Stalin полностью

Very early on in his rule, proper leadership had emerged as one of Stalin’s most recurrent themes. For him it meant not declarations of decrees, but their implementation.⁴⁵ Stalin derived his sense of the country and the world predominantly from documents, as well as intuition.⁴⁶ But without irony he castigated “paper leadership” and “office leadership,” functionaries who sat in their big suites and issued orders without familiarizing themselves with the situation in the factory shops or fields, who failed to inquire about people’s experiences and difficulties in order to lend practical help in the tasks at hand. He had complained early and often of needing to “break through the wall of bureaucratism and improve the slipshod performance of our bureaucracies.”⁴⁷ He had stressed the work of “checking up by punching people in the face” (September 2, 1930).⁴⁸ His view of power was deceptively simple: indicate the correct line, assign individuals to implement it, and goad and watch them. Less than 100 percent fulfillment meant rotten liberals showing leniency, playing into the hands of enemies, becoming enemies themselves. But even as his regime demanded unwavering implementation of central directives, it often provided little guidance in the rationales for policies as recorded in the minimalist politburo minutes that were circulated. This left officials poring over Pravda, especially the speeches of Stalin. He appears to have assumed that he was being crystal clear, leaving no room for ambiguity, so that misinterpretations had to be deliberate. He also does not appear to have appreciated the negative consequences of coercion.

Policy to Stalin was reduced to an exercise in obedience and resolve. But by constantly pushing to tighten the system and render it more hierarchical, Stalin had empowered the gatekeeping officials not only in his secretariat but also in the regions, whom he instinctively did not trust. Even allowing for secret police exaggeration, the provincial nomenklatura certainly dragged their feet over directives, failed to cope with the (impossible) demands placed upon them (as would their successors), covered their failures with deception, and brazenly feathered their own nests. Stalin closely followed the reports of self-dealing and local collusion (“family-ness”), flouting of central directives, scapegoating of rivals or underlings who had dared to heed the exhortations in the party press to criticize bosses.⁴⁹ He detested officials making excuses or covering up their failures and pretending they were succeeding, behavior he denounced as double-dealing. Stalin likely understood but would not admit that his own relentless pressure and exorbitant demands made the evasions and coping mechanisms pervasive. He wanted officials to perform well but to be constantly looking over their shoulders. He worked to identify or assign agents inside locales and institutions to report directly to him, bypassing administrative hierarchies, and empowered the secret police to stand above other institutions, yet he feared that the police might conspire against him, so he worked to trip them up, too.

Evasive, self-serving behavior by officialdom is endemic to every authoritarian state.⁵⁰ What was atypical—to put it mildly—was their mass extermination by their own regime. Stalin faced no imperative to murder them. He could sack or transfer any local satrap at will.⁵¹ Instead, he not only put Soviet officials to death or had them deported to slave labor camps en masse, but, in a huge expenditure of state resources, had them tortured to confess and, incredibly, had these Communists confess not to being corrupt or incompetent, but to plotting to assassinate him and restore capitalism on behalf of foreign powers. And that was not all. In the Marxist worldview, entire classes—feudal lords, the bourgeoisie—had outlived their usefulness and become “fetters” on humanity’s further development. (“Everyone is against us who has outlived the epoch allotted to him by history,” Maxim Gorky had written in Pravda in November 1930.)⁵² But Stalin took to applying notions of epochal obsolescence, not just presumptive disloyalty, to the body of experienced Soviet functionaries, as if they, too, were people of a bygone epoch and needed to make way. He would promote the young, to fix the pathologies of the state.

WE ARE THE ENEMY