Stalin, Volume 1

CHAPTER 12

FAITHFUL PUPIL

Departing from us, comrade Lenin enjoined us to hold high and safeguard the purity of the great title of a member of the party. We vow to thee, comrade Lenin, we shall fulfill thy behest with honor!

Departing from us, Comrade Lenin enjoined us to safeguard the unity of the party as the apple of our eye. We vow to thee, comrade Lenin, that we shall fulfill with honor this, thy behest, too!

Stalin, January 26, 19241

SUCH WERE THE PARADOXES of Stalin’s vertiginous ascent: he had “boundless power” early, from spring 1922, when appointed general secretary of the party and the next month Lenin suffered his first major stroke, but only one year later, in spring 1923, out popped a sheet of paper calling for Stalin’s removal. This supremacy-insecurity dyad defined his inner regime, and shaped his character. It also paralleled the Bolshevik dictatorship’s own fraught relationship to the outside world: the supposed global inevitability of the revolutionary cause amid perilous capitalist encirclement. Of course, such a combination of aggressive ambition and siege mentality was well known from the long sweep of Russia’s history, a great power whose aspirations always seemed to exceed its capabilities in that complicated Eurasian space. But this predicament also derived from Lenin’s handiwork—a monopoly party’s seizure of power and a cynical approach to international relations. Both the revolution as a whole, and Stalin’s personal dictatorship within it, found themselves locked in a kind of in-built, structural paranoia, triumphant yet enveloped by ill-wishers and enemies. The revolution’s predicament and Stalin’s personality began to reinforce each other, and form into a kind of Mobius strip under the pressure exerted by the Lenin dictation. Lenin would always remain the single most important relationship in Stalin’s life, a relationship of protégé, not merely in fact but, crucially, in self-conception. Stalin proved spectacularly successful in 1924 in positioning himself as Lenin’s heir, as we shall see, but, again paradoxically, this would only raise the stakes of the existential threat posed by the dictation.

Stalin got help in easing his dilemma from none other than Trotsky. Uniquely for those at the very top of the regime, Trotsky was not a longtime Bolshevik and the lateness of his conversion (July 1917) made him vulnerable to charges of being an interloper—a Menshevik, not a true Leninist. Trotsky’s own pen provided a cornucopia for this charge. In August 1904, following the Bolshevik-Menshevik split, Trotsky had denounced Lenin as “a slipshod attorney,” a “Robespierre” who sought “a dictatorship over the proletariat.” The fusillade of epithets included “hideous,” “dissolute,” “demagogical,” “malicious and morally repulsive.” Such over-the-top, if accurate, denunciation by Trotsky continued through the years.2 Lenin returned the invective, in writings that were similarly preserved in amber. “A new pamphlet by Trotsky came out recently . . . a pack of brazen lies,” Lenin wrote in October 1904.3 In August 1909, he wrote that “Trotsky behaves like a despicable careerist and factionalist. He pays lip-service to the party and behaves worse than any other of the factionalists.”4 In a private letter of October that same year, Lenin coined the pejorative term “Trotskyism.”5 In January 1911, he referred to “Judas Trotsky.”6 As late as early 1917 he wrote (to Inessa Armand), “That’s Trotsky for you!! Always true to himself = twists, swindles, poses as a leftist, helps the rightists while he can. . . .”7 Stalin’s minions in the central apparatus who had taken possession of Lenin’s archive had little difficulty dredging up his anti-Trotsky gems.8 Nothing had to be invented, although much would be fabricated or lifted out of context. Trotsky, however, magnified the effects by presenting himself as Lenin’s equal and even, in some ways, his superior. Trotsky did not seem to comprehend that his relationship to Lenin was a question not of fact but of positioning.9

That Stalin was fortunate in his rivals, from Trotsky on down, has long been understood.10 To be sure, Kamenev and Zinoviev, both five years younger than Stalin, had better political skills than usually credited to them, especially Zinoviev, who built a formidable machine in Leningrad. That said, scholars have correctly noted that Kamenev was widely perceived as a deputy rather than a leader in his own right and that Zinoviev’s personality aroused widespread enmity (the Italian Communist Angelica Balabanoff deemed him, “after Mussolini . . . , the most despicable individual I have ever met”).11 But what may be less well appreciated is that Trotsky proved to be less the obstacle to than the instrument of Stalin’s aggrandizement. Just as the Bolshevik regime needed the civil war to form a state, so Stalin needed “opposition” to consolidate his personal dictatorship—and he found it. Compared with Trotsky’s delight in polemicizing against this or that regime policy, which lent itself to accusations of schism and factionalism, Stalin presented himself as the faithful defender of the Central Committee and Lenin’s legacy. At the same time, Stalin was the one with the pronounced physical features, including the protruding nose, and the thick accent, but Trotsky turned out to be the alien.12 Compared with the preening Trotsky, Stalin could appear as the revolution’s hardworking, underappreciated foot soldier. Compared with Trotsky’s popularity among Russia’s small cosmopolitan intelligentsia, as the master of multiple European languages and author of fluent works about culture as well as politics, Stalin could be the representative of the far vaster middling sort, whose aspirations he captured like a tuning fork.13 Stalin walked into a golden opportunity to become the orthodox Leninist as well as a household name by battling, and besting, the world-renowned Trotsky.

Stalin certainly showed guile, maneuvering always to seize the orthodox middle ground and to drive his critics into the position of apparent schismatics and factionalists, while employing the classic device of changing political alliances to his advantage, but such textbook stratagems ultimately have their limits. The succession was a brawl not just over raw power but also ideas and narratives. Nothing is more powerful than a compelling story, especially in the framework of a revolution, which entails a struggle to create new symbols, new vocabularies, new ways of looking at the world, new identities, new myths.14 In 1924, Stalin produced a greater written output than even in 1917. His major work of the year, and of his life to that date, “Foundations of Leninism,” was plagiarized.15 It proved to be a striking success, reflecting not just dishonesty but diligence and even sound judgment: he chose an excellent text, and appears to have sharpened it. Additionally, Stalin produced a second major work, Socialism in One Country, which was his own and, contrary to received wisdom, had nothing to do with abandoning world revolution and everything to do with imagining a viable Marxist approach to geopolitics. As Lenin’s would-be faithful pupil, Stalin emerged in 1924–25 as both an ideologue (“capital,” “the bourgeoisie,” “imperialism”) and an embryonic geostrategic thinker.

REVELATION

On January 8, 1924, Pravda divulged that Trotsky was ill, a statement, according to OGPU informants, the rank and file took as a sign of his imminent removal.16 He was suffering raging fevers, migraines, chest pains, catarrh in the upper respiratory organs, enlargement of the bronchial glands, and loss of appetite and weight. Some specialists thought he had a paratyphoid infection; the Kremlin doctors diagnosed influenza.17 Trotsky supporters kept up the fight.18 But with Trotsky convalescing in a village outside Moscow, Stalin ripped into him at a two-day Central Committee plenum (January 14–15, 1924), and was even more relentless in his report to the 13th party conference (January 16–18) attended by 350 delegates, most of them non-voting, an obvious packing of the gallery for maximum hostility.19 Stalin scolded party members who “fetishized” democracy as “possible always and under all conditions,” as if “only the evil will of ‘apparatchiks’ prevents its introduction.” He demanded to know why ordinary workers had to submit to party discipline, while Trotsky “imagines himself to be a superman standing above the Central Committee, above its laws, above its decisions.”20 Then Stalin pulled out the truncheon: “I think the time has come when we must publicize the clause of the resolution on party unity made at the suggestion of comrade Lenin, adopted by the 10th Congress of our party, but which was not subject to disclosure”: namely, the penalty of expulsion from the Central Committee by two-thirds vote for forming an illegal faction.21 Stalin appears to have found it a lot easier to get the better of Trotsky in the latter’s absence.22 The 13th conference demonized the Left opposition as “not only a direct turn away from Leninism, but a manifest expression of petit bourgeois deviation.”23 After Stalin’s withering speech to close out the gathering, an Italian journalist observed that most “people consider the political role of comrade Trotsky over.”24

Trotsky appears to have been thrown into depression by the unremitting opprobrium, laced with smears, from the very party to which he had devoted his whole being. Of course, he had been no slouch at condemning and smearing the Mensheviks, SRs, or revolutionary Kronstadt sailors, but none of that lessened the impact on him.25 “The pages of Pravda seemed endless, and every line of the paper, even every word, a lie,” observed his wife, Natalya Sedova. “L.D. kept silent. . . . In the family we avoided talking about the persecution, and yet we could talk of nothing else.”26 Trotsky’s most trusted physician, Fyodor Guetier, prescribed a prolonged rest in the Soviet subtropics, and so, on January 18, 1924, the same day as Stalin’s party conference‒ending speech, Trotsky retreated southward to the Black Sea. The timing proved momentous.

Lenin was dead to the regime but still alive. Soviet newspapers were spreading false hopes about his disposition.27 During intermissions at the 13th conference, Maria Ulyanova told delegates crowded around her that he was better and had attended Orthodox Christmas festivities at Gorki.28 Krupskaya, meanwhile, sought to alleviate her husband’s torment and on January 19 read a tale aloud to him out of Jack London’s Love of Life (1906) about a Canadian gold prospector in the wilderness bereft of food who is followed by a wolf waiting for him to die. The next day, Lenin woke up feeling poorly; that evening, he began pointing to his eyes. An oculist summoned from Moscow arrived around 10:00 p.m. but detected nothing other than nearsightedness in one eye. On Monday, January 21, Lenin was examined by his doctors; minutes after they left, he began convulsing. Bukharin, as usual, had been staying at the Moscow party organization’s facility in Gorki near Lenin’s estate, and although usually only allowed to observe Lenin from afar, this time a doctor appears to have summoned him.29 “When I ran into Ilich’s room, stuffed full of medicines and doctors, Ilich made his last breath,” Bukharin would claim. “His face turned backwards, and went horribly pale, a wheeze was heard, hands shook.”30 Krupskaya recalled that with Lenin’s chest gurgling, his bodyguard-nurse held him in his arms, and that Lenin “occasionally moaned quietly, a tremor ran through his body, at first I held his hot, damp hand, but then just watched as the towel turned red with blood, and the stamp of death settled on his deathly pallid face.”31 The doctors applied artificial respiration. He died at 6:50 p.m.32

Maria Ulyanova phoned the Kremlin, and her call was redirected to the presidium of the Eleventh All-Russia Congress of Soviets in the Bolshoi Theater’s smaller Beethoven Hall; she asked for Stalin or Zinoviev. Evidently, Stalin took the phone.33 The news shattered the hall. “I had never before seen that many crying men,” recalled a then seventeen-year-old Communist Youth League eyewitness in the Bolshoi.34 The members of the inner circle repaired to Zinoviev’s Kremlin apartment, and around 9:30 p.m. they departed on vehicles outfitted with sled tracks for Gorki.35 Rykov was ill, and Trotsky was en route to the Soviet subtropics. Molotov and Rudzutaks remained at party headquarters to prepare public statements; Dzierzynski also stayed behind in Moscow to oversee public order. At Gorki, Stalin is said to have entered the room first, theatrically. “He moved heavily, gravely, decisively, holding his right hand behind his semi-military jacket,” wrote one eyewitness, who added that at parting, “Stalin, impulsively, emotionally, suddenly approached Lenin’s head: ‘Farewell, farewell, Vladimir Ilich. . . . Farewell!’ And he, pale, took Lenin’s head in both his hands, lifted it, bringing it almost to his breast, to his heart, and firmly, firmly kissed him on the cheeks and on the lips. . . . He waved his hand and stepped back sharply.”36 Kamenev, Zinoviev, and Bukharin also pronounced their farewells, and the sculptor Sergei Merkulov composed a gypsum cast of Lenin’s hands and a death mask, which would find a place in Stalin’s Old Square office.37

The inner circle, returning to Moscow in the wee hours, at 2:30 a.m. on January 22, convened a meeting of the presidium of the Soviet central executive committee to approve a funeral commission and discuss arrangements.38 At Gorki an autopsy commenced, during which Lenin’s brain was opened, revealing fatty deposits blocking the arteries supposed to carry blood (and oxygen) to the brain, a condition for which there was no cure. Some arteries were so calcified a human hair could not have passed through. The pressure built and the arteries finally burst, which resulted in a vast river of blood on his brain. The destroyed vessels happened to be in the part of the brain controlling the respiratory function, so Lenin stopped breathing.39 The public reports were obsessive, minutely detailing even the precise weight of his brain (1,340 grams).40 Privately, Professor Kramer, the neurologist, recorded that Lenin’s illness “lasted all in all about two and a half years, and its general characteristics harbored signs that all the neurologists, whether Russian or foreign, dwelt on as something that did not conform to the conventional disease of the nervous system.”41 Lenin’s father had apparently died in his early fifties of a brain hemorrhage, perhaps brought on by a clogging of arteries. The condition had affected Lenin’s moods: elation, followed quickly by depression; laughter for no reason; extreme irritability.42

Lenin had been incapacitated for more than a year, but now the regime had to confront his eternal absence. Kalinin, on January 22, asked the delegates to the Eleventh All-Russia Congress of Soviets to rise as the orchestra struck up a funeral march. “Comrades,” he started, tears streaming down his face, “I must tell you some frightful news. Vladimir Ilich’s health. . . .” Screams pierced the hall. Some delegates erupted into sobs. Kamenev, Zinoviev, Budyonny, and other members of the presidium wept. Avel Yenukidze, secretary of the Soviet central executive committee, cut in and imposed quiet, Kalinin broke down again. Mikhail Lashevich stepped to the dais to announce the details of the viewing and burial. The congress was suspended.43 There is no reliable record of Stalin’s emotional state. On the day before Lenin’s sudden death, one functionary who visited Stalin’s small Kremlin apartment in the Grand Kremlin Palace’s outbuilding noted “an abundance of books.”44 That is how Stalin had and would always relate to Lenin: through his writings, and how Stalin would express himself. On the morning of January 23, Lenin’s casket was transported from the manor house to Moscow, arriving around 1:00 p.m. to the accompaniment of the Bolshoi orchestra playing a dirge. The casket, draped in red cloth, made a five-mile processional to the House of Trade Unions, and was placed in its Hall of Columns (where Sverdlov had lain in state).45 The catafalque, in the middle of the grand space, was surrounded by countless wreaths, fragrant lilies, and a rotating honor guard. That evening at 7:00 p.m., the doors were thrown open to the public. Already in spring 1923, when Lenin had become deathly ill, regional military commanders had received a secret telegram to prepare to put down uprisings.46 Now, Dzierzynski sent instructions via OGPU channels to “pay the main attention to Black Hundreds, monarchists, White Guardists,” while making sure “to maintain complete calm and preempt panic, giving no pretext for panic by outward behavior or unfounded mass arrests.”47

If one read the OGPU political mood summaries delivered to party headquarters, as Stalin did, one would have thought the USSR was overrun by monarchists and “former” people, priests and mullahs, hostile intelligentsia, sullen workers, property-loving peasants, Red Army malcontents.48 Dzierzynski again and again complained to Yagoda that “these summaries produce a very depressing impression, utterly dark without any ray of light.” (Yagoda would invariably respond that “our task is to illuminate the shadowy side. . . . Thus it is natural that our summaries produce dark impressions.”)49 In January 1924, reports from the countryside suggested that without Lenin, peasants expected the regime to collapse and imperialist powers to take advantage and intervene again.50 Thus did the Soviet regime prove wholly unprepared for the emotional outpouring: Over the course of three days, between half a million and one million people passed by Lenin’s open coffin in the Hall of Columns at the House of Trade Unions, enduring queues a mile and a half long in outside temperatures of −28 degrees F. (Delegations from state or party agencies could visit outside the queue at appointed times.) Certainly many rejoiced at seeing Lenin dead. But a large number seem to have believed he was better than the other Communists, if only for having introduced the NEP, an admission of error and a humane policy.51 “An enormous proportion of the population,” wrote one eyewitness to the scene at the bier who was not part of the regime, “reacted to Lenin’s death with unshakeable grief.”52

POLITICAL PARALYSIS VERSUS HOLY OATHS

Four days after departing Moscow for the Soviet subtropics of Abkhazia, Trotsky’s train had pulled into the station in Tiflis early on Tuesday, January 22, with the last leg to the Black Sea coast still pending. But a messenger came to their railcar with a decoded telegram, sent via secret police channels: “Tell comrade Trotsky. On January 21 at 6:50 p.m. comrade Lenin died prematurely. Death followed from paralysis of his respiratory center. Burial on Saturday January 26. Stalin.” Trotsky telegrammed back: “I consider it necessary to return to Moscow.” The train was held at the station. An hour later, came Stalin’s reply: “The funeral will take place on Saturday, you will not make it in time. The politburo considers that in your state of health you should continue on to Sukhum. Stalin.”53 Trotsky claimed that once in Sukhum, convalescing under blankets on an outdoor veranda, he would learn that the funeral was delayed for a day, until Sunday, proving that Stalin had tricked him.54 Certainly Stalin was devious. But special trains were continuing to pour into the capital, some from farther away than Tiflis, so that the funeral commission, chaired by Dzierzynski, announced only on January 25 that Lenin’s funeral would take place one day later, on Sunday (January 27).55 (Also, workers had dynamited the frozen ground in front of the Kremlin Wall but were still furiously constructing a temporary wooden crypt.) Even with Stalin’s original timetable, Trotsky had almost 100 hours to retrace the 1,000 miles back to Moscow. When Lenin had been shot, in September 1918, Stalin had remained in Tsaritsyn, but Trotsky had rushed back from the far-off eastern front of the civil war, reaching Moscow on only the second day after the shooting. That was when the regime had established a Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic, which in January 1924 Trotsky still led. If he feared his train might not make it back to Moscow on time, he could have commandeered whatever military or civilian aircraft were to hand in the South Caucasus military district, headquartered right there in Tiflis.

Trotsky was not the only top official to miss the funeral: Rykov, who had influenza, had gone to Italy with his wife for a rest cure for a few months under a false name, but his absence had no effect on his political career; after all, Rykov was Lenin’s deputy and potential successor only bureaucratically. Everyone in Moscow was expecting Trotsky. “For the last three days there had been a report that he was returning from the Caucasus where he was ill,” wrote the New York Times reporter. “More than once crowds assembled to greet him at the station, and official photographers were sent to wait chilly hours before the Hall of Columns to film his entry. To the last many believed he would come.”56 Trotsky’s disconsolate seventeen-year-old son, Lev Sedov, who had his own fever well above 100 degrees F., rose from his sickbed in Moscow to pay his respects to Lenin in the Hall of Columns, unable to comprehend his father’s absence.57 Trotsky would also be missing from the newsreel shown to the masses and the world.58 Decades later, he would lament, “I should have come at any price.”59 True enough, but he would also later write that on that January 22, when his train was being held in the station in Tiflis after news of Lenin’s death had been delivered to him, he had wanted to be left alone. Beseeched by a delegation of local officials, Trotsky had hurriedly composed a short tribute: “And now Vladimir Ilich is no more. The party is orphaned. The working class is orphaned. Such was the very feeling aroused by the news of the death of our teacher and leader. How will we go forward, will we find the way, will we not go astray? . . . Our hearts are stricken with boundless grief, all of us who by the great grace of History were born contemporaries of Lenin, who worked alongside him, who learnt from him. . . . How shall we go ahead? With the lamp of Leninism in our hands.”60 Eloquent, and perhaps indicative of Trotsky’s own feelings of being orphaned.

After being demoralized by the skullduggery of the Stalin-manipulated January 1924 party gatherings censuring him for factionalism, Lenin’s death offered Trotsky a potential breakout moment to reverse the setbacks of the closed-door sessions, to outshine them all on the biggest stage, Red Square. He could have arrived dramatically from afar, like Lenin had once done at the Finland Station, and used his powers to capture the prevailing grief of Lenin’s death, electrify the crowds, embody the revolution in its next phase. It was none other than Trotsky who had written breathlessly about the “art of the insurrection,” and now he could try to use that art to smash “the ring” around him formed by those he regarded as pygmies. In the name of the greater cause of safeguarding the revolution, he could have violated party discipline by reading aloud on Red Square from Lenin’s purported dictation, using as his mantra Lenin’s summons to “remove Stalin” as general secretary, then flown from factory to factory to rally workers, just as in 1917—let them arrest him. Of course, to do all that, Trotsky needed to perceive Lenin’s death as a strategic opportunity, and he needed a persuasive story line about how the grand socialist dream could be revived, why all those harsh exchanges he had had with Lenin were incidental, and why he (Trotsky) was uniquely qualified to carry forward the sacred Leninist cause. A tall order, to put it mildly. But who could doubt that if Lenin had found that others were conspiring against him, he would have mounted a coup against his own party? Stalin, in Trotsky’s position, would have been incapable of dramatic street actions to win over the masses. Of course, Stalin did not have to accomplish that: he already held the levers of power, ensconced at Old Square. Indeed, Stalin relocated to the new party headquarters at Old Square precisely in January 1924.

For Stalin, Lenin’s death presented a different kind of opportunity, and he seized it. With more than 2,000 delegates inside the Bolshoi on January 26, the Second USSR Congress of Soviets opened, devoting its first day to Lenin’s memory. After Kalinin (head of state) and Krupskaya (widow), Zinoviev took the floor, marveled at the crowds that had come to pay their respects, and advised everyone always to ponder, “What would comrade Lenin do if he were in my place?” But what would Zinoviev do in Lenin’s place? Unclear. Next up Stalin, who evoked a mystical calling. “Comrades, we Communists are people of a special mold,” he stated, in his first known remarks on Lenin’s passing. “We are made of special stuff. We are those who constitute the army of the great proletarian strategist, the army of comrade Lenin. There is nothing higher than the honor of belonging to this army. There is nothing higher than the title of member of the party whose founder and leader was comrade Lenin. It is not given to everyone to be a member of such a party.” Now those afforded such an honor would be tested. “Departing from us, comrade Lenin enjoined us to hold high and safeguard the purity of the great title of member of the party. We vow to thee, comrade Lenin, we shall fulfill thy behest with honor!” Stalin said. “Departing from us, Comrade Lenin enjoined us to safeguard the unity of the party as the apple of our eye. We vow to thee, comrade Lenin, that this behest, too, we shall fulfill with honor!” And on and on went the collective vows: to safeguard the dictatorship of the proletariat, the worker-peasant alliance of the New Economic Policy, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the Communist International. Each time he intoned the collective promise: “We shall fulfill this bequest with honor!”61 Stalin’s liturgical incantations stood out starkly not just from the drab content offered by Zinoviev, normally a surpassing orator, but from everyone’s remarks.62 When the speeches were published in Izvestiya, however, the editor excised the religious aura of Stalin’s speech.63 Perhaps some Communist sensibilities were offended. But Stalin, as general secretary, had Pravda republish the speeches three days later in full.64 Within days of Lenin’s death, the ex-seminarian had unveiled the winning formula he would pursue: zealously dedicating his life and the entire party to fulfillment of Lenin’s sacred “behest.”

Delegates at the Congress of Soviets voted to rename Petrograd Leningrad, erect Lenin monuments around the Union, and publish his works in millions of copies, then adjourned for the outdoor funeral, which took place the next day, January 27, and lasted six hours in bitter cold of ‒30 degrees F.65 At 4:00 p.m., as the coffin was placed in a temporary wooden crypt, all radios and telegraphs broadcast a single message: “Stand up, comrades. Ilich is being lowered into the grave!” All factories and transport were halted as the whole country came to a dramatic standstill, with five minutes of silence. At 4:06 radios sent a new message: “Lenin has died—Leninism lives!”

The quest for retrospective precedence in proximity to the deceased Lenin was in full swing.66 Stalin gave another speech on January 28, this time to Kremlin military cadets, and asserted he had received a “simple but deeply significant letter” from Lenin in 1903, which he did not produce, but which advanced by two years their actual acquaintance.67 Trotsky supporters, for their part, were printing copies of Lenin’s purported dictation to distribute to the party members who had arrived in Moscow from around the country for the funeral. The Trotsky people affixed the written appellation “Testament” (zaveshchanie), which the written document carried for the first time. The Central Control Commission expressly banned circulation of the Lenin documents on January 30.68 That same evening, the Second USSR Congress of Soviets resumed and, the next day, ratified the new Constitution of the USSR.69 Rykov was formally named chairman of the USSR Council of People’s Commissars, but in the traditional gathering space on the third floor of the Imperial Senate, Lenin’s chair, directly in front of the door to his old office, was left empty.70 Still, many details testified to Stalin’s ascendancy, including the fact that he had taken charge of the regime’s Special Purpose Garage. Nothing spoke power more than the allocation of scarce state cars. Automobiles also happened to be a special interest of Stalin’s, from the six-cylinder 1914 Vauxhall purchased in England for Nicholas II’s mother (and used by Paul Miliukov after the February Revolution), to the twelve-cylinder Packard Twin Six (originally purchased for the tsarist military) that Stalin had in Tsaritsyn. Stalin would soon decide to purchase a suite of American-made cars for the regime: Lincolns, Cadillacs, Buicks, and for himself, a Packard. Packards would remain Stalin’s preferred machine for decades—heavy yet fast.71 Meanwhile, with Lenin buried, in early February 1924 Stalin took a holiday.

Oddly enough, it was Trotsky’s holiday that testified to Stalin’s ascendancy. That winter of 1924 was the Trotskys’ first visit to Abkhazia and its capital, Sukhum, on the balmy Black Sea. Trotsky seems to have been entranced by his escape. They were put up at a villa, the Sinop (Synoptic), located in the outskirts on a hill enveloped by a botanical park with hundreds of varieties of flora and fauna that the prerevolutionary owner had imported from around the world.72 “In the dining room of the rest house there were two portraits on the wall, one—draped in black—of Vladimir Ilich, the other of L.D. [Trotsky],” Natalya Sedova wrote.73 Their host was the diminutive Nestor Lakoba, who was nearly deaf—the sound amplifier he used helped little—but Trotsky took a shine to the man-of-the-people demeanor of a Communist beloved among his countrymen of Abkhazia (jokingly known as Lakobistan).74 Lakoba visited Trotsky nearly every day, bringing oranges, tangerines, and lemons, sitting for long discussions. His Caucasus hospitality, however, had a further purpose: Dzierzynski had sent a telegram the day of Trotsky’s Moscow departure noting that the war commissar’s rest trip to Sukhum “has become widely known even abroad, and so I am concerned that the White Guards do not attempt an assassination.” Ah, yes, those White Guard terrorists: Dzierzynski requested that Trotsky be kept in splendid isolation. That same day Lakoba also received a letter from Tiflis, written by the South Caucasus party boss Orjonikidze, asking him to “take care” of Trotsky and adding that in Tiflis “matters are going splendidly well. The Left opposition has been smashed to its foundation.”75

Relieved by the exemplary Caucasus hospitality, Trotsky appears not to have suspected the ulterior motives behind it on what was, after all, Stalin’s home turf.76 Already on the day Trotsky had landed in Sukhum, January 23, a very young police operative (b. 1899) who had already become deputy head of the Georgian Cheka wrote to Yagoda in Moscow that he had visited Trotsky. The ostensible reason for the visit was to inform Trotsky he had to deliver a speech (still feverish, Trotsky promised to write an article). The real reason was a personal initiative to size up Trotsky’s thinking. “The death of Ilich has affected him greatly,” the secret police interlocutor reported. “He thinks that at this moment what’s needed is a closing of ranks [splochennost’]. . . . Lenin can only be replaced by a collective. Comrade Trotsky does not feel well.”77 The precocious Georgian Chekist humbly asked Yagoda, his superior in Moscow, to share the requested report with Stalin immediately. The name of the secret police operative was . . . Lavrenti Beria.

Trotsky’s political quarantine was broken by Krupskaya, who sent a warm note (January 29) stressing how, about a month before, “as he was looking through your book, Vladimir Ilich stopped at the place where you sum up Marx and Lenin, and asked me to read it over again to him: he listened very attentively, and then looked it over himself. And there is another thing I want to tell you: the attitude of V.I. toward you at the time you came to us in London from Siberia did not change right up to his death. I wish you, Lev Davidovich, strength and health, and I embrace you warmly.”78 This was the same Krupskaya who, earlier that same month, had repudiated Trotsky’s recent writings, denying the party was alienated from the masses and underscoring that his charges of bureaucratism came without practical solution, other than substituting Trotsky supporters for sitting officials.79 But now Krupskaya had undertaken a demonstrative political act, to counterbalance Stalin.80 Stalin, however, sent a delegation, led by Mikhail Frunze, to inform Trotsky that he Frunze would replace Trotsky’s loyal first deputy at the war commissariat, Yefraim Sklyansky.81 In Abkhazia, Trotsky had become well enough to hunt, the avid avocation that had afflicted him with the fevers in the first place. Lakoba, a top marksman, gushed to the major local newspaper, Dawn of the East, that Trotsky “kills ducks in flight; in the outskirts of Sukhum, not a single lake or swamp that contained game escaped his eye.”82 It was Trotsky who did not escape Lakoba’s eye until mid-April 1924, when Trotsky finally disembarked for Moscow.

LENINISM

Lenin’s mummification for viewing in a crypt near the Kremlin Wall may look inevitable, but many, perhaps most, members of the inner circle objected to the idea; the decision was pushed by Dzierzynski, the funeral commission chairman, who had once studied for the Catholic priesthood and was backed by Stalin the seminarian. Dzierzynski argued that “if science can preserve a human body for a long time, then why not do it,” adding that “the tsars were embalmed just because they were tsars. We will do it because he was a great person, unlike any other.”83 Preservation of Lenin as a viewable holy relic required an extraordinarily high level of scientific technique, which did not emerge immediately; the lead scientist eventually hit upon a novel solution mixing glycerin, alcohol, water, potassium acetate, and quinine chloride, which managed to restore the body.84 For a more permanent mausoleum to replace the original jerry-built crypt, the regime commissioned the architect Alexei Shchusev, noted for his art nouveau Kazan railway station in Moscow, who would come up with an alluring design of three cubes arranged horizontally and connected by corridors, based upon ancient Mayan motifs.85 Inside, Lenin would be laid in a red-lined sarcophagus covered with airtight glass, dressed not in his usual bourgeois suit but a khaki tunic, his posthumously awarded Order of the Red Banner pinned to his chest.86 Leonid Krasin had proposed inclusion of a terrace from which the masses could be addressed, an idea that Shchusev adopted, albeit only on the flanks, not across the top front.87 The mausoleum’s formal public opening would take place later in 1924.88 “The body is in a perfect state of preservation,” Walter Duranty of the New York Times would enthuse, noting that the Soviet professors boasted to him that unlike Egyptian pharaoh mummies, not only the body but the entire face was preserved. Duranty would add that “the embalmers have even contrived to impart a smile.”89 The lifelike mummy of a saintlike figure would prove of incalculable value to the regime.

Unexpectedly, the Soviet regime had acquired a potent sacred space on Red Square. (Many visitors to Lenin adopted a superstitious pose.)90 Meanwhile, the Lenin Museum had already been established.91 Some items there were not on public view. The artist Yuri Annenkov, invited to select photographs for a book, noticed a glass jar in which sat “Lenin’s brain preserved in alcohol . . . one hemisphere was healthy and full-sized, with clearly defined convolutions; the other, which hung as it were by a ribbon, was wrinkled, crumpled, crushed, and no larger than a walnut.”92 Publicly, the museum humanized Lenin with photographs of his childhood, alongside heroic episodes of the revolution. “In a glass case is the revolver with which he was shot in 1918,” wrote a professor from Chicago of an early visit. “The extracted bullet, with the signed reports of the doctors who performed the operation, is also exhibited.”93 Codification of Lenin’s written legacy was also well under way. The informal Lenin Institute had emerged on the initiative of the Moscow party organization, but Stalin took it under the wing of the central apparatus, partly to put it on better financial footing, but mostly to ensure his control.94 He implanted his Marxist-scholar aide, Ivan Tovstukha, as the person in charge of day-to-day operations.95 Stalin would commission a new five-story building in modernist style, at Soviet Square, 1/3 (formerly Tver Square), one of the first large public buildings to be built after the revolution.96 Kamenev remained editor of Lenin’s Collected Works, but Tovstukha oversaw the immediate publication, or suppression, of key Lenin documents.97 Everyone who had known Lenin was required to send the Lenin Institute their reminiscences.98 Krupskaya sent hers to Stalin for comments; he would have the text published without running his editing by her.99

Pravda’s portrait, likely penned by Bukharin, gave voice to the emerging orthodoxy: Lenin’s modesty, intense force of logic, fidelity to principle, faith in the masses, perseverance and will.100 Unmentioned was his extreme cruelty. Lenin loved people only “in general,” the self-exiled writer Maxim Gorky nicely summarized in a short book in 1924. “His love looked far ahead, through the mists of hatred.”101 Molotov, who worked intimately with both Lenin and Stalin, would famously judge Lenin “the more severe” and “harsher.”102 Lenin had liked to see himself as Marx’s equal (once, when a factory worker asked him for a photograph as a memento of their meeting, Lenin pulled from his pocket a small badge with Marx’s portrait). But although Lenin’s and Marx’s portraits in giant size hung side by side on Red Square for the major holidays, many were calling Marx the theorist, and Lenin the (mere) practitioner.103 It was Stalin who would resolve their equality. In April 1924, he went into the mouth of the tiger, the Sverdlov Communist University, where the Trotsky Left opposition had carried the vote at a party meeting in fall 1923.104 Stalin’s lectures would be serialized in April and May 1924 under the title “Foundations of Leninism.”105

Stalin had long carried the stamp of an organizer, not a theoretician.106 Few knew that he had plagiarized whole cloth his “Anarchism or Socialism?” (1906–7) from the deceased Giorgi Teliya. Now, for his “Foundations of Leninism,” he plagiarized Lenin’s Doctrine of Revolution, a manuscript by the still-living Filipp Ksenofontov (not to be confused with the unrelated Ivan Ksenofontov, the Cheka operative). Ksenofontov (b. 1903), a journalist and editor, was suddenly packed off to Tashkent amid rumors that he had protested Stalin’s borrowings. (In a private letter to Ksenofontov, Stalin expressed gratitude for his help; later Stalin would deny Ksenofontov permission to cite this letter.)107 While in Tashkent in 1924, Ksenofontov published a book on the tenth anniversary of the Great War, Lenin and the Imperialist War 1914–1918, in which his presentation of Leninism tracked closely with that published under Stalin’s name.108 Leninism, Ksenofontov wrote, was not merely Marxism in practice, as many suggested, but “the science of the revolutionary politics of the working class in conditions of imperialism, i.e. the theory and practice of the proletarian revolution.”109 Stalin’s “Foundations of Leninism” had a punchier version: “Leninism is the Marxism of the epoch of imperialism and of the proletarian revolution.”110 Stalin also made abundantly clear that Lenin, not Trotsky (and not Stalin), had been the reason for victory in 1917.

Trotsky’s parallel effort, a May 1924 compilation of older materials and current recollections, adopted a stance very different from Stalin’s discipleship.111 His On Lenin was, as expected, less about Lenin than Trotsky’s supposed special closeness to him (as emphasized in the fawning book review by a Trotsky supporter).112 But Trotsky made himself the coleader of the revolution, the very stance that had gotten him into trouble time and again while Lenin was still alive. In fact, Lenin in October 1917 was depicted as taking advice from Trotsky. The outrage was intense. Molotov hammered Trotsky for portraying Lenin as mistake prone (fallible).113 Zinoviev lashed out at Trotsky for equating his (Trotsky’s) Brest-Litovsk blundering in 1918 with Lenin’s failed Polish War in 1920.114 But Zinoviev, whose vanity may have exceeded even Trotsky’s, in his own reminiscences included passages no one else would have been stupid enough to set down in print. “In Paris once we were drinking to the success of his new book and we sat in the cafe till the small hours (though, to be honest, I could not imagine who would read the book, apart from a handful of Social Democrats),” he wrote.115 More often, Zinoviev went to the other extreme of embarrassing obsequiousness, even by the standards of the emerging hagiography: “As mighty as the ocean; as stern and inaccessible as Mont Blanc; as tender as the southern sun; as great as the world; as humane as a child.”116 For all his oratorical prowess, on the written page Zinoviev tended to be diffuse, the opposite of Stalin.

Already in spring 1924 it was evident that Stalin had won the battle over presenting Leninism.117 “Stalin’s book is, without doubt, so far the best text on Leninism, although it does not bear a loud and pretentious title, unlike other such publications,” noted a signed review in Bolshevik. The reviewer, Alexander Slepkov (b. 1899), was a product of the Sverdlov Communist University, where the lectures had been delivered, as well as of the Institute of Red Professors (1924), the first institution of higher learning founded on the basis of Marxism across all subjects, from literary criticism to natural science. He embodied Stalin’s target audience.118 Slepkov made some criticisms—of a work by the general secretary—but he singled out for special praise the book’s overall conceptualization, the organization and exactitude of each chapter, the economy of expression, and the clarity of the core principle of the party “as an expression of the historical interests of the proletariat.”119

“LETTER TO THE CONGRESS”

The 13th Party Congress took place May 23–31, 1924, in the Grand Kremlin Palace, and was attended by 1,164 delegates (748 voting), who represented 736,000 party members. Only around 150,000 lived outside of a town, and of the latter, 61,000 lived in the central regions of the Russian republic and Ukraine. All of Soviet Belorussia had only about 3,000 party members, the Soviet Far East, about the same.120 Even as the regime had continued to grow, it had remained remarkably narrow. For the congress, the triumvirate had taken no chances: the Left opposition was limited to only non-voting delegates and from their ranks only Trotsky had been elected to the forty-two-person congress presidium.121

Everyone knew this congress would be unusual, with Lenin gone forever, but delegates were still in for a shock. Krupskaya had been negotiating for months to publish the dictation, which was now being called Lenin’s “Letter to the Congress.”122 A few late Lenin dictations had already been published, but not the explosive six evaluations of possible successors or the “Ilich letter about the secretary” calling for Stalin’s removal.123 Trotsky, who alone argued in favor of publication, made notes of the discussion. Kamenev: “It cannot be published: it is a speech unspoken at the politburo. It is nothing more.” Zinoviev: “N.K. [Krupskaya] was also of the opinion that it should only be given to the Central Committee. I did not ask about publishing it, for I thought (and think) that is excluded.” Stalin: “I suggest there is no necessity to publish, especially as there is no authorization for publication from Ilich.”124 On the evening of May 21, at the customary Central Committee plenum on the eve of a congress, Kamenev delivered a report on behalf of a special commission for the Lenin documents.125 No transcript is extant. According to the apparatchik Bazhanov, Kamenev read aloud the dictation, after which Zinoviev rose to defend Stalin, a message Kamenev reinforced as he presided over discussion.126

Stalin offered to step down. “Well, yes, I am definitely rude,” Trotsky quoted Stalin as saying. “Ilich proposes to you to find another person who differs from me only in external politeness. Well, ok, try to find such a person.” But in a hall packed with Stalin loyalists, a voice shouted out: “It’s nothing. We are not frightened by rudeness, our whole party is rude, proletarian.”127 A neat trick, but the moment was extraordinary all the same. Back during the cave meeting episode in summer 1923, Stalin had testily intimated he could give up the general secretary position, but that was in a mere private letter.128 This was a plenum, which had the power to remove him. But Stalin escaped: the precongress plenum retained him.129

On May 23, the 13th Congress opened with a parade of Young Pioneers, an organization for children aged ten to sixteen, at Lenin’s wooden tomb on Red Square.130 That day, Stalin inscribed a copy of his Lenin book for the party boss of Azerbaijan in language he used for no one else: “To my friend and dear brother Kirov.” Zinoviev delivered the main political report, just as he had at the 12th Congress, and demanded the Left opposition recant publicly.131 Trotsky rose to speak, and his appearance aroused prolonged applause, just as it had at the previous congress. Afforded an opportunity to go on the offensive and read aloud Lenin’s dictation, Trotsky did not do so. Nor did he recant. Instead, he sought to disarm his critics with conciliation. “Comrades, none of us wishes to be nor can be right against our party,” he stated. “In the last analysis the party is always right, because the party is the unique instrument given to the proletariat for the fulfillment of its fundamental tasks. . . . I know it is impossible to be right against the party. It is possible to be right only with the party and through the party, because history has created no other paths to the realization of what is right.” Trotsky paraphrased the English saying—“my country, right or wrong”—to conclude “this is still my party.”132 The gesture backfired. Even Krupskaya rebuked him, observing that if the party was always right, he should never have instigated the now half-year-long debate for a new course.133 A formal resolution again condemned the Left opposition as a “petit bourgeois deviation.” Rumors spread that Trotsky had come in fifty-first out of the fifty-two members elected to the new Central Committee, perhaps a Stalin-instigated defamation, because the regime conspicuously broke tradition and did not announce the voting totals.134

The precongress plenum had resolved to present the “Letter to the Congress” not at the congress sessions, but to each delegation individually.135 This meant that the congress stenographic record—controlled by Stalin’s secretariat—could omit how these discussions went. Still, memoirs offer an indication. “They read the letter, and everyone was shocked,” recalled Alexander Milchakov (b. 1903), a Communist Youth League official, who noted that his North Caucasus delegation asked that the text be read again. “After a repeat reading the readers proposed the following: taking into account the difficult situation in the country and party, the condition of the Comintern, and the fact that comrade Stalin promises to take comrade Lenin’s criticisms into consideration, there is a proposal to ask comrade Stalin to remain in the post of general secretary. The North Caucasus delegation agreed with this.”136 Similar affirmations occurred at the May 25 gathering of the delegations from the central industrial region and Volga valley (presided over by Isai “Filipp” Goloshchokin and Nikolai Uglanov, Stalin supporters) and the May 26 gathering of Urals, Siberia, Far East, Bashkiria, and Vyatka province delegates (presided over by Mikhail Lashevich, the staunch Zinovievite). These well-orchestrated gatherings accepted assurances that Stalin had acknowledged Lenin’s criticisms and promised to modify his behavior, as well as assertions that he had already improved, that he was shouldering a colossal burden, and that anyway, whatever Lenin had been worried about, time had shown Stalin had not abused his power because of his character.137 The new postcongress Central Committee voted unanimously to reelect him general secretary.138 Even the cave meeting addition of Zinoviev and Trotsky to the orgburo was formally rescinded.

If, contrary to myth, Lenin’s dictation was widely read and discussed, many revealing documents were suppressed. A group of unemployed workers, for example, had written a letter to Comrades Zinoviev, Kamenev, Stalin—in Russian alphabetical order—stating that “no one, comrades, is seriously talking about the army of a million unemployed.”139 Requesting in vain that their letter be read to the congress, the writers added, “We ask, give us work, give us a hunk of bread, let us earn our keep so that our families do not die of starvation there where there is ‘splendor.’”140 Anger in villages was hardly less raw. “You Red butchers ought to know that the steam boiler of peasant patience may explode one day,” one outraged villager shouted at an agitator in 1924, according to a police summary. “You ought to know that the peasants curse you usurpers in their morning prayers. . . . Where is truth? Where is justice? Why did you fool us with words such as freedom, land, peace, and equality?”141

FASCISM’S LESSONS

Fascism constituted the other major Great War‒era mass revolt against the constitutional liberal order besides Bolshevism. Back in 1922, Benito Mussolini, despite the fact that his fascist party had won just 35 seats out of 500 in its best showing in open elections, was demanding to be made prime minister, threatening to march on Rome with hordes of Blackshirts known as squadristi. The squads were lightly armed, their numbers exaggerated.142 The proposed “march” was a colossal bluff, an exercise in psychological warfare, and King Vittorio Emanuele III seemed ready to summon the army to disperse the ruffians. But the king backed off from the anticipated bloodshed, and the well-equipped army did not act on its own.143 On the contrary, the brass, as well as influential business circles, the pope, and even some constitutionalists thought Mussolini should be given a chance to “restore order,” as an antidote to the left. The vacillating king telegraphed Mussolini to ask him to become prime minister in a coalition (with just those 35 fascists in the Chamber of Deputies).144 On October 30, 1922, the thirty-nine-year-old fascist leader arrived in a luxury sleeping car, alighting at the last station before Rome, which he then entered as if on a march. Mussolini had almost lost his nerve; a comrade bucked up his resolve.145 Only after he had been made prime minister did about 20,000 fascist marchers enter Rome. Many of them had failed to muster at appointed locations, and many of those who did show arrived short of weapons or food. After the squadristi paraded around Rome like conquerors, paying tribute at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and at the palace of the king, whom they saluted in ancient Roman style (right arm outstretched), Mussolini sent them home.146 But their presence in Rome created a myth of a successful coup d’etat.

Fascism puzzled the Communists in Moscow. From Rome, Yemelyan Yaroslavsky—the prosecutor of the mad sadist and would-be conqueror of Mongolia, Baron von Ungern-Sternberg—had written to Lenin on October 3, 1922, predicting that Italian fascism stood on the verge of seizing power, pointing out that their organizational abilities were influencing workers “who are impressed by the fascists’ strength,” and adding that “our Italian colleagues” (i.e., the Italian Communists) “have something to learn from the fascists.”147 But Yaroslavsky’s prescient surmise that fascism was a movement on the right capable of attracting workers and peasants made little impression in Moscow. Instead, Izvestiya, beginning on October 31 and for several days thereafter, had reprinted Comintern speeches highlighting Mussolini’s origins as a socialist (not a Communist) and linking Italy’s Socialist party to the fascist triumph.148 Mussolini, the apostate socialist, would enhance the appearance of an ostensible socialist-fascist link by soon taking to wearing tailcoats, wing collars, and spats, like a bourgeois class enemy. This superficial impression made in connection with Mussolini’s biography and dress was reinforced in Communist thinking by the allegiance of German workers to the Social Democrats, particularly during the fall 1923 Communist putsch fiasco. But in reality, fascism and Social Democracy were implacable enemies. (In fact, as one historian noted, both “Bolshevism and fascism were heresies of socialism.”149) Moreover, the traditional right, not Social Democrats, had brought fascism to power in Italy, while Communists had divided the left and galvanized the right in Italy and in Germany.

Stalin’s inability to understand fascism was sorely evident. He followed Lenin, who had insisted that the non-Bolshevik left—Mensheviks, SRs, other moderates—were the most dangerous of all counterrevolutionaries, because they hid behind the mask of socialism. This chasm on the left undergirded the misinterpretation of fascism, and was institutionalized globally at the Fifth Comintern Congress, which met from June 17 to July 8, 1924, in the ornate Andreyev Hall of the Grand Kremlin Palace, with 504 delegates from 46 parties and 49 countries. The congress was held under the explicit slogan of “Bolshevization,” which meant member parties were ordered to organize along Leninist lines to combat “petit-bourgeois deviation,” and which meant Russification, facilitating an enlargement of Stalin’s Comintern role (he did not speak German).150 Stalin took over Trotsky’s seat on the Comintern executive committee.151 During the interminable denunciations of Trotsky and his foreign “stooges,” one delegate from French Indochina interrupted: “I feel that the comrades have not yet sufficiently grasped the idea that the destiny of the proletariat of the whole world . . . is closely tied to the destiny of the oppressed nations in the colonies.” His name was Nguyen Ai-Quoc, better known as Ho Chi-Minh.152 Despite the acrimonious atmosphere, the delegates closed the proceedings by collectively singing the “Internationale.” Congress delegates also visited Lenin’s mummy and a session of the congress was staged on Red Square, with speakers perched on the cube.153 But the Fifth Congress was most notable for institutionalizing the analysis, as Zinoviev said in his speech, that “the fascists are the right hand and the Social Democrats are the left hand of the bourgeoisie.” Stalin, in his speech, reiterated the point, arguing that the Comintern needed “not a coalition with Social Democracy but lethal combat against it as the pillar of fascist-ized power.”154

If Italian fascism offers a crucial lesson on the fateful limits of Stalin’s thinking, its story holds another transcendent lesson: on how dictatorships take root. In April 1924, Prime Minister Mussolini’s national list won 66.3 percent of the vote, against just 14.6 for the socialists and Communists and 9.1 percent for the Catholics. This gave the fascists 374 of 535 seats. On May 30, Giacomo Matteotti, the son of a wealthy family from the Veneto, a graduate of the law faculty in Bologna, and the leader of the United Socialist party, who had persistently criticized Mussolini and carried tremendous prestige, accused the fascists of intimidation and outright fraud, and demanded that the elections be annulled. “I’ve said my piece,” he concluded. “Now you prepare my funeral speech.”155 Eleven days later he was bundled into a car, stabbed multiple times with a carpenter’s knife, and beaten to death. His corpse was found two months later, on August 16, in a shallow grave some twenty miles from Rome. The motive for his murder remains murky.156 But fascist complicity was established early: five thugs with ties to the fascist secret police had been arrested almost immediately. Mussolini’s complicity or at least foreknowledge became a matter of speculation; it was never proven or disproven, but the murder sabotaged his secret intrigues to broaden his coalition and pushed his government to the point of collapse. Anti-fascist demonstrations occurred in the streets, a general strike was bruited, and many centrist supporters of Mussolini in the Chamber removed their fascist party badges. (Toscanini refused to play the fascist youth anthem “Giovinezza” at La Scala, saying the opera house was “not a beer garden.”)157 Mussolini seemed evasive under questioning. By December 1924, it was widely thought he would have to resign. The king refused to dismiss Mussolini, and so the anti-fascist deputies in parliament, to pressure him, quit the Chamber, heading for the Aventine Mount, where in ancient Rome the plebeians had exacted revenge against the patricians.158 Their foolish act was reminiscent of the Mensheviks and SRs who in October 1917 abandoned the Congress of Soviets.

The leader of the anti-fascists in the Italian Senate “was in favor of arresting Mussolini by a coup de main,” one historian explained, but most anti-fascists refused to employ extralegal means.159 In the meantime, Mussolini was galvanized by fascist hard-liners who condemned the idiotic murder of Matteotti, called for a bottom-up fascist renewal, and threatened him with a coup in a new march on Rome.160 On January 3, 1925, Mussolini rose in the Chamber, stating “I declare here, before this solemn assembly and before the whole Italian people, that I, and I alone, assume political, moral and historic responsibility for all that has happened.” He dared those assembled to prosecute him. They did not. Already on January 10, by decree he outlawed all parties but the fascists and curbed the press. He also refused to let his opponents back in the parliament and pronounced their mandate forfeited as a result of their secession. Only now was Italy transformed from a constitutional monarchy into a one-party dictatorship. A fascist party card became a prerequisite for employment in universities, schools. Soon, Mussolini started calling himself duce. This turnaround of the Matteotti crisis against his opponents, not the 1922 march on Rome, was the fascist seizure of power.

There are moments in history that could have been turning points but did not turn or turned in the opposite direction, such as happened in 1924 simultaneously in fascist Italy, thanks to the parliamentary secession as well as the king, and in the Soviet Union, thanks to Zinoviev and Kamenev. A congress was one of Stalin’s few vulnerable moments—and he had asked to be removed at the precongress plenum, so Zinoviev and Kamenev could have had the measure placed on the congress agenda. They could not have been unaware of Stalin’s ambitions.161 Perhaps they were content in the belief that he had been wounded by revelation of the dictation. Still, opportunism alone could have dictated that they seize on Lenin’s purported dictation and take down the general secretary. In the case of Italy, Mussolini’s political destruction might have allowed the rickety parliamentary system to survive the pressure of the street squads and the king’s fecklessness, although Mussolini’s demise might instead have facilitated the rise of the likes of Roberto Farinacci, the toughest, nastiest of the fascist local bosses, who could have pushed through an even more radical fascist social revolution. In the case of the USSR, the removal of Stalin might have proven temporary, given the lackluster qualities of his rivals; or for that same reason, it might have precipitated an eventual dissolution of the one-party rule that he was holding together.

Just as Mussolini had triumphed over his Matteotti crisis, Stalin did so over the Lenin dictation, but Stalin had not walked away unscathed. The nearly 1,200 delegates to the 13th Party Congress had witnessed his humiliation. Many of them doubtless brought back stories to the three quarters of a million party members they represented. Mention of the Lenin dictation appeared in the Paris-based Menshevik emigre newspaper Socialist Herald (July 24, 1924).162 The whole world was beginning to learn: Lenin had called for Stalin’s removal.

SOVIET GEOPOLITICS

In Moscow there were no easy answers for the circumstance that the USSR was a would-be alternative global order, but the existing order had not gone away.163 By the mid-1920s, around twenty countries, including almost all the major powers—Germany, Britain, France, Italy (but not the United States)—as well as Japan and Poland would recognize the Soviet state, but none saw a close, reliable partner in the Communist dictatorship. How could they, given Soviet behavior?164 In one sense, the USSR was no different from all countries of the day, working to intercept and decode foreigners’ radio signals and mail. A special cryptology department proved able to read the ciphered telegrams of foreign embassies from Moscow to Berlin and to Ankara from 1921, while Polish codes were broken in 1924 (in 1927 Japanese codes would be broken); access to this traffic fed an already deep Soviet cynicism about “diplomatic relations” as intercourse with the enemy.165 At the same time, the British had broken Soviet codes and could compare internal Communist discourse with the external prevarication, which shredded already low Soviet credibility. Stalin, however, unlike his prying foreign counterparts, had little understanding of or interest in the simultaneous need for trust building in international affairs. While foreign embassies on Soviet soil were treated as Trojan horses of imperialism—even vital trade pacts were dogged by assumptions of spying and subversion by “agents of imperialism”—Soviet embassies abroad were headquarters for instigating Communist coups abroad, even as the USSR was conducting diplomatic and economic relations with those same countries.166

Mongolia occupied a special place as the sole other country to have had a Communist-style “revolution.” At Lenin’s death, the German ambassador Count Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau had laid a wreath in the name of the entire diplomatic corps in Moscow, but the Mongolian ambassador laid a separate wreath “to the world leader of the toilers, friend and defender of the lesser peoples.”167 In 1924, the Bogd Gegen, the quasi-monarchical head of state, died; he was fifty-five. No traditional determination of his reincarnation was allowed. Instead, the Soviets oversaw proclamation of a “Mongolian People’s Republic.”168 Soviet “advisers” were already pulling the strings behind nominal Mongol leaders.169 Following the establishment of a Mongol version of the OGPU, membership in the Mongol party shrank by half from purges; many mysterious deaths ensued, including those of several of the original Mongol revolutionaries who had sought Soviet aid. A German foreign ministry official, on a visit, found Mongolia to be “practically on the way to becoming a Russian province.”170 Although Soviet-led attempts to create a single centralized trade cooperative failed and a mere 400 Mongol children were enrolled in schools, instruments of political indoctrination were being created: on November 10, 1924, the first issue of a Mongol-language newspaper, the organ of the Mongolian People’s Party, was published—in Irkutsk, Siberia.171 Building a socialist order in a nation of shepherds and monks presented profound problems for Communist ideology as well as practice. Most immediately, though, the Mongolian satellite was meant to serve Soviet security interests as a forward base of national liberation in Asia.

For Europe, the dream of additional Communist coups had not died in the German and Bulgarian fiascos. Peteris Kuzis, known as Jan Berzin, a former member of the Latvian Riflemen and the head of Soviet military intelligence, had infiltrated some threescore operatives into Estonia in spring 1924 to prepare a seizure of power with Estonian Communists.172 Estonian counterintelligence had stepped up infiltration of the local Communist underground, however, and in a November 10–27, 1924, trial, 149 indigenous Communists stood accused of participation in a clandestine Communist organization (the party had been banned) and of being agents of the USSR. Seven were acquitted but for those convicted sentences were severe: one got death; thirty-nine, life; twenty-eight, fifteen years.

Moscow’s putsch went ahead anyway.173 Before dawn on Monday, December 1, a few hundred men in small squads—underground Baltic Communists, armed longshoremen from the Soviet merchant marine, Soviet consulate personnel—assaulted strategic positions in Tallinn, the Estonian capital.174 The putschists chased half-dressed military men around their barracks in the darkness, threw grenades without having pulled the pins, and climbed into tanks not realizing the exits of the tank garages were blocked.175 Still, the squads managed to occupy the main railway station for almost two hours, where they killed the railway minister (who arrived to investigate the commotion), and seized the residence of the head of government (state elder) and a military airfield. But the accompanying worker uprising never materialized. By 10:00 a.m. the coup was over.176 Officially, 12 of the more than 250 putschists were killed in the fighting; more would die and around 2,000 would be arrested during a multimonth manhunt. Some escaped to the USSR. The Soviet press wrote fancifully of a rising of Estonian workers put down by a “White Guardist bourgeois clique.”177

Right at this time, Stalin issued yet another anti-Trotsky broadside in Pravda (December 20, 1924), which he republished as the preface to his collection On the Path to October (January, 1925), with the title “Socialism in One Country,” pointing out that the latter was possible.178 Stalin had already said as much at the 6th Party Congress in August 1917, and now, essentially, was just affirming the seven-year existence of the Soviet Union. Lenin had quietly come around to the view that, if necessary, socialism could be built in one country.179 Even Trotsky, in an unpublished lecture at the Sverdlov Communist University in spring 1923, had stated that “if the whole world collapsed except for Russia, would we perish? . . . No, we would not perish, given our resources, given the circumstance that we constitute a sixth of the earth.”180 True, Stalin’s “Foundations of Leninism,” when serialized in Pravda back in April and May 1924 and published in stand-alone form as On Lenin and Leninism (May 1924), had contained a passage denying the possibility of socialism in one country, but that was excised in a second edition in late 1924.181 Stalin, moreover, was only declaring the possibility of socialism in one country first, for he noted that the “final” victory of socialism required the help of the proletariat of several countries and that world revolution would still occur, most likely as a result of uprisings in countries under the yoke of imperialism, and they could expect help from the USSR. This meant that the victory of socialism in one country actually “bore an international character,” and that Russia had a special mission, now in revolutionary guise.182 The essay became his most misunderstood piece of writing, but when initially published, aroused no controversy.183

The Menshevik newspaper in Europe Socialist Herald would later sensationalize Stalin’s position as “A fig for Europe—we shall manage by ourselves.”184 Such a sentiment did have deep roots in Russia. Imperial Russia’s international posture had vacillated between the pursuit of validating Western alliances and pursuit of a special, messianic mission in a space all its own, as heir to both the Byzantine empire and the grand Eurasian empires of the Mongols. Stalin’s statement on socialism in one country superficially looked like just such a declaration of independence—the Soviet Union could go forward without waiting for revolution in the West—and therefore like an indulgence of the old saw of the expansive self-contained space. But hunkering down did not actually emancipate Russia from the West: the latter remained stronger, and therefore a geopolitical threat, while also possessing the advanced machines indispensable to Russia (and now the USSR). A “fortress Russia” stance had never worked, despite the temptation, as Stalin, no less than Trotsky, knew. The key to his “socialism in one country” article lay not in some imagined nose-thumbing of the West, but in a passage in which he explained the relative ease of the Bolshevik victory with reference to three conditions, all related to the Great War: the existence of two “imperialist blocs, the Anglo-French and Austro-German,” whose all-out clash distracted them from giving serious attention to the revolution in Russia; the hated war’s spawning in Russia of a profound longing for peace, which made proletarian revolution seem the pathway out of the conflict; and the war’s spurring of strong movements of workers in imperialist countries who sympathized with the revolution in Russia.185 In other words, even as Stalin had shown a primitive understanding of fascism derived from class analysis, he achieved an ideological breakthrough in linking revolution to war, rather than just class.

Additionally, Stalin recognized that world revolution afforded the Soviet Union a tool to pursue a special global mission and to break out of its enclosed geopolitical space. From the days of ancient Muscovy, Russia had expanded at the expense of weaker neighbors (Sweden, Poland, the Ottoman empire, China), always in the guise of seeking security amid wide-open frontiers. What had smacked of pure adventurism—the thrust into Central Asia and then Manchuria, where Russia had built a railroad to shorten the route to Vladivostok—could be seen as the logical completion of an advance that otherwise would have had to stop in the middle of nowhere.186 Bolshevik instigation of world revolution, in a way, was the ultimate “defensive” expansionism. But while the tsarist borderlands had been vulnerable to foreign powers stirring up trouble among the domestic enemies of tsarism, now many of the borderlands were full-fledged anti-Soviet states: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, Poland, Romania. Known in Soviet parlance as the “limitrophe,” they imposed the burden on the great powers of securing small state cooperation for any repeat military intervention in the USSR, but in Soviet eyes, this made the small states nothing more than playthings in the designs of world imperialism. Part of Stalin’s calculation for the putsch in Estonia had entailed a desire to deny anti-Soviet forces a base of operations in the Baltics.187 One Soviet intelligence analysis reported that Finland had held a conference in 1924 with the three Baltic countries to exchange intelligence about the USSR, relying upon the listening posts in Helsinki, Riga, Tallinn (Revel), Lwów, and Wilno, and recruiting agents among emigres’ family members who hoped to join their loved ones in emigration.188 (Such intelligence reinforced the inclination to see as illegitimate the independence of the former imperial Russian territories.)189 Considerations of Russia’s position in the world had also motivated Stalin’s otherwise inexplicable wild enthusiasm for the Communist coup in Germany, which he saw as a strike against independent Poland and the Baltics as well.

Stalin made revealing remarks about the failed coup in Estonia at a January 19, 1925, Central Committee plenum in a discussion of the defense budget. He had inserted the question of Trotsky’s continuation as war commissar and head of the Revolutionary Military Council on the plenum’s agenda.190 Trotsky, not waiting to be sacked, had submitted his resignation on January 15 and departed for subtropical Abkhazia again.191 Kamenev slyly proposed that Stalin replace Trotsky in the military; Stalin was not about to move out of or dilute his command of the party apparatus.192 Mikhail Frunze, a recently named candidate member of the politburo and already the day-to-day operations head of the war commissariat, was promoted from first deputy to commissar.193 But the plenum was no less noteworthy for the Estonia analysis. Stalin argued that “people there began to take action, made some noise, and tried to gain something, but all facts show that without the presence of the Red Army, standing united and vigilant and creating facts [on the ground], nothing serious will be achieved.” He added that “our banner, as of old, remains the banner of peace, but if war begins, then we must not sit with folded arms—we must act, but act last. And we will act in order to throw the decisive weight on the scales, a weight that might be dominant. Hence my conclusion: be ready for everything, prepare our army, shoe and clothe it, train it, improve its technology, improve its chemical weapons, aviation, and in general lift our Red Army to the requisite heights. This is demanded of us by the international situation.”194

Stalin reiterated his war-revolution theme following the anniversary of Lenin’s death (January 21, 1925), when the Red Army Political Administration, just days after ceasing to report to Trotsky, issued a list of recommended readings with Stalin’s On Lenin and Leninism as number one.195 “This may seem strange but it is a fact, comrades,” Stalin told a Moscow party conference on January 27. “If the two main coalitions of capitalist countries during the imperialist war in 1917 had not been engaged in mortal combat against each other, if they had not been at one another’s throat, not been preoccupied and lacking in time to enter a contest with the Soviet regime, the Soviet regime would hardly have survived then. Struggle, conflicts, and wars between our enemies are, I repeat, our greatest ally.”196 Soviet geopolitics had been born.

BRUSHING OFF EUROPEAN RAPPROCHEMENT

That Stalin would be enticed by a vision of an opportunistic windfall dropping into his arms from an intracapitalist war is understandable. The Communists seemed to be staring into the very dilemma that had bedeviled tsarist Russia’s foreign policy: namely, whether to seek a German orientation, the way Durnovó had advocated, or an Anglo-French one, the path the ill-starred tsarist regime had chosen.197 Like Lenin, Stalin saw Britain as the principal pillar of global imperialism, refracting a familiar imperial-Russian Anglophobia through the prism of Marxism-Leninism. Moreover, a reprise of the Franco-Russian alliance waned not only because the Communist regime was anathema to France, but Russia’s strategic value had declined thanks to the resurrection of a Polish state on the other side of Germany; to contain Berlin, Paris set its sights on partnership with Warsaw. Stalin, for his part, worried less about containing German power, the rationale for the tsarist alliance with France, than benefitting from Germany as a source of solidarity against Versailles and technology transfer. But Stalin was in for a nasty surprise: the two opposing blocs that had offered tsarist Russia a fateful choice snatched that choice away from the USSR.

First came some Soviet maneuvering. Stalin despised the demands of the capitalist powers, especially the British, for such things as anti-propaganda clauses in bilateral agreements—the British incessantly propagandized against internal Soviet politics such as the repressions, as if their police did not beat striking workers—but the Soviets swallowed and symbolically foreswore Comintern propaganda in the British empire.198 This secured coveted diplomatic recognition in February 1924 and, on August 8, 1924, the agreement of Britain’s first ever Labour government to a draft commercial treaty that afforded British goods most-favored-nation status in exchange for which the USSR was to receive significant loans, albeit only after successful conclusion of negotiations over the status of tsarist debts.199 Before the latter deal was sealed, on October 29 Britain held parliamentary elections and Labour lost (covertly subverted by the British intelligence services). The Tory Stanley Baldwin became prime minister and the new British foreign secretary Austen Chamberlain delivered an official note to Moscow stating, “The government of his majesty finds that it cannot recommend these treaties for consideration by parliament or propose them to the king for ratification by his majesty.” A forged letter attributed to Zinoviev surfaced seeming to confirm Comintern subversion on the British Isles as well as Labour’s political flirtations with Moscow.200 While anti-Communist interests were at work in the UK, in the USSR far from all Communists appreciated the value to be gained from repaying the debts to blood-sucking British capitalists incurred by the bloody tsarist regime.201 Still, the power of the major capitalist countries could not be wished away.202 The West had the technology.

Moscow had also achieved commercial relations with Berlin, which were capped by diplomatic recognition, and the prospect loomed of modernizing Soviet industry with German help, but here, too, the Comintern cast a long shadow, especially the attempted Communist putsch in Germany.203 While Berlin deplored how German Communists secretly trucked with German right-wing nationalists against the Weimar Republic, the Soviets were maddened by German pursuit of Western rapprochement. Pro-Western elements in Germany, in a secret document captured by Soviet military intelligence, asserted that “without doubt Moscow is prepared to sacrifice the interests of Germany.”204 But there was also an “Eastern School” of German diplomacy, represented by the German ambassador to Moscow, Count Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, who had supported Kolchak and other anti-Bolshevik forces, but even before their final defeat sought to make the most of the Bolshevik regime.205 Back when he was Weimar Germany’s first foreign minister, Brockdorff-Rantzau had led the German delegation to the Versailles talks in 1919 and publicly declared that a German admission of sole guilt would constitute a lie and warned that the Versailles terms would generate a German combination of nationalism and socialism.206 He saw close ties with the Soviets as a way to overcome France’s Versailles diktat and revive Germany’s special mission in the world. To be sure, he was disgusted by Bolshevism, but he resented everything French, save cognac, and worried that his colleagues in Berlin would align Germany with Britain, thereby pushing the Soviets into the arms of France, a repeat of the fatal Great War two-front scenario. The count and Chicherin, also an aristocrat, found common cause, even observing similar nocturnal schedules (the two often met after midnight).207 Most important, the Chicherin‒Brockdorff-Rantzau pas de deux fit Stalin’s Leninist Anglophobic, Germanophile inclinations.

A hidden dimension to German-Soviet ties entailed clandestine military cooperation, initiated under Lenin.208 Versailles had imposed severe restrictions on the German military’s size, training, weapons production, and even the ability to send military attachés abroad, but the Soviets offered to allow Germany to violate these restrictions. Major German manufacturers (Blohm & Voss, Krupp, Albatrosswerke) were able to build submarines, aircraft, and artillery on Soviet territory, and the Reichswehr obtained secret training facilities. The Soviets, for their part, sought to attract German firms through leases, or concessions, to take over and revive moribund weapons factories. Moscow welcomed an “unofficial” German military mission in the form of a commission for the verification of German economic concessions on USSR territory, known as Moscow Center in secret documents, and headed by Oskar von Niedermeyer, a Lawrence of Arabia type who had led missions during the Great War to Afghanistan and the Ottoman empire to rally tribes against the British. The Germans used the Moscow Center to gather intelligence as well as to cooperate, but Junkers did reopen an airplane plant just outside Moscow (at Fili).209 And Germany held out the promise of coveted advanced and financial credits for Soviet industrial purchases well beyond the military sphere. Chicherin, knowing that von Brockdorff-Rantzau reported directly to the German chancellor, in fall 1924 offered the ambassador an enlargement of the Rapallo partnership into a “continental bloc” with France against Britain, emphasizing the clash of Soviet and British interests in Asia.210

Back in Berlin, where distrust of the Soviets lingered, the consensus was that Germany needed Britain for its Versailles revisionism against France; Germany declined the Soviet offer.211 Rebuffed on the continental bloc, Chicherin, with the full backing of the politburo, proposed a bilateral Soviet-German alliance.212 The German side did not immediately reject the idea, given the mutual enmity and mutual claims against Poland, but on the latter score the Soviet side hesitated, at least as presented by Chicherin, who sought a security guarantee against an aggression by or from the territory of Poland but not a new Polish partition.213 The Soviets, for leverage, had not ignored France, which also recognized the USSR (October 1924), but conservatives in France voiced extreme disgust at the red flag flying over the reestablished embassy. Karl Radek, the Comintern official, published word of Soviet negotiations with France in German newspapers, but it did not move Berlin. Notwithstanding the Rapallo Treaty breakthrough, the German-Soviet dalliance resembled a marriage of convenience, in which each partner cheated on the other. Stalin was waxing on about how “the struggle between Britain and America for oil, for Canada, for markets, the struggle between the Anglo-American bloc and Japan for Eastern markets, the struggle between Britain and France for influence in Europe, and, last, the struggle between enslaved Germany and the dominant Entente—all these are commonly known facts that indicate that the successes capital has achieved are transient, that the process of capitalism’s ‘recovery’ contains within itself the germs of its inherent weakness and disintegration.” And German foreign minister Gustav Stresemann put out feelers for normalization with the Entente.214

Britain, prioritizing its empire, remained wary of committing significant resources to continental Europe and therefore was eager to integrate Germany politically and economically to remove the presumed basis for war, and perhaps even have Germany to manage the Soviet Union. Britain’s Foreign Secretary Austen Chamberlain, unusually for a top London official, was sensitive to French security concerns, but keen to pry Germany away from the Soviet Union. Stresemann, for his part, remained keen to retain German-Soviet military cooperation, however. An agreement to open an aviation school was signed April 15, 1925, and ground broken in the Soviet city of Lipetsk (it would go into full operation within two years).215 In August 1925, Reichswehr officers observed Red Army maneuvers for the first time (they arrived disguised as German worker Communists). A group of Red Army officers, disguised as Bulgarians, reciprocated, going to Germany to observe fall maneuvers. “The German command made sure that we did not come into contact with soldiers,” Mikhail Tukhachevsky, head of the delegation, reported to Moscow on October 3, 1925, adding that “secret observation was established.” (German drivers for the Soviets, predictably, pretended not to know Russian when they did.) Tukhachevsky was particularly struck by how “discipline in the mass of soldiers is firm and profoundly inculcated. I did not observe officer’s rude treatment of soldiers, but I did by the unter-officers. . . . One notices the immense proportion of aristocrats among the officers in the field command and the general staff.”216 Still, right at this time, Stresemann’s Western feelers yielded results.

The Locarno Peace Pact consisted of a clutch of seven agreements negotiated at a resort on Lake Maggiore (October 5–16, 1925) between Britain, France, Italy, Belgium, and Germany as well as Poland and Czechoslovakia. Germany recognized its borders in the west (the Rhineland frontier), effectively ceding Alsace-Lorraine to France, and agreed to vague arbitration over its borders to the east, effectively allowing for future revision. Germany was given a path to admission into the League of Nations, shedding its pariah status. “The gates of war are closed,” declared France’s foreign minister Aristide Briand (who had headed the government back during the siege of Verdun). But no comparable non-aggression pledges or mutual guarantees were issued for Germany’s relations with its smaller eastern neighbors. Polish foreign minister Józef Beck would complain that “Germany was officially asked to attack the east, in return for peace in the west.” The retired former head of state Józef Piłsudski observed that “every honest Pole spits when he hears this word [Locarno].”217 Still, all three principals (Briand, Stresemann, and Chamberlain) would be awarded Nobel Prizes. The Soviets, who had not been invited, were alarmed that Germany had apparently been drawn back into the western orbit as part of a presumed British-led anti-Soviet coalition. Chicherin did get Stresemann to promise that Germany would not participate in sanctions against the USSR or seek a frontier rapprochement with Poland.218 But suspicions about Germany’s motives lingered. The Soviet press wrote of “a united anti-Soviet imperialist bloc.”219

Locarno’s implications—the two capitalist blocs making agreements—threatened to upend Stalin’s theory of a pending Soviet windfall from an intracapitalist war. Was this a capitalist “stabilization”?220 Stalin tried to puzzle out Locarno’s significance in notes to himself for a speech he would deliver before the end of 1925. “They want to repeat the history of ‘guaranteed pacts’ that existed before the Franco-Prussian War,” he wrote. “Then and now, the grouping of forces for a new war is hidden under the phrase securing peace (guarantee of peace).” But in the old days, Stalin continued, Russia had been fodder for the imperialist cliques, while now “Russia cannot and will not be either a weapon, or a reserve, or cannonball fodder for bourgeois states.” He also stressed the games of British conservatives, whom he suspected of scheming to use Poland against the USSR.221 In other observations of 1925, Stalin characterized the international situation as analogous to the time right before the Great War.222 He refused, in other words, to accept the notion of an enduring capitalist stabilization. Despite the Locarno shock, Stalin persisted in foreseeing a fratricidal war between imperialist blocs, with the USSR as the potential beneficiary and revolutionary outbreaks as a potential consequence. Believing otherwise implied the necessity of deep Soviet concessions to the capitalist powers on core principles, up to granting domestic political pluralism. Either innate rivalry among the capitalist powers for markets and colonies led to fratricidal war or Leninism was wrong and the USSR in trouble.

A DUUMVIRATE

Stalin’s apparatus, along with Zinoviev’s in Leningrad, deluged the public domain with tendentious pamphlets undoing Trotsky’s heroics in the October coup and civil war and blackening his image (“For Leninism, Against Trotskyism”).223 Stalin had the wherewithal to make this line ubiquitous throughout the provincial press.224 Still, he had a way to go to extirpate Trotsky’s renown, especially internationally: in a February 1925 report intercepted by the OGPU, a British diplomat deemed Trotsky—after his sacking—“the most powerful figure in Russian Bolshevism” and even “the most significant individual in socialist revolutionary Europe.” A copy went to Stalin.225 But Trotsky was no longer Stalin’s sole target. Already in late 1924, Stalin had begun to move against his allies Kamenev and Zinoviev. He replaced a Kamenev protégé as Moscow party boss and Central Committee secretary with his own new loyalist, Nikolai Uglanov.226 Uglanov had originally worked under Zinoviev in Leningrad, but the two had clashed and Stalin had found Uglanov, promoting him from Nizhny Novgorod to the capital; in Moscow, Uglanov fended off Zinoviev’s blandishments.227 Most important, Nikolai Bukharin had been promoted to fill the politburo slot vacated by Lenin’s death, which kept the full (voting) members at seven—and Stalin became very solicitous of him. From August 1924, the prepolitburo gatherings of the triumvirate had been expanded to a “septet”: Bukharin, Rykov, Tomsky, and Kuibyshev, in addition to Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Stalin—that is, all members of the politburo except Trotsky, plus the head of the Central Control Commission (Kuibyshev).228 But Stalin was already working on a new configuration, an alliance with the thirty-six-year-old Bukharin as well as Rykov and Tomsky.229

Trotsky assisted Stalin’s scheme, inadvertently but decisively. In late 1924, from the spa town of Kislovodsk, recuperating from fevers again, he detonated another written bomb, “Lessons of October.”230 It recounted the opposition by Zinoviev and Kamenev to the 1917 coup, which Trotsky labeled “desertion” and “not at all accidental”—a phrase straight out of the Lenin dictation. (Stalin went unmentioned, as if he had not been around in 1917.) Trotsky, being himself, also could not resist demonstrating that at times he had corrected Lenin. Still, he scored a spectacular strike against the triumvirate. Stalin mobilized the full anti-Trotsky forces: at least thirty articles denouncing “Trotskyism” appeared in Pravda over two months, including those by Bukharin, Kamenev, Zinoviev, even Sokolnikov.231 In a single issue, Pravda printed a long dilatory attack by Kamenev and a concise, devastating one by Stalin.232 Krupskaya’s rebuttal praised Trotsky’s “colossal energy” but deemed him weak in “Marxist analysis” and inclined to “a purely ‘administrative’ and utterly superficial” approach to the party’s role, similarly echoing Lenin’s dictation.233 But the damage to Zinoviev and Kamenev was severe: most of the party mass had no idea about the pair’s opposition to the 1917 coup, and Trotsky joined it to the failure of the German coup in 1923, warning that such “cowardice” would be dangerous going forward.

Stalin’s shifting political alliance to undercut rivals—with Zinoviev and Kamenev against Trotsky; with Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky against Zinoviev and Kamenev—hardly constituted evidence of special genius: it was no more than Personal Dictatorship 101. Nonetheless, his elementary tactics surprised his erstwhile partners. Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Krupskaya, still living in the apartment she had shared with Lenin, had taken to meeting in a threesome on their own. At the same time, Stalin’s provocations of them were also evident: Molotov, at the party secretariat, stopped inviting Zinoviev supporters to the semiclosed party sessions without Trotsky, perhaps to induce the Leningraders to meet on their own, thereby giving the appearance of an illegal faction. Additionally, Trotsky later claimed, plausibly, that Stalin’s minions spread rumors that their boss was looking to reconcile with Trotsky, and had even sent emissaries to him in Abkhazia in March 1925. (The plane carrying the emissaries crashed.) “Stalin, without entangling himself,” Trotsky wrote, “was merely trying to sow illusions among the ‘Trotskyites,’ and panic among the Zinovievites.”234 And the coup de grâce? When Zinoviev and his Leningrad party organization supporters aggressively demanded Trotsky’s expulsion from the politburo, Central Committee, and even the party, Stalin would defend Trotsky against their attacks.235 As for Bukharin, having savaged Trotsky, he turned his fluent viciousness against Kamenev and Zinoviev with gusto. Wholly under Stalin’s patronage, Bukharin became half of an emerging duumvirate.

“ENRICH YOURSELVES”

Not Bukharin the ideologist but Grigory Sokolnikov the finance commissar made the New Economic Policy work. Sokolnikov did not strike the typical leather-clad Bolshevik pose. “An effeminate looking gentleman, he had the face of an Indian maharajah,” noted his wife Galina Serebryakova. “His refined gestures, clean aristocratic face with direct, proud nose, oblong dark eyes, tall, unusually contoured lips and wonderful ears—all his bearing of a well-developed and physically powerful person of the English peerage.”236 But Sokolnikov was tough. He campaigned to raise apparatchiks’ salaries and eliminate the cash envelopes (“bonuses”), special food packets, special fashion ateliers, the state-supplied dachas, personal automobiles, and all the rest. These perquisites became entrenched, even as the salaries would rise, but in his strenuous efforts to separate the state budget from apparatchiks’ personal finances, Sokolnikov lived what he preached. “He could not abide gifts from people unknown to him and steadfastly took nothing from his subordinates,” his wife maintained. “He saved Soviet power’s every kopeck, and not only did not spend the money given him for foreign travel, but, as a rule, returned the greater part of his advances.” Abroad he always traveled third class and stayed in the cheapest hotels.237

Sokolnikov drew lessons for the USSR from postwar European capitalist experience. In a speech delivered in July 1924, for example, he reasoned that in France and Germany the “bourgeoisie” had wielded inflation at the expense of workers and peasants to support privately owned industry. State-owned industry, he believed, was preferable, but nonetheless he warned that the interests of state industry might conflict with the interests of “the state as a political organization.” In other words, if state industry got its way, the resulting inflation would be paid for by the peasants, who could not turn over their money quickly and would see it devalued. Sokolnikov also deduced from European inflation that absent a stable currency, the Soviet state could be engulfed in political crisis, as had happened in France, to say nothing of Weimar Germany. Sokolnikov concluded that even if the Soviet state tried to use inflation to underwrite industry, it would be forced to retreat, just as “the bourgeoisie” in Europe had been.238 But many Communists remained incredulous that gold was a guarantor of value under socialism and that the USSR needed to accumulate reserves of capitalist currencies, even if they took comfort in the fact that the party controlled the “commanding heights” (heavy industry, railways, foreign trade).239 Soviet industrial trusts were struggling just to pay wage arrears, let alone invest in the future. “There is in the Soviet Union a very great shortage of capital,” a secret British diplomatic report observed in December 1924. “The need for re-equipment of the factories is great, but where are the resources to pay for this equipment?”240

Industrial production in 1925 on average was less than half of what it had been in 1913, and Sokolnikov’s opponents in the Soviet industrial lobby screamed that he was strangling the very “material base” the country needed to build socialism. Most prominently, the left economist Yevgeny Preobrazhensky presented a scientific paper titled “The Fundamental Law of Socialist Accumulation,” which, building on Marx’s idea of primitive capitalist accumulation, argued for a stage of forced “expropriation of surplus product,” meaning pumping resources out of the countryside and artisanal labor at low prices.241 But Sokolnikov’s monetary reforms and stringent budgets had paid dividends—by 1924, a tax in money had replaced the tax in kind and the economy had been remonetized—but in state industry, costs were rising and labor productivity was not, while mismanagement and waste were rampant. State trusts were largely shielded from market discipline: perversely, those that performed better received lower budget allocations, while the worst could count on bailouts instead of bankruptcy.242 Sokolnikov’s hesitation was fully warranted. He pressed the point by writing books and articles characterizing the USSR system as “state capitalist” and arguing that capitalist methods were essential in a transition period for the benefit of the proletariat and that the country could revive economically only if reconnected to the world economy.243

What tripped up Sokolnikov, however, was that the harvest in 1924 had been poor, and in some regions famine had not ended. Foreign currency‒earning grain exports would be suspended entirely that hungry summer.244 The head of the government, Alexei Rykov, and the OGPU’s Yagoda toured the Volga valley accompanied by journalists. (“Comrade Yagoda,” the Soviet journalist Mikhail Koltsov remarked, “did it ever occur to you that without horns you simply do not look your part?” Everyone guffawed, Yagoda included.) Rykov addressed an enormous crowd on the central square of Saratov, his hometown, where twelve years earlier, under the old regime, he had been beaten during a May Day demonstration. “These very stones ran red with our blood,” he said. “In those days we dreamed of a Russia redeemed from the blight of tsarism. That dream is fulfilled. But to destroy absolutism was only part of our task. Our aim today is to build a truly free, socialist Russia.” The square erupted in applause. But as Rykov made the rounds of villages, peasants asked him, “What is a kulak? Can it be a muzhik who owns a horse, a cow, and some poultry?” Rykov tried to calm the peasants, but answered, “If we let kulaks thrive, we shall soon revert to the old system—a few rich peasants in each village and the rest destitute. Do you want those exploiters?”245 Of course, Rykov knew full well that the danger was incompetent, corrupt governance.246 But the party debate about agricultural policy became consumed with arguments about class differentiation amid reports that kulaks had seized control over cooperatives and village soviets.247

The state, as in tsarist times, could not “see” all the way down to the self-governing villages. The peasant revolution had strengthened the communes, rechristened “land societies,” which the regime saw as survivals of a backward era. Under the commune system, livestock was usually held individually (by household), albeit often pastured in common, and the land was worked by household rather than collectively (except for some scything in meadows). But the commune as a collective bestowed the usage rights to the land, allocating each household a number of strips of varying size and location, which the commune periodically redistributed according to shifting household size and other considerations. Improving one’s assigned strips with manure or other means made little sense because they could be reallocated. In regions of black soils, the number of strips typically ran twenty to thirty per household; in areas of non-black earth, fifty to eighty. Some strips could be as narrow as seven to fifteen feet wide and a mere seventy feet long. They could also lie as far as ten miles or more away, and sometimes peasants declined to farm them. Some of the arable land was lost to access paths, while the redistributions could be time-consuming, requiring measurements in situ and volatile meetings. Soviet legislation tried to restrict redistributions as inefficient, but efforts to place villages under rural soviets often failed. Communes generated their own income—they collected the taxes—while rural soviets required subsidies from above (and spent the funds on administrative salaries).248 Peasants could quit the commune, Stolypin style, and in the northwest, Ukraine, or Belorussia, enclosed farms rather than communes predominated, but here, too, the party and soviet were just an occasional presence. In 1924, the party’s theoretical journal mockingly referred to the NEP as the new “Stolypin-Soviet” policy as well as a “kulak deviation.”249

Sokolnikov insisted that the chief instrument of struggle against the “kulak danger” had to be economic—progressive taxation—but the Bolsheviks needed more grain, immediately. The politburo was compelled to approve grain imports, costing vital hard currency. Even then, in several provinces, including in the Volga valley visited by Rykov, peasants would still be consuming food surrogates into 1925. Herds were increasing in size, consumption was going up, and sown acreage finally attained the 1913 level, but yields per acre were substantially lower, and grain marketings overall seemed to be declining.250 Agricultural prices rose precipitously, from 102 kopecks per pud (36 pounds) of rye to 206 kopecks, and reports circulated of kulaks’ buying up and holding grain stocks in anticipation of further price rises. Pravda blamed private capital for “disorganizing” the internal grain market.251 The regime was forced to spend more budget revenue on higher wages for the workers at state factories so they could buy bread. At the same time, the imports threatened Sokolnikov’s strong currency and budget discipline: the grain imports would push the country back into a trade deficit. Agriculture’s “backwardness” took the blame for multiple dilemmas of unfortunate weather, poor governance, and policy errors.

Stalin’s position was a Lenin-style combination of flexible tactics and unshakable core beliefs. He urged party officials to earn the trust of the peasant, kulaks excepted, following to the letter the late Lenin’s dicta regarding the NEP. He also asserted that a capitalist path of development would impoverish Soviet peasants, producing an underclass of wage slaves condemned to toil on latifundia, and that private traders would gouge the peasants, so he stressed mass peasant membership in agricultural and trade cooperatives, also true to Lenin’s vision of the NEP.252 But on November 7, 1924, the revolution’s seventh anniversary, Stalin visited the Moscow factory Dynamo and offered a glimpse into his deeper thinking. “I wish for the workers of Dynamo, and the workers of all Russia,” he wrote in the visitors’ book, “that our industry expands, in order that the number of proletarians in Russia in the near term climbs to 20-30 million, that collective agriculture flourishes in villages and subordinates to its influence private farming.” Stalin’s words that day—a leftist manifesto—were not published until several years later.253 In January 1925, this time in a public setting, Stalin did reveal something of his otherwise closely held views. “[The peasantry] is at our side, we are living with it, we are building a new life together with it, whether that’s good or bad,” he said at a meeting of the Moscow party organization. “This ally, you know yourselves, is not a very strong one, the peasantry is not as reliable an ally as the proletariat of the developed capitalist countries.” But Stalin had also been relentlessly accusing Trotsky of underestimating the peasantry, and in the speech characterized “Trotskyism” as the “disbelief in the forces of our revolution, disbelief in the alliance [smychka] between workers and peasants,” which was indispensable to the success of the NEP and the revolution’s ultimate triumph.254 Attacks on Trotsky, in other words, translated into strong support for the NEP.

Such was the background to the 14th party conference in April 1925, when, continuing to adhere to Sokolnikov’s advice on the need for fiscal discipline and currency stability, while also indulging Bukharin’s insistence on conciliation on the peasant question, Stalin oversaw a doubling down on the NEP’s concessions. The Central Committee reduced the agricultural tax and cost of farm machinery, expanded the rights to lease land and hire labor, enhanced loan programs, and softened the restrictions on small-scale trade.255 These measures, it was hoped, would bring in a bumper harvest both to feed the country and, via exports, to finance a higher tempo of industrialization.256

Stalin relished demonstrating his superior leadership skills with people, not least because the others at the top viewed him as inferior. Once, for instance, the politburo discussed uniting the commissariats of foreign and domestic trade and appointing as the single head Alexander Tsyurupa, Lenin’s former deputy, so Kamenev went to talk to him. “He waved his hand, went white and became so obviously resentful that I ditched the conversation,” Kamenev, giving up, wrote to Stalin. But Stalin answered: “I also spoke with him (he himself asked). Outwardly he protested against his candidacy, but his eyes were smiling. I told him that, in that light, he is agreed, obviously. He stayed silent. I think he’ll do.”257 On matters of international political economy, too, Stalin revealed himself as a quick study and adept. The Soviet Union operated in a capitalist financial world, which, for better or worse, had seen the reintroduction of a quasi-gold standard and the institutionalization of convertible currency reserves, but hardly anyone in the Central Committee grasped these issues.258 Stalin would invariably take the floor to explain matters, employing his canonical style (first point, second point, third point). In deliberations about prices, for example, he illuminated why trade margins were still operative even though this was socialist trade. He also reinforced Sokolnikov’s point about the causal link between monetary emissions and inflation, and admonished that expenses had to be held in check, which meant enduring high levels of unemployment and lower rates of economic expansion, just as the capitalists did for the same reasons.259 But it was Bukharin who, with Stalin’s blessing, seized the spotlight to explain this deepening of the NEP.

On April 17, 1925, in a memorable speech to a meeting of the Moscow party active, Bukharin chastised those who were dismissive of the village, for “nothing is more harmful than the lack of understanding that our industry depends on the peasant market,” that is, on peasant demand and ability to pay for manufactured goods. But, he lamented, “the well-off upper stratum of the peasantry and the middle peasant who strives to become well-off are now afraid to accumulate. The situation is created such that a peasant is afraid to mount a metal roof over his house so as not to be called a kulak; if he purchases machinery he does so in a way that the Communists do not see. Higher technology becomes conspiratorial.” Poor peasants, meanwhile, complained that Soviet power hindered their hiring by the better-off peasants. (Most peasants who hired labor themselves worked; they were not rentier landlords.) Party attitudes were holding down production on which the state’s well-being and industrialization hopes rested. Bukharin dismissed the fantasy of collective farms, because the peasants were just not joining them. “That we should in all ways propagandize among the peasants formation of collective farms is true, but it is not true when people maintain that there is a highway to the movement of the peasant mass toward the path of socialism,” he stated. Rather, the answer was to benefit from economic incentives. “It is necessary to say to the entire peasantry, to all its strata: ‘Enrich yourselves, accumulate, develop your farms,’” he told the party activists. “Only idiots can say that we should always have the poor; now we need to conduct policy in such a way that the poor would vanish.”260

Bukharin’s typically inflammatory rhetoric notwithstanding, he was merely drawing the logical conclusions of the regime’s own policy: Did the Communists want a smaller harvest? Should peasants be encouraged to produce less just to avoid appearing to be kulaks? Fury at Bukharin’s aggressive logic, however, exploded. Also, it was now that furious critiques were belatedly launched against Stalin’s “socialism in one country,” demagoguing Stalin’s arguments as antiworld revolution, a rare taste of his own medicine.261 The combination of Bukharin’s incautious speech and Stalin’s deliberately misconstrued article afforded a significant opportunity for critics of the new duumvirate. Zinoviev, in May 1925, stated that “the worst thing that can happen to a revolutionary party is to lose its [revolutionary] perspective.”262 He was acutely aware of the rising discontent over disparities of wealth and privilege based upon his knowledge of Leningrad, where workers repeatedly engaged in slowdowns and strikes, and in that context a doubling down on the NEP would be perceived as, and indeed was becoming, a wager on the kulaks.263 He viewed Bukharin’s advocacy as unwittingly paving the way for the very capitalist restoration predicted by emigre critics when they said the Bolsheviks would be forced to make ever greater concessions to capitalism. Zinoviev would state that 14 percent of the peasantry produced 60 percent of the grain, while earning half a billion rubles.264 Behind closed doors, in June 1925, Stalin stated that “the slogan ‘get rich’ is not our slogan,” adding, “our slogan is socialist accumulation.”265 Bukharin had to publicly repudiate his summons of enrichment, over and over, even as the opposition continued to bash him with it.

But all the questions about the New Economic Policy remained. Lenin himself had warned of the dangers of a self-inflicted capitalist restoration in the “peasant Brest-Litovsk,” but whereas the original Brest-Litovsk had been overturned with Germany’s defeat in the war on the western front, it remained unclear what, if anything, would overturn the NEP. How long was the retreat? Lenin’s statements were highly ambiguous (“seriously, and for a long time” “a long period, measured in years,” “not less than a decade, and probably more,” “25 years is too pessimistic”).266 The only clarity was that the NEP had not been intended to last forever. In the meantime, was it leading to socialism or full restoration of capitalism? And how was the NEP facilitating the imperative to industrialize? Leftists such as Preobrazhensky insisted that the NEP would never produce the “surplus” necessary to fund industrialization; therefore, why indulge the kulak?267 Stalin himself wrote in Pravda in May 1925 that “we need 15-20 million industrial proletarians,” at a time when the country had perhaps 4 million.268 Was this feasible? It was all well and good to talk about wielding the contradictions among the imperialists, but how was socialism going to survive without modern machine industry? If kulak farms were to be harassed and contained, how would petty-peasant farming serve to build up the country, in conditions of capitalist encirclement? How would NEP Russia become socialist Russia? “The main thing now is not at all to ignite the class struggle in the village,” Stalin said, contra Zinoviev’s line, in a summary of the 14th party conference in May 1925, while adding emptily that “the leadership of the working class is the guarantee that the construction proceeds along the path to socialism.”269

Police, party, and journalistic channels continued to report deep resentment in villages of kulaks, while largely ignoring the anger at officials.270 The regime directed its own ire at private traders, disparaged as “NEPmen.” The vast majority of privateers were small-fry hawkers of what they themselves had planted or fabricated (or of their possessions), but OGPU operatives periodically made a show of swooping in on the bazaars and throwing a dragnet. “There was a very fine line between permissible profits and illegal speculation,” wrote one eyewitness of the arrests, a process known as skimming the NEP. “The cook knows how to skim the fish soup but I doubt whether all the NEPmen understood which they were: the scum or the fish.”271 A few NEPmen did achieve scale, using their wealth to open restaurants, billiard houses, bathhouses, recreational facilities, in other words, points of public congregation, where people traded news, rumor, and ideas, and a few exercised influence over the strategic rail network, paying bribes to underpaid officials. There was even a private airline based in Ukraine, one of only three airlines in the country, which served Kharkov (the capital), Rostov, Odessa, Kiev, and Moscow.272 But no NEPman could rise and remain above the others without the complicity of the authorities, especially the OGPU, which commandeered the choice rooms in those restaurants.273 Outside the thick ideological soup, the Soviet Union’s greatest challenge was neither kulaks nor NEPmen, but the “Enrich yourselves” behavior of officials engaged in shakedowns and massive embezzlement.274

TESTAMENT REPUDIATED

Stalin had an additional worry: the damned Lenin dictation, which Trotsky’s supporters had labeled the Testament. Someone had passed a copy to the writer Max Eastman, who knew some Russian, having married Yelena Krylenko, sister of Nikolai (lately, deputy justice commissar). In spring 1925, Eastman published Since Lenin Died, which retailed Trotsky’s analysis of a bureaucratic deformation under Stalin, carried excerpts from Lenin’s purported dictation, and made reference to the warm private letter Krupskaya had sent to Trotsky immediately following Lenin’s death. Because Cristian Rakovski, the Soviet envoy to France (a form of exile), had read Eastman’s manuscript, the American took it as Trotsky’s approval. In Moscow that May, Trotsky had tried to explain himself and claimed he had had no contact with Eastman for more than a year and a half and had never passed him any secret documents. But Eastman’s book was being cited in the “bourgeois” press and spurring questions among Communists abroad.275 Stalin’s apparatus made a Russian translation, and he wrote a long letter on June 17, 1925, citing many specific passages as “slander” against Lenin and the party, demanding that Trotsky refute them in print. Trotsky was summoned before the politburo the next day and ordered to denounce Eastman’s book. Stalin rejected Trotsky’s first draft response, which was published in France, after being leaked by the Comintern operative and Stalin loyalist Manuilsky, in order to blacken Trotsky with more leaking.

Stalin personally edited Trotsky’s final text.276 The long note appeared in English in the Sunday Worker (July 19) and then in Russian in the Soviet party’s main theoretical journal. “In certain parts of his short book Eastman says that the Central Committee ‘concealed’ a number of extremely important documents from the party that had been written by Lenin in the last period of his life,” Trotsky’s text stated. “This cannot be called anything other than slander of the Central Committee of our party.” Trotsky’s text further averred that Lenin, contrary to Eastman’s assertions, had not intended these documents for publication, and that they merely offered “advice of an organizational nature,” and even that “Lenin did not leave behind any ‘Testament,’ and the very nature of his relations to the party, like the nature of the party itself, exclude such a ‘Testament.’”277 Trotsky’s text also stated that the Lenin document had not been concealed but “examined by the 13th Party Congress in the most attentive way.”278 Trotsky concluded that Eastman’s “little book could only serve the vilest enemies of Communism and the revolution, and constitutes, in that sense, an objective counterrevolutionary weapon.”279 Trotsky’s supporters, who had been circulating the Testament underground at personal risk, were dumbfounded. “He has made himself despicable,” one commented on what he saw as the lies that Trotsky signed his name to.280 But the politburo had voted on the wording, and Trotsky was subject to party discipline.281

Krupskaya, as Lenin’s widow, was also summoned to repudiate Eastman, and her remarks were published in the Sunday Worker (August 2, 1925) and in the party theoretical journal as well.282 “All delegates of the congress familiarized themselves with the letters, just as Lenin had wanted,” her text averred. “They are being called a ‘testament’ incorrectly, since Lenin’s Testament in the true sense of the word is much more extensive—it includes his last articles and touches on the foundations of party and soviet work.” She condemned how the “enemies of the Russian Communist party are trying to use the ‘Testament’ to discredit the current leaders of the party, to discredit the party itself.” She also repudiated Eastman’s use of her January 1924 private letter to Trotsky: “This letter in no way should be interpreted as it was interpreted by Max Eastman. One cannot conclude from this letter that Lenin considered Trotsky as his deputy.”283 There is no record of Stalin’s reaction.284 But if he imagined this gift from his enemies had driven a stake through the Testament, he was mistaken. It would never die.

VOROSHILOV’S ASCENT

Stalin’s theory of geopolitics presupposed a robust Red Army, but this instrument gave the regime trouble. Even before Frunze’s promotion to commissar, he had headed a military commission, which by September 1925 pushed through a reform that combined the existing (and inadequate) territorial militia system with a regular peacetime army, improved living conditions and supply, and increased the army’s party membership and Communist Youth League support groups.285 Frunze envisioned wholesale replacement of former tsarist officers with Red commanders (such as himself), and rapid industrialization to transform the military’s material base, which remained painfully below the level of 1916 (during the Brusilov offensive), even as Western military production had advanced. In conditions of the NEP, however, Frunze barely succeeded in retaining dedicated military factories: Red militarism was not merely a dirty word but expensive.286 The intrigues around former tsarist officers, meanwhile, had not subsided, even though their number had been trimmed from the peak of 75,000 (including noncoms) to fewer than 2,000.287 Former tsarist officers dominated military education institutions, including the General Staff Academy, while no more than about 6 percent of the Red Army belonged to the Communist party.288 Even Trotsky, the person most responsible for their mass recruitment, in a 1925 publication divided former tsarist officers into a minority who had consciously chosen to fight the Whites and an “unsteadfast, convictionless and cowardly” majority who had sided with Bolshevism but might yet turn back the other way.289 It is hard to know which threatened the army more: the primitive material base or the paranoid class politics.

OGPU reports portrayed former tsarist officers as a tightknit caste with shared values, capable of acting as a collective body, lying in wait for an opportunity, while Soviet foreign intelligence was organized almost entirely to penetrate emigre circles, especially those with a military aspect.290 The OGPU special departments in the army set up false anti-Soviet conspiracies, using former White officers in Cheka employ as provocateurs to expose anti-Soviet moods, while abroad an elaborate OGPU operation known as the Trust (or the Syndicate) was created around a false underground monarchist “center” that supposedly united former tsarist officers, high tsarist officials, and expropriated industrialists serving the Bolshevik regime while secretly plotting against it.291 Agents of the Trust smuggled abroad some genuine documents, thereby entering into confidences, enabling them to feed disinformation about the status and plans of the Red Army.292 Even skeptical emigres clued in to OGPU methods wanted to believe their homeland could somehow be seized back from the godless, barbaric Bolsheviks, and speculated endlessly about a Napoleon figure to lead a patriotic movement, mentioning most often Mikhail Tukhachevsky: noble by birth, megalomaniacally ambitious, and rumored to “imitate Napoleon in everything and constantly to read his biography and history.”293 One emigre publication, which derided Tukhachevsky as “a typical adventurist, in love with himself, self-reliant, striving for one thing only: career and power,” allowed that he “might be determined” to follow in the footsteps of the French general who had massacred the Paris Communards. After all, Tukhachevsky had done it at Kronstadt to the sailors and at Tambov to the peasants, what were the Communists to him?294 Soviet intelligence fostered these fantasies about Tukhachevsky’s concealed disloyalty, feeding it through multiple channels, such as the OGPU-sponsored Russian-language journal War and Peace in Berlin, which held him up as an anti-Bolshevik nationalist savior linked to foreign intelligence circles.295 At home, Tukhachevsky was under close police surveillance.296

An additional source of anxiety was Frunze’s fragile health. Despite an operation in 1916 for a perforated ulcer, he continued to endure chronic inflammation, and doctors had warned him his internal organs were utterly frayed, counseling a surgical excision, the only known treatment at the time, but he would only agree to less invasive treatments. Thus it went for years until summer 1925, when his internal bleeding worsened considerably; in early September, the politburo mandated a seven-week holiday. Frunze left for Yalta with his wife, Sofia, but on September 29 he returned to enter the Kremlin hospital. No fewer than twelve leading internists and surgeons examined him in two rounds, concurring on the need for surgery.297 “I now feel completely healthy and it’s laughable even to contemplate, let alone undergo an operation,” Frunze wrote to Sofia, still in Crimea, on October 26. “Nevertheless, both sets of consultations decided to do it. I’m personally satisfied with this decision. Let them once and for all make out what’s there and try to establish a genuine treatment.”298 Two days later, he was transferred to the country’s best facility, Soldatyonkov Hospital, where Lenin had been operated on, and the next afternoon a team led by Dr. V. N. Rozanov, who had treated Lenin, performed an operation. A day and a half later, in the wee hours of October 31, 1925, Frunze died of what the newspaper reported to be heart failure provoked by anesthesia.299 It seems he had been administered a heavy dose of chloroform, which might have provoked dystrophy in the muscles of his vital organs.300 Frunze was buried near the Kremlin Wall on November 3.301 Pishpek, Kyrgyzia, where he had grown up, was renamed for him.

Rumors were instigated that Trotsky’s people had killed the proletarian commander in revenge for taking his place, while Trotsky’s acolytes turned the tables, accusing Stalin.302 Beyond these false accusations, Bolshevik susceptibility to illnesses became the talk of the day as a psychoneurologist presented a grim report about pervasive “revolutionary exhaustion and attrition.”303 Nearly half of all visits by top party figures to medical clinics were for nervous disorders (with tuberculosis well behind, at around one quarter).304 Two German specialists were imported to examine a list of fifty regime figures, beginning with Dzierzynski and Mezynski and working through to Rykov and Stalin, with what results remains unknown, but the internal discussions indicate acceptance, including by Trotsky, of the fact that Frunze had died of natural causes, even if better medical care might have saved him.305 For Stalin, Frunze’s demise presented yet another opportunity. Tukhachevsky, during a moment of the usual gossip, voiced support for Sergo Orjonikidze—which was duly reported—but the handwriting was on the wall: Stalin appointed his close associate Voroshilov.306

Voroshilov, after his checkered civil war role, had written to Stalin begging to be let out of the army (“you should pity me”), but Stalin had ignored his pleas.307 In May 1924, he had promoted him to Moscow military district commander, in place of Trotsky’s associate Nikolai Muralov. Absent Frunze, Voroshilov was the next highest “proletarian” commander. Zinoviev’s man, Mikhail Lashevich, became first deputy war commissar.308 Tukhachevsky became the chief of the general staff, the so-called brains of the army, and a vivid rival to Voroshilov, who began to circumscribe the general staff chief’s powers, removing military intelligence from his purview. Tukhachevsky complained bitterly in writing, but Voroshilov remained unmoved.309 Probably no one despised Trotsky more than Voroshilov, not even Stalin himself, but the Voroshilov-Tukhachevsky animosity would reach operatic dimensions. This afforded Stalin tight control, but did nothing to elevate fighting capacity. “The situation with the Red Army is very difficult,” Tukhachevsky reported. “If enemies learn about the situation, they may want to attempt something.”310

DZIERZYNSKI’S MUDDLE

Kamenev, though close to Stalin, had joined Zinoviev’s Leningrad opposition and, from September 1925, his speeches began to disappear from the press and even from the “stenographic” records of party meetings.311 Kamenev had no political machine and publishing house, unlike Zinoviev in Leningrad, but he had skill at intrigue and he managed to recruit Finance Commissar Sokolnikov to protest the Stalin-Bukharin duumvirate’s leadership. Together with Krupskaya, they produced a “platform of the four” that, though unpublished, circulated to members of the Central Committee and Central Control Commission, where it was discussed at a plenum October 3–10.312 Sokolnikov, unlike the other signatories, stood by the NEP’s conciliatory peasant policy but he objected to the throttling of internal party debate and bullying tactics. The wily Kamenev had even courted the head of the OGPU, Dzierzynski, and not without success: On the night of October 5–6, Dzierzynski sent an abject letter to Stalin, which he also addressed to Orjonikidze (but in the end not to Krupskaya, indicating she, too, may have played a role in recruiting him). “I ask that you acquaint a meeting of the faction of Leninists with the following letter from me,” Dzierzynski began, divulging the existence of “a plot” by Zinoviev and Kamenev, a “new Kronstadt within our party,” which, he noted, was especially alarming because “the peasantry in the majority is not with us, though they are not against us—we have not yet organized the peasantry to our side.” After explaining that a schism in the party would open the doors to enemies and make Thermidor unavoidable, Dzierzynski confessed that he had joined the conspiracy before coming to his senses. “I am not a politician, I am unable to find a solution or to propose one, perhaps in judging me you will find the fragment of a solution. But I am leaving the [opposition] faction, remaining a Leninist, for I do not wish to be a participant in a schism, which brings death to the party.” Expecting to be relieved of his post, Dzierzynski offered to take up any work he might be given.313

Stalin had to wonder who else in the OGPU might have been recruited to the side of the opposition. Dzierzynski, as head of the political police and someone whose stout reputation made him invulnerable to removal, occupied a potentially decisive position. Stalin, of course, made no move to remove him; public revelation of a rift between them would have been damning.

Dzierzynski had been a staunch Left Communist who hung a portrait of the Polish-German leftist martyr Rosa Luxemburg in his Lubyanka office, but his experience of practical work as concurrent head of the Supreme Council of the Economy, where he employed an army of “bourgeois” economists, had made him a staunch defender of the NEP.314 Already in 1923, he denounced “the rise of ever newer apparatuses, monstrous bureaucratism of all kinds, mountains of paper and hundreds of thousands of scribblers, the seizure of huge buildings and facilities, the automobile epidemic,” and what he dubbed “legal kormlenie”—that is, functionaries living parasitically off those they were supposed to serve, as in ancient Muscovy.315 He predicted the overweening bureaucracy and pilferage would bankrupt the system, but offered no practical solutions.316 Stalin, who called him “Felix” in his confidential letters to Molotov (when he called everyone else by their last names), knew Dzierzynski was overworked and had a heart condition. Dzierzynski had suffered his first heart attack back in late 1924, but ignored doctors’ warnings that he limit his work hours.317 In summer 1925, Dzierzynski had submitted his resignation.318 Stalin had already left for Sochi and wrote to him (July 25, 1925), “I implore you not to do that,” asking for patience.319 That same day, Stalin wrote to Bukharin: “Dzierzynski is just jittery, he’s drowning. It’ll pass.”320 In August 1925, when Tovstukha wired Stalin to ask if Dzierzynski, who was going south on vacation, could visit him in Sochi, Stalin wrote back, “With pleasure I’ll receive Dzierzynski and his friends from work. Stalin.”321 Not long thereafter Dzierzynski was approached by Kamenev, who was aware of the OGPU’s frustrations with economic policy.

Although Dzierzynski quickly went back on Kamenev and Zinoviev, the opposition did not relent, taking the offensive in rival regional party conferences, including one of the Moscow organization, which opened on December 5, 1925 (and ran until the thirteenth), and one of the Leningrad organization, which started and ended earlier. In Leningrad the delegates attacked Bukharin and his slogan “Enrich yourselves”; in Moscow, Bukharin hysterically mocked Zinoviev and his supporters as “hysterical young ladies,” and forced through a resolution condemning the Leningrad party organization’s behavior as “antiparty.”322 Besides the policy dispute over the NEP’s seeming prokulak bias, the Leningrad party fought to uphold its autonomy. But the New opposition amalgamated contradictory tendencies, as the Menshevik emigre newspaper pointed out.323 Sokolnikov, in his speech, extolled market relations, which he called different from capitalism, and cultured farmers, whom he called different from kulaks. Such a formulation had the potential to render markets compatible with socialism, at least in the countryside. Sokolnikov, however, also put his finger on the fundamental problem at the heart of the NEP: “We are encouraging the middle peasant up to a certain limit and then we begin strangling him.” Politics, in other words, limited economic growth. Another speaker, Yakov Yakovlev, founder and editor of Peasant Newspaper, flat out proposed that the regime allow peasants to register the land they farmed as private property, to be bought, sold or inherited, arguing that legal ownership, instead of mere user rights, would boost output because peasants would be able to pass on the fruits of their hard work to their children.324

As for Dzierzynski, on December 12 he sent Stalin a long letter enumerating the intractable problems in the economy, citing his inability to manage them, pointing to his health, his nerves, and asking to be allowed to resign from the Supreme Council of the Economy: “I am sure that if Vladimir Ilich were alive he would honor my request.”325 Stalin again refused the request. But Stalin also found out that sometime in late 1925, with the 14th Party Congress looming, a number of leading figures gathered in the apartment of Petrovsky, the Ukrainian Communist, and without Dzierzynski’s participation, discussed having him replace Stalin as general secretary.326 But unlike secret police chiefs in most dictatorships, he did not aspire to supreme power. In fact, Dzierzynski would not speak at the 14th Congress.

BIRTHDAY DENUNCIATIONS

Stalin had twice postponed the 14th Party Congress, and by the time it met (December 18–31, 1925), eighteen months had elapsed since the previous one, the longest interval yet. The Leningrad delegation arrived early, on December 14, fanning out to factories and urban ward party organizations to argue their case. Back at the previous congress, when Stalin was still in alliance with Zinoviev, the two had agreed to hold the next one in Leningrad, but in October 1925, Stalin’s new politburo majority voted to annul this as “out of date.” The congress assembled 1,306 delegates (665 voting), representing 1,088,000 party members and candidates. Stalin for the first time since before the revolution delivered the main political report. But on the opening day, Zinoviev had fired an advance salvo in Leningrad Pravda. “They fight against the kulak, but they offer the slogan ‘Enrich yourselves!’” he charged. “They proclaim the Russia of NEP as a socialist country.” Stalin, in his speech, cunningly made no mention of disagreements with Zinoviev and Kamenev, ensuring that the opposition would be viewed as causing the dissension. Sure enough, the Leningrad delegates petitioned that Zinoviev be allowed to deliver a coreport, which took place on the evening of the second day, ran for four hours, and targeted Bukharin with a vengeance.327 After a break, Bukharin was given the floor, and droned on even longer.328 The atmosphere was belligerent. Krupskaya, on behalf of the opposition, omitted mention of Stalin but assailed Bukharin’s “Enrich yourselves” slogan as unsocialist, while scolding the delegates for their “shameful” heckling of Zinoviev. She cited the Stockholm Party Congress of 1906, when the Mensheviks had a majority, to imply that the current Zinoviev, Kamenev, Krupskaya group, though a minority, were the real Bolshevik-Leninists.329 But the congress sensation turned out to be, of all people, Kamenev, who was known for equivocating, but delivered a sharply worded oration on December 21.330 This happened to be Stalin’s birthday (officially he was forty-six).

Kamenev began by referring to his responsibilities as nominal director of the Lenin Institute, which was intended to assert Leninist credentials, then took aim at “rosy” portrayals of Lenin’s New Economic Policy.331 “I have reproached comrade Stalin at a number of conferences, and I repeat it at the congress: ‘You do not really agree with this [pro-NEP] line, but you protect it, and this is where you are at fault as a leader of the party,’” Kamenev said. “‘You are a strong man, but you do not allow the party strongly to reject this line, which a majority of the party thinks incorrect.’” He called Stalin “a prisoner of this incorrect line, the author and genuine representative of which is comrade Bukharin.” But Kamenev went far beyond separating Stalin from Bukharin.

We are against creating a “leader” theory, we’re against building up a “leader.” We are against the idea that the secretariat, by combining both policy and organization in practice, should stand above the main political organ, that is, the politburo. . . . Personally, I suggest that our general secretary is not someone who is capable of unifying the old Bolshevik headquarters around himself. . . . Precisely because I have spoken on numerous occasions with Comrade Stalin, precisely because I have spoken on numerous occasions with a group of Lenin’s comrades, I say here at the Congress: I have come to the conclusion that Comrade Stalin cannot perform the function of unifying the Bolshevik headquarters.

Kamenev, as he uttered these remarkable words, was interrupted repeatedly, and the jeering became nearly deafening:

“Untrue!” “Nonsense.” “So that’s what they’re up to.” “Stalin! Stalin!” The delegates rise and salute Comrade Stalin. Stormy applause. . . . “Long live Comrade Stalin.” Prolonged stormy applause. Shouts of “Hurrah.” General commotion.

The published stenogram continued: “Yevdokimov, from his seat: ‘Long live the Russian Communist Party! Hurrah! Hurrah!’ (The delegates stand and shout ‘Hurrah!’ Noise. Stormy, long-sustained applause) (Yevdokimov, from his seat) ‘Long live the central committee of our party! Hurrah!’ (The delegates shout ‘Hurrah!’) ‘The party above all! Right!’ (Applause and shouts, ‘Hurrah!’)”332

Stalin never had a birthday like this (nor would he again).

Tomsky was given the floor for repudiation: “It is ridiculous to speak as some comrades have spoken here, attempting to represent someone as having concentrated power in his hands. . . . How could this happen?”333 The answer to Tomsky’s question was, in part, Kamenev himself, who had abetted Stalin nearly every step of the way.

Stalin’s birthday celebration was not over: That same evening, Sokolnikov got the floor. Stalin relied on him utterly for the NEP. “Garya’s relations with Stalin . . . were friendly,” his wife, Galina Serebryakova would recall, referring to her husband by a diminutive of his real first name (Gersh). “I heard their conversations often on the vertushka. There was never any tension or inequality in tone or interaction. . . . Before the congress, according to what Garya told me, Stalin met with him and implored him not to support Krupskaya and Klavdiya Nikolaeva, not to speak of Lenin’s Testament and the need to elect a different general secretary. But Garya would not agree. ‘You’ll be sorry, Grigory,’ Stalin warned him and later that same night called him on the vertushka, asking for his support and not to mention the Testament in his speech.” Sokolnikov refused to back down.334 At the congress, speaking for nearly an hour, he cited Lenin against Bukharin, stated that the USSR was “state capitalist,” and called not for dispossessing the kulaks but raising the level of agriculture in order to have more grain for export to pay for imports of machinery, which in turn would develop agriculture in a virtuous circle, the only realistic path to industrialization. But though Sokolnikov backed the Stalin-Bukharin Central Committee majority against the opposition in economic policy, he backed the latter against the Central Committee in their critique of the absence of party democracy and the concentration of Stalin’s power.335

The published stenogram carried only the bare bones of Sokolnikov’s speech, but the unpublished version contains the details. Of the tendentious characterizations of Zinoviev and Kamenev in official resolutions and the party press, he said, “since when did you start throwing around such accusatory expressions?” Sokolnikov was interrupted repeatedly—“Give us facts!”—but he persisted, stating he could not imagine the politburo without Kamenev and Zinoviev, and demanding the politburo, not the secretariat, run the country. He further stated that Stalin, as general secretary, should not concurrently sit in the politburo. “I have absolutely no feelings of hostility, personal or political, toward Comrade Stalin—absolutely none,” Sokolnikov stated. “I must say this because people are claiming that our relationship is dictated by personal hostility. It is not, and I do not doubt that for the entire party, the work of Comrade Stalin brings the most enormous benefit.” Against accusations that talk of changing the general secretary amounted to a coup, Sokolnikov stated matter-of-factly, “Could it be that at the congress we cannot discuss a question that any provincial party organization can discuss: namely who will be the secretary?” Sokolnikov concluded with a challenge: if “comrade Stalin” wants to enjoy “the kind of trust comrade Lenin had,” then “Win that trust, comrade Stalin!”336

Stalin’s power—its extent and legitimacy—dominated much of the rest of the congress. Voroshilov stated that “it is clear either nature or fate allows Comrade Stalin to formulate questions more successfully than any other member of the politburo. Comrade Stalin—and I confirm this—is the principal member of the politburo.”337 Zinoviev spoke again, and invoked the Testament. “Without Vladimir Ilich it became clear to everyone that the secretariat of the Central Committee would acquire absolutely decisive significance,” he stated, in the language of the letters he had sent to Stalin from the cave meeting. “Everyone thought, how could we do things . . . so that we had a well-known balance of forces and did not commit big political mistakes. . . . At that time, some kind of personal confrontations ripened—and rather sharp confrontations—with comrade Stalin.”338 This allowed Stalin to quip, “And I did not know that in our party to this day there are cave people!”

Sycophants leapt to dismiss talk of a Stalin personal dictatorship.339 “Now—about that ‘boundless power’ of the secretariat and the general secretary,” said Sergei Gusev, whom Stalin named to head the central apparatus department overseeing newspapers. “Look what experience says about this. Was there abuse of this power or not? Prove even one fact of abuse of this power. Who put forward such a fact of abuse? We, the members of the Central Control Commission at the meetings of the politburo systematically watch over the work of the politburo secretariat and, in part, the work of the general secretary. Did we see abuse of this ‘boundless power’? No, we did not see such abuses of power.”340 When a delegate from Leningrad complained of the pervasiveness of denunciations, such that “a friend cannot tell his closest friend the thoughts in his soul,” Gusev shot back: “Lenin taught us that every party member should be a Chekist, that is, should observe and denounce. . . . If we suffer from anything, it is not denunciations but non-denunciations.”341

Momentous policy issues were also broached. Stalin’s report invoked “peaceful coexistence” with the capitalists, a phrase that had been born with the regime itself, but whereas some figures, such as Litvinov, deputy foreign affairs commissar, took it to connote joint efforts toward the prevention of any war—socialism as peace for all—Stalin maintained that because international conflicts were at bottom economic, he expected, indeed hoped, the capitalist powers would clash among themselves. The congress resolution alluded to only “a certain period of ‘peaceful coexistence’ between the world of the bourgeoisie and the world of the proletariat.”342 Meanwhile, the Soviet Union was hemorrhaging gold to import machinery and food and support the exchange rate of the chervonets, policies that were unsustainable; Stalin played both sides, echoing Skolonikov’s insistence on “a positive trade balance, restraint in the pace of industrialization and the importance of avoiding inflation,” but accusing the finance commissariat of trying to keep the Soviet Union in economic dependence on the West.343 Stalin’s corrections to Bukharin’s text for the congress stressed a vague coming technical rearmament of agriculture with machines and mysterious “all-encompassing support” among peasants for collectivized agriculture. Stalin’s version was approved at the congress.344 The congress also resolved to create, somehow, a world-class military industry.345

Stalin’s concluding speech, on December 23, was priceless, asserting that Zinoviev and Kamenev “demand the blood of comrade Bukharin,” but “we shall not give you that blood.” He continued: “We did not agree with Zinoviev and Kamenev because we knew that a policy of cutting off members was fraught with great dangers for the party, that the method of cutting off, the method of bloodletting—and they were asking for blood—is dangerous and contagious. Today one person is cut off, tomorrow another, the next day a third—but what will remain of the party? (Appaluse)”346

A resolution condemned the Leningrad delegation for “the attempts to undermine the unity of our Leninist party.”347 Congress delegates supported Stalin not only because he had appointed them, ward-boss style, and they could recognize his commanding power, but also because back home they had a common foe—“oppositionists” (i.e., rivals to themselves)—and Stalin proactively helped them solidify their power locally.348 In the elections to a new Central Committee, there were 217 votes against Kamenev, 224 against Zinoviev, 87 against Stalin, and 83 against Bukharin.349 Trotsky was not on the slate. He would never attend another Party Congress. Beforehand, some of his supporters had been advocating a bloc with Zinoviev and Kamenev against Stalin—after all, Zinoviev and Kamenev now admitted that the “Trotskyites” had been right all along—but other Trotsky loyalists urged keeping a distance from either side. Trotsky had met secretly with Zinoviev and Kamenev, but nothing resulted.350 Hearsay accounts have Stalin, just prior to the congress, seeking the assistance of Trotsky’s faction to destroy Zinoviev.351 If true, it was not because Stalin needed Trotsky’s help, but to sow further discord among the oppositionists. At the congress Stalin loyalists (Mikoyan, Yaroslavsky) praised Trotsky against Zinoviev and Kamenev. Trotsky, for his part, said nothing when Zinoviev invoked Lenin’s Testament. Sitting in the congress presidium, he kept silent even when addressed directly. Over the nearly two weeks of sessions, he made a single intervention. Most remarkably, Trotsky failed to react to Kamenev’s bold, courageous denunciation of Stalin’s personal dictatorship. “The explosion was absolutely unexpected by me,” Trotsky would write. “During the congress, I waited in uncertainty, because the whole situation had changed. It appeared absolutely unclear to me.”352

AND NOW, ONE

In January 1926, Voroshilov, without having served as a candidate politburo member, became a full member, the only military man under Stalin ever to do so. Molotov and Kalinin were promoted to full membership as well, raising the voting members to nine. Kamenev was demoted to candidate member, joining Dzierzynski and three Stalin protégés (Rudzutaks, Petrovsky, Uglanov). Stalin removed Sokolnikov as a candidate politburo member and finance commissar. Sokolnikov’s wife, Serebryakova, observed that “Stalin did not once and for all break relations with Sokolnikov. They saw each other less often.”353 Sokolnikov’s policies of tight money and accumulation of gold reserves were formally reconfirmed at a politburo meeting, but without him to fight tooth and nail against the industrial lobby, monetary emissions appear to have jumped.354 Kamenev was named commissar of trade over his vehement objections (“I do not know this stuff,” he wrote to the Central Committee), payback for his volcanic speech.355 Zinoviev’s machine in Leningrad presented a bigger challenge, and Stalin sent in an expansive commission led by Molotov and Voroshilov, as well as squads of Communist Youth League activists. Raucous party meetings were held at Leningrad’s universities and big factories. “Yesterday I was at the Three Angle Factory, a collective of 2,200,” Sergei Kirov, Stalin’s appointee to take over the Leningrad party, wrote to his close friend Orjonikidze on January 16, still using the letterhead of the Azerbaijan party. “There was an incredible fracas, such as I had not seen since the October [1917] days. I did not even imagine that a meeting like that of party members was possible. At times it got to the point of real smashing of faces. I’m telling you, I’m not exaggerating.”356 To ensure passage of the anti-Zinoviev resolutions, Molotov spewed threats: “son-of-a-bitch, saboteur, counterrevolutionary, I’ll turn you into dust, I’ll force you before the Central Control Commission.”357

Kirov begged Stalin to allow him to return to Baku, but he was indispensable to Stalin in Leningrad.358 During his first year there, Kirov would go out to almost every single Leningrad factory—more than 180 total—admit he was weak in theory, and win people over with his simplicity and directness. “I discovered for the first time that Kirov was a wonderful orator,” one eyewitness wrote, adding that Kirov’s oratory “was not distinguished by particular depth, but it was full of allegory, metaphors, comparisons, folk sayings. I sensed that he spoke sincerely.”359

Kamenev clung to a compromise from Stalin’s side, telling a March 18, 1926, politburo meeting, “At the congress, when I used the phrase that Stalin cannot unite around his person the Bolshevik general staff and when the congress noisily protested this and gave Stalin a standing ovation, I could have cut off this ovation if I had said that I was only repeating the words of Ilich.” Stalin interjected: “Why did you not say it?” Kamenev: “Because I did not want to employ such methods.”360 And to think this was the Bolshevik who in 1904 had given Stalin a copy of Machiavelli in Russian translation. Kamenev was almost as much a gift to Stalin as Trotsky, and even more than Zinoviev.

To sow additional discord Stalin went so far as to meet one on one with Trotsky, even as the calumnies continued to rain down on Trotsky in the party press under Stalin’s control.361 Kamenev, in parallel, invited Trotsky to a private meeting in his Kremlin apartment with Zinoviev, their first such gathering in three years, and flattered him: “It is enough for you and Zinoviev to appear on the same platform, and the party will find its true Central Committee.”362 They found common cause mimicking Stalin’s accent and body movements, and wrote nearly apologetic statements to each other. But a Trotsky supporter recalled objecting, “How could we sit at the same table with the bureaucrats who had hunted and slandered us, who had murdered the principles and ideas of the party?”363 Trotsky, for his part, traveling incognito (he shaved his goatee), picked up and left for two months of medical treatment in Berlin.364 Many years later, commenting on the machinations of early 1926, he would quote one of his supporters: “Neither with Stalin nor with Zinoviev; Stalin will cheat, and Zinoviev will run.”365

Stalin traveled to liberated Leningrad himself, and on April 12 delivered a report to the local party on a recent Central Committee plenum. The journalist Pyotr Boldovkin, known as Chagin, was summoned to Kirov’s apartment, where he found Stalin, too. Chagin handed over the proofs of Stalin’s speech he was working on and made to depart, but Kirov and his wife, Maria Markus, invited him to stay for supper, along with the others. Chagin recalled that Kirov said, “‘It would be hard without Lenin, of course, but we have the party, the Central Committee, the politburo and they will lead the country along the Leninist path.’ Stalin paced the room and said, ‘Yes, this is true—the party, the CC, the politburo. But consider, the people understand little in this. For centuries the people in Russia were under a tsar. The Russian people are tsarist. For many centuries the Russian people, especially the Russian peasants, have been accustomed to one person being at the head. And now there should be one.’”366

MENACING TURNS

Three years of clandestine military cooperation with Germany had done little to boost Soviet weapons production, but in yet another push for a breakthrough, Józef Unszlicht, the deputy military commissar for armaments and a German-speaking Pole, led a delegation to Berlin in spring 1926 seeking a vast expansion of joint German-Soviet production on Soviet territory: tanks, heavy artillery, machine guns, precision optics, field telephones, radios.367 But at a grand reception on March 30, 1926, at the Soviet embassy on Unter den Linden, attended by the German chancellor, foreign minister, and army commander in chief, the German government seemed hesitant, according to the Soviet report, wanting “to reduce their role to that of intermediaries between private German companies and Soviet organizations.”368 German private companies, in turn, preferred to sell weapons, not help potential competitors manufacture them. Herbert von Dirksen, a German foreign ministry official, warned his government that Moscow viewed enhanced military cooperation as “the most persuasive evidence of our wish to continue our relationship with them.”369 But even though the German establishment had become less hopeful about the degree of Versailles Peace revisionism the British would allow, the German government still did not want a deal with Moscow that could be perceived as anti-British, while the continuing illiberal nature of the regime in Moscow, despite the NEP, aroused antipathy in Germany.370 Still, the German nightmare was losing the East without winning the West, and a compromise emerged: the German-Soviet Neutrality and Non-Aggression Pact of April 24, 1926, also known as the Treaty of Berlin, which affirmed the earlier Rapallo agreement: the two states pledged neutrality in the event one was subject to an unprovoked attack by a third party. It sounded like something, but amounted to little, essentially a pledge by Germany not to grant transit rights to another power hostile to the USSR.371 As long as Germany entertained hopes of Western rapprochement, the USSR was a means to that end.372

Stalin had not excluded a deal with Britain, even though he saw it as the bulwark of the global imperialist order, but the global political economy got in the way of resumed trade negotiations. Europe’s collective decision to return to gold at the pre-Great War sterling-gold parity meant a return to the sterling-dollar exchange rate ($4.86), which made British exports expensive. An overvalued currency led to balance-of-payment deficits and an outflow of gold, which tamped down domestic economic activity. Critics saw this as sacrificing industry on the altar of gold, but the obvious solution, devaluation of the pound, was viewed in London’s financial district as tantamount to filing for bankruptcy or inflicting fraud on creditors. Winston Churchill, chancellor of the exchequer, had wondered why the Bank of England governor “shows himself perfectly happy in the spectacle of Britain possessing the finest credit in the world simultaneously with a million and a quarter unemployed,” and claimed he “would rather see Finance less proud and Industry more content.”373 (This provides insight into the debates inside the Soviet Union between Sokolnikov, backed by Stalin, and the industrial lobby of Pyatakov.) The gold standard and fiscal austerity hit British mining especially hard. The Great War had hindered exports and allowed other countries to develop their domestic coal industries, while Germany was exporting “free” coal to pay its Versailles Treaty obligations, leading to a drop in world prices at a time when British productivity was declining at overworked seams. A major structural adjustment to remove excess capacity was unavoidable, but British miners and their families constituted perhaps 10 percent of Britain’s population, and their pay had already fallen. Some mine owners were ready to compromise, others were eager to abolish the national bargaining framework hammered out in the Great War and impose terms; the Conservative Tory government ended up colluding with the more intransigent owners and, on May 1, 1926, around 1 million miners were locked out. Dealt an unwinnable hand, British miners decided to fight rather than settle.374 In solidarity, more than a million and a half other British workers launched the first (and only) general strike in British history on May 3, which disrupted the entire economy, including food production and distribution.375 On May 4, the politburo resolved to support the British workers financially, with a notice published in the press.376 Zinoviev, in Pravda, enthused about “great events” in Britain.377 But the general strike fizzled, and though the miners’ strike would drag on for months, it would end with the wage cuts in place. The Soviet Union had gone out on a limb and in the bargain risked dashing hopes for resuming talks toward an improved bilateral trade deal.

Events in Poland were the most directly menacing. Its parliamentary system saw a parade of no less than fourteen different cabinets up to May 1926, when the zloty, the Polish currency, collapsed.378 The Soviet-German Treaty of Berlin, despite its modesty, raised the nightmare scenario in Warsaw of a return to partitioning at the hands of powerful neighbors. With Dzierzynski away, finishing up a holiday in early May and about to travel to Ukraine for a month—he instructed Yagoda in Moscow to keep an eye on the lowly emigre Alexander Guchkov, the former war minister in the Provisional Government—the retired Polish marshal Józef Piłsudski, a private citizen, left his home on the morning of May 12, rendezvoused with troops loyal to him, and marched on nearby Warsaw.379 The marshal expected his show of force and peacock-feather prestige to compel the president to dismiss the week-old center right government; instead, the president arrived to confront Piłsudski on the bridge into Warsaw. The intended bloodless coup degenerated into skirmishes. Piłsudski, unnerved, lucked out: on May 13, the commander of government forces, rather than press his tactical victories to decisive conclusion, waited for reinforcements, a blunder made fatal when Piłsudski’s former associates in the Socialist Party—not the army he relied upon—conspired with railroad workers to stymie troops loyal to the right-wing government from arriving while shepherding through reinforcements loyal to Piłsudski. On May 14, the president and prime minister stepped down. Piłsudski had been dismissive of the idea of enacting a coup. “If I were to break the law, I would be opening the door to all sorts of adventurers to make coups and putsches,” he had told a journalist some years back, in remarks that were published on May 27.380 Now he was master of Poland again. The Assembly elected him president, but he declined, instead reigning as commander in chief and war minister. Political parties, trade unions, and the press endured as Poland’s semidemocracy became a soft dictatorship.

The British government, which had not been involved in the coup, mostly welcomed it.381 Already strained Soviet-Polish relations worsened.382 Tukhachevsky was dispatched to Minsk and Alexander Yegorov to Kharkov to be at the ready should Piłsudski suddenly repeat his eastward march of several years back, while the Soviet press agency TASS denied rumors of Red Army troop massing near Polish frontiers as a typical Polish provocation.383 The marshal insisted to the Soviet envoy in Warsaw that the Russians must consider him stupid if they believed he wanted a war, from which Poland could gain nothing.384 Truth be told, it did seem improbable that Poland could fulfill the role of a significant European power when sandwiched between a hostile Germany and hostile Soviet Union, itself antagonistic to Lithuania, scornful of Czechoslovakia, cool even to its ally France, and discriminatory against its large ethnic Ukrainian and Belorussian populations, while harboring territorial designs on Soviet Ukraine and Soviet Belorussia. But Foreign Affairs Commissar Chicherin deemed Piłsudski “unpredictable.” Greater Romania, too, was a worry, as the Romanian national project radicalized amid the addition of many minorities as a result of the Great War. It acquired the third most powerful fascist movement after Italy and Germany, and its antiurban, anti-Semitic nationalist ideology folded in anti-Bolshevism.385 Romania refused even to grant diplomatic recognition to the USSR. To be sure, Romania was just a 17-million peasant nation and Poland just a 32-million peasant nation. But they signed a treaty of mutual aid in 1926, and the combination of the two implacably anti-Soviet states, in alliance with France—or egged on by some other more furtive imperialist machination—set Moscow on edge.

Stalin also had to worry about an exposed eastern flank. Japan had agreed in 1925 to diplomatic recognition and to vacate northern Sakhalin, while holding on to the southern half of the island and receiving an extensive lease for oil and coal extraction in the north, while the Soviet Union confirmed Japanese supremacy in Manchuria.386 But protracted negotiations over fishery convention and timber concession highlighted the fundamental lack of comity, and in Moscow few doubted Japan would take advantage of any possible complications in the Soviet Union’s international situation. In the Soviet Far East, the population of ethnic Koreans, whose homeland had been annexed into the Japanese empire, had almost tripled to nearly 170,000 by 1926, reaching one quarter of the total population of the USSR’s strategic Vladivostok region.387 The Soviets knew the Japanese cultivated spies among this enormous East Asian population on its soil. Stalin permitted formation of a Korean national district and scores of Korean national townships, with Korean-language schools, but the regime also began discussing deportation of the concentrated Koreans away from the border, indicating the feeling of vulnerability.388 In the European part of Soviet territory, the number of ethnic Poles was estimated at between 2.5 and 4 million, and at least some of the many disaffected among them were assumed to be collaborating with Polish intelligence.389 Additionally, there were ethnic Finns on the Soviet side of the border with Finland. The USSR was hardly alone in suspecting disloyalty among its ethnic population with coethnics on the other side of an international border, but Soviet borders were incomparably vast.390

• • •

LENIN’S DEATH brought him back to life for the regime, and especially for Stalin. Trotsky’s political position showed itself to have been dependent on Lenin being physically around.391 But even had Trotsky been more adept politically, his biography (a former Menshevik, an intellectual), his personality (condescending, aloof), and his position (war commissar) afforded him little chance to succeed Lenin, especially against a formidable rival. Of course, in Trotsky’s mind Stalin was a deformation conjured into being by “the tired radicals, by the bureaucrats, by the NEPmen, the kulaks, the upstarts, the sneaks, by all the worms that are crawling out of the upturned soil of the manured revolution.”392 This, of course, was exactly how Stalin would characterize his nemesis. Had there been no Trotsky, Stalin would have had to invent him. Or more precisely, Stalin invented the Trotsky he needed, a task that looks simple only in hindsight. Stalin defeated Trotsky on the plane where the Georgian was perceived as most vulnerable yet proved strong—ideology. His propagation of a persuasive, accessible Leninism, which also happened to afford him the role of guarantor, was virtuoso, if unscrupulous in its plagiarism. Stalin certainly marshaled all his bureaucratic advantages and maneuvered with skill, but he also studied assiduously. “I must add a few words to try to explain Stalin’s effectiveness as a writer and orator, which gave him an edge over other orators and writers who were more skilled,” one contemporary Soviet literary critic remarked. “Kamenev, Zinoviev, Bukharin, even Trotsky were much less familiar with the texts of Lenin’s writings than Stalin. . . . Unlike them, Stalin studied Lenin’s texts and knew the printed Lenin intimately. He had no trouble selecting a quotation from Lenin if he needed it.”393

Stalin positioned himself as honoring Lenin’s “behest.” He could have made a different choice, like Trotsky, and presented himself as Lenin’s equal. Stalin had the ego for that, too. But he opted for the more strategic stance, the appearance of humility, the mere pupil, and excelled at its realization.394 Strange to say, Stalin demonstrated a far better capacity for empathy than Trotsky as well. Later, Trotsky would viciously mock the functionary and Stalin loyalist Lazar Kaganovich, failing to appreciate the uneducated Kaganovich’s immense organizational talents and perspicacity. Kaganovich—who had once admired Trotsky—showed himself to be the more incisive person, sizing up Trotsky as supremely talented in public speaking and even organization (referring to the civil war), but woefully inferior to Stalin in strategy.395 Stalin was indeed a strategist, improvising dexterously in the face of sudden opportunities, thereby seizing the advantage, including in the case of the colossal opportunity presented by upstart self-made types like Kaganovich and countless other new men like him. But Stalin emerged a victor with a grudge, roiling with self-pity, resentment, victimhood. Many scholars have attributed such feelings to an inferiority complex, an assertion that may or may not be true. But what is certain is that he exercised his personal dictatorship amid a profound structural hostility: Stalin was the disciple of a man who seemed to have called for his removal. This state of siege mirrored the position of the revolution as a whole.

Stalin’s geopolitical vision of a Soviet Union able to avoid entanglement in what he saw as the inevitable next intraimperialist war, which would produce new revolutions, was put in doubt by the apparent rapprochement of the two capitalist blocs at Locarno, as well as by the hostile posture of newly independent Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, expanded Romania, and Japan. Stalin entered the summer of 1926 amid profound disquiet over close-neighbor enmity, to say nothing of the ambiguous trajectory of the New Economic Policy. And the cursed Testament continued to hound him.