The "Special" World: Stalin’s Power Apparatus and the Soviet System’s Secret Structures of Communication (Volume 2)

522 Pages·2009·12.1 MB·English

by  Niels Erik Rosenfeldt

The "Special" World
To Inger

The "Special" World. Stalin's power apparatus and the Soviet system's
secret structures of communication
© Museum Tusculanum Press and Niels Erik Rosenfeldt, 2009
Translated by Sally Laird and John Kendal
Set and printed in Denmark by Special-Trykkeriet Viborg a-s
Set with ITC Charter and Berthold Akzidenz Grotesk
Printed on Multi Design Ivory
Cover design by Pernille Sys Hansen
ISBN 978 87 635 0773 8
Cover illustration: Stalin and his chief assistant Aleksandr Poskrebyshev, head of the
"Special Sector", in 1934. TSGAFKD. Reproduced courtesy of Abamedia
The majority of illustations in this publication are from the photographic collections
of Corbis and Ullstein (see credit lines). The small official portraits have mainly been
reproduced from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 1" and 3rd edition, N.V. Petrov, K.V.
Skorkin: Kto rukovodil NKVD r934-r94r, 1999, Vladimir Pyatnitskii: Zagovor protiv Stalina,
1998, and Iosif Linder and Sergei Churkin: Krasnaya Pautina, 2005.
Published with financial support from
The Danish Research Council for the Humanities
Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen
Faculty of Humanities, University of Copenhagen
Augustinus Fonden
Denne afhandling er af Det Humanistiske Fakultet ved K0benhavns Universitet antaget ti!
offentligt at forsvares for den filosofiske doktorgrad.
11. maj 2006
John Kuhlmann Madsen
Dekan
Forsvaret finder sted fredag den 13. februar 2009 kl. 13.00, Njalsgade 128 i lok. 23.0.50.
Museum Tusculanum Press
University of Copenhagen
Njalsgade 126
DK-2300 Copenhagen S
www.mtp.dk
Contents
Volume 1
19 I. INTRODUCTION
Previous studies 21
The original material 24
The strength of the material 26
The present challenge 31
The central problem 32
Possibilities and limitations 33
The scholarly literature 39
Key categories of sources 45
General problems 51
The concept of "control" 52
Fundamental dilemmas 55
The nature of power - the administration of power
- the prerequisites of power 59
A question of information 62
65 II. SECRECY: PRINCIPLES AND PROCEDURES
The general significance of "conspiracy" 66
The first steps 67
The overall pattern 69
The core of the conspiracy 74
The dynamics of escalation 76
The bureaucratic system 78
The main categories of material and their recipients 78
The daily jigsaw 84
The return and destruction of material 88
The messengers 93
The special coded communications 95
The storage of classified materials 97
Clearance and control of cadres 101
Basic characteristics of the secret system 104
109 Ill. THE TOP OF THE PYRAMID
The background 109
The secret Party chancellery: identifying the object of
research 113
New sources and problems of interpretation 116
Stalin and the secret apparatus 118
The original model 122
The secret staff: size and structure 1 25
The secret staff: the concentration of information 131
The secret staff: qualifications and codes of conduct 133
The basic service apparatus 135
The technical chancellery 135
Ramifications in the ordinary Central Committee apparatus 140
Out of house 14 1
The especially secret structures 143
The role of the Code Bureau 143
The apparatuses of the Politburo and the Organisation
Bureau 145
The assistants and their individual tasks 149
The Secretary General's men and women 156
The innermost circle 157
The top leadership 166
Other employees in the secret apparatus 168
The staff of the Politburo and the Organisation Bureau 170
Supplementary evidence 175
The secret apparatus seen from inside 181
The structure and nature of the work 181
The importance of the work 1 83
The Information Bureau 192
Stasova, Stalin and the outside world 193
Radek, Tivel' and Borovich - and the Bureau of International
Information 198
The foreign press 202
Forming the nomenklatura's worldview 204
Servicing the decision-makers 205
The staff and its network 21 4
Varga and the Institute of World Economics and World
Politics 21 6
Summing up 221
Control of cadres 223
The allocation of cadres 223
Security clearances 228
The key features of the secret chancellery 231
235 IV. NEW BUREAUCRATIC CONSTELLATIONS
Unrest in the secret apparatus 236
Internal disputes over authority 236
The Kremlin offices 238
Tightening up the controls on information and implementation 243
On the threshold of the new decade 253
Mobilisation preparedness and consolidation of the "rear'' 254
The road to maximum mobilisation preparedness 255
Problems of control and authority 262
The special departments 269
The "untouchable reserves" and the Committee for Reserves 275
The mobilisation apparatus as a whole 280
The state security service and the mobilisation stockpiles 282
Mobilisation preparedness and the Communist Party's
secret apparatus 285
Mobilisation correspondence 286
Mobilisation activities within the Central Committee apparatus
itself 289
Mobilisation responsibility 291
A "special" Party office? 295
299 V. THE SPECIAL SECTOR AND ITS SISTER INSTITUTIONS
The prelude 299
The first clues 300
Secret moving plans 304
The divorce 308
The tightening of security controls in the Kremlin 313
The Special Sector in action 315
The Politburo's area of work and Stalin's special priorities 316
Poskrebyshev and the Special Sector 325
Letters to Stalin 329
Parallels at the local level 332
Supplementary control organs 336
The picture of the Special Sector and the emigre reports 341
The internal structure of the Special Sector 345
Important sub-departments 345
The question of Stalin's personal secretariat and archive 349
The Organisation Bureau's technical secretariat 353
Basic service functions 353
Security control on Old Square and elsewhere 357
Structure and size 359
The Bureau of International Information - and the
institutional context 360
Continued activities 360
Foreign policy communications: the interwar period 363
Foreign policy communications: the postwar period 369
A pattern with variations 372
Connections with the intelligence service: the overall picture 374
Organisational innovations 378
The secret Party apparatus and the organisation
of the Terror 386
The special judicial system 389
The primary purpose of the Terror 395
The culmination of the Terror and the pressure on the central
bureaucracy 402
Sporadic evidence of secret structures 408
A source of particular interest 412
The top of the Terror apparatus 417
Old and new faces 420
Archive-based material 422
Narrative sources and more indirect evidence 427
Evidence concerning external advisers to Stalin 430
Changes in the secret apparatus 432
New departures 436
Poskrebyshev's fate 442
Stalin's death and the secret Party chancellery 447
The continuing power struggle and the secret Party chancellery 453
The General Department's functions 462
The Secretary General's sources of information 466
The structure of the General Department 468
The red threads 474
477 VI. PATTERNS IN THE DECISION-MAKING PROCESS
The framework 477
The decline of the official leadership organs 480
Commissions, bureaus and ad hoc meetings 484
New and old forums 494
The decision-making structures in the postwar period 500
The 1930s, the 1940s, the 1950s 507
The decision-making 508
Stalin and the Politburo 509
Patterns of behaviour in the inner circle 51 2
Various decision-making contexts 51 7
Underlying mechanisms 526
The nature of the bureaucratic work 536
The government apparatus versus the Special Sector:
developments 539
The government chancellery in the 1930s 541
The handling of defence and security policy matters
after the Great Terror 543
Stalin, the state administration and the Party chancellery 553
Poskrebyshev: still on the spot 558
The expansion of the government apparatus versus the Party's
basic functions 562
The pattern of the Politburo's activities in the second half of
the 1940s 573
The government apparatus versus the Special Sector:
endgame 584
Along familiar bureaucratic tracks - more or less 585
The overall defence and security policy perspective 597
The blurred picture of the 1950s 605
The new Party commissions and their apparatuses 609
The Communist Party and the state security service 616
The Party Presidium's new bureau 619
The overall picture 627