The World

A million American troops, under MacArthur, counter-attacked, pushing the Chinese back. MacArthur threatened to use tactical nuclear weapons; Truman sacked him. Crushed between Stalin–Mao and the Americans, Kim Il-sung was desperate for peace. Stalin and Zhou discussed whether to liquidate the panicking Korean, but Stalin agreed with Mao that the war must go on. ‘The war’s shown American weakness,’ said Stalin. ‘They want to subjugate the world and can’t subdue little Korea,’ adding chillingly, ‘The North Koreans have lost nothing except casualties.’ Mao had lost a little more: 400,000 men, and his son Anying, who, working as Marshal Peng’s Russian interpreter, died in an American air raid. When told, Mao was silent, then just said, ‘In a war, how can there be no deaths?’

In February 1953, the newly elected president Dwight Eisenhower, the general who had commanded D-Day, explicitly threatened China with nuclear weapons. Korea had shown Stalin that China needed the Bomb. On the 28th, Stalin sat up jovially drinking with his henchmen until the early hours.^*

He was planning a new Terror against his grandees, linked to the arrest of mainly Jewish doctors in a murder plot he had himself invented. But that night he suffered a stroke; his comrades and his doctors were too terrified to treat him in case he was merely drunk: he was left on the floor soaked in his own urine. After the embalmed Stalin had joined Lenin in the Mausoleum, Beria dominated the state as first-vice-premier, security chieftain and nuclear supremo, freeing vast numbers of GULAG slave labourers and proposing a withdrawal from East Germany – ‘It’s not even a real state,’ he said, ‘but only kept in existence by Soviet troops’ – and political liberalization, much the same programme later proposed by Gorbachev.

The new leaders made peace in Korea. Kim Il-sung had lost the war and ruined the country, but he executed rivals and devised a particularly Korean concept of Communism and nationalism, juche

– self-reliance and isolation – infused with a sacred cult which involved the quasi-divine birth of his son Jong-il (actually born in the USSR) on Korea’s holy mountain. Out of it he would spawn a hereditary dynasty which ruled North Korea into the third generation.

Beria, who had not received the top offices, nonetheless appeared to be the real power, yet his ghoulish vices and risky politics alarmed his coarse, lumpy and warty comrade Nikita Khrushchev, whom Beria fatally underrated. Khrushchev warned his comrades, ‘Beria’s sharpening his knives.’ Beria controlled the security organs who guarded the grandees, so Khrushchev recruited Marshal Zhukov, who on 26 June 1953 led a posse of loyal officers, including Leonid Brezhnev, deputy army commissar favoured by Stalin, into the Kremlin. At a Presidium session, Khrushchev orchestrated the denunciation of Beria; Zhukov’s posse burst in, pistols drawn, and arrested the Georgian. Beria was later tried for rape and treason and, his mouth stuffed with a towel, shot in the forehead.

Khrushchev, a pugnacious semi-literate miner and devout Marxist-Leninist, impulsive and irrepressible, was Stalin’s protégé, who had killed many when he ran Ukraine and Moscow. Yet he brought to an end government by killing, though the secret police – renamed KGB – remained omnipresent and vigilant. After war and terror, there was such a shortage of men that women were encouraged to work, and abortion, illegal since 1935, was legalized. The porcine Khrushchev now confronted the polished Eisenhower in a bipolar tournament of power, fought out in proxy duels across the world. After Communist victories in China then in Indo-China, Eisenhower feared ‘what you call the “falling domino” principle. You knock over the first one and … the last one … will go over very quickly.’ America and Russia, the two nuclear superpowers, now enjoyed truly global reach, each seeking local clients and using war, espionage, credit and culture to defeat their ideological rivals. Both showered spending and technology on their military industries. Both the KGB and America’s new intelligence agency, the CIA, became huge, potent and often murderous global bureaucracies, though the KGB was also responsible for oppressing its own citizens and those of its vassals.^*