Stalin’s most important minion, Molotov, showed little ambition to cultivate his own power base.284 Orjonikidze, by contrast, had built an immense semi-autonomous fiefdom in heavy industry, which Stalin had broken up into numerous economic commissariats. But now Stalin found himself constrained to facilitate the establishment of another fiefdom: Beria at the NKVD. A rivalry between Molotov and Beria for Stalin’s favor assisted the despot in keeping an eye on both.285 Still, Beria challenged him to stay on his toes, and Stalin would strive to institute all manner of checks on Beria, a process that had begun before his transfer to Moscow.286 Unlike in the case of Voroshilov at the Red Army, Stalin had appointed not merely a loyalist, but a man exceptionally suited for his post. Beria would come to exercise immense power by dint of the organization he now headed de facto and his undeniable operational skill.
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“TYRANTS DESTROYED,” a short story published in Russian in 1936 by the émigré Vladimir Nabokov (the son of a Provisional Government scribe), imagined an egomaniac with the power to drive his subjects mad, in a kind of infectious psychosis.287 Stalin knew the state of the country and the consequences of his actions. Compared with anyone else inside the USSR, he was exceptionally well informed, served by an information-gathering system that stretched across the vast country and, to an extent, the entire globe.288 Still, it took intense effort on his part to ferret out information that officials did not want him to know. He sought accurate information, but for him that meant Marxist-Leninist ways of thinking refracted through a jaundiced view of people. Stalin exhibited a proclivity to depict the world as he wanted to see it, indeed, as he could and did shape it. He elicited intelligence about enemies, treason, vulnerabilities. It would be going too far to call him, or the Soviet system, a victim of its own trap.289 An echo chamber effect shapes surveillance and reporting mechanisms in any authoritarian regime. Still, in the Soviet case the revolution was encircled, and Stalin’s worldview reinforced that structural paranoia.
The USSR faced genuine foreign threats, and the terror was conducted in the name of state security, but mass arrests in the Red Army further emboldened foreign enemies, including Hitler and proponents of war in the Nazi regime, while rendering the USSR’s already wary potential allies more wary. The vastly expanded hunt to root out enemies in 1936–38 helped unify the country around threats but spread deep fear and made many otherwise loyal Soviet people anti-Soviet. The mass annihilation of party and state functionaries, and the heightened dread among survivors, did nothing to alter the political system’s inbuilt malperformance. Stalin smashed nearly every provincial party machine in 1937–38, but they would reappear.290 He killed off heads of state bodies, too, and the state fiefdoms reappeared. Industry had been suffering genuine problems, but the mass arrests that were attributed to wrecking only lowered output further. Complicity in the mass murder of Red Army officers and loyal officials compromised all those who took part or benefited, including large numbers of new young people.
During the enemy mania of 1937 and 1938, no military graduation banquets took place (eleven of the fourteen military academy directors suffered arrest).291 Still, the graduations themselves did take place. So did at least fifteen Kremlin banquets for other occasions, which eclipsed party gatherings in ceremony and—alongside the parades on Red Square for May Day, Revolution Day, and Physical Culture Day—became the principal staging ground of Stalin’s rule.292 He held banquets (large and small) for managers, engineers, and high-profile workers in various industrial branches; women; athletes; aviators; representatives of the Union republics. Marina Raskova, the aviator, was bundled along with the rest of the