Wednesday, October 08, 2014

Stalin: The Architect


Did no one in the Soviet Communist Party hierarchy ever think that it might not have been a wise move to put Joseph Stalin in charge of their personnel department? While Lenin and Trotsky were giving speeches and Bukharin and others were scribbling away, Stalin was slowly putting his allies into jobs great and small.

Years ago, I began studying the management styles of dictators in order to glean lessons about organizational pressure points. Adolf Hitler's charisma and his tendency to select flawed associates created an atmosphere of dependency and fantasy centering on one man. Benito Mussolini also used his charisma but he never developed the intense dependency by his associates. Later, when things were falling apart, it was really not a surprise that the Fascist Grand Council turned on him. If he had not blundered into war, he probably would have died, like Franco, in his bed after years of rule.

Stalin had no pretense of charisma. He believed in raw power and was constantly alert for conspiracies. [He seems to have felt, in a form of psychological projection, that if you weren't plotting against him, you should have been.] With rare exception, his associates were more terrified than devoted and for good reason. Crossing Stalin put you, your family, your friends, and associates at risk and the man had a keen eye and a very long memory for every slight. His genius was in knowing exactly how to administer the right dosage of fear. Too much and his inner circle might conclude that rebellion was less risky than compliance.

Of course, rebellion would have been a neat trick. Stalin created a government in which no one trusted anyone, top generals were afraid of his disfavor, and bureaucrats slept at their desks out of fear that the General Secretary, a night owl, might decide to call their office in the middle of the night. There were secret police watching the secret police. No separate power base was permitted to form.

He did all of this while giving plodding speeches which revealed unusual insight into how organizations work. The former personnel director knew all of the dodges and he was not above mentioning them in large halls; all the better to signal to even the lowest-ranking manager of a Five Year Plan that "the Boss" knew what was going on. He told one Party Congress that it was important to bring up young talent because "the thing is not whether to rely upon the old cadres or on the new cadres, but to steer for a combination, a union of the old and the young cadres in one common symphony of leadership of the Party and the state." The speech transcript notes this was followed by "prolonged applause."  

That may be an understatement.

Many of those vigorously applauding were not around for the next Party Congress. They were either in the Gulag or the recipient of a bullet from the secret police. [Stalin liked to put his victims at ease before striking.] Keep in mind that when one person went down, the relatives and friends went as well.

He was an architect of fear and truly one of the scariest leaders in history.

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