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:
A cadre must know how to carry out instructions, must understand them, adopt them as his own, attach the greatest importance to them, and make them part of his very existence. Otherwise, politics loses its meaning and consists merely of gesticulating. Hence the decisive importance of the cadres department in the apparatus of the Central Committee. Every functionary must be closely studied, from every angle and in the most minute detail.1
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.
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:
We have seen that orthodoxy incited heresy by condemning and naming it. But we must now add that orthodoxy, because it punished, because it hunted people, put in place a whole arsenal that then took on a life of its own, and which often survived the heresy it was supposed to be fighting. The historian must attend very carefully to these screening bodies and their specialist personnel, who were often former heretics making amends.
Because it hunted and punished people, orthodoxy also instilled particular mental attitudes: a dread of heresy, the conviction among the orthodox that heresy is hypocritical because it is concealed and, as a result, that it must be detected at all costs and by any means. On the other hand, repression created various systems of representation as an instrument of resistance and counter-propaganda; and these continued to operate for a very long time … Let us also reflect, much more straightforwardly, on the political use of heresy, of the heretical group treated as a scapegoat, with all the desirable amalgamations at any particular moment.3
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.