But proportionately to the degree in which the government succeeded in enforcing inequality the necessity for the terror employed to enforce it decreased. The growing awareness of this process, even in the ruling group, has in recent years been reflected in the arguments over the tempo at which the State may ‘wither away’ in the transition to communism. Behind this dogmatic formula loomed the practical and insistent question: When are we going to mitigate the rigours of our criminal codes? When are we going to soften the draconic discipline in our factories, collective farms, offices, and schools? When are we going to sweep away our concentration camps?

Another source of the strength of Stalinism — Soviet Russia's isolation — has also run dry. The emergence of new communist regimes beyond Russia's frontiers has had profound repercussions inside Russia. Stalinism had justified its despotism with the argument that, as the sole bulwark of proletarian revolution, Russia was surrounded by a hostile world. The argument had great power: it disarmed or paralysed innumerable recalcitrant minds. It was, after all, true that twice within living memory German armies had marched towards the Dnieper and the Volga. It was also true that in its first days the revolution had had to struggle for existence against French, British, and even American intervention, against a blockade, a commercial and financial boycott, and a cordon sanitaire. Stalinism throve on the popular memory of these unhappy events. It kept alive that memory and fanned the smouldering hatreds and fears that went with it.

However, when new communist regimes had formed vast ‘security belts’ around Russia, in Asia and Eastern and Central Europe, it was no longer so easy to invoke isolation and capitalist encirclement as the justification for the harshness of Stalinism. For the first time in decades Russia seemed secure from foreign threats. For a short spell fear of American monopoly in atomic weapons once again appeared to justify in the eyes of the Russian people the Stalinist attitude towards the world. But this fear, too, soon subsided.

Even a regime armed with all the machinery of totalitarian control needs its moral justification. Without this, popular disillusionment and resentment clog and slow down the totalitarian machine. Fear of American atomic supremacy helped to keep the wheels of the machine turning, but they were not turning with their old impetus.

Yet such is the power of inertia that institutions and methods of government outlast the causes that have brought them into being; and they struggle to outlast them. In its last years and months Stalinism fought desperately to keep its hold on Russia. In doing so, it parodied its own previous performances, revealed its own grotesqueness, and betrayed its weakness. Before its extinction Stalinism experienced a spasm of deceptive vigour which contorted its face into a last repulsive grimace.

In these final years the primitive magic of Stalinism made an insolent mockery of Russia. The cult of the Leader assumed so nauseating and nightmarish a quality, especially after the celebration of Stalin's seventieth birthday in 1949, that it is difficult to describe it. For nearly two years the columns of Pravda, for instance, were filled with birthday greetings to the septuagenarian deity. No Soviet author, Journalist, scientist or general dared to write even a few sentences without referring to the Father of the Peoples, the Greatest and the Wisest Genius. An outsider could not help wondering how the Soviet people could put up with these wild extravagances of adulation, especially when the same issues of Pravda reported that 57 million Soviet citizens were receiving education in schools of all grades. How — one reflected — could the primitive magic of Stalinism ‘co-exist’ with modern knowledge and Marxist theories in the minds of millions?

The same air of bizarre unreality hung over the orgy of nationalism of these last years. The Russian people were constantly and insistently told that they, and they alone, were the salt of the earth; that they, and only they, had made all the great scientific and technological discoveries and initiated all the great philosophical, sociological, and other ideas. If such propaganda had been addressed to an illiterate people one might believe that it could be effective in some measure. But it could not possibly find much credence in a Russia in which the revolution and then Stalinism itself had aroused an insatiable thirst for knowledge. Nationalist self-glorification might have suited the isolated and self-centred Soviet people of the early years of the Stalin era, when, as a rule, it was not indulged in. But such self-glorification was quite out of date in 1950-2, when Russia's destiny had become inextricably bound up with that of the rest of the world. Even from the Stalinist viewpoint, it could not be reconciled with the spreading of revolution abroad. One-third of mankind already lived under communist regimes, and Stalinism spoke as if its realm had been confined to the old Tambov gubernia or to the Tula district. All account of time seemed to have been lost in the Kremlin.

Equally parochial and anachronistic was the interference of Stalinist dogma with biology, chemistry, physics, linguistics, philosophy, economics, literature, and the arts. This interference, more obtrusive and noisier than at any earlier stage, was reminiscent of the days when the Inquisition decided for the whole Christian world which were the right and the wrong ideas about God, the universe, and man. The intrusion of theological or bureaucratic dogma on the working of the scientific mind belongs essentially to a pre-industrial epoch. In contemporary Russia it amounted to virtual sabotage of science and technology. It was possible only because the rulers who had taken charge of Russia's education were themselves inadequately educated; and Stalin behaved like a half-educated, capricious guardian constantly tampering with the curriculum of his ward and imposing his own fancies and tastes.

But even while Stalin was alive it was easy to see that the primitive magic of Stalinism was losing its last battle. The heresy hunt was never at a standstill and yet it was producing little effect. Its victims did not suffer the cruel fate of their unhappy predecessors of the 1930's. There were no new purge trials in Russia, although such trials were staged in Budapest, Prague, and Sofia. As a rule the ‘deviationists’ were not imprisoned or deported. They were required to confess the error of their ways and were punished by some mild form of demotion. Sometimes the government honoured them with the highest awards only a short time after they had been singled out for attack. Even the confessions of error were different in kind from those to which Russia had become accustomed earlier on. Having uttered the conventional words of recantation, the ‘deviationists’ often defended themselves and their views in a veiled yet transparent manner. This seems to have been the regular pattern from the time of the attack on Professor Varga, the well-known economist, in 1946, up to the campaigns against the unorthodox biologists, linguists, musicians, and others. A notable exception was the case of Voznessensky, the disgraced member of the Politbureau and chief economic planner, who completely disappeared from the public eye.

Those who viewed the Russia of Stalin's last years through the prism of the 1930's saw in the heresy hunts a repetition of the great purges and hardly noticed their very different and much milder consequences.

What was the reason for this relative mildness?

In the first instance, the new heresies contained no immediate or visible threat to the regime, let alone to Stalin's position. In this they differed from the genuinely political ‘deviations’ of earlier periods inspired by Stalin's real rivals and opponents. Since the suppression of the latter, Stalin's position was so secure that he could well afford to show a certain degree of indulgence.