CAMBRIDGE A2 HISTORY: THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE SECRETARIAT BEFORE STALIN. Summary: Bolsheviks controlling the empire, Sverdlov, Lenin, Stalin, the privilege of being in a party, loyalty to the party, capturing positions, the struggle, various party departments, paralysis of the party, power struggle, homework.

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.