Stalin and the Making of a New Elite, 1928-1939

“Cadres decide everything,” Stalin proclaimed in 1935. The slogan is familiar, as is the image of Stalin as a politician skilled in the selection and deployment of personnel. But who were his cadres? The literature on the prewar Stalin period tells us little even about his closest political associates, let alone those one step down the political hierarchy—Central Committee members, people's commissars and their deputies, obkom secretaries—or in key industrial posts. Only the Old Bolsheviks and the military leaders seem to emerge as individuals. The rest are relegated to that servile and faceless bureaucracy about which Trotsky wrote from afar. Their very anonymity (which might also be described as our —and Trotsky's—ignorance) has become part of a sociological generalization.