opportunistic mistake’ had consisted in allowing excerpts from Churchill’s speeches to be reproduced in Moscow.11 The matter was hardly of great importance but Stalin had refused to see it that way. ‘None of us’, he barked by telegram from Abkhazia, ‘has the right to undertake a unilateral disposition involving alteration of our course of policy. Yet Molotov has arrogated that right to himself. Why and on what grounds? Is it not because such tricks enter his plan of work?’12 Mikoyan too had to humble himself when Stalin was angered by decisions on grain procurement:13
I and others of course can’t pose questions in the way you can. I’ll make every effort to learn from you how to work properly. I’ll do everything to draw the necessary lessons from your severe criticism so that it will help me in future work under your fatherly leadership.
Some father! Some sons! The hands of Molotov and Mikoyan were steeped in the blood of the victims of Soviet state policies, and yet they too had to grovel. They knew they had to approach Stalin as if he were the USSR’s stern but fair patriarch — and just possibly they might survive.
Stalin’s paternal functions involved regular humiliation, and he was inventive in going about this. Molotov asked the Polish communist leader Jakub Berman for a waltz at one of Stalin’s soirees. This infringement of manly convention pleased and suited Stalin. Molotov led the fumbling Berman while Stalin presided at the gramophone. Berman was to put a positive gloss on the episode: the waltz with Molotov had been a chance not to whisper sweet nothings to the Soviet Minister of Foreign Affairs but to mumble ‘things that couldn’t be said out loud’.14 He contrived to forget how he and Molotov had been degraded for Stalin’s delight.
The Leader’s dominion involved chronometric regulation. Lunch was taken in the late afternoon around four or five o’clock and dinner was arranged for no earlier than nine o’clock. Stalin lived like this, and the entire ruling group had to adjust its collective body-clock to his habits.15 Kaganovich aped him to the minute.16 Molotov coped by taking little naps in daytime; such was his self-control that he was known to announce to his aides: ‘I’m now going to take a rest in the next room for thirteen minutes.’ He got up from the divan like an automaton and returned precisely thirteen minutes later.17 All knew that the Leader worked from the early evening onwards; everyone in the upper strata of the Soviet elite had to do the same — and their families had to put up with this as the price to be paid for sustaining life and privilege. With the communisation of eastern Europe the schedule of the working day changed there too. Throughout the USSR and across to Berlin, Tirana and Sofia the leading figures in party and government dared not stray from the proximity of the phone. Stalin could ring at any time of the night through to the early hours of the morning.18
As Stalin’s vacations in the south became longer, he resorted frequently to telegrams. He could not control the entire machinery of state in detail. This had long been obvious to him. ‘I can’t know everything,’ he said to Ivan Kovalev, Minister of Communications after the Second World War. ‘I pay attention to disagreements and to objections, and I work out why they’ve arisen and what they are about.’19 Stalin explained that his subordinates constantly kept things from him and that they always concocted a compromise behind the scenes before they reported to him. To him this was tantamount to conspiracy. Only Voznesenski stood out against such practices — and Stalin admired him for this. Stalin hated the ‘insincerity’ of other Politburo members. He might not detect particular cases of trickery but he knew they could trick him, and he functioned on the assumption that they were not to be trusted. The result was that Stalin, depleted in energy, looked for discrepancies between the accounts of one leader and another.20 Any disagreement was likely to lie across fault-lines in policy. Stalin had hit upon an economical way of penetrating the secrets of what was being done in the corridors of the Kremlin.
Information also came to him by secret channels. The ‘organs’ — known as MGB from March 1946 and kept separate from the MVD — regularly reported on their eavesdropping of conversations among the Soviet leaders. Other Politburo members, he knew, were personally ambitious; and since they had repressed millions on his orders, he assumed they could form a violent conspiracy against him. Throughout the war with Germany he had ordered listening devices to be installed in the apartments of military personnel. The practice was applied to a growing list of civilian politicians. Even Molotov and Mikoyan were being bugged by 1950.21
Another of his modalities was to cultivate jealousy among his subordinates. There was constant bickering, and Stalin alone was allowed to arbitrate. He seldom allowed the highest political leaders to stay in a particular post for long. Nothing was left settled in the Kremlin: Stalin saw that job insecurity among his potential successors aided his ability to dominate them. The Moscow political carousel flung off some individuals from time to time, and the survivors regularly had to dismount and move from one seat to another. This was not enough by itself. Stalin’s ill health barred him from undertaking the detailed supreme supervision he had exercised in the 1930s and during the Second World War. He needed a dependable individual to act as his eyes and ears in the leadership just as Lenin had turned to him for help in April 1922. Stalin operated with cunning. At any given time after 1945 he had a political favourite, and he sometimes hinted that the favourite was his chosen successor. But such favour was never formally bestowed, and Stalin raised up individuals only to hurl them down later. No one could grasp the levers of power in such a fashion as to acquire the capacity to supplant Stalin.
There were many levers. In 1946 the Council of Ministers (as Sovnarkom was redesignated in the same year) had forty-eight ministries and committees, each being responsible for a large sector of state functions.22 Stalin ceased chairing it. Instead he increased the emphasis on ‘curatorship’. This was a system whereby every leading associate of Stalin was assigned responsibility for a group of institutions.23 Stalin, while wanting flux and vagueness as an ultimate safeguard of his rule, needed to assure himself that the state complied with his declared intentions. Curators were his solution. They met him frequently and never knew when he might haul them over the coals because one of their institutions had given him grounds for disquiet. Each group of institutions was the object of rivalry. Politburo members wanted to have as many as possible; this was a token of Stalin’s approval as well as a grant of real power. Reduction of the number signalled that a particular associate had fallen under the shadow of disapprobation — or even of the Leader’s lethal suspicion. His associates were under constant, intense pressure. Always they feared that some silly slip by one of their own subordinates might have adverse consequences for themselves. This could happen at any time because the Leader cultivated jealousies among all of them.
He also harangued them into adopting his own ferocious style of leadership: at a Party Central Committee plenum in March 1946 he declared: ‘A People’s Commissar must be a wild animal; he must work and take direct responsibility for work.’24 Rulership as Stalin recommended it to People’s Commissars and their curators was nothing like the model of bureaucratic life described by sociologists since Max Weber and Roberto Michels. Even in his last years, when the Soviet order was stabilised and in many ways petrified, it retained a militant and dynamic quality.
Politics were a bear-pit. Politburo members could bite and claw each other as brutally as they liked so long as they produced the outcome demanded by Stalin. Only in Stalin’s presence were they constrained to moderate their behaviour. The Politburo had ceased to convene in the war and the pre-war tradition was not resumed.25 Stalin continued to consult other leaders by informal methods. Always he liked to have leading figures in the Politburo write, telegram or telephone their assent to his preferences into policy. The Orgburo and the Secretariat — as well as the Council of Ministers and its Presidium — deliberated in his absence. The Party Congress, which had supreme formal authority over all party bodies, was not called until 1952. Stalin expected to rule through unofficial channels; he knew that disruption of institutional regularity helped to prolong his personal despotism. He could intervene with an order at his whim. He deliberately inflicted a contradictory pattern of work on his subordinates. They, unlike him, had to observe administrative procedures punctiliously. At the same time they had to obtain practical results regardless of the rulebook. The pressure was unremitting. This was the way he liked things, and the other leaders dared make no objection.
The fact that Stalin was often away from Moscow led many contemporaries (and subsequent commentators) to surmise that he was losing his grip on power. This was a misperception. On the large questions of the international, political and economic agenda there was little that escaped his adjudication; and Kremlin politicians were altogether too fearful of him to try to trick him. The framework of rulership at the centre and in the provinces also continued to exercise his attention. At the end of the war four bodies had immense importance. These were the government, the party, the security police and the army. Stalin needed all of them. He also required a situation in which no institution became so dominant as to threaten his position. The most obvious menace after the Second World War was the Red Army, and the country’s military hero Georgi Zhukov immediately came under his
