Chapter twenty-three - High Stalinism 1945 - 1953

Question 1

What is dictatorship?

Answer 1

A form of government in which absolute power is exercised by a single person or a whole clique

Question 2

What is totalitarianism?

Answer 2

A political system that demands absolute obedience to the state and that each and every citizen is subject to central state authority; this means that individual rights and freedoms cannot exist; all forms of human expression must be dictated by the state and everything individual must be submerged into one mass identity.

Question 3

What was the population of the Soviet Union?

Answer 3

175 million

Question 4

When was the GKO dissolved?

Answer 4

Wartime institutions such as the State Defence Committee was dissolved in September 1945

Question 5

How was the minister of war downgraded?

Answer 5

Marshal Zhukov was demoted to minor command at Odessa

Question 6

When did Stalin suffer from a stroke?

Answer 6

He suffered from a mild stroke in 1946

Question 7

Who were the leading figures in the regime?

Answer 7

Molotov, Malenkov. Mikoyan, Beria and Zhdanov

Question 8

How did Malenkov lose power?

Answer 8

Zhdanov challenged the policy of Stalin’s closest wartime aide, Malenkov. An investigation was set up under Mikoyan which condemned Malenkov’s actions. Malenkov lost his position as party secretary

Question 9

How did Zhdanov fall from power?

Answer 9

Malenkov and Beria schemed against Zhdanov and engineered his political downfall in 1948.

Question 10

How did Molotov fall from power?

Answer 10

Molotov held great power in the regime during and after the war but fell out of favour in 1949

Question 11

How were party institutions undermined?

Answer 11

No party congresses were held between 1939 and 1952

Question 12

What was a key feature of high Stalinism?

Answer 12

Inertia

Question 13

When was a law passed outlawing marriages to foreigners?

Answer 13

1947

Question 14

Who was Leopold Trepper?

Answer 14

He was a Polish Communist who risked his life as a key leader of the red Orchestra, the left-wing spy ring inside Nazi Germany. When he returned, trepper was awarded with a medal as a Hero of the Soviet Union; immediately afterwards he was arrested and deposited in the gulag. He was released in 1955.

Question 15

Who was the head of the NKVD?

Answer 15

Beria

Question 16

What positions did Beria hold?

Answer 16

NKVD chief, deputy prime minister, a full member of the politburo and the man in charge of developing the Soviet atomic bomb. He presided over the vast expansion of prison labour camps in the gulag.

Question 17

What was the NKVD split into?

Answer 17

The MVD controlled domestic security and the gulags and the MGB handled counter-intelligence and espionage.

Question 18

How many people were victims of the terror?

Answer 18

Tens of thousands were arrested annually for counter revolutionary activities and around 12 million wartime survivors were sent to labour camps.

Question 19

Who led the cultural purge?

Answer 19

Zhdanov - the period became known as the Zhdanovshchina

Question 20

When was the cultural purge launched?

Answer 20

1946

Question 21

What literary works were purged in Leningrad?

Answer 21

The adventures of a monkey by satirist Zoshchenko
A collection of poems by Anna Akhmatova
The authors were expelled from the Soviet Union of Writers

Question 22

How was Boris Pasternak condemned?

Answer 22

His girlfriend was sent to the gulags

Question 23

How was cinema targeted?

Answer 23

Sergei Eisenstein was attacked for his epic film Ivan the Terrible (1944) because he portrayed the tsar’s bodyguards as thugs rather than the progressive army

Question 24

What composers came under criticism?

Answer 24

Shostakovich and Prokofiev

Question 25

When did the Stalin cult reach its climax?

Answer 25

On his 70th birthday - Moscow’s Red square was dominated by a giant portrait of Stalin

Question 26

What towns are renamed after him?

Answer 26

Stalingrad, Stalino, Stalinsk, Stalinabad, and Stalinogorsk

Question 27

What was the Leningrad affair?

Answer 27

1949 - He decided to follow up the death of Zhdanov with purging the Leningrad party. This escalated from attacks on Voznesenski to a major purge of leading officials. All were executed on October 1950. More than 2000 officials had been dismissed from their posts.

Question 28

Why was Zhdanov targeted?

Answer 28

1948 - party base in Leningrad too powerful
The pride than Leningrad took in its great siege of 1941-44

Question 29

What were the purges?

Answer 29

The Mingrelian case was launched in 1951. The target was party officials in Georgia who were accused of collaboration with Western powers. They were mostly Mingrelian - an ethnic group - and followers of Beria. This was not settled by the time that Stalin died in 1953 but it limited Beria’s power.

Question 30

What was the Doctors’ plot?

Answer 30

This was a conspiracy revealed by Lydia Timashuk who wrote to Stalin accusing the doctors who treated Zhdanov in 1948 of sloppy methods. In 1952, this was used to arrest many doctors for being part of a Zionist conspiracy to murder Zhdanov.

Question 31

Who were the victims of the doctor’s plot?

Answer 31

Hundreds were arrested; several of them tortured.
Thousands of ordinary Jews were deported to the gulag
Nine senior doctors were condemned to death but they survived as Stalin died

Question 32

How were Jewish people targeted?

Answer 32

Director of the Jewish theatre in Moscow was mysteriously killed in a car crash in 1948.
The Jewish wives if Politburo members Molotov and Kalanin were arrested in 1949