Stalin, meanwhile, was also working behind the scenes to remove Trotsky’s supporters from important posts in the Commissariat for Military and Naval Affairs. Within an eighteen-month period many district, army and section commanders lost their jobs. The appointments machine, which was in the hands of the Secretariat and Orgburo, i.e. Stalin’s, advanced new men whose allegiance was simply to the triumvirate. Once, while he was taking the cure at Sukhumi after Lenin’s death, Trotsky was visited by a number of members of the Central Committee—Tomsky, Pyatakov, Frunze and Gusev—who came to bring him up to date on the important changes of personnel taking place in the military administration. He was warned of the arrival of I.S. Unshlikht, whom he had never liked. The transfer of the Deputy Chairman of the GPU was a bad sign, but Trotsky was sick and unable to put up strong resistance. He particularly lamented the removal of Sklyansky, who had proved himself to be an excellent organizer and effective link between the War Commissariat and supply organizations during the civil war. A vacuum was being formed around Trotsky.
Stalin’s campaign was greatly assisted by Trotsky himself. By virtually retiring from everyday life and the tasks facing the country and the Party in order to concentrate on his writing, by taking frequent sick leaves and by remaining silent during debates on important questions of current policy, he played into his enemies’ hands. Also, by repeatedly affirming the correctness of Central Committee decisions, upholding the ban on factions and agreeing with the leadership’s line, he created an inescapable impression of weakness, guilt and loss of self-assurance. In those two decisive years, he plainly overrated his power over people’s minds, as well as his popularity. He had still believed he would ultimately triumph even after Lenin’s death, and he was not prepared for the personal defeat that was moving inexorably upon him.
Against the powerful intellect and brilliant personal characteristics of this creative individual, stood the dull but mighty machine of the Party organization. The bureaucratic monster had come into being with amazing rapidity and was now capable of carrying out, unquestioningly and efficiently, orders issued by the centre, where Stalin was steadily strengthening his own position. The coming decisive battle would be an unequal one. Trotsky’s defeat was certain.
The Duel of ‘Outstanding Leaders’
From 1917 until the end of Trotsky’s life, a thread of fierce rivalry and irreconcilable struggle connected the two revolutionaries whom Lenin in December 1922 called two ‘outstanding leaders’. The thread was not severed until August 1940, when Trotsky was assassinated on Stalin’s personal order. As we have seen, before 1917 the two barely knew each other, despite coming face to face several times. In 1905, at the Fifth Party Congress in London, Trotsky simply did not notice Stalin, who gazed at the motley crowd of revolutionaries with mixed feelings of curiosity and surprise. In the winter of 1913 another meeting took place, this time in Vienna, which Trotsky described in a note intended for his unfinished book on Stalin. He recalled sitting at the samovar in a cheap Viennese hotel with the Menshevik Skobelev:
The son of a rich Baku miller, Skobelev was at the time a student and my political pupil; a few years later he would be my political opponent and a minister in the Provisional Government. We drank fragrant Russian tea and of course discussed the overthrow of tsarism. Suddenly, the door was opened without a prior knock and there stood a man I had not seen before. He was short of stature, thin, his face a swarthy-greyish hue and bearing the marks of smallpox. He was holding an empty glass in his hand. He was evidently not expecting to see me and there was no sign of friendship in his eyes. Muttering a guttural sound, which could be taken as a greeting, he approached the samovar, silently filled his glass and just as silently left the room. I glanced at Skobelev enquiringly. ‘He’s the Caucasian, Dzhugashvili, a fellow-countryman. The Bolsheviks have just made him a member of their Central Committee and he’s already beginning to play a part, it seems.’47
No doubt, his later experience did much to colour Trotsky’s recollection of that encounter.
During the summer of 1917, after his return to Russia in May, Trotsky, seeing Stalin at numerous meetings and conferences, committees and editorial boards, and also in Lenin’s company, realized that the silent Georgian had become an integral part of the Bolshevik establishment, yet he did not arouse Trotsky’s interest as a personality. Listening in silence to speakers as he smoked his pipe, Stalin would watch as people entered and left the room. Trotsky tried to recall if he had ever heard Stalin speak at one of these meetings, but could remember nothing. When they had met face to face or when he had felt those cold eyes on him, Trotsky would nod a cursory greeting and pass by. He saw Stalin less as a personality than a supernumerary, a member of the Party corps de ballet, such as will always be found in large numbers at all major historical events, and who will later embellish their reminiscences to enhance their true role.
Stalin was in fact not such a person. Almost imperceptibly, he was steadily and surely making his way up into the ranks of the leadership. Oddly, it was when they were not seeing each other that Trotsky got to know Stalin better, during the civil war when Trotsky was the dominant figure and Stalin was in charge of food supply and later a member of the Revolutionary Military Council on various fronts. There would even be occasions when Trotsky would give Stalin credit, as in May 1920 when he sent a telegram from his train to the Sovnarkom: ůAs Comrade Stalin has devoted his main attention over the last year to military affairs, and as he is well acquainted with the South-western front, where the work is of the utmost importance, it would be highly desirable to make him a member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic and thus use his abilities for central military work better than hitherto, in particular and especially for servicing the centre of the South-western front.’48 Stalin had been a member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic from 8 October 1918 to 8 July 1919 when it was reduced to a membership of six; he became a member again on 8 May 1920 until 1 April 1922.
Trotsky was right to point out that Stalin could be put to better use. In 1918, when Stalin was ‘entrenched’ at Tsaritsyn, a number of sharply worded cables had flown between him and the People’s Commissar. They had both appealed to Lenin for support, and Lenin had tried to reconcile them, but their differences had proved too deep. For instance, Trotsky believed that former tsarist officers would help make a regular and battle-ready army, while Stalin supported commanders like Voroshilov, who put Party membership above military training and experience. In a telegram from Tsaritsyn to Trotsky, with a copy to Lenin, Stalin had reported that the headquarters staff of the Northern Caucasus front was ‘totally unfit for the conditions of struggle against counter-revolution. It is not only that our “specialists” are psychologically incapable of decisive warfare against counter-revolution, but also that, as “headquarters” personnel who are only capable of “drawing charts” and producing redeployment plans, they are utterly indifferent to operational actions, questions of supply, the monitoring of different commanders, and in general they feel like outsiders or guests.’49 Stalin had interfered in the work of headquarters, removing staff who did not meet with his approval and applying repressive measures. He often used his staff of food-supply organizers, as well as staff from the Nationalities Commissariat, to carry out supervisory and inspection jobs that were outside their remit. The Centre and Trotsky started receiving complaints, to which at first he responded calmly. On one occasion he cabled the Balashov Revolutionary Military Committee that he was ‘in complete agreement with Comrade Raskolnikov’s protest against the interference of some comrades from the Nationalities Commissariat in arrangements at the front. I have made an appropriate statement to the Commissar for Nationalities. Comrade Bobinsky is leaving for the front today with full authority from me to act exclusively under the direction of the Revolutionary Military Committee.’50
Stalin and his people seemed to take no notice. He continued to issue orders and send demanding messages to Trotsky. On 27 September
1918 he requested an enormous quantity of all kinds of weapons, plus no less than 100,000 full sets of uniform, even though at that moment there were less than that number of troops on the southern front. He had personally penned the ending of his message in purple ink: ‘We declare that if these demands (which are the minimum considering the number of troops on the Southern front) are not met with the utmost urgency, we shall be forced to cease military action and withdraw to the left bank of the Volga.’51 Such ultimatums drove Trotsky to exasperation. The warehouses were empty and it was only with the greatest difficulty that a few munitions factories were able to function. Trotsky had cause to complain to Lenin that ‘Stalin’s actions are disrupting all my plans.’52 His orders were being systematically ignored by Stalin, but it seems that it was not until the summer of 1918 that he sensed that the ‘unremarkable Caucasian’ was a man with a mind and a will of his own. After a number of such clashes, Trotsky tried to persuade Moscow to withdraw Stalin from the front, but Lenin and Sverdlov, who supported Trotsky in everything concerning the purely military aspects of his work, were in no hurry to take sides. Despite summoning Stalin to Moscow from time to time at moments convenient to Trotsky, and transferring Voroshilov and some other unsympathetic commanders to other sectors, Lenin declined to define such moves as the victory of one People’s Commissar over the other. Hoping to effect a compromise, he urged them to sort out their differences themselves by making mutual concessions.
There were some short-lived moments of comparative improvement in relations between Trotsky and Stalin, and these were due to the latter’s efforts. In his memoirs Trotsky remarked on these episodes:
Because of his enormous envy and ambition, Stalin could not help feeling at every step his intellectual and moral inferiority. It seems that he tried to get closer to me. Not until much later did I realize the meaning of attempts to establish something approaching familiarity between us. But I was repelled by those very qualities that were his strength on the wave of decline—the narrowness of his interests, his empiricism, the coarseness of his psychological make-up, his peculiar cynicism of a provincial whom Marxism has freed from many prejudices without, however, replacing them with a philosophical outlook thoroughly thought out and mentally assimilated.53
Stalin took a number of small steps towards reconciliation. On the eve of the first anniversary of the October revolution, he published an article in which he effectively placed Trotsky side by side with Lenin by calling him the second chief organizer of the uprising—an original way of congratulating Trotsky on the occasion of his birthday, which also fell on 7 November (25 October Old Style). Later versions of this article omitted any celebratory remarks in this vein.54
Stalin’s early telegrams to Trotsky, in 1918, were distinctly respectful in tone and signed ‘Yours, Stalin’55—unimaginable a year hence. In fact, this phase lasted only while Stalin was preparing for the next stage of his military activities. By July, he was demanding that Moscow endow him with military authority and threatening that if he did not receive it he would without ceremony ‘get rid of the officials and commanders who are destroying the cause’ and that ‘the absence of a bit of paper from Trotsky will not stop me.’56 He was duly granted military authority and henceforth ignored orders whether issued by Trotsky or the Centre. The conflict was, as we have seen, momentarily resolved, on the one hand, by Lenin’s softening Trotsky’s blows against Stalin, and by Stalin’s tactical decision not to contradict Trotsky.
Trotsky made no attempt to reciprocate Stalin’s minimal efforts at reconciliation. He underestimated his rival as a politician and on the purely personal level found him uninteresting and unpleasant. It was therefore a surprise to him when suddenly, and with the onset of Lenin’s illness, Stalin emerged among the top-ranking leaders, and this despite Trotsky’s having recognized Stalin’s tenacity and his ability to act decisively in a crisis. Indeed, he had even acknowledged this in a request for tough measures by Stalin and the Orgburo in 1919, when the Party’s rules on mobilization were being regularly flouted: ‘It would be helpful if Comrade Stalin would write an article in Pravda in this vein.’57
Until Lenin’s death, Trotsky was convinced in his heart that the Politburo would call on him to replace the leader, and it was precisely in this sense that he later interpreted Lenin’s ‘Letter to the Congress’: ‘Unquestionably, his object in making the will was to facilitate the work of direction for me. He naturally wanted to do it with the least possible amount of friction. He talks about everyone most guardedly, softening the most devastating judgments. At the same time he qualifies with reservations the too definite indication of the one whom he thinks entitled to first place.’58 He was convinced that Lenin intended him as his successor, and that the references to his character were a smokescreen to moderate the decisiveness of his choice.
The ongoing struggle between Stalin and Trotsky was greatly exacerbated by this ambiguity, which only provoked their mutual rivalry and made cooperation impossible. Trotsky, however, lost the fight from the outset. The fight itself was of course about something more than a matter of ambition, personal incompatibility or the clash of character. It was a contest between centrist and leftist tendencies in the Party. Stalin always embodied the centre, while Trotsky personified the leftists. In all times, whenever the centre collapses and either the left or right wing triumphs, society and the state will suffer. Here, however, something unexpected happened: having defeated the ‘left’ opposition, Stalin in effect armed himself with its programme and embarked on ‘revolutions from above’. Hence, willingly or unwillingly, much of Trotsky’s own methodology was appropriated by Stalin and put into practice.
An important distinction is called for here. It has often been said that Stalin carried out Trotsky’s programme, and that if there were serious theoretical differences between them, they were about the future of socialism in the USSR. In fact, Stalin and Trotsky—and their respective supporters—represented two different social types. One, the pragmatists, were those who, in Trotsky’s phrase, ‘went over to a settled way of life’ and wanted to build socialism in one country. The others, ‘the nomads of the revolution’, were romantics, full of faith in the triumph of their ideals. Both types were advocates of War Communism. If Trotsky and his supporters wanted to return to ‘Lenin’s’ War Communism, with its Bolshevik zeal, revolutionary heroics, internal Party democracy (as they understood it) and working-class activity, then Stalin and his supporters wanted a bureaucratic society in which millions of functionaries and Party organizers would secure their own well-being by means of a dictatorship that would leave no room for democracy and in which the masses would be reduced to ‘cogs’. Trotsky hoped to combine the revolutionary changes that were taking place in the cities and villages with the affirmation of a democratic regime in both the Party and the country—an impossible aim, given the one-party dictatorship.
An almost unending conflict began between the two rivals. While Lenin was alive it bore a more personal character and was less connected with ‘platforms’ and positions, apart from Trotsky’s ‘revolt’ of October 1923. Mutual recrimination and argument went on at meetings of the Politburo and Central Committee, with minor injuries. For instance, a decision of the VTsIK in 1921 called for a review of the staff of People’s Commissariats, and People’s Commissars were asked for their views. Trotsky’s office reported that in recent months Stalin had taken virtually no part in their work.59 Trotsky plainly did not want inactive members on his team, but the bare statement of the facts suggested more significantly that he did not accept Stalin as a leader of the top rank.
Both rivals learnt of Lenin“s ‘Letter to the Congress’ before Lenin died, and it did nothing to reconcile them, rather the opposite. In it, Lenin described Trotsky as “probably the most capable man in the current Central Committee’, while of Stalin he had written that he doubted if he would use the immense power he had in his hands with sufficient caution. The famous postscript of 4 January 1923, in which Lenin suggested
the Congress consider ways of removing Stalin as General Secretary, would appear to have settled the struggle in Trotsky’s favour. In practice, however, things turned out very differently. Trotsky, who had already shown himself to be accident-prone politically, lost his bearings completely and dropped his guard, while Stalin carried on strengthening his position behind the scenes. It was probably Stalin who initiated the notion that Lenin had become incapable of further work.
As Trotsky later admitted, it was a big mistake on his part not to have attended Lenin’s funeral. He claimed he had been misled by the telegram Stalin sent to the local Cheka in Tiflis (Tbilisi) on 22 January: ‘Convey this at once and report when it was handed over. Mogilevsky or Pankratov to decode personally. Tell Comrade Trotsky. On 21 January at 6.50 p.m. Comrade Lenin died suddenly. Death followed the failure of the respiratory centre. Burial on Saturday 26 January.’60
Characteristically, Stalin did not send the telegram to the local Soviet authorities or even the Party committee, but to the Caucasian Cheka. It was also a Chekist, one Gerson, who had encrypted the telegram. Trotsky wanted to attend the funeral and cabled Moscow to this effect. Stalin replied with another telegram: ‘The funeral is on Saturday, you won’t be in time. The Politburo thinks that in your state of health you should go to Sukhumi.’ The funeral, in fact, took place on the Sunday, 27 January, and Trotsky had thus been purposely prevented from taking part in an event of enormous political importance. At the All-Union Congress of Soviets on 26 January, Stalin stated his claim as a true Leninist to be the defender of Lenin’s heritage. Cut off in Tiflis, Trotsky could do little more than cable a brief article, that was none the less full of feeling and that included the following words: ‘How will we go forward, will we find the way, will we not go astray? Our hearts are now stricken with boundless grief, all of us who by the great grace of history were born contemporaries of Lenin, who worked alongside him, who learnt from him … How shall we go ahead? With the lantern of Leninism in our hands …’61
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