The contretemps between Lenin and Stalin vanished like snow in the sun. The reason was political. In November 1920 Trotski attacked the Soviet trade unions, and suddenly Lenin needed Stalin’s assistance. Conventional trade unionism, according to Trotski, had no place in the revolutionary state; his case was that Sovnarkom safeguarded workers’ interests and that trade unions should be constitutionally subordinated to its commands. This suggestion riled the Workers’ Opposition, which was campaigning to enable the working class to control factories, mines and other enterprises. Lenin objected to the Workers’ Opposition and in practice expected the trade unions to obey the party and government. Yet Trotski’s demand for the formal imposition of this arrangement would affront workers unnecessarily. Lenin vainly tried to get Trotski to back down. Factions gathered around Trotski and Lenin as they wrote furious booklets and addressed noisy meetings. Although Bukharin formed a ‘buffer group’ between the two sides, this group too became a faction. Not only the Workers’ Opposition but also the Democratic Centralists (who, since 1919, had campaigned for a restoration of democratic procedures in party life) entered the fray. The party was enveloped in a bitter conflict lasting the long winter of 1920–1.
Lenin enlisted Stalin to organise supporters in the provinces. Stalin was carrying out the function discharged by Sverdlov in the Brest-Litovsk dispute in 1918. A particular effort was made to discredit the other factions. Party rules were bent but not broken; Lenin knew that Stalin, whom he teased as a ‘wild factionalist’, would do whatever was necessary for victory.1 The Central Committee Secretariat was led by Preobrazhenski, Krestinski and Serebryakov, who were sympathisers of Trotski and Bukharin. Stalin therefore sent trusted supporters of Lenin into the provinces to drum up a following for him and indicate how to organise the campaign against Trotski. While Stalin arranged things in Moscow, Zinoviev travelled the country giving speeches on Lenin’s behalf. Trotski made a similar tour; but as the time of the Tenth Party Congress approached in March 1921, it was clear that victory would lie with the Leninists. Stalin co-ordinated the faction as its delegates assembled in Moscow. The Leninists drew up their own list of candidates for election to the Central Committee. This was gratifying for Stalin. Trotski, who had been in Lenin’s good books in the Soviet–Polish War, had fallen into disfavour.
Factionalism had distracted the Bolsheviks from recognising a fundamental menace to their power. Garrisons of troops were mutinying. Factory workers in the main Russian industrial cities went on strike. And across the entire state there was trouble with the peasantry. Whole provinces in Ukraine, the Volga region and west Siberia rose against the Bolshevik party dictatorship. The demands of mutineers, strikers and village fighters were broadly the same. They wanted a multi-party democracy and an end to grain requisitioning. The revolt of the Tambov province peasantry at last brought the Politburo to its senses, and on 8 February 1921 its members decided on a momentous change in policy. Grain requisitioning would be replaced by a graduated tax in kind. Peasants would be left to trade the rest of their harvest on local markets. This New Economic Policy would take the sting out of rural discontent and allow the Red Army to mop up rebellions. There would be no political concessions: the objective was to save the Soviet state in its existing form from destruction. A commission was established to draft a full policy for consideration at the Tenth Party Congress. There was no dispute in the Politburo. Measures needed to be changed for disaster to be avoided.
The Party Congress, starting on 8 March, was surprisingly quiet. The New Economic Policy (or NEP) in its rudimentary form was approved almost on the nod and the Leninists won the debate on the trade unions without difficulty. Stalin organised the faction as supporters arrived in Moscow. Criticism from the Workers’ Opposition was easily rebuffed; neither Alexander Shlyapnikov nor Alexandra Kollontai managed to stir the Congress with pleas for the working class to have greater direct influence on policy in the Kremlin and on conditions in the workplace. The reason for the easy victory of Lenin’s faction had little to do with Lenin’s eminence or Stalin’s cunning.2 On 28 February the Kronstadt naval garrison, thirty-five miles off the Petrograd coast, had started a mutiny. These sailors in 1917 had been among the party’s most eager supporters. The mutiny shocked the Congress into recognising that the entire Soviet regime was under fundamental threat. Congress delegates volunteered to join the troops sent to suppress the Kronstadters. Trotski led the military offensive on Kronstadt. Unity was everything. Lenin was virtually unopposed when stating that the NEP – a retreat from the economic system of the Civil War years which was becoming known as ‘War Communism’ – should be accompanied by a political clampdown. No factional activity in the party would be permitted and all factions were required to dissolve themselves.
After the Congress, Lenin asked Stalin to secure the control of Lenin’s group over the central party apparatus. Because of his other obligations – in the Politburo, the Orgburo, the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities’ Affairs and the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate – this was not going to be his prime task but would add substantially to his heavy workload. It was with some reluctance that he agreed to supervise the Department of Agitation and Propaganda in the Central Committee Secretariat.3
This aspect of political activity, though, was vital for a ruling party in a state dedicated to imposing a single ideology. Among the problems was the large number of institutions involved. The most influential was the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment, whose deputy leader was Lenin’s wife Nadezhda Krupskaya. Resenting Stalin’s attempt to assert the party’s authority, she appealed to Lenin. Stalin wrote bluntly to Lenin:4
What we are dealing with here is either a misunderstanding or a casual approach . . . I have interpreted today’s note from you to my name (to the Politburo) as you posing the question of my departure from the Agitprop Department. You will recall that this job in agitation and propaganda was imposed on me (I was not looking for it). It follows that I ought not be objecting to my own departure. But if you pose the question precisely now, in connection with the misunderstandings sketched above, you’ll put both yourself and me in an awkward position – Trotski and others will think that you’re doing this ‘for Krupskaya’s sake’ and that you’re demanding a ‘victim’, that I’m willing to be a ‘victim’, etc. – which is undesirable.
Stalin’s patience had snapped. This was obvious in his simultaneous request to step down from the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities’ Affairs.5 He wanted and needed to be appreciated. Asking to resign was his usual way of signalling this. Lenin understood the code and backed down. Stalin was too important a member of his team to be allowed to leave.
Lenin distrusted Trotski after the trade union dispute. What also worried him was that Trotski wished to raise the influence of state economic planning in the NEP. Trotski was not the only problem for Lenin; the entire central leadership made life difficult for him. When even the head of the Soviet trade union movement Mikhail Tomski refused to toe the party line, Lenin called for his expulsion from the Central Committee.6 The leading group had not been so fissiparous since 1918. When Lenin’s request was turned down, he was at his wits’ end and did not mind saying so. The ill health of several of his comrades, as the immense physical strain of recent years took its toll, aggravated the situation. Zinoviev had two heart attacks. Kamenev had a chronic cardiac condition. Bukharin had been very poorly and Stalin had suffered from appendicitis. In the absence of these strong supporters of the NEP, Lenin alone had had to implement the measures decided by the Politburo.7 He was eager to have Stalin back at his side. Having recruited him to the Leninist cause in the trade union dispute, Lenin supported a proposal to make him General Secretary of the Russian Communist Party.
Molotov’s year in charge of the Secretariat had not been a success;8 indeed no one since Sverdlov’s death in March 1919 had got on top of the job.9 Lenin was disappointed. He and Molotov had regularly conspired at Central Committee meetings. Passing a message to Molotov, he ordered: ‘You’re going to make a speech – well, speak out as sharply as possible against Trotski!’ He added: ‘Rip up this note!’ A furious row followed between Molotov and Trotski, who knew that Molotov had been put up to it.10Lenin’s own health gave him trouble in 1921. He doubted Molotov’s ability to rein back Trotski in his absence. Lenin concluded that a firmer grip should be applied in the Party Orgburo and Secretariat.
It was in this atmosphere that Stalin’s candidature as Party General Secretary with Vyacheslav Molotov and Valeryan Kuibyshev as his Assistant Secretaries was informally canvassed at the Eleventh Party Congress in March–April 1922. Yevgeni Preobrazhenski, one of Trotski’s allies, saw what was coming. Taking the platform, he took exception to Stalin’s multiplicity of posts.11 Preobrazhenski was complaining about the way that Stalin was accumulating excessive central power; but above all he was arguing that someone with so many posts could not carry out all his functions effectively. At any rate there was no formal decision at the Congress about the General Secretaryship; and when the matter was discussed at the next Central Committee plenum, on 3 April, the complaint was made that Lenin and his close associates had preempted debate by agreeing to pick Stalin for the job. Apparently Lenin had written ‘General Secretary’ next to Stalin’s name in the list of candidates he put forward for election to the Central Committee.12 But Kamenev smoothed things over and Stalin’s appointment was confirmed on condition that he delegated much more to his deputies in the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate (or Rabkrin) and the Nationalities’ Affairs Commissariat. The party had to come first.13
Conventionally it has been supposed that Stalin was put in office because he was an experienced bureaucrat with an unusual capacity for not being bored by administrative work. The facts do not bear this out. He was an editor of Pravda in 1917 and a policy-making intimate of Lenin immediately after the October Revolution. He had spent most of the Civil War as a political commissar. He went on military campaign in Ukraine and Poland in 1920; and although he had posts in Moscow in the Party Orgburo, the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities’ Affairs and Rabkrin, he had never had much time to devote to them. What is more, Stalin was known for his restlessness when administrative meetings in the capital were dragged out. But of course he had to sit through a lot of them, as did Lenin, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Trotski and the other leaders. They headed a state that had yet to be consolidated. Unless they saw to implementation and supervision of administrative decisions as much as to the making of policy, the state would fall apart before it was made. The reason why Lenin chose Stalin was less administrative than political. He wanted one of his allies in a post crucial to the maintenance of his policies.
Lenin stressed that the General Secretaryship was not equivalent to the supreme party leadership and that the party had never had a chairman.14 He was being mealy-mouthed. What he meant was that he himself would remain the one dominant leader. Lenin and Stalin had fallen out many times before, during and after the October Revolution.15 This was the norm in the Central Committee. Lenin had confidence that he would not lose control of things.
Stalin agreed with the broad lines of the NEP. He did not see himself as a mere administrator and freely offered his opinions across the range of debates within the leadership; and, contrary to later depictions of him, his caution in foreign policy did not reconcile him to total abstention from taking risks abroad. Even after the Anglo-Soviet Treaty of March 1921, he favoured sending military instructors and supplies to Afghanistan with the objective of undermining the British Empire.16 He also continued to regard the new Baltic states – especially Latvia and Estonia – as territories illegitimately torn away from Russia ‘which enter our arsenal as integral elements vital for the restoration of Russia’s economy’.17 The idea is false that Stalin could hardly care less if the Soviet state remained permanently isolated. He accepted isolation as a fact of political and military life that could not yet be altered. In such a situation, he considered, it behoved the Politburo to get on with post-war reconstruction as best it could until such time as fresh revolutionary opportunities abroad arose. This remained his attitude in subsequent years.
But Stalin, like Lenin, wanted to avoid trouble for the foreseeable future. Lenin saw a chance for the Soviet state to come to an understanding with Germany. Talks among the European powers had been convened at Genoa in northern Italy. The RSFSR and Germany were treated as pariah states, and Lenin made overtures for a separate commercial treaty between them. This was duly signed at nearby Rapallo in April 1922. Both states had more in mind than mere trade. Germany, prevented by the Treaty of Versailles from rearming itself, arranged to test military equipment and train army units secretly on Soviet soil. Others in the Politburo, especially Zinoviev, were reluctant to accept that the ‘revolutionary upsurge’ had subsided in Europe. Despite the Treaty of Rapallo, the Comintern in 1923 at Zinoviev’s behest encouraged an armed rising against the German government on the sixth anniversary of the Bolshevik seizure of power in Petrograd. Stalin had nothing to do with such adventures.
Yet the working arrangement between Lenin and Stalin had already been put to an acute test. The occasion was the sudden deterioration in Lenin’s health on 25 May 1922, when he suffered a massive stroke while recuperating from surgery to remove a bullet lodged in his neck since the attempt on his life in August 1918. Lenin lost mobility on the right side of his body; he could not speak clearly and his mind was obviously confused. Groups of doctors, including well-rewarded specialists brought from Germany, consulted among themselves on the nature of Lenin’s illness. Opinion was divided. Among the possibilities considered were hereditary cardiac disease, syphilis, neurasthenia and even the effects of the recent operation on his neck. There were times when Lenin gave up hope entirely and thought his ‘song was sung’. But, helped by his wife Nadya and sister Maria Ulyanova, he pulled himself together psychologically. He welcomed visitors to keep abreast of public affairs.
As General Secretary, Stalin was the most frequent of these. He was not a friend. Lenin did not think highly of him outside their political relationship. He told Maria that Stalin was ‘not intelligent’. He also said Stalin was an ‘Asiatic’. Nor could Lenin abide the way Stalin chewed his pipe.18 Lenin was a fastidious man typical of his professional class; he expected comrades to behave with the politesse of the European middle class. He turned to the language of national superiority. Stalin was not merely a Georgian but an Oriental, a non-European and therefore an inferior. Lenin was unconscious of his prejudices: they emerged only when he was off his guard. These prejudices contributed to his failure until then to spot that Stalin might be a leading candidate to succeed him. When he thought of power in parties, Lenin had the tendency to assume that only those well grounded in doctrine stood much chance. He assumed that the sole figures worth consideration in any party were its theorists. The classic instance was his obsession with Karl Kautsky. Both before and during the Great War he overrated Kautsky’s influence over the German Marxist movement. Although Kautsky was an influential figure, he was very far from moulding the policies of the German Social-Democratic Party.19
At any rate Stalin was Lenin’s intermediary with the distant world of Kremlin politics while Lenin convalesced at the village of Gorki, twenty miles south of Moscow. When Stalin was set to arrive there for one of their conversations, Lenin would tell his sister Maria to fetch a bottle of decent wine for the guest. Stalin was a busy man; he needed to be treated properly. Maria had recently studied photography in order to catch Lenin on camera, and she snapped Stalin with him on one of his frequent visits.20 The two of them got along fine and sat out on the terrace for their discussions. There were a few matters that in other circumstances would have been resolved in Lenin’s favour at the Central Committee; his absence compelled him to entrust his cases to Stalin. But there was one request which caused Stalin much trepidation. Lenin before his stroke had asked Stalin to supply him with poison so that he might commit suicide if ever he became paralysed. He repeated the request on 30 May. Stalin left the room. Outside was Bukharin. The two of them consulted Maria. They agreed that Stalin, rather than refuse point-blank, should go back to Lenin and say that the doctors were offering an optimistic diagnosis which made suicide wholly inappropriate.21 The episode passed, and Stalin resumed his trips to keep Lenin up to date with politics in the capital.22
Lenin was a cantankerous patient and sought Stalin’s assistance in sacking those doctors who annoyed him:23
If you have left Klemperer here, then I at least recommend: 1) deporting him from Russia no later than Friday or Saturday together with Förster, 2) entrusting Ramonov together with Levin and others to use these German doctors and establishing surveillance over them.
Trotski praised Lenin’s ‘vigilance’, but – like the whole Politburo – he voted to reject the request. Eighty other leading Bolsheviks were being treated by the Germans. Deportation would have been a ludicrous measure.24 Lenin’s capriciousness grew. Exasperated by his comrades’ refusal to accede to his preferences on policy, he proposed a total reorganisation of the Central Committee. His preposterous suggestion was to sack most of its members. The veterans should be removed forthwith and replaced by Vyacheslav Molotov, Alexei Rykov and Valeryan Kuibyshev. Out, then, would go not only Stalin but also Trotski, Kamenev and Zinoviev.25
Lenin’s physical debility and political inactivity frustrated him. His tirades stemmed from irritation with what he heard about shifts in official policy. In each instance he found Stalin in disagreement with him. A dispute had been brewing about foreign trade since November 1921.26 Although Lenin had promoted the expansion of the private sector under the NEP, he drew the line at ending the state’s monopoly on commercial imports and exports. Others in the Central Committee, led by Finance Commissar Sokolnikov and supported by Stalin, regarded this as impractical. Sokolnikov had a point. The creaky state bureaucracy was incapable of pursuing all opportunities for trade abroad. The frontiers were not effectively sealed; smugglers were doing business unimpeded and untaxed by the authorities. If the purpose of the NEP was to regenerate the economy, then permission for a widening of the limits of legal private engagement in foreign trade would help. Lenin refused to listen. It had become an article of faith for him to turn the Soviet state into an economic fortress against infiltration by unsupervised influences from abroad.
Lenin had to seek friends outside his previous group. Sokolnikov was with him. Also strongly on his side was the People’s Commissar for Foreign Trade Lev Krasin; but Krasin carried little weight in the Party Central Committee. The most influential advocate of a position similar to Lenin’s was in fact the person who himself had argued that Lenin had removed too much state regulation from the running of the economy at home: Trotski.
The growing alliance of convenience between Lenin and Trotski came into existence only slowly. Suspicion persisted on both sides about current economic measures. But a second matter meanwhile unsettled Lenin’s relationship with Stalin in summer 1922 when the constitutional discussions about the future of the Soviet state came to a head. To Lenin it seemed crucial that the Soviet republics established since 1918 should be joined on equal terms in a federal structure. Formally, the impression had to be given that, although the state would be run from Moscow, the communist rulers rejected all tendencies of ‘Great Russian chauvinism’. The RSFSR, vast as it was, would be but one Soviet republic alongside the Soviet republics of Ukraine, Belorussia and the Transcaucasian Federation. Lenin wanted the new federal state to be called the Union of Soviet Republics of Europe and Asia. This had always been his goal. (He had explained this in his confidential correspondence with Stalin in mid-1920.)27 Lenin was not aiming to run down the influence of the Bolsheviks in the Comintern. But his medium-term objective was genuinely internationalist, and he thought that the name and structure of the projected federal state ought to mirror this.
Stalin, however, wished to expand the RSFSR over the entire territory held by Soviet republics and to provide Ukraine, Belorussia and the Transcaucasus with the same status as existing ‘autonomous republics’ of the RSFSR such as the Bashkirian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. The state would remain designated as the RSFSR. Stalin could argue that he was only proposing what the Bolsheviks had always said they would supply in their socialist state: ‘regional autonomy’. Lenin and Stalin had long asserted, since before the Great War, that this would be the party’s solution to the yearnings of the ‘national minorities’. Stalin wanted to prevent the Soviet republics from privileging those nations after which each such republic had been named. It was for this reason that he had proposed that the Soviet republics formed in Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia in 1920–1 should be gathered together in a Transcaucasian Federation within the RSFSR. This was his device to stop local nationalisms getting further out of hand as had happened in previous years. He regarded Lenin’s demand for a formal federal structure as having the potential to undermine the whole state order. With characteristic brusqueness he dismissed it as ‘liberalism’.
Stalin continued to plan for ‘autonomisation’. His associates Sergei Kirov and Sergo Ordzhonikidze successfully put pressure on the communist leaderships of Azerbaijan and Armenia to approve his scheme in September 1922. So did the Transcaucasian Regional Committee.28 But the Georgian Central Committee, which had always disliked the scheme and knew it would diminish its low popularity in Georgia still further, rejected it. There were also signs that the Ukrainian and Belorussian communist leaderships – and even, in its quiet way, the Armenian one – accepted it only with great reluctance.29 Stalin struck back, claiming that failure to follow his proposals would lead to a continuation of ‘sheer chaos’ in Soviet governmental affairs.30 He pushed the scheme through a commission of the Party Orgburo on 23 September.31 News of this reached Lenin, who spoke with Stalin directly on 26 September.32 Lenin insisted that changes should be made to the draft accepted by the Orgburo commission. He called for an abandonment of ‘autonomisa-tion’. Lenin again demanded a Union of Soviet Republics of Europe and Asia; he continued to insist that Russia (in the form of the RSFSR) should join this federation on an equal basis with the other Soviet republics.33
Lenin had got his information from Budu Mdivani and other Georgian communists. Stalin was losing his grip. Mdivani had previously been in his good books; it was Stalin who had arranged for him to become Chairman of the Georgian Revolutionary Committee in July 1921 instead of Stalin’s internal party critic Pilipe Makharadze.34 Lenin began to take the side of the Georgian communist leaders when they disagreed with Stalin. Yet Lenin did not go all the way with Mdivani. He still supported Stalin on the need for a Transcaucasian Federation as a device to damp down the manifestations of nationalisms in the south Caucasus; and Stalin, from his side, retracted his demand for the RSFSR to ‘autonomise’ the other Soviet republics. He did this reluctantly: when Kamenev advised compromise, he replied: ‘What is required, in my view, is firmness against Ilich.’ Kamenev, who knew his Lenin, demurred and argued that this would merely make matters worse. Stalin at last conceded to Kamenev: ‘I don’t know. Let him do as he thinks sensible.’35 The agreed name of the state was to be the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (or USSR). Stalin did not like the idea but he ceased to raise objections.
He had cause to feel let down by Lenin. The matters dividing them were not of primary importance despite what was said by Lenin at the time (and despite what was written by historians ever after).36 Stalin and Lenin agreed about basic politics. Neither questioned the desirability of the one-party state, its ideological monopoly or its right to use dictatorial and terrorist methods. They concurred on the provisional need for the NEP. They had also reached an implicit agreement that Stalin had an important job in the central party apparatus to block the advance of the Trotskyists and tighten the whole administrative order. Lenin had trusted him with such tasks. Stalin had also been the comrade in whom he had confided when he wanted to commit suicide. Whenever toughness or underhandedness was needed, Lenin had turned to him. Not once had there been a question of basic principle dividing them, and they had worked well together since the trade union dispute. Lenin had been behaving bizarrely in summer 1922 before he fell out with Stalin. But it was Stalin who had to deal with him. His difficulties with Lenin would have tested the patience of a saint.
Their quarrels about Georgia and about the state monopoly of foreign trade touched matters of secondary importance. Lenin was not demanding independence for Georgia; his pleas on behalf of Georgian communists related to the degree of autonomy they should be permitted: it was almost a dispute about political cosmetics. Stalin also had a reasonable case that the Georgian communist regime had been far from even-handed in its treatment of the non-Georgians. The Transcaucasian Federation was a plausible scheme to prevent national oppression in Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. The foreign trade dispute, too, was nowhere near as clear-cut as Lenin claimed. The state monopoly had failed to thwart the growth of smuggling and currency speculation; and Stalin and his supporters had a point that this led to a loss of state revenues. Yet although Stalin resented Lenin’s intervention, he could not stop the Old Man of Bolshevism carrying on as he liked to the extent that his physical condition permitted.