Stalin, Volume 1

CHAPTER 11

“REMOVE STALIN”

Comrade Stalin, having become general secretary, has concentrated boundless power in his hands; and I am not sure that he will always be able to use that power with sufficient caution.

Dictation attributed to Lenin, given a date of December 24, 1922, and brought forward in late May 19231

Stalin is too rude and this defect, although quite tolerable in our midst and in relations among us Communists, becomes intolerable in a general secretary. That is why I suggest the comrades think about a way of removing Stalin.

Dictation attributed to Lenin, given a date of January 4, 1923, and brought forward in June 19232

STALIN FOUND HIMSELF in a position of supreme power before most people knew of him, let alone of his power. Trotsky, in fall 1922, seems to have been among the first to recognize how, with Lenin sidelined, Stalin held uncanny power. By summer 1923, Zinoviev and Bukharin, as we shall see, were stunned at how much wherewithal Stalin had to act. Examining the instruments at Stalin’s command in the central apparatus, as we did in the last chapter, his path to absolute rule looks like a cakewalk. But even as the means to build a dictatorship within the dictatorship had fallen right into his hands, the most astonishing thing took place: Lenin appeared to call for Stalin’s removal. Stalin’s vast power fell under siege, just as he was energetically building it up. The general secretary’s cakewalk was more like a treacherous bivouac through enemy territory.

Lenin’s vexation by Trotsky was amply documented over a long period, but Lenin’s alleged exasperation with Stalin emerged all of a sudden in cryptic documentary form, in spring and summer 1923. The centerpiece would become known as Lenin’s Testament (zaveshchanie) and was brought forth by Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, with the assistance, or collusion, of the women working for Lenin, especially Maria Volodicheva and Lidiya Fotiyeva, the head of Lenin’s secretariat. There are no extant originals of the most important documents attributed to Lenin (which had no such title as “testament,” indeed no title at all when they first surfaced). Their authenticity has never been proven, as one Russian scholar has demonstrated in a scrupulously detailed examination. He argues, correctly, that unless persuasive documentary evidence comes forward corroborating Lenin’s generation of this dictation, we must treat his authorship with caution.3 That said, whether or not and, if so, in what form the documents might have derived from Lenin’s own words, they became a reality in Soviet political life, and particularly in Stalin’s life. We shall analyze the documents attributed to Lenin not by their alleged dates of dictation, but by the dates and the context in which they were brought forth, and above all, by their consequences. Their key phrase—“remove Stalin”—would eventually haunt Soviet Eurasia and the world beyond, but in the first instance would haunt Stalin himself.

Developments in 1922–23 were quite bizarre. The trigger of Stalin’s potentially mortal political troubles turned out to be none other than Georgia, the homeland he’d left behind but had colluded in reconquering for the Bolshevik regime. The specific event in Georgia that set in motion a vast wheel of intrigues in Moscow against Stalin’s continuation in the position of general secretary of the Communist party was a slap in someone’s face. Stalin had no role in that act—he was busy with the herculean task of forcing into being a functioning state out of the loose, ambiguous, hardly even confederal structures among the various Soviet republics that had emerged from civil war. His mastery of the complex national brief, not just his position as general secretary, remained a key source of his supremacy. But not long after the heavy assignment of banging together what would become the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Stalin got caught up in a delirious plot by Zinoviev to instigate a “German October,” or Communist coup, in the one country across the entire hostile capitalist world that had already promised the Soviet Union clandestine military cooperation and technology transfer. Moreover, the Soviet regime, claiming to perceive a “revolutionary situation” in Germany, was itself beset by waves of strikes by the workers in whose name it ruled.4 And the New Economic Policy, expected to bring recuperation, brought a confounding gulf between prices in the countryside for foodstuffs and prices for manufactures made in the towns. All the while, Lenin was suffering a succession of massive strokes.

Often this period is narrated in terms of the formation of a ruling triumvirate of Stalin, Kamenev, and Zinoviev arrayed against Trotsky. There is truth to this, even though, for many years, the erroneous judgment held sway that Stalin was the junior partner. But the triumvirate against Trotsky was shadowed by the circumstance that even as it was getting operational, a conspiracy took place against Stalin, initiated by Zinoviev and Bukharin, with the latter trying but failing to serve as self-appointed go-between between Zinoviev and Trotsky. The triumvirate narrative should not be allowed to eclipse the far more important story: namely, the attempts in the Bolshevik inner circle to overcome the unforeseen yet inbuilt structural circumstance of the ability of the party’s general secretary to build a dictatorship within the dictatorship. Those efforts, in turn, generated a new reality, overlaid on the first: Stalin’s sense of grievance and betrayal. If in the previous chapter, wielding the levers of power, he came across as charming and confident, if occasionally peculiar, in this chapter, battling Zinoviev, Trotsky, and especially the dictation attributed to Lenin, Stalin will come across as distrustful and self-pitying, a potentate who viewed himself as a victim.

The life of the Communist—congresses, Central Committee plenums, politburo meetings (Stalin’s life)—did not encompass even a fraction of rank-and-file party members, let alone define the rhythm of life in the vast country. To most peasants, who continued to compose the overwhelming majority of the inhabitants, the party was just a greedy adversary, concealing its tax-collecting and conscripting activities behind elaborate rhetorical camouflage. (Party meetings were closed to the public, not least for fear that non-party people would lash out at members from the floor.) Peasants were preoccupied with surviving the famine and tilling the land; with the size and health of their herds, if they had them; with weeds and weather; obtaining and maintaining their implements; warding off disease and rodents; making sure their spouses did not all of a sudden seek to take advantage of new Communist laws on divorce. The land of socialism was a hardscrabble one, struggling to emerge from devastation. Soviet per capita income in the early 1920s, at least in terms of recorded economic activity, was probably no more than around 70 rubles, annually. What follows, therefore, is not a portrait of the life of the country, which Stalin viewed mostly through the twisted top secret reports brought to him by telegraph and field courier, but a portrait bookended by the formation of the USSR and a would-be “German October,” of a dictatorship with circumscribed capacities but grandiose ambitions, and of a man at the center of it all who was skillfully enlarging those dictatorial state capacities while constantly glancing over his shoulder.

UNION OF SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLICS—AND A SLAP IN TIFLIS

The grand story of the formation of the USSR is saturated in misapprehension, with Lenin cast as defender of the nationalities and Stalin as Russian chauvinist and archcentralizer.5 Stalin did propose forging a unitary state by having the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR) absorb the other Soviet republics, but he also proposed granting them “autonomy” in most domestic affairs, and initially Lenin had accepted Stalin’s plan. Trotsky’s reaction had been similar: “Comrade Stalin’s proposal presents itself as very alluring from the point of view of simplicity.”6 This framework gained impetus in mid-1922, when Georgian Communists permitted the Ottoman Bank, funded by British and French capital, to open a branch in Tiflis, inciting an angry Grigory Sokolnikov, finance commissar for Soviet Russia, to demand the bank’s charter for operations in Georgia be rescinded, which in turn provoked the fury of the Georgian Communist Central Committee.7 But could the genie of national states unleashed by the Great War really be put back in the bottle? Stalin thought so.

As head of an orgburo commission on state structure, Stalin drafted theses calling for “unifying [the Soviet republics] in a single federation, folding in military and economic matters and external connections (foreign affairs, foreign trade) into one whole, keeping for the republics autonomy in internal affairs.”8 But the formal proposal for the RSFSR to absorb Ukraine, Belorussia, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan was accepted only by the Central Committees of Azerbaijan, which faced an Iranian state that used to rule it, and Armenia, which faced Turkey, where Armenians had been massacred. The Georgian Central Committee agreed solely to “the unification of economic strength and general policy, but with the retention of all the attributes of independence.” The Belorussian Central Committee requested the same treaty relations as currently existed between Soviet Ukraine and Soviet Russia—ambiguity cum de facto independence—while the Ukrainian Central Committee did not even discuss the new draft.9 Only an extraordinary effort by an extraordinary figure was going to produce a functioning integrated state.

Stalin’s most dogged opponent initially was the-then head of Ukraine’s government, Kryasto Stanchev, known as Cristian Rakovski, a respected official whose calls for the weakest possible central authority amounted to confederation. Stalin would not be so easily stopped, however: on September 23 and 24, while Rakovski and others happened to be on holiday, he had the commission approve his plan for a unitary state with autonomy.10 The Moscow party secretariat immediately circulated the paperwork to the members of the Central Committee of Soviet Russia even before the politburo had met. Stalin also privately lobbied Lenin on the extreme urgency of his plan, noting that the RSFSR apparatus found itself constantly revisiting decisions of the republics, while republics protested the “illegal” interference of Soviet Russia. He presented a stark choice: either genuine independence (“a divorce”), “or the real unification of the Soviet republics into one economic whole with formal extension of the powers of the Council of People’s Commissars, Council of Labor and Defense, and central executive committee of the RSFSR over [those] of the independent republics.” The latter, he noted, would still retain “real autonomy . . . in the areas of language, culture, justice, internal affairs, agriculture.” Stalin warned Lenin that “independentists among the Communists,” emboldened by “Moscow’s liberalism” during the civil war, would only grow if not brought to heel.11 Lenin received Stalin’s letter on September 25, after the orgburo commission had approved it. The next day, Stalin went out to Gorki for a long private meeting. He would never again visit Gorki (Lenin returned to Moscow the next week.) By one account, Stalin was observed departing Gorki in bad temper.12

Lenin nixed the idea of the unitary state, instructing Stalin to switch from “enter” the RSFSR to “formal unification together with the RSFSR in a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics of Europe and Asia.” Lenin’s counterproposal presupposed that the units, including Soviet Russia, would be equal members, and that as more countries underwent socialist revolutions, they could join the federation as well. Stalin conceded the change, allowing Lenin to crow to Kamenev that day about “the significance of [Stalin’s] concession.”13 Lenin insisted that the RSFSR central executive committee of the Soviet not become the one for the single state, contradicting Stalin, but Lenin also proposed having Union commissariats where Stalin had proposed republic-level ones (finance, food, labor).14 Moreover, Lenin, in the way he behaved as head of the RSFSR government, taking decisions for all the Soviet republics, was hardly a genuine federalist.15 But in the letter to Kamenev, Lenin insisted that “it is important not to give grist for the mill of the ‘independence lobby,’ not to destroy their independence, but to create a new level, a federation of equal republics.” Stalin, however, also felt the issue involved principle, complaining that in Lenin’s plan, some republics—Ukraine, Belorussia—were being treated equally with Russia but others, the various autonomous republics currently inside the RSFSR, were not. He argued that his plan of autonomy for all the national republics was actually fairer, which certainly held for Bashkiria, Tataria, or Turkestan, which in Stalin’s scheme would be equal to Ukraine or Belorussia. At the same time, in Stalin’s version the Russian republic would be the mother ship, which was Lenin’s objection.

Lenin had never set foot in Georgia, or even Ukraine, for that matter; Stalin had far greater firsthand experience of the varied realm, and, while cognizant of the need to indulge nationalism in order to secure political allegiance, recognized a state need to tame nationalism. Unlike Lenin, who viewed Georgians as a small-nation victim of imperial Russia, Stalin knew that Georgian national chauvinism oppressed the other peoples of the Caucasus.16 More than that, Stalin rightly suspected the Georgian Communists’ agenda was really de facto Georgian independence through mere confederation. Polikarp “Budu” Mdivani, a member of the orgburo commission as well as of the Georgian Central Committee, had managed to get a letter through to Lenin—Bukharin passed it on—that hurled accusations at Stalin as well as Orjonikidze, the highest-ranking Bolshevik in the South Caucasus.17 On September 27, right after seeing Stalin, Lenin received Mdivani.18 That same day, Stalin exploded, writing an irate letter to all members of the politburo accusing Lenin of “national liberalism” as well as “hurriedness.” No top party official had ever used such an intemperate tone in written communications with the Bolshevik leader.19 Stalin, however, knew Lenin was being inconsistent: earlier in 1922 the Bolshevik leader had accused Ukraine’s Communists—“the people there are sly”—of trying to evade party directives in a struggle against Moscow’s centralism.20 That was precisely what Stalin understood his fellow Georgians to be doing now; hence his explosion. Nonetheless, the plan that Stalin circulated for the October 5–8, 1922, Central Committee plenum corresponded entirely to Lenin’s version of a federal Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Even though Lenin was too ill to attend the plenum, Stalin made sure Lenin’s plan carried.21

Stalin’s absorption-by-Russia proposal faced fatal obstacles—not just Lenin and the Georgian nationalist Communists, but also the Bolshevik leaders of Ukraine, including Rakovski, an ethnic Bulgarian raised in Romania, as well as Ukrainian national Communists who fought tooth and nail in the orgburo commission.22 Indeed, lost in the confusion generated by Mdivani was the fact that opponents of a unitary state had won. (Objections were raised to the designation “of Europe and Asia”—what if revolutions took place in Africa or the Americas?—so the geographical marker was dropped.) The Soviet state became a federation. Also lost in the swirling passions was the circumstance that Stalin was the would-be centralizer in Eurasia, but Lenin was the centralizer globally. He had wanted during the Polish War not just to Sovietize but also to incorporate a number of states on the heels of a Red Army sweep westward into Europe. Stalin had responded that “for the nations that formed part of old Russia, we can and should consider our (Soviet) type of federation as an appropriate path to international unity,” but not so for “a future Soviet Germany, Poland, Hungary, Finland. These peoples . . . would scarcely agree to enter straight into a federative bond with Soviet Russia on the Bashkir or Ukrainian model.” Instead, he had deemed “confederation (a union of independent states) as the most appropriate form of drawing together.”23 Stalin had also set Finland and Poland apart as unsusceptible to federation with Soviet Russia even though they had been constituents of “old Russia.”24 Lenin’s reply, if there was one, has been lost or destroyed, but its gist was captured in a summary by Stalin: Lenin scorned Stalin’s proposal for European confederation as “chauvinism, nationalism,” insisting “we need a centralized world economy, run from a single organ.”25 Stalin had no such delusions.

Further lost in the Georgian-generated confusion of 1922 was the circumstance that any federal state structure in Eurasia would be fettered even before coming into being. That was because although the Russian Communist party had authorized the creation of national Communist parties, in connection with the USSR’s formation the non-federal nature of the party that had been set down at the 8th Congress in 1919 was not rescinded. It took a lot of head banging to implement the strict subordination to Moscow of republic Communist parties in practice, but in the last analysis, as Marxists liked to say, the party trumped the state. Indeed, that is how nationalist Communists such as Mdivani could be called to account: they were subject to Communist party discipline, meaning the rule of the Stalin-controlled apparatus in Moscow.

Even as the Ukrainians and Georgians managed to hold the line against annexation into Russia, the Georgians remained deeply unsatisfied: they were not being afforded the same status in the Union as Ukraine, for which they blamed Orjonikidze. Sergo Orjonikidze, thirty-six years old in 1922, had been born in western Georgia to a non-serf family, and studied medicine in Tiflis, qualifying as a medical orderly, while also joining the Bolsheviks (1903). In 1907 he had met Stalin, aka Koba, in cell number 3 of the Baku prison.26 In 1920–21, colluding with Stalin, Orjonikidze had seized back Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia militarily, raising Georgians’ ire. Only Lenin’s forceful intervention had spared Orjonikidze being dropped from the Central Committee. “What can I do?” Orjonikidze had pleaded. “I’m a hot-tempered person. Maybe when I turn fifty I’ll mellow a bit, but in the meantime I can’t do anything about it.”27 Not long after this, in November 1921, Orjonikidze, over the objections of his fellow Georgian Bolsheviks, had set in motion the formation of a South Caucasus Federation.28 Georgians were forcibly driving the large Armenian population from Tiflis, directly or indirectly, and the Georgian Council of People’s Commissars issued instructions for citizenship in Soviet Georgia based upon ethnic criteria.29 Armed territorial disputes, customs barriers, and other acts of “chauvinist poison” also argued for federation.30 After Orjonikidze’s latest fait accompli, Lenin, writing to Stalin (November 28, 1921), deemed the formation of a South Caucasus Federation premature but accepted it.31 The formal treaty for the South Caucasus Federation was signed on March 12, 1922.

The Georgian Central Committee had refused to accede. “Dear Iosif!” Alyosha Svanidze, Stalin’s brother-in-law from his deceased first wife, Kato, wrote to him in despair. “Not a single Central Committee meeting has taken place lately that did not start and end with stormy scenes between Sergo and Budu. . . . Teach them to treat each other with respect. P.S. I shall be boundlessly grateful to you for tearing me out of this milieu and giving me the chance to work in some mission abroad.”32 Mdivani, also the offspring of west Georgian nobility, was himself stubborn and hotheaded, but the intense personal animosity between him and Orjonikidze flowed from significant policy disagreements over Georgia’s place in the Union.33 Orjonikidze’s federation plan was passed at a Georgian Party Congress with the support of rank-and-file delegates.34 Orjonikidze also had behind him Stalin, who made none of the arguments on behalf of national “equality” for the Georgians that he had made for the Bashkirs and Tatars. This derived partly from grudges—Stalin and Mdivani had long known and detested one another—but also from Georgia’s borderland position. Stalin reasoned that as the case of Georgian Menshevism had proven, socioeconomic “backwardness” spawned “opportunists” who, wittingly or even unwittingly, used nationalism to separate territories from Soviet Russia, which played into the hands of the international bourgeoisie by creating “a zone of foreign intervention and occupation.”35 Mdivani and his supporters complained to Lenin about an influx of non-Georgians to Georgia, Moscow’s concession of Georgian territory to Turkey, and the abandonment of Georgian territorial claims vis-à-vis Armenia and Azerbaijan.36 In Stalin’s mind, this behavior was no different from that of the Georgian Mensheviks.

As the formation of the USSR entered its final stage, Orjonikidze erupted in fury, vowing to purge the “chauvinist rot” from the Georgian Central Committee. On October 21, 1922, at 2:55 a.m., Mdivani called from Tiflis to the Kremlin on the Hughes apparatus and unleashed a long stream of invective against Orjonikidze to Avel Yenukidze, an ethnic Georgian in Moscow and the secretary of the Soviet central executive committee presidium. Yenukidze responded sharply that if the situation in Georgia had deteriorated, the “soil had been prepared by the Georgian Central Committee majority.”37 Lenin, too, had now had his fill of them, sternly rebuking Mdivani in a telegram later that same day, defending Orjonikidze, and proposing that the dispute go to the party secretariat—meaning Stalin.38 In Tiflis, the local Central Committee met in the presence of Orjonikidze as well as Rykov (who happened to be down south), yet a majority voted up a resolution to join the USSR not in the form of a South Caucasus Federation but as the Georgian republic, against the decision of the Central Committee of Soviet Russia—a blatant flouting of party discipline. The Georgians were instructed to resign and on October 22 nine of the eleven Georgian Central Committee members did so. Orjonikidze had achieved his purge.39 But the Georgians still refused to desist, and one Mdivani supporter leveled formal party charges against Orjonikidize for going after him with a marble paperweight as well as a knife and threatening to have him shot; Orjonikidze denied the accusations.40

Although the South Caucasus Federation had been settled by majority Georgian vote, the accusations could not be ignored and the politburo decided on November 25, 1922, to send a three-person investigatory commission headed by GPU chief Dzierzynski, who was on holiday near Tiflis in Sukhum on the Black Sea.41 Lenin, for whatever reason, did not participate in the telephone vote confirming the commission’s composition, but he may have asked Rykov, who was also on holiday in Sukhum, to be his eyes and ears. Rykov stayed in Orjonikidze’s Tiflis apartment, where he arranged to meet a former Siberian coexile, Akaki Kabakhidze, who belonged to the Mdivani group. It is likely the parties were drinking. Kabakhidze accused Orjonikidze of keeping a fine white horse at state expense. Orjonikidze’s friend Mikoyan would later explain that the animal had been a gift from mountain tribesmen in the Caucasus—such a gift could not be declined—and that Orjonikidze had turned it over to the state stables, riding it occasionally.42 Orjonikidze struck Kabakhidze. Rykov separated the men, and reported to Moscow that the altercation had been personal, not political.43 But the slap would reverberate, and form the basis of a challenge to Stalin’s dictatorship.

FAILED QUEST FOR ECONOMIC DICTATORSHIP

While Stalin had his hands full trying to forge a functioning state across Eurasia, Trotsky was busy trying to seize command over the economy. Just before the 11th Party Congress in spring 1922—the one at which Stalin was appointed Communist party general secretary—Trotsky had sent a critical note to Lenin complaining that provincial party organizations were concerning themselves with economic issues such as the agricultural sowing campaign or the leasing of factories. “Without the emancipation of the party, as a party, from direct governing and supervision, it is impossible to cleanse the party from bureaucratism and the economy from dissoluteness,” Trotsky wrote, urging that the party confine its attention to questions such as the rearing of youth in matters of theory.44 Lenin wrote on the note: “to the archive.”45 Trotsky, however, continued his struggle to forge an “economic dictatorship” by proposing to vastly expand the powers of the tiny state planning commission, which did not do economic planning, only ad hoc consultation with managers.46 But the kind of planning Trotsky desired was incompatible with the NEP. Whereas Trotsky warned of a revolution drowning in an ocean of petit bourgeois peasants, Lenin warned that the peasants were the “judges” of the Bolsheviks: rural toilers were extending the Bolsheviks political “credit” and would cease to do so if the Bolsheviks failed to raise living standards.47 Lenin called a working class “alliance” (smychka) with the peasantry a necessity “insofar as there is not yet a possibility to rely on the victorious working class of Europe.”48 At Lenin’s initiative, the 11th Congress reaffirmed the NEP as well as the party’s predominance in all spheres, including the economy.

Following his defeat at the 11th Party Congress, Trotsky took to criticizing Lenin regarding the likely ineffectiveness of his proposals to improve the state’s performance.49 Their exchanges heated up when Trotsky declared in a speech in October 1922 that if world capitalism managed to stand another ten years, it would be “strong enough to put down the proletarian revolution once and for all throughout the world, and of course, in Soviet Russia, too.”50 There can be no doubt that Trotsky was trying to change Lenin’s version of the NEP, and that he provoked Lenin to respond. On November 20, 1922, at the Moscow soviet—in what would turn out to be his final public appearance—Lenin declared that “we never doubted that we should . . . attain success alone.” He tried to stress that “socialism is now not a question of the far-off future,” suggesting rivalries among the capitalist powers would provide an opening, but overall he was stumped: “We dragged socialism into everyday life and here we need to figure it out.” Workers were organizing production at factories themselves, peasants were forming cooperatives, maybe socialism, or at least its seeds, lay in that.51 Trotsky persisted in exposing the despair of Lenin’s position, demanding immediate industrialization through planning. Lenin in effect was saying be patient: the regime was fully secure for now and in time would win out if it performed its job of regulating capitalist relations. Trotsky was saying build socialism in the economy now, or else the opportunity would be lost forever.52

SECOND STROKE

Lenin’s poststroke return to public life, after a long, slow, and partial convalescence, would turn out to be brief: only from October 2, 1922, through December.53 On December 7, after departing a politburo meeting early, he was ushered back to Gorki, where he was visited two days later by Rykov, just returned from Tiflis.54 Lenin insisted on returning to the Kremlin, which he did on December 12, but, after discussions with his government deputies in his Kremlin office during the day, and in the evening receiving Dzierzynski to hear about the Georgian events, Lenin retired to his apartment down the corridor, feeling extremely unwell.55 It would prove to be his last working day in his Kremlin office. The next morning he suffered two attacks. “He is having paralytic attacks every day,” the doctors’ journal noted. “Vladimir Ilich is upset and worried by the deterioration in his condition.”56 Still, Lenin met with Stalin in the apartment from 12:30 p.m. for more than two hours.57 That same day, however, he conveyed to his deputies that he was compelled to take another holiday after “liquidating” the issues he was working on.58 On December 14 and 15, Lenin continued working in his apartment, lobbying several officials, including Trotsky, to forestall dilution of the state monopoly on trade.59 On December 15, Lenin wanted to dictate a letter on the national question but did not manage to do so.60 Nonetheless, he sent a letter to Stalin reporting that he had finished the “liquidation” of pressing matters, and reminded him that Trotsky would be defending his position on the trade monopoly at the upcoming plenum, warning against any backsliding.61

This letter would serve, in Trotsky’s memoirs, as evidence that Lenin had proposed that he and Trotsky form a “bloc” on the trade monopoly, and that Lenin and Stalin suffered a break in relations over this question, on top of their national question contretemps.62 But in an exchange of letters around this time, both Lenin and Trotsky underscored not just their partial agreement (trade monopoly) but their continuing differences (planning).63 Moreover, on the trade monopoly, just as on the USSR structure, Stalin readily acceded to Lenin’s wishes. There was no bloc and no break.

Before Lenin could depart for Gorki to renew his convalescence, in the wee hours of December 15–16 he suffered what may have been a series of lesser strokes. “His condition has worsened,” the physicians wrote. “He can write with difficulty, but what he writes is illegible, the letters overlapping each other. . . he could not touch the tip of his nose with the tip of his finger.”64 Lenin would never write again.65 Despite migraines, spasms, memory loss, speech impairment, bouts of paralysis, and despair, Lenin somehow managed to dictate a letter to his three deputies (recorded in Krupskaya’s hand) instructing that Rykov should be given the state planning commission.66 Sometime between December 16 and 18, Lenin dictated a letter to Stalin conveying that just days ago (December 14) he had received Kamenev and had “a lively political conversation. Slept well, felt wonderfully. Then, on Friday [December 15], paralysis. I demand your appearance immediately, to tell you something in the event the illness worsens.”67 Lenin feared the onset of total paralysis and wanted poison. Stalin is not recorded in the visitors’ book for Lenin’s office but, like Kamenev, could have gone to the apartment.68 On December 18, 1922, a Central Committee plenum voted to make Stalin responsible for “the isolation of Vladimir Ilich in terms of personal relations with staff and correspondence,” as per doctors’ orders, based on a diagnosis of strain from overwork.69 Visits to Lenin were forbidden, beyond immediate family members, physicians, orderlies, and secretaries, and those few allowed contact were forbidden to agitate him by discussing current affairs.70

The physicians’ journal records no activities by Lenin for December 19–22.71 Trotsky claimed that on December 21 Lenin dictated a warm letter to him (“with the very best comradely greetings”) via Krupskaya, thanking Trotsky for winning the battle on the foreign trade monopoly.72 But the alleged letter in Trotsky’s archive is not an original but a copy of a copy; the copy in Lenin’s archive is a copy of that copy.73 Lenin certainly had reason to be pleased: the December 18 Central Committee plenum had voted to uphold his position on keeping the state foreign trade monopoly—the draft resolution is in Stalin’s hand.74 The plenum had also voted for Lenin’s preferred version of the new state structure, a USSR, which Stalin arranged. Finally, the plenum had rejected Trotsky’s insistence on a reorganization of economic management under the state planning commission.75 Further doubts about the December 21 dictation are connected with Krupskaya’s manufacture of an incident on December 22 whereby Stalin, having supposedly learned of Lenin’s alleged congratulatory dictation for Trotsky the day before, phoned to berate her.76 Stalin would indeed get angry at Krupskaya, but that would take place a month later, and, as we shall see, the difference in timing is crucial. What we know for sure is that on December 22, Lenin managed to dictate a formal request (through Lidiya Fotiyeva) to Stalin for cyanide “as a humanitarian measure.”77 Right then, Lenin’s worst fears were realized: during the night of December 22–23, he suffered his second massive stroke.78 “Absolutely no movement,” the doctors wrote, “neither of the right arm nor of the right leg.”79

We also know for sure that on the evening of December 23, Lenin wheedled permission for five minutes’ dictation with a stenographer, “since,” according to the doctors’ journal, “he is anxious about one question and worried that he won’t be able to fall asleep.” After a tiny bit of dictation, “he calmed down.” The original of the dictation of December 23 appears to be in Nadya Alliluyeva’s hand.80 If so, this was the last time Stalin’s wife would be summoned to take dictation.81 The short dictation was a personal letter to Stalin, as is clear from the fact that it was addressed with a capital “You” (for a person), not lower case (for a group); the subject matter comported with Stalin’s role as head of the party: namely, a proposal for expansion of the Central Committee from the then 27 to 50 or even 100.82 Lenin’s dictation to Stalin also called for granting law-making but not executive functions to the state planning commission and noted he was prepared to “move toward Trotsky’s position to a certain degree and under certain conditions.” Lenin was furiously insisting that he be able to continue dictation, spurring the politburo subcommittee responsible for him (Stalin, Kamenev, Bukharin) to hold a conference with his doctors on December 24; they resolved that “Vladimir Ilich has the right to dictate every day for 5 to 10 minutes, but this cannot have the character of correspondence, and Vladimir Ilich may not expect to receive any answers”—restrictions that, far from soothing Lenin, provoked his ire, undercutting their ostensible medical purpose.83 The injunction also deepened Lenin’s already near-paranoiac suspicions that his politburo colleagues were hiding political decisions from him that contradicted his instructions.

Stalin evidently informed Trotsky straightaway of Lenin’s December 23 letter, including the unspecified concession to Trotsky on the economy.84 Trotsky seems to have been emboldened, for on December 24 and 26, 1922, he sent two letters to the Central Committee relitigating his proposal for a grandiose reorganization of executive institutions, insisting that the matter be placed on the upcoming Party Congress’s agenda.85 In the letters, Trotsky effectively sought a merger of the state planning commission and the Supreme Council of the Economy under himself.86 Lenin received a copy of the letters, and expressly rejected Trotsky’s proposal for a super ministry to run the economy and, against Trotsky’s criticisms, defended state planning commission chairman Gleb Kryzanowski, a respected, soft-spoken specialist.87 Lenin’s staff passed his December 27 dictation to Stalin, for the politburo, in real time.88

On December 30, 1922, in the Bolshoi Theater, the USSR was formally acclaimed by the Tenth Congress of Soviets, which now became the First USSR Congress of Soviets. Constituent republics were awarded control over commissariats of justice, education, land, health, and social security, while the Union government in Moscow controlled the commissariats of war, foreign affairs, foreign trade, and finance, as well as the GPU—now rechristened the “united” or OGPU. Lenin had missed both the October 1922 and the December 1922 Central Committee plenums when the form of the new state had been discussed, and had not been able to attend and speak at the Tenth Congress of Soviets, but the USSR state structure conformed to his vision of a federation of equal members. True, because of the party, the federative nature of the USSR was overridden, but the fact that, as Lenin insisted, the Soviet Socialist republics such as Ukraine formed a joint federation with the RSFSR would have immense consequences one day. The USSR would dissolve into its constituent republics, but the RSFSR would remain intact. Lenin’s preferred form of a USSR was ultimately a bet on world revolution, while Stalin’s proposal—annexation into the RSFSR—would have been a bet on historic Russia, without excluding world revolution.

FIRST RECOGNITION

On the recommendation of doctors, Trotsky was granted a six-week holiday from January 6, 1923, but he stayed in Moscow. That same day, Stalin addressed a letter to the Central Committee proposing that Trotsky be made chairman of the Supreme Council of the Economy and a deputy chairman of the government, a proposal Stalin attributed, properly, to Lenin.89 Trotsky declined. On January 15, Trotsky detailed why he had already refused to become deputy prime minister at Lenin’s suggestion back in September 1922, writing that he disliked both the practice of a “deputies’ collegium,” which took people away from running their respective commissariats, and the policies of the party apparatus (under Stalin). For example, decisions on military affairs were being taken “de facto against the interests of the institution and even behind its back,” so “I do not consider it possible to take on still more responsibility for still other institutions.” Trotsky claimed that Lenin had proposed forming a commission to examine the selection, training, and promotion of cadres—Stalin’s bailiwick—but it had never been formed because Lenin’s illness worsened.90 On January 17, Stalin proposed that Trotsky become head of the state planning commission as well as deputy chairman of the government.91 Trotsky refused this, too.92 By refusing to become Lenin’s top deputy with Lenin seriously ill, Trotsky in effect was refusing to take over the government. It seems inexplicable. One part of the explanation consists of Trotsky’s continued insistence on replacing Sokolnikov’s “dictatorship of finances” (as Trotsky wrote in this exchange of letters) with a “dictatorship of industry,” which, however, Lenin adamantly refused. No less fundamentally, Trotsky understood that Stalin, as head of the party, could control the government (through the nomenklatura process, among other levers), and he was just not going to take a position subordinated to Stalin, even if Trotsky refrained from saying as much explicitly.

Trotsky’s desire for a dictatorship of industry and an end to the party’s oversight of the economy had both a policy aspect (planning, super industrialization) and a political aspect: it was his answer to Stalin’s dictatorship of the party apparatus. But Stalin, who did not like the NEP any more than Trotsky did, crucially, like Lenin, and because of Lenin, understood the necessity of flexible tactics for the greater cause: Stalin accepted the NEP. To put the matter another way, in 1922, Stalin could have his party dictatorship and Lenin’s NEP. Trotsky could not have his economic dictatorship and the NEP. This means that the charges of Trotskyism that Stalin would level, with all manner of distortions, nonetheless had some basis: Trotsky on the economy was forcefully pushing against Lenin’s foundational policy. This episode also shows that, with Lenin incapacitated, Trotsky recognized the sudden vastness of Stalin’s power.

But Stalin suddenly became vulnerable over that slap in Tiflis. Lenin now saw his bête noire—Great Russian chauvinism—in the persons of a Georgian (Orjonikidze) and a Pole (Dzierzynski), whom he suspected of whitewashing Georgian events.93 On January 25, 1923, without Lenin, the rest of the politburo met—even Trotsky took part, though on holiday—and heard from the Dzierzynski commission as well as Mdivani, then voted to approve Dzierzynski’s findings exonerating Orjonikidze and removing the four leading Georgian Communists from Georgia.94 No one was supposed to be keeping Lenin informed about party affairs, on doctors’ orders, but on January 24, Lenin’s secretariat recorded that he directed Maria Volodicheva to request the materials of the Dzierzynski Commission from Stalin or Dzierzynski, so that his secretariat could study them and report to him in order that he could prepare a report to the upcoming 12th Party Congress (scheduled for spring 1923).95 His innate suspiciousness was intensified by his illness and prescribed treatment of reduced political involvement. He began to accuse Fotiyeva, his head secretary, of “intriguing” against him, according to the doctors, because she had discovered that Dzierzynski was away from Moscow but reported that when he returned, she would ask him for the dossier.96 Sometime around now, in late January, Stalin and Krupskaya had a confrontation over the telephone. The sources indicate the conflict was sparked by the request for the Dzierzynski report, which Lenin’s secretariat formally made to Stalin on January 29.97

The request struck Stalin as prima facie evidence that someone, presumably Krupskaya, had been informing Lenin about party and state affairs against the strict prohibition set down by the politburo at the instruction of the doctors. Molotov, who knew Stalin extremely well, recalled late in life that “Stalin was irritated: ‘Why should I get up on my hind legs for her? To sleep with Lenin does not necessarily mean to understand Leninism!’ Stalin told me something like this: ‘Just because she uses the same bathroom as Lenin, do I have to appreciate and respect her as if she were Lenin?’ He was too coarse and rude.”98 Krupskaya would characterize Stalin’s rudeness over the phone as extraordinary, but this is not corroborated by any other source. Maria Ulyanova, an eyewitness—the telephone was in the corridor just outside Lenin’s room in Gorki—would recall that Stalin had pointed out Krupskaya’s violation of the politburo decision “in a rather sharp manner” and that Krupskaya had descended into hysterics: “She completely did not resemble herself, she screamed out, she rolled around on the floor, and so on.” Perhaps Krupskaya was deliberately trying to stage a memorable incident. Ulyanova would further recall that Krupskaya had told Lenin about the incident “after several days” and that she (Krupskaya) and Stalin had reconciled.99

The fact that the rudeness incident took place in late January—not, as most accounts assert, on December 22—helps explain why, on February 1, 1923, Stalin read out a statement at the politburo requesting to be “relieved of the responsibility for overseeing the regime established by the doctors for comrade Lenin.” The politburo unanimously rebuffed his request.100 That same day, Stalin also turned over the Dzierzynski Commission materials to Lenin’s secretariat. The request was unorthodox, given that the materials were supposed to be re-examined by a new “commission,” which no party body had authorized, and which was made up of mere technical personnel with no standing.101 The next day, the politburo discussed, once again, Trotsky’s insistence on concentrating economic authority in the state planning commission and opening the sluices to finance industry; the issue was tabled.102 His proposals were turned over to the whole Central Committee and, ultimately, the 12th Party Congress.103 Trotsky persisted in his quest for economic dictatorship as a counter to Stalin’s party dictatorship.

SUSPICIOUS DICTATION

Maria Glasser, Lenin’s secretary who handled politburo matters, recalled that between December 1922 and March 1923, the Bolshevik leader, “having only a half hour each day, rarely more, and sometimes less, hurried frightfully to say and do everything necessary.”104 But Professor Kramer, in February 1923, noted that “Vladimir Ilich was finding it hard to recall either a word he wanted or he was unable to read what he had dictated to the secretary, or he would begin to say something completely incoherent.”105 Despite the strict prohibition on conveying political information to him, all regime materials were still being sent to his secretariat, and Lenin, confined to his small room in the Kremlin apartment, cajoled his secretaries into divulging information about current events and making phone calls on his behalf. It was these loyal women, Fotiyeva, Volodicheva, and above all Krupskaya, who assumed the task of interpreting his nearly unintelligible words and half-paralyzed pantomime.106 On February 14, he was said to have instructed a secretary to “convey to someone of the insulted [Georgians] that he is on their side.” Lenin added, “Did Stalin know? Why did he not respond?”107 The doctors recorded that on February 20 Krupskaya withheld from Lenin the protocols of the Tenth Congress of Soviets, which happened to show that Stalin had implemented Lenin’s will.108 Fotiyeva recorded on March 3, that she passed to Lenin their dossier on Georgia, which refuted the Dzierzynski Commission report article by article.109

The counterdossier was blatantly tendentious. Just one example: it omitted the salient fact that Pilipe Makahradze’s secret letter to the Central Committee, with Kamenev’s response, had been leaked to the emigre Menshevik Socialist Herald—i.e., the Georgians had divulged state secrets.110 The counterdossier also rendered political judgments about the slap in Tiflis (“the differences carry a political character and should be raised at the next Party Congress”). Who inserted these assessments remains unclear. Trotsky’s involvement has been suggested.111 But feeling under the weather, he was holed up in his Kremlin apartment, in a different building from Lenin’s. “Neither Lenin nor I could reach the telephone; furthermore, the doctors strictly forbade Lenin to hold any telephone conversations,” Trotsky would write, adding that Lenin’s secretaries shuttled back and forth between the two with messages. The latter included a note, dated March 5, 1923, which purported to be from Lenin, beseeching Trotsky’s “to undertake the defense of the Georgian affair at the Central Committee of the party. That affair is now under ‘prosecution’ at the hands of Stalin and Dzierzynski and I cannot rely on their impartiality. Indeed, quite the contrary!”112 That same day, Trotsky called Lenin’s secretariat and spoke to Volodicheva, complaining he was too ill to do as Lenin requested. Trotsky added that Orjonikidze’s behavior in the incident was an aberration.113

The circumstances point to Krupskaya as the shaper of the anti-Dzierzynski dossier and of the note to Trotsky. Another purported Lenin dictation, also said to be have been taken by Volodicheva, was for Stalin and reached him the next day.114 It was typed; no stenographic handwritten copy survives. Nor did the staff of Lenin’s secretariat make the usual obligatory notation that a letter had been dispatched. The typescript demanded an apology for mistreatment of Krupskaya and threatened a break in relations. Copies, for some reason, went to Zinoviev and Kamenev. Stalin had already apologized to Krupskaya, but the incident was now revived. On March 7, Stalin answered in writing: “Around five weeks ago [i.e., late January] I had a conversation with comrade N. Konstantinova, whom I consider not only your wife but also my old party comrade, and told her (over the telephone) approximately the following: ‘Doctors forbid giving Ilich political information, considering that such a regimen was a very important means of healing him, and you, Nadezhda Konstantinova, turn out to violate that regimen; it’s not allowed to play with Ilich’s life’ and so on.” Stalin continued: “I do not consider that one could find something rude or impermissible undertaken ‘against’ you in these words, for I pursued no goal other than your returning to health. Moreover, I considered it my duty to oversee implementation of the regime. My explanations with N. Kon[staninova] confirmed there was nothing here, and could be nothing here, other than a trivial misunderstanding. Still if you consider that in order to maintain ‘relations’ I must ‘take back’ the words I said as above, I can take them back, but I refuse to understand what it was about, where my ‘guilt’ lies, and what is really wanted of me.”115

Yet another purported dictation from Lenin, this one a telegram dated March 6, was addressed to Mdivani and Makharadze: “I am with you in this matter with all my heart. I am outraged at the rudeness of Orjonikidze and the connivance of Stalin and Dzierzynski. I am preparing notes and a speech for you.”116 Only a few months before, Lenin was admonishing Mdivani and Makharadze sternly. It was not clear Lenin was in any condition to dictate letters. On March 6, the physicians recorded the following: “When he awoke, he summoned a nurse, but he could almost not converse with her, he wanted the nurse to summon Nadzehda Konstantinova, but he could not say her name. . . . Vladimir Ilich lay with a confused visage, the expression on his face was frightening, his eyes were sad, his look questioning, tears came down from his eyes. Vladimir Ilich is agitated, he tries to speak, but cannot find the words, and he adds: ‘Ah the devil, ah the devil, such an illness, this is a return to the old illness’ and so on. After measures were taken, ‘his speech improved,’ V.I. Lenin calmed down and fell asleep.”117

It is noteworthy that Trotsky later would write that “Lenin entered into clandestine contact with the leaders of the Georgian opposition (Mdivani, Makharadze, and others) against the faction of Stalin, Orjonikidze, Dzierzynski, through Krupskaya” (italics added).118 Perhaps Krupskaya, interpolating Lenin’s intentions, concocted all three March letters. Perhaps she first mouthed the words to Lenin and he mouthed them back. Perhaps he mumbled versions of them himself. We shall likely never know. Whatever their provenance, the letters had consequences. On March 7, Kamenev, writing to Stalin, divulged Lenin’s support for the “national deviationists” in Georgia; writing to Zinoviev, Kamenev assigned himself the role of peacemaker.119 By this time, Lenin’s illness had taken a sharp turn for the worse: he suffered a seizure on the night of March 6–7.120 (The journal kept by Lenin’s secretaries ends in midsentence on March 6.)121 Stalin’s March 7 apologetic response to Lenin over Krupskaya was recorded as “not read” by Lenin. These three March letters were the last documents that would be attributed to Lenin by the dates assigned to them, but not the last ones that would emerge in his name.

THIRD STROKE AND FAKE ARTICLE

On the night of March 9–10, 1923, Lenin suffered another massive stroke, which resulted in “complete loss of speech and complete paralysis of the right extremities,” according to Professor Kramer, the neurologist.122 The physicians’ duty journal for March 11 recorded that “he kept trying to say something, but only quiet, disjointed sounds emerged. . . . Today, especially towards evening, his comprehension of what was being said to him was worse, sometimes he replied ‘no’ when he should have said ‘yes.’” The next day the physicians wrote: “He cannot understand what he is asked to do. He was shown a pen, his spectacles, and a paper-knife. When he was asked to give the spectacles, he gave them, when he was asked for the pen, he gave the spectacles again.”123 On March 11, Stalin sent a cipher to all provincial and republic party organizations: “More than ever, the provincial committees need to be informed about the moods of the masses so as to allow no confusion.” Moscow in the 1920s was generally roiled by rumors and leaks and Soviet newspapers conducted polemics with emigre periodicals, so keeping anything totally under wraps was out of the question. Lenin’s illness was publicly disclosed in a special edition of Pravda on March 12, albeit with utmost caution: “some weakening of the movement functions of his right hand and leg,” “some upset in his speech.”124 This published note, signed by German doctors, was enough for sharp readers to deduce that Lenin had suffered partial paralysis.125

That same day the OGPU sent ciphers to the regional branches instructing them to intensify activity: “The state of comrade Lenin’s health is critical. A fatal end is possible. Immediately set up a secret ‘troika’ in order to take all necessary measures to prevent anti-Soviet disturbances.”126 Dzierzynski worried that emigres in France would lobby that country and perhaps Poland to take advantage with a military intervention. The politburo contemplated introducing martial law. A partial mobilization occurred on March 14. Of the discussion to disclose Lenin’s illness to the public, Trotsky would soon state in a speech, “I think, comrades, you can imagine the mood in which this meeting of the politburo took place. . . . We asked ourselves with genuine alarm how those outside the party would receive the news—the peasant, the Red Army man.”127

Everything was being filtered through the prism of the succession. Pravda began issuing special bulletins concerning Lenin’s health from March 14, 1923. That issue happened to be the twenty-fifth anniversary of the party’s official founding, and the twentieth of the 2nd Party Congress, when the Bolshevik faction had been constituted, and it carried commemorative essays. One stood out: “Lev Trotsky—Organizer of Victory,” by Karl Radek, who deemed Trotsky “the first leader [vozhd’],” and used soaring language to laud Trotsky’s “genius,” praising even controversial subjects, such as “his courageous determination to utilize military specialists for creating the army.”128 Rumors circulated that Lenin had designated Trotsky his successor.129 Within a short period the OGPU submitted a report on eavesdropped conversations, with coverage of workers in cities and peasants right near cities or along the rail lines, because “the news about Lenin’s illness had barely begun to penetrate the genuine village.” Some people did not believe the reports of illness, others expressed concern for Lenin. According to the OGPU, people discussed possible successors for Lenin by name, mentioning Trotsky, purportedly “without particular sympathy,” which the OGPU attributed to “anti-Semitism of the masses.” Others named as possibilities to become chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars included Kamenev, Bukharin, Zinoviev, and Dzierzynski.130 Stalin was not mentioned. In the country at large, in spring 1923, he was poorly known. But the OGPU report was submitted to him.

Lenin was frantically trying to get the nurses to give him cyanide or summon Stalin to do so. On Saturday, March 17, Krupskaya herself summoned Stalin, telling him Lenin was in a “horrible” state and demanding poison again.131 Stalin went over to Lenin’s Kremlin apartment, and that same day wrote an explanatory note to Kamenev and Zinoviev, following up four days later with a note to the full politburo. Stalin was not admitted to Lenin’s room; Krupskaya transmitted Lenin’s poison request and Stalin’s answer, a vague promise that “at the necessary time, I will implement your request without vacillating.” But he told the politburo that “I do not have the strength to fulfill this request of V. Ilich and must refuse the mission, since it is not humane and necessary.” The politburo members supported Stalin’s stalling tactics.132 Also on March 21, Lenin’s secretariat ceased to receive regime documents, a cutoff only Stalin could have ordered.133

Kamenev, meanwhile, had acted upon his self-assigned peacemaker role for Georgia and, along with Kuibyshev (Central Control Commission), had gone to the Second Georgian Party Congress, which opened in Tiflis on March 14.134 The Georgian party delegates refused to reinstate Mdivani and seven other “national deviationists” in the new twenty-five-member Georgian Central Committee, but the Muscovite emissaries insisted.135 Orjonikidze perceived Kamenev as playing both sides.136 On March 21, Stalin telegrammed Orjonikidze to admonish him that he had learned from Kamenev and Kuibyshev that the South Caucasus Federation constitution was “wrong and illegal,” because the economic commissariats of the three individual republics lacked genuine operational functions. “This mistake must be corrected obligatorily and immediately.”137 Suddenly, on March 23, Trotsky, belatedly taking up the cause of the Georgian Central Committee, lobbied the politburo to remove Orjonikidze, but only one other member voted with him. Kamenev and Kuibyshev returned to Moscow and reported to the politburo on March 26 on mistakes of “both sides” in Georgia. Trotsky kept up the attack.138 On April 1, he tried to get Bukharin to write a prominent article on the national question before the upcoming Party Congress (which had been postponed from March 30 until April 17). Nothing appeared in Pravda by Bukharin.139 But then, something extraordinary happened: on April 16, Lidiya Fotiyeva telephoned Kamenev to report that there was a new article by Lenin on nationalities.

Fotieya then telephoned Stalin with the same information. Stalin refused to receive the “article,” stating he would “not get involved.”140 The article, titled “Notes on the Question of Nationalities,” departed significantly from Lenin’s lifelong and even recent views on nationalities, advocating confederation.141 The “Notes” also had Lenin stating that “I think that Stalin’s haste and his infatuation with pure administration, together with his spite against the notorious ‘nationalist-socialism,’ played a fatal role here,” meaning in the bad blood aroused in Georgia. “In politics spite generally plays the basest of roles.”142

Lenin’s alleged “Notes” were dated December 30–31, 1922, and Fotiyeva later observed that the long article had been dictated in two fifteen-minute sessions.143 The typescript lacked a signature or initials. The existing evidence strongly points to a maneuver by Krupskaya, and the staff in Lenin’s secretariat, to forge what they interpreted as Lenin’s will. They knew he was exercised over the Georgian affair; indeed, they egged him on over it. Trotsky might also have been complicit by this point. Controversy ensued over his claim that he had received Lenin’s “Notes on the Question of Nationalities” before the Central Committee had—and, supposedly, before Lenin’s third stroke—but had inexplicably held on to them.144 Lenin’s purported dictation happened to dovetail with views Trotsky published in Pravda (March 20, 1923).145 Even more telling, Lenin’s secretaries had kept working on the counterdossier on Georgia, for a report by Lenin to a future Party Congress, even after he had his third massive stroke and permanently lost his ability to speak. Their material contains the following note (dated March 12): “Group the material not so much in defense of the [national] deviationists as in the faulting of the great power chauvinists”—meaning Stalin. In fact, their counter-Dzierzynski Commission dossier reads like a first draft of the “Notes on the Question of Nationalities.” On April 16, when Fotiyeva set the “Notes” in motion, Trotsky belatedly adduced the alleged Lenin letter, supposedly dictated March 6, to Mdivani. Rumors were spreading that “Lenin had expressed confidence in Trotsky and gave him some kind of important tasks and prerogatives.”146

ABSENT LENIN

The 12th Party Congress, which took place April 17–25, 1923, in Moscow, with 408 voting delegates among 825 attendees, was the first that Lenin would miss since the 6th in summer 1917, when he was in hiding. Initially, the politburo, as usual, had assigned Lenin the main political report, but that now fell to Zinoviev.147 “You remember with what thirst we always listened to this speech, a thirst like that of a man who, on a sultry summer day, falls upon a deep clear spring to drink his fill,” Zinoviev remarked, raising expectations, then failing to meet them.148 Stalin, in his organizational report, boasted that “for the past six years the Central Committee has never before prepared a congress the way it has prepared this one.”149 In fact, the opening was postponed because the delegate elections were annulled and new elections held in far-flung locales with “representatives” of the Central Committee present. The garrulous Zinoviev later admitted that “people could say to us: the party’s Central Committee, right before a congress at which the Central Committee was going to be criticized, . . . has gathered its own delegates, curtailing the electoral rights of members. . . . But we had to do this from the point of view of the interests of the revolution. From the point of view of the benefits to the revolution, [we decided] to allow voting only by those who are the genuine party guard.”150 Translation: Trotsky supporters were culled. Some sense of the acrimony can be gleaned from the anecdote that when Voroshilov saw Radek at the congress walking behind Lev Trotsky, he called out something to the effect of “There goes Lev [Lion] and behind him his tail.” Radek got to work and, a few moments later, produced a riposte: “Oh, Klim, you empty head,/Stuffed full of manure,/Better to be Lev’s [Lion’s] tail/Than Stalin’s ass.”151

Trotsky’s appearance, amid blazing lights and rolling movie cameras, provoked a thunderous ovation.152 He delivered a long, intricate speech that introduced a brilliant metaphor to capture a major crisis bedeviling the regime’s economic policy. Soviet industry, slower to recover than farming, was producing insufficient goods leading to higher prices (a situation exacerbated by the organization of the industrial economy into trusts that engaged in monopoly price gouging); at the same time, prices for farmers’ output were falling, and the price differential inhibited peasants from marketing their grain. Trotsky adduced a sensational graph that showed the rising prices for manufactured goods and falling prices for agricultural goods, which he likened to the opening of scissor blades.153 His speech culminated in a paean to planning. “Our New Economic Policy was established seriously and for a long time, but not forever,” he stated, calling the market a “diabolical phenomenon” and drawing applause.154 Trotsky did not specify how a transition to planning might happen, but he did indicate how he would pay for it: “There may be moments when the state does not pay a full wage or pays only a half, and you, the worker, give a credit to your state at the expense of your wages.” A few voices called Trotsky out on this call for exploitation of labor, but the members of the leadership, for the most part, avoided engaging his speech, which was followed by applause.155 What did Trotsky then do? “As soon as he had finished he left the hall,” one student admirer remarked. “There was no personal contact in the corridors.”156

Stalin delivered a second report, on nationalities, and being unable to outdo Trotsky in theatrics, concentrated on substance and delivered the speech of his career to that date. He refrained from stating that Lenin’s “Notes on the Question of Nationalities” was a forgery, but he did allow that “comrade Lenin forgot, he forgot a great deal recently. He forgot that with him we passed the fundamentals of the Union (Voice: he was not at the plenum).”157 Stalin proceeded to refute the arguments of the “Notes” point by point. Stalin knew his Lenin. He painstakingly proved that Lenin himself had spurned the confederation argument, accurately citing his own correspondence with Lenin as well as Lenin’s many other writings. Stalin demonstrated that Lenin stood for a federation, which is how the recently formed Union had been designed and approved; Lenin stood for a single, integrated economy; “for Lenin the national question is a question subordinated to a higher question—the workers’ question.”158 Stalin further proved that Lenin had been an early backer of a South Caucasus Federation to tamp down nationalist excess.159 Stalin drove home the point by noting that the Georgians oppressed national minorities, and not just the tribals (Abkhazians and Ossetians), but also Armenians—look at Georgian officials’ efforts to deport local Armenians and “transform Tiflis into a real Georgian capital.”160 Great Russians, in other words, had no monopoly on chauvinism. Anyway, not chauvinism but backwardness and the need for development were the salient issues. The party needed to employ the instruments of regional autonomy and native language education, which would now consolidate the nations, so that they could be developed, a policy confirmed at the congress as “indigenization” (korenizatsiia).161

Dissenting voices tried to rally. Rakovski decried usurpation of republic prerogatives and a creeping “administrative, apparatus, bureaucratic psychology,” and sought to marshal Lenin against Stalin, but Stalin mounted a strong rebuttal with an accurate account of his 1920 exchange with Lenin, during the Polish War, quoting himself and Lenin’s answer to show that Lenin was the archcentralizer; Stalin, the one who acknowledged difference.162 Ukraine’s Skrypnyk characterized Great Russian chauvinism as “sucked in with their mother’s milk,” so that it had become “instinctual in many, many comrades”—including, somehow, in the Georgian Stalin—while Mdivani denounced the South Caucasus Federation as “artificially established.” No one tried to use Lenin’s alleged letter to Mdivani—not Trotsky, not even Mdivani. The latter did try to use Lenin’s alleged “Notes on the Question of Nationalities” article, but Kamenev, who was presiding, cut him off.163 Only Bukharin joined Rakovski in supporting a confederation (after the Union federation had already been formed).164 The vast majority of the delegates lined up with Stalin. “The thunder of applause from everywhere was heard,” Bukharin admitted.165 Even Yevgeny Preobrazhensky—the person who had challenged Lenin at the previous congress a year earlier over Stalin holding so many concurrent positions—allowed that “comrade Stalin’s report was extremely substantive, I would say that it was a very intelligent report.”166

Stalin enjoyed a moment of high visibility and a smashing victory.167 Trotsky himself, by putting before the Party Congress the choice of Lenin’s authority versus his (Trotsky’s) on the matters of the New Economic Policy and the Union federation, had allowed Stalin to demonstrate that he was the one faithful to Lenin. Kamenev, too, had thundered that “the NEP could be terminated with a single decree of yours or of any higher organ of Soviet power, and this would not cause any political tremors,” while Zinoviev remarked that “it is not the turn of NEP right now.”168 Stalin was leery of “the corrupting influence of NEP elements” on the party, and even blamed NEP and private capital for growth in Great Russian chauvinism and “Georgian, Azerbaijan, and Uzbek and other nationalisms,” but at the top of the regime Stalin was the one who defended Lenin’s NEP.169 He was reconfirmed as general secretary. In the elections to the new Central Committee, Trotsky came in thirty-fifth place in the total number of positive votes, as opposed to second, where he had stood in the elections at the previous Party Congress. Kamenev came in twenty-fourth, Zinoviev thirty-second, and Stalin tied for first (384 votes out of 386) with Lenin.170 Trotsky would not even have remained a member of the Central Committee if Stalin had not now radically expanded that body, as Lenin had proposed in his December 23 dictation for Stalin.

MIRACULOUS DICTATION

On May 15, 1923, Lenin was transported at a snail’s pace from the Kremlin to Gorki with a team of doctors. On top of paralysis, he suffered insomnia, lost appetite, stomach troubles, fevers, and memory loss. He was desperately trying to regain the power of speech, mostly by reciting the alphabet and singing the “Internationale.”171 But his speech was limited to a handful of words—“congress,” “peasant,” “worker”—and when he repeated the words Krupskaya said to him, it was not clear he understood their meaning. Physicians observed how he was “given dried bread chips, but for a long time he could not put his hand straight onto the plate and kept putting it around it.”172 He had bouts of weeping and raged at the doctors, as if they were at fault. It was abundantly clear that he would never again play any role in political life. From May 16, no more official bulletins appeared about his health. The strain on Krupskaya was enormous.173 Lenin’s life work, the fate of the revolution, would have to be carried forward by others, and while she spent her days with a hopeless invalid, Stalin had emerged as successor.

But then the heavens crackled and a lightning bolt flashed across the sky: sometime in late May 1923, Krupskaya brought forth a very short document purporting to be dictation from Lenin. She handed it to Zinoviev, with whom she had developed close relations dating back to the emigration in Switzerland.174 Volodicheva, again, was said to have taken the dictation, over several sessions, recorded as December 24–25, 1922.175 But the purported dictation had not been registered in the documents journal in Lenin’s secretariat. It was a typescript; no shorthand or stenographic originals can be found in the archives. Lenin had not initialed the typescript, not even with his unparalyzed left hand.176 According to Trotsky, the typescript had no title.177 Later, titles would be affixed—Lenin’s Testament or “Letter to the Congress”—and an elaborate mythology would be concocted about how the dictation had been placed in a wax-sealed envelope with Lenin’s instructions that it be opened only after his death. Of course, Krupskaya had given the typescript to Zinoviev while Lenin was still alive.

These were extraordinary pieces of paper, consisting of barbed evaluations of six people. (When Stalin was handed and read the dictation, he is said to have exclaimed of Lenin, “He shit on himself and he shit on us!”178) Several top officials were omitted, however, including Rykov, Tomsky, and Kalinin, all full members of the politburo, and Molotov, a candidate member of the politburo and someone who worked very closely with Lenin.179 By contrast, Bukharin, another politburo candidate member, was mentioned, as was Pyatakov. Lenin saw these two in Gorki and he was preoccupied with next-generation cadres; the purported dictation called them “the most outstanding best forces (among the youth forces).” Still, the document drove a stake through both of them:

Bukharin is not only a most valuable and major theorist of the party; he is also rightly considered the favorite of the whole party, but his theoretical views can be classified as fully Marxist only with great reserve, for there is something scholastic about him (he has never made a study of dialectics, and, I think, never fully understood it). . . . As for Pyatakov, he is unquestionably a man of outstanding will and outstanding ability, but shows too much zeal for administrating and the administrative side of the work to be relied upon in a serious political matter.

The dictation urged Bukharin, then thirty-four, and Pyatakov, then thirty-two, to “find occasion to enhance their knowledge and amend their one-sidedness.” This seemingly fatherly advice had to sting.

But the immediately preceding comments in the typescript, about Zinoviev and Kamenev, were still more damning:

The October episode with Zinoviev and Kamenev was, of course, no accident, but neither can the blame for it be laid upon them personally, any more than non-Bolshevism can upon Trotsky.

That was it: a single sentence about two of the most important regime figures, an apparent pardon for their opposition to the October coup in the form of a devastating reminder of it.

What preceded the dismissal of Kamenev and Zinoviev, however, was nothing short of earth-shattering:

Comrade Stalin, having become general secretary, has concentrated boundless power in his hands, and I am not sure whether he will always be able to use that power with sufficient caution.

Stalin had somehow acquired “boundless power” himself, as if Lenin had not made him general secretary. The immediate next line was eye-popping as well:

Comrade Trotsky, as his fight against the Central Committee in connection with the issue of the people’s commissariat of railways proved, is distinguished by the highest abilities. He is personally perhaps the most able man in the present Central Committee, but he has displayed excessive self-assurance and shown excessive preoccupation with the purely administrative side of matters.180

The dictation warned that “these two qualities of the two outstanding leaders of the present Central Committee”—Stalin’s incaution, Trotsky’s self-assured political daftness—“can inadvertently lead to a schism, and if our party does not take steps to avert this, the schism may come unexpectedly.”181

Although the text raised doubts about all six, as well as others who had not merited a mention, Trotsky emerges as the central figure, called the ablest, pardoned for his grievous non-Bolshevism up to 1917, and mentioned even when others were being dealt with. Before, during, and after the 12th Party Congress, Trotsky was under relentless, scurrilous assault. Anonymous opposition pamphlets had appeared demanding the removal from the Central Committee of Stalin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev, but a far greater number of “underground” works emerged against Trotsky, such as A Small Biography of a Big Man (rumored to have been authored by Stalin’s minion Tovstukha) and What Ilich Wrote and Thought About Trotsky (which dredged up Lenin’s nasty comments).182 Conspicuously, all the phrases of the supposedly late December 1922 dictation correspond with either the anonymous pro-Trotsky hectographs or with the pro- and anti-Trotsky speeches during the congress: the threat of a schism, the need to remove the triumvirate or leading group, Trotsky’s non-Bolshevism (mentioned by Zinoviev), Stalin’s rudeness. A veritable rough draft of the dictation appeared in the form of the congress speech by the trade unionist Vladimir Kosior (brother of Stanisław Kosior), who pointed a finger at the “triumvirate,” the “secretariat,” and the “leading party organs” as having interests different from those of the party as a whole and as threatening a schism.183 Overall, there is a strong sense that the author of the dictation supposedly made in December 1922 had studied the speeches of the 12th Party Congress in spring 1923.184

No one at the congress—which ended on April 25—Krupskaya included, had hinted at the existence of Lenin’s alleged dictation. Why did Krupskaya not choose to show this document to the 12th Party Congress? She had brought forth the “Notes on the Question of Nationalities,” a blatant forgery that had failed to gain any attraction.

One cannot exclude the possibility that Lenin dictated the untitled typescript with evaluations of six personnel, despite the absence of corroborating evidence. It is also possible that someone, knowing Lenin’s thoughts, rendered some barely audible but genuine words and gestures into this form. But it may be that the intermediaries interpolated Lenin without specific dictation. The timing of late May 1923 closely fits a circumstantial case that the alleged Lenin dictation was produced as part of the struggle in the party in connection with the outcome of the 12th Party Congress—Stalin’s triumph, Trotsky’s rout. The document’s appearance also followed Lenin’s removal from the Kremlin to Gorki and the termination of official bulletins about his health, indicating a certain hopelessness about his condition.185 Furthermore, on or just before June 2, 1923, Krupskaya handed Zinoviev what was said to be a Lenin dictation on the state planning commission that, wondrously, now supported Trotsky’s long-standing desire to achieve economic dictatorship, against which Lenin had fought tooth and nail right through his second massive stroke.186

One thing is indisputable: the miraculous dictation could not have emerged from Lenin’s innermost sanctum without the involvement of Krupskaya.187 But why would she support Trotsky? She and Stalin had been at daggers drawn for some time, yet her acrimony with Trotsky dated back far longer.188 After she had become not only Lenin’s wife but also secretary in 1898, she had found herself in the middle of bitter polemics that would produce the Bolshevik-Menshevik split, and in her own letters of the time she wrote sharp barbs not just against Martov but Trotsky, too, calling one of his brochures “the most scandalous perversion of the revolutionary movement in years.”189 More recently, Krupskaya was keenly aware of Lenin’s deep exasperation at Trotsky’s constant public polemics with him during the civil war and early NEP. It is wrong to see her as on Trotsky’s side, just as it is wrong to see Maria Ulyanova on Stalin’s.190 Both women sought not to favor someone but to attain a balance.191 Krupskaya, in her quarter century by Lenin’s side, had undergone a master class of political intrigue, and no doubt she believed in her heart she knew Lenin’s wishes. From deep inside the regime, she could see Stalin’s “boundless power,” and her gambit, if that is what it was, seems designed to deny the Georgian the status of Lenin’s sole successor.

OPERATION PARLIAMENT-2 (SOLTANĞALIEVISM)

Stalin, right after the 12th Party Congress, was unfolding a cunning manipulation of his own, aimed at national-minority party cadres he suspected of disloyalty. It began with the OGPU Eastern Department, which carried responsibility for Muslims and Buddhists, whether abroad or on Soviet territory. The Eastern Department, founded and headed by the Latvian Jekabs Peterss, had instituted close surveillance over Soviet Muslim Communists, tracking everything from political views to sexual liaisons. In an operation code-named Parliament-2, a particular target was the Tatar Mirsayet Soltanğaliev, a Stalin protégé and rare bird. Tataria had a mere 3,483 party members, of whom just 28.5 percent were Tatars.192 Here was a literate Muslim Communist with a mass following among a difficult constituency (as Stalin knew well from his time agitating among Muslims in Batum and Baku), but Soltanğaliev had taken to consistently criticizing Stalin at party forums over such matters as the inclusion of Muslim Turkestan as part of the RSFSR rather than as a self-standing republic of the Union.193 He called the Muslim peoples of the Volga valley, southern Urals, Central Asia, and Caucasus the springboard of the world revolution, battled the writ of the RSFSR agricultural commissariat over land in Tataria, sponsored glorification of the medieval Tatar Khanate, and pushed to impose Tatar as the language for Muslims across Soviet Russia. Casually, in spring 1923, Stalin approached Soltanğaliev and informed him he had been shown a conspiratorial letter from the Tatar to a comrade in Baskhiria, which indicated the existence of an underground organization, and warned him to be careful. Whether by design or not, this warning prompted Soltanğaliev to write in code to one of his correspondents to ask that his previous letters be destroyed.194 This letter was intercepted by the OGPU and sent to Kuibyshev, chair of the party Central Control Commission, where, in early May 1923, Soltanğaliev was summoned, expelled from the party for pan-Turkism, pan-Islamism, and nationalism, and arrested.195

Although the 13th Party Congress had just discussed the national question in depth, the expulsion of a member of the central government (nationalities commissariat collegium) seemed sufficient for the politburo to summon a special meeting of national Communists, fifty-eight of whom attended, along with two dozen members and candidate members of the Central Committee. On June 9, 1923, with Kamenev chairing, and the Muslim attendees aware that Soltanğaliev was sitting at Lubyanka internal prison, Kuibyshev opened the four-day gathering with a report containing excerpts from the incriminating Soltanğaliev letter asking that his previous letters be destroyed as well as from his interrogation testimony. Kuibyshev asserted that Soltanğaliev had admitted writing the secret correspondence, called his own arrest “lawful,” and allowed that “it would also be lawful to apply the highest measure of punishment to me—execution. I say this sincerely.” Kuibyshev concluded that Soltanğaliev had committed grave transgressions but could be released, because he had admitted his actions; otherwise, despite the proof just presented (in this secret forum), the Tatar might become a martyr.196 Much of the ensuing discussion was taken up by those who had worked closely with Soltanğaliev and were trying to explain themselves. But Orjonikidze observed that in Turketsan, where he had been recently, the infighting took the form of Sunnis versus Shiites, Turks versus Persians, not national Communism, while in the Caucasus, students in the Azerbaijan Muslim-teachers school wore badges featuring Turkey’s Mustafa Kemal. He called for training national-minority Communists as internationalists (like himself). By contrast, Skrypnyk, the Ukrainian Communist, remarked that someone was trying to use this incident “to shift policy” toward a harder line against national Communists (Trotsky shouted out: “Completely correct”).197 Skrypnyk, along with Rakovski, was giving Stalin fits on the constitutional commission to finalize the governing structures of the Union.198

Stalin spoke in the discussion after Kuibyshev’s report, even though his own report was scheduled for that evening. “Nationalism is the fundamental idea-obstacle on the path to growing Marxist cadres, a Marxist avant-garde, in the borderlands,” he stated, equating Muslim nationalists to Mensheviks, “a bourgeois ideology” and platform for reviving a bourgeoisie in conditions of the NEP. Before the four-day meeting, he may have been contemplating a revolutionary tribunal culminating in a death penalty.199 But now, Stalin agreed with his minion Kuibyshev on the need to release Soltanğaliev. “The guy admitted all his sins and sought forgiveness,” Stalin stated, as if being magnanimous. “He has been expelled from the party and of course will not be readmitted. But for what purpose should he be held in prison?” When a voice interjected to ask what work Soltanğaliev could do, Stalin answered, “He is not ours, he’s alien, but, I assure, you, he is no worse than certain military specialists who conduct very important work in important posts.”200 The equation of a national minority Communist with tsarist military specialists was revealing of Stalin’s pervasive suspicions of disloyalty. He made Soltanğaliev into an example as a means of intimidation and control. While Zinoviev inadvertently managed to reveal his ignorance of national affairs at the forum, Kamenev, who was in on Stalin’s virtuoso manipulation to tighten the political screws, closed the gathering by reminding attendees that internal threats such as Soltanğalievism could become a weapon in the hands of Britain, “the greatest imperialist power.”201 On June 14, the OGPU’s Mezynski had Soltanğaliev released, after forty-five days in prison. (He would end up relegated to working in the country’s hunting association.)202 Stalin had a stenographic account of the gathering quickly distributed for required discussion in all national republic party organizations. The discussion in the Tatarstan party was presided over by the local OGPU chief.203 There would be “indigenization” of national cadres, as mandated by the 12th Party Congress, but also OGPU surveillance. Here were techniques Stalin could apply beyond Muslim Communists.

“CAVE MEETING”

On July 10, 1923, Zinoviev and Bukharin left Moscow for an extended holiday in Kislovodsk, the country’s celebrated southern spa town of medicinal “acidic waters” (kislye vody).204 Before departing, the pair had become privy to a sensational additional purported Lenin document, what was called “Ilich’s letter about the secretary.” Supposedly, it had been dictated by the Bolshevik leader on January 4, 1923, as an addendum to the dictations dated December 24–25; Fotiyeva claimed to have taken the addendum dictation.205 Krupskaya had again approached Zinoviev.206 Kamenev, who remained in Moscow at this time, also knew about it. The contents were explosive:

Stalin is too rude, and this defect, while fully tolerable in the milieu and company among us, Communists, becomes intolerable in the post of general secretary. That is why I suggest that the comrades think about a way to transfer Stalin from this post and name a different person who in all other respects differs from Stalin in having only one advantage, namely that of being more tolerant, more loyal, more polite and more considerate toward comrades, less capricious, and so on. This circumstance may appear to be a mere trifle. But I think that from the standpoint of safeguards against a schism and from the standpoint of what I wrote above about the relationship between Stalin and Trotsky it is not a trifle, or it is a trifle that can assume decisive importance.207

Could Lenin have wanted to sack Stalin just fifteen months after having created the post of general secretary expressly for him? If so, why did the dictation not suggest a replacement? And why did the letter also mention Trotsky?

There is no stenographic original of the “Ilich letter about the [general] secretary.” In the journal of Lenin’s activities kept by the secretarial staff there is no mention of any such “Ilich letter.” The physicians’ journal for January 4, 1923, recorded that Lenin suffered a sleepless night and a “poor” disposition, and “gave dictation twice and read,” but not a single source corroborates the content of the January 4 dictation.208 Also curious is the fact that Zinoviev had not been made privy to the “Ilich letter about the [general] secretary” in late May, along with the evaluations of six regime personnel. The new typescript emerged only in June.209

This alleged dictation—perhaps the most momentous document of the entire regime’s history until now—should have radicalized the political dynamic. But Zinoviev and Bukharin, in possession of knowledge of Lenin’s ostensible instruction to find a way to remove Stalin as general secretary, did not do so. What the pair did do was to hold a “cave meeting,” conspiratorially bringing together on the rock cliffs a few other officials who were also on holiday in Kislovodsk or nearby.210 Attendees, besides Zinoviev and Bukharin, were Grigory Yevdokimov, the trade union head in Petrograd and one of Zinoviev’s closest allies; Mikhail Lashevich, the commander of the Siberian military and another close Zinoviev supporter; and Klim Voroshilov, a staunch Stalin supporter and the commander of the local North Caucasus military district headquartered in Rostov, who received a telegram to come to Kislovodsk, some 300 miles away.211 There were five “cavemen” in total. An invitation had also gone to Mikhail Frunze, commander of the Ukraine and Crimea military district, who was on holiday at Zheleznovodsk, 25 miles away, but he arrived only the day after.212

Trotsky also happened to be in Kislovodsk on holiday, but by all accounts he took no part in the cave meeting.213 He was, of course, no less unhappy than Zinoviev or Bukharin with how Stalin operated the party secretariat, but Trotsky, polemicizing against potential allies, holding himself at a distance, made it exceedingly difficult for anyone to ally with him. That summer he was mostly absorbed in writing, though he did agree to receive the American leftist writer Max Eastman, who came down to Kislovodsk during a twenty-one-month stay in the Soviet Union to talk to Trotsky about writing his biography (“the most universally gifted man in the world to-day,” Eastman would write).214

Zinoviev would later explain that “all the participants understood that the secretariat under Lenin was one thing, but the secretariat without Lenin altogether something else.” Bukharin, who may have spurred the cave process, proposed that they “politicize” the secretariat, that is, turn it into a small politburo by adding (alongside Stalin) Zinoviev and Trotsky, or perhaps Trotsky and Kamenev, or Trotsky and Bukharin. “There were great rows over this,” Zinoviev continued in his explanation, “and many (myself included) considered that comrade Trotsky would work with us, and together we would succeed in creating a stable balance of power.”215

A consolidated “triumvirate” against Trotsky had yet to form in summer 1923; rather, the immediate concern generated by Lenin’s three strokes was not Trotsky’s power but Stalin’s.

Some days after the cave meeting, Sergo Orjonikidze, the head of the South Caucasus regional party committee in Tiflis, who had a previously scheduled trip to Berlin via Moscow for medical treatment, stopped over in Kislovodsk. Zinoviev briefed Orjonikidze, considered a Stalin loyalist, on the cave discussions and handed him a letter (dated July 29) for Stalin and Kamenev.216 Predictably, Stalin became infuriated. Zinoviev, in the meantime, had received two letters from Stalin (dated July 25 and 27) reporting various actions that Stalin, as general secretary, had taken.217 The most important, for Zinoviev, entailed Stalin’s decision to countermand Zinoviev’s Comintern directives for bolder actions by German Communists. This infuriated Zinoviev. On July 30, a white-hot Zinoviev dashed off an accusatory letter from Kislovodsk to Kamenev in Moscow, complaining of the latter’s complicity in Stalin’s peremptory, non-consultative decision making. “You are in Moscow,” Zinoviev wrote. “You have no small influence. And you are simply letting Stalin mock us.” Zinoviev cited various examples, then added, “Did Stalin consult with anyone about these appointments? Not with us, of course.” Even at sessions of the Comintern, run by Zinoviev (and Bukharin), Stalin was dominant: “Stalin arrives, glances about and decides. And Bukharin and I are ‘dead bodies’—we are not asked anything.” Then Zinoviev delivered the punch line:

We shall not tolerate this anymore. If the party is condemned to go through a period (prob. very brief) of Stalin’s one-man-rule [edinoderzhavie], so be it. But at least I do not intend to cover up all this swinishness. In practice there is no “triumvirate,” there is Stalin’s dictatorship. Ilich was a thousand times correct.

The final reference could only denote the “Ilich letter about the secretary.”218

Zinoviev reminded Kamenev that “you yourself said this more than once,” and appeared at once irate (“If you do not answer this letter, I will write no more”) and hopeful: “But what surprises me is that Voroshilov, Frunze, and Sergo think almost the same.” Here, however, Zinoviev may have been shaving the truth. Frunze’s position on Stalin’s exercise of power is unclear, though he could have tilted toward a “balancing” strategy, while Orjonikidze, even though Stalin had just saved his political hide over the Georgian affair, was his own man and owed his high position in the party not only to Stalin but also to Lenin.219 But whatever the dispositions of Frunze and Orjonikidze, Voroshilov certainly opposed Zinoviev.220 Bukharin, meanwhile, wrote his own letter to Kamenev (on July 30), complaining that in his (Bukharin’s) absence and without consultation, Stalin had named a temporary editorial collective to oversee Pravda. In fact, the politburo had appointed the Trotsky supporter Preobrazhensky as temporary editor, but he had resigned over the reintroduction of a vodka monopoly (the much-criticized tsarist practice of raising revenue from drunkenness), and this unexpected act compelled Stalin to take alternate temporary action, until Bukharin returned from holiday.221 Stalin’s mundane power to act, in this instance and others, seems to have shocked both Bukharin and Zinoviev. They discovered that Stalin indeed had “boundless power.”

Zinoviev saw himself as behaving reasonably—“Don’t take it and interpret it badly. Consider it calmly,” he wrote to Stalin on July 31—given that there was dictation attributed to Lenin calling for Stalin’s removal and Zinoviev was merely asking for Stalin to share power.222 But Stalin did not take kindly to the proposal. Moreover, he had not seen this purported Lenin dictation, and he had to be anxious, perhaps frightened, about what the entire document might contain. Orjonikidze wrote to Voroshilov (August 3, 1923) that Stalin viewed the Zinoviev-Bukharin proposals as akin to the appointment of “political commissars” to watch over him, as if he were as untrustworthy as one of those former tsarist generals. Stalin went on the counterattack that same day (August 3), writing to Zinoviev and Bukharin: “I received your letter [of July 29], I spoke with Sergo. I do not understand what I am supposed to do in order that you don’t curse me, or what the problem is here?” Stalin proposed a face-to-face meeting—“If you consider the possibility of further friendly work (for from the conversation with Sergo I began to understand that you, evidently, are not against preparing a break, as something unavoidable).”223

Stalin would not let them do to him what he had just done to the Tatar Mirsayet Soltanğaliev. After another Zinoviev-Bukharin letter (August 6), written in a conciliatory tone (“the mention of a ‘break’ comes from your exhaustion, of course. Such a possibility is excluded”), Stalin exploded. “Why was it necessary to cite Ilich’s letter about the [general] secretary, which is unknown to me—is there no proof that I’m not enamored of position and therefore not afraid of letters?” Stalin wrote on August 7. “What does one call a group whose members try to intimidate one another?” Stalin added that decisions were not being taken by the secretariat alone without others and that the agendas were not being decided without input from anyone other than the secretariat. He painted himself as a victim: “You are lucky people: you have the opportunity on holiday to discuss all manner of concoctions, debate them and so on, and meanwhile I am here tugging like a dog on a chain, sputtering, and I turn out to be ‘guilty.’” He was doing all the work! Scoffing at their pretense of friendship, he called their bluff: “I favor a change in the [general] secretary, but I’m against instituting political commissars (we have not a few political commissars already: the orgburo, the politburo, the plenum).”224

Stalin’s response, laced with self-pity, yet forceful—and including an apparent offer to resign—provoked from Zinoviev and Bukharin their sharpest letter yet. “Yes, there exists a letter of V.I., in which he advises the 12th Party Congress not to reelect you as [general] secretary,” they wrote on August 10. “We (Bukharin, Kamenev, and I) decided not to talk to you about it yet. For an understandable reason: You already take disagreements with V.I. too subjectively, and we did not want to unnerve you.” Unnerve him they had, of course, and their attempt at mollification was strained:

There’s no Ilich. The secretariat of the CENTRAL COMMITTEE, therefore, objectively (without evil intentions on your part) begins to play the role in the Central Committee that the secretariat plays in another provincial party organization, that is, in fact (not formally), it decides everything. This is a fact, which is impossible to deny. No one wants to institute political commissars. (You even deem the orgburo, politburo, and plenum political commissars!) . . . The situation (both with Trotsky and with various “platforms”) gets more complicated and dissatisfaction in the party grows (don’t look at the surface). Hence, a search for a better form of collaboration.

The document was handwritten by Bukharin yet signed only by Zinoviev. It concluded: “Don’t for a minute think that we are conspiring. Take a holiday as you should. All the best. Zinoviev.”225 But the letter was never sent.226 Stalin was scheduled to depart for Kislovodsk on August 15, 1923, for a one-and-a-half-month holiday, which, however, he put off.227

DELIRIUM

A key issue delaying Stalin’s holiday departure was the vision of an October-style revolution in Germany.228 Germany was far and away the most important country in the world for the USSR. Suffering devastating inflation, Germany had defiantly fallen into arrears in its reparations. France had been bled white in the Great War (fought on its territory), but the British wanted to reduce German obligations, which made the French even more livid. The Reparations Commission declared Germany in default, and France and Belgium militarily occupied the Ruhr valley, site of 80 percent of Germany’s steel, pig iron, and coal.229 This crashed German markets and worsened the rampant inflation (by November 1923, to purchase $1 would cost 130 billion marks).230 Expressing solidarity with its Rapallo partner, Soviet Russia boldly warned its nemesis Poland not to take advantage of Germany’s crisis and seize East Prussia, on the other side of the Versailles-created Polish Corridor.231 Moscow also urged Latvia and Lithuania to agree to a policy of non-intervention in German affairs. At the same time, Zinoviev and Bukharin had decided the moment was ripe for the USSR to intervene in German affairs by staging a Communist coup d’etat. In Kislovodsk, while pondering how to curb Stalin’s power, the pair received a letter (dated July 11) from Heinrich Brandler (b. 1881), a former bricklayer and a leader of German Communists who had a quarter-century experience in revolutionary struggle. Brandler crowed that the German Communists would soon stage a major antifascist day rally and that “for every Communist who is killed we shall kill ten fascists.”232

While Karl Radek warned Brandler to avoid any confrontation that could serve as a pretext for a massive anti-Communist crackdown, Zinoviev took Brandler’s letter as a sign of newfound determination and Radek’s action as insubordination—Zinoviev headed the Comintern. Stalin supported Radek, expressing skepticism in his exchange of letters with Zinoviev about Germany, just as he had over Poland’s alleged ripeness for revolution back in 1920. Brandler, for his part, disregarded Radek’s warnings and on July 31 publicly announced German Communists’ intention “to win political power.” A few days later, he proclaimed the imminent “fall of the bourgeois order” and onset of a “civil war.”233 Stalin continued his skepticism. Although Germany in 1923 had a far larger working class than Russia had had in 1917, in his letter to Zinoviev on August 7 Stalin enumerated special circumstances that had favored the Bolsheviks in 1917, and he emphasized not only or even primarily worker support for Bolshevism, but also that the Bolsheviks had had a people desperate for peace and a peasantry eager to seize the landlords’ estates. “At the moment, the German Communists have nothing of the kind,” he noted. “They have, of course, a Soviet country as neighbor, which we did not have, but what can we offer them at this time? Should power in Germany, so to speak, topple over now and the Communists seize it, they would end up crashing. That is in the best case. In the worst case they will be smashed to smithereens. . . . In my opinion the Germans should be restrained and not encouraged.”234

This disagreement was not going to be resolved over the wires and on August 9, Stalin had the politburo formally request that members return from holiday for direct discussion. An affirmative answer came back from Zinoviev and Bukharin on August 12. Trotsky stipulated that the interruption in his course of medical treatment should last “not more than one week.”235

Mass strikes had engulfed Germany, involving 3 million workers, a scale that surprised even German Communist militants, and, after the hapless German central government resigned, its place was taken by the classical liberal politician Gustav Stresemann in a grand coalition that included German Social Democrats. Even before this, leftist Social Democrats had entered the regional governments of Thuringia and Saxony, Brandler’s home state. The evident radicalization in Germany fed Zinoviev’s initial zeal; Stalin warned of a likely military intervention by France and Poland against a German workers’ government that would also engulf the USSR.236 On August 21, the politburo resolved to dispatch 1 million gold marks to Germans by underground channels, the onset of a river of money from a poor and ruined country still suffering severe hunger.237 Two days later a breathtaking discussion took place at the politburo, at which Stalin supported the idea of a coup, but in hypersecrecy. “Stalin’s point of view is correct,” Trotsky noted. “It cannot seem that we, not only the Russian Communist party but also the Comintern, are orchestrating.” Trotsky appeared to be the skeptic, demanding a detailed plan of insurrection, while Stalin stated, lyrically, that “either the revolution in German fails and knocks us off, or there, the revolution succeeds, all goes well, and our situation is secured.” There was likely some cold calculation at work here: if Germany did go Communist, and Stalin was on record as having been unsupportive, he would end up looking like Zinoviev and Kamenev in 1917. Still, Stalin’s turnaround revealed a degree of enthusiasm unnecessary to a calculated demonstration. He rhapsodized about the USSR needing “a border with Germany,” which could be created by trying to “overturn one of the bourgeois border states.” When Chicherin asked whether the USSR should work to consolidate the states of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia or prepare uprisings in them, voices shouted “of course, both.”238

The Comintern issued a worldwide appeal on August 25 to trade unionists and socialists of all stripes for unified action in the face of the “fascist” threat. No one answered.239 That same day, Trotsky instructed his deputy at the Military Revolutionary Committee of the Republic, Yefraim Sklyansky, to prepare the Red Army for a possible Entente attack.240 Three days later, Central Committee secretary Rudzutaks sent a coded telegram to provincial party committees to the effect that a revolution was imminent in Germany and to expect a bourgeois military intervention against Germany, as had happened to Soviet Russia.241

DREAD EVERLASTING

Stalin knew that his expansive faction would be aggressive in his defense. When he had informed Kuibyshev and Rudzutaks, the other Central Committee secretaries and his staunch loyalists, they supposedly laughed at Zinoviev’s intrigues.242 And yet, this was no laughing matter: an apparent instruction from Lenin to remove Stalin, which lay in the hands of politburo members. Powerful indirect testimony to the fear Stalin felt appeared in the journal Proletarian Revolution. In its ninth issue for 1923, which came out in September, Lenin’s letters of spring 1917 to Karpinsky and Ganetsky were published, the very letters that the Provisional Government police had intercepted and used to charge Lenin with treason as a German agent in July 1917.243 One might expect such incriminating documents, published from police copies, to appear in an emigre periodical aiming to discredit Lenin, but in a Soviet journal, and one prepared for publication in August 1923? It could have been a bizarre coincidence. But it seems highly likely that Stalin, who controlled Lenin’s archives, set in motion the publication, aiming to strike a blow at Lenin’s reputation.244 If so, it was an act of desperation. Precisely when Stalin first read the “Ilich letter” remains unknown. One would expect to find a copy of it, with his pencil marks, in his archive, but no such copy is extant. Who showed it to him, when, under what circumstances, and with what reaction, may never be known. We can guess, however, that when Zinoviev and Bukharin returned to Moscow around August 20, 1923, Stalin demanded to see it. But it is possible that Krupskaya had not handed a copy to Zinoviev but only let him read it, which would only have augmented Stalin’s terror.

Stalin blunted the cave-meeting initiative with a clever proposal, accepted by the others, to add two politburo members, Zinoviev and Trotsky, to the orgburo—not, as originally proposed, to the secretariat—as full members, along with two new candidate orgburo members, Ivan Korotkov (a regional party boss promoted to Moscow) and Bukharin (listed second). Predictably, Trotsky and Bukharin would never attend a single meeting of the labor-intensive orgburo; Zinoviev would claim he attended once or twice.245

Part of the failure of the cave-meeting machinations derived from Trotsky’s behavior. Bukharin would explain that “I personally wanted to unify the biggest figures into an upper stratum of the Central Committee, namely Stalin, Trotsky and Zinoviev. . . . I tried with all my might to bring peace inside the party. . . . Comrade Zinoviev vacillated, and soon he took the position of a merciless attack against Trotsky, ruining this plan. Comrade Trotsky, for his part, did everything possible to aggravate relations.”246 True enough, but an even greater factor was Kamenev’s position.247 Kamenev, because he ran meetings efficiently, developed a reputation for business-like practicality, but those who knew him better understood he was an inveterate intriguer. His thinking at this moment is undocumented. He knew Zinoviev well and perhaps did not have as high opinion of him as Zinoviev had of himself. Similarly, Kamenev had known Stalin a very long time, since the early 1900s, in Tiflis, and in 1917 the two had returned from Siberian exile to Petrograd together, then worked together. Kamenev certainly understood that Stalin was no angel—thin-skinned, two-faced, a nasty provocateur—but Kamenev clearly did not see Stalin as a special danger, for otherwise he would have joined the action against him. Here is an indicator that, in 1923 at least, the monstrous later Stalin either did not yet exist or was not visible to someone who worked with him very closely. On the contrary, Kamenev appears to have viewed Stalin as manageable. He told Orjonikidze that the complaints of Zinoviev and Bukharin were exaggerated.248 Kamenev also likely appreciated the heavy load that Stalin was carrying as general secretary. The draft USSR constitution was ceremonially approved by the Soviet central executive committee on July 6, 1923, in the Grand Kremlin Palace—the nationalities commissariat was abolished, so that Stalin no longer had a formal government position—but the USSR structure still had to be implemented, and in that Stalin was indispensable.249 Whatever Kamenev’s precise calculations, or miscalculations, his siding with Stalin was deliberate and crucial to the general secretary’s political survival.

Zinoviev and Bukharin had misjudged Kamenev, who in turn misjudged Stalin, but Zinoviev’s behavior is the grand mystery. Everyone understood that Zinoviev had designs on being number one.250 And in that summer of 1923, Krupskaya had handed him a letter from Lenin advising that they remove Stalin. But Zinoviev did no such thing. He had been afforded an opportunity to alter the course of history, and did not seize it. To be sure, the views of Rykov, Kalinin, and Tomsky, as well as Molotov, remained to consider; and Kamenev’s siding with Stalin—even on a proposal well short of removal—had been a ghastly surprise for Zinoviev. Trotsky, moreover, had been his usual aloof self in connection with the admittedly inchoate feelers Zinoviev appears to have delivered via Bukharin. Nonetheless, Zinoviev could have forced the issue to remove Stalin from the pivotal position of general secretary by demanding that Lenin’s will be enforced. He could have demanded a Central Committee plenum on the subject, even an extraordinary party congress. Instead, Zinoviev had called a meeting in a cave, then signed his name to some letters to Stalin Bukharin wrote, then did not even send one of them. Given the fact that Stalin’s personality would prove to have momentous consequences, Zinoviev’s failure to act upon his own blatant ambition and force the issue of Stalin’s removal—even more than Kamenev’s hesitation merely to curb some of Stalin’s powers—was arguably the most consequential action (or inaction) by a politburo member after Lenin had become irreversibly sidelined.

Krupskaya setting in motion in summer 1923 the “Ilich letter about the [general] secretary” turned out to be a turning point that did not turn. For Stalin, however, the episode was hardly over. He likely suspected Zinoviev would return to Lenin’s purported dictation, and perhaps reveal it to the Central Committee and maybe beyond. And would not Trotsky, too, become involved? And how long would Kamenev’s backing last? And what about Bukharin’s prominent role in the cave intrigue? Stalin’s biggest concern, though, remained Lenin, even though the Bolshevik leader could neither speak nor write. Out at Gorki, he was being walked around the grounds in imported wheelchairs, struggling to scratch out some words with his left hand (“mama,” “papa”), and listening as Krupskaya read to him as to a baby.251 Lenin was never going to return to public life. But documents attributed to him had been coming forward piecemeal, months after they were allegedly dictated. Through the OGPU, Stalin could maintain close surveillance on the comings and goings at Gorki, under the guise of security, but he could not control Krupskaya, and he could not be sure what other documents purporting to be instructions from “Ilich” might yet be brought to light. Finally, Stalin appears to have departed for Kislovodsk in late August.252 But one wonders what kind of “holiday” it could have been with the sword of Damocles hanging over his head. In any case, the dubious respite was brief, for he was attending meetings in the capital by the third week of September.

HUMILIATION

Revolutionary fever swept Moscow in September 1923. Brandler had arrived in late August and by mid-September other German Communists had arrived to find the city strewn with banners proclaiming the imminent “German October,” while factories held meetings on how Soviet workers could aid their German counterparts.253 But the German Communists were at each other’s throats, riven into left, right, and center factions, and Brandler was begging for either Zinoviev or Trotsky to lead the insurrection. That September, a Comintern-pushed uprising in Bulgaria, aimed at overthrowing a government that itself had recently come to power in a coup d’etat, was crushed, after which the Bulgarian forces of order went on a reprisal spree, killing 2,000 Communist activists and agrarians, but this, too, did nothing to slow the plans for Germany.254 Zinoviev pursued a German breakthrough to blot out the stain of having opposed the October 1917 seizure of power. Stalin was not to be outdone by him. “The forthcoming revolution in Germany is the most important world event of our day,” he wrote on September 20, in response to a request for an article from the editor of Die Rote Fahne, the Communist organ in Germany. “The victory of the revolution in Germany would have more substantive significance for the proletariat of Europe and America than the victory of the Russian Revolution six years ago. The victory of the German proletariat would undoubtedly shift the center of the world revolution from Moscow to Berlin.”255

Meetings of the politburo or its German commission took place from September 21 through 23.256 One key agenda item was what to do about the German Social Democrats. If they agreed to be junior partners to the Communists, cooperating with them would be helpful, Stalin argued; if they refused, this would expose the Social Democrats in front of the German workers—even better.257 Right in the middle of these sessions, Avel Yenukidze, secretary of the Presidium of the central executive committee, formally approved a USSR coat of arms with a hammer and sickle resting on a globe depicted in sun rays, with the inscription “Workers of the world, unite!” in six languages (Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian, Georgian, Azeri, Armenian).258 Zinoviev enlarged upon the possible formation of a United States of Worker-Peasant Republics of Europe.259 Trotsky published an overview of revolutionary tactics in the French and Russian revolutions in Pravda (September 23, 1923), which he intended as instructions to the Communist forces in Germany. What effect the article, which was republished in German in Berlin, had on the German Communist organizers is unclear, but it did draw an official protest from the German ambassador in Moscow.260 Zinoviev was beside himself with zeal and sat night after night with Trotsky in the latter’s war commissariat offices at Znamenka, 23, posing operations questions about Germany to Sergei Kamenev, the Red Army military commander-in-chief.261 Brandler boasted to a Party Congress of the Polish Communist party held in Moscow’s immediate countryside that the German Communists had more than 350,000 members, and would be able to field 200,000 armed workers, weapons for the equivalent of fifteen divisions of 5,000 troops each, and 330 partisan groups for behind-the-lines warfare—numbers that were eye-popping, or eye wash.262

From September 23 to 25, a Central Committee plenum took place in the Grand Kremlin Palace with fifty-two participants. The opening day saw two reports, one by Zinoviev on the international situation, which concerned Germany, and another by First Deputy Head of government Rykov on the defense of the country and the creation of a special reserve fund.263 The plenum approved a date for the German coup of November 9, the anniversary of the kaiser’s abdication and the “bourgeois” revolution (i.e., the founding of the Republic).264 Kuibyshev reported on changes in the composition of the Revolutionary Military Council, headed by Trotsky. In other words, instead of a discussion of Lenin’s apparent demand to find a way to remove Stalin—the “Ilich letter about the [general] secretary”—Trotsky was ambushed by a scheme, developed without his consultation, to enlarge and stuff the Revolutionary Military Council with partisans of Stalin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev. Trotsky announced his intention to resign from every one of his posts—including his politburo and Central Committee membership—and requested to be sent abroad “as a soldier of the revolution” to assist the German Communists in the planned coup.265 When one attendee from Petrograd, Fyodor Sobinov, known as Nikolai Komarov—the son of poor peasants and himself a former factory worker—suddenly asked why Trotsky “put on such airs,” Trotsky exploded. He shot up, stated “I request that you delete me from the list of actors of this humiliating comedy,” and stomped out, resolving to slam the cast-iron door—a massive metal structure not given to demonstrative slamming. He could only manage to bring it to a close slowly, unwittingly demonstrating his impotence.266

Whether by design or dumb luck, Stalin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev had humiliated Trotsky.

A delegation was dispatched to his nearby apartment to coax him back, but he refused and the plenum continued and officially rebuked his behavior.267 The protocols further noted: “Send excerpt to comrade Trotsky immediately.” In his absence, the plenum voted to add several Central Committee members to the Revolutionary Military Council.268 This was the second time its composition had been altered against Trotsky; the first had been by Lenin, in March 1919, which had also precipitated Trotsky’s announcement of his resignation. Back then, his resignation had been rejected, and Lenin mollified him. This time, too, Trotsky’s resignation was rejected, but without Lenin to smooth things over and balance the personalities.

It was only now that the other top members of the politburo began to act concertedly as a triumvirate. At one of the subsequent politburo sessions, when a ruckus erupted between Trotsky and Zinoviev, the latter burst out, “Can’t you see you’re in a ring [obruch]? . . . Your tricks no longer work, you’re in a minority, you’re in the singular.” From this point, whenever Zinoviev and Kamenev secretly came over to Stalin at the secretariat to prearrange issues before politburo meetings, their three-way clandestine gatherings acquired the secret catchphrase “the ring.”269 Their ring around Trotsky provoked him.

LEFT OPPOSITION

NEP’s grudging legalization of markets had done nothing to alleviate the blatant squalor of workers in whose name the regime ruled. Industry had been reorganized in giant trusts (metalworking, cotton) and those enterprises deemed most important, known as the commanding heights, had been placed under the aegis of the state, but this had not shielded many factories from being shuttered or leased, sometimes to their former capitalist owners. Redundant workers were being laid off, while those not fired saw their wages linked to output quotas, just as under the old regime.270 Engineers and “specialists,” meanwhile, enjoyed conspicuous privileges, also as if no revolution had happened. “The specialist lives better, gets paid better, he gives the orders, makes demands; the specialist is an alien, the specialist did not make the October Revolution,” Mikhail Tomsky, the head of the trade unions, explained, in summarizing worker views.271 When lectured that the country was poor, workers snapped that officials should go to the city’s restaurants, where party bosses did not seem to be experiencing poverty.272 This combustible situation had erupted in strike waves at the biggest factories beginning in spring 1923 and continuing through the fall.273 Soviet and British intelligence independently noted a linkage between hopeful rumors of impending war and of the Soviet regime’s downfall.274 The OGPU conducted sweeping arrests, but workers often struck again to free their comrades, according to the secret reports sent to party headquarters. Matters resembled a Kronstadt dynamic: only fanatics (“special purpose units”) would bash in the heads of proletarians.275

Bolshevik propaganda sought to explain away worker unrest by references to an alleged “dilution” of the proletariat by recent arrivals from the countryside and by women, or sophistry. “Although there are several workers’ parties there is only one proletarian party,” Zinoviev asserted in a series of lectures on the history of the party in connection with its twenty-fifth anniversary in 1923. He added that “a party can be a workers’ party in its composition and yet not be proletarian in its orientation, program, and policy.”276 In other words, the regime’s “proletariat” was no longer even a partly sociological entity, but a wholly ideological one.

The secret police vigorously enforced the ban on independent trade unions and on non-Communist worker movements, but an ostensible alternative within the single party emerged around Trotsky, and became known as the Left opposition. Trotsky in fall 1923 began demanding “inner party democracy,” decrying how “the bureaucratization of the party apparatus has developed to unheard of proportions by means of the method of secretary selection [appointment]” and how “a very broad stratum of functionaries has been created who, upon entering into the apparatus of the government of the party, completely renounce their own party opinion, at least the open expression of it.”277 Of course, it was hardly surprising that Bolshevik assaults on private property and the rule of law had not resulted in the formation of a supple, efficient, responsive civil service. Apparatchiks supposed to engage in merciless class warfare with summary executions on one side, were not likely, on the other, to make way for a Greek polis. Unaccountable bureaucratic satrapies, political intimidation, and runaway self-dealing were inescapable consequences of Trotsky’s own commitment to Communism. Moreover, even as he was railing against bureaucratic “degeneration,” he was proposing a super bureaucracy of specialists (preferably led by him) to “plan” the economy. The Left opposition’s positive program promised next to nothing for working people on strike. In fall 1917, Trotsky had shown himself to be a political magician, able to popularize even the most difficult ideas for the working man, raising enormous crowds to fever pitch as they swore sacred oaths to the positions he argued, but in fall 1923 he was writing not about the plight of real workers and their families who needed jobs or housing but abstractly about “crisis.” Wage arrears and forced deductions for state “loan” subscriptions were tailor-made for Populist appeals, but Trotsky made no concerted effort to demagogue them.

Still, Trotsky’s critique had considerable impact on the apparatus. On October 12, 1923, a mere four days after Trotsky had sent a blistering missive to the Central Committee, Molotov dispatched to all party organizations a secret circular that enumerated “excessively luxurious” apartments, “stables with race and riding horses,” “heavy expenditures at restaurants,” and on and on. “At the disposal of the Central Committee are a series of facts indicating both the central and provincial party organizations . . . maintain fleets of automobiles and horse-drawn carriages without any work-related need,” the circular read. “It has come to our attention that very often special railcars have been dispatched to southern resorts for the sole purpose of delivering one passenger. . . . At state expense, entire freight railcars were dispatched to the southern resorts transporting automobiles.”278 Reports were flooding the apparatus of inebriated, power-hungry, thieving officials who were “cut off from the masses,” as the jargon had it—unless they were trying to rape them.279

Trotsky forced a public debate upon the triumvirate in fall 1923, but its contours were strikingly narrow—furious polemics about a monopoly party’s procedures for discussion of the complexities of modern society in terms of class, with no sense of common humanity.280 On top of its sterile program, as far as the non-party masses were concerned, the Left opposition was severely handicapped by regime structure. Bolshevism itself was nothing if not a faction, a minority, which, back in 1903, had broken off and called itself majoritarians (Bolsheviks) while tagging its opponents as minoritarians (Mensheviks), but after the resolution on party unity at the 10th Party Congress, there was no way for like-minded party members to criticize regime policies without risking expulsion from the party. A so-called Declaration of the 46—a disparate group of policy critics—tried to turn the tables, demanding “the factional regime” of the central party apparatus be “replaced by a regime of comradely unity and internal party democracy.”281 Neither Trotsky nor several of his highest profile supporters had affixed their names to the text. Nonetheless, the triumvirate mobilized party bodies to condemn the document, as well as Trotsky’s own letter, as illegal factionalism.282 Regime failures were so blatant, however, that Left opposition resolutions were carrying votes in protest at meetings of primary party organizations in Moscow. Stalin’s top aide, Nazaretyan, threw the winning tallies in the trash and reported false returns for publication in Pravda. Nazaretyan’s aide, however, felt a pang of conscience and confessed. Both would both be transferred out of the central apparatus, but the distorted vote counts were not redone.283 The anti-Trotsky struggle accelerated institutionalization of the party’s violation of its own rules.284 When the French and Polish Communist parties initiated protests of the vilification of Trotsky, Stalin had Trotsky charged with attempting to split the Comintern.285 The prime mover of the French action, Boris Lifschitz, known as Souvarine, would later write an excellent condemnatory biography of Stalin.286

CONFRONTATION

Trotsky united instead of divided his enemies with a relentlessly condescending personality.287 By nature aloof as well, he was clueless about the consequences, even in hindsight, as when he would recall that he had refused to socialize with others in the ruling group because he “hated to inflict such boredom on myself. The visiting of each other’s homes, the assiduous attendance at the ballet, the drinking-parties at which people who were absent were pulled to pieces, had no attraction for me. . . . It was for this reason that many group conversations would stop the moment I appeared.”288 Nonetheless, Trotsky did at times fight hard.289 He suffered a physical setback, however. As he would tell the story, one Sunday that October 1923, while hunting for geese, curlew, snipe, and ducks north of Moscow in the marshes of Tver province, he stepped into a deep bog of cold water, proved unable to warm himself in the car, and came down with flu symptoms.290 Whatever the cause, his fevers were real, and he was confined to bed by doctors’ orders. In deference, at Kamenev’s suggestion, the politburo meeting on October 16 took place in the study of Trotsky’s Kremlin apartment in the Cavalry Building. This was the meeting that decreed an immediate investigation of Trotsky by the Central Control Commission for “factionalism.” The war commissar, according to his wife, “came out of his study soaked through, and undressed and went to bed. His linen and clothes had to be dried as if he had been drenched in a rainstorm.”291

With Trotsky under political assault and feverish, a bizarre event occurred: On October 18, 1923, Lenin showed up at the Kremlin, where he had not been for five months.292 It went like this: following the usual late afternoon meal at Gorki, Lenin demanded to be pushed in his wheelchair to the garage, used his orthopedic shoes to climb into his Silver Ghost, and refused to get out, insisting—by his demeanor—that he was going to Moscow. Staff talked him into shifting to a closed vehicle, and he departed around 4:00 p.m. with Krupskaya, Maria, and nurse attendants, while others, including his doctors, Professors Osipov, Rozanov, Priorov, and a bodyguard detail, traveled in accompanying vehicles. Upon arrival at the Imperial Senate, Lenin looked over his Kremlin apartment, took tea and lunch. He stayed overnight. He visited his Kremlin office on October 19, where he retrieved books from his library (three volumes of Hegel, works of Plekhanov). He insisted on being pushed around the Kremlin grounds—where, of course, people recognized him—but a driving rain forced him instead to take a car ride around central Moscow, including to the All-Russia Agricultural and Handicraft Exhibition, which would soon close and which Lenin had avidly followed in the press, but which he saw only through the vehicle windows because of the downpour. He agreed to return to Gorki in the early evening, exhausted.293 “News of Vladimir Ilich’s arrival spread around the Kremlin, and people were looking out from all the windows and doors,” Lenin’s driver recalled.294 It is inconceivable that Stalin did not know, because OGPU channels would have alerted the party secretariat to Lenin’s movements. Also, Lenin’s drivers reported to the head of the Special Purpose Garage, who was Stalin’s principal driver. Trotsky, as war commissar, would have received word from the Kremlin garrison and Moscow military district. Strangely, however, by all accounts Lenin did not meet with Stalin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, or anyone else from the leadership.

On October 18 and 19 (a Thursday and Friday), the usual politburo and Council of People’s Commissars meeting space next to Lenin’s office and apartment proved to be empty. Whether Lenin expected to catch meetings there remains unknown. “Did he [Lenin] wish to see one of the comrades on this visit?” wrote Maria Ulyanova, later, in recollections of the trip. “I think not. I’m judging by the fact that, shortly before his trip, when he asked for something and no matter how much we strained our heads we could not understand what he wanted, I asked him would he not like to see someone from among his comrades. I named a few names, but he shook his head bitterly—he had no cause to see them, since he had been deprived of the opportunity to work.”295 Be that as it may, sources agree that when the car from Gorki with Lenin had first gotten within sight of Moscow’s golden-dome skyline, he excitedly pointed with his finger, a by now familiar gesture that was taken to mean: “That’s it, that’s it, that’s it, that’s iiiitttt!”296 Lenin remained in high spirits during the entire time in Moscow. Back at Gorki, he became manifestly sad. His trip seems to have fulfilled a long-standing wish to set his eyes on Moscow once more. He would never set foot in the Kremlin again.

If Lenin had been looking for the Bolshevik “conspiracy in power,” he did not find it because, though a politburo meeting did take place on October 18, by twist of fate it was convened in feverish Trotsky’s apartment in the Cavalry Building, a different building from Lenin’s apartment in the Imperial Senate. (The meeting might also have finished before Lenin arrived from Gorki.) On the agenda was the dire need to send grain to Germany, anticipating likely civil war over the planned Communist coup, and the possible behavior of Germany’s neighbors. “I think that it’s better to refrain from sounding out the Poles and instead sound out the Latvians—the Latvians can be intimidated, put up against the wall, and so on,” Stalin wrote on a piece of paper during the meeting. “You cannot do that with the Poles. The Poles must be isolated, we will have to fight with them. We’ll never ferret them out, just reveal our cards. . . . The Poles to be isolated. The Latvians to be bought (and intimidated). The Romanians to be bought. But with the Poles we wait.”297 For Stalin, a German revolution, in addition to everything else, recommended itself as a means of addressing the existence of the newly independent states that were arrayed in whole or in part on former tsarist territories.

On October 19, with Lenin walking the Kremlin grounds and Trotsky holed up in the Cavalry Building, the politburo collectively answered Trotsky’s critical letters to the Central Committee in a long text composed primarily by Stalin—it was typed up and distributed from the party secretariat on Vozdvizhenka. “If our party does not compel comrade Trotsky to repudiate those monstrous mistakes he has made in his ‘letter-platform’ of October 8, 1923, then not just the Russian Communist party but also the USSR and the German revolution will suffer colossal damage,” the politburo response stated.298 The politburo scheduled a further meeting (in Trotsky’s apartment), as well as a joint plenum of the Central Committee and Central Control Commission for October 25–27. On the opening evening of October 25, immediately after Stalin’s report, Trotsky got the floor for forty-five minutes. A so-called joint plenum was something of another Stalin trick to add more loyalists from the apparatus. He stacked the deck even beyond that, inviting not just the now punitive (instead of impartial) Control Commission personnel but “representatives” of ten major “industrial” party organizations who turned out to be provincial party bosses whom Stalin’s orgburo had appointed to their posts. At the same time, just twelve of the forty-six signatories of the Declaration were asked to appear, and only on the second day.299 The second day was given to discussion, culminating in summations, first by Trotsky (10:33 p.m. to 11:25 p.m.), then by Stalin (11:25 p.m. to 12:10 a.m.). Stalin had the politburo recording secretary, Boris Bazhanov, secretly compile resumes of the speeches, anticipating using them against Trotsky.300

This was the first direct confrontation, absent Lenin, between Stalin and Trotsky at a party forum, and those present had to understand the stakes.

Trotsky, on the attack, acknowledged that he was being accused of recidivism, given his role in the trade union debate two years ago, but he charged that now “within the politburo there is another politburo and within the Central Committee there is another Central Committee, so that I was effectively sidelined from the discussion . . . as a result I only had this path.” In trying to explain the seemingly inexplicable—why he had refused Lenin’s request to become a deputy head of government—he revealed that in 1917 he had declined Lenin’s request to serve as interior minister. “The fact is, comrades, there is one personal aspect of my work, which although playing no role in my personal life and my day-to-day existence, is nonetheless of great political significance,” he stated. “This is my Jewish origin. . . . I firmly turned down his offer on the grounds, as before, that we should not give our enemies the opportunity to say that our country was being ruled by a Jew.”301 More recently, when Lenin proposed that he become his deputy in the government, Trotsky said, he refused on the same grounds. This revelation is hard to credit. Trotsky accepted other high-profile appointments in the government.

In his speech to the plenum, Trotsky conceded that he and Lenin had disagreed about economic policy and that relations had become strained. But he stressed, again, that the party should take up ideology and party life, while economic experts ran the economy. “If I were removed from other work and sent to the state planning commission, I would not object,” he said. “The state planning commission is our most important organ,” but the current institutional architecture did not suit him. “I return to the question: ‘What would I do at the Council of People’s Commissars, if the state planning commission were not reorganized?’” He claimed his character was such that “I cannot abide sloppiness, un-thought-through-ness.” In closing, Trotsky pleaded with those assembled not to condemn him for factionalism. “Comrades, . . . try to think about and understand my situation. I was in extremely tragic circumstances”—the party press and a whispering campaign accused him of being anti-Lenin, of creating “Trotskyism”; others were meeting behind his back, he was enclosed in a ring: “I had to break out.”302

Stalin, in his speech, displayed contempt. “Could anyone be against improvement of the state planning commission?” he stated. “It’s laughable to build a platform around the necessity of improving the state planning commission. . . . Instead of discussing these serious questions, you go around with platforms. In all the statements of the oppositionists I did not find one single concrete proposal.” To their concrete calls for party democracy, he answered, “the Central Committee implements the decisions of party congresses,” adding that “democrats tell the congress that we do not need distancing from the influence of the NEP. Let’s see if the congress will agree with you.” To the complaint of an attendee that “there is no discussion,” Stalin likened him to “Chekhov’s Lady, ‘give me atmosphere.’ There are times when it’s not a matter of discussion.” Bald-faced, he added that “there has never been a case when someone came to the Central Committee proposing to discuss a question and the Central Committee refused.” He accused the group of 46 and Trotsky of taking their accusatory statements about the Central Committee’s “mistakes” outside proper party channels, appealing directly to the party mass. Stalin averred that “a discussion in the center right now would be especially dangerous. Both the peasants and the workers would lose their trust in us, enemies would regard it as weakness. We experienced such discussion in 1921. At that time we lost out frightfully. . . . Trotsky started it back then, refusing to abide by Lenin’s suggestion to limit the discussion in the trade union commission. . . . Trotsky has repeated that step, which had threatened us with schism.”303 In fact, in 1921 Lenin had deliberately provoked Trotsky into public debate; and now, in 1923, Trotsky had not appealed to the party mass—he had no such possibility because Stalin controlled the party press.

After Stalin spoke, no rebuttal was allowed. Notwithstanding Trotsky’s gobbledygook about his refusals to become Lenin’s deputy and his continuing obsession with planning, he had not had to resort to naked lies. Stalin was desperately making up spurious arguments, and showed himself to be thin-skinned, an intellectual bully. Of course, the room had already been prepared: in the voting on a long resolution condemning Trotsky and the Left opposition for factionalism and schism, 102 votes were recorded as in favor, with just 2 against and 10 abstentions. In violation of party rules, non-Central Committee members—the twenty “representatives” of the ten big “industrial” party organizations invited by Stalin—had been permitted to vote.304 Such manipulation was a sign of weakness. Stalin never used the secretly recorded transcript of this confrontation with Trotsky.

Stalin’s other principal nemesis, Krupskaya, who had taken part in the “joint” plenum, on October 31 sent a strongly reproachful letter to Zinoviev. She had voted with the majority against Trotsky, but now, privately, she insisted that Trotsky was not the sole person to blame for party divisions and that “the workers would severely judge not just Trotsky but us” even though what was going on in the party “was being kept hidden” from them. “The moment is too serious to create a schism and make it psychologically impossible for Trotsky to work.” She criticized the “intemperate language,” “the personal quarrels and squabbles,” and took particular umbrage at the “abuse of Vladimir Ilich’s name. . . . References to Ilich were uncalled-for and insincere. . . . They were mere hypocrisy.” She seemed especially incensed at insinuations that Trotsky’s letter writing to internal party bodies had exacerbated Lenin’s illness (“I should have shouted that this was a lie”). She reminded Zinoviev of Lenin’s dictation warning of a schism because of Stalin.305 And yet, Krupskaya, who, uniquely, could speak with the authority of Lenin’s purported wishes, had failed to express any of this at the plenum, where it would have mattered. She had relied on Zinoviev, who was drunk with world revolution and just not up to the task of curbing Stalin’s power.

The OGPU and Comintern had flooded Germany with agents and money, and worked hand in glove with the foreign affairs commissariat, borrowing its cipher codes and the diplomatic pouch, with the approval of Chicherin.306 But Brandler’s wild claims about the vast forces the German Communists commanded were now exposed: Mátyás Rákosi (b. 1892), a Hungarian Comintern agent in Germany, reported to Moscow that the ratio of the forces of order to armed Communists was twenty to one. Contrary to Brandler’s earlier boasts, Saxony had a mere 800 rifles, not 200,000.307 Comintern agents who were supposed to purchase and stockpile weapons either failed to manage the difficult task or stole the funds. But the deepest failing was that German Communists held a majority in a mere 200 of the 1,400 local trade union committees and just 5,000 of the 70,000 factory committees.308 German workers were overwhelmingly members of the Social Democrats. There were, in effect, two Communist conspiracies over Germany in fall 1923: one against the German government, one against the German Social Democrats. Stalin had proposed a “united front” against the German right as mere tactics, designed to split the German Social Democrats and discredit their left wing, leaving the entire revolutionary space to the Communists. The German Social Democrats—as the Communists discovered and reported to Moscow—issued their own secret circular calling for cooperation with German Communists only in the event of absolute necessity against the right, while secretly forming combat units for defense against expected attacks on Social Democrats by the Communists.309 Rather than discrediting the Left Social Democrats—Stalin’s prediction—in the eyes of the workers, Stalin’s strategy of a phony “united front” utterly exposed the German Communists.310

The empty arsenals, German Communist unpreparedness, and the Social Democrats’ cold shoulder prompted the Soviet squad on the ground to call off the uprising at the last minute. “I well remember the evening of 22 October [1923] in our apartment in the Lux Hotel, where Otto [Kuusinen], [Osip] Pyatnitsky and [Dmitry] Manuilsky sat waiting for a telegram from Berlin which was to inform them that the revolution had broken out,” recalled Kuusinen’s wife Aino, one of the many Soviet military intelligence officers under Comintern cover. “They remained for hours in Otto’s study, smoking and drinking coffee. There was a direct telephone line to Lenin’s sick-bed at Gorki, and this was kept open all night: Lenin could not speak except to mumble a few syllables, but his mind was fully alert.” No telegram from Berlin arrived and the threesome dispersed at dawn. “The Comintern leaders were besides themselves with fury and disappointment, and could not wait to discover what had gone wrong and, no less important, whose fault it was.”311 In Hamburg, however, Germany’s second largest city, 300 Communists rose up on their own initiative between October 23 and 25, 1923, assaulting police stations and seized plenty of weapons, but reinforcements crushed them; an estimated 90 people were killed and hundreds wounded.312 In Moscow, the politburo was shocked at both the postponement and the massacre.313 In Germany, the Soviet agents were shocked at the divisive anti-Trotsky politics at home, threatening to abandon their work in Germany.314 Stalin was trying to puzzle out what happened. “If Ilich were in Germany, he would say: ‘I think that the main enemy of the revolution is the Social Democrats, especially their left wing,’” he wrote to the Soviet agent group in Berlin (November 8, 1923).315 The very next day, in a sign of his confusion, he reversed, writing that the Social Democrat “leftists were right in many ways”: German Communists did not have the workers’ support and a seizure of power would fail.316 The Communists were not the only political group in fiasco, however: on November 8, Adolf Hitler, along with Hermann Goring, Rudolf Hess, and a squadron of Brownshirts, marched on Munich’s Townsmen’s Beer Hall.317

• • •

THE BOLSHEVIK REGIME was suffocating the country and itself in paperwork and red tape, presiding over mass embezzlement amid impoverishment, hostile to, yet dependent upon, the market, fearful not only of peasants’ political leanings but of workers’ as well. Inside the roiling mess, however, Stalin was building a personal dictatorship. His was a life of theses and countertheses, compilation and dissemination of meeting protocols, intense orgburo drudgery of the expanding personnel machine, and absorption of the denunciations and secret reports forwarded by and about the OGPU, the military, foreign embassies, newspaper correspondents. More than anyone he had brought the USSR into being. It was he who schemed to bring to heel the Muslim Communists of the populous East. He was the one who defended the anathema of Lenin’s New Economic Policy. Objectively, no one was more central to the Communist enterprise on a day-to-day basis, a conclusion Stalin likely reached himself. But during these years, his power was gravely threatened by a sheet of paper calling for his removal. Volodicheva’s and Fotiyeva’s memoirs, composed after Stalin’s death (for obvious reasons), contain a number of implausible or outright impossible details. Lenin’s doctors also never clarified the origins of the dictation.318 Krupskaya, as far as the record indicates, never publicly explained the specific circumstances of the dictation’s generation. Molotov would recall that “Krupskaya had a big grudge against Stalin. But he had a grudge against her, too, because Lenin’s signature to his Testament was supposedly affixed under Krupskaya’s influence. Or so Stalin believed.”319 This was an odd formulation because the dictation lacks Lenin’s signature, but it indicated that Stalin believed Krupskaya was complicit in the content, and possibly even the very existence, of the documents.

Maria Ulyanova does not appear to have been directly involved in any aspect of the key dictation, but she saw her brother nearly every day during his illness, and singled out two incidents relating to Stalin that had disturbed Lenin. One was the time in 1921 when the Menshevik leader Yuly Martov had taken ill and Stalin had refused Lenin’s request to transfer funds for Martov’s medical treatment. The other was the Georgian affair in 1922, which was far more consequential. “One morning Stalin summoned me to Lenin’s office,” she explained a few years later. “He had a very depressed and sorry look. ‘I did not sleep the whole night,’ he said to me. ‘Who does Ilich take me for, how does he treat me! As if I am some kind of traitor. I love him with all my soul. Tell him this sometime.’” Ulyanova recalled that she “felt sorry for Stalin. It seemed to me he was sincerely aggrieved.” Stalin’s immense power was at stake. Ulyanova conveyed to her brother Stalin’s message that he loved him, but, she recalled, Lenin received this coldly. Ulyanova then told her brother that “after all Stalin is intelligent,” prompting Lenin to frown and state, “He is not at all intelligent.” Ulyanova added that this had been uttered not out of anger but matter-of-factly, and accorded with what she knew to be her brother’s long-held view—a devastating observation. She added, trying to soften but instead sharpening the blow, that Lenin “valued Stalin as a practical type.” This had to sting. Ulyanova praised Stalin’s dedication and hard work, but concluded that Lenin had wanted to have Stalin’s peculiarities held in check, which is why he had called for Stalin’s removal as general secretary.320

Without proving her brother’s authorship or precise date of generation of the dictation, Ulyanova—no enemy of Stalin—corroborated that the dictation captured something of Lenin’s views. Equally telling, Molotov, a lifelong Stalin loyalist and admirer, validated the dictation’s criticisms. “I think Lenin was right in his evaluation of Stalin,” Molotov recalled. “I said it myself right after Lenin’s death, at the politburo. I think Stalin remembered it because after Lenin’s death we got together at Zinoviev’s in the Kremlin, about five of us, including Stalin and me, and talked about the ‘Testament.’ I said I considered all of Lenin’s evaluation of Stalin to have been right. Stalin, of course, did not like this. Despite this we remained close for many years. I think he appreciated me because I spoke out about certain matters in a way others hypocritically avoided, and he saw that I addressed the matter of the ‘Testament’ forthrightly.”321 Stalin himself never publicly voiced suspicions about the authenticity of Lenin’s dictation. He could not escape the fact that Lenin’s dictation—however it was produced—comported with a widespread view of his own character. In other words, even if it was partly or wholly concocted, the dictation rang true. Stalin’s leadership, as we saw in the previous chapter, went a long way toward holding the whole sprawling regime together, but he could be malevolent and possessed too much power.

Although Stalin blamed Krupskaya, the dictation may have had an effect on his feelings for Lenin. Direct evidence of Stalin’s emotional state in 1922–23 is slight. Reminiscences from his closest colleagues, such as Kaganovich, recalled these years at party headquarters fondly, a gregarious Stalin laughing and joking, exuding warmth (“It was a happy time of life. And Stalin was in a good mood”).322 But the record also includes Stalin’s written remarks in the letter to Zinoviev in Kislovodsk, reinforced by observations of others in his inner circle at the time, of his sense of victimhood and self-pity. And the role of the dictation was only beginning.