As yet, neither the state nor the party bureaucracy has a ‘history’, and we can only deal with a few of their key features here. For clarity’s sake, we must employ distinct terms for the personnel of the two ruling bodies. The state bureaucracy can be classified as the ‘administration’, while its upper echelons are often referred to as upravlentsy (the equivalent of ‘managers’) in Soviet sources. For its part, the party administration is best designated an ‘apparatus’ or apparat, and the apparatchik is precisely someone who holds a post in the party’s own administration. It is not always possible to distinguish clearly between these two categories, but even so the terminology is serviceable.
We have already alluded to the fact that from the time of its emergence the ‘apparatus’ created problems for party members. As early as 1920, voices were raised denouncing the increasing disparity between the verkhi (those at the top) and the nizy (those at the bottom), and they were taken seriously by both the rank and file and the leadership. Something that was to become obvious a few years later to the Soviets and outside observers alike – namely, the inequality between upper and lower echelons – was still a shock for members of a party that remained Bolshevik. In the miserable year of 1920, which I shall return to in Part Three, the leadership was embarrassed by the problem and allowed it to be aired in the party press. During the 1920s, the lack of equality and democracy inside party ranks was one of the key issues raised by the opposition while it could still express itself. But it was met with demagogic denials. Until the end of the 1920s (and even later), the battle against bureaucratic tendencies – ‘bureaucratization’ – in the state administration was officially authorized, and seemingly supported by the party leadership. It lent itself to scapegoating officials. Attacking bureaucratization in the party itself, especially when such criticism emanated from the successive oppositions, was an altogether different matter. Still, the party, which at the end of the 1920s had more than a million members and thousands of apparatchiks, could not afford to bury reactions to internal bureaucratization within its ranks, even though opposition had been practically eliminated.
Thus, it turned out that if an administration is a tool, it also takes its toll. The problem came under the jurisdiction of the party’s Central Control Commission (CCC). In June 1929, the chairman of its Presidium, Ia. A. Iakovlev, presented it with an outline of the intervention he intended to make on the theme of bureaucratization at the Sixteenth Party Conference. Not everything he said was included in the published record, but what does feature there is highly informative.1
Iakovlev, one of the ‘old guard’ still in post, did not hide his concerns: a struggle of the utmost vigour must be conducted against bureaucratization inside the party itself. According to him, the phenomenon could be explained by the fact that so many party members worked in the state administration and acquired there pernicious habits with which they were ‘contaminating’ the party. To counteract this trend, the party needed to fight for a democratic spirit within Soviet institutions and other governmental bodies, where those in charge were concentrating all power in their own hands and substituting themselves for the formal leading bodies of state and cooperative organizations. Democratization, he suggested, was the only way to treat the disease at source.
Such an approach by an old Bolshevik, who was known as an intelligent, competent administrator, testifies to a time when the party no longer tolerated being perceived as responsible for anything negative. He understood that if, as so often before, he engaged in a real analysis of the problem without quotation marks, he risked being accused of belonging to some opposition or other. Yet calls for more democracy and less bureaucracy, including within the party itself, featured in a mass of material addressed by local party organizations to the Control Commission and other leading bodies complaining about party bosses. These complaints were still being summarized in the 1920s by the party’s Information Service and circulated in a bulletin for the use of its top cadres. The bulletin also contained other documents deemed important, issuing from the trade unions and the GPU. At least twice a month it provided briefings on the mood and opinions of specific social groups, especially workers. It referred to strikes, but also to the reactions of party members who had participated in them. Certainly, in 1929 Pravda was not somewhere one would find the bitter accusations of workers who were party members and on strike against their bosses, who were themselves members. But the leadership was kept informed of such matters and regularly discussed what to do in response, for the most part without much publicity. Readers should also be aware that, regardless of what conclusions they might care to draw from the fact, during the 1920s GPU reports on labour disputes were mainly critical of both administrative and party bosses, who were accused of indifference and incompetence when it came to dealing with workers’ legitimate grievances. The reports often vindicated strikers and criticized the behaviour of union leaders. GPU and party information bulletins from the 1920s contain a mass of material of this type.
It was not inaccurate to say that the state apparatus was contaminating the party. But this was due to the existence of an apparatus peculiar to the party, which did all it could to prevent public animus against bureaucrats rebounding on it. The Central Committee had launched a major campaign, particularly during the struggle against the various oppositions in the 1920s, to defend and celebrate the party apparatus – those referred to as politrabotniki (party cadres) or even the party’s ‘faithful guard’. Nevertheless, non-party people and members who had remained loyal to Bolshevik ideals continued to amalgamate both types of cadre into the single category of ‘bureaucrat’. There were good reasons for this.
Once an apparatus has been set up, especially if it is intended to control other, larger apparatuses, it operates in an environment that secretes shared habits, behaviour and a mindset. The use of the term ‘comrade’ loses its magic if the ‘comrade’ is a superior who issues orders and determines your salary and promotion prospects. The new reality, which is now part of daily life, is very simple: ‘We are not on an equal footing but on a ladder, comrade Ivanov, and I am not your comrade, comrade Ivanov.’
The secretariat machinery was a pyramid. At its apex were the Politburo, Secretariat and the Orgburo; at its base, the party secretaries with their own secretariats at district level (the raiony, or lowest administrative levels). It was a system designed to serve the top party leadership in keeping tabs on two much larger pyramids: the scaffolding of the soviets and the much more powerful governmental administration, from the Council of People’s Commissars to its local agencies. The soviets, from the Supreme Soviet down to the local soviets, which further complicated an already intricate organizational structure, may be left to one side here. Their only reality consisted in accomplishing local administrative tasks. As a pyramid capped by the supreme soviets of each republic and by the Supreme Soviet of the USSR at the summit, they were scarcely more than a fiction preserved in order to claim residual allegiance to the revolutionary past and the popular sovereignty it had supposedly established. The local soviets were in fact subordinate to the Council of Commissars (renamed ‘ministries’ in 1946) and their departments. The whole bureaucratic set-up, composed of ‘pyramids’ and ‘scales’, was subject to control by a parallel party apparatus. The division between the two major administrative spheres was somewhat attenuated at the top inasmuch as the Prime Minister, and sometimes one of his deputies, was also a Politburo member. Similarly, interconnection between party and state bodies at the bottom of the ladder was ensured by the presence in every workplace of a party cell, which was itself integrated into a party organization covering the whole firm or ministry. If we add to this the fact that the great majority of important posts in the administration were held by party members, thanks to the so-called nomenklatura procedure (which we shall return to), we might wonder how much more supervision and control were required to render the system ‘crash-proof’. Were a planetary insurance company to exist offering insurance policies to states, it would probably take its cue from the Soviet method of handling such things.
Nevertheless, at every stage of our journey through the 1930s we shall encounter a sort of ‘permanent insecurity’ system, whose shadow hung over an apparatus that was intended both to run the party and to control the strategic layers of the upravlentsy. This mission came up against numerous fault-lines throughout the system. We shall have more than one occasion to ask whether one small apparatus can effectively master a much larger one, with the ultimate aim of controlling the whole society.
It is now time to offer some data about the party apparatus and the apparatchiki. ‘Bureaucratization’, frequently bemoaned since its onset, had rapidly assumed such proportions that it was a feature of all ruling and other bodies. Regularly criticized by ad hoc institutions formally designed to correct such faults, the phenomenon was reduced in public to an enumeration of bureaucratic malfunctions, with reassuring words to the effect that remedies existed whose results would be seen … one day. On the other hand, it should be noted that unpublished documents, especially in the post-Stalin era, were often quite frank and sometimes of good analytical quality. The effects of bureaucratization on Soviet citizens and party members alike, whether persons of integrity or careerists, were multiple.
Many party members, particularly idealistic ones who were ready to serve their country by taking on responsible positions at a local level or in ‘vanguard’ institutions, were often deeply disturbed by what bureaucratization was doing to the party and to them personally. Some did not dare use it as an explicit term of criticism: they just told their superiors that they felt they could do a better job elsewhere. But others would draw more far-reaching conclusions. A few examples from among a myriad of others will illustrate the difficulty of being a party apparatchik, even before the term had become established. Those who had previously waged the revolutionary struggle in clandestine activities, in prison or on the battlefield, and who were now engaged in the prestigious task of helping to build socialism, suddenly perceived – or gradually discovered – that working in a hierarchical apparatus was far from edifying. Quite the reverse: amid the tedious routines boredom predominated. Two examples, drawn from different years, reveal this malaise.
A well-known militant, Ksenofontov, wrote to Kaganovich on 4 November 1924.2 He had served in the Cheka, taken part in suppressing the Kronstadt uprising, and participated in restoring calm to the country thereafter. He had then asked to be released from such duties and transferred to a position where he could help to build the party-dominated system. Attached to the Central Committee, he was appointed head of its Business Administration department. He had been there for more than three years. Everything was highly organized, and his work was utterly routine. So he now wanted to move on and was hoping for another job from the Central Committee, provided it was not in the economy, trade or the cooperative sector, which did not attract him. At this time, such requests could be submitted without fear of reprisals – though telling Kaganovich that working for him had been uninteresting was perhaps not very prudent. Ksenofontov was authorized to switch to a job in education.
The second example, which dates from ten years later (November 1934), concerns another erstwhile revolutionary who complains about the profound tedium of work at the top of the apparatus. The story here is somewhat more convoluted. A certain Khavinson, deputy head of the ‘Department of Culture and Propaganda of Marxism-Leninism’, reported to his superiors about one comrade Slepchenko. A disciplined and steady worker, who chaired a party committee responsible since 1933 for checking membership lists, Slepchenko had been experiencing difficulties and asked to be transferred to work in production. ‘Working in the apparatus depresses me’, he is reported to have said. Such a statement, made when he had been asked to become aide to the Central Committee’s Industry Department, could have caused him problems. He too had written to Kaganovich, stating that after three years working in the apparatus he had not been able to adapt to it: ‘With every passing day, I am losing my identity.’ Khavinson was of the opinion that he should be accommodated and it is likely that he was allowed to quit, 1934 being (as we shall see) a good year.3
Such personal statements, which were acceptable despite their implicit criticism of the apparatus, can be usefully supplemented by a third example, containing a direct critique of the system. This denunciation was based on a solidly argued analysis and its author was a fine political sociologist, Christian Rakovsky. We have already spoken of him when he was head of the Ukrainian government in 1923 and opposed Stalin’s plans for the USSR. Accused of Trotskyism, he was exiled in 1928 to Astrakhan, a city whose climate was very bad for his heart condition. He nevertheless managed to hold out until 1934, while all the time producing critical studies of the state of the Soviet system. He ‘capitulated’ in 1934 when in urgent need of medical treatment. But it was not his heart that finally killed him.
The substance of his diagnosis went as follows: The party is now an aggregate of hundreds of thousands of individuals. What unites them is not a shared ideology, but the trepidation each has about his own fate. The question arises as to how a communist party can be recreated out of such an amorphous mass. There is no other way but to restore inner-party democracy.4 But restoring the party of Rakovsky’s past was an illusion – and he knew it. In another part of the same text, probably written somewhat later, he comments on the ongoing debate in the party over versions of the second five-year plan (1933–7) which, according to official declarations, was to be a ‘sober five-year plan’. In Rakovsky’s view, the years corresponding to this ‘sober’ plan would consummate the ‘total separation of the bureaucracy from the working class’ and witness the former transform itself into a ‘ruling stratum supported by the state apparatus’. Some thirty years later, in a widely acclaimed book,5 the Yugoslav Milovan Djilas supposedly made a theoretical innovation when he suggested that the USSR was now run by a ‘new class’.
These cases of disillusionment among highly placed cadres close to the corridors of power must be supplemented by information on the way in which ordinary party members lost their enthusiasm. It was long assumed that under Stalin it was not possible to leave the party without inviting reprisals. But the opening of the archives led to the discovery that such cases were real enough – sometimes even numerous – but rarely ostentatious, which explains why the phenomenon remained invisible for so long. The available data indicate that between 1922 and 1935 approximately one and a half million members left the party, mostly by failing to pay dues and thereby letting their membership lapse. Others changed workplace and address without re-registering with the local party branch. In other words, they drifted away and many of them were subsequently expelled. There were many workplaces where the number of those who had left the party exceeded current membership levels.6
These former members, and those excluded during the wave of so-called ‘pre-purges’ in 1935–6 when membership cards were being checked, afforded an automatic target for the onslaught of 1937–8. The one and a half million people who had left the party represented a huge pool of self-declared ‘enemies of the people’ for the NKVD to cast their nets in.
During the 1930s, the party apparatus grew ever larger and more complex. Stalin had the first and last word on everything, on every meeting and every institution. In one sense, this should have simplified decision-making and policy execution alike. But this simplification – it certainly seemed such to Stalin – was nothing but an illusion: the party apparatus continued to swell, which could only complicate things.
The number of People’s Commissariats also kept increasing – from ten in 1924 to eighteen in 1936 and then forty-one in 1940 – as did ‘state committees’ with Commissariat status like Gosplan, Grain Procurement, Higher Education and Artistic Affairs. Their staffs expanded at the same rate. The logic of party control as practised at the time dictated a corresponding adaptation. At every level, and especially at the centre, each party organization was instructed to create in its own apparatus branch departments, equipped with the appropriate personnel: heads, deputies, instructors, technical staff.7 By 1939 the Central Committee apparatus contained large structural directorates for each branch of state administration, as well as a massive ‘directorate for cadres’ (upravlenie kadrov). When Malenkov was its secretary, the Central Committee was composed of forty-five departments – one for practically each branch of government activity. At republican district levels, the party apparatuses were also constantly expanding, with ever more rigid hierarchies.
The conduct of internal party affairs was strictly centralized. Virtually everything of any importance ended up on the agenda of the Politburo, which took the final decision. This amounted to hundreds of items which, in a less centralized system, would never have been dealt with at this level. Predictably, with such a vast number of items to get through, the Politburo did not have time to go into the genuinely important ones. It operated on the basis that they would have been thrashed out en route from the Secretariat to the Orgburo. The overload at the top, and the exponential expansion of the party apparatus and state administration, created a vicious circle; and the system’s efficiency was almost inevitably relegated to the lowest priority. As long as increased staffing was primarily a means of meeting the obvious need to control a sprawling, unruly reality, amid a constant shortage of supplies and very low living standards, this vicious circle could not be broken. The truth of this claim can be attested by glancing at how things looked to those at the bottom of the ladder.
In a very gloomy letter, written following a tour of inspection of the party organization in the Far Eastern Province (Dal’kraikom) accompanied by a Central Committee instructor, Shcherbakov, head of the Central Committee’s Cadres Department, reported that what he had discovered resembled a ‘railway station in total chaos’. In one year (1 January 1933 to 1 January 1934), party membership in the region had shrunk from 44,990 to 23,340: 7,651 members had been expelled, 1,892 downgraded to the status of ‘sympathizers’, 1,557 had left the area with authorization and 6,328 without (they had simply deserted). Among the last group were people with a solid party record, but also irreplaceable specialists who were urgently required. According to the two inspectors, the reasons for the exodus were as follows: ‘an excessively bureaucratic attitude’ towards members displayed by the provincial party committee; neglect of their recreational and cultural needs; and scandalous housing conditions for workers and specialists alike. Some of them were still living in dug-outs; one family was living in the toilets; other families were staying in disgusting dormitories; five people were crammed into one room of six square metres; and so on. Construction materials and builders were being sent to the province every year, but the housing situation remained lamentable and public services were completely neglected (public baths, crèches, hospitals, theatres). The food situation was very bad and the provincial party committee was doing nothing. It simply expelled those who had deserted and constantly shuffled cadres around from place to place. In fact, no one knew for sure how many party members there were.
The apparatchik who wrote this gloomy report requested that the situation be investigated by the Orgburo (the level below the Politburo), or even be put on the agenda of the party’s Control Commission, in order to remedy things.
This sorry state of affairs involved a remote, low-priority region that would anyway have been assigned second- or third-rate leaders. But malfunctioning in local party organizations and administrative agencies was endemic in many more central regions. The constant expansion in the number of tasks and difficult living conditions easily outstripped the ability of party cadres to handle such problems. These regions lived in something like a permanent state of emergency, which they coped with reasonably, badly, or not at all – as in the just-cited case of the Dal’kraikom. Itself expanding rapidly, the party’s control apparatus could make reports, but was probably overwhelmed by what it found.
We have already seen that any mess, often caused by the centre’s own policies, was arbitrarily imputed to lower-level cadres. This was inherent in the Stalinist method of government. Any mishap, catastrophe, tragedy or chaotic situation could readily be interpreted as an act of sabotage. In this respect, party cadres enjoyed no privileges; as cadres, they were potentially guilty – and the higher the rank, the more likely this was. At a higher level of responsibility, they were capable of inflicting more damage than lower ranks could and for this reason were ‘naturally’ under suspicion.
This paranoiac system of government had an additional twist. There was no reason to wait for the danger actually to materialize. That would have been imprudent. Great leadership involved ‘preventive medicine’. Our initial analysis of the ‘cadre philosophy’, but also the disruption and human suffering we observe towards 1933 – consequent on the failures of the ‘collectivization’ of the peasantry and breakneck industrialization, not to mention the famine that struck the Ukraine and parts of Russia – mean that we are not in the least surprised to find massive recourse to such ‘preventive medicine’, in the form of large-scale bloody purges. A storm of protest was brewing against the government’s policy, especially in the countryside, and Stalin risked becoming the focus of it. This was quite unacceptable to him, and a spectacular campaign was launched to shift the blame elsewhere. Repressive measures were adopted and there were signs that something more was in the offing. In his speech to the Central Committee meeting of January 1933 on the state of the country, Stalin referred to a host of enemies undermining the regime’s foundations like termites. And yet, despite these ominous signals, the policy actually adopted in May 1933 took the opposite course, making the unanticipated ‘interlude’ of 1933–4 all the more remarkable. A country in the throes of famine may not buy the idea that the supreme leader has nothing to do with it. So the economic situation had to improve, and Stalin’s prestige be restored, before the mass terror was unleashed and took on the appearance of a manifestation of strength. Stalin was in the process of planning his killing frenzy, but he was doing it very methodically.
The Seventeenth Party Congress was held in April 1934. Dubbed the ‘Congress of the Victors’, it sang the praises of the main victor among them: Stalin. But it also epitomized the line of internal appeasement initiated a year earlier. It offered oppositionists the chance to appear before it, mainly to repent their errors in public. Just as remarkable were the decision substantially to reduce the growth rates fixed for the second five-year plan (1933–7) and an appeal for greater respect for legality in the country. The new line was proclaimed with much fanfare, and signals were sent to the effect that the regime finally had its feet firmly on the ground. A Writers’ Congress took place the same year, which seriously discussed literary issues and celebrated the passing of the sectarian Writers’ Union. Less noticed at the time was a short speech by one Andrei Zhdanov – a party secretary, not a writer – laying down, almost sotto voce, the line of ‘socialist realism’ in all the arts. If it went largely unremarked, it was because it was overshadowed by spectacular interventions from Bukharin, Radek and Ehrenburg, and many others, which were much more open and intellectually stimulating.
These moves were important ingredients of the ‘new line’. In a letter to Stalin of 13 September 1934,8 Ehrenburg took it seriously. His hopes were raised by the USSR’s new foreign policy, with entry into the League of Nations and ‘common fronts’ between communists and social-democrats in response to the rise of fascism. But he complained about the Soviet organization responsible for relations with foreign writers, denouncing its sectarianism and taste for petty quarrels which repelled internationally renowned writers. Only a few writers of such stature, like André Malraux and Jean-Richard Bloch, had been invited to the congress. As for the others, it would have been better not to invite them. Amid the mounting power and aggressiveness of fascism, Ehrenburg believed that it was possible to create an anti-fascist writers’ association in the West, which would rally leading literary figures and help defend the Soviet Union. Such an initiative was now more realistic: foreign participants had been impressed by the serious open exchanges between communists and non-communists and persuaded of the flourishing state of culture and literature in the USSR. But the new organization must not, he insisted, be run by sectarians.
In a handwritten note to Kaganovich, Stalin registered his agreement with Ehrenburg. Such an organization should be established and organized around the two themes he had suggested: anti-fascism and defence of the USSR. He was proposing some names and awaited a response. Here we see a businesslike Stalin, quite different from the one sniffing out ‘termites’ everywhere. The 1934 interlude was still under way. Kaganovich, number two in the Politburo at the time, was vigorously promoting the ‘new line’ aimed at strengthening respect for the law: ‘We can now punish people via the legal system without resorting to extra-judicial means as in the past. Many cases that went exclusively through the GPU will now be handled by the courts.’
Kaganovich made this statement on 1 August 1934 during a special conference convened by the Prosecutor General’s Office, whose sphere – when it received authorization at least – was precisely ‘legality’. Kaganovich also reminded his audience that the GPU itself would be undergoing changes and merged into a new ministerial department, the NKVD (Commissariat of Internal Affairs). He explained that the Prosecutor General’s Office was the central institution in the legal system, and that with the creation of the NKVD it would have many more cases to process. Henceforth the main task was to educate the population and legal personnel to respect the law. Such, he said, was the line decided by Stalin. A major obstacle to surmount was the lack of education within the legal system itself. Judges were supposed to operate on the basis of codes, but all too often their pronouncements were unclear. Everyone now had to learn the text of the law: ‘Citizens have to know that there are laws and that they also apply to the apparatus.’
We might mention in passing that on the basis of this new enhanced role, the legal apparatus requested a significant salary increase. Kaganovich stalled, suggesting that the new line should not be ushered in with such a selfish move …
These outpourings of moderation, level-headedness and good sense contained not the slightest hint as to what was brewing, and which would explode after Kirov’s assassination at the end of 1934. Sometimes attributed to other leaders, the ‘liberal interlude’ was in fact Stalin’s own – just like what was to follow.
As the evidence available to us today indicates, Stalin never forgot or forgave past critics. Take the case of Bukharin. On the face of it he was forgiven, became editor-in-chief of Izvestiia, and kept up a friendly correspondence with Stalin. He felt entitled to print all manner of opinions on industrialization, collectivization, and the NEP. He often presented analyses or assessments that differed from official pronouncements. For example, he laid firm stress on the fact that the high rate of investment fixed for heavy industry was having pernicious economic effects, at a time when other, more promising alternatives were available. Whereas the Bukharin of 1928 had seen Stalin for what he was, in 1934 he was playing with fire, probably in the belief that the lull of that year derived from a sincere desire to rectify a policy whose negative results he had anticipated. He regarded it as legitimating his opposition to Stalin in 1928–9. Moreover, this is precisely how Stalin read the situation. Bukharin never suspected that Stalin was setting a trap for him, encouraging other leaders to write articles against him and circulating all sorts of acerbic remarks about him in the Politburo, while concealing what he really had in mind.
Stalin enjoyed this game. He was absolutely convinced that everyone, including his current entourage, had ‘offended’ him at some point, had belonged to a different faction, spoken disparagingly about him, or said a good word about Trotsky. All this remained engraved in his rancorous memory. In the case of Bukharin, it cannot be excluded that his speech to the Writers’ Congress and the impressive agenda he set there had rekindled Stalin’s resentment.9
Whoever was responsible for Kirov’s murder, it is clear that Stalin was by now ready to change line overnight, to write the most murderous and authentically ‘Stalinist’ chapter of them all. The ‘other policy’ – the terror – was always on his mind, ready to be activated. The interlude was nothing but a requisite pause following a spasm. Whether such increases and reductions in political tension and terror also reflected Stalin’s fluctuating state of mind remains a matter for conjecture.