growth rates were administered in the First Five-Year Plan. Agricultural collectivisation had been directed in the same way. The point was that the entire administrative system operated on the premise that lower-level officials had to be given precise numerical indicators. Stalin and the Politburo knew that the information reaching them from the localities was frequently unreliable. Misinformation was a basic defect of the Soviet order. Just as waste occurred in industrial production, so unnecessary human losses could be accepted in the Great Terror. So long as Stalin achieved the ultimate aim of eradicating most of that mass of disgruntled individuals who might remain a menace he had no compunction about the mayhem he caused.
Unmistakably he had become the country’s despot. He had eliminated foes in every institution. Not even the party had restrained him. Among the main results of the Great Terror had been drastic reduction in the party’s power and status. Stalin had turned himself into the unchallengeable individual locus of state authority. His was a most personal autocracy. He had come closer to total despotism than almost any monarch in history. He held sway over the Soviet state; no state institution could push him into decisions which he found uncongenial. Grand policy was firmly in his grasp and, by unpredictable interventions in smaller affairs of state, he caused all holders of office to try and anticipate his wishes. The state, moreover, kept its people in a condition of traumatic subservience. Civil society barely existed. Only the Russian Orthodox Church kept the slightest vestige of autonomy from the state — and it was scarcely much of an autonomy when tens of thousands of priests had been murdered. Every other institution and association was subject to the requirements of the central political authorities. Stalin had stabilised his despotism and its structures by means of the Great Terror, and the pervasiveness of control by the one-party state was deep and irresistible.
Yet this was not a totalitarian dictatorship as conventionally defined because Stalin lacked the capacity, even at the height of his power, to secure automatic universal compliance with his wishes. He could purge personnel without difficulty. But when it came to ridding the Soviet order of many informal practices he disliked, he was much less successful. In such cases he was like someone trying to strike a match on a block of soap.
Constraints continued to exist upon his rule. In 1937 he had told the Party Central Committee that he intended to eradicate the network of political patronage in the USSR. Yet cliental groups survived. The politics of the USSR continued to involve patronage — and in many parts of the country this meant links based on families and clans. There were also local ‘nests’ of functionaries leading the party, soviets and other public institutions. Technical and social obstacles to a neat vertical system of state power remained. Functionaries promoted in the late 1930s, however much they admired Stalin, saw it was vital to be cautious in messages to Moscow. Misinformation from below remained a basic local requirement for self-protection. The press, judiciary and market had countervailed only weakly against provincial political establishments under the NEP; they had massively less weight — if indeed they had any weight at all — after 1928. The situation changed little after 1938. Stalin’s clique could not know everything with the desired accuracy. Promoted functionaries were keen to enjoy their privileges. Stalin needed to treat them well materially; he could not permanently rely on terror alone.
He had a clear understanding of this. He had deliberately promoted the young and working-class cadres to high postings. Whereas in France and Britain the old clung to power, Stalin had brought on a fresh generation to replace the ageing veterans of the October Revolution — and he was pleased with his achievement.8 He had promoted young adults to all rungs on the ladder of party and government. This had long been one of his objectives, and he had attained it by the most brutal methods. At the end of the Great Terror he sought to keep the promotees on his side. The system of graduated perks and privileges was maintained. The higher the rung, the greater the reward. Stalin bribed them into murderous complicity. The administrative beneficiaries of the purges had a fixed higher income and guaranteed access to goods and services denied to the rest of society. Even if they did not literally step into dead men’s shoes, they certainly took possession of their apartments, dachas, paintings, carpets and pianos. They hired their tutors, chauffeurs and nannies. The promoted officials belonged to a privileged elite.
Stalin wished to sedate the minds of officials still fearful that he might resume the terror. At the celebratory Eighteenth Party Congress in March 1939, his general report picked up the theme:9
The correct selection of cadres means:
Firstly to value cadres like the gold reserve of party and state, to cherish them, to show them respect.
Secondly to know the cadres, to make a careful study of the virtues and defects of each cadre official, to know how to facilitate the official’s capacities.
Thirdly to cultivate the cadres, to help each growing official to rise higher, not to begrudge time in handling these officials patiently and hastening their growth.
Fourthly to promote new, young cadres boldly and in a timely fashion, to avoid letting them stand around in the same old place or letting them go stale.
His appeal to the recent promotees was fervent. Unnamed discussants, he declared, thought it better for the state to ‘orientate itself to the old cadres’ with all their experience. But Stalin insisted that the wiser course was the one he had chosen.10 Not for the last time he gave the impression that the promotees had no firmer friend than himself.
Having created a new administrative elite, he wanted their allegiance. It was for them more than for any other group in society that he had ordered the publication of the
A technocratic imperative was being proclaimed, and Stalin was putting himself forward as the Leader of the newly reformed USSR. With typical false modesty — and even self-pity — he pretended that the burden of individual leadership had somehow been thrust upon him. At times he complained about this. While other Soviet leaders tended the business of their assigned institutions, he gave consideration to the entire range of affairs. At a supper party in 1940 he was quite mawkish:13
But I
Yes, I can study, read, follow things up each day. But why can’t you do that? You don’t like to study, you go on living complacently. You waste Lenin’s legacy.
When Kalinin protested that they were always short of time, Stalin exclaimed: ‘No, that’s not the point! People wet behind the ears don’t want to study and re-study. They listen to me and then leave everything as it was before. But I’ll show the lot of you if I lose my patience. And you know how I can do that!’ This was a charade: Stalin would have locked up any Politburo members poking their noses into what he regarded as exclusively his business.
While wanting his policies to be followed, however, Stalin demanded that his subordinates should give frank, instant opinions. Every so often he got each of them on his own and enquired about options. For Stalin, Politburo members were useless unless they could come up with ideas for fresh measures. His period of rule was characterised by constant emergency. This made for an arena of discussion which would have driven most men crazy. Stalin was incessantly looking for signs of weakness or treachery. If they seemed shifty, he told them so; and he had a knack of catching them off guard. Always Stalin was querying whether a subordinate was ‘sincere’. He could not abide what official propaganda referred to as ‘double-dealing’. His ideal communist party associate was ruthless, dynamic, straightforward and utterly loyal. He liked, too, individuals who came ‘from the people’. Not all his subordinates, even after the Great Terror had spent itself, were working class or peasant in origin. Indeed Molotov, Zhdanov and Malenkov were distinctly middle class by parentage. But the general tone in Stalin’s entourage was never genteel, and all his subordinates had to join in displays of the crude masculinity which the Boss liked.
Like all bullies, Stalin acted out his fantasies. If ever any of these Soviet leaders was insincere in his behaviour to his intimates, it was the Boss himself. His was the least straightforward personality of all of them. He would have hated to be asked the piercing questions with which he skewered others. In identifying personal
