From September 23 to 25, a Central Committee plenum took place in the Grand Kremlin Palace with fifty-two participants. The opening day saw two reports, one by Zinoviev on the international situation, which concerned Germany, and another by First Deputy Head of government Rykov on the defense of the country and the creation of a special reserve fund.263 The plenum approved a date for the German coup of November 9, the anniversary of the kaiser’s abdication and the “bourgeois” revolution (i.e., the founding of the Republic).264 Kuibyshev reported on changes in the composition of the Revolutionary Military Council, headed by Trotsky. In other words, instead of a discussion of Lenin’s apparent demand to find a way to remove Stalin—the “Ilich letter about the [general] secretary”—Trotsky was ambushed by a scheme, developed without his consultation, to enlarge and stuff the Revolutionary Military Council with partisans of Stalin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev. Trotsky announced his intention to resign from every one of his posts—including his politburo and Central Committee membership—and requested to be sent abroad “as a soldier of the revolution” to assist the German Communists in the planned coup.265 When one attendee from Petrograd, Fyodor Sobinov, known as Nikolai Komarov—the son of poor peasants and himself a former factory worker—suddenly asked why Trotsky “put on such airs,” Trotsky exploded. He shot up, stated “I request that you delete me from the list of actors of this humiliating comedy,” and stomped out, resolving to slam the cast-iron door—a massive metal structure not given to demonstrative slamming. He could only manage to bring it to a close slowly, unwittingly demonstrating his impotence.266
Whether by design or dumb luck, Stalin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev had humiliated Trotsky.
A delegation was dispatched to his nearby apartment to coax him back, but he refused and the plenum continued and officially rebuked his behavior.267 The protocols further noted: “Send excerpt to comrade Trotsky immediately.” In his absence, the plenum voted to add several Central Committee members to the Revolutionary Military Council.268 This was the second time its composition had been altered against Trotsky; the first had been by Lenin, in March 1919, which had also precipitated Trotsky’s announcement of his resignation. Back then, his resignation had been rejected, and Lenin mollified him. This time, too, Trotsky’s resignation was rejected, but without Lenin to smooth things over and balance the personalities.
It was only now that the other top members of the politburo began to act concertedly as a triumvirate. At one of the subsequent politburo sessions, when a ruckus erupted between Trotsky and Zinoviev, the latter burst out, “Can’t you see you’re in a ring [obruch]? . . . Your tricks no longer work, you’re in a minority, you’re in the singular.” From this point, whenever Zinoviev and Kamenev secretly came over to Stalin at the secretariat to prearrange issues before politburo meetings, their three-way clandestine gatherings acquired the secret catchphrase “the ring.”269 Their ring around Trotsky provoked him.
LEFT OPPOSITION
NEP’s grudging legalization of markets had done nothing to alleviate the blatant squalor of workers in whose name the regime ruled. Industry had been reorganized in giant trusts (metalworking, cotton) and those enterprises deemed most important, known as the commanding heights, had been placed under the aegis of the state, but this had not shielded many factories from being shuttered or leased, sometimes to their former capitalist owners. Redundant workers were being laid off, while those not fired saw their wages linked to output quotas, just as under the old regime.270 Engineers and “specialists,” meanwhile, enjoyed conspicuous privileges, also as if no revolution had happened. “The specialist lives better, gets paid better, he gives the orders, makes demands; the specialist is an alien, the specialist did not make the October Revolution,” Mikhail Tomsky, the head of the trade unions, explained, in summarizing worker views.271 When lectured that the country was poor, workers snapped that officials should go to the city’s restaurants, where party bosses did not seem to be experiencing poverty.272 This combustible situation had erupted in strike waves at the biggest factories beginning in spring 1923 and continuing through the fall.273 Soviet and British intelligence independently noted a linkage between hopeful rumors of impending war and of the Soviet regime’s downfall.274 The OGPU conducted sweeping arrests, but workers often struck again to free their comrades, according to the secret reports sent to party headquarters. Matters resembled a Kronstadt dynamic: only fanatics (“special purpose units”) would bash in the heads of proletarians.275
Bolshevik propaganda sought to explain away worker unrest by references to an alleged “dilution” of the proletariat by recent arrivals from the countryside and by women, or sophistry. “Although there are several workers’ parties there is only one proletarian party,” Zinoviev asserted in a series of lectures on the history of the party in connection with its twenty-fifth anniversary in 1923. He added that “a party can be a workers’ party in its composition and yet not be proletarian in its orientation, program, and policy.”276 In other words, the regime’s “proletariat” was no longer even a partly sociological entity, but a wholly ideological one.
The secret police vigorously enforced the ban on independent trade unions and on non-Communist worker movements, but an ostensible alternative within the single party emerged around Trotsky, and became known as the Left opposition. Trotsky in fall 1923 began demanding “inner party democracy,” decrying how “the bureaucratization of the party apparatus has developed to unheard of proportions by means of the method of secretary selection [appointment]” and how “a very broad stratum of functionaries has been created who, upon entering into the apparatus of the government of the party, completely renounce their own party opinion, at least the open expression of it.”277 Of course, it was hardly surprising that Bolshevik assaults on private property and the rule of law had not resulted in the formation of a supple, efficient, responsive civil service. Apparatchiks supposed to engage in merciless class warfare with summary executions on one side, were not likely, on the other, to make way for a Greek polis. Unaccountable bureaucratic satrapies, political intimidation, and runaway self-dealing were inescapable consequences of Trotsky’s own commitment to Communism. Moreover, even as he was railing against bureaucratic “degeneration,” he was proposing a super bureaucracy of specialists (preferably led by him) to “plan” the economy. The Left opposition’s positive program promised next to nothing for working people on strike. In fall 1917, Trotsky had shown himself to be a political magician, able to popularize even the most difficult ideas for the working man, raising enormous crowds to fever pitch as they swore sacred oaths to the positions he argued, but in fall 1923 he was writing not about the plight of real workers and their families who needed jobs or housing but abstractly about “crisis.” Wage arrears and forced deductions for state “loan” subscriptions were tailor-made for Populist appeals, but Trotsky made no concerted effort to demagogue them.
Still, Trotsky’s critique had considerable impact on the apparatus. On October 12, 1923, a mere four days after Trotsky had sent a blistering missive to the Central Committee, Molotov dispatched to all party organizations a secret circular that enumerated “excessively luxurious” apartments, “stables with race and riding horses,” “heavy expenditures at restaurants,” and on and on. “At the disposal of the Central Committee are a series of facts indicating both the central and provincial party organizations . . . maintain fleets of automobiles and horse-drawn carriages without any work-related need,” the circular read. “It has come to our attention that very often special railcars have been dispatched to southern resorts for the sole purpose of delivering one passenger. . . . At state expense, entire freight railcars were dispatched to the southern resorts transporting automobiles.”278 Reports were flooding the apparatus of inebriated, power-hungry, thieving officials who were “cut off from the masses,” as the jargon had it—unless they were trying to rape them.279
Trotsky forced a public debate upon the triumvirate in fall 1923, but i
ts contours were strikingly narrow—furious polemics about a monopoly party’s procedures for discussion of the complexities of modern society in terms of class, with no sense of common humanity.280 On top of its sterile program, as far as the non-party masses were concerned, the Left opposition was severely handicapped by regime structure. Bolshevism itself was nothing if not a faction, a minority, which, back in 1903, had broken off and called itself majoritarians (Bolsheviks) while tagging its opponents as minoritarians (Mensheviks), but after the resolution on party unity at the 10th Party Congress, there was no way for like-minded party members to criticize regime policies without risking expulsion from the party. A so-called Declaration of the 46—a disparate group of policy critics—tried to turn the tables, demanding “the factional regime” of the central party apparatus be “replaced by a regime of comradely unity and internal party democracy.”281 Neither Trotsky nor several of his highest profile supporters had affixed their names to the text. Nonetheless, the triumvirate mobilized party bodies to condemn the document, as well as Trotsky’s own letter, as illegal factionalism.282 Regime failures were so blatant, however, that Left opposition resolutions were carrying votes in protest at meetings of primary party organizations in Moscow. Stalin’s top aide, Nazaretyan, threw the winning tallies in the trash and reported false returns for publication in Pravda. Nazaretyan’s aide, however, felt a pang of conscience and confessed. Both would both be transferred out of the central apparatus, but the distorted vote counts were not redone.283 The anti-Trotsky struggle accelerated institutionalization of the party’s violation of its own rules.284 When the French and Polish Communist parties initiated protests of the vilification of Trotsky, Stalin had Trotsky charged with attempting to split the Comintern.285 The prime mover of the French action, Boris Lifschitz, known as Souvarine, would later write an excellent condemnatory biography of Stalin.286
CONFRONTATION
Trotsky united instead of divided his enemies with a relentlessly condescending personality.287 By nature aloof as well, he was clueless about the consequences, even in hindsight, as when he would recall that he had refused to socialize with others in the ruling group because he “hated to inflict such boredom on myself. The visiting of each other’s homes, the assiduous attendance at the ballet, the drinking-parties at which people who were absent were pulled to pieces, had no attraction for me. . . . It was for this reason that many group conversations would stop the moment I appeared.”288 Nonetheless, Trotsky did at times fight hard.289 He suffered a physical setback, however. As he would tell the story, one Sunday that October 1923, while hunting for geese, curlew, snipe, and ducks north of Moscow in the marshes of Tver province, he stepped into a deep bog of cold water, proved unable to warm himself in the car, and came down with flu symptoms.290 Whatever the cause, his fevers were real, and he was confined to bed by doctors’ orders. In deference, at Kamenev’s suggestion, the politburo meeting on October 16 took place in the study of Trotsky’s Kremlin apartment in the Cavalry Building. This was the meeting that decreed an immediate investigation of Trotsky by the Central Control Commission for “factionalism.” The war commissar, according to his wife, “came out of his study soaked through, and undressed and went to bed. His linen and clothes had to be dried as if he had been drenched in a rainstorm.”291
With Trotsky under political assault and feverish, a bizarre event occurred: On October 18, 1923, Lenin showed up at the Kremlin, where he had not been for five months.292 It went like this: following the usual late afternoon meal at Gorki, Lenin demanded to be pushed in his wheelchair to the garage, used his orthopedic shoes to climb into his Silver Ghost, and refused to get out, insisting—by his demeanor—that he was going to Moscow. Staff talked him into shifting to a closed vehicle, and he departed around 4:00 p.m. with Krupskaya, Maria, and nurse attendants, while others, including his doctors, Professors Osipov, Rozanov, Priorov, and a bodyguard detail, traveled in accompanying vehicles. Upon arrival at the Imperial Senate, Lenin looked over his Kremlin apartment, took tea and lunch. He stayed overnight. He visited his Kremlin office on October 19, where he retrieved books from his library (three volumes of Hegel, works of Plekhanov). He insisted on being pushed around the Kremlin grounds—where, of course, people recognized him—but a driving rain forced him instead to take a car ride around central Moscow, including to the All-Russia Agricultural and Handicraft Exhibition, which would soon close and which Lenin had avidly followed in the press, but which he saw only through the vehicle windows because of the downpour. He agreed to return to Gorki in the early evening, exhausted.293 “News of Vladimir Ilich’s arrival spread around the Kremlin, and people were looking out from all the windows and doors,” Lenin’s driver recalled.294 It is inconceivable that Stalin did not know, because OGPU channels would have alerted the party secretariat to Lenin’s movements. Also, Lenin’s drivers reported to the head of the Special Purpose Garage, who was Stalin’s principal driver. Trotsky, as war commissar, would have received word from the Kremlin garrison and Moscow military district. Strangely, however, by all accounts Lenin did not meet with Stalin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, or anyone else from the leadership.
On October 18 and 19 (a Thursday and Friday), the usual politburo and Council of People’s Commissars meeting space next to Lenin’s office and apartment proved to be empty. Whether Lenin expected to catch meetings there remains unknown. “Did he [Lenin] wish to see one of the comrades on this visit?” wrote Maria Ulyanova, later, in recollections of the trip. “I think not. I’m judging by the fact that, shortly before his trip, when he asked for something and no matter how much we strained our heads we could not understand what he wanted, I asked him would he not like to see someone from among his comrades. I named a few names, but he shook his head bitterly—he had no cause to see them, since he had been deprived of the opportunity to work.”295 Be that as it may, sources agree that when the car from Gorki with Lenin had first gotten within sight of Moscow’s golden-dome skyline, he excitedly pointed with his finger, a by now familiar gesture that was taken to mean: “That’s it, that’s it, that’s it, that’s iiiitttt!”296 Lenin remained in high spirits during the entire time in Moscow. Back at Gorki, he became manifestly sad. His trip seems to have fulfilled a long-standing wish to set his eyes on Moscow once more. He would never set foot in the Kremlin again.
If Lenin had been looking for the Bolshevik “conspiracy in power,” he did not find it because, though a politburo meeting did take place on October 18, by twist of fate it was convened in feverish Trotsky’s apartment in the Cavalry Building, a different building from Lenin’s apartment in the Imperial Senate. (The meeting might also have finished before Lenin arrived from Gorki.) On the agenda was the dire need to send grain to Germany, anticipating likely civil war over the planned Communist coup, and the possible behavior of Germany’s neighbors. “I think that it’s better to refrain from sounding out the Poles and instead sound out the Latvians—the Latvians can be intimidated, put up against the wall, and so on,” Stalin wrote on a piece of paper during the meeting. “You cannot do that with the Poles. The Poles must be isolated, we will have to fight with them. We’ll never ferret them out, just reveal our cards. . . . The Poles to be isolated. The Latvians to be bought (and intimidated). The Romanians to be bought. But with the Poles we wait.”297 For Stalin, a German revolution, in addition to everything else, recommended itself as a means of addressing the existence of the newly independent states that were arrayed in whole or in part on former tsarist territories.
On October 19, with Lenin walking the Kremlin grounds and Trotsky holed up in the Cavalry Building, the politburo collectively answered Trotsky’s critical letters to the Central Committee in a long text composed primarily by Stalin—it was typed up and distributed from the party secretariat on Vozdvizhenka. “If our party does not compel comrade Trotsky to repudiate those monstrous mistakes he has made in his ‘letter-platform’ of October 8, 1923, then not just the Russian Communist party but also the USSR and the
German revolution will suffer colossal damage,” the politburo response stated.298 The politburo scheduled a further meeting (in Trotsky’s apartment), as well as a joint plenum of the Central Committee and Central Control Commission for October 25–27. On the opening evening of October 25, immediately after Stalin’s report, Trotsky got the floor for forty-five minutes. A so-called joint plenum was something of another Stalin trick to add more loyalists from the apparatus. He stacked the deck even beyond that, inviting not just the now punitive (instead of impartial) Control Commission personnel but “representatives” of ten major “industrial” party organizations who turned out to be provincial party bosses whom Stalin’s orgburo had appointed to their posts. At the same time, just twelve of the forty-six signatories of the Declaration were asked to appear, and only on the second day.299 The second day was given to discussion, culminating in summations, first by Trotsky (10:33 p.m. to 11:25 p.m.), then by Stalin (11:25 p.m. to 12:10 a.m.). Stalin had the politburo recording secretary, Boris Bazhanov, secretly compile resumes of the speeches, anticipating using them against Trotsky.300
This was the first direct confrontation, absent Lenin, between Stalin and Trotsky at a party forum, and those present had to understand the stakes.
Trotsky, on the attack, acknowledged that he was being accused of recidivism, given his role in the trade union debate two years ago, but he charged that now “within the politburo there is another politburo and within the Central Committee there is another Central Committee, so that I was effectively sidelined from the discussion . . . as a result I only had this path.” In trying to explain the seemingly inexplicable—why he had refused Lenin’s request to become a deputy head of government—he revealed that in 1917 he had declined Lenin’s request to serve as interior minister. “The fact is, comrades, there is one personal aspect of my work, which although playing no role in my personal life and my day-to-day existence, is nonetheless of great political significance,” he stated. “This is my Jewish origin. . . . I firmly turned down his offer on the grounds, as before, that we should not give our enemies the opportunity to say that our country was being ruled by a Jew.”301 More recently, when Lenin proposed that he become his deputy in the government, Trotsky said, he refused on the same grounds. This revelation is hard to credit. Trotsky accepted other high-profile appointments in the government.
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