The Penguin History of Modern Russia

This same system, although it increased central control, had inherent difficulties. Candidates for jobs knew in advance that overt political loyalty and class origins counted for more than technical expertise. But this induced people to lie about their background. Over-writing and over-claiming became a way of life. The state reacted by appointing emissaries to check the accuracy of reports coming to Moscow. Yet this only strengthened the incentive to lie. And so the state sent out yet more investigative commissions. The party itself was not immune to the culture of falsehood. Fiddling and fudging pervaded the operation of lower Bolshevik bodies. Each local leader formed a group of political clients who owed him allegiance, right or wrong.⁵² There was also a reinforcement of the practice whereby local functionaries could gather together in a locality and quietly ignore the capital’s demands. Although the party was more dynamic than the rest of the Soviet state, its other characteristics gave cause for concern in the Kremlin.

The NEP had saved the regime from destruction; but it had induced its own grave instabilities into the compound of the Soviet order. The principle of private profit clashed in important economic sectors with central planning objectives. Nepmen, clerics, better-off peasants, professional experts and artists were quietly beginning to assert themselves. Under the NEP there was also a resurgence of nationalist, regionalist and religious aspirations; and the arts and sciences, too, offered cultural visions at variance with Bolshevism. Soviet society under the New Economic Policy was a mass of contradictions and unpredictabilities, dead ends and opportunities, aspirations and discontents.

8 Leninism and its Discontents

It would have been possible for these instabilities to persist well into the 1930s if the Politburo had been more favourably disposed to the NEP. Admittedly Lenin came to believe that the NEP, which had started as an economic retreat, offered space for a general advance. He argued that the policy would enable the communists to raise the country’s educational level, improve its administration, renovate its economy and spread the doctrines of communism. But not even Lenin saw the NEP as permanently acceptable.¹

And there was huge tension between what the communist party wanted for society and what the various social groups — classes, nationalities, organizations, churches and families — wanted for themselves. Most Bolshevik leaders had never liked the NEP, regarding it at best as an excrescent boil on the body politic and at worst a malignant cancer. They detested the reintroduction of capitalism and feared the rise of a new urban and rural bourgeoisie. They resented the corrupt, inefficient administration they headed; they disliked such national, religious and cultural concessions as they had had to make. They were embarrassed that they had not yet eliminated the poverty in Soviet towns and villages. They yearned to accelerate educational expansion and indoctrinate the working class with their ideas. They wanted a society wholly industrialized and equipped with technological dynamism. They desired to match the military preparedness of capitalist powers.

What is more, Lenin’s NEP had always disconcerted many central and local party leaders. His chief early opponent behind the scenes was Trotski. The disagreement between them related not to the basic immediate need for the NEP but to its scope and duration. Lenin wanted large-scale industry, banking and foreign trade to remain in Sovnarkom’s hands and ensured that this was achieved. This was not enough for Trotski, who urged that there should be an increase in the proportion of investment in industry and that the State Planning Commission (Gosplan) should draw up a single ‘plan’ for all sectors of the economy; and although he did not expressly demand a debate on the timing of the eventual phasing out of the NEP, his impatience with the policy evoked sympathy even among those communists who were suspicious of Trotski’s personal ambitions.

Lenin secretly arranged for Stalin and other associates to face down Trotski at the Eleventh Party Congress in March 1922.² Yet Lenin himself was ailing; and the Central Committee, on the advice of Molotov and Bukharin, insisted that he should reduce his political activity. In the winter of 1921–2 he was residing at a sanatorium in Gorki, thirty-five kilometres from the capital, while he recuperated from chronic severe headaches and insomnia. In May 1922, however, he suffered a major stroke and his influence upon politics diminished as his colleagues began to run the party and government without him.

He continued to read Pravda; he also ordered the fitting of a direct telephone line to the Kremlin.³ Stalin, too, kept him informed about events by coming out to visit him. With Lenin’s approval, Stalin had become Party General Secretary after the Eleventh Congress and knew better than anyone what was happening in the Politburo, Orgburo and the Secretariat. Lenin looked forward to Stalin’s visits, ordering that a bottle of wine should be opened for him.⁴ And yet the friendliness did not last long. The constitutional question about what kind of federation should be created out of the RSFSR and the other Soviet republics flared up in summer 1922, and found Lenin and Stalin at odds. Stalin also infuriated Lenin by countenancing the abolition of the state monopoly over foreign trade as well as by running the central party apparatus in an authoritarian manner. Now perceiving Trotski as the lesser of two evils, Lenin turned to him for help in reversing the movement of policy in a Politburo controlled by Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev.

On foreign trade Trotski won the Central Committee discussion in mid-December 1922, as Lenin remarked, ‘without having to fire a shot’.⁵ Lenin also began to have success in his controversy with Stalin over the USSR Constitution. But his own ill-health made it highly likely that his campaign might not be brought to a successful conclusion before he died. In late December 1922, despairing of his own medical recovery, he dictated a series of confidential documents that became known as his political testament. The intention was that the materials would be presented to the next Party Congress, enabling it to incorporate his ideas in strategic policies.

He had always behaved as if his own presence was vital to the cause of the October Revolution; his testament highlighted this when he drew pen-portraits of six leading Bolsheviks: Stalin, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Pyatakov, Bukharin and Trotski. Not one of them — not even his newly-found ally Trotski — emerged without severe criticism.⁶ The implication was plain: no other colleague by himelf was fit to become supreme leader. Lenin sensed that Bolshevism’s fate depended to a considerable extent on whether Stalin and Trotski would work harmoniously together. Hoping that a collective leadership would remain in place after his own demise, he argued that an influx of ordinary factory-workers to the Party Central Committee, the Party Central Control Commission and the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate would prevent a split in the Politburo and eradicate bureaucracy in both the party and the state as a whole.

In January 1923 Lenin dictated an addendum to his testament, to the effect that Stalin was too crude to be retained as the Party General Secretary.⁷ Lenin had learned that Stalin had covered up an incident in which Sergo Ordzhonikidze had beaten up a Georgian Bolshevik who opposed the line taken by Stalin and Ordzhonikidze on the USSR Constitution. Lenin had also discovered from his wife Nadezhda Krupskaya that Stalin had subjected her to verbal abuse on hearing that she had broken the regime of Lenin’s medical treatment by speaking to him about politics.

Yet Lenin’s health had to hold out if he was to bring down the General Secretary. On 5 March 1923 he wrote to Stalin that unless an apology was offered to Krupskaya, he would break personal relations with him.⁸ It was all too late. On 6 March, Lenin suffered another major stroke. This time he lost the use of the right side of his body and could neither speak nor read. In subsequent months he made little recovery and was confined to a wheel-chair as he struggled to recover his health. His wife Nadezhda and sister Maria nursed him attentively; but the end could not long be delayed. On 21 January 1924 his head throbbed unbearably, and his temperature shot up. At 6.50 p.m. he let out a great sigh, his body shuddered and then all was silence. The leader of the October Revolution, the Bolshevik party and the Communist International was dead.

There was no disruption of politics since the Politburo had long been preparing itself for Lenin’s death. Since Trotski was recuperating from illness in Abkhazia at the time, it was Stalin who headed the funeral commission. Instead of burying him, the Politburo ordered that Lenin should be embalmed and put on display in a mausoleum to be built on Red Square. Stalin claimed that this corresponded to the demands of ordinary workers; but the real motive seems to have been a wish to exploit the traditional belief of the Russian Orthodox Church that the remains of truly holy men did not putrefy (even though the Church did not go as far as displaying the corpses in glass cabinets⁹). A secular cult of Saint Vladimir of the October Revolution was being organized. Krupskaya, despite being disgusted, was powerless to oppose it.

The NEP had increased popular affection for Lenin; and the members of the Politburo were hoping to benefit