economic mismanagement; he saw them as having fulfilled his fears about the NEP as a potential instrument for turning away from the objectives of the October Revolution and towards the requirements of the peasantry.
Trotski’s fellow leftists in the party made a move against the developing nature of the New Economic Policy in October 1923. Yevgeni Preobrazhenski and others signed the Platform of the Forty-Six, criticising the organisational and economic policies of the ascendant party leadership. They demanded wider freedom of discussion and deeper state intervention in industrial development. In November 1923 Trotski joined the dissenters with a series of articles entitled ‘The New Course’. The Thirteenth Party Conference in December had arraigned this Left Opposition for disloyalty. The ascendant leaders needed Stalin more than ever as a counterweight to Trotski; all the criticisms of the summer were mothballed — and Zinoviev no longer talked of the need to restrain Stalin’s administrative autonomy. The suppression of factional activity in the provinces, they thought, was best left in his hands. They also entrusted him with putting the case against Trotski at the Conference. For once they did not want this honour. They knew that Stalin could look Trotski in the eye and smack him politically in the face — and perhaps they calculated that Stalin would do himself no favours by appearing divisive while they seemed above the demands of factional struggle.
Stalin was more than willing to oblige with a castigation of Trotski. His words were incisive:19
Trotski’s mistake consists in the fact that he has counterposed himself to the Central Committee and put about the idea of himself as a superman standing above the Central Committee, above its laws, above its decisions, so that he gave grounds for a certain part of the party to conduct their work in the direction of undermining confidence in the Central Committee.
The Conference was a triumph for Stalin. Lenin ailed while Trotski wavered and Kamenev and Zinoviev applauded. Stalin had secured his rehabilitation.
And although the Testament had warned against a split between himself and Trotski, Stalin had gone ahead and denounced Trotski. Lenin, if he had recovered, would not have accepted Stalin’s excuse that he was only doing what the rest of the Politburo had asked. Yet Stalin had never prostrated himself before Lenin and had reason to feel wronged by him. He had kept a grip on his resentment at his treatment; this was not a comportment he often displayed. Presumably he understood that the chances were that Lenin was too ill to make a physical recovery; and anyway he continued to feel a genuine admiration for the sinking Leader. Stalin limited himself to monitoring what went on at the Gorki mansion, where bodyguards and nurses were reporting to Dzierzynski, who in turn kept him informed.20 Stalin was not yet out of trouble. Nadezhda Krupskaya could be up to her old tricks by reading out the
20. THE OPPORTUNITIES OF STRUGGLE
Lenin died of a heart attack on 21 January 1924. Stalin, who was given the honour of organising the funeral, gained further security in his post. The Politburo had decided on extraordinary treatment of the corpse. It was to be embalmed and put on permanent display in a mausoleum to be erected on Red Square. Krupskaya objected in vain to the quasi-religious implications. Stalin was determined upon the ‘mausoleumisa-tion’ of the founder of Bolshevism. Several scientists volunteered their services and the race was joined to find a chemical process to do the job. Trotski enquired whether he should come back from Tbilisi, where he had arrived
Much has been made of Stalin and Dzierzyn ski’s wish to keep Trotski out of the way. Purportedly Trotski’s absence from the funeral ruined his chances of succeeding Lenin as supreme party leader whereas Stalin’s leadership of the funeral commission put him at a crucial advantage. This is unconvincing. Although Trotski years later was to complain about Stalin’s trickery, he did not claim it had made much difference. Placing his premium on his own convalescence, Trotski stayed in Sukhum for weeks before making the train journey back to Moscow.
In fact the funeral took place on 27 January, and Stalin was a pallbearer with Kamenev, Zinoviev, Bukharin, Molotov, Dzierzynski, Tomski and Rudzutak. He turned out in his quasi-military tunic. Along with others he gave a speech. It included a series of oaths ending with the words:2
Leaving us, comrade Lenin left us a legacy of fidelity to the principles of the Communist International. We swear to you, comrade Lenin, that we will not spare our own lives in strengthening and broadening the union of labouring people of the whole world — the Communist International!
He was not alone in using religious imagery3 and his delivery was still not that of a polished orator. The significance of the speech lay elsewhere. Stalin was at last talking like someone who could speak to the party as a whole. Indeed he spoke as if on the party’s behalf. He was emerging on to centre-stage — and he had the nerve to drape himself in a flag of loyalty to the man who had wished to shatter his career. Few had imagined he would act with such aplomb.
The Central Committee put aside its disputes, at least in public. Bolsheviks had often talked about the threat posed by other political parties. This was an exaggerated fear after the Civil War; organised opposition to Bolshevism was at its nadir. Yet GPU head Felix Dzierzyn-ski and Stalin did not drop their guard, believing that Mensheviks, Socialist-Revolutionaries or even ‘Black Hundreds’ (who had organised anti-semitic pogroms before the Great War) might arrange ‘counterrevolutionary’ outbreaks against the Bolsheviks.4 Their attitude mirrored the beleaguered, suspicious outlook of the communist leaders. They had surprised their opponents by seizing power in the October Revolution and were concerned lest something similar might happen to themselves.
Stalin had worked closely with the GPU since returning from the Soviet–Polish War.5 This reflected the interdependence of party and police as well as his personal preoccupation with considerations of security. The Soviet dictatorship was maintained by repression, and no Bolshevik — not even ‘softer’ ones like Kamenev and Bukharin — failed to appreciate the regime’s dependence on the GPU. As Stalin began to show his confidence, Lenin’s widow Krupskaya temporarily changed her behaviour towards the General Secretary. She no longer said what she thought of him. Nor could she prevent historical confections about his career from appearing in print. Her authority in the People’s Commissariat for Enlightenment was on the wane.6 In order to reassert herself she presented herself as the prime annalist of Lenin in his time. She undertook this also as a means of coping with bereavement: she had written a sketch for Lenin’s biography within weeks of his death. In May she sent it to Stalin asking what he thought of her project.7 Stalin, who had his own reasons to build a bridge towards her, wrote back approvingly. Certainly he read the piece carefully since he took the trouble to correct a mistaken date.8
Stalin and Krupskaya were setting themselves up as the high priest and priestess of the Lenin cult. Lenin’s image was ubiquitous. Petrograd was renamed Leningrad and books and articles on him were produced in vast quantities. Paradoxically this new cult required the censoring of Lenin’s works. Comments by Lenin at variance with Stalin’s policies were banned. Lenin could not be allowed to appear as having ever made mistakes. An example was the speech to the Ninth Party Conference in which Lenin admitted that the Polish War had been a blunder and declared that ‘Russian forces’ alone were insufficient for the building of communism in Russia.9 It was withheld from publication. Stalin also censored his own works so as to enhance his reputation for consistent loyalty. At Lenin’s fiftieth-birthday celebration in 1920 Stalin’s eulogy had included a reference to past failures of
