characterisation:8
Stalin is too crude; and this defect, which is wholly bearable inside our milieu and in relations among ourselves, becomes intolerable in the post of General Secretary. I therefore make a proposal for comrades to think of a way to remove Stalin and in his place appoint someone else who is distinguished from comrade Stalin in all other respects through having the single superior feature of being more patient, more loyal, more courteous and more attentive to comrades, less capricious, etc.
Lenin’s meaning pierced its way through his shaky syntax: he wanted to remove Stalin from the General Secretaryship.
His scheme was limited in scope. He was not proposing Stalin’s removal from the central party leadership, still less from the party as a whole. Such an idea would have been treated with the disdain which had met his request in July 1922 to dismiss most members of the Central Committee.9 Nor was Lenin the perfect political astrologer of his time. There was absolutely nothing in the Testament predicting the scale of terror which ensued in the years from 1928. Lenin, the leading proponent of state terror in the Civil War, failed to detect Stalin’s potential to apply terror-rule still more deeply in peacetime. The Testament of 1922–3 was limited to an effort to deprive Stalin of his most important administrative post.10
Files on the Georgian Affair were brought out for Lenin to examine. He had made up his mind about the verdict: Stalin and his associates were guilty of Great Russian chauvinism even though Stalin, Ordzhonikidze and Dzierzyn ski themselves were not Russians. Already at the end of the previous year, in an article on the national question, Lenin had acknowledged:11
I am, it seems, immensely guilty before the workers of Russia for not intervening sufficiently energetically and sufficiently sharply in the notorious question of autonomisation, officially known, it seems, as the question of the union of soviet socialist republics.
He also dictated an article on bureaucracy in the organs of party and government, making strong criticisms of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate. It was obvious to informed observers that Stalin, who headed the Inspectorate, was his principal target.
Lenin went on giving dictation to Maria Volodicheva and Lidia Fotieva. Although he seems to have stopped mentioning sensitive matters in front of Nadya Allilueva, he took no other precaution beyond telling his secretaries to keep everything to themselves and to lock up his papers. This was how he plotted the downfall of an individual whom he considered the greatest danger to the Revolution. Lenin’s excessive self-confidence — the very defect he ascribed to Trotski — had not left him.
He would have been less insouciant if he had known his secretaries better. Volodicheva was disconcerted by the contents of his dictated notes on 23 December and she consulted her colleague Fotieva, who advised her to take a copy to none other than Stalin. Stalin was shocked but not deterred. He had had an altercation with Krupskaya the previous day on discovering that she had been helping Lenin to communicate with Trotski and others about current politics. Krupskaya’s behaviour contravened the Politburo’s orders, and Stalin, who had been asked to ensure observance of the regimen specified by Lenin’s doctors, directed verbal obscenities at her. Krupskaya declared that she alone knew what was medically best for Lenin. If Lenin were to be denied political contact with other leaders, his recovery would be delayed still further. She wrote in these terms to Kamenev, adding that nobody in the party had ever addressed her as foully as Stalin. But she did not tell Lenin for fear of upsetting him; and Stalin had not sought to withhold the right to dictate from Lenin. He resented being picked out for blame when he was only carrying out Politburo orders;13 but he reasonably assumed that the matters dividing him from Lenin were amenable to eventual resolution.
Some weeks later, however, Krupskaya blurted out to Lenin how Stalin had behaved towards her. Lenin was infuriated. Although he himself often swore,14 he drew the line at the verbal abuse of women. Stalin’s comportment offended him, and on 5 March 1923 he dictated a sharp letter:
You had the uncouthness to summon my wife to the telephone and swear at her. Although she has even given you her agreement to forget what was said, this fact has nevertheless become known through her to Zinoviev and Kamenev. I do not intend to forget so easily what has been done against me, and it goes without saying that I consider something done against my wife to be something also done against me. I therefore ask you to consider whether you agree to retract what you said and apologise or you prefer to break relations between us.
Stalin was stupefied. He had tried to mend bridges with Lenin by letting him continue dictating and researching even though the resultant articles hurt him. He had asked Lenin’s sister Maria Ulyanova to plead his case: ‘I love him with all my heart. Tell him this in some way.’ With the letter in his hands Stalin tried to tell himself: ‘This isn’t Lenin who’s talking, it’s his illness!’
He scribbled out a half-hearted compromise. ‘If my wife had behaved incorrectly and you had had to punish her,’ he wrote, ‘I would not have regarded it as my right to intervene. But inasmuch as you insist, I am willing to apologise to Nadezhda Konstantinovna.’ On reflection Stalin redrafted the message and admitted to having bawled at Krupskaya; but he added that he had only been doing his duty as given him by the Politburo. He added:
Yet if you consider that the maintenance of ‘relations’ requires me to ‘retract’ the above-mentioned words, I can retract them, while nevertheless refusing to understand what the problem is here, what my ‘guilt’ consists of and what in particular is being demanded of me.
Whenever he started to apologise, he ended up rubbing salt in the wound. How on earth Stalin thought such a message would placate Lenin is hard to imagine. But he was a proud man. He could not bring himself to show any greater contrition, and was on the point of paying dearly.
Yet this did not happen. On 10 March, agitated by the dispute, Lenin suffered a heart attack. Suddenly Stalin no longer needed to concern himself about Lenin directly leading a campaign against him. Lenin was taken off to the Gorki mansion outside Moscow, never to return. He was a helpless cripple tended by his wife Nadya and sister Maria; and although the doctors told them that all was not lost, Nadya ceased to believe them. His medical condition remained subject to security surveillance. The reports of GPU operatives to the Kremlin let Stalin know he was in the clear: Lenin was beyond recovery; it was only a matter of time before he died.
Lenin’s dictated thoughts, however, remained a threat. The dying leader had had them typed up in multiple copies and their existence was known to Politburo members and to the secretaries in Lenin’s office. Not everyone in the Politburo was friendly to Stalin. Relations between Trotski and Stalin had never been good, and Stalin could expect trouble from that quarter. What counted in Stalin’s favour, though, was that Kamenev, Zinoviev and others anticipated a strong bid from Trotski for supreme power. Stalin was a valuable accomplice whom they were disinclined to remove from the General Secretaryship. They knew his defects as well as Lenin did; they were also less aware of his capacities and ambition than Lenin had become: they therefore underestimated the difficulty they might have in handling him in the years ahead. This meant that if Stalin played his hand skilfully, he might yet survive the storm. The next Party Congress — the Twelfth — was scheduled for April 1923. The Politburo aimed to show that the regime could function effectively in Lenin’s absence. Trotski was offered the honour of delivering the political report on behalf of the Central Committee, but refused. Instead it was Zinoviev who gave it. Among themselves Zinoviev, Kamenev and Stalin arranged the rest of the proceedings in advance.
Stalin, though, gave the organisational report. Cleverly he accepted Lenin’s proposal for structural reforms to the Party Central Committee and the Central Control Commission; but whereas Lenin had wished to promote ordinary workers to membership of these bodies, Stalin gave preference to local party leaders of working-class origin who no longer worked in factories or mines. By this means Stalin would control the process and emasculate Lenin’s intentions.
