The arrests, personnel cutbacks, and reorganization of the Guard Directorate undoubtedly set its members on edge. None of them, fearing for their jobs and their lives, wanted to face the consequences that could come with taking initiative. For these reasons Stalin’s bodyguards were very reluctant to check on him on 1 March 1953, even though something out of the ordinary was clearly taking place.
The branches of state security, including the branch in charge of Stalin’s personal safety, were one very important set of controls regulating the huge machine that historians call the Stalinist party-state. The framework that held this machine together was the Bolshevik party, bequeathed by Lenin, but repeatedly modified to fit the needs of Stalin’s dictatorship. Under Stalin, the party was a rigidly centralized organization whose power rested on its unquestioned right to hire, fire, and reassign personnel. Over many years, lists of positions were compiled (“the nomenklatura”). Each position came under the purview of a particular party committee, from the raikom (district committee) to the TsK (the party’s Central Committee). The career and fate of every official in the country depended on one of these party committees, and nobody, including the party functionaries themselves, could evade the system. Key government leaders were approved within the TsK apparat in Moscow.
The nomenklatura of TsK positions was constantly growing, a reflection of the center’s pursuit of ever-greater control. In September 1952, half a year before Stalin’s death, it comprised approximately 53,000 positions. Those who filled these positions were the “cream” of Soviet society, including high-level party and state officials, top military leaders, and the heads of the “creative unions” such as the Writers’ Union. One step lower were officials in charge of important regional bodies: those holding nomenklatura positions within obkoms (oblast or provincial committees), kraikoms (krai or territorial committees), and the central committees of the Communist parties of the various republics that made up the Soviet Union. This list was also constantly growing. As of 1 July 1952 it totaled 350,000 positions.16
These hundreds of thousands of functionaries were the backbone of the apparat and the pillar of the dictatorship. Of course Stalin never had direct contact with the vast majority of them. Furthermore, the party-state apparat had a life of its own and was relatively free of interference from the top leadership. In the struggle to survive, prosper, and rise through the ranks, officials sought ways to get around the strict rules aimed at centralization. They could generally act as convenience dictated so long as the paper trail they left reflected adherence to the rules. Abuses of power were common. A number of historians, exaggerating the significance of these processes, have argued that the Stalinist dictatorship was unstable, and many have attempted to explain the worst features of Stalinism—mass repression especially—as arising spontaneously from below.
The documentary evidence offers no support for the idea of a “weak dictator.” We do not know of a single decision of major consequence taken by anyone other than Stalin. We do not know of even a brief period when he did not exercise dictatorial control. The dictatorship developed extremely effective methods of manipulating and pressuring society and the apparat, and thus Stalin had a firm grip on power and the implementation of key decisions. Ongoing repression and purges of personnel kept society and the apparat in a state of mobilized tension. The archives have allowed historians to assess, in fairly precise numbers, the scale of the violence necessary to achieve such control. Official records show that approximately eight hundred thousand people were shot between 1930 and 1952.17 The number who perished as a result of the regime’s actions, however, was much higher, insofar as Stalin’s security apparat made frequent use of fatal torture techniques and the conditions prevailing in labor camps at times made them indistinguishable from death camps. Between 1930 and 1952, some 20 million people were sentenced to incarceration in labor camps, penal colonies, or prisons. During that same period no fewer than 6 million, primarily “kulaks” and members of “repressed peoples,” were subjected to “administrative exile”: forced resettlement to a remote area of the USSR. On average, over the more than twenty-year span of Stalin’s rule, 1 million people were shot, incarcerated, or deported to barely habitable areas of the Soviet Union every year.
Those who were shot or sent to the camps included a fair number of ordinary criminals. But the exceptional severity of laws and the criminalization of all spheres of socioeconomic and political life meant that ordinary citizens who committed minor infractions or were swept up in various political campaigns were often classified as criminals. Furthermore, in addition to the 26 million who were shot, imprisoned, or subjected to internal exile, tens of millions were forced to labor on difficult and dangerous projects, arrested, subjected to lengthy imprisonment without charges, or fired from their jobs and evicted from their homes for being relatives of “enemies of the people.” Overall, the Stalinist dictatorship subjected at least 60 million people to some sort of “hard” or “soft” repression and discrimination.
To this figure we must add the victims of periodic famines or starvation, which during 1932–1933 alone took the lives of between 5 and 7 million people. The Stalinist famine was largely the result of political decisions. In its campaign to break peasant opposition to collectivization, the Stalinist government used famine as a means of “punishing” the countryside. All opportunities to relieve the situation—such as purchasing grain abroad—were rejected. Starving villages had their last stores of food expropriated.
We can conclude from this horrific summation that a significant proportion of Soviet citizens suffered some form of repression or discrimination during the Stalin period.18 It would not be an exaggeration to say that an absolute majority were brutally suppressed by a privileged minority—except that many in that minority were also swept up in the terror.
To achieve its goals, including the implementation of mass repression and the extraction of grain from the starving countryside, the regime did not need its apparat to run with clocklike precision. The inability to achieve perfect centralization in such a vast country was compensated for by the widespread use of campaigns, which mostly followed a similar template. Campaigns were the cornerstone of Stalinist political practice. They all began with a set of goals and the assignment of specific tasks that originated with the center, usually Stalin himself. These steps were followed by the mobilization of the apparat to carry out the assigned tasks, using extraordinary methods and the total suspension of any sort of legality. As a result, a campaign took on the aura of a crisis, culminating at a point where retreat became necessary. This retreat took the form of a counter-campaign that eliminated some of those who had carried out the original campaign while solidifying its results and stabilizing the situation. This swinging pendulum led to the destruction of vast material resources and countless human lives. But within the context of the Stalinist system, the campaigns were an effective method of mobilizing a vast country toward a central goal.
Stalin himself did not need to exercise tight control over all party and government bodies in order to retain dictatorial power. It was sufficient to hold the main levers of power, the most important being control of the secret police. He understood, sooner than other Soviet leaders, that state security could be a valuable weapon in intraparty warfare. This was a key reason for his success. Once he attained control of the Soviet Union’s “punitive structures,” he never let it slip from his hands. He continued to use state security as an instrument of power until the day he died.