Stalin

by Ian Grey

  Throughout the Congress, the first to be held since Lenin’s death, there was a strong general desire to exclude polemics and factionalism. Zinoviev delivered the principal report, and he avoided controversy. At the end of his speech, he referred to the “growth of a new bourgeoisie” under NEP and the danger of a “new Menshevism,” but he did not name Trotsky or the oppositionists. Finally, he offered a peace formula to dispose of the disputes which had plagued the party during the past year.

  “The most sensible step and most worthy of a Bolshevik,” he said, “which the opposition could take is what a Bolshevik does when he happens to make some mistake or other . . . is to come before the party on the tribune of the Party Congress and say ‘I made a mistake and the party was right.’”

  Zinoviev’s rhetorical call for unity received “stormy and prolonged applause,” giving some indication of the party’s impatience with internecine disputes. Stalin followed him on the platform and delivered a businesslike report on the party’s organization. He made no mention of the opposition, and as always, showed that he was the last man to provoke conflict.

  Present as a nonvoting delegate, Trotsky did not have to speak. But he could not ignore Zinoviev’s appeal. Nothing was more difficult for Trotsky than to believe that he might be mistaken unless it was to confess it publicly. At this time, however, his arrogance and inflexibility involved him in an inner conflict with his strong sense of dedication to the revolution and to the party as its embodiment. This led him into a confused and emotional defense of his position.

  In his speech, he again stressed the dangers of bureaucracy, confirmed his adherence to the resolution of December 5, 1923, on the need to eliminate factions, and pressed for more effective planning. Most of those present had heard him make these points on previous occasions, and he was evidently unconscious of the fact that, coming from him, these reiterated demands implied criticisms of the party leaders.

  “Comrades,” he continued, “none of us wishes to be right or can be right against his party. The party is in the last resort always right, because the party is the unique historical instrument given to the proletariat for the fulfilment of its fundamental tasks. I have already said that nothing is easier than to say before the party ‘All this criticism, all these declarations, warnings and protests, were simply a sheer mistake.’ But Comrades, I cannot say this, because I do not think so. I know that one cannot be right against the party. One can be right only with the party and through the party, since history has created no other paths to the realization of what is right.”

  Trotsky went on in this tortuous fashion. He repeated that certain parts of the resolutions of the previous party conference were “incorrect and unjust. But,” he stressed, “the party cannot take any decisions, however incorrect and unjust, which could shake by one jot our boundless devotion to the cause of the party, the readiness of each one of us to bear on his shoulders the discipline of the party in all conditions.”

  The speech, with its painstaking avowals of the party’s infallibility, was poisoned by the conspicuous sense of his own intellectual superiority and his conviction that he was right and the party wrong. Moreover, he had misjudged the timing and the audience. To the majority of the delegates, his speech, with its insistence on incorrect and unjust party decisions, sounded as though he put himself above the party.

  The fury of the Congress was now directed at him. Krupskaya made an appeal for the factions to put aside their disputes and work together. The delegates were in no mood to heed her. On the day after Krupskaya’s speech, Stalin addressed the delegates. He said that he, too, was opposed to “duplicating debates about differences,” and for this reason, he had made no reference to them in his previous speech. But it was unthinkable that he should be silent now. He proceeded to attack Trotsky for his defiance of the resolution of December 5, 1923, and of the decisions of the Thirteenth Party Conference.

  Zinoviev and Kamenev both delivered vicious attacks. Kamenev, who had a reputation for mildness, apparently harbored a deep hatred of Trotsky, whose sister he had married, and his attack was venomous. The Congress unanimously confirmed the decisions of the party conference and praised the Central Committee for its “firmness and Bolshevik uncompromisingness . . . in defending the foundations of Leninism against petty bourgeois deviations.”

  The Congress increased the size of the Central Committee from forty to fifty-three members and from seventeen to thirty-four candidates. The new men were in the main from the provincial apparatus and Stalin’s supporters. Lazar Kaganovich, one of Stalin’s ablest assistants, became a member of the committee as well as both the Secretariat and the Orgburo. Bukharin was elected to the Politburo to fill the vacancy left by Lenin. Trotsky scraped through in the elections to the committee and retained his other posts.

  In the Third Communist International, known as the Comintern, which had been founded in March 1919, Trotsky was still highly regarded. Many Western communists were appalled by the ferocious attacks on him. But Zinoviev, whom Lenin had appointed president of the Comintern’s executive committee, was actively undermining Trotsky’s position and removing his main supporters from the organization. Indeed, during the Thirteenth Congress of the Russian party, several Western communists were invited to speak, and all, with the exception of Boris Souvarine, the French communist, who subsequently wrote a hostile biography of Stalin, condemned Trotsky and the opposition. At the Fifth Congress of the Comintern, held in Moscow in June–July 1924, Trotsky was again savagely attacked and called upon to appear in person to justify himself. His refusal to attend set the seal on his condemnation.

  Stalin was active among Western communists in Moscow at this time. Within a few months, he and Zinoviev had managed to reduce the international movement to complete subservience to Moscow. Trotsky and Lenin had founded the Comintern in the faith that it would become a world party into which the Russian party would ultimately merge. Stalin, the realist, could see little prospect of this ideal being achieved. It would happen, if at all, only in the far distant future. He insisted that, in the meantime, the Comintern should be under Moscow’s control for tactical and propaganda purposes.

  Since May 1922, the troika of Stalin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev had held power. Relations had become tense, but unity was maintained. All three paid lip service to the theory of collective leadership, but they were held together mainly by the fear that Trotsky might try to seize power. Furthermore, in the midst of the mounting cult, it was still too soon after Lenin’s death for anyone to attempt to assume the leadership.

  The contest appeared now to be between Stalin and Zinoviev. Several incidents had sharpened their rivalry, but at this stage, Zinoviev continued to see himself as Lenin’s successor. He and Kamenev were taken aback in June 1924 when Stalin publicly chided them for mistakes in communist doctrine. The mistakes, if, indeed, they were mistakes, concerned petty points of interpretation. The importance of the incident was that Stalin was asserting his authority within the troika.

  Another significant step taken by Stalin, a few weeks later, was to post Isaak Zelensky, secretary of the Moscow party apparatus, to Central Asia, replacing him with Nikolai Uglanov. This weakened the position of Kamenev as chairman of the Executive Committee of the Moscow Soviet and leader of the Moscow party organization. A meeting of fifteen senior party members, convened by Zinoviev, criticized Stalin for his “uncomradely” action. He rejected the criticism, accusing them of trying to break up the collective leadership and to introduce dictatorship in place of party democracy. By autumn, an open split among the leaders was imminent, but again Trotsky kept them together.

  After the mauling he had suffered at the Thirteenth Party Congress and at the Congress of the Comintern, and after experiencing the hostility of the Central Committee and the Politburo, Trotsky might have been expected to lie quietly for a time. He was, however, wholly lacking in political judgment. It was not that he miscalculated the response of other people to his actions, but that their thoughts and
feelings did not exist for him. He was concerned solely with his own ideas and policies, which, he believed, transcended all others in their rightness, and he was genuinely astonished when they met with storms of protest and criticism. By contrast, Stalin was keenly sensitive to the attitudes and feelings not only of members of the party but also of people outside. With his sense of timing and his political acumen, he was a formidable foe.

  With the tide of party opinion running strongly against him, Trotsky gave an extraordinary demonstration of ineptitude. Already in June 1924, he had published a pamphlet, intended as a salute to Lenin, but in treating the great leader as his partner and equal, he had caused offense to many members. Then in September 1924, while resting in Kislovodsk in the Caucasus, he published his early articles and speeches in one volume with an introduction, entitled “Lessons of October.” It was an account of the progress of the revolution with the theme of the betrayal by the “right.” He dwelt on the conflict among Lenin and Zinoviev and Kamenev on the eve of the October Revolution and even wrote about mistakes made by Lenin himself.

  The volume, published in October 1924, caused a sensation. By digging up the past, Trotsky was seen to be attempting to indict the present leadership and to cast doubts on the infallibility of Lenin. Bukharin promptly published an article in Pravda, entitled “How Not to Write the History of October.” This was an interim reply. Trotsky had to be answered fully, and by raking up the past, he had exposed himself to a devastating counterattack. Before 1917, he had engaged constantly in polemics with Lenin; as was characteristic of the revolutionaries, their exchanges were marked by virulent abuse. Kamenev, then editor of the official edition of Lenin’s works, published his reply in Pravda and Izvestiya on November 26, 1924, under the title “Leninism or Trotskyism.” The article, ranging over Trotsky’s early career, sought to show that Trotsky had always been opposed to Bolshevism and Leninism.

  Stalin’s contribution was a reasoned and destructive attack. Referring to Trotsky’s prominent role in October, he said that it was to be admitted that Trotsky had done well, but so had others. He dealt lightly with the errors of Zinoviev and Kamenev, which were generally known, and even admitted that before Lenin’s arrival in Petrograd in March 1917, “I shared this mistaken position of other comrades.” Nothing had antagonized members more than Trotsky’s insufferable assumption that he had been right all the time. Stalin was at pains to show that he himself was human and fallible.

  Examining Trotsky’s main heresies, he demonstrated by quotations from Lenin’s writings that Trotsky had been in direct conflict with the master at all stages. In fact, Trotsky and Lenin had been basically close in their views, but it was not difficult to find quotations to prove the opposite. The most damaging part of Stalin’s attack came in quotations from Trotsky’s correspondence in 1913 with Chkheidze in which Trotsky had written that Lenin was “the professional exploiter of everything that is backward in the Russian workers’ movement.” He had also written that “the whole foundation of Leninism at the present time is built on King and falsification.” Stalin closed his speech with the statement that “Trotsky has come forward now with the purpose of dethroning Bolshevism and undermining its foundations. The task of the party is to bury Trotskyism as an ideology.”

  The speech sent a shock of horror through the party. It seemed impossible that any member, least of all a leading Bolshevik like Trotsky, could have written in such terms of Lenin. But Stalin’s evidence was irrefutable. The charge that Trotsky had been all along a vicious enemy of Lenin and Leninism was accepted as proven.

  A campaign was mounted “to bury Trotskyism.” Newspapers throughout the country published articles and reports of local party meetings, vilifying and condemning him. A persecution fever gripped members, now oblivious of his services to the revolutionary cause. As the days passed, there was a growing amazement that he issued no denials or answers to these attacks. His uncharacteristic silence could only mean an admission of guilt. On December 13, 1924, Pravda went so far as to publish an editorial note, stating that no communication had been received from Trotsky concerning the charges against him.

  The campaign against Trotsky, which had been going on for over a year, now reached its climax. He was shaken by the intensity of the new vilification. He had never expected that his “Lessons of October,” which he had written to set the record straight and to warn the party that it was on a wrong course, would unleash such a hurricane of protest. Under the strain, his health broke down. Doctors recommended a rest in the Caucasus. He refused to leave his quarters in the Kremlin. Sick, solitary, and surrounded by hostility, he awaited the meeting of the Central Committee to be held on January 17–20, 1925. He had written what is known as his letter of resignation in which, as in his speech to the Thirteenth Congress, he expressed his loyalty and submission to the party, but refused to make any confession of error.

  At the committee meeting, Zinoviev and Kamenev showed eagerness to make the final kill. Supported by others, they demanded the expulsion of Trotsky not only from the committee and the Politburo but from the party itself. This, the final sentence of excommunication, was opposed by Stalin. Reporting later to the Fourteenth Party Congress, he explained that “we, the majority of the Central Committee . . . did not agree with Comrades Zinoviev and Kamenev because we realized that the policy of cutting off heads is fraught with major dangers for the party. . . . It is a method of blood-letting - and they want blood - dangerous and contagious; today you cut off one head, tomorrow a second, and then a third: Who would remain in the party?” It was a fateful pronouncement.

  The only action taken against Trotsky at this meeting of the Central Committee was to remove him from office as president of the Revolutionary War Council and kommissar for War. For some months, he had held office only nominally, M. V. Frunze, one of his chief antagonists in military matters, had been appointed deputy kommissar in the spring of 1924 and had virtually taken control. For the time being, Trotsky remained a member of the Central Committee and the Politburo, but he was a member on sufferance. He had forfeited the support and prestige he had commanded in the party. His conduct had demoralized his few supporters. He was alone.

  The collective leadership of the troika now quickly broke up. Stalin and Zinoviev were recognized as the chief adversaries. Kamenev had lost his influence as head of the Moscow party organization. Zinoviev was still in a strong position. By the end of 1924, however, he had come to recognize belatedly that Stalin was not merely the unobtrusive provincial who ran the central party apparatus, but a formidable opponent. Now when the conflict between them erupted, Zinoviev found he was outmatched and struggling not for power but for survival.

  The conflict brought a flare-up of the traditional rivalry between the two cities. The Leningradtsi were in an arrogant mood and resented Moscow’s pre-eminence as the center of the party organization and of the government. Conscious of their revolutionary tradition and of the fact that their city had borne the name of Peter the Great and now bore the name of Lenin, they maintained a proud independence.

  Zinoviev was in control of Leningrad, and although not personally popular, had the support of the city against Stalin and the Muscovites. The insubordination of the Leningradtsi caused Stalin considerable trouble, and it was not until the end of the following year, 1926, that he brought their city finally under Moscow’s control.

  The struggle within the troika and the Politburo centered on the nature of NEP, which had troubled Marxists since its introduction in 1921. The difficulty arose from the fact that Marxism, a doctrine devised for an industrial society, was being imposed upon a predominantly peasant society, and the dogma provided no guidance on the problems that arose. The party leaders were not sure how to proceed. If they exploited the peasants for the benefit of the proletariat, which was considered inevitable in building a communist state, the peasants would resist with a massive silent withdrawal of their cooperation or outright rebellion. The party’s hold on the country was still precari
ous, and a major peasant rising could mean the collapse of the regime.

  The alternative was to allow the peasants to produce and market their grain in a more or less free economy, encouraging them to expand production and to market increased grain surpluses. On this basis, Bukharin, Preobrazhensky, and others argued, it would be possible to promote an industrial revival. The danger was that the peasants, who were restive and constantly demanding further concessions, would seize the opportunities to exercise not only economic but also political influence. It was an obsessive fear among the party leaders that the peasants would challenge the party’s monopoly of power. Lenin had feared this possibility and in introducing NEP, which gave the peasants economic freedom, had been careful to deny them political power. Between these two extremes, various compromises were possible, but compromise was foreign to the Russian approach to such problems.

  The Politburo was divided, Bukharin and the right-wing Bolsheviks argued in favor of maximum concessions to the peasantry. Bukharin went so far in an article in Pravda on April 14, 1925, as to declare to the peasants, “Enrich yourselves, develop your farms, do not fear that you will be subjected to restrictions.” Later, he was obliged to modify this statement and then to retract it completely, but at the time, it was intended to encourage grain production and to calm peasant fears for their security under the communist regime.

  Stalin leaned toward this policy of appeasement of the peasants. To his practical mind, there seemed no alternative at this time, but he had no fondness for the peasant with his conservative bourgeois outlook and his obsession with private ownership. He was uneasy about the encouragement given to the kulak, the prospering peasant who might become a capitalist power in the countryside.