Stalin: A Biography

by Robert Service

  The Leader’s dominion involved chronometric regulation. Lunch was taken in the late afternoon around four or five o’clock and dinner was arranged for no earlier than nine o’clock. Stalin lived like this, and the entire ruling group had to adjust its collective body-clock to his habits.15 Kaganovich aped him to the minute.16 Molotov coped by taking little naps in daytime; such was his self-control that he was known to announce to his aides: ‘I’m now going to take a rest in the next room for thirteen minutes.’ He got up from the divan like an automaton and returned precisely thirteen minutes later.17 All knew that the Leader worked from the early evening onwards; everyone in the upper strata of the Soviet elite had to do the same — and their families had to put up with this as the price to be paid for sustaining life and privilege. With the communisation of eastern Europe the schedule of the working day changed there too. Throughout the USSR and across to Berlin, Tirana and Sofia the leading figures in party and government dared not stray from the proximity of the phone. Stalin could ring at any time of the night through to the early hours of the morning.18

  As Stalin’s vacations in the south became longer, he resorted frequently to telegrams. He could not control the entire machinery of state in detail. This had long been obvious to him. ‘I can’t know everything,’ he said to Ivan Kovalëv, Minister of Communications after the Second World War. ‘I pay attention to disagreements and to objections, and I work out why they’ve arisen and what they are about.’19 Stalin explained that his subordinates constantly kept things from him and that they always concocted a compromise behind the scenes before they reported to him. To him this was tantamount to conspiracy. Only Voznesenski stood out against such practices — and Stalin admired him for this. Stalin hated the ‘insincerity’ of other Politburo members. He might not detect particular cases of trickery but he knew they could trick him, and he functioned on the assumption that they were not to be trusted. The result was that Stalin, depleted in energy, looked for discrepancies between the accounts of one leader and another.20 Any disagreement was likely to lie across fault-lines in policy. Stalin had hit upon an economical way of penetrating the secrets of what was being done in the corridors of the Kremlin.

  Information also came to him by secret channels. The ‘organs’ — known as MGB from March 1946 and kept separate from the MVD — regularly reported on their eavesdropping of conversations among the Soviet leaders. Other Politburo members, he knew, were personally ambitious; and since they had repressed millions on his orders, he assumed they could form a violent conspiracy against him. Throughout the war with Germany he had ordered listening devices to be installed in the apartments of military personnel. The practice was applied to a growing list of civilian politicians. Even Molotov and Mikoyan were being bugged by 1950.21

  Another of his modalities was to cultivate jealousy among his subordinates. There was constant bickering, and Stalin alone was allowed to arbitrate. He seldom allowed the highest political leaders to stay in a particular post for long. Nothing was left settled in the Kremlin: Stalin saw that job insecurity among his potential successors aided his ability to dominate them. The Moscow political carousel flung off some individuals from time to time, and the survivors regularly had to dismount and move from one seat to another. This was not enough by itself. Stalin’s ill health barred him from undertaking the detailed supreme supervision he had exercised in the 1930s and during the Second World War. He needed a dependable individual to act as his eyes and ears in the leadership just as Lenin had turned to him for help in April 1922. Stalin operated with cunning. At any given time after 1945 he had a political favourite, and he sometimes hinted that the favourite was his chosen successor. But such favour was never formally bestowed, and Stalin raised up individuals only to hurl them down later. No one could grasp the levers of power in such a fashion as to acquire the capacity to supplant Stalin.

  There were many levers. In 1946 the Council of Ministers (as Sovnarkom was redesignated in the same year) had forty-eight ministries and committees, each being responsible for a large sector of state functions.22 Stalin ceased chairing it. Instead he increased the emphasis on ‘curatorship’. This was a system whereby every leading associate of Stalin was assigned responsibility for a group of institutions.23 Stalin, while wanting flux and vagueness as an ultimate safeguard of his rule, needed to assure himself that the state complied with his declared intentions. Curators were his solution. They met him frequently and never knew when he might haul them over the coals because one of their institutions had given him grounds for disquiet. Each group of institutions was the object of rivalry. Politburo members wanted to have as many as possible; this was a token of Stalin’s approval as well as a grant of real power. Reduction of the number signalled that a particular associate had fallen under the shadow of disapprobation — or even of the Leader’s lethal suspicion. His associates were under constant, intense pressure. Always they feared that some silly slip by one of their own subordinates might have adverse consequences for themselves. This could happen at any time because the Leader cultivated jealousies among all of them.

  He also harangued them into adopting his own ferocious style of leadership: at a Party Central Committee plenum in March 1946 he declared: ‘A People’s Commissar must be a wild animal; he must work and take direct responsibility for work.’24 Rulership as Stalin recommended it to People’s Commissars and their curators was nothing like the model of bureaucratic life described by sociologists since Max Weber and Roberto Michels. Even in his last years, when the Soviet order was stabilised and in many ways petrified, it retained a militant and dynamic quality.

  Politics were a bear-pit. Politburo members could bite and claw each other as brutally as they liked so long as they produced the outcome demanded by Stalin. Only in Stalin’s presence were they constrained to moderate their behaviour. The Politburo had ceased to convene in the war and the pre-war tradition was not resumed.25 Stalin continued to consult other leaders by informal methods. Always he liked to have leading figures in the Politburo write, telegram or telephone their assent to his preferences into policy. The Orgburo and the Secretariat — as well as the Council of Ministers and its Presidium — deliberated in his absence. The Party Congress, which had supreme formal authority over all party bodies, was not called until 1952. Stalin expected to rule through unofficial channels; he knew that disruption of institutional regularity helped to prolong his personal despotism. He could intervene with an order at his whim. He deliberately inflicted a contradictory pattern of work on his subordinates. They, unlike him, had to observe administrative procedures punctiliously. At the same time they had to obtain practical results regardless of the rulebook. The pressure was unremitting. This was the way he liked things, and the other leaders dared make no objection.

  The fact that Stalin was often away from Moscow led many contemporaries (and subsequent commentators) to surmise that he was losing his grip on power. This was a misperception. On the large questions of the international, political and economic agenda there was little that escaped his adjudication; and Kremlin politicians were altogether too fearful of him to try to trick him. The framework of rulership at the centre and in the provinces also continued to exercise his attention. At the end of the war four bodies had immense importance. These were the government, the party, the security police and the army. Stalin needed all of them. He also required a situation in which no institution became so dominant as to threaten his position. The most obvious menace after the Second World War was the Red Army, and the country’s military hero Georgi Zhukov immediately came under his suspicion.

  No sooner had Zhukov led the victory parade on Red Square and completed Allied military negotiations with Eisenhower and Montgomery in Berlin than he was pulled out of the limelight. Stalin had plenty of compromising material against him. The security agencies reported to the Kremlin that Zhukov had stolen a trainload of loot from Germany. The list was enormous, including 3,420 silks, 323 furs, 60 gilt-framed pictures, 29 bronze statues and
a grand piano.26 This was established custom in the Red occupying forces. Practically every commander could have been arraigned on similar charges. Stalin played with the idea of a trial but in June 1946 limited himself to relegating the victor of Kursk and Berlin to the Odessa Military District (from which he was in turn dismissed in February 1947). Pravda steadily ceased to give prominence to the names of marshals. The police were empowered to tighten surveillance over the officer corps. Undeniably the Red Army (redesignated the Soviet Army in 1946) remained vital to the tasks of maintaining political control in the USSR and eastern Europe; it was also the recipient of budgetary largesse as Gosplan increasingly skewed central economic planning in favour of military expenditure. Yet Stalin remained eager to hold the armed forces under his civilian control.

  The security agencies too came under suspicion. Here Stalin’s method was different. Beria in peacetime, unlike Zhukov, was too useful to discard. Yet it suited Stalin to replace him in the leadership of the police. Beria knew too much and had too many clients whom he had appointed to office. Stalin therefore put Beria in charge of the Soviet atom-bomb project and introduced younger men to the Ministry of State Security (MGB) and to the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD). The appointee to the MVD in December 1945 was Sergei Kruglov, and Alexei Kuznetsov was given oversight over security matters on the Politburo’s behalf; Viktor Abakumov became head of the MGB in May 1946. Although continuity of administrative leadership was desirable in theory, Stalin’s higher demand was his inviolable personal power. A police chief who settled into office could pose an acute danger to him, especially since the MGB had uniformed forces which could be deployed in the normal course of events. Stalin also retained his own parallel security agency in the form of the Special Department. He relied heavily on Poskrëbyshev to keep him apprised of anything important to his interests. He also ensured that his bodyguard chief Vlasik should be beholden to himself and to no one else. This was a police state where the ruler held his police in permanent mistrust.

  Yet his simultaneous reliance on the MGB and MVD was intense. Without their operational efficiency it would have been difficult to reduce the standing of the Soviet Army leadership. The Soviet budget continued to allocate massive resources to the security agencies. The Gulag still produced a crucial proportion of the country’s diamonds, gold and timber, and the uranium mines were developed after 1945 with convict labour. Indeed Stalin’s reliance on the security agencies grew as he reinforced policies which frustrated the hopes of most citizens for political and economic relaxation. Coercion of society was hugely important.

  Yet not even Stalin projected a future for the USSR when the MGB and MVD would be the effective government. The Council of Ministers retained that function. The increasing complexity of the economy required specialist knowledge lacking in the security agencies. The Council of Ministers also sought to free itself from excessive tutelage by party bodies: a technocratic imperative was pursued by several leading political figures. This was an old discussion that had exercised Stalin’s mind throughout the 1930s. As previously, he moved between two solutions. One was to give way to the ministerial lobby and put a stop to the party’s interference. This was the orientation espoused especially by Georgi Malenkov. The other solution was to extend and strengthen the powers of the party, if not to the pitch of the late 1920s then at least to the detriment of the Council of Ministers in the 1940s. Among the advocates of this orientation was Andrei Zhdanov. Stalin in the early years after the Second World War leaned positively in the direction of Zhdanov. But then Zhdanov fell into disfavour, and he began to give backing to Malenkov.27

  The arguments, from a structural viewpoint, were finely poised. Zhdanov and his friends could indicate that the Council of Ministers, left to itself, could not guarantee Stalinist ideological rectitude. Without this, the October Revolution was undermined and the rationale of the USSR’s existence was ruined. The Soviet Union could not survive on technocratic impulses alone. Yet the other side of the debate had an equally strong case. The USSR functioned in a world of intense military and economic competition. If party doctrinaires held the whip hand over ministerial specialists, the country’s capacity to match the USA and its capitalist allies would be reduced. Pettifogging tutelage by the party would tie one of the Soviet Union’s hands behind its back in a contest which placed the West at an advantage.

  Stalin did not need to be persuaded that the USSR had to become more competitive or that ideological indoctrination and political control were important. His state could do without neither government nor party; and even when he gave preference to one of them over the other, he omitted to make the choice a definitive one. The institutional tension worked to his personal advantage. By locking the two bodies in rivalry, he strengthened his position as arbiter. But this in turn meant that he had to settle for a lower level of administrative efficiency that he would otherwise have liked. He started from the premise that each institution pursued its interests at the expense of others. Persistent rivalries led to systematic obstruction. The tangled competences of government, party and police produce a thicket of bureaucratic paperwork which slowed down the processes of deliberation and implementation. Dynamism was introduced when Stalin himself gave a direct order or when he allowed an influential group of subordinates to pursue a desired initiative. But Stalin knew he could not know everything. The network of central institutional bodies worked well to maintain his despotism; it was less effective in facilitating flexible, efficient rulership. Stalin paid a price for his despotism.

  49. POLICIES AND PURGES

  Stalin did not confine his Kremlin political activity to manipulating the existing central structures and playing the leading politicians off against each other. There had to be constant deliberation on policies in the dangerous post-war years. The external and internal situation was always in flux and Stalin could not cope without consulting his fellow leaders. He had to accept that limits existed to what he could learn about the world by his solitary efforts. Nor could he safely rely exclusively on his own judgement. It was pragmatic to sanction a degree of diversity of opinion among his subordinates before fixing policy. Disagreements among the leaders were not only inevitable: they were also desirable. There was no secret about this; Politburo members understood how they were being manipulated. But they also saw that if they failed to take a position when affairs were under discussion, Stalin might decide that they were no longer of any use to him. At the same time they had to avoid saying anything which would annoy him. Short of assassinating him, they remained at his mercy — and his scrupulous attention to the details of his personal security made it highly unlikely that an attempt on his life would be successful.

  Stalin’s leading associates were in any case simultaneously occupied with the discharge of their institutional duties. Immense responsibility fell to each of them and their power and privileges were at least some compensation for the subjugated condition of their work. They were also motivated by patriotic zeal and, in some cases, ideological commitment. They had operated under Stalin’s control for years. It is hardly a surprise that he continued dominating and exploiting them just as they did their own subordinates.

  And so Stalin frequently shuffled the pack of the leadership as individuals won or lost his trust in the battles he permitted over policy. One leader he demoted soon after the war was Vyacheslav Molotov. Alongside Kaganovich and Mikoyan, Molotov was his longest-serving subordinate. Initially all seemed well. When Stalin went south on vacation in October 1945, he left the foursome of Molotov, Beria, Mikoyan and Malenkov in charge of the Kremlin.1 But almost certainly he was looking for a pretext to attack Molotov, and the incident over the publication of excerpts of Churchill’s speeches gave him what he wanted. Stalin may have resented Molotov’s wartime fame as well as his popularity as an ethnic Russian. The British press must have made the situation still worse by speculating that Molotov was flexing his muscles to assume power.2 The beneficiaries of the demise of Molotov were Malenkov and B
eria, who in March 1946 were promoted — at a rare Party Central Committee plenum — to full membership of the Politburo, and Malenkov’s name came after Stalin’s in the composition of the Orgburo and Secretariat.3 Molotov was not sacked as Minister of External Affairs until March 1949 but his time as Stalin’s deputy had already ceased.

  Yet although Stalin was resentful and suspicious, even he did not yet wish to get rid entirely of Molotov. When Trygve Lie, Secretary-General of the United Nations Organisation, visited Stalin in Moscow in May 1950, Stalin recalled Molotov to take an active part in the discussions.4 Molotov’s expertise was as yet too useful to discard. His formal status had been undermined but his actual influence, despite having been reduced, was still far from negligible. He remained a Politburo member and, more importantly, a regular dinner guest at Stalin’s dacha. Stalin was playing a long game.

  For a counterweight to Malenkov’s new authority he turned to Andrei Zhdanov, who was put in charge of the Propaganda Administration in the Party Secretariat in April 1946. Zhdanov’s position was consolidated by the simultaneous appointment of Alexei Kuznetsov, who worked alongside him in Leningrad, to head the Secretariat’s Cadres Administration. Malenkov knew he would need to look over his own shoulder.5 Indeed scarcely had he risen than he was cast down. In May 1946 the Politburo sacked him from the Party Secretariat. Stalin blamed him for failing to improve the quality of aircraft production. N. S. Patolichev took his place.6 Malenkov’s time in the sun had been short; like Molotov, however, he was not entirely excluded from Kremlin activity (at least after his return from an assignment in the Soviet republics of central Asia). As yet the juggling of the personnel pack after the war did not involve much beyond the obvious loss of prestige and influence. Malenkov was not arrested but his clients in party and government were removed from posts and often replaced by individuals associated with Zhdanov at the time when he had worked in Leningrad. Zhdanov’s star was in the ascendant.