FROM LENIN TO STALIN

FROM LENIN TO STALIN Like Roman Catholicism, the religion of Leninism logically leads to the worship of one man as the infallible incarnation of the one truth. The truth is History, the vanguard of History is the Party, and the leader of the Party is the one true interpreter of its Will. All those who oppose him are deviants who miss the mark, being consigned, in Trotsky’s phrase, “to the dustbin of History”. Although this teaching had always been implicit in Leninism, and although the Tenth Congress in 1921 had gone a long way, through its banning of all factionalism, to prepare the way for its universal acceptance, it was not until the rise of Stalin as dictator that it was impressed upon the hearts as well as the minds of the Bolshevik faithful. For before that time, while Lenin was the undisputed vozhd’, it was not clear whether there could be Leninism without Lenin. After his death from a brain haemorrhage in January, 1924, the answer was clear: just as there can be no Catholicism without the Pope, so there can be no Leninism without Lenin, and the new Lenin was Stalin. For, as Pravda wrote in January, 1934: Now when we speak of Lenin, / It means we are speaking of Stalin. Alan Bullock, Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives, London, 1991, p. 413. By that time Stalin’s cult of personality, his elevation to equality (at least) with Lenin, was well-established. But, as Ian Kershaw writes, it “had to be built carefully. This was not just because the man himself was so physically unprepossessing – diminutive and squat, his face dominated by a big walrus moustache and heavily pitted from smallpox – or that he was a secretive, intensely private individual, who spoke in a quiet, undemonstrative voice, his Russian couched in a strong Georgian accent that never left him. The real problem was the giant shadow of Lenin. Stalin could not be seen to be usurping the legendary image of the great Bolshevik hero and leader of the revolution. So at first Stalin trod cautiously. The celebration for his fiftieth birthday in December 1929 brought public eulogies. But the cult was still in its embryonic stages. Stalin professed modesty, publicly disowning attempts to put him on a pedestal with Lenin, and disavowed expressions of personalized devotion. It was no more than a front. Tacitly, he allowed his own elevation – amid outright falsification of his role during the revolution, in reality a fairly minor one – first to equal status with Lenin in a. sort of dual cult, then to outright supremacy. “Untold numbers of minions, time-servers and sycophants rushed to embellish in myriad ways the heroic image of the ‘people’s leader’. By 1935 there were more than twice as many busts and images of Stalin to be seen in central Moscow than of Lenin. And by now Stalin, no notable philosopher of Marxism, had been elevated into its preeminent theorist, his works published in numbers far exceeding those of Marx and Engels, greater even than those of Lenin. When Stalin made a relatively rare public appearance, dressed as usual in his dull party tunic, at a Moscow congress in 1935, the frenetic applause by over 2,000 delegates lasted fifteen minutes. As it finally subsided, a woman shouted out ‘Glory to Stalin’, and it all began again…” Kershaw, To Hell and Back. Europe 1914-1949, London: Penguin, 2015, p. 269. How did it come to that? How did perhaps the most evil and murderous tyrant in history come to rule over the home of Holy Russia, “the Israel of God”, the largest concentration of truly believing Christians in history? * Stalin’s colleagues, writes Piers Brendon, “had long been aware of his brutal propensities. The first head of the Cheka secret police, Felix Dzerzhinsky, took the job because otherwise it would have fallen to Stalin and ‘he would nurse the baby with blood alone’. But throughout the 1920s Stalin had risen by guile more than force. He was secretive and self-sufficient and he had a memory like a machine. A supreme bureaucrat, nicknamed ‘Comrade Card-index’, he had climbed to power through committees. As General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, he had outmanoeuvred his rivals one by one. He had defeated Lev Kamenev, who called him a ‘ferocious savage’, and Grigori Zinoviev, who described him as a ‘bloodthirsty Ossetian’ with ‘no idea of the meaning of conscience’. He had exiled the inspiring Trotsky, who denounced him as ‘the grave-digger of the proletarian revolution’. He had isolated the intellectual Bukharin, who regarded him as a ‘debased Genghis Khan’. By 1929 Stalin had established what Trotsky called ‘the dictatorship of the secretariat’. He was thus able to initiate a revolution more far-reaching than Lenin’s…” Brendon, The Dark Valley, London: Pimlico, 2001, p. 197. The rise to power of Stalin over the whole of Russia is one of the mysteries of Soviet history. Why should it have been the plodding, proletarian Stalin, and not Trotsky, the hero of 1905, of October and the Civil War, the brilliant writer and demagogue, the dynamic, cultivated and popular European internationalist, who conquered in their famous struggle for power in the 1920s? How did Stalin, the most undistinguished of the leading Bolsheviks from an intellectual point of view, the uncharismatic bureaucrat, the non-Russian, non-Slav, non-European ex-seminarian and bank robber, acquire, within ten years of the revolution, such ascendancy over the party and the nation? As a provisional hypothesis to explain this fact we may apply to the Soviet situation the words of the ancient Greek historian Thucydides in his History of the Peloponnesian War: “Inferior minds were as a rule more successful; aware of their own defects and of the intelligence of their opponents, to whom they felt themselves inferior in debate, and by whose versatility of intrigue they were afraid of being surprised, they struck boldly and at once. Their enemies despised them, were confident of detecting their plots, and thought it needless to effect by violence what they could achieve by their brains, and so were caught off guard and destroyed.” In agreement with this hypothesis, there is plenty of evidence that Trotsky grossly underestimated Stalin, “the outstanding mediocrity of our Party”, as he said to Sklyansky. Boris Bazhanov, Stalin’s secretary during the mid-twenties, confirms Isaac Deutscher’s opinion that “Trotsky felt it beneath his dignity to cross swords with a man as intellectually undistinguished and personally contemptible as Stalin.” Bazhanov, “Stalin Closely Observed”, in G. Urban (ed.), Stalinism, Maurice Temple Smith, 1982; Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky: 1929-1940, Oxford University Press, 1963. Trotsky refused to indulge in the kind of political skulduggery that Stalin excelled in, especially the tactic of “divide and conquer”. Stalin’s very obscurity, the stealthy but steady way in which he acquired power, lulled his opponents into inactivity. Trotsky was like a hare, opening up a large lead very quickly but then sitting back and preening his whiskers, while Stalin the tortoise crept past him to the finishing-line. And indeed, we know that he was vain and arrogant, “treasuring his historic role”, in Lunacharsky’s words, in the looking-glass of his imagination. For, already in his teens, Trotsky had manifested this besetting weakness. “The fundamental essence of Bronstein’s personality,” explained G.A. Ziv, who knew him then, “was to demonstrate his will, to tower above everyone, everywhere and always to be first.” Kotkin, Stalin, vol. I, p. 201. Only to Lenin did he concede precedence (and that only from the summer of 1917 – before that, he had been a fierce critic of him). Stalin, too, was vain, but he hid this fault more carefully… In any case, Stalin was far more talented than Trotsky supposed. He was a skilled and tenacious guerrilla fighter, bank-robber and organizer in the pre-revolutionary period; and during his numerous exiles and escapes from exile he acquired endurance, prudence and ingenuity. The Western leaders and diplomats who met him in the Second World War admired his toughness, realism and cleverness – sometimes even his supposed moral qualities! Jonathan Fenby, Alliance, London: Pocket Books, 2006, p. 16. And he outmanoeuvred them time and again… He was a good judge of character, and could be attractive, strange as it may seem, to women, without ever being controlled by them. He knew several languages, had a fine voice, composed poetry, liked to instruct people in art and music, and read voraciously. According to Richard Overy, “in the 1930s his library counted 40,000 volumes. He wrote extensively both before 1917 and in the 1920s, works and speeches that ran to thirteen volumes when they were published” (The Dictators, London, p. 9). In the opinion of the diplomat-defector Fyodor Raskolnikov, Stalin’s “fundamental trait” was a “superhuman strength of will” that “suffocates, destroys the individuality of people who come under his influence”. Kotkin, Stalin, vol. II, London: Penguin, 2018, p. 709. At the same time, if he judged that imposing his will was not good politics, he could take the slower, gentler method of patient persuasion, even making concessions to his opponent. That, for example, is what he tried to with the stubborn Finns in 1939, invading their land only when persuasion failed. He could not match Trotsky in oratory, and yet this, too, he turned to his advantage, since it marked him out as a genuine proletarian, which Trotsky certainly was not: in the eyes of rough Bolsheviks from the provinces, writes Sebastian Sebag Montefiore, “his flat quiet public speaking was an asset, a great improvement on Trotsky’s oratorical wizardry. His very faults, the chip on the shoulder, the brutality and fits of irrational temper, were the Party’s faults. ‘He was not trusted but he was the man the Party trusted,’ admitted Bukharin. ‘He’s like the symbol of the Party, the lower strata trust him.’ But above all, reflected the future secret police chief, Beria, he was ‘supremely intelligent’, a political ‘genius’. However rude or charming he was, ‘he dominated his entourage with his intelligence’.” Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, London: Phoenix, 2004, p. 50. In fact, Trotsky was more impressed by Stalin than he liked to admit, and foresaw his triumph earlier than most. As Norman Davies writes, “Trotsky saw it coming: in 1924 he was correctly predicting that ‘the gravedigger of the Party of the Revolution’ would take over: ‘The dialectics of history have already hooked him and will raise him up. He is needed by all of them, by the tired radicals, by the bureaucrats, by the nepmen, by the kulaks [!], by the upstarts, by all the sneaks that are crawling out of the upturned soil of the revolution… He speaks their language, and knows how to lead them. Stalin will become the dictator of the USSR…” Davies, Europe, London: Pimlico, 1997, p. 960. As Montefiore writes: “Stalin impressed Trotsky, whose description reveals why he lost their struggle for power. ‘Stalin was very valuable behind the scenes,’ he wrote. ‘He did have the knack of convincing the average run of leaders, especially the provincials.’ He ‘wasn’t regarded as the official leader of the Party,’ says Sagirashvili, another Georgian Menshevik in Petrograd throughout 1917, but ‘everyone listened to what he had to say, including Lenin – he was a representative of the rank and file, one who expressed its real views and moods’, which were unknown to émigrés like Trotsky. Soso [Stalin] was the ‘unquestioned leader’ of the Caucasians. Lenin, says Sagirashvili, ‘felt that behind him stood countless leaders from the provinces’. While Trotsky was prancing on the stage at the Circus, Stalin was finding new allies such as the young man he had unceremoniously kicked off the Bureau, Molotov.” Montefiore, Young Stalin, London: Phoenix, 2007, pp. 333-334. There was another aspect to Trotsky’s vanity that placed him at a disadvantage in relation to Stalin. As Edmund Wilson has shown, Trotsky was a deeply committed believer in History, and in the ultimate triumph of international Socialism under History’s aegis. Wilson, To the Finland Station, London: Fontana, 1940. But it was self-evident to him that such a great movement must have great leaders – educated, internationally minded men who had absorbed all the riches of bourgeois culture, decisive men of action who would jump to the forefront of the masses and be immediately accepted by them. Lenin fitted this role, which is why Trotsky, from August, 1917 onward, accepted his leadership unquestioningly. But Stalin, the uncouth Asiatic, did not fit this role. Trotsky could not see how History could anoint him, of all people, to be the leader of the revolutionary movement. Perhaps this betrayed a certain lack of culture and historical acumen on Trotsky’s part. After all, the ultimate victor in the great French revolution was the provincial, Napoleon. Stalin, too, was a provincial – and he had studied Napoleon… Trotsky’s fanatical faith in History as a kind of substitute for God (he once spoke of “the great grace of History”) was indeed a major bonus at those moments when History seemed to be at her most active – in 1905 and 1917-21. Bertram Wolff, Three Who Made a Revolution. At such times fiery ardour, disregard of obstacles and the infirmities of men, firm faith in the goal and hope in its attainment, are at a premium. And these were the times when the plodding, cautious Stalin did not shine – although he did not lose ground, either. But in the ebb of revolutionary fervour, when History seemed to have hidden her face from her devotees, different qualities were required – patience above all, but also hard, detailed, unglamorous work. These were qualities possessed by Stalin, and these were the years – 1906-16 and 1921-27 – when he advanced most rapidly up the ladder of power. Moreover, he continued to show faith in his goddess even in the most difficult times, as during his Siberian exile during the First World War. “Even this fanatical Marxist,” writes Montefiore, “convinced that the progress of history would bring about revolution and dictatorship of the proletariat, must have sometimes doubted if he would ever return. Even Lenin doubted the Revolution, asking Krupskaya, ‘Will we ever live to see it?’ Yet Stalin never seems to have lost faith. ‘The Russian Revolution is as inevitable as the rising of the sun,’ he had written back in 1905 and he had not changed his view. ‘Can you prevent the sun from rising?’” Montefiore, Young Stalin, p. 305. In 1919 the Central Committee created the “Orgburo” (Organizational Bureau) “to manage the apparatus under Stalin’s command. Hence, even before becoming General Secretary in [April] 1922, Stalin controlled major appointments, including those of provincial party secretaries; Orlando Figes writes: “During 1922 alone more than 10,000 provincial officials were appointed by the Orgburo and the Secretariat” (Revolutionary Russia, 1891-1991, London: Pelican, 2014, p. 173). (V.M.) he thereby shaped the composition of party conferences and congresses, a crucial asset in the power struggle of the 1920s. Stalin was also the head of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate (Rabkrin), another organ of paramount influence.” Daniel T. Orlovsky, “Russia in War and Revolution 1914-1921”, in Gregory L. Frazee (ed.). Russia. A History, Oxford University Press, 2019, pp. 294-295. From 1922, when Lenin and Kamenev engineered Stalin’s appointment to the powerful post of General Secretary The attainment of this post was the critical step in Stalin’s career. It meant, as Niall Ferguson explains, that “As the only person with positions on all three of the most powerful Party institutions – the politburo, orgburo and secretariat – and, as the apparatchik with by far the largest staff, Stalin set about establishing his control by a combination of administrative rigour and personal deviousness. He quickly established his loyalties in the localities and, crucially, in the secret police. He developed the list of senior functionaries known as the nomenklatura so that (as he told the Twelfth Party Congress in April 1923) ‘people who occupy these position are capable of implementing directives, comprehending those directive, accepting those directives as their own and bringing them to life’ The business directorate gave him power over much more than just officials’ expenses; its ‘secret department’, hidden behind steel doors, became an agency for intra-party denunciation and investigations. And the government phone system – the vertutshka – and telegram cipher unit gave him control over communications, including the power to eavesdrop on others” (The Square and the Tower, London: Penguin, 2018, p. 228)., Trotsky frittered away the enormous advantage given him by his reputation as a war-leader by refusing to build up a political power-base, or appeal to the mass of the party against the growing centralization of power in the Politburo, or in any way to pander to the vanities and jealous susceptibilities of his colleagues. Thus he elicited their contempt by pointedly reading French novels while the Politburo was in session. Through his arrogance, Trotsky made enemies easily – and one of the first was Stalin. Thus when, at the London Congress of 1907, Trotsky attacked the bank robberies that Stalin had organized on Lenin’s behalf, Stalin was hurt, later talking about Trotsky’s “beautiful uselessness”. Trotsky again embittered Stalin by justly attacking his conduct at Tsaritsyn (later Stalingrad) in 1918 during the Civil War. Unfortunately for Trotsky, Stalin’s nature was not such as could shrug off personal insults. He was a bully; but, as Robert Service puts it, “he was an extremely sensitive bully”. Service, Stalin, London: Pan, p. 247. And that gave him the defining trait of his nature: vengefulness. Thus “at a boozy dinner, Kamenev asked everyone round the table to declare their greatest pleasure in life. Some cited women, others earnestly replied that it was the progress of dialectical materialism towards the workers’ paradise. Then Stalin answered: ‘My greatest pleasure is to choose one’s victim, prepare one’s plans minutely, slake an implacable vengeance, and then go to bed. There’s nothing sweeter in the world.’…” Montefiore, Young Stalin, p. 309. This cynical vengefulness is the critical element in Stalin’s character, the element that truly distinguishes him from his colleagues. Not that vengefulness was not characteristic of the whole revolutionary movement. But Stalin possessed it to a quite exceptional degree. It appeared early in his life. He felt vengeful towards his father, who use to beat him. Again, Vershak writes: “Stalin’s comrades in the seminary circle say that soon after his expulsion [from Tiflis seminary], they were in turn expelled as the result of a denunciation by Stalin to the rector. He did not deny the accusation, but justified the deed by saying that the expelled students, having lost their right to become priests, would become good revolutionaries…” Again, in 1930 the Georgian Menshevik newspaper, Brdzolis Khhma, wrote: “From the earliest days of his activity among the workers, Djugashvili [Stalin] attracted attention by his intrigues against the outstanding Social Democratic leader, Sylvester Jibladze. He was warned but took no notice, continuing to spread slanders with the intention of discrediting the recognized representative of the local organization. Brought before a party tribunal, he was found guilty of unjust slander, and was unanimously excluded from the Tiflis organization.” Again, Iremashvili relates what Stalin said to him on the death of his first wife, Ekaterina: “This creature softened my stony heart. She is dead, and with her have died my last warm feelings for all human beings.” Iremashvili comments: “From the day he buried his wife, he indeed lost the last vestige of human feelings. His heart filled with the unutterably malicious hatred which his cruel father had already begun to engender in him while he was still a child. Ruthless with himself, he became ruthless with all people.” One should not discount the importance attached to the death of Stalin’s first wife. It was after the death of Tsar Ivan IV’s first wife, Anastasia Romanova, that he became “the Terrible”, cruel and rapacious. Ivan’s decimation of the boyars through his oprichnina in the 16th century bears a striking resemblance to Stalin’s of the Communist Party through the NKVD in the 1930s; and Stalin showed great interest in the Terrible Ivan. In the period 1923-26 Stalin and his cronies churned out endless propaganda against Trotsky, while the Opposition of Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev proved itself inept and divided. Indeed, it was not their ineffective opposition, but, Lenin’s Testament with its expressed plea that Stalin be removed as organizational secretary, that most disturbed the budding dictator. Several times he offered to resign, but each time the Central Committee, packed with his stooges, refused his request. For these years we have the invaluable testimony of Bazhanov, a secretary of the Politburo. He said that Stalin’s sole concern during this period “was to outwit his colleagues and lay his hands on the reins of unrestricted power”. He accused Stalin of murdering Frunze and Sklyansky. “It was clear to me already in those early years that Stalin was a vindictive Asiatic, with fear, suspicion and revenge deeply embedded in his soul. I could tell from everything he said and left unsaid, his tastes, preferences and demeanour, that he would recoil from nothing, drive every issue to its absurd extreme and send men to their deaths without hesitation if they stood in his way.” Bazhanov considers Trotsky to have been potentially as ruthless as Stalin. But there was an important difference between the two kinds of ruthlessness. Trotsky’s was not a personally directed emotion but a kind of impersonal passion stemming directly from his faith in the revolution. As David Deutscher said (perhaps over-generously): “His judgement remained unclouded by any personal emotion against Stalin, and severely objective.” Stalin, on the other hand, had the great advantage of really hating his opponent. Deutscher suggests that Stalin must have had “better qualities and emotions, such as intellectual ambition and a degree of sympathy with the oppressed, without which no young man would ever join a persecuted revolutionary party” Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast, p. 455.. But he produces no evidence in support of this dubious statement. And even he had to admit that Stalin’s betrayal of the Warsaw rising in 1944 could have been motivated, not by political expediency, but by nothing else than “that unscrupulous rancour and insensible spite of which he had given so much proof in the great purges”. Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography, Oxford University Press, 1949, p. 524. This spite may have been linked with the defeat that the Poles inflicted on the Red Army near Warsaw in 1920, for which Stalin bore some responsibility. But hatred and ambition, without intelligence, accomplishes little. And here we must revise the simplistic notion that Trotsky was intelligent and Stalin stupid. Kotkin sums up Stalin’s “stupidity” well: “Stalin emerged as a leader of acute political intelligence and bottomless personal resentment… “His demonic disposition, which the experience of this kind of rule in this place heightened, never overwhelmed his ability to function at the highest level. Physically, he continued to suffer from frequent bouts of flue and fever, stomach ailments, dental problems, and severe pain in his joints, but he proved hearty enough to be a hands-on ruler of one-sixth of the earth’s surface. His capacity to work was prodigious, his zeal for detail unquenchable. He received 100 or even 200 documents a day, some of substantial length, and he read many of them, often to the end, scribbling comments or instructions on them. He initiated or approved untold personnel appointments, goaded minions in relentless campaigns, attended myriad congresses and ceremonies bearing the burden of instruction, assiduously followed the public and private statements of cultural figures, edited novels and plays, and prescreened films. He pored over a voluminous flow of intelligence reports and lengthy interrogation protocols of accused spies, wreckers, counterrevolutionaries, traitors. He wrote and rewrote the texts of decrees, newspaper editorials, and his own speeches, confident in his own abilities. Very occasionally he made grammatical mistakes in Russian, his second language, but he wrote accessibly, using rhetorical questions, catchphrases, enumeration. The fools were the ones who took him for a fool…” Kotkin, Stalin. Waiting for Hitler. 1929-1941, London: Penguin, 2018, p. 303. As for Trotsky, he was indeed a brilliant intellectual, one of the most acute judges of the national and international scene, not only in politics but also in culture. Not for nothing did Deutscher call him a “prophet”. But he had his weaknesses apart from the vanity that we have already mentioned. Bazhanov says that he was naïve with the naïveté that comes from fanaticism. Lunacharsky said that he was a bad organizer. These two faults were linked to a third, which may be called a kind of stupidity: his blindly optimistic faith in the infallibility of the party. As he wrote to Zinoviev: “The party in the last analysis is always right, because the party is the single historic instrument given to the proletariat for the solution of its fundamental problems… I know that one must not be right against the party.” It was because of this faith in the party – and in Lenin – that Trotsky accepted the ban on factionalism at the Tenth Party Congress in 1921 and refrained from any anti-Stalinist activity that might have been interpreted as factionalist, leaving the field open to Stalin’s faction. And yet he understood better than anybody what this “egocentralist” restriction of free speech within the party would lead to. (At the Thirteenth Party Congress in January 1924 Stalin used it to try to expel Trotsky from the Central Committee.) As he had declared several years earlier: “The organization of the party takes the place of the party itself; the Central Committee takes the place of the organization; and finally the dictator takes the place of the Central Committee.” Why, then, did he not protest when he saw Stalin attaining supreme power by precisely these means, using his position as General Secretary to fill the party with men loyal to himself alone? Partly because, as we have seen, he underestimated Stalin. And partly because, after Lenin’s death in 1924, he did not want to appear to be stepping too eagerly into Lenin’s shoes. But mainly because he simply trusted in the Party to get it right in the long run. Stalin also believed in the Party. But the Party would become his own creation, and so be manipulated by him… The Party was always right because Stalin was always right… This attitude of Trotsky’s persisted for a long time, even after he had been expelled from the country and the horrors of the First Five-Year-Plan had revealed the extent of Stalin’s “bureaucratic collectivist” heresy. As late as October, 1932, Trotsky refused to support a “Remove Stalin!” slogan because it might encourage counter-revolution. Instead, he proposed the formation of a Fourth International opposed to the Stalin-controlled Comintern – but only after Hitler (aided by the Comintern’s refusal to form a Popular Front with the other left-wing parties) had come to power in Germany. Even then he said that this new International should have jurisdiction only up to, but not beyond, the frontiers of the USSR. And it was only in October, 1933 that he declared that the Opposition should constitute a new party against the Bolshevik party within the country. Indeed, it was not until the later 1930s that Trotsky began, in a letter to Angelica Balabanov, to rebel both against the Party and History herself: “History has to be taken as she is; but when she allows herself such extraordinary and filthy outrages [Stalin’s show-trials], one must fight back at her with one’s fists…” Stalin had no such ideological scruples, no agonies of a revolutionary conscience. He was clever enough to become a follower of Lenin as early as 1903 and to stick to him, in spite of some disagreements, right up to the revolution. Not that he loved Lenin – he was delighted at the news of Lenin’s death, according to Bazhanov, whereas Trotsky fainted for two hours, according to Krupskaya. Nor was he a consistent Leninist thereafter, for all his propaganda to the contrary – Stalin’s career covers the most extraordinary range between extreme communism to near-convergence with capitalism, from strident Russian nationalism to the purest internationalism, from world revolutionary to “socialism in one country”. What mattered to him was not ideological purity, but power; and while he did not underestimate the importance of ideology in the attainment and maintenance of power – in this respect Lenin trained him well, - he never mistook the means for the end. Thus he paid attention to organization and to the shifting patterns of alliances within the party. He did not wear his heart on his sleeve, and was capable of the most studied hypocrisy in the manner of Shakespeare’s Iago or Richard III. In October, 1917 Trotsky had impetuously condemned Zinoviev and Kamenev “to the dustbin of history” for their refusal to back Lenin’s call for an immediate putsch; but Stalin held his fire. Thus he was able to use Zinoviev and Kamenev against Trotsky, and then, when his own power base had been established, destroy all three of them. This combination of hatred with prudence, cunning with caution, made him a formidable politician. Other objective aspects of the political situation in the mid-twenties favoured Stalin against Trotsky. Stalin’s discovery (with Bukharin) of the slogan “Socialism in One Country” answered to the country’s pride in itself, its weariness with the failure of European revolution and its longing for stability. The fact that Stalin later stole so many pages out of Trotsky’s book – his emphasis on rapid industrialization, on militarization of the unions and on discipline within the party – does not contradict this thesis. In the early twenties, when Trotsky proposed these policies, the time was not yet ripe for their implementation; whereas in the late twenties and early thirties, when the New Economic Policy had run into the sands and political power was concentrated exclusively in Stalin’s hands, they could be embarked upon with some prospect of success – according to Stalin’s criteria, that is. Have we then succeeded in explaining why Stalin triumphed over Trotsky? Can we say that Stalin’s greater hatred, cunning, prudence and organizational ability, on the one hand, and Trotsky’s vanity, naiveté, on the other, were bound to lead to Stalin’s triumph in the conditions of ideological cooling-off and party sclerosis that prevailed in the mid-1920s? No, because the factors mentioned above do not help us to understand the extraordinary drama that took place over Lenin’s will in the critical years 1922-24, when Stalin was very nearly catapulted from power, and in which it is difficult not to see another, metaphysical factor entering into the situation… * In April, 1922 Stalin became General Secretary, the critical platform for his rise to supreme power. In May, Lenin suffered his first stroke, thereby removing the main obstacle to Stalin’s exploiting the secretariat in his personal bid for power. Then, during the autumn, while he was slowly recovering from his stroke, Lenin fell out for the first time with the man whom, in 1913, he had called “the wonderful Georgian”. The quarrel seems to have been initially over Georgia, which the Second Army, on instructions from Stalin, had invaded in 1921. Contrary to Stalin, Ordzhonikidze and Dzerzhinsky, but in agreement with Mdvani Makharadze and others, Lenin believed that Georgia, like other autonomous, non-Russian regions, should have the right of secession from the Union because, as Figes writes, “he thought they would want to be part of the Soviet federation in any case. As he saw it, the revolution trumped all national interests. “Stalin’s plans were bitterly opposed by the Georgian Bolsheviks, whose power base depended on their having gained a measure of autonomy from Moscow for their country. The entire Central Committee of the Georgian Communist Party resigned in protest against Stalin’s policy. Lenin intervened. He was outraged when he learned [from Dzerzhinsky] that in an argument Sergo Ordzhonikidze, the head of Moscow’s Caucasian Bureau and Stalin’s close ally, had beaten up a Georgian Bolshevik. It made him see Stalin and his Georgian base in a different light. In his notes for the Congress Lenin called Stalin a ‘rascal and a tyrant’ who would only bully and subjugate small nations, whereas what was need was ‘profound caution, sensitivity, and a readiness to compromise’ with their legitimate national aspirations, especially if the Soviet Union was not to become a new empire and was to pose as a friend and liberator of the oppressed nations in the colonial world. “Because of Lenin’s illness, Stalin got his way. The founding treaty of the Soviet Union was basically centralist in character, allowing the republics to develop cultural forms of ‘nationhood’ within a political framework set by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in Moscow. The Politburo purged the Georgian Bolsheviks as ‘national deviationists’ – a label Stalin would use against many leaders in the non-Russian regions in the years to come…” Figes, op. cit., p. 175. “Seeking for an ally,” writes Alan Bullock, “Lenin turned to Trotsky. Twice in the course of 1922 he had urged Trotsky to accept the post of a deputy chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, and twice Trotsky had refused, failing to see the opportunity Lenin was offering him to establish his political position as first among his deputies. In December, however, when Lenin opposed a move by Stalin to relax the government’s monopoly of foreign trade, he was delighted to find that Trotsky was willing to put his views to the Central Committee, and even more delighted when the committee was persuaded to reverse its original decision. ‘We have captured the position without a fight,’ he wrote. ‘I propose that we do not stop but press on with the attack.’ In a private talk with Trotsky Lenin renewed his offer of the post of deputy chairman and declared he was ready to form a bloc to fight bureaucratism in both the state and the party. A few days later, however, Lenin suffered his second stroke and nothing more came of a proposal which could have had far-reaching consequences for Stalin.” Bullock, op. cit., p. 131. On March 4, there appeared in Pravda a blistering attack by Lenin on Stalin’s work as Commissar of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate. Deutscher wrote: “This was Lenin’s first, publicly delivered blow. Behind the scenes he prepared for a final attack at the twelfth party congress, convened for April; and he agreed with Trotsky on joint action. On 5 March, the day after Pravda had at last published his criticisms of Stalin’s Commissariat, he had a sharp exchange with Stalin. He then dictated a brief letter to Stalin, telling him that he ‘broke off’ all personal relations with him. The next day, 6 March, he wired a message to the leaders of the Georgian opposition, promising to take up their case at the congress: ‘I am with you in this matter with all my heart. I am outraged by the arrogance of Ordzhonikidze and the connivance of Stalin and Dzerzhinsky.’ He again communicated with Trotsky about their joint tactics in the Georgian business; and he briefed Kamenev who was to depart for Tiflis with a special commission of inquiry. Just in the middle of all these moves, on 9 March, he suffered the third attack of his illness, from which he was not to recover…” Deutscher, Stalin, pp. 252-253. With Lenin hors de combat, the scene was set for a battle royal between Stalin and Trotsky at the 12th Party Congress in April, 1923. Before the Congress, Stalin had used his powers as party secretary to conduct a cull of Trotsky’s supporters from the Central Committee. Kotkin, Stalin, vol. I, p. 495. Although Trotsky still had important supporters (notably Radek and Bukharin), he made the mistake of attacking the NEP, which Lenin had introduced. Even if many of the Communist leaders (including Stalin) agreed with him on this, it was not a politic thing to say at that time. On delivering the speech, he immediately left the hall… This was Stalin’s chance. He delivered a speech on nationalities, in which he, too, criticized Lenin – but much more subtly and respectfully. Stalin accurately demonstrated that, in spite of the recent Georgian crisis, Lenin had always been a centralizer-federalist at heart – which was just as well, because the creation of the federal USSR had just been agreed on at the recent plenum (which Lenin had not been able to attend). Moreover, Lenin stood for a single, integrated economy among all the republics. So “for Lenin the national question is a question subordinated to a higher question – the workers’ question.” The vast majority of the delegates lined up behind Stalin, to thunderous applause. Stalin had pulled off an amazing victory: while actually opposing Lenin, he had successfully made himself out to be the true disciple of Lenin. And so at the new elections to the Central Committee, ”Trotsky came in thirty-fifth place in the total number of positive votes, as opposed to second, where he had stood in the elections at the previous Party Congress. Kamenev came in twenty-fourth, Zinoviev thirty-second, and Stalin tied for first (384 votes out of 386) with Lenin…” Kotkin, Stalin, vol. I, p. 497. Stalin had emerged as Lenin’s likely successor… But then a most unexpected bolt came out of the blue. In late May, 1923, Lenin’s wife Krupskaya “bought forth a very short document purporting to be dictation from Lenin. She handed it to Zinoviev, with whom she had developed close relations dating back to the emigration in Switzerland. [Another secretary] Volodicheva, again, was said to have taken the dictation, over several sessions, recorded on December 24-25, 1922. But the purported dictation had not been registered in the documents journal in Lenin’s secretariat. It was a typescript; no shorthand or stenographic originals can be found in the archives. Lenin had not initiated the typescript, not even with his unparalyzed left hand. According to Trotsky, the typescript had no title. Later, title would be affixed – Lenin’s Testament or “Letter to the Congress’ – and an elaborate mythology would be concocted about how the dictation had been placed in a wax-sealed envelope with Lenin’s instructions that it be opened only after his death. Of course, Krupskaya had given the document to Zinoviev while Lenin was still alive… “These were extraordinary pieces of paper, consisting of barbed evaluations of six people. (When Stalin was handed and read the dictation, he is said to have exclaimed of Lenin: ‘He shit on himself and he shit on us!’” Kotkin, Stalin, vol. I, p. 498. Commenting on each member of the Politburo in the Testament, Lenin wrote (supposedly): “Comrade Trotsky, as his fight against the Central Committee in connection with the issue of the people’s commissariat of railways, is distinguished by the highest qualities. He is personally perhaps the most able man in the present Central Committee, but he has displayed excessive self-assurance and shown excessive preoccupation with the purely administrative side of matters.” Of Stalin he wrote: “Comrade Stalin, having become General Secretary, has concentrated enormous power in his hands; and I am not sure that he always knows how to use that power with sufficient caution… “I think that the hastiness and administrative clumsiness of Stalin played a fatal role here [in Georgia], and also his spite against the notorious ‘social chauvinism’. Spite in general plays the worst possible role in politics…” Fairly mild criticism, perhaps (for Lenin). But a quarrel between Stalin and Krupskaya had led to a significant hardening in Lenin’s attitude in the few months remaining to him. It appears that the Politburo had banned Lenin from working more than ten minutes a day, a restriction which it was Stalin’s responsibility to enforce. This led to the quarrel with Krupskaya and then with Lenin himself. “Stalin’s row with Lenin’s wife,” writes Sebag Montefiore, “outraged Lenin’s bourgeois sentiments. But Stalin thought it was entirely consistent with Party culture. ‘Why should I stand on my hindlegs for her? To sleep with Lenin does not mean you understand Marxism-Leninism. Just because she used the same toilet as Lenin…‘ This led to some classic Stalin jokes, in which he warned Krupskaya that if she did not obey, the Central Committee would appoint someone else as Lenin’s wife. That is a very Bolshevik concept. His disrespect for Krupskaya was probably not helped by her complaints about Lenin’s flirtations with his assistants, including Yelena Stasova, the one whom Stalin threatened to promote to ‘wife’” Montefiore, Stalin, p. 3). On January 4, 1923, in a supposed postscript to his will, Lenin wrote: “Stalin is too rude, and this fault… becomes unbearable in the office of General Secretary. Therefore I propose to the comrades to find a way to remove Stalin from that position and appoint to it another man more patient, more loyal, more polite and more attentive to comrades, less capricious, etc. This circumstance may appear an insignificant trifle, but in view of what I have written above about the relations between Stalin and Trotsky, it is not a trifle, or it is such a trifle as may acquire a decisive significance.” “The dictation warned that ‘these two qualities of the two outstanding leaders of the present Central Committee – Stalin’s incaution, Trotsky’ self-assured political daftness – ‘can inadvertently lead to a schism, and if our party does not take steps to avert this, the schism may come unexpectedly...” Kotkin, Stalin, vol. I, p. 500. There is strong suspicion (although Stalin, surprisingly, never expressed it) that the “Testament” was a forgery by Krupskaya. She may have considered that she was conveying Lenin’s real feelings. Lenin’s sister, Maria Ulyanova, another of his secretaries, certainly thought so… Kotkin, Stalin, vol. I, p. 501. At the Twelfth Congress in January, 1924, Stalin attacked Trotsky for attempting to create an illegal faction, “and threatened severe measures against anyone circulating secret documents, a possible reference to Lenin’s Testament”. Bullock, op. cit., p. 146. So the contents were not made known until just before the Thirteenth Congress in May, 1924. By that time, however, Stalin had worked hard to create a bloc with Zinoviev and Kamenev against Trotsky. So when the matter came up before the Central Committee plenum, Zinoviev and Kamenev spoke in favour of Stalin and against the publication of the Testament, deciding instead “to read the document only to select delegates as opposed to the entire assembled congress. Trotsky, reluctant to appear divisive in his coming bid for power, did not intervene [for which he was rebuked by Krupskaya]. Stalin, pale as death, humbly asked for release from his duties, hoping that his show of contrition would prompt the Central Committee to refuse his request. “Stalin offered to step down. ‘Well, yes, I am definitely rude.’ Trotsky quoted Stalin as saying: ‘Ilich [Lenin] proposes to you to find another person who differs from me only in external politeness. Well, ok, try to find such a person.’ But in a hall packed with Stalin loyalists, a voice chanted out: ‘It’s nothing. We are not frightened by rudeness, our whole party is rude, proletarian.’ A neat trick, but the situation was extraordinary all he same.” (Kotkin, Stalin, vol. I, p. 541). His gamble paid off, but left him seething with resentment. He was the disciple of a man who seemed to have demanded his removal…” Frank Dikötter, Dictators, London: Bloomsbury, 2020, p. 69. Stalin, though wounded, was saved… But Lenin’s hostile remarks about him in his “Testament” haunted him for the rest of his life… “By the end of 1924 Stalin, with Kamenev and Zinoviev doing the dirty work, had created the heresy of ‘Trotskyism’ and related it to Trotsky’s earlier disputes with Lenin, who had been embalmed and put into his apotheosis-tomb five months earlier. In January 1925 Stalin was thus able to strip Trotsky of his army control with the full approval of the party. Party stalwarts were now informed that Trotsky’s part in the Revolution was very much less than he claimed and his face was already being blacked out of relevant photographs – the first instance of Stalinist re-writing of history.” Johnson, Modern Times, p. 265. Two years later, Stalin was stronger than all three – Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev – put together. In November, 1927 Trotsky and Zinoviev were expelled from the party, and in December the Fifteenth Party Congress confirmed the decision… In January, 1928 Trotsky was bundled off (wearing only pyjamas, socks and a greatcoat) to internal exile in Kazakhstan; he never returned to Moscow. In 1936 Kamenev and Zinoviev were tried and executed, and in 1940 Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico with a pick-axe… Bazhanov writes: “Trotsky’s position in 1923-4 was strong. If he had used the cards history had dealt him, Stalin could have been stopped. Of course Stalin was an accomplished schemer, but with the support Lenin had given him Trotsky could have lined up the party behind him if his temperament had not stood in the way. But he failed to understand the nature of the Party machine, Stalin’s use of it, and the full significance Stalin’s position as General Secretary had acquired by the time of the Thirteenth Congress.” * And yet there was more to it than that. The vital factor was the timing of Lenin’s strokes, and above all the fact that the last stroke incapacitated him without immediately killing him. Was this a product of blind Chance (as Bullock implies)? Or History’s choice of Stalin (as Trotsky should have inferred, however reluctantly)? Or God’s judgement on apostate Russia? For a believer in the true God there can be only one possible answer to this question. God acted now as He had acted in seventh-century Byzantium when He allowed the cruel tyrant Phocas to murder the good Emperor Maurice and ascend the throne. “One contemporary,” writes Alexander Dvorkin, “cites the story of a certain man who cried out to God: ‘Why did You send Your people such a blood-thirsty wolf?’ And the Lord replied to him: ‘I tried to find someone worse than Phocas, so as to punish the people for its self-will, but was unable. But from now on don’t you question the judgements of God…’” Dvorkin, Ocherki po Istorii Vselenskoj Pravoslavnoj Tserkvi (Sketches on the History of the Universal Orthodox Church), Nizhni-Novgorod, 2006, p. 439. October 28 / November 10, 2021.