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The Cold War International History Project

EDITOR: DAVID WOLFF

CO-EDITOR: CHRISTIAN F. OSTERMANN
ADVISING EDITOR: JAMES G. HERSHBERG
ASSISTANT EDITOR: CHRISTA SHEEHAN MATTHEW

RESEARCH ASSISTANT: ANDREW GRAUER

Special thanks to: Benjamin Aldrich-Moodie, Tom Blanton, Monika Borbely, David Bortnik, Malcolm Byrne, Nedialka Douptcheva
Johanna Felcser, Drew Gilbert, Christiaan Hetzner, Kevin Krogman, John Martinez, Daniel Rozas, Natasha Shur, Aleksandra Szczepanowska
Robert Wampler, Vladislav Zubok.

The Cold War International History Project was established at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C
in 1991 with the help of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and receives major support from the MacArthur Foundatio
and the Smith Richardson Foundation. The Project supports the full and prompt release of historical materials by governments on all sida
of the Cold War, and seeks to disseminate new information and perspectives on Cold War history emerging from previously inaccessib
sources on "the other side"-the former Communist bloc-through publications, fellowships, and scholarly meetings and conference
Within the Wilson Center, CWIHP is under the Division of International Studies, headed by Dr. Robert S. Litwak. The Director of the Col
War International History Project is Dr. David Wolff, and the incoming Acting Director is Christian F. Ostermann. The project is oversee
by an advisory committee chaired by Prof. William Taubman (Amherst College) and consisting of Michael Beschloss; Dr. James Billingto
(Librarian of Congress); Prof. Warren I. Cohen (University of Maryland-Baltimore); Prof. John Lewis Gaddis (Yale University); D
Samuel F. Wells, Jr. (Deputy Director, Woodrow Wilson Center); and Prof. Sharon Wolchik (George Washington University). Reade
are invited to submit articles, documents, letters, and Update items to the Bulletin. Publication of articles does not constitute CWIHP
endorsement of authors' views. Copies are available free upon request, or by downloading cwihp.si.edu.

Cold War International History Project Bulletin
Issue 10 (March 1998)

Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars

1000 Jefferson Drive, SW

Washington, DC 20560

Tel.: (202) 357-2967
Fax.: (202) 357-4439

Photo on cover: From left to right: Anastas Mikoian, Nikita Khrushchev, Iosif Stalin, Georgii Malenkov, Lavrentii Beriia, and Viacheslav Moloto

From Zubok, Vladislav and Konstantin Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin's Cold War. Copyright ©1996 by Harvard University Press. Photo printed
permission from the Russian State Archive of Film and Photodocuments, Krasnogorsk.

"We [the CC CPSU Presidium members] were all stunned, though we knew much And now it all was verified and confirmed by documents."

A. I. Mikoian Memoirs1

Leadership Transition in a Fractured Bloc : Editor's Note

On 1 March 1953, I.V. Stalin retired from a late night feast with Comrades Beriia, Bulganin, Khrushchev and Malenkov to read some top secret files. The first told 2 him that the Soviet gold reserve had reached 2049 tons. The second was bad news: despite imaginative efforts, 3 Soviet organs had failed to "rub out” (skovyrnut') Tito.In the course of the following few hours, Stalin himself was laid low by a stroke. On 5 March 1953, with Stalin in a terminal coma, an emergency plenary session (plenum) of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CC CPSU) was called. The mood was somber and the final resolution focused on one point.4

In connection with Comrade Stalin's serious illness, which means his longer or shorter non-participation in leadership [duties], to consider the most important party and government task during Comrade Stalin's absence to be the unbroken, correct leadership of the country, which in turn requires complete leadership unity and the impermissibility of any kind of division or panic.

Stalin did not tarry long, dying that very night at 9:50, but the succession crises, against which the plenum had warned, dragged on for years.

This period of "collective leadership," as it was known, also defined a new era of the Cold War. Whether for reasons of state, matters of principle or simply convenient pretext, decisions on current foreign policy and interpretations of past decisions became linked to the personal political fortunes of a series of top leaders. The falls of Beriia, Malenkov, Molotov, Zhukov, and finally Khrushchev himself are linked to such key Cold War topics as the German question, nuclear strategy, Yugoslavia, "Open Skies” and the Cuban Missile Crisis, respectively. With the West, hesitancy gave way to renewed 5 hostility. Insecure and changing leadership in the Kremlin was a poor base on which to try and build détente. Stalin was gone, but the nature of the succession to his autocratic regime guaranteed long life to the Cold War.

Several sections of this Cold War International History Project Bulletin 10 cover the immediate postStalin period from a variety of angles. The Plenums section presents excerpted transcripts from three gatherings of the CC CPSU at which bitter words of leadership disagreement were spoken in the interstices of foreign policy debate. In addition, new materials on Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin in a "secret speech" to the 20th

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The Berlin 1953 section presents multiple perspectives from German, Russian and Hungarian archives on this earliest East-bloc uprising against Communist rule, quashed in a day by Soviet occupation forces stationed in Germany. Unlike 1956 in Hungary and 1968 in Czechoslovakia, no invasion was necessary. To broaden perspective even further, materials come from party, military and state sources. On the actual day of maximum unrest, June 17, coverage becomes almost hourly thanks to the frequent reporting schedule of the Russian military authorities repressing the "disorders." Other highlights are Beriia's groveling, unheeded pleas from prison to old associates in the Presidium, following his arrest in late June (he was shot in December 1953) and the remarkable meeting, literally on the eve of the German uprising, between Soviet and Hungarian leaderships that shows reforms being suggested to Budapest that are in perfect parallel with the New Course pressed on Berlin. Soviet plans for internal 8 change were bloc-wide in scope.

The Yugoslavia section examines the first fracture in the Communist bloc and the special role played by the Southern Slavs in both Stalinist and post-Stalinist international relations. Possibly, the most exciting materials in this section are Stalin's conversations with Yugoslav and Bulgarian leaders in 1946 and 1948, with detailed introduction and notes by Leonid Gibianskii. These Stalin conversations, together with others (Mao Zedong, Wilhelm Pieck, Kim Il Sung) published in previous CWIHP Bulletins, are part of a growing body of material on Stalin being assembled by CWIHP. It would be hard to pick any single individual more important to this period and yet remarkably little is known about Stalin as a Cold War statesman. Much material remains bottled up in the Presidential Archive of the Russian Federation. Control of Stalin's archive was considered a perquisite of highest office in Soviet times and the practice continues. It remains unclear, however, how much material there really is, since Stalin did not like note-taking. But he did like to talk.9 As Averell Harriman said in Stalin's presence when escorting Harry Hopkins on a mission to convince the

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