The Soviet Century

The documents presented thus far have provided us with a good deal of insight into Stalin’s political designs and personality. The next two topics will illuminate them still further.

Some years after the events we have recounted, when he held all the levers of power in his own hands, Stalin continued to imagine himself a great man and leader – but he knew how to simulate a modest and unassuming personality, a simple follower of the great founder of the party. Taciturn and forever cautious, he seemed to be cool-headed – and was generally described as such. He affected a role of unassuming simplicity, casting himself as the modest follower of a great man. Yet his political activity – in fact, much of the puzzle – is readily decipherable: behind this image there lay hidden a quite different persona. We already know something about the kind of state he envisaged. Moreover, his utterances on the tasks and role of state and party cadres disclose the way in which he conceived the exercise of power, including his own part in it. These statements are revealing, even if their meaning eluded his contemporaries or observers. Perfectly clear in his own mind, his positions were publicly expressed during the Thirteenth Party Congress in 1924:

Mention of the cadres department (uchraspred) should not be taken to mean that Stalin attributed any importance to the party itself This becomes clearer if we refer to one of his later declarations to ‘future cadres’, students at the Sverdlov Party University. Here he basically explained that ‘for us, objective difficulties do not exist. The only problem is cadres. If things are not progressing, or if they go wrong, the cause is not to be sought in any objective conditions: it is the fault of the cadres’.

Thus, for this ‘Marxist’, objective conditions do not exist: the leader is free to set tasks, but cannot be held responsible for poor decisions or results. These short texts contain the substance of Stalinist philosophy and practice in its entirety, as formulated by Stalin himself. With good cadres, nothing is impossible. The policies decided at the top are always correct; failures are attributable to the leader’s entourage or underlings. As expressed here, the essence of Stalin’s conception of his personal power consists in the idea that such power should be ‘naked’. Stalin never wrote anything resembling a Mein Kampf – a book that anyone who wished to understand Hitler and his aspirations had only to read. But his conception of an unaccountable personal power, at the head of a state responsible only to him – in other words, his conception of an ‘irresponsible dictatorship’ – was succinctly articulated early on, in a couple of sentences that could easily escape the attention of even quite seasoned party members. This conception had already been put into practice in emergency situations – when the party was underground, during the revolution or Civil War – when militants had simply to obey. But the same logic was now to be transposed to a quite different situation – in which routine, not emergency, was the everyday reality – and applied to the state administration and the various party apparatuses and bureaucracy. The leader was demanding a type of behaviour that had its place in wartime, when an army is besieged on all sides. This exigency – an ‘untrammelled dictatorship’ – could only lead to deformations at the most elementary level.

A highly illuminating example can be found in the memoirs of Stalin’s interpreter, Valentin Berezhkov.[2] Unaware of Stalin’s 1925 text and its implications, he recounts an episode that occurred during the war, when he worked under Molotov in the Foreign Affairs Ministry. Stalin’s ‘illogical logic’ was explained to him by Molotov, who was one of its connoisseurs. When something went wrong, Stalin demanded that ‘the culprit be found and severely punished’. The only thing to do was to identify someone, and Molotov would do just this. One day it was noticed that a telegram from Stalin to Roosevelt had not been answered. Molotov ordered Berezhkov to investigate and identify the guilty party. Berezhkov discovered that no one on the Soviet side was responsible; he concluded that the fault lay with the American State Department. On hearing his report, Molotov mocked him, explaining that every failing was attributable to someone. In the case to hand, someone had decided a procedure for transmitting and monitoring telegrams. This involved the Soviet side alone. Stalin had given orders for the culprit to be found, and so it could only be the person who had established the procedure. Finding him was assigned to Molotov’s deputy, Vyshinsky who did so without difficulty. The ill-fated head of the cipher department was immediately relieved of his duties, expelled from the party, and disappeared without a trace. Stalin’s order had been executed to the letter. The source of this insane logic was clear: if there was no culprit for failures that occurred at lower levels, they might be attributed to those at the top. And that was out of the question.

The methods employed by Stalin to ‘construct’ the image of his power involved some other dimensions. Thus, he composed the various scenarios in his mind and everything else followed – usually without the least imagination. One of the simplest consisted in appropriating the lingering images of the power and influence associated with Lenin and Trotsky. Trotsky was a recurrent figure in this phantasmagoria: he was systematically vilified and had every possible calumny heaped on his head. There can be no doubt that he played a special role in Stalin’s psyche and that is why mere political victory would not suffice. Stalin would not rest until he had issued the order for Trotsky’s assassination. He also wished to erase him from Soviet history – via censorship, obviously, but also (astonishingly) by ascribing Trotsky’s achievements to himself. The country would thus be offered films in which the military exploits of his sworn foe – for example, Trotsky’s role in the defence of Petrograd against General Yudenich’s army in December 1919 – were attributed to Stalin. This is only one example of his incredible pettiness and envy.

The appropriation of Lenin took the more convoluted and curious form of the ‘oath to Lenin’, sworn before the Supreme Soviet on 26 January 1924, the day before Lenin’s funeral. The decision to embalm Lenin’s body, despite his family’s vigorous protests, formed part of the scenario. As for the oath itself, it was a long incantation in which Stalin listed the commandments supposedly bequeathed by Lenin to the party and then solemnly pledged, in the party’s name, faithfully to obey them. Now that we have a better understanding of Stalin’s real attitude to Lenin, it is obvious that this ‘apotheosis’ was not a sincere gesture of respect, but a way of preparing the launch of his own cult. As some of Stalin’s opponents noticed at the time, the oath made no reference to any of the ideas that were at the heart of Lenin’s real testament. In short, the whole script was self-serving.

STALINISM AND THE HERESY SYNDROME

Stalin’s recourse to the symbols of the Orthodox religion is also revealing. His foreign biographers have discerned this when commenting on the liturgical form of the ‘oath’, which probably dates back to his years in the Orthodox seminary where he received his only systematic education. Such influences were evident again later, in the rituals of confession and repentance imposed on his political enemies, which never sufficed: by definition, even when forgiven, a sinner remains a sinner. In this context, it is worth reflecting for a moment on the concept of heresy and its use in politics. For Stalinism, the equivalent of ‘sin’ was ‘deviation’, to be extirpated in the manner of a heresy. ‘Heresy syndrome’ is the appropriate term for the rituals and propaganda and the persecution of those who had – or, more often, might have had – opinions that differed from what was supposed to be a common creed. In one of his speeches, Stalin ‘explained’ in characteristic fashion that a ‘deviation’ begins as soon as one of the party faithful starts to ‘entertain doubts’.

In connection with this theme, let us cite Georges Duby, who has studied heresy in the Middle Ages – a period when highly elaborate methods were perfected for rooting out dissidence and ensuring conformity:

This analysis of the Middle Ages sounds as if it were really about Stalinism and its purges. Heresy-hunting was part of Stalin’s strategy and the construction of the cult of his personality. What actually justifies the use of the term ‘cult’, as practised, say, by Catholicism or Orthodoxy, is not simply the attribution of superhuman qualities to the supreme ruler, but also the fact that the practice of this cult is underpinned by a whole technology of heresy-hunting (with the heresy invariably being invented by it) – as if the system could not survive without such underpinnings. In fact, the furies unleashed against heretics represented the optimal psycho-political strategy for justifying mass terror. In other words, the terror did not result from the existence of heretics; heretics were invented to justify the terror Stalin required.

The parallel with ecclesiastical strategies is even more obvious when we consider that Trotsky was available as the perfect embodiment of the ‘apostate’ for many people, whether religious or anti-religious, nationalist, anti-Semitic, and so on. Rejection of him outlasted the adulation of Stalin. Even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a persistent hatred of Trotsky was extremely widespread, whether among contemporary Stalinists, nationalists or anti-Semites. The question is worth asking: Should it be seen as some kind of concentrate of hatred of socialism? Of internationalism? Of atheism? A careful reading of the arguments offered by Stalin’s apologists would doubtless reveal the ingredients that render Trotsky odious to so many positions on the Russian ideological spectrum, where he is rarely studied with a minimum of detachment.

Besides the Orthodox religion, other things from the past appealed to Stalin. Comparisons between his position and that of a Tsar did not develop immediately. On the other hand, the decision to construct ‘socialism in one country’ (to put it plainly, ‘we can do it on our own’) indicates that ideology was manipulated as required, in the direction of the ‘great-power chauvinism’ his opponents accused him of. Even before turning into sheer ideological and political intoxication, the slogan was capable of seducing an audience largely composed of the victors in a civil war. The domination over the Church exercised by the Tsars was closely bound up with the symbols of the Church, with the Tsars appropriating this supra-terrestrial legitimacy for themselves. In contrast, the case of Stalin and his cult was not a religious phenomenon. It was a purely political construction, which borrowed and utilized symbols of the Orthodox faith, regardless of the question of how far Stalin himself shared elements of this faith and its psychological underpinnings. To my knowledge, no information exists that could help us answer this question. But there is every reason to suppose that personally he was an atheist.

It is essential that we understand that Stalin was executing a systematic policy designed to transform the party into an instrument for controlling the state, even into a tool tout court. Once again, this emerges from his ‘cadres philosophy’. Visible early on, the project was practically completed by the end of the NEP in 1929. It followed logically from the cavalier statement that ‘objective difficulties do not exist for us’. Such a conception of the role of cadres required more than mere transformation of the party. It was already changing rapidly in any event, owing to massive recruitment of new members and the expulsion of successive oppositions, not to mention the considerable numbers of resignations, which went officially unacknowledged. All this feverish ‘traffic’ dictated the expansion of the party apparatus, which had hitherto been rather small and not perceived as a danger by Bolshevik cadres, most of whom sooner or later turned to open or silent opposition. The modest but indispensable Central Committee apparatus, which had been established in 1919, did not at the time know how many members the party had. In the hands of Stalin, however, especially after he was appointed to the post of general-secretary in 1922, it began to play a quite different role.

Stalin possessed an unerring sense of the levers of power. ‘Old Bolsheviks’ preferred to work in state administration (commissariats and other governmental agencies). He tightened his control over the ‘Secretariat’ – an instrument that was indispensable not only for assimilating the raw mass of newcomers, but for dominating the party, including veteran cadres. It took the ‘old Bolsheviks’ time to understand this process. Not until 1923 did some begin to criticize, and then deplore, the growing power of the ‘Secretariat machinery’. By then, it was evidently past master in the art of fixing the composition of delegations to party conferences and congresses in accordance with the Politburo’s wishes. Historians seem agreed that the Thirteenth Congress in 1924, when Stalin was re-elected general-secretary, was ‘packed’. The party as known to its first members, and to those who had joined its ranks during the Civil War, was fast disappearing. Henceforth everyone other than rank-and-file members was a ‘cadre’ – in other words, worked in an apparatus where each person held a precise post in a hierarchy of disciplined functionaries. Some appearances were still preserved, as in the case of the Central Committee, which for a few more years continued to be elected, to deliberate, and to vote on resolutions. But the selection of its members was completely outside the control of party members.

In this way, Stalin accomplished his ‘master plan’ to become sole ruler. The party was stripped of the very thing Stalin wanted to strip it of : the ability to change its leadership through elections. Bolshevism – and this point must be underscored – still possessed this ability. Destroying such a mechanism was consequently a precondition for Stalin’s success; contrary to the widespread idea that the Soviet Union was ‘ruled by the Communist Party’, it tolled the bell for any political party. Under Lenin, something like this did obtain; under Stalin, the government and party executed policies in precisely the fashion ‘cadres’ were supposed to, so long as they gave satisfaction.

All this must be studied in detail, for dictatorships come in different guises. Some ‘one-party systems’ retain a capacity to master their fate, or at least the composition of their leadership. When this is not the case, a ‘one-party system’ is merely the scenery, not the play itself. The principal roles are played by the apparatus that administers the country, in accordance with the dictates of the summit, whatever it might be. The history of the Soviet system reveals a radical change in the rules of power, and not mere inflections over time. It is to this issue that we must now turn in more detail.

As yet, neither the state nor the party bureaucracy has a ‘history’, and we can only deal with a few of their key features here. For clarity’s sake, we must employ distinct terms for the personnel of the two ruling bodies. The state bureaucracy can be classified as the ‘administration’, while its upper echelons are often referred to as upravlentsy (the equivalent of ‘managers’) in Soviet sources. For its part, the party administration is best designated an ‘apparatus’ or apparat, and the apparatchik is precisely someone who holds a post in the party’s own administration. It is not always possible to distinguish clearly between these two categories, but even so the terminology is serviceable.

We have already alluded to the fact that from the time of its emergence the ‘apparatus’ created problems for party members. As early as 1920, voices were raised denouncing the increasing disparity between the verkhi (those at the top) and the nizy (those at the bottom), and they were taken seriously by both the rank and file and the leadership. Something that was to become obvious a few years later to the Soviets and outside observers alike – namely, the inequality between upper and lower echelons – was still a shock for members of a party that remained Bolshevik. In the miserable year of 1920, which I shall return to in Part Three, the leadership was embarrassed by the problem and allowed it to be aired in the party press. During the 1920s, the lack of equality and democracy inside party ranks was one of the key issues raised by the opposition while it could still express itself. But it was met with demagogic denials. Until the end of the 1920s (and even later), the battle against bureaucratic tendencies – ‘bureaucratization’ – in the state administration was officially authorized, and seemingly supported by the party leadership. It lent itself to scapegoating officials. Attacking bureaucratization in the party itself, especially when such criticism emanated from the successive oppositions, was an altogether different matter. Still, the party, which at the end of the 1920s had more than a million members and thousands of apparatchiks, could not afford to bury reactions to internal bureaucratization within its ranks, even though opposition had been practically eliminated.

Thus, it turned out that if an administration is a tool, it also takes its toll. The problem came under the jurisdiction of the party’s Central Control Commission (CCC). In June 1929, the chairman of its Presidium, Ia. A. Iakovlev, presented it with an outline of the intervention he intended to make on the theme of bureaucratization at the Sixteenth Party Conference. Not everything he said was included in the published record, but what does feature there is highly informative.[1]

Iakovlev, one of the ‘old guard’ still in post, did not hide his concerns: a struggle of the utmost vigour must be conducted against bureaucratization inside the party itself. According to him, the phenomenon could be explained by the fact that so many party members worked in the state administration and acquired there pernicious habits with which they were ‘contaminating’ the party. To counteract this trend, the party needed to fight for a democratic spirit within Soviet institutions and other governmental bodies, where those in charge were concentrating all power in their own hands and substituting themselves for the formal leading bodies of state and cooperative organizations. Democratization, he suggested, was the only way to treat the disease at source.

Such an approach by an old Bolshevik, who was known as an intelligent, competent administrator, testifies to a time when the party no longer tolerated being perceived as responsible for anything negative. He understood that if, as so often before, he engaged in a real analysis of the problem without quotation marks, he risked being accused of belonging to some opposition or other. Yet calls for more democracy and less bureaucracy, including within the party itself, featured in a mass of material addressed by local party organizations to the Control Commission and other leading bodies complaining about party bosses. These complaints were still being summarized in the 1920s by the party’s Information Service and circulated in a bulletin for the use of its top cadres. The bulletin also contained other documents deemed important, issuing from the trade unions and the GPU. At least twice a month it provided briefings on the mood and opinions of specific social groups, especially workers. It referred to strikes, but also to the reactions of party members who had participated in them. Certainly, in 1929 Pravda was not somewhere one would find the bitter accusations of workers who were party members and on strike against their bosses, who were themselves members. But the leadership was kept informed of such matters and regularly discussed what to do in response, for the most part without much publicity. Readers should also be aware that, regardless of what conclusions they might care to draw from the fact, during the 1920s GPU reports on labour disputes were mainly critical of both administrative and party bosses, who were accused of indifference and incompetence when it came to dealing with workers’ legitimate grievances. The reports often vindicated strikers and criticized the behaviour of union leaders. GPU and party information bulletins from the 1920s contain a mass of material of this type.

It was not inaccurate to say that the state apparatus was contaminating the party. But this was due to the existence of an apparatus peculiar to the party, which did all it could to prevent public animus against bureaucrats rebounding on it. The Central Committee had launched a major campaign, particularly during the struggle against the various oppositions in the 1920s, to defend and celebrate the party apparatus – those referred to as politrabotniki (party cadres) or even the party’s ‘faithful guard’. Nevertheless, non-party people and members who had remained loyal to Bolshevik ideals continued to amalgamate both types of cadre into the single category of ‘bureaucrat’. There were good reasons for this.

Once an apparatus has been set up, especially if it is intended to control other, larger apparatuses, it operates in an environment that secretes shared habits, behaviour and a mindset. The use of the term ‘comrade’ loses its magic if the ‘comrade’ is a superior who issues orders and determines your salary and promotion prospects. The new reality, which is now part of daily life, is very simple: ‘We are not on an equal footing but on a ladder, comrade Ivanov, and I am not your comrade, comrade Ivanov.’

The secretariat machinery was a pyramid. At its apex were the Politburo, Secretariat and the Orgburo; at its base, the party secretaries with their own secretariats at district level (the raiony, or lowest administrative levels). It was a system designed to serve the top party leadership in keeping tabs on two much larger pyramids: the scaffolding of the soviets and the much more powerful governmental administration, from the Council of People’s Commissars to its local agencies. The soviets, from the Supreme Soviet down to the local soviets, which further complicated an already intricate organizational structure, may be left to one side here. Their only reality consisted in accomplishing local administrative tasks. As a pyramid capped by the supreme soviets of each republic and by the Supreme Soviet of the USSR at the summit, they were scarcely more than a fiction preserved in order to claim residual allegiance to the revolutionary past and the popular sovereignty it had supposedly established. The local soviets were in fact subordinate to the Council of Commissars (renamed ‘ministries’ in 1946) and their departments. The whole bureaucratic set-up, composed of ‘pyramids’ and ‘scales’, was subject to control by a parallel party apparatus. The division between the two major administrative spheres was somewhat attenuated at the top inasmuch as the Prime Minister, and sometimes one of his deputies, was also a Politburo member. Similarly, interconnection between party and state bodies at the bottom of the ladder was ensured by the presence in every workplace of a party cell, which was itself integrated into a party organization covering the whole firm or ministry. If we add to this the fact that the great majority of important posts in the administration were held by party members, thanks to the so-called nomenklatura procedure (which we shall return to), we might wonder how much more supervision and control were required to render the system ‘crash-proof’. Were a planetary insurance company to exist offering insurance policies to states, it would probably take its cue from the Soviet method of handling such things.

Nevertheless, at every stage of our journey through the 1930s we shall encounter a sort of ‘permanent insecurity’ system, whose shadow hung over an apparatus that was intended both to run the party and to control the strategic layers of the upravlentsy. This mission came up against numerous fault-lines throughout the system. We shall have more than one occasion to ask whether one small apparatus can effectively master a much larger one, with the ultimate aim of controlling the whole society.

It is now time to offer some data about the party apparatus and the apparatchiki. ‘Bureaucratization’, frequently bemoaned since its onset, had rapidly assumed such proportions that it was a feature of all ruling and other bodies. Regularly criticized by ad hoc institutions formally designed to correct such faults, the phenomenon was reduced in public to an enumeration of bureaucratic malfunctions, with reassuring words to the effect that remedies existed whose results would be seen… one day. On the other hand, it should be noted that unpublished documents, especially in the post-Stalin era, were often quite frank and sometimes of good analytical quality. The effects of bureaucratization on Soviet citizens and party members alike, whether persons of integrity or careerists, were multiple.

THE TEDIUM OF PARTY APPARATUS WORK (1924–34)

Many party members, particularly idealistic ones who were ready to serve their country by taking on responsible positions at a local level or in ‘vanguard’ institutions, were often deeply disturbed by what bureaucratization was doing to the party and to them personally. Some did not dare use it as an explicit term of criticism: they just told their superiors that they felt they could do a better job elsewhere. But others would draw more far-reaching conclusions. A few examples from among a myriad of others will illustrate the difficulty of being a party apparatchik, even before the term had become established. Those who had previously waged the revolutionary struggle in clandestine activities, in prison or on the battlefield, and who were now engaged in the prestigious task of helping to build socialism, suddenly perceived – or gradually discovered – that working in a hierarchical apparatus was far from edifying. Quite the reverse: amid the tedious routines boredom predominated. Two examples, drawn from different years, reveal this malaise.

A well-known militant, Ksenofontov, wrote to Kaganovich on 4 November 1924.[2] He had served in the Cheka, taken part in suppressing the Kronstadt uprising, and participated in restoring calm to the country thereafter. He had then asked to be released from such duties and transferred to a position where he could help to build the party-dominated system. Attached to the Central Committee, he was appointed head of its Business Administration department. He had been there for more than three years. Everything was highly organized, and his work was utterly routine. So he now wanted to move on and was hoping for another job from the Central Committee, provided it was not in the economy, trade or the cooperative sector, which did not attract him. At this time, such requests could be submitted without fear of reprisals – though telling Kaganovich that working for him had been uninteresting was perhaps not very prudent. Ksenofontov was authorized to switch to a job in education.

The second example, which dates from ten years later (November 1934), concerns another erstwhile revolutionary who complains about the profound tedium of work at the top of the apparatus. The story here is somewhat more convoluted. A certain Khavinson, deputy head of the ‘Department of Culture and Propaganda of Marxism-Leninism’, reported to his superiors about one comrade Slepchenko. A disciplined and steady worker, who chaired a party committee responsible since 1933 for checking membership lists, Slepchenko had been experiencing difficulties and asked to be transferred to work in production. ‘Working in the apparatus depresses me’, he is reported to have said. Such a statement, made when he had been asked to become aide to the Central Committee’s Industry Department, could have caused him problems. He too had written to Kaganovich, stating that after three years working in the apparatus he had not been able to adapt to it: ‘With every passing day, I am losing my identity.’ Khavinson was of the opinion that he should be accommodated and it is likely that he was allowed to quit, 1934 being (as we shall see) a good year.[3]

Such personal statements, which were acceptable despite their implicit criticism of the apparatus, can be usefully supplemented by a third example, containing a direct critique of the system. This denunciation was based on a solidly argued analysis and its author was a fine political sociologist, Christian Rakovsky. We have already spoken of him when he was head of the Ukrainian government in 1923 and opposed Stalin’s plans for the USSR. Accused of Trotskyism, he was exiled in 1928 to Astrakhan, a city whose climate was very bad for his heart condition. He nevertheless managed to hold out until 1934, while all the time producing critical studies of the state of the Soviet system. He ‘capitulated’ in 1934 when in urgent need of medical treatment. But it was not his heart that finally killed him.

The substance of his diagnosis went as follows: The party is now an aggregate of hundreds of thousands of individuals. What unites them is not a shared ideology, but the trepidation each has about his own fate. The question arises as to how a communist party can be recreated out of such an amorphous mass. There is no other way but to restore inner-party democracy.[4] But restoring the party of Rakovsky’s past was an illusion – and he knew it. In another part of the same text, probably written somewhat later, he comments on the ongoing debate in the party over versions of the second five-year plan (1933–7) which, according to official declarations, was to be a ‘sober five-year plan’. In Rakovsky’s view, the years corresponding to this ‘sober’ plan would consummate the ‘total separation of the bureaucracy from the working class’ and witness the former transform itself into a ‘ruling stratum supported by the state apparatus’. Some thirty years later, in a widely acclaimed book,[5] the Yugoslav Milovan Djilas supposedly made a theoretical innovation when he suggested that the USSR was now run by a ‘new class’.

These cases of disillusionment among highly placed cadres close to the corridors of power must be supplemented by information on the way in which ordinary party members lost their enthusiasm. It was long assumed that under Stalin it was not possible to leave the party without inviting reprisals. But the opening of the archives led to the discovery that such cases were real enough – sometimes even numerous – but rarely ostentatious, which explains why the phenomenon remained invisible for so long. The available data indicate that between 1922 and 1935 approximately one and a half million members left the party, mostly by failing to pay dues and thereby letting their membership lapse. Others changed workplace and address without re-registering with the local party branch. In other words, they drifted away and many of them were subsequently expelled. There were many workplaces where the number of those who had left the party exceeded current membership levels.[6]

These former members, and those excluded during the wave of so-called ‘pre-purges’ in 1935–6 when membership cards were being checked, afforded an automatic target for the onslaught of 1937–8. The one and a half million people who had left the party represented a huge pool of self-declared ‘enemies of the people’ for the NKVD to cast their nets in.

ADDITIONAL REMARKS ON THE PARTY AND STATE ADMINISTRATION

During the 1930s, the party apparatus grew ever larger and more complex. Stalin had the first and last word on everything, on every meeting and every institution. In one sense, this should have simplified decision-making and policy execution alike. But this simplification – it certainly seemed such to Stalin – was nothing but an illusion: the party apparatus continued to swell, which could only complicate things.

The number of People’s Commissariats also kept increasing – from ten in 1924 to eighteen in 1936 and then forty-one in 1940 – as did ‘state committees’ with Commissariat status like Gosplan, Grain Procurement, Higher Education and Artistic Affairs. Their staffs expanded at the same rate. The logic of party control as practised at the time dictated a corresponding adaptation. At every level, and especially at the centre, each party organization was instructed to create in its own apparatus branch departments, equipped with the appropriate personnel: heads, deputies, instructors, technical staff.[7] By 1939 the Central Committee apparatus contained large structural directorates for each branch of state administration, as well as a massive ‘directorate for cadres’ (upravlenie kadrov). When Malenkov was its secretary, the Central Committee was composed of forty-five departments – one for practically each branch of government activity. At republican district levels, the party apparatuses were also constantly expanding, with ever more rigid hierarchies.

The conduct of internal party affairs was strictly centralized. Virtually everything of any importance ended up on the agenda of the Politburo, which took the final decision. This amounted to hundreds of items which, in a less centralized system, would never have been dealt with at this level. Predictably, with such a vast number of items to get through, the Politburo did not have time to go into the genuinely important ones. It operated on the basis that they would have been thrashed out en route from the Secretariat to the Orgburo. The overload at the top, and the exponential expansion of the party apparatus and state administration, created a vicious circle; and the system’s efficiency was almost inevitably relegated to the lowest priority. As long as increased staffing was primarily a means of meeting the obvious need to control a sprawling, unruly reality, amid a constant shortage of supplies and very low living standards, this vicious circle could not be broken. The truth of this claim can be attested by glancing at how things looked to those at the bottom of the ladder.

In a very gloomy letter, written following a tour of inspection of the party organization in the Far Eastern Province (Dal’kraikom) accompanied by a Central Committee instructor, Shcherbakov, head of the Central Committee’s Cadres Department, reported that what he had discovered resembled a ‘railway station in total chaos’. In one year (1 January 1933 to 1 January 1934), party membership in the region had shrunk from 44,990 to 23,340: 7,651 members had been expelled, 1,892 downgraded to the status of ‘sympathizers’, 1,557 had left the area with authorization and 6,328 without (they had simply deserted). Among the last group were people with a solid party record, but also irreplaceable specialists who were urgently required. According to the two inspectors, the reasons for the exodus were as follows: ‘an excessively bureaucratic attitude’ towards members displayed by the provincial party committee; neglect of their recreational and cultural needs; and scandalous housing conditions for workers and specialists alike. Some of them were still living in dug-outs; one family was living in the toilets; other families were staying in disgusting dormitories; five people were crammed into one room of six square metres; and so on. Construction materials and builders were being sent to the province every year, but the housing situation remained lamentable and public services were completely neglected (public baths, crèches, hospitals, theatres). The food situation was very bad and the provincial party committee was doing nothing. It simply expelled those who had deserted and constantly shuffled cadres around from place to place. In fact, no one knew for sure how many party members there were.

The apparatchik who wrote this gloomy report requested that the situation be investigated by the Orgburo (the level below the Politburo), or even be put on the agenda of the party’s Control Commission, in order to remedy things.

This sorry state of affairs involved a remote, low-priority region that would anyway have been assigned second- or third-rate leaders. But malfunctioning in local party organizations and administrative agencies was endemic in many more central regions. The constant expansion in the number of tasks and difficult living conditions easily outstripped the ability of party cadres to handle such problems. These regions lived in something like a permanent state of emergency, which they coped with reasonably, badly, or not at all – as in the just-cited case of the Dal’kraikom. Itself expanding rapidly, the party’s control apparatus could make reports, but was probably overwhelmed by what it found.

We have already seen that any mess, often caused by the centre’s own policies, was arbitrarily imputed to lower-level cadres. This was inherent in the Stalinist method of government. Any mishap, catastrophe, tragedy or chaotic situation could readily be interpreted as an act of sabotage. In this respect, party cadres enjoyed no privileges; as cadres, they were potentially guilty – and the higher the rank, the more likely this was. At a higher level of responsibility, they were capable of inflicting more damage than lower ranks could and for this reason were ‘naturally’ under suspicion.

This paranoiac system of government had an additional twist. There was no reason to wait for the danger actually to materialize. That would have been imprudent. Great leadership involved ‘preventive medicine’. Our initial analysis of the ‘cadre philosophy’, but also the disruption and human suffering we observe towards 1933 – consequent on the failures of the ‘collectivization’ of the peasantry and breakneck industrialization, not to mention the famine that struck the Ukraine and parts of Russia – mean that we are not in the least surprised to find massive recourse to such ‘preventive medicine’, in the form of large-scale bloody purges. A storm of protest was brewing against the government’s policy, especially in the countryside, and Stalin risked becoming the focus of it. This was quite unacceptable to him, and a spectacular campaign was launched to shift the blame elsewhere. Repressive measures were adopted and there were signs that something more was in the offing. In his speech to the Central Committee meeting of January 1933 on the state of the country, Stalin referred to a host of enemies undermining the regime’s foundations like termites. And yet, despite these ominous signals, the policy actually adopted in May 1933 took the opposite course, making the unanticipated ‘interlude’ of 1933–4 all the more remarkable. A country in the throes of famine may not buy the idea that the supreme leader has nothing to do with it. So the economic situation had to improve, and Stalin’s prestige be restored, before the mass terror was unleashed and took on the appearance of a manifestation of strength. Stalin was in the process of planning his killing frenzy, but he was doing it very methodically.

THE ‘INTERLUDE’

The Seventeenth Party Congress was held in April 1934. Dubbed the ‘Congress of the Victors’, it sang the praises of the main victor among them: Stalin. But it also epitomized the line of internal appeasement initiated a year earlier. It offered oppositionists the chance to appear before it, mainly to repent their errors in public. Just as remarkable were the decision substantially to reduce the growth rates fixed for the second five-year plan (1933–7) and an appeal for greater respect for legality in the country. The new line was proclaimed with much fanfare, and signals were sent to the effect that the regime finally had its feet firmly on the ground. A Writers’ Congress took place the same year, which seriously discussed literary issues and celebrated the passing of the sectarian Writers’ Union. Less noticed at the time was a short speech by one Andrei Zhdanov – a party secretary, not a writer – laying down, almost sotto voce, the line of ‘socialist realism’ in all the arts. If it went largely unremarked, it was because it was overshadowed by spectacular interventions from Bukharin, Radek and Ehrenburg, and many others, which were much more open and intellectually stimulating.

These moves were important ingredients of the ‘new line’. In a letter to Stalin of 13 September 1934,[8] Ehrenburg took it seriously. His hopes were raised by the USSR’s new foreign policy, with entry into the League of Nations and ‘common fronts’ between communists and social-democrats in response to the rise of fascism. But he complained about the Soviet organization responsible for relations with foreign writers, denouncing its sectarianism and taste for petty quarrels which repelled internationally renowned writers. Only a few writers of such stature, like André Malraux and Jean-Richard Bloch, had been invited to the congress. As for the others, it would have been better not to invite them. Amid the mounting power and aggressiveness of fascism, Ehrenburg believed that it was possible to create an anti-fascist writers’ association in the West, which would rally leading literary figures and help defend the Soviet Union. Such an initiative was now more realistic: foreign participants had been impressed by the serious open exchanges between communists and non-communists and persuaded of the flourishing state of culture and literature in the USSR. But the new organization must not, he insisted, be run by sectarians.

In a handwritten note to Kaganovich, Stalin registered his agreement with Ehrenburg. Such an organization should be established and organized around the two themes he had suggested: anti-fascism and defence of the USSR. He was proposing some names and awaited a response. Here we see a businesslike Stalin, quite different from the one sniffing out ‘termites’ everywhere. The 1934 interlude was still under way. Kaganovich, number two in the Politburo at the time, was vigorously promoting the ‘new line’ aimed at strengthening respect for the law: ‘We can now punish people via the legal system without resorting to extra-judicial means as in the past. Many cases that went exclusively through the GPU will now be handled by the courts.’

Kaganovich made this statement on 1 August 1934 during a special conference convened by the Prosecutor General’s Office, whose sphere – when it received authorization at least – was precisely ‘legality’. Kaganovich also reminded his audience that the GPU itself would be undergoing changes and merged into a new ministerial department, the NKVD (Commissariat of Internal Affairs). He explained that the Prosecutor General’s Office was the central institution in the legal system, and that with the creation of the NKVD it would have many more cases to process. Henceforth the main task was to educate the population and legal personnel to respect the law. Such, he said, was the line decided by Stalin. A major obstacle to surmount was the lack of education within the legal system itself. Judges were supposed to operate on the basis of codes, but all too often their pronouncements were unclear. Everyone now had to learn the text of the law: ‘Citizens have to know that there are laws and that they also apply to the apparatus.’

We might mention in passing that on the basis of this new enhanced role, the legal apparatus requested a significant salary increase. Kaganovich stalled, suggesting that the new line should not be ushered in with such a selfish move…

These outpourings of moderation, level-headedness and good sense contained not the slightest hint as to what was brewing, and which would explode after Kirov’s assassination at the end of 1934. Sometimes attributed to other leaders, the ‘liberal interlude’ was in fact Stalin’s own – just like what was to follow.

As the evidence available to us today indicates, Stalin never forgot or forgave past critics. Take the case of Bukharin. On the face of it he was forgiven, became editor-in-chief of Izvestiia, and kept up a friendly correspondence with Stalin. He felt entitled to print all manner of opinions on industrialization, collectivization, and the NEP. He often presented analyses or assessments that differed from official pronouncements. For example, he laid firm stress on the fact that the high rate of investment fixed for heavy industry was having pernicious economic effects, at a time when other, more promising alternatives were available. Whereas the Bukharin of 1928 had seen Stalin for what he was, in 1934 he was playing with fire, probably in the belief that the lull of that year derived from a sincere desire to rectify a policy whose negative results he had anticipated. He regarded it as legitimating his opposition to Stalin in 1928–9. Moreover, this is precisely how Stalin read the situation. Bukharin never suspected that Stalin was setting a trap for him, encouraging other leaders to write articles against him and circulating all sorts of acerbic remarks about him in the Politburo, while concealing what he really had in mind.

Stalin enjoyed this game. He was absolutely convinced that everyone, including his current entourage, had ‘offended’ him at some point, had belonged to a different faction, spoken disparagingly about him, or said a good word about Trotsky. All this remained engraved in his rancorous memory. In the case of Bukharin, it cannot be excluded that his speech to the Writers’ Congress and the impressive agenda he set there had rekindled Stalin’s resentment.[9]

Whoever was responsible for Kirov’s murder, it is clear that Stalin was by now ready to change line overnight, to write the most murderous and authentically ‘Stalinist’ chapter of them all. The ‘other policy’ – the terror – was always on his mind, ready to be activated. The interlude was nothing but a requisite pause following a spasm. Whether such increases and reductions in political tension and terror also reflected Stalin’s fluctuating state of mind remains a matter for conjecture.

THE SOCIAL FABRIC

Setting personalities to one side for a moment, let us turn our attention to an issue we touched on when evoking the situation in the Far Eastern party organization. The time has come to broaden our canvas and plunge into the social realities of the 1930s. The state and its ‘psyche’ continued to confront phenomena that were highly characteristic of these tumultuous years. These formed the matrix of what has been called a ‘systemic paranoia’ (a theme that will be explored later). The 1930s were years of unprecedented social flux, caused by tempos of development that the planners themselves did not believe in and by ‘collectivization’ of the peasantry. This experiment in ‘social engineering’ was launched with unparalleled violence whose consequences had not been considered, leaving the country short of food just as it was embarking on an equally unprecedented industrial great leap forward. The decision to collectivize formed part of an ideology that endowed industry with mythical powers: industrialize agriculture and Russia’s rural past would vanish, but food supplies would still be plentiful, as if offloaded from containers. This was to overlook a ‘detail’: the peasantry itself. While the task had to be carried out by peasants, it was directed against them. What followed was not so much the industrialization of agriculture as its nationalization by the state – an aspect of Stalinism we have already encountered.

POPULATION AND LABOUR FORCE

To sketch the ‘social panorama’ of the USSR in the 1930s and its transformation, we must begin with the population statistics. But simply reciting the figures provided by two censuses – 147 million on 17 December 1926 and 170.6 million on 17 January 1939 – will not do. These significant totals were arrived at rather mechanically and gloss over the dramatic population shifts and losses that occurred in these years. The leadership ordered a census in 1937, but when it yielded a figure below expectations – 162 million – the statisticians were accused of distorting an allegedly much more radiant reality. Their ranks were decimated and a new census was ordered. Its result was virtually dictated in advance. Even so, it was quite an achievement on the part of the surviving statisticians to report a figure of 167,305,749 Soviets – neither more nor less. When this census was re-examined in 1992, experts agreed on a somewhat higher total of 168,870,700 inhabitants, arrived at by minor statistical corrections and additions. According to them, the figure published originally was not distorted, but involved a discrepancy that was perfectly acceptable in census-taking.[1] Given that the leadership had much to hide in order to escape responsibility for the population losses occasioned by ‘de-kulakization’ (raskulachivanie), the 1932–3 famine and the wave of purges, it is remarkable that the demographers of the time somehow managed to persuade the Kremlin that too flagrant a falsification would have been more compromising than the truth.

The next set of figures concerns the strategically crucial categories of the available labour force. In 1928, the approximate totals for the non-agricultural labour force amounted to 9.8 million workers and 3.9 million employees, representing some 17.6 per cent of the national total (12.4 per cent for workers, 5.2 per cent for employees). That year, industry employed 3,593,000 workers and 498,000 employees – the engineers and technicians grouped together under the category of ITR (where the R stands for rabotniki, or ‘workers’, as opposed to rabochie, which refers to manual labourers).

The picture changed dramatically towards 1939–40. By then, workers and employees constituted a mass of between 31 and 33 million people, of whom more than 21 million were workers and 11–12 million employees. Together they now represented over half the national labour force. The percentage of employees had risen from 5.2 per cent to 16 per cent of the total. In the key sector of industry, the number of workers had leapt from 3.5 to 11 million and that of employees from around 400,000 to 2 million, while a similar pattern was evident in transport, construction and communications.

Such profound structural shifts brought onto the social stage categories which yielded a labour force substantially different from that of the previous period, and whose emergence prefigured unavoidable changes in class relations and the power structure. To this must be added the massive appearance (or reappearance) of women in the world of work. This point is worth emphasizing, because their participation in production went far beyond their traditional concentration in the textile industry and services. In 1913 women represented 24.5 per cent of the labour force in large-scale industry, mostly in the textile branch. In 1928 the number of women in the ‘workers-employees’ category amounted to 2,795,000, but reached 13,190,000 in 1940, or 39 per cent of the average annual labour force (43 per cent in industry). They were equally present en masse in heavy industry and mining, and their role in industrialization had become decisive.

But this significant development, which seemingly represented progress, was marred by phenomena that rendered this emancipation an ambiguous affair. New positions in the industrial sector; preponderance in medicine, primary and secondary schools; equal access to education; a growing presence in scientific research laboratories – these were certainly advances. But women had little access to positions of administrative power, including in the hospitals and schools where they constituted a majority of employees; and were totally absent from positions of political responsibility (apart from some posts where they had a token presence). The disparity was obvious. Moreover, many jobs in heavy industry and other branches required physical labour often performed without any mechanical aid. Inappropriate for women, such jobs had deleterious effects on birth rates and increased the number of abortions. This situation was further aggravated by the fact that nothing was done to alleviate the burden of the daily household chores women faced with. The price they paid for entering an expanding labour market was very heavy. The patriarchal tradition still deeply ingrained in society likewise permeated the Soviet establishment, whose conservatism was actually on the increase.

The statistical data presented here for the period beginning 1928–9 are often taken from estimates that are much ‘softer’ than the results of the 1926 census. But since the aim is to give readers a sense of the intensity of the transformation, rather than to offer statistical precision, we have preferred (here and subsequently) to draw statistics from various sources and several authors, even if they do not always coincide.[2]

THE ‘EMPLOYEES-SPECIALISTS-INTELLIGENTSIA’ QUID PRO QUO

The term sluzhashchie (employees) was very broadly used to refer to anyone who was not a worker or peasant. The range of categories it covered rendered it rather ineffective, except when applied to office employees. The totals for ‘employees’ included a category of strategic importance for the country’s development: namely, ‘specialists’, or those who had completed their studies in a higher technical institute or specialist secondary establishment. In 1928 this group numbered 521,000 (233,000 with higher education, 288,000 with specialist secondary education). By 1 January 1941 their number had reached 2.4 million (approximately 4 per cent of wage-earners) and represented 23 per cent of the total for ‘employees’; 909,000 had graduated from higher education and 1,492,000 from secondary. Industry employed 310,400 of these – mainly engineers and technicians. Their numbers had quintupled in twelve years. We possess a breakdown of this category of ‘specialists’, done at the end of 1940. It offers data for the technical, medical, economic and legal professions and, with less precision, for teachers, librarians and other cultural professions.

In the statistics we are using, the category of ‘specialists’ stops there: it does not include scientists, artists or writers. If we add the latter, we can very approximately quantify an additional category used by Soviet statistics (and propaganda): the ‘intelligentsia’. It often overlaps with that of ‘specialists’, but not completely. If we add to the figure for people employed in the cultural sphere, as supplied by other tables or sources for 1 January 1941, the category of specialists, we arrive at a figure of 2,539,314.[3] Some official sources claimed almost 5 million, with the aim of making the ‘cultural revolution’ proclaimed by the leadership in these years more credible. To the same end, official documents used a different category, which was broader and vaguer: that of ‘people primarily employed in intellectual work’. This category was quite illegitimately identified with the ‘intelligentsia’, making it possible to manipulate the image the government wished to present of the country’s cultural development. As early as 1937, Molotov announced a huge figure for the number of such ‘intellectuals’. The same fluid category probably underlay the imprudent claims subsequently made by Soviet researchers, who declared (as they were obliged to) that ‘by the beginning of the 1940s, the problem of a popular intelligentsia was resolved’. But some of these researchers knew perfectly well that those who had acquired a degree from an institute of higher education accounted for only a percentage of those engaged in ‘primarily intellectual work’. Most of the latter were actually praktiki – that is to say, people who had learnt their profession on the job or during intensive training courses, and who had no professional education, even when their jobs demanded specialist knowledge.[4] At the beginning of 1941, inadequate training was particularly widespread among those classified as ‘engineers’ in industry. For every 1,000 workers there were 110 engineers and technicians. But only 19.7 per cent of them had a higher education qualification and 23 per cent a secondary school qualification; 67 per cent were praktiki who had probably never completed the secondary school curriculum. And the picture is similar for other professional groups, all of them swept up into a process of quantitative growth that outstripped the country’s ability to train them properly.

The accelerated pace of industrialization was the inevitable cause of such shortcomings, as well as of the economic and socio-cultural costs that form part of the panorama we are going to describe. If industrial workers around 1929 had on average no more than 3.5 years of primary schooling behind them, rising to 4.2 years by the end of 1939, those engaged in ‘primarily intellectual work’ – simply put, office employees – hardly fared better, especially when the category of ‘specialists’ is deducted from their number. Of ‘employees’, representing 16.6 per cent of the working population, only 3.3 per cent can be counted as ‘specialists’, a majority of whom had only an incomplete secondary education. This did not prevent some writers in the post-Stalin era including them under the rubric of the ‘intelligentsia’.

General data on the educational levels of the active population in the towns and countryside in 1939 help to clarify the problem. For every 1,000 workers, the statistics indicate that 242 had benefited from tertiary or secondary education in the towns and 63 in the countryside. If we separate out higher education, the figure for towns is 32 and for the countryside 3. For secondary education, the figures are 210 and 60 respectively. But this is the crucial point: the statistics for ‘secondary’ education actually include two categories – ‘complete’ and ‘incomplete’ – and it is reasonable to suppose that the majority of individuals concerned did not in fact complete their secondary education.[5]

The emergence of new groups with a good intellectual education, and the rise in the number of those who might legitimately be included in this prestigious category,[6] are undeniable. Nevertheless, we cannot ignore the extent to which the regime inflated the figures. This manipulation (which probably also involved self-deception) sought to embellish the much less edifying reality: the generally low educational level of workers, employees, and even many of those who held responsible positions. We must keep this in mind, because the low cultural level of the whole society formed the social backdrop to Stalinism. The top leadership was sufficiently well-informed to seek to conceal and embellish this frustrating situation.

But these inflated figures – an intelligentsia numbering 5 million – also reveal a fundamental characteristic of the Soviet experience and especially the Stalinist period: its ‘extensive’ character, or propensity to prioritize the quantitative. The 1939 census estimated the number of people employed in ‘primarily intellectual work’ at 13,821,452. A breakdown by educational level in each sector of employment does lead to a figure of close on 5 million (4,970,536, to be precise). But it includes anyone with a general education, however minimal. Moreover, most of them occupied posts requiring a specialist – even higher – education, which they did not possess. Accordingly, they were simply praktiki – a huge category in these years, which remained a strong presence after the war. We even encounter it in the period following Stalin’s death, though by then it was beginning to disappear.

What transpires from this is that the mass of ‘blue-collar’ employees who, as we have seen, mushroomed in the years between the two censuses, contained whole layers of poorly educated and trained people (including sales staff, cashiers, telegraphers), who were nevertheless better paid – sometimes substantially so – than workers. In 1940 the average monthly wage of an industrial worker stood at 30.7 roubles, while that of an office employee was 53.5. This average includes engineers and technicians (ITR). But even when they are excluded, an office worker fared better than a worker.[7] We therefore have the following picture: a situation where even limited skills or some basic literacy and numeracy were at a premium, against the backdrop of a much larger labour force with only basic schooling doing manual work and an even larger rural population, which was much less literate than urban workers. But even in the ‘primarily intellectual’ category, education rarely went beyond what could be acquired in seven years of schooling.

The benefits enjoyed by office employees (even though they were sneered at in official propaganda) and the exaggerated figures for members of the ‘intelligentsia’ attest to the obvious: the country’s low starting point. And the generally low level of education was no social equalizer, especially in the bureaucratic agencies. Social differentiation shot up there, and people were acutely aware of it. For when living standards are low, the quantitatively small advantages obtained by some cause a keener sense of injustice among the worst-off and a feeling of solidarity among the beneficiaries, as well as hostility to those who do not enjoy them. And this stands to reason: in conditions of penury, a spare loaf of bread can be a matter of life or death.

The expanding social stratum referred to as ‘employees’ (neither workers nor peasants) was far from being or remaining socially homogeneous. In fact, it covered an ever more disparate social reality, including the category of ‘specialists’, but also an increasingly differentiated hierarchy of officials of every rank in all spheres of life. They were the recipients of most of the privileges and possessed a good deal of power. In everyday life, this growing differentiation among the ruling strata would sooner or later find its expression in official and unofficial language – notably because the powerful but spontaneous trend of ‘differentiation’ became in the mid-1920s, but especially from the early 1930s, a deliberate policy of motivation and social control.

As the 1930s unfolded, social and ideological divisions kept widening, strengthened by this strategy, which is best encapsulated by the term ‘status revolution’. It consisted in distributing perks and privileges to the layer of ‘employees’, with a particular bias towards the ‘intelligentsia’ and the rukovoditeli (‘office-holders’) – categories that overlapped, but were concealed for ideological reasons. This policy was deemed indispensable for normalizing the social climate and imparting stability to the regime. None of those selected for preferential treatment had an easy time of it in these years. Their relations with the top leadership were, to say the least, bumpy. Whenever official policy and ideology suffered setbacks, the higher and lower strata of officialdom served as scapegoats and were sacrificed to popular indignation. This was easy to do, given the gulf between ordinary citizens and these privileged officials, especially when they were in positions of political or economic responsibility. Thus, ‘privileges’, much coveted by those seeking to climb the social ladder, were also a dangerous trap in the political conditions of the period.

Having dealt with the general categories of ‘employees’, ‘specialists’ and ‘intelligentsia’, let us now turn to a sketch of the rukovoditeli – the managers or office-holders.

OFFICE-HOLDERS

In Soviet statistical classifications, those holding responsible office – the rukovoditeli – were also called rukovodiashchie rabotniki, sometimes otvet-politrabotniki, and later simply otvet-rabotniki. To be included in this category, one had to be at the head of a structural unit, with at least some subordinates, in an administrative agency of the state, the party, a trade union, or some other official organization. According to the 1926 census there were about 364,816 such managers in firms, on construction sites, in administrative agencies and their departments. In the 1939 census the category numbered 445,244, to which were added 757,010 people occupying lower but still quite powerful positions in enterprises of every kind: there were 231,000 factory directors and other higher ranks in industry; 165,191 people in charge of workshops and other, less important units; and 278,784 chairmen and deputy-chairmen of kolkhozy (sovkhoz administrators were already included under the rubric of ‘firms’). This yields a total of 2,010,275 (924,009 of them in the countryside). Finally, at the summit of the party and state at Union, republican and district levels, we find some 67,670 individuals heading institutions in urban areas and 4,968 doing so in rural areas: a total of 72,638 nachal’niki (‘top bosses’) for the whole country. It was around them, and under their orders, that the rukovoditeli we have just mentioned worked; and the latter were themselves supported by lower-ranking officials, not to mention technical and service personnel (transport, repairs, cleaning).

At this stage we must return to the broad category of the ‘intelligentsia’ in order to bring out various important components of it – i.e. influential writers, scientists, architects, inventors, economists, and other experts whom the military–industrial complex (among others) had urgent need of. This stratum became socially and politically close to those we have just described as high-ranking bosses, and formed an elite with them – or, more precisely, one of the key components of the country’s elite.

The categories of rukovoditeli and ‘intelligentsia’ are important, because they make it possible to identify layers that are now influential, capable of articulating their own interests, exercising pressure, and often getting what they want. The advent of social groups with the ability to acquire powerful positions and defend their interests was something Stalin observed with keen interest and a degree of vigilance. His concern was precisely to prevent the emergence of such potentially ‘negative phenomena’.

RUNAWAY URBANIZATION: CITIES, HUTS, BARRACKS

The changes in the socio-professional landscape which, as we have seen, included an expansion in the number of workers and the intellectual, administrative and technical strata, were evident throughout the economy, including – though to a lesser degree – in agriculture. Industry, construction and transport, as well as education and research, were inextricably bound up with the country’s urbanization. And industrialization was itself a powerful factor in urbanization, as was the proliferation of educational, research, public health and administrative institutions.

Urbanization was also the vehicle for a much broader process, signalling a crucial phase in Russia’s history: the disappearance of one kind of society (our subject here) and the emergence of another, quite different one. The changing ratios between urban and rural populations take us to the heart of the matter. The brief period under discussion simply set the stage for a rapid, decisive turn, whose initial manifestations in the 1930s were a disparate set of phenomena inherent in a transitional phase, dominated by clashes between intermingling social strata and cultures. Things would only take shape in the longer term, even if this ‘long term’ was not long in coming. The 1930s, meanwhile, were years of an initial, profoundly destabilizing impetus, whose repercussions were felt throughout the system.

The numbers and relative weight of the rural versus the urban population were almost constantly subjects of heated discussion among statisticians, demographers and politicians. According to results of the 1926 population census, city inhabitants reached the number of 26,314,114 (17.9 per cent), while the rural population reached 120,718,801 (82.1 per cent). The noted specialist on the peasantry V. P. Danilov claimed that the percentage of the peasants was actually higher (84 per cent according to him). He argued that census takers and demographers included in the category of ‘towns’ settlements that were at that time nothing more than large villages and thus artificially increased the weight of the urban population.[8] This correction affords a good introduction to one of the predominant features of the period: the ongoing urbanization occurred against the background of what were still profoundly rural realities and roots. This was something registered by many visitors, who at the end of the 1920s observed the extent to which in the cities (Moscow included) ‘country and city are still playing hide-and-seek’ (Walter Benjamin). The prevalence of rural origins in the present urban population was, in many ways, ubiquitous; and this socio- historical reality was far from having disappeared despite ‘collectivization’ and other ‘modernizing’ strategies. Exaggerated claims for the size of the ‘intelligentsia’, inflated pronouncements about the achievements of planning, the trumpeting of the advent of ‘socialism’, decreed on Stalin’s whim in the annus mirabilis of 1937 – these conveyed a need to accelerate, at least verbally, the completion of a historical stage that was still anchored in the past. But this in no way diminished the intensity and agonies of the transition: quite the reverse.

For the USSR in its pre-September 1939 borders, the January 1939 census recorded a total population of 170.5 million inhabitants, 114.4 million in the countryside (67 per cent) and 56.1 million in the towns (33 per cent). Accordingly, the urban population had doubled in twelve years, increasing by 30 million – an exceptionally rapid rate of urbanization by any standards. The annual growth rate for the urban population is eloquent testimony: 2.7 per cent from 1926 to 1929; 11.5 per cent from 1929 to 1933; and 6.5 per cent from 1933 to 1939. The average for the years between the two censuses of 1926 and 1939 was 9.4 per cent a year.[9]

The raw statistics are no less eloquent: between 1926 and 1929 the urban population grew by 950,000 a year; between 1929 and 1932 by 1.6 million a year; and between 1933 and 1939 by 2.34 million a year. In 1940 the urban population stood at 63.1 million inhabitants (this included 7 million in recently annexed territories). But as we have seen, this urban world was still profoundly enmeshed with the countryside and the peasantry, which remained the substantial majority of the population and served as ‘reservoir’ for the whole social structure. The main social changes in this short period can be encapsulated in an interaction of three powerful ‘transformers’: at one pole, collectivization ‘de-ruralized’ the countryside; at the other, urbanization did the same; and industrialization, another potent demiurge, operated at both poles.

As a result of this transformation, the growth of towns and the influx of peasants into them assumed gigantic proportions. In the years 1926–39, towns swelled by 29.6 million inhabitants – 18.5 million of them new arrivals; 5.3 million through natural growth (births, marriages, and so on); and 5.8 million through administrative decisions to attach larger rural settlements to the category of ‘towns’. In 1939, 62 per cent of new town dwellers thus hailed from the countryside: endogenous population growth in towns and ‘urban settlements’ accounted for only 17.8 per cent; while the remaining 19.5 per cent became town dwellers by administrative fiat – meaning that 5.8 million peasants acquired such status without having to migrate.

This whole process was not restricted to the 640 towns inherited from Tsarist Russia. Approximately 450 new towns were created in the space of thirteen years. Seventy-one towns had a population of 100–500,000 – in 1926 only twenty-eight of such size existed – while eight had in excess of 500,000 (as against three in 1926). Moreover, whereas in the period 1897–1926 the fastest-growing towns were the largest ones (over 100,000 inhabitants), the years 1926–39 witnessed the development, under the impact of industrialization, of medium-sized towns (those of 50–100,000 inhabitants). Many urban areas were created in an ‘empty spot’ – in other words, around a new industrial building site. In 1926, 17.4 per cent of the population was urban. Thirteen years later, the percentage had leapt to 32.9 per cent.[10]

However, neither the figure for average annual growth, nor the overall total of 30 million new town dwellers, can convey the intensity of the turmoil entailed by such urban expansion. The 18.5 million peasants did not simply arrive and stay. This figure, already enormous, is the end result of population flows in opposite directions. On the one hand, millions of peasants tried out living in towns or, in the case of richer peasants, sought refuge from persecution there; on the other hand, masses of people abandoned – even fled – urban areas. This was a veritable human maelstrom.

As can readily be imagined, the country was scarcely prepared to deal with such mass migration. As a result of bad harvests and grain procurement crises, living standards had fallen considerably, as is indicated by the dramatic housing problem. Shelter was invariably to be found in barracks or in the corner of someone’s room. The best scenario was where a family had a room of its own in some overcrowded communal apartment. Such difficulties were not restricted to newcomers. The housing figures underscore the gravity of the crisis: workers’ barracks (often a mere roof, with no amenities) and the growing number of communal apartments (one room per family and one kitchen for four or more families) became an integral part of the Soviet urban landscape then and for years to come.

In 1928, housing was considered ‘normal’ in terms of hygiene and comfort if it possessed 6 square metres per person. But this, however modest, was just a dream – proposed as an objective in the first five-year plan and never met. In the interim, workers had to find some miserable accommodation or a corner in neighbouring villages, far from their workplace. In many industrial enterprises, the situation was actually deteriorating; apartments were falling into decay and did not meet minimal hygiene standards. On 6 January 1936, inhabitants of new urban settlements in European Russia on average had 4.4 square metres per person, compared with only 3.2 square metres in Siberia. The data for services and amenities in towns were depressing. In European Russia and Siberia, indicators for sewers, running water and central heating were extremely low. Electricity was the only exception: electric lighting was available in 92.3 per cent of houses in Russia (70 per cent in Western Siberia). In contrast, only 22.8 per cent of houses in Russia and 5 per cent in Siberia had sewers and only 43 per cent and 19 per cent, respectively, had water mains.

Such data provide a good indication of living standards in these years. They also give us an inkling of the difficulties of cohabitation in overcrowded housing, where privacy was impossible and personal and family life must have been strained to the limit. Undernourishment, poor housing, the lack of hygiene, physical and nervous exhaustion due to too little rest, not to mention the extensive participation in the labour force of women, who endured the same pressures as men (if not more) – these explain the decline in birth rates in the 1930s. In the early years of this decade, economic difficulties, famine (especially in 1932–3) and other hardships depressed population growth. Food shortages, rationing, intensive migration, ‘de-kulakization’, and constant flows in and out of the towns shattered traditional family life and relations within families.

From 1923 to 1928, the population had grown by an unprecedented 4 million a year, thanks to lower death rates and higher birth rates, especially in the countryside. In 1928, the birth rate was 42 per thousand, the mortality rate 18, and the rate of population growth 24 per cent. A quite different picture emerges between 1928 and 1940: rates of population growth fell, especially in 1930–1, and went on falling thereafter. In 1932, birth rates exceeded death rates by only 5.6 per cent. And for the first time, 1933 witnessed a negative demographic balance in the towns of European Russia. The years 1930–5 must have been especially alarming. In 1938, population growth improved in the same areas and returned to its 1929 level (20 per cent), before declining to 19.2 per cent in 1939 and 13.2 per cent in 1940 because of the threat of war and also because of the smaller number of people of marriageable age, resulting from the losses incurred in the First World War and Civil War.[11]

It is difficult to tell whether these statistics, drawn from Soviet sources, tell the real story. It is true that the decline in the birth rate can possibly be attributed in part to a long-term trend. But the fact that the government took drastic measures to halt and reverse the decline suggests that it possessed even more alarming figures. An improvement in living standards, although attempted, was not easy to achieve at the end of the 1930s, given the increase in arms production. Greater emphasis was placed on such draconian measures as criminalizing abortion (27 June 1936), which were largely ineffective and far from enlightened. Neither crude pro-birth policies – the image of the ‘heroic mother’ (an honorary title and medal bestowed on mothers for bearing ten children and a source of many jokes) – nor the butchery of women condemned to back-street abortions can account for the small improvement officially claimed for 1937 (at the height of the purges). It was followed by a new decline in 1939, back down to the 1935 level. By now, of course, an additional factor was at work: the mobilization of men into the army.

As yet, we have said nothing about the waves of criticism, expressions of dissent, and often harsh words issuing from the lower classes, which reached just about every government and party letterbox. The policy mix of pampering and badgering pursued with respect to administrators and the intelligentsia sought to make them a rampart for the regime and cadres in the state machinery. Any large-scale expression of popular discontent or sustained, sharp criticism was regarded as dangerous, even when not followed by disorder or demonstrations on the streets that could be dubbed ‘opposition’ or ‘counter-revolution’. Even the reactions of members working outside the apparatus were a matter of concern for party leaders. And such discontent did not begin with the five-year plans.

PARTY MEMBERS PARTICIPATE IN STRIKES (1926)

Reports from the GPU and the party’s information department noted that not all party members were strike-breakers, even if some were perceived as such and indeed were. Between January and September 1926, party members had participated in 45 of the 603 strikes recorded throughout the country.[1] Documents show some party members not only initiating, but also leading, the strikes. Reports also deplore the negative conduct of members in various factories and stress that economic difficulties are engendering what are described as ‘peasant’ attitudes: passivity in social and working life, religious and nationalistic prejudices, hostile reactions to the decisions of the party cell.

Examples are quoted of party members making highly critical statements – for example, ‘We’re now more exploited than we were before. Then we had the bourgeoisie; now we’ve got our managers.’ Another case is cited where the party cell demands that its members halt a strike, prompting this response from a female communist worker: ‘What do you want? Does the party feed me? It’s become impossible to survive.’ Another reaction is quoted: ‘We’re being squeezed to the last drop. Our union representatives have cosied up to the factory management and pay no attention to workers’ demands.’

In a glass factory in the Krasnoyarsk province, some workers go on strike demanding a pay rise from 42 to 52 roubles and a party member is among the leaders. All the strikers were fired, probably because there were so few of them. When strikes were on a larger scale, strikers’ demands were often met.

In the Nevsky shipyards in Leningrad, a strike breaks out that could have been prevented by two party members who are highly regarded by the workforce. But when asked to intervene by management, they refuse.

The reports quote copiously from the criticisms made by some party members of all aspects of party policy. To take an example, two of them come to see their cell secretary, put their membership cards on the desk, pay their dues for the last month, and announce that they are quitting the party: ‘Your cell works for the management; you’re helping it to oppress the workers.’

GPU reports on election campaigns in trade unions and other organizations register considerable passivity among workers, even when they are party members. Some workers want to leave a meeting. When stopped at the exit, they reply: ‘Why do you stop us leaving when party members are the first to be off?’

The reports also cite anti-Semitic statements by working-class party members. They sound familiar: ‘All power is in Jewish hands’; ‘The yids are in power and oppress the workers’; ‘You won’t find one decent person among the yids’; ‘I’ve been itching to have a go at this hateful tribe.’

We must be careful when interpreting these snippets. If such cases were frequent, the reports, which derive from the GPU or the party’s information department, do not permit us to assess the extent of the protests. Other documents maintain that the instructions or interdictions issued by cells were rarely disobeyed by party members. This does not mean that they did not express or share opinions only openly expressed by a minority, or did not tacitly sympathize with workers’ grievances. But they balanced their fear of reprisals at the hands of other workers, which were common when they evinced hostility to them or to strikes – against fear of being reprimanded by the party – which could end up with them losing their jobs. It is also clear now that rank-and-file party members, like everyone else in the workplace, were spied on by stukachi (unpaid informers) or secret agents.

If material from the base attests to demands for a ‘democratization’ of working conditions and party life alike, trends inside the regime were moving in the opposite direction and elicited a variety of reactions, including directly political ones, even among some apparatchiks. The problem was not just the emergence of criticism among these strata. Worse, dedicated old Bolsheviks or idealistic newcomers declared themselves deeply disappointed – even disgusted – with their work and no longer wanted to serve at the heart of the citadel. Some apparatchiks who had not chosen their jobs out of careerism found themselves inside a machine where their sense of vocation, political perspectives and the fate of the country were drowned in bureaucratic vermicelli – a term, picked up in Italy, that was often used by veteran revolutionaries. We have already cited documents to this effect. Even more negative expressions of rejection of the system and accusations of treason also circulated, invariably unsigned.

In the 1930s, however, the regime possessed more instruments than it had in the 1920s for imposing its authority on everyone, including party members – the criminal code and the secret police foremost among them. But another phenomenon proved still more potent: with the expansion of its apparatus, the party ended up becoming its mere appendix – though this was not Stalin’s ultimate objective (in the 1940s he developed even more radical projects). Whether he adopted this policy in 1933 or somewhat earlier is a secondary issue. What matters is a combination of different factors. Domination of a country thrust into full-scale industrialization and ‘collectivization’ demanded the final emasculation of the old revolutionary party and its transformation into an obedient tool. ‘Adequate’ repressive agencies, as well as an ideological lexicon to justify the repression, were constructed to this end or simply updated for new purposes. Thus, the category of ‘counter revolutionary crime’ contained in the criminal code, and which sounded obvious in a revolutionary situation, was refined to meet new requirements. A military prosecutor, V. A. Viktorov, who was very active under Khrushchev, described the terroristic trends and practices of the Stalinist era in highly critical terms, referring to the ‘amendments with far-reaching consequences’ introduced into the criminal code in 1926, despite strenuous opposition in various circles.[2]

The article on ‘counter-revolutionary crimes’ originally required a clearly proven ‘intention followed by action’ before prosecution was warranted. But the newly created GPU skilfully manoeuvred so that arrests and interrogation eluded supervision by prosecutors, who were supposed to monitor their legality. It also succeeded in circumventing ‘awkward’ legal provisions in the criminal code. Amendments to the code, and the new powers granted to the GPU by the government, enabled the latter to prosecute and punish without real proof – i.e., without the ‘culprit’ having actually committed a crime. Investigations no longer had to prove the existence of an ‘intention followed by action’. Viktorov’s analysis indicates that the way was now open for a type of ‘legal’ repression where the only requisite proof was the accusation itself. However strange it might seem, guilt was firmly established even before the indictment was decided.

In the last analysis, the combination of this pseudo-legal manipulation of the code and use and abuse of the ‘heresy syndrome’ led to a surreal situation where guilt was genetically inscribed in all citizens, who were liable to be prosecuted at will. Paradoxically, this juridical absurdity, cloaked in the vaguest of terminologies, would soon be used to combat not only what were regarded as anti-regime currents, but also – and primarily – the ruling organization itself, in whose name the operation was supposedly being conducted. Party members, as well as the large pool of ex-members, became the target of a witch-hunt, at a time when no serious opposition to Stalin remained – unless we regard as opposition the attitude of those who resigned their party duties or let them lapse, or the numerous complaints and criticisms emanating from the party’s rank and file, and even some of its higher strata, as reported by whoever did the reporting.

Thus, as Stalin increasingly entrenched himself at the top and the category of ‘counter-revolutionary crime’ became ever more vague in the criminal code and in practice, the security agencies extricated themselves from control by the law and legal authorities and expanded the scope of their arbitrary punitive powers. A veritable machinery of terror was now available, ready to be deployed against anyone. Party membership, old or new, became irrelevant – or even dangerous. Stalin had scores to settle with many members of what was supposed to be his own party, including with some of those who had helped him acquire the tools to do just that. With the party tamed and the police completely unconstrained and directly subordinate to the ‘top man’, the way was free for Stalin’s solo stewardship, without ‘sentimentality’ or checks, of a powerful centralized state. In fact, this state was a war machine ready to do battle and provided with all necessary means for that purpose. As the title of Part One puts it, this state was combined with a ‘psyche’. It is remarkable how long members of the ‘old guard’ – with the exception of Lenin – were unaware of what Stalin was capable of. By the time they discovered it, it was too late. Were they too ‘Westernized’ to decipher such a dark psyche? Or just short-sighted? Or, more charitably, were they still too dominated by a socialist ideology to realize that they had embarked on a journey that was leading them back into the depths of Mother Russia, and that different means would have been required to prevent the worst?

Whatever our answer to that question, once in opposition to Stalin the different currents in the old guard – supporters of Trotsky, Zinoviev or Bukharin, each of them ‘waking up’ after the previous one had already been vanquished – fought as best they could for some four years. Most ended up yielding to Stalin. Trotsky, forced into exile, was the main exception. Following the defeat of the more sizeable oppositions, small groups of disillusioned top officials attempted some criticism between 1929 and 1932, but they were soon neutralized. Mention should be made of a particularly brave illegal organization headed by a former secretary of the Moscow party, Ivan Riutin. He had circulated a thousand-page document entitled ‘Platform of the Marxist-Leninists’, which accused Stalin of betraying the party and the revolution. According to some information, the Central Committee would not permit Stalin to eliminate him physically in 1932. We know that Riutin was sufficiently courageous and intransigent to declare to one of his interrogators: ‘I will not go down on my knees.’ He went to prison and subsequently disappeared. Another opposition figure whom we have already encountered – Trotsky’s former associate, Christian Rakovsky – carried on writing remarkable critical analyses of Stalin’s policies and regime until 1934, when he finally ‘repented’. It only served to prolong his life for a few more years.

Small, sometimes tiny, currents, as well as numerous individuals, continued to express criticism. The authorities were informed of it either when the police seized material during raids on people’s homes, or when such criticisms were sent by mail to the press, the party, leaders, or Stalin himself – invariably unsigned, so as to escape retribution. Researchers today are still unearthing them in large numbers in the archives.

Thus, any organized opposition, whether open or clandestine, was now impossible. But individual demonstrations, as well as politically charged collective reactions – disorder, strikes, withdrawal from the party (however discreet) – allow us to suggest that the population and many party members were not exactly mute. This is a topic that requires more research, but we already have a pioneering book, The Year 1937, by Oleg Khlevniuk, which offers the first evidence of the widespread existence of different forms of opposition and protest – in this case, against the purges. One of the forms of protest mentioned is a wave of suicides. Official propaganda insinuated that a suspect’s suicide was proof of guilt or cowardice, but the measures adopted to reduce the number of such suicides were unavailing. Helpless in the face of state terror, some people had no other way of defending themselves. According to one source, suicides numbered in the thousands. In 1937, there were 782 in the ranks of the Red Army alone. The following year, the figure rose to 832 (not counting the navy). Such suicides were not always desperate acts by the powerless; they were also courageous gestures of protest.

The social turbulence generated by the ‘great leap forward’ – the massive population movements, particularly those covered by the term tekuchka – and the need to control those sectors where the ensuing crisis was at its most acute, impelled the regime to adopt two strategies that had contradictory dynamics:

(1) recourse to various forms of repression, referred to by the term shturmovshchina (storming) – i.e. the launch of huge campaigns to achieve whatever the current objectives were at any price;

(2) construction of a hypertrophied bureaucracy to control population flows by systematizing and channelling them.

Seemingly unavoidable, these strategies contradicted one another. The mobilizing campaigns alternated, or ran in parallel, with attempts to ‘regularize’ things: in sum, the Mr Hyde of terror versus the Dr Jekyll of bureaucracy, keen on planning, stability and ‘tenure’. Both belonged to the regime’s internal clock.

This alternation between stick and carrot persisted even at the height of the terror. The bloody purges of 1937–9 contained their own swings of the pendulum. The inability to pursue a steady course, the innate preference for violent acceleration, always ended up causing a trail of damage that had to be cleared away before the next mobilization.[3] This innate preference was the hallmark of a concentration of power, regarded as the only way of pursuing the chosen course to the end. Whatever the current line, whether hard or softer, the regime never relaxed its compulsive attachment to a strict centralism as the only fixed point in a chaotic situation. This approach was not altogether lacking in logic: the gigantic endeavour that had been embarked upon could never have derived from below, and could not be managed at local level either. But centralism on this scale was the source of endless imbalances. Stalinist centralism grew out of a specific situation: a powerful centre had existed since the end of the 1920s, but it had a narrow summit. The configuration of power was such that the assessment of the situation, the diagnosis, the very definition of reality and the policies to adopt depended on the opinions and views of a very small number of leaders. As the great leap unfolded, the way they had governed the country before 1929 must in retrospect have seemed like simplicity itself. The object of government was now literally in perpetual motion.

This enormous fluidity in society and institutions was, of course, the result of the speed and scale of the transformation that had been embarked on. By definition, it was inevitable, and corrigible only in the long run. However, especially in the early 1930s, the regime had to undertake its enormous economic tasks in the here and now, while confronting intense social ferment. The inexorable growth of the whole administrative apparatus – a novelty in itself on this scale – had inevitable social consequences. Even before they had learnt to do their jobs properly, administrative personnel displayed an amazing ability to express their needs, desires and interests, and hit upon means of satisfying them. Thus the problem-solver generated new problems, in conformity with much else in these tumultuous years. A sketch of the bureaucratic structures of the state is now in order.

THE BUREAUCRATIC ‘GENE’

A document from early 1929, and two others from 1940, cast light on some key aspects of bureaucratic state-building between these dates, or at least on the rulers’ perception of it. The first derives from Kujbyshev, Politburo member and head of the State Inspectorate, composed of members of the party’s Central Control Commission and the Worker-Peasant Inspectorate, which had commissariat status. The speech he made to his department heads in early 1929 was, to say the least, rather alarming: ‘Nothing in our new state resembles the old Tsarist regime as much as our administration.’ He listed the well-known defects of the latter and then concluded, like Lenin before him, that they were very difficult to rectify. The abuses and scandals were on such a massive scale that urgent measures were being canvassed. However, they would at best make it possible to get shot of some swindlers, who would quickly be replaced by others, sowing despair in the ranks of militants in the Worker–Peasant Inspectorate. Their commissariat was supposed to be exemplary and enjoy great authority among other government agencies. But this was dangerous: no agency could live up to it. Everyone knows, he continued, about the intra-agency disputes that are typical here and no department is prepared to accept the solutions suggested by another body, especially if they occasion the slightest inconvenience. The higher government agencies, which are supposed to coordinate the activity of lower bodies, are torn apart by the same quarrels and their decisions are often the product of nothing more than fortuitous majorities. Supra-ministerial bodies like the Council for Labour and Defence, or the economic councils at regional level, are insufficiently powerful, because the offended party appeals to the Council of Commissars and often succeeds in getting decisions overturned. ‘In a word,’ Kuibyshev said, ‘you will not find one uncontested authority in this system.’ And he added: people still hope that the Worker-Peasant Inspectorate will find a way of becoming such an authority.

Incredible as it might seem, in his diagnosis of an absence of uncontested authority, Kuibyshev did not mention the Politburo as an exception – though this might have been unintentional.

The Politburo was itself looking for ways of remedying the situation, notably by ousting old cadres from the apparatus and training new ones. We know enough about Stalin by now to guess that in his eyes such a defective organization could only be tantamount to sabotage on a grand scale.

By 1940, with the great purges already in the past, the communism ‘without deformations’ – particularly ‘without bureaucratization’ – imminently anticipated by some was still very far off It suffices to read these lamentations from Izvestiia, which echo Kuibyshev’s twelve years earlier: ‘A great many superfluous departments and agencies have grown up in our state administration, innumerable superstructures where employees do nothing but write, “conduct inquiries”, answer correspondence. And all too often, this paper trail leads to absolutely nothing.’ This was a leading article. It went on to deplore the plethora of supply agencies and gave the example of Gorky, where they were pointlessly proliferating – there were sixty in this town alone. Every commissariat had several supply agencies, each agency had a large workforce, and running expenses kept on increasing. The agencies were duplicating one another, since they virtually all performed the same tasks. In Gorky, running expenses had doubled in 1940 and the editor of Izvestiia could not understand why. Most worrying was the fact that this was a widespread phenomenon.

Thus, the regime responsible for this situation, be it the ‘social mobility’ or the proliferation of bureaucracy, was in turn put to the test and forced to react to one emergency after another, each of which was perceived as a threat. This perception of things was to become the main motor of Stalinism. Not only did the threats exist, but they were necessary to the regime to mobilize the faithful and justify the terror. Yet the factors that had destabilized the social structure were not contained by the terror. The camps and the terror only compounded the instability and sense of insecurity in society, which then rebounded on the state. The leadership was haunted by the spectre of an ungovernable system and losing control of the social ‘magma’. Their counter-measures consisted in strengthening state control over most, if not all, aspects of life, more centralization, and transforming the system into a fortified camp, by increasing the layers of bosses at every administrative level – precisely what Izvestiia denounced.

We know that bureaucracies, whether efficient or sloppy, are not that pliable a tool. Stalinism hoped to solve its problems by ‘mastering the masters’ – i.e. the summits of the bureaucracy. Yet this endeavour was to be complicated by an unanticipated trap, which the top leadership fell into. They had concentrated enormous power in their hands, which they justified on the basis of their tasks. Strong pressure from above was their strategy and it had its logic. The fact that so many crucial decisions depended on the capacities and psychological make-up of a small ruling group, and each of its members personally, might on the face of it have served to unify and consolidate the group. But amid the turmoil of the 1930s, the more the leadership reinforced its control and grip on power, the deeper was its sense that things were escaping its control. As they read reports or visited factories, villages and towns, they realized how many people were not carrying out their orders, were concealing the reality as best they could, or were quite simply unable to maintain the stipulated pace. They noted that thousands of their directives and decrees were not even properly filed. All this helped to spread a perception among the top ranks that their power was actually more fragile than it seemed. They shared a sense of insecurity and disorientation, leading some to doubt the validity of the whole line.

This phenomenon might be called ‘systemic paranoia’ – a term that encapsulates the condition of the precariousness of power. It constitutes one of the core elements of Stalinist autocracy and its ‘self-beatification’.

Overwhelmed by problems and undermined by doubts, the top echelon became more vulnerable to the influence of the one of its members who seemed sufficiently strong and determined to face this historical flood tide. His toughness – even ruthlessness – seemed like the requisite qualities for the tasks of the day. It was a classically auspicious moment for a master of intrigue and backstage manipulation to gather all power in his hands, including the power to decide the fate of every other leader. It was at this point that autocratic power reached its peak. The country’s destiny largely found itself at the mercy of one psyche, a personality prone to paranoia, a figure on whose shoulders the whole weight of the 1930s now came to rest. This is the conjuncture that explains the title of Part One, ‘A Regime and Its Psyche’. Had a collective leadership existed, it might have attenuated the effects of such tensions. But once power was allowed to become so deeply personalized, outbursts of irrationality – including murderous outbursts – were bound to occur. ‘Systemic paranoia’ (at the political level) was going to crystallize in the paranoid tendencies (at the psychic level) of an individual. Spite, malice, deviousness, fury – all became components of the system’s modus operandi.

But this is also the moment to point out that the system Stalin created was inherently recalcitrant to being ‘mastered’, even though the image of ‘master’ was the one he projected at home and abroad. Certainly, the objective of an extreme centralization of power was attained. Henceforth, however, there was nowhere else to go but to cling compulsively to the summit of power. This situation generated its own tensions and side-effects: the less power you delegate, the more it imperceptibly flows into the hands of local ‘little Stalins’; the more you monopolize information, the more it is kept from you; the more you control institutions, the less you master them. As we have indicated, such a configuration was intrinsically unstable and perceived as menacing. No wonder, then, that a central dimension of Stalinism consisted in fighting hordes of enemies. It was obviously not in a position to overcome the effects of this patent over-concentration of power, for that was its very essence. And yet these ‘enemies’ were not individuals and the dictator’s personal safety was never threatened. The real enemies were objective limitations (which Stalin had declared non-existent ‘for us’ in 1924): social trends and changes, institutional attrition, psychological and cultural structures. Later, we shall have the chance to see such limitations at work.

Meanwhile, if it is accepted that the essence of Stalinism consisted in accumulating all power in Stalin’s own hands, we can turn to the issue of how he ruled Russia. Had he not been obsessively preoccupied by this solitary exercise of power, we might have borrowed the title of our next chapter from Merle Fainsod’s How Is Russia Ruled? But our own research leads us to formulate the question rather differently.

Let us start with a simple, surprising discovery: the same man for whom family life meant so little (in fact, he took no interest in it), and whose personal life was a terrible mess (but did this really affect him?), chose as a ruler to personalize and privatize institutional power. No wonder: this – and not much else – was his life. To effect this strange project, he employed the method of fragmenting key political institutions and emptying them of their substance.

We can start with the party, which is where things are clearest. As an autonomous organization, which is what it had been under Bolshevism, the party was liquidated, transformed into a bureaucratic apparatus, and treated as such – i.e. with some considerable disdain. Symptomatically, the old party principle of ‘party maximum’ (whereby a member, whatever his position in the hierarchy, could not earn more than a skilled worker) was abandoned as early as 1932, along with other remnants of the initial egalitarianism, and was contemptuously referred to as uravnilovka (levelling down). The reason was obvious: an ‘egalitarian apparatus’ is as realistic as a square circle. To motivate and control the apparatchiks, they now had to climb a ladder of responsibilities and privileges. Lower-level bosses in the party and state administration (who were mostly party members) no longer played the game of ‘proletarian fraternity’. The call from above was for tough, authoritarian task-masters (Stalin called them ‘commanders’), forming a ruling stratum (nachal’stvo) whose structural hierarchy covered the whole system. They were supported and flattered, but not allowed to settle down and stabilize their position. This was something peculiar to the Stalinist dictatorship, which would be abandoned after it. As Stalin tightened his grip on power, we find him dismantling the many erstwhile party-state consultative bodies, which the Politburo used to convene systematically. He emasculated all institutions of any weight, including (surprisingly for those not already aware of it) the Politburo itself.

THE POLITBURO (1935–6)

This core institution remains little understood, and it is therefore worth taking a look at its operation in 1935–6 – years of violent tremors preceding the veritable earthquake of 1937.

On 1 February 1935, the Central Committee plenum elevated Mikoyan and Chubar to the rank of full members of the Politburo, while Zhdanov and Eikhe became candidate members. No juggling of ‘moderates’ and ‘radicals’ was involved here – just a formal procedure for filling empty posts. Mikoyan and Chubar replaced Kirov (assassinated) and Kuibyshev (deceased), because they had long been candidate members and had held high-level jobs since 1926. Eikhe, leader of an important remote region (Western Siberia), was not able to participate in meetings regularly. As for Zhdanov, it was impossible to deny him candidate membership: he had been a Central Committee secretary since 1934, worked as a de facto Politburo member, and was going to replace Kirov as Leningrad party secretary.

The redistribution of functions and responsibilities within the Politburo (27 February 1937), probably decided during a pre-meeting between some Politburo members and Stalin, was significant. Andreev left his job as Railways Commissar and became a Central Committee secretary. Kaganovich took over railways and kept his position as Central Committee secretary, but gave up his duties on the party’s Central Control Commission and the Moscow party committee. Andreev joined the very powerful Orgburo (which prepared dossiers for the Politburo) and became its head. But preparation of the Orgburo’s agenda was to be done in collaboration with Ezhev, who now headed the Control Commission. Andreev was also put in charge of the Central Committee’s industrial department (where he replaced Ezhev) and assigned to supervise the Central Committee’s transport department and its current affairs department. For his part, Ezhev was given the important post of head of the department of ‘leading party organs’. All the other departments, particularly culture and propaganda, remained under Stalin’s personal supervision. Kaganovich retained oversight of the Moscow regional and city party committees, but he was requested to prioritize his work at the Railways Commissariat. He was a trusted trouble-shooter and this sector required a firm hand.

This reorganization gives an idea of Central Committee activity and, in particular, of the most important departments and posts. Our source, Oleg Khlevniuk, provides us with an interpretative key, demonstrating that underlying the redistribution of duties there was a deliberate policy on the part of Stalin.[1] He was seeking to disperse and dilute the power of his close associates. Kaganovich, previously considered second in command, lost this rank. Formally, he was replaced by Andreev, who, in some spheres, shared his responsibilities with Ezhev. Andreev had important Politburo responsibilities, but a department of lesser importance (industry), whereas Ezhev, who was not a Politburo member, ran key departments and for this reason participated in its meetings. Stalin had entrusted him with major responsibilities at Internal Affairs (the NKVD). In this capacity, he organized the trial of Zinoviev. Charged with supervising the NKVD for the party, he formulated the statutes for its espionage and counter-espionage department, the GUGB (General Department of State Security), and effectively controlled the NKVD for eighteen months, before officially becoming Commissar for Internal Affairs. His first job as head of the party Control Commission was to organize the campaign for checking membership cards – a kind of ‘prepurge’. He was then responsible for the purges for one and a half years.

Zhdanov was assigned to Leningrad, but was to spend ten days a month in Moscow. Pursuing his policy of dispersal, Stalin next decided that rather than three Central Committee secretaries (himself, Kaganovich and Zhdanov), there would henceforth be five. And the post of Stalin’s ‘deputy’ disappeared. He now saw Politburo members more rarely, according to a strict calendar, and he spent less time with Molotov and Kaganovich. It is not that they had been demoted, but in 1935–6 Kaganovich had to seek Stalin’s advice (i.e. approval) on everything. His letters to Stalin now contained obsequious formulations, whereas he had previously taken quite a few final decisions himself and written to Stalin without servility. Such fawning at the highest level is a good indication of the diminishing influence of Politburo members and Stalin’s growing personal power. More decisions were now taken by signing a circular containing the resolution to be approved, rather than by voting at meetings. The time for criticism and reservations, which had hitherto been regarded as normal on the part of high-ranking leaders, was at an end. Requests to retire, refusals to write some report, ultimata to defend the interests of some agency – these disappeared without a trace. Frequently, the sheet containing decisions for approval did not circulate. Many resolutions carry only Molotov’s stamp. Other decisions were taken by a few members who came to visit Stalin on vacation in Sochi.

Sometimes a simple telegram from Stalin would do. The famous letter announcing the nomination of Ezhev to head the NKVD and betokening the dismissal of Yagoda, who was four years late in organizing a great purge, was signed by Stalin and Zhdanov. Kaganovich received a copy on 25 September 1936. As for ‘poor’ Yagoda, who had not realized that he should have acted in 1932, he was of course executed. Stalin’s power was now so well established and accepted by the others that he could make them swallow anything. The accusations against Yagoda are a good example: he obviously would not have been able to launch a vast purge in 1932 without being explicitly instructed to do so by Stalin.

Mastery of the Politburo was achieved by the technique of fragmenting even this small body. According to Stalin’s whim, it functioned in fragments – meetings of seven, five, three or two. The only people summoned were those who had to handle some particular matter. Meetings often took the form of dinner at Stalin’s dacha for those he singled out as ‘friends’. This is attested by Mikoyan,[2] who explained that a quintet (Stalin, Molotov, Malenkov, Beria and himself) existed in the Politburo until 1941 dealing with foreign policy issues and ‘operational matters’. After the war, Zhdanov joined this group, as did Voznesensky later. Voroshilov, who had been added at the beginning of the war, was dropped in 1944.

This is what has been called the ‘narrow’ Politburo, excluding Kaganovich, Kalinin and Khrushchev, all of whom were burdened with heavy administrative responsibilities outside the Politburo. The ‘habit’ of convening a few reliable elements had become established with the struggle of the triumvirate (Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev) against Trotsky, and continued with a different cast during the struggle against Rykov, when the latter was still in charge of the Sovnarkom (Council of People’s Commissars). In the 1930s, Stalin sent Molotov a letter in which he asked him to consider an important problem and talk it over with ‘friends’. Not all Politburo members fell into this category and no one could count on remaining in it permanently. Before the war, members like Rudzutak, Kalinin, Kossior and Andreev were never invited to such ‘intimate’ caucuses, although they might have known that such meetings took place.

To summarize, the Politburo in Stalin’s hands was precisely a bureau whose personnel he nominated and used as he saw fit.

THE PARTY APPARATUS

As the party lost its political identity, its apparatus – the very citadel of the system – grew ever more complex. In order to ‘simplify’ things and ensure greater control, a super-apparatus – variously dubbed ‘special’, ‘political’, and finally ‘general’ – was constructed to serve Stalin personally, without the knowledge of the rest of the apparatus. Its staff constantly expanded, as did its status vis-à-vis other Central Committee departments. Stalin’s personal secretary – the ubiquitous and highly discreet Poskrebyshev – headed it and thereby acquired a promotion and salary increase. As for the Sovnarkom – a supposedly powerful institution with its departments, specialists and consultants – its authority was undermined by conspiratorial techniques at the summit. It was in fact sidestepped, since all decisions were taken elsewhere, by Stalin and Molotov. Their business was conducted via a completely secret channel of communication: Molotov submitted his proposals to Stalin and the latter corrected, approved or rejected them, sending his response, which had the force of an order, back to Molotov via the same channel. A very intimate affair! If we are aware of such details today, it is thanks to the research of Oleg Khlevniuk and his team of hardened researchers in the Soviet archives.

By way of an overview of Stalin’s complex, and expanding, system of power, we might single out the following features. We are dealing with a ‘security state’, headed by a figure who organized his own ‘cult’ and resorted to a laborious method, refined down to the last detail, of running and controlling the whole enterprise. The objective was not only to guarantee its smooth operation, but also to avoid his entourage and officials at any level accumulating too much authority and power. It was achieved by fragmenting the highest institutions of state, emptying them of substance. This way of ruling – just the opposite of what might have been expected in such circumstances – created gluts and bottlenecks, to which the centre responded with emergency measures.

In a form of ‘hands-on’ government, Stalin personally, the Politburo, the Orgburo and the Secretariat immersed themselves in local minutiae. All this amounted to nothing less than an attempt to ‘micromanage’ a continent from the centre of power in Moscow.

To appreciate how the leaders and their teams engaged in such micromanaging of social groups, institutions, people and material goods, we need only glance at the minutes of the two main agencies of the Central Committee – namely the Orgburo and the Secretariat. The agendas of these two bodies charged with preparing the materials for Politburo meetings are quite simply mind-boggling, as is the number of items and documents they handled. But the best illustration of what micromanagement meant in practice is to be found in numerous telegrams from Stalin (signed by him) to party or state agencies at the other end of the country, whether ordering someone to supply a building site with the nails it desperately needed, or build an internal railway line in a steelworks, or find some barbed wire – a product always in short supply in these years. Let us add that these countless messages always took the form of ultimata.

The Secretariat and Orgburo always proceeded in similar fashion, dealing with all manner of problems in great detail. Their work was impressive – especially their efforts to train or retrain workers, specialists and cadres in all sorts of professions, and to create courses, schools and academies, as well as compiling lists of students and teachers. It was a matter of equipping the state with the cadres it required and replacing layer after layer of specialists, who were so difficult to find.

To summarize: what we see here is the functioning of a highly centralized state, taking on a mass of tasks that are often simply not feasible. The system then suffers from a pathology of ‘hyper-centralization’, the cure for which is to delegate powers downwards, while retaining general policy orientation at the centre. But in the system we are concerned with, the supreme ruler mistook his own security for that of the country and perceived each failure as a fault to be punished. Such a boss had to seem omnipotent. Consequently, in a country desperately short of cadres, Stalin could declare that ‘no one is irreplaceable’ – a formula that harboured many demons, especially because it was false.

DOMINATING TALENTS AND UTILIZING THEM

The characteristics referred to above, including ‘hands-on’ management, equally apply to managing culture and, of course, the government’s relations with outstanding figures in the worlds of culture and science. On this score, Stalin’s dictatorship was innovative.

Once Stalin felt firmly in the saddle, a further feature of his psychology emerged: a strange fascination – a mixture of attraction and repulsion – for genius or great talent; an urge to dominate, use, humiliate and, ultimately, destroy it – rather like a child who asserts mastery over a toy by breaking it. Stalin’s dealings with great writers, scientists or military figures attests to this destructive bent. He spared some of them (quite unpredictably), but the very fact that he took an interest in someone was always dangerous, if not ominous, for its object.

This subject affords insight into another important facet of Stalin’s insatiable thirst for total mastery of his world. He turned to a device that would allow him to penetrate his subjects’ minds and souls, their emotional systems, by using the power of fiction in novels, plays and films. He understood (and envied) the power of a writer who could single-handedly achieve a stronger grip on the thoughts and emotions of millions of people than all the agitprop in the world. He saw art as a device that could be of direct service to him, on condition that creators were coached and their work revised personally, with Stalin acting as in some sense editor and adviser or discussing with authors the behaviour of their heroes. As the reader will doubtless realize, these ‘heroes’ had to obey, and there was no need to be a writer to secure such obedience.

Stalin was no scientist either. Yet he personally edited, for example, Lysenko’s lecture to the Academy of Science for publication. Stalin also had the last word on economic and linguistic questions and – it goes without saying – history. Since he was making history, why not personally edit a history textbook for schools? In short, Stalin’s labours assumed pathological proportions: he aimed at personal mastery of a complex totality that no one had ever mastered and imposed his terms on it. Did he take himself for a genius? What we know for sure is that great talents fascinated him. Was it envy that he could assuage with the knowledge that he could destroy them at will? Or the simple pleasure of proving that he could detect errors and offer advice? It is difficult to say, but the subject is relevant to our theme of political pathology.

STALIN’S ‘APOLOGY’ TO TUKHACHEVSKY

His behaviour towards the brilliant Marshal Tukhachevsky, thirty-seven at the time, provides our first example of Stalin’s sharply alternating attitudes towards talented figures.[3] We know that Stalin had a high opinion of himself as a military strategist. When, in 1929–30, Tukhachevsky embarked on a campaign to direct the leadership’s attention to new military technology and impending changes in the character of warfare, Stalin supported Voroshilov’s rejection of these ideas and wrote to him to say that Tukhachevsky was ‘floundering in anti-Marxism, unrealism, even red militarism’. At the same time, he had 3,000 former Tsarist officers cashiered and arrested. The NKVD extracted ‘testimony’ from one of them to the effect that Tukhachevsky, himself a former Tsarist officer, belonged to some right-wing organization and was helping to plot a coup.

Stalin lapped all this up. He retained very bitter memories of the campaign against Poland in 1920, during which accusations abounded, including from Tukhachevsky, that he was a mediocre military commander. But the hour of vengeance had not yet struck. Stalin wrote to Molotov and others to say that he had personally investigated the accusations against Tukhachevsky and established that the latter was ‘100 per cent clean’. In 1932, he even wrote a personal apology to Tukhachevsky, with a bowdlerized copy of the letter he had sent to Voroshilov in 1930 (the allusion to ‘red militarism’ was omitted). He accused himself of having been unjustifiably harsh – a rare event, to say the least. In fact, Stalin had now adopted Tukhachevsky’s standpoint on military technology, although in this domain, as in so many others, the targets fixed for 1932 were far from having been met. The apology did not mention the accusations fabricated by the NKVD against the marshal in 1930. It was manifestly insincere and, had Tukhachevsky understood Stalin, the duplicity would not have escaped him. Stalin’s gesture actually signified: I need you for the time being, but there is a sword hanging over your head…

Whether naive or just plain audacious, Tukhachevsky was the only participant not to conclude his speech to the Seventeenth Party Congress in 1934 with the obligatory ‘hail the leader’. The reckoning came in 1937, when Stalin destroyed his military high command. A special fate was reserved for Tukhachevsky, probably the best military mind of them all. ‘Information from a German source’ – a total fabrication – was produced, ‘proving’ that the flower of the army had betrayed the country. Atrociously beaten, Tukhachevsky was dragged before Stalin for a confrontation with his accusers. Naturally, it emerged from this that he was guilty. We are dealing here with a maniac who breaks a precious object to show that it can be broken. Preferring an incompetent but obsequious Voroshilov to Tukhachevsky and the rest, and destroying the military high command, were monumental blunders. This purge alone would warrant the death penalty…

There is no way of knowing whether Stalin was haunted by the memory of his victims. But the strategies employed during the Second World War had been brilliantly foreshadowed by Tukhachevsky, who virtually bombarded Stalin with memos and articles about the need to prepare for a war that would require massive technological resources and in which mobile armies, geared to breakthroughs and encirclements, would play an unprecedented role. All this required a new system of command and coordination. At the beginning of the war, the Germans employed such a strategy against Soviet troops to devastating effect. Of course, no one asked Stalin why he had killed the most brilliant generals. Who was the real traitor? With the likes of Tukhachevsky, Blucher and Yegorov, the tragedy of 22 June 1941 could have been avoided.

We can cite one occasion where Stalin received a moral slap in the face, though we do not know whether he registered it at the time. After the liquidation of the high command, Stalin and Voroshilov attended a meeting of air force commanders to discuss how to rescue the air force from the lamentable state it found itself in following the purges. The officers set out the position: everything was in a woeful state – planes, weaponry, repairs, fuel, provisions, finances, administration. Training was disastrous and the number of planes and pilots lost alarming. Stalin listened carefully, requested details, and posed concrete questions to demonstrate his competence and mastery of the subject. Voroshilov took a less active part, but he was the one who closed the meeting with an explosion of anger against the officers, whom he accused of failing to mention the ‘obvious fact’: the situation had been caused by the sabotage and treason of the former high command, which had been justly punished. The minutes of the meeting indicate that of the dozens of officers who commented on the situation, not one uttered the word ‘sabotage’. Such silence made it plain that their explanation was quite different: the dire state of the air force was due to the destruction of a group of highly capable senior officers. Voroshilov’s explosion may well have been provoked by his perception that the silence implied condemnation of his leadership and his fear of Stalin’s possible reaction on learning that his subordinates lacked the requisite vigilance against enemies of the USSR. We do not know what Stalin said to Voroshilov. At all events, doubtless preoccupied by the fact that the air force was far from battle-ready, he preserved his equanimity on this occasion.

Another example, which also concerns the air force, reveals Stalin’s other side. It figures in the memoirs of the writer Konstantin Simonov. He recounts a high-level conference that he attended at the beginning of the war, devoted to the excessively high number of accidents involving planes and the heavy losses in terms of pilots. A young air force general came forward with a simple answer: the poorly constructed planes were veritable ‘flying coffins’. Stalin was now commander-in-chief. Confronted with such a blunt accusation, his face convulsed with rage. He restrained himself from a public outburst, but murmured: ‘You would have done better to keep quiet, general!’ The brave young man disappeared for good the very same day.[4]

NOT SO QUIET FLOWS THE DON

Our last example involves the writer Mikhail Sholokhov, who after Stalin’s death became the spokesman for a nationalist and conservative current, earning him strong enmity. But the events recounted here go back to 1933, when the Cossack region of Kuban, so dear to Sholokhov, was stricken by famine, like many other regions of Russia and the Ukraine.

Sholokhov wrote to Stalin to condemn the tragedy of the Kuban peasants, forcibly deprived of their harvest on the orders of the grain procurement agencies at the very moment when famine was setting in. Sholokhov was being bold, but Stalin tolerated the dramatic description of the results of his own policies. Why? In fact, it was calculated. Stalin literally forced himself to read Sholokhov’s powerful denunciation of the mistreatment of peasants condemned to starvation, the arbitrariness of the local administration, and the provocative activities of the secret police. Once he had finished reading it, he ordered the region to be supplied with the quantity of grain that Sholokhov estimated was required to prevent a calamity. He even protected Sholokhov from the enraged local authorities (including the secret police), who did everything in their power to discredit this direct communication between the two men, which was causing them so much trouble. The game here was utterly devious and Stalin played every role in it: he convened phoney ‘confrontations’, pretended to have checked the facts himself, and rehabilitated Sholokhov’s friends in the local party apparatus. He did all this because he wanted something that Sholokhov possessed: prestige with the Russian public. The man was an authentic Russian Cossack – which Stalin was not – a powerful writer, and a good speaker – again, not Stalin’s strong points. He therefore pretended to accept the facts and criticisms set out by the writer, even though he was intensely irritated by the whole business. Finally, however, he gave the game away. In one short passage in a supposedly friendly letter to Sholokhov, he vented his anger. It was pure Stalin:

Setting to one side the question of who starved whom in 1933, what we read in this letter (and what Sholokhov read) is an expression of Stalin’s real policy – a politico-ideological summons to arms against sabotage by ‘respectable cereal-growers’. This war was launched by Stalin in similar terms at the January 1933 Central Committee meeting, when he called on the party and the country to mobilize against the hordes of shadowy enemies who were ‘perniciously undermining’ the regime’s foundations. In his letter to Sholokhov, he even implied that a still greater enemy – the peasantry in its entirety – was engaged in a war of starvation against the system.

It is likely that Sholokhov appreciated the precariousness of his position. Stalin was actually accusing him of defending ‘pernicious’ enemies for whom Stalin had a visceral hatred. Sholokhov’s prestigious correspondent was signalling that his life could be on the line at any moment. Stalin might have hated Sholokhov, but he needed his talents for his own ends at this point.

Stalin was unconcerned about the suffering of masses of people. Yet he knew that he was responsible for the calamity and that his image would suffer gravely if the peasant masses actually turned against him. There would be immediate repercussions in the army and the police, composed in the main of young people from the countryside who were never shy about protesting when they learnt that their parents were starving or suffering injustice at the hands of the authorities.

Constructing his own image was the name of Stalin’s game. Standing on a pedestal above the fray was a better guarantee of his security and power than a host of bodyguards. And in these times of peasant starvation and persecution, what better to serve his image than a public declaration by a defender of the peasantry like Sholokhov, to the effect that Stalin had personally ordered the dispatch of tons of grain to save lives? That was the heart of the matter and this was precisely what Sholokov supplied to the press, without even having to lie.

LIFE AT THE TOP (THE 1940s)

Another image Stalin liked to project – the thrifty farmer (khoziain) – was in part a genuine character trait. He was intolerant of personal weaknesses like drinking, extramarital relationships, or a taste for luxury, including among his closest associates. He made sure he was kept informed about such behaviour and ordered Politburo members to be spied on so that he could know about and, where necessary, exploit such weaknesses.

Aleksei Kosygin’s memoirs provide an insight into Stalin’s scheming in the late 1940s. A rising star at the end of the Second World War, Kosygin had to his wartime credit such achievements as the evacuation of industrial plant from territories about to fall to the Nazis and the organization of supplies to besieged Leningrad. Kosygin was unpopular with many at the top, envious as they were of his rapid rise. But he was also feared, because Stalin had taken him under his wing and assigned him the delicate task of making a list of the privileges enjoyed by Politburo members. As Kosygin subsequently reported to his son-in-law Gvishiani, Stalin had told him during a Politburo meeting that he possessed a list detailing everything that the families of Molotov, Mikoyan, Kaganovich and others were spending on themselves, their guards and servants, and was outraged: ‘It’s simply revolting.’ At the time, while Politburo members earned a comparatively modest salary, they enjoyed unlimited access to consumer goods – hence their anger when Stalin instructed Kosygin to put the house in order. Obviously, they dared not blame Stalin himself and some of them, like Mikoyan, understood that this was a way of keeping them on their toes. But perhaps it was also a pretext for getting rid of some of them when needed.

In fact, Stalin was forever plotting such things. Kosygin also told Gvishiani that one of the accusations levelled against Voznesensky, head of Gosplan and Deputy Prime Minister until he was purged in 1950, was that he possessed one or more weapons. Kosygin and Gvishiani immediately searched their own homes and threw all the weapons into a lake. They also looked for listening devices and did find them in Kosygin’s house (though they might have been installed to spy on Marshal Zhukov, who lived there before Kosygin). No wonder, then, that every morning in these years (1948–50), Kosygin – a candidate member of the Politburo – said farewell to his wife and reminded her what to do if he did not return home in the evening. They soon concluded, however, that he would not be harmed – Stalin felt some kind of sympathy towards him.[5]

He was lucky. But all the leaders, unless naive or too sure of themselves, very soon learnt from their own experience or that of their colleagues. After the assassination of Kirov in 1934, a sea-change occurred in their status vis-à-vis Stalin and they were immediately aware of it. It can be observed in the correspondence between Stalin and Kaganovich, then his number two. Hitherto self-assured and very direct, Kaganovich completely changed his tone, declaring himself immensely ‘grateful’ to fate for having vouchsafed him such a friend, leader and father: ‘What would we have done without him?’, and so on. It is obvious that at some stage Kaganovich had a ‘revelation’. In particular, he realized that Stalin was informed of anything he might write to others. That such senior leaders should find themselves in such a situation is something unique in the annals of history. Nothing comparable occurred in Hitler’s entourage after the Night of the Long Knives in 1934 (the SA were potentially political rivals). What we observe here is a highly elaborate despotic regime, launched in top gear, with an unchecked master of the art at its head.

In constructing his image, Stalin resorted to various methods. He personally selected the words to be employed in singing his praises in films, speeches and biographies. He ensured that his favourite superlatives were used, but censored others in order to demonstrate his modesty. He chose his decorations and titles. The rituals of congresses and other public occasions were perfected in minute detail. Finally, history was rewritten so that everything revolved around his person.

Stalin conceived himself as an autocrat and was determined not to share his place and image with anyone else, past or present. In his eyes, the other leaders were not in the same league. They did not really count: it was simply necessary to ensure their servility. From 1934 onwards, he turned them into something resembling temporarily reprieved inmates on death row. His spies supplied him with what he would need against them when the time came. In order to test and ensure their unfailing loyalty, he persecuted members of their families: Kaganovich’s three brothers were killed and Molotov’s wife arrested.

On various occasions, Stalin explained to gatherings at his dacha that what ‘the people’ wanted was a Tsar, a generalissimo. Everything in fact suggests that this is what he himself wanted and needed. Moreover, the spectacle of his oath to Lenin in 1924 had created a precedent for his own cult. Everything becomes clearer when we examine Stalin’s relationship to his own revolutionary past. It is easy to demonstrate that he erased it and worked hard to create not only a different system, but also an entirely new pantheon and past. Stalin faced what might be called a historical alibi problem and needed to acquire legitimacy. Unlike Hitler, for example, he expounded his true strategy and programme only in snippets, as in his pronouncement on cadres in 1925. But we also know the grudges he harboured towards other leaders of the Bolshevik party, who had not given him the recognition he considered his due. In fact, the historical leadership, personified by Lenin, had rejected him. In the party’s eyes, he did not belong to the category of founding fathers and did not deserve to belong to it. This had to be obliterated to justify the new self-image he was hard at work imposing on the country. And this he accomplished with considerable success.

The need to furnish himself with a new historical alibi was doubtless among the reasons that impelled Stalin to launch the purges of party cadres he had long been contemplating in 1937. He needed to erase a whole historical period and rid himself of those who had witnessed it and who knew who had done what in those heroic years. But this carefully nurtured, calculated revenge was not always cold-bloodedly conducted. At various stages, it unfolded in a state of extreme tension.

BUKHARIN’S CURSE[1]

The liquidation of a figure like Bukharin – politically weak, but intellectually greatly superior to Stalin, and guilty of having been (despite his young age) a ‘founding father’, ‘the party’s favourite’ – sheds light on Stalin’s approach and his state of mind. It unfolded in accordance with a precise script, beginning with a protracted phase of mental torture, proceeding to public degradation, and terminating in a show trial and execution.

The initial manoeuvring began in 1936. Anguished but defiant, Bukharin’s reaction illuminates one aspect of the drama. At first, he thought he still had friends at the top and wrote a desperate letter to Voroshilov, asking for his help and support. He asserted his innocence, concluding: ‘I embrace you because I am guilty of nothing.’ Voroshilov was not the right man to turn to. He immediately showed the letter to Molotov, who instructed him to return it to Bukharin with a note saying: ‘You would do better to confess your vile deeds against the party.’ If Bukharin did not comply, Voroshilov would consider him ‘a scoundrel’. Voroshilov did as he was told.

Desperate, and conscious that he was the victim of a deadly plot, Bukharin then wrote to Stalin on 15 December 1936. Using his Georgian nickname, as in the good old days, Bukharin addressed him as ‘Dear Koba’. He said that he had just read an article in Pravda against the ‘Right’ (i.e. against him) which ‘knocked me off my feet’. The letter ended: ‘I’m perishing because of scoundrels, human scum, loathsome villains. Yours, Bukharin.’

Supposedly directed against anonymous scoundrels, this curse-like tirade fitted Stalin perfectly. It is unlikely that Bukharin, however distressed, did not know who was pulling the strings. Stalin certainly understood that the expression ‘loathsome villain’ was directed at him personally. His vengeful response to Bukharin’s appeals for help and indirect accusations came during a carefully planned ‘spectacle’ – the Central Committee meetings of February—March 1937. The way Stalin conducted these puts one in mind of a half-crazed actor, bent on driving a sane audience (the Central Committee members) into a state of collective insanity and forcing them to share his own fantasies. What he had to say was incoherent. But the aim of the meeting was not only to destroy ‘his’ enemy. In addition, it had a hidden agenda: to test Central Committee members through a barely concealed stratagem. Three versions of the resolution on Bukharin’s ‘guilt’ were to be put to the vote. The first – ‘arrest and consignment of the matter to the NKVD’ – was clearly Stalin’s preference (it betokened a death sentence, possibly preceded by torture); the second involved not proceeding to an arrest, but requiring the NKVD to pursue its investigation; while the third envisaged releasing Bukharin. This was a trap for Central Committee members, as most of them probably appreciated. No one dared declare for the third option, although several did choose the second – and paid with their lives for it.

This is just one small illustration of the incredible nightmare of the purges in 1937–8. ‘Human scum’ is the appropriate term to describe those responsible for this orgy of arrests, show trials, and sentencing without trial, conducted on an unprecedented scale. And there are good grounds for thinking that the events of these atrocious years had been being carefully prepared for a long time, possibly since 1933. As Khlevniuk has indicated,[2] the supposed ‘re-examination of reality’ on the agenda of the Central Committee in February-March 1937 is strongly reminiscent of a point addressed during the Central Committee session in January 1933. Then numerous speakers had said things they virtually repeated in 1937, in the hope of proving their lucidity and vigilance. It seems likely that Stalin was ready in 1933 to declare war on society and, one might add, the party, with the support of his acolytes and repressive apparatuses. But there were probably reasons preventing him (we have suggested some); and he opted for the ‘interlude’ despite his resentment at the ‘termite-like’ methods of his enemies – especially the ‘respectable cereal-growers’ of whom he had spoken to Sholokhov.

PREPARING THE VALIANT CHEKISTS

When it came to preparing the launch of the terror, certain measures were required apart from administrative spring-cleaning like checking the rolls of party members and validating membership cards. Above all, it was necessary to prepare the secret police, its leadership and personnel, for the gruesome task ahead. Ideological and moral inducements were applied along with material incentives. While propaganda extolled their valour, the new Interior Minister Yezhov increased the wages of NKVD functionaries at every level. An NKVD head at republican level received 1,200 roubles a month (as did other higher ranks), while an average worker’s wage was 250 roubles. But the NKVD’s top brass now received up to 3,500 roubles a month. Having previously had access to collective dachas and sanatoria, where they mixed with other party activists, they were now accorded individual dachas and significant bonuses.[3]

The infamous NKVD order no. 00447 of July 1937, approved by the Politburo on 31 July, contained the order to act and an action plan. It singled out two categories of victims and prescribed the punishment to be meted out to them: 75,000 people were to be shot and 225,000 sent to camps. There are different drafts of this order and the figures vary somewhat. But the documents in our possession demonstrate that in the event the ‘norms’ were fulfilled at least twice over. A budget of 85 million roubles was allocated for the operation. The pampering of the NKVD reached an even higher pitch when, in a speech, Stalin bestowed upon his security apparatus the lofty status of ‘armed detachment of our party’.[4] ‘The cult of the NKVD,’ writes Khlevniuk, ‘the special extralegal status of the secret police, attained its apogee.’ Stalin used the heads of the NKVD and rewarded them for their services, while controlling them with an iron hand. He distributed material rewards and severe punishments with equal arbitrariness. Several authors have seen an analogy here with the way that Ivan the Terrible used the oprichnina (his militia) in his struggle against the boyars.

This dual attitude is Stalin all over. Chekists – the historical term of honour that is still used today – were now separated from other party members, including socially, since they had their own dachas, clubs and other leisure facilities. In December 1937, huge ceremonies were held throughout the country to celebrate the glorious tradition of the Cheka-GPU-NKVD. The Kremlin called on regional party committees to organize public trials of ‘enemies of the people’ in agriculture and the NKVD was instructed to ‘unmask’ – in fact, supply – them. Likewise, on the third anniversary of Kirov’s assassination (29 November 1937), Stalin telegraphed local party authorities and ordered them to ‘mobilize party members mercilessly to eradicate Trotskyite–Bukharinite agents’. Khlevniuk concludes that the whole apparatus, as well as the wider society, was in the grip of a truly psychotic hunt for enemies, punctuated by the descent of the secret police, usually in the early hours, to knock at the door, seize their victims, and transport them in sinister black vans to meet their fate.

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT IN THE NKVD (1935–50)

As we have already indicated, the NKVD’s symbolic incorporation into the party – in other words, its attachment to Stalin personally – elevated it above all other institutions. The party now possessed its own iron guard, its crusaders, on whom Stalin lavished favours and honours. The Stalinist party – especially its own apparatus – itself became a police agency, with the qualification that the secret police deferred exclusively to Stalin and no one else in the party. It was therefore above the party and a powerful weapon with which to bludgeon it. Here an impertinent question is in order: if the chekists were a valiant detachment in the service of morality and ideology, why were its leaders paid ten times more than a worker? The real chekists of the Civil War, who risked their lives, were poorly paid. Was it really necessary to pay those charged with representing the country’s ideological vanguard in cash, material goods and privileges? Lenin would have turned in his grave – had his embalming not prevented him…

The irony of history extends still further. Praised to the skies, the NKVD was a bureaucracy with its own routines. An internal inspectorate was assiduous in watching over its smooth functioning. Its reports reveal an institution characterized by innumerable irregularities, professional ineptitude, shortcomings and thievery; and we find long lists of criminal acts that had been investigated and reported to higher bodies, with demands for severe sanctions.

A few examples may shed light. In a memo to the head of the NKVD’s cadres department, comrade Veinshtok, who held the rank of major of state security, inventoried the misdemeanours and crimes committed by NKVD agents in 1935. The data supplied by agencies at all levels (from republics to regions) for the first ten months of the year indicated a total of 11,436 offences and crimes. The memo also contained a list of the measures taken by way of sanctions. According to Veinshtok, something was wrong with the administrative policies of regional and local NKVD agencies and the problem should be discussed. The total number of criminal cases was 5,639, of which 3,232 were accounted for by urban sections. But what most worried the major was the fact that 2,005 of those had been committed by section heads themselves.

A breakdown of the punishments by rank indicates that all categories in every branch were committing offences and crimes – whether in the military or transport units – and at every administrative level (heads, their deputies, and junior staff). Thus, of the 3,311 leading personnel at the level of district and town sections, 62 per cent (2,056) received penalties. As Veinshtok commented, it had to be admitted that this was a very high percentage indeed. Sixty per cent of the sanctions against regional agents were for negligence, poor work, drunkenness, debauchery, and other acts bringing the NKVD into discredit. Of these, particular attention should be paid to the high percentage of penalties imposed for disobeying orders and instructions (13 per cent), for breaches of discipline (8.5 per cent), or for infringement of procedural norms (5 per cent). The list also contains cases of embezzlement and misappropriation, concealment of social origins (67 cases), ‘anti-party and anti-Soviet’ attitudes (17), suicides and rapes (78 in total), lack of the vigilance expected of a chekist and party member (76), as well as false statements.

Most of the penalties fell on younger agents, mainly from auxiliary services like signals. But the number of sanctions against the hard core of NKVD personnel with twelve or more years of service was also deemed too high (1,171).[5]

A further report from the cadres department for the period 1 October 1936–1 January 1938 provides information on ‘departures’ from the GUGB (an independent agency within the NKVD). Among the reasons for these ‘departures’, we find 1,220 arrests, 1,268 dismissals and 1,345 transfers to the reserves. To these must be added 1,361 cases of punishment for membership of counter-revolutionary groups, or contact with counter-revolutionaries (Trotskyists), right-wing nationalists, traitors or spies; 267 for ‘workplace disruption’; and 593 for ‘moral turpitude’. Finally, we have 547 individuals who were ‘socially alien’, or in contact with such people, or who had served in the past with the Whites. Among the other various causes for departures from the GUGB were illness (544), death (138), or transfer to other agencies (1,258).

The reports indicate that things did not change until after Stalin’s death. The inspection agencies carried on doing their work and a separate branch, with responsibility for financial controls, also had a lot to say about the high frequency of theft and embezzlement, counterfeit receipts, and false accounting. It paid particular attention to what was going on in warehouses and storage facilities.[6] In addition, there are annual accounting reports for use by the authorities (and by today’s researchers), for the Stalinist period at least. In short, in terms of professionalism, respect for the law, and honesty, the security services were no better than the rest. Efforts were made to improve the quality of the personnel by bringing in thousands of cadres from the NKVD’s own schools. But it took a long time for positive results to emerge.

Such documents on the party’s own security force, poised to save the country from the enemy within, highlight a further dimension of this dark episode: the security services were packed with morally and professionally dubious elements. Commanders were pampered, but were nevertheless demoralized and disoriented by the very character of the task assigned them. They did not have to prove anything, they were simply required to fulfil quotas and, as throughout the USSR’s planned system, to surpass them to obtain bonuses, promotions and wage increases. But the sword they suspended over the head of the country also hung over their own heads – and not for drunkenness or debauchery. All the security services, including foreign intelligence, constantly lived on the brink of a catastrophe lurking within their own regime – and which was much more dangerous than spying or catching spies, combating smugglers or bandits, or facing the other risks associated with their work.

‘MAN HUNT’

Many details about the mass arrests and executions first became available from a committee headed by the party secretary, Pospelov, which was set up by Khrushchev in 1955 prior to his ‘secret speech’ of 1956. In fact, the policy of rehabilitation had already begun in 1954. It is worth starting with this committee’s disclosures, if only in order to appreciate how little was known about these horrendous events not only by the wider public, but even by the political elite itself.[7]

The Pospelov committee received documents from the archives of the secret police, as well as depositions from many interrogators-executioners who recounted how they had obtained confessions from their victims. The Prosecutor’s Office also supplied the committee with a wealth of material. Stalin’s personal role was clearly documented. Other documents showed that the ‘troikas’ (composed of the local party secretary, the head of the secret police, and the local prosecutor), which were responsible for the terror at the local level, kept pressing Moscow to increase the ‘execution quotas’, knowing full well that it was disposed to do so.

When Pospelov presented his committee’s findings to the Party Presidium, a ‘terrifying picture emerged that shocked all those present’. We may surmise that this reaction was not feigned. Few people could fully have imagined the mechanics and scope of what were basically secret operations. The statistics supplied principally concerned party leaders accused of treason, as well as the broad category of people arrested for ‘anti-Soviet activity’, who were mainly party and state cadres. On the other hand, Pospelov said nothing of the enormous category of ‘socially alien elements’. For the fateful years of 1937–8, the report gave the figure of 1,548,366 persons arrested for anti-Soviet activity, of whom 681,692 were shot. Leading personnel in the state and party had been decimated at all levels. Those who replaced them had succumbed in their turn, as had their replacements, and so on. The majority of delegates to the 1934 Seventeenth Congress (the ‘Congress of the Victors’) – 1,108 of them – had been arrested and 848 shot.

The report also cited NKVD orders instructing agents how to conduct the repression and provided an idea of its methods: the outright confection of all manner of anti-Soviet organizations and centres; gross violations of the law by investigators; phoney plots invented by NKVD agents themselves; a total failure by the Prosecutor’s Office to exercise due oversight over the NKVD; judicial arbitrariness on the part of the Military Collegium of the USSR’s armed forces, which condoned ‘extra-judicial procedures’.

According to the report, the source of the whole venture lay in the Executive Central Committee’s authorization in December 1934, following Kirov’s assassination, of action outside the law. Stalin and Zhdanov’s telegram to Kaganovich and Molotov preparing the ground for the February–March 1937 Central Committee plenum was cited as the direct trigger for mass repression. Stalin’s personal responsibility for the widespread recourse to torture of the accused was stated in numerous testimonies, including those of officers from the Internal Affairs ministry (MVD) who were themselves victims of the repression, and by three documents appended to the report: a telegram from Stalin dated 10 January 1939 reaffirming the validity of ‘physical methods’; a memo giving his approval for the execution of 138 high-ranking officials; and the letter he received from P. I. Eikhe (Politburo member) prior to his execution. Between 1937 and 1939, Stalin and Molotov personally signed around 400 lists of people to be executed (a total of 44,000 names).

The aim of Pospelov’s report was not simply to take stock of the past. Its content was also a burning issue in debates about policy and strategy, which we shall study in Part Two. The overall toll of the terror was much heavier, since the verdict of the 1950s mostly dealt with victims from the party’s ranks.

The documents we are now going to focus on should make the scope and character of the camps and forced labour, and their organic connection with the Stalinist system, more tangible. Here there was no ‘retreat’. We shall try to outline what might be called the NKVD’s ‘economic empire’, briefly summarizing its main features and trends.

Students of the justice and prison systems during the 1920s (the NEP period) know that camps were intended to be a more humane form of detention than the ‘cages’ in what were called prisons: labour in conditions approximating to a normal workplace was considered the best means of re-educating and rehabilitating people. At the time, conditions in the camps were far from rigorous, with the exception of those that held political prisoners – notably on the Solovki Islands on the White Sea, which was the sole camp under the jurisdiction of the GPU. Serious criminals were, of course, closely guarded, but some of those detained worked in the camp during the day and returned home for the night. Courts sought to limit prison sentences, opting instead for penalties of ‘obligatory labour’ (prinud-roboty) – sometimes mistranslated in the West as ‘forced labour’. The expression in fact meant keeping the same job, but paying a fine deducted at source for the term fixed by the sentence. The penal system was being experimented with; and the literature and debates on crime and punishment were public and innovative.

However, the liberalism of the NEP period in penal policy suffered from an objective limit: too little meaningful work for the re-education of prisoners. The country had a high unemployment rate and the unemployed had to have priority in access to work.

All this came to end in the 1930s, even if liberal notions lingered on for some time. Judges and criminologists fought a losing battle against the camps becoming an instrument of punishment through labour (in fact, forced labour), thereby losing their original purpose of re-education through labour. The new trend was a ‘side effect’ of hyper-industrialization. The labour of prisoners was easy to mobilize, cheap to exploit, subject to firm discipline – and not too difficult to replenish. The erstwhile liberals – still present in the Justice and Labour Commissariats (the latter was soon wound up) – fought in the government and party to prevent the prison system from relapsing into penal servitude. But the centre was set on its course – even if it resembled a quagmire in these years. The respite of sorts occasionally offered by the government involved no change in policy, but simply its consolidation and coordination.

The NKVD and its secret police inevitably became interested in playing a key role in the country’s industrialization and they spearheaded the transformation of the prison system into an enormous industrial sector under their administrative control. Obviously, convicts were to furnish the manpower, so they had to be supplied in the maximum numbers possible. Mere policing was not a source of glamour for the NKVD. But as soon as industrialization became the national ethos, the NKVD could hope to see its prestige enhanced by assuming an important role in economic development thanks to the Gulag. As for the Politburo, if it did not initiate this new line, it was certainly very interested in it. The Justice Commissariat lost its responsibility for penal institutions, which were gradually turned over to the NKVD. The process was completed in 1934.

Here we must go into some detail about a complex administrative situation. Officially, it was the NKVD that absorbed the secret police proper, the OGPU. But in these years, ‘security’ was never what it seemed. In fact, it was the GPU component – renamed the GUGB[1] that took over the whole NKVD from the inside, with its head assuming control of the Commissariat of Internal Affairs. This complication serves to illustrate the confusing character of Soviet administrative practices.

To oversee the prison system – camps, colonies, prisons – a new administrative agency was created, called Gulag (Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei), or General Camp Directorate. It also ran prisons and colonies for petty criminals and juvenile delinquents. A separate agency within it was responsible for people sentenced to terms of exile and isolation in resettlement colonies – kulaks, for example. This is just the start of the story. Around and in conjunction with the Gulag, the NKVD created a sizeable network of industrial administrative agencies for the construction of roads, railways and hydro-electric dams, mining and metallurgical enterprises, forestry, and the development of the Far East region (the Dal’stroi). Research and engineering projects in weapons production, including atomic weapons, were set up in special prison camps – the so-called sharashki – containing top specialists, among them Tupolev (planes) and Korolev (rockets).

The first NKVD showpiece was the construction of the White Sea Canal, launched with much fanfare in 1931–2 as the feat of dedicated prisoners and their chaperons, the secret police. These odes to Soviet labour and the working masses concealed a quite different reality: the work was done by unpaid workers stripped of all rights – in short, by slave labour.

Around the same time, confidential reports informed leaders about the headlong growth of the still rather young Gulag and the significance of its major construction projects. In 1935 the total number of prisoners listed on the supply rolls reached almost a million. Among the major projects were the construction of railways (in the Trans–Baikal region, along the Ussuri River, on the Baikal-Amur line); a series of canals, one of which connected Moscow and Volga; and numerous factories, sovkhozy and sawmills. Over time, the reports became more elaborate. In 1936, a map of the Gulag was drawn up. It identified sixteen sites with the term lager’ attached to their names (Dmitrovskii lager’, Ukhto-Pecherskii lager’, Baikalo-Amurskii lager’, etc.). Those were not actual prison units, but central administrative hubs with prison establishments – camps and colonies – mushrooming around them. Each such centre had a representative of the Prosecutor’s Office attached to it, sometimes assisted by a few aides. But despite their substantial salaries, their presence made no difference to what went on in the camps.

What did count was the system’s ever more numerous officials –administrative and operational – at central and local levels. Like every other bureaucracy, this one displayed a strong appetite for growth. At the beginning of 1940 the Gulag’s administrative structure was inspected by a brigade of officials from the Finance Commissariat, who concluded that the apparatus was excessively bulky.[2] The Gulag was therefore ordered to create a commission to review its structure and personnel, with the help of the inspectors from Finance. It emerged from this review that the Gulag’s central administration contained 33 departments employing 1,697 staff, to which should be added ancillary units. In total, the Gulag had 44 directorates and departments, 137 sections, and 83 offices – some 264 structural units that were oversized and duplicated each other’s work. The brigade proposed cuts, mergers and other organizational changes that would make it possible to abolish 511 posts or 30 per cent of the total. The supply agencies in Moscow and Leningrad were to effect similar reductions, cutting 110 posts. The brigade wished to reduce the current number of administrative units from 264 to just 143, and the workforce from 1,696 to 1,186. They also wanted the local structures, with their 4,000 administrators and operatives, inspected, simplified and slimmed down. The report’s charts and lists indicate an enormously complex system. We do not know what, if anything, changed in the light of its proposals.

There is no doubt that had it not been for the outbreak of war, the Gulag’s apparatus would have carried on growing. The number of prison camps contained in the major regional units, invariably referred to by a geographical term, stood at 528 at the beginning of 1941, justifying further expansion of the Moscow-based directorates and their officials and personnel in the field. Like any other administration, they found all kinds of excuses for creating new offices – supplies, finances, coordination – with the connivance of those who benefited from the labour camps. And there was a noticeable tendency to create new agencies in Moscow or some other desirable large city, ‘where they would have a good time without bothering at all about the camps’ – the words of a State Control commission rather bewildered by what it discovered. It added that all these functionaries had nothing to do in Moscow, where there were already plenty of them.

However gruesome its function, any administration can engage in business as usual. This administration wanted to be like any other. The fact is, however, that it found itself heading a gigantic industrial empire.

THE MVD AS INDUSTRIAL AGENCY

In 1940, the Finance Commissariat received reports and memos on each of its industrial and other branches of economic activity from the NKVD (which, like all the other commissariats, subsequently took the title of ministry and became the MVD, or Ministry for Internal Affairs). In its case, this was probably the first occasion. Here the complex administrative system we have just referred to becomes even more intricate. Forty-two agencies filed reports, but only two units pertained to the Gulag’s camps and colonies. All the rest were industrial directorates (paper, timber, fuel, agriculture, etc.). The reports were composed in the habitual idiom of an industry ministry planning its finances, costs, budgets, labour force and, of course, output.[3]

This activity shrank during the war on account of a reduction in the number of prisoners – zeks – many of whom were mobilized, frequently in ‘punishment battalions’ assigned the most dangerous offensives. Those who survived joined the ranks of ordinary units and were ‘rehabilitated’. Many were hardened criminals, and it is easy to imagine how they behaved towards civilians in territories liberated from the Germans and, a fortiori, in areas conquered from them. Not a few of them were condemned to death or returned to the camps.

As a direct producer or subcontractor, the Gulag began to boom again after the war (see Appendix 1). Here I shall simply summarize the NKVD’s operation as an ‘industrial agency’, basing myself on the reliable source of Marta Kraven and Oleg Khlevniuk.

Once the decision was taken to use the labour of camp inmates for economic tasks, the NKVD (renamed the MVD) became a key component of Stalinism. In 1952 its investments, which amounted to 12.18 billion roubles (9 per cent of gross domestic product), surpassed those of the petrol and coal ministries combined. Gross output of MVD industry was estimated at 17.18 billion roubles in February 1953 – only 2.3 per cent of the country’s total production. But it was the leading producer of cobalt and pewter and was responsible for a third of nickel production and a significant percentage of gold, wood and sawn timber (12–15 per cent). The plan for the early 1950s enhanced its weight and one of Stalin’s last orders related to cobalt output.[4]

Scrutiny of the meticulous and regular reports on production, finance and manpower leaves no room for doubt as to the prosperity of this booming economic complex. However, a few sentences complaining about ministries not paying up – making it impossible to feed inmates properly – set one thinking. In fact, this huge, peculiarly archaic industrial-police conglomerate was, despite some advanced branches, in deep crisis. The working and living – dying – conditions of zeks could not sustain genuine industrial expansion. Sooner or later, one way or another, the system would have to be abandoned. We can get a realistic picture of the camps’ problems from a report by Beria himself to Molotov in 1940.[5]

According to this report, the camp labour force, employed in constructing enormous factories, railways, port facilities and ‘special sites’ (for defence needs), or logging and producing timber for export, was not used to the full because the inmates were fed too little and clothed too badly to face the difficult climatic conditions. As of 1 April 1940, 123,000 exhausted inmates were unable to work for want of sufficient food and some tens of thousands of others were idle for lack of adequate clothing. These conditions were creating tension in the camps and entailed losses. The reason was that party and government directives about improving food and clothing supplies were not heeded by the Trade Commissariat. Worse still, every quarter, food and clothing supplies were actually dwindling. Eighty-five per cent of the stipulated flour and cereals were supplied, but as for the rest only half materialized, and barely a third in the case of clothing. Hence the growing number of sick and idle inmates.

The norms themselves require examination. Daily expenditure per zek was estimated at 4.86 roubles, whereas the plan projected 5.38 roubles.[6] Evidently, then, targets were not being met. But had they been, what would they have amounted to? We can only make some indirect estimates here. The cost of an armed guard was 34 roubles a day – six times more than an inmate. Since we do not know the precise date of this statistic, we can use a reference-point closer to 1940: a German general who was a prisoner of war in a Soviet camp cost 11.74 roubles a day in 1948 and he did not have to work.

Inadequate food and clothing, hard, unpaid labour, hunger and illness – these rendered many zeks unfit for work. Some – the more daring and desperate among them – refused to do so. To this must be added high internal crime and mortality rates, not to mention the phenomenon of dokhodiagi – prisoners at the end of the road who were now nothing but human wrecks. Against this backdrop, the Gulag’s administration emerges as an utterly obscene complex. It was a rather opulent empire – a state within a state – with its complicated economic interests, its secret police, its intelligence and counter-intelligence agencies, its educational and cultural activities. The MVD was also in charge of the regular police, border guards, recording demographic data and population transfers, and aspects of local government. In short, it was a classic product of the Soviet administration’s propensity for size and centralization. Viewed from above, the simplest way of running this highly centralized system was to have administrative pyramids supervising a plethora of agencies under the auspices of a single head, flanked by four or five deputies. The idea would have made some sense if the agencies had been less inflated, or if they had possessed simpler organizational structures. As it was, the reliance on ‘pyramids’ was a very costly illusion, threatening the power hub itself with paralysis.

In the given climate, it was well-nigh impossible to interfere with a monster like the MVD. Yet at the same time, problems were piling up in the Gulag’s empire – notably in its administration. Theft, embezzlement, false reporting, criminal treatment of zeks (beatings, even killings) – all these were facilitated by the remoteness of the camps and the secrecy surrounding them. The plentiful supply of cheap labour rendered the MVD careless about its efficient employment. The general tendency to expand bureaucracy and the surplus of cadres bred irresponsibility. The MVD wished to be the spearhead of the ‘building of communism’ vaunted by Stalin’s propaganda, which consisted in covering the country with massive construction sites that were useless and expensive in equal measure. But other central government agencies, such as the Finance Ministry, Gosplan, the Prosecutor General, or inspectorates (e.g. the Mining Inspectorate), were not blind. They kept appealing to the government to eliminate the secrecy that shrouded so much irresponsibility and inefficiency, and so many serious violations of the law. Maybe they were aware of the report by Kruglov, Internal Affairs Minister, stating that the cost of a zek, however low, was still superior to the value of what he produced. According to the minister, the only way to achieve a balanced budget was to extend the working day and increase labour norms. Such a conclusion is comment enough on Kruglov’s expertise.

The party and state leadership, the Prosecutor General, the presidency of the Supreme Soviet, and many other leading figures were by now well aware of how things stood. They, like numerous party and state institutions, received a flood of letters from zeks containing complaints, appeals, accusations, political criticisms and denunciations. And to cap it all, honest party members in post in the camps or neighbouring regions, and even some camp administrators conscious of their responsibilities, secretly forwarded desperate letters and reports about the terrible living conditions endured by inmates, their exhaustion, and the mortality rate. Thus the problem was not a lack of information: the government was informed of the situation down to the smallest details. At the top, however, the prevailing philosophy was ‘So what?’ Or worse still, the situation was contemptuously shrugged off: they’re feigning it all, malingering…

As in other spheres, however, we observe a certain unrest heralding changes. Even at the height of Stalinism, it began spontaneously and surreptitiously in government agencies. Everyone knew that the low labour productivity of zeks was a major problem, discussed by the government. An extended, interesting analysis by a zek had reached the Central Committee. It demonstrated that prison labour was wasted and that the administration displayed not the least concern for productivity. Its author – a certain Zhdanov – proposed that camps be retained only for dangerous criminals; all other convicts should serve their sentences in their own workplaces as obligatory but free labour. Kruglov attempted to refute these arguments (and those of other letters cited in their support), but soon most heads of MVD production branches requested authorization to pay prisoners a partial wage in order to improve their productivity. In some camps, prisoners even began to receive a full wage. And on 13 March 1950 the government decided that a form of payment should be universally introduced.

While the MVD continued to trumpet its achievements as if nothing had happened, many economic officials realized that the camps were incapable of employing zek labour efficiently and that relying on such manpower was becoming a drain on resources. MVD ‘planning’ had an eerie quality to it: even though it paid the zeks next to nothing, it was in deficit. Given this anomaly, the economic system, in order to progress, had to acknowledge the superiority of civilian industry employing wage-labour. The police component of the industrial system was not only inefficient, it was moribund. Like its begetter, it was on course for self-destruction and threatened to take the whole edifice with it. This was evident to many administrators, economists and politicians, some of whom understood that lancing this boil was a precondition for reviving the system.

The search for ways to ‘resuscitate’ the forced-labour sector, by motivating its manpower, began even before Khrushchev’s arrival in power. Different camp administrators had tried out modest changes with the utmost discretion, well before the gravity of the problem and the need to intervene had been acknowledged at the top by the Finance and Justice ministries, Gosplan, and their opposite numbers in the party apparatus. Some offered zeks a reduction in their prison terms – for example, one day in exchange for three days’ productive labour. This practice had existed before the war, but was abolished in 1939. By 1948 it was being restored in many branches. And on 19 January of that year, the deputy head of Gosplan, Kosiachenko, deemed it worthy of consideration in a letter to Molotov.[7]

Whether as a consequence of this or not, a more radical reform was set in train. Prison terms were cancelled altogether and detainees were employed in their jobs as free wage-earners. In April 1952 the Council of Ministers studied these measures and issued a decree liberating some prisoners before the end of their sentences, on condition that they carried on working for MVD ventures as wage-earners. The MVD itself began to prefer to deal with relatively free manpower, thereby acknowledging the inefficiency of forced labour. Various partial changes were implemented in different sites with high numbers of zeks, and it became apparent that the next step was the total abolition of forced labour.

THE NEW ‘DESIGNS’ FOR DAL’STROI (NOVEMBER 1948)

One of the pilots for this was the enormous Dal’stroi MVD complex in the Far Eastern province, where 120,000 zeks worked. A wage, as well as other measures intended to stimulate productivity, had been introduced. Under pressure from the Ministry of Non-Ferrous Metals, Dal’stroi played a pioneering role in this transition. Those in charge of the Volga-Don Canal soon emulated them – unless they adopted the same approach at the same time. The Dal’stroi complex became fully self-financing and its procedures spread almost everywhere.[8]

According to Kraven and Khlevniuk, the ‘thaw’ of the Khrushchev period, already adumbrated in these moves, would have happened anyway, quite independently of the calculations and manoeuvrings of leaders at the top. The reason for the ‘de-gulagization’ (my term) was the crisis of the Gulag and its forced labour. By now, the MVD was finding it difficult to cope with the camps. The latest waves of arrests had brought with them many recalcitrant opponents – in particular, experienced military officers – in addition to hardened criminals. Refusal to work occurred on a mass scale and former officers were masters in the art of neutralizing informers and secret agents in the camps, undermining a proven system of espionage and making it increasingly difficult to recruit new informers. Moreover, there was a shortage of guards, at the very moment when acts of insubordination – even rebellion – were on the increase (the first of them occurred in 1942). The MVD sought to keep all this secret, despite the flood of letters of protest sent to Moscow, which it met with stubborn denials. But criticism and condemnation were now coming from guards themselves, as well as from prosecutors, at a point when the MVD was requesting more armed guards from the government in order to reinforce the camp regime – a confession of its inability to cope. In 1951, the number of ‘refusals to work’ climbed to a million days in 174 camps, colonies and other penal institutions. The bankruptcy of the Gulag, both as an economic and a penal organization, was irremediable.[9]

Immediately after Stalin’s death, the changes were accelerated and the inevitable decision to destroy the very basis of the MVD’s system of forced labour was finally taken. On 18 March 1953 the Prime Minister, Malenkov, transferred most of the MVD’s industrial directorates to civilian ministries, while the penal establishments, with their inmates, reverted to the Justice Ministry, restoring the pre-1934 situation. On 27 March a further decree freed 1 million detainees out of a total of 2.5 million. During the same month, the order was given to discontinue several major MVD projects: the Turkmenistan grand canal, the Volga-Baltic network of canals, several hydro-electric dams and major irrigation systems. These enormous construction sites – especially the canals – used huge quantities of forced labour and, in its reports, the MVD continually prided itself on its role in such chimerical wonders, which pandered to Stalin’s penchant for the gargantuan. Khlevniuk surmises that higher governmental circles must have realized that such projects were ruinously expensive. And it was for the same reason that as early as 1950 Beria, responsible for the MVD in his capacity as Deputy Prime Minister, had envisaged reforming the huge ministry. But as long as Stalin was alive, no one dared put the issue on the official agenda. The only thing to do was to let factors inducing spontaneous decay do their work, as well as the courageous protests of unjustly imprisoned people. Only with Stalin’s death were many of these glorious ventures liquidated as useless for economic development, dealing a decisive blow to the forced-labour system.

OMINOUS FIGURES

We now know a lot more about the number of Gulag inmates and other relevant data.[10] For a long time, wild speculation raged over the issue, sometimes giving rise to amazing exaggerations. We shall leave it to the authors of such hyperbole to explain what purpose they served. In addition to the human losses attributable to the camp system, we are now in a position to tackle another question statistically: namely, the number of political arrests per year for virtually the whole pre- and post-Stalinist periods, as well as the sentences imposed on the accused.

The toll in human life due to events such as the famines, the forced exile of the kulaks, and other calamities is more difficult to quantify precisely and uncontroversially. The best way of assessing it is via demographic studies that calculate excess deaths for the relevant periods. Such studies encompass all the events and political measures that might have caused such deaths. They also allow us to identify losses caused not by increased mortality, but by reduced birth rates. These are losses too. Yet the unborn cannot be directly included among the regime’s victims, since they did not endure the terror. Readers can refer to the statistics and other data provided in the appendices.

I shall restrict myself to synthesizing the statistical material available for the period from 1921 to mid-1953 (the details can be found in Appendix 1).[11] Over the course of these thirty-three years, the total number of arrests for primarily political reasons (the charge of ‘counterrevolutionary crimes’) was 4,060,306 persons. Of these, 799,455 were sentenced to death; 2,634,397 were sent to camps, colonies and prison; 423,512 were banished – in other words, either forbidden to reside in some specified place (vysylka) or deported to a particular settlement (ssylka); and 215,942 fell into the category of ‘others’. Given the enormous increase in the number of arrests from 1930 onwards, we may legitimately separate the figures for 1921–9 from the specifically Stalinist toll. In 1929, the number of arrests, already higher than in the previous year, reached 54,211 and included 2,109 death sentences. But it was not of the same order as the figure for the subsequent year, which leapt to 282,926 and included 20,201 death sentences.

We also possess other data, calculated by the KGB under Khrushchev, for the period 1930–53: 3,777,380 people had been arrested for ‘counter-revolutionary crimes’ and the number of death sentences was around 700,000 – the majority during the 1937–8 purges.

The intensity of the persecution, the criminalization of activities hitherto regarded as legal, and the inflation in the number of utterly fictitious crimes are no doubt good indicators of the degree of ‘social peace’ enjoyed by the system and the level of composure that prevailed in the state. Notwithstanding a surge in repression in 1928, and especially 1929, the total for 1921–9 is inferior – or just slightly superior – to that for 1930 alone.

In the first half of 1953, the repressive apparatus was suddenly checked and the figures become comparatively low: 8,403 arrests, with 198 death sentences, 7,894 prison sentences of various sorts, 38 exile or deportation sentences, and 273 ‘others’. At Stalin’s death, 600,000 political prisoners were still detained in camps or prisons. By the end of 1954 the figure had fallen to 474,950. On Khrushchev’s initiative, the regime had begun to review the Stalinist policy of terror.

According to some estimates, between 1934 and 1953 about 1.6 million inmates, including common-law prisoners, died in captivity. Mortality was somewhat higher among political prisoners, of whom half a million died in these twenty years. Thus, over a period of thirty-three years, around 4 million people were sentenced for political crimes and 20 per cent of them shot – the overwhelming majority from 1930 onwards.

Detailed calculation of Stalin’s other victims is more difficult, but there are nevertheless reliable data. In 1930–2, some 1,800,000 peasants regarded as kulaks were exiled to the so-called ‘resettlement areas for kulaks’ (kulakskaia ssylka) supervised by the secret police. At the beginning of 1932, only 1,300,000 were still there: the remaining half a million had died, fled, or been released after review of their sentences. Between 1932 and 1940, these ‘kulak settlements’ registered 230,000 births and 389,521 deaths; 629,042 people had escaped, of whom 235,120 were caught and returned to their settlement. From 1935 onwards, birth rates exceeded mortality rates: between 1932 and 1934 there were 49,168 births and 271,367 deaths, but between 1935 and 1940 181,090 births were recorded as against 108,154 deaths.[12]

Without going into details, we might add that the great majority of kulaks did not perish. Most fled their villages and scattered throughout the country among Russians or Ukrainians. They got themselves hired on the major projects of the five-year plan, which were constantly short of labour and ready to accept anyone without asking too many questions. The exiles gradually had their rights restored to them and their case was closed. Some went into the army, while others were simply rehabilitated. By 1948 the kulak resettlement colonies under police surveillance had been closed.

We are thus dealing with a significant number of victims of the terror – a mass that there is no need to inflate, manipulate or falsify. It remains to add to the toll a further sad category: demographic losses in the broad sense. In order to sort out the complicated picture for the period 1914–45, we must turn to a specialist in historical demography: Robert Davies.[13] The figures here concern the history of the Russian population for the whole period. But the Stalinist phase within it is clearly distinguished.

In Russia–USSR, two world wars and a civil war occasioned greater demographic losses (or population deficits) than elsewhere. These are measured both by ‘excess deaths’ – from violence, famine and epidemics – and by ‘birth deficit’, due to a temporary drop in birth rates. For the First World War and the Civil War, excess deaths are estimated at 16 million and the birth deficit at some 10 million. For the Second World War, the corresponding figures are 26–27 million and 12 million.

Stalinist industrialization also led to excess deaths in peacetime of the order of 10 million or more, many of them during the 1933 famine. Thus, total population loss for 1914 to 1945 from premature deaths and birth deficits amounted to 74 million: 26 million in 1914–22, 38 million for 1941–5, and 10 million in the peacetime years. Davies furnishes no figures for the birth deficit for this last period, but his work does aid us to have done with the fictitious body-counts in which anything goes as long as the record of ‘communism’ is drenched in ever more blood. When, for example, 80 million corpses are laid at its door, we might wonder: why not twice as many?

At the war’s close, the country was exhausted and the vast territories occupied by the Germans, or which had formed military theatres, were literally devastated. In the reconquered territories there was no economy to speak of and no government. The Soviet system had to be completely reconstructed, initially without an economic base and among populations that contained many former collaborators.

I shall restrict myself to one point about the reconstitution of the Soviet system in these regions. Finding cadres for the reconquered territories was an immense task, conducted in conditions of utter chaos. Newly appointed personnel often had to be replaced several times over, because they were incompetent, unreliable, or criminal elements who had penetrated the administration. Cadres assigned from areas that had escaped German conquest were often of poor quality and inclined to abandon a difficult job and return home. In the Ukraine, Lithuania and Latvia, strong detachments of nationalist insurgents fought Soviet troops and security forces, sometimes in pitched battles, with heavy losses on both sides. It took the regime time and effort to subdue these partisans. But work resumed, factories were rebuilt, and life slowly returned to normal.

Recovery and the restoration of social and economic indicators to their prewar levels – especially for agricultural output – had been achieved by the time of Stalin’s death. But his disappearance from the scene was insufficient wholly to rid the USSR of his legacy – especially since postwar reconstruction involved restoring a decaying Stalinist model with its aberrations and irrationalities.

The return of peace confronted the state and party, hitherto wholly absorbed in the war effort, with unanticipated realities. The state bureaucracy – the main organizer of the war – now had to face the problems of reconversion. For the party and its apparatus, things were even more complicated. Whatever the propaganda, between 1941 and 1945 the party apparatus had been demoted to an auxiliary role. Certainly, Politburo members ran the war machine via the State Defence Committee, but they did so under Stalin’s rod of iron as leaders of the state, not the party. The Central Committee was in abeyance and no party congress had been convened.

To put the party’s house in order, Stalin brought in the well-known Leningrad party leader Alexis Kuznetsov, who had distinguished himself during the siege of the city as Zhdanov’s second in command. He became party secretary for cadres, a member of the Politburo, and was thought to be being groomed by Stalin to succeed him. This was not an enviable lot for a beginner caught up in the complex power apparatus around Stalin. His prerogatives were considerable, but the task ahead was daunting. He was responsible for supplying high-quality, politically reliable leaders for all important state agencies. To do this, he was to supervise the work of the party’s cadres directorate, which had been reorganized to tackle the job. The priority was to find qualified personnel for positions of responsibility in the most important branches of the economy throughout the country.

Reorganizing the party was another order of the day. If the personnel of the party apparatus were in a permanent state of flux, its structures remained more or less the same hereafter. This is why the new structure that emerged is sufficiently instructive to warrant us going into some detail.

It was now decided that the head of the cadres directorate would have five deputies and that it would contain twenty-eight departments (instead of the previous fifty), each of them responsible for overseeing a group of ministries or other government agencies. A single personnel department and a few sectional services were envisaged for the whole directorate.

Of the twenty-eight departments, one would deal with cadres for party organizations, another with the training and retraining of cadres, and a third with the cadres of Soviet institutions (armed forces, internal affairs and foreign trade). State security services, the Prosecutor’s Office and justice came under the same department. Similarly, a department was projected for transport and for each branch of industry, as well as for agriculture, finance, trade, higher education and research, publishing, the arts, and so on. In short, the new directorate was a bulky piece of machinery, employing some 650 senior officials. Probably the largest of the Central Committee’s apparatuses, it was organized on functional lines – until, two years later, it reverted to the older ‘economic branch’ structure. Meanwhile, the new secretary’s position gave him sight of everything, including the most secret institutions, for they all needed the cadres his directorate supplied and controlled – or at least was beginning to supply and control.

Kuznetsov’s (unpublished) speeches and conversations with his subordinates allow us to conclude that he was a man of considerable intelligence. His organizational abilities, and the ease with which he earned the esteem of the apparatus, attest to his calibre. The attempt to reconstruct and revitalize the party and its apparatus was, of course, coordinated with Stalin. When it came to organizational matters, Kuznetsov was clearly his own man. On ideology, however, he had to toe the line. Accordingly, before continuing our discussion of reforms in the party apparatus we must introduce these ‘ideological questions’, and especially a novelty that stemmed from Stalin’s growing identification with Tsarist symbols during the war. The new ideological line directly concerned the party’s central cadres, who were now subject to rein-doctrination in common with various social groups and administrative bodies.

ZHDANOVISM AND THE ‘COURTS OF HONOUR’ (1946–50)

Zhdanovism – named after its chief proponent, Andrei Zhdanov, at the time party secretary – refers to an especially obscurantist chapter in the history of Stalinism.[1] Since this policy, which ravaged the country’s cultural life, is studied in all histories of Soviet literature, we have opted to deal with it exclusively through unpublished documents from the party apparatus.

The main target of Zhdanovism was the professional intelligentsia, which was accused of ‘fawning on the West’ and taxed with ‘cosmopolitanism’ (a term that conveyed the regime’s barely concealed anti-Semitism in these years). But its spirit profoundly marked the state and party apparatuses, which employed large numbers of people with higher education. An expression of extreme Russian nationalism, Zhdanovism attacked manifestations of nationalism in the non-Russian republics. The introduction into high party and government spheres of the archaic-sounding ‘courts of honour’ contradicted any minimally coherent administrative logic, and significantly frustrated efforts to raise the professional level of the party apparatus. These ‘courts’ were supposed to instil in apparatchiks a sense of patriotism and pride in the unique achievements of their (Stalinist) fatherland, by means of staged mock-trials in every administrative agency. The culprits were accused of all manner of infamies, but only their careers suffered (they escaped with their lives). In sum, these ‘courts’ judged ‘crimes’ approximating to treason, but which were not subject to criminal prosecution.

The practice was explained by Kuznetsov in a report to the full party apparatus on 29 September 1947. The target of such measures was individuals with higher education, including the growing number of specialists. The central apparatus was not considered immune from the relevant disease and the report was presented during a meeting convened to elect the ‘court of honour’ for the Central Committee’s own apparatus – an election that gave the signal for similar elections throughout the country’s administrative bodies. The professed aim was to combat behaviour displaying servility to the West.

A court was likewise established in the State Security Ministry (MGB). Its operatives were seemingly irked by being subjected to such a procedure, but Kuznetsov informed them that if such courts were required in the central party apparatus – the country’s citadel – then there was no reason to exempt the MGB. Its members also had progress to make when it came to patriotism and ‘spiritual independence’ – the only things that could ensure recognition of the superiority of Soviet culture over that of the West.

Kuznetsov’s argument ran as follows. In so far as the country’s activity depended on the quality of the party apparatus, the ‘courts of honour’ had a decisive role to play. The apparatus harboured numbers of employees who engaged in anti-patriotic, anti-social and anti-state deviations. Hitherto, when such instances had been discovered, they had been handled internally with the utmost possible discretion. This stemmed from the widespread belief that once someone had become a member of the apparatus, there was no further need for vigilance or political improvement. But many officials seemed not to appreciate that their work in the central apparatus – that ‘holy of holies’ (the expression is used in the report) – was not a routine job, but a party duty. Dissolute behaviour was even to be found among leading figures, Kuznetsov observed – something that was absolutely inadmissible in the party’s ranks, let alone the apparatus of the Central Committee. Drunkenness, debauchery, and negligence when handling confidential documents were among the most frequent misdemeanours cited. Such derelictions were highly dangerous, because the Central Committee received reports on all aspects of the country’s activities, including defence and foreign policy. For this reason, any work performed in the apparatus, whatever the position held, must remain confidential. Vigilance was the party’s best weapon against its enemies; it must form an inviolable principle of national life.

There was a disturbing but evident undercurrent to this policy. During the meeting, it was officially stated that the new line drew its inspiration from the methods of the great purges. Some of the key signposts of the latter were actually cited as useful reminders. Among them were the ‘confidential’ letters addressed to party members that had marked the launch of purges: the letter of 18 January 1935 concerning actions against ‘Kirov’s murderers’; the letter of 13 May 1935 on party members’ cards; the 29 July 1936 circular on the Trotsky–Zinoviev ‘terrorist bloc’; the 29 June 1941 circular to party and state agents operating near the front. All of these preceded or followed the unleashing of waves of terror against the population in general and cadres in particular. The shadow of this dark epoch was deliberately invoked to serve as a warning to a potentially disloyal intelligentsia. Stalin’s speech on vigilance during the hallucinatory 1937–8 Central Committee sessions – another ‘classic’ on the best way to deal with enemies – was also cited.

Such was the spirit of a campaign gearing to inculcate nothing less than ‘spiritual independence’. The foreign espionage factor was also employed. The apparatchiks were informed that Western intelligence services were seeking to penetrate the party and that their families were not immune: ‘You tell your wife something, she tells a neighbour – and everyone gets wind of state secrets.’ Anyone in the least familiar with Stalin’s way of criticizing party officials and leaders would recognize his own inimitable style here. In fact, the condemnation of ‘family chatterboxes’ by members of the apparatus was based on a recent episode: in 1948, the government had decided in the utmost secrecy to raise prices, but the decision had become known to the population before its promulgation, resulting in a mad scramble for the shops.

The purges accompanying Zhdanovism never reached anything like the scale of 1936–9, but they nevertheless gave rise to such atrocities as the execution of the writers of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, the assassination of the great actor Mikhoels (in a rigged car accident), numerous arrests and executions of cultural figures, not to mention careers ruined and artistic and scientific works destroyed. In 1950 came the ‘Leningrad affair’: all the old leaders of the Leningrad party and administration – including Kuznetsov himself and the Deputy Prime Minister and Gosplan head, Voznesensky – were executed and more than a hundred others perished or were sent to camps.

The ideology of the zhdanovshchina was Stalin’s own, of course – the culmination of his ideological peregrinations. Stalin was by now fascinated by the ‘glorious’ Tsarist past. The ‘courts of honour’ were not the only thing he borrowed from its history. All the ministerial top brass now wore a uniform and their titles derived directly from Peter the Great’s ‘table of ranks’. Worse than the external paraphernalia was the extreme Russian nationalism, savouring of proto-fascism, typical of decaying Stalinism. Stalin wanted this spirit to survive him. To this end, he personally revised the new Soviet anthem, imposing on a multinational country a chauvinist paean to ‘Great Russia’.

It is worth adding that the ‘courts of honour’ and the archaic titles and uniforms (with their ridiculous epaulettes) were abolished or abandoned under Khrushchev, to be quickly forgotten by an administration that had little time for such antics. And the putrid fumes of Zhdanovism largely dissipated.

All this is important for understanding the atmosphere that suffused the country when Kuznetsov tackled the important task of rationalizing the work of cadres, in the first instance in the party. His idea was to treat them firmly but fairly, and expect the appropriate response. The difference in tone and spirit between Kuznetsov’s public explanation of Zhdanovism in 1947 and his frank and rational discussions with colleagues in 1946–7, is striking. It prompts the question as to whether he fully approved of Zhdanovism.

THE NEW APPROACH

New sources – in particular, the minutes of closed meetings of the cadres directorate, probably something unprecedented in the history of the apparatus – offer a sense of how the Politburo intended to put its own house in order. In the first place, this involved an attempt to redefine the functions of the whole apparatus, to clarify the division of labour within it, and – no less important – to change the way in which the central apparatus ran the economy. Astonishing as it might seem, the apparatus was to disengage from any direct involvement in economic management.

The functions and spheres of operation of party and state were henceforth to be redefined and separated. According to the new organizational doctrine, the Central Committee was a body charged with setting policy orientation, which it conveyed to the government. Through its personnel management, the party was responsible for the leading cadres of the state. Its mission consisted in the ideological education of the nation and supervision of its local organizations.

There was nothing inherently new about this, but the apparatchiks were surprised to learn that the Central Committee would no longer be dealing directly with economic questions. Its economic departments, such as those for agriculture and transport, were abolished. The main task of the apparatus was now to manage the party itself and supervise cadres in each domain, but without concerning itself with the details of their activities or the way in which they fulfilled their duties. The Central Committee would, of course, continue to issue directives, including on the economy, to the government. And in the context of its responsibility for supervising the cadres in government bodies, it did involve itself indirectly in monitoring economic policy. Finally, the party’s local bodies, such as regional committees fulfilling ‘executive functions’, continued to supervise economic activity, as in the past. Their responsibilities were not a carbon copy of the Central Committee’s.

To introduce some clarity into the ever more obscure division of labour between the two bodies situated immediately below the Politburo – the Orgburo and the Secretariat – it was decided that the former should take responsibility for local party organs. It summoned them, listened to their reports, and proposed improvements – though this was not how party statutes had previously defined its role. Its meetings were regular and their dates were fixed in advance. For its part, the Secretariat was a permanent body. It met each day, even several times a day, as and when required. It prepared the agenda and relevant materials for Orgburo meetings, and checked that the decisions taken by it and by the Politburo were properly implemented. It was also responsible for the distribution of leading cadres throughout the system via the appropriate departments.

Helping local party organizations to control state and economic bodies effectively; criticizing them; taking responsibility for political leadership of the masses: these were the main concerns of the top party leadership – and these were the terms in which they were defined.

The sources available to us shed light on the reasons for this disengagement from economic matters at the summit. The party’s local bodies – all those below the Central Committee – were in a far from healthy condition; and even the Central Committee itself was in a spot of trouble. The main cause for anxiety was party officials’ widespread dependency on, and submission to, economic ministries.

One aspect of this dependency was what has been called ‘self-procurement’ (samosnabzhenie), which covered various practices. Heads of government agencies, particularly those of economic ministries and their local branches, offered party bosses illegal inducements in the form of premiums, prizes, bonuses, valuable gifts, and services of all sorts – construction of dachas, house repairs, reservations in comfortable sanatoria for local party secretaries (and their families, of course). All of this was at the state’s expense. According to our source, such economic cushioning of the party elite ‘assumed vast proportions’.

Further information on this score derives from another Kuznetsov document, dating from late 1947. The Politburo had just issued a stern decree against the rewards offered to party officials by economic managers. During the war the practice had been generalized, and it was now ubiquitous, ‘from top to bottom’. In these times of rationing and low living standards, the situation more closely approximated famine than simple everyday shortages. Many members of the party hierarchy actually engaged in illegal requisition – even extortion – of food and other merchandise from economic bodies. These were, of course, crimes. According to Kuznetsov, they were ‘in essence a form of corruption that makes representatives of the party dependent on economic agencies’. The latter were prioritizing their own interests over those of the state they were supposed to represent. If the defence of state interests was to take precedence over private interests, how could party cadres ensure it when improvement in their own material situation depended on bonuses and benefits from economic managers?

Such cases of corruption, in which economic ministries ‘remunerated’ party officials throughout the country – some of them highly placed in the apparatus – had been uncovered and reported to Stalin by his right-hand man, Lev Mekhlis, Minister of State Control. Kuznetsov clearly had access to this information. Numerous documents which I have collected indicate that many local apparatchiks and their bosses expended much of their energy laying their hands on housing, goods and bribes – when they were not organizing profligate binges where the alcohol flowed, at the expense of local soviet or government agencies. Inspection authorities reported in enormous detail on the number of bottles of alcohol drained, their cost, the total bill charged by the restaurant that had supplied the food, and the name of the public institution that had paid for all this. Bribes were not simply offered; they were solicited, even demanded. The offices of the State Prosecutor were heaving with documents concerning cases against party bosses accused of misconduct or criminal behaviour.

Local party leaderships were manifestly in poor shape after the war. The central apparatus was perfectly well aware of the situation, but did not report it because it did not attribute much significance to such behaviour, which was so widespread that everyone had grown used to it. However, it was said that Stalin had declared such pillaging of national resources to be a crime. For Kuznetsov, bribes created cosy ‘family’ relations, making party organizations playthings in the hands of economic managers. ‘If this situation persists, it will spell the end of the party’, he declared: it was imperative for ‘party organizations to recover their independence’. For those who regarded party primacy as firmly established, this phrase would have come as a surprise. It is clear that he was repeating what he had heard during a closed meeting of the cadres directorate in 1946, shortly after his appointment. A consultation of this kind, with all the ranks of the apparatus present, had possibly never occurred before. Kuznetsov had asked participants to be frank and had heard plenty: heads of department in the directorate itself were super-bureaucrats, inaccessible to their subordinates; they formed cliques and enjoyed special privileges; the hierarchy was very strict and did not allow for any party camaraderie; finally, the climate of secrecy was stifling. No less revealing was the apparatchiks’ appraisal of important ministers: they were perceived as feudal lords who looked down scornfully on officials. Someone had interjected: ‘When did you last see a minister come and visit us in the Central Committee?’ And someone else added: ‘Not even a deputy minister!’

It is interesting to note – and Kuznetsov himself was sensitive to this – how many of the criticisms, especially when uttered by younger, ‘instructor’-level apparatchiks, were imbued with idealism and the bitterness they felt in seeing their expectations dashed. Kuznetsov had even heard a phrase he did not anticipate (and nor did a researcher like me, some fifty years later!): ‘We [the party] have lost power!’ (my poteriali vlast’!). All this is recorded in the minutes of the 1946 meeting. So it is scarcely surprising if a year later Kuznetsov declared that party organizations needed to regain their ‘independence’. He did not even have to specify from whom. The party’s ‘economization’ was the curse that was alarming its leadership as never before.

At stake was the very existence of the party as a ruling institution. During the war, its transformation into a ministerial appendage had accelerated, with a consequent loss of power. This was not surprising: the ministries had indeed been responsible for the war effort and its most glamorous activities. The party apparatus was being bought off and corrupted by managers, who increasingly dealt exclusively with the Council of Ministers and ignored the Central Committee and its nomenklatura. There is abundant data on such disregard for the ‘nomenklatura rules’ (a term we shall return to).

Extricating the central apparatus from any direct involvement in economic affairs and agencies – from economics tout court – apart from general guidelines and oversight of cadres, seemed to be the remedy. But Zhdanovism was going to complicate matters. In the past, the cadres directorate had preferred to recruit people who already possessed technical training for party work. Now humanities graduates were to have preference, in order to avoid such ideological lapses as the failure to censor ‘ideologically alien’ passages in an opera, or the publication of an insufficiently expurgated biography of Lenin, and so on. ‘Technicians’ were regarded as incapable of exposing ideological subversion, let alone combating it. A threat like ‘economization’ – much more prosaic, but also less obvious – which was beginning to blur the party’s ideological vision, was quite beyond their wit.

But what was the ideological framework that was supposedly losing its vigour? And what was to be counterposed to the influence of the capitalist West? Here we touch a sensitive point in the party’s ideological armour. At this stage, Stalinism was characterized by an unwillingness – even an inability – to criticize capitalism from a socialist standpoint. As we have said, a virulent Russian nationalism had been opted for instead. This point will be taken up in Part Three, when we sketch a broader picture of the ideological history. As for the narrower practical problem of the party apparatus restoring control over the ministries and over itself, it was (to repeat the point) bound up with undue direct involvement in the economy, which had allowed managers to get the upper hand. Hence the 1946 reform of the apparatus largely consisted in terminating such direct involvement and halting the party’s ‘economization’.

In and of itself, however, this kind of ‘line’ could not replace the ideological cement that Stalinism had lost. Kuznetsov implied as much during the plenary meeting of the party apparatus. ‘The party has no programme’, he declared, stating that the only extant programmatic texts were the Stalin Constitution and the five-year plan. These words certainly possessed an audacious ring, for they implied that under Stalin the party had lost its original ideological vigour. They would have been suicidal had Stalin himself – we surmise – not said as much and Kuznetsov not simply been quoting him. When Kuznetsov referred to the party losing out to economic managers and needing to regain its independence, the sentiment was probably Stalin’s – or approved by him, at any rate. As Stalin himself was aware, the erosion of most of the original ideology must have been a factor in the ‘economization’ of party cadres. Zhdanovite policies had been instigated at Stalin’s behest, which tends to indicate that he was aware of the regime’s ideological weakness and had decided to furnish it with a new ideological cement. We have seen what this consisted in. But it was part of the problem, not part of the solution.

At all events, for now ‘the economy’ was identified as the reason for the decay of the party’s main apparatus. The measures adopted rested on the conviction that a better division of labour between the Central Committee and the Council of Ministers could remedy the situation. The Council of Ministers would continue to run the country, while the Central Committee would staff key posts and oversee the cadres departments in every institution. But this line – ‘quit the economy and get back to party work’ – would not last long. Less than two years later, the reorganization, which testified to a long-term vision (even if its goal was unattainable), was reversed.

RETREAT

A halt was called at the end of 1948. Let us now briefly analyse its consequences. In early 1949 the specialist sectors of the cadres directorate were converted into separate departments dealing with different spheres of state activity. Officially, they would deal only with the cadres in these various spheres, not with their professional field of activity. In fact, however, whether inadvertently or otherwise, these Central Committee departments would continue to get entangled in the economy’s managerial structures. The cause was the very character of the branch system – something the 1946 reform had sought to surmount. Thus the ‘turn’ turned into a retreat.

One document sums up the character of the new phase. Swings of the pendulum were recurrent in Soviet administrative practice, so this one was no novelty. Instead of the cumbersome cadres directorate, and specialist units in charge of inspecting party bodies, there was to be a new organizational structure. Henceforth the Central Committee apparatus, overseen mainly by the Secretariat and to a lesser degree by the Orgburo, would supervise the operations of ministries and other central government agencies. The task was assigned to new Central Committee departments – among them, ‘agitprop’, ‘party-komsomol-trade unions’, ‘international relations’, heavy industry, consumer goods industry, engineering (machine building), transport and agriculture, as well as a new, very powerful, ‘administrative’ department with responsibility for the security services and the cluster of agencies in planning, finance and trade. (The last three would soon be detached to form a separate department.)

In sum, the reorganization consisted in converting the structural units of the old cadres directorate into independent departments and distributing, more or less logically, the 115 ministries and all party bodies (republican and regional) between these departments. This was no easy undertaking. Each of the state agents to be supervised and monitored itself encompassed a multitude of local branches – in particular, a labyrinthine set of supply networks that were a headache for any inspection agency. This tangled web was even more complicated than the one we shall discuss when we deal with the state administration.

Each Central Committee department had its own more or less complex structure and personnel office. But there were also structures servicing the whole Central Committee apparatus, like the central statistical office, and coordinating departments such as the general-secretary’s ‘special unit’, the encrypting service, and ‘confidential matters’. In addition there were various ‘groups’ or ‘special offices’ unfamiliar to outsiders, including a service for receiving foreign visitors, a separate ‘department of the Central Committee’ (possibly an auxiliary secretariat for the Orgburo), a pivotal ‘general department’ through which all significant texts and appointments to and from departments passed, a ‘business’ department, a ‘post office’ for letters from the public, an office dealing with party membership registration, a ‘commission for foreign travel’, a special office for running the Kremlin, and a unit dealing with ‘auxiliary farms’ (probably part of the business department, which also had a cars and mechanical repairs service).

We still have one mechanism to investigate, and readers will hopefully not be discouraged by its complexity (simplicity often derives from a mastery of the details). In the final analysis, the Soviet tendency for administrative opacity is not as complicated as all that. And if a comparison between the Soviet and other bureaucracies can generate confusion, its results are invariably illuminating – and sometimes surprising.

THE NOMENKLATURA OF THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE

The endeavour in 1946–8 to reorganize the party’s central apparatus can be encapsulated in the term nomenklatura, which refers to the mechanism used to keep leading cadres under party control. It was also the cause of problems and side-effects that plagued the regime to the very end.

The resuscitation in 1946 of the Central Committee’s nomenklatura required considerable effort on the part of the cadres directorate and the three supreme bodies: the Politburo, the Orgburo (abolished in 1952), and the Secretariat. The Russian term nomenklatura means a ‘list’ of items, whatever they might be, that have to be ‘named’. We are now going to examine this list more closely to figure out how it was supposed to work in practice.

A document signed on 22 August 1946 by Andreev, head of the cadres directorate, and his deputy Revsky, was sent to the four secretaries of the Central Committee (Zhdanov, Kuznetsov, Patolichev and Popov). It presented for their approval a version of the nomenklatura that contained 42,894 leadership positions in party and state apparatuses. (The precise number varied from one draft to another, but this need not concern us.) Let us underscore once again that this list was established and controlled by the Central Committee.

The text begins by stating the obvious: it is difficult to exercise control over cadres when more than half of the appointments to, and dismissals from, ministerial posts figuring in the current nomenklatura are decided without Central Committee approval. It was therefore urgent that the latter formally endorse the new list, which was only a draft but which was presented as better suited than previous versions to the requirements of the five-year plan for 1946–50. The directorate was also working on another much-needed list – the so-called ‘reserve register’ containing an auxiliary list of candidates for nomenklatura posts. In the event of rising demand for personnel, this would make it possible rapidly to supply the requisite cadres. The latest version of the new nomenklatura eliminated approximately 9,000 positions from the old rolls and introduced some new ones. These alterations were required to take account of economic and technological changes and concomitant alterations in the relative importance of various posts.

It took about three months for the first postwar ‘nomenklatura of Central Committee posts’ to be approved in stages. At the end of November 1946 the Central Committee possessed a text that could serve as a basic grid for handling leading cadres. The general list of posts to be filled in accordance with nomenklatura rules was supplemented by a detailed record of the officials currently holding these posts. Referring to some 41,883 posts (and the names of their incumbents), it allows us to draw up a picture of the whole cohort that was considered pivotal to the system. The classification was extremely detailed. The enumeration of the posts that the Central Committee wanted on its own list began with ‘posts in party organizations’, classified by rank: Central Committee secretaries and their deputies, heads of department and their deputies, heads of ‘special sectors’, and so on. Next came local party officials at republican and regional level, followed by the directors of party schools and holders of chairs in Marxist-Leninist history and economics.

The list then proceeded to senior positions in the state apparatus, from central level via the republics to district level: ministers, deputy ministers, members of ministerial collegia, departmental heads. It went on down the whole hierarchy of administrative posts in government agencies, as well as the parallel apparatus of the soviets, until it reached the lowest rank that the Central Committee wished to have under its direct or indirect tutelage.

The text provides figures for each ministry, but examination of the data by hierarchical stratum is more illuminating. Out of 41,883 ‘nomenklatura positions’, the top stratum (ministries and party) accounted for 4,836, or 12 per cent of the list. (Readers are aware by now that this ‘excursion’ into the nomenklatura leads us to a sketch of the whole Soviet administrative system.) To analyse what this represents, it should be read in conjunction with data from the Central Statistical Office, which provide details for the whole state apparatus. In sum, the nomenklatura represented around a third of the 160,000 top posts, of which 105,000 were based in the central government apparatus in Moscow, while 55,000 were located in republican administrative bodies (ministries and agencies). We might note that at this moment state administration numbered some 1.6 million managerial posts, 18.8 per cent of the total 8 million employees. (A more realistic calculation would reduce the latter figure to 6.5 million, by excluding from ‘administration’ categories like cleaners and other junior technical staff.) ‘Senior managerial cadres’ comprised officials heading up administrative units which lower ranks were directly or indirectly attached to. There we also find staff with the title (and probably the role) of ‘principal’ or ‘senior specialist’.

Returning now to the Central Committee nomenklatura proper, we possess a breakdown by field of activity. The most important contingent was that of party and Komsomol officials: 10,533, or 24.6 per cent of the list. Next came industry with 8,808 posts, or 20.5 per cent; general administrative agencies with 4,082, or 9.5 per cent; defence with 3,954, or 9.2 per cent; culture, the arts and sciences with 2,305, or 5.4 per cent; transport with 1,842, or 4.4 per cent; agriculture with 1,548, or 3.6 per cent; state security and public order with 1,331, or 3.1 per cent; the prosecution service and justice with 1,242, or 2.9 per cent; foreign affairs with 1,169, or 2.7 per cent; construction enterprises with 1,106, or 2.6 per cent; procurement and trade with 1,022, or 2.4 per cent; social services with 767, or 1.8 per cent; trade unions and cooperatives with 763, or 1.8 per cent; state planning, registration and control with 575, or 1.3 per cent; and financial and credit institutions with 406, or 1 per cent.

Analysis of the professional profile of officials included on the list in mid-1946 reveals that 14,778 posts were held by engineers with different specialities. The fact that many of the rest had a lower educational profile was compensated for, or so it was claimed, by length of service. Seventy per cent of those who possessed only primary education had more than ten years’ experience in leadership roles. This figure conduces to rather less optimistic conclusions. In total, 55.7 per cent of central nomenklatura cadres had more than ten years of service; 32.6 per cent had between six and ten years; 39.2 between two and five years; 17.25 per cent between one and two years; and 22.1 per cent less than a year. The nomenklatura also contained 1,400 office-holders who were not party members (3.5 per cent of the total). And last but not least, 66.7 of positions were held by Russians, 11.3 per cent by Ukrainians, 5.4 per cent by Jews, etc. (the ‘etc.’ occurs in the document itself).

Readers with a particular interest in bureaucracy will find plenty of food for thought here on supervisory methods, and the logic and illogic involved in such a centralized staffing policy. The complexity of the nomenklatura hierarchy raises the issue of the extent to which bureaucratic methods of controlling a bureaucracy are unrealistic. A more detailed examination would indicate that this list was in fact only one part of a larger system. The Central Committee controlled – or sought to control – the highest stratum of officials. But those at the top also had power over some lower-level nominations, though it had to be exercised in collaboration with the relevant party committee at each level, or with the lower echelon of their own hierarchy, which in turn performed the same function vis-à-vis the cadres of institutions under its control (alone or in consultation), and so on and so forth.

Thus, a system that seems clear when viewed from above turns out to be composed of different decision-making hierarchies, in which prerogatives are fluid and allow for numerous derogations. Endless complaints by the Central Committee apparatus against ministries demonstrate that the latter were not particularly diligent when it came to following nomenklatura rules. They appointed, transferred or dismissed job-holders without consulting the Central Committee; or only did so retrospectively. If they behaved like that, it was because the nomenklatura did not in reality operate as a one-way system. When a post became vacant, the Central Committee could look for a candidate in its reserve list, but it only did so if the ministry concerned was reckoned to be in a crisis situation. Otherwise, it asked the minister to propose the best candidate and would subsequently confirm the appointment.

At a later point in our study, in Parts Two and Three, the question of who ultimately controlled whom in this system will be posed once again – and answered. But we can already see that the logistics involved in controlling the machinery actually reveal dependency on it. And the dangers of ‘economization’ and losing control of the government machine and its administrative class were formulated in precisely these terms in internal party debates.

In conclusion, we would like to underscore two features of the Stalinist system. When dealing with Stalin’s own governmental methods, we are in the realm of arbitrariness and personal despotism. When speaking of Soviet government, we are in the realm of bureaucracy or rather its two branches, one of them (the party apparatus) minor and the other (state administration) much larger.