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Finally, the war established a new generation that would succeed Stalin. At the close of the war in Europe GKO members comprised Stalin (65), Molotov (55), Kaganovich (51), Bulganin (50), Mikoyan (49), Beria (46), Malenkov (43) and Voznesenskii (41); Voroshilov (64) had been made to resign in November 1944. Members of the Politburo included Khrushchev (51) and Zhdanov (49). Stalin's successors would be drawn from among those in their forties and early fifties.[47] These were selected in several stages. First, the purges of 1937/8 cleared their way for recruitment into the political elite. Then they were tested by the war and by Stalin's last years. Those who outlived Stalin became the great survivors of the post-war Soviet political system. Once they were young and innovative. Having fought their way to the top in their youth, they became unwilling to contemplate new upheavals in old age. The war had taught them the wrong lessons. Unable to adapt to new times, they made an important contribution to the Soviet Union's long-term decay.

Stalin and his circle

YQRAM GQRLIZKI AND OLEG KHLEYNIUK

Research in recent years has highlighted the limits of the Stalinist state. Aside from the numerous forms of resistance, both physical and symbolic, which they faced, Soviet bureaucracies under Stalin often lacked the resources or co-ordination to provide a consistent and effective system of administration. In between campaigns, as one commentator has noted of the countryside in the late 1930s, 'neglect by Soviet power was as characteristic as coercion, and perhaps sometimes even as much resented'.[48] Despite these limitations, the Stalinist state did have the capacity to mobilise its officials and to transform the lives of its citizens. The most powerful state-sponsored campaigns overturned traditional modes of existence and effected reorganisations against which the combined forces of armed rebellion and popular resistance would prove to be no match.[49] Although some enjoyed the support of activists on the ground, the most important campaigns of this kind were driven from above, usually from the very summit of the political system. Some of the key turning points of this period, such as forced collectivisation, the Great Purges, and the onset of the Cold War, were the consequence of decisions taken by a small leadership group around Stalin. Although Stalin attracted the support of a variety of constituencies within Soviet society, he was never a mere cipher for these groups, but was rather a powerful and independent force in a social order that would come to bear his name.

Stalin's personality left a giant imprint on the Soviet system. The leader's approach to solving problems was, first, overwhelmingly coercive. While this was not entirely exceptional, given the Bolshevik state's origins in revolution and civil war, Stalin ratcheted up the combination of pressure and violence to new levels. This devotion to force was an important factor in converting an already brutal regime into a terrorist dictatorship, the excesses of which were gratuitous and unnecessary by any standards.[50] On matters of policy Stalin was also extremely stubborn. Ideological concessions and policy retreats were, on the whole, only wrung out of him under considerable duress, normally when the country was teetering on the edge of crisis. Augmented by a personality cult, which tended to present it as a mark of the leader's 'infallibility', this obduracy would, as towards the end of his life, when Stalin steadfastly blocked much-needed reforms in key sectors, cost his country dear.

For all its brutality and bloody-mindedness, this position of 'firmness' did, from Stalin's perspective, serve a particular purpose: to secure his own posi­tion as the leader of a separate, powerful and respected socialist state. Many of Stalin's actions were guided by quite rational calculations towards the attain­ment of this goal.[51] While this pragmatism has most often been observed in Stalin's behaviour on the international stage, it was also evident in domestic affairs. Perhaps nowhere was this more apparent than in Stalin's relations with his immediate colleagues. Despite a reputation for arbitrary brutality, Stalin systematically promoted younger functionaries and treated with great care those high-level leaders whose qualities, either as workers or as symbols of the revolution, he valued; after the Great Purges in particular, this was a group towards which the leader exhibited a surprising degree of self-restraint and moderation.[52]

The attention Stalin paid his colleagues was fully merited, for these deputies played an indispensable role in running the Soviet state. Well known in their own right, most members of the Politburo managed important portfolios and headed powerful personal networks. In two periods - during the war and in the early 1950s - Stalin was forced to hand over complete control of certain jurisdictions to this leadership substratum. Rather than being an inherently stable or inert form of rule, Stalin's one-man dictatorship was repeatedly in tension with powerful oligarchic tendencies.[53] Maintaining the upper hand would prove to be a taxing business, one which would keep the ageing leader on his toes.

Stalin's relations with his deputies were not fixed or constant over time. In this chapter their evolution is divided into four phases. We begin by assessing the rise of the Stalinist faction in the 1920s. The consolidation of dictatorship from the 1920s to the late 1930s and the operation of the Stalinist dictatorship at its peak, following the Great Purges, is the subject of the second section. The chapter then goes on to examine Stalin and his entourage during the war years, a period of marked decentralisation. The chapter concludes by looking at Stalin's last years, as the decision-making structures of the post-Stalin era began to take shape.

Rise of the Stalinist faction

With victory in the civil war, the locus of political struggle in the early 1920s shifted to the upper reaches of the Bolshevik Party. In the lead-up to Lenin's death, the broad collegial leadership which had existed under him dissolved into factions, usually consisting of short-term tactical alliances. The consolidation of a 'Stalinist faction' out of these groupings was the result of an extremely convoluted process and an outcome which few would have predicted.

The first stage took place from the end of 1923 to 1924, when a solid majority formed within the Politburo against Leon Trotsky, whose impetuous behaviour and poor political judgement stoked up widespread unease within the leadership.[54] To co-ordinate their stand, in August 1924 a 'septet' was cre­ated, consisting of six members of the Politburo (that is, all of the Politburo, apart from Trotsky) and the chair of the Central Control Commission, Valerian Kuibyshev. It was this 'septet'which took the key decisions, bringing to official sessions of the Politburo (attended by Trotsky) resolutions which it had agreed beforehand. Once Trotsky had been sidelined, however, the septet's coherence quickly evaporated, and it soon broke off into two wings, with the minority group, consisting of Kamenev and Zinoviev, eventually drifting off towards Trotsky. Following a bitter dispute, all three leaders of the Zinoviev-Trotsky bloc were expelled from the Politburo in autumn 1927.

With a clear majority ending up in Stalin's inner circle of the 1930s, it is tempting to think of the Politburo of late 1927 as staunchly 'Stalinist'. At this stage, however, rank-and-file members of the Politburo still enjoyed a consid­erable degree of latitude. Their autonomy was bolstered by the still-prevailing norm of'collective leadership' which rested on a comparatively clear-cut divi­sion oflabour within the cabinet. Apart from Stalin himself, who led the party apparatus, Aleksei Rykov chaired the Council of People's Commissars (Sov­narkom, which managed the economy), and Nikolai Bukharin acted as chief ideologist to the party. So long as no one leader fully dominated the summit of the political system, other members of the Politburo remained more or less free to pursue their own course. The same applied to the middle layers of the power pyramid, the members of the Central Committee, on whose votes much would depend in the coming power struggle.

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47

John Crowfoot andMarkHarrison, 'The USSRCouncil of Ministers under Late Stalinism, 1945-54: Its Production Branch Composition and the Requirements ofNational Economy and Policy', Soviet Studies 42,1 (1990): 41-60.

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48

Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin's Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Col­lectivization (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 174.

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49

See e.g. Lynne Viola, Peasant Rebels under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 238-9.

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50

See Alec Nove, Was Stalin Really Necessary? Some Problems of Soviet Political Economy (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1964), pp. 27-32.

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51

For an alternative view, which lends greater weight to the irrational aspects of Stalin's behaviour, see Roy Medvedev, Let HistoryJudge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism, revised edn (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).

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52

An early version of this argument may be found in T. H. Rigby, 'Was Stalin a Disloyal Patron?' Soviet Studies 38, 3 (1986): 311-24.

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53

Oligarchy is classically viewed as inherently unstable and displaying a propensity to dissolve either into a pattern of individual dominance or into a more diffuse distribution of power. Under Stalin, however, one detects repeated shifts in the opposite direction, from one-man dictatorship towards oligarchical forms of decision-making. Cf. T. H. Rigby, 'The Soviet Leadership: Towards a Self-Stabilizing Oligarchy?' Soviet Studies 22, 2 (1970): 167-8.

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54

Recent research suggests that Stalin was able to provide leadership in the Politburo's struggle with Trotsky precisely because, in the words of one commentator, 'he had a good case'. See Lars Lih, 'Introduction', in Lars T. Lih, Oleg V Naumov and Oleg V Khlevniuk, Stalin's Letters to Molotov (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 19-24, esp. p. 23.