Although an important staging post on the road to dictatorship, the leadership system of the early 1930s is best viewed as a phase of unconsolidated oligarchic rule. In this system, Politburo members still retained considerable political influence. In leading a key department of government, every member of the Politburo not only took operational decisions and controlled considerable resources, but formed around himself an extensive network of personally devoted functionaries. While intrusions into the personal domain of a Politburo member were possible they were, as a rule, accompanied by unholy scandals. The significance ofthese Politburo 'patrimonies' was such that Stalin himself would have to take them seriously.
This pattern of relationships became most fully apparent in 1931, when the Politburo had to face up to the effects of its radical policies, which included food shortages, housing crises, labour disturbances, deportations and rebellion. The sense of deepening crisis led to very real showdowns on the Politburo. In what would become a common refrain, Stalin blamed many of the country's woes on the shoddy work and departmental egoism of his colleagues. Politburo members in turn resisted Stalin's onslaught with whatever means they had, including the threat of resignation. One of the fiercest clashes arose in connection with orders for imported goods. Despite a steep rise in foreign debts, the economic commissariats insisted on an increase in deliveries from abroad. Although Stalin accused his colleagues of wrecking the state budget, his demands that new orders be rescinded went unheeded. In September 1931, he finally issued an ultimatum, declaring that he would cut short his vacation and return to Moscow for a special sitting of the Politburo.[62] Stalin's manoeuvre, which resembled his tactics over the expulsion of Trotsky and Zinoviev in 1927, was a response to the still powerful oligarchic forces which continued to constrain him. Yet while the earlier dispute had centred on an essentially political question, the new one - and others like it - revolved around the economic issue of resource allocation. Battles over economic and organisational questions of this kind were a typical feature of leadership debates in the early 1930s.
The existence of such conflicts should not be confused with the view that Stalin was surrounded by 'radicals' and 'moderates', between whose stands the leader continuously vacillated. Certainly, recent research does not lend much support to this position, nor to the view that there were 'factions' as such in the Politburo at all in this period.[63] In fact, virtually all conflicts in the Politburo appear to have been driven by bureaucratic interests, rather than by questions of principle or ideology. Hence, the same member of the Politburo could at any one time adopt a 'moderate' position and at others 'radical' ones, depending on the particular needs and requirements of the department which
he headed. [64]
In fact, most members of the Politburo were 'moderates' in the sense that they had an interest in maintaining unconsolidated oligarchical rule and, through that, preserving overall stability within the system. The personal rights and jurisdictions of Politburo members remained the final barrier preventing the establishment of a full-blown personal dictatorship at the centre. Attempts by Politburo members to preserve these oligarchic privileges added up to a defence of a more 'moderate' line, marked by certain checks and balances. We may observe this phenomenon most clearly in the conflicts which flared up between Stalin and his long-term friend and Politburo colleague, Sergo Ordzhonikidze.
One of the best-known leaders of the 1930s, Ordzhonikidze headed the Commissariat of Heavy Industry, a powerful portfolio which became the institutional symbol of Soviet industrialisation. As he learned to defend the interests of his own department and to attract qualified, enterprising managers to work under him, Ordzhonikidze turned into a proponent ofmoderation within the leadership. The slightest attempt to encroach on his department was warded off, and Ordzhonikidze guarded his traditional right to 'punish or pardon' his own people with great fervour. It was on these grounds that Ordzhonikidze had regular run-ins with other leaders, most notably Stalin.[65] Their differences reached a head in 1936, as Stalin began a sweeping purge of Soviet officialdom which included sanctioning the arrest of Ordzhonikidze's elder brother. Although Ordzhonikidze put up a stout defence of his own particular patrimony, the scope of resistance was limited. Rather than engaging in principled opposition, Ordzhonikidze's main goal appearsto havebeento convince Stalin to end attacks on Ordzhonikidze's 'own' people. Ordzhonikidze's eventual suicide on 18 February 1937, on the eve of the Central Committee plenum which pronounced a policy of widening repression, amounted to a last desperate act of defiance against Stalin's onslaught on Politburo prerogatives.
Faced with the choice of fighting for the last vestiges of collective rule or succumbing to the shrill demands from Stalin on carrying out a mass purge, most members of the Politburo and of the Central Committee capitulated.[66]The mass terror which followed numbered among its victims hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens, as well as party-state officials at all levels.[67]The epidemic of arrests and confessions opened up leads implicating those around Stalin. For the first time in Soviet history members and candidates of the Politburo - Kosior, Chubar, Eikhe, Rudzutak and Postyshev - were arrested and executed. By the end of the purges, two members of the Politburo had been executed, one, Ordzhonikidze, had committed suicide and three candidate members had been shot. Close aides and relations of other Politburo leaders were also defenceless against the purge. The wife of the head of state, Mikhail Kalinin, was sent to the camps, while the case of Molotov's wife, Polina Zhemchuzhina, came up several times at Politburo meetings. Although she narrowly escaped prosecution, Zhemchuzhina was dismissed as commissar of fish industries, thereby sending a further pointed message to her husband and his cabinet colleagues. In asserting his power to have anyone he wished fired, prosecuted or killed, Stalin had attained the truest hallmark of a tyrant.[68]
The late 1930s may be regarded as the high water mark of Stalin's dictatorship, a fact underscored by two key developments. First, Stalin now promoted a new cohort of junior figures who had played no role during the revolution and owed their rise entirely to the dictator. In March 1939, following the Eighteenth Party Congress two young Stalinists, Zhdanov and Khrushchev, were elected as full members of the Politburo, while the new commissar of internal affairs, Lavrentii Beria, was made a candidate member. They were joined in February 1941 by three other up-and-coming career administrators, Nikolai Voz- nesenskii, Georgii Malenkov and Aleksandr Shcherbakov, who also became candidate members. Each of these figures performed clearly designated roles. The thirty-nine-year-old Beria had been summoned from Georgia to work in Moscow in August 1938, when Stalin decided to appoint him, in place of Ezhov, as commissar of internal affairs. Stalin had already formed a favourable impression of Beria in the early 1930s. Nominating him as first secretary of the Transcaucasian regional committee, Stalin, in a letter of 12 August 1932, had observed: 'Beria makes a good impression. He is a fine organiser, is businesslike, and is an able worker.'[69] In 1937, a second member of the new cohort, Georgii Malenkov, was only thirty-five. By this time he had already served in a number of party posts including, as of 1934, as head ofthe department of leading party agencies at the Central Committee. Set up to assert control over regional leaders, the department assumed a critical role during the purges, affording Malenkov direct and regular access to Stalin. Following the Eighteenth Party Congress, at which Malenkov delivered one of the major speeches, he became a Central Committee secretary. In March 1941, a third member of this new cohort, the thirty-seven-year-old chair of Gosplan, Nikolai Voznesenskii, was chosen by Stalin as first deputy chair of Sovnarkom. Prior to his promotion to Moscow, Voznesenskii had worked in Leningrad under Zhdanov, and it is quite possible that Zhdanov had recommended Voznesenskii to Stalin. At the same time it is clear that Stalin rated Voznesenskii highly as a specialist and as a person who was fully committed to the Stalinist cause. In becoming first deputy prime minister, Voznesenskii had, like Beria and Malenkov, leapfrogged over a number of more senior and experienced Politburo members.
62
R. W Davies et al. (eds.),
63
This view of a stand-off between 'moderate' members of the higher leadership (Kirov, Kuibyshev, Ordzhonikidze) and 'radicals', who advocated an intensification of repression (Molotov, Kaganovich, Ezhov) has, among other things, been used to account for one of the most important political events of the 1930s - the murder on 1 December 1934 of the head of the Leningrad party organisation Sergei Kirov. As a supposed 'moderate', Kirov was ostensibly murdered on the orders of Stalin, who saw in Kirov a potential competitor. While this version ofevents is based on indirect evidence and on memoirs, no specific evidence ofStalin's participation in the murder has ever surfaced.
64
See Sheila Fitzpatrick, 'Ordzhonikidze's Takeover ofVesenkha: A Case Study in Soviet Bureaucratic Politics',
65
Oleg Khlevniuk,
66
For a useful collection of documents on the purge of the party, see J. Arch Getty and Oleg V Naumov (eds.),
68
For this view of Stalin as 'tyrant', see T. H. Rigby 'Stalinism and the Mono-organisational Society', in Tucker,