Stalin also built up a retinue of supporters in the Central Committee. Among them were Sergo Ordzhonikidze, Kliment Voroshilov, Semen Budenny, Sergei Kirov and Andrei Andreev. All these men were loyal to him without being servile and called him Koba.18 Some had had disputes with him in the past. Molotov had fallen out with him in March 1917. Kaganovich had criticised the Central Committee’s organisational policy in 1918–19 and Ordzhonikidze could never button his lip when he had something on his mind.19 Andreev had even been a Workers’ Oppositionist. Budenny and Voroshilov had served under him in Tsaritsyn; Ordzhonikidze and Kirov had been his subordinates in the Caucasus. Andreev had impressed him with administrative work in the early 1920s. The gang took time to coalesce, and Stalin never allowed its members to take their positions for granted. Even the Tsaritsynites needed to keep proving their worth in his eyes. Sergei Minin and Moisei Rukhimovich, cronies on the Southern Front, came to seem as useless as hardened paint. Minin sided with the opposition to the ascendant party leadership and Stalin had nothing more to do with him. Minin committed suicide in 1926. When Rukhimovich’s incompetence at organising transport was exposed, Stalin sacked him as ‘a self-satisfied bureaucrat’.20
He demanded efficiency as well as loyalty from the gang members. He also selected them for their individual qualities. He wanted no one near to him who outranked him intellectually. He selected men with a revolutionary commitment like his own, and he set the style with his ruthless policies. None earned disapprobation for mercilessness towards enemies. He created an ambience of conspiracy, companionship and crude masculine humour. In return for their services he looked after their interests. He was solicitous about their health. He overlooked their foibles so long as their work remained unaffected and they recognised his word as law.
This is what Amakyan Nazaretyan wrote about working ‘under Koba’s firm hand’:21
I can’t take offence. There’s much to be learned from him. Having got to know him at close hand, I have developed an extraordinary respect towards him. He has a character that one can only envy. I can’t take offence. His strictness is covered by attentiveness to those who work with him.
On another occasion he added:22
He’s very cunning. He’s hard as a nut and can’t be broken at one go. But I have a completely different view of him now from the one I had in Tiflis. Despite his rational wildness, so to speak, he’s a soft individual; he has a heart and knows how to value the merits of people.
Lazar Kaganovich shared this endorsement:23
In the early years Stalin was a soft individual… Under Lenin and after Lenin. He went through a lot.
In the early years after Lenin died, when he came to power, they all attacked Stalin. He endured a lot in the struggle with Trotski. Then his supposed friends Bukharin, Rykov and Tomski also attacked him…
It was difficult to avoid getting cruel.
For Kaganovich, Stalin’s personality responded to circumstances not of his making.
He discouraged attention to his national origin. In the provinces his supporters played up the fact that his main opponents — at first Trotski and then Kamenev and Zinoviev — were Jews. He himself never mentioned this, but he did not stop others from bringing it up.24 He had his own reasons for caution. Not only Jews but also Poles, Georgians and Armenians had a presence in the Bolshevik party central and local leadership out of proportion to the USSR’s demography, and there was growing resentment of the fact in the country. Stalin, moreover, still spoke with a heavy accent. Trotski put this with typical cattiness: ‘The Russian language always stayed for him not only a language half-foreign and improvised but — much worse for his awareness — conventional and strained.’25 Snubs about his linguistic facility were not uncommon in the 1920s.26
Yet no one else in the ascendant central leadership set himself up quite so effectively. Bukharin had a following in the party but no consolidated network of clients. Zinoviev had such a network but most of his clients were based in Leningrad. Kamenev had never been much of a patron. The sole leader to match Stalin’s ability in forming a cliental group was Trotski. He still appealed to members of the Inter-District group which had joined the Bolsheviks in May 1917, and he had attracted admirers in the Civil War as People’s Commissar for Military Affairs. The Left Opposition, when attacking the Politburo in the last quarter of 1923, looked to him for inspiration. Among them were Yevgeni Preobrazhenski, Leonid Serebryakov, Nikolai Krestinski, Adolf Ioffe and Christian Rakovski. Yet Trotski lacked Stalin’s day-to-day accessibility. He had the kind of hauteur which peeved dozens of potential supporters. He was also devoid of Stalin’s tactical cunning and pugnacity, and there was a suspicion among Trotski’s followers that their idol’s illnesses at crucial conjunctures of factional struggle had a psychosomatic dimension. Yet he had a large enough following to take on and beat Stalin if the situation had been different. The trouble was that Trotski had lost the early rounds of the contest. He was always coming from behind on points.
Stalin continued to box warily. The defeat of the Left Opposition in the winter of 1923–4 had been achieved in open combat. Trotski and the Left Opposition had attacked and Stalin, Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin had retaliated. Stalin had had little need to sack Trotskyists and replace them with individuals loyal to the ascendant party leadership.27 Yet the Orgburo and the Secretariat — as well as the Politburo in the highest instance — used their right to change postings in the following months. The ascendant party leadership manipulated the various administrative levers to its advantage. Steadily the Left lost its remaining key jobs in party, government, army and police. The sackings were accompanied by demotions which frequently involved relocation to distant parts of the USSR. This was really a light form of exile whereby the ascendant leadership consolidated its grip on power. The Left was also doctrinally undermined. The Agitprop Department of the Secretariat publicised past disputes between Lenin and Trotski. Its various adjuncts printed dozens of anti-Trotski pamphlets; and Stalin as an avid reader scribbled an
He was highly conspiratorial. According to Politburo secretary Boris Bazhanov, Stalin’s desk had four telephones but inside the desk was a further apparatus giving him the facility to eavesdrop on the conversations of dozens of the most influential communist leaders. He could do this without going through the Kremlin switchboard, and the information he gathered must have alerted him to any manoeuvres being undertaken against him.29 Personal assistants such as Lev Mekhlis and Grigori Kanner carried out whatever shady enterprise he thought up.30 He was ruthless against his enemies. When Kamenev asked him about the question of gaining a majority in the party, Stalin scoffed: ‘Do you know what I think about this? I believe that who votes how in the party is unimportant. What is extremely important is who counts the votes and how they are recorded.’31 He was implying that he expected the central party apparatus to fiddle the voting figures if ever they went against him.
This sort of remark gave Stalin the reputation of an unprincipled bureaucrat. He revelled in his deviousness when talking to his associates. But there was much more to him. He had the potential of a true leader. He was decisive, competent, confident and ambitious. The choice of him rather than Zinoviev or Kamenev to head the charge against Trotski at the Thirteenth Party Conference showed that this was beginning to be understood by other Central Committee members. He was coming out of the shadows. From the last months of 1924 he showed a willingness to go on attacking Trotski without keeping Zinoviev and Kamenev at his side. Kamenev had made a slip by referring to ‘nepman Russia’ instead of ‘NEP Russia’. The so-called nepman was typically a private trader who took advantage of the economic reforms since 1921 and who was resented by Bolsheviks. Stalin made a meal of Kamenev’s slip in the party press. Around the same time Zinoviev had described the Soviet regime as ‘a dictatorship of the party’. Stalin as Party General Secretary vigorously repudiated the term as a description of political reality.32 Kamenev and Zinoviev were put on notice that they should look out for themselves. In autumn 1924 Stalin moved against their leading supporters. I. A. Zelenski was replaced as Moscow City Party Secretary by Stalin’s supporter Nikolai Uglanov.33
Strategic factors were coming between Stalin on one side and Zinoviev and Kamenev on the other. Stalin wanted to defend the case for the possibilities of ‘building socialism’ in the USSR even during the NEP. This countered Trotski’s argument, fleshed out in
