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The chief administrator of Stalin's domestic and foreign policies was the NKVD,* a huge secret bureaucracy with absolute powers which grew out of Lenin's Extraordinary Commission (Cheka). The Cheka was a picked group of Bolshevik revolutionaries whose duty, during the 1918-1920 Civil War, was to instill Marxism in soldiers, workers and peasants and to liquidate anti-Bolshevik activity. Stalin made the NKVD the "inner temple" of Communism, and its dedicated, anonymous thousands of operators not only controlled the police, espionage, security and surveillance agencies, but by dominating innumerable inspection, control, auditing and credentials committees and commissions, reached down into every corner of Soviet life; their chauffeurs abroad gave orders to ambassadors. In the shape of Gulag (literally, State Administration of Camps), the NKVD was the undisguised administrator of vast areas of the Soviet hinterland.
Stalin's autocracy, according to Khrushchev, was responsible for Soviet army reversals in the first six months of World War II, a debacle which cost four or five million Russian lives and lost most of European Russia to the Nazis. By the time the Russians, by a superhuman effort, had reversed the balance, the whole country was literally sick of autocracy. There were murmurs of dissent, attempts to guide Stalin along other paths. But the mysterious demise of a number of high Politburo-crats halted any defiance from on high. The result was, says Robert C. Tucker, who spent 5½years in the U.S. embassy in Moscow as an attache, an "inward migration'' of the Russian people. Boredom, cynicism, and mediocrity—what the NKVD called "formalism"—characterized almost all cultural and political life.
Stalin's autocracy was incapable of dealing with the vastly enlarged empire gained in World War II. The aging dictator ruthlessly suppressed nationalist tendencies in Poland, launched a bitter hate campaign against the recalcitrant Tito, and in the Soviet Union refused his war weary people any of the easing of their misery that they had hoped peace would bring. Toward the end of his days, Stalin may have begun to see the essential weakness of his personal autocracy; in 1952 he called, for the first time since 1939, a congress of the party, reconvened the Central Committee and set up a 36-man Party Presidium (a new name for the Politburo) in which his favorite, Malenkov, had a prominent place. Was this a dying dictator's effort to reconstitute a party whose power he had all but destroyed? Or was it, as Khrushchev said, his way of seeking "younger" men who would do nothing "but extol him?"
The evidence of the past four years is that the Soviet inner power struggle, of which the Malenkov banishment is only one chapter, began at this point. It is not only a fight between known men, but a struggle among powerful institutions—the party as a political organization, the party in the NKVD, the party in the Soviet Army—and involved in this struggle are others, as well as the faces the world knows, with degrees of power the world can only guess at. They want no new autocracy, but the inevitable impulse, Soviet Communism being what it is, has been one head, one brain, that will bring all factions together in a semblance of monolithic unity.