Stalin’s carnage made him more preoccupied than ever with identifying and promoting people, to fill the vacant positions in the mammoth and still growing apparatus.349 He blended incited pandemonium and mass murder with an ambitious, people-centric exercise in statecraft. Statecraft may seem a bizarrely incongruous framework for understanding the mass murder of one’s own people. To be clear, the challenges of running and conceptualizing the state under socialism did not cause the terror. His obsessions with criticism of collectivization, Trotsky, and the independence of his own inner circle were the key drivers. Still, the challenges of the state’s operation and personnel were the context in which Stalin acted. He apparently hoped that younger, more energetic, and—ultimately—better-educated functionaries would better spur economic development, because of dynamism and superior political consciousness. Those who had been through the trials of revolution, collectivization, and industrialization were exhausted, morally and politically, susceptible to temptation, whether through blandishments proffered by foreign agents or the indulgence of the high life. Their replacements, no less significantly, would all be beholden to Stalin utterly.350
This went far beyond patronage. Instinctively didactic, Stalin was at heart a pedagogue. A critical core of his inner being consisted of an ethos and practice of self-improvement, a result of his initial leap at the Gori school, studies at the seminary, discovery of Marxism, path into punditry, and triumph over the intellectuals and pseudo-intellectuals atop the party. Stalin “worked very hard to improve himself,” Molotov, the longest close observer, would later recall.351 In turn, the advancement of new people to high positions, and their personal growth while in those positions, became defining elements in his self-conception as the leader who opened opportunity to them. Young cadres, he argued, could lead by mastering Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy and the ins and outs of technology. He latched on to younger people, those who represented the future, products of the soil and the shop floor, as well as of the evening technical and party courses, bootstrapping just as he had and in need of mentoring. The terror enabled him to play the role of teacher to a populous new generation of functionaries, a fundamental trait of his persona and of his conception of rule. He directed showcase trials, the content of confessions extracted even in the absence of trials, and newspaper reportage to tell stories and teach lessons.
All the while, Stalin purposefully ratcheted up fear to strengthen political control and mobilize the entire country to a state of high tension, a technique of rule undergirded by his connect-the-dots theory of party opposition to forced collectivization leading inexorably to a putsch on behalf of foreign powers—it was at once ludicrous and logical, and he repeated it over and over again, in public and in private. “In the face of the danger of military attack,” he was quoted as saying in a 1938 book on “defense dramaturgy,” by the theater critic Zinaida Chalaya, “our entire people must be kept in the condition of mobilization readiness, so that no ‘accident’ or tricks by our external enemies could catch us off guard.”352 Stalin worked tirelessly to put the country in the grip of fear, supposedly for its own benefit.
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NO ONE HAD TALKED more about the coming war than Stalin, as he drove the country’s military buildup, but then he attacked all the institutions critical for a war effort, and not just the armed forces. In the foreign affairs commissariat, at least one third of all staff would be either executed or imprisoned, including nearly two thirds of the upper echelons.353 Soviet trade representatives abroad were also destroyed en masse, absurdly accused of embezzling and funneling hundreds of thousands of rubles to Trotsky and Sedov, even as NKVD foreign intelligence’s agent in Paris lent Trotsky’s son in Paris sums of 10 to 15 francs that he had trouble paying back.354 In NKVD foreign intelligence, there would be nearly 100 arrests in 1937–38, including at least a dozen station chiefs abroad; in Berlin, Stalin cleaned house, arresting nearly every NKVD operative there. Military intelligence fared still worse, losing 182 operational staff to arrests in 1937–38. “You are aware that, in essence, there is no intelligence gathering,” the head of the political administration in Soviet military intelligence reported to Mekhlis in 1938. “We have no military attaché in America, Japan, England, France, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Finland, Iran, Turkey, that is, in almost every major country.”355, 356 For 127 consecutive days in 1938, Stalin did not receive any information whatsoever from NKVD foreign intelligence.