Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime

9

The Crisis of the New Regime

How do you solve the following problem: if the peasantry is not with us, if the working class falls under the influence of various anarchist elements and also tends to abandon us—on what can the Communist Party now base itself?

Iurii Milonov at the Tenth Congress of

the Communist Party (March 1921)¹

Nothing has been left that could obstruct the central government, but, by the same token, nothing could shore it up.

Alexis de Tocqueville²

The political crisis that shook the Communist Party in 1921–23 was due to the fact that the suppression of rival parties did not eliminate dissent, but merely shifted it from the public arena into the inner ranks of the party. This development violated the cardinal tenet of Bolshevism, disciplined unity. The resolutions of the Eleventh Party Congress obliquely acknowledged what was occurring:

In order to consolidate the victory of the proletariat and to maintain its dictatorship under conditions of an exceedingly stressful civil war, the proletarian vanguard had to deprive all political groupings hostile to Soviet authority of the freedom to organize. The Russian Communist Party was left the country’s only legal political party. This circumstance, of course, gave the working class and its party many advantages. But, on the other hand, it also produced phenomena that have extremely complicated the party’s work. Inevitably, into the ranks of the only legal political party streamed, seeking to exert their influence, groups and strata that under different conditions would be found not in the ranks of the Communist Party but those of Social-Democracy or another variant of petty-bourgeois socialism.³

As Trotsky put it: “Our party is now the only one in the country; all discontent goes only through our party.”⁴ The leadership thus confronted a painful choice: whether to sacrifice unity and all the advantages that flowed from it by tolerating dissent within party ranks, or to outlaw dissent and maintain unity even at the risk of both the ossification of the party’s leading apparatus and its estrangement from the rank and file. Lenin unhesitatingly opted for the second alternative: by this decision, he laid the groundwork for Stalin’s personal dictatorship.

The Bolshevik leaders, and no one more than Lenin, fretted about the progressive bureaucratization of their regime. They had the feeling—and statistical evidence to support it—that both the party and the state were being weighed down by a parasitic class of functionaries who used their offices to promote personal interests. To make matters worse, the more the bureaucracy expanded, the more of the budget it absorbed, the less got done. This held true even of the Cheka: in September 1922 Dzerzhinskii demanded a thorough accounting of what Cheka personnel were doing, adding that he believed such a survey would yield “deadly” (ubiistvennye) results.⁵ For Lenin in the last period of his life the bureaucracy became an obsessive concern.

That they should have been surprised by this phenomenon only provides further evidence that under the hard-bitten realism of the Bolsheviks lurked a remarkable naïveté.^* It should have been apparent to them that the nationalization of the country’s entire organized life, economic activity included, was bound to expand the number of white-collar workers. It apparently never occurred to them that “power” (vlast’), of which they never had enough, meant not only opportunity but also responsibility; that the fulfillment of that responsibility was a full-time occupation calling for correspondingly large cadres of professionals; and that these professionals were unlikely to be concerned exclusively or even primarily with public welfare but would also attend to their own needs. The bureaucratization of life that accompanied Communist rule opened unprecedented opportunities for clerical careers to lower-middle-class elements previously barred from them: they were its principal beneficiaries.⁶ And even workers, once they left the factory floor for the office, ceased to be workers, merging with the bureaucratic caste, although in party censuses they often continued to be listed as workers: in a private letter to Lenin, Kalinin urged that only persons engaged in manual labor be listed as workers, whereas “foremen, markers, watchmen” should be classified as office personnel (sluzhashchie).⁷ This is how the Menshevik émigré organ analyzed the phenomenon on the eve of NEP:

The Bolshevik dictatorship … has ejected from all spheres of governmental and public administration not only the tsarist bureaucracy, but also the intelligentsia from bourgeois circles, with their diplomas, and in this manner opened the “path upward” to that countless offspring of the petty bourgeoisie, the peasantry, the working class, the armed forces, and so forth, who previously, by virtue of the privileged status of wealth and education, had been attached to the lower classes and who now make up the huge “soviet bureaucracy”—this new urban stratum, in its essence and ambitions a petty bourgeoisie, all of whose interests bind it to the Revolution, because it alone enabled them to climb to where they are, freed of hard productive labor and involved in the mechanism of state administration, rising above the nation’s masses.⁸

The Bolsheviks failed to anticipate this development because their philosophy of history taught them to regard politics exclusively as a by-product of class conflicts, and governments as nothing but instruments of the ruling class: a view that precluded the state and its corps of civil servants having interests distinct from those of the class they were said to serve. The same philosophy prevented them from understanding the nature of the problem once they had become aware of it. Like any tsarist conservative, Lenin could think of no better device to curb the abuses of the bureaucracy than piling one “control” commission on top of another, sending out inspectors, and insisting there was no abuse that “good men” could not correct. The systemic sources of the problem eluded him to the end.

Bureaucratization occurred in the apparatus of the party as well as of the state.

Although structured in a highly centralized fashion, the Bolshevik party traditionally cultivated within its ranks a certain degree of informal democracy.⁹ Under the principle of “democratic centralism,” decisions taken by the directing departments had to be carried out by the lower organs with no questions asked. But the decisions were reached by majority vote—first of the Central Committee, and then of the Politburo—after thorough debate in which everyone had a chance to have his say. Provincial party cells were routinely consulted. Even as dictator of the country, within the party Lenin was only primus inter pares: neither the Politburo nor the Central Committee had a formal chairman. Delegates to the party’s congresses, its highest organs, were elected by local organizations. Local party officials were chosen by fellow members. In fact, Lenin almost always prevailed by the force of his personality and stature as the party’s founder: but victory was not assured and on occasion eluded even him.

As the party assumed ever greater responsibilities for managing the country, its membership expanded and so did its administrative apparatus. Until March 1919, a single person, Iakov Sverdlov, carried in his head all the details of party organization and personnel. He ran the party from day to day, freeing Lenin and his associates to make the political and military decisions.¹⁰ Such a system could not last for long in any event, given that by March 1919 the party had 314,000 members. Sverdlov’s sudden death at this time made it imperative to place the party’s management on a more formal basis. To this end the Eighth Party Congress in March 1919 created two new organs of the Central Committee: the Politburo, initially of five members (Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Kamenev, Nikolai Krestinskii), to decide swiftly on urgent issues, without resort to the entire Central Committee; and the Orgburo, also of five members, to attend to organizational matters, which in practice meant personnel appointments. The third institution, the Secretariat, established in March 1917, until Stalin’s appointment as its chairman in April 1922, seems to have occupied itself mainly with shuffling papers. Its head, the Secretary, was required to be a member of the Orgburo. Judging by the agenda of the Orgburo and the Secretariat after Stalin had taken over, there was no strict division of responsibilities between them, both dealing with personnel matters, although the Orgburo seems to have been more directly responsible for monitoring the performance of the cadres.¹¹ The creation of these organs began the process of concentrating authority in party affairs at the top, in Moscow.

By the time the Civil War ended, the Communist Party had a sizeable staff occupied exclusively with paperwork. A census conducted toward the end of 1920 revealed interesting facts about its composition. Only 21 percent of the members engaged in physical labor in industry or agriculture; the remaining 79 percent held various white-collar positions.^* The members’ educational level was exceedingly low and not commensurate with their responsibilities and authority: in 1922, only 0.6 percent (2,316) had completed higher education, and 6.4 percent (24,318) had secondary school diplomas. On the basis of this evidence, one Russian historian has concluded that at that time 92.7 percent of party members were functionally semiliterate (18,000, or 4.7 percent, were completely illiterate).¹² From the body of white-collar personnel emerged an elite of functionaries employed in Moscow by the central organs of the Communist Party. In the summer of 1922, this group numbered over 15,000 persons.¹³

The bureaucratization of party life had inevitable consequences.… The Party official engaged exclusively on Party business was at an obvious advantage compared with the rank-and-file Party member who had a full-time job in a factory or in a government office. The sheer force of professional preoccupation with Party management rendered the officialdom the center of initiative, direction, and control. At every level of the Party hierarchy, a transfer of authority became visible, first from the congresses or conferences to the committees which they nominally elected, and then from the committees to the Party secretaries who ostensibly executed their will.¹⁴

The Central Committee apparatus, gradually, naturally, and almost imperceptibly, supplanted the local organs of the Party not only in making most of the decisions but also in selecting executive personnel at all levels. The process of centralization did not stop there, progressing with an inexorable logic: first the Communist Party took over all organized political life; then the Central Committee assumed direction of the Party, stifling initiative and silencing criticism; next, the Politburo began to make all the decisions for the Central Committee; then three men—Stalin, Kamenev, and Zinoviev—came to control the Politburo; until finally one man alone, Stalin, decided for the Politburo. Once the process culminated in a one-man dictatorship, it had nowhere further to go, with the result that Stalin’s death led to the gradual disintegration of the Party and its authority over the country.

Already in 1920 it was common for the Orgburo to designate provincial Party officials without consulting the organizations they were selected to manage¹⁵: a practice which came to be known as naznachenstvo, or “appointmentitis.” In a country accustomed for centuries to bureaucratic rule and the flow of directives from above, such procedures seemed normal, and opposition to it was confined to a small and ineffective minority.

Although there undoubtedly were Communists who joined the Party for idealistic reasons, the majority did so for the advantages membership bestowed. Members enjoyed privileges that in the nineteenth century had been associated with gentry (dvorianstvo) status, namely, assured access to executive (“responsible”) positions in government. Trotsky labeled them “radishes” (red outside, white inside). Those sufficiently high in the Communist hierarchy received additional food rations and access to exclusive shops, as well as cash allowances. They had virtual immunity from arrest and prosecution, which in the lawless Soviet society was no mean privilege. Emulating tsarist practices, the Soviet government established as early as 1918 the principle that its officials could not be brought to justice for actions committed in the performance of duties.¹⁶ Whereas under tsarism, an official could be tried only with the concurrence of his immediate superiors, a Communist functionary could be arrested “only with the knowledge and approval of the Party organization corresponding to the rank he held in the Party.”¹⁷ Lenin strenuously objected to this practice, demanding that Communists be punished for wrongdoing more severely than others, but he was powerless to change custom.¹⁸ From the beginning of its reign, the Communist Party’s status as an entity above the law transferred also to its membership.

Such power, combined with legal immunity, inevitably led to abuses. Beginning with the Eighth Party Congress (1919), complaints were heard of the corruptibility of party personnel and their estrangement from the masses.¹⁹ The pages of the Communist press were filled with accounts of violations of the most elementary norms of decency by party officials: judging by some, Communist bosses behaved like eighteenth-century owners of serfs. Thus, in January 1919 the Astrakhan organ of the Communist Party reported on the visit of Kliment Voroshilov, Stalin’s comrade-in-arms and commander of the Tenth Army at Tsaritsyn. Voroshilov made his appearance in a luxurious shestërka, a coach pulled by six horses, followed by ten carriages with attendants, and some fifty carts piled high with trunks, casks, and other wares. On such forays, the local inhabitants were required to render the visiting dignitaries all manner of personal services and were threatened with revolvers if they refused.²⁰

To end such scandalous behavior, the Party carried out a purge in late 1921 and early 1922. Although ostensibly directed at careerists who had enrolled under the relaxed admission procedures in force during the Civil War, its true targets were persons who had transferred from the other socialist parties, notably Mensheviks, whom Lenin blamed for injecting democratic and other heretical ideas into Communist ranks.²¹ Many were expelled; and with voluntary resignations, especially by disgruntled workers, the membership declined from 659,000 to 500,000, and then sank still lower, below 400,000.^* The practice was instituted at this time of appointing “candidate members,” who had to undergo a period of apprenticeship before qualifying for admission. In subsequent purges (1922–23) more were expelled or resigned, until nearly half of the party turned over.²² These procedures may have rid the party of Mensheviks and other “petty-bourgeois socialists” but not of corrupt Communists. Abuses continued because they inhered in the privileged status of the Communist Party and its complete freedom from accountability. If the citizen had no means of redress against those administering him either as voter or as the owner of property, and if, moreover, party members were exempt from legal responsibility, then it was inevitable that the administrative corps would turn into a self-contained, self-perpetuating, and self-gratifying body. The Control Commission established in 1920 to oversee the ethics of the Party reported that party officials felt they were accountable for the performance of their duties only to those who had appointed them, not to the “party masses,”²³ let alone to the population at large. It was a carryover of attitudes prevalent among officials under tsarism.²⁴

To make matters worse still, the Party itself began to corrupt the bureaucracy. In July 1922, the Orgburo passed an innocuous-sounding ruling, “On the improvement of the living conditions of active party workers,” originally published in a truncated version.²⁵ It established a salary scale for party functionaries: they were to receive several hundred (new) rubles, with additional allowances for families and overtime, which in their totality could double their basic pay—this at a time when the average industrial worker earned 10 rubles. High party bureaucrats were further entitled, free of charge, to extra food rations, as well as housing, clothing, and medical care, and, in some instances, chauffeured cars. In the summer of 1922 “responsible workers” employed in the central organs of the Party were issued supplementary food rations entitling them to 26 pounds of meat and 2.6 pounds of butter a month. They traveled in special train coaches, upholstered and lit by candles, while ordinary mortals, fortunate enough to obtain tickets, had to squeeze into crowded third-class compartments or freight cars.²⁶ The very highest officials had the right to vacations and rest cures of one to three months in foreign sanitoria, for which the Party paid in gold rubles. In November 1921, no fewer than six top-level Communists were receiving medical care in Germany: one of them (Lev Karakhan) went there for hemorrhoid surgery.²⁷ Allocations of such benefits were made by Stalin’s Secretariat, the staff of which, on his assumption of office, numbered 600.²⁸ In the summer of 1922, the number of persons entitled to special benefits exceeded 17,000; in September of that year, the Orgburo raised it to 60,000.

The Party’s leaders qualified for dachas. The first to acquire a country house was Lenin, who in October 1918 took over an estate at Gorki, 35 kilometers southwest of Moscow, the property of a tsarist general. Others followed suit: Trotsky took over one of the most luxurious landed estates in Russia, Arkhangelskoe, the property of the princes Iusupov, while Stalin made himself at home in the country house of an oil magnate at Zubalovo.²⁹ At Gorki, Lenin had at his disposal a fleet of six limousines operated by the GPU.³⁰ Although he rarely asked favors for himself, he was not averse to requesting them for members of his family and friends, as, for instance, directing that the private coach in which his sister and the Bukharins were traveling to the Crimea, almost certainly on vacation, be attached to military trains to speed up their journey.³¹ When attending the theater or opera, the new leaders occupied as a matter of course the imperial loges.

Imperceptibly, the new rulers slipped into the habits of the old. Adolf Ioffe complained to Trotsky in 1920 of the spreading rot:

From top to bottom and from bottom to top, it is everywhere the same. On the lowest level, it is a pair of shoes and a soldier’s shirt [gimnasterka]; higher up, an automobile, a railroad car, the Sovnarkom dining room, quarters in the Kremlin or the “National” hotel; and on the highest rungs, where all this is available, it is prestige, prominent status, and fame.³²

According to Ioffe it was becoming psychologically acceptable to believe that “the leaders can do anything.” None of these patrician habits of public servants had anything to do with Marxism, but they did have a great deal to do with the political traditions of Russia.

69. A new elite in the making: a party functionary (extreme right) reads while workers labor.

The key territorial administrators under the new regime were the chairmen of the provincial (guberniia) committees of the Party, popularly known as gubkomy. Since Peter the Great, the guberniia had been the basic administrative unit of Russia, and its chief, the governor, enjoying broad executive and police powers, represented imperial authority. The Bolshevik regime followed this tradition: secretaries of the gubkomy became, in effect, successors to imperial governors. The authority to designate them, therefore, was a source of considerable patronage. Before the Revolution, governors had been appointed by the tsar on the recommendation of the Minister of the Interior; now they were appointed by Lenin at the recommendation of the Orgburo and the Secretariat. A special department of the latter, called Uchraspred (Uchetno-Raspredetil’nyi Otdel), established in 1920, selected and transferred party personnel. In December 1921, it was ruled that to qualify as gubkom secretary one had to have joined the Party before October 1917; secretaries of district (uezd) party committees (ukomy) had to have belonged for a minimum of three years. All such appointments were to be approved by a higher party authority.³³ These provisions may have helped safeguard discipline and orthodoxy, but at the price of depriving party cells of the right to choose their own officers. Although little noticed at the time, they vastly enhanced the powers of the central apparatus: “The right of confirmation by the Orgburo or Secretariat … became in practice tantamount to a right of ‘recommendation’ or ‘nomination.’ ”³⁴ All this had occurred before Stalin assumed the post of General Secretary in April 1922.

As a result of these practices, appointments to key Party posts in the provinces increasingly were made not by the members but by the “Center.” During 1922, thirty-seven gubkom secretaries were removed or transferred by Moscow, and forty-two appointed on its “recommendation.”^* Now, as under tsarism, loyalty was the supreme qualification for appointment: in a circular sent out by the Central Committee, “the loyalty of a given comrade to the Party” was listed as the very first criterion for office.³⁵ In the course of 1922, the Secretariat and Orgburo made over 10,000 assignments.³⁶ Since the Politburo was overburdened with work, many of these assignments were made at the discretion of the General Secretary and the Orgburo. Frequently, inspection teams were sent to the provinces to report on the performance of gubkomy—an echo of the “revisions” of Imperial Russia. At the Tenth Party Conference held in May 1921, it was resolved that gubkom secretaries were to come to Moscow every three months to report to the Secretariat.³⁷ Viacheslav Molotov, who worked for the Secretariat, justified these practices with the argument that left to themselves the gubkomy attended mostly to their own, local affairs and ignored national party concerns.³⁸ In effect, the gubkomy turned into “conveyor belts for Moscow directives.”³⁹

The Secretariat acquired the additional authority to select delegates to party congresses, nominally the party’s highest authority. By 1923, most delegates were appointed on the recommendation of gubkom secretaries, who themselves were in good measure appointees of the Secretariat.⁴⁰ This authority enabled the Secretariat to muzzle opposition from the rank and file. Thus at the Tenth Party Congress (1921), which witnessed acrimonious debates pitting the so-called “Workers’ Opposition” and “Democratic Centralists” against the Central Committee, 85 percent of the delegates fell in line with the Central Committee’s resolutions condemning the dissenters: a vote which, judging by the available evidence, hardly reflected the sentiments of the membership at large.⁴¹ Two years later, at the Twelfth Congress, the opposition was reduced to an impotent fringe. At the next Congress, there no longer was an opposition.

Thus an aristocracy emerged in the Communist service class. The practices adopted five years after the power seizure were a far cry from the early days of the regime, when the Party insisted on its members’ receiving lower salaries than the average worker and confining their living quarters to one room per person.⁴² They also meant the abandonment of regulations that denied Communists employed in factories special privileges, while imposing on them heavier obligations.⁴³

So much for the Party bureaucracy.

The state bureaucracy expanded at an even more spectacular rate. The structure of nationwide soviets rapidly lost the little influence they had had on Bolshevik policies, and by 1919–20 turned into rubber stamps for party decisions transmitted through the Council of People’s Commissars and its branches. Their “elections” turned into ceremonies to approve nominees picked by the Party: fewer than one in four eligible citizens bothered to vote.⁴⁴ The soviets were supplanted by bureaucratic state institutions, behind which stood the all-powerful Party. In 1920, the last year that the soviets were allowed to hold open discussions, it was common to hear complaints about the spread of the bureaucracy.⁴⁵ In February 1920, the office of Worker-Peasant Inspection (Rabkrin) was created, with Stalin as chairman, to oversee abuses in state institutions; but as Lenin conceded two years later, it did not meet his expectations.⁴⁶

The expansion of the governmental bureaucracy is explainable first and foremost by the fact of the government taking over the management of institutions that before October 1917 had been in private hands. By eliminating private enterprise in banking and industry, by abolishing zemstvos and city councils, by dissolving all private associations, the government assumed liability for their functions, which, in turn, demanded a proportionate expansion of officialdom. One example will suffice. Before the Revolution, the nation’s schools were partly supervised by the Ministry of Public Instruction, partly by the Orthodox Church, and partly by private bodies. When, in 1918, the government nationalized all schools under the Commissariat of Enlightenment, it had to create a staff to replace the clerical and private personnel previously in charge of nongovernmental schools. In time, the Commissariat of Enlightenment was also given responsibility for directing the country’s cultural life, previously almost entirely in private hands, and for enforcing censorship. As a consequence, as early as May 1919 it had on its payroll 3,000 employees—ten times the number employed by the corresponding tsarist ministry.⁴⁷

But enhanced administrative responsibilities were not the sole reason for the increase in the Soviet bureaucracy. An employee even on the lowest rungs of the civil service ladder acquired precious advantages of survival under the harsh conditions of Soviet life: access to goods not available to ordinary citizens, as well as opportunities to obtain bribes and tips.

The result was massive featherbedding. White-collar jobs multiplied in the various bureaus directing the Soviet economy at the very time that production was declining. While the number of workers employed in Russian industry dropped from 856,000 in 1913 to 807,000 in 1918, the number of white-collar employees rose from 58,000 to 78,000. Thus, already in the first year of the Communist regime, the ratio of white- to blue-collar industrial employees grew by one-third, compared to 1913.⁴⁸ In the next three years, this ratio rose even more dramatically: whereas in 1913, for every 100 factory workers there were 6.2 white-collar employees, in the summer of 1921 their proportion rose to 15.0 per hundred.⁴⁹ In transport, with railroad traffic declining by 80 percent and the number of workers remaining stationary, bureaucratic personnel increased by 75 percent. Whereas in 1913 there were 12.8 employees, both blue- and white-collar, per one kilometer (five-eighths of a mile) of railroad track, in 1921 20.7 were required to perform the same tasks.⁵⁰ An inquiry into one rural district of Kursk province, carried out in 1922–23, showed that the local agriculture department, which under tsarism had 16 employees, now had 79—and this while food output had dropped. The police chancery in the same district had doubled its personnel compared to prerevolutionary days.⁵¹ Most monstrous was the expansion of the bureaucracy charged with managing the economy: in the spring of 1921, the Supreme Council of the National Economy (VSNKh) employed 224,305 functionaries, of whom 24,728 worked in Moscow, 93,593 in its provincial agencies, and 105,984 in the districts (uezdy)—this at a time when the industrial productivity of which it was in charge had dropped to below one-fifth of what it had been in 1913.⁵² In 1920, to Lenin’s astonishment and anger, Moscow housed 231,000 full-time functionaries, and Petrograd, 185,000.⁵³ Overall, between 1917 and the middle of 1921, the number of government employees increased nearly fivefold, from 576,000 to 2.4 million. By then, the country had over twice as many bureaucrats as workers.⁵⁴

Given the immense need for officials and the low educational level of its own cadres, the new regime had no choice but to hire large numbers of ex-tsarist officials, especially personnel qualified to run ministerial bureaus. The following table indicates the percentages of such officials in the commissariats as of 1918:⁵⁵

Commissariat of the Interior

48.3%

Supreme Council of National Economy

50.3%

Commissariat of War

55.2%

Commissariat of State Control

80.9%

Commissariat of Transport

88.1%

Commissariat of Finance

97.5%

“Indications are that over half the officials in the central offices of the commisariats, and perhaps ninety percent of upper echelon officials, had worked in some kind of administrative position before October 1917.”⁵⁶ Only the Cheka, with 16.1 percent ex-tsarist officials, and the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, with 22.9 percent (both figures are for 1918), were staffed primarily with new personnel.⁵⁷ On the basis of this evidence, one Western scholar has reached the startling conclusion that the changes in government personnel made by the Bolsheviks in the first five years “could perhaps be compared with those occurring in Washington in the heyday of the ‘spoils system.’ ”⁵⁸

The new bureaucracy modeled itself on the tsarist. As before 1917, officials served the state, not the nation, which they viewed as a hostile force. The anarchist Alexander Berkman, who visited Russia in 1920, thus depicted the typical government office under the new regime:

The Soviet institutions [in the Ukraine] present the familiar picture of the Moscow pattern: gatherings of worn, tired people, looking hungry and apathetic. Typical and sad. The corridors and offices are crowded with applicants seeking permission to do or to be exempt from doing this or that. The labyrinth of new decrees is so intricate, the officials prefer the easier way of solving perplexing problems by “revolutionary method,” on their “conscience,” generally to the dissatisfaction of the petitioners.

Long lines are everywhere, and much writing and handling of “papers,” and documents by baryshni (young ladies) in high heeled shoes, that swarm in every office. They puff at cigarettes and animatedly discuss the advantages of certain bureaus as measured by the quantity of the paëk [ration] issued, the symbol of Soviet existence. Workers and peasants, their heads bared, approach the long tables. Respectfully, even servilely, they seek information, plead for an “order” for clothing, or a “ticket” for boots. “I don’t know,” “In the next office,” “Come tomorrow,” is the usual reply. There are protests and lamentations, and begging for attention and advice.⁵⁹

As in the days of tsarism, Soviet officialdom was elaborately stratified. In March 1919, the authorities divided the civil service into 27 categories, each minutely defined. Salary differentials were relatively modest: thus employees in the lowest rank (razriad), made up of junior doormen, charwomen, and the like, received 600 (old) rubles a month, those in the 27th rank (heads of commissariat departments, and such like) were paid 2,200 rubles.⁶⁰ But wages counted for little, because of hyperinflation: the meaningful salary took the form of perquisites, of which food rations were the most important. Thus Lenin in 1920 obviously did not live on his monthly salary of 6,500 rubles, which would have bought him thirty cucumbers on the black market, the only place where they were available to ordinary citizens.⁶¹ In addition to the paëk, even the lowest officials had ways of supplementing their wages by means of bribery, which was rampant, notwithstanding severe laws against it.⁶²

Lenin liked to ascribe the unsatisfactory state of the Soviet apparatus to the large number of ex-tsarist bureaucrats in its employ: “With the exception of the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs,” he wrote, “our state apparatus, most of all, represents a survival of the old apparatus, least of all subjected to the smallest changes. It is only slightly adorned at the top; in other respects, it is the most typically old of our old state apparatus.”⁶³ But as his disjointed and confused remarks on the subject indicate, he had not the slightest idea what had gone wrong and why. The size of the bureaucracy was determined by the scope of his government’s ambitions, while its corruptibility was assured by freedom from public controls.

In the summer of 1920 the Communist Party was shaken by a heresy the party establishment designated the “Workers’ Opposition.” It reflected the dissatisfaction of Bolshevik industrial workers with the manner in which intellectuals had taken control of the country, and, more specifically, with the bureaucratization of industry and the concurrent decline in the authority and autonomy of trade unions. Although its spokesmen were veteran Communists, the movement also expressed the sentiments of that majority of workers who either belonged to no party or inclined toward Menshevism. Its main bases of support were Samara, where the Workers’ Opposition took over the gubkom, the Donbass region, and the Urals. Its adherents were very influential in the metallurgical, mining, and textile industries.⁶⁴ Alexander Shliapnikov, its head, ran the Metal Workers’ Union, the strongest union in the country and the one traditionally most friendly to the Bolsheviks. The highest Bolshevik functionary of worker background, during World War I Shliapnikov had directed the party’s underground in Petrograd, and in October 1917 took over the Commissariat of Labor. Alexandra Kollontai, his mistress, was the movement’s most articulate theorist. Alongside the Workers’ Opposition emerged a second heresy known as “Democratic Centralism.” Composed of well-known Communist intellectuals, it objected to the bureaucratization of the party and the employment in industry of “bourgeois specialists.” Its adherents wanted greater power for the soviets, while opposing trade union demands for a dominant role in economic management. One of their leaders, T. V. Sapronov, an old Bolshevik, also of worker origin, had the temerity at a party congress to call Lenin an “ignoramus” (nevezhda) and an “oligarch.”^*

The Workers’ Oppositionists were stalwart Bolsheviks. They accepted the dictatorship of the Party and its “leading role” in the trade unions; they approved of the abolition of “bourgeois” freedoms and the suppression of political parties. They found nothing wrong with the party’s treatment of the peasantry. When Kronshtadt rebelled in 1921 they were among the first to volunteer for the Red Army units formed to suppress the mutiny. In Shliapnikov’s words, their differences with Lenin were not over objectives, but over means. They found it unacceptable that the intelligentsia, formed into a new bureaucracy, was displacing labor as the country’s ruling class. For indeed, the country’s “worker” government had not a single worker in a position of authority: most of its leading officials had not only never worked in a factory or on a farm, but had never even held a steady job.⁶⁵

70. Shliapnikov.

Lenin took this challenge extremely seriously: he was not inclined to ignore “worker spontaneity,” which he had fought ever since founding the Bolshevik party. Denouncing the Workers’ Opposition as a species of Menshevism and syndicalism, he counterattacked and crushed it in no time. But in so doing he had recourse to procedures that destroyed, once and for all, what was left of democracy in Communist ranks. To maintain the fiction that the Bolshevik dictatorship was a government of workers while ignoring the workers’ wishes, he ensured the government’s isolation even from its own supporters.

The Workers’ Opposition emerged into the open at the Ninth Party Congress (March 1920) in connection with Moscow’s decision to introduce into industry the principle of one-man management. Until then, Soviet Russia’s nationalized enterprises had been administered by boards, on which sat, alongside technical specialists and party officials, representatives of trade unions and factory committees. This arrangement proved inefficient and was blamed for the collapse of industrial production. The party leadership had determined already in 1918 to shift to personal management, but the decision was difficult to implement because of labor resistance. Now that the Civil War was over, the Ninth Party Congress resolved to put into effect, “from top to bottom, the frequently stated principle of express responsibility of a given person for the given work. Collegiality, to the extent that it has a place in the process of deliberation or decisionmaking, must unconditionally yield to individualism in the process of execution.”⁶⁶ In anticipation of this resolution, the Central Council of Soviet Trade Unions had voted in January 1920 against one-man management. Lenin disregarded its wishes. He similarly ignored the preference of the workers of Donbass, whose delegates voted 21 to 3 in favor of retaining the collegial system of industrial management.⁶⁷

Under the new arrangement, introduced nationwide in 1920 and 1921, trade unions and factory committees no longer participated in decisionmaking, but only in the implementation of decisions made by professional managers. Lenin had the Ninth Party Congress pass a resolution forbidding trade unions to interfere with management. He justified such procedures with the argument that under Communism, which had eliminated the exploiting classes, trade unions no longer had to defend the interests of the workers since this was done for them by the government. Their proper function was to act as government agents in improving production and maintaining labor discipline:

Under the dictatorship of the proletariat, trade unions transform themselves from organs of struggle of the vendors of labor against the ruling class of capitalists, into instruments of the ruling working class. The tasks of trade unions lie, mainly, in the areas of organization and education. These tasks the trade unions must fulfill not as a self-sufficient, organizationally isolated force, but as one of the basic instruments of the Soviet state, led by the Communist Party.⁶⁸

In other words, Soviet trade unions henceforth were to represent not the workers but the government. Trotsky fully subscribed to this view, arguing that in a “workers’ state” the trade unions had to rid themselves of the habit of viewing the employer as an adversary, and turn into factors of productivity under the party’s guidance.⁶⁹ This view of their function meant in practice that trade union officials would not be elected by their members but appointed by the party. As had so often happened in the course of Russian history, an institution created by a social group to defend its interests was taken over by the state for its own purposes.

Russia’s trade union leaders took seriously the claim that their country was a “dictatorship of the proletariat”: strangers to the subtleties of dialectic, they failed to understand how the party leadership, composed of intellectuals, could know better what was good for labor than labor itself. They objected to the dismissal of worker representatives from industrial management and the return to positions of authority, in the guise of “specialists,” of former captains of industry. These people, they complained, treated them exactly as they had done under the old regime. What, then, had changed? and what had the revolution been for? They further objected to the introduction into the Red Army of a command hierarchy and to the restoration in it of ranks. They criticized the bureaucratization of the Party and the accumulation of power in the hands of its Central Committee. They denounced the practice of having provincial party officials appointed by the Center. To bring the Party into direct contact with the laboring masses, they proposed that its directing organs be subjected to frequent personnel turnovers, which would open access to true workers.⁷⁰

The emergence of the Workers’ Opposition brought into the open a smoldering antagonism that went back to the late nineteenth century, between a minority of politically active workers and the intellectuals who claimed to represent them and speak in their behalf.⁷¹ Radical workers, usually more inclined to syndicalism than Marxism, cooperated with the socialist intelligentsia and allowed themselves to be guided by them because they knew they were short of political experience. But they never ceased to be aware of a gulf between themselves and their partners: and once a “workers’ state” had come into being, they saw no reason for submitting to the authority of the “white hands.”^*

The concerns expressed by the Workers’ Opposition stood at the center of the deliberations of the Tenth Party Congress in March 1921. Shortly before it convened, Kollontai released for internal party use a brochure in which she assailed the regime’s bureaucratization.⁷² (Party rules prohibited venting party disputes in public.) The Workers’ Opposition, she argued, made up exclusively of laboring men and women, felt that the Party’s leadership had lost touch with labor: the higher up the ladder of authority one ascended, the less support there was for the Workers’ Opposition. This happened because the Soviet apparatus had been taken over by class enemies who despised Communism: the petty bourgeoisie had seized control of the bureaucracy, while the “grand bourgeoisie,” in the guise of “specialists,” had taken over industrial management and the military command.

The Workers’ Opposition submitted to the Tenth Congress two resolutions, one dealing with party organization, the other with the role of trade unions. It was the last time that independent resolutions—that is, resolutions not originating with the Central Committee—would be discussed at a party congress. The first document spoke of a crisis in the party caused by the perpetuation of habits of military command acquired during the Civil War, and the alienation of the leadership from the laboring masses. Party affairs were conducted without either glasnost’ or democracy, in a bureaucratic style, by elements mistrustful of workers, causing them to lose confidence in the party and to leave it in droves. To remedy this situation, the party should carry out a thorough purge to rid itself of opportunistic elements and increase worker involvement. Every Communist should be required to spend at least three months a year doing physical labor. All functionaries should be elected by and accountable to their members; appointments from the Center should be made only in exceptional cases. The personnel of the central organs should be regularly turned over: the majority of the posts should be reserved for workers. The focus of party work should shift from the Center to the cells.⁷³

The resolution on trade unions was no less radical.⁷⁴ It protested the degradation of unions, to the point where their status was reduced to “virtual zero.” The rehabilitation of the country’s economy required the maximum involvement of the masses: “The systems and methods of construction based on a cumbersome bureaucratic machine stifle all creative initiative and independence” of the producers. The party must demonstrate trust in the workers and their organizations. The national economy ought to be reorganized from the bottom up by the producers themselves. In time, as the masses gain experience, management of the economy should be transferred to a new body, an All-Russian Congress of Producers, not appointed by the Communist Party, but elected by the trade unions and “productive” associations. (In the discussion of this resolution, Shliapnikov denied that the term “producers” included peasants.)⁷⁵ Under this arrangement, the Party would confine itself to politics, leaving the direction of the economy to labor.

These proposals by veteran Communists from labor ranks revealed a remarkable ignorance of Bolshevik theory and practice. Lenin, in his opening address, minced no words in denouncing them as representing a “clear syndicalist deviation.” Such a deviation, he went on, would not be dangerous were it not for the the economic crisis and the prevalence in the country of armed banditry (by which he meant peasant rebellions). The perils of “petty bourgeois spontaneity” exceeded even those posed by the Whites: they required greater party unity than ever.⁷⁶ As for Kollontai, he dismissed her with what apparently was intended as a humorous aside, a reference to her personal relations with the leader of the Workers’ Opposition (“Thank God, we know well that Comrade Kollontai and Comrade Shliapnikov are ‘bound by class ties [and] class consciousness’ ”).^*

Worker defections confronted Lenin and his associates with a problem: how to govern in the name of the “proletariat” when the “proletariat” turned its back on them. One solution was to denigrate Russia’s working class. It was now often heard that the “true” workers had given their lives in the Civil War and that their place had been taken by social dregs. Bukharin claimed that Soviet Russia’s working class had been “peasantified” and that, “objectively speaking,” the Workers’ Opposition was a Peasant Opposition, while a Chekist told the Menshevik Dan that the Petrograd workers were “scum” (svoloch) left over after all the true proletarians had gone to the front.⁷⁷ Lenin, at the Eleventh Party Congress, denied that Soviet Russia even had a “proletariat” in Marx’s sense, since the ranks of industrial labor had been filled with malingerers and “all kinds of casual elements.”⁷⁸ Rebutting such charges, Shliapnikov noted that 16 of the 41 delegates to the Tenth Congress supportive of the Workers’ Opposition had joined the Bolshevik party before 1905 and all had done so before 1914.⁷⁹

Another way of dealing with the challenge was to interpret the “proletariat” as an abstraction: in this view, the party was by definition the “people” and acted on their behalf no matter what the living people thought they wanted.⁸⁰ This was the approach taken by Trotsky:

One must have the consciousness, so to speak, of the revolutionary historic primacy of the party, which is obligated to assert its dictatorship notwithstanding the transient hesitations of the elemental forces (stikhiia), notwithstanding the transient wavering even among the workers.… Without this consciousness the party may perish to no purpose at one of the turning points, of which there are many.… The party as a whole is held together by the unity of understanding that over and above the formal factor stands the dictatorship of the party, which upholds the basic interests of the working class even when the latter’s mood is wavering.⁸¹

In other words, the Party existed in and of itself and by the very fact of its existence reflected the interests of the working class. The living will of living people—stikhiia—was merely a “formal factor.” Trotsky criticized Shliapnikov for making a “fetish of democracy”: “The principle of elections within the labor movement is, as it were, placed above the Party, as if the Party did not have the right to assert its dictatorship even in the event that this dictatorship temporarily clashed with the transient mood within the worker democracy.”⁸² It was not possible to entrust the management of the economy to workers, if only because there were hardly any Communists among them: in this connection, Trotsky cited Zinoviev to the effect that in Petrograd, the country’s largest industrial center, 99 percent of the workers either had no party preference, or, to the extent that they did, sympathized with the Mensheviks or even the Black Hundreds.⁸³ In other words, one could have either Communism (“the dictatorship of the proletariat”) or worker rule, but not both: democracy spelled the doom of Communism. There is nothing to indicate that Trotsky or any other leading Communist saw the absurdity of this position. Bukharin, for example, explicitly acknowledged that Communism could not be reconciled with democracy. In 1924, at the closed Plenum of the Central Committee, he said:

Our task is to acknowledge two dangers. In the first place, the danger that emanates from the centralization of our apparatus. In the second, the danger of political democracy, which may occur if democracy goes over the edge. The opposition sees only one danger—bureaucracy. Behind the bureaucratic danger it does not see the danger of political democracy.… To maintain the dictatorship of the proletariat, we must support the dictatorship of the party.^*

Shliapnikov conceded that “unity” was indeed the supreme objective, but, he argued, the party lost the unity it had enjoyed in the past, before taking power, from lack of communication with its rank and file.⁸⁴ This rupture accounted for the wave of strikes in Petrograd and the Kronshtadt mutiny. The problem was not the Workers’ Opposition: “The causes of the discontent that we see in Moscow and other worker cities lead us not to the ‘Workers’ Opposition’ but to the Kremlin.” The workers felt completely estranged from the party. Among Petrograd metal workers, a traditional bastion of Bolshevism, fewer than 2 percent were members; in Moscow, the proportion of metallurgists belonging to the party fell to a mere 4 percent.^† Shliapnikov rejected the argument of the Central Committee that the economic disasters resulted from “objective” factors, notably the Civil War: “That which we presently observe in our economy is the result not only of objective causes, independent of us. In the breakdown which we see, a share of responsibility falls also on the system we have adopted.”⁸⁵

The motions of the Workers’ Opposition were not submitted to a vote but the delegates could register their preferences by casting ballots for or against two resolutions introduced by Lenin: “On the unity of the party,” and “On the syndicalist and anarchist deviations in our party,” which repudiated the platform of the Workers’ Opposition and condemned its sponsors. The first collected 413 votes against 25, with 2 abstentions; the second, 375 against 30, with 3 abstentions and one invalid vote.⁸⁶

The Workers’ Opposition suffered a decisive defeat and was ordered to dissolve. It was doomed from the outset not only because it challenged powerful vested interests of the central apparatus, but because it accepted the undemocratic premises of Communism, including the idea of a one-party state. It championed democratic procedures in a party that was by its ideology and, increasingly, by its structure committed to ignoring the popular will. Once the Opposition conceded that the unity of the party was the supreme good, it could not carry on without opening itself to charges of subversion.

We have spent much time on what turned out to be an episode in the history of the Communist Party because the Workers’ Opposition, for the first and, as it turned out, the last time, confronted the Party with a fundamental choice. The Party, whose base of support among the population at large had dwindled to a wafer-thin layer, now faced rebellion in its own ranks from workers, its putative masters. It could either acknowledge this fact and retire, or else ignore it and stay in power. In the latter event, it would have no choice but to introduce into the party the same dictatorial methods it employed in running the country. Lenin chose the second alternative, and he did so with the hearty support of his associates, including Trotsky and Bukharin, who later, when these methods were turned against them, would pose as tribunes of the people and champions of democracy. In taking this fateful step, he ensured the hegemony of the central apparatus over the rank and file; and since Stalin was about to become the unchallenged master of the central apparatus, he ensured Stalin’s ascendancy.

To make impossible further dissent in the party, Lenin had the Tenth Congress adopt a new and fateful rule that outlawed the formation of “factions”: these were defined as organized groupings with their own platforms. The key, concluding article of the resolution “On the unity of the party,” kept secret at the time, provided severe penalties for violators:

In order to maintain strict discipline within the party and in all soviet activities, [in order] to attain the greatest unity by eliminating all factionalism, the Congress authorizes the Central Committee in instances of violations of discipline, or the revival or tolerance of factionalism, to apply all measures of party accounting up to exclusion from the party.^*

Exclusion required a two-thirds vote of the members and candidate members of the Central Committee and the Control Commission.

Although Lenin and the majority that voted for his resolution seem to have been unaware of its potential implications, it was destined to have the gravest consequences: Leonard Schapiro regards it as the decisive event in the history of the Communist Party.⁸⁷ Simply put, in Trotsky’s words, the ruling transferred “the political regime prevailing in the state to the inner life of the ruling party.”⁸⁸ Henceforth, the party, too, was to be run as a dictatorship. Dissent would be tolerated only as long as it was individual, that is, unorganized. The resolution deprived party members of the right to challenge the majority controlled by the Central Committee, since individual dissent could always be brushed aside as unrepresentative, while organized dissent was illegal.

The ban on inner-party groupings was self-perpetuating and irreversible: under it no movement for its revision could be set afoot. It established within the party that barrack discipline which may be meat for an army but is poison for a political organization—the discipline which allows a single man to vent a grievance but treats the joint expression of the same grievance by several men as mutiny.⁸⁹

Nothing was better calculated to ensure the bureaucratic rigidity that ultimately stifled everything that was alive in the Communist movement. For it was mainly to enforce the ban on factions that Lenin created in 1922 the post of General Secretary and agreed to Stalin being the first holder of that office.

The consequences of the ban on factions became visible in the representation of the Eleventh Party Congress the following year. Of the 30 delegates who had the courage at the Tenth Congress to vote against Lenin’s resolution condemning the Workers’ Opposition as an “anarchosyndicalist deviation” (the voting was open), all but six had been purged and replaced with more compliant delegates. Molotov could now boast that all party factions had been eliminated.⁹⁰ By the time the Twelfth Congress convened in 1923, three of the surviving six were gone as well, Shliapnikov among them.⁹¹ Such silent purges ensured the unchallenged domination of the Central Committee, which packed party congresses with delegates supportive of its position and interests: suffice it to say that 55.1 percent of the delegates to the Twelfth Congress (1923) were fully occupied with party work, and an additional 30.0 percent were so part-time.⁹² Not surprisingly, at the Twelfth Congress and subsequently, all resolutions were adopted unanimously. Like the “Land Assemblies” of Muscovite Russia, these gatherings were (in the words of the historian Vasilii Kliuchevskii) “consultations of the government with its own agents.”

Even in the face of such formidable obstacles, the Workers’ Opposition tried to persevere. Ignoring party resolutions, in May 1921, the Communist Party faction of the Metal Workers’ Union rejected by a vote of 120 to 40 the list of officers submitted to it by the Center. The Central Committee disqualified this vote, and proceeded to take over the direction of this and the other trade unions. Union membership became compulsory, and virtually the entire financing of unions henceforth came from the state.⁹³

The anti-faction resolution made the Workers’ Opposition an illegal body and provided grounds for its prosecution. Lenin harried its leaders with a vengeance. In August 1921, he asked the Central Committee Plenum to have them expelled, but his motion fell one vote short of the required two-thirds majority.^* Even so, they were subjected to harassment and removed, under one pretext or another, from party posts.⁹⁴ Unable to get a hearing, the Workers’ Opposition unwisely took its case to the Executive Committee of the Comintern, without securing prior approval of either the party or the Russian delegation to that body. The Executive, by now a section of the Russian Communist Party, rejected the appeal. In September 1923, following a wave of strikes, many adherents of the Workers’ Opposition were arrested.⁹⁵ Stalin would make certain all were killed. Kollontai was the one exception: in 1923 she was sent to Norway, then to Mexico, and ultimately to Sweden to serve as ambassador—the first woman in history, it was said, to head a diplomatic mission. It seems to have gratified Stalin’s ribald sense of humor to have the apostle of free love represent him in the country of free love. Shliapnikov he had shot in 1937.

The first symptoms of Lenin’s illness appeared in February 1921, when he began to complain of headaches and insomnia. They were not entirely physical in origin. Lenin had suffered a succession of humiliating defeats, including the military debacle in Poland, which ended the hope of spreading the revolution to Europe, and the economic disasters that necessitated a humiliating capitulation to market forces. The physical symptoms resembled those he had suffered in 1900, at another critical moment in the history of the party, when the Social-Democratic movement seemed about to collapse from internal divisions.^* In the course of the summer of 1921 the headaches gradually eased, but he continued to suffer from sleeplessness.^† In the fall, the Politburo, concerned that Lenin was overworking, requested that he lighten his schedule. On December 31, still unhappy over his condition, it ordered him to take a six-week vacation: he was not to return to his office without the permission of the Secretariat.⁹⁶ Strange as such orders may appear, they were routinely issued by the highest party organs to Communist personnel: as E. D. Stasova, Lenin’s principal secretary, told General S. S. Kamenev, Bolsheviks were to regard their health as “a treasury asset.”⁹⁷

Lenin’s condition showed no improvement. He grumbled that he, who in the past had been able to work for two, now could hardly do the work of one. He spent most of March 1922 resting in the country, where he closely followed the course of events and drafted speeches for the Eleventh Party Congress. He was gruff and irritable, and the physicians treating him misdiagnosed his problem as “neurasthenia induced by exhaustion.”⁹⁸ At this time his habitual truculence assumed ever more extreme and even abnormal forms: it was while in this state that he ordered the arrest, trial, and execution of the SRs and clergymen.

Lenin’s physical deterioration became apparent at the Eleventh Party Congress, held in March 1922, the last he would attend. He delivered two rambling speeches, defensive in character and replete with ad hominem attacks on anyone who disagreed with him, subjecting some of his closest associates to ridicule. Observing his erratic motions, lapses of memory, and occasional speech difficulties, some doctors now concluded that he was suffering from a more serious malady, namely progressive paralysis, for which there was no cure and which was bound to end before long in total incapacitation and death. Lenin, who as recently as February had denied in a private letter to Kamenev and Stalin that his illness showed any “objective symptoms,”⁹⁹ apparently accepted this diagnosis, because he began to make preparations for an orderly transfer of authority. This was for him a very painful task, not only because he loved power above all else, but also because, as he would make clear in his so-called “Testament” of December 1922, he thought no one was truly qualified to inherit his mantle.^* He further worried that his withdrawal from active politics would set off destructive personal rivalries among his associates.

71. Inessa Armand.

At the time, Trotsky seemed the natural heir to Lenin: who but the “organizer of victory,” as Radek called him,¹⁰⁰ had a better right to be his successor? But Trotsky’s claim had more appearance than substance, for he had much going against him. He had joined the Bolshevik Party late, on the eve of the October coup, after subjecting Lenin and his followers for years to ridicule and criticism. The Old Guard never forgave him for his past: no matter what his accomplishments since 1917, he remained an outsider to the party’s inner circle. Although a member of the Politburo, unlike Zinoviev, Stalin, and Kamenev, his principal rivals, he held no executive post in the party and hence lacked a base of support in its cadre, not to speak of the power of patronage. In elections to the Central Committee at the Tenth Party Congress (1921), he came in tenth, behind Stalin and even the relatively unknown Viacheslav Molotov.¹⁰¹ At the next Congress a young Armenian Communist, Anastas Mikoyan, disparagingly referred to him as “a military man” ignorant of the way the party operated in the provinces.¹⁰² Nor was Trotsky’s personality an asset. He was widely disliked for arrogance and lack of tact: as he himself admitted, he had a reputation for “unsociability, individualism, aristocratism.”¹⁰³ Even his admiring biographer concedes he “could rarely withstand the temptation to remind others of their errors and to insist on his superiority and insight.”¹⁰⁴ Scorning the collegiate style of Lenin and the other Bolshevik leaders, he demanded, as commander of the country’s armed forces, unquestioned obedience to himself, giving rise to talk of “Bonapartist” ambitions. Thus in November 1920, angered by reports of insubordination among Red Army troops facing Wrangel, he issued an order that contained the following passage: “I, your Red leader, appointed by the government and invested with the confidence of the people, demand complete faith in myself.” All attempts to question his orders were to be dealt with by summary execution.¹⁰⁵ His high-handed administrative style attracted the attention of the Central Committee, which in July 1919 subjected them to severe criticism.¹⁰⁶ His ill-considered attempt to militarize labor in 1920, not only cast doubts on his judgment, but reinforced suspicions of Bonapartism.¹⁰⁷ In March 1922 he addressed a long statement to the Politburo, urging that the party withdraw from direct involvement in managing the economy. The Politburo rejected his proposals and Lenin, as was his wont with Trotsky’s epistles, scribbled on it, “Into the Archive,” but his opponents used it as evidence that Trotsky wanted to “liquidate the leading role of the Party.” ¹⁰⁸ Refusing to involve himself in the routine of day-to-day politics, frequently absent from cabinet meetings and other administrative deliberations, Trotsky assumed the pose of a statesman above the fray. “For Trotsky, the main things were the slogan, the speaker’s platform, the striking gesture, but not routine work.”¹⁰⁹ His administrative talents were, indeed, of a low order. The hoard of documents in the Trotsky archive at Harvard University, with numerous communications to Lenin, indicate a congenital incapacity for formulating succinct, practical solutions: as a rule, Lenin neither commented nor acted on them.

72. Trotsky, 1918.

For all these reasons, when in 1922 Lenin made arrangements to distribute his responsibilities, he passed over Trotsky. He was much concerned that his successors govern in a collegial manner: Trotsky, never a “team player,” simply did not fit. We have the testimony of Lenin’s sister, Maria Ulianova, who was with him during the last period of his life, that while Lenin valued Trotsky’s talents and industry, and for their sake kept his feelings to himself, “he did not feel sympathy for Trotsky”: Trotsky “had too many qualities that made it extraordinarily difficult to work collectively with him.”^* Stalin suited Lenin’s needs better. Hence, Lenin assigned to Stalin ever greater responsibilities, with the result that as he faded from the scene, Stalin assumed the role of his surrogate, and thus in fact, if not in name, became his heir.

In April 1922, Stalin was appointed General Secretary, that is, head of the Secretariat: this was formalized at the Party Plenum on April 3, on Lenin’s personal instructions.^* It has been asserted, by contemporaries in a position to know, that Lenin took this step because Stalin was continuously warning him of the danger of splits in the party and assuring him that he, Stalin, alone was capable of averting them.¹¹⁰ But the circumstances of this event remain obscure, and it has also been suggested that Lenin had no idea of the importance of Stalin’s promotion to a post that until then had been of very minor significance.¹¹¹

The Secretariat under Stalin’s direction had two responsibilities: to monitor the flow of paperwork to and from the Politburo, and to prevent deviations in the party.

In his report on organizational matters to the Eleventh Party Congress, Molotov complained that the Central Committee was swamped with paperwork, much of it trivial: in the preceding year, it had received 120,000 reports from the local branches of the party, and the number of questions it had to take up increased by almost 50 percent.¹¹² At the same Congress, Lenin ridiculed the fact that the Politburo had to deal with such weighty issues as imports of meat conserves from France.¹¹³ He thought it absurd to have him sign every directive issued by the government.¹¹⁴ One of the tasks of the General Secretary was to ensure that the Politburo received only important papers and that its decisions were properly implemented.¹¹⁵ In this capacity, the Secretary was responsible for preparing the Politburo agenda, supplying it with pertinent materials, and then relaying its decisions to the lower party echelons. These functions made the Secretariat a two-way conveyor belt. But because it was not, strictly speaking, a policy-making post, few realized the potential power that it gave the General Secretary:

Lenin, Kamenev, Zinoviev, and to a lesser extent, Trotsky, were Stalin’s sponsors to all the offices he held. His jobs were of the kind which would scarcely attract the bright intellectuals of the Politburo. All their brilliance in matters of doctrine, all their powers of political analysis would have found little application either at the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate or at the … Secretariat. What was needed there was an enormous capacity for hard and uninspiring toil and patient and sustained interest in every detail of organization. None of his colleagues grudged Stalin his assignments.¹¹⁶

The key to Stalin’s rising power was the combination of functions vested in him as member of the Orgburo and chairman of the Secretariat. At his command, officials could be promoted, relocated, or dismissed. This power Stalin used not only to eliminate anyone who challenged the judgment of the Central Committee, as Lenin wanted, but to appoint functionaries personally loyal to him. Lenin’s intention was to have the General Secretary ensure ideological orthodoxy by keeping close watch on party personnel and rejecting or expelling divisive elements. Stalin promptly realized that he could use these powers to enhance his personal authority in the party by appointing to responsible posts, in the guise of safeguarding ideological purity, individuals beholden to him. He drew up registers (nomenklatury) of party officials qualified for executive positions, and selected for appointment only those listed on them. In 1922, Molotov reported that the Central Committee kept files on 26,000 party functionaries (or “party workers,” as they were euphemistically called) subject to close scrutiny; in the course of 1920, 22,500 of them had received assignments.¹¹⁷ To make certain nothing escaped his attention, Stalin required provincial party secretaries to report to him personally once a month.¹¹⁸ He also made an arrangement with Dzerzhinskii to have the GPU send his Secretariat on the seventh day of every month its regular summaries.¹¹⁹ In this manner Stalin acquired unrivaled knowledge of party affairs down to their lowest levels, knowledge that, together with the power to make appointments, gave him effective control of the party machine. By ruling that a high proportion of party documents, including protocols of plenums, were secret, he withheld this information from his potential rivals.¹²⁰

Stalin’s self-aggrandizement did not go unnoticed: at the Eleventh Congress an associate of Trotsky’s complained he had taken on too many responsibilities. Lenin impatiently brushed such objections aside.¹²¹ Stalin got things done, he understood the supreme need to preserve party unity, he was modest in his behavior and personal needs. Later, in the fall of 1923, Stalin’s associates, led by Zinoviev, who in a private letter to Kamenev referred to “Stalin’s dictatorship,” held a secret conclave to curb his powers. It failed because Stalin cleverly outmaneuvered his rivals.¹²² In his eagerness to stir the cumbersome machine of state and to prevent splits, Lenin endowed Stalin with powers that he himself six months later would characterize as “boundless.” By then it would be too late to curb them.

Lenin did not anticipate that as a result of the regime he had introduced, Russia would come under one-man rule. He thought that impossible. In January 1919, in an exchange with the Menshevik historian N. A. Rozhkov, who had urged him to assume dictatorial powers, he wrote:

As concerns “personal dictatorship,” if you pardon the expression, it is utter nonsense. The apparatus has grown altogether gigantic—in some respects [excessive]. And under these conditions, a “personal dictatorship” is (in general) unrealizable.¹²³

In fact, he had little idea how gigantic the apparatus had grown and how much money it cost. He reacted with disbelief to information supplied by Trotsky in February 1922 that in the preceding nine months the party’s budget absorbed 40 million gold rubles.^*

He was worried about something different: he dreaded the prospect of the party being torn apart by rivalries at the top and paralyzed by the bureaucracy from below. He had not expected either to be a threat. Communists treated everything that happened as inevitable and scientifically explicable except their own failures: here they became extreme voluntarists, blaming whatever went wrong on human error. To a detached observer the problems that troubled Lenin and jeopardized his revolution appear embedded in the premises of his regime. One need not share Isaac Deutscher’s romantic view of the Bolsheviks’ aspirations to accept his analysis of the contradictions they had created for themselves:

In its dream the Bolshevik party saw itself as a disciplined yet inwardly free and dedicated body of revolutionaries, immune from corruption by power. It saw itself committed to observe proletarian democracy and to respect the freedom of the small nations, for without this there could be no genuine advance to socialism. In pursuit of their dream the Bolsheviks had built up an immense and centralized machine of power to which they then gradually surrendered more and more of their dream: proletarian democracy, the rights of small nations, and finally their own freedom. They could not dispense with power if they were to strive for the fulfillment of their ideals; but now their power came to oppress and overshadow their ideals. The gravest dilemmas arose; and also a deep cleavage between those who clung to the dream and those who clung to the power.¹²⁴

This link between premise and effect escaped Lenin. In the last months of his active life, he could think of nothing better to safeguard his regime than restructuring institutions and reassigning personnel.

He reluctantly concluded that the fusion of party and state organs that he had enforced since taking power could not be permanently institutionalized because it depended on one person, himself, directing both in his double capacity as Chairman of the Sovnarkom and titular leader of the Politburo. The arrangement, in any event, was becoming unworkable because the policy-making organs of the party were becoming clogged from the multitude of affairs, important and petty, mostly petty, that the state apparatus forwarded to them for decision. After Lenin’s partial withdrawal, the old arrangement had to be altered. In March 1922, Lenin protested that “everything gets dragged from the Sovnarkom to the Politburo,” and conceded that he bore blame for the resulting disarray, “because much that concerned links between the Sovnarkom and the Politburo was done personally by me. And when I had to leave, it transpired that the two wheels did not work in a coordinated manner.”¹²⁵

In April 1922, at the same time that Stalin assumed the post of General Secretary, Lenin came up with the idea of naming two trusted associates to act as watchdogs over the state apparatus. He suggested to the Politburo the creation of two deputies (zamestiteli, or zamy for short), one to run the Sovnarkom, the other the Council of Labor and Defense (Sovet Truda i Oborony, or STO).^* Lenin, who chaired both institutions, suggested the agrarian specialist Alexander Tsiurupa for the Sovnarkom and Rykov for the STO, each to oversee a number of commissariats.^† Trotsky, who was given no voice in economic management, subjected this proposal to harsh criticism, arguing that the zamy’s responsibilities were so broad as to be meaningless. He believed that the economy would continue to perform unsatisfactorily unless subjected to authoritarian methods of management from the Center, without Party interference¹²⁶—an argument widely interpreted to mean that he aspired to become “dictator” of the economy. Lenin called Trotsky “fundamentally wrong” and accused him of passing ill-formed judgments.¹²⁷

On May 25–27, 1922, Lenin suffered his first stroke, which resulted in a paralysis of the right arm and leg and deprived him temporarily of the ability to speak or write. For the next two months he was out of commission, most of the time resting at Gorki. Physicians now altered their diagnosis to read arteriosclerosis of the brain, possibly of hereditary origin (two of Lenin’s sisters and his brother would die in a similar manner). During this period of forced absence, his most important posts—the rotating chairmanships of the Politburo and of the Sovnarkom—were assumed by Kamenev, who also headed the Moscow Party organization. Stalin chaired the Secretariat and the Orgburo, in which capacities he directed the day-to-day business of the party apparatus. Zinoviev was chief of the Petrograd Party organization and the Comintern. The three formed a “troika,” a directory that dominated the Politburo and, through it, the party and state machines. Each, even Kamenev, who was Trotsky’s brother-in-law, had reasons for joining forces against Trotsky, their common rival. They did not even bother to inform Trotsky, who was vacationing at the time, of Lenin’s stroke.¹²⁸ They were in constant communication with Lenin. The log of Lenin’s activities during this time (May 25–October 2, 1922) indicates Stalin to have been the most frequent visitor to Gorki, meeting with Lenin twelve times; according to Bukharin, Stalin was the only member of the Central Committee whom Lenin asked to see during the most serious stages of his illness.^* According to Maria Ulianova, these were very affectionate encounters: “V. I. Lenin met [Stalin] in a friendly manner, he joked, laughed, asked that I entertain him, offer him wine, and so on. During this and further visits, they also discussed Trotsky in my presence, and it was apparent that here Lenin sided with Stalin against Trotsky.”¹²⁹ Lenin also frequently communicated with Stalin in writing. His archive contains many notes to Stalin requesting his advice on every conceivable issue, including questions of foreign policy. Worried lest Stalin overwork himself, he asked that the Politburo instruct him to take two days’ rest in the country every week.¹³⁰ After learning from Lunacharskii that Stalin lived in shabby quarters, he saw to it that something better was found for him.¹³¹ There is no record of similar intimacy between Lenin and any other member of the Politburo.

73. The “troika,” from left to right: Stalin, (Rykov), Kamenev, Zinoviev.

After obtaining Lenin’s consent and then settling matters among themselves, the triumvirate would present to the Politburo and the Sovnarkom resolutions that these bodies approved as a matter of course. Trotsky either voted with the majority or abstained. By virtue of their collaboration in a Politburo that at the time had only seven members (in addition to them and the absent Lenin, Trotsky, Tomskii, and Bukharin), the troika could have its way on all issues and isolate Trotsky, who had not a single supporter in that body.

Stalin played a brilliant game that deceived everyone, from Lenin down. He would take on himself essential jobs that no one else wanted: drudgeries involving the flow of paper from the party cells to the Politburo and from the Politburo to the party cells, along with countless personnel assignments. No one seemed aware that they formed the basis of patronage, which enabled him to fashion an invincible political machine. He always claimed to have the good of the party uppermost in mind. He seemed devoid of personal ambitions and vanity, quite content to let Trotsky, Kamenev, and Zinoviev bask in the public limelight. He did this so skillfully that in 1923 it was widely thought that the battle for Lenin’s succession pitted Trotsky against Zinoviev.¹³² Sometimes Stalin would insist that the unity of the party was the supreme good and that for its sake even principles had to be sacrificed. At other times he would argue that if necessary to uphold principles a split should not be avoided. He would resort now to this, now to that argument, depending on which happened to suit him at a given moment. In disputes his was always the voice of reason, striving to reconcile lofty standards with expediency, a model of moderation and a threat to no one. He had no enemies, except possibly Trotsky, and even him he sought to befriend until rebuffed: Trotsky dismissed him as the party’s “outstanding mediocrity” (vydaiushchaiasia posredstvennost’), too insignificant to bother with. At his country dacha, Stalin would gather the party’s leaders, sometimes with their wives and children, to discuss matters of substance but also to reminisce, sing, and dance.¹³³ Nothing he did or said suggested that underneath his amiable exterior lurked murder. Like a predator mimicking harmless insects, he insinuated himself into the midst of his unsuspecting prey.

On September 11, 1922, Lenin addressed to Stalin a note for the Politburo in which he suggested that in view of Rykov’s imminent departure for a vacation and Tsiurupa’s inability to handle the whole load by himself, two new deputy chairmen be appointed, one to help oversee the Council of People’s Commissars, the other, the Council of Labor and Defense (STO): both were to work under close supervision of the Politburo and himself. For the posts he suggested Trotsky and Kamenev. A great deal has been made by Trotsky’s friends and enemies alike of this bid: some of the former went so far as to claim that Lenin chose him as his successor. (Max Eastman, for example, wrote not long afterward that Lenin had asked Trotsky to “become the head of the Soviet Government, and thus of the revolutionary movement of the world.”)¹³⁴ The reality was more prosaic. According to Lenin’s sister, the offer was made for “diplomatic reasons,” that is, to smooth Trotsky’s ruffled feathers¹³⁵; in fact, it was because it was so insignificant that Trotsky would have none of it. When the Politburo voted on Lenin’s motion, Stalin and Rykov wrote down “Yes,” Kamenev and Tomskii abstained, Kalinin stated “No objections,” while Trotsky wrote “Categorically refuse.”^* Trotsky explained to Stalin why he could not accept the offer. He had previously criticized the institution of zamy on grounds of substance. Now he raised additional objections on grounds of procedure: the offer had not been discussed either at the Politburo or at the Plenum, and, in any event, he was about to leave on a four-week vacation.¹³⁶ But his true reason very likely was the demeaning nature of the proposal: he was to be one of four deputies—one of them not even a Politburo member—without clearly defined responsibilities: a meaningless “deputy as such.” Acceptance would have humiliated him; refusal, however, handed his enemies deadly ammunition. For it was quite unprecedented for a high Soviet official “categorically” to refuse an assignment.

Stalin returned to Gorki the next day. What he discussed with Lenin during their two-hour encounter is not known. But it is not unreasonable to assume that Trotsky’s rejection of Lenin’s offer was one of the topics; nor, in view of what followed, is there reason to doubt that Lenin agreed to Trotsky’s being formally reprimanded. The Politburo, meeting on September 14, in Trotsky’s absence, expressed “regrets” that he had not seen fit to accept the proffered post. It was the first shot in a campaign of discreditation. Not long afterwards, Kamenev, acting on behalf of the triumvirate, in a personal communication to Lenin suggested expelling Trotsky. Lenin reacted furiously: “To throw Trotsky overboard—this is what you are hinting at. It cannot be interpreted otherwise—the height of absurdity. Unless you think me hopelessly deceived, how can you think so???? ‘Bloodied children before the eyes’ …”^†

The political constellation, however, suddenly changed in Trotsky’s favor. In September, physicians permitted Lenin to resume work. On October 2, over the protests of Stalin and Kamenev, who pleaded concern with his health, he reappeared at the Kremlin and adopted a grueling schedule, which kept him busy between ten and twelve hours a day. Closer acquaintance with the activities of the troika during his absence aroused his suspicions: “He seemed to sense,” writes Trotsky, presuming a nonexistent partnership with Lenin, “the almost imperceptible threads of conspiracy being woven behind our backs in connection with his illness.”¹³⁷ Lenin indeed discerned a cabal whose purpose was to isolate him. He had the sense, soon to turn into conviction, that while treating him with outward deference, his colleagues were assiduously at work to eliminate him from the conduct of affairs. One item of evidence was the procedures followed at Politburo meetings. Because he was easily exhausted, Lenin often had to leave these meetings early. The next day he would learn of critical decisions that had been made in his absence.¹³⁸ To put a stop to such practices, he ruled on December 8 that Politburo meetings were to last no longer than three hours (from eleven A.M. to two P.M.): all unresolved questions were to be deferred to the next meeting. The agenda was to be distributed at least 24 hours in advance.¹³⁹

Lenin’s late rapprochement with Trotsky began over a minor issue, the monopoly of foreign trade; it was cemented by disagreement with Stalin over the “Georgian question,” which broke out at the same time. (See below.) During Lenin’s absence, the Central Committee had voted to grant Soviet entrepreneurs and firms greater latitude in their dealings with foreign countries. Krasin, who saw in this measure a breach in the state monopoly on foreign trade, objected on the grounds that the monopoly placed Soviet Russia at a great advantage in dealing with competing foreign countries and enterprises.¹⁴⁰ For Lenin, the monopoly on foreign trade was one of the “commanding heights” reserved by the state under the New Economic Policy. His anger against this measure stemmed from the feeling that his associates were taking advantage of his absence to dismantle the safeguards he had built against the restoration of capitalism. Having learned that Trotsky shared his view, he dictated notes to him on December 13 and 15, requesting that at the next session of the Central Committee Plenum he defend their common stand.¹⁴¹ Trotsky did so, and on December 18 managed without great difficulty to persuade the Plenum to adopt Lenin’s position.

This minor bureaucratic defeat, and the specter of a Lenin-Trotsky alliance, alarmed the triumvirate: their political survival demanded Lenin’s complete insulation from government affairs. On December 18, the day that Trotsky won his victory, Stalin and Kamenev obtained from the Plenum a mandate giving Stalin authority over Lenin’s health regimen. The critical clause of the resolution, as communicated by Stalin to Lenin’s secretary, Lydia Fotieva, read:

To place on Comrade Stalin personal responsibility for the isolation (izoliatsiiu) of Vladimir Ilich both in respect to personal contacts with [Communist] workers and correspondence.¹⁴²

According to Stalin’s instructions, Lenin was to work only at brief intervals, to dictate to secretaries, one of whom was N. I. Allulieva, Stalin’s wife. It was an astonishing measure, which treated Lenin and his wife as mentally incompetent. Lenin came immediately to suspect that the Central Committee was not acting on the advice of physicians, but, on the contrary, was telling the physicians what to say.¹⁴³

Feeling ensnared by a web of intrigue, at the heart of which he came increasingly to suspect Stalin, Lenin turned for help to Trotsky, who was in a similar predicament. According to Trotsky, and we only have his word for it, in a private conversation sometime in the first half of December—it was to be the last direct contact between the two men—Lenin urged him once again to accept the post of Deputy Chairman of Sovnarkom. But on this occasion, Trotsky claims, Lenin went further, offering to join him in a “bloc” against the bureaucracy in general and the Orgburo in particular. Trotsky understood it to mean a coalition against Stalin.¹⁴⁴

During the night of December 15–16 Lenin suffered another stroke, following which physicians ordered forced rest and abstention from all political activity. Lenin refused to obey.¹⁴⁵ He felt on the brink of complete physical incapacitation, possibly death, and wanted to make certain he left everything in good order. On December 22, he requested Fotieva to provide him with cyanide in the event he lost the capacity to speak.¹⁴⁶ He had made a similar request of Stalin as early as May, a fact in which Maria Ulianova saw proof of Lenin’s special confidence in Stalin.^*

On December 21, apparently distrusting his secretaries, Lenin dictated to Krupskaia a warm note to Trotsky, congratulating him on winning the battle over the foreign trade monopoly “without a single shot being fired, simply by a tactical maneuver.” He urged him to press the attack.¹⁴⁷ The contents of this note were at once communicated to Stalin, who now had confirmation of his suspicion that Lenin and Trotsky were joining forces against him. The next day he telephoned Krupskaia, berating her crudely for having transcribed her husband’s dictation in violation of the regimen he had established under the party’s authority, and threatening her with an investigation by the Central Control Commission. After hanging up, Krupskaia fell into hysterics, crying and rolling on the floor.¹⁴⁸ That night, before she could tell Lenin of the incident, he suffered yet another stroke. Krupskaia wrote Kamenev that in all her years as party member no one had spoken to her as Stalin had done. Who cared more for the health of her husband than she, and who knew better what was good for him?¹⁴⁹ Apprised of the letter, Stalin thought it prudent to call her to apologize; but, acting in concert with Kamenev, he also took further precautions to enforce Lenin’s quarantine. On December 24, following instructions of the Politburo (Bukharin, Kamenev, and Stalin), the doctors ordered Lenin to confine his dictation to 5 to 10 minutes a day. His dictations were to be regarded as personal notes rather than as communications requiring an answer: it was a subtle way of prohibiting him from intervening in affairs of state and corresponding with Trotsky. “Neither friends, nor domestics,” the instruction read, were “to inform Vladimir Ilich of anything about political life, so as not to give him material for reflections and excitement.”¹⁵⁰ Thus, under the pretense of safeguarding his health, Stalin and his associates in effect placed Lenin under house arrest.^*

Lenin was paying dearly for his political habits. For twenty years he had dominated his associates; but now they had tasted power, and were burning with impatience to be on their own. They justified what amounted to a quiet coup d’état in a whispered campaign within party circles that the “old man” was out of touch and even something of a “mental invalid.”¹⁵¹ Trotsky disloyally joined in this campaign. In January 1923, Lenin wrote for Pravda an article intended for the forthcoming Party Congress, in which he voiced anxiety over the possibility of a split in the party and suggested ways of averting it.¹⁵² The Politburo and Orgburo, meeting in joint session, debated at length whether to publish an essay likely to cause consternation in party ranks, which were never told of any disgreements in the leadership. Since Lenin demanded to see the issue of Pravda with his article, V. V. Kuibyshev proposed printing a single issue for his eyes only. In the end it was decided to publish the article, minus one passage urging that meetings of the Politburo be attended by representatives of the Central Control Commission (TsKK), who were under no condition to be influenced by any “personalities,” the General Secretary specifically included.¹⁵³ At the same time, the leadership sent a confidential circular to the provincial and district party organizations intended to neutralize the article’s potentially harmful effect. The letter, dated January 27, drafted by Trotsky and signed by all the members of the Politburo and Orgburo on hand, including Stalin, advised that Lenin was unwell and unable to participate in Politburo meetings. This explained why he did not realize that, in fact, there was not the slightest risk of a split in the party.¹⁵⁴ Had he known of this document, Lenin might well have echoed the words Nicholas II had written in his diary after being forced to abdicate: “All around treason and cowardice and deception!”

As a reward for Trotsky’s collaboration, Stalin in January once again offered him the post of a zam in charge of either the VSNKh or the Gosplan. Trotsky again refused.¹⁵⁵

Lenin fought back like a cornered animal. In lucid moments between strokes he informed himself of what the triumvirate was doing and prepared against it a major campaign. Although obviously in no condition to do so, he planned to intervene with Trotsky’s help at the Twelfth Party Congress scheduled for March, to force through drastic changes in the country’s political and economic management. Trotsky was his natural ally in this endeavor, for he, too, was politically isolated. Had Lenin succeeded, Stalin’s career would have been seriously set back, if not ruined.

Lenin’s hostility toward Stalin, which was assuming obsessive forms, was aggravated by Stalin’s high-handed methods in dealing with ethnic minorities. Lenin attached immense importance to the proper treatment of Russia’s minorities, not only because he felt it essential for the cohesion of the Soviet state, but also because of the repercussions it was likely to have on colonial nations. On matters of substance, he had no quarrel with Stalin: nationalism was a “bourgeois” relic that had no place in the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” The Soviet state had to be centralized and decisions made without regard to national preferences. His differences with Stalin were over manners. Lenin believed that the ethnic minorities had justified grievances against Russians because of their past maltreatment. These grievances he meant to assuage by essentially formal concessions such as granting them the appearance of federal status along with limited cultural autonomy, and, above all, by treating them with utmost tact. A person totally devoid of national sentiments, he despised and feared Great Russian chauvinism as a threat to the global interests of Communism.

Stalin, a Georgian who spoke Russian with a comic foreign accent, viewed the matter differently. He realized early that the power base of Communism lay among the Great Russian population. Of the 376,000 party members registered in 1922, fully 270,000, or 72 percent, were Russian, and of the remainder, a high proportion was Russified: of the Ukrainian members, one-half, and of the Jewish, two-thirds.¹⁵⁶ Moreover, in the course of the Civil War, and even more so during the war with Poland, a subtle fusion occurred between Communism and Russian nationalism. Its clearest manifestation was the so-called “Smena Vekh,” or “Change of Landmarks,” movement, which gained popularity among conservative émigrés by acclaiming the Soviet state as the champion of Russian national greatness and urged all émigrés to return home. At the Tenth Party Congress (1921) a delegate remarked that the achievements of the Soviet state “have filled with pride the hearts of those who had been connected with the Russian Revolution and engendered a peculiar Red Russian patriotism.”¹⁵⁷ To an ambitious politician like Stalin, more interested in acquiring power at home than in overturning the world, this development spelled not danger but opportunity. From the beginning of his career, and more overtly with each year of his dictatorship, he identified himself with Great Russian nationalism at the expense of the ethnic minorities.

By 1922, the Communists had reconquered most of the borderlands populated by non-Russians. The decisive factor in this imperial expansion had been the Red Army. But native Communists had also contributed, with their propaganda and subversion, and once the new regime was installed, they wanted a voice in local affairs. To this demand the center paid scant attention: in the capacity of Commissar of Nationalities and General Secretary, Stalin treated each so-called Soviet republic as an intrinsic part of Russia, much as had been the case under tsarism. The result was resentment and conflicts between local Communists and the Moscow apparatus, which came to Lenin’s attention in late 1922.

The most violent confrontation of this kind occurred in Georgia. Stalin regarded the subjugated Menshevik stronghold as his personal bailiwick, and after Georgia had been occupied, he ran roughshod over the local Communists with the help of a fellow Georgian, Sergo Ordzhonikidze, the head of the Caucasian Bureau of the Communist Party. Implementing Lenin’s instructions to integrate the economy of Transcaucasia, Ordzhonikidze merged Georgia with Armenia and Azerbaijan into a single federation, preliminary to the area’s incorporation into Soviet Russia. Local Communists, led by Budu Mdivani and Philip Makharadze, resisted and complained to Moscow of Ordzhonikidze’s high-handed behavior.¹⁵⁸ Yielding to their protests, Lenin temporarily postponed the political and economic integration of Transcaucasia: then, in March 1922, he ordered the merger to proceed. At that time Ordzhonikidze announced the establishment of the Federal Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics of Transcaucasia: most of the powers exercised by the governments of the three republics were to be transferred to the new federal entity. Protests from Tiflis had no effect on Lenin, who in such matters relied on Stalin’s counsel.

In the summer of 1922, the Communist realm consisted of four republics: Russia (RSFSR), the Ukraine, Belorussia, and Transcaucasia. Formal relations among them were regulated by bilateral treaties; in reality, all four were administered by the Russian Communist Party. It was now decided that the time had come to place relations between these republics on a more orderly basis. The task of working out the principles of a federal union Lenin entrusted in August 1922 to a commission headed by Stalin.¹⁵⁹ Stalin came up with a solution of striking simplicity: the three non-Russian republics would enter the RSFSR as autonomous entities, and the central state organs of the Russian Republic would assume federal functions. Under this arrangement, no constitutional distinction would be drawn between the Ukraine or Georgia on the one hand, and the autonomous republics of the RSFSR, such as Iakutiia or Bashkiriia, on the other. It was an exceedingly centralistic arrangement that assigned all essential state functions to the government of the Russian Republic.¹⁶⁰ In effect, it reverted to the “Russia one and indivisible” principle of tsarist times.

This was not at all what Lenin had in mind. As early as 1920 he had conceived two kinds of Soviet entities, “union” republics, endowed with formal sovereignty, for the major ethnic groups, and “autonomous” republics for the smaller ones. Stalin thought the distinction scholastic, inasmuch as in terms of administrative practice Moscow drew no distinction between large and small national minorities.¹⁶¹ With Lenin’s mandate, he now proceeded to design a new state structure according to his own conceptions.

The draft of Stalin’s proposal, based on the concept of “autonomization,” was sent to the republics for approval. It ran into a hostile reception. Most displeased were the Georgian Communists, who on September 15, 1922, declared the proposal “premature.”¹⁶² Ordzhonikidze overruled them and advised Stalin on behalf of the Transcaucasian Federation that his draft had been approved. The Ukraine withheld judgment, while Belorussia hedged, declaring it would be guided by the Ukraine’s decision. Stalin’s commission adopted his plan with virtual unanimity.

Lenin acquainted himself with Stalin’s draft on September 25. He also read the resolutions of the Central Committee of the Georgian Communist Party, to which Stalin appended an explanatory letter of unusual (for him) length. Stalin justified his plan on the grounds that there really was no middle ground between genuine independence of each republic and complete unity. Regrettably, Stalin wrote, during the years of the Civil War when “we had to demonstrate Moscow’s liberalism in the nationality question, we managed to produce among Communists, against our wishes, genuine and consequential social-independists (sotsial-nezavisimtsy), who demand genuine independence.”¹⁶³

Lenin was very unhappy with the contents as well as the tone of what he read. Stalin had not only ignored the objections of the non-Russian Communists, but treated them rudely. He summoned Stalin for a conversation (September 26) which lasted two hours and forty minutes, following which he sent the Politburo a note in which he subjected Stalin’s draft to scathing criticism.¹⁶⁴ Instead of the three non-Russian republics being incorporated into the Russian Republic, he proposed that they join with the RSFSR to form a new supranational entity tentatively called “The Union of Soviet Republics of Europe and Asia.” By omitting “Russia” from the name of the new state, Lenin wished both to stress the equality of its constituent entities (in his words, so as not to “give food to the ‘separatists’ ”) and to create a nucleus around which would consolidate countries that went Communist in the future.^* Lenin further proposed that instead of having the Russian Central Executive Committee assume ail-Union functions, as Stalin had envisaged, a new Central Executive Committee be formed for the federal entity.

In his response to Lenin’s criticism, Stalin displayed none of the customary deference due the Party’s leader. While bowing to Lenin’s wishes on the structure of the new state, and submitting to his commission a revised plan, he persisted in demanding that the Central Executive Committee of the RSFSR turn into the federal CEC. Lenin’s other objections he dismissed as trivial. At one point he accused Lenin of “national liberalism.”¹⁶⁵ In the end, however, he was forced to accede to all of Lenin’s wishes and revised his proposal accordingly.¹⁶⁶ In this form, it became the charter of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which would be formally proclaimed on December 30, 1922, at the Tenth Congress of Soviets of the RSFSR. Augmented by representatives of the three non-Russian republics, the Congress proclaimed itself the First All-Union Congress of Soviets.

The Georgians stood their ground: they found it intolerable that whereas the Ukraine and Belorussia entered the Union directly, as formally sovereign republics, they had to do so through the Transcaucasian Federation, that is, as autonomous entities. Bypassing Stalin’s Secretariat, they informed the Kremlin that if the proposal went through they would resign in a body.¹⁶⁷ In his response Stalin advised them that the Central Committee had unanimously rejected their objections. On October 21 a cable came from Lenin in which he, too, rebuffed the Georgians for the substance of their protest as well as for the manner in which it had been presented.¹⁶⁸ On its receipt, on October 22, the entire Central Committee of the Georgian Communist Party tendered its resignation; it was an unprecedented event in the history of the Communist Party.¹⁶⁹ Ordzhonikidze took advantage of this gesture to replace the Central Committee with a new body staffed with young converts to Communism, pliable to his and Stalin’s wishes. On October 24, Stalin cabled him the Central Committee’s approval.¹⁷⁰

Up to this point Lenin had agreed with Stalin in the matter of Georgia. But in late November, already in an anti-Stalin mood, studying materials sent him from Tiflis, he concluded that there could be more to the Georgian case. He requested a fact-finding commission to be sent to Georgia. Stalin appointed Dzerzhinskii to head it. Distrustful of the General Secretary’s machinations and wishing to establish his own channel to Tiflis, Lenin asked Rykov to go to Georgia as well. One of Lenin’s secretaries noted that he awaited the results of the investigations with burning impatience.¹⁷¹

Dzerzhinskii returned from his mission on December 12. Lenin at once left Gorki for Moscow to meet with him. Dzerzhinskii completely exonerated Ordzhonikidze and Stalin, but Lenin was not persuaded. He was especially upset to learn that in the course of a political argument Ordzhonikidze had struck a Georgian comrade. (He had called Ordzhonikidze a “Stalinist ass.”)¹⁷² Lenin ordered Dzerzhinskii to return to Georgia to gather more evidence. The next day (December 13) he saw Stalin for two hours: it was to be their last encounter. Following the talk, Lenin intended to write Kamenev a substantial memorandum on the whole nationality question, but before he could do so, on December 15 he was laid low by another stroke.

Lenin felt so betrayed by his associates that during the thirteen months he had left to live he categorically refused to see any of them, communicating only indirectly, through his secretarial staff. The chronicle of his activities indicates that during 1923 he saw neither Trotsky, nor Stalin; not Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, or Rykov. All were kept away on his explicit orders.¹⁷³ This separation from his closest associates resembled the decision of Nicholas II, in the last months of his reign, to break off relations with the Grand Dukes.

Lenin returned to work later that month, and in the two months of lucidity left to him, in the brief intervals when permitted to work, dictated short essays in which he gave expression to a desperate concern over the direction Soviet policy had taken during his illness and charted the course of reforms. These essays are distinguished by lack of cohesion, a digressive style, and repetitiveness, all symptoms of a deteriorating mind. The most damaging of them remained unpublished in the Soviet Union until after Stalin’s death. Initially used by Stalin’s successors to discredit him, later, in the 1980s, they served to legitimize Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika. The writings dealt with economic planning, cooperatives, the reorganization of Worker-Peasant Inspection, and the relationship between the party and the state. Through all his late writings and speeches runs, as a common theme, the sense of despair over Russia’s cultural backwardness: he now came to regard its low level of culture as the principal obstacle to the construction of socialism in Russia. “Previously we placed and had to place the center of gravity on the political struggle, on the revolution, on conquest of power, and so on. Now, however, that center of gravity changes to that extent, that it shifts to peaceful ‘cultural’ work.”¹⁷⁴ With these words Lenin tacitly acknowledged that he had been wrong thirty years earlier in rejecting as “bourgeois” the arguments of Peter Struve that before Russia could attain socialism she had to admit her want of culture and graduate from the school of capitalism.¹⁷⁵

The most important of Lenin’s late writings dealt with the issues of succession and the nationalities. Between December 23 and 26, with an addendum on January 4, Lenin dictated, in brief bursts, a series of personal comments on his associates—subsequently known as his “Testament”—for distribution to the forthcoming, Twelfth Party Congress.^* Worried about the rivalry between Stalin and Trotsky, he proposed to enlarge the Central Committee from twenty-seven to as many as one hundred members, the newcomers to be drawn from the peasantry and working class. This would have the double effect of closing the gap between the party and the “masses” and diluting the power of the party’s directing organs, now firmly in the hands of Stalin.

Lenin wanted this and other, related documents to be kept in strictest secrecy, ordering that they be placed in sealed envelopes to be opened either by him or by Krupskaia. M. A. Volodicheva, the secretary who took the dictation on December 23, however, troubled by the responsibility that knowledge of such an important document placed on her, consulted Fotieva, who advised her to show it to the General Secretary. Having read it in the presence of Bukharin and Ordzhonikidze, Stalin asked Volodicheva to burn it, which she did, without betraying that four more copies were deposited in a safe at Gorki.¹⁷⁶

Unaware of her indiscretion, the following day Lenin dictated to Volodicheva still more explosive lines on the leading figures of the party.¹⁷⁷ Stalin, having become General Secretary, had accumulated “unbounded [neob’iat-naia] power”: “I am not convinced that he will always know how to use this power with sufficient circumspection.” On January 4 he dictated to Fotieva the following addendum:

Stalin is too coarse [grub], and this shortcoming, fully tolerable within our midst and in our relations, as Communists, becomes intolerable in the post of General Secretary. For this reason I suggest that the comrades consider how to transfer Stalin from this post and replace him with someone who in all other respects enjoys over Comrade Stalin only one advantage, namely greater patience, greater loyalty, greater courtesy and attentiveness to comrades, less capriciousness, etc.¹⁷⁸

Lenin thus fathomed only Stalin’s minor vices, flaws of conduct and temperament: his sadistic cruelty, his megalomania, his hatred of anyone superior, eluded him to the end.

Trotsky he characterized as the “most capable person in the current Central Committee,” but also someone “overly prone to self-confidence and overly attracted to the purely administrative aspect of work.” By the latter he meant addiction not to paperwork but to a noncollegial command style of management. He recalled the shameful behavior of Kamenev and Zinoviev in October 1917, when they had opposed the power seizure, but he had some nice, if qualified, things to say about Bukharin and Piatakov—the former he characterized as the most outstanding theoretician in the party and the party’s favorite, yet not quite a Marxist and something of a scholastic^* There was no indication whom he wanted as General Secretary, but he left no doubt that Stalin had to go. The impression one gains from reading these rambling comments is that he considered no one fit to inherit his mantle. Fotieva promptly communicated these remarks to Stalin.¹⁷⁹

Next Lenin addressed himself to the nationality question, on which subject he dictated on December 30–31 three memoranda. Here, he severely criticized the manner in which the Communist apparatus dealt with the minorities.^† The thrust of his comments was that Stalin’s proposal of “autonomization”—now abandoned—had been entirely inopportune and that its purpose was to enable the Soviet bureaucracy, mostly holdovers from tsarism, to lord it over the country. He accused Stalin and Dzerzhinskii, assimilated non-Russians, of chauvinism: Stalin he called “not only a genuine and veritable ‘social-nationalist,’ but also a crude Great Russian Dzerzhimorda” (a policeman in Gogol’s Inspector General, whose name means “Snout-Muzzler”). Stalin and Dzerzhinskii were to be held personally accountable for “this truly Great Russian nationalistic campaign” against the Georgians. In his practical conclusions, Lenin demanded that the Union be strengthened, but, at the same time, that the minority peoples be given the maximum of rights compatible with national unity: any attempts at independence on the part of the republican ministries, he noted, could be “adequately paralyzed by the authority of the Party.” It was a typically Leninist solution, in which a democratic facade was to conceal the totalitarian substance.

Whether or not Stalin knew of Lenin’s essay on the nationalities is not clear: in any event, he could have no doubt now that Lenin was readying an all-out campaign against him, likely to result in his losing most of if not all his posts. (To Trotsky, Lenin confided he was “preparing a bomb” against Stalin at the Twelfth Party Congress.) Stalin was fighting for his political life: powerfully positioned though he was, once Lenin personally took the field, he stood no chance. His one hope was that Lenin would be fully incapacitated before he could bring him down.

Dzerzhinskii returned from his second mission to Georgia at the end of January 1923. To Lenin’s request for the materials he had brought with him, he responded evasively that he had turned them over to Stalin. Stalin could not be found for two days; when finally located, he told Fotieva that he could grant Lenin’s request only if authorized by the Politburo. In an aside he asked whether “she was not telling Lenin something unnecessary,” and “how was it that he was abreast of current business?” Fotieva denied telling Lenin anything; in fact, she was telling everything to Stalin. Lenin later said to her face that he suspected her of disloyalty.¹⁸⁰ He was right. It has been subsequently established from archival sources that Fotieva, ignoring Lenin’s orders that his dictations be kept “absolutely” and “categorically secret,” routinely passed on their contents to Stalin and several other members of the Politburo.^*

On February 1, the Politburo at last acceded to Lenin’s request and delivered to his secretaries the materials collected by Dzerzhinskii on his second mission. In no condition to read them, Lenin distributed the papers among his secretarial staff with exact instructions as to what information to locate. They were to report to him as soon as they finished. Building a case for the Party Congress against Stalin, Dzerzhinskii, and Ordzhonikidze, he followed the progress of his staff with keen interest: according to Fotieva, during February 1923 the Georgian question was uppermost on his mind.¹⁸¹ The report was delivered to him on March 3. Once he familiarized himself with it, Lenin threw his full support behind the Georgian opposition. On March 5, he forwarded to Trotsky his memoir on the nationality question with a request that he take charge of the defense of the Georgian Communists in the Central Committee. “The matter is being ‘prosecuted’ by Stalin and Dzerzhinskii, on whose objectivity I cannot rely. Quite the contrary.”¹⁸²

It so happened that on that very day, March 5, after Lenin questioned her about a telephone conversation he had overheard, Krupskaia told him of the incident with Stalin the previous December.¹⁸³ Lenin immediately dictated the following letter to Stalin:

Respected Comrade Stalin!

You had the rudeness to telephone my wife and abuse her. Although she has told you of her willingness to forget what you have said, this fact came to be known, through her, also to Zinoviev and Kamenev. I have no intention of forgetting so easily what is done against me, and, needless to say, I consider whatever is done against my wife to be directed also against myself. For this reason I request you to inform me whether you agree to retract what you have said and apologize, or prefer a breach of relations between us.^†

Krupskaia vainly tried to stop Lenin from dispatching this letter: it was personally delivered to Stalin by Volodicheva on March 7, with copies to Kamenev and Zinoviev.¹⁸⁴

Stalin calmly read it and then wrote a response, first published in 1989, which can only be described as a very qualified apology. Insisting that he had meant no offense and was merely reminding Krupskaia of her responsibility for Lenin’s health, he concluded: “If you feel that for the preservation of ‘relations’ I should ‘retract’ the above words, I can take them back, failing, however, to understand what it is all about, wherein lies my ‘fault,’ and what, really, is wanted of me.”^*

The following day, Lenin dictated another note—it was to be the very last communication of his life—to the leaders of the Georgian opposition, with copies to Trotsky and Kamenev, informing them that he was following their case “with all my heart,” that he was appalled by the “connivances” of Stalin and Dzerzhinskii, and that he was preparing a speech on the subject.¹⁸⁵

Stalin faced the prospect of political annihilation. With Lenin offering to break relations and Trotsky in charge of the prosecution, his chances of staying on as General Secretary were close to nil. But the news was not all bad, for Lenin’s physicians, with whom he was in constant communication, advised him that the patient’s health was growing worse. So he decided to play for time. On March 9, Pravda carried a terse, one-sentence announcement from him, without explanation, that the forthcoming Party Congress, which was scheduled for mid-March, was deferred to April 15.¹⁸⁶

The gamble paid off. The next day (March 10), Lenin suffered a massive stroke, which robbed him of the power of speech: until his death ten months later, he could utter only such monosyllables as “vot-vot” (“here-here”) and “s”ezd-s”ezd” (“congress-congress”).¹⁸⁷ Physicians attending him—there were forty of them, including several specialists from Germany—concluded that he would never again be able to play an active role in politics. In May, he was moved permanently to Gorki, where on fine days he sat in a wheelchair in the park. For all practical purposes he was a living corpse: for although he seemed to understand what was said to him and was able to read, he could not communicate. In August, Krupskaia tried to teach him to write with his left hand, but the results were not encouraging and she gave up.¹⁸⁸

In this, the last period of his life, he seems to have been overwhelmed by a sense of failure. It was evidenced by an uncharacteristic craving for praise, for reassurance that whatever the outcome, he had made history. In 1923 and early 1924, Lenin, who in the past had paid no attention to the opinions of others, whether favorable or hostile, craved panegyrics. He read with visible pleasure Trotsky’s article comparing him to Marx, Gorky’s assertion that without him the Russian Revolution would not have triumphed, and the encomiums of such foreign admirers as Henri Guilbeaux and Arthur Rhys Williams.¹⁸⁹

74. Lenin at Gorki, 1923.

With Lenin out of the picture, Stalin still had to neutralize Trotsky, who had Lenin’s mandate to discredit him for his handling of the Georgian question. The task proved unexpectedly easy, because Trotsky evaded the responsibility that Lenin had entrusted to him. Instead of executing Lenin’s commission, he abandoned the Georgians to their fate: when a secretary read to him over the telephone Lenin’s letter of March 5, Trotsky flatly refused to speak for the Georgians at the Plenum, on grounds of ill health: he claimed to be nearly paralyzed. But, he added, after earlier hesitations he had now come fully to side with the Georgian opposition.¹⁹⁰ Even so, he fell in line with Stalin’s self-serving decision to defer the opening of the Twelfth Congress.¹⁹¹ On the eve of the Congress, he assured Kamenev that he would support Stalin’s reappointment as General Secretary and oppose the expulsion of Dzerzhinskii and Ordzhonikidze.¹⁹² He turned down Stalin’s offer, made in an effort to coopt him, to deliver to the Congress the report of the Central Committee, traditionally given by Lenin. He thought Stalin, as General Secretary, was better qualified. Stalin modestly declined and the honor went to Zinoviev, who was heedlessly elbowing his way to the front, convinced Lenin’s mantle was his for the asking.¹⁹³

Trotsky’s behavior at this critical juncture in his and Stalin’s careers has mystified both contemporaries and historians. He himself never provided a satisfactory explanation. Various interpretations have been advanced: that he underestimated Stalin; or that, on the contrary, he thought the General Secretary too solidly entrenched to be successfully challenged; that he had no stomach for a conflict certain to divide the Party.¹⁹⁴ Some of his acolytes claim that he considered political infighting below his dignity, having “no idea whatever of personal political maneuvering.”¹⁹⁵ His biographer, Issac Deutscher, attributes Trotsky’s passivity to his “magnanimity” and “heroic character,” in which respect, he claims, he had “only very few equals in history.”¹⁹⁶

Trotsky’s behavior seems to have been caused by a number of disparate factors that are difficult to disentangle. He undoubtedly considered himself best qualified to take over Lenin’s leadership. Yet he was well aware of the formidable obstacles facing him. He had no following in the party leadership, which clustered around Stalin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev. He was unpopular in party ranks for his non-Bolshevik past as well as his aloof personality. Another factor inhibiting him—imponderable by its very nature but certainly weighty—was his Jewishness. This came to light with the publication in 1990 of the minutes of a Central Committee Plenum of October 1923, at which Trotsky defended himself from criticism for having refused Lenin’s offer of deputyship. Although his Jewish origins held for him no meaning, he said, it was politically significant. By assuming the high post Lenin offered him, he would “give enemies grounds for claiming that the country was ruled by a Jew.” Lenin had dismissed the argument as “nonsense” but “deep in his heart he agreed with me.”¹⁹⁷

Such considerations moved Trotsky in 1922–23 to behave in a very contradictory fashion, as he strove to act independently of the majority and, at the same time, cooperated with it to avoid the fatal stigma of “factionalism.” In the end he not only lost the political battle, but forfeited the moral esteem that a more courageous stand would have earned him.

With Trotsky’s connivance, the Twelfth Party Congress, which could have been the scene of Stalin’s ruin, witnessed his triumph. On March 16, exuding confidence, Stalin cabled Ordzhonikidze in Tiflis that “despite everything,” the Congress would approve the conduct of the Transcaucasian Committee.¹⁹⁸ He proved right. At the Congress, he patiently explained why introducing more democratic procedures into a party of 400,000 would transform it into a “discussion club” incapable of action, at a time when the country was under continuous threat from the “wolves of imperialism.”¹⁹⁹ He agreed with Lenin on the utility of enlarging the Central Committee with fresh elements, while ignoring his proposals for structural and personnel changes. Lenin’s notes on the nationality question were distributed to the delegates but not made public.^* In the report he delivered on this subject, Stalin cleverly steered a middle course, neutralizing Lenin’s arguments on behalf of the Georgian opposition and a looser Union: he even had the temerity to condemn “Great Russian chauvinism,” with which Lenin had charged him.²⁰⁰ The minutes record that on the completion of his organizational report on behalf of the Central Committee, the delegates rewarded Stalin with “loud, protracted applause.”^† (Lenin’s speeches at Party Congresses normally rated only “loud applause.”) Trotsky confined himself to an address on the future of Soviet industry—it was his only intervention at the Congress and he received bare “applause.” Stalin was readily reconfirmed as General Secretary.

Trotsky’s appeasement availed him little. In his memoirs he writes that during Lenin’s incapacitation, Stalin’s associates formed a conspiracy involving all the members of the Politburo except for himself, which caucused before any decisions were to be taken and then acted in unison. To qualify for appointments, party members had to meet only one criterion: enmity to Trotsky.²⁰¹ In the new Central Committee of forty members he could count on no more than three supporters.²⁰²

Aware that the odds were overwhelmingly against him and that he had nothing to lose, Trotsky gave up currying favor with his enemies and went on the offensive. To restore his faltering fortunes, he assumed the pose of spokesman for the party masses: if the entrenched Old Guard insisted on treating him as an outsider, he would become the champion of the outsiders. The latter were the vast majority of the Party’s membership: according to the census of 1922, only 2.7 percent of the 376,000 members had joined before 1917 and thus qualified for the Old Guard.²⁰³ But that 2.7 percent monopolized the Party’s directing organs and, through them, the apparatus of the state.^* Friends assured Trotsky that he was an influential Communist leader and that his name was inseparably bound to Lenin’s.²⁰⁴ Why not, then, rally the Communist rank-and-file to his side? Although couched in moral terms, Trotsky’s counteroffensive, launched in October 1923, was little more than a desperate gamble. Since October 1917 no one had insisted more resolutely on the supreme importance of party unity and rejected more derisively the calls for greater party democracy voiced by the Workers’ Opposition and the Democratic Centralists. His sudden conversion to party democracy could not have been motivated by fundamental changes in the way the Party was run, since no such changes had occurred. What had shifted was his standing in the Party: once an insider, he had become an outcast.

On October 8, 1923, Trotsky addressed to the Central Committee an Open Letter charging the leadership with abandoning democratic procedures in the Party.²⁰⁵ (In the Party only—as he reminded the Plenum that met to discuss his letter: “You, comrades, know very well that I was never a ‘democrat.’ ”^†) The event that precipitated the move was Dzerzhinskii’s demand that Communists who had knowledge of factional activity be required to inform the GPU and other appropriate Party organs.²⁰⁶ Well aware that this provision was directed against him and his followers, he interpreted it as symptomatic of the Party’s bureaucratization. What has happened, he demanded to know, that a special instruction had to be issued requiring Communists to do that which it was their duty to do in any event? He aimed his fire against the concentration of power at the top of the hierarchy, singling out the practice of naznachenstvo, the appointment of secretaries of provincial party organizations by the Center:

The bureaucratization of the Party has developed to unheard-of proportions as a result of the procedure of secretarial selection.… There has been created a very broad stratum of party workers, in the apparatus of the government and the Party, who completely renounce their own party opinion, at least in its open expression, as if assuming that the secretarial hierarchy represents the apparatus that creates party opinion and makes party decisions. Beneath the stratum of those who abstain from [expressing] their own opinions, lies the broad mass of the Party, for whom every decision comes in the form of a ready summons or command.²⁰⁷

While conceding that “old Bolsheviks” had a right to special status, he reminded them that they constituted but a minuscule minority. He concluded: “There must be an end to secretarial bureaucratism. Party democracy—at any rate, within such limits without which the party is threatened with ossification and degeneration—must acquire its rights.”²⁰⁸

All of which was true enough: yet only three years earlier Trotsky himself had dismissed identical complaints as “formalism” and “fetishism.” On his new platform he acquired some support, especially from the so-called “Group of 46,” members who shared his views and sent a letter to this effect to the Central Committee.²⁰⁹ The directing organs of the Party, however, had a ready answer: the letter constituted a “platform” that could lead to the creation of an illegal faction.²¹⁰ In a lengthy rebuttal, it took Trotsky to task:

Two or three years ago, when Comrade Trotsky began his “economic” pronouncements against the majority of the Central Committee, Lenin himself explained to him dozens of times that economic questions belong to a category that precludes quick successes, that requires years and years of patient and persistent work to achieve serious results.… To secure correct leadership of the country’s economic life from a single center and to introduce into it the maximum of planning, the Central Committee in the summer of 1923 reorganized the STO, introducing into it personally a number of the leading economic workers of the republic. In that number, the Central Committee elected also Comrade Trotsky. But Comrade Trotsky did not consider making an appearance at meetings of the STO, just as for many years he had failed to attend meetings of the Sovnarkom and rejected the proposal of Comrade Lenin to be one of the deputies of the Sovnarkom Chairman.… At the basis of Comrade Trotsky’s discontent, of his whole irritation, of all his assaults over the years against the Central Committee, of his decision to rock the party, lies the circumstance that Comrade Trotsky wants the Central Committee to have him and Comrade [A. L.] Kolegaev take charge of our economic life. Comrade Lenin had long fought against such an appointment, and we believe he was entirely correct.… Comrade Trotsky is a member of the Sovnarkom and of the reorganized STO. He has been offered by Comrade Lenin the post of deputy of Sovnarkom chairman. Had he wanted, in all these positions Comrade Trotsky could have demonstrated to the entire party in fact, in deed, that he can be entrusted with that de facto unlimited authority in the field of economic and military affairs for which he strives. But Comrade Trotsky preferred a different method of action, one which, in our opinion, is incompatible with the duties of a Party member. He has attended not a single meeting of the Sovnarkom either under Comrade Lenin or after Comrade Lenin’s retirement from work. He has attended not a single meeting of the STO, whether old or reorganized. He has not moved once either in the Sovnarkom, or in the STO, or in the Gosplan any proposals concerning economic, financial, budgetary, and so forth, questions. He has categorically refused to be Comrade Lenin’s deputy: this he apparently considers below his dignity. He acts according to the formula “All or Nothing.” In fact, Comrade Trotsky has assumed toward the Party the attitude that it either must grant him dictatorial powers in the economic and military spheres, or else he will, in effect, refuse to work in the economic realm, reserving himself only the right to engage in systematic disorganization of the Central Committee in its difficult day-to-day work.²¹¹

The response did not answer the political questions raised by Trotsky’s letter: instead, following the principle that Lenin and Trotsky had long established in political controversies, it assailed him personally. The assault was powerful and must have discredited Trotsky still further in the eyes of the Communist cadres.

Defiant, on October 23, in a letter to the Plenum of the Central Committee, Trotsky expanded on the themes he had raised and denied charges he was promoting divisiveness in party ranks.²¹² Taking note of his refusal to fall in step, the Plenum voted 102 against 2 (with 10 abstentions) to reprimand him for engaging in “factionalism.” It also “completely approved” the conduct of the Party’s leadership.²¹³ Kamenev and Zinoviev wanted Trotsky expelled from the Party, but Stalin thought this not prudent: on his urging, the motion was rejected. The Politburo published in Pravda a resolution stating that notwithstanding Trotsky’s improper behavior, it was inconceivable to carry on work without him: his continued collaboration in the highest party organs was “absolutely indispensable.”^* Realizing that the regime of the “troika” was coming under increasing criticism, Stalin thought it advisable to pretend that he wished to retain Trotsky as a valued if errant associate. As he would later explain:

We did not agree with comrades Zinoviev and Kamenev because we knew that the policy of severance is fraught with dangers for the party, that the method of severance is the method of blood-letting. It is dangerous, contagious: today they will cut off one, tomorrow another, the day after, a third, and then there will be no one left in the Party.²¹⁴

As always, Stalin’s was the voice of reason and compromise.

In December 1923, Trotsky finally broke ranks and took his case to the public with an article in Pravda called “The New Course.” Here he contrasted the Party’s youth, fired with democratic ideals, with the entrenched Old Guard. His operative conclusion was “The party must subordinate to itself its apparatus.”²¹⁵ To which Stalin replied: “Bolshevism cannot accept pitting the party against the party apparatus.”²¹⁶

Now according to the party rules adopted at the Tenth Congress, with Trotsky’s approval, the actions in which he engaged, in particular consultations with the Group of 46, indisputably constituted “factionalism.” The crime was compounded by the leakage of his two letters—accidental or deliberate, no one could tell—to the public. The Party Conference that convened in January 1924, therefore, was entirely within its rights in condemning Trotsky and “Trotskyism” as a “petty-bourgeois” deviation.²¹⁷

The game was up for Trotsky: the rest was anticlimactic. He had no defense against the party majority for, as he would himself concede in 1924: “None of us wants to be and none of us can be right against the Party. In the final analysis, our party is always right.”²¹⁸ In January 1925, he would be forced to resign as Commissar of War. There followed expulsion from the Party and exile, first to Central Asia and then abroad; and, finally, assassination. The moves to oust him, masterminded by Stalin, with the connivance of Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, and the others, were carried out with the backing of the party cadres, who believed they served to safeguard party unity from a selfish schemer.

There are many instances in history when the loser earns posterity’s sympathy because he is seen as morally superior to the victors. It is difficult to muster such sympathy for Trotsky. Admittedly he was more cultured than Stalin and his confederates, intellectually more interesting, personally more courageous, and, in dealings with fellow Communists, more honorable. But as in the case of Lenin, such virtues as he possessed manifested themselves exclusively within the Party. In relations with outsiders as well as those insiders who strove for greater democracy, Trotsky was at one with Lenin and Stalin. He helped forge the weapons that destroyed him. He suffered the same fate that was meted out, with his wholehearted consent, to the opponents of Lenin’s dictatorship: the Kadets, the Socialists-Revolutionaries, the Mensheviks; ex-tsarist officers who would not fight in the Red Army; the Workers’ Opposition; the Kronshtadt sailors, and the Tambov peasants; the priesthood. He awoke to the dangers of totalitarianism only when it threatened him personally: his sudden conversion to party democracy was a means of self-defense, not the championship of principle.

Trotsky liked to depict himself as a proud lion brought down by a pack of jackals; and the more monstrous Stalin revealed himself to be, the more persuasive this image appeared to those in Russia and abroad who wanted to salvage an idealized vision of Lenin’s Bolshevism. But the record indicates that in his day Trotsky, too, was one of the pack. His defeat had nothing ennobling about it. He lost because he was outsmarted in a sordid struggle for political power.

Lenin died in the evening of Monday, January 21, 1924. Apart from the family and attending physicians, the only witness to his last moments was Bukharin.^* As soon as they heard the news, Zinoviev, Stalin, Kamenev, and Kalinin rushed to Gorki on motorized sleds; the rest of the leadership followed by train. Stalin, who led the procession to the dead leader’s bedside, raised his head, pressed it to his heart, and kissed it.²¹⁹ The next day, Dzerzhinskii drafted a brief note on Lenin’s death, warning the population not to “panic” so as not to compel the GPU to carry out mass arrests.²²⁰

On the day of Lenin’s death, Trotsky arrived in Tiflis en route to the resort city of Sukhumi. He learned of it the next day from a coded telegram signed by Stalin.²²¹ In response to a cabled query, Stalin advised him that the funeral would take place on Saturday (January 26), and added that since there was not enough time for him to return for the funeral, the Politburo thought it best that he proceed to Sukhumi as planned.²²² As it turned out, the funeral took place on Sunday. Trotsky subsequently accused Stalin of deliberately misinforming him in order to have him miss the funeral. The charge does not stand up to scrutiny. Lenin died on Monday and Trotsky had the information on Tuesday morning. It had taken him three days to travel from Moscow to Tiflis. Had he immediately turned around, he could have reached Moscow by Friday at the latest, in good time to attend the funeral even if it had been held on Saturday.^* Instead, for reasons he never satisfactorily explained, he followed Stalin’s advice and went on to Sukhumi. There he basked in the Black Sea sun while Lenin’s body lay in state in wintry Moscow attended by the Old Guard. His absence caused widespread surprise and dismay.

What was to be done with Lenin’s remains?²²³ In his will, which has not been published so far, Lenin had expressed the wish to be buried by the side of his mother in Petrograd. This was also what Krupskaia wanted: in a letter to Pravda, she spoke strongly against a cult of Lenin—she wanted no monuments, no celebrations, and, implicitly, no mausoleum.²²⁴ But the Party’s masters had other ideas. The Politburo had discussed embalming Lenin’s body months before his death: this course was especially favored by Stalin and Kalinin, who wanted the dead leader buried in “a Russian manner.” They needed the physical Lenin on permanent exhibit to cater to the popular belief, rooted in Orthodox religion, that the remains of saints were immune to decay. None of them, except their common enemy, Trotsky, was widely known: Stalin, who by this time had acquired, by virtue of bureaucratic infighting, nearly dictatorial powers, was hardly a household name. A dead, and therefore mute but corporeal, Lenin, suitably preserved, would provide validation of the faith he had founded and provide continuity between the October Revolution and the rule of his successors. The decision to embalm Lenin’s remains and display them in a mausoleum on Red Square was taken over the objections of Bukharin and Kamenev.

75. Stalin viewing Lenin’s body.

Lenin’s body lay in state in the Hall of Columns of the Dom Soiuzov, where it was seen by tens of thousands. On January 26, Stalin delivered a funeral speech with a “pledge” in which, using religious cadences he had learned in the seminary, he vowed in the name of the Party faithfully to carry out Lenin’s commands.²²⁵ On Sunday, January 27, the body was borne to a temporary wooden mausoleum.^* Unfortunately, by March, with the advent of spring, the corpse began to decompose.²²⁶ What was to be done? Krasin, placed in charge of the funeral arrangements, believed in resurrection and suggested that the corpse be frozen: special apparatus for this purpose was imported from Germany, but the idea had to be dropped as impractical. Then Dzerzhinskii, whose job it was to know everything, learned that a Kharkov anatomist by the name of V. P. Vorobev had developed new methods of preserving live tissue. After lengthy discussions, the leadership decided to entrust Vorobev with the task of embalming Lenin. The group he headed was named the Immortalization Commission.

Helped by an assistant, Vorobev worked for three months on replacing the water in the cells and tissues with a chemical fluid of his own invention. This compound was said not to evaporate at normal temperatures and humidity, to destroy bacteria and fungi, and to neutralize fermentation. Embalming was completed in late July, and the following month the body was exposed to view in a new wooden mausoleum. In 1930 this was replaced with a mausoleum of stone that Stalin unveiled and that subsequently became the object of state-sponsored veneration. In 1939, Stalin assigned 22 scientists to a laboratory to oversee the mummy, which, despite precautions, did not remain stable. The most advanced scientific methods were applied to prevent further decay or changes in appearance.

Thus, the Bolsheviks who five years earlier in a noisy campaign of blasphemy and ridicule exposed as sham the relics of Orthodox saints, created a holy relic of their own. Unlike the church’s saints, whose remains were revealed to be nothing but rags and bones, their god, as befitted the age of science, was composed of alcohol, glycerin, and formalin.

^*In April 1921, Lenin admitted that in the first year and a half of the regime he had not been aware of the dangers of bureaucratization. He publicly acknowledged it in only in 1919 at the Eighth Party Congress, which adopted a new party program. The program noted with regret the “partial reemergence of bureaucratism inside the soviet system.” Lenin, PSS, XLHI, 229. But even then Lenin blamed this phenomenon on the methods of primitive production and trade operations necessitated by the Civil War: ibid., 230.

^*N. Solovev in Pravda, No. 190 (August 28, 1921), 3–4. Although not complete—the census covered only two-thirds of the Russian Republic—it was assumed to be representative of the Party as a whole. The figures also do not include the capital city, Moscow, the statistics for which were declared “unreliable”: if these were counted, the proportion of Communists holding white-collar jobs would have been considerably higher, since the capital was the hub of the bureaucratic empire.

^*A report to Stalin by the Party’s Organizational Department (Orgotdel) in September 1922 stated that in 1921–22, depending on the province, resignations from the Party ranged from 6.8 to 9.2 percent: RTsKhIDNI, F. 558, op. 1, delo 2429. According to Kalinin, the majority of those quitting the Party were peasants and workers: RTsKhIDNI, F. 5, op. 2, delo 27, list 9.

^*Merle Fainsod, How Russia Is Ruled, revised ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1963), 633, note 10. In 1923, E. A. Preobrazhenskii said that 30 percent of gubkom secretaries were “recommended” by the Central Committee, which he called a “state within the state” (Dvenadtsatyi S”ezd RKP(b), Moscow, 1968, 146).

^*Struck from the record, these epithets were first made public by Stalin in 1924: 1. Stalin, Ob oppozitsii (Moscow-Leningrad, 1928), 73.

^*In 1925, Krupskaia wrote Clara Zetkin that “the broad layers of peasants and workers identify the intelligentsia with large landowners and the bourgeoisie. The hatred of the intelligentsia among the people is strong” (IzvTsK, No. 2/289, February 1989, 204).

^*Lenin, PSS, XLIII, 41. Cf. Angelica Balabanoff, My Life as a Rebel (Bloomington, Ind., and London, 1973), 252. Lenin was so furious at Kollontai for joining the Workers’ Opposition that he refused to talk to her or even about her: Angelica Balabanoff, Impressions of Lenin (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1964), 97–98.

^*Dmitrii Volkogonov, Triumf i tragediia, I/1 (Moscow, 1989), 197. Emphasis added. Bukharin was addressing himself to Trotsky, who by 1924, for reasons that will be spelled out below, had reversed himself and become a champion of the ideas espoused earlier by the Workers’ Opposition.

^†A confidential report to Lenin’s Secretariat from Petrograd in early 1922 confirmed Shliapnikov’s assessment, stating that in that city only 2 to 3 percent of the factory workers belonged to the Communist Party: RTsKhIDNI, F. 5, op. 2, delo 27, list 11.

^*Desiatyi S”ezd RkP(b): Stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow, 1963), 573. The clause was first made public by Stalin in January 1924 at the Thirteenth Party Conference, to condemn Trotsky: I. V. Stalin, Sochineniia, VI (Moscow, 1947), 15.

^*Lenin, PSS, XLV, 526–27; Odinadtsatyi S”ezd, 748. Lenin’s actions on this occasion contradict the frequently heard claim by his admirers that as long as he was in charge no leading party figure or party grouping was expelled or threatened with expulsion (e.g., Vadim Rogovin, Byla li al’ternativa?, Moscow, 1992, 25). The author committed the same mistake in his Russian Revolution (p. 511).

^*N. K. Krupskaia, Vospominaniia o Lenine, 2nd ed. (Moscow, 1933), 35. This time he was further shaken by the sudden death (September 1920) from cholera of his beloved, Inessa Armand.

^†Lenin would order sedatives for himself (Sumnacetin and Veronal) from the Kremlin pharmacy: RTsKhIDNI, F. 2, op. 1, delo 23036.

^*There is a curious note from him dated March 21, 1922, requesting the Central Committee’s approval to have a visiting German specialist on “nervous diseases” examine Chicherin, Trotsky, Kamenev, Stalin, and some other high Soviet officials: RTsKhIDNI, F. 2, op. 1, delo 22960.

^*IzvTsK, No. 12/299 (December 1989), 197. According to her, Trotsky, in contrast to Lenin, could not control his temper, and at one meeting of the Politburo called her brother a “hooligan.” Lenin turned white as chalk but made no reply: ibid.

^*F. Chuev, ed., Sto sorok besed s Molotovym (Moscow, 1991), 181. Trotskii (Moia zhizn’, II, Berlin, 1930, 202–3 and The Suppressed Testament of Lenin, New York, 1935, 22) claims, without providing any evidence, that the appointment was made against Lenin’s wishes; he further muddles matters by asserting that Stalin was appointed at the Tenth Party Congress and on Zinoviev’s initiative.

^*RTsKhIDNI, F. 2, op. 1, delo 22737. The sum was nearly equivalent to the credit which Germany had offered Soviet Russia at this time (above, p. 427).

^*Lenin, PSS, XLV, 152–59. The Council was the most important commission of the Sovnarkom. It occupied itself mainly with economic questions, and constituted something of an “economic cabinet” (Alex Nove, An Economic History of the USSR, Hammondsworth, 1982, 70). Cf. E. B. Genkina, Perekhod sovetskogo gosudarstva k Novoi Ekonomicheskoi Politike (Moscow, 1954), 362. On the background of this proposal see T. H. Rigby, Lenin’s Government: Sovnarkom, 1917–1922 (Cambridge, 1979), Chapter 13.

^†Isaac Deutscher (The Prophet Unarmed, London, 1959, 35–36), with general reference to the Trotsky Archive, claims that on April 11, 1922, at a meeting of the Politburo, Lenin offered Trotsky the post of third Deputy. However, there is no record of a Politburo meeting on that day and there is no document in the Trotsky Archive confirming this statement. Nor is there any evidence for Deutscher’s claim that Trotsky justified the rejection of the alleged offer on the grounds that it “would have effaced him politically”: Deutscher, ibid., 87. See further, Rigby, Lenin’s Government, 292–93.

^*IzvTsk, No. 12/299 (December 1989), 200, note 19. Later, however, Bukharin confided to the Menshevik historian Boris Nicolaevsky that he had frequently visited Lenin in late 1922 and had serious conversations with him: Boris I. Nicolaevsky, Power and the Soviet Elite (New York, 1965), 12–13.

^*RTsKhIDNI, F. 2, op. 1, delo 26002; Stalin in Dvenadtsatyi S’ezd, 198n. Stalin’s recollection of this episode was omitted from the original edition of the protocols of the Twelfth Congress at his request: ibid., 199n.

^†RTsKhIDNI, F. 2, op. 2, delo 1239. The document is dated by the archivist as “after July 12, 1922”: October 1922 seems a more likely date, as argued by V. Naumov in Kommunist, No. 5 (1991), 36. It was almost certainly connected with Kamenev’s, and Zinoviev’s proposal—vetoed by Stalin—to remove Trotsky from the party. See below, p. 485.

^*IzvTsK, No. 12/299 (December 1989), 198. Her statement was written at the request of Bukharin, acting at Stalin’s behest, and it is preserved in Bukharin’s handwriting, which raises some questions about its reliability: Rogo vin, Byla li, 71. In 1939, shortly before he was murdered, Trotsky recalled an incident at a Politburo meeting in February 1923, at which Stalin, with a sinister leer, reported that Lenin had asked him for poison to end his hopeless condition. L. D. Trotskii, Portrety (Benson, Vt., 1984), 45–49. Trotsky to the end of his life believed it likely that Lenin died from toxin supplied by the General Secretary: Houghton Library, Harvard University, Trotsky Archive, bMS Russian 13 T-4636, T-4637, and T-4638. There was something disingenuous about Trotsky’s claim, because he was in possession of a cable from Dzerzhinskii, dated February 1, 1924, that advised him that the autopsy had revealed no traces of poison in Lenin’s blood: RTsKhIDNI, F. 76, op. 3, delo 322. According to Fotieva, Stalin never supplied Lenin with poison: MN, No. 17 (April 23, 1989), 8.

^*These measures had a curious echo thirty years later. In the fall of 1952 Stalin’s physician found him unwell and urged that he immediately cease all work. Stalin, probably mindful of precedent, ordered him arrested: Egor Iakovlev in MN, No. 4/446 (January 22, 1989), 9.

^*As Stalin noted at the time, the new Union marked a “decisive step on the road toward uniting the toilers of the world into a World Soviet Socialist Republic”: I. V. Stalin, Sochineniia, V (Moscow, 1947), 155.

^*Lenin, PSS, XLV, 343–48. In the spring of 1924, Krupskaia, in accord with Lenin’s wishes, turned Lenin’s last writings over to his associates. Kamenev read the “Testament” to the Council of Seniors at the Thirteenth Party Congress in 1924. Stalin was rescued from the acute embarrassment it might have caused him, had it been distributed to the delegates, by Zinoviev’s suggestion to let bygones be bygones. Over Krupskaia’s objections, but with Trotsky’s concurrence, it was agreed that it would be made known to the delegates but not published: Egor Iakovlev in MN, No. 4/446 (January 22, 1989), 8–9. Its contents first became public knowledge from an article by Max Eastman in the New York Times, October 18, 1926,1,5. Trotsky, who in 1925 had categorically denied that Lenin left a “testament” (Bolshevik, No. 16, 1925, 68), ten years later published it in The Suppressed Testament of Lenin. Here he recalled that when the “Testament” was read to the party leaders, on hearing Lenin’s remarks about him Stalin blurted out a “phrase” expressive of his true feelings about Lenin: what it was he did not say (Suppressed Testament, 16). The “Testament” was first published in the U.S.S.R. in 1956.

^*A year earlier, Lenin had jotted down four adjectives to describe Kamenev: “Poor chap” (bednenkii), weak, cheerful, intimidated”: RTsKhIDNI, F. 2. op. 2, delo 22300.

^†First published in SV, No. 23–24/69–70 (December 17, 1923), 13–15, for reasons stated below, the essays were not released in the Soviet Union until the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956: PSS, XLV, 356–62. My translation, published two years earlier, in 1954 (Formation of the Soviet Union, 273–77), was based on the copy in the Trotsky Archive at Harvard.

^*Volkogonov, Triumf, I/1, 153. As a reward, Stalin spared Fotieva’s life during the purges of the 1930s. She outlived him and died in 1975.

^†Lenin, PSS, LIV, 329–30. Lenin did not address colleagues with the adjective “Respected” (Uvazhaemyi): the use of this form suggests that he no longer considered Stalin a colleague. The text of the letter makes it clear that Lenin did not “break all personal and comradely relations” with Stalin, as Trotsky subsequently claimed (e.g., Portrety, 42), but only threatened to do so if Stalin did not apologize—which Stalin did.

^*IzvTsK, No. 12 (December 1989), 193. According to Maria Ulianova, Lenin’s health deteriorated so rapidly that he never had a chance to read Stalin’s “apology”: ibid, 199.

^*On April 16, Fotieva, on her own authority, sent Stalin a copy of Lenin’s essay on the nationalities. Stalin refused to accept it on the grounds that he did not want to “involve himself” (vmeshivatsia) in this matter. Copies then went to the Central Committee. That evening, Stalin secured from Fotieva a letter in which she cited Lenin’s sister to the effect that Lenin did not give instructions to have it published, adding on her own that he did not consider it ready for publication. On receipt of Fotieva’s letter, Stalin wrote the Central Committee a complaint against Trotsky for keeping secret so important a statement by Lenin, ending: “I believe that the articles of Comrade Lenin [on the nationality question] should be published in the press. One can only regret that as it transpires from Comr. Fotieva’s letter, they cannot be published inasmuch as Comrade Lenin has not yet looked them over.” Instead, copies of Lenin’s essay on the nationalities were distributed “for their information” to the delegates. The relevant documents on this matter, deposited in RTsKhIDNI, F. 5, op. 2, delo 34, have been reproduced in IzvTsK, No. 9 (September 1990), 153–61.

^†Dvenadtsatyi S”ezd RKP(b), 62. The only other speaker to receive this kind of accolade was Zinoviev (ibid., 47)—further evidence that he was being touted as Lenin’s successor.

^*According to Leonard Schapiro, the vast majority of persons in key party positions in the early 1920s had been Leninists before the Revolution. “The organizational structure after the revolution was therefore in this respect very close to the pre-revolutionary underground structure” (The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, London, 1960, 236–37).

^†Nikolai Vasetskii, Likvidatsiia (Moscow, 1989), 22. As late as May 1922, he had opposed legalizing the Menshevik and SR parties: Pravda, No. 102 (May 10, 1922), 1.

^*Pravda, No. 287 (December 18, 1923), 4. Bukharin later reminded Zinoviev that in 1923 he, Zinoviev, had wanted Trotsky arrested: Pravda, No. 251/3,783 (November 2, 1927), 3. On Lenin’s reaction, see above, p. 467.

^*Bukharin in Pravda, No. 17/2,948 (January 21, 1925), 2. In a letter to Stalin from prison in February 1937, pleading for his life, he wrote that Lenin had “died in his arms”: NYT, June 15, 1992, p. A 11

^*The decision to postpone Lenin’s funeral to Sunday was announced only on Friday, January 25 (Lenin, Khronika, XII, 673), so that it is by no means apparent that in cabling on January 22 that it would take place on Saturday, Stalin was deliberately deceiving him, as Trotsky later claimed. (Moia zhizn’, II, 249–50). Deutscher, in a not uncharacteristic instance of carelessness favorable to his hero, claims that Stalin advised Trotsky the funeral would be “the next day” (Prophet Unarmed, 133). Stalin’s second cable stated that the funeral would be on Saturday, i.e., not the “next” day but in four days.

^*Lenin’s brain was removed and transferred to the V. I. Lenin Institute, where scientists were assigned to discover the secret of his “genius” and to prove that it represented a “higher stage in the evolution of mankind.” Later on, the brains of Stalin and some other Communist luminaries were added to the collection. Lenin’s heart was deposited in the V. I. Lenin Museum. AiF, No. 43/576 (November 1991), 1.