Stalin’s hand-picked Congress, with support from Kamenev and Zinoviev, swallowed the letter without difficulty. Trotsky remained silent. The Congress was followed by a plenary meeting of the Central Committee, to elect its General Secretary. This was where Stalin made one of his favorite moves. He offered his resignation: that was what the Messiah had wanted, and for him the will of the God Lenin was sacred. It happened exactly as he expected: they all—Trotsky, Kamenev, and Zinoviev, because they hated each other—voted unanimously that he should remain. So now he had become Gensek at their wish. From now on he could tell them all that “you got what you asked for!”
On January 31, 1924, he had announced the “Leninist draft”—a mass recruiting drive to enlarge the Party. It was as if the God Lenin was appealing to his people from the grave. The Party gained 240,000 new members. By 1930 almost 70 percent of Party members had joined during Stalin’s tenure as Gensek. He was preparing the Party for the game he meant to play.
TROTSKY OUTMANEUVERED
“Lessons of October,” Trotsky titled his crucial new article. In it he disingenuously lauded the departed God Lenin for resurrecting his, Trotsky’s, theory of permanent revolution, harnessing an inert Party, and—together with Trotsky—leading it to victory, despite the craven behavior of Zinoviev and Kamenev. This was yet another reminder that he, Trotsky, was the October leader, that Zinoviev and Kamenev were cowards, that Stalin was simply irrelevant, and further that the Party had always been inert. The implication was obvious: why should anyone submit to the Party majority?
This was suicide. Zinoviev and Kamenev immediately fell upon the weakened Trotsky, and Stalin joined in the chorus of outrage. Forgetting his previous utterances, Stalin coolly asserted that “Comrade Trotsky did not, and could not, play any special part either in the Party or in the October Revolution.” He had learned it from Lenin, of course: to the Leader, all things are permitted. This was the beginning of a campaign to separate Lev from the Messiah. Trotsky’s disagreements with the God Lenin were harped on endlessly. Trotsky agreed that he had come to Lenin struggling, but asserted that ultimately he had come over to him fully and completely. He was the former sinner who had become the apostle Paul. The others had now to show that his conversion was not genuine. Stalin drew the chief ideologist, Bukharin, into the fight, and he found new and deadly ammunition in Lenin’s last articles.
Lenin had in the past often asserted that a socialist society could not be constructed in a single country, and Trotsky, following his lead, had often repeated this “elementary Marxist truth.” Now here was Bukharin triumphantly quoting Lenin’s last article, “On Cooperation,” in which he said, “All the conditions for building socialism already exist in Russia.” This was by no means all that Bukharin found in Lenin’s last articles. Lenin, he also pointed out, spoke of an alliance with the peasants, whereas Trotsky was still repeating Lenin’s earlier belief that clashes with this hostile class were inevitable. Trotsky could not argue that Lenin’s last articles were merely a maneuver, that they were written in the context of the temporary New Economic Policy, to deceive the “deaf-mutes.” The God could not, of course, be guilty of low cunning. Thus, the “ever-living” Ilyich reached out from his Mausoleum to finish off his eternal friend-and-enemy.
Zinoviev and Kamenev moved at a plenary meeting of the Central Committee that Trotsky should be expelled from the Party—only to be opposed by Stalin. To the amazement of his allies, who wanted blood, Stalin persuaded the Central Committee not to expel Trotsky, nor even to remove him from the Politburo. They did not realize that the game was still in its opening stage. It was not yet time to remove a once powerful piece from the board. On the contrary, it would soon be their turn to leave the board, while Trotsky, who hated them, might prove useful to the Gensek in dealing with the “victors”—for that was how these foolish fellows now thought of themselves. But while leaving Lev in the Politburo he clipped his claws. Trotsky lost his post as chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council: the founder of the Red army was removed from the army. A letter from P. A. Koloskov reads in part:
Bazhanov, Stalin’s secretary at the time, who later escaped to the West, correctly describes Trotsky’s finale. My father told the same story.… Trotsky made a thunderous speech. And rushed towards the exit. He intended to slam the door as he left. But the session was taking place in the Throne Room of the Kremlin Palace. The door was, as it happened, too heavy. Some doors can’t be slammed. The wretched fellow ended up wrestling with the door handle.… But it wasn’t all one big joke. The day before, Trotsky’s supporters had put it to him that while he was still in charge of the army he should have Stalin, Zinoviev, etc. arrested as traitors to the Revolution. This was in the evening. Night fell, and there was still no answer from Trotsky. By then the other camp knew all about it. It was a night of acute anxiety. Koba sat in a corner sucking his pipe, then suddenly vanished. Zinoviev, in hysterics, sent people to look for him. He was nowhere to be found. At dawn Trotsky told his associates that he would not do it. He could not let the Party accuse him of that most terrible of sins for a revolutionary—Bonapartism. The Party’s major dogma was that all political activity outside the Party was counterrevolutionary. An appeal to the people or the army would lead to the creation of a new Napoleon and ruin the Party. The freedom-loving Trotsky was also the supreme dogmatist. He was like the wolf who would sooner face a bullet than run past the red flags. Koba reappeared next morning as suddenly as he had vanished.
His next moves were made quickly. M. Frunze was put in charge of the army. A prominent Civil War commander, Frunze was not Stalin’s man, which was why Zinoviev and Kamenev supported his appointment. Frunze was given the task of reorganizing the army. Of the old unruly army only the officers and NCOs were retained. The new army was drawn from the peasant youth called up in the autumn. Once that was done, Frunze developed an ulcer, and when his condition became acute a dubious operation was performed on him, by order of the Politburo. He died on the operating table, and his wife, convinced that he had been murdered, committed suicide. Stalin’s loyal servant Klim Voroshilov was now put in charge of the Red army. The maneuver paid off. Voroshilov, who looked like a florid counter-jumper, hated the brilliant Tukhachevsky, whom some people, greatly daring, called Napoleon. War between them was inevitable, but then again, Voroshilov also hated Trotsky and was not likely to forget his humiliation at Tsaritsyn. So what lay ahead was a ruthless purge of Trotskyists in the army. Stalin had appointed the right man.
THE RIGHT IS RIGHT … FOR THE MOMENT
It was now Zinoviev’s and Kamenev’s turn. Stalin made the last remaining leader, Bukharin, his ally. Bukharin was now at the head of a faction known in the Party as “rightist.” He and his associates, the Trades Union chief Tomsky and the chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, Rykov, were in favor of prolonging NEP and of the alliance with the middle peasantry, and against collectivization, against superindustrialization, against war on the kulak. In short, they favored unhurried, peaceful development. Bukharin quoted copiously from Lenin’s last articles: everything now had to be reinforced with quotations from the God. Bukharin’s enemies, however, could produce plenty of quotations contradicting him, also from the God.
On April 14, 1925, Pravda published an article by Bukharin with a slogan addressed to the peasants: “Enrich yourselves, develop your holdings. And don’t worry that they may be taken away from you.” The country sighed with relief. With Trotsky’s fall things were obviously beginning to change for the better.
Old Party members were flabbergasted by Bukharin’s slogan. A rich peasant! This was a knockout blow to utopia. Kamenev asked Stalin for an explanation. Stalin puffed at his pipe enigmatically and said nothing. Zinoviev and Kamenev decided that it was time to call Bukharin to order. By destroying Bukharin they would give Stalin a bit of a scare. He had lured this foolish pair out into the open: they now spent all their time sniping at Bukharin, while Stalin remained silent. Waiting. The decisive battl
e was joined at the Fourteenth Congress in December 1925. Zinoviev declared, “There exists within the Party a most dangerous right deviation. It lies in the underestimation of the danger from the kulak—the rural capitalist. The kulak, uniting with the urban capitalists, the NEP men, and the bourgeois intelligentsia will devour the Party and the Revolution.”
Stalin would reproduce Zinoviev’s thoughts almost word for word some years later, when he himself was ready to destroy Bukharin and the other right-wingers. But now it was the turn of Zinoviev and Kamenev. For the time being he passionately defended Bukharin: “You want Bukharin’s blood? We shall not let you have his blood.”
Bukharin would recall these words as he went to his death thirteen years later. But one of Stalin’s rejoinders augured ill for the rightists: “But if you ask Communists what the Party most wants, I think 99 Communists out of 100 would say that the Party wants above all to hear the slogan ‘Beat the kulak.’ ” Although he was defending Bukharin, he knew very well that the Party was eager to continue the revolution and to have done with the hated capitalists and the hated NEP—that betrayal of the Great Utopia. Even then, as he thought over his future moves, he had no doubt that the Party would applaud him when the time came to deal with the rightists. Meanwhile, history was repeating itself in a most amusing way: the ruthless sanctions which Zinoviev and Kamenev had tried to invoke against Trotsky were now invoked against them by the hyperintellectual Bukharin.
From start to finish the proceedings of the Fourteenth Congress had a surprising accompaniment. When Lenin had dismissed the Constituent Assembly organized uproar had been one of his ploys. Stalin now made use of this example. Kamenev tried in vain to shout above the noise of a frenzied audience: “You will not force me to be silent, however loudly a small group of comrades may shout.… Stalin cannot play the part of unifier of the Bolshevik general staff. We are against one-man rule, against the creation of a Leader!” To which the whole hall yelled in reply: “Untrue! Rubbish! We want Stalin! Stalin!” The stenographic record is one continuous “voice from the hall,” supposedly personifying the people, identified here with the lower levels of the Party.
Koba’s handpicked Congress was not merely obedient. The delegates no longer believed in the sincerity of those arguing on the platform. Yesterday Zinoviev and Kamenev had joined Stalin in attacking Trotsky, today Zinoviev and Kamenev sided with Trotsky against Stalin. The Leningrad dictator, bloodstained Zinoviev, now demanding democracy, made just as strange a spectacle as the dictator Trotsky calling for democracy. The shrewd Mikoyan summed it up neatly: “When Zinoviev has a majority he is in favor of iron discipline, when he hasn’t he is against it.” The delegates knew by now that this was all merely a struggle for power. Ideas no longer mattered. So they eagerly demonstrated their support of Koba: there might at least be some career advantage in it.
Krupskaya, however, tried to retain her independence, and came out in support of Zinoviev and Kamenev. The majority, she said, was not always in the right, witness Lenin’s defeat at the Stockholm Congress. Stalin politely contradicted her on the platform—and less politely in the lobbies. Molotov remembered Stalin saying about her that “she may use the same lavatory as Lenin, but that doesn’t mean she knows anything about Leninism.”
On the platform, however, he was the embodiment of peaceableness and moderation: “Methods such as amputation and bloodletting are infectious. If we chop off one person today, another tomorrow … what will be left of our Party?” kindly, tolerant Stalin asked the Fourteenth Party Congress. He cited the resolution drafted by Lenin for the Tenth Congress, which spoke of measures against splitters up to and including expulsion, and his furious audience demanded their immediate application. His reply was, “Wait a while, comrades, don’t be in such a hurry.” He had staged this spectacle, and for the present the role he had chosen for himself was to pacify his audience, to play the wise, calm, anything but bloodthirsty leader.
Zinoviev and Kamenev were condemned by the Congress. It was total defeat—559 votes against them, 65 for, to the novel accompaniment of approving shouts, as Stalin’s tame Congress drew to its close. His new-fangled system of selecting delegates had worked splendidly.
Bukharin and his rightist sympathizers, happy that they had defeated their enemies, all praised this system. Just as Kamenev and Zinoviev had recently praised it after defeating their enemy Trotsky at the previous Congress.
The rightists did not realize what lay ahead, nor did Kamenev and Zinoviev. Only later the rules of the game would become clear: one of them was that Stalin shared power with different people and factions each time. But only from one Congress to the next. For one move at a time. Trotsky had taken no part in these latest polemics. He looked on sardonically while Stalin deftly rammed the fool’s cap marked “oppositionist” on the heads of his allies of yesterday.
Trotsky now sat through Party meetings pointedly reading French novels.
“KNOCK THEIR TEETH OUT”
At this Congress Stalin was singled out for the first time from the other members of the Politburo. His name no longer appeared in alphabetical order. He had removed Kamenev from his post as chairman of the Council of Labor and Defense. He now had a stable majority in the Politburo. The new members—Voroshilov, Molotov, and Kalinin—were his obedient servants. He mercifully left Zinoviev in place for the time being, but took the precaution of drawing his teeth: Zinoviev lost control of the dangerous city of Leningrad, and his supporters were ruthlessly expelled from the local leadership. The purge was directed by the new Leningrad boss, Sergei Kirov (Party pseudonym of the worker Kostrikov). Kirov was an effective organizer, with no experience of intrigue, a modest, efficient provincial. And efficient people were what the times called for. Kirov had won back the Caucasus for the Bolsheviks, and had tracked down Stalin’s son Yakov in Georgia. Stalin was friends with Kirov. (I have seen only one affectionate inscription in Stalin’s hand, and that was in a book presented to Kirov: “To my friend and favorite brother from the author.” He wrote to no one else in such terms.)
He also left Trotsky in the Politburo. He still had to accustom the Party to the new position of yesterday’s leaders. To this end the dread epithet “factionalist” would soon be regularly attached to their names.
For the present he appointed Trotsky to a relatively unimportant post in the Supreme Economic Council. The rumor current in Moscow was that he intended to make Lev head of the council in the near future. Trotsky let himself be influenced by this rumor, and bided his time. But nothing happened, and he finally realized that Stalin had made a fool of him. Throughout 1926 he was ill. It was a nervous disorder. His friend Joffe, formerly ambassador to Germany, made use of his connections to arrange medical treatment for Trotsky in that country. He left Moscow.
Stalin had also departed, for a holiday in Sochi, leaving Moscow in Molotov’s hands. It was during this period that Molotov became his faithful shadow, as Koba had once been to Lenin. “Stone Arse” now wrote to him in Sochi almost every day. Every step the demoted leaders took was monitored by the GPU, and reported immediately in Molotov’s letters.
He was a strange figure as he walked around Sochi in a white cotton suit, with his white trousers tucked into black jackboots. He explained to the loyal henchmen on holiday with him that the boots were “very convenient. That way you can give certain comrades a kick in their ugly mugs that’ll knock their teeth out.” This wasn’t just a stupid joke.
One day he received startling news. And he prepared to knock out each and every tooth his enemies had left.
It turned out that Trotsky had returned from his cure in much better health and eager to “dispel the political shadows.” Zinoviev and Kamenev had got to know of it, and approached him, offering an alliance. With the man they had so often betrayed, so often traduced! Like many others born in Russia, they suffered from the peculiarly Russian disease of naive romanticism. They believed that the three of them had only to appear together and the Party would immediately rememb
er the heroic past and fall in behind its former leaders. They refused to see that the membership had long been eating out of the new potentate’s hand, that the overwhelming majority of the bureaucrats who now managed the Party had been installed by Stalin, and that in any case the country had no wish at all to see the bloodstained ideas of the Revolution resurrected. Realistically, they could command the support of a mere handful of idealistic young Party fanatics. To attack with such forces would be suicide. Stalin was nonetheless certain that they would attack. The injured aristocratic pride of these ex-leaders would prevail.
While he waited he planned the “kicks to the face” in a series of letters:
June 25. To Molotov, Rykov, Bukharin, and other friends … Zinoviev’s group is now the inspiration of all schismatics.… This role has devolved upon their group because (a) it is more familiar with our methods than any other group. [As they might well be, since they had only recently joined in his effort to destroy Trotsky] And (b) their group is on the whole stronger than others because it has in its hands the Comintern, which is a serious force. Our blow must be aimed specifically at this group. To unite Zinoviev and Trotsky in the same camp would be premature and at present strategically unsound. It is better to defeat them separately.
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