A congress report by the apparatchik Yezhov revealed that 10 percent of the party membership had joined during the civil war or before 1917, but that this profile applied to 80 percent of the congress delegates. In other words, 1,646 of the 1,966 delegates had become Communists when Lenin was the leader.218 But Lenin-era Communists showed loyalty to Stalin. One was Veniamin Furer (b. 1904), a talented organizer in a mining town of Ukraine who had been given the floor at the congress during the February 7 session. “At the 16th Party Congress, comrade Stalin spoke of those reserves that lurk in the depths of our Soviet system,” Furer said in his remarks at the 17th. “If one breaks the bureaucratic knot, if one advances organizational work, these reserves would surface. . . . These reserves are the creative energy, the creative initiative of the mass.” He hit all the Stalin notes: “Thousands of new people have grown in the Donbass and constitute the proletarians of the Stalinist epoch. . . . They present to us, to our organizational work, to our leadership, more demands, demands that are more complex. . . . Our new worker judges us, in localities, on concrete questions: apartment repair, club organization, development of shops and canteens. . . . This party congress, opening a new plane of battle for socialism, should task the entire party and each Communist with the fighting task of studying and fully mastering the Stalinist style of work. (Applause.)”219
MERE SECRETARY
A military-industrial parade on Red Square punctuated the victors’ congress. On February 10, 1934, Stalin and his inner circle met, apparently before the Central Committee plenum that evening, and he proposed that Kirov relocate to Moscow as a Central Committee secretary. “What are you talking about?!” Molotov later recalled of Kirov’s response. “I’ll be no good here. In Leningrad I can do as well as you, but what can I do here?” Some evidence suggests that Orjonikidze supported Kirov’s refusal, Stalin stalked out, and Kirov went to mollify him.220 A compromise ensued: Kirov would become a Central Committee secretary but remain party boss in Leningrad.221
This provoked the hasty transfer of Andrei Zhdanov from Gorky (Nizhny Novgorod) to Moscow as Central Committee secretary.222 Born in Mariupol (1896), Zhdanov was the grandson of a priest and the son of a school inspector (who had died when the boy was just three) and a classical pianist (who had health issues after giving birth to him).223 He affected the trappings of an intellectual, had an easy demeanor in Stalin’s presence, and was a Russian nationalist. Khrushchev recalled him as a charming fellow who would carry out any assignment.224 Zhdanov was not even a politburo candidate member, but, in the absence of the dictator or Kaganovich, he would sign politburo meeting protocols.225
Working sessions of the politburo were giving way to “commissions” (an invention of Kaganovich), while the use of telephone polls for approving politburo decisions had grown to between 1,000 and 3,000 times a year. Even so, Stalin was often just dictating “politburo” decrees to Poskryobyshev or his other top aide Boris Dvinsky. (Ever the functionaries, they would note, “No telephone polling of politburo members taken.”)226
Further reflecting the changes wrought by collectivization-dekulakization, Stalin elevated several secret police officials to full membership in the Central Committee without prior candidate status: Yagoda (43 years old), Yevdokimov (43), Balytsky (42), and Beria (35). Yezhov (39) and Khrushchev (39) also became full members without having been candidates. Zhdanov (38) was promoted from candidate to full member; Poskryobyshev and Mekhlis became candidate members, even though they had not even been congress delegates.227 The post-congress Central Committee returned all members of the politburo from the previous congress, in 1930, except for Rykov.228 Stalin’s name came first on the list of members of the politburo, the orgburo, and the secretariat (after the 16th Congress, his name had appeared alphabetically). His portrait in the gallery of politburo members was rendered far larger, and his khakis lightened to make him stand out. Tellingly, however, Stalin decided that he should be formally listed as merely a “secretary,” in what looks like yet another indication of the long shadow of Lenin’s Testament about removing him as “general secretary.”229
PRIVATE LIFE