Stalin, Volume 1

by Stephen Kotkin

  Stalin’s response, laced with self-pity, yet forceful—and including an apparent offer to resign—provoked from Zinoviev and Bukharin their sharpest letter yet. “Yes, there exists a letter of V.I., in which he advises the 12th Party Congress not to reelect you as [general] secretary,” they wrote on August 10. “We (Bukharin, Kamenev, and I) decided not to talk to you about it yet. For an understandable reason: You already take disagreements with V.I. too subjectively, and we did not want to unnerve you.” Unnerve him they had, of course, and their attempt at mollification was strained:

  There’s no Ilich. The secretariat of the CENTRAL COMMITTEE, therefore, objectively (without evil intentions on your part) begins to play the role in the Central Committee that the secretariat plays in another provincial party organization, that is, in fact (not formally), it decides everything. This is a fact, which is impossible to deny. No one wants to institute political commissars. (You even deem the orgburo, politburo, and plenum political commissars!) . . . The situation (both with Trotsky and with various “platforms”) gets more complicated and dissatisfaction in the party grows (don’t look at the surface). Hence, a search for a better form of collaboration.

  The document was handwritten by Bukharin yet signed only by Zinoviev. It concluded: “Don’t for a minute think that we are conspiring. Take a holiday as you should. All the best. Zinoviev.”225 But the letter was never sent.226 Stalin was scheduled to depart for Kislovodsk on August 15, 1923, for a one-and-a-half-month holiday, which, however, he put off.227

  DELIRIUM

  A key issue delaying Stalin’s holiday departure was the vision of an October-style revolution in Germany.228 Germany was far and away the most important country in the world for the USSR. Suffering devastating inflation, Germany had defiantly fallen into arrears in its reparations. France had been bled white in the Great War (fought on its territory), but the British wanted to reduce German obligations, which made the French even more livid. The Reparations Commission declared Germany in default, and France and Belgium militarily occupied the Ruhr valley, site of 80 percent of Germany’s steel, pig iron, and coal.229 This crashed German markets and worsened the rampant inflation (by November 1923, to purchase $1 would cost 130 billion marks).230 Expressing solidarity with its Rapallo partner, Soviet Russia boldly warned its nemesis Poland not to take advantage of Germany’s crisis and seize East Prussia, on the other side of the Versailles-created Polish Corridor.231 Moscow also urged Latvia and Lithuania to agree to a policy of non-intervention in German affairs. At the same time, Zinoviev and Bukharin had decided the moment was ripe for the USSR to intervene in German affairs by staging a Communist coup d’etat. In Kislovodsk, while pondering how to curb Stalin’s power, the pair received a letter (dated July 11) from Heinrich Brandler (b. 1881), a former bricklayer and a leader of German Communists who had a quarter-century experience in revolutionary struggle. Brandler crowed that the German Communists would soon stage a major antifascist day rally and that “for every Communist who is killed we shall kill ten fascists.”232

  While Karl Radek warned Brandler to avoid any confrontation that could serve as a pretext for a massive anti-Communist crackdown, Zinoviev took Brandler’s letter as a sign of newfound determination and Radek’s action as insubordination—Zinoviev headed the Comintern. Stalin supported Radek, expressing skepticism in his exchange of letters with Zinoviev about Germany, just as he had over Poland’s alleged ripeness for revolution back in 1920. Brandler, for his part, disregarded Radek’s warnings and on July 31 publicly announced German Communists’ intention “to win political power.” A few days later, he proclaimed the imminent “fall of the bourgeois order” and onset of a “civil war.”233 Stalin continued his skepticism. Although Germany in 1923 had a far larger working class than Russia had had in 1917, in his letter to Zinoviev on August 7 Stalin enumerated special circumstances that had favored the Bolsheviks in 1917, and he emphasized not only or even primarily worker support for Bolshevism, but also that the Bolsheviks had had a people desperate for peace and a peasantry eager to seize the landlords’ estates. “At the moment, the German Communists have nothing of the kind,” he noted. “They have, of course, a Soviet country as neighbor, which we did not have, but what can we offer them at this time? Should power in Germany, so to speak, topple over now and the Communists seize it, they would end up crashing. That is in the best case. In the worst case they will be smashed to smithereens. . . . In my opinion the Germans should be restrained and not encouraged.”234

  This disagreement was not going to be resolved over the wires and on August 9, Stalin had the politburo formally request that members return from holiday for direct discussion. An affirmative answer came back from Zinoviev and Bukharin on August 12. Trotsky stipulated that the interruption in his course of medical treatment should last “not more than one week.”235

  Mass strikes had engulfed Germany, involving 3 million workers, a scale that surprised even German Communist militants, and, after the hapless German central government resigned, its place was taken by the classical liberal politician Gustav Stresemann in a grand coalition that included German Social Democrats. Even before this, leftist Social Democrats had entered the regional governments of Thuringia and Saxony, Brandler’s home state. The evident radicalization in Germany fed Zinoviev’s initial zeal; Stalin warned of a likely military intervention by France and Poland against a German workers’ government that would also engulf the USSR.236 On August 21, the politburo resolved to dispatch 1 million gold marks to Germans by underground channels, the onset of a river of money from a poor and ruined country still suffering severe hunger.237 Two days later a breathtaking discussion took place at the politburo, at which Stalin supported the idea of a coup, but in hypersecrecy. “Stalin’s point of view is correct,” Trotsky noted. “It cannot seem that we, not only the Russian Communist party but also the Comintern, are orchestrating.” Trotsky appeared to be the skeptic, demanding a detailed plan of insurrection, while Stalin stated, lyrically, that “either the revolution in German fails and knocks us off, or there, the revolution succeeds, all goes well, and our situation is secured.” There was likely some cold calculation at work here: if Germany did go Communist, and Stalin was on record as having been unsupportive, he would end up looking like Zinoviev and Kamenev in 1917. Still, Stalin’s turnaround revealed a degree of enthusiasm unnecessary to a calculated demonstration. He rhapsodized about the USSR needing “a border with Germany,” which could be created by trying to “overturn one of the bourgeois border states.” When Chicherin asked whether the USSR should work to consolidate the states of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia or prepare uprisings in them, voices shouted “of course, both.”238

  The Comintern issued a worldwide appeal on August 25 to trade unionists and socialists of all stripes for unified action in the face of the “fascist” threat. No one answered.239 That same day, Trotsky instructed his deputy at the Military Revolutionary Committee of the Republic, Yefraim Sklyansky, to prepare the Red Army for a possible Entente attack.240 Three days later, Central Committee secretary Rudzutaks sent a coded telegram to provincial party committees to the effect that a revolution was imminent in Germany and to expect a bourgeois military intervention against Germany, as had happened to Soviet Russia.241

  DREAD EVERLASTING

  Stalin knew that his expansive faction would be aggressive in his defense. When he had informed Kuibyshev and Rudzutaks, the other Central Committee secretaries and his staunch loyalists, they supposedly laughed at Zinoviev’s intrigues.242 And yet, this was no laughing matter: an apparent instruction from Lenin to remove Stalin, which lay in the hands of politburo members. Powerful indirect testimony to the fear Stalin felt appeared in the journal Proletarian Revolution. In its ninth issue for 1923, which came out in September, Lenin’s letters of spring 1917 to Karpinsky and Ganetsky were published, the very letters that the Provisional Government police had intercepted and used to charge Lenin with treason as a German agent in July 1917
.243 One might expect such incriminating documents, published from police copies, to appear in an emigre periodical aiming to discredit Lenin, but in a Soviet journal, and one prepared for publication in August 1923? It could have been a bizarre coincidence. But it seems highly likely that Stalin, who controlled Lenin’s archives, set in motion the publication, aiming to strike a blow at Lenin’s reputation.244 If so, it was an act of desperation. Precisely when Stalin first read the “Ilich letter” remains unknown. One would expect to find a copy of it, with his pencil marks, in his archive, but no such copy is extant. Who showed it to him, when, under what circumstances, and with what reaction, may never be known. We can guess, however, that when Zinoviev and Bukharin returned to Moscow around August 20, 1923, Stalin demanded to see it. But it is possible that Krupskaya had not handed a copy to Zinoviev but only let him read it, which would only have augmented Stalin’s terror.

  Stalin blunted the cave-meeting initiative with a clever proposal, accepted by the others, to add two politburo members, Zinoviev and Trotsky, to the orgburo—not, as originally proposed, to the secretariat—as full members, along with two new candidate orgburo members, Ivan Korotkov (a regional party boss promoted to Moscow) and Bukharin (listed second). Predictably, Trotsky and Bukharin would never attend a single meeting of the labor-intensive orgburo; Zinoviev would claim he attended once or twice.245

  Part of the failure of the cave-meeting machinations derived from Trotsky’s behavior. Bukharin would explain that “I personally wanted to unify the biggest figures into an upper stratum of the Central Committee, namely Stalin, Trotsky and Zinoviev. . . . I tried with all my might to bring peace inside the party. . . . Comrade Zinoviev vacillated, and soon he took the position of a merciless attack against Trotsky, ruining this plan. Comrade Trotsky, for his part, did everything possible to aggravate relations.”246 True enough, but an even greater factor was Kamenev’s position.247 Kamenev, because he ran meetings efficiently, developed a reputation for business-like practicality, but those who knew him better understood he was an inveterate intriguer. His thinking at this moment is undocumented. He knew Zinoviev well and perhaps did not have as high opinion of him as Zinoviev had of himself. Similarly, Kamenev had known Stalin a very long time, since the early 1900s, in Tiflis, and in 1917 the two had returned from Siberian exile to Petrograd together, then worked together. Kamenev certainly understood that Stalin was no angel—thin-skinned, two-faced, a nasty provocateur—but Kamenev clearly did not see Stalin as a special danger, for otherwise he would have joined the action against him. Here is an indicator that, in 1923 at least, the monstrous later Stalin either did not yet exist or was not visible to someone who worked with him very closely. On the contrary, Kamenev appears to have viewed Stalin as manageable. He told Orjonikidze that the complaints of Zinoviev and Bukharin were exaggerated.248 Kamenev also likely appreciated the heavy load that Stalin was carrying as general secretary. The draft USSR constitution was ceremonially approved by the Soviet central executive committee on July 6, 1923, in the Grand Kremlin Palace—the nationalities commissariat was abolished, so that Stalin no longer had a formal government position—but the USSR structure still had to be implemented, and in that Stalin was indispensable.249 Whatever Kamenev’s precise calculations, or miscalculations, his siding with Stalin was deliberate and crucial to the general secretary’s political survival.

  Zinoviev and Bukharin had misjudged Kamenev, who in turn misjudged Stalin, but Zinoviev’s behavior is the grand mystery. Everyone understood that Zinoviev had designs on being number one.250 And in that summer of 1923, Krupskaya had handed him a letter from Lenin advising that they remove Stalin. But Zinoviev did no such thing. He had been afforded an opportunity to alter the course of history, and did not seize it. To be sure, the views of Rykov, Kalinin, and Tomsky, as well as Molotov, remained to consider; and Kamenev’s siding with Stalin—even on a proposal well short of removal—had been a ghastly surprise for Zinoviev. Trotsky, moreover, had been his usual aloof self in connection with the admittedly inchoate feelers Zinoviev appears to have delivered via Bukharin. Nonetheless, Zinoviev could have forced the issue to remove Stalin from the pivotal position of general secretary by demanding that Lenin’s will be enforced. He could have demanded a Central Committee plenum on the subject, even an extraordinary party congress. Instead, Zinoviev had called a meeting in a cave, then signed his name to some letters to Stalin Bukharin wrote, then did not even send one of them. Given the fact that Stalin’s personality would prove to have momentous consequences, Zinoviev’s failure to act upon his own blatant ambition and force the issue of Stalin’s removal—even more than Kamenev’s hesitation merely to curb some of Stalin’s powers—was arguably the most consequential action (or inaction) by a politburo member after Lenin had become irreversibly sidelined.

  Krupskaya setting in motion in summer 1923 the “Ilich letter about the [general] secretary” turned out to be a turning point that did not turn. For Stalin, however, the episode was hardly over. He likely suspected Zinoviev would return to Lenin’s purported dictation, and perhaps reveal it to the Central Committee and maybe beyond. And would not Trotsky, too, become involved? And how long would Kamenev’s backing last? And what about Bukharin’s prominent role in the cave intrigue? Stalin’s biggest concern, though, remained Lenin, even though the Bolshevik leader could neither speak nor write. Out at Gorki, he was being walked around the grounds in imported wheelchairs, struggling to scratch out some words with his left hand (“mama,” “papa”), and listening as Krupskaya read to him as to a baby.251 Lenin was never going to return to public life. But documents attributed to him had been coming forward piecemeal, months after they were allegedly dictated. Through the OGPU, Stalin could maintain close surveillance on the comings and goings at Gorki, under the guise of security, but he could not control Krupskaya, and he could not be sure what other documents purporting to be instructions from “Ilich” might yet be brought to light. Finally, Stalin appears to have departed for Kislovodsk in late August.252 But one wonders what kind of “holiday” it could have been with the sword of Damocles hanging over his head. In any case, the dubious respite was brief, for he was attending meetings in the capital by the third week of September.

  HUMILIATION

  Revolutionary fever swept Moscow in September 1923. Brandler had arrived in late August and by mid-September other German Communists had arrived to find the city strewn with banners proclaiming the imminent “German October,” while factories held meetings on how Soviet workers could aid their German counterparts.253 But the German Communists were at each other’s throats, riven into left, right, and center factions, and Brandler was begging for either Zinoviev or Trotsky to lead the insurrection. That September, a Comintern-pushed uprising in Bulgaria, aimed at overthrowing a government that itself had recently come to power in a coup d’etat, was crushed, after which the Bulgarian forces of order went on a reprisal spree, killing 2,000 Communist activists and agrarians, but this, too, did nothing to slow the plans for Germany.254 Zinoviev pursued a German breakthrough to blot out the stain of having opposed the October 1917 seizure of power. Stalin was not to be outdone by him. “The forthcoming revolution in Germany is the most important world event of our day,” he wrote on September 20, in response to a request for an article from the editor of Die Rote Fahne, the Communist organ in Germany. “The victory of the revolution in Germany would have more substantive significance for the proletariat of Europe and America than the victory of the Russian Revolution six years ago. The victory of the German proletariat would undoubtedly shift the center of the world revolution from Moscow to Berlin.”255

  Meetings of the politburo or its German commission took place from September 21 through 23.256 One key agenda item was what to do about the German Social Democrats. If they agreed to be junior partners to the Communists, cooperating with them would be helpful, Stalin argued; if they refused, this would expose the Social Democrats in front of the German workers—even better.257 R
ight in the middle of these sessions, Avel Yenukidze, secretary of the Presidium of the central executive committee, formally approved a USSR coat of arms with a hammer and sickle resting on a globe depicted in sun rays, with the inscription “Workers of the world, unite!” in six languages (Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian, Georgian, Azeri, Armenian).258 Zinoviev enlarged upon the possible formation of a United States of Worker-Peasant Republics of Europe.259 Trotsky published an overview of revolutionary tactics in the French and Russian revolutions in Pravda (September 23, 1923), which he intended as instructions to the Communist forces in Germany. What effect the article, which was republished in German in Berlin, had on the German Communist organizers is unclear, but it did draw an official protest from the German ambassador in Moscow.260 Zinoviev was beside himself with zeal and sat night after night with Trotsky in the latter’s war commissariat offices at Znamenka, 23, posing operations questions about Germany to Sergei Kamenev, the Red Army military commander-in-chief.261 Brandler boasted to a Party Congress of the Polish Communist party held in Moscow’s immediate countryside that the German Communists had more than 350,000 members, and would be able to field 200,000 armed workers, weapons for the equivalent of fifteen divisions of 5,000 troops each, and 330 partisan groups for behind-the-lines warfare—numbers that were eye-popping, or eye wash.262