Stalin ran a cruel police state, but economically and politically it was a totalitarian state in decay. When Stalin died in March 1953, his successors, Georgi Malenkov and Nikita Khrushchev, began a process of de-Stalinization. Both Malenkov and Khrushchev also had a sound appreciation for the inherent dangers of a nuclear arms race. Malenkov, a technocrat with an interest in quantum physics, stunned the Politburo in 1954 with a speech in which he said that the use of the hydrogen bomb in war “would mean the destruction of world civilization.”
