During Great Patriotic War – many aspects of Stalin’s dictatorship were softened as the regime sought to mobilise the patriotism of the people. After victory was achieved, however, Stalin turned back to repression, authoritarianism and paranoia. In these years of ‘High Stalinism’, the cult of personality reached even greater heights. Both the ruler’s ad the ruled lived in a climate of fear until the death of Stalin in March 1953.
Dictatorship and totalitarianism:
High Stalinism was the culmination of Stalin’s regime, lasting from 1945 to 1953. It was the most extreme expression of Stalinism.
Key Features:
Unchallenged leadership by Stalin
An extreme form of dictatorship
Stalin as the heroic leader of the Great Patriotic War
The Stalin cult portrayed him as god-like & apart from others
A secret police state: renewed terror
Cultural purges in the name of ideological ‘purity’
The Party and its institutions weakened or ignored
Rivalries & plots amongst Stalin’s inner circle
Stalin increasingly withdrawn & paranoid
Deep suspicion of any influences from outside the USSR
A lack of policy reform due to stagnation & inertia at the top of the government
During the war – some aspects of Stalin’s dictatorship had been relaxed, for example religion was tolerated and churches were reopened. But after the war, Stalin’s dictatorship became even stronger than before.
The Party was side-lined; there were no Party congress between 1939 and 1952. The Politburo and Central Committee did only what Stalin ordered.
The Red Army and its heroes were downgraded, so they would not challenge Stalin. For example, in 1946 war hero Marshal Zhukov was sent to faraway Odessa to a lower-level command.
Stalin’s inner circle were kept divided by Stalin’s schemes and their own rivalries. For example, Malenkov and Beria plotted against Zhdanov and engineered his downfall in 1948.
Terror was renewed to ensure people gave their absolute obedience to the state – totalitarianism.
Renewed terror:
Stalin enforced the USSR’s isolation from the non-socialist world. This was partly for security reasons as the Cold War intensified, but also for fear of Soviets losing their ideological commitment, for example if they saw how much better people lived in other countries.
Around 15% of 1.8 mil returned prisoners of war were sent to the gulags.
Any contact with foreigners could get a person denounced and arrested. A 1947 law outlawed marriage to foreigners.
Foreign travel by Soviet citizens was tightly controlled. Few were allowed to leave the USSR.
The sense of terror was pervasive, and tens of thousands of Soviet citizens continued to be arrested during Stalin’s last years, sometimes for no more than a careless few word. In total, around 12 million wartime survivors were sent to the gulags.
The NKVD under Beria:
After the war, Lavrentii Beria was not only NKVD chief, but also deputy prime minister, a full member of the Politburo, and the head of the USSR’s atomic weapon programme.
The NKVD under Beria was strengthened and reorganised as 2 separate ministries:
The MVD which controlled domestic security and the gulags
The MGB which handled counter-intelligence and espionage
Zhdanovism and the culture purge:
Andrei Zhdanov were appointed to lead cultural. Policy in 1946.
He insisted that Soviet artists and writers followed Party lines: socialist realism, the praise of Stalin and Soviet achievements, and criticism of American commercialism and inequalities.
Those whose work did not embody socialist realism had to publicly apologise in order to continue working.
Zhdanovism began with the purge of 2 literacy works: Zoschenko’s The Adventure of a Monkey and a collection of poems by Anna Akhmatova. The writers were expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers.
In music, Shostakovich and Prokofiev were 2 of the composers criticised for ‘rootless cosmopolitanism’ and ‘anti-socialist tendencies. They were removed from their teaching posts and Prokofiev’s wife was imprisoned.
Western cultural influences were blocked. It was impossible to ger non- communist foreign newspapers, and only a few approved foreign books were translated into Russian.
Soviet scientific development was hampered by Trofim Lysenko’s dominance over the Academy of Sciences; new theories or lines of research were suppressed if they somehow contacted Marxist principles.
Stalin’s cult of personality:
Building on his reputation as the saviour of the USSR, Stalin was portrayed as the world’s greater living genus, equally superior in all areas of philosophy, science, military strategy and economics.
For example, it became customary or all books and articles to start and end with a paragraph acknowledging Stalin’s genius on the subject.
Stalin’s victory in the Great Patriotic War replaced Lenin’s October/ November Revolution as the greatest event of Soviet history.
Stalin was portrayed as a man of the people, who was instinctively in touch with what the average worker was thinking, but the fact he was increasingly isolated and often misled but his own propagandists.
Towns and cities competed for the honour of being named after Stalin; there was even a movement for Moscow to be renamed Stalinodar.
Stalin prizes were launched in the USSR after it was felt that Soviets were being excluded from winning as many Nobel prizes as they deserve.
The Leningrad affair; purges and the Doctors’ Plot:
The Leningrad affair:
Stalin was suspicious of the Party’s base in Leningrad because his rivals often built up a power base there.
Stalin also did not like the way Leningraders glorified their heroic struggle to survive their 872-day siege during the Great Patriotic War. There had been accusations that Stalin could have done more help to the city, such as airdrops of food or large-scale evacuations.
In 1948, Zhdanov appeared to be out of favour with Stalin, when he died of a heart attack in August, Stalin launched a purge of the Leningrad Party.
Leading Party officials, such as Nikolai Vozenski, were arrested, interrogated and executed in 1950. Most of these people had owed their positions to Zhdanov.
By 1950, 2000 Party officials had been dismissed and replaced by pro-Stalin communists.
Purges:
The Leningrad affair was the 1st major Party purge since 1938, more followed increasing the climate of fear.
The next was the ‘Mingrelian Case’. In 1951, targeted at Party officials in Georgia who were mainly from the Mingrelian ethic group.
Bera was a Mingrelian, and the accusations were mainly against followers of Beria. Many were also accused of conspiring with ‘Jewish plotters’
Stalin was using the accusations to contain Bera’s power. The accusations were still being made at the time of Stalin’s death.
The Doctor’s plot:
A doctor called Lydia Timashuk accused the doctors who had treated Zhdanov of contributing to his death in August 1948.
In 1952, Stalin used this complaint as a reason to arrest many Jewish doctors for participating ‘Zionist conspiracy’ to harm the USR on behalf of Iran and its ally, the USA.
Other Jewish people were caught up in the purge, including the Jewish wives of Molotov and Kalinin.
Thousands of ordinary Jewish people were also arrested and deported to the gulag.
Nine senior doctors were condemned to death, but Stalin’s own death saved them from execution