The secretariat machinery was a pyramid. At its apex were the Politburo, Secretariat and the Orgburo; at its base, the party secretaries with their own secretariats at district level (the raiony, or lowest administrative levels). It was a system designed to serve the top party leadership in keeping tabs on two much larger pyramids: the scaffolding of the soviets and the much more powerful governmental administration, from the Council of People’s Commissars to its local agencies. The soviets, from the Supreme Soviet down to the local soviets, which further complicated an already intricate organizational structure, may be left to one side here. Their only reality consisted in accomplishing local administrative tasks. As a pyramid capped by the supreme soviets of each republic and by the Supreme Soviet of the USSR at the summit, they were scarcely more than a fiction preserved in order to claim residual allegiance to the revolutionary past and the popular sovereignty it had supposedly established. The local soviets were in fact subordinate to the Council of Commissars (renamed ‘ministries’ in 1946) and their departments. The whole bureaucratic set-up, composed of ‘pyramids’ and ‘scales’, was subject to control by a parallel party apparatus. The division between the two major administrative spheres was somewhat attenuated at the top inasmuch as the Prime Minister, and sometimes one of his deputies, was also a Politburo member. Similarly, interconnection between party and state bodies at the bottom of the ladder was ensured by the presence in every workplace of a party cell, which was itself integrated into a party organization covering the whole firm or ministry. If we add to this the fact that the great majority of important posts in the administration were held by party members, thanks to the so-called nomenklatura procedure (which we shall return to), we might wonder how much more supervision and control were required to render the system ‘crash-proof’. Were a planetary insurance company to exist offering insurance policies to states, it would probably take its cue from the Soviet method of handling such things.
Nevertheless, at every stage of our journey through the 1930s we shall encounter a sort of ‘permanent insecurity’ system, whose shadow hung over an apparatus that was intended both to run the party and to control the strategic layers of the upravlentsy. This mission came up against numerous fault-lines throughout the system. We shall have more than one occasion to ask whether one small apparatus can effectively master a much larger one, with the ultimate aim of controlling the whole society.
It is now time to offer some data about the party apparatus and the apparatchiki. ‘Bureaucratization’, frequently bemoaned since its onset, had rapidly assumed such proportions that it was a feature of all ruling and other bodies. Regularly criticized by ad hoc institutions formally designed to correct such faults, the phenomenon was reduced in public to an enumeration of bureaucratic malfunctions, with reassuring words to the effect that remedies existed whose results would be seen… one day. On the other hand, it should be noted that unpublished documents, especially in the post-Stalin era, were often quite frank and sometimes of good analytical quality. The effects of bureaucratization on Soviet citizens and party members alike, whether persons of integrity or careerists, were multiple.
THE TEDIUM OF PARTY APPARATUS WORK (1924–34)
Many party members, particularly idealistic ones who were ready to serve their country by taking on responsible positions at a local level or in ‘vanguard’ institutions, were often deeply disturbed by what bureaucratization was doing to the party and to them personally. Some did not dare use it as an explicit term of criticism: they just told their superiors that they felt they could do a better job elsewhere. But others would draw more far-reaching conclusions. A few examples from among a myriad of others will illustrate the difficulty of being a party apparatchik, even before the term had become established. Those who had previously waged the revolutionary struggle in clandestine activities, in prison or on the battlefield, and who were now engaged in the prestigious task of helping to build socialism, suddenly perceived – or gradually discovered – that working in a hierarchical apparatus was far from edifying. Quite the reverse: amid the tedious routines boredom predominated. Two examples, drawn from different years, reveal this malaise.
A well-known militant, Ksenofontov, wrote to Kaganovich on 4 November 1924.[2] He had served in the Cheka, taken part in suppressing the Kronstadt uprising, and participated in restoring calm to the country thereafter. He had then asked to be released from such duties and transferred to a position where he could help to build the party-dominated system. Attached to the Central Committee, he was appointed head of its Business Administration department. He had been there for more than three years. Everything was highly organized, and his work was utterly routine. So he now wanted to move on and was hoping for another job from the Central Committee, provided it was not in the economy, trade or the cooperative sector, which did not attract him. At this time, such requests could be submitted without fear of reprisals – though telling Kaganovich that working for him had been uninteresting was perhaps not very prudent. Ksenofontov was authorized to switch to a job in education.
The second example, which dates from ten years later (November 1934), concerns another erstwhile revolutionary who complains about the profound tedium of work at the top of the apparatus. The story here is somewhat more convoluted. A certain Khavinson, deputy head of the ‘Department of Culture and Propaganda of Marxism-Leninism’, reported to his superiors about one comrade Slepchenko. A disciplined and steady worker, who chaired a party committee responsible since 1933 for checking membership lists, Slepchenko had been experiencing difficulties and asked to be transferred to work in production. ‘Working in the apparatus depresses me’, he is reported to have said. Such a statement, made when he had been asked to become aide to the Central Committee’s Industry Department, could have caused him problems. He too had written to Kaganovich, stating that after three years working in the apparatus he had not been able to adapt to it: ‘With every passing day, I am losing my identity.’ Khavinson was of the opinion that he should be accommodated and it is likely that he was allowed to quit, 1934 being (as we shall see) a good year.[3]
Such personal statements, which were acceptable despite their implicit criticism of the apparatus, can be usefully supplemented by a third example, containing a direct critique of the system. This denunciation was based on a solidly argued analysis and its author was a fine political sociologist, Christian Rakovsky. We have already spoken of him when he was head of the Ukrainian government in 1923 and opposed Stalin’s plans for the USSR. Accused of Trotskyism, he was exiled in 1928 to Astrakhan, a city whose climate was very bad for his heart condition. He nevertheless managed to hold out until 1934, while all the time producing critical studies of the state of the Soviet system. He ‘capitulated’ in 1934 when in urgent need of medical treatment. But it was not his heart that finally killed him.
The substance of his diagnosis went as follows: The party is now an aggregate of hundreds of thousands of individuals. What unites them is not a shared ideology, but the trepidation each has about his own fate. The question arises as to how a communist party can be recreated out of such an amorphous mass. There is no other way but to restore inner-party democracy.[4] But restoring the party of Rakovsky’s past was an illusion – and he knew it. In another part of the same text, probably written somewhat later, he comments on the ongoing debate in the party over versions of the second five-year plan (1933–7) which, according to official declarations, was to be a ‘sober five-year plan’. In Rakovsky’s view, the years corresponding to this ‘sober’ plan would consummate the ‘total separation of the bureaucracy from the working class’ and witness the former transform itself into a ‘ruling stratum supported by the state apparatus’. Some thirty years later, in a widely acclaimed book,[5] the Yugoslav Milovan Djilas supposedly made a theoretical innovation when he suggested that the USSR was now run by a ‘new class’.
4
‘VKP(b) i oppozitsiia’ – a file from RGASPI, f. 17, op. 120, d. 68, L. 6, which reproduces for internal party information various Left Opposition documents, copied from Trotsky’s