The party felt surrounded by enemies in its own country, and the Soviet communist leadership — including Stalin — was acutely aware that the imposition of a centralised one-party state had not yet led to a revolutionary change in attitudes and practices at lower levels of the party, the state and society. Policies were formulated largely without consultation outside the Kremlin. Overt opposition was restricted to the successive internal Bolshevik party oppositions. Other tendencies, whenever they came into the open, were suppressed with vigour by the OGPU (as the GPU was renamed in 1924). Politburo members without exception were aware that they presided over a state with imperfect methods of rule. Social, national and religious antagonism to Bolshevism was widespread. Even the party had its defects: factional strife and administrative passive disobedience as well as a decline in ideological fervour at the very lowest echelons was evident. Whoever won the struggle to succeed Lenin would immediately face a graver task: to make the governance of the USSR denser and irreversible. Stalin had power over the formulation of policy and the choice of personnel; he had managed to trounce his main individual enemies in the party. He had not yet turned the Soviet order into a system of power enshrining pervasive obedience and enthusiasm.
The sense that at any time a capitalist ‘crusade’ might be declared against the USSR added to his fundamental concern. Foreign states had intervened in Soviet Russia in 1918–19 and might do so again. Admittedly the USSR had trade treaties with the United Kingdom and other states. It had signed the Treaty of Rapallo with defeated Germany. The Comintern was gradually building up the number and strength of affiliated communist parties. Ostensibly there was no threat to peace. Even the French, who had made trouble over the Soviet renunciation of the debts of Nicholas II and the Provisional Government, were in no mood to start an invasion. Yet so long as the USSR was the sole socialist state in the world, there would be diplomatic tension which could abruptly turn the situation on its head and the Soviet Union could be invaded. Bolsheviks were on the alert for military outbreaks on their borders. They believed that the Poles would not have moved into Ukraine in 1920 unless the incursion had been instigated by the Western Allies (and although this was untrue, there was indeed military collusion with French military advisers and diplomatic negotiation with the British). If the British and French themselves did not crusade against the USSR in the 1920s, Bolsheviks thought, they might well arm and deploy proxy invading armies. The armed forces of Poland, Finland, Romania and even Turkey were regarded as candidates for such a role.
Yet it was in such a situation, with the USSR pressed by enemies from within and outside its frontiers, that Zinoviev and Kamenev were choosing to take the path already trodden by Trotski. Even without Stalin’s speeches against them, they appeared menacingly disloyal. In 1925 there were 1,025,000 Bolsheviks in a population of 147 million.5 As Bolsheviks conceded, they were a drop in the ocean; and it was admitted that the mass recruitment campaigns during and after the Civil War had created a party which had a few thousand experienced leaders and militants and a vast majority which differed little in political knowledge and administrative expertise from the rest of society. Zinoviev and Kamenev seemed to be self-indulgently ambitious and they were about to pay the price.
Stalin continued to issue works explaining his purposes. He had to prove his ideological credentials; and among his various accomplishments was a sequel to his lectures at the Sverdlov University: in 1926 he published On Questions of Leninism. (This is conventionally translated as Problems of Leninism.) Its contents did little to change the consensus among leading Bolsheviks that Stalin was an unimaginative interpreter of Lenin’s doctrines. The more exploratory pamphlets and articles were produced by others. Trotski wrote on problems of everyday life, Preobrazhenski on economic development, Bukharin on epistemology and sociology. There was scarcely anything in Problems of Leninism that could not easily be found in the main published works of Lenin. It was indeed a work of codification and little else. Just one ingredient of the book held attention at the time: Stalin’s claim that socialism could be constructed in a single country. Until then it had been the official Bolshevik party assumption that Russia could not do this on its own. Indeed it had been taken for granted that while capitalism remained powerful around the globe, there would be severe limits on the achievability of immense social and economic progress in even the most advanced socialist country.
Such had been Lenin’s opinion, and he had expressed it in his foreign policy. Whenever possible, he had tried to spread Revolution westwards by propaganda, financial subsidy, advice or war. Repeatedly he had urged that Russian economic reconstruction would be a chimerical objective unless German assistance, whether socialist or capitalist, were obtained. Consequently his programme involved Bolsheviks beginning to build socialism in Russia in the expectation that states abroad, especially Germany, would eventually aid the task of completing the construction. In September 1920 he stated this at the Ninth Party Conference. ‘Russian forces’ alone, Lenin insisted, would be inadequate for that purpose; even economic recovery, far less further economic development, might take ten to fifteen years if Soviet Russia were to remain isolated.6
Stalin, however, argued that the construction of socialism was entirely feasible even while no fraternal socialist state existed. The great codifier had to engage in subterfuge here. He had to misquote Lenin’s published texts and, using his organisational authority, prevent embarrassing unpublished speeches and writings from appearing. Such was the contempt in which his enemies held his writings that they did not deign to expose his unorthodoxy; and indeed it is only in retrospect that his heretical teaching came to have any practical significance. In the 1920s it had no direct impact on practical politics. All supporters of the NEP took it for granted that the USSR had to get on with ‘socialist construction’ on its own at a time when no other socialist state existed. The question of how far the Bolsheviks would be able to succeed in this seemed unnecessarily abstract.
The other contenders for the leadership also produced books explaining Leninism to the rest of the party: Trotski, Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin. Each invoked the authority of Lenin and claimed to have produced a coherent Leninist strategy. There was nothing intellectually astounding in any of these works, but each author had the knack of giving the impression of being an outstanding intellectual. Trotski, when bored in the Politburo, would pull out a French novel and read it to himself ostentatiously. He was arrogant even by the Politburo’s standards. But his contempt for ‘ignorant’ and ‘ill-educated’ Stalin was universally shared. What they failed to understand was that Problems of Leninism, apart from the heretical point on ‘socialism in one country’, was a competent summary of Lenin’s work. It was well constructed. It contained clear formulations. It was a model of pedagogical steadiness: ideas were introduced and carefully explained from various angles. Nearly all the main themes of Lenin’s life’s work were dealt with. The book’s succinct exposition was recognised at the time, and it went into several subsequent printings.
Stalin’s rivals quite underestimated his determination to prove them wrong in their low opinion of him. He understood where his deficiencies lay. He knew little German, less English and no French. He therefore resumed his attempt to teach himself English.7 He had no oratorical flourish. He therefore worked hard on his speeches and let nobody write them for him or edit his drafts. His Marxism lacked epistemological awareness. He therefore asked Jan Sten to tutor him on a weekly basis in the precepts and methods of contemporary Marxist philosophy.8
Stalin was meanwhile marking out a distinct profile for himself at the apex of the party. His idea about ‘socialism in one country, taken separately’ was poor Leninism; but it struck a chord with many party committee members who disliked Trotski’s insistence that the October Revolution would wither and die unless socialist seizures of power took place in other powerful countries on the European continent. Stalin, steady advocate of the NEP, contrived to suggest that he deeply believed
in the basic potential of progress in the USSR without foreign assistance. Socialism in one country was an exposition of ideological inclination.9 Equally important were certain tendencies in Stalin’s thought. His commitment to the NEP was increasingly equivocal. He never followed Bukharin in giving it a rousing endorsement; and increasingly he stipulated the need for higher levels of investment in state industry and for ever heavier taxation of the more affluent peasants. He also continued to insist that workers should be promoted from the factory into administrative posts; his detestation of ‘bourgeois specialists’ remained constant.10 In line with official party policy he made appointments to party posts on the basis of demonstrable allegiance to Bolshevism before 1917.11
The point is that this configuration of tendencies in ideology and policy had growing appeal for party leaders in Moscow and the provinces. Stalin did not rise to supreme power exclusively by means of the levers of bureaucratic manipulation. Certainly he had an advantage inasmuch as he could replace local party secretaries with persons of his choosing. It is also true that the regime in the party allowed him to control debates in the Central Committee and at Party Congresses. But such assets would have been useless to him if he had not been able to convince the Central Committee and the Party Congress that he was a suitable politician for them to follow. Not only as an administrator but also as a leader — in thought and action — he seemed to fit these requirements better than anyone else.
Stalin and Bukharin prepared themselves for a last decisive campaign against the internal party opposition. They had always hated Trotski and, in their private correspondence, they took delight in their growing success in humbling him. But they also retained a certain fear of him. They knew him to be talented and determined; they were aware that he had kept a personal following in the party. Trotski remained a dangerous enemy. They had less respect for Zinoviev but saw that he too was still a menace. Even more perilous was the effect of the rapprochement of Trotski and Zinoviev. As Zinoviev criticised Bukharin and Stalin from a left-wing position, the differences among the oppositionists lessened. A United Opposition was formed in mid-1926. When Stalin heard that Krupskaya had sympathies with Zinoviev, he wrote to Molotov: ‘Krup-skaya’s a splitter. She really needs a beating as a splitter if we wish to conserve party unity.’12 Two years earlier he had welcomed her support as he defended himself against the effects of Lenin’s Testament. Having survived that emergency, he intended to deal with her as severely as with other leading members of the United Opposition.
By mid-1926 the scene was set for the settling of accounts and Stalin was spoiling for a fight. When Trotski muttered to Bukharin that he expected to have a majority of the party on his side, the General Secretary wrote to Molotov and Bukharin: ‘How little he knows and how low he rates Bukharin! But I think that soon the party will punch the snouts of Tr[otski] and Grisha [Zinoviev] and Kamenev and will turn them into renegades like Shlyapnikov.’13 He accused them of behaving even less loyally than Shlyapnikov’s Workers’ Opposition. They needed to be confronted. Zinoviev should be sacked from the Politburo. The ascendant party leadership need have no fear: ‘I assure you that this matter will proceed without the slightest complications in the party and the country.’14 Zinoviev should be picked off first. Trotski could be left for later.15
The Stalin group in the leadership was by then well organised. Stalin himself could afford to stay by the Black Sea while, on 3 June 1926, a terrific dispute raged for six hours about theses proposed by Zinoviev.16 Stalin wanted total control of his group. He wanted to be kept abreast of developments and relayed regular instructions to his subordinates. But he had created a system which permitted him to be the master even while he was on vacation. He asserted himself to an ever greater extent. In September 1926 he wrote to Molotov indicating substantial reservations about his ally and supposed friend Bukharin: ‘Bukharin’s a swine and surely worse than a swine because he thinks it below his dignity to write a couple of lines.’17 Around that time he also said of his associate Mikoyan: ‘But Mikoyan’s a little duckling in politics, an able duckling but nevertheless a duckling.’18 From all this it appeared that Stalin saw himself as the single indispensable force in the campaign against the United Opposition. In his own eyes, no one else could successfully coordinate and lead the ascendant party leadership in the coming factional conflicts. He made it his aim to send Trotski and Zinoviev down to permanent defeat.
Yet the strain of constant polemics took its toll on him. Free in his accusations against the United Opposition, he was hurt by the tirade of personal abuse he himself had to endure. He was an extremely sensitive bully. When the situation got too much for him, he followed his pattern in the early years after October 1917 and sought to resign. On 27 December 1926 he wrote to Sovnarkom Chairman Alexei Rykov saying: ‘I ask you to release me from the post of Central Committee General Secretary. I affirm that I can no longer work at this post, that I’m in no condition to work any longer at this post.’ He made a similar attempt at resignation on 19 December 1927.19 Of course he wanted to be persuaded to withdraw such statements of intent — and indeed his associates did as he wished. But the mask of total self-control and self-confidence had slipped in these moments.
Stalin’s vacillation was temporary and fitful. The United Opposition had yet to be defeated and he returned to work as Party General Secretary with the pugnacity for which his associates admired him. Stalin and Bukharin were ready for the fight (although Bukharin had the disturbing tendency to go on talking to their opponents in a friendly fashion). The political end for Trotski, Zinoviev and Kamenev came surprisingly quickly. In spring 1927 Trotski drew up an ambitious ‘platform’, signed by eighty-three oppositionists (including himself), offering a fulminating critique of the sins of the ascendant party leadership. He demanded a more ‘revolutionary’ foreign policy as well as more rapid industrial growth; and whereas previously he had expressed concern about the ‘bureaucratisation’ of the party, he and his supporters now insisted that a comprehensive campaign of democratisation needed to be undertaken not only in the party but also in the soviets. The claim was made that only through such a set of measures would the original goals of the October Revolution be achievable. For the United Opposition, then, the Politburo was ruining everything Lenin had stood for. A last-ditch fight was required for the re-elevation of the party’s principles to the top of the current political agenda.
Stalin and Bukharin led the counter-attacks through the summer of 1927. Their belligerent mood was strengthened by their acute awareness that the United Opposition, while hurling accusations about the Politburo’s dereliction of revolutionary duty, was also indicting its members for simple incompetence. The Politburo was determined to hold firm as international complications intensified. The British Conservative government had been looking for a scrap for some months and when a police search of the Anglo-Soviet trading company Arcos came up with compromising evidence, the United Kingdom broke diplomatic relations entirely and expelled the Soviet ambassador in May. Next month the Soviet ambassador to Poland was assassinated. Not for the first time there were war scares in the USSR. The OGPU reinforced its vigilance against subversion and sabotage. Troubles came thick and fast. In mid-July the news had come from China that the nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek had massacred communists in Shanghai in April. Whereas nothing which happened in London and Warsaw was the Politburo’s fault, Stalin and Bukharin were directly responsible for the policies imposed by the Comintern on the Chinese communist leadership. Until recently they had insisted on an alliance with Chiang Kai-shek against the wishes of the Chinese communists; now, in August 1927, they licensed them to organise an uprising against Chiang Kai-shek. The United Opposition upbraided the Politburo for a total lack of effective supervision of the USSR’s foreign policy.
Stalin, however, went off as usual to the south for his vacation. His assumption was that he could leave the Central Control Commission, chaired by Ordzhonikidze, to handle the disciplining of the Opposition.
Papers were couriered to him regularly. What he read threw him into a rage. Somehow Zinoviev and Trotski had succeeded in turning the Central Control Commission’s enquiries into an opportunity to challenge the Central Committee. And Ordzhonikidze seemed to have lost control of developments. ‘Shame!’ wrote Stalin to Molotov in anticipation of a more aggressive stance being taken by the men he had left in charge of Moscow.20
In June and July he peppered his letters with detailed instructions on both Britain and China.21 Yet he did not lift his eyes from the internal threat: Trotski had to be dealt with. Stalin raised with Molotov and Bukharin the question of whether their enemy would be best deported to Japan.22 The decision was taken to proceed in stages. At the joint plenum of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission in October 1927, some of Trotski’s followers shouted out that the Politburo was burying Lenin’s Testament. Stalin was ready for them:23
The Opposition is thinking of ‘explaining’ its defeat by personal factors: Stalin’s crudity, the uncompromising attitude of Bukharin and Rykov and so on. It’s a cheapskate explanation! It’s less an explanation than superstitious nonsense… In the period between 1904 and the February [1917] Revolution Trotski spent the whole time twirling around in the company of the Mensheviks and conducting a campaign against the party of Lenin. Over that period Trotski sustained a whole series of defeats at the hands of Lenin’s party. Why? Perhaps Stalin’s crudity was the cause of this? But Stalin was not yet secretary to the C[entral] C[ommittee]; [Stalin] at that time was cut off and distant from foreign parts, conducting the struggle in the underground whereas the struggle between Trotski and Lenin was played out abroad. So where exactly did Stalin’s crudity come into that?
Stalin: A Biography Page 32