Why did the late Soviet Elite decide to murder the USSR? Part 1, Stalin and the absurd institutional power arrangement of the Soviet Union

If you can understand who murdered the USSR and why then you can understand why the modern Russian Federation has so many systemic problems

From my point of view, the goal of the SMO, which is being carefully concealed from us, is to create conditions under which the ruling class in the Russian Federation will be recognized as equal by the Western ruling oligarchic elite, and they will begin to negotiate with it as an equal entity.

Let's look at the situation from the perspective of the Western ruling elite.

You and your ancestors have built a global capitalist world. Almost the entire planet lives by your rules. You have defeated the alternative project for the development of the planet, which was the Soviet Union. You're doing well, you're in charge of all the processes.

And then there are some upstart jackals who have squeezed out some of your natural resource extraction projects on the territory of the Russian Federation. These jackals were the gravediggers of your most credible enemy, the USSR. They brought it down, they destroyed its industrial, intellectual and military power. They were obedient to you and followed all your orders for the time being. And then suddenly they begin to assert their rights within the framework of the model of the world order that you have built. In other words, some people obediently came to you, who had previously sworn allegiance to you and as proof of their loyalty they destroyed their own house and threw its ashes at your feet. And then suddenly these comrades, being in your house, start yammering about their rights. First, they break the contracts with you on minerals and squeeze them for themselves. Moreover, they then push forward the Munich Speech, in which they demand equal rights for themselves.

As a business owner, how would you look at your employee who defected to you from a competitor (the USSR) with his customer base, who, after working for you for some time, suddenly began to demand from you that you put him at the same table with you, and even consider his interests? Would you agree to his terms, or would you do everything to weaken and then swat him?

Looking at the upstart jackal, who, let me remind you, destroyed his own scientific, industrial and intellectual base with his own hands, Western reptilians will never perceive him as their equal. They simply have no reason to do so. They understand that they are stronger, more intelligent, moreover, the upstart does not want to defeat them, which means that he does not pose a global threat, no matter what epistolary blows Medvedev strikes at them with his twitter posts. The upstarts want to negotiate with their uncle about spheres of influence. And if so, you need to lead the upstart by the nose, give him hope for the desired arrangement, and at the same time weaken him as much as possible, so that you can swat him like an annoying buzzing fly.

There is no other option for the development of events. It is impossible to come to an agreement with the Western fraternity even in theory. The only language that this rabid blood dog understands is the language of power. She will stop gnawing at you only when she is physically unable to do so. And for that, she needs to be defeated.

Question. Within its intellectual confines, can the Russian Federation defeat her? Is it possible to defeat those by whose rules we live by today? Is it possible to win when the raison d’etre of every individual in the Russian Federation is loot? Is it possible to win when the government is strangling its own population with a usurious yoke? Is it possible to win when ordinary citizens are not provided with living conditions, but with an electronic concentration camp with cameras on every corner, when every initiative of the government is the introduction of new fines and overregulation of everyone’s life, when financial and economic authorities burn out any economic activity with napalm, heroically fighting the “overheating” of a breathing economy? The questions, as you understand, are rhetorical.

There can be no question of victory without changing the intellectual basis of the existence of the Russian Federation. In the Soviet intellectual matrix, people fought for their factories, for free education, for free medicine, for free housing, for the absence of a usurious hell, for equal opportunities for all, for those very social elevators.

That text is a recent Telegram Post from an Arch Stalinist who goes by Comrade Artem. https://t.me/t_artm/6953

He made that post about a week after I dropped my article about why the R.F. can’t win the war in Ukraine due to structural limitations and as anyone who read my article can see Artem’s thoughts on the matter are identical to my own. If you are fighting a war within parameters set by the enemy, you are agreeing to fight with both hands tied behind your back while blind folded. You are fighting for some kind of “equality” within a system where you can only exist a priori in a position of subordinance, the “Russian” elite who launched the SMO did so in pursuit of a goal that is literally impossible to realize. No business owner is going to allow some upstarts who just sold out to him to become his equal within the system he created because they are having a tantrum and throwing around coffee creamer during board meetings.

This post is something like an addendum to my last one about how the R.F. as it exists today is simply incapable of building and sustaining the sort of Armed Forces that would be required to force the collective west to surrender in Ukraine on Russia’s Terms. As a rule, a state cannot feed a ravenous, parasitic, xenocratic elite and a powerful military capable of forcing its will on the world at the same time. The U.S. is an exception to this general rule due to a unique set of circumstances which allows it to print money endlessly without any serious consequences, this is a historical anomaly that proves the general rule. To grasp where exactly the late Soviet Elite that would eventually murder their own Empire came from, we need to first have an idea of how the Soviet Union was managed in practice. For this I’m going to be leaning on a book that I have briefly reviewed in small part already:

In that linked post I reviewed a Chapter of Yuri Muxins 2002 book entitled “the Murderers of Stalin and Beria” where Muxin compares Stalin and Hitler as National Leaders. In today’s Post I’m again going to be quoting from it quite a bit, any block quoting you see today without an embedded link is something I pulled from this book.

For anyone who hasn’t read that Hitler vs Stalin Post here is a recap of who Yuri is copy pasted from that essay of mine:

I should probably however give more background on Muxin. By profession Muxin was a metallurgist and engineer and he worked in what was for a time the largest metallurgy plant in the world which was located in Soviet Kazakhstan. He was apparently very good at his job and became the Assistant Director of the operation but in 1995 he lost his job when Kazakhstan, free at least from Communist tyranny sold the plant the USSR built off to foreigners. Muxin moved to Russia and became a Commie Oppositionist but he never joined the Russian Communist Party as he rightfully considered them sellouts and controlled opposition. Throughout the 90s he was pretty active as an author and editor for a bunch Nazbol tier journals. Eventually Moscow would crack down on hard on the Nazbols and Muxin would be arrested for extremism, and he was on house arrest for a few years. He has mostly made his living as an author and in the early 2000s at least he was cranking out books about history and politics every year or 2. The Murder of Stalin and Beria is the only one I’ve read but it was good enough. He gives a pretty convincing explanation of why Stalin was killed and a description of just how bad the USSRs structural problems were. After the SMO started Muxin lost his mind a little bit and on a broadcast with Strelkov he said that the biggest priority should be ending the SMO and that Navalny would be preferable to Putin which provoked Strelkov into walking off the set. After that episode Muxin lost a lot of credit with Russian Nationalist and he hasn’t recovered from it really. He was born in Ukraine and some chalk his “stop the war at all costs” stance as being motivated by his identity. I don’t think that’s fair though, Muxin gains nothing by trying to hide pro Ukrainian sentiment by pretending to care about Russia. He could literally be openly pro Ukrainian and liberal in Moscow where he lives and would face less harassment from the authorities than he currently does. More likely he just thinks that the SMO is a precursor to dismembering Russia, he actually wrote about that a being a possibility in the book I’m quoting here.

So that is a TLDR on who Yuri Muxin is. I don’t agree with him on everything but IMO he is absolutely dead on about the parasitic nature of the Communist Party of the USSR and how that Parasitic Party morphed into a key component of the oligarchy ruling the RF today. Notice this very low appraisal of the Party is coming from a Stalinist. My own thoughts on Stalin are basically that he was a Great Man of History that changed the world and the trajectory of the Greater Russian Empire for a few brief decades. On the other hand, I blame Stalin for the existence of “Ukrainians” and “Belarussians” and for artificially dividing Historic Russian Soil. Anyone who has read my posts on the Ukrainian and Belarussian Languages, the Holodomor or Communist/Hohol Friendship should know that I am not an unqualified Stalin Fan Boy. So, please don’t fly at me in a rage over what follows below if anti-Communism is a pillar of your identity. If you are unable to objectively consider what I’m presenting here then you will never, ever understand why the RF today is so messed up and in that case, I have no idea why you are you even following me. I’m throwing that out there because despite making clear that I’m mostly ambivalent about the USSR and Stalin I still occasionally get people flipping out over anything less then total and full disavowals that conform to a simplified cookie cutter take on WW2, the Cold War etc. Thankfully 98% of my small but much Appreciated and Respected Readership are above that kind of petty nonsense so lets get going with our analysis.

[In order to survive the Civil War and the years immediately following] the Bolsheviks were forced to take the only possible effective measure: they reorganized their party into an all-encompassing organization of control. If we distract ourselves from the reasons why they were forced to do this, and consider it academically, then it was a double crime – both against authority and against the party. But there was no other way out.

Why is this a crime against the authority? Because the basis of any legitimate system of authority is one-man management and accountability. Only with one-man management is accountability possible. With two bosses over one department – an official one and an unofficial supervisor over it – accountability disappears. You can’t understand who is responsible: either the official to whom matters are publicly entrusted or the controller who told the official how to conduct affairs unofficially. Control is the most striking sign of the bureaucratization of the management system (in a business-like management system, the executor is controlled by the one for whom he does the work). However, in those years, that is, immediately after the Bolsheviks seized power it was necessary for the Party to exercise direct control over the State as a matter of personal survival. The fact is that the Bolsheviks at that time bore the sole and complete responsibility for the results of their rule, while purely state officials did not!

In the USSR there was no distinction in practice between the State Apparatus and the Communist Party. The USSR had a Foreign Ministry, a Ministry of Internal Affairs etc but they were nothing more than extensions of the Party. Muxin gives us an example of how this State of Affairs arose in the first place.

For example, during the Civil War of 1917-1920, officials of the Russian railway department were not specifically in the service of the Bolsheviks. Let’s say the White Army, an enemy of the Bolsheviks, or the rebellious peasants seize a certain area, railroad station or section of tracks. What will the Whites or Rebellious Peasants do to the Railroad Workers? Nothing, the railroad workers will work in their places in the same way under the Whites as under the Rebels or the Reds. And what will they do with the Communists who Controlled these Railway Workers? That's right – they will hang you! For the Bolshevik Controllers, there will come a moment of great responsibility for their own bad work and for the bad work of controlled officials. Therefore, at that moment in the history of Russia, such a dual power was justified, since the Communist Controllers were responsible for the matter to a greater extent than its executors.

If the Bolsheviks had not controlled the levers of State Power themselves during the civil war they would have all been killed in other words. Whether you are a diehard anticommunist or sympathetic to them the logic behind the Communist Party micromanaging the State Apparatus behind the scenes is very easy to understand once it is pointed out. The railroad workers and bureaucrats didn’t give a shit about the Fortunes of the USSR in the late teens and early twenties of the twentieth century. This indifference is understandable, but it could also prove deadly to the Bolsheviks themselves. Muxin explains how this all played out long term for the country:

The dual system of government led to the following: as soon as the historical conditions for dual power passed, as soon as it became safe to be a communist, the ugliness of dual power – irresponsibility – would immediately manifest itself and eventually destroy the entire system of government of the country.

Why was the transformation of the Party into a control body a crime against the Party? Because at its core, the party was supposed to be the intellectual and moral elite of the country. Stalin had intended for the Communist Party to be something like an order of the Brothers of the Sword, fanatics of the holy faith. But for this to happen, every Communist had to know a great deal about everything in the world in order to form an idea of the future on the basis of this knowledge. And to know a lot about everything is not so much difficult as it is uninteresting for many. The Controllers are interested in knowing how to steal more, how to work less, etc.

So, with his calm and safe life, the controller can only know what he controls, and with the complete bureaucratization of the management system, he does not need even need to know much about that. Being a controller is a thousand times easier than working yourself, than being the communist that Stalin demanded. And since in reality the places of controllers in the party are the places of party leaders, Lenin and Stalin hung the sword of Damocles over all communists by turning the CPSU into a controlling party: at the first opportunity, the party’s management, its nomenklatura, turned into a collection of stupid, lazy and greedy scoundrels.

This is why in my last article I said that the Stalinist Sovaks (like Muxin here) and the National Bolsheviks are the best sources for understanding why the USSR was and the RF currently is so screwed up. It’s actually not hard to grasp once you have the basics pointed out to you. As a matter of personal survival, the Bolsheviks had to micromanage the State because the bureaucrats, workers etc were not invested in the October Revolution and the fact that Kerensky’s Provisional Government crumbled so quicky is testament to the fact that the State Apparatus that the Bolsheviks seized was already in shambles anyway. But once the USSR was stable and being a Party Member/Big Whig didn’t carry the risk of being hanged or bayoneted by righteously angry Peasants and Cossacks the Party didn’t part with its direct control over the State as it enriched the Nomenklatura. In other words, the Party went from Controllers fighting for their lives to a parasite on the Country who weren’t accountable to anyone.

So, in order to control power in the country, the CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union) reorganized and built an unofficial structure parallel to the official constitutional one. Nominally, it was believed that this unofficial structure only managed inner party affairs (I repeat, the Constitution did not provide for such a structure as a body of state administration), but in fact, the structure of the party’s management, controlling the constitutional power, governed both the State Apparatus and the entire country.

In this situation, a rather comical situation developed: the leader of the party, and not the constitutional head of the country, was the leader of the USSR.

This Respected Readers is exactly why the CPSU 1st Secretary was always the guy that Foreign Leaders had to deal with and who was always calling shots in the USSR as opposed to the official head of State. Here is a Screen Shot from wiki about the Soviet Head of State:

So, there you have it, the Real Head of State in the USSR was a “de facto” one and not the Official One. The Chairmans of the Council of Ministers and Presidiums mentioned above were the Official State Offices analogous to Presidents and Prime Ministers, but can you name any Chairmans? Notice that Wiki says the General Secretary, the real Head of State “often” held high positions in the Government. Isn’t that pretty wild? The de-facto Head of State “often” but not always held some important Official Government Position and probably not even the highest official one. Wiki claims that it was after Stalin concentrated power that the Post of General Secretary became synonymous with Leader of the USSR and this is more or less true, but it wasn’t until the mid to late 30s that the USSR became truly Stalinist for the brief period between say 1937 and Stalin’s Murder. Stalin however did not initially set out to become the Red Tsar that he eventually would. As we touched on above the more comparatively stable the USSR became after the Civil War the more the Party Leadership was inclined to rest on its laurels and parasite off the Country, and the Party Leadership were the controllers over the State Apparatus. There is a common line of thinking that isn’t entirely wrong that Stalin “beat” the Trotskyites for control over the USSR but there is an element to that argument that is little understood amongst Westerners. To a very large extent Trotsky and his closest followers didn’t even show up to the game.

Muxin asserts that this Party Control over the State was criminal specifically because it allowed the Controllers to avoid responsibility and guaranteed that what was supposed to be the National Intellectual Vanguard would eventually stagnate and rot. This process was already underway in the 20s, the Party Big Whigs sought to avoid taking responsibility for anything risky and this very much included the Trotskyites. The Party Elite would give their fiery speeches, but they were much less enthusiastic about getting involved in the day to day to grind of running the State. Unlike Stalin. A rather long block quote is called for here:

after the Bolsheviks took power in Russia, Stalin was pushed into the background - in the Bolshevik government under the chairmanship of Lenin, he occupied a rather modest place as People’s Commissar for Nationalities. But he was constantly used outside Moscow in all cases of vital importance for Russia. In 1918, he provided the Bolsheviks with bread, keeping Tsaritsyn from being captured by the Whites; he was sent as a commissar to all fronts where the Reds were in danger of collapsing.

I think that already at this time other Bolshevik leaders began to envy him very much, especially the mass of Jewish socialists who ran to the Bolsheviks in 1917. I think that Lenin also envied him. Unlike other party leaders, Stalin knew Russia well, continuously engaged in self-education and could organize the implementation of all kind’s difficult tasks. The rest of the leaders, many of whom could only talk revolutionarily, could hardly take such difficulties in stride.

Strange as it may seem, this is the only explanation for the fact that Stalin was appointed General Secretary of the Party in 1922. That is, Lenin and other leaders who had posts in the state gathered at the Politburo as needed and resolved the issues that had accumulated in the party. The party was growing rapidly in numbers, and, most importantly, the number of state issues facing party organizations, which had to be controlled, grew exponentially. Then the posts of party secretaries were introduced, i.e., people who made decisions from the Politburo, brought them to the attention of party organizations, and controlled their implementation.

Stalin unlike any other member of the Bolshevik Elite had actually lived in Russia his entire life and regardless of being Georgian he knew the Russian Mentality very, very well from living in exile with Peasants in Siberia for years at a time. Now of course other Bolsheviks also lived in Siberian Exile for various periods, but Stalin is unique in the depths to which he went native. For example, unlike the rest of the Bolsheviks who passed through exile Stalin actually developed a taste for hunting and fishing. The peasants even gave him guns in violation of the law against arming exiles for shooting game on top of letting him use their fishing equipment. That indicates he developed a friendly rapport with them. In one instance while ice fishing in winter he fell through a not so frozen lake and almost died and the family he was living with nursed him back to health. He also fathered a son with a widowed peasant women and while he didn’t exactly support the lad, he did come through for him later in life when he saved him from probably being shot due to Beria’s scheming. In any case Stalin’s illegitimate son would go on to have a fairly successful life in the USSR on his own merits and considering the fates of his Official Sons perhaps being illegitimate was preferable in the scheme of things. A very basic overview of Stalins life in exile can be read here if anyone is interested but in general, he seems to have genuinely fit in and enjoyed the experience.

Konstantin Kuzakov, illegitimate Son of Stalin

Getting back on track, even arch Stalinist will admit that he was incredibly well read on an extremely wide range of subjects. Like Hitler for example Stalin could shift from talking about Opera and Literature to the technical specifics of automobiles and airplanes. Like Hitler he was not from the intelligentsia, unlike Lenin, Trotsky, and the jewish socialist filling the party ranks that Muxin mentioned above. Muxin says that Lenin and these jews were jealous of Stalin but I disagree with him on that, the jews and former intelligentsia that made up the Bolshevik Elite simply disdained him and didn’t consider him a threat, which would be their undoing and change the trajectory of the USSR for a few decades.

As the last block of bold text above says in the early 20s party membership was rising as was the amount of mundane, difficult and thankless tasks associated with running the country and party. This resulted in the Politburo creating Secretaries that would oversee managing Party Affairs, but there was no distinction in 1922 between Party and State Affairs. Since Stalin had proven himself an unassuming but effective enough trouble shooter the Bolshevik Elite assumed he was an ideal candidate on whom to pawn off the increasingly unwelcome workload of managing the growing Party Bureaucracy, and it was this Bureaucracy that Controlled State Affairs. There is a nuance here that needs to be understood, the Bolsheviks wanted to enjoy the fruits of lording over a semi functioning state. That is, they didn’t want control over ruins, they wanted control over something they could milk. The problem is that in 1922 the State and Country were in shambles. So, the Party Bureaucracy overseeing the State Apparatus was expected to build and organize stuff and this was not something the majority of the Party Members in question had any interest in taking responsibility for. Professional revolutionaries like Lenin and Trotsky may be in their element critiquing, subverting, and undermining, but building something in a positive sense is beyond them. This is where Stalin started accumulating power and influence.

Officially, the secretariat was headed by Y.M. Sverdlov, but he was also the head of the country’s legislative body, the theoretical head of Soviet power. Therefore, in fact, the party was led by his wife K.T. Novgorodtseva, who held the post of head of the Secretariat of the Central Committee. Stalin replaced her in this position, and it was given the formal title of General Secretary. It was envisaged that Stalin would organize the execution of what was ordered by the Politburo, i.e., Lenin and Trotsky, who headed it. And that’s all.

An opponent and enemy of the USSR and Stalin, who in those years held very high posts in the Bolshevik government, L.D. Trotsky commented on this appointment as follows: “However, the Petrograd delegation led by Zinoviev (who was advancing Stalin’s candidacy for General Secretary) won the congress. The victory was all the easier because Lenin did not accept the battle. He did not bring resistance to Stalin’s candidacy because the post of secretary in the conditions of that time had a completely subordinate significance. As long as the old Politburo remained in power, the General Secretary could only be a subordinate figure.”

Stalin was simply supposed to be the guy doing the actual work and accepting responsibility while the Politburo gave speeches and set agendas. But this didn’t work out long term because eventually it came obvious to everyone that if something needed to get done that Stalin was the one you needed to go.

Neither Trotsky, nor Lenin, and probably Stalin himself, thought that if the party undertook to control the state apparatus, then in this case it was not the technical head of the state apparatus who became the head of the country, but the technical leader of the party who became the head of the country. But, really, all this depended on the person in this position. After all, Stalin’s predecessors in this position did not even approximately have the weight in the country that Stalin began to gain very quickly. He began to work better than Lenin, Trotsky and others, and, accordingly, everyone began to look at him as a leader.

Think about it. What was Lenin’s work as head of state? Officials came to him and asked how to do this and that. Lenin thought and found a solution.

And what was Stalin’s work as the leader of the party? Party workers and officials who had a headache about the same questions came and asked him what to do. Stalin thought and found a solution. But thanks to his knowledge of the people of Russia, tireless self-education and careful study of affairs, he did it better than Lenin.

Both in his “Testament” and “Letters to the Congress” Lenin in December 1922 writes a line in which one can see bewilderment: “Comrade. Stalin, having become general secretary, concentrated immense power in his hands...” How?

He did not “become” general secretary it was you, the Politburo (Lenin, Trotsky, etc.), that appointed him to the post previously held by Sverdlov’s wife. He did not “concentrate” any power, you gave him all the power.

This phrase of Lenin’s testifies to the fact that neither Lenin nor Trotsky understood until the end of their lives what had happened: why their secretary began to have more power than themselves who occupied official high positions in the state.

Few people understand this subtlety to this day. Everyone thinks that power gives authority. That’s how it is. But the question must be considered more fundamentally: authority arises based on whom people obey. It does not arise from official positions, but from subordination. And it follows that if people find it useful to obey a given person, then he will have authority without a position. Stalin is a vivid example of this. He only carried out the decisions of the Politburo, which, I repeat, was chaired by the official heads of the USSR Government: A.I. Rykov, and then V.M. Molotov. But the latter did not become the leaders of the country, but Stalin did!

Basically, the Trotskyites and Professional Revolutionaries thought that they could just appoint themselves into the Top Positions of the State and enjoy the authority and power that ought to accompany those positions while delegating all the thankless work to Stalin’s Office. In theory if the Bolsheviks had inherited a Functioning State Apparatus and Semi-Intact Country this might have worked out for them. But in the case of the early USSR everything had to be built from the ground up and it soon became very obvious that the only person amongst the Party Leadership that was actually working and taking responsibility was Stalin. Already by the early 20s the general ethos of the Bolshevik Elite could be described as avoiding all responsibility and danger like the plague while enjoying the fruits of total control over the Country. The Trotskyites and Professional Revolutionaries often criticized Stalin but they never, ever, took it upon themselves to take the reins of responsibility and accountability when it came to running and building the Country from the ground up. That’s how Stalin accumulated so much influence, so many favors, and basically just ended up being the guy that de facto ran the country despite being subordinate to the Heads of State. Stalin even asked to be relieved of his duties as General Secretary on 3 occasions before he had even consolidated power. In this sense he gave the Trotskyites and people he would later purge an opening to curb his influence, but he was turned down every time. In 1927, the last time Stalin asked to be relived he even asked that the post of General Secretary be abolished. Needless to say he was not relived and the Post was not abolished. Why?

Try to understand this: those who could replace him were themselves afraid of the position of leader like fire and afraid of being left without a leader like fire. Why?

Because they already had more benefits than Stalin, and Stalin relieved them of personal responsibility for their own decisions. Under the leader, they could, without working, without thinking, without delving, talk anything and criticize the leader himself in any way they wanted. After all, it was just “their opinion”, it could be erroneous, because, as everyone knows, even an intelligent person can be mistaken.

Remember, this is 1927 we are speaking of and yes at that time it was safe to openly criticize the General Secretary. The Politburo really did have it better than Stalin, they had all the privileges and none of the responsibility. Stalin’s most thorough purges of the Party Elite were in the future at this point, if the Central Committee and Politburo hadn’t been so terrified of taking the reins for themselves a lot of them would have died of old age as opposed to being shot once Stalin had consolidated power and decided correctly enough that these people were useless parasites at best and active saboteurs in many cases. We can also see here that Stalin had responsibility, but he was not yet Red Tsar. The Central Committee was able to turn down his request to relive him and terminate the position of General Secretary. The fact is that the Party created the man that Stalin would eventually become through its own laziness, cowardice, and parasitic inclinations and once Stalin had totally concentrated power in his own hands he would seek to gradually break the Partys strangle hold on the country. WW2 and the events surrounding it would gradually halt this process, but Stalin never abandoned it and this is what would cost him his life eventually. A Russian historian gives a decent summary here:

After the completion of collectivization and the first successes of industrialization, Stalin thought about how to put an end to the diktat of party functionaries and transfer the center of power to where it should have been - in state structures. Constitutional reform, in fact, was aimed at achieving this very goal. The Constitution of 1936 specifically spelled out various kinds of rights and freedoms of citizens, which gave many observers a reason to talk about it as the most advanced and democratic. Today they laugh at this, pointing to the events of 1937-1938. However, Stalin did plan to carry out large-scale democratization, and without any imitation of the West with its multi-party system, in which power passes from one financial and industrial group to another.

Joseph Vissarionovich proposed to hold truly competitive elections to the Supreme Soviet, which was created instead of the cumbersome, multi-stage system of Congresses of Soviets. Y. N. Zhukov’s book “Another Stalin” contains a photocopy of the draft ballot that was planned to be introduced in the 1937 elections. One of them contains the names of three rival candidates running in the elections to the Council of Nationalities in the Dnepropetrovsk district. The first candidate was supposed to be from the general meeting of workers and employees of the plant, the second from the general meeting of collective farmers, and the third from the local district committees of the party and the Komsomol. Samples of voting protocols have also been preserved, which asserted the principle of alternative nature of future elections.

Obviously, in such elections, nominees from party organizations had to withstand serious competition from non-party candidates and public organizations. And it would undoubtedly weed out the bronzed partocrats, accustomed to thinking in a leftist way – as during the Civil War and collectivization.

At the same time, it was planned to apply another filter - the party filter. Stalin advocated making the election of party leaders at all levels secret.

However, the party oligarchy was very concerned about these plans. Party Secretaries shouted that there were many enemies of the people in the country and that premature free elections would be dangerous.

These events took place in the mid 1930s on the eve of the adoption of the 1936 Soviet Constitution. Stalin responded to the Party Functionaries concerns about bad people being elected with the following:

“If the people elect hostile individuals here and there, it will mean that our agitational work is poorly executed, and we fully deserve such a disgrace”

That is perfectly consistent with what Stalin thought the Parties actual function should be, acting as the intellectual and moral vanguard of the population as opposed to acting as an unaccountable control mechanism incapable of inspiring the population. In any case the great terror prevented him from fully enacting his plans which may sound odd to many readers because it’s typically assumed that Stalin initiated it to begin with, but this is not true. Party Activist at lower levels initiated the terror in response to these planned elections which they were perfectly capable of doing at the time. Reminder, this was right before Stalin had concentrated power therefore, he could not totally control the activities of the Party. The Party correctly perceived the elections Stalin was proposing as a threat to their easy way of life and reacted accordingly by starting denunciations left and right of any potential threating person. Also, it must be said that while many, many victims of the terror were innocent by no means were absolutely all. First and foremost, Stalin would use the excesses committed by many Party Barons during the terror to purge said Barons in turn. Also, some of the people who were denounced actually were criminals or subversives that Local Security Organs simply didn’t want to run in elections. From the same essay quoted above:

Under these conditions, Stalin decided to join the terror, which could no longer be stopped, but under the wheels of which it was quite possible to fall. The flywheel of repression began to work, and the planned elections were disrupted. At the same time, the initiators of repression fell victim to their own bloodthirstiness – they were destroyed as “enemies of the people” in turn.

Stalin, nevertheless, managed to achieve some reformist successes. Thus, according to the December (1936) Constitution, restrictions on the rights imposed on certain social categories ranked as “exploiters” were lifted. The elections became anonymous, which somehow brought them closer to the status of “free”.

In addition, Stalin significantly increased the role of the government in the state and political system. Various operational and coordination structures began to be formed in the Council of People’s Commissars (the Defense Committee and the Economic Council, which were later merged into a single Bureau), the number of deputy chairmen of the Council of People’s Commissars was increased, and the post of deputy for personnel was introduced at each People’s Commissariat.

If Stalin could not halt the terror, he could at least leverage it for his own ends. The result was his reforms were only partially realized but it’s easy to misunderstand these reforms and how important they were even if they didn’t amount to what Stalin fully wanted. I say misunderstood because basic bitch conservative people and cold war tier anticommunist will read “significantly increased the role of the government in the state and political system” and think “well yeah commies always want the gubment running everything amirite”. Well, we have already covered that the Communist Party was already running everything anyway. This means Stalin wanted to transfer authority from one group to another, in this case from the Party to the State, and that implies he did not view them as synonymous and in fact he thought they should not be synonymous. The reforms he wanted were a blow directed at the party. It’s easy to misunderstand just how vital these reforms were because the USSR was on the eve of WW2, therefore a stronger State Apparatus not being 100% incompetently managed by unaccountable, retarded, “professional revolutionaries” was a life or death matter to the country. In addition to that it was precisely the capital accumulated via Stalins less then fully realized reforms that bought the USSR the economic, industrial, and military prestige it would enjoy for 40+ years. It was because the State was partially strengthened at the expense of the Party that the USSR was able to briefly become a true superpower.

All the way back in 1926 Stalin had published an essay in Pravda where he rebutted the idea of Pornographer/Coin Clipper by ethnicity Grigory Zinoviev that the dictatorship of the proletariat was synonymous with dictatorship of the party. There is of course a school of thought that asserts that nothing written or said by a Bolshevik has any worth whatsoever because it’s always cover for wanting to take over the West and terrorize puppies and babies and to a large extent this is actually true. Probably well over 90% of Bolshevik writing and speech falls under this rule but the problem is when we pretend exceptions to rules don’t exists. Since we have seen that Stalin did have a conflict with the Party and he took steps to remake the USSR along lines that he preferred it’s worth paying attention when he addresses that topic specifically. The following is a fragment of Stalin’s rebuttal to Zionoviev in regard to Party Dictatorship and Dictatorship of the Proletariat being the same thing:

Dictatorship, in the strict sense of the word, is power based on violence, for without the elements of violence there is no dictatorship, if we take dictatorship in the strict sense of the word. Can a party be a power based on violence against its own class (the very class it is supposed to represent), against the majority of the working class? It is clear that it cannot. Otherwise, it would not be a dictatorship over the bourgeoisie, but a dictatorship over the working class.
The Party is the teacher, the leader, the leader of its class, but not a power which relies on violence against the majority of the working class. Otherwise, there would be no point in speaking of the method of persuasion as the fundamental method of work of the proletarian party in the ranks of the working class. Otherwise, there would be no need to say that the Party must convince the broad masses of the proletariat of the correctness of its policy, that only in the course of fulfilling this task could the Party consider itself a really mass party capable of leading the proletariat into battle. Otherwise, the Party would have had to replace the method of persuasion by an order and a threat against the proletariat, which is absurd and completely incompatible with the Marxist conception of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Such is the nonsense to which Zinoviev's "theory" of conflating leadership of the party with the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Again, Stalin wrote that in 1926 so already by that relatively early time in the USSRs existence he was not excited about the Party being synonymous with the State. In Stalin’s conception the Dictatorship of the Proletariat was synonymous with the State, not the Communist Party therefore the State should not be an extension of the Party. Zinoviev would be executed in 1936.

The last thing we will address in this post is why was Stalin murdered and I suspect my Respected Readers already have a fairly good idea about that. But let’s examine the specifics briefly. By May of 1941 Stalin had already stopped meeting with the Politburo, preferring to meet directly with his Ministers which was keeping with his preference of working through the State Apparatus and side lining the Party. Muxin again:

when he [Stalin] became the head of the USSR [In May of 1941 when he appointed himself as Chairman of the Head of Peoples Commissars], the Politburo began to consider only personnel issues, issues of propaganda, awards and pardons, and issues of control over the power structures of the state. If in 1940 the Politburo considered the issues of the national economy in a continuous stream, starting from the state budget and ending with the organization of catering at individual enterprises, then in 1952 there are no economic issues at all, practically the only cases when the Politburo remembers money were cases of paying honoraria to “progressive writers” and assistance to “progressive newspapers” abroad, that is, these are all the same issues of propaganda. In other words, Stalin ousted the party nomenklatura from state administration by not allowing it to interfere in the affairs of Soviet power.

At that time, Stalin signed the joint decisions of the party and the government only as chairman of the Council of Ministers. On behalf of the party, these documents were signed by one of the secretaries: first A. A. Zhdanov, then G. M. Malenkov. Nevertheless, the authority of the party nomenklatura did not fall in society, and (this must be specially emphasized) only because Stalin remained in the post of party secretary. His authority as a leader gave authority to the entire party apparatus, but each step to remove the party apparatus from state power deprived party functionaries of troughs. Well, judge for yourself: would the director of a plant, subordinate only to the Soviet government, give gifts to party functionaries if they did not have the opportunity to remove him from office, evaluate his work, reward and punishment?

So, by 1941 Stalin had more or less stripped the Party of Power and important responsibility but paradoxically the Partys Authority remained intact because of Stalin occupying the role of General Secretary. Under Stalin the Nomenklatura could still loot to a modest extent like the example given above of Plant Managers feeling compelled to give Party Functionaries gifts but on the balance they had no control over the course of the Country. In 1952 on the eve of his murder Stalin was taking steps to finally curb even this last opportunity for the Party to loot by resigning his Position as its Head and taking the Position of only the Head of State. Like Muxin emphasizes above, the Party’s Authority rested on Stalins Authority.

What needed to be obtained was clear [neuter the party], but how to do it? Just announce that the C.P.S.U. is being removed from power? For what? The party lost half of its membership in battles at the front. And even its apparatus, especially the lower ones, was far from being filled exclusively with scoundrels. Moreover, this would be a bad example for those countries where the Communists have not yet come to power, where power must be seized!

The operation to formally cut off the party nomenklatura from the direct leadership of the state had to be carried out without pain and without much noise. The process should go naturally. And Stalin took a scalpel in his hands. This scalpel was the XIX Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), held in the autumn of 1952. Historians write that Stalin’s decision to convene the XIX Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) was unexpected for the party apparatus. Stalin made this decision in June 1952, and in August the draft of the new charter of the All-Union Communist Party was published, that is, Stalin convened the congress precisely for this purpose – to change the status of the party and its organizational structure.

In other words, Stalin didn’t want to totally liquidate the Party and therefore discredit and demoralize other countries where the Communist were at war. On top of that there were still decent people in it that he had use for, his fight was specifically with the parasitic Nomenklatura. The last Congress had been back in 1939 and given Stalins general disdain for the Party the announcement of a new congress probably did come as a surprise. First off Stalin intended to abolish the Politburo and replace it with Presidium of the Central Committee. The Politburo was accountable to absolutely nobody, but the Presidium would be accountable to the Central Committee of the Party. As is implied in the name of the Presidium, it would exist to manage the affairs of the Party specifically. A Russian Historian puts it likes this:

If earlier the Politburo decided issues without coordinating them with anyone, now the Presidium was obliged to coordinate them with the Central Committee. This meant that the party was deprived of the body that directly ruled the country and turned into an organ that directed only the party. The draft of the new Charter of the Party was written as follows: ... “It is proposed to transform the Politburo into a Presidium of the Central Committee of the Party, organized to direct the work of the Central Committee between plenums. Such a transformation is expedient because the name 'Presidium' is more in line with the functions actually
performed by the Politburo at the present time." That is, Stalin
confronted the party with a fait accompli: the new body was
to lead only the party, without interfering in the activities of the Soviet
power.

Recall that by this time, in October of 1952 the Politburo already wasn’t controlling anything especially important in terms of State Affairs, so that line in the New Party Charter of having the Presidium operate “more in line with the functions actually performed by the Politburo at the present time” is key here. Stalin was taking steps to formalize the existing State of Affairs. The Presidium was to include 25 members as opposed to the Politburos 7 as well as 11 “candidates” and all the new members were apparently selected by Stalin personally. So, on top of formalizing the state of affairs where the Politburo was in charge of nothing especially important the “Old Guard” were to be drowned in Stalins Newcomers. Equally worrying for the Party was Stalin’s next request to be relieved as General Secretary. Had this happened Stalin would no longer be Leading the Party, but he would still be the Formal Head of State as he was the Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR (equivalent to Prime Minister). In this way Stalin was planning on ensuring that authority would be transferred from the Party to the State Apparatus. However, when he made it known that he intended to step down as General Secretary the crowd went nuts:

Listing the candidates for the Secretariat of the Central Committee, Joseph Stalin, who chaired the Plenum, contrary to general expectations, did not offer his name. When fellow party members tried to name him, Stalin asked those present to release him from the post of General Secretary of the Central Committee. According to one version, Stalin simultaneously wanted to leave the post of chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, however, the writer Konstantin Simonov, who was present at the Plenum, clarified in his memoirs that Stalin still planned to keep this key post for himself. The leader agreed, as before, to chair the meetings of the Politburo (or rather, the newly elected Presidium) and only asked to be relieved of the obligation to head the Secretariat of the Central Committee. Stalin’s associate Georgy Malenkov intervened in the situation, who went down to the rostrum and, as if on behalf of all those present, asked the generalissimo to continue to remain general secretary. Voices were heard from the hall:

“Please stay! Please take your request back!”

Marshal Semyon Timoshenko, who got up from his seat, said that if Stalin left, then “the people will not understand.” He repeated that all the participants in the Plenum elected Stalin as their leader. The hall burst into applause. After a long pause, Stalin had no choice but to wave his hand [and give in].

Liberals/Hardcore Ideological Anti Communist will claim that actually Stalin had no intention of resigning as General Secretary and the whole thing was a loyalty shit test but that’s not at all convincing given that he had already been chipping away at the Partys Power since 1936, and had expressed back in 1926 that he didn’t believe that Party Dictatorship was synonymous with Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Stalin in fact had no intention of giving up his personal power, but he planned on taking his personal power with him over to the State Apparatus and out of the Politburo and leaving them with a parting gift of 18 new members all loyal to him. The Politburo knew just like Stalin did that their authority was linked with him specifically, so it was imperative that he not leave the post of General Secretary alive. So, when he gave in to the hysteria at the Plenum Stalin signed his death warrant and within 4 months, he was dead and his reforms were cancelled. In this way the next General Secretary, Nikita Khruschev formally carried the Old Authority of Stalin whereas Stalin had intended for his Old Authority to be associated with the actual Head of State.

Who actually murdered Stalin is unclear, the most common suspects are Khruschev and Beria and I have seen very good cases for both. Muxin makes a compelling case for Khruschev, but Beria was also a Master Villian and one of the most competent Spooks in the history of Spookery so he also can’t be ruled out. The only reason Muxin doesn’t consider him is that he thinks Beria was a genuinely good guy but that is simply not possible imo. Beria wanted to abolish the inner Passport System in the USSR, he wrote the following to Malenkov:

The established restrictions on free movement and residence on the territory of the USSR causes fair criticism and dissatisfaction on the part of citizens.

It should be noted that such a practice of passport restrictions does not exist in any country. In many capitalist countries – in the USA, England, Canada, Finland and Sweden – the population does not have passports at all, no notes are made about the criminal record in the personal documents of citizens.

The Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR considers it necessary to abolish the existing passport restrictions in the cities and localities of the Soviet Union, as well as the regime zone along the border of the USSR.

If Beria had had his way Russia might already be majority non Russian as the internal passport regime is exactly what prevented Russian Cities from turning into ghettos overflowing with Churkas during the Soviet Era. I criticize Khruschev a lot but based on this alone I’m glad he prevented Beria from seizing power. It’s all pretty wild, Beria was indispensable for winning WW2 as he oversaw the evacuation of Soviet Industry to beyond the Urals during the war, he prevented the Germans from getting a drop of oil in the Caucuses, he rooted out many bonafide spies, he was indispensable in the USSRs rapid acquisition of the A-bomb, but he also showed that he was ready to piss away and crash the whole empire by removing the internal passport system. I count him solidly in the villain category, he wasn’t an outright parasite but something more dangerous actually, a highly competent and intelligent wrecker biding his time. In any case who exactly murdered Stalin is beyond the scope of this post which it’s time to wrap up but it was likely either Beria or Khruschev.

In summary the Soviet State Apparatus was nothing more than an extension of the Party and under those circumstances the Party naturally became a parasite on the State. Stalin correctly enough considered this a case of the Party sucking the blood out of the very workers they were supposed to be representing, in other words the Party were the new bourgeoise. They had their own class interest, not working, rent seeking and generally growing ever more decadent and degenerate. This would come to a head in the late 80s when it would be the Party Elite that set the liquidation of the entire country in motion. Why would they do this? Like Comrade Artems Post that we led off with says, they saw how much better their fellow parasitic elites in the West lived and they wanted the same. We will look at that in more detail next time.