“Your Hands, Malenkov, Are Covered in Blood…”: Nikita Khrushchev and the Instrumentalization of the 1949–1952 Leningrad Affair

Abstract This article analyzes how the Leningrad Affair, one of the most poorly understood of Joseph Stalin’s purges, was weaponized by Nikita Khrushchev and his comrades‐in‐arms in order to consolidate power during the 1950s and early 1960s. An exposé of how Khrushchev accused four different people of being responsible for the purge over the span of just four years, it offers new insight into several aspects of post‐Stalin high politics. First, it demonstrates the process by which victims of the Stalin period were rehabilitated to have been inherently politicized from the start. Second, it identifies the history and memory of Stalin‐era repressions within the party elite to have been similarly volatile. Third, it reveals that the political charges and countercharges of the Thaw were at times accompanied by increasingly professional investigations that in this case succeeded in producing a balanced accounting of the Leningrad Affair—only to have it hidden away by Khrushchev's successors for the half century that followed.