How'd Joey do it?

[Thorvald of Lym]

Something got me thinking: how do totalitarians maintain their monopoly on power? I'll use Stalin as the example, since he was who I was thinking of. Nineteen Eighty-Four and Darkness at Noon explain how the masses are brought to heel, but how is the loyalty of organizations like the NKVD/KGB/FSB secured? What personal quality prevents them from usurping their commander? Kalinin was the official head of state, but in practical terms was little more than a figurehead; The Politburo could never dream to deposing Stalin the way they did Khrushchev. In the long run, of course, dictatorships are dismantled, but what solidifies the power base of the leader as individual?

 

[Birdjaguar]

Lots of well paid henchmen who will support you unless you get too crazy or they get a better offer.

 

[ParkCungHee]

Well you've asked a couple different question here: How do they maintain control over organizations, how do they remove potential rivals, and how do they prevent a transfer of power.

I think, in the way you worded it, you hit on the key to the last question. The politburo could not dream of removing Stalin from power, because they couldn't dream of how to do it.
One of the more common traits among totalitarian leaders (using Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini as examples) is that they tend to make themselves necessary to the system, not only as a leader but as an arbitrator. If you try and explain the system of governments without emphasizing the role of the executive, it becomes bewildering and impossible, due to overlapping responsibilities, mulitple institutions of power, etc.
And this is why totalitarian regimes rarely outlast their ruler, in order for the system to continue at all, an institution needs to sieze control of the government, and once they done that, it's nearly impossible to bring them back to being dependent on them. The reason Kruschev was possible to remove was he wass dependent on the politburo, and not vice-versa.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

Part of Stalin's securing of power in the late 1920s-early 1930s was that he had many many many job holders killed, exiled, or purged from the party, and replaced them all with his own pets. They owed their careers to him. The NKVD/GPU was headed by Dzerzhinsky and answerable only to him, and Stalin was fortunate to have Big D in kahoots with him. Felix was probably the only person who could have gotten rid of Stalin (or Nadezhda, and she may actually have), but even he was rather afraid of what the GPU was capable of, and killing the head of government was taking things to a whole other level from before. It was his desire to deliberately constrain the organization after the complete madness of 1936-38 that actually decreased the power of it.

 

[RedRalph]

Obviously power structures such as the ones Cheezy described were a huge factor, but there is an element of personality there too.

Don't forget, Stalin had a brutal upbringing, a lunatic father, was a street brawler as a yougn teenager and was involved in bank robberies during his early years in the party, so on a personal level he was a very tough man. People were terrified of him. Khrushchev admitted as much, people used to wet themselves on meeting him.

 

[Karalysia]

He had an impressive cult of personality in his later years.

 

[Neonanocyborgasm]

Something got me thinking: how do totalitarians maintain their monopoly on power? I'll use Stalin as the example, since he was who I was thinking of. Nineteen Eighty-Four and Darkness at Noon explain how the masses are brought to heel, but how is the loyalty of organizations like the NKVD/KGB/FSB secured? What personal quality prevents them from usurping their commander? Kalinin was the official head of state, but in practical terms was little more than a figurehead; The Politburo could never dream to deposing Stalin the way they did Khrushchev. In the long run, of course, dictatorships are dismantled, but what solidifies the power base of the leader as individual?

In Stalin's case, simple terror and the threat of disappearing. By the start of WW2, Stalin had liquidated so many people that everyone feared when their number was up, especially as many of these disappearances were random. Despite overwhelming annihilation at the hands of Germans and his perceived incompetence, Stalin maintained power during the war, only because he had made himself the only permanent fixture of the state for which everyone had to rely.

 

[Fugitive Sisyphus]

I can't help but think of that quote from The Usual Suspects...


"How do you shoot the devil in the back? What if you miss?"

 

[Arwon]

.....

 

[Arwon]

I think in a more general sense, these regimes perpetuate on a general and basic aspect of human psychology, the bias towards immediate and personal self-interest, our ability to rationalise anything, and our ability to mentally distance ourselves from the consequences of our actions. I'm talking about the tendency expressed things like Hannah Arendt's writing on the banality of evil (Eichmann in Jerusalem) and on the distinction between power and violence, along with the Milgram and Stanford experiments.

This diffuseness allows an almost infinite variety of terrible things to happen. No one person feels that their actions are key, they don't think that hard about what they're doing, and they have vested interests in doing what they doing. So things keep rolling along.

It's the same reason we're able to live lives of relative luxury when we could be spending more money on helping charities and fighting injustice, the same quirk of our collective mental makeup. The bad stuff is far away, and we have our own interests to look out for.

So:

Basically if they can keep some powerful people's interests in not overthrowing them, if they have a system which separates enough people from direct or tangible negative consequences of their actions, and have those self-interested people as a buffer to anyone who might wish it, then they can rely on them to support them. Overthrow occurs when that power ends.