Let us start with a simple, surprising discovery: the same man for whom family life meant so little (in fact, he took no interest in it), and whose personal life was a terrible mess (but did this really affect him?), chose as a ruler to personalize and privatize institutional power. No wonder: this – and not much else – was his life. To effect this strange project, he employed the method of fragmenting key political institutions and emptying them of their substance.
We can start with the party, which is where things are clearest. As an autonomous organization, which is what it had been under Bolshevism, the party was liquidated, transformed into a bureaucratic apparatus, and treated as such – i.e. with some considerable disdain. Symptomatically, the old party principle of ‘party maximum’ (whereby a member, whatever his position in the hierarchy, could not earn more than a skilled worker) was abandoned as early as 1932, along with other remnants of the initial egalitarianism, and was contemptuously referred to as uravnilovka (levelling down). The reason was obvious: an ‘egalitarian apparatus’ is as realistic as a square circle. To motivate and control the apparatchiks, they now had to climb a ladder of responsibilities and privileges. Lower-level bosses in the party and state administration (who were mostly party members) no longer played the game of ‘proletarian fraternity’. The call from above was for tough, authoritarian task-masters (Stalin called them ‘commanders’), forming a ruling stratum (nachal’stvo) whose structural hierarchy covered the whole system. They were supported and flattered, but not allowed to settle down and stabilize their position. This was something peculiar to the Stalinist dictatorship, which would be abandoned after it. As Stalin tightened his grip on power, we find him dismantling the many erstwhile party-state consultative bodies, which the Politburo used to convene systematically. He emasculated all institutions of any weight, including (surprisingly for those not already aware of it) the Politburo itself.
This core institution remains little understood, and it is therefore worth taking a look at its operation in 1935–6 – years of violent tremors preceding the veritable earthquake of 1937.
On 1 February 1935, the Central Committee plenum elevated Mikoyan and Chubar to the rank of full members of the Politburo, while Zhdanov and Eikhe became candidate members. No juggling of ‘moderates’ and ‘radicals’ was involved here – just a formal procedure for filling empty posts. Mikoyan and Chubar replaced Kirov (assassinated) and Kuibyshev (deceased), because they had long been candidate members and had held high-level jobs since 1926. Eikhe, leader of an important remote region (Western Siberia), was not able to participate in meetings regularly. As for Zhdanov, it was impossible to deny him candidate membership: he had been a Central Committee secretary since 1934, worked as a de facto Politburo member, and was going to replace Kirov as Leningrad party secretary.
The redistribution of functions and responsibilities within the Politburo (27 February 1937), probably decided during a pre-meeting between some Politburo members and Stalin, was significant. Andreev left his job as Railways Commissar and became a Central Committee secretary. Kaganovich took over railways and kept his position as Central Committee secretary, but gave up his duties on the party’s Central Control Commission and the Moscow party committee. Andreev joined the very powerful Orgburo (which prepared dossiers for the Politburo) and became its head. But preparation of the Orgburo’s agenda was to be done in collaboration with Ezhev, who now headed the Control Commission. Andreev was also put in charge of the Central Committee’s industrial department (where he replaced Ezhev) and assigned to supervise the Central Committee’s transport department and its current affairs department. For his part, Ezhev was given the important post of head of the department of ‘leading party organs’. All the other departments, particularly culture and propaganda, remained under Stalin’s personal supervision. Kaganovich retained oversight of the Moscow regional and city party committees, but he was requested to prioritize his work at the Railways Commissariat. He was a trusted trouble-shooter and this sector required a firm hand.
This reorganization gives an idea of Central Committee activity and, in particular, of the most important departments and posts. Our source, Oleg Khlevniuk, provides us with an interpretative key, demonstrating that underlying the redistribution of duties there was a deliberate policy on the part of Stalin.1 He was seeking to disperse and dilute the power of his close associates. Kaganovich, previously considered second in command, lost this rank. Formally, he was replaced by Andreev, who, in some spheres, shared his responsibilities with Ezhev. Andreev had important Politburo responsibilities, but a department of lesser importance (industry), whereas Ezhev, who was not a Politburo member, ran key departments and for this reason participated in its meetings. Stalin had entrusted him with major responsibilities at Internal Affairs (the NKVD). In this capacity, he organized the trial of Zinoviev. Charged with supervising the NKVD for the party, he formulated the statutes for its espionage and counter-espionage department, the GUGB (General Department of State Security), and effectively controlled the NKVD for eighteen months, before officially becoming Commissar for Internal Affairs. His first job as head of the party Control Commission was to organize the campaign for checking membership cards – a kind of ‘prepurge’. He was then responsible for the purges for one and a half years.
Zhdanov was assigned to Leningrad, but was to spend ten days a month in Moscow. Pursuing his policy of dispersal, Stalin next decided that rather than three Central Committee secretaries (himself, Kaganovich and Zhdanov), there would henceforth be five. And the post of Stalin’s ‘deputy’ disappeared. He now saw Politburo members more rarely, according to a strict calendar, and he spent less time with Molotov and Kaganovich. It is not that they had been demoted, but in 1935–6 Kaganovich had to seek Stalin’s advice (i.e. approval) on everything. His letters to Stalin now contained obsequious formulations, whereas he had previously taken quite a few final decisions himself and written to Stalin without servility. Such fawning at the highest level is a good indication of the diminishing influence of Politburo members and Stalin’s growing personal power. More decisions were now taken by signing a circular containing the resolution to be approved, rather than by voting at meetings. The time for criticism and reservations, which had hitherto been regarded as normal on the part of high-ranking leaders, was at an end. Requests to retire, refusals to write some report, ultimata to defend the interests of some agency – these disappeared without a trace. Frequently, the sheet containing decisions for approval did not circulate. Many resolutions carry only Molotov’s stamp. Other decisions were taken by a few members who came to visit Stalin on vacation in Sochi.
Sometimes a simple telegram from Stalin would do. The famous letter announcing the nomination of Ezhev to head the NKVD and betokening the dismissal of Yagoda, who was four years late in organizing a great purge, was signed by Stalin and Zhdanov. Kaganovich received a copy on 25 September 1936. As for ‘poor’ Yagoda, who had not realized that he should have acted in 1932, he was of course executed. Stalin’s power was now so well established and accepted by the others that he could make them swallow anything. The accusations against Yagoda are a good example: he obviously would not have been able to launch a vast purge in 1932 without being explicitly instructed to do so by Stalin.
Mastery of the Politburo was achieved by the technique of fragmenting even this small body. According to Stalin’s whim, it functioned in fragments – meetings of seven, five, three or two. The only people summoned were those who had to handle some particular matter. Meetings often took the form of dinner at Stalin’s dacha for those he singled out as ‘friends’. This is attested by Mikoyan,2 who explained that a quintet (Stalin, Molotov, Malenkov, Beria and himself) existed in the Politburo until 1941 dealing with foreign policy issues and ‘operational matters’. After the war, Zhdanov joined this group, as did Voznesensky later. Voroshilov, who had been added at the beginning of the war, was dropped in 1944.
This is what has been called the ‘narrow’ Politburo, excluding Kaganovich, Kalinin and Khrushchev, all of whom were burdened with heavy administrative responsibilities outside the Politburo. The ‘habit’ of convening a few reliable elements had become established with the struggle of the triumvirate (Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev) against Trotsky, and continued with a different cast during the struggle against Rykov, when the latter was still in charge of the Sovnarkom (Council of People’s Commissars). In the 1930s, Stalin sent Molotov a letter in which he asked him to consider an important problem and talk it over with ‘friends’. Not all Politburo members fell into this category and no one could count on remaining in it permanently. Before the war, members like Rudzutak, Kalinin, Kossior and Andreev were never invited to such ‘intimate’ caucuses, although they might have known that such meetings took place.
To summarize, the Politburo in Stalin’s hands was precisely a bureau whose personnel he nominated and used as he saw fit.
As the party lost its political identity, its apparatus – the very citadel of the system – grew ever more complex. In order to ‘simplify’ things and ensure greater control, a super-apparatus – variously dubbed ‘special’, ‘political’, and finally ‘general’ – was constructed to serve Stalin personally, without the knowledge of the rest of the apparatus. Its staff constantly expanded, as did its status vis-à-vis other Central Committee departments. Stalin’s personal secretary – the ubiquitous and highly discreet Poskrebyshev – headed it and thereby acquired a promotion and salary increase. As for the Sovnarkom – a supposedly powerful institution with its departments, specialists and consultants – its authority was undermined by conspiratorial techniques at the summit. It was in fact sidestepped, since all decisions were taken elsewhere, by Stalin and Molotov. Their business was conducted via a completely secret channel of communication: Molotov submitted his proposals to Stalin and the latter corrected, approved or rejected them, sending his response, which had the force of an order, back to Molotov via the same channel. A very intimate affair! If we are aware of such details today, it is thanks to the research of Oleg Khlevniuk and his team of hardened researchers in the Soviet archives.
By way of an overview of Stalin’s complex, and expanding, system of power, we might single out the following features. We are dealing with a ‘security state’, headed by a figure who organized his own ‘cult’ and resorted to a laborious method, refined down to the last detail, of running and controlling the whole enterprise. The objective was not only to guarantee its smooth operation, but also to avoid his entourage and officials at any level accumulating too much authority and power. It was achieved by fragmenting the highest institutions of state, emptying them of substance. This way of ruling – just the opposite of what might have been expected in such circumstances – created gluts and bottlenecks, to which the centre responded with emergency measures.
In a form of ‘hands-on’ government, Stalin personally, the Politburo, the Orgburo and the Secretariat immersed themselves in local minutiae. All this amounted to nothing less than an attempt to ‘micromanage’ a continent from the centre of power in Moscow.
To appreciate how the leaders and their teams engaged in such micromanaging of social groups, institutions, people and material goods, we need only glance at the minutes of the two main agencies of the Central Committee – namely the Orgburo and the Secretariat. The agendas of these two bodies charged with preparing the materials for Politburo meetings are quite simply mind-boggling, as is the number of items and documents they handled. But the best illustration of what micromanagement meant in practice is to be found in numerous telegrams from Stalin (signed by him) to party or state agencies at the other end of the country, whether ordering someone to supply a building site with the nails it desperately needed, or build an internal railway line in a steelworks, or find some barbed wire – a product always in short supply in these years. Let us add that these countless messages always took the form of ultimata.
The Secretariat and Orgburo always proceeded in similar fashion, dealing with all manner of problems in great detail. Their work was impressive – especially their efforts to train or retrain workers, specialists and cadres in all sorts of professions, and to create courses, schools and academies, as well as compiling lists of students and teachers. It was a matter of equipping the state with the cadres it required and replacing layer after layer of specialists, who were so difficult to find.
To summarize: what we see here is the functioning of a highly centralized state, taking on a mass of tasks that are often simply not feasible. The system then suffers from a pathology of ‘hyper-centralization’, the cure for which is to delegate powers downwards, while retaining general policy orientation at the centre. But in the system we are concerned with, the supreme ruler mistook his own security for that of the country and perceived each failure as a fault to be punished. Such a boss had to seem omnipotent. Consequently, in a country desperately short of cadres, Stalin could declare that ‘no one is irreplaceable’ – a formula that harboured many demons, especially because it was false.
The characteristics referred to above, including ‘hands-on’ management, equally apply to managing culture and, of course, the government’s relations with outstanding figures in the worlds of culture and science. On this score, Stalin’s dictatorship was innovative.
Once Stalin felt firmly in the saddle, a further feature of his psychology emerged: a strange fascination – a mixture of attraction and repulsion – for genius or great talent; an urge to dominate, use, humiliate and, ultimately, destroy it – rather like a child who asserts mastery over a toy by breaking it. Stalin’s dealings with great writers, scientists or military figures attests to this destructive bent. He spared some of them (quite unpredictably), but the very fact that he took an interest in someone was always dangerous, if not ominous, for its object.
This subject affords insight into another important facet of Stalin’s insatiable thirst for total mastery of his world. He turned to a device that would allow him to penetrate his subjects’ minds and souls, their emotional systems, by using the power of fiction in novels, plays and films. He understood (and envied) the power of a writer who could single-handedly achieve a stronger grip on the thoughts and emotions of millions of people than all the agitprop in the world. He saw art as a device that could be of direct service to him, on condition that creators were coached and their work revised personally, with Stalin acting as in some sense editor and adviser or discussing with authors the behaviour of their heroes. As the reader will doubtless realize, these ‘heroes’ had to obey, and there was no need to be a writer to secure such obedience.
Stalin was no scientist either. Yet he personally edited, for example, Lysenko’s lecture to the Academy of Science for publication. Stalin also had the last word on economic and linguistic questions and – it goes without saying – history. Since he was making history, why not personally edit a history textbook for schools? In short, Stalin’s labours assumed pathological proportions: he aimed at personal mastery of a complex totality that no one had ever mastered and imposed his terms on it. Did he take himself for a genius? What we know for sure is that great talents fascinated him. Was it envy that he could assuage with the knowledge that he could destroy them at will? Or the simple pleasure of proving that he could detect errors and offer advice? It is difficult to say, but the subject is relevant to our theme of political pathology.
His behaviour towards the brilliant Marshal Tukhachevsky, thirty-seven at the time, provides our first example of Stalin’s sharply alternating attitudes towards talented figures.3 We know that Stalin had a high opinion of himself as a military strategist. When, in 1929–30, Tukhachevsky embarked on a campaign to direct the leadership’s attention to new military technology and impending changes in the character of warfare, Stalin supported Voroshilov’s rejection of these ideas and wrote to him to say that Tukhachevsky was ‘floundering in anti-Marxism, unrealism, even red militarism’. At the same time, he had 3,000 former Tsarist officers cashiered and arrested. The NKVD extracted ‘testimony’ from one of them to the effect that Tukhachevsky, himself a former Tsarist officer, belonged to some right-wing organization and was helping to plot a coup.
Stalin lapped all this up. He retained very bitter memories of the campaign against Poland in 1920, during which accusations abounded, including from Tukhachevsky, that he was a mediocre military commander. But the hour of vengeance had not yet struck. Stalin wrote to Molotov and others to say that he had personally investigated the accusations against Tukhachevsky and established that the latter was ‘100 per cent clean’. In 1932, he even wrote a personal apology to Tukhachevsky, with a bowdlerized copy of the letter he had sent to Voroshilov in 1930 (the allusion to ‘red militarism’ was omitted). He accused himself of having been unjustifiably harsh – a rare event, to say the least. In fact, Stalin had now adopted Tukhachevsky’s standpoint on military technology, although in this domain, as in so many others, the targets fixed for 1932 were far from having been met. The apology did not mention the accusations fabricated by the NKVD against the marshal in 1930. It was manifestly insincere and, had Tukhachevsky understood Stalin, the duplicity would not have escaped him. Stalin’s gesture actually signified: I need you for the time being, but there is a sword hanging over your head …
Whether naive or just plain audacious, Tukhachevsky was the only participant not to conclude his speech to the Seventeenth Party Congress in 1934 with the obligatory ‘hail the leader’. The reckoning came in 1937, when Stalin destroyed his military high command. A special fate was reserved for Tukhachevsky, probably the best military mind of them all. ‘Information from a German source’ – a total fabrication – was produced, ‘proving’ that the flower of the army had betrayed the country. Atrociously beaten, Tukhachevsky was dragged before Stalin for a confrontation with his accusers. Naturally, it emerged from this that he was guilty. We are dealing here with a maniac who breaks a precious object to show that it can be broken. Preferring an incompetent but obsequious Voroshilov to Tukhachevsky and the rest, and destroying the military high command, were monumental blunders. This purge alone would warrant the death penalty…
There is no way of knowing whether Stalin was haunted by the memory of his victims. But the strategies employed during the Second World War had been brilliantly foreshadowed by Tukhachevsky, who virtually bombarded Stalin with memos and articles about the need to prepare for a war that would require massive technological resources and in which mobile armies, geared to breakthroughs and encirclements, would play an unprecedented role. All this required a new system of command and coordination. At the beginning of the war, the Germans employed such a strategy against Soviet troops to devastating effect. Of course, no one asked Stalin why he had killed the most brilliant generals. Who was the real traitor? With the likes of Tukhachevsky, Blucher and Yegorov, the tragedy of 22 June 1941 could have been avoided.
We can cite one occasion where Stalin received a moral slap in the face, though we do not know whether he registered it at the time. After the liquidation of the high command, Stalin and Voroshilov attended a meeting of air force commanders to discuss how to rescue the air force from the lamentable state it found itself in following the purges. The officers set out the position: everything was in a woeful state – planes, weaponry, repairs, fuel, provisions, finances, administration. Training was disastrous and the number of planes and pilots lost alarming. Stalin listened carefully, requested details, and posed concrete questions to demonstrate his competence and mastery of the subject. Voroshilov took a less active part, but he was the one who closed the meeting with an explosion of anger against the officers, whom he accused of failing to mention the ‘obvious fact’: the situation had been caused by the sabotage and treason of the former high command, which had been justly punished. The minutes of the meeting indicate that of the dozens of officers who commented on the situation, not one uttered the word ‘sabotage’. Such silence made it plain that their explanation was quite different: the dire state of the air force was due to the destruction of a group of highly capable senior officers. Voroshilov’s explosion may well have been provoked by his perception that the silence implied condemnation of his leadership and his fear of Stalin’s possible reaction on learning that his subordinates lacked the requisite vigilance against enemies of the USSR. We do not know what Stalin said to Voroshilov. At all events, doubtless preoccupied by the fact that the air force was far from battle-ready, he preserved his equanimity on this occasion.
Another example, which also concerns the air force, reveals Stalin’s other side. It figures in the memoirs of the writer Konstantin Simonov. He recounts a high-level conference that he attended at the beginning of the war, devoted to the excessively high number of accidents involving planes and the heavy losses in terms of pilots. A young air force general came forward with a simple answer: the poorly constructed planes were veritable ‘flying coffins’. Stalin was now commander-in-chief. Confronted with such a blunt accusation, his face convulsed with rage. He restrained himself from a public outburst, but murmured: ‘You would have done better to keep quiet, general!’ The brave young man disappeared for good the very same day.4
Our last example involves the writer Mikhail Sholokhov, who after Stalin’s death became the spokesman for a nationalist and conservative current, earning him strong enmity. But the events recounted here go back to 1933, when the Cossack region of Kuban, so dear to Sholokhov, was stricken by famine, like many other regions of Russia and the Ukraine.
Sholokhov wrote to Stalin to condemn the tragedy of the Kuban peasants, forcibly deprived of their harvest on the orders of the grain procurement agencies at the very moment when famine was setting in. Sholokhov was being bold, but Stalin tolerated the dramatic description of the results of his own policies. Why? In fact, it was calculated. Stalin literally forced himself to read Sholokhov’s powerful denunciation of the mistreatment of peasants condemned to starvation, the arbitrariness of the local administration, and the provocative activities of the secret police. Once he had finished reading it, he ordered the region to be supplied with the quantity of grain that Sholokhov estimated was required to prevent a calamity. He even protected Sholokhov from the enraged local authorities (including the secret police), who did everything in their power to discredit this direct communication between the two men, which was causing them so much trouble. The game here was utterly devious and Stalin played every role in it: he convened phoney ‘confrontations’, pretended to have checked the facts himself, and rehabilitated Sholokhov’s friends in the local party apparatus. He did all this because he wanted something that Sholokhov possessed: prestige with the Russian public. The man was an authentic Russian Cossack – which Stalin was not – a powerful writer, and a good speaker – again, not Stalin’s strong points. He therefore pretended to accept the facts and criticisms set out by the writer, even though he was intensely irritated by the whole business. Finally, however, he gave the game away. In one short passage in a supposedly friendly letter to Sholokhov, he vented his anger. It was pure Stalin:
You only see one side of the story. But in order to avoid political errors (your letters are not literature, they are political), you have to see the other side. Your highly respectable cereal-growers are in fact conducting a ‘secret’ war against Soviet power – a war that uses famine as a weapon, comrade Sholokhov. Obviously, this in no way justifies the scandalous treatment inflicted on them. But it is clear as daylight that these respectable cereal-growers are not as innocent as it might seem from a distance. Well, all the best. I shake your hand. Yours, J. Stalin.
Setting to one side the question of who starved whom in 1933, what we read in this letter (and what Sholokhov read) is an expression of Stalin’s real policy – a politico-ideological summons to arms against sabotage by ‘respectable cereal-growers’. This war was launched by Stalin in similar terms at the January 1933 Central Committee meeting, when he called on the party and the country to mobilize against the hordes of shadowy enemies who were ‘perniciously undermining’ the regime’s foundations. In his letter to Sholokhov, he even implied that a still greater enemy – the peasantry in its entirety – was engaged in a war of starvation against the system.
It is likely that Sholokhov appreciated the precariousness of his position. Stalin was actually accusing him of defending ‘pernicious’ enemies for whom Stalin had a visceral hatred. Sholokhov’s prestigious correspondent was signalling that his life could be on the line at any moment. Stalin might have hated Sholokhov, but he needed his talents for his own ends at this point.
Stalin was unconcerned about the suffering of masses of people. Yet he knew that he was responsible for the calamity and that his image would suffer gravely if the peasant masses actually turned against him. There would be immediate repercussions in the army and the police, composed in the main of young people from the countryside who were never shy about protesting when they learnt that their parents were starving or suffering injustice at the hands of the authorities.
Constructing his own image was the name of Stalin’s game. Standing on a pedestal above the fray was a better guarantee of his security and power than a host of bodyguards. And in these times of peasant starvation and persecution, what better to serve his image than a public declaration by a defender of the peasantry like Sholokhov, to the effect that Stalin had personally ordered the dispatch of tons of grain to save lives? That was the heart of the matter and this was precisely what Sholokov supplied to the press, without even having to lie.
Another image Stalin liked to project – the thrifty farmer (khoziain) – was in part a genuine character trait. He was intolerant of personal weaknesses like drinking, extramarital relationships, or a taste for luxury, including among his closest associates. He made sure he was kept informed about such behaviour and ordered Politburo members to be spied on so that he could know about and, where necessary, exploit such weaknesses.
Aleksei Kosygin’s memoirs provide an insight into Stalin’s scheming in the late 1940s. A rising star at the end of the Second World War, Kosygin had to his wartime credit such achievements as the evacuation of industrial plant from territories about to fall to the Nazis and the organization of supplies to besieged Leningrad. Kosygin was unpopular with many at the top, envious as they were of his rapid rise. But he was also feared, because Stalin had taken him under his wing and assigned him the delicate task of making a list of the privileges enjoyed by Politburo members. As Kosygin subsequently reported to his son-in-law Gvishiani, Stalin had told him during a Politburo meeting that he possessed a list detailing everything that the families of Molotov, Mikoyan, Kaganovich and others were spending on themselves, their guards and servants, and was outraged: ‘It’s simply revolting.’ At the time, while Politburo members earned a comparatively modest salary, they enjoyed unlimited access to consumer goods – hence their anger when Stalin instructed Kosygin to put the house in order. Obviously, they dared not blame Stalin himself and some of them, like Mikoyan, understood that this was a way of keeping them on their toes. But perhaps it was also a pretext for getting rid of some of them when needed.
In fact, Stalin was forever plotting such things. Kosygin also told Gvishiani that one of the accusations levelled against Voznesensky, head of Gosplan and Deputy Prime Minister until he was purged in 1950, was that he possessed one or more weapons. Kosygin and Gvishiani immediately searched their own homes and threw all the weapons into a lake. They also looked for listening devices and did find them in Kosygin’s house (though they might have been installed to spy on Marshal Zhukov, who lived there before Kosygin). No wonder, then, that every morning in these years (1948–50), Kosygin – a candidate member of the Politburo – said farewell to his wife and reminded her what to do if he did not return home in the evening. They soon concluded, however, that he would not be harmed – Stalin felt some kind of sympathy towards him.5
He was lucky. But all the leaders, unless naive or too sure of themselves, very soon learnt from their own experience or that of their colleagues. After the assassination of Kirov in 1934, a sea-change occurred in their status vis-à-vis Stalin and they were immediately aware of it. It can be observed in the correspondence between Stalin and Kaganovich, then his number two. Hitherto self-assured and very direct, Kaganovich completely changed his tone, declaring himself immensely ‘grateful’ to fate for having vouchsafed him such a friend, leader and father: ‘What would we have done without him?’, and so on. It is obvious that at some stage Kaganovich had a ‘revelation’. In particular, he realized that Stalin was informed of anything he might write to others. That such senior leaders should find themselves in such a situation is something unique in the annals of history. Nothing comparable occurred in Hitler’s entourage after the Night of the Long Knives in 1934 (the SA were potentially political rivals). What we observe here is a highly elaborate despotic regime, launched in top gear, with an unchecked master of the art at its head.
In constructing his image, Stalin resorted to various methods. He personally selected the words to be employed in singing his praises in films, speeches and biographies. He ensured that his favourite superlatives were used, but censored others in order to demonstrate his modesty. He chose his decorations and titles. The rituals of congresses and other public occasions were perfected in minute detail. Finally, history was rewritten so that everything revolved around his person.
Stalin conceived himself as an autocrat and was determined not to share his place and image with anyone else, past or present. In his eyes, the other leaders were not in the same league. They did not really count: it was simply necessary to ensure their servility. From 1934 onwards, he turned them into something resembling temporarily reprieved inmates on death row. His spies supplied him with what he would need against them when the time came. In order to test and ensure their unfailing loyalty, he persecuted members of their families: Kaganovich’s three brothers were killed and Molotov’s wife arrested.
On various occasions, Stalin explained to gatherings at his dacha that what ‘the people’ wanted was a Tsar, a generalissimo. Everything in fact suggests that this is what he himself wanted and needed. Moreover, the spectacle of his oath to Lenin in 1924 had created a precedent for his own cult. Everything becomes clearer when we examine Stalin’s relationship to his own revolutionary past. It is easy to demonstrate that he erased it and worked hard to create not only a different system, but also an entirely new pantheon and past. Stalin faced what might be called a historical alibi problem and needed to acquire legitimacy. Unlike Hitler, for example, he expounded his true strategy and programme only in snippets, as in his pronouncement on cadres in 1925. But we also know the grudges he harboured towards other leaders of the Bolshevik party, who had not given him the recognition he considered his due. In fact, the historical leadership, personified by Lenin, had rejected him. In the party’s eyes, he did not belong to the category of founding fathers and did not deserve to belong to it. This had to be obliterated to justify the new self-image he was hard at work imposing on the country. And this he accomplished with considerable success.