It is interesting to note – and Kuznetsov himself was sensitive to this – how many of the criticisms, especially when uttered by younger, ‘instructor’-level apparatchiks, were imbued with idealism and the bitterness they felt in seeing their expectations dashed. Kuznetsov had even heard a phrase he did not anticipate (and nor did a researcher like me, some fifty years later!): ‘We [the party] have lost power!’ (my poteriali vlast’!). All this is recorded in the minutes of the 1946 meeting. So it is scarcely surprising if a year later Kuznetsov declared that party organizations needed to regain their ‘independence’. He did not even have to specify from whom. The party’s ‘economization’ was the curse that was alarming its leadership as never before.
At stake was the very existence of the party as a ruling institution. During the war, its transformation into a ministerial appendage had accelerated, with a consequent loss of power. This was not surprising: the ministries had indeed been responsible for the war effort and its most glamorous activities. The party apparatus was being bought off and corrupted by managers, who increasingly dealt exclusively with the Council of Ministers and ignored the Central Committee and its nomenklatura. There is abundant data on such disregard for the ‘nomenklatura rules’ (a term we shall return to).
Extricating the central apparatus from any direct involvement in economic affairs and agencies – from economics tout court – apart from general guidelines and oversight of cadres, seemed to be the remedy. But Zhdanovism was going to complicate matters. In the past, the cadres directorate had preferred to recruit people who already possessed technical training for party work. Now humanities graduates were to have preference, in order to avoid such ideological lapses as the failure to censor ‘ideologically alien’ passages in an opera, or the publication of an insufficiently expurgated biography of Lenin, and so on. ‘Technicians’ were regarded as incapable of exposing ideological subversion, let alone combating it. A threat like ‘economization’ – much more prosaic, but also less obvious – which was beginning to blur the party’s ideological vision, was quite beyond their wit.
But what was the ideological framework that was supposedly losing its vigour? And what was to be counterposed to the influence of the capitalist West? Here we touch a sensitive point in the party’s ideological armour. At this stage, Stalinism was characterized by an unwillingness – even an inability – to criticize capitalism from a socialist standpoint. As we have said, a virulent Russian nationalism had been opted for instead. This point will be taken up in Part Three, when we sketch a broader picture of the ideological history. As for the narrower practical problem of the party apparatus restoring control over the ministries and over itself, it was (to repeat the point) bound up with undue direct involvement in the economy, which had allowed managers to get the upper hand. Hence the 1946 reform of the apparatus largely consisted in terminating such direct involvement and halting the party’s ‘economization’.
In and of itself, however, this kind of ‘line’ could not replace the ideological cement that Stalinism had lost. Kuznetsov implied as much during the plenary meeting of the party apparatus. ‘The party has no programme’, he declared, stating that the only extant programmatic texts were the Stalin Constitution and the five-year plan. These words certainly possessed an audacious ring, for they implied that under Stalin the party had lost its original ideological vigour. They would have been suicidal had Stalin himself – we surmise – not said as much and Kuznetsov not simply been quoting him. When Kuznetsov referred to the party losing out to economic managers and needing to regain its independence, the sentiment was probably Stalin’s – or approved by him, at any rate. As Stalin himself was aware, the erosion of most of the original ideology must have been a factor in the ‘economization’ of party cadres. Zhdanovite policies had been instigated at Stalin’s behest, which tends to indicate that he was aware of the regime’s ideological weakness and had decided to furnish it with a new ideological cement. We have seen what this consisted in. But it was part of the problem, not part of the solution.
At all events, for now ‘the economy’ was identified as the reason for the decay of the party’s main apparatus. The measures adopted rested on the conviction that a better division of labour between the Central Committee and the Council of Ministers could remedy the situation. The Council of Ministers would continue to run the country, while the Central Committee would staff key posts and oversee the cadres departments in every institution. But this line – ‘quit the economy and get back to party work’ – would not last long. Less than two years later, the reorganization, which testified to a long-term vision (even if its goal was unattainable), was reversed.
RETREAT
A halt was called at the end of 1948. Let us now briefly analyse its consequences. In early 1949 the specialist sectors of the cadres directorate were converted into separate departments dealing with different spheres of state activity. Officially, they would deal only with the cadres in these various spheres, not with their professional field of activity. In fact, however, whether inadvertently or otherwise, these Central Committee departments would continue to get entangled in the economy’s managerial structures. The cause was the very character of the branch system – something the 1946 reform had sought to surmount. Thus the ‘turn’ turned into a retreat.
One document sums up the character of the new phase. Swings of the pendulum were recurrent in Soviet administrative practice, so this one was no novelty. Instead of the cumbersome cadres directorate, and specialist units in charge of inspecting party bodies, there was to be a new organizational structure. Henceforth the Central Committee apparatus, overseen mainly by the Secretariat and to a lesser degree by the Orgburo, would supervise the operations of ministries and other central government agencies. The task was assigned to new Central Committee departments – among them, ‘agitprop’, ‘party-komsomol-trade unions’, ‘international relations’, heavy industry, consumer goods industry, engineering (machine building), transport and agriculture, as well as a new, very powerful, ‘administrative’ department with responsibility for the security services and the cluster of agencies in planning, finance and trade. (The last three would soon be detached to form a separate department.)
In sum, the reorganization consisted in converting the structural units of the old cadres directorate into independent departments and distributing, more or less logically, the 115 ministries and all party bodies (republican and regional) between these departments. This was no easy undertaking. Each of the state agents to be supervised and monitored itself encompassed a multitude of local branches – in particular, a labyrinthine set of supply networks that were a headache for any inspection agency. This tangled web was even more complicated than the one we shall discuss when we deal with the state administration.
Each Central Committee department had its own more or less complex structure and personnel office. But there were also structures servicing the whole Central Committee apparatus, like the central statistical office, and coordinating departments such as the general-secretary’s ‘special unit’, the encrypting service, and ‘confidential matters’. In addition there were various ‘groups’ or ‘special offices’ unfamiliar to outsiders, including a service for receiving foreign visitors, a separate ‘department of the Central Committee’ (possibly an auxiliary secretariat for the Orgburo), a pivotal ‘general department’ through which all significant texts and appointments to and from departments passed, a ‘business’ department, a ‘post office’ for letters from the public, an office dealing with party membership registration, a ‘commission for foreign travel’, a special office for running the Kremlin, and a unit dealing with ‘auxiliary farms’ (probably part of the business department, which also had a cars and mechanical repairs service).