3
‘CADRES INTO HERETICS’
The documents presented thus far have provided us with a good deal of insight into Stalin’s political designs and personality. The next two topics will illuminate them still further.
Some years after the events we have recounted, when he held all the levers of power in his own hands, Stalin continued to imagine himself a great man and leader – but he knew how to simulate a modest and unassuming personality, a simple follower of the great founder of the party. Taciturn and forever cautious, he seemed to be cool-headed – and was generally described as such. He affected a role of unassuming simplicity, casting himself as the modest follower of a great man. Yet his political activity – in fact, much of the puzzle – is readily decipherable: behind this image there lay hidden a quite different persona. We already know something about the kind of state he envisaged. Moreover, his utterances on the tasks and role of state and party cadres disclose the way in which he conceived the exercise of power, including his own part in it. These statements are revealing, even if their meaning eluded his contemporaries or observers. Perfectly clear in his own mind, his positions were publicly expressed during the Thirteenth Party Congress in 1924:
A cadre must know how to carry out instructions, must understand them, adopt them as his own, attach the greatest importance to them, and make them part of his very existence. Otherwise, politics loses its meaning and consists merely of gesticulating. Hence the decisive importance of the cadres department in the apparatus of the Central Committee. Every functionary must be closely studied, from every angle and in the most minute detail.[1]
Mention of the cadres department (uchraspred) should not be taken to mean that Stalin attributed any importance to the party itself This becomes clearer if we refer to one of his later declarations to ‘future cadres’, students at the Sverdlov Party University. Here he basically explained that ‘for us, objective difficulties do not exist. The only problem is cadres. If things are not progressing, or if they go wrong, the cause is not to be sought in any objective conditions: it is the fault of the cadres’.
Thus, for this ‘Marxist’, objective conditions do not exist: the leader is free to set tasks, but cannot be held responsible for poor decisions or results. These short texts contain the substance of Stalinist philosophy and practice in its entirety, as formulated by Stalin himself. With good cadres, nothing is impossible. The policies decided at the top are always correct; failures are attributable to the leader’s entourage or underlings. As expressed here, the essence of Stalin’s conception of his personal power consists in the idea that such power should be ‘naked’. Stalin never wrote anything resembling a Mein Kampf – a book that anyone who wished to understand Hitler and his aspirations had only to read. But his conception of an unaccountable personal power, at the head of a state responsible only to him – in other words, his conception of an ‘irresponsible dictatorship’ – was succinctly articulated early on, in a couple of sentences that could easily escape the attention of even quite seasoned party members. This conception had already been put into practice in emergency situations – when the party was underground, during the revolution or Civil War – when militants had simply to obey. But the same logic was now to be transposed to a quite different situation – in which routine, not emergency, was the everyday reality – and applied to the state administration and the various party apparatuses and bureaucracy. The leader was demanding a type of behaviour that had its place in wartime, when an army is besieged on all sides. This exigency – an ‘untrammelled dictatorship’ – could only lead to deformations at the most elementary level.
A highly illuminating example can be found in the memoirs of Stalin’s interpreter, Valentin Berezhkov.[2] Unaware of Stalin’s 1925 text and its implications, he recounts an episode that occurred during the war, when he worked under Molotov in the Foreign Affairs Ministry. Stalin’s ‘illogical logic’ was explained to him by Molotov, who was one of its connoisseurs. When something went wrong, Stalin demanded that ‘the culprit be found and severely punished’. The only thing to do was to identify someone, and Molotov would do just this. One day it was noticed that a telegram from Stalin to Roosevelt had not been answered. Molotov ordered Berezhkov to investigate and identify the guilty party. Berezhkov discovered that no one on the Soviet side was responsible; he concluded that the fault lay with the American State Department. On hearing his report, Molotov mocked him, explaining that every failing was attributable to someone. In the case to hand, someone had decided a procedure for transmitting and monitoring telegrams. This involved the Soviet side alone. Stalin had given orders for the culprit to be found, and so it could only be the person who had established the procedure. Finding him was assigned to Molotov’s deputy, Vyshinsky who did so without difficulty. The ill-fated head of the cipher department was immediately relieved of his duties, expelled from the party, and disappeared without a trace. Stalin’s order had been executed to the letter. The source of this insane logic was clear: if there was no culprit for failures that occurred at lower levels, they might be attributed to those at the top. And that was out of the question.
The methods employed by Stalin to ‘construct’ the image of his power involved some other dimensions. Thus, he composed the various scenarios in his mind and everything else followed – usually without the least imagination. One of the simplest consisted in appropriating the lingering images of the power and influence associated with Lenin and Trotsky. Trotsky was a recurrent figure in this phantasmagoria: he was systematically vilified and had every possible calumny heaped on his head. There can be no doubt that he played a special role in Stalin’s psyche and that is why mere political victory would not suffice. Stalin would not rest until he had issued the order for Trotsky’s assassination. He also wished to erase him from Soviet history – via censorship, obviously, but also (astonishingly) by ascribing Trotsky’s achievements to himself. The country would thus be offered films in which the military exploits of his sworn foe – for example, Trotsky’s role in the defence of Petrograd against General Yudenich’s army in December 1919 – were attributed to Stalin. This is only one example of his incredible pettiness and envy.
The appropriation of Lenin took the more convoluted and curious form of the ‘oath to Lenin’, sworn before the Supreme Soviet on 26 January 1924, the day before Lenin’s funeral. The decision to embalm Lenin’s body, despite his family’s vigorous protests, formed part of the scenario. As for the oath itself, it was a long incantation in which Stalin listed the commandments supposedly bequeathed by Lenin to the party and then solemnly pledged, in the party’s name, faithfully to obey them. Now that we have a better understanding of Stalin’s real attitude to Lenin, it is obvious that this ‘apotheosis’ was not a sincere gesture of respect, but a way of preparing the launch of his own cult. As some of Stalin’s opponents noticed at the time, the oath made no reference to any of the ideas that were at the heart of Lenin’s real testament. In short, the whole script was self-serving.