8. Stasova, Vospominaniia, 161. See also Isbakh, Tovarishch Absoliut.
9. Nikolai Osinsky had written to Lenin (October 16, 1919) suggesting the “formation of an organizational dictatorship consisting of three members of the Central Committee, the best known organizers,” naming Stalin, Krestinsky, and Leonid Serebryakov (while allowing that Dzierzynski could be appropriate, too). RGPASI, f. 5, op. 1, d. 1253, l. 6. Osinsky on Sverdlov at the 8th Party Congress: VIII s”ezd RKP (b), 165. Lenin kept Osinsky away from high posts after his opposition to Brest-Litovsk.
10. Schapiro, Origin of the Communist Autocracy [1977], 266.
11. Daniels, “The Secretariat,” 33. Krestinsky admitted the defects: IX s”ezd RKP (b), 41.
12. See, for example, Zinoviev’s comments at the 11th Party Congress: Pravda, April 2, 1921.
13. Even though Lenin blocked Krestinsky’s inclusion on the electoral list, 161 of the 479 voting delegates wrote in his name, a unique event in party annals. X s”ezd [1963], 402. Krestinsky also lost his seat on the politburo (March 16, 1921) and was sent to Germany as a Soviet envoy. Lenin was not sentimental: Krestinsky’s wife had been the first doctor to treat Lenin when he was shot in 1918.
14. Nikonov, Molotov, 517–8; Zelenov, “Rozhdeniie partiinoi nomenklatury,” 4. See also Ali, “Aspects of the RKP (b) Secretariat.”
15. This was up from 82,859 passes to its offices in 1920: Izvestiia TsK, no. 3 (39), March 1922: at 55.
16. Harris, “Stalin as General Secretary: The Appointment Process and the Nature of Stalin’s Power,” 69 (citing RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 78, l. 2); Pravda, April 2, 1922 [Zinoviev]; Izvestiia TsK KPSS, 1990, no. 4: at 176.
17. PSS, XLIV: 393–4. Molotov would recall that when he became head of the party secretariat, in 1921, Lenin told him, “as Central Committee secretary you should take up politics [policy], and delegate all the technical work to deputies and aides.” Chuev, Sto sorok, 181.
18. Daniels, “Stalin’s Rise to Dictatorship”; Rosenfeldt, Knowledge and Power. See also Daniels, “The Secretariat”; Rigby, “Early Provincial Cliques”; Rosenfeldt, Stalin’s Special Departments; and the wrongly dismissive reviews by Gábor Rittersporn, Russian History/Histoire Russe, 17/4 (1990), 468, and J. Arch Getty, Russian Review, 50/3 (1991) 372–74.
19. “Iosif Stalin: opyt kharakteristiki (September 22, 1939),” in Trotskii, Portrety revoliutsionerov, 46–60 (at 59), 351, n35 (note by Fel’shtinskii, citing Trotsky’s 1930s notebooks). Elsewhere Trotsky wrote that “Stalin took possession of power, not with the aid of personal qualities, but with the aid of an impersonal machine. And it was not he who created the machine, but the machine that created him.” Trotsky, Stalin, xv.
20. Avtorkhanov, Tekhnologiia vlasti, 5; McNeal, Stalin, 82.
21. “There was nothing ‘automatic’ about the process of Stalin’s elevation during the twenties,” Tucker rightly noted in 1973. “It took an uncommonly gifted man to navigate the treacherous waters of Bolshevik politics with the skill that he showed in those years.” Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary, 392.
22. Lenin’s personal secretariat overlapped with that of the Council of People’s Commissars. It gathered every political mood report from 1918 through 1922, and every cockamamie policy proposal.
23. On March 31, 1920, Dzierzynski had proposed creating two lists of functionaries, one alphabetical, one regional, a suggestion immediately taken up. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 112, d. 14, l. 183.
24. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 11, d. 114, l. 14.
25. XII s”ezd RKP (b), 62–3, 180 (Viktor Nogin, a member of the Revision Commission of the 12th Party Congress). Nogin died in May 1924.
26. Kvashonkin, Bol’shevistskoe rukovodstvo, 262–3 (RGASPI, f. 85, op. 1/S, d. 13, l. 10).
27. This chapter makes use of Vsia Moskva (Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1923) and Vsia Moskva v karmane (Moscow-Leningrad: Gosizdat, 1926), among other sources.
28. Stalin had implored Lenin to be relieved of this or that task, complaining of overwork—not without basis, although Stalin’s presence at the workers and peasants inspectorate or nationalities commissariat was minimal. Stalin relinquished both these government posts to concentrate fulltime on the party apparatus, though he retained a government office in the Kremlin’s Imperial Senate.
29. Sharapov, Razreshenie agrarnogo voprosa, 174.
30. This would be the peak rural proportion of party members in the regime’s entire history. Rigby, Communist Party Membership, 135.
31. Pethybridge, One Step Backwards. In 1924, Smolensk, a rural province, had 16 Communists for every 10,000 rural working-age inhabitants. Fainsod, Smolensk Under Soviet Rule, 44. Zinoviev, at the Party Congress in 1923, flatly stated that the Communists were an urban party. XII s”ezd RKP (b), 39.
32. Pirani, Russian Revolution in Retreat, 155.
33. Pirani, Russian Revolution in Retreat, 101.
34. “‘Menia vstretil chelovek srednego rosta . . .’ .”
35. Barmine, Vingt ans au service de l’U.R.S.S., 256–60.
36. Lenin understood that “policy is conducted through people.” PSS, XLV: 122–3. An early version of Stalin’s 1935 slogan “cadres decide everything.”
37. Shefov, Moskva, kreml’, Lenin; Volkogonov, Lenin: Life and Legacy, 230; Duranty, “Artist Finds Lenin at Work and Fit.”
38. The rooming house proved to be something of a catch basin: Kalinin, head of the Soviet central executive committee, also set up offices here on the second floor, as did Alexei Rykov, deputy head of the Council of People’s Commissars, though they would have their main offices in the Imperial Senate, on the same floor as Lenin. Vozdvizhenka, 3, had held tsarist foreign affairs ministry archives and it became the Soviet state archive (the building that would be torn down for an expansion of the Lenin Library), while Vozdvizhenka, 6, a private clinic, became the Kremlin hospital. Barmin, Sokoly Trotskogo, 155. The rooming house, known as Petergof, was built in 1877 and added a fourth story in 1902. It was designated the House of Soviets no. 4. The Central Committee publishing arm was located at Vozdvizhenka, 9, while no. 10, built by the Economic Society of the Officers of the Moscow Military District, would become the military store (Voentorg); it also housed the Communist Youth League Central Committee offices, Young Guard publishing association, and a dormitory. Bela Kun lived here, 1923–37, and not in the Hotel Lux. Down Vozdvizhenka stood the Morozov mansion as well as the Sheremetyev family’s Moscow compound, known as the Corner House. Vozdvizhenka ran perpendicular to the Kremlin; Mokhovaya, parallel. Vozdvizhenka would be renamed Comintern Street in 1935; Mokhovaya became Karl Marx Prospect. Sytin, Iz istorii Moskovskikh ulits [1948].
39. IX s”ezd RKP (b), 357, 610, n118; Pavliuchenkov, Rossiia Nepovskaia, 61; Pavliuchenkov, “Orden mechenostsev,” 213–27. Later, Vozdvizhenka, 5, became the State Museum of Architecture, which it remains today.
40. Berkman, Bolshevik Myth, 46, 36–7. The headquarters of the Zhenotdel—derisively known as Tsentro-Baba—was also at Vozdvizhenka, 5.
41. Kazakov’s building had gained its third story in 1898. Stalin’s initial secretariat office, when he was assigned to party work nearly full-time, before he became general secretary, had been set up on September 26, 1921, at Trubnikovskiii pereulok, no. 19, second floor, at least for correspondence. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 1, d. 4505, l. 1, 3; d. 1860, l. 1–4.
42. “We [the party] have become the state,” one delegate stated at the 8th Party Congress in 1919. VIII s”ezd [1959], 178 (Varlam Avanesov). “Everyone knows, it’s a secret for no one, that in fact the leader of Soviet power in Russia is the Central Committee,” Zinoviev stated in his report on the 8th Congress to the Leningrad party machine. Izvestiia TsK KPSS, 1989, no. 8: 187.
43. Lenin’s government was effectively a cabinet, not a cabinet system rooted in parliamentary majority (as in the British case). Rigby
, Lenin’s Government, 230.
44. Rigby, Lenin’s Government, 176–86. Of course, there were local soviets, but these grassroots bodies mostly recruited new political elites, many of whom moved up and out of the soviets. Abrams, “Political Recruitment and Local Government.” The commissariat for local self-government had been formally folded into the commissariat of internal affairs on March 20, 1918; meanwhile, the regime had facilitated elimination of zemstvo local government bodies (which dated to Russia’s 1860s Great Reforms, and which the Provisional Government had democratized and, on paper, greatly expanded). Gronsky, “The Zemstvo System.”
45. Yevgeny Preobrazhensky, at the 9th Party Congress (March 1920), had observed that some delegates had “gone so far as to suggest that the party can be abolished, because we have soviets, in which the Communists are a majority.” But Krestinsky, then party secretary, suggested, instead, eliminating the soviets in the provinces. IX s”ezd RKP (b), 68; Izvestiia TsK KPSS, 1990, no. 7: 160.
46. Izvestiia TsK KPSS, 1921, no. 28 (March 5): 23–4; no. 29: at 7; 1922, no. 3 (39): 54. See also Schapiro, Communist Party, 250.
47. Sakwa, Soviet Communists, 49–53, 191–3; Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 688.
48. Rosenfeldt, The “Special” World. By 1924, the central party apparatus ballooned to nearly 700.
49. Sytin, Iz istorii moskovskikh ulits [2000], 70. “Kitai,” in Russian, can signify China, but this is clearly not the meaning of Moscow’s Kitaigorod, which no one has definitely established. Kolodnyi, Kitai-gorod, 5–16. Vozdvizhenka, no. 5, went to the state planning commission. The separate Moscow party organization apparatus in the capital was all set: following the September 25, 1919, bombing of its headquarters at Leontyev Lane, 18, it had moved to Bolshaya Dmitrovka, 15a, once a wealthy club before the revolution—with a restaurant, exhibit and concert halls, billiard rooms, and card-playing rooms—which had been renowned for artistic salons. The Moscow organization stayed at Bolshaya Dmitrovka until after Lazar Kaganovich, a Central Committee secretary, concurrently became Moscow party boss (1930) and grabbed Old Square, no. 6, from the commissariat of labor in order to remain proximate to the central apparatus and Stalin (at no. 4).
50. Balashov and Markhashov, “Staraia ploshchad’, 4 (20-e gody),” no. 5: 192.
51. Bazhanov, Bazhanov and the Damnation of Stalin, 38–9.
52. Loginov, Teni Stalina, 95. Vlasik dictated his recollections to his wife Mariia; their adopted daughter Nadezhda passed them to Georgii Egnatashivili. Egnatashvili’s father, Aleksandr, had worked under Vlasik, as head of bodyguard detail for politburo member Nikolai Shvernik.
53. The politburo generally met on Tuesdays and Thursdays; the Council of People’s Commissars, on Wednesdays.
54. Lieven, “Russian Senior Officialdom”; Armstrong, “Tsarist and Soviet Elite Administrators.” Some functions of the tsar’s secretariat were taken by the Ministry of the Imperial Household, which supervised the emperor’s property (known as Cabinet Lands, the largest landowner in Russia).
55. Remnev, Samoderzhavnoe pravitel’stvo, 83 (citing unpublished memoirs of A. N. Kulomzin). The imperial chancellery did more than merely summarize; its functionaries rewrote and recast proceedings, going so far as to eliminate arguments to compose smooth narratives of policy formation, creating paperwork designed to be accessible to the tsar. The chancellery often “spared” the tsar reports from the provinces. The heads of imperial chancellery sections conducted the final editing of laws, while the overall chancellery head oversaw appointments and attended virtually all special commissions. Remnev, Samoderzhavnoe pravitel’stvo, 68–110; Shepelev, Chinovny mir Rossii XVIII–nachalo XX v., 47–55.
56. Alexander III had tried to have his chancellery become something of a personal watchdog over the bureaucracy, but he failed. The ministers denounced and obstructed the change, and the autocrat could not gain operational control over the state. Lieven, Russia’s Rulers, 286–7.
57. E. H. Carr, in his fourteen-volume history of the first twelve years of the revolution, explored the relationship of political contingency (Stalin’s dictatorship) and what he saw as the primary structural determinant (Russian backwardness). As a reader progresses through the volumes, the Russian past impresses itself more and more on the reader, as it did on many of the Bolshevik revolutionaries. But in the final volume, which appeared in 1978, Carr would reconsider, writing that the emphasis on tsarism, “though not wrong, now seems to me somewhat overstated.” Carr, Foundations of a Planned Economy, III/iii: viii.
58. Ilin-Zhenevskii, “Nakanune oktiabria,” 15–6; Rabinowitch, Bolsheviks Come to Power, 57–9.
59. Balashov and Markhashov, “Staraia ploshchad’, 4 (20-e gody),” no. 5: 191–2.
60. PSS, XLV: 123. With all members said to be “strictly subordinate to party discipline,” as the 8th Party Congress in 1919 emphasized, “the whole matter of assignment of party functionaries is in the hands of the Central Committee of the party. . . . Its decision is binding for everyone. The Central Committee is entrusted with the carrying out of the most determined struggle against any localism or separatism in these questions.” The Central Committee seized the right to “systematically rotate functionaries from one sphere to another, from one region to another, with the aim of their most productive use.” VIII s”ezd RKP (b) [1959], 426–8; Kommunisticheskaia partiia Sovetskogo Soiuza, I: 444.
61. From the summer of 1922 through the fall of 1923, 97 of 191 local party secretaries were elected; Moscow “recommended” or outright appointed the rest. Tsakunov, V labirinte, 93 (citing RGASPI, f. 17, op. 68, d. 484, l. 170–85); Rigby, “Early Provincial Cliques,” 15–19.
62. “The Central Committee,” declared a policy statement in 1922, “considered as its duty the constant observation of the internal affairs of local party organizations, trying in every way to eliminate from the localities those frictions and dissensions known under the name of ‘skloki.’” Izvestiia TsK, March 1922: at 13. In April 1920, for example, the entire membership of the Central Committee of the Communist party of Ukraine had been transferred to Russia. Ravich-Cherkasskii, Istoriia kommunisticheskoi partii, appendix 12. See also Service, Bolshevik Party in Revolution.
63. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 84, d. 147, l. 150; Spravochnik partiinogo rabotnika, vyp. 3: 108, 118. On the centralizing process in Petrograd, under Zinoviev, see McAuley, Bread and Justice, 145.
64. Daniels, “The Secretariat”; Moore, Soviet Politics, 290. After a fall 1921 party purge, the third one in three years, which targeted careerists and “disguised” class enemies and resulted in just under one fourth of the 659,000 members being expelled (many quit of their own volition), a re-registration of the remaining half million Communists followed in 1922; it constituted a party “census,” during which the central apparatus collected questionnaires from nearly every member and candidate. Spravochnik partiinogo rabotnika, vyp. 3, 128–30; Service, Bolshevik Party in Revolution, 164; Gimpel’son, NEP, 329 (citing RGASPI, f. 17, op. 34, d. 1, l. 19); Izvestiia TsK RKP (b), March 5, 1921. In 1921, many party commissions invited the non-party mass to voice their opinions about individual Communists. In one military unit of the Moscow garrison, 400 non-party soldiers threw the 36 party members out of the meeting and themselves decided who should be purged, an outcome later nullified. Izvestiia MK RKP (b), 1922, no. 1: 6. The apparatus evidently failed to index all party members by the start of the 11th Congress in spring 1922. Pravda, September 10, 1921; Protokoly XI, 52; Leonard Schapiro, Origin of the Communist Autocracy, 1977, 337–8; Gimpel’son, NEP, 329 (citing RGASPI, f. 17, op. 34, d. 1, l. 19); Izvestiia TsK RKP (b), March 5, 1921.
65. Molotov had told the 11th Party Congress (1921) that a three-person commission sent to Samara province had uncovered a “complete lack of disciplne” and a membership dropoff from 13,000 to 4,500 (leaving out the fact that a terrible famine raged), compelling Moscow to replace the entire
Samara leadership with appointees. XI s”ezd RKP (b), 57–8; Izvestiia TsK, March 1922: at 35. Umpteen secret circulars, including one dated November 30, 1922, referred to the “immensely widespread bribe-taking” among functionaries that was threatening “the degeneration and destruction of the workers state apparatus,” and called for a person or commission in every region to be responsible for fighting the scourge. Bribe-taking was blamed on “the general lack of culture and economic backwardness of the country.” RGASPI, f. 17, op. 11, d. 100, l. 234; op. 84, d. 291а, l. 282.
66. Izvestiia TsK, no. 42, June 1922, no. 43, July 1922, no. 9 (45), September 1922, no. 11–12.
67. Harris, “Stalin as General Secretary.” Partly because of vast expansion, partly because of turnover, only between 20 and 40 percent of Party Congress delegates carried over from one yearly gathering to the next. Of the 106 voting and non-voting delegates to the 7th Congress, 38 percent appeared at the 8th; of the 442 at the 8th, 23 percent carried over to the 9th; of the 593 at the 9th, 22 percent made it to the 10th; of the 1,135 at the 10th, only 15 percent were at the 11th; only 36 percent were at the 12th. Carryover on the Central Committee, however, was substantial, even as that body, too, expanded (from 23 full and candidate members in 1918 to 46 in 1922). Gill, Origins, 58, 61.
68. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 112, d. 370, l. 2; Pavliuchenkov, Rossiia Nepovskaia, 70 (citing RGASPI, f. 17, op. 11, d. 142, l. 4).
69. Merridale, Moscow Politics, 29.
70. Izvestiia TsK VKP (b), January 1924, no. 1 (59): 64–7; April 1924, no. 4 (62): 41; January 18, 1926, no. 1 (122): 22–4; Balashov and Markhashov, “Staraia ploshchad’, 4 (20-e gody),” no. 4: 186; RGASPI, f. 17, op. 68, d. 139, l. 74; Rigby, “Origins of the Nomenklatura System,” 241–54; Rigby, “Staffing USSR Incorporated”; Korzhikhina and Figatner, “Sovetskaia nomenklatura.”
71. XII s”ezd RKP (b), 704–5; RGASPI, f. 17, op. 69, d. 259, l. 101. Nonetheless, the Central Committee apparatus also seized the initiative to register non-party state bureaucrats, beating an attempt by the Soviet central executive committee to take charge of this function. Pavliuchenkov, Rossiia Nepovskaia, 69; Pavliuchenkov, “Orden mechenostsev,” 227–53. Soon, the nomenklatura system would be required practice in all republics of the Union. Daniels, “The Secretariat,” 37–8; Rigby, “Staffing USSR Incorporated,” 529–30. By 1924, the list was divided in two, with 3,500 included on list no. 1, and another 1,500 on list no. 2. Those on no. 1 were to be named by the politburo and approved by the Central Committee and encompassed. RGASPI, f, 80, op. 19, d. 1, l. 6–14.
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