358. Tsarism’s executive branch was in theory autocratic but was moved—or not—by the operation of patronage networks. Only a strong-willed person at or near the top could impose direction and energy, and usually only for limited periods. Many tsarist loyalists had objected in principle to a strong government, detesting Witte and Stolypin; they wanted firm rule led only by the autocrat himself. But Nicholas II went into audiences with his ministers without seeking to be briefed beforehand, and, suspecting them of sabotage, worked to divide them. The tsar, one scholar has noted, “had his own interest in preserving the very confusion in government that was to be remedied.” Even an audience did not translate into effective action. Orlovsky, Limits of Reform, 125; Kuropatkin, Dnevnik A. N. Kuropatkina, 53 (conversation with Plehve); Yaney, “Some Aspects of the Imperial Russian Government,” 88–9; Khristoforov, Aristokraticheskaia oppozitsiia Veilkim reformam, 300.
359. The tsarist department of police had no more than 10,000 informants across its entire history, a scale the Soviets would dwarf. Lauchlan, Russian Hide and Seek, 133, 203. For perceptive comments on the Leninist revolutionary disposition and social engineering, see Massell, Surrogate Proletariat, 39–40.
360. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 198–237.
361. Pokrovsky in his 1927 Essays on the History of the October Revolution wrote that the revolution had been the only way to avoid “the colonization of Russia by Anglo-American capital.” Ocherki po istorii oktiabr’skoi revoliutsii, II, 447–8. See also Agursky, “The Bolshevik Revolution as a Revolution of National Liberation.”
362. Baynes, Speeches of Adolf Hitler, II: 1312–3 (March 20, 1936); Bullock, Hitler, 404.
363. Stalin also said to Howard that “public [obshchestvennye] organizations, which we have created, may be called Soviet, socialist organizations even though they are not yet completed, but they are the root of the socialist organization of the public.” Pravda, March 5, 1936. De Tocqueville had dismissed the authoritarians who, hiding behind constitutional facades, cherished “the illusion that they can combine the prerogatives of absolute power with the moral authority that comes from popular assent.” De Tocqueville, Old Regime and the French Revolution, 45. Mobilization of the masses lay behind the claim of Giovanni Gentile, the fascist ideologue, for the superiority of Italian fascism over a parliamentary liberal order. Gentile, “Philosophical Basis of Fascism.” In Lenin’s vision of the party, the militant vanguard became meaningful if linked to a militant people. Miliukov, in emigration, would pay Stalin a backhanded compliment: “If, contrary to the American saying, Stalin succeeded in cheating the whole people the whole time, it was because people wished to be deceived.” Tucker, Political Culture and Leadership in Soviet Russia, 39; P. N. Miliukov, “From Nicholas II to Stalin: Half a Century of Foreign Politics,” typescript (n.d.), 334, Hoover Institution Archives.
364. George Mosse argued that the massification of politics threatened anarchy, but that the masses were shaped into a manageable political body by nationalist symbols and liturgy, a key challenge for liberal orders, too. He went too far in asserting that “parliamentary republics were naturally unable to construct effective representations of themselves, just as they failed to create national festivals.’” Mosse, Nationalization of the Masses, 72.
365. A March 30, 1936, secret report for Maurice Gamelin warned bleakly of low morale and high Communist subversion among the French troops. Gamelin sent it to Daladier with a warning that France was coming to resemble Spain. Jackson, “French Strategy” (citing SHAT, 7N 4034–1, “Eta d’esprit de l’armée, April 1, 1936).
366. Rieber, “Persistent Factors,” 336–7.
367. Khaustov and Samuelson, Stalin, NKVD, 93. In Odessa in 1934, a single Trotskyite “group” was unmasked; in 1935, suddenly, thirty-one such groups were found.
PART II. TERROR AS STATECRAFT
1. Kollontai added: “If I don’t fall ‘underneath the wheel,’ it will be almost a miracle.” Vaksberg, Alexandra Kollontai, 393; Farnsworth, “Conversing with Stalin,” 944 (citing RGASPI, f. 134, op. 3, d. 62, l. 6).
