The scheme for a three-man Central Committee was harebrained. Molotov, Kuibyshev and Rykov would have lacked the necessary authority to impose themselves on the other leaders; and, furthermore, there was nothing in the Party Rules to validate the replacement of a Central Committee in the interim between Congresses. Lenin had lost his sense of political proportion – and the Central Committee had reason on its side in refusing to dignify his scheme with a written rebuttal. The founder of the Bolshevik party and the Soviet state was best ignored until he came back to psychological normality.
27. DISPUTING TO THE LAST
September to December 1922
Despite being stuck in Gorki and feeling very poorly, Lenin still expected to dominate the making of policy. In the early months of 1922 there had been discussion on four matters of acute concern to him. On two of them he had largely obtained satisfaction before his stroke in May. The first matter had been the Genoa Conference. Without undue dissent, the Politburo accepted his guidance and gave priority to a German–Soviet agreement at the expense of pursuing a comprehensive settlement with the European powers in general. The second involved the modalities of political control in Russia. Lenin convinced his Politburo colleagues that the time was ripe to strike at the enemies of the Soviet state: the Socialist-Revolutionaries, the Mensheviks, the Russian Orthodox Church and the leading anti-Bolshevik figures in philosophy, arts and scholarship. Not every detail of policy had gone his way, but he was not balked on broad strategy. It was on the third and fourth matters that he encountered trouble in the central party leadership. One related to the limits of the state monopoly on foreign trade, the other to the inter-republican constitutional structure of the Soviet state. Neither of these matters was of fundamental significance. But the dispute over them exposed fissures in the party leadership that continued to have an impact many years later.
Stalin was among Lenin’s opponents in the discussions of both foreign trade and the constitution. On the foreign-trade monopoly, Stalin simply went along with the majority in the Politburo. On the constitution, however, it was Stalin who led the opposition to Lenin. Stalin the Party General Secretary. Stalin the man whom Lenin had used as his conduit of instructions to the Politburo. Stalin who had been Lenin’s ally in the internal party disputes of 1920–1. Stalin the adjutant and the loyalist. It was this same Stalin who was challenging Lenin’s supremacy over policy.
Lenin was highly agitated by the proposal to repeal the state monopoly. Vladimir Milyutin and Grigori Sokolnikov, his colleagues in the Central Committee, argued that private commerce across the borders would promote internal economic regeneration. Lenin disapproved, insisting that the NEP (New Economic Policy) should be kept within the limits he had established in 1921. The Soviet state, he urged, should keep its monopoly over large-scale industry, banking and foreign trade. Previously he had been the one who had insisted that the Politburo should be pragmatic and should broaden the framework of the NEP. This is what Milyutin and Sokolnikov thought they were doing by suggesting that capitalists should be able to export and import certain goods without going through state trading institutions; and they added that the monopoly in practice induced smuggling by private traders. Among the supporters of Milyutin and Sokolnikov were some of Lenin’s most prominent colleagues: Kamenev, Bukharin and Stalin. Yet Lenin persuaded himself that the debate on foreign trade involved matters of profound principle and was determined to keep the party in line with his particular version of the NEP.
The second great topic for discussion in summer 1922 was Stalin’s proposal for a new constitutional structure for the Soviet state. Lenin and Stalin had already quarrelled about this in 1920.1 Stalin believed that best plan was for the Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic (RSFSR) to incorporate all the other independent Soviet republics within its territory. Ukraine, Belorussia, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia would become part of the RSFSR. Lenin violently disagreed, and advocated the formation of a Union of Soviet Republics of Europe and Asia. In such a Union the RSFSR would be merely one Soviet republic alongside the Soviet republics of Ukraine, Belorussia, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia.
Struggle was joined over both foreign trade and the constitution. Lenin’s opponents felt bewildered since none of them genuinely proposed to dismantle the entirety of the state’s foreign-trade monopoly. Their objective was not total but partial repeal. Lenin not only misrepresented their purpose but also treated them as if they had offended the tenets of Marxism – and he targeted Sokolnikov with a tirade of personal abuse. Equally disconcerting was Lenin’s approach to the state constitution. He did not aim to weaken Moscow’s strict party and governmental control over the ‘borderlands’. Lenin and Stalin were at one in their commitment to the one-party, one-ideology multinational state. Their disagreements affected secondary rather than primary aspects of policy. Yet Lenin saw fit to attack Stalin and his supporters in language of extreme bitterness, and Politburo members were at a loss to explain why.
Leading party members put this down to the effects of illness and to his distance from day-to-day political management. Even in the discussions over the Genoa Conference and over domestic political repression – discussions in which he got his way – he had been unpleasant to Georgi Chicherin, Nikolai Bukharin and Karl Radek. Thus his ill temper belonged to a pattern and his doctors were long accustomed to this. In June 1922 he had written to the Politburo demanding that he should be ‘liberated’ from Professor Klemperer and be ‘rid of’ Professor Förster, and he added: ‘Russians cannot put up with German meticulousness.’2 To his colleagues, this attitude appeared a little disingenuous since he had always been meticulous in his personal and working habits and had called upon others to be the same. If anyone – apart from Trotski – appeared to conform to the Russian popular stereotype of a German, it was Lenin. If anyone had been prominent in comparing Russians unfavourably with Germans, it had been Lenin. Unsurprisingly the Politburo ignored his request to send the German specialists back to Germany and grew accustomed to soothing him in the hope that, as he got better, he would become a more manageable colleague.
But Lenin saw things differently; he began to identify Stalin as the universal villain. In 1912 he had admired him as ‘the wonderful Georgian’,3 and after the October Revolution had assigned to him tasks of state that required a ruthless, crude energy. But of Stalin’s other characteristics he had a low opinion. Stalin had habits that Lenin thought vulgar and unpleasant. Once, when Stalin had been puffing on his pipe, Lenin blurted out: ‘Look at the Asiatic – all he can do is go on sucking!’ Stalin knocked out his pipe in deference.4 It was unusual for Lenin to be so rude; he had been brought up to have decent social manners. Furthermore, he needed comrades to believe he thought well of them, and could see how upset people were by Trotski or Zinoviev. Within Lenin the blunt revolutionary there survived Lenin the fastidious European Russian gentleman; he was a bit of a snob in national, social and cultural terms.
It was only when his guard was down that he allowed this to show. In earlier days Lenin had acted differently, as Maria Ilinichna noted:5
V.I. had a lot of self-restraint. And he knew very well how to disguise and not reveal his attitude to people when he felt this to be for any reason more sensible… All the more did he hold himself back in relation to comrades with whom his work brought him into contact. The cause for him had priority; he knew how to subordinate the personal to the cause and this personal element never obtruded or took precedence with him.
Now the angry contempt he felt for Stalin was removing such inhibitions. Maria Ilinichna was to try to warn him that his opponent was more intelligent and therefore more dangerous than he imagined. But Lenin would have none of it: ‘He is absolutely not intelligent!’ Thus spake the brilliant gimnazia student, the polyglot émigré and chief party ideologist. He was about to learn, in the last lesson of his political life, that intelligence was not monopolised by those who had formal cultural proficiency.
The scene was set for three po
litical battles. Two of them intensified in the course of the summer: the struggle over the state monopoly of foreign trade and the struggle over the new constitution. In both cases Lenin identified Stalin as a standard-bearer of the campaign against the policies that had his approval. The third battle was a product of the others. And it was a struggle that Lenin had not anticipated that he would have to fight. This was the battle he eventually decided was necessary if he was to remove Iosif Stalin from the Party General Secretaryship.
These were battles that would barely have merited a footnote in the history of Soviet communism if Lenin’s health had not deteriorated. The chances are that Lenin would simply have unseated ‘the wonderful Georgian’ from the Secretariat and replaced him with a more compliant official. Stalin would have endured a period of quiet humiliation. Even so, it is doubtful that Stalin’s career would have been entirely over. For example, he would surely have retained membership of the Central Committee. Lenin had not been able to push out Tomski in 1921, even though Tomski had flouted a Central Committee policy. was guilty of no such delinquency in 1922. It was not, after all, against the rules of the party to disagree with Lenin. Nor was Stalin alone in advocating the policies that Lenin found annoying. As was usual when Lenin did not get his way, he became abusive to his rivals. The pathos of Lenin’s medical condition has tended to deflect attention from the merits of the argument between the two men across that long, hot summer. We have also been affected by our retrospective knowledge of what horrors – horrors of which Lenin had no presentiment – Stalin went on to commit in the 1930s and subsequently.
Yet the discussions about the future constitution produced the first clash. Unease existed among communists in the Soviet republics about Stalin’s plan to incorporate their republics in the RSFSR. The Georgian Central Committee was outspoken. Lenin disliked Stalin’s project and suspected that Stalin was bullying the Soviet republics into accepting it. Stalin wrote to Lenin in self-justification. Lenin, he felt, ought to understand that nationalism was on the rise in the borderlands and that Lenin’s scheme would only encourage it and increase the complexity of administrative structures. Stalin wanted to give Soviet republics ‘autonomous’ status within the RSFSR and prevent them from entering a federal arrangement on equal terms with the RSFSR. A Party Orgburo commission ratified Stalin’s project on 23 September 1922.
Lenin hated the idea of ‘autonomisation’, likening it to ‘Great Russian chauvinism’. When he told Stalin of his position three days later in a conversation that lasted two hours, Stalin caved in and agreed to the abandonment of ‘autonomisation’ and the formation of a Union of Soviet Republics of Europe and Asia. This was the sort of project that Lenin had advocated in discussion with Stalin himself in mid-1920. Yet Stalin had not thrown in the towel. He wrote a note next day to the Politburo and proposed that the Union should not have separate organs of legislation from those of the RSFSR. He also tweaked Lenin by changing the proposed name to Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Furthermore, he insisted that Georgia should join Armenia and Azerbaijan in a Transcaucasian Soviet Federation and that this Federation should enter the USSR on a par with the RSFSR and the Ukrainian Soviet Republic; thus he set his face against Georgia retaining a status equal to that of the RSFSR. Kamenev warned Stalin to desist from being provocative: ‘Ilich has girt himself up for war in defence of [Soviet republican] independence.’ Stalin was undismayed, and in the process showed himself as a leader in the making: ‘What is needed, in my opinion, is that firmness is shown against Ilich.’
When Kamenev told him that he was only making things worse than they absolutely had to be, Stalin professed indifference; but, sure enough, Lenin had got his gander up: ‘I declare war to the death on Great Russian chauvinism.’ After a summer of convalescence, he was determined to return to the fray in Moscow. This was stupid of him because his recovery from the stroke had been interrupted by further collapses. In June he had had one after walking round the park at Gorki, and in July he had had another after doing the same thing and he lost the use of the right side of his body. In August, too, he had days of incapacity.6 He pushed himself hard and resumed his intellectual work. Secretaries were sent scurrying to libraries for the books he wanted – in particular, he asked for Bukharin’s The ABC of Communism.7 He also started a contribution to Anna Ilinichna’s collection of memoirs on his old Marxist friend from his Kazan days, Nikolai Fedoseev.8 He overcame the objections of the doctors and the doubts of the Politburo, and on 2 October 1922 he left the Gorki mansion and returned by car to the Kremlin, where he resumed the occupancy of his apartment next to the Sovnarkom rooms in the old Senate Building. Next day he chaired the regular Sovnarkom meeting and on 6 October he did the same at the Party Central Committee plenum. He tried to impress everybody with his ability to take up his official duties again.
Yet Lenin was nothing like his old self and could not fool his colleagues when he had to keep up appearances at these two important meetings. His colleagues tried to avoid controversy at the Sovnarkom session. But this served only to agitate him.9 They could do nothing right. If they disputed with Lenin, he might have another heart seizure; if they held back, the result might still be the same because he became irritated by their very politeness. The Central Committee plenum started better, but halfway through the proceedings he had a bout of toothache and had to withdraw to his apartment.10 Although he returned for other meetings in the following days, his performance was well below normal. This in turn made him acutely nervous and he got angry at the least disturbance. His secretary Lidia Fotieva dreaded another heart attack and discreetly asked his leading colleagues not to get up from their seats or talk among themselves in meetings. Every conceivable cause of agitation had to be eliminated.11 His mental capacity had been impaired. Sometimes he lost his place while speaking from a text and was known to repeat whole passages without knowing it.
Kamenev, Stalin and Zinoviev met to discuss his condition but came to no decision leading to action.12 They knew that, if they ordered him back to the mansion at Gorki, he would accuse them of using his illness as a pretext for eliminating him from the discussions on foreign trade and the constitution. And so they left him alone. In fact he was already on the way to getting what he wanted on the constitution. At the Central Committee plenum on 6 October, he had had the support of Bukharin and Kamenev, and Stalin had not dared to oppose his basic demands. Only one concession had come from Lenin’s side, and this was hardly a momentous one: he had accepted that the Soviet state should be designated not the Union of Soviet Republics of Europe and Asia but the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. A party commission was established under Stalin to prepare the final text for the Congress of Soviets in December. Lenin meanwhile sent a message to Kamenev asking him to enable the Georgian communists to have access to the relevant documents in defence of their position. He wanted to clip the wings of Iosif Stalin.13
Lenin went on pushing himself to the limit and addressed the Fourth Comintern Congress on 13 November. The speech was incoherent in passages, but he had just enough energy and experience to get through to the end. His friends, however, were alarmed about his worsened condition. Bukharin wrote:14
Our hearts were sinking when Ilich walked out on to the platform. We all saw what effort his speech cost Ilich. Then we saw him finish. I ran over to him and embraced him under my fur coat; he was completely wet from exhaustion, his shirt was drenched and there were beads of sweat on his forehead. His eyes suddenly rolled around.
The Comintern delegates applauded Lenin without suspecting that his recovery was in jeopardy. The foreign delegates in particular wanted to see and hear the man under whose leadership they expected communism to triumph around the world. But his fellow central party leaders had erred in allowing him to give a speech, and they knew it. After the Comintern Congress they increasingly tried to restrict his activities, regardless of his wishes. By then they were wondering, in their confidential discussions, whether his disease – whatever it wa
s – was ever going to release its grip on him.
Stalin and his friends felt freer to do as they pleased. The Georgian communist leaders had annoyed Stalin beyond measure and Ordzhonikidze, close ally of Stalin, denounced them at a meeting in Tbilisi as ‘chauvinistic filth’. The Georgian Central Committee protested by resigning en masse and complaining to Lenin. For a while Lenin took no notice since he too objected to the Georgian communist leadership’s demand that Georgia should not be included in a Transcaucasian Federation. He also consented to Stalin’s plan to send a commission of enquiry under Dzierżyński to investigate the situation in Georgia. The tension among communists in Tbilisi was enormous. In late November, Ordzhonikidze was so enraged at being accused of acting like an imperial emissary that he beat up a certain Kobachidze, who was an adherent of Mdivani. Lenin was worried about Georgia even though he had no accurate knowledge of events there, and pestered his secretaries to find out when Dzierżyński was scheduled to return. In fact Dzierżyński agreed with Stalin on the constitutional question and his report whitewashed the behaviour of Ordzhonikidze in the Transcaucasus. But, when Dzierżyński had a chat with Lenin back in Moscow on 12 December, he could not stop himself blurting out what had happened to the unfortunate Kobachidze.
For Lenin it was clear that Stalin had not surrendered on the USSR constitution and that he had to resume the battle he thought won on 6 October. There was more to this than fighting to restore an agreed official policy. Stalin’s protection of Ordzhonikidze had involved him in condoning violence by one party official against another. Lenin was aghast. As long ago as 1903 he had dragged back Alexander Shotman from beating up a Menshevik on the streets of London. Now he objected to Ordzhonikidze on grounds not merely of stupidity but also of morality.
Lenin: A Biography Page 60