Kamenev, meanwhile, had acted upon his self-assigned peacemaker role for Georgia and, along with Kuibyshev (Central Control Commission), had gone to the Second Georgian Party Congress, which opened in Tiflis on March 14.134 The Georgian party delegates refused to reinstate Mdivani and seven other “national deviationists” in the new twenty-five-member Georgian Central Committee, but the Muscovite emissaries insisted.135 Orjonikidze perceived Kamenev as playing both sides.136 On March 21, Stalin telegrammed Orjonikidze to admonish him that he had learned from Kamenev and Kuibyshev that the South Caucasus Federation constitution was “wrong and illegal,” because the economic commissariats of the three individual republics lacked genuine operational functions. “This mistake must be corrected obligatorily and immediately.”137 Suddenly, on March 23, Trotsky, belatedly taking up the cause of the Georgian Central Committee, lobbied the politburo to remove Orjonikidze, but only one other member voted with him. Kamenev and Kuibyshev returned to Moscow and reported to the politburo on March 26 on mistakes of “both sides” in Georgia. Trotsky kept up the attack.138 On April 1, he tried to get Bukharin to write a prominent article on the national question before the upcoming Party Congress (which had been postponed from March 30 until April 17). Nothing appeared in Pravda by Bukharin.139 But then, something extraordinary happened: on April 16, Lidiya Fotiyeva telephoned Kamenev to report that there was a new article by Lenin on nationalities.
Fotieya then telephoned Stalin with the same information. Stalin refused to receive the “article,” stating he would “not get involved.”140 The article, titled “Notes on the Question of Nationalities,” departed significantly from Lenin’s lifelong and even recent views on nationalities, advocating confederation.141 The “Notes” also had Lenin stating that “I think that Stalin’s haste and his infatuation with pure administration, together with his spite against the notorious ‘nationalist-socialism,’ played a fatal role here,” meaning in the bad blood aroused in Georgia. “In politics spite generally plays the basest of roles.”142
Lenin’s alleged “Notes” were dated December 30–31, 1922, and Fotiyeva later observed that the long article had been dictated in two fifteen-minute sessions.143 The typescript lacked a signature or initials. The existing evidence strongly points to a maneuver by Krupskaya, and the staff in Lenin’s secretariat, to forge what they interpreted as Lenin’s will. They knew he was exercised over the Georgian affair; indeed, they egged him on over it. Trotsky might also have been complicit by this point. Controversy ensued over his claim that he had received Lenin’s “Notes on the Question of Nationalities” before the Central Committee had—and, supposedly, before Lenin’s third stroke—but had inexplicably held on to them.144 Lenin’s purported dictation happened to dovetail with views Trotsky published in Pravda (March 20, 1923).145 Even more telling, Lenin’s secretaries had kept working on the counterdossier on Georgia, for a report by Lenin to a future Party Congress, even after he had his third massive stroke and permanently lost his ability to speak. Their material contains the following note (dated March 12): “Group the material not so much in defense of the [national] deviationists as in the faulting of the great power chauvinists”—meaning Stalin. In fact, their counter-Dzierzynski Commission dossier reads like a first draft of the “Notes on the Question of Nationalities.” On April 16, when Fotiyeva set the “Notes” in motion, Trotsky belatedly adduced the alleged Lenin letter, supposedly dictated March 6, to Mdivani. Rumors were spreading that “Lenin had expressed confidence in Trotsky and gave him some kind of important tasks and prerogatives.”146
ABSENT LENIN
The 12th Party Congress, which took place April 17–25, 1923, in Moscow, with 408 voting delegates among 825 attendees, was the first that Lenin would miss since the 6th in summer 1917, when he was in hiding. Initially, the politburo, as usual, had assigned Lenin the main political report, but that now fell to Zinoviev.147 “You remember with what thirst we always listened to this speech, a thirst like that of a man who, on a sultry summer day, falls upon a deep clear spring to drink his fill,” Zinoviev remarked, raising expectations, then failing to meet them.148 Stalin, in his organizational report, boasted that “for the past six years the Central Committee has never before prepared a congress the way it has prepared this one.”149 In fact, the opening was postponed because the delegate elections were annulled and new elections held in far-flung locales with “representatives” of the Central Committee present. The garrulous Zinoviev later admitted that “people could say to us: the party’s Central Committee, right before a congress at which the Central Committee was going to be criticized, . . . has gathered its own delegates, curtailing the electoral rights of members. . . . But we had to do this from the point of view of the interests of the revolution. From the point of view of the benefits to the revolution, [we decided] to allow voting only by those who are the genuine party guard.”150 Translation: Trotsky supporters were culled. Some sense of the acrimony can be gleaned from the anecdote that when Voroshilov saw Radek at the congress walking behind Lev Trotsky, he called out something to the effect of “There goes Lev [Lion] and behind him his tail.” Radek got to work and, a few moments later, produced a riposte: “Oh, Klim, you empty head,/Stuffed full of manure,/Better to be Lev’s [Lion’s] tail/Than Stalin’s ass.”151
Trotsky’s appearance, amid blazing lights and rolling movie cameras, provoked a thunderous ovation.152 He delivered a long, intricate speech that introduced a brilliant metaphor to capture a major crisis bedeviling the regime’s economic policy. Soviet industry, slower to recover than farming, was producing insufficient goods leading to higher prices (a situation exacerbated by the organization of the industrial economy into trusts that engaged in monopoly price gouging); at the same time, prices for farmers’ output were falling, and the price differential inhibited peasants from marketing their grain. Trotsky adduced a sensational graph that showed the rising prices for manufactured goods and falling prices for agricultural goods, which he likened to the opening of scissor blades.153 His speech culminated in a paean to planning. “Our New Economic Policy was established seriously and for a long time, but not forever,” he stated, calling the market a “diabolical phenomenon” and drawing applause.154 Trotsky did not specify how a transition to planning might happen, but he did indicate how he would pay for it: “There may be moments when the state does not pay a full wage or pays only a half, and you, the worker, give a credit to your state at the expense of your wages.” A few voices called Trotsky out on this call for exploitation of labor, but the members of the leadership, for the most part, avoided engaging his speech, which was followed by applause.155 What did Trotsky then do? “As soon as he had finished he left the hall,” one student admirer remarked. “There was no personal contact in the corridors.”156
Stalin delivered a second report, on nationalities, and being unable to outdo Trotsky in theatrics, concentrated on substance and delivered the speech of his career to that date. He refrained from stating that Lenin’s “Notes on the Question of Nationalities” was a forgery, but he did allow that “comrade Lenin forgot, he forgot a great deal recently. He forgot that with him we passed the fundamentals of the Union (Voice: he was not at the plenum).”157 Stalin proceeded to refute the arguments of the “Notes” point by point. Stalin knew his Lenin. He painstakingly proved that Lenin himself had spurned the confederation argument, accurately citing his own correspondence with Lenin as well as Lenin’s many other writings. Stalin demonstrated that Lenin stood for a federation, which is how the recently formed Union had been designed and approved; Lenin stood for a single, integrated economy; “for Lenin the national question is a question subordinated to a higher question—the workers’ question.”158 Stalin further proved that Lenin had been an early backer of a South Caucasus Federation to tamp down nationalist excess.159 Stalin drove home the point by noting that the Georgians oppressed national minorities, and not just the tribals (Abkhazians and Ossetians), but also Armenians—look at Georgian offic
ials’ efforts to deport local Armenians and “transform Tiflis into a real Georgian capital.”160 Great Russians, in other words, had no monopoly on chauvinism. Anyway, not chauvinism but backwardness and the need for development were the salient issues. The party needed to employ the instruments of regional autonomy and native language education, which would now consolidate the nations, so that they could be developed, a policy confirmed at the congress as “indigenization” (korenizatsiia).161
Dissenting voices tried to rally. Rakovski decried usurpation of republic prerogatives and a creeping “administrative, apparatus, bureaucratic psychology,” and sought to marshal Lenin against Stalin, but Stalin mounted a strong rebuttal with an accurate account of his 1920 exchange with Lenin, during the Polish War, quoting himself and Lenin’s answer to show that Lenin was the archcentralizer; Stalin, the one who acknowledged difference.162 Ukraine’s Skrypnyk characterized Great Russian chauvinism as “sucked in with their mother’s milk,” so that it had become “instinctual in many, many comrades”—including, somehow, in the Georgian Stalin—while Mdivani denounced the South Caucasus Federation as “artificially established.” No one tried to use Lenin’s alleged letter to Mdivani—not Trotsky, not even Mdivani. The latter did try to use Lenin’s alleged “Notes on the Question of Nationalities” article, but Kamenev, who was presiding, cut him off.163 Only Bukharin joined Rakovski in supporting a confederation (after the Union federation had already been formed).164 The vast majority of the delegates lined up with Stalin. “The thunder of applause from everywhere was heard,” Bukharin admitted.165 Even Yevgeny Preobrazhensky—the person who had challenged Lenin at the previous congress a year earlier over Stalin holding so many concurrent positions—allowed that “comrade Stalin’s report was extremely substantive, I would say that it was a very intelligent report.”166
Stalin enjoyed a moment of high visibility and a smashing victory.167 Trotsky himself, by putting before the Party Congress the choice of Lenin’s authority versus his (Trotsky’s) on the matters of the New Economic Policy and the Union federation, had allowed Stalin to demonstrate that he was the one faithful to Lenin. Kamenev, too, had thundered that “the NEP could be terminated with a single decree of yours or of any higher organ of Soviet power, and this would not cause any political tremors,” while Zinoviev remarked that “it is not the turn of NEP right now.”168 Stalin was leery of “the corrupting influence of NEP elements” on the party, and even blamed NEP and private capital for growth in Great Russian chauvinism and “Georgian, Azerbaijan, and Uzbek and other nationalisms,” but at the top of the regime Stalin was the one who defended Lenin’s NEP.169 He was reconfirmed as general secretary. In the elections to the new Central Committee, Trotsky came in thirty-fifth place in the total number of positive votes, as opposed to second, where he had stood in the elections at the previous Party Congress. Kamenev came in twenty-fourth, Zinoviev thirty-second, and Stalin tied for first (384 votes out of 386) with Lenin.170 Trotsky would not even have remained a member of the Central Committee if Stalin had not now radically expanded that body, as Lenin had proposed in his December 23 dictation for Stalin.
MIRACULOUS DICTATION
On May 15, 1923, Lenin was transported at a snail’s pace from the Kremlin to Gorki with a team of doctors. On top of paralysis, he suffered insomnia, lost appetite, stomach troubles, fevers, and memory loss. He was desperately trying to regain the power of speech, mostly by reciting the alphabet and singing the “Internationale.”171 But his speech was limited to a handful of words—“congress,” “peasant,” “worker”—and when he repeated the words Krupskaya said to him, it was not clear he understood their meaning. Physicians observed how he was “given dried bread chips, but for a long time he could not put his hand straight onto the plate and kept putting it around it.”172 He had bouts of weeping and raged at the doctors, as if they were at fault. It was abundantly clear that he would never again play any role in political life. From May 16, no more official bulletins appeared about his health. The strain on Krupskaya was enormous.173 Lenin’s life work, the fate of the revolution, would have to be carried forward by others, and while she spent her days with a hopeless invalid, Stalin had emerged as successor.
But then the heavens crackled and a lightning bolt flashed across the sky: sometime in late May 1923, Krupskaya brought forth a very short document purporting to be dictation from Lenin. She handed it to Zinoviev, with whom she had developed close relations dating back to the emigration in Switzerland.174 Volodicheva, again, was said to have taken the dictation, over several sessions, recorded as December 24–25, 1922.175 But the purported dictation had not been registered in the documents journal in Lenin’s secretariat. It was a typescript; no shorthand or stenographic originals can be found in the archives. Lenin had not initialed the typescript, not even with his unparalyzed left hand.176 According to Trotsky, the typescript had no title.177 Later, titles would be affixed—Lenin’s Testament or “Letter to the Congress”—and an elaborate mythology would be concocted about how the dictation had been placed in a wax-sealed envelope with Lenin’s instructions that it be opened only after his death. Of course, Krupskaya had given the typescript to Zinoviev while Lenin was still alive.
These were extraordinary pieces of paper, consisting of barbed evaluations of six people. (When Stalin was handed and read the dictation, he is said to have exclaimed of Lenin, “He shit on himself and he shit on us!”178) Several top officials were omitted, however, including Rykov, Tomsky, and Kalinin, all full members of the politburo, and Molotov, a candidate member of the politburo and someone who worked very closely with Lenin.179 By contrast, Bukharin, another politburo candidate member, was mentioned, as was Pyatakov. Lenin saw these two in Gorki and he was preoccupied with next-generation cadres; the purported dictation called them “the most outstanding best forces (among the youth forces).” Still, the document drove a stake through both of them:
Bukharin is not only a most valuable and major theorist of the party; he is also rightly considered the favorite of the whole party, but his theoretical views can be classified as fully Marxist only with great reserve, for there is something scholastic about him (he has never made a study of dialectics, and, I think, never fully understood it). . . . As for Pyatakov, he is unquestionably a man of outstanding will and outstanding ability, but shows too much zeal for administrating and the administrative side of the work to be relied upon in a serious political matter.
The dictation urged Bukharin, then thirty-four, and Pyatakov, then thirty-two, to “find occasion to enhance their knowledge and amend their one-sidedness.” This seemingly fatherly advice had to sting.
But the immediately preceding comments in the typescript, about Zinoviev and Kamenev, were still more damning:
The October episode with Zinoviev and Kamenev was, of course, no accident, but neither can the blame for it be laid upon them personally, any more than non-Bolshevism can upon Trotsky.
That was it: a single sentence about two of the most important regime figures, an apparent pardon for their opposition to the October coup in the form of a devastating reminder of it.
What preceded the dismissal of Kamenev and Zinoviev, however, was nothing short of earth-shattering:
Comrade Stalin, having become general secretary, has concentrated boundless power in his hands, and I am not sure whether he will always be able to use that power with sufficient caution.
Stalin had somehow acquired “boundless power” himself, as if Lenin had not made him general secretary. The immediate next line was eye-popping as well:
Comrade Trotsky, as his fight against the Central Committee in connection with the issue of the people’s commissariat of railways proved, is distinguished by the highest abilities. He is personally perhaps the most able man in the present Central Committee, but he has displayed excessive self-assurance and shown excessive preoccupation with the purely administrative side of matters.180
The dictation warned that “thes
e two qualities of the two outstanding leaders of the present Central Committee”—Stalin’s incaution, Trotsky’s self-assured political daftness—“can inadvertently lead to a schism, and if our party does not take steps to avert this, the schism may come unexpectedly.”181
Although the text raised doubts about all six, as well as others who had not merited a mention, Trotsky emerges as the central figure, called the ablest, pardoned for his grievous non-Bolshevism up to 1917, and mentioned even when others were being dealt with. Before, during, and after the 12th Party Congress, Trotsky was under relentless, scurrilous assault. Anonymous opposition pamphlets had appeared demanding the removal from the Central Committee of Stalin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev, but a far greater number of “underground” works emerged against Trotsky, such as A Small Biography of a Big Man (rumored to have been authored by Stalin’s minion Tovstukha) and What Ilich Wrote and Thought About Trotsky (which dredged up Lenin’s nasty comments).182 Conspicuously, all the phrases of the supposedly late December 1922 dictation correspond with either the anonymous pro-Trotsky hectographs or with the pro- and anti-Trotsky speeches during the congress: the threat of a schism, the need to remove the triumvirate or leading group, Trotsky’s non-Bolshevism (mentioned by Zinoviev), Stalin’s rudeness. A veritable rough draft of the dictation appeared in the form of the congress speech by the trade unionist Vladimir Kosior (brother of Stanisław Kosior), who pointed a finger at the “triumvirate,” the “secretariat,” and the “leading party organs” as having interests different from those of the party as a whole and as threatening a schism.183 Overall, there is a strong sense that the author of the dictation supposedly made in December 1922 had studied the speeches of the 12th Party Congress in spring 1923.184
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