Stalin: A Biography

17. WITH LENIN

The contretemps between Lenin and Stalin vanished like snow in the sun. The reason was political. In November 1920 Trotski attacked the Soviet trade unions, and suddenly Lenin needed Stalin’s assistance. Conventional trade unionism, according to Trotski, had no place in the revolutionary state; his case was that Sovnarkom safeguarded workers’ interests and that trade unions should be constitutionally subordinated to its commands. This suggestion riled the Workers’ Opposition, which was campaigning to enable the working class to control factories, mines and other enterprises. Lenin objected to the Workers’ Opposition and in practice expected the trade unions to obey the party and government. Yet Trotski’s demand for the formal imposition of this arrangement would affront workers unnecessarily. Lenin vainly tried to get Trotski to back down. Factions gathered around Trotski and Lenin as they wrote furious booklets and addressed noisy meetings. Although Bukharin formed a ‘buffer group’ between the two sides, this group too became a faction. Not only the Workers’ Opposition but also the Democratic Centralists (who, since 1919, had campaigned for a restoration of democratic procedures in party life) entered the fray. The party was enveloped in a bitter conflict lasting the long winter of 1920–1.

Lenin enlisted Stalin to organise supporters in the provinces. Stalin was carrying out the function discharged by Sverdlov in the Brest-Litovsk dispute in 1918. A particular effort was made to discredit the other factions. Party rules were bent but not broken; Lenin knew that Stalin, whom he teased as a ‘wild factionalist’, would do whatever was necessary for victory.¹ The Central Committee Secretariat was led by Preobrazhenski, Krestinski and Serebryakov, who were sympathisers of Trotski and Bukharin. Stalin therefore sent trusted supporters of Lenin into the provinces to drum up a following for him and indicate how to organise the campaign against Trotski. While Stalin arranged things in Moscow, Zinoviev travelled the country giving speeches on Lenin’s behalf. Trotski made a similar tour; but as the time of the Tenth Party Congress approached in March 1921, it was clear that victory would lie with the Leninists. Stalin co-ordinated the faction as its delegates assembled in Moscow. The Leninists drew up their own list of candidates for election to the Central Committee. This was gratifying for Stalin. Trotski, who had been in Lenin’s good books in the Soviet–Polish War, had fallen into disfavour.

Factionalism had distracted the Bolsheviks from recognising a fundamental menace to their power. Garrisons of troops were mutinying. Factory workers in the main Russian industrial cities went on strike. And across the entire state there was trouble with the peasantry. Whole provinces in Ukraine, the Volga region and west Siberia rose against the Bolshevik party dictatorship. The demands of mutineers, strikers and village fighters were broadly the same. They wanted a multi-party democracy and an end to grain requisitioning. The revolt of the Tambov province peasantry at last brought the Politburo to its senses, and on 8 February 1921 its members decided on a momentous change in policy. Grain requisitioning would be replaced by a graduated tax in kind. Peasants would be left to trade the rest of their harvest on local markets. This New Economic Policy would take the sting out of rural discontent and allow the Red Army to mop up rebellions. There would be no political concessions: the objective was to save the Soviet state in its existing form from destruction. A commission was established to draft a full policy for consideration at the Tenth Party Congress. There was no dispute in the Politburo. Measures needed to be changed for disaster to be avoided.

The Party Congress, starting on 8 March, was surprisingly quiet. The New Economic Policy (or NEP) in its rudimentary form was approved almost on the nod and the Leninists won the debate on the trade unions without difficulty. Stalin organised the faction as supporters arrived in Moscow. Criticism from the Workers’ Opposition was easily rebuffed; neither Alexander Shlyapnikov nor Alexandra Kollontai managed to stir the Congress with pleas for the working class to have greater direct influence on policy in the Kremlin and on conditions in the workplace. The reason for the easy victory of Lenin’s faction had little to do with Lenin’s eminence or Stalin’s cunning.² On 28 February the Kronstadt naval garrison, thirty-five miles off the Petrograd coast, had started a mutiny. These sailors in 1917 had been among the party’s most eager supporters. The mutiny shocked the Congress into recognising that the entire Soviet regime was under fundamental threat. Congress delegates volunteered to join the troops sent to suppress the Kronstadters. Trotski led the military offensive on Kronstadt. Unity was everything. Lenin was virtually unopposed when stating that the NEP — a retreat from the economic system of the Civil War years which was becoming known as ‘War Communism’ — should be accompanied by a political clampdown. No factional activity in the party would be permitted and all factions were required to dissolve themselves.

After the Congress, Lenin asked Stalin to secure the control of Lenin’s group over the central party apparatus. Because of his other obligations — in the Politburo, the Orgburo, the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities’ Affairs and the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate — this was not going to be his prime task but would add substantially to his heavy workload. It was with some reluctance that he agreed to supervise the Department of Agitation and Propaganda in the Central Committee Secretariat.³

This aspect of political activity, though, was vital for a ruling party in a state dedicated to imposing a single ideology. Among the problems was the large number of institutions involved. The most influential was the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment, whose deputy leader was Lenin’s wife Nadezhda Krupskaya. Resenting Stalin’s attempt to assert the party’s authority, she appealed to Lenin. Stalin wrote bluntly to Lenin:⁴

What we are dealing with here is either a misunderstanding or a casual approach… I have interpreted today’s note from you to my name (to the Politburo) as you posing the question of my departure from the Agitprop Department. You will recall that this job in agitation and propaganda was imposed on me (I was not looking for it). It follows that I ought not be objecting to my own departure. But if you pose the question precisely now, in connection with the misunderstandings sketched above, you’ll put both yourself and me in an awkward position — Trotski and others will think that you’re doing this ‘for Krupskaya’s sake’ and that you’re demanding a ‘victim’, that I’m willing to be a ‘victim’, etc. — which is undesirable.

Stalin’s patience had snapped. This was obvious in his simultaneous request to step down from the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities’ Affairs.⁵ He wanted and needed to be appreciated. Asking to resign was his usual way of signalling this. Lenin understood the code and backed down. Stalin was too important a member of his team to be allowed to leave.

Lenin distrusted Trotski after the trade union dispute. What also worried him was that Trotski wished to raise the influence of state economic planning in the NEP. Trotski was not the only problem for Lenin; the entire central leadership made life difficult for him. When even the head of the Soviet trade union movement Mikhail Tomski refused to toe the party line, Lenin called for his expulsion from the Central Committee.⁶ The leading group had not been so fissiparous since 1918. When Lenin’s request was turned down, he was at his wits’ end and did not mind saying so. The ill health of several of his comrades, as the immense physical strain of recent years took its toll, aggravated the situation. Zinoviev had two heart attacks. Kamenev had a chronic cardiac condition. Bukharin had been very poorly and Stalin had suffered from appendicitis. In the absence of these strong supporters of the NEP, Lenin alone had had to implement the measures decided by the Politburo.⁷ He was eager to have Stalin back at his side. Having recruited him to the Leninist cause in the trade union dispute, Lenin supported a proposal to make him General Secretary of the Russian Communist Party.

Molotov’s year in charge of the Secretariat had not been a success;⁸ indeed no one since Sverdlov’s death in March 1919 had got on top of the job.⁹ Lenin was disappointed. He and Molotov had regularly conspired at Central Committee meetings. Passing a message to Molotov, he ordered: ‘You’re going to make a speech — well, speak out as sharply as possible against Trotski!’ He added: ‘Rip up this note!’ A furious row followed between Molotov and Trotski, who knew that Molotov had been put up to it.¹⁰ Lenin’s own health gave him trouble in 1921. He doubted Molotov’s ability to rein back Trotski in his absence. Lenin concluded that a firmer grip should be applied in the Party Orgburo and Secretariat.

It was in this atmosphere that Stalin’s candidature as Party General Secretary with Vyacheslav Molotov and Valeryan Kuibyshev as his Assistant Secretaries was informally canvassed at the Eleventh Party Congress in March–April 1922. Yevgeni Preobrazhenski, one of Trotski’s allies, saw what was coming. Taking the platform, he took exception to Stalin’s multiplicity of posts.¹¹ Preobrazhenski was complaining about the way that Stalin was accumulating excessive central power; but above all he was arguing that someone with so many posts