(1) recourse to various forms of repression, referred to by the term shturmovshchina (storming) – i.e. the launch of huge campaigns to achieve whatever the current objectives were at any price;
(2) construction of a hypertrophied bureaucracy to control population flows by systematizing and channelling them.
Seemingly unavoidable, these strategies contradicted one another. The mobilizing campaigns alternated, or ran in parallel, with attempts to ‘regularize’ things: in sum, the Mr Hyde of terror versus the Dr Jekyll of bureaucracy, keen on planning, stability and ‘tenure’. Both belonged to the regime’s internal clock.
This alternation between stick and carrot persisted even at the height of the terror. The bloody purges of 1937–9 contained their own swings of the pendulum. The inability to pursue a steady course, the innate preference for violent acceleration, always ended up causing a trail of damage that had to be cleared away before the next mobilization.[3] This innate preference was the hallmark of a concentration of power, regarded as the only way of pursuing the chosen course to the end. Whatever the current line, whether hard or softer, the regime never relaxed its compulsive attachment to a strict centralism as the only fixed point in a chaotic situation. This approach was not altogether lacking in logic: the gigantic endeavour that had been embarked upon could never have derived from below, and could not be managed at local level either. But centralism on this scale was the source of endless imbalances. Stalinist centralism grew out of a specific situation: a powerful centre had existed since the end of the 1920s, but it had a narrow summit. The configuration of power was such that the assessment of the situation, the diagnosis, the very definition of reality and the policies to adopt depended on the opinions and views of a very small number of leaders. As the great leap unfolded, the way they had governed the country before 1929 must in retrospect have seemed like simplicity itself. The object of government was now literally in perpetual motion.
This enormous fluidity in society and institutions was, of course, the result of the speed and scale of the transformation that had been embarked on. By definition, it was inevitable, and corrigible only in the long run. However, especially in the early 1930s, the regime had to undertake its enormous economic tasks in the here and now, while confronting intense social ferment. The inexorable growth of the whole administrative apparatus – a novelty in itself on this scale – had inevitable social consequences. Even before they had learnt to do their jobs properly, administrative personnel displayed an amazing ability to express their needs, desires and interests, and hit upon means of satisfying them. Thus the problem-solver generated new problems, in conformity with much else in these tumultuous years. A sketch of the bureaucratic structures of the state is now in order.
THE BUREAUCRATIC ‘GENE’
A document from early 1929, and two others from 1940, cast light on some key aspects of bureaucratic state-building between these dates, or at least on the rulers’ perception of it. The first derives from Kujbyshev, Politburo member and head of the State Inspectorate, composed of members of the party’s Central Control Commission and the Worker-Peasant Inspectorate, which had commissariat status. The speech he made to his department heads in early 1929 was, to say the least, rather alarming: ‘Nothing in our new state resembles the old Tsarist regime as much as our administration.’ He listed the well-known defects of the latter and then concluded, like Lenin before him, that they were very difficult to rectify. The abuses and scandals were on such a massive scale that urgent measures were being canvassed. However, they would at best make it possible to get shot of some swindlers, who would quickly be replaced by others, sowing despair in the ranks of militants in the Worker–Peasant Inspectorate. Their commissariat was supposed to be exemplary and enjoy great authority among other government agencies. But this was dangerous: no agency could live up to it. Everyone knows, he continued, about the intra-agency disputes that are typical here and no department is prepared to accept the solutions suggested by another body, especially if they occasion the slightest inconvenience. The higher government agencies, which are supposed to coordinate the activity of lower bodies, are torn apart by the same quarrels and their decisions are often the product of nothing more than fortuitous majorities. Supra-ministerial bodies like the Council for Labour and Defence, or the economic councils at regional level, are insufficiently powerful, because the offended party appeals to the Council of Commissars and often succeeds in getting decisions overturned. ‘In a word,’ Kuibyshev said, ‘you will not find one uncontested authority in this system.’ And he added: people still hope that the Worker-Peasant Inspectorate will find a way of becoming such an authority.
Incredible as it might seem, in his diagnosis of an absence of uncontested authority, Kuibyshev did not mention the Politburo as an exception – though this might have been unintentional.
The Politburo was itself looking for ways of remedying the situation, notably by ousting old cadres from the apparatus and training new ones. We know enough about Stalin by now to guess that in his eyes such a defective organization could only be tantamount to sabotage on a grand scale.
By 1940, with the great purges already in the past, the communism ‘without deformations’ – particularly ‘without bureaucratization’ – imminently anticipated by some was still very far off It suffices to read these lamentations from Izvestiia, which echo Kuibyshev’s twelve years earlier: ‘A great many superfluous departments and agencies have grown up in our state administration, innumerable superstructures where employees do nothing but write, “conduct inquiries”, answer correspondence. And all too often, this paper trail leads to absolutely nothing.’ This was a leading article. It went on to deplore the plethora of supply agencies and gave the example of Gorky, where they were pointlessly proliferating – there were sixty in this town alone. Every commissariat had several supply agencies, each agency had a large workforce, and running expenses kept on increasing. The agencies were duplicating one another, since they virtually all performed the same tasks. In Gorky, running expenses had doubled in 1940 and the editor of Izvestiia could not understand why. Most worrying was the fact that this was a widespread phenomenon.
Thus, the regime responsible for this situation, be it the ‘social mobility’ or the proliferation of bureaucracy, was in turn put to the test and forced to react to one emergency after another, each of which was perceived as a threat. This perception of things was to become the main motor of Stalinism. Not only did the threats exist, but they were necessary to the regime to mobilize the faithful and justify the terror. Yet the factors that had destabilized the social structure were not contained by the terror. The camps and the terror only compounded the instability and sense of insecurity in society, which then rebounded on the state. The leadership was haunted by the spectre of an ungovernable system and losing control of the social ‘magma’. Their counter-measures consisted in strengthening state control over most, if not all, aspects of life, more centralization, and transforming the system into a fortified camp, by increasing the layers of bosses at every administrative level – precisely what Izvestiia denounced.
3
See Oleg V. Khlevniuk, ‘The Politbureau, Penal Policy and “Legal Reforms’”, in Peter H. Solomon, Jr, ed.,