Stalin died some fifty years ago. New sources have become available and fine books are in the process of being written. Notwithstanding this wealth of material, however, it remains difficult to get the full measure of his character inasmuch as assessments and first-hand testimony offer contrasting portraits and snapshots. Some present a matter-of-fact, well-informed, often polite, and even benevolent leader – in other words, a rational statesman. Others offer a cold, manipulative tactician. Yet others depict a control freak, distrusting everyone and everything, an irate, vindictive monster who could barely contain his fits of rage; or worse, a capricious madman who believed the massacres he committed were his greatest political invention. Ham actor on a grand scale or skilful organizer? For many, he was nothing but a pathetic figure who made a mess of everything. Was he talented, even a genius (however evil)? Or just a vulgar and perverse mediocrity?
This kaleidoscopic picture is further complicated by the fact that observers who had pronounced on the subject in one setting subsequently revised their judgement when they saw the same man in different situations.
Such diametrically opposed assessments (some of which do reflect the reality and nature of Stalin) are bewildering. Given, however, that we are dealing with a figure known for meticulously staging his appearances, a case can be made for the idea that all the various Stalins glimpsed by observers were authentic. At all events, we must state the obvious: the whole phenomenon had a beginning and an end, dictated not merely by the banal fact of mortality, but also because the phase of systemic aberration the USSR endured under Stalin had its natural limits. This obliges us to reinsert Stalin into the historical flux from which he emerged, to which he contributed, and from which he departed in dying a natural death. This tortuous, bloody, intensely dramatic and deeply personal path was also one component of a historical ‘motherboard’ – in other words, it was also an impersonal product. Some of these aspects will be clarified here; others will be broached in Part Three.
We shall begin by querying what is usually regarded as incontestable. Stalin was a member of the Bolshevik Party, a Leninist like everyone else in the leadership. Or so it appeared. He did indeed belong to the leading circles, was a member of the Central Committee, and later of the Politburo. Especially during the Civil War, he served as Lenin’s man on special assignments. And yet, intellectually and politically Stalin was different from most of the historical figures in the Bolshevik movement. The other Bolshevik leaders were often political analysts, who knew the West well because they had lived there. More ‘European’, easier to ‘read’, they were interested in theoretical questions and intellectually superior to Stalin. He was less well-educated, with little experience of the outside world. Capable of leading discussions and conducting arguments, he was no orator. He was secretive, intensely self-centred, cautious and scheming. His highly sensitive ego could be soothed, if by anything, only by a sense of his own greatness, which had to be unreservedly acknowledged by others.
Acquiring personal power seemed to Stalin the surest way to compel others to bow to him. Despite his high position (he entered the Politburo on its creation in 1919), he was overshadowed not only by Lenin and Trotsky – the two top-ranking leaders – but also by a pleiad of others who did not know – and could not have conceived – that they would one day have to yield to him completely. Stalin must have compensated for this relative inferiority by mobilizing his own fantasies of greatness and assigning himself a much larger part than he actually played. He did it by gathering around him an expanding group of insignificant acolytes and sycophants like Voroshilov or Budenny; the abler but still uncouth Ordzhonikidze; the skilful but very young Mikoyan; and, somewhat later, Molotov, who became, perhaps unwittingly at the outset, the future dictator’s main support and a high priest of his cult.
These features of a profoundly authoritarian personality were given free rein during the Civil War – an experience that contributed considerably to Stalin’s vision of the form that the new state emerging from its ravages should take and of how it should be governed. At the same time, such ideas represented an ingredient of the psychological urge for self-aggrandizement. In short, one cannot but be struck by the difference between his personality and what we know about the other members of the ‘old guard’, Lenin included. Stalin’s world was initially quite naturally shaped by the traditions of his native Caucasus, and subsequently by his experience of the depths of popular Russia. By contrast, the impact on him of the Second and Third Internationals was minimal, if not non-existent. Accordingly, it was no wonder that he and his intimates emerged from the Civil War with a quite different approach to what should be done in Russia from that of Lenin, Trotsky, Kamenev and their ilk, whether the issue was their conception of socialism or the kind of state that should run the country. Thus, two very different political and cultural universes coexisted within what was presented as ‘Bolshevism’, and this coexistence endured as long as everyone shared the same key objective. Once the regime defeated the ‘Whites’, the two divergent orientations surfaced and clashed: one concentrated on equipping Russia with a state that defended the interests of the majority of the population; the other focused its strategy on the state itself – an approach shared by many in Russia, not least in the ranks of Civil War veterans.
At this stage, dictatorship was the only available option. The Civil War had temporarily concealed the fact that the term did not denote a single unequivocal reality. This is far from being the case: dictatorial regimes come in different shapes and colours, just like other political regimes – including democracies, which all too often fluctuate, and sometimes dangerously, between authoritarian, liberal and social-democratic variants. Once peace had returned, and the issue was to construct a peacetime state, two antagonistic models came to the fore. The differences revolved around representations of Russia, the type of state power required to handle the nationalities problem, cooperation, the peasantry, party structure, development strategies, and the kind of social transformation to aim at. Two politically opposed camps found themselves within what was supposedly the same party. Predictably, the one that ended up winning preserved the old name for a time. But we know what it became – and how rapidly.
Because for the most part Stalin kept his goals concealed, other party leaders were outmanoeuvred. By the time they realized the trap they had set for themselves, it was too late. Lenin himself was fooled for quite a while. When he finally understood what he was dealing with, again it was too late for effective remedial action. Stalin’s rise was greatly facilitated by the fact that Lenin was seriously ill from late 1920 onwards. On and off medication, subject to extensive treatment, for long periods he had to abandon political activity – especially for much of 1922 and part of 1923. As we have stressed, however, the problem went deeper than ‘deciphering’ Stalin’s personality, for with the latter went a whole vision of the political line to be pursued in future years. Implicit in his political behaviour, this had not yet been explicitly formulated. Even so, the two different programmes emerged very clearly during ‘Lenin’s last struggle’, as attested mainly (but not exclusively) in his so-called ‘testament’. Stalin’s position became evident in his plans for the constitutional form of the USSR, which were debated and adopted in 1922–3 under his rule (he had become party general-secretary in 1922). The documents relating to the construction of the USSR contain the most revealing material about the clash between Lenin and Stalin, even though the polemic went much further and deeper than the nationalities problem in the Soviet state. It ran virtually the whole gamut of system-building: ideology, the respective roles of party and state, economic policy, and especially the strategically crucial issue of policies towards the peasantry.1
Materials that became available after perestroika enable us to appreciate not only how far-reaching the differences were, but also the profound personal hostility that had developed between Lenin and the figure he had himself selected as general-secretary – a post that at the time was not meant to have the importance it subsequently acquired. Stalin’s hostility towards Lenin and Lenin’s growing irritation with Stalin – a deepening personal and ideological divide that was concealed from all but a few insiders – can be sampled, or rather guessed at, from a previously unknown letter by Stalin to Lenin, written some time in 1921.2 This letter, which deals with the party apparatus, Lenin’s wife Krupskaya, and the Politburo, offers a rare insight into how Stalin’s political mind worked. As it transpires from the text, the story began with a complaint from Krupskaya to Lenin (she kept her ailing husband informed on many subjects): Stalin had created a large party agitprop department that ‘looks like a full-blown new commissariat’, with virtually the same tasks and objectives as the political education department she headed in the education commissariat, thus undermining it. After carefully reading her memo, Lenin forwarded it to Stalin with his remarks, requesting him not to concern himself with agitprop. Stalin’s reply was that of a kinto – Georgian for ‘street-urchin’ (the nickname he had been given in his youth). He behaved like a petty, insolent intriguer, exploiting the fact that his correspondent was not in the best of health. He denied the figures Krupskaya had given for the number of officials recruited to the department. He claimed that he had been forced to take on this department, but now refused to give it up, ‘explaining’ to Lenin that it was in his interests for him to stay on since, if not, ‘Trotsky will conclude that Lenin is only doing this because of Krupskaya’. In short, Stalin refused to knuckle under.
The ruse is obvious. It was not, of course, a question of what Trotsky would say. It was Stalin’s way of telling Lenin that he knew the story came from Krupskaya; and of giving him to understand that faced with the formidable Trotsky, who at the time was in conflict with Lenin on a series of issues, the latter, weakened by illness, could not be certain of commanding a majority in the Politburo without Stalin’s help.
Nineteen twenty-one witnessed more of these skirmishes, which are just as revealing. The Trotsky card that Stalin played to contain Lenin emerged during this period, which was dominated by a rather sterile dispute about the role of trade unions between a Trotsky-led minority and Lenin’s majority in the Politburo. Trotsky, who had been rebuffed that year when he proposed a change of course to an NEP-type system, could see no other way of handling the economic devastation than by temporarily persisting with quasi-military methods for mobilizing manpower. For his part, Lenin could not as yet envisage a new economic policy, but wanted to allow the unions, rooted in the working class, greater autonomy. The two factions manoeuvred to win over a majority of delegates to the upcoming Eleventh Party Congress. As Mikoyan testified in his autobiography Tak Bylo (‘It happened like this’), if Lenin participated in some of the meetings held to refine tactics to counter Trotsky, it was Stalin who conducted the whole operation.
Making common cause with Lenin against his bête noire – Trotsky – seemed to Stalin a good way of manipulating the former. And this is what he was also up to in the ‘Krupskaya affair’. But it is possible that these machinations – and Stalin’s grudge against Lenin himself – developed even earlier, during the Civil War, but had passed unnoticed because of urgent military tasks and the fact that the chief target of Stalin’s intrigues at the time was Trotsky. Stalin’s total lack of respect and, soon, hatred, for Lenin – this is my point here – were indirectly fed by his obsessive hatred of Trotsky, who stood in the way of Stalin’s self-image as a great military strategist and statesman. The object of numerous derogatory (and often unpublishable) epithets directed at him by Stalin and his supporters, Trotsky was the creator of the Red Army, the People’s Commissar for War, and co-leader of the 1917 revolution – nothing to do with Stalin’s depiction of him. Trotsky’s name was associated with Lenin’s – something Lenin never openly disavowed – and this more than anything else irked Stalin. The incessant intrigues and the pressures he and his acolytes brought to bear on Lenin with the aim of eliminating Trotsky from his military post, but also from the leadership tout court (a story long familiar to biographers of Lenin and Stalin), make this interpretation of Stalin’s attitude plausible.
Apart from a few moments of hesitation, this ‘siege’ of Lenin was unsuccessful. Lenin relied on Trotsky and his prestige. He worked closely with him – and not just on military matters. Moreover, he maintained daily, confident contact with Trotsky’s right-hand man on the Military Revolutionary Council and in the Defence Commissariat – Yefraim Skliansky – who doubtless played the role of trusted intermediary between the two men. Documents dating from the Civil War reveal his absolutely critical importance in the everyday activity of the centre. Yet very little is known about him, or the circumstances of his drowning when boating on a river in 1925.
This close network of relationships was bound to fuel Stalin’s profound hostility towards Lenin. But it only emerged when Lenin was dying and Stalin was already in almost total command. Openly attacking a healthy Lenin would not have suited Stalin’s calculating, cautious character, but with Lenin’s illness – of whose details Stalin was fully informed – things changed. As general-secretary, Stalin was charged by the Central Committee with supervising Lenin’s medical treatment, which allowed him unabashedly to spy on the sick man. Lenin’s secretary, Fotieva, may have reported to Stalin about every piece Lenin dictated to her, even though he had stipulated that they were to remain confidential for the time being. One can imagine Stalin’s state of mind when he realized that Lenin wanted to demote him from his current position and perhaps destroy his political career altogether. If Fotieva did not inform him of this earlier, he learnt it at the same time as the Politburo from the text Lenin delivered to them on the eve of the Twelfth Party Congress for which it was intended. Here Lenin demanded the removal of Stalin from his post and explained why. But at precisely this moment Lenin became totally incapacitated and could no longer be consulted on anything. At the time, Lenin’s demand was known only to the Politburo. Not until Khrushchev thirty-three years later was his text revealed to the Soviet public.
The debate on the place of nationalities in the nascent USSR, which was conducted in the seats and corridors of power, reveals the depth of the disagreements about the future state and the shape it should take. These differences of opinion elicited some extremely sharp reactions from Lenin who, although seriously ill, managed, astonishingly enough, to formulate his own ideas with the utmost clarity.
Stalin’s conception of the future Soviet state was largely shaped by his experience immediately following the revolution, when he was in charge of nationalities. His first government position after 1917 was Commissar for Nationalities, and the first book he published, written before the revolution at Lenin’s request and with Bukharin’s editorial aid, dealt with the ‘national question’. Dabbling in such endlessly complicated and conflict-ridden problems may have convinced him that all those highly diverse, unruly and combative nationalities might at any moment throw a spanner in the works of central government.
Lenin’s last stand on this subject was a manifesto containing the most powerful and clearest analysis he had produced in the entire post-Civil War period. According to him, Stalin wished to give the non-Russian nationalities ‘autonomy’ – meaning that they would become part of Russia (at the time named the RSFSR or Russian Federation) or, in other words, administrative units subordinate to Russia. The debate over this approach, but also about other proposals for the shape of the future state, was fierce; and the clash between Lenin and Stalin on precisely these points was at its epicentre, with far-reaching consequences for the system’s future. This is why it is a story well worth telling.