Stalin полностью

Even with such promotions, the Soviet system was not producing nearly enough young people to fill all the vacated positions, in the center or the locales, because right through the terror and beyond, the apparatus was ballooning.¹⁷³ In fall 1937, a floodlike 130,000 students were admitted to higher-education institutions.¹⁷⁴ On October 23, 1937, the politburo established a commission for assigning graduates of higher education directly via the Central Committee.¹⁷⁵

On the evening of October 29, Stalin hosted a reception in the Kremlin’s Palace of Facets, culminating a four-day conference of some 400 representatives of the metals-and-coal industry. He had already explicitly identified his rule with the expansive ranks of middling “cadres” in his resounding slogan “Cadres decide everything” (1935), but by 1937 he was singling out the up-and-coming generation more and more, receiving them in the magical inner sanctum, the Little Corner, or, as now, in the lustrous reception halls of the Kremlin.¹⁷⁶ “Leaders come and go, but the people remain,” he told the coal-and-metals gathering. “Only the people are immortal. All the rest is transient. Therefore, it is necessary to be able to value the confidence of the people.” He could not help divulging, “I am not sure, I apologize again, that there are not people among you who, although they work for the Soviet government, are not also taking care of themselves in the West by also working for some foreign intelligence services: Japanese, German, or Polish.” (These lines were edited out of his remarks published in Pravda.) But he went on to accentuate the positive. “Comrades! My toast will be original and unusual,” he continued. “We are accustomed to pronounce toasts for the health of leaders, bosses, vozhdi, people’s commissars. This, of course, is not bad. But besides the big leaders, there are middling and lesser leaders. We have tens of thousands of these leaders, the middling and lesser ones. They are modest people, they do not push themselves out front, they are almost unnoticeable. But one would be blind not to notice them. Because the fate of production in our entire economy depends on them. . . . To the health of our middle and smaller economic leaders! (Ovation, shouts of Hurrah.)”¹⁷⁷

Stalin’s populism was addressed not to the workers but to the middle and lower-level functionaries, people he christened the “Soviet intelligentsia.” He showed an uncanny knack for winning over people who, like himself, had risen from humble backgrounds, thanks to education. He identified with these up-and-comers, claiming them as his own, sentiments they keenly reciprocated. To be sure, Stalin bullied and dominated others, demanded unquestioning obedience, whose manifestation (or not) he alone judged. And yet, cruel and capricious though he was, Stalin could also be highly personable. “All his life he was very good at finding people and promoting them,” recalled Svetlana, “and that is why so many remained devoted to him, often young people whom he would pull out and promote over the heads of the old guard. That was quite a part of him: his sociability and being with people.”¹⁷⁸

Galvanizing and molding young strivers fit Stalin’s personality as much as pathological suspicion and wholesale murder. Ryutin, in his 1932 “Stalin and the Crisis of the Proletarian Dictatorship,” had called for “new forces” from within the party and the working class to “destroy Stalin’s dictatorship,” but Stalin himself was conjuring these new forces to replace destroyed functionaries of his dictatorship.¹⁷⁹ Of course, if he felt he needed to clear space to promote a hard-charging younger generation, he could have forced sitting functionaries into retirement.¹⁸⁰ By having the new people take the place of the wantonly tortured and executed, he compromised them all.

PETER AND SOVIET PATRIOTISM