Cold Peace: Stalin and the Soviet Ruling Circle, 1945-53 (review)

Gorlizki and Khlevniuk present a detailed, intriguing study about the last years of Joseph Stalin and his ruling circle, using Russian archival sources dealing with the Communist Party's governing body—the Politburo—and its members that have only recently become available, as well as newly published memoirs and oral interviews. They show that, far from being at the complete disposal of one man or of various Party factions, the Soviet ruling circle had become a mixture of personal dictatorship and modern state bureaucracy. It was a "neo-patrimonial" system marked by two elements in tension with each other—one based on a need to have predictable, specialized, committee-based methods of governing and the other based on a system of personal loyalty that threatened "any notion of a continuous routine bureaucracy" (9).

In clear, concise prose, the authors show that Stalin, attempting to control autonomous tendencies among his colleagues during World War II, resorted to bullying and vilifying them to restore the prewar equilibrium rather than initiating mass purges of the Party and state. Stalin's personal whims weighed heavily on the actions of members of the ruling circle, as seen in the campaign against Western influences wrongly attributed by others to advisor Andrei Zhdanov. Yet elements of predictable, committee-based forms of governance emerged as the Soviet government—the Council of Ministers and its committees—assumed greater responsibility for the economy. The Leningrad and Gosplan Affairs of 1949 to 1951, concocted by Stalin, were purges of a limited, surgical nature rather than signs of radical changes in governance. In the Nineteenth Party Congress of 1952, Stalin shook up the Party and state apparatus by fiercely attacking potential successors and instigating a campaign of hysteria against a supposed "Doctors' Plot." His failing health and declining mental state, however, increasingly removed him from the workings of the inner circle, the members of which turned to collective forms of leadership and initiated comparatively radical reforms in the months after Stalin's death.

Though it is a fascinating, well-researched analysis of Kremlin inside politics, Cold Peace lacks a comparative approach to the study of twentieth-century dictatorships. It makes only passing reference to those of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, failing to engage contemporary scholarship about either of them. In some cases, its arguments could have been more clearly explained. The authors often refer to the growing Cold War tensions that had begun to influence Soviet policy by 1947/48, but they do not show them having an impact on the dynamics of the ruling circle. Nor do they pursue their suggestion that Stalin's seventieth birthday in 1949 played a role in his motivation for the Leningrad and Gosplan Affairs and his change of leadership tactics. In addition, the oral interviews that they conducted with lower-ranking officials and relatives of Politburo members did not receive critical treatment as sources.