The party would continue to serve as the regime’s indispensable ideological, personnel, and disciplinary instrument and charismatic symbol, but the state (government, military, secret police) gained more and more operational power, thanks to Molotov (government), the consigliere and longest-serving full politburo member after Stalin, Voroshilov (military), and Beria (secret police), nemesis of both Voroshilov and Molotov. Beria was elevated to one of two candidate member positions in the politburo, along with Shvernik, head of the trade unions (since 1930).136 Stalin was uncommonly solicitous toward Beria, ordering, for example, that his household be given better accommodations after inspecting their first Moscow flat, with its shared kitchen. Beria ended up not at the Kremlin but in a two-story detached mansion, the former residence of General Alexei Kuropatkin, war minister during the Russo-Japanese War fiasco, at Little Nikitskaya Street, 28.137 The Beria household also obtained use of a wooden dacha in the pine forest near Arkhangelskoe, but, the story goes, Stalin saw it, judged it a hovel, and moved them into the arrested Postyshev’s newer, palatial country estate.138 “Beria’s dacha was sumptuous, immense,” recalled Svetlana, who played there with Sergo Beria (fifteen months her senior). Beria’s deputy Merkulov would later testify that “in Moscow, practically every evening, comrade Stalin summoned Beria” to the Near Dacha.139
SOCIALIST REALISM
Nearly 19 million peasant households belonged to collective farms. Investment in mechanization and infrastructure had increased from 1.5 billion rubles in the first Five-Year Plan to 6.3 billion in the second (the third, which had commenced in 1938, would see another 5 billion). But output of tractors and combines, after having risen exponentially, was declining as the number of tanks, made at the same factories, soared.140 Official harvest figures for 1937 (120.2 million tons), 1938 (94.9 million), and 1939 (105.4 million) were exaggerated. Even these numbers signified output per head below the 1913 level.141 Still, the state procured 36 million tons of the 1939 harvest (as compared with 10.8 million in 1928). The regime had reacted with assistance, rather than secret police barricades, to the regions that had suffered a major drought in 1936 and a lesser one in 1938, avoiding even a partial repeat of the famine of 1931–33.142 The continued underperformance of the livestock and dairy sectors, still not recovered from dekulakization-denomadization, was publicly acknowledged.
In his congress report, Andreyev, now the Central Committee secretary responsible for agriculture, called for a reduction in the size of the farmers’ household plots, which he claimed had been allowed to become their main occupation. To an extent, he was correct, although, according to official statistics, 77 percent of household plots conformed to size limits imposed by the February 1935 statute, 12 percent were below, and only 10 percent above.143
Molotov gave the congress report on industry and the third Five-Year Plan. The heavy industry commissariat had been further divided in early 1939 into many smaller ones, reducing the power of their commissars.144 Industry remained a wreck as a result of Stalin’s massacres. “If last year and today the majority of industries has not fulfilled their plan, the cause of this is our weak cadres, who were promoted to leading work during the past year,” one brave official wrote to the despot in March 1939, adding that “the atmosphere of lack of confidence and oversuspiciousness . . . blunts the initiative and energy of the personnel, and has an extremely harmful effect on all the work.”145 Molotov, however, regaled the delegates with fantastic projections of annual growth in the third Five-Year Plan, of between 13.5 and 15.2 percent. Production of locomotives was supposed to reach 225 percent of the 1937 figure, coal 206 percent, electric power 200 percent. Nearly simultaneous with Molotov’s congress speech,