Leningrad Affair

1. Leningrad Affair 1948-1953

2. What was it? The Leningrad Affair was a sudden and sweeping purge of Communist Party and government officials in Leningrad and the surrounding region. The purge occurred several months after the sudden death of Andrey A. Zhdanov (Aug. 31, 1948), who had been the Leningrad party boss as well as one of Joseph Stalin’s most powerful lieutenants in the postwar period. As many as 2,000 people were purged, many of which were Zhdanov’s associates and subordinates. The purge resulted in the execution and imprisonment in labour camps of thousands of party officials, managers, and technical personnel, most of whom were associates and followers of Zhdanov.

3. Who did it? The motivation for the purges are unknown but there is speculation that Stalin initiated and participated in the purges due to his paranoia and jealousy of the rising young leaders of the Leningrad party faction. It is also speculated that Zhdanov’s enemies Georgy Malenkov and Lavrenty Beria may have also been involved in the making of these purges. In the postwar period Malenkov became involved in a bitter rivalry with Zhdanov, as a result of whose charges Malenkov was relieved of one of his party posts.

4. Andrey A. Zhdanov Zhdanov was born in Ukraine. He was appointed govenor of Leningrad after the assasination of Sergey Kirov and he played an important role in the Great Purge that took place in the Communist Party between 1934 and 1941. As party boss he helped defend Leningrad during World War Two. Zhdanov also led the post-war purge of non-conformist artists and intellectuals in the Soviet Union. He was a member of the Bolsheviks from 1915, he rose through the party ranks after the October Revolution of 1917 and eventually became political boss of Leningrad (St. Petersburg), leading the city’s defense during the 1941–44 siege by the Germans. He was a close associate of Joseph Stalin and reached the peak of his career after World War II, when as a full member of the Politburo (from 1939) he severely tightened the ideological guidelines for postwar cultural activities .

5. Georgy Malenkov Malenkov was a prominent Soviet statesman and Communist Party officiel, a close collabortor of Joseph Stalin and the prime minister (from 1953-1955) after Stalin’s death. He joined the Communist Party in 1920 and quickly rose in ranks. He became closely associated with Stalin and was deeply involved in the great party purge of the late 1930s. he served during World War II on the State Defense Committee, the small group that directed the Soviet war effort. After the war Malenkov won full membership on the Politburo (1946) and was appointed second secretary of the Central Committee and deputy prime minister. After his rivarly with Zhdanov, heregained his position as one of Stalin’s chief lieutenants and, when Stalin died, Malenkov became the senior party secretary and the prime minister. Malenkov had to give up his position to Khryshchev and he worked for the next two years to reduce arms appropriations, increase the production of consumer goods at the expense of heavy industry, and provide more incentives for collective farm workers. He was expelled from the Central Committee and the Communist Party due to his participation in the anti-group to dispose of Khrushchev.

6. Lavrenty Beria He was the director of the Soviet secret police and played a major role in the purges of Stalin’s opponents. In 1917, he joined the Communist Party and participated in revolutionary activities before he was drawn into intelligence and counterintelligence activities (1921). He was then appointed head of cheka in Georgia. He became party boss of the Transcaucasian republics in 1932 and personally oversaw the political purges in those republics during Stalin’s Great Purge (1936–38). Beria was brought to Moscow in 1938 as the deputy to Nikolay Yezhov, head of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD), the Soviet secret police. After the death of Yezhov, Beria became the head of the secret police (1938–53). He supervised a purge of the police bureaucracy itself and administered the vast network of labour camps set up throughout the country. In 1941 he became the a deputy prime minister of the U.S.S.R., and during World War II, as a member of the State Defense Committee where he controlled the Soviet Union’s internal-security system and played a major role in raw-materials production using the slave labour in the camps. He was also a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party from 1934 and of the executive policy-making committee, the Politburo, from 1946.

7. ... After Stalin’s death, Beria became one of four deputy prime ministers as well as head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Beria apparently attempted to use his position as chief of the secret police to succeed Stalin as sole dictator but he was defeated by an anti-Beria coalition (led by Molotov, Khrushchev, and Malenkov). He was arrested, excecuted and accused for being a “imperialist agent”. During the civil war Muslim Democratic Musavat Party in opposition to the Red Army. There were rumors that Beria worked for the counter-intelligence service of the Mussavat government, who were under control of the english. He was apparently never a marxist or revolutionary. In 1924 Beria was in charge of the repression of a Georgian nationalist uprising. It is claimed that up to 10,000 people were executed.He liked to boast about his victims and he personally tortured them. He managed to be a sadistic torturer as well as a loving husband and warm father but he was already a Priapic womanizer whom power would distort into a sexual predator. Krushchev recalled being shocked by his sinister, two-faced, scheming hypocracy.

8. Beria and his daughter

9. David Brandenburg Brandenburg wrote “Stalin, the leningrad affair, and the Limits of Postwar Russocentralism”. In it Brandenburg revises the commonly accepted view that the purge represented the victory of Beria and Malenkov over a cohort of upstart political rivals connected to Leningrad, who were protected by Zhdanov until his death. Brandenburg proposes that the dispute between Zhdanov and Beria, Malenkov may have been more ideological than political in nature.

10. Nikita S. Khrushchev The purge was never acknowledged but it was mentioned by Nikita S. Khrushchev during his secret speech at the party’s Central Committee in February 1956. There Khrushchev noted that the charges of treason and conspiracy imposed against the victims of the purge had been fabrications. Khrushchev claimed that Lavrenty P. Beria, the late chief of security police, and V.S. Abakumov, minister of state security (1947–51), had been responsible for making up the cases against Zhdanov and his followers and for convincing Stalin of the authenticity of the accusations. In July 1957, Khrushchev further identified Malenkov as “one of the chief organizers” of the purge.

11. Catriona Kelly Catriona Kelly in her article ‘The Leningrad Affair: Remembering the “Communist Alternative” Kelly demonstrates, however, that there is little evidence for a systematic policy of discrimination against Leningrad as a city and that the scale of this purge was much smaller than that of many other Stalinist purges. If the event was to reach such proportions in collective memory, it was because of the discursive practices that emerged in its wake. Kelly observes that the victims of the Affair are paradoxically seen as both innocent (they were not rebels against Stalin) and as representing an alternative to the Central Committee line, which in Stalinist terms would have made them traitors.

12. ... The Affair engages with larger issues of evaluating Stalinism and the Soviet project in general. The discourse of the Affair necessarily and increasingly oscillates between the attempt to describe the wrongs done to Leningrad party leaders within their own ideological framework, to demonstrate that Leningrad party leaders were, in a way, better Stalinists than their Moscow prosecutors, and a quite incompatible critique of Stalinism and the Soviet project in general as inherently criminal.

13. Anti Semitism Post war years

14. Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee The jewish committee was apart of the five other committees established in 1942 to appeal to a sector of the western public. Stalin's regime was seeking to obtain material, moral, and ideological support from other parts of the world. The head of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was the acclaimed theater personality Solomon Mikhoels, one of the most prominent figures in Yiddish culture in the Soviet Union. Mikhoels was joined by Yiddish writers and poets, and the Committee quickly began to produce thousands of articles and notices for the international press, successfully conveying the Soviet regime's message in the Western media.

15. ... When the truth about the horrors suffered by Jews in the hands of the Nazis emerged, many Jews in the Soviet Union turned to the committee. Many of these Jews having fled German occupied territories. The committee then began turning to Soviet authorities on behalf of these Jews. Stalin chose to overlook the development of this leadership during the war. However, when the war ended Stalin became more strict on all sectors of the society. The Committee’s heads were identified with Yiddish culture and their empowerment indicated the Jews’ intention of cultivating a separate culture with its own unique language.

16. ... To Stalin, this was intolerable, as was the fact that the Committee members had, in documenting the terrors of the Holocaust, begun creating a version of the events which did not serve the needs of the Soviet government. Even though many of the members of the committee were loyal communists, they still documented the local population's cooperation with the Nazis, and the harm inflicted on Jews who attempted to return to Ukraine after surviving the war, as they documented the horrors that took place in Ukraine and in other territories under Soviet rule. Stalin felt threatened by this.

17. ... Also around this time Israel was founded in 1948 and the Cold war was developing between Russia and the United States. So, Stalin was convinced that the loyalty of the Jews would be on the side of the west and Israel. This further complicated the situation of the Jews in the USSR and it further agitated Stalin.

18. ... Stalin made the decision that the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was to be dismantled and its members executed. In January of 1948, Solomon Mikhoels was murdered in a staged car accident. In the months that followed, the majority of the Committee members were arrested. As was often the case with Stalin’s persecutions, in order to confirm the existence of a plot against the regime and the revolution, the net was cast wide. As a result, prominent Jews who had no connection to the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee were accused and arrested as well.

19. ... The arrests made between 1948 and 1949 did not immediately lead to trials or convictions. The investigations went awry, the investigators’ priorities changed, and even officials in the Soviet judicial system began to have doubts. A rigorous and violent interrogation of most of the accused did not yield any substantial, non-circumstantial evidence regarding a plot against the Soviet Union. The violent investigation and blatant anti-Semitic rhetoric often had the undesired effect of making several of the accused retract confessions that had previously been extracted by force. In the meanwhile, there were those who died in prison.

20. ... The trial began on May 8, 1952 and the verdicts were delivered on July 18. Despite Stalin’s original plans to showcase the trial, arguments were held behind closed doors, with no public presence. Three military judges presided and there were no prosecutors or defense attorneys. Nevertheless, accurate and detailed protocols were recorded. Ultimately, on the night of August 12-13, 1952, thirteen of the accused were executed. Solomon Bregman, one of the accused, fell into a coma during the trial and died in prison a few months later. The only one not sentenced to death was scientist Lina Stern, who was exiled instead.

21. ... The thirteen individuals executed were writers and poets, active in various cultural realms. Their execution, in August of 1952, following a trial behind closed doors, was one of Stalin’s last acts of persecution. The families of those executed did not learn of their relatives’ fate until after Stalin’s death. Today this event can be referred as Stalin’s secret program which may have not only wiped out the leaders of the Jewish community in the Soviet Union after the Holocaust, but also to have dealt a fatal blow to the last vestiges of Yiddish culture in the Soviet world.