As the years passed, the regime’s initial orientation towards the working and peasant classes and masses gave way to a different orientation – towards the state administration, its ‘organs’, and the various categories of ‘officials’. This all-encompassing process of ‘statization’, whereby the state’s centrality became absolute, culminated in a cult of the state, which represented the mindset of the upper echelons of the bureaucracy. In private discussions, but also in public, we find top party officials declaring that government ministries deal only with sectoral matters, whereas the party alone concerns itself with the higher interests of the state. Obviously they were responding to ministerial circles, which asserted precisely the opposite. This enables us better to appreciate what ‘statism’ meant. Party officials were not claiming that they alone were capable of representing society’s interests: they were competing with other bureaucrats to be the better spokesmen for the state and seeking to assert their primacy in the state.
In the 1930s, the organization calling itself the ‘party’ had already lost its political character; it had been transformed into an administrative network, wherein a hierarchy ruled a rank and file. During the next step, even this administrative creature was deprived of any power: under Stalin, it made no sense to speak of a party in power, given that its institutions did not function, no one asked its members for their views, and the rare occasional congress was just one long clapping session.
It is true that Khrushchev restored power over the party and state to the party’s summit (the Central Committee) and its apparatus. However, this made no difference to various key characteristics: rank-and-file members still had no political rights and the party remained a ruling hierarchy, devoid of any real political life. Under Stalin, the party had lost power to the supreme leader; after Khrushchev, it kept losing power to the state machine, which ended up absorbing its ruling network, making it into its own spokesman and representative – and this time for good. The process of ‘statization’ which was so important in the Soviet phenomenon, and probably its main characteristic when it came to the political system, reached its final stage. When the system entered into a prolonged phase of ‘stagnation’, the party, unable to do anything, powerless to impose far-reaching measures on ministries and other agencies, foundered along with everything else.
We can already formulate some initial conclusions: the ‘party’ was not actually always in power; and at a certain moment, it stopped being a political party and became one agency among others – the linchpin of an administration. This is why it is appropriate to put the term ‘party’ in quotation marks. We can even go so far as to venture that the ‘one-party’ system, on which so much ink has been spilt, eventually became a ‘no-party’ system. It may well be that if the USSR had possessed a genuine party, engaged in political life and capable of political leadership, it might have escaped its sorry fate and the country been spared a monumental crisis. However, after so many years and waves of historical change, this political structure, based on a powerful apparatus and members deprived of rights, was moth-eaten. No wonder it collapsed so easily, without any need for a strong jolt or storm.
What were the factors and circumstances that led the party system to a quasi-phantom existence, despite the awe inspired, then and now, by the Staraia Ploshchad? It was the transformation of the party into an apparatus – an old phenomenon – that entailed its de facto absorption by and into the bureaucratic realities of the state. The process started when the party became directly immersed in economic and other minutiae that were supposed to be handled by government ministries. Ministerial staff justly sensed that the party was duplicating their work, rather than concentrating on its own. The little-known conflict between Brezhnev and Kosygin over who should represent the country abroad is a good illustration of the problem.
The party’s ‘identity crisis’ – a formula used in Part One to describe the reformist endeavours of 1946–8 – can now be further deciphered. The apparatus had been restructured in 1946 with a view to its rediscovering its political identity by withdrawing from direct supervision of economic life. The argument was that the ministries ‘were buying the apparatchiks’, the ‘party had lost power’, and it must revert to its proper functions if it wanted to recover its power. Two years later, however, it was once again restructured for the converse reasons: so that it could interfere in economic affairs and ‘control’ them. The contradiction was the following: when the party concerned itself with politics, it lost control of the economy and bureaucracy; when it was fully engaged in controlling the economy, and meddled directly with what the ministries were doing and the way they were doing it, it lost its specific functions – even any sense of what they were. The second logic prevailed, and it allowed the party’s de facto absorption by the bureaucratic colossus.
It is worth remembering that Lenin and Trotsky (the latter in a letter to the Politburo just before the Eleventh Congress) had raised this problem, and warned Bolshevik leaders that direct meddling in the affairs of economic agencies (as opposed to ruling through them) would encourage the bureaucratization of the party, as well as increasing irresponsibility on the part of the administration. Trotsky argued that just as they had declared that the trade unions should not engage in managing the economy, but should remain trade unions, so the party should remain a party. But things did not turn out that way, prompting Bukharin 1928 to lament a virtual fait accompli: ‘The party and state apparatuses have merged and it’s a calamity.’ Following Stalin’s death, this was to lead to a further deepening of this trend.
THE ANTI-WASTE COMMISSION AT WORK
Growing labour shortages elicited an almost ‘classical’ market response. Labour is a commodity and as the state – the principal employer – became more and more dependent on it (and with forced labour no longer an option), it had to confront these shortages in various ways. As a result of the interaction of the factors involved, a different climate and new patterns emerged in labour relations. But this was insufficient to cure the illness ravaging the state economy. The regime brought in more and more measures in response to the pressures and aspirations of different social strata. However, despite the urgent recommendations impressed on it by the Anti-Waste Commission, the State Control Commission, and many other agencies, the regime failed to secure an increase in labour productivity, to prevent enterprises accumulating reserve stocks of labour and raw materials, and to stimulate the sluggish rate of technological innovation. The country’s rulers faced a dilemma. On the one hand, they were desperately in need of labour and had to court the labour force. On the other, they also had to court the administrative bodies that managed the labour force. This was not an easy game to play. A ‘consensual’ modus operandi was now unavoidable; and bargaining with the ministries became the rule. As is always the case with bureaucracies, however, this finally amounted to sharing power with them. There was no such power-sharing with labour, although here too we could point – as we did – to many concessions, improvements and extentions of rights (the same was true for other interests and social groups). This new way of conducting affairs of state, consisting in taking account of all sorts of social pressures and responding to them, is never registered by theorists of ‘totalitarianism’, for whom dependency remained total and unilateral. (In this instance, one can sympathize with their predicament: by definition, a semi-totalitarian regime is as impossible as a half-pregnant woman.)