At the war’s close, the country was exhausted and the vast territories occupied by the Germans, or which had formed military theatres, were literally devastated. In the reconquered territories there was no economy to speak of and no government. The Soviet system had to be completely reconstructed, initially without an economic base and among populations that contained many former collaborators.
I shall restrict myself to one point about the reconstitution of the Soviet system in these regions. Finding cadres for the reconquered territories was an immense task, conducted in conditions of utter chaos. Newly appointed personnel often had to be replaced several times over, because they were incompetent, unreliable, or criminal elements who had penetrated the administration. Cadres assigned from areas that had escaped German conquest were often of poor quality and inclined to abandon a difficult job and return home. In the Ukraine, Lithuania and Latvia, strong detachments of nationalist insurgents fought Soviet troops and security forces, sometimes in pitched battles, with heavy losses on both sides. It took the regime time and effort to subdue these partisans. But work resumed, factories were rebuilt, and life slowly returned to normal.
Recovery and the restoration of social and economic indicators to their prewar levels – especially for agricultural output – had been achieved by the time of Stalin’s death. But his disappearance from the scene was insufficient wholly to rid the USSR of his legacy – especially since postwar reconstruction involved restoring a decaying Stalinist model with its aberrations and irrationalities.
The return of peace confronted the state and party, hitherto wholly absorbed in the war effort, with unanticipated realities. The state bureaucracy – the main organizer of the war – now had to face the problems of reconversion. For the party and its apparatus, things were even more complicated. Whatever the propaganda, between 1941 and 1945 the party apparatus had been demoted to an auxiliary role. Certainly, Politburo members ran the war machine via the State Defence Committee, but they did so under Stalin’s rod of iron as leaders of the state, not the party. The Central Committee was in abeyance and no party congress had been convened.
To put the party’s house in order, Stalin brought in the well-known Leningrad party leader Alexis Kuznetsov, who had distinguished himself during the siege of the city as Zhdanov’s second in command. He became party secretary for cadres, a member of the Politburo, and was thought to be being groomed by Stalin to succeed him. This was not an enviable lot for a beginner caught up in the complex power apparatus around Stalin. His prerogatives were considerable, but the task ahead was daunting. He was responsible for supplying high-quality, politically reliable leaders for all important state agencies. To do this, he was to supervise the work of the party’s cadres directorate, which had been reorganized to tackle the job. The priority was to find qualified personnel for positions of responsibility in the most important branches of the economy throughout the country.
Reorganizing the party was another order of the day. If the personnel of the party apparatus were in a permanent state of flux, its structures remained more or less the same hereafter. This is why the new structure that emerged is sufficiently instructive to warrant us going into some detail.
It was now decided that the head of the cadres directorate would have five deputies and that it would contain twenty-eight departments (instead of the previous fifty), each of them responsible for overseeing a group of ministries or other government agencies. A single personnel department and a few sectional services were envisaged for the whole directorate.
Of the twenty-eight departments, one would deal with cadres for party organizations, another with the training and retraining of cadres, and a third with the cadres of Soviet institutions (armed forces, internal affairs and foreign trade). State security services, the Prosecutor’s Office and justice came under the same department. Similarly, a department was projected for transport and for each branch of industry, as well as for agriculture, finance, trade, higher education and research, publishing, the arts, and so on. In short, the new directorate was a bulky piece of machinery, employing some 650 senior officials. Probably the largest of the Central Committee’s apparatuses, it was organized on functional lines – until, two years later, it reverted to the older ‘economic branch’ structure. Meanwhile, the new secretary’s position gave him sight of everything, including the most secret institutions, for they all needed the cadres his directorate supplied and controlled – or at least was beginning to supply and control.
Kuznetsov’s (unpublished) speeches and conversations with his subordinates allow us to conclude that he was a man of considerable intelligence. His organizational abilities, and the ease with which he earned the esteem of the apparatus, attest to his calibre. The attempt to reconstruct and revitalize the party and its apparatus was, of course, coordinated with Stalin. When it came to organizational matters, Kuznetsov was clearly his own man. On ideology, however, he had to toe the line. Accordingly, before continuing our discussion of reforms in the party apparatus we must introduce these ‘ideological questions’, and especially a novelty that stemmed from Stalin’s growing identification with Tsarist symbols during the war. The new ideological line directly concerned the party’s central cadres, who were now subject to rein-doctrination in common with various social groups and administrative bodies.
Zhdanovism – named after its chief proponent, Andrei Zhdanov, at the time party secretary – refers to an especially obscurantist chapter in the history of Stalinism.1 Since this policy, which ravaged the country’s cultural life, is studied in all histories of Soviet literature, we have opted to deal with it exclusively through unpublished documents from the party apparatus.
The main target of Zhdanovism was the professional intelligentsia, which was accused of ‘fawning on the West’ and taxed with ‘cosmopolitanism’ (a term that conveyed the regime’s barely concealed anti-Semitism in these years). But its spirit profoundly marked the state and party apparatuses, which employed large numbers of people with higher education. An expression of extreme Russian nationalism, Zhdanovism attacked manifestations of nationalism in the non-Russian republics. The introduction into high party and government spheres of the archaic-sounding ‘courts of honour’ contradicted any minimally coherent administrative logic, and significantly frustrated efforts to raise the professional level of the party apparatus. These ‘courts’ were supposed to instil in apparatchiks a sense of patriotism and pride in the unique achievements of their (Stalinist) fatherland, by means of staged mock-trials in every administrative agency. The culprits were accused of all manner of infamies, but only their careers suffered (they escaped with their lives). In sum, these ‘courts’ judged ‘crimes’ approximating to treason, but which were not subject to criminal prosecution.
The practice was explained by Kuznetsov in a report to the full party apparatus on 29 September 1947. The target of such measures was individuals with higher education, including the growing number of specialists. The central apparatus was not considered immune from the relevant disease and the report was presented during a meeting convened to elect the ‘court of honour’ for the Central Committee’s own apparatus – an election that gave the signal for similar elections throughout the country’s administrative bodies. The professed aim was to combat behaviour displaying servility to the West.
A court was likewise established in the State Security Ministry (MGB). Its operatives were seemingly irked by being subjected to such a procedure, but Kuznetsov informed them that if such courts were required in the central party apparatus – the country’s citadel – then there was no reason to exempt the MGB. Its members also had progress to make when it came to patriotism and ‘spiritual independence’ – the only things that could ensure recognition of the superiority of Soviet culture over that of the West.
Kuznetsov’s argument ran as follows. In so far as the country’s activity depended on the quality of the party apparatus, the ‘courts of honour’ had a decisive role to play. The apparatus harboured numbers of employees who engaged in anti-patriotic, anti-social and anti-state deviations. Hitherto, when such instances had been discovered, they had been handled internally with the utmost possible discretion. This stemmed from the widespread belief that once someone had become a member of the apparatus, there was no further need for vigilance or political improvement. But many officials seemed not to appreciate that their work in the central apparatus – that ‘holy of holies’ (the expression is used in the report) – was not a routine job, but a party duty. Dissolute behaviour was even to be found among leading figures, Kuznetsov observed – something that was absolutely inadmissible in the party’s ranks, let alone the apparatus of the Central Committee. Drunkenness, debauchery, and negligence when handling confidential documents were among the most frequent misdemeanours cited. Such derelictions were highly dangerous, because the Central Committee received reports on all aspects of the country’s activities, including defence and foreign policy. For this reason, any work performed in the apparatus, whatever the position held, must remain confidential. Vigilance was the party’s best weapon against its enemies; it must form an inviolable principle of national life.
There was a disturbing but evident undercurrent to this policy. During the meeting, it was officially stated that the new line drew its inspiration from the methods of the great purges. Some of the key signposts of the latter were actually cited as useful reminders. Among them were the ‘confidential’ letters addressed to party members that had marked the launch of purges: the letter of 18 January 1935 concerning actions against ‘Kirov’s murderers’; the letter of 13 May 1935 on party members’ cards; the 29 July 1936 circular on the Trotsky–Zinoviev ‘terrorist bloc’; the 29 June 1941 circular to party and state agents operating near the front. All of these preceded or followed the unleashing of waves of terror against the population in general and cadres in particular. The shadow of this dark epoch was deliberately invoked to serve as a warning to a potentially disloyal intelligentsia. Stalin’s speech on vigilance during the hallucinatory 1937–8 Central Committee sessions – another ‘classic’ on the best way to deal with enemies – was also cited.
Such was the spirit of a campaign gearing to inculcate nothing less than ‘spiritual independence’. The foreign espionage factor was also employed. The apparatchiks were informed that Western intelligence services were seeking to penetrate the party and that their families were not immune: ‘You tell your wife something, she tells a neighbour – and everyone gets wind of state secrets.’ Anyone in the least familiar with Stalin’s way of criticizing party officials and leaders would recognize his own inimitable style here. In fact, the condemnation of ‘family chatterboxes’ by members of the apparatus was based on a recent episode: in 1948, the government had decided in the utmost secrecy to raise prices, but the decision had become known to the population before its promulgation, resulting in a mad scramble for the shops.
The purges accompanying Zhdanovism never reached anything like the scale of 1936–9, but they nevertheless gave rise to such atrocities as the execution of the writers of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, the assassination of the great actor Mikhoels (in a rigged car accident), numerous arrests and executions of cultural figures, not to mention careers ruined and artistic and scientific works destroyed. In 1950 came the ‘Leningrad affair’: all the old leaders of the Leningrad party and administration – including Kuznetsov himself and the Deputy Prime Minister and Gosplan head, Voznesensky – were executed and more than a hundred others perished or were sent to camps.
The ideology of the zhdanovshchina was Stalin’s own, of course – the culmination of his ideological peregrinations. Stalin was by now fascinated by the ‘glorious’ Tsarist past. The ‘courts of honour’ were not the only thing he borrowed from its history. All the ministerial top brass now wore a uniform and their titles derived directly from Peter the Great’s ‘table of ranks’. Worse than the external paraphernalia was the extreme Russian nationalism, savouring of proto-fascism, typical of decaying Stalinism. Stalin wanted this spirit to survive him. To this end, he personally revised the new Soviet anthem, imposing on a multinational country a chauvinist paean to ‘Great Russia’.
It is worth adding that the ‘courts of honour’ and the archaic titles and uniforms (with their ridiculous epaulettes) were abolished or abandoned under Khrushchev, to be quickly forgotten by an administration that had little time for such antics. And the putrid fumes of Zhdanovism largely dissipated.
All this is important for understanding the atmosphere that suffused the country when Kuznetsov tackled the important task of rationalizing the work of cadres, in the first instance in the party. His idea was to treat them firmly but fairly, and expect the appropriate response. The difference in tone and spirit between Kuznetsov’s public explanation of Zhdanovism in 1947 and his frank and rational discussions with colleagues in 1946–7, is striking. It prompts the question as to whether he fully approved of Zhdanovism.
New sources – in particular, the minutes of closed meetings of the cadres directorate, probably something unprecedented in the history of the apparatus – offer a sense of how the Politburo intended to put its own house in order. In the first place, this involved an attempt to redefine the functions of the whole apparatus, to clarify the division of labour within it, and – no less important – to change the way in which the central apparatus ran the economy. Astonishing as it might seem, the apparatus was to disengage from any direct involvement in economic management.
The functions and spheres of operation of party and state were henceforth to be redefined and separated. According to the new organizational doctrine, the Central Committee was a body charged with setting policy orientation, which it conveyed to the government. Through its personnel management, the party was responsible for the leading cadres of the state. Its mission consisted in the ideological education of the nation and supervision of its local organizations.
There was nothing inherently new about this, but the apparatchiks were surprised to learn that the Central Committee would no longer be dealing directly with economic questions. Its economic departments, such as those for agriculture and transport, were abolished. The main task of the apparatus was now to manage the party itself and supervise cadres in each domain, but without concerning itself with the details of their activities or the way in which they fulfilled their duties. The Central Committee would, of course, continue to issue directives, including on the economy, to the government. And in the context of its responsibility for supervising the cadres in government bodies, it did involve itself indirectly in monitoring economic policy. Finally, the party’s local bodies, such as regional committees fulfilling ‘executive functions’, continued to supervise economic activity, as in the past. Their responsibilities were not a carbon copy of the Central Committee’s.
To introduce some clarity into the ever more obscure division of labour between the two bodies situated immediately below the Politburo – the Orgburo and the Secretariat – it was decided that the former should take responsibility for local party organs. It summoned them, listened to their reports, and proposed improvements – though this was not how party statutes had previously defined its role. Its meetings were regular and their dates were fixed in advance. For its part, the Secretariat was a permanent body. It met each day, even several times a day, as and when required. It prepared the agenda and relevant materials for Orgburo meetings, and checked that the decisions taken by it and by the Politburo were properly implemented. It was also responsible for the distribution of leading cadres throughout the system via the appropriate departments.
Helping local party organizations to control state and economic bodies effectively; criticizing them; taking responsibility for political leadership of the masses: these were the main concerns of the top party leadership – and these were the terms in which they were defined.
The sources available to us shed light on the reasons for this disengagement from economic matters at the summit. The party’s local bodies – all those below the Central Committee – were in a far from healthy condition; and even the Central Committee itself was in a spot of trouble. The main cause for anxiety was party officials’ widespread dependency on, and submission to, economic ministries.
One aspect of this dependency was what has been called ‘self-procurement’ (samosnabzhenie), which covered various practices. Heads of government agencies, particularly those of economic ministries and their local branches, offered party bosses illegal inducements in the form of premiums, prizes, bonuses, valuable gifts, and services of all sorts – construction of dachas, house repairs, reservations in comfortable sanatoria for local party secretaries (and their families, of course). All of this was at the state’s expense. According to our source, such economic cushioning of the party elite ‘assumed vast proportions’.
Further information on this score derives from another Kuznetsov document, dating from late 1947. The Politburo had just issued a stern decree against the rewards offered to party officials by economic managers. During the war the practice had been generalized, and it was now ubiquitous, ‘from top to bottom’. In these times of rationing and low living standards, the situation more closely approximated famine than simple everyday shortages. Many members of the party hierarchy actually engaged in illegal requisition – even extortion – of food and other merchandise from economic bodies. These were, of course, crimes. According to Kuznetsov, they were ‘in essence a form of corruption that makes representatives of the party dependent on economic agencies’. The latter were prioritizing their own interests over those of the state they were supposed to represent. If the defence of state interests was to take precedence over private interests, how could party cadres ensure it when improvement in their own material situation depended on bonuses and benefits from economic managers?
Such cases of corruption, in which economic ministries ‘remunerated’ party officials throughout the country – some of them highly placed in the apparatus – had been uncovered and reported to Stalin by his right-hand man, Lev Mekhlis, Minister of State Control. Kuznetsov clearly had access to this information. Numerous documents which I have collected indicate that many local apparatchiks and their bosses expended much of their energy laying their hands on housing, goods and bribes – when they were not organizing profligate binges where the alcohol flowed, at the expense of local soviet or government agencies. Inspection authorities reported in enormous detail on the number of bottles of alcohol drained, their cost, the total bill charged by the restaurant that had supplied the food, and the name of the public institution that had paid for all this. Bribes were not simply offered; they were solicited, even demanded. The offices of the State Prosecutor were heaving with documents concerning cases against party bosses accused of misconduct or criminal behaviour.
Local party leaderships were manifestly in poor shape after the war. The central apparatus was perfectly well aware of the situation, but did not report it because it did not attribute much significance to such behaviour, which was so widespread that everyone had grown used to it. However, it was said that Stalin had declared such pillaging of national resources to be a crime. For Kuznetsov, bribes created cosy ‘family’ relations, making party organizations playthings in the hands of economic managers. ‘If this situation persists, it will spell the end of the party’, he declared: it was imperative for ‘party organizations to recover their independence’. For those who regarded party primacy as firmly established, this phrase would have come as a surprise. It is clear that he was repeating what he had heard during a closed meeting of the cadres directorate in 1946, shortly after his appointment. A consultation of this kind, with all the ranks of the apparatus present, had possibly never occurred before. Kuznetsov had asked participants to be frank and had heard plenty: heads of department in the directorate itself were super-bureaucrats, inaccessible to their subordinates; they formed cliques and enjoyed special privileges; the hierarchy was very strict and did not allow for any party camaraderie; finally, the climate of secrecy was stifling. No less revealing was the apparatchiks’ appraisal of important ministers: they were perceived as feudal lords who looked down scornfully on officials. Someone had interjected: ‘When did you last see a minister come and visit us in the Central Committee?’ And someone else added: ‘Not even a deputy minister!’
It is interesting to note – and Kuznetsov himself was sensitive to this – how many of the criticisms, especially when uttered by younger, ‘instructor’-level apparatchiks, were imbued with idealism and the bitterness they felt in seeing their expectations dashed. Kuznetsov had even heard a phrase he did not anticipate (and nor did a researcher like me, some fifty years later!): ‘We [the party] have lost power!’ (my poteriali vlast’!). All this is recorded in the minutes of the 1946 meeting. So it is scarcely surprising if a year later Kuznetsov declared that party organizations needed to regain their ‘independence’. He did not even have to specify from whom. The party’s ‘economization’ was the curse that was alarming its leadership as never before.
At stake was the very existence of the party as a ruling institution. During the war, its transformation into a ministerial appendage had accelerated, with a consequent loss of power. This was not surprising: the ministries had indeed been responsible for the war effort and its most glamorous activities. The party apparatus was being bought off and corrupted by managers, who increasingly dealt exclusively with the Council of Ministers and ignored the Central Committee and its nomenklatura. There is abundant data on such disregard for the ‘nomenklatura rules’ (a term we shall return to).
Extricating the central apparatus from any direct involvement in economic affairs and agencies – from economics tout court – apart from general guidelines and oversight of cadres, seemed to be the remedy. But Zhdanovism was going to complicate matters. In the past, the cadres directorate had preferred to recruit people who already possessed technical training for party work. Now humanities graduates were to have preference, in order to avoid such ideological lapses as the failure to censor ‘ideologically alien’ passages in an opera, or the publication of an insufficiently expurgated biography of Lenin, and so on. ‘Technicians’ were regarded as incapable of exposing ideological subversion, let alone combating it. A threat like ‘economization’ – much more prosaic, but also less obvious – which was beginning to blur the party’s ideological vision, was quite beyond their wit.
But what was the ideological framework that was supposedly losing its vigour? And what was to be counterposed to the influence of the capitalist West? Here we touch a sensitive point in the party’s ideological armour. At this stage, Stalinism was characterized by an unwillingness – even an inability – to criticize capitalism from a socialist standpoint. As we have said, a virulent Russian nationalism had been opted for instead. This point will be taken up in Part Three, when we sketch a broader picture of the ideological history. As for the narrower practical problem of the party apparatus restoring control over the ministries and over itself, it was (to repeat the point) bound up with undue direct involvement in the economy, which had allowed managers to get the upper hand. Hence the 1946 reform of the apparatus largely consisted in terminating such direct involvement and halting the party’s ‘economization’.
In and of itself, however, this kind of ‘line’ could not replace the ideological cement that Stalinism had lost. Kuznetsov implied as much during the plenary meeting of the party apparatus. ‘The party has no programme’, he declared, stating that the only extant programmatic texts were the Stalin Constitution and the five-year plan. These words certainly possessed an audacious ring, for they implied that under Stalin the party had lost its original ideological vigour. They would have been suicidal had Stalin himself – we surmise – not said as much and Kuznetsov not simply been quoting him. When Kuznetsov referred to the party losing out to economic managers and needing to regain its independence, the sentiment was probably Stalin’s – or approved by him, at any rate. As Stalin himself was aware, the erosion of most of the original ideology must have been a factor in the ‘economization’ of party cadres. Zhdanovite policies had been instigated at Stalin’s behest, which tends to indicate that he was aware of the regime’s ideological weakness and had decided to furnish it with a new ideological cement. We have seen what this consisted in. But it was part of the problem, not part of the solution.
At all events, for now ‘the economy’ was identified as the reason for the decay of the party’s main apparatus. The measures adopted rested on the conviction that a better division of labour between the Central Committee and the Council of Ministers could remedy the situation. The Council of Ministers would continue to run the country, while the Central Committee would staff key posts and oversee the cadres departments in every institution. But this line – ‘quit the economy and get back to party work’ – would not last long. Less than two years later, the reorganization, which testified to a long-term vision (even if its goal was unattainable), was reversed.
A halt was called at the end of 1948. Let us now briefly analyse its consequences. In early 1949 the specialist sectors of the cadres directorate were converted into separate departments dealing with different spheres of state activity. Officially, they would deal only with the cadres in these various spheres, not with their professional field of activity. In fact, however, whether inadvertently or otherwise, these Central Committee departments would continue to get entangled in the economy’s managerial structures. The cause was the very character of the branch system – something the 1946 reform had sought to surmount. Thus the ‘turn’ turned into a retreat.
One document sums up the character of the new phase. Swings of the pendulum were recurrent in Soviet administrative practice, so this one was no novelty. Instead of the cumbersome cadres directorate, and specialist units in charge of inspecting party bodies, there was to be a new organizational structure. Henceforth the Central Committee apparatus, overseen mainly by the Secretariat and to a lesser degree by the Orgburo, would supervise the operations of ministries and other central government agencies. The task was assigned to new Central Committee departments – among them, ‘agitprop’, ‘party-komsomol-trade unions’, ‘international relations’, heavy industry, consumer goods industry, engineering (machine building), transport and agriculture, as well as a new, very powerful, ‘administrative’ department with responsibility for the security services and the cluster of agencies in planning, finance and trade. (The last three would soon be detached to form a separate department.)
In sum, the reorganization consisted in converting the structural units of the old cadres directorate into independent departments and distributing, more or less logically, the 115 ministries and all party bodies (republican and regional) between these departments. This was no easy undertaking. Each of the state agents to be supervised and monitored itself encompassed a multitude of local branches – in particular, a labyrinthine set of supply networks that were a headache for any inspection agency. This tangled web was even more complicated than the one we shall discuss when we deal with the state administration.
Each Central Committee department had its own more or less complex structure and personnel office. But there were also structures servicing the whole Central Committee apparatus, like the central statistical office, and coordinating departments such as the general-secretary’s ‘special unit’, the encrypting service, and ‘confidential matters’. In addition there were various ‘groups’ or ‘special offices’ unfamiliar to outsiders, including a service for receiving foreign visitors, a separate ‘department of the Central Committee’ (possibly an auxiliary secretariat for the Orgburo), a pivotal ‘general department’ through which all significant texts and appointments to and from departments passed, a ‘business’ department, a ‘post office’ for letters from the public, an office dealing with party membership registration, a ‘commission for foreign travel’, a special office for running the Kremlin, and a unit dealing with ‘auxiliary farms’ (probably part of the business department, which also had a cars and mechanical repairs service).
We still have one mechanism to investigate, and readers will hopefully not be discouraged by its complexity (simplicity often derives from a mastery of the details). In the final analysis, the Soviet tendency for administrative opacity is not as complicated as all that. And if a comparison between the Soviet and other bureaucracies can generate confusion, its results are invariably illuminating – and sometimes surprising.
The endeavour in 1946–8 to reorganize the party’s central apparatus can be encapsulated in the term nomenklatura, which refers to the mechanism used to keep leading cadres under party control. It was also the cause of problems and side-effects that plagued the regime to the very end.
The resuscitation in 1946 of the Central Committee’s nomenklatura required considerable effort on the part of the cadres directorate and the three supreme bodies: the Politburo, the Orgburo (abolished in 1952), and the Secretariat. The Russian term nomenklatura means a ‘list’ of items, whatever they might be, that have to be ‘named’. We are now going to examine this list more closely to figure out how it was supposed to work in practice.
A document signed on 22 August 1946 by Andreev, head of the cadres directorate, and his deputy Revsky, was sent to the four secretaries of the Central Committee (Zhdanov, Kuznetsov, Patolichev and Popov). It presented for their approval a version of the nomenklatura that contained 42,894 leadership positions in party and state apparatuses. (The precise number varied from one draft to another, but this need not concern us.) Let us underscore once again that this list was established and controlled by the Central Committee.
The text begins by stating the obvious: it is difficult to exercise control over cadres when more than half of the appointments to, and dismissals from, ministerial posts figuring in the current nomenklatura are decided without Central Committee approval. It was therefore urgent that the latter formally endorse the new list, which was only a draft but which was presented as better suited than previous versions to the requirements of the five-year plan for 1946–50. The directorate was also working on another much-needed list – the so-called ‘reserve register’ containing an auxiliary list of candidates for nomenklatura posts. In the event of rising demand for personnel, this would make it possible rapidly to supply the requisite cadres. The latest version of the new nomenklatura eliminated approximately 9,000 positions from the old rolls and introduced some new ones. These alterations were required to take account of economic and technological changes and concomitant alterations in the relative importance of various posts.
It took about three months for the first postwar ‘nomenklatura of Central Committee posts’ to be approved in stages. At the end of November 1946 the Central Committee possessed a text that could serve as a basic grid for handling leading cadres. The general list of posts to be filled in accordance with nomenklatura rules was supplemented by a detailed record of the officials currently holding these posts. Referring to some 41,883 posts (and the names of their incumbents), it allows us to draw up a picture of the whole cohort that was considered pivotal to the system. The classification was extremely detailed. The enumeration of the posts that the Central Committee wanted on its own list began with ‘posts in party organizations’, classified by rank: Central Committee secretaries and their deputies, heads of department and their deputies, heads of ‘special sectors’, and so on. Next came local party officials at republican and regional level, followed by the directors of party schools and holders of chairs in Marxist-Leninist history and economics.
The list then proceeded to senior positions in the state apparatus, from central level via the republics to district level: ministers, deputy ministers, members of ministerial collegia, departmental heads. It went on down the whole hierarchy of administrative posts in government agencies, as well as the parallel apparatus of the soviets, until it reached the lowest rank that the Central Committee wished to have under its direct or indirect tutelage.
The text provides figures for each ministry, but examination of the data by hierarchical stratum is more illuminating. Out of 41,883 ‘nomenklatura positions’, the top stratum (ministries and party) accounted for 4,836, or 12 per cent of the list. (Readers are aware by now that this ‘excursion’ into the nomenklatura leads us to a sketch of the whole Soviet administrative system.) To analyse what this represents, it should be read in conjunction with data from the Central Statistical Office, which provide details for the whole state apparatus. In sum, the nomenklatura represented around a third of the 160,000 top posts, of which 105,000 were based in the central government apparatus in Moscow, while 55,000 were located in republican administrative bodies (ministries and agencies). We might note that at this moment state administration numbered some 1.6 million managerial posts, 18.8 per cent of the total 8 million employees. (A more realistic calculation would reduce the latter figure to 6.5 million, by excluding from ‘administration’ categories like cleaners and other junior technical staff.) ‘Senior managerial cadres’ comprised officials heading up administrative units which lower ranks were directly or indirectly attached to. There we also find staff with the title (and probably the role) of ‘principal’ or ‘senior specialist’.
Returning now to the Central Committee nomenklatura proper, we possess a breakdown by field of activity. The most important contingent was that of party and Komsomol officials: 10,533, or 24.6 per cent of the list. Next came industry with 8,808 posts, or 20.5 per cent; general administrative agencies with 4,082, or 9.5 per cent; defence with 3,954, or 9.2 per cent; culture, the arts and sciences with 2,305, or 5.4 per cent; transport with 1,842, or 4.4 per cent; agriculture with 1,548, or 3.6 per cent; state security and public order with 1,331, or 3.1 per cent; the prosecution service and justice with 1,242, or 2.9 per cent; foreign affairs with 1,169, or 2.7 per cent; construction enterprises with 1,106, or 2.6 per cent; procurement and trade with 1,022, or 2.4 per cent; social services with 767, or 1.8 per cent; trade unions and cooperatives with 763, or 1.8 per cent; state planning, registration and control with 575, or 1.3 per cent; and financial and credit institutions with 406, or 1 per cent.
Analysis of the professional profile of officials included on the list in mid-1946 reveals that 14,778 posts were held by engineers with different specialities. The fact that many of the rest had a lower educational profile was compensated for, or so it was claimed, by length of service. Seventy per cent of those who possessed only primary education had more than ten years’ experience in leadership roles. This figure conduces to rather less optimistic conclusions. In total, 55.7 per cent of central nomenklatura cadres had more than ten years of service; 32.6 per cent had between six and ten years; 39.2 between two and five years; 17.25 per cent between one and two years; and 22.1 per cent less than a year. The nomenklatura also contained 1,400 office-holders who were not party members (3.5 per cent of the total). And last but not least, 66.7 of positions were held by Russians, 11.3 per cent by Ukrainians, 5.4 per cent by Jews, etc. (the ‘etc.’ occurs in the document itself).
Readers with a particular interest in bureaucracy will find plenty of food for thought here on supervisory methods, and the logic and illogic involved in such a centralized staffing policy. The complexity of the nomenklatura hierarchy raises the issue of the extent to which bureaucratic methods of controlling a bureaucracy are unrealistic. A more detailed examination would indicate that this list was in fact only one part of a larger system. The Central Committee controlled – or sought to control – the highest stratum of officials. But those at the top also had power over some lower-level nominations, though it had to be exercised in collaboration with the relevant party committee at each level, or with the lower echelon of their own hierarchy, which in turn performed the same function vis-à-vis the cadres of institutions under its control (alone or in consultation), and so on and so forth.
Thus, a system that seems clear when viewed from above turns out to be composed of different decision-making hierarchies, in which prerogatives are fluid and allow for numerous derogations. Endless complaints by the Central Committee apparatus against ministries demonstrate that the latter were not particularly diligent when it came to following nomenklatura rules. They appointed, transferred or dismissed job-holders without consulting the Central Committee; or only did so retrospectively. If they behaved like that, it was because the nomenklatura did not in reality operate as a one-way system. When a post became vacant, the Central Committee could look for a candidate in its reserve list, but it only did so if the ministry concerned was reckoned to be in a crisis situation. Otherwise, it asked the minister to propose the best candidate and would subsequently confirm the appointment.
At a later point in our study, in Parts Two and Three, the question of who ultimately controlled whom in this system will be posed once again – and answered. But we can already see that the logistics involved in controlling the machinery actually reveal dependency on it. And the dangers of ‘economization’ and losing control of the government machine and its administrative class were formulated in precisely these terms in internal party debates.
In conclusion, we would like to underscore two features of the Stalinist system. When dealing with Stalin’s own governmental methods, we are in the realm of arbitrariness and personal despotism. When speaking of Soviet government, we are in the realm of bureaucracy or rather its two branches, one of them (the party apparatus) minor and the other (state administration) much larger.