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john barber and mark harrison

problem was that, as numbers expanded, the quality of personnel deteriorated

amongst both rank and ﬁle and ofﬁcers. It was impossible to recruit ofﬁcers

in sufﬁcient numbers, give them a professional training and pay them enough

to command with integrity and competence. Another was the cost of re-

equipping the rapidly growing numbers with motorised armour and aviation

at a time of exceptional change in tank and aircraft technologies. The industry

of a low-income, capital-scarce country could not produce new weapons in

sufﬁcient numbers to equip the army uniformly in the current state of the

arts; instead, the army had to deploy new and obsolete weapons side by side.

Then in 1937/8, in the middle of rapid expansion, Stalin forced the Red

Army through a major backward step in the bloody purge that he inﬂicted

on its leadership. Most commanding ofﬁcers down to the level of corps com-

manders were executed; altogether, more than twenty thousand ofﬁcers were

discharged after arrest or expulsion from the party. Stalin carried out the

purge because he feared the potential for a ﬁfth column to develop in the

armed forces, as in other structures of Soviet society, that would emerge in

wartime to collaborate with an adversary and hand over the key to the gates.

He determined to destroy this possibility in advance by savage repression. He

believed that this would leave the army and society better prepared for war.

Stalin succeeded in that the purge turned the army’s command staff, ter-

rorised and morally broken, into his absolutely obedient instrument. At the

same time, while continuing to grow rapidly in numbers, it declined further

in quality. Ofﬁcer recruitment and training had to ﬁll thousands of new posts

and at the same time replace thousands of empty ones. The mass promotions

that resulted had a strongly accidental character; they placed many competent

but poorly qualiﬁed soldiers in commanding positions and many incompetent

ones beside them. Bad leadership brought falling morale amongst the rank

and ﬁle. The army paid heavily for incompetent military leadership at war

with Finland in 1939/40, and more heavily still in the June 1941 invasion.

The backward step that the Red Army took in 1937 was expressed in its

organisation and thinking. Organisationally, Stalin sought to compensate for

ofﬁcers’ collapsing prestige and competence by returning to the model of dual

command: in 1937 military commanders again lost their undivided authority

to issue orders, which had to be countersigned by the corresponding politruk

(political commissar). Uniﬁed command was restored in 1940; then, in the mili-

tary chaos of 1941 following the German invasion, Stalin once more returned to

29 Oleg Khlevniuk, ‘The Objectives of the Great Terror, 1937–1938’, in Julian Cooper, Mau-

reen Perrie and E. A. Rees (eds.), Soviet History, 1917–53: Essays in Honour of R. W. Davies

(London and Basingstoke: St Martin’s Press, 1995).

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the politruk system, ﬁnally restoring uniﬁed command in the military reforms

of 1942.

In military thinking the Red Army also took a step back, marked by a return

to the cult of the offensive. The main reason was Stalin’s fear of defeatist

tendencies in the armed forces; since retreat was the ﬁrst stage of defeat, his

logic ran, the easiest way to identify defeatism was to connect it with plans for

Tukhachevskii’s ‘deep battle’, which envisaged meeting the enemy’s invasion

by stepping back and regrouping before launching a counter-offensive. Thus,

the advocates of operations in depth were accused of conspiring with Nazi

leaders to hand over territory. As a result, when war broke out many ofﬁcers

found it easier to surrender to the Wehrmacht than to retreat against Stalin’s

orders.

Soviet military plans for an enemy attack became dominated by crude

notions of frontier defence involving an immediate counter-offensive that

would take the battle to the enemy’s territory. Stalin now hoped to deter

German aggression by massing Soviet forces on the frontier, apparently ready

to attack. This was a dangerous bluff; it calmed fears and stimulated compla-

cency in Moscow, while observers in Berlin were not taken in. The revived

cult of the offensive also had consequences for the economy. The planned war

mobilisation of industry was based on a short offensive campaign and a quick

victory. Threats of air attack and territorial loss could not be discussed while

such fears were equated with treason. As a result, air defence and the dispersal

of industry from vulnerable frontier regions were neglected.

Stalin was surprised and shocked when Hitler launched his invasion. Having

convinced himself that Hitler would not invade, he had rejected several warn-

ings received through diplomatic and intelligence channels, believing them to

be disinformation. When the invasion came, he was slow to react and slow

to adapt. Better anticipation might not have prevented considerable territo-

rial losses but could have saved millions of soldiers from the encirclements

that resulted in captivity and death. After the war there was tension between

Stalin and his generals over how they should share the credit for ﬁnal vic-

tory and blame for early defeats. In 1941 Stalin covered his own responsibility

for misjudging Hitler’s plans by shooting several generals. The army had its

revenge in 1956 when Khrushchev caricatured Stalin planning wartime military

operations on a globe.

The war completed the Red Army’s transition to a modern ﬁghting force,

but the process was complicated and there were more backward steps before

progress was resumed. As commander-in-chief, Stalin improvised a high

command, the Stavka, and took detailed control of military operations. He

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demanded ceaseless counter-attacks, regardless of circumstances, and indeed,

in the circumstances of the time, when ﬁeld communications were inopera-

tive and strategic co-ordination did not exist, there was often no alternative to

unthinking resistance on the lines of ‘death before surrender’. This gave rise to

episodes of both legendary heroism and despicable brutality. Over time Stalin

ceded more and more operational command to his generals while keeping

control of grand strategy.

For a time the army threatened to become de-professionalised again.

Reservists were called up en masse and sent to the front with minimal training.

More than 30 million men and women were mobilised in total. The concepts

of a territorial militia and voluntary motivation were promoted by recruiting

‘home guard’ detachments in the towns threatened by enemy occupation.

These were pitched into defensive battle, lightly armed and with a few hours’

training, and most were killed. The few survivors were eventually integrated

into the Red Army. At the same time, partisan armies grew on the occupied

territories behind German lines, sometimes based on the remnants of Red

Army units cut off in the retreat; these, too, were gradually brought under the

control of the General Staff. Once the tide had turned and the Red Army began

to recover occupied territory, it reﬁlled its ranks by scooping up able-bodied

men remaining in the towns and villages on the way. Offsetting these were

high levels of desertion that persisted in 1943 and 1944, even after the war’s

outcome was certain.

The annihilating losses of 1941 and 1942 instituted a vicious cycle of rapid

replacement with ever-younger and less-experienced personnel who suffered

casualties and loss of equipment at dreadful rates. This affected the wholearmy,

including the ofﬁcer corps. At the end of the war most commanding ofﬁcers

still lacked a proper military education, and most units were still commanded

by ofﬁcers whose level of responsibility exceeded their substantive rank.

In the end, three things saved the Red Army. First, at each level enough

of its units included a core of survivors who, after the baptism of ﬁre, had

acquired enough battleﬁeld experience to hold the unit together and teach

new recruits to live longer. Second, in 1941 and the summer of 1942, when the

army’s morale was cracking, Stalin shored it up with merciless discipline. In

October 1942 he followed this with reforms that ﬁnally abolished dual com-

mand by the political commissars and restored a number of traditional grada-

tions of rank and merit. Third, the economy did not collapse; Soviet industry

was mobilised and poured out weapons at a higher rate than Germany. As a

result, despite atrocious losses and wastage of equipment, the Soviet soldier

of 1942 was already better equipped than the soldier he faced in armament,

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though not yet in rations, kit or transport. In 1943 and 1944 this advantage rose

steadily.

By the end of the war the Red Army was no longer an army of riﬂemen

supported by a few tanks and aircraft but a modern combined armed force.

But successful modernisation did not bar soldiers from traditional pursuits

such as looting and sexual violence, respectively encouraged and permitted

by the Red Army on a wide scale in occupied Germany in the spring of 1945.

Government and politics

The war ended in triumph for Soviet power. Whether or not the Soviet Union

has left anything else of lasting value, it did at least put a stop to Hitler’s imperial

dreams and murderous designs. This may have been the Soviet Union’s most

positive contribution to the balance sheet of the twentieth century.

Millions of ordinary people were intoxicated with joy at the announcement

of the victory and celebrated it wildly in city squares and village streets. But

some of the aspirations with which they greeted the post-war period were

not met. Many hoped that the enemy’s defeat could be followed by political

relaxation and greater cultural openness. They felt the war had shown the

people deserved to be trusted more by its leaders. But this was not a lesson

that the leaders drew. The Soviet state became more secretive, Soviet society

became more cut off and Stalin prepared new purges.

Ten years would pass

before Khrushchev opened up social and historical discourse in a way that was

radical and shocking compared with the stuffy conformity of Stalinism, but

pathetically limited by the standards of the wider world.

As for the social divisions that the war had opened up, Stalin preferred

vengeance to reconciliation. While the Germans retreated he selected entire

national minorities suspected of collaboration for mass deportation to Siberia.

The Vlasov ofﬁcers were executed and the men imprisoned without forgive-

ness. No one returned from forced labour in Germany or from prisoner-of-war

camp without being ‘ﬁltered’ by the NKVD. Party members who had survived

German occupation had to account for their wartime conduct and show that

they had resisted actively.

Therewere other consequences. The Soviet victory projected the RedArmy

into the heart of Europe. It transformed the Soviet Union from a regional

30 Yoram Gorlizki, ‘Ordinary Stalinism: The Council of Ministers and the Soviet Neo-

Patrimonial State, 1946–1953’, Journal of Modern History 74, 4 (2002): 699–736.

31 Weiner, Making Sense of War.

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power to a global superpower; Stalin became a world leader. It strengthened

his dictatorship and the role of the secret police.

Nothing illustrates Stalin’s personal predominance better than the lack of

challenge to his leadership at the most critical moments of the war. As head

of GKO and Sovnarkom, defence commissar, supreme commander-in-chief

and General Secretary of the Communist Party, Stalin’s authority over Soviet

political, economic and military affairs was absolute. From the moment when

his colleagues asked him to lead the war cabinet Stalin exercised greater inﬂu-

ence over his country’s war effort than any other national leader in the Second

World War. Washing away his mistakes and miscalculations in 1941 and 1942,

the victory of 1945 further strengthened his already unassailable position.

The establishment of the ﬁve-man GKO was a ﬁrst step to a comprehen-

sive system of wartime administration that institutionalised pre-war trends.

GKO functioned with marked informality. Meetings were convened at short

notice, without written agendas or minutes, with a wide and varying cast of

supernumeraries. It had only a small staff; responsibility for executing deci-

sions was delegated to plenipotentiaries and to local defence committees with

sweeping powers. But it was vested, in Stalin’s words, with ‘all the power

and authority of the State’. Its decisions bound every Soviet organisation and

citizen. No Soviet political institution before or after possessed such powers.

Another pre-war trend that continued in wartime was the growth in inﬂu-

ence of the government apparatus through which most GKO decisions were

implemented. Its heightened importance was reﬂected in Stalin’s becoming

chairman of Sovnarkom on the eve of war and thus head of government.

The role of central party bodies declined correspondingly. The purges of

1937/8 had already diminished the role of the Politburo. Before the war it met

with declining frequency; all important decisions were taken by Stalin with

a few of its members, and issued in its name. During the war the Politburo

met infrequently and the Central Committee only once; there were no party

congresses or conferences. It was at the local level that the party played an

important role in mobilising the population and organising propaganda. It did

this despite the departure of many members for the front; in many areas party

cells ceased to exist.

The NKVD played several key roles. While repressing discontent and

defeatism, it reported on mass opinion to Stalin. In military affairs it organ-

ised partisans and the ‘penal battalions’ recruited from labour camps. In the

economy it supplied forced labour to logging, mining and construction, and

to high-security branches of industry. These roles gave it a central place in

wartime government. Beria, its head, was a member of GKO throughout the

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war and deputy chairman from 1944, as well as deputy chairman of Sovnarkom.

Not accidentally, reports from him and other security chiefs constituted the

largest part of Stalin’s wartime correspondence.

In economic life the overall results of the war were conservative and fur-

ther entrenched the command system. The war gave a halo of legitimacy to

centralised planning, mass production and standardisation. It showed that the

Soviet economy’s mobilisation capacities, tried out before the war in the cam-

paigns to ‘build socialism’ by collectivising peasant farming and industrialising

the country, could be used just as effectively for military purposes: the Soviet

economy had devoted the same high proportion of national resources to the

war as much wealthier market economies without collapsing.

Had the war changed anything? At one level Hitler had made his point.

Germany had fought two world wars to divert Europe from the class struggle

and polarise it on national lines. The Second World War largely put an end

to class warfare in the Soviet Union. By the end of the war nationality and

ethnicity had replaced class origin in Soviet society as a basis of selection for

promotion and repression.

Other inﬂuences made the post-war economy and society more militarised

than before.The country had paid a heavy price in 1941 for lack of preparedness.

In the post-war years a higher level of economic preparedness was sustained so

as to avoid a lengthy conversion period in the opening phase of the next war.

This implied larger peacetime allocations to maintain combat-ready stocks of

weapons and reserve production facilities to be mobilised quickly at need.

After an initial post-war demobilisation, the Soviet defence industry began

to grow again in the context of the US nuclear threat and the Korean war.

Before the Second World War, defence plants were heavily concentrated in

the western and southern regions of the European USSR, often relying on

far-ﬂung suppliers. The Second World War shifted the centre of gravity of

the Soviet defence industry hundreds of kilometres eastward to the Urals and

Western Siberia. There, huge evacuated factories were grafted onto remote

rural localities. A by-product was that the defence industry was increasingly

concentrated on Russian Federation territory.

After the war, despite some westward reverse evacuation, the new war

economy of the Urals and Siberia was kept in existence. The weapon facto-

ries of the remote interior were developed into giant, vertically integrated

production complexes based on closed, self-sufﬁcient ‘company towns’. Their

existence was a closely guarded secret: they were literally taken off the map.

32 Harrison, Accounting for War. 33 Weiner, Making Sense of War.

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The post-war Soviet economy carried a defence burden that was heavier

in proportion to GNP than the burdens carried by the main NATO powers.

Whether or how this contributed to slow Soviet post-war economic growth or

the eventual breakdown of the economy are questions on which economists

ﬁnd it hard to agree; there was certainly a substantial loss to Soviet consumers

that accumulated over many years.

Finally, the war established a new generation that would succeed Stalin. At

the close of the war in Europe GKO members comprised Stalin (65), Molotov

(55), Kaganovich (51), Bulganin (50), Mikoyan (49), Beria (46), Malenkov (43)

and Voznesenskii (41); Voroshilov (64) had been made to resign in November

1944. Members of the Politburo included Khrushchev (51) and Zhdanov (49).

Stalin’s successors would be drawn from among those in their forties and

early ﬁfties.

These were selected in several stages. First, the purges of 1937/8

cleared their way for recruitment into the political elite. Then they were tested

by the war and by Stalin’s last years. Those who outlived Stalin became the

great survivors of the post-war Soviet political system. Once they were young

and innovative. Having fought their way to the top in their youth, they became

unwilling to contemplate new upheavals in old age. The war had taught them

the wrong lessons. Unable to adapt to new times, they made an important

contribution to the Soviet Union’s long-term decay.

34 JohnCrowfootand MarkHarrison, ‘The USSR Council of Ministers underLate Stalinism,

1945–54: ItsProduction Branch Composition andthe Requirementsof NationalEconomy

and Policy’, Soviet Studies 42, 1 (1990): 41–60.

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yoram gorlizki and oleg khlevniuk

Research in recent years has highlighted the limits of the Stalinist state. Aside

from the numerous forms of resistance, both physical and symbolic, which

they faced, Soviet bureaucracies under Stalin often lacked the resources or

co-ordination to provide a consistent and effective system of administration.

In between campaigns, as one commentator has noted of the countryside

in the late 1930s, ‘neglect by Soviet power was as characteristic as coercion,

and perhaps sometimes even as much resented’.

Despite these limitations, the

Stalinist state did have the capacity to mobilise its ofﬁcials and to transform the

lives of its citizens. The most powerful state-sponsored campaigns overturned

traditional modes of existence and effected reorganisations against which the

combined forces of armed rebellion and popular resistance would prove to be

no match.

Although some enjoyed the support of activists on the ground, the

most important campaigns of this kind were driven from above, usually from

the very summit of the political system. Some of the key turning points of

this period, such as forced collectivisation, the Great Purges, and the onset of

the Cold War, were the consequence of decisions taken by a small leadership

group around Stalin. Although Stalin attracted the support of a variety of

constituencies within Soviet society, he was never a mere cipher for these

groups, but was rather a powerful and independent force in a social order that

would come to bear his name.

Stalin’s personality left a giant imprint on the Soviet system. The leader’s

approach to solving problems was, ﬁrst, overwhelmingly coercive. While this

was not entirely exceptional, given the Bolshevik state’s origins in revolution

and civil war, Stalin ratcheted up the combination of pressure and violence to

new levels. This devotion to force was an important factor in converting an

1 Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Col-

lectivization (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 174.

2 See e.g. Lynne Viola, Peasant Rebels under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant

Resistance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 238–9.

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yoram gorlizki and oleg khlevniuk

already brutal regime into a terrorist dictatorship, the excesses of which were

gratuitous and unnecessary by any standards.

On matters of policy Stalin was

also extremely stubborn. Ideological concessions and policy retreats were, on

the whole, only wrung out of him under considerable duress, normally when

the country was teetering on the edge of crisis. Augmented by a personality

cult, which tended to present it as a mark of the leader’s ‘infallibility’, this

obduracy would, as towards the end of his life, when Stalin steadfastly blocked

much-needed reforms in key sectors, cost his country dear.

For all its brutality and bloody-mindedness, this position of ‘ﬁrmness’ did,

from Stalin’s perspective, serve a particular purpose: to secure his own posi-

tion as the leader of a separate, powerful and respected socialist state. Many of

Stalin’s actions were guided by quite rational calculations towards the attain-

ment of this goal.

While this pragmatism has most often been observed in

Stalin’s behaviour on the international stage, it was also evident in domestic

affairs. Perhaps nowhere was this more apparent than in Stalin’s relations with

his immediate colleagues. Despite a reputation for arbitrary brutality, Stalin

systematically promoted younger functionaries and treated with great care

those high-level leaders whose qualities, either as workers or as symbols of the

revolution, he valued; after the Great Purges in particular, this was a group

towards which the leader exhibited a surprising degree of self-restraint and

moderation.

The attention Stalin paid his colleagues was fully merited, for these deputies

played an indispensable role in running the Soviet state. Well known in their

own right, most members of the Politburo managed important portfolios and

headed powerful personal networks. In two periods – during the war and in

the early 1950s – Stalin was forced to hand over complete control of certain

jurisdictions to this leadership substratum. Rather than being an inherently

stable or inert form of rule, Stalin’s one-man dictatorship was repeatedly in

tension with powerful oligarchic tendencies.

Maintaining the upper hand

3 See Alec Nove, Was Stalin Really Necessary? Some Problems of Soviet Political Economy

(London: George Allen and Unwin, 1964), pp. 27–32.

4 For an alternative view, which lends greater weight to the irrational aspects of Stalin’s

behaviour, see Roy Medvedev, Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism,

revised edn (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).

5 An early version of this argument may be found in T. H. Rigby, ‘Was Stalin a Disloyal

Patron?’ Soviet Studies 38, 3 (1986): 311–24.

6 Oligarchy is classically viewed as inherently unstable and displaying a propensity to

dissolve either into a pattern of individual dominance or into a more diffuse distribution

of power. Under Stalin, however, one detects repeated shifts in the opposite direction,

from one-man dictatorship towards oligarchical forms of decision-making. Cf. T. H.

Rigby, ‘The Soviet Leadership: Towards a Self-Stabilizing Oligarchy?’ Soviet Studies 22, 2

(1970): 167–8.

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Stalin and his circle

would prove to be a taxing business, one which would keep the ageing leader

on his toes.

Stalin’s relations with his deputies were not ﬁxed or constant over time. In

this chapter their evolution is divided into four phases. We begin by assessing

the rise of the Stalinist faction in the 1920s. The consolidation of dictatorship

from the 1920s to the late 1930s and the operation of the Stalinist dictatorship

at its peak, following the Great Purges, is the subject of the second section.

The chapter then goes on to examine Stalin and his entourage during the war

years, a period of marked decentralisation. The chapter concludes by looking

at Stalin’s last years, as the decision-making structures of the post-Stalin era

began to take shape.

Rise of the Stalinist faction

With victory in the civil war, the locus of political struggle in the early

1920s shifted to the upper reaches of the Bolshevik Party. In the lead-up to

Lenin’s death, the broad collegial leadership which had existed under him

dissolved into factions, usually consisting of short-term tactical alliances. The

consolidation of a ‘Stalinist faction’ out of these groupings was the result

of an extremely convoluted process and an outcome which few would have

predicted.

The ﬁrst stage took place from the end of 1923 to 1924, when a solid

majority formed within the Politburo against Leon Trotsky, whose impetuous

behaviour and poor political judgement stoked up widespread unease within

the leadership.

To co-ordinate their stand, in August 1924 a ‘septet’ was cre-

ated, consisting of six members of the Politburo (that is, all of the Politburo,

apart from Trotsky) and the chair of the Central Control Commission, Valerian

Kuibyshev. It was this ‘septet’ which took the key decisions, bringing to ofﬁcial

sessions of the Politburo (attended by Trotsky) resolutions which it had agreed

beforehand. Once Trotsky had been sidelined, however, the septet’s coherence

quickly evaporated, and it soon broke off into two wings, with the minority

group, consisting of Kamenev and Zinoviev, eventually drifting off towards

Trotsky. Following a bitter dispute, all three leaders of the Zinoviev–Trotsky

bloc were expelled from the Politburo in autumn 1927.

7 Recent research suggests that Stalin was able to provide leadership in the Politburo’s

struggle with Trotsky precisely because, in the words of one commentator, ‘he had a

good case’. See Lars Lih, ‘Introduction’, in Lars T. Lih, Oleg V. Naumov and Oleg V.

Khlevniuk, Stalin’s Letters to Molotov (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 19–24,

esp. p. 23.

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