Politburo resolution appointed Zhdanov chair of the commission for the Stalin Prizes for 1945 in the fields of art and literature.172 Concomitantly, Zhdanov intensified his involvement in the affairs of the global Communist movement. During the evening and night of May 27–28, Zhdanov, Stalin, Molotov, Beria, and Bulganin met a Yugoslav delegation, headed by Josip Broz Tito, in Moscow.173 The idea of an information bureau coordinating the activities of the different East European Communist parties was floated for the first time.174 Stalin, too, expressed support for the inclusion of Albania in the Yugoslav federation and advocated eventual inclusion of Bulgaria as well, which ran counter to the convictions of the Yugoslav dictator, who was more attuned to the subtleties of nationalism in the Balkans. When Tito began to move in Stalin’s direction in the next eighteen months, he did so in a manner that Stalin construed as insubordination. Even now, though, Zhdanov was not made part of all important decisions affecting the Soviet Union. Partially, this was because of the (loose) division of tasks among the highest leaders, but it was also the consequence of Stalin’s wish to be the sole person handling the overall coordination.175 For example, Zhdanov was only sporadically made part of matters of state security.176 Political and other types of crime did not fall within Zhdanov’s competence, but the fate of the “Punished Peoples,” those ethnic groups deported for alleged collaboration with the Nazis during the Second World War, somehow did. Around 15 June Kruglov reported to Stalin, Molotov, Beria, and Zhdanov that in May 1946 hundreds of bandits in Ukraine, Belorussia, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia had been killed, and close to one thousand arrested.177 On 31 July Kruglov reported to Stalin, Molotov, Beria, and Zhdanov on the adaptation of the exiled Caucasian people of the Kalmyks to life in the Altai krai and Novosibirsk, Tiumen, Omsk, and Tomsk oblasts. Their mortality rates were dropping, Kruglov noted, although a high incidence of tuberculosis remained prevalent among the exiles, to whom very few children were being born, especially when compared to the local population.178 Zhdanov often participated in discussions of government matters

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even though he usually had no formal government post, showing that a strict distinction between the competence of the two powers – Party and government – was not observed at the top of the Soviet hierarchy.179 One example was Zhdanov’s report (co-authored with Aleksandrov and Bol’shakov) on shortcomings in the Soviet film industry. The report led to a Politburo resolution on 17 June on the quantity and quality of film production in 1946–47 and on the membership of the artistic council that fell under Bol’shakov’s Ministry of Cinematography.180 Because filmmaking was part of culture, such matters were Zhdanov’s responsibility, though he had no formal government post. Agitprop also prepared in June the publication of Kul’tura i zhizn’ (Culture and Life), a journal that soon came under debate in Stalin’s office and at the Orgbiuro.181 Stalin spent more time at one of his dachas near Moscow than in the Kremlin during that hot dry summer.182 But the boss worked hard and remained, as much as he could, keenly alert, even during the many long-drawn-out dinners that he held there. In jolly moments, Zhdanov sometimes played the piano, accompanying the singing of Stalin, Voroshilov, and Molotov, and occasionally that of famous opera singers.183 Such frivolity was unusual for Zhdanov, though, who generally soldiered on feverishly, judging by the avalanche of decrees and meetings on which he left his imprint at the time. The next fruit of Zhdanov’s efforts was the cc resolution of 26 July “On the growth of the Party and measures for the strenghtening of the Party-organizational and Party-political work with the new entrants in the vkp (b).”184 The Orgbiuro had discussed measures to improve work with new Party members in July, a meeting shaped by the discussions held in the Agitprop directorate in April under Zhdanov’s lead. By the spring of 1946, Communists (candidates and members) formed six per cent of the population: an all-time record.185 But nearly three-quarters of the membership had joined the Party since the beginning of the German invasion of the Soviet Union.186 The political formation of the membership was therefore less than desirable from the bosses’s point of view.187 But educational levels also remained low, with only 67.2 per cent of Communists in the ussr having some sort of secondary education. Additionally, the Party had too many white-collar workers, 47.6 per cent of total membership being identifed as sluzhashchie (employees).188 Even though the 1936 Constitution and the rules of the Eighteenth Party Congress had officially abolished the positive discrimination of workers, the Soviet Union remained the world’s first proletarian state and the belief in the special revolutionary qualities of the blue-collar worker continued unabated. The July 1946 resolution and subsequent measures created in the ussr 60,000

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Politshkoli (political schools) in which 800,000 people studied politics.189 In 1948 this amount doubled, while the number of groups studying Party history grew from 45,500 in 1947 to 88,000 in 1948, the participants increasing from 846,000 to 1.2 million. But maintaining a high percentage of blue-collar members – of workers who still worked behind the workbench, at the looms, or at the conveyor belts – proved an elusive goal. Factory workers who joined the Party were often asked to take a desk job within the Party organization or promoted to a desk job at their plant because they were Party members, thus leaving the shopfloor behind forever. Zhdanov’s ideological offensive found further expression in a cc resolution of July 30 on the improvement of the newspapers Molot (published in Rostov-on-the-Don), Volzhskaia kommuna (Kuibyshev), and Kurskaia pravda (Kursk).190 The papers were criticized for their poor ability to propagate efforts to stimulate the economy. The decree ordered the Agitprop directorate to increase control over regional newspapers. Three days later there followed the cc resolution “On the training and retraining of leading Party and soviet workers.”191 It created a new Higher Party School, Academy of Social Sciences, and Military-Political Academy. The Orgbiuro meeting in July delineated the tasks of Kul’tura i zhizn’ as “the criticism of the shortcomings in the different fields of ideological work: critical investigations of newspapers, magazines, films, theatrical productions, literary works, sociopolitical literature, radio programs, and criticism of shortcomings in agitation-propaganda work of local Party organizations [explaining] systematically the tasks posed by the Party in the field of ideological work, and to reflect in its articles and materials cc decisions and decrees… on questions of ideology, the press, propaganda and culture.”192 These ambitious plans were never realized. The journal remained a rather sterile publication and closed down in 1951, apparently having failed to reach its goals.193 On 2 August 1946, Zhdanov officially replaced Malenkov as Orgbiuro chair and introduced proposals for the better division of labour between Orgbiuro and Secretariat.194 Once again the reforms failed to separate the tasks of the two bodies.195 Little came of weekly Orgbiuro meetings in the following couple of years. There was a great deal of overlap thanks to key bosses sitting on both Party organs, as Stalin and Zhdanov did in 1946–48. They could use several routes to formalize decisions that were ostensibly based on discussions in Orgbiuro or Secretariat (and sometimes presented to the general public as a decision made by the Central Committee as a whole), which in reality had been predetermined by the few ranking leaders in Stalin’s office or at his dacha (the same goes for

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decisions presented as having originated with the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet or Sovmin). In the late spring and summer of 1946, Andrei Zhdanov, who replaced Georgii Malenkov in May as Stalin’s highest Party steward, began a broadly based ideological offensive to restore firm control over the arts and inculcate political orthodoxy into the general Soviet population. Part of the effort entailed a structural reorganization of the cc aimed at a more efficient operation of its branches and control over the execution of its orders. But restricted by narrow ideological boundaries and under Stalin’s watchful eye, his initiatives were unimaginative and harked back to similar campaigns of the pre-war era. The results of Zhdanov’s activities (and those of his associates and subordinates), as we shall see, were hardly impressive, despite all the energy he expended on them.

leaking s c ientific se c r e t s On 3 August cc secretaries Zhdanov, Kuznetsov, Patolichev, and Popov were notified by one of the cc department heads of a visit that had been made by us ambassador Walter Bedell Smith to the Soviet oncologists Nina Kliueva (1898–1971) and Georgii Roskin (1892–1964) at the Academy of Medical Sciences on 20 June.196 Though the minister of Health, Georgii Miterev, had sought and received permission for the visit from both the Foreign Affairs Ministry (mid) and the Ministry of State Security (mgb), the American’s visit had somehow never been cleared with the cc, despite the fact that in March 1946 the discovery by Kliueva and Roskin of a possible anticancer substance had been made public and the cc had been instrumental in providing the researchers with a better laboratory.197 Importing foreign equipment for the laboratory was deemed necessary but the money for doing so was hard to find, so Miterev had invited Smith to visit Kliueva and Roskin in an attempt to awaken American interest and thus find a sponsor. At the meeting, Smith proposed the creation of a SovietAmerican institute for cancer research, for which the Americans would deliver the equipment that was in such short supply in the ussr, while the two researchers would supply the ideas and concepts.198 On 6 July the Health ministry officially conveyed to Kliueva and Roskin that the suggested collaboration with the Americans would be allowed, including the sharing of their discoveries with them, and soon two American professors visited their laboratory. When Zhdanov received the report on Smith’s visit in early August 1946, he was heavily involved in shaping the ideological and cultural campaigns. The report confirmed many of his and Stalin’s worst

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suspicions about the subversive ways of foreign intelligence (Smith was known to have been an oss operative) and the cavalier attitude within the ussr regarding the protection of state secrets. Furthermore, Stalin and Zhdanov saw in the report an example of government bureaucrats bypassing the Party as if it had no authority in such matters.199 The idea of sharing such a potentially major scientific breakthrough with the Americans, who had been and remained unwilling to share their atomic secrets, infuriated Zhdanov. 200 Zhdanov immediately scolded the mgb (and its supervisory body, the cc Cadres directorate, which had missed out on the issue) for having permitted Smith’s visit.201 The Russian historian Vladimir Esakov plausibly suggests that Zhdanov’s displeasure with Smith’s visit (and the liberal attitude towards contact with foreigners that it exemplified) added to the venomous nature of his attack on the literary journals in subsequent days.202 Indeed, there is evidence that on 20 August 1946 the “cc” ordered the mgb to intensify its efforts to combat espionage in the Soviet Union by American and English agents.203 Further scientific communication with the Americans about the cancer cure was supposed to halt, but the researchers’ collaboration with the Americans continued throughout the next months, unbeknownst, apparently, to Zhdanov. In August 1946 no disciplinary steps were taken against the cancer researchers themselves.204 On the contrary, in fact, for on 19 November Zhdanov distributed copies of letters he had received from Kliueva and Roskin about their research to Beria, Mikoian, and Voznesensky, and he met the researchers two days later.205 Zhdanov managed to persuade Stalin and the three deputy premiers to issue a secret Council of Ministers resolution in December to support their laboratory, perhaps to compensate for the earlier forced refusal of American aid.206 But about the same time he found out that the secretary of the Academy of Medical Sciences, Academician V.V. Parin, who was visiting the United States, had transferred to the Americans a sample of Kliueva and Roskin’s experimental vaccine and the manuscript they had written on their research, about which the two scientists had not informed him even when he had met them on 21 November.207 Zhdanov was furious with this second instance of what he thought were unauthorized contacts with the Americans (in fact, Molotov, who was in the us, had allowed Parin to transfer the items). In 1947 Zhdanov’s dismay with the scientists’ cavalier behaviour was channelled into a new stage of the ideological offensive that he had initiated in the spring of 1946. Parin was arrested upon his return in February 1947, while Kliueva and Roskin were publicly shamed for their carelessness.208

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lit erary cr it ic ism From the beginning of the ideological crackdown, cultural matters had been a prime focus. In August and September 1946, Zhdanov conducted a six-week campaign to reinforce adherence to SocialistRealist principles and produce wholesome works in literature, film, and the theatre. On Stalin’s instructions and with Stalin’s active participation, Zhdanov began to draft a set of decrees on the state of Soviet literature in early August.209 Zhdanov’s mood, worsened by the Kliueva-Roskin-Smith meeting, deteriorated further on 7 August when he received a report by Aleksandrov and Agitprop deputy chief A.M. Egolin (1896–1956) outlining the shortcomings of the Leningrad literary journals Zvezda and Leningrad.210 Two days later, the cc Orgbiuro met in the presence of Stalin (Orgbiuro members Popkov, the political chief of Leningrad, Malenkov, and Aleksandrov were all present) to discuss Soviet literary journals (especially Zvezda and Leningrad), Soviet film (especially the second part of Leonid Lukov’s Bol’shaia Zhizn,’ or The Great Life), and the repertory of drama theatres.211 The origins of this gathering can be found in the April meeting of the cc Agitprop Directorate on ideology, but the sharp tone of the criticism seems to have been provoked by the Egolin report and the KliuevaRoskin affair. As a sign of the session’s importance, it was the only Orgbiuro session that Stalin attended in the last fifteen years of his life, and it was he who was the main editor of the text of the three cc resolutions for which it laid the groundwork.212 In his opening remarks, Zhdanov, appearing more agitated than ever, noted that Stalin had placed the question of the two journals on the Orgbiuro’s agenda.213 Stalin then spoke, voicing a special dislike for two authors whose work had resurfaced in recent times, Anna Akhmatova and Mikhail Zoshchenko. The Vozhd’ also took exception to Leningrad and its editor Likharev for “fawning before the West.”214 In the discussion of film, Zhdanov replaced Stalin in the role of grand inquisitor.215 He deplored the second instalment of The Great Life in which Leonid Lukov (1909–63) depicted the postwar reconstruction of a Donbas mine by manual labour, portraying the workers as crude fellows who liked their drink. Zhdanov said that the film distorted the role of the Party and state, which seemed to hinder rather than help the mine’s efforts to rebuild, giving the Soviet people the wrong impression. Lukov was further censured for paying exaggerated attention to a private life that included a desire for orgiastic abandonment. Zhdanov ended his address by suggesting that Lukov’s picture should have been a depiction of tireless toilers using superior technology under the loving guidance of the Communist party.216 While

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Zhdanov therefore claimed that Lukov did not show reality, the film’s director appears to have painted a rather too realistic picture for leaders who preferred an idyllic portrayal of Soviet society in the early days of the Fourth Five-Year Plan. The “discussion” concluded with the announcement that Aleksandrov was to prepare a cc resolution on the film and its ramifications.217 Repertory theatre occupied the last discussion on 9 August. Again, it was Zhdanov who presented the main points of criticism.218 In subsequent weeks and months, the critique of the Soviet stage was the least emphasized of the three fields of culture discussed by the Orgbiuro in August. Later, in early 1949, its unsatisfactory state was revisited in an attack on theatre critics that took an anti-Semitic spin, for soon after Zhdanov’s death, Stalin began to obsess about Soviet Jews.219 By 26 August Aleksandrov sent his first draft of the resolution on Soviet film to Zhdanov, who added his annotations and forwarded it to Orgbiuro members Mekhlis and Malenkov. The first agreed to the text without corrections, but Malenkov used the opportunity to show off his talents in the ideological field by making a number of editorial changes that were incorporated into the resolution of 4 September.220 By following his suggestions, Zhdanov (and Stalin) appear to have magnanimously allowed Malenkov to regain some of his battered selfconfidence. Perhaps, too, it is a sign that, whereas Malenkov was jealous of Zhdanov, the latter was not vindictive towards Malenkov (of whom the Zhdanovs may have been rather contemptuous).221 Alhough the attacks on different aspects of the Soviet cultural scene were more concerted than in 1940, little was original about them. In 1940 the same areas had been subjected to severe criticism, but a sustained ideological campaign had been prevented by the threat of war, and the critique was largely based on concepts originating in the early 1930s. Because writers and artists’ were confused about what fell within its guidelines and what did not, they repeatedly crossed the vague boundaries ordained by Socialist Realism. Their transgression led to several rebukes by the Party’s cultural bosses, including Stalin himself, from the early 1930s until 1953 and beyond. But it was easier to criticize works of art that failed SocialistRealist criteria than to praise those that could serve as a model; for after the early 1930s writers and other artists produced few “exemplary” works. In Zhdanov’s view Zoshchenko was “not a great writer,” far from a Soviet Voltaire, Saltykov-Shchedrin, Nekrasov, or Pushkin, and he ranked Akhmatova, too, as a second-tier poet.222 While these appraisals did little justice to Zoshchenko and Akhmatova, Andrei Zhdanov seems to have been particularly annoyed that a Soviet Pushkin (or a new Gor’kii) refused to appear, and that even so-called

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second-raters refused to use their modest talents to praise the wonderful Soviet present. The Stalinist dismay with the poor state of literature was communicated to a widening audience, sometimes indirectly, through underlings who served as their mouthpieces, and sometimes directly.223 On 14 August the cc resolution “On the journals Zvezda and Leningrad” was issued.224 For four decades, it stood as the basic statement about the Party’s expectations of “good” Soviet literature: “Soviet writers must concern themselves largely with current themes, and their writings must inculcate loyalty to party and state. In comedy and satire, writers would be held within the approved limits of ‘self-criticism.’ Above all, Soviet belles-lettres must show the best aspirations of Soviet man, must be positive and optimistic.”225 Zhdanov, who had helped Stalin to unleash the campaign at the Orgbiuro meeting, now played a pivotal role in this public campaign. He travelled to Leningrad, the centre of heretic writing. On 15 August Zhdanov spoke about the journals and their defects to a meeting of Party aktiv in the Smol’nyi. He worked on the same theme the next day at a meeting of Leningrad writers, editors, publishers, and Party officials responsible for literature and publishing, during which his anger was palpable.226 Zhdanov’s wrath was particularly directed against the apolitical (and long defunct) Serapion Brothers, the literary group to which Zoshchenko had belonged during the 1920s.227 After returning to Moscow, Zhdanov met with writers there to discuss the cc resolutions of 14 August.228 On Zhdanov’s suggestion, A.A. Fadeev (1901–56) was officially appointed as head of the Writers’ Union with K.M. Simonov (1915–79), V.V. Vishnevskii (1900–51), and N.S. Tikhonov (1896–1979) as his deputies.229 On 22 August Pravda published measures based upon the cc discussion of the wayward journals, one of which was ordered to stop publication altogether.230 In the press, various writers’ work came under a wave of criticism by all and sundry – from Party agitprop officials to the model factory worker or kolkhoznitsa – in the next weeks.231 What was not published in the papers was the main censor’s order to remove the books by Zoshchenko and Akhmatova published in 1945 and 1946 from the sales network and libraries.232 The next cc decree – on the theatre repertory – was issued on 26 August, followed by the cc resolution on Lukov’s film The Great Life on 4 September.233 The last decree also condemned Nikolai Pudovkin’s Admiral Nakhimov and part two of Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible, in which Tsar Ivan iv is portrayed as a morally dubious character who relies on his nasty secret police, subverting the positive image of the protagonist in part one.234

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The first phase of the campaign for cultural conformity concluded with the publication in Pravda on 21 September of a version of Zhdanov’s Leningrad speech on Zvezda and Leningrad carefully edited by Stalin.235 The initial reaction of the party organizations to the three cc resolutions focused on flaws in the artists’ works, such as their “unrealistic” portrayal of the Soviet present. The corollary charge of exaggerated praise for Western culture, a criticism raised by Stalin at the Orgbiuro, began to surface in the ideological-cultural campaigns in early 1947.236 Stalin was satisfied with the campaign’s effect for the time being and departed for a prolonged holiday, from 8 September until 21 December, during which he further reflected upon the state of the arts in the Soviet Union. He left Party matters in the hands of the ultravigilant Andrei Zhdanov.237 The paranoid atmosphere with its fear of spies and enemies asserted itself ever more strongly in Stalin’s absence. On 11 September, under Zhdanov’s lead, the cc Secretariat met and discussed the evening broadcast on Moscow radio a few days previously of the “Imperial and fascist” national anthem of Germany.238 Three days later, a Politburo resolution, based on a report written by Zhdanov, Kuznetsov, Kosygin, Malenkov, and Aleksandrov, sharply reduced the possibility of subscription to foreign literature.239 And on 4 October a cc Secretariat meeting condemned the journal Vestnik sviazi (The Communication Herald) for its high praise of radios manufactured by rca.240 More was to follow. In November a new cc journal, Partiinaia zhizn’ (Party Life), was launched, replacing in part the defunct Partiinoe stroitel’stvo.241 Intended for middling and lower Party officials, Partiinaia zhizn’ stressed Party propaganda, political education, and the exemplary role to be played by local Party organizations. Its first issue republished the recent cc decrees on the organization of the network of political schools, on Zvezda and Leningrad, the repertory theatre, and The Great Life. We cannot measure exactly the extent to which the Soviet public absorbed the lessons of the ideological and cultural campaigns, but few memorable works of art were produced in Stalin’s last years. Meanwhile, the faith of the average Communist in the radiant future of the Soviet Union, which may have begun to wilt even before the war, seems to have continued to erode from its high point of around 1930. The postwar campaigns failed to breathe much vigour into Soviet residents’ belief in the Communist ideal. Considering this questionable result, one may propose that the outlay for the campaigns in material terms was irresponsibly wasteful, especially in a year when hunger once again visited the Soviet Union.

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The Stalinists’ persistent confidence in the efficacy of propaganda and ideological indoctrination is startling. Had agitation and propaganda ever proved particularly effective in winning the minds of the Soviet population, especially its intelligentsia? It can be argued that the Stalinists’ practice of bullying and threatening deviant artists effectively suppressed most dissenting voices, although the leaders were only satisfied once a further slate of measures had been introduced to silence their subjects. But beyond that the campaigns yielded precious few results. Campaigns found more resonance among the Soviet public once they began to play on popular fears, particularly the fear of another war. This theme loomed larger in Soviet propaganda after August 1946. People’s fresh memories of wartime suffering predisposed them to worry about new winds of war. The Party could appeal to that anxiety in an effort to divert popular attention from the postwar material squalor.242 Such fears strengthened wishful thinking about Stalin’s omniscient wisdom and the need to maintain a unified front. Zubkova posits, with some exaggeration, that popular fear of a new war prevented large-scale protest from erupting in the Soviet Union after 1945.243 Propaganda failed meanwhile to combat traditional human vices such as drinking and brawling, crimes against property, stubborn adherence to religion, or the urge among youth to distinguish themselves from their elders.244 Thus, on 12 November 1946, Kruglov reported to Stalin, Beria, and Zhdanov that anti-Soviet pamphlets had been found in Moscow and Moscow oblast’, while drunken brawls between youths had taken place around the holiday for the October Revolution.245 Such events were sporadic and the authorities treated culprits harshly, but law-enforcement agencies and onerous sanctions did not nearly succeed in suppressing all violations of the law.246 Poverty and scarcity lay at the root of much crime, and the ideological offensive after the war never quite succeeded in convincing all people to bear destitution patiently in expectation of the radiant future. The regime combined propaganda with the ruthless treatment of criminals as a means to suppress such deviant behaviour. In those years, it proved to be far beyond the means and capabilities of the Soviet regime and such unappealing mediocre spokesmen as Andrei Zhdanov to stimulate belief in (or complacency about) socialism through a higher standard of living.

fa min e The effort expended by the Stalinists on issues of ideology and foreign policy in 1946 and 1947 needs to be seen in the context of their sluggishness in seeking relief for the victims of the third Soviet-era famine.

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Although the leadership was not wholly insensitive to the people’s suffering, its efforts to bring relief to the afflicted areas seemed token at best; the Stalinists resigned themselves to the tragedy all too soon. Andrei Zhdanov had been implicated in earlier disasters that had tormented the inhabitants of the Soviet Union. During the fall of 1946 and winter of 1947, he was again guilty of criminal negligence for his failure to take decisive steps to limit the spread of a new human catastrophy. In the summer of 1946, a severe drought affected the European parts of the ussr and led to a poor harvest. Already by late July, the Sovmin and cc were warning local authorities to prevent any squandering of grain.247 On 2 August Kruglov reported to Stalin, Molotov, Beria, and Zhdanov on the failure of the harvest in the Black Earth zone (Orel, Tambov, Voronezh, and Kursk provinces).248 A cc resolution of 17 August condemning the shoddy supervision of agriculture by the Sal’sk raikom in Rostov-on-the-Don oblast’ signalled worsening prospects for any decent harvest results.249 A week after Stalin’s departure for his holiday resort, cc secretary Patolichev wrote to Zhdanov that most of the population of Moscow, Leningrad, and other cities were anticipating an imminent increase in the price of rationed goods because of the rampant shortages.250 The authorities had indeed planned a price hike and now announced their increases (which amounted to fewer goods being given to consumers who were eligible for ration cards) early to prevent further hoarding of consumer goods. On 19 September a cc and Sovmin decree followed on abuses committed by kolkhoz farmers and administrators. The decree had a double purpose: to restore pre-war discipline on the collective farms (which had slackened owing to the war and its consequences), and to attempt to salvage as much of the harvest as possible.251 The resolution condemned the practice by which the workdays (trudodni), the unit of payment with which collective farmers were compensated for their labour, were awarded to nonagricultural workers. It also chided the squandering of kolkhoz property (particularly cattle) and the use of kolkhoz land by people who were not collective farmers. The authorities demanded regular kolkhoz meetings in order to prevent autocratic rule by the collective farm’s chair. This emphasis on accountability is reminiscent of the “Party democracy” wave of 1937 and is one likely sign of Zhdanov’s role in drafting the decree. Nevertheless, it also expressed a vain expectation that collective farmers would take more interest in the welfare of their kolkhoz if their voice and vote really counted. Zhdanov cosigned the Sovmin and cc decree of 27 September 1947 “On economizing on the expenditure of grain,” of which he was likely

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the main editor.252 The decree announced that the summer drought and subsequent rainfall during harvesting had reduced the amount of grain collected by the state. As a result, the amount of grain distributed by way of the ration-card system would be reduced by decreasing the number of people eligible for coupons for grain products by onethird. Zhdanov, backed by Premier Stalin, who was the official coauthor of the decree, justified this cutting off of twenty-seven million people from the rations that they had hitherto received by noting the falling prices on the kolkhoz markets (where kolkhoz farmers sold their surplus, if they had any).253 In reality, few urban or rural residents could afford the still enormously expensive victuals sold on these markets, which was perhaps the real cause of the drop in their price. Though neither factor can be discounted, the famine was not just the result of inclement weather leading to a misharvest or of the understandable postwar difficulties in restoring the ruined infrastructure of the Soviet Union. The Party and state, impervious of postwar farming conditions, continued to requisition most farm produce from kolkhozy and sovkhozy.254 Appallingly, the Soviet leadership went on to sell part of the grain it collected on the international market, instead of using it to offset some of the worst of the famine. Such was the callousness of the procurement policy that famine even affected rural regions that were not visited by drought.255 Virtually the whole Soviet countryside was plagued by faminelike conditions in 1946–47 that afflicted some one hundred million people. Two million people may have died as a result of the famine and its side effects. Infant mortality in 1947 reached the medieval level 319 per 1,000.256 Although the famine was a matter that fell more within the competence of state organs, including the mvd-mgb, Zhdanov attempted to ameliorate the situation but lacked the means and imagination to do much. He reverted to the usual threats and bullying, and then left for an extended holiday, again plagued by health problems.257 Early in October, Zhdanov heard a report in the Secretariat by Ivanovo oblast’ Party secretary Kapranov on his territory’s problems in meeting graindelivery targets. Zhdanov predictably concluded that the obkom’s leadership was to blame. Patolichev’s cc directorate for the Checking of Party Organs was ordered to propose personnel changes in Ivanovo’s Party apparatus.258 On 25 October a Sovmin and cc decree threatened severe punitive action against those who appropriated grain designated for state procurements.259 In November the first secretary of the fertile Stavropol krai, A.L. Orlov, was dismissed because of his region’s failure to deliver grain in a timely fashion. The veteran chief of Kalinin oblast’, I.P. Boitsov, succeeded him.260 Such measures brought no relief to those who starved.

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sub stit ute l e a d e r Amidst the human tragedy engulfing the Soviet Union, Zhdanov’s star shone brighter than ever. On 3 October 1946 Nikolai Voznesensky was added to the sextet of the Politburo’s foreign policy commission (Stalin, Molotov, Beria, Mikoian, Malenkov, Zhdanov), which had widened its competence to matters domestic, both political and economic.261 The Politburo met only twice in full complement thereafter until 1952.262 Thus, since the highest bosses no longer discussed policy together, Zhdanov’s position among them became even stronger, certainly in Stalin’s absence; he was now the only member of this Inner Politburo of the “Seven” who had (in Voznesensky) a reliable ally. Zhdanov’s substantial political power seemed to be underlined by his delivery, at the Mossoviet (the Moscow townhall), of the traditional speech on behalf of the leadership on 6 November, the anniversary of the October Revolution.263 This “State of the Soviet Union” address was laced with lies and half-truths. He painted a stark contrast between the economic crisis and unemployment in the postwar capitalist countries and the carefully organized and efficient Soviet economy, though he conceded that the summer’s drought had prevented the abolition of the ration-card system in his country.264 He praised his compatriots’ enthusiasm in working to achieve the FiveYear Plan’s goals of reconstruction and further development of the country. Reaching these targets was difficult, he noted, thanks to the labour shortage, which in turn was caused by the death of seven million [sic] Soviet citizens during the war. Even if the war had led to a dearth of horses and tractors, kolkhozniks were obligated to meet the plan of grain procurements for 1946. Although some of the collective farms’ problems could be attributed to wartime devastation, Zhdanov added, they suffered especially from poor leadership and violations of the collective-farm statute of 1935, such as had been condemned in the decree of 27 September. He then told his audience that, while the Soviet population’s ideological proficiency had improved during the war, more recently the cc’s decrees had condemned lingering apolitical attitudes and a lack of ideas in Soviet art. The resolutions had underlined the key role of the Soviet intelligentsia in the political and cultural education of the population. Zhdanov dedicated the second part of his speech to the negotiations for a “comprehensive” peace with the Allies.265 At the Paris peace conference held in June and July 1946, two kinds of foreign policy had become evident, he explained: while the Soviet Union strove towards a strong United Nations organization, others undermined the basis of the un in an effort to free the way for expansion and aggression. Their

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efforts ranged from atomic propaganda and blackmail to Churchill’s warmongering. Zhdanov particularly singled out the Western media for their reactionary and aggressive bourgeois attitude, but he refrained from openly identifying any Western government with this aggressive trend. Zhdanov’s speech was published on 7 November in Pravda, accompanied by photographs of the orator.266 On the next day Pravda printed a picture of the notables greeting the commemorative parade in honour of the October Revolution in Red Square.267 Politburo members Stalin, Molotov, Beria, Kaganovich, Khrushchev, and Malenkov were not in the photograph, which created the impression that the Soviet Union was ruled by Andrei Zhdanov and his associates. Stalin, however, remained firmly in the saddle, despite his absence from Moscow, and as political players Beria, Molotov, and even Malenkov remained about as formidable as Zhdanov. Though the November 1946 speech and parade represented Zhdanov’s finest hour as a politician, it came ironically in the midst of the terrible famine. On 10 November a Sovmin and cc decree, signed by Stalin for the government and Zhdanov for the Party, again noted unsatisfactory levels of grain deliveries.268 On 11 November Kruglov reported to Stalin, Beria, Mikoian, Zhdanov, and A.A. Kuznetsov on mvd measures to protect grain stocks from being pilfered.269 From August until the end of October, judicial proceedings had been instigated against 53,971 people working in agriculture or procurement organizations, while in October alone almost one thousand kolkhoz chairs had been prosecuted. On the next day, Kruglov reported to Stalin, Beria, and Zhdanov that massive fraud had been occurring with the ration-card system.270 In the month of October, the mvd had detained 26,444 people for speculation and illegal sale of ration cards. In Stalin’s and his own name as the responsible heads of the government and the Party, Zhdanov dispatched throughout the fall a plethora of threatening telegrams to the periphery in order to improve grain deliveries.271 Under the general coordination of Andreev, the Politburo’s agricultural specialist, a number of Politburo and important cc members (Mikoian, Malenkov, Beria, Mekhlis, Kaganovich, and Patolichev) were dispatched to the republics and provinces to improve grain deliveries in the middle of November. Andreev, whose star had been in eclipse for some time, eventually proved unable to solve the difficulties. The upshot was that on 6 February 1947, Zhdanov, the man of the hour, was added by the Politburo to an Andreev-chaired commission working on resolutions for an upcoming cc plenary session to improve agricultural performance.272 In November 1946 more than thirty thousand people were arrested

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by the mvd for the illegal sale and barter of, and speculation in, grain.273 In late November 1946, a telegram signed by Stalin and Zhdanov was dispatched to regional Party and government leaders condemning farmers for hiding grain from procurements and for the squandering of grain, unnecessary loss of grain, and abandonment of grain in the fields.274 Supply problems were attributed to sloppy supervision and control over the system of collection by soviets, Party organizations, and the courts. But the worst of the famine was not overcome until the spring of 1947.

a new c ampa ig n is b o r n The Politburo granted Zhdanov a holiday on 30 November 1946, which it prolonged in a decision of 9 January 1947.275 As Vladimir Esakov has suggested, Zhdanov was not just resting in the Caucasus. First under Stalin’s aegis, Zhdanov prepared an intensification of the campaign to heighten secrecy and shut the door on contacts between the Soviet Union and the non-Communist world.276 After Stalin’s return to Moscow in the course of December, Zhdanov worked further on the details of the campaign. Stalin and Zhdanov had become extremely dismayed by Kliueva, Roskin, Parin (who, four days before Zhdanov’s holidays began, had passed on Kliueva and Roskin’s experimental cancer cure to the Americans), Miterev, and mid bureaucrats, who seemed perfectly to illustrate how laxity among the intellectual vanguard and the Communist elite could damage the Soviet interest. They had failed to understand that scientific discoveries were the intellectual property of the Soviet state and should be jealously guarded against scheming capitalists. Esakov’s contention that the Stalinists’ allout attempt to seal off the Soviet camp originated with Stalin’s and Zhdanov’s discussions in December 1946 and January 1947 seems probable. For instance, in Soviet-occupied Germany, segregation of Soviet troops from the German population began in early 1946, but the separation became much more pronounced by December and was almost absolute by mid-1947.277 Upon his return to Moscow, Andrei Zhdanov threw himself with renewed energy into the new campaign to halt the aiding and abetting by Soviet citizens and foreign Communists of the “warmongers” of Western capitalism.

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10 The Selfless Fighter Succumbs, 1947–1948 Stalin did not try to force events, he acted guardedly, through other people, [and] at times consciously disappeared into the shadows. V.P. Danilov and O.V. Khlevniuk1

cold war, domes t ic c a mpa ig n s, a nd la b ou r c a mp s The Cold War, the “signal military, political, and cultural event of the last fifty years,” found its origins in the mutual distrust between the Soviet Union and the Western liberal democracies that went back to the Russian Revolution and the Civil War.2 This suspicion precluded any long-term continuation of the wartime alliance against the Axis powers. By the late summer of 1947, the battle lines were drawn in a war that never became hot in Europe. Andrei Zhdanov’s landmark speech at Szklarska Poremba in September 1947 underlined the division of Europe and the world into two camps. In 1945 and 1946, Stalin and Molotov had mapped Soviet foreign policy and decided on the opening salvos in the Cold War with regard to the treatment of Finland, Poland, and the German and Austrian occupied zones in Europe, and the pressure to be applied to Turkey and Iran. It was Stalin who decided to create a smaller international organization of Communist parties, even though the Cominform was associated with Zhdanov.3 The manner in which the speeches at the two Cominform meetings in 1947 and 1948 were prepared is clear testimony that Zhdanov, Malenkov, Suslov, Beria, Mikoian, Vyshinskii, and Dekanozov all played a secondary part as executors of Soviet foreign and defence policy and only participated in discussions about its contours when invited by Stalin and Molotov, who were its architects. Ultimately even Molotov always deferred to Stalin.

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In November 1940 Molotov had demanded from Hitler Soviet dominance over Romania and Bulgaria, and stubborn adherence to the idea of domination over the area made Churchill concede to Stalin much of what he wanted in southeastern Europe in October 1944.4 Albeit more grudgingly, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary were relinquished to the insistent Soviets by the Anglo-Americans as well. Neither Hitler in 1939–40 nor the Western Allies in 1945 raised serious objections to the subjugation of the Baltic countries. But highhanded Soviet behaviour in East-Central Europe added to the lack of trust between the two camps. Domestically, the years 1947 and 1948 in the Soviet Union were punctuated by the continuation of the campaigns that had begun in the spring of 1946 in which Zhdanov remained heavily involved. Until 1948, the Stalinists attempted either by public criticism or shaming in front of one’s peers to bring Communist deviants and Soviet citizens back from errant ways. But even before Zhdanov’s retirement in the summer of 1948, Stalin was dissatisfied with the effect of this type of disciplinary action, as exemplified by the rougher treatment meted out in January 1948 to four ranking navy officers found guilty of excessive fraternizing with their Western counterparts. The desire for secrecy and the belief in capitalist conspiracies reached a new height by 1950, when many Soviet citizens were persecuted as if the second half of the 1930s had returned. Eventually, too, anti-Semitism crept into the campaigns. Although it fit in well with the increasing “Great Russian chauvinism” that was the hallmark of the various campaigns, the anti-Semitic wave that overtook the Soviet Union in 1949 (unfolding almost entirely after Zhdanov’s death) had a political motive. For soon after the founding of the State of Israel in May 1948, Stalin grew suspicious of Soviet Jews whose loyalty he saw as split between the newly-founded state and the ussr. Stalin’s suspicious nature can also be detected in the disciplining of scholars in 1947 who proved overconfident in writing on topics that the Vozhd’ considered his own prerogative as the sole living authority on Marxism. In philosophy and economics, two careless “freethinkers” were thus reprimanded. This petty jealousy of the aging dictator further contributed to the stifling atmosphere that descended upon the Soviet Union in the course of 1947. Zhdanov, who was the instrument Stalin used to berate the audacious scholars, may have foreseen Stalin’s reaction to their encroachment upon what Stalin saw as his turf. What Zhdanov could not anticipate was the exception Stalin took to an unauthorized foray into the field of biology by one Iurii Zhdanov. After all, disagreements about scientific theory had never interested Stalin very much, who preferred applied science that yielded concrete results.

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For many subjects of the Soviet empire, meanwhile, the years before 1948 were hard as well. Former pows along with ethnic Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians repopulated the concentration camps, which had emptied out through mortality and the early release of those volunteering for the Red Army during the war.5 In disregard of certain international conventions, foreign troops belonging to the former Axis countries were sometimes kept for years in Soviet confinement to replace some of the thinned Soviet labour force.6 Furthermore, among Soviet citizens whole nations were deported east of the Ural mountain range on charges of collaborating with the Nazis between 1943 and 1946. Owing to enormous shortages in the first postwar years, life was tough for those at liberty. Consequently, the incidence of property and other crimes rose dramatically, with thousands of criminals ending up in labour camps.7 In his last years, Andrei Zhdanov eagerly helped to maintain the population of the Soviet Gulag Archipelago. Besides his work on foreign policy and the campaigns, Zhdanov continued to serve as Stalin’s deputy for the Communist party until July 1948. Whether in Stalin’s Kremlin office or at his dacha near Moscow, Zhdanov participated at most discussions about general policy matters in 1947 and 1948. His workload was heavy, in other words – it would likely have been too much for a younger and healthier man – and he could not monitor his subordinates as minutely as he might have wished, something that he came to rue in 1948. In the end so much work proved too much for the fifty-two-year-old Zhdanov.

ph iloso p h y While Zhdanov remained in the Sochi area working on the campaign to increase vigilance about state secrets, Stalin returned to Moscow in late December 1946. On the twenty-third of the month, the Vozhd’ met in his office with cc secretaries Kuznetsov and Patolichev, who were accompanied by Agitprop workers Aleksandrov, Pospelov, Kruzhkov, Fedoseev, M.T. Iovchuk, Mitin, and a few others.8 Stalin expressed dismay with Aleksandrov’s History of Western Philosophy,9 which had been awarded the Stalin Prize in April 1946 on the recommendation of a committee chaired by Petr Pospelov (Stalin had probably read the work on his holidays).10 A few days after the meeting in Stalin’s chambers, the cc Secretariat met to “organize a discussion” about Aleksandrov’s book.11 Stalin criticized Aleksandrov’s excessive praise for Hegel and his underestimation of the watershed caused by Marx’s works within the evolution of Western philosophy. According

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to Bolshevik dogma, Marx’s discovery of the scientific laws that steered historical development had been a quantum leap, heralding the beginning of a new phase in human history that would lead to humanity’s ultimate liberation. Aleksandrov, however, had presented Marx and Engels as a “mere” synthesis “of the vast scientific material accumulated in all fields of knowledge.”12 On 14, 16, and 18 January 1947, Aleksandrov’s book was the topic of discussion at the Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences.13 Supporters and opponents of the work spoke up. Stalin’s old favourites Mark Mitin and Pavel Iudin, likely following Stalin’s instructions, attacked Aleksandrov, as did Professor Beletskii, who may have first alerted Stalin to the heterodoxy of the book.14 Pospelov and the philosopher B.M. Kedrov, on the other hand, tried to deflect the worst criticism. The session ended in a small victory for the Mitin-Iudin team, whereby Aleksandrov was issued a remarkably light reprimand. Stalin was not pleased when he found out about this civility; it seems that the Agitprop officials who visited him in December 1946 had misunderstood his instructions. Once he had found time to evaluate the results of the discussions at the Institute, Stalin decided to repeat the exercise with Andrei Zhdanov guiding the proceedings. On 24 January, for the first time since September 1946, Zhdanov, accompanied by Beria, Malenkov, Khrushchev, Mikoian, and Voznesensky, visited Stalin’s Kremlin office .15 The next day, he returned for a follow-up visit on his own; after almost two hours, he and Stalin were joined by A.A. Kuznetsov, Aleksandrov, and the latter’s deputy, Iovchuk.16 Like Aleksandrov, Iovchuk was on probation. Beletskii’s letter drawing Stalin’s attention to the questionable contents of Aleksandrov’s work accused Iovchuk of receiving the academic degree of doktor from the Academy of Social Sciences for a dissertation that did not exist.17 Considering that this was Iovchuk’s last visit to Stalin’s office and Aleksandrov’s penultimate one (he met Stalin once more after his book was more thoroughly slammed in June), it seems clear that neither could provide a satisfactory explanation for his missteps and lost Stalin’s favour. Nevertheless, Aleksandrov and Iovchuk were spared arrest; in fact, Iovchuk was appointed Belorussian Party secretary responsible for ideology. The fate of Mitin and Iudin in 1943 and 1946 and that of Iovchuk or Aleksandrov in 1947 eloquently testify to Stalin’s measured indulgence with those who succeeded in appearing steadfastly loyal to him despite their personal or political flaws. Of course, Stalin’s loyalty was not always reliable, as hardened Stalinists had found out in the 1930s and would find out again in 1949.

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After a long delay during which other issues on Stalin and Zhdanov’s agenda took priority, the cc Secretariat met on 14 March to revisit Aleksandrov’s book.18 On 22 April a Politburo decision expressed a renewed and much sharper criticism of Aleksandrov’s philosophical work:19 The … cc received materials on the results of the discussion concerning the book of com. Aleksandrov The History of Western-European Philosophy that was conducted at the Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences in the middle of January of 1947. Reviewing the presented materials, the cc came to the conclusion that both the organization of the discussion and the manner of summing up were unsatisfactory. Workers from the republics and other large cities except Moscow were not drawn into the discussion. A part of those who had signed up to react were not allowed to speak. The speeches of the majority of the orators were exceedingly short. For all these reasons the discussion was inarticulate, ineffective and did not lead to the necessary results.20

The cc therefore resolved to hold a new discussion of the book in late May (which became the second half of June), to involve people from the periphery, publish the discussion’s minutes in a number of separate publications, and have Zhdanov organize and lead the discussion.21 The intervention of Stalin lichno (personally), as Zhdanov put it in June, prompted this second round of “discussion” of Aleksandrov’s work.22 One surmises that a more elaborate review of January’s discussion materials had further riled the Vozhd’. Its polite exchange had not resulted in a sufficiently categorical condemnation of Aleksandrov’s enthusiasm for Western (German) philosophy and his underestimation of Marx’s towering importance, while the opportunity had been missed to bring the practice of philosophy in the Soviet Union under closer scrutiny by the highest Party officials.

th e kr a ffa ir Exposing Aleksandrov’s impudence and Iovchuk’s fraud in January constituted a kind of prelude to the intensified drive that now unfolded under Stalin and Zhdanov’s auspices to heighten control, enforce discipline and full disclosure as well as unconditional obedience to the leadership, and impose a cult of the strictest secrecy about politics, the economy, society, science, and culture inside the Soviet Union and Soviet Bloc. Step by step the Soviet empire was hermetically sealed off from the rest of the world. The intensity of the campaign

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partially betrays the leadership’s anxiety that there might be a leak about the famine that had the country in its grip; knowledge of such a catastrophe might undermine the prestige of the Soviet Union in the global battle between communism and capitalism.23 Likewise, although paranoid overtones began to surface, the security campaign was partially informed by tentative Western probing to destabilize the Soviet Union. The motives for Ambassador Smith’s visit to the Academy of Medical Sciences in the middle of 1946 may not have been quite innocent. And the government-sponsored Voice of America radio began to broadcast anti-Soviet propaganda to the ussr on 17 February 1947.24 The broadcasts embarrassed the Soviet side because it took a full year before Soviet technology could distort the radio signal sufficiently to render the broadcasts inaudible to Soviet listeners. On his holidays, Zhdanov had discovered an ideal lynchpin for the vigilance campaign that he and Stalin had decided upon in December: the careless behaviour of Kliueva and Roskin and the medical bureaucrats that had backed them. As Esakov notes, one can observe, by way of Zhdanov’s notebooks of the early months of 1947, how Stalin and Zhdanov gradually zoomed in on the “Kliueva-Roskin (kr) Affair” as the pivot of their all-out campaign against pro-Western attitudes.25 On 28 January Zhdanov questioned the biologist Kliueva about the transfer of papers on her vaccine to the us.26 In no uncertain terms he condemned her behaviour, for (even if she had received Molotov’s tacit permission for her actions) she should have known that sharing such information with what was now clearly a former ally brought great damage to the interests of the Soviet state. Kliueva could have objected that until very recently it had been far from obvious that the United States was an inveterate Soviet foe. But Zhdanov, who felt that he had been hoodwinked earlier by the researchers and their backers, would have been unreceptive to such protests. He continued the next day by interrogating Health minister Miterev about the circumstances of the transfer of manuscript and sample in the United States. On 1 February Zhdanov sent all materials on the kr Affair to Stalin.27 The next day, in a related move, the mgb, citing a secret cc decree of 20 August 1946, ordered its agents to step up their efforts to fight attempts by American and British intelligence to gather information and establish contacts with “nationalists and anti-Soviet elements.”28 On 3 February Zhdanov chaired a session of the cc Secretariat that prohibited Soviet speedskaters to travel abroad for a meet.29 On 15 February the Sovmin released an edict prohibiting marriages between

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Soviet citizens and foreigners.30 Then, in a Politburo meeting held on the very day the Voice of America began its broadcasts, Stalin announced the renewal of the spiritual struggle with the West. He singled out the kr Affair as typical and underlined the seriousness of the scientists’ trespasses by having the Academician Parin arrested immediately upon the conclusion of the meeting. Stalin, who alternated the meeting’s chairship with Zhdanov, announced that the pervasive “kowtowing to the West” needed to stop once and for all.31 The Politburo agreed to organize so-called Courts of Honour to censure, through an audience of their peers, those who had been too cavalier in their handling of state secrets. The courts could thus set an example to all Party and government workers.32 On 28 March, after a series of meetings with Stalin in his Kremlin office, the first Courts of Honour within ussr ministries and other central institutions were established by means of a decree signed by Stalin for the government and Zhdanov for the Party.33 From April to October 1947, courts were elected in eighty-two ministries and central organizations, encompassing “in this way … the entire stratum of higher and middling Party-state chinovniks, including ministries of Union significance and secretaries of Union communist parties, as well as the elite of the Soviet intelligentsiia.”34 The courts functioned as instruments for enforcing diligence, discipline (indeed, a Soviet version of honourable behaviour), and cultivated Soviet patriotism. Court sentences ranged from mere reprimands to transfer cases to regular investigative organs for the preparation of a criminal trial of the accused. The first courts were organized within the ministries of Health, Trade, and Finance. Party committees of the affected governmental agencies or Party divisions were assigned the role of initiators of court proceedings, underlining the renewed emphasis on the pre-eminence of the Party in the Soviet political system.35 Zhdanov’s role was crucial. He set the example, using the condemnation of the trespass by the cancer researchers as his didactic model for subsequent courts. Nikolai Krementsov analyses Zhdanov’s role as producer: The main organizer of the honor courts was Zhdanov, whose notebooks from 1947 contain numerous references to the subject. Moreover, it was Zhdanov himself who “directed” the first trial, that of Kliueva and Roskin. Indeed, he wrote a complete scenario for the forthcoming show. First, he created a series of roles, deciding that the trial should include a Public Prosecutor, a Chair, Court Members, Witnesses, the Accused, and Spectators (a

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Defense Counsel was not provided). He then selected “actors” to play these roles from among officials of the Ministry of Public Health and the Academy of Medical Sciences … In the kr case, Zhdanov himself initiated the process by writing a draft of the party committee’s appeal to the minister of public health and sending it to Stalin and other members of the Politburo for approval. Moreover, he edited drafts of the public prosecutor’s speech and of the indictment.36

With Zhdanov’s assistance, Stalin had developed the broad outline and purpose of these courts, while Zhdanov, A.A. Kuznetsov, and Suslov wrote the script of the actual trials.37 These were a hybrid of the show trials (Zhdanov as scriptwriter taking over Stalin’s role in the Moscow Trials), earlier “agitation trials,” and a prerevolutionary precursor, for both their name and concept of judgment and condemnation before one’s peers seem based on the tsarist army’s Courts of Honour. The use of this latter model betrays the former junior officer Zhdanov’s role in designing in them.38 In shaming before their colleagues scientists and especially state and Party bureaucrats guilty of violating codes of secrecy by being too loose-lipped, irresponsible, or sloppy, and in punishing the accused with disciplinary measures, the courts aimed at heightening vigilance at the workplace.39 In practice, it turned out to be difficult to differentiate between these Courts of Honour and regular or extrajudiciary trials (those conducted by the mvd Special Board, for example) that were part of “normal” Soviet penal policy during the second half of the 1940s. The courts encroached as well upon the usual disciplinary function of Party cells within government and economic organizations.40 That there were problems with the overlapping roles of these various disciplinary bodies is evident from one particular case in which the defendants were well-known Soviet figures.41 In early 1948 four admirals – N.G. Kuznetsov, L.M. Galler (1883–1950), V.A. Alafuzov (1901–66), and G.A. Stepanov (1890–1957) – were tried and convicted in a Court of Honour of passing on military secrets to the former Allies (although most of their “crimes” had occurred during the war, when British and Americans had indeed been allies). The case was judged to be serious enough to send all four on to be tried by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court, chaired by V.V. Ulrikh, which had become notorious during the Moscow Trials of the 1930s.42 This court let Kuznetsov off with a warning but sentenced the other three to jail sentences of various length.43 The admirals’ retrial in a more regular court shows that jurisdictions had become blurred. The Courts of Honour rapidly faded from view after the sentencing of the

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admirals by Ulrikh’s court. On 6 July 1948 the Politburo decreed that some of the structure of the Courts of Honour would be maintained within the ussr ministries and central institutions, but few new trials were organized after this.44 Even in the first case tried by a Court of Honour, the Kliueva-Roskin Affair, arrests occurred as well, such as Parin’s in February 1947.45 Altogether, then, Stalin and Zhdanov’s new (limited) version of the show trial restored some of the pre-war siege atmosphere in the Soviet Union (particularly among the elite), but Stalin and the Inner Circle soon concluded that discipline and vigilance might be achieved more efficiently by applying draconian penalties to offenders instead. By 1949 the regime had returned to its usual routine of closed or carefully rehearsed open trials revealing the “confessions” of the accused to heinous political crimes – from the Leningrad Affair and the Jewish Anti-Fascist Council to the trials of the East-Central European Titoists and Zionists.

a gric ult ural imp r ov e me n t s? Zhdanov stood watch over the conclusion of a definitive peace with Finland. He met the Finnish Communist leaders when he visited Helsinki on 7 and 8 February 1947.46 Finland could find a road to socialism in a peaceful manner, he reiterated, provided that successes already achieved in the “political democratization” of the country were reinforced with economic policies that intensified the process.47 Zhdanov delivered a farewell speech as head of sacc at a luncheon in the presidential palace in Helsinki, a speech that had been screened by Stalin and some of Zhdanov’s other Politburo colleagues in Moscow.48 On 10 February in Paris, the wartime Allies signed official peace treaties with Finland, Italy, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania, a last gasp of the wartime alliance between the Soviet Union, the United States, and the United Kingdom.49 Upon Zhdanov’s return to Moscow from Helsinki, apart from the campaign for heightened vigilance to guard against perfidious destabilizing Western schemes, he was occupied with Andreev’s Politburo commission on agriculture, and the organization of simultaneous meetings of the cc and Supreme Soviet.50 Stalin, Zhdanov, and the other leaders debated the desirability of convoking a Party Congress (already long overdue according to the Party Statute of 1939) and of writing a new Party program.51 The cc plenum was held on 21, 22, 24, and 26 February, interspersed by a session of the Supreme Soviet, “about as dull as usual.”52 On 25 February the Soviet parliament registered Zhdanov’s departure as chairman of its

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Council of the Union, a task that had cost him little time.53 The debate at the cc plenary session concentrated on the poor state of Soviet agriculture. But as Stalin’s Central Committee could not transcend the fundamental dogma that the kolkhoz and sovkhoz represented an indisputable step forward on the road to socialism and that agriculture remained auxiliary to the first economic priority of ongoing industrialization, no remedy was found. The extremely poor results of agricultural production until 1953 make the quandary evident.54 Still, the raging famine had not just been caused by the leadership’s blinkered belief in certain dogmas. Even if more time and energy (as well as money) had been dedicated to agriculture and collective farming had been abolished, famine might not have been avoided in 1946–47. Apart from the adverse climatic circumstances of 1946, the war had depleted the labour force and worsened the already poor state of the transport-and-distribution system (leading, among other things, to the storage of crops in warehouses where they were infected with mould or began to rot). Mechanized equipment in many regions had entirely disappeared. Still, the authorities at all levels could have taken many steps to reach better results even within the limitations of the collective-farm system and despite the adverse conditions. For example, adequate remuneration might have improved the collective farmers’ productivity, while the regime’s decision in 1946 to export foodstuffs rather than import them to relieve the afflicted areas bespeaks utter cynicism. Farming under Stalin would not flourish. The cc plenum’s measures to stimulate agricultural productivity amounted to the usual stale militant formulae for improving the organization and discipline of kolkhoz and mts labour and threatening punishment for those violating the many rules.55 An initiative of Zhdanov’s gave this threat concrete form: on his proposal, a week after the plenum’s conclusion the Politburo created a commission to design much stricter judicial measures against theft of private and public property. The commission prepared a draconian law that came into force in June.56 On 6 March 6, mvd minister Kruglov sent a report on crime statistics in the ussr for 1946 to Stalin, Molotov, Beria, Voznesensky, and Zhdanov:57 Registered crimes had totalled more than half a million, while the number of murders surpassed ten thousand. Some 375,000 suspects had been arrested (of whom fifty-nine per cent were first-time offenders). Those numbers were high for a country of about 160 million people whose leaders’ propaganda claimed that crime was a relic of the capitalist past. The population itself, meanwhile, hardly

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grew in 1946. Like the preponderance of crime, the arrested birthrate reflected poverty and famine.58 The famine’s consequences only began to abate in the early summer of 1947.59

zh da nov ’s wo r k l oa d February 1947 was one of the most hectic months of Zhdanov’s last years, as a closer description of his activities during the last few days of the month will show. On 25 February Zhdanov officially left his chairship of the Supreme Soviet’s Council of the Union, after which he visited Stalin in the Kremlin for almost six hours in the evening.60 First, from seven o’clock until half past eight, the two met alone. Then they were joined by Molotov accompanied by the Polish leaders Wladyslaw Gomulka (1905–82) and Hilary Minc (1905–74), who were reporting to their Soviet superiors on the recently held elections for the Polish parliament and its adoption of a new set of basic laws for Poland.61 After the Poles’ departure at eleven, film director Sergei Eisenstein and actor Nikolai Cherkasov visited Stalin, Molotov, and Zhdanov for fifty minutes to discuss the second part of Ivan the Terrible, which had been condemned in September 1946 and was bogged down in re-editing.62 Zhdanov’s greatest objection to the film was the way it, and particularly Ivan, looked: “Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible looks like a neurasthenic, … Eisenstein is easily carried away by shadows. Even Ivan the Terrible’s beard distracts from the action. The tsar raises his head too often so that his beard will be seen.”63 Cherkasov, who wrote down his impressions immediately after the meeting, noted that his director had replied by promising to shorten the tsar’s beard in the future.64 Zhdanov’s complaints about the high incidence of church ceremonies were a nonstarter since Stalin chose to ignore them.65 Otherwise, during most of the conversation, Zhdanov’s remarks were few, brief, and cryptic.66 His interjections, like the one about the beard, hinted at exhaustion. But he had to stay in Stalin’s office for another forty minutes after the artists’ departure before he was allowed to retire to his quarters. On the next day, the last day of the cc plenum, Zhdanov announced the organization of an upcoming Party Congress, which he expected to be called “in late 1947 or in any event in 1948.”67 The Congress was to accept a new Party statute and program. Zhdanov joined the committees that were struck to draft both documents.68 At the end of the meeting, he explained to the cc members that it had become imperative to remove two candidate members, army commander G. Zhukov

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and diplomat I. Maiskii (1884–1975), from the cc.69 The subsequent election of N.A. Voznesensky as full Politburo member meant a further strengthening of Zhdanov’s power.70 The day after the plenum ended, the Inner Circle reorganized the leadership of the Belorussian and Ukrainian Soviet republics, in an attempt to overcome the republics’ difficulties with economic recovery, low agricultural productivity, and ongoing armed struggle with nationalists.71 The shuffle was both a rebuke to P.K. Ponomarenko (1902–84) and N.S. Khrushchev, who had each simultaneously occupied the posts of premier and Party leader in their own republics, and the result of the Politburo’s realization that in part of the unsatisfactory job performance of the two leaders was the consequence of their immense workload. On 27 February Stalin met in his Kremlin office with Ponomarenko and Khrushchev, as well as Zhdanov, Molotov, Malenkov, Beria, Kaganovich, and Voznesensky.72 Decades later, Ponomarenko would remember how earlier on this day he had been received first by Zhdanov, who told him that Stalin had concluded that it was time to separate the two jobs of prime minister and Party secretary in Belorussia and Ukraine.73 Indeed, the fact that Stalin himself wore two hats (Soviet premier and the Party’s general secretary) was a temporary arrangement, according to Zhdanov. In the evening, Stalin reiterated the point during a three-hour meeting.74 In the course of three days, Zhdanov had spent nine hours in Stalin’s office, met with the Supreme Soviet and cc, and explained to the bosses of two Soviet republics why they were being demoted. Discussions in which he had been involved had ranged from culture, to the Communist party’s program and rules, to Polish domestic politics. He had to prepare for these highly varied discussions while coping as well with the more routine matters landing on his desk from the various cc branches. Intellectually, Andrei Zhdanov was sufficiently versatile to deal with such a bewildering variety of issues, but the latenight meeting with Eisenstein and Cherkasov showed his fatal flaw. Ultimately, he lacked the physical stamina to survive for long at Stalin’s side.

ly senko Among certain scientists, meanwhile, the growing mistrust of foreigners was welcome. The anti-geneticist Lysenko faction among Soviet biologists used the xenophobic mood to score a comprehensive victory over their opponents, the adherents of classical genetics as developed by A.F.I. Weissman (1834–1914), Th.H. Morgan (1866– 1945), and G.J. Mendel (1822–84). Even before the Second World

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War, the anti-genetic camp had struck the first blow which had ended with the death in prison of the most famous Soviet geneticist, N.I. Vavilov, in 1941. With this victory under their belts, those upholding the idea that the inheritance of acquired traits was impossible had refused to let up. The opening salvo of the Lysenkoists’ postwar offensive was delivered on 6 March 1947, when Isaak Prezent (1902–70?) published an article in Leningradskaia Pravda that was critical of A.R. Zherbak, a supporter of genetics. Prezent’s masterstroke was that he could imply that supporting genetics amounted to “groveling before foreign trends.”75 Zhdanov remained as undecided on the issue as he had been on the eve of the war. He continued to receive letters from scientists who criticized the Lysenko school, apparently under the impression that Zhdanov was not Lysenko’s admirer.76 For the time being, the debate within Soviet biology was allowed to continue without decisive interference by the highest bosses. From 21 to 26 March, a Unionwide Genetics Conference was held at the biology faculty of Moscow State University.77 On 27 March Ivan Benediktov, the Agriculture minister, denounced the conference in a letter to Zhdanov on the grounds that Lysenko and Lysenkoists had not been invited and the conference had ignored the decisions on agriculture taken at the cc plenum in February.78 Zhdanov, again noncommittal, asked Agitprop chief Aleksandrov to investigate. On 15 April Aleksandrov reported to Zhdanov positively about the genetics conference.79 The next day, the Orgbiuro met to discuss, among other things, the situation in biology and agronomy. Lysenko, Chairman Zhdanov, and Malenkov spoke on the genetics issue but failed to resolve the conflict.80 Zhdanov’s hesitance seems to have been born of his uncertainty about Stalin’s position. It was known that Stalin had been fond of Lysenko earlier, but the boss’s silence gave rise to doubt. In addition, Zhdanov, as a former student of the Petrovsko-Razumovskii Agricultural Academy and helped, perhaps, by his son Iurii who was studying biochemistry, may have understood genetics well enough to realize that Lysenko’s scientific theories were dubious.

inter nat ional t e n sio n From 10 March to 24 April, a new round of meetings took place, this time in Moscow, between Allied ministers of foreign affairs.81 The American Republican leader, Harold Stassen, was part of the American delegation and took the opportunity to visit Leningrad.82 Before the visit he met Zhdanov on 14 April, flattering him by referring to his heroic role in the defence of the city during the war. It is probable that the ambitious Stassen, who had set his sights on the

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American presidency, wanted to meet the person whom he saw as Stalin’s likeliest successor (a view he shared with a great many informed Americans).83 The record of Stassen’s meeting with Zhdanov indicates a brief exchange of polite platitudes. At the end of the foreign ministers’ conference, Zhdanov joined the closing banquet in his capacity as former sacc head in Finland. He sat next to us ambassador Bedell Smith with whom he conversed in French.84 Smith noticed that Zhdanov held to a diet but looked healthy. Zhdanov had few dealings with non-Communist foreigners throughout his life and these were his only meetings with highranking American politicians. Typical of Stalin’s coterie (apart from Molotov and Mikoian), Zhdanov knew more of the outside world from reading books or watching films than from personal experience. Such ignorance, of course, did not stop the Stalinists (fortified by their Marxist wisdom) from telling foreign Communists what to do in their countries. While the diplomatic meetings in Moscow were underway, President Harry Truman announced in the us Congress on 12 March 1947 that his administration would not tolerate any further spread of Communist regimes in Europe and the Mediterranean. The presidential address spoiled the atmosphere in the Soviet capital.85 The diplomats made little progress thereafter on key issues such as the future of Germany or Austria, both sides further entrenching themselves in their respective zones of occupation. In April and May, the growing hostility between East and West was underlined by the departure of Communist ministers from the government coalitions in France, Italy, and Belgium.86 The Communist leaders in those countries were acknowledging what they thought was a signal from Moscow indicating a general Communist rejection of further collaboration with the former allies of the fight against Nazism and fascism. But to the puzzlement of the Western European Party leaderships, the Soviet chiefs turned out to be dismayed by the resignations. In early June Zhdanov’s letter to the French Communist leader Maurice Thorez criticizing the Communists’ departure from the French government was distributed among East-Central European Communist parties.87 By that point, Zhdanov was being groomed for the leadership of a new agency to coordinate the more important European Parties, for which his experience in the Comintern suited him well.

th e rea l mas t er o f c u lt u r e Zhdanov regularly chaired meetings of the cc Secretariat and Orgbiuro during the first half of 1947.88 Dissenting voices were further

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silenced and heterodox texts suppressed. On 5 April 1947 a nonconformist literary specialist and former political officer of the Red Army, Lev Kopelev, was sentenced for the second time to a labour camp for anti-Soviet agitation.89 He joined the future writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in one of the special prisons for convicted scientists, the sharaski.90 On 10 April after the minister of State Control, Lev Mekhlis, had told Zhdanov about the sale of second-hand books printed abroad with fascist and “pornographic” content, Zhdanov ordered Agitprop chief Aleksandrov to stop any further sale of such material in bookshops.91 A cc resolution followed on 14 May prompting massive screening of book sales from library collections in the ensuing months. A great many books (in the second quarter of 1947 almost 180,000) that had hitherto gone unnoticed by the state censorship agency, Glavlit, and its local branches were discovered throughout the country.92 On 13 May in the Kremlin, Stalin, Molotov, and Zhdanov received the leaders of the Writers’ Union, Fadeev, Gorbatov, and Simonov.93 In a manner that was symbolic of the relationship between the leaders and Soviet creative artists of the time, their discussion began with an exchange about the possible increase in fees for the work of Soviet writers. Stalin asked Zhdanov to organize a committee to look into the matter, but when Zhdanov proposed himself as the first member of this body, Stalin ridiculed him in front of the others. After being thus belittled, Zhdanov confined himself during the rest of the meeting to a few oblique and sycophantic remarks. Meanwhile, Stalin relished the occasion, showing his profound interest in literature in a long monologue.94 For Simonov the meeting marked his first introduction to the anti-Western campaign and he believed in hindsight that he and his fellow writers were being used as guinea pigs to gauge the reaction of the intelligentsia to the campaign. The writers received some cues. Stalin criticized the Soviet intelligentsia’s traditional pro-Western attitude, which began, in his view, with Peter the Great’s favouritism towards Germans. Stalin told the writers to emphasize the theme of Soviet patriotism. Tellingly, the writers were acquainted with the official line on the kr Affair as a typical example of the lack of Soviet patriotic pride (its Court of Honour was still some weeks away). Stalin suggested that the Writers’ Union journal, Literaturnaia gazeta, might follow an even more fanatic Soviet patriotism (he called this a “leftist inclination”) in its editorials; Soviet intellectuals would then be relieved to find Stalin and his cronies gently rebuking the journal’s more extreme utterances. It transpired in the course of the meeting that Simonov, as editor of

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Novyi Mir, had wanted to publish a series of Zoshchenko’s short stories on wartime partisans in his journal and had forwarded them to Zhdanov to seek the latter’s permission.95 Zhdanov had not replied to Simonov, showing that he was loath to substitute his own judgment for Stalin’s in deciding on such important issues. Stalin now asked Zhdanov whether he had read the stories; Zhdanov said he had not. Stalin, for whom Simonov’s request was new, chose to be magnanimous towards the disgraced writer, and in the September 1947 issue of Novyi Mir ten of Zoshchenko’s stories were published. Stalin’s pestering of Zhdanov before the writers shows that even the ultracautious Zhdanov could provoke Stalin’s jealousy and suspicion of those in his immediate environment who had any pretensions to autonomous political power. Stalin had thoroughly dressed down his selfless servant, so that the writers could have no doubt who was the real master of culture in the Soviet Union. By allowing some of Zoshchenko’s work to be published again, Stalin criticized the categorical nature of Zhdanov’s celebrated objections in August 1946 to Zoshchenko’s work.

lega l exp e rt It may surprise the reader to learn that on 26 May 1947 the death penalty was temporarily abolished in the Soviet Union. The change was part of the judicial reforms developed by the Politburo commission that began its work at Zhdanov’s instigation on 5 March.96 Within ten days, however, a law was announced that negated any impression of official magnanimity the measure might have provoked. On 4 June new laws were promulgated on the theft of public property, mandating extremely long prison or camp sentences for those convicted.97 The laws proved to be fairly effective according to reports sent by Kruglov in July to Stalin, Molotov, Beria, and Zhdanov. The crime rate dropped because the draconian new penalties scared off most potential criminals. The legal tightening of the screws continued with a decree of 9 June ordaining heavy penalties for divulging any “state secrets.”98 This decree announced a minimum sentence of eight years for disclosure of state secrets, which in a direct reference to the kr Affair included “giving information abroad about any scientific discoveries made on the territory of the ussr [which] was punishable by ten to fifteen years in corrective-labor camps.”99 In concert with the public announcement of this legislation, the semisecret first Court of Honour trial was staged in a Moscow theatre from 5 to 7 June.100 As noted earlier, Zhdanov edited the prosecutor’s speech.101 Kliueva and Roskin were accused primarily of estab-

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lishing and maintaining unauthorized contact with the Americans; furthermore, it was alleged that they had admitted their wrongdoing only after their cancer medicine had been transmitted to the Americans and they had been confronted by the Soviet authorities about their actions.102 Zhdanov was disingenuous, for Kliueva and Roskin had not just gained permission from the Health ministry but also from the Foreign Affairs ministry in 1946. But they had misunderstood the Soviet Union’s bureaucratic structure and failed to get clearance from the Party’s Central Committee, the supreme arbiter. They were now pilloried for this mistake before an audience of some one thousand spectators, predominantly from the upper levels of the Party and government bureaucracy. Though humiliated by the court, Kliueva and Roskin otherwise came off lightly, sentenced to a mere reprimand. On 16 July, just after the Soviets had definitively rejected the Americans’ Marshall Plan for the economic reconstruction of postwar Europe, the cc sent a closed letter on the kr Affair to Party committees around the country.103 Edited by Zhdanov, the letter condemned “kowtowing to the West” especially among certain parts of the intelligentsia. Thus Zhdanov returned to his perennial theme of intellectuals and their fickle loyalty.104 The theme of Russian “patriotism” was vehemently emphasized, too. The letter brought Russian chauvinism to new heights, ascribing to Russians a number of scientific discoveries hitherto thought to have been of Western origin. It argued that the Soviet peoples’ mistaken awe for Western scientific and cultural accomplishments was even more deplorable in that it made people like Kliueva and Roskin vulnerable to sly Western offers (conveyed through their intelligence agencies) of aid to Soviet science. The letter and accompanying trial materials formed the basis of intensive discussions of the kr Affair among thousands of Communists in special closed meetings throughout the country.105 In 1948 and 1949 a widely distributed film and a play taught the lessons of the affair to a nonParty audience, without explaining that the productions were connected with actual recent events.106 Zhdanov’s letter about the kr Affair was a radical synthesis of the ideological offensive embodied in the cultural campaigns and the cult of secrecy. Its conclusions amounted to a total rejection of the West, and it signalled the end to any Soviet willingness to compromise or collaborate with its former allies.107 The anti-Western campaign took on increasingly petty traits (the July letter had already attributed the invention of the light bulb and radio to Russians).108 On 10 June Zhdanov chaired a meeting of the cc Secretariat in which he forbade the election of British and American corresponding members to the

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Soviet Academy of Sciences, in response to the alleged refusal by the scientific community of those countries to elect Soviet scholars and scientists to their academies.109

ph ilosoph y r e v isit e d From 16 to 25 June, Zhdanov participated in the second conference on Aleksandrov’s book on Western European philosophy.110 AntiWestern sentiment saturated the proceedings. Zhdanov delivered the definitive summary at the meeting’s end, a speech once more heavily edited by Stalin.111 It decreed an even “greater emphasis on patriotic motifs and the definitive overcoming of ideological ties with the Western world … [which] were now described as cosmopolitanism and admiration for the bourgeois culture of the West.”112 Zhdanov meanwhile expressed an uncomplicated belief in human progress, a simplistic dialectic and hollow materialism.113 He took the opportunity to explain that, against Marx’s postulates, a dialectic driving force continued its work in a postrevolutionary socialist society, and he “pompously told them that the motive force of Soviet society was the shopworn cliché, criticism and self-criticism.”114 Furthermore, Zhdanov decried the detachment of contemporary philosophers from the everyday life of Soviet citizens, the scarcity of published philosophical works, and the petty academic quarrels among the philosophers.115 But one may agree with Corbett that philosophical depth was not at issue, since “the form of the attack, the nature and substance of the charges, [had] their own distinct significance. The episode was built up into a high-power drive in the campaign of party and government to dominate and use every form of intellectual activity in the Soviet Union. It also served as an occasion to reassert the inevitable hostility of the Soviet order to all other orders.”116 Zhdanov railed against the atomic-dollar democracies, the Vatican, racist theories, the yellow press, Jean Genet, and Jean-Paul Sartre.117 Some remnants of the 1946 campaigns can be traced in the speech, as when Zhdanov bemoaned a lack of Party spirit and creative ideas in the arts, but those themes had been downgraded to give voice to a new nationalistic rant.118 The June conference comprehensively and publicly condemned Aleksandrov’s book, and after a few months of waiting in the wings, Aleksandrov was replaced by Suslov as Agitprop chief.119 On 16 July 1947, the day that Zhdanov’s cc letter about the kr Affair was dispatched, Zhdanov chaired a meeting of the cc Secretariat that resolved to publish a new philosophical journal, Voprosy filosofii (Problems of Philosophy); within a few days the journal was established by an

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official Politburo decree.120 B.M. Kedrov was appointed editor in chief. The first issue was to be dedicated to the condemnation of Aleksandrov’s work. On 5 August Zhdanov visited Stalin in the Kremlin to finalize a Politburo decree on the writing of a new work on the history of philosophy.121 No such work was published, however, before Stalin’s death.

mars h a ll plan an d c o min fo r m Stalin and Zhdanov soon found ample confirmation for their belief in ongoing subversive Western conspiracies. On 5 June us Secretary of State George Marshall had announced a plan of American support for European economic recovery.122 Although the Americans promised financial aid to any European country attempting to recover from wartime devastation, funding was made conditional on agreement to allow great freedom of manoeuvre to us monitors of the plan in the recipient countries and on full disclosure by goverments about their use of the aid. On the basis of such conditions the plan was unacceptable to the Soviet regime, which considered such forced openness an infringement of its sovereignty and a threat to its national security and that of its satellites. From 27 June to 2 July, Molotov attended meetings held in Paris to prepare a general European conference on the Marshall Plan. Because of the conditions attached to the plan, the Soviets declined to participate at the general conference scheduled to open on 12 July.123 On 7 July the Soviet envoys in the capitals of the seven EastCentral European countries received instructions to warn the governments to which they were accredited against attending the actual Marshall Plan negotiations.124 On the following day, Zhdanov, Mikoian, and Suslov received disturbing news on the position of the Czechoslovak government regarding the upcoming meeting in Paris.125 The Czechoslovak Communists were against any trade agreement with the us, but the “reactionaries” among their coalition partners were supportive. On the very next day, Stalin explained to the Czechoslovak government leaders, who had been hastily flown to Moscow, that any participation in the Marshall Plan conference would be considered inappropriate.126 The moves by various Soviet government leaders (Stalin, Molotov, Mikoian, Malenkov, Beria, Voznesensky) and the Central Committee secretaries (Stalin, Zhdanov, sometimes Suslov) during these weeks indicate the intense level of interaction and collaboration among the highest Soviet leaders in such crises.127 Certainly Stalin always had the last word, but he involved his personal favourites in many of his

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decisions, as he had done with Zhdanov, Beria, Molotov, and Mikoian in 1940 and 1941, or the members of the State Defence Committee during the war. Stalin tried to keep up the pretence of collective decisionmaking, even though in practice his opinion always prevailed. He had surrounded himself with yes-men, such as Zhdanov, who had partially internalized Stalin’s manner of thinking and his political modus operandi. Even if they had ideas of their own on certain issues, those ideas were essentially Stalinist in nature. Occasionally in matters where he really felt out of his depth (as during the war, after he had discovered that his decisions in purely military affairs had had disastrous consequences), Stalin was willing to listen to others who were more competent, but such occasions were rare after 1945. There are several reasons why Stalin did not want to behave outwardly as an autocrat. One-man rule was anathema, of course, to the Marxist worldview. But Stalin also seems to have needed some emotional reassurance that his were the right decisions and he found it by “sharing” their authorship. Such collective responsibility ensured, moreover that there would always be a scapegoat other than himself in case a decision backfired. Meanwhile, Stalin behaved like a tyrant, even in minor things. His ridiculing of Zhdanov in front of Simonov and the other writers, his delight in getting his lieutenants drunk at his late-night dinners, and the way he scared them all by engaging in whimsical and at times lethal political attacks were the moves of a stereotypical wicked autocrat lording it over his courtiers.128 The Stalinists sped up the plan for a Communist Information Bureau (Cominform) in direct response to the Marshall Plan conference in Paris.129 On the basis of the evidence recently unearthed by Adibekov and Gibianskii, it seems erroneous to place the roots of the organization too far back.130 The Stalinists may have pondered an early version of the Cominform during Tito’s visit to Moscow in MayJune 1946.131 Any further development stalled until Stalin concluded that the rupture between the Communist and capitalist camps was definite. He fielded his latest ideas about a coordinating agency of Communist parties for the first time during meetings with the Polish leaders Gomulka and Berman in the spring and summer of 1947. Zhdanov was a central figure in Moscow during this ideological counteroffensive, as “the member of the Politbiuro of the vkp (b) who curated the area of relations with foreign communist parties and problems of the global communist movement.”132 Beria, Molotov, and Malenkov worked with Zhdanov on the reports for the first session.133 But the personal imprint of Stalin on all sessions of the Cominform

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and on the four sessions of the Cominform Secretariat is evident from the sources.134 After May 1945 Soviet military, economic, and security advisors could be found all over East-Central Europe and the presence of the Red Army was used to prompt the relevant governments to do Moscow’s bidding.135 The sovietization of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria had begun as soon as the Red Army had captured their capital cities in 1944 and 1945.136 The establishment of a full-fledged Communist dictatorship occurred in an analogously staged “democratic” manner in all states. But until the summer of 1947, the different Communist parties had been allowed a measure of freedom to chart their own course towards communism.137 The Cominform, then, “consolidate[d] communist power in Eastern Europe,” as Seton-Watson calls it, meaning “in practice … increased subjection of the parties to Moscow.”138 Such “overkill” led Adam Ulam in 1951 to note that “whether rightly or wrongly, [the leaders] appear … to think that the fate of Communism in the satellite countries is most intimately connected with the survival of their whole system of power.”139 In late July Wladyslaw Gomulka invited the Communist parties of various countries to a meeting in Poland to discuss the political state of affairs.140 By then, Zhdanov was already working on an enlarged agenda for the meeting, brainstorming in the second half of July almost daily with Stalin.141 They decided that the meeting was to have a threefold purpose: to discuss the international situation, to coordinate the activities of the parties, and to form a permanent informational bureau. One thorny issue was the exact membership of the bureau. For the time being, the Albanians (who were in Moscow in those days) and the Finns would remain outside.142 Albania’s future as an independent state remained moot. Even half a year later, Stalin suggested to Milovan Djilas that the Yugoslavs annex Albania.143 Since the Yugoslavs remained Stalin’s favourite allies throughout 1947, the Albanian Communists were placed in a holding pattern.144 Cominform membership was ultimately limited to nine European Communist parties, while the Communist parties that never joined the information bureau were subordinated to Moscow through the cc Department of Foreign Policy. Instructing Zhdanov between 12 and 14 August on how to proceed with the Cominform and once more handing him general responsibility for Party affairs in Moscow, the Vozhd’ left town on 15 August for another lengthy vacation.145 On the very eve of Stalin’s departure, L.S. Baranov (1909–53), deputy head of the cc dfp, reported to Zhdanov on the preliminary agenda of the Cominform meeting.146 In the next

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weeks dfp apparatchiks wrote a long version of Zhdanov’s keynote speech on the international situation for the upcoming meeting of the major European Communist parties, from which the Stalinist bosses – Stalin, of course, but also Beria, Molotov, and Malenkov – 147 erased much detail in September.148

ec onom ic s In May 1947 critics at Moscow State University’s Institute of Economics challenged the ideas of the director of the Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Global Economy and World Politics, the longtime Soviet resident Eugen Varga, on a long-term stabilization of global capitalism in the postwar period as expressed in his Changes in the Capitalist Economy (1946).149 The work’s political implication of a long-lived capitalism went against the extreme anti-Western spirit of Soviet ideology and policy. On 12 September Zhdanov chaired a meeting of the cc Secretariat that focused on criticism of Varga by the university institute.150 The upshot was that on 18 September, the Politburo merged the two institutes into a new Institute of Economics.151 Its chief was to be veteran Party economist K.V. Ostrovitianov (1892–1969), while Varga, as a mild form of punishment, was demoted to consultant for the economy of foreign countries and editor of the journal World Economy and World Politics (Mirovoe khoziaistvo i mirovaia politika), published by the new institute.152 The study of economics was a risky venture in a state that based itself on the idea of the primacy of the material over the spiritual. In December 1947 Nikolai Voznesensky’s Wartime Economy of the USSR in the Period of the Patriotic War was published in the Soviet Union and received a Stalin Prize in 1948.153 Voznesensky, a Politburo member and friend of Zhdanov’s, probably underestimated the danger he exposed himself to by publishing such a book. Stalin himself had never published a work on economics of comparable scope, and this lacuna now became all the more embarassing for the living leader of the global political movement that based itself on historical materialism and maintained that economics was the prime mover of the historical process. As with Aleksandrov’s book, the committee awarding the Stalin Prize to Voznesensky eventually came to regret its choice. Stalin connected the book’s publication with defiant behaviour and a general lack of proper modesty in Voznesensky, who had ventured into territory reserved only for the icons of Marxism-Leninism. As long as Zhdanov remained at the centre of Soviet politics, Voznesensky had a champion who could protect him. But after Zhdanov’s death Stalin’s creeping suspicion about Vozne-

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sensky’s ambition was handsomely fed by those who loathed the overconfident economist.154 The sharp criticism of the books by Varga, Voznesensky, and Aleksandrov further deadened the creative impulses of Soviet citizens, and in the course of the next five years few if any scholarly works of lasting quality were published in the ussr. Lack of time and low theoretical aptitude prevented the other lieutenants from producing any major treatises of their own, but the dearth of serious analytical writing by people like Zhdanov, Molotov, or Suslov can also be attributed to their realization that Stalin as a Marxist thinker did not like to share the limelight with anyone still alive.

s h epilov On 17 September Georgii Aleksandrov was officially replaced by cc secretary Mikhail Suslov as Agitprop chief.155 Dmitrii Shepilov (1905–95), propaganda editor of Pravda and recently involved in drafting a new Party program, was appointed Suslov’s deputy in Agitprop. The next day, Shepilov met Zhdanov in his office on the fifth floor of the cc building in Moscow.156 In his recollections of this meeting, Shepilov has left us with a composite picture of Zhdanov in the twilight of his life. He remembered a winsome man dressed in the uniform of a colonel-general with wise eyes that had a twinkle in them, who liked to talk while walking (with a stoop) around his office, reinforcing his points with expansive gestures. Now and then he approached his interlocutor and looked him straight in the eye to see if he had convinced him, or to gauge his reaction. Occasionally, Zhdanov had to interrupt his pacing to catch his breath.157 Aleksandrov had come under suspicion of being too soft and liberal in his management of the Agitprop bureaucracy. In response to this flabbiness, on 23 September, the Politburo established a Court of Honour in the cc apparatus, a decision prepared the previous day at a meeting, led by Zhdanov, of the cc Secretariat.158 On 29 September, standing in for Zhdanov who was travelling back from Poland, Aleksei Kuznetsov announced the establishment of a Court of Honour to a meeting of cc apparatus workers.159 As one pertinent reason for the creation of the court, Kuznetsov cited Aleksandrov’s lack of vigilance and his tolerance of vapid talk about sensitive matters among the Agitprop bureaucrats.160 Aleksandrov was additionally reproached for hiring too many well-educated specialists who had never been shopfloor workers, and even for turning a blind eye to the activities of an outright spy.161 Kuznetsov emphasized in his speech the nefarious habit of grovelling before the West and the intelligentsia’s lack of

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Soviet patriotism.162 He referred ominously to the warnings of some of the cc letters that, along with utterances by Stalin, had heralded the Great Terror.163 Perhaps Kuznetsov’s references to the Great Terror were linked to his appointment on 17 September as formal supervisor of the security organs, the mvd and mgb, even if in reality they reported mainly to Stalin.164 With Aleksandrov, other cc apparatchiki were singled out for criticism in the Court of Honour. Kuznetsov chided Agitprop bureaucrat K.S. Kuzakov for allowing the publication of a book with unauthorized vignettes about Lenin, as well as M.I. Shcherbakov, responsible for personnel working in journalism in the cc Cadres directorate, for hiring questionable journalists.165 The Court of Honour against Shcherbakov and Kuzakov was staged on 23 and 24 October.166 For their complacency in the spy case, both were excluded from the Party. Aleksandrov, although criticized for condoning the behaviour of both men, was not indicted. In the fall of 1947, the Courts of Honour remained the preferred means to heighten watchfulness among bureaucrats, but the Stalinists’ patience was beginning to run out. The law of 9 June 1947 had already threatened heavy penalties for those found guilty of misbehaving. Within a few months, the comparatively mild chastisement applied by the Courts of Honour was deemed inadequate.

th e f ounding of th e c o min fo r m Although Zhdanov had been selected much earlier to deliver the keynote address at the founding meeting of the Cominform in Poland, the Politburo only resolved officially on 19 September 1947 that Zhdanov was to discuss the international situation, while Malenkov was to give the cc report on the state of affairs within the Soviet Party at the upcoming gathering of Communist parties in Poland.167 On the twenty-second, Zhdanov, Malenkov, and their staff travelled to Szklarska Poremba, the location of the (secret) first meeting of the Cominform.168 Zhdanov read his keynote speech “On the International Situation” (“O mezhdunarodnoi polozhenii”) on the morning of 25 September.169 He signalled a new hard line by depicting the irreversible division of the globe into two camps, the democratic and antiimperialist camp and its imperialist-capitalist adversary. The leading enemy of communism had become the United States, which aimed at enslaving Western Europe and dominating the global market; the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan provided clear evidence of these intentions. As Craig Nation notes, “the ‘Zhdanov line’ offered a mirror image of Truman’s ‘freedom versus tyranny’ rhetoric. It described the

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world in Manichean fashion, as strictly bipolar and potentially fated to an apocalyptic showdown.”170 As Stalin’s special envoy, Zhdanov’s role at the first Cominform session was not restricted to this speech alone. Aided especially by the Yugoslav Communists, he used the French Communists (and to a lesser degree the Italians) as whipping boys during smaller meetings.171 The strategy was not coincidental: the Soviet leadership had less opportunity to bully the Western European Parties than the Communist parties of the East-Central European People’s Democracies. By resigning from the government in spring, Zhdanov said in his major address, the French Communists had been outfoxed by their coalition partners, for the strategy of the moment had called for continued Communist participation in government to better subvert their bourgeois colleagues.172 This accusation against the French disclosed a key motive for convoking the meeting – the French Communists’ failure to seek the advice of the Soviet Communist party, a flaw deemed to be common to all Party leaderships. Zhdanov, as Stalin’s envoy, demanded discipline and the strict observance of the Bolshevik tradition of democratic centralism, whereby subordinate Parties were to defer to the Soviet party. Any separate paths to socialism were now closed. Making the best of a bad situation, Zhdanov advised the Western Europeans to follow a confrontational strategy as opposition parties. In following this advice, the French and Italian Communist parties did not gain in popularity.173 At first, their electoral support dropped, and while it soon stabilized at a reasonably high level, it was never strong enough for the Communists to avoid being ignored for decades as potential coalition partners by the other political parties. Neither Communist party was asked to join another government in their respective countries until the 1980s. The Western European Communist parties, with their unions, youth and women’s organizations, and recreational clubs, became compartmentalized forces that were hostile to, and shunned by, the rest of their societies. In a way, the Cominform failed here on two counts. In the first place, the bureau members met too late to prevent the Western European Communists from leaving their respective government coalitions. Secondly, it counselled its Western members to follow a counterproductive political course. The Cominform sustained a fatal blow when Yugoslavia, the one European country in which the Communist movement had taken power without substantial Soviet support, defected in 1948. After the summer of 1948, the Cominform was superfluous in steering the satellite Communists, who had no choice but to do the Soviet bidding anyway. That Stalin heightened his direct

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personal control over the fraternal Parties and soon bypassed the Cominform is suggested by the visits paid to him in Moscow by top delegations of the French, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Yugoslav, Romanian, and Bulgarian Communist parties between mid-November 1947 and March 1948.174 On 27 September 1947, Zhdanov delivered the concluding speech of the Cominform meeting, summarizing the conclusions of the discussion on the international situation.175 The meeting ended on 28 September with a discussion of the text of the declaration to be published in the press about the meeting.176 Using mainly the telegraph, Stalin, who had been kept informed with regular bulletins throughout the session, was involved in the editing process of the official declaration.177 It was only gradually, during the next weeks, that the Communist media released more detailed information to the outside world about the proceedings in Poland. On 29 September Zhdanov, Malenkov, and the cc staff flew back to Moscow.178 On 7 October the Politburo appointed Pavel Iudin as main editor of the Cominform’s journal, For a Lasting Peace, For a People’s Democracy, intended as a counterweight to the anti-Communist rhetoric of many of the Western politicians and media.179 Soon after, Zhdanov and Iudin flew to Sochi to discuss the new journal with Stalin; Stalin himself came up with the cumbersome title.180 Finally, on 15 December after one of those grinding Soviet delays, the Politburo ratified a permanent group of editors for the journal, with Iudin as chief editor and Grigor’ian as the Soviet cc representative.181 Pravda did not publish Zhdanov’s speech “On the International Situation” until 22 October. As he was seen as one of Stalin’s closest confidants, Zhdanov’s implacable hostility towards the West, now made public, could only be understood by Western politicians as the Soviet announcement of the final end of wartime collaboration.182 On 27 October an official cc resolution was issued on the results of the Polish meeting of the Communist parties.183 The cc expressed its satisfaction with the account of the proceedings provided by Zhdanov and Malenkov. The meeting had served to unite the Communist parties in their determined struggle against American efforts to achieve world domination. Obkoms, kraikoms, and republican committees were ordered to organize meetings of Party activists, non-Party workers, intelligentsia, and collective farmers to explain the conclusions of the meeting. The keynote speaker at the Cominform session, meanwhile, had once again fallen ill. Zhdanov spent the second half of October in Sochi recovering from “angina pectoris.”184

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discipline a n d p u n ish In Moscow, Aleksei Kuznetsov continued the relentless campaign to make the Soviet government and Party impregnable secure fortresses, following the model Zhdanov had set in June. Soon after his appointment as the curator of the mvd and mgb, Kuznetsov addressed a meeting in the mgb headquarters in which he ordered the election of a Court of Honour within the mgb (he had agreed previously on this step with mgb minister Abakumov, albeit not with Stalin).185 Kuznetsov’s appearance was an attempt to underline the subordination of the security organs to him and his own Cadres Directorate, in other words, to stress the primacy of the Communist party over the government. Abakumov, meanwhile, did not appreciate Kuznetsov’s meddling in his affairs and awaited his chance to rid himself of this supervisor.186 The Party’s Agitprop Directorate kept up the campaign for greater ideological aptitude as well.187 On the evening of 6 November, Molotov delivered the keynote anniversary speech commemorating the October Revolution.188 After a visit to Finland followed by a brief stay in Moscow where he was examined by Doctor P.I. Egorov of the Kremlin medical staff, Zhdanov returned to Sochi to recover from his health problems, so he could not repeat his performance of the previous year.189 Molotov’s receiving this brief is consistent with Stalin’s divide-and-conquer strategy towards his minions: Zhdanov was not allowed to become too clearly his dauphin. But whereas Zhdanov’s speech the year before had been printed on the front page of Pravda, Molotov’s was relegated to page three.190 On 22 December Zhdanov, behind Stalin and Molotov, was listed in the national press as the third most prominent candidate in upcoming elections for the municipal soviets, thus marking Zhdanov’s high profile.191 Stalin was the front-page candidate, but separate stories on the nominations of Molotov and Zhdanov covered page two.192 Zhdanov’s hectic travelling and work schedule once again took its toll. On 9 November the ailing and exhausted Zhdanov received three weeks’ holiday from the Politburo (possibly having suffered a minor heart attack).193 As his wartime doctors had already cautioned, Zhdanov’s heart problems could only have been alleviated by permanent abstention from the stress and fatigue of his work, but in Stalin’s environment few people ever retired peacefully. The great majority of those who died a natural death under Stalin, such as Kalinin or Shcherbakov, dropped in their harness, still in the midst of work on behalf of their Party and the radiant future. Stalin returned to Moscow by 21 November, after a three-month

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absence. From early December 1947, after Zhdanov’s return from his rest cure, he resumed his customary visits to Stalin’s Kremlin office.194 On 13 December, one of the very few postwar Politburo meetings was held. Full members Stalin, Beria, Voznesensky, Voroshilov, Zhdanov, Kaganovich, Malenkov, Mikoian, and Khrushchev attended as well as candidates Bulganin, Kosygin, and Shvernik, and cc members A.G. Zverev (1900–69), A.A. Kuznetsov, Mekhlis, Popov, Poskrebyshev, Shkiriatov, and two other guests who were not cc members, trade minister A.V. Liubimov (1896–1967) and Petrov, another trade official.195 The main item on the agenda was the abolition of the ration-card system and the implementation of a monetary reform, which both came into force at midnight on the fifteenth.196 People who had more than a certain amount of cash in the old currency were barred from exchanging it for the new ruble at par and thus stood to lose considerable sums. In a report of 21 May 1948 to Stalin, Molotov, Beria, Malenkov, Voznesensky, and Kosygin, Kruglov showed that the implementation of the currency reform had led to widespread fraudulent practices.197 Across the ussr, almost 20,000 people in the months after 15 December saw criminal proceedings instigated against them for currency fraud. Communists were seven times as likely as others to abuse what was often prior knowledge of the reform, further testimony that the Zhdanov-led ideological offensive of the previous twenty months had not resulted in the desired effect of creating a morally impeccable vanguard of Communists. After a series of virtually daily visits by Zhdanov to his office, on 19 December Stalin signed a Sovnarkom decision to conduct a Court of Honour against Admiral Kuznetsov and three other ranking navy officers.198 Defence minister Bulganin appointed Marshal Govorov as its chair on the same day. The navy officers were accused of passing on military secrets to English and American naval attachés in 1943–44, including a strategic map of the Kamchatka coast; they were also accused of organizing a visit by Allied representatives to a Soviet submarine in 1944. One of the state prosecutors later remembered that, when the case was handed to him, he received guidelines that included excerpts from the cc resolutions on Zvezda and Leningrad, and the letter on the biologists Parin, Kliueva, and Roskin.199 Zhdanov’s original script for the Courts of Honour had been polished by now. But the admirals were among the last people to be tried by them.200 Stalin appears to have become impatient with their limited effect. They had not stopped officials from flaunting the rules, as the fraud by Party members during the monetary reform made evident. The Courts of Honour failed sufficiently to inculcate xenophobia or a

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high standard of ethics among Soviet citizens. The courts and the antiWestern campaign of 1947 had prepared the ground for a much more openly repressive phase in postwar domestic policy.201 Henceforth those guilty of a “dulling of vigilance” leading to security leaks or the divulging state secrets were immediately turned over to the longerestablished investigative organs and courts that applied the much harsher law of June 1947.202 Very rarely the Courts of Honour were convoked, primarily to deal with minor cases of embezzlement and fraud. The Stalinists took several concrete measures that further sharpened penal policy during the first months of 1948. On 27 January Stalin received a report by Kruglov and Abakumov on the organization of “special-regime camps.”203 The Politburo, which had commissioned the report, ordered the creation of such camps in the following weeks. They were intended for “especially dangerous criminals,” namely political convicts, such as Trotskyites, who had to perform hard labour. The compounds were located in remote areas of the Union. An initial number of 100,000 inmates was planned, while a further 5,000 places were created in the special prisons of Vladimir, Aleksandrovsk, and Verkhne-Ural’sk. By the middle of 1949, the capacity of the camps, which had filled handsomely in the course of 1948, was expanded by some 45,000 extra spots. Thorough as always, the mgb organized cells of informers in the special camps to unearth any subversive convict networks. On 10 February 1948 the Politburo formed a commission on Khrushchev’s instigation to toughen the treatment of those shirking their responsibilities on kolkhozy in Ukraine.204 The leadership relied increasingly on coercion to bring its Soviet and foreign subjects to heel, at the expense of the persuasive methods of agitation and propaganda.205 As Djilas suggested, the prevailing sentiment among the late Stalinist leadership had shifted back to the point where they believed that “force was more effective than ideology as the means of realizing Communism.”206 Criminal courts worked overtime.207

musi c The militant anti-Western and pro-Russian sentiment also affected the next campaign on the cultural front. The campaign criticizing Soviet music took particular exception to the composers’ insufficient celebration of the Russian tradition to the exclusion of any other cultural traditions.208 It is indicative of how the postwar campaigns culminated with a return to the “xenophobic and Russophilic mode” of the late 1930s.209 As it had a decade earlier, this process would be underlined

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by the persecution of a diaspora, a cynical attempt in Bismarckian or even Hitleresque style to forge Soviet unity around the Russian older brothers by scapegoating the enemy within. The music campaign, the last cultural campaign in which Zhdanov played a key role, completed the disciplining of the creative arts under Stalin.210 On 5 January 1948, Stalin, Zhdanov, and some other bosses watched the opera The Great Friendship, by the composer V. Muradeli (1908–70) in the Bol’shoi Theatre.211 The Stalinists’ dismay with Muradeli’s piece caused the Soviet composers, who had stayed outside the fray for several years, to fall under close scrutiny by the Party leadership. The Great Friendship made a convenient target in that it presented the Russians (not without grounds in fact) as foes of the Ossetians and Georgians during the civil war, which was according to the Stalinists “historically false, for the obstacle to the establishment of the friendship of the peoples in that period in the Northern Caucausus were the Ingushetians and Chechens [who had been deported at the end of the Second World War].”212 By thus depicting hostility between different Soviet nations, the opera’s plotline undermined the official myth of the “Great Friendship” (Velikaia Druzhba) between all ethnic groups in the ussr. But apart from the libretto, the leaders were irritated by the infusion of modernist bourgeois Western European and American music (this meant both atonal music and jazz) in the work, and, more importantly, in many of the compositions of leading Soviet composers, such as Dmitrii Shostakovich, Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953), Aram Khachaturian (1903–78), and Nikolai Miaskovskii.213 Already on 6 January, Zhdanov and Shepilov chided composers, writers, and musicians involved with The Great Friendship.214 Then, on 13 January, Zhdanov again criticized Muradeli’s opera at a larger meeting held at the cc buildings of some seventy Soviet musicians, composers, and music critics.215 “Formalism” (meaning too much experimentation) was one point of criticism, but Zhdanov hammered away at the lack of patriotism and nationalist content in the work of leading Soviet composers.216 On 26 January, the Politburo issued decrees on the Committee for Artistic Affairs under the Sovmin and the organizational committee for the ussr Union of Composers.217 M.B. Khrapchenko was removed as chair of the Committee for Artistic Affairs and replaced by P.I. Lebedev. The Politburo resolution on the composers’ union said: The organizational committee of the Union of Soviet Composers followed a fundamentally wrong line in the field of Soviet music. Instead of developing

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Soviet music in the spirit of socialist realism, ideinost’ and narodnost’, and to perfect the artistic mastery of Soviet composers, the organizational committee turned into a breeding-ground of formalist, anti-narod direction in Soviet music, which seriously damaged its development and has been condemned by the Party. The organizational committee not only failed to facilitate the development of a creative discussion, of criticism and self-criticism among Soviet composers, but, on the contrary, it cultivated morals, alien to Soviet society, of suppression of criticism and self-criticism and promoted an unrestrained eulogizing of the creations of a small group of composers to cultivate friendly relations.218

The leaders of the organizational committee, Khachaturian, Muradeli, and Atovm’ian, none of them ethnic Russians, were removed from their leading positions.219 The Russian B.V. Asaf’ev was appointed new chair of the organizational committee, while his compatriot T.N. Khrennikov (b. 1913) was appointed general secretary of the composers’ union, which now finally came into being. On 2 February Zhdanov sent Stalin drafts of a cc resolution.220 The cc decree “On the Opera The Great Friendship of V. Muradeli” was issued on 10 February.221 On 10 and 11 February, Zhdanov delivered a final keynote speech to a closed meeting of the Party cell of the Soviet composers’ union organizational committee.222 The offensive came to a close with the publication of the cc resolution in Pravda on 11 February.223 The campaign’s intimidation of the Soviet composers and stress on Russian-Soviet patriotism missed their aesthetic mark, for few positive artistic works were inspired by it. Instead the campaign further stifled musical and other artistic projects, thus creating the gaping cultural void that became the hallmark of High or Late Stalinism, to which Zhdanov was an important contributor, albeit not its main inspiration. There was perhaps no direct connection, but the death on the same day of the film director Sergei Eisenstein may have been connected with the attack on his favourite composer of film music, Sergei Prokofiev, specifically, and on the Soviet cultural scene in general.224 And although most composers themselves were not physically harmed, on 20 February in Moscow Prokofiev’s ex-wife, Lina, was arrested.225

edif y ing e x a mp l e s By early 1948, the hunt for the enemy within and without had returned to the Soviet land. While in early January 1948 preparations were in full swing for the Court of Honour against the admirals, public

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trials of pro-Nazi war criminals found among pows confined in the ussr were staged, too. On 10 September 1947, on Stalin’s urging, the Sovmin had resolved to intensify the prosecution of war criminals discovered in Soviet pow camps and to have some of them appear at widely publicized public trials in the areas where they had committed their crimes.226 On 10 January 1948, Kruglov, Justice minister Rychkov and State Prosecutor Gorshenin sent Stalin, Molotov, Beria, and Zhdanov a report on these public trials. One hundred and thirty-eight war criminals had been convicted, and 128 of them had been sentenced to twenty-five years in labour camp; none had been sentenced to fewer than fifteen years.227 In closed trials held during the fall of 1947, another 876 had been convicted and, without exception, sentenced to twenty-five years in the camps. This sudden intensification in the hunt for Nazis and their ilk was part of the new grim face the Soviet Union was showing, and it was connected to the closer linkage Soviet propaganda began to make at the time between the Anglo-American capitalists and fascism.228 Meanwhile, war heroes were also under the gun. In January 1948 Zhdanov chaired a Politburo commission investigating Marshal Zhukov, by then commander of the Odessa Military District.229 On 20 January the Politburo resolved on the basis of Zhdanov’s commission report (which was based partially on mgb reports to Stalin, including one of a search of Zhukov’s Moscow apartment) that Zhukov had misappropriated goods confiscated in Germany and had lied about it when he testified before the commission. He got off lightly, receiving a severe reprimand and a transfer to a military district in the rear. From 12 to 15 January, meanwhile, Admirals Kuznetsov, Galler, Alafuzov, and Stepanov appeared before their Court of Honour. The day after their trial ended the Sovmin decided to confirm the court’s decision to hand over the case to the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court.230 On 14 January mvd minister Kruglov reported to Stalin, Molotov, Beria, Voroshilov, and Zhdanov on the murder in Minsk of the Jewish actor Shlomo Mikhoels.231 Kruglov gave no hint in his account of the crime that the killing had been orchestrated by Stalin himself through the other security ministry, the mgb.232 Mikhoels’ elimination was part of the preparation of a campaign against Soviet Jews, most of which unfolded in earnest after Zhdanov’s death.

unr uly s ubje c t s In January 1948 the Stalinists also intensified their efforts to bring the major European Communist parties in line. Zhdanov, Stalin, Suslov,

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and the other ranking leaders discovered a disturbing pattern in minor incidences of insubordinate behaviour by the Communist party leaders within the People’s Democracies.233 In the Soviet leaders’ view such minor deviations could lead to dangerous developments, as their experience with Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Bukharin two decades previously had taught them. Even before the Cominform was organized, Wladyslaw Gomulka, the Polish Communist leader, was never fully trusted, since he had not been among the East-Central European Party leaders to be groomed in Moscow during the 1930s.234 Gomulka had compounded Soviet suspicions by expressing only lukewarm enthusiasm for the new Cominform. From 14 to 27 January 1948, the Polish Communist party and government leadership made an official visit to the ussr, giving the Stalinists an opportunity to watch Gomulka closely.235 On 15 January Gomulka and Minc were received by Stalin, Zhdanov, Molotov, and Malenkov.236 Gomulka may have been able to reassure the Soviet leaders of his loyalty and trustworthiness for the time being, but after the Yugoslavs began to assert their independence from Moscow, Stalin decided that Gomulka could not be relied on either.237 Indeed, the Stalinists’ suspicions of seditious behaviour in the fraternal Parties seemed to be confirmed by the sudden rapid widening of the rift with the Yugoslavs. Late in the evening of 16 January Milovan Djilas, a member of the Yugoslav Politburo, met with Molotov, Stalin, and Zhdanov in the Kremlin, minutes after a larger Polish delegation had left.238 Though it is likely that Stalin was just as suspicious of the Yugoslav political leadership as he was of the Poles, he dissembled before Djilas. He again advised the Yugoslavs to “swallow” Albania eventually, although he cautioned against hurry.239 After the meeting, the company left for dinner at Stalin’s dacha, Djilas riding in a car with Stalin, Molotov, and Zhdanov.240 As soon as they reached the villa, Stalin began to order Zhdanov around in front of Djilas. Zhdanov, unfazed (apparently accustomed to such abuse), was in an expansive mood that evening, talking about the punctuality of the Finns and his recent work on “music,” and gleefully recounting the story of his bullying of Zoshchenko.241 On 17 January another Communist leader, the Bulgarian Party leader and former Comintern stalwart Georgi Dimitrov, displayed a distressing independence of spirit. Without Moscow’s permission, Dimitrov publicly announced his support for a political federation of Eastern European countries.242 Subsequently, Yugoslavs and Bulgarians intensified discussions on the formation of a Balkan Federation. An article in Pravda of 28 January criticizing the staging of these talks hinted for the first time at a minor rift with Communist Yugoslavia.243

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Meanwhile, on 19 January Tito had proposed to Albanian leader Enver Hoxha that a Yugoslav division be stationed in southern Albania to protect the country from any fighting that might spill over from the Greek civil war.244 Perhaps Tito’s move was in the spirit of Stalin’s remarks on Albania to Djilas (who was still in Moscow), but it did not observe the letter of the unwritten rules in the international Communist movement, since Moscow’s authorization for such steps had neither been given nor even requested.

too many dis t r ac t io n s On 30 August 1947, while Zhdanov had been preoccupied with the Cominform, Literaturnaia Gazeta had published a letter by the poets Surkov and Tvardovsky (both had ties to agriculture) reviving criticism of the anti-Lysenko biologist Zhebrak, and an article critical of genetics, composed under the auspices of the journal’s newly appointed science editor, Mark Mitin.245 The Lysenkoists were on the offensive. In early February 1948, in a countermove by the embattled geneticists, Academician Shmal’gauzen met the young head of the Agitprop science department, Iurii Zhdanov.246 The twenty-eight-year-old Iurii Andreevich, holding a degree in chemistry from Moscow State University, was a fledgling scientist at best and had no experience in the Party’s organization. But he had been appointed on Stalin’s suggestion as the highest Party authority within the vast Soviet science complex in the autumn of 1947.247 Iurii Zhdanov’s task was varied: he monitored personnel (in terms both of appointments and ideological reliability) and research, advised on assigning funds, and looked after the academics’ general well-being. He also arbitrated in conflicts between scientists and scholars. Levina notes that, “[taken] together, [Iurii Zhdanov’s] high post and the support of his father A.A. Zhdanov … allowed Iu.A. Zhdanov during the early part of his employment to take an independent line in leading science. He, undoubtedly, carefully studied the materials on biology that were kept in the cc archives, [and] knew about the critical mood towards Lysenko of a number of members of the cc Orgbiuro … Among these appeals [to the cc to solve the biology conflict] was also a letter by Academician I.I. Shmal’gauzen, who at the time was the country’s leading biologist.”248 That “a number of members” of the Orgbiuro were critical may be an exaggeration, but certainly Andrei Zhdanov himself had previously seemed sceptical about Lysenko’s ideas. Such scepticism was underlined when, from 3 to 8 February, another conference on genetics was held at Moscow State University without the participation of any Lysenkoists.249

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On 12 February Andrei Zhdanov received a letter by Shmal’gauzen with comments added by Iurii, one of several letters critical of Lysenko that Zhdanov received after the war.250 One infers from Zhdanov senior’s lack of response that, at best, he only glanced briefly at the material before dispatching it to subordinate bureaucrats or to his personal archive.251 Even when, on 24 February, Iurii Zhdanov sent a note to Stalin, Andrei Zhdanov, and, somewhat curiously, Malenkov, attacking Lysenko, no immediate reaction by any of Iurii’s superiors followed. Iurii Zhdanov took the silence as tacit approval of his criticism. Andrei Zhdanov’s attention was distracted by a variety of issues during the first months of 1948. While the East-Central European Communist parties, the Zhukov commission, and the music composers demanded a lot of his time, he also prepared for and ran Secretariat and Orgbiuro meetings.252 Shepilov recalled about those last months that Zhdanov served as Stalin’s stand-in: “He had to occupy himself with the most varied questions: the re-evacuation of factories and the abolition of bread ration-cards, the growth of fishing and the development of book-printing, the production of cement and the increase of scientists’ wages, the sowing of flax, and television.”253 In addressing ideological questions, Zhdanov did not wait for his apparat to come up with the answers but developed them himself by rereading the classical Marxist and Leninist texts.254 However laudable this may be from the point of view of a Marxist purist, this attention to detail was time-consuming and came at the expense of other matters. Indeed, he even overlooked some things that came directly to his desk, such as his own son’s note on Lysenko. Although Andrei Zhdanov boasted of his almost fifteen years at the highest levels of the Party’s central apparatus, this oversight proved to be a crucial slip.

t h e y ugos lav r e b e l l io n On 10 February Zhdanov addressed himself to the composers’ union, the problem of kolkhozniks’ shirking their work, and the specialregime camps. On the same day, Stalin, Molotov, Malenkov, Zhdanov, and Suslov, joined by the diplomat Zorin, met in the Kremlin for three hours with Yugoslav leaders (Kardelj, Djilas, Vakaric) and Bulgarian leaders (Dimitrov, Kostov, Kolarov).255 Zhdanov’s role was minor in these proceedings at which Stalin and Molotov pilloried the Bulgarians and Yugoslavs for the proposed stationing of a Yugoslav division in Albania as well as Dimitrov’s statements about a future federation.256 The Soviet leaders, usually including Zhdanov, lectured other Communist parties as well in subsequent days.257 The Stalinist condescension towards the East-Central European Communists backfired: rather

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than repenting for its alleged sins, the Soviets’ most valued EastCentral European partner, Yugoslavia, rebelled against Soviet tutelage. The late winter of 1948 also saw aggressive Communist moves in some of the countries bordering the Soviet Union. Between 20 and 22 February, the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia was completed with the ouster of the last government members who were not willing to submit to Moscow. Stalin applied pressure on Finland, too.258 In early March Finnish Communists tried to intimidate their government further, having thugs attack non-Communist newspaper offices in Helsinki, but when on 6 April the Finns signed the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance with the ussr, the Soviet bosses called off the offensive. On 13 April Zhdanov met Finnish Party leader Ville Pessi in Moscow to map a less belligerent course for the Finnish Communists. Underlining the combative attitude prevailing in February and March among the Soviet leaders, the minister of Defence, Nikolai Bulganin, became a full Politburo member on 16 February.259 The Inner Circle met often with ministers involved in defence industries and army commanders in March.260 This belligerent upsurge may have been an impulsive attempt to test Western (and even Finnish?) resolve. Stalin’s postwar foreign policy lacked consistency and often seemed confused, alternating cunning strategic moves with impulsive blunders. From Yalta to the end of the Korean War, the Soviet leaders were in search of the right balance between short-term gains and long-term goals, and between the Soviet need for secure borders and desire for the growth of the global Communist movement and the worldwide proletarian revolution. They never found it. The lack of consistency was, of course, not just due to muddled Soviet geopolitical thinking. Foreign policy is, more than anything, a matter of reacting to unexpected developments, as the Yugoslav case shows. The Yugoslavs showed a defiant spirit after their scolded emissaries had returned to Belgrade. From late February onward, the Yugoslav Communists became more rigid in their refusal to defer to the Russians over the issues of Albania and Greece.261 While on 1 March, Stalin, Molotov, Beria, Voznesensky, Malenkov, Mikoian, Bulganin, Kaganovich, and Zhdanov met in the Kremlin, in Belgrade an enlarged meeting of the Yugoslav Communists’ Politburo condemned the patronizing Soviet attitude towards Yugoslavia.262 Zhdanov frequented Stalin’s office during most of March while the Yugoslav issue was heating up. On 12 March Zhdanov together with most other Politburo members listened to a report by the Soviet ambassador to Belgrade, A.I. Lavrent’ev (1904–84), about growing Yugoslav obnoxiousness.263 On 16 March Zhdanov, Stalin, and Molotov met the

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Bulgarians Dimitrov and Kolarov, and Cominform official Pavel Iudin, who had flown in from Belgrade.264 On the eighteenth a telegram signed by Molotov arrived in Belgrade announcing that the Soviets were withdrawing all their military and civilian advisers from Yugoslavia.265 And on the twentieth, a larger Bulgarian delegation was back in Stalin’s office, where they met the ranking Red Army commanders Vasilevskii and A.I. Antonov (1896–1962) as well as Stalin, Molotov, Mikoian, and Bulganin.266 Did the Soviets consider using the threat of military force against the Yugoslavs? On 27 March, in the name of the entire Soviet cc, a letter was dispatched to the Yugoslav Communist party rebuking it for its errors.267 Daily visits with Stalin and the other leaders (Malenkov, Beria, Molotov, Mikoian, Voznesensky, Kaganovich, Bulganin) occupied a good part of Zhdanov’s time in early April.268 The fall-out of the Yugoslav heresy further intensified the Stalinists’ scrutiny of the other East-Central European parties. On 5 April Baranov, Pukhlov, and Ovcharov of the cc dfp sent a letter to Suslov on the anti-Marxist ideological positions within the leadership of the Polish Communist party and particularly criticized the “nationalism” of Gomulka.269

fath er an d so n Andrei Zhdanov may not have liked Trofim Lysenko, considering him a buffoon, boor, and neither intelligent nor kul’turnyi, as Iurii Zhdanov maintains.270 But Andrei Zhdanov had done precious little to weaken Lysenko because he had recognized early on that Stalin was fond of the “proletarian” agronomist. Much less inhibited than his father, Iurii Andreevich Zhdanov delivered his fateful address on “Moot Points of Contemporary Darwinism” (‘Spornye voprosy sovremennogo darvinizma’) to a gathering of Agitprop lecturers working for regional Party committees in Moscow’s Polytechnical Museum on 10 April.271 As David Joravsky explains, in the lecture Iurii tried to maintain the precarious compromise reached between pro-geneticists and anti-geneticists in the later 1930s. This uneasy truce had been supported by his father but had recently come under renewed attack by the Lysenko school, which had managed to enlist Literaturnaia gazeta’s editor, the formidable Mark Mitin.272 The text of the lecture had been authorized by Shepilov, who as deputy chief of the Agitprop directorate was Iurii’s immediate supervisor.273 Shepilov claims to have sent a draft (or at least the announcement) of Iurii’s speech to his own immediate boss, Suslov, who did not object to its being read.274 Iurii’s contribution to this heavily politicized scientific debate should not have been a complete surprise to Andrei Zhdanov, since on

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12 February, as we saw, Iurii Zhdanov had sent a note to his father’s personal secretariat attesting to his discussions about genetics with the Academician Shmal’gauzen.275 Mark Mitin and Trofim Lysenko secretly listened to the lecture in a neighbouring room with the help of a listening device, and exactly one week later Lysenko sent a letter to Stalin complaining about Iurii’s criticism of his theories.276 But Stalin was busy with other affairs and could not afford to spend much time investigating the conflict. It was only in the second half of May that Stalin interfered personally in the affair. Zhdanov continued to meet frequently with Stalin the last week of April.277 On the twenty-eighth he had a long meeting with Stalin and Molotov, much of which likely involved the break with Yugoslavia.278 On 1 May Zhdanov stood third in the listing of Soviet notables in coverage of the traditional May Day celebrations, which he watched from the dais on top of the Lenin Mausoleum in Red Square.279 Lengthy visits with Stalin and Molotov continued in the early days of May, focusing on what had now become the Yugoslav problem.280 On 4 May a letter was sent to the Yugoslav leaders comparing their behaviour to that of the revisionist German socialist Eduard Bernstein’s followers, and to Mensheviks, Trotskyites, and Bukharinites.281 Some of the literature on the topic has presented the speculative hypothesis that Zhdanov was personally blamed for the Yugoslav defection from the Soviet camp and that the Yugoslav defiance caused the fall of Zhdanov in the early summer.282 This argument is attractive because of the coincidence of the two events. But, to date, neither in archival nor published sources has any corroborating evidence for it been found. Zhdanov was very much involved with Stalin and Molotov in designing a strategy to berate the Yugoslavs for their errors and make them do Moscow’s bidding again. All three leaders (along with Beria, Malenkov, and Suslov, as well as some of the lesser Soviet politicians) appear to have made their cardinal mistake in concert.283 They tried to intimidate Tito in Belgrade in 1948 in the way they had bullied other East-Central European Communist leaders in preceding years, whom they held at gunpoint through the presence of the Red Army, in a sense the mainstay of their power in the region. But there was no Soviet occupation force in Yugoslavia and Tito showed that his spirit had not been broken by his having witnessed the devastating effect of the Great Terror on the Comintern in Moscow (unlike the thoroughly intimidated Dimitrov, Pieck, or Rakosi, with whom he had shared the experience). On 20 May the Yugoslav leadership declared in an open letter that it would not attend a June Cominform meeting that was to be held in Bucharest.284 Definitive invitations for the meeting, authored by

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Zhdanov under the auspices of Stalin and Molotov, went out to the other Cominform members on 22 May.285 Almost six weeks after Iurii Zhdanov’s genetics lecture, Stalin at last found time to pay attention to it. Lysenko’s April letter had been left unanswered. On 11 May the president of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences (vaskhnil), in a strategic move showing proper modesty, tendered his resignation with Agriculture minister Benediktov, claiming that the Party had lost faith in him and his work.286 Formally, Benediktov could not terminate Lysenko, however, as his position fell within the Politburo’s nomenklatura. The logic of the appointment system thus forced the two men to turn to the highest authorities. Around 20 May, Zhdanov, Stalin, and Lysenko met.287 Then on 28 May, Andrei Zhdanov, accompanied by Molotov, Beria, Malenkov, Bulganin, Voznesensky, Mikoian, and Kaganovich, paid a key visit to Stalin’s office that decided the scientific controversy in Lysenko’s favour.288 Suslov, Shepilov, and Iurii Zhdanov attended for almost two hours.289 Stalin voiced his dismay with Iurii and Shepilov for failing to seek proper authorization from the “Central Committee” (read Politburo, or even Stalin himself) for delivery of the speech. He wondered who had taken the liberty of allowing Iurii to read his lecture.290 When Suslov remained silent, Shepilov owned up to permitting the lecture, upon which Stalin asked Shepilov whether he realized that the entire agriculture of the Soviet Union [sic] rested on Lysenko’s work. Shepilov’s protestations about Lysenko’s wrongheaded ideas on genetics and agronomy failed to convince Stalin. The Vozhd’ concluded by stating that Andrei Zhdanov and Shepilov were the main culprits in the matter, while Iurii Zhdanov’s rash behaviour was largely ascribed to his youth and lack of experience on the job. Stalin demanded that Lysenko be publicly vindicated, that his critics among the biologists be condemned, and that the independent behaviour exposed by the case among Agitprop employees be stopped. Andrei Zhdanov maintained an embarrassed silence throughout the meeting. Shepilov thought he had suffered a terrible blow.291 Wrapping up the discussion, Stalin proposed the creation of a cc commission to formalize all these points and investigate further, with Malenkov as chair.292 The commission submitted some preliminary conclusions on 31 May; at a meeting in Stalin’s office, Stalin lashed out much more forcefully at the absent Iurii Zhdanov in the presence of his father.293 On 7 July, upon returning from Bucharest (see below), Zhdanov and Malenkov received from Shepilov and Mitin a draft of a cc resolution titled “On the Michurinist Trend in Soviet Biological Science.”294 The draft was corrected by Zhdanov and Malenkov and

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forwarded on 10 July to Stalin (and the rest of the Politburo), but never issued by the cc. Instead, loosely basing his remarks on this report, Stalin edited Lysenko’s publicized keynote address to the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Science session that opened later that month. Lysenko’s speech thus acquired the authority of a cc decree. On the same day that he received the draft resolution Stalin also received an apologetic letter from Iurii Zhdanov, repenting his attack on Lysenko. Although Andrei Zhdanov was blamed by Stalin for his oversight regarding Iurii’s manoeuvres against Lysenko, he was not immediately put out to pasture.295 For about six weeks after the meeting in which Stalin berated Iurii and Andrei Zhdanov, he clearly remained a trusted member of Stalin’s team, participating in deliberations on matters foreign and domestic. First he focused on the decree, issued on June 2 by the Supreme Soviet,296 that increased sanctions against collective farmers who shirked their labours. The early effect of the law was outlined by Kruglov in one of his last reports coaddressed to Zhdanov. Kruglov suggested that the law had had the right effect, for kolkhozniks were now much more inclined to show up for work; meanwhile, resistance to enforcement of the law had been slight.297 Thereafter, Zhdanov, Malenkov, and Suslov drafted the keynote speech to be delivered at the Bucharest Cominform meeting, concentrating on the Yugoslav rebellion.298 On 8 June Pavel Iudin met the Politburo members (including Zhdanov) involved in foreign-policy decision making to prepare for an impending meeting of the editorial board of For a Lasting Peace.299 On 15 June Stalin, Molotov, and Zhdanov met the Soviet ambassador to Yugoslavia, Lavrent’ev, in the Kremlin.300 On the next day, the “Eight” responsible for foreign policy in the Politburo agreed to delegate Zhdanov, Malenkov, and Suslov to the Cominform meeting.301 From 19 to 23 June the second Cominform meeting was held in Bucharest.302 Stalin, very concerned about the conflict with the Yugoslavs, kept an even closer eye on proceedings than he had at the gathering in Poland the previous September.303 On 20 and 21 June, while the conference delegates waited in Bucharest for a reply by the Yugoslav Communist party to another invitation to send delegates to Romania, the Soviet delegates met the different Party delegations in separate meetings.304 On 20 June Sorokin (Suslov’s alias), Zhuravlev (Zhdanov), and Maksimov (Malenkov) wrote a coded telegram to Filippov (Stalin) about their discussions with the Bulgarians Vulko Chervenkov and Traicho Kostov, who accused Tito of living beyond his means in 1938 or 1939 because he had been bankrolled by the Anglo-American intelligence services.305 Later,

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Italian Communist leader Palmiro Togliatti supplied another anecdote to “prove” the presence of English and American agents in the Yugoslav leadership. In separate sessions the Soviet trio met the Frenchman Jacques Duclos, the Hungarian Matyas Rakosi, and the Romanian Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej (1901–65).306 Meanwhile in Moscow, news arrived that in the Western zones of occupied Germany, including Berlin, a currency reform was being implemented, diverting Stalin’s attention away from the Yugoslav issue.307 On 24 June, in response to the currency reform, the Soviet authorities announced a blockade of Berlin.308 On 21 June, at the Cominform session in Bucharest, Zhdanov delivered the keynote report, which largely concentrated on the loathsome behaviour of the Yugoslavs. In the evening Rakosi, Duclos, Kostov, and the Polish leader Berman delivered their formal reactions to the speech to the conference.309 Before Zhdanov’s speech, Zhdanov, Malenkov, and Suslov had held informal discussions with the Polish delegates Berman, Zavadskii, Spykhal’skii and the Czechoslovak delegate Slansky. All dutifully reported their utter loyalty to Stalin and the Soviet Party. On 22 June the various representatives continued to give the proper anti-Yugoslav reactions in response to Zhdanov’s speech.310 But when the meeting wrapped up the next day, it was clear that the Yugoslavs had not been intimidated; the criticism levelled at them had in fact only stiffened their resolve to break with Moscow. On 28 June, then, the rift between the Cominform and the Yugoslavs was finally made public.311 Zhdanov visited Stalin again in the Kremlin upon his return from Bucharest.312 The Iurii Zhdanov case had likely confirmed Stalin’s general displeasure with the highly centralized organization of the cc apparatus. Most of its work had been concentrated since 1939 into its two key divisions, the Cadres and Agitprop directorates. By 1948 it had become evident that the cc secretaries heading the directorates could not cope with supervising the thousands of bureaucrats of their vast apparatuses and deal with the paperwork these enormous bureaucratic machines generated. The Iurii Zhdanov controversy showed that Agitprop curator and cc secretary Andrei Zhdanov and cc secretary and Agitprop chief Suslov had simply been too busy to check one of the more important policy statements that a direct subordinate, a high-level official, was planning to deliver. A new reorganization of the cc apparatus into somewhat more manageable smaller units, rather than the two vast directorates and one or two ancillary departments (or directorates), seemed opportune. Handwritten notes in Zhdanov’s papers indicate that even prior to the discussion of his son’s errant ways, Andrei Zhdanov discussed with Stalin and

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others a reorganization of the cc Secretariat and its sections.313 In Zhdanov’s first draft, a general cadres’ section was entirely phased out; each cc department was to have its own cadres’ division. In Zhdanov’s notebook, however, the directorates survived the reorganization in a new form. Ultimately, it was the first version rather than the second that prevailed. Reorganization proposals such as Zhdanov’s helped Stalin to make up his mind. Stalin was forced to conclude that Iurii’s case showed that Andrei Zhdanov had failed to cope with his responsibilities as deputy Party chief. Spreading the responsibilities among more people might prevent such blunders. Concomitantly, Andrei Zhdanov’s health was clearly failing. Stalin had already been assigning greater responsibility in Party affairs to Georgii Malenkov (and Mikhail Suslov); Malenkov seems to have become Zhdanov’s understudy even before 1 July. It had been impractical to remove Zhdanov immediately from his assignments in late May, since he was looking after several pieces of unfinished business. But most of those assigments had been completed by late June. Perhaps Zhdanov’s weary countenance after the Bucharest meeting convinced Stalin that the reorganization of the Secretariat was imperative. Thus, on 1 July 1948, Zhdanov attended a meeting in Stalin’s office in the Kremlin where, on Stalin’s proposal, Georgii Malenkov was once again appointed cc secretary.314 In the shuffle, P.K. Ponomarenko, the Belorussian leader, was appointed cc secretary together with Malenkov.315 The Politburo protocol records state that the appointments were made because of the increase in the cc’s work and that the subsequent reorganization aimed to improve both cadres’ selection and the execution of the Party’s decisions. On 6 July, on advice of Doctor Egorov, the Politburo granted Zhdanov a two-month leave.316 On 10 July the Politburo officially dissolved the three cc directorates following the Secretariat’s recommendations.317 This was the first major change of the cc’s organizational structure in nine years. The decision where to put Zhdanov in the new structure was indefinitely postponed until the man recovered from what was clearly a severe illness. Ponomarenko recalled thirty years later: Soon cc … secretary G.M. Malenkov, at that time a Politbiuro member, called and asked [me] to meet him immediately in the cc [building]. He met me affably, congratulated me on the new appointment and told me that the cc … secretary A.A. Zhdanov, who had led the work of the CC Sekretariat, was gravely ill and released from his work to be treated. Instead of him, by way of a decision by the Politbiuro and the cc plenum he, Malenkov, had been appointed.318

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… On the following day [na drugoi den’], the last meeting of the cc Sekretariat chaired by A.A. Zhdanov took place, at which he passed to G.M. Malenkov the papers concerning important issues, which demanded “operative” decisions …319

Ponomarenko, Malenkov’s ally, is tellingly silent about the fact that initially a new Agitprop department, headed by Shepilov, was to fall under the curatorship of cc secretary Zhdanov.320 Within days, however, Suslov (at first temporarily) took over from Zhdanov in supervising the Agitprop department. In the shuffle, cc secretary Malenkov was assigned to curate the Department of Party, Trade Union, and Komsomol organizations (under B.N. Chernousov), and the agricultural department.321 cc secretary A.A. Kuznetsov was to be curator of the administrative department (under E.E. Andreev), as well as the machine-building department (under Churaev). cc secretary Suslov continued to head the Department of Foreign Relations, while Ponomarenko curated the transport and planning-finance-trade departments. Instead of the centralized Cadres directorate, all cc departments were to concentrate on the selection of personnel, although in practice Chernousov’s section took on much of the role of the former personnel branch.322 The dissolution of the directorates was a sharp demotion particularly for Zhdanov’s friend and former Cadres boss A.A. Kuznetsov, who soon proved vulnerable to further attempts by Malenkov to undermine his position.323 Malenkov, perhaps taking his cue from Zhdanov’s and Kuznetsov’s actions in the spring of 1946, made sure that the Politburo reconfirmed regular meeting days for sessions by Orgbiuro and Secretariat, both of which he was to chair, allowing him to keep a close eye on the activities of all departments and of the other secretaries.324 One of Zhdanov’s ultimate political deeds was a nefarious act. In these July days, prompted by a suggestion of Shepilov’s, he worked on the draft for a Politburo resolution on the closure of the weekly Moscow News on the grounds that most of its editorial staff were Jewish.325 Zhdanov never finished the draft. On 12 July Zhdanov paid what was his last visit ever to Stalin in the Kremlin.326 The meeting lasted almost two hours. A memo of a few lines to Shepilov of 19 July constitutes the last work-related correspondence in Zhdanov’s personal papers.327

zh da nov ’s l a st day s When Zhdanov left Moscow in July 1948, his political career was not considered to be over. Despite having already received Politburo

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permission on 6 July to leave for a two-month holiday in order to recover from his ailments, Zhdanov visited Stalin on business several times after the official start of his holidays on 10 July.328 Shepilov recalls that his supervisor by then suffered from a series of ailments related to the heart, from arteriosclerosis, high blood pressure, and angina pectoris to cardio-asthma.329 Both Zhdanov and Shepilov were assigned certain tasks in the reorganization of 10 July. It is clear that Zhdanov’s leave was expected to be temporary. He had been ill before and recovered, and he had made mistakes before for which Stalin had scolded and then forgiven him. In this instance, he had not even been relieved from his secretaryship and he had been made curator of the new Agitprop department. On 13 July Zhdanov left Moscow and travelled to a state spa in the Valdai Heights, where the Volga has its source, not far from the place where he had grown up.330 To recover at Valdai was not Zhdanov’s preference, but he stayed there on his doctor’s advice rather than going to his beloved South, where the summer heat was thought to have a detrimental effect on his heart disease.331 His health, however, did not improve in this more temperate climate. The wear and tear of years of poor health and overwork combined with anxiety about events unfolding in Moscow. On 15 July the Politburo formally condemned Iurii Zhdanov in a kind of response to the younger Zhdanov’s letter to Stalin of 10 July.332 Iurii Andreevich had admitted his errors in supporting antiLysenkoists, but his repentance was less than complete. He still attempted to maintain a halfway position between pro- and antiLysenkoists.333 Both the letter itself and the Politburo’s subsequent condemnation did not give his father, Andrei, much peace of mind at the very beginning of his health cure.334 Further news of disturbing developments in Moscow, by way of a phonecall from Shepilov, may have contribued to the severe heart attack that Zhdanov suffered around 23 July.335 On 25 July, a team of Moscow medical specialists – V.N. Vinogradov (1882–1964), V.Kh. Vasilenko, and P.I. Egorov – arrived in Valdai to check on Zhdanov’s condition. Apparently they believed that he would fully recover.336 On 27 July Lysenko met Stalin in the Kremlin to discuss the scenario for the impending meeting of the Academy of Agricultural Sciences, which opened on 31 July and would last only until 7 August.337 On the direct orders of the Politburo, the conference unequivocally supported Lysenko’s theories about plant inheritance.338 Within days the Politburo dismissed Lysenko’s opponents from their posts within the Soviet agricultural and biological establishment and replaced them with his supporters.339 Iurii Andreevich Zhdanov’s letter to Stalin, now

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serving as a model apology for anyone who had doubted Lysenko, was published in Pravda on the final day of the vaskhnil meeting.340 As Elena Levina suggests, what was most important about the exercise from the Party leadership’s perspective was not the support for Lysenko’s theories but the renewed attack on the “the activity of the intelligentsiia, which formed a threat for the continuation of the politics of the dictate by the leadership of the country.”341 The seventh of August was also the day of a misguided attempt to jump-start Zhdanov’s recovery. At the spa, intensive massage began in order to improve his condition, but his progress was not closely monitored through regular ecgs, and the unexpected publication of Iurii’s letter may have scuttled his chances of recuperating.342 In August Nikolai Voznesensky visited his friend and ally Zhdanov on his sickbed, the sole member of the leadership to do so.343 At the Valdai sanatorium, Voznesensky also met Iurii Zhdanov.344 But the proximity of his wife, his close friend, and his beloved son could no longer save Andrei Zhdanov. On 27 August Zhdanov suffered another heart attack that was not recognized, it seems, by Vinogradov, Egorov, or Vasilenko, who arrived by plane at the spa the next day, accompanied by the radiologist Lydia Timashuk, who prepared an electrocardiogram.345 She concluded that Zhdanov’s condition called for strict bedrest, but the other five attending doctors disagreed with her and rejected her diagnosis. On 29 August, on the suggestion of Zhdanov’s bodyguard, A.M. Belov, Timashuk warned the head of the Kremlin bodyguards, Vlasik, about a possible misdiagnosis of Zhdanov’s illness, but it was too late.346 In the early hours of 31 August 1948, Zhdanov, on his way to the washroom, suffered a final fatal heart atttack.347 An autopsy was conducted at Valdai at which A.A. Kuznetsov was present.348 The post-mortem may have established the erroneous diagnosis, but neither Kuznetsov nor Stalin was interested in any further investigation, even when they were acquainted with Timashuk’s warnings.349 The job of most politicians in modern societies is full of stress. However, the relentless effort to increase control combined with constant fear of physical annihilation that coloured the job in Stalin’s time added drastically to the tension to which someone like Zhdanov was exposed. Andrei Zhdanov worked extremely late hours with few days off for years on end.350 It was unusual for him to get much sleep, his diet was poor, he smoked too much, drank much more, at least when younger, than was good for him, and omitted exercise. But his physical constitution was delicate. One needed a steely (stal’naia) physique to survive such a lifestyle, and Zhdanov lacked such fortitude. Perhaps

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he was genetically predisposed to an early death, for his father died of similar causes and almost at the same age. Stalin hardly mourned his faithful partner in crime. The ceremonies surrounding Zhdanov’s funeral seem perfunctory and the deceased received little lasting recognition for his leadership over the Communist party and his contributions to the Soviet state.351 The funeral over and the cog in the wheel replaced, Stalin’s political machine trundled inexorably along, far beyond his own demise in March 1953.

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e p i l og u e Myths, the Man, and a Legacy in Limbo

At the twin peaks of his career (1938–41 and 1946–48), Zhdanov had been Stalin’s second or third in command. Like Molotov, Stalin’s other confidant in those years, Zhdanov was a willing partner. But neither Molotov nor Zhdanov was an aspiring leader. Nevertheless, by virtue of Zhdanov’s position at the top, he cautiously cultivated some alliances and friendships with up-and-coming leaders. Zhdanov’s death thus had some profound short-term political consequences. Without their protector many of his (former) clients and assistants fell victim to a ruthless political feud. Zhdanov left a void in the highest level of the power structure and fatally exposed “his” people to those who filled the vacuum as well as to the suspicions of the Vozhd’ himself. The Leningrad (and Gosplan) Affair consumed many of Zhdanov’s former protégés and allies, though never tarnishing Zhdanov’s own name.1 The destiny of Agitprop deputy chief D.T. Shepilov hung in the balance after he was removed from the central Party apparatus in July 1949.2 Pravda editor-in-chief Petr Pospelov was transferred to a far less prestigious post.3 But they were lucky. The worst of fates awaited cc secretary Aleksei Kuznetsov and Politburo member and vice-premier Nikolai Voznesensky. From being Stalin’s darlings,4 they became his worst enemies and found themselves in jail inside a year of Andrei Zhdanov’s death. While they were executed in 1950, some two thousand leaders of the Leningrad, Murmansk, Gor’kii, Crimean, rsfsr, and all-Union Party organizations and governments were arrested in 1949–50, many of whom ended up before a firing squad.5 But this was not a posthumous revenge on Zhdanov by Malenkov or

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Beria.6 If it had been, Iurii Zhdanov would not have survived as head of the cc science section until 1953 or married Stalin’s daughter in 1949.7 It was instead a direct attack orchestrated by Stalin on the insufficiently deferential Kuznetsov and Voznesensky, as I have argued elsewhere.8 Andrei Zhdanov’s name quickly disappeared from Soviet public discourse as a result of the Leningrad Affair. It largely liquidated his champions, those who could have stimulated and cultivated a posthumous Zhdanov cult. Instead, any mention of Zhdanov led to uncomfortable associations with Voznesensky, Aleksei Kuznetsov, and the others.9 But even while both were still in good standing, the initial period of mourning for Zhdanov was brief.10 On 22 October 1948, the Politburo established a commission headed by Suslov, with Il’ichev, Pospelov, A.A. Kuznetsov, A.N. Kuznetsov, Z.A. Zhdanova, and Kruzhkov as members, to bring order to Zhdanov’s personal archive.11 Even though publication of Zhdanov’s collected works was considered, nothing ever appeared after his death, nor did a more substantial biography.12 One of the few moments his name returned to the limelight was by way of the 1948 painting “I.V. Stalin at the Grave of A.A. Zhdanov,” by A.M. Gerasimov (1881–1963).13 It received the Stalin Prize for 1948 and became a symbol of the aesthetic vacuum created by Stalin and Zhdanov in their era.14 The first anniversary of his death merited no more than an article on the third page of Pravda.15 After Zhdanov’s death the position of most other lieutenants at Stalin’s court proved wobbly.16 Only Georgii Malenkov and Nikolai Bulganin seemed reasonably secure in their posts, with Malenkov especially entrenching himself as second-in-command to Stalin after 1948.17 Meanwhile, Stalin’s own health worsened after Zhdanov’s death.18 His behaviour became erratic, and during periods when he was out of commission, his lieutenants tried to strengthen their position against the others. This all added up to an explosive mix. In 1953 Andrei Zhdanov’s death became part of the “Doctor’s Plot.”19 The investigation of the doctors accused of conspiring to murder the Soviet leadership was quickly halted upon Stalin’s death in March 1953. Georgii Malenkov, briefly Stalin’s successor, sent Iurii Zhdanov to Rostov-on-the-Don in a kind of semi-exile. As Wolfgang Leonhard observes, in the short period of Malenkov’s ascendancy after Stalin’s death, the fifth anniversary of Zhdanov’s death was ignored in the Soviet press.20 Malenkov, as noted earlier, clearly did not remember Zhdanov fondly.21 Andrei Zhdanov’s family continued, however, to enjoy the special privileges of the Soviet elite until the collapse of the ussr.22 Andrei Zhdanov may have narrowly escaped posthumous public

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condemnation in 1963, when the “Shvernik Report” was completed.23 This report had been commissioned by the cc, and comprehensively outlined the cruel deeds perpetrated on the orders of Stalin and the Inner Circle, but it was then shelved, likely because publication of the ghastly statistics it presented about Stalin’s crimes would have deprived the Soviet Regime of most of its credibility. On 25 December 1988, a Politburo commission submitted a report to the cc about the injustices of the Stalin era.24 The report stated that the Soviet security organs had prosecuted 3,778,234 people from 1930 to 1953.25 Almost 2.5 million had been sentenced by “extra-legal organs” (that is, outside regular judicial procedure, by bodies such as the nkvd Special Boards or the troikas). The report counted 786,098 people who had been shot, of whom more than 650,000 had been executed on the orders of these organs. By asking the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet to issue a blanket rehabilitation of all those convicted in such manner, the report’s authors admitted to the absolute injustice of the victims’ fate. The report noted additionally that already in 1930–31 some 1,680,000 peasants had been exiled from European Russia to remote northern regions and Siberia, and that the ogpu between 1929 and 1933 had arrested another 519,000 as kulaks.26 The report further detailed how at least 2.3 million inhabitants from the Baltic region, Ukraine, Belarus’, Moldavia, Tadzhikistan, and the rsfsr were exiled to remote and inhospitable areas in the 1940s and 1950s.27 Andrei Zhdanov’s signature or permission was found, as the fifth most frequent signatory, on 177 out of 383 lists containing the names of tens of thousands of people convicted of spurious political crimes on “Politburo” orders in 1937 and 1938.28 Any thoughts of resurrecting Zhdanov as Soviet hero were thereby laid to rest. The commission specified other crimes against humanity (for such they surely are) perpetrated by Zhdanov, such as his responsibility for the sentencing of tens of thousands of people in Leningrad between 1935 and 1940, his encouragement of the persecutions in Orenburg, Kazan, and Ufa, his contribution to the demolition of the Komsomol leadership in 1938, and the witchhunt he led against deviant artists.29 On 18 January 1989, the cc resolved to abolish legal acts connected with the eternalization of Zhdanov’s memory.30 Thus Zhdanov finally passed into history.

zh danov’s r e c o r d Andrei Zhdanov’s thought and view of the world were entrenched in the Zeitgeist of the Russian revolutionary movement of late tsarism and

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of the first two decades of Soviet Communist rule. He saw politics, economics, society, and culture through the prism of his reading of the metanarrative of Marx as edited by Lenin and, later, Stalin. Even though the Marxist view of history was based on a critical analysis of the economy and society of a different place at a different time – early industrial Britain – it provided Zhdanov (and countless others) with certitude. He did not question the validity of its premises once he joined the Bolsheviks decisively in 1917. Flawed as orthodox Marxism may have been (or Lenin’s and Stalin’s interpretation of Marx31), Zhdanov was one of many Russian revolutionaries and Soviet citizens who seem to have been captivated by its millenarian certainty and its utilitarian ethic of any means justifying the dazzling goal of ultimate social justice.32 Their Party supported two leaders who showed no doubt about Marxism’s claim to have discovered the laws of history and its ability to predict the future as a result. This authoritative certainty was attractive to the fatherless Zhdanov. His emotional surrender to this secular religion and its leader seems to have formed the basis of his lack of intellectual curiosity (and courage), otherwise odd for a man with a decent level of education for his times, who was kul’turnyi – knowing his literature, his philosophers (including Enlightenment thinkers and Hegel), his music, and loving motion pictures made by people such as Sergei Eisenstein. The Russian historians Zubok and Pleshakov portray Zhdanov as “[a librarian] responsible for finding the proper quotation at the right time and for keeping the credo in strict order. No creativity or ardor from an ideologue was tolerated.”33 Zhdanov showed little ability (or chose not to flaunt it) in composing original storylines, but he could rewrite them (as with the Courts of Honour) and had some talent for packaging policies in attractive formulae and presenting them to the public. Nikita Khrushchev and Vyacheslav Molotov were correct in identifying Zhdanov as a quintessential second-tier leader, who never attained the status of a “very strong statesman.”34 Referring to the German Communist party’s leadership in the 1930s, Peter Sloterdijk notes that “every politician, in addition to what he says, calculates on a second level.”35 It is difficult, however, to sort out where Andrei Zhdanov the true believer in the gospel of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin ends and the cynical realpolitiker begins. While an idealist, Zhdanov was a “political animal” through and through, as indicated by his almost unparalleled rise to the top of the hierarchy from rather unpromising beginnings. His talent lay in an intricate and agile understanding of the political process and of human weakness in political actors. Skilled rather than gifted, he showed remarkable ability in pleasing Stalin, eagerly volunteering for any assignment.

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One of the tasks Zhdanov performed on Stalin’s behalf was to reduce Marx and Engels’s theories to a palatable substance for an unsophisticated audience. Much of this public had enjoyed a fairly modest education, usually less than seven years of formal elementary schooling.36 It is likely, however, that the leaders underestimated their public. Generally, the Soviet citizens received the Stalinist message selectively. Some Party propaganda did strike a chord and was internalized.37 Yet many Soviet citizens were either repelled by the message’s unattractive packaging or insulted by the one-dimensional simplicity of its formulae, offended by its condescension or disillusioned about the outright lies and the blatant discrepancy between the leadership’s promises and the everyday reality of life in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 1940s.38 The Stalinists attempted a more sophisticated approach to subjugate or enlist the (creative) intelligentsia, but its success was paltry. It is remarkable how much time the half-baked intelligenty Stalin and Zhdanov dedicated to communicating with the creative intelligentsia, with their love of film and literature. The leaders both feared and admired the intellectuals’ and artists’ talent, and in fashioning imaginative policies (or spinning the plot of the Great Terror’s alleged conspiracy) Stalin may intuitively have felt akin to an artist. While Stalin was not a great philosopher or theorist, the plot of the Great Terror shows considerable literary talent. Stalin’s creative well ran dry after the war. Thus, the postwar cultural policy of Zhdanov’s (second) heyday was generally based on recycled unimaginative pre-war formulas. Zhdanov’s return to prominence in 1946 was the consequence of Stalin’s conclusion that Zhdanov would be the best possible conduit to lead the offensive towards new ideological and cultural rigidity. Having tried and tested him in the 1930s, and lacking clear alternatives, Stalin chose to rely on Zhdanov to lead the exhaustive struggle. Stalin, never much at ease in public and in declining health himself, preferred after 1945 to reign with a Byzantine aloofness while meticulously editing his cronies’ performances. He had Zhdanov organize and steer the campaigns towards renewed cultural conformity, greater ideological orthodoxy, Russian pre-eminence, heightened secrecy, and international Communist unity. By early 1949 the tone of the cultural campaigns became more shrill and took on a decidedly anti-Semitic bent.39 Zhdanov died too soon to become heavily involved with overt Soviet anti-Semitism, but we saw how in July 1948 during his last days as a politician he had begun to move into that direction.40 Apart from Zhdanov’s role as ideological simplifier and Stalinist cultural apostle, he was a bureaucratic manager, a supreme clerk eternally

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searching for efficiency and savings. Even then he did not always manage to foster efficiency among his subordinates. Most of the reorganizations he engaged in as a cc secretary did not ultimately slim the Party bureaucracy down. On the contrary, it became bulkier in the longer term. Nor was Zhdanov a very pleasant boss. He was short-tempered and inclined to make incompetent, recalcitrant, or disobedient subordinates fall in line by shouting and threatening. If sufficiently provoked, he could be merciless in dealing with supposed insubordination, as the Vannikov case of 1941 shows. Zhdanov did know his own limits. He was modest about his own place in the greater scheme of things, perfectly happy to do Stalin’s bidding. Whenever called upon by Stalin, Zhdanov answered without a moment’s hesitation. Thus, he retired to Leningrad when war broke out in 1941, relinquishing his powerful position in Moscow. Until the spring of 1944, he was merely the political leader of that sector of the Soviet front.41 He remained a kind of second-tier leader for some time after the German retreat from Leningrad, becoming Soviet representative and chair of the Allied Control Commission in Finland, an emissary subordinate to both Stalin and Molotov. The survivors in Stalin’s circle were men whom Stalin could not consider any threat whatsoever to his power: the unambitious paperpusher Molotov, the slavish but merciless Kaganovich, the unintelligent Voroshilov, the spineless bureaucrat Malenkov, the facelessly agreeable Zhdanov, the unbearable toady Beria, or the bumpkin Khrushchev. They were slavishly loyal to their patron, and in exchange he usually remained loyal to them.42 The irony was that, having selected these men as his trusted lieutenants, there was no one of any convincing political stature with enough personal authority, charisma, and brains to become Stalin’s logical successor upon the dictator’s death. Khrushchev became Stalin’s sole heir mainly because of his slick manoeuvring after the Vozhd’s death, rather than before March 1953. Perhaps, if he had survived Stalin, Zhdanov could have outfoxed his rivals as deftly, but it is more likely that he would have behaved as Molotov did. Zhdanov’s years as a high-ranking leader dramatically show the limitations of power that afflicted the Soviet dictatorship. On the one hand, from 1917 onward (and heavily reinforced after 1928) the senior leaders made a consistent effort to establish increasing control over Soviet society. But this control could only be accomplished by using an ever-expanding bureaucratic apparatus, which could not always be held in check, despite vicious and frequent purges.43 If diligent Party or government bureaucrats waited for authorization from higher up, their superiors accused them of passivity. Bureaucrats at all

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levels thus had to risk deciding certain issues themselves without awaiting proper permission. Such unauthorized actions would then be condemned (as during collectivization, the 1938 decree to stop the massive wave of arrests, or the campaigns against dubious artistic works), but they could also be passed over if they led to positive results (particularly in the economy). At lower levels, a collective farm director had to allow his farmers a measure of freedom to pursue their own aims (as in cultivating an oversized private plot), for he needed their help in meeting procurement quotas.44 To meet his production quotas, a factory manager hired many workhands who lacked the documentation required for work in his enterprise. Playing strictly by the rules would have impeded such people from getting any decent results. The senior bureaucrats also prevented the system from ossifying by taking licence, neglecting to request authorization for many of their actions, and assuming or hoping that their bosses would turn a blind eye. But Stalin’s dismay with Aleksandrov’s work on philosophy, Voznesensky’s book on the economy, or Iurii Zhdanov’s 1948 speech makes clear that such behaviour was risky. It was altogether safer to refrain from any serious creative forays. As a result, very few interesting works on philosophy, politics, or history were published after 1938. For example, after years of work, a team of philosophers writing a comprehensive history of philosophy stalled (with Aleksandrov’s book) at the year 1840. The multivolume history of the Russian Civil War had to await Stalin’s death to reach completion, leaving a hiatus of twenty years between the publication of its second and third volumes. For Stalin or Zhdanov, the effort to monitor everything, even within the higher levels of the bureaucracy, proved beyond their means. Zhdanov failed to block his son from delivering his heterodox speech or to halt Parin before he handed Kliueva and Roskin’s work to the Americans. Zhdanov and Stalin’s annoyance with such things as the kr Affair became dramatized in the Court of Honour, the definitive end of any lingering postwar Soviet openness. Ironically, this extreme isolationism had a detrimental effect on their empire’s chances of survival. As Dominic Lieven has argued for the eighteenth century, “Russian success and Ottoman failure as great powers was the [result of the] former state’s much greater openness to European innovations and to the foreigners who introduced them.” 45 Rejecting this earlier Russian choice, the Stalinists repeated the Ottoman mistake after the Second World War. The Soviets’ aversion to communication with the capitalist world, a legacy especially of the late Stalinist era, contributed to the Soviet

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failure to understand the information-technology revolution that swept the West during the 1970s and 1980s. Zhdanov expended enormous efforts to forge two postwar policies. The Courts of Honour and the Cominform could have been Zhdanov’s finest achievements in his relentless battle to infuse some renewed ideological zeal into the postwar Communist movement at home and abroad. But with the possible exception of the first trial, the Courts of Honour were not very efficacious. Instead, the more established “real” courts, such as the Military Tribunals, and the law of 9 June 1947 to prosecute any sloppy delinquents were as effective at a much cheaper price. The second project, the Cominform, also disappointed. The Yugoslavs defected soon after its formation, while its censure of the French and Italian Communists came too late. This tardiness was meanwhile indicative of the lack of foresight and cleverness that characterized many postwar Soviet policies. Zhdanov’s legacy included an ever-growing ideological apparatus, to which, according to Vladimir Shlapentokh, some twenty million people in the ussr dedicated some of their time in 1985.46 Perhaps Zhdanov’s most enduring legacy was his contribution in forging a Russian national identity by his activities in the fields of Party and general history and culture.47 Within the Soviet Union, the Russian national sense of sharing a common heritage, paradoxically, spread widely among the Russians for the first time in the supranational Soviet Union. Zhdanov was responsible for helping to formulate and propagate several elements of this Russian nationhood. Zhdanov had been partially responsible as well for the enormous concentration-camp and prison system in the Soviet Union, the gulag Archipelago. This should be considered his most important “accomplishment.”48 Four months after Zhdanov’s death, the gulag administered sixty-eight corrective labour camps and 1,734 corrective labour colonies, in which 2,356,685 inmates were held. Of those, 1,078,324 had been newcomers in 1948, while 842,036 were released during the year. Of the total number on 1 January 1949, 274,413 were serving sentences of ten years or more. There were 101,000 convicts held in the new strict-regime camps. The entire system used 165,446 guards, while 40,000 “socially dangerous” convicts had secondary positions in the camps. Common criminals were better trusted than political offenders and, as trustees, exerted a regime of terror over the other convicts. A surprising amount of speculative myth surrounds Zhdanov. Indeed, until recently there were several schools of thought about the man as politician. For one group, he was a kind of dove who preferred persuasion over force.49 A second school portrayed him as a scheming

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ambitious hawk, overshadowing even Stalin.50 According to a third group Zhdanov was a sycophant of decent but limited intellectual talents whose power was always circumscribed by his master.51 The first two schools shared one trait. They both hypothesized too much room to manoeuvre for Stalin’s lieutenants and attributed excessive importance to Zhdanov, an idea that appears to have originated with Boris Nicolaevsky.52 He believed that he recognized in some of the postwar personnel moves the signs of vicious intrigue that pitted Zhdanov’s team against Malenkov’s faction. In support of Nicolaevsky and his followers, one could say that Stalin’s Soviet Union was a bureaucratic labyrinth, in which there was much overlapping authority. The chain of command was difficult to comprehend for the lowerlevel apparatchiks of party and state. Those leaders who did find their way around this maze could derive some advantage from it. Malenkov, for example, who for many years ran the personnel department within the leadership, could attempt to gain advantage through the appointment of people he trusted and whom he hoped would prove loyal to him. But it is questionable that Malenkov did so systematically, as it was far too great a risk to appoint to key posts solely people whom he and others knew to be sympathetic to him. Appointments had been Stalin’s main tool in becoming the supreme Communist leader after Lenin’s death and he does not seem to have allowed Malenkov much independence in the area. Stalin took the trouble, after all, to scan personally the names of tens of thousands of arrested Soviet state, army, nkvd, and Party bosses and other prominent people in 1937 and 1938 and then ratify their deaths. In assessing Zhdanov’s record, we should finally consider the role of a patronage system. Rigby aptly recognizes that “political clientelism appears to be one of the most durable features of the power system bequeathed by Stalin to his successors,” adding later that Stalin was a reasonably “loyal patron.”53 But Zhdanov could never be sure of Stalin’s faithfulness, nor could Zhdanov himself behave too overtly as a patron of any family clique. Nevertheless, Andrei Zhdanov had the good fortune to belong to a network of Party officials who aided both Stalin and each other in their rise to the top during the 1920s. Thereafter, many of them remained Stalin’s most trusted aides until 1953. This book’s evaluation of the extant material on the life and times of Andrei Zhdanov – new published and unpublished sources, such as documents from the Central Committee archives, Zhdanov’s personal archive, the archives of the Soviet State, the protocols of the Politburo, the archives of Nizhnii Novgorod’s and Leningrad’s Communist party, as well as the interview with Zhdanov’s son, the diaries of Georgii Dimitrov, the memoirs of Mikoian, Kaganovich, and

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Khrushchev, the conversations between Feliks Chuev and Molotov, the correspondence between Soviet leaders, the recently published documents on collectivization, the purges, and the lead-up to and the war itself, and on the postwar period – leads to only one conclusion. Andrei Zhdanov was a reprehensible character unswervingly loyal to Stalin, a man who was unhesitatingly Stalin’s partner in crime. Following a twisted morality and in utter awe of his master, Zhdanov was prepared to commit the most horrific crimes as a partner of the man he worshipped as the messiah of the Gospel according to Karl Marx.54 Thus, Andrei Zhdanov comprehensively failed “to fulfil … the most primitive tasks of [a political leader,] securing peace, upholding the law, [and] protecting life.”55

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Notes

preface 1 See the epilogue, and Boterbloem, “Death of Andrei Zhdanov.” 2 State Archival Service, Archives. One source in the State Department files of the us National Archives proved useful as well (Archives of the Department of State, Decimal File 861.00/12.546 – Message by usa chargé d’affaires ad interim Benjamin D’Hulley in Helsinki to us Secretary of State – : “John Scott’s Notes on Zhdanov”). To identify Russian archives, see the Archival Annotation. 3 Zhdanov’s personal papers are collected in rgaspi, fond 77. Sources originating in this archive are indicated forthwith in the notes by omission; the names of other archives are either abbreviated or written out in full. 4 In general, too, one can establish fairly precisely the occurrence of Politburo meetings, the issues that were discussed and the decisions that were made, as well as the names of those who participated, but extraordinary Politburo sessions were called that were not registered, while verbatim transcripts of discussions in Stalin’s Kremlin office, or of sessions of the Politburo or the Secretariat and Orgbiuro are usually unavailable; more often, they were never produced (Howlett et al., eds., CPSU’s Top Bodies, 12–3, 15). 5 I am sincerely grateful to Dr Vasilis Vourkoutiotis and Ms Daria Krutous for helping me gain access to material in this archive. Many documents (entire files or parts of them) dating from before 1941 are not given to researchers on the grounds that they contain information on individuals

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7 8

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of a private nature, a spurious argument since probably no adult playing any political role in the turbulent history of Leningrad before the Second World War is alive today (indeed, many of them were shot during those events of almost seventy years ago). These two provincial newspapers are unavailable in the West and can only be viewed at special library repositories, such as the Khimki depot of the Russian State Library. Today known as fsb: Federal’naia Sluzhba Bezopasnosti (Federal Security Service). Grimsted, Archives, 183–203; Foitzik, Sowjetische, 21; Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 1, 24; Gromov, Stalin, 7. On opis’ 4 of fond 77, see Adibekov, “Korotko,” xxi. In June 2000, Doctor V.D. Esakov, a researcher of the Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, informed me that few surprises can be found in this part of Zhdanov’s personal archive, to which he has enjoyed access. For an account of the archives of the former secret police and their contents, see for instance, Shentalinskii, Raby, 256–8; for continuing inaccessibilty to many files in Stalin’s personal archive (fond 558 at rgaspi), see Ilizarov, “Stalin,” 152. A good discussion of the destruction was recently offered by Medvedev and Medvedev, “Lichnyi arkhiv,” 21–2. See as well Grimsted, Archives, 64–9; Brandenberger, “Short Course,” 63n4; 106n73; S. Cohen, “Introduction,” viii–ix; Y. Cohen, “Des lettres,” 307, 309, 311. The improved telephone lines between Moscow and the southern resorts has likely limited the amount of written evidence we have about Stalin’s personal steering of the purges from 1935 onward, while his constant presence in or near Moscow as of 1937 also diminished the amount of correspondence between Stalin and his comrades-in-arms (Sovetskoe, 11, 13). Such practices may have begun in 1923 when the “senioren-convent” of the Politburo without Trotsky predecided key issues before they officially came to the table of the highest body of the Communist party, in this manner excluding the unaware Trotsky from any role in decision making. For a definition of italicized words see the glossary. See also Gibianskii, “Sovetskie Tseli,” 190–9, 199n4. Many of these knizhki are to be found in the files of fond 77, opis’ 3, dela 154–81 at rgaspi, which usually is only made available to the researcher on microfilm. See rgaspi fond 77, opis’ 2, list 87, and fond 77, opis’ 2, delo 88. Kotkin, “The State,” 38n14; see also Pavlova, “Ponimanie,” 8, who warns of the use of documents containing false information. Borisov, Andrei; Iu. Zhdanov, “Vo mgle.” See Iurii Zhdanov; Iu. Zhdanov, Solnechnoe. Iurii Zhdanov was apparently the inspiration for the figure of Bad’in (Badin) in Grossman’s Life and Fate (Kulish, Oskotskii, “Epos,” 84–5).

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Bad’in is involved in the weeding out of Jews from scientific institutions as head of the cc Department of Science; indeed, by 1949, Iurii Andreevich did involve himself in such actions (Grossman, Life and Fate, 568, 576–81, 583–4); in May and June of 1949, Iu. A. Zhdanov and his supervisor in the cc apparatus, D.T. Shepilov, attacked the ethnically Jewish Soviet historian I.I. Mints for his cosmopolitanism, a euphemism for being Jewish (Kostyrchenko, Out, 199–200; rgaspi, fond 17, opis’ 118, delo 425, listy 1–74). 17 See Iu. Zhdanov, “Vo mgle.” 18 See Malenkov, O moem ottse; S. Khrushchev, Khrushchev, Pensioner; and Krizisy, vols. 1 and 2.

introduction 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

8

9

10

See S. Volkov, Testimony, 215. Volkogonov, Triumf 2:2, 47. Pares, Russia, 203–4. Meissner, “Shdanow” 1:15. Z. Medvevev, “Sekretnyi,” 99. The comparison with Goebbels was recently made by Zhores Medvedev in “Sekretnyi,” 99. See Salisbury, 900 Days, note 3; Antonov-Ovseyenko, Time, 298; or Borisov, Andrei, 3; B.N. Ponomarev, ed., Politicheskii, 187, shows how relatively obscure Zhdanov had already become in the official canon by 1958, ten years after his death. As Iurii Andreevich Zhdanov mentioned in his interview with me on 4 July 2000 in Rostov, plans to publish an “official” biography of his father were quickly shelved within months after his death in 1948. References to this conversation will be cited as “Iu. A. Zhdanov, interview.” In 1954, twenty-three urban settlements carried Kirov’s name, sixteen Lenin’s, twelve Stalin’s, six Molotov’s and Kaganovich’s, five Voroshilov’s and Kalinin’s, and only two Zhdanov’s (Torchinov, Leontiuk, Vokrug, 255n4). A few late Soviet works provide fairly minimal information about the young Zhdanov, without showing too much pride in the activities of this Stalinist founding father; see Alekseeva, Chernyshov, Kalininskaia; Platov, “Andrei”; B. Ponomarev, Politicheskii; Smirnov et al., eds., Ocherki; Arzhanova et al., Ocherki. See for instance Sereny, Albert; Heiber, Goebbels; Reuth, Goebbels. Few of Mao’s cronies have been the subject of scholarly biographies, but see for example Teiwes, Sun, Tragedy. R. Medvedev, All Stalin’s; S. Cohen, Bukharin; Frankland, Khrushchev; Crankshaw, Khrushchev; R. Medvedev, Khrushchev; Taubman, Khrushchev. There have been quite a few works on Trotsky’s life, including his

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11 12 13 14

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autobiography: Trotsky, My Life; Wolfe, Three; Deutscher, Prophet Armed, Prophet Unarmed and Prophet Outcast; Volkogonov, Trotsky. Watson, Molotov; Knight, Beria, Who Killed Kirov?; Vaksberg, Stalin’s Prosecutor; Khlevniuk, In Stalin’s Shadow (translation of Khlevniuk, Stalin). R. Medvedev, All Stalin’s Men. Tompson, Khrushchev; see the recent biography by Taubman, however (Khrushchev). A few studies discuss parts of his early career: smothered in MarxistLeninist jargon, Galina Kurbatova’s dissertation “A.A. Zhdanov”; his son’s impressionistic memoirs (Iu.A. Zhdanov, “Vo mgle”); and Borisov’s very short work, Andrei, which mainly addresses his sojourn in Shadrinsk. Zhdanov’s eldest sister Tatiana dictated and proofed a biography of her brother, which is preserved in Andrei Zhdanov’s personal archive. Her manuscript was submitted to the Communist party’s Central Committee ideological branch in March 1948. The thirty-five-page biography is to be found in 77/2/75. In German, in the early 1950s Meissner published a short two-part biography based on limited sources in Osteuropa, while Alfred Rieber wrote a brief account of Zhdanov’s activities as head of the Allied Control Commission in Helsinki (Zhdanov). One very useful recent English-language book that is partially based on interviews with high-ranking Soviet administrators is Mawdsley, White, The Soviet Elite. Volkogonov, Lenin, Triumf i Tragediia, Trotsky, Autopsy; Churchill, Second World War; Djilas, Conversations; R. Medvedev, Let History Judge; Conquest, The Great Terror. For works on these issues in which Zhdanov’s role is highlighted, see, among others, Adibekov, Kominform; Alliluyeva, Only One Year; Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters; Armstrong, Politics; Central Committee Resolution; Baudin, Le réalisme; The Cominform; Conquest, Power, Stalin, The Great Terror; Djilas, Conversations; Dunham, In Stalin’s Time; Hahn, Postwar Soviet Politics; Harris, “Origins”; Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers, vols. 1–3; Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, Stalin; Knight, Beria; Kurbatova, “A.A. Zhdanov”; Kutuzov, “Tak nazyvaemoe”; Literaturnyi Front; Maksimenkov, Sumbur; Malenkov, O moem ottse; “Materialy” i–x; McCagg Jr, Stalin; Pervyi vsesoiuznyi s’ezd; Pikhoia, “O vnutripoliticheskoi”; Ra’anan, International; Rieber, Zhdanov; Schapiro, The Communist Party; Shdanow, Abänderungen; Stalinskoe politbiuro; A. Werth, Russia at War, Russia: The Post-War Years, Leningrad; N. Werth, “A State”; A. Zhdanov, Essays, Organizational Problems; Iu. Zhdanov, “Vo mgle”; Zubkova, Obshchestvo, Poslevoennoe; Zubok, Pleshakov, Inside; O’Connor, “Zhdanov.” The Cambridge Five, well-educated, privileged, and intelligent British students, proved equally susceptible to the Communist ideal (Furet, Passing, 272).

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19 On the importance of modernization to all Russian Marxists, see Shlapentokh, A Normal Totalitarian Society. 20 Sloterdijk, Critique, 247. 21 Torchinov, Leontiuk, Vokrug, 536. 22 The bloodshed of the Great War, Marxist criticism of middle-class hegemony, Freudian analysis, and the rise of Nazism led ultimately to a reappraisal of terms such as “civilization” or “culture” and their role in legitimizing Western (French, British, German) middle-class hegemony. One of the first studies to chart the historical development of these valueladen terms and their use to legitimize cultural or political hegemony by the middle class of various Western societies is the brilliant study by the sociologist Norbert Elias published in 1937, which was only translated into English some forty years later (Elias, Über, Civilizing). Elias was an eyewitness to the unravelling of German Kultur during the 1930s. 23 For a recent survey of the discussion, see Gleason, Totalitarianism. For a convincing attempt to continue to use the term totalitarian, see Shlapentokh, A Normal Totalitarian Society. One of Freud’s famous pupils, Wilhelm Reich, was a member of the German Communist Party and travelled to the Soviet Union in 1929: some of Reich’s observations from that trip and his continued reading of Soviet public statements led him to propose that Stalin’s communism and Hitler’s Nazism were converging; his criticism of communism led to his ouster from the Party (Reich, Mass Psychology; on Reich’s visit in 1929, see Pruzhinina, Pruzhinin, “Iz istorii,” 147–50). 24 Orwell, Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four; Arendt, Origins; Brzezinski, The Permanent Purge; Brzezinski, Friedrich, Totalitarian Dictatorship. 25 Gleason makes the appropriate distinction: “[In recent use of the term in analysing Soviet society, t]he stress [is] on the aspiration of the state to totalitarianism, rather than its achievement, and the introduction of the term civil society as a shorthand indicator of what totalitarianism destroyed” (Totalitarianism, 107). 26 Peter Gay traces the origins of the effort to master other human beings to nineteenth-century industrialization (Schnitzler’s Century, 145). See Zamyatin, We; Huxley, Brave New World; Atwood, Handmaid’s Tale. Furet makes the point about the ideal type as well (Passing, 157, 180). 27 See Shlapentokh, Normal Totalitarian Society, 11. 28 Ibid., 17; Boterbloem, Life and Death, 262; Lieven, Empire, 304–9. 29 Zizek, Sublime, 5. Zizek adds (4–5): “Man is … ‘an animal sick unto death’, an animal extorted by an insatiable parasite (reason, logos, language). In this perspective, the ‘death drive’, this dimension of radical negativity, cannot be reduced to an expression of alienated social conditions, it defines la condition humaine as such: there is no solution, no

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escape from it; the thing to do is not to ‘overcome’, to ‘abolish’ it, but to come to terms with it, to learn to recognize it in its terrifying dimension and then, on the basis of this fundamental recognition, to try to articulate a modus vivendi with it. All ‘culture’ is in a way a reaction-formation, an attempt to limit, canalize – to cultivate this imbalance, this traumatic kernel, this radical antagonism through which man cuts his umbilical cord with nature, with animal homeostasis. It is not only that the aim is no longer to abolish this drive antagonism, but the aspiration to abolish it is precisely the source of totalitarian temptation: the greatest mass murders and holocausts have always been penetrated … in the name of New Man”(Zizek, Sublime, 4–5). The small group of Stalin’s most intimate collaborators (among whom one may count Molotov, Kaganovich, Zhdanov, Malenkov, Voroshilov, Khrushchev, Bulganin, Kalinin, Beria, Andreev, Ordzhonikidze, Kuibyshev, Kirov, Kosior, Chubar’, Postyshev, Shcherbakov, Suslov, and Shvernik, even if none of them was continuously part of the leading nucleus between 1929 and 1953) will sometimes be called the “Stalinists” in the following pages, particularly when discussing the years from 1929 onward. Cohen, “Des lettres,” 310. On Stalin as a loyal patron, see Mawdsley, White, Soviet Elite, 80. Chuev, Molotov, 377, 388. Babichenko, Pisateli; Boterbloem, Life and Death; Bugai, L. Beria; Dunham, In Stalin’s Time; Gotovil li Stalin?; Harris, “Origins”; Meretskov, Serving the people; Rieber, Zhdanov; G. Zhukov, Vospominaniia; Leningrad v osade; Gouré, Siege. Kenez, Shepherd, “‘Revolutionary’ Models,” 50. While one can thus understand the Zhdanovshchina as a sort of “soft-line policy,” following Terry Martin, his analytical model does not quite fit the case, since Martin believes that “promoting vigilance” was a hard-line “activity,” and the campaign, too, was led by the Central Committee, a “hard-line bureaucracy” in Martin’s analysis (see his Affirmative Action Empire, 21–2). Pares, Russia, 203. This perception is reflected in Theodor Plievier’s bestselling Moscow, which presents a fictional discussion among the Soviet leaders in October 1941 whether or not to give up Moscow up to the Nazis; in that scene, Plievier proposes that “Molotov and Zhdanov were the two pillars on whom the empire rested” (Moscow, 292). The following works discuss aspects of Zhdanov’s postwar role in an even-handed manner: Kostyrchenko, Out of the Red Shadows; Kostyrchenko, Tainaia; Kutuzov, “Tak nazyvaemoe”; Levina, Vavilov; Löwenhardt, Ozinga, Van Ree, Rise and Fall; R. Medvedev, All Stalin’s Men; Nashe otechestvo; Nekrasov, Trinadtsat’; “O tak nazyvaemom”; Zubok, Pleshakov, Inside; Beria Affair.

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36 See as well Boterbloem, “Death of Andrei Zhdanov.” 37 In Stalin’s extended family, one could suggest that Molotov, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, and Mikoian functioned as younger brothers, while Zhdanov, Malenkov, Khrushchev, Bulganin, and Beria behaved emotionally like sons towards him. Stalin also evokes, of course, the image of a Mafia godfather, while the almost uniquely male environment he cultivated around him once he had become a Soviet leader suggests a latent homoerotism. The strongly ritualized male bonding is a characteristic of Russian-Caucasian tradition. For a psychological portrait, see Tucker, Stalin as a Revolutionary, and for the influence of his Georgian background, see Suny, “Young Stalin.” 38 Compare for example Molotov; Politbiuro 1945–53, 12; or Aksenov, “Apogei,” to works that are at times too speculative (Conquest, Power; Getty, Origins; Duskin, Stalinist Reconstruction; Hahn, Postwar Soviet Politics; Harris, “Origins”; McCagg, Stalin; Knight, Beria; Pikhoia, “O vnutripoliticheskoi”; Ra’anan, International; Seibert, Jr., “Zhdanovism”; Iu.N. Zhukov, “Bor’ba”; Reiman, “Poslevoennoe sopernichestvo”) or self-serving (Beriia, Moi otets; Burlatsky, Khrushchev; Malenkov, O moem ottse; Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers, vols. 1–3). For the contrast between Zhdanov the hawk and Zhdanov the dove, see Seibert, Zhdanovism, 13; Nation, Black Earth, 185; Conze, Sowjetische. Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 8, notes how “one and the same member of the Politbiuro in different periods occupied different positions – both ‘moderate’ and ‘radical.’” For a similar point of view, see Sovetskoe, 10–11. On Stalin as editor, see Ilizarov, “Stalin,” 164. 39 Nikolaevskii, Tainye, 205–6, 210; Nikolaevskii has also been criticized for his erroneous presentation of a rivalry between Kirov and Stalin in 1932–34 for which there is not much evidence (Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 127). The implausible image of Zhdanov the hawk (who even bosses Stalin around) in the postwar period originates perhaps with Borkenau (Der europäische). 40 Georgii Maksimilianovich Malenkov had talents similar to Zhdanov’s. It is therefore not surprising that between 1939 and 1953 Stalin alternately relied on one, then on the other, to act as his stand-in for Party matters. The pattern roughly emerges thus: Zhdanov favoured from late 1938 to June 1941, Malenkov from June 1941 to March 1946, Zhdanov from March 1946 to July 1948, Malenkov from July 1948 to March 1953. 41 After Stalin’s death, following Joseph Rothschild, high politics within the Soviet and East-Central European leaderships were driven by “the compounding of ideological issues, political questions, power struggles, and personal vendettas … characteristic of a political system to which the concept of legitimate opposition is alien,” but before March 1953 any informal political conflict between different leaders was stunted by

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Stalin’s paramount position as supreme and ever-watchful leader (Rothschild, Return to Diversity, 214). 42 See for example, Getty, “Politics,” 50–1; Dunmore, Soviet Politics, 2, 146–51; Duskin, Stalinist Reconstruction; Kennedy-Pipe, Stalin’s Cold War, 93–4; Seibert, Zhdanovism, 7; Harris, “Origins”; McCagg, Stalin; Hahn, Postwar Soviet Politics. 43 I disagree therefore with Brandenberger’s argument (“Short Course,” 16) that Zhdanov played a “decisive role” in some of these matters, for which he adduces too little evidence.

chapter one 1 A version of this chapter has appeared as Boterbloem, “Young Zhdanov.” 2 She became (the deceased) Zhdanov’s daughter-in-law by her marriage to Iurii Zhdanov in 1949 (Allilueva, Tol’ko, 360). 3 The one-storey house in which he was born is pictured in the Greater Soviet Encyclopedia’s second Russian edition (s.v. “Zhdanov”); the town had 31,000 inhabitants according to the 1897 census. I will use the transcription of the Russian spelling here and below, which was what the tsarist administration used. The area of Ekaterinoslav guberniia is located today in the Eastern Ukrainian Donbas (see Kuromiya, Freedom, 14). Mariupol’ was named Zhdanov from 1948 to 1989. 4 77/2/2, l.3; 77/2/75, ll.2, 5; 77/2/85, ll.4–5ob., 27. Andrei Zhdanov’s only son Iurii stated that one Pavel and one Aleksandr Gorskii had been rectors of the Theological Academy (Iu.A. Zhdanov, interview). 5 77/2/75, ll.3–5; 77/2/75, l.5, has a crossed-out sentence which indicates the mother’s health problems. E.P. Gorskaia-Zhdanova nevertheless survived her husband by some thirty years; according to her grandson, Iurii Andreevich, she died around 1939 (Iu.A. Zhdanov, interview). The comrade of his early days as a Communist, A.D. Sokolov, believed later that he had even studied singing with the composer A.V. Aleksandrov before World War 1 (77/2/77, l.83). Svetlana Allilueva (Tol’ko, 360) calls Zhdanov’s mother a dvorianka , or “woman of the gentry, gentle woman.” 6 77/2/85, l.4; Iu. A. Zhdanov, “Vo mgle,” 67; 77/2/75, ll.8–12. 7 For Ekaterinoslav, Ukraine, the Donbas, and Soviet industrialization, see Kuromiya, Freedom, 14, 39; Martin, Affirmative Action Empire, 81, 84; Pokshishevsky, Geography, 164–6; Subtelny, Ukraine, 407; Pipes, Formation, 63; Rogger, Russia, 107. 8 Kuromiya, Freedom, 43–8. 9 77/2/75, l.4. 10 77/2/75 l.8; 77/2/84, ll.69–70; for more on the transfer, see Boterbloem, “Young Zhdanov.” 11 In 1907 a request by Aleksandr to be transferred to Tver’ to allow his

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children to attend secondary school in the city was rejected, which indicates that he continued to be under a cloud (77/2/85, l.30ob.). 12 77/2/75, ll.8–10, 14–15. Iu.A. Zhdanov stated categorically that his grandfather had never become a Marxist (Iu.A. Zhdanov, interview). On Pospelov, see Alekseeva, Chernyshov, Kalininskaia oblastnaia, 452–3. 13 77/2/1, l.1. Though Aleksandr Zhdanov wrote a master’s thesis on the Apocalypse in the Bible, he also published an article on Socrates as a pedagogue in the early 1890s (77/2/85, ll.1, 4). 14 77/2/85, l.31ob. The Revolution of 1905 formally ended the tsarist autocracy but stopped short of the wholesale overthrow of the Old Regime in Russia. 15 77/2/75, l.8; 77/2/85, l.6; Vershinskii, Zolotarev, Naselenie, Table 1, 8–9; Korcheva was located about forty kilometres from Tver’; it was submerged under water when the Ivankovo reservoir was created, a result of the construction of the Moskva-Volga canal during the 1930s. Zhdanov’s former neighbour N. Golovina, prompted by rumours of a visit to Korcheva by cc secretary Zhdanov looking for his roots, sent him in the 1930s a photograph of his ancestral home (77/2/84, ll.77–8). 16 77/2/75, ll.8–12. The sisters became women “of unheard of independence for those days,” in the early 1900s, according to Allilueva (Tol’ko, 360). 17 His large personal library likely contained some works written by Karl Marx. Iurii Zhdanov called his grandfather a typical raznochinets-intelligent (“non-noble opposition intellectual” is a translation which somewhat approximates the complex meaning of this term) and a democrat (Iu.A. Zhdanov, interview; see also Iu.A. Zhdanov, “Vo mgle,” 67). 18 See Chuev, Molotov, 663–4. 19 Khrushchev, Vospominaniia 1: 111–13; Molotov seems to agree; see Chuev, Molotov, 663–4. 20 77/2/75, ll.15–16; 77/2/85, ll.31–31ob. The last record contains the official death certificate, mentioning the cause of death vaguely as “palsy” and “paralysis,” but Tat’iana Zhdanova, who was eighteen at the time and thus unlikely to err about it, identified a heart attack as the cause (77/2/75, l.16). 21 77/2/75, l.17; 77/2/8; 77/2/1, ll. 2, 4. The oldest child, Tat’iana, was lodged with her uncle in Vladimir province. 22 77/2/1, l.4ob. 23 The boys’ gymnasium in Tver’ was an elite school of which in 1905 almost half of the pupils belonged to the noble stratum in tsarist Russia. Less than twenty per cent was categorized as belonging to the peasant class; from October to December 1905 the gymnasium was in active revolt against the tsarist regime (Kotliarskaia, Freidenberg, Iz istorii, 11–14). On such radicalism elsewhere in tsarist Russia, see Pipes, Russian

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Revolution, 26, 36–7; on the similarly important influence of the secondary-school environment on young Stalin, see Suny, “Young Stalin,” 55. Iu. A. Zhdanov, “Vo mgle,” 67. Bullock, Hitler, 14. The so-called Lena goldfield massacre (1912) and other circumstances led in Tver’ as in other Russian cities to an upsurge in strikes and other forms of labour unrest on the eve of World War 1 (see 77/2/77, ll.2, 18). Such episodes may have contributed to his move towards the Marxists. Smirnov et al., eds., Ocherki, 134, 704; Alekseeva, Chernyshov, Kalininskaia oblastnaia, 448–9; Kirilina, Neizvestvennyi, 512, 536. Moskvin studied later at the St Petersburg Mining Institute. Between 1917 and 1926 he occupied different posts in the Petrograd party organization. In the 1920s he headed one of the cc departments, he was a cc member and cc Orgbiuro member from 1927 to 1934, and in 1934 he moved to the Soviet Control Commission (Sovetskoe, 477). 77/2/1, ll.7–7ob., 11ob.; 77/2/2, l.14; 77/2/3, l.3; 77/2/75, ll.17–18; 77/2/87, l.5. 77/2/1, ll.14–39; 77/2/2, l.3; 77/2/78, l.3. Sokolov met Zhdanov for the first time at a club for nature lovers in 1912 or 1913 (77/2/77, l.11). In 1920–21, as a young local leader of the Communist party in Tver’, Zhdanov continued to show a lively interest in biology. Iurii Andreevich noted that his father was drawn more to meteorology and climatology than agronomy (Iu.A. Zhdanov, interview and “Vo mgle,” 65; indeed, in becoming a scientist in the 1940s, the son fulfilled his father’s abandoned project). 77/2/1, ll.15–16. 77/2/77, ll.39, 42; Zhdanov visited Tver’ soon after, in November 1915 (77/2/77, l.39). 77/2/77, ll.40–2. Allilueva (Tol’ko, 360) believes his sisters remained Socialist-Revolutionary until 1917; if true, perhaps the young man also revolted against his older siblings. 77/2/19, ll.1–1ob., 7, 11–13: on 8 May 1916 the Tver’ police noticed for the first time a student in the uniform of the Moscow agricultural institute visit Robert Vikman, a Latvian social democrat who had already been under their surveillance for two years. Zhdanov’s name was then quickly established: until 1 July he frequently contacted another Latvian social democrat, German Vil’ks; he briefly went to Korcheva to conduct statistical work (probably related to his studies) after which he was called up (77/2/77, ll.41–2). Schapiro, Communist Party, 153; 77/2/2, ll.8, 11, 14ob.; 77/2/3, l.3; 77/2/8, l.1; 77/2/19, ll.2, 12–13; 77/2/78, ll.14, 16; Smirnov et al.,

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eds., Ocherki, 135; Platov, “Andrei,” 116–17. An alternative version, dating from more than thirty years after the actual events took place, embellishes Zhdanov’s Bolshevik credentials (Archives of the Department of State, “John Scott’s Notes,” 2). The story relayed to the American journalist John Scott in Helsinki in 1946 held that Zhdanov became fully drawn into politics in Moscow in 1915, neglecting his studies; he reappeared in Tver’ in the autumn of 1915 to help organize a chapter of the Party there on the orders of the Moscow organization. Much of the information on young Zhdanov in Scott’s account, however, is convoluted and erroneous. For the general rise of “revolutionary” unrest in Russia, see for instance Pipes, Russian Revolution, 244. Vershinskii, Goroda, 33; Kraevedcheskii; Vershinskii, Zolotarev, Naselenie, Table 1, 8–9, form the basis of what is an estimate of the size of the town’s population here. Stalin himself, in penal exile in Siberia, was medically examined for army service in 1916 (Torchinov, Leontiuk, Vokrug, 12). For the shortages, see for example Sokolov, Neizvestnyi, 31. 77/2/77, l.57. 77/2/2, ll.3, 4, 14ob.; 77/2/8, ll.1, 3; 77/2/77, l.59; 77/2/78, l.17. Schapiro, Communist Party, 99–101, 143–4, 153. 77/2/78 l.17; Iu.A. Zhdanov, interview. Three key secondary sources provide evidence for Shadrinsk and Zhdanov: a roman à clef with Zhdanov as the protagonist written in good Socialist-Realist style and published in 1952 (Vlasov, Na beregakh); Broekmeyer, Stalin; and a biography of Zhdanov in Shadrinsk written by a local historian (Borisov, Andrei). In 1917 Shadrinsk was not connected to Kurgan by rail: the connection Sverdlovsk-Kurgan (the latter is on the Trans-Siberian Railroad) was only completed in 1933 (see Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3d ed., vol. 29, s.v. “Shadrinsk,” and ibid., vol. 23, s.v. “Sverdlovsk railroad”). The nkvd chief of Ukraine during part of the 1930s, V.A. Balitskii, had gone to the same ensign school as Zhdanov in 1915 and ended up stationed on the Persian and Caucasus fronts, see Tragediia 2: 845. See Boterbloem, “Young Zhdanov,” 284–5, for a more detailed description of Shadrinsk. Short Course, 206. See as well for Zhdanov and Shadrinsk, History of the Civil War 1: 108. The unfinished Stalinist history of the Civil War emphatically points this out, probably to absolve Zhdanov and others from the sin of serving as tsarist officers; see History of the Civil War 1: 36. A source dating from long after the events, and thus suspect, suggests that Ensign Zhdanov formed a “Bolshevik” faction in the early weeks of his sojourn in Shadrinsk (77/2/2, ll.11, 15). Iurii Andreevich Zhdanov

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recalled that his mother told him that in March 1917 only her future husband and a sailor stranded in the town had been Bolsheviks, a story reiterated by Andrei Zhdanov’s own statement in a questionnaire he filled out in 1920 (Iu. A. Zhdanov, interview). Ivnitskii, Tragediia, 859; Smirnov et al., eds., Ocherki, 140. In his study of the German spd published almost exactly at the time of Zhdanov’s entry into the rsdlp, Robert Michels noted the peculiar effect of joining the social-democratic movement on “bourgeois” youth such as Zhdanov: “The violent internal and external struggles, the days full of bitterness and the nights without sleep during which his socialist faith has ripened, have combined to produce in the socialist of bourgeois origin … an ardor and a tenacity which are rarely encountered among proletarian socialists. He has broken completely with the bourgeois world, and henceforward confronts it as a mortal enemy, as one irreconcilable a priori” (Michels, Political Parties, 294). 77/2/71, ll.1–2; Borisov, Andrei, 5–7. In April 1922 he claimed in one of the Party questionnaires that members filled out regularly that he knew no foreign languages (77/2/2, l.3). 77/2/82, l.1. Figes, Kolonitskii, Interpreting, 26–7, 42. 77/2/2, l.15; 77/2/71, l.8; 77/2/75, l.19; 77/2/74; 77/2/82, l.1. Udintsev was by 1921 a secretary of the provincial Party committee of Ekaterinburg (77/2/2, l.15). Sukhanov, Russian Revolution, 350–8; Borisov, Andrei, 4; 77/2/82, l.1. Figes and Kolonitskii (Interpreting, 113, 159) indicate that the Bolsheviks, too, heavily identified with “internationalism.” For the precipitous drop in the morale of the Russian army resulting from the failed June offensive, see for example Hosking, History, 43. 77/2/2, l.15; 77/2/3, l.4; 77/2/71, l.8; 77/2/74, l.1a; History of the Civil War 2: 108; Borisov, Andrei, 5–6; almost a year later, Zhdanov refers to unspecified difficulties the Party organization faced in July 1917 (Borisov, Andrei, 11–12). On the Sixth Party Congress and the break with the Mensheviks, see Resolutions 1898–1917, 249–61. 77/2/2, l.12. Iurii Zhdanov claimed that his grandfather Kondrat’ev had been a zemstvo activist in Riazan province; supposedly, as punishment for his efforts at “enlightening” the local peasantry, he had been exiled in 1907 to Shadrinsk, but I have not been able to find any corroborating evidence for his account. Borisov merely notes that Kondrat’ev was a clerk employed in one of the rural districts surrounding the town (Borisov, Andrei, 7–8; Iu.A. Zhdanov, interview). 77/2/2, ll.3, 10, 15, 15ob.; 77/2/3, ll.1, 3; 77/2/75, l.18; 77/2/85, l.5; Borisov, Andrei, 11; Iu.A. Zhdanov, interview; Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 192, 193, 197; Golovko, “Svetlana,” 83, 85; Volkov, Vzlët, 293; on the alias, see for instance Platov, “Andrei,” 116.

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58 77/2/77, ll.60–2, notes how the visit occurred somewhere between 12 and 20 October. Zhdanov is said to have delivered a diatribe against Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks. 59 Smirnov, Ocherki, 182, 224; Figes notes that some fighting took place in late October before Soviet (Bolshevik) power took over in Tver’ (Figes, People’s Tragedy, 520); Alekseeva and Chernyshov indicate that the Tver’ city soviet supported the Bolshevik coup and note that fighting occurred in the town in late October (Alekseeva, Chernyshov, Kalininskaia oblastnaia, 141, 144); the likely date of the local takeover was 28 October 1917. See History of the Civil War 2: 648; 77/2/78, l.17. 60 77/2/2, l.15; 77/2/71, ll. 1–2, 8–9; 77/2/80, l.15; Chernev, 229, 180. 61 Borisov, Andrei, 6; 77/2/71, ll.1–2. 62 Vlasov, Na beregakh, 110. 63 77/2/3, l.1; 77/2/71, ll.2, 4, 6; Borisov, Andrei, 8. 64 Borisov, Andrei, 8–9; 77/2/74; 77/2/82, l.2. 65 77/2/71, ll.4, 6, 10; 77/2/74, ll.1a, 3; Borisov, Andrei, 8. 66 77/2/82, l.3. The Socialist-Revolutionariess may not have been doing the best of jobs in communicating with the peasants; in nearby Kurgan region, the language of local sr leaders was poorly understood (Figes, Kolonitskii, Interpreting, 128–8, 131). 67 77/2/74, ll.10–13, has the full text of the article; for the date of publication, see 77/2/83, l.3. Zhdanov’s views echoed those of Party authorities such as People’ Commissar of Enlightenment A.V. Lunacharskii (see Pis’ma, 134, note, for example). 68 77/2/74, ll.6–7. 69 Borisov, Andrei, 9, 11; 77/2/82, l.5. By early 1918 the Bolsheviks began to call themselves Communists. 70 77/1/3, l.1; 77/2/2, l.3; Borisov, Andrei, 11–12. By June 1918 the Bolsheviks had renamed themselves Russian Communist Party (bolsheviks). “Already by the first week of June 1918 the Bolsheviks had been swept out of power across Western Siberia” (Landres, “P.V. Vologodskii,” 19). Landres adds, ibid., 16, that the first rumours of the uprising spread around May 25–26. 71 77/1/3, l.1. 72 Ibid. 73 Figes, People’s Tragedy, 595. 74 Zhdanov’s anxiety about his father’s degree can be seen in his statement to a Party commission conducting a purge in September 1921 that his father’s degree was in philosophy, rather than in theology (77/2/78, l.32; 77/2/77, l.95). 75 See Goncharov, Oblomov.

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chapter two 1 77/2/2, l.3; 77/2/3, l.1; Borisov, Andrei, 12; see below in this chapter for a discussion of the Bolshevik meaning of Agitprop. 2 Volkogonov, Lenin, 211, 214; Sovetskoe, 464; Tragediia 2: 848. 3 See “Ispoved’,” the recollections of Iurovskii, one of the execution squad. 4 Anichkov, Ekaterinburg, 139, 154–5. 5 77/2/2, ll.15–15ob., 18; 77/2/3, l.3; Anichkov, Ekaterinburg, 151; Figes, People’s Tragedy, 639; Soviet Union Year-Book, 548. 6 Figes, People’s Tragedy, 602, 652–3. 7 77/2/3, ll.1, 3; 77/2/2, ll.10, 15ob.; Soviet Union Year-Book, 549. 8 See Figes, People’s Tragedy, 601. 9 77/2/2, ll.10, 15ob.; Soviet Union Year-Book, 549. 10 Much later, Sokolov remembered the transfer being the result of a cc decision “in the summer” (77/2/77, l.65). 11 77/2/75, ll.18–20; 77/2/78, l.18; 77/2/2, ll.3, 4; 77/2/2, l.15ob; Ivkin, “Vysshie” 1: 145. 12 Smirnov et al., eds., Ocherki, 215. 13 Ibid., 229–30. 14 Kriukovskikh was startled in his investigations by the absence of Zhdanov from most hot spots during the Second World War in Leningrad; as far as he has been able to establish, Zhdanov even refrained from delivering speeches to Party and non-Party rank and file. At the same time, he did not hesitate to have army officers executed on the basis of rumours about their betrayal and insubordination of orders (Kriukovskikh, “Leningradskaia,” 77–8). 15 Figes, People’s Tragedy, 602–3. See also Merridale, Night, 143; Fitzpatrick, “Civil War.” 16 Smirnov et al., eds., Ocherki, 230–1. 17 Gorelov, Tsugtsvang, 72–5. 18 In fact, the Bolsheviks managed to end the strike only with the help of the local Mensheviks (Gorelov, Tsugtsvang, 74; Smirnov et al., eds., Ocherki, 230–1). 19 See Glossary for Russian (-Soviet) Terms. 20 Desertion, theft of grain stores, minor rebellions of peasants and deserters were noticed by the Cheka and, in one district in June, a massive revolt led by deserters was suppressed by the security forces (Sovetskaia derevnia, 138–40, 145). By July the popular mood was still judged hostile to the Regime in Cheka reports (ibid., 158). By late August reports indicated a more tranquil situation (ibid., 171–2) 21 Sovetskaia derevnia, 212. 22 77/2/78, l.18; 77/2/77, ll.65–6. 23 77/2/2, l.10; 77/2/3, l.1; 77/2/78, l.19. Its editor was A.I. Kapustin,

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who played an influential role in shaping the general outlook of the Soviet press during the later 1920s (see Lenoe, Agitation, 25–6, 28–9, 56–8, 61–2, 68–74, 88). 77/2/78, l.20; Smirnov et al., eds., Ocherki, 232. Its intent was to increase the depleted membership of the Communist Party which was hemorrhaging as a result of Civil War deaths (Figes, People’s Tragedy, 691). 77/2/3, ll.1–2. Lenoe suggests that Kapustin was editor; perhaps responsibilities were shared; Zhdanov’s role was subsequently inflated to sole editor in the file, which was created thirty years later (Lenoe, Agitation, 88). Brooks, Thank You, xiv: “The press was not coterminous with all public expression, but it contextualized the Soviet experience and imposed a structure on thinking even among nonbelievers ... [It] instilled a vision of the world that precluded other ways of seeing ... [It became] the hegemon of information, and it remained so to the end of Communism.” Lenoe also lists Pravda assitant editor Kapustin, and its journalists I. Riabov, V. Khodakov, and L. Khvat, A.I. Troitskii, editor of Komsomol’skaia Pravda, and D.I. Liakhovets of Kooperativnaia zhizn’ (Lenoe, Agitation, 62). Sokolov recalled how Riabov and Polevoi joined Zhdanov in a group of Bolsheviks involved in literature (77/2/77, l.73). On Polevoi’s great popularity during the 1930s and 1940s, see Shlapentokh, Normal Totalitarian Society, 131; see also Brandenberger, “Short Course,” 325–6. 77/2/77, l.75. Figes, People’s Tragedy, 691. 77/2/3, l.1; preface of opis’ 2 of fond 77; Smirnov et al., eds., Ocherki, 229. 77/2/2, ll.3, 15ob., 33; 77/2/77, l.71; 77/2/78, l.21; Smirnov et al., eds., Ocherki, 227–8. 77/2/78, ll.21–22. 77/2/2, l.33; 77/2/77, l.71; Platov, “Andrei,” 118. 77/2/78, l.23; Smirnov et al., eds., Ocherki, 237, 243. Resolutions 1917–29, 98; Iovchuk, “Vydaiushchiisia,” 81; Smirnov et al., eds., Ocherki, 234, Platov, “Andrei,” 118; 77/2/2, l.15ob. The total number of voting delegates was 554 with another 162 attending without voting rights. Smirnov et al., eds., Ocherki, 233. 77/2/2, ll. 11ob., 15ob.; 77/2/3, l.1; 77/2/4/, ll.1–2. Shlapentokh, Normal Totalitarian Society, 37. Tverskaia Pravda, 27 February 1921, 2. Gimpel’son, “Nachal’nyi etap,” 43. Smirnov et al., eds., Ocherki, 252. Ibid., 252.

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43 Ibid., 252–4; 77/2/78, l.29. 44 77/2/78, ll.27–9; TP, 10 February 1921, 2. 45 TP, 27 February 1921, 2; Smirnov et al., eds., Ocherki, 253–4. 46 TP, 1 March 1921, 1. 47 TP, 1 March 1921, 1; Smirnov et al., eds., Ocherki, 254. 48 Smirnov et al., eds., Ocherki, 250. See Schapiro, Communist Party, 194–5, on the possibility of free discussion before the Tenth Party Congress. 49 See TP, 2 February 1921, 1, 13 February 1921, 1, 11 March, 1921, 1; Smirnov et al., eds., Ocherki, 250–1. 50 TP, 3 March 1921, 1. 51 77/2/78, l.30. 52 77/2/2, l.10; 77/2/78, l.30. 53 77/2/2, l.3; 77/2/3, ll.3–4. 54 See for instance Rigby, Communist Party, 96–100. 55 Figes, People’s Tragedy, 692. On the tradition of the purge, see Weiner, Making Sense of War, 82–3. 56 TP, 1 September 1921, 2. 57 77/2/2, ll.12, 14–15ob.; 77/2/77, ll.94–5; 77/2/78, ll.30, 32; TP, 6 September 1921, 2, 7 September 1921, 2. 58 Smirnov et al., eds., Ocherki, 238, 250. 59 TP, 11 September 1921, 1. 60 In Tver’ province, protest against grain requisitioning was widespread still in April and May of 1921; by July the new agricultural policy introduced by nep led to greater tranquillity (Sovetskaia derevnia, 403, 436, 475). 61 For Chudov’s posts, see TP, 17 September 1921, 1; Smirnov et al., eds., Ocherki, 256. 62 TP, 15 September 1921, 1. 63 See as well Figes, People’s Tragedy, 688. 64 TP, 15 September 1921, 2, 18 September 1921, 1. 65 77/2/22, ll.94–7. 66 77/3/110, l.1. 67 77/2/77, l.99; 77/2/78, l.32. 68 77/2/2, l.12. Zhdanov wrote that a church marriage was demanded by his wife and her parents, for only such a marriage was considered legal under the laws then in force. 69 TP, 15 December 1921, 2; 77/2/77, l.99; 77/2/78, l.32. 70 Smirnov et al., eds., Ocherki, 260. See Fainsod, Smolensk, 48: “that familiar Soviet institution, the entrenched family circle embracing the leading Party and government officials of the guberniya who did their best to protect each other from exposure of their sins of commission and omission.” 71 77/2/77, ll.94, 98–9.

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74 75 76 77

78 79 80

81 82 83

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TP,

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15 December 1921, 2–3. In the city of Tver’, close to fifty per cent of the membership was purged (TP, 11 December 1921, 1). 77/2/77, l.99; 77/2/78, l.32; 77/2/3, l.3; Alekseeva, Chernyshov, Kalininskaia oblastnaia, 454: Zhdanov’s offical promotion may have occurred only in April 1922. See TP, 29 September 1921, 2. Mikoian, Tak, 186. 77/2/2, l.2; 77/2/77, l.104; 77/2/78, l.35. Iu.A. Zhdanov, interview. Zhdanov was recalled from Tver’ by the Central Committee in June 1922 and departed for Nizhnii Novgorod in September 1922; in one Party autobiography of the middle of the 1920s, Zhdanov notes that the transfer was an Orgbiuro decision of June (77/2/2, l.11ob.). Zhdanov may have attended (either officially as a delegate or as a guest) the all-Union Twelfth Party Conference in early August 1922, which had a little more than two hundred delegates in attendance (Resolutions 1917–29, 178; Mikoian, Tak, 211). Figes, People’s Tragedy, 693. Ibid., 693. Until 1937, Kaganovich remained a kingpin who selected many of the younger leaders who rose to the top in the late 1930s and in the 1940s (Nicolaevsky, Power, 234). Tver’ newspapermen were transferred to Moscow in significant numbers in the second half of the decade and, like Zhdanov in Nizhnii Novgorod, contributed to the campaign against Bukharin (Lenoe, Agitation, 67–70). Torchinov, Leontiuk, Vokrug, 210, 212. See chapter 1. See, for example, R. Medvedev, Let History Judge, 70. For the importance of the nomenklatura appointment lists that sustained the Soviet system until 1991 and found their roots in this period, see Voslensky, Nomenklatura. Radzinsky, Stalin, 178 . See as well Fainsod, How Russia Is Ruled, 183; Pavlova, “Strength,” 26–7; L. Kaganovich, Pamiatnye, 251–3, 258–64; Cohen, “Des lettres,” 309; Korzhikhina, “Osnovnye cherty,” 146–64, 156–7; Evseev, Satrap, 30. The last work is an anti-Semitic diatribe that must therefore be read with extreme caution. gopano, 1/1/2314, l.49, indicates that already by June 1922 Kaganovich headed the Organization Instruction department. One former secretary and chair of Nizhnii’s gubkom, Sergushev (Markel), a former Sormovo worker, was employed in 1922–23 for Kaganovich as cc inspector (Kaganovich, Pamiatnye, 267–8). By 1924, the overlap between the cc’s Uchraspred and the Organization-Instruction Departments became so large that the two were merged into one (Fainsod, How Russia Is Ruled, 190). Stalin may have already suggested this idea to Kaganovich in the summer of 1922 (Kaganovich, Pamiatnye, 253).

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85 Kaganovich was key, too, in sponsoring both Malenkov and Khrushchev during the 1920s and 1930s (see Nemzer, “Kremlin’s Professional Staff,” 66; N. Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers 1: 21, 26–9). 86 For further details on Nizhnii Novgorod and its region, see chapters 3 and 4. 87 Zen’kovich, Vozhdi, 458. 88 Bulganin had served in the local Cheka at the beginning of the Civil War and had been acquainted since that time with Lazar Kaganovich (Nicolaevsky, Power, 230–3; Evseev, Satrap, 25). 1930s Politburo member Vlas Ia. Chubar’ worked with Kaganovich in running the Sormovo plant in Nizhnii in 1918–19 (Kumanev, Riadom, 82; “Chubar’,” 90). Rykov, Lenin’s successor as Soviet premier, may have been born in the same village as his successor, Molotov, in the nearby Viatka (Kirov) region of Kukarka; at least, Molotov believed this. Other sources maintain that Rykov had been born in Saratov (administratively, the Viatka area was at times part of Nizhnii Novgorod region; see Kumanev, Riadom, 7–10; Torchinov, Leontiuk, Vokrug, 413). From November 1919 to June 1920 Molotov was chair of Nizhnii’s gubispolkom (Politicheskaia elita, 30; Mikoian, Tak, 169). L.M. Kaganovich had first chaired its gubispolkom and then its gubkom between 1918 and 1920 (Politicheskaia elita, 20–1. Torchinov, Leontiuk, Vokrug, 237). In 1921–22, too, union boss and future Politburo member A.A. Andreev visited Nizhnii on occasion, when he apparently already maintained good relations with Mikoian (Mikoian, Tak, 184). 89 Politicheskaia elita, 29–30; Mikoian, Tak, 169, 173; Mikoian notes that he was formally elected gubkom secretary in the late winter of 1921. Prior to this, after protracted negotiations between Mikoian and the local Bolshevik potentates, who refused to accept him as first secretary despite the fact that he had been assigned as such by the cc, Mikoian had worked as chief of agitprop within the gubkom, as Zhdanov did from late 1922 to August 1924. Mikoian’s work included running the newspaper as well as supervising the Komsomol and the “nationality” department, which dealt with non-Russian ethnic groups. 90 Mikoian had been dispatched to Nizhnii by the cc after receiving instruction from Molotov on the situation there (Mikoian, Tak, 169–73, 183–4). As head of the provincial government in late 1919 and early 1920, Molotov had managed to alienate the local leaders altogether (Chuev, Molotov, 175, 226–30). 91 Mikoian, Tak, 200. Uglanov was dispatched by the cc in February 1922 to Nizhnii; from May 1922 to August 1924 he was “responsible secretary” of the gubkom, as direct successor of Mikoian (Politicheskaia elita, 46; Mikoian, Tak, 203). Mikoian recalled half a century later later that Stalin transferred Uglanov from Leningrad to Nizhnii after discussion with

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94 95

96 97 98 99 100

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Mikoian. Elected candidate cc member in 1921, Uglanov was dropped from the cc in 1922, when he presumably worked in Leningrad (Deiateli SSSR, 822–3). In 1923 he returned to the cc as full member at the end of the Twelfth Party Congress. Mikoian, Tak, 201. In December 1936 Bukharin depicted Uglanov, who was then under arrest, as “the most incredible hysteric of great doubts. He was a clear anti-Trotskyite in the period of the struggle with Trotsky. He was the first to leave the Rightists, together with Kulikov at the plenum of November 1929. He, clearly, again returned to fractional work and then ‘evolved’ towards the Trotskyites and Zinovievites” (“Fragmenty stenogrammy,” 13). Nikolai A. Kubiak (1881–1937) was a Petersburger who had been on the barricades in 1917 Petrograd (see Kirilina, Neizvestvennyi, 502). Later he became Orgbiuro member from 1927 to 1930, cc secretary in 1927 and 1928, chair of the Central Cooperative Council in 1927 and People’s Commissar of Agriculture of the rsfsr from 1928 to 1931 (Soviet Union Year-Book, 571; “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 101). 77/2/2, l.61; his name in the archives of the Nizhnii Party organization is first mentioned on 21 September; see gopano, 1/1/2333, l.150. Kurbatova, “A.A. Zhdanov,” 12; 77/2/2, ll. 16–16ob.; the Sormovo works had 11,541 workers and employees in September 1924; its workers amounted to seven per cent of all workers living in the guberniia (gopano, 1/1/3612, ll.3, 11). The importance of the plant is underlined when one takes into account that at the Sormovo works some of the first Soviet tanks were constructed at the end of the Civil War (Stone, “Re: Russian”; Downs, “Re: Russian”). The plant also made railroad cars (Santalov, Segal, Soviet, 176). The nervosity about workers’ unrest went back to the Civil War (Shlapentokh, Normal Totalitarian Society, 36, 65). Meanwhile, the fact that the largest factory in heavy industry in Tver’ also produced means of conveyance for transport (railroad passenger cars, mainly) may have played some role in the cc Secretariat sending Zhdanov to Sormovo rather than someone else. Sormovo’s importance partially derived from its revolutionary tradition: the brother of G.G. Iagoda, chief of the nkvd in the 1930s, had died on its barricades in the Revolution of 1905 (Genrikh Iagoda, 15). Politbiuro TsK RKP(b), 1: 185; Mikoian, Tak, 169–73, 183–4. gopano, 1/1/2321, ll.1–5. Ibid., 1/1/2321, l.72ob. Ibid., 1/1/2321, l.78ob. The plant remained a source of worry for the Party after Zhdanov’s transfer in late 1922. In January 1923, the gubkombiuro listened to a report by gpu chief Zapol’skii and First Secretary Uglanov on resurgent Menshevik activity (gopano, 1/1/2986, l.1).

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101 Ibid., 1/1/2334, ll.112, 116ob.-117. 102 Like Uglanov and Zhdanov, Liadov had been transferred to Nizhnii soon after the Twelfth Party Congress; he moved to Moscow to become the rector of the Sverdlov Communist University in May 1923 (Deiateli SSSR, 346–50). 103 77/2/2, l.16; Iulii (Izrail’) Moiseevich Kaganovich headed one of the district Party organizations in the city of Nizhnii; later he was to be ispolkom chair of Gor’kii krai (formerly Nizhnii Novgorod) from 1934 to 1937 and first secretary of Gor’kii province from June 1937 to January 1939; he was thus one of the few provincial secretaries to survive the Great Purge; in 1939 he was appointed deputy People’s Commissar of Foreign Trade (Kostyrchenko, Out of the Red Shadows, 234; “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 83; Kaganovich, Pamiatnye, 25; Nizhegorodskaia Kommuna (NK), 12 August 1923, 1). 104 gopano, 1/1/2326, l.93. Mikhail Kaganovich worked in Vyksa at this time (to which Uglanov refers in the minutes; see R. Medvedev, All Stalin’s Men, 117; see as well Chernev, 229, 158). 105 77/2/2, l.16ob.; gopano, 1/1/2326, ll. 76ob., 93–93ob. 106 gopano, 1/1/2326, ll.93–93ob. 107 Lazar Kaganovich expressed to Khrushchev a dislike of Zhdanov during the 1930s and 1940s, noting that Zhdanov had a silver tongue and knew how to please and entertain Stalin but did not know how to work very well (Khrushchev, Vospominaniia 1: 110). But Lazar’s “grumbling” to Khrushchev about Zhdanov was undoubtedly informed by his resentment of having to relinquish his position as Stalin’s trusted aide to Zhdanov during the later 1930s. 108 gopano, 1/1/2780, ll.122–28. 109 77/1/44, l.1; 77/2/81, l.5; gopano, 1/1/2326, l.97, and 1/1/2329, l.64. The Union of Socialist Soviet Republics was officially founded on 30 December 1922. See NK, 24 July 1923, 1, 26 July 1923, 1, 10 August 1923 (see 77/2/81, l.7), 18 August 1923, 1, 26 August 1923, 1, 26 September 1923, 4, 28 September 1923, 1. 110 His son Iurii claimed that Andrei was saddled with matters of propaganda and culture rather more than he would have liked, specifying that Zhdanov had felt much more comfortable with “practical” work (Iu. A. Zhdanov, interview). 111 “The socialist activities of Russian Social-Democrats consist in spreading by propaganda the teachings of scientific socialism, in spreading among the workers a proper understanding of the present social and economic system, its basis and its development ... Inseparably connected with propaganda is agitation among the workers ... In conducting agitation among the workers on their immediate economic demands, the Social-Democrats inseparably link this with agitation on the immediate

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112 113 114

115 116 117 118 119 120 121

122 123 124 125 126

127 128

129 130 131 132 133

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political needs” (Lenin, “The Tasks,” 329, 332; see also Lenoe, Agitation, 15–17). Lenoe, Agitation, 14–17; see as well Kenez, Birth, 4. Domenach, “Leninist,” 265. Its efficacy is another matter. Soviet propaganda seemed most effective during the war when it emphasized the theme of the defence of the Soviet, but often straightforwardly Russian, motherland. It supports Kershaw’s argument that propaganda “works” when it “build[s] upon … already existing values and mentalities” (Kershaw, ‘Hitler Myth’, 4 and also 80). For the early role of propaganda in the Soviet state and the meaning of propaganda in the Soviet context, see Kenez, Birth, particularly 1–17. “Public Opinion,” 10. gopano, 1/1/2973, ll.137–8. Fainsod, Smolensk, 44; Smirnov et al., eds., Ocherki, 690 Fainsod, How Russia Is Ruled, 249, Table 2. gopano, 1/1/2973, l.1. Ibid., 1/1/2973, ll.15, 16ob.-17, 27–28ob. gopano, 1/1/2973, l.33; gopano, 1/1/2986, l.8; M.M. Kaganovich was appointed to chair the provincial sovnarkhoz somewhere in 1923 (Ivkin, Gosudarstvennaia vlast’, 327). gopano, 1/1/2973, ll.29–30. Resolutions 1917–29, 187–9; Schapiro, Communist Party, 273–4; Iovchuk, “Vydaiushchiisia,” 81. The first had been in 1920 (see above). gopano, 1/1/2973, l.1. Ibid., 1/1/2986, l.12. There is no sign of him in the Party’s records for almost three months (see gopano, 1/1/2986, ll.13–23). Judging from 77/2/81, l.5, he did not publish any new articles between March and July 1923. Iu.A. Zhdanov, interview. Ibid. See Gay, Enlightenment 1: 397–8 and 2: 150, 170, 194–5, 486, 526–7, 548–52; and van Ree, Political Thought, 18–24. One is reminded of the argument made by Talmon about the formative influence of Enlightenment thinkers such as Rousseau and Holbach on twentiethcentury “totalitarian” regimes (Talmon, Origins, 17–65). White, Metahistory, 47. Gay, Schnitzler’s Century, 145; Milosz, Captive, 43. Gay, Schnitzler’s Century, 145. Iu.A. Zhdanov, interview. Ibid.; Allilueva, Tol’ko, 337. See Tolstoi, Sobranie. Tolstoi’s work apparently also appealed to young Bukharin (Bukharin, How It All Began, 227). Zhdanov was fond of Saltykov’s History, in part, perhaps, because the writer had been at some point vice-governor of Tver’ guberniia and

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135

136 137

138 139

140 141 142

143 144 145 146 147 148 149

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Notes to pages 46–8 Zhdanov recognized Saltykov’s ridiculing of life in the prerevolutionary town of “Foolov” (Glupov) as an apt criticism of Tver’ (see SaltykovShchedrin, History). Khrushchev, Vospominaniia 1: 111; Allilueva, Tol’ko, 337. Zhdanov’s enjoyment of Arkhangel’skii did not prevent the latter from being executed in the Great Terror. For an example of Arkhangel’skii’s parodies, see for instance On Babel. Zhdanov’s case perhaps proves Katerina Clark’s point that even though a socioeconomic and political hierarchy can be turned upside down as it was in Russia between 1917 and 1921, aesthetic preferences and certain cultural traditions tend to last much longer (Clark, Petersburg, 11). Maksimenkov, Sumbur, 200–3; compare as well Plamper, “Foucault’s Gulag,” 258–9, 262. See Chuev, Molotov, 283. This tendency seems to be denied by an account of a wartime meeting in which, in Zhdanov’s presence, Zhukov berated in no uncertain terms a subordinate general, a crude outburst that supposedly made Zhdanov cringe; in fact, however, Zhukov’s account of the episode is rather the result of prudish censorship than a depiction of reality (Stalin and His Generals, 437). gopano, 1/1/2986, l.18; for the further fate of Muralov, Tragediia 2: 859, and Politicheskaia elita, 31. gopano, 1/1/2986, ll.19–20, 22–3, 34. In the Politburo, responsibility for the policy towards the two socialist parties was Trotsky’s responsibility since at least June 1923 (Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 1: 15–16). gopano, 1/1/2986, l.23 Ibid., 1/1/2986, ll.39–40. Ibid., 1/1/2986, ll.29, 30, 32–3; Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 1: 234. Sormovo’s labour unrest was far from unique: industrial strikes were a constant phenomenon in the Soviet Union during the 1920s, and 1923 witnessed a wave of it (Gorelov, Tsugstvang, 139; Schapiro, Communist Party, 281; R. Medvedev, Let History Judge, 117). gopano, 1/1/2986, ll.39ob.-40, 50. Ibid., 1/1/3359, l.1. Ibid., 1/1/2986, l.49. See Pavlova, “Strength,” 29. NK, 9 October 1923, 4. Iu.A. Zhdanov, interview. Zinaida Zhdanova, after starting out as a stenographer, began to move up in the provincial soviet bureaucracy. At the age of eighty, Iurii Zhdanov still could name all of the main generals involved in the Chinese civil war in 1926–27 (Iu.A. Zhdanov, interview).

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158 159 160

161 162 163

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Schapiro, Communist Party, 282–4; Arzhanova et al., eds., Ocherki, 114. Arzhanova et al., eds., Ocherki, 114; NK, 25 December 1923, 1–3. Nikolaevskii, Tainye, 226n26. R. Medvedev, Let History Judge, 126. At the cc plenum held after the meeting, Uglanov spoke out against Trotsky (see Vilkova, Struggle, 344–7). gopano, 1/1/3623, contains several of these reports. NK, 27 January 1924, 1, January 30, 1924, 1. 77/1/65, ll.1–2; 77/1/67, ll.1, 4–5. NK, 3 February 1924, 1, 7 March 1924, 1, 23 March 1924, 1, 2 April 1924, 1, 3 April 1924, 1, 13 April 1924, 1, 22 April 1924, 1. gopano, 1/1/3611, l.55, indicates that from March to October 1924, the biuro met on the average every four days and looked at about twenty issues per session and the gubkom secretariat met seventeen times, deliberating some twenty topics at each meeting, while four plenary meetings of the guberniia committee were held discussing more than thirty questions; at times as well, separate committees were struck to investigate specific issues. gopano, 1/1/2557, l.53. 77/2/81, l.6. Agriculture at the time was customarily the territory of the second regional Party secretary (77/1/93, l.1; 77/2/81, l.6; Arzhanova et al., eds., Ocherki, 118–19; NK, 4 May 1924, 1, 6 May 1924, 1 and 3, 10 May 1924, 3, 11 May 1924, 2). NK, 16 May 1924, 1, 17 May 1924, 1. NK, 13 May 1924, 2; Arzhanova et al., eds., Ocherki, 119; Trinadtsatyi s’ezd RKP (b), 286–7, 485, 723, 739, 744. 77/2/2, ll.19–20; 77/2/3, l.3; Arzhanova et al., eds., Ocherki, 101; Schapiro, Communist Party, 289; Chernev, 229, 32. The Politburo protocols appear to indicate that the decision dated from 12 August or 14 August, when cc secretary Zelenskii’s case was discussed (Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 1: 319). In his 1981 study, Rigby tentatively concluded that such networks played their role in Stalin’s rise but insufficient evidence prevented him from making the case more forcefully (see Rigby, “Early Provincial Cliques,” 5, 15–19; see also Rigby, “Was Stalin a Disloyal Patron?”; both are reprinted in Rigby, Political Elites). Weiner calls patron-client relations the “predominant form of Soviet political association” (Making Sense of War, 58). See, again, the curious reference to him by Mikoian in Tak, 184.

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chapter three 1 Part of Stalin’s speech to the cc on 19 November 1928 (Stalin, Sochineniia 11: 248). For a less-edited version of this speech, see Kak lomali NEP 3: 203–23. 2 Tver’ guberniia had 2,242,350 inhabitants according to the census held in December 1926 (Vershinskii, Zolotarev, Naselenie, 12–13). Its Party membership was half that of Nizhnii’s provincial chapter. The estimate for Tver’s Party is based on Smirnov et al., eds., Ocherki, 690, using numbers for 1 January 1924 and 1 January 1925. 3 gopano, 1/1/3611, l.53ob. 4 Ibid., 1/1/3611, l.56; I do not include in this number the almost ten thousand Young Pioneers who were more like boy or girl scouts and too young to make much of a difference (ibid., 1/1/3611, l.56ob.). The guberniia population (borders of 1937) in December 1926 stood at 3,025,827; by January 1937 it had increased to 3,683,008, representing a growth of 21.7 per cent in ten years (Poliakov, “Polveka” 1: 16). 5 Soviet Union Year-Book, 23. The census of 1926 counted 220,000 inhabitants in Nizhnii. 6 Ibid., 272, 274. 7 See Fainsod, Smolensk, 93. The gubispolkom chair, the second secretary of the provincial Party organization, and sometimes the chair of the Party Control Commission (judging from the documents in the archive of the Communist party in Nizhnii) were usually among the more influential biuro members. 8 “The joint rule of Party and state was replaced by a new ‘party state,’ in so far as the state functions were taken over by the illegal anti-constitutional system of Party organs, which now became the basic structure of power” (Pavlova, “Strength,” 29). 9 77/1/160, ll.1–15. 10 Soviet Union Year-Book, 141. 11 Hosking, History, 130. 12 Stalin, Sochineniia 11: 248. 13 See this chapter’s epigraph. 14 gopano, 1/1/3612, ll. 2ob., 4ob., 11 and 1/1/3624, ll.81–6. 15 77/1/122, ll.1–2. 16 77/1/167, l.1. 17 gopano, 1/1/3612, ll.1ob., 2, 11 and 1/1/3624, ll.81–6. Workers at Red Sormovo nevertheless complained about living conditions (Gorelov, Tsugtsvang, 142). 18 Obviously, ogpu reports should be treated with caution. The Russians often refrained from openly criticizing the regime, as even in the 1920s such behaviour could yield grave consequences; praise of the political

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23

24 25

26

27 28 29 30 31

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leadership and its policies might be disingenuous. ogpu employees were likely inclined to exaggerate stability and support for the regime, thus lauding their own efficient operation in maintaining law and order. See Kershaw, ‘The Hitler Myth’, 6–8, for the similar dangers in use of reports on the population’s mood in Nazi Germany. gopano, 1/1/3611, ll.53ob., 56. Ibid., 1/1/3624, ll.21, 60, 65; resentment and hostility were widespread and persistent, see Golos Naroda, 137–8. gopano, 1/1/3624, ll.1ob.-2. Golos Naroda, 149–51, 156, 175. In 1924, at election meetings only nineteen per cent of the voters showed up, as even a Soviet source has to admit (Arzhanova et al., eds., Ocherki, 128); in 1925, only forty per cent bothered to go to the polls (ibid., 129). Golos Naroda, 149–51, 154, 159. According to the census of 1926, the guberniia was home to tens of thousands of Tatars; in addition, the linguistically Finno-Ugrian Mordvinians formed another substantial majority of almost 100,000. Such ethnic and cultural minorities would grow in absolute numbers with the territorial increase of 1929 (Zhiromskaia, Demograficheskaia, 76). Golos Naroda, 103–4. This state of affairs can be deduced from letters to Krest’ianskaia gazeta by Russian peasants living in the regions that would become part of the Nizhnii krai, such as Nizhnii Novgorod guberniia, Viatka guberniia, and the Chuvash autonomous region, in Golos Naroda, 95–101. See, particularly, Golos Naroda, 99–101, 125–6, 149, 152. In the nonRussian villages of the ussr, continued adherence to the traditional organization of the community also prevailed during the 1920s. 77/1/813, ll.26–8. 77/1/813, ll.29–31. Marx, Engels, Communist Manifesto, 92. N.A. Zagvozdin (1898–1940) headed the guberniia ogpu from 1924 to 1929, see Politicheskaia elita, 19; “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 75. 77/1/813, l.2. The report was addressed as well to gubispolkom chair Muralov and to the chair of the guberniia Control Commission, Busse; see 77/1/813, l.1. 77/1/191, l.19; Zhdanov noted that a geologist had warned the leadership of the Nizhnii soviet that the city was potentially threatened by landslides. The geologist had advocated that, in order to prepare for such a calamity, academics needed to become members of the city soviet’s executive and get involved in planning of construction projects and securing existing buildings. Zhdanov interpreted this as a conspiracy to gain political clout. “Soviet power” was somewhat misleading short-hand that Communist officials used for their rule.

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77/1/813, ll.13–14. 77/1/813, ll.2–6, 12. See Pis’ma, 51. 77/1/813, l.21. The “Living Orthodox Church” was created as a kind of collaborationist pro-Soviet version of Russian Orthodoxy soon after the Revolution, supporting the strict separation of church and state, for example, and the expropriation of church property; it neither appealed to the Orthodox believers and clergy, to whom it was a heretical and treacherous organization, nor to the Communists themselves, who lacked the patience to tolerate what they saw as a halfway house to atheism for very long. By the 1930s, the “Living Orthodox Church” only existed in name. 77/1/813, ll.22–3. 77/1/813, ll.23–4. Old Believers refused to abandon the traditional rites of the Russian Orthodox church after a major reform was undertaken in the mid-seventeenth century. Old Believers thus broke away from official Orthodoxy. They gradually split into many different sects. On the collapse of private trade, see Osokina, Za fasadom, 59–70, especially 68–70. A good overview can be found in Schapiro, Communist Party, particularly 271–381. Trotsky’s arguments have been supported by scholars studying the elite’s composition during the 1920s (Mawdsley, White, Elite, 51). Schapiro, Communist Party, 286. 77/1/93, l.1; Arzhanova et al., Ocherki, 118–9; 77/2/81, l.9; NK, 4 May 1924, 1. Schapiro, Communist Party, 289; Bol’shevistskoe, 297, note 1. According to Bukharin, Uglanov became the main figure in Moscow in the struggle against Trotsky and Trotsky detested him (“Fragmenty stenogrammy,” 14). 77/1/80, ll. 3–17; Arzhanova et al., Ocherki, 120; Trotsky, Lessons of October; before the year’s end the main opponents of Trotsky had their criticism of Trotsky’s treatise published in Leningrad (see Zinoviev, Kamenev, Ob ‘Urokakh Oktiabria’). Trotsky had only joined Lenin’s followers in the summer of 1917, after more than a decade of polemicizing against the Bolsheviks in the sd Party. 77/1/83, ll.1–4; 77/2/81, l.6. 77/1/88, ll.1–4. The ccc was mainly composed of workers, but its membership had already been hand-picked by Stalin in the mid-1920s (see Schapiro, Communist Party, 260–1).

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371

50 77/1/92, ll.1–4; Kaganovich, Pamiatnye, 372. That is, Trotsky lost his chairmanship of the Military Revolutionary Committee and as People’s Commissar of Defence. 51 77/1/93, ll.1–2; Arzhanova et al., Ocherki, 122. 52 77/1/93, ll.1–9; gopano, 1/1/6065, l.1, indicates that even in the late winter of 1929, Konev remained army commander in the province; M.M. Kaganovich chaired the guberniia’s economic council from 1923 to 1927 (Ivkin, Gosudarstvennaia vlast’, 327). Konev became famous for his part in leading the Soviet forces to victory in World War ii and was ultimately made commander-in-chief of the Warsaw Pact forces, while Shcherbakov was the wartime chief of Moscow and head of the Party’s Propaganda and Agitation Directorate. 53 Kaganovich, Pamiatnye, 374–5; Schapiro, Communist Party, 296. 54 Arzhanova et al., Ocherki, 138; see as well ibid., 134–8, and Schapiro, Communist Party, 297–8. 55 Resolutions 1917–29, 255–6. 56 “Vydaiushchiisia…,” 12; Meissner, “Shdanow” I, 16; Kurbatova, “A.A. Zhdanov,” 15; 77/2/3, l.3; Politicheskii slovar’, 187; Iovchuk, “Vydaiushchiisia,” 81. 57 Kommunisticheskaia oppozitsiia, 169. His son Iurii believes that his father’s oratorical skills contributed to his ultimate arrival at the very top (I. A. Zhdanov, interview). 58 Resolutions 1917–29, 257. 59 77/1/119; 77/1/114; Kommunisticheskaia oppozitsiia, 207, 210, 212. 60 77/1/114, ll.1–4; 77/1/119, ll.1–7. 61 “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 14. 62 Resolutions 1917–29, 284–5; Kaganovich, Pamiatnye, 381; 77/1/144, ll.19–20. 63 77/1/144, ll.8–9 64 Kaganovich, Pamiatnye, 385; Schapiro, Communist Party, 305–6; Resolutions 1917–29, 289–90. 65 The replacements happened by means of the appointment (nomenklatura) system, which ignored the elective principle; Party committees were hand-picked by higher bodies even if committee members were formally elected by Party conferences (see Fainsod, Smolensk, 64–74). 66 Arzhanova et al., Ocherki, 152. 67 77/1/160, l.14. 68 Golos Naroda, 199–202. 69 Kershaw, The ‘Hitler Myth’, 4. 70 I. A. Zhdanov, interview. 71 By which manner again his solidly middle class roots betray themselves (see Gay, Schnitzler’s Century, 191–2).

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72 Iu. A. Zhdanov, interview. 73 Samsonova, Doch’, 237–9, 241. Perhaps too much: as an adult, Iurii appeared to some a bit of a spoiled mama’s boy. 74 See Shlapentokh, Normal Totalitarian Society, 37; see the recent article about Leningrad’s elite standard of living during the 1920s and early 1930s by Izmozik and Lebina (Izmozik, Lebina, “Zhilishchnyi vopros,” 104). 75 77/2/85, l.5ob.; 77/2/75, ll.27–8; Iu. A. Zhdanov, interview. 76 She and her sister had learned to drive trucks when they volunteered for the army during World War i; all sisters were unusually independent women in the eyes of Svetlana (Allilueva, Tol’ko, 360). 77 Arzhanova et al., Ocherki, 165. 78 I. Ivanov, “Polozhenie,”32; on the general nature of this “scissors” crisis, see Hosking, History, 121–2, 158–9. 79 Golubev, “Formirovanie,” 186. 80 77/1/179, ll.14–15. 81 Arzhanova et al., Ocherki, 156. 82 Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 1: 560; see as well Stalin’s Letters, 138, 138n5, 256. 83 Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 1: 572. 84 Schapiro, Communist Party, 310; Resolutions 1917–29, 306; on Ishchenko as well, see Cherniavskii, Stanchev, Rakovskii, 159, 171. Ishchenko was a member of the executive bureau of the Profintern (“Razgrom levoi oppozitsii,” 265). 85 “‘Massovye’,” 118; Resolutions 1917–29, 306–8 86 Piatnadtsatyi s’ezd VKP (b), 5, 8–9; 77/2/3, l.4; Stalinskoe Politbiuro, 183; Politicheskii slovar’, 187; ”Vydaiushchiisia …,” 12; Resolutions 1917–29, 309. In January 1928 Trotsky, N. Muralov, Ishchenko, Radek, Rakovskii, I.N. Smirnov, Serebriakov, and Smilga authored a letter to the Comintern and to other Communist parties protesting their treatment (“Razgrom levoi oppozitsii,”265). 87 Ivnitskii, Repressivnaia, 37–40; Sovetskoe, 19n1. 88 Hosking, History, 158–9, Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants, 43–5. 89 Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 1: 595; Tragediia 2: 859. 90 Tragediia 1: 823; both were shot, however, in 1937. 91 Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 1: 596 92 Ibid. 1: 541; Politicheskaia elita, 31; Ivkin, Gosudarstvennaia vlast’, 464, gives March 1928; Sovetskoe, 479, is less accurate. 93 Sovetskoe, 28n1; Kak lomali NEP 1; Kak lomali NEP 3, 618n132; Schapiro, Communist Party, 367. The first sharp conflict between the trio of Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky and Stalin’s supporters in the Politburo perhaps occurred in March 1928 (Gorelov, Tsugtsvang, 197). 94 Tragediia 1: 237–60 95 Ibid., 258.

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96 77/1/266, l.10; 77/1/419, l.10; Pis’ma, 47n3. 97 See Kak lomali NEP 1. Zhdanov announced here that Nizhnii also counted “counter-revolutionary” elements among its economic managers (Harris, “Dual,” 435). 98 Sovetskoe, 28, note 2, 33, note 1; Akademiia Nauk, 534, note 165; Fainsod, Smolensk, 48–52. 99 77/1/244, l.1. 100 77/1/244, l.2. 101 77/1/244, l.3; this “generational conflict” ended more or less by 1933; it was connected with the tremendous influx of particularly young workers into industry during the First Five-Year Plan (Barber, Davies, “Employment,” 98). 102 77/1/246. 103 He shared with Stalin a belief in its crucial significance, in which he betrayed his middle-class roots (see Gay, Schnitzler’s Century, 191–2). 104 77/1/246, ll.1, 4–5. 105 The Party rules of 1925 stipulated that the Central Committee was to meet in full session every two months, but it usually met about twice a year until the Seventeenth Party Congress of 1934 (Resolutions 1917–29, 273). 106 Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 1: 623. 107 Kak lomali NEP 2: 525–46, 580–1, 599–604, 662. 108 This plenum took place from 4 July to 12 July 1928 (for the full transcript, see Kak lomali NEP 2; for Stalin’s speech, see ibid., 625–49); Golos Naroda, 260; Schapiro, Communist Party, 368; Resolutions 1917–29, 338; Sovetskoe, 35n1. 109 Ivnitskii, Repressivnaia, 47; in July, during a notorious meeting between Bukharin and Kamenev, Bukharin expressed his fears about Stalin and his ways (Vatlin, Komintern, 105). In September, Stalin wrote to Mikoian calling Uglanov a “hopelessly muddle-headed person” (Sovetskoe, 9). 110 Schapiro, Communist Party, 370–1; Kak lomali NEP 2: 98–162, 580, 605–22. 111 Schapiro, Communist Party, 372–3; see Bukharin, Izbrannye, 391–418. 112 Schapiro, Communist Party, 375; Kak lomali NEP 3: 14; Sovetskoe, 53n1; the “Rightists” did not consider themselves an opposition and did not engage in much coordinated criticism of the radical change of policy. 113 Kak lomali NEP 3: 451, 506–8. The plenum was held from November 16 to 24. 114 Kak lomali NEP 3: 587. Zhdanov had been a member of a large commission preparing the resolutions (ibid., 551, 560). Meissner argues that by December, Zhdanov heavily criticized the Right deviation at the Eighth Congress of Soviet Trade Unions and demanded the resignation of trade-union boss M.P. Tomskii, one of its “leaders,” but that seems

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115 116 117 118 119 120

121 122 123 124 125

126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141

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Notes to pages 68–73 too early for a minor cc member to attack Tomskii so openly (Meissner, “Shdanow” 1: 16). See Kak lomali NEP vols 2–5. gopano, 1/1/6097, l.1. Ibid., 1/1/6097, ll.3, 13–14, 21. Tragediia 1: 588–9, 594. Mawdsley, White, The Soviet Elite, 107. Membership grew almost four times in the ussr from January 1927 to January 1933. gopano, 2/1/22, ll.135–6. No savings materialized. For example, the kraikombiuro of the Party would be much larger than the gubkombiuro previously, which translated into a much larger apparatus as well (See ibid., 2/1/30, l.1). Mawdsley, White, The Soviet Elite, 100–1. Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 1: 660. gopano, 1/1/6050, l.173. Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 1: 664. Ibid. 1: 670; only by late March did the Politburo ratify the definitive composition of this body, to which two additions were made later on at the request of the “central committee of the oblast’”; see ibid. 1: 678, 685. In May, by means of a survey, the Politburo confirmed the biuro membership of I.M. Reshetov, the new ogpu chief who had succeeded Zagvozdin (Ibid. 1: 694; Politicheskaia elita, 34). Reshetov himself was transferred to Sverdlovsk oblast’ during the 1930s and likely purged in the Great Terror (see Khaustov, “Razvitie,” 359). gopano, 1/1/6049, ll.134, 146–7. Ibid., 1/1/6049, ll.148–9. Soviet Union Year-Book, 17. Hosking, History, 151. gopano, 1/1/6066. Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 1: 681. 77/2/81, l.10. gopano, 1/1/6065, l.2. 77/1/262, ll.1–7. See Shestnadtsataia konferentsiia; Kak lomali NEP 4, especially 534–9. Shestnadtsataia konferentsiia, 3, 256, 443, 468, 502. Ibid., 4; Kak lomali NEP 3: 630n319; ibid. 4: 532. Shestnadtsataia konferentsiia, 106–9. See ibid., 438–43. Ivnitskii, Kollektivizatsiia, 52–9; Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 22; Kaganovich, Pamiatnye, 401–3. Stalinskoe Politbiuro, 93; Tragediia 2: 866. On the last day of the Conference, Uglanov lost his status as candidate Politburo member. Further

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142 143 144 145 146 147 148

149 150 151

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demotions followed in 1930, and in 1933 he was arrested for the first time. He was released quickly but banished to Siberia where he worked as a low-level apparatchik in the local fisheries. In August 1936 Uglanov was re-arrested as a consequence of allegations against him uttered during the first Moscow Trial. On 31 May 1937 he was given the death sentence by the Military Collegium of the ussr Supreme Court and shot on the same day. Ivnitskii, Kollektivizatsiia, 59. Tragediia 2: 822n46. gopano, 2/1/192, l.1; Tragediia 2: 814n12. Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 28. Ivnitskii, Kollektivizatsiia, 17. Ivnitskii, Repressivnaia, 56. One of its victims was an old acquaintance from Tver’, Petr Grigor’evich Petrovskii (1899–1941), son of G.I. Petrovskii (1878–1958), the official head of state of Ukraine. P.G. Petrovskii, an Agitprop employee and newspaper editor in Leningrad and Astrakhan in the late 1920s, would die in the purges (Kak lomali NEP 5: 12, 683). 77/1/264, l.1. “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71; “Posetiteli” 1: 18. See as well Zabveniiu, 166. Dmitrii Volkogonov based his account on his great familiarity with the archival records, to which he has had greater access than anyone before or since he inspected them in the late 1980s. But Volkogonov errs when he notes that Nizhnii had already been renamed Gor’kii in 1929 and his words should only be accepted with reluctance, for the author does not provide us with clear references to his sources. Volkogonov, Triumf 2: 2, 148–9, compare with 77/1/266, l.9. Khrushchev, Vospominaniia 1: 111. Ibid., 111–2. Khrushchev notes clearly here that Zhdanov was a keen observer of human behaviour. 77/1/266, l.13. 77/1/266, ll.1–8. 77/1/268, ll.1–10. 77/1/268, ll.1–10. This amounted to a population density thirty to forty times lower than that of contemporary Germany. Arzhanova et al., Ocherki, 207; gopano, 2/1/21. gopano, 2/1/21, ll.10–12. Ibid. Ibid., 2/1/21, ll.12–13. Arzhanova et al., Ocherki, 207; gopano, 2/1/22, ll.2–3, 2/1/30,

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Notes to pages 77–81 ll.1–1ob. Among the twenty-four were two women. Lepa was a member of the Central Revision Committee (Kak lomali NEP 5: 540). Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 1: 720; ibid., 723, records another vote on the Party organization of Nizhnii on September 9. gopano, 2/1/36, ll.4, 5ob. Zhdanov, Osnovnye, 3–29, 139–49. Moore, Jr., “Communist Party,” 270–1. Arzhanova et al., Ocherki, 209; 77/2/75, l.21. Kurbatova, “A.A. Zhdanov,” 30. Ivnitskii, Kollektivizatsiia, 17–18. gopano, 2/1/37, ll.2–3; Kak lomali NEP 5: 7. Ivnitskii, Repressivnaia, 70; Tragediia 1: 742–3.

chapter four Ilyashov, “Victor,” 309. Van Ree, Political Thought, 93–4, 99. gopano, 2/1/30 and 2/1/31. Ibid., 2/1/31, ll.1–45. Stalin, Sochineniia 12:118–35; Ivnitskii, Kollektivizatsiia, 19–20; Tragediia 1: 740–2. 6 Ivnitskii, Kollektivizatsiia, 20; Kak lomali NEP 5; Schapiro, Communist, 381. 7 77/2/81, l.14. 8 Ivnitskii, Kollektivizatsiia, 25; Tragediia 2: 8, 814–15n17. 9 The leaders knew very little about life in the villages and agriculture in general in the late 1920s. Andreev, who occupied a post similar to Zhdanov’s at the time, and Ordzhonikidze unashamedly admitted their “illiteracy” (bezgramotnost’) in agricultural matters before a cc plenum in November 1928 (Kak lomali NEP 3: 344). On the importance attributed by the leadership to grain export, see Tragediia 3: 51–3; Zelenin, “Vvedenie,” 23. 10 Ivnitskii, Kollektivizatsiia, 32–4. 11 Ibid., 34, 61; Tragediia 2: 9; Ivnitskii, Repressivnaia, 100–4. 12 Ivnitskii, Kollektivizatsiia, 35, 37, 61–3; Tragediia 2: 45–6. 13 gopano, 2/1/36, l.59; Zabveniiu, 166. 14 gopano, 2/1/36, l.61ob.; 77/2/82, l.14. On 12 and 13 December, Zhdanov discussed with the kraikomburo why full collectivization of peasant households in the krai needed to be accomplished inside of three years and how it was to be done. 15 77/2/81, l.10; 77/2/82, l.14. 16 Tragediia 2: 52. 17 Zabveniiu, 166; gopano, 2/1/33. 18 gopano, 2/1/33, l.2. 1 2 3 4 5

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26 27 28

29 30 31 32

33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

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Ibid., ll.4ob.-5ob. Ibid., ll.22–22ob. Ibid., ll.46–7 Ibid., ll.59–60ob. Ibid., l.60. Ibid., ll.60–60ob. Ibid., ll. 125–125ob. What this meant in practice, among other things, may be surmised from a kraikomburo decree of 30 December 1929 to the ogpu that prohibited “worthless and wrecking” engineers and technical personnel from working on the construction of the automobile plant and ordered scrutiny of the workers there so as not to allow “kulakwrecking” elements at the site (gopano, 2/1/37, l.15). Ibid., 2/1/33, ll. 125–129. Ibid., 2/1/53, l.53 Ibid., 2/1/165, l.33. One of them was the Komsomol chief of Dzerzhinsk, N.S. Patolichev, who was assigned to the Urals region (Mawdsley, White, The Soviet Elite, 121). gopano, 2/1/33, ll.132–3. 77/2/82, l.14. Stalin, Sochineniia 12:141–72; Ivnitskii, Kollektivizatsiia, 65–6; Schapiro, Communist Party, 381. In January 1930 Zhdanov participated at three consecutive Politburo meetings concentrating on collectivization (see Stalinskoe Politbiuro, note 183). Other matters were not ignored, of course, as is evident from Zhdanov’s report about Volga shipping on 5 and 20 January; see Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 2: 7, 12. Ivnitskii, Repressivnaia, 107–9; Ivnitskii, Kollektivizatsiia, 46, 66–7; Tragediia 2: 10–11, 822n49. gopano, 2/1/192, l.1. 77/2/82, ll.14–15. 77/2/82, l.15 Tragediia 2: 123–6. gopano, 2/1/244, ll.38–9. Ivnitskii, Kollektivizatsiia, 7–8, 67–9; Tragediia 2: 11, 126–30; Ivnitskii, Repressivnaia, 130. 77/2/82, l.15. gopano, 2/1/192, l.2. It was edited by Stalin himself (Ivnitskii, Kollektivizatsiia, 80). Tragediia 2: 151–5. gopano, 2/1/180, l.7 and 2/1/192, l.3. Zabveniiu, 175–6; gopano, 2/1/192, ll.4–4ob. gopano, 2/1/191, l.8ob. Ibid.

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48 Foitzik, Sowjetische, 28. 49 Figes, Kolonitskii, Interpreting, 5. 50 77/2/81, l.3. See Kershaw for comparable behaviour by Hitler (The ‘Hitler Myth’, 65–6, 121). After 1929 Stalin’s appearances in public were well nigh all ritualistic, as during Communist holidays when he saluted parades from Lenin’s Mausoleum. 51 Nicolaevsky, Power, 18–19. 52 Figes, People’s Tragedy, 96–8, 520–36; Merridale, Night, 141; Fitzpatrick, “Civil War,” 66–7. 53 For an impression of the fanaticism that had caught on among the zealots, see Lev Kopelev’s recollections of his own attitude towards collecting grain from “anti-Soviet” peasants in Ukraine in 1932–33; such ruthless confiscation contributed to the death of millions (Kopelev, Education, 224–52). 54 Zabveniiu, 167–8; these quotas were decided upon by the buro on February 4 and 9, see gopano, 2/1/192, l.4. Already on the next day, the kraikom instructed local authorities to step-up collectivization and dekulakization further, following Central Executive Committee and Sovnarkom guidelines (Zabveniiu, 177–9; gopano, 2/1/192, ll.10ob., 13). 55 Ivnitskii, Kollektivizatsiia, 193; in June 1930, at a Party conference in Nizhnii, the figures Zhdanov presented for those who had been persecuted in the operation were lower than the target set out in February; see gopano, 2/1/180, l.8. 56 Tragediia 2: 429, 738–44, 746. In “Other Archipelago,” Lynn Viola has shown how similar chaos also affected the treatment of kulaks in the higher categories. 57 Ivnitskii, Kollektivizatsiia, 7–8; Tragediia 2: 14. 58 Tragediia 2: 14, 213–19; Ivnitskii, Repressivnaia, 121–2, 127–8. 59 Tragediia 2: 15, 219 60 Ibid., 224 61 gopano, 2/1/255, l.8 62 Zabveniiu, 167. According to statistics of the People’s Commissariat of Agriculture, the level was even slightly higher: of a total of 1,331,900 peasant households, 671,100 had entered the 5,620 collective farms organized by that date – 50.4 per cent of households (Tragediia 2: 289); 51.8 per cent of ploughed fields, and more than 56.1 per cent of all cattle (likely horses and bovines) had been “socialized” (Tragediia 2: 290). 63 See for example Ivnitskii, Kollektivizatsiia, 93; Stalin, “Dizzy with Success.” 64 gopano, 2/1/298, ll.97–8, 110, 114–15 and 2/1/180, l.25; Tragediia 2: 364, gives a level of collectivization of eighteen per cent for 1 April. 65 Tragediia 2: 533–4. 66 Ibid., 702–3, 788; one secret cc letter to local organizations “On the

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67 68 69 70 71 72 73

74 75 76 77 78

79 80 81 82

83

84 85 86 87

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tasks of the kolkhoz movement in connection with the struggle with perversions of the Party line” was dispatched on 2 April (Ivnitskii, Kollektivizatsiia, 7; gopano, 2/1/53, ll.19–20); as well, see gopano, 2/1/180, l.2; Stalin’s article “Answer to the Comrades Kolkhozniks” was published on 3 April; see Tragediia 2: 837n126. Tragediia 2: 787–9, 791–2, 807. Ibid., 801, 804. Ibid., 809–10; Ivnitskii, Repressivnaia, 194, 203–4, 225–6. 77/1/276, ll.1, 11. Ibid., ll.13–14. Ibid., ll.23–4. 77/1/276, ll.17–19; see as well Zabveniiu, 168–9, which notes similar criticism by Zhdanov at a kraikomburo session in March. gopano, 2/1/192, l.29, notes that, at a buro session of 13 March he criticized the heavyhanded closure of churches. gopano, 2/1/180, ll.1–48. Zabveniiu, 170. 77/2/81, ll.10–11. Simonov, Glazami, 131. In adducing Sloterdijk’s Critique to his argument, Zizek (Sublime, 29) notes how not just in totalitarian regimes “cynicism is the answer of the ruling culture … it recognizes, … the particular interest behind the ideological universality, the distance between the ideological mask and the reality, but it still finds reasons to retain the mask.” “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71; “Posetiteli” I, 21; Stalinskoe Politbiuro, 184. Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants, 63–4; Tragediia 2: 698–9. Zabveniiu, 240; gopano, 2/1/192, l.30. “Kak sozdavalis’,” 5–6. Compare Scott’s account of the learning on the job by former peasants in Magnitogorsk during the early years of the Five-Year Plan (Scott, Beyond the Urals, 70). Arzhanova et al., Ocherki, 238; 77/2/75, l.21; already in 1929 the aid of the Ford company had been enlisted for the construction of the plant (see Reuter, Brothers, 92). Reuter, Brothers, 93. gopano, 2/1/53, ll.23–4 and 2/1/53, ll. 25–8. Ibid., 2/1/165, l.5. It is true, however, as Fainsod noted in studying the Party organization of Smolensk oblast’, that the provincial bosses especially focused on agriculture, because they were not held as fully responsible for industry as for agriculture: there existed a “higher degree of centralized control in the industrial area,” by which he means that many key decisions were made by central organs such as vsnkh, Gosplan, or the rsfsr People’s Commissariats (Fainsod, Smolensk, 72).

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88 gopano, 2/1/165, ll.5, 34–5. 89 Ibid., 2/1/165, l.43. Still, adults in 1929–30 attended education courses seven times more than in 1928–29 (70,000, respectively, and 470,000). In the city, meanwhile, churches were closed to combat the pervasive influence of religion (R. Medvedev, Let History Judge, 228–9). 90 gopano, 2/1/165, ll.46–9; see also Prokof’ev et al., eds., Ocherki, 182–3. On the meaning of the term “backwardness,” see Martin, Affirmative, 6, 14. 91 gopano, 2/1/165, ll.6–9. 92 Ibid., ll.34–5 93 Conze, Sowjetische, 49, 49n86. 94 gopano, 2/1/165, ll.24–8. 95 Ibid., ll.34, 58; Zabveniiu, 241. 96 gopano, 2/1/165, l.53. 97 Stalinskoe Politbiuro, 187; Resolutions 1929–53, 50–1. 98 77/2 preface; 77/2/3, l.4; Stalinskoe Politbiuro, 188; Seibert, Zhdanovism, 87; Politicheskii slovar’, 187; Zhdanov also gave a speech lauding Stalin’s policies in what had become the custom by this time (“Vydaiushchiisia …,” 13). 99 Stalinskoe Politbiuro, 188; Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 2: 57. 100 Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 2: 61. 101 Tragediia 2: 570–5; gopano, 2/1/191, ll.55, 61, 64, 72. 102 Similarly, delays in the construction of the car-manufacturing plant forced Zhdanov to report on them to the Politburo on 15 August (Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 2: 66). 103 Sovetskoe, 471; “Kak sozdavalis’,” 5–6; gopano, 2/1/191, l.79, indicates that the affair was still smouldering in October when Krinitskii attended a kraikombiuro session discussing the Sormovo works. 104 In November, the Politburo looked at a new report from the Nizhnii kraikom, a follow-up on Zhdanov’s report of July; it seems that the kraikom had performed to the Politburo’s satisfaction (Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 2: 99). The Politburo received another report about the state of affairs in Nizhnii in December (ibid., 111). 105 On 25 October he attended a Politburo meeting; on 4 November the combined forum of the Politburo and Central Control Commission, discussing the heresy of Syrtsov, Lominadze, Shatskin, and others, was supported in its attack on the group by a letter from Nizhnii’s kraikom signed by Zhdanov (77/1/294, ll.1–2; Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 45); on 15 December he was present once more at the Politburo and participated from 17 to 21 December in a joint session of the Central Committee and Central Control Commission in which the last of the Rightists to survive at the top, Rykov, lost his Politburo seat and was dismissed as Sovnarkom chair (Stalinskoe Politbiuro, 194; 77/1/298; Khlevniuk, Polit-

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106 107 108 109 110 111 112

113

114

115 116 117

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biuro, 22). Undoubtedly, Zhdanov’s attendance at plena of the cc and Politburo sessions was merely the highlight of his array of meetings and discussions with representatives of lower Party organs, and particularly of the Central Committee’s Secretariat in Moscow. Thus, on 22 December Pakhomov and Zhdanov attended a meeting in the Central Committee’s buildings discussing the results of fall sowing and the prospects for spring sowing in 1931; Nizhnii krai had done very badly in the autumn, for which it was criticized (Tragediia 2: 774–84). 77/2/81, l.11. Tragediia 2: 762, 767, 809–10. Zabveniiu, 170. In mid-1931 collectivization levels stood at thirty-two per cent of all households (gopano, 2/1/583, l.29). Zabveniiu, 170, 240–1. 77/1/298, ll. 1–42; gopano, 2/1/592. 77/1/298, l.27. Ibid., ll.8–9, 21. The show trial against the alleged wreckers of a supposed Industrial Party was held in Moscow between 25 November and 7 December 1930; most of the accused were engineers and technologists; it was a crude attempt to explain the many problems the crash industrialization movement was facing (R. Medvedev, Let History Judge, 263). The ‘Mensheviks’ were accused as well of deliberate sabotage of the economy; they included Sukhanov and others who had worked in Gosplan: their trial was in March 1931 (see Getzler, Nikolai, 159–74; Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 34; Carmichael, “Preface,” xi–xii; Werth, “State,” 170–1; Zensur, 122n1; R. Medvedev, Let History Judge, 264–5). The Peasant Party was allegedly headed by N.D. Kondrat’ev (1892–1938), N.P. Makarov, and A.V. Chaianov (1888–1937); most accused had been arrested in July of 1930. The accused agricultural specialists were sentenced in January 1932 to various jail terms and in 1937–38 retried and executed. In his closing words, Zhdanov condemned Chaianov’s theories of the small farm as the cornerstone of Eastern Slavic agriculture (77/1/298, ll.40–1). 77/1/298, ll.9–10. We can only guess how much Zhdanov seriously feared an invasion by Romania or a plot by university professors such as Chaianov or Kondrat’ev. 77/1/298, l.10. Zhdanov noted that in December Rykov had been removed from the leadership, but that the repentance shown by Rykov and Bukharin was not genuine (77/1/298, ll.30–2). Lominadze was a cc candidate member (who had briefly been stationed in Nizhnii in the late 1920s), while Syrtsov was a candidate Politburo member. 77/1/298, ll.2–5. Ibid., ll.6–7. Ibid., ll.17–18.

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126 127

128 129

130 131 132

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Notes to pages 95–6 Ibid., ll.20–1. Ibid., l.8. Ibid., l.7. Ibid., l.14. Ibid., l.23. Ibid., l.24. Ibid., l.15. Ibid., l.26; in the fall of 1930, the krai’s ogpu troika condemned fortyeight people to execution by firing squad for wrecking the provisioning of workers (Zabveniiu, 240–1). 77/1/298, l.28. 77/1/298, ll.23, 36–42; in August 1930 four years of basic education were made compulsory for all children in the ussr (see Boterbloem, Life and Death, 201–2, 355n120). 77/1/298, ll.36–7. “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71; “Posetiteli” I, 28; Stalinskoe Politbiuro, 195. Zhdanov was invited to attend Politburo sessions twice in March 1931 and once in April, and one of these occassions was accompanied by a visit to Stalin in his Kremlin office (“Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71; Stalinskoe Politbiuro, 196–8). In May he visited Stalin again in his office, without sitting in on a Politburo session (“Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71). Ivnitskii, Kollektivizatsiia, 181–2; Stalinskoe Politbiuro, 196; Tragediia 3: 90. See for example Tragediia 3: 150. Ivnitskii, Repressivnaia, 168–70, 229–32; Zabveniiu, 170–2. In March Zhdanov requested further repressive measures against the “national” kulaks in his domain, that is, against people of non-Russian ethnicity living in the krai (Ivnitskii, Kollektivizatsiia, 184; Tragediia 3: 96). Most of these measures had to be ratified by the Central Committee: in May Secretary Postyshev signed a cc resolution ordering the exile of 5,000 kulak families from the Nizhnii region to Kazakhstan (gopano, 2/1/782, ll.132–3). While it is not always clear who took the initiative, by 1931 the process followed in “dekulakization” appears to have become more structured: one could hypothesize that the initial hint had been given by Stalin to Zhdanov in January, who then proposed to the Politburo what to do with the former kulaks (probably after his decision had been edited and discussed by Orgbiuro and Secretariat), which decided on their treatment and destination; after this, the numerical parameters of the deportations were relayed to the regional bosses who had to receive the ultimate permission from the Politburo or Secretariat to initiate the deportations. Sistema, 157, 331. Tragediia 3: 104, 119–20. Ibid., 171.

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136 Zhdanov, Pakhomov, and Os’mov visited Stalin on 28 May (“Posetiteli” 1: 33). 137 77/2/81, l.12. The first sign of his involvement in oil transport is his participation in a Politburo discussion on 16 June (Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 2: 179). In late July the Politburo granted him a holiday (Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 2: 198). 138 Stalin delivered a famous speech to industrial workers on 4 February 1931 in which he again underlined “Russia’s” traditional backwardness and the need to overcome in ten years the fifty to one hundred years the Soviet Union had been behind the advanced capitalist countries on the eve of the Great Turn (see Stalin, Sochineniia 13:38–9). 139 gopano, 2/1/583. 140 Ibid., l.28ob. Labour fluctuation has been discussed at some length in recent literature (see for instance Kotkin, Magnetic, 94–9). Indeed, by late August Zhdanov’s stand-ins complained about the lack of funds transferred by the centre, leading to the late payment of wages; payments had become irregular because of the lack of productivity in the timber industry (“‘Privlech’,” 106). Forest products continued to form an important component of the krai’s revenue meted out by the central government. 141 In 1933, when Victor Reuther arrived to work at the Molotov works, housing was still appalling (Ilyashov, “Victor,” 301). 142 Kaganovich, Pamiatnye, 425; Stalinskoe Politbiuro, 201. 143 According to records in the Party’s archive in Nizhnii Novgorod, Zhdanov attended a Politburo session on 28 June in which the discussion was about the state of peat-winning; perhaps this was a Secretariat or Orgbiuro session instead, or one of a subcommittee of the Politburo (gopano, 2/1/782, ll.139–40). 144 Stalinskoe Politbiuro, 203, 205, 208–10; “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71; “Posetiteli” 1: 39, 42. 145 See “‘Privlech,’” 106; Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 2: 234. 146 Arzhanova et al., Ocherki, 245. Stalin sent his greetings, published in Pravda on 2 January 1932, wishing for a smooth production of cars (Stalin, Sochineniia 13:124). The passenger cars and light trucks produced there were based on blueprints from the Ford factories in the us (Ilyashov, “Victor,” 298). 147 Arzhanova et al., Ocherki, 247; the official opening occurred on 1 January, when Zhdanov delivered a speech (77/2/82, l.41). 148 Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 2: 245, 249; Ilyashov, “Victor,” 301. 149 In 1932 he had no more than two meetings with Stalin in his office, and in 1933 none at all (see “Posetiteli” 2, and “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71, which are not in agreement about a supposed visit in March 1932). In January 1932 the third Party conference of Nizhnii

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150

151

152 153 154 155 156

157

158

159

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Notes to pages 98–9 Novgorod krai re-elected Zhdanov as first secretary (Arzhanova et al., Ocherki, 245). Stalinskoe Politbiuro, 214, 216–17; Rubtsov, Alter Ego, 78; “Posetiteli” 2: 144; “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71; 77/2/81, l.12. Somewhat antithetical to Zhdanov’s later reputation as “cultural pope,” he was not, for example, involved in the beginnings of the organization of the Soviet Writers’ Union and the origins of the canonization of the literary style of socialist realism. On 23 April 1932, the Politburo (Central Committee) resolved to organize unions of Soviet writers and other artists (Maksimenkov, Sumbur, 23–4; Resolutions 1929–53, 115–16). Recently, Getty and Naumov argued on the basis of their reading of many newly available and several older documents that 1932 was the nadir of Stalin’s “Revolution from Above”: the deepening economic crisis led to what was seen as a supremely dangerous political opposition by those who had supported the General Line before 1929, such as Martem’ian Riutin (Getty, Naumov, Road to Terror, 32–3). Zhdanov mainly focused on the economic issues of his realm (77/2/82, l.42). 77/2/82, l.42–8. Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 2: 312, 314. Tragediia 3: 326–7. 77/1/354, ll.1–4. In Smolensk, a much larger scandal had been uncovered in 1928; it is not obvious, however, to what case in Smolensk Zhdanov refers here (Fainsod, Smolensk, 48–52). The cc resolution on conducting a new purge was issued on 10 December 1932 (Sovetskoe, 301n6). The screening lasted until the spring of 1935 when it merged into a campaign for the checking and exchange of Party documents; new members were taken into the Party again only from 1 November 1936 onward (out of a total of 3.5 million on 1 January 1933, 450,000 members were excluded; see Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 62; Sovetskoe, 301n6). In their telegram from Sochi of September 1936, Stalin and Zhdanov remarked how the ogpu was four years late in seeking out nests of spies. They may have meant that the secret police should have coordinated its work with the Party’s authorities, who began to conduct their purge in January 1933. Fainsod suggests a few reasons for the persistence of such networks, such as “an almost desperate desire for relaxation and security” among local leaders (see Smolensk, 48, 85–6, 92). 77/2/82, l.48. By this point, his holidays had to be ratified by the Politburo, which on 16 June gave him leave for six weeks (Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 2: 319). Getty, Naumov, Road to Terror, 52–61. Cohen, “Des lettres,” 329–30.

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162 Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 150–1; Stalinskoe Politbiuro, 61–2; Zelenin, “‘Zakon,’ ” 114–23. 163 Obshchestvo, 95; the camp was built in the years 1930–32 (GULAG, 336). 164 Zelenin, “‘Zakon,’ ” 117–18. And it seems the situation in the krai was also criticized in several confidential reprimands, issued in July and early August, by the cc, Sovnarkom, and cc secretary Postyshev (77/2/82, l.48). 165 77/2/82, l.48. 166 Prokof’ev, Ocherki, 209–10. 167 “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71. 168 “Posetiteli” 2: 148. Ia.A. Iakovlev (1896–1938), the People’s Commissioner of Agriculture, participated in this meeting, a sign that the operation of Nizhnii’s collective farms and the progress of collectivization in the krai were discussed. Obviously, Zhdanov did not have much to boast about either. 169 77/2/82, l.51; see Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 2: 360. 170 Stalinskoe Politbiuro, 220; he attended the cc plenary session of October, which discussed the Ryutin case (Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 76). Indeed, Pakhomov rather than Zhdanov represented the krai at Politburo meetings in late 1932 and throughout 1933 (see below). It is not impossible, meanwhile, that health problems may have forced Zhdanov to lie low. 171 Arzhanova et al., Ocherki, 299n1; Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 60; Sovetskoe, 199, 204–25. 172 77/1/375, l.2; forty-two per cent of households were collectivized by early 1933 (77/1/375, l.2). Part of this success was apparently due to the application of force (see Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 2: 382). 173 Rubtsov, Alter Ego, 78. The Molotov automobile factory continued to have problems that were important enough to become the Politburo’s business in subsequent years (Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 2: 487, 502, 506). 174 77/2/81, l.12. 175 “‘Massovye,’ ” 119; Sovetskoe, 196n1; KPSS 6: 8. The meeting also condemned a new opposition group, led by Eismont, Tolmachev, and A.P. Smirnov (R. Medvedev, Let History Judge, 329). 176 77/1/375, ll.1–13. A kraikom plenum was staged immediately after his return from Moscow (77/2/82, l.52). 177 Sovetskoe, 196, 320n6; Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 94–9. 178 KPSS 6: 8–18; Short Course, 319–20. 179 Ilyashov, “Victor,” 305–7. 180 “I remember the only time I really saw fresh butter after maybe a six- or eight-month lapse,” Victor Reuther recalled about his life in Nizhnii in 1933–34 (Ilyashov, “Victor,” 304). In February 1933 Zhdanov travelled to the Chuvash capital of Cheboksary to admonish the local Party

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181 182 183 184

185 186 187

188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204

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Notes to pages 101–3 organization about its inadequate guidance of the collective farms (Prokof’ev, Ocherki, 224). “‘Privlech,’” 106–7, 114. See for instance Reuter, The Brothers, 89. Tragediia 3: 748. Zelenin, “‘Zakon,’ ” 122; still, in the Russian Republic alone, in the second half of 1933, 687,000 people were sentenced, only slightly less than the 738,000 of the first half of the year (Stalinskoe Politbiuro, 132). Churchill, Hinge of Fate, 447–8. 77/2/81, l.13. Harrison, “National,” 54; Stalinskoe Politbiuro, 133–4, 228–9; in fact, between the last visit in 1932 and the first in 1933, Pakhomov, a candidate cc member, had attended the Politburo three times (Stalinskoe Politbiuro, 221, 223, 227). In November and December 1933, Pakhomov on his own attended three consecutive Politburo meetings (Stalinskoe Politbiuro, 230–1). 77/2/82, l.65; Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 2: 470. 77/2/82, l.65. Arzhanova et al., Ocherki, 306; the award had been decided by the Politburo on 1 January (Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 2: 495). gopano, 2/1/2600, l.12; Arzhanova et al., Ocherki, 306; 77/1/408, ll.1–9; 77/2/81, l.3. Spravochnik po fondam, 20; Fainsod, How Russia Is Ruled, Table 2, 249. 77/2/82, l.65; Resolutions 1929–53, 129–31; Suvenirov, Tragediia, 21; KPSS 6: 102. KPSS 6: 102. “Rech’ tov. Zhdanova.” “Vydaiushchiisia …,” 13; Borisov, Andrei, 14. “Rech’tov. Zhdanova,” 151. Ibid., 152. Ibid. Ibid. gopano, 2/1/2601, ll.13–13ob. He had not visited Stalin in his office since the late summer of 1933 (“Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71). 77/2/3, l.4; Resolutions 1929–53, 131; Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 112–13. This sudden decision left the third largest Party organization in Russia, that of Gor’kii, without any cc member or candidate among its leaders. A referendum had to be hastily staged after the Congress to elect Eduard Karlovich Pramnek, Zhdanov’s successor as first secretary in Gor’kii, to the cc. Pramnek would eventually be transferred to Donetsk, where he fell victim to the Great Terror (17/3/998, l.10). Pakhomov, too, departed the krai at the same time as Zhdanov to

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become People’s Commissar of Water Transport; he was arrested on 9 April 1938 and eventually executed (Ivkin, Gosudarstvennaia vlast’, 464). Arzhanova et al., Ocherki, 308; gopano, 2/1/2601, l.15ob.; Zhdanov delivered here his farewell speech (77/1/409, ll.1–4). 77/2/82, ll.68–9; 77/1/409, ll.1–4. 77/1/409, l.4. Chernev, 229, 226. Mikhail Kaganovich committed suicide on the eve of the Second World War. The early special status of both Tver’s and Nizhnii’s Communists is illustrated by the fact that in 1925 their first secretaries had a seat on the cc, which was otherwise only the case for the Moscow, Leningrad, Tula, and Don regional secretaries (Mawdsley, White, The Soviet Elite, 46). Thirty-six European Russian provinces were not represented on the cc.

chapter five 1 Mandelshtam, Hope against Hope, 13. 2 “‘Massovye repressii,’ ” 125–9. 3 “Great Terror” is the usual name given by scholars to the period of massive arrests in 1937 and 1938; it derives from the “Terreur” exercised by the Committee of Public Safety in the French Revolution. Other terms used for the same phenomenon are the “(Great) Purge,” the “purge(s)” (which can be confusing as there were many purges of the ranks of the Communist Party from the Civil War onwards), or the “Ezhovshchina,” after Ezhov, the notorious head of the nkvd in 1937 and 1938, which is a misnomer, for Stalin was its main architect. I use “(Great) Terror” and “(Great) Purge” synonymously; when there is no doubt that “purge” or “purges” denote the arrests of 1937–38, I use these terms as additional synonyms. 4 Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 113–15. 5 Sovetskoe, 9–10, notes the compromising material on the two. 6 Although it is impossible to establish the procedure applied to the selection of the letters by the editors of the collection so that it cannot be considered a conclusive piece of evidence, in the published correspondence of the leadership before the Seventeenth Party Congress, Zhdanov’s name does not even appear once (see Sovetskoe, 17–270). 7 Stalin obviously was not fully convinced of the absolute loyalty of either of these Party bodies towards him, as he showed eloquently by having the majority of both cc and 1934 Congress delegates executed within the next five years. 8 Iu. A. Zhdanov, interview.

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Notes to pages 108–11

9 Certainly not by Lenin himself, who wrote in 1918 how “the Russian is a bad worker compared with people in advanced countries” (Lenin, “Immediate Tasks,” 259; see also Lenin’s note to Kamenev of early 1922, in Pipes, Unknown Lenin, 146; Chuev, Molotov, 331). Dominic Lieven makes the point that Chinese history shows how autocrats who “seek to dominate great bureaucratic machines” must devote their lives to this task; Stalin appears to have taken that lesson to heart and expected a similarly tireless effort from his close collaborators (Lieven, Empire, 31). 10 See Iu.N. Zhukov, Tainy, 36. 11 Unlike Khrushchev, though, Zhdanov did have prerevolutionary underground and revolutionary experience as a local Party leader, although he did not have the heroic stature of a Postyshev or Kirov (Ponomarev, “Nikita,” 129). 12 Molotov recalled with some wonder Stalin’s fondness for Zhdanov (Chuev, Molotov, 377, 388). 13 KPSS 6: 103, 129. 14 See among others, Krementsov, Stalinist, 70, and Stalinskoe Politbiuro, 10–11. 15 Stalinskoe Politbiuro, 10–11. 16 See CPSU Top, 11–12. In some of the 1940s archival material one can find lists with printed names of all Central Committee members on which an aide marked their vote on certain issues by a tick in a box behind their names (see for example rgani, 2/1/1a, ll.4–4ob.). Such practice was sometimes used in case of controversial questions (such as the exclusion of cc members from the Party from 1936 onward). The practice was, strictly speaking, a violation of Party rules, as such things as exclusions of cc members were supposed to be discussed in full session by the cc (see Dimitroff, Kommentare, 71, 75). 17 See Schapiro, Communist Party, 445. 18 See “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi” and the chronological lists of visitors as published in Istoricheskii arkhiv in the 1990s (“Posetiteli,” vols. 1–8). 19 Djilas, Conversations, 148, 156; 77/1/539; Mikoian, Tak, 568; Cohen, “Des lettres,” 310–11, 316–17, gives the physical description of L.M. Kaganovich’s notebooks, which were similar to those used by Zhdanov. 20 Hardman, Robespierre, 188. 21 1941 God 1: 429n1. 22 They then absolve themselves further by noting that fear for their lives and for the lives of their relatives prevented them from opposing Stalin’s or his evil advisors’ more odious decisions. Such claims were published after Stalin’s death in the men’s memoirs, their sons’ portraits of their fathers, or the excerpts of Chuev’s meetings with Molotov (see Beriia, Moi otets; Malenkov, O moem ottse; S. Khrushchev, Khrushchev; Mikoian, Tak

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23 24

25

26 27 28 29

30 31 32 33

34 35

36 37

38 39 40 41

389

bylo; Chuev, Molotov; Khrushchev, Vospominaniia, vols. 1–4; Kaganovich, Pamiatnye). Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 111–12. Iu.A. Zhdanov, interview. Perhaps his and other leaders’ talents were more inclined towards such practical matters than to matters spiritual or cultural, as the writer Mikhail Zoshchenko caustically remarked in the summer of 1944 to a Leningrad mgb employee who interrogated him (Babichenko, “‘Povest,’” 71). Zhdanov’s offices, and those of the other secretaries, were located on the fifth floor of the Central Committee buildings (Stalinskoe Politbiuro, 29–30, 30n1). The fifth floor used to be the location of Stalin’s and his aides’ offices in the 1920s (Rubtsov, Alter Ego, 45, 48). Stalin had moved to the Kremlin in the autumn of 1930 (Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 142). “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71; “Posetiteli” 3: 121; Stalinskoe Politbiuro, 232. “Posetiteli” 3: 123–7. 17/114/58, l.2. Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 111. He occasionally worked on reports on agriculture for the cc after December 1934 but was often distracted by other assignments (see, for example, 77/1/530, ll.1–5). Stalinskoe Politbiuro, 48–55; Meissner, “Shdanow” 1: 19; KPSS 6: 151; Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 2: 517, 521, 527, 557. “Posetiteli” 3: 123–8. 77/1/410, ll.1–27; 77/1/414, ll.1–5, shows that his involvement in agriculture was constant throughout 1934. Stalinskoe Politbiuro, 233; Sovetskoe, 272–5. Antonov-Ovseenko knew about this quarrel long before the Soviet archives opened, although he placed it in 1933 (Antonov-Ovseyenko, Time, 206). He claims that Osinskii was only shot in 1941 in Orel, after four years of prison. Sovetskoe, 274–5. Osinskii was given a two-month holiday to recover from the controversy’s stress, only to lose his job within the year; he eventually ended up before a firing squad in 1938 (Sovetskoe, 478). Stalinskoe Politbiuro, 70–1. Because of his transfer to Leningrad, he was replaced in this job on 25 December by another rising star, N.I. Ezhov. This point is made by V.D. Esakov, the editor of a collection of documents referring to Soviet academicians, a group most severely affected by this extreme suspicion (see Akademiia Nauk, 15). Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 158. Brandenberger, Dubrovsky, “‘The People,” 874–6; Brandenberger, “Short Course,” 54–5, 68; Maslov, “’Kratkii kurs,’” 54. Perrie, Cult, 29; see as well van Ree, Political Thought, 194. Dimitroff, Tagebücher, 105.

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42 Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 112–13; Stalinskoe Politbiuro, 141–2; Akademiia Nauk, 15–16. But this delineation was quickly ignored: on 13 June 1934, in Stalin’s presence Zhdanov addressed a meeting of workers in defence industries (77/3/5, ll.9–36). 43 Illustrative of the continued ad hoc practice regarding the division of responsibilities among the secretaries was the fact that, almost exactly a year later, on 30 May 1935, Zhdanov addressed in the cc a meeting of water-transport managers. This should have been Kaganovich’s terrain, but it likely became Zhdanov’s assignment because of his background in Gor’kii, a key point for river transport along the Volga and Oka rivers (77/2/81, l.3). 44 “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71; Stalinskoe Politbiuro, 234–5; KPSS 6: 153–69. Much of Zhdanov’s time in supervising agriculture had been taken up by animal husbandry, as was much of this meeting. Now that the worst crises with grain production had been overcome, livestock became the focus. Collective farms would not be able to produce adequate amounts of meat and milk for domestic consumption in the ussr until Stalin’s death, at least not from the collectively owned herds (see Boterbloem, Life and Death, 216, 221–2, 260–1). 45 “Posetiteli” 3: 141. 46 Stalinskoe Politbiuro, 235–7. 47 The Politburo had made a decision on Zhdanov’s holidays on 9 July (Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 2: 557). Zhdanov apparently (either then or earlier) became quite fond of Kirov and was shaken by his death (Lobanov, Stalin, 291; Iu.A. Zhdanov, interview). 48 Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 2: 572. As Mazour and Bateman write: “The textbook then in use, written by followers and pupils of [M.N.] Pokrovsky, was condemned by Stalin, Sergei Kirov, and Andrei Zhdanov. They deplored the treatment of the Russian people as remote from Western culture. The trio also scored historians for neglecting Western democratic and socialist movements and their effect upon the social development of Russia. Finally, the influence of Western ideas was not to be ignored. These instructions became fundamental to the new ‘line’ but were to be a source of unending grief to historians from the date of their issue and especially after 1945” (Mazour, Bateman, “Recent Conflicts,” 59). Perrie notes that the “Observations” contradicted the trend towards “Russian nationalism” noticeable in the media from 1934 onward, which were one reason for this confusion (Perrie, Cult, 26). The remarks on the two textbooks on the history of the ussr and on New History (more or less Early Modern and Modern History) were only published in the Unionwide press in January 1936 (77/2/81, l.14). 49 Kirilina, Rikoshet, 85–6; Iu.A. Zhdanov, “Vo mgle,” 69; Meissner, “Shdanow” 1: 19; KPSS 6: 151; Mawdsley, White, The Soviet Elite, 115–16.

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50 Brandenberger, “Short Course,” 32, 48–50, 54–8. 51 The pedagogical benefits of the reforms on the quality of history teaching seem to have been slight during the 1930s (Brandenberger, “Short Course,” 94–5). In September 1936, while he was holidaying again with Stalin in Sochi, Zhdanov became involved in the organization of a contest for the creation of the best textbook for the history of the ussr (77/1/611, l.4). In 1935 and 1936 he headed the subcommittee on education of the committee drafting a constitution for the Union. In 1938–39, he reorganized agitation and propaganda while concurrently introducing the Short Course, and in 1946 he introduced a comprehensive system of Party schools. Educational levels were also affected by the tardy introduction of general compulsory four-year education, which dated from the beginning of the First Five-Year Plan (Soviet Union YearBook, 463). 52 Iu.N. Zhukov, Tainy, 286. 53 Iu.A. Zhdanov, interview. 54 77/2/81, l.3; Pervyi Vsesoiuznyi S’ezd, 2–5; Kirilina, Rikoshet, 88, is mistaken in noting that Zhdanov only returned to Moscow towards 23 August. 55 Clark, Petersburg, 278–9. Censorship had been in effect since 1917 and the Communist rulers had been from the beginning suspicious of the arts. Stalin had for years kept a close eye on writers like Evgenii Zamyatin (who managed, after long pleading, to leave the country in 1929) and Mikhail Bulgakov. 56 Shentalinskii, Raby, 346–8; Maksimenkov, Sumbur, 40; Brooks, Thank You, 108; Clark, Petersburg, 284–5. 57 Getty and Naumov imply that his transfer to Leningrad led to his relinquishing of the supervision over the cc Culture and Propaganda department to Stalin himself (Road to Terror, 108). The “official” Politburo decree about the reshuffling of duties may have been issued on 3 April 1935 (ibid., 160). 58 Gromov, Stalin, 84; Maksimenkov, Sumbur, 6, 303; for Stalin’s personal involvement in these matters, Maksimenkov, Sumbur, 52–3. 59 Brooks, Thank You, 107–8; Ehrenburg, Post-War Years, 44: “Stalin evidently regarded him as an expert on art and letters and as early as 1934 had given him the task of speaking at the Congress.” 60 See Kenez, Shepherd, “‘Revolutionary’ Models,” 48. 61 Clark, Petersburg, 285–6, 293; Ermolaev, Censorship, 53: “Approved by Zhdanov and the Congress, the official formula of Socialist Realism described it as “the basic method of Soviet literature and literary criticism,” which “demands from the artist a truthful, historically concrete depiction of reality in its revolutionary development … combined with the task of ideologically remolding and educating the working people in

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62 63 64 65

66 67

68 69

70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77

78

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the spirit of socialism.” This definition identified the truth with the portrayal of life “in its revolutionary development,” thus instructing the writers to concentrate on people and events advancing social, economic, and political aims of the ruling Party.” Shneidman, Russian Literature, 53. Gromov, Stalin, 142, 301. Gromov, Stalin, 302. Gorky, Mother. Gromov, Stalin, 161, 236; 77/3/112, l.3; Vlast’ i khudozhestvennaia, 220–3, 230–1; that Stalin was still in Sochi is clear from Kalinin’s reference to him in a letter to Enukidze of 11 September (Sovetskoe, 295–6) and from a note by Stalin to Ordzhonikidze on 18 September 18 (Stalinskoe Politbiuro, 142). Gromov writes further (Stalin, 160–1): “The first violin was Gor’kii, while behind the scene A. Zhdanov conducted. In the name of the highest leadership he gave a directing speech. It is clear that the cards were already dealt before the Congress from a note by Zhdanov to Stalin, in which Zhdanov referred to the pre-Congress meeting of the communist writers who had been warned against any [ultra-leftist] sentiments.” Babichenko, Schast’e, 126. Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 113. In Zhdanov’s personal archive, the great variety of materials that have been preserved for the summer months of 1934 attest to Zhdanov’s role as the highest Party leader present in Moscow (see, for example, 77/1/415, ll.1–10). Kirilina, Neizvestvennyi, 330. Kirilina, Rikoshet, 91; he arrived around 21 September, which means that he left Moscow no later than the twentieth. The Stalingrad region’s agricultural woes had been the subject already of Politburo attention in June and August (Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 2: 566). 77/1/416, ll.15–16, 68. 77/1/416, ll.1–26, l.1. See, for example, Iu.N. Zhukov, Tainy, 17. 77/1/416, l.2. 77/1/416, ll.6, 12–13. 77/1/416, ll.27–68. 77/1/416, l.64. It may be noted here that the two prize-winning regions had been (or were) led by the high-flying Zhdanov and Khrushchev (although the latter was formally Kaganovich’s deputy in Moscow until 1935): in the course of the 1930s (and even more so after World War ii) the agricultural performance of a region was used to measure the competence of a Party leader. In October and November of 1934, Zhdanov may have participated in an aborted attempt to curtail the powers of the nkvd, when he joined

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79 80 81 82 83 84

85

86 87

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Kuibyshev (its chair), State Prosecutor Akulov (1888–1939), and Kaganovich on a Politburo commission (on Stalin’s suggestion) investigating the ogpu (reorganized as ussr nkvd in July 1934) for extremely high levels of arrest and abuse of detainees (Getty, Naumov, Road to Terror, 122). But no direct reference is given by Getty and Naumov to any commission activities. Zhdanov was appointed by the Politburo to “the Central Commission for the Purge” on 6 October 1934, but this was the Party purge committee formed in April 1933 (Road to Terror, 125–8; Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 2: 421, 594). Kaganovich appears to have been in the Urals and Siberia in October (Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 2: 592, 595–6). On the nkvd reorganization, see Khaustov, “Razvitie,” 357–8. Stalinskoe Politbiuro, 236; “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71. “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71; Stalinskoe Politbiuro, 237; Khrushchev, Vospominaniia 2: 805, 807. 77/1/411, ll.1–3; Stalinskoe Politbiuro, 50–5; 77/1/418, l.1; 77/2/83, l.50; tsgaipd, 24/2/91, ll.1–4. 77/1/419; Resolutions 1929–53, 153; KPSS 6: 182, 186–90. Davies, Economic Transformation, 286–8, Table 19, 302–3, Table 31. “Ubiistvo v Smol’nom,” 62; “Posetiteli” 3: 144; Kirilina, Neizvestvennyi, 229. Molotov, Kaganovich, Zhdanov, and Voroshilov all stayed with Stalin for five consecutive hours; their meeting began before the news had arrived that Kirov had been assassinated. Iagoda, who entered Stalin’s office two and a half hours into the meeting, was the first to inform the quintet. Half an hour after Iagoda’s arrival, nkvd guards’ chiefs Pauker, Peterson, and Gul’ko joined, closely followed by Politburo alternate members Ordzhonikidze, Kalinin, Mikoian, Andreev, and Chubar’, as well as the secretary of the Central Executive Committee of soviets, A.S. Enukidze. After everyone but Iagoda had left, Agitprop chief A.I. Stetskii, newspaper editors Bukharin and Mekhlis, and the young ideological apparatchik M.A. Suslov met Stalin briefly, apparently to receive instructions on how to report the murder in the press. Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 142. In subsequent months, while levels of arrest were burgeoning, a widening application of the death penalty was legislated: In March 1935 the death penalty was mandated for convicted “socially harmful elements” (armed robbers). By April 1935 twelve-yearold “hardened criminals” could be executed (Hagenloh, “‘Socially Harmful,’ ” 291; Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 146). These measures may have been primarily intended against common criminals in 1935, but they eventually facilitated the merciless judicial persecution of political criminals as well. Kirilina, Rikoshet, 32; Kirilina, Neizvestvennyi, 232. Kirilina, Rikoshet, 32–3; Kirilina, Neizvestvennyi, 232. Khrushchev’s presence is altogether curious.

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88 Kirilina, Rikoshet, 50–1; Kirilina, Neizvestvennyi, 262. They probably interrogated the self-proclaimed witness M.N. Volkova on the same day, a paranoid schizophrenic who claimed to have known about the plot to murder Kirov before it was carried out (“‘Ia znala,’” 58–70). 89 Lubianka, 147. Medved’ had been fired on 3 December (Davies, Popular, 118). The Latvian Zakovskii (Genrikh Ernestovich Stibus) was a veteran nkvd operative who had earned his stripes in Ukraine and Belarus’ (Antonov-Ovseyenko, Time, 96; Kirilina, Neizvestvennyi, 494). 90 Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 142. 91 Reabilitatsiia, 124. 92 Kirilina, Neizvestvennyi, 232. Kirov’s body lay in state for another day in Moscow before being buried in the Kremlin wall (Kirilina, Neizvestvennyi, 233). 93 “Posetiteli” 3: 145. 94 Visits with Stalin at the Kremlin continued from 4 December through the twelfth (“Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71; “Posetiteli” 3: 145). 95 “Ubiistvo v Smol’nom,” 62. 96 Chudov had first moved from Tver’ to Rostov-on-the-Don and then been promoted to the position of secretary of the Northern Caucasus kraikom, where he probably met Kirov; he had been transferred to Leningrad in 1928 (Kirilina, Neizvestvennyi, 536). 97 77/1/419, ll.1–3; tsgaipd, 24/2/83 and 24/2/131. 98 77/1/419, ll.7–51; tsgaipd, 24/2/83, ll.1–46. Its practical implementation was then worded in a decree by the municipal and provincial committees issued on the next day (Rimmel, “Another Kind,” 496, 496n85). 99 Based on 77/2/76, 43–4. 100 77/2/3, l.4; Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 159; Stalinskoe Politbiuro, 94; the candidate members Mikoian and Chubar’ were made full members, while Zhdanov gained candidate status together with Siberian boss Robert Eikhe. The cc plenum on 1 February 1935 appears to have been short: it mainly obliged Premier Molotov to propose to the upcoming Seventh Congress of Soviets a draft of the new constitution (KPSS 6: 197). 101 CPSU’s Top, 6. 102 Whereas in 1934 Zhdanov visited Stalin almost as much as Kaganovich and Molotov did (about seven times a month), in 1935 such visits took place twice a month and in 1936 just once a month (Khlevniuk, Stalinskoe, 290–1). 103 Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 160. 104 Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 246. 105 Stalinskoe Politbiuro, 247; Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 246, 290–1; 17/3/986, l.1. 106 Davies, Popular Opinion, 31; Fitzpatrick, “Supplicants,” 81n10, 84.

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107 Davies, Popular Opinion, 158, 163. 108 Fitzpatrick calculates that Zhdanov in his capacity as Leningrad obkom secretary received between 150 and 200 letters per day in 1936 (“Supplicants,” 81n10). Permitting the population’s criticism of misbehaving officials and difficulties was a safety valve; it was strictly forbidden, however, to criticize the Regime’s fundamental tenets (see Shlapentokh, Normal Totalitarian Society, 129). 109 Kershaw, The ‘Hitler Myth,’ 102–3. 110 Davies, “‘Us,’ ” 50–1. 111 Among broad sections of Leningrad workers, the leaders, indeed, do not seem to have enjoyed great popularity in the mid-1930s. Before the purges began in earnest Zhdanov was sent many a letter attesting to this resentment or even hatred (Davies, “‘Us,’” 57–60). In Zhdanov’s first published speech as local boss, which appeared in the Leningradskaia Pravda in early April 1935, he spoke before Party workers of the Moskovskii raion (77/2/81, l.14). In the spring of 1936 he made a slate of public appearances in Leningrad in a stab at a populist approach (77/2/81, l.15; he spoke to railroad Stakhanovites, students and staff of a new propaganda school, and workers in the optical industry). This effort was aborted by the summer, probably in connection with the trumped-up paranoia about terrorists engendered by the first Moscow Trial. 111 Davies, Popular Opinion, 165–6. 112 Davies, Popular Opinion, 165–6. 113 “Foreign News,” 20; Archives of the Department of State, “John Scott’s Notes,” 7. 114 Iu. A. Zhdanov, interview. 115 Allilueva, Tol’ko, 356. 116 Osokina, Za fasadom, 134; Davies, Popular Opinion, 141–2, “‘Us,’” 61–7; the gap between the small group of privileged (enjoying special food parcels and other perquisites) and the “common people” remained in place throughout the 1930s and 1940s (Zima, Golod, 55–6). 117 Iu.A. Zhdanov, “Vo mgle,” 66. 118 Iu. A. Zhdanov, interview. 119 Razumov, Leningradskii 2: 457–9. 120 Poliakov, “Polveka” 1: 16; Zhiromskaia, Demograficheskaia, 38–9, Table 6. 121 Poliakov, “Polveka” 1: 16; Davies, Popular Opinion, 18. By 1939 its population stood at 3.1–3.2 million (Zhiromskaia, Demograficheskaia, 53–6, Table 7). 122 Davies, Popular Opinion, 17–18. See as well Karasev, Leningradtsy, 19; Dzeniskevich, Nakanune, 29. 123 Davies, Popular Opinion, 18; Clark, Petersburg, 297–9. 124 Clark, Petersburg, 299; Akademiia Nauk, 141, 157–9.

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125 Davies, Popular Opinion, 17–18; Boterbloem, Life, 36. 126 Davies, Popular Opinion, 17–18; Rimmel, “Another Kind,” 489. According to Zhdanov’s own account in June 1935, in the winter of 1935 sixtysix per cent of households in the oblast’ had been collectivized, but by June 1935 the figure had already risen to eighty-two per cent (Pravda, 19 June 1935, 2). 127 After Kirov’s murder, the first issue Zhdanov addressed upon his arrival in Leningrad was the situation of “backward” kolkhozy (tsgaipd, 24/2/87, ll.63–8). See as well tsgaipd, 24/2/111; Rimmel, “Another Kind,” 489; Boterbloem, Life and Death, 14–22, 206–32; Fainsod, Smolensk, 265–79; Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants, 145–8. 128 Zhiromskaia, Demograficheskaia, 9–25. 129 Zhiromskaia, Demograficheskaia, 27. 130 Davies, Popular Opinion, 24–5; O.F. Suvenirov’s family had less than 2.5 square metres available to each in 1930s Leningrad (Suvenirov, Tragediia, 34). 131 Pravda, 19 June 1935, 2. 132 77/1/419, l.19; Davies, Popular Opinion, 29, 31; Rimmel, “Another Kind,” 483–7, 493, 497. 133 Davies, Popular Opinion, 31. 134 Zhiromskaia, Demograficheskaia, 29. 135 In 1957 a former high employee of the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry noted that the production of pig iron stagnated during the Great Terror, something he explained by pointing at the extermination of cadres going on in 1937 and 1938 (see Molotov, 443). 136 17/3/1009, l.17; see as well the behaviour of Soviet troops who occupied former eastern Poland in September-October 1939 (Gross, Revolution, 45–9; Scott, Duel, 23, 40–1, 211; Broekmeyer, Stalin, 31). 137 1941 God 1: 550–61. 138 This destitution was charted long ago and admirably proven by Janet Chapman; see Real Wages, 165–75; see as well Gordon, Klopov, Chto eto bylo?, 105. 139 Hellbeck, “Fashioning the Stalinist Soul,” 111. 140 See for example Suvenirov, Tragediia, 35. 141 Davies, “‘Us,’ ” 58–61. 142 On 9 January 1935, a nkvd oso sentenced seventy-seven members of “the Leningrad counterrevolutionary Zinovievite Group of Safarov, Zalutskii, and others” to confinement and exile. The level of persecution now began to intensify in Moscow as well, as is evident from the sentencing of the nineteen members of a Moscow Centre, each of whom was given from five to ten years of confinementh on 16 January (Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 142; Reabilitatsiia, 124–41; former cc member P.A. Zalutskii [1887–1937] had been arrested in December 1934; at

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143 144

145

146 147

148

149 150

151 152

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the time of the Revolution and during the 1920s, he had been a Petrograd Bol’shevik leader). Even before Zhdanov had arrived there, a special judicial troika had been instituted in Leningrad by the Politburo on 16 April 1933, consisting of Kirov, F.D. Medved’, and I.F. Kadatskii [sic]. The troika had enjoyed the right to examine cases of rebellion and counterrevolution and been given permission to sentence people to death (rgani, 89/per 43/46, l.1; Razumov, Leningradskii 1: 36). Subsequently, Zakovskii and Zhdanov replaced Medved’ and Kirov in the troika, after which it was soon abolished, only to be resurrected again (see Shearer, “Social Disorder,” 522–5). Resolutions 1929–53, 168–9; Reabilitatsiia, 169–70; Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 143; Getty, Naumov, Road to Terror, 147–50. Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 143; Reabilitatsiia, 170; Berezhkov, Piterskie, 139; on 31 January the obkom-gorkombiuro discussed the Zinovievites (tsgaipd, 24/2/133, l.2; see also 24/2/134, ll.64–5, from which it is obvious that Chudov mainly occupied himself with the issue). Kovalev, Dva stalinskikh, 125; the stepped-up screening fell within the terms of the Party purge that had been instituted in early 1933, which had still not been brought to conclusion in early 1935. Seibert, “Zhdanovism,” 97, 104–12; it was a belated publication of a plenum speech held early in the month (tsgaipd 24/2/101, ll.1–11). Ivanov, “Byvshie,” 72–3; Genrikh Iagoda, 465–76; Berezhkov, Piterskie, 150–7; Pis’ma, 261; Il’inskii, Narkom, 198–9; Rimmel, “Microcosm,” 534. Genrikh Iagoda, 470–3, 476. If the decree had been applied indiscriminately, Zhdanov and his family would have fallen under the terms of the categories liable to exile, because his father had been a tsarist civil servant, while Zhdanov himself had served as an officer in the tsarist army and knew foreign languages. Genrikh Iagoda, 465–9. In March the Politburo ordained the exile of dubious elements from border areas near Leningrad and in the Karelian autonomous republic (Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 145). For the impact of the arrests on those affected, see Likhachev, Reflections, 195–6. At the end of 1935, the total number of exiles from Leningrad reached 40,000, a figure that may include the “kulak and anti-Soviet elements” discussed by Shearer but likely did not include the tens of thousands of violators of the passport regime who had been residing illegally in Leningrad (see Shearer, “Social Disorder,” 524–5; Ivanov, “Byvshie,” 73; Iu.N. Zhukov, “Repressii,” 7). Some victims were (partially) amnestied, but they were only a minority of all who were banished (Pis’ma, 271, 290–1). Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 148; KPSS 6: 197. See Iu.N. Zhukov, “Repressii.”

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398 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161

162 163

164 165 166

167 168 169 170 171 172 173

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Notes to pages 128–30 Davies, Popular Opinion, 53; Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants, xviii. Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 149–50, 152; Iu.N. Zhukov, “Repressii,” 7–8. Boterbloem, Life and Death, 229–31. 77/2/81, l.15. 77/2/82, l.74. Getty, Naumov, Road to Terror, 160–84. Pravda, 19 June 1935, 2–3; Iu.N. Zhukov, “Tainy,” 104. Pravda, 19 June 1935, 2. Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 146–7. And in his speech in Leningrad published in Pravda on the eve of his departure he had already criticized the poor record keeping (Pravda, 19 June 1935, 3). Zhdanov, Uroki, 5; 77/2/82, l.74; 77/1/472, title page. 77/1/472; 77/1/477, l.1; 77/1/478, l.74; Getty, Origins, 106, indicates that the visit happened from 5 to 7 July, but those were only the days when Saratov krai’s Party committee met. Seibert, “Zhdanovism,” 128; 77/2/81, l.4; Zhdanov, Uroki. Zhdanov, Uroki, 6. Before Krinitskii’s transfer to Saratov, which had been recent, he had worked both in the cc apparatus (from 1927 to 1929 he headed, ironically, the Agitprop department, later Zhdanov’s domain) and as Deputy People’s Commissar of Agriculture in the preceding years (see for instance Mawdsley, White, The Soviet Elite, 45, Table 2.3; Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 155; and chapter 4). Unlike Zhdanov or Malenkov, Krinitskii seems to be one of a cohort of Stalinists in the central apparatus who did not perform quite up to Stalin’s standards; similarly, K. Bauman, I. Moskvin, Ia. Iakovlev, and P. Postyshev moved laterally or were demoted at or immediately after the Seventeenth Party Congress and were ultimately arrested in 1937–8. Zhdanov criticized kraikom decisions on agriculture as well (see Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants, 115, 134). 77/1/478, l.67. 77/1/478, l.106. As can be seen from the specifics of the print-run for Zhdanov, Uroki. Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 147. 77/1/479, l.15; 77/1/483, ll.1–2; 77/2/82, l.75; Clark, Petersburg, 297–300. Getty, Origins, 111–12; Iu.N. Zhukov, “Repressii,” 7. On 7 July, while Zhdanov was in Saratov, he was appointed chair of the subcommission on education by the constitutional commission (77/2/82, l.75; 77/1/602, l.1). His involvement with the improvement of higher education continued until the war; as responsible cc secretary Zhdanov handwrote resolutions regarding the lack of instruction in bookkeeping and accounting for engineering students in Leningrad on a letter sent

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175

176

177

178 179 180 181 182 183

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to the Central Committee’s Secretariat by Aleksei Kuznetsov in 1940 (Sovetskoe, 412–16). See as well, for instance, KPSS 6: 376–7. Shteppa, Russian Historians, 119–20; KPSS 6: 254–7, 263–7; 77/1/497; 77/1/498, l.3. On 13 May 1935 he had spoken before the Politburo about the need to improve schooling at all levels (Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 2: 645). Roy Medvedev scorns these educational reforms as “perverting the basic principles of Communist education” (R. Medvedev, Let History Judge, 814–15). Despite the successful offensive against illiteracy in the Soviet Union, in January 1936, Sovnarkom and cc issued a resolution for a further battle to educate the estimated ten per cent who were illiterate, and an unspecified number of “semiliterates” in 1936 and 1937 (see KPSS 6: 305–9). By the autumn of 1936, Zhdanov stressed the more exacting educational standards by berating his immediate colleagues in the Leningrad Party leadership and the employees of its bureaucracy for the poor grammatical quality of reports that were submitted to the obkombiuro, sometimes even after numerous copy edits (77/1/633, ll.9–10). On 23 June 1936 the Sovnarkom and cc issued a decree on the work of institutions of higher education and on the leadership of higher schools: entry guidelines and exams were defined for postsecondary education (KPSS 6: 351–62). The decree reflected the goals of a Politburo commission chaired by Zhdanov that had begun its work in June 1935 (Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 2: 656, 679). On 4 July 1936 another cc decree condemned the republican People’s Commissariats of Education for the plethora of special-education schools and for the state of the study of “pedology” (the interdisciplinary “scientific” study of the nature and development of children, especially “troubled” children, using insights from psychology, pedagogy, and physiology; KPSS 6: 364–7; Pruzhinina, Pruzhinin, “Iz istorii,” 143; Brandenberger, “Short Course,” 58n50). Zhdanov had presented the case on 27 June 1936 to the Politburo (Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 2: 768). Davies, Popular Opinion, 69. On 26 June 1936 the cc established a Higher School of Party Organizers under the cc ORPO (see KPSS 6: 363). 77/2/82, l.75; Meissner, “Shdanow” 2: 94; Adibekov, Organizatsionnaia, 180, 183; Ebon, Malenkov, 50; Iovchuk, “Vydaiushchiisia,” 84. Dimitroff, Tagebücher, 99–103. Adibekov, Organizatsionnaia, 182–3; Dimitroff, Kommentare, 83. Nevertheless, in practice Zhdanov lacked time to focus on the Comintern until 1938. Romanovskii suggests that at some point during 1937 Zhdanov asked Comintern chief Dimitrov to keep him informed about everything concerning the Comintern (Romanovskii, Liki, 59).

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189 190 191 192

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Notes to pages 131–4 Zhdanov may only have been able to concentrate on Comintern affairs at about the time when Agitation and Propaganda became his domain, in the late summer of 1938; Agitprop supervised the relationship between the vkp (b) and its sister parties. On March 9 and 16, Nazi authorities had announced the rebuilding of the German army. See for example Iu.N. Zhukov, Tainy, 17. Schapiro, Communist Party, 488–9. 77/2/82, ll.76–7; 77/1/485; 77/1/486, ll.19, 23; Shaskov, Spetspereselentsy, 79. The Kola Peninsula and Murmansk underwent rapid economic development during the 1930s (Kolarz, Russia, 93). Many of its newer inhabitants were former kulaks, who had been deported to the region. 77/1/496, l.11; 77/2/81, l.15; 77/2/82, l.77. Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 2: 693. Ibid., 697. Fainsod, Smolensk, 320. To a degree, the movement was nothing new, for it harked back to earlier “socialist-emulation” or “shock-worker” movements that had popped up around 1930. See Shlapentokh, Normal Totalitarian Society, 66. 77/2/82, l.78. Zhdanov, Stakhanovtsy, 7. 77/2/82, l.78. 77/1/504; 77/1/505. 77/1/506, l.1. 77/1/505, l.3. 77/1/507, l.3. Sovetskoe, 488. 77/1/508, l.1. The speech that can be found in this file was published in the press, and Lewis Siegelbaum could therefore analyse it already before Zhdanov’s papers became available in the early 1990s; see Siegelbaum, Stakhanovism, 83–4. 77/2/81, l.4; 77/2/82, l.78; Iovchuk, “Vydaiushchiisia,” 81; Zhdanov, Stakhanovtsy; for notes for this speech and for Stalin’s speech at the allUnion rally, see 77/1/516. Files 77/1/517 and 77/1/520 provide more material on Zhdanov’s role in propagating Stakhanovism. A photograph was published in the Union wide press of Zhdanov applauding the Stakhanovites, but he was standing on his own, distinctly behind the quintet of Stalin, Andreev, Ordzhonikidze, Voroshilov, and Kaganovich (who stand abreast), as if to underline that Zhdanov remained a mere alternate Politburo member (see Siegelbaum, Stakhanovism, 122). Moullec, “Les grandes purges,” 121. Sabotage of the movement was

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condemned in a cc decree in late November of 1935 (Davies, Popular Opinion, 33). Attempts to attain record levels of output were impaired by a host of difficulties: “[These] included the absence of sufficient quantities of supplies or fuel to sustain increased output, failure to integrate production and delivery schedules, and inadequate attention to the preparation of workers, psychologically and otherwise … Radiator fittings, ball bearings, and frame girders were what the Kirov works lacked to achieve its target of seventy-five tractors per day during its Stakhanovite [drive], whereas at the Leningrad Elektrosila plant, it was a question not only of late delivery of supplies, but of their alleged poor quality” (Siegelbaum, Stakhanovism, 106). At the Kirov works the purges hit perhaps harder than elsewhere in 1937 and 1938 because the factory had been a Zinovievite hotbed in the 1920s (R. Medvedev, Let History Judge, 450; Chuev, Molotov, 371). On 13 April 1937, a Leningrad obkom plenum condemned former Kirov factory director K. Ots (1892–1937) for his negligence regarding the formation of saboteurs’ organizations at his plant (tsgaipd, 24/2/1332, ll.15–61; Kirilina, Neizvestvennyi, 516). Zhdanov himself admitted publicly to the ferocity with which the purges (combined with the unsettling consequences of the Stakhanov movement?) had hit the Kirov plant, where production levels in 1937 had dropped to less than fifty per cent of planned targets (A. Zhdanov, “Report,” 705). Resolutions 1929–53, 156; 77/1/538; KPSS 6:284–304; on 30 December 1935 Zhdanov reported on the cc plenum to a meeting of Party activists in Leningrad (77/2/81, l.3). 77/1/560, ll.1–19. Maksimenkov, Sumbur, 81; Vlast’ i khudozhestvennaia, 765–6n2. On 28 January Pravda published “Sumbur vmesto muzyki” (Pravda, 28 January 1936, 3; “‘Ne buduchi,’ ” 113; Maksimenkov, Sumbur, 12). The theatre director V. Meyerhold came under attack as well around this time (Clark, Petersburg, 290–1). Maksimenkov, Sumbur, 49, 66, 182; Vlast’ i khudozhestvennaia, 281. On 6 January 1936, Kerzhentsev was appointed by the Politburo as chair of the new All-Union Committee for the Arts under the Sovnarkom, organized on Stalin’s suggestion. 77/2/82, l.81; Brandenberger, “Short Course,” 381, 384–5; Tillett, The Great Friendship, 44. 77/1/557; Maksimenkov, Sumbur, 69. In addition, he received regular reports from both local and all-Union censors (Zensur, xxii). He met about twice a month with Stalin in his Kremlin office in the autumn of 1935 and in the winter and spring of 1936. In addition, there were several Politburo meetings in Moscow, as well as sessions of the Secretariat and Orgbiuro, which Zhdanov attended (“Posetiteli …

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Notes to pages 136–8 Alfavitnyi,” 71; Stalinskoe Politbiuro, 243–4). On 14 January 1936, Zhdanov participated in an Orgbiuro meeting where the main point of discussion was the “exchange of party documents”; Ezhov ran the meeting (17/114/559, ll.1–4). Exaggerations of Stakhanovism and I.P. Pavlov’s funeral were among the matters he looked into in Leningrad (77/2/81, l.15; 77/2/82, ll.81–2; Stalinskoe Politbiuro, 244; “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71; Moullec, “Les grandes purges,” 121; Akademiia Nauk, 227–30). 77/1/594, title page, l.1; Molotov, 838; Maksimenkov, Sumbur, 236. Petrovichev, Kolotov, N.A. Voznesenskii, 19. 77/1/590, title page, l.1; KPSS 6: 335–50; Davies, Popular Opinion, 102. Iu.N. Zhukov, Tainy, 28 Obshchestvo, 124, 127–8. See Obshchestvo, 122–3. Getty, Naumov, Road to Terror, 331–3, 452–4. 77/1/590, ll.1–70. 77/1/593, l.1; 77/1/594. 77/2/82, ll.88–9. For more on the celebration of such Soviet heroes, see Petrone, Life, 46–84. Resolutions 1929–1953, 167–81; Reabilitatsiia, 196–210. There was one Politburo meeting in July, on the nineteenth (Stalinskoe Politbiuro, 245). It may have ratified the staging of the trial against Kamenev and Zinoviev, although the interrogations of Zinoviev and Kamenev were far from completed (Getty, Naumov, Road to Terror, 250–2). Zhdanov visited Stalin twice after the Politburo session (Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71). Resolutions 1929–1953, 172; Rogovin, 1937, 21; Reabilitatsiia, 189. Dimitroff, Tagebücher, 166. See Dimitroff, Kommentare, 72, 84, 245, 499; Antonov-Ovseyenko, Time of Stalin, 98. Iu.N. Zhukov, “Repressii,” 14. Obviously, having succeeded Iagoda in September, Ezhov became more actively involved in editing the script with Stalin. Ezhov came dangerously close to admitting the whole scam in March 1937 at the cc plenum when he noted: “I told the comrades [Iagoda, Vyshinskii, other nkvd employees]: ‘Because the trial is near at hand, the trial will have a huge international political significance, we need to document everything to the small items, to collect exhaustive references – is there such a hotel or not, is there such a sign or not, is there such a street and so on’” (“Materialy” 7: 17). Among them were Kaganovich, Molotov, Mikoian, Voroshilov, Zhdanov, Khrushchev, Shkiriatov, Malenkov, Beria, Mekhlis, even Kalinin and Shvernik (see Dimitroff, Kommentare, 72). Some who eventually fell

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victim themselves also belonged for a while to this general staff of the Terror, like Kossior, Postyshev, Eikhe, and Chubar’. I do not agree with Erik van Ree who argues that (a severely deluded) Stalin actually believed that the hundreds of thousands who were arrested (and their supposed ringleaders in the Party, government, and army leadership) were guilty of treason, sabotage, and so on (see van Ree, Political Thought, 117–25). Stalin’s margin notes, for example, regarding the questioning of G.Ia. Sokol’nikov’s testimony of October 1936 seem to me the sign of the playwright developing his plot line (see ibid., 120). And the occasional unanticipated behaviour of the accused could be bowdlerized in the published version of the proceedings in the Soviet press. Getty, Naumov, Road to Terror, 274. 77/1/607, l.1. Zinovievists had been unmasked in scientific institutes according to the cc letter of July 29 (Getty, Naumov, Road to Terror, 255). Likely the introduction of conscription in the Soviet Union on 13 August may have been discussed briefly as well as the arrest of the chief of the Leningrad Military District, V.M. Primakov (Dimitroff, Kommentare, 73). Getty, Naumov, Road to Terror, 268–72. Rogovin, 1937, 30. 77/1/610, ll.1, 5; Gorelov, Tsugtsvang, 232–3. Reabilitatsiia, 174. Zhdanov arrived in Sochi before 7 September and stayed for four weeks; he was still there on 2 October (and there is evidence of his stay there on both 13 and 25 September; see 77/1/611, ll.1–2, 4, 9. Stalin only returned to Moscow on 24 October (see Dimitroff, Tagebücher, 134). Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 164–5, Khlevniuk, 1937–i, 9; Reabilitatsiia, 221. Yves Cohen argues convinvingly that Stalin (in 1936) thought that he should have started his radical destruction of all supposed enemies in 1932 (see Cohen, “Des lettres,” 314–15). The year 1932 was an extremely bad year for the Soviet leader politically, and probably psychologically: the opposition in the Party (Riutin’s Platform), the questionable success of industrialization; the low standard of living of the workers; the discrepancy between the public myth of the triumph of the Five-Year Plan and the actual deprivations; the disaster of collectivization that led to a famine in Ukraine and elsewhere; and finally the suicide of his wife. Stalin may have had a nervous breakdown; at least it is plausible that all these failures caused a rather significant

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Notes to pages 139–41 psychological change in him in 1932. He took some harsh measures that year, such as the merciless treatment meted out to the Ukrainians, the law of 7 August, and the internal passport law. Certainly, other members of the inner circle remembered 1932 as a trying time, as is clear from Voroshilov’s reference to it in February 1937 (Getty, Naumov, Road to Terror, 377). Stalin’s and Zhdanov’s reference to it in the telegram struck a chord with the other Politburo members. Conversely, however, Stalin told Dimitrov in a private conversation in November 1937 that many Party members had begun their illegal opposition to the Party in reaction to collectivization, that is, in 1930 (Dimitroff, Tagebücher, 165–6). Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 165. From early 1935 until his appointment as People’s Commissar, Ezhov headed the cc orpo; after his takeover of the nkvd, he remained both cc secretary and head of the Party Control Commission (Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 205). Mikoian, Tak, 565: “Stalin related well to him especially before the war. Zhdanov was a good fellow in general, but too weak. In the hands of Stalin, he could play any role.” KPSS 6: 369. Getty, Naumov, Road to Terror, 442–3, 452–4, 468–9. See Fainsod, Smolensk, 59–60. Getty, Naumov, Road to Terror, 498–9. Stalinskoe Politbiuro, 246. In 1936 neither Zhdanov, who was often in Leningrad, nor Ezhov were always part of that group, which included Molotov, Kaganovich, Voroshilov, and Ordzhonikidze, all of whom visited Stalin in his office more than fifty times during that year, on average for more than two hours per visit (Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 290–1). Zhdanov’s presence in Leningrad gradually became more sporadic. He was likely away from the city for almost two months, from late August to late October 1936 (77/2/82, l.89). The trusted Aleksandr Shcherbakov stood in. See Politbiuro TsK RKP(b), vol. 2. See, for example, 17/3/1002, l.49; 17/3/1003, l.2; 17/3/1000, l.12. “‘Resheniia Osobykh,” 81. 77/1/613; 77/2/82, ll.89–90. 77/1/613, l.1. Getty, Naumov, Road to Terror, 358–61, suggests that the great discrepancy between the planned liquidation and the actual number of executions might have resulted from the overzealous interpretation by local authorities of the central leadership’s guidelines on how to deal with the former opposition and other subversives. By this argument, the process took on a momentum of its own, and reminds

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one somewhat of the snowball-effect that had occurred during collectivization (and of which Stalin washed his hands with “Dizzy with Success”). See Ezhov’s words in Getty, Naumov, Road to Terror, 305. On 21 November Zhdanov addressed the fifth oblast’ soviet congress about the draft constitution (77/2/82, l.90; tsgaipd, 24/2/1192, ll.1–106). The 1936 Constitution replaced a previous one dating from the time of the official founding of the ussr in 1923–24, which in turn had replaced the first Bolshevik constitution of 1918. Sovetskoe rukovodstvo, 361n2; Dimitroff, Tagebücher, 135. 77/2/81, l.4; Zhdanov, Pobeda; 77/1/630; Von Rauch, Baltic States, 191–2; Iovchuk, “Vydaiushchiisia,” 81. Von Rauch, Baltic States, 191–2; Meissner, “Shdanow” 2: 94. Slowly warming up for his growing role as a foreign-policy spokesman, Zhdanov had given a speech advocating a return to Soviet isolationism in Leningrad in October (Pons, Stalin, 68). Von Rauch, Baltic States, 191; Meissner, “Shdanow” 2: 94; Vikhavainen, “Vneshniaia,” 55; 77/1/630, ll.39–40. The governments of Estonia, Latvia, and Finland were quite disturbed by Zhdanov’s threats. 77/1/630, ll.1–2. 77/1/630, l.7. Zhdanov, Pobeda, 16; the great popularity of the film has been discussed by Kotkin in “Modern Times,” 112, 116–18; Kotkin makes a link with the Soviet admiration for Ford’s production methods. The emulation of those methods in the Soviet Union did little to overcome the workers’ alienation from the product of their labour, critically analysed by Marx as a capitalist phenomenon. On 3 December 1936, Zhdanov, Khrushchev, and Moscow’s head of government, Bulganin, visited the Kiev station of the underground (77/2/82, l.90). Davies, Popular Opinion, 36–8, 55–6. Tinkering with the collective-farm system was rampant, in desperate attempts to make this fundamentally flawed form of agricultural organization work. Thus, in January 1937, the central leadership resolved to amalgamate 1,270 small collective farms in Leningrad oblast’ to ensure that the kolkhozy used their equipment more efficiently (“‘Vtoroi i …,’” 30–1). Davies, Popular Opinion, 40. Ibid., 103. “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71; Rogovin, 1937, 98–112; “Fragmenty stenogrammy,” 3–23; for evidence of the confrontation, “Fragmenty stenogrammy,” 18–19. “Fragmenty stenogrammy,” 3; see as well Getty, Naumov, Road to Terror, 303–30.

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272 Brandenberger, “Short Course,” 70–2; Brandenberger, Dubrovsky, “‘The People,’ ” 878, 889n47. 273 Brandenberger, “Short Course,” 70–1. 274 Tillett, basing himself on the historian Nechkina’s utterings of the early 1960s, suggests that this formula was Stalin’s invention; despite Brandenberger’s objections I am inclined to follow Tillett in this (Tillett, The Great Friendship, 45–6). 275 Zhdanov’s involvement went back to the September joint holiday; 77/1/611, l.4; Brandenberger, “Short Course,” 72–4. 276 77/1/633, l.11.

chapter six 1 Akhmatova, Complete Poems, 386. 2 Zizek, Sublime, 147. 3 Politburo member and heavy industry tsar Ordzhonikidze committed suicide in early 1937 when, it seems, he realized that he could protect neither his brother nor some of his deputies against arrest (see note 19 in this chapter). Health commissar Kamenskii may have spoken out at the June 1937 plenum, which led to his own arrest, trial, and execution. But these were isolated cases. 4 Chuev, Molotov, 562–71, 578–80. “The revolution is on the move, strengthens itself, it all goes forward, but not without victims. And he who thinks, that it is possible without victims and without errors to go forward toward communism, is a naïve person” (ibid., 580). 5 Ibid., 464. In December 1936, even Bukharin hinted at this motive for the purge (Getty, Naumov, Road to Terror, 309; see also ibid., 328). 6 Iu.A. Zhdanov, interview. 7 Dimitroff, Tagebücher, 140. 8 Getty, Naumov, Road to Terror, 273. 9 Hellbeck, “Fashioning the Stalinist Soul,” 103. 10 Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 167; Rogovin, 1937, 117. 11 77/1/639, ll.19–20. For Sheboldaev’s and Postyshev’s errors and their initial demotions, see Getty, Naumov, Road to Terror, 333–63. 12 77/1/635, l.21. 13 77/1/635, l.28. 14 See “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71, with Getty, Naumov, Road to Terror, 335; a summary of this criticism had been distributed among republican and provincial leaders. 15 G.M. Malenkov had succeeded as head of orpo in February 1936. Malenkov, like Beria and Zhdanov, had enjoyed (largely prerevolutionary) secondary schooling. Like Zhdanov’s his civil war record also included a stint as organizer-instructor of the Red Army (in Malenkov’s

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21 22

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case, educating recruits in reading and writing), although Malenkov joined the Red Army at a time when Zhdanov had already retired to Tver’. Kaganovich had been Malenkov’s sponsor in the Party, too (Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 205–6). Getty, Naumov, Road to Terror, 345, 354–5. 77/1/635, l.29; Kirilina, Neizvestvennyi, 523. “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71; Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 291. Although he continued formally as Leningrad Party chief, he visited Stalin in Moscow on average more than once a week in those years. This was less often than Molotov, Ezhov, Kaganovich, and Voroshilov, but more often than Mikoian, Andreev, and the rising young star, Malenkov. “Posetiteli” IV, 44–5; “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71; Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 185–6; Volkov, Vzlët, 96; McNeal, Stalin, 194; Mikoian, Tak, 333; R. Medvedev, Let History Judge, 402; Zen’kovich, Vozhdi, 266–7. The last two sources agree that Zhdanov was wearing a black bandage on his head without explaining why that might have been. After their afternoon visit to Ordzhonikidze’s quarters, Stalin, Zhdanov, Molotov, Kaganovich, Voroshilov, and Postyshev spent a long evening together in Stalin’s office. At some point they were joined by Ezhov, Chubar’, Kalinin, Andreev, Akulov, and Mekhlis as well as Dr L.G. Levin (1870–1938) (“Posetiteli” 4: 44–5). At the 1938 show trial, Levin was accused of murdering several Soviet prominent citizens (though not Ordzhonikidze). Besides about 130 full- and candidate members, eighteen members of the Party’s Central Revision Committee, fifty-four members of the Party Control Commission, eight members of the Committee for Soviet Control, and approximately 150 other guests (nkvd officers, Comintern leaders) attended (Dimitroff, Kommentare, 86). See as well Resolutions 1929–53, 181; Getty, Naumov, Road to Terror, 365. Ordzhonikidze’s remains were placed in the Kremlin wall on the twenty-first; Zhdanov participated in the ceremonies (Dimitroff, Tagebücher, 151). Getty, Naumov, Road to Terror, 367–8. See ibid., 367–412. Stalin took a backseat as well, preferring to have others defile Rykov and Bukharin, as if he had little to do with “uncovering” the duo’s “treason.” Ibid., 412–3. 77/1/642; “Materialy,” vols. 2–4, especially, “Materialy” 2: 3–14 and 4: 17–23, including the resolution on basis of the report, which was published at the time; see Resolutions 1929–53, 184–7; see as well Rogovin, 1937, 239–46. Dimitrov’s diary entry places the speech on 27 February, however (Dimitroff, Tagebücher, 151–2). See Getty, Naumov, Road to Terror, 411. “Materialy” 2: 3–14. See Getty, Naumov, Road to Terror, 411; the proceedings have been partially published; see “Materialy” vols. 1–10. Altogether

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Zhdanov’s speech was short in length. His words covered about eleven pages of the historical journal Voprosy istorii in 1993, which are few compared to the pages filled with the transcription of the discussion of the other points at the cc meeting. The journal printed some 250 pages of the surviving transcript of the plenum, which even then is not an exhaustive account of the discussions. “Materialy” 2: 4–8. Ibid., 11. Literally, “triangles,” used figuratively here to mean three-headed leadership, triumvirates. “Materialy” 2: 12. Ibid., 13. Ibid., 4: 19. Ibid., 23; Resolutions 1929–53, 187. Publication in Pravda of “The Preparation of Party Organizations for Elections to the ussr Supreme Soviet under the New Electoral System and the Corresponding Reorganization of Party Political Work” occurred on 6 March (see Resolutions 1929–53, 187). On 27 March the cc ordained the procedure for elections of Party organs more specifically (KPSS 6: 382–4). Getty, Origins, 158–60. Yoram Gorlizki notes that “besides mobilizing mass support, the ‘restoration of democratic practices’ helped deflect discontent. Second, in directing opprobium from below onto the middle level, the leadership in Moscow could justify its actions against those regional leaders who had taken shelter from central pressure in local ‘family’ and ‘mutual assistance’ networks” (Gorlizki, “Party Revivalism,” 2; see as well Iu.N. Zhukov, Tainy, 38; Rogovin, 1937, 246). Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants, 369n70. “Materialy” 5: 4. Getty, Naumov, Road to Terror, 420–33; “Materialy” 5: 13–27, 6: 3–9. “Materialy” 6: 12–13; Getty, Naumov, Road to Terror, 425–9. “Materialy” 8: 3–15, 10: 11–23; see also “Materialy” 9. It is no coincidence that Zhdanov presented a plan to select and prepare two deputies for secretaries of primary Party organizations and raikoms to the Leningrad obkombiuro on 27 July, three days before the Politburo selected the personnel of Leningrad’s troika (tsgaipd, 24/2/1502, l.1; see below in this chapter). Zhdanov did not visit Stalin’s Kremlin office again until 1 April 1937, three weeks later (“Posetiteli” 4: 48). 77/2/81, l.16. McNeal, Stalin, 191. There is also evidence that Zhdanov occassionally began to chair

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48 49

50 51

52

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54

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Orgbiuro sessions in 1937, although Andreev remained the usual chair (Akademiia Nauk, 256). On 14 April a special commission was organized by the Politburo to prepare questions for the Politburo agenda as well as consider certain “secret” decisions. Its members were Stalin, Molotov, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, and Ezhov (CPSU’s Top, 10). During the following months Zhdanov seemed have joined this commission de facto. In the first half of April, Zhdanov may not have left the capital at all (“Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71; Stalinskoe Politbiuro, 247; “Posetiteli” 4: 45–52). Thus on April 13 he personally led the attack on Kirov factory director Ots, who was alleged to have turned a blind eye to wreckers’ organizations at the plant (tsgaipd, 24/2/1332, 45–9, 61). Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 246; 17/3/986, l.1. 17/3/986, l.3; see as well Volkogonov, Triumf 2: 2, 144. Arch Getty suggests that the plan for a new canonical Party history can be traced to the contents of the January 1935 letter on the lessons of Kirov’s murder (Getty, Naumov, Road to Terror, 147–50). See, for instance, R. Medvedev, Let History Judge, 437. Chuev, Molotov, 302. Even though Zhdanov had been the official supervisor of the trio’s project since 1935 (Brandenberger, “Short Course,” 405–7). Shestakov, Kratkii kurs; Shestakov, Short Course (English version); Brandenberger, “Short Course,” 73–7, 73n25, 81; Platt, Brandenberger, “Terribly Romantic,” 637–8, 638n11; Brandenberger, Dubrovsky, “‘The People,’ ” 878–81. Zhdanov’s words at the Eighteenth Party Congress about the role of the Party are telling (Zhdanov, “Report on the Amendments,” 693; see discussion of Short Course towards the end of this chapter). For Stalin’s interest in history textbooks, see Ilizarov, “Stalin,” 161. Brandenberger, Dubrovsky, “‘The People,’” 879. On 27 August 1937 a cc and Sovnarkom resolution was issued on Shestakov’s textbook (Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 2: 898). Stalin also found time during the 1930s to edit the history of the Civil War of which two volumes appeared, and which also lists Zhdanov as an editor, although his contributions were likely slight (Chuev, Molotov, 300; see History of the Civil War, vols. 1 and 2). The last three volumes of this five-volume work appeared after 1953. Terry Martin traces this russophilic trend back to some of Stalin’s utterances in 1930 and 1931, which became policy guidelines through Politburo decrees in December 1932. The trend reached its conclusion in the Terror (see Martin, Affirmative Action Empire, 269–71, 304, 305, 423). Zhdanov had thus little to do with inspiring this new line on nationality policy. Martin argues that it emphasized “state building” in reaction to

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59

60 61

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both the “socialist offensive” and the concomitant “mass popular participation” of the Cultural Revolution of around 1930 (ibid., 239; compare to Perrie, Cult, 28). Perrie, Cult, 28. 77/1/638. Stalinskoe Politbiuro, 33; Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 251; KPSS 6: 387. On 22 July Zhdanov was appointed by the Politburo member of the Military Council of the Leningrad Military District (17/3/989, l.67). In the fall, Zhdanov, together with marshals Voroshilov, Budennyi, and Egorov, attended army manoeuvres near Leningrad (Spahr, Stalin’s Lieutenants, 175–6). Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 216; Getty, Naumov, Road to Terror, 448; in May, one-quarter of the total membership of the ussr Military Council of the People’s Commissariat of Defence was arrested (“Nevol’niki …,” 72–88). Seibert, Zhdanovism, 169–71; 77/1/655. 77/1/655, ll.32–3, 43–4. There had been increasing arrests of obkom and gorkom members in previous weeks; some were arrested while still officially Party and ob-(gor-)kom members (tsgaipd, 24/2/1336, l.2). 77/1/659. Similar tumultuous events unfolded at concurrent conferences in, for instance, Moscow and Kalinin (for Kalinin, see Boterbloem, “Einige Aspekte,” 67–71; for Moscow, particularly Khrushchev’s defence of Malenkov, see Ponomarev, “Nikita,” 135). GVS: Glavnoe Voennoe Soveshchanie. “Nevol’niki …,” 72. Ibid., 72–88. Ibid., 73; Suvenirov, Tragediia, 235–6; Dimitroff, Kommentare, 73, 91. Among them was one of the first commanders to have been arrested (in August 1936), Vitalii Primakov, who had been deputy commander of the armies of the Leningrad Military District. Seibert, Zhdanovism, 171–4; 77/1/658, l.1; 77/1/860, l.13. Dimitroff, Kommentare, 77. 77/1/659, ll.1–68; 77/2/82, l.93. tsgaipd, 24/2/1196, ll.2–6, 24/2/1198, ll.1–59, 24/2/1199, ll.1–8, 24/2/1200, ll.1–195, 24/2/1201, ll.1–72; and so on (the last transcript is in 24/2/1212). 77/1/659, ll.18–19. See Merridale, Night of Stone, 143. A trade treaty struck between the two international “pariahs” of the 1920s, Weimar Germany and the Soviet Union, which also, secretly, entailed mutual military aid with the German Reichswehr holding exercises in the Soviet Union and the Soviet Armed Forces receiving arms and training from the German officer corps. See Shlapentokh, Normal Totalitarian Society, 132–3. 77/1/658, l.25. Immediately afterward, he chaired an obkom plenum

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77

78

79

80

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electing obkom secretaries and the members and alternate members of the obkombiuro (tsgaipd, 24/2/1342, ll.1–6). The three secretaries elected were Zhdanov, Smorodin, and Petrovskii, who were joined on the buro by Ugarov, Zakovskii, Dybenko, Grichmanov, Shestakov, and Pozern. Troitskii, Vaishel’, and Nikanorov became alternates. The obkom’s membership went the same way as the gorkom: except for Zhdanov, none of them survived the Great Terror. See Fainsod, Smolensk, 59–60; Boterbloem, Life and Death, 29–31; Boterbloem, “Einige Aspekte,” 67–71; Ponomarev, “Nikita,” 135. On June 19, the PB removed the first secretary of the western oblast’, I.P. Rumiantsev for his close ties with an enemy of the people, army commander Uborevich, and replaced him with D.S. Korotchenkov, who before that time had been second secretary of the Moscow obkom (17/3/988, l.3). On 21 June L.M. Kaganovich was dispatched by the Politburo to Smolensk to attend an obkom plenum regarding the transition there (17/3/989, l.2). “Posetiteli” 4: 56–7. On 18 June Zhdanov received a letter from Irkutsk written by his protégé, A.S. Shcherbakov (who had moved up under Zhdanov in Nizhnii in the late 1920s and worked in 1936–37 under Zhdanov in Leningrad), the newly appointed secretary of the Eastern Siberian oblast’, giving Zhdanov an update on his purging of the regional Party organization; he asked Zhdanov for more ‘cadres’ from Leningrad to take over from those who had been removed (Getty, Naumov, Road to Terror, 456–7; Sovetskoe, 363; still in June Shcherbakov had delivered the main obkom report at the Leningrad Party conference; tsgaipd, 24/2/1196, l.4). Zhdanov also participated in the festive reception in Moscow of a group of Soviet polar explorers in June (see Petrone, Life, 63). Rogovin, 1937, 489–99, specifically 497. The public announcement of the cc’s discussions only referred to the usual agricultural questions and the procedure for the Supreme Soviet elections (KPSS 6: 392–403). Stalinskoe Politbiuro, 159n2; Rogovin, 1937, 496; Getty, Naumov, Road to Terror, 452–3; Reabilitatsiia, 82; Struppe was arrested 27 on June and Chudov the next day (Izmozik, Lebina, “Zhilishchnyi vopros,” 107). According to Russian sources, the sessions from 23 to 26 June were not stenographed (Lavrentii, 410n49). Because of this, it is difficult to reconstruct what was said at the cc meeting about the alleged plotting of the five Stalin named and, possibly, of others. In the early evening of the twenty-third, Stalin, Molotov, Kaganovich, Voroshilov, Ezhov, Mikoian, Kalinin, Andreev, Zhdanov, and, very briefly, Kossior and Chubar’ met to go over the scenario (“Posetiteli” 4: 56–7). Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 188–9; 17/3/989, l.22; rgani 89/per 73, ll.49, 50; “Rasstrel,” 1.

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81 Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 190–1. 82 77/1/660, ll.1–68; for his words on the cc members who were purged see ll.59–68; 77/2/82, l.94. 83 This was an accusation similar to that levelled at the “Leningraders” (Kuznetsov, Popkov, etc.) in 1949–50 (see the epilogue). The orgy of arrests that the removal of such highly placed figures could lead to became evident when in 1938 Leningrad nkvd chief Litvin reported to Zhdanov that 1,500 alien and hostile elements in the state supply organization had been unmasked (Berezhkov, Piterskie, 170–1). It had been headed by Chudov after his transfer from Leningrad to Moscow: any contact with him was apparently sufficient ground for arrest. The accusation of “Great Russian nationalism” shows how at times “enemies” were accused of Russian nationalism in the Terror, although altogether the supposed nationalism of non-Russian peoples was a more common charge (Martin, Affirmative Action Empire, 424). 84 On 2 July Pravda announced that the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee (the official Soviet parliament) had issued regulations for “freely contested” Supreme Soviet elections Articles 104 and 107 of the statute indicate contested elections; see Pravda, 2 July 1937, 1–2, 2; see Getty, Origins, 180, 259n30. 85 See 77/1/660, ll.14–15. 86 Erik van Ree is correct, nevertheless, in recognizing a desire on Stalin’s part to accommodate popular participation in the political process in the Soviet Union; the difficulty was how to channel such participation into a force that was supportive (rather than critical) of Communist rule (van Ree, Political Thought, 75). The flirtation with contested elections in 1936–37 was likely another occasion of this desire surfacing. 87 See rgani, 89/per 73/49, l.1, 89/per 73/50, l.1; Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 189; Molotov, 738. 88 GULAG, 97; “Rasstrel,” 4. Priests were a significant category of victims, reflecting the Communist dismay that more than one-half of all Soviet citizens and thirty-three per cent of the population of Leningrad considered themselves religious according to the suppressed 1937 census; churches were closed in great number; only five remained open by Easter 1938 in Leningrad (Davies, Popular Opinion, 74, 81; Zhiromskaia, Demograficheskaia, 186–7, 201–2, 206). See Merridale, Night of Stone, 3–6, for a description of one of the mass graves inside Leningrad province and of some of the victims and executioners. 89 For the Mikhailov case, see Literaturnaia gazeta, 1 June 1988, 12. Sheila Fitzpatrick notes that in the autumn of 1937, Zakovskii identified university students who were sons of kulaks and Nepmen and needed to be purged as “enemies of the people” (Fitzpatrick, “Ascribing Class,” 33).

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90 On 31 July the Politburo confirmed Ezhov’s proposal (Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 190; “‘Resheniia Osobykh,” 85; “Rasstrel,” 4). 91 Albats, State within State, 80–3, inside cover; Getty, Naumov, Road to Terror, 473–80; “Rasstrel,” 1, 4; Razumov, Leningradskii 1: 41–4; full text in GULAG, 96–104. 92 Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 189; “‘Resheniia Osobykh,” 85. 93 Getty, Naumov, Road to Terror, 470. In 1957, Khrushchev said (“Posledniaia” 4: 41): “I will name terrible numbers: in only two years – 1937 and 1938 – more than one and a half million people were arrested, of whom 681,692 were shot.” On 11 August, Politburo members Stalin, Molotov, Kaganovich, and Kosior sanctioned a “dvoika” (a two-person commission of the ussr nkvd) made up of State Prosecutor Vyshinskii and People’s Commissar Ezhov, to handle further counterrevolutionary, anti-Soviet, and other crimes; such dvoiki were formed also at lower levels, although, perhaps not in every major Soviet territorial subdivision (Razumov, Leningradskii 1: 38 and 2: 9; Berezhkov, Piterskie, 87). 94 Vladimir Nikolaevich Garin (1896–1940) was from 13 December 1936 to 2 June 1938 vice-chief of Leningrad oblast’ nkvd. Apparently, there was some scepsis about the quotas among nkvd employees at first, as is evident from a new missive of 22 July by Garin’s boss, Zakovskii (Razumov, Leningradskii 1: 40). He criticized a number of local nkvd chiefs for their apparent reluctance to engage in the campaign and threatened them with disciplinary measures. 95 GULAG, 102. Smorodin’s appointment may have been formalized by the June oblast’ conference; he moved to Stalingrad on 31 August and was arrested on 28 June 1938 (17/3/990, l.79). During the height of the purge, from April 1937 to June 1938, Pozern was state prosecutor of Leningrad oblast’; Pozern and Smorodin appear to have been shot together on 25 February 1939 (Razumov, Leningradskii 1: 37–8, 677, 679–80 and 3: 554). The commander of the firing squads in 1937 and 1938 in Leningrad was the senior state security lieutenant, A.R. Polikarpov (1897–1939), who committed suicide on 14 March 1939 (ibid., 1: 57, 680). 96 Ibid., 41. 97 Ibid., 39. Binner and Junge have tried to make a tentative tally of the number of people in the oblast’ who fell victim to this and similar orders in 1937 and 1938 (Binner, Junge, “Wie,” 601–2, Table). 98 Suvenirov, Tragediia, 64. 99 Izmozik, Lebina, “Zhilishchnyi vopros,” 107. 100 Efimov, “Sergei,” 64; “Massovye repressii,” 124. It depends, for one thing, on whom to include: whether only those executed and sentenced to camp terms, or also those who were exiled.

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101 “‘Massovye’”, 129; GULAG, 101–2; N. Werth, “State,” 192. In a justified aside, the editor of this Book of Martyrs notes how the mastermind of the Great Terror in the northwestern region of Russia, Andrei Zhdanov, remained formally outside of the purging mechanism and the dirty work (Razumov, Leningradskii 1: 38). A Petrov in the Chuvash republic’s troika may have been one of two kraikom members named Petrov who worked around 1930 with Zhdanov in Nizhnii, when the Chuvash area had been part of the Nizhnii krai. 102 Between 27 February 1937 and 12 November 1938, these lists condemned 38,679 people in all; many years later, in 1957, Stalin, Molotov, Kaganovich, Voroshilov, and Zhdanov were found guilty (posthumously) of ordering the Military Tribunal of the ussr Supreme Court to sentence those on the lists to death before they were even convicted by the tribunal (“‘Resheniia Osobykh,” 81–2). See as well “‘Massovye’,” 123–30, especially 129. 103 Berezhkov, Piterskie, 144, 171. 104 “Massovye,” 126; see Kariakin, “‘Zhdanovskaia,’” 26. 105 Razumov, Leningradskii 3: 502–3; Berezhkov, Piterskie, 158–9, 165, 192. 106 One of the few examples of material evidence that could be unearthed during the early 1990s in the nkvd archives was produced in the case of the sixty-eight-year-old pensioner Dmitrii Nikolaevich Ruzhevskii. His guilt amounted to crossing out a portrait of Zhdanov on a page of a tear-off calendar. He was executed in Leningrad on 12 November (Razumov, Leningradskii 3: see pictures 55–6 between 480 and 481, 529). 107 “Vragi,” 2. 108 Krinitskii was released from his duties by the Politburo for his weak leadership of the Saratov Party organization and his hopeless blindness towards enemies of the people (17/3/989, l.47; Sovetskoe, 364–5). In Saratov, Malenkov conducted interrogations of nkvd employees and of several other people who had been arrested because their recently appointed boss, Ia. Agranov, a former deputy of Iagoda, had fallen under suspicion of being a masked enemy (Sovetskoe, 364–5). 109 For instance, see 17/3/989, l.40; in early September, eight leading Leningrad and three leading Moscow Party workers were sent to Belorussia to restore order there (17/3/990, l.87). See also Getty, Naumov, Road to Terror, 456–7; Sovetskoe, 363. On 14 August the Politburo ordered the transfer of the junior obkom secretary (and chief of the local cadres department), A.A. Kuznetsov, to Moscow in order to become deputy chief of the cc department of Leading Party Organs headed by G.M. Malenkov; the decision was rescinded two days later (17/3/990, ll.39, 47). Kuznetsov made a stellar career in Leningrad and, after 1945, in Moscow.

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110 Borisov, Andrei, 18–19; Grekhov, “Rasprava,” 137–9. 111 The missi dominici were emissaries (usually serfs) dispatched by Charlemagne to the different parts of his empire to check up on its administration. 112 One of the papers he inspected prior to his departure was a report by the Orenburg nkvd chief addressed to him and Ezhov, which informed him of the purges that had been conducted there prior to his arrival (see Werth, Moullec, Rapports secrets, 569–75). Zhdanov visited Stalin in September six times and participated in an official Politburo meeting held in that month (which was the last before February 1938; see “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71; Stalinskoe Politbiuro, 248). 113 This was likely another meeting connected with the purge; its (new) director had been dismissed by the Politburo in August (Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 2: 897). 114 77/2/82, l.94. It is not quite clear whether Zhdanov visited Kazan before or after (or in between) his visit to Orenburg and Ufa, but as he did not leave the Bashkir capital before 6 October and visited Stalin in Moscow on 9 October, the Orenburg visit took place likely before rather than after his sojourn in Bashkiria. As there is no evidence of his presence in Moscow after 22 September, he may have begun with Kazan, then travelled via train or by river (the Volga) to Kuibyshev and on to Orenburg by train; from there he probably travelled by car to Ufa, whence he could board the train back to Moscow (“Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71). Among those arrested in Kazan in these months was one of Zhdanov’s former lieutenants in Nizhnii, A.K. Lepa, who had previously been a member of the Tatar Republic’s troika (R. Medvedev, Let History Judge, 411). 115 Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 192; some 232 people were arrested, and most of them executed, after his visit: “‘Massovye,’” 126; Volkov, Vzlët, 311; the victims included the original troika of Bak, Isanchurin, and Tsypniatov (see GULAG, 101). 116 See Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 2: 878. 117 Ivkin, “Vysshie” 1: 145; 17/3/989, l.39. 118 Werth, Moullec, Rapports secrets, 569–75. For Gorkin’s responsibility, see as well “‘Massovye,’” 126. Connections between Orenburg’s Rightists and like-minded plotters in Kuibyshev oblast’ had been unearthed as well. 119 N. Werth, “State,” 194–5. 120 Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 2: 884. 121 Mitrofanov’s year of death is given as 1941 in Kak lomali NEP 4 (see ibid., 737), probably the result of the editors’ use of Soviet-era sources, which often engaged in covering up the Terror by altering the year of death of its victims.

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122 rgani, 89/per 73/50, l.1. Mitrofanov was an old hand at Party purges: he had made a name as a member of the Party Control Commission in explaining the principle of another purge at the April 1929 Plenum (Getty, Origins, 44; GULAG, 102). 123 Werth, Moullec, Rapports secrets, 574–5. 124 77/1/848, ll.1–109; see particularly, 77/1/848, ll.5–7. 125 Nine out of eleven members of the obkombiuro that had led the province before the Party conference of June 1937 had been unmasked as enemies of the people and, since then, three of the newly elected obkomburo. 126 77/1/848, l.8; Ivkin, “Vysshie” 1: 145, N. Werth, “State,” 193; Werth, Moullec, Rapports secrets, 569–75. 127 Gorkin was given a holiday “because of illness” on 10 October by the Politburo (Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 2: 914). Considering that on 9 October, Ezhov, Ia. Iakovlev(then a high-ranking Party Control Commission official), and Mekhlis accompanied Gorkin on a visit to Stalin, the latter may already have been considered part of the in-crowd orchestrating the purge (“Posetiteli” 4: 66). 128 17/3/992, l.25; Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 2: 910. This dismissal happened soon after the Politburo had ratified a decree authorizing a quota of people to be purged in the republic (Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 2: 903). The Politburo appointed a temporary replacement only for the first secretary. 129 77/1/848, ll.110–15; Kariakin, “‘Zhdanovskaia,’” 25. 130 Kariakin, “‘Zhdanovskaia,’ ” 25. 131 “‘Massovye,’ ” 126. Personnel changes among the highest government bosses of the republic were decided on 16 October by the Politburo (Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 2: 915). 132 Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 192; Getty, Naumov, Road to Terror, 454–5; Boterbloem, Life and Death, 31–2; Fainsod, Smolensk, 59 133 77/3/115, ll.31–2. Zhdanov likely first went to Moscow and returned only to Leningrad after the October cc plenum (he did not attend a meeting of the obkom’s secretariat on 9 October; see tsgaipd, 24/2/1725, l.2 and 24/2/1556, l.2). Other victims included Kodatskii’s successor A.N. Petrovskii, whose fate was soon shared by oblispolkom chair Tiurkin (Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 2: 918; tsgaipd, 24/2/1525, l.1). Nizovtsev, a former obkom member, had been head of the obkom’s personnel department in the mid-1930s (Kirilina, Neizvestvennyi, 361) 134 In Zhdanov’s absence, the obkombiuro dismissed a host of district secretaries and department heads on 9 October 1937 (tsgaipd, 24/2/1556, ll.2–3).

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135 17/3/992, l.44; this department was considerably smaller than it was a year later. 136 Iu. Kaganovich was appointed deputy People’s Commissar of Foreign Trade in 1938; after the war he was demoted but never arrested (see for example Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 515). His brother Mikhail committed suicide in 1941. 137 Zhdanov appeared to complain mildly about the frequent departure of Leningrad cadres for more responsible jobs in his speech to the joint obkom and gorkom meeting on 22 October in Leningrad (77/1/664, ll.1–4). In those grim days, Zhdanov was also forced to occupy himself with the replacement of those who had been purged (often on his personal orders); thus, he selected Aleksandr Nikolaevich Kuznetsov (b.1903 in a “petty bourgeous milieu”), since 1933 an instruktor of the cc’s cultural-enlightenment department, as head of his personal secretariat (77/3/115, ll.37, 43). Kuznetsov remained Zhdanov’s secretary until August 1948. 138 77/1/671, ll. 2–3. 139 On 9 January the cc issued the resolution “On the politically erroneous decisions of the Kuibyshev obkom of the vkp (b),” condemning Party chief Postyshev for his manic purging (Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 225). 140 Getty, Naumov, Road to Terror, 470. 141 “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71. Two thick volumes filled with names of Leningrad victims, one each for October and November 1937, testify to the size of the slaughter in the fall of 1937 (Razumov, Leningradskii vols. 2 and 3). 142 Stalinskoe Politbiuro, 159n1; Getty, Naumov, Road to Terror, 462–4; KPSS 6: 412–14; “Posetiteli” 4: 66–7. Kosior and Chubar’ also participated in the preparatory sessions in Stalin’s office, but each missed part of a meeting, while Kalinin missed parts of both meetings. 143 Davies, Popular Opinion, 109; Getty, Origins, 181; Seibert, Zhdanovism, 186, 189; Iu.N. Zhukov, Tainy, 41. 144 Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 209, 212; Stalinskoe Politbiuro, 157–9; Reabilitatsiia, 82; Rubtsov, Alter ego, 82. 145 Istoriia sovetskoi, 68–70. 146 The monthly Glavlit bulletin that presented an overview of censorship activities was only sent to the five cc secretaries (Il’inskii, Narkom, 221–2). 147 77/1/860, l.10. See below for his January speech in the Supreme Soviet. 148 77/1/664, ll.1–4; tsgaipd, 24/2/1350, ll.37–46. This likely occurred just after he returned to Leningrad from his trip to the Southeast and Moscow (see tsgaipd, 24/2/1725, ll.1–2, which indicates his absence;

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Notes to pages 166–7 ibid., 24/2/1568, l.2, shows that he still was not in Leningrad on 16 October). On 21 October Ugarov delivered the main report on the Supreme Soviet elections (ibid., 24/2/1348, ll.2–50). See also ibid., 24/2/1349 and 24/2/1355. Ibid., 24/2/1350, l.37. Ibid., 24/2/1350, ll.37–9 and 24/2/1355, l.2. A number of earlier exclusions (about which obkom members had been polled without meeting) were confirmed as well (ibid., 24/2/1355, ll.4–5). 77/1/664, ll.1–4; tsgaipd, 24/2/1350, l.43 and 24/2/1355, l.3. Kuznetsov had held this position provisionally since mid-September (tsgaipd, 24/2/1549). The decision was made during the fall, but when is not fully clear. Petrovichev, Kolotov, N.A. Voznesenskii, 19; Watson, Molotov, 168; for a biography, see “O tak nazyvaemom,” 134. Mikoian remembered something about Voznesensky’s swift promotion to Gosplan chair, on 19 January, on the recommendation of Zhdanov (Mikoian, Tak, 422). At first, the factory manager Kosygin was promoted to head the industrial-transport department of the obkom; in August 1938 he took over as chief of the gorispolkom from A.N. Petrovskii, after which Kosygin was transferred to Moscow. In the first half of 1942, he once more played a leading role in the affairs of Leningrad as plenipotentiary for the city of the State Defence Committee (Ivkin, Gosudarstvennaia vlast’, 362; 17/3/1001, l.22). Although Kosygin was undoubtedly a client of Zhdanov’s in the late 1930s, some have argued that Zhdanov and Kosygin may have become estranged during the war as Kosygin witnessed Zhdanov’s bungling of Leningrad’s supplies in the early days of the war (see chapter 8). The names are contained on a list that survives. “‘Resheniia Osobykh,” 82; “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71. Mawdsley, White, The Soviet Elite, 46, 69, Table 2.8, 70–4. Zhdanov addressed a group of cc workers who were to aid the staging of the elections in localities throughout the Union on 17 November 17 in the cc buildings in Moscow (77/2/82, l.94; tsgaipd, 24/2/1808, ll.1–12). Seibert, Zhdanovism, 191–2; Zhdanov, Rechi, 3–8, 9–15. The first Soviet broadcast dated from 1924 (Soviet Union Year-Book, 259). In Zhdanov’s days, the radio’s audience did not equal the readership of the printed press. Nizhnii Novgorod had an important experimental short-wave station in the time of Zhdanov’s leadership there, and it produced wireless valves for radio receivers. This tradition went back to the time when Molotov was head of its government (Chuev, Molotov, 235). One token factory worker lauded Zhdanov for keeping the Party organization in

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Leningrad together after Kirov’s murder and for purging enemies from the ranks (77/2/8, ll.64–7). Davies, Popular Opinion, 112; KPSS 6: 418. “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71; Maksimenkov, Sumbur, 195. 17/3/994, l.62; Lubianka, 147. rgani, 89/per 73/127, l.1. On 14 April the Politburo dismissed Moscow nkvd chief and deputy nkvd narkom Zakovskii and made him head of the Kuibyshev hydro plant; he was accused of fabricating cases, while allowing “spies” to continue their work and correspond with prisoners; he was soon arrested and shot in late August (Lubianka, 16, 22, 147; 17/3/998, l.34; Suvenirov, Tragediia, 186; see as well Tragediia 2: 851). 17/3/994, l.51. “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71. Iu.N. Zhukov, Tainy, 48–9. Malenkov had already written a report that was critical of the scope of the arrests in the fall of 1937 (Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 207–8). Zhdanov criticized the indiscriminate exclusions as well at an Orgbiuro meeting in 1938, probably early in the year (77/3/17, ll.28–38; see Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 160). Resolutions 1929–53, 187–95; Maksimenkov, Sumbur, 287–8; KPSS, 7, 8–17; Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 216, 225–7; Stalinskoe Politbiuro, 167n1. Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 222–3; Pervaia sessiia, 14–15, 37. It had been elected by 96.8 per cent of eligible voters, some ninety-one million people in all, of whom 98.6 per cent had voted for the bloc of Party and nonparty candidates (the rest having spoiled their ballots). 77/2/2, l.49; Salisbury, 900 Days, 135–6; I.N. Zhukov, Tainy, 46. A point made by Meissner (“Shdanow” 2: 94). Still, when on 14 April a special permanent five-man Politburo commission was formed to deal with secret questions, including those of foreign policy, Zhdanov was not included (Stalinskoe Politbiuro, 55). Pervaia sessiia, 122–7. Seibert, Zhdanovism, 198–9; Maksimenkov, Sumbur, 283–8; Pervaia sessiia, 135–41; for handwritten notes, see 77/1/672, which also shows that he doodled nicely as well, drawing a fine leaf of a tree, 77/1/672, l.49. Razumov, Leningradskii 2: 421. For instance, Poles had been accused of transmitting sensitive information to Warsaw through the Polish consulate in the city. For these “diaspora nationalities” and the Terror, see Martin, Affirmative Action Empire, 425–7. Pervaia sessiia, 137–8. Zhdanov’s speech was carried by Pravda the next day (18 January 1938, 2–3). Pervaia sessiia, 139–41.

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175 Maksimenkov, Sumbur, 288–90. 176 77/2/81, l.4; 77/1/673; it was published in Pravda on 28 January and printed separately in 200,000 copies as a brochure (Zhdanov, Leninskie). 177 77/1/673, l.14. 178 77/1/673, ll.22–3. 179 Albats, State, 82; Gevorkian, “Vstrechnye,” 18–19; Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 190–1. 180 Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 190–1. 181 77/1/674, ll.1–22; tsgaipd, 24/2/1951, ll.2–11. 182 Iu.N. Zhukov, Tainy, 102; Getty, Naumov, Road to Terror, 611. The experienced Ugarov was initially promoted to first obkom secretary of the Moscow region, but he was ultimately dismissed and arrested in late 1938. Ugarov’s transfer had been formalized on 9 February at one of the very few Politburo meetings of 1938, when candidate Politburo member Postyshev was delivered to the Party Control Commission; Postyshev subsequently met his end before a firing squad (Stalinskoe Politbiuro, 249–50; Ugarov’s parting shot in Leningrad had been his proposals to expel more than a dozen gorkom members on 19 February; see tsgaipd, 24/2/1951, ll.2–10). A Politburo meeting occurred on 25 April, after which no official meetings were held until October. Possibly, the arrest of Eikhe, a candidate member like Postyshev, made a full meeting desirable in April (Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 228). To fill in for Ugarov, “on the request of the Leningrad obkom,” the Politburo confirmed V.I. Kharlamov instead of A.A. Kuznetsov as second secretary of Leningrad obkom, while Kuznetsov was appointed second secretary of the Leningrad gorkom on 23 February (17/3/996, l.39). A.S. Shcherbakov was transferred from Stalino to Moscow by the Politburo on 25 October to become the new secretary of the obkom and gorkom there (17/3/1002, l.60; Iu.N. Zhukov, Tainy, 102). He replaced Ugarov, who had been dismissed on 15 October, arrested soon after, and then shot in early 1939. 183 While the trial was held, Zhdanov was in Moscow, often visiting Stalin in the Kremlin (“Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71). 184 17/3/998, l.49. The purges also wreaked havoc among the naval command (Erickson, Road to Stalingrad, 30–1). 185 See for such assignments Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 160–3, 168–9. 186 Vlast’ i khudozhestvennaia, 408–11. 187 Babichenko, Pisateli, 14, “Schast’e”, 277; Vlast’ i khudozhestvennaia, 412–13, 775–6n12. 188 Zensur, 275–6. 189 Ibid., 276–7. 190 77/1/678, l.1; 77/1/679, ll.2–4; tsgaipd, 24/2/1961, ll.1–22. The

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plenum excluded another three “unmasked enemies of the people” from its ranks (tsgaipd, 24/2/1957, l.3). 191 See Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants, 313; Boterbloem, Life and Death, 20–2. 192 rgani, 89/per 73/136, l.1. 193 77/1/676, l.2. 194 The log of visitors to Stalin’s office only shows Zhdanov there on 11 May, 31 May, and then again on 20 and 23 June (“Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71). 195 77/1/682, ll.4–6. 196 77/1/684; notes for the speech can be found in 77/1/683. 197 77/1/684, l.1. 198 77/1/684, l.4. On the “ethnic quality” of the purges, Martin suggests that “by the end of 1938, [the Terror’s] primary targets were diaspora nationalities and its primary policy implication was the strenghtening and celebrating of the centrality, primacy, and unifying function of the rsfsr and the Russian nation” (Martin, Affirmative Action Empire, 431). 199 Zelenov, “Stalin,” 2002, 6. 200 77/1/684, ll.39–41. 201 77/1/860, ll.8–10. 202 77/1/860, l.6. 203 17/3/1000, l.11; 77/2/93, ll.12–13. Pozern was broken under interrogation by the nkvd and confessed to having organized a counterrevolutionary conspiracy (R. Medvedev, Let History Judge, 494). 204 77/2/2, l.49; 77/1/698, l.1; 77/1/699, l.2. 205 “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71. 206 Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 211. 207 Suverinov, “Voennaia Kollegiia,” 138. 208 Chubar’ian, “Vneshnepoliticheskii,” 34–5. 209 Lukes, Czechoslovakia, 198, 208n125. 210 Ibid., 199. 211 Tragediia 2: 864; Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 160. It was called culture and propaganda, or Kul’tprop, from 1930 to 1934. 212 In late September, Zhdanov stated that other “issues” (implying both the Great Terror and the Great Turn) had prevented the country form giving its full attention to propaganda before September 1938 (Maslov, “Iz istorii,” 99). 213 “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 145, 202–3; see “Posetiteli” 5: 18–19. There are some surviving editorial suggestions by Zhdanov (likely dating from August, when the book circulated among the Inner Circle) on the draft of the Short Course, but his editorial contribution was meagre (see 77/1/701; Zelenov, “Stalin,” 2002, 7; Maslov, “’Kratkii kurs,’” 54–61). These meetings were long, ranging from ninety minutes to two meetings on one day of almost five hours combined. Another frequent

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214 215

216

217 218 219

220 221 222 223 224

225

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Notes to pages 176–7 participant was Pravda editor L.A. Rovinskii (1900–?); see Zelenov, “Stalin,” 2002, 7–8). On at least one occasion (13 September), Ezhov, Voroshilov, and Kaganovich left just before Iaroslavskii and Pospelov entered; that trio was apparently deemed useless when dealing with such arcane matters. “I.V. Stalin,” 4. 17/3/1000, l.12. Already by March 1939, as Zhdanov reported to the Eighteenth Party Congress, twelve million copies of the work in Russian had been sold, and two million copies in other languages of Soviet nations, while translations into twenty-eight languages had been completed. The Short Course had become, in Zhdanov’s words, “the first Marxist book in all the existence of Marxism to have been disseminated so widely” (Zhdanov, “Report on the Amendments,” 702). On 22 October the Politburo determined the price of milk in Moscow and Leningrad for the next year: it was to be two rubles in the winter, and one ruble sixty kopecks in spring and summer 1939 (17/3/1002, l.56). On 19 September the Politburo had resolved that the book would be priced at three rubles in the shops (17/3/1000, l.12). Torchinov, Leontiuk, Vokrug, 5. 17/3/1002, l.49; 17/3/1003, l.2. Brandenberger, following Martin Malia, suggests that its ideology was one of “populism, nationalism and socialism” (Brandenberger, “Short Course,” 4). He is probably correct in proposing that before the 1930s most Russians (and Ukrainians, Belarusyn, or Kazaks) did not share a common sense of nationality but rather identified with their region (ibid., 23–7). See Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 158. Ivkin, “Rukovoditeli” 1: 166, 180, 2: 147, 156; Ivkin, “Vysshie” 1: 143, 148. Mawdsley, White, The Soviet Elite, 113–15; Zhiromskaia, Demograficheskaia, 183. Zhdanov, “Report on the Amendments,” 693. Lieven, Empire, 321. See also Gay, Schnitzler’s Century, 175, who notes the inadequacy of pure materialism to satisfy the spiritual needs of the nineteenth-century middle classes, and Petrone, Life, 2, who writes: “While Soviet ideologues created powerful categories with which to describe the world and did their best to forbid the expression of alternative discourses … they could not control the way that the official discourses they created were used by others or entirely eliminate alternative worldviews.” See Zhdanov’s lack of activity in editing the text in Zelenov, “Stalin,” 2003).

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226 “I.V. Stalin,” 4; Maslov, “Iz istorii,” 98–9; Brandenberger, “Short Course,” 108; some of Zhdanov’s handwritten notes on Stalin’s presentation on the book survive (77/1/704). 227 Brandenberger, “Short Course,” 108, 112; Zelenov, “Stalin,” 2002, 4–5. 228 Kershaw, “The Hitler Myth,” 1. 229 Hitler’s popularity was at its height during his foreign-policy successes of the mid-1930s, and Stalin’s would increase dramatically because of the Soviet victory, despite its extraordinary price in human lives. See Kershaw, ibid., 128. 230 Ibid., 4, 128. 231 77/1/705, ll.16–37. The speech spanned twenty typewritten one-and-ahalf spaced a4–sized pages. Zhdanov was rarely if at all in Leningrad in September and October of 1938. See “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71; Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 212; Suvenirov, Tragediia, 65. See the photograph of the leaders at the fortieth anniversary of Stanislavskii’s Moscow Art Theatre (MKhAT ), in Gromov, Stalin, between 96 and 97. 232 17/3/1002, ll.1–2; Maslov, “Iz istorii,” 106. 233 17/3/1002, l.37. N.M. Rychkov had become People’s Commissar of Justice in 1938; see Suvenirov, Tragediia, 218, note. On 16 October Beria had met Stalin tête-à-tête for one and a half hours; afterwards, Beria, Malenkov, and Stalin had discussed Ezhov’s likely errors for almost ninety minutes (“Posetiteli” 5: 21). 234 77/2/81, l.4; Rech’ tov. A.A. Zhdanova; “Vydaiushchiisia …,” 16. Pravda published it on 4 November, and it was later issued as a brochure of which 100,000 copies were printed (see Rech’ tov. A.A. Zhdanova). 235 Rech’ tov. A.A. Zhdanova, 6. 236 Ibid., 9, 11. 237 Getty, Naumov, Road to Terror, 530–543. 238 17/3/1003, l.25; Getty, Naumov, Road to Terror, 532–7; Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 192–3; Iu.N. Zhukov, Tainy, 75, 78–9; “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi”, 71. Judging from the individuals visiting Stalin’s office on 14 and 15 November – Beria, Molotov, Malenkov, Zhdanov on the first day, Molotov, Ezhov, nkvd state-security chief V.V. Iartsev (1904–40), Beria, Vyshinskii, Malenkov on the second – one infers that only a select group were involved in the decision to abolish the troikas (“Posetiteli” 5: 24). Again in the next two days, Molotov, Malenkov, and Beria visited Stalin. Zhdanov joined meetings in Stalin’s office again only on the seventeenth. 239 Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 193; 17/3/1003, l.34. It seems that the sealing of Ezhov’s fate had already occurred in a meeting that ran unusually late (from 11:00 pm to 4:20 am) in Stalin’s office on 19 November. Stalin, Molotov, Zhdanov, Beria, Andreev, Mikoian, Voroshilov, Kaganovich,

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240

241 242 243 244

245 246

247 248

249 250 251 252

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Notes to pages 179–80 Malenkov, and Shkiriatov faced Ezhov and his lieutenant Frinovskii (“Posetiteli” 5: 24). Ezhov’s last visit to Stalin, when perhaps he was formally dismissed, happened a few days later. See, for example, 17/3/1004, l.9. On 20 December, together with three other Party officials, the later mvd minister S.N. Kruglov was transferred from Malenkov’s orpo to the central organs of the nkvd (17/3/1004, l.28). There is some evidence that another Politburo commission headed by Andreev in 1939 further investigated the nkvd’s activities during the Great Purge, but few who had been wrongfully convicted were released (Mawdsley, White, The Soviet Elite, 77). Berezhkov, Piterskie, 173. Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 212; 17/3/1003, l.18. Berezhkov, Piterskie, 182. Ibid., 190. One man who escaped was the head of the Pskov okrug nkvd, G.G. Karpov, who had arrested almost 1,200 “enemies” in his region between 17 September and 18 November (ibid., 183–4). Karpov engaged in the torture of detainees and falsification of statements of the accused; under a cloud for his brutality in the Great Purge, he managed to have his case shelved because of a transfer to Moscow and went on to become the head of the council on the activities of the Orthodox church during the war. His only punishment for his conduct during the Terror was the severe reprimand he received in 1957 from the Committee of Party Control (Reabilitatsiia, 80). Berezhkov, Piterskie, 191, 193. 77/3/19, ll.1–67 (two edits of the same transcript); Molotov, 342, 421, 751n5, 757n8; Borisov, Andrei, 19; Grekhov, “Rasprava,” 140. The main report, which condemned the leadership of the youth organization, was delivered by Party Control Commission deputy chief M.F. Shkiriatov. One of the victims was Leningrad Komsomol chief V.F. Pikina, who had only recently replaced another purge victim (Molotov, 751n5). Borisov, Andrei, 19; Grekhov, “Rasprava,” 140, 142–4. On the twenty-seventh Stalin received O.P. Mishakova (1906–80), who had played a key role in denouncing the Komsomol leadership (“Posetiteli” V, 25). Exactly one month later, part of the new Komsomol leadership (including Mishakova), accompanied by Zhdanov, met with Stalin in his office (ibid., 27). Zhdanov had done well in reorganizing the Youth League, since by and large its leaders were kept in office for years after this. Davies, Popular Opinion, 43–5, 67. The decree concomitantly reduced maternity rights. See the epilogue. For example, Getty, Origins, 97. Molotov, 757; Stalinskoe Politbiuro, 249, indicates that the Politburo made

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253 254

255 256 257 258

259 260 261 262 263 264 265 266 267 268

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decisions dated for that day at least, but that no formal session took place. Resolutions 1929–53, 195–9; Maslov, “Iz istorii,” 94. 17/3/1003, l.29; see as well Iovchuk, “Vydaiushchiisia,” 81, who erroneously suggests that Zhdanov remained its chief until 1941; 77/2/2, l.49; Seibert, Zhdanovism, 212, suggests mistakenly that the merger had already been decided upon on the fifteenth. On 27 November, a new shuffle of responsibilities of cc secretaries did not change much for Zhdanov, but Pospelov was appointed his deputy for Agitprop (Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 246; Stalinskoe Politbiuro, 171; 17/3/1004, l.2). On 27 January 1939, G.F. Aleksandrov was appointed deputy chief of the Agitprop department for propaganda issues, presumably at first with Pospelov as his immediate superior (17/3/1005, l.61). Arlen Blium mysteriously suggests that the Administration only came into being in August 1939 (Zensur, 291–2n1). Seibert, Zhdanovism, 212; Resolutions 1929–53, 199, Meissner, “Shdanow” 1: 19–20. Meissner, “Shdanow” 2: 94. See the remarks of the former censor V.A. Solodin in Tsenzura, 18; see also ibid., 74; Konashev, “Tainstvo,” 156 77/1/706; 77/1/707. On 7 December Zhdanov spoke at a plenum of the Leningrad obkom, concentrating on the perennial problems of the collective farms (77/1/710, l.1). This time, the Pskov’s Party’s leadership was singled out as inadequate in the matter. “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71. Kuznetsov, Nakanune, 227–8. 77/3/160, l.183. 77/3/4, ll.5–7, 11. “Posetiteli” 5: 26–9. It was only later in the year that army commanders became frequent visitors to Stalin’s office. 77/1/712. Stalinskoe Politbiuro, 251; 17/3/1005, l.1; 77/3/20. 17/3/1005, l.2. For more on the report, see the next chapter. 77/1/713; 77/1/714. Nadzhafov, “Nachalo,” 89–90.

chapter seven 1 Scott, Duel for Europe, 17. Scott believed that the population boom caused by rural dwellers flocking to the cities since the beginning of the Great Turn was mainly responsible for the huge housing shortage in the capital and elsewhere (ibid., 23). 2 Masha Gessen writes insightfully that “the leaders’ knowledge of history

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5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

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… seemed [not] to have prepared them for the untidy and uncontrollable ways in which history writes itself” (Dead Again, 136). Silvio Pons assigns rather too much agency to Zhdanov and Molotov within the formation of Soviet foreign policy (Stalin, xi): Zhdanov’s position was not perceptibly different from Stalin’s throughout the immediate pre-war years. Voznesenskii, Voennaia, 179; Broekmeyer, Stalin, 51; Iurii Zhukov (Tainy, 113) suggests fifty per cent on the eve of the war. Among other things, such civilian privations were caused by an economy that had to supply a number of troops that trebled between 1939 and 1941 (Broekmeyer, Stalin, 52). Baryshnikov, “Ekonomika,” 218–19. Ibid., 219. On 1 May 1939, the Politburo again resolved on the issue in an attempt to overcome queues for clothes and footwear (17/3/1009, l.17). Gross, Revolution, 45–9; Scott, Duel for Europe, 40–1, 211. Berezhkov, Piterskie, 199 Broekmeyer, Stalin, 31. The appointment was made somewhere in February 1939 (Spahr, Stalin’s, 220). Spahr, Stalin’s Lieutenants, 220–2. 1941 God 1: 69n2. Nadzhafov, “Nachalo,” 89–90. “Posetiteli” 5: 33; “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71. KPSS 7: 8–49. The Communist party consisted of 1.6 million members and 890,000 candidates. Aleksei Kuznetsov noted that the Party organization for the city of Leningrad had 115,211 full members and 36,911 candidate members in April 1940; the oblast’ had the second largest Party organization in the ussr, amounting to about five per cent of the total membership in the Soviet Union (77/1/748, l.60). On 23 March the Politburo ordered the newspapers to publish preliminary results of the census of late 1937: the ussr was said to have 170,126,000 people (17/3/1008, l.10). That number may have been inflated to hide the havoc caused by collectivization, famine, and the purges. Nadzhafov, “Nachalo,” 90–1 Zhdanov, Izmeneniia, 3–4. An English version of the report can be found in the Comintern journal (see Zhdanov, “Report on the Amendments”). It was not made quite clear which stage of historical development the Soviet Union had entered; much later this theoretical conundrum plagued the Soviet leadership under Khrushchev and Brezhnev as well. In Zhdanov’s speech, he noted that “the U.S.S.R. has entered a new phase of development – the phase of completion of the building of class-

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19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

36 37 38

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less, socialist society and of gradual transition from socialism to communism” (ibid., 682, 716). Zhdanov, Izmeneniia, 6. Zhdanov, “Report on the Amendments,” 689, 694. Ibid., 694. Dzeniskevich, Nakanune, 37–8. Ibid., 39. Zhdanov, “Report on the Amendments,” 692. Ibid., 693. Zhdanov, Izmeneniia, 11–13, 18–19; Zhdanov, “Report on the Amendments,” 703; Iu.N. Zhukov, Tainy, 110; Krementsov, Stalinist Science, 64; see as well KPSS 7: 90. Perhaps because Agitprop had been restructured since the autumn of 1938 (and Zhdanov had been the cc department’s chief, supervising the process, from the fall until the Party Congress), it was deemed “safe” to leave the new administration to Aleksandrov, since organization of the division had been completed. The organization of the Cadres directorate, meanwhile, may only have begun in earnest after the Congress, for on 31 March the Politburo ordered its official organization (17/3/1008, l.29): Malenkov was appointed head of the Cadres Directorate, with N.N. Shatalin as his first deputy. Batygin, Deviatko, “Sovetskoe,” 176. “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 67, 137; “Posetiteli” 5: 30–1. 17/3/1010, l.1; Ogurtsov, Podavlenie, 103–4; Kojevnikov, “Games,” 147; Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 156–7; R. Medvedev, Let History Judge, 305. For Mitin’s and Iudin’s destructive work in the purges, see R. Medvedev, Let History Judge, 438. Molotov, 807. Maksimenkov, Sumbur, 54; Zis’, “Chemu svidetelem,” 154; Molotov, 838; Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 156–7, 157, note. Ogurtsov, Podavlenie, 112. Schapiro, Communist, 455, 653. Zhdanov, Izmeneniia. It is indicative of the unease felt about Zhdanov in the ussr after 1948 that, even in 1985, official Soviet sources indicated Stalin’s speech but did not mention Molotov or Zhdanov as other keynote speakers at the Congress (KPSS 7: 49–50; for all the major speeches in English, see Communist International). See Petrone, Life, 178. Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 229; Kuznetsov, “Krutye” 7: 50. Kuznetsov, Nakanune, 231. Another victim of the ultimate fall of Ezhov was the writer Isaak Babel’. Zhdanov, as head of ideology and, therefore, of culture, enjoyed the macabre privilege of receiving from Beria the

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39

40

41 42

43

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record of the nkvd interrogation of Babel’ on 7 June (Shentalinskii, Raby, 51). Schapiro, Communist Party, 446, 648–9; “Kak zapreshchali,” 141–2; Resolutions 1929–53, 200; 77/2/81, l.4; Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 229; Communist International, 718–9. In Russian, sometimes called rukovodiashchee iadro (see also chapter 5). Perhaps one could substitute “magic circle” for “Inner Circle,” with reference to the leadership of the British Conservative party of the early 1960s. Molotov noted that there always was a “leading group” within the Politburo, to which neither Rudzutak, Kosior, Kalinin, nor Andreev ever belonged (Chuev, Molotov, 498). The hypothesis, recently recycled by Iurii Zhukov, about rampant intrigues in which the Vozhd’ was an almost equal participant in this group rather than its leader and the instigator of such intrigues, does not hold much water (see, for instance Zhukov, Tainy, 274–5, 389; earlier proponents of this idea include McCagg, Stalin Embattled). Some cautious jockeying for position among the slightly younger group (Beria, Malenkov, Voznesensky) may have begun after the war as a result of Stalin’s declining health and his prolonged absences from Moscow, but very little occurred before 1945. After Stalin’s return from his holiday in the south in 1936, he was almost continuously in the Moscow area until the summer of 1945, either at his Kremlin office and apartment or in one of his dachas. His only prolonged absences in that decade were his visits to Teheran, Yalta, and Potsdam. In Moscow little of consequence escaped him. Even after the war, Voznesensky paid with his life, possibly underestimating Stalin’s suspicion, which Stalin himself fed by maintaining a constant surveillance of his lieutenants. Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 239, 291. Kaganovich (who led the ussr’s transport) and Beria visited about as much as Zhdanov during that summer. For example, see Dimitrov, 126–34, 163–4; Dimitroff, Tagebücher, 359–60, 386–8; Lebedeva, Narinskii, Komintern, 15; Narinskii, “Sovetskaia,” 39. But the Comintern was not Zhdanov’s exclusive responsibility, since Stalin involved himself in matters of general policy, and Andreev seems to have monitored its budget (see Dimitroff, Tagebücher, 273–4, 362, 377). In November 1939 the Comintern’s executive committee announced a new composition of its membership, a shake-up deemed necessary because of the “changed international situation.” It was then that Zhdanov entered the presidium of the Comintern Executive for the first time, although he had already been involved intensely with Dimitrov before then (Adibekov, Organizatsionnaia, 209, 211; Dimitroff, Tagebücher, 273–4, 277–80). For example, Zhdanov had a number of short meetings in Stalin’s office before the cc issued a decree on 16 August 1939 condemning the state of propaganda in Belorussia and the Orel and Kursk oblasts (KPSS 7:

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52 53

54 55 56

57

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129–33; “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71; “Posetiteli” 5: 47). And on 20 August, in the midst of the negotiations with Germany, Zhdanov conducted an Orgbiuro session that discussed the editorial staff of literary and art journals (Literaturnyi front, 43–4; Vlast’ i khudozhestvennaia, 433–4). For such a division of tasks, see Khlevniuk, Politburo, 254. Ibid., 238–9, 251. Iurii Zhukov exaggerates the significance of this or other similar organizational changes at the top (see Tainy, 233–4, 299–300, 360–2). The enormous number of official Politburo decisions can be seen from Politbiuro TsK RKP(b), vols. 2 and 3. “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71. See Dimitroff, Kommentare, 117–18. The Comintern tried to organize support for the Chinese in the fall of 1938; see Dimitroff, Kommentare, 117–18. Kuznetsov, Nakanune, 23, “Pered” 2: 177–83, “Pered” 3: 151. Additionally, first Party secretary of the Maritime region N.M. Pegov (1905–91), first Party secretary of the Far Eastern (or Khabarovsk) region V.A. Donskoi (1903–47), Generals I.S. Konev and G.M. Shtern (1900–41), and other commanders met Stalin in Moscow on 23 March and accompanied Zhdanov and Kuznetsov on their trip (“Posetiteli” 5: 33). As well, see Kuznetsov, “Krutye” 3: 28–9; Admiral, 80; Erickson, Road to Stalingrad, 30–1; see previous chapter. Kuznetsov, “Krutye” 4: 54. A key moment when Zhdanov behaved in such manner came in June 1941 when Kuznetsov wanted to place the Navy on a heightened state of alert, to which Zhdanov at first agreed but then deferred to Malenkov, who, acting on behalf of Stalin, prohibited the issue of any such order (Erickson, Road to Stalingrad, 96). During the war, Zhdanov relinquished his supervision over the navy, never to regain it, even though he continued as a member of the Naval Council (Kuznetsov, “Krutye” 3: 30; see also ibid., 31–2n9; and chapters 9 and 10). Kuznetsov, “Krutye” 3: 31–2n9. Ibid., 30. Ibid., 30–1. In the memoirs published after the collapse of the ussr, Kuznetsov is less enthusiastic about Zhdanov than in those published in the Soviet Union during the 1960s. 77/2/76; Salisbury, 900 Days, 136; Kuznetsov, Nakanune, 236, “Krutye” 1: 43; Admiral, 487. It seems that the delegation was recalled to Moscow on 15 April, but the train trip took more than a week; see Kuznetsov, “Pered” 2: 179. On 26 April Dimitrov met Zhdanov, Molotov, Kaganovich, Voroshilov, and Mikoian in Stalin’s office (Dimitroff, Tagebücher, 251).

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63 64 65 66

67 68 69 70 71

72 73 74

75 76 77

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Admiral, 61–2. Pons, Stalin, 155–6, 182n26, 182n27. 77/2/76, ll.4–5, 39–41; Kuznetsov, Nakanune, 200, 228, “Krutye” 1: 43. Kuznetsov, “Krutye” 6: 79. Ibid., Nakanune, 240; Admiral, 85–7. Perhaps, however, Kuznetsov errs in placing the meeting on the twenty-seventh; according to Stalin’s book of visitors, Kuznetsov came on the twenty-eighth, joining Zhdanov (registered in the log for the first time since March), Molotov, and Voroshilov in Stalin’s office (“Posetiteli” 5: 36). In Zhdanov’s absence, on the personal initiative of Stalin, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet awarded Zhdanov, somewhat mysteriously, the Labour Red Banner for his outstanding successes in the field of agriculture, while Voznesensky, Zhdanov’s protégé, was appointed deputy premier by the Politburo (77/2/2, l.51; Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 247; 17/3/1008, l.40). “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71; “Posetiteli” 5: 36. Nadzhafov, “Nachalo,” 91. The replacement occurred officially on 3 May 1939. Maksimenkov, Sumbur, 94; “Posetiteli” 5: 37; “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71. Dimitroff, Kommentare, 133; Dokumenty 1939 1: 507–8. The Soviet units pretended to be part of the army of Outer Mongolia. The fighting lasted until mid-September (Dokumenty 1939 2: 85–6, 90). KPSS 7: 109–28. The cc met on 21 to 24 May and on 27 May, while the Supreme Soviet met from 25 to 31 May (Dimitroff, Tagebücher, 258–61). Dimitroff, Tagebücher, 259. For the offensive that was unleashed thereafter against the khutory, see Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants, 163–4. Dimitroff, Tagebücher, 259–60. A facile accusation, perhaps, as Litvinov had a British wife. See Scott, Duel for Europe, 12–13. In the first four days of June, Zhdanov, Molotov, Malenkov, Voroshilov, and Stalin spent many hours together in Stalin’s office (“Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71; “Posetiteli” 5: 38–9). See 195–7. See Stalin’s remarks in the presence of Zhdanov, Molotov, and Dimitrov on 7 September 1939 (Dimitroff, Tagebücher, 273–4). For in many ways this appreciation of the international situation in the summer of 1939 went back to Lenin’s “Imperialism,” written during the First World War. 1941 God 1: 69n2. Soyfer, Lysenko, 132–3; Krementsov, Stalinist Science, 66, 68–9; Konecny, Builders, 136. Much has been written about Lysenko: see for example Graham, Science, or Joravsky, Lysenko. David Joravsky interprets Zhdanov’s silence on the issue throughout the fall of 1939 as a sign that Zhdanov was far from

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supportive of Lysenko’s ideas, contrary, perhaps, to Andreev, who then supervised agriculture as cc secretary and Politburo member (Joravsky, Lysenko, 108–9). Soyfer, Lysenko, 132–5. 77/1/758, ll.1, 8. Joravsky, Lysenko, 379–80n138. On 25 June Zhdanov was twice in Stalin’s Kremlin office, and from 27 June to 4 July Zhdanov spent there a combined total of almost twentyfour hours (“Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71; “Posetiteli” 5: 42–3). In other ways his workload remained heavy too. While foreign affairs and defence matters were on his mind for much of the following months, he was also editing a blueprint for the creation of artists’ and composers’ unions, supervising Leningrad, and working on regular Party business, particularly Agitprop. Among other tasks, he had to deal with thousands of letters he received every month from Soviet citizens, who were in the habit of taking their consitutional right to petition seriously; in January 1940, Zhdanov received 5,638 letters as Leningrad Party secretary. Most avoided critical remarks about political issues: although often filled with complaints, only fifteen were categorized as anti-Soviet (Davies, Popular Opinion, 15). Rieber, Zhdanov, 4–5; Pravda, 29 June 1939, 1; Ra’anan, International, 185n15; Salisbury, 900 Days, 133–4; 77/1/884 is a handwritten version of the article. Note particularly the brief visit by newspaper editor Rovinskii for five minutes to Stalin’s office on 28 June, where, in addition to Stalin, he was received by Zhdanov, Molotov, Voroshilov, Mikoian, Kaganovich, and Beria (“Posetiteli” 5: 42). Craig Nation supposes that Zhdanov especially, together with Molotov and Kaganovich, was supportive of a “fortress Russia” concept, different from the old Litvinov line of international collaboration and the Popular Front, but his evidence is slim; Gorodetsky argues upon more solid ground that Molotov and Zhdanov favoured an isolationist stand and that Stalin (“as was his practice”) wavered for a long time, but I believe that both give too much credence to the idea that Zhdanov expressed a genuine personal opinion about the choice for or against Germany (Nation, Black Earth, 78; Gorodetsky, Grand Delusion, 7). Zhdanov was a master at evading any impression that he was coming down on one side or other until Stalin had given a clear sign of the direction in which he was veering. The only time that Zhdanov may have made an ill-considered choice was when, in ill health, he ended up on the wrong side in the Lysenko conflict in 1948 (see chapter 10). Even then, however, perhaps not so much Zhdanov himself but his son had been rash. Iu.N. Zhukov believes as well that the article merely reflects the opinion of all of the Inner Circle (Tainy, 136).

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Notes to pages 195–8

83 Pons, Stalin, 167–8. 84 The article’s rhetoric would be a classic example of Zizek’s point that “totalitarian power is not a dogmatism which has all the answers; it is, on the contrary, the instance which has all the questions” (see Zizek, Sublime, 179). 85 One is reminded of the Conservative Churchill’s criticism of the Conservative Chamberlain’s foreign policy regarding Hitler’s Germany before September 1939. 86 See Scott, Duel for Europe, 19, who emphasizes this point. 87 “Posetiteli” 5: 43. 88 77/2/82, l.164; Salisbury, 900 Days, 136–7; Kuznetsov, Nakanune, 239, 241–2; Kuznetsov, “Pered” 2: 182. 89 “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71; “Posetiteli” 5: 46. Zhdanov also dedicated on three different occasions in July considerable time to observing gymnastic (fizkul’turnyi) parades in Leningrad and Moscow and meeting with these fitness fiends in the Kremlin (77/2/82, l.164; for more on them, see Petrone, Life, 15, 23, 30–2, 40). 90 Lebedeva, “Pol’sha,” 68; Nadzhafov, “Nachalo,” 92. It was only on 11 August that an official Politburo decision permitted exploration of the possibilities for a German pact, showing clearly the often retroactive “rubber-stamp” role of the Politburo in this instance. 91 Lebedeva, “Pol’sha,” 68; “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71; “Posetiteli” 5: 48. 92 Werth, Russia at War, 48; Dimitroff, Kommentare, 138. 93 Several researchers refer to Stalin’s report being delivered at a kind of informal Politburo meeting (Doroshenko, “Stalinskaia,” 73–5; Nadzhafov, “Nachalo,” 96; Broekmeyer, Stalin, 22–5). There is no record in Stalin’s book of visitors or the cc records of any such meeting on the nineteenth, but that does not mean that a section of the Politburo did not meet with guests. During those momentous August days, Zhdanov and the other key leaders met Stalin almost every day (“Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71; “Posetiteli” 5: 48–9). Alternatively, Stalin may have made his pitch at the meeting of 17 August. 94 Dimitroff, Tagebücher, 273–4. In many ways, the points that Stalin is supposed to have made on this occasion resemble a more candid version of what he told Dimitrov (at a meeting, held just after the German invasion of Poland, that Zhdanov and Molotov attended; see below) was to be the proper interpretation of the Nazi-Soviet pact and the war it triggered. 95 Volkov, Vzlët, 230. 96 Lebedeva, “Pol’sha,” 69. 97 “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71; Lebedeva, “Pol’sha,” 69. 98 Mezhdunarodnoe, 3–11; Scott, Duel for Europe, 29. 99 Davies, Popular Opinion, 68; Lebedeva, “Pol’sha,” 69; Dimitroff, Kommentare, 141; Scott, Duel for Europe, 37–8.

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Notes to pages 198–9

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100 “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71; “Posetiteli” 5: 50–4. On 10 September Zhdanov was promoted from his candidate status to full member of an enlarged ko. Others receiving full membership included Beria, N.G. Kuznetsov, Shaposhnikov, Kulik, and Mikoian, who were added to the quintet of Voznesensky, Stalin, Molotov, Kaganovich, and Voroshilov. Apart from the military commanders, the ko’s composition was an indication of who really mattered politically at the time (see Iu.N. Zhukov, Tainy, 144, 146; Zhukov errs in believing that Zhdanov had nothing to do with this committee previously, for Zhdanov had been a candidate member of the ko since its creation in April 1937). The function of the ko, meanwhile, remained poorly circumscribed, as Erickson notes (Road to Stalingrad, 136). 101 Lebedeva, “Pol’sha,” 70; Lebedeva, “Chetvertyi,” 242; Katyn’, 10; Nevezhin, “Making,” 152, 162n19; Pons, Stalin, 176, 189, 212n14. 102 See above for Stalin’s pronouncements during the visit with Dimitrov; “Posetiteli… Alfavitnyi,” 71; “Posetiteli” 5: 50–1; Dimitrov, Tagebücher, 273–4; 1941 God 2: 584–5; Lebedeva, Narinskii, Komintern, 10–1; Gorodetsky, Grand, 8; Chubar’ian, “Sovetskaia,” 18; Narinskii, “Sovetskaia,” 38; Dimitrov, 151. On 24 September Zhdanov called Dimitrov on the phone from Stalin’s Moscow dacha to demand an acceleration of the preparation of Comintern theses regarding the war. These were to be based on Stalin’s statements of the night of 7–8 September. Zhdanov also berated the Comintern boss by adding that, in this amount of time, Stalin would have been able to write an entire book (Lebedeva, Narinskii, Komintern, 121, 171; Dimitroff, Tagebücher, 277). The theses were never published, but the gist of them was published in an article in the journal Communist International in the fall (it was published as a separate brochure; see Dimitroff, The War). 103 “Posetiteli” 5: 51. 104 Pravda, 14 September 1939, 1; Nevezhin, “Making,” 162; Pons, Stalin, 176. 105 See Dimitroff, Tagebücher, 274 106 Volkov, Vzlët, 228–9; Chubar’ian, “Sovetskaia,” 10. 107 Misiunas, Taagepera, Baltic States, 15; Manninen, Baryshnikov, “Peregovory,” 116. 108 Manninen, Baryshnikov, “Peregovory,” 116; 1941 God, 1: 69–70n3; Scott, Duel for Europe, 65; Misiunas, Taagepera, Baltic States, 15; for the terms of the pact, see Dokumenty 1939 2: 138–41. 109 On 5 October, following the Estonian blueprint, a pact of mutual military aid was concluded with Latvia (Manninen, Baryshnikov, “Peregovory,” 116). And on 10 October Lithuania signed an agreement of mutual defence with the Soviet Union. In exchange, it was handed the city of Vilnius, the ancient Lithuanian capital, from defunct Poland

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110

111 112 113 114 115 116

117 118 119 120 121 122 123

124

125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135

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Notes to pages 199–201 (Manninen, Baryshnikov, “Peregovory,” 116; Gross, Revolution, 72). For the Latvian-Soviet pact, see Dokumenty 1939 2: 161–4; and for the Lithuanian-Soviet pact, ibid., 173–6. Lebedeva, “Chetvertyi,” 264; Lebedeva, “Pol’sha,” 81. For the Politburo’s outline of the process of annexation, see Dokumenty 1939 2: 19–22). Bugai puts the number of people deported from the two republics in 1939–41 and 1945–1950 at more than 600,000 (Bugai, Beria, 6). Katyn’, 20–1, 112–19. Katyn’, 390–2, 432; Lebedeva, “Pol’sha,” 77; Lebedeva, “Chetvertyi,” 282–6. 77/1/737, l.18 See as well Dokumenty 1939 2: 19–22. 77/1/737, ll.6, 7, 18. 77/1/737, l.6; Gross, Revolution, xv, 71, 106; Lebedeva, “Pol’sha,” 81. Gross, Revolution, 71, 75, notes that elections for national assemblies began to be organized in both Western Ukraine and Western Belarus’ in early October. Whether or not Zhdanov ever went to the region is not fully clear; he may have merely drafted the pronouncements; Khrushchev and Timoshenko certainly spoke in L’vov. Lebedeva, “Chetvertyi,” 242; Gross, Revolution, xx–xxi, 107–8. Bugai, Beria, 12; Lebedeva, “Pol’sha,” 82; Gross, Revolution, 108. Gross, Revolution, 35–45, 51. 77/1/737, ll.6, 7, 18. Gross, Revolution, 226, 228–9. Volkov, Vzlët, 229. Manninen, Baryshnikov, “Peregovory,” 117. A partial mobilization had already been completed by the time of the Soviet-Finnish talks of 12 October (see Dokumenty 1939 2: 178). Zhdanov’s visits to Stalin in his office, which had occurred almost daily in previous weeks, halted for several days (“Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71; “Posetiteli” 5: 54–5). Manninen, Baryshnikov, “Peregovory,” 116. Ibid., 124. Manninen, Baryshnikov, “V kanun,” 131; Manninen, “Pervyi,” 151. Manninen, Baryshnikov, “V kanun,” 131–2; “Posetiteli” 5: 56. Manninen, Baryshnikov, “Peregovory,” 124; Scott, Duel for Europe, 94. “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71; “Posetiteli” 5: 56; Manninen, Baryshnikov, “V kanun,” 132. Manninen, Baryshnikov, “Peregovory,” 127. 77/2/82, l.168. Manninen, Baryshnikov, “V kanun,” 132. “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 7, 71; “Posetiteli” 5: 57–8. Ibid., 136.

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136 Ibid., 132. 137 Ibid., 133; Baryshnikov, Baryshnikov, “Pravitel’stvo,” 184. 138 On that very day Zhdanov visited Stalin’s office for the first time in almost two weeks. The meeting was long, over five hours, and the two men were joined by the army commanders in its later stages (“Posetiteli” 5: 60). 139 Manninen, Baryshnikov, “V kanun,” 136–7. 140 “Uroki voiny,” 104. 141 Volkov, Vzlët, 229; Salisbury, 900 Days, 113; Spahr, Stalin’s Lieutenants, 220; “Uroki voiny,” 100. 142 “Uroki voiny,” 100–1. Salisbury maintains that Timoshenko succeeded in January; Meretskov, meanwhile, continued to command a sector of the front (Salisbury, 900 Days, 114). To some extent, Zhdanov left more routine civilian matters to his Party deputies. See, for example, tsgaipd, 24/2/3247, ll.1–3, testifying to his absence from an obkomburo meeting addressing minor matters. 143 After he had returned from the friendship treaty with the Terijoki government, he only visited Stalin’s office once before the end of the year, on 30 December (when army and navy commanders participated), and only twice in January 1940 (again with the key commanders). On 2 February, at a session of the Military Council of the Leningrad Military District, he addressed Red Army soldiers who had distinguished themselves in the war (77/1/739). Zhdanov’s absence from Moscow is evident from the visitors’ book of Stalin’s office and some entries in Dimitrov’s diary (“Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71; Dimitroff, Tagebücher, 285; “Posetiteli” 5: 64; “Posetiteli” 6: 4, 6). 144 See below. On 21 March the presidium of the Supreme Soviet awarded him the Order of the Red Banner for his model execution of a commander’s tasks in the war with the Finns and for his courage and valour (77/2/2, l.51; Borisov, Andrei, 21). 145 “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71. 146 Lebedeva, Narinskii, Komintern, 16–17. 147 Zhdanov, Kuusinen, Molotov, Stalin, and Voroshilov met in Stalin’s office (“Posetiteli” 5: 61). See also Werth, Russia at War, 68; Baryshnikov, Baryshnikov, “Pravitel’stvo,” 179; “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71; Chuev, Molotov, 21. For the pact, see Dokumenty 1939 2: 355–8. 148 Scott, Duel for Europe, 101–2. 149 Gross, Revolution, 45–50. 150 Habeck, “Dress Rehearsals,” 105. 151 Grif, 96; Davies, Popular Opinion, 100–1. 152 Davies, Popular Opinion, 100. In the province, kolkhozniks engaged in mass-scale slaughter of bovines; perhaps this too was the result of the fear that the war would spread (tsgaipd, 24/2/3582, l.2).

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Notes to pages 203–5

153 Berezhkov, Piterskie, 199. 154 “Uroki voiny,” 101, 115: by 11 February the offensive became massive. 155 Dokumenty 1939 2: 771n7; Vekhviliainen, Baryshnikov, “Ot voiny,” 345, 353. Vekhviliainen and Baryshnikov point out that “undoubtedly, Stalin in particular formulated the peace conditions, and the members of the Soviet delegation were the executors of his decisions” (“Ot voiny,” 346). 156 “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71; Ra’anan, International, 14; A. Werth, Russia at War, 76; Scott, Duel for Europe, 114. On 31 March Zhdanov presented a proposal to the Supreme Soviet to transform the Karelian autonomous ssr into the Karelo-Finnish ssr, a full-fledged Soviet republic. Making it the leadership of a short-lived Soviet republic ended the embarassment of the existence of an alternative Finnish government led by Kuusinen (77/2/81, l.4; Shestaia Sessia, 46–51; Zhdanov, O preobrazovanii). 157 Grif, 99; Kumanev cites another, perhaps more accurate, source that gives twice the number of deaths and 325,000 wounded (Kumanev, Podvig, 80); Finnish estimates were much higher; see Scott, Duel for Europe, 114. 158 Reese states, “There is ample evidence, however, to suggest that the Red Army had significant internal problems that were not at all related to the purges, which in and of themselves contributed far more than all other factors to its defeats in 1941 and 1942 and compounded all other disadvantages. Difficulties with social cohesion, officer manning, discipline, and training mostly brought on by rapid expansion degraded the Red Army’s ability to fight effectively” (Reese, Stalin’s Reluctant Soldiers, 1, see as well, ibid., 207–8). 159 1941 God 1: 277–8n2. 160 See the Gosplan report of early 1941 in 1941 God 1: 550–61. 161 “Posetiteli” 6: 11–12. 162 “Iz istorii Velikoi” 1: 176. At the time, A.I. Zaporozhets was a member of the Moscow gorkomburo and a member of the Military Council of the Moscow Military District; in September 1940, Zaporozhets was appointed head of the Main Administration of Political Propaganda of the Red Army (Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 218). 163 CPSU’s Top, 7; “Uroki voiny,” 101; for the foreign-policy effects of the war, see “Uroki voiny,” 113; KPSS 7: 148–53. 164 Rubtsov, Alter ego, 135; “Uroki voiny,” 100–22. There may have been another meeting between Stalin, Molotov, Voroshilov, and the top military brass, on its own, on the Finnish campaign in mid-April, from which Zhdanov was absent (Rubtsov, Alter ego, 135; Zimniaia voina, 162; Kuznetsov, “Krutye” 7: 48). 165 “Uroki voiny,” 112–13. 166 Ibid., 114.

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Notes to pages 206–7

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167 Ibid., 119. 168 See below in this chapter for its conclusions. Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 245; Rieber, Zhdanov, 9–10; Salisbury, 900 Days, 115n5. 169 Voroshilov handed over the People’s Commissariat of Defence to Timoshenko in the presence of witnesses Zhdanov, Malenkov, and Voznesensky (“Iz istorii Velikoi,” 193, 207). Later that day, Voroshilov, Molotov, Zhdanov, Shchadenko, Budennyi, Mekhlis, Timoshenko, Kulik, and Admirals Kuznetsov and Galler visited Stalin (“Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71). 170 77/1/750; 77/1/751, ll.11–13. He had been involved in drafting both T.F. Shtykov’s extremely long report on behalf of the obkom and A.A. Kuznetsov’s gorkom report delivered later during the proceedings (77/1/747; 77/1/748; 77/1/753). On Shtykov’s further career, see Hyun-su Jeon, Gyoo Kahng, “Shtykov Diaries.” 171 The appeal was later published in the fifth issue of the year of Communist International (Lebedeva, Narinskii, Komintern, 332–40; see “May Day Manifesto”). 172 On 27 April he spoke before a meeting of dockyard workers of the Leningrad wharves (77/1/754, l.1) and on 29 April he was present at a session of the gorkomburo (77/1/755). 173 “Posetiteli” 6: 12–15; “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71; 1941 God 1: 12–13. Apart from the senior commanders Timoshenko, Kulik, Voroshilov, Shaposhnikov, Pavlov, deputy Red Army chief of staff I.V. Smorodinov (1894–1953), and army political bosses Shchadenko and Mekhlis, those managing defensive production (Tevosian, Malyshev, Shakhurin) also frequented Stalin’s office (“Posetiteli” 6: 15–16). 174 See Khrushchev’s recollection of Stalin’s despair at France’s weakness (Khrushchev Remembers, vol.1, 117). 175 Stalinskoe Politbiuro, 253. 176 “Posetiteli” 6: 16–21. A stunned Dimitrov consulted with Zhdanov in mid-June on the position of the French Communist party regarding the German occupation of France (Dimitrov, 169–70; Lebedeva, Narinskii, Komintern, 29). 177 Von Rauch, Baltic States, 219–22; Zhdanov met Stalin on 16 June (“Posetiteli” 6: 18). Misiunas and Taagepera suggest that a definitive decision was made in February to annex the Baltic states, but it is not quite clear why the Soviets then waited until mid-June, as such a move would have been opportune both in April (during the German invasion of Denmark and Norway) and in May (during the invasion of the Low Countries and France; Misiunas, Taagepera, Baltic States, 18). It is more likely that the force of circumstance prevailing by mid-June made Stalin, Molotov, and the others decide that full annexation would be a blustering answer to the Nazi advances, conveying that the Soviets were

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178 179

180

181

182 183 184

185

186 187 188 189

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Notes to pages 207–8 not going to let the Nazis redraw the map of Europe alone, even after the humiliations of the Winter War. 1941 God 1: 35–7, 40. Overy, Russia’s War, 60; Misiunas, Taagepera, Baltic States, 19, 21. Some fighting occurred between Estonian troops and pro-Soviet activists and Soviet Red Army units, but the resistance was short-lived, as the Estonian patriots realized the hopelessness of their struggle. Von Rauch, Baltic States, 222; Von Rauch argues that Zhdanov had the general responsibility for the annexation of all three states by the Soviet Union, so that he rather stood above the other two within the chain of command. See as well Von Rauch, Geschichte, 395. As the editors of a documentary collection on the Soviet Union in 1941 note, “in close collaboration with local communist parties [he controlled] the whole process of political transformation … leading to the creation of [a] Soviet republic … and [its] entrance into the ussr” (1941 God 1: 70n4). See as well Von Rauch, Baltic States, 222–3; Misiunas, Taagepera, Baltic States, 19; Meissner, “Shdanow” 2: 96; Orlov, “Pribaltika,” 205. Päts held out as president until mid-July, when he was forced to resign (Misiunas, Taagepera, Baltic States, 22). Vares succeeded him. Misiunas and Taagepera note that there were no “known” Communists among the ministers (Baltic States, 22). “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71; Zhdanov, Dekanozov, and Vyshinskii met with Stalin, Molotov, Malenkov, Mikoian, Bulganin, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, and Beria in Stalin’s office (“Posetiteli” 6: 21); 1941 God 1: 17. Sovetskoe, 420. This dearth was attributed by Vares to the machinations of the Estonian “plutocracy”, which had propagated Estonian chauvinism in the course of the previous twenty-two years (77/3/124, l.1). Potential leaders of a Communist Estonia had been killed during the purges in the ussr, and the Estonian club in Leningrad had been closed (see R. Medvedev, Let History Judge, 433; Misiunas, Taagepera, Baltic States, 23). Misiunas, Taagepera, Baltic States, 30. Orlov, “Pribaltika,” 205; Von Rauch, Baltic States, 225; Misiunas, Taagepera, Baltic States, 25–6. Von Rauch, Baltic States, 226. 77/3/124, ll.1–2; Vares died by his own hand in November 1946, although there is suspicion of mgb involvement in his death (Misiunas, Taagepera, Baltic States, 75). Even though the process that incorporated Estonia into the Soviet Union shared certain traits with the sovietization of East-Central Europe after the Second World War, there appear to be too many sub-

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191 192 193 194 195 196

197

198 199 200 201

202 203

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stantial differences between the two to call the postwar creation of the “People’s Democracies” a straightforward repetition of the annexation of the Balticum in 1940, as Meissner proposes (“Baltic Question,” 145). Stalin calibrated his actions to his main diplomatic partners: allied with Hitler Stalin could be blunt like the Führer, ignoring most diplomatic niceties and international law; with Truman and Attlee, he had to be more circumspect. He also seems to have been influenced by his reading of Russian history in his recreation of a (Soviet-) Russian empire: the Balticum had been part of the tsar’s realm, most of EastCentral Europe had not. Finland (after the Winter War) and perhaps Poland do not fit this pattern, but here Stalin’s pragmatism surfaced, for annexation of either would have caused extreme tension with the Western Allies and subjugation of either Polish or Finnish resistance would have been a long-winded and perhaps futile process. Sovetskoe, 420, 436. Misiunas, Taagepera, Baltic States, 24. Rieber, Zhdanov, 7–8; Harris, Origins, 299; Vaksberg, Stalin’s, 208–9, 214; Orlov, “Pribaltika,” 205; Werth, Russia at War, 94; Bugai, Beria, 6. 77/3/124, l.1. Sovetskoe, 430. 1941 God 1: 128. Iurii Zhukov maintains that Zhdanov was only added after a week, but he contradicts himself later (compare Iu.N. Zhukov, Tainy, 151, with ibid., 160–1). Khizhniakov, XVIII Partkonferentsiia, 16; 1941 God 1: 57–61; Davies, Popular Opinion, 45. These laws remained in force until 1956: Zubkova, Obshchestvo, 65–6. In May the labour norms had been heightened within most branches of the Soviet economy in order to increase production of war-related goods (Davies, Popular Opinion, 42). Davies, Popular Opinion, 45. Davies, Popular Opinion, 70; Scott, Duel for Europe, 336–7, 339–40; 1941 God 1: 279. See Boterbloem, Life and Death, 202. 1941 God 1: 71, 139–43: State Prosecutor Pankrat’ev was dismissed as he had proven incapable of adequately implementing the decree; for its “official” agenda, see KPSS 7: 159–74. 1941 God 1: 147, 150–2; Von Rauch, Baltic States, 226; Scott, Duel for Europe, 129. Zhdanov was accompanied by Kiril Meretskov, who within days succeeded Boris Shaposhnikov as army chief of staff (both remaining deputy narkoms of defence; see “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71; 1941 God 1: 148). The reason for this move is not clear. Shaposhnikov, who was highly respected by Stalin, was plagued by frequent bouts of severe illness and perhaps could not handle the workload. Meretskov’s

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promotion is more intriguing than Shaposhnikov’s release, for the former had been roundly criticized for his poor generalship during the Winter War and had been subordinated at the front to Timoshenko. Obviously, the work of a chief of staff is different from a front commander, but Meretskov’s appointment did constitute a promotion. Was he moved up on Zhdanov’s recommendation? Zhdanov had known him for some time in Leningrad. At the beginning of the Second World War, Meretskov was suddenly arrested on charges of participating in a military plot but just as suddenly released. Did he then suffer from the absence of his protector Zhdanov in the capital? Meretskov’s official appointment occurred on 19 August (17/3/1026, ll.62–3; 1941 God 1: 147). 204 Scott, Duel for Europe, 214. 205 “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71; 1941 God 1: 149. On 26 August Zhdanov visited Stalin in the Kremlin and the two had a one-on-one session of forty-five minutes, likely addressing cultural affairs. 206 Vlast’ i khudozhestvennaia, 449–50. 207 77/2/2, l.49. The transfer was announced on 7 September in Pravda (Ra’anan, International, 17; Kostyrchenko, Out of the Red Shadows, 24). The suggestion by Denis Babichenko that Zhdanov was thus rebuked for letting pass the controversial film-script by Avdeenko (see below), if at all true (and Zhdanov continued to belong to the film censorship board, which seems to undermine Babichenko’s point), should probably be understood to mean only that he had not had the time to notice its nefarious existence, distracted by too many other tasks, which may have made Stalin (and Zhdanov himself) aware that his lieutenant could not keep an eye on everything and needed to be relieved from some of his many responsibilities (Babichenko, Pisateli, 24). Indeed, Corbett points out that the cc decree “explicitly kept Zhdanov in general control of this essential instrument of Soviet government” (Corbett, “Aleksandrov,” 162). 208 “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71; “Posetiteli” 6: 27, indicates that Stalin, Zhdanov, and Molotov met Bol’shakov, the successor of Dukel’skii as head of the Sovnarkom Film Committee, on 14 September. 209 Babichenko, Pisateli, 25; Gromov, Stalin, 255: Vlast’ i khudozhestvennaia, 450–5, 778n38. 210 Borisov, Andrei, 21. 211 “Kak zapreshchali,” 141–2; Leonov, Metel’. On 30 August Zhdanov’s deputy Petr Pospelov, assisted by the head of the cultural and educational section of Agitprop, D.A. Polikarpov (1905–65), had submitted a report to his boss about the ideologically detrimental effect of Leonov’s play (17/3/1026, l.100; Stalinskoe Politbiuro, 73n1). 212 Harjan, Leonid, 146–7.

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213 Babichenko, Pisateli, 46–9. On 25 September Zhdanov received a report by Krupin, a cc department chief, on Akhmatova’s poetry (Vlast’ i khudozhestvennaia, 456–8). 214 The Leningrad obkom and Zhdanov as Agitprop chief had received a report denouncing the publication in Leningrad literary journals of works that “propagated a shameful and cynical philosophy of love” (Zensur, 288–9). 215 Vlast’ i khudozhestvennaia, 456. 216 Gromov, Stalin, 311. 217 Stalinskoe Politbiuro, 254. On or around this day, Zhdanov, Andreev, and Malenkov received a report by Aleksandrov and his deputy Polikarpov on the book Reprimand (Vygovor), by N. Borisov: the book presented the fear and panic of the Great Terror somewhat too literally (Vlast’ i khudozhestvennaia, 458–60). It was prohibited from publication as an antiSoviet piece on 2 October. Another late sign of the waning cultural campaign was Zhdanov and Aleksandrov’s presentation to the Orgbiuro on 26 November of a draft resolution on literary criticism and bibliography (Vlast’ i khudozhestvennaia, 462–5). Around the Politburo session, meetings between the military establishment and the Inner Circle were held frequently in Stalin’s office (“Posetiteli” 6: 27–8). 218 Gromov, Stalin, 310–12. 219 A last sign of the ideological campaign was a meeting in Stalin’s office on 29 January 1941 of a group of economists that included L.A. Leont’ev (1901–74) and K.V. Ostrovitianov (1892–1969) with Stalin, Zhdanov, Molotov, Voznesensky, and Aleksandrov. They discussed the publication of textbooks on political economy, which had been in the works since 1937 (“Posetiteli” 6: 39). The projects, shelved during the war, were never completed in Stalin’s lifetime (see Pollock, Conversations, 14n11). 220 Gorky had called Soviet writers “engineers of the human soul” at the 1934 Writers’ Congress. 221 “Posetiteli” 6: 28–30; 1941 God 1: 280–4. 222 On the eve of the war, the addressees of the “special file” (osobaia papka) group were Stalin, Molotov, Voroshilov, Mikoian, and Kaganovich (1941 God 1: 286, 302–5; see as well Dokumenty vneshnei). If deemed proper, Vyshinsky, Dekanozov, or Lozovskii received some of the materials. 223 V. Petrov, “Osobennosti”, 59. 224 Sovetskoe, 13, 16n15; 1941 God 1: 501–2 225 77/3/121, ll.1–3. Peter Solomon provides a non-existent reference to this letter (there is no delo 1949 in opis’ 1 of fond 77), while misdating it to 1939 (Solomon, Soviet Criminal Justice, 263–4, 264n89; 264n90 is also incorrect).

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226 1941 God 1: 142. 227 Volkov, Vzlët, 234; Dimitroff, Kommentare, 182–3. 228 Nikitin, “Otsenka,” 140, 157; Nevezhin, “Rech’,” 119. Molotov remembered that while war with Germany was expected, the time of the attack remained a mystery to the Soviet leadership (Chuev, Molotov, 41). 229 1941 God 1: 431. 230 Ibid. 231 Russkii 12 (1) is a transcript; see as well G.K. Zhukov, Vospominaniia 1: 289; Meretskov, Serving the People, 123; Salisbury, 900 Days, 138; Erickson, Road to Stalingrad, 40–6; Overy, Russia’s War, 66; 1941 God 1: 431, 470–5, 498n2; Sokolov, Neizvetsnyi, 188–9; Stalin, oddly, was apparently absent (see as well Georgii Zhukov, 668n99). He did meet with the highest army officers in his office in these days (see “Posetiteli” 6: 36–7). 232 Erickson, Road to Stalingrad, 50. Zhdanov also participated in a meeting of the People’s Commissariat of the Navy on 10 December 1940. See Russkii 12 (1–2), 499–501. 233 Overy, Russia’s War, 66–7; Russkii 12 (1), 388–90; 1941 God 1: 498, 499n2. 234 Erickson, Road to Stalingrad, 78–9. 235 1941 God 1: 577–82; Gorodetsky, Grand, 208; Zaporozhets had been received by Stalin, Malenkov, Molotov, Zhdanov, and airforce commander P.V. Rychagov (1911–41) on 8 January (“Posetiteli” 6: 37). 236 Erickson, Road to Stalingrad, 78–9. 237 Ibid., 79. 238 Spahr, Stalin’s Lieutenants, 205–7; Vannikov, “Zapiski,” 133; Torchinov, Leontiuk, Vokrug Stalina, 110–11. 239 Salisbury, 900 Days, 188. 240 Gromov, Stalin, 372–3; Vlast’ i khudozhestvennaia, 779–80n51; Perrie, Cult, 149, 152; Platt, Brandenberger, “Rehabilitating Ivan iv,” 649–50, 649n65. 241 “Posetiteli” 6: 37; Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71; 1941 God 1: 501, 537. M.M. Popov was made commander of the Leningrad Military District. 242 G. Zhukov, Vospominaniia 1: 333–4. In May, at a meeting of an incomplete Politburo, Chief of Staff Zhukov may have criticized Kulik, Shaposhnikov, and Zhdanov’s initiative to disarm the reinforced military districts along the “old” borders of the country (Miagkov, “Predvoennye,” 490). 243 Kuznetsov, Nakanune, 324–5, as well as Kuznetsov, “Pered” 3: 147. 244 1941 God 1: 593; the two were merged again on 21 July 1941 and then split again two years later; see Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 3: 215. 245 1941 God 1: 598–600 246 77/2/82, l.175; “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71. On 14 February another

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meeting of an incomplete Politburo was held on the day before the conference’s opening (1941 God 1: 585; “Posetiteli” 6: 40). The Leningrad Party organization numbered 200,000 full and candidate members at the time (Kriukovskikh, “Leningradskaia,” 48). Dimitroff, Tagebücher, 349; Iu.N. Zhukov, Tainy, 166. Altogether, 456 voting and 138 nonvoting delegates participated, representing nearly four million Communist party members in the Soviet Union (Khizhniakov, Khlevniuk, XVIII Partkonferentsiia, 16; Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 248; KPSS 7: 192–206; Scott, Duel for Europe, 159–60; Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 353). Scott, Duel for Europe, 160. At the cc plenum immediately after the conference, one important measure that was agreed was to stimulate productive efficiency by the introduction of a system of bonuses for managers in industry and transport (Dimitroff, Tagebücher, 349). The efficiency drive and the effort to improve management an unwieldy bureaucratic organization that emerged during the first months of 1941 led to the creation of a special inner government cabinet, the Biuro of the Sovnarkom, on 21 March (Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 253; Iu.N. Zhukov, Tainy, 179–81). Its members were Molotov, Voznesensky, Mikoian, Bulganin, Beria, and Andreev. Zhukov makes rather too much of the significance of this move (see Iu.N. Zhukov, Tainy, 179–82). 77/2/82, l.175. Zal’tsman had met Stalin, Zhdanov, and some of the other leaders twice in Stalin’s office on the eve of the Conference (“Posetiteli” 6: 40). Khizhniakov, Khlevniuk, XVIII Partkonferentsiia, 89–90; 1941 God 1: 583. On 21 February a cc plenum was held (KPSS 7: 207; Mawdsley, White, The Soviet Elite, 101). Rubtsov, Alter ego, 149 Mawdsley, White, The Soviet Elite, 95. Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 229–30; 248. 1941 God 1: 583, 691; Dimitroff, Tagebücher, 350–2. Dimitroff, Tagebücher, 351–2. Narinskii, “Kak,” 57; Narinskii, “Sovetskaia,” 47; Dimitroff, Tagebücher, 374–5. Dimitroff, Tagebücher, 386–7. Martin, Affirmative Action Empire, 394–431. Dimitroff, Tagebücher, 386–7; Narinskii, “Kak,” 57; Narinskii, “Sovetskaia,” 48; Dimitrov, 227–8. Apart from the works in the previous note, see also Lebedeva, Komintern, 1994, 50–2; Gorodetsky, Grand Delusion, 200–1. Lebedeva, Komintern, 1994, 45–6; Narinskii, “Sovetskaia”, 47; Dimitroff, Tagebücher, 370.

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264 Narinskii, “Kak,” 56; Dimitrov, 184. 265 Iu.N. Zhukov, Tainy, 182–3; Stalinskoe Politbiuro, 34n2; Rieber, Zhdanov, 11–2; “Iz istorii Velikoi” 2: 203. 266 Zhdanov, Molotov, Malenkov, Voroshilov, Beria, and Mikoian visited Stalin daily in April and almost always met with part or all of the highest army, airforce, and ground-force commanders (“Posetiteli” 6: 44–6). 267 Dimitroff, Kommentare, 193–4; Scott, Duel for Europe, 350–2. 268 77/2/82, l.177; Chernov, “Smertnyi,” 12. Popkov was gorispolkom chair. Previously, in 1938 and 1939, he had been first deputy chair. He headed the city soviet from 1939 to 1946; in 1946 he became first gor- and obkom secretary, which he remained until 1949 (Molotov, 816). Kapustin was third gorkom secretary. He had previously been Party organizer and secretary at the Kirov works in 1938–39, Kirov raikom secretary in 1939–40, and gorkom secretary from 1940 to 1945. In 1945–49 he was second obkom secretary (ibid., 791). 269 Salisbury, 900 Days, 135. 270 Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 254; 1941 God 2: 155–6; rgani, 2/1/1a, ll.1–4a. 271 Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 3: 201. 272 Iurii Zhukov again makes too much of this shuffle (Tainy, 187–8). Kostyrchenko, who uses his evidence much more cautiously than the speculative Zhukov, believes the shuffle was a sign that Zhdanov lost some power (the Agitprop supervision). But, in my opinion, the shuffle likely had to do with the increase in Zhdanov’s workload as cc secretary (Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 220). 273 Sovetskoe, 13. 274 77/2/82, l.177. 275 Vishlëv, “Rech’,” 77–89; Dokumenty 1940–1 2: 648–51. One key problem with interpretating his words is that there is no complete version of the speech (at least none has been found yet) in the archives. 276 Afanas’ev, “Vvedenie,” 25; Erickson, “Great Patriotic War,” 113. Soviet fears of war were increased by the news in mid-May that Hitler’s lieutenant Rudolf Hess had parachuted into Britain. Any truce with Britain would drastically increase the chances of a German attack on the Soviet Union. 277 Afanas’ev, “Vvedenie,” 22; Nevezhin, “Rech’,” 115–16. 278 From Zhdanov’s visits to Stalin on both days we can assume that Stalin orchestrated this affair and edited the speech (“Posetiteli” 6: 47). 279 77/1/919, l.1; Nikitin, “Otsenka,” 123, 140; Iu.A. Zhukov, Krutye, 194–5; Gromov, Stalin, 312–14; Afanas’ev, “Vvedenie,” 22. 280 Nevezhin, “Making,” 158. 281 Gorodetsky, Grand Delusion, 241. 282 General Aleksandr Gorbatov, recently released from jail, noticed

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around this time that army divisions “lacked the necessary order, organisation and military discipline … Many of the commanders did not see these failings” (Gorbatov, Years Off My Life, 153). Kuznetsov, Nakanune, 346. Stalinskoe Politbiuro, 35–6; Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 255. To underline the bureaucratic confusion, it should be pointed out that the Main Council of Naval Affairs continued to operate, having perhaps more of a military-strategic function. The commission particularly looked into armament production. Because of this shift, it seemed all the more pertinent to add Zhdanov added to the Sovnarkombiuro (Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 254–5). Meltiukhov, “Ideologicheskie,” 77, or June 9, see 1941 God 2: 424n1; V.P. Petrov, “O strategicheskom…,” 75n1; Zhdanov had been a member of this body at least since July 1940; the council was abolished on 23 June 1941. V.P. Petrov, “O strategicheskom …,” 68; Kiselev, “Upriamye …,” 15; Afanas’ev, “Vvedenie,” 22; Rubtsov, Alter ego, 152–3. Kiselev, “Upriamye …,” 15; see also Nevezhin, “Vystuplenie,” 149; Nevezhin, “Rech’,” 128–9; Afanas’ev, “Vvedenie,” 22. Meltiukhov, “Ideologicheskie,” 77; Nevezhin, ”Rech’,” 113–14; Nevezhin, “Making of Propaganda,” 159. Aleksandrov’s original version had not satisfied Zhdanov, after which it had been largely rewritten by Shcherbakov. 1941 God 2: 424n1; Overy, Russia’s War, 68–9, makes the case succinctly against any serious Soviet plans to launch an attack on Germany in the summer of 1941. Admiral, 141, 256–7, 398. Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 247; Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 3: 205. Molotov justified Zhdanov’s leave by saying that the threat of war was intense throughout 1939, 1940, and 1941, and that one could not postpone Zhdanov’s rest (which he had forfeited in 1939 and 1940) indefinitely (Chuev, Molotov, 45, 47–8). 1941 God 2: 428; Salisbury, 900 Days, 41; Kumanev, Riadom, 313. Dokumenty 1940–1 2: 734–5. Compare as well Pechenkin, “Byla,” 206.

chapter eight 1 Stalin, O velikoi, 11. 2 Meretskov, Serving the People, 136–7; Glantz, Battle for Leningrad, 13–14. Meretskov’s official title was Representative of the Supreme Command of the Soviet Armed Forces for Leningrad Military District; M.M.Popov, his predecessor, was subordinate to him.

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3 Salisbury, 900 Days, 116–17. The customary bureaucratic habit of creating commissions to face the emergency led to the organization of several subordinate bodies by the city’s leadership. It is not always clear whether these commissions met at all after their initial creation. One example is a special committee for the defence of the city itself, created in July, that included Aleksei Kuznetsov as chair, P.S. Popkov, N.V. Solov’ev, Generallieutenant Zhevaldin, Academician B.G. Galerkin, the chemist, physicist, and Academician, N.N. Semenov (1896–1986; he received the 1956 Nobel Prize for chemistry), and the director of the Kirov factory, I.M. Zal’tsman (77/1/921; Holloway, Stalin, 451). 4 Meretskov, Serving the People, 141; Molotov, 806. See as well Glantz, Stumbling Colossus, 30; one reason for the prolongation of his incarceration may have been his friendship with D.G. Pavlov, commander of the Western Front who was held responsible for its collapse in late June and executed. 5 1941 God 2: 441; KPSS 7: 211; Erickson, Road to Stalingrad, 136–7. 6 1941 God 2: 469–70. 7 “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71; “Posetiteli” 6: 52; Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 3: 211; 1941 God 2: 428. Zhdanov stayed behind for a few minutes with Molotov and Stalin at the end of what was altogether a thirty-five-minute visit (“Posetiteli” 6: 52). Salisbury errs in placing Zhdanov’s return to Leningrad on 27 June, for already on the twenty-fifth Zhdanov, chief-ofstaff Nikishev, and M. Popov sent a telegram asking for more cadres to be dispatched their way (Salisbury, 900 Days, 145; Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 3: 211; Bidlack also mentions the twenty-seventh without providing a clear source; see Bidlack, “Political Mood,” 100). 8 Mikoian presents a mean-spirited account of the episode, again clearly showing his dislike for Zhdanov (Mikoian, Tak, 562). 9 Glantz, Battle for Leningrad, 34. 10 Mikoian, Tak, 390–1; Kumanev, Riadom, 28–31; 1941 God 2: 499–500; Chuev, Molotov, 60. 11 Salisbury, 900 Days, 140; Gouré, Siege, 60; Kumanev, Riadom, 31. How much this body superseded the Politburo in wartime is obvious from the Politburo’s failure to send a high-level civilian and military delegation to Leningrad in late August when the city’s fall to the Germans and Finns appeared a distinct possibility, even though the delegation was to include Molotov and Malenkov (Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 3: 221–3; see below). 12 Salisbury, 900 Days, 146; Leningrad, 29–30; Kriukovskikh calls it the Commission for Defensive Questions of Leningrad but agrees that it was a copy of the gko; see Kriukovskikh, “Leningradskaia,” 48. Solov’ev was Leningrad oblispolkom chair from 1938 to 1946 (Molotov, 825). 13 Salisbury, 900 Days, 214, 217; CPSU’s Top, 12; Gouré, Siege, 59: “The

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Leningrad leaders looked to Moscow for cues and cleared their decisions with the Kremlin.” Kosolapov, Slovo, 171–7; Volkov, Vzlët, 194. Adamovich, Granin, Blokadnaia, 272; Freidenberg, “Osada,” 10 Stalin, O velikoi, 11–16. Lomagin, Soldiers, 1; Bidlack, “Political Mood,” 112–13. I rely partially on Bidlack in providing the answer along the lines sketched in the text. Erickson believes that the defenders’ morale was still much lower than desirable (Erickson, “Great Patriotic War,” 110). Broekmeyer, Stalin, 168. Ibid. For some of the harsh measures, including the arrest of family members of officers derelict in their duty, see 1941 God 2: 476–9. G.K. Zhukov, Vospominaniia 2: 79; 1941 2: 469–70; Glantz, Battle for Leningrad, 40. Gouré, Siege, 59–60; Kardashov, “Trudiashchiesia …,” 171. On 24 June 24, a central Council for Evacuation had been formed in Moscow, chaired by L.M. Kaganovich, which included Lenoblispolkom chair P.S. Popkov and deputy premier A.N. Kosygin (“Pervye dni,” 29). An evacuation committee for industrial plant was formed on the twenty-third, chaired by Shvernik (Erickson, Road to Stalingrad, 138). A. Werth, Russia at War, 311. Some of the Kirov factory’s machinery and staff, including its director, Zal’tsman, were evacuated to Cheliabinsk (see Shlapentokh, Normal Totalitarian Society, 112; R. Medvedev, Let History Judge, 9). Adamovich, Granin, Blokadnaia, 277, 281; Likhachev, Reflections, 218. Gouré, Siege, 58; the commission was struck on the Politburo’s orders (see Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 3: 213). Karasev, Leningradtsy, 94; Adamovich, Granin, Blokadnaia, 130–1; Kovalchuk, “Bitva,” 15; see also Bidlack, “Political Mood,” 98. These authors suggest that more than 600,000 people in total were evacuated from the city, but at least 100,000 were refugees from the Baltic and Novgorod regions. See also Velikaia, 441–2, which gives official numbers; but the exactitude of the calculations from this source, which date from the war, leads one to doubt their accuracy. Gouré, Siege, 109–10. While most people were thus trapped in the city, the Leningrad branch of the Academy of Sciences (people and equipment) was evacuated from Leningrad and Moscow on 16 July (“Pervye dni,” 32). Academicians N.N. Semenov and A.F. Ioffe were among those evacuated to Kazan, as were corresponding members A.I. Alikhanov and Ia.I. Frenkel’, key players in the postwar construction of the Soviet atomic bomb (“Pervye dni,” 35–6).

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28 Karasev, Leningradtsy, 61; Kovalchuk, “Bitva,” 16; A. Werth, Russia at War, 302–3; Glantz, Battle for Leningrad, 119–20, 122. 29 Leningrad, 30–1; Bidlack, “Political Mood,” 99. The first units had been formed from 30 June onwards (Karasev, Leningradtsy, 37; Glantz, Battle for Leningrad, 125). Some independent artillery and machine-gun batallions were made up out of volunteers (Gouré, Siege, 35). They remained separate from other opolchenie units but, like those units, were short on training and arms. 30 A. Werth, Russia at War, 300; A. Kuznetsov, “Bol’sheviki,” 55; Glantz, Battle for Leningrad, 127. Freidenberg claims that there was little that was genuinely voluntary about these units (“Osada,” 11). 31 By 9 July many units reported to their command that they lacked decent arms and equipment (Leningrad, 34–6). On 10 July a first Leningrad opolchenie division, after only a few days of training, was sent to the front (A. Werth, Russia at War, 300; A. Kuznetsov, “Bol’sheviki,” 54). 32 Gouré, Siege, 34–5; S. Volkov, St Petersburg, 489–90; Lomagin, Soldiers, 11; Broekmeyer, Stalin, 94. 33 Glantz, Battle for Leningrad, 35. 34 Kovalchuk, “Bitva,” 11; Salisbury writes that Pskov only fell on the thirteenth; 900 Days, 184. 35 Glantz, Battle for Leningrad, 43–5. 36 Gouré, Siege, 35; Karasev, Leningradtsy, 48; Salisbury, 900 Days, 184–5; A. Kuznetsov, “Bol’sheviki,” 55. 37 Even though this alternative, too, was no more promising a strategy, since, for example, fixed frontier defences were far from ready on the eve of the war (Erickson, Road to Stalingrad, 102). On 24 July in the Smol’nyi Institute, Voroshilov and Zhdanov delivered rousing speeches at a meeting of the Leningrad Party aktiv (Salisbury, 900 Days, 204). Whether they convinced their audience with their emphatic assertions that the Germans would be stopped is open to question. On the same day, true to their bureaucratic habits, Voroshilov and Zhdanov ordered the creation of another commission, this time to better coordinate construction of the city’s defensive lines (77/1/921, l.32). Voroshilov was condemned by the Politburo for his poor organization of Leningrad’s defence in April 1942 (Kovalchuk, “Bitva,” 25; Stalin, “O velikoi,” 57–8). 38 A. Werth, Russia at War, 300–3; Salisbury, 900 Days, 187; Glantz, Battle for Leningrad, 37. They compared them very unfavourably to the units facing the Finns on the northern front, which was not quite fair since the latter had halted their advance early and showed little inclination to storm the city. 39 Lomagin, Soldiers, 11. Deserters became particularly numerous after midAugust. Around the same time, the Stavka mandated reprisals against the families of officers or political cadres who deserted.

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Broekmeyer, Stalin, 191–4; Lomagin, Soldiers, 9–10. A. Werth, Russia at War, 312; Salisbury, 900 Days, 205. 77/1/921, l.36. Glantz, Battle for Leningrad, 47. A. Werth, Russia at War, 304. On 15 August the Germans took Novgorod (Rubtsov, Alter ego, 187). Glantz, Battle, 54–7. Freidenberg, “Osada,” 11–12; Lomagin, Soldiers, 10. The collapse became evident with the fall of Kingisepp on 16 August. 77/1/924, l.12; Erickson, Road to Stalingrad, 188. Despite Zhdanov’s repeated references to the important role of the nkvd in those days, Lomagin exaggerates somewhat by claiming that “[Zhdanov] still relied mostly on secret police” (Soldiers, 13). A. Werth, Russia at War, 305; Salisbury, 900 Days, 209; Karasev, U sten, 40; A. Kuznetsov, “Bol’sheviki,” 56; Gouré, Siege, 90. A. Werth, Leningrad, 110, 155, Russia at War, 305; Salisbury, 900 Days, 209–10; A. Kuznetsov, “Bol’sheviki,” 56; Karasev, Leningradtsy, 103; Stremilov, “Organizatsiia,” 66–7. Vannikov, “Zapiski,” 140–1. Sarnov, Chukovskaia, Sluchai, 78. Gouré, Siege, 97. Mikoian, Tak, 381–2, 427, 429–30, 562–3; Kumanev, Riadom, 32–3. See Kriukovskikh, “Leningradskaia,” 77–8; Granin, “Zapretnaia,” 128; Freidenberg, “Osada,” 18–19. Mikoian, Tak, 562: “Flying into Moscow, [Zhdanov] openly told us, in the presence of Stalin, that when being shot at and bombed he would fall into a panic and be paralysed.” For Freidenberg, Popkov, a “foolish clown”, was the main culprit in causing the hardships of the ensuing winter (“Osada,” 18; Freidenberg makes the interesting point that Zhdanov’s disappearance from view was deliberate, for beginning with his June 1939 Pravda article he had advocated the German alliance against one with England). The pensioner Mikoian recalled in an interview with Kumanev how Voroshilov and Zhdanov decided on their own initiative in August to order Leningrad factories to produce swords and spears when Moscow could not supply them with rifles, because there were not enough weapons to go around (Kumanev, Riadom, 33; in the exchange of 22 August, the Leningraders informed Stalin, Molotov, and Mikoian about the grossly inadequate supply of weapons to arm the workers’ batallions, see 77/3/126, l.100). Stalin had to call Voroshilov and convince him to rescind the order. Mikoian, unable to hide his dislike of Zhdanov in his memoirs, appears to exaggerate Zhdanov’s flaws, and his testimony should be treated with some reservation. Zhdanov and Mikoian seem to have engaged in mutual mud-slinging regarding the lack of stores in the city in the fall of 1941.

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The source for Mikoian’s contention about Zhdanov’s subterranean wartime existence may be Zhdanov’s reluctance to venture out to the front or travel much in the city during the war (which did not endear him to the population; see Granin, “Zapretnaia,” 126). Salisbury, 900 Days, 209; Erickson, Road to Stalingrad, 187–8; 77/1/924, 12; Leningrad, 579–80n4. The Military Council of Defence at first included A.A. Kuznetsov, P.S. Popkov, Ia. F. Kapustin, the commander of the opolchenie A.I. Subbotin, and L.M. Antiufeev (who before the war was head of the organizational department of the gorkom; see Karasev, Leningradtsy, 37; Gouré, Siege, 112). A special committee to organize resistance in case the Germans captured the city had already been struck; it was composed of Subbotin, Antiufeev, and a (nkvd?) colonel Antonov (Leningrad, 46–7; Stremilov, “Organizatsiia,” 70, pretends that the council was set up on 24 August, but this was the day Zhdanov and Voroshilov were added; see Salisbury, 900 Days, 209, 219n7). 77/3/126, ll.98–104, is an edited transcript of the criticism transmitted on 22 August via special telephone (Bodo). In Moscow, Molotov, Mikoian and unnamed others listened in, while in Leningrad Voroshilov, Zhdanov, Kuznetsov, General M. Popov, and others were on the receiving end (77/3/126, l.98). The Moscow bosses also emphasized the importance of artillery in the city’s defence to support the workers’ batallions, which appears to be a reflection of Stalin’s continued love for the use of cannon above all other arms (77/3/126, ll.98–9). See as well Salisbury, 900 Days, 217–8; Gouré, Siege, 112–13. 77/3/126, l.99. 77/3/126, l.103, shows how after some mild protest they agreed to join the council during the heated conversation with Stalin of 22 August. See as well Salisbury, 900 Days, 218; Gouré, Siege, 111–13; Leningrad, 579–80n4; Bitva, 60; Gouré, Siege, 111–12; 77/1/921, ll.1, 23–4; Stremilov, “Organizatsiia,” 70. Berezhkov, Piterskie, 212. Karasev, Leningradtsy, 105. On 27 August authorities forbade the use of private telephones and cut rations (Leningrad, 49–51). The phones were only cut on 13 September, a sign of the confusion that reigned in those days (Leningrad, 55). The nkvd also collected any privately owned arms. Later, on 1 October 1942, Kubatkin reported to Zhdanov that the nkvd had arrested 9,574 people in the city since the beginning of the war, 1,246 of whom were “spies and diversants, sent by the enemy” (Leningrad, 441–5). Zhdanov paid close attention to the popular mood in the city by way of nkvd reports (see Bidlak, “Rabochie,” 185–6; Lomagin, “Nastroeniia,” 213). Some of the spies had been Soviet pows who had switched sides after being captured by the Germans. Glantz, Battle for Leningrad, 59–63.

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62 Ibid., 63. 63 Kuznetsov, “Nashi,” 76–7; Erickson, Road to Stalingrad, 188; Salisbury, 900 Days, 260, 260n1; Granin, “Zapretnaia,” 119–20; Chuev, Molotov, 63; Ramanichev, “Sryv,” 202. 64 Granin, “Zapretnaia,” 120. 65 Ibid., 119–120. 66 Kriukovskikh, “Leningradskaia,” 55, notes the needless overlapping of the competence of many of these committees. 67 Salisbury, 900 Days, 218–19, 265; Karasev, U sten, 46; Gouré, Siege, 113; Erickson, Road to Stalingrad, 189. 68 Erickson, Road to Stalingrad, 190–1. 69 N. Werth, “State,” 218; some of them were the ethnically Finnish Soviet Ingermanlanders (see Broekmeyer, Stalin, 195–6). 70 Glantz, Battle for Leningrad, 64. 71 Karasev, Leningradtsy, 120; Lomagin, Soldiers, 15, 17. There were some genuine spies and enemy agents active in the city, although the editors of the documention collection Leningrad appear to use Stalinist jargon and uncritically portray the existence of a widespread subversive plot, following nkvd logic and language (Leningrad, 15; see also Lomagin, Soldiers, 4, 7). 72 Stremilov, “Organizatsiia,” 164, notes how, for example, an nkvd troops’ Military Tribunal in October handed death sentences to four criminals, guilty of theft, robbery, and hooliganism, and ten-year sentences to four others. 73 In October the nkvd arrested 127 people in the city as members of a counterrevolutionary group led by a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences, Ignatovskii (Broekmeyer, Stalin, 108; Golovanov, “Palachi,” 16–17). 74 Leningrad, 14. 75 Adamovich, Granin, Blokadnaia, 134. 76 Kovalchuk, “Bitva,” 20–1. 77 N. Werth, “State,” 218; A. Werth, Russia at War, 304. 78 Malenkov, O moem ottse, 44, 53. G.K. Zhukov met Zhdanov soon after and calls him “sincere and charming and [a] great organizer” in his not entirely candid memoirs (G. Zhukov, Vospominaniia 2: 162). 79 Chuev, Molotov, 63–4. 80 Salisbury, 900 Days, 219; Chuev, Molotov, 63. Some of the Moscow emissaries would spent almost ten days in Leningrad, while Molotov returned, after a sojourn of about five days, with a plane that was forced to take a north-eastern course across Lake Ladoga. “Posetiteli” 6: 61–4, shows the absence from Stalin’s office of many of them in the last two weeks of August and the first days of September. It is not clear where Molotov, Malenkov, or Beria may have been from about 20 to 27 August, but they

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82 83 84 85 86 87 88

89 90 91

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may have visited other parts of the front before going to Leningrad. Admiral Kuznetsov stayed behind for longer: he crossed paths in the air with Zhukov and reported to Stalin in Moscow only on or about 11 September (Kuznetsov, “Nashi,” 77). Salisbury, 900 Days, 269–70. Salisbury’s contention that Zhdanov, because of his determination in holding on to the city, now finally became a genuinely popular leader in Leningrad while Stalin, thought to have ordered the destruction of the city in case of German capture, was detested is not borne out by other evidence. A. Werth, Russia at War, 313; Salisbury, 900 Days, 293. Adamovich, Granin, Blokadnaia, 298–9. A. Werth, Russia at War, 312; Mikoian, Tak, 429. Glantz, Battle for Leningrad, 65–8, 87–9. A. Werth, Leningrad, 110; G. Zhukov, Vospominaniia 2: 160; A. Werth, Russia at War, 306, 312; Bitva, 9; Gouré, Siege, 99; Leningrad, 372. A. Werth, Russia at War, 306; Salisbury, 900 Days, 289, 291–2; Gouré, Siege, 100–1; Adamovich, Granin, Blokadnaia, 45. Leningrad, 14. It probably provoked a Politburo decree of 10 September pronouncing the level of rations for soldiers and civilians in the city, the only such instance of Politburo interference in these matters (Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 3: 223). Mikoian maintains that Zhdanov had refused to accept extra supplies for his city on the basis of the argument that he lacked storage space. In contrast, Kosygin, who was no friend of Mikoian, remembered how Zhdanov complained to Stalin about Mikoian’s organization of the city’s supply, for which the People’s Commissar of Trade carried some responsibility (see Mikoian, Tak, 427, 429–30; Adamovich, Granin, Blokadnaia, 381; Zinich, Budni, 22; Leningrad, 9, 209–10; Granin, “Zapretnaia,” 126). Freidenberg, “Osada,” 18. Adamovich, Granin, Blokadnaia, 45; Leningrad, 372. Sokolov, Neizvetsnyi, 251, 287; Kovalchuk, “Bitva,” 21. A commander who proved himself rather capable near Leningrad was the airforce general A.A. Novikov (1900–76); Novikov was arrested in 1946 (Molotov, 812–3). Leningrad, 374. Popkov, “Voprosy,” 9. Gouré, Siege, 91, 98–101. In the Leningrad leadership’s offices, crucial documents began to be destroyed as well. On 16 and 17 September, explosives were distributed in the city on orders of the Military Council, but unbeknownst to it, the gravest danger had already passed (Salisbury, 900 Days, 335; Leningrad, 580n6; Erickson, Road to Stalingrad, 193; Gouré suggests that Stalin may have ordered the mining of the city around 9 September; Gouré, Siege, 91). The front had more KV heavy tanks than any front, but the front com-

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98 99

100 101 102 103

104

105

106

107 108

109 110 111

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manders did not seem to know how to deploy them; support by Kulik’s army was pondered. Leningrad, 580n6; Zinich, Budni, 22; “Iz istorii Velikoi” 3: 217; Ramanichev, “Sryv,” 202. G.K. Zhukov, Vospominaniia 2: 161; Ramanichev, “Sryv,” 202; Kovalchuk, “Bitva,” 22; Glantz, Battle for Leningrad, 74–5, 559n57. The substitution was officially made on 11 September. On 1 August he had been replaced as the army’s chief of staff by Shaposhnikov (Kuznetsov, “Nashi,” 76). After the war, Zhdanov publicly scorned the way Hitler, on 24 September 1941, had ordered Leningrad to be wiped off the face of the earth (Zhdanov, “Rech’,” 48; Glantz, Battle for Leningrad, 85–6, names 24 September; see, too, Salisbury, 900 Days, 347–8). Leningrad, 5. See, for example, G. Zhukov, Vospominaniia, 2: 162. Leningrad, 6; Salisbury, 900 Days, 188. G. Zhukov, Vospominaniia 2: 164; Salisbury, 900 Days, 397. For the signatories, see for example, Kumanev, Riadom, 184–212. Among others leading the civilian defence were G.F. Badaev (d. 1950), who was from 1941 to 1945 secretary of the Moscow raikom of Leningrad. In 1945 he was promoted to Leningrad gorkom secretary and then was second obkom secretary until his arrest (Molotov, 768). Another was V.N. Ivanov (1912–50), who from 1940–45 was first secretary of the Leningrad obkom and gorkom of the Komsomol (ibid., 787). G. Zhukov, Vospominaniia, 2: 162–3; Chaney, Zhukov, 146; A. Werth, Russia at War, 307. Erickson maintains that Zhukov only arrived on 13 September; his account is hard to verify because of his singular manner of providing references to his sources (Erickson, Road to Stalingrad, 191). Salisbury concurs with Erickson; see 900 Days, 320–1. Erickson, Road to Stalingrad, 191–5. Marshal A.E. Golovanov recalled how Zhukov ordered the execution of “entire batallions” that had retreated without permission (Chuev, Soldaty, 314). Sokolov, Neizvetsnyi, 268–9; Lomagin, Soldiers, 14; Glantz, Battle for Leningrad, 75, 78, 81–2, 124–5. Zhdanov had officers shot for treason merely on the basis of rumours (Kriukovskikh, “Leningradskaia,” 77–8). Volkogonov, Lenin, 472. Salisbury, 900 Days, 347–8. By 19 September the Germans began to transfer some of their materiel away from the city (Erickson, Road to Stalingrad, 194). Kumanev, Riadom, 201. 1941 God 2: 484; Grif, 167–8. Adamovich, Granin, Blokadnaia, 104–5. Somewhat oddly, it was only on

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Notes to pages 236–7 13 February 1942 that the Supreme Soviet decreed theat all ablebodied city dwellers between the ages of sixteen and forty-five in the Soviet Union had to work; in September the age limits were extended (Conze, Sowjetische, 52). Glantz, Battle for Leningrad, 82–4. Ibid., 459. Erickson, Road to Stalingrad, 234, 237; Glantz, Battle for Leningrad, 130–1. G. Zhukov, Vospominaniia 2: 202–3; Sokolov, Neizvestnyi, 278–9. Still, on behalf of Stalin, Chief of Staff Vasilevskii called General I.I. Fediuninskii, Zhdanov, and Kuznetsov on 23 October to scold them for their inability to maintain contact with the 54th Army; it was believed that separation between the Soviet forces at Leningrad and the 54th Army could cut the former entirely off from the rest of the country and ensure Leningrad’s surrender, Vasilevskii implied (77/3/126, ll.9–12). Marshal, 52. Khozin had headed the Frunze Army Academy on the eve of the war and had risen through the ranks of the Leningrad Military District in the 1920s and 1930s (see Russkii 12 (1), 110–11, 238). Glantz, Battle for Leningrad, 85. A. Werth, Russia at War, 312–14. Ibid., 316. Ibid., 321–2. Grif, 172–3. It cost the lives of almost 18,000 soldiers and 31,000 wounded. A. Werth, Russia at War, 320; Salisbury, 900 Days, 401. A. Werth, Russia at War, 316, 323. Ibid., 316, 323. A. Kuznetsov, “Bol’sheviki,” 57. Adamovich, Granin, Blokadnaia, 16; cellulose was used in its production; see Leningrad, 194–6; see Glantz, Battle for Leningrad, 134. Freidenberg, “Osada,” 19. In early November, rations as ordained by the card system could no longer be honoured (A. Werth, Russia at War, 315). For a powerful portrayal of those months see Lidia Ginzburg’s “Siege of Leningrad,” 23–49. Adamovich, Granin, Blokadnaia, 48, 88; Leningrad, 415. Adamovich, Granin, Blokadnaia kniga: Glavy, 9–10, 12; Leningrad, 13, 410–12, 421–2. Adamovich, Granin, Blokadnaia kniga: Glavy, 14. Adamovich, Granin, Blokadnaia, 32–3. Ibid., 126. Ibid., 42–3. Freidenberg remembered that an uncommonly cold

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summer was followed by an unusually dry and bright autumn and then an unusually cold winter (Freidenberg, “Osada,” 13). Bitva, 10; A. Kuznetsov, “Bol’sheviki,” 57. Adamovich, Granin, Blokadnaia, 65. A. Werth, Russia at War, 329. Ibid., 324. Rubtsov, Alter ego, 196; Erickson, Road to Stalingrad, 237. F.D. Volkov, Vzlët, 204; A. Werth, Russia at War, 322; Glantz, Battle for Leningrad, 103, 109, 111, 115. Adamovich, Granin, Blokadnaia, 423, 434. For the first time, too, some Soviet pows were liberated in December, because of which on 27 December camps were organized to screen liberated Red Army service men and women (called fil’tratsiia in Russian); for the Leningrad, Karelian, North-West and Volkhov Fronts such camps were established in Vologda oblast’ (1941 God 2: 479–80). Meretskov recalled that this took place around 12 December, but Stalin’s book of visitors places Zhdanov and Meretskov in his office on 17 December (“Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71; “Posetiteli” 6: 71; Meretskov, Serving the People, 178; Glantz uses Meretskov’s dates; see Battle for Leningrad, 109, 111). See also Erickson, Road to Stalingrad, 277–9. Marshal, 15–17; Grif, 172. Granin, “Zapretnaia,” 126. However, this increase of the norms did not always garner more food for one’s coupons. The first ten days of 1942 saw thirty to thirty-five degrees of frost. As supplies remained inadequate, the gko dispatched Kosygin to Leningrad again to help relieve the suffering. Kosygin’s (imminent?) arrival spurred Zhdanov to write a letter on 5 January 1942 addressed to all those working on the Ice Road, urging them to be more careful when using it so as not to spill any supplies (A. Werth, Russia at War, 331; Salisbury, 900 Days, 415–17; Gouré, Siege, 206, 211; A. Kuznetsov, “Bol’sheviki,” 57; Adamovich, Granin, Blokadnaia, 132; Karasev, Leningradtsy, 189; Granin, “Zapretnaia,” 122, 126; Karasev, U sten, 116–17). Freidenberg, “Osada,” 19, notes that in January, nothing was available in many food stores. In February Zhdanov authored an appeal to railroad workers of the October Railroad to improve the supply on the Ice Road (Gouré, Siege, 207, 210). A. Werth, Russia at War, 326, 332; Salisbury, 900 Days, 494. Salisbury, 900 Days, 512; Adamovich, Granin, Blokadnaia, 131. 77/1/937; A. Werth, Russia at War, 325. A. Werth, Russia at War, 315, 326; Salisbury, 900 Days, 450; Volkov, St Petersburg, 437; Gouré, Siege, 216, 222.

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150 Adamovich, Granin, Blokadnaia, 429. 151 At the Nuremberg Trials of 1945–46, Soviet representatives put the number of deaths by famine at 632,000, but that was probably a low estimate (A. Werth, Russia at War, 312, 324; Salisbury, 900 Days, 491–2, 514–17). Broekmeyer suggests that, including those who fled to Leningrad before September 1941, perhaps two million in total may have been killed, of whom almost all died between July 1941 and July 1942 (see Broekmeyer, Stalin, 102). 152 Leningrad, 339; A. Kuznetsov, “Bol’sheviki,” 58; see also Gouré, Siege, 211, 218; Glantz, Battle for Leningrad, 468–9; Likhachev, Reflections, 247. 153 Leningrad, 353. In September 1942 an official of the Public Works’ department of Leningrad, N.G. Karpushenko, reported that, from 1 July 1941 to 1 June 1942, 1,093,695 people had been buried in communal graves in four cemeteries; Pervyshin calculates on the basis of this number that as many as 2.3 million may have died of hunger, cold, bombings etc. (Pervyshin, “Liudskie poteri,” 118). 154 Leningrad, 298. This figure agrees in its scope with a number submitted to Popkov by one of his subordinates in March 1942 (see “Vmesto uglia …,” 64). 155 Karasev, Leningradtsy, 193. See also Leningrad, 433. 156 Leningrad, 17; Bidlack, “Political Mood,” 106. 157 77/1/937, ll.16–19; Salisbury, 900 Days, 513. 158 A. Kuznetsov, “Bol’sheviki,” 58; Glantz, Battle for Leningrad, 237–8; A. Werth, Russia at War, 325; it had already started tentatively in March: Marshal, 12, notes 27 March to 15 April; see Salisbury, 900 Days, 507–8, as well. 159 A. Werth, Russia at War, 334. Even in 1943 Leningrad’s birthrate was almost at to zero, through infertility caused by malnutrition and untreated infections (Conze, Sowjetische, 140n79). 160 Zinich, Budni, 90. The citizens managed to grow considerable quantities of vegetables and potatoes on these patches, staving off hunger in subsequent years (Zinich, Budni, 22). Such gardens on city outskirts were a general Soviet phenomenon in the 1930s; postwar shortages caused private plots to be maintained, although they moved to areas outside city borders (Conze, Sowjetische, 44–5). 161 Adamovich, Granin, Blokadnaia, 408; Volkogonov, Autopsy, 119; Broekmeyer, Stalin, 104–5. This indulgence did lead to hostile sentiment among the population during the worst weeks of the famine in December and January (see Bidlack, “Political Mood,” 110–11). Zhdanov appears to have monitored such critical utterances with some apprehension; the fate of those identified as his critics was presumably arrest and possibly execution (see Bidlack, “Political Mood,” 110, 110n56, 111, 111n57, 112).

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162 Ivin, “I veritsia,” 260; Ivanovskii, “Pis’mo,” 7; Chernov, “Smertnyi,” 14. 163 Chernov, “Smertnyi,” 15. 164 See Ivin, “I veritsia,” 259; Likhachev remembered several ships protecting key buildings on the shore (Likhachev, Reflections, 239–40). 165 Granin, “Zapretnaia,” 125 166 Ivin, “I veritsia,” 263–4. 167 Iu.A. Zhdanov, interview. 168 Iu. Zhdanov, “Vo mgle,” 67, 72. 169 Iu. A. Zhdanov, interview. 170 Salisbury, 900 Days, 402–3. Marshal Govorov met a similarly ailing Zhdanov in April 1942 (Marshal, 7, 232). In order to give himself some relief, Zhdanov smoked a special medicinal papirosa (a short roll-yourown cigarette smoked in a little pipe). In one of his medical reports, he is said to have had a habitual cough (77/3/182, l.9). 171 Iu. A. Zhdanov, interview. 172 77/3/126, ll. 86–7. 173 77/3/126, l.101. 174 77/3/182, ll.7–8. In his personal archive, a series of doctors’ reports can be found on his several bouts of illness between early 1942 and the summer of 1944. He was examined and treated in the Sverdlov Hospital in Leningrad (see 77/3/182). 175 See the power-plant engineer S.V. Usov’s recollection of a meeting about the city’s energy supply with an extremely well prepared Zhdanov in March 1942 (77/2/76, ll.42–7). Copying (Stalin’s) Politburo habits, a very small group of the highest leaders made most crucial decisions; even the gorkom- and obkombiuro met less than once every two weeks in 1942, and scarcely more in 1943 (Kriukovskikh, “Leningradskaia,” 61–2). 176 But the devil remained in the detail, Zhdanov seems to have thought, as exemplified by his personal papers, in which evidence can be found that he personally supervised the program of the visit of the journalist Alexander Werth to Leningrad (77/3/173, ll.5–9). Werth observed numerous portraits of the local leader inside public buildings, almost as many as of Stalin (A. Werth, Leningrad, 70, 85). 177 77/3/182, ll.8–21. 178 77/3/182, ll.22–31. 179 Glantz, Battle for Leningrad, 156–187. 180 Ibid., 187. 181 Ibid., 203–5. 182 Leningrad, 581n11; Marshal, 19; Glantz, Battle for Leningrad, 182–3. 183 Leningrad, 581n11; Marshal, 54, 239; Glantz, Battle for Leningrad, 203–4. 184 “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71. 185 A. Werth, Russia at War, 381–6; Bitva, 197, 216–17; Deviataia sessiia, 27–32; 77/1/943.

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186 “Posetiteli” 6a: 26; “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71. Both times, however, Zhdanov was not alone with Stalin, since Molotov, Malenkov, and some of the army staff were also present. 187 Dimitroff, Tagebücher, 540–1. 188 Ibid., 540. 189 77/1/771, ll.3; 13. 190 77/1/771, ll.5–7. 191 Salisbury, 900 Days, 533; Glantz, Battle for Leningrad, 247–7, 286; Leningrad, 87–95; Marshal, 242, gives a different number. 192 Stalin, O velikoi, 51–4; Volkov, Vzlët, 207; Broekmeyer, Stalin, 115–16. 193 Glantz, Battle for Leningrad, 213–34. 194 Marshal, 256–7. 195 Glantz, Battle for Leningrad, 264–6. 196 “Posetiteli” 6a: 47; see the orders by the Stavka in Velikaia, 438–9. 197 Marshal, 277. 198 The actual decree to begin the offensive can be found in Velikaia, 439–40. 199 Velikaia, 439. 200 Erickson, Road to Berlin, 60–1; Bitva, 11; Leningrad, 350, 581n9; Marshal, 107; Grif, 184–5. 201 Grif, 185; Velikaia, 467; Glantz, Battle for Leningrad, 284–5, 287–98, 300, 306–14, 321, 323. For his role in the success of Iskra, Zhdanov received the rank of lieutenant-general of the army on 12 February 1943 (77/2/2, l.50). In the course of 1943, Zhdanov was also decorated with two medals, one for the defence of Leningrad (Za oboronu Leningrad), and one as partisan of the war (Partizanu Otechestvennoi voiny), although the award of the latter may only have come at the very end of the war (77/2/2, l.51). 202 77/3/182, ll.32–4. 203 77/3/182.ll.36–8. 204 77/3/182, ll.40–3. 205 In August he was ill for a couple of weeks, again affected by heart trouble and asthmatic coughs, but he recovered well (77/3/182, ll.1–2). In October gall-bladder problems, high blood pressure, and asthmatic attacks plagued him, as well as general exhaustion of his nervous system (77/3/182, ll.49–55). 206 F.D. Volkov, Vzlët, 269; A. Werth, Russia at War, 672. The Comintern’s abolition was announced on 22 May. Zhdanov had been in Moscow in mid-April (“Posetiteli” 6a: 62–3). Meanwhile, the Comintern staff was largely kept on, eventually becoming employees of the cc Department of International Information, created in July 1944 (Gibianskii, “Kak voznik,” 136–7). 207 Gibianskii, “Kak voznik,” 136–7.

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77/1/780, ll. 1–4ob. 77/2/82, l.182. “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71; “Posetiteli,” 6a: 86. 77/2/82, l.182. Marshal, 129. Ivin, “I veritsia,” 266; Glantz, Battle for Leningrad, 352. F.D. Volkov, Vzlët, 213; Erickson, Road to Berlin, 171–3. The Stavka deployed some 822,000 troops throughout the winter offensive of 1944, of whom almost half become casualties and almost ten per cent were killed (Grif, 199–200). Erickson, Road to Berlin, 174; Karasev, U sten, 158–9; Marshal, 140. Karasev, U sten, 166. 77/2/2, l.51. More honours bwere estowed on Zhdanov in 1944: on 18 June he was promoted to colonel-general of the army (77/2/2, l.50). Govorov was awarded the title of Marshal of the Soviet Union (Marshal, 157). On 29 July the Presidium of Supreme Soviet awarded Zhdanov the Order of Kutuzov, first class, for his model execution of commanding tasks at the front in the fight with the German occupiers (77/2/2. l.51). In 1945 the medal “Za pobedy nad Germaniei v Velikoi Otechestvennoi voine 1941–1945gg.” (“For the Victory over Germany in the Great Patriotic War 1941–1945”) was added to his collection (77/2/2, l.49). Martin, Affirmative, 394–431. KPSS 7: 490; rgani, 2/1/4, 2/1/3, l.1. Broekmeyer, Stalin, 166. Some nationalist sentiments, even if hard to square with the philosophical foundations of the atheist Soviet state, were more chauvinistic than racist in the Nazi style. On 4 September 1943, Stalin met the three Orthodox metropolitans who remained at liberty (most others had died or been killed during the 1930s) and promised the prelates more freedom to manoeuvre, in exchange for the Church’s support in the war (Broekmeyer, Stalin, 239). In order to coordinate state-church relations, on 8 October of the same year a State Council on Religion was founded, of which G.G. Karpov (see note 244, chapter 6) became chair (Hazard, “Soviet,” 273; Berezhkov, Piterskie, 183–4). Kuniaev, “Post,” 186–7. Already in 1942 and 1943 exhibitions stressing the Russian victory in the first Patriotic (Fatherland) War had been mounted in Leningrad to help steel the resolve of the defenders (Brandenberger, “Short Course,” 228, 230). See chapters 10 and 11. In the late winter of 1938, Zhdanov had been involved in a Politburo commission drafting a cc resolution mandating the study of the Russian language at all non-Russian schools, though not to the exclusion of the mother tongue of the pupils (see Martin,

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Affirmative Action Empire, 457–9). Stalin was behind this move, and the appointment of Zhdanov to chair the commission may have be the result of his educational expertise rather than his reputation as a Great Russian nationalist. 223 Martin, Affirmative Action Empire, 395, 460–1. Stalin reiterated the Russians’ leading role in his victory toast of 24 May 1945, but it was only towards 1948 that things Russian began to be emphasized above and beyond other cultural traditions within the ussr (see the next two chapters; Documentary History, 2: 232). 224 In 1943 a third volume of the general history of philosophy, edited by G.F. Aleksandrov, M. Mitin, P. Iudin, and B.E. Bykhovskii, was published in the Soviet Union. Its contents concentrated on the classical German philosophy of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The main contributors to the series’ first three volumes received a Stalin Prize after the issue of the third tome. But on 25 February 1944, Malenkov chaired a meeting of Party Agitprop bureaucrats and court philosophers to “correct” the mistakes made by the volume’s actual authors, Mitin and Iudin, especially their somewhat overly positive appreciation of Hegel’s philosophy. Shcherbakov, Aleksandrov, Mitin, Iudin, Beletskii, Pospelov, L.F. Il’ichev, P.N. Fedoseev (1908–95), V.S. Kruzhkov (1905–?), N.N. Shatalin, M.A. Shamberg, and M.T. Iovchuk (1908–90) all spoke. Pospelov, Aleksandrov, Beletskii, Kruzhkov, Il’ichev, Higher Education Committee chair S.V. Kaftanov (1905–78), Iovchuk, and Fedoseev all joined Malenkov in condemning Iudin and Mitin in subsequent sessions on 10 and 11 March. Their criticism was formalized in a cc decree of 1 May 1944 condemning the shortcomings in philosophy. But neither Mitin nor Iudin was harshly punished even though both Mitin as director of the Marx, Engels, Lenin Institute and Iudin as director of the Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences were subsequently found guilty of poor management and dismissed from those posts (see “Posetiteli” 7: 70–1; “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71; Batygin, Deviatko, “Sovetskoe,” 180–93; Batygin, Deviatko, “Delo akademika,” 200; Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 255–7). Iudin was compromised as well because of the uncovering of systematic theft of foodstuffs in the rsfsr State Publishing Houses, which he had headed since 1937, but he kept the position (Batygin, Deviatko, “Sovetskoe,” 192). In July 1946, for their failure to produce sufficient copies of the biographies of Lenin and Stalin as well as the Short Course, P.F. Iudin’s performance as chief of the state publishing houses was again criticized by the cc Orgbiuro (17/117/627, ll.1–3; Molotov, 839). The instigators of this attack on Iudin may have been Aleksandrov and Fedoseev, for the first signs of a renewed attack on Iudin in this file can be found in a letter

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225

226

227

228 229 230 231

232 233 234

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by Aleksandrov and Fedoseev to Zhdanov. Only in October 1946 was a cc resolution issued on the work of the rsfsr state publishing houses. Iudin again received no more than a slap on the wrist (KPSS 8: 71–4). Indeed, he was soon after assigned an even more important job. Although Zhdanov did not not participate in the historians’s discussion on the cc’s premises, on 12 May he wrote some comments regarding a letter by A.M. Pankratova to the cc on the shortcomings in the works of several historians (77/1/971; Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 252–3, 257–8; see also Platt, Brandenberger, “Rehabilitating Ivan IV,” 650, 650n68). A rift had opened between historians on the issue of a textbook for the history of the ussr. Pankratova protested the overly pro-Russian tone Soviet historiography was taking on, and she enjoyed some support in her efforts from Zhdanov, who had edited an earlier version in 1937 (Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 252–4). Perrie, Cult, 99. On 14 August Zhdanov sent a long report on the state of Soviet historiography to Shcherbakov (17/125/222, ll.11–46; “Stenogramma soveshchaniia …,” 50–2). This was in reaction to discussions with leading historians conducted in the cc Secretariat from May to July 1944, which Shcherbakov, Andreev, and Malenkov led, rather than Zhdanov (“Stenogramma soveshchaniia …,” 47; 17/125/222, ll. 47–113; 17/125/224, ll.1–11ob; Platt, Brandenberger, “Rehabilitating Ivan iv,” 645, 645n47). Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 156–7. Brandenberger, “Short Course,” 189–93. Brandenberger is likely correct in arguing that Shcherbakov (who followed Stalin’s and Zhdanov’s line) was not as chauvinistic as Aleksandrov (see “Short Course,” 195n54). Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 258; Brandenberger, “Short Course,” 200–1. Perrie, Cult, 99. 77/1/973; Kostyrchenko, Out of the Red Shadows, 27; Brandenberger, “Short Course,” 197–8. 77/1/973, ll.5–8. Zhdanov suggested that the allegedly Ukrainian nature of Rus’ had originated with the Ukrainian historian (and, in 1917–18, political leader) Mihailo Hrushevsky. 77/1/973, l.9. 77/1/973, l.3. On 8 October 1944 in Moscow Zhdanov attended a cc Orgbiuro meeting calling for an improvement of Soviet film production (77/3/23, ll.1–5). He received on 31 October a report on the attitude of Soviet writers towards the state of Soviet literature from People’s Commissar of State Security V. Merkulov (Gromov, Stalin, 367–8; Vlast’ i khudozhestvennaia, 522–33). Merkulov wrote that Zoshchenko, Chukovskii, Gladkov, and film director Dovzhenko were highly critical

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of the cultural scene for different reasons, but they shared resentment of the increasing ideological pressure that had been exerted in the previous year after the “freedom” of the early war years. 235 He visited Stalin in Moscow only once a month from September 1944 to May 1945 and was otherwise mainly occupied in Helsinki and Leningrad (“Posetiteli” 7: 85–101). 236 Karasev, Leningradtsy, 9; Salisbury, 900 Days, 573; 77/1/968; Dzeniskevich, Nakanune, 153. 237 Dzeniskevich, Nakanune, 153. 238 Salisbury, 900 Days, 574. 239 Glantz, Battle for Leningrad, 416–18. At first, in the desperate early months of the war, Stalin had been willing to surrender to the Finns the Soviet gains made in March 1940 in exchange for an armistice, but after the tide turned at Stalingrad the Soviet demands became harsher (“‘My dolzhny,’ ” 54–5). 240 “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71. 241 Glantz, Battle for Leningrad, 420–55. Zhdanov fell ill while his troops were advancing. Again overworked and deprived of sleep, he was short of breath and complained about unpleasant sensations in his chest. The doctors prescribed strict bedrest and medicines such as digitalis and luminal to improve the condition of his heart (77/3/182, ll.4–6). 242 Glantz, Battle for Leningrad, 457–8. 243 “Posetiteli” 7: 84. 244 Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 3: 361. 245 77/2/2, l.49; A. Werth, Russia at War, 906–7; Rieber, Zhdanov, 14, 17; Sipols, Velikaia, 201. 246 Androsova, “Allied Control,” 44; “‘My dolzhny,’” 55. 247 77/2/82, l.126; “‘My dolzhny,’ ” especially 81n20. 248 Nevakivi, “Control Commission,” 67; Rentola, “Soviet,” 217; “‘My dolzhny,’ ” 55–6. 249 Nevakivi, “Control Commission,” 67–9. 250 See “‘My dolzhny,’ ” 72. 251 Rentola, “Soviet,” 218. 252 Androsova, “Allied Control,” 50–2. 253 See next chapter. 254 “‘My dolzhny,’ ” 75–6. 255 Androsova, “Allied Control,” 47; Rieber, Zhdanov, 28. He returned for several brief visits after February 1945. 256 Ulam, “Few,” 112. 257 During the very first meeting of the sacc, Zhdanov stated that the sacc should not appear to be advising the Finnish Communists and should probably refrain from giving them any advice (“‘My dolzhny,’” 70). In

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practice, the Finnish comrades solicited Zhdanov’s advice nevertheless. See as well Korobochkin, “sssr,” 16; Androsova, “Allied Control,” 57. 258 Androsova, “Allied Control,” 58–9.

chapter nine 1 Volkogonov, Autopsy, 141–2. But for Mikoyan, none of the last six named was much involved in the decision-making process between 1945 and 1949. 2 Gay, Schnitzler’s Century, 235. 3 Compare Romanovskii, Liki, 34–5. 4 As historian Serhy Yekelchyk points out, after May 1945 the leading role of the Russian nation within the Soviet Union was emphasized at the expense of the numerically dominant ethnic group in the non-Russian republics (Yekelchyk, “Celebrating,” 274–5). To use Martin’s terminology, the tension between the “Friendship of the Peoples” metaphor and Great Russian nationalism was increasingly resolved to the advantage of the latter (Martin, Affirmative Action Empire, 429, 461). Nonetheless, this chauvinism originated in the 1930s, as Martin (ibid., 394–431) and Brandenberger and Dubrovsky (“ ‘The People Need a Tsar,’” 883) show. Stalin’s toast to the Russian people of May 1945 restarted this trend (Brandenberger, “Short Course,” 202, also 282, 289). 5 Zhdanov and Stalin shared an aesthetic, firmly rooted in the prerevolutionary past, that was “petty bourgeois” and “Victorian” (in the pejorative sense), supporting Katerina Clark’s point that “reversal of sociopolitical or economic status quo does not necessarily bring about corresponding reversals in other hierarchies … Those who occupy a low position on the socioeconomic hierarchy are, if elevated for some reason, not always eager to jettison the cultural baggage of their former superiors” (Clark, Petersburg, 11). Kostyrchenko describes the collaboration between the two as a tandem-bicycle, with Stalin steering (Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 161). 6 See chapter 5. Somewhat exceptionally, Borkenau includes Zhdanov’s involvement in the Cominform and in the attack on genetics in biology in his use of the term, partially because he believes that Zhdanov managed to surpass Stalin in power and influence in 1946–48; thus by Zhdanovshchina he really means something like the “Zhdanov rule” (see Borkenau, Der europäische Kommunismus, 495–6). 7 Romanovskii, Liki, 105–7. 8 See Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 556. Maksimenkov, Sumbur, 52: “In all the years of his leadership Stalin always remained the highest curator of the ideological front in the Party. Bubnov and Stetskii, Kerzhentsev and Shcherbakov, Zhdanov and Khrapchenko, Mekhlis and Suslov were his

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9

10 11

12

13 14

15

16

17

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namestniki (deputies), clergymen, but at least no more than executors of the ideas of the high priest.” See for a similar interpretation, Gromov, Stalin, 4, 236–7. As Dmitrii Volkogonov stated in his last work, “Stalin was not interested in what was said by his entourage. He had long realized that, except for Molotov, they simply tried to read his thoughts and anticipate his decisions. They were there to grasp his intentions and then to see that they were implemented expeditiously” (Volkogonov, Autopsy, 143). And in 1945, Molotov was taken to task by Stalin for showing too independent a spirit in conducting negotiations with the Western Allies about the postwar settlement (Pechatnov, “The Allies”, 4, 12–13). Politbiuro 1945–53, 12. On Stalin’s fondness for Zhdanov, see Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 192; Allilueva, Tol’ko, 360–1; see as well Ilizarov, “Stalin,” 165. Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 448; Politbiuro 1945–53, 7. It is puzzling how Krementsov, in what seems a contradiction of his own findings (and he nowhere offers clear evidence corroborating Zhdanov’s independence), attributes an enormous amount of agency to Zhdanov in the postwar campaigns (Krementsov, Cure, 102–4). See for example Conze, Sowjetische, 255; one issue to which Zhdanov returned after 1945 was that of the textbooks on political economy, but his efforts in this regard, such as they were, yielded no results (see Pollock, Conversations, 14, 28n11). Shlapentokh, Normal Totalitarian Society, 58. The suffocating decrees of 1946 on literature remained in force until 1988. In October of that year the Politburo recognized the decree as erroneous and repealed it (Shneidman, Russian Literature, 53–4). For the buoyant and expectant mood among Leningrad’s scientists and scholars following the victory in Europe, see Mezhdunarodnoe polozhenie, 147–52. Many expressed the desire to maintain or establish contacts with foreigners. Akademiia Nauk, 18. Zubkova’s suggestions of a spontaneous wartime “destalinization” as a result of the accessibility of new information and more sense of “personal responsibility” as well as the rise of the practice of “extolling” the Western way of life (as it was dubbed by the leadership) appears to me to be pars pro toto argumentation; intellectuals may have been affected, but the great majority of the Soviet population for less. Gefter, like Zubkova another intellectual, seems to mistake the experience of one group of Soviet society (the intelligentsia) for that of all Soviet citizens after the war. (Zubkova, Poslevoennoe, 22–3, 40; Gefter, Iz tekh, 243; see as well Subkowa, “Kaderpolitik,” 189; Corbett, “Aleksandrov,” 170, is as an early example of similar ideas gaining currency in the West about Stalin’s motives). Shlapentokh, Normal Totalitarian Society, 68–9; Krementsov, Cure, 70.

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18 See Kostrychenko, Tainaia, 290; Conze, Sowjetische, 37; Mezhdunarodnoe polozhenie, 144–7; Boterbloem, Life and Death, 134. 19 Conze, Sowjetische, 74–7, 81–2, 89–92, 140–1. Thus divorces were made extremely expensive in 1944. Again, this trend predated the war, going back to the mid-1930s when abortions had been prohibited. The turn to Russian tradition and conservative family policy during the 1930s and early 1940s was identified as a “Great Retreat” half a century ago by Nicholas S. Timasheff, but this was certainly not a conscious coherent policy on the part of Stalin, or Zhdanov (see Timasheff, Great Retreat). Their imagined postwar socialist Soviet society remained a mixture of Marxist-Leninist ideals and Russian tradition and culture, in which the Communist ideals remained far more important. There was an ulterior motive for advocating motherhood: the enormous wartime population losses needed to be compensated. The Stalinists never resolved the tension between the economy’s need for female labour because of those losses and the pronatality policies. But it seems clear that, whether intended or not, many Soviet citizens welcomed this return to traditional gender roles, particularly, but not exclusively, men. Conze shows clearly the persistence of traditional ideas about the relation between men and women in the postwar Soviet factory (Conze, Sowjetische, 152, 172–4, 191, 203, 236, 244, 247, 251–2, 255). See as well Boterbloem, Life and Death, 196–8. 20 Boterbloem, Life and Death, 135, 184–6, 228. 21 See Georgii Zhukov, and 267, 272, and 319–20. The spring of 1946 saw an attack on Marshal Zhukov and the arrest of airforce general Novikov (who denounced Zhukov) and others (Georgii Zhukov, 586–91). Perhaps, too, the power of the security organs was reduced at the same time (see, for instance, Foitzik, Sowjetische, 227). In 1947 and early 1948, Zhukov was further reprimanded, while four navy admirals were tried by the courts (see 319–20). 22 See Politbiuro 1945–53, 7. 23 As Francisco Goya once wrote, in a comment on his etching Quien lo creyera from the series Los Caprichos “Villains can be accomplices but not friends”; see Goya, Los Caprichos, 78, 158. Stalin himself had betrayed many a close comrade in his time, after all (Gromov, Stalin, 363). See Allilueva, Tol’ko, 363, too; Conquest perceives something of an alignment in 1947 between Andreev, Zhdanov, Voznesensky, and Kaganovich against Malenkov, Beria, and Khrushchev, when both Malenkov and Khrushchev had been demoted and placed under a kind of surveillance, and Beria lost direct control over the police ministries (Conquest, Power, 87–90). To the first group, which was in the ascendancy from the spring of 1946 onward, Nicolaevsky adds Voroshilov and A.A. Kuznetsov; since Voroshilov, Zhdanov, Kaganovich, and Andreev had all four been

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24

25 26

27 28 29 30 31

32

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sidetracked by Malenkov during the war, they now sought revenge (Nikolaevskii, Tainye, 212–13). Although Conquest and Nicolaevsky present some circumstantial evidence, I am not convinced that any such alliance had much substance or ever lasted for very long. Stalin pulled the strings and the moves against Malenkov, Krushhchev, and Beria had been made at his instigation, it would seem. Iu. A. Zhdanov, interview; Elena Zubkova, one of the current Russian specialists on the postwar period, agrees with this line-up (Subkowa, “Kaderpolitik,” 199, 201; Zubkova, Poslevoennoe, 202–3). See Shlapentokh, Normal Totalitarian Society, 82–3. Iu. A. Zhdanov, interview. Gibianskii cautions as well against overestimating these rivalries; see Gibianskii, “Dolgii,” xxxv. Good examples of contemporary Western speculations on Zhdanov as “dauphin” are “Foreign News: Russia,” 18–20, and Pares, Russia, 203. More recently, Seibert has placed exaggerated importance on these rivalries (Seibert, Zhdanovism, 23). See Chuev, Molotov, 318; Allilueva, Tol’ko, 361. See Politbiuro 1945–53, 7; Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 277, 283–4. XX s’ezd, 47. Politbiuro 1945–53, 7, 195–202, 210–224. See, too, Pechatnov, “The Allies,” 12–13, 20. See Djilas, Conversations, (British edition) 118. “For all intents and purposes, A.A. Zhdanov became the second secretary of the cc of the vkp (b), who concentrated fully on work in the Central Committee of the party.” (Reabilitatsiia, 313). But he had to share some of the limelight, according to the same report, with Voznesensky, Malenkov, and perhaps Beria. Zhores Medvedev has noted that Molotov and Zhdanov were cautious conservatives and had been enthusiastic participants in the Great Terror, while he considers Zhdanov a zealous supporter of the cultural isolation of the ussr from the rest of the world, something to which Stalin had always been predisposed since his advocacy of “Socialism in One Country” during the 1920s (Z. Medvevev, “Sekretnyi,” 97). Djilas, Conversations, 148. See chapter 5. Many of these knizhki can be found among Zhdanov’s personal papers (77/1/539 has several of them from late 1935), unfortunately usually only in photocopied form so that these scribbles are almost impossible to decipher, while it is extremely difficult sometimes to establish the notes’ context. See as well Maksimenkov, Sumbur, 108–9, on Zhdanov’s notes regarding the resolution on Soviet composers of 1948. Zhdanov might have acquired the habit from following the example of Kaganovich, who was already using similar notebooks in the late 1920s (Cohen, “Des lettres,” 310–11, 316–17, gives the physical description of the notebooks of L.M. Kaganovich, which

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33 34 35 36 37

38 39 40 41 42

43 44

45 46 47

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were similar to Zhdanov’s); Malenkov also dutifully wrote Stalin’s orders down in knizhki, even at dinner (Mikoian, Tak, 568). Djilas, Conversations, 156. Ilizarov, “Stalin,” 164. 1941 God 1: 429, note 1. “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71. 77/2 preface; 77/2/2, l.49. While he was in Finland, a special celebration of the first anniversary of the break-up of the blockade was held in Leningrad on 27 January (Nikolaevskii, Tainye, 206–8). If we are to believe Boris Nicolaevsky, Zhdanov’s absence was deliberately orchestrated by Malenkov, who thus punished Zhdanov for his mistakes before and during the war. Nicolaevsky lists as Zhdanov’s sins some things that are nowhere encountered in other sources and other “facts” that are clearly wrong: confusion in September 1939; poor intelligence about the resistance of the Finns in the fall of 1939; some kind of partisan revolt against the policies of Moscow in the fall of 1944 that occurred in Leningrad after Zhdanov had called a partisan meeting; and a toorealistic film, shot just after liberation of the siege of Leningrad. See also Frazier, Malenkov, 47. Volkogonov, Triumf 2: 2, 150. They had met for the first time on 7 October 1944 in Helsinki (77/2/82, l.126). Androsova, “Allied Control,” 52; Korobochkin, “ussr,” 171–2. Volkogonov, Triumf 2: 2, 150; Androsova, “Allied Control,” 52; Korobochkin, “ussr,” 171–2. Androsova, “Allied Control,” 53. Androsova concludes on good grounds that the sacc behaved quite tactfully in Finland (Androsova, “Allied Control,” 55). Finland was not important enough a foreign-policy priority to start a quarrel about. Rieber’s work makes this abundantly clear (Zhdanov in Finland). “Foreign News,” 20; see as well Archives of the Department of State, “John Scott’s Notes,” 7, which gives almost exactly the same description. Scott sent the notes for his article on Zhdanov in Time to the American diplomat D’Hulley in Berlin, who, on the orders of the State Department, was gathering information about the man it thought might become Stalin’s successor. The existence of a daughter is as erroneous as the claim that Shcherbakov was Zhdanov’s brother-in-law or son-in-law. His fondness for gorodki dated from his youth, apparently (77/2/77, l.85). Archives of the Department of State, “John Scott’s Notes,” 7. See Scott, Duel, 149; his son Iurii is hardly taller. Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers 1: 251, 266, Vospominaniia 1: 111; Mikoian, Tak bylo, 353, 562. With regard to Khrushchev’s testimony that

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Zhdanov had a drinking problem, one suspects that his source was Malenkov or Beria, for Khrushchev himself was seldom in Moscow between 1938 and 1949. Even if Khrushchev saw Zhdanov “drunk” on some of the sparing occasions they met in Moscow, we cannot tell whether it was typical; there is a difference between the occasional drunk and alcoholic behaviour. Malenkov and Khrushchev had supported each other since the 1930s and their families still got along well after Khrushchev’s return to Moscow in late 1949; in other words, Nikita Sergeevich will hardly have been an intimate friend of Zhdanov’s, even though in hindsight he remembered liking Zhdanov, whom he thought to have been clever and wise, with a sense of humor that was sometimes akin to German Schadenfreude, and at other moments ironic (Khrushchev, Vospominaniia 1: 111–13; Molotov seems to agree; see Chuev, Molotov, 663–4). Beria and Khrushchev seem to have been on decent terms until 1953, too (A. Ponomarev, ”Nikita,” 135; S. Khrushchev, Krizisy, 58, 305–6). Mikoian’s memoirs betray a profound dislike of Voznesnensky and Zhdanov, portraying the latter as an incompetent sycophantic pathetic cowardly drunk (Mikoian, Tak bylo, 382–3, 423–4, 426–7, 430, 432–4, 559–60, 562–3). Edvard Radzinsky, who has seen documents that few others have been allowed to inspect, notes: “‘The all-powerful favorite’ Zhdanov was in reality a hopeless drunkard, a lackey on whom the Boss regularly vented his bad temper” (Stalin, 526). Radzinsky, a playwright by trade, does stretch the evidence sometimes to create a kind of shock-effect. The unreliable Deriabin notes that among the mgb guards it was a commonplace that Zhdanov was an alcoholic; often inebriated, he is supposed to have missed important meetings and was incoherent at others (Deriabin, Inside, 34). Seibert, using only published sources, argues enigmatically that as far as he can establish, Zhdanov had a drinking problem but was not an alcoholic (Zhdanovism, 70–1). 48 His shaky countenance (if that is what it was) may have been solely caused by his various health problems (Meissner, “Shdanow” 1: 17–8; Djilas, Conversations, 154–5). 49 One should bear in mind, again, that after June 1941 Khrushchev did not meet Zhdanov much at all, while Mikoian does his utmost to disparage Zhdanov in his self-serving memoirs. Mikoian recounts that Stalin forgave Zhdanov even after he had openly admitted to cowardice during the war (Mikoian, Tak, 562). Khrushchev, too, thought that Zhdanov was too faint-hearted (Gromov, Stalin, 384). But doubts remain: the deaths of other leaders (such as A.S. Shcherbakov and G.F. Aleksandrov), who had worked closely with Zhdanov, may be attributed to overindulgence in drink, so a team of binge drinkers can easily be imagined, especially considering Russian traditions (on Shcherbakov, see Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers 1: 66–7, and on Aleksandrov, Shepilov, “Vospominaniia” 1: 7).

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50 Khrushchev, Vospominaniia 1: 111. Several other sources suggest that Zhdanov tried to abstain after the war. 51 In contrast to the good manners he presented to the British, Zhdanov could swear like a trooper if he was in the mood (Chuev, Molotov, 283). 52 Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 197; Alliluyeva also notes the “trunkloads” of possessions that Zinaida had stuffed into the apartment. 53 Billington, “The Intelligentsia,” 815–16. 54 Hauser, Social History, 245. 55 “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71. 56 Nevakivi, “Control Commission,” 73; Rentola, “Soviet,” 219. 57 Nevakivi, “Control Commission,” 73–4; Volokitina, “Vvedenie,” 12. For an outline of the sovietization of East-Central Europe, Seton-Watson, East European Revolution, remains reliable. 58 Mark, Revolution, 6, 41. 59 Odinadtsataia sessiia, 3. 60 Zubkova, Poslevoennoe, 25; Broekmeyer, Stalin, 247. Broekmeyer notes furthermore that those who had been disabled in particularly gruesome manner were kept from sight (Broekmeyer, Stalin, 251). 61 Broekmeyer, Stalin, 202. In May 1945, eleven million men and women were serving in the Soviet armed forces (Zubkova, Poslevoennoe, 28; Foitzik, Sowjetische, 228). By 1948, after three waves of demobilization, only about 2.5 million remained under arms. 62 Ra’anan, International, 88; Kostyrchenko, Out of the Red Shadows, 261–2n47. Maksimenkov, Sumbur, 178–9, notes that, in 1938, Shcherbakov finally got a holiday after five years without one; after that he may not have had one at all. Khrushchev detested Shcherbakov and emphasizes his drinking problem (see Khrushchev, “Memuary,” 54). 63 “A.S. Shcherbakov,” 53; another obituary accompanied by a short biography of Shcherbakov appeared in Bol’shevik (“Pamiati A.S. Shcherbakova,” 52–5); 77/2/82, l.127. Even though Shcherbakov and Zhdanov remained on good terms for most of their careers, they were not related through marriage; Shcherbakov was neither Zhdanov’s brother-in-law nor his son-in-law, as Foitzik wants (Sowjetische, 25). 64 77/2/82, ll.187–8; Dvenadtsataia sessiia, 3. The oldest thirteen years were demobilized (forty-two years of age and older, soon followed by other categories; official contemporary numbers cited seven million demobilized by early 1946; see Zubkova, Poslevoennoe, 28; Hazard, “Soviet,” 249). Within weeks, the work week was reduced to pre-war levels (forty-eight hours) and vacations for factory workers and employees reintroduced (Duskin, Stalinist Reconstruction, 36). 65 Brooks, Thank You, 201. 66 Stalin, O velikoi, 151; Zubkova, Obshchestvo, 30; Vaksberg, Stalin, 141–2; Short History, 247.

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67 Slovo tovarishchu, 189; Zubkova, Obshchestvo, 30. Sloterdijk notes that in fact most twentieth-century Europeans internalized such thinking in the course of, and as a result of, World War i: “Being schooled through war reports, every individual developed the perspective of a general; the feeling grew that those who were not generals could only be tiny cogs in the war machine … In this cold romanticism of grand strategic overviews, the political camps of the Left and the Right are quite close to each other … The principal psychopolitical model of the coming decades is the ‘cothinking’ cog in the machinery” (Sloterdijk, Critique, 470). Human life became cheap, a notion reinforced in Russia during its Civil War, and this sentiment is quite pronounced in Stalin, his generals in World War ii, Ezhov, Beria, Zhdanov, Molotov, and the other leaders. 68 Hazard, “Soviet,” 253. 69 One of Zhdanov’s first actions may have involved the preparation of a decree requiring the improvement of the quality and quantity of republican, krai, and oblast’ newspapers, issued in the name of the cc on June 20 (KPSS 7: 547). On 23 June, together with Malenkov, Aleksandrov, Khrapchenko (State Arts Committee), Bol’shakov (State Film Committee), and Tikhonov (Writers’ Union), he addressed a report to Stalin on errors made in awarding Stalin Prizes (Gromov, Stalin, 405). 70 In search of some sort of resolution, the Politburo decreed the establishment of Voprosy istorii (Questions of History) to replace the defunct Istoricheskii zhurnal (The Historical Journal) on 2 July (KPSS, 7: 550–1). 71 “Posetiteli” 7: 101–2; “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71. 72 Volkov, Vzlët, 259. 73 Beria had on the orders of the gko monitored the physicist Kurchatov’s laboratory since 3 December 1944 (Molotov, 735–6). See Holloway, Stalin, 8–116, for a lucid discussion of the prehistory of the Soviet bomb. 74 Iu. Zhukov, Tainy, 352–3. 75 Molotov, 735–6; Iu. Zhukov, Tainy, 355–6. After the dissolution of the State Defence Committee, it fell under the authority of the Sovnarkom. 76 Holloway, Stalin, 172. 77 Short History, 248; KPSS 7: 554. 78 Ivanova, Labor, 96 79 “Demograficheskaia situatsiia …,” 278. 80 Kohn, “Pan-Slavism,” 703. 81 Hazard, “Soviet,” 252; Iu. Zhukov, Tainy, 360–3. On 21 September an official end to the state of war was announced, except in the newly annexed Western territories (Hazard, “Soviet,” 253). 82 Iu. Zhukov, Tainy, 364; Zh. Medvedev, “Sekretnyi,” 97; Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 278. Pechatnov, in contrast, believes that Stalin merely pretended to be ill (“The Allies”, 9).

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83 Politbiuro 1945–53, 398; Iu. Zhukov, Tainy, 364–5. Stalin did not receive anyone in his Kremlin office in September 1945. 84 “‘Soiuzniki,’ ” 80; Pechatnov, “The Allies,” 9; “Posetiteli” 7: 113. The nkgb was only renamed mgb in March 1946. 85 Androsova, “Allied Control,” 53–4, 64n37; Rentola, “Soviet,” 222–3; Archives of the Department of State, “John Scott’s Notes,” 1. In October, the Seventh Congress of the Finnish Communist Party took place: Zhdanov rewrote the speech of its General Secretary, Ville Pessi (Rentola, “Soviet,” 220–1, 241–2n3). 86 Thus in April 1946 Pessi met in Moscow with Zhdanov, Malenkov, and Suslov, who instructed the Finnish party to follow a tougher political line than had previously been observed (Rentola, “Soviet,” 226–8). 87 Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 278; Iu.N. Zhukov, “Bor’ba,” 24–6. 88 Politbiuro 1945–53, 25. 89 Politbiuro 1945–53, 204; Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 277–8. 90 Politbiuro 1945–53, 24–5; Adibekov, Organizatsionnaia, 231–3, 237–8, 240–1. The cc Department of International Information dated from the war, as we saw in the previous chapter. 91 Yegorova, “Iran Crisis”, 9n28. The crisis lasted from November 1945 until April 1946; Soviet “advisors” had instigated a revolt of the Azeris in the northwest of Iran under the protection of the Soviet troops stationed there (see for example Hill, Cold War, 8–15). In this case, Zhdanov at first (before January 1946) was not part of the quintet that managed foreign policy (Stalin, Molotov, Malenkov, Mikoian, and Beria). But even after the “Five” had become the “Six,” Europe rather than Asia was the focus of Zhdanov’s attention. After Suslov complained to him in mid1946 about the reluctance of mid employees to provide his department with all relevant information on foreign developments, Zhdanov did not raise the issue with Molotov, still deferring to the foreign minister, apparently, and not willing to risk another quarrel with him (Ulunian, “Gretsiia,” 24). Molotov considered Zhdanov to be a bit of a soft character, but it also appears clearly from Chuev’s conversations with Molotov that he quite liked Zhdanov (Chuev, Molotov, 63–4). 92 See Mastny, Cold War, 31. Note as well Molotov’s remarks about Stalin’s absolute dominance over Soviet diplomacy (Chuev, Molotov, 134). 93 “The dfp’s evolution into a bureaucratic-party organ closely connected with the ideology and policy of [sic] ‘Cold War’ began … in mid-1946,” according to Natal’ia Yegorova, who goes on to state that “evidence for this interpretation includes the way the Department was reorganized, particularly the effort to shed its inheritance from the Comintern, as well as the substance of its work” (Yegorova, “Iran Crisis”, 5n11). 94 “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 72; Iu.N. Zhukov, “Bor’ba,” 30; 17/3/1065, l.22; rgani, 2/1/19, l.3; R. Medvedev, All Stalin’s Men, 71–2, 77;

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95 96

97

98 99 100 101

102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110

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Notes to pages 265–7 Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 292–3, note. On 22 May 1947, cc secretary N.S. Patolichev was dismissed and replaced by Suslov, who continued to head the cc foreign-policy department. Suslov also took over from Patolichev the cc directorate for checking Party bodies in May 1947, which was reduced to a department (for Party, Trade Union, and Komsomol organs) in July 1948; then B.N. Chernousov took over from Suslov (see next chapter; Schapiro, Communist Party, 515; Politbiuro 1945–1953, 50–1). Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 279; Politbiuro 1945–53, 24. Molotov emphasized that Kruglov was not Beria’s man (Chuev, Molotov, 411–12). Lubianka, 34–5, 46; Politbiuro 1945–53, 207. Kruglov had been a protégé of Malenkov’s during Malenkov’s tenure as cc orpo chief (Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 208). Abakumov was head of military counterintelligence during the war. Indicative of the recent nature of Zhdanov’s return to prominence was the handwritten addition of his name to a list that included Stalin, Mikoian, Beria, Malenkov, and Dekanozov on Soviet representative Vyshinskii’s report, dated 1 January 1946, on negotiations with the Romanian king about the practical implementation of decisions made at the recently held Moscow meeting of foreign ministers of the Big Three (Tri Vizita, 190–2). Molotov had been its original addressee. On 4 January, another report by Vyshinskii was sent to Zhdanov and the other five; this time, Zhdanov was included as a “regular” addressee; more reports followed in the next couple of days (Tri Vizita, 195–7, 206–8, 211). “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71. “Posetiteli” 7: 116. Holloway, Stalin, 147–8. Zh. Medvedev, “Kak sozdavalas’,” 112; Holloway, Stalin, 134–5. Sometimes Malenkov or Voznesensky joined the troika. Note Zhdanov’s absence from the discussions in Goncharov et al., “Russian Nuclear,” 410–16. Foitzik, Sowjetische, 253, 253n198. Zhdanov, “Rech’,” 47; Zhdanov, Rech’, 16; 77/1/800; for a critical outline of his speech, see A. Werth, Russia: Postwar, 87–8. Zhdanov, “Rech’,” 49. Zhdanov delivered another election speech at a meeting of the “Bol’shevik” factory in Leningrad on the next day (77/1/801). Krementsov, Cure, 62, 75. Documentary History, 2: 232–5, provides excerpts. Hazard, “Soviet,” 260–1. KPSS 8: 7. Kuznetsov, Nakanune, 307. Kuznetsov believed, in hindsight, that his

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demise began here; it ended with his trial before the Military Tribunal in early 1948 (Kuznetsov, “Krutye” 2: 43). 111 Torchinov, Leontiuk, Vokrug, 18. 112 77/2/2, l.51; 77/2/23, ll.155–61; Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 3: 419. Stalin, Molotov, Mikoian, Beria, Malenkov, and Vyshinskii had the opportunity to congratulate him in person when they met that evening in Stalin’s office; it is unclear whether business was followed by a birthday party (“Posetiteli” 7: 118). 113 rgani, 2/1/6. 114 Zubok, Pleshakov, Inside, 124. 115 Pechatnov believes that Stalin already in November 1945 had made clear to his Politburo intimates that confrontation rather than accommodation with the West would be the correct foreign-policy line; even then he attacked the habit of “fawning before the West” (Pechatnov, “The Allies,” 10–11). 116 Even though Stalin and the others did not believe in the imminent outbreak of war, as is evidenced by Stalin’s comments about Churchill’s speech in Pravda of 14 March and the second wave of demobilization announced on 20 March (Zubkova, “Zemlia,” 8; Hazard, “Soviet,” 249–50). 117 By May 1946 the us government had halted reparation deliveries to the Soviet zone from their occupational zone in Germany (Foitzik, Sowjetische, 267). 118 rgani, 2/1/6, l.2. 119 Politbiuro 1945–53, 25. The Supreme Soviet accepted this change on March 15 (Hazard, “Soviet,” 257). 120 Pervaia sessiia 2: 3. 121 Pervaia sessiia 2. Among its agenda points was the official acceptance of the Fourth Five-Year Plan. 122 77/2/2, l.49; Ivkin, “Vysshie” 1: 133; Pervaia sessiia 2: 437. 123 Politbiuro 1945–53, 27–9; Iu.N. Zhukov, “Bor’ba,” 25–8. 124 Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 118; Politbiuro 1945–53, 30. 125 Politbiuro 1945–53, 26–7. The handful of key leaders (Malenkov, Beria, Zhdanov, Molotov, Stalin, Voznesensky, occasionally Mikoyan and Bulganin) had met in Stalin’s Kremlin office before and during the sessions of the cc and Supreme Soviet to map the course of the deliberations that were to take place in both bodies (“Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71; I.S. Aksenov, “Apogei Stalinizma,” 99; I.N. Zhukov, “Bor’ba,” 26; rgani, 2/1/6, l.7). 126 rgani, 2/1/6, l.7; Conquest, Power, 400; “Informatsionnoe,” 3. 127 Politbiuro 1945–53, 26. One can very tentatively distinguish three “clans” among the Orgbiuro membership, but the value of such a classification is limited, for most high-ranking cc leaders did not bet on one

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130 131

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Notes to page 269 horse. For what it is worth, the Malenkov “faction” consisted of Andrianov, Popov, and Shatalin who had all worked in the cc Department of Leading Party Organs under Malenkov during the 1930s (Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 208). A.A. Kuznetsov, Patolichev, and rsfsr premier Rodionov had been Zhdanov protégés. G.F. Aleksandrov, N.A. Mikhailov, and M.A. Suslov may have belonged to either (or neither) camp. Bulganin, trade-union chief V. Kuznetsov, and Mekhlis owed their careers clearly to Stalin’s patronage, but the same could be said of all Orgbiuro members, including Zhdanov and Malenkov. KPSS 8: 17–20; “Posetiteli” 7: 119–20; “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71. Politbiuro 1945–53, 32–4; Subkowa, “Kaderpolitik,” 199, 201; Iu.N. Zhukov, “Bor’ba,” 26; Iu.N. Zhukov, Tainy, 385. Pikhoia suggests, mistakenly, that this change took place in March; see “O vnutripoliticheskoi,” 5–6, 6n8. Pikhoia, Sovetskii, 60–1. There is no good reason to believe that the cautious and suspicious Stalin had already taken a shine to Kuznetsov before he had shown his abilities, as Iu. Zhukov suggests without providing clear evidence (“Bor’ba,” 26–7; see as well Volkov, Vzlët, 274). According to Zhukov, Aleksandrov still was a protégé of Zhdanov’s, but Conquest sees Aleksandrov by 1946 as a Malenkov man, perhaps following Nicolaevsky; compare Iu.N. Zhukov, Tainy, 387–8, Nikolaevskii, Tainye, 211, with Conquest, Power, 83. It is true that Aleksandrov’s loyalty to Zhdanov may not have survived the war, during which the two saw little of each other, and when Shcherbakov and Malenkov worked much more closely with Aleksandrov. Still, the survival of the link Zhdanov-(Shcherbakov-)Aleksandrov remains plausible. Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 282; 17/125/421, ll.1–11, shows that Agitprop materials were directed to Malenkov until April, after which they were addressed to Zhdanov. The 26 July cc decree “On the growth of the Party and measures for the strengthening of the Party-organizational and Party-political work with the new entrants in the vkp (b)” originated in the period of Malenkov’s leadership of the Secretariat and Orgbiuro. Malenkov had been forwarded a draft by Patolichev on 8 April; see 17/117/627, ll.96, 117. On 14 March 1946, on Stalin’s suggestion, the cc plenum had replaced the Sovnarkom Cinematography Committee with a Ministry of Cinematography; in the leader’s opinion, film was the best means of propaganda, better than the radio or printing press, and thus deserved its own ministry (rgani, 2/1/7, l.21). This reorganization was possibly connected, too, with Stalin’s great irritation over the second instalment of Eisenstein’s trilogy on Ivan the Terrible (see Platt, Brandenberger, “Rehabilitating Ivan iv,” 641, 641n29, 652n75). A draft of a cc resolu-

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tion banning the film had been authored by Zhdanov, showing that the latter’s postwar involvement in matters cultural predated his reassignment to managing Agitprop. Of course, Zhdanov had similarly been involved in historical and philosophical issues in 1943 and 1944 without an obvious mandate to focus on cultural matters, further evidence of the fluidity of the division of tasks among the cc secretaries and Politburo members. Aksenov, “Apogei,” 99–100; Politbiuro 1945–53, 32–3. D.T. Shepilov outlines in his memoirs the tasks of Agitprop as leadership over all aspects of spiritual life in Soviet society (Shepilov, “Vospominaniia” 2: 12). The bureaucracy of the Propaganda Directorate was already well described by Nemzer in 1950 (Nemzer, “Kremlin’s Professional Staff,” 72–8). Suslov remained head of the foreign-policy department until the next great reorganization of July 1948; his was a large department, too, with seventeen subsections (Foitzik, Sowjetische, 24, 24n18). Iu.N. Zhukov, “Bor’ba,” 26; Deriabin, Inside Stalin’s Kremlin, 33. Mikoian considered the promotion of Aleksei Kuznetsov as a blow in favour of Zhdanov and against Beria and Malenkov, whom Mikoian remembered as second only to Stalin in the Party by that time (Mikoian, Tak, 564). Mikoian’s suspicion that Zhdanov prevailed upon Stalin in suggesting Kuznetsov’s appointment (and thus managed to exclude Beria and Malenkov from deciding important issues) is unconvincing, for both remained part of the Inner Circle. Perhaps Stalin appreciated the Zhdanov protégés Shcherbakov, Voznesensky, Aleksei Kuznetsov, or Kosygin because Stalin believed that Zhdanov mentored them well; concomitantly, Kuznetsov appeared a competent, young, and energetic addition to the central leadership. Subkowa, “Kaderpolitik,” 200. In 1947 Party committees were given the right to initiate Courts of Honour in state and Party organizations, which also contributed to the benefit of the Party’s power versus that of the state (see the next chapter). Zhdanov met with Stalin the day before the meeting, likely to finalize the agenda (“Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71; Vlast’ i khudozhestvennaia, 785n3; Babichenko, Pisateli, 116–17; I.N. Zhukov, “Bor’ba,” 27). The Agitprop Directorate had authority over the appointment of 4,386 people in its bureaucracy at the time of its transformation into a department in July 1948 (Nadzhafov, “Stalinskii,” 206). “Iz istorii Velikoi” 4:, 213. See Boterbloem, Life and Death, 61. In the Orgbiuro papers reflecting the preparation for this meeting, many statistics on change in the Party membership during the war may be found (see 17/117/627). Between 1 July 1941 and 1 January 1946, 5,319,297 full members and 3,615,451 candidate members had entered the Party, two and a half times more than the intake in the

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144 145 146 147 148 149

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Notes to pages 270–2 comparable period of four and a half years from January 1937 to July 1941 (17/117/627, ll. 79–145; especially, see ll.80, 137, 139). The total membership of the Communist party stood at 5.5 million on 1 January 1946 (Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 352–3). By June 1947, threequarters had joined the Party during or after the war (Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 508). A. Zhdanov, “Report on the Amendments,” 681. Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 508–9. 77/1/976, ll.1–2; Vlast’ i khudozhestvennaia, 549–50, 785n3. Stalin had met Zhdanov, Molotov, Beria, Malenkov, Mikoian, and Bulganin the previous evening, although part of the discussion concerned military matters (“Posetiteli” 7: 122). 17/125/377, l.36. Babichenko, Pisateli, 116–17. 17/125/377, ll.65–7. 17/125/377, l.69. Boterbloem, Life and Death, 201–2. “The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade-union consciousness” (Lenin, “What Is to Be Done?,” 375). Brandenberger, “Short Course,” 423–6, notes that this biography was first released in 1939 and continued to be refined and reprinted in a huge volume throughout the 1940s and 1950s. For two versions, see Iosif 1 and Iosif 2. Brandenberger, “Short Course,” 172–4, who uses Bakhtin’s insights; see Bakhtin, Dialogic, 342–4. 17/125/377, l.77. Within a few days, Zhdanov and Aleksandrov asked A.A. Kuznetsov to reassign more competent cadres to better Agitprop’s work (Babichenko, Pisateli, 118). On 26 April Zhdanov guided a subsequent Agitprop discussion concentrating on the state of Soviet cinematography (Zubok, Pleshakov, Inside, 123; 17/125/378, ll.5–6). Akademiia Nauk, 316, 318; Kumanev, Riadom, 309. Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 282. Politbiuro 1945–53, 205–6; Molotov, 760–1; Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 281; Pikhoia, Sovetskii, 47; some of it was known to Nicolaevsky, Nikolaevskii, Tainye, 211. All were sentenced to various jail terms on 11 May; the ussr Supreme Court rescinded the sentences in May 1953. mgb chief Abakumov and his aides brought Novikov, Shakhurin, and the others to such a state by their interrogation and torture techniques that they signed a statement addressed to Stalin accusing Malenkov of knowingly suppressing any information (so that it would not reach the Central Committee) about the production of defective airplanes and engines during the war (“‘Sledstvie pribeglo,’” 99–100). Stalin appar-

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161 162

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ently kept this information handy afterwards, in case Malenkov further annoyed him. Pikhoia, “O vnutripoliticheskoi …,” 5n6; but see Iu.N. Zhukov, “Bor’ba,” 27 (Zhukov’s point about Malenkov’s continued high-level role is confirmed by Molotov, 760–1); rgani, 2/1/10, l.190; Lavrentii, 402n33; Subkowa, “Kaderpolitik,” 201; “Posetiteli” 7: 123–9. Part of the fall-out of Malenkov’s temporary demotion may have included an attack in July 1946 on the high-ranking Komsomol chief O.P. Mishakova. On 15 July a meeting of the cc Secretariat was held in which this notorious instigator of the Komsomol purge of the autumn of 1938 was released from her work in the Komsomol cc at her own request, a decision ratified offically on 19 July by the Politburo. Zhdanov may have been instrumental in causing her fall; in 1957 N.A. Mikhailov, Komsomol chief in 1946, claimed that there was a connection between Beria and Mishakova and, through Beria, with Malenkov too (Molotov, 624, 762n2). It should not be forgotten that Stalin remained the Party’s general secretary and Soviet prime minister, and, as Esakov notes, as head of the government Stalin personally supervised the issues of the so-called “Special Committee,” the Radar Committee, the Reactor-Technology Committee, the (second) Special Committee, and the Currency Committee. In the Politburo he chaired discussions on foreign affairs, foreign trade, the mgb, defence, and monetary issues (Akademiia Nauk, 17). On 1 June 1946, the Supreme Military Council demoted Zhukov (Sokolov, Neizvetsnyi, 516–17, 519). See as well Pikhoia, Sovetskii, 47–50. Kostyrchenko notes that both Shakhurin and Zhukov were accused of unauthorized looting of goods confiscated from the Germans (Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 279). See also the next chapter. See Novikov’s letter to Stalin of April 1946, even though some of its contents may have been “suggested” by his mgb interrogators (Georgii Zhukov, 586–91). Subkowa, “Kaderpolitik,” 200–1. In fact, the cc membership was polled about the decision without a formal meeting (Babichenko, Pisateli, 120; Lavrentii, 402n33; “‘Sledstvie pribeglo,’” 100). 77/3/4, ll.20–3; Iu.N. Zhukov, Tainy, 386, 389; Nikolaevskii, Tainye, 215–16; Mawdsley, White, The Soviet Elite, 123. In 1945 and early 1946 both cc Orgbiuro and Secretariat sessions were usually chaired by Malenkov (see for instance Akademiia Nauk, 301–3, 310, 312, 314–15, 321–2, 325, 327, 332). Politbiuro 1945–53, 36–7. Ibid., 33, 35, 206. He did not remain cc secretary for long and was

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168 169

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Notes to pages 273–4 replaced by Suslov in May 1947 (see above). His directorate was organized because the cc Orginstruktor department was seen as incapable of exercising control over local Party organizations (ibid., 35). The directorate was akin to an earlier body like the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate. The directorate became the cc Department of Party, Trade Union, and Komsomol organs in the July 1948 reorganization (Schapiro, Communist Party, 515, 653; Mawsdley, White, The Soviet Elite, 123; Krementsov, Cure, 82). The Russian Menshevik émigré Boris Nicolaevsky appears to have been the originator of the story of a long-standing rivalry between Malenkov and Zhdanov, which supposedly began at the time of the Eighteenth Party Congress, but as usual in his work, Nicolaevsky gets some things right but errs on a great number of points (see also Politbiuro 1945–53, 12; Nikolaevskii, Tainye, 205–6, 210; see for example Frazier, Malenkov, 46–7). Mikoian believed that Zhdanov distrusted Beria much more than the spineless Malenkov (Mikoian, Tak, 565–6). Shepilov suggests that Zhdanov was aware of the intrigues of others but did not himself disparage the other lieutenants before Stalin (Shepilov, “Vospominaniia” 3: 4). Molotov, 392–3. Shtykov was secretary of the Primore oblast’ at the time (ibid., 837–8). Politbiuro 1945–53, 423. Iu.N. Zhukov, “Bor’ba,” 27, Tainy, 386–7. Thus on 15 June, mvd minister Kruglov reported to Stalin, Beria, Molotov, and Zhdanov on the anti-Soviet guerilla war in the western regions (garf, 9401/2/137, ll. 173–85). Crime statistics for the Soviet capital, too, seemed to be reported solely to Stalin in 1946 (see ibid., 9401/2/137, ll.361–5). See Khlevniuk, “Stalin,” 537–8, for a good discussion of the uneasy division of supervisory tasks between Abakumov, Kuznetsov, and Stalin in 1947 and 1948. KPSS 8: 21–3. On the same day, the cc issued a special decree prohibiting Party workers from accepting gifts and premiums from representatives of government agencies and enterprises, particularly factories (Subkowa, “Kaderpolitik,” 198–9). 17/125/421, ll.11–15, 69; Boterbloem, Life and Death, 61. Vlast’ i khudozhestvennaia, 556. For a few days in early June, the ceremonies surrounding the burial of Kalinin, the Soviet president, temporarily distracted Zhdanov and halted his ideological overhaul (77/2/82, l.195). Volkogonov, Autopsy, 132–3; Conquest, Power, 92. Gibianskii, “Kak voznik,” 135. The first sign of the idea of a coordinating organization of Communist parties dates from 1 April 1946, when

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Hungarian Communist leader (and former Comintern official) Matyas Rakosi visited Stalin (Gibianskii, “Dolgii,” xxxv, xxxv, note 42). The evidence of Stalin’s osobye papki for the immediate postwar period indicates this. Few of these special files in the archives are addressed to Zhdanov. For 1947 the number of special files forwarded to Zhdanov seems to decline compared to 1946. Besides Stalin, Molotov, Beria, A.A. Kuznetsov, Voznesensky, and even Malenkov received more copies of reports than Zhdanov. Of seventy-one spravki (mvd reports) in garf, 9401/2/168, fewer than ten were also addressed to Zhdanov. One reason for this was that Zhdanov was never assigned much of an official role in the formal government, under which fell the security and foreign ministries that generated most of these papers, in contrast to Beria, Molotov, Kuznetsov (from September 1947, mvd-mgb curator), Voznesensky, or Malenkov. But, as on the eve of World War ii, Stalin involved Zhdanov often in government decisions (compare to Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 256). After 1945 Zhdanov may have read through the contents of the special files in Stalin’s office, even if he was not sent these materials directly. In 1946 mvd reports went usually to Stalin, with copies going sometimes to Beria and Molotov and far less often to Zhdanov, Mikoian, or Malenkov. Thus, on 12 June 1946 mvd chief S.N. Kruglov reported to Stalin alone that the mvd Special Board had sentenced 312 people accused of various political crimes on 10 June and had confirmed the exile to northern regions of 259 family members of traitors to the Motherland (garf, 9401/2/137, l.135). Ibid., 9401/2/137, ll.173–85. And the fighting continued throughout that summer. On 21 August Kruglov reported again to Stalin, Molotov, Zhdanov, and Beria on “banditry” in Ukraine, Belorussia, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia: hundreds had been captured, but several hundred bandit groups remained active in western Ukraine and had inflicted many casualties upon Soviet counter-insurgency units (ibid., 9401/2/139, ll.46–78). On 22 September a new mvd report to Stalin, Molotov, Beria, and Zhdanov followed on continued “banditry” in the western Soviet Union in August (ibid., 9401/2/139, ll.140–53): deaths on both sides ran to the hundreds. Ibid., 9401/2/138, ll.317–22. In August Stalin, Molotov, Beria, and Zhdanov received a report from Kruglov about the adaptation of the Chechen and Ingush to their new environment (ibid., 9401/2/137, ll.380–4). Zhdanov only rarely participated in the meetings of the Sovminburo, the pinnacle of the government (see Politbiuro 1945–53, 489, 495, 516, 518).

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180 Vlast’ i khudozhestvennaia, 556–8; “…imeiutsiia,” 109. 181 Its first issue was dated 28 June but was “antedated” (see below; Babichenko, Pisateli, 118; Krementsov, Stalinist Science, 144). A.M. Egolin, deputy chief of Agitprop, Aleksandrov, Khrapchenko, Kaftanov, Bol’shakov, and Fadeev met with Stalin, Zhdanov, Beria, Mikoian, Malenkov, and Voznesensky on 26 June in Stalin’s Kremlin office (“Posetiteli” 7: 127). 182 “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71; for the dinner parties, see for example Mikoian, Tak, 353. 183 Gromov, Stalin, 239–40. 184 Subkowa, “Kaderpolitik,” 194–5; KPSS 8: 24–30; Zhukov incorrectly dates this resolution 8 July (Iu.N. Zhukov, “Bor’ba,” 27). cc department head Patolichev wrote the original draft of the resolution, which was then checked by Zhdanov (see 17/117/627, l.96). 185 17/117/627, l.139. 186 Subkowa, “Kaderpolitik,” 189. 187 Ibid., 191–2. 188 Ibid., 194–5; Iu.N. Zhukov, “Bor’ba,” 27. The leaders’ awareness of the inadequate political skill of the “new” Communists went back at least to 1943 (Boterbloem, Life and Death, 124). 189 Zubkova, Poslevoennoe, 194; Brandenberger, “Short Course,” 308–13. 190 KPSS 8: 31–8. 191 Resolutions 1929–53, 236; Iu.N. Zhukov, “Bor’ba,” 27; KPSS 8: 39–48; Mawdsley, White, The Soviet Elite, 116–17, 116–7n60. Zhukov interprets this as a a move by Zhdanov and Aleksandrov against the cc Cadres department led by Kuznetsov; Zhukov argues that, because the emphasis in the resolutions was on the selection of cadres, Kuznetsov’s responsibility, Zhdanov and Aleksandrov developed the series of ideological resolutions between early August and December 1946 in order to undermine Kuznetsov (Iu.N. Zhukov, “Bor’ba,” 27–8). One needs to point out, however, that the offensive was aimed primarily at the poor state of ideology, political education, and agitprop. Kuznetsov, meanwhile, had only just begun as head of cadres: he could hardly have been held responsible for such shortcomings. Finally, on the basis of the evidence that I have seen, an alliance between Kuznetsov and Zhdanov appears much more likely than hostility between the two. Indeed, Zhdanov was likely rather sceptical of Aleksandrov, whom he had hardly met throughout the war years, and who was held partially responsible for the poor state of Agitprop (and thought to be incapable of improving matters without Zhdanov’s close supervision). Within a year, Zhdanov orchestrated the removal of the incompetent Aleksandrov from Agitprop. 192 17/117/627, l.74. With Aleksandrov as its editor, it was to be published

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every ten days in an edition of 200,000 copies (17/117/627, ll.74ob.). Its first vice-editor was P.A. Satiukov (1911–76), who later on became editor (Molotov, 822). The Orgbiuro also criticized Iudin’s poor stewardship of the state publishing houses (see note 224 of chapter 8). Iu. Zhukov, Tainy, 553. Politbiuro 1945–53, 34–7. In fact, this seemed a second attempt to distinguish the two organs after a first try in May 1946. Compare 77/3/4, ll.20–23, with “Posledniaia” 3: 76n24; Laurent, “L’Interdiction,” 140, 152n22; Iu.N. Zhukov, “Bor’ba,” 28; Krementsov, Stalinist Science, 113; Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 283. “The activities of the cc Orgbiuro and Secretariat were always of a great similarity” (Il’ina, “Partnomenklatura,” 276). See, too, CPSU’s Top, 9, 11, although the clear demarcation between the competence of the Orgbiuro and Secretariat was not as evident in the immediate postwar period as Howlett makes it out to be. Esakov, “Delo” 1: 58. The report was authored by cc administrative department head E.E. Andreev. Esakov, “Delo” 1: 57, 57n9; Krementsov, Cure, 1; Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 293–4. Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 294; Krementsov, Stalinist, 132; Esakov, “Delo” 1: 58–9. Krementsov mistakenly claims that Smith visited the actual laboratory of the two scientists; see Esakov, “Delo” 1: 58. 77/3/147, l.3. Zhdanov forwarded the report on the visit to Deputy Foreign Minister Dekanozov on 7 August, noting that Smith’s visit should never have been allowed to happen. See as well Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 294, and on the bosses’ dismay particularly with Smith, Krementsov, Cure, 96. Maksimenkov (Sumbur, 98) has noted that, by this time, Zhdanov’s notebooks begin to show evidence of the offensive to step up secrecy and to highlight Soviet patriotism. Esakov, “Delo” 1: 59. Ibid., 59–60. The first sign of Zhdanov’s work on the Smith case appears on 5 August (see 77/3/147). Istoriia sovetskikh organov, 465. Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 296–7. Politbiuro 1945–53, 232; Krementsov, Stalinist, 133; Krementsov, Cure, 95. Krementsov, Stalinist, 133; Krementsov, Cure, 97. The scientists expressed their gratitude for this support in January 1947 by sending all Politburo members a courtesy copy of Kliueva and Roskin’s Biotherapy of Malignant Tumors (1947). On the day of Smith’s visit of 20 June, the Politburo had resolved to dispatch Parin to the United States (Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 294).

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207 Krementsov, Cure, 84–9, 95. 208 Esakov, “Delo” 1: 61. 209 There is no doubt that Stalin took the initiative in this matter; see Volkogonov, Triumf 2: 2, 61. See also the next chapter. 210 Babichenko, Pisateli, 121; Vlast’ i khudozhestvennaia, 559–65; on his loss of patience, see Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 285. Leningrad had been under surveillance since the spring of 1944 (Zensur, 321). 211 Babichenko, Pisateli, 121–31, 144–5n28; Vlast’ i khudozhestvennaia, 584, 566–81; Literaturnyi front, 197–215; Sarnov, Chukovskaia, Sluchai, 70; Esakov, “Delo” 1: 54; Laurent, “L’Interdiction,” 139; for exact participation, see Literaturnyi front, 215; Gromov, Stalin, 386–90. 212 Esakov, “Delo” 1: 54. 213 77/1/802, l.2; see Volkov, St Petersburg, 449. Zhdanov’s agitation was recorded by Vishnevskii, who participated in the meeting (Sarnov, Chukovskaia, Sluchai, 71). Certainly, Malenkov made his mark, for he was at times only slightly less vocal than Stalin, while Zhdanov remained relatively silent (Literaturnyi front, 197–215; Babichenko, Pisateli, 130–1). But since parts of Zoshchenko’s Before Sunrise were published in 1943, Malenkov could just as well as Zhdanov be held responsible for any lack of vigilance (Gromov, Stalin, 363–4): “One should never discount the fact, that the novella ‘Before Sunrise’ was printed in a journal published in the capital, for which the Directorate of Agitation and Propaganda carried direct responsibility, that is Aleksandrov and his immediate chief Shcherbakov. Partially Malenkov carried responsibility as well, [as head of] the leading cadres[’ appointments], among whom also were those at the artistic-literary journals. In a word, thus to place simply upon Zhdanov all responsibility for the ‘depraved’ novella would be impossible … It is a different thing that all of the participating Party figures tried to shield themselves and use the situation towards careerist purposes.” On this latter point, see as well Gromov, Stalin, 384–5. 214 Babichenko, Pisateli, 124–5, 128–9; Sarnov, Chukovskaia, Sluchai, 70; Literaturnyi front, 200, 203–4, 206. Zoshchenko had already been condemned for his novella Before Sunrise by Zhdanov in Bol’shevik in early 1944 (Gromov, Stalin, 364–6). At issue now was a short story by Zoshchenko published in July in Zvezda (of which Zoshchenko was briefly editor) about a monkey who prefers living in a zoo cage over life in the Soviet Union (Babichenko, Pisateli, 121). On 27 August Zoshchenko wrote an apologetic letter to Stalin, which was forwarded to Zhdanov, A.A. Kuznetsov, Patolichev, Popov, and Aleksandrov, but he suffered further public condemnation, which seems to have broken his spirit (Vlast’ i khudozhestvennaia, 596–8; “Delo ot otravlenii,” 140–2). On 10 October Zoshchenko wrote to Zhdanov again begging for clemency (“Delo ot otravlenii,” 143–4).

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215 77/3/23, ll.25–31; Laurent, “L’interdiction,” 140–3. Perhaps Zhdanov led the attack here because Lukov was a native of Mariupol’, like Zhdanov; perhaps, too, Zhdanov was considered to be somewhat familiar with this area because of his birth there, although he hardly seems to have visited the Donbas region after 1901. 216 Zhdanov and the rest of the clique may have been horrified that the film failed to mention Stalin (Kuromiya, Freedom, 314). 217 Laurent, “L’interdiction,” 149. 218 Vlast’ i khudozhestvennaia, 584, 566–81; Laurent, “L’interdiction,” 139; Gromov, Stalin, 386–90. 219 An article appeared on 28 January 1949 in Pravda, inspired and maybe even written by Stalin with the assistance of Shepilov, Pospelov, and Malenkov; with special vehemence it attacked “rootless cosmopolitans” among theatre critics (Pravda, 28 January 1949, 3; Hahn, Postwar, 119; Iu.N. Zhukov, “Bor’ba,” 33; Liuks, “Evreiskii,” 5). 220 Malenkov managed to restore some of his credibility in the course of the attack on the writers and journals, although Kostyrchenko exaggerates the consequences of one of Malenkov’s interjections at the Orgbiuro discussion (see Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 288–9). 221 Allilueva, Tol’ko, 363. 222 Iu. A. Zhdanov, interview. Iurii added that in calling the poet a “halfnun, half-whore” (as he did in one of his speeches in Leningrad), his father only threw back at Akhmatova her own words, for in an early work (c. 1913) she had called herself a bludnitsa, a whore or fornicatress. Andrei Zhdanov’s nasty characterization of Akhmatova as a poet, rather than repeating Akhmatova’s own epithet, was a perversion of a description of Akhmatova’s poetry as suggested by the critic Boris Eikhenbaum in 1923 (see Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 285, note). I refer the reader to Michael Ignatieff’s rather more positive appreciation of Zoshchenko and particularly Akhmatova and to Akhmatova’s own poetry (Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin, 150, 157; Akhmatova, Complete Poems). See as well Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 286–7, 287, note, on Isaiah Berlin and Akhmatova; I am not convinced, as Kostyrchenko is, that Zhdanov and Stalin’s anger was especially provoked by the visits of Berlin, then a British diplomat, to the poet in Leningrad, although they cannot have relished such news. 223 In the 10 August issue of Kul’tura i zhizn’ (which was only issued several weeks later), Vishnevskii expressed in a letter to the editor his disgust with Zoshchenko’s short story (Sarnov, Chukovskaia, Sluchai, 69). On the same day mgb minister Abakumov provided A.A. Kuznetsov with a profile of Zoshchenko (“Delo ot otravlenii,” 136). 224 77/1/ 803-title; Resolutions 1929–53, 240; see Central Committee Resolution.

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225 Swayze, Political Control, 39; see also ibid., 36. For the long-lasting effect of the prescriptive formulae of the resolution (which in itself was largely based on what had been said at the First Writers’ Congress in 1934 by Gor’kii and Zhdanov), see for instance the words of Soviet president Podgornyi in the fall of 1974 on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the Malyi Theatre in Moscow (Krechmar, Politika, 81–2). 226 On 14 August he left on the fourteenth for Leningrad to explain the cc resolution (Babichenko, “‘Povest,’” 75; Literaturnyi front, 225; Vlast’ i khudozhestvennaia, 591, 787n24; “K piatidesiatoi,” 4). 77/1/802 contains the stenogram of the same speech or a speech delivered before the Leningrad aktiv that is similar to the speech to the writers of the next day. See, too, 77/1/803–title; Literaturnyi front, 240–52; Volkogonov, Triumf 2: 2, 34–5. For the sequence of the two speeches, see “K piatidesiatoi,” 4. One version found its way into English; see Zhdanov, Essays. I.M. Shirokov was dismissed as Leningrad propaganda secretary, while secretary Kapustin was condemned for the 26 June Leningrad gorkom decision approving a new editorial board of Zvezda that had included Zoshchenko (Literaturnyi front, 225). 227 77/1/802, ll. 15–17; Babichenko maintains that the published text of Zhdanov’s remarks was purged of most of the swearing and crudeness that Zhdanov apparently indulged in (see Babichenko, Pisateli, 132–6). 228 Babichenko, Pisateli, 137–8. 229 Simonov, Glazami, 110–11. 230 Vlast’ i khudozhestvennaia, 787n24. 231 Chukovskii, Dnevnik, 172–6. 232 Istoriia sovetskoi politicheskoi, 508. 233 “Postanovleniia tsk vkp(b),” 71; Hahn, Postwar, 59; Nikolaevskii, Tainye, 215; Laurent, “L’interdiction,” 137–9; Krementsov, Stalinist Science, 144. Dmitrii Volkogonov errs in identifying already at this time an antiSemitic flavour; he appears to confuse the resolution on the repertory with the later attack on theatre critics, which occurred after Zhdanov’s death (see Volkogonov, Lenin, 315). 234 As with the other campaigns, the shortcomings would be addressed again on several occasions in the following years. On 16 December the Sovmin, over the signature of Stalin and the head of Sovmin Affairs department, Ia. Chaadaev, issued the resolution “On the great shortcomings in the organization of the production of cinematic films and the mass-scale facts of squandering and theft of the state’s means in film studios” (“…imeiutsiia,” 107–9). It threatened Minister Bol’shakov with dismissal. 235 Politbiuro 1945–53, 229; Vlast’ i khudozhestvennaia, 606, 787n27. 236 Esakov, “Delo” i: 54–5; Brandenberger, “Short Course,” 275–8, notes

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how Russian chauvinism was emphasized less than before or during the war or after 1946. “Posetiteli” 7: 130. There seems indeed to be a correlation between Stalin’s absence and a somewhat higher incidence of mvd reports sent to Zhdanov as well in the autumn, particularly because their contents are not of the kind to which Zhdanov was usually privy (such as political crime). See for example Kruglov’s report of 5 November to Stalin, Beria, and Zhdanov about the arrest in the train between Moscow and Klin of one B.Iu. Petrovskii, who had in his possession almost nine hundred counterrevolutionary pamphlets calling for terror and diversion; Petrovskii appeared to be mentally deranged, decorating his pamphlet with swastikas (garf, 9401/2/139, ll.313–14). On the same day, Kruglov reported to the same trio that the mvd of the Leningrad Volodarskii and Smol’nyi districts had found six counterrevolutionary pamphlets: in that case a suspect had yet to be found (garf, 9401/2/139, l.319). “‘Po radio,’ ” 84. Akademiia Nauk, 334–5. “Nepomerno,” 85. “Postanovleniia tsk vkp(b),” 53–72. Zubkova, “Zemlia,” 7–8; Shlapentokh, Normal Totalitarian Society, 134. Zubkova, “Zemlia,” 8. See Boterbloem, Life and Death, 133–51. garf, 9401/2/139, ll.353–60. See Boterbloem, Life and Death, 157–65. Zelenin, “‘Zakon,’ ” 122. The threat of a poor harvest is reflected by a series of meetings between four of the highest agricultural chiefs and Stalin, Zhdanov, Beria, and Mikoian on 21, 22, and 25 June 19 (“Posetiteli” 7: 126–7). garf, 9401/2/137, ll.328–31. KPSS 8: 49–54. Typically, the Party committee of Sal’sk was criticized for its poor use of propaganda in the management of agriculture. Zubkova, Poslevoennoe, 73–4; see also Politbiuro 1945–53, 210–25. Hahn, Postwar, 59; KPSS 8: 55–61. Russian: Ob ekonomii v raskhodovanii khleba. It was formally signed by a vacationing Stalin for the government and by Zhdanov for the Party (“Golod i gosudarstvennaia,” 45–7). Stalin seems altogether to have exposed his usual lack of interest in the well-being of the Soviet countryside throughout the crisis. See, too, Zima, Golod, 42. Zima, Golod, 10–11. The postwar difficulties included a labour shortage, the result of the enormous drop in the number of able-bodied males in

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Notes to pages 285–8 the countryside thanks to the war (a drop that may have amounted to 2.5 times; ibid., 12). Ibid., 20: “Procurements were the main criterion in [Stalin’s] appreciation of cadres who were employed in this sphere.” Broekmeyer, Stalin, 271–2. Politbiuro 1945–53, 398. On 9 October a special government Council for Kolkhoz Affairs, chaired by A. Andreev, was created to deal with the emergency (Nikolaevskii, Tainye, 215). On 13 October Kruglov reported to Stalin, Beria, and Zhdanov on the progress of grain deliveries (garf, 9401/2/139, ll.188–93). Zima, Golod, 24–5. Zelenin, “‘Zakon,’ ” 122. Zima, Golod, 26. I have written extensively on Boitsov elsewhere (see Boterbloem, Life and Death). Politbiuro 1945–53, 38; Iu.N. Zhukov, “Bor’ba,” 28; Akademiia Nauk, 329. Politbiuro 1945–53, 424–38; 0n 13 December 1947 and 17 July 1949. Hahn, Postwar, 23; Zhdanov, “29–aia” 2: 5; 77/1/804. He did so with some verve, despite the pedestrian clichés that he uttered. Admiral N.G. Kuznetsov remembered Zhdanov’s public speaking style as “passionate and heated” (Kuznetsov, Nakanune, 239). Zhdanov, “29–aia” 2: 6–12. Ibid., 12–16. Pravda, 7 November 1946, 1–3. Ibid., 8 November 1946, 1. Zima, Golod, 26–7. garf, 9401/2/139, ll.338–49. Ibid., 9401/2/137, ll.361–7. Kruglov also sent around this time a report to Stalin and Beria urging the release of some 175,000 convicts who had been sentenced, according to a Supreme Soviet decree of 26 December 1941 and other related laws, for labour-related and other petty crime (including absenteeism and violations of the passport regime; see ibid., 9401/2/139, ll. 368–9). The mvd sometimes lent these convicts to industrial enterprises to overcome labour shortages, but the inmates remained unproductive, lacking motivation, and the mvd minister argued that they would be much more useful to the Soviet economy if they were released. Zima, Golod, 28. rgani, 2/1/10, l.68. Kruglov to Stalin, Beria, Zhdanov, and A.A. Kuznetsov (garf, 9401/2/139, ll.525–8). Ibid., 9401/2/139, ll.507–8. Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 3: 455, 460.

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276 From 2 December 1946, A.A. Kuznetsov chaired meetings of the Secretariat (see Akademiia Nauk, 336–7); Esakov, “Delo” 1: 55, 62. 277 Foitzik, Sowjetische, 70, 70nn104, 105, 106.

chapter ten 1 Kak lomali NEP 3: 8. 2 Samuels, “On Message,” 56. I agree here with the argument presented by George F. Kennan in Russia and the West (see Kennan, Russia). 3 Getty, Naumov, Road to Terror, 167: “Stalin often used his henchmen to make his points while remaining silent.” 4 Furet, Passing of an Illusion, 347. 5 In total some six million people returning from German pow camps and formerly German-occupied territory were screened (‘filtered’) by the nkvd; more than 500,000 were sent to the Gulag, while additionally many were shot (Ivanova, Labor, 43). 6 More than 2 million pows were counted in the Soviet Union on 1 January 1946 (Ivanova, Labor, 114). On 1 June 1946, the mvd reported to Stalin, Beria, and Molotov on the amount and health of pows in the Soviet Union (garf, 9401/ 2/137, ll.366–77): 1,571,877 belonged to the former German [-led?] army and 466,497 to the former Japanese army, for a total of 2,038,374; only 68% was capable of work. 7 At the end of June 1946, mvd minister S.N. Kruglov sent his regular report to Stalin detailing crime in Moscow in the months of April and May 1946 (garf, 9401/2/137, ll.361–5); he noted that forty-eight burglaries had been registered (and forty-two solved), against forty-nine in February and March; twenty-four murders had been committed (and nineteen solved), eighteen of which were caused by domestic disputes, against twenty-six in February and March; acts of theft of all kinds amounted to 1,069 cases (of which nine hundred were solved) against 1,121 in February and March; 182 burglars, 43 murderers, 1,417 thieves, and 365 hooligans had been arrested; and 4,916 violators of the passport regime had been removed from Moscow, while judicial proceeedings had been instigated against 589 of such violators. 8 “Posetiteli” 7: 130. 9 See Aleksandrov, History. Vladimir Esakov shows that the discussion in the Institute of Philosophy of January 1947 unfolded according to Stalin’s guidelines (Esakov, “Toward a History,” 14). 10 On 6 April 1946, the Stalin Prize’s historical-philosophical and philosophical sciences section, chaired by P.N. Pospelov, decided to honour Aleksandrov’s book (Esakov, “Toward a History,” 9, “K istorii,” 85). In November 1946 Z.I. Beletskii, a professor of philosophy at Moscow State University, had sent a letter to Stalin complaining about Aleksandrov’s

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book (Esakov, “Toward a History,” 11–3). This was not the first time Beletskii complained about Aleksandrov; see Batygin, Deviatko, “Delo akademika,” 203–5. Esakov, “Toward a History,” 13; Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 212–13. Aleksandrov, History, 392. Hahn, Postwar, 68, 74; Esakov, “Toward a History,” 14, 16 Batygin, Deviatko, “Delo akademika,” 210–13. “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 71; “Posetiteli” 8: 5. “Posetiteli” 8: 5. Esakov, “Toward a History,” 11–13; Batygin, Deviatko, “Delo akademika,” 201–5. Esakov, “Toward a History,” 17–18, “K istorii,” 89. Iu.N. Zhukov, “Bor’ba,” 30; 17/3/1064, l.45; Akademiia Nauk, 344–5. 17/3/1064, l.45. Ibid. Zhdanov, “Vystuplenie,” 13. On 4 and 13 February, the seven members of the Inner Circle were joined in Stalin’s office for two hours by the agricultural bosses (led by Andreev) and Patolichev, but such meetings would have little practical consequence for the hungry (“Posetiteli” 8: 6–7). Brooks, Thank You, 210. Esakov, “Delo” 1: 62–3. 77/3/149, ll.1–22; in addition, the deputy health minister was questioned by Zhdanov. See, as well, Krementsov, Stalinist Science, 134–5. In shifting the blame onto Molotov, Zhdanov may have played a wicked game, for he too had earlier encouraged Kliueva and Roskin without determining the limits of their academic freedom. Perhaps Zhdanov attempted to absolve himself from guilt in Stalin’s eyes. See as well Esakov, “Delo” 1: 61–2. On 29 January the Inner Circle had met with Abakumov for ninety minutes in Stalin’s office; Zhdanov and Stalin likely brought up the “security breach” (“Posetiteli” 8: 5). On 18 February, in all likelihood because a publication ban was useless after the manuscript had fallen into American hands, the Orgbiuro allowed the official publication of Biotherapy in the Soviet Union (Krementsov, Stalinist Science, 134; Krementsov, Cure, 99). Istoriia sovetskikh organov, 465. “‘Sovetskie zhenshchiny,’ ” 106 Ivanova, Labor, 18–19. Kliueva and Roskin were present; see Esakov, “Delo” 2: 103; Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 297; Krementsov, Cure, 99, 106–7. Krementsov, Stalinist Science, 136–7; Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 298. “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 72 ; “TsK Vskryl,” 68–9; 17/3/1064, ll.32, 49;

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Esakov, “Delo” 1: 63–4; Kuznetsov, “Krutye” 2: 49n12; Zubkova, Poslevoennoe, 187. 34 “‘TsK Vskryl …,’ ” 68; see as well, Esakov, “Delo” 1: 63–4. 35 Krementsov, Stalinist Science, 137. 36 Ibid., 137–8. On 7 May Zhdanov completed the formulation of the accusations to be levelled against Kliueva and Roskin at the impending Court of Honour, after which the logistics of the organization were left to lower-level apparatchiki (as was the diffusion of its lessons among the groups who were targeted to learn from it), but his supervisory role over the kr Affair continued and on several occasions he involved himself directly (Esakov, “Delo” 1: 64). 37 “‘TsK Vskryl…’,” 68. 38 Krementsov, Cure, 109–10; Getty, Naumov, Road to Terror, 256. And Stalin had taken his cue from earlier trials, beginning with the 1922 Socialist Revolutionary trial. Much of the vocabulary used was recycled from the 1930s, as Esakov notes (Demidov, Esakov, “‘Delo,’” 170nn8, 17). Neither Zhdanov nor Stalin showed much originality in direction or wording of their policies after the war, as we have seen. “‘TsK Vskryl …,’” 68. Pikhoia makes a link with the revival of the tsarist officers’ tradition during World War ii, which he claims exerted an influence on other walks of life, too (Pikhoia, Sovetskii, 43). 39 Here one may draw a parallel with the public humiliation of people during the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, but it is not quite clear how much the Chinese Communists knew about the Soviet Courts of Honour of the 1940s. 40 Pikhoia, Sovetskii, 43. 41 Among others, there was a trial against the military intelligence officer Malinin, who worked for the Committee of Information (Komitet informatsii, or ki), which combined for a while foreign and military intelligence under the auspices of the Foreign Ministry, in the spring or early summer of 1948 (Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 3: 515). 42 Kuznetsov, “Nashi,” 78, 78n4, “Krutye” 1: 39–41, “Krutye” 2: 46–7. 43 In prison, Galler lost his mind and died in 1950. 44 Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 3: 518. A last sign of the Courts of Honour can be found in the June 1949 trial of Food minister V.P. Zotov (1899–1977), his deputy N.I. Pronin (1896–1966), and the chief of the Main Administration of Alcohol Production within the ministry, I.F. Gudzenko (Politbiuro 1945–53, 132–5, 576, 579, 594). Found guilty of gross mismanagement by the Sovmin and cc Court of Honour, the Politburo dismissed both Zotov and Pronin, but they were spared arrest. Gudzenko’s fate is unknown. 45 Krementsov, Stalinist Science, 135; see also Romanovskii, Liki, 117–18; Esakov, “Delo” 1: 62, “Delo” 2: 103. Miterev was also dismissed in 1947.

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46 Adibekov, Kominform, 130. 47 Murashko, “Fevral’skii,” 52. 48 Androsova, “Allied Control,” 55. Perhaps the Soviet authorities only released him officially from his sacc duties in September 1947, after the Supreme Soviet had ratified the Finnish peace treaty in August (77/2/2, l.49; Krosby, “Communist,” 229). Zhdanov returned one last time to Finland, the only foreign country he ever knew well (Rentola, “Soviet,” 231). 49 Korobochkin, “sssr,” 16; A. Werth, Russia, 221. 50 Zhdanov had been appointed to the Politburo commission preparing the Supreme Soviet session on 29 January (Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 3: 463). The book of visitors to Stalin shows that, on 4 February, Andreev, deputy minister of Agriculture I.A. Benediktov (1902–83), Minister of Procurements B.A. Dvinskii (1894–1973), deputy chair of Gosplan S. Demidov, and Minister of Technical Crops N.A. Skvortsov (1899–1974) met with the Inner Circle for about two hours to discuss agricultural shortcomings (“Posetiteli” 8: 6). Another such meeting lasted for three and a half hours on 13 February (“Posetiteli” 7: 7). On 19 February, two days before the cc meeting was to begin, the Andreev commission completed its resolutions (rgani, 2/1/10, l.70). 51 “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 72. 52 rgani, 2/1/10; KPSS 8: 98–145; A. Werth, Russia, 222. 53 77/2/2, l.49; Ivkin, “Vysshie” 1: 133. 54 See, for instance, Boterbloem, Life and Death, 214–5, 232–51. 55 Ibid., 214, 226. 56 Zima, “Tupiki,” 153; Zima, Golod, 99–100. 57 garf, 9401/2/168, ll.411–7. 58 “Demograficheskaia situatsiia,” 28–31. The mortality rate of the Soviet population in 1946 was almost as high as in the war year 1945. It was indicative of the scope of the famine even before the end of 1946. Hunger spread especially across the southern European Russian oblasts. Even in Leningrad oblast’, however, the mortality rate increased by almost thirty per cent in 1946 compared to 1945. 59 On 18 June, Health minister E.I. Smirnov sent a report to Zhdanov on the dire consequences of starvation in the rsfsr in April and May (“Golod i gosudarstvennaia,” 56–7). 60 “Posetiteli” 8: 7; “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 72; 77/2/2, l.49; Ivkin, “Vysshie” 1: 133. 61 Halecki, Poland, 76–7. Gomulka was chief of the Polish Communist Party (ppr), Minc the economic boss of Poland (ibid., 526–7). 62 “Formidable Shadows,” 8; “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 199; Volkov, St Petersburg, 451–2; Vlast’ i khudozhestvennaia, 612–19. 63 “Formidable Shadows,” 8.

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Notes to pages 299–301

491

64 Ibid. 65 Gromov, Stalin, 378 66 It is unclear to me why Brandenberger writes about Zhdanov’s “numerous interjections” (italics mine; see Brandenberger, “Short Course,” 284). 67 Iu.N. Zhukov, “Bor’ba,” 29; rgani, 2/1/10, ll. 1, 187 and 2/1/14, ll.20–30. 68 They hardly gathered, forcing the Politburo (on 15 July) to strike a new commission to prepare a new Party program, with Zhdanov as its chair (17/3/1066, l.13). This Politburo commission was to work out the program on the basis of two kinds of premise: a) a general part, which was to include an estimate of the victory of the October Socialist Revolution from the point of view of the historical development of humanity; an analysis of the current international situation; and an outline of the achievements of Soviet society in all aspects up to the current moments; and b) a practical-political part in which the fundamental tasks were to be formulated of the Party from the point of view of the development of Soviet society towards communism in the next twenty to thirty years. By September 1947, P.N. Fedoseev, M. Mitin, L. Leont’ev, and D.T. Shepilov had produced a draft program which they sent to Zhdanov. In December of the next year, Zhdanov’s secretary assigned it to the archive after Zhdanov’s death (17/125/476, l.111). New Party rules were introduced (by Khrushchev) still in Stalin’s lifetime, at the Nineteenth Party Congress in the fall of 1952. 69 rgani, 2/1/11, ll.2–4. Two full members and three other candidate members were also removed. 70 Resolutions 1929–53, 243–8. 71 Politbiuro 1945–53, 46–8. The dismay of the Moscow bosses with the Ukrainian leadership went back to the summer of 1946, when Zhdanov was in the process of drafting a cc resolution condemning Ukrainian practices in the recruitment and distribution of Party and soviet cadres, a vague formula hinting at lack of adequate leadership in resurrecting the devastated republic; on 26 July 1946 the Orgbiuro addressed the issue. Apparently, Khrushchev and his team failed to improve things sufficiently, the famine (though it afflicted more than Ukraine alone) being one sign of their incompetence (77/3/31, ll.1–13, 21). 72 “Posetiteli” 8: 7–8; “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 72, 144, 185; Kumanev, Riadom, 142. 73 Kumanev, Riadom, 141. Ponomarenko remembered mistakenly that these events had taken place in the early summer of 1947. 74 Kumanev, Riadom, 142–3; Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 357. 75 Soyfer, Lysenko, 166. 76 See, for example, Zubkova, Poslevoennoe, 159. 77 Krementsov, Stalinist Science, 109.

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84 85 86 87 88 89 90

91 92 93 94 95 96

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Notes to pages 301–4

Ibid., 110. Ibid.; “Iz istorii bor’by,” 137–40. “Iz istorii bor’by,” 137–41. Krementsov, Stalinist Science, 145. 77/3/87, ll.1–4. Stassen also met Stalin; see, for instance, Parrish, Narinsky, New Evidence, 9. While on holiday, Andrei Zhdanov’s name had suddenly become common knowledge in the United States. On 9 December 1946, his picture appeared on the cover of Time, accompanied by a lead story about him as possible successor to Stalin (Ra’anan, International, 132; Time, 9 December 1946; “Foreign News”). Its author was John Scott. Meissner places this dinner erroneously in March (Meissner, “Shdanow” 1: 17–18). Krementsov, Stalinist Science, 145. Mastny, The Cold War, 26–7; Krementsov, Stalinist Science, 145. Murashko, “Fevral’skii,” 53; Volokitina, “Vvedenie,” 13; Di B’iadzho, “Sozdanie,” 23; Mastny, The Cold War, 208n94. See, for example, Akademiia Nauk, 343, 345–7. Kopelev, No Jail, 248. Kopelev and Solzhenitsyn have both written about their acquaintance and friendship in the camps (see Kopelev, No Jail; Solzhenitsyn, First Circle). “‘Knizhnaia lavka,’ ” 71–3. Ibid., 78. For more on the organization of Glavlit, see Goriaeva, Politicheskaia tsenzura, 293–4. Simonov, Glazami, 120–7; “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 161; “Posetiteli” 8: 11. I follow Simonov’s memoirs in depicting this meeting. Simonov, Glazami, 127–31. Simonov had handed the stories months earlier to A.N. Kuznetsov, Zhdanov’s personal secretary (ibid., 136–41). Krementsov, Stalinist Science, 141, 335n78; “Posetiteli” 8: 12; Ivanova, “Gulag,” 228, Labor, 58. Meanwhile, Kruglov reported that on 2 June the mvd oso (Special Boards) judged 232 people, of whom 204 were given jail and camp sentences from two to ten years (garf, 9401/2/170, l.148). Twice in the last ten days of May, in Zhdanov’s presence, Stalin received mvd minister Kruglov; the meeting on 21 May undoubtedly addressed security matters as other ranking police officers accompanied Kruglov; that of 22 May, when Kruglov was accompanied by Justice minister Rychkov and state prosecutor Gorshenin, dealt with the new legislation; Rychkov and Gorshenin returned on the twenty-sixth to hammer out the details. All three of them briefly met Stalin in his office on 4 June, presumably for a final edit of the law (“Posetiteli” 8: 14).

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Notes to pages 304–6

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97 Ivanova, “Gulag,” 221; garf, 9401/2/170, ll.185–92. On 14 July Kruglov reported to Stalin that more than two hundred people had been convicted by mvd oso to varying camp sentences; four received twenty-five years, a length of sentence then deemed appropriate because of the 4 June laws (garf, 9401/2/170, l.184). 98 Krementsov, Stalinist Science, 141; Ivanova, “Gulag,” 221–2, Labor, 52; published next day in Pravda, see Esakov, “Delo” 1: 55. The maximum sentence was twenty years. It replaced a law of 15 November 1943 for divulging state secrets that carried a maximum penalty of five years (Ivanova, Labor, 52). Again Rychkov and Gorshenin joined the inner circle in Stalin’s office on this day to help formulate the decree (“Posetiteli” 8: 12). 99 Ivanova, Labor, 52. 100 Krementsov, Stalinist Science, 138; Esakov, “Delo” 1: 65, “Delo” 2: 103. 101 77/3/146, ll.1–40. One version has found its way to his personal archive. It is an elaborate piece of forty typewritten a-4 pages. He also functioned as a witness, sending an affidavit to the judge testifying to previous false statements given by Kliueva and Roskin regarding their behaviour (77/3/150, ll.1–27). See as well Krementsov, Cure, 123. 102 77/3/146, ll.15–16. 103 77/3/153, ll.1–18; Krementsov, Stalinist Science, 145; Esakov, “Delo” 1: 65–9; Romanovskii, Liki, 118–19. 104 Krementsov, Stalinist Science, 139. 105 Esakov, “Delo” 1: 55. On 27 August the Orgburo met to address the issue of the political education of Soviet Communists. Part of the discussion was the effect of the diffusion among the Party membership of the lessons to be learned from the kr Affair (77/3/14, l.20; Esakov, “Delo” 2: 115). On 15 October the Orgburo discussed again the campaign around the kr Affair (Esakov, “Delo” 2: 115). 106 Krementsov, Cure, 136–57. 107 On 30 June in Moscow, Zhdanov met with Finnish Communist party leaders, who were probably surprised to hear him condemn their exaggerated courtesy towards their partners in the Finnish coalition government and demand a more aggressive attitude towards their partners (Volokitina, “Vvedenie,” 15; Adibekov, Kominform, 130–1; Narinsky, “Soviet Union,” 83–4). Zhdanov painted the Marshall Plan as a kind of global American plot into which the Finnish bourgeoisie were tempting the Finns. 108 Krementsov, Stalinist Science, 139. 109 Akademiia Nauk, 348, 353. 110 77/2 preface, 77/1/805; also see Resolutions 1929–53, 227. 111 Zhdanov’s keynote speech report was probably given on 24 June:

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494

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Notes to pages 306–7

Zhdanov, “Vystuplenie,” [Partiinaia Zhizn’]; he had opened the meeting on 16 June; see Esakov, “Toward a History,” 19–23. For an English version, see Zhdanov, Essays. For a proper appreciation of Zhdanov’s role, see also Kojevnikov, “Games,” 145–7. 112 Shteppa, Russian Historians, 220; “Vydaiushchiisia …,” 17. 113 See for instance “Vydaiushchiisia …,” 17. 114 Aspaturian, “Contemporary,” 1,042. Kojevnikov rightly emphasizes the ritualistic quality of this kritika i samokritika; see “Games,” 153. Its importance in a society without class antagonism (the “dictatorship of the proletariat”) and within the Bolshevik party had already been stressed in April 1928 in Stalin’s speech to the Moscow Party aktiv (Kosolapov, Slovo, 63). 115 Miller and Miller, “Andrei,” 45–6. 116 Corbett, “Aleksandrov,” 171. 117 A.A. Zhdanov, “Vystuplenie,” 16–17. 118 Ibid., 14. 119 See Partiinaia Zhizn’. Hahn errs in suggesting that Aleksandrov immediately lost his post as Agitprop chief (Postwar, 68, 76–7). Within a week after his release in September, he was appointed head of the Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences, an odd assignment for someone who had misunderstood the significance of the crucial philosopher upon whose ideas the Soviet Union was based (17/3/1066, l.52; Batygin, Deviatko, “Delo professora,” 229). Aleksandrov would be elected cc member in 1952, a sign of his continued good standing (Mawdsley, White, The Soviet Elite, 102n28). Shepilov argues that Aleksandrov’s demotion was punishment for moral turpitude, which may have played a role but was probably not decisive (“Vospominaniia” 2: 7). The discussion of Aleksandrov’s book and its author’s condemnation presented Mark Mitin and Pavel Iudin with the opportunity to make a full comeback to the forefront of Soviet intellectual life (Esakov, “K istorii,” 260–1, 270–1, in the book version). 120 17/3/1066, l. 17; Esakov, “Toward a History,” 32–3; Akademiia Nauk, 358; “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 72; Krementsov, Stalinist Science, 145. On the previous day Zhdanov, A. Kuznetsov, and Suslov met with Stalin for more than two and a half hours (“Posetiteli” 8: 18). 121 “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 72; 17/3/1066, l.25. This time it was to be a collaborative effort between a group of philosophers and apparat workers including Aleksandrov, Iovchuk, B.M. Kedrov, Mitin, Iudin, and Fedoseev as well as representatives of all the constituent Soviet republics. The book was to be written within the next year and a half. 122 Iu.N. Zhukov, “Bor’ba,” 30. 123 Krementsov, Stalinist Science, 145; Sovetskii faktor, 465–6. 124 Volokitina, “Kholodnaia,” 34.

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Notes to pages 307–9

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125 Sovetskii faktor, 460–2. Zhdanov is not among the visitors to Stalin’s office, however, after 2 July and before 15 July; his absence may have been related to health problems, as there is no record of any official leave having been granted while the international situation was tense (see “Posetiteli” 8: 117–18). 126 Sovetskii faktor, 462–6. Parrish and Narinsky suggest considerable hesitation even among the Soviet bosses, as the prizes offered, American credits, were tempting (see Parrish, Narinsky, New Evidence, 4, 5, 17–27). 127 “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 72; Akademiia Nauk, 353–4. Thus copies of a report on the significance of Marshall’s plans by the economist Varga to Molotov were sent to Stalin, Beria, Zhdanov, Mikoian, Malenkov, and Voznesensky, as well as the diplomats Vyshinskii and Iakov Malik (Parrish, Narinsky, New Evidence, 17n40). In particular, Molotov, Beria, Mikoian, Voznesensky, and Malenkov frequented Stalin’s office in the early days of July, when Zhdanov was absent (see “Posetiteli” 8: 17–18). Zhdanov reappeared on July 15, and, together with most of the above quintet, was almost daily in Stalin’s office from 22 to 29 July (“Posetiteli” 8: 18–19). 128 For a survey of Stalin’s attacks on Molotov, Beria, Malenkov, Mikoian, and Voroshilov, see Politbiuro 1945–53, 195–228, 274–325, 331–41, 349–58. 129 Iu.N. Zhukov, “Bor’ba,” 30; Chubar’ian, “Predislovie,” x. In contrast, Gibianskii, “Dolgii,” xxxix, notes that, despite the likelihood that the Cominform was created in reaction to the Marshall Plan, concrete evidence has yet to be found that this was indeed the case. 130 The founding of the Cominform meant the full rejection of the previous course of permitting distinct “national roads to socialism,” particularly emphasized from 1943 to 1945 (Murashko, “Fevral’skii,” 51–4). Perhaps the foundation of the Cominform was an echo of the radical “leftist” turn of the Comintern between 1927 and 1934. Indeed, the domestic economic policy of the Soviet Union in those years became the model for the satellites from 1947 onward (Volokitina, “Kholodnaia,” 60, 64, note). 131 Gibianskii, “Kak voznik,” 135; Djilas, Conversations (British edition), 100; see previous chapter. 132 Gibianskii, “Dolgii,” xxxvi. 133 Ibid., xxxvi. 134 Adibekov, “Korotko,” xix. 135 Noskova, “Moskovskie,” 104–5, 112; Noskova, Murasmko, “Institut,” 152–7, 163–3; for the nkvd-mvd-mgb involvement, see for instance Ivanova, Labor, 158–9; Volokitina, “Kholodnaia,” 42. Volokitina suggests three main reasons for the creation of the Cominform: the Soviet

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136 137 138 139 140

141 142 143 144

145

146

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Notes to page 309 leaders wanted to prevent and combat heresy within the political leadership of their sister parties; they desired full ideological conformity; and they were keen to gain better information about those parties and the countries in which they functioned. Seton-Watson, East European Revolution, 168–71. Volokitina, “Kholodnaia,” 49–50. Seton-Watson, East European Revolution, 314. Ulam, “Cominform,” 217. Gibianskii, “Kak voznik,” 138–9; Volokitina, “Kholodnaia,” 43. On 22 July Polish Politburo member Jakub Berman had visited Stalin and Zhdanov in the Kremlin to discuss the possibility of setting up an information bureau (Iazhborovskaia, 1948, 12). “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 72. Sovetskii faktor, 467–7. Djilas, Conversations (British edition), 111. On 4 December Zhdanov personally attended to the Yugoslav-Albanian issue. He met Yugoslav envoy V. Popovic, sent by Tito to investigate what the Soviet position had been towards the Albanian leader, Nako Spiru. See Sovetskii faktor, 512; Djilas, Conversations (British edition), 104–5. Spiru had been opposed to any further infraction of Albanian’s sovereignty and had stressed the country’s desire for independence, over which he had come into conflict with his own leaders Enver Hoxha and Koci Xoxe. They had accused Spiru of attempting to create conflicts between Yugoslav and Soviet advisors. Cornered, he had committed suicide in November. “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 72; “Posetiteli” 8: 20. Though it was only on 18 November that Stalin received visitors again in his Kremlin office, he may have been back in Moscow briefly in the last week of September to monitor the Cominform session in Poland and to participate in a meeting of cc apparatus workers that introduced a Court of Honour into their organization (while Zhdanov was in Poland for the Cominform meeting, the Politburo created a Court of Honour in the cc apparatus on 23 September; see“‘TsK Vskryl…,’” 70; 17/3/1066, l.53). Adibekov, Kominform, 26–7; 575/1/3, ll.1–3. Zhdanov also received a report on this day (or soon after) indicating that the attitude of the non-Communists in the Czechoslovak government (particularly of Defence minister Ludvik Svoboda and of President Edvard Benes) in the Czechoslovak government toward the Communists remained dubious (the episode with the Marshall Plan had exacerbated tensions). A week later, Zhdanov forwarded the report to the other Politburo members. The matter fell apparently within Molotov’s competence, as it was Molotov who, in a note of 17 September, instructed

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Notes to pages 310–11

147 148

149 150 151 152 153

154 155

497

Zhdanov and Malenkov to discuss a strategy with the Czech Communists in Poland at the upcoming meeting (Sovetskii faktor, 455). Adibekov, “Kak gotovilos’,” 14–15. See 575/1/3, ll.35–99, especially ll.74–5; Adibekov, “Kak gotovilos’,” 13; Adibekov, Kominform, 27–9; Soveshchaniia Kominforma, 152–71, 297–302. The earlier version contained concrete criticism of the American, Dutch, French, Italian, and Swedish Communist parties that was left out of the speech’s ultimate version in Poland, partially because several of these parties would never join the Cominform. Ultimately, too, the criticism of the Yugoslavs and Czechoslovaks in earlier versions for left-wing errors was lifted from the reports of both Zhdanov and Malenkov (Volokitina, “Kholodnaia,” 46). On 2 September Baranov sent a lengthy report to Zhdanov and Suslov titled “On the international relations of the vkp (b)” (575/1/3, ll.15–32; Sovetskii faktor, 478–85). It noted obliquely that the relationship between the Soviet Communist party and its fraternal parties had become too spotty since the dissolution of the Comintern and argued for regular contacts, for the fraternal parties stood in need of guidance and would benefit from an uninterrupted exchange of information (575/1/3, ll.25–7). Hahn, Postwar, 84–5; Varga, Izmeneniia. Akademiia Nauk, 360–1; Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 572. 17/3/1066, l.48; Akademiia Nauk, 360–1. Ebon, Malenkov, 62–3; Pravda announced the merger on 7 October. Voznesenskii, Voennaia ekonomika; Shepilov, “Vospominaniia” 3: 15; Hahn, Postwar, 88. Shepilov maintains that Stalin himself had corrected the manuscript, which in the light of later events appears incongruous, though not entirely implausible. See Boterbloem, “Death of Andrei Zhdanov.” 17/3/1066, l.219; Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 301. Aleksandrov’s seconds Fedoseev (who was reduced to merely editing Bol’shevik), Egolin, and S.G. Suvorov were dismissed as deputy chiefs of the Agitation-Propaganda directorate. According to Zhukov, Zhdanov thereby became a “general without an army,” even if he remained second cc secretary and chair of Orgbiuro and Secretariat sessions; he links this with Aleksei Kuznetsov’s curatorship over the mgb and the [spurious, kb] addition of Kuznetsov to the “Eight” of the Politburo, who thus became the “Nine” (Iu.N. Zhukov, “Bor’ba,” 30). But both Suslov and Shepilov had worked under Zhdanov previously, and they were as much his “clients” as anyone else’s. Zhukov’s point about Kuznetsov’s addition to the Eight disagrees with Gibianskii’s observation that even in December 1947 it was still the Eight dealing with foreign policy (Gibianskii, “Ot pervogo”, 342, 342n24). I tend to agree with Gibianskii, whose work is

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Notes to page 311

based on more thorough research than Zhukov’s. Among the Eight, by the way, in 1947 and 1948 N.A. Bulganin, who had been minister of Defence since March 1947 and a Politburo candidate member (and full member as of February 1948) is counted. 156 Shepilov, “Vospominaniia” 2: 10–11. Shepilov’s description is presented in his memoirs as if it were the first time the two men met. This cannot be true, as Shepilov earlier had worked under Zhdanov’s auspices on the new Party program. Clearly, Shepilov remembered Zhdanov with some fondness, so that Zhdanov comes across in Shepilov’s recollections as a long-suffering Party leader who had been hindered by a bunch of scheming minions in his honest efforts to create a strong Soviet Union and a better life for all. Shepilov makes himself shine as the new (virtual) head of Agitprop. We should thus treat Shepilov’s statements with caution (see as well the telling account of Shepilov’s duplicity by G.V. Kostyrchenko, who, in 1994, tried to interview Shepilov about his involvement in the anti-Semitic campaign; Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 338–9, 339 note). 157 Shepilov, “Vospominaniia” 2: 11–12. Zhdanov is supposed to have noted to Shepilov on this occasion that Aleksandrov and his “pettybourgeois” assistants had done a poor job of trying to generate more selfless enthusiasm among the Soviet population for the rebuilding and development of the country. About the “Aleksandrov boys,” Shepilov recalled in disparaging manner that they were “prepared to invent and inculcate any concept of the history of the party, the civil war, and socialist construction” (Shepilov, “Vospominaniia” 2: 3–4). Aleksandrov’s deputies P.N. Fedoseev, Kruzhkov (who also headed the Institute of Marx-Engels-Lenin until 1949), A.N. Egolin, Izvestiia and later Pravda editor L.F. Il’ichev, and Kultura i zhizn’ deputy editor P.A. Satiukov were some of these “boys,” who lived the good life, according to Shepilov, and did not aid in “the construction of socialism in the countryside” in the 1930s – or took service in the war; Egolin, Kruzhkov, and Aleksandrov himself fell from grace by their visits to a kind of “high-class” Soviet brothel, according to Shepilov; they were condemned in a closed letter by the cc but avoided prosecution; Fedoseev and Il’ichev, meanwhile, wrote slanderous denunciations about Voznesensky to the Politburo around this time – 1947, it seems (Shepilov, “Vospominaniia” 2: 4–7; see also Vaksberg, Stalin, 135, note). Aleksandrov gradually became an alcoholic and died of cirrhosis of the liver (Shepilov, “Vospominaniia” 2: 7). Kruzhkov disappears from the list of visitors to Stalin’s office after June 1947 (see “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 100). In 1948 he was nevertheless one of the people who organized Zhdanov’s personal archive and was later academic supervisor of Kurbatova’s thesis (Kurbatova, “A.A. Zhdanov”).

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Notes to pages 311–13

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158 “‘TsK Vskryl …,’ ” 70; 17/3/1066, l.53; Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 301–2; Akademiia Nauk, 347, 363. 159 “‘TsK Vskryl …,’ ” 70; Subkowa, “Kaderpolitik,” 204–5. Stalin himself may have been in attendance. 160 “‘TsK Vskryl …,’ ” 75. 161 This unmasked spy was one Suchkov, head of the publishing house of foreign literature and previously substitute head of the propaganda directorate, who was said to have wormed his way into the higher echelons; Lev Kopelev (by then back in jail) was mentioned as another subversive who had benefited from Aleksandrov’s oversight (“‘TsK Vskryl …,’ ” 76–8; Subkowa, “Kaderpolitik,” 204–5). 162 “‘TsK Vskryl …,’ ” 71–2. 163 Ibid., 74. 164 Politbiuro 1945–53, 51; Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 303; Khlevniuk, “Stalin,” 537–8; see Deriabin, Inside Stalin’s Kremlin, 33. In addition to those security organs and Military Intelligence, for a while a Committee of Information operated under Molotov’s supervision at mid. It received information from Military Intelligence and the mgb’s foreign intelligence departments. mgb and mvd osobye papki (special files) deposited at garf are always addressed to Stalin and seldom to Aleksei Kuznetsov (even during the latter’s brief spell as their curator). 165 “‘TsK Vskryl …,’ ” 73, 79n8. 166 Ibid., 79n8. This was not quite the last time that the cc apparatus Court of Honour gathered (compare Politbiuro 1945–53, 132–5, to Subkowa, “Kaderpolitik,” 205). 167 Adibekov, Kominform, 36; Adibekov, “Kak gotovilos’,” 19. This is clear evidence that certain issues were decided long before they were formalized as an official Politburo decree. 168 Hahn, Postwar, 98; Iu.N. Zhukov, “Bor’ba,” 30; Adibekov, Kominform, 48–55. Adibekov suggests a departure on 21 September, but Zhdanov chaired on the twenty-second a session of the cc Secretariat (Adibekov, Kominform, 36; Adibekov, “Kak gotovilos’,” 19; Akademiia Nauk, 347, 363). 169 Soveshchaniia Kominforma, 152–71, 297–302, 315; Gibianskii, “Kak voznik,” 146; Adibekov, Kominform, 58; also see the explanation of different versions of speech as provided by Adibekov, “Korotko,” xv–xvi. See also Cominform: Minutes. For some older commentary, see for instance A. Werth, Russia: Postwar, 296–303. 170 Nation, Black Earth, 174. 171 Soveshchaniia Kominforma provides the entire text. See also Borkenau, Der europäische Kommunismus, 493, or Furet, Passing of an Illusion, 402–3. 172 Soveshchaniia Kominforma, 152–71. 173 Parrish, Narinsky, New Evidence, 40.

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174 “Posetiteli” 8: 20–8. The Hungarians and Yugoslavs each visited him twice. 175 Soveshchaniia Kominforma, 226–9. Late in the evening of that day, he chaired a short meeting of a committee polishing the resolutions on the international situation (ibid., 251–2). On the next day, from 11:00 am to 1:15 pm, Zhdanov chaired another session of this committee (ibid., 253–9). 176 Ibid., 233–8. 177 His changes were rather cosmetic; see Adibekov, “Korotko,” xvi; for the declaration, Soveshchaniia Kominforma, 242–4. 178 Adibekov, Kominform, 75; Gibianskii, “Kak voznik,” 131. 179 17/3/1066, l.59. Iudin was released from a short-lived editorship of the trade-union newspaper Trud. It was only on 16 October that the Politburo officially resolved to establish and support For a Lasting Peace (Adibekov, “Korotko,” xix; Gibianskii, “Ot pervogo,” 339). 180 Gibianskii, “Ot pervogo,” 339. 181 17/3/1068, l.1. The members who discussed this matter with Iudin and Stalin in Stalin’s Kremlin office were Beria, Malenkov, Mikoian, Zhdanov, Voznesensky, and, at the tail end, Bulganin (Molotov was in London for the foreign ministers’ conference), constituting the members of the Politburo foreign policy committee, “the Eight” (Gibianskii, “Ot pervogo,” 342, 342n24). On 18 January 1948, the first meeting took place in Belgrade of the permanent staff of For a Lasting Peace (ibid., 343). 182 Pravda, 22 October 1947, 2–3. From 25 November to 15 December a last conference of Allied foreign ministers went through the motions in London (Meissner, “Shdanow” 2: 99). 183 17/3/1066, l.69. 184 Politbiuro 1945–53, 269, note. 185 Subkowa, “Kaderpolitik,” 199; Khlevniuk, “Stalin,” 537–8; Politbiuro 1945–53, 51. By 15 March a Politburo decree reprimanded both Abakumov and Kuznetsov for their unauthorized behaviour (Khlevniuk, “Stalin,” 538). 186 Mikoian, Tak, 564. 187 KPSS 8: 152–6. On 25 November the cc criticized in an ukaz (decree) the shortcomings of the Stalingrad Party organization’s work with agitators. 188 Pravda, 7 November 1947, 3. 189 Politbiuro 1945–53, 269, note. In Helsinki, Zhdanov met with the leaders of the left-wing Finnish parliamentary factions, where he emphasized the importance of the continuation of their coalition (Androsova, “Allied Control,” 60–1). Despite the Finns’ provisional exclusion from the Cominform, Soviet contacts with the Finnish cp

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remained frequent and intensive and were part of Zhdanov’s domain. On 2 January 1948, in the cc buildings in Moscow, Zhdanov met Hertta Kuusinen and Yrjö Leino, members of the Finnish Communist party’s Politburo, after which he visited Stalin (“Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 72; Adibekov, Kominform, 129, 131; Rentola, “Soviet,” 235). When on 16 February Suslov’s foreign department forwarded to the Politburo “Seven” dealing with foreign policy a Finnish request for Cominform membership, the request was shelved (Rentola, “Soviet,” 237). Perhaps it was the translation in practical terms of Molotov’s remark to Djilas in late January 1948 that Finland was a “peanut.” (Djilas, Conversations (British edition), 120. On 7 November the parade marching down Red Square was greeted by Malenkov, Beria, and Molotov. Their photo did make it onto Pravda’s front page the next day (Pravda, 8 November 1947, 1). Ibid., 22 December 1947, 1–2; Smith, Moscow Mission, 59–61; Hahn, Postwar, 103. Smith recalled erroneously that this had occurred in November. In early 1947 Zhdanov had been listed fourth in the national press for rsfsr soviet elections (Smith, Moscow Mission, 59–60). Testifying to Zhdanov’s importance, he met Stalin in his office seven out of ten days in late December 1947 (“Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 72; “Posetiteli” 8: 23–5). 17/3/1066, l.77; Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 3: 495; Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 304, 638. Kostyrchenko suggests that Zhdanov’s health began to fail him seriously during the autumn of 1947, and that the treatment he now underwent at Sochi proved unsuccessful (Kostyrchenko, Out of the Red Shadows, 265). Somewhere in the autumn at an official dinner, he told Ambassador Smith that he was on a diet, forbidden to eat copious meals or drink alcoholic beverages (Smith, Moscow Mission, 65). One of the dinners Zhdanov attended that fall at Stalin’s house in Sochi on the Black Sea left a vivid impression on the memory of Stalin’s daughter; an irritated Stalin compared the visibly suffering Zhdanov, who was largely silent throughout the meal, to Christ (Allilueva, Tol’ko, 333). Politbiuro 1945–53, 398; “Posetiteli” 8: 21; “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 72; 7/3/1066, l.77. 17/3/1067. From late November, the financial and trade bosses I.I. Golev, A.G. Zverev (1900–69), and A.V. Liubimov (1898–1966) often joined the Inner Circle to discuss currency reform and the abolition of ration cards (“Posetiteli” 8: 20–3). Politbiuro 1945–53, 425; 17/3/1067, l.2; Zubkova, Obshchestvo, 47; Rubtsov, Alter ego, 272–3; KPSS 8: 157–64; “Posetiteli” 8: 22–3; “I. Stalin: ‘Mozhem,’ ” 123–6. Furthermore, a Politburo commission was set up with Zhdanov as chair to prepare a second edition of the Great Soviet

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Notes to pages 316–17 Encyclopedia, since the first edition “contained too many [politically embarassing] errors” (17/3/1067, l.4). garf, 9401/2/200, ll.102–6. Admiral, 271–2. One of the decisions in which he was involved was the recall of Kaganovich to Moscow and the reappointment of Khrushchev as first secretary of Ukraine on 15 December (Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 361). Admiral, 271. On 5 April 1948, following a blueprint on this coauthored by Zhdanov and Suslov on Stalin’s orders, the Politburo resolved to organize a Court of Honour in the Central Committee and Council of Ministers. However, this highest of the Courts of Honour would never be in session (“‘TsK Vskryl …,’ ” 80–1; 17/3/1070, l.9; rgani, 2/1/19, l.3). Subkowa, “Kaderpolitik,” 206. For instance, in mid-January 1948 the mvd Special Boards sentenced 221 suspects to varying camp sentences; see garf, 9401/2/199, point 15. Hundreds continued to be sentenced by the Special Boards throughout the year, as evidenced by Kruglov’s report of 8 May to Stalin informing him that on 7 May the mvd oso sentenced 136 accused and released fourteen suspects (ibid., 9401/2/200, l.15), while on 21 May the mvd Special Boards sentenced 121 people to varying camp sentences (ibid., 9401/2/200, l.107). Ibid., 9401/2/199, ll.213–7; Ivanova, Labor, 53. Ivanova likely means the report of 27 January authored by Abakumov and Kruglov when she suggests that Stalin received a report by Kruglov on these camps on 21 January. Iu.N. Zhukov, “Bor’ba,” 32; 17/3/1069, l.11. On the same day, the Politburo set up the commission that organized the special-regime labour camps. On 7 May a Politburo commission chaired by Malenkov and including Zhdanov was formed to widen beyond Ukraine the decree on shirkers from collective farms (Ibid., 32; see below). cc resolutions on the state of Party-political work in the coal-mines of the Donbass and Kuzbass issued around this time stressed agitprop (KPSS 8: 165–178). Djilas, Conversations (British edition), 37. One of mvd minister Kruglov’s last reports of which Zhdanov is a coaddressee, together with Stalin, Molotov, Beria, Malenkov, and Voznesensky, dated 28 May, listed the results of the struggle with the pilfering of socialist property and speculation in the first quarter of 1948. Some 126,010 people had seen criminal proceedings instituted against them for this type of crime in the first quarter, against 122,573 during the last quarter of 1947 (garf, 9401/2/200, ll.119–38). See as well Boterbloem, Life and Death, 159–65.

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208 The emphasis on the leading role of the Russians in the Soviet Union had already been reiterated by Stalin at his toast of 24 May 1945 (see Documentary History, 2: 232). 209 Martin, Affirmative Action Empire, 431. 210 It is true that in early 1949 theatre critics were under attack, but the primary motive behind that campaign seems anti-Semitic rather than aesthetic, although one can maintain that in all campaigns Russian nationalism played its role. The exception is plastic arts, where the Party line of socialist realism on behalf of Stalin was laid down by the painter A.M. Gerasimov, the first president of the Academy of Arts of the ussr (XX s’ezd, 348–9; see also Baudin, Le réalisme). 211 Maksimenkov, “Partiia,” 6; Vlast’ i khudozhestvennaia, 788n37. From there, they went on to Stalin’s Kremlin office, apparently (“Posetiteli” 8: 25). This late-night meeting was partially staged to meet Savonenkov, a Soviet diplomat stationed in Finland, but before his arrival the opera was discussed. On 30 October the Politburo had already resolved to call the first Unionwide Congress of Soviet composers in February of the next year (17/3/1066, l.70). The Agitprop Directorate was to supervise the theses of the reports that were to be presented at the Congress. The Great Friendship opened in early November at the Bol’shoi, which premiere most Politburo members, except Stalin and Zhdanov, attended. The opera provided a focal point for the discussions at the upcoming Congress (Shepilov, “Vospominaniia” 2: 16). Aleksandrov may earlier have been working on a report to Zhdanov warning about the questionable content of the opera’s libretto, but his report only reached Zhdanov on 9 January 1948, by way of Aleksandrov’s (virtual) successor Shepilov, when the situation within the Soviet composers’ world suddenly became topical (I primknuvshii, 272; Vlast’ i khudozhestvennaia, 627–8). Maksimenkov shows how the process that ultimately created the Composers’ Union in 1948 had already begun in April 1932 (Maksimenkov, Sumbur, 29–30). 212 “Ob opere,” 2; Tillett, The Great Friendship, 496–7. Muradeli referred with his opera to the “reigning metaphor for describing the multiethnic Soviet state” as proposed by Stalin in the mid-1930s (see Martin, Affirmative Action Empire, 440–1). 213 “Ob opere,” 2–4. 214 77/1/986; Vlast’ i khudozhestvennaia, 788n37; Maksimenkov, “Partiia,” 7–8; “Vydaiushchiisia …,” 18; Shepilov, “Vospominaniia” 2: 19–20; see also Robinson, Sergei Prokofiev, 471–3. For an English version of one of his speeches, see A. Zhdanov, Essays. 215 77/1/987; Vlast’ i khudozhestvennaia, 788n37; Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 305. Popov, Suslov, A.A. Kuznetsov, and Shepilov were present. 216 Shostakovich caustically remembered Zhdanov explaining that “the

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Notes to pages 318–20 goal of music was to give pleasure, while our music was crude and vulgar, and listening to it undoubtedly destroyed the psychological and physical balance of a man, for example a man like Zhdanov” (Volkov, Testimony, 146). 17/3/1069, l.3. Ibid. Ibid. 77/3/142, l.2. Some of the intense work that went into preparing this resolution is obvious from Shepilov’s recollections (“Vospominaniia” 2: 15; also see the hagiographical I primknuvshii, 140–1). Many years later, Shepilov recalled how he and his assistants prepared a rather harmless initial draft, which unlike the final version never included abusive terms like “anti-people,” nor attacks ad hominem (I primknuvshii, 144–5). Shepilov claims that Stalin made Zhdanov and the latter’s secretary, A.N. Kuznetsov, transform the text into a vicious diatribe (Shepilov, “Vospominaniia” 2: 16). Shepilov argues that, as a rule, any nastiness in the condemnation of certain writers, composers, or film directors, was not Zhdanov’s doing, but Stalin’s. Elsewhere, however, Shepilov remembered differently: Zhdanov found the initial draft too “academic” and together with his own aides wrote a very different report upon which the resolutions regarding the opera were based (I primknuvshii, 272). 17/3/1069, l.12; the text of the resolution on Muradeli’s opera is to be found in “Ob opere,” 1–5; Maksimenkov, “Partiia” 2: 10. 77/3/142, ll.4–8; Resolutions 1929–53, 248–51. Pravda, 11 February 1948, 1. The resolution was formally rescinded in the Thaw (see Tillett, The Great Friendship, 315, 315n17). In March 1948 Artistic Affairs Committee chair Polikarp Lebedev, a former lathe operator from Leningrad, tried to gain permission to organize a Court of Honour primarily against Jewish-Soviet music critics; it is unclear whether cc secretaries Zhdanov, A.A. Kuznetsov, and Suslov gave him the green light (see “Dokumenty proshlogo” 1). Robinson, Sergei Prokofiev, 477. Ibid., 474–5. garf, 9401/2/199, l.7 and 9401/2/170, ll.406–7. A report of 6 September by Kruglov and Vyshinskii about the presence of such criminals had been submitted to Stalin. garf, 9401/2/199, ll.33–7. This linkage has been particularly emphasized by the late François Furet (see for instance, Furet, Passing of an Illusion, 403). Georgii Zhukov, 22–3, 591–3, 644n14; Pikhoia, Sovetskii, 47–56. Admiral, 272–3, 277. From 31 January to 2 February the Military

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Collegium of the Supreme Court tried the four admirals (Kuznetsov, “Krutye” 2: 49n15; Admiral, 274–5). As he was wont to do in cases affecting such prominent individuals, Stalin personally ordered the sentences (from four to ten years) for the three subordinates (Admiral, 272). The somewhat elderly Galler lost his mind after a few months of solitary confinement and died in 1950; the other three survived (ibid., 276–7). garf, 9401/2/199, l.53. Despite its sketchy use of sources, Vaksberg’s outline of the plot to murder Mikhoels is convincing (see Vaksberg, Stalin, 159–82; see Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 389). Already in 1946, the Hungarian Communists had been faulted for showing too independent a spirit, when Suslov sent Zhdanov a negative report regarding the suggestion by Party leader Rakosi to have a meeting of Communist parties of the Danube valley with representatives of the Soviet Communist party present (Gibianskii, “Kak voznik,” 137–8). One key objection then was that Hungary had been “on the wrong side” in World War ii. Zhdanov attached his rejection to Rakosi’s proposal, after which the note was soon sent around to Malenkov, Beria, Mikoian, and Stalin who agreed with the rejection of the idea. Halecki, Poland, 522. In contrast, his colleagues in the Polish Politburo, Minc and Berman, had spent the war in the Soviet Union (see Gross, Neighbors, 243n3). Iazhborovskaia, 1948, 18. “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 72; “Posetiteli” 8: 26. On 16 March Zhdanov received a letter from Gomulka urging the necessity of unifying the pps (Social-Democrats) and ppr (Communists) in the near future (Sovetskii faktor, 565–7). He forwarded the letter to Stalin, who agreed to an imminent merger. By the late summer, when Zhdanov was already out of commission, Gomulka’s political career was in jeopardy when he was branded as a Polish nationalist (Sovetskii faktor, 650n2). From 12 to 16 August, Gomulka was attacked in Poland for his errors, and was replaced by Boleslaw Bierut, who visited Stalin in Moscow on 15 August for instructions (Iazhborovskaia, 1948, 33–4). Gomulka was eventually jailed but made a comeback after Stalin’s death. “Posetiteli” 8: 26. “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 72; Djilas, Conversations (British edition), 104–114; Gibianskii, “Ot pervogo,” 359; Conquest, Power, 92; “Posetiteli” 8: 26. Foitzik mistakenly claims that this meeting took place on 8 January; see Sowjetische, 271, 271n292. Foitzik notes that Stalin by this point expressed his resignation about the existence of “Two Germanies”; any pretence at accommodating the nationalistic spirit of the

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Notes to pages 321–3 people’s democracies had lost its purpose now that the lines had been drawn in the sand between the two camps and the West considered the countries behind the Iron Curtain lost to full-scale Soviet dominance. Djilas, Conversations (British edition), 115. Ibid., 154–5. Gibianskii, “Ot pervogo,” 359. The criticism was muffled, as it only appeared in the form of a brief (unsigned) reply to supposed readers’ queries on page four (Pravda, 28 January 1948, 4); Hahn, Postwar, 99; Conquest, Power, 92. Gibianskii, “Ot pervogo,” 359. Soyfer, Lysenko, 166; Krementsov, Stalinist Science, 146. In October in Literaturnaia Gazeta, Lysenko himself attacked Leningrad biologist P.M. Zhukovskii (Hahn, Postwar, 80–1). Was this a sign of its “leftist” editorial line as suggested by Stalin in May 1947? Krementsov, Stalinist Science, 153. When Zhdanov and Iudin had visited Sochi in the fall of 1947, Zhdanov’s sister Anna and his son had met with Stalin as well, who suggested to Iurii that he should take over the science department within the Agitprop Directorate (Iu.A. Zhdanov, “Vo mgle,” 69–71; Levina, Vavilov, 103; Krementsov, Stalinist Science, 337n129). Iurii Zhdanov replaced S.G. Suvorov. Esakov mistakenly places this appointment in early 1948; see Akademiia Nauk, 17. One must surmise that Stalin thus expressed his love for Zhdanov, for the appointment of Iurii seems utter folly, not just from our perspective but then as well to those who were near to Stalin, as Mikoian recalls (Mikoian, Tak, 363). Levina, Vavilov, 103–4. Krementsov, Stalinist Science, 152–3. Levina, Vavilov, 104; “Iz istorii bor’by” 3: 109; Shepilov, “Vospominaniia” 3: 7. “Iz istorii bor’by” 3: 109–10. Thus he discussed in a cc Secretariat meeting a report of the Chkalov obkom on 11 February and the situation of the Stalino [Donetsk] obkom on 17 February (Politbiuro 1945–53, 257–61; 77/3/21, ll.20–7). Shepilov, “Vospominaniia” 2: 14. Ibid., 14–15. Still, as noted earlier, Iurii Zhdanov said that his father at home sometimes lamented his preoccupation with ideological matters and expressed a desire to involve himself in socialist (re)construction as in the good old days in Nizhnii (Iu.A. Zhdanov, interview). Although again the citation seems more Shepilov’s Zhdanov than the Zhdanov of history, his testimony about the absolute dedication of Zhdanov to those diverse tasks that were assigned to him rings true. Volkogonov, Triumf 2: 2, 97; Conquest, Power, 92; Djilas, Conversations

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(British edition), 134–44; Gibianskii, “Ot pervogo,” 359–60; “Posetiteli” 8: 27. 256 The only point made by Zhdanov that was recorded was his reiteration of Soviet dismay with the failure by the Yugoslavs and Bulgarians to forewarn them about the two issues (“Report of Milovan Djilas,” 130). 257 On 13 February Zhdanov, Suslov, and Baranov met with the leaders of the Austrian Communist Party in Moscow (Pons, “Sumerki,” 382). 258 Murashko, “Fevral’skii,” 59–60; Korobochkin, “ussr,” 169; see also Fevral’ 1948. A letter from Stalin to President Paasikivi of 22 February heightened the pressure exerted upon Finland (Krosby, “Communist,” 231–2, 235; Adibekov, Kominform, 130–2; Rentola, “Soviet,” 239). The bullying was not remembered fondly by most of the Finnish electorate, for the Finnish parliamentary elections on 1 July resulted in severe losses for the Communists (Krosby, “Communist,” 243). The importance of developments in Prague in February 1948 has sometimes been exaggerated. In one of his more lucid observations, Borkenau notes: “In the entire world the general political significance of the Prague state strike was greatly exaggerated. Basically, the communists had, after all, just conquered what they already owned. They could have erected their formal rule in Prague before and after February 1948 at any convenient moment. In global policy and in international economic policy, they could count on Czechoslovakia also without the general strike – of which the fact that a simple order by Stalin was sufficient to have the republic step back from the Marshall Plan is proof. The great noise about an act that basically only revealed the futility of the Czech democratic leaders before the world was characteristic for the Zhdanovshchina; it was emblematic for this period that the only real, [if] really second-rate, success of communist policy in Europe was achieved [in a place], where in truth the communists [had been] the real masters already for a long while” (Borkenau, Der europäische Kommunismus, 507). 259 rgani, 2/1/19, l.3. 260 “Posetiteli” 8: 28–9. 261 Gibianskii, “Ot pervogo,” 360–1. Around this time, Zhdanov received the Soviet diplomat Chuvakhin, who had been stationed in Tirana and was on leave in Moscow (Chuvakhin, “S diplomaticheskoi,” 123). Zhdanov expressed his worry about the developments in Albania and the relations between the Yugoslav and Albanian leadership. The Yugoslavs were criticized for causing the trouble that had led to the problems, such as the suicide of Spiru. Chuvakhin was told to return as soon as possible to Tirana to monitor the situation. 262 Gibianskii, “Ot pervogo,” 361; “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 72. The pro-

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Notes to pages 324–6 Soviet Yugoslav minister of Finances, Zujovic, informed Soviet ambassador Lavrent’ev, who cabled Moscow about the defiant mood. A Yugoslav Party cc plenum on 12 and 13 April excluded Zujovic from its cc. He was arrested on a charge of treasonous activities on 7 May (Gibianskii, “Ot pervogo,” 367). “Posetiteli” 8: 28; Gibianskii, “Ot pervogo,” 362–3. “Posetiteli” 8: 30. Hahn, Postwar, 99; Gibianskii, “Ot pervogo,” 363–4. “Posetiteli” 8: 30. Oddly, Zhdanov and the rest of the inner circle only joined Stalin when the Bulgarians left. Iazhborovskaia, 1948, 20. Zhdanov spoke around this time about the theoretical misconceptions of the Yugoslav leadership at a meeting of the cc apparatus preparing a congress of Slavist scholars (“Zapis’ besedy A.A. Zhdanova,” 5; Pons, “Sumerki,” 375, 383; Volokitina, “Kholodnaia,” 72). “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 72; “Posetiteli” 8: 30–1. Iazhborovskaia, 1948, 20–3. Iu.A. Zhdanov, “Vo mgle,” 66. 17/1/620, l.1; Iu.A. Zhdanov, “Vo mgle,” 74. 17/1/620; Joravsky, Lysenko, 135. Iu.A. Zhdanov, “Vo mgle,” 86. I primknuvshii, 277; Shepilov, “Vospominaniia” 3: 5, 9. “Iz istorii bor’by” 3: 109; see above. Ibid., 111; Levina, Vavilov, 104. Perhaps Stalin was informed early on by Malenkov that a conflict between Iurii Zhdanov and Lysenko had erupted, but he did not act upon that news. Stalin’s book of visitors shows that, on 17 and 19 April, Shepilov visited him in his Kremlin office, but since other key players in the affair were not registered in the log and Shepilov was accompanied by Il’ichev and Lebedev on both days (and by Fadeev as well on the nineteenth), it seems improbable that the matter was discussed at all or, indeed, at any great length (“Posetiteli” 8: 32). According to Shepilov, the day after the lecture, Malenkov called him on the telephone and demanded the text of Iurii’s speech from him (Shepilov, “Vospominaniia” 3: 9). Shepilov remembers that he replied that the lecture had to be translated from stenogramme, which would take some time, upon which Malenkov demanded that he speed matters up. Seeking advice, Shepilov then claims to have met with Zhdanov who surmised that Stalin was behind Malenkov’s urgent request. Zhdanov expressed dismay that he had not been given a copy of the lecture before its delivery, for, Shepilov recalls, he thought his son too much of a “romantic,” which could create difficulties. Zhdanov is then said to have noted calmly how Shepilov himself had been guilty of political naivety in the matter. But Shepilov’s story is

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unreliable, especially in its presentation of the sequence of events. He claims that things came to a head just days after the lecture. Considering the usual delay caused by bureaucratic hurdles that had to be cleared before matters reached Stalin (and he often pondered a while on how to proceed), this is highly unlikely. “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 72. Gibianskii, “Ot pervogo,” 366n145. Hahn, Postwar, 103; Pravda, 2 May 1948, 1. “Posetiteli” 8: 33; “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 72; Gibianskii, “Ot pervogo,” 366n145. Gibianskii, “Ot pervogo,” 366; Gibianskii, “Ot pervogo,” 366n145. Franz Borkenau was one of the first in 1952 in his book on European communism (Borkenau, Der europäische Kommunismus, 509–14); recently, the theory was recycled by Vojtech Mastny (see for example Mastny, Cold War, 54). To be fair to Mastny, he does state soon after that “regardless of how much he [Stalin] allowed those around him to differ and bicker about strategies and priorities while he was still undecided, once he made up his mind the resulting policy was none other than his own,” thus indicating Stalin’s crucial role (Mastny, Cold War, 54–5). Molotov recalled working together with Zhdanov on one of the drafts regarding the Yugoslavs’ misbehaviour (Chuev, Molotov, 168). Hahn, Postwar, 99; Gibianskii, “Ot pervogo,” 370. Adibekov, Kominform, 102–3; Gibianskii, “Ot pervogo,” 370. “Iz istorii bor’by” 8: 111 Although the visitors’ book to Stalin’s Kremlin office does not indicate a visit by Lysenko in Zhdanov’s presence there, a meeting between Stalin, Lysenko, and Zhdanov appears to have taken place around this time, judging from Zhdanov’s notebooks, probably in the Central Committee building or at Stalin’s dacha (“Iz istorii bor’by” 3: 111; “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 111). “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 72, 193; “Posetiteli” 8: 35. Iurii’s name is omitted in the alphabetical overview recently published, but see “Posetiteli” 8: 35. The meeting was also attended by Kaftanov (Higher Education minister), V.A. Malyshev (1902–57), vice-premier and chair of the Sovmin Committee on the introduction of advanced technology in the economy, Academician and chemist A.N. Nesmeianov (1899–1980), and K.F. Zhigach, a research and higher-education apparatchik. Shepilov, “Vospominaniia” 3: 9–10; I primknuvshii, 119–20, 277, 280, 281. Shepilov writes that Suslov’s defence was that other things (foreign affairs?) had preoccupied him, preventing him from reading Iurii’s lecture, which was deemed acceptable and he avoided retribution.

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Notes to pages 327–8 Although, as already noted, Shepilov’s account is often unreliable, other sources corroborate his testimony sufficiently to accept the gist of his depiction of the proceedings. But see also Iu.A. Zhdanov, “Vo mgle,” 86, who remembers a less-heroic performance by his supervisor (see as well, Soyfer, Lysenko, 180–1, 335n60). In his interview with me, Iurii Zhdanov showed a great dislike for Shepilov. Krementsov and Kojevnikov place this meeting in June, which is mistaken; there were two separate meetings, one with and one without Iurii Zhdanov, on 28 and 31 May (see Krementsov, Stalinist Science, 166; Kojevnikov, “Games,” 158–9). If we accept Shepilov’s version, the remark (likely uttered first by Stalin) that “Zhdanov oshibsia” (Zhdanov erred) recorded in one of the last notebooks Zhdanov kept was probably either written at exactly this meeting or slightly before, in preparation for it (77/3/180, l.21). It could have been written on the thirty-first, though, when Zhdanov listened to the conclusions of the Malenkov commission. Zhdanov was referring either to himself or to his son Iurii in his note. See as well “Iz istorii bor’by” 3: 111–12. Already on 31 May, Lysenko sent a letter to Malenkov taking apart Iurii’s lecture (17/125/620, l.104). Pikhoia, Sovetskii, 63; “Posetiteli” 8: 36; Politbiuro 1945–53, 270n1; Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 307–8. Malyshev, Kaftanov, Nesmeianov, and Zhigach again met with the Inner Circle (including Andrei Zhdanov) in Stalin’s office that day. Krementsov, Stalinist Science, 163, 168; “Iz istorii bor’by” 3: 112, 119–21; Levina, Vavilov, 105. Andrei Zhdanov continued to meet daily with Stalin (“Posetiteli” 8: 36–7; “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 72). “Neizvestnaia …,” 31; Iu.N. Zhukov, “Bor’ba,” 32. On 7 May a Politburo committee was formed, chaired by Malenkov and including Zhdanov, to extend the decree on shirkers from collective farms beyond Ukraine (Iu.N. Zhukov, “Bor’ba,” 32). On 26 May Malenkov, Zhdanov, Suslov, and Kruglov sent a draft of the Supreme Soviet decree “On the Exile to Remote Regions of the ussr of Persons Maliciously Shirking from Labour in Agriculture and Leading an Antisocial, Parasitic Way of Life” to Stalin for inspection (“Neizvestnaia …,” 36). On June 2, the Politburo committee’s work was issued as a Supreme Soviet decree (see Boterbloem, Life and Death, 363n40). Report of 27 June; see garf, 9401/2/200, ll.282–9. Adibekov, Kominform, 103; Gibianskii, “Ot pervogo,” 372; Pons, “Sumerki,” 384–5. Gibianskii, “Ot pervogo,” 372. Ibid., 373n180; “Posetiteli” 8: 37–8. He also met, with Stalin, Molotov,

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301 302 303 304 305 306 307

308 309

310 311 312 313

314 315 316 317 318 319

320

511

and Suslov, the Greek Communist leader Zakhariadis on 14 and 16 June (“Posetiteli” 8: 38). Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 3: 517; Adibekov, Kominform, 103; Gibianskii, “Ot pervogo,” 372–3. Adibekov, Kominform, 104; Soveshchaniia Kominforma, 482. Pons, “Sumerki,” 391. Soveshchaniia Kominforma, 399–401. 77/3/106, ll.6–7. Kostov himself was soon to be shot as a “Titoist.” 77/3/106, ll.17–19; Togliatti’s statement is on l.18. Foitzik, Sowjetische, 271. On 26 March Zhdanov had attended a meeting in Stalin’s office with the German Communist chiefs Pieck, Elsner, and Grotewohl, one of the few pieces of evidence that Zhdanov played a role in German affairs (“Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 72; “Posetiteli” 8: 30). On 6 January and 15 March, Zhdanov had met in Stalin’s office V.S. Semenov (1911–92), political advisor to the Soviet military administration in Germany, and V.D. Sokolovskii (1897–1968), commander in chief of the Soviet forces in Germany (“Posetiteli” 8: 25, 29–30). Krementsov, Stalinist Science, 163; Foitzik, Sowjetische, 271. See Soveshchaniia Kominforma, 407–17; 77/3/108, ll.5–6, 9–14. Somehow Hahn suggests that Zhdanov’s last public appearance at the Cominform meeting took place on 28 June, when Zhdanov had been back in Moscow for several days (Hahn, Postwar, 98, 100). Soveshchaniia Kominforma, 433–47. Kohn, “Pan-Slavism,” 710. “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 72. 77/3/180, ll.1–7. The page in his notebook on which Zhdanov wrote these notes precedes the one on which he wrote the remark “Zhdanov erred.” See, too, Politbiuro 1945–53, 59–60. rgani, 2/1/19, l.3; “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 72; Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 3: 518; Aksenov, “Apogei,” 101; Iu.N. Zhukov, “Bor’ba,” 31. rgani, 2/1/19, l.3; Iu.N. Zhukov, “Bor’ba,” 32. Politbiuro 1945–53, 268–9. 17/3/1071, ll.24, 28–9; Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 3: 519; Iu.N. Zhukov, “Bor’ba,” 31. This was done by Stalin’s secretary, Poskrebyshev, polling its membership by the telephone. Kumanev, Riadom, 144; Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 3: 518; Ponomarenko’s recollections about these events dated from long after his promotion, which likely accounts for his error about the date of his transfer from Minsk to the cc Secretariat, which he believes to have been the result of a survey vote by cc members on 5 May (Kumanev, Riadom, 143–4). He related these events in 1978 (see ibid., 110). Ibid., 143–4; 17/3/1071, l.28–9; Iu.N. Zhukov, “Bor’ba,” 31–2; see as

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well Krementsov, Stalinist Science, 163. Shepilov lasted for almost exactly a year as Agitprop chief (see Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 574). 321 17/3/1071, l.28–9; Iu.N. Zhukov, “Bor’ba,” 31–2; Krementsov, Stalinist Science, 163. 322 The first results of the reorganization may have shown some early promise, for the Politburo decided on 25 October that obkoms, kraikoms, and republican ccs were to be reorganized following the cc’s model, with slight differences: they would have no foreign department and, instead of three, just one combined industry and transport department (17/3/1072, ll.70–1). On 4 January 1949, lower Party committees were also remodelled following the July 1948 reorganization of the cc (17/3/1073, l.65). 323 Subkowa, “Kaderpolitik,” 207. This was probably a reflection of Stalin’s dismay with Kuznetsov’s moves regarding the organization of the mgb Court of Honour in the fall of 1947 for which he had been reprimanded by the Politburo in March (Khlevniuk, “Stalin,” 538). 324 17/3/1071, l.29; Secretariat on Fridays, Orgbiuro twice a month on Mondays. It appears, from the notes in Zhdanov’s knizhka about the discussions regarding the reorganization, that Wednesday Secretariat meetings had been considered (77/3/180, l.4). Ultimately, because of the continued overlap of tasks with the Secretariat, the Orgbiuro was dissolved in 1952 at the Nineteenth Party Congress. 325 Kostyrchenko, Out of the Red Shadows, 162–3. Zhdanov seems to have been looking into the number of Jews in the higher bureaucracy of the ussr Ministry of Finance as well in the spring (Politbiuro 1945–53, 264–5). 326 “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 72; “Posetiteli” 8: 40. 327 77/3/145, l.3. It was a reply to a note by Shepilov on the distribution of tasks among the employees of the new Agitprop department (77/3/145, l.4). 328 “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 72; 17/3/1071, l.25; Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 3: 518; Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 308. 329 Shepilov, “Vospominaniia” 3: 11. 330 Kostyrchenko, Out of the Red Shadows, 266; Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 638. Kostyrchenko suggests that he may have gone to the South first, which was not what Iurii Zhdanov remembered when I interviewed him (Iu.A. Zhdanov, interview). 331 Iu. A. Zhdanov, interview. Iurii noted that, in general, his father was not particularly fond of the environment in which he had grown up, that of the lakes and forests of North and Central Russia. 332 17/3/1071, l.32; Politbiuro 1945–53, 269–70; Iu.N. Zhukov, “Bor’ba,” 33; Hahn, Postwar, 69–70. A full English translation of Iurii’s letter can be found in Iu. Zhdanov, “Yuri,” 175–7. There is some confusion about

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the dating of the letter but 10 July, rather than 15 July, is suggested by most authors (compare Krementsov, Stalinist Science, 163, with Shepilov, “Vospominaniia” 3: 10, and Joravsky, Lysenko, 137). The repentant letter was published on 7 August in Pravda (Hahn, Postwar, 96). The Politburo decree on vaskhnil that ordered the conference that was to refute Iu. Zhdanov’s criticism of Lysenko was dated 15 July (Politbiuro 1945–53, 269–70). 333 Joravsky, Lysenko, 138–40. Iurii later became a zealous Lysenkoist (Joravsky, Lysenko, 153–4). 334 When Iurii visited his father at the spa, Zhdanov is said to have exclaimed: “Well, there you have it, I am on a pension for the time being. You will write and publish a denial [of your previous positions], and from its fees we will live” (Iu.A. Zhdanov, “Vo mgle,” 87). Beria had already ominously told Andrei Zhdanov that one needed to be above fatherly feelings in these matters (Iu. A. Zhdanov, interview). 335 Kostyrchenko, Out of the Red Shadows, 266; Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 638–9; Borisov, Andrei, 35; Kojevnikov, “Games,” 159. Shepilov maintains that he was Zhdanov’s Moscow source of information during Zhdanov’s last weeks and attests that they had a couple of phone conversations with each other (Shepilov, “Vospominaniia” 3: 11). Although Iurii visited him too, Zhdanov’s information was sketchy, as is indicated as well from the absence of his name among the group of addressees on mvd reports from July onwards (garf, 9401/2/201, and 9401/2/202). 336 Kostyrchenko, Out of the Red Shadows, 266; Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 639. 337 “Posetiteli” 8: 41; “Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 111; Soyfer, Lysenko, 183. 338 See the third point of the 15 July Politburo resolution (Politbiuro 1945–53, 270). 339 Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 3: 523. On 9 August the Politburo decreed that I.I. Shmal’gauzen was to be dismissed as head of the department of Darwinism at the biological faculty of Moscow State University and replaced by I.I. Prezent (Akademiia Nauk, 379). On 10 August Lysenko himself replaced A.R. Zhebrak as head of the department of genetics of the Timiriazev Agricultural Academy, a Politburo decision. These personnel moves had been in principle decided at an Orgbiuro session, chaired by Malenkov, the day before (ibid., 383–4). In related events, the philosopher Z. Beletskii, the earlier enemy of Aleksandrov who had been sent on an indefinite leave by Iu. Zhdanov in the spring of 1948, made a comeback (Batygin, Deviatko, “Delo professora,” 221, 224–5). 340 Pravda, 7 August 1948, 5. It was placed after three pages filled with the text of speeches by agrobiologists at the conference who praised Lysenko’s theories (ibid., 2–4). Iu.A. Zhdanov, “Vo mgle,” 87; Soyfer, Lysenko, 189–91.

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341 Levina, Vavilov, 95. Joravsky makes another point about the affair that seems plausible: “The most important fact is the institutional one, which is in the public record for all to see. Agricultural chiefs presided at the climactic triumph of agrobiology, while the heads of the cultural and scientific establishment still showed signs of doubt and lingering reservations. The obvious explanation is that the Party’s chiefs of culture and science were not only rulers but also representatives of their constituencies. That will sound absurd to those who think of Zhdanov senior as the personification of Stalinist anti-intellectualism. Beyond doubt he was that, but he was also the ultimate chief under Stalin of a large bureaucracy of higher learning, which had been putting up strong resistance to Lysenkoism” (Joravsky, Lysenko, 137–8). 342 Kostyrchenko, Out of the Red Shadows, 267; Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 309. Daily health bulletins were telegraphed to the Kremlin, meanwhile, following a Bolshevik tradition in which the severe illness of any of its leading members was closely observed by his peers (“‘Tsel’ byla,” 11). 343 Iu.A. Zhdanov, “Vo mgle,” 87; Seibert, Zhdanovism, 76, 76n118; Shepilov, “Vospominaniia” 3: 12. 344 Iurii and Voznesensky discussed the state of Andrei Zhdanov’s health during a long walk in the woods (Iu.A. Zhdanov, interview). 345 Kostyrchenko, Out of the Red Shadows, 267; Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 640; “‘Tsel’ byla,” 10. 346 “‘Tsel’ byla,” 4–5, 8; “Posledniaia …” 1: 92n61; see as well Stoliarov, Golgofa, 43. Supplying no references, Stoliarov maintains that Stalin immediately read the warning by Timashuk when it was passed on to him by Vlasik and Abakumov (see Stoliarov, Golgofa, 50). Timashuk’s diagnosis may have been correct, but the other doctors’ fatal error is no evidence that Zhdanov was deliberately murdered as part of a major conspiracy of Kremlin doctors, to which some confessed under duress in 1953. (See as well Kostyrchenko, Out of the Red Shadows, 267, 273–8, 287). After his release in March 1953, Vinogradov, the most senior physician of the group, who survived the mgb’s interrogation in 1952–53, wrote a letter to Beria in which he stated that in Zhdanov’s case he had failed to recognize the symptoms of someone who had suffered cardiac arrest (Torchinov, Leontiuk, Vokrug, 118). Regarding the death of his father, Iurii Zhdanov was quite categorical in rejecting the suggestion of foul play, noting that he had seen and read all the relevant materials (Iu. A. Zhdanov, interview). Stalin in 1948, and Beria in 1953, came to the same conclusion (Lavrentii, 22, 388n12). 347 Pravda, 1 September 1948, 1. Timashuk maintained in 1956 that Zhdanov had died on the thirtieth (“Tsel’ byla,” 8–9; see, too, Kostyrchenko, Out of the Red Shadows, 268). 348 Kostyrchenko, Out of the Red Shadows, 268; Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 641;

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Shepilov, “Vospominaniia” 3: 12. Kuznetsov, rather than Voznensensky, was the leadership’s representative, because he was a member of the funeral commission (the other members were G.M. Popov, A.A. Kuznetsov, A.F. Gorkin, A.N. Poskrebyshev, N.S. Vlasik, and Kremlin guards’ commander N.K. Spiridonov), which appears to have been involved in the decision to conduct a post-mortem and the recipient of Timashuk’s warnings (77/2/53, ll.1–3). 349 See “‘Tsel’ byla,’ ” 3–16. Ironically, on the very day of Zhdanov’s death, Lysenko met with Stalin in the Kremlin, where he was probably told the news by Stalin himself (“Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 111). We can only speculate on how far the father’s death saved the son. Since Iurii Zhdanov never was officially demoted as head of the Science section of the Agitprop department, Stalin appears to have continued to believe in the talents of the young man despite his error of April (and he had said as much in May at the “Politburo meeting” on the case). One surmises that Stalin had forgiven him even before his father’s death; he showed his liking for Iurii by allowing him to marry his daughter early the next year (see Kostyrchenko, Out of the Red Shadows, 199, 212, 244). Indeed, on 16 September Iurii Zhdanov authored a report with L.F. Il’ichev on the delegation of Soviet mathematicians to an international congress of mathematicians; see Akademiia Nauk, 385–6. 350 The size of Zhdanov’s personal archive is testimony to the fact that Lazar Kaganovich (or Nikita Khrushchev) had the wrong perception of Zhdanov as being lazy (Khrushchev, Vospominaniia 1: 111–12). 351 See Boterbloem, “Death of Andrei Zhdanov,” and the epilogue.

epilogue 1 See for several key documents on this case, Politbiuro 1945–53, 64, 66–70, 274–311. 2 Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 347; Politbiuro 1945–53, 77, 290–3. 3 On 30 July 1949, Pospelov visited Stalin in the Kremlin for the last time (“Posetiteli … Alfavitnyi,” 144). Around this time he was removed as editor of Pravda and appointed head of the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute, replacing Kruzhkov, who, with Aleksandrov, seems to have been hit by some of the debris from the Leningrad Affair in July, without ever being arrested; Shepilov, too, lost his job as Agitprop chief in the summer of 1949 but was never arrested. Suslov took over the editorship of Pravda from Pospelov (Kostyrchenko, Out of the Red Shadows, 183; Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 525; Hahn, Postwar, 11–12; Resolutions 1929–53, 251–3; Conquest, Power, 105; Shepilov, “Vospominaniia” 3: 19–21; Torchinov, Leontiuk, Vokrug, 275). 4 Either just before or just after Zhdanov’s death, Stalin had privately

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expressed to some of his lieutenants that he pictured as his successors Voznesensky, as head of the government, and Kuznetsov, as chief of the Communist party (Reabilitatsiia, 313; “O tak nazyvaemom,” 127; Volkov, Vzlët, 274; Mikoian, Tak, 565; Molotov, 202, 490). 5 Reabilitatsiia, 318; see also Ruble, “Leningrad Affair,” 313–15. Volkogonov notes that some 200 people were executed, apart from Kuznetsov and N.A. Voznesensky; they included Rodionov, Popkov, Ia.F. Kapustin (second Leningrad gorkom secretary), and P.G. Lazutin (chair of Leningrad’s municipal government) (Volkogonov, Triumf 2: 2, 65). I.M. Turko, the Iaroslavl’ Party secretary, received twenty years. Other victims included T.V. Zakrzhevskaia (head of a department of the Leningrad obkom), F.E. Mikheev (director of affairs of the Leningrad obkom and gorkom), A.A. Voznesensky (rsfsr minister of Education), M.A. Voznesenskaia (secretary of Leningrad’s Kuibyshev district), G.F. Badaev (second Leningrad obkom secretary), I.S. Kharitonov (head of the Leningrad provincial government), P.I. Kubatkin (the former nkvd chief of Leningrad), P.I. Levin (Leningrad gorkom secretary), M.V. Basov (chair of rsfsr Gosplan), A.D. Verbitskii (second secretary of the Murmansk obkom, previously Leningrad gorkom secretary), N.V. Solov’ev (first secretary of the Crimea obkom, and earlier, Leningrad oblispolkom chair), A.A. Bubnov (Leningrad gorispolkom secretary), and the apparat workers A.I. Burlin, V.I. Ivanov, M.I. Nikitin, V.P. Galkin, M.I. Safonov, P.A. Chursin, and A.T. Bondarenko (see as well Reabilitatsiia, 312, 316 note, 319; “O tak nazyvaemom,” 130). Reabilitatsiia adds to those who were purged (but reinstated in the Party after Stalin’s death) Leningrad obkom secretary G.G. Vorotov, Leningrad gorkom secretary G.T. Kedrov, Leningrad obkom and Novgorod obkom secretary G.Kh. Bumagin, Leningrad oblispolkom chair I.D. Dmitriev, Vyborg gorkom first secretary A.N. Prokof’ev, Leningrad oblispolkom deputy chair N.Ia. Panarin, director of the Leningrad branch of the Lenin Museum N.V. Telegin, deputy director of the Institute for Party History S.F. Beliaev, secretary of the Crimea obkom N.P. Khovanov, and chair of the Crimea oblispolkom V.I. Nikanorov (Reabilitatsiia, 74). Another victim was Lev L’vovich Rakov, director of the Museum of the Defence of Leningrad; he was accused of stockpiling arms in his museum to stage a revolt that would aid the transfer of Leningrad to Finland (Glinka, “Chelovek,” 147). There was concomitantly a purge of ethnic Estonians in the Party and state apparatus of the Estonian sssr, but it has remained unclear whether or not this was the consequence of an attack on perceived Estonian “nationalist deviations” (there were more campaigns of this kind waged between 1948 and 1953) or connected with the Leningrad Affair (see Misiunas, Taagepera, Baltic States, 78, 79, 79n9). One could of course propose that a general antinationalist (separatist?) line was pursued in a manner that was never

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6 7

8

9 10

517

altogether logically consistent; thus, paradoxically accompanied by a general Russification of the Soviet Empire, the “Russians,” led by Voznesensky and Kuznetsov, were attacked, along with the Estonians of Karotamm, the Jews of Lozovskii, and the Mingrelians, although that last attack left untouched the person who was to be presented as the alleged leader of the “Mingrelian Affair,” Lavrentii Beria (see Martin, Affirmative Action Empire, 395, 442, 453, 460–1). Politbiuro 1945–53, 7. Sometime in the spring of 1949, Iurii Andreevich and Svetlana Allilueva married while the “Leningraders” were being purged (Soyfer, Lysenko, 168; F.D. Volkov, Vzlët, 293). T.F. Shtykov, Zhdanov’s former deputy, who had been shocked by Zhdanov’s death, also continued in good standing (Hyun-su Jeon, Gyoo Kahng, “Shtykov”, 93nn1, 2). Iurii’s repentance was apparently considered to have been sincere enough to earn him an election as cc member at the Nineteenth Party Congress, but he lost his cc membership in 1956 at the Twentieth Party Congress (Levytsky, Soviet Political Elite, 657). Boterbloem, “Death of Andrei Zhdanov.” Without a doubt, Stalin coedited the script of the Leningrad Affair (and may even have been its main playwright). It is quite possible that Stalin was gradually hatching a new plan to rid himself of those who had witnessed his errors (or who knew too much), plagued by a progressive paranoid dementia: the Jewish conspiracy, the “Leningrad Affair,” the Doctor’s Plot, and the Mingrelian Affair may all have become part of one grandiose plot like the TrotskyiteZinovievite-Rightist-Anglo-Japanese-German conspiracy in the later 1930s. See for instance the note made by the editors of Molotov, who have had more access to the relevant archives than most scholars: “At the end of the 1940s I.V. Stalin prepared a purge within the highest echelons of power. The mgb collected compromising materials about individual members of the Politbiuro of the vkp (b), in the first place about V.M. Molotov, A.I. Mikoian, L.M. Kaganovich and others. At exactly that time falsified cases were organized against a large group of leading cadres – the case of the ussr Gosplan, ‘the Leningrad Affair,’ ‘the Moscow Affair.’ Because of them, high Party and government workers such as N.A. Voznesensky, A.A. Kuznetsov, and M.I. Rodionov were persecuted” (Molotov, 739). Romanovskii, Liki, 56–7; see also Stoliarov, Golgofa, 68. On the day of Zhdanov’s burial, Kosygin was appointed to the vacant seat Zhdanov had left on the Politburo (Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 3: 526). On 5 September Pravda (page 3) mentioned Zhdanov’s death, in the form of condolences, for the last time. On 8 September the 130-page brochure A.A. Zhdanov 1896–1948 was printed, but its print-run was a meagre ten thousand copies. The opportunity was taken in the brochure to stress the

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priorities of the Party’s domestic policy, especially the emphasis on ideological issues, referring in this context to Zhdanov’s appearance at the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934 (A.A. Zhdanov, 6). Reference, too, was made to Zhdanov’s contribution in cleansing the Party in the 1930s in Leningrad. Zhdanov was praised for explaining the great utility of the Short Course in 1938 and for reconstructing propaganda in connection with its issue (ibid., 104). Particular attention was given to his speeches in the 1947 philosophical discussions, and “his” thesis that the transformation in dialectical manner from lower to higher in the development of Soviet society does not occur as a result of the clash of antagonistic classes but in the form of criticism and self-criticism (ibid., 105, 108). The brochure, however, mainly contained formulaic condolences by Party organizations, ministries, the Komsomol, the trade unions, the Supreme Soviet Presidium and foreign Communist parties (ibid., 9–59). The Pravda report on the funeral was reprinted (ibid., 75–8), along with the tributes by Molotov, Popov, Popkov, and Govorov (ibid., 85–98). The obituary article by P.N. Pospelov and L.F. Il’ichev dated 5 September 1948 that appeared in Kul’tura i zhizn’ was also reprinted (ibid., 99–116). Zhdanov’s accomplishments, then, presented a rather thin list, as is apparent, too from the commemoration observed by the theoretical journal Bol’shevik. In Bol’shevik 16(1948): 6–19 three obituaries appeared; the last and longest one, “Vydaiushchiisia deiatel’ bol’shevistskoi partii i Sovetskogo gosudarstvo,” is unsigned and tries to assess Zhdanov’s significance (see “Vydaiushchiisia”). Its tone is uncompromisingly sharp, particularly emphasizing Zhdanov’s unwavering struggle against different oppositional groups in 1920s. Emphasis was given to Zhdanov’s involvement with literature (in 1934 and 1946) and history, as well as philosophy and music. There is also mention of his role in the creation of the Cominform. 11 17/3/1072, l.67; Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 3: 532. An earlier proposal had A.A. Kuznetsov chairing, with Pospelov, Kruzhkov, A.N. Kuznetsov, and Zinaida Aleksandrovna as members (77/2/53, l.7). 12 See Istoriia sovetskoi politicheskoi, 517; Borisov, Andrei, 36; his personal archive includes a biography dictated by his sister Tat’iana that was handed to the Central Committee Secretariat in March 1948; the same opis’ (fond 77, opis’ 2) contains several personal reminiscences about Zhdanov as well as some documents from archivists in Kalinin and Gor’kii that appear to have been collected to prepare a biography (for Tat’iana’s work, see rgaspi 77/2/75). Galina Kurbatova’s kandidat thesis of 1949 at Moscow State University (faculty of philosophy) is a frightfully sterile political biography of Zhdanov the politician, filled with all the shopworn clichés, and resembles a lengthy version of the obituary

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15 16

17

18 19 20 21

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brochure and Bol’shevik article; perhaps not surprisingly, her supervisor was V.S. Kruzhkov (Kurbatova, “A.A. Zhdanov” and ibid., title page). Torchinov, Leontiuk, Vokrug, 149. “Dokumenty prosulogo,” 1. See for instance Baudin, Le réalisme socialiste, 123, 145. This ugly painting, one of the hallmarks of socialist-realist painting in Stalin’s day, no longer received mention in the entry on Gerasimov in the third edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia in the 1970s, probably owing to both Stalin’s and Zhdanov’s dubious status as former leaders in official Soviet memory (see “Gerasimov”). “Vydaiushchiisia.” Von Rauch, Geschichte, 563. Khrushchev was publicly humiliated in 1950 on the issue of amalgamation of collective farms; just before that, Andreev had been attacked for failed agricultural policies; Molotov’s wife was arrested in 1949; Beria appeared to have been compromised by the Mingrelian Affair; Voroshilov and Kaganovich had become has-beens sometime earlier and no longer had Party or government functions befitting a member of the Politburo; Mikoian and Molotov were attacked before a cc plenum by Stalin in October 1952. See for instance V.P. Naumov, “Byl li,” 19. Molotov believed that was Beria rather than Malenkov who had orchestrated the moves against the Leningraders, but with Stalin’s blessing; Malenkov executed the plan on behalf of Stalin and Beria (Chuev, Molotov, 508–9, 531). Pikhoia, Sovetskii, 56. See Boterbloem, “Death of Andrei Zhdanov.” Leonhard, Kreml, 257–8, 524. Shepilov, “Vospominaniia” 3: 3–4, also notes Beria’s resentment towards Zhdanov and Voznesensky. In 1961, during another phase of destalinization that, in contrast to the Secret Speech of Khrushchev at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, took aim at most of Stalin’s former lieutenants such as Malenkov, Iurii Zhdanov was partially rehabilitated by his appointment as rektor (president) of Rostov University, where he remained until the final days of the ussr (Levytsky, Soviet Political Elite, 657). For the criticism regarding the repressions in Leningrad at the Twenty-Second Party Congress of 1961, see the speech by Leningrad Party secretary I.V. Spiridonov (1905–91) as reported in Pravda, published underneath the announcement that Stalin’s body had been removed from the mausoleum in Red Square (Pravda, 31 October 1961, 1). Torchinov, Leontiuk, Vokrug, 347. “‘Massovye,’ ” 117–22. Ibid., 123–30. A few months earlier, the magazine Ogonek had questioned the fact that universities, streets, factories, printing presses, ships,

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29

30

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schools, institutes, and collective and state farms still carried Zhdanov’s name (Kariakin, “‘Zhdanovskaia,’ ” 25–7). “‘Massovye,’ ” 123. Ibid., 124. Ibid., 129. Ibid. The 383 lists were suspected to be only a fraction of all such lists that had existed. By signing 362 of them, Stalin ordered the death penalty for 39,000 of the 44,000 people named on those sheets. The sadism of his quintet included advising the investigative organs to torture the detainees (ibid., 124–5). Beyond Stalin, Molotov, Kaganovich, Voroshilov, and Zhdanov, the Politburo commission of 1988 named Ezhov, Mikoian, S. Kosior, Beria, Malenkov, Khrushchev, Bulganin, Andreev, and Suslov as wholehearted participants in organizing mass murder. Ibid., 125–6. The report recommended the removal of Zhdanov’s and the others’ names from towns, administrative districts, settlements, streets, enterprises, kolkhozy and sovkhozy, army units, ships, educative institutes, and other institutions and organizations, and from stipends as well (ibid., 129). The decree was called “On the Rescinding of the Legal Acts Connected with the Eternalization of the Memory of A.A. Zhdanov” (Ob otmene pravovykh aktov, sviazannykh s uvekovecheniem pamiati A.A. Zhdanova); see Pravda, 18 January 1989, 3; Volkov, Vzlët, 311–12. This changed the name of Irkutsk and Leningrad State Universities and of the city of Mariupol’. The cc asked other public institutions to eliminate anything named after Zhdanov, which happened in the subsequent months. By decrees of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, the Irkutsk State University had been named Zhdanov University on 19 February 1939, the Higher School of the Engineers of the Army had been named after him on 31 March 1939, and the train-engine factory of Poltava on 25 November 1949. Rescinded, too, were the Sovmin resolutions of 22 October 1948 on the name change for Mariupol’, and of 18 June 1950 on the renaming of Leningrad State University (Pravda, 18 January 1989, 3). There may have been one other town besides Mariupol’ that carried the name of Zhdanov in 1954; it may have lost his name even earlier (see Torchinov, Leontiuk, Vokrug, 255). “Soviet policies … retained only rudiments of Marxism, but the adaptability of those rudiments enabled the Soviets to annex any optimistic historical conception that suited them” (Furet, Passing of an Illusion, 279). Again, Furet phrases it attractively: “Militant Communists drew their inner strength from the sense that they were accomplishing history as a

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33 34 35 36

37

38

39

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supreme good and using force to the right ends” (ibid., 418). See as well Chuev, Molotov, 568–9. Zubok, Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War, 113 Khrushchev, Vospominaniia 1: 112; Chuev, Molotov, 388. Sloterdijk, Critique, 525. This aspect Stalinism shared with Nazism and fascism (see Sloterdijk, Critique, 114, 483; Petrone, Life, 182). Still, Petrone’s point that in the second half of the 1930s it was a “product of socialist realist fantasy rather than reality” to believe that “the constitution and Stalin’s speech [of December 1936] were … immediately accessible to everyone” indicates that even that simplification was not easy to accomplish (Petrone, Life, 182). See Hellbeck, “Working,” 341, 358–9. Brandenberger believes that the propagation of a common Russian identity was, ironically, particularly successful (Brandenberger, “Short Course,” 263). Peter Sloterdijk has noted about another, more or less contemporary, society (Weimar Germany) “that the expectation of being deceived (in the double sense: as readiness to let oneself be deceived and as mistrust that someone would try to pull the wool over one’s eyes) had become a universal state of consciousness … Modernity establishes itself in people’s minds in the form of a permanent training in seduction and simultaneous mistrust” (Sloterdijk, Critique, 484–5). This seems fitting, too, for an understanding of the Soviet citizens’ attitude towards their rulers and their ideology and politics. Although Bakhtin’s caveat about the complexity of ideological reception among its targets needs to be remembered (Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 341–6). The main cause for this phenomenon appears to have been the inability to make the State of Israel into a Soviet ally, despite the support shown to Israel by the Soviet Union in quickly recognizing the new state after it proclaimed its independence on 18 May 1948. Stalin began to believe that the existence of Israel might divide the loyalty of Soviet Jews and make them into a potential fifth column. Thus, the enthusiastic welcome prepared by Soviet Jews for the Israeli ambassador to the Soviet Union, Golda Meir, in September 1948, may have caused Stalin’s latent antiSemitism to come out into the open (Redlich, War, 135; on 16 October Meir met thousands of Soviet Jews in Moscow celebrating Jewish New Year; see Liuks, “Evreiskii,” 50). Stalin’s personal dislike of Jews, leading eventually to his apparent conviction that an anti-Soviet Jewish conspiracy existed, seems a product of traditional Russian anti-Semitism combined with the fact that many of Stalin’s opponents, including “Judas” Trotsky, had been Jews in the 1920s and 1930s (but see van Ree, Political

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Thought, 63–6). Anti-Semitism ran deep in the Soviet Union, a legacy of the tsarist Russian tradition; Kopelev already distinguishes the first signs of its re-emergence even during the war, in 1942 (Kopelev, No Jail, 234; see as well Vaksberg, Stalin, 135–6). His impression is confirmed by evidence recently found by Liuks and Kostyrchenko about anti-Semitic documents prepared within Agitprop in 1942–43 (Liuks, “Evreiskii,” 44–5; Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 259–60). Early anti-Semitic moves thus clearly predated Zhdanov’s 1945 return to Moscow. Aleksandrov had been actively involved already in the summer of 1942 (Liuks, “Evreiskii,” 45; Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 259–61). 40 Nowhere in the records does Zhdanov appear to be a zealous antiSemite, and Suslov and Malenkov were Stalin’s pointmen in the antiSemitic campaign. Already in the spring and summer of 1946, Zhdanov referred matters Jewish to Suslov because they fell under the competence of the cc foreign-policy department (see Redlich, War, 43, 79, 86, 103, 122–3, 126, 161; for Malenkov’s role in the anticosmopolitan campaign, see Pikhoia, Sovetskii, 75–6). Zhdanov’s apparent sponsorship of the creation of two Yiddish periodicals in 1947–48 suggests that he was far from being a rabid anti-Semite (Redlich, War, 53, 125–6, 161). He became more suspicious of an organization such as the Jewish Anti-Fascist Council (and its chief, Mikhoels) when, from about early 1947 onward, the Cold War was heating up and the general wave of xenophobia spread (see for instance Redlich, War, 86–7, 127, 129–30, 342). Lev Kopelev recalled how anti-Semitism began to rise at that point (Kopelev, No Jail, 233, 237). Ultimately, again after prolonged hesitation and consultation with Suslov and Aleksandrov, Zhdanov twice refused permission for the Soviet publication of the Black Book (a work on the destruction of the Soviet Jews by the Nazis), although rumours went around that Stalin had been responsible for this decision (Redlich, War, 103–4, 126, 364–8; Black Book). Even though Zhdanov was not an anti-Semite by conviction, his opportunism would have prevailed over any moral scuples, had he lived long enough to help the campaign along; perhaps Iurii’s behaviour may be taken as indicative (see Kostyrchenko, Out of the Red Shadows, 199–200; Kostyrchenko, Tainaia, 583–4, 595; 17/118/425, l.3–6, 11; 17/119/183, ll.184–199). But the real anti-Semitic campaign began after Zhdanov’s death, with the Politburo’s order to the mgb to dissolve the Jewish Antifascist Committee on 20 November (Reabilitatsiia, 324; Liuks, “Evreiskii,” 50). 41 Again Khrushchev’s memoirs are perceptive regarding Zhdanov’s role, although he appears to have confused the period of Zhdanov’s wartime disgrace with 1946, when Zhdanov was in the ascendant (Khrushchev, Vospominaniia 1: 112).

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42 As Rigby, Mawdsley, and White have noticed (see Rigby, “Was Stalin a Disloyal Patron?”; Mawdsley, White, The Soviet Elite, 80). 43 Kotkin calls it “the terrible immensity of this administrative Cyclops” (“The State,” 45). 44 Such behaviour has not been the focus of this book, but I refer the reader to the writings by Fedor Abramov (New Life ), Kotkin’s Magnetic Mountain, or my own Life and Death under Stalin to get an impression of the relation between “management” and workforce in factories and collective farms. 45 Lieven, Empire, 258. 46 Shlapentokh, Normal Totalitarian Society, 62. 47 As Brandenberger, Tillett, and, to some degree, Martin argue. 48 mvd minister Kruglov to Stalin, Molotov, Beria, and Malenkov on 1 January 1949 (garf, 9401/2/234, ll.148–79). 49 J. Arch Getty, in his Origins, was perhaps this school’s most forceful proponent, although in his recent Road to Terror (with O. Naumov) he seems to have discarded this image of Zhdanov. 50 Borkenau may have been one of the founding fathers of this school in his Der europäische Kommunismus. 51 Certainly Djilas had this impression when he visited Moscow, judging from his Conversations. 52 See for example Nikolaevskii, Tainye, or Nicolaevsky, Power. It is ultimately a version of the myth that the tsar was innocent and was deceived by his wicked advisors; see on this the scathing remarks by AntonovOvseenko (Time, 167). 53 See Rigby, “Early Provincial,” 5; Rigby, “Was Stalin a Disloyal Patron?” 54 Similar unswerving dedication to their leader was expressed by many of Hitler’s lieutenants after the Second World War (Kershaw, ‘The Hitler Myth,’ 263). “Our humanism is Marxist, it cannot resemble bourgeois humanism … If we guide morals in such a way as to rear good qualities in a human being, but leave the structure as it is – with bribery, theft, if we leave that, then all those morals remain rotten” (Chuev, Molotov, 564). 55 Sloterdijk, Critique, 239.

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– “Report on the Amendments to the Rules of the cpsu (b).” The Communist International. Special Number (1939): 680–717. – Stakhanovtsy nastoiashchie bol’sheviki proizvodstva. Moscow: Partizdat tsk vkp (b), 1935. – Uroki politicheskikh oshibok Saratovskogo kraikoma. Moscow: Partizdat tsk vkp (b), 1935. – “Vystuplenie na diskussii po knige G.F. Aleksandrova ‘Istoriia zapadnoevropeiskoi filosofii.’” Bol’shevik 16 (1947): 7–23. – “Vystuplenie na diskussii po knige G.F. Aleksandrova ‘Istoriia zapadnoevropeiskoi filosofii.’” Partiinaia zhizn’ 16 (1947): 1–18. “Zhdanov, Andrei Aleksandrovich.” In Bol’shaia Sovetskaia Entsiklopediia. 2d ed., vol. 15, ed. S.I. Vavilov, 604–7. Zhdanov, Iu.A. “Vo mgle protivorechii”. Voprosy filosofii 7 (1993): 65–92. – Solnechnoe spletenie Evrazii. Uchebnaia lektsiia po regionovedeniiu. Rostov-onDon: Pegas, 1998. – “Yuri Zhdanov’s Letter to Stalin.” Soviet Studies 2 (1949): 175–7. Zhiromskaia, V.B. Demograficheskaia istorii Rossii v 1930–e gody. Vzgliad v neizvestnoe. Moscow: Rosspen, 2001. Zhukov, G.K. Vospominaniia i razmyshleniia. Enlarged ed. 2 vols. Moscow: Novosti, 1990. Zhukov, Iu.A. Krutye stupeni: Zapiski zhurnalista. Moscow: Mysl’, 1983. Zhukov, Iu.N. “Bor’ba za vlast’ v rukovodstve sssr v 1945–1952 godakh.” Voprosy istorii 1 (1995): 23–39. – “Repressii i Konstitutsiia sssr 1936 goda.” Voprosy istorii 1 (2002): 3–26. – “Tainy ‘Kremlevskogo dela’ 1935 goda i sud’ba Avelia Enukidze.” Voprosy istorii 9 (2000): 83–113. – Tainy Kremlia: Stalin, Molotov, Beriia, Malenkov. Moscow: Terra, 2000. Zima, B.F. Golod v SSSR 1946–1947 godov: Proiskhozhdenie i posledstviia. Moscow: Institut Rossiiskoi istorii ran, 1996. – “Tupiki agrarnoi politiki (1945–1953gg.).” In SSSR i kholodnaia voina, ed. V.S. Lel’chuk and E.I. Pivovarov, 142–59. Zimniaia voina: 1939–1940. Vol. 1. Ed. O.A. Rzheshevskii and O. Vekhviliainen. Moscow: Nauka, 1999. Zimniaia voina: 1939–1940. I.V. Stalin i finskaia kampaniia. Vol. 2. Ed. E.N. Kul’kov and O.A. Rzheshevskii. Moscow: Nauka, 1999. Zinich, M.S. Budni voennogo likholet’ia 1941–1945. Vol. 1. Moscow: Institut rossiiskoi istorii ran, 1994. Zinoviev, G., L. Kamenev, et al. Ob “Urokakh Oktiabria.” S prilozheniem stat’i L. Trotskogo “Uroki Oktiabria.” Leningrad: Priboi, 1924. Zis’, A.Ia. “Chemu svidetelem byl.” In Filosofiia ne konchatetsia, ed. V.A. Lektorskii, 153–70. Zizek, S. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1989.

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Abakumov, V.S., 265, 273, 315, 317 See also mgb, smersh abortion. See health care Abramov, P., 143–4, 148, 152 Abyssinia, 131 Academy of Agricultural Sciences. See vaskhnil Academy of Medical Sciences, 277–8, 294, 296 Academy of Sciences, 123, 188, 247, 292–3, 305–6, 310 Academy of Social Sciences, 276, 292 Adibekov, G., 308 administrative redivision of Soviet Union. See Soviet Union agitation. See agitprop agitprop,* x, 42–4, 129, 139, 175–8, 181, 187, 220–2, 247, 268–7, 275–6, 283; activists, 42; cc administration of, 8, 181, 187–8, 194, 210–12, 222, 254–5, 261, 269–72, 274–5, 279, 291–2, 306–7, 311–12, 315, 322, 327, 329, 342, 475n135, 475n138, 197–8n155; cc department of, 90, 165, 175, 331, 335; in Civil War, 27–9; effect in 1920s of, 61; as enlightenment, 44, 65; Nizhniii department of, 41–2; in Nizhnii guberniia, 42; in World War ii, 268. See

also ideology, Marxism, MarxismLeninism, propaganda, Russian nationalism, Shepilov, Stalinism, Stetskii, Suslov, A. A. Zhdanov agriculture, xv, 22, 65, 76, 114, 190, 298, 322; animal husbandry, 88, 94, 102, 113, 125, 204; dairy farming, 52, 55; flax, 102, 171, 323; grain procurements, 55, 64–6, 94, 99–100, 102, 117–18, 210, 246, 285–8, 341; grain requisitions, 55, 78; grain shipping, 51; harvests, 55, 88, 125, 210, 246; horses, 52, 171; incurs Stalin’s wrath, 64; mechanization of, 52, 55, 83, 298; modernization of, 55; and nep, 35; in Nizhnii province, 52, 108; People’s Commissariat of, 81; postwar situation of, 297–8; problems of, 98, 119, 136–7, 158, 171, 193, 184–8; production of, 74, 88, 118–19, 172, 193, 204, 284–8, 298; wartime damage to, 298; and A.A. Zhdanov, 22, 190. See also A.A. Andreev, cattle, collectivization, crop cultivation, famine, kolkhoz, kolkhozniki, mts, peasantry, sovkhoz aircraft production. See industry, Malenkov, Shakhurin

*The meaning of terms in italics can be found in the Glossary.

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Akhmatova, Anna, 8, 145, 211–12, 279–82 Alafuzov, V.A., 296, 320 Albania, 206, 274, 309, 321–4, 496n144 Aleksandrov, G.F., 115, 188, 211, 220–1, 247–8, 265, 268–9, 275, 279–80, 282, 191–3, 301, 303, 306–7, 310–12, 341, 421n254, 515n3 Alekseev, P., 120 Allilueva, S. See Stalina, S. All-Union Communist Party. See Communist Party All-Union Conference of Marxist Agrarians, 83 All-Union Organization of Cooperative Manufacturing, 136 America. See United States of America anarchists, 22, 36, 171 Andreev, A.A., 8, 50, 57, 106–7, 111, 121–2, 143, 149–50, 162, 164–6, 171, 176, 179, 189, 205, 211, 218, 253, 287, 297, 376n9 Andreev, E.E., 331 Andrianov, V.M., 268 annexations. See Soviet Union Anschluss, 170 anti-Semitism, 12, 69, 127, 205, 280, 290, 317–18, 320, 329, 522n40. See also Jews anti-Soviet agitation. See Great Terror, gulag, mgb, nkvd, penal system Antonov, A.I., 325 archival law. See archives archives, ix-x, xxii; of Communist Party, 343; contents of, xxiii; destruction of, xxii; of president (Kremlin), xxii; of Soviet government, 343; study of documents by author, xxiii, 343–4 Arctic, 258 Arctic Circle, 194, 204 aristocracy, 56–7, 127, 187 Arkhangel’skii, A.G., 46 army. See Red Army, tsarist army, White Army artisans, 52, 54, 57, 123–4 artists, 56, 212, 255–6, 270, 272 Arzamas, 89 Asaf’ev, B.V, 319 Astrakhan, 98 atheism, 19, 45, 164 atomic bomb, 262–3, 265–6, 278, 306, 447n27

Atovm’ian, 319 Attlee, Clement, 262–3 Atwood, M., 6 Austria, 170, 289, 302 automobile plant (in Nizhnii). See Molotov Works Avdeenko, A., 211–12, 221 Axis, 182, 206–7, 213, 219, 250, 289, 291 Babel’, I., 427–8n38 Badaev, G.F., 453n103, 516n5 Badaev Warehouses, 234, 237 Balakhna, 80 Baltic countries. See Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania Baltic-White Sea Canal, 132 Baranov, L.S., 309–25 Barents Sea, 28, 164 Bashkiria, 28, 164 Bashkortostan. See Bashkiria Battle of Britain, 210, 213 Battle of Moscow. See World War ii Bauman, K.Ia., 80–1, 107–8 bedniaks. See peasantry Beilis Affair, 216 Belarus’, 198–200, 210, 263, 274, 300, 337. See also Western Belarus’ Belarusyn, 200, 248 Beletskii, Z., 292 Beliakov, 137 Belinskii, V.G., 12 Belorussia. See Belarus’ Belorussian Communist Party, 198, 292. See also Iovchuk, Ponomarenko Belov, A.M., 333 Benediktov, I.A., 301, 327 Benes, Eduard, 128, 146 Beria, L.P., xxiv, 4, 8, 106–7, 130, 168, 174, 178–9, 181, 184, 189, 193, 198–9, 213–14, 218, 226–7, 232, 241, 250, 253, 256–7, 263–6, 268, 273–4, 278, 283–7, 289, 292, 298, 300, 304, 307–9, 316, 320, 324–7, 336 Beria, S.L., xxiv Berlin Blockade, 329 Berman, Y., 308, 329 Bernstein, Eduard, 326 Bessarabia, 185, 193, 197. See also Moldavian ssr Bezhetsk, 14 Bibles. See religion

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Index Biedermeier, 259 Big Three, 263. See also Potsdam Conference, Yalta Conference biology. See genetics Bironovshchina, 254 Bismarck, O. von, 222, 318 black market. See second economy Black Sea, 62, 123, 223, 264 Blitzkrieg, 198, 236 Blue Division, 243. See also Spain Boitsov, I.P., 285 Bol’shakov, I.G., 211, 295, 275, 440n208 Bol’shevik, 188, 248 Bolshevik insurrection, 7, 20–2, 53, 194, 289; in Petrograd and Moscow, 20, 36, 59; in Shadrinsk, 20–2; in Tver’, 20 Bolsheviks, x, xviii, xxi, 15, 17, 19–21, 23–5, 86, 128, 157, 183. See also Communist Party Bolshevik Untermenschen, 204 Bol’shoi Theatre, 167, 169, 178, 318 Bormann, M., 3 Borisov, S.B., xxiii bourgeoisie. See middle class Brandenberger, David, 143, 155 Brezhnev, L.I., 146 Brooks, Jeffrey, 262 Bubnov, A.S., 135, 143 Bucharest, 326–9 Budennyi, S.M., 155, 209, 226 Bühren. See Bironovshchina Bukharin, N.I., xxiv, 33, 38, 43, 58–60, 63, 67–8, 70, 72–3, 86, 111, 114, 141, 143, 147, 150, 158, 167, 169–70, 321 Bukharinites. See Bukharin, Rykov, Tomsky, Uglanov, Right Opposition, show trials Bulgakov, Mikhail, 212, 391n55 Bulganin, N.A., 8, 39, 50, 103, 108, 253, 268, 274, 316, 324–5, 327, 336 Bulgaria, 197, 206, 219, 290, 297, 309, 321, 323, 325 bureaucracy, 32, 34–5, 46, 54–5, 58, 60, 68–8, 86, 90, 130, 133–4, 136, 140, 146, 151, 153, 156, 180, 187, 217, 255–6, 295–6, 305, 329, 339–41 Bykin, 164 Cambridge University, xxii cannibalism, 237 capitalism, 7, 52–4, 79, 94, 142, 146, 150, 157–8, 169–71, 182–3, 186, 194,

567

262, 267, 288, 290, 294, 298, 306, 308, 312, 320 Caspian Sea, 17 Catherine the Great, 69 cattle, 52, 113, 171, 263, 284. See also agriculture, kolkhoz, kolkhoznik, peasantry Caucasus, 45, 123, 149, 223, 259, 288, 318 cc. See Central Committee cc Agitprop Administration. See Agitprop ccc. See Central Control Commission cc Cadres Administration, 187, 189, 190, 269, 272, 278, 312, 329, 343 cc departments, 109, 136, 166, 175, 188–9, 212, 245, 264, 331. See also cc Agitprop, cc Cadres Administration, cc Department of Checking Organs, cc Department of Foreign Policy, cc Orginstruktor department, cc Orgraspred department, cc orpo, cc Uchrasped department, cc Secretariat, Central Committee cc Department of Checking Organs, 273, 285, 331 cc dfp. See cc Department of Foreign Policy CC Department of Foreign Policy, x, xi, 245, 264–5, 269, 309, 325, 331 CC Orgbiuro, x, xxii, 37, 49, 64, 67, 76–7, 109, 112, 114, 165–6, 181, 190, 211, 268–9, 272–3, 275–6, 279–82, 301 CC Orginstruktor Department, xviii, 38, 41, 269, 273 CC Orgraspred Department, xi, xviii, 49 CC ORPO, xi, xv, 149, 152, 168, 189 CC OVP. See cc Department of Foreign Policy CC Politburo, xi, xv, xvi, xxii, 31, 38, 40, 47–8, 57, 63–4, 69, 102, 111, 114, 118, 165, 196, 212, 220, 261, 264, 274, 286, 295, 297, 312, 315–16, 318–19, 327, 330, 332, 343; camouflages power, 109–10; commissions of, 67, 80–1, 87, 109, 113, 118–19, 154, 175, 178–80, 199, 205–6, 215–16, 264, 286–7, 297, 304, 317, 320, 327, 337; composition of, 189, 217, 268, 324; and culture, 211; and dekulakization, 96; halts collectivization, 86–8; halts Great Terror, 178–9; importance of membership, 264; and industry, 71,

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90; number of decisions by, 109–10, 141; permits holidays, 222; planning, 71; role of, 67, 77, 105, 109, 126; and Zhdanov, 117. See also decision-making process CC Secretariat, xi, xv, xvi, xxii, 42, 49–50, 67, 102, 165, 190, 212, 218, 247, 264, 269, 273, 291, 293; organization of, 109, 186–9, 269, 273, 329–30; role of, 77, 273. See also cc Orgbiuro, cc Politburo, cc secretaries, Central Committee, decision-making process cc secretaries, 189, 264, 268–9, 307; division of tasks between, 109, 112, 114–16, 121–2, 170–1, 181, 190, 269; tasks of, 112, 114 CC Uchraspred, xviii, 37, 39 cec. See Central Executive Committee censorship, xii, 63, 125, 128, 166, 181, 194, 210, 235, 281–2, 303 census. See demography Central Asia, 263 Central Black Earth Region, 263, 284 Central Committee (of Communist Party), x, xv, xxii, 28, 34, 83, 92, 107, 124, 284, 311, 337; commissions of, 67, 87, 135; and collective farms, 73; and collectivization, 80–1; decrees of, 73, 117, 178–9, 181, 212, 226, 247, 263, 268, 272–3, 275–6, 279–82, 284–5, 287, 314, 316, 327–8; and Eighteenth Party Conference, 217; March 1948 letter, 325; meets as plenum, 67; membership of, 57, 60, 67, 299–300; and Great Terror, 166–7, 189; January 1935 letter, 126; July 1936 letter, 137; July 1947 letter, 305–6; political role of, 88, 105, 305. See also Central Committee plenary sessions, decision-making process, Higher Party School, L.M. Kaganovich, Kirov, A.A. Kuznetsov, Malenkov, cc Orgbiuro, cc Politburo, cc Secretariat, Shcherbakov, Stalin, Voznesensky, A.A. Zhdanov Central Committee plenary sessions, of April 1928, 64–5; of April 1929, 72; of December 1930, 93; of December 1935, 134; of December 1936, 143; of February 1934, 109; of February 1947, 287, 297–301; of February-March 1937, 122, 140, 149–54, 187; of January 1933, 100; of January 1938, 168,

187; of January 1944, 246; of July 1926, 60; of July 1928, 67; of June 1931, 97; of June 1934, 114; of June 1935, 128; of June 1936, 136; of June 1937, 159; of March 1939, 189; of May 1939, 192; of March 1940, 205; of March 1946, 267–8; of November 1929, 80; of November 1934, 108, 121; of October 1927, 63; of October 1937, 159–60, 165–6 Central Committee Secretariat. See cc Secretariat Central Control Commission, xi, xvi, 58, 60, 63–4, 72, 82, 100, 105, 114, 121, 134, 150, 190, 192 Central Executive Committee (of soviets), xi, 19, 32, 62, 64, 83, 88, 100–1, 109, 119, 128, 163. See also Supreme Soviet centralization. See Soviet Union central leadership. See Andreev, Beria, Bulganin, cc Orgbiuro, cc Politburo, cc Secretariat, cc Secretaries, Central Committee, decision-making process, Gorbachev, Gosplan, L.M. Kaganovich, Khrushchev, Kosygin, A.A. Kuznetsov, Lenin, Malenkov, Mikoian, ministries, Molotov, Patolichev, Sovmin, Sovnarkom, Stalin, Stalinists, Supreme Soviet, Suslov, Voznesensky, A.A. Zhdanov Central Powers, 22 Chaianov, A.V., 381n112 Chamberlain, Neville, 178 Chaplin, Charlie, 142 Cheboksary, 385n180 Chechens, 318, 479n118 Cheka. See mgb, nkvd Cherkasov, N., 299 Chernousov, B.N., 331 Chervenkov, V., 328 China, 191 chinovnik. See bureaucracy Chkalov, 137 Chubar’, V.Ia., 19, 49–50, 107 Chudov, M.S., 14, 26, 33, 35–7, 49–50, 57, 120–1, 127, 136–7, 159, 164–5, 171, 394n96, 411n79 Chuev, F., 8, 146, 344 Churaev, 331 church. See Orthodox church, religion Churchill, Winston, 101, 262, 267, 287, 290

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Index Chuvash, 91, 99, 385n180 cia, xvi Civil War, xvii, xviii, 7, 20, 23–5, 27–31, 33–4, 49, 53, 57, 59, 86, 125, 146, 155, 157, 183, 194, 202, 230, 251, 289, 341, 409n54. See also disease, famine, Red Army, White Armies Cold War, 5–7, 252, 256, 261, 263, 265–8, 270, 283, 288–9, 294, 302, 312–14, 328–9, 473n115 collaboration. See World War ii collective farms. See kolkhoz collectivization, xiv, 5, 7, 55, 62, 75, 84, 86, 146, 217, 337, 341, 344; degree of, 74, 78, 80–1, 85, 88, 95–6, 119, 124; and “dekulakization,” xi, xiv, 72–3, 75, 80–1, 83–6, 89, 95–6, 101, 146, 337; and dissolution of social fabric, 55, 73; eve of, 72; and factory workers, 81, 83, 187; failure of, 73–4, 88; and food shortages, 88; in Leningrad province, 124; in Nizhnii province, 74, 78, 80–1, 87–8, 124; perpetrators of, 81, 84, 86; preparation of, 63, 65, 67–8, 70; rationale for, 64, 73, 80, 172; role of coercion in, 77, 84, 86–7, 89, 93; and Stalin, 64, 67, 79; victims of, 86–7, 128, 337; violent resistance to, 81, 88, 95–6; and wrecking, 77, 82; and A.A. Zhdanov, 68, 77. See also agriculture, kolkhoz, kolkhozniki, kulaks, mts, peasantry, A.A. Zhdanov Cominform, xi, 218, 257, 274, 289, 308–10, 312–14, 321–2, 326–9, 342 Comintern, xi, 32, 59, 67, 104, 114, 131–2, 181, 188, 190, 198, 206, 211, 217–19, 243, 245, 250–1, 266, 302, 326 Committee for Artistic Affairs, 116, 169, 211–12, 318 Communism. See ideology, MarxismLeninism, Stalinism Communist Academy, 58, 188 Communist China. See People’s Republic of China Communist Parties of East-Central Europe (postwar), 302, 313–14, 320–3, 327–9 Communist Party (All-Union), xv, xvi, xviii, 141, 313; in Civil War, 27–31, 33; and collectivization, 83–4, 86, 89, 92;

569

and cooptation, 152; and corruption, 65, 98, 180, 290, 316; discipline of, 235, 290; discourse, 31, 254; formal democratic structure of, 60, 150–4, 313; and Great Terror, 98, 140, 147–8, 154, 157–8, 160, 168, 172, 187; and inner-Party elections, 150–4; keeping of records in, 129; and Leningrad Affair, 335; membership of, 44, 69, 141, 186, 270, 275–6; mindset, 157–8; and party unity, 151; peasant membership of, 68, 92, 187, 271; and peasantry, 55; primary Party organizations, 151, 157, 172, 214, 282, 296; and postwar role of veterans, 270; and purge of 1921, 34, 121; and purge of 1929, 68, 72, 74; and purge of 1933–35, 98, 129, 132, 134, 384n157; and purge of 1935–37, 134–7, 140–1; and religion, 45; and reorganization of 1939, 186–9; role of, 52, 269, 278, 288, 295, 315; and rotation of cadres, 37, 147–8; rules, 48, 114, 182, 186–9, 271, 297, 299, 311; set example, 66, 150; and secrecy, 166; supervise specialists, 94; trade-union discussion, 32–4; workers’ membership of, 53, 68, 275–6; in World War ii, 228. See also archives, bureaucracy, cc Politburo, Central Committee, Great Terror, ideology, Leningrad Communist Party provincial organization, MarxismLeninism, Nizhnii Novgorod Communist Party provincial organization, Orgbiuro, Party Congresses, Stalin, Tver’ Communist Party provincial organization, A.A. Zhdanov Communist Party (Russian), 40 Communist Party of Belgium, 302 Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. See Czechoslovak Communist Party Communist Party of Estonia, 208 Communist Party of Finland, 250–1, 260, 264, 297, 324 Communist Party of France, 302, 313–14, 320, 327–9, 342 Communist Party of Germany. See kpd, sed Communist Party of Italy, 302, 313–14, 320, 327–9, 342 Communist Youth League. See Komsomol composers, 135, 317–19

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concentration camps (German), xii concentration camps (Soviet). See gulag concerts, 318 Congress of Soviet Writers, 111, 113, 115–16, 135, 210–11, 254 conscription. See Red Army Constituent Assembly, xviii, 21, 23 constitution (rsfsr), 30 constitution (ussr), of 1936, 127, 130, 136, 143, 148, 150–1, 169, 211, 248, 271, 265 Constitutional Democrats. See Kadets construction. See industrialization, industrial production, industry consumer goods, 62, 124–5, 143, 184, 204, 256, 263 convicts. See gulag corrective labour camps. See gulag corrective labour colonies. See gulag corruption. See Communist Party cottage industry. See artisans Council of Labour and Defence. See sto Council of Ministers. See Sovmin, Sovnarkom, Sovminbiuro Council of People’s Commissars. See Sovmin, Sovnarkom, Sovminbiuro Courts of Honour, 267, 290, 295–7, 303–5, 311–12, 315–17, 319–20, 341–2, 489n39, 489n44 Counter-Reformation, 6 cpsu. See Communist Party crop cultivation. See agriculture, kolkhoz, kolkhozniki, collectivization, peasantry crime, non-political. See non-political crime, penal system crime, political. See Great Terror, gulag, nkvd, mgb, penal system Crimea, 335 Cubism, 135 cult of secrecy, 166, 255, 270, 278, 288, 293, 295–6, 304–5, 311–12, 315–17, 339 cultural campaigns (pre-war), 210–12, 280 cultural campaigns (postwar), 253, 278–82, 317–19, 341 Cultural Revolution, 56, 65, 75, 79, 91, 114, 253 Czechoslovak Communist Party, 175, 307, 324 Czechoslovakia, 128, 131, 175, 186, 193, 246, 290, 307, 309, 324

Czechoslovaks, 23–4, 28 Daladier, Edouard, 178 Danilov, V.P., 289 Danzig, 192 Davies, Sarah, 124–5, 209 death penalty. See penal system deathrate. See demography decision-making process, xxii, 4, 52, 66, 83, 109–10, 141, 156, 190, 213, 255, 257, 268, 274–7, 305, 307–9, 382n132, 388n16 defence, 155–6, 158, 181, 190; expenditure on, 125, 184, 204. See also Red Army, industry, Stalin, World War i, World War ii, A.A. Zhdanov Dekanozov, V.G., 207–8, 250, 289 Dekulakization. See collectivization, Great Terror, kulaks, peasantry demobilization. See Red Army demography, 124, 239, 263, 274, 285, 299. See also disease, famine, factory workers, health care, peasantry, World War ii Denikin, A.I., 31 Denmark, 206 deportations. See ethnic groups Depression, 94, 143, 158 Detroit, 76 D’aikov, 172 Diderot, Denis, 45 Dimitrov, G., 114, 131, 137, 147, 198, 206, 198, 206, 218–19, 243, 245, 321, 323, 325–6, 343 disease, 30, 33, 53, 274. See also Civil War, Leningrad siege distribution system, 95, 172, 298; flawed operation of, 95; and shortages, 95, 118–19, 124, 176, 184–5, 204, 283–4, 291. See also consumer goods Djilas, Milovan, 309, 317, 321–3 Dnipropetrovsk. See Ekaterinoslav doctors. See health care Doctors’ Plot, 336, 517n8 documents. See archives Donbas, 12, 65, 132, 279 Domskoi, V.A., 429n51 drinking, 54, 65, 68, 98, 259, 283 Dubrovsky, A., 155 Duclos, Jacques, 329 Dukel’skii, S.S., 188 Duma, xii, 17

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Index Dzerzhinsk (Rastiapino), 80, 103, 108 Dzerzhinskii, F.E., 36 East Asia, 263 Eastern Slavs, 248 Eastern European Communist states. See People’s Democracies economy, 62, 67, 71, 98, 124–5, 166, 184, 217. See also agriculture, consumer goods, capitalism, Depression, distribution system, Five-Year Plans, Gosplan, industrialization, industrial production, industry, nep edinonachal’e, xii, 77, 82, 151, 153. See also factory managers, industry education, 56, 67, 95, 172, 339; co-education, 256; of Communists, 135, 154, 270, 272, 275–6, 282; curriculum, 113–15, 130; of factory workers, 56, 130–1; general, 104, 113, 115, 130, 135, 176, 271; higher technical, 67; history textbooks, 113–14, 135, 143, 155; and illiteracy, 95; improvement in 1930s of, 114, 130–1; of Party cadres, 154, 272, 276; of Party history, 115, 154–5, 173–4, 271, 276; and patriotism, 113, 215; political, 104, 115, 130–1, 175, 190, 270, 272, 275–6, 282, 286; of “proletarians,” 67; quality of, 114–15; of Russian history, 115; and teachers, 68–9; tuition fees, 209; and A.A. Zhdanov, 67, 104, 130, 135, 143, 154–5, 173–4, 176, 398–9n173. See also agitprop, ideology, MarxismLeninism, propaganda, A.A. Zhdanov Egolin, A.M., 248, 279, 480n181 Egorov, P.I., 315, 330, 332–3 Eikhe, R.M., 107 Eisenstein, S., 212, 216, 281, 299, 319, 338 Ekaterinburg, 7, 17, 21, 23–5, 27, 29 Ekaterinoslav, 11–12 employment. See unemployment, factory workers enemies of the people. See Great Terror, gulag, nkvd, show trials, World War ii engineers, 55, 90, 217 Engels, Friedrich, xi, xii, xxiv, 248, 292 Enlightenment, 45, 247 Enukidze, A.S., 128–9 epidemics. See disease Erickson, John, 214

571

Esakov, Vladimir, 278, 288, 294 Estonia, 123, 142, 158, 169, 173, 197, 199–201, 204, 207–8, 210, 246, 249, 263, 274, 290–1 Estonian ssr, 207–8, 223, 516n5 ethnic groups, 83–4, 247, 318; deportation of, 232–3, 274, 291, 337 Extraordinary Eighth All-Union Congress of Soviets, 143–3, 189 Ezhovshchina. See Ezhov, Great Terror Ezhov, N.I., xii, xviii, xix, 8, 107, 119–22, 131, 134, 138–9, 149–50, 154, 159–6, 164–6, 170–1, 174–5, 178–9, 189, 192, 213–14, 255, 257, 423– 4n239 factory committees, 53 factory managers, 65, 77, 82, 90, 101, 151, 163, 217, 341. See also edinonachal’e, industry factory workers, 12, 22, 30, 35, 41, 53, 57, 167; absenteeism of, 52; adaptation of new workers to factory labour, 66; called up, 184; in capitalist world, 142; and collectivization, 81, 83; Communists among, 53, 187, 271, 276; drinking among, 54; housing situation, 53, 97, 124; increase in 1930s of, 91; lack of freedom of, 142; living conditions, 53, 82, 91–2, 97, 101, 124; in 1920s, 39–40, 44, 47, 63; in Nizhnii Novgorod, 39–40, 47; numbers in twenties of, 35; political mood, 53; postwar numbers of, 291; preferential treatment of, 56, 127, 130, 275; as ruling Soviet class, 41, 170, 178, 186–7, 271; skilled, 90, 184, 248; and Stakhanovism, 104, 132; and unemployment, 7, 33, 47, 53, 95; wages of, 53, 91, 97, 124, 204; workbooks of, 180; workdays, 209; workweek of, 209; in World War ii, 229, 236–7; xenophobia, 90. See also Central Committee, edinonachal’e, Five-Year Plans, Great Turn, industrialization, industrial production, industry, cc Politburo, Stalin, strikes, trade unions, A.A. Zhdanov Fadeev, A.A., 89, 188, 281, 303 familyness. See patronage networks famine, 143; of 1921–22, 33, 35; of 1932–33, 98–101, 117; of 1946–47,

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263, 283–8, 294, 298–9; in Civil War, 30; in World War ii, 237–9. See also Leningrad siege fascism, 104, 147, 169, 172, 186, 225, 249–50, 266, 282, 302–3, 320 fatherland, 227 fear. See N.I. Ezhov, gulag, nkvd, Russians, Stalin February Revolution, 7, 17, 53 Fediuninskii, I.I. 454n115 Fedoseev, P.N., 291, 460n224 feminism, 25 Figes, Orlando, 24, 29, 85 Filippov, 328 Film Committee under Sovnarkom, 188, 211 films, 65, 188, 210, 212, 215–16, 221, 254, 270, 276–6, 279–82, 299, 474n134 fil’tratsiia. See World War ii Finland, 142, 158, 169, 173, 175, 18, 193, 196–6, 200–6, 213, 222–3, 227, 248–51, 258, 260, 264, 289, 297, 302, 309, 315, 324. See also Winter War, A.A. Zhdanov Finnish Gulf, 207 Finns. See Finland. fishing, 124 Fitzpatrick, Sheila, 152–3 Five-Year Plans, 158; First, 7, 67, 71–2, 76–7, 90–1, 97–8, 100, 104, 108, 119, 124, 130; Fourth, 263, 274, 280, 286; Second, 98, 102, 108; Third, 182. Foitzik, Jan, 85 food rationing. See ration-card system For a Lasting Peace, For a People’s Democracy, 314, 328 Ford Motor Company, 383n146 forced labour. See gulag foreigners, 159, 170, 215, 255, 294–5 foreign policy. See Litvinov, Molotov, Soviet Union, Stalin, A.A. Zhdanov foreign travel, 113 forest industry, 87, 91, 97, 124. See also industry formalism, 135 France, 53, 131, 175, 186, 192–7, 206–7, 222, 247 Franco, Francisco, 262 French Revolution, 6, 110 Frinovskii, M.P., 189 Futurism, 135

Galler, L.M., 296, 320 Gamarnik, Ia.B., 157 Garin, V.N., 161, 167, 413n94 Gay, Peter, 46, 253 General Line, 48, 57, 59–60, 63, 68, 72. See also Stalin, A.A. Zhdanov General Staff. See Red Army, Stavka Genet, Jean, 306 genetics, 194–5, 300–1, 322–3, 325–9, 332–3 Georgia (Soviet), 16, 45, 166, 318 Gerasimov, A.M., 336 German-led invasion. See Germany, Hitler, Leningrad siege, Nazi Germany, World War ii German-occupied Europe, 223 German-Polish conflict, 192, 198 Germany, 47, 53, 125, 142, 158, 168–9, 173, 177, 185, 197, 203, 206–7, 213–14, 219, 223, 263, 266, 288–9, 302–3, 329. See also Battle of Moscow, Battle of Stalingrad, Berlin Blockade, Gestapo, Hitler, Jews, Leningrad siege, Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Nazi Germany, spd, kpd, sed, Ulbricht, Wehrmacht, World War ii Gestapo, 228 Gheorghiu-Dej, G., 329 Gibianskii, Leonid, 308 gko (pre-war), 208 gko (Second World War), xii, 190, 227–30, 232, 234, 241, 243, 263–6, 308 Glantz, David, 236, 242 Glasnost’, xii, 4 Glavlit. See censorship Gleiwitz, 202 Goebbels, J., 3 Goglidze, S.A., 179, 203 Goloshchekin, F., 27 Gomulka, W., 299, 308–9, 321, 325 Goncharov, A.I., 25 Gorbachev, M.S., xii Gorbatov, B., 89, 303 Gor’kii. See Nizhnii Novgorod Gor’kii, M., 39, 99, 116, 213, 254, 280 Gorkin, A.F., 14, 26, 28, 33–5, 37–8, 50, 57, 163–5, 168, 220 gorodki, 259 Gorshenin, 320 Gosplan, xii, xviii, 71, 77, 90, 92, 109, 113, 124–5, 167, 181, 263–4, 335

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Index Gouré, Leon, 229 government. See bureaucracy, Central Executive Committee, ministries, People’s Commissariats, soviets, Sovnarkom, sovmin, Supreme Soviet Govorov, L.A., 235, 241–2, 244, 246, 316 Goya, Francisco, 465n23 GPU. See nkvd grain. See agriculture Great Britain, 53, 192–7, 219, 222, 242, 250, 261–3, 266, 278, 290, 294, 296–7, 316, 328–9, 338 Great Patriotic War. See World War ii Great Terror, xii, xviii, 5, 7–8, 98, 104, 140–1, 147–82, 254, 339, 343–4, 387n3; and alleged plot, 137–8, 156; and arrests in 1935, 127; and common criminals, 163; and Communist Party, 140, 147, 154, 157; consequences of, 124, 175, 180, 185, 217, 326; cover-up of, 159, 173; end of, 178, 185, 210, 341; evidence for, 161; family members in, 161, 164; height of, 159–167; hysteria of, 162; justification of, 145–6, 153, 169–70; in Kazan, 163; and Komsomol, 162; in Leningrad province, 161, 164, 166, 172, 175; in Orenburg, 163–4; and patronage networks, 36, 49–50, 71, 98, 103, 161; perpetrators of, 152; possible reasons for, 142, 145–7, 152, 158, 187; and Red Army, 156–7; postwar image of, 312; and Soviet people, 147; unfolding of, 154; victims of, 141, 160, 163–5; and wreckers, 134, 147, 153, 157. See also Ezhov, gulag, Iagoda, nkvd, Molotov, mvd, oso, show trials, Stalin, troikas, A.A. Zhdanov Great Turn, xii, xiv, 7, 52, 56–7, 64–5, 75–6, 79–104. See also collectivization, industrialization, Five-Year Plans Greece, 206, 219, 222, 322, 324 Grigor’ian, 314 Gromov, P.P., 35–6 Groznyi, 252 GULag, xiii, 73, 84, 180, 291, 342; Aleksandrovsk prison, 317; arrests during collectivization, 84, 128; “criminal” and “politicial” convicts, 159; growth in 1930s, 73, 99, 159–60; informers, 317; and Katyn massacre, 199; kulaks in, 87, 96, 128, 159; and Lubianka,

573

134; at Moskva-Volga canal, 154; in Nizhnii province, 96, 99; postwar, 291, 303; for pows, 250, 291; prisons, 152, 179, 237; number of inmates, 291; sharashki, 303; Solovki camps, 57; special-regime camps, 317, 323, 342; Verkhne-Ural’sk prison, 317; Vladimir prison, 317; in war, 291. See also Beria, Ezhov, nkvd, penal system GUPPKA, xiii, 215, 221–2, 261 Gusev, D.N., 244, 246 Gus’kov, 41, 47 gymnasium, 13–14, 20, 56 handicrafts. See artisans Harriman, Averell, 264 harvest. See agriculture health care, 7, 69, 172, 256. See also disease Hegel, G.W., 247, 291, 338 Helsinki. See Finland Hess, R., 3, 444n276 Higher Party School, 20, 276 Higher School of Marxism-Leninism, 181 Hiroshima, 263 historiography, of the Soviet Union, xxi; Soviet, 3–4, 225, 247, 262; Western, 3–4, 9, 254. See also Stalin; A.A. Zhdanov History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Short Course), 17, 23, 115, 138, 154–5, 173–81, 187, 210, 253, 271 history textbooks. See education Hitler, A., 3–4, 6, 111, 122, 177–8, 184, 186, 192, 194, 197, 204–5, 214, 218, 222, 224, 227–8, 234–5, 237, 290, 318 Holbach, 45 Holy Synod, 11 hooliganism. See non-political crime horses. See agriculture, mts, Red Army hospitals. See health care housing, 97, 124. See also factory workers Hoxha, E., 322 Hungary, 193, 197, 206, 223, 249, 290, 297, 309 Huxley, Aldous, 6 Iagoda, G.G., 119–20, 138–9, 153–4, 170 Iakovlev, Ia.A., 107, 385n186 Iaroslavskii, E., 154–5, 173, 175, 177 Iartsev, V.V., 423n238

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Ice Road. See Lake Ladoga idealtypus, 6 ideinost’. See Socialist Realism ideology (Communist), xix, 3, 45–6, 190, 222, 260, 283, 286; anti-Western nature of, 180–2, 288, 293–5, 303, 305–7, 310–14, 317, 341; atheism of, 45; and image of enemies, 116, 183, 194, 222, 267–8, 318; ideals of, 5, 43, 52, 62, 79, 80, 84, 212, 270, 279, 282, 298; postwar lack of enthusiasm for, 282–3, 317, 339; postwar offensive of, xix, 5, 253–6, 260, 268–83, 288, 290, 293, 315, 339, 341–2; postwar state of, 270–1; role in modern societies, 3; and spies, 157–8; and Stalin, 79, 157, 176–8, 283; and A.A. Zhdanov, xix, 79, 175, 190, 253–4, 260, 277, 283. See also agitprop, Aleksandrov, kr Affair, Malenkov, Marxism-Leninism, propaganda, Shcherbakov, Shepilov, Stalin, Stalinism, Suslov, A.A. Zhdanov Il’ichev, L.F., 188, 366 Il’in, 148 illiteracy, 54, 91, 95. See also education indoctrination. See agitprop, ideology, propaganda industrialization, 5, 6, 12, 52, 59, 62, 67, 75–6, 217, 223, 298; in 1930s, 76, 90; and fluctuation of labour force, 95, 97, 100, 124–5; investment in 1930s in, 91; in Nizhnii Novgorod krai, 81; and labour discipline, 124, 180; shortcomings of, 90, 95; under Stalin, 79, 123, 142; under tsar, 12, 16; and “wreckers,” 38, 90, 134, 158. See also Central Committee, edinonachal’e, factory workers, Five-Year Plans, Great Turn, industrial production, industry, Ordzhonikidze, Politburo, Stalin, A.A. Zhdanov industrial managers. See factory managers Industrial Party, 94, 381n112 industrial production, 119, 125, 132, 184, 204, 223, 241; of defence industry, 62, 125, 184, 204, 235, 237, 263; of consumer goods, 125, 184, 204; in Five-Year Plans, 71, 77, 81, 263; of industrial machinery, 91, 102, 125, 204, 263; in Nizhnii Novgorod, 52, 77, 91, 102; and plan fulfillment, 81, 100, 119; 1930s growth, 142, 223; and sta-

tistics, 90; stoppages, 184, 241. See also Central Committee, consumer goods, edinonachal’e, factory workers, FiveYear Plans, Great Turn, industrialization, industry, Leningrad province, Ordzhonikidze, Politburo, Stalin, A.A. Zhdanov industrial specialists. See spetsy industrial workers. See factory workers industry, xv, xix, 120, 248; accidents in, 158; aircraft industry, 264, 272; chemical, 108, 125; defence, 108, 263; electricity generation, 52; forest, 87; investment in, 81, 95; labour force, 35, 95–6; and lack of supplies 90, 95, 99, 184, 241; in Leningrad, 248; light, 125, 139, 263; mining, 96; in Nizhnii Novgorod, 51, 81; planning for, 35, 71; radio manufacturing, 52; and Stakhanovism, 132–4, 139. See also defence, factory workers, Five-Year Plans, Gosplan, industrialization, industrial production, spetsy, sto, vsnkh Ingermanland, 250 Ingushetians, 318, 479n179 Inner Circle. See Stalin, Stalinists Institute of Global Economy and World Politics, 310 Institute of History, 247 Institute of History, Philosophy, and Literature, 188 Institute of Party History, 155 Institute of Philosophy, 188, 291–3 Institute of Red Professors, 155, 188, 247 Intelligentsia, xiii, xvi, 12, 22, 25, 41, 56–7, 130, 178, 186–7, 255–6, 271, 283, 288, 295, 303, 311–12, 325, 339; in Communist Party, 187, 271, 295; composition of, 130; in countryside, 68–9; definition of, xiii, 56, 178, 186–7; and Great Terror, 178; role of, 271, 286; treatment by Communists, 56, 178 Iovchuk, M.T., 248, 291–3, 460n224 Iran, 265, 289 Irklis, 172 Iron Curtain, 267 Isakov, I.S., 232, 235 Isanchurin, 164 Iset’, 17

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Index Iset’ (newspaper), 19 Ishchenko, A.G., 48, 63, 70, 104 Islam, 54, 57, 164 Israel, 290, 521n39 Italy, 131, 168, 177, 203, 206, 213, 219, 297 Iudin, P.F., 103, 188–9, 247–8, 292, 314, 325, 328 Ivanov, V.N., 453n103 Ivanovo-Voznesensk, 185 Ivan the Terrible, 216, 281, 299 Izhevsk, 72, 82 Izvestiia, 192, 223 Japan, 53, 163, 168, 181, 192, 203, 213, 219; military conflict with, 191–2, 261, 263–4 Jewish Anti-Fascist Council, 297 Jews, 12, 127, 192, 200, 290, 331, 521–2n39 Joravsky, David, 325 judges. See penal system judiciary. See penal system justice. See penal system Kadets, 56, 127 Kaftanov, S.V., 265, 460n224 Kaganovich, L.M., xxiii, 4, 8, 38–42, 50, 57–60, 75, 98, 103, 106, 111–18, 121–2, 130, 143, 150, 153, 161–2, 164–5, 171, 176, 181, 189, 193, 196, 226, 253, 257, 261, 287, 300, 316, 324–5, 327, 340, 343 Kaganovich, M.M., 39, 41, 44, 59, 103, 105, 387n208, 417n136 Kaganovich, Iu.M., 39, 41–2, 50, 59, 103, 161, 165, 168, 364n103, 417n136 Kaganovich brothers, 39, 44 Kalinin. See Tver’ Kalinin, M.I., 8, 50, 57, 106–7, 114, 163, 176, 189, 253, 261, 268, 315, 478n172 Kalmyks, 274 Kamchatka, 316 Kamenev, L.B., xxiv, 38, 48–9, 58–61, 64, 70, 120, 128, 137–9 Kamennyi island, 123 Kamenskii, G.N., 80–1 Kampov, B.N. See Polevoi. Kapranov, 285 Kapustin, Ia.F., 219, 235, 444n268, 516n5

575

Kardelj, E., 323 Karelia, 132, 249 Karelians, 201 Karpov, G.G., 424n244 Katyn massacre, 199 Kazakhstan, 87, 99–100, 247, 263 Kazan, 163–4, 180, 337 Kedrov, B.M., 292, 307 Kekkonen, Uhro, 264 Kennan, George, 266 Kershaw, Ian, 60, 122 Kerzhentsev, P., 116, 135, 169, 401n210 kgb. See nkvd Khachaturian, Aram, 318–19 Khlevniuk, Oleg, 4, 289 Khozin, M.S., 236, 238, 240–2 Khrapchenko, M.B., 211, 265, 318 Khrennikov, T.N., 319 Khrushchev, N.S., xxiv, 4, 8, 106–8, 119–22, 146, 165, 168, 176, 189, 198, 253, 256–7, 259, 261, 273, 287, 292, 300, 316–17, 338, 340, 344 Khrushchev, S.N., xxiv khutor, 55 Khvostov, 259 Kiev, 148, 216 Kingisepp, 232 Kirov, S.M., 3–4, 7–8, 50, 57, 98, 102–3, 105–6, 111, 114–15; murder of, 119–23, 127–9, 136–7, 145, 158, 173, 393n84 Kirov Works, 134, 162–3, 217 Kiselev, A.A., 198 Klaipeda, 186 Klement’ev, N.N., 226, 232 Kliueva, Nina. See kr Affair Knight, Amy, 4 knizhki, xiii, xxiii, 110–11, 257, 294, 346n11, 466–7n32 Knorin, V.G., 131, 154–5 KO, xii, xiii, xviii, 155–6, 219, 221 Kodatskii, I.F., 120, 148–9, 153, 159, 171 Kola Peninsula, 123 Kolarov, 323, 325 Kolchak, Admiral, 28 kolkhoz, xiii, 72, 78, 172, 284–5, 298, 317; chairs, 83, 172, 284, 287, 341; charter, 84, 124, 128, 286; condition of, 100, 124, 284; early organization of, 72, 78, 82–3; labour force, 100; lands used for private farming, 284–5; and manual labour, 172; in Nizhnii

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province, 101; numbers of, 68; pilfering at, 99; receive preferential treatment, 89; and trudoden’, xviii, 284, 298; unpopularity of, 88, 92, 171–2, 193, 317; and A.A. Zhdanov, 99. See also agriculture, cattle, collectivization, demography, kolkhozniki, kulaks, mgb, mts, nkvd, peasantry, Stalin kolkhoz chairs. See kolkhoz, collectivization kolkhozniki, 85, 117, 128, 133, 171–2, 193, 230, 284–6, 323, 328, 341 Kolonitskii, Boris, 85 Komarov, 159 Komissarov, 41, 44, 77 Komsomol, xiii, xv, xix, 54, 98, 114; and collectivization, 86; criticized in 1937, 162; and Cultural Revolution, 65–6, 95; and Great Terror, 162, 166, 172, 178–80, 337; and Young Pioneers, 95; and A.A. Zhdanov, 77, 179 Kondrat’ev, N.D., 95, 381n112 Konev, I.S., 59, 103, 429n51 Kopelev, Lev, 303 Korcheva, 12–13 Korean War, 321 Korniets, L.R., 198 Kosarev, A.V., 119–20, 168, 179 Kosior, S., 50, 107, 150–1 Kostov, T., 323, 328–9 Kostyrchenko, Gennadii, 255 Kosygin, A.N., 165, 167, 217, 220, 229, 232, 268, 282, 316, 418n153 Kotkin, Stephen, xxiii Kovalev, 270–1 Kozelev, 41 KPD, xiii, 194, 223, 266, 338 kr Affair, 277–9, 288, 294–5, 297, 304–6, 316, 341 Krementsov, Nikolai, 295 Kremlin Archive. See archives Krest’ianin i rabochii, 22 Kresty Prison. See nkvd Krinitskii, A.I., 14, 20, 26, 93, 129–30, 162, 165, 398n166 Krivoi Rog, 12 Kronshtadt, 170 Kronshtadt Revolt, 33, 146 Kruglov, S.N., 265, 274, 283–4, 287, 298, 304, 316–17, 320, 328, 424n244, 472n96 Krupskaya, N.K., 20, 168

Kruzhkov, V.S., 148, 191, 336, 224n460, 515n3 Kubatkin, P.N., 232, 237, 239, 241, 516n5 Kubiak, N.A., 39 Kuibyshev, V.V., 50, 67, 107, 113 Kuibyshev region, 168, 276 Kulaks, xiv, 54–5, 57, 66, 68–9, 72–4, 76–8, 80, 82–4, 87–9, 92, 94–5, 100–1, 128, 154, 160–1, 163, 170, 187. See also collectivization, gulag, kolkhoz, peasantry Kulik, G.I., 209, 215–16, 231, 235 Kul’tura i zhizn’, 275–6 Kul’turnyi, xiv, xxiv Kumchenok, 173 Kurchatov, I.V., 265 Kurgan, 17, 74 Kursk, 276, 284 Kutuzov, 262 Kuusinen, O., 201–2, 245 Kuzakov, K.S., 312 Kuznetsov, A.A., 166–7, 172–4, 217, 219–20, 226–7, 232–3, 235, 237, 239, 241, 243, 246, 256, 258, 268–9, 272–3, 277, 282, 287, 291–2, 296, 311–12, 315–16, 331, 333, 335–6 Kuznetsov, A.N., 336, 417n137 Kuznetsov, N.G., 184, 191–2, 196, 202, 219–22, 226, 232, 267, 296, 316, 320 Kuznetsov, V.V., 268 kv tanks, 235 labour camps. See gulag labour force. See collective farms, factory workers, Five-Year Plans, industrialization, industry labour discipline. See factory workers, industrialization, industry labour laws, 124–5 Labour Peasant Party, 94–5, 381n112 Lake Ladoga, 234, 236–7, 244, 249 Lake Onega, 249 landowners, 57 Latvia, 123, 142, 169, 172–3, 193, 197, 199–201, 204, 207–8, 210, 246, 249, 263, 274, 290–1, 337 Lavrent’ev, A.I., 324, 328 Law of 7 August 1932, 99, 101, 128 Law of 1 December 1934, 119 Laws. See Supreme Soviet League of Nations, 117, 131, 203

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Index Lebedev, P.I., 319 Left Opposition, 58–61, 63–4, 70, 92, 138–9, 147–8, 154, 171 Lenin, V.I., xxi, xxiv, 4–7, 12, 15, 17–19, 21, 25, 32–3, 37, 43–6, 48, 58, 95, 111, 143, 146, 176, 183, 244, 247, 271, 388n9 Lenin cult, 48, 169 Lenin enrolment, 48, 51 Lenin’s succession, 59, 158, 174. See also Bukharin, Kamenev, Trotsky, Stalin, Zinoviev Leningrad, 8, 13, 17–19, 25, 102, 119, 123–4, 130, 158, 203, 209, 228–9, 234, 246, 248, 251 Leningrad. See A.A. Zhdanov Leningrad Affair, 8–9, 180, 273, 297, 335–6, 516–17n5 Leningrad Centre, 126. See also Left Opposition, Zinoviev Leningrad Communist Party city organization, 173, 182, 206 Leningrad Communist Party provincial organization, 39, 44, 49, 51, 59, 102, 120–2, 126, 135, 157, 165, 182, 186–7, 205–6, 258, 335, 337, 343 Leningrad Defence Council. See lko Leningrad famine. See famine, Leningrad siege Leningrad gorispolkom, 132, 148, 238–9, 246 Leningrad gorkom, 121, 132, 136, 138, 256, 166, 170–2, 182, 203, 214, 239, 243, 248 Leningrad Military District. See lvo Leningrad obkom, 121, 135–7, 157, 166, 171–2, 174, 182, 214, 217, 248, 258 Leningrad obkombiuro, 148, 161, 246 Leningrad oblispolkom, 228 Leningrad province, 123–5, 184, 207, 248 Leningrad siege, 225, 227–9, 231–46, 249; climate, 237–8; and famine, 229, 231, 233–9. See also A.A. Kuznetsov, Popkov, Voroshilov, Stalin, World War ii, A.A. Zhdanov Leningradskaia Pravda, 301. See also A.A. Zhdanov Leninism. See Marxism-Leninism Lenoe, Matthew, 43 Leonhard, Wolfganag, 336 Leont’ev, L.A., 441n219

577

Leonov, Leonid, 211 Lepa, A.K., 77, 103, 161, 165, 415n114 Levin, L.G., 407n19 Levina, Elena, 322, 333 Liadov, M.N., 41 Libava (Liepaja), 221 Library of Congress, xxii Lieven, Dominic, 177, 341 Likharev, 279 Lishentsy, xiv, 54–5, 127 Literaturnaia gazeta, 171, 303, 322, 325 Literary criticism, 270–1 literature, 65, 115–16, 135, 171, 211–12, 215, 254, 259, 270, 276, 279–82 Lithuania, 142, 186, 193, 197, 199–201, 204, 207–8, 210, 246, 248–9, 263, 274, 290–1, 337 Litvin, M.I., 167, 175, 179 Litvinov, M.M., 107, 168, 175, 192–3, 197 Liubimov, A.V., 316 Living Orthodox church. See Orthodoxy LKO, xiv, 227, 229, 232 Lominadze, V.V., 94 Long Telegram, 266 Low Countries, 206 Lozovskii, S.A., 33, 211 Lubianka Central Prison. See gulag, nkvd Luga, 232 Lukes, Igor, 175 Lukov, Leonid, 279 Lunacharskii, A.V., 67 Lur’e, N., 137 L’viv (L’vov, Lwow), 199 LVO, xiv, 155, 185, 199, 201–2, 207, 210, 226 Lysenko, T.D., 194–5, 300–1, 322–3, 325–8, 332–3 Lysenkoism. See agitprop, agriculture, genetics, Lysenko, Marxism-Leninism, Michurin, Stalin, Vavilov, A.A. Zhdanov, Iu.A. Zhdanov Lyskovo, 103 Maiskii, I., 300 Makarov, N.P., 381n112 Malenkov, A.G., xxiv, 233 Malenkov, G.M., xxiii-iv, 4, 8–9, 106–8, 115, 130, 149, 162, 164, 168, 178–82, 193, 198, 205–6, 209, 217, 220–2, 226–7, 232–8, 244, 248, 253–7, 262,

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264–9, 272, 279–80, 282, 286–9, 292, 300–1, 307–9, 312, 314, 316, 321, 323–30, 335–6, 340, 343; as cc secretary, 189–90, 211, 218, 268, 273, 330–1 managers. See factory managers Manchuria, 263 Manhattan Project. See atomic bomb Mandelshtam, Osip, 104 Mannerheim, Carl Gustav, 249–50, 258 Manuilskii, D.Z., 131, 198, 206 Mao Tse-tung (Mao Zedong), 3 Mariupol’, 11–12 Marshall, George, 307 Marshall Plan, 305, 307–8, 312 Martov, Iulii, 19 Marx, Karl, xi, xxi, xxiv, 5, 55, 57, 146, 247, 271, 291–3, 344 Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute, 188 Marxism, 5, 14, 43, 53, 79, 115, 293, 306, 308, 310–11, 338. See also Marxism-Leninism, Stalinism Marxism-Leninism, 5, 7, 43, 111, 174, 255, 291–2, 298, 323, 338; belief in, 125, 282, 302; and “cult of personality,” 176–8; ideals of, 7, 45–6, 52–3, 79–80, 84–5, 146, 177–8, 212, 270–1, 310, 324; morality of, 85; and philosophy, 188, 291–2, 306; postwar lack of enthusiasm for, xix, 282; postwar study of, 255; and Short Course, 174–80; view of history, xxi, 146; and violence, 27; and war, 194; worldview of, 24, 42, 183, 194; and World War ii, 183. See also ideology, Stalinism Mednoe, 199 Medved, F.D., 120 Medvedev, Roy, 4 Meissner, Boris, 3 Mekhlis, L.Z., 113, 166, 189, 199, 209, 226, 237, 268, 280, 287, 303, 316 Mendel, G., 194, 300 Mensheviks, xiv, 17, 19, 22, 30, 36, 40, 47, 54, 94, 127, 172, 326 Meretskov, K., 185, 202, 205, 209, 216, 226, 235, 238, 241, 244 Merkulov, V.N., 265, 273 Meshchanstvo. See middle class, kul’turnyi Mettrie, La, 45 Meyerhold, V., 169, 401n209 MGB, xiv, xv, xxii, 213, 216, 262, 264,

273, 278, 285, 294, 312, 315, 317, 320, 337. See also Abakumov, smersh Miaskovskii, Nikolai, 318 Michels, Robert, 356n49 Michurin, 195, 327 Michurinite biology. See genetics, Lysenko, Michurin, Iu.A. Zhdanov MID, xiv, xv, xxii, 168, 192, 198, 265, 288 middle class, 6, 53, 55, 57, 66, 77, 147, 187, 260, 318 middle peasants. See peasantry Mikhailov, M.E., 160 Mikhailov, N.A., 189, 268 Mikhoels, S., 255, 320 Mikoian, A.I., 4, 37–9, 42, 50, 57, 103, 107, 132, 135, 143, 150, 166, 175, 181, 189, 193, 196, 205, 213, 222, 231, 253, 257, 259, 261, 264–5, 267, 278, 286, 289, 292, 302, 307–8, 316, 324–5, 327, 343 military. See defence, Red Army, Red Navy Military-Political Academy, 276 Military Tribunal. See Supreme Court militsiia. See nkvd Minc, Hilary, 299, 321 mining. See industry Ministry of Defence, xxii, 157, 216, 222, 226, 243, 324 Ministry of Education, 67, 135 Ministry of Foreign Affairs. See mid Ministry of Health, 277, 295–6 Ministry of Justice. See penal system Ministry of State Security. See mgb ministries, 295, 303 Minsk, 320 Mirovoe khoziaistvo i mirovaia politika, 310 Mishakova, O.P., 422n248 Miterev, G., 277, 288, 294 Mitin, M.B., 188–9, 194–5, 247–8, 291–2, 322, 325–7 model statute. See kolkhoz modernization. See collectivization, Cultural Revolution, Great Turn, industrialization, Soviet Union Moldavian ssr, 210, 337 Molotov, V.M., 4, 8, 39, 47, 50, 57–8, 60, 67–8, 75, 87, 89–90, 98, 101, 103, 106–10, 114, 117–20, 135, 143, 146, 149–50, 153–4, 161, 164–5, 171, 175–82, 184, 186, 188–93, 196–8, 200–8, 210, 213–14, 220, 226–7,

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Page 579

Index 232–5, 240–1, 244, 250, 253–9, 261, 264–6, 273–5, 278, 284–90, 194, 198–300, 302–4, 307–11, 315, 320–7, 338, 340, 344 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, 195–200, 223, 225, 227 Molotov Works (Nizhnii), 71, 76, 90, 95, 97, 99–100, 102, 108 monarchists, 56, 127 monetary reform, 316 Mordovians (Mordvi), 91 Morgan, T.H., 300 Morozov, Pavlik, 95 Morozov textile plant, 35–6 Moscow (city of), 8, 13, 37, 51, 99, 102–3, 130; Moscow Communist Party organization, 44, 49, 51, 59, 68, 70, 121–2, 165, 220, 261 Moscow meeting of 1947, 301–2 Moscow metro, 143 Moscow News, 332 Moscow Polytechnical Museum, 325 Moscow Theological Academy, 11 Moscow Trials. See show trials Moskva-Volga Canal, 154 Moskvin, I.M., 14, 26, 38, 49 Motherland, 227 Mozart, W.A., 259 MTS, 73, 117, 119, 298. See also agriculture, collectivization, famine, kolkhoz, kolkhozniki, peasantry Mukhina, V., 6 Munich Agreement, 178, 185–6, 193–4 Muradeli, Vano, 318–19 Muralov, A.I., 46–8, 64, 103, 165 Muralov, N.I., 61, 64 Murmansk, 123, 132, 143–4, 335 music, 215, 317–19. See also composers, concerts Mussolini, B., 178, 218 MVD. See nkvd Nagasaki, 263 Nakhodka, 181, 191–2 Napoleonic Era, 6, 246 narod. See Russians narodnoe opolchenie. See opolchenie narodnost’. See Socialist Realism Nation, R. Craig, 312–13 nationalism, 6, 160, 172. See also Russian nationalism, Soviet patriotism

579

natural calamities, 263 Navy. See Red Navy Nazi Germany, 3, 6, 122, 131, 142, 175, 177–8, 184, 192–4, 202, 206, 217, 219. See also Germany, Hitler Nekrasov, Nikolai, 280 NEP, xiv, 35, 48, 52, 60, 65 Nepmen, 57, 77 Neva River, 233, 240 Nevskii, I.A., 31–4, 165 New Economic Policy. See nep. New Order, 218 newspapers, 49, 90, 162, 166, 215, 276. See also agitprop, censorship; Nizhegorodskaia kommuna, Leningradskaia Pravda, Pravda, propaganda, Tverskaia Pravda Nicolaevsky, B., 9, 343, 478n166 Nikishev, D.N., 226 Nikolaev, L., 119–20, 129 Nikolaevskii Railroad. See October Railroad Nizhegorodskaia kommuna, ix, xxii, 42, 48–9, 71, 81 Nizhnii Novgorod (city), 7–8, 13, 20, 38–9, 51, 99 Nizhnii Novgorod Communist Party city organization, 52, 61, 80 Nizhnii Novgorod Communist Party provincial organization, 38–40, 42, 44, 49, 51, 58–9, 69–70, 76, 91–2, 99, 102–3, 165, 188, 335, 343; criticized by Left Opposition, 59–60, 70; support for opposition among, 60–1, 104 Nizhnii Novgorod fair, 51–2 Nizhnii Novgorod gubispolkom, 46–7, 69 Nizhnii Novgorod gubkom, 41, 44, 47, 59, 71–2, 74, 103 Nizhnii Novgorod gubkombiuro, 41–2, 45, 47, 49, 52, 71 Nizhnii Novgorod kraikom, 77, 79–80, 83, 86, 89, 92, 94, 96–7, 100, 103 Nizhnii Novgorod kraikombiuro, 77–8, 80–1, 84–5, 89, 92, 102–3 Nizhnii Novgorod province, 51–2, 69, 72, 76, 87, 92, 101–2, 108 Nizovstev, P.L., 164 NKGB. See mgb NKID. See mid nkiu. See Ministry of Justice NKVD, xi-xv, xxii, 35–6, 52, 54, 139, 167, 213, 273, 285–8, 312, 315, 317, 337;

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580

Index

in 1934, 139; in archives, xxii; arrests after Kirov murder, 120, 126; in Civil War, 30; and collectivization, 73, 78, 82, 84, 86–7, 89; in eastern Poland, 200; fear of, 227, 283; and fil’tratsiia, xii, 291; firing squads, 152; and foreign intelligence, 198; and Great Terror, 138–41, 149, 152, 160, 162, 167, 178–9, 192; and industrialization, 90; invents conspiracies, 90, 156; and Katyn massacre, 199; Kresty Prison, 156; in Leningrad, 126, 157, 161, 232, 239; at Liteiny 4, 161; at Lubianka, 143, 156, 226; and mass arrests, 101, 141, 147, 160–3, 170, 179; and militsiia, xiv, 55; in Nizhnii province, 47, 52–3, 77; and “political vigilance,” 150; and rehabilitations, 192, 337; reports in 1920s, 48, 53, 55–6, 68–9, 368–9n18; reports in 1930s, 88, 98; reports to Politburo, 67; splits, 216; and Stalin, 153; survey political mood, 283; and torture, 216; wartime searchand-destroy units, 4; in World War ii, 230–3, 239. See also archives, Beria, Ezhov, Dzerzhinskii, Goglidze, gulag, Kruglov, Litvin, Merkulov, mgb, penal system, oso, Stalin, Yagoda, Zakovskii, A.A. Zhdanov nomenklatura, xv, xviii, 152, 327 non-political crime, 54, 75, 94, 100, 126, 160–1, 163, 170, 185, 203, 283, 291, 298, 316–17; anti-crime offensives, 126–7, 160, 304; survival under Stalin of, 283; in wartime, 233 Normanist Theory, 248 Northern region, 87 Norway, 205–6 Novgorod, 123, 229, 232 Novgorod-Volynskii, 199 Novikov, A.A., 272, 452n91 Novyi Mir, 270, 304 Nuremberg Trials, 199 Oblomov, 25 Obolenskii (Osinskii), 113 October Railroad, 13, 232, 242, 246 October Revolution. See Bolshevik insurrection Octobrists, 127 Odessa Military District, 205, 320 OGPU. See nkvd

oil, 51 Oka River, 51 Old Belief, xv, 57, 370n38 opolchenie, xiv, 229, 231, 235 opros-voting, xv, 64, 110, 388n16 Ordzhonikidze, G.K., 4, 50, 57, 97, 107, 114, 143, 149–50 Orel, 284 Orenburg, 163–4, 180, 190, 337 Orlov, A.L., 285 Orgbiuro. See cc Orgbiuro Orthodox church, 11–14, 56–7, 127, 227, 424n244; and True Orthodox church, 56–7, 370n36. See also Holy Synod, religion Orwell, G., 5–6, 44 Os’mov, N.M., 82 OSO, xv, xvi, 126, 214, 337 Osobye papki, xvi, 213 OSS, xvi, 278 Ossetians, 318 Ostrovitianov, K.V., 310, 441n219 Ots, K., 401n206, 409n47 Ottoman Empire, 341 Ovcharov, 325 ovp. See cc Department of Foreign Policy Paasikivi, J.K., 264 Pakhomov, N.I., 64–5, 69, 71–2, 77, 81, 83, 97, 101, 103, 386–7n204 Pankrat’ev, M.I., 214 Pankratova, A.M., 247 Pares, B., 8 Parin, V.V., 278, 288, 295, 297, 316, 341 partisans. See World War ii Partiinaia zhizn’, 282 Partiinoe stroitel’stvo, 261, 266, 282 partiinost’. See Socialist Realism Party Conferences (All-Union), Eighteenth, 214; Fifteenth, 60; Fourteenth, 59; Seventeenth, 97–8; Sixteenth, 72–4; Thirteenth, 48 Party Congresses (All-Union), Eighteenth, 8, 177, 181–2, 186, 189, 191, 210, 223, 270, 275; Fifteenth, 64; Fourteenth, 59–60; Ninth, 31; questions about next convocation of, 297, 299; Seventeenth, 7, 102–3, 106–7; Sixteenth, 92, 102; Sixth, 19; Tenth, xiv, 33–4; Thirteenth, 49; Twelfth, 44 Party Control Commission. See Central Control Commission

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Page 581

Index passports, 100 Pasternak, Boris, 212 pastoral farming. See agriculture, kolkhoz, collectivization, peasantry Patolichev, N.S., 103, 268, 273, 277, 284–5, 287, 291, 472n94 patronage networks, 25–6, 33–8, 49–50, 71–2, 98, 151, 165, 179, 188, 256, 310–11, 335, 343, 473–4n127 Päts, K., 207–8 Pauker, K.V., 120 Pavlenko, P.A., 188 Pavlov, D.G., 209, 228 Peace of Brest-Litovsk, 23 peasantry, xiv, 22, 57, 64, 67; and alcohol distillation, 54; attitude towards authorities, 22, 54, 61–2, 69, 73, 101; attitude towards collectivization, 73–4, 81, 84–5, 87; as basic Soviet class, 170, 178, 186–7; in Civil War, 29; Communist policy towards, 70, 73–4, 337; and Communist party membership, 54, 187; generational conflict among, 55; and grain requisitions, 29, 34, 55, 69; in Great Terror, 172; and individual farming after 1930, 89, 100, 172, 193; and khutors, 55; and “kulaks,” 54–5; landless peasants (batraks), 55, 83; middle peasants (seredniaks), 55, 72, 83; norms and values of, 55, 61–2; and passports, 100; poor peasants (bedniaks), 22, 55, 83; and religion, 54; revolts in 1920–21, 33–4, 146; and shkod, xvii, 55; slaughter livestock, 82, 93; and sr, xvii, 22; voting rights, 55; work outside agriculture of, 54. See also agriculture, kolkhoz, kolkhozniki, kulaks, collectivization, Russians Pegov, N.M., 191, 429n51 penal system, 99, 101, 296; and death penalty, 304; courts, 101, 317, 342; state prosecutors, 78, 160, 179, 213–24. See also Great Terror, Law of 7 August 1932, Law of 1 December 1934, gulag, nkvd, oso, Supreme Court, Vyshinsky People’s Commissariat of Agriculture. See agriculture People’s Commissariat of Defence. See Ministry of Defence People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment. See Ministry of Education

581

People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs. See mid People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs. See nkvd People’s Commissariat of Justice. See Ministry of Justice People’s Commissariat of the Navy, 216, 267, 296–7. See also Frinovskii, N.G. Kuznetsov, A.A. Zhdanov People’s Commissariat of State Control, 210 People’s Commissariat of State Security. See mgb People’s Democracies, 250–1, 260, 267, 307, 309, 321–2 Peredvizhniki, xvi, 213 Perm, 17, 28–9 Perrie, Maureen, 113, 155 Persian Front, 17 personal cattle. See kolkhoz personal plot. See kolkhoz Pessi, Ville, 324 Petrograd. See Leningrad. Petrov (Nizhnii), 41 Petrov (trade), 316 Petrovskii, A.N., 416n133 Petrovskii, P.G., 35, 375n148 Petrovsko-Razumovskii Agricultural Academy, 15, 22, 301 petty bourgeois. See kul’turnyi, middle class philosophy, 247. See also Aleksandrov, agitprop, ideology, Iudin, Marx, Marxism, Marxism-Leninism, Mitin, Stalin, Stalinism, A.A. Zhdanov Piatakov, G.E., 139, 141, 143, 158, 168 Piatnitskii, O., 131 Pieck, W., 326 Pikina, V.F., 424n246 Pioneers. See Young Pioneers plans. See agriculture, economy, Five-Year Plans, Gosplan, industrialization, industry plastic arts, 65, 135, 270; Pleshakov, Constantine, 338 Pod znamenem Marksizma, 188, 238 pogroms. See anti-Semitism Pokrovsky, M.N., 390n48 Poland, 94, 169, 173, 184–5, 192–3, 197–200, 222, 258, 263, 289–90, 299, 309, 311–12, 314, 321, 325 Poles, 200

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582

Page 582

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Polevoi, B., 31 Polikarpov, P.A., 211, 265, 440n211 Polish Corridor, 192 Polish pows, 199 Politburo. See cc Politburo. political system. See Central Committee, cc Politburo, cc Orgbiuro, Communist Party, decision-making process, Lenin, soviets, Sovnarkom, Stalin, Stalinists, Supreme Soviet, A.A. Zhdanov Ponomarenko, P.K., 198, 300, 330–1 poor peasants. See collectivization, kolkhoz, peasantry Popkov, P.S., 219, 227, 231, 234–5, 239, 241, 279, 444n268, 516n5 Popov, G.M., 268–9, 277, 316 Popov, M.M., 232–3, 442n241 population. See demography Porkkala Peninsula, 249 pornography, 303 Portugal, 223 Poskrebyshev, A.N., 110, 211, 316 Pospelov, P.N., 12, 14, 20, 26, 31, 33–5, 37–8, 50, 57, 154–5, 165, 173, 175, 177, 188, 211, 220, 247–8, 291–2, 335–6 Pospelova, A.I., 12 postwar ideological offensive. See agitprop, cultural campaigns, ideology, Stalin, A.A. Zhdanov postwar peace settlement, 263, 286, 297 postwar reconstruction, 251–2, 256, 268–70, 286 Postyshev, P., 106–8, 140, 148, 150, 153, 168 Potsdam Conference, 262–3 Pozern, B.P., 161, 165, 167, 174 Prague, 175, 190 Pramnek, E.K., 77, 83, 93, 97, 103, 161, 165, 386n204 Pravda, ix, xxii, 12, 48, 68, 80, 88, 99, 113, 128, 142, 169, 176, 180–1, 188–9, 193, 195–6, 198, 200, 220, 263, 270, 281–2, 287, 311, 314–15, 319, 321, 222, 335–6 Prede, 172 Presidential Archive. See archives Preslav, 12 press. See censorship, newspapers Prezent, I.I., 301 priests. See Orthodoxy, religion Primakov, V., 410n66

primary Party organizations. See Communist Party prisoners of war (pows), xii, 228, 250, 291, 320. See also fil’tratsiia, gulag prisons. See gulag private cattle. See kolkhoz private plot. See kolkhoz procuracy. See penal system procurements. See agriculture, distribution system, kolkhoz, mts professors, 56 Profintern, xvi, 33 Prokofiev, S., 8, 212, 318–19 proletariat. See factory workers Proletkul’t, xvi, 30 propaganda, 282, 298, 339; in army, 215, 221; in Civil War, 157; and constitution, 127; effect in 1930s of, 125; effect in postwar period of, 270–1; and “enemies,” 83; Nazi, 44; and Short Course, 180, 271; in World War ii, 227. See also agitprop, ideology, newspapers, radio provincial Party organizations, 190. See also Communist Party, Great Terror, A.A. Zhdanov, Leningrad Communist Party provincial organization, Nizhnii Novgorod Communist Party provincial organization, Tver’ Communist Party provincial organization provincial Party’s first secretary, 47, 50, 52, 93, 241. See also provincial Party organization, A.A. Zhdanov Provisional Government, 17, 19, 183 Pskov, 123, 229 Pudovkin, Nikolai, 281 Pukhlov, 325 purges. See Beria, Communist Party, Ezhov, Iagoda, Leningrad Affair, Great Terror, gulag, Stalin, A.A. Zhdanov Pushkin, A., 280 racism, 306 Radek, K.B., 141, 148 radio, 167, 215, 276, 282, 294. See also censorship Radzinsky, Edvard, 38 railroads, 12, 91, 95, 118, 184–5, 229, 233, 242, 298. See also October Railroad Rakosi, M., 326, 329, 478–9n174

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Page 583

Index ration-card system, 65, 119, 121, 124, 230, 233, 236–9, 284–7, 316, 323 realschule, xiii, xvi-xvii, 13–14 Red Army, xvii, 156, 309, 326; in Civil War, 23–4, 27–31; arms of, 231, 242; commanders, 185, 198, 205–6, 214, 225, 235, 244, 256, 261, 266–7, 324–4; and Communist Party, 214; desertion, 230, 235; in eastern Poland, 184, 198–200, 203; and Great Terror, 155–6, 158, 162; mobilization of 1939, 198; morale of, 155, 215, 221, 227–8, 230, 243; necessity of overhaul, 205; occupies Baltic countries, 207; officer corps of, 155, 221, 242; and political indoctrination, 27–9; postwar demobilization, 262; readiness of, 207, 221, 238, 242; and retreat, 243; Stalin on, 225; training of, 155, 238, 242; veterans in villages, 55, 87; and Winter War, 201–6; in World War ii, 227, 246; and A.A. Zhdanov, 27–8. See also Civil War, prisoners of war, Stavka, Winter War, World War ii Red Arrow train, 201 Red Guards, 21 Red Navy, 155–6, 170, 181, 189, 191, 316, 319–20; Baltic Fleet, 204, 221, 267; Pacific Fleet, 191 Red Sormovo. See Sormovo Works Red Terror. See Civil War Reformation, 6 rehabilitations, 179, 192, 213–14 religion, xv, 7, 54, 56, 75, 283; persecution of, 54, 57, 83, 89, 146, 160. See also Holy Synod, Islam, Karpov, Orthodox church Repin, I., xvi Reshetov, I.M., 77, 84, 90, 374n125 retail trade. See distribution system revisionism. See historiography Riabushinskii textile mill, 16 Riga, 204, 221, 229 Right Deviation. See Right Opposition Right Opposition, 58, 68, 71–2, 74, 77, 82, 92, 94, 139, 150, 159, 163, 170, 172, 326 Riutin, M., 98, 104, 384n151 roads, 91, 124, 184–5, 298 Road to Life. See Lake Ladoga Robespierre, M., 110 Rodionov, M.A., 103, 268, 516n5

583

Rogovin, L., 159 Romania, 94, 193, 197, 206, 213, 219, 223, 290, 297. See also Bucharest Romanovskii, N.V., 254 rootless cosmoploitanism, 218. See also cultural campaigns, ideology, Stalin Roskin, G. See kr Affair Rostov-on-Don, 148–9, 162, 276, 284, 309 Rousseau, J.J., 45 Rovinskii, L.A., 422n213, 431n82 RSFSR, xvii, 30 RSDLP, x, xiv, xvii, 14–19 RSDWP. See rsdlp Rudzutak, Ia., 59–60, 67, 106–7, 123, 156–7 Rumiantsev, I.P., 107 Russia. See rsfsr Russian Liberation Army, 242 Russian nationalism, 43, 159, 216, 218, 227, 246–8, 253–6, 262, 279, 281, 290, 305–6, 317, 319, 339, 341, 412n83 Russians, 12, 84, 248, 264, 318, 342; attitude towards Soviet regime, 6–7, 18; as narod, xiv, 82, 268–9; Stalin’s praise for, 262; supposed laziness of, 25, 168, 388n9. See also kolkhoz, factory workers, Leningrad, Nizhnii Novgorod, peasantry, religion, Soviet public, Stalin, World War ii Rychagov, P.V., 442n235 Rychkov, 178, 320 Rykov, A.I., 38, 58, 68, 72, 143, 150, 170 Ryti, 249 Ryutin Platform. See Riutin Saar, 131 sacc, 249, 264, 297, 302 saboteurs. See Great Terror, industry, show trials, Stalin St Petersburg. See Leningrad salesclerks, 237 Salisbury, Harrison, 219, 240 Sal’sk, 284 Saltykov-Shchedrin, M.E., 46, 280 samozvanets, 57 Saratov, 129, 162, 190 Sartre, J.P., 306 Savel’ev, 173 Scandinavians, 248

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584

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Index

scarlet fever. See disease, health care, A.A. Zhdanov Schapiro, Leonard, 16 Schulenburg, 196 Scott, John, 183, 259 scientists, 255–6, 266, 296, 323. See also genetics, kr Affair, Vavilov, Iu.A. Zhdanov schools. See education Sea of Azov, 11 seasonal work, 54, 123–4. See also agriculture, forest industry, kolkhoz second economy, 256 Second Shock Army, 241–3 secret police. See nkvd, mgb “Secret Speech.” See Khrushchev Secretariat. See CC Secretariat security organs. See nkvd, mgb SED, xvii, 266 Semenov, N.N., 446n3 Seniushkin, K.M., 34 seredniaks. See collectivization; peasantry Sergo. See G.K. Ordzhonikidze Seton-Watson, Hugh, 309 sexuality, 98, 254 shabashniki. See artisans Shadrinsk, 16–25, 27, 56, 74 Shakhty Trial, 65, 75, 77, 90 Shakhurin, A.I., 264 Shaposhnikov, B.M., 196, 202, 209, 238 Shatalin, N.N., 168 Shcherbakov, A.S., 59, 103, 115–16, 135–7, 161, 165, 188–9, 217, 220–2, 248, 254, 256–7, 261, 269, 315 Shcherbakov, M.I., 312 Sheboldaev, B.P., 107, 148–9, 153, 162 Sheinin, L., 216 Shepilov, D.T., 311, 318, 323, 325, 327, 331–2, 335, 346–7n16, 515n3 Shestakov, A.V., 155 shipping. See railroads, water transport Shkiriatov, M.F., 58, 150, 168, 316 Shlapentokh, Vladimir, 342 Shlissel’burg, 234–5, 244 Shmal’gauzen, 322–3 shock-workers. See Stakhanovism Short Course. See History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Short Course) Shostakovich, Dmitrii, 3, 8, 135, 212, 318 show trials, 113, 137–8, 145, 148, 150,

170, 203, 296, 320, 402n228, 489n38; in Leningrad province, 162 Shtern, G.M., 429n51 Shtykov, T.F., 205, 226–7, 235, 241, 244, 273, 517n7 Shvernik, N.M., 107, 189, 253, 268, 316, 337 Shvernik Report, 337 Shvetsov, 173 Siberia, 27, 126, 133, 263 Simonov, K.M., 89, 281, 303–4, 308 skhod. See peasantry Slansky, R., 329 Slavophiles, 247 Sloterdijk, Peter, 5, 338 Slovaks, 245 SMERSH, xvii, 273 Smirnov, 98 Smirnov, I.M., 36 Smith, W. Bedell, 277–8, 294, 302 Smolensk provincial Communist Party organization, 44, 65, 98 Smol’nyi, 119–22, 239–41, 281 Smorodin, P.I., 161, 165 Smushkevich, Ia.V., 209 Sochi, 98, 138. See also Caucasus socialist competition. See Stakhanovism socialist emulation. See Stakhanovism Socialist Realism, xiii, xiv, xvi, 116, 211–12, 254, 271, 279–80, 318–19, 391–2n61. See also literature, Congress of Soviet Writers, Gor’kii, writers’ union Socialist-Revolutionary Party. See srs Sokolov, A.D., 16, 31, 34–7 Sokolov, A.V., 61 soldiers. See Red Army, tsarist army Solov’ev, N.V., 227, 235, 244, 246, 516n5 Solovki Islands. See gulag Solzhenitsyn, A.I., 303 Sormovo district, 59, 75 Sormovo Works, 39–41, 47, 58, 76, 81–2, 93, 108, 363n95 Sorokin, 238 Soviet Baltic Fleet. See Red Navy Soviet bloc, 250 Soviet citizens. See Soviet public, Soviet society Soviet Control Commission. See Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate Soviet Far East, 191–2, 263 Soviet-Finnish War. See Winter War

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Index Soviet government. See bureaucracy, Sovmin, Sovminbiuro, Sovnarkom, Supreme Soviet Soviet historians. See historiography Soviet national hymn, 246 Sovietologists. See historiography Sovietology. See historiography Soviet Pacific Fleet. See Red Navy Soviet patriotism, 215, 268, 295, 303, 312, 319 Soviet people. See ethnic groups, factory workers, intelligentsia, peasantry, Russians, Soviet public, Soviet society, Ukrainians Soviet postwar empire. See Soviet bloc Soviet public, 6–7, 61, 125, 128, 142–3, 165, 176, 194, 198, 225, 227–8, 246, 253, 255–6, 266, 268, 271, 286, 290, 317, 339. See also ethnic groups; factory workers, intelligentsia, peasantry, Russians, Soviet society, Ukrainians soviets, xvii, 52, 54, 172; in 1917, 17–18, 21–2, 30; and collectivization, 89, 92; and corruption, 180; executive committees of, 51; elections for, 54–5, 127, 142–3, 150–1, 192, 315; role of, 52, 55; in villages, 55. See also Central Executive Committee, Supreme Soviet Soviet society, 7, 142–3, 147, 165–6, 223, 225, 253–6, 263, 283, 298–9. See also ethnic groups, factory workers, intelligentsia, peasantry, Russians, Soviet public, Ukrainians Soviet satellites. See People’s Democracies, Soviet bloc Soviet Union, 53; alliance with Great Britain, 242; annexation by, 185, 193, 196–9, 210; collapse of, 341–2; and Finland, 250, 258; foreign policy, 47, 60, 131, 172, 190, 192–8, 210, 217, 219, 250, 265, 289–90, 324; and foreign threat, 79, 94, 104, 117, 146, 155, 158, 166, 173, 178, 181, 206, 210; formation of, 42, 45; isolation of, 206; and League of Nations, 117, 131, 203; and military pacts, 131; modernization of, 184, 223; pact with Japan, 219; population of, 186; postwar defence of, 250; as promised land, 159; republics of, 168; self-sufficiency of, 79; as superpower, 252; territorial reorganization of, 69, 123. See also

585

Cold War, Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Munich Agreement, World War ii sovkhoz, xvii, 298 Sovmin, xvii, 268, 277–8, 284–5, 287, 294–5, 320. See also Sovnarkom Sovminbiuro, xvii, xxii, 268. See also Sovnarkom Sovnarkom, xvi, xvii, xxii, 23, 32, 83, 88, 92, 200, 109, 135, 264, 268; and agriculture, 73; biuro of, 190, 220–1; decrees by, 117, 179, 226, 163; and industrialization, 71; and industry, 124; role of, 67, 88, 109, 220; and secrecy, 166. See also bureaucracy, decision-making process, Molotov, sovmin, Stalin Spain, 175, 206, 223 Spaniards, 245 SPD, xvii, 223, 266 Special Board. See oso special files. See osobye papki specialists. See spetsy speedskaters, 294 spetsy, xvii, 56, 82, 94–5, 114; accused of wrecking, 65–6, 75 spies. See Great Terror, penal system, Stalin Spiridonov, I.V., 519n21 Spykhal’skii, 329 SRs, xvii, xviii, 15, 21–3, 30, 33, 36, 47, 54, 127, 160, 171–2 Stakhanov, Aleksei, 132 Stakhanovism, xviii, 104, 113, 132–5, 139, 274 Stalin (Dzhugashvili), I.V., xii, xiv, xvii, xix, xxi, 4–6, 32, 283, 287, 298; announces defeat of Japan, 264; and anti-Semitism, 280; and atomic bomb, 265–6; at August 1946 Orgbiuro, 272, 279–82; authors “Dizzy with Success,” 88–9; belief in, 158; biographies of, 3, 9, 271, 476n150; and biology, 290, 301, 323, 325–9; as cc Secretary, 103, 106, 109, 114, 179, 186, 208, 216, 266, 477n158; and Central Committee, 107; and Churchill, 290; and collectivization, xxi, 53, 70–1, 73, 80, 83, 98, 101; and Comintern, 131, 218; and Cominform, 308–10, 313–14, 321–2, 326–7; and Courts of Honour, 295–6, 316–17; created generalissimus, 262; and crisis of 1932–33,

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98–9, 101, 403–4n242; cult of, 177–8, 189; and culture, 116, 135, 171, 188, 210–12, 253–4, 279–82, 318; death of, 263; and defence issues, 110, 219–22, 243; as Defence minister, 243, 273; as dictator, xxi, 110–11, 141, 213, 264, 274–5, 290, 336; dinners at, xxii, 259, 275, 308; dissociates himself from terror, 89; and economic issues, 110, 290, 310–11; as editor, 257; at Eighteenth Party Congress, 186; and Ezhov, 255; and ethnic deportations, xxi; at February-March plenum, 151–4; foreign policy of, 110, 186, 192–200, 214, 220–1, 250, 260–1, 264, 286, 289, 324; and General Line, 38, 63, 174; and German invasion, 125, 214, 221, 227; and gko, 227, 244; and Great Terror, xxi, 137–41, 145–82, 339; and Great Turn, 80; greets May Day parade, 114; halts Great Terror, 141, 178; height, 259; and history textbooks, 155; on holidays, 114, 117–18, 138, 264, 282, 288; and ideology, 110–11, 253–4, 271; illness of, 256, 264; and industrialization, xxi, 53, 98; and Inner Circle, xxi, 4, 9, 43, 106, 108, 110–11, 115, 141, 149–50, 186, 189, 193, 196, 207, 218, 253, 256–9, 261, 264–7, 272, 286, 297, 300, 307–9, 311, 315, 324, 337, 340, 428n40; and Ivan the Terrible, 216; and Kirov murder, 119–20; and kr Affair, 288, 294–5, 297, 303; as Lenin of Today, 176; and Leningrad, 121, 173, 336; and Leningrad Affair, 336; and Malenkov, 255, 331; meets writers, 89, 303; and mgb-nkvd, 153, 312, 320; and military, 111, 157, 181; mindset, 85, 145–6; and Molotov, 255; patronage by, 37, 50, 71, 98, 108, 255, 264, 292, 343, 298n166; and patronage networks, 71; and People’s Democracies, 320–2; and philosophy, 290–1, 293, 306–7; political goals of, 6; political ideas of, xxiv, 46, 95, 271, 308; political power of, 9, 110, 213, 264, 272, 274–7, 286, 307–9, 336; political role of, 4, 158, 168; and postwar campaigns, 254–6, 293–4, 339; and postwar atmosphere, 255–6; postwar policies of, 256, 262, 264; and Potsdam Conference, 262–3; and Politburo,

189, 316; and prisoners of war, xxi, 320; quoted, 51, 225; responsibility for postwar economic problems, 284; responsibility for terror, xxi; and Right Opposition, 77; rise of, 40, 57–8; and Russians, 262, 264; and self-criticism, 129; and sharpening class struggle, 100; and Short Course, 154–5, 177; as Sovnarkom chair, 220; speech of 9 February 1946, 266; speech of 5 May 1941, 220–1; speech of 3 July 1941, 227–8; as Stavka member, 226; suspiciousness of, 173, 213, 226, 290 ; and threat of war, 186; travels to Siberia, 64; and Trotsky, 58; and victory celebrations, 261–2; visitors to Kremlin office, 110; and Voroshilov, 205, 230, 233–5; and Winter War, 201–6; and World War ii, xxi, 227, 233, 237, 244, 250, 320; and Writers’ Congress, 116; and Yugoslav Communists, 271, 309, 321–2, 323–6; and A.A. Zhdanov, xxii, 8–9, 24–6, 74–5, 79, 89, 11, 118, 165, 184, 190, 209, 213, 230–1, 233–5, 238, 240–2, 50–1, 303–4, 307–8, 311, 314, 329–31, 333, 344; and Zinoviev and Kamenev, 45, 48, 58–9. See also Beria, collectivization, decision-making process, Ezhov, Five-Year Plans, gko, ideology, L.M. Kaganovich, Kirov, Malenkov, Marxism-Leninism, Mikoian, Molotov, Stalinism, Stalinists, Voroshilov, World War ii, A.A. Zhdanov, Iu.A. Zhdanov Stalin Constitution. See Constitutions Stalin Prizes, 256, 274, 291, 311, 336 Stalina, S., xxiv, 11, 20, 25, 259–60, 336 Stalingrad, 16, 129 Stalinism, 3, 174, 319. See also MarxismLeninism Stalinists, 4, 8–9, 29, 38, 43, 49–50, 57, 71–5, 79, 106–11, 115, 130, 141, 143, 149–50, 165–6, 168, 174, 176, 180, 184–5, 189–90, 193, 196, 200, 202, 205–6, 218–21, 238, 252–9, 261, 264–5, 281, 285–6, 290, 297, 300, 302, 307–9, 324, 328, 335, 337, 340–1, 344, 376n9, 428n40; mindset of, 85–6, 89, 145–6, 221–2, 224, 226, 246–7, 271, 283, 293–4, 312, 317–18, 321, 323, 341; xenophobia of, 113,

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Index 246–7. See also Beria, gko, Kaganovich, Malenkov, Mikoian, Molotov, Voroshilov, A.A. Zhdanov Stanford University, xxii Staraia Russa, 230 Starobel’sk, 194 Stassen, Harold, 301–2 State Defence Council. See gko State Labour Reserves, 209 state farms. See sovkhoz State Planning Committee. See Gosplan State Publishers (rsfsr), 188 State University of Leningrad, 195 State University of Moscow, 310, 322 State University of Nizhnii Novgorod, 56 State University of Rostov-on-Don, xxiv Stavka, xviii, 214, 216, 226, 229, 236, 242, 244 Stavropol region, 285 Stepanov, G.A., 296, 320 Stetskii, A.I., 90, 175, 188 STO, xiii, xviii, 73, 109 Stoliar, A.Ia., 77, 103 strikes, 30, 33–4, 47, 53 Struppe, P.I., 120, 159, 164–5, 172 students, 56, 61 superpower. See Soviet Union Supreme Court, 120, 296, 320 Supreme Soviet, xvii, xviii, xxii, 14, 50, 109, 193; April 1945 session, 261; August 1939 session, 197–8; August 1940 session, 210; February 1947 session, 297–8; February-March 1941 session, 217; January 1938 session, 166, 168; June 1942 session, 242–3; June 1945 session, 262; March 1946 session, 267; decree of 4 June 1947, 298, 304; decree of 9 June 1947, 304, 312, 317, 342; decree of 2 June 1948, 328; decree of 26 June 1940, 209–10; elections of December 1937, 140, 151, 159–60, 166–7; elections of February 1946, 266; formal role of, 196; of rsfsr, 174, 261–2. See also Central Executive Committee, decision-making process, soviets Surkov, A., 322 Suslov, M.A., 4, 265–5, 268, 289, 296, 306–7, 311, 320, 323, 325–31, 336 Suvorov, 262 Sverdlov, Ia.M., 39

587

Sverdlov Communist Academy. See Communist Academy Svetikov, I.P., 149 Sviriuev, 36 Sweden, 123 Symbolism, 135 Syrtsov, S.I., 87, 94, 107 Szklarska Poremba, 289, 312 Tadzhikistan, 337 Tallinn, 204, 207–8, 232 Tambov, 284 Tambov Revolt. See peasantry Tarakanov, 34 Tatar assr, 163 Tauride guberniia, 12 Tbilisi, 16 Tchaikovsky, P.I., 259 teachers. See education terror. See Beria, Ezhov, Great Terror, gulag, nkvd, mgb, Stalin, Yagoda, A.A. Zhdanov. Teheran Conference, 262 television, 323 Ter (Nizhnii), 41 Terijoki government, 202 Terreur (France), 110 theatre, 135, 169, 154, 270, 276, 279 Thorez, M., 245 Tikhonov, N.S., 281 Tikhvin, 236, 238 Tillett, Lowell, 406n274 Timasheff, N.S., 465n19 Timashuk, L., 333 Timoshenko, S.K., 202, 205–6, 208, 216, 219, 221, 226 Tito J. Broz, 274, 308, 322, 326, 328 Titoists, 297 Togliatti, Palmiro, 245, 329 Tolstoi, A.K., 46 Tomskii, M.P., 38, 58, 67–8, 72, 139 totalitarianism, 6, 45–6 tractors. See kolkhoz, mts trade. See distribution system, Mikoian, nep trade unions, xv, xvi, 30, 32, 35, 41, 52–3, 63, 76, 82, 101, 107, 151, 172, 194, 271 transport. See mts, railroads, roads, water transport Treaty of Rapallo, 158 Trilisser, M.A., 131

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troika, xviii, 84, 88, 126, 159–61, 163, 167, 172, 337 Trotsky, L.D., xxiv, 21, 32–3, 38, 43, 48, 58–64, 70–4, 111, 128, 137–9, 147, 150, 158, 174, 247, 321, 371n50 Trotskyites, 48, 57–8, 94, 106, 126, 136, 147–9, 153, 163–4, 167, 169–70, 172, 317, 326 trudoden’. See kolkhoz True Orthodox Church. See Orthodox church Truman, Harry S., 262–3, 302, 312 Truman Doctrine, 312 Tsar Nicholas ii, 6, 27–8 Tsar Peter the Great, 303 Tsarina Anna Ioannovna, 254 tsarist army, 15, 19, 36, 171, 296 tsarist empire, 6, 12, 143, 247 tsarist regime, 12 Tsaritsyn. See Stalingrad Tsesarskii, V.E., 120 tuberculosis. See disease, health care Tukhachevsky, M.N., 158 Turkey, 289 Tushino Airshow, 289 Tvardovsky, A., 322 Tver’ (city of), 13–14, 16, 35, 51. See also Tver’ Communist Party city organization, Tver’ Communist Party provincial organization, Tver’ gorispolkom, Tver’ gorkom Tver’ (province of), 12–13, 29, 30, 33–5, 285 Tver’ Communist Party city organization, 33 Tver’ Communist Party provincial organization, 15–16, 20, 28, 30–6, 44, 49, 51, 103, 160, 285 Tver’ gorispolkom, 20, 28 Tver’ gubispolkom, 32, 34–7 Tver’ gubkom, 30–2, 35, 37 Tver’ gubkombiuro, 31–2, 34, 36–7, 52 Tverskaia Pravda, ix, xxii, 30–1, 34–5 Twenty-Five Thousanders, 83 typhoid. See disease, health care typhus. See disease, health care Uchraspred. See cc Uchraspred Udintsev, 18 Udmurtia assr, 72 Udmurtians, 91 Ufa, 28, 164, 180, 190, 337

Ugarov, A.I., 120, 127, 165, 168, 170, 420n182 Uglanov, N.A., 39, 41–2, 47–50, 50, 52, 58, 67–8, 70–2, 103, 133–4 Uglanovschina, xviii, 70 Ukraine, 12–13, 99–100, 106, 198–200, 210, 248, 263, 274, 300, 317, 337. See also Western Ukraine Ukrainian Party organization, 168, 198, 300 Ukrainians, 12, 200, 248, 290 Ulam, Adam, 309 Ulbricht, W., 266 Ulrikh, V.V., 138, 296–7 unemployment, 7, 62, 258. See also factory workers United Front policy, 131–2, 175, 250, 260–1 United Kingdom. See Great Britain United Nations, 286 United Opposition. See Left Opposition, Trotsky, Trotskyites, Zinoviev United States of America, 53, 142–3, 194, 219, 252, 261–3, 266, 278, 290, 294, 296–7, 302, 305, 307, 312, 314, 316, 318, 328–9 Ural region, 87 Urals, 20, 23, 27, 29, 74, 162 Urals’ soviet gubispolkom, 23 urbanization, 66, 123. See also factory workers, Five-Year Plans, peasantry ussr. See Soviet Union Utkin, 173 Vakaric, 323 Vaksberg, Arkadii, 4 Valdai Heights, 332 Vannikov, B.L., 215–16, 226, 231, 340 Vareikis, I.M., 107 Vares, J., 208, 438n189 Varga, E., 310–11 Vashel’, 173 Vasilenko, V.Kh., 332–3 Vasilevskii, A.M., 203, 325 VASKhNIL, xviii, 327–8, 332–3 Vatican, 306 Vavilov, N.I., 194–5, 301 V-E Day, 261 Velikii Perelom. See Great Turn vertushka, 227, 241 Vestnik sviazi, 282 veterans. See Red Army

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Index Viataka, 75–6 victims. See Civil War, collectivization, Great Terror, Russians, Soviet public, Soviet society, World War ii Viipuri (Vyborg), 196, 249 Vikman, R., 354n34 Vil’ks, G., 354n34 villages. See kolkhoz, peasantry Vinogradov, V.N., 332–3 Vishnevskii, V.V., 281, 482n213 VKP(b). See Communist Party Vladivostok, 181, 191–2 Vlasik, N., 333 Vlasov, A.A., 241–2 VLKSM. See Komsomol vodka. See drinking Voice of America, 294–5 Voitinskaia, O., 171 Volga, 35, 51, 332 Volgograd. See Stalingrad Volkhov, 242 Volkogonov, D.A., 3, 74–5, 253, 375n151 Volodarskii district (Leningrad), 167, 266 Voltaire, 45, 280 Voltsit, 172 Voprosy filosofii, 306–7 Voprosy istorii, 470n70 Voronezh, 160, 284 Voronov, N.N., 232 Voroshilov, K.E., 8, 50, 57, 106–7, 114, 119–20, 130, 150, 154–5, 161, 154–5, 176, 181, 189, 193, 196, 198, 201–2, 205–6, 209, 219, 222, 226–8, 230–2, 234–5, 241, 253, 257, 261, 275, 316, 320, 340, 448n37 Votsk oblast’. 92 Vozhd. See Stalin Voznesensky, N.A., 113, 130, 136, 165, 167, 188, 206, 217, 220, 222, 248, 253, 256, 265–6, 268, 278, 286, 292, 298, 300, 307, 310–11, 316, 324–5, 327, 333, 335–6, 341 VSNKh, xviii, xix, 35, 71, 76, 92 VSO, xix, 231–2 vydvizhentsy, 217 Vyksa Pedagogical Academy, 61 Vyksa Works, 45 Vyshinskii, A.Ia., 4, 106, 120, 138, 178, 207–8, 214, 259, 289 wages. See factory workers

589

War Communism. See Civil War water transport, 51, 63, 83, 91, 95, 154, 169, 298. See also Volga barge haulers Watson, Derek, 4 Weber, Max, 6 Wehrmacht, 206–7, 219, 223, 225, 229, 237–8, 249–50, 258. See also World War ii Weisman, A.F.I., 300 West, 261, 265–7, 312–14. See also Cold War, France, Great Britain, United States of America, Western Europe, World War ii Western Belarus’, 198–200 Western Dvina, 227 Western Europe, 247, 312, 318 Western historians. See historiography Westernizers, 247 Western scholars. See historiography Western Ukraine, 198–200 White Armies, 23, 27, 31, 127, 157, 160, 194 White emigrés, 62 White Sea, 57, 123 Winter War, 124, 155, 184–5, 200–7, 223, 249–50 women, 54, 230, 236, 256 Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate, xvii, xix, 93, 113, 477–8n165 working class. See factory workers World War i, 6, 15, 17, 22, 29, 53, 86, 125, 194, 197 World War ii, 5, 7, 29, 225–52, 260, 344; and battle of Moscow, 234, 237–8; and battle of Stalingrad, 243–4; civilians in, 229, 231, 233, 236, 238–9; civilian morale, 227–8, 236, 246; collaboration in, 242, 274; evacuation of Leningraders, 228–9, 231, 238, 243; and fil’tratsiia, 250, 291, 455n141, 487n5; first Soviet counteroffensive, 236; German advance, 226–7, 229–30, 233–4; German advance halted, 223, 225, 236; German bombing, 234, 238, 246; German brutality, 227–8, 236; German invasion, 7, 125–6, 147, 155, 180, 184, 202, 207, 210, 212, 214, 219, 221, 223–7; German retreat, 225, 244–6; and Holocaust, 228; Leningrad Front, 232–3, 235, 238, 241, 246; loss of life in, 126, 225, 231, 234, 236–9, 252, 261; material damage caused by,

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126, 225, 234, 248, 251–2, 261, 286; North-West Direction, 228–30, 232; Operation Iskra, 243–4; outbreak of, 184, 198, 210; and partisans, 229–30; preparations for, 124–5, 131, 183–224; scorched-earth tactics, 230; Soviet fronts, 228, 232, 235; Soviet 1942 summer offensive, 243; Soviet 1944 offensive, 249; ss Einsatzgruppen, 228; treason, 233; victory, 7; Volkhov Front, 238, 241, 244; war criminals, 320; and weather 238; Western Allies in, 113, 242, 250, 252, 256, 258, 266–7, 289–90, 297. See also blitzkrieg, defence, ethnic groups, factory workers, demography, Germany, gko, Govorov, Jews, Khozin, Lake Ladoga, Leningrad siege, lko, lvo, Meretskov, nkvd, opolchenie, propaganda, pows, Red Army, Russians, smersh, Stalin, Vlasov, Voroshilov, vso, Wehrmacht, A.A. Zhdanov, Zhukov wrecking. See collectivization, Ezhov, Great Terror, industrialization, purges, rehabilitation, spetsy, Stalin, A.A. Zhdanov Writers’ Union, 115–16, 135, 171, 188, 212, 270, 303 Yagoda. See Iagoda Yakutia, 126 Yalta Conference, 258, 262, 324 yellow press, 306 Young Pioneers, 95 youth. See education, kolkhozy, Komsomol, penal system, Russians, Soviet public, Soviet society Yugoslavia, 197, 206, 219, 222, 274, 309, 313, 321, 323–6, 328–9, 342 Zagvozdin, N.A., 56, 161, 369n30 Zakharov, M.V., 228 Zakovskii, L., 120, 126–7, 153, 161, 167, 394n89 Zal’tsman, I.M., 217, 443n251, 446n3 Zalutskii, P.A., 396–7n142 Zamyatin, E., 6, 391n55 Zaporozhets, A.I., 205, 215, 221, 221, 436n162 Zapolskii, 47 Zashibaev, 77, 81–2, 103 Zavadskii, 329

Zdobnov, N.V., 21 zemstvo, xix Zhdanov, Aleksandr A. (father). See A.A. Zhdanov Zhdanov, A.A., passim; and agitprop 3, 8, 16, 27–9, 32, 41–4, 49, 111–12, 175–8, 181, 187–8, 210, 212, 214–15, 220–2, 268–71, 305, 331, 338–9; as agricultural supervisor, 112–14, 118; and Akhmatova and Zoshchenko, 280–2, 321, 283n222; and alleged alcoholism, 159, 467–8n47; ambitions of, 48; ancestry, 11; announces Great Turn, 80; announces siege’s end, 246; and anti-Semitism, 221, 339; army rank, 262; and army service, 15, 16, 296; atheism of, 19, 24, 36; and atomic bomb, 265–6; attacks Leningrad and Zvezda, 270, 278–82; attends cc plena, 66, 93, 97, 99; at August 1946 Orgbiuro, 272, 279–82; authors’ appeals, 231; biography of, xxi, 4, 336; as cc secretary, xxii, 7, 25, 103, 112–14, 154, 171, 190, 220, 225, 251, 258, 262, 264, 268–9, 273, 282, 285, 294, 302, 305, 310–11, 323, 330–1, 339–40; as ccc emissary, 74; chair of rsfsr Supreme Soviet, 174; chairs Orgbiuro 174, 272, 276, 302, 323; chairs Supreme Soviet Foreign Affairs Commission, 168, 174, 195–6, 242–3, 268; and chastushki, 13; and Civil War, 23–31, 192, 251; and Cold War, 5; and collectivization, 5, 68, 78, 80–4, 87–9, 92–4, 96, 108; comeback of 1933–4, 101; comeback of 1945, 248, 253–4, 264–4; and Cominform, 289, 302, 307–10, 312–14, 323, 326–9; commemorates Lenin’s death, 169; commemorates October Revolution, 286; and communist ideals, 5; as Communist leader in Tver’, 31–7, 241; compared to Kirov, 3; compared to Nazi leaders, 3; and composers, 317–19, 321, 323; and Congress of Soviet Writers, 111, 115–16, 254; and Courts of Honour, 295–7, 316–17, 338; crudeness of, 89, 215–16, 340; cult of, 85–6, 122, 132, 336; and Cultural Revolution, 91, 95; and culture, 115–16, 135, 171, 181, 188, 210–12, 216, 254–5, 260, 265, 274–5, 279, 286, 299–300,

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Index 303–5, 317–19, 337–8; and cynicism, 145; and Czechoslovakia, 307; death of, 3, 8, 256, 332–4, 336; decorated, 128, 202, 245–6, 267; and defence, 155–6, 170, 190, 209–10, 213–16, 219–22, 225, 230–5; demonizes enemies, 128, 167; and deportations, 274; deputizes for Stalin, 106, 112, 117–18, 190, 220, 223, 226–7, 254, 282, 286–8, 291, 295, 323, 330, 335; discusses Operation Iskra, 244; disillusioned in 1931, 96; divides time between Moscow and Leningrad, 104, 120–2, 149, 154; drafts legislation, 304, 328; and economics, 310; at Eighteenth Party Conference, 217; at Eighteenth Party Congress, 181–2, 186–9, 270; elected alternate cc member, 60, 64; elected alternate pb member, 121; elected to cec, 32; elected full cc member, 92; elected pb member, 189; enters rsdlp, 15; and Estonia, 207–8, 249; and factory workers, 44; and famine of 1946–47, 284–5; in Far East, 191–2; and February-March plenum, 122, 150–3; at Fifteenth Party Congress, 64; in Finland, 8, 249–51, 258–61, 264, 297, 315, 340; and foreign affairs, 48, 131, 168–9, 171–5, 186, 190–3, 195–8, 213–14, 222, 242, 243, 264, 286, 302; and foreign languages, 18, 302; at Fourteenth Party Congress, 60; and French culture, 45, 247; and French Enlightenment, 45–6, 247, 338; front Military Council member, 228, 230, 232, 235–6, 241, 246, 249; and Genet, 46; and genetics discussion, 194–5, 290, 300–1, 322–3, 325–8; and German invasion, 125, 218, 225–6, 230; and Gide, 46; and Great Terror, 8, 104–5, 111, 139–41, 143, 145–82, 337, 342; and Great Turn, 82, 94, 104; greets May Day parades, 114, 137, 219, 326; greets Red Square parade, 287; health, 32, 37, 45, 77, 98–9, 101, 108, 219–20, 222–3, 233, 239–42, 244–5, 259, 285, 288, 291, 300, 302, 311, 314–15, 330, 332–4; height, 259; historians on, 342–3; and historiography, 262; and history textbooks, 113–14, 155; as homophobe, 46; on holidays, 62, 77,

591 93, 101, 111, 123, 138, 222–3, 226, 285, 288, 331–2; as ideologist, 3, 5–6, 8, 22, 111–12, 112, 177–8, 181, 202, 210, 215, 247–8, 251, 254–6, 265, 268, 271, 277, 286, 305, 312–14, 323, 338–9; and industrialization, 5, 80, 108; and Inner Circle, 104, 189; inspects Baltic naval defence, 196; and intelligentsia, 22, 25; and international Communist movement, 131, 181, 218, 245, 274, 302, 308–10, 312–14, 320–2, 399n183, 128n42; joins Bolsheviks, 17–19; joins Comintern leadership, 104, 131; and Kaganovich, 38; and Kirov murder, 119–20; and knizhki, xxiii, 110, 294–5, 330, 346n11; and Komsomol, 77, 162, 179, 337; and kr Affair, 277–9, 288, 294–5, 297, 304–6, 316, 341; lauds Stalin, 102, 142, 169, 266; as leader of Leningrad, xxii, 7, 25, 111, 122, 126, 132, 138–9, 156–9, 171, 173, 181, 214, 219–20, 235, 241, 244–6, 248, 258, 337; and Leningrad troikas, 126, 161; and Lenin’s death, 48; library, 62; living conditions, 122–3, 239–42, 259; marriage, 19–20, 24, 36, 260; and Marxist movement, 14; meets Fadeev, Gorbatov, and Simonov, 89, 303, 308; meets Pessi, 324; meets Ponomarenko, 300; meets Stalin alone, 96; meets Stassen, 301–2; and Mikhoels murder, 320; military expertise of, 29, 155, 209, 225, 230, 235; and Molotov, 8, 255, 471n91; and Molotov Works, 71; morality of, 85, 145, 338, 344; at Moscow banquet, 302; mourned, 3, 336–7; as musician, 11, 275; and navy, 155, 170, 181, 191, 196, 226, 221, 267; as newspaper editor, 22, 30–1; and nkvd, 126–7, 167, 213, 274, 283, 298, 342; 1922 transfer, 37–40; 1924 transfer to cc Secretariat, 49; 1934 transfer, 3, 7, 102–4, 107–8, 118; 1934 transfer to Leningrad, 115–16, 119–21; 1945 transfer to Moscow, 248, 253–4; at Ninth Party Congress, 31; as Nizhnii Party leader, 40–2, 44, 47, 49, 57, 60–1, 76–7, 79–80, 101–3, 112, 241; at November 1928 plenum, 68; offices, 112, 121–2, 132, 243, 311; on ogpu, 82; opportunism of, 25, 104–5, 147; as

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orator, 18, 30, 108, 187; orders arrests, 126; and Ordzhonikidze’s death, 149–50; and Orthodoxy, 19–20, 24, 36, 89; oversees annexation of eastern Poland, 198–200; outward behaviour, 46, 259, 311; panic in war, 230, 251; parents of, xxiv, 11–14, 20, 34–5; and patronage, 25–6, 33, 35–6, 49–50, 71, 75, 92, 103, 165–6, 256–7, 273, 335, 343, 475n136; perquisites, 62; personal archive, xxii-iii, 164, 258, 331, 336, 343; personality, xxiii, 5, 13–15, 24–5; and petitions, 122; and philosophy discussion, 292–3, 306–7; phoneline with Moscow, 121; as plenipotentiary for oil shipments, 96–7; and Polish Communists, 321; and Polish pows, 199; in Politburo, 105–6, 121, 141, 159, 189, 225, 264, 316; political career, 7–8; political ideas, 19, 24–5, 45–6, 95, 338; and political rivalry, 9, 273, 343; political role, 3, 66, 69, 189, 273–4, 276–7, 286, 289, 300, 204, 315, 335, 479n175; as politician, 5, 9, 86, 338, 344; posthumous reputation, 336–7; post-secondary education, 15, 17; and postwar ideological offensive, 256, 268–9, 277–9, 290, 293, 339; preparatory year of, 15; in Pravda, 128, 287; private correspondence, xxiii; prude, 46, 254; pseudonyms, 16, 328; and purge of 1921, 34–6; at realschule, 13–15; and record-keeping campaign, 129; and reorganization of cc apparatus, 273, 276–7, 329–30; returns to Leningrad, 226–7, 340; return to Tver’, 25–6, 28–9; as revolutionary leader, 20–3; rhetoric of, 43, 82, 218; as Russian nationalist, 143, 155, 216, 218, 246–7, 306, 342; and Saratov Party, 129, 134; and science, 255, 277; sense of humour, xxiv, 13, 187, 468n47; sensibility of, 75; setbacks in career, 97–9, 108, 225, 230–43, 261, 264, 340; at Seventeenth Party Congress, 102–2, 106; in Shadrinsk, 16–25; on Shakhty and Smolensk Cases, 66–7, 77; and Short Course, 154–5, 176–8; sisters of, xxiii, 5, 13, 20, 62, 92; at Sixteenth Party Congres, 92; as Slavophile, 247; social origins, 11–12, 17, 34–6, 127; sophistry,

69–70; and Sormovo district, 65, 75; and Sormovo Works, 39, 41, 47, 58, 76, 93; as Soviet leader, 3–4, 104, 106, 116–17, 129, 134, 154, 167, 186, 189; and Soviet patriotism, 3; in Sovnarkombiuro, 220; speaks at Congress of Soviets, 142; speaks on film in May 1941, 221; speaks to Nizhnii krai conference, 76–7, 91; speaks at Seventeenth Party Conference, 97–8; speaks to Supreme Soviet, 166, 169, 242–3, 252; and special-regime camps, 323, 342; and Stakhanovism, 132–4; and Stalin, xxii, xxiv, 3, 8–9, 24–6, 79, 96–7, 108, 115, 118–19, 138, 143, 190, 220, 223, 230, 238, 240–1, 251–8, 264, 275–7, 297, 303–9, 311, 315, 329–40, 343–4; in Stalingrad, 117–18, 129; in Stalin’s office, 74–5, 89, 97, 99, 106, 112, 114, 159, 165, 167, 176, 189, 191–2, 198, 210, 216, 234–5, 242, 246, 262, 265, 275, 292, 299–300, 307, 316, 324–5, 327, 331–2; as Stalin’s successor, 3, 257, 302, 315; and Stalinists, 8, 25, 57, 238, 253, 255, 338; Stavka advisor, 226–7; succeeds Uglanov, 49, 103; supports General Line, 48; and Supreme Soviet, 266, 268, 297–9; on Supreme Soviet Presidium, 168; and Suslov, 265, 269; swearing of, 46, 340; taste, 259–60; at Thirteenth Party Congress, 49; and trade-union discussion, 33–4; and transfer of western fortification line, 216; travels to Prague, 175; tries to visit Stalin, 60; and Trotskyites, 58; under tsarist surveillance, 16; and Tver’ gubkom, 30–1; at Twelfth Party Congress, 44–5; unknown, 3, 114; and use of coercion, 101; and victory celebrations, 261–2; and violence, 27–8, 30, 89, 159, 164; visits Arzamas okrug, 89; visits Moskva-Volga Canal, 154; visits Politburo, 69, 92–3, 97, 103; and war preparations, 214, 216, 218; and Winter War, 200–6; worldview of, xxiv, 14, 259–60, 337–8, 344; and World War ii, 5, 8, 155, 251–2, 320, 340; workload, 32, 37, 49, 62, 118, 121, 245, 291, 299–300, 323, 333; writings by, 18, 22, 30, 42, 48–9, 81, 89, 193, 195–6, 198, 200; and xenophobia,

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Index 113; youth, xxiv, 5, 11–26; and Yugoslav Communists, 274, 321, 323–6; and Iu.A. Zhdanov, xxiii-iv, 47–8, 62, 240, 259, 290, 301, 322–3, 325–30, 332–4, 341; and Z.A. Zhdanova, xxiii-iv, 5, 19–20, 25, 47–8, 62, 146, 240, 259–60, 333, 336; and Zhukov, 320, 323. See also decision-making process, education, Zhdanovshchina Zhdanova, A.A. (sister). See A.A. Zhdanov Zhdanova, E.A. (sister). See A.A. Zhdanov Zhdanova, E.P. (Gorskaia; mother). See A.A. Zhdanov Zhdanov, Iu.A., xxiii-iv, 5, 20, 37, 45, 47–8, 62, 107–8, 112, 115, 118, 146, 240, 301, 322–3, 325–33, 336, 341, 343, 356–7n16, 522n40 Zhdanova, T.A. (sister). See A.A. Zhdanov Zhdanova (Kondrat’eva), Z.A. See A.A. Zhdanov

593

Zhdanovshchina, xviii, xix, 8, 254. See also ideology, Zhdanov Zhemchuzhina-Molotova, P., 255 Zherbak, A.R., 301, 322 Zhigarev, P.F. 232 Zhuravlev, 328 Zinoviev, G.E., xxiv, 32, 38–9, 48–9, 58–61, 63–4, 70, 111, 120, 126, 128, 136–9, 147, 158, 173, 321 Zinovievite Opposition. See Left Opposition Zionists, 297 Zizek, Slavoj, 145 Zorin, 323 Zoshchenko, M., 8, 211–12, 279–82, 304 Zubkova, Elena, 283 Zubok, V., 338 Zverev, A.G., 319 Zvezda. See Zhdanov

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