all opportunities for trade abroad. The frontiers were not effectively sealed; smugglers were doing business unimpeded and untaxed by the authorities. If the purpose of the NEP was to regenerate the economy, then permission for a widening of the limits of legal private engagement in foreign trade would help. Lenin refused to listen. It had become an article of faith for him to turn the Soviet state into an economic fortress against infiltration by unsupervised influences from abroad.
Lenin had to seek friends outside his previous group. Sokolnikov was with him. Also strongly on his side was the People’s Commissar for Foreign Trade Lev Krasin; but Krasin carried little weight in the Party Central Committee. The most influential advocate of a position similar to Lenin’s was in fact the person who himself had argued that Lenin had removed too much state regulation from the running of the economy at home: Trotski.
The growing alliance of convenience between Lenin and Trotski came into existence only slowly. Suspicion persisted on both sides about current economic measures. But a second matter meanwhile unsettled Lenin’s relationship with Stalin in summer 1922 when the constitutional discussions about the future of the Soviet state came to a head. To Lenin it seemed crucial that the Soviet republics established since 1918 should be joined on equal terms in a federal structure. Formally, the impression had to be given that, although the state would be run from Moscow, the communist rulers rejected all tendencies of ‘Great Russian chauvinism’. The RSFSR, vast as it was, would be but one Soviet republic alongside the Soviet republics of Ukraine, Belorussia and the Transcaucasian Federation. Lenin wanted the new federal state to be called the Union of Soviet Republics of Europe and Asia. This had always been his goal. (He had explained this in his confidential correspondence with Stalin in mid-1920.) 27 Lenin was not aiming to run down the influence of the Bolsheviks in the Comintern. But his medium-term objective was genuinely internationalist, and he thought that the name and structure of the projected federal state ought to mirror this.
Stalin, however, wished to expand the RSFSR over the entire territory held by Soviet republics and to provide Ukraine, Belorussia and the Transcaucasus with the same status as existing ‘autonomous republics’ of the RSFSR such as the Bashkirian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. The state would remain designated as the RSFSR. Stalin could argue that he was only proposing what the Bolsheviks had always said they would supply in their socialist state: ‘regional autonomy’. Lenin and Stalin had long asserted, since before the Great War, that this would be the party’s solution to the yearnings of the ‘national minorities’. Stalin wanted to prevent the Soviet republics from privileging those nations after which each such republic had been named. It was for this reason that he had proposed that the Soviet republics formed in Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia in 1920–1 should be gathered together in a Transcaucasian Federation within the RSFSR. This was his device to stop local nationalisms getting further out of hand as had happened in previous years. He regarded Lenin’s demand for a formal federal structure as having the potential to undermine the whole state order. With characteristic brusqueness he dismissed it as ‘liberalism’.
Stalin continued to plan for ‘autonomisation’. His associates Sergei Kirov and Sergo Ordzhonikidze successfully put pressure on the communist leaderships of Azerbaijan and Armenia to approve his scheme in September 1922. So did the Transcaucasian Regional Committee.28 But the Georgian Central Committee, which had always disliked the scheme and knew it would diminish its low popularity in Georgia still further, rejected it. There were also signs that the Ukrainian and Belorussian communist leaderships — and even, in its quiet way, the Armenian one — accepted it only with great reluctance.29 Stalin struck back, claiming that failure to follow his proposals would lead to a continuation of ‘sheer chaos’ in Soviet governmental affairs.30 He pushed the scheme through a commission of the Party Orgburo on 23 September.31 News of this reached Lenin, who spoke with Stalin directly on 26 September.32 Lenin insisted that changes should be made to the draft accepted by the Orgburo commission. He called for an abandonment of ‘autonomisa-tion’. Lenin again demanded a Union of Soviet Republics of Europe and Asia; he continued to insist that Russia (in the form of the RSFSR) should join this federation on an equal basis with the other Soviet republics.33
Lenin had got his information from Budu Mdivani and other Georgian communists. Stalin was losing his grip. Mdivani had previously been in his good books; it was Stalin who had arranged for him to become Chairman of the Georgian Revolutionary Committee in July 1921 instead of Stalin’s internal party critic Pilipe Makharadze.34 Lenin began to take the side of the Georgian communist leaders when they disagreed with Stalin. Yet Lenin did not go all the way with Mdivani. He still supported Stalin on the need for a Transcaucasian Federation as a device to damp down the manifestations of nationalisms in the south Caucasus; and Stalin, from his side, retracted his demand for the RSFSR to ‘autonomise’ the other Soviet republics. He did this reluctantly: when Kamenev advised compromise, he replied: ‘What is required, in my view, is firmness against Ilich.’ Kamenev, who knew his Lenin, demurred and argued that this would merely make matters worse. Stalin at last conceded to Kamenev: ‘I don’t know. Let him do as he thinks sensible.’35 The agreed name of the state was to be the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (or USSR). Stalin did not like the idea but he ceased to raise objections.
He had cause to feel let down by Lenin. The matters dividing them were not of primary importance despite what was said by Lenin at the time (and despite what was written by historians ever after).36 Stalin and Lenin agreed about basic politics. Neither questioned the desirability of the one-party state, its ideological monopoly or its right to use dictatorial and terrorist methods. They concurred on the provisional need for the NEP. They had also reached an implicit agreement that Stalin had an important job in the central party apparatus to block the advance of the Trotskyists and tighten the whole administrative order. Lenin had trusted him with such tasks. Stalin had also been the comrade in whom he had confided when he wanted to commit suicide. Whenever toughness or underhandedness was needed, Lenin had turned to him. Not once had there been a question of basic principle dividing them, and they had worked well together since the trade union dispute. Lenin had been behaving bizarrely in summer 1922 before he fell out with Stalin. But it was Stalin who had to deal with him. His difficulties with Lenin would have tested the patience of a saint.
Their quarrels about Georgia and about the state monopoly of foreign trade touched matters of secondary importance. Lenin was not demanding independence for Georgia; his pleas on behalf of Georgian communists related to the degree of autonomy they should be permitted: it was almost a dispute about political cosmetics. Stalin also had a reasonable case that the Georgian communist regime had been far from even-handed in its treatment of the non-Georgians. The Transcaucasian Federation was a plausible scheme to prevent national oppression in Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. The foreign trade dispute, too, was nowhere near as clear-cut as Lenin claimed. The state monopoly had failed to thwart the growth of smuggling and currency speculation; and Stalin and his supporters had a point that this led to a loss of state revenues. Yet although Stalin resented Lenin’s intervention, he could not stop the Old Man of Bolshevism carrying on as he liked to the extent that his physical condition permitted.
18. NATION AND REVOLUTION
It was galling for Stalin that Lenin had turned against him on the national question. Their collaboration in trying to solve it had begun before the Great War, and Lenin could not have coped without him. Although Stalin did not look for gratitude, he had cause to expect a more reasoned exchange of opinions. Disagreements between them about policy were not new.1 But Lenin and Stalin had concurred about the strategic orientation of rule in the Soviet multinational state. Stalin was the People’s Commissar for Nationalities’ Affairs and the Politburo’s specialist on the nexus of matters touching on nationhood, religion and territorial boundaries throughout the Civil War. As his military duties ended, he maintained control over decisions on the nationalities. When the leadership began to plan the country’s permanent constitutional structure, he was given a central role. The task was taken up in earnest in 1922.
Sovnarkom had long ago settled its viewpoint on several aspects of ‘national’ policy. Non-Russians were allowed their own schools and press and promising young supporters of the Bolsheviks of each national and ethnic group were trained to occupy leading political positions. Stalin supervised the policy even though, during the Civil War, he was often away from Moscow. Meetings of the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities’ Affairs collegium in his absence had been chaotic. Sometimes they were also noisy and over-long when he was present. His deputy Stanislaw Pestkowski recalled:2
It is hardly surprising that he sometimes lost patience. But on no occasion did he show this at the meetings
