Stalin: A Biography

was already angry with him and his speech made everything worse. Stalin argued that the Georgian economy was incapable of post-war recovery without the specific assistance of Russia.²⁸ This was both untrue and offensive; for Western investment and trade could have helped to regenerate industry and agriculture in the country. Intellectually he was on firmer ground when he asserted:²⁹

Now, on arriving in Tiflis [Tbilisi], I’ve been struck by the absence of the old solidarity among the workers of the various nationalities of the Caucasus. Nationalism has developed among workers and peasants and distrust has been strengthened towards comrades of a different nationality; anti-Armenian, anti-Tatar, anti-Georgian, anti- Russian and any other nationalism you like to mention.

But this argument, too, failed to go down well. Essentially Stalin was warning the Georgian communist leaders and activists that they had to show themselves worthy of Moscow’s support. Abkhazians, Ossetians and Adzharians had indeed suffered under the Menshevik government, which had treated their lands as provinces of historical Georgia. They had insisted that the Abkhazians were a Georgian tribe despite the fact that their language is entirely unrelated. If harmony was to be attained, the Georgian communist leadership had to set an example.

Stalin ran into still worse trouble at a workers’ mass meeting he addressed in Tbilisi. Georgia’s returning son was heard in silence as he explained the case for Sovietisation. This contrasted with the attitude to Isidore Ramishvili, the deposed Menshevik Interior Minister and old personal enemy of Stalin, who was greeted with a lengthy ovation.³⁰ Stalin’s temper had a fast fuse and, protected by his Cheka guards, he stormed out. His entire political career in Tbilisi had been full of rejections. This latest episode was one humiliation too many. As usual he sublimated his resentment by attacking others. He held Pilipe Makharadze, Chairman of the Georgian Revolutionary Committee, personally responsible for the fracas. Makharadze was sacked and replaced by Budu Mdivani.³¹ At the time Stalin felt he had promoted a more loyal and compliant Bolshevik to power in Georgia. And of course he misjudged his man. Mdivani turned out to be a far from pliable appointee; and it was he who had agitated Lenin into action from his sickbed against Stalin on the national question.

The tempestuous dispute between Lenin and Stalin in 1922–3 tended to hide the fact that Stalin stood by the general agreement they reached after he had made the concessions that Lenin demanded. The decision to form the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was ratified on 31 December 1922 and the new Constitution came formally came into force at the beginning of 1924. The federal system was a mere screen. The Politburo of the Russian Communist Party took the main decisions about each Soviet republic. Stalin had his own growing bias in favour of Russia and the Russians. Yet the grant of authority, prestige and enhancement to the other peoples remained intact. The Soviet republics were conserved and the autonomous republics proliferated. National and ethnic groups enjoyed the freedom to run presses and schools in their own languages — and Stalin and his associates gave resources for philologists to develop alphabets for the languages of several small peoples in the Caucasus and Siberia so that schooling might commence. The party also tried to attract indigenous young recruits to the party. Stalin spelled this out to a conference held by the Central Committee with ‘national’ republican and provincial communist leaders in June 1923.³²

It was an extraordinary experiment. The Politburo, while setting its face against the possibility that any region of the USSR might secede, continued to try to demonstrate to everyone at home and abroad that the October Revolution had set the conditions for the final solution of the national problems. Stalin was not just following policy. He believed in it and was one of its most committed exponents. His Georgian origins and early Marxist activity had moored him to the idea that the peoples of the former Russian Empire needed to be schooled, indoctrinated and recruited if Marxism was to take root among them. He and Lenin had got together about this in 1912–13. Stalin was not just playing with such ideas. Since before 1917 he had understood the importance of national languages and national personnel for the advancement of communism. He had sloughed off some early ideas but continued to insist that Marxism had to incorporate a serious commitment to solving the national question. His altercations with Mdivani and the Georgian communist leadership derived not from ‘chauvinism’ (as Lenin had claimed at the time and Trotski repeated later) but from a specific set of objections to Mdivani’s reckless disregard for the wishes of Moscow and the interests of the non-Georgians in Georgia.³³

Official measures on the national question had always been distasteful to many communist leaders, and it was Stalin who had to shoulder the bulk of the opprobrium. Trotski, Zinoviev and Kamenev agreed with the official line. Being Jews, however, they felt inhibited from taking a prominent role in debates about nationhood. Although Bukharin made the occasional comment, he too kept out of the spotlight. And so Stalin, despite Lenin’s accusation that he was a Great Russian chauvinist, remained chiefly responsible for party policy. Mdivani and other Georgian communist leaders quickly fell out with him. The imposition of a Transcaucasian Federation was too bitter a cup for them to drink from, and Stalin’s manipulations in 1922 permanently offended them. Not for the first time since 1917 he was undertaking uncongenial tasks which others shunned.

19. TESTAMENT

Tensions between Stalin and Lenin went on rising in autumn 1922. Stalin was not in a conciliating mood. He rebuked Lenin for garbling the contents of party policy in an interview for the Manchester Guardian:¹ the pupil was telling off his teacher. No Politburo member except Trotski wrote so bluntly to Lenin. These niggles added to Lenin’s set of concerns about the General Secretary, and he became agitated about leaving the communist party to Stalin. As his hope of physical recovery slipped away, he dictated a series of notes to be made public in the event of his death.² They were headed ‘Letter to the Congress’ because he wanted them to be read out to the next Party Congress. These are the notes known to history as Lenin’s Testament.

The gist lay in the sentences he composed on 25 December 1922 about fellow party leaders Stalin, Trotski, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin and Pyatakov. Molotov was one of the leaders peeved to have been left out of the list:³ Lenin was leaving a record for history. In fact the Testament’s main concern was with two individuals on the list:⁴

Comrade Stalin, having become General Secretary, has concentrated boundless power in his hands and I am not convinced that he will always manage to use this power with adequate care. On the other hand comrade Trotski, as has been shown by his struggle against the Central Committee in connection with the People’s Commissariat of the Means of Communication, is distinguished not merely by his outstanding talents. He surely is personally the most able individual in the current Central Committee but he has an excessive self-confidence and an excessive preoccupation with the purely administrative side of affairs.

Lenin dwelt on rivalry between Trotski and Stalin:⁵ ‘These two qualities of the two outstanding leaders of the present Central Committee have the capacity to bring about an unintended split [in the party], and unless the party takes measures to prevent this, a split could happen unexpectedly.’ A split in the party, he argued, would imperil the existence of the Soviet regime.

Lenin went on: ‘Our party rests upon two social classes and this is what makes possible its instability and makes inevitable its collapse unless agreements can take place between these two classes.’⁶ The danger he had in mind was that Trotski and Stalin would promote policies favouring different classes — the working class and the peasantry — and that this would induce strife that would undermine the regime.

To many party officials who were privy to the Testament this seemed an eccentric analysis. They recognised the isolation of the Soviet state in the international system and had not forgotten about the foreign intervention in the Civil War. They could also understand why Lenin picked out Trotski as someone who might bring disunity to the central party leadership. But Lenin’s preoccupation with Stalin caused surprise. Popular opinion, according to reports of the GPU (as the Cheka had been known since 1921), suggested Trotski, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Rykov, Bukharin or even Dzierzyn ski as the likeliest winner of the contest for the political succession.⁷ Even within the ruling group Stalin was still not taken as seriously as he should have been. Lenin, though, had at last got his measure; and on 4 January 1923, as the dispute over Georgia grew bitter, he dictated an addendum to his