Arch. Practicing Stalinism: Bolsheviks, Boyars, and the Persistence of Tradition

335 Pages·2016·2.64 MB·English

by  Getty J.

PRACTICING STALINISM
PRACTICING STALINISM
BOLSHEVIKS, BOYARS, AND THE PERSISTENCE OF
TRADITION
J. ARCH GETTY
Published with assistance from the Louis Stern Memorial Fund.
Copyright © 2013 by Yale University.
All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in
any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S.
Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written
permission from the publishers.
Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational,
business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail
[email protected] (U.S. office) or sales @yaleup.co.uk (U.K. office).
Set in Sabon type by Westchester Book Group, Danbury, Connecticut.
Printed in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Getty, J. Arch (John Arch), 1950–, author.
Practicing Stalinism : Bolsheviks, boyars, and the persistence of tradition / J.
Arch Getty.
pages ; cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-300-16929-4 (cloth : alkaline paper) 1. Politics, Practical—Soviet
Union. 2. Politics, Practical—Social aspects—Soviet Union. 3. Soviet Union—
Politics and government—1917–1936. 4. Soviet Union—Politics and
government—1936–1953. 5. Kommunisticheskaia partiia Sovetskogo Soiuza—
Party work. I. Title.
JN6581.G48 2013
324.247'07509041—dc23
2013000343
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of
Paper).
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Soviet Organizational Acronyms and Abbreviations
Note on Transliteration and Party/Government Terms
Introduction
1. The Old and the New
2. Cults and Personalities, Politics and Bodies
3. The Party Personnel System: Upstairs at the Central Committee
4. The Party Personnel System: Downstairs at the Central Committee
5. Principled and Personal Conflicts
6. Stalin and the Clans I: The “King’s Men”
7. Stalin and the Clans II: Who Can Vote? Who Can Shoot?
8. Stalin and the Clans III: The Last Stand of the Clans
Epilogue. The New and the Old
Notes
Index
Preface
For more than twenty years I sat first in Soviet libraries and then in Soviet and
Russian archives studying the political history of Stalin’s time. As was common
at that time, I was trained in “Soviet studies” by a few historians and several
political scientists. My peers and I cut our teeth on Merle Fainsod’s How Russia
Is Ruled, and we knew everything there was to know about the hierarchical
pyramids and structures of the “pattern of political controls.” Although my
intellectual path eventually led me to reject much of the totalitarian approach of
such works, I remained convinced that there was a modern rational structure to
Stalinist and Soviet power and that understanding the organization and
interaction of institutions could reveal that structure, much as it could for
Western countries and my native USA.
I visited Russia every year from 1987 and, like a good political historian, I
assiduously pored through Soviet books, journals, newspapers, and eventually
archives looking for the keys to this strange but recognizably modern society.
The research difficulties we faced in those early years at the hands of hostile
archivists, discouraging rules, pointless surveillance, and restrictions on access
to materials brought the well-known forbidding power of ubiquitous Soviet
bureaucracy home to us every day. For those of us studying politics, that seemed
to provide a daily confirmation of the importance of understanding the history of
that bureaucracy.
But for many of us, there were other Soviet and Russian experiences that
were just as important. After work, we relaxed with Russian friends, spending
long evenings eating and drinking and talking in the cramped kitchens of
Moscow apartments. On weekends we would walk around the city and continue
our mutually curious conversations about our respective societies. Perhaps
because work was so stressful, I made an unconscious but sharp separation
between work and leisure. At work I spent time with long-dead bureaucrats;
after hours I mixed with very much alive average people. For a long time, these
two circles of “friends” seemed to have little in common, even though some of
my after-hours friends were themselves Communist Party members.
From those friends, I learned about Russia. I understood for the first time
From those friends, I learned about Russia. I understood for the first time
what it meant to be part of a group, a “clan,” an “us.” I understood the
importance and comfort of doing informal favors for friends in the group,
watching their backs as they watched mine, and learned the hundreds of informal
(and sometimes technically illegal) ways to get things done, ranging from
hitching a ride, getting a good cut of meat, buying a TV, or getting one’s child
into a good school. In the Soviet and later Russian climates of shortage, such
skills and connections were important both economically and morally, and more
than once I found nourishment of every kind at dinner with friends when my
dorm’s café and most of the grocery stores in town inexplicably closed.
In Russia, one often makes friends sequentially in networks. My first
colleague in Leningrad introduced me to his two best army buddies, who
introduced me to their neighbors, who introduced me to their dacha friends, and
so forth. My circle consisted not only or even mostly of academics. As people
my age often were, they tended to be sarcastic and irreverent about many things,
and as I spent more and more time with them, I noticed that they put their
irreverence into practice. They spent a good deal of time and energy sneering at
rules, not only ridiculing them, but actively avoiding and violating them. The
obtuse and uncooperative official system was impossible to navigate legally, so
everyone learned how to circumvent it. One bought a driver’s license. One
bribed a policeman to leave one alone. One drove into the suburbs at night and
gave a password in a clearing to get gasoline for the car. In a covert economy
one used whatever resources one had based on reciprocity, friendship, and
everything except the law. Avoidance of the official was the culture, and you
helped your friends (and they you) to maneuver in a kind of parallel society that
intersected the public, prescribed, official one only occasionally and
accidentally.
Such behaviors are not new and scholars and journalists have written about
them many times. They belong to the world of “informal practices” that,
depending on whom you talk to, either subvert the system or help it to function
efficiently. In either case, the general assumption—which I shared—was that the
line between informal social and formal political practices was firm and
belonged to the era of Soviet bureaucracy and economic shortages.
But the more time I spent with my friends, the less clear that line seemed.
Gradually, I began to detect a surprising convergence between the lives of my
dead archival Bolsheviks and my dear living friends. For me, certain memories
stand out as catalysts that launched my thinking in a different direction.
For a time in the early 1990s, I worked informally in a Russian university
helping to establish a computer laboratory for quantitative methods in historical
research. I worked with friends who worked under professors who worked under
deans who worked under a vice rector in the usual Soviet pyramid arrangement.
At one point, as a result of an intrigue in high places, one of the vice rectors was
forced out. Even though this struggle of titans was many levels above my
humble work, it immediately touched me and my friends. I was told that I
needed to resign immediately “at my own request.” Why? Because I was
connected to someone who was connected to someone who was connected to a
client of the purged official. “This is the custom here,” I was told. “Everybody
goes; it’s pointless to argue.” I was a victim of the age-old Russian notion of
collective responsibility (krugovaia poruka, explored in Chapter 1) and was
reminded of the chains of clients who fell in tsarist or Muscovite times when a
senior boyar or family lost position. Or when entire networks of people down to
the lowest level were arrested when their senior Old Bolshevik patron fell to
Stalin’s purges. No rule, law, or regulation dictated such a root-and-branch
purge; it was an informal, customary practice in both my bureaucratic and my
nonbureaucratic worlds that seemed to transcend centuries. Could both those
worlds operate according to the same rules?
Another memory is from a walk across Red Square with my friend Leonid
sometime in the 1990s after the fall of the USSR. Leonid was always amused at
my studies, which he considered “very American” and therefore a bit naïve. That
day as we walked, I asked Leonid what he thought of crime in Russia. He
patiently explained to me that “organized crime” was a peculiarly Western
expression. “When there are too many laws, what is crime? When everyone pays
someone for protection, who is the criminal? We don’t think much about ideas
like ‘state’ or ‘law’ or ‘crime’ these days. We try to figure out who is who and
how to get by.”
Then I asked him about the famous Russian mafia. “Which one?” he said.
“Let’s see. In Moscow, there’s the Chechen mafia that handles fruits and
vegetables. If you want to do business in fruits and vegetables, you do it with
them or they kill you. There is the Tambov gang that handles prostitution in
most parts of the city. The Iaroslavl’ boys are into extortion; very tough guys.
Same as with the vegetables; if you want to do these things, you do them with
the appropriate gang or they hurt you. “Oh,” and he gestured to the Kremlin:
“there’s that mafia too. They do politics, and they are really big. Lots of guns.
You want to do politics, you do it with them or else. The thing about all these
mafias is that they are highly organized and secret, and you’re either in or out.”
In Leonid’s view, there was no very great difference between the official and
the informal. There were several “mafias,” defined as tight groups of people,
criminal or not, protecting each other. When I thought about and unpacked it
criminal or not, protecting each other. When I thought about and unpacked it
over a very long time, I realized that he had given me a key to Russians’ view of
government, power, and institutions. Official institutions were just collections of
people whose public façade was better than most at convincing people to obey
them. Few people trusted or even believed in institutions; they believed in
people. Everything was personal. There were only groups and organizations
inside, outside, and overlapping the line between government and society.
The line that separated informal from formal practices was imaginary. They
were the same thing, and one could say that age-old informal cultural practices
in society also characterized the official world, regardless of what the latter’s
rules might say. After a while, as I continued to sit in my archives, I began to
wonder if those archival folders were, in a sense, tricking me. Was the modern
state, as in Pierre Bourdieu’s suspicion, creating itself through my reading of it?
Was I reading the state the way it wanted me to read it? Maybe a little
Bourdieuian reflexive sociology was in order; maybe it was time to be aware of
my own illusions because “when it comes to the state, one never doubts
enough.”
The archives, organized by hierarchical departments into folders containing
official and logical-sounding papers, commend themselves to us as the artifacts
of a well-organized and rational modern state. But the more I read them, the
more I started to have my doubts about this, especially as I talked to Russians
outside the archive. Was it really possible that a rational bureaucratic (not to say
totalitarian) state presided over millions of anarchists determined to circumvent
it? Or could it rather be that the informal and ancient traditional practices of
Russian society contaminated, infiltrated, or even made up the basic fabric of a
state that desperately pretended to be something else? If we pulled back the
curtain, would we see that there was little difference between official and
informal practices, between the traditional and the modern? Maybe there were
just practices, high and low.
Another conversation with a different Russian friend brought up another
quandary. It was the early 1990s. The Soviet regime was gone and some kind of
wild market mechanisms were getting traction. It seemed to me at the time that
the impact of money would erode if not destroy the traditional informal clan way
of doing things. After all, surely the collapse of Communist Party and the
creation of free elections would end elite nepotism? Surely how one got a job or
a place in school would no longer depend on connections? Surely money would
now become the key to access rather than circles of friends? Nikolai agreed, but
only to a point. Much of what he called the “Russian collective spirit” would
remain forever. “Your money [!] will never change that.” Yes, he thought,
money would play an increasing role, but still within the realm of informal
money would play an increasing role, but still within the realm of informal
practice: as bribery. Russian “black market” practices would become universal.
Yes, he thought, cars and refrigerators and a variety of foods would be easier to
get, in principle, but only if you had the money. If not, the old circle of
connections would continue to operate. And gesturing with a nod in the direction
of the Kremlin (which Russians do even if far across town), “over there, nothing
will change. Nobles, tsars, and clans will always operate the same way over
there.”
Over the years, I have been fortunate to be able to work with a talented and
experienced group of archivists in the Moscow party archive, and they have
become close friends. When I start a new project, I customarily explain it to
them over tea to get their advice. This time, I started by explaining that I wanted
to study informal practices, patronage, and practices in the Stalin period. They
listened politely, then looked at each other frowning and shaking their heads. I
was sure my Russian was correct and that they knew what these words meant.
But they said they just didn’t understand. Only in our third conversation did one
of them finally light up. She got it! “Oh!” she said, “You mean real life! But
everybody knows that. How is that a research project?”
I think it is, and now I think they do too. I hope the reader will agree.