Stalin, Volume 1

by Stephen Kotkin

  That Stalin was fortunate in his rivals, from Trotsky on down, has long been understood.10 To be sure, Kamenev and Zinoviev, both five years younger than Stalin, had better political skills than usually credited to them, especially Zinoviev, who built a formidable machine in Leningrad. That said, scholars have correctly noted that Kamenev was widely perceived as a deputy rather than a leader in his own right and that Zinoviev’s personality aroused widespread enmity (the Italian Communist Angelica Balabanoff deemed him, “after Mussolini . . . , the most despicable individual I have ever met”).11 But what may be less well appreciated is that Trotsky proved to be less the obstacle to than the instrument of Stalin’s aggrandizement. Just as the Bolshevik regime needed the civil war to form a state, so Stalin needed “opposition” to consolidate his personal dictatorship—and he found it. Compared with Trotsky’s delight in polemicizing against this or that regime policy, which lent itself to accusations of schism and factionalism, Stalin presented himself as the faithful defender of the Central Committee and Lenin’s legacy. At the same time, Stalin was the one with the pronounced physical features, including the protruding nose, and the thick accent, but Trotsky turned out to be the alien.12 Compared with the preening Trotsky, Stalin could appear as the revolution’s hardworking, underappreciated foot soldier. Compared with Trotsky’s popularity among Russia’s small cosmopolitan intelligentsia, as the master of multiple European languages and author of fluent works about culture as well as politics, Stalin could be the representative of the far vaster middling sort, whose aspirations he captured like a tuning fork.13 Stalin walked into a golden opportunity to become the orthodox Leninist as well as a household name by battling, and besting, the world-renowned Trotsky.

  Stalin certainly showed guile, maneuvering always to seize the orthodox middle ground and to drive his critics into the position of apparent schismatics and factionalists, while employing the classic device of changing political alliances to his advantage, but such textbook stratagems ultimately have their limits. The succession was a brawl not just over raw power but also ideas and narratives. Nothing is more powerful than a compelling story, especially in the framework of a revolution, which entails a struggle to create new symbols, new vocabularies, new ways of looking at the world, new identities, new myths.14 In 1924, Stalin produced a greater written output than even in 1917. His major work of the year, and of his life to that date, “Foundations of Leninism,” was plagiarized.15 It proved to be a striking success, reflecting not just dishonesty but diligence and even sound judgment: he chose an excellent text, and appears to have sharpened it. Additionally, Stalin produced a second major work, Socialism in One Country, which was his own and, contrary to received wisdom, had nothing to do with abandoning world revolution and everything to do with imagining a viable Marxist approach to geopolitics. As Lenin’s would-be faithful pupil, Stalin emerged in 1924–25 as both an ideologue (“capital,” “the bourgeoisie,” “imperialism”) and an embryonic geostrategic thinker.

  REVELATION

  On January 8, 1924, Pravda divulged that Trotsky was ill, a statement, according to OGPU informants, the rank and file took as a sign of his imminent removal.16 He was suffering raging fevers, migraines, chest pains, catarrh in the upper respiratory organs, enlargement of the bronchial glands, and loss of appetite and weight. Some specialists thought he had a paratyphoid infection; the Kremlin doctors diagnosed influenza.17 Trotsky supporters kept up the fight.18 But with Trotsky convalescing in a village outside Moscow, Stalin ripped into him at a two-day Central Committee plenum (January 14–15, 1924), and was even more relentless in his report to the 13th party conference (January 16–18) attended by 350 delegates, most of them non-voting, an obvious packing of the gallery for maximum hostility.19 Stalin scolded party members who “fetishized” democracy as “possible always and under all conditions,” as if “only the evil will of ‘apparatchiks’ prevents its introduction.” He demanded to know why ordinary workers had to submit to party discipline, while Trotsky “imagines himself to be a superman standing above the Central Committee, above its laws, above its decisions.”20 Then Stalin pulled out the truncheon: “I think the time has come when we must publicize the clause of the resolution on party unity made at the suggestion of comrade Lenin, adopted by the 10th Congress of our party, but which was not subject to disclosure”: namely, the penalty of expulsion from the Central Committee by two-thirds vote for forming an illegal faction.21 Stalin appears to have found it a lot easier to get the better of Trotsky in the latter’s absence.22 The 13th conference demonized the Left opposition as “not only a direct turn away from Leninism, but a manifest expression of petit bourgeois deviation.”23 After Stalin’s withering speech to close out the gathering, an Italian journalist observed that most “people consider the political role of comrade Trotsky over.”24

  Trotsky appears to have been thrown into depression by the unremitting opprobrium, laced with smears, from the very party to which he had devoted his whole being. Of course, he had been no slouch at condemning and smearing the Mensheviks, SRs, or revolutionary Kronstadt sailors, but none of that lessened the impact on him.25 “The pages of Pravda seemed endless, and every line of the paper, even every word, a lie,” observed his wife, Natalya Sedova. “L.D. kept silent. . . . In the family we avoided talking about the persecution, and yet we could talk of nothing else.”26 Trotsky’s most trusted physician, Fyodor Guetier, prescribed a prolonged rest in the Soviet subtropics, and so, on January 18, 1924, the same day as Stalin’s party conference‒ending speech, Trotsky retreated southward to the Black Sea. The timing proved momentous.

  Lenin was dead to the regime but still alive. Soviet newspapers were spreading false hopes about his disposition.27 During intermissions at the 13th conference, Maria Ulyanova told delegates crowded around her that he was better and had attended Orthodox Christmas festivities at Gorki.28 Krupskaya, meanwhile, sought to alleviate her husband’s torment and on January 19 read a tale aloud to him out of Jack London’s Love of Life (1906) about a Canadian gold prospector in the wilderness bereft of food who is followed by a wolf waiting for him to die. The next day, Lenin woke up feeling poorly; that evening, he began pointing to his eyes. An oculist summoned from Moscow arrived around 10:00 p.m. but detected nothing other than nearsightedness in one eye. On Monday, January 21, Lenin was examined by his doctors; minutes after they left, he began convulsing. Bukharin, as usual, had been staying at the Moscow party organization’s facility in Gorki near Lenin’s estate, and although usually only allowed to observe Lenin from afar, this time a doctor appears to have summoned him.29 “When I ran into Ilich’s room, stuffed full of medicines and doctors, Ilich made his last breath,” Bukharin would claim. “His face turned backwards, and went horribly pale, a wheeze was heard, hands shook.”30 Krupskaya recalled that with Lenin’s chest gurgling, his bodyguard-nurse held him in his arms, and that Lenin “occasionally moaned quietly, a tremor ran through his body, at first I held his hot, damp hand, but then just watched as the towel turned red with blood, and the stamp of death settled on his deathly pallid face.”31 The doctors applied artificial respiration. He died at 6:50 p.m.32

  Maria Ulyanova phoned the Kremlin, and her call was redirected to the presidium of the Eleventh All-Russia Congress of Soviets in the Bolshoi Theater’s smaller Beethoven Hall; she asked for Stalin or Zinoviev. Evidently, Stalin took the phone.33 The news shattered the hall. “I had never before seen that many crying men,” recalled a then seventeen-year-old Communist Youth League eyewitness in the Bolshoi.34 The members of the inner circle repaired to Zinoviev’s Kremlin apartment, and around 9:30 p.m. they departed on vehicles outfitted with sled tracks for Gorki.35 Rykov was ill, and Trotsky was en route to the Soviet subtropics. Molotov and Rudzutaks remained at party headquarters to prepare public statements; Dzierzynski also stayed behind in Moscow to oversee public order. At Gorki, Stalin is said to have entered the room first, theatrically. “He moved heavily, gravely, decisively, holding his righ
t hand behind his semi-military jacket,” wrote one eyewitness, who added that at parting, “Stalin, impulsively, emotionally, suddenly approached Lenin’s head: ‘Farewell, farewell, Vladimir Ilich. . . . Farewell!’ And he, pale, took Lenin’s head in both his hands, lifted it, bringing it almost to his breast, to his heart, and firmly, firmly kissed him on the cheeks and on the lips. . . . He waved his hand and stepped back sharply.”36 Kamenev, Zinoviev, and Bukharin also pronounced their farewells, and the sculptor Sergei Merkulov composed a gypsum cast of Lenin’s hands and a death mask, which would find a place in Stalin’s Old Square office.37

  The inner circle, returning to Moscow in the wee hours, at 2:30 a.m. on January 22, convened a meeting of the presidium of the Soviet central executive committee to approve a funeral commission and discuss arrangements.38 At Gorki an autopsy commenced, during which Lenin’s brain was opened, revealing fatty deposits blocking the arteries supposed to carry blood (and oxygen) to the brain, a condition for which there was no cure. Some arteries were so calcified a human hair could not have passed through. The pressure built and the arteries finally burst, which resulted in a vast river of blood on his brain. The destroyed vessels happened to be in the part of the brain controlling the respiratory function, so Lenin stopped breathing.39 The public reports were obsessive, minutely detailing even the precise weight of his brain (1,340 grams).40 Privately, Professor Kramer, the neurologist, recorded that Lenin’s illness “lasted all in all about two and a half years, and its general characteristics harbored signs that all the neurologists, whether Russian or foreign, dwelt on as something that did not conform to the conventional disease of the nervous system.”41 Lenin’s father had apparently died in his early fifties of a brain hemorrhage, perhaps brought on by a clogging of arteries. The condition had affected Lenin’s moods: elation, followed quickly by depression; laughter for no reason; extreme irritability.42

  Lenin had been incapacitated for more than a year, but now the regime had to confront his eternal absence. Kalinin, on January 22, asked the delegates to the Eleventh All-Russia Congress of Soviets to rise as the orchestra struck up a funeral march. “Comrades,” he started, tears streaming down his face, “I must tell you some frightful news. Vladimir Ilich’s health. . . .” Screams pierced the hall. Some delegates erupted into sobs. Kamenev, Zinoviev, Budyonny, and other members of the presidium wept. Avel Yenukidze, secretary of the Soviet central executive committee, cut in and imposed quiet, Kalinin broke down again. Mikhail Lashevich stepped to the dais to announce the details of the viewing and burial. The congress was suspended.43 There is no reliable record of Stalin’s emotional state. On the day before Lenin’s sudden death, one functionary who visited Stalin’s small Kremlin apartment in the Grand Kremlin Palace’s outbuilding noted “an abundance of books.”44 That is how Stalin had and would always relate to Lenin: through his writings, and how Stalin would express himself. On the morning of January 23, Lenin’s casket was transported from the manor house to Moscow, arriving around 1:00 p.m. to the accompaniment of the Bolshoi orchestra playing a dirge. The casket, draped in red cloth, made a five-mile processional to the House of Trade Unions, and was placed in its Hall of Columns (where Sverdlov had lain in state).45 The catafalque, in the middle of the grand space, was surrounded by countless wreaths, fragrant lilies, and a rotating honor guard. That evening at 7:00 p.m., the doors were thrown open to the public. Already in spring 1923, when Lenin had become deathly ill, regional military commanders had received a secret telegram to prepare to put down uprisings.46 Now, Dzierzynski sent instructions via OGPU channels to “pay the main attention to Black Hundreds, monarchists, White Guardists,” while making sure “to maintain complete calm and preempt panic, giving no pretext for panic by outward behavior or unfounded mass arrests.”47

  If one read the OGPU political mood summaries delivered to party headquarters, as Stalin did, one would have thought the USSR was overrun by monarchists and “former” people, priests and mullahs, hostile intelligentsia, sullen workers, property-loving peasants, Red Army malcontents.48 Dzierzynski again and again complained to Yagoda that “these summaries produce a very depressing impression, utterly dark without any ray of light.” (Yagoda would invariably respond that “our task is to illuminate the shadowy side. . . . Thus it is natural that our summaries produce dark impressions.”)49 In January 1924, reports from the countryside suggested that without Lenin, peasants expected the regime to collapse and imperialist powers to take advantage and intervene again.50 Thus did the Soviet regime prove wholly unprepared for the emotional outpouring: Over the course of three days, between half a million and one million people passed by Lenin’s open coffin in the Hall of Columns at the House of Trade Unions, enduring queues a mile and a half long in outside temperatures of −28 degrees F. (Delegations from state or party agencies could visit outside the queue at appointed times.) Certainly many rejoiced at seeing Lenin dead. But a large number seem to have believed he was better than the other Communists, if only for having introduced the NEP, an admission of error and a humane policy.51 “An enormous proportion of the population,” wrote one eyewitness to the scene at the bier who was not part of the regime, “reacted to Lenin’s death with unshakeable grief.”52

  POLITICAL PARALYSIS VERSUS HOLY OATHS

  Four days after departing Moscow for the Soviet subtropics of Abkhazia, Trotsky’s train had pulled into the station in Tiflis early on Tuesday, January 22, with the last leg to the Black Sea coast still pending. But a messenger came to their railcar with a decoded telegram, sent via secret police channels: “Tell comrade Trotsky. On January 21 at 6:50 p.m. comrade Lenin died prematurely. Death followed from paralysis of his respiratory center. Burial on Saturday January 26. Stalin.” Trotsky telegrammed back: “I consider it necessary to return to Moscow.” The train was held at the station. An hour later, came Stalin’s reply: “The funeral will take place on Saturday, you will not make it in time. The politburo considers that in your state of health you should continue on to Sukhum. Stalin.”53 Trotsky claimed that once in Sukhum, convalescing under blankets on an outdoor veranda, he would learn that the funeral was delayed for a day, until Sunday, proving that Stalin had tricked him.54 Certainly Stalin was devious. But special trains were continuing to pour into the capital, some from farther away than Tiflis, so that the funeral commission, chaired by Dzierzynski, announced only on January 25 that Lenin’s funeral would take place one day later, on Sunday (January 27).55 (Also, workers had dynamited the frozen ground in front of the Kremlin Wall but were still furiously constructing a temporary wooden crypt.) Even with Stalin’s original timetable, Trotsky had almost 100 hours to retrace the 1,000 miles back to Moscow. When Lenin had been shot, in September 1918, Stalin had remained in Tsaritsyn, but Trotsky had rushed back from the far-off eastern front of the civil war, reaching Moscow on only the second day after the shooting. That was when the regime had established a Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic, which in January 1924 Trotsky still led. If he feared his train might not make it back to Moscow on time, he could have commandeered whatever military or civilian aircraft were to hand in the South Caucasus military district, headquartered right there in Tiflis.

  Trotsky was not the only top official to miss the funeral: Rykov, who had influenza, had gone to Italy with his wife for a rest cure for a few months under a false name, but his absence had no effect on his political career; after all, Rykov was Lenin’s deputy and potential successor only bureaucratically. Everyone in Moscow was expecting Trotsky. “For the last three days there had been a report that he was returning from the Caucasus where he was ill,” wrote the New York Times reporter. “More than once crowds assembled to greet him at the station, and official photographers were sent to wait chilly hours before the Hall of Columns to film his entry. To the last many believed he would come.”56 Trotsky’s disconsolate seventeen-year-old son, Lev Sedov, who had his own fever well above 100 degrees F., rose from his sickbed in Moscow to pay his respects to Lenin in the
Hall of Columns, unable to comprehend his father’s absence.57 Trotsky would also be missing from the newsreel shown to the masses and the world.58 Decades later, he would lament, “I should have come at any price.”59 True enough, but he would also later write that on that January 22, when his train was being held in the station in Tiflis after news of Lenin’s death had been delivered to him, he had wanted to be left alone. Beseeched by a delegation of local officials, Trotsky had hurriedly composed a short tribute: “And now Vladimir Ilich is no more. The party is orphaned. The working class is orphaned. Such was the very feeling aroused by the news of the death of our teacher and leader. How will we go forward, will we find the way, will we not go astray? . . . Our hearts are stricken with boundless grief, all of us who by the great grace of History were born contemporaries of Lenin, who worked alongside him, who learnt from him. . . . How shall we go ahead? With the lamp of Leninism in our hands.”60 Eloquent, and perhaps indicative of Trotsky’s own feelings of being orphaned.

  After being demoralized by the skullduggery of the Stalin-manipulated January 1924 party gatherings censuring him for factionalism, Lenin’s death offered Trotsky a potential breakout moment to reverse the setbacks of the closed-door sessions, to outshine them all on the biggest stage, Red Square. He could have arrived dramatically from afar, like Lenin had once done at the Finland Station, and used his powers to capture the prevailing grief of Lenin’s death, electrify the crowds, embody the revolution in its next phase. It was none other than Trotsky who had written breathlessly about the “art of the insurrection,” and now he could try to use that art to smash “the ring” around him formed by those he regarded as pygmies. In the name of the greater cause of safeguarding the revolution, he could have violated party discipline by reading aloud on Red Square from Lenin’s purported dictation, using as his mantra Lenin’s summons to “remove Stalin” as general secretary, then flown from factory to factory to rally workers, just as in 1917—let them arrest him. Of course, to do all that, Trotsky needed to perceive Lenin’s death as a strategic opportunity, and he needed a persuasive story line about how the grand socialist dream could be revived, why all those harsh exchanges he had had with Lenin were incidental, and why he (Trotsky) was uniquely qualified to carry forward the sacred Leninist cause. A tall order, to put it mildly. But who could doubt that if Lenin had found that others were conspiring against him, he would have mounted a coup against his own party? Stalin, in Trotsky’s position, would have been incapable of dramatic street actions to win over the masses. Of course, Stalin did not have to accomplish that: he already held the levers of power, ensconced at Old Square. Indeed, Stalin relocated to the new party headquarters at Old Square precisely in January 1924.