5
Patronage and the Intelligentsia
in Stalin's Russia*
Sheila Fitzpatrick
In 1930 in the little Sukhumi rest-house for bigwigs where we ended up
through an oversight of Lakoba's, Ezhov's wife was talking to me:
'Pil'nyak goes (khodit) to us,' she said. 'And whom do you go to?' I
indignantly reported that conversation to 0. M., but he quietened me
down: 'Everyone "goes". Obviously it can't be otherwise. We "go", too.
To Nikolai Ivanovich [Bukharin]'.1
Patronage relations were ubiquitous in the Soviet elite. The phenomenon is
perhaps most familiar in the political sphere, where local and central leaders
cultivated and promoted their own client networks (the often-criticised
'family circles' [semeistva]). 2 But it was not only rising politicians who needed
patrons. Lacking an adequate legal system, Russians relied on patronage
alliances to protect 'personal security, goods, career and status, freedom of
expression and other material interests'.3 These words, written by David
Ransel about Russian elites in the time of Catherine the Great, apply equally
well to Stalinist society. Like blat connections, patronage relations were part
of the well-placed Soviet citizen's survival kit. And no sector of the elite was
more intensive in its pursuit of patrons, or more successful in finding them
in the heights of the party leadership, than the Soviet 'creative intelligentsia',
whose clientelist practices are the subject of this chapter.
To say that patronage relations were ubiquitous in the elites of Stalin's
Russia is not to say that everybody had them. Not everyone is equally adept
at the human skills involved in patronage and blat relations. Some members
of the intelligentsia were virtual non-participants for lack of opportunity or
aptitude; others avoided clientelist relations with highly-placed Communists
on principle. But nobody within the elites - and perhaps outside them,
but that question remains to be investigated by scholars - could live in a
patronage-free environment, any more than he or she could live in a social
environment that was free of blat. These two phenomena are intimately connected.
Both involve the doing of favours based on some degree of personal
relationship, for which there is no direct payment; the difference is that
92
Sheila Fitzpatrick 93
patronage connections exist between persons of unequal social status,
whereas blat relations are non-hierarchical.4
Like blat, patronage was and remains a semi-taboo subject with slightly
shady overtones of corruption for Russians (at least when they are talking
about themselves). Among intelligentsia memoirists, only the most
sociologically-inclined (like Nadezhda Mandelstam) or the most flagrant
practitioners of clientelism (like Natal'ya Sats, former director of the Moscow
Children's Theatre) openly discuss their own relations with patrons from the
political elites.5 Most memoirists remain reticent, though they may note
occasions where some important personage showed his nobility of character
or devotion to the arts by intervening on their behalf. The same
reticence is to be found in the language which Russians use to talk about
patronage. While terms describing a patron's protection exist (pokrovitel'stvo,
protektsiya, ruka), they tend to be pejorative and would rarely be used about
one's own patronage relations. Most non-pejorative ways of referring to a
patron are euphemistic and tend to present the patron-client relationship
in terms of friendship. Verbs like 'help' (pomogat'), 'support' (podderzhivat'),
and 'come to the aid of' (vyruchat') are often used to describe patronage
transactions. Written appeals to patrons request their 'advice' (sovet) and
'help' (pomoshch').6
There is an extensive comparative literature on clientelist/patronage relations
in which these are defined as reciprocal, personal (conventionally
involving affective ties), continuing (not one-off events), and taking place
between unequal partners.7 The advantage to the client is that he or she
obtains goods, jobs, promotion, protection, and so forth from the more
powerful and worldly-connected patron. The advantage to the patron, as it
is described in the literature, is that the patron has the loyalty and services
of the client for a range of purposes ranging from work, protection of reputation,
and provision of intelligence to support in elections. The client is
the patron's 'man'. Many writers on clientelism see it as closely connected
with insecurity and vulnerability:
One may posit that resort to patronage mechanisms will be the more pronounced
where the weak are disproportionately weak, the strong disproportionately
strong, and formal, alternative mechanisms for protecting
citizens - laws, court systems, police, procedural rules of the game, etc. remain
embryonic, manipulable or perhaps imbued with little or no
legitimacy.8
It has also been suggested that, in situations of scarcity of goods and services,
patronage may provide the necessary discriminatory selection basis.9
Much of this general theory of patronage fits the Soviet case very well,
in particular the insecurity/vulnerability and preferential distribution
arguments. Undoubtedly patronage and blat were Soviet mechanisms for
94 The Stalin Period
distributing scarce goods in the absence of a market. There was not enough
social provision such as housing, health care, and so on to go round; there
was no market to set priorities via pricing; bureaucratic rules of allocation
were clumsy and unsatisfactory; law functioned poorly, especially as a protection
for the individual against arbitrary state action. In the real world,
personalistic processes like patronage and blat were what often determined
who got what.
Less clearly applicable to the Soviet case is the notion of reciprocity in
patron-client relations. In the sphere of political clientelism, one can see
possible forms of reciprocity in the form of loyalty, discretion and mutual
protection within the family circle: since semeistva got local political leaders
into big trouble during the Purges, their ubiquity presumably tells us that a
local mutual-protection ring was an almost essential modus operandi in
Stalinist politics, despite the dangers.10 But in the multifarious patron-client
relationships that linked the creative intelligentsia and the regime, it is hard
to see what reciprocal benefits the clients could offer their patrons. Of what
use would the loyalty of (say) Mandelstam have been to Bukharin, or of
Vavilov to Molotov? And what 'services' could these intelligentsia clients
provide for their patrons?
On closer examination, this may not constitute a deviation of Soviet
patronage from the general rule so much as point up a weakness in the
articulation of the theory. There must, in fact, be many contexts in which
patrons are unlikely to obtain tangible material benefits from their clients.
As one writer notes, 'a patron controlling bureaucratic favours may be
victimised by his own power, unable to extract from his clients anything
commensurate with the services he has rendered'.11 (I will consider the
intangible benefits to the patron later in this chapter.)
Patronage is still an underdeveloped topic in modern Russian/Soviet historiography.
Daniel Orlovsky has provided a valuable introductory overview
of pre-Soviet patronage focussed on the late imperial period,12 and Daniel
Aleksandrov and other young Russian historians of science have begun to
investigate patronage in the sciences as part of their study of the everyday
practices (byt) of Russian and Soviet science. n The present essay is, as far as
I know, the first attempt at an overview of client-patron relationships
between members of the Soviet intelligentsia and members of the Soviet
political elite. For reasons of space, the equally important topic of clientalist
relations within the intelligentsia is not discussed in this chapter.
5.1 Who were the patrons?
Officials were the people with access to resources in Soviet society; consequently,
officials were the major source of patronage. Any office-holder
could function as a patron who did favours for clients, and it is hard to
believe that there was any official who never did this. As for patronage of
Sheila Fitzpatrick 95
the intelligentsia, some political leaders were more involved, some less, but
it is probably safe to assume that all members of the Politburo and obkom
secretaries acted at least occasionally as patrons of members of the intelligentsia.
This was not necessarily because of love of the arts and scholarship
but a matter of noblesse oblige - the position and status required it.
From the existing memoir literature, it would be easy to get the impression
that patronage of the intelligentsia - indeed, patronage in general - was
the prerogative of a few particularly generous or culturally-inclined party
leaders: for example, Sergei Kirov, the Leningrad obkom leader; 'Sergo'
Ordzhonikidze, People's Commissar of Heavy Industry; Mikhail Kalinin,
longtime President of TslK; and Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin's widow,
who was Deputy Commissar of Enlightenment.14 This is not the case,
however. It must be remembered that in the Khrushchev and Brezhnev
periods, when most of these memoirs of 'unforgettable meetings' with
'friends of science' and 'friends of the arts' in the party leadership appeared,
large numbers of former leaders - from Oppositionists of the 1920s like
Trotsky and Kamenev to the 'anti-party group' of the 1950s, including
Molotov and Malenkov - were non-persons whose names could not be
mentioned in print.
It may be that I good' Communists like Kirov and Ordzhonikidze - along
with Bukharin, whose patronage is attested by dissident and samizdat
sources - really were particularly generous as patrons of the intelligentsia.
But 'bad' Communists like State Prosecutor Andrei Vyshinskii or Nikolai
Ezhov, Genrikh Yagoda and Yakov Agranov of the NKVD were also active
patrons.15 With the opening of the Soviet archives, we find that even
Vyacheslav Molotov, head of the Soviet government throughout the 1930s,
who gets few if any mentions as a patron in the memoir literature (or, for
that matter, in his own quasi-memoir volume),16 was much sought after
and responsive as a cultural patron. (The next section of this essay is largely
based on Molotov's Sovnarkom archive.)
Stalin, of course, was in a category of his own. While his eminence tended
to disqualify him from engaging in ordinary patron-client relations in the
1930s and 1940s, he may be regarded as the universal and archetypal patron,
as in this extract from a fantasy about the writer Mikhail Bulgakov (whom
Stalin did in fact help):
Motorcycle ... brrm!!! In the Kremlin already! Misha goes into the hall,
and there sit Stalin, Molotov, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Mikoyan and
Yagoda.
Misha stands in the door, making a low bow.
STALIN: What's the matter? Why are you barefoot?
BULGAKOV (with a sad shrug): Well ... I don't have any boots.
STALIN: What is this? My writer going without boots? What an outrage!
Yagoda, take off your boots, give them to him.17
96 The Stalin Period
High officials in the cultural bureaucracies played a special role as patrons
of the intelligentsia. Anatolii Lunacharskii, as head of the Commissariat of
Enlightenment (Narkompros), was notoriously generous in this regard,
though the generosity of his response reduced the value of his interventions
on behalf of clients.18 As the writer Kornei Chukovskii recalled, as early as
1918 dozens of clients gathered every day outside Lunacharskii's apartment
in Petrograd, 'thirsting for his advice and help':
Pedagogues, workers, inventors, librarians, circus clowns, futurists, artists
of all schools and genres (from peredvizhniki to Cubists), philosophers,
ballerinas, hypnotists, singers, Proletkul't poets and simply poets, artists
of the former Imperial stage - all of them went to Anatolii Vasil'evich in
a very long queue up the dilapidated staircase to the crowded room which
finally came to be called the 'reception room' (priemnaya). 19
In the realm of cultural patronage, nobody was more important than Maxim
Gorky. His position was anomalous, since he was neither a cultural bureaucrat
nor a party leader. He established the role first during the Civil War
by virtue of his longtime close acquaintanceship with Lenin and other
Bolshevik leaders. Then, after his return to the Soviet Union at the end of
the 1920s, Gorky was essentially given the job of patron extraordinaire by
Stalin; indeed, this was probably one of the main incentives for him to
return. Chukovskii's tribute to Gorky's 'unforgettable role' as a patron of
children's literature ('How stubbornly he helped up children's writers
struggle with Leftist apologists, how many times he saved our books from the
then Narkompros, RAPP [the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers], and
so forth') is one of hundreds.20 There are more than 13000 letters to Gorky
from Soviet writers in the Gorky archive,21 a sizeable proportion of which
approach him as an actual or potential patron,22 and his activities in this
sphere in the first half of the 1930s were legendary.
Finally, institutional sources of patronage outside the cultural bureaucracy
should not be forgotten. Katerina Clark notes that in the early years of NEP,
when Narkompros's budget was drastically reduced, the Komsomol assumed
new importance as a source of patronage for Petrograd intellectuals.n
The GPU/NKVD and its leaders also provided important patronage for
some cultural and educational activities (Matvei Pogrebinskii's and Anton
Makarenko's communes for delinquents; the writers' expedition to the
White-Sea Canal that resulted in the Belomor volume,24 and so on). For
the artists of AKhRR (the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia,
established in the mid-1920s), trade unions and the Red Army were the main
sources of patronage.25 It should be noted that artists had access to private
patronage in a fully traditional sense: the commissioning of portraits of
patrons in the political world. The army leader Klim Voroshilov was one of
those whose portraits were painted by a client.26 Opponents of the AKhRR
Sheila Fitzpatrick 97
group claimed that AKhRR owed its success to a 'policy of worming a
privileged position by doing portraits of the establishment figures, who in
turn passed on lucrative commissions to the Association on behalf of the
organizations they headed'.27
5.2 What could patrons do for their clients?
There were three main categories of request from clients:
(i) goods and services;
(ii) protection, and;
(iii) intervention in professional disputes.
The first category is the one where we see patronage acting as a non-market
mechanism for the distribution of scarce goods, above all housing. Molotov's
Sovnarkom archive of the 1930s is full of requests from members of the intelligentsia,
writing to him as a patron (addressed by name and patronymic)
and putting their requests on a personal basis, for help in obtaining a larger
apartment.28 The letter of Nikolai Sidorenko, a member of the Writers'
Union, was a typical if florid example. Sidorenko described pathetically how
he lived with wife and stepson of 15 in one attic room, damp, low and dark,
13 square metres, off Arbat. As a result of 'every-day life and moral torments
of my family', his wife was suffering from severe nervous breakdown;
the boy was growing up 'abnormal, without his own corner'; his wife's
father, a 72-year-old invalid, had to beg corners in strange apartments.29
Writers, musicians, scientists, and artists were among those who approached
Molotov, often successfully, for help in obtaining housing.30
The second category - even more common, at least in the Great Purge
years - consists of requests for protection. In the Soviet case this could mean
intervention to stop the writer being harassed by colleagues or particular
state institutions; help in re-establishing a reputation after falling into
political disgrace; help in getting an arrested relative released or their
case reviewed, and so on. Take a characteristic selection of items from
Molotov's mailbag in the second half of the 1930s: Professor A. L.
Chizhevskii appealed for protection from harassment by the Communist
biologist B. M. Zavadovskii;31 Academician Derzhavin asked for help in
resisting 'persecution' at the hands of Academician Deborin;32 I. I. Mints
asked Molotov to squash a libellous rumour that Mints was a friend of the
disgraced 'Trotskyite', Leopol'd Averbakh (former leader of RAPP);33 the poet
A. Zharov complained about the 'death sentence' pronounced on his recent
book in a Pravda review.34
There is no reason to think Molotov was unusual in the scope of his
patronage activities (after all, as noted above, he is not celebrated as a patron
in the annals of the literary intelligentsia). Similar 'client' cases can be found
98 The Stalin Period
in Ordzhonikidze's archives. In 1931, for example, the former Menshevik
economist, 0. A. Ermanskii, wrote to Ordzhonikidze asking for his help in
dissipating the 'social isolation into which I have fallen'.35 There are many
letters to party leaders in the archives from aggrieved actors, singers and
other performers complaining about being denied good roles.36 Agranov of
the NKVD, a patron of the Vakhtangov Theatre, was the person to whom
the actress Tsetsiliya Mansurova regularly applied when her husband, a
member of the aristocratic Sheremet'ev family, was disenfranchised or
arrested because of his social origins.37 When the composer Dmitrii
Shostakovich fell into disgrace over his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk
District in 1936, he turned naturally to his friend and patron, Marshall
Tukhachevskii.38
The third type of help for which clients appealed to patrons was intervention
in professional disputes. Lysenko's feud with the geneticists, for
example, was the subject of many appeals from both sides.39 Physics, too,
was a subject of appeals and counter-appeals. For example, the militants
at Pod znamenem marksizma, M. B. Mitin, A. A. Maksimov and P. F. Yudin,
sought Molotov's support for their controversial attack on 'idealism' in
physics,40 while Petr Kapitsa wrote in defence of the militants' targets to
Stalin, Molotov and Mezhlauk, characterising Pod znamenem marksizma's
intervention in physics as 'scientifically illiterate' and deploring the assumption
that 'if you are not a materialist in physics .. . you are an enemy of the
people'.41
Artists were perhaps even more prone than scientists to appeal to patrons
to resolve professional disputes. At the beginning of 1937, Konstantin
Iuon, Aleksandr Gerasimov (head of the Moscow Union of Artists), Sergei
Gerasimov and Igor' Grabar' asked Molotov to receive a delegation to
adjudicate their quarrels with Kerzhentsev's Arts Committee, claiming that
'extra and decisive interference of authoritative instances is necessary so as
not to allow that union [of artists] to collapse completely'.42
5.3 How to acquire a patron
The patron-client relationship requires the existence of some sort of
personal connection. That connection may be social or familial, or have
occurred through a chance meeting in a work context, in a train, at a resort,
for example, or through an introduction. Boris Pil'nyak was taken along to
meet an early patron, Trotsky, by A. K. Voronskii (editor of Krasnaya nov')
in the early 1920s.43 How he met a later patron, Ezhov, is unknown, but
most likely it was through Babel, who was a friend and former lover of
Ezhov's wife. Leopol'd Averbakh knew Yagoda because his sister married
him; one of the sources of his (and Yagoda's) contact with Maxim Gorky
was that his uncle, Zinovii Peshkov, was Gorky's adopted son. Meyerhold
expanded his network of party and security-police patrons through the salon
Sheila Fitzpatrick 99
run by his second wife, Zinaida Raikh.44 Painters could acquire patrons by
painting them: q.v. requests to pose from painters Mark Shafran (to Andrei
Zhdanov) and B. V. Ioganson (to Ivan Gronskii).45
But these are only the beginnings of chains by which a potential client
could establish contact with a patron. There were political leaders who were
known to specialise in certain types of clients on the basis of ethnicity,
profession, avocation etc.: Mikoyan for Armenians,46 Ordzhonikidze for
Georgians,47 Vyshinskii for lawyers and diplomats,48 Voroshilov (an amateur
singer) for opera singers ... And there were also introductions from lowerlevel
patrons: for example, when Pil'nyak was in trouble in the mid-1920s
after the publication of his scandalous novella, Paves( nepogashennoi luny,
he approached a middle-level patron, Ivan Skvortsov-Stepanov, then editor
of Izvestiya, who arranged a meeting with Rykov (who 'advised me to write
letters of contrition, which I did').49 And people with contacts might pass
on a letter 'kuda sleduet', as Babel did when he handed Ezhov's wife a letter
from Eduard Bagritskii's widow asking for the release from prison of her
sister's husband.5°Finally, major cultural institutions like the Bol'shoi or
Vakhtangov theatres would have their own sets of patronage connections
that could be activated on behalf of a member in need.51
5.4 Brokers
There were certain leading members of the cultural and scholarly professions
- P. L. Kapitsa and S. I. Vavilov were examples in the natural sciences
- who acted as representatives of a whole group of clients in dealing with
highly-placed patrons. They assumed this broker function because of their
professional statures and their established connections with various government
leaders: chairmen of the Academy of Sciences, secretaries of professional
unions, directors of scientific institutes, and so on, had it ex officio.
Sometimes brokering was a matter of representing the professional interests
of a group, as when Aleksandr Fadeev, secretary of the Writers' Union, wrote
to Molotov in January 1940 to express the distress of the literary community
that none of the newly established 100000 ruble Stalin Prizes had been
earmarked for literature.52 Sometimes it meant interceding on behalf of subordinates
- for example when Graftio, head of Svir'stroi, wrote to Leningrad
leader M. S. Chudov in 1935 on behalf of Svir'stroi engineers threatened
with deportation.53
Many 'broker' interventions had to do with arrests within the professional
community that the broker represented. Kapitsa, for example, appealed to
Valerii Mezhlauk (deputy chairman of Sovnarkom) and Stalin about the
arrest of V. A. Pock in 1937 and to Molotov and Stalin about Landau's arrest
(in 1938) and continuing imprisonment (in 1939).54 S. I. Vavilov wrote to
Beria in 1944 attempting to gain the release of N. A. Kozyrev, a young
astronomer from Pulkovo.55 Gorky, of course, was famous for such inter-
100 The Stalin Period
ventions on behalf of Petrograd intellectuals during the Civil War, and
continued the practice - though increasingly sparingly - in the 1930s.
Meyerhold frequently appealed to his patrons Avel' Enukidze and Genrikh
Yagoda on behalf of arrested friends and acquaintances in the theatre world
- it was said of him that 'he practically never refused anyone'.56 If this is not
hyperbole, however, it suggests that Meyerhold lacked the quality of sober
calculation of the odds that characterised the best brokers (there was no
point in a broker using up credit with a patron on a hopeless case).
5.5 How to write to a patron
While other forms of initial approach to a patron existed (for example, a
word to the patron about the client's needs from a family member or assistant),
writing a letter was the standard way of communicating a clientelist
request. The composition of such letters was a serious matter: Kapitsa
'worked on letters to "up there" no less seriously and responsibly than on
an article or a paper' and often wrote four or five drafts before he was
satisfied. Kapitsa, who was often writing as a broker for the physics community
rather than for himself, wrote dignified, substantive letters with a
minimum of flattery and little intrusion of the personal; some of his letters
were so like articles that they contained separate headed sections and even
on one occasion an epigraph.57 Like most clients, Kapitsa used a formal
salutation with name and patronymic ('Much respected [mnogouvazhaemyi]
Valerii Ivanovich') for lower-level patrons like Valerii Mezhlauk, Karl
Bauman, or Nikolai Gorbunov, ending his letters 'Yours, P. Kapitsa'. In
writing to top leaders in the 1930s, however, he used the less common style
of addressing his letters to 'Comrade Stalin' and 'Comrade Molotov' without
further salutation, ending his letters simply with a signature.58
Natal'ya Sats approached the task of writing equally seriously. In 1941,
visiting Moscow seeking intervention on her behalf in troubles in her
theatre work in Kazakhstan, she sat up all night in the bathroom of a friend's
apartment in Moscow, writing on the window-ledge, composing a letter to
Aleksandr Shcherbakov, secretary of the Central Committee and a major
force in cultural affairs. The letter went through 15 or 20 versions. It was
important to be brief, in Sats' view; on the other hand, it was also necessary
to strike a personal note. In the letter to Shcherbakov, whom Sats did not
know well, this meant slipping in a reminder of past contacts, however
tenuous ('He probably knows me from past work. Once Aleksei Maksimovich
Gor'kii mentioned me in a letter to him').
Once the letter was finished, both Kapitsa and Sats agreed, it must be
hand-delivered. Kapitsa would send his wife, personal assistant or secretary
to deliver his letter to the Central Committee and obtain a receipt.59 Sats
delivered her own letter by hand to Shcherbakov's assistant, asking him to
give Shcherbakov the letter personally at once.60
Sheila Fitzpatrick 101
Although the approach to a patron was normally by letter, the reply, if
there was one, usually came by telephone.61 Two days after the delivery of
her letter, Natal'ya Sats received a telephone call from Shcherbakov's assistant
giving her the good news that Shcherbakov supported her in the quarrels
in the Kazakhstan theatre world about which she had complained.62 For
a client to make his pitch to a patron over the telephone was apparently
very rare, probably because this approach seemed insufficiently deferential.
(There were exceptions, however. In 1937, the much-rewarded writer Aleksei
Tolstoi had the nerve to telephone Molotov's secretary and request - though
it came across almost as a demand - an 11-room dacha in a particular location
that he preferred to that of the dacha he had been offered.63)
5.6 The human factor: affective ties between patrons
and clients
In 1930, Mikhail Bulgakov received a telephone call from Stalin responding
to his complaints about persecution and censorship and promising to
remedy the situation. News of this call spread rapidly on the grapevine
through the intelligentsia. As an anonymous police agent reported, the story
had had an enormous impact on intellectuals' views of Stalin: 'It's as if a
dam had broken, and everyone around saw the true face of comrade Stalin.'
They speak of his simplicity and accessibility. They say that Stalin is not to
blame for the bad things that happen; 'he lays down the right line, but
around him are scoundrels. These scoundrels persecuted Bulgakov, one of
the most talented Soviet writers. Various literary rascals were making a career
out of persecution of Bulgakov, and now Stalin has given them a slap in the
face'. Intellectuals were talking of Stalin 'warmly and with love'.64
The conventions of Soviet client-patron relations demanded that they be
represented as based on friendship or at least mutual regard, or sometimes
even in familial terms (the patron as father who 'pitieth his children'). These
conventions are most evident in the hagiographic memoir literature on
great men - from political leaders like Ordzhonikidze to cultural figures
like Maxim Gorky - in which the client-memoirist dwells affectionately on
the deeply human traits (generosity, compassion, understanding, paternal
solicitude) of the patron as well as emphasising his high culture. Kalinin
'looked up at me with sparkling eyes and smil[ed] his kind old-man's smile,
as if his entire face had lit up in an instant'.65
Valerian Vladimirovich [Kuibyshev] was a many-sided man, a great connoisseur
of art and literature, enchanting, uncommonly simple and
modest in approach . .. He liked nature and flowers very much. When we
went out on the sea, he, with youthful animation, called us up on deck to
enjoy the spectacle of the beautiful sunset. 'How sad that all this is so fleeting,'
he said, when the multihued sky dulled and grey twilight descended.66
102 The Stalin Period
Although these memoirs were written for public consumption and, to a large
extent, according to formula, we can find similar statements of affection for
patrons in diaries.67 This does not fully answer the question of how 'sincere'
such protestations were. But our interest is less in whether the emotions
expressed were genuine than in the fact that their expression was conventionally
required in a patronage situation. Even the irreverent Nadezhda
Mandelstam writes of her husband's patron, Bukharin, with affection; while
the cynical Shostakovich called Tukhachevsky his 'friend' and 'one of the
most interesting people I knew', while acknowledging that, unlike other
admirers of the Marshall, 'I behaved very independently. I was cocky, [but]
Tukhachevsky liked that.'68
Many client-memoirists describe their patrons as people whose happiness
in life came from helping others (or specific categories of others, like young
people or artists). As applied to Soviet party leaders, this may seem a bizarre
characterisation. Yet it must have had resonance, for it is common also in
the thousands of letters of appeal that humble Soviet citizens - non-elite
members without direct, personal access to a patron - wrote to political
leaders in the 1930s.69 One can imagine that subjectively the belief of a
Stalinist obkom secretary or Politburo member that he was basically a good
man doing something useful for humanity must have rested to a significant
extent on his patronage activities, demonstrating his capacity for loyalty
(to members of his official 'family'), generosity and civilised values (with
respect to elite clients), and compassion (towards clients in distress and
popular supplicants).
If this is correct, we would expect the affective ties to go two ways.
Evidence on patrons' attitudes to their clients is harder to come by than its
obverse, but is not totally lacking: Molotov noted a 'mutual liking' (vzaimnaya
byla takaya svyaz') between Voroshilov and his client, the painter
Aleksandr Gerasimov.7° Khrushchev, whose connections with the intelligentsia
in the 1930s seem to have been less abundant than those of many
other leaders, emphasises his personal regard in the few instances he recalls
in his memoirs, for example, with regard to the engineer-inventor Paton.71
If a particular patron-client relationship was too distant for the notion of
friendship to be appropriate, it was at least necessary to impart some touch
of the personal. This is evident, albeit in stylised form, in the possibly
anecdotal description that Vyshinskii's biographer provides of Vyshinskii's
relationship with his client Aleksandr Vertinskii, a famous popular singer.
After Vyshinskii had made possible Vertinskii's return from emigration in
China, he supposedly attended one of Vertinskii's concerts, sitting
modestly in a side box hidden from inquisitive eyes behind velvet drapes.
However, his presence was no secret to the artist on the stage. He knew
perfectly well whom Destiny had appointed as his patron. When he
started singing, as a token of respect he turned very slightly towards the
Sheila Fitzpatrick 103
box. Only very slightly but it was still noticeable. And he also bowed
separately and with particular dignity towards the box.72
For Natal'ya Sats, exiled to the provinces in the 1940s, it was a matter of the
highest importance to establish new clientelist ties in the towns to which
she had been exiled. As her description makes clear, this meant trying
by every means possible to arrange a meeting with a potential patron, and
then - most important - somehow establishing personal rapport, however
tenuous, in the course of the meeting. In Alma-Ata, for example, when Sats
finally got to see Zhumbai Shaiakhmetov, second secretary of the Kazakhstan
party, for example, the success of the meeting - that is, the establishment
of a personal connection - was demonstrated when Shaiakhmetov (who also
knew how to play this game) playfully dispatched a messenger to Sats
bearing the box of matches from his desk which, at their meeting, had
momentarily distracted her attention. Later, when enemies in the Saratov
Theatre were threatening to have her transferred further into the boondocks,
she appealed 'personally, tears running down my face', to the patron
who had got her the job, G. A. Borkov, first secretary of the regional party
organisation.73
5.7 Hierarchies of patronage
In his memoirs, Yurii Elagin tells the story of the epic 'battle of patrons'
between two well-connected theatrical figures, L. P. Ruslanov, administrator
of the Vakhtangov Theatre, and A. D. Popov, director of the Moscow Red
Army. Ruslanov and Popov lived in the same apartment house, and the
trouble arose when Popov hung flowerpots from his balcony which
Ruslanov regarded as a potential danger to passers-by. Using his contacts,
Ruslanov got an order from the head of the raion militia to remove the
flowerpots; Popov trumped this by getting permission from the head of the
militia of the city of Moscow to keep his flowerpots. Ruslanov then went to
the chief director of militia of the whole Soviet Union for a removal order,
to which Popov responded with a letter from Voroshilov instructing that he
should not be further harassed about his flowerpots. But Ruslanov was the
winner when he went to Kalinin, president of the USSR, and obtained an
order that the flowerpots should be removed.74
Apocryphal or not, this story is a nice illustration of the hierarchies of
patronage that could be invoked by persistent and well-connected clients.
The Vakhtangov Theatre, according to Elagin, had its set of middle-level
patrons in the pre-1937 period - Maxim Gorky, Avel' Enukidze, Daniil
Sulimov (chairman of Sovnarkom RSFSR) and Yakov Agranov (deputy head
of OGPU) - who were 'always ready to do everything possible for our
theater'. But there were also even more highly placed persons, notably
Voroshilov and Molotov (both Politburo members, Molotov chair of
104 The Stalin Period
Sovnarkom), who could also be called on in extreme cases.75 These middlelevel
patrons were themselves clients whose efficacy as patrons often
depended on access to patrons at the very top. Thus Gorky, for example,
was effective as a patron only so long as Stalin, Molotov, Yagoda and so on
were prepared to honour his requests for his clients.
Naturally in the politically perilous circumstances of the Soviet Union in
the 1930s, a patron's status was not necessarily stable:76 he might rise and
fall in the hierarchy of patronage; indeed he might even fall from the status
of patron completely and become a client-supplicant. Bukharin provides a
good illustration of this process. As the sharp-eyed Nadezhda Mandelstam
noted, 'Up until 1928 he would cry "Idiots!" and seize the telephone, but
from 1930 he would frown and say: "I have to think whom to ask [komu
obratit'sia] [sic]." 177 Molotov was one patron whom Bukharin successfully
approached on Mandelstam's behalf in the early 1930s;78 and, although
Bukharin did not know Gorky particularly well,79 he recognised his power
as a patron in the early 1930s and 'kept wanting to go to "Maksimych" in
his search for "transmission channels" '.80 Ordzhonikidze and Voroshilov
were figures to whom he turned on his own behalf in the last years.81
5.8 Perils and pleasures of patronage
As already noted, there were no obvious tangible benefits to the Soviet
patron in having clients. Soviet officials' tenure was not dependent on
popularity or winning elections. Clients might praise their patrons' generosity
- but too fulsome expressions of enthusiasm for a local leader could
provoke the accusation that he was developing a local 'cult of personality'.
Indeed, in the suspicion-laden world of Stalinist politics, there were definite
risks associated with being too active or committed a patron. The pejorative
words khvosty and semeistva were frequently invoked when local leaders were
unmasked as 'enemies of the people' during the Great Purges. An example
of the possible pitfalls of patronage comes from the memoirs of Ivan
Gronskii, Izvestiya editor, who was a patron of old-school realist artists in
the 1930s. The day after a group of his 'clients' escorted him home as a
gesture of appreciation after his pro-realism intervention at an artists'
meeting, Gronskii received a telephone call from Stalin with the abrupt and
threatening query: 'What kind of demonstration was that yesterday? (Chto
vchera byla za demonstratsiya?)'82
That patronage of the intelligentsia could be a negative in Stalin's eyes is
confirmed by Molotov's reported comments on Voroshilov, who 'loved to
play a bit at being, so to speak, a patron of the arts (metsenat), a protector
(pokrovitel') of artists and so on'. Stalin saw this as a weakness, 'because artists,
they're irresponsible people (rotozei). They are harmless in themselves, but
around them swarm all kinds of dubious riffraff (shantrapa polosataya). They
exploit that connection - with Voroshilov's subordinates, with his family'.83
Sheila Fitzpatrick 105
The archetypal example of a good Bolshevik ruined by his taste for patronage
was Avel' Enukidze, secretary of TsIK, whose dramatic fall from grace in
1935 was one of the harbingers of the Great Purges. Enukidze was well
known both as a patron of the arts with a taste for ballerinas and as one of
the party leaders who was most likely to be sympathetic to the plight of
'former people', members of the old nobility and privileged classes who were
liable to disenfranchisement and other forms of discrimination in the Soviet
period.84 The accusations made at the June 1935 plenum focussed particularly
on the latter: in Ezhov's words, 'Enukidze created a situation in which
any Whiteguard could and did get in to work in the Kremlin, often using
the direct support and high protection (pokrovitel'stvom) of Enukidze'. People
got a job in the TsIK apparatus through friends and family connections, and
Enukidze himself was 'linked through personal, friendly relations' with
many TsIK employees. Even when their alien social backgrounds and 'antiSoviet
attitudes' were reported to Enukidze by the NKVD, he continued to
shield them and refused to fire them. He used government money from
TsIK's 'secret fund' to support various unfortunates, including six hundred
rubles to 'Stepanova, one of the wives of the writer [Nikolai] Erdman, exiled
for a lampoon against Soviet power'. All this made Enukidze 'the most
typical example of the degenerating and complacent Communist who not
only fails to see the class enemy, but actually forms an alliance (smykat'sya)
with him', in Ezhov's words.85 It also led inexorably to corruption, sexual as
well as financial.86
Defending himself at the closed session of the Central Committee,
Enukidze regretted having involuntarily aided the class enemy in some
instances, but still managed to convey that his patronage was needed and
justifiable in human terms:
There were really a lot of people to whom I gave that help that is now
characterised as my high protection in regard to certain persons. Unfortunately,
circumstances were such that people appealed to me for everything:
if they needed an apartment, material help, things (veshchi), or to
be sent somewhere to a rest home. Through me both our people (nashi)
and people alien to us (chuzhie) received aid, I distributed that aid to
everyone.87
What Enukidze personally got out of his patronage activities (before he lost
his life for them) is not known. In general, however, what patrons got out
of patronage were intangibles: prestige and status associated with the ability
to act as a patron; a sense of noblesse oblige or a desire to play the great
man as it was traditionally played; a desire to see themselves as good,
generous people; a desire to receive flattery and gratitude from clients.
'Tukhachevsky liked being a patron of the arts', wrote his client and friend
Shostakovich. 'He liked finding "young talents" and helping them. Perhaps
106 The Stalin Period
because the marshal himself had been a military Wunderkind, or perhaps
because he liked demonstrating his enormous power.'88 Patronage is a traditional
prerogative of power and also a visible mark of it. Writing of her
refusal on principle to establish patronage connections, an informant in
Ledeneva's blat study notes that 'the nomenclatura people I met did not pay
me any respect for that [refusal]. They respected those who made them feel
powerful and helpful.'89 They would have thought better of her, she felt,
if she had approached them as a humble client asking for favours.
There were added benefits in the case of patronage of the arts, such as
access to the world of celebrity and glamour - famous singers and film actors,
writers and scientists of international renown - to which members of Stalin's
Politburo were drawn just as contemporary American politicians are often
drawn to Hollywood and sports stars. Like rulers in many societies, Stalinist
politicians obviously felt that contact with the arts and scientists adorned
them. To some degree, patronage was an indicator of kul'turnosf for some
Soviet leaders. In the Gronskii story cited above, Gronskii portrayed himself
as embarrassed but also flattered by the fulsomely-expressed admiration of
the artists, 'famous old masters of painting' as he puts it.90
There was even some allure in the risk inherent in acting as patron to
someone of high reputation in the cultural world who was under a cloud.
This is most often seen in the case of middle-level patrons like journal
editors, who would take the risk of publishing a controversial poem or story
because of the kudos to be gained within the intelligentsia through such
boldness. But the same dynamic may have operated at a higher level, for
example in Vyshinskii's patronage of the former emigre singer Vertinskii,
whose semi-disgrace was underlined by the ban on publicising the concerts
which he was occasionally allowed to give after his return.91
Patronage networks are important to the functioning of many societies;
patronage of the arts exists in some form in virtually all. But how much
patronage matters in the day-to-day life of clients and patrons depends on
the seriousness and frequency of the clients' need for protection. Stalin's
Russia was a dangerous place to live. Insecurity and the ever-present danger
of a major personal calamity were facts of life for the elites as much as
(perhaps more than) for lower social strata. It was not uncommon, even
among the privileged intelligentsia, for a person suddenly to find himself
in truly desperate straits as a result of the loss of an apartment or ration
privileges or an accident at work that was construed as 'wrecking'. Arrest or
the public besmirching of reputation that might lead to loss of employment
and arrest were also common occurrences. Having a patron to 'go to' could
make the difference between surviving or failing to survive.
This was one of the features of Soviet patronage that distinguished it from
patronage in late imperial Russia or most other modern societies. Another
distinguishing feature was that goods and services were in chronically short
supply in the Stalin period, and the party-state had monopoly control over
Sheila Fitzpatrick 107
their distribution. If one had the misfortune to be without a decent apartment
in Moscow, how else could one obtain it without recourse to a patron?
If one's child suddenly fell critically ill, how else could one get access to the
right doctor and the right hospital to treat her? If one lost one's job or was
arbitrarily denied access to the 'closed' foodstore, how to remedy the situation
except by appeal to a patron? The malfunctioning of the Soviet legal
system was another of the features of Stalinist society that made patronage
practices - as well as their humbler counterpart, petitioning - essential.
One of the fascinating aspects of patronage in Stalinist society is its strange
relationship to official ideology. On the one hand, the patron-client
relationship exemplified the personalistic interests of officialdom that were
routinely deplored and sometimes harshly punished as corruption. On the
other hand, this same relationship exemplified the human and familial
motif that was at the heart of Stalinist discourse about rulers and people.92
In the familial metaphor, the whole Soviet Union was a family (sem'ya) with
Stalin as the father; and it is only a short semantic step from sem'ya to
semeistvo (the pejorative applied to political patronage relations). If Stalin
was 'father' and 'benefactor' of his people, was he not by the same token
the universal 'patron' of Soviet citizens, bound by ties of mutual affection
to his 'clients'? Were not all the vozhdi, local and regional, construed as
benevolent patrons of the citizenry, ready to respond to need and rescue
from distress? It may be argued that patron-client relations in the everyday
world were exactly what gave that rhetoric a grounding in reality for
Soviet citizens, making patronage practices a kind of intuitive proof of the
ideological premise that the Soviet regime was the people's benefactor.
Notes
*Thanks to Alena Ledeneva, T. H. Rigby, Yuri Slezkine, and Lewis Siegelbaum,
as well as participants in discussion at the Munich conference, for helping to clarify
my thoughts on this topic. I am also indebted to Jonathan Bone for his services as
my research assistant. Note: this chapter is largely based on an article entitled
'Intelligentsia and Power: Client-Patron Relations in Stalin's Russia', in Manfred
Hildermeier, ed., Stalinismus var dem Zweiten Weltkrieg: Neue Wege der Forschung/
Stalinism before the Second World War: New Avenues ofResearch (Munich: Oldenbourg
Verlag, 1998).
1. Nadezhda Mandel'shtam, Vospominaniya (New York: Izdat. Im. Chekhova, 1970),
pp. 119-20.
2. T. H. Rigby was a pioneer in studies of political patronage in the Soviet Union:
much of his work on the subject is collected in his Political Elites in the USSR:
Central Leaders and Local Cadres from Lenin to Gorbachev (Aldershot: Edward Elgar,
1990). On political patronage in the Stalin period, see Graeme Gill, The Origins
ofthe Stalinist Political System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), esp.
pp. 129-30, 315-16, 324-5.
108 The Stalin Period
3. David L. Ransel, The Politics or Catherinian Russia: the Panin Party (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1975), p. 1.
4. On blat, see Alena V. Ledeneva, 'Formal Institutions and Informal Networks in
Russia: a Study of Blat' (DPhil, Cambridge University, 1996).
5. See Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope against Hope (London: Atheneum, 1970) and
Hope Abandoned (London: Atheneum, 1974), both trans. Max Hayward (Russian
titles Vospominaniya and Vtoraya kniga); and Natal'ya Sats, Zhizn' - yavlenie
polosatoe (Moscow: Novosti, 1991), esp. pp. 377-92, 443-4, 467, 479-80.
6. Thanks to Yuri Slezkine and Alena Ledeneva for their advice on the language of
patronage.
7. Anthony Hall, 'Patron-Client Relations: Concepts and Terms', in Steffen W.
Schmidt, Laura Guasti, Carl H. Lande and James C. Scott, eds, Friends, Followers
and Factions: a Reader in Political Clientelism (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1977), p. 510; Ernest Gellner, 'Patrons and Clients', in Ernest Gellner and
John Waterbury, eds, Patrons and Clients in Mediterranean Societies (London:
Duckworth, 1977), p. 4. On asymmetry, durability, and reciprocity, see John
Waterbury, 'An Attempt to Put Patrons and Clients in their Place', in Gellner and
Waterbury, Patrons and Clients, pp. 329-32. On the personal aspect, see James
Scott, 'Patronage or Exploitation?', in ibid., p. 22.
8. Waterbury, 'Patrons and Clients in their Place', p. 336.
9. Ibid., p. 339.
10. See Gill, Origins, pp. 129-30, on the ways in which 'local control by a personalized
network' could protect subnational leaders from both grassroots criticism
and interference and investigation from above. The best concrete description of
such a ring, based on regional party and NKVD archive material from Ekaterinburg
(Sverdlovsk), is in James Harris, 'The Great Urals: Regional Interests and the
Evolution of the Soviet System, 1917-1937' (PhD diss., University of Chicago
1996), ch. 6.
11. Waterbury, 'Patrons and Clients in their Place', p. 331.
12. Daniel T. Orlovsky, 'Political Clientelism in Russia: the Historical Perspective', in
T. H. Rigby and Bohdan Harasymiw, eds, Leadership Selection and Patron-Client
Relations in the USSR and Yugoslavia (London: Allen & Unwin, 1983), pp. 175-99.
13. D. A. Aleksandrov, 'Istoricheskaya antropologiya nauki v Rossii', Voprosy istorii
estestvoznaniya i tekhniki, no. 4 (1994). This article appeared in English translation
in Russian Studies in History, (Fall 1995) 62-91.
14. For a bibliographical survey of this literature, which incidentally provides a useful
guide to the range of 'acceptable' subjects of memoirs, see the section on
'Deyateli Kommunisticheskoi partii i sovetskogo gosudarstva .. .', in V. Z.
Drobizhev, ed., Sovetskoe obshchestvo v vospominaniyakh i dnevnikakh, vol. 1
(Moscow: Kniga, 1987), pp. 26-101.
15. See Arkady Vaksberg, The Prosecutor and the Prey: Vyshinsky and the 1930s Moscow
Show Trials, trans. Jan Butler (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990), pp. 3-7,
275-7; Yurii Elagin, Ukroshchenie iskusstv (New York: Izd. im. Chekhova, 1952),
pp. 48, 52; Yurii Elagin, Temnyi genii (Vsevolod Meierkhol'd) (New York: Izd. im.
Chekhova, 1955), p. 291.
16. Sto sorok besed s Molotovym. Iz dnevnika F. Chueva (Moscow: Terra, 1991).
17. Vitalii Shentalinskii, Raby svobody. V literaturnykh arkhivakh KGB ([Moscow]: Parus,
1995), p. 120.
18. See Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat or Enlightenment (London: Cambridge
University Press, 1970), pp. 131-2. Examples of Lunacharskii's activity as a patron
Sheila Fitzpatrick 109
may be found in RGASPI, f. 142, d. 647 (Pis'ma akademikov, deyatelei nauki i
kul'tury o pomoshchi ... 1928-33).
19. Kornei Chukovskii, Sovremenniki. Portrety i etyudy (Moscow: Molodaya gvardiya,
1963), pp. 401-2.
20. Ibid., p. 360.
21. Novyi mir, no. 3 (1968) 6.
22. For Gorky's position after his return to the USSR and his patronage activities, see
Shentalinskii, Raby svobody, pp. 302-77 passim; and Valentina Khodasevich,
'Takim ya znala Gor'kogo', Novyi mir, no. 3 (1968) 11-66.
23. Katerina Clark, Petersburg: Crucible ofCultural Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1995), p. 145.
24. Be/omorsko-Bal'tiiskii kanal imeni Stalina (Moscow, 1934).
25. Elizabeth Valkenier, Russian Realist Art. The State and Society: the Peredvizhniki and
their Tradition (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1977), p. 151. For another example of military
patronage, see the discussion of LOKAF in Evgenii Dobrenko, Metafora vlasti:
Literatura stalinskoi epokhi v istoricheskom osveshchenii (Munich: Verlag Otto Sagner,
1993), pp. 138-51.
26. Sta sorok besed, p. 315.
27. Valkenier, Russian Realist Art, p. 156.
28. See Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF), f. 5446, op. 82, d. 72,
I. 114 for a letter of early 1938 from the housing officer noting that as soon as
the NKVD released the apartments and rooms it had sealed up after arresting their
occupants, he would get back to Molotov with a response to the clients' cases
Molotov had raised.
29. Molotov sends this on to Bulganin with a request for action. GARF, f. 5446,
op. 82, d. 72, I. 115.
30. See, for example, GARF, f. 5446, op. 82, d. 77, II. 9-10; d. 72, I. 34; d. 51 [n.p.]
(case of Academician V. I. Vernadskii); d. 51, I. 286 (thanks from the Kukryniksy,
cartoonists).
31. GARF, f. 5446, op. 82, d. 51, I. 144.
32. Tsentral'nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv istoriko-politicheskoi dokumentatsii SanktPeterburga
(TsGAIPD), f. 24, op. 2v, d. 2220, 11. 103-5.
33. GARF, f. 5446, op. 82, d. 53, I. 130.
34. GARF, f. 5446, op. 82, d. 70, I. 165.
35. Rossiskii archiv sotsial'no-politicheskoi istorii (RGASPI), f. 85, op. 28, d. 77.
Ermanskii's work on the scientific organisation of labour was savagely attacked
in 1930, and he was expelled from the Communist Academy along with other
Mensheviks.
36. See, for example, the letter to Zhdanov in TsGAIPD f. 24, op. 2v, d. 2679, 11. 28-30.
37. Elagin, Ukroshchenie, pp. 52-3.
38. Testimony: the Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, ed. Solomon Volkov, trans.
Antonina W. Bouis (New York: Harper, 1980), pp. 98-9.
39. See, for example, the letter to Zhdanov in TsGAIPD f. 24, op. 2v, d. 2679, II.
28-30.
40. GARF, f. 5446, op. 82, d. 65, I. 207. The attack was launched in PZM nos 7 and
11-12 (1937).
41. P. L. Kapitsa, Pis'ma o nauke 1930-1980 (Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1989),
p. 151.
42. GARF, f. 5446, op. 82, d. 53, I. 82. The meeting was duly held on 11 February
1937, Kerzhentsev also being present; GARF, f. 5446, op. 82, d. 53, I. 102.
l 10 The Stalin Period
43. From Pil'nyak's statement under interrogation by the NKVD, 11 December 1937,
cited in Shentalinskii, Raby svobody, p. 196.
44. Elagin, Temnyi genii, p. 291.
45. TsGAIPD, f. 24, op. 2v, d. 2219, I. 1; Ivan Gronskii, Jz proshlogo . .. Vospominaniya
(Moscow, 1991), p. 142.
46. After the arrest of her stepfather, the Armenian Gevork Alikhanov, Elena Bonner's
mother appealed to Mikoyan for help, even though they had not been particularly
close friends judging by Bonner's recollections; moreover, Mikoyan
responded with an offer to adopt Elena and her younger brother. Elena Bonner,
Mothers and Daughters, trans. Antonina W. Bouis (New York: Vintage Books, 1993),
pp. 123-4.
47. RGASPI, f. 85 (Ordzhonikidze fond) contains many such letters.
48. Vaksberg, Prosecutor and Prey, pp. 3-4, 275.
49. Shentalinskii, Raby svobody, p. 197.
SO. From Babel's confession, in ibid., p. SO.
51. See Yurii Elagin's examples in his Ukroshchenie iskusstv, including his own case.
52. GARF, f. 5446, op. 81a, d. 338, II. 76-8.
53. TSGAIPD, f. 24, op. 2v, d. 1515, II. 64-5.
54. Ibid., II. 184-5.
55. Paul Josephson, Physics and Politics in Revolutionary Russia (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), p. 316. From Academy of Sciences
archive.
56. Elagin, Temnyi genii, pp. 294-5.
57. Kapitsa, Pis'ma o nauke, with an introduction by former secretary P. E. Rubinin,
pp. 11-12.
58. Ibid., passim. In 1943, Kapitsa switched to 'Much respected Vyacheslav
Mikhailovich' for Molotov and retained this style thereafter, using it also in his
letters to Khrushchev, Mikoyan and Malenkov in the 1950s. Stalin remained
'comrade Stalin' to the end, though from 1945 Kapitsa ended his letters to him
with 'Yours', or 'Respectfully yours'.
59. Ibid., pp. 11-12.
60. Sats, Zhizn', p. 446.
61. K. Rossiyanov, 'Stalin as Lysenko's Editor: Reshaping Political Discourse in Soviet
Science', Russian History, 21, no. 1 (1994) 49-63.
62. Sats, Zhizn', p. 446.
63. GARF, f. 5446, op. 82, d. 56, I. 154. (Molotov approved this request, though he
cut the dacha size down to ten rooms.)
64. Shentalinskii, Raby svobody, pp. 124-5.
65. Mikhail Sholokhov, 'Velikii drug literatury', in M. I. Kalinin ob iskusstve i literature:
Stat'i, rechi, besedy (Moscow: Gos. izdat. khudozh. lit., 1957), pp. 234-7.
66. Galina Serebryakova, 'V. V. Kuibyshev', in O Valeriane Kuibysheve: Vospominaniya,
ocherki, stat'i (Moscow: Politizdat, 1983), pp. 219-21.
67. For example, Galina Shtange on Lazar Kaganovich (patron of her women's group)
in Veronique Garros, Natalia Korenevskaya and Thomas Lahusen, eds, Intimacy
and Terror: Soviet Diaries of the 1930s (New York: The New Press, 1995), p. 184.
68. Shostakovich, Testimony, p. 96.
69. On this, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, 'Supplicants and Citizens: Public Letter-Writing in
Soviet Russia in the 1930s', Slavic Review 55, no. 1 (1996) 78-105.
70. Sta sorok besed, p. 315.
71. Khrushchev Remembers, trans. Strobe Talbott (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), pp.
116-19.
Sheila Fitzpatrick 111
72. Vaksberg, Prosecutor and Prey, p. 237.
73. Sats, Zhizn', pp. 443-4, 479.
74. Elagin, Ukroshchenie, pp. 66-9.
75. Ibid., p. 48.
76. Note that patronage relations were not without risk to the client: the patron
might be disgraced. In 1939, the young writer A. 0. Avdeenko was blamed for
his connections with unmasked 'enemies of the people', the industrialist
Gvkhariya and Urals party leader Kabakov. See D. L. Babichenko, Pisateli i tsenzory.
Sovetskaya literatura 1940-kh godov pod politicheskim kontrolem TsK (Moscow:
Rossiiya molodaya, 1994), pp. 26-7. Pil'nyak was another whose connections with
opposition figures was held against him. It has been suggested that the fall of
theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold at the end of the 1930s was associated with
his clientalist ties to Trotsky and Zinoviev in the early 1920s (Testimony, p. 80),
or to Rykov and other 'Rightists' at the end of the decade (Elagin, Temnyi geniii,
p. 319), but Meyerhold had so many political patrons at various times that this
is hard to judge (it is equally plausible to link his fate with that of his NKVD
patrons of the 1930s).
77. Mandel'shtam, Vospominaniya, p. 124.
78. Ibid.
79. Gronskii, Iz proshlogo, p. 125.
80. Mandel'shtam, Vospominaniya, p. 124.
81. See Anna Larina, This I Cannot Forget, trans. Garry Kern (New York: Norton, 1993),
pp. 310, 328.
82. Gronskii, Iz proshlogo, p. 143. Note, however, that despite this threatening
preamble, Stalin was sympathetic to the artists when Gronskii described their
situation and actively took up their cause, according to Gronskii's account.
83. Sta sorok besed, p. 315.
84. The TsIK archive contains many instances: see, for example, GARF, f. 3316, op.
2, d. 918, II. 1-13 (1930 memo from Enukidze to Stalin on abuses of disenfranchisement)
and ibid., d. 1227, I. 101 (conflict between Enukidze and the Moscow
OGPU in 1933 over denial of passports to 'former people').
85. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 542, II. 79-84 (stenogram with speakers' corrections of
proceedings at the plenum). Thanks to Arch Getty for generously making this
material available to me.
86. Bribes and presents of a thousand rubles or more (evidently accepted by
Enukidze's subordinates, not Enukidze himself) were mentioned in Ezhov's indictment.
Sex is not explicitly mentioned in the surviving text of Ezhov's indictment,
but it must have been there originally since Enukidze in response denied that he
had 'had affairs (sozhitel'stvoval) with any of those who were arrested' (ibid., pp.
I. 128). For gossip about the sexual aspect of the Enukidze scandal, see 'Dnevnik
M. A. Svanidze', in Josi{ Stalin v ob"yatiyakh sem'i. Iz lichnogo arkhiva (Moscow:
Rodina, 1993), p. 182.
87. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 542, 139.
88. Testimony, p. 98.
89. Ledeneva, 'Formal Institutions and Informal Networks', pp. 105-6.
90. Gronskii, Iz proshlogo, pp. 142-3.
91. Vaksberg, Prosecutor and Prey, p. 237.
92. My thinking here is indebted to discussion with Yuri Slezkine. See also Katerina
Clark's treatment of the 'Great Family' myth in The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 114-17.