Sheila Fitzpatrick: Stalins Team With and Without Stalin

CEU History Department, public lecture, Gellner room

October 14/2015

·         She has a research on Soviet DPs who went to Australia after WWII!

·         The members of this team were more than Stalin’s “yes-men”

·         Khrushchev got rid of the other members in 1957

·         Berija and Khrushchev were the only members of the dozen not interested in collective leadership, but rather in their own individual leadership

·         Over  a million Gulag inmates released in a short time after Stalin’s death, as the team released all political inmates

·         Mrs. Molotova brought back from her Stalinist exile in Kazakhstan and reportedly lived happily ever after with Molotov – strange by-way of Soviet history…

·         Release of the accused doctors of the doctors’ plot within 3 weeks after Stalin’s death, moreover news about this in the press- unpopular in public opinion, Stalin’s death seemed to confirm the accusation that the Jewish doctors had killed him

·         Berija investigated Mikhoels’ death and established that Stalin was involved in it

·         Berija also abolished the use of torture as a means of interrogation –excellent idea especially considering that later himself was arrested and interrogated….

·         The team was terrified by Berija because the secret police was in his hands, in the end Khrushchev initiated his arrest, he was the least intimidated team member

·         1949 Molotova’s arrest, 1953 July Berija’s arrest –not much political accusation could be brought up in any of the cases, but a lot about their sexual life which was used to scandalize the public

·         Berija’s promiscuity was used for his demonization

·         Berija became the last Soviet leader who was executed and the only one after Stalin’s death

·         Khrushchev unjustly claimed that De/Stalinization was solely his merit and initiative, it started as a team project, it’s just that he got rid of the rest of the team…..and took credit for all the De-Stalinization

·         In Stalin’s late years his work capacity substantially decreased therefore a system of semi-collective leadership came into being

·         October 1952 Stalin tries to marginalize Molotov and Mikoyan with his usual method of trash talking a close colleague for months until the team members get used to the idea that they must get rid of that person –now it didn’t work because finally such a solidarity had been built up in the team that they felt like being in the same boat and agreed to warn each other when Stalin begins trash talking someone

o   At least that’s what Berija’s son wrote in his memoir

o   I don’t understand (and I find it sad) why did it take so much time for these people to understand this very basic manipulative tactic of Stalin, this is basic group-dynamics….