Stalin: A Biography

could not carry out all his functions effectively. At any rate there was no formal decision at the Congress about the General Secretaryship; and when the matter was discussed at the next Central Committee plenum, on 3 April, the complaint was made that Lenin and his close associates had preempted debate by agreeing to pick Stalin for the job. Apparently Lenin had written ‘General Secretary’ next to Stalin’s name in the list of candidates he put forward for election to the Central Committee.¹² But Kamenev smoothed things over and Stalin’s appointment was confirmed on condition that he delegated much more to his deputies in the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate (or Rabkrin) and the Nationalities’ Affairs Commissariat. The party had to come first.¹³

Conventionally it has been supposed that Stalin was put in office because he was an experienced bureaucrat with an unusual capacity for not being bored by administrative work. The facts do not bear this out. He was an editor of Pravda in 1917 and a policy-making intimate of Lenin immediately after the October Revolution. He had spent most of the Civil War as a political commissar. He went on military campaign in Ukraine and Poland in 1920; and although he had posts in Moscow in the Party Orgburo, the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities’ Affairs and Rabkrin, he had never had much time to devote to them. What is more, Stalin was known for his restlessness when administrative meetings in the capital were dragged out. But of course he had to sit through a lot of them, as did Lenin, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Trotski and the other leaders. They headed a state that had yet to be consolidated. Unless they saw to implementation and supervision of administrative decisions as much as to the making of policy, the state would fall apart before it was made. The reason why Lenin chose Stalin was less administrative than political. He wanted one of his allies in a post crucial to the maintenance of his policies.

Lenin stressed that the General Secretaryship was not equivalent to the supreme party leadership and that the party had never had a chairman.¹⁴ He was being mealy-mouthed. What he meant was that he himself would remain the one dominant leader. Lenin and Stalin had fallen out many times before, during and after the October Revolution.¹⁵ This was the norm in the Central Committee. Lenin had confidence that he would not lose control of things.

Stalin agreed with the broad lines of the NEP. He did not see himself as a mere administrator and freely offered his opinions across the range of debates within the leadership; and, contrary to later depictions of him, his caution in foreign policy did not reconcile him to total abstention from taking risks abroad. Even after the Anglo- Soviet Treaty of March 1921, he favoured sending military instructors and supplies to Afghanistan with the objective of undermining the British Empire.¹⁶ He also continued to regard the new Baltic states — especially Latvia and Estonia — as territories illegitimately torn away from Russia ‘which enter our arsenal as integral elements vital for the restoration of Russia’s economy’.¹⁷ The idea is false that Stalin could hardly care less if the Soviet state remained permanently isolated. He accepted isolation as a fact of political and military life that could not yet be altered. In such a situation, he considered, it behoved the Politburo to get on with post- war reconstruction as best it could until such time as fresh revolutionary opportunities abroad arose. This remained his attitude in subsequent years.

But Stalin, like Lenin, wanted to avoid trouble for the foreseeable future. Lenin saw a chance for the Soviet state to come to an understanding with Germany. Talks among the European powers had been convened at Genoa in northern Italy. The RSFSR and Germany were treated as pariah states, and Lenin made overtures for a separate commercial treaty between them. This was duly signed at nearby Rapallo in April 1922. Both states had more in mind than mere trade. Germany, prevented by the Treaty of Versailles from rearming itself, arranged to test military equipment and train army units secretly on Soviet soil. Others in the Politburo, especially Zinoviev, were reluctant to accept that the ‘revolutionary upsurge’ had subsided in Europe. Despite the Treaty of Rapallo, the Comintern in 1923 at Zinoviev’s behest encouraged an armed rising against the German government on the sixth anniversary of the Bolshevik seizure of power in Petrograd. Stalin had nothing to do with such adventures.

Yet the working arrangement between Lenin and Stalin had already been put to an acute test. The occasion was the sudden deterioration in Lenin’s health on 25 May 1922, when he suffered a massive stroke while recuperating from surgery to remove a bullet lodged in his neck since the attempt on his life in August 1918. Lenin lost mobility on the right side of his body; he could not speak clearly and his mind was obviously confused. Groups of doctors, including well-rewarded specialists brought from Germany, consulted among themselves on the nature of Lenin’s illness. Opinion was divided. Among the possibilities considered were hereditary cardiac disease, syphilis, neurasthenia and even the effects of the recent operation on his neck. There were times when Lenin gave up hope entirely and thought his ‘song was sung’. But, helped by his wife Nadya and sister Maria Ulyanova, he pulled himself together psychologically. He welcomed visitors to keep abreast of public affairs.

As General Secretary, Stalin was the most frequent of these. He was not a friend. Lenin did not think highly of him outside their political relationship. He told Maria that Stalin was ‘not intelligent’. He also said Stalin was an ‘Asiatic’. Nor could Lenin abide the way Stalin chewed his pipe.¹⁸ Lenin was a fastidious man typical of his professional class; he expected comrades to behave with the politesse of the European middle class. He turned to the language of national superiority. Stalin was not merely a Georgian but an Oriental, a non-European and therefore an inferior. Lenin was unconscious of his prejudices: they emerged only when he was off his guard. These prejudices contributed to his failure until then to spot that Stalin might be a leading candidate to succeed him. When he thought of power in parties, Lenin had the tendency to assume that only those well grounded in doctrine stood much chance. He assumed that the sole figures worth consideration in any party were its theorists. The classic instance was his obsession with Karl Kautsky. Both before and during the Great War he overrated Kautsky’s influence over the German Marxist movement. Although Kautsky was an influential figure, he was very far from moulding the policies of the German Social-Democratic Party.¹⁹

At any rate Stalin was Lenin’s intermediary with the distant world of Kremlin politics while Lenin convalesced at the village of Gorki, twenty miles south of Moscow. When Stalin was set to arrive there for one of their conversations, Lenin would tell his sister Maria to fetch a bottle of decent wine for the guest. Stalin was a busy man; he needed to be treated properly. Maria had recently studied photography in order to catch Lenin on camera, and she snapped Stalin with him on one of his frequent visits.²⁰ The two of them got along fine and sat out on the terrace for their discussions. There were a few matters that in other circumstances would have been resolved in Lenin’s favour at the Central Committee; his absence compelled him to entrust his cases to Stalin. But there was one request which caused Stalin much trepidation. Lenin before his stroke had asked Stalin to supply him with poison so that he might commit suicide if ever he became paralysed. He repeated the request on 30 May. Stalin left the room. Outside was Bukharin. The two of them consulted Maria. They agreed that Stalin, rather than refuse point-blank, should go back to Lenin and say that the doctors were offering an optimistic diagnosis which made suicide wholly inappropriate.²¹ The episode passed, and Stalin resumed his trips to keep Lenin up to date with politics in the capital.²²

Lenin was a cantankerous patient and sought Stalin’s assistance in sacking those doctors who annoyed him:²³

If you have left Klemperer here, then I at least recommend: 1) deporting him from Russia no later than Friday or Saturday together with Forster, 2) entrusting Ramonov together with Levin and others to use these German doctors and establishing surveillance over them.

Trotski praised Lenin’s ‘vigilance’, but — like the whole Politburo — he voted to reject the request. Eighty other leading Bolsheviks were being treated by the Germans. Deportation would have been a ludicrous measure.²⁴ Lenin’s capriciousness grew. Exasperated by his comrades’ refusal to accede to his preferences on policy, he proposed a total reorganisation of the Central Committee. His preposterous suggestion was to sack most of its members. The veterans should be removed forthwith and replaced by Vyacheslav Molotov, Alexei Rykov and Valeryan Kuibyshev. Out, then, would go not only Stalin but also Trotski, Kamenev and Zinoviev.²⁵

Lenin’s physical debility and political inactivity frustrated him. His tirades stemmed from irritation with what he heard about shifts in official policy. In each instance he found Stalin in disagreement with him. A dispute had been brewing about foreign trade since November 1921.²⁶ Although Lenin had promoted the expansion of the private sector under the NEP, he drew the line at ending the state’s monopoly on commercial imports and exports. Others in the Central Committee, led by Finance Commissar Sokolnikov and supported by Stalin, regarded this as impractical. Sokolnikov had a point. The creaky state bureaucracy was incapable of pursuing