Stalin, Volume 1

by Stephen Kotkin

  TESTAMENT, AGAIN

  The delayed Central Committee plenum opened on July 14 (it met through the twenty-third). On the second day, outside the plenum, Dzierzynski instructed Yagoda to remove local OGPU archives from the frontier regions closest to Poland and Romania. He also suggested transferring out the spies, White Guards, and bandits held in prisons near the western borders.46 To the plenum, Dzierzynski gave a report on July 20. Having recently instructed Yagoda to clear speculators from Moscow and other cities, now Dzierzynski complained that the provincial OGPU “arrested, exiled, imprisoned, pressured, and blackmailed private traders (who meanwhile were prepared to work 14–16 hours a day).”47 He called the Trotsky supporter Pyatakov, deputy chief of the state planning commission, “the single biggest disorganizer of industry.” To Kamenev, who had recruited Dzierzynski into the opposition, he said, “You are engaged in intrigue [politikantsvo], not work.” Dzierzynski stated that had he known about the opposition’s secret gatherings outside Moscow beforehand, he would “not have hesitated to take two companies of OGPU troops with machine guns and settle matters.” Sweating profusely, pale, he barely managed to finish before returning to his seat. Soon he was helped from the hall and placed on a divan outside the meeting hall. Someone administered camphor. Dzierzynski began to make his way back to his apartment in the nearby Grand Kremlin Palace but collapsed. Forty-nine years old, he was dead. He had evidently suffered a heart attack during his plenum speech. The autopsy revealed advanced arteriosclerosis, especially in the blood vessels to the heart.48 “After Frunze, Dzierzynski,” Stalin observed in brief remarks at the funeral on July 22. “‘The terror of the bourgeoisie’—that’s what they called him.”49

  The plenum continued. Trotsky read a statement on behalf of himself, Zinoviev, and Kamenev announcing their common struggle against the tyranny of the apparatus, defense of worker interests against the NEP, the need for tax increases on kulaks, collectivization of agriculture, and rapid industrialization. Stalin had the “Lashevich affair” in his pocket, but the opposition was circulating Lenin’s Testament, and without the lines about Trotsky’s non-Bolshevism. Stalin grabbed the Testament nettle and read it aloud, in its entirety. Trotsky later wrote that Stalin was choking back anger, and suffered repeated interruptions calling out his distortions. “In the end he completely lost his equilibrium and, rising on tiptoe, forcing his voice, with a raised hand started to shout, hoarsely, crazy accusations and threats, which dumbfounded the whole hall,” Trotsky claimed. “Neither before nor after have I ever seen him in such a state.”50 But the declassified record of the discussion shows the opposition on the defensive and Stalin on the attack.

  “It is incorrect to call Lenin’s letter a Testament,” Stalin noted in a long speech on July 22, going on to observe that “Lenin’s letter mentions six comrades. Of three comrades, Trotsky, Kamenev, and Zinoviev, it says they had errors of principle that were not accidental. I think it would not be immodest if I observed here the fact that there is not one word in the ‘testament’ about the mistakes of principle of Stalin. Ilich scolds Stalin and notes his rudeness, but in the letter there is not even a hint that Stalin has errors of principle.”51 Stalin added that he had taken the criticisms into account, while Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev had ignored them. Trotsky’s method, Stalin asserted, was to attack with rumors, and above all to make everything a matter of personalities. “The letter says that we should not blame Trotsky ‘personally’ for his non-Bolshevism . . . from this it follows that comrade Trotsky needs to be cured of ‘non-Bolshevism,’” Stalin said. “But from this it does not follow that comrade Trotsky has been afforded the right to revise Leninism, that we should nod our heads in agreement, when he revises Leninism.” Trotsky interjected “past” concerning his non-Bolshevism, to which Stalin answered, “The letter does not say ‘past,’ it only says non-Bolshevism. . . . Two different things. The ‘non-Bolshevism’ of Trotsky is a fact. The impossibility of blaming comrade Trotsky ‘personally’ for the non-Bolshevism is also a fact. But Trotsky’s non-Bolshevism exists and the struggle against it is necessary—that’s also a fact, beyond doubt. Lenin should not be distorted.”52 Stalin dismissed Lenin’s “Notes on the Question of Nationalities” as a matter of the leader’s weakening memory, and asserted that Mdivani and the Georgians deserved far more serious punishment than he (Stalin) had meted out: after all, they had created a faction, which was illegal. Stalin conceded nothing but his own rudeness, which, in light of the fight against Trotsky’s seeming non-Leninism, could indeed appear trifling.53

  Stalin did not overlook the “October episode” of Zinoviev and Kamenev either, which, echoing the Testament, he called “non-accidental,” an ongoing, chronic, endemic, defining characteristic, like Trotsky’s non-Bolshevism. “The ‘episode’ could be repeated. Do you not think, comrades that a repeat of the October mistakes of Zinoviev and Kamenev, a certain recidivism of these mistakes was demonstrated in front of us at the 14th Party Congress?” Stalin answered his rhetorical question: “This is true. From this the conclusion follows that comrades Kamenev and Zinoviev did not take into account Lenin’s directives.”54 Zinoviev, when he got a chance to respond, admitted, “I made many mistakes. . . . My first mistake in 1917 is known to all. . . . My second mistake I consider even more dangerous because the 1917 mistake was done under Lenin, and Lenin corrected it, and so did we with his help after a few days, but my mistake in 1923 consisted in . . .” At this point Orjonikidze cut him off: “What are you doing, taking the whole party for a fool?” Orjonikidze had allowed himself to be caught up in the summer 1923 cave meeting intrigue and did not want the plenum members to find out.

  Thus did Stalin not only neutralize their main weapon—the damned Testament—he flagellated them with it.55 All the while he remained the humble servant, executor of the party’s will. “Delegations of the 13th Congress discussed this question and I do not consider it a lack of humility if I report that all delegations without exception spoke out for the retention of Stalin in the post of general secretary. I have these resolutions right here and I can read them aloud, if you want.” Voice: “Unnecessary.” Stalin: “Despite this fact immediately after the 13th Party Congress, at the first plenum of our Central Committee, I offered my resignation. Despite my request to be removed, the plenum decided, and as I recall, unanimously, that I should remain in the post of general secretary. What could I have done comrades? I am a person not of free will and I subordinated myself to the plenum’s decision.”56

  Zinoviev was voted out of the politburo entirely. “Down with factions and factional struggle,” read the resolution. “Long live the unity and cohesion of the Leninist party.”57 And yet, Stalin managed to maintain his pose as the moderate, noting that against the insistence of Zinoviev and Kamenev, he had refused to have Trotsky removed from the politburo.

  Stalin had Rudzutaks promoted to full member of the politburo, assuming Zinoviev’s place, while the Caucasus duo Mikoyan and Orjonikidze were named candidate members, along with Kirov in Leningrad, Kaganovich, and Andrei Andreyev. A few days later Stalin informed Mikoyan, party boss in the North Caucasus, that he was being transferred to Moscow to replace Kamenev as commissar of trade. Mikoyan balked, but Stalin forced him.58 As Dzierzynski’s replacement as head of the Supreme Council of the Economy, Stalin named Valerian Kuibyshev, which opened a hole at the party Central Control Commission. Stalin summoned Orjonikidze from Tiflis to head it, warning him “not to buck,” but the transfer required considerable arm-twisting.59 Before the year was out, Stalin would have two new key allies in the capital (Mikoyan, Orjonikidze), to go with his key ally in Leningrad (Kirov).60

  Dzierzynski’s office became a shrine to the incorruptible ascetic. “A simple desk, an old screen hiding a narrow iron bed . . . he never went home to his family except on holidays,” one of his old-school colleagues observed.61 The man who had insisted on preserving Lenin’s mummy was honored with a lesser version: an effigy made from the death ma
sks of Dzierzynski’s face and hands was placed in his uniform under a glass case in the OGPU officers’ club.62 A cult of Dzierzynski would buttress the police regime. He was said to pluck flowers while carefully avoiding trampling on a nearby anthill—but woe to enemies of the revolution.63 Mezynski was formally promoted to chairman of the OGPU. “Everyone was surprised that there was nothing military about him,” recalled Raisa Sobol, an operative. “He spoke quietly, and could be heard only because the hall was tensely silent. And his manner of speech was not command-style but contemplative. The chairman, strangely, resembled a teacher.”64 But the physically ailing Mezynski, also depressed by Dzierzynski’s death, went south to Matsesta for six weeks of sulfur baths.

  Testament unpleasantries extended beyond the sitting of the plenum. Zinoviev had charged that “in a private letter to comrade Stalin Lenin broke comradely relations with him.”65 Stalin responded in written form. “Lenin never broke comradely relations with me—that is the slander of a person who has lost his head. One can judge Lenin’s personal relations with me by the fact that Lenin, while ill, turned to me several times with such important assignments, the kind of assignments with which he never once tried to turn to Zinoviev or Kamenev or Trotsky. Politburo members and comrades Krupskaya and Maria Ilinichna [Ulyanova] know about these assignments.”66 (Stalin refrained from specifying that these were requests for poison.) On July 26, 1926, Ulyanova lent her authoritative status as Lenin’s sister to Stalin’s defense in the Testament controversy, signing a formal letter to the presidium of the just concluded joint plenum; the archives contain a draft for her by Bukharin (she worked at Pravda, where he was editor). “V. I. Lenin valued Stalin highly,” her letter stated, using her brother’s initials. “V.I. used to call him and would give him the most intimate instructions, instructions of the sort one can only give to someone one particularly trusts, someone one knows as a sincere revolutionary, as a close comrade. . . . In fact, during the entire time of his illness, as long as he had the possibility of seeing his comrades, he most frequently invited comrade Stalin, and during the most difficult moments of his illness Stalin was the only member of the Central Committee he invited.” She allowed that an incident had occurred, “of a purely personal character without any connection to policy,” because Stalin had upheld the doctors’ prohibition against Lenin’s engaging in political matters while ill. “Comrade Stalin apologized and with that the incident was exhausted. . . . Relations were and remained the closest and most comradely.”67

  Not long thereafter, evidently feeling pangs of guilt, Ulyanova wrote a second letter, for which no one supplied a draft, noting that she had been reflecting on those days more broadly, not just in the context of blocking the intrigues of Kamenev and Zinoviev, and found her original letter incomplete: Lenin had indeed wanted to curb Stalin’s power, removing him as general secretary because of his personal traits.68 But Ulyanova’s second, private letter, unlike her first, was not circulated to members of the joint plenum. Krupskaya, a member of the joint plenum and thus, presumably, a recipient of Ulyanova’s original letter, does not appear to have moved to contradict her.69 Krupskaya still wanted to publish the Testament, but Stalin had pointed out that only a congress, the party’s highest organ, had the right to remove the prohibition on publication that had been placed by the 13th Party Congress. “I regret that the joint plenum of the Central Committee and Central Control Commission does not have the right to decide to publish these letters in the press,” he stated. “I deeply regret this and I shall get it done at the 15th Party Congress of our party.”70 Mention of the Testament was included in the plenum transcript circulated to party organizations countrywide.71 A dark cloud accompanied every hard-earned advance over the opposition.

  RUSSIA’S NEW RULER (EYE ON AMERICA)

  Zinoviev was still, nominally, chairman of the Comintern, but the days were long passed when Stalin conducted Comintern affairs with him. Kuusinen, the Comintern secretary general, who referred to Zinoviev behind his back as the satrap, had been reporting all serious business to Stalin.72 Stalin had Kamenev named ambassador to Italy. The short-lived trade commissar surreptitiously brought 600,000 gold rubles to finance the Italian Communist party. In the one known meeting between Kamenev and Mussolini, the duce was disgusted to receive as an envoy a man who was not only a Communist but disgraced by his own government. Kamenev, for his part, told Mussolini he was “grateful to get away from Russia and from Stalin.”73 The day before exiling Kamenev, Stalin granted an interview—his first ever—to an American journalist. The interviewer, Jerome Davis, was a former YMCA leader in Russia, a labor activist, and a professor at Yale University’s Divinity School who arrived in the USSR on an American delegation of some twenty self-described progressives. Davis managed to obtain his audience with Stalin on the pretext of being able to assist with U.S. diplomatic recognition of the Soviet state.74 Davis would publish a sensational essay, “Russia’s New Ruler,” as he called Stalin, in the New York American, owned by the conservative William Randolph Hearst. “After a hearty handshake,” Davis wrote, “I turned out to be seated at a table across from a powerful, magnetic personality with curly black hair, manly moustaches, brown eyes, and a face with visible marks of smallpox, and a welcoming, friendly smile.”75

  Davis filled a vacuum. But the Hearst exclusive passed largely without commentary in the rest of the American press, a circumstance, according to the director of the New York bureau of TASS, that would not have happened had it been the property of the Associated Press or the New York Times—a passage Stalin underlined.76 Still, whatever the disappointment over the dearth of international resonance, the published interview offered something to both sides: it rendered Stalin very articulate (a Soviet plus); it contained interesting details about his life and apparent political views (a Davis achievement).

  During the interview, when Davis requested a copy of Stalin’s biography, the dictator had handed him a photograph, with a short note. “That’s so little,” Davis responded. “How did you become a Communist?” Stalin: “That’s difficult to say. At first people go over to opposition, then they become revolutionaries, then they choose for themselves a party. We had a lot of parties—SRs, Mensheviks, Anarchists, Bolsheviks.” Davis pressed: “Why a Communist?” Stalin: “We had so many Communists because Russian capitalism was the most savage. . . . We had the most severe political system, so that even the most peaceable types went into opposition; and because a simple opposition could not help the oppositionists. From the rich to the laborers, they were sent to exile in Siberia, [so] they strove to create a party that was the sharpest in standing against the government and acted the most decisively. Therefore all those inclined to opposition sympathized with the Bolsheviks and looked upon them as heroes.” Stalin related the story of how he had allegedly been expelled from the seminary for reading Marx. He also offered a theory of rule, explaining that the Communist party had 1 million members—a fighting organization, not a discussion club—but an organization even with 1 million could not rule such a large country: once decisions were taken, they had to be implemented. For that, a regime needed a shared sense of mission. Davis pointed to the conspiratorial nature of Bolshevism, and Stalin referred to “shadow committees” in British politics, and asserted that the politburo was newly elected every year.77 When Davis touched on the peasants, Stalin said, “You cannot do anything with propaganda alone. We hope that we’ll attract the peasants because we create the material conditions for pushing the peasants onto the Bolshevik side.” Peasants needed affordable consumer goods, credit, aid during famine. “I would not say that they are in ecstasy over the Bolsheviks. But the peasants are practical and, comparing the capitalists, who did not want to talk to them and exploited them, and the Communists, who talk to them, persuade them, and do not rob them, they come to the conclusion that it’s better with us. They do not take us for the ideal, but they consider us as better than the others.”78

  While strenuously trying to soft
en the image of the Soviet state, Stalin’s main subject was the puzzle of securing American diplomatic recognition, trade, and foreign investment to advance the Soviet economy. He complained that it remained unclear what more, concretely, he could do; the USSR had made abundant public pronouncements of its desire for normal relations. Davis indicated that for state recognition, Stalin should consider acknowledging tsarist and Kerensky government debt; compensating the majority of Americans who suffered from confiscations; and refraining from using Soviet representatives abroad in propaganda work. Stalin retorted that any agitation against the United States stemmed from its failure to recognize the Soviet state, unlike the other powers. On the commercial side, he pointed to the profits obtained by Averell Harriman in the Lena goldfields, thanks to the Soviet Union’s internationally low wages. Davis asked Stalin if the Soviets lived up to their agreements. “Concerning the Bolsheviks, sundry myths are propagated, that they do not eat, do not drink, that they are not people, that they have no families and that they do nothing but fight with each other and depose one another (and then it turns out they are all still there), that night and day they send out directives to the whole world,” he responded. “Here that only induces laughter.” Stalin did not allow that the United States government might refuse to truck with Communism on moral grounds; after all, when did imperialists have morals? “Germany stands below the United States in technical level, culture, yet Germany takes more leases [concessions], it knows the market better, it engages more. . . . Why?” Stalin asked. “Germany extends us credit.” Stalin craved the same from the United States. “In view of American technical skill and her abundant surplus capital,” he said, “no country in the world is better fitted to help Russia. . . . The unsurpassed technology of America and the needs and tremendous population of Russia would yield large profits for Americans, if they cooperated.”