Stalin: A Biography

by Robert Service

  Some weeks later, however, Krupskaya blurted out to Lenin how Stalin had behaved towards her. Lenin was infuriated. Although he himself often swore,14 he drew the line at the verbal abuse of women. Stalin’s comportment offended him, and on 5 March 1923 he dictated a sharp letter:

  You had the uncouthness to summon my wife to the telephone and swear at her. Although she has even given you her agreement to forget what was said, this fact has nevertheless become known through her to Zinoviev and Kamenev. I do not intend to forget so easily what has been done against me, and it goes without saying that I consider something done against my wife to be something also done against me. I therefore ask you to consider whether you agree to retract what you said and apologise or you prefer to break relations between us.

  Stalin was stupefied. He had tried to mend bridges with Lenin by letting him continue dictating and researching even though the resultant articles hurt him. He had asked Lenin’s sister Maria Ulyanova to plead his case: ‘I love him with all my heart. Tell him this in some way.’ With the letter in his hands Stalin tried to tell himself: ‘This isn’t Lenin who’s talking, it’s his illness!’

  He scribbled out a half-hearted compromise. ‘If my wife had behaved incorrectly and you had had to punish her,’ he wrote, ‘I would not have regarded it as my right to intervene. But inasmuch as you insist, I am willing to apologise to Nadezhda Konstantinovna.’ On reflection Stalin redrafted the message and admitted to having bawled at Krupskaya; but he added that he had only been doing his duty as given him by the Politburo. He added:

  Yet if you consider that the maintenance of ‘relations’ requires me to ‘retract’ the above-mentioned words, I can retract them, while nevertheless refusing to understand what the problem is here, what my ‘guilt’ consists of and what in particular is being demanded of me.

  Whenever he started to apologise, he ended up rubbing salt in the wound. How on earth Stalin thought such a message would placate Lenin is hard to imagine. But he was a proud man. He could not bring himself to show any greater contrition, and was on the point of paying dearly.

  Yet this did not happen. On 10 March, agitated by the dispute, Lenin suffered a heart attack. Suddenly Stalin no longer needed to concern himself about Lenin directly leading a campaign against him. Lenin was taken off to the Gorki mansion outside Moscow, never to return. He was a helpless cripple tended by his wife Nadya and sister Maria; and although the doctors told them that all was not lost, Nadya ceased to believe them. His medical condition remained subject to security surveillance. The reports of GPU operatives to the Kremlin let Stalin know he was in the clear: Lenin was beyond recovery; it was only a matter of time before he died.

  Lenin’s dictated thoughts, however, remained a threat. The dying leader had had them typed up in multiple copies and their existence was known to Politburo members and to the secretaries in Lenin’s office. Not everyone in the Politburo was friendly to Stalin. Relations between Trotski and Stalin had never been good, and Stalin could expect trouble from that quarter. What counted in Stalin’s favour, though, was that Kamenev, Zinoviev and others anticipated a strong bid from Trotski for supreme power. Stalin was a valuable accomplice whom they were disinclined to remove from the General Secretaryship. They knew his defects as well as Lenin did; they were also less aware of his capacities and ambition than Lenin had become: they therefore underestimated the difficulty they might have in handling him in the years ahead. This meant that if Stalin played his hand skilfully, he might yet survive the storm. The next Party Congress — the Twelfth — was scheduled for April 1923. The Politburo aimed to show that the regime could function effectively in Lenin’s absence. Trotski was offered the honour of delivering the political report on behalf of the Central Committee, but refused. Instead it was Zinoviev who gave it. Among themselves Zinoviev, Kamenev and Stalin arranged the rest of the proceedings in advance.

  Stalin, though, gave the organisational report. Cleverly he accepted Lenin’s proposal for structural reforms to the Party Central Committee and the Central Control Commission; but whereas Lenin had wished to promote ordinary workers to membership of these bodies, Stalin gave preference to local party leaders of working-class origin who no longer worked in factories or mines. By this means Stalin would control the process and emasculate Lenin’s intentions.

  He also delivered the report on the national question. He crafted his words with cunning and spoke like a man on the attack. He condemned both Great Russian nationalism and the nationalisms of the non-Russian peoples. He suggested that party policy had been correct in doctrine, policy and practice — and by implication he suggested that he was merely progressing along a line marked out by Lenin. Budu Mdivani got up to say that Stalin and his associates had handled affairs unfairly.15 By then, however, Stalin had had time to organise his defence and to get leaders from the south Caucasus to put Mdivani under fire. Zinoviev, too, rallied to Stalin’s side, demanding that Mdivani and his supporters should dissociate themselves from Georgian nationalism. Bukharin asserted the need to avoid giving offence to non-Russian national sensibilities; but he too failed to indicate that Stalin had acted as an obstacle to the success of official policy. Even Trotski refrained from an open attack on the General Secretary despite the encouragement he had been given by Lenin. Yet the pressure on Stalin had been intense, and with a degree of self-pity he claimed he had not wanted to deliver the report on the national question. As usual he represented himself as simply carrying out duties assigned to him by the leadership.

  And he survived the ordeal. He paid a price: he had to accept several amendments to the draft resolution and most of these gave greater rights to the non-Russians than he liked. Yet the Georgian case was rejected and Stalin survived the Congress. The Testament remained under lock and key. It could have been revealed to the Congress, but his allies Zinoviev and Kamenev had blocked such a move.16 For a general secretary who had been on the brink of being removed from the Central Committee this was worth celebrating as a victory. Zinoviev, Kamenev and Stalin appeared to run party and state like a triumvirate.

  Trotski passed up his opportunity to cause an upset. In subsequent years his supporters criticised his failure to grab his chance at the Twelfth Party Congress. Undoubtedly he had little tactical finesse in internal party business. Yet it is questionable whether he would have done himself a favour by breaking with the rest of the Politburo. Too many leaders at the central level and in the provinces had identified him as the Bonaparte-like figure who might lead the armed forces against the Revolution’s main objectives. His anti-Bolshevik past counted against him. His Civil War record, which involved the policy of shooting delinquent Bolshevik leaders in the Red Army, had not been forgotten. Furthermore, several of his admiring subordinates in the Revolutionary-Military Council of the Republic had — like him — not belonged to the Bolsheviks before 1917; and some of them had not been revolutionaries at all. Trotski had an intermittent tendency towards nervousness in trials of strength in the party. He was also aware that any attempt to unseat a Politburo member would have been interpreted as a bid for supreme power even before Lenin had passed away. Trotski decided to wait for a better chance in the months ahead.

  Rivalry in fact grew among his enemies as soon as the Congress was over. Kamenev and Zinoviev had protected Stalin because they wanted help against Trotski. But they were disconcerted by the individual initiatives taken by Stalin in the weeks since Lenin’s heart attack. Zinoviev, based in faraway Petrograd, objected to decisions being taken without consultation. In the Civil War and afterwards it had been normal for Lenin to seek the opinion of Politburo members by phone or telegram before fixing policy. Stalin had gone ahead with his preferences on the Pravda editorial board, on the national question in the USSR, on the Middle East and on the Comintern. He was getting too big for his Tsaritsyn boots, and Zinoviev aimed to treat him firmly. While in Kislovodsk in the north Caucasus, Zinoviev called a meeting with other leading Bolsheviks on vacation near by. These included Bukhar
in, Voroshilov, Lashevich and Yevdokimov. Although Lashevich and Yevdokimov were his trusted supporters working with him in Petrograd, Voroshilov was a client of Stalin who was likely to relay the content of the conversations to the General Secretary. Perhaps (as most have supposed) Zinoviev was naïve. More likely, though, he thought that Voroshilov would be the intermediary who would carry the message back to Stalin that he had to change his behaviour or suffer the negative consequences.

  On 30 July he wrote to Kamenev:17

  You’re simply letting Stalin make a mockery of us.

  Facts? Examples?

  Allow me!

  1) The nat[ional] question.

  … Stalin makes the appointment of the Central Committee plenipotentiaries (instructors)

  2) The Gulf Convention. Why not consult the two of us and Trotski about this important question? There was sufficient time. By the way, I’m meant to be responsible for the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs…

  3) Comintern…

  V.I. [Lenin] dedicated a good 10 per cent of his time to the Comintern… And Stalin turns up, takes a quick look and makes a decision. And Bukh[arin] and I are ‘dead souls’: we’re not asked about anything.

  4) Pravda

  This morning — and it was the last straw — Bukharin learned from Dubrovski’s personal telegram that the ed[itorial] board had been replaced without informing him or asking Bukh[arin]…

  We won’t tolerate this any longer.

  If the party is doomed to go through a period (probably very brief) of Stalin’s personal despotism, so be it. But I for one don’t intend to cover up all this swinish behaviour. All the platforms refer to the ‘triumvirate’ in the belief that I’m not the least important figure in it. In reality there’s no triumvirate, there is only Stalin’s dictatorship.

  According to Zinoviev, the time to act was overdue.

  He exaggerated the power of the General Secretary. A simple vote in the Politburo, chaired by Kamenev, could still restrain Stalin; and when Zinoviev was unable to attend sessions, it would not have been difficult to insist on preliminary consultation of his opinions. Yet he was right about Stalin’s growing desire to get his way without reference to fellow Politburo members. Stalin saw the need for tactical retreat. He agreed to — and indeed appeared to encourage — changes in the composition of central party bodies. His critics had seen how often he had placed his supporters in posts of authority outside Moscow. He sat through Orgburo meetings which decided such matters. The solution was obvious. Trotski, Zinoviev and Bukharin were appointed to the Orgburo. They could oppose Stalin’s schemes whenever they wanted.18

  It made little difference. The reason usually given is that Trotski and Zinoviev failed to appreciate the importance of attending the Orgburo whereas Stalin was a contented participant. Yet the basic question is why Trotski and Zinoviev, having identified the source of Stalin’s bureaucratic power and demanded Orgburo membership for themselves, failed to follow through with their action against him. This question, though, raises yet another one. Was Stalin’s willingness to sit through meeting after meeting the most important reason for his capacity to defeat them? The answer must surely be no. It was not as if Trotski, Kamenev and Zinoviev spent their time untroubled by the duty to attend bureaucratic meetings. The entire Soviet order was bureaucratic, and meetings of administrative officials were the norm. The leading organs of the Central Committee had been recomposed mainly with a view towards administering a shock to the General Secretary. His fellow Politburo members thought they could get on with their individual campaigns to succeed Lenin. Each expected to run his administrative hierarchy without interference from the others. Stalin’s career had not been extinguished but his political capital had been reduced to a minimum.

  He was helped by events. All Politburo members, including Trotski, wanted to keep unity in the central party leadership. Isolated and resented across the country outside the party, they eagerly presented a front of agreement in public. Lenin was not yet dead even though leaders in the Kremlin knew that his chances of recovery were remote. Stalin’s adversaries in the Politburo did not want to rock the communist party boat by trying to throw Stalin overboard.

  Yet the disagreements continued behind the scenes. They were exacerbated by the handling of economic policy by Kamenev, Zinoviev and Stalin. In mid-1923 there was suddenly a deficit in food supplies to the towns. This was the result of what Trotski called the ‘scissors crisis’. Prices of industrial goods had increased three times over prices paid for agricultural products since 1913. Thus the blades of the economy’s scissors opened. Peasants preferred to keep grain in the countryside rather than sell to government procurement agencies. They hoarded some of their harvest. They fed themselves and their animals better. They made more vodka for themselves. What they refused to do was to give way to the Bolsheviks, who had made the goods of manufacturing industry so expensive. The members of the Politburo majority gave ground to rural demands and reduced industrial prices. The wheels of exchange between town and village started to move again. Trotski did not fail to criticise his rivals for economic mismanagement; he saw them as having fulfilled his fears about the NEP as a potential instrument for turning away from the objectives of the October Revolution and towards the requirements of the peasantry.

  Trotski’s fellow leftists in the party made a move against the developing nature of the New Economic Policy in October 1923. Yevgeni Preobrazhenski and others signed the Platform of the Forty-Six, criticising the organisational and economic policies of the ascendant party leadership. They demanded wider freedom of discussion and deeper state intervention in industrial development. In November 1923 Trotski joined the dissenters with a series of articles entitled ‘The New Course’. The Thirteenth Party Conference in December had arraigned this Left Opposition for disloyalty. The ascendant leaders needed Stalin more than ever as a counterweight to Trotski; all the criticisms of the summer were mothballed — and Zinoviev no longer talked of the need to restrain Stalin’s administrative autonomy. The suppression of factional activity in the provinces, they thought, was best left in his hands. They also entrusted him with putting the case against Trotski at the Conference. For once they did not want this honour. They knew that Stalin could look Trotski in the eye and smack him politically in the face — and perhaps they calculated that Stalin would do himself no favours by appearing divisive while they seemed above the demands of factional struggle.

  Stalin was more than willing to oblige with a castigation of Trotski. His words were incisive:19

  Trotski’s mistake consists in the fact that he has counterposed himself to the Central Committee and put about the idea of himself as a superman standing above the Central Committee, above its laws, above its decisions, so that he gave grounds for a certain part of the party to conduct their work in the direction of undermining confidence in the Central Committee.

  The Conference was a triumph for Stalin. Lenin ailed while Trotski wavered and Kamenev and Zinoviev applauded. Stalin had secured his rehabilitation.

  And although the Testament had warned against a split between himself and Trotski, Stalin had gone ahead and denounced Trotski. Lenin, if he had recovered, would not have accepted Stalin’s excuse that he was only doing what the rest of the Politburo had asked. Yet Stalin had never prostrated himself before Lenin and had reason to feel wronged by him. He had kept a grip on his resentment at his treatment; this was not a comportment he often displayed. Presumably he understood that the chances were that Lenin was too ill to make a physical recovery; and anyway he continued to feel a genuine admiration for the sinking Leader. Stalin limited himself to monitoring what went on at the Gorki mansion, where bodyguards and nurses were reporting to Dzierżyński, who in turn kept him informed.20 Stalin was not yet out of trouble. Nadezhda Krupskaya could be up to her old tricks by reading out the Pravda editorials on the divisive proceedings at the Thirteenth Conference. By this means it would be possible for Lenin to learn that his predicted spat betwe
en Stalin and Trotski had already occurred. Yet Stalin was registering an impact. Proud of his performance at the Conference, he was a supreme Leader in the making and was beginning to stand tall.

  20. THE OPPORTUNITIES OF STRUGGLE

  Lenin died of a heart attack on 21 January 1924. Stalin, who was given the honour of organising the funeral, gained further security in his post. The Politburo had decided on extraordinary treatment of the corpse. It was to be embalmed and put on permanent display in a mausoleum to be erected on Red Square. Krupskaya objected in vain to the quasi-religious implications. Stalin was determined upon the ‘mausoleumisa-tion’ of the founder of Bolshevism. Several scientists volunteered their services and the race was joined to find a chemical process to do the job. Trotski enquired whether he should come back from Tbilisi, where he had arrived en route for Sukhum on the Black Sea to convalesce from a severe bout of influenza. Stalin telegraphed that his return was neither necessary nor possible since the funeral would be held on 26 January. The advice had hostile intent: Stalin knew Trotski would attract all the attention if he appeared in Moscow for the ceremony. Trotski travelled on to Sukhum, where Stalin’s supporter Nestor Lakoba welcomed him. Dzierżyński, who had taken Stalin’s side in the Georgian Affair, had already sent instructions that nobody should bother Trotski during his stay at the state dacha.1

  Much has been made of Stalin and Dzierżyń ski’s wish to keep Trotski out of the way. Purportedly Trotski’s absence from the funeral ruined his chances of succeeding Lenin as supreme party leader whereas Stalin’s leadership of the funeral commission put him at a crucial advantage. This is unconvincing. Although Trotski years later was to complain about Stalin’s trickery, he did not claim it had made much difference. Placing his premium on his own convalescence, Trotski stayed in Sukhum for weeks before making the train journey back to Moscow.