Readers with a particular interest in bureaucracy will find plenty of food for thought here on supervisory methods, and the logic and illogic involved in such a centralized staffing policy. The complexity of the nomenklatura hierarchy raises the issue of the extent to which bureaucratic methods of controlling a bureaucracy are unrealistic. A more detailed examination would indicate that this list was in fact only one part of a larger system. The Central Committee controlled – or sought to control – the highest stratum of officials. But those at the top also had power over some lower-level nominations, though it had to be exercised in collaboration with the relevant party committee at each level, or with the lower echelon of their own hierarchy, which in turn performed the same function vis-à-vis the cadres of institutions under its control (alone or in consultation), and so on and so forth.
Thus, a system that seems clear when viewed from above turns out to be composed of different decision-making hierarchies, in which prerogatives are fluid and allow for numerous derogations. Endless complaints by the Central Committee apparatus against ministries demonstrate that the latter were not particularly diligent when it came to following nomenklatura rules. They appointed, transferred or dismissed job-holders without consulting the Central Committee; or only did so retrospectively. If they behaved like that, it was because the nomenklatura did not in reality operate as a one-way system. When a post became vacant, the Central Committee could look for a candidate in its reserve list, but it only did so if the ministry concerned was reckoned to be in a crisis situation. Otherwise, it asked the minister to propose the best candidate and would subsequently confirm the appointment.
At a later point in our study, in Parts Two and Three, the question of who ultimately controlled whom in this system will be posed once again – and answered. But we can already see that the logistics involved in controlling the machinery actually reveal dependency on it. And the dangers of ‘economization’ and losing control of the government machine and its administrative class were formulated in precisely these terms in internal party debates.
In conclusion, we would like to underscore two features of the Stalinist system. When dealing with Stalin’s own governmental methods, we are in the realm of arbitrariness and personal despotism. When speaking of Soviet government, we are in the realm of bureaucracy or rather its two branches, one of them (the party apparatus) minor and the other (state administration) much larger.
13
AN AGRARIAN DESPOTISM?
In the aftermath of the war Stalin remained obsessed with constructing an adequate ‘historical alibi’ and thereby acquiring legitimacy. He needed something substantial in order to be fully absolved from his original political commitments. The war had seen the outline of the third panel of what was to form a veritable ‘triptych’, but it remained to display it to the full. The first panel corresponded to the elimination of Leninism and the taming of the party, the second to the extermination of the historical party via the purges and the rewriting of its history. The third would consist in dispensing with ideological liabilities and switching to a nationalist ‘great power’ ideology, comparable to Tsarism and adopting its attributes.
During these three phases, countless citizens had lost their lives, many of them valuable, independent-minded cadres. The whole society lived in terror. And yet Stalinism in its turn would be ‘buried’. It would be a mistake to think that the dictator’s death, eventually inevitable, was the decisive factor in this. After the end of the war, the system was in decline and Stalin, notwithstanding the impression of omnipotence he created, was in search of something to give it a new lease of life. The primary cause of the decline lay in the regime’s internal contradictions. Its absolutist features, befitting another age, were profoundly incompatible with the effects of a forced industrialization in response to the challenges of new times. The government that had summoned these furies was unable to accommodate the emerging realities, or interest groups, or constraints embodied in the social structures and layers generated by the developmental process. The pathological purges attested to this: Stalinism could not live with the fruits of its own policies, starting with its own bureaucracy; it could not live without it, but could not live with it either.
Stalin’s personal path was in a sense mapped out by his experience of the Civil War. The conclusions he drew about Russia’s present and future needs were those to which his personality, intellect and experience predisposed him. But we should not ignore the decisive part played in this by the specificity of Russian history: it not only produced a Stalin, but allowed him to seize power and lead the country in a particular direction. Throughout its vast territory and the regions surrounding it (Middle East, Far East, and also Eastern Europe), the political system of old Russia had numerous ancestors, neighbours and cousins with experience of agrarian despotism. The transformation of Muscovy into a centralized state involved combining numerous separate principalities into a single political unit. On the one hand this betokened a form of’de-feudalization’, in the sense that parcellization was reduced. But on the other hand it meant the introduction of a new type of feudalism, with the conversion of peasants into serfs on the land offered to the nascent gentry in exchange for service to the state: the concurrent creation of serf-owners (servants of the state) and serfs. Expansion of the personal domain of Moscow’s ruler coincided with the construction of an autocracy and the creation, over a huge territory, of a nation by means of colonization, which was the principal feature in the making of Russia. According to the term used by the nineteenth-century Russian historian Solovev, this process was ‘drawn out’ – in other words, it was extensive and repetitive. It dictated a highly centralized state under a sovereign who ruled by divine right.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the autocracy had sought with difficulty to shed its original agrarian mould, which had become an obstacle to its governmental methods and imperial image. The changes that had occurred over the centuries had rendered such a framework increasingly untenable, even if Tsar Nicholas II remained very attached to a model of autocracy that dated back to an era when the sovereign identified his state with a personal domain and ruled it like a family concern. In this connection, it is worth recalling that despotes in ancient Greek referred to the head of a household with many servants and slaves. But in the twentieth century, serfdom no longer existed and the patriarchal peasant system, where the master represented the equivalent of sovereign authority in the popular imaginary – something that could have served as the pillar of a sui generis popular monarchy – was changing rapidly. The head of the peasant family might have long supported Tsarism, for as a mini-monarch he sensed an affinity with the great monarch – a ‘little father’ (batiushka) like him. But the base of this primitive rural monarchism was giving way as peasants began to question the analogy.
Stalin’s growing tendency to identify with the imperial Russian past, and to tap its oldest traditions for the benefit of his regime, might seem puzzling in view of the fact that Tsarism had been in rapid decline. But it would be wrong to reduce the phenomenon to a device dictated by wartime mobilization against the German invader, or his repeated contention about the Russians to the effect that ‘they cannot cope without a Tsar’. It corresponded to a profound political and psychological need: a radical redefinition of both his and his regime’s political and ideological identity.