Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928

PART III COLLISION

“Lenin was born for revolution. He was a genuine genius of revolutionary explosions and the greatest master of revolutionary leadership. Lenin never felt himself freer or happier than in the epoch of revolutionary shocks.”

Stalin, January 19241

“The truth is that the Socialist revolution has ended in pure individualism. . . The great achievement of the Bolshevik class has been the creation of a peasant class intensely conscious of the value of private ownership of land.”

Max Sering, German scholar of Russian agriculture, 19212

ONCE IN A BLUE MOON THE FUTURE can be foreseen—as when former tsarist interior minister Pyotr Durnovó predicted, in the event of a lost war against Germany, mass social revolution and catastrophe—but mostly clairvoyance is impossible. Into the latter category falls the fact and consequences of Vladimir Lenin’s health. He was a singular political figure. The nightmarish Great War and all-encompassing breakdown rendered even more unlikely that a rule-of-law order would replace the intransigent tsarist autocracy, but Lenin’s malign contribution should not be underestimated. In August 1917, even before the Bolshevik coup, he had belligerently observed that “who does not know that the world history of all revolutions shows that class struggle turns not accidentally but inevitably to civil war.”3 Once in power, Lenin elevated political violence to principle.4 Moderate socialists, in his mind, were more dangerous than open counterrevolutionaries, whom the moderates abetted with their “ornate Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik phraseology about a people’s government, a constituent assembly, liberties, and the like. . . . He who has not learned this from the whole history of the 19th century is a hopeless idiot.”5 Behind mundane disagreement he saw not legitimate opinion but malevolent forces. His conception of politics did not even allow for politics.6 Lenin railed against the idea that every society was made up of multiple interests that deserved competitive political representation and balancing as naively inviting in the “wrong” interests (“bourgeois” or “petit bourgeois”).7 He repudiated any separation of powers among executive, legislative, and judicial branches as a bourgeois sham.8 He rejected the rule of law as an instrument of class domination, not a protection against the state.9 He dismissed the self-organization of society to hold the state in check.10 The upshot was a brutal intensification of tsarism’s many debilitating features: emasculation of parliament, metastasizing of parasitic state functionaries, persecution and shakedowns of private citizens and entrepreneurs—in short, unaccountable executive power, which was vastly enhanced in its grim arbitrariness by a radiant ideology of social justice and progress. But then, Lenin fell fatally ill.

Rarely in world history has one man played such an outsized role and, suddenly, been sidelined—an outcome evocative, in very different political ways, of Abraham Lincoln’s civil war victory and emancipation of the slaves, followed by his assassination. Lenin’s early departure was an unintentional revolutionary shock second only to the seizure of power, and it unexpectedly cleared a path for Stalin to supreme power.

Lenin’s poor health had affected him longer than almost anyone knew. He endured a variety of ailments common to the time, including typhoid, influenza, and erysipelas (a skin disorder), but he also suffered blinding headaches, sleeplessness, and blackouts—on a hunt during the civil war, for example, he suddenly slumped down on a tree stump unable to move (“pins and needles,” he said). In winter 1920–21, his insomnia and headaches became still more frequent, which stumped his battery of physicians. “Unfortunately I am very ill,” Lenin wrote to Clara Zetkin in German in February 1921, during the tense days of the Tambov rebellion and Petrograd worker strikes. “My nerves are kaputt.”11 During the 10th Party Congress the next month, he continued to complain about feeling debilitated. His nerves were on edge in July 1921, when his Kremlin apartment was being remodeled: he directed that the walls between rooms be rendered “absolutely soundproof, and the floors absolutely free of squeaks.”12 In summer 1921, the politburo several times decreed, to no avail, that Lenin should take a month-long break; finally, in August, he relented.13 In mid-September 1921, when Lenin sought to resume a full workload, he proved unable to do so. In October he blacked out several times.14 In December 1921, even a severely curtailed workload proved too much; the politburo decreed another six-week holiday, and on December 6 Lenin departed for the countryside, where he was supposed to be restricted to a maximum of just one hour per day for telephone conversations on priority business. He returned to the Kremlin on January 13, 1922, but his condition had not improved, and he returned to the Moscow countryside, resolving to come to the capital only for politburo and government meetings. But even that became less and less the case. On March 1, 1922, Lenin came back to the Kremlin, but the next day his family and staff noted a periodic loss of speech and of feeling on his right side.15 On March 4, Lenin told one of his doctors that “his song had been sung, his role played, and he needed to pass on his cause to someone.”16

Lenin never named a successor. But in a momentous act in March 1922, he created a new post, “general secretary” of the party, expressly for Stalin. Stories would be invented, for understandable reasons, about how Lenin had never really intended to give Stalin so much power. These stories, however, are belied by the facts. Lenin had been taking Stalin into his confidence across a wide range of matters, and already in August-September 1921 he had moved Stalin nearly fulltime to overseeing party affairs; Stalin took to preparing politburo meeting agendas and appointing officials.17 True, there were two other Central Committee secretaries at that time, but Stalin was senior to both. Despite that seniority, Lenin still chose to underscore Stalin’s predominant position in an appointment announced at the 11th Party Congress March 27-April 2, 1922, and formalized at an April 3 Central Committee plenum—both of which Lenin attended.18 Stalin was voted “general secretary” at the congress by 193 votes in favor, 16 against; the rest (273), more than half the voting delegates, effectively abstained.19 This was Lenin’s initiative, and he certainly knew what he was doing. Just before the opening of the 11th Congress in the Kremlin, he had organized a conspiratorial meeting in a side room, gathering his most reliable followers, 27 people, to ensure election to the Central Committee of his preferred candidates against Trotsky’s followers; Stalin’s name was marked on Lenin’s list as “general secretary.”20 At the congress itself, where all 27 names on Lenin’s list were duly elected, one delegate (Preobrazhensky) questioned how Stalin could hold so many concurrent positions, but Lenin stoutly defended his protégé.21

Lenin had by no means intended to hand over supreme power to Stalin. Some insight into how Lenin might have envisioned Stalin’s new position can be gleaned from the circumstance that the politburo had acceded to Zinoviev’s request for creation of a Comintern “general secretary” to run its day-to-day affairs, appointing Otto Kuusinen, a Finnish Communist resident in Moscow, while Zinoviev (in Petrograd) remained chairman (predsedatel’).22 In similar fashion, Lenin remained chairman of the government (Council of People’s Commissars), while Stalin became general secretary of the (party) apparatus.23 Of course, the Russian Communist party far outweighed the Comintern as a power base, and Stalin’s “chairman” was not well.24 Still, no one dreamed Lenin would become utterly incapacitated, and so quickly. In March 1922, Stalin had imported two German doctors, Otfried Forster (a neurologist) and Felix Klemperer (a lung specialist), at a cost of 50,000 gold rubles each.25 The latter judged Lenin’s severe headaches to be caused by lead poisoning from the bullets, which, following the attempted assassination four years earlier, were still lodged in his body (one in the neck, one, which had pierced his lung, in the left collarbone).26 April 22 was Lenin’s birthday—he turned 52—and the next day he underwent surgery to remove the neck bullet: it turned out to be three millimeters from his carotid artery.27 After his surgery, on May 19, in good cheer, Lenin composed a playful note to Stalin.28 Doctors in the hospital, however, recorded “a general nervousness, . . . neurasthenia,” which they attributed to “overwork.” On May 23, 1922, Lenin went back to the countryside to continue his post-surgery recuperation.29 There, catastrophe struck: on the night of May 26-27, he suffered severe memory lapse, partial loss of speech, and partial paralysis of his right leg and right arm. The regime issued a bulletin to the effect that Lenin had a stomach ailment.30 In fact, he had suffered a massive stroke—a mere seven weeks after having elevated Stalin to general secretary.

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LENIN’S ILLNESS became another avenue for Stalin to draw closer to him. The stroke, a state secret (like the hemophilia of Tsarevich Alexei), exposed Lenin’s dearth of close confidantes and protectors. He had no children, who might be considered possible heirs, and no Praetorian Guard, whose leader might have sought to mount a coup, as so often happens in a dictatorship. He did have a politburo, but Molotov, who worked very closely with Lenin and knew him well, would recall that “Lenin had no friends in the politburo.”31 One reason may have been Lenin’s relentless disparagement of his colleagues.32 He did have an extremely loyal service staff, which included a business manager and a number of secretaries, one of whom, the most junior, was Nadya Alliluyeva, Stalin’s wife.33 But after the death of Lenin’s mistress Inessa Armand (in fall 1920), he was left with just two trustworthy intimates: his unwed younger sister Maria Ulyanova (b. 1878), who worked at Pravda, and his wife Nadezhda Krupskaya (b. 1869), who worked in the commissariat of enlightenment; both of them lived with Lenin.34 Stalin was well-positioned as Lenin’s right hand and all-purpose fixer.

Unbeknownst to the world, Lenin had retreated to the thick woods outside Moscow, where, in the southeast, lay the Gorki estate, a 16th century property that had changed hands a number of times and fallen into disrepair by the early 1900s, when a two-time widow (of both a leading art collector and the second-to-last Moscow governor-general) had the main building remodeled in gaudy “Russian Empire” style. This produced a yellowish baronial manor fronted by six white columns, which the Bolsheviks nationalized. Lenin first went to Gorki on September 25, 1918, about a month after the near fatal attempt on his life.35 (To prolong the restless leader’s recuperation, Yakov Sverdlov began to refurbish a new Kremlin apartment for Lenin in the Imperial Senate: three bedrooms, one each for Lenin, Krupskaya, and Ulyanova, as well as a service kitchen and a small dining room formed out of a former hallway, but, conspicuously, no parlor room to receive guests.)36 As Lenin’s health further deteriorated, he spent more and more time at the estate: all told, about two-and-a-half of the next five years after his initial visit. Gorki acquired a staff, including the worker-cook Spiridon Putin (grandfather of Vladimir Putin), a large library, and a direct telephone line to Moscow. Leonid Krasin, the former top salesman in tsarist Russia for the German company Siemens and now the Bolshevik foreign trade commissar, purchased a Rolls-Royce “Silver Ghost” in 1921, so Lenin could be driven around, while a film projector enabled him to watch newsreels of Bolshevik anniversaries and Henry Ford’s assembly lines.37 Nonetheless, Lenin came to feel isolated in his second home, imprisoned by incapacitating illness.38 Stalin visited Gorki more than any other person in the inner circle—twelve times—and was observed by Lenin’s sister Maria Ulyanova to cheer Lenin up, cracking wise, mockingly impersonating others in the regime, sharing jokes about police surveillance on Lenin’s doctors.39 Stalin would use these visits to advantage, arriving from Gorki to politburo meetings, passing on “greetings from Ilich,” and orally transmitting the leader’s directives.

Lenin’s medical issues did not stem from the lead in the bullet or overwork (nor, for that matter, from syphilis: Lenin’s tests had come back negative, although he was nonetheless injected with arsenic, the remedy of the day).40 On May 27, 1922, Professor V.V. Kramer, a neuropathologist, definitively concluded not only that Lenin’s migraines, acute anxiety, and insomnia stemmed from brain disease, but that “the basis of his illness is actually not only overstrain of the brain, but also severe disorder of the blood vessels in the brain.” The diagnosis was inadequate supply of blood to the brain caused by a clogging of the arteries with fibrous plaque (athereosclerosis). Kramer noted that his patient “has lost the ability to recall even a few short phrases, while retaining his intellect in full”—a grim dynamic that intensified Lenin’s anxieties about becoming paralyzed.41 “When the first obvious signs of brain disease appeared,” Ulyanova would recall, “Lenin spoke about it with Stalin, asking him for poison, since his further existence would be pointless. Stalin promised to fulfill Lenin’s request, should it become necessary, while treating [the likelihood] rather skeptically.”42 On May 29, after proving unable to fulfill the doctor’s request to multiply 12 by 7, the Bolshevik leader “determined . . . that it was over for him and demanded we summon Stalin for the briefest interval.” Lenin’s other Russian doctor, A.M. Kozhenikov, advised against the meeting, but Lenin was adamant. Stalin arrived on May 30 with Nikolai Bukharin, who remained outside Lenin’s room, leaving Stalin alone with Lenin for perhaps five minutes. Stalin, walking back to the car with Bukharin and Ulyanova, divulged that Lenin had reminded him of his request for cyanide “to help him leave the stage should he become paralyzed” and stated “now that time had come.” The three evidently decided to send Stalin back in to say he had conferred with the doctors and they did not consider Lenin’s condition irreversible, a blatant lie.43 Kozhevnikov recorded in his notebook: “Stalin visited. Conversation about suicidium.”44 Had Stalin wanted to poison Lenin, the Bolshevik leader himself had furnished him a golden opportunity to do so, as a humanitarian gesture, with reliable witnesses. Stalin did no such thing.

Lenin’s illness also had an impact on his relations with Trotsky. No one had given him more grief. Once, at a politburo meeting, Trotsky was sitting studying the English language, then paused briefly to criticize the politburo’s poor organization—causing Lenin to lose his composure. At another politburo meeting Trotsky was said to have called the Bolshevik leader “a hooligan,” inducing him to turn “white as chalk.”45 In March 1921 Lenin had deemed Trotsky “a temperamental man . . . as for policy [politika], he hasn’t got a clue.”46 In summer 1921, Lenin had taken part in a scheme to transfer Trotsky to Ukraine, a move that Trotsky, in breach of party discipline, resisted; Lenin backed down.47 Still, in violation of party rules, “Lenin proposed that we gather for the politburo meetings without Trotsky,” Molotov recalled. “We conspired against him.” Molotov, whose recollections comport with the archival record, added that “Lenin’s relations with Stalin were closer, albeit on a business footing.”48 But now, in 1922, Lenin appears to have tried to reconcile and balance Stalin and Trotsky. In summer 1922, Lenin miraculously seemed to improve—a circumstance celebrated in Pravda—and on July 11 Stalin visited him.49 “Ilich greeted him in friendly manner, joked, laughed, demanded that I afford Stalin hospitality, I brought wine and such,” recalled Ulyanova, who added that “during this and subsequent visits they spoke about Trotsky. . . . They discussed inviting Trotsky to visit Ilich.” She maintained that the invitation “had the character of diplomacy,” denoting mere mollification, but it appears to have been genuine.50 Trotsky, although duly invited, never once came to see Lenin in Gorki in 1922.51 On July 14, Stalin telegrammed Orjonikidze, apropos of his own Gorki visit, that “for the first time after a month and a half the doctors permitted Lenin visitors. Today we already have written directives from him. The doctors think that in a month he’ll be able to return to work in the old way.”52 Stalin—writing to an intimate—showed himself unafraid of Lenin’s return, a sign of confidence in his position and perhaps affection for Lenin—or of dissembling. On July 18, Lenin wrote Stalin, gleefully, “Congratulate me! I got permission for newspapers!”53 That same day Lenin wrote again to Stalin to make a note for himself and Kamenev inquiring whether Kamenev had not forgotten, as he had agreed, to answer Lenin about Trotsky.”54 Lenin may have been urging them to desist from ganging up.

Lenin’s efforts to reconcile and balance Trotsky and Stalin did not come easily. The party that Lenin had founded and Stalin now led wielded too much power. On July 20, for example, when the entire politburo, Trotsky included, resolved that “Lenin should have absolutely no meetings” without that ruling body’s permission, they tasked Stalin with overseeing enforcement.55 Stalin tried not to overdo it. At the 12th party conference (August 4–7, 1922), the first major gathering since his appointment as general secretary—which he and his staff organized—he was observed behaving with arch-humility. “Such conduct,” recalled Anastas Mikoyan, a delegate, “raised Stalin’s prestige in the eyes of the delegates.”56 Lenin’s continuing confidence in Stalin’s management of party affairs is copiously documented in the archives, but so is Lenin’s continued desperation to do something about the Council of People’s Commissars and the regime’s future more broadly. On September 2, 1922, he evidently discussed with his sister Maria the ages of the leading figures and noted it would be good to have people of various age cohorts in the Central Committee, to ensure longevity.57 On September 11, Lenin wrote to Stalin (for the entire politburo) proposing an expansion of his formal deputies by adding Trotsky to the Council of People’s Commissars and Kamenev to the Council of Labor and Defense (a parallel, if smaller, top executive body).58 Lenin’s motives remain unclear: He was proposing to move Trotsky near the top of the government, but rather than offering him the economy portfolio, which was Trotsky’s preference, Lenin seems to have wanted him to take up ideology and education, as well as second-order questions of international affairs.59 Was Lenin, who had just browbeaten the party to swallow the legalized markets of the New Economic Policy, concerned about Trotsky’s obsession with state planning? Or was he trying to elevate Trotsky’s position? It is impossible to say for sure, but it is likely Lenin had both considerations in mind: containment of Trotsky’s anti-NEP impulses and balancing of Stalin’s power.

Lenin’s proposal presented an immense opportunity for Trotsky to begin to lay claim to Lenin’s government mantle.60 Stalin put Lenin’s proposal before the seven members of the politburo (likely the very day he received it) for vote by telephone. Stalin, Rykov, and Kalinin (“do not object”) voted with Lenin; Kamenev and Mikhail Yefremov, known as Tomsky, abstained. One person voted against Trotsky’s appointment—Trotsky himself: “I categorically refuse.”61 Trotsky’s most outstanding biographer surmised that he refused because he “had no doubt that even as Lenin’s deputy he would depend at every step on decisions taken by the General Secretariat which selected the Bolshevik personnel for the various government departments and by this alone effectively controlled them.”62 Dependency on Stalin was indeed anathema to Trotsky. But equally important, Trotsky seems to have been holding out for a major overhaul of the administration to allow planning of the entire economy under his leadership. On September 12, Stalin went to see Lenin in Gorki, evidently to discuss the situation. Trotsky’s stance meant that, at a politburo meeting on September 14, Kamenev alone was added to the ranks of deputies at both the Council of People’s Commissars and the Council of Labor and Defense, which meant he also chaired politburo meetings. “The politburo,” stated its September 14 protocols, “records the categorical refusal of comrade Trotsky with regret.”63 Trotsky’s refusal—like his failure to visit Lenin at Gorki in 1922—was a choice.64

Immediately after Trotsky’s refusal to become Lenin’s deputy in the government, Pravda, the organ of the party apparatus that Stalin controlled, spotlighted Stalin’s September 1922 visits to Gorki in an illustrated supplement (September 24) intended to demonstrate how well Lenin was doing. Stalin was quoted enumerating the plethora of matters he and Lenin had supposedly discussed: “the internal situation . . . the harvest . . . the condition of industry . . . the ruble exchange rate . . . the budget . . . the external situation . . . the Entente . . . France’s behavior . . . England and Germany . . . America’s role . . . the SRs and Mensheviks . . . the White press . . . the emigration . . . the far-fetched legends about Lenin’s death.”65 In effect, Stalin was enumerating his own limitless responsibilities. The article, in addition, carried a photograph, taken by Ulyanova, of a happy Lenin with Stalin outdoors at Gorki seated side by side, smiling, conveying Lenin’s supposed ruddy health as well as Stalin’s proximity to him, for the entire party, the country, and the world.66 The succession struggle was on, but the prospects for Lenin’s recovery had not been extinguished and, on October 2, 1922, after a four-month absence, he returned to Moscow, presiding the next day over the Council of People’s Commissars. “The meeting was populous, fifty-four people attended,” recalled the head of Lenin’s secretariat, Lidiya Fotiyeva. “Everyone wanted to see Lenin, as soon and as closely as possible.”67 But the Trotsky question lingered. Around this time, Lenin reacted sharply to efforts by Kamenev and Stalin to reduce Trotsky’s position. “You write, ‘(the Central Committee) is casting or is preparing to cast a healthy cannon overboard’,” Lenin observed in a letter to Kamenev. “To cast Trotsky overboard—which is what you’re hinting at, there’s no other interpretation—would be the height of absurdity. If you do not consider me to have become hopelessly stupid, then how can you think of such a thing!!!” Lenin went so far as to close with a quotation from Pushkin’s Boris Godunov warning about “bloody children before the eyes”—a clear allusion to the wages of betrayal for the sake of political ambition.68

Hopes that Lenin might beat his health troubles were raised on October 31, when, in his first public address since the stroke, he delivered the closing speech to a session of the Soviet central executive committee, which incited a prolonged ovation.69 The euphoria did not last, however. Lenin declined an invitation for November 7, 1922, the fifth anniversary of the October Revolution, to return to the Mikhelson factory, now renamed for him, where he had been shot in 1918.70 On November 13, he did speak at the Fourth Comintern Congress, for an hour, in German, but he was drenched in perspiration and told people that during the speech he had “forgot what he had already said, and what he still had to say.”71 On November 20, Lenin delivered a public speech to the Moscow soviet at the Bolshoi Theater. “Long Live Ilich!” the audience shouted upon spotting him, applauding until their hands ached. When, finally, Kamenev introduced Lenin as speaker, a prolonged ovation erupted again.72 But, one witness recalled, Lenin “seemed to me even more exhausted than at the Fourth Comintern Congress.”73 A French Communist eyewitness noted that “those who were seeing him for the first time said, ‘This is still the same Lenin!’ But for the others no such illusion was possible; instead of the alert Lenin they had known, the man before them now was strongly affected by paralysis, his features remained immobile . . . his usual simple, rapid, confident speech was replaced by a hesitant, jerky delivery.”74 Lenin himself stated in the speech that “he had lost his ability to work for a rather long time.”75 The next day (November 21, 1922) a “diary of duty secretaries” was launched to monitor Lenin; the first entry was made by Alliluyeva (Stalin’s wife).76 Four days later, Lenin was walking along the corridor when his legs erupted in spasms, which caused him to fall. He rose only with great difficulty. In consultation with his doctors, he had to cancel meetings and speeches. On November 30, a day Lenin missed a politburo session, he wrote “retain on the shelf,” meaning do not return to the library, on a copy of Engels’s Political Testament (Moscow, 1922).77 Perhaps Lenin would compose his own political testament?

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FEW ISSUES IN SOVIET HISTORY involved more intrigue than Lenin’s so-called Testament, which is dated to December 1922-January 1923, but which, as we shall see, Lenin might not have dictated at that time—contrary to entrenched scholarship—or even dictated at all. Whatever its provenance, however, the document gravely threatened Stalin’s embryonic personal dictatorship, and became an enduring, haunting aspect of his rule. Usually adduced in connection with delegitimizing Stalin’s position as Lenin’s successor, the Testament is important as a key to Stalin’s psyche and behavior. The Testament helped bring out his demons, his sense of persecution and victimhood, his mistrust of all and sundry, but also his sense of personal destiny and iron determination. None of this is intended in any way to affirm Stalin as Lenin’s legitimate successor. But it bears reminding that the assertion that Stalin “usurped” power has an absurdist quality. Beyond the fact that Stalin’s ascendancy inside the regime owed a great deal to Lenin’s actions, the Communist regime had come into being as a result of a coup, and, while claiming to rule in the name of the proletariat, executed proletarians who dared to question the party’s self-assigned monopoly. It was the party that had usurped power. In effect, those scholars who intentionally or unintentionally echo Trotsky and his supporters are accusing Stalin of stealing what had already been stolen.78

Likewise, assertions of a Bolshevik collective leadership predating Stalin ring hollow. Lenin’s secretariat took on an essentially limitless range of issues, setting a precedent, and no one did more than Lenin to establish a living example of one-man rule at the top. (When the other “collective leaders” disagreed with Lenin, he threatened to expel them or, failing that, to quit the party and form a new one.) Beyond the red herring of Stalin’s alleged usurpation and supposedly unprecedented unilateralism, Trotsky and other critics of Stalin’s regime also asserted that his triumph reflected no special abilities, just special circumstances. This is manifestly false. Still, we must be careful not to err in the opposite direction and lionize him. He was brilliantly adept at administration and manipulation, but we shall observe Stalin learning on the job, and often failing. That was not merely because of his plentiful shortcomings but also because Lenin had helped conjure into being both an ideologically blinkered dictatorship and a costly global antagonism. Managing the severely difficult challenge of Russian power in the world, now further complicated by the Leninist Communist dictatorship, would have confounded any would-be successor. Stalin’s efforts were strenuous but the results decidedly mixed.

Part III will examine Stalin’s creation of a personal dictatorship within the Bolshevik dictatorship, and the ways he put that remarkable power to use. It was Stalin who formed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, helped make the recuperative New Economic Policy work, and spelled out the nature of Leninism for the party mass. Stalin not only managed to implant and cultivate immense numbers of loyalists, but also to invent for himself the role of Lenin’s faithful pupil. Stalin’s role as guardian of the ideology was as important in his ascendancy as brute bureaucratic force. In the 1920s, Communist party plenums, conferences, and congresses constituted the core of Soviet political life and of Stalin’s biography; the political brawling shaped not just his methods of rule, but also his character, and image. To an extraordinary extent, it was skirmishes over ideas not solely personal power that preoccupied him and his rivals in the struggle to define the revolution going forward. Ideology was Bolshevik reality: The documents, whether those made public at the time or kept secret, are absolutely saturated with Marxist-Leninist ways of thinking and vocabulary—the proletariat, Bonapartism, the petit bourgeoisie, imperialism, capitalist encirclement, class enemies, military specialists, NEPmen, kulaks, socialism. Mastery and control over the ideology turned out to be a key to unlocking ultimate power, but at the same time the content of the ideology proved to be tragically for real, in domestic and foreign affairs.

The Bolshevik dictatorship was not the only outcome of the revolution and civil war. What had emerged on the ground was two parallel revolutions: one in the northern cities, where an expanding functionary class—the regime’s social base—and proliferating, overlapping institutions scratched and clawed among themselves for power and spoils; and another in the countryside, where smallholding peasant households had seized the land, still by far the country’s principal source of wealth. (“The revolution,” Molotov would recall later in life, “had taken place in a petty-bourgeois country.”)79 These two revolutions were set on a collision course. The entrenched peasant revolution could not hold back entrenchment of the Communist dictatorship, but, no less than the international environment, it acted as a severe constraint on Bolshevik ambitions. Accommodation to the peasant, in turn, proved extremely difficult to stomach for many party stalwarts. Indeed, over time, exactly as the militants feared, the forced accommodation of the New Economic Policy would begin to change the composition and political mood in the Communist party, much to Stalin’s alarm. His collision with Trotsky in the wake of Lenin’s illness would turn out to be mere prelude. More profoundly, the stage was set for one of the truly manifold collisions in Russian and indeed world history—between Stalin’s personal dictatorship and the entire Russian-Eurasian peasantry.

That Stalin would end up launching a violent reversal of the peasant revolution was literally fantastic. A perspicacious German scholar of Russian agriculture, Max Sering, had concluded in an analysis in 1921 that “a regime in Russia under which the peasants would not independently own the land they cultivate is now inconceivable.”80 Sering erred in that the peasants did not, de jure, own the land, but they did assume that their usage rights were tantamount to ownership, and overturning that did seem inconceivable. Stalin, however, would prove Sering, as well as a mostly disbelieving Communist party, wrong. Collectivization and the violent expropriation of better-off farmers (dekulakization)—Stalin’s revolutionary shock of 1928–30—would turn out to be significantly more ramified even than Lenin’s shock coup of 1917. What stands out in Stalin’s action is not just his desire to launch a socialist transformation of the countryside, which all Bolsheviks expected to see eventually, but the fact that when the gamble met mass resistance and caused unfathomable ruin, Stalin saw it through to completion. No one else in or near the Bolshevik leadership, Trotsky included, could have stayed the course on such a bloody social-engineering escapade on such a scale. The personal dictatorship that Stalin painstakingly built, he would, beginning in January 1928, use to enact a vision of anti-capitalist socialism, utterly transforming and shattering Eurasia.