“LETTER TO THE CONGRESS”
The 13th Party Congress took place May 23–31, 1924, in the Grand Kremlin Palace, and was attended by 1,164 delegates (748 voting), who represented 736,000 party members. Only around 150,000 lived outside of a town, and of the latter, 61,000 lived in the central regions of the Russian republic and Ukraine. All of Soviet Belorussia had only about 3,000 party members, the Soviet Far East, about the same.120 Even as the regime had continued to grow, it had remained remarkably narrow. For the congress, the triumvirate had taken no chances: the Left opposition was limited to only non-voting delegates and from their ranks only Trotsky had been elected to the forty-two-person congress presidium.121
Everyone knew this congress would be unusual, with Lenin gone forever, but delegates were still in for a shock. Krupskaya had been negotiating for months to publish the dictation, which was now being called Lenin’s “Letter to the Congress.”122 A few late Lenin dictations had already been published, but not the explosive six evaluations of possible successors or the “Ilich letter about the secretary” calling for Stalin’s removal.123 Trotsky, who alone argued in favor of publication, made notes of the discussion. Kamenev: “It cannot be published: it is a speech unspoken at the politburo. It is nothing more.” Zinoviev: “N.K. [Krupskaya] was also of the opinion that it should only be given to the Central Committee. I did not ask about publishing it, for I thought (and think) that is excluded.” Stalin: “I suggest there is no necessity to publish, especially as there is no authorization for publication from Ilich.”124 On the evening of May 21, at the customary Central Committee plenum on the eve of a congress, Kamenev delivered a report on behalf of a special commission for the Lenin documents.125 No transcript is extant. According to the apparatchik Bazhanov, Kamenev read aloud the dictation, after which Zinoviev rose to defend Stalin, a message Kamenev reinforced as he presided over discussion.126
Stalin offered to step down. “Well, yes, I am definitely rude,” Trotsky quoted Stalin as saying. “Ilich proposes to you to find another person who differs from me only in external politeness. Well, ok, try to find such a person.” But in a hall packed with Stalin loyalists, a voice shouted out: “It’s nothing. We are not frightened by rudeness, our whole party is rude, proletarian.”127 A neat trick, but the moment was extraordinary all the same. Back during the cave meeting episode in summer 1923, Stalin had testily intimated he could give up the general secretary position, but that was in a mere private letter.128 This was a plenum, which had the power to remove him. But Stalin escaped: the precongress plenum retained him.129
On May 23, the 13th Congress opened with a parade of Young Pioneers, an organization for children aged ten to sixteen, at Lenin’s wooden tomb on Red Square.130 That day, Stalin inscribed a copy of his Lenin book for the party boss of Azerbaijan in language he used for no one else: “To my friend and dear brother Kirov.” Zinoviev delivered the main political report, just as he had at the 12th Congress, and demanded the Left opposition recant publicly.131 Trotsky rose to speak, and his appearance aroused prolonged applause, just as it had at the previous congress. Afforded an opportunity to go on the offensive and read aloud Lenin’s dictation, Trotsky did not do so. Nor did he recant. Instead, he sought to disarm his critics with conciliation. “Comrades, none of us wishes to be nor can be right against our party,” he stated. “In the last analysis the party is always right, because the party is the unique instrument given to the proletariat for the fulfillment of its fundamental tasks. . . . I know it is impossible to be right against the party. It is possible to be right only with the party and through the party, because history has created no other paths to the realization of what is right.” Trotsky paraphrased the English saying—“my country, right or wrong”—to conclude “this is still my party.”132 The gesture backfired. Even Krupskaya rebuked him, observing that if the party was always right, he should never have instigated the now half-year-long debate for a new course.133 A formal resolution again condemned the Left opposition as a “petit bourgeois deviation.” Rumors spread that Trotsky had come in fifty-first out of the fifty-two members elected to the new Central Committee, perhaps a Stalin-instigated defamation, because the regime conspicuously broke tradition and did not announce the voting totals.134
The precongress plenum had resolved to present the “Letter to the Congress” not at the congress sessions, but to each delegation individually.135 This meant that the congress stenographic record—controlled by Stalin’s secretariat—could omit how these discussions went. Still, memoirs offer an indication. “They read the letter, and everyone was shocked,” recalled Alexander Milchakov (b. 1903), a Communist Youth League official, who noted that his North Caucasus delegation asked that the text be read again. “After a repeat reading the readers proposed the following: taking into account the difficult situation in the country and party, the condition of the Comintern, and the fact that comrade Stalin promises to take comrade Lenin’s criticisms into consideration, there is a proposal to ask comrade Stalin to remain in the post of general secretary. The North Caucasus delegation agreed with this.”136 Similar affirmations occurred at the May 25 gathering of the delegations from the central industrial region and Volga valley (presided over by Isai “Filipp” Goloshchokin and Nikolai Uglanov, Stalin supporters) and the May 26 gathering of Urals, Siberia, Far East, Bashkiria, and Vyatka province delegates (presided over by Mikhail Lashevich, the staunch Zinovievite). These well-orchestrated gatherings accepted assurances that Stalin had acknowledged Lenin’s criticisms and promised to modify his behavior, as well as assertions that he had already improved, that he was shouldering a colossal burden, and that anyway, whatever Lenin had been worried about, time had shown Stalin had not abused his power because of his character.137 The new postcongress Central Committee voted unanimously to reelect him general secretary.138 Even the cave meeting addition of Zinoviev and Trotsky to the orgburo was formally rescinded.
If, contrary to myth, Lenin’s dictation was widely read and discussed, many revealing documents were suppressed. A group of unemployed workers, for example, had written a letter to Comrades Zinoviev, Kamenev, Stalin—in Russian alphabetical order—stating that “no one, comrades, is seriously talking about the army of a million unemployed.”139 Requesting in vain that their letter be read to the congress, the writers added, “We ask, give us work, give us a hunk of bread, let us earn our keep so that our families do not die of starvation there where there is ‘splendor.’”140 Anger in villages was hardly less raw. “You Red butchers ought to know that the steam boiler of peasant patience may explode one day,” one outraged villager shouted at an agitator in 1924, according to a police summary. “You ought to know that the peasants curse you usurpers in their morning prayers. . . . Where is truth? Where is justice? Why did you fool us with words such as freedom, land, peace, and equality?”141
FASCISM’S LESSONS
Fascism constituted the other major Great War‒era mass revolt against the constitutional liberal order besides Bolshevism. Back in 1922, Benito Mussolini, despite the fact that his fascist party had won just 35 seats out of 500 in its best showing in open elections, was demanding to be made prime minister, threatening to march on Rome with hordes of Blackshirts known as squadristi. The squads were lightly armed, their numbers exaggerated.142 The proposed “march” was a colossal bluff, an exercise in psychological warfare, and King Vittorio Emanuele III seemed ready to summon the army to disperse the ruffians. But the king backed off from the anticipated bloodshed, and the well-equipped army did not act on its own.143 On the contrary, the brass, as well as influential business circles, the pope, and even some constitutionalists thought Mussolini should be given a chance to “restore order,” as an antidote to the left. The vacillating king telegraphed Mussolini to ask him to become prime minister in a coalition (with just those 35 fascists in the Chamber of Deputies).144 On October 30, 1922, the thirty-nine-year-old fascist leader arrived in a luxury sleeping car, alighting at the last station
before Rome, which he then entered as if on a march. Mussolini had almost lost his nerve; a comrade bucked up his resolve.145 Only after he had been made prime minister did about 20,000 fascist marchers enter Rome. Many of them had failed to muster at appointed locations, and many of those who did show arrived short of weapons or food. After the squadristi paraded around Rome like conquerors, paying tribute at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and at the palace of the king, whom they saluted in ancient Roman style (right arm outstretched), Mussolini sent them home.146 But their presence in Rome created a myth of a successful coup d’etat.
Fascism puzzled the Communists in Moscow. From Rome, Yemelyan Yaroslavsky—the prosecutor of the mad sadist and would-be conqueror of Mongolia, Baron von Ungern-Sternberg—had written to Lenin on October 3, 1922, predicting that Italian fascism stood on the verge of seizing power, pointing out that their organizational abilities were influencing workers “who are impressed by the fascists’ strength,” and adding that “our Italian colleagues” (i.e., the Italian Communists) “have something to learn from the fascists.”147 But Yaroslavsky’s prescient surmise that fascism was a movement on the right capable of attracting workers and peasants made little impression in Moscow. Instead, Izvestiya, beginning on October 31 and for several days thereafter, had reprinted Comintern speeches highlighting Mussolini’s origins as a socialist (not a Communist) and linking Italy’s Socialist party to the fascist triumph.148 Mussolini, the apostate socialist, would enhance the appearance of an ostensible socialist-fascist link by soon taking to wearing tailcoats, wing collars, and spats, like a bourgeois class enemy. This superficial impression made in connection with Mussolini’s biography and dress was reinforced in Communist thinking by the allegiance of German workers to the Social Democrats, particularly during the fall 1923 Communist putsch fiasco. But in reality, fascism and Social Democracy were implacable enemies. (In fact, as one historian noted, both “Bolshevism and fascism were heresies of socialism.”149) Moreover, the traditional right, not Social Democrats, had brought fascism to power in Italy, while Communists had divided the left and galvanized the right in Italy and in Germany.
Stalin’s inability to understand fascism was sorely evident. He followed Lenin, who had insisted that the non-Bolshevik left—Mensheviks, SRs, other moderates—were the most dangerous of all counterrevolutionaries, because they hid behind the mask of socialism. This chasm on the left undergirded the misinterpretation of fascism, and was institutionalized globally at the Fifth Comintern Congress, which met from June 17 to July 8, 1924, in the ornate Andreyev Hall of the Grand Kremlin Palace, with 504 delegates from 46 parties and 49 countries. The congress was held under the explicit slogan of “Bolshevization,” which meant member parties were ordered to organize along Leninist lines to combat “petit-bourgeois deviation,” and which meant Russification, facilitating an enlargement of Stalin’s Comintern role (he did not speak German).150 Stalin took over Trotsky’s seat on the Comintern executive committee.151 During the interminable denunciations of Trotsky and his foreign “stooges,” one delegate from French Indochina interrupted: “I feel that the comrades have not yet sufficiently grasped the idea that the destiny of the proletariat of the whole world . . . is closely tied to the destiny of the oppressed nations in the colonies.” His name was Nguyen Ai-Quoc, better known as Ho Chi-Minh.152 Despite the acrimonious atmosphere, the delegates closed the proceedings by collectively singing the “Internationale.” Congress delegates also visited Lenin’s mummy and a session of the congress was staged on Red Square, with speakers perched on the cube.153 But the Fifth Congress was most notable for institutionalizing the analysis, as Zinoviev said in his speech, that “the fascists are the right hand and the Social Democrats are the left hand of the bourgeoisie.” Stalin, in his speech, reiterated the point, arguing that the Comintern needed “not a coalition with Social Democracy but lethal combat against it as the pillar of fascist-ized power.”154
If Italian fascism offers a crucial lesson on the fateful limits of Stalin’s thinking, its story holds another transcendent lesson: on how dictatorships take root. In April 1924, Prime Minister Mussolini’s national list won 66.3 percent of the vote, against just 14.6 for the socialists and Communists and 9.1 percent for the Catholics. This gave the fascists 374 of 535 seats. On May 30, Giacomo Matteotti, the son of a wealthy family from the Veneto, a graduate of the law faculty in Bologna, and the leader of the United Socialist party, who had persistently criticized Mussolini and carried tremendous prestige, accused the fascists of intimidation and outright fraud, and demanded that the elections be annulled. “I’ve said my piece,” he concluded. “Now you prepare my funeral speech.”155 Eleven days later he was bundled into a car, stabbed multiple times with a carpenter’s knife, and beaten to death. His corpse was found two months later, on August 16, in a shallow grave some twenty miles from Rome. The motive for his murder remains murky.156 But fascist complicity was established early: five thugs with ties to the fascist secret police had been arrested almost immediately. Mussolini’s complicity or at least foreknowledge became a matter of speculation; it was never proven or disproven, but the murder sabotaged his secret intrigues to broaden his coalition and pushed his government to the point of collapse. Anti-fascist demonstrations occurred in the streets, a general strike was bruited, and many centrist supporters of Mussolini in the Chamber removed their fascist party badges. (Toscanini refused to play the fascist youth anthem “Giovinezza” at La Scala, saying the opera house was “not a beer garden.”)157 Mussolini seemed evasive under questioning. By December 1924, it was widely thought he would have to resign. The king refused to dismiss Mussolini, and so the anti-fascist deputies in parliament, to pressure him, quit the Chamber, heading for the Aventine Mount, where in ancient Rome the plebeians had exacted revenge against the patricians.158 Their foolish act was reminiscent of the Mensheviks and SRs who in October 1917 abandoned the Congress of Soviets.
The leader of the anti-fascists in the Italian Senate “was in favor of arresting Mussolini by a coup de main,” one historian explained, but most anti-fascists refused to employ extralegal means.159 In the meantime, Mussolini was galvanized by fascist hard-liners who condemned the idiotic murder of Matteotti, called for a bottom-up fascist renewal, and threatened him with a coup in a new march on Rome.160 On January 3, 1925, Mussolini rose in the Chamber, stating “I declare here, before this solemn assembly and before the whole Italian people, that I, and I alone, assume political, moral and historic responsibility for all that has happened.” He dared those assembled to prosecute him. They did not. Already on January 10, by decree he outlawed all parties but the fascists and curbed the press. He also refused to let his opponents back in the parliament and pronounced their mandate forfeited as a result of their secession. Only now was Italy transformed from a constitutional monarchy into a one-party dictatorship. A fascist party card became a prerequisite for employment in universities, schools. Soon, Mussolini started calling himself duce. This turnaround of the Matteotti crisis against his opponents, not the 1922 march on Rome, was the fascist seizure of power.
There are moments in history that could have been turning points but did not turn or turned in the opposite direction, such as happened in 1924 simultaneously in fascist Italy, thanks to the parliamentary secession as well as the king, and in the Soviet Union, thanks to Zinoviev and Kamenev. A congress was one of Stalin’s few vulnerable moments—and he had asked to be removed at the precongress plenum, so Zinoviev and Kamenev could have had the measure placed on the congress agenda. They could not have been unaware of Stalin’s ambitions.161 Perhaps they were content in the belief that he had been wounded by revelation of the dictation. Still, opportunism alone could have dictated that they seize on Lenin’s purported dictation and take down the general secretary. In the case of Italy, Mussolini’s political destruction might have allowed the rickety parliamentary system to survive the pressure of the street squads and the king’s fecklessness, although Mussolini’s demise might
instead have facilitated the rise of the likes of Roberto Farinacci, the toughest, nastiest of the fascist local bosses, who could have pushed through an even more radical fascist social revolution. In the case of the USSR, the removal of Stalin might have proven temporary, given the lackluster qualities of his rivals; or for that same reason, it might have precipitated an eventual dissolution of the one-party rule that he was holding together.
Just as Mussolini had triumphed over his Matteotti crisis, Stalin did so over the Lenin dictation, but Stalin had not walked away unscathed. The nearly 1,200 delegates to the 13th Party Congress had witnessed his humiliation. Many of them doubtless brought back stories to the three quarters of a million party members they represented. Mention of the Lenin dictation appeared in the Paris-based Menshevik emigre newspaper Socialist Herald (July 24, 1924).162 The whole world was beginning to learn: Lenin had called for Stalin’s removal.
SOVIET GEOPOLITICS
Stalin, Volume 1 Page 76