The Xenophile Historian

A History of Russia

1917 to 1985

	The February Revolution and the Provisional Government
	The Bolsheviks Take Over
	The Russian Civil War
	The Russo-Polish War and the Comintern
	The New Economic Policy
	The Struggle to Succeed Lenin
	The Nightmare of Stalinism Begins
	Prelude to World War II
	Operation Barbarossa
	Stalingrad: The Turning Point
	The Battle Of Kursk
	Crushing the Third Reich
	Aftermath
	The Cold War Begins
	Recompression at Home
	The Khrushchev Years
	Brezhnev Takes Charge
	Foreign Policy: The Brezhnev Doctrine & Détente
	Gerontocracy Triumphant
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The Allied countries sensed this and tried to keep Russia's economy from collapsing with massive amounts of foreign aid, but Turkey blocked access to the Black Sea and Germany kept Allied shipping out of the Baltic. The aid that did get in had to follow a long roundabout path via Siberia (Vladivostok) or the Arctic (Murmansk).

Despite the inflation, the government paid the farmers the same price for their harvests as before. Realizing that the money they were getting was worthless, the farmers stopping selling food, and the cities found themselves facing starvation. In February 1917, 40,000 workers from the Petrograd Putilov factory went on strike, demanding food and a 50% wage increase. The management retaliated by firing the workers; in a wave of sympathy, 200,000 other Petrograd factory workers left their jobs. As the strikes and demonstrations increased, the soldiers were ordered to shoot the protesters; they did so at first, but then they joined the rebels and shot the officers giving the orders instead.

It was 1905 all over again, with the workers and soldiers electing Soviets as rebel governments in the cities. Meanwhile the tsar ordered the Fourth Duma to stop meeting until the crisis was passed. Fearing dissolution, the Duma also switched sides, becoming the "Provisional Government" of the revolution until free elections could be held. Seeing nobody left to support him, Nicholas was compelled to abdicate; on March 15 he gave up his throne at a little railroad station that was appropriately named Dno (bottom). The crown was offered to the ex-tsar's brother Michael, but knowing how unpopular the monarchy had become, he said he would only accept it if the people asked him to become tsar. They didn't, and the 304-year-old Romanov dynasty came to an end.

The leaders of the Provisional Government were inexperienced and unable to agree on important issues like land reform; they chose to procrastinate, putting as many decisions off as possible until after the elections they promised. Often they would ask the Petrograd Soviet for advice on crucial matters, feeling deep down that it was the actual spokesman for the masses. Thus for eight months there were actually two governments in Petrograd, one with formal authority but no power, the other with power but no authority.

While the country drifted helplessly from one crisis to another, one man had a practical program for the future: Lenin. Living in Switzerland, where he had been in exile for many years, Lenin had been denouncing the war ever since it began. To him World War I was an imperialist struggle, from which the workers of the world had nothing to gain. Lenin said that the masses would be oppressed whether they were ruled by German, French or British capitalists. The only path to peace and freedom, he asserted, was to overthrow those who had started the fighting. "Turn the imperialist war into a civil war" was his alternative to victory. His supporters heard his views with dismay, his enemies with scorn⁽¹⁾, and the Germans decided that he was just what they needed to get Russia out of the war altogether. The German government therefore arranged Lenin's return to Russia, giving him safe passage through Germany and neutral Sweden in a sealed train. Once he arrived in Petrograd Lenin campaigned on the slogan "Peace, land, and bread," and went to work bringing the other Bolsheviks around to his line of thinking.

The Provisional Government was quick to reassure the Allies by promising to continue fighting the war as if nothing happened. But the capacity to wage war was no longer there; the support system had disintegrated and the troops were "voting with their feet" (deserting) in increasing numbers. A loudly proclaimed offensive in July failed miserably, and became a rout; most of the front line troops ran away, and the Germans conquered Latvia. Some of the units in the Petrograd garrison, afraid of being sent to the front, revolted. The Bolsheviks tried to use the mutiny as an opportunity to seize power, but most of the garrison stayed loyal, and the uprising was put down after three days of bloody street fighting. Lenin had to go into hiding, shaving off his familiar beard and carrying a fake Finnish passport.

The suppression of the July Bolshevik riots in Petrograd should have given the Provisional Government a new lease on life, but another crisis followed only two days later. On July 20 the premier, Prince George Lvov, resigned because he could not get his cabinet to agree on three vital issues: whether to proclaim Russia a republic, what kind of land reform should be carried out for the peasants, and whether or not to give the Ukraine autonomy. He was succeeded by Alexander Kerensky, a lawyer from the Labor Party. Looking for someone to blame the July offensive on, Kerensky dismissed the commander-in-chief, General Brusilov, and replaced him with General Lavr G. Kornilov, a man of great courage but little understanding of politics (his chief of staff once called him "a man with a lion's heart and the brain of a sheep"). In August Kerensky secretly told Kornilov to keep his elite troops ready in case the Bolsheviks revolted again. Kornilov thought he was being told to march on Petrograd and become a military dictator, so he tried to do just that. The shocked Kerensky reversed his stand when faced with what he called a "Bonapartist threat." All charges against the Bolsheviks were dropped, their leaders were released on bail, and 40,000 rifles were given to the Bolsheviks to use in defending against Kornilov. Fortunately this coup attempt never reached the capital; propaganda from the Soviets told Kornilov's soldiers to go home and get their land. The whole army dissolved away underneath Kornilov, and Kerensky arrested him. The arms lent to the Bolsheviks were never returned.

The Bolsheviks Take Over

The Provisional Government was vaguely aware of what the Bolsheviks were doing, but it remained passive until it was too late. On November 7, 1917, the cruiser Aurora, manned by pro-Bolshevik sailors, sailed up to the Winter Palace and fired several blank shots as a warning to the government, which was still meeting inside. Meanwhile Bolshevik and pro-Bolshevik troops went through the city, occupying key points (the telephone and telegraph building, various offices, ministries, and banks) one by one. On the following day the Winter Palace itself was seized almost bloodlessly; thirteen members of the Provisional Government that stayed till the end were arrested, while the rest, including Kerensky, fled into exile. Within a week Bolshevik coups elsewhere put them in control of every major Russian city.⁽²⁾

Once he was in control, Lenin carried out his promise of land reform by ordering every large estate--whether it belonged to private individuals, the former imperial family, or the Church--seized, divided up, and distributed to the peasants. All land was declared the property of the state, and only those willing to cultivate it themselves were allowed to use it. Other reforms quickly followed, like nationalization of all banks, insurance companies, factories and means of communication; a Soviet constitution; and separation of the state from the Orthodox Church (that marked the beginning of communism's anti-religious persecutions).

But the Provisional Government had promised to hold elections on November 25, to create a legislative body called the Chamber of Deputies. Rather than risk ignoring public opinion, the Bolsheviks allowed the elections to go on as planned. The result was an embarrassing defeat; of the 703 deputies elected, 380 of them were right-wing Social Revolutionaries, while the Bolsheviks won only 168, or 24% of the available seats. As for the other parties, the left-wing SRs won 39 seats, the Mensheviks 18, the Cadets 17, and the rest went to the parties of ethnic minorities. The Chamber of Deputies met on January 18, and refused to recognize Bolshevik rule, so Lenin ordered armed sailors and members of the secret police⁽³⁾ to clear the meeting hall. "The interests of the Revolution," he explained, "stand over the formal rights of the Constituent Assembly." The CHEKA spent the next few months hunting down Mensheviks, SRs, and other enemies of the Bolshevik regime. Thus, the democratically elected government lasted less than 24 hours. The Communist Party did not allow another free election until 1989.

Before 1917 was over Lenin sent Trotsky to the city of Brest-Litovsk to negotiate peace with the Central Powers. Because the Germans were in a hurry to end the war before American troops arrived on the western front, Lenin thought he could get an honorable peace with no major territorial concessions. But instead the Germans asked for the harshest terms they could get: Russia had to give Poland and Lithuania to Germany, and independence to Finland and Ukraine. Lenin had already granted independence to Finland, and he expected to see Poland and Lithuania go, since these people were not Eastern Slavs (Lenin believed national boundaries mattered less than class boundaries). But no Russian could willingly give up Ukraine, the birthplace of Russian civilization. Still, Lenin had promised peace at any price, so he ordered Trotsky to sign the dotted line.

Despite the signing of the treaty on March 3, 1918, the Central powers ended up with considerably more Russian territory than they were entitled to. The Germans did not give back Latvia, and they advanced up the Baltic coast until Estonia was theirs as well. They pushed east and occupied the Taman peninsula on the east shore of the Black Sea, and just for the fun of it they added Belarus and the Crimea to the German Empire. Turkey was promised the piece of Armenia taken in 1878, but when Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan declared independence from the Soviet Union in May, the Turks moved in and occupied everything south of the Caucasus mts. Soviet Russia's helplessness at this time was shown by Romania, which had been crushed by the Central powers in 1916, but now was able to grab Bessarabia (modern Moldova) and hold it until 1940. By August 1918, except for Petrograd itself, every piece of European territory Russia had gained in the past three centuries was lost, and one third of Russia's people fell under foreign rule. One important consequence of these losses was that in March 1918 Lenin moved the capital to Moscow, because he felt the Germans were getting too close to Petrograd. Another was the creation of the Red Army by Trotsky, to replace the old tsarist army that had all but disappeared by 1918.

The Russian Civil War

The first blow struck in favor of the anti-Bolshevik cause did not come from the White Army, however, but from Czech and Slovak prisoners of war, 30,000 of which remained in Russia after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Tomas G. Masaryk, the founder of Czechoslovakia, wanted these POWs transferred to France, where he planned to use them as the army for the new Czecho-Slovak state; the Bolsheviks agreed, armed the prisoners, and let them organize into a military unit, the Czech Corps. Since going directly west was out of the question while the Central powers were still at war, the Czech Corps had to get out of Russia the long way: by taking the Trans-Siberian Railroad east to the Pacific, where Allied shipping would pick them up. The journey started in March, but having that many armed men in one place was a guaranteed source of trouble; local Red authorities often delayed them, and rumors spread suggesting that the Bolsheviks either wanted to draft the Czechs into the Red Army or turn them over to Austria and Germany. On May 14 at Chelyabinsk a fight between the Corps and some Hungarian communists ended in a Czech victory; War Commissar Trotsky declared the Czechs counter-revolutionaries and ordered them disarmed or shot. The Corps decided almost unanimously to go on to Vladivostok, even though it meant fighting at every train station along the way, and the well-disciplined force succeeded at this, reaching the Pacific on June 29. As a result of the Czech adventure, the Reds lost control of the Trans-Siberian Railroad, and with it, all of Siberia.

Not long after this death came to the Romanovs. For sixteen months after his abdication, Tsar Nicholas II and his family had been exiled to Siberia, first in Tobolsk and later in Yekaterinburg, trying to live the lives of ordinary citizens. The actions of the Czech Corps made the local Bolsheviks fearful that the royal family would soon fall into enemy hands and become a symbol of anticommunist resistance. On July 16 Nicholas, his family, doctor, servants and even his dog were herded into the cellar of their house and shot to death.

So far the Allies had been offended by everything the Bolsheviks did: proclaiming a philosophy that rejected every Western ideal, getting out of the war without their permission, refusing to pay the huge foreign debts of the pre-1917 regime, and executing the tsar. The adventure of the Czech Corps convinced them that the communist government could be easily overthrown, so in July British, French and American troops landed at the Arctic ports of Murmansk and Archangel, occupying a large stretch of the USSR's northern coastline. This was followed by a landing of Americans, British and Japanese at Vladivostok. Officially these forces were only there to recover the war materiel that had been shipped to Russia before 1918, but once that was done they began to actively help the White Armies, especially that of Admiral Alexander V. Kolchak, which at this point occupied everything between the Urals and Lake Baikal. After World War I ended the Allies made even more attempts at intervention; the French landed at Odessa to give support to Denikin and the Ukrainians, and the British came through Iran to occupy Merv (in Turkmenistan) and the Baku oilfields.

By 1919 a truly formidable list of anti-Bolshevik groups had appeared. They were as follows:

White Army Commanders

Minority Groups Seeking Independence

Foreign Powers

Throughout late 1918 and early 1919 these factions advanced toward the central part of the country where the Bolsheviks were still in control. The low point for the Bolsheviks was June-October 1919, when 86% of the old Russian Empire was under enemy control. Only the most important part of the country--Petrograd, Moscow, and the Volga River--remained to the Bolsheviks. But the largest White army, Kolchak's, was also the worst organized. A conservative who wanted to see the old autocracy restored, Kolchak refused to grant land reform, even though it made his soldiers ("peasants in uniform") unreliable. Riots and mutinies broke out constantly behind his advancing troops, and Red partisans also hindered his progress. Under these circumstances it only took one defeat to stop him, and when this happened on the banks of the Volga in June Kolchak was sent fleeing back eastward. His army was killed off by a Siberian winter that made Napoleon's retreat from Moscow look like a cakewalk, and by February 1920 Bolsheviks stood on the shores of Lake Baikal again.

It was almost the same story with the other Whites. Denikin advanced steadily northward until he reached Orel, only 250 miles from Moscow, in October 1919; at this point Lenin ordered false passports made, in case the government was forced to flee Moscow and go underground. But Denikin was unable to get the other anti-Bolshevik groups in his area, the Poles and Ukrainians, to cooperate with him. Part of this was his own fault; his favorite slogan was "Russia: one, great, and indivisible," and the non-Russians definitely did not want any more of that. As a result, when Denikin got to Orel his forces were stretched dangerously thin. As was the case with Kolchak, one defeat caused his army to collapse with amazing speed. By the end of 1919 the Ukrainians had lost Kiev to the Reds, and Denikin went into exile on an Allied ship. Command of his force went to General Wrangel, who was by far the most competent White leader, but he had come along too late to prevent a Red victory; one year later he too was leaving Russia on an Allied ship, along with the men he had left.

The story of General Yudenich is marked by amazing stupidity. While Denikin was driving north toward Moscow, Yudenich led a force of 20,000 Estonians and Russians to the gates of Petrograd. When he got there in October he expected the city to fall any minute and declared, "There is no Estonia. It is a piece of Russian soil, a Russian province. The Estonian government is a gang of criminals." The shocked Estonians removed their troops and went home; by November Yudenich also had to retreat because he no longer had enough men to take the city.

1920 was a year of mopping-up operations for the victorious Communists; by the end of the year the only resistance left was in isolated parts of the Caucasus and Central Asian regions, and Japanese-occupied east Siberia.⁽⁴⁾

When looking at the political situation, one would think that a White victory was inevitable, since they outnumbered the Reds in area and numbers of people. But the reasons why the Reds won are not hard to figure out. Five of them are listed below:

1. The Bolsheviks were united in purpose, forming a single, highly centralized, strongly motivated force. Their enemies, on the other hand, were a loosely united group made up of everything from reactionary officers to SRs and Mensheviks. Whenever the question of land reform or freedom for the minorities came up, they quarreled and eventually alienated each other (see the example with Yudenich above).
2. The Reds were more successful at economic efficiency than the Whites; their policy, called "War Communism," will be described in more detail later.
3. The Bolsheviks had superior leadership all around. None of their enemies could make impassioned speeches as well as Trotsky, and none of them had the self-discipline and talent for organization that Lenin did.
4. Even at their nadir in 1919, the Bolsheviks still controlled most of the country's railroads and factories.
5. The Allied intervention, which was slow in arriving and carried out badly. Morale among the Allies (except the Japanese) was poor; after all, the "Great War" was over in the West and most of them just wanted to go home. They also worked at cross-purposes; each Allied nation had its own plan for Russia's future and was more willing to pursue that than cooperate with anybody else. The aid given to the White armies had a negative propaganda effect because the Reds could claim that their enemies were tools of foreign imperialism while the Bolsheviks were the real defenders of "Mother Russia." By the end of 1919 most of the Allied troops had departed, their strange adventure forgotten by almost everybody in the West today.

The Russo-Polish War and the Comintern

Throughout the entire civil war period Lenin hoped that communist revolutions in the West would take the foreign pressure off Russia. Even before World War I ended communist governments had been set up in Estonia and Finland, but the Germans quickly replaced them with anticommunist regimes. From 1919 to 1923 there were eight procommunist uprisings in Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria. All of them failed; the closest thing to success came from Hungary, where Bela Kun ruled a communist government from March to August of 1919, only to be thrown out by a Romanian invasion.

To encourage more revolutions abroad, Lenin set up an organization for foreign communists called the Communist International, or Comintern. Many future communist leaders, like China's Zhou Enlai, Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh, Yugoslavia's Josip Broz (later known as Tito), and Germany's Walter Ulbricht attended the meetings. But in the short run the Comintern was a failure; after Poland's victory in 1920 the Comintern stopped getting actively involved in foreign politics, though it continued to exist as an institution until 1943. During those years the only successful communist revolution was in Mongolia, which declared independence from China in 1921.

The New Economic Policy

"When the writer visited [sic] Petersburg in 1920 he beheld an astonishing spectacle of desolation. It was the first time a modern city had collapsed in this fashion. Nothing had been repaired for four years. There were great holes in the streets where the surface had fallen into the broken drains; lamp-posts lay as they had fallen; not a shop was open, and most were boarded up over their broken windows. The scanty drift of people in the streets wore shabby and incongruous clothing, for there were no new clothes in Russia, no new boots. Many people wore bast wrappings on their feet. People, city, everything were shabby and threadbare. Even the Bolshevik commissars had scrubby chins, for razors and such-like things were neither being made nor imported. The death-rate was enormous, and the population of this doomed city was falling by the hundred thousand every year."⁽⁵⁾

Throughout the Civil War years the government had kept itself going by a process of emergency appropriations called "War Communism." This involved forced labor, tightly controlled commerce, confiscation of all surplus goods, removing nonessential people from the cities to work the farms, and a general leading of civilians in a military manner. But War Communism was not entirely successful because the radical wing of the Party wanted to continue it until the last vestiges of capitalism were eliminated. By 1921 War Communism had become so oppressive that the sailors from the Kronstadt naval base revolted again, this time against communism. At the same time peasant revolts occurred in different parts of the country.

Lenin feared these revolts more than he did the White Armies; they were caused by the same people who had helped him gain control of Russia in the first place! At the Tenth Congress of the Communist Party (February 1921) he announced that the Party had overreached itself and must try a new policy. Since it had taken seven years of destruction to bring the country to this point, he reasoned, seven years of recovery will be needed before progress toward socialism can continue. The New Economic Policy (NEP) that he now formulated was effectively a step back to capitalism: private enterprise was made legal again, the government removed all controls from the economy, taxes replaced expropriations, and the country was allowed to recover at a natural rate. Hardline communists scornfully referred to those who profited from the NEP as "NEP-men," but the plan worked; by 1928 agricultural production was back to the 1913 levels, and 5% of the peasants, a group called the kulaks, actually grew wealthy enough to hire other peasants to work on the fields for them. Industry did not fully recover--it needed more supervision than it was getting--but growth was seen there, too.

The Struggle to Succeed Lenin

As time went on, Stalin grew increasingly arrogant, intolerant and rude, even to Lenin and his wife. At the end of 1922 Lenin wrote a memo to the other Party members, warning that: "Comrade Stalin, having become Secretary General, has concentrated enormous power in his hands; I am not sure that he always knows how to use that power with sufficient caution." He then recommended that Stalin be removed at a convenient time, and called on the party to stay united in purpose. Stalin and his cronies, however, suppressed the memo called Lenin's Testament as soon as they heard about it.

Despite Lenin's urging, the Party split into two factions over the issue of the USSR's future. The left wing of the Party, led by Trotsky, Lev Kamenev and Gregory Zinoviev, advocated these ideas:

1. "Permanent Revolution" (Spread communism everywhere)
2. "Primitive Socialist Accumulation" (Redistribute the wealth so that everyone has the same amount)
3. Dump the kulaks, go to immediate industrialization.

1. "Socialism in One Country" (Build up the Soviet Union before spreading revolution abroad)
2. Continue NEP indefinitely, perhaps even 25 years.
3. Help the farmers first.

Before I go on, I should mention something about the two men who now wanted to succeed Lenin. Stalin and Trotsky had some similarities in their biographies to this point. Both of them were born in 1879, under different names from what we commonly call them now. Both of them came from ethnic minorities, but both gave up their heritage to make themselves acceptable to Russians.⁽⁶⁾ Both of them were active Party members from the time they grew up, and both were in exile when the 1917 revolutions began (Trotsky in America, Stalin in Siberia). But in personality the two men were very different. Trotsky was a brilliant speaker and writer, with an ego to match, while Stalin was the quiet, organizing, calculating type. Trotsky had been in the limelight as a Bolshevik leader since the 1905 Revolution, while Stalin was as inconspicuous as a bug under a rock, even after he had been promoted to the Politburo in 1917. It was the clash between their personalities that set the stage for the events that followed.

Trotsky must have thought that since he was so popular, he could become leader of the Soviet Union whenever he asked for it; that's the only way to explain his lack of activity while Stalin was bringing the rest of the Party around to his side. By not criticizing Stalin while Lenin was alive, and by missing Lenin's funeral, Trotsky made two grave errors. In May 1924 Lenin's Testament was read to the Central Committee; Stalin offered to resign, but Zinoviev persuaded the Central Committee to suppress the memo again.⁽⁷⁾ Even Trotsky voted to suppress Lenin's Testament at this point, feeling that Party unity mattered more than his personal success. That was his last chance to oust Stalin, and in the next few years Stalin effectively cut out the ground from under him:

1925: Trotsky loses his job as War Commissar.
1926: Trotsky is expelled from the Politburo.
1927: Trotsky is expelled from the Central Committee, and later the Party.
1928: Trotsky is expelled to Alma-Ata, in Kazakhstan.

Every step of the way Trotsky continued to denounce Stalin, especially when he could catch Stalin making a mistake. Having had enough, Stalin exiled him from the USSR in 1929. Trotsky wandered around the world for eleven years after that, warning of the dangers of Stalinism. Finally in 1940, an assassin sent by Stalin caught up with Trotsky in Mexico City and drove an ice-axe into his brain. That was Stalin's policy: eliminate all enemies, both actual and potential.

The Nightmare of Stalinism Begins

But the cost in human life, freedom and well-being was almost unbelievable. To build a modern state overnight, workers labored long hours for poor pay, lived in cramped, unheated quarters and had to forego things that Westerners take for granted: shoes, radios, sometimes even food. And they had to live with the system whether they liked it or not.

To protest was futile. Stalin and his henchmen brutally repressed whatever real or imagined opposition they encountered. Factories and farms were given production quotas they had to meet; if they failed to do so, the plant or farm manager would be denounced as a "wrecker," "foreign spy," or "imperialist agent"; that failure often cost the manager his job, and sometimes his life. The peasants who did not give up their farms willingly to the collectives were herded into a network of concentration camps called the Gulag, and there the kulaks were ruthlessly liquidated as a class. Even animals suffered as a result of the Five Year Plans; to avoid giving them up to the state, 2/3 of the country's livestock was killed by the peasants.

These brutal methods could not make agricultural and industrial production meet Stalin's goals, but they did get impressive results. Total industrial output increased fivefold under the first two Five-Year Plans. The new blast furnaces at Magnitogorsk and Stalinsk were producing as much iron and steel as the whole country had in 1914, to give just one example. Only the industry of the United States and Germany produced more, and the USSR was rapidly catching up with Germany. Part of this was because of the Great Depression; since the USSR had little trade with the outside world, it was unaffected by the worldwide slump that hit every other advanced nation, allowing the USSR to leap ahead while most of the world economy lay idle.

To justify his actions, Stalin launched a Soviet cultural revolution. Russian art and literature, which had been largely ignored by the state since 1917, now became Stalin's tools of propaganda. The cultural expression of minority groups was suppressed; when Soviet archaeologists found fourth-century artifacts left by the Ostrogoths, they had to invent a new civilization to explain them, because the party line would not have allowed this reminder that a German tribe once ruled the same parts of Russia that the Germans occupied in both World Wars. New history books were written that claimed the Russians invented everything years before the West did, and that the Bolshevik Revolution was the most important event in world history. Plays and movies that Stalin did not like were suppressed for being "ideologically unsatisfactory," and they were replaced by shows that glorified Russian heroes like Alexander Nevsky, Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, and Alexander Suvorov; all of them emphasized submission to the state as the best way to stop foreign invasions. Later on, when Stalin had exterminated most of the revolution's participants, he had himself portrayed as the omnipotent and infallible leader, the only man who could finish what Lenin started.

Stalinism reached a new level of absurdity in the field of biology. In 1930 an agronomist named Trofim Lysenko claimed that he had proved through experiments with seeds that plants acquire their characteristics from the environment, not through heredity. Stalin endorsed the theory, thinking it was proof that a Marxist society could produce superior human beings. "Lysenkoism" was taught in the schools, and the teaching of classical genetics was outlawed because it disagreed with Lysenkoism. Lysenko's methods were not objectively tested until 1965, and only then was Lysenkoism shown to be the fraud that it really was.

Stalin dealt fiendishly with political opposition. After Trotsky was gone, the main opponent to Stalin's rule was Sergei Kirov, the young chief of the Leningrad Communist Party since 1926. By criticizing Stalin's heavyhanded tactics at the Seventeenth Party Congress (1934), Kirov immediately became the most popular man in the USSR. At the end of the same year, however, Kirov was murdered by a secret police agent. To cover up, Stalin immediately ordered the assassin and 49 alleged accomplices shot; Zinoviev and Kamenev were charged and sent to prison. Then the accusations became a horrible mass purge that arrested and sent at least half a million "Kirov's assassins" to the Gulag.

When the Kirov affair had reached the limits of excess, Stalin put into motion a series of purge trials in 1936. At the first one he put on trial all sixteen of the Party's highest ranking left-wing members, including Kamenev and Zinoviev. Stalin went back into the past of these men, digging out any "skeleton in the closet" he could find, such as:

1. Did this Bolshevik ever oppose Lenin on anything?
2. Did he ever support Trotsky's point of view?
3. Was he ever a Menshevik?

If any of those questions could be answered yes, Stalin had an open and shut case. Whether or not he did, he would accuse them of preposterous conspiracies, like plotting to kill Lenin, Stalin, and/or Kirov; attempting to sabotage Soviet industry; spying for the capitalist powers; or plotting to hand over the Ukraine to Germany. The defendants were forced to confess to these "crimes," recant, and put the finger on anyone else they might know who had done what they confessed to. The show trial was over in four days, and all the defendants were executed immediately.

This process was followed throughout 1937 and 1938. Stalin's next victim was the army; more than half of the officers, including Marshall Mikhail Tukhachevsky, the Civil War's most popular hero, were liquidated. Then he eliminated the right wing of the Party, accusing his former allies of overzealousness, becoming, as he put it, "dizzy with success" while carrying out the dictator's orders. One of these victims, for example, was Genrikh Yagoda, the police chief who had presided over the first trials; he was accused of supplying false evidence! His successor, Nikolai Yezhov, was so cruel that the purge trials were sometimes known as the Yezhovshchina afterwards. Finally, when the NKVD was the only power bloc left that could oppose Stalin, he purged it of the former purgers, including Yezhov, and filled its ranks with men like the new chief, Lavrenti Beria, who were devoted both body and soul to Stalin.

At the levels below party leadership, the purges grew to mass proportions before they stopped. Any arrest, deportation and/or execution could result in the same thing happening to the victim's family. Even trivial incidents could bring a sentence in the labor camps; it was said that the huge Baltic-White Sea Canal was dug by those punished for telling political jokes. The Eighteenth Party Congress in 1939 was a very subdued one; only one fourth of those who had attended the Seventeenth Party Congress, five years earlier, were still alive now. We may never know the exact number of Stalin's killings; during the Gorbachev years official Soviet figures put the grim total at 15 million. Of these 1 million were shot in the purges; at least 6 million starved when a Ukrainian famine was allowed to run unchecked in 1931; most of the rest were callously worked to death in the labor camps. To save his people from the threat of Nazi Germany, Stalin murdered, beat and brutalized them in a reign of terror that even Adolf Hitler would have difficulty matching.

Prelude to World War II

In the USSR, nobody hated the Nazis more than the Jewish Foreign Minister, Maxim Litvinov, and when Stalin replaced him with the less independent-minded Vyacheslav Molotov in May 1939, Hitler took this as a hint that Stalin was willing to listen to a better offer from the Axis powers. Hitler stopped making anti-Soviet remarks in his speeches, and in August he sent his Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, to Moscow with the following offer: How would Stalin like to have the eastern half of Poland in return for keeping out of the upcoming war between Germany and the West? Stalin, angry and alarmed at the West's attitude toward him and his regime, accepted--with conditions. As well as eastern Poland he asked for, and got, Romanian Bessarabia and a free hand in Finland, Estonia and Latvia. In return for this he promised to supply the Nazi war machine with whatever raw materials it needed; that promise was kept punctually until the day Germany invaded Russia. Once the non-aggression pact was signed, both sides were elated; at the Kremlin banquet afterwards, Ribbentrop was bold enough to joke that soon the Soviet Union would join the Anti-Comintern Pact! One week later, on September 1, 1939, Nazi tanks rumbled across the Polish border from the west. Britain and France declared war, Russia moved in to grab its share of Poland 16 days later, and World War II had begun.

By the first week of October Poland had been crushed between the Nazis and the Soviets. Because the USSR had delayed its invasion, Hitler ended up with more of Poland than had been agreed to, but Stalin did not make a fuss; he just said he would like to have Lithuania added to his sphere of influence as compensation. Hitler agreed and Stalin now went ahead to claim the other areas promised to him. Too weak to resist, the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were pressured into allowing Soviet military bases on their territories. Then Stalin turned to Finland, demanding that the Finns abandon their fortifications--some of which were only 17 miles from Leningrad--and pull back to the Russo-Finnish border of 1743-1809. Finland refused and Stalin ordered an invasion in November. Six-foot-deep snow, terrible Russian leadership, and a magnificent Finnish resistance turned Western opinion in favor of the Finns. The Soviets suffered 200,000 casualties, but Stalin poured in 1 million men, 3,000 tanks and 3,000 planes; in four months Stalin had the border he wanted, winning by sheer numbers. The Finns were forced to cede the disputed territory, but by keeping their freedom, they were more fortunate than the peoples of the Baltic states, which by July had been completely absorbed into the Soviet system as the USSR's 14-16th republics.

If Hitler forgot Stalin while he was crushing Denmark, Norway, the Low Countries and France, at the end of June 1940 he got a nasty reminder; that was when the Soviet dictator leaned on Romania, demanding Bessarabia and northern Bukovina. Bessarabia had been promised in the Nazi-Soviet pact, but no one had said anything about Bukovina. Being fully committed against the British, Hitler couldn't do anything except advise the Romanians to submit, but he wasn't at all pleased.

From there Russo-German relations got worse. Both Germany and Russia wanted to have military bases in the Balkans and Turkey, and they could not reach agreement on that. In September Germany, Italy and Japan announced they were dividing the Old World into three "natural spheres of interest": most of Europe would be for Germany, Africa for Italy, and Asia for Japan. It was ominous that Russia was not invited to that meeting, and so were the German troops stationed in Slovakia, Finland and Romania. The last attempt to patch up relations was made in November, when Molotov visited Berlin. At one point during the visit, Ribbentrop proposed dividing up the British Empire between Germany and Russia, because the war against England was really over. Suddenly a massive British air raid interrupted the speech. Molotov asked, "If Britain is finished, whose bombs are falling on us?" There was no answer, and negotiations broke down. By the end of the year Hitler had signed the directive for "Operation Barbarossa," the planned invasion of Russia.

Operation Barbarossa

Even so, Stalin refused to heed the warnings, and when the onslaught began on June 22, 1941, his surprise was total; the "man of steel" spent the next eleven days in shocked, near-catatonic isolation from almost everybody. The British had mixed feelings about their new ally; anyone fighting Hitler was welcome, but Stalin had behaved shamefully up to this point. Nevertheless, a portion of the American military aid ("Lend-Lease") that had been sent to the British was soon going to the Russians as well.

The peoples living in the areas captured by the Germans welcomed them as liberators from Stalin, but Hitler did not respond accordingly; to him all Slavs were untermenschen, only fit to be slaves of the master race. Three million Slavs were put to work in German mines and factories, where they were treated like subhuman creatures. All Soviet commissars were shot on sight. As persecution of the eastern Europeans, particularly the Jews, increased, it became apparent that Hitler's form of oppression was worse than what they already experienced. A full-scale partisan movement developed, starting with the Red Army soldiers caught behind enemy lines. Their campaigns of sabotage, assassination, etc., seriously hampered the Axis war effort, and encouraged resistance to stiffen in those areas still under Soviet control. A "scorched-earth" policy was practiced, where the Russians burned or blew up everything that was likely to fall into German hands.

Stalin sensed this and changed the tone of his speeches; he stopped talking about Marxist ideals and called upon the Russians to defend the "Motherland" in patriotic terms, using heroes of the past like Alexander Nevsky and Dmitri Donskoy as examples for their descendants to follow. Religious persecution was reduced, to win the support of the Orthodox Church; the Church was allowed to have a patriarch lead it (the first since 1700) and own property again.

The Germans advanced in three groups: Army Group North toward Leningrad, Army Group Center toward Moscow, and Army Group South toward Kiev, all using the blitzkrieg tactics that had been perfected in Poland and France. They had orders to take everything west of a line drawn from Archangel to Astrakhan in six weeks, but nobody could do that; in fact, the removal of Soviet industry beyond the Urals meant that the USSR could lose its western territory and still fight on. The Soviet forces were always numerically superior, but they were strung out evenly along a 1200-mile front, and thanks to the purges, were commanded by leaders chosen for their loyalty rather than their competence; the Ukrainian front, for example, was led by Marshall Semyon Budyonny, who had distinguished himself by botching the campaign against Finland in 1939. The northern commander, Marshall Kliment Voroshilov, was hardly better, and only Semyon Timoshenko (the general in charge of the central front) showed enough skill to inspire any hope. Most of the generals feared Stalin so much that they stood and fought to the last man instead of withdrawing to safer lines of defense. This gave the Germans on the central front a fabulous initial opportunity and they seized it; two pincer movements surrounded first Minsk, then Smolensk, capturing 348,000 Russian prisoners in the first month of the campaign.

Army Groups North and South did not do as well because they had no obvious pincer moves to make, so in August Hitler, who was always less interested in Moscow than in the grain and oil of the south, made an important intervention. He halted the advance on other fronts (which kept Leningrad in Soviet hands, but under siege for 900 days), and ordered the panzer divisions from Army Group North and half of Army Group Center to strike south. They met the southern units 150 miles east of Kiev, trapping 600,000 troops. The whole Ukraine passed under German occupation.

Greatly elated by this victory, Hitler resumed the offensive on Moscow. Army Group Central's tanks broke through the first of three defense lines around Moscow, trapping 45 divisions. The second was carried almost as easily. The fall of Moscow looked so certain that the Soviet government moved to Kuibyshev (modern Samarra), 550 miles to the southeast; Stalin, however, chose to stay until the end. With more panzers racing up from the south, the envelopment of Moscow appeared to be proceeding satisfactorily, but now it was October. On the very first day of the Moscow offensive, the first snowflakes of winter fell. The autumn rains had turned the Russian dirt roads to mud, supplies were failing to get through, and the troops were exhausted. From the Far East came Stalin's best general, Georgi Zhukov, and 40 divisions of reinforcements, made available when Japan and the USSR signed a neutrality agreement in April. Winter immobilized the panzers with 40 below zero weather that froze important pieces of equipment, split engine blocks, and made engine oil as thick as tar. The Germans had expected in be in Moscow by the end of summer, and did not have cold weather gear. The Russians introduced divisions of cavalry, which suffered frightful losses, but had the advantage in mobility while the tanks could not move. Bayonets and grenades were the only effective weapons in this weather, and the Russians were better-trained in this hand-to-hand fighting than the Germans. Hitler's terrifying war machine finally ground to a halt.

Stalingrad: The Turning Point

Stalin was forced to admit that it would take a long campaign to get the Germans out of Russia. But when the weather warmed up in April 1942, he failed to see that it was now his turn to pull back. The first German offensive of the year cut off the Russian salients; the Russian gains, which had looked so menacing during the winter, now became death traps. Soviet losses for May and June exceeded three quarters of a million men; for anyone who thought that the Nazis would be quickly shoved into the garbage can of history, it came as a disturbing shock.

Hitler chose to be more cautious in the 1942 campaign. Rather than make a second attempt at Moscow, he went for a purely economic objective, the oilfields of the Caucasus. One half of Army Group South would be used to drive the Soviets behind a line stretching from Voronezh to Stalingrad⁽⁸⁾, while the other half would make a beeline for Azerbaijan. The first part of the operation, in July and August, followed the German plan perfectly; Russians called this period "the black summer," and a Soviet collapse looked likely. But the river and rail connections between the Caucasus and the rest of the USSR ran through Stalingrad, meaning that the Germans would have to conquer that city to isolate the areas to the south. By the time Hitler noticed this, a Russian army had moved into Stalingrad, ending all chances of taking it easily. Stalingrad had to be fought for street by street, and since Russian reinforcements came across the Volga every night, The Germans were soon measuring their daily gains in yards, counting their casualties in the thousands, and turning the entire city into rubble. This type of attrition, which had been so common in World War I, was deadly to an army that had shown the world how to win by moving fast. Yet Hitler would not give up; he sent division after division into Stalingrad, which seemed to devour men as fast as they could be committed. As for the Russians, they would not be driven out even when their backs were against the Volga.

Most of the German reinforcements for Stalingrad came from the army in the Caucasus, which had gotten halfway to Baku by this time (it halted just short of Grozny, in Chechnya). The Germans never had enough men to capture Stalingrad and the Caucasus at the same time, and now the offensive stalled before it had gained complete control of either. In fact, the demands of Stalingrad meant that only the most important points on the front had any Germans at all. Elsewhere the gaps were reluctantly filled by a mixture of Italian, Hungarian and Romanian divisions. When the Russian counterattack came on November 19, it struck the two Romanian armies stationed just north and south of Stalingrad; both crumbled so rapidly that the Russian forces joined hands four days later, surrounding a quarter of a million Germans in Stalingrad itself.

Whatever chance the German Sixth army had of breaking out of this trap, Hitler now threw away. He refused to allow a retreat while the Soviet cordon was still weak enough to break through ("I am not leaving the Volga!"), and ordered it to stand fast until a relief army came to the rescue. But before the rescuing forces could get there, General Zhukov launched a second pincer attack. Faced with a second envelopment of the same proportions as Stalingrad, even Hitler saw the light. For the first time in the war, orders to pull back to defensible lines were permitted. As a result, in December and January everything east of the Don River was abandoned.

Nothing could be done for the men trapped in Stalingrad. They fought until February 2, 1943, when the 91,000 survivors finally surrendered. Few of them lived to see the Fatherland again.⁽⁹⁾

The Battle of Kursk

The largest land battle of World War II began on July 4. The panzers fought their way steadily, but could only penetrate Soviet defenses to a depth between 10 and 30 miles. Casualties were very heavy (1,000 tanks and 200 planes on the first day!); the Soviet losses were even heavier, but they, unlike the Germans, still had the reserves to replace them. Eight days after the battle started, Hitler called the offensive off. He claimed that the Wehrmacht was needed elsewhere; although this was true, he wouldn't have canceled a successful operation. Where the Russian front was concerned, the Third Reich was always on the defensive after this. Stalingrad meant that Germany could not win the war; Kursk guaranteed that Germany would lose.

The place where German troops were needed was the Mediterranean, where things had been going badly for a long time. A few months earlier a combination of American, British and Free French forces cleared the Axis out of North Africa, and at the height of the battle of Kursk the Allies landed on Sicily, as a prelude to an invasion of the Italian peninsula. In September the Italians jailed Mussolini and announced they wanted to join the Allies; Hitler was forced to occupy Italy to keep it on his side.

Though his forces got considerable relief, Stalin was not impressed with the Allied victories in the Mediterranean. There were still 200 German divisions on Russian soil and what happened to the odd ten deployed elsewhere mattered little to him. When Winston Churchill visited Moscow in 1942, Stalin gave him a good dressing down, asking him questions like, "When are you going to start fighting? Are you going to let us do all the work?" What he wanted to see was an Anglo-American invasion of France that would force Germany to divide its forces equally between east and west. The Americans agreed that this would be the quickest way to win the war, but they did not have enough troops in Europe yet to fight on this sort of scale, and the British were very reluctant to take part in a campaign where they would have to provide more than half the men. Remembering the long casualty lists of World War I, the British instead proposed the attack on Italy, which Churchill called "the soft underbelly of the Axis beast." Rather unhappily, the Americans agreed to go along with this plan.

To avoid misunderstandings in the future, Churchill and Roosevelt met with Stalin in Tehran in September 1943. Stalin's victories were the most impressive to date, allowing him to negotiate from a position of strength. It was here that he got his allies to promise a cross-channel invasion of the European continent in 1944.⁽¹⁰⁾ He also proposed annexing eastern Poland and compensating the Poles with German territory; in return he promised to help Roosevelt against Japan, and to cooperate with the new international organization Roosevelt was setting up (the United Nations). On most of these proposals the details were set aside to be worked on in future conferences.

Crushing the Third Reich

The only disappointment in the Red Army's performance was its failure to grip and destroy any large German units, because Stalin insisted on attacking everywhere at once. This strategy kept Army Groups North and South on the run, but it also meant that none of the envelopments were strong enough to hold what they captured; time and time again apparently doomed German units fought their way out of traps and got back to safety. Soviet plans for the summer of 1944 showed that this point had not gone unnoticed; the pincer movement on the central front was both simple and strong.

The campaign to liberate Belarus began on June 22, the third anniversary of Hitler's invasion of Russia. It started with pincer movements to surround Vitebsk and Bobruisk, two towns 150 miles apart that Hitler had overgarrisoned. Once both were cut out of the German line, the Russian tanks converged on Minsk in a great pincer attack that enveloped most of Belarus. On July 4 they reached Minsk, and they proved to be strong enough to keep and crush what they held. It was a staggering haul; Army Group Center, desperately trying to re-form in eastern Poland, found that it only had twelve of its forty divisions left. Nor could Hitler mend this gaping hole torn in his forces, because the D-Day invasion of France had given him a disaster that was just as bad in the west.

By the beginning of August the Russians were on the east bank of the Vistula river, with Warsaw just on the opposite side. Thinking that liberation was only a few days away, the Poles of Warsaw revolted. Their aim was not only to give the boot to the Nazis but also to get the flag of independent Poland aloft before the Russians imposed a puppet communist government on them. Tragically, instead of helping the Poles, Stalin halted his advance into Poland and just watched while the Germans cut the Polish resistance to bits over the next nine weeks.⁽¹¹⁾

With the assault on Germany having (temporarily) run out of steam, Stalin spent the late summer and fall of 1944 stripping Hitler of his Axis partners. When he launched an attack against Romania on August 20, it only took five days for the Romanians to surrender and join the Allies, leaving twenty German divisions in the country to be quickly overwhelmed. In the first week of September Bulgaria also switched sides. At the same time a new offensive on the northern front made up the Finns' minds for them; they accepted Stalin's terms (the loss of Petsamo, Finland's only Arctic port; the 1940 frontier in the south; and a heavy reparations bill) and left the war. Effectively, Army Group North did too; it was confined to Latvia's Kurland peninsula until the war ended.

The loss of Romania and Bulgaria convinced even Hitler that it would be necessary to evacuate the rest of the Balkans. As the Germans withdrew to a new defensive line in Hungary (which held until February 1945), communist guerrilla leaders Josip Broz Tito and Enver Hoxha seized control of Yugoslavia and Albania respectively; a British landing in Greece insured that the postwar Greek government would be pro-Western. In response to the loss of his allies, Hitler reversed his anti-Slavic prejudice and organized an anticommunist "Russian Liberation Army," composed of 1 million ex-POWs and led by one, General Andrei A. Vlasov. But this move came too late to be convincing, and too late to do much good; at the end of the war Vlasov's Russians were opposing Americans in Czechoslovakia, rather than trying to halt the Soviet drive from the east.

In February 1945 came a second conference of the "Big Three" Allied leaders, held at Yalta in the Crimea. At the time of the meeting Soviet troops were only 30 miles from Berlin; that plus the massive casualties suffered by the USSR gave Stalin the same negotiating advantage he had enjoyed at Tehran. Stalin agreed to support the embryonic United Nations and to declare war on Japan 90 days after the fighting ended in Europe.⁽¹²⁾ In return for these he was given sizeable territorial concessions, permission to continue Soviet occupation of eastern Europe (though he did promise free elections there), and a role in the occupation of Germany; nobody in the West at that time expected either the second or third of these concessions to become permanent. To put it in a nutshell, what was proposed at Tehran was elaborated and confirmed at Yalta.

Once Germany's river barriers were crossed, the end of the Third Reich came quickly, especially in the west, where Germans surrendered in large numbers to American, British, Canadian and French forces, rather than risk falling into Soviet hands. The Russians crossed the Vistula River in January; three months later they crossed the Oder and entered Berlin. Hitler committed suicide a day before the Russians reached the bunker in which he was hiding, and one week later Germany surrendered. A war which had cost 30 million lives, 2/3 of them Russian troops and civilians, was finally over.

Aftermath

The Cold War Begins

1. The Soviet domination of eastern Europe.
2. The partition of Germany.
3. The Soviet Union attempted to set up a communist government in northwestern Iran, and demanded that Turkey allow the building of Soviet military bases on Turkish territory. US President Truman and the United Nations pressured Stalin to leave Iran alone.
4. Albania, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria (though not the USSR) supported Greek communist guerrillas in an attempt to overthrow the pro-Western Greek government. In response to #3 and #4, the US sent a $400 million aid package ("The Truman Doctrine") to Greece and Turkey, saving those countries from falling into the Soviet sphere of influence.
5. The poverty of war-ravaged Europe and the alarming power of the Communist parties in France and Italy made the US launch a $1+ billion economic aid package, called the Marshall Plan, to repair the continent in 1947. It was a complete success, creating the dynamic economies of western Europe that still exist today. The countries behind the Iron Curtain were also invited to participate, but Stalin would not accept any money with the strings of US influence attached to it.
6. Yugoslavia remains communist, but breaks with the Soviet Union.
7. To contain Soviet expansionism, the Western countries formed a series of economic and military alliances, the most successful being NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Others modeled after NATO include SEATO (Southeast Asia), CENTO (the Middle East), OAS (Latin America), and ANZUS (the south Pacific). To oppose the West, the Soviets formed their own series of alliances: the Cominform (a political alliance) in 1947, the COMECON (an economic alliance) in 1949, and the Warsaw Pact (a military alliance) in 1955.
8. China falls to communism after years of civil war. In the same year (1949) the USSR ended the American nuclear monopoly by exploding an A-bomb of its own.
9. In various places the Cold War became a hot one, as the US and the USSR supported opposing sides in local brush wars, starting with Korea (1950-3) and French Indochina (1946-54). Americans and Soviets never fought each other directly, but often there was the danger of a war by proxy turning into World War III.

These events are covered in more detail in the other history papers on this website:

Europe.
Turkey & Iran.
China.
Korea.
Indochina.

Recompression at Home

Always preoccupied with security, Stalin spent the postwar years further strengthening his control over the country. He was so thorough at this, in fact, that the years 1945-53 are the most repressive in Soviet history. Western art, literature, clothing and lifestyles (even jazz) were banned, and foreign tourists were not allowed to visit the USSR until 1958. During and immediately after the war 1,250,000 people from seven ethnic groups of dubious loyalty (Volga Germans, Crimean Tatars, Kalmucks, and four smaller minorities from the Caucasus) were accused of collaboration with the Nazis and deported to Central Asia and Siberia. The unruly Ukrainians were next on Stalin's blacklist, but even he had to concede that there were not enough trains in the USSR to get rid of all 40 million of them. Stalinist rule was toughest in those areas that had just come under Soviet rule since 1939, and the Catholics living in those areas were regarded as untrustworthy and forced to join the Orthodox Church. This resulted in a strange spectacle as the officially atheistic Soviet state threw its powers of coercion behind the Orthodox clergy.

At the same time came new episodes of anti-Semitism. Officially it was justified on the grounds that many Jews in the Red Army had defected to the West from East Germany, and Stalin suspected that Soviet Jews were sending military secrets to their relatives in the United States. But little actual persecution took place until the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. This was because many Israelis were socialists and/or immigrants from the USSR, giving Stalin some hope that Israel would join the Soviet Bloc after independence; the USSR even voted for the 1947 UN mandate that created the Jewish state. But because Israel is a parliamentary democracy, the Israelis have preferred to ally themselves with the West almost from the beginning. The final blow came when the first Israeli ambassador to the Soviet Union, Golda Meir, came to Moscow and received an enthusiastic welcome from Soviet Jews that made Stalin intensely jealous. Jewish organizations were suppressed by the state, and Jews in the Communist Party were removed from their posts. To avoid comparisons with the pogroms of the tsars, Stalin called this campaign "anti-Zionism."

In February 1953, nine doctors, most of them Jewish, were accused of poisoning Andrei A. Zhdanov (the Leningrad party chief and Stalin's favorite minister from 1934 to 1948), and of plotting to do in other generals and Politburo members. During the previous year Stalin called his henchmen spies, and Molotov lost his position as foreign minister because of his Jewish wife; she was sent to a labor camp without her husband even protesting. Alleged "Titoists" and "Zionists" were already being arrested and put on trial in eastern Europe. A new wave of purges, especially an anti-Jewish one, appeared to be beginning, and plans were made to deport all Soviet Jews to an autonomous region set aside for them on the border of Manchuria. But fate intervened; Stalin died of a cerebral hemorrhage on March 5, 1953. The politburo quickly released the victims of "the Doctor's Plot."⁽¹³⁾

The Khrushchev Years

Nikita Khrushchev was born in 1894 to a small farmer in the Ukraine. He only had three years of formal schooling and struggled to make ends meet as a miner and locksmith, until he joined the Communist Party in 1918. He rose swiftly after he got the attention and patronage of Lazar Kaganovich, the Ukrainian party boss and the last Jewish member of the Politburo. By 1934 he was a member of the Central Committee, and in the Politburo by 1938. At that time Stalin transferred him to Kiev and placed him in charge of the purges in the Ukraine; that probably saved his life. The other senior Politburo members thought that this self-educated peasant worker with a simplistic mind, extremely crude manners and a preoccupation with agriculture could be easily manipulated, but by 1955 he showed that the tail could wag the dog, by firing Malenkov and installing Nikolai Bulganin as premier.

Khrushchev's interest in agriculture was not misplaced because the annual harvests had been exceptionally poor in recent years. Stating that "the agricultural sector" had become a major bottleneck for economic progress, Khrushchev tried to reorganize it along functional, more efficient lines. To start with, taxes on farmers were reduced and the government paid more for the food taken from them. Then came what was called "The Virgin Lands Campaign," in which thousands of young peasants were dispatched to Kazakhstan and west Siberia to plow up arable land there. At first it was his greatest success: by 1956 the amount of farmland in the Soviet Union had been increased by 87 million acres, or 50%. Corn, meat and milk production increased so dramatically that Khrushchev predicted the USSR's total agricultural production would overtake that of the United States by 1970. Those successes made Khrushchev very popular, and encouraged him to make sweeping changes in other areas as well.

During Khrushchev's first three years it seemed that Stalin still controlled the Soviet Union from the grave. His monuments were visible everywhere; everybody in the government was there because he stayed in Stalin's good graces; and only 12,000 of the five or six million prisoners that were still living in the Gulag had been freed. The Twentieth Party Congress in February 1956 seemed to continue this trend when it opened with a tribute to the late "Great Leader and Teacher." But on the last day, after the routine work was finished, Khrushchev suddenly convened an extraordinary session that no foreigners were allowed to attend. For the next four and a half hours he stunned the world by giving a passionate speech that denounced Stalin's personality, methods and policies with words that only the most virulent anticommunists would use, calling him a "criminal murderer" and a "purveyor of moral and physical annihilation," among other things. He denounced the mass purges, calling all of the cases fabrications that crippled the country's leadership just before World War II began. He questioned Stalin's policy toward minorities, his rigid centralized planning of the economy, and accused him of driving Tito away.⁽¹⁴⁾

A wave of de-Stalinization followed the secret speech. The ethnic groups deported by Stalin to Siberia/Central Asia (except the Crimean Tatars) were immediately returned to their homelands. The political prisoners were freed, though not all were rehabilitated. Stalin's victims in the Red Army, like Marshall Tukhachevsky, were posthumously rehabilitated, as well as his political victims in the right wing of the Party; left-wing Party members like Kamenev and Zinoviev, however, were tainted by their association with Trotsky, and did not have their good names restored until 1988. Most of Stalin's pictures and statues disappeared from public places. In 1961 his remains were removed from a place of honor beside Lenin and buried outside Lenin's Tomb; that year also saw the five cities named after Stalin renamed.⁽¹⁵⁾ But by discrediting Stalin, Khrushchev had also destroyed the myth that Soviet leaders were the infallible interpreters of Marxism-Leninism. He had unknowingly cast doubt on the legitimacy of all future leaders. If a sadistic monster could rule Russia for three decades and claim to be following Marxism correctly, how reliable could the system be? Russians learned for the first time to question authority, and the political dissidents that have been a part of Russian life since the 1960s got started as a result of the secret speech.

The effects of de-Stalinization were immediately felt in the satellite states. There the USSR had already loosened the grip on its empire slightly, to prevent a repeat of the riots that rocked East Germany in 1953. Despite this, riots broke out in both Poland and Hungary in 1956. Wladislaw Gomulka, the new first secretary of Poland, quickly managed to make a deal when Khrushchev flew to Warsaw. In Hungary, it took a bloody suppression of the rebellion with Soviet tanks to keep that state in the Soviet camp. For more about these affairs, see Chapter 15 of my European history.

Khrushchev's problems abroad were good news to the old Stalinists in the Politburo, who resented Khrushchev's popularity and feared being implicated as Stalin's henchmen. While Khrushchev and Bulganin were visiting Finland in 1957, Malenkov, Molotov and Kaganovich got an 8-4 vote from the Politburo to expel the secretary-general. Khrushchev rushed back, got Defense Minister Zhukov to convene the Central Committee, and persuaded it to vote in his favor; according to the Soviet constitution, it takes a no-confidence vote from both the Politburo & Central Committee to remove a secretary-general. His position now secure, Khrushchev fired the conspirators. He also did not want to pay any political debts, so Bulganin & Zhukov were "retired" by 1958.

As the 1950s ended and the 60s began, Khrushchev was at the height of his career, popular at home and feared abroad. At this time nothing more symbolized the USSR's status as a world leader than the beginning of the space age. Between 1957 and 1965 the Soviet Union set one space record after another: the first satellite in orbit; sending space probes to the moon; putting the first man and the first woman in space; keeping a manned spacecraft in orbit for as long as five days; and the first space walk. But while Khrushchev was enjoying his successes, his mistakes were catching up with him. It has been said that Khrushchev's downfall was caused by three words beginning with the letter "C": China, Cuba, and corn. We will look in more detail at each below.

1. China: Mao Zedong regarded Stalin as a teacher and never approved of de-Stalinization. But the apparent Soviet superiority in rocket technology shown by the launch of Sputnik I caused Mao to put aside his feelings and urge Khrushchev to provide China with nuclear weapons so that a planned invasion of Taiwan could succeed. He argued that China was not afraid of a nuclear war with the West because there were now more communists than capitalists; if 300 million Chinese were killed, there would still be 300 million left alive to continue the war after both sides ran out of bombs. Horrified at this line of thinking, Khrushchev refused, and Mao accused the Soviet Union of "revisionism."⁽¹⁶⁾ His suspicions were confirmed when Khrushchev enjoyed himself immensely on a trip to the United States in 1959, but left early when he came to the celebrations marking the tenth anniversary of Communist China in the same year. After that the mutual name-calling got worse, Russia withdrew its technical experts from China, and China demanded the return of Chinese territory taken by the tsars in the nineteenth century. China decided to bring home its nuclear specialists who were studying in the USSR, but the Soviet authorities refused to let the Chinese send planes to pick them up, insisting that there was a Red Army transport available to do the job. When the plane was finally allowed to leave, after much diplomatic haggling, it exploded in midair, killing everyone aboard in what was later described as "engine failure." After that China and the USSR were implacable foes for a generation, hating each other more bitterly than either disliked the "citadel of capitalism," the USA.
One year later (1961), another Stalinist, Enver Hoxha of Albania, also chose to break with the USSR. When Khrushchev heard the news, he shouted, "You have poured a bucket of dung on my head!", while Hoxha replied that he was not afraid of the Russians because he had 800 million Chinese to back him up.

2. Cuba: In 1959 Fidel Castro seized control of Cuba. We do not know if Castro was a communist at first, but US hostility drove him into the Soviet Bloc during the next two years. The thawing of Soviet-US relations in the late 50s was followed by a series of tension-raising incidents in the early 60s: the capture of an American spy plane pilot, Soviet-US rivalry for influence in the new nations of the Third World, an unsuccessful invasion of Cuba by US-backed guerrillas, and a world crisis caused by the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961. But the most dangerous event was the placing of Soviet troops and missiles in Cuba in 1962. To Khrushchev's surprise, US President Kennedy refused to tolerate this, mobilized American forces in nearby Florida, and threatened war if the missiles were not removed. Never did the two superpowers come closer to starting World War III than they did here. Khrushchev blinked first and removed the missiles when the USA promised not to invade Cuba again. The troops stayed, but the Soviet Union took an enormous blow to its prestige.

3. Corn: While all this was going on, the Soviet economy deteriorated. The agricultural situation was especially bad, with harvests in 1959 and 1960 that were far less than expected. At the 22nd Party Congress in October 1961, Khrushchev unveiled a vast twenty-year plan to revolutionize agriculture. The success of the Virgin Lands campaign made him set extremely high goals for this plan: grain output was to double, milk to triple, and meat to quadruple. He especially encouraged the growing of corn, ordering farms to cultivate that more than anything else. It was a disaster; the seeds, fertilizer, machinery, silos and experience needed were just not there. Bad land management caused the topsoil of the Virgin Lands area to be blown away, turning Kazakhstan into a dustbowl, and old agricultural regions like the Ukraine fell into neglect as manpower and machines were poured into Central Asia. To prevent starvation Khrushchev was forced to buy 6.5 million tons of grain from Canada and Australia in 1963, the first of the many grain purchases in recent Russian history.

Khrushchev's style of leadership and his blunders made him a national embarrassment; the most notorious example came during a 1960 UN speech, when he got so mad that he banged his shoe on the podium! The last straw was Khrushchev's announcement that he would divide the Communist Party in two and place the two halves under an agricultural and an industrial bureau, a move that gave him more power at the expense of other bureaucrats. The Politburo voted to expel him a second time in October 1964, and this time the Central Committee voted against him too. Khrushchev lost his job, but not his head; he lived in comfortable obscurity until he died of natural causes in 1971. Khrushchev is remembered for many things, but most of all he was the only Soviet leader to leave Russia a better place than it had been under his predecessor.

Brezhnev Takes Charge

Leonid Ilich Brezhnev was the first Soviet leader who climbed to the top because of political connections rather than personal ability. Like Khrushchev, he was an ethnic Russian native to the northern Ukraine. Born there in 1906, he completed his high school education (the first secretary-general to do so) and worked as a public administrator in various posts until he joined the Party in 1931. At first he was just an engineer in the metallurgical factory of his hometown, Dneprodzerzhinsk, but when Stalin's purges removed his superiors, he was able to become the Party boss of a key industrial district, Dnepropetrovsk, by the end of the 30s. Serving as a political commissar, he came out of World War II as a decorated major-general, and returned to Ukraine, where he rebuilt a hydroelectric dam and a steel plant so quickly that he was promoted to the Ukrainian Politburo. In the 50s he was Party chief of first Moldova, then Kazakhstan; in the latter he gained the friendship of Khrushchev by personally managing the Virgin Lands campaign. By 1960 he was in the Politburo as Communist Party President, the third most powerful job. There he gained the know-how to claim Khrushchev's job when he got the opportunity in 1964.

As secretary-general Brezhnev's first priority was to put some order into the chaos left behind by Khrushchev. Khrushchev's unpopular policies, like the splitting of the Party, were eliminated, as well as his plan to take the private plots of farmers. There were also some experiments with supply-&-demand economics, as an alternative to the strict government control over workers that emphasized quantity over quality. Unfortunately this attempt at limited capitalism didn't catch on, because it was sabotaged by the Party's more orthodox Marxists, who feared losing power if it succeeded. A concession was made to ordinary Soviet citizens in the form of the Ninth Five-Year Plan (1971-5), which emphasized consumer goods like cars, food, and clothing rather than heavy industry, but overall the economy remained as inefficient as ever. Nothing symbolized this better than the regular purchases of grain from the United States, an embarrassment to a government that promised agricultural self-sufficiency long ago.⁽¹⁷⁾

Many Soviet leaders, concerned with the increasing freedom enjoyed by artists, writers and scholars since 1956, felt that the de-Stalinization campaign had gone too far in its criticism of Party leadership. The 60s and 70s saw a cautious reversal of the trend, beginning with official speeches that praised Stalin for his leadership of the country during World War II. Along with re-Stalinization came crackdowns on the political and religious dissidents; Alexander Solzhenitsyn, for example, was able to write openly under Khrushchev, but was exiled from Russia by Brezhnev. But the clock could not be turned completely back to the pre-1956 era, and this was reflected in the way the USSR treated the dissidents; rather than shooting them out of hand, they were deported, fired from their jobs, or subjected to other subtle forms of harassment. Before 1989 many dissidents were also placed in mental institutions; Brezhnev's KGB chief, Yuri V. Andropov, explained this by stating that any resident of the "worker's paradise" who hates the system is seriously ill and requires long psychiatric treatment. Andropov himself was a symbol of the new policy; in 1973 he became the first police chief to join the Politburo since the downfall of Lavrenti Beria twenty years before.

Since the dissidents were not allowed to organize into political parties, they had a multitude of viewpoints. They ranged from conservatives who wanted the tsars back (Solzhenitsyn), Marxist reformers, those who wanted a Western-style democracy (Andrei Sakharov), Jews who wanted to emigrate, and Christians who wanted to practice their faith without persecution. The most unusual was Stalin's daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, who emigrated to the West in 1967, but came back in 1984 when she concluded that she was no happier outside the USSR than inside it.

Foreign Policy: The Brezhnev Doctrine & Détente

The Kremlin's response to what happened in Czechoslovakia and Poland is known as "The Brezhnev Doctrine": once a country joins the Soviet Bloc, the USSR will do everything it can to keep it there. Brezhnev also practiced this policy in those Third World countries that professed Marxism, like Vietnam, Angola, Ethiopia, Nicaragua and Afghanistan. The USSR also tried to woo neutral nations into its camp, but there the defeats (Indonesia in 1965, Ghana in 1966, Egypt in 1972, Chile in 1973, and Somalia in 1977) nearly offset the victories. The bottom line was that the USSR had no real friends anywhere, just alliances of mutual convenience.

Even more embarrassing was the behavior of the Communist Parties in western Europe. Their attitude was summarized in a statement made by the leader of the Spanish Communists, Santiago Carillo, at a 1976 conference of Communist parties held in East Berlin: "For years Moscow was our Rome. Today we have grown up. More and more we lose the character of a church." When the Kremlin declared that there was only one true way to socialism, the French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese communists ("Eurocommunists") went their own ways, pursuing local ideas that they claimed were appropriate in their own countries, if not in Russia. Often the Eurocommunists entertained thoughts that were considered heresy in Brezhnev's Russia, like a tolerance for religion and noncommunist political parties. By the early 1980s the Soviet press even had to censor copies of the French communist paper L'Humanite' before they could be distributed in the USSR (unheard of in times when communists everywhere were in total agreement!).

If the Soviet economy stagnated under Brezhnev, the armed forces never had to go hungry. Every year the defense budget increased; indeed, it has been estimated that the amount spent on defense, space, and nuclear energy may have been as high as 20-25% of the GNP. Since most of the manned and unmanned space missions carried military payloads of one sort or another, the space program also got everything it wanted.⁽¹⁸⁾ By 1968 the Soviet nuclear arsenal had grown to match that of the United States, but the buildup continued without interruption, until the Soviet Union had the largest war machine in history.

Despite the buildup and the adventures abroad, Moscow looked for a way to relax tensions with the West, a policy called Détente (French for disengagement). Negotiations to this effect were attempted by Kosygin when he visited US President Johnson in 1967. The big breakthrough came five years later when the next president, Richard Nixon, visited the USSR. During the Nixon-Brezhnev summit meeting, a number of agreements promoting scientific & cultural exchanges were drawn up, and Russia bought $750 million worth of US grain. Most important was the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT), which got rid of antiballistic missile systems (ABMs), and declared how many strategic weapons each side could have; the USSR got numerical advantages in missiles and submarines, while the USA had a greater number of total warheads. Nixon and Brezhnev had three follow-up meetings in 1973 and 1974. Détente's high point came in 1975, with a joint US-Soviet space mission, and a conference at Helsinki where the leaders of 34 nations (the USA, USSR, and every European country except Albania) recognized Russia's domination of eastern Europe in return for promises of improved human rights in the Soviet Bloc.

In 1977 Brezhnev and US President Jimmy Carter signed another arms treaty, called SALT II, but the Soviet-US honeymoon was over. In the years since SALT I, the Soviet Union talked peace, but continued to sharpen its sword in arms buildups as if there was no peace at all. In addition, the continuing adventurism in the Third World, and a lack of progress on human rights, caused the US Congress to reject SALT II. Soviet-American relations soured after that, and there was another series of "incidents" like those of the previous generation: Soviet intervention in Afghanistan and Central America; the boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympic games by the US, followed by a Soviet boycott of the Los Angeles Olympic games four years later; the election of a conservative US president, Ronald Reagan, who rebuilt the US armed forces with increased funds and new weapons the Soviets did not have the technology to match; and the shooting down of a South Korean airliner by Soviet warplanes. It was the end of Détente, and the beginning of a new round of mutual distrust.

Gerontocracy Triumphant

During this time a withering of Marxism became obvious to outsiders. This trend began in World War II, when a British journalist noticed that during his three years as a war correspondent in Moscow, nobody tried to convert him to Marxism. Stalin's wartime propaganda had effectively caused a new form of Russian nationalism to replace Marxism as the driving force in Soviet society. The doctrine taught by Marx, Engels and Lenin had been slaughtered in the purges, by censorship that allowed no deviation from the Kremlin's viewpoint, and by repeated changes in official interpretations of it. By the time of Brezhnev, Marxism was destroyed as a credible system of thought; it was only taken seriously in the classroom, while everyday problems were solved by people who did what they thought was right and then explained it in Marxist terms later. The egalitarian principles of Lenin's day were largely forgotten, replaced by a new aristocracy. An entire government bureau, known by the innocent-sounding name of the "Administration of Affairs," maintained exclusive apartments, dachas, car pools, servants, and special stores for high-ranking Party members and their families, giving them the privileges once enjoyed by the tsars. The moral of the story could be that, as George Orwell would say, "All are equal, but some are more equal than others."

The Soviet leaders, many of them in important posts since the time of Stalin, refused to step down and let younger men take over. Consequently, in the late 1970s Russia became a true gerontocracy. By 1981 the average age of those in the Politburo was 69, and only two members, Grigori Romanov (58) and Mikhail Gorbachev (50), were under 60. But inevitably nature took its course. Kosygin died in 1980; Suslov and Brezhnev followed in 1982. Brezhnev, like Stalin, ended up dying twice: first in body & soul, and then in public opinion a few years later. Nowadays he and his friends, called collectively "the Dnepropetrovsk Mafia," are accused of incompetence and corruption. One joke compares the administrations of Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev to the operation of a train. Stalin shot the engineer and sent the conductor to the Gulag; Khrushchev rehabilitated the engineer and released the conductor; Brezhnev let the train go off the tracks and told the passengers to pretend it was still moving!

Because of the Byzantine nature of Soviet politics, Kremlin-watchers in the West resorted to looking for various symbols to understand what was going on. On the November 7th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, the Politburo members would line up in front of Lenin's tomb, and Sovietologists would guess that whoever was standing close to the General Secretary was currently in favor; they also rated a Soviet leader's standing by the number of people who went with him on trips abroad. If TV and radio programs were interrupted by a day or two of solemn music, that was the best sign (before the official announcement) that a Politburo member had died.

Brezhnev's immediate successor, Yuri Andropov, was already 68 years old and too sickly to accomplish much; he died after 15 months in office. The next secretary general, Konstantin U. Chernenko, was three years older than Andropov, in worse physical shape (he regularly missed major public occasions), and only held the top post for thirteen months (February 1984-March 1985) before he too succumbed to old age.⁽¹⁹⁾ Under the ineffective rule of both, Soviet-US relations cooled to their lowest point since the Cuban missile crisis.

2. Before 1918 Russia used the Julian calendar, which runs thirteen days behind the Gregorian calendar of the West. Because of that the two revolutions of 1917 are called the February and October revolutions, though the main events actually took place in March and November.

3. The secret police, the most feared arm of the Soviet government, was originally called the CHEKA, and was founded by a ruthless Pole named Felix Dzerzhinsky. Under Stalin it became the NKVD, and from Khrushchev onwards it was known as the KGB, but all of these organizations acted in the same way.

4. The Soviets declared east Siberia an independent "Far Eastern Republic," but then promptly re-annexed it after the Allies departed from Vladivostok in 1922. Some Japanese troops remained on the north half of Sakhalin island as late as 1925.

5. Wells, H. G., The Outline of History, Garden City, NY, Garden City Books, 1920 (revised in 1949), pg. 1131.

6. Stalin even forgot the Georgian of his birth, speaking nothing but Russian after he was about 30.

7. It was not published until 1956.

8. The original name for Stalingrad was Tsaritsyn. During the Russian Civil War, Stalin led the Red Army force that defended Tsaritsyn from Admiral Kolchak, so he renamed the city after himself in 1929. Just the name was enough to give Hitler an obsession for capturing this place.

9. An effort was made by the Luftwaffe (German air force) to airlift supplies into Stalingrad, because they had successfully supplied the German force in Demyansk the previous winter. It failed for two reasons. First, the Sixth Army was more than twice as large as the Demyansk garrison, so the logistics of keeping the troops fed and clothed were much more difficult. Second, the airlift itself was badly organized. Thousands of right shoes were sent without matching left shoes. Another time the soldiers received four tons of spices, as if somebody thought they were sixteenth-century explorers! And when the soldiers opened one shipment, they were stunned to discover millions of condoms.

10. Stalin was really worried that the British would begin the liberation of the Continent by landing in the Balkans rather than France, a move which would have kept the Red Army out of most of the future Warsaw Pact countries. By getting an Allied promise to launch D-Day in the west instead, he gained a major diplomatic victory, with results that would not become clear until years after the war ended.

11. Stalin could never get along with the Polish government in exile, which he scornfully called "the London Poles." In 1941 he released most of the Polish soldiers he had captured two years earlier, but not the 15,000 officers who led them; when the Polish government demanded to know where they were, all he said was, "Maybe they have fled to Manchuria." The truth was that he had executed them in 1940, adding them to his long list of atrocities. In April 1943 the Germans discovered the mass grave of these officers in the Katyn forest, near Smolensk; the USSR accused the London Poles of believing slander, broke diplomatic relations with them, and set up a communist government, "the Lublin Poles," to oppose the pre-1939 regime. When the Red Army finally liberated Warsaw and western Poland in January 1945, there were only communists left to rule the area. A similar denial of help to non-communist Slovaks late in 1944 gave the USSR uncontested control of Slovakia.

12. At that time, before the first test of the atomic bomb, it was feared that the war in the Pacific might continue until 1947.

13. In 2003, on the fiftieth anniversary of Stalin's death, two historians, one American and one Russian, released a book entitled Stalin's Last Crime, which proposed that Stalin was preparing for war with the United States, and he was only stopped when somebody in the government, most likely Lavrenti Beria, poisoned him. If there is any truth to this, the much-reviled secret police chief may have prevented World War III.

14. An attempt to reconcile Soviet-Yugoslav differences with a summit meeting in Belgrade got nowhere the year before.

15. Stalingrad, for example, became Volgograd. A 1961 political cartoon has a Red Army veteran tell his son, "Stop asking me for stories about Stalingrad. There is no more Stalingrad."

16. "Revisionism" means backsliding from communism to capitalism; it is the dirtiest word in the Marxist vocabulary.

17. Despite all the promises and efforts, Marxism could never create a human being totally free from greed. This was most evident on the Soviet collective farms, where farmers had little motivation to work since the profits went to the state rather than to themselves. Even Stalin had to give the farmers a concession in the form of private plots of land, where they could keep or sell the crops and/or livestock raised on them. Of course the farmers gave their best seed, fertilizer, and attention to the private plots, but Khrushchev and his successors never found a way to eliminate the plots without causing an economic catastrophe, because 30% of the country's food was being produced on the private 5% of the farmland! Neither were they willing to do away with the inefficient collective farms, because collective work of any kind is a sacred cow that communists and socialists refuse to give up.

18. In the late 1960s and 70s the USA gained the lead in space exploration by putting men on the moon, but America's government and people have shown less willingness to support their space program. The Soviet space program suffered many mishaps, some of them stupid by Western standards, but eventually Russian determination allowed the USSR to catch up again, in a hare-and-tortoise fashion.

19. Because Moscow gets notoriously cold in the winter, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher let an aide persuade her to stop at a shoe store and get some fleece-lined boots, before going to Andropov's funeral. She complained about spending money on that purchase until she shook hands with Chernenko, and then, realizing that she was likely to be making a second trip soon, said this about the boots: "They were a prudent long-term investment." The American vice president, George H. W. Bush, had similar sentiments; after the funeral, he said goodbye to the US Embassy staff by telling them, "Next year, same time, same place."

© Copyright 2000 Charles Kimball