For Stalin, Lenin’s death presented a different kind of opportunity, and he seized it. With more than 2,000 delegates inside the Bolshoi on January 26, the Second USSR Congress of Soviets opened, devoting its first day to Lenin’s memory. After Kalinin (head of state) and Krupskaya (widow), Zinoviev took the floor, marveled at the crowds that had come to pay their respects, and advised everyone always to ponder, “What would comrade Lenin do if he were in my place?” But what would Zinoviev do in Lenin’s place? Unclear. Next up Stalin, who evoked a mystical calling. “Comrades, we Communists are people of a special mold,” he stated, in his first known remarks on Lenin’s passing. “We are made of special stuff. We are those who constitute the army of the great proletarian strategist, the army of comrade Lenin. There is nothing higher than the honor of belonging to this army. There is nothing higher than the title of member of the party whose founder and leader was comrade Lenin. It is not given to everyone to be a member of such a party.” Now those afforded such an honor would be tested. “Departing from us, comrade Lenin enjoined us to hold high and safeguard the purity of the great title of member of the party. We vow to thee, comrade Lenin, we shall fulfill thy behest with honor!” Stalin said. “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 this behest, too, we shall fulfill with honor!” And on and on went the collective vows: to safeguard the dictatorship of the proletariat, the worker-peasant alliance of the New Economic Policy, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the Communist International. Each time he intoned the collective promise: “We shall fulfill this bequest with honor!”61 Stalin’s liturgical incantations stood out starkly not just from the drab content offered by Zinoviev, normally a surpassing orator, but from everyone’s remarks.62 When the speeches were published in Izvestiya, however, the editor excised the religious aura of Stalin’s speech.63 Perhaps some Communist sensibilities were offended. But Stalin, as general secretary, had Pravda republish the speeches three days later in full.64 Within days of Lenin’s death, the ex-seminarian had unveiled the winning formula he would pursue: zealously dedicating his life and the entire party to fulfillment of Lenin’s sacred “behest.”
Delegates at the Congress of Soviets voted to rename Petrograd Leningrad, erect Lenin monuments around the Union, and publish his works in millions of copies, then adjourned for the outdoor funeral, which took place the next day, January 27, and lasted six hours in bitter cold of ‒30 degrees F.65 At 4:00 p.m., as the coffin was placed in a temporary wooden crypt, all radios and telegraphs broadcast a single message: “Stand up, comrades. Ilich is being lowered into the grave!” All factories and transport were halted as the whole country came to a dramatic standstill, with five minutes of silence. At 4:06 radios sent a new message: “Lenin has died—Leninism lives!”
The quest for retrospective precedence in proximity to the deceased Lenin was in full swing.66 Stalin gave another speech on January 28, this time to Kremlin military cadets, and asserted he had received a “simple but deeply significant letter” from Lenin in 1903, which he did not produce, but which advanced by two years their actual acquaintance.67 Trotsky supporters, for their part, were printing copies of Lenin’s purported dictation to distribute to the party members who had arrived in Moscow from around the country for the funeral. The Trotsky people affixed the written appellation “Testament” (zaveshchanie), which the written document carried for the first time. The Central Control Commission expressly banned circulation of the Lenin documents on January 30.68 That same evening, the Second USSR Congress of Soviets resumed and, the next day, ratified the new Constitution of the USSR.69 Rykov was formally named chairman of the USSR Council of People’s Commissars, but in the traditional gathering space on the third floor of the Imperial Senate, Lenin’s chair, directly in front of the door to his old office, was left empty.70 Still, many details testified to Stalin’s ascendancy, including the fact that he had taken charge of the regime’s Special Purpose Garage. Nothing spoke power more than the allocation of scarce state cars. Automobiles also happened to be a special interest of Stalin’s, from the six-cylinder 1914 Vauxhall purchased in England for Nicholas II’s mother (and used by Paul Miliukov after the February Revolution), to the twelve-cylinder Packard Twin Six (originally purchased for the tsarist military) that Stalin had in Tsaritsyn. Stalin would soon decide to purchase a suite of American-made cars for the regime: Lincolns, Cadillacs, Buicks, and for himself, a Packard. Packards would remain Stalin’s preferred machine for decades—heavy yet fast.71 Meanwhile, with Lenin buried, in early February 1924 Stalin took a holiday.
Oddly enough, it was Trotsky’s holiday that testified to Stalin’s ascendancy. That winter of 1924 was the Trotskys’ first visit to Abkhazia and its capital, Sukhum, on the balmy Black Sea. Trotsky seems to have been entranced by his escape. They were put up at a villa, the Sinop (Synoptic), located in the outskirts on a hill enveloped by a botanical park with hundreds of varieties of flora and fauna that the prerevolutionary owner had imported from around the world.72 “In the dining room of the rest house there were two portraits on the wall, one—draped in black—of Vladimir Ilich, the other of L.D. [Trotsky],” Natalya Sedova wrote.73 Their host was the diminutive Nestor Lakoba, who was nearly deaf—the sound amplifier he used helped little—but Trotsky took a shine to the man-of-the-people demeanor of a Communist beloved among his countrymen of Abkhazia (jokingly known as Lakobistan).74 Lakoba visited Trotsky nearly every day, bringing oranges, tangerines, and lemons, sitting for long discussions. His Caucasus hospitality, however, had a further purpose: Dzierzynski had sent a telegram the day of Trotsky’s Moscow departure noting that the war commissar’s rest trip to Sukhum “has become widely known even abroad, and so I am concerned that the White Guards do not attempt an assassination.” Ah, yes, those White Guard terrorists: Dzierzynski requested that Trotsky be kept in splendid isolation. That same day Lakoba also received a letter from Tiflis, written by the South Caucasus party boss Orjonikidze, asking him to “take care” of Trotsky and adding that in Tiflis “matters are going splendidly well. The Left opposition has been smashed to its foundation.”75
Relieved by the exemplary Caucasus hospitality, Trotsky appears not to have suspected the ulterior motives behind it on what was, after all, Stalin’s home turf.76 Already on the day Trotsky had landed in Sukhum, January 23, a very young police operative (b. 1899) who had already become deputy head of the Georgian Cheka wrote to Yagoda in Moscow that he had visited Trotsky. The ostensible reason for the visit was to inform Trotsky he had to deliver a speech (still feverish, Trotsky promised to write an article). The real reason was a personal initiative to size up Trotsky’s thinking. “The death of Ilich has affected him greatly,” the secret police interlocutor reported. “He thinks that at this moment what’s needed is a closing of ranks [splochennost’]. . . . Lenin can only be replaced by a collective. Comrade Trotsky does not feel well.”77 The precocious Georgian Chekist humbly asked Yagoda, his superior in Moscow, to share the requested report with Stalin immediately. The name of the secret police operative was . . . Lavrenti Beria.
Trotsky’s political quarantine was broken by Krupskaya, who sent a warm note (January 29) stressing how, about a month before, “as he was looking through your book, Vladimir Ilich stopped at the place where you sum up Marx and Lenin, and asked me to read it over again to him: he listened very attentively, and then looked it over himself. And there is another thing I want to tell you: the attitude of V.I. toward you at the time you came to us in London from Siberia did not change right up to his death. I wish you, Lev Davidovich, strength and health, and I embrace you warmly.”78 This was the same Krupskaya who, earlier that same month, had repudiated Trotsky’s recent writings, denying the party was alienated from the masses and underscoring that his charges of bureaucratism came without practical solution, other than substituting Trotsky supporters for sitting officials.79 But now Krupskaya had undertaken a demonst
rative political act, to counterbalance Stalin.80 Stalin, however, sent a delegation, led by Mikhail Frunze, to inform Trotsky that he Frunze would replace Trotsky’s loyal first deputy at the war commissariat, Yefraim Sklyansky.81 In Abkhazia, Trotsky had become well enough to hunt, the avid avocation that had afflicted him with the fevers in the first place. Lakoba, a top marksman, gushed to the major local newspaper, Dawn of the East, that Trotsky “kills ducks in flight; in the outskirts of Sukhum, not a single lake or swamp that contained game escaped his eye.”82 It was Trotsky who did not escape Lakoba’s eye until mid-April 1924, when Trotsky finally disembarked for Moscow.
LENINISM
Lenin’s mummification for viewing in a crypt near the Kremlin Wall may look inevitable, but many, perhaps most, members of the inner circle objected to the idea; the decision was pushed by Dzierzynski, the funeral commission chairman, who had once studied for the Catholic priesthood and was backed by Stalin the seminarian. Dzierzynski argued that “if science can preserve a human body for a long time, then why not do it,” adding that “the tsars were embalmed just because they were tsars. We will do it because he was a great person, unlike any other.”83 Preservation of Lenin as a viewable holy relic required an extraordinarily high level of scientific technique, which did not emerge immediately; the lead scientist eventually hit upon a novel solution mixing glycerin, alcohol, water, potassium acetate, and quinine chloride, which managed to restore the body.84 For a more permanent mausoleum to replace the original jerry-built crypt, the regime commissioned the architect Alexei Shchusev, noted for his art nouveau Kazan railway station in Moscow, who would come up with an alluring design of three cubes arranged horizontally and connected by corridors, based upon ancient Mayan motifs.85 Inside, Lenin would be laid in a red-lined sarcophagus covered with airtight glass, dressed not in his usual bourgeois suit but a khaki tunic, his posthumously awarded Order of the Red Banner pinned to his chest.86 Leonid Krasin had proposed inclusion of a terrace from which the masses could be addressed, an idea that Shchusev adopted, albeit only on the flanks, not across the top front.87 The mausoleum’s formal public opening would take place later in 1924.88 “The body is in a perfect state of preservation,” Walter Duranty of the New York Times would enthuse, noting that the Soviet professors boasted to him that unlike Egyptian pharaoh mummies, not only the body but the entire face was preserved. Duranty would add that “the embalmers have even contrived to impart a smile.”89 The lifelike mummy of a saintlike figure would prove of incalculable value to the regime.
Unexpectedly, the Soviet regime had acquired a potent sacred space on Red Square. (Many visitors to Lenin adopted a superstitious pose.)90 Meanwhile, the Lenin Museum had already been established.91 Some items there were not on public view. The artist Yuri Annenkov, invited to select photographs for a book, noticed a glass jar in which sat “Lenin’s brain preserved in alcohol . . . one hemisphere was healthy and full-sized, with clearly defined convolutions; the other, which hung as it were by a ribbon, was wrinkled, crumpled, crushed, and no larger than a walnut.”92 Publicly, the museum humanized Lenin with photographs of his childhood, alongside heroic episodes of the revolution. “In a glass case is the revolver with which he was shot in 1918,” wrote a professor from Chicago of an early visit. “The extracted bullet, with the signed reports of the doctors who performed the operation, is also exhibited.”93 Codification of Lenin’s written legacy was also well under way. The informal Lenin Institute had emerged on the initiative of the Moscow party organization, but Stalin took it under the wing of the central apparatus, partly to put it on better financial footing, but mostly to ensure his control.94 He implanted his Marxist-scholar aide, Ivan Tovstukha, as the person in charge of day-to-day operations.95 Stalin would commission a new five-story building in modernist style, at Soviet Square, 1/3 (formerly Tver Square), one of the first large public buildings to be built after the revolution.96 Kamenev remained editor of Lenin’s Collected Works, but Tovstukha oversaw the immediate publication, or suppression, of key Lenin documents.97 Everyone who had known Lenin was required to send the Lenin Institute their reminiscences.98 Krupskaya sent hers to Stalin for comments; he would have the text published without running his editing by her.99
Pravda’s portrait, likely penned by Bukharin, gave voice to the emerging orthodoxy: Lenin’s modesty, intense force of logic, fidelity to principle, faith in the masses, perseverance and will.100 Unmentioned was his extreme cruelty. Lenin loved people only “in general,” the self-exiled writer Maxim Gorky nicely summarized in a short book in 1924. “His love looked far ahead, through the mists of hatred.”101 Molotov, who worked intimately with both Lenin and Stalin, would famously judge Lenin “the more severe” and “harsher.”102 Lenin had liked to see himself as Marx’s equal (once, when a factory worker asked him for a photograph as a memento of their meeting, Lenin pulled from his pocket a small badge with Marx’s portrait). But although Lenin’s and Marx’s portraits in giant size hung side by side on Red Square for the major holidays, many were calling Marx the theorist, and Lenin the (mere) practitioner.103 It was Stalin who would resolve their equality. In April 1924, he went into the mouth of the tiger, the Sverdlov Communist University, where the Trotsky Left opposition had carried the vote at a party meeting in fall 1923.104 Stalin’s lectures would be serialized in April and May 1924 under the title “Foundations of Leninism.”105
Stalin had long carried the stamp of an organizer, not a theoretician.106 Few knew that he had plagiarized whole cloth his “Anarchism or Socialism?” (1906–7) from the deceased Giorgi Teliya. Now, for his “Foundations of Leninism,” he plagiarized Lenin’s Doctrine of Revolution, a manuscript by the still-living Filipp Ksenofontov (not to be confused with the unrelated Ivan Ksenofontov, the Cheka operative). Ksenofontov (b. 1903), a journalist and editor, was suddenly packed off to Tashkent amid rumors that he had protested Stalin’s borrowings. (In a private letter to Ksenofontov, Stalin expressed gratitude for his help; later Stalin would deny Ksenofontov permission to cite this letter.)107 While in Tashkent in 1924, Ksenofontov published a book on the tenth anniversary of the Great War, Lenin and the Imperialist War 1914–1918, in which his presentation of Leninism tracked closely with that published under Stalin’s name.108 Leninism, Ksenofontov wrote, was not merely Marxism in practice, as many suggested, but “the science of the revolutionary politics of the working class in conditions of imperialism, i.e. the theory and practice of the proletarian revolution.”109 Stalin’s “Foundations of Leninism” had a punchier version: “Leninism is the Marxism of the epoch of imperialism and of the proletarian revolution.”110 Stalin also made abundantly clear that Lenin, not Trotsky (and not Stalin), had been the reason for victory in 1917.
Trotsky’s parallel effort, a May 1924 compilation of older materials and current recollections, adopted a stance very different from Stalin’s discipleship.111 His On Lenin was, as expected, less about Lenin than Trotsky’s supposed special closeness to him (as emphasized in the fawning book review by a Trotsky supporter).112 But Trotsky made himself the coleader of the revolution, the very stance that had gotten him into trouble time and again while Lenin was still alive. In fact, Lenin in October 1917 was depicted as taking advice from Trotsky. The outrage was intense. Molotov hammered Trotsky for portraying Lenin as mistake prone (fallible).113 Zinoviev lashed out at Trotsky for equating his (Trotsky’s) Brest-Litovsk blundering in 1918 with Lenin’s failed Polish War in 1920.114 But Zinoviev, whose vanity may have exceeded even Trotsky’s, in his own reminiscences included passages no one else would have been stupid enough to set down in print. “In Paris once we were drinking to the success of his new book and we sat in the cafe till the small hours (though, to be honest, I could not imagine who would read the book, apart from a handful of Social Democrats),” he wrote.115 More often, Zinoviev went to the other extreme of embarrassing obsequiousness, even by the standards of the emerging hagiography: “As mighty as the ocean; as stern and inaccessible as Mont Blanc; as tender as t
he southern sun; as great as the world; as humane as a child.”116 For all his oratorical prowess, on the written page Zinoviev tended to be diffuse, the opposite of Stalin.
Already in spring 1924 it was evident that Stalin had won the battle over presenting Leninism.117 “Stalin’s book is, without doubt, so far the best text on Leninism, although it does not bear a loud and pretentious title, unlike other such publications,” noted a signed review in Bolshevik. The reviewer, Alexander Slepkov (b. 1899), was a product of the Sverdlov Communist University, where the lectures had been delivered, as well as of the Institute of Red Professors (1924), the first institution of higher learning founded on the basis of Marxism across all subjects, from literary criticism to natural science. He embodied Stalin’s target audience.118 Slepkov made some criticisms—of a work by the general secretary—but he singled out for special praise the book’s overall conceptualization, the organization and exactitude of each chapter, the economy of expression, and the clarity of the core principle of the party “as an expression of the historical interests of the proletariat.”119
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