The Penguin History of Modern Russia

by Robert John Service

  The distrust felt by the central party leadership for both its society and even its own state continued to grow. Control organs such as the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate and the Party Central Control Commission had their authority increased. Investigators were empowered to enter any governmental institution so as to question functionaries and examine financial accounts.50

  And yet who was to control the controllers? The Bolshevik leaders assumed that things would be fine so long as public institutions, especially the control organs, drew their personnel mainly from Bolsheviks and pro-Bolshevik workers. But how were the leaders to know who among such persons were genuinely reliable? Under the NEP the system known as the nomenklatura was introduced. Since mid-1918, if not earlier, the central party bodies had made the main appointments to Sovnarkom, the Red Army, the Cheka and the trade unions. In 1923 this system was formalized by the composition of a list of about 5,500 designated party and governmental posts — the nomenklatura — whose holders could be appointed only by the central party bodies. The Secretariat’s Files-and-Distribution Department (Uchraspred) compiled a file-index on all high-ranking functionaries so that sensible appointments might be made.51

  And provincial party secretaries, whose posts belonged to this central nomenklatura, were instructed to draw up local nomenklaturas for lower party and governmental posts in analogous fashion. The internal regulation of the one-party state was tightened. The graded system of nomenklaturas was meant to ensure that the policies of the Politburo were carried out by functionaries whom it could trust; and this system endured, with recurrent modifications, through to the late 1980s.

  This same system, although it increased central control, had inherent difficulties. Candidates for jobs knew in advance that overt political loyalty and class origins counted for more than technical expertise. But this induced people to lie about their background. Over-writing and over-claiming became a way of life. The state reacted by appointing emissaries to check the accuracy of reports coming to Moscow. Yet this only strengthened the incentive to lie. And so the state sent out yet more investigative commissions. The party itself was not immune to the culture of falsehood. Fiddling and fudging pervaded the operation of lower Bolshevik bodies. Each local leader formed a group of political clients who owed him allegiance, right or wrong.52 There was also a reinforcement of the practice whereby local functionaries could gather together in a locality and quietly ignore the capital’s demands. Although the party was more dynamic than the rest of the Soviet state, its other characteristics gave cause for concern in the Kremlin.

  The NEP had saved the regime from destruction; but it had induced its own grave instabilities into the compound of the Soviet order. The principle of private profit clashed in important economic sectors with central planning objectives. Nepmen, clerics, better-off peasants, professional experts and artists were quietly beginning to assert themselves. Under the NEP there was also a resurgence of nationalist, regionalist and religious aspirations; and the arts and sciences, too, offered cultural visions at variance with Bolshevism. Soviet society under the New Economic Policy was a mass of contradictions and unpredictabilities, dead ends and opportunities, aspirations and discontents.

  8

  Leninism and its Discontents

  It would have been possible for these instabilities to persist well into the 1930s if the Politburo had been more favourably disposed to the NEP. Admittedly Lenin came to believe that the NEP, which had started as an economic retreat, offered space for a general advance. He argued that the policy would enable the communists to raise the country’s educational level, improve its administration, renovate its economy and spread the doctrines of communism. But not even Lenin saw the NEP as permanently acceptable.1

  And there was huge tension between what the communist party wanted for society and what the various social groups — classes, nationalities, organizations, churches and families — wanted for themselves. Most Bolshevik leaders had never liked the NEP, regarding it at best as an excrescent boil on the body politic and at worst a malignant cancer. They detested the reintroduction of capitalism and feared the rise of a new urban and rural bourgeoisie. They resented the corrupt, inefficient administration they headed; they disliked such national, religious and cultural concessions as they had had to make. They were embarrassed that they had not yet eliminated the poverty in Soviet towns and villages. They yearned to accelerate educational expansion and indoctrinate the working class with their ideas. They wanted a society wholly industrialized and equipped with technological dynamism. They desired to match the military preparedness of capitalist powers.

  What is more, Lenin’s NEP had always disconcerted many central and local party leaders. His chief early opponent behind the scenes was Trotski. The disagreement between them related not to the basic immediate need for the NEP but to its scope and duration. Lenin wanted large-scale industry, banking and foreign trade to remain in Sovnarkom’s hands and ensured that this was achieved. This was not enough for Trotski, who urged that there should be an increase in the proportion of investment in industry and that the State Planning Commission (Gosplan) should draw up a single ‘plan’ for all sectors of the economy; and although he did not expressly demand a debate on the timing of the eventual phasing out of the NEP, his impatience with the policy evoked sympathy even among those communists who were suspicious of Trotski’s personal ambitions.

  Lenin secretly arranged for Stalin and other associates to face down Trotski at the Eleventh Party Congress in March 1922.2 Yet Lenin himself was ailing; and the Central Committee, on the advice of Molotov and Bukharin, insisted that he should reduce his political activity. In the winter of 1921–2 he was residing at a sanatorium in Gorki, thirty-five kilometres from the capital, while he recuperated from chronic severe headaches and insomnia. In May 1922, however, he suffered a major stroke and his influence upon politics diminished as his colleagues began to run the party and government without him.

  He continued to read Pravda; he also ordered the fitting of a direct telephone line to the Kremlin.3 Stalin, too, kept him informed about events by coming out to visit him. With Lenin’s approval, Stalin had become Party General Secretary after the Eleventh Congress and knew better than anyone what was happening in the Politburo, Orgburo and the Secretariat. Lenin looked forward to Stalin’s visits, ordering that a bottle of wine should be opened for him.4 And yet the friendliness did not last long. The constitutional question about what kind of federation should be created out of the RSFSR and the other Soviet republics flared up in summer 1922, and found Lenin and Stalin at odds. Stalin also infuriated Lenin by countenancing the abolition of the state monopoly over foreign trade as well as by running the central party apparatus in an authoritarian manner. Now perceiving Trotski as the lesser of two evils, Lenin turned to him for help in reversing the movement of policy in a Politburo controlled by Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev.

  On foreign trade Trotski won the Central Committee discussion in mid-December 1922, as Lenin remarked, ‘without having to fire a shot’.5 Lenin also began to have success in his controversy with Stalin over the USSR Constitution. But his own ill-health made it highly likely that his campaign might not be brought to a successful conclusion before he died. In late December 1922, despairing of his own medical recovery, he dictated a series of confidential documents that became known as his political testament. The intention was that the materials would be presented to the next Party Congress, enabling it to incorporate his ideas in strategic policies.

  He had always behaved as if his own presence was vital to the cause of the October Revolution; his testament highlighted this when he drew pen-portraits of six leading Bolsheviks: Stalin, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Pyatakov, Bukharin and Trotski. Not one of them — not even his newly-found ally Trotski — emerged without severe criticism.6 The implication was plain: no other colleague by himelf was fit to become supreme leader. Lenin sensed that Bolshevism’s fate depended to a considerable extent on whether Stalin and Trotski wo
uld work harmoniously together. Hoping that a collective leadership would remain in place after his own demise, he argued that an influx of ordinary factory-workers to the Party Central Committee, the Party Central Control Commission and the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate would prevent a split in the Politburo and eradicate bureaucracy in both the party and the state as a whole.

  In January 1923 Lenin dictated an addendum to his testament, to the effect that Stalin was too crude to be retained as the Party General Secretary.7 Lenin had learned that Stalin had covered up an incident in which Sergo Ordzhonikidze had beaten up a Georgian Bolshevik who opposed the line taken by Stalin and Ordzhonikidze on the USSR Constitution. Lenin had also discovered from his wife Nadezhda Krupskaya that Stalin had subjected her to verbal abuse on hearing that she had broken the regime of Lenin’s medical treatment by speaking to him about politics.

  Yet Lenin’s health had to hold out if he was to bring down the General Secretary. On 5 March 1923 he wrote to Stalin that unless an apology was offered to Krupskaya, he would break personal relations with him.8 It was all too late. On 6 March, Lenin suffered another major stroke. This time he lost the use of the right side of his body and could neither speak nor read. In subsequent months he made little recovery and was confined to a wheel-chair as he struggled to recover his health. His wife Nadezhda and sister Maria nursed him attentively; but the end could not long be delayed. On 21 January 1924 his head throbbed unbearably, and his temperature shot up. At 6.50 p.m. he let out a great sigh, his body shuddered and then all was silence. The leader of the October Revolution, the Bolshevik party and the Communist International was dead.

  There was no disruption of politics since the Politburo had long been preparing itself for Lenin’s death. Since Trotski was recuperating from illness in Abkhazia at the time, it was Stalin who headed the funeral commission. Instead of burying him, the Politburo ordered that Lenin should be embalmed and put on display in a mausoleum to be built on Red Square. Stalin claimed that this corresponded to the demands of ordinary workers; but the real motive seems to have been a wish to exploit the traditional belief of the Russian Orthodox Church that the remains of truly holy men did not putrefy (even though the Church did not go as far as displaying the corpses in glass cabinets9). A secular cult of Saint Vladimir of the October Revolution was being organized. Krupskaya, despite being disgusted, was powerless to oppose it.

  The NEP had increased popular affection for Lenin; and the members of the Politburo were hoping to benefit from his reputation by identifying themselves closely with him and his policies. Arrangements were made for factory hooters to be sounded and for all traffic to be halted at the time of his funeral. Despite the bitter cold, a great crowd turned out for the speeches delivered by Lenin’s colleagues on Red Square. The display of reverence for him became mandatory and any past disagreements with him were discreetly overlooked. Bukharin, Dzierżyński, Kamenev, Preobrazhenski, Stalin, Trotski and Zinoviev had each clashed with him in the past. None of them was merely his cipher. As his body was being laid out under glass, a competition took place as to who should be recognized as the authentic heir to his political legacy.

  Oaths were sworn to his memory and picture-books of his exploits appeared in large print-runs. An Institute of the Brain was founded where 30,000 slices were made of his cerebral tissue by researchers seeking the origins of his ‘genius’. His main works were published under Kamenev’s editorship while rarer pieces of Leniniana were prepared for a series of volumes entitled the Lenin Collection.10 Petrograd was renamed Leningrad in his honour. On a more practical level, Stalin insisted that homage to Lenin should be rendered by means of a mass enrolment of workers into the ranks of the Russian Communist Party, which in 1925 renamed itself the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks).

  But what was Leninism? Lenin had eschewed giving a definition, affirming that Marxism required perpetual adjustment to changing circumstances. But his successors needed to explain what essential ideology they propounded in his name. The principal rivals — Trotski, Zinoviev, Bukharin, Kamenev and Stalin — produced speeches, articles and booklets for this purpose in 1924. A new term emerged: Marxism-Leninism. (There were still clumsier neologisms such as Marksovo-Engelso-Leninism; but Marxism-Leninism was clumsy enough: it was as if Mohammed had chosen to nominate his doctrines as Christianity-Islam.) The contenders for the succession announced their commitment to every idea associated with Lenin: the dictatorship of the proletariat; violence as the midwife of revolutionary transformation; hierarchy, discipline and centralism; concessions to peasants and oppressed nationalities; the incontrovertibility of Marxism; and the inevitability of world revolution.

  Each Bolshevik leader believed in the one-party state, the one-ideology state, in legalized arbitrary rule and in terror as acceptable methods of governance, in administrative ultra-centralism, in philosophical amoralism. Neither Lenin nor any of the others used this terminology, but their words and deeds demonstrated their commitment. The speculation that if only Lenin had survived, a humanitarian order would have been established is hard to square with this gamut of agreed principles of Bolshevism.

  The differences with Lenin’s oeuvre touched only on secondary matters. Trotski wished to expand state planning, accelerate industrialization and instigate revolution in Europe. Zinoviev objected to the indulgence shown to richer peasants. Kamenev agreed with Zinoviev, and continued to try to moderate the regime’s authoritarian excesses. Bukharin aspired to the creation of a distinctly ‘proletarian’ culture (whereas Lenin wanted cultural policy to be focused on traditional goals such as literacy and numeracy).11 Intellectual and personal factors were entangled because several Politburo members were engaged in a struggle to show who was the fittest to don Lenin’s mantle. Although Zinoviev and Kamenev had joined hands with Stalin to prevent Trotski from succeeding Lenin, by summer 1923 they were also worrying about Stalin; and they conferred with Bukharin and even Stalin’s associates Ordzhonikidze and Voroshilov in the north Caucasian spa of Kislovodsk as to how best to reduce Stalin’s powers.

  They might eventually have achieved their purpose had Trotski not picked that moment to challenge the wisdom of the Politburo’s handling of the economy. Fear of Trotski continued to be greater than annoyance with Stalin; and Kamenev, Zinoviev and Bukharin put aside their differences with Stalin in order to repel Trotski’s attack.

  Economically it appeared that the NEP had succeeded beyond everyone’s expectations. Agricultural output in 1922 had risen enough for the Politburo to resume the export of grain. As trade between town and countryside increased, output recovered. By 1923, cereal production had increased by twenty-three per cent over the total recorded for 1920. Domestic industrial recovery also gathered pace: in the same three years output from factories rose by 184 per cent.12 The snag was that, as Trotski memorably put it, a ‘scissors’ crisis’ divided the economy’s urban and rural sectors. For by 1923, the retail prices of industrial goods were three times greater than they had been in relation to agricultural goods back in 1913. The state’s pricing policy had turned the terms of trade against the peasantry, which responded by refraining from bringing its wheat, potatoes and milk to the towns. The two scissor blades of the economy had opened and the NEP was put at risk.

  The fault lay not with market pressures but with the decisions of politicians, and Trotski teased the ascendant central leadership for its incompetence. Many on the left of the communist party welcomed Trotski’s decision to speak his mind. In October 1923 Preobrazhenski and others signed a Platform of the Forty-Six criticizing the Politburo and demanding an increase in central state economic planning and internal party democracy. They were not a monolithic group: most of them insisted on appending their own reservations about the document.13 Trotski made arguments similar to those of the Platform in The New Course, published in December. It was his contention that the stifling of democracy in the party had led to a bureaucratization of party life. Debate and administration had become inflexible.
The erroneous decisions on the prices of industrial goods were supposedly one of the results.

  Zinoviev, Stalin, Kamenev and Bukharin counter-attacked. They rebutted the charge of mismanagement and authoritarianism and argued that Trotski had been an anti-Leninist since the Second Party Congress in 1903. Trotski’s proposal for more rapid industrialization, they declared, would involve a fiscal bias against the peasantry. At the Thirteenth Party Conference in January 1924 they accused him of wishing to destroy Lenin’s NEP. ‘Trotskyism’ overnight became a heresy. By the mid-1920s, moreover, Bukharin had concluded that further steps in the ‘transition to socialism’ in Russia were unachievable by mainly violent means. The October Revolution and Civil War had been necessary ‘revolutionary’ phases, but the party ought presently to devote itself to an ‘evolutionary’ phase. The objective, according to Bukharin, should be civil peace and a gradual ‘growing into socialism’. He was enraptured by the NEP, urging that the Bolshevik philosophical and political antagonism to private profit should temporarily be abandoned. To the peasantry Bukharin declared: ‘Enrich yourselves!’

  This imperative clashed so blatantly with the party’s basic ideology that Bukharin had to retract his words; and it was Stalin who supplied a doctrine capable of competing with the Left’s criticisms. In December 1924 he announced that it was a perfectly respectable tenet of Leninism that the party could complete the building of ‘Socialism in One Country’. This was a misinterpretation of Lenin; but it was a clever political move at the time. Trotski’s appeal to Bolshevik functionaries in the party, the Komsomol, the armed forces and the security police derived in part from his urgent will to industrialize the USSR and create a socialist society. Stalin’s doctrinal contribution reflected his long-held opinion that Europe was not yet ‘pregnant with socialist revolution’; and he maintained that Trotski’s insistence on the need for fraternal revolutions in the West underestimated the Soviet Union’s indigenous revolutionary potential. Stalin, by talking up the achievability of socialism without Trotskyist policies, was offering an encouraging alternative.