Stalin полностью

The party’s monopoly went hand in hand with administrative dysfunction. This was a state with awesome power, one that had the capacity to build competitive tanks and artillery in big batches, confiscate much of a harvest, deliver a coordinated propaganda message at every factory and farm, and internally deport whole nations but was largely unable to execute subtle tasks (except when functionaries knowingly behaved illegally).³⁷ The Soviet party-state was clumsy and pervasive, at its strongest in mobilization, suppression, and surveillance. The system gathered incredible quantities of information yet was often poorly informed.³⁸ Stalin expressed frustration at local officials’ supposed narrow horizons and imagined that he alone upheld the interests of the revolution and state tout court, as against specific institutional or sectoral interests. He was cognizant of some limits on his freedom of action—great distances, primitive communication, low levels of education, the bureaucratism and self-dealing—but he nonetheless tried to force his way past them and often did so. He presumed the efficacy of administration and administrative methods and spent considerable time and energy in reorganizations of agencies and work flow.³⁹ But he frequently obviated those same agencies by calling in a plenipotentiary, delivering a pep talk, and having that person go out and bang heads to get things done, then report solely to him. He had come to understand that the ever-growing system of monitoring decision making was achieving less and less.⁴⁰ Still, he did not understand that organizations, particularly overly large ones, develop an often perverse dynamic beyond functionaries’ self-interest.

Far from everything began with Stalin. The politburo adjudicated some 3,000 items per year in the 1930s.⁴¹ Stalin did not really delegate, but the work flow exceeded his capacity to oversee every issue.⁴² Some decisions under his signature (affixed by his staff) he never read. Molotov recalled that Stalin would approach the pile and ask which were the important ones.⁴³ Stalin could ask for guidance: “What to do?” he would sometimes write on documents. (Who knew if it was genuine or a test?) Others in the leadership and throughout the labyrinthine apparatus had no choice but to try to address issues that confronted them day in and day out. But he concentrated information and decision making at the top, which overwhelmed him and his top aides, drowned the central agencies in paperwork, and created massive logjams. The system was in constant pressure against itself—in information gathering and reporting, in coordination or refusal thereof, in pushing responsibility off and back on.⁴⁴ Stalin’s interventions were perforce episodic, sometimes preceded by careful study, sometimes not. He unwittingly created bottlenecks, and narrowed the exchange of information even at the top of the regime. Coordination did take place across agencies in the Little Corner. But when he assigned spheres to individual plenipotentiaries, he sometimes did not inform them of one another’s work. Everything rested upon the people Stalin chose to summon, or not, the reports he solicited and decided to read, or not, the decisions he rendered and how he did or even did not communicate them, and, ultimately, his ability to understand the country and the world.