Lenin had confessed in November 1922 that “we still do not know where and how we must restructure ourselves, reorganize ourselves, so that after the retreat we may begin a stubborn move forward.”311 It would fall to Stalin to provide an answer. Before that, though, he had to deal with Trotsky. Every dictatorship needs a ubiquitous “enemy,” who threatens it from within. For that role, Trotsky was tailor-made, a gift to Stalin, once he figured that out. It was not Trotsky, let alone Zinoviev or Kamenev, but Stalin’s principal patron, Lenin—or at least, dictation attributed to Lenin—who would prove to be the gravest threat to the absolute power inherent in the general-secretary position, and to Stalin’s psychic balance.
CHAPTER 11
“REMOVE STALIN”
Comrade Stalin, having become general secretary, has concentrated boundless power in his hands; and I am not sure that he will always be able to use that power with sufficient caution.
Dictation attributed to Lenin, given a date of December 24, 1922, and brought forward in late May 19231
Stalin is too rude and this defect, although quite tolerable in our midst and in relations among us Communists, becomes intolerable in a general secretary. That is why I suggest the comrades think about a way of removing Stalin.
Dictation attributed to Lenin, given a date of January 4, 1923, and brought forward in June 19232
STALIN FOUND HIMSELF in a position of supreme power before most people knew of him, let alone of his power. Trotsky, in fall 1922, seems to have been among the first to recognize how, with Lenin sidelined, Stalin held uncanny power. By summer 1923, Zinoviev and Bukharin, as we shall see, were stunned at how much wherewithal Stalin had to act. Examining the instruments at Stalin’s command in the central apparatus, as we did in the last chapter, his path to absolute rule looks like a cakewalk. But even as the means to build a dictatorship within the dictatorship had fallen right into his hands, the most astonishing thing took place: Lenin appeared to call for Stalin’s removal. Stalin’s vast power fell under siege, just as he was energetically building it up. The general secretary’s cakewalk was more like a treacherous bivouac through enemy territory.
Lenin’s vexation by Trotsky was amply documented over a long period, but Lenin’s alleged exasperation with Stalin emerged all of a sudden in cryptic documentary form, in spring and summer 1923. The centerpiece would become known as Lenin’s Testament (zaveshchanie) and was brought forth by Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, with the assistance, or collusion, of the women working for Lenin, especially Maria Volodicheva and Lidiya Fotiyeva, the head of Lenin’s secretariat. There are no extant originals of the most important documents attributed to Lenin (which had no such title as “testament,” indeed no title at all when they first surfaced). Their authenticity has never been proven, as one Russian scholar has demonstrated in a scrupulously detailed examination. He argues, correctly, that unless persuasive documentary evidence comes forward corroborating Lenin’s generation of this dictation, we must treat his authorship with caution.3 That said, whether or not and, if so, in what form the documents might have derived from Lenin’s own words, they became a reality in Soviet political life, and particularly in Stalin’s life. We shall analyze the documents attributed to Lenin not by their alleged dates of dictation, but by the dates and the context in which they were brought forth, and above all, by their consequences. Their key phrase—“remove Stalin”—would eventually haunt Soviet Eurasia and the world beyond, but in the first instance would haunt Stalin himself.
Developments in 1922–23 were quite bizarre. The trigger of Stalin’s potentially mortal political troubles turned out to be none other than Georgia, the homeland he’d left behind but had colluded in reconquering for the Bolshevik regime. The specific event in Georgia that set in motion a vast wheel of intrigues in Moscow against Stalin’s continuation in the position of general secretary of the Communist party was a slap in someone’s face. Stalin had no role in that act—he was busy with the herculean task of forcing into being a functioning state out of the loose, ambiguous, hardly even confederal structures among the various Soviet republics that had emerged from civil war. His mastery of the complex national brief, not just his position as general secretary, remained a key source of his supremacy. But not long after the heavy assignment of banging together what would become the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Stalin got caught up in a delirious plot by Zinoviev to instigate a “German October,” or Communist coup, in the one country across the entire hostile capitalist world that had already promised the Soviet Union clandestine military cooperation and technology transfer. Moreover, the Soviet regime, claiming to perceive a “revolutionary situation” in Germany, was itself beset by waves of strikes by the workers in whose name it ruled.4 And the New Economic Policy, expected to bring recuperation, brought a confounding gulf between prices in the countryside for foodstuffs and prices for manufactures made in the towns. All the while, Lenin was suffering a succession of massive strokes.
Often this period is narrated in terms of the formation of a ruling triumvirate of Stalin, Kamenev, and Zinoviev arrayed against Trotsky. There is truth to this, even though, for many years, the erroneous judgment held sway that Stalin was the junior partner. But the triumvirate against Trotsky was shadowed by the circumstance that even as it was getting operational, a conspiracy took place against Stalin, initiated by Zinoviev and Bukharin, with the latter trying but failing to serve as self-appointed go-between between Zinoviev and Trotsky. The triumvirate narrative should not be allowed to eclipse the far more important story: namely, the attempts in the Bolshevik inner circle to overcome the unforeseen yet inbuilt structural circumstance of the ability of the party’s general secretary to build a dictatorship within the dictatorship. Those efforts, in turn, generated a new reality, overlaid on the first: Stalin’s sense of grievance and betrayal. If in the previous chapter, wielding the levers of power, he came across as charming and confident, if occasionally peculiar, in this chapter, battling Zinoviev, Trotsky, and especially the dictation attributed to Lenin, Stalin will come across as distrustful and self-pitying, a potentate who viewed himself as a victim.
The life of the Communist—congresses, Central Committee plenums, politburo meetings (Stalin’s life)—did not encompass even a fraction of rank-and-file party members, let alone define the rhythm of life in the vast country. To most peasants, who continued to compose the overwhelming majority of the inhabitants, the party was just a greedy adversary, concealing its tax-collecting and conscripting activities behind elaborate rhetorical camouflage. (Party meetings were closed to the public, not least for fear that non-party people would lash out at members from the floor.) Peasants were preoccupied with surviving the famine and tilling the land; with the size and health of their herds, if they had them; with weeds and weather; obtaining and maintaining their implements; warding off disease and rodents; making sure their spouses did not all of a sudden seek to take advantage of new Communist laws on divorce. The land of socialism was a hardscrabble one, struggling to emerge from devastation. Soviet per capita income in the early 1920s, at least in terms of recorded economic activity, was probably no more than around 70 rubles, annually. What follows, therefore, is not a portrait of the life of the country, which Stalin viewed mostly through the twisted top secret reports brought to him by telegraph and field courier, but a portrait bookended by the formation of the USSR and a would-be “German October,” of a dictatorship with circumscribed capacities but grandiose ambitions, and of a man at the center of it all who was skillfully enlarging those dictatorial state capacities while constantly glancing over his shoulder.
UNION OF SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLICS—AND A SLAP IN TIFLIS
The grand story of the formation of the USSR is saturated in misapprehension, with Lenin cast as defender of the nationalities and Stalin as Russian chauvinist and archcentralizer.5 Stalin did propose forging a unitary state by having the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR) absorb the other S
oviet republics, but he also proposed granting them “autonomy” in most domestic affairs, and initially Lenin had accepted Stalin’s plan. Trotsky’s reaction had been similar: “Comrade Stalin’s proposal presents itself as very alluring from the point of view of simplicity.”6 This framework gained impetus in mid-1922, when Georgian Communists permitted the Ottoman Bank, funded by British and French capital, to open a branch in Tiflis, inciting an angry Grigory Sokolnikov, finance commissar for Soviet Russia, to demand the bank’s charter for operations in Georgia be rescinded, which in turn provoked the fury of the Georgian Communist Central Committee.7 But could the genie of national states unleashed by the Great War really be put back in the bottle? Stalin thought so.
As head of an orgburo commission on state structure, Stalin drafted theses calling for “unifying [the Soviet republics] in a single federation, folding in military and economic matters and external connections (foreign affairs, foreign trade) into one whole, keeping for the republics autonomy in internal affairs.”8 But the formal proposal for the RSFSR to absorb Ukraine, Belorussia, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan was accepted only by the Central Committees of Azerbaijan, which faced an Iranian state that used to rule it, and Armenia, which faced Turkey, where Armenians had been massacred. The Georgian Central Committee agreed solely to “the unification of economic strength and general policy, but with the retention of all the attributes of independence.” The Belorussian Central Committee requested the same treaty relations as currently existed between Soviet Ukraine and Soviet Russia—ambiguity cum de facto independence—while the Ukrainian Central Committee did not even discuss the new draft.9 Only an extraordinary effort by an extraordinary figure was going to produce a functioning integrated state.
Stalin’s most dogged opponent initially was the-then head of Ukraine’s government, Kryasto Stanchev, known as Cristian Rakovski, a respected official whose calls for the weakest possible central authority amounted to confederation. Stalin would not be so easily stopped, however: on September 23 and 24, while Rakovski and others happened to be on holiday, he had the commission approve his plan for a unitary state with autonomy.10 The Moscow party secretariat immediately circulated the paperwork to the members of the Central Committee of Soviet Russia even before the politburo had met. Stalin also privately lobbied Lenin on the extreme urgency of his plan, noting that the RSFSR apparatus found itself constantly revisiting decisions of the republics, while republics protested the “illegal” interference of Soviet Russia. He presented a stark choice: either genuine independence (“a divorce”), “or the real unification of the Soviet republics into one economic whole with formal extension of the powers of the Council of People’s Commissars, Council of Labor and Defense, and central executive committee of the RSFSR over [those] of the independent republics.” The latter, he noted, would still retain “real autonomy . . . in the areas of language, culture, justice, internal affairs, agriculture.” Stalin warned Lenin that “independentists among the Communists,” emboldened by “Moscow’s liberalism” during the civil war, would only grow if not brought to heel.11 Lenin received Stalin’s letter on September 25, after the orgburo commission had approved it. The next day, Stalin went out to Gorki for a long private meeting. He would never again visit Gorki (Lenin returned to Moscow the next week.) By one account, Stalin was observed departing Gorki in bad temper.12
Lenin nixed the idea of the unitary state, instructing Stalin to switch from “enter” the RSFSR to “formal unification together with the RSFSR in a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics of Europe and Asia.” Lenin’s counterproposal presupposed that the units, including Soviet Russia, would be equal members, and that as more countries underwent socialist revolutions, they could join the federation as well. Stalin conceded the change, allowing Lenin to crow to Kamenev that day about “the significance of [Stalin’s] concession.”13 Lenin insisted that the RSFSR central executive committee of the Soviet not become the one for the single state, contradicting Stalin, but Lenin also proposed having Union commissariats where Stalin had proposed republic-level ones (finance, food, labor).14 Moreover, Lenin, in the way he behaved as head of the RSFSR government, taking decisions for all the Soviet republics, was hardly a genuine federalist.15 But in the letter to Kamenev, Lenin insisted that “it is important not to give grist for the mill of the ‘independence lobby,’ not to destroy their independence, but to create a new level, a federation of equal republics.” Stalin, however, also felt the issue involved principle, complaining that in Lenin’s plan, some republics—Ukraine, Belorussia—were being treated equally with Russia but others, the various autonomous republics currently inside the RSFSR, were not. He argued that his plan of autonomy for all the national republics was actually fairer, which certainly held for Bashkiria, Tataria, or Turkestan, which in Stalin’s scheme would be equal to Ukraine or Belorussia. At the same time, in Stalin’s version the Russian republic would be the mother ship, which was Lenin’s objection.
Lenin had never set foot in Georgia, or even Ukraine, for that matter; Stalin had far greater firsthand experience of the varied realm, and, while cognizant of the need to indulge nationalism in order to secure political allegiance, recognized a state need to tame nationalism. Unlike Lenin, who viewed Georgians as a small-nation victim of imperial Russia, Stalin knew that Georgian national chauvinism oppressed the other peoples of the Caucasus.16 More than that, Stalin rightly suspected the Georgian Communists’ agenda was really de facto Georgian independence through mere confederation. Polikarp “Budu” Mdivani, a member of the orgburo commission as well as of the Georgian Central Committee, had managed to get a letter through to Lenin—Bukharin passed it on—that hurled accusations at Stalin as well as Orjonikidze, the highest-ranking Bolshevik in the South Caucasus.17 On September 27, right after seeing Stalin, Lenin received Mdivani.18 That same day, Stalin exploded, writing an irate letter to all members of the politburo accusing Lenin of “national liberalism” as well as “hurriedness.” No top party official had ever used such an intemperate tone in written communications with the Bolshevik leader.19 Stalin, however, knew Lenin was being inconsistent: earlier in 1922 the Bolshevik leader had accused Ukraine’s Communists—“the people there are sly”—of trying to evade party directives in a struggle against Moscow’s centralism.20 That was precisely what Stalin understood his fellow Georgians to be doing now; hence his explosion. Nonetheless, the plan that Stalin circulated for the October 5–8, 1922, Central Committee plenum corresponded entirely to Lenin’s version of a federal Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Even though Lenin was too ill to attend the plenum, Stalin made sure Lenin’s plan carried.21
Stalin’s absorption-by-Russia proposal faced fatal obstacles—not just Lenin and the Georgian nationalist Communists, but also the Bolshevik leaders of Ukraine, including Rakovski, an ethnic Bulgarian raised in Romania, as well as Ukrainian national Communists who fought tooth and nail in the orgburo commission.22 Indeed, lost in the confusion generated by Mdivani was the fact that opponents of a unitary state had won. (Objections were raised to the designation “of Europe and Asia”—what if revolutions took place in Africa or the Americas?—so the geographical marker was dropped.) The Soviet state became a federation. Also lost in the swirling passions was the circumstance that Stalin was the would-be centralizer in Eurasia, but Lenin was the centralizer globally. He had wanted during the Polish War not just to Sovietize but also to incorporate a number of states on the heels of a Red Army sweep westward into Europe. Stalin had responded that “for the nations that formed part of old Russia, we can and should consider our (Soviet) type of federation as an appropriate path to international unity,” but not so for “a future Soviet Germany, Poland, Hungary, Finland. These peoples . . . would scarcely agree to enter straight into a federative bond with Soviet Russia on the Bashkir or Ukrainian model.” Instead, he had deemed “confederation (a union of independent states) as the most appropriate form of drawing together.”23 Stalin had also set Finland and Poland apart as unsu
sceptible to federation with Soviet Russia even though they had been constituents of “old Russia.”24 Lenin’s reply, if there was one, has been lost or destroyed, but its gist was captured in a summary by Stalin: Lenin scorned Stalin’s proposal for European confederation as “chauvinism, nationalism,” insisting “we need a centralized world economy, run from a single organ.”25 Stalin had no such delusions.
Further lost in the Georgian-generated confusion of 1922 was the circumstance that any federal state structure in Eurasia would be fettered even before coming into being. That was because although the Russian Communist party had authorized the creation of national Communist parties, in connection with the USSR’s formation the non-federal nature of the party that had been set down at the 8th Congress in 1919 was not rescinded. It took a lot of head banging to implement the strict subordination to Moscow of republic Communist parties in practice, but in the last analysis, as Marxists liked to say, the party trumped the state. Indeed, that is how nationalist Communists such as Mdivani could be called to account: they were subject to Communist party discipline, meaning the rule of the Stalin-controlled apparatus in Moscow.
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