Alfred Rieber: Super-centralization and Improvisation. Stalin at War

Alfred Rieber, Professor Emeritus at the Central European University in Budapest and the University of Pennsylvania argues that during the war Stalin modified in important ways the pre-war institutional structures and shifted the emphasis in cultural practices employed to transform Soviet society into a modern industrialized power. In doing so he resorted to two apparently contradictory strategies. On the one hand, he virtually abandoned the institutional chain of command of the prewar period for both the military and civilian branches of the system. On the other hand he allowed, if he did not encourage, a high level of improvisation that proved to be essential in solving problems which defied centralized control. Kaganovich once declared that he had known many Stalins and certainly the wartime version was in many ways a radical departure from the previous avatar. The event is part of the lecture series "Stalinist Terror in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe."