A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

by Orlando Figes

  The key to Stalin's growing power was his control of the party apparatus in the provinces. As the Chairman of the Secretariat, and the only Politburo member in the Orgburo, he could promote his friends and dismiss opponents.

  During the course of 1922 alone more than 10,000 provincial officials were appointed by the Orgburo and the Secretariat, most of them on Stalin's personal recommendation. They were to be his main supporters during the power struggle against Trotsky in 1922—3. Most of them came, like Stalin himself, from very humble backgrounds and had received little formal education. Mistrusting intellectuals such as Trotsky, they preferred to place their trust in Stalin's wisdom, with his simple calls for proletarian unity and Bolshevik discipline, when it came to matters of ideology.

  Lenin had gone along with Stalin's growing powers of 'appointmentism' from Moscow as an antidote to the formation of provincial opposition factions (the Workers' Opposition, for example, remained strong in the Ukraine and Samara until 1923). As the Chairman of the Secretariat, Stalin spent much of his time rooting out potential troublemakers from the provincial party apparatus. He received monthly reports from the Cheka (renamed the GPU in 1922) on the activities of the provincial leaders. Boris Bazhanov, Stalin's personal secretary, recalls his habit of pacing up and down his large Kremlin office, puffing on his pipe, and then issuing the curt command to remove such and such a Party Secretary and send so and so to replace him. There were few party leaders, including members of the Politburo, whom Stalin did not have under surveillance by the end of 1922. Under the guise of enforcing Leninist orthodoxy, Stalin was thus able to gather information about all his rivals, including many things they would rather have kept secret, which he could use to secure their loyalty to himself.33

  While Lenin recovered from his stroke Russia was ruled by the triumvirate — Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev — which had emerged as an anti-Trotsky bloc during the summer of 1922. The three met before party meetings to agree their strategy and instruct their followers on how to vote. Kamenev had long had a soft spot for Stalin: they had been together in exile in Siberia; and Stalin had sprung to his defence when Lenin tried to have him kicked out of the party for his opposition to the October coup. Kamenev had ambitions to lead the party and this had led him to side with Stalin against Trotsky, whom he considered the more serious threat. Since Trotsky was Kamenev's brother-in-law, this meant putting faction before family. As for Zinoviev, he had little love for Stalin. But his hatred for Trotsky was so all-consuming that he would have sided with the Devil so long as it secured his enemy's defeat. Both men thought they were using Stalin, whom they considered a mediocrity, to promote their own claims to the leadership. But Stalin was using them, and, once Trotsky had been defeated, he went on to destroy them.

  By September Lenin had recovered and was back at work. He now became suspicious of Stalin's ambitions and in an effort to counteract his growing power proposed to appoint Trotsky as his deputy in Sovnarkom. Trotsky's

  followers have always argued that this would have made their hero Lenin's heir. But in fact the post was seen by many people as a minor one — power was concentrated in the party organs rather than the government ones — and no doubt for this reason Stalin was happy to vote for Lenin's resolution in the Politburo. Indeed it was Trotsky who was most opposed, writing on his voting slip: 'Categorically refuse'. He claimed that his objections were on the grounds that he had already criticized the post in principle when it had been introduced the previous May. Later he also claimed that he had turned the post down on the grounds that he was a Jew and that this might add fuel to the propaganda of the regime's enemies (see pages 803-4). But his refusal was probably as much because he thought it was beneath him to be merely a 'deputy chairman'.

  This does not mean that Lenin shared this dim view of the Sovnarkom job. Nor does it mean that he offered it to Trotsky, in the words of Lenin's sister, as merely a 'diplomatic gesture' to compensate for the fact that 'Ilich was on Stalin's side.' Lenin had always placed a higher value on the work of Sovnarkom than on that of the party itself. Sovnarkom was Lenin's baby, it was where he focused all his energies, even to the point where, amazingly, he became ignorant of party life. 'I am admittedly not familiar with the scale of the Orgburo's "assignment" work,' he confessed to Stalin in October 1921. This was Lenin's tragedy. During his last months of active politics, as he came to grapple with the problem of the growing power of the leading party bodies, he increasingly looked to Sovnarkom as a means of dividing the power between the party and the state. Yet Sovnarkom, as Lenin's personal seat of power, was bound to decline as he became ill and withdrew from politics. Even with Trotsky standing in for him as chairman, it was almost certainly too late to halt the shift in power to the party organs in Stalin's hands, and Trotsky must have known this.34

  Lenin's suspicions of Stalin deepened when, in October, Stalin proposed to expel Trotsky from the Politburo as a punishment for his arrogant rejection of the Sovnarkom post. It became clear to Lenin, as he acquainted himself with the activities of the triumvirate, that it was acting like a ruling clique and intended to oust him from power. This was confirmed when Lenin discovered that as soon as he retired from the Politburo meetings, which he often had to leave early because of exhaustion, the triumvirate would pass vital resolutions which he would only learn about the next day. Lenin now ordered (on 8 December) that Politburo meetings were not to go on for more than three hours and that all matters left unresolved were to be put off to the following day. At the same time, or so Trotsky later claimed, Lenin approached him with an offer to join him in a 'bloc against bureaucracy', meaning a coalition against Stalin and his power base in the Orgburo. Trotsky's claim is credible. This, after all, was on the eve of Lenin's Testament, which was mainly concerned with the problem of Stalin and his hold on the bureaucracy. Trotsky had already criticized

  the party bureaucracy, Rabkrin and the Orgburo in particular. And we know that Lenin shared his opposition to Stalin on both foreign trade and the Georgian issue. In sum, it seems that towards mid-December Lenin and Trotsky were coming together against Stalin. And then suddenly, on the night of 15 December, Lenin suffered his second major stroke.35

  Stalin at once took charge of Lenin's doctors and, on the pretext of speeding his recovery, obtained from the Central Committee an order giving him the power to keep him 'in isolation' from politics by restricting visitors and correspondence. 'Neither friends nor those around him', read a further order of the Politburo on 24 December, 'are allowed to tell Vladimir Ilich any political news, since this might cause him to reflect and get excited.' Confined to his wheelchair, and allowed to dictate for only '5 to 10 minutes a day', Lenin had become Stalin's prisoner. His two main secretaries, Nadezhda Alliluyeva (Stalin's wife) and Lydia Fotieva, reported to Stalin everything he said. Lenin was evidently unaware of this, as later events were to reveal. Stalin, meanwhile, made himself an expert on medicine, ordering textbooks to be sent to him. He became convinced that Lenin would soon die and increasingly showed open contempt towards him. 'Lenin kaput,' he told colleages in December. Stalin's words reached Lenin through Maria Ul'ianova. 'I have not died yet,' her brother informed her, 'but they, led by Stalin, have already buried me.' Although Stalin based his reputation on his special relationship with Lenin, his real feelings towards him were betrayed in 1924, when, having had to wait a whole year for him to waste away and die, he was heard to mutter: 'Couldn't even die like a real leader!' Actually, Lenin might have died much sooner. Towards the end of December he became so frustrated with the restrictions on his activities that he once again requested poison so that he could end his life. According to Fotieva, Stalin refused to supply the poison. But he no doubt soon came to regret it, since in the brief spells when he was allowed to work Lenin now dictated a series of notes for the forthcoming Party Congress in which he condemned Stalin's growing power and demanded his removal.36

  These fragmentary notes, which later became known as Lenin's Testament, were dictated in brief s
pells — some of them by telephone to a stenographer who sat in the next room with a pair of earphones — between 23 December and 4 January. Lenin ordered them to be kept in the strictest secrecy, placing them in sealed envelopes to be opened only by himself or Krupskaya. But his senior secretaries were also spies for Stalin and they showed the notes to him.37 Throughout these last writings there is an overwhelming sense of despair at the way the revolution had turned out. Lenin's frenzied style, his hyperbole and obsessive repetition, betray a mind that was not just deteriorating through paralysis but was also tortured — perhaps by the realization that the single goal on which it had been fixed for the past four decades had now turned out a

  monstrous mistake. Throughout these last writings Lenin was haunted by Russia's cultural backwardness. It was as if he acknowledged, perhaps only to himself, that the Mensheviks had been right, that Russia was not ready for socialism since its masses lacked the education to take the place of the bourgeoisie, and that the attempt to speed up this process through the intervention of the state was bound to end up in tyranny. Was this what he meant when he warned that the Bolsheviks still needed to 'learn how to govern'?

  Lenin's last notes were concerned with three main problems — with Stalin in each as the principal culprit. The first of these was the Georgian affair and the question of what sort of union treaty Russia should sign with the ethnic borderlands. Despite his own Georgian origins, Stalin was the foremost of those Bolsheviks whom Lenin had criticized during the civil war for their Great Russian chauvinism. Most of Stalin's supporters in the party were equally imperialist in their views. They equated the colonization of the borderlands, the Ukraine especially, by Russian workers, and the suppression of the native peasant population ('petty-bourgeois nationalists'), with the promotion of Communist power. As the Commissar for Nationalities, Stalin proposed in late September that the three non-Russian republics that had so far come into being (the Ukraine, Belorussia and Transcaucasia) should join Russia as no more than autonomous regions, leaving the lion's share of power to the federal government in Moscow. The 'autonomization plan', as Stalin's proposals came to be known, would have restored the 'Russia united and indivisible' of the Tsarist Empire. It was not at all what Lenin had envisaged when he had assigned to Stalin the task of drawing up the plans for a federal union. Lenin stressed the need to pacify what he saw as the justified historical grievances of the non-Russians against Russia by granting them the status of 'sovereign' republics (for the major ethnic groups) or 'autonomous' ones (for the smaller ones) with broad cultural freedoms and the formal right — for whatever that was worth — to secede from the union.

  Stalin's plans were bitterly opposed by the Georgian Bolsheviks, whose attempts to build up their own fragile political base depended on the concession of these national rights. Already, in March 1922, Stalin and his fellow-Georgian, Ordzhonikidze, head of Moscow's Caucasian Bureau, had forced Georgia, much against its leaders' will, to merge with Armenia and Azerbaijan in a Transcauca-sian Federation. It seemed to Georgia's leaders that Stalin and his henchman were treating Georgia as their fiefdom and riding roughshod over them. They rejected the autonomization plan and threatened to resign if Moscow forced it through.*

  * The opposition of the other republics was more circumspect: the Ukrainians refused to give their opinion on Stalin's proposals, while the Belorussians said that they would be guided by the Ukraine's decision.

  It was at this point that Lenin intervened. To begin with he took Stalin's side. Although his proposals were undesirable — Lenin forced them to be dropped in favour of the federal union that later became known as the Soviet Union Treaty ratified in 1924 — the Georgians had been wrong to issue ultimatums and he told them so in an angry cable on 21 October. The next day the entire Central Committee of the Georgian Communist Party resigned in protest. Nothing quite like it had ever happened before in the history of the party. From late November, however, when Lenin was generally beginning to turn against Stalin, his position changed. New evidence from Georgia made him think again. He despatched a fact-finding commission to Tiflis, headed by Dzerzhinsky and Rykov, from which he learned that during the course of an argument Ordzhonikidze had beaten up a prominent Georgian Bolshevik (who had called him a 'Stalinist arsehole'). Lenin was outraged. It confirmed his impressions of Stalin's growing rudeness and made him see the Georgian issue in a different light. In his notes to the Party Congress on 30—1 December he compared Stalin to an old-style Russian chauvinist, a 'rascal and a tyrant', who could only bully and subjugate small nations, such as Georgia, whereas what was needed from Russia's rulers was 'profound caution, sensitivity, and a readiness to compromise' with their legitimate national aspirations. Lenin even claimed that in a socialist federation the rights of 'oppressed nations', such as Georgia, should be greater than those of the 'oppressor nations' (i.e. Russia) so as to 'compensate for the inequality which obtains in actual practice'. On 8 January, in what was to be the final letter of his life, Lenin promised the Georgian opposition that he was following their cause 'with all my heart'.38

  Lenin's second major concern in his Testament was to check the growing powers of the party's leading organs, which were now under Stalin's control. Two years earlier, when his own command had been supreme, Lenin had condemned the proposals of the Democratic Centralists for more democracy and glasnost in the party; but now that Stalin was the great dictator Lenin put forward similar plans. He proposed to democratize the Central Committee by adding 50 to 100 new members recruited from the ordinary workers and peasants in the lower organs of the party. To make the Politburo more accountable he also suggested that the Central Committee should have the right to attend all its meetings and to inspect its documents. Moreover, the Central Control Commission, merged with Rabkrin and streamlined to 300 or 400 conscious workers, should have the right to check the Politburo's powers. These proposals were a belated effort (similar in many ways to Gorbachev's perestroika) to bridge the widening gap between the party bosses and the rank and file, to make the leadership more democratic, more open and efficient, without loosening the party's overall grip on society.

  The final issue of Lenin's last writings — and also by far the most

  explosive — was the question of the succession. In his notes of 24 December Lenin voiced his worry about a split between Trotsky and Stalin — it was partly for this reason that he had proposed to enlarge the size of the Central Committee — and, as if to underline his preference for a collective leadership, pointed out the faults of the major party leaders. Kamenev and Zinoviev were compromised by their stand against him in October. Bukharin was 'the favourite of the whole Party, but his theoretical views can only be classified as Marxist with reserve'. As for Trotsky, he 'was personally perhaps the most capable man in the present Central Committee, but he has displayed excessive self-assurance and shown excessive preoccupation with the purely administrative side of work'. But it was for Stalin that Lenin's most devastating criticisms were reserved. Having become the General Secretary, he had 'accumulated unlimited power in his hands, and I am not sure that he will always know how to use this power with sufficient caution'. On 4 January Lenin added the following note:

  Stalin is too rude and this defect, although quite tolerable in our midst and in dealings between Communists, becomes intolerable in a General Secretary. For this reason I suggest that the comrades think about a way to remove Stalin from that post and replace him with someone who has only one advantage over Comrade Stalin, namely greater tolerance, greater loyalty, greater courtesy and consideration to comrades, less capriciousness, etc.39

  Lenin was making it clear that Stalin had to go.

  Lenin's resolve was further strengthened at the start of March, when he learned about an incident which had taken place between Stalin and Krupskaya several weeks before but which had been kept secret from him. On 21 December Lenin had dictated to Krupskaya a letter to Trotsky congratulating him on his successful tactics in the battle against Stalin over the f
oreign trade monopoly. Stalin's informers told him of the letter, which he seized upon as evidence of Lenin's 'bloc' with Trotsky against him. The next day he telephoned Krupskaya and, as she herself put it, subjected her 'to a storm of coarse abuse', claiming she had broken the party's rules on Lenin's health (although the doctors had authorized her dictation), and threatening to start an investigation of her by the Central Control Commission. When she put the phone down, Krupskaya apparently went pale, sobbed hysterically and rolled around on the floor. Stalin's reign of terror had begun. When Lenin was finally told about this incident, on 5 March, he dictated a letter to Stalin demanding that he should apologize for his 'rudeness' or else risk a 'breach of relations between us'. Stalin, who had become completely arrogant with power, could hardly mask his contempt for

  the dying Lenin in his ungracious reply.* Krupskaya, he reminded him, 'is not just your wife but my old Party comrade'. In their 'conversation' he had not been 'rude' and the whole incident was 'nothing more than a silly misunderstanding ... However, if you consider that for the preservation of "relations" I should "take back" the above words, I can take them back, although I fail to understand what all this is supposed to be about, or where I am at "fault", or what, exactly, is wanted of me.'40