Patronage and the Intelligentsia in Stalin’s Russia

Abstract

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 Mat 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.

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 O. M., but he quietened me down: ‘Everyone “goes”. Obviously it can’t be otherwise. We “go”, too. To Nikolai Ivanovich [Bukharin]’.¹

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 vor dem Zweiten Weltkrieg: Neue Wege der Forschung/ Stalinism before the Second World War: New Avenues of Research (Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 1998).