The Icon and the Axe

On Christmas eve of 1952, Suslov sounded the first note in a fresh campaign of denunciation that was both a throwback to the witch-hunting at the court of Ivan III and the apparent harbinger of a vast new purge. Suslov's denunciation of editors for insufficiently rigorous self-criticism over long-forgotten issues of economic development was followed by an announcement in Pravda that nine doctors had been charged with assassinating through mistreatment and poisoning a variety of leading Soviet figures, including Zhdanov. This campaign against the predominately Jewish "doctor-poisoners" who had allegedly infiltrated the Kremlin was apparently directed against Beria, as head of state security, and his close associate, Georgy Malenkov. As the most intelligent and powerful of Stalin's lieutenants, they were the logical candidates for victimization; and their careers were saved (though only temporarily) by the convenient death of Stalin himself

on March 5, 1953. The last time he was seen alive by a non-Communist observer, Stalin was doodling wolves in red ink; and the last officially announced medical treatment administered to him before death was bleeding with leeches.60

For nearly ten years, a mummified and faintly smiling Stalin lay alongside Lenin in the Red Square mausoleum. It was an awesome reminder of the carefully cultivated myth of infallibility-the idea that, however absurd Soviet policy may have seemed to those on the front lines, there was always an omniscient leader at the command post: a "magic citadel" within the Kremlin inviolable to assault from ordinary experience and common-sense doubts. As one student of the Stalin formula wrote:

The strength of communism and its originality come from the disinterested militants and sympathizers. . . . Their sympathy and faith will not become untenable while the remote inner citadel remains intact-that magic citadel within which evil is transformed to good, fact into myth, history into legend, and the steppes of Russia into paradise.61

Giant, omnipresent statues of Stalin had provided Russia with a new image of omnipotence: a macabre parody of the Byzantine Pantokrator. This divine image had stared down from the central domes of the original cathedrals of the holy wisdom to provide sanctifying power and some mystical foretaste of the splendors of heaven to those who gathered on feast days in these original centers of Russian civilization. So Stalin smiled down his assurances of holy wisdom and sanctifying authority to those who gathered on the new feast days for the pathetic foretaste of heaven on earth provided by a "park of culture and rest." This quasi-religious myth of Stalin with its many psychologically satisfying features could not be easily dispelled. When his body was finally removed from the mausoleum in Red Square late in 1961, an ancient woman who had known Lenin and spent seventeen years in prison under Stalin issued the call rather in the manner of a sectarian prophetess:

The only reason I survived is that Il'ich was in my heart, and I sought his advice, as it were. (Applause) Yesterday I asked Il'ich for advice, and it was as if he stood before me alive and said: "I do not like being next to Stalin, who inflicted so much harm on the Party." (Stormy prolonged applause.)62

The scene of ritual reburial is reminiscent of late Muscovite politicst with Khrushchev calling forth his sanctifying approval of the woman's, recommendation from the podium of the Twenty-second Party Congress as it bellowed forth its antiphonal responses of "Stormy, prolonged applause." One Soviet intellectual of the post-Stalin era has written:

Ah, if only we had been more intelligent; if only we had surrounded his death with miracles! We should have given it out on the radio that he was not dead but had gone up into heaven, whence he was still looking at us silently, over his mystical moustache. His relics would have cured paralytics and people possessed with devils. And children, before going to bed, would have been praying by their windows, with their eyes turned toward the bright stars of the celestial Kremlin.63