from his reputation by identifying themselves closely with him and his policies. Arrangements were made for factory hooters to be sounded and for all traffic to be halted at the time of his funeral. Despite the bitter cold, a great crowd turned out for the speeches delivered by Lenin’s colleagues on Red Square. The display of reverence for him became mandatory and any past disagreements with him were discreetly overlooked. Bukharin, Dzierzynski, Kamenev, Preobrazhenski, Stalin, Trotski and Zinoviev had each clashed with him in the past. None of them was merely his cipher. As his body was being laid out under glass, a competition took place as to who should be recognized as the authentic heir to his political legacy.
Oaths were sworn to his memory and picture-books of his exploits appeared in large print-runs. An Institute of the Brain was founded where 30,000 slices were made of his cerebral tissue by researchers seeking the origins of his ‘genius’. His main works were published under Kamenev’s editorship while rarer pieces of Leniniana were prepared for a series of volumes entitled the Lenin Collection.10 Petrograd was renamed Leningrad in his honour. On a more practical level, Stalin insisted that homage to Lenin should be rendered by means of a mass enrolment of workers into the ranks of the Russian Communist Party, which in 1925 renamed itself the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks).
But what was Leninism? Lenin had eschewed giving a definition, affirming that Marxism required perpetual adjustment to changing circumstances. But his successors needed to explain what essential ideology they propounded in his name. The principal rivals — Trotski, Zinoviev, Bukharin, Kamenev and Stalin — produced speeches, articles and booklets for this purpose in 1924. A new term emerged: Marxism-Leninism. (There were still clumsier neologisms such as Marksovo-Engelso-Leninism; but Marxism-Leninism was clumsy enough: it was as if Mohammed had chosen to nominate his doctrines as Christianity-Islam.) The contenders for the succession announced their commitment to every idea associated with Lenin: the dictatorship of the proletariat; violence as the midwife of revolutionary transformation; hierarchy, discipline and centralism; concessions to peasants and oppressed nationalities; the incontrovertibility of Marxism; and the inevitability of world revolution.
Each Bolshevik leader believed in the one-party state, the one-ideology state, in legalized arbitrary rule and in terror as acceptable methods of governance, in administrative ultra-centralism, in philosophical amoralism. Neither Lenin nor any of the others used this terminology, but their words and deeds demonstrated their commitment. The speculation that if only Lenin had survived, a humanitarian order would have been established is hard to square with this gamut of agreed principles of Bolshevism.
The differences with Lenin’s
They might eventually have achieved their purpose had Trotski not picked that moment to challenge the wisdom of the Politburo’s handling of the economy. Fear of Trotski continued to be greater than annoyance with Stalin; and Kamenev, Zinoviev and Bukharin put aside their differences with Stalin in order to repel Trotski’s attack.
Economically it appeared that the NEP had succeeded beyond everyone’s expectations. Agricultural output in 1922 had risen enough for the Politburo to resume the export of grain. As trade between town and countryside increased, output recovered. By 1923, cereal production had increased by twenty-three per cent over the total recorded for 1920. Domestic industrial recovery also gathered pace: in the same three years output from factories rose by 184 per cent.12 The snag was that, as Trotski memorably put it, a ‘scissors’ crisis’ divided the economy’s urban and rural sectors. For by 1923, the retail prices of industrial goods were three times greater than they had been in relation to agricultural goods back in 1913. The state’s pricing policy had turned the terms of trade against the peasantry, which responded by refraining from bringing its wheat, potatoes and milk to the towns. The two scissor blades of the economy had opened and the NEP was put at risk.
The fault lay not with market pressures but with the decisions of politicians, and Trotski teased the ascendant central leadership for its incompetence. Many on the left of the communist party welcomed Trotski’s decision to speak his mind. In October 1923 Preobrazhenski and others signed a Platform of the Forty-Six criticizing the Politburo and demanding an increase in central state economic planning and internal party democracy. They were not a monolithic group: most of them insisted on appending their own reservations about the document.13 Trotski made arguments similar to those of the Platform in
Zinoviev, Stalin, Kamenev and Bukharin counter-attacked. They rebutted the charge of mismanagement and authoritarianism and argued that Trotski had been an anti-Leninist since the Second Party Congress in 1903. Trotski’s proposal for more rapid industrialization, they declared, would involve a fiscal bias against the peasantry. At the Thirteenth Party Conference in January 1924 they accused him of wishing to destroy Lenin’s NEP. ‘Trotskyism’ overnight became a heresy. By the mid-1920s, moreover, Bukharin had concluded that further steps in the ‘transition to socialism’ in Russia were unachievable by mainly violent means. The October Revolution and Civil War had been necessary ‘revolutionary’ phases, but the party ought presently to devote itself to an ‘evolutionary’ phase. The objective, according to Bukharin, should be civil peace and a gradual ‘growing into socialism’. He was enraptured by the NEP, urging that the Bolshevik philosophical and political antagonism to private profit should temporarily be abandoned. To the peasantry Bukharin declared: ‘Enrich yourselves!’
This imperative clashed so blatantly with the party’s basic ideology that Bukharin had to retract his words; and it was Stalin who supplied a doctrine capable of competing with the Left’s criticisms. In December 1924 he announced that it was a perfectly respectable tenet of Leninism that the party could complete the building of ‘Socialism in One Country’. This was a misinterpretation of Lenin; but it was a clever political move at the time. Trotski’s appeal to Bolshevik functionaries in the party, the Komsomol, the armed forces and the security police derived in part from his urgent will to industrialize the USSR and create a socialist society. Stalin’s doctrinal contribution reflected his long-held opinion that Europe was not yet ‘pregnant with socialist revolution’; and he maintained that Trotski’s insistence on the need for fraternal revolutions in the West underestimated the Soviet Union’s indigenous revolutionary potential. Stalin, by talking up the achievability of socialism without Trotskyist policies, was offering an encouraging alternative.
As Stalin began to add an ideological dimension to his bureaucratic authority, he was also contriving to clear his name of the taint applied to it by the deceased Lenin. At the Twelfth Party Congress in April 1923 Stalin leant on Kamenev and Zinoviev, who still preferred Stalin to Trotski, to restrict knowledge of Lenin’s political testament to the leaders of provincial delegations.
He worked hard to win the confidence of such leaders and their fellow committee-men, putting aside time at Congresses and in his Secretariat office to converse with them. Yet abrasiveness, too, remained part of his style when he attacked oppositionists. His language was sarcastic, repetitious and aggressive; his arguments were uncompromising and schematic. At the Party Conference in January 1924 it had been he who had lined up the speakers for the assault upon Trotski, Preobrazhenski and the so-called Left Opposition. Stalin’s ability to run the Secretariat was well attested; the surprise for his rivals, inside and outside the Left Opposition, was his talent at marshalling the entire party. He personified the practicality of those Bolsheviks who had not gone into emigration before 1917; and his recent military experience increased his image as a no-nonsense leader.
Stalin stressed that the party was the institutional cornerstone of the October Revolution. This had been Lenin’s attitude in practice, but not in his theoretical works. Stalin gave a series of lectures in 1924 on
