The boss and his team

Stalin and the inner circle, 1925–33

Sheila Fitzpatrick

pp. 51-75

in: Stephen Fortescue (ed), Russian politics from Lenin to Putin, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010

Abstract

For many years, study of the Soviet political leadership usually took the form of Stalin biographies.¹ This was natural, both in view of the comparative paucity of sources and Stalin's unchallenged authority within the leadership from the end of the 1920s. It meant, however, that as far as the historiography was concerned, the Leader seemed to exist in a vacuum. There was a political 'system", usually described in mechanistic terms (the "totalitarian model") with little reference to contingency or individual actors; and at the top of the system stood Stalin — a more or less human figure (thanks to the biographies) alone in an otherwise mechanical landscape. One of the many new ideas that T.H. Rigby introduced into the study of Soviet politics was that Stalin did not exist in a vacuum. He was a "boss' with "lieutenants", a gang leader, the most powerful of all political patrons, operating in a system in which, as Rigby disclosed, patronage was a key element and whose clients were themselves powerful men.²