high stalinism 1945-53

• During the Great Patriotic War, Stalin's dictatorship softened as mobilising the patriotism of the people was priority. However, Stalin turned back to repression, authoritarianism and paranoia.
• High Stalinism


  • Unchallenged leadership
  • An extreme form of dictatorship
  • Stalin as the heroic leader of the Great Patriotic War
  • Stalin cult portrayed him as god-like
  • A secret police state renewed terror
  • Cultural purges for ideological 'purity'
  • The Party and its institutions weakened or ignored
  • Rivalries and plots amongst Stalin's inner circle
  • Stalin increasingly withdrawn and paranoid
  • Deep suspicion of any outside influences
  • A lack of policy reform due to stagnation and inertia at the top of the government
• During the war some aspects of Stalin's dictatorship had been relaxed. For example, religion was tolerated and churches were reopened. But after the war, Stalin's dictatorship became even stronger than before.
• Renewed terror

  • Around 15 per cent of 1.8 million returned prisoners of war were sent to the gulags
  • It was an offence for any Red Army soldier to surrender, and there were also suspicions that they might have collaborated with the Germans
  • Any contact with foreigners could get a person denounced and arrested
  • A 1947 law outlawed marriage to foreigners
  • Foreign travel by Soviet citizens was tightly controlled
  • Tens of thousands of Soviet citizens continued to be arrested during Stalin's last years, sometimes for no more than a careless few words
  • In total, around 12 million wartime survivors were sent to the gulags
• The NKVD under Beria


  • Lavrenti Beria was not only NKVD chief, but also deputy prime minister, a full member of the Politburo, and the head of the USSR's atomic weapons programme
  • The NKVD under Beria was strengthened and reorganised as two separate ministries - the MVD (Ministry of Internal Affairs), which controlled domestic security and the gulags, and the MGB (Ministry of State Security), which handled counter-intelligence and espionage
• Zhdanovism and the cultural purge

  • appointed to lead cultural policy in 1946 - artists and writers must follow socialist realism, the praise of Stalin and Soviet achievements, and criticism of American commercialism and inequalities
  • Zhdanovism began with the purge of two literary works: Zashchenko's The Adventures of a Monkey and a collection of poems by Anna Akhmatova - criticised for lacking ideological content, writers expelled from Union of Soviet Writers
• Stalin's cult of personality


  • Stalin was portrayed as the world's greatest living genius, equally superior in all areas of philosophy, science, military strategy and economics
  • It became customary for all books and articles to start and end with a paragraph acknowledging Stalin's genius on the subject
  • Stalin's victory in the Great Patriotic War replaced Lenin's October/November Revolution as the greatest event of Soviet (and Russian) history
  • Stalin was portrayed as a man of the people, who was instinctively in touch with what the average worker was thinking, but in fact he was increasingly isolated and often misled by his own propagandists
  • Towns and cities competed for the honour of being named after Stalin, there was even a movement for Moscow to be renamed Stalinograd
  • Stalin prizes were launched in the USSR after it was felt that Soviets were being excluded from winning as many Nobel prizes as they deserved
• Stalin was suspicious of the Party's base in Leningrad because his rivals had often built up a power base there

  • Stalin did not like the way Leningraders glorified their heroic struggle to survive their 872-day siege during the Great Patriotic War
  • There had been accusations that Stalin could have done more to help the city, such as airdrops of food or large-scale evacuations
• The Leningrad affair


  1. Zhdanov appeared to be out of favour with Stalin

  2. When Zhdanov died of a heart attack in August 1948, Stalin launched a purge of the Leningrad Party

  3. Leading Party officials, such as Nikolai Vasenski, were arrested, interrogated and executed in 1950

  4. By 1950, 2000 Party officials had been dismissed and replaced by pro-Stalin communists
• Purges


  • The Leningrad affair was the first major Party purge since 1938
  • More followed, increasing the climate of fear
• The Mingrelian Case


  1. Targeted Party officials in Georgia who were mainly from the Mingrelian ethnic group

  2. Accusations were mainly against followers of Beria (a Mingrelian); accusations of conspiring with Jewish plotters

  3. Stalin was using the accusations to contain Beria's power
• The Doctors' plot


  1. A doctor (and police informer) called Lydia Timashuk accused the doctors who had treated Zhdanov of contributing to his death in August 1948

  2. In 1952, Stalin used this complaint as a reason to arrest many Jewish doctors for participating in a 'Zionist conspiracy' to harm the USSR on behalf of Israel and its ally, the USA

  3. Other Jewish people were caught up in the purge including the Jewish wives of Molotov and Kalinin

  4. Thousands of ordinary Jewish people were also arrested and deported to the gulag

  5. Nine senior doctors were condemned to death, but Stalin's own death saved them from execution
• High Stalinism meant renewed terror, a heightened cult of personality and unchallengeable dictatorship by Stalin
• Stalin used rivalries between members of his inner order to stop anyone getting too powerful, together with purges and false accusations to get rid of possible challenges
• By 1953, Stalin's total control had paralysed the USSR. Everyone was too terrified of Stalin's disapproval to suggest anything new or challenge his ideas
• Relaxed Dictatorship

  • 1939-52 no Party Congresses - Party was sidelined
  • 1946 war hero Marshal Zhukov sent to Odessa at lower-level command - Red Army was downgraded
  • Malenkov & Beria plotted against Zhdanov, 1948 downfall - Stalin‘s inner circle division