This was something Lenin and Koba must have discussed on that sunlit bench. In any case, as soon as he rose from his sickbed Lenin published in Pravda an article calling for the blood of the SRs. Twelve of them were sentenced to death. But Bukharin’s promises had to be taken into account, and the sentence specified that the execution of the SRs was to “take place only after the first terrorist act against the Bolsheviks.”
The SRs, spared for the time being, Krylenko, who had condemned them, and the provocateur Semyonov would all perish together in the days of Stalinist terror.
Meanwhile, a Lenin full of energy, the old Lenin, was ready for work again. But, as Lunacharsky wrote, “Everyone was aware of a worrying impediment in his speech. It was particularly frightening when he just stopped short in the middle of a statement, turned pale, and could only continue with a terrible effort.”
It was Koba’s official duty to supervise Lenin’s treatment and he was kept reliably informed by the doctors. The illness was expected to recur. A second stroke might follow at any time. Koba, the great chess player who could always see several moves ahead, drew his conclusion.
Lenin himself realized his condition. It was time to turn once more to faithful Koba.
KOBA AND THE POISON
Trotsky wrote: “During Lenin’s second illness, in February 1923, Stalin told a meeting of the Politburo that Lenin had unexpectedly sent for him and asked to be supplied with poison, since he … foresaw that another stroke was imminent. He did not believe the doctors, because it had not been difficult to catch them out in contradictions … and he was suffering unbearable agonies.… I remember how strange, how inappropriate to the circumstances, Stalin’s looks seemed to me. The request he was passing on had a tragic character, but his face was frozen in a half-smile, as if it were a mask. ‘There can, of course, be no question of carrying out that request,’ I exclaimed. ‘I told him all that,’ Stalin retorted, rather irritably, ‘but he just dismissed it. The old man is suffering, says he wants to have poison handy. He will do it only if he becomes convinced that his situation is hopeless.… The old man is suffering,’ Stalin repeated, ‘he’s obviously got something in mind.’ ”
Trotsky went on to ask: “Why was Stalin the one Lenin turned to at such a time?… The answer is simple: Lenin saw in Stalin the only man who would [i.e., the only man cruel enough to] carry out his tragic request.”
Maria Ulyanova also wrote about Lenin’s request for poison. But the circumstances as she described them were quite different. Shortly before her death Lenin’s sister wrote a note which was found among her private papers, immediately landed in the secret section of the Party Archive, and was made available to historians only half a century later. It was a penitential act on her part. Feeling that death was near, she wrote:
I consider it my duty to say something, however briefly, about Ilyich’s real attitude to Stalin in the last period of his life [since in previous statements] I did not tell the whole truth.
In the winter of 1921–1922 V.I. fell ill. Around that time, I don’t know exactly when, he told Stalin that he would probably end up paralyzed, and made him promise to help him get and to administer potassium cyanide if that should happen. Stalin promised.… The reason why he chose to ask Stalin was that he knew him to be a hard man, a man of steel, devoid of sentimentality. There was no one else whom he could ask to do such a thing. V.I. made the same request to Stalin in May 1922, after his first stroke. V.I. had decided that he was finished, and asked for Stalin to be fetched. He was so insistent that they dared not refuse him. Stalin spent a little time with V.I., really not more than five minutes, and when he came out of the room he told me and Bukharin that V.I. had asked him to get him the poison, since the time had come to carry out his promise. Stalin promised, he and V.I. embraced, and Stalin left the room. But after talking it over together we decided that we should try to reassure V.I., so Stalin went back into his room and said that after talking to the doctors he was convinced that all was not yet lost, and that the time to carry out V.I.’s request had not yet come. V.I. cheered up considerably although he said to Stalin, “Are you fooling me?” “When did I ever try to fool you?” Stalin said. They parted, and didn’t see each other again until V.I. started getting better.… In those days Stalin was with him more often than the others.
So Trotsky was right about one thing—there was a request for poison. But Trotsky placed it in 1923, by which time Lenin and Koba were enemies. Maria Ulyanova places it in 1922, when they were the best of friends. Lenin’s request to Koba was an expression of implicit trust in him, at a time when, so Maria Ulyanova tells us, “Stalin was with him more often than any of the others.”
I used to think that Trotsky had made a mistake, perhaps a deliberate mistake, to make his readers believe that Stalin was already Lenin’s enemy when he carried out his request. Imagine my amazement when, working in the President’s Archive, I learned that Stalin had indeed been asked again, in 1923, to obtain poison for Lenin. But this time the request came, as we shall see, not from Lenin himself. By then, Lenin could not “summon Stalin … and request,” as Trotsky says he did. He could not even speak.
But first we must return to 1922.
What did they talk about when Koba visited him? Maria Ulyanova says, “On that occasion, and during subsequent visits, they talked about Trotsky.” In the intervals of his illness Lenin saw many things clearly. While he was ill, his suspicious nature had made him form an alliance against Trotsky. He now knew that the danger came from a different quarter. He evidently received alarming news from Kamenev, Zinoviev, and even Trotsky: that the Party was now completely controlled by Koba. He himself, of course, had made Koba General Secretary, to create an apparatus to manage the Party. And Koba had carried out his wishes. But times had changed. Lenin was now a sick man, his illness might become acute at any moment, and if it did … who could tell how Koba, with the Party apparatus at his command, might behave? He had evidently succeeded in undermining Lenin’s authority.
Lenin took fright and decided to remove Koba from the post of General Secretary. An excuse was needed. Lenin found one.
THE DISAPPEARANCE OF KOBA, THE EMERGENCE OF STALIN
In 1922 Lenin decided to regularize the position of the republics. Parts of the old tsarist empire—Ukraine, Belorussia, and the Transcaucasian Federation—were now formally independent of Russia, but in fact governed by protégés of Moscow. Lenin was planning the next step—unification.
In Lenin’s absence Koba had proposed abandoning secrecy in favor of frankness: the “independent” republics should all enter into a Russian federation, retaining only local autonomy. This caused grumblings in the republics, especially in Georgia, which had only recently lost its independence. The Georgian leader, Budu Mdivani, realized how difficult it would be to tell the Georgians that the clock was being turned back to tsarist times. He asked to be given a fig leaf: let Georgia enjoy independence, at least on paper. Lenin supported him, and put forward his own concept of a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). The republics were to enjoy equal rights, on paper, and even the right to leave the future union. This was enough to satisfy the “independents” in Georgia, and at the same time it allowed Lenin to open his campaign against Koba. Koba—and another non-Russian who favored federation, the leader of the Transcaucasian Bolsheviks, Ordzhonikidze—knew how deep-seated nationalist sentiment was in the republics, and how dangerous even formal independence might become tomorrow. In the heat of debate the temperamental Ordzhonikidze struck the “independent” Mdivani. This gave Lenin a splendid excuse. He denounced Koba’s and Ordzhonikidze’s policy as “Great Russian chauvinism,” and promoted Ordzhonikidze’s punch to the status of a crime.
Kamenev, who realized that Lenin would not last much longer and lived in mortal fear that Trotsky might become supreme, decided to honor his alliance with Koba, and immediately reported to him that “Ilyich is ready for war in defense of independence.”
Koba realized that Lenin
no longer felt the same toward him, and of course knew why. He invited Kamenev to join him in rebellion, and wrote in reply to his note that “in my view we must show firmness against Ilyich.” In other words, he was no longer afraid. The doctors made their reports to the Gensek, and Koba had been informed that another stroke was inevitable. Lenin, however, took effective action. He dispatched a special commission to Georgia, and drew Koba’s enemy Trotsky into the struggle against him. A Lenin-Trotsky combination meant that the result was a foregone conclusion. No one could stand up to both leaders.
Lenin now resolved to destroy Koba at the next (Twelfth) Party Congress and, according to Trotsky, he had a bombshell ready.
Kamenev got cold feet, and wrote to Koba, “If V.I. insists, resistance will get more difficult.” Koba replied gloomily, “I don’t know—let him do what he thinks best.” Koba meant to wait. He was good at that. He began drafting a declaration on the formation of a Union of Republics, just as Ilyich wished. But Lenin did not accept his surrender. At the beginning of October, he wrote to Kamenev, “I am declaring war on Great Russian chauvinism.” Kamenev saw that there was no way of stopping Ilyich.
Lenin was in constant contact with Trotsky on the Caucasian problem through his secretary Fotieva:
Trotsky: So he isn’t looking for a compromise with Stalin, even if the line is the correct one?
Fotieva: Right. He doesn’t trust Stalin, and wants to attack him openly before the whole Party. He’s preparing a bombshell.… Ilyich’s condition is deteriorating from one hour to the next. He has difficulty speaking, and he’s afraid he’ll collapse completely before he can act. When he handed me the note he told me: “If I don’t want to be too late I must speak out sooner than I meant to.”
Trotsky, however, was not the only one who heard this from Fotieva. She also kept Koba informed about everything that happened in Lenin’s office. She knew from Ilyich’s worsening condition that a new master was on the threshold. (Lidia Fotieva was one of the few close associates of Lenin whom Koba would not touch. In 1938 he would send her to work in the Lenin museum. Lavishly decorated and rewarded, she died in 1975, in her nineties, outliving Koba, and indeed almost outliving the Soviet era.)
Kamenev turned up in Trotsky’s office. Trotsky wrote, “He was a sufficiently experienced politician to realize that it was not just a question of Georgia, but of the whole role of Stalin in the Party.” Fainthearted Kamenev had deserted Koba.
The downfall of Ilyich’s one-time favorite seemed imminent. But …
Koba’s information proved accurate. The struggle and his hard feelings proved too much for Lenin.
The doctors demanded complete rest for Lenin. Koba clarified their demands: In mid-December he carried a resolution at a plenary meeting of the Central Committee placing “personal responsibility for the isolation of Comrade Lenin—in respect both of his personal dealings with officials and of his correspondence” on the Gensek. Meetings with Lenin were forbidden. Neither friends nor members of his household were allowed to tell Ilyich anything about political events, in case it overexcited him.
The Leader himself was not informed of the Party’s decision. But what sort of leader was he now? The Leader had vanished, leaving only a sick man in his place. Koba too had vanished, and Joseph Stalin had appeared on the scene. A graduate of Lenin’s university, summa cum laude.
THREE
STALIN: HIS LIFE, HIS DEATH
10
THE OCTOBER LEADERS MEET THEIR END: LENIN
The tyrant grows from a root called popular representation. To begin with he smiles at and embraces all whom he meets.… He promises much.… But having become a tyrant and realizing that the citizens who made possible his elevation now condemn him the tyrant will be forced willy-nilly to destroy those who condemn him, until he has neither friends nor enemies left.
—Plato
MEETING WITH STALIN
The Central Committee plenum adopted a decision recommended by Lenin before his illness: the monopoly of foreign trade was to remain in the hands of the state. Trotsky took the lead in supporting this decision. He was obviously now playing what used to be Koba’s role vis-à-vis Lenin. Krupskaya informed Lenin that his proposal had prevailed and the moment he recovered from his stroke he dictated a letter to Trotsky: “We seem to have taken the position without firing a single shot.… I suggest we do not stop there but continue the offensive.” By “offensive” Lenin meant the attack on Koba. Lenin was a skillful fighter. Next day Kamenev, alarmed by the obvious rapprochement between Trotsky and Lenin, informed Stalin in a note that the two leaders were in contact: “Joseph, Trotsky rang me tonight to say he had received a note in which the Old Man expresses his satisfaction with the resolution on foreign trade.” Stalin replied: “Comrade Kamenev, how was the Old Man able to organize correspondence when Dr. Ferster has absolutely forbidden it?” The tone of this note is new. He is no longer just “Joseph”; he is the Gensek, who allows no one to act in breach of a Party decision.
Stalin then rang Krupskaya and rudely berated her.
Krupskaya was in a state of shock. According to Maria Ulyanova, when she got home she “was quite unlike her usual self. She rolled about the floor, sobbing.” This was evidently when Krupskaya lost her self-control and told Lenin how she had been insulted. Lenin was in a rage, and wrote to Stalin breaking off relations. At the same time, Krupskaya wrote a furious letter to Kamenev: “Stalin has taken it upon himself to treat me in the rudest possible way.… Never in all these thirty years have I heard a single rude word from any comrade, and the interests of the Party and of Ilyich are no less dear to me than to Comrade Stalin. At present I need all the self-control I can muster. I know better than any doctor what may and what may not be talked about.… And certainly better than Stalin does. I am appealing to you, and to Grigori, as V.I.’s closest comrades, and I beg you to protect me from rude interference in my private life, from vulgar abuse and threats. I too am a living person, and my nerves are strained to the utmost.” She did not understand what had happened. Lenin’s wife had, for the first time in her life, seen Stalin. Until then she had known only faithful Koba.
But once she had recovered her composure Krupskaya began to appreciate the new situation and to realize how helpless she was. She must have immediately begged Lenin’s secretary not to send his letter to Stalin just yet. Meanwhile, Kamenev had realized when he received Krupskaya’s letter that hostilities with Stalin had been resumed. He sought Trotsky out at once. They discussed what the situation in the Party would be in the wake of this note. And both decided to leave Stalin where he was. Trotsky subsequently described this scene: “I am in favor of preserving the status quo,” he told Kamenev. “If Lenin gets on his feet for the Congress, which is not very likely, we will discuss the matter further. I am against liquidating Stalin, but agree with Lenin on the essential point. Stalin’s resolution on the nationalities question is no good at all.… That apart, Stalin must immediately write Krupskaya a letter of apology.”
In the middle of the night Kamenev informed Trotsky that Stalin had accepted all their conditions and that Krupskaya would receive a written apology. That was evidently when she persuaded Lenin not to send the letter. According to Maria Ulyanova’s memoirs, “she told V.I. that she and Stalin had already made their peace.”
Lenin consented. He was always able to control his impulses. He decided to prepare for another attack before sending the letter. But Stalin was evidently informed of everything that happened in Lenin’s household. Maria Ulyanova recalled, “One morning Stalin called me into his office. He looked distraught. ‘I didn’t sleep at all last night,’ he told me. ‘What does Ilyich think I am, treating me as some sort of traitor, when I love him with all my heart? Try and let him know what I’ve said.’ ”
Stalin had decided to act the part of Koba one last time. But he had learned a very important lesson: Trotsky and Kamenev hated each other so much, and each so much feared the others elevation, that they would both support him,
even against Lenin’s will.
THE INDEFATIGABLE V.I.
Lenin had been living in the Kremlin. He should have left for Nizhny Novgorod but a heavy snowfall had blocked the road. He wasted no time. As soon as he felt a little better he resumed his offensive. At the end of December he began dictating his “Letter to the Congress”—a document which has gone down in history as “Lenin’s Testament” because Lenin himself stipulated that it should be read out at the first Congress after his death, and not before. In this letter, he gave character sketches of his closest comrades-in-arms, noting the significant faults of each of them. He got to Stalin last, juxtaposing him with Trotsky.
Relations between Stalin and Trotsky account for more than half the danger of the schism … which could be avoided … by increasing the membership of the Central Committee.… Since becoming Gensek Comrade Stalin has concentrated immense power in his own hands, and I am not sure that he will always succeed in using that power with the requisite caution. On the other hand, Comrade Trotsky is perhaps the ablest person in present Central Committee, but is too boastfully sure of himself and too carried away by the strictly administrative side of things.
The document was typed by a secretary, and the original drafts were burned. Copies were placed in envelopes marked “Strictly Secret,” and sent to Krupskaya, to be opened only after Lenin’s death.
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