Stalin

SOVIET ADMINISTRATIVE STRUCTURE

ONCE PRIVATE PROPERTY WAS ELIMINATED, in 1929–30, all institutions in the Soviet Union effectively became statized. At the same time, Communist party organizations expanded inside every institution. The result was an intensification of the party-state dualism, structurally akin to a theocracy, that had been born with the revolution and the civil war. The state, in turn, was variegated, such that one part essentially had no power but another had a great deal.

Party rule comprised periodic gatherings of delegates to a Party Congress (technically the highest body), a party conference (which possessed none of the powers of a congress), the Central Committee (the ruling body between congresses), the politburo (which usurped the Central Committee’s policy-making function), the orgburo (which handled personnel decisions), and the secretariat (in which sat the secret department, Stalin’s dictatorship within the dictatorship). The secretariat and the orgburo, along with their local equivalents, constituted the “apparatus,” which had innumerable departments and whose functionaries were full-time party workers or apparatchiks. All party members, the vast majority of whom did not work in the apparatus, were duty bound to follow party dictates. To investigate party members, the regime had a Central Control Commission (with local affiliates), which until 1934 was joined with a state body known as the workers’ and peasants’ inspectorate.

Stalin was the general secretary of the Communist party from the inception of the office, in 1922, until 1934, when he became just a “secretary” (but continued to be listed first). He had held a state post (commissar of nationalities) before 1922 but would not hold another until spring 1941.

The weighty component of the state was the executive branch, or Council of People’s Commissars, a cabinet-style government. The council’s chairman was the equivalent of prime minister (Lenin, then Rykov, then Molotov, and finally Stalin). The various commissariats that made up the council multiplied over time, and included heavy industry, foreign affairs, land, grain collection, finance. The state planning commission worked in parallel with the economic commissariats. The army and eventually the navy (when separated in 1937) were commissariats, too. The commissariat of internal affairs, or NKVD—its infamous Russian acronym—encompassed the regular and the secret police. The latter had originated as the Cheka (secret policemen were often still called Chekists) and then became the OGPU (sometimes rendered as GPU); in 1941 it would split into NKVD and NKGB (“GB” signifying state security). Together, the economic and security commissariats conducted the day-to-day operational management, under the supervision of the party apparatus and Stalin’s personal regime.

The lesser part of the state was, ironically, the one that gave the political-administrative structure its name: the Soviet. There were myriad local soviets and a countrywide body, which originally took the form of a periodic Congress of Soviets and in 1938 became a permanent sitting Supreme Soviet, whose members were “elected” in single-candidate elections. This part of the state might be considered the legislative branch, except that it did not have the powers of even a quasi parliament. It also contained its own executive arm between congresses: a central executive committee, which, under the Supreme Soviet, became a presidium. The Soviet’s executive powers, in any case, were appropriated by the Council of People’s Commissars. Still, the chairman of the central executive committee and then of the presidium was the head of state—Mikhail Kalinin. It was Kalinin, not Stalin, who handed out state medals (which were awarded by the executive arm of the nominal legislature) and who received foreign ambassadors when they presented their credentials. Technically, the Council of People’s Commissars served the Soviet, but in reality it served the party. The state also had a judicial component, a procuracy, and courts, also subordinated to the party apparatus, affording a dictatorial rule by law (rather than rule of law).

Workers were enrolled in trade unions, which were part of the state and played a key role in their lives—not by defending their interests but by being the conduits for social welfare. Cultural figures, too, were organized into unions, beginning with writers; Stalin eventually introduced a committee for artistic affairs in the Council of People’s Commissars. Peasants belonged mostly to “collective farms,” which were nominally member constituted and self-governing but run by the party-state. “State farms,” formed where no villages had existed that could be collectivized, did not bother with even the pretense of being peasant collectives.

The state was constituted as a federation, established in 1922, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, whose composition changed over time. Some Union republics were themselves federations. Inside the Union republics, there were autonomous republics and autonomous provinces, also formed on an ethnoterritorial basis. All such units had national Communist parties (the Russian republic excepted), councils of people’s commissars (Russia included), and congresses of soviets/supreme soviets, plus procuracies and courts (indeed, there was no USSR legal code, only republic ones). While the state was federal, the party was only nominally so. The council of people’s commissars of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, for example, had many prerogatives, but the Communist party of Ukraine had only the same standing vis-à-vis Moscow as the Communist party of a province in the Russian republic. The party’s pyramidal quality undercut the state’s federal nature.

Coordination of the Soviet leviathan, to the extent it took place, was driven by the party apparatus, the invocation of party discipline, and Stalin’s personal rule. Stalin also directed the operations of the Communist International (Comintern) for Communist parties around the world, although nominally the body was governed by its infrequent congresses and, in between, by an executive committee (which also held occasional enlarged plenums that resembled minicongresses), and staffed by its own secretariat.

By design, the Soviet regime lacked a central clearinghouse for assembling and analyzing the voluminous espionage reports that its agents generated. The defense commissariat had a directorate for intelligence, known in Russian as the RU but here spelled out as “military intelligence,” and the NKVD (and then the NKGB) had its own foreign intelligence directorate, while most foreign correspondents of TASS, the Soviet press agency, engaged in espionage, and the Comintern, too, ran a spy network. Only Stalin knew what was produced by all the parallel intelligence networks.