Stalin: A Biography

There were many levers. In 1946 the Council of Ministers (as Sovnarkom was redesignated in the same year) had forty-eight ministries and committees, each being responsible for a large sector of state functions.²² Stalin ceased chairing it. Instead he increased the emphasis on ‘curatorship’. This was a system whereby every leading associate of Stalin was assigned responsibility for a group of institutions.²³ Stalin, while wanting flux and vagueness as an ultimate safeguard of his rule, needed to assure himself that the state complied with his declared intentions. Curators were his solution. They met him frequently and never knew when he might haul them over the coals because one of their institutions had given him grounds for disquiet. Each group of institutions was the object of rivalry. Politburo members wanted to have as many as possible; this was a token of Stalin’s approval as well as a grant of real power. Reduction of the number signalled that a particular associate had fallen under the shadow of disapprobation — or even of the Leader’s lethal suspicion. His associates were under constant, intense pressure. Always they feared that some silly slip by one of their own subordinates might have adverse consequences for themselves. This could happen at any time because the Leader cultivated jealousies among all of them.

He also harangued them into adopting his own ferocious style of leadership: at a Party Central Committee plenum in March 1946 he declared: ‘A People’s Commissar must be a wild animal; he must work and take direct responsibility for work.’²⁴ Rulership as Stalin recommended it to People’s Commissars and their curators was nothing like the model of bureaucratic life described by sociologists since Max Weber and Roberto Michels. Even in his last years, when the Soviet order was stabilised and in many ways petrified, it retained a militant and dynamic quality.

Politics were a bear-pit. Politburo members could bite and claw each other as brutally as they liked so long as they produced the outcome demanded by Stalin. Only in Stalin’s presence were they constrained to moderate their behaviour. The Politburo had ceased to convene in the war and the pre-war tradition was not resumed.²⁵ Stalin continued to consult other leaders by informal methods. Always he liked to have leading figures in the Politburo write, telegram or telephone their assent to his preferences into policy. The Orgburo and the Secretariat — as well as the Council of Ministers and its Presidium — deliberated in his absence. The Party Congress, which had supreme formal authority over all party bodies, was not called until 1952. Stalin expected to rule through unofficial channels; he knew that disruption of institutional regularity helped to prolong his personal despotism. He could intervene with an order at his whim. He deliberately inflicted a contradictory pattern of work on his subordinates. They, unlike him, had to observe administrative procedures punctiliously. At the same time they had to obtain practical results regardless of the rulebook. The pressure was unremitting. This was the way he liked things, and the other leaders dared make no objection.

The fact that Stalin was often away from Moscow led many contemporaries (and subsequent commentators) to surmise that he was losing his grip on power. This was a misperception. On the large questions of the international, political and economic agenda there was little that escaped his adjudication; and Kremlin politicians were altogether too fearful of him to try to trick him. The framework of rulership at the centre and in the provinces also continued to exercise his attention. At the end of the war four bodies had immense importance. These were the government, the party, the security police and the army. Stalin needed all of them. He also required a situation in which no institution became so dominant as to threaten his position. The most obvious menace after the Second World War was the Red Army, and the country’s military hero Georgi Zhukov immediately came under his suspicion.