Stalin’s Power After the War: High Stalinism, 1945–1953 (AQA A Level History: Component 1: Breadth study): Revision Note

Summary

• After 1945, Stalin rebuilt his personal dominance

  • He sidelined the Party, the army and the government

• The temporary easing of control during the war came to an end

  • Repression increased again, targeting returning soldiers and anyone suspected of disloyalty

• The Zhdanovshchina, from 1946, crushed independent culture and revived state anti-Semitism

• Stalin's cult of personality reached its height, presenting Stalin as a god-like genius and saviour

• Stalin's death in March 1953 left a power vacuum

  • A ruling troika of Beria, Malenkov and Molotov emerged

• Historians debate whether Stalin's control by 1953 was total personal dictatorship or a system decaying from within

  • Freeze emphasises Stalin's unwavering personal control and godlike cult

  • Davies sees an "armoured dinosaur" held up by terror and routine

High Stalinism, 1945–1953: key features of post-war rule

Illustration: Concept map of High Stalinism (new)

• High Stalinism described Stalin's rule after the Second World War

  • It was marked by:

    • re-imposed personal rule

    • renewed terror

    • cultural control

    • anti-western isolation

    • a more intense cult of personality

    • no clear plan for succession

Reasserting personal control

Stalin's post-war approach

• Stalin's approach to post-war rule was "back to the future"

  • He revived tight personal control after the wartime relaxation

• The wartime growth in Party membership made it harder to manage

• The army's prestige after victory was higher than Stalin wanted

Ending wartime structures

• The State Defence Committee (GKO) was dissolved on the 4th September 1945

  • Its powers returned to government ministries

  • Stalin remained People’s Commissar for Defence until February 1946

Cutting down war heroes

• Popular war heroes were reduced in status

  • Marshal Zhukov was demoted and sent to command in Odessa

• Potential competitors for public praise were thus eliminated

Sidelining the Party and government

Dividing senior figures

• Stalin played senior figures off against one another

  • Zhdanov and Malenkov competed for Stalin's favour

  • Their shifting fortunes prevented either from becoming too powerful

Weakening Party institutions

• The Party's own institutions were left to deteriorate

  • No Party congress met between 1939 and 1952

  • Only six full meetings of the Central Committee were held in that time

Reducing the Politburo

• The Politburo became more like an advisory body

  • It waited for the "official" line from Stalin or his spokesperson

  • Key decisions were taken in small, informal meetings of Stalin's inner circle

A changing Party membership

• By 1952, the Party had nearly seven million members

  • New recruits came from administrative ranks

    • They did not come from workers or peasants

• Many became cautious "faceless bureaucrats"

  • They followed orders rather than leading policy

The revival of terror after the Second World War

The revival of terror

Terror returns

• High Stalinism brought a deliberate revival of terror after a relaxation during wartime

• Stalin feared "ideological contamination"

  • This meant Soviet citizens being influenced by contact with the outside world

• Returning prisoners-of-war and former officers were treated as suspect

  • Even relatives of those who had been abroad could be condemned

Policing everyday life

• Everyday life was policed for signs of disloyalty

  • A careless word could lead to the Gulag

  • Contact with a foreigner could also be dangerous

• A 1947 law banned marriages between Soviet citizens and foreigners

Rebuilding the security apparatus

Illustration: NKVD split (new)

• The security apparatus was rebuilt and divided

  • The NKVD was split into the MVD and MGB

    • The MVD controlled internal affairs and the Gulags

    • The MGB controlled state security

• Lavrenti Beria oversaw a huge expansion of the camps

  • He was a deputy prime minister and Politburo minister

The scale of repression

• Repression was widespread, though less intense than the 1930s

  • Tens of thousands were arrested each year for "counter-revolutionary activities"

  • Hundreds of thousands of returning prisoners of war and forced labourers were sent to camps or exile

The Zhdanovshchina and the attack on culture

Cultural purge

• From 1946, Andrei Zhdanov led a cultural purge

  • This was known as the Zhdanovshchina

• It demanded strict conformity to socialist ideals

• Everything western was labelled as bourgeois

  • Everything Russian was praised

Writers and artists

• Writers and artists were publicly disciplined

  • The satirist Zoshchenko and the poet Akhmatova were expelled from the Writers' Union

  • Composers Shostakovich and Prokofiev were condemned and forced to recant

Science and scholarship

• Soviet science and scholarship were brought into line

  • Zhdanov backed Lysenko’s discredited theories in biology in 1948

  • Russian was declared the model language in 1950

  • Stalin published his own economic theory in 1952

The anti-cosmopolitan campaign and anti-Semitism

Rootless cosmopolitanism

• A campaign against "rootless cosmopolitanism" revived state anti-Semitism

  • "Cosmopolitan" became a coded label for Jewish intellectuals accused of disloyalty

• Jewish critics, writers and the last Jewish newspaper were silenced

Key cases

• The Leningrad Affair, 1949, purged the city's Party leaders on false charges

  • Four, including Voznesensky, were later found to have been executed

• The theatre director Solomon Mikhoels was killed in a staged car accident in 1948

• The Mingrelian Case (1951-52) targeted Beria's followers in Georgia

The Doctors' Plot, 1952

The accusation

• In 1952, Stalin revived an old accusation against Kremlin doctors

  • Nine, mostly Jewish, doctors were accused of a "Zionist" plot

    • They were accused of planning to murder Soviet leaders

• Hundreds of doctors were arrested

  • They were tortured to extract confessions

• The accused doctors were released after Stalin's death in 1953

A wider anti-Jewish purge

• The plot widened into a broader anti-Jewish purge

  • Thousands of ordinary Jews were deported to remote regions

  • The press encouraged anti-Jewish hysteria

The cult of Stalin: propaganda & personality

The cult of personality

A god-like image

• After the war, Stalin's cult of personality reached new heights

• A mild stroke in 1946 may have deepened his paranoia and reclusiveness

• His wartime role as saviour of the nation became the foundation of the cult

Stalin as a universal "genius"

• Propaganda presented Stalin as a universal genius

  • He was shown as supreme in philosophy, economics and political theory

• A 1948 biography named him the "modern Lenin"

  • It also presented him as the leading Marxist thinker

Managing the image

• Stalin's image was carefully managed

  • It became customary to open and close academic works with praise of Stalin

  • His photographs were airbrushed to remove pockmarks from his face

The cult in everyday life

Stalin "everywhere"

• Stalin's name and image seemed to be everywhere

  • Towns were renamed after him

    • This included Stalingrad and Stalinsk

  • Stalin Prizes were created to rival the Western Nobel Prizes

Stalin's 70th birthday

• Stalin's 70th birthday in 1949 became a national event

  • Newspapers were given over entirely to his praise

  • A giant portrait was lit over Red Square by searchlights

Stalin's isolation

• In reality, Stalin was remote from the people he claimed to represent

  • He had not visited a village or farm for 25 years

  • He relied on films and reports

  • He was potentially misled by his own propagandists

Stalin’s death & the political vacuum, 1953

Stalin's final months

• Stalin became increasingly frail and isolated in his final year

  • He spent long nights with a close small circle

  • He made no clear plan for a successor

The 19th Party Congress

• The 19th Party Congress met in October 1952

  • It was the first Congress since 1939

  • The Politburo was renamed and enlarged as the Presidium

• Many read this as preparation for another purge

Death and the vacuum

• Stalin died at the age of 74 in March 1953

  • He suffered a severe stroke and was unattended to for around 12-14 hours

    • This was due to fear from the guards of interrupting Stalin

• His death left the country demoralised

  • There were huge public displays of grief

  • Crowds queued to view his body lying in state

Collective leadership

• Power passed to a collective leadership, not a single heir

  • A ruling troika emerged:

    • Beria

    • Malenkov

    • Molotov

• The troika left out Nikita Khrushchev

  • His grip on the Party machine would prove decisive in the succession struggle to come

How total was Stalin’s control of the USSR by 1953?

• By 1953, Stalin's authority appeared complete

  • Historians disagree over how solid that control really was

Stalin's control was effectively total and personal

• Stalin's power no longer depended on the Party or any institution

  • He ruled through his private secretariat

  • No congress or rival body could check him

• Terror and the cult of personality left little room for opposition

  • Fear kept officials and the population in line

  • The cult made Stalin appear infallible

• No successor was allowed to emerge

  • Potential rivals were kept in competition with one another

  • Even Stalin's closest colleagues feared they might be targeted next

Key historian

• Freeze presents Stalin’s post-war cult and personal grip as evidence that his control remained total

The system looked unbeatable but was decaying from within

• The reliance on terror can suggest insecurity rather than strength

  • Stalin's paranoia drove purges of loyal officials, not just enemies

  • A fully secure ruler would arguably not need constant terror

• The machinery of government became rigid and hollow

  • Party life had withered

  • Decision-making narrowed to one man

  • "Faceless bureaucrats" followed orders rather than governing well

• So much rested on one ageing leader

  • No stable way to replace him had been built

  • Stalin's death exposed how much depended on him personally

Key historian

• Davies presents post-war strength as partly an illusion

  • Terror and routine masked internal decay