All-Russian Wholesale Fair (January 1949)

Background

After the war, in conditions of acute shortage, the warehouses of the USSR Ministry of Trade held over 5 billion rubles in non-liquid consumer goods, foodstuffs among them. On 14 October 1948 the Bureau of the USSR Council of Ministers ordered measures prepared to dispose of this surplus; the archival account by Vladimir Kuznechevsky has Voznesensky chairing that session (Stalin was Bureau chairman, with Voznesensky, Malenkov and Beria as deputies who took turns chairing). The result was the Bureau resolution of 11 November 1948, "On Measures to Improve Trade", signed by Georgy Malenkov, which instructed union-republic and oblast leaders to organize inter-oblast wholesale fairs in November-December 1948 and permitted the free movement of industrial goods bought at a fair from one oblast to another.

The Fair

Mikhail Rodionov, Chairman of the RSFSR Council of Ministers, whose republic held the largest stockpile of such goods, followed established procedure by petitioning the Bureau to hold the All-Russian Wholesale Fair in Leningrad on 10-20 January 1949 and to permit the invitation of trade organizations of the union republics. The Bureau considered the proposal and agreed; Kuznechevsky writes that Voznesensky presided at that session by rotation, whereas ru.wikipedia describes the same resolution as adopted at a session chaired by Malenkov. Samples of 450 product lines were brought to Leningrad, and, as Professor V. A. Kutuzov reports, contracts were proposed for the supply of 6 billion rubles of industrial goods and 2 billion rubles of foodstuffs. The proceedings were open: Leningradskaya Pravda reported these transactions on 8, 11 and 21 January. On 13 January Rodionov sent Malenkov written information that the fair had opened with union-republic trade organizations taking part; Malenkov annotated the letter, writing that such events should be conducted with the permission of the Council of Ministers, and this January annotation became the trigger of the Leningrad Affair.

The Fair as Pretext

The fair's conduct is consistently described in the sources as the povod, the pretext or trigger, of the Leningrad Affair, not as the affair itself: the fair was a separate economic event, while the affair was the fabricated political case built on it. Assessments of its authorization diverge. The Encyclopedia of Russian History describes a wholesale trade market set up in Leningrad without Moscow's permission, while English Wikipedia calls the fair legitimate, approved by Gosplan and the Soviet government, and falsely portrayed in propaganda as a scheme to divert the federal budget to Leningrad. The act authorizing the fair had been signed by Malenkov himself, and the 15 February 1949 resolution later branded the fair as held "arbitrarily and unlawfully", although no formal ban on inviting other republics existed.

Malenkov's attack was not limited to the fair. His accusation against Kuznetsov, Rodionov, Popkov and Kapustin was that they had held the fair "without the knowledge of and bypassing the Central Committee and the government". The charge supplemented existing compromising material, and a third episode was added: violations in the counting of votes at the Leningrad party elections of late 1948. Voznesensky was targeted separately through a memo from Gosnab deputy chairman M. T. Pomaznev alleging that Gosplan understated the plan. On 28 January 1949 the Central Committee plenum released Kuznetsov from the post of CC secretary, and on 15 February 1949 the Politburo resolution "On the Anti-Party Actions of Comrade A. A. Kuznetsov, Member of the Central Committee of the CPSU(b), and Comrades M. I. Rodionov and P. S. Popkov, Candidate Members of the Central Committee" removed Kuznetsov, Rodionov and Popkov from their posts, launching the Leningrad Affair. Abakumov's draft indictment of ten accused charged the Leningraders, first, with conducting the so-called All-Union wholesale trade fair in Leningrad without the permission of the CPSU(b) Central Committee to dispose of non-liquid consumer products, and secondly with allegedly falsifying the election results for leading party bodies at the December 1948 Leningrad party conference.

Scale and Reversal

More than two hundred Leningraders, including many family members of those directly accused, were convicted on fabricated political charges and twenty-three were executed; over two thousand city officials were fired, and hundreds from other cities were jailed. Britannica states that the purge resulted in the execution and imprisonment in labour camps of thousands of party officials, managers and technical personnel, most of them associates and followers of Zhdanov, whose sudden death on 31 August 1948 preceded it. In 1954 those convicted in the affair were rehabilitated and the charges recognized as fictitious, with responsibility placed on MGB minister Viktor Abakumov, executed in December 1954. In his February 1956 secret speech Khrushchev stated the treason and conspiracy charges were fabrications, and in July 1957 he identified Malenkov as "one of the chief organizers" of the purge. Sources date the purge variously, to 1948-50 or to 1949-1951.