Five
LENIN’S HEIR
The New Style
The Russian people quickly discovered the harshness of the new order. Born of what in 1920 Bertrand Russell called ‘an impatient philosophy’, the Bolshevik government would brook no compromise. The Tsar and his family had been under arrest since March 1917 and in the summer of 1918, with the Civil War already under way, they were being held in the Urals. Whether to prevent Nicholas from being made a rallying point for the White movement, or to fulfil the Bolshevik vow to rid the country of monarchy forever, Lenin ordered their murder. It duly took place on 16 July 1918 in the town of Yekaterinburg.
At the end of August 1918 an attempt was made on Lenin’s life, allegedly by a Socialist Revolutionary – a near-blind, unbalanced woman who was arrested and shot within four days. Having survived two bullets in the neck and shoulder, Lenin launched a campaign of violence against all real and suspected political opponents. The Red Terror, he told his party, would emulate the violent rule of the French Revolution. As enemies of religion, the Bolsheviks were savage in their treatment of all clergy, especially of the Orthodox priests who still exercised residual moral authority over the peasantry, at least.
The peasants themselves also felt the sharp edge of Bolshevik rule. Lenin’s policy of ‘War Communism’ was a brutal means of forcibly collecting grain and other produce from the countryside to feed the Red Army and the factory workers during the Civil War.
In May 1922 he told his Justice Commissar that Mensheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries ‘and the like’ should be shot, whatever activities they were engaged in, and that these activities should be linked in some way to the ‘international bourgeoisie and its struggle against us. . . . ’1 Many anti-Bolshevik revolutionaries suffered this fate, or were sent to prison or concentration camp. Relatively few were lucky enough to obtain an exit permit and leave the country.
Surrounded by hostile states, a mood of embattled paranoia developed in the Soviet government, continuing the same outlook of defensive belligerence that had characterized the Leninists before 1917. Class war under Lenin meant class destruction and its obverse, class loyalty. Stalin and his comrades were in complete harmony with this outlook, and when he needed a compliant force to carry out government policy, he had no difficulty in finding it. Lenin had decreed that the bourgeoisie would find no hiding place in the new Russia: they would either work or perish. Stalin developed this idea to perfection by ensuring that every citizen was inscribed in one party approved organization or another. These would dole out the due allocation of food, money, living space and any other minimal benefits the state felt it could afford.
Two conflicting traditions had characterized Russian social democracy, and their continued existence after 1917 helps to explain Stalin’s victory over his rivals. Dominated by intellectuals, the party leadership was mainly preoccupied with policy and theory, and as a consequence factions and the threat of splits were endemic. On the other hand, among the rank and file the norm was to accept central authority, support the leadership, avoid splits and concentrate on practical matters, i.e. follow the ‘party line’.
Throughout the 1920s the regime faced the task of constructing the new order – ‘building socialism’. No blueprint existed and every policy was the subject of intense debate. As General Secretary, Stalin was well placed not only to observe shifts of opinion, but also to bring the rank and file behind the point of view he himself favoured. And when he spoke it was always in the name of the ‘Centre’, the party organization. The rank and file would accept this as the official line, which in effect it was.
Late in 1922 Stalin precipitated a crisis in the leadership which might have blighted his ambition to succeed Lenin: he had a row with Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, on the telephone. Lenin was outraged and began thinking about who should succeed him. By now it was plain that, following a series of strokes, his infirmity would prevent him from returning to full participation in the management of the country. Therefore, between December 1922 and January 1923, he set down his thoughts on the personal qualities of his entourage in a letter to the party leadership which has become known as Lenin’s ‘Testament’.
Lenin commented on six senior Bolsheviks, each of them having positive characteristics, but none being ideal. Trotsky, though he might be ‘the most able man in the present Central Committee’, was also distinguished by ‘his too far-reaching self-confidence and a disposition to be far too attracted by the purely administrative side of affairs’. With Stalin’s personality in mind, Lenin clearly thought attitude was of prime importance. As for Stalin, ‘having become General Secretary, he has concentrated enormous power in his hands, and I am not sure that he always knows how to use that power with sufficient caution’. He warned that the clash of personalities between Trotsky and Stalin might lead to a split. Of Kamenev and Zinoviev he wrote that the ‘weakness’ they had shown in October 1917, while ‘not accidental, ought to be as little used against them as the “non-Bolshevism” of Trotsky’. Bukharin, described by Lenin as ‘the most valuable theoretician of the party’, and ‘also . . . the favourite of the whole party’, was nevertheless dismissed as too ‘scholastic’, his ‘theoretical views can only with the greatest reservations be regarded as fully Marxist’. And Pyatakov was, like Trotsky, too absorbed by administrative questions to be relied on in political matters.
Ten days later he added a postscript condemning Stalin as too rude, and urging the Congress ‘to find a way to remove Stalin . . . and appoint another man who in all respects differs from Stalin only in superiority, namely, more patient, more loyal, more polite, and more attentive to comrades, less capricious, etc’.2
Buried within Lenin’s confused and contradictory views there may have been an unexpressed intention to persuade the Congress to appoint a collective leadership whose combined qualities would adequately replace his own: an immodest presentation of his own political skills, no doubt, and a hopelessly divisive inheritance to leave his comrades.
Trotsky was sure that Lenin wanted him as his successor, and he was stiffened in his own contempt for Stalin by Lenin’s strictures. As for Lenin’s criticism of his character, it was merely a device, he believed, to deflect the hostility of Trotsky’s rivals.
Stalin could not possibly misinterpret Lenin’s view of himself, and henceforth his hatred of Trotsky would mount to murderous heights. When Lenin died on 21 January 1924, Trotsky was convalescing in Georgia. Stalin cabled the news to him, and when Trotsky replied that he wanted to attend the funeral, Stalin’s answer was, ‘you won’t be in time. The Politburo thinks that in your state of health you should go to Sukhumi.’3 In fact the funeral took place a day later than Stalin had indicated and Trotsky was absent unnecessarily.
Stalin had established an important precedent that would be observed on every future occasion when the party leader died: the Politburo member in charge of the funeral arrangements would invariably become the successor. Throughout its history, the Soviet government established no formal or constitutional procedure for the succession of the party leader. Instead, whoever was given the task of arranging his funeral enacted a public ritual of inheritance. Also, in his funeral oration Stalin swore in the party’s name repeated oaths to uphold Lenin’s ‘commandments’, thus in effect proclaiming himself as their custodian. In due course, the official ideology of Marxism-Leninism would be transformed into Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism.
Debate and Dissonance
From now until 1928, Stalin used his position as General Secretary to organize support within the Central Committee Secretariat, and hence also among the delegates who were selected by the Secretariat to attend party conferences and congresses where policy was made and ratified. When Stalin’s rivals criticized him, they were placed in the position of appearing to undermine party unity.
Lenin’s ‘Testament’ was not made public, partly because Stalin’s rivals were not united, but mainly because Stalin was already perceived by the party organization as a stabilizing force, loyal to party policy and not a loud advocate of revolutionary adventures abroad in the name of the world revolution.
Trotsky was the chief spokesman for that school of thought. Having created the ‘theory of permanent revolution’ in 1905, he now argued that the regime must focus its efforts on promoting socialist revolution abroad wherever the opportunity presented itself. Indeed, the Politburo had been secretly sending large sums of hard currency and gold to foreign communist parties with just this aim. But ‘world revolution’ was not a popular policy among the rank and file, let alone the population at large: they were tired of revolutionary zeal and looked forward to some material relief from years of deprivation. The belief was widespread that the regime should now devote its energies to rebuilding the economy and laying the foundations of a socialist society inside Soviet Russia.
Since the new regime came into being in 1917, reorganization of the national economy had naturally been of primary concern. When, by 1921, it was obvious that War Communism had failed, fostering discontent and even serious armed rebellion, Lenin introduced the New Economic Policy (NEP). This was essentially a compromise with the peasants, allowing a market to flourish in agricultural goods and small trade with the aim of rekindling the ruined domestic economy on the one hand, and accumulating surpluses to finance an ambitious programme of industrialization on the other.
By the mid-1920s, however, the coexistence of even a limited free market with a state-owned heavy industrial sector was generating serious friction. Moreover, the strain on official ideology and the intellectual tolerance of the party reached a critical level. Lenin had uttered contradictory remarks about the NEP, not making it clear whether it was only meant to provide a breathing space or whether it would continue for a long time. In any case, the NEP became both impractical and politically unacceptable.
Stalin meanwhile had been building his own position within the leadership and, no less important, his reputation in the party in general. Continuing the popularization of Lenin’s ideas that had brought him to the leader’s attention originally, when Lenin died Stalin published the lectures he had given to the Higher Party School as The Foundations of Leninism and Problems of Leninism. The concise, pithy style he had learnt in the seminary a quarter of a century earlier now stood him in good stead as a theorist who could convey (Lenin’s) complex ideas to ordinary workers. Other Bolshevik intellectuals had been similarly engaged, but they did not have the advantage of the party’s ‘imprimatur’ as General Secretary. Stalin was becoming the popular voice of the late Lenin, the interpreter of his word, and as such was consolidating his place at the pinnacle of power. He was also laying the foundation of his ‘cult of personality’.
Stalin also caught the mood of the party when he declared that it was indeed possible to build socialism in the Soviet Union alone, and when Trotsky and his supporters attacked him, they were accused of defeatism. The charge found a genuine echo at grassroots level. In short, Stalin was unassailable and by the end of 1927 Kamenev, Zinoviev and Trotsky, who together led the main opposition, were expelled from the Central Committee. In February 1929 Trotsky was deported from the USSR. Stalin was now unchallenged as ‘the Lenin of today’.