Stalin: A Biography

The Leningrad Affair did not halt dispute about policy. Certainly the position of the ministerial apparatus was consolidated to the detriment of the party, and trained specialists in economic and social sectors of public life — and indeed in political ones — were left undisturbed by party and police. Having toyed with measures to raise the popular standard of living, Stalin had reverted to older priorities. The Cold War imposed colossal budgetary strains on the already damaged Soviet economy. Dispositions were made to maximise heavy-industrial production and resources were devoted in abundance to the armed forces and the armaments factories as well as to the development of nuclear weapons. Xenophobic statements were issued about world affairs; little remained of the restraints characteristic of the Grand Alliance. The wartime cultural relaxation was revoked and persecution of the creative intelligentsia was resumed. Things Russian attracted extravagant praise. Marxism–Leninism in its peculiar Stalinist variant was at the centre of the propaganda of press, radio and schooling. Punitive procedures were tightened; prisoners released at the end of their sentences in the Gulag were rearrested and either sent back to camps or transferred to special settlements.

Stalin liked the world to believe that debate about primary aspects of policy had ceased to be necessary and that a popular consensus existed in the USSR. Thus any reconsideration of the ‘line of the day’ was a waste of time at best and a heresy and danger to state interests at worst. Supposedly Stalin’s ideas were exactly those of the party and of the working class. Nevertheless some members of his entourage felt that several sectors of public life required reform. Malenkov believed that light-industrial production should be prioritised notwithstanding the deterioration in relations between the USA and the USSR. Beria agreed (and after Stalin’s death he co-operated with Malenkov in seeking to foster reconciliation between the former military allies). Probably Malenkov and Beria also concurred that the breach with Yugoslavia had been undesirable. Malenkov, though, was less eager than Khrushchëv to acknowledge the existence of an agricultural emergency in the USSR. He also declined to admit the dangers, identified by Beria, which were posed by the exacerbation of national feelings among the non-Russian peoples. The supreme leadership was riddled by suppressed disputes along a range of current policies.

It was one thing for Stalin to develop an idiosyncratic structure for the Soviet political leadership and entirely another to keep it standing. By playing with the fate of his subordinates, he risked destabilising the whole state order, as had happened in 1937–8. The institutions controlling society, the economy and culture needed to maintain their authority. Society was cowed but it was capable of bursting into rebellion: the history of popular revolts in the Russian Empire provided a warning against official complacency. This was not Stalin’s sole calculation. He knew that, if he removed his subordinates in one great purge, he would bring himself into disrepute. He had picked all of them and his judgement would be put under question. Furthermore, Stalin also had to be wary of the reaction of his intended victims. If he made them feel frightened about his intentions, they might attempt a coup. He therefore moved against individuals rather than the whole group. Stalin was not omnipotent. He needed to act with caution, moving against his subordinates in stages.

There abides an image of Stalin as ruler which shows him as a despot unprecedented in history. More than Louis XIV, he could accurately claim: ‘L’État, c’est moi.’ The Great Terror had resulted in total victory. The lasting institution of supreme power and authority — the party — was conquered by his bloody methods and subsequently he could do more or less what he pleased. All institutions were in permanent contest with each other at a level vastly lower than Stalin’s imperial throne. Institutions certainly mattered. But they received their orders from the celestial heights without being able to amend the contents. They functioned as Stalin’s administrative conveyor belts, their task being to carry out whatever errands he had set for each particular day. The leaders of institutions were in post solely at his whim, and they discharged their duties to the letter of his expressed will. Institutions and leaders were therefore mere extensions of Stalin’s declared wishes and intimations. Politics in any generally accepted sense had ceased. An administrative behemoth ran the USSR whose master was the pockmarked little psychopath. According to such imagery, Stalin was totalitarianism in human form.