A People's Tragedy (167 page)

Having become the General Secretary, he had 'accumulated unlimited power in his hands, and I am not sure that he will always know how to use this power with sufficient caution'. On 4 January Lenin added the following note:

Stalin is too rude and this defect, although quite tolerable in our midst and in dealings between Communists, becomes intolerable in a General Secretary. For this reason I suggest that the comrades think about a way to remove Stalin from that post and replace him with someone who has only one advantage over Comrade Stalin, namely greater tolerance, greater loyalty, greater courtesy and consideration to comrades, less capriciousness, etc.39

Lenin was making it clear that Stalin had to go.

Lenin's resolve was further strengthened at the start of March, when he learned about an incident which had taken place between Stalin and Krupskaya several weeks before but which had been kept secret from him. On 21 December Lenin had dictated to Krupskaya a letter to Trotsky congratulating him on his successful tactics in the battle against Stalin over the foreign trade monopoly. Stalin's informers told him of the letter, which he seized upon as evidence of Lenin's 'bloc' with Trotsky against him. The next day he telephoned Krupskaya and, as she herself put it, subjected her 'to a storm of coarse abuse', claiming she had broken the party's rules on Lenin's health (although the doctors had authorized her dictation), and threatening to start an investigation of her by the Central Control Commission. When she put the phone down, Krupskaya apparently went pale, sobbed hysterically and rolled around on the floor. Stalin's reign of terror had begun. When Lenin was finally told about this incident, on 5 March, he dictated a letter to Stalin demanding that he should apologize for his 'rudeness' or else risk a 'breach of relations between us'. Stalin, who had become completely arrogant with power, could hardly mask his contempt for

the dying Lenin in his ungracious reply.* Krupskaya, he reminded him, 'is not just your wife but my old Party comrade'. In their 'conversation' he had not been 'rude' and the whole incident was 'nothing more than a silly misunderstanding ... However, if you consider that for the preservation of "relations" I should "take back" the above words, I can take them back, although I fail to understand what all this is supposed to be about, or where I am at "fault", or what, exactly, is wanted of me.'40

Lenin was devastated by the incident. He became ill overnight. One of his doctors described his condition on 6 March: 'Vladimir Ilich lay there with a look of dismay, a frightened expression on his face, his eyes sad with an inquiring look, tears running down his face. Vladimir Ilich became agitated, tried to speak, but the words would not come to him and he could only say: "Oh hell, oh hell. The old illness has come back." '

Three days later Lenin suffered his third major stroke. It robbed him of the power to speak and thus to contribute to politics. Until his death, ten months later, he could only utter single syllables:
'vot-vot'
('here-here') and
's'ezi-s'ezi
('congress-congress').41

In May Lenin was moved to Gorki, where a team of doctors was placed at his disposal.

On fine days he would sit outside. There a nephew found him one day 'sitting in his wheelchair in a white summer shirt with an open collar . .. A rather old cap covered his head and the right arm lay somewhat unnaturally on his lap. [He] hardly noticed me even though I stood quite plainly in the middle of the clearing.' Krupskaya read to him

— Gorky and Tolstoy gave him the most comfort — and strove in vain to teach him how to speak. By September, with the help of a cane and a pair of orthopaedic shoes, he was just able to walk again. Sometimes he pushed his wheelchair round the grounds. He began to read papers sent from Moscow and, with Krupskaya's help, learned to write a little with his left hand. Bukharin visited in the autumn and, as he later told Boris Nikolaevsky, found Lenin deeply worried about who was to succeed him and about the articles he could not write. But there was no question of him ever returning to politics.

Lenin, the politician, was already dead.42

* * * Getting Lenin out of the way was just what Stalin needed. Through his spies Stalin had learned of Lenin's secret letter to the Twelfth Party Congress. If he was to survive in office, he had to prevent it from being read out there. On 9 March Stalin used his power as the General Secretary to put off the Congress from mid-March until mid-April.

Trotsky, although he stood to gain most from Stalin's likely downfall at the Congress, readily agreed to its delay. He even reassured Kamenev that, whilst he agreed 'with Lenin in substance' (i.e. on the Georgian question and party reform), he was 'for preserving the status quo' and

* It was not published until 1989.

'against removing Stalin' provided there was a 'radical change' of policies. Trotsky concluded with the hope that: 'There should be no more intrigues but honest cooperation.' The outcome of this 'rotten compromise' — just what Lenin had warned him not to make — was that the Party Congress witnessed Stalin's triumph rather than his final defeat. Lenin's notes on the nationality question and the reform of the party were distributed among the delegates, discussed, and then dismissed by the leadership. Most of the delegates, in any case, probably shared the view expressed by Stalin that at a time when unity was needed in the party above all else there was no need to waste time discussing democracy. The urge to silence Trotsky, and all criticism of the Politburo, was in itself a crucial factor in Stalin's rise to power.43 Lenin's notes on the question of the succession, including his demand that Stalin be removed, were not read out at the Congress and remained suppressed until 1956.*

It is difficult to explain Trotsky's conduct. At this crucial moment of the power struggle, when he could have won a major victory, he somehow engineered his own defeat.

Among the forty members of the new Central Committee, elected at the Congress, he could count only three supporters. Perhaps, sensing his growing isolation, especially after Lenin's stroke, Trotsky had decided that his only hope lay in trying to appease the triumvirate. His memoirs are filled with the conviction that he had been brought down by a conspiracy of its three leaders. There was certainly a very real danger that, if he had opted to defy them, Trotsky would have been accused of 'factionalism' — and after 1921 this was a political death sentence. But there is also some truth in the claim that Trotsky lacked the stomach for a fight. There was an inner weakness to his character, one that stemmed from his pride. Faced with the prospect of defeat, Trotsky preferred not to compete. One of his oldest friends tells the story of a chess game in New York.

Trotsky had challenged him to a game, 'evidently considering himself a good chess player'. But it turned out that he was weak and, having lost the game, went into a temper and refused to play another game.44 This small episode was typical of Trotsky: when he came up against a superior rival, one who was able to out-manaeuvre him, he chose to retreat and sulk in glorious isolation rather than lose face by trying to confront him on disadvantageous terms.

This was, in a sense, what Trotsky did next. Rather than fight Stalin

* The contents of the Testament were made known to the delegates of the Thirteenth Party Congress in 1924. Stalin offered to resign but his offer was rejected on the suggestion of Zinoviev to 'let bygones be bygones'. The conflict with Lenin was put down to a personal clash, with the implication that Lenin had been sick and not altogether sound in mind. None of these last writings was fully published in Russia during Stalin's lifetime, although fragments appeared in the party press during the 1920s. Trotsky and his followers made their contents well known in the West, however (Volkogonov,
Stalin,
ch. II).

in the highest party organs he took up the standard of the Bolshevik rank and file, posing as the champion of party democracy against the 'police regime' of the leadership.

It was a desperate gamble — Trotsky was hardly known for his democratic habits and he ran the deadly risk of 'factionalism' — but then he was in desperate straits. On 8

October he addressed an Open Letter to the Central Committee in which he accused it of suppressing all democracy within the party:

The participation of the party masses in the actual formation of the party organization is becoming increasingly marginal. A peculiar secretarial psychology has been established in the past year or so, its main feature is the belief that the [party] secretary is capable of deciding every and any question, without even knowing the basic facts . . . There is a very broad stratum of party workers, both in the government and party apparatus, who completely abnegate their own party opinion, at least as expressed openly, as if assuming that it is the apparatus of the secretarial hierarchy which formulate party opinion and policy. Beneath this stratum of abstainers from opinion lies the broad party masses, for whom every decision already comes down in the form of a summons or command.

Support for Trotsky came from the so-called 'Group of 46' — Antonov-Ovseenko, Piatakov and Preobrazhensky were the best known — who also wrote in protest to the Central Committee. The climate of fear in the party was such, they claimed, that even old comrades had become 'afraid to converse with one another'.43

Predictably, the party leadership accused Trotsky of instigating a dangerous 'platform'

which could lead to the creation of an illegal 'faction' in the party. Without responding to his political criticisms, the Politburo issued a vicious personal attack on Trotsky on 19 October. Trotsky was arrogant, considered himself above the day-to-day work of the party, and acted by the maxim 'all or nothing' (i.e. 'Give me all or I'll give you nothing').

Four days later Trotsky addressed a defiant rebuttal of the charges of 'factionalism' to the Plenum of the Central Committee. On 26 October he appeared at the Plenum itself.

Until recently it was thought that Trotsky had not attended this crucial meeting.

Deutscher and Broue, his two main biographers, both have him absent with the flu. But he did attend and, indeed, put up such a powerful defence that Bazhanov, Stalin's secretary, who was charged with transcribing Trotsky's speech, buried the records of it in his personal files. They were found there in 1990. Trotsky's speech was a passionate denial of the allegations of 'Bonapartism' which he claimed had been levelled against him. It was at this point that he raised the question of his Jewish roots. To prove that he lacked ambition Trotsky

cited two occasions when he had turned down Lenin's offer of high office — once in October 1917 (Commissar of the Interior) and once again in September 1922 (Deputy Chairman of Sovnarkom)—on the grounds that it would not be wise, given the problem of anti-Semitism, to have a Jew in such a high post. On the first occasion Lenin had dismissed this as 'trivial'; but on the second 'he was in agreement with me'.46 Trotsky's implication was obvious: opposition to him in the party — and Lenin had acknowledged this — stemmed partly from the fact that he was a Jew. It was a tragic moment for Trotsky — not just as a politician but also as a man — that at this turning point in his life, standing condemned before the party, he should have to fall back on his Jewish roots. For a man who had never felt himself a Jew, it was a mark of how alone he now was.

Trotsky's emotional appeal made little impression on the delegates — most of whom had been picked by Stalin. By 102 votes to two the Plenum passed a motion of censure against Trotsky for engaging in 'factionalism'. Kamenev and Zinoviev pressed for Trotsky to be expelled from the party; but Stalin, always eager to appear as the voice of moderation, thought this was unwise and the motion was rejected.47 Stalin, in any case, had no need to hurry. Trotsky was finished as a major force and his expulsion from the party — which finally came in 1927 — could await its time. The one man capable of stopping Stalin had now been removed.

* * * The public had not been told that Lenin was dying. Right until the end the press continued to report that he was recovering from a grave illness — one from which any mortal man would have died. By inventing this 'miracle recovery' the regime sought to keep alive the cult of Lenin upon which it now increasingly depended for its own sense of legitimacy. The term 'Leninism' was used for the first time in 1923: the triumvirate sought to present themselves as its true defenders against Trotsky, the 'anti-Leninist'.

The same year saw work commence on the first edition of his collected works (the
Leninskii shornik),
the holy scriptures of this orthodoxy, and the establishment of the Lenin Institute (formally opened in 1924), complete with an archive, a library and a museum of Leninania. There was a spate of hagiographies whose main aim was to create myths and legends — Lenin as a poor peasant, or a worker, Lenin as the lover of animals and children, Lenin as the tireless worker for the people's happiness — which might help to make the regime more popular. It was also from this time that huge portraits of Lenin began to appear on the facades of public buildings — one Moscow park even had a 'living portrait' of him made up of bedding plants — while inside many factories and offices there were 'Lenin Corners' with approved photographs and artefacts to illustrate his achievements.48 As Lenin the man died, so Lenin the God was born. His private life was nationalized. It became a sacred institution to consecrate the Stalinist regime.

Lenin died on 21 January 1924. At 4 p.m. he had a massive stroke, fell into a deep coma and died shortly before 7 p.m. Apart from his family and attendant doctors, the only witness to his death was Bukharin. In 1937, pleading for his own life, he claimed that Lenin had 'died in my arms'.49

The announcement was made by Kalinin the next day to the delegates of the Eleventh Soviet Congress, which was then in session. There were screams and sobbing noises from the hall. Perhaps because of its unexpectedness, the public showed signs of genuine grief: theatres and shops closed down for a week; portraits of Lenin, draped in red and black ribbons, were displayed in many windows; peasants came to his rest home at Gorki to pay their last respects; thousands of mourners braved the arctic temperatures to line the streets of Moscow from the Paveletsky Station to the Hall of Columns, where Lenin's body was brought to lie in state. Over the next three days half a million people queued for several hours to file past the bier. Thousands of wreaths and mournful declarations were sent by schools and factories, regiments and naval ships, towns and villages throughout Russia. Later, in the months following the funeral, there was a mad rush to erect monuments and statues of Lenin (one in Volgograd had Lenin standing on top of a giant screw), and to rename streets and institutions after him. Petrograd was renamed Leningrad. Whole factories pledged to join the party — one agitator said that this 'would be the best wreath on the coffin of the deceased leader' — and in the weeks following his death 100,000 proletarians were signed up in this so-called 'Lenin enrolment'. Many Western journalists saw this 'national mourning' as a 'post-mortem vote of confidence' in the regime. Others saw it as a cathartic release of collective grief after so many years of human suffering. People sobbed hysterically, hundreds fainted, in a way that defies rational explanation. Perhaps it shows that the cult of Lenin had already cast its spell: that however much they may have hated his regime the people still loved the 'Good Lenin', just as in the old days they had despised the boyars but loved the 'Father Tsar'.