Today, one of the most informal and sincere anniversaries ever celebrated on the territory of the USSR is the day of Stalin's death (that's why it was always celebrated in the kitchens, without fanfare and festivals). Since then, tons of dissertations and books have been written about the death of the tyrant, famous thrillers and comedies have been filmed in the cinema, performances have been staged. A year after the "mustachioed dead", the Soviet writer Ehrenburg will publish the story "The Thaw", the name of which will become the emblem of an entire era. The multi-million people literally thawed out.
But one circumstance too often remains in the shadow of the bright historical labels stamped on that time: the "Khrushchev" 20th Congress of the CPSU took place three years after getting rid of the murderer, and it was not the beginning, but the result of a rapid transformation that began already on March 6 ( and for the elite – on March 4, when, while Stalin was still alive, the Bureau of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the CPSU, which he had recently invented, was blasphemously dissolved).
The 20th Congress of the CPSU was not the beginning, but the result of a rapid transformation that began already on March 6
From this follows the second question, which is much more complicated: how did it happen that the system, which legions of elite guardsmen built with fire and sword, was provided by thousands of pedantic lawyers, where scenery was designed by world-famous directors, composers and writers, and millions of devotees were dragged on their shoulders and hardy slaves, by the end of the 50s it had changed so dramatically (no matter how hard they tried to decorate its facade brighter with rubies, kumach, sickles and hammers). In short, back in 1952 in the USSR a “final solution to the Jewish question” was planned and there were millions of prisoners, and already in 1956 the American troupe Porgy and Bess toured triumphantly in Moscow and Leningrad, and three years later Nikita Khrushchev met in America with Marilyn Monroe and Frank Sinatra.
Let's not be blunt. This is the sacramental question of the day – how does a system that is powerful and hopeless in its cruelty suddenly begin to unravel with readiness and swiftness, as soon as only one screw is removed from it, even if it is very long and thick?
In a word: what will happen when Putin dies?
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Already on March 9, 1953, at a funeral rally, Beria mentions the peasantry without the epithet "collective farm", and reminds the intelligentsia throughout the square that it has the rights written in the Constitution. In a private conversation with Mikoyan, Beria confirms that this is serious. Immediately after the funeral, he hands Molotov his wife returned from exile. Meanwhile, Malenkov, on behalf of the Central Committee, scolds the editor-in-chief of Pravda, Shepilov, that his, Malenkov, speech in Pravda is typed in a larger size than Molotov and Beria. And as a result of the meeting, the unthinkable sounds: “In the future, one should not quote only one of the speakers at the funeral meeting. This would be, firstly, undeserved, and secondly, wrong, because it smacks of a cult of personality. We consider it obligatory to stop the policy of the cult of personality!” .
(Not even a week had passed since Stalin's death).
Since March 20, Stalin has disappeared from the headlines without explanation. At the end of March, the broadest amnesty was announced – a million people were released with terms of up to five years. (Yes, half a million "counter-revolutionaries" of Beria were not allowed to be released, but this is not far off either). On April 3, the Kremlin doctors are released. At the same time, the members of the Central Committee begin to document the role of Stalin in the repressions. Konstantin Simonov writes: "The documents were similar to the truth and testified to the painful mental state of Stalin."
( Not even a month had passed since Stalin's death).
By May 9, Stalin had completely disappeared from the newspapers; This can interrupt the well-known historical chronicle, I just wanted to note the very speed of development of events.
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What happened to the closest associates of dear and beloved comrade Stalin? How has their Bolshevik consciousness turned upside down since the housekeeper Matryona Butusova reported to the security officers on duty that Iosif Vissarionovich was lying on the floor, and “there was a pimple under him”?
Of course, nothing new happened to them, except for a feeling of deep satisfaction. Simonov’s recollection of the conference of the communist elite on March 5 went down in the annals: “I had the feeling that the people who appeared from there, from the back room, in the presidium, the old members of the Politburo, came out with some hidden, not outwardly expressed, but felt in them feeling relief."
Beria and Malenkov, and everyone with brains a little bigger than Voroshilov’s acorn, on whose shoulders after the war the burden of real economic management fell, knew perfectly well what state the empire was in, outwardly capturing more and more new territories, having just received its atomic bomb and building in its capital was a giant Babylonian ziggurats under the University, hotels and the Foreign Ministry.
It was the infallibility, greatness and imperial genius of Stalin that played a cruel joke on the system. While Stalin could boast of the largest gold reserves in history and lifetime monuments throughout the country as high as a 15-story building, a terrible famine broke out in 1947 (which for some reason, few people still remember). In Eliseevsky there was red caviar, in GUM – sable coats, and millions of people, even having received a salary, could not buy plain flour in the store – it was not there. And the peasants did not have a salary. Industry groaned from militarism and senseless wars that continued even after the victory over Hitler.
Beria and Malenkov were well aware of this (remember the broadcast from a recent night meeting, where Sechin, Miller and Nabiullina were literally sitting with black faces, the rest were sleeping?). And they understood that all this economy would not last long. The only thing that made them keep their poker face and devotion to the cause of Mars-Engels-Lenin-Stalin was a shivering fear and the knowledge that Stalin had a folder in his personal safe, not metaphorically, but literally.
And all communist (patriotic, imperial, militaristic) gilding is for ordinary citizens. When Stalin died (he himself was already very cynical about all these hammers and sickles), in their place, Surkov and Pavlovsky, who are remembered by all of us, rose the phlegmatic Suslov, who knew how to formulate absolutely any decision with a quote from Lenin (apparently he was the only one of them who really read all the volumes of the bloody graphomaniac). But no matter how any of them swore on the red volumes, for 8 years they saw only the cessation of wars, the reduction of the army and even the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the return of money to the collective farms as the only way for the system to survive (and Beria and Malenkov swung at the collective farm system itself, for which paid off). The primitive instinct of self-preservation made them immediately after the funeral sharply apply the brakes.
But the survival of the system inevitably turned into its rebirth, as the survival of a dinosaur regenerates it into a bird.
The survival of the system inevitably turned into its rebirth, as the survival of a dinosaur rebirths it into a bird.
As the outstanding actor Dmitry Nazarov, thrown out of the Chekhov Moscow Art Theater, says about the personally familiar Z-public like Shakhnazarov and even Solovyov, with their hysterical support for the war, they will not even pass a simple polygraph test. In 1953, Stalin's death became such a polygraph for the entire Soviet elite. From the mighty and invincible system, only one screw fell out.
Much was written about the intrigues and struggle for power at that time. The squad lost one soldier after another. But this was an internal game that could no longer affect the overall inexorable drift of the system towards a more liberal, more peaceful, safer, more stable, and even slightly more affluent life. Whatever subjectively the stern Molotov, the fussy Khrushchev, and, as it turned out, not the all-powerful Beria, achieved, already on March 5, the laws of nature took over.
The assassination of Beria, the fall of Malenkov, the nomination of Khrushchev, who triumphantly consolidated his power with the 20th Party Congress, the reprisal against the "anti-party group" and Shepilov, who fatally joined it (however, in contrast to the execution of Lavrenty Palych and a couple of his henchmen, no one else even not jailed for a while) paradoxically, it can no longer be considered a “thaw”, but a reaction, a return to conservative positions and a revenge on the party apparatus – minus repressions.
A Russian scientist (whom I would not like to name because The Insider in the Russian Federation is an “undesirable organization” and a “foreign agent” and the very fact of talking to us is dangerous for him today) in a zoom conversation briefly described the plot of the transformation of power on this stage:
“The party was pushed away from the levers of government in the last years of Stalin's life. In the Soviet Union there was a principle of departmentalism, when ministries were the executors of political decisions. They had their own verticals of power. Large enterprises, primarily defense ones, were independent of local party leaders. They had their leaders in Moscow, they received resources centrally. The creators of this system, Malenkov and Beria, played an important role in the Soviet military-industrial complex and in territorial administration. The party leadership remained pushed aside, and Khrushchev was to play a subordinate role in this triumvirate. After Beria was removed, it turned out that the party apparatus could become an important support for Khrushchev. In a well-known book by Yuri Aksyutin, an episode is described when, at one of the meetings, Malenkov tried to “shorten” the party apparatus with all its privileges, and Khrushchev, on the contrary, said that everything is based on the party apparatus, and deserved applause. The real control of the Communist Party was restored both over the "siloviki", and later over the armed forces.
In the thirties, the Great Terror dealt a very big blow to the party apparatus. In the course of the war, the apparatus was largely subordinated to military managers, and this continued after the war. When Khrushchev turned out to be the head of the party ex officio, he understood that the party apparatus could serve as his support.
But this was already, as they say, "another country", and the reprisal against Beria was the last extrajudicial reprisal carried out with the pomp of the Stalinist "big style". After that, even if you fell into disgrace with your party bosses, you could not be afraid of execution and Kolyma, discussions and different opinions turned out to be possible at economic meetings and economic institutions. Malenkov was accused of a "right deviation", but was not killed, like Bukharin, and even after the failure of the anti-Khrushchev coup, they were only sent as the director of the thermal power plant.
Later, Tvardovsky had the opportunity to publish Solzhenitsyn (who almost won the Lenin Prize in general), jazz dances flourished in youth cafes, and neither Vysotsky nor Okudzhava had anything for "underground" tape recordings, on the contrary, as a result, their officially released records were sold everywhere, and some songs became title songs in Soviet blockbuster films (Galich, Brodsky, Solzhenitsyn and many others, already under Brezhnev, were punished strangely – they were expelled to the safe Free World).
Galich, Brodsky, Solzhenitsyn and many others were punished strangely – they were kicked out to the safe Free World
Yes, sometimes the dragon woke up and began to emit sulphurous puffs of smoke, and honest people could fall under this or that campaign, and there were political prisoners, and there was a lot of wild and terrible things. But it was no longer possible to equate this country with either 1937, or 1929, or 1918.
The communist system and the imperial consciousness have not disappeared, but the drift of this giant block of ice towards the shore has already begun.
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Neither Comrade Lysenko nor the Kovalchuk brothers succeeded in repealing the laws of physics and chemistry. The law of universal gravitation does not obey either Stalin or Putin, even if they have both a nuclear suitcase and a suitcase for collecting feces. Bourgeois scientists Cheyne and Stokes found that if the system regularly emits suspicious wheezing, its hour will inevitably strike, no matter what trinkets and colored glass you decorate it with.
And after our future "March 5" everything will be even faster. And, as someone Koba used to say – "better and more fun."