This wasn’t the only sign that a new era had begun. Within three weeks of Stalin’s death, an amnesty for nonpolitical prisoners led to the release of more than a million prisoners. Two months later, the convicted defendants in the Doctors’ Plot were announced to be innocent and released, with leading security officials taking their place in prison. The Supreme Court rehabilitated victims of the Leningrad Affair in April. Feelers were put out to the West, beginning in the eulogies at Stalin’s funeral, and by midyear a truce was signed ending the Korean War. In August, Malenkov started talking of “détente” in the Cold War. Diplomatic relations with Israel and Yugoslavia were restored. The 1947 law forbidding marriages of Soviet citizens and foreigners was quietly dropped, allowing seven hundred Russian wives to leave the Soviet Union with their foreign husbands. Rapid de-Russification of government in the non-Russian republics, along with encouragement of the use of indigenous languages in place of Russian, was under way by June, leading to remarkable shake-ups in administration in Belorussia, Ukraine, the Baltics, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. Government offices throughout the Soviet Union went back to a normal workday, no longer constrained to follow Stalin’s nocturnal habits. In the late summer and autumn of 1953, taxes on peasants were lowered and procurement prices on agricultural goods raised. For the urban population, the government announced a major expansion in the consumer goods sector, with production of radios tripled, furniture doubled, and all types of clothing significantly increased, not to mention promise of the first domestic refrigerators.
Many of these measures were popular in the country, but not all of them. The Gulag amnesty terrified ordinary citizens in Siberia and the Urals, who were now faced with an influx of penniless, desperate characters without jobs or housing into their towns. Street crime rose, generating a law-and-order panic that spread throughout the Soviet Union and lingered on for many months as the prisoners slowly made their way back home. The release of the Doctors’ Plot defendants was equally unpopular, though a minority (mainly from the intelligentsia) applauded. Many members of the public had seen the anti-Semitic campaign as a long-overdue attack on a serious social problem, and Stalin’s death seemed to them simply confirmation of the charges that enemies had been systematically killing off their leaders. An anonymous writer warned Khrushchev later in the month that “90 percent of our people don’t believe that Stalin died a natural death”; Jewish involvement was suspected. “Get the Jews out of the government, the people don’t trust them. They are parasites on the neck of the people.” “If war came, they would be a Fifth Column.”
– Sheila Fitzpatrick, On Stalin's Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics (2015), 227-228.
