Stalin, Volume 1

by Stephen Kotkin

  In his speech to the plenum, Trotsky conceded that he and Lenin had disagreed about economic policy and that relations had become strained. But he stressed, again, that the party should take up ideology and party life, while economic experts ran the economy. “If I were removed from other work and sent to the state planning commission, I would not object,” he said. “The state planning commission is our most important organ,” but the current institutional architecture did not suit him. “I return to the question: ‘What would I do at the Council of People’s Commissars, if the state planning commission were not reorganized?’” He claimed his character was such that “I cannot abide sloppiness, un-thought-through-ness.” In closing, Trotsky pleaded with those assembled not to condemn him for factionalism. “Comrades, . . . try to think about and understand my situation. I was in extremely tragic circumstances”—the party press and a whispering campaign accused him of being anti-Lenin, of creating “Trotskyism”; others were meeting behind his back, he was enclosed in a ring: “I had to break out.”302

  Stalin, in his speech, displayed contempt. “Could anyone be against improvement of the state planning commission?” he stated. “It’s laughable to build a platform around the necessity of improving the state planning commission. . . . Instead of discussing these serious questions, you go around with platforms. In all the statements of the oppositionists I did not find one single concrete proposal.” To their concrete calls for party democracy, he answered, “the Central Committee implements the decisions of party congresses,” adding that “democrats tell the congress that we do not need distancing from the influence of the NEP. Let’s see if the congress will agree with you.” To the complaint of an attendee that “there is no discussion,” Stalin likened him to “Chekhov’s Lady, ‘give me atmosphere.’ There are times when it’s not a matter of discussion.” Bald-faced, he added that “there has never been a case when someone came to the Central Committee proposing to discuss a question and the Central Committee refused.” He accused the group of 46 and Trotsky of taking their accusatory statements about the Central Committee’s “mistakes” outside proper party channels, appealing directly to the party mass. Stalin averred that “a discussion in the center right now would be especially dangerous. Both the peasants and the workers would lose their trust in us, enemies would regard it as weakness. We experienced such discussion in 1921. At that time we lost out frightfully. . . . Trotsky started it back then, refusing to abide by Lenin’s suggestion to limit the discussion in the trade union commission. . . . Trotsky has repeated that step, which had threatened us with schism.”303 In fact, in 1921 Lenin had deliberately provoked Trotsky into public debate; and now, in 1923, Trotsky had not appealed to the party mass—he had no such possibility because Stalin controlled the party press.

  After Stalin spoke, no rebuttal was allowed. Notwithstanding Trotsky’s gobbledygook about his refusals to become Lenin’s deputy and his continuing obsession with planning, he had not had to resort to naked lies. Stalin was desperately making up spurious arguments, and showed himself to be thin-skinned, an intellectual bully. Of course, the room had already been prepared: in the voting on a long resolution condemning Trotsky and the Left opposition for factionalism and schism, 102 votes were recorded as in favor, with just 2 against and 10 abstentions. In violation of party rules, non-Central Committee members—the twenty “representatives” of the ten big “industrial” party organizations invited by Stalin—had been permitted to vote.304 Such manipulation was a sign of weakness. Stalin never used the secretly recorded transcript of this confrontation with Trotsky.

  Stalin’s other principal nemesis, Krupskaya, who had taken part in the “joint” plenum, on October 31 sent a strongly reproachful letter to Zinoviev. She had voted with the majority against Trotsky, but now, privately, she insisted that Trotsky was not the sole person to blame for party divisions and that “the workers would severely judge not just Trotsky but us” even though what was going on in the party “was being kept hidden” from them. “The moment is too serious to create a schism and make it psychologically impossible for Trotsky to work.” She criticized the “intemperate language,” “the personal quarrels and squabbles,” and took particular umbrage at the “abuse of Vladimir Ilich’s name. . . . References to Ilich were uncalled-for and insincere. . . . They were mere hypocrisy.” She seemed especially incensed at insinuations that Trotsky’s letter writing to internal party bodies had exacerbated Lenin’s illness (“I should have shouted that this was a lie”). She reminded Zinoviev of Lenin’s dictation warning of a schism because of Stalin.305 And yet, Krupskaya, who, uniquely, could speak with the authority of Lenin’s purported wishes, had failed to express any of this at the plenum, where it would have mattered. She had relied on Zinoviev, who was drunk with world revolution and just not up to the task of curbing Stalin’s power.

  The OGPU and Comintern had flooded Germany with agents and money, and worked hand in glove with the foreign affairs commissariat, borrowing its cipher codes and the diplomatic pouch, with the approval of Chicherin.306 But Brandler’s wild claims about the vast forces the German Communists commanded were now exposed: Mátyás Rákosi (b. 1892), a Hungarian Comintern agent in Germany, reported to Moscow that the ratio of the forces of order to armed Communists was twenty to one. Contrary to Brandler’s earlier boasts, Saxony had a mere 800 rifles, not 200,000.307 Comintern agents who were supposed to purchase and stockpile weapons either failed to manage the difficult task or stole the funds. But the deepest failing was that German Communists held a majority in a mere 200 of the 1,400 local trade union committees and just 5,000 of the 70,000 factory committees.308 German workers were overwhelmingly members of the Social Democrats. There were, in effect, two Communist conspiracies over Germany in fall 1923: one against the German government, one against the German Social Democrats. Stalin had proposed a “united front” against the German right as mere tactics, designed to split the German Social Democrats and discredit their left wing, leaving the entire revolutionary space to the Communists. The German Social Democrats—as the Communists discovered and reported to Moscow—issued their own secret circular calling for cooperation with German Communists only in the event of absolute necessity against the right, while secretly forming combat units for defense against expected attacks on Social Democrats by the Communists.309 Rather than discrediting the Left Social Democrats—Stalin’s prediction—in the eyes of the workers, Stalin’s strategy of a phony “united front” utterly exposed the German Communists.310

  The empty arsenals, German Communist unpreparedness, and the Social Democrats’ cold shoulder prompted the Soviet squad on the ground to call off the uprising at the last minute. “I well remember the evening of 22 October [1923] in our apartment in the Lux Hotel, where Otto [Kuusinen], [Osip] Pyatnitsky and [Dmitry] Manuilsky sat waiting for a telegram from Berlin which was to inform them that the revolution had broken out,” recalled Kuusinen’s wife Aino, one of the many Soviet military intelligence officers under Comintern cover. “They remained for hours in Otto’s study, smoking and drinking coffee. There was a direct telephone line to Lenin’s sick-bed at Gorki, and this was kept open all night: Lenin could not speak except to mumble a few syllables, but his mind was fully alert.” No telegram from Berlin arrived and the threesome dispersed at dawn. “The Comintern leaders were besides themselves with fury and disappointment, and could not wait to discover what had gone wrong and, no less important, whose fault it was.”311 In Hamburg, however, Germany’s second largest city, 300 Communists rose up on their own initiative between October 23 and 25, 1923, assaulting police stations and seized plenty of weapons, but reinforcements crushed them; an estimated 90 people were killed and hundreds wounded.312 In Moscow, the politburo was shocked at both the postponement and the massacre.313 In Germany, the Soviet agents were shocked at the divisive anti-Trotsky politics at home, threatening to abandon their work in Germany.314 Stalin was trying to puzzle out what happened. “If Ilich were in Germany, h
e would say: ‘I think that the main enemy of the revolution is the Social Democrats, especially their left wing,’” he wrote to the Soviet agent group in Berlin (November 8, 1923).315 The very next day, in a sign of his confusion, he reversed, writing that the Social Democrat “leftists were right in many ways”: German Communists did not have the workers’ support and a seizure of power would fail.316 The Communists were not the only political group in fiasco, however: on November 8, Adolf Hitler, along with Hermann Goring, Rudolf Hess, and a squadron of Brownshirts, marched on Munich’s Townsmen’s Beer Hall.317

  • • •

  THE BOLSHEVIK REGIME was suffocating the country and itself in paperwork and red tape, presiding over mass embezzlement amid impoverishment, hostile to, yet dependent upon, the market, fearful not only of peasants’ political leanings but of workers’ as well. Inside the roiling mess, however, Stalin was building a personal dictatorship. His was a life of theses and countertheses, compilation and dissemination of meeting protocols, intense orgburo drudgery of the expanding personnel machine, and absorption of the denunciations and secret reports forwarded by and about the OGPU, the military, foreign embassies, newspaper correspondents. More than anyone he had brought the USSR into being. It was he who schemed to bring to heel the Muslim Communists of the populous East. He was the one who defended the anathema of Lenin’s New Economic Policy. Objectively, no one was more central to the Communist enterprise on a day-to-day basis, a conclusion Stalin likely reached himself. But during these years, his power was gravely threatened by a sheet of paper calling for his removal. Volodicheva’s and Fotiyeva’s memoirs, composed after Stalin’s death (for obvious reasons), contain a number of implausible or outright impossible details. Lenin’s doctors also never clarified the origins of the dictation.318 Krupskaya, as far as the record indicates, never publicly explained the specific circumstances of the dictation’s generation. Molotov would recall that “Krupskaya had a big grudge against Stalin. But he had a grudge against her, too, because Lenin’s signature to his Testament was supposedly affixed under Krupskaya’s influence. Or so Stalin believed.”319 This was an odd formulation because the dictation lacks Lenin’s signature, but it indicated that Stalin believed Krupskaya was complicit in the content, and possibly even the very existence, of the documents.

  Maria Ulyanova does not appear to have been directly involved in any aspect of the key dictation, but she saw her brother nearly every day during his illness, and singled out two incidents relating to Stalin that had disturbed Lenin. One was the time in 1921 when the Menshevik leader Yuly Martov had taken ill and Stalin had refused Lenin’s request to transfer funds for Martov’s medical treatment. The other was the Georgian affair in 1922, which was far more consequential. “One morning Stalin summoned me to Lenin’s office,” she explained a few years later. “He had a very depressed and sorry look. ‘I did not sleep the whole night,’ he said to me. ‘Who does Ilich take me for, how does he treat me! As if I am some kind of traitor. I love him with all my soul. Tell him this sometime.’” Ulyanova recalled that she “felt sorry for Stalin. It seemed to me he was sincerely aggrieved.” Stalin’s immense power was at stake. Ulyanova conveyed to her brother Stalin’s message that he loved him, but, she recalled, Lenin received this coldly. Ulyanova then told her brother that “after all Stalin is intelligent,” prompting Lenin to frown and state, “He is not at all intelligent.” Ulyanova added that this had been uttered not out of anger but matter-of-factly, and accorded with what she knew to be her brother’s long-held view—a devastating observation. She added, trying to soften but instead sharpening the blow, that Lenin “valued Stalin as a practical type.” This had to sting. Ulyanova praised Stalin’s dedication and hard work, but concluded that Lenin had wanted to have Stalin’s peculiarities held in check, which is why he had called for Stalin’s removal as general secretary.320

  Without proving her brother’s authorship or precise date of generation of the dictation, Ulyanova—no enemy of Stalin—corroborated that the dictation captured something of Lenin’s views. Equally telling, Molotov, a lifelong Stalin loyalist and admirer, validated the dictation’s criticisms. “I think Lenin was right in his evaluation of Stalin,” Molotov recalled. “I said it myself right after Lenin’s death, at the politburo. I think Stalin remembered it because after Lenin’s death we got together at Zinoviev’s in the Kremlin, about five of us, including Stalin and me, and talked about the ‘Testament.’ I said I considered all of Lenin’s evaluation of Stalin to have been right. Stalin, of course, did not like this. Despite this we remained close for many years. I think he appreciated me because I spoke out about certain matters in a way others hypocritically avoided, and he saw that I addressed the matter of the ‘Testament’ forthrightly.”321 Stalin himself never publicly voiced suspicions about the authenticity of Lenin’s dictation. He could not escape the fact that Lenin’s dictation—however it was produced—comported with a widespread view of his own character. In other words, even if it was partly or wholly concocted, the dictation rang true. Stalin’s leadership, as we saw in the previous chapter, went a long way toward holding the whole sprawling regime together, but he could be malevolent and possessed too much power.

  Although Stalin blamed Krupskaya, the dictation may have had an effect on his feelings for Lenin. Direct evidence of Stalin’s emotional state in 1922–23 is slight. Reminiscences from his closest colleagues, such as Kaganovich, recalled these years at party headquarters fondly, a gregarious Stalin laughing and joking, exuding warmth (“It was a happy time of life. And Stalin was in a good mood”).322 But the record also includes Stalin’s written remarks in the letter to Zinoviev in Kislovodsk, reinforced by observations of others in his inner circle at the time, of his sense of victimhood and self-pity. And the role of the dictation was only beginning.

  CHAPTER 12

  FAITHFUL PUPIL

  Departing from us, comrade Lenin enjoined us to hold high and safeguard the purity of the great title of a member of the party. We vow to thee, comrade Lenin, we shall fulfill thy behest with honor!

  Departing from us, Comrade Lenin enjoined us to safeguard the unity of the party as the apple of our eye. We vow to thee, comrade Lenin, that we shall fulfill with honor this, thy behest, too!

  Stalin, January 26, 19241

  SUCH WERE THE PARADOXES of Stalin’s vertiginous ascent: he had “boundless power” early, from spring 1922, when appointed general secretary of the party and the next month Lenin suffered his first major stroke, but only one year later, in spring 1923, out popped a sheet of paper calling for Stalin’s removal. This supremacy-insecurity dyad defined his inner regime, and shaped his character. It also paralleled the Bolshevik dictatorship’s own fraught relationship to the outside world: the supposed global inevitability of the revolutionary cause amid perilous capitalist encirclement. Of course, such a combination of aggressive ambition and siege mentality was well known from the long sweep of Russia’s history, a great power whose aspirations always seemed to exceed its capabilities in that complicated Eurasian space. But this predicament also derived from Lenin’s handiwork—a monopoly party’s seizure of power and a cynical approach to international relations. Both the revolution as a whole, and Stalin’s personal dictatorship within it, found themselves locked in a kind of in-built, structural paranoia, triumphant yet enveloped by ill-wishers and enemies. The revolution’s predicament and Stalin’s personality began to reinforce each other, and form into a kind of Mobius strip under the pressure exerted by the Lenin dictation. Lenin would always remain the single most important relationship in Stalin’s life, a relationship of protégé, not merely in fact but, crucially, in self-conception. Stalin proved spectacularly successful in 1924 in positioning himself as Lenin’s heir, as we shall see, but, again paradoxically, this would only raise the stakes of the existential threat posed by the dictation.

  Stalin got help in easing his dilemma from none other than Trotsky. Uniquely for those at the very top of the regime, Trotsky
was not a longtime Bolshevik and the lateness of his conversion (July 1917) made him vulnerable to charges of being an interloper—a Menshevik, not a true Leninist. Trotsky’s own pen provided a cornucopia for this charge. In August 1904, following the Bolshevik-Menshevik split, Trotsky had denounced Lenin as “a slipshod attorney,” a “Robespierre” who sought “a dictatorship over the proletariat.” The fusillade of epithets included “hideous,” “dissolute,” “demagogical,” “malicious and morally repulsive.” Such over-the-top, if accurate, denunciation by Trotsky continued through the years.2 Lenin returned the invective, in writings that were similarly preserved in amber. “A new pamphlet by Trotsky came out recently . . . a pack of brazen lies,” Lenin wrote in October 1904.3 In August 1909, he wrote that “Trotsky behaves like a despicable careerist and factionalist. He pays lip-service to the party and behaves worse than any other of the factionalists.”4 In a private letter of October that same year, Lenin coined the pejorative term “Trotskyism.”5 In January 1911, he referred to “Judas Trotsky.”6 As late as early 1917 he wrote (to Inessa Armand), “That’s Trotsky for you!! Always true to himself = twists, swindles, poses as a leftist, helps the rightists while he can. . . .”7 Stalin’s minions in the central apparatus who had taken possession of Lenin’s archive had little difficulty dredging up his anti-Trotsky gems.8 Nothing had to be invented, although much would be fabricated or lifted out of context. Trotsky, however, magnified the effects by presenting himself as Lenin’s equal and even, in some ways, his superior. Trotsky did not seem to comprehend that his relationship to Lenin was a question not of fact but of positioning.9