chairman, it was almost certainly too late to halt the shift in power to the party organs in Stalin's hands, and Trotsky must have known this.34
Lenin's suspicions of Stalin deepened when, in October, Stalin proposed to expel Trotsky from the Politburo as a punishment for his arrogant rejection of the Sovnarkom post. It became clear to Lenin, as he acquainted himself with the activities of the triumvirate, that it was acting like a ruling clique and intended to oust him from power. This was confirmed when Lenin discovered that as soon as he retired from the Politburo meetings, which he often had to leave early because of exhaustion, the triumvirate would pass vital resolutions which he would only learn about the next day. Lenin now ordered (on 8 December) that Politburo meetings were not to go on for more than three hours and that all matters left unresolved were to be put off to the following day. At the same time, or so Trotsky later claimed, Lenin approached him with an offer to join him in a 'bloc against bureaucracy', meaning a coalition against Stalin and his power base in the Orgburo. Trotsky's claim is credible. This, after all, was on the eve of Lenin's Testament, which was mainly concerned with the problem of Stalin and his hold on the bureaucracy. Trotsky had already criticized
the party bureaucracy, Rabkrin and the Orgburo in particular. And we know that Lenin shared his opposition to Stalin on both foreign trade and the Georgian issue. In sum, it seems that towards mid-December Lenin and Trotsky were coming together against Stalin. And then suddenly, on the night of 15 December, Lenin suffered his second major stroke.35
Stalin at once took charge of Lenin's doctors and, on the pretext of speeding his recovery, obtained from the Central Committee an order giving him the power to keep him 'in isolation' from politics by restricting visitors and correspondence. 'Neither friends nor those around him', read a further order of the Politburo on 24 December, 'are allowed to tell Vladimir Ilich any political news, since this might cause him to reflect and get excited.' Confined to his wheelchair, and allowed to dictate for only '5 to 10 minutes a day', Lenin had become Stalin's prisoner. His two main secretaries, Nadezhda Alliluyeva (Stalin's wife) and Lydia Fotieva, reported to Stalin everything he said. Lenin was evidently unaware of this, as later events were to reveal. Stalin, meanwhile, made himself an expert on medicine, ordering textbooks to be sent to him. He became convinced that Lenin would soon die and increasingly showed open contempt towards him. 'Lenin kaput,' he told colleages in December. Stalin's words reached Lenin through Maria Ul'ianova. 'I have not died yet,' her brother informed her, 'but they, led by Stalin, have already buried me.' Although Stalin based his reputation on his special relationship with Lenin, his real feelings towards him were betrayed in 1924, when, having had to wait a whole year for him to waste away and die, he was heard to mutter: 'Couldn't even die like a
These fragmentary notes, which later became known as Lenin's Testament, were dictated in brief spells — some of them by telephone to a stenographer who sat in the next room with a pair of earphones — between 23 December and 4 January. Lenin ordered them to be kept in the strictest secrecy, placing them in sealed envelopes to be opened only by himself or Krupskaya. But his senior secretaries were also spies for Stalin and they showed the notes to him.37 Throughout these last writings there is an overwhelming sense of despair at the way the revolution had turned out. Lenin's frenzied style, his hyperbole and obsessive repetition, betray a mind that was not just deteriorating through paralysis but was also tortured — perhaps by the realization that the single goal on which it had been fixed for the past four decades had now turned out a
monstrous mistake. Throughout these last writings Lenin was haunted by Russia's cultural backwardness. It was as if he acknowledged, perhaps only to himself, that the Mensheviks had been right, that Russia was not ready for socialism since its masses lacked the education to take the place of the bourgeoisie, and that the attempt to speed up this process through the intervention of the state was bound to end up in tyranny. Was this what he meant when he warned that the Bolsheviks still needed to 'learn how to govern'?
Lenin's last notes were concerned with three main problems — with Stalin in each as the principal culprit. The first of these was the Georgian affair and the question of what sort of union treaty Russia should sign with the ethnic borderlands. Despite his own Georgian origins, Stalin was the foremost of those Bolsheviks whom Lenin had criticized during the civil war for their Great Russian chauvinism. Most of Stalin's supporters in the party were equally imperialist in their views. They equated the colonization of the borderlands, the Ukraine especially, by Russian workers, and the suppression of the native peasant population ('petty-bourgeois nationalists'), with the promotion of Communist power. As the Commissar for Nationalities, Stalin proposed in late September that the three non-Russian republics that had so far come into being (the Ukraine, Belorussia and Transcaucasia) should join Russia as no more than autonomous regions, leaving the lion's share of power to the federal government in Moscow. The 'autonomization plan', as Stalin's proposals came to be known, would have restored the 'Russia united and indivisible' of the Tsarist Empire. It was not at all what Lenin had envisaged when he had assigned to Stalin the task of drawing up the plans for a federal union. Lenin stressed the need to pacify what he saw as the justified historical grievances of the non-Russians against Russia by granting them the status of 'sovereign' republics (for the major ethnic groups) or 'autonomous' ones (for the smaller ones) with broad cultural freedoms and the formal right — for whatever that was worth — to secede from the union.
Stalin's plans were bitterly opposed by the Georgian Bolsheviks, whose attempts to build up their own fragile political base depended on the concession of these national rights. Already, in March 1922, Stalin and his fellow- Georgian, Ordzhonikidze, head of Moscow's Caucasian Bureau, had forced Georgia, much against its leaders' will, to merge with Armenia and Azerbaijan in a Transcauca-sian Federation. It seemed to Georgia's leaders that Stalin and his henchman were treating Georgia as their fiefdom and riding roughshod over them. They rejected the autonomization plan and threatened to resign if Moscow forced it through.*
* The opposition of the other republics was more circumspect: the Ukrainians refused to give their opinion on Stalin's proposals, while the Belorussians said that they would be guided by the Ukraine's decision.
It was at this point that Lenin intervened. To begin with he took Stalin's side. Although his proposals were undesirable — Lenin forced them to be dropped in favour of the federal union that later became known as the Soviet Union Treaty ratified in 1924 — the Georgians had been wrong to issue ultimatums and he told them so in an angry cable on 21 October. The next day the entire Central Committee of the Georgian Communist Party resigned in protest. Nothing quite like it had ever happened before in the history of the party. From late November, however, when Lenin was generally beginning to turn against Stalin, his position changed. New evidence from Georgia made him think again. He despatched a fact-finding commission to Tiflis, headed by Dzerzhinsky and Rykov, from which he learned that during the course of an argument Ordzhonikidze had beaten up a prominent Georgian Bolshevik (who had called him a 'Stalinist arsehole'). Lenin was outraged. It confirmed his impressions of Stalin's growing rudeness and made him see the Georgian issue in a different light. In his notes to the Party Congress on 30—1 December he compared Stalin to an old-style Russian chauvinist, a 'rascal and a tyrant', who could only bully and subjugate small nations, such as Georgia, whereas what was needed from Russia's rulers was 'profound caution, sensitivity, and a readiness to compromise' with their legitimate national aspirations. Lenin even claimed that in a socialist federation the rights of 'oppressed nations', such as Georgia, should be greater than those of the 'oppressor nations' (i.e. Russia) so as to 'compensate for the inequality which obtains in actual practice'. On 8 January, in what was to be the final letter of his life, Lenin promised the Georgian opposition that he was following their cause 'with all my heart'.38
Lenin's second major concern in his Testament was to check the growing powers of the party's leading organs, which were now under Stalin's control. Two years earlier, when his own command had been supreme, Lenin had condemned the proposals of the Democratic Centralists for more democracy and
