[Diately following the death of Stalin in Marc…]

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Diately following the death of Stalin in Marc cluded the ousting of Lavrenti Beria, head o This concluding article looks at Beria's rise change of style in the Kremlin which The first part of this article looked at removal.

Stalin looked upon the most experienced generals and officers of the Red Army as a political link with Trotsky and with the old Bolshevism. And this was a link he was determined to break.

20,000 to 30,000 officers were liquidated; 90% of generals, 80% of colonels, three out of five Marshalls, 13 out of 15 army commanders, 57 out of 85 corps commanders and 220 out of 406 Brigade commanders were seized and shot by Stalin's secret police.

In these crucial years leading up to World War 2, as Hitler gathered strength in Europe, the Red Army had been stripped of 80% of its general staff! The price to be paid was millions dead and the near extinction of the Soviet state when Hitler invaded in June 1941.

It was in the midst of this carnage that Beria got his chance. The completion of the 1938 Moscow Trial left Yezhov knowing too much: he too was bundled aside, and Beria took over at the head of the purgers - a post he held until 1953.

Cattle trucks

He had plenty to do. After 1940 Stalin began to doubt the loyalty of some national minorities in North Caucasia. They had suffered an estimated 120,000 arrests in the 1930s.

Asthe Red Army reconquered these areas in 1944-45 these people, along with the Volga Germans, the Crimean Tartars and some Asian minorities were packed. into cattle trucks and ramble eastern parts of the deported into the USSR - some 1.5 million people in all.

Estimates are that up lo the events immedih 1953, which inf the secret police. to power and the accompanied his lower levels. In all some 2.5 million people were expelled from East European Communist Parties, with up to 250,000 of them imprisoned, as Stalin -particularly after the 1948 break with Tito - set out to ensure complete and servile obedience.

It appears that in his final years and months Stalin was contemplating purges even more terrible than any previous: a wholesale extermination of the older members of the Politburo - Voroshilov, Molotov, Mikoyan, Beria, Bulganin, Malenkov and Kruschev -together with a "final solution" to the "Jewish problem" their mass deportation to Siberia. He even dreamed of sending with them the entire population of the Ukraine -à total of some 50 million people!

Stalin's sudden and unexpected death in March 1953 may not have been unconnected with one or more of his leading prospective victims learning of these plans.

His decease lifted the immediate danger from all but Beria. But the problem before the new leadership was to retain the structures which preserved their own power and material privileges within the Soviet Union -and consolidate a new authoritative leadership — while at the same time exchanging the more authoritarian aspects of Stalin's regime for more subtle and less constrictive methods.

There had already been clear signs of unrest among the prisoners in the labour camps which exploded in 1953 into a 250,000-strong general strike in the Vorkuta camp which had to be put down by military force.

Khruschev was in every respect a Stalinist. He had been brought into Stalin's inner circle as early as 1934, and held onto his head and his position while hundreds and thousands arourd him were losing theirs.

In 1938 Khruschev himself headed purges in the Ukraine. Between 1934 and 1939 he watched the 71 full members of the Central Committee he joined decimated by 9 executions, 12 secret executions, and 24 "disappearances" . Of 68 candidate members, 14 had been executed by 1939, 34 had vanished, nine had been declared 'enemies of the people' and two committed suicide.

In total 35 had survived out of 139. One of them was Khruschev, who was brought to tears by the death of Stalin but then made haste to secure his position, and the continuity of the multi-million strong Soviet bureaucracy.

The ousting of Beria ran alungside the emergence of a new leading 'troika" - Khruschev, Malenkov and Bulganin.

Some of the trappings of put an end to the practice of conducting administrative work at night and the small hours of the morning which had arisen from Stalin's peculiar pattern of sleep and work.

A handful of Stalin's victims were cautiously rehabilitiated about 1,000 by the end of 1953.

But the news of Beria's execution in December prompted a spate of demands for the rehabilitation of prisoners and victims of decades of terror.

As investigations -began, the close involvement of Malenkov in many of the more recent purges became a growing embarrassment.

By late 1954 he was clinging on to office without visible means of support, and early in 1955 he was removed as head of state and replaced by Bulganin, while Zhukov stepped in as Minister of Defence.

The new 'troika" - Khruschev, Bulganin and Zhukov -was firmly dominated by Khruschev, but in 1956 the hard line of Zhukov could. be seen in the initial moves towards a military crackdown on June strikes in Poland, and the brutal military repression of the Hungarian workers' uprising in October.

Secret Speech Earlier in 1956, Khruschev had played his most risky card of all — his "secret speech" to the 20th Congress of the CPSU, in which he lifted the lid on a fraction of Stalin's crimes, and launched a frontal attack on the "cult of personality"

To a shocked assemblage of bureaucrats, many of whom owed their positions to stalin, Khruschev spoke of the illegal mass repression, tortures and forced confessions.

He revealed Lenin's suppressea testament - calling for the removal of Stalin as General Secretary. He pinned on Stalin land on his slaughter of the Red 1960: pressure from US arms drive for was utterly bewildering while to countless millions of workers, peasants and prisoners who had languished decades in the Gulags of the East, the speech opened up a sudden hope of freedom, the chance to see again long lost friends, relations, comrades.

During 1956 special commissions undertook the task of the mass liberation of millions of political prisoners from the camps, and the rehabilitation (often posthumous) of many of those unjustly imprisoned or executed.

This step proved to be Khruschev's trump card in the struggle for stable power and influence at the head of the Communist Party.

The denunciation of the cult of Stalin, and the release of prisoners secured him a solid inass base of support while multiplying the discredit and disgrace of his rival Politburo members most complicit in the purges and closest to Stalin.

Conspicuously, Khruschev's moves for the rehabilitation öf those politically framed in the Moscow Trials did not extend to the rehabilitation of Trotsky and the Left Opposition, who had been incessantly and falsely accused of links with the fascists.

Khruschev had no intention of allowing the emergence of political opposition to the bureaucracy in the USSR: he merely sought less heavy-handed means of holding down his opponents.

Though a flowering of literary and intellectual expression could not be prevented in the immediate period following Stalin's death and the Secret Speech of 1956, it was expected to remain within strict limits.

When students in Moscow University became too critical and asked awkward questions about the 1930s, Khruschev personally visited the campus and ordered 200 expulsions. In 1957 defiant Moscow writers trappings of bureaucratic rule.

And there were some switches too in foreign policy as the new leadership moved swiftly to procure an armistice in Korea, to seek a deal in Vietnam, and to heal the rift with Yugoslavia and with Mao's leadership in China.

As Korea and • Vietnam showed, the overall objective of the Stalinist bureaucracy remained unchanged - to protect its own privileged position through suppression of working class opposition at home, and through the containment of revolutionary struggles to preserve a policy of "peaceful coexistence" with capitalism internationally.

Already under Stalin the early 1950s had seen the development of a specifically and avowedly reformist orientation for the Western European Communist Parties - exemplified in the "British Road to Socialism"

But at the same time the Soviet Union was coming face to face with new problems in a changing post-war situation.

The consolidation of the anti-Soviet NATO alliance was met by the formation of the Warsaw Pact in 1955. And there were attempts to court the various emergent and "non-aligned" nationalist leaderships of Nasser in Egypt, Nehru in India (to the displeasure of Mao's Chinese leadership), Burma and Afghanistan.

It was to be the pressures of the imperialist-led arms race and Khruschev's attempts to keep pace at minimimum economic cost which were to break this general pattern of class compromise in Soviet diplomacy and bring the Cuban missiles crisis ot the early 1960s.

In this setting, the contradictions of the new leadership which kicked and punched its way to power after Stalin's death are best summed up in the counterposition of its main events of 1956

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Stalin's cult of personality were pushed aside, and Khruschev