In December 1940, Hitler approved plans to invade the USSR in May 1941. The only allies Stalin had left were his own people. The vozhd spent the final months before Hitler marched into the Soviet Union consolidating his power and making extraordinary efforts to bolster the country’s military strength.
One important result of the Great Terror was the dramatic shift in the balance of power within the Politburo. Remnants of collective leadership survived into the mid-1930s, but by late 1937 the Politburo was entirely subject to Stalin’s will. The Terror brought his power to new heights. He was now a full-fledged dictator in whose hands rested the lives not only of ordinary citizens, but also those of his most esteemed fellow leaders. Five Politburo members (Stanislav Kosior, Vlas Chubar, Robert Eikhe, Pavel Postyshev, and Yan Rudzutak) were shot, and one (Grigory Petrovsky) was expelled from the upper echelons and survived only because Stalin chose to show him clemency. Another name on the list of Stalin’s high-ranking victims was Grigory Ordzhonikidze, driven to suicide by Stalin’s ruthlessness. But even the top leaders who held onto their posts found themselves in an impotent and demeaning position, forced to carefully walk the line between power and death and unable to protect their most valued subordinates or even close friends and relatives. The names of top leaders inevitably came up in the countless confessions the NKVD extracted under torture. It was up to Stalin to decide what denunciations and incriminations should be taken seriously. Anyone could suddenly be labeled an enemy.
As Stalin’s longtime comrades disappeared from the top leadership, younger faces took their place. As noted, these replacements were an important element of his consolidation of power. Lacking the revolutionary credentials of the older generation, these young leaders owed their standing directly to Stalin and were entirely dependent on him. In March 1939 Andrei Zhdanov and Nikita Khrushchev, members of this second generation, were granted full membership in the Politburo. At the same time, a member of the third generation, Lavrenty Beria, was made a candidate member. In February 1941 three other members of the third generation were added: Nikolai Voznesensky, Georgy Malenkov, and Aleksandr Shcherbakov.57 These appointments did not simply represent the normal advance of competent leaders up the career ladder. Stalin made a point of placing young officials in important posts, often as counterweights to his older, more deserving colleagues.
Changes to the composition of the Politburo were just one manifestation of processes taking place under the surface that ultimately destroyed the formal aspects of the collective leadership and substituted new unofficial or quasi-official institutions adapted to the administrative and political needs of Stalin’s dictatorship and lifestyle. The deterioration of the Politburo’s meaningful role was brought to its logical conclusion when it essentially ceased to function as a formal institution. During the years of the Great Terror, it was replaced by a narrower group within the leadership, always chaired by Stalin. In early 1938 the “Secret Five” took shape, consisting of Stalin, Molotov, Voroshilov, Mikoyan, and Kaganovich. This group, though not an official body, largely took the place of the Politburo. The only vote that mattered was Stalin’s. In addition to his deliberations during meetings of the Five, Stalin settled many questions with individual members of the leadership. These ad hoc decision-making mechanisms bore little resemblance to constitutional structures or procedures and depended purely on the will of the vozhd. The meetings, following Stalin’s habits and nocturnal lifestyle, took the most varied forms. Matters of state could be decided day or night, in Stalin’s Kremlin office or at his dacha, in the movie theater or during long hours at the dinner table.
The next level of the pyramid of power consisted of governmental bodies to which Stalin delegated particular authority while retaining overall control. This system first took shape within the party’s Central Committee apparat, which had the mission of promulgating ideology and selecting and assigning senior party and state officials. These key areas were overseen personally by Stalin’s protégés, Zhdanov and Malenkov, who could make relatively trivial decisions on their own but had to bring more consequential ones to Stalin for approval. In January 1941, Stalin explained the Central Committee’s new modus operandi: “It’s been four or five months since we in the Central Committee have convened the Politburo. All questions are prepared by Zhdanov, Malenkov, and others in separate meetings with comrades who have the necessary expertise, and the job of governing is only going more smoothly as a result.”58
On the government side, accommodating the commissariats, departments, and committees of the Sovnarkom to the dictator’s needs was more difficult. The Sovnarkom oversaw the entire Soviet economy, which was then laboring under the strain of urgent preparations for war. Stalin sought to make the bureaucracy into something he could steer at will, but the sluggishness and unmanageability of its agencies sent him into fits of irritation and temper. His frustration led to numerous attempts to reorganize how the system was managed by the country’s top leadership. Finally, in March 1941, a new governmental body was created: the Bureau of the USSR Sovnarkom, consisting of Sovnarkom chairman Molotov and his deputies. This bureau was created as a governing group within the Sovnarkom, much like the leading group within the Politburo.
As part of the political intrigue around the reorganization, the relatively young Nikolai Voznesensky became first deputy to the government’s chairman, Molotov. His appointment to such an important post, over the heads of more senior members of the Politburo such as Mikoyan and Kaganovich, heightened tensions within Stalin’s inner circle. Even in memoirs written decades later, Mikoyan could not hide his hurt feelings: “But what struck us most of all about the composition of the Bureau leadership was that Voznesensky became first deputy chairman of the Sovnarkom.… Stalin’s motives in this whole leapfrog were still not clear. And Voznesensky, being naive, was very pleased with his appointment.”59 In giving this important job to Voznesensky, Stalin may have been intentionally pitting him against Molotov, hinting that the Sovnarkom chairman was not able to handle all his duties and needed a younger and more energetic deputy. In any event, the entire government reorganization came with a chorus of reprimands and accusations directed against Molotov’s Sovnarkom leadership. This was a clear sign that Stalin had something up his sleeve.
His plans became evident a month after the Sovnarkom Bureau was established. On 28 April 1941 Stalin sent a memorandum to Bureau members explaining that it had been created for the purpose of straightening out government operations and bringing an end to “chaos” within the economic leadership, which continued to decide “important questions related to the building of the economy through so-called ‘polling.’” As an example of the inappropriate use of polling (having members of a committee vote on a circulated document individually rather than meeting to discuss it in person), Stalin pointed to a draft resolution concerning the construction of an oil pipeline in the Sakhalin area. Molotov had signed the document, he wrote indignantly, even though it had not been discussed by the Sovnarkom Bureau. After labeling this practice “paper-pushing and scribbling,” he issued an ultimatum: “I think ‘management’ of this sort can’t go on. I propose discussing this question in the Central Committee’s Politburo. And for now, I feel compelled to say that I refuse to participate in voting through polling on any draft resolution whatsoever concerning economic questions of any consequence whatsoever if I don’t see the signatures of the Sovnarkom Bureau indicating that the draft has been discussed and approved by the Bureau of the USSR Sovnarkom.”60