Stalin's word carried more weight than did that of any general or ordinary Politburo member. When the high command (Stavka) was established on the second day of the war, and the commissar of defence, General Timoshenko, was appointed its head, none ofthe nine Politburo members who served on it 'showed any intention of taking orders from the commissar'.31 It was only later, on 19 July, when Stalin himself became commissar of defence, and then on 8 August, when he became supreme commander-in-chief of the Soviet armed forces, that the Stavka gained genuine authority.
Despite a profusion of new bodies, such as the GKO and the Stavka, there were important continuities with pre-war structures. While the GKO was given overall command of the war effort, and it was directly modelled on the Council of Workers' and Peasants' Defence from the civil war, it was a pre-eminently civilian body. With all its members from the Politburo, the GKO was, in key respects, the direct successor to the Politburo's 'ruling circle', whose membership and operating norms Stalin had shaped in the preceding years. Setting up the GKO gave formal cover for Stalin's civilian ruling circle to exercise unlimited powers as a 'war cabinet'. These included the authority to reorganise the armed forces, to take charge of military production, to undertake personnel changes, and to control the agencies of repression.
At the same time, the GKO epitomised the versatility of the Soviet system in adjusting to conditions of crisis. Under the GKO the mode of governance over subordinate bodies shifted with remarkable speed to an emergency regime.32 Under this system procedures were simplified in the extreme. 'Meetings of the GKO in the usual sense of the term - that is, with definite agendas, secretaries and protocols - did not take place. Procedures for reaching agreement with [other agencies] were reduced to a minimum,' recalled General Khrulev.33 Given the overlap in membership between the GKO, the Politburo and Sovnarkom, it was not always apparent in what capacity a meeting had been convened, nor on whose authority a resolution had been passed.
In addition to heading the Politburo and Sovnarkom, Stalin chaired meetings of the GKO and the Stavka, acted as commissar of defence and, as of
31 N. G. Kuznetsov, cited in A. A. Pechenkin, 'Gosudarstvennyi komitet oborony v 1941 godu', Otechestvennaia istoriia 4-5 (1994): 134-5.
32 See SanfordR. Lieberman, 'Crisis Management in the USSR: Wartime System of Administration and Control', in Susan Linz (ed.), The Impact of World War II on the Soviet Union (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Allanhead, 1985). The term 'emergency regime' comes from John Barber and Mark Harrison, The Soviet Home Front 1941 -1945: A Social and Economic History of the USSR in World War II (London: Longman, 1991), pp. 197-200.
33 A.VKhrulev.'StanovleniestrategicheskogotylavVelikoiOtechestvennoivoine',Voenno- istoricheskii zhurnal 6 (1961): 66; cited in Lieberman, 'Crisis Management', p. 61.
14 September 1942, led a new key GKO Transport Committee. The extraordinary burdens on Stalin left him with no choice but to completely let go of certain leadership functions on which he had earlier kept half an eye. The main beneficiaries of this process of delegation were Stalin's companions on the GKO, who were now given full and unqualified charge of whole sectors of the war effort. Thus members of the GKO were entrusted with the authority to convene meetings and to arrive at decisions of importance under their own steam, without reference to the overburdened leader.
The emergency regime, consisting ofplenipotentiaries, ad hoc committees and very high levels of autonomy for GKO members, was particularly well suited to the early phase of the war. Yet while well adapted to a situation of crisis, this system of decision-making was far from effective over the long term. In many areas, the conversion of the economy to munitions production was carried too far, as a result of which by 1942 it was the dwindling stocks of coal, oil, iron and steel, rather than limited munitions capacity, which had become the key factor constraining the Soviet war effort.[78] Greater co-ordination was required to rectify these imbalances. A big step in this direction was achieved on 8 December 1942 with the formation of a GKO Operations bureau, and with the reconstitution, also on that day, of the Sovnarkom bureau which took up responsibility for considering economic plans and the state budget, as well as for overseeing the work of economic commissariats not under the jurisdiction of the GKO bureau. As the war progressed, the authority and status of both
bureaux grew.[79]
It is significant that Stalin played no part on either bureau. As the war unfolded, the delegation of powers to GKO members and the emergence of a more balanced and co-ordinated system of economic decision-making was matched by a narrowing of Stalin's commitments, which focused increasingly on military issues and foreign affairs. Further, as Stalin's grasp of military matters improved, the obstinacy he had displayed in the early stages of the war gave way to a certain pragmatism. From the spring of 1942 Stalin removed incompetent cronies such as Voroshilov and Budennyi as well as political appointees such as Kulikand Mekhlis on whom he had relied earlier. In October 1942 Stalin also abolished political commissars - political appointees who shadowed military leaders at the front - and he became more willing to defer matters of strategic leadership to a group of senior military figures on the Stavka. Further, whereas in the first months of the war virtually every bungled operation had resulted in executions, Stalin was now willing to heed the advice of top military aides in sparing the lives of commanders in the field.[80]
The war had caught Stalin off guard and highlighted the flaws of the onesided form of government he had fashioned in the preceding years. At the same time, the war also showed how mutually interdependent Stalin's leadership was with the social and administrative system which had formed in the 1930s. In the early days of the conflict, Stalin's deputies saw that they needed Stalin and the cult which surrounded him to boost morale and to co-ordinate the higher ranks of Soviet officialdom. For his part, in the guise of the State Defence Committee, Stalin was able to keep his ruling circle and informal modes of decision-making similar to those he had installed before the war. The one major difference was that, with the advent of an 'emergency regime', Stalin was compelled to hand over total responsibility for certain spheres to his deputies. Originally constituted on an informal basis, this delegation of powers was formalised with the establishment of the GKO and Sovnarkom bureaux in December 1942. It was this relatively decentralised system of wartime governance which lasted until the effective end of hostilities in May 1945.
Post-war dictatorship
During the war Stalin had delegated large swaths of authority to his deputies and set aside ideological differences with his coalition partners. Soon, however, a souring of relations with the West would bring a swift end to the relaxation of the war years. In a programmatic speech to voters of 9 February 1946, Stalin once again highlighted the need to strengthen the sinews of national power, most notably heavy industry. The laying out of long-term plan priorities was accompanied by a newly belligerent rhetoric in which Stalin sought, to quote one commentator, to transform the post-war period 'into a new prewar period' in which a 'postulated external danger [was] the primary fact of national life and the internal policies of the government [were] a compulsive response to it'.[81] This return to the ideological matrix of the pre-war years was matched by a much harsher and less accommodating approach to his Politburo companions. Here too, the leader clawed back the discretion he had ceded during the war and, in a series of attacks, resurrected the relations of strict subservience and control which had predominated in the late 1930s.
79
Thus on 16 May 1944 Beria, the head of the GKO bureau, was made deputy chair of GKO and three days later, on 19 May 1944 the bureau's jurisdiction was widened from 14 to 21 commissariats and its responsibilities enhanced.
81
Robert C. Tucker,