We were unable to retain all the positions we had taken, but, on the other hand, it is only because, rising on the crest of the enthusiasm of the workmen and peasants, we had conquered so much space, that we had so much to give away and were able to retreat a long way back, and may still continue to retreat, without forfeiting the essential and fundamental.
Lenin’s Works, xviii, p. 27
WHEN Joseph Stalin was given the task of securing the food supplies from the south of Russia and became involved in military leadership, he was not relieved of other responsibilities. He was still Commissar for Nationalities, also a leading member of the Political Bureau of the Party and its Secretariat of three. Any one of these posts contained enough work to occupy an ordinary person twenty-four hours a day. Headquarters were now in Moscow, and this change in the centre of gravity of Stalin’s work brought with it a great change in his domestic life. For the first time since he left the paternal roof to embark on his underground political career he secured a home. This home consisted of two or three rooms in a large block of buildings in the Kremlin which previously had been occupied by attendants of the Czar. The Kremlin stands on high ground—I think the highest in Moscow. Its high, towered walls surround palaces and churches, dwelling-places, a hospital, and an armoury, all monuments of the centuries that are gone; but I doubt very much whether Stalin, as he moved into his new quarters, gave much thought to these historic associations. He was too busy shaping the pathways of the morrow. One side of the Kremlin towers alongside the lovely river Mosckva which winds its way through the city. Another side forms part of the framework of the great Red Square, now famous throughout the world as the final resting-place of Lenin. Within these walls Stalin came to have his permanent address.
It was here that in 1919 he brought Nadya Alleluiev, the daughter of his old friend of early Bolshevik days, and now grown into a beautiful woman. He was at this time forty and she seventeen, but for her he was still the same hero who had once come from afar and taken refuge in her parents’ home. This was Stalin’s great love affair. He was by nature monogamous. Those in search of sexual scandal in his life will search in vain. I recall Radek speaking to me of Stalin’s reaction to the vagaries and often abominable aberrations in the sexual life of modern civilisation. Several illustrated German books dealing with the subject lay on Radek’s table, which was as usual piled with volumes newly arrived from Europe and America. Stalin was just about to leave Radek’s room when he noticed these books and began thumbing over their pages. Turning to Radek he asked: “Are there really people in Europe who do these kinds of things?” “Yes, of course,” answered Radek. “Stalin,” Radek said to me, “looked utterly disgusted, shrugged his shoulders, and walked away without saying another word.” To Stalin they reflected a diseased way of life, and he was a normal healthy man in his reactions to disease whether of the mind or of the body.
He and Nadya Alleluiev were happily married. Of this marriage there were two children, and no blow Stalin ever received was so severe as that of her death in 1929. But that is to anticipate. In 1919 the word “home” began to have for him a new connotation, and that home life he cherished although he as yet had little opportunity to enjoy it.
The intervention war did not end until the closing months of 1922, when the last Japanese soldier left Vladivostok promising to return. By the end of 1920, however, all Russia in Europe and a part of Siberia were free from the foreign foe, and the counter-revolution had been mastered. This was a great achievement. But without in any way seeking to distract from its greatness, it would be a mistake to visualise it in terms of the great clash of arms which had characterised the western front in the first world war or was to characterise the eastern front in the second. The improvised Red Army was fluctuating. It had no soft jobs to offer, no emoluments worth speaking about, nothing but grim, hard fighting with troops ill-equipped, poorly fed, and badly clothed. Indeed, there were hardly any uniforms but what could be secured from the enemy, together with old ones left over from the Czarist army. I saw regiments march through the streets of Leningrad and Moscow in 1920 clad in the uniforms of almost every country in Europe—French, British, German, Polish, Russian, and many others. If ever there was an army which fought “with sweat and blood and tears,” clothed in rags and tatters, on a minimum of food, and with a minimum of equipment, it was this army of the Revolution between 1918 and 1922. It was fighting for an idea, and it was this idea which held the army together and inspired it—the new life of Socialist society which lay ahead. It is doubtful if at any period during these years the Red Army had rifles for more than 600,000 to 700,000 men, or more than 1,000 guns and 3,000 machine-guns. And all these were not of the same manufacture. Lenin once described to me how reliable sections of the Red Army went over to the advancing enemy and advanced with them until they had got food, clothing, and equipment, then returned to their own ranks with reinforcements. On the other hand, the efforts of the fourteen countries which sent considerable supplies and forces to assist the Russian counter-revolution were also not comparable with their efforts in either Great War. Their aid had to be sent in opposition to the will of their own people. The Revolution had stirred all Europe. For a short period a Bolshevik Government had reigned in Hungary, and the tide of revolution had been so great in Germany that it had swept the Kaiser from power and thrown up Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils throughout the country. Germany, in fact, had had her “March Revolution” in November, 1918. In France and Britain the “unrest” had mellowed down to great strikes and widespread anti-capitalist movements. The people everywhere had had enough of war, and at length rose in widespread protest against the intervention policy of their governments. It was this great “Hands off Russia” movement, combined with the political rottenness of the Russian “White” armies, the disintegrating effect of Bolshevik propaganda even among the Allied forces, and the growing fighting strength of the young Red Army, that finally led to the defeat of the intervention forces and the Governments of Europe coming to terms one by one with the Soviet Government.
Various explanations have been given of the motives of the Powers in adopting intervention. The British were being “loyal to their friends in Russia who had made the alliance with them for the Great War.” The Americans were watching the Japanese in Siberia and making sure they did not stay there to the disadvantage of the U.S.A.; and so forth. But one and all made the same mistake. They supported the forces which were for the restoration of the power of the landlords and for depriving the peasants of their new freedom of possession of their own land. This alone doomed intervention to disaster, while providing one more classic demonstration of the Marxist truism that the propertied classes have a “property patriotism” which transcends nationality and ignores all boundaries and legalities. Not one government declared war on Soviet Russia, but fourteen governments sent armies to make war on her, to destroy her administration, to re-establish the landlords in possession of the land and the capitalists in possession of the factories, the mills, the mines, and the State.
They failed. But they left behind them a legacy of immeasurable destruction. Attempts have been made to estimate the damage in terms of cash. Such estimates are of little value, for it is impossible to calculate the cost of the diversion of human energy from the tasks of construction to the tasks of war. We can count the shattered bridges, the destroyed and disabled locomotives and waggons, the upturned streets and battered buildings, the blown-up factories and burnt-out farms and possibly count the number of the killed and wounded, although I doubt it. But who can tell the number of crops that would have been sown and reaped had not vast stretches of territory been time and again over-run by the fighting armies? Who can tell the loss in labour productivity in the mines and factories from the continuous recruiting of the best workmen to fight? What was the social cost of the diversion of the Soviet Government from the economic policy Lenin had outlined at the beginning of 1918 to that of War Communism? It is impossible to answer these questions. The devastation was tremendous. I saw it. It brought in its trail hunger such as the peoples of the invading Powers had never experienced. It laid great areas of the country naked for the scorching suns of 1920 and 1921 to parch completely, turning hunger into famine and bringing epidemics that affected more than thirty millions directly and the whole population indirectly. The number who perished from famine and disease in the bitterly cold winters of 1921 and 1922 has been variously estimated as between five and ten millions. Perhaps in these days, when we have adjusted ourselves to hearing without turning a hair, of disasters involving multitudes, such figures may mean little. But we may at least appreciate that those who lived through these terrible years in Soviet Russia find it difficult to forget the experience and who was responsible. Yet there are persons stupid enough to declare that the “War Communism” of these years corresponds to the real aims of the Bolsheviks and to hold them responsible for the sufferings of the country.
When Stalin requisitioned the grain of the south to feed the hungry population of the north, he had regard neither for the open market of capitalism nor for the principle of the future exchange of goods in communist society. He was doing what any State power would have had to do if it intended to survive, whether that State were a slave, feudal, capitalist, or socialist. The economics of War Communism were the economics of survival, and that they took on extreme forms of centralisation of authority, applied measures of confiscation right and left, requisitioned without regard for the economic niceties of the market, is incidental.
At this period Stalin and Trotsky again found themselves in opposite camps. Flushed with enthusiasm for the growing discipline of the Red Army, Trotsky initiated the transformation of its regiments into military Labour Battalions. Again showing his characteristic lack of confidence in the workers, he proposed to militarise labour in industry and make the Trade Unions into governmental institutions which would effect the necessary discipline. He opposed the election of trade union officials and favoured their appointment by the Government. “What does militarisation mean, if not organisation, strict execution of orders, war against idleness?” he asked in a speech. “Misery engenders avarice, famine, epidemics, which at all times have devastated Russia. All these should have become a thing of the past with the arrival of the workers and peasants in power. We shall lift our country out of the dirt, misery and poverty. The basis of our State is the rule of universal labour. It is time to put this principle into practice.”
Lenin and Stalin together fought Trotsky’s proposal. They insisted that the Trade Unions be voluntary and democratic, elect their officials, adopt methods of comradely persuasion, and eschew the dictatorial practices of the military-minded.
A group of workers led by Shliapnikov, a metal worker named Medyedyev, and Kollantai, went to the other extreme and fought for a syndicalist policy. They wanted the entire national economy to be entrusted to an “All-Russian Producers’ Congress.” They contended that the Trade Unions were the highest form of working-class organisation, and in necessary opposition to the State and the Party. Stalin and Lenin led the struggle against this group too, insisting that this lop-sided exaggeration of the rôle of the unions threatened the Party and the State, and, above all, the alliance of the workers and peasants in the Revolution. But these by-products of War Communism were swept aside by a more powerful and significant movement among the masses, which ended War Communism altogether by a revolt—essentially a peasant revolt, although it took the form of a revolt of the sailors at Kronstadt.
Most of the sailors were drawn from the peasantry. The composition of those at Kronstadt had changed considerably since the days when the Aurora had steamed up the Neva to bombard the Winter Palace. Time and again they had sent the pick of their forces to the various fronts of the civil war, and their ranks had been replenished with peasant youths. Situated at the frontier of the revolution, feeling acutely their own conditions of semi-starvation, and knowing the full effect of the requisitioning policy in the villages from which they had come, they were inflamed by the “Whites” centred in Helsingfors and Reval. This I know from personal observation. As I passed through Reval on my way to Petrograd several weeks before the revolt burst forth, the newspapers of Esthonia and Finland were full of reports of uprisings in Kronstadt and Petrograd. The people of Reval were excited by the so-called news. I was urged by friends not to proceed with my journey. I was told that Petrograd had been seized by the Whites; the Czar’s flag was again flying over the Winter Palace; civil war was raging. But on arriving in the city several days later I found all quiet. There was not even a meeting in progress. Thus it is no exaggeration to say that the “Whites” were fanning the discontent, which undoubtedly existed, into open warfare. But the discontent had a real basis far more serious than their machinations. The relaxation of the pressure imposed by the civil and intervention wars led the peasants to protest against the continuation of the requisitioning system, whereupon the hunger in the towns developed bitterness among the workers against both the Government and the peasants.
Although the Government crushed the revolt at Kronstadt, it had to do more than just answer the protests with the gun. It had to retreat from “War Communism” to what became known as the “New Economic Policy.” How the press of the world rejoiced over what was interpreted as the abandonment of the Bolshevik programme and the “return to capitalism and sanity.” The governments of the world still held the view that the Bolsheviks could not maintain themselves in power, and saw in this new policy an opportunistic mode of surrendering the Soviets’ revolutionary purpose. Again they underestimated the Bolsheviks. It was not easy for the latter to retreat and disillusion many valiant men and women who had fought and sacrificed ceaselessly for years in the belief that they were rushing full-speed-ahead through terror to triumph and the era of plenty. Yet it had to be done. In all the regions that had been overrun by the armies, the richest food-growing regions of Russia, the marching forces of each side had requisitioned the reserves of the peasants, and the peasants had almost ceased producing. Thousands of draft animals had perished. Hospital and medical supplies were gone. There was a universal shortage of consumer goods. The paper roubles were almost valueless. The cities and the towns were in a hopeless state of disrepair. Nothing could be more drab and colourless than Petrograd as I saw it in 1920. Shop windows were boarded up. Streets were dangerous for vehicles because of their battered condition. Buildings grimly recorded the bespattering of their walls by machine gun fire. Railways were cluttered with shattered rolling stock. Not more than a tenth of the locomotives available at the outbreak of the Great War were running. Bridges by the thousand had been destroyed. Coal production was down to 7,000,000 tons per annum. There was a dearth of everything. Hunger stalked town and village alike, and brigandage was rife throughout the countryside. Money payments gave way to payments in kind. Industrial labour had shrunk to half pre-war figures and output was down to 18 per cent of the level of 1913. Ten million peasants were using wooden ploughs.
Civil war, with frontiers that expand and contract like a concertina, is not a period of enhanced production but of industrial decline. It is not the period in which a country can pass from small-farm to collective-farm economy: on the contrary, economy becomes more primitive and the production forces grow less.
When Lenin led the retreat from “War Communism” to the “New Economic Policy” the Bolsheviks were faced with more than a strategic withdrawal to prepared positions. New problems loomed. The strategy governing the N.E.P. consisted of maintaining the “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” by the State retaining its hold on key positions such as the banks, railways, telegraphs, postal services, large industrial enterprises, and foreign trade, and re-establishing private ownership in small-scale industry, with free market conditions for the exchange of commodities, industrial and agricultural. The peasants were released from requisitioning raids, and were free to sell any surplus production over and above the tax in kind which they had to deliver to the State.
The position thus approximated to that outlined by Lenin in his “April Theses” of 1917 and his first report to the Soviet Congress in 1918, but only approximated. Had there been no civil war and no intervention, the Bolsheviks would not so early have made such great inroads into private ownership or have adopted a policy of requisitioning the peasants’ supplies. Now they had to push ahead with the nationalisation of industry not for economic but political reasons. The N.E.P. therefore consisted of a mixture of Socialist and capitalist economy. It has been described as “a return to capitalism” and as “State capitalism.” Neither description is wholly true. The State-owned section of economy was Socialist, but had to struggle in a milieu of capitalist market conditions, to enter into competitive relationships in commodity production and be subject to their characteristic fluctuations.
When the N.E.P. came into operation the whole character of revolutionary activity had to change. A “good communist” was no longer the man who could storm the barricades, but one who could understand and practise the art of management and master the technique of production. Here was a test of adaptability and political leadership without parallel or precedent. The majority of Bolsheviks had presumed that the Revolution would have swept Europe by this time and simplified the problems of production for them by reinforcing the Soviet working-class with the more technically-trained workers of the industrial West. But while the surging movement of revolution indeed swept across Europe, nowhere, except for a short period in Hungary, had it reached its November 7th.
At the same time the dread sequel to the desolation and destruction caused by the Great War, the civil war, the over-rumoring of the country by the armies of intervention, and the summer droughts of 1920, was at hand. Famine in all its horror was drawing ever closer, and would soon threaten 30,000,000 people with extinction. No orator could master this situation with words. The Bolsheviks had to prove they could organise production anew. The strategical answer of the N.E.P. carried with it, therefore, the need for a complete overhaul of the Bolshevik Party. The battlefield had called forth its militant abilities, its military leaders, its iconoclasts, its storm troops for battle. Now the call was for builders of industry, pioneers of construction, accountants, managers, educationalists, people who could teach illiterate peasants to become industrial workers and, in short, could heave the masses from their degradation and abysmal ignorance to the level of industrial society of the twentieth century.
These facts led to a new crisis. It was met in a new way, and Stalin played a rôle which led him to the most powerful position in the Party. In the days when the Party had been passing through its crises with the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries, people had left it or joined it as the result of each new controversy, until by 1921 it had grown to nearly 700,000 members. But numbers were not everything, and in the new circumstances I have outlined the Central Committee organised a “purge” and expelled nearly 170,000 members in order to improve the Party quality.
Stalin has frequently been held responsible for the “purge.” He was not its author. This party-cleansing was done under Lenin’s leadership. It is a process which is unique in the history of political parties. The Bolsheviks, however, do not regard it as an extraordinary measure for use only in a time of crisis, but a normal feature of Party procedure. It is the means of guaranteeing Bolshevik quality. To regard it as a desperate move on the part of leaders anxious to get rid of rivals is to misunderstand how profoundly the Bolshevik Party differs from all others, even from the communist parties of the rest of Europe. It has, also, an important bearing on the conduct of the ex-Bolsheviks who were to appear in the famous trials later on.
The purge on this occasion was carried through at open meetings in which non-Party members were permitted to take part. On these occasions each group or branch of the Party holds a meeting and every member, no matter what his rank, is under obligation to review his history before his comrades, to tell of his social origin and circumstances and his political career, to explain his views on Party policy, to recall his practical work, to admit his mistakes and explain them. The meeting then makes its judgement and recommendations to the Party control commission which is in charge of the task of verifying the membership. “Confession” is therefore a common practice in the ranks of Bolshevism. Its sociological origin may be traced through the religious practices of the Orthodox Church, which for centuries dominated the life of the Russian peasants, to the circumstances of life in the peasant communities in which every villager knows intimately the business of his neighbour and openly discusses it. However, the Marxist type of “confession” is very different from that of the poor wretch whose mind is tormented by his sins and feels he must unburden himself to someone. The Bolshevik is called on to review his own activity objectively, to recognise that he is a social unit in a great social process. What he thinks and does must be tested in the light of the principles and aims of the Party, to which he voluntarily committed himself when he joined. I can imagine the consternation in the ranks of any party in Britain if some daring executive ventured to stage a “purge” on Bolshevik lines!
Lenin initiated the first great “cleansing” of the Bolshevik Party just as the transition had begun from “War Communism” to the New Economic Policy. The social composition of the Party and its unity were improved. In 1922, when, as Lenin put it, “the Party had rid itself of the rascals, bureaucrats, dishonest or wavering communists, and of Mensheviks who have repainted their ‘façade’ but who remained Menshevik at heart,” another Congress took place; and it was this Congress which advanced Stalin to the key position of Bolshevik power. He was elected General Secretary of the Party, a position he holds to this day. In his hands the post ceased to be simply an administrative one, and was transformed into a political position of outstanding importance. Upon him fell the responsibility for preparing the agendas of the Political Bureau; its decisions passed through his hands to the executive and administrative organs of the Party; it brought him into intimate contact with every functionary of the organisation, enabling him to examine their work as well as their ideas. No one had assimilated more thoroughly than he, Lenin’s teachings on the rôle of the Party as the organiser of leadership in every institution of the country. And none, not even Lenin himself, was more determined to make it function efficiently. He was ruthless yet patient. He knew how to drive and how to wait. He was never a shouter, but he knew how to hustle—with a gun and without.
His handling of the Commissariat of Nationalities confirms these observations. Pestovsky, the Pole who became his first secretary in this department, writes:
There were Lettish, Polish, Lithuanian, Esthonian, and other elements in the council of his secretariat. They were afflicted with the ideas of Left Bolshevism. I myself belonged to that faction. . . . I am almost certain that Trotsky, who accuses Stalin of “dictating,” would in three days have dispersed the oppositional council and surrounded himself with his own followers. But Stalin acted differently. He decided to educate us by slow and persistent efforts, and displayed much discipline and self-control. He had his conflicts with individual members of the council, but was loyal to the body as a whole, submitted to its decisions even when he disagreed, with the exception of such cases where there was a violation of party discipline. Then he would appeal to the Central Committee, and, of course carry his point.
Here Stalin was the patient collective worker. But it was also while carrying through the policy of this department that he showed his ruthlessness and capacity to act swiftly as soon as he had made up his mind. The Georgian Committee, led by Mdiviani, with whom he had worked in his younger days, had proved incapable of dealing with the remnants of the Social Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, who were using in a campaign for secession the declared right of a nation to withdraw from the Soviet Union. Stalin, with Dzerzhinsky and Ordjonikidze, went to Tiflis to “straighten out” the situation. They convened a conference of Georgian Bolsheviks, at which Stalin lashed the secessionists and those who had been so weak as to give them scope. Many of the delegates to the conference were old personal friends. He spared neither friend nor foe. Within twenty-four hours the three chiefs established a new Georgian leadership among the Bolsheviks, since when there has been no more Georgian secessionist agitations.
Some biographers, Trotsky included, assert that Lenin was violently opposed to the course taken by Stalin on this occasion, and that he sought to make a “bloc” with Trotsky in the forthcoming Party Congress with a view to removing Stalin from his new post as General Secretary. There appears to be some truth in the tale, although it is surrounded with contradictory facts. Lenin was ill at this time—the early autumn of 1922—and unable to participate in the meetings of the Central Committee and the Political Bureau. Neither Trotsky nor any other member of the Central Committee opposed Stalin’s report on the matter to the Congress, and all voted for his resolution on the Party’s policy in the Nationalities Question. It was at this period, however, that Lenin drafted his famous “Testament,” which undoubtedly reflects his forebodings with regard to Stalin’s brusqueness but says not one word in criticism of his policy. The storm about this document still lay ahead; at the time no one knew of its existence, and meanwhile, as already said, Stalin was not challenged. Nor did Lenin challenge him on his return to activity in the latter part of the year. On the contrary, it appeared they were in complete accord, for together they brought to completion the work of amalgamating the Soviet Republics into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Stalin had played a great part in the shaping of the Union, and it represented his greatest political achievement to date. At the First All-Union Congress of Soviets, which met on December 22nd, 1922, on the joint proposal of Lenin and Stalin the delegates endorsed the important decision. Stalin’s sense of triumph is conveyed in these words that he addressed to the Congress:
Comrades, this day marks a turning-point in the history of the Soviet Government. It places a landmark between the old period, now past, when the Soviet Republics, although they acted in common, yet each followed its own path and was concerned primarily with its own preservation, and the new period, already begun, when an end is being put to the isolated existence of each of the Soviet Republics, when the republics are being amalgamated into a single federal State in order to successfully cope with economic disruption, and when the Soviet Government is concerned not only with its preservation, but with developing into an important international power, capable of influencing the international situation and of modifying it in the interests of the toilers.
The greatness of this achievement in human association can hardly be exaggerated. To bring into being a multi-national State uniting races which for centuries had been at each other’s throats, inflicting pogroms and enslaving each other; races which were largely illiterate, steeped in superstition, and engulfed in abysmal ignorance, was daring in the extreme. Every nation became free to speak its own language, have its own schools, form its own government, and exercise its own clearly-defined right to federate or withdraw from the federation. But in making the U.S.S.R. its creators had at the same time founded their union on economic and political foundations that were international. In the defence of the new federation, in the development of its means of defence, in foreign policy, in regard to the banks, the railways and means of communications, the planning council of the Union Government transcends all frontiers and unites the basic forces of production. The boundaries of the republics are neither customs barriers nor military frontiers. The military frontier is the frontier of the Union. The customs barriers are at the frontiers of the Union. The boundaries of the republics and other autonomous regions are but the demarcation lines of authority in essentially national matters. Again, the Bolshevik Party is an international party—a single party of the Union and not a collection of national parties. Thus national culture comes to flower in the soil of international economic and political unity and the abolition of class exploitation. And as class oppression vanishes, national oppression vanishes also. Every nation has the “right” to separate itself from the Union, but none is likely to wish to exercise that “right” when its economic and social existence and national freedom are tightly bound up with union.
The Bolshevik attitude towards the relationship of national independence to class exploitation has generally been misunderstood. They have always held the view that where there is class exploitation there cannot be national freedom, and in the struggle for that freedom they have therefore always put the “labour question” first. This was the case before the Revolution, and it remains the case after it. Before the revolution the Bolsheviks had opposed the formation of separate working-class parties and trade unions under the banner of each nation, and stood firmly for one party uniting the workers of all the nations in the common struggle against Czardom. After the Revolution they stood for national freedom on the basis of working-class union.
The history of the struggle in Georgia is a classic example of an attempt to dismember the Soviet Republics under the banner of Georgian self-determination. The Georgian Mensheviks aimed at an independent bourgeois Georgia. Their allies were the British and French forces of intervention. Had they won, the outcome would have been a pseudo-free republic under the patronage of Anglo-French capital predominantly interested in the oil of Georgia and not the emancipation of the Georgians. The Bolsheviks unhesitatingly put the issue of Georgian freedom on the basis of the settlement of the class issue, brought the Red Army to the aid of the Georgian proletariat, swept the Mensheviks aside, and in short, handled matters so that the freedom of Georgia to-day rests on the strength of its class foundations in the Soviet Union.
The Constitution of 1922, for which Lenin and Stalin were responsible and most of which was drawn up by Stalin, was by no means the final form of the Union. Fourteen years later Stalin was to draft another and still greater project. But even in the project of 1922 the lineaments of the future synthesis of nationalism and internationalism, of the classless society in the World Socialist Community of Peoples, are discernible amid the dark days of famine and before the approach of death towards the leader who had created the party of leaders.
During 1922 Lenin had fallen ill. The fire of his life was burning low. He recovered somewhat during the later months of the year, but to those of us who saw him on the occasion of his speech to the Fourth Congress of the Communist International, held about the time of the Soviet Congress which formed the Union, he was already talking from the shadows. When I met him in the Congress Hall and spoke with him, I felt as all who saw him then must have felt—torn between hope and fear, refusing to believe in the possibility of him not recovering. But hope was of no avail. The wounds he had received in 1918, together with years of overwork, were proving too much for him. Shortly afterwards he ceased all political activity, and the burden of leadership fell primarily on the shoulders of Stalin—though not before he had given another amazing example of his creative genius and capacity to see through the most confusing situations to the goal ahead. In the midst of the period of hunger, civil war, and strife on many fronts, with their tremendous daily problems commanding his attention, he was also working on a plan for the “electrification of Russia.” In March, 1921, Stalin had written to Lenin about this plan:
It is a masterly outline of an economic, a really constructive plan, a real “State” plan, in every accepted sense of the word. It is the only real Marxist attempt of our times to put the superstructure of Russia, so economically in arrears, on a “really true” industrial technical basis, only possible under existing conditions. . . . My advice? . . . First: Not to waste one moment more in chattering about this plan. Secondly: To begin carrying the scheme out immediately in a practical manner. Thirdly: To subordinate at least one-third of the available labour to the interests of the commencement of this new work. . . . Fourthly: as the collaborators of the plan, in spite of all their good qualities, are nevertheless lacking in practical experience, practical men must figure on the “Plans Commission.” Fifthly: The newspapers Pravda, Izvestia and especially Economiicheskaya Zhizn must devote themselves to popularising the Electrification Plan both so as to bring it to everyone’s notice and to give all material details about it . . .
The pundits of the West thought Lenin crazy, but the scheme was put into operation without delay, and soon the planning machinery for electrification grew into a State Economic Planning Commission. Thus amid the contradictions and confusion of the birth period of the New Economic Policy, a clear programme was emerging which would eventually dominate the whole course of development of the economics of the Union. But this period produced its own crop of problems, which during Lenin’s illness became the occasion for renewing the struggle between the various groups within the Bolshevik Party. Once more Bucharin, Trotsky, and others reflected the doubts and fears concerning the new era. Bucharin wanted to dispose of the State Monopoly of Foreign Trade and to allow Western capitalism to satisfy the demand for consumer and industrial goods more freely. Trotsky was in favour of starting an economic drive against the peasants as a means of ending what was called the “scissors crisis”—the widening gap between industrial and agricultural prices. At the same time he opened an attack upon the “bureaucracy of the Party.”
The controversy that now arose found Stalin the custodian of Lenin’s policy; but with Lenin no longer there to prevent it, the open clash between the forces soon assumed big dimensions. Lenin had written from his sick-room against Bucharin’s policy of relaxing the State control of Foreign Trade; but he was too ill to deal with Trotsky’s “New Course” when that appeared. This Stalin dealt with, rejecting the proposal for a class war of the proletariat against the peasantry, and instead, at the Party Congress of December, 1923, raising the cry of a fight against “Trotskyism.”
Was this due to some anticipation that Lenin would be permanently absent, and that the “courage” he had called for on the military fronts could now be given free play? It may be. That personal feeling was there in abundance is a fact. However, it is also a fact that the fundamental political cleavage between the two men was there also. While personal feelings might be subdued, the challenge of rival policies demanded action. That Lenin was alarmed by this struggle in the Party leadership is clear from his Testament, written during his first illness as a result of the impression created by Stalin’s fierce drive against Trotsky while going from one front to another to “clean up the War Commissar’s Augean stables.” On the other hand, that Lenin had an admiration for Trotsky’s abilities despite his own fierce polemics against him is equally clear from the Testatnent. It is obvious, too, that the whole purpose of this document was to prevent if possible “a split of the Party.” It states:
I have in mind stability as a guarantee against a split in the near future and I intend to examine here a series of considerations of a purely personal character. I think that the fundamental factor in the matter of stability—from this point of view—is such members of the Central Committee as Stalin and Trotsky. The relation between them constitutes, in my opinion, a big half of the danger of that split, which might be avoided, and the avoidance of which might be promoted, in my opinion by raising the number of members of the Central Committee to fifty or one hundred.
Comrade Stalin, having become secretary-general, has concentrated an enormous power in his hands; and I am not sure that he always knows how to use that power with sufficient caution. On the other hand, Comrade Trotsky, as was proved by his struggle against the Central Committee in connection with the question of the people’s commissariat of ways and communications, is distinguished not only by his exceptional, abilities—personally, he is, to be sure, the most able man in the present Central Committee—but also by his too far-reaching self-confidence and a disposition to be too much attracted by the purely administrative side of affairs.
These two qualities of the two most able leaders of the present Central Committee might, quite innocently, lead to a split; if our party does not take measures to prevent it, a split might arise unexpectedly.
. . . Stalin is too rude, and this fault, entirely supportable in relations among us communists, becomes insupportable in the office of secretary-general. Therefore, I propose to the comrades to find a way to remove Stalin from that position and appoint to it another man who in all respects differs from Stalin only in superiority—namely, more patient, more loyal, more polite, and more attentive to comrades, less capricious, etc.
This circumstance may seem an insignificant trifle, but I think that from the point of view of the relation between Stalin and Trotsky which I have discussed above it is not a trifle, or it is such a trifle as may acquire a decisive significance.
There is no criticism in the document of Stalin’s policy, but only this delineation of personal qualities, written in extraordinary circumstances. It appears strange to have held over such a document until after the author’s death and more than twelve months after it was written. Nevertheless, it was a vain hope of Lenin’s that an improvement in Stalin’s manners would contribute so much to the overcoming of fundamental political differences. Had Lenin not died, there is no doubt that he would have been able to hold the team together because both disputants would have accepted his leadership and authority. But his absence made all the difference. Stalin might pursue Lenin’s policy, but Trotsky could not adopt it from Stalin. Thus amid the gathering shadows of Lenin’s illness, so soon to end in his passing, there loomed a conflict destined to decide the fate of the Revolution and Stalin’s fate for years to come.
That Stalin deeply felt Lenin’s personal criticism is certain. For more than twenty years Lenin had been his teacher and he a faithful disciple. But he could “take it.” He has many of the qualities of the master. He is no yes-man. He has deep convictions, tremendous will-power and determination, and—could Lenin have lived long enough to see it—a patience which at times seems inexhaustible.
In January, 1924, Lenin died. Sorrow immeasurable descended on the millions of Russia, and on millions beyond her frontiers. This man was loved as no other leader in the history of the working-class movement. The disputes in the ranks of the Party were immediately hushed. For days, in a temperature registering forty degrees below zero, vast crowds filed their way slowly past the bier in the great Hall of the Trade Unions in Moscow. Stalin and other leaders, with the exception of Trotsky, stood for hours by his side as the guard of honour. His body was embalmed and he was laid to rest in a Mausoleum in the Red Square, where red soldiers guard his tomb to this day. On January 26th, at a special memorial session of the Second All-Union Congress of Soviets to honour Lenin’s memory, Stalin made the following declaration:
We Communists are people of a special mould. We are made of a special stuff. We are those who form the army of the great proletarian strategist, the army of Comrade Lenin. There is nothing higher than the honour of belonging to this army. There is nothing higher than the title of member of the Party whose founder and leader was Comrade Lenin. . . .
Departing from us, Comrade Lenin adjured us to guard and strengthen the dictatorship of the proletariat. We vow to you, Comrade, that we will spare no effort to fulfil this behest with credit! . . .
Departing from us, Comrade Lenin adjured us to consolidate and extend the Union of Republics. We vow to you, Comrade Lenin, that this behest, too, we will fulfil with credit!
Time and again did Lenin point out to us that the strengthening of the Red Army and the improvement of its conditions is one of the most important tasks of our party. . . . Let us vow then, comrades, that we will spare no effort to strengthen our Red Army and our Red Navy. . . .
Lenin had died. But Leninism had been born, and Stalin was its banner-bearer.
Next: XIII. Stalin versus Trotsky