In imperial Russia, only a strong personality—a Sergei Witte, a Pyotr Stolypin—had been able to impose something of a unified will on the ministries, while toiling to implant loyalists across the entire bureaucracy, but the tsar and his agents deliberately undermined strong central government, because that threatened the prerogatives of the autocrat. Stolypin, arguably Russia’s greatest statesman, had occupied the position of prime minister, but Stalin occupied the position of supreme ruler, like the tsar, and he favored unified government.358 Through Molotov and others, he achieved coordination, and over a much larger apparatus. And while Stolypin had had to contend with a quasiparliament to legalize his policies, the Congress of Soviets possessed none of the powers even of the tsarist Duma. To be sure, Stalin had to obtain politburo approval. But he either manipulated the members or just acted unilaterally. He possessed instruments Stolypin could not have dreamed of: a single-party machine that enveloped the whole country, a Soviet secret police that vastly exceeded the tsarist
Perhaps the biggest difference was that the Soviet regime mobilized the masses on its behalf. Machiavelli had suggested that princes aim to restrict or eliminate access to public spaces—amphitheaters and squares, town halls and auditoriums, streets and even parks—but Stalin flooded them. His state’s power was magnified by a host of mass organizations: the party and Youth League, the army and civil defense associations, trade unions that dispensed social welfare, a kind of mass conscription society.360 The dictator coerced and cajoled the artistic intelligentsia into state service as well. His regime actively engaged the new Soviet society at every level, in identities and practices of everyday life, through which people became part of the system.361 The populace absorbed the regime’s language, ways of thinking, and modes of behavior. Aspirations, in turn, emerged from the new Soviet society, and Stalin became attentive to quality of life, consumer goods, entertainment, and pride. By the mid-1930s the revolution and Stalin’s leadership were seen as having enabled a great country to take its rightful place among the powers, with a supposedly morally and economically superior system.362 “In Germany bayonets do not terrorize a people,” Hitler had boasted in spring 1936. “Here a government is supported by the confidence of the entire people. . . . I have not been imposed by anyone upon this people. From the people I have grown up, in the people I have remained, to the people I return. My pride is that I know no statesman in the world who with greater right than I can say that he is representative of his people.”363 Similarly, Stalin had boasted to Roy Howard that same spring of 1936 that the USSR was “a truly popular system, which grew up from within the people.”364
Stalin had improvised his way toward attainment of the modern authoritarian dream: incorporating the masses without empowering them. Europe’s democratic great powers were put on the defensive by the dynamic mass politics and stated aspirations of the authoritarian regimes. France’s dilemma was particularly stark. Fearful of revived German power, it had turned to a pact with the Communist USSR, but its willingness to do so was based precisely upon the pact’s absence of a military convention, alongside a desperately desired deepening of cooperation with Britain, as well as mollification of Italy and the marginalization of the French Communists.365 In the event, Britain had shown itself ready to surrender the continental guarantees that France viewed as bedrock, France’s precarious placation of a prickly Mussolini was failing, and France’s Communist party was growing significantly in strength, winning more than 15 percent of the vote and seventy-two seats in spring 1936 (versus 8 percent and ten seats four years earlier). All of this damaged Paris’s already weak commitment to alliance with Moscow.