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Stalin's World

Dictating the Soviet Order

Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS

"BOLSHEVIK" LEADERSHIP

The opening of the Soviet archives told us more about the way the state worked than anything else. The archives confirmed much that we already knew, but it has been possible to add considerable nuance to the picture. For all that progress, though, scholars are still locked in a debate about whether the Soviet state under Stalin was "weak" or "strong." Does the big picture show us that Stalin gradually built an unassailable personal dictatorship in the 1930s, or that he was embattled, frustrated, and angered by the unresponsiveness of officialdom to the will of the center?

Some of the best work on the subject has suggested a sort of middle ground. Paul Gregory, R. W. Davies, and others have argued convincingly that although Stalin was the final arbiter in all significant matters of policy, he "was not immune to pressure and persuasion from Politburo members, or from society at large." Gregory emphasizes the role of "bargaining" between the center and "lower levels" in shaping policy. The most obvious manifestation of this came after the persistent crises of the first five-year plan, when targets were reduced to more sustainable levels in the second plan.

The suggestion is that neither the "weak state" nor the "strong state" perspective accounted adequately for the process of bargaining that underlay the evolution of policy. But one needs to be careful, because the process of bargaining was not stable and its "rules," to the extent that there were any, were far from clear. Davies and Gregory account for changes in policy such as the moderation of plan targets and the relatively stable growth of 1934–37, but neither accounts for the devastating purge of state and party officialdom at the end of those "three good years." Davies has argued emphatically that economic problems did not contribute to the purge. But if the economy was doing well, and the process of bargaining was having its effect, why did Stalin see fit to decimate officialdom in 1937 and 1938? Is the notion of bargaining a useful middle ground for understanding the weak-state/strong-state conundrum?

This chapter examines Stalin's conception of "Bolshevik" leadership and administration from his early years as General Secretary to the Great Terror of 1936–38 as a way of addressing the conundrum. It argues that Stalin's experience as de facto head of state convinced him that he, and perhaps his inner circle, were alone in upholding the interests of the state as a whole. When he declared in the early 1930s that officials were not permitted to cite "objective" reasons for failing to meet targets, he effectively closed off a key source of information about the situation in the country. Often asked to do the impossible, officials learned the fine arts of expectation management, evasion, and even the subversion of central directives. Stalin did manage to build a state apparatus capable of extraordinary feats of mass mobilization, but it was never as responsive as he thought it should be. He knew about the "coping behaviors" of Soviet officialdom from the work of agencies checking the fulfillment of decisions, but he never grasped that these behaviors were products of the excessive demands issued by the center. In forbidding any attribution of underfulfillment to the demands of the plan, Stalin inhibited his capacity to understand and resolve economic problems. The reduction of plan targets by 1933 powerfully reinforced his determination to obtain complete plan fulfillment, though plans remained taut and local officials continued to exhibit coping behaviors that Stalin was ever less willing to tolerate.

By the mid-1930s, he showed a growing concern for the "dvurushnik," the "two-faced" official who praised policy in public and worked to subvert it behind closed doors. He increasingly argued that officialdom was littered with enemies of the Revolution. Though the economy grew stably for three years from 1934, by 1937 Stalin felt compelled to root out the "dvurushnik." Because the coping behaviors were so pervasive, the political violence directed against economic officials was doomed to be devastating. The mechanism of "bargaining" had failed in this instance. So how can we resolve the strong-state/weak-state conundrum? In short, the state was strong, but Stalin and his inner circle perceived it to be weak.

Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky

To understand the origins of the purge of economic officials, it is important to understand the evolution of Stalin's views on leadership and administration. As the tide of the civil war was turning in the Bolsheviks' favor, Lenin turned his attention to new demands that would be placed on the state apparatus in the post-war era. At first he calculated that a network of inspectors (Rabkrin—the "Workers' and Peasants' Inspectorate") could be a guarantor of an efficient and effective state apparatus. Stalin was the first head of the Inspectorate and his two years in charge did not reinforce his reputation as a skilled administrator. Rabkrin proved only to be "an additional source of muddle, corruption, and bureaucratic intrigue." As Lenin reflected on this failure, he warned against building communism by means of the mass mobilization characteristic of the civil war period and accepted that the Bolsheviks lacked a solid grasp of how to organize the state:

We must show sound skepticism for too rapid progress, for boastfulness, etc. We must give thought to testing the steps forward we proclaim every hour, take every minute and then prove every second that they are flimsy, superficial, and misunderstood. The most harmful thing here would be haste ... [W]e must not forget that we are too prone to compensate (or imagine that we can compensate) our lack of knowledge by zeal, haste, etc.

In order to renovate our state apparatus we must at all costs set out, first, to learn, second, to learn, and third, to learn, and then see to it that learning shall not remain a dead letter, or a fashionable catchphrase (and we should admit in all frankness that this happens very often with us), that learning shall really become part of our very being, that it shall actually and fully become a constituent element of our social life. In short, we must not make the demands that were made by bourgeois Western Europe, but demands that are fit and proper for a country that has set out to develop into a socialist country ... We ought to at once announce a contest in the compilation of two or more textbooks on the organization of labor in general, and on management in particular ... We ought to send several qualified and conscientious people to Germany, or to Britain, to collect literature and to study this question.

And yet at the same time, he was not proposing that the Soviet state be organized and run like Germany or England. Rather, he insisted that the knowledge of administration obtained through careful study be applied in such a way that bureaucratic practice would not be a drag on revolutionary change: "In all spheres of social, economic, and political relationships we are 'frightfully' revolutionary. But as regards precedence, the observance of the forms and rites of office management, our 'revolutionariness' often gives way to the mustiest routine. On more than one occasion, we have witnessed the very interesting phenomenon of a great leap forward in social life being accompanied by amazing timidity whenever the slightest changes are proposed."

Lenin never clarified how the best of European administrative practices could be employed to underpin revolutionary change. Shortly after publishing these reflections in Pravda, he suffered the stroke that permanently removed him from politics and initiated the struggle to succeed him. In that struggle, Stalin and Trotsky were the key figures; the issue of how the state should function was one of the key debating points between them, and their contributions to that debate were substantially influenced by the political struggle, with each contribution a carefully crafted exercise in self-promotion and character assassination.

What were Stalin's views on the Soviet state? From the time of the Revolution, no one apart from Lenin was as involved as Stalin in the task of making the machinery of the Soviet state work. After his rather inglorious years as Commissar of State Control and chief of Rabkrin, fighting "bureaucratism" and improving the quality of Soviet administration, Stalin was appointed the General Secretary of the party. There, he looked at the same problem from only a slightly different perspective. As General Secretary, he was responsible for assigning party officials to the most important posts in the capital and the regions. His focus shifted from the question of what made effective institutions to that of the qualities of intellect and temperament that made a Bolshevik a good leader. This seems to have suited him much better. As we shall see, Stalin never had a particularly sophisticated grasp of how institutions function and what makes them effective. Stalin was always more interested in individual cadres. From within the Secretariat, Stalin developed the view that cadres need considerable training in general education, in Marxism-Leninism, and especially in the actual practice of running an organization. Not everyone could rise to the challenge and become a proper Bolshevik leader, and if they did not, they should be replaced with someone who had that potential. Stalin was convinced that the right person, in charge of the right team, could have a transformative effect on the work of any organization.

In the emerging political struggle, Stalin knew he was vulnerable to the accusation that he was not a sophisticated thinker. He was a capable administrator but he was shaken by the Rabkrin experience, and it left him vulnerable to the accusation that he was a mere bureaucrat. Yet Trotsky was perhaps in an even more disadvantageous position. He was head of the Red Army as the civil war was coming to a close. His position could only remain relevant if the Soviet Union remained at war with the capitalist world. Most of Stalin's few published speeches and articles from the time are calculated to stress that his role had become the more important one. For example, in the summer of 1921, he argued that since the civil war had been won, the central task had shifted "from all for the war to all for the economy." The future of the regime was not in further revolutionary wars abroad. On the contrary, "our domestic successes make us the avant-garde of the world revolution." Now was the time for cooperation with the capitalist powers, rather than confrontation: "The proletariat must hold firmly the power it has won, skillfully employ the wealth and knowledge of the bourgeoisie for the economic regeneration of the country." Trotsky responded by observing the parlous state of the apparatus. Not only was it full of corrupt and class-alien elements, but it also lacked clear organizational principles. He argued that Stalin had done little to bring order out of the chaos. Stalin replied by reasserting the consensus view among Bolshevik leaders that periodic purges were necessary to remove corrupt, careerist, and class-alien elements from the party and state structures, but he insisted that Trotsky was insulting the CC, which had done much to correct the situation. He took no credit for his work in Rabkrin on the fulfillment of decisions, which was going nowhere. Rather, he emphasized his efforts within the CC to create a unified and centralized system of decision making at the top and bring a basic order to the system.

In his first year as General Secretary, Stalin said and wrote little about his work, but in the course of 1923, he began to express his views on leadership and administration with some regularity. As his struggle with Trotsky had not diminished, these views continued to be colored by the political imperatives of the Lenin succession. While Trotsky warned about incompetence, corruption, and the "embourgeoisement" of the apparatus, Stalin understood that such criticisms were insulting to officials and that Trotsky risked alienating a key constituency whose support could play a decisive role in the leadership struggle. In April 1924, Stalin addressed that very constituency when he gave the "Organization Report" to the twelfth party congress. His speech was modest and conciliatory. He observed that the role of the party was not only to give the correct political line, but also to ensure that the right people are in place to realize it. Regional party officials were the key in that strategy, "lead[ing] the economic and political life of the region." Stalin acknowledged that producing good leaders was not easy. Few members of regional party committees had experience in running a large organization. The most capable officials were concentrated in regional centers and the quality of officialdom tapered off dramatically from there. Stalin discussed the challenge of producing new leaders, while taking another swipe at Trotsky the military leader: "It takes five to ten years and more. It is easier to conquer a country with the help of comrade Budennyi's cavalry than to draw two or three cadres from below who can in time become real leaders of the country." Those five to ten years were not to be spent in study. You can't teach cadres with books, he insisted, only on the job. He complimented the regional officials for learning on the job in the past year, and he repeated the compliments at subsequent meetings with leading (otvetstvennye) workers.

Leading officials were indeed learning on the job, and the double-digit growth rates generated by the NEP economy in these years appeared to be proof of that, but the apparatus was not functioning smoothly by any measure. Stalin could not be boundlessly patient with leading Soviet officials; he had to make the system work. Perhaps the biggest problem for Stalin was that the apparatus was riven with factional infighting (skloki). Lines of authority remained foggy, and in the absence of a clear and universally agreed hierarchy of power, infighting was inevitable. Officials preferred to give orders rather than to take them. Regular meetings of leading workers were meant to "build mutual understanding between those who develop policy and those who implement it," but they were not enough. Stalin decided to reinforce the powers of existing "bosses," and particularly the local party secretaries. In effect, the bosses became the main arbiters of the struggles, with the power to remove officials who did not submit to their decisions.

In time, the creation of powerful bosses dealt with the problem of bureaucratic infighting and the lack of clarity in the administrative hierarchy, but Stalin had failed to anticipate that the move would create other problems. Stalin soon found himself criticizing those bosses who exercised their powers too aggressively and without regard to the attitudes and opinions of those they led. This was a "habit of civil-war days," Stalin warned. He demanded that they combine an active encouragement of the broadest expression of opinion and the criticism of "mistakes" with "iron discipline" and a "unity of will." It was not enough just to exercise their power. Leaders had to carry their organizations with them. In a letter to a leading official of the German Communist Party, Stalin wrote: "I am decidedly against simply removing comrades who hold opinions different from one's own. I am against it not because I want to preserve those differences, but because that sort of approach leads to a regime of fear, a regime that undermines the spirit of self-criticism and initiative [from below]. It is not good when the leaders of the party are feared but not respected. Leaders are real leaders only if they are not only feared, but also respected, if they have authority in the party."

In this respect, Lenin was the obvious model. Stalin observed that, by force of argument, Lenin had carried the Bolsheviks with him. He had respected the opinion of the majority, but never became its hostage. At times, he took principled positions against the majority and brought it around to his point of view with his clarity of vision and force of argument. This model remained something of an ideal for party officials in leadership posts. Stalin had given them dictatorial powers to sort out the skloki and they were not about to renounce their use. Besides which, carrying an organization with "clarity of vision and force of argument" was a lot to expect of officials with little more than a primary education and often with only the crudest understanding of Marxism-Leninism.

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Excerpted from Stalin's World by Sarah Davies, James Harris. Copyright © 2014 Yale University. Excerpted by permission of Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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