In a form of ‘hands-on’ government, Stalin personally, the Politburo, the Orgburo and the Secretariat immersed themselves in local minutiae. All this amounted to nothing less than an attempt to ‘micromanage’ a continent from the centre of power in Moscow.
To appreciate how the leaders and their teams engaged in such micromanaging of social groups, institutions, people and material goods, we need only glance at the minutes of the two main agencies of the Central Committee – namely the Orgburo and the Secretariat. The agendas of these two bodies charged with preparing the materials for Politburo meetings are quite simply mind-boggling, as is the number of items and documents they handled. But the best illustration of what micromanagement meant in practice is to be found in numerous telegrams from Stalin (signed by him) to party or state agencies at the other end of the country, whether ordering someone to supply a building site with the nails it desperately needed, or build an internal railway line in a steelworks, or find some barbed wire – a product always in short supply in these years. Let us add that these countless messages always took the form of ultimata.
The Secretariat and Orgburo always proceeded in similar fashion, dealing with all manner of problems in great detail. Their work was impressive – especially their efforts to train or retrain workers, specialists and cadres in all sorts of professions, and to create courses, schools and academies, as well as compiling lists of students and teachers. It was a matter of equipping the state with the cadres it required and replacing layer after layer of specialists, who were so difficult to find.
To summarize: what we see here is the functioning of a highly centralized state, taking on a mass of tasks that are often simply not feasible. The system then suffers from a pathology of ‘hyper-centralization’, the cure for which is to delegate powers downwards, while retaining general policy orientation at the centre. But in the system we are concerned with, the supreme ruler mistook his own security for that of the country and perceived each failure as a fault to be punished. Such a boss had to seem omnipotent. Consequently, in a country desperately short of cadres, Stalin could declare that ‘no one is irreplaceable’ – a formula that harboured many demons, especially because it was false.
DOMINATING TALENTS AND UTILIZING THEM
The characteristics referred to above, including ‘hands-on’ management, equally apply to managing culture and, of course, the government’s relations with outstanding figures in the worlds of culture and science. On this score, Stalin’s dictatorship was innovative.
Once Stalin felt firmly in the saddle, a further feature of his psychology emerged: a strange fascination – a mixture of attraction and repulsion – for genius or great talent; an urge to dominate, use, humiliate and, ultimately, destroy it – rather like a child who asserts mastery over a toy by breaking it. Stalin’s dealings with great writers, scientists or military figures attests to this destructive bent. He spared some of them (quite unpredictably), but the very fact that he took an interest in someone was always dangerous, if not ominous, for its object.
This subject affords insight into another important facet of Stalin’s insatiable thirst for total mastery of his world. He turned to a device that would allow him to penetrate his subjects’ minds and souls, their emotional systems, by using the power of fiction in novels, plays and films. He understood (and envied) the power of a writer who could single-handedly achieve a stronger grip on the thoughts and emotions of millions of people than all the agitprop in the world. He saw art as a device that could be of direct service to him, on condition that creators were coached and their work revised personally, with Stalin acting as in some sense editor and adviser or discussing with authors the behaviour of their heroes. As the reader will doubtless realize, these ‘heroes’ had to obey, and there was no need to be a writer to secure such obedience.
Stalin was no scientist either. Yet he personally edited, for example, Lysenko’s lecture to the Academy of Science for publication. Stalin also had the last word on economic and linguistic questions and – it goes without saying – history. Since he was making history, why not personally edit a history textbook for schools? In short, Stalin’s labours assumed pathological proportions: he aimed at personal mastery of a complex totality that no one had ever mastered and imposed his terms on it. Did he take himself for a genius? What we know for sure is that great talents fascinated him. Was it envy that he could assuage with the knowledge that he could destroy them at will? Or the simple pleasure of proving that he could detect errors and offer advice? It is difficult to say, but the subject is relevant to our theme of political pathology.
STALIN’S ‘APOLOGY’ TO TUKHACHEVSKY
His behaviour towards the brilliant Marshal Tukhachevsky, thirty-seven at the time, provides our first example of Stalin’s sharply alternating attitudes towards talented figures.[3] We know that Stalin had a high opinion of himself as a military strategist. When, in 1929–30, Tukhachevsky embarked on a campaign to direct the leadership’s attention to new military technology and impending changes in the character of warfare, Stalin supported Voroshilov’s rejection of these ideas and wrote to him to say that Tukhachevsky was ‘floundering in anti-Marxism, unrealism, even red militarism’. At the same time, he had 3,000 former Tsarist officers cashiered and arrested. The NKVD extracted ‘testimony’ from one of them to the effect that Tukhachevsky, himself a former Tsarist officer, belonged to some right-wing organization and was helping to plot a coup.
Stalin lapped all this up. He retained very bitter memories of the campaign against Poland in 1920, during which accusations abounded, including from Tukhachevsky, that he was a mediocre military commander. But the hour of vengeance had not yet struck. Stalin wrote to Molotov and others to say that he had personally investigated the accusations against Tukhachevsky and established that the latter was ‘100 per cent clean’. In 1932, he even wrote a personal apology to Tukhachevsky, with a bowdlerized copy of the letter he had sent to Voroshilov in 1930 (the allusion to ‘red militarism’ was omitted). He accused himself of having been unjustifiably harsh – a rare event, to say the least. In fact, Stalin had now adopted Tukhachevsky’s standpoint on military technology, although in this domain, as in so many others, the targets fixed for 1932 were far from having been met. The apology did not mention the accusations fabricated by the NKVD against the marshal in 1930. It was manifestly insincere and, had Tukhachevsky understood Stalin, the duplicity would not have escaped him. Stalin’s gesture actually signified: I need you for the time being, but there is a sword hanging over your head…
Whether naive or just plain audacious, Tukhachevsky was the only participant not to conclude his speech to the Seventeenth Party Congress in 1934 with the obligatory ‘hail the leader’. The reckoning came in 1937, when Stalin destroyed his military high command. A special fate was reserved for Tukhachevsky, probably the best military mind of them all. ‘Information from a German source’ – a total fabrication – was produced, ‘proving’ that the flower of the army had betrayed the country. Atrociously beaten, Tukhachevsky was dragged before Stalin for a confrontation with his accusers. Naturally, it emerged from this that he was guilty. We are dealing here with a maniac who breaks a precious object to show that it can be broken. Preferring an incompetent but obsequious Voroshilov to Tukhachevsky and the rest, and destroying the military high command, were monumental blunders. This purge alone would warrant the death penalty…
3
One of my sources here is Lennart Samuelson,