Stalin: A Biography

themselves did not crusade against the USSR in the 1920s, Bolsheviks thought, they might well arm and deploy proxy invading armies. The armed forces of Poland, Finland, Romania and even Turkey were regarded as candidates for such a role.

Yet it was in such a situation, with the USSR pressed by enemies from within and outside its frontiers, that Zinoviev and Kamenev were choosing to take the path already trodden by Trotski. Even without Stalin’s speeches against them, they appeared menacingly disloyal. In 1925 there were 1,025,000 Bolsheviks in a population of 147 million.⁵ As Bolsheviks conceded, they were a drop in the ocean; and it was admitted that the mass recruitment campaigns during and after the Civil War had created a party which had a few thousand experienced leaders and militants and a vast majority which differed little in political knowledge and administrative expertise from the rest of society. Zinoviev and Kamenev seemed to be self-indulgently ambitious and they were about to pay the price.

Stalin continued to issue works explaining his purposes. He had to prove his ideological credentials; and among his various accomplishments was a sequel to his lectures at the Sverdlov University: in 1926 he published On Questions of Leninism. (This is conventionally translated as Problems of Leninism.) Its contents did little to change the consensus among leading Bolsheviks that Stalin was an unimaginative interpreter of Lenin’s doctrines. The more exploratory pamphlets and articles were produced by others. Trotski wrote on problems of everyday life, Preobrazhenski on economic development, Bukharin on epistemology and sociology. There was scarcely anything in Problems of Leninism that could not easily be found in the main published works of Lenin. It was indeed a work of codification and little else. Just one ingredient of the book held attention at the time: Stalin’s claim that socialism could be constructed in a single country. Until then it had been the official Bolshevik party assumption that Russia could not do this on its own. Indeed it had been taken for granted that while capitalism remained powerful around the globe, there would be severe limits on the achievability of immense social and economic progress in even the most advanced socialist country.

Such had been Lenin’s opinion, and he had expressed it in his foreign policy. Whenever possible, he had tried to spread Revolution westwards by propaganda, financial subsidy, advice or war. Repeatedly he had urged that Russian economic reconstruction would be a chimerical objective unless German assistance, whether socialist or capitalist, were obtained. Consequently his programme involved Bolsheviks beginning to build socialism in Russia in the expectation that states abroad, especially Germany, would eventually aid the task of completing the construction. In September 1920 he stated this at the Ninth Party Conference. ‘Russian forces’ alone, Lenin insisted, would be inadequate for that purpose; even economic recovery, far less further economic development, might take ten to fifteen years if Soviet Russia were to remain isolated.⁶

Stalin, however, argued that the construction of socialism was entirely feasible even while no fraternal socialist state existed. The great codifier had to engage in subterfuge here. He had to misquote Lenin’s published texts and, using his organisational authority, prevent embarrassing unpublished speeches and writings from appearing. Such was the contempt in which his enemies held his writings that they did not deign to expose his unorthodoxy; and indeed it is only in retrospect that his heretical teaching came to have any practical significance. In the 1920s it had no direct impact on practical politics. All supporters of the NEP took it for granted that the USSR had to get on with ‘socialist construction’ on its own at a time when no other socialist state existed. The question of how far the Bolsheviks would be able to succeed in this seemed unnecessarily abstract.

The other contenders for the leadership also produced books explaining Leninism to the rest of the party: Trotski, Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin. Each invoked the authority of Lenin and claimed to have produced a coherent Leninist strategy. There was nothing intellectually astounding in any of these works, but each author had the knack of giving the impression of being an outstanding intellectual. Trotski, when bored in the Politburo, would pull out a French novel and read it to himself ostentatiously. He was arrogant even by the Politburo’s standards. But his contempt for ‘ignorant’ and ‘ill-educated’ Stalin was universally shared. What they failed to understand was that Problems of Leninism, apart from the heretical point on ‘socialism in one country’, was a competent summary of Lenin’s work. It was well constructed. It contained clear formulations. It was a model of pedagogical steadiness: ideas were introduced and carefully explained from various angles. Nearly all the main themes of Lenin’s life’s work were dealt with. The book’s succinct exposition was recognised at the time, and it went into several subsequent printings.

Stalin’s rivals quite underestimated his determination to prove them wrong in their low opinion of him. He understood where his deficiencies lay. He knew little German, less English and no French. He therefore resumed his attempt to teach himself English.⁷ He had no oratorical flourish. He therefore worked hard on his speeches and let nobody write them for him or edit his drafts. His Marxism lacked epistemological awareness. He therefore asked Jan Sten to tutor him on a weekly basis in the precepts and methods of contemporary Marxist philosophy.⁸

Stalin was meanwhile marking out a distinct profile for himself at the apex of the party. His idea about ‘socialism in one country, taken separately’ was poor Leninism; but it struck a chord with many party committee members who disliked Trotski’s insistence that the October Revolution would wither and die unless socialist seizures of power took place in other powerful countries on the European continent. Stalin, steady advocate of the NEP, contrived to suggest that he deeply believed in the basic potential of progress in the USSR without foreign assistance. Socialism in one country was an exposition of ideological inclination.⁹ Equally important were certain tendencies in Stalin’s thought. His commitment to the NEP was increasingly equivocal. He never followed Bukharin in giving it a rousing endorsement; and increasingly he stipulated the need for higher levels of investment in state industry and for ever heavier taxation of the more affluent peasants. He also continued to insist that workers should be promoted from the factory into administrative posts; his detestation of ‘bourgeois specialists’ remained constant.¹⁰ In line with official party policy he made appointments to party posts on the basis of demonstrable allegiance to Bolshevism before 1917.¹¹

The point is that this configuration of tendencies in ideology and policy had growing appeal for party leaders in Moscow and the provinces. Stalin did not rise to supreme power exclusively by means of the levers of bureaucratic manipulation. Certainly he had an advantage inasmuch as he could replace local party secretaries with persons of his choosing. It is also true that the regime in the party allowed him to control debates in the Central Committee and at Party Congresses. But such assets would have been useless to him if he had not been able to convince the Central Committee and the Party Congress that he was a suitable politician for them to follow. Not only as an administrator but also as a leader — in thought and action — he seemed to fit these requirements better than anyone else.

Stalin and Bukharin prepared themselves for a last decisive campaign against the internal party opposition. They had always hated Trotski and, in their private correspondence, they took delight in their growing success in humbling him. But they also retained a certain fear of him. They knew him to be talented and determined; they were aware that he had kept a personal following in the party. Trotski remained a dangerous enemy. They had less respect for Zinoviev but saw that he too was still a menace. Even more perilous was the effect of the rapprochement of Trotski and Zinoviev. As Zinoviev criticised Bukharin and Stalin from a left-wing position, the differences among the oppositionists lessened. A United Opposition was formed in mid-1926. When Stalin heard that Krupskaya had sympathies with Zinoviev, he wrote to Molotov: ‘Krup-skaya’s a splitter. She really needs a beating as a splitter if we wish to conserve party unity.’¹² Two years earlier he had welcomed her support as he defended himself against the effects of Lenin’s Testament. Having survived that emergency, he intended to deal with her as severely as with other leading members of the United Opposition.

By mid-1926 the scene was set for the settling of accounts and Stalin was spoiling for a fight. When Trotski muttered to Bukharin that he expected to have a majority of the party on his side, the General Secretary wrote to Molotov and Bukharin: ‘How little he knows and how low he rates Bukharin! But I think that soon the party will punch the snouts of Tr[otski] and Grisha [Zinoviev] and Kamenev and will turn them into renegades like Shlyapnikov.’¹³ He accused them of behaving even less loyally than Shlyapnikov’s Workers’ Opposition. They needed to be confronted. Zinoviev should be sacked from the Politburo. The ascendant party leadership need have no fear: ‘I assure you that this matter will proceed without the slightest complications in the party and the country.’¹⁴ Zinoviev should be picked off first. Trotski could be left for later.¹⁵

The Stalin group in the leadership was by then well organised. Stalin himself could afford to stay by the Black Sea while, on 3 June 1926, a terrific dispute raged for six hours about theses proposed by Zinoviev.¹⁶