Stalin, Volume 1

by Stephen Kotkin

  No one at the congress—which ended on April 25—Krupskaya included, had hinted at the existence of Lenin’s alleged dictation. Why did Krupskaya not choose to show this document to the 12th Party Congress? She had brought forth the “Notes on the Question of Nationalities,” a blatant forgery that had failed to gain any attraction.

  One cannot exclude the possibility that Lenin dictated the untitled typescript with evaluations of six personnel, despite the absence of corroborating evidence. It is also possible that someone, knowing Lenin’s thoughts, rendered some barely audible but genuine words and gestures into this form. But it may be that the intermediaries interpolated Lenin without specific dictation. The timing of late May 1923 closely fits a circumstantial case that the alleged Lenin dictation was produced as part of the struggle in the party in connection with the outcome of the 12th Party Congress—Stalin’s triumph, Trotsky’s rout. The document’s appearance also followed Lenin’s removal from the Kremlin to Gorki and the termination of official bulletins about his health, indicating a certain hopelessness about his condition.185 Furthermore, on or just before June 2, 1923, Krupskaya handed Zinoviev what was said to be a Lenin dictation on the state planning commission that, wondrously, now supported Trotsky’s long-standing desire to achieve economic dictatorship, against which Lenin had fought tooth and nail right through his second massive stroke.186

  One thing is indisputable: the miraculous dictation could not have emerged from Lenin’s innermost sanctum without the involvement of Krupskaya.187 But why would she support Trotsky? She and Stalin had been at daggers drawn for some time, yet her acrimony with Trotsky dated back far longer.188 After she had become not only Lenin’s wife but also secretary in 1898, she had found herself in the middle of bitter polemics that would produce the Bolshevik-Menshevik split, and in her own letters of the time she wrote sharp barbs not just against Martov but Trotsky, too, calling one of his brochures “the most scandalous perversion of the revolutionary movement in years.”189 More recently, Krupskaya was keenly aware of Lenin’s deep exasperation at Trotsky’s constant public polemics with him during the civil war and early NEP. It is wrong to see her as on Trotsky’s side, just as it is wrong to see Maria Ulyanova on Stalin’s.190 Both women sought not to favor someone but to attain a balance.191 Krupskaya, in her quarter century by Lenin’s side, had undergone a master class of political intrigue, and no doubt she believed in her heart she knew Lenin’s wishes. From deep inside the regime, she could see Stalin’s “boundless power,” and her gambit, if that is what it was, seems designed to deny the Georgian the status of Lenin’s sole successor.

  OPERATION PARLIAMENT-2 (SOLTANĞALIEVISM)

  Stalin, right after the 12th Party Congress, was unfolding a cunning manipulation of his own, aimed at national-minority party cadres he suspected of disloyalty. It began with the OGPU Eastern Department, which carried responsibility for Muslims and Buddhists, whether abroad or on Soviet territory. The Eastern Department, founded and headed by the Latvian Jekabs Peterss, had instituted close surveillance over Soviet Muslim Communists, tracking everything from political views to sexual liaisons. In an operation code-named Parliament-2, a particular target was the Tatar Mirsayet Soltanğaliev, a Stalin protégé and rare bird. Tataria had a mere 3,483 party members, of whom just 28.5 percent were Tatars.192 Here was a literate Muslim Communist with a mass following among a difficult constituency (as Stalin knew well from his time agitating among Muslims in Batum and Baku), but Soltanğaliev had taken to consistently criticizing Stalin at party forums over such matters as the inclusion of Muslim Turkestan as part of the RSFSR rather than as a self-standing republic of the Union.193 He called the Muslim peoples of the Volga valley, southern Urals, Central Asia, and Caucasus the springboard of the world revolution, battled the writ of the RSFSR agricultural commissariat over land in Tataria, sponsored glorification of the medieval Tatar Khanate, and pushed to impose Tatar as the language for Muslims across Soviet Russia. Casually, in spring 1923, Stalin approached Soltanğaliev and informed him he had been shown a conspiratorial letter from the Tatar to a comrade in Baskhiria, which indicated the existence of an underground organization, and warned him to be careful. Whether by design or not, this warning prompted Soltanğaliev to write in code to one of his correspondents to ask that his previous letters be destroyed.194 This letter was intercepted by the OGPU and sent to Kuibyshev, chair of the party Central Control Commission, where, in early May 1923, Soltanğaliev was summoned, expelled from the party for pan-Turkism, pan-Islamism, and nationalism, and arrested.195

  Although the 13th Party Congress had just discussed the national question in depth, the expulsion of a member of the central government (nationalities commissariat collegium) seemed sufficient for the politburo to summon a special meeting of national Communists, fifty-eight of whom attended, along with two dozen members and candidate members of the Central Committee. On June 9, 1923, with Kamenev chairing, and the Muslim attendees aware that Soltanğaliev was sitting at Lubyanka internal prison, Kuibyshev opened the four-day gathering with a report containing excerpts from the incriminating Soltanğaliev letter asking that his previous letters be destroyed as well as from his interrogation testimony. Kuibyshev asserted that Soltanğaliev had admitted writing the secret correspondence, called his own arrest “lawful,” and allowed that “it would also be lawful to apply the highest measure of punishment to me—execution. I say this sincerely.” Kuibyshev concluded that Soltanğaliev had committed grave transgressions but could be released, because he had admitted his actions; otherwise, despite the proof just presented (in this secret forum), the Tatar might become a martyr.196 Much of the ensuing discussion was taken up by those who had worked closely with Soltanğaliev and were trying to explain themselves. But Orjonikidze observed that in Turketsan, where he had been recently, the infighting took the form of Sunnis versus Shiites, Turks versus Persians, not national Communism, while in the Caucasus, students in the Azerbaijan Muslim-teachers school wore badges featuring Turkey’s Mustafa Kemal. He called for training national-minority Communists as internationalists (like himself). By contrast, Skrypnyk, the Ukrainian Communist, remarked that someone was trying to use this incident “to shift policy” toward a harder line against national Communists (Trotsky shouted out: “Completely correct”).197 Skrypnyk, along with Rakovski, was giving Stalin fits on the constitutional commission to finalize the governing structures of the Union.198

  Stalin spoke in the discussion after Kuibyshev’s report, even though his own report was scheduled for that evening. “Nationalism is the fundamental idea-obstacle on the path to growing Marxist cadres, a Marxist avant-garde, in the borderlands,” he stated, equating Muslim nationalists to Mensheviks, “a bourgeois ideology” and platform for reviving a bourgeoisie in conditions of the NEP. Before the four-day meeting, he may have been contemplating a revolutionary tribunal culminating in a death penalty.199 But now, Stalin agreed with his minion Kuibyshev on the need to release Soltanğaliev. “The guy admitted all his sins and sought forgiveness,” Stalin stated, as if being magnanimous. “He has been expelled from the party and of course will not be readmitted. But for what purpose should he be held in prison?” When a voice interjected to ask what work Soltanğaliev could do, Stalin answered, “He is not ours, he’s alien, but, I assure, you, he is no worse than certain military specialists who conduct very important work in important posts.”200 The equation of a national minority Communist with tsarist military specialists was revealing of Stalin’s pervasive suspicions of disloyalty. He made Soltanğaliev into an example as a means of intimidation and control. While Zinoviev inadvertently managed to reveal his ignorance of national affairs at the forum, Kamenev, who was in on Stalin’s virtuoso manipulation to tighten the political screws, closed the gathering by reminding attendees that internal threats such as Soltanğalievism could become a weapon in the hands of Britain, “the greatest imperialist power.”201 On June 14, the OGPU’s Mezynski had Soltanğaliev released, after forty-
five days in prison. (He would end up relegated to working in the country’s hunting association.)202 Stalin had a stenographic account of the gathering quickly distributed for required discussion in all national republic party organizations. The discussion in the Tatarstan party was presided over by the local OGPU chief.203 There would be “indigenization” of national cadres, as mandated by the 12th Party Congress, but also OGPU surveillance. Here were techniques Stalin could apply beyond Muslim Communists.

  “CAVE MEETING”

  On July 10, 1923, Zinoviev and Bukharin left Moscow for an extended holiday in Kislovodsk, the country’s celebrated southern spa town of medicinal “acidic waters” (kislye vody).204 Before departing, the pair had become privy to a sensational additional purported Lenin document, what was called “Ilich’s letter about the secretary.” Supposedly, it had been dictated by the Bolshevik leader on January 4, 1923, as an addendum to the dictations dated December 24–25; Fotiyeva claimed to have taken the addendum dictation.205 Krupskaya had again approached Zinoviev.206 Kamenev, who remained in Moscow at this time, also knew about it. The contents were explosive:

  Stalin is too rude, and this defect, while fully tolerable in the milieu and company among us, Communists, becomes intolerable in the post of general secretary. That is why I suggest that the comrades think about a way to transfer Stalin from this post and name a different person who in all other respects differs from Stalin in having only one advantage, namely that of being more tolerant, more loyal, more polite and more considerate toward comrades, less capricious, and so on. This circumstance may appear to be a mere trifle. But I think that from the standpoint of safeguards against a schism and from the standpoint of what I wrote above about the relationship between Stalin and Trotsky it is not a trifle, or it is a trifle that can assume decisive importance.207

  Could Lenin have wanted to sack Stalin just fifteen months after having created the post of general secretary expressly for him? If so, why did the dictation not suggest a replacement? And why did the letter also mention Trotsky?

  There is no stenographic original of the “Ilich letter about the [general] secretary.” In the journal of Lenin’s activities kept by the secretarial staff there is no mention of any such “Ilich letter.” The physicians’ journal for January 4, 1923, recorded that Lenin suffered a sleepless night and a “poor” disposition, and “gave dictation twice and read,” but not a single source corroborates the content of the January 4 dictation.208 Also curious is the fact that Zinoviev had not been made privy to the “Ilich letter about the [general] secretary” in late May, along with the evaluations of six regime personnel. The new typescript emerged only in June.209

  This alleged dictation—perhaps the most momentous document of the entire regime’s history until now—should have radicalized the political dynamic. But Zinoviev and Bukharin, in possession of knowledge of Lenin’s ostensible instruction to find a way to remove Stalin as general secretary, did not do so. What the pair did do was to hold a “cave meeting,” conspiratorially bringing together on the rock cliffs a few other officials who were also on holiday in Kislovodsk or nearby.210 Attendees, besides Zinoviev and Bukharin, were Grigory Yevdokimov, the trade union head in Petrograd and one of Zinoviev’s closest allies; Mikhail Lashevich, the commander of the Siberian military and another close Zinoviev supporter; and Klim Voroshilov, a staunch Stalin supporter and the commander of the local North Caucasus military district headquartered in Rostov, who received a telegram to come to Kislovodsk, some 300 miles away.211 There were five “cavemen” in total. An invitation had also gone to Mikhail Frunze, commander of the Ukraine and Crimea military district, who was on holiday at Zheleznovodsk, 25 miles away, but he arrived only the day after.212

  Trotsky also happened to be in Kislovodsk on holiday, but by all accounts he took no part in the cave meeting.213 He was, of course, no less unhappy than Zinoviev or Bukharin with how Stalin operated the party secretariat, but Trotsky, polemicizing against potential allies, holding himself at a distance, made it exceedingly difficult for anyone to ally with him. That summer he was mostly absorbed in writing, though he did agree to receive the American leftist writer Max Eastman, who came down to Kislovodsk during a twenty-one-month stay in the Soviet Union to talk to Trotsky about writing his biography (“the most universally gifted man in the world to-day,” Eastman would write).214

  Zinoviev would later explain that “all the participants understood that the secretariat under Lenin was one thing, but the secretariat without Lenin altogether something else.” Bukharin, who may have spurred the cave process, proposed that they “politicize” the secretariat, that is, turn it into a small politburo by adding (alongside Stalin) Zinoviev and Trotsky, or perhaps Trotsky and Kamenev, or Trotsky and Bukharin. “There were great rows over this,” Zinoviev continued in his explanation, “and many (myself included) considered that comrade Trotsky would work with us, and together we would succeed in creating a stable balance of power.”215

  A consolidated “triumvirate” against Trotsky had yet to form in summer 1923; rather, the immediate concern generated by Lenin’s three strokes was not Trotsky’s power but Stalin’s.

  Some days after the cave meeting, Sergo Orjonikidze, the head of the South Caucasus regional party committee in Tiflis, who had a previously scheduled trip to Berlin via Moscow for medical treatment, stopped over in Kislovodsk. Zinoviev briefed Orjonikidze, considered a Stalin loyalist, on the cave discussions and handed him a letter (dated July 29) for Stalin and Kamenev.216 Predictably, Stalin became infuriated. Zinoviev, in the meantime, had received two letters from Stalin (dated July 25 and 27) reporting various actions that Stalin, as general secretary, had taken.217 The most important, for Zinoviev, entailed Stalin’s decision to countermand Zinoviev’s Comintern directives for bolder actions by German Communists. This infuriated Zinoviev. On July 30, a white-hot Zinoviev dashed off an accusatory letter from Kislovodsk to Kamenev in Moscow, complaining of the latter’s complicity in Stalin’s peremptory, non-consultative decision making. “You are in Moscow,” Zinoviev wrote. “You have no small influence. And you are simply letting Stalin mock us.” Zinoviev cited various examples, then added, “Did Stalin consult with anyone about these appointments? Not with us, of course.” Even at sessions of the Comintern, run by Zinoviev (and Bukharin), Stalin was dominant: “Stalin arrives, glances about and decides. And Bukharin and I are ‘dead bodies’—we are not asked anything.” Then Zinoviev delivered the punch line:

  We shall not tolerate this anymore. If the party is condemned to go through a period (prob. very brief) of Stalin’s one-man-rule [edinoderzhavie], so be it. But at least I do not intend to cover up all this swinishness. In practice there is no “triumvirate,” there is Stalin’s dictatorship. Ilich was a thousand times correct.

  The final reference could only denote the “Ilich letter about the secretary.”218

  Zinoviev reminded Kamenev that “you yourself said this more than once,” and appeared at once irate (“If you do not answer this letter, I will write no more”) and hopeful: “But what surprises me is that Voroshilov, Frunze, and Sergo think almost the same.” Here, however, Zinoviev may have been shaving the truth. Frunze’s position on Stalin’s exercise of power is unclear, though he could have tilted toward a “balancing” strategy, while Orjonikidze, even though Stalin had just saved his political hide over the Georgian affair, was his own man and owed his high position in the party not only to Stalin but also to Lenin.219 But whatever the dispositions of Frunze and Orjonikidze, Voroshilov certainly opposed Zinoviev.220 Bukharin, meanwhile, wrote his own letter to Kamenev (on July 30), complaining that in his (Bukharin’s) absence and without consultation, Stalin had named a temporary editorial collective to oversee Pravda. In fact, the politburo had appointed the Trotsky supporter Preobrazhensky as temporary editor, but he had resigned over the reintroduction of a vodka monopoly (the much-criticized tsarist practice of raising revenue from drunkenness), and this unexpected act co
mpelled Stalin to take alternate temporary action, until Bukharin returned from holiday.221 Stalin’s mundane power to act, in this instance and others, seems to have shocked both Bukharin and Zinoviev. They discovered that Stalin indeed had “boundless power.”

  Zinoviev saw himself as behaving reasonably—“Don’t take it and interpret it badly. Consider it calmly,” he wrote to Stalin on July 31—given that there was dictation attributed to Lenin calling for Stalin’s removal and Zinoviev was merely asking for Stalin to share power.222 But Stalin did not take kindly to the proposal. Moreover, he had not seen this purported Lenin dictation, and he had to be anxious, perhaps frightened, about what the entire document might contain. Orjonikidze wrote to Voroshilov (August 3, 1923) that Stalin viewed the Zinoviev-Bukharin proposals as akin to the appointment of “political commissars” to watch over him, as if he were as untrustworthy as one of those former tsarist generals. Stalin went on the counterattack that same day (August 3), writing to Zinoviev and Bukharin: “I received your letter [of July 29], I spoke with Sergo. I do not understand what I am supposed to do in order that you don’t curse me, or what the problem is here?” Stalin proposed a face-to-face meeting—“If you consider the possibility of further friendly work (for from the conversation with Sergo I began to understand that you, evidently, are not against preparing a break, as something unavoidable).”223

  Stalin would not let them do to him what he had just done to the Tatar Mirsayet Soltanğaliev. After another Zinoviev-Bukharin letter (August 6), written in a conciliatory tone (“the mention of a ‘break’ comes from your exhaustion, of course. Such a possibility is excluded”), Stalin exploded. “Why was it necessary to cite Ilich’s letter about the [general] secretary, which is unknown to me—is there no proof that I’m not enamored of position and therefore not afraid of letters?” Stalin wrote on August 7. “What does one call a group whose members try to intimidate one another?” Stalin added that decisions were not being taken by the secretariat alone without others and that the agendas were not being decided without input from anyone other than the secretariat. He painted himself as a victim: “You are lucky people: you have the opportunity on holiday to discuss all manner of concoctions, debate them and so on, and meanwhile I am here tugging like a dog on a chain, sputtering, and I turn out to be ‘guilty.’” He was doing all the work! Scoffing at their pretense of friendship, he called their bluff: “I favor a change in the [general] secretary, but I’m against instituting political commissars (we have not a few political commissars already: the orgburo, the politburo, the plenum).”224