backward, dark fellow, I cannot imagine the construction of socialism without tight cohesion of our party and leadership. I fully understand what will happen if at the heart of the construction of socialism are quarrelling, lack of coordination, disunity. We will build nothing. And how will the bourgeoisie and the western countries look on us? They will make fun of us, they will listen open-mouthed, expecting the break-up of our soviet power. If there are quarrels this will once again make it easier for provocateurs and Mensheviks to spread their lying propaganda against soviet power. I am a young worker who was born in 1902 and who joined the Komsomol in 1923.
Letter from P. Ivanov, a worker, to the Central Committee Vyshchi Ol'chedaevskii works, Nemirch station, Mogilev district,
This ideological and psychological context helps us to understand why Stalin came out on top in the inner- party conflict; but it hardly explains how an able but relatively inconspicuous 'organization man' could become one of the 20th century's most savage tyrants. To appreciate this, one must look to Stalin's personality and to his brilliant grasp of machine politics. Stalin, in contrast to Lenin and Trotsky, was born into poverty, into a family where his violent and drunken father was frequently absent. This early experience bred a deeply pessimistic outlook on life; he shared completely the view of Machiavelli -whom he had read - that 'men are ungrateful, fickle, liars and deceivers'. Outshone intellectually by the likes of Trotsky and Kamenev, he made his mark by his immense capacity for detailed work. A first-rate tactician with an excellent memory, he was cool and calculating, averse to the histrionics to which Zinovievand Trotsky were prone. In the words of M. I. Riutin, leader of the last of the opposition groupings in the early 1930s, he was 'narrow-minded, sly, power-loving, vengeful, treacherous, envious, hypocritical, insolent, boastful, stubborn'. What this misses is the fact that he was also genial and unstuffy, with a capacity to make himself agreeable.
From April 1922 Stalin was the only member of the oligarchy who was simultaneously a full member of the Politburo, theOrgburo, and the Secretariat. Through control of the latter two organs, he was able to influence the agenda of the Politburo and to determine the appointment of personnel down to local district party secretaries. One of his first acts as general secretary was to order the latter to report to him personally by the fifth of each month. Gradually, he used his patronage to appoint supporters to key positions in the party-state apparatus and to break up the power bases of his opponents, including Zinoviev's stronghold in Leningrad and Uglanov's rightist base in Moscow. At each of the key turning-points in the inner-party struggle, with the exception of the battle against the'rightist deviation' in 1928, most lower-level party leaders swung behind Stalin. By 1929 the 'moustachioed one' had acquired absolute control over the party
machine, turning the Secretariat into his personal chancery and revealing a positively byzantine capacity for intrigue and subterfuge.
Party and people
During the 1920s a new ruling elite began to emerge, defined by its privileges and powerful political connections. The key mechanism through which it was constituted was the 'nomenklatura' system, established in 1920, whereby the Central Committee (or the relevant provincial or district committee in the case of junior positions) reserved to itself the right to make key appointments in party and state administration. By 1922 the personnel assignment office of the Central Committee was responsible for over 10,000 appointments nation-wide. The emergent elite consisted of party officials at
g 100,000 at middle and lower levels. When one adds senior officials in
I
e the state apparatus, including industry and education, perhaps half a
jg million people - out of a working population of more than 86 million -
Conference in August 1922, responsible officials down to the level of
district party secretaries were guaranteed rations, housing, uniforms,
health care, and rest cures in the Crimea. Family members also enjoyed
these privileges. However, in contrast to their counterparts in capitalist
countries, members of the elite derived power and privilege from
tenure of office, rather than ownership of property and wealth, and they
enjoyed no security of tenure and were unable to bequeath their office
to their offspring.
Between 1921 and 1929 party membership roughly doubled, to reach over a million, in spite of a series of'purges' - a term that had not yet acquired a sinister ring - to remove hundreds of thousands of members for passivity, careerism, or drunkenness. The party succeeded in 'proletarianizing' itself, insofar as by 1927 nearly half its members were
lie
workers by social origin. Over 300,000 of these'workers', however, were actually occupied in white-collar or administrative positions. As this expansion took place, 'Old Bolsheviks' went into eclipse. In 1925 only 2,000 members had joined the party before 1905. Many of these were intellectuals, who had suffered imprisonment and internal exile or lived for periods abroad, whose values were very different from those of plebeian incomers. Most of the incomers had only primary education and little grasp of Marxist theory. In the mid-ig20s the party control commission found that 72% of party members in Voronezh were 'politically illiterate'. Though doubtless sincere, they understood building socialism largely as entailing the conscientious performance of tasks set down by the leadership. Moreover, as secret police reports regularly commented, not least of their motivations was the desire 'to get a higher-paying job and a good apartment'. Those plebeians promoted into administrative positions - and in Votskaia autonomous region (formerly part of Viatka province) they constituted no less than half the party membership - sawtheir promotion as proof that the proletariat was now the ruling class, although probably no more than 5% of the total workforce ever benefited from such upward mobility.
Meanwhile the'bureaucratization' of the party continued apace. In his last years, perhaps under the strain of illness, Lenin's writings took on a dark, pessimistic tone. 'We are being sucked into a foul, bureaucratic swamp.' Yet he continued to believe that the solution lay in promoting workers and in getting the Workers and Peasants' Inspectorate (Rabkrin)and the party control commission to wage war on inefficiency and inertia in the state and party respectively. These new agencies, however, rapidly succumbed to the disease they were meant to cure. In Tver' no less than 29 different sections of Rabkrin carried out an inspection of the local textile industry. The 1920s saw endless appeals to activists to expose corruption, incompetence, and capriciousness, but there was little awareness that'bureaucratism'was a systemic rather than an individual problem. At the same time, despite the proliferating division of labour, the ramified hierarchies, and the ever-lengthening
trail of paperwork, the operation of power was not strictly 'bureaucratic' at all. For the system relied far more on personalized authority than on formal institutions and procedures. Middle-and lower-level officials, with little security of tenure or institutional protection against superiors, developed networks of clients to consolidate their
