Lenin: A Biography
Page 61
Usually Lenin had scoffed at moral codes of any kind. But at heart he was a romantic, a revolutionary believer. There were some things – just a few – that a Marxist should not do even under provocation. Marxists should be dedicated to Marxism and not take their ideas lightly. Marxists should be fighters and could assault each other verbally, but the idea that they should take to fisticuffs in order to settle a mutual grievance was anathema to him. Marxists should set an example of civil decency, and Ordzhonikidze had disgraced the party by his physical assault on Kobachidze. Already in 1920 Lenin had upbraided Ordzhonikidze for going on a drunken binge and carrying on with a group of loose women.15 Every Politburo member knew of Ordzhonikidze’s waywardness, and Lenin held it against Stalin and Dzierżyński that they had concealed the truth from him. Everything he learned about the treatment of the Georgian communist leadership pointed in the same direction: Stalin was presiding over a movement towards an authoritarian chauvinism inside the party. It did not matter that Stalin was himself a Georgian. He had acted like a Russian imperialist, and this was scandalous.
Lenin would have resumed the campaign against Stalin if he had not suffered yet another medical crisis. He underwent five collapses between 24 November and 2 December.16 On 13 December, the day after his conversation with Dzierżyński, he suffered two severe collapses and there were fears that he would not survive the.17 Dr Kozhevnikov and Professor Kramer, who hurried round to attend him, told him that he would not survive unless he agreed to a regime of ‘complete rest’. Their unwilling patient at last gave his consent. He called in his secretary Lidia Fotieva and made arrangements for the ‘liquidation of his affairs’.18
He had thought often enough that his illness was fatal; but from this day, he was also improvising how to leave his impact upon his party and upon the Revolution. He refused to be taken to Gorki, where he knew it would be difficult to maintain any kind of political role. He left his medical specialists and attendants in no doubt about his intentions. He would continue to live in the Kremlin and, since he could not write legibly, he would ask his Sovnarkom secretaries to take down dictation. He understood that he might suddenly perish and that, if he wished to leave a legacy, he had to write some kind of political testament. For this purpose he had to ponder whom he should recommend as his successor – or successors. The future of the Revolution dominated his thinking. Indeed it had done so for months. In autumn 1922 his agitation made him exclaim to Maria Ilinichna: ‘What scoundrel among us is going to live until the age of sixty?’ Then he had explained his desire that power, when he died, should somehow be passed from his own generation to those Bolsheviks who were in their twenties.19
Lenin’s concerns about the Revolution had burgeoned. His two remaining preoccupations with policy – on foreign trade and on the non-Soviet republics – had been joined by a political animus against Stalin. Nor was he convinced that his colleagues continued to share his priority for the maintenance of internal repression. It was beginning to seem to Lenin, in his weakened and febrile condition, that the agreed policies of the Politburo were being eroded. As he faced the probability of his imminent death, he was troubled by the general problem of ensuring that the Revolution would flourish when he was gone. Time was not on his side.
He called Fotieva to his Kremlin apartment after Kozhevnikov and Kramer had left at midday on 13 December. He was worrying less about collapsing again than about the policies of the central party leadership. One letter was about the elderly ex-Menshevik historian N. A. Rozhkov, whom Lenin had tried for months to have deported or at least exiled to Pskov (where Lenin had been confined in 1900 after his release from Siberia). Lenin treated the Politburo’s postponement of this decision as a sign of a growing reluctance to sanction his strategy of appropriate repression, and he demanded that Rozhkov should finally be deported.20 A second letter was sent to Trotski and others about the foreign-trade monopoly.21 A third, which was about the delegation of his Sovnarkom functions, went to Kamenev, Rykov and Tsyurupa. He also talked for two hours face to face with Stalin,22 who was left in no doubt about Lenin’s obstinacy. While being reconciled to devolving his day-to-day executive responsibilities, Lenin had not abandoned hope of giving the main speech to the Congress of Soviets.23 No deviation from his preferred policies, it was clear, was going to be tolerated. Stalin agreed to withdraw his opposition to the state foreign-trade monopoly,24 but still Lenin did not feel confident about the policy and he waited anxiously for the Central Committee to resolve the matter in his favour.
Extreme circumstances called for desperate measures. No longer having an ally in Stalin, Lenin turned to the very person against whom he had formed the alliance with Stalin. This was Trotski. Like Lenin, Trotski supported the state foreign-trade monopoly, and Lenin asked him to speak on his behalf at the forthcoming Central Committee plenum.25
This was an unprecedented manoeuvre. Previously Lenin had tried to keep a wide group of allies on his side and had avoided showing a definite preference for any one of them. Even his calculated choice of Stalin as ally in April 1922 had not implied a deliberate self-distancing from Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin. By achieving this rapprochement with Trotski, he was effectively indicating that this relationship in internal party affairs was to take precedence over all others. Such a manoeuvre was a token of Lenin’s desperation. Trotski’s vanity and arrogance had annoyed him before the February 1917 Revolution. The Brest-Litovsk negotiations, in Lenin’s eyes, had shown Trotski as a revolutionary poseur and the ‘trade union discussion’ inside the party in 1920–1 had demonstrated his recklessness and impracticality. Lenin could not bring himself to like him. At times he had turned ‘white as chalk’ in anger at Trotski’s polemical style in the central party leadership. Such arrogance seemed unnecessary to Lenin (who was incapable of recognising his own arrogance). But this had to be put to one side. Realpolitik demanded that Lenin should overcome his distaste and work harmoniously with Trotski.
The need became greater on 16 December, when Lenin’s condition deteriorated further and for a while he completely lost mobility in his right arm and right leg.26 Without Trotski at the Central Committee plenum on 18 December he had no guarantee that his colleagues would keep the foreign-trade monopoly. Despite his own physical pain, Lenin’s mind was focussed on politics. Perhaps he already was thinking that if Trotski proved reliable at the plenum he might be able to use him in other policy discussions. Even so, he still did not completely trust him and asked another Central Committee member, Yemelyan Yaroslavski, to report to him about the proceedings.27 In the event the Central Committee went Lenin’s way with ease.28 After the state monopoly on foreign trade was reaffirmed, Lenin wrote ecstatically to his new ally Trotski: ‘It’s as if we’ve managed to seize a position by a simple movement of manoeuvre and without having to fire a single shot.’29 In the evening session, the broad lines of Lenin’s project for a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) were passed.30 By then he had also had the pleasure of learning that the Politburo had agreed to his demand for Rozhkov’s exile to Pskov.31 One by one, Lenin’s objectives in policy were being met.
But he still had several to achieve, and he recognised that he could not assume that he had long to live. He was right to be sceptical, especially about Stalin. On 21 December the Orgburo, of which Stalin was the leading member, ratified the Dzierżyński report on Georgia. Ordzhonikidze had escaped without censure; and, just as disturbingly, the decision was taken to withdraw Mdivani and Stalin’s other opponents from their posts in Tbilisi.32 Stalin was out for revenge and was bent upon emasculating the agreement he had made with Lenin on the formalities of the USSR Constitution. There was bound eventually to be another spat between Stalin and Lenin. The tension mounted.
In the night of 22–23 December, Lenin’s health broke down again when he suffered another collapse and again lost the use of his whole right side. His relatives and doctors attended to him as best they could, but Lenin as ever was thinking about politics as soon as he regained co
nsciousness. He had to employ low cunning since the Central Committee on 18 December had formally ordered him to withdraw from public life until he had recovered, and Stalin had been put in charge of this medical regime. Lenin, however, told his doctors that he feared he would not be able to get back to sleep unless he was allowed to dictate something to a secretary on ‘a question troubling him’. The doctors relented and duty secretary Maria Volodicheva was summoned to the apartment. He was still very poorly when she arrived. But he insisted on going ahead: ‘I want to dictate to you a letter to the congress.’33 Although he could manage only four minutes’ dictation, he had set the pattern; over the next few days, he hoped, he would put down in writing the general concerns and plans he had in mind and would make them available to the next Party Congress. Everything was to be ‘absolutely secret’. The letter was typed out in five copies that were sealed in envelopes with a wax seal; Lenin stipulated that only he or, in the event of his death, Nadezhda Konstantinovna should have the right to open them.34
He had complete trust in his secretaries Lidia Fotieva and Maria Volodicheva. Previously he had also been using the secretarial services of Nadezhda Allilueva, Stalin’s young second wife; but, by a favourable accident, she had ceased performing such work for him since the beginning of the month. Lenin was cheered, furthermore, by the decision of Stalin, Kamenev and Bukharin on 24 December to allow him to go on dictating for five to ten minutes a day. Stalin had recognised that, if permission were to be refused, Lenin retained the capacity to do him harm by complaining that he was being unreasonably constrained.
Yet Stalin was wrong to think that he ran no serious risk by allowing the dictation. Lenin, crippled and distraught, was also angry. His bedridden existence did nothing to calm him down. He was a man in a hurry. For a couple of years he had contemplated the question of the Soviet political succession and occasionally he had given voice to this. He and Alexander Shlikhter had talked about the deaths of several of their Bolshevik acquaintances in late summer 1921. Shlikhter had said that the party need not worry about the loss of the veterans since the younger generation was ready to take over. Lenin had demurred: ‘For a long, long time Lenin looked in silence without taking his eyes off me. “No, you’re wrong,” was his reply, “It’s still too early to leave. Five more years of training are needed.”’35 These words were not casually spoken; they reflected his unease about the kind of leadership available in the party once he had left the scene. Subsequently Lenin had avoided the topic. But, fearing that he would soon die, he rushed to commit his conclusions to paper. The effort this required was enormous. He tried to prepare his argument carefully so that he would not need to redraft it. He was writing a political testament for his party and the intentions had to be expressed with clarity.
As a writer he had been used to seeing his text emerge in front of him as he wrote it out in longhand, and of course it did not help that he was so ill. Sometimes his grammar went awry and Volodicheva had to correct his drafts. She knew he found this demeaning: ‘I know that I’m your necessary evil, but it’s only for a short time.’36 The problem, however, was that he had to get the contents right in his own mind and the stenographers often had to wait endlessly for his next sentence. At one point they experimented with putting the secretary in the room adjacent to Lenin’s, and having him ring them up when he had composed his thoughts.37
One way or another he was determined to finish his testament. While Fotieva and Volodicheva supplied him with technical help, they also tried to boost his morale. Of even greater emotional importance to him were Nadezhda Konstantinovna and Maria Ilinichna. Wife and sister made sure that they were available to sit with him each day. Nadezhda Konstantinovna went further and became his unofficial political assistant. This was against the terms of the medical regime decreed by the Central Committee and overseen by General Secretary Stalin. But Nadezhda Konstantinovna enjoyed the fact that she could again fulfil the role of his political assistant, a role she had given up in April 1917. Perhaps she relished the secretiveness; it was a bit like the old days when the two of them had conspired to fool the Okhrana. Above all, Nadezhda Konstantinovna recognised that, if the Central Committee shut Lenin off from politics as the Central Committee demanded, he would not last long. He could not live without politics. She therefore went on telling him what she knew about events in the Kremlin and putting him in confidential contact with other party leaders. Steadily his feeling of well-being returned to him.
Unfortunately Stalin found out about this on 22 December. He rang up Nadezhda Konstantinovna and abused her in the language of the gutter. Nadezhda Konstantinovna, troubled by Lenin’s condition, was overwhelmed by Stalin. Next day she wrote an impassioned letter to Kamenev: ‘In all the past 30 years I’ve not heard a single obscene word from any individual comrade; the interests of the party and Ilich are no less dear to me than to Lenin.’ Thus did she defend her husband’s right to remain politically active and indicated that Stalin would repeat his aggression at his own peril. And Lenin, while there was breath in his body, could initiate his plan to bequeath a legacy of ideas, strategy and personnel to the Communist Party and the Soviet state.
28. DEATH IN THE BIG HOUSE
1923–1924
Lenin began dictating his political testament on 23 December 1922. He wanted to present his ideas in person to the next Party Congress, but would leave a testament in case this was impossible. His opening words ran as follows: ‘I would very much advise the undertaking at this Congress of a series of changes in our political structure.’ Lenin put forward two proposals. The first was that the State Planning Commission, which currently advised on economic policy, should be given a degree of legislative authority. The second was that the Party Central Committee should be increased from twenty-seven to between fifty and one hundred members.1
There was a political calculus behind this. The State Planning Commission’s reform would strengthen the government’s direction of the economy: Lenin was trying to make further use of his recent alliance with Trotski and had to pay a price. For Trotski had been demanding a reinforcement of the state’s economic planning role. At the same time Lenin wanted to place a constraint on Trotski and the rest of his colleagues. To this end he urged the expansion of the Central Committee by introducing industrial workers to its membership. Lenin believed that action was needed to prevent conflicts in the central party leadership that might threaten the existence of the party and the survival of the Revolution.2 In his next period of dictation with secretary Maria Volodicheva, he sketched the prospect of a split in the party. He had little faith in the efficacy of the Tenth Party Congress’s ban on factional activity. The October Revolution, he stated, rested upon the support of two social classes, the workers and the peasants, and he insisted that the differing interests of these classes could become the basis for one section of the party leadership to engage in ruinous conflict with another.3
Lenin turned to the individuals who might head such sections: Trotski and Stalin. He was far from welcoming Trotski as his sole successor even though he was presently his main ally. The testament proceeded idiosyncratically. Lenin was suggesting, as no one else at the time was doing, that Stalin might be a serious contender for the succession. Trotski, Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin had a sharper public profile than Stalin, who was ridiculed by the great historian of 1917, Nikolai Sukhanov, as a ‘grey blur’.
Lenin was able to evaluate Stalin more accurately after recent experiences and had long ago known of the deficiencies of Trotski:4
Comrade Stalin, having become General Secretary, has concentrated unlimited power in his hands, and I am not convinced that he will always manage to use this power with sufficient care. On the other hand, comrade Trotski, as is shown by his struggle against the Central Committee in connection with the question of the People’s Commissariat of the Means of Communication, is characterised not only by outstanding talents. To be sure, he is personally the most capable person in the present Central Committee but he also
overbrims with self-confidence and with an excessive preoccupation with the purely administrative side of things.
Continuing with these thumbnail characterisations, Lenin asserted that the behaviour of Grigori Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev before the October 1917 seizure of power had been no accident (although he added, rather paradoxically, that this should not be held against them). He castigated Nikolai Bukharin’s ideas as scholastic and not entirely Marxist. He accused Georgi Pyatakov of taking too administrative an approach to politics.5 Deftly Lenin had put his colleagues to the test and found each unsatisfactory. His implicit but unmistakable conclusion was that there was no single leader in the party worthy of succeeding him.
The hypocrisy here was stunning. Lenin too had ruled with insufficient care (Stalin), had been addicted to administrative methods (Trotski and Pyatakov), had opposed revolutionary over-optimism (Zinoviev and Kamenev) and had exhibited a dubious grasp of Marxist orthodoxy (Bukharin). Yet Lenin now contended – and obviously believed – that only his comrades were guilty of these inadequacies.
In the past he had avoided general criticism of a comrade unless a rupture of political ties was involved, and such was the affection for him among his comrades that general criticism of Lenin by one of them was almost unknown. Almost, but not quite unknown. In 1921 he had had a spat with Pyatakov about the desirability of inviting American concessionnaires to take over the Donbass coalmines. Pyatakov, according to Lenin, exhibited ‘a boastfulness and an adherence to the bad old Russian sect of those who seek to use swords to strike down’ a dangerous and strong enemy. Back came a letter from Pyatakov, who did not mince his words:6
You, Vladimir Ilich, have grown accustomed to looking at everything on too large a scale, deciding all the big questions of strategy at a distance of a hundred kilometres whereas our need is to resolve the little tactical questions from three kilometres away, or, ten kilometres at the very most. And this is the reason, in my opinion, why you on this question are relapsing into schematism and – if I may pay you back in kind – genuine boastfulness.