The central leadership was like a gang, and Stalin as its leader relied upon his fellow members to organize the state’s institutions. Competence and obedience remained prerequisites of gang membership. The penalty for disagreement with Stalin was constant: ‘seven grams of lead’ in the head.
Stalin continued to make occasional arrests of cronies. Like Al Capone, he knew how to ‘keep the boys in line’.15 For instance, he asked Khrushchëv whether it was true that he was really a Pole.16 This was quite enough to terrify Khrushchëv, who knew that in 1938 Stalin had executed the Polish communist émigrés in Moscow. The nearer someone was to the apex of power, the more directly he was intimidated by Stalin. People’s commissars trembled at meetings of Sovnarkom. Stalin’s ploy was to get up from the long green-baize table and pad up and down in his soft leather boots behind the seats of his colleagues. It was an unnerving experience. In reply to Stalin’s enquiry about the number of recent plane crashes, air force commander Rychagov, being the worse for drink, blurted out: ‘There will continue to be a high level of accidents because we’re compelled by you to go up in flying coffins.’ The room fell silent as a graveyard, and after a long pause Stalin murmured: ‘You shouldn’t have spoken like that.’ Rychagov was shot a few days later.17
Yet the uppermost élite lived in greater safety than in 1937–8. Stalin could not afford to reduce his associates to the condition of robots: he needed them to accompany their self-abasement before him with a dynamic ruthlessness in the discharge of their tasks — and to give orders on their own initiative. Laws, decrees, regulations and commands were produced in profusion in this period of frightful legal abusiveness.18 But, as under Lenin, office-holders were given to understand that they would not be assessed on the basis of their adherence to procedural norms. What would ultimately count for or against them was their record of practical results.
At the supreme and middling levels they had to combine the talents of cardinals, condottieri and landed magnates: they had to be propagators of Marxism-Leninism; they had to fight for the policies of the party; and each of them had to assemble a band of followers who would carry out orders throughout the area of their patron’s responsibility. The unavoidable result was that Stalin had to settle for a less amenable administration than he had aimed to establish by means of the Great Terror. Just as he needed his cronies, so they needed cronies of their own. The cliental groupings therefore stayed in place. For example, Postyshev’s team in the Ukrainian party leadership gave way to Khrushchëv’s team when Stalin sent Khrushchëv to Kiev in 1938; and Beria likewise cleared out Yezhov’s team from the NKVD and installed his own: it was the only available way to ensure the substitution of reliable anti-Yezhovites.
Not only vertically but also horizontally the old administrative practices stayed in place. In June 1937 Stalin had complained: ‘It’s thought that the centre must know everything and see everything. No, the centre doesn’t see everything: it’s not like that at all. The centre sees only a part and the remainder is seen in the localities. It sends people without knowing these people one hundred per cent. You must check them out.’19 But new local ‘nests’ or ‘family circles’ were formed almost as soon as Stalin destroyed the existing ones. Wheeling and dealing occurred among the heads of party, soviet, police, army and enterprise management; local officials protected each other against the demands made by central authorities. More than ever, lying to Moscow was a skill crucial for physical survival. Institutions had to fiddle the accounts so as to exaggerate achievements enough to win acclaim, but not to the point that the following year’s quotas would be raised intolerably high.
Such evasiveness was not confined to officialdom. A black market existed in those many types of product which were in severe deficit in the USSR. Moisei Kaganovich, brother of Stalin’s close associate, loudly objected to the general evidence of disobedience: ‘The earth ought to tremble when the director walks around the plant!’ In theory the managerial stratum was obliged to give its work-forces a harder time than since the October Revolution. But the potential for harshness was limited outside the forced-labour camps by the chronic shortage of skilled free labour. Strict time-keeping and conscientious work could not be enforced if hired labourers could simply wander off and find employment elsewhere. A kind of social concordat was established whereby managers overlooked labour indiscipline so long as they could hang on to their workers. Records were written to over-state a worker’s technical qualifications or his hours of attendance or his output. Managers had to break the law in order to fulfil their own quotas.20
In every branch of the economy it was the same story. Even in the kolkhozes and the sovkhozes the local authorities found it convenient to make compromises with the work-forces. A blind eye was turned to the expansion of the size of peasants’ private plots.21 Regular contribution of ‘labour days’ was not always insisted upon. Illicit borrowing of the farm’s equipment was overlooked by the chairman who needed to keep the peasants on his side in order to fulfil the governmental quotas.
The central political leadership had been encouraging the workers and kolkhozniki to denounce factory directors and farm chairmen for their involvement in sabotage; but the end of the Great Terror led to a renewed emphasis on labour discipline. Increasingly draconian punishments were introduced. Managers in town and countryside were threatened with imprisonment if they failed to report absenteeism, lack of punctuality, sloppy workmanship as well as theft and fraud. According to a decree of December 1938, labourers who were late for work three times in a month should be sacked. Another decree in June 1940 stated that such behaviour should incur a penalty of six months’ corrective labour at their place of work.22 Stalin also tightened his grip on the collective farms. A decree of May 1939 ordered local authorities to seize back land under illegal private cultivation by kolkhozniki.23 But the fact that such measures were thought necessary showed that, at the lower levels of administration, non-compliance with the demands of the central authorities was widespread. Sullen, passive resistance had become a way of life.
The Soviet order therefore continued to need a constant dosage of excitation in order to keep functioning. Otherwise the institutions of party and government would tend to relapse into quietude as officials pursued personal privilege and bureaucratic compromise. Ideological apathy would also increase. The provision of dachas, nannies, special shops and special hospitals was already well developed in the 1920s; and, with the termination of the Great Terror, these benefits were confirmed as the patrimony of Stalin’s ruling subordinates. How to ensure a lively discomfort among the central and local nomenklaturas?
Or indeed among all sections of the USSR’s society? Denunciation by ordinary workers became a routine method of controlling politicians and administrators. Stalin knew that anonymous letter-writing was open to abuse; and yet he fostered the practice in order to keep all leaders in a state of trepidation. Likewise he reinforced Pravda’s custom of carrying out muck-raking investigations in a specific locality. The idea was that an exposé of malpractice would stimulate the eradication of similar phenomena elsewhere. Stalin and his colleagues were attracted to a campaigning style of work. Time after time the central political authorities imposed a fresh organizational technique or a new industrial product, and used the press to demand enthusiastic local obedience. Reluctantly they had accepted that Stakhanovism caused more disruption than increase in output; but the pressurizing of managers and workers to over-fulfil plans was an unchanging feature.24