Stalin, Volume 1

by Stephen Kotkin

  Unlike Nazaretyan, the aide, most everyone who managed to encounter Stalin in the 1920s caught mere glimpses. Marina Ryndzyunskaya, a sculptress at the Museum of the Revolution commissioned to craft a likeness, noted that he was a man “of medium height” and that his gait was odd. “With his left hand tucked into his pocket, he moved forward all at once,” she wrote. “When he turned, he turned not gradually, head, neck, and then body, but completely, like a soldier.”34 But what moved him? Even those who worked with Stalin usually failed to take his measure. Alexander Barmine, then a twenty-three-year-old general staff officer, first glimpsed Stalin in 1922 at the Fourth Congress of the Comintern in the Kremlin’s St. George’s Hall and claimed to have seen him “not only as he is on dress parade before delegations or admiring audiences, but in his office at work.” Stalin “looks coarser and more common, and also smaller” in person, Barmine later wrote. “His face is pockmarked and sallow. . . . His eyes are dark brown with a tinge of hazel. His expression tells nothing of what he feels. There is to me a curious heaviness and sullenness about him. The man seems neither European nor Asiatic, but a cross between the two.” At meetings, Barmine noted, Stalin sat off to the side, smoked a pipe that he stuffed with cigarette tobacco, and doodled, but he accumulated power because of his “strength of will, patience, slyness, ability to perceive human frailties and play upon them with contempt, and the supreme gift of pursuing a chosen goal inflexibly and without scruple.”35 It was a simplistic assessment—master psychologist, iron will—that came to be widely held, especially retrospectively, but it overlooked Stalin’s immersion in Marxism, a key source of his power. And it left open the question of why so many people proved susceptible to him.36 Naked careerism was one reason they sought to attach themselves to the general secretary, but many were attracted to Stalin because of his tenacious dedication to the revolutionary cause and to the state’s power.

  FROM VOZDVIZHENKA TO OLD SQUARE

  Before Lenin took ill, the regime revolved around his physical location: the dacha at Gorki or the office and apartment in the Kremlin’s Imperial Senate, between which the regime had its principal meeting space, used by both the Council of People’s Commissars and the politburo.37 Central Committee offices were less grand, and located outside the Kremlin walls. Initially, the party staff set up shop inside a rooming house, where the “apparatus” squeezed into a single apartment, though soon it knocked down the wall, linking to a second. Stasova, then Krestinsky, then Molotov had offices here. It was located on Vozdvizhenka, a radial street that ran from just outside the Kremlin walls, from the Trinity Gate-Kutafya Tower westward to the Arbat. (The address was Vozdvizhenka, 4, although on the building’s other side it was listed as Mokhovaya, 7.)38 In 1920, the expanding apparatus relocated across the street, to Vozdvizhenka, 5, a more august structure built in the late eighteenth century by Matvei Kazakov, the architect of the Kremlin’s Imperial Senate, but just a fraction of the size of the latter.39 “The anterooms were crowded with callers; numerous clerks, mostly young girls in abbreviated skirts and high-heeled lacquered shoes, flitted about with arms full of documents,” wrote a Russo-American anarchist of a visit in 1920, adding that the functionaries themselves “looked pale, with sunken eyes and high cheek bones, the result of systematic undernourishment, overwork, and worry.”40 Vozdvizhenka, 5, was near the historic location of a monastery that had been burned down in the fires that had helped drive out Napoleon. Before that, it had been the site of Ivan the Terrible’s Oprichnina. Here, in the jammed neoclassical edifice, Stalin would have his inaugural general secretary’s office.41

  That the party’s service apparatus would become almighty was something of a surprise, but not an accident.42 Lenin had chosen a ministerial form of government, but the busy people’s commissars sent proxies to the supposedly deliberative Council of People’s Commissars’ meetings, which, in any case, Lenin dominated, whoever might be present.43 More fundamentally, Lenin had insisted that the party, mainly the politburo but to an extent the Central Committee, serve as the top policy-making body. This choice was reinforced by the circumstance that neither the Council of People’s Commissars nor individual commissariats had local branches and depended on local party organizations for implementing decisions, as well as for supplying personnel perceived to be loyal.44 Technically, the party was not a state organ, so its decisions had to be formulated as decrees of the Council of People’s Commissars or laws of the Soviet central executive committee, and this redundancy bred confusion, with some suggesting that the party be abolished, others that the soviets be abolished.45 Nothing was eliminated. Departments of the central party apparatus came to parallel the structure of the Council of People’s Commissars. Not all Central Committee staff were full-fledged functionaries (or otvetstvennye rabotniki); many were stenographers, accountants, drivers—indeed, around 240 of the 600 staff members were non-party members; 340 were female.46 (Here, as elsewhere, the typing and most of the filing were done by Bolshevik wives, mistresses, or “bourgeois ladies.”)47 Nonetheless, the apparatus of the party-centric regime attracted talented people, who developed areas of special expertise, touching on nearly every possible sphere of administration: personnel, propaganda, communications, army, navy, foreign policy, security, finance.48

  Pinched for space, the central party apparatus relocated in late December 1923 to the inner-city trading quarter of Kitaigorod (whose high walls and gate towers dated from medieval times), where it took over Old Square, 4, a grand former trading house of the Moscow Merchant Association dating to 1915.49 Of the wintertime move, the functionary Alexei Balashov recalled that “the staff themselves loaded and unloaded the furniture and documents on sleds, forming a long train.”50 Stalin took an office in the combined modernist-neoclassical structure built by merchant capital on the top floor, with access only through two other offices, which accommodated his main aides and a special document courier. Stalin’s suite was spacious and orderly, with a door at the back that opened to an ample conference room, where he and Molotov often conferred (behind this meeting room was Molotov’s office).51 To the left inside Stalin’s office stood a large table that could accommodate twenty people; to the right, in the far corner, stood his writing desk, along with a smaller table holding telephones, and his personal safe. He was not the night owl he would become. “Stalin arose usually around 9:00 a.m., and arrived at the Central Committee on Old Square by 11:00,” according to a long-serving bodyguard. “Stalin frequently worked until late at night, especially in those years after Lenin’s death when he had to conduct an active struggle against the Trotskyites.”52 After work, he walked home the short distance down to Red Square and through the Savior Gate (the one with the clock), often with Molotov, who also lived in the Kremlin.

  Stalin had an office in the Kremlin’s Imperial Senate building, too, a result of his government post (people’s commissar for nationalities), but he seems to have used that office sparingly. But the Kremlin was also the location of the twice weekly politburo meetings. As of 1922, there were only seven full members (Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Rykov, Tomsky) and three candidate or non-voting members (Bukharin, Kalinin, Molotov), although Stalin would soon add a fourth (Janis Rudzutaks). But politburo sessions were sprawling affairs, including numerous technical personnel from the apparatus, as well as various Central Committee members, Central Control Commission members, and others invited to attend parts of the meetings based upon pertinent agenda items. Central Committee plenums were even larger, and took place once or twice a month.53 But the orgburo, which handled personnel decisions, met far more frequently than any party body, and its sessions sometimes lasted whole days—they were known as orgies. And the party secretariat was essentially in continuous session. In addition, central party apparatchiks could command the assistance of the staff of entire commissariats when gathering information and preparing politburo and Central Committee agendas, reports, or recommendations for Stalin.

  Stalin’s emerg
ing dictatorship within the dictatorship, despite having no link, physical or personal, to the old regime in the old capital, nonetheless resembled tsarism in an important respect. Before 1917, the locus of power had been the imperial chancellery, nominally a service apparatus, which reported directly to the tsar and eventually merged with the tsar’s own personal chancellery.54 “The head of the chancellery,” wrote one of its long-serving heads, “was completely independent and not subordinate to the chairman of the Committee of Ministers.”55 Ministers were often less informed than chancellery functionaries, who alone developed a bird’s eye view on the state, accumulating vast power thanks to the size and complexity of the realm as well as their own aspirations and skills. All this could be said of the central Communist party apparatus vis-à-vis the Council of People’s Commissars or the Soviet central executive committee. But whereas the imperial chancellery never succeeded in fully subordinating the ministries—bureaucratic infighting had thwarted the tsars’ efforts to transform the chancellery into a personal watchdog over the entire state—in the Soviet case, every institution far and wide, except peasant communes, had a party organization that enabled the party to serve as a watchdog over the state, and the society.56 The ubiquitous party cells were empowered by a potent worldview and belief system. Stalin’s machine was not tsarist autocracy redux, in other words, but a modern one-party dictatorship.57

  Old Square, 4, the heart of the Soviet regime, came to present a formidable contrast for those who knew the informal days of 1917. Alexander Ilin, known as the Genevan, recalled the original “headquarters” of the Central Committee in Petrograd “as a serene family scene,” with “everyone sitting at the dining table and drinking tea.” Now there was “a gigantic building with a labyrinth of sections and subsections. An immense number of functionaries are on every floor, hurrying about.”58 Ilin viewed this bureaucratic metamorphosis as inevitable yet sad. What he did not seem to appreciate was that inside the new “gigantic building,” there was still intimacy and camaraderie. Functionaries rode in the elevator with Stalin; some ran into him in the corridor. His office door was unlocked. “Sometimes I took a book from his library to the reading lounge,” the functionary Balashov recalled. “There, there were cupboards with a splendid library. Stalin was sent two copies of every book published by the central publishers, often signed copies. Many authors themselves sent their books. Stalin passed one copy on to us and we divided them among ourselves.” Stalin did not lock his desk. “At night he turned or locked in the safe all secret documents,” Balashov explained. “At the reception area someone stood duty, and further on were guards, so what did he have to fear?”59

  NOMENKLATURA AND CONSPIRACY

  Power accrued to Stalin’s apparatus in the first instance thanks to leverage over personnel. The vast majority of party members held full-time jobs, whether in factories or commissariats, their party activities being seen as voluntary, but a small number were paid to engage exclusively in party work (apparatchiks), such as running party organizations, and although such officials were supposed to be elected, during the civil war elections had taken a backseat. As fighting wound down, many officials insisted on reversion to elections, prompting Lenin, at the 11th Party Congress (March-April 1921), to counter that “if the Central Committee is deprived of the right to distribute personnel, it will be unable to direct policy.”60 Stalin, on June 6, 1922, dispatched a circular on the prerogative of Central Committee overseers to nominate the candidates (usually just one) for election to local party posts.61 Would-be regional potentates were seeking to impose their will over other locals, partly out of personal ambition, partly out of frustration at the proliferation of agencies and power centers, and the central apparatus took sides, rotating out local officials of the side it did not back. This enabled some regional officials to consolidate authority as provincial party bosses, who, in turn, centralized their power by intervening lower down, having their people “elected” as county party bosses.62 Stalin could never centralize the whole country himself, but he could effectively centralize the bosses who were centralizing their own provinces.63

  Stalin’s success remained circumscribed by the country’s great distances and by mutual protection rackets (semeistvennost’), but the central apparatus compelled locals to submit ever more personnel data, forced through periodic campaigns of verifications or “purges,” and managed to register all party members in the country.64 Stalin’s functionaries incited local apparatchiks to denounce each other to the center, and sent traveling commissions to break up or at least manage local cliques.65 Here was a hoary cat-and-mouse game in sprawling Russia—far-off locales struggling to evade or otherwise cope with central commands—but now the center had the potent mechanism of the party and party discipline. What stands out is not that local party organizations often managed to reject candidates to top party posts proposed by the center, but that the central apparatus managed to impose itself to a high degree. The orgburo made at least a thousand appointments just between April 1922 and March 1923, including no fewer than forty-two new provincial party bosses.66 Stalin could hardly know every one of the cadres being moved about.67 But the desire for promotion made provincials eager to please, if they could not deceive, him. In September 1922, Stalin created a commission to promote standout local functionaries to Moscow. In confidential written evaluations that year of forty-seven secretaries of provincial party committees, one official in the Urals (Leonid) was deemed “unable to lead either soviet or party work. Falls under alien influence. . . . A functionary below provincial level.” But another, Nikolai Uglanov of Nizhny Novgorod, was said to show “initiative. He is able to unite functionaries to achieve the work. Authoritative.”68 In 1923, Stalin named Uglanov a voting member of the Central Committee, and the next year he would promote him to the capital as second secretary of the Moscow organization, and soon, first secretary.69

  Appointments and transfers of senior functionaries were systematized with the development, on the initiative of Stalin’s orgburo, of a “nomenklatura” (from the Latin nomenclatura, for a list of names). Functionaries occupying a position on the nomenklatura could not be removed without approval from the central apparatus. The initial list (November 1923) contained some 4,000 positions/officials: first secretaries of republics, provinces, and counties; people’s commissars and their deputies; military district commanders; ambassadors.70 Especially notable was application of the party-controlled nomenklatura process to state-run industry. Sorting all these appointments out entailed no small amount of work, and Stalin sought to reduce the number of positions for which the central apparatus would be responsible.71 Provincial party organizations emulated the center with their own nomenklatura of appointments under their control. Tensions persisted between the practice of appointment and the principle of election and between central and local prerogatives, but the invention of the nomenklatura system, and its demand for up-to-date personnel data, was a remarkable patronage mechanism in energetic hands. Stalin put a premium on competence, which he interpreted in terms of loyalty. “We need to assemble functionaries so that people who occupy these positions are capable of implementing directives, comprehending those directives, accepting those directives as their own and bringing them to life,” he observed at the 12th Party Congress (April 1923).72 Fulfillment of Central Committee directives became Stalin’s mantra, and suspicion of non-fulfillment, his obsession.73

  Stalin’s apparatus wielded additional instruments. Ivan Ksenofontov, a founding member of the Cheka, who had overseen the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal during the civil war, was placed in charge of the party’s business directorate, which managed mundane matters such as party member dues and the party budget, but also controlled offices and furnishings, apartments, food packets, medical care, cars and drivers, trips abroad.74 The business directorate had the power to grant or withhold favors, affording Stalin enormous leverage. Yet another key device was the government phone system. Worried that switchboard operators cou
ld listen in on calls, the regime developed a “vertushka,” so named because it had dials, then a novelty. At first, the self-dialed government network linked around sixty people, but soon it grew to a few hundred, and served as a mark of power (or lack thereof for those without).75 One defector claimed that Stalin oversaw installation of the vertushka system and as a result connived a way to eavesdrop on it.76 This is plausible but not corroborated by other evidence, at least for this early period.77 What we can say is that most of the vertushka phones were at Old Square and reinforced the party apparatus as a nodal point.78 The regime also established a special cipher unit, which, though nominally a division of the Cheka, in practice was autonomous, so that politburo telegrams did not pass through the secret police leadership.79 Run by Gleb Boki, an ethnic Ukrainian born in Tiflis who had studied math and physics at the St. Petersburg Mining Institute—and who had also founded a colony for wife swapping and drunken orgies—the cipher specialists coded and decoded hundreds of telegrams per day for regional party organizations, embassies abroad, and officials on holiday.80

  Only Stalin, in the name of the Central Committee, could issue directives to every locale and institution, while anything sent to the politburo or Central Committee from commissariats, secret police, or the military went to the party secretariat. The Old Square mail room resembled a military operation with secret police couriers gluing, sewing, sealing, and unsealing envelopes; couriers also had to carry clean, well-oiled, loaded weapons, and to check and recheck the identity of recipients.81 But complaints of leaks and violations became constant, and officials were perpetually admonished.82 In July 1922, Yaroslavsky, who had been shifted to the party’s Siberian Bureau, lost his briefcase in which he had a codebook and notebook. The authorities offered a 100 million ruble reward—obviously, with no intention or possibility of paying; the briefcase was found, but without its contents.83 As of April 1923, it was forbidden to put in writing anything relating to state security; instead, security matters were to be discussed first in Stalin’s secretariat, before being brought to the attention of the politburo.84 On August 19, 1924, the politburo issued a resolution “on conspiracy in handling documents of the CC,” with an appendix laying out the “rules in handling the conspiratorial documents of the CC.” Many of the instructions demanded that officials “observe absolute conspiracy in the handling of documents” in terms of who saw them and how they were kept; any official who pursued a secret document had to sign it. Many had to be returned after reading.