But one copy, sealed with wax, remained in the Secretariat.
Why did the Leader, who was obsessively secretive, suddenly behave so naively? Did he truly believe that a copy passed to his Secretariat would remain unknown to his comrades-in-arms? Had he no inkling of the rule that servants do not carry out the wishes of former masters? Or of the fact that secretaries might not carry out the requests of their former chief?
FOTIEVA TAKES CARE OF IT
Fotieva’s letter to Kamenev is still there in the Party Archive: “Comrade Stalin was given V.I.’s letter to the Congress on Saturday, December 23.… However, it transpired after this that V.I. wanted the letter to be kept strictly secret in Archives, and to be opened only by himself or by Krupskaya.… I asked those comrades who know the contents of this letter to … regard it as a record of V.I.’s personal opinion, which no one else was meant to know.” Fotieva’s letter is marked: “Read by Stalin. To Trotsky only.” Trotsky said later, “Naturally, I told nobody about V.I.’s letter.”
We see then that Fotieva failed to understand Lenin’s instructions and “happened” to pass the letter immediately to Stalin. Stalin in turn passed it on to Trotsky and Kamenev. Why? Because it contained quite unflattering character sketches of both of them. Which meant that both of them were extremely anxious that no one else got wind of it. In this way Stalin made certain that he had allies in his effort to conceal the letter.
But at the beginning of January the indefatigable Lenin added a supplement to his text:
Stalin is too rude. This is a fault which can easily be tolerated in our own circle, in dealings between fellow Communists, but it becomes intolerable in the office of Gensek. I therefore propose that some way be found of transferring Stalin from that post and appointing to it someone else who would differ from Stalin in one respect only, that he was more tolerant, more loyal, more polite, and more considerate, less capricious etc., in his dealings with comrades.
Lenin didn’t leave it at that. He began writing a series of articles, one of which was sharply critical of Rabkrin, Stalin’s former Commissariat.
Koba evidently heard about it immediately, and in February 1923 the doctor told Lenin that he was “categorically forbidden newspapers, visits, and political information.” Fotieva plucked up her courage immediately after Stalin’s death and recalled that “Lenin at once saw that these prohibitions were not simply doctor’s orders.… He began to feel worse. They had upset him so much that his lips trembled.… V.I. obviously got the impression that it was not the doctors who were advising the Central Committee, but the Central Committee giving instructions to the doctors.”
Lenin nonetheless thought of a way of escaping from Stalin’s tutelage. On March 5 he suddenly sent Stalin a furious letter about the incident with Krupskaya (which had supposedly been laid to rest):
Dear Comrade Stalin! You were so rude as to call my wife to the telephone and abuse her. Although she told you that she agreed to forget what had been said … I do not intend to forget so easily what was done against me, and needless to say I regard anything done against my wife as done against me. I ask you, therefore, to consider whether you are willing to take back what was said, or whether you prefer to break off relations between us.
Respectfully yours,
Lenin
Copies to Comrades Kamenev and Zinoviev
This was Lenin’s attempt to break out of jail. Surely a man with whom he had broken off relations could not continue keeping watch over him? Even if Stalin did apologize, he would find a way of prolonging the quarrel, so that the Central Committee would have to do something. Lenin did not know that Stalin had anticipated this move too. Already on February 1 he had asked the Politburo to relieve him of responsibility for looking after the sick Lenin. But Koba knew that Zinoviev and Kamenev were frightened by the dying leader’s attempts to ally himself with their enemy Trotsky, and would not want Lenin to escape from his supervision. His expectations were realized. The Politburo turned down his request. So he was now, at the Party’s request, Lenin’s jailer forever.
“HELP!… THE DEVIL … OH, THE DEVIL …”
Stalin received Lenin’s letter next morning. But he was unperturbed. He had heard what had happened the previous night. Lenin’s rage had cost him dearly, and during the night he had lost the gift of speech. He kept whispering disconnected phrases and inarticulate sounds, which the doctors recorded: “Help—oh … the devil … devil … evi helped, if it … evi.…” “Evi” was obviously “the devil” again. And although the former Leader recovered his speech toward morning, Stalin was in no doubt: the devil could be of no more help to him. It would be soon!
Stalin promptly wrote his reply. That letter would be kept hidden for decades in a secret archive. I am now reading it—the last letter from the former Koba to the former Leader.
Comrade Lenin! Five weeks ago I had a conversation with Comrade Nadezhda Konstantinovna [Krupskaya].… I spoke to her by telephone approximately as follows: “The doctors have forbidden anyone to give Ilyich political information.… You, however, seem to be disrupting this regimen. You must not play with Ilyich’s life,” and so on. I do not think that anyone could find anything rude in these words … anything aimed “against you.” However, if you think that in order to preserve relations between us I ought to take back the words mentioned above I can take them back, though unable to understand what it is all about, where I am to blame, and what exactly is wanted of me.
A stiff letter. Time for this semicorpse to realize that Koba was dead, and that Stalin did not stand on ceremony. Lenin, however, never read it.
On March 10 Stalin heard that a stroke had deprived Lenin of the ability to read and write, and of speech.
A WIFE ASKS FOR POISON
Stalin received a request which he immediately reported in writing to members of the Politburo. On March 17 Krupskaya, “in the strictest secrecy,… communicated to me V. I. Ilyich’s request to obtain and pass on to him a quantity of potassium cyanide.… N.K. said that V. I. Ilyich’s suffering was beyond belief.… I must declare that I lack the strength to carry out the request and I am compelled to refuse this mission … and hereby inform the Politburo accordingly.” The unfortunate Leader was by now scarcely able to think at all. Krupskaya herself was trying to carry out his former wish and spare him from further suffering. In fact, Stalin informed his friends in the triumvirate, Zinoviev and Kamenev, that “Nadezhda Konstantinovna said … she had ‘tried to give him cyanide’ but ‘couldn’t go through with it,’ and so was ‘asking for Stalin’s support.’ ” But Stalin was a connoisseur of character. He knew that his partners would subsequently accuse him. No, Ilyich must oblige by dying unaided. The members of the Politburo naturally approved his decision. So now his hands were clean.
THE CLAIMANTS
The struggle in the Kremlin now began in earnest. It was a fight not merely for power, but for life. Each of the claimants knew how to make political enemies pay in blood. These were leaders molded by the Civil War and the Red Terror and in Lenin’s academies. They thought of the country as a “fortress under siege,” and in such conditions ruthlessness was the supreme virtue. Trotsky, neatly summing up their common creed, spoke of “priestly—or quakerish—driveling about the sanctity of human life.” So each of them knew what the price of defeat might be. Stalin alone was extremely cautious in calling for blood. He seemed more moderate than the others. His record included no bloody words. Only bloody deeds. And, as a rule, secret deeds.
How did the claimants compare? Stalin, incontestably, came first. He did not, of course, have Trotsky’s fame. He had little fame, but a great deal of power. Lenin had concentrated power over the Party in his hands, and power over the country in the Party’s hands. He controlled the whole central Party machine and the local Party committees—the 15,000 Party functionaries with dictatorial power over the country’s political and economic life were his protégés.
After Stalin came the Kamenev-Zinoviev duo. Kamenev was chairm
an of the Moscow Soviet and Lenin’s deputy in the Council of People’s Commissars, “an exceptionally capable and willing workhorse,” one who could “pull two carts at once,” Lenin said of him. Zinoviev was head man in Petrograd and also presided over Comintern.
Finally there was Trotsky. He was in charge of the republic’s armed forces. But the army had been scaled down by demobilization. Thanks to Lenin’s efforts his “brother-enemy” was now the least influential of the claimants, the farthest removed from all key posts. Nonetheless, Trotsky was still the glamorous Second Leader of the Revolution.
One last name—Bukharin, editor of Pravda, and the Party’s leading theoretician. He was not himself a contender. But it was very important whom he chose to support.
Trotsky was first off the mark. On March 13 the newspapers published a guarded bulletin on “the deterioration in Lenin’s health.” Next day an article by one of Trotsky’s closest associates, Karl Radek, appeared in Pravda: “Lev Trotsky: Organizer of Our Victories.” To the man in the street, and to ordinary Party members, this must have looked like a signal: Trotsky was to be the Leader’s successor. Trotsky was now in a hurry for the Congress.
The Twelfth Party Congress—the last not completely orchestrated by Stalin—was held in April. At the Congress Trotsky’s supporters spread rumors of some sort of will in which Lenin named Trotsky as his successor. Trotsky delivered a brilliant speech on the state of industry. It was greeted with thunderous applause. “Indecent—Lenin never got a reception like that,” Voroshilov commented. It enraged the envious Zinoviev and frightened Kamenev. Fear of Trotsky finally forced Kamenev, Zinoviev, and Bukharin to ally themselves with the Gensek. Stalin was the force which could stand up to the very dangerous Lev.
In May the publication of bulletins on Lenin’s health ceased. The country was told that the threat to his life had passed, and began to believe that he had indeed returned to work. This was Stalin’s idea. Armed with a special decision of the Central Committee, he introduced a “check on all information concerning Ilyich’s health.” Trotsky was obliged to obtain information from Dr. F. Gautier, his own doctor as well as one of Lenin’s. Stalin had Gautier removed.
In May Lenin was moved to Nizhny Novgorod. He was carried to the car on a stretcher. The unfortunate Leader wore a mindless smile.
By order of the Gensek, several photographs of Lenin were taken around this time, and the artist Annenkov was called in to paint a final portrait. “Semirecumbent in a chaise longue, wrapped up in a blanket, and staring past us with the blank stare of a man in second childhood, Lenin could serve as a model only for an illustration of his own illness,” Annenkov noted. But Stalin wanted documentary proof that in the last phase of his life Lenin had been imbecile, so that his last jottings might look like a product of feeble-mindedness. Krupskaya, however, vetoed the portrait. On May 6, 1923, she wrote to Inessa Armand, the daughter of Lenin’s mistress (also Inessa), who had died in 1920. “You reproach me for not writing to you, but you cannot possibly imagine what things are like here … there are no words for what is going on at present.… Everybody has left us—they express sympathy but are afraid to call on us. The only thing that keeps me going is that Volodya is glad to see me in the morning, he takes my hand, and sometimes we exchange a few words about things for which however there are no words.”
LENIN IMPROVES
Lenin not only survived—he began to improve. Stalin no longer visited Nizhny Novgorod and he allowed no one else to do so, alleging that this was the sick man’s own wish. Lenin still could not speak, but he was hard at work. Exercise books which Krupskaya used to teach the Leader to speak are preserved in the Party Archive: “This is our dog. Its name is Jack. It is playing.…” The words which Lenin repeated most successfully were proletariat, people, revolution, bourgeois, Congress, etc. Words and phrases disappeared from his memory as fast as he mastered them, but his understanding of what others were saying was restored. And he no longer had difficulty in analyzing what was happening. For instance, because he liked picking mushrooms they “used to collect a few in advance and plant them beside the path along which he was usually taken in his wheelchair,” recalled Dr. V. Osipov, one of his doctors. “On one occasion, he touched a mushroom with his cane and it fell over. This underestimation of his intellectual capacity greatly annoyed him.”
The doctors’ case notes were always read carefully by the Gensek. He was kept informed, among other things, of the dangerous fits of anger which alarmed those present. Lenin was in a hurry to get well. Krupskaya recalled that “I used to say ‘see—your speech is coming back, but slowly. Think of it as a temporary stay in jail.’ ” Lenin knew that he was in jail, and was evidently thinking furiously of ways to break out.
Tovstukha was now working furiously, collecting Lenin’s documents. I found in the Party Archive a warrant authorizing Tovstukha to remove documents originating with Lenin from the archives of his comrades-inarms. Stalin was planning another game of chess. One in which these documents would be invaluable.
Meanwhile anonymous brochures with such titles as “Small Biography of a Big Man” were beginning to find their way round Moscow. They set out to prove, using quotations from Lenin himself, that Trotsky had always been against him. This “bathroom literature,” as Trotsky contemptuously called it, was disseminated in the provinces too. Tovstukha was doing his job.
“YOU’VE GOT IT TOO GOOD, MY FRIENDS”
In summer 1923 most of the leaders went on holiday. Zinoviev and Bukharin made for Kislovodsk, leaving Kamenev in Moscow.
The Gensek, needless to say, stayed put in sweltering Moscow. He had no time for holidays. It was work, endless work. Besides, the strange improvement in the Leader’s health troubled him.
During the summer intermission in their fight with Trotsky, Zinoviev and Bukharin resolved to put pressure on Stalin, and make him share power with them. The holiday-makers wrote to him in a humorous vein: “29.07.23 … Two ordinary citizens propose the introduction of Zinoviev, Trotsky, and Stalin into the secretariat, to consolidate it.”
The purpose of the letter was not, however, humorous. Their idea was to level the odds. If they succeeded, he would be compelled to ally himself with Zinoviev in order to defeat Trotsky—in other words, to carry out their decisions. Stalin must indeed have been amused. They seemed to take him for an idiot.
At the same time Zinoviev wrote to Kamenev: “… and you allow Stalin to treat us with undisguised contempt. [He mentions innumerable examples of Stalin’s highhanded behavior while they were away on vacation.] We are not going to put up with it any longer.” The Gensek, of course, knew about their correspondence. The trusty GPU was already keeping an eye on each of them. But he knew the way to calm them down. He wrote to Bukharin and Zinoviev, telling them that he did not “know what to do to stop you abusing me. It would have been better if you had written me a little note in clear and precise terms. Always supposing, of course, that you think it possible for us to go working together in future (for … I have begun to realize that you are half-inclined to hasten the breach which you think unavoidable).… Do what you think best. In 8–10 days time I am going on leave (I’m tired, worn out). All the best. PS. How lucky you people are. You have the leisure to think up all sorts of crazy things,… while I’m here doing the heavy work, miserable as a dog on a chain. Which is all my own fault. This is enough to get anybody down. You’ve got it too good, my friends! J. St.”
This ploy never failed. The hint that he might resign terrified them: if he went, Trotsky might step in. He could use the same trick on Trotsky—who also knew that if he went, Zinoviev and Kamenev would move in. They were indeed afraid of the “rough, primitive Georgian.” But they were much more frightened of each other. Their hatred of each other ensured that Stalin would win the endgame.
Zinoviev and Kamenev wrote back immediately: “All this talk about a breach is, of course, just the result of your tiredness. It is out of the question. Where are you thinking of going on vacation?
Regards.”
He had made a close study of these gentlemen. They weren’t afraid only of Trotsky. They were afraid of work. They did not like the hard grind. They preferred representational roles. Let him get on with the work. Well, so he would. He wrote to them at once about Lenin’s “Letter to the Congress.” He of course knew all about the letter. He wanted to find out how much they knew.
On August 10, 1923, they responded: “Yes, there is a letter from V.I. in which he advises the Congress not to elect you Secretary. We—Bukharin, Kamenev and I [Zinoviev]—decided not to tell you about it for the time being … for the obvious reason that … we did not want to upset you. But these are all small matters. The essential point is that there is no Ilyich now. The Secretariat of the Central Committee (with no disrespect to you) in practice decides everything. Collaboration on an equal footing is impossible with our present setup. Hence our efforts to find a better form of collaboration. We do not doubt for a minute that we shall come to an arrangement.”
They still lived in hope that he would voluntarily give up the machine he had created. How this must have amused him.
But one thing may have worried him. They thought that “there is no Ilyich now”: he was horrified to see Lenin recovering!
Krupskaya observed, “From July he started recovering rapidly, he was soon able not only to sit up but even to walk, with the aid of a cane … and his speech began to come back to him—in October, as it happened.”
Another event in October must have come as a great shock to Stalin: Lenin put in an appearance in Moscow. But as soon as he returned to Nizhny Novgorod the nightmare began again. His recovery was cut short, and Lenin began to die. Can something have happened during his visit to Moscow?
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