Readers of this column are already acquainted with the Hoover Institute’s Studies in the Revolution of Our Time, some of the first of which were reviewed here in July 1952 by Richard Crossman. Here Daniel Lerner, formerly Research Director of the Hoover Institute and Library at Stanford University, reports some of the major findings of these studies relating to the nature of the elites of totalitarian countries. Mr. Lerner has a more than academic acquaintance with totalitarianism, for during the war he served as Chief of Intelligence, Psychological Warfare Division, on General Eisenhower’s staff at SHAEF, and, in addition to studying the Nazi enemy, participated in negotiations with the Russians in postwar Berlin. Mr. Lerner draws here on two of the Hoover Institute Studies which he has himself written (The Nazi Elite, and The Soviet Military Elite—still to be published), and on other studies as well. 

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A perennial problem of government concerns the relation between men of knowledge and men of power in the shaping of social policy. The best-known answer of classical antiquity—never, however, tried out—was that proposed by Plato in The Republic: men of knowledge should be kings and men of power should be their guardians. It remained for Machiavelli, fifteen centuries later, to describe the actual conditions of governance: a man rules by virtue of his power; knowledge is but an instrument which, if he is wise, he will use to insure the stability of his rule. Machiavelli thus reverses the Platonic perspective. Government is by power, which “guards” such knowledge as it finds useful.

Democracy complicated but did not ultimately change this formulation. Under the system of democracy, power is compromised by suffrage and knowledge by opinion. Government becomes a process of brokerage in the opinion market, with the politician serving as the professional broker. The skills needed to mediate power conflicts of interest and desire were those acquired by knowledge of law and experience of affairs. Hence we find the lawyer figuring most prominently in modern political elites. To illustrate: of the 221 members of the American Cabinet since 1890, over half were lawyers; eliminating Attorneys General, who must be lawyers, still leaves 43.9 per cent. A comparable situation prevails in Britain, France, and pre-Nazi Germany.

In our time, with the rise of the new revolutionary despotism, a significant change has occurred in the relations between knowledge and power. In the 19th century intellectuals formed an alliance with the proletariat; this alliance began to bear fruit after 1918, with the coming to power of regimes that claimed to give a radically new answer to the ancient problem of knowledge and power. The problem of power was solved by taking all of it; the problem of knowledge was solved by a comprehensive “ideology.” Power, using ideology, defined what was valid knowledge; and ideology justified absolute power. If Soviet Russia had gone the way of Mussolini’s New Rome and Hitler’s tausend-jährige Reich, we could have safely concluded that totalitarianism was incapable of coping with the realities of a complex industrial order, and ignored it. But the fact of the endurance of the Soviet Union demands that we try to understand the totalitarian answer to the ancient problem of knowledge and power.

II

Marxism, though it is the most comprehensive body of social dogma officially associated with any modern polity, is silent as the grave on the particular question of the role of elites in Communist society. Indeed, the original Marxist doctrine saw no need even to consider this problem, believing that with the emergence of a classless society and the withering away of the state there would be no place for an elite. For this reason the Soviet elite lacks a formal doctrine by which to understand its own role, and this lack helps to account for its ad hoc development.

The nearest approach to a doctrinal rationale for the Bolshevik elite was made by Lenin and amended by Trotsky. Lenin developed the notion of the party as “the vanguard,” whose chief figures were “the leading elements” in every sphere of Bolshevik society. Any such word as “elite” was of course anathema to the Bolsheviks; but it was clear to the more perceptive among Lenin’s colleagues that his politics implied “elitism” regardless of the words he used. Trotsky, in particular, feared the installation of a new elite composed of the “muzhiks” who had taken control of the party apparatus. Like many Old Bolsheviks a close student of past revolutions, especially the French, Trotsky feared a “Thermidorian reaction”; his theory of “permanent revolution” aimed at preventing the degeneration of the Bolshevik revolution into what he called a “muzhik revolution.” Trotsky held that the emergence of a new class of rulers in the “classless society” coould be prevented only by periodically reconstituting the revolutionary elite.

Stalinism, as a distinctive variant of Bolshevik theory and practice, was dedicated to seeing that just such a revitalization of the revolutionary elite did not take place. Stalin himself “reconstituted” the elite, in such a way that none but he could reconstitute it thereafter. Louis Fischer sums up this crucial phase of Bolshevik history in these same terms of knowledge and power that we have been using: “. . . the use of the secret police to end a dispute on policy was the Communist Party’s Waterloo. Thereafter, those who had force would think they had wisdom” (The God That Failed, page 212).

Lenin’s doctrine of “the vanguard” had legitimized the supremacy of political men in Soviet society, thereby fixing the priority of power as a social value, and had placed the political elite (the Politburo) at the controls of the party. Stalin eliminated certain types of men from this elite and recruited other types. The struggle has been portrayed as one between generations—between the old revolutionary and the new careerist. It is true that a generation had to pass before the Stalinist supremacy was asserted absolutely in the Great Purge of 1937. But in a deeper sense the Old Bolsheviks were a type rather than a generation of men. Many of Stalin’s closest associates, men who were with him from the start and lived to carry his coffin (e.g., Molotov, Kaganovich, Voroshilov), were also Old Bolsheviks. The essential struggle was characterological—between two different kinds of men.

The history of the Politburo, like every side of Soviet history, has three phases: (1) Leninist; (2) interregnum; (3) Stalinist. The Stalinist transformation is clearer if, skipping the period of internecine strife, we compare the composition of the Politburo in the first and third periods. During the seven years of Lenin’s rule, the Politburo members were typically intellectuals of bourgeois origin. Consider, for example, the occupations of their fathers: Lenin’s was a school inspector; Trotsky’s a landowner (indeed a “kulak”); Kamenev’s an engineer. Bukharin and Krestinsky were the sons of school teachers. No more respectable bourgeois backgrounds could be imagined.

As such social origins imply, the early Politburo members were also an urban group. Of the nine men who reached the summit of power during Lenin’s lifetime, seven had been born in cities—three of these in the metropolitan centers of Moscow and Leningrad. It is noteworthy that of the nineteen Politburo members appointed after Lenin’s death up until 1950, not one was born in these centers. Along with these bourgeois and urban characteristics, several other features distinguish the Leninist Politburo from the successive Stalinist Politburos. They were a highly educated group of men, widely traveled, Continental in their politics and cosmopolitan in their outlook. Not surprisingly, six of them were university graduates, and four were Jews.

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All of these seven university graduates in . the early Politburo (with the sole exception of Lenin) were executed as traitors during the second period, as the Politburo came under the control of the ex-seminarist Stalin. Following the Moscow trials, after Stalin’s new “muzhik” power elite had established itself as supreme, the composition of the Politburo exhibits some striking changes. Gone are the men from bourgeois families and the big cities, men with university training, varied interests, and broad sympathies. In their place are “muzhiks” from rural, peasant, impoverished Russia. They have not been to college or traveled abroad. Their outlook is the reverse of cosmopolitan; indeed, they have made “cosmopolitan” (prefaced by “rootless” or “passportless”) into a Bolshevik swearword.

The triumph of the “muzhiks” over the intellectuals in the Politburo bespeaks the transformation of Soviet life under Stalinism. The “new” totalitarian solution of the problem of knowledge and power was simply to eliminate the men of knowledge. After Lenin’s death, the only two Politburo members who might be called intellectuals had the briefest of political careers: Zhdanov died, under curious circumstances, in 1948; Voznesensky was dropped, after only two years, in 1949—apparently the only case on record of a man who left the Politburo and lived.

What did the new men of power bring to their jobs to replace the knowledge of the intellectuals they had ousted? Certainly, they were no theoreticians. As compared with the outpourings of the Leninist Politburo, the members of the Stalinist Politburo shunned print. Aside from Stalin himself (of whose “theoretical” work, out of respect for the departed, it is better not to speak) and Voznesensky (who has been thrown out), no Politburo member of the past decade has attempted any sustained theoretical analysis. The new men of power say with Job: “Behold, my desire is . . . that mine adversary had written a book.” Soviet knowledge is defined by the official ideology; evidence of skill in the use of this knowledge is mastery of the dialectic—that wondrous “method,” invented by Humpty Dumpty and perfected by Stalinism, whereby words can be made to mean whatever suits one’s convenience.

As print is somewhat less amenable than speech to “dialectical” treatment, it is perhaps understandable that the new Politburo members should not write books. But we are struck by the fact that they also are not especially gifted orators, as the early Bolsheviks were. The new rulers do not talk brilliantly, or much, in public. It is no longer necessary. Other channels than public discussion are now favored for making top decisions operative throughout the USSR. This helps to explain the superfluity of the intellectual, who is the professional of oral and written symbols, and the consequent transformation of the Politburo under Stalinism. The different demands of the present call for different men.

Before the Bolshevik revolution, with a party to be united and a mass following to be won, the instrument of power was perforce persuasion. The brilliant theoretician served an indispensable function in converting a band of Marxian ideologues into a Bolshevik party that could act effectively. Indispensable, too, was the masterful orator who won the great crowds in public squares over to his side. Lenin and Trotsky, Bukharin, Kamenev, and Zinoviev were masters of theoretical disputation, skillful political pamphleteers, and brilliant orators.

Once power was seized, other skills were called for. Stalin vanquished Trotsky thanks to superior organizational skill, i.e., skill at mobilizing and using power, not superior intellectual endowment. The consequences for Soviet history were profound. Coercion replaced persuasion. This is not to imply that Trotsky was not capable of brutality and violence—he was; or that Stalin has not created the hugest propaganda machine in modern history—he has. The point is rather that for Trotsky violence was sporadic; the preferred mode of settling policy issues, under the rule of “democratic centralism,” was by discussion. Stalin preferred to settle issues by organizational maneuver, with murder as his not so ultimate argument.

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In The Stalinist political system, the brilliant intellectual has no important function. Indeed, the disputatious theorist and gifted orator is at best a nuisance and may even be a menace. The characterological model of the new Politburo today has been Stalin himself—the impersonal administrator and master of bureaucracy, the man whose personality expresses itself in calculated repression rather than intellectual flamboyance.

Instead of writing books, the new Politburo man gets up dossiers on the citizenry, like Beria; or keeps card files on his colleagues, like Malenkov. He does not make speeches, he gives orders. The writing of books and speeches, when needed, is something that his subordinates do for him on order. Lenin and Trotsky were very much in the public eye; the new Politburo men have a passion for anonymity. None has written an autobiography; none has been the subject of a biography, unless we dignify with the title of biography those official party handouts that conceal more than they reveal. An exhaustive search through the printed sources by a research team at Stanford University, for example, failed to turn up any verifiable facts about Malenkov’s parents or family life. The impersonality of efficient bureaucracy is the dominant characterological style. The important thoughts that Politburo members now think can be sufficiently publicized by a few quiet words, spoken between puffs on a pipe, embodied in Pravda communiqúes, after the decision and the act.

Increasingly, in the past two decades, Politburo membership comes as the climax of long and successful party work. It was possible for a Trotsky to enter the Politburo without having been even a party member; whereas admission to the Politburo today would appear to be impossible for anyone without a record of successful work in the party, even in the inner administration of the party. The ladder of success has become standardized. In the Stalinist Politburo, member after member has stepped up these rungs in turn: local party work, Central Committee, Secretariat, Politburo candidate, Politburo member.

So uniform has the successful career line become that the Stanford analysis of Politburo biographies, made in 1949-50, concluded that there was only one plausible alternative in the matter of the succession to Stalin: either Malenkov alone, or, more likely, Malenkov as one of “a directorate of two or more”.(for which Molotov and Beria were named as likely prospects).

The bureaucratization of Soviet power permits us to forecast successfully some of the changes in the Soviet leadership; but of course its significance is much more than this. For regardless of who comes out on top, the course of Soviet society in the foreseeable future is not likely to be drastically altered. Stalin is dead; but the Stalinist system remains very much alive. The institutions of Stalinism are now firmly rooted in Soviet life; a generation of rulers and ruled has grown up that knows only these institutions. Even if they wanted to, Stalin’s heirs would need a lifetime to transform their inheritance. Moreover, it is incredible that a Malenkov or a Beria should want to transform a system upon which their own power and success are based. If they fall out and fight each other, it is not to transform the system but to control it.¹

III

The rigidity of the Stalinist system is both a cause and a consequence of the elimination of men of knowledge from the Soviet elite. The ruthlessness with which they were got rid of was in some measure due to the deep-seated hatred of intellectuals that Stalin exhibited throughout his life and which was institutionalized in the Stalinist system. And the consequence of this was to make it easier to erect a totalitarian system which holds that history, is knowledge; a system, that is to say, which answers the problem of the relation of knowledge and power with the tautology that power is power is power. . . .

Knowledge, however, it would appear from its history, is a relatively autonomous element in any social order. Under the democratic system, socially useful knowledge is largely in the hands of the “free professions.” The criteria of professionalism are competence and autonomy. A scientist, for example, must possess a certain minimum knowledge of his field to be accepted as a professional; and just as important he must also be free to decide issues in this field on the basis of what he knows. It is true that political elites everywhere can (and do) decide such questions as whether to promote, say, atomic as against bacteriological research. But normally they base such decisions largely on alternatives proposed, and information provided, by professional scientists. Normally, too, knowledge less directly connected with political power is left pretty much under the control of the professionals.

In the Soviet system it is difficult for the rulers to let anything alone. This is particularly so in the “sector” of the professions, which have traditionally resisted the claims of absolute power. Stalinism laid down what is the truth in history, philosophy, linguistics, and other subjects about which it is felt that the official ideology is peculiarly competent to decide. But power after all is not knowledge and, ironically, it is in just those areas where knowledge is most intimately connected with the effective maintenance of power that the Soviet elite has had the least success. These are the sciences upon which the technologies of destruction are based.

The Soviet rulers have discovered that the man of power can do anything he likes with the man of knowledge—except perform his function. The modern despot is in an even more difficult position vis-ô-vis the scientist than was the ancient tyrant vis-ô-vis the sage. For knowledge qua science has become such a massive accumulation of specialized information and techniques that even the most cunning despot cannot long pretend to competent judgment. To maintain his total power over society, the modern despot must limit his authority by allowing professional autonomy to the men upon whose knowledge his power rests. Such is his dilemma.

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The dilemma extends beyond the field of atomic physics into all of the professions of modern society. Consider the case of the military. Professional soldiers are a constant threat to elites claiming absolute power for themselves. But armies cannot be dispensed with, and so even a totalitarian elite must allow the professional soldier sufficient freedom to exercise his skills with more or less efficiency.

The history of the Soviet military corps reflects the hostility of the political elite to knowledge outside its own competence. The purge in 1937 of the army eliminated those men who were preeminently the military “intellectuals,” brilliant theorists like Tukhachevsky and Yegorov whose competence had won them professional independence. Their places were filled by “muzhik generals” (as the Red Army itself called them), men like Voroshilov and Budenny, who were much more adept at bureaucratic than military maneuver.

The absurdity of placing a Marshal Budenny, who could not solve equations of one unknown, in command of cavalry that used tanks instead of horses, and electrical signals instead of wild Cossack cries, was plain in the test of action. The three “muzhik generals” who commanded the major fronts at the outbreak of the Nazi-Soviet war—Voroshilov, Budenny, Timoshenko —were rapidly assigned to other tasks. But after the war it was again necessary to purge the military corps. D. J. Dallin writes: “How mercilessly the MGB has been purging the Army in the past few years is seen in the fact that no less than 112 ‘deaths’ of young generals have been reported in the Soviet press since 1948” (New Leader, April 27, 1953).

Actuarial data on a sample of 217 generals reveals a startlingly low life-expectancy. The average longevity for general officers as a whole is just under 50 years—a most unripe age considering that only a fraction of these generals died in combat. Forty-two generals, according to all available sources of information, died during the war years 1939-45 (not all of them. by any computation, in combat), as compared with 72 who died during the immediate postwar years 1946-50. This is an extraordinary rate of attrition in peacetime.

Interestingly enough, it is the men who become generals young who are most likely to die at an early age. Those who were over 50 when they became generals had an average age at death of 63.5 years. This figure declines to 49.3 for the middle generation of men who became generals between the ages of 40-50; their average life in the elite was thus well under 9 years. The youngest generation, however, appears to have no future at all: those who were under 40 when they became generals died at an average age of 37.8 years.

How, in view of these facts, does the Soviet regime induce men to take the risky job of general? By paying them lavishly.

Between the private soldier and the general, in the Soviet Army, yawns a gulf the like of which is unkown in the West. The magnitude of the disparity can be seen by comparing the pay scales of the Soviet and American armies, calculated by taking the pay of a private in each army as the base, and the pay of each higher rank as the factor of increase over this base:

Whereas the spread from bottom to top in the American army is in the ratio 1:15, in the’ Soviet army it is 1:115! The difference between the pay of a Soviet private and a Soviet second lieutenant is greater than that between an American private and an American five-star general.

Does such a system produce competent military leaders? The evidence is not clear. To say that, after all, the Soviets whipped the Nazis is not to answer the question—a number of military scientists have asserted that the Soviet army triumphed in spite of gross professional incompetence among Soviet commanders.

This same Stalinist solution to the problem of utilizing knowledge—roughly, to alternate murder with bribery—has been followed in the various fields of science. Has it proved successful? Here, too, it is misleading to point to Soviet possession of the atom bomb as proof of scientific excellence; this may prove only the excellence of Soviet espionage. It is the considered opinion of leading American scientists that scientific progress has on the whole been retarded under Stalinism; progress in particular fields seems to have been inversely proportional to the degree of political control actually exercised over professional decisions. (See the volume Soviet Science, published in 1952 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.)

IV

Recent history provides two other examples of revolutionary elites, the Fascist and the Nazi, that organized a “new” system of government on the Bolshevik pattern—and both failed, though only after they were defeated on the battlefield. To what extent was the totalitarian conception of power, involving among other thing the subordination of all knowledge to a power elite, involved in these defeats?

I merely note in passing that the Fascist elite developed in much the same direction as the Bolshevik, from a revolutionary elite dominated by intellectuals to a totalitarian elite dominated by a party bureaucracy. Mussolini himself was a socialist intellectual, a student of the elite theorist Pareto, and his early colleagues in the Fascist movement were largely of this type. With the conquest of power, things took a different turn. A careful statistical analysis of “The Changing Italian Elite,” by Lasswell and Sereno, summarized developments as follows:

“The rising agencies exhibit the relative predominance of those who are devoted to the arts of government and politics in the narrowest possible sense. There are found many who owe their entire career to skill in violence and who had no antecedent skill before their entry into politics. With the consolidation of the new regime, preliminary technical training assumes greater importance as the bureaucratizing tendencies of party and government manifest themselves.” The changes in the Fascist elite thus follow the Bolshevik pattern: from the professional intellectual to the party administrator, under whom knowledge is the function of the bureaucratized technician. For Mussolini as for Stalin, murder was an approved method for accomplishing this “transition.”

The pattern repeats itself, with local variations, in Nazi Germany. The initial situation of the Nazi party—as a “reactionary” movement ranged against a “liberal” government—meant that it had to do without the support of the large number of professional intellectuals committed to the other side. This is why the Nazi elite, in its first phase preceding the seizure of power, was dominated not by professional intellectuals but by intellectuals manqué. Hitler, the unsuccessful applicant for admittance to an architectural school who turned to politics in part because of his professional failure, was the model.

But intellectuals, qualified or manqué, tend not to survivé the initial revolutionary upsurge. The need to curb the dynamism of ideas, and legitimize the ideology as the official fount of knowledge, appears to be inexorable once power has been seized. Hitler’s major act in the year following the Machtergreifwng was the Roehm massacre, by which he purged the Nazi party of the “intellectual fringe” that had played so crucial a role in his coming to power. By the same stroke, he wiped out a section of the Nazi regime’s potential professional military corps, for the students and aesthetes grouped around Roehm had also been junior Reichswehr officers in World War I. They presented the same threat to Hitler jointly that, say, Trotsky and Tukhachevsky had presented to Stalin separately—the threat, in Konrad Heiden’s apt phrase, of an “armed intelligentsia.”

Thereafter the Nazi elite makes the familiar transition from the intellectual to the plebeian administrator as the dominant type. For Hitler as for Stalin, the process was continuous and ruthless. Throughout the 1930’s, intellectuals were jailed, scientists fled abroad, professional men “disappeared” or “died.” Even the Stalinesque decimation of the professional soldiery was institutionalized (the process of literal “decimation” having been described by Hess, in connection with the Roehm massacre, as follows: “Every tenth man, without any investigation, whether innocent or guilty, was struck by a bullet.”) The professional Chiefs of Staff—von Witzleben, von Brauchitsch, von Fritsch—had to go. The Nazi “muzhiks” could not tolerate the superior knowledge and independent professional conduct of these men.

The Nazis, unlike the Bolsheviks, had not the time to crush the professionals completely. It was still possible, in the Nazi Germany of July 1944, to organize a conspiracy of soldiers and intellectuals for an attempt on Hitler’s life and the seizure of power. No such attempt was ever made on Stalin’s life. Despite the haste with which the Nazi drama played itself out, its final scene conformed to the totalitarian pattern: the Third Reich went down under the stewardship of the men who ruled the party apparatus and secret police, Martin Bormann and Heinrich Himmler—the opposite numbers of Malenkov and Beria.

V

One does not point out these parallel developments among the revolutionary elites of our time in order to arrive at the comforting conclusion that they must all founder sooner or later, the Nazis and Fascists sooner, the Communists later. The Nazi and Fascist regimes did not last, it is true, but it took a bloody war to bring them down. Our interest here has been rather to indicate some of the distinctive features which the Bolsheviks have shared with the other despotisms of our time. In particular, we have tried to elucidate the answer totalitarianism gives to the perennial problem of the relation of knowledge and power. In this answer we can detect certain weaknesses that call into question the viability of the totalitarian system under modern industrial conditions. But such weaknesses in the Soviet structure do not guarantee the inevitable final defeat of Stalinism as a system of world rule. Power decides who wins and who loses. And power has a logic of its own—in which knowledge may conceivably not constitute a major term within certain social settings.

I believe, however, that in the organization of modern society power is in fact a function of knowledge. The modern technological social order achieves stability when it is “progressive” and adaptive, as Schumpeter brilliantly demonstrated; it is viable in the degree that knowledge is left free to define and solve the big and little problems of the social order as they emerge. Under a liberal system of government there is always the danger that substantial numbers of citizens will refuse to recognize society’s problems as their own; its triumph has been that, where the rewards of technological achievement are widely shared, the citizenry has shown itself willing and able to cope with all the difficulties and problems of modern life. The social liberation of human intelligence, under democratic dispensation, has paid large dividends in power as well as in other values.

The “moral crisis of the West,” about which we have heard so much, springs from the widespread belief, especially among a certain number of Western “men of knowledge,” that the Stalinist discipline pays even greater dividends, at a smaller risk.

Lord Macaulay, trying to clarify this issue, made the distinction between a “loyalty culture” and an “ingenuity culture.” This distinction can help us to understand the challenge of Soviet Communism. In the end, two kinds of character are involved. Stalin’s “loyalty culture” encourages obedience through purges and bribes, and it rewards loyalty above all other character traits; it has shown a strength that was scarcely suspected before the war. The democratic “ingenuity culture,” by granting equal opportunity and personal autonomy to all, encourages initiative and rewards successful ingenuity; it has been challenged seriously for the first time in modern history. The characterological lines of conflict have now been drawn. Stalinism is not likely to be transformed into an “ingenuity culture” by the internal succession either of a Malenkov or a Beria. It is also unlikely that our liberal system can be undermined at home. Despite new and erratic demands for “loyalty,” our commitment is to the method of free intelligence. The struggle will work itself out along these lines (although the weaker system may well resort to violence before it acknowledges defeat). In this struggle the liberal system, though it dare not relax its watchfulness, can well be confident of the outcome.

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¹ This sentence, written shortly after Stalin’s death, has been borne out by the purge of Beria, both by its matter and manner.