CAMBRIDGE A2 HISTORY: THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE SECRETARIAT BEFORE STALIN
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The document analyzes Stalin's rise to power as General Secretary of the Bolshevik Party, highlighting his use of appointments to build personal loyalty among party officials. It contends that recent archival evidence challenges the notion that Stalin maintained unchallenged control, emphasizing instead that party officials often acted based on institutional interests. The analysis reveals a complex relationship between Stalin and party officials, suggesting that while he reinforced their power, doubts and conflicts within the party created a politically charged environment.
CAMBRIDGE A2 HISTORY: THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE SECRETARIAT BEFORE STALIN
- 1. HISTORY CAMBRIDGE A2 (PAPER 4) PRESENTATION 3 STALIN MODULE 2. STALIN AND THE PARTY GENERAL SECRETARY STALIN AND THE NATURE OF HIS POWER
- 2. POWERPOINT BASED ON Lenin, Socialism and war, 1915 Lynch, Stalin’s Russia 1924-53 Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed Deutscher, Stalin
- 3. TOPIC FOCUS The central focus of this part of the topic should be gaining an understanding of the vital role played by the Party in Bolshevik thinking and examining in depth Stalin’s use of the party to acquire both influence and power. • The role of the Bolshevik Party in the period 1914–1924 and the part it played in those years. • Explain the structure of the Party and identify the centre/s of power in it. • Identify Stalin’s role in the party to 1924. • Identify the way in which Stalin utilised his role in the Party to acquire power.
- 4. Stalin - the general secretary As General Secretary, Stalin used his control over appointments to build a personal following in the Party apparatus. The process is sometimes referred to as ‘a circular flow of power’. Stalin appointed individual Party secretaries and gave them security. In return, they voted for him at Party Congresses. Stalin used the power to remove his political rivals in the course of his rise to power, and those officials who had reservations about his policies. In short, Stalin’s power over appointment is commonly understood not only as a key factor in his rise to power, but also as the origin of his personal dictatorship.
- 5. Stalin and the new reality In the late 1970s and the 1980s , ‘revisionist’ scholars began to cast doubt on the idea that Stalin could be sure of the personal loyalty of Party officials and that they would unquestioningly execute his will. Since the opening of the archives, a substantial body of new evidence has reinforced their views. New studies have clearly shown that Party officials pursued agendas defined by their institutional interests and not solely by the will of Stalin or the directives of the central leadership. Recent document collections portray a Stalin nagged by doubts that central directives were being fulfilled.
- 6. DVURUSHNIK His immediate subordinates were not the problem, but the greater mass of the Party and state bureaucracy, pursuing institutional interests and responding to impossible demands from the centre with foot-dragging and deception. Rather than being confident of his control of Party officials, Stalin appears to have been obsessed with the spectre of the ‘dvurushnik ’ (one who is two- faced, or a ‘double-dealer’) publicly professing his loyalty to the Party line while privately working to subvert it. The new evidence thus seems to contradict the way we have understood the emergence of Stalin’s personal dictatorship.
- 7. THE SECRETARIAT OF THE PARTY The archives of the Central Committee, and those of the Secretariat among them, contain thousands of files from which it is possible to re-examine the relationship of the General Secretary and Party and state officials. The following analysis of these files concludes that, while the Secretariat played a crucial role in Stalin’s rise to power, it never became a source of a personalistic control of the Party apparatus as is commonly assumed. The Secretariat was never able to cope with its task of assigning cadres to Party organisations. It assigned them in large numbers in an almost entirely impersonal process. Meanwhile, the Party organisations receiving cadres were profoundly involved in the appointments process. They could, and did, refuse candidates proposed by the centre.
- 8. SKLOCHNICHESTvO The fact of appointment was not sufficient to generate personal loyalty to the General Secretary. Stalin did, however, provide security of tenure to many Party secretaries. The gravest threat to their power in the first decade of Soviet power came from political infighting (sklochnichestvo) in local organisations. Stalin won the support of secretaries by attacking intra- Party democracy and reinforcing their power within their organisations. The political battles over the Lenin succession were exacerbating political infighting locally, and the secretaries were happy to see Stalin stop them. But only in this limited sense was there a ‘circular flow of power’.
- 9. THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE LINE Many Party secretaries voted for Stalin at Party Congresses. They helped him defeat his rivals in the Politburo because they had a common interest in it, not because they felt personally beholden to Stalin. In the early 1930s, their interests began to diverge with the crisis of the First Five-Year Plan, punishing grain collections, famine, and the emergence of the ‘command-administrative system’. The secretaries had helped Stalin to power, but they may have begun to worry if they had made the right choice. There was nothing they could do about it though. In attacking intra-Party democracy, they contributed to a situation in which it was impossible to question the ‘Central Committee line’.
- 10. BACK TO THE PAST Where discussion and criticism of central policy was impossible, the foot- dragging and subversion we now see in the new sources was a logical response. In order to understand how this apparently tense relationship between Stalin and Party officialdom emerged in the early 1930s, we must return to the very origins of the Central Committee Secretariat, in the October seizure of power.