CHAPTER 7
JULY 1921-OCTOBER 1922: SEARCHING FOR ALLIES
Stalin’s own words constitute a brazen admission that he murdered Lenin. But
how did he do the deed? What means were employed? Was the killing accomplished in
one stroke, or was it drawn out? Who helped Stalin? And how did political relations
between Stalin and Lenin develop in the shadow—visible only to Stalin—of his design to
kill Lenin? Though the evidence concerning many of these problems is highly
circumstantial and conjectural, we must try to reconstruct the crime now that we have
Stalin’s boastful confession in hand. But be warned: we plunge into sometimes slippery
and obscure territory.
For years Lenin had suffered from an assortment of maladies (chiefly headaches
and insomnia), but in early July 1921—less than four months after the end of the Tenth
Party Congress—he suffered a new illness marked by a sensitivity to noise so painful that
he was forced for the first time to request permission for a vacation, which he took at his
country home in Gorki from July 13. Though he returned to Moscow in mid-August, he
1
needed another month of rest before he could resume a normal schedule. Debilitating
and mysterious illnesses plagued Lenin for the next—the last—two and one-half years of
his life. It seems likely that Stalin bears responsibility for this scheme of illnesses, which
apparently were induced to incapacitate Lenin until Stalin decided to finish him off. The
killing of Lenin was a deliberately gradual process.
Several political calculations recommended a protracted assassination. First,
killing Lenin promptly after the Tenth Party Congress—if Stalin could have managed it—
would have been disadvantageous for Stalin, who needed time both to jockey for a
position in the Party from which he could challenge effectively for the succession and also
to undermine the standing of the man generally regarded as Lenin’s most natural heir,
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Trotsky. Delaying Lenin’s death also afforded Stalin the unique advantage (at least for a
while) of being the only one of the potential successors to know that a struggle for Lenin’s
mantle was underway. But while these factors counseled that Lenin’s death should not
occur until an opportune moment in the future, political common sense also suggested
that Stalin try to minimize Lenin’s activity in the interim. A Lenin who was incapacitated
could not serve effectively as Party leader, and thus he could not be as much of a problem
for Stalin as could the whole man. For Stalin, then, the ideal practical approach was to
find the means to render Lenin politically ineffective until the time came to finish him off.
This approach required of Stalin great patience and single-mindedness, both of
which he possessed. It also appealed to a possible desire to extract from Lenin the
maximum retribution for having long usurped the leadership position Stalin thought was
rightfully his own. These elements of Stalin’s mentality were voiced in a remark he made
to Kamenev and Dzerzhinsky a few months before Lenin’s death: “his highest delight in
life,” he said (according to Trotsky’s account), “was to keep a keen eye on an enemy,
prepare everything painstakingly, mercilessly revenge himself, and then go to sleep.”
2
This attitude reflects the honoring of vindictiveness in the culture of Stalin’s native
Georgia. One of the better Western correspondents in the Soviet Union in the twenties and
thirties, Eugene Lyons, recalls a commonly told Georgian tale about a man who wanted to
revenge himself upon someone who had offended him in an encounter at a street corner.
He waited at the corner for ten years until his enemy came by again and then stabbed him
3
in the back. Boris Bazhanov, an official in Stalin’s personal secretariat from August 1923
until he defected to the West in the mid-1920s, perhaps had this story in mind when he
reported Stalin’s characteristic dogged determination to take revenge against an opponent
4
even if it took ten years. For both political and personal reasons, then, Stalin was
inclined to kill Lenin by pieces, waiting years, if necessary, for the right moment to settle
accounts with Lenin once and for all.
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3
In an article in Pravda in late September 1922, Stalin aesopically hinted that he was
indeed murdering Lenin gradually. Reporting on visits in July and August to Lenin, who
was recuperating from an illness which had struck him in May, Stalin represented the
meetings as lively and merry affairs and assured his readers that “our old Lenin” was
back. Considering what Stalin really thought of “our old Lenin,” the facetious character of
his remark is evident. Stalin carried his little joke farther toward the end of the article by
quoting what Lenin supposedly had said of “Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks,
and their rabid agitation against Soviet Russia.” “Yes,” Lenin was reported to have said,
“They have made it their aim to defame Soviet Russia. They are facilitating the
imperialists’ fight against Soviet Russia. They have been caught in the mire of capitalism,
and are sliding into an abyss. Let them thrash about. They have been dead a long time as
far as the working class is concerned.” Stalin then concluded his article by quoting words
Lenin supposedly had uttered about persons who spread “incredible fairy tales about
Lenin’s death”: “Let them tell lies and console themselves; one need not to take from the
dying their last consolation.”
5
Stalin’s reference to Mensheviks who are “caught in the
mire of capitalism … sliding into an abyss,” seems to echo Lenin’s scorning (in What Is To
Be Done?) of “pseudo-Social-Democrats” who were backsliding into “the marsh.”
6
Stalin’s apparent ironic intention makes it possible, then, that his attribution of these
words to Lenin was Stalin’s perverse way of declaring that Lenin, who Stalin regarded as a
Menshevik who had died long ago as a leader of the proletariat and had slid “into an
abyss,” was himself being deprived of the “last consolation” of a peaceful death, left
instead to “thrash about” in “the mire of capitalism” until he expired.
The means by which the murder of Lenin was accomplished was certainly
poisoning; the circumstances of both killer and victim from 1921 to 1924 permit no other
possibility. Probably a variety of toxins or disease agents were used, both to heighten
Lenin’s suffering and to confound his honest doctors and thus reduce Stalin’s risk of
being detected. Stalin’s inclination covertly to boast of his deed may have led him to
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4
indicate what toxins were used. One possibility is rabies: in relating his visits with the
recovering Lenin in 1922, Stalin characterized the activity of Mensheviks as literally
7
“rabid” (beshenyi). Other candidates include the substances with which defendants in the
March 1938 show trial (in which a key charge concerned a plot to assassinate Lenin,
discussed below) were said to have killed their victims, both human and animal: several
preparations from digitalis and strophanthus, cardiosol, camphor, lysates (experimental
drugs developed in the early 1900s by Dr. I. N. Kazakov, one of the show-trial defendants),
other specified alkaloids, plague (presumably bubonic), erysipelas (St. Anthony’s Fire),
8
and the anthrax bacillus. The highly fragmentary and uncertain nature of the available
evidence concerning Lenin’s health problems permits only speculation about the use of
these substances; their actual use can be neither confirmed nor gainsaid.
9
Conjecture is all that can be hazarded, also, in the question of Stalin’s
accomplices. It is almost certain that Stalin had an ally among Lenin’s doctors and highly
probable that a third party served as liaison. The possible identity of these persons is
suggested by a story related by Yves Delbars, a French journalist. According to this
report, a defector once employed in Stalin’s personal secretariat claimed that G. Kanner,
another member of the secretariat, had heard Stalin on the evening of January 20, 1924,
tell G. G. Yagoda (a deputy head of the OGPU, as the secret police was then known) to go
to Gorki where Lenin was invalided. “’There will soon be another attack. The symptoms
are there,’” Stalin allegedly said. Handing Yagoda a note with “a few lines in Lenin’s
distorted handwriting,” he added, “’He has written a few lines to thank you for sending him
a means of deliverance. He is terribly distressed by the thought of a fresh attack.’”
Together with two of Lenin’s physicians, one of whom was F. A. Guétier, Yagoda
proceeded to Gorki, from which at 7:15 the next evening he telephoned Stalin to tell him of
Lenin’s death.
10
Though the story sounds feasible enough, there are several reasons to
question its credibility. First, it is unconfirmed. Second, “Yves Delbars” was a nom de
plume of Nicholas Kossiakov, a fabricator of books and articles about Soviet affairs.
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11
5
Third, though the information which Kossiakov-Delbars provides about his source points
to Boris Bazhanov, nowhere in his own writing on Stalin does Bazhanov repeat the tale.
12
If the credibility of this particular story is in doubt, however, there are other reasons to
suspect that Yagoda and Guétier were involved in the murder of Lenin.
In the Moscow show trial of 1938, Yagoda was charged with having supervised the
poisonings of several prominent Soviet figures, including writer Maxim Gorky and
government figures V. V. Kuibyshev and V. R. Menzhinsky.
13
Together with allegations
that there had been earlier plots against Lenin’s life, these charges, Trotsky thought,
revealed “an infernal hive of intrigues, forgeries, falsifications, surreptitious poisonings
and murders back of the Kremlin dictator” which “cast a sinister light on the preceding
years.”
14
Specifically, the exiled leader believed that the charges indicated that Yagoda,
who had a background in pharmacology, had stood “At [Stalin’s] side” in the killing of
Lenin.
15
That there was a connection between Yagoda and Stalin at this time is indicated
by Yagoda’s being entrusted with effective control of the secret police after Lenin’s death.
Most suggestive, though, is Yagoda’s continued dominance in the security apparatus (he
became actual head of the NKVD IN 1934-1936) even after Stalin learned that he was a
supporter of the so-called “Right Opposition” of the late 1920s. The assumption that
Yagoda was involved with Stalin in murdering Lenin provides an explanation for Stalin’s
otherwise puzzling tolerance of an oppositionist as head of the security organs.
16
If it was Yagoda who provided the toxins and served as liaison, it was most likely
Guétier, Lenin’s personal physician, who carried out the poisoning. Physicians were the
instruments Yagoda was alleged to have used to murder Gorky and the rest, and Guétier
was the only doctor in a position from 1921 to 1924 to implement Stalin’s protracted
design. Moreover, Guétier was also personal physician to Trotsky, who too was stricken
during these years (1922-1924) with intractable illnesses.
suggest that Guétier was in Stalin’s service.
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18
17
These several circumstances
6
The 1938 show trial record contains suggestions about the possible involvement in
the murder of Lenin of two other persons, both prominent figures in Soviet political life.
The first is A. S. Yenukidze, a Georgian Bolshevik long close to Stalin. It was Yenukidze,
according to Yagoda’s testimony, who “conceived the idea of death by disease.”
19
Though
Yagoda’s words were part of the great fiction of the trial and though they purported to
concern the murders of Gorky and others in the 1930s, they may reflect a bit of truth about
a conversation some seventeen years earlier between two Georgians about how best to
kill Lenin.
The other major figure who the 1938 show trial record hints may have been
implicated in the murder of Lenin is Nikolai Bukharin. One of Stalin’s major allies until
1928-1929, Bukharin was charged with having plotted against Lenin’s life early in 1918.
20
In this charge Trotsky saw psychological evidence against Stalin. “All the accusations of
the Moscow trials,” Trotsky argued, “are cut to this pattern. Stalin sees the best means to
dispel suspicions against himself in ascribing the crime to his adversary and forcing him
to confess.”
21
Strictly applied, Trotsky’s line of reasoning suggests that Stalin might have
been involved in a conspiracy to kill Lenin in 1918, but he apparently knew of no evidence
to support such an accusation against the Georgian. The symptoms Trotsky noticed
might have had deeper roots: Stalin perhaps was trying to cope with the granite burden of
guilt for his own crimes by transferring the crimes and the punishments to others. Such
behavior would be a special case of Stalin’s general tendency, described by Tucker, “to
impute his own mistakes and failings to others and then to visit upon them the selfaccusations and self-punitive feelings that these mistakes and failings caused in him.”
22
But, because any innocent person could serve this purpose for Stalin, this interpretation
of the accusation against Bukharin does not mean that he was involved in the murder of
Lenin. Further reason for skepticism is that Bukharin was allowed to deny the charge
categorically and to argue against it at great length.
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23
7
Bukharin did “admit,” however, that there was a plot to kill Lenin, Stalin and
Sverdlov later, in “an entirely different period, the period following the Brest-Litovsk
Peace, the Moscow period.”
24
Curiously incurious, the court failed to explore this
tantalizing suggestion.
The court also failed to follow up an even more interesting exchange which took
place earlier in the trial between prosecutor Andrei Vyshinsky and co-defendant Vladimir
Ivanovich Ivanov, the relatively obscure People’s Commissar for the Timber Industry, who
stated that he had “met Bukharin at the Tenth Party Congress, where we had the following
conversation. He said that he differed with Lenin on fundamental questions; that he
engaged in mustering cadres, so that they might be ready at his, Bukharin’s, first call to go
into action against Lenin.”
VYSHINSKY: How did Bukharin expect to take action against Lenin? In what
ways was he preparing to act?
IVANOV: He was in a fairly truculent mood. He was just waiting for a suitable
moment. He wanted to have his own cadres.
VYSHINSKY: What for?
IVANOV: To remove Lenin.
VYSHINSKY: How to remove him?
IVANOV: Even by physical means.
VYSHINSKY: And you talk about a school. A fine “school!”
25
This dialogue suggests an attempt in 1921 to kill Lenin, especially since Vyshinsky had
earlier established that in the language of the trial, “To remove means to kill.”
26
Nonetheless, no further mention of this episode was made during the trial.
What are we to make of all this? The reference to the Tenth Party Congress
suggests that the passage may be related to Stalin’s own determination at that time “to
remove” Lenin. A second clue lies in the high probability that no such conversation
between Bukharin and Ivanov actually took place: the whole trial was a work of fiction,
much of it authored by Stalin. Bukharin, moreover, was allowed to refute the notion that
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8
he would have enlisted obscure figures in his “plot” when more important persons whose
“political temperament and political activity” made them “more efficient” were associated
with him in opposition to Lenin.
27
Why then was poor Ivanov made to say that the
conversation had occurred? The answer may lie in his name, specifically in his
patronymic—Ivanovich—which was also one of Stalin’s early pseudonyms and among
those he listed in the 1927 Tovstukha biography.
28
This consideration permits the
inference that V. Ivanovich Ivanov was a stand-in for Ivanovich-Stalin, who was more
much more likely to be one of the ranking men with the appropriate “political temperament
and political activity” to be associated with Bukharin in a plot against Lenin in 1921.
29
One possible explanation of why Stalin prompted Ivanov’s testimony is that he
wanted to hint Aesopically that in 1921 Bukharin had been involved in a plan to remove
Lenin. It is, however, not “Ivanovich” who in the show-trial story tries to recruit Bukharin;
rather, it is Bukharin who tries to enlist “Ivanovich.” This suggests that Stalin included the
episode in the show trial script to indicate that Bukharin had actually made an approach to
him during the Tenth Party Congress along the lines which the show trial testimony
describes. Bukharin had been a vigorous partisan of socialist construction and had coauthored the foremost popular defense of the effort to build a communist society, the
famous ABC of Communism of 1919.
30
In the months preceding the Tenth Party Congress
a sharp split developed between Bukharin and Lenin over how to deal with the country’s
economic problems: Bukharin’s idea centered on expanding state control over trade
unions to promote increased productivity and to make the unions into “schools for
communism.” Despite quite vicious personal attacks by Lenin, Bukharin clung doggedly
to his proposals until defeated at the Congress.
of the tax-in-kind and restoration of free trade.
31
32
He did not support Lenin’s introduction
Conflict with Lenin was nothing new for
Bukharin, his affection for the older man notwithstanding; the clash of 1920-1921 was but
the most recent and bitter of a long series of disputes.
33
This background makes it
entirely plausible that the headstrong Bukharin, politically bloodied by Lenin and
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9
temporarily embittered against him, could have been—in the words of the show-trial—“in a
fairly truculent mood” at the Congress and already “engaged in mustering cadres” to help
him “remove Lenin.” Stalin would have been a likely person for Bukharin to think of as a
potential ally. Though Stalin evidently disagreed with some of the economic ideas
Bukharin had proposed, his own argument in January 1921 that the way to tackle the
economic problems was “to educate [the workers] in the spirit of communism” and
thereby persuade them to work more productively suggests common ground with
Bukharin. Significantly, though Stalin publicly attacked the views of Trotsky, he elected to
make no criticism of Bukharin.
34
Given their common opposition to Lenin’s restoration of
capitalism, it is not unreasonable to suspect that Bukharin might have turned to Stalin for
help in trying “to remove” Lenin. However, Stalin, mistrusting Bukharin or suspecting that
“to remove” did not have the murderous connotation for Bukharin that it had for himself,
would have declined.
Similar considerations militate against any notion that Stalin had tried to recruit
Bukharin. Because each co-conspirator constituted a danger to Stalin, he certainly would
not have recruited anyone not absolutely essential to his design or not wholly reliable.
Bukharin was neither. It is hard, indeed, to imagine anything that he could have
contributed to Stalin’s criminal enterprise. Moreover, his emotional volatility and his
attachment to Lenin
35
(despite frequent clashes) recommended against him. Bukharin’s
innocence of participation in the assassination is further suggested by his being allowed
in 1938 to deny involvement in any plot to kill Lenin and especially by his being granted,
alone among the defendants, the privilege to refer to Lenin familiarly as Vladimir Ilyich.
36
Acceptance of an approach in 1921 to Stalin by Bukharin for help in removing
Lenin might help explain how Stalin won at least a measure of cooperation from Bukharin
at the 1938 show trial. Because Lenin could not have been removed from power without
the use of potentially deadly force, Stalin might have persuaded Bukharin that his
(Bukharin’s) plan, though aimed only at ousting Lenin, had logically implied the prospect
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10
of killing him. It seems significant in this regard that one of those who accused Bukharin
of plotting against Lenin’s life in 1918 stated that Bukharin had expressed the idea of
killing Lenin “in a number of vague and…theoretical arguments,” “wrapped up … like a
cocoon in a host of lengthy explanations.”
37
This language may be taken to mean that
Bukharin did not realize the fatal implication of his fuzzy thinking. The same inference
may be drawn from an exchange that occurred a few minutes later between Vyshinsky and
Bukharin, in which the prosecutor wrung from Bukharin the acknowledgment that the use
of life-threatening force was inherent in any plan to remove government leaders, even one
which sought “at all costs” to safeguard them.
38
If Bukharin had in fact contemplated
ousting Lenin in 1921, the impresario of the purges might have exploited these arguments
to nurture in him a sense of guilt. But whether or not Bukharin felt any responsibility for
Lenin’s death, he seems to have known that Lenin had been murdered—and he seems to
have struck a deal with Stalin which gave him, in exchange for his cooperation with
Stalin’s aims, an opportunity Aesopically to cast suspicion on the murderer.
* *
In late May 1921, about two months after he pronounced Lenin a philistine, Stalin
went on vacation to the southern spa of Nal’chik, where (save for Party business in Tiflis
in July) he remained until August 8. Health problems of some sort were the ostensible
reason for the trip.
39
In the coming months, secure in his power over Lenin, Stalin began
to act with new confidence and openness.
In Nal’chik Stalin made an effort to enhance his reputation as a theorist of
socialism. Just as his earlier forays into theory had been meant to complement
proclamations of his rightful role as the hero of the revolution, this effort was meant to
document his completeness as a leader and justify the heroic poses as Martin Luther,
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Russia, and David that he had recently struck. The project was a pamphlet entitled, “The
Political Strategy and Tactics of the Russian Communists.”
40
Though it was not
completed, it served as the source for three works issued in the months and years ahead:
the first was an article in Pravda in August 1921 (to be discussed in a moment); the
second, a long article, “Concerning the Question of the Strategy and Tactics of the
Russian Communists,” published in Pravda on March 14, 1923, a few days after the
strokes which ended Lenin’s political activity; and third, The Foundations of Leninism,
which appeared shortly after Lenin’s death.
41
This last work, in particular, was of
inestimable importance in establishing Stalin as the interpreter of Lenin’s political legacy.
The intention to stake out a position as Lenin’s ideological heir is already
apparent, however, in the Nal’chik manuscript. Though the organization of the material is
rather jumbled (suggesting that organizational problems might account for Stalin’s failure
to finish the project), Stalin embraced a broad range of important, fundamental topics: the
historical development of the Party and its role in the Soviet state, basic concepts of
Marxist strategy and tactics and specific problems of their application, the definition of
tasks facing Communists, rules for them to follow, and so forth. Throughout, Stalin made
numerous references to Lenin’s writings, something he had not done since before
Tammerfors. He was beginning to sculpt a pseudo-history, in which Lenin’s writings
would be selectively used to buttress political directions that Stalin intended to pursue.
Naturally, he suppressed any signs of the sharp differences between Lenin and himself.
For example, he matter-of-factly stated that Lenin’s strategy in 1917 “took as its starting
point that ‘we shall begin the socialist revolution in Russia, overthrow our own
bourgeoisie and in this way unleash the revolution in the West, and then the Western
comrades will help us to complete our revolution.’” Later Stalin noted only that “the
Western Socialists are not yet able to help us to restore our economy.” Most remarkably,
he concealed the fact that he disagreed with ending socialist construction. Failing to say
that there had been any effort to build socialism in Russia between 1918 and 1921, he
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described the period as one of “incipient peaceful construction” which had been
interrupted by war. From “the beginning of 1921,” according to Stalin’s new script, the
“course towards peaceful construction” had resumed.”
42
This was the phony history that
Lenin had employed to conceal his abrupt change of course in 1921. Stalin’s publication of
this sketch three decades later in his Works and his claim that The Foundations of
Leninism derived from it witness the importance which the unfinished theoretical effort of
1921 had for him. More significant, the fact that he was preparing to pose as Lenin’s heir
and interpreter at such an early date—before any innocent party could reasonably
anticipate Lenin’s death—betrays his knowledge that Lenin was being killed.
Though in the Nal’chik manuscript Stalin muted his differences with Lenin, he
covertly voiced them in the first of the publications he derived from it, a long assessment
of “The Party Before and After Taking Power” which appeared in Pravda on August 28,
1921,
43
while Lenin was still recovering from his illness.
44
The title did not suggest any
important content, nor did the seemingly pedestrian character of the recital of the Party’s
history and its present tasks which followed. But Stalin-Aesop was again at work beneath
the tranquil surface. About half way into the article, he pointed out that with the October
Revolution
our Party was transformed from a national force into a predominantly
international force, and the Russian proletariat was transformed from a
backward detachment of the international proletariat into its vanguard.
Henceforth, the tasks of the international proletariat are to widen the
Russian breach, to help the vanguard which has pushed forward, to
prevent enemies from surrounding the brave vanguard and cutting it off
from its base. The task of international imperialism, on the contrary, is to
close it without fail. That is why our Party, if it wants to retain power,
obligates itself to do “the utmost possible in one (its own—J. St.) country
for the development, support, and awakening if the revolution in all
countries (see “The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky” by
45
Lenin).
There was “an unfavorable aspect” to October, however, in that the revolution took place
in “an economically backward country” beset on all sides by powerful enemies. As a
result of this, Stalin said,
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to this day Russia is a socialist island surrounded by hostile, industrially
more developed capitalist states. If Soviet Russia had as her neighbor one
big, industrial developed Soviet state, or several Soviet states, she could
easily establish cooperation with those states on the basis of exchange of
new materials for machinery and equipment. But as long as that is not the
case, Soviet Russia and our Party, which guides its government, are
obliged to seek forms of methods of economic cooperation with the hostile
capitalist groups in the West in order to obtain the necessary technical
equipment until the proletarian revolution triumphs in one or several
industrial capitalist countries…Without this it will be difficult to count on
decisive success in economic construction, in the electrification of the
country. This process will undoubtedly be slow and painful, but it is
inevitable, unavoidable, and what is inevitable does not cease to be
inevitable because some impatient comrade get nervous and demand quick
46
results and showy operations.
Stalin’s words affirm a concept of socialist internationalism which consists of a Russian
commitment to help inspire world-wide revolution by doing “the utmost” within Russia
and a reciprocal obligation by the international proletariat to aid Russia. The notion that
Russia must wait for the revolution to triumph in the West before achieving “decisive
success” in her own effort to build socialism is specifically rejected. Though “slow and
painful,” Russia’s transformation is “inevitable,” Stalin says, and those “comrades” too
“impatient” or “nervous” to see it through to the end are irrelevant. Stalin’s disdain for
such “comrades” is perhaps best expressed by the pun he makes involving the
concluding words, “showy operations” (effektnykh operatsii), which in Russian sound
similar to “operatic effects” (opernykh effektov). Expressing political criticism by means of
musical allusions was nothing new to Stalin: he had long been given to mocking the
“singing” of political foes.
47
These allusions were grounded in Stalin’s possession of a
good singing voice. His preference in vocal music seems to have been limited, though, to
traditional songs, which he often sang at home.
48
For opera he had no zest; indeed, he
derived great amusement from a recording of an operatic soprano accompanied by a
chorus of barking and howling dogs.
49
By joking about his “nervous” colleagues’ efforts
to achieve “operatic effects,” then, Stalin was punishing them for pursing grandiose
objectives instead of persevering in the down-to-earth work of building socialism.
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14
After a few remarks about the need for world economic growth, Stalin returned to
the viewpoint of “the party, which has overthrown the bourgeoisie in our country and has
raised the banner of proletarian revolution,” but which, he said,
nevertheless considers it expedient to “untie” small production and small
industry in our country, to permit the partial revival of capitalism, although
making it dependent upon state authority, to attract leaseholders and
shareholders, etc., etc., until the time when the party’s policy of “doing the
utmost possible in one country for the development, support and
50
awakening of the revolution in all countries” produces real results.
This sketch of policy for the period until international revolution produces “real results”
conflicts sharply with the sketch Stalin had offered just a few lines earlier. In the first
sketch, the task was to do “the utmost possible” to build socialist Russia, undeterred by
the delay of revolution in the industrialized countries. This effort would inspire the world
proletariat. By contrast, in the second sketch, the party, though having “raised the banner
of proletarian revolution,” thinks that “the utmost possible” it can do to promote world
revolution is to revive capitalism in Russia! And it does this neither on principle nor of
necessity, but because it finds it expedient.
Stalin did not call attention to these conflicting positions; indeed, he camouflaged
his Aesopic carpentry behind a thick veneer of soporific prattle about party history. His
characterizations of the two positions, however, make his purpose clear: the first position
was a determined, militant, confident and Russian road to socialism; the second, an
opportunistic betrayal of socialist principle by those too “nervous” or “impatient” to
undertake the “slow and painful” rigors of the first road. Stalin’s association with the first
position is self-evident in his characterizations, but he underscored it in two additional
ways. First, he consistently called the militant position that of “our party,” while he
consistently labeled the expedient position that of “the party.” Second, he identified the
militant position with himself by associating it with his own interpretation of a quotation
from Lenin, while linking the expedient position with Lenin’s unamended words. This
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15
device also served to connect Lenin with the second policy and thus to brand him as
“nervous,” “impatient” and opportunistic.
Stalin’s choice of a quotation from Lenin’s “The Proletarian Revolution and the
Renegade Kautsky” perhaps had an additional purpose. In 1918, Lenin had blasted
Kautsky for forgetting, in his attacks on the young Soviet regime for denying freedom to
the bourgeoisie, the class basis of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Now it was Lenin
who, forgetting the class basis of the Soviet dictatorship, was granting new life to the
Russian bourgeoisie, and Stalin seems to have thought it appropriate to throw Lenin’s
words back at him.
In Stalin’s view, a party led by a man who forgot the class basis of Bolshevism
could not be Bolshevik, and in “The Party Before and After Taking Power” he conveyed
this message by once again omitting the “(b)” from the Party’s acronym: “From the party
of revolution within Russia the RCP has turned into the party of peaceful construction.”
51
That Stalin indeed meant this omission as criticism of the Party is confirmed by his
explicit characterization of its transformation from a party of “revolution within Russia” to
one of “peaceful construction.” Under Lenin, in other words, the revolution was dead.
This was a reasonable judgment for a militant “dreamer” to make of the NEP.
In the remaining months of 1921 Stalin commented publicly on the NEP only once,
in December in a Pravda article entitled “Prospects.”
52
A casual reading of the article can
give the impression that Stalin looked favorably on the nation’s emerging economic
direction. A closer reading reveals, however, that Stalin’s apparent optimism was a
façade: beneath it he smuggled contradictions and ambiguities which insinuated his
continuing hostility toward Lenin’s policy.
Stalin began “Prospects” with a lengthy discourse on the international situation,
which he said was of “paramount significance in the life of Russia.” Then he offered “the
key to understanding the New Economic Policy”: “Now that the war is over and great
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16
danger no longer threatens the land,” he said, the old, “military-political” form of the
worker-peasant alliance needed to be replaced with a new, “economic” form. This might
seem a straightforward defense of the shift to the NEP, except that in the opening section
Stalin repeatedly had stressed that, though war had ended, Soviet Russia remained in
serious danger. She was “surrounded by a hostile camp of bourgeois states” which was
“constantly intensifying” its efforts “to prepare a new offensive against Russia, one more
complex and thorough than all previous offensives.” The imperialist powers were erecting
“an economic (and not only economic) cordon around Soviet Russia.” Stalin said, and
Poland and other neighboring states “are vigorously arming themselves with Entente
backing, readying themselves for war.” Counterrevolutionary forces were infiltrating
Soviet territory and foreign spies were “now pouring into Russia” in the guise of
mercantile and philanthropic associations, “the most efficient spy agencies of the world
bourgeoisie.” What they were learning would place Russia “in grave danger,” he feared,
concluding that Russia faced “a combination of economic and military struggle, a
coordinated assault from without and within.” Stalin’s claim that the new openness
toward Western traders increased the espionage threat is a barb clearly aimed at the NEP
and evidently intended to appeal to anxious chekists and soldiers. More important, by
contradicting his later statement that “great danger no longer threatens the land, “ Stalin’s
discussion of the international situation undermined the rationale he presented for the
NEP; this contradiction suggests that, though Stalin felt obliged to mouth Lenin’s line on
the NEP, he did not agree with it.
After offering this dubious explanation of why it had been necessary to change
policy, Stalin briefly assessed the results of abolishing “requisitioning and other similar
obstacles.” These actions, he said,
freed the hands of the small producer and gave an impetus to the
production of more food, raw materials and other products. It is not hard
to understand the colossal significance of this step if one considers that
Russia is now experiencing just such a mass eruption in the development
of productive forces as North America experienced after the Civil War.
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17
Doubtless, Stalin concluded, all of this would “be grist for the mill of the Soviet state.”
53
To conclude from Stalin’s words that he saw the NEP as “a colossal step forward”
is plausible,
54
but I doubt it is correct. Though he called the ending of requisitioning a
step of “colossal significance,” he did not say whether it was a step forward or a step
backward. It is natural for persons schooled in capitalistic, growth-oriented Western
industrial societies to regard the kind of step Stalin described as forward; Stalin, however,
embodied a different value system. He was, after all, a militant Communist, and the class
war against the capitalists was central to his outlook. For him to liken the unfolding NEP
to the post-Civil War capitalist boom in America was probably meant to insinuate that the
NEP would give rise to a new class of Russian “robber-barons” who would brutally exploit
the working people and come to dominate all aspects of national life. That Stalin chose to
characterize the NEP with an ambiguous analogy rather than unequivocally call it a step
forward suggests that his words had a hidden purpose.
A similar suspicion must attach to his choice of words in the concluding
paragraphs of “Prospects.” After presenting a digest of NEP measures taken and
proposed, Stalin pointed out that, “Needless to say, in carrying out these measures we, as
could be expected, made a great many errors that have distorted their actual character.
Nevertheless, it can be taken as proved that it is precisely these measures that open the
way along which we can promote the economic rebirth of the country.” Stalin concluded
by assuring his readers that “the first results of the New Economic Policy . . . undoubtedly
confirm this conclusion.”
55
It may sound so positive: “taken as proved”; “promote the economic rebirth of the
country”; “first results”; “undoubtedly confirm.” Stalin’s tone, however, masks a negative
judgment. Just what “conclusion” was confirmed by NEP experience to date? That
Russia’s economic revitalization was progressing well—or that the road being taken was
paved “precisely” with error-ridden and distorted measures? Stalin’s deceptively upbeat
tone to the contrary, it is the latter that he actually said. Characterizing the measures
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18
taken as riddled with mistakes was not a roundabout way to apologize for them but a way
to indict them as mistaken. Moreover, these steps were not leading to the transformation
of Russia but to its “economic rebirth.” One might ask just what kind of economy was
being reborn.
What is perhaps most interesting about “The Party Before and After Taking Power”
and “Prospects” is not that they contained strong criticism of the NEP but that this
criticism was so thinly veiled. Though Stalin apparently saw no advantage in coming out
openly against the Party’s economic policy, he evidently felt strong enough to take the
risk that his opposition to the NEP might be discovered. This suggests that he feared
nothing from Lenin. It also suggests that he believed there were many in the Party who
shared his point of view. And by using so thin a veil to mask his opposition to Lenin’s
policies, Stalin was evidently eager to court political allies among other Bolshevik leaders
who were hostile to the NEP, alienated from Lenin, or antagonistic toward Trotsky. These
alignments were tactical and temporary, calculated to enhance Stalin’s position or
undermine his adversaries. The two most important of these early allies were Politburo
members Kamenev and Zinoviev, who shared Stalin’s antipathy toward Trotsky; it was
their support which helped Stalin (despite Lenin’s misgivings) capture the newly created
post of General Secretary (Gensek) of the RKP(b) in April 1922.
56
Control of the Secretariat
extended the authority over Party personnel matters that Stalin already possessed
through his dominance in the Central Committee’s Organization Bureau (Orgburo).
Another ally was secret police head Feliks Dzerzhinsky, who shared Stalin’s views on key
issues (such as industrialization and nationality affairs) and whose career ambitions had
been frustrated by Lenin.
57
Support for Stalin from within the secret police came also from
Yagoda and from several Cheka alumni who formed the original nucleus of Stalin’s
personal secretariat.
58
As suggested above, appealing to the secret police and defense establishments
(Trotsky and his lieutenants excluded) was one purpose of “Prospects.” Warning of a
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19
Western design to launch “a combination of economic struggle and military struggle, a
combined assault from within and from without,” Stalin criticized the NEP for facilitating
the West’s efforts. It allowed “the most efficient spy agencies of the world bourgeoisie”—
trade missions and foreign businessmen—to “pour into Russia,” he claimed. But it also
failed to provide for a flow of grain to the state adequate for industrial growth and for the
needs of the army. This latter problem arose, Stalin said, because, though a free market in
grain had been created, peasants still did not have incentives sufficient to maintain, let
alone increase, the level of grain production. At the heart of the matter was the scarcity of
consumer goods. Stalin argued that this situation endangered the worker-peasant alliance
on which Soviet power rested. To deal with the incipient crisis he proposed that the
powers of the Central Association of Cooperatives (Tsentrosouiz) be expanded, in
particular by granting it “access to foreign trade.”
59
His reasoning appears to have been
that the Tsentrosouiz, if allowed to deal directly in foreign markets free of monopolistic
restraints imposed by the Commissariat for Foreign Trade, would market grain more
efficaciously and increase the importation of consumer goods wanted by its members.
Because cooperatives would thus be better able to satisfy peasants’ needs, peasants
would have better incentives to increase grain production, and the amount of grain
available to the state would be increased. In addition, peasants would be attracted to
cooperative (rather than purely private) operation. Stalin’s proposal was thus intended to
combat retrogressive tendencies unleashed by the NEP and to advance important social
and security interests of the state.
Stalin’s desire to loosen the monopoly of foreign trade in this limited way brought
him close to a group of Soviet leaders, including Bukharin and the People’s Commissar
for Finance, G. Ya. Sokolnikov, who wanted to relax or even abolish the trade monopoly.
In March and again in May 1922 they attacked the monopoly, but both times they were
repulsed by its defenders, captained by Lenin.
60
Precisely where Stalin stood in these
battles is unclear. On one hand, he opposed the existing strict monopoly; on the other,
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abolition or too great a loosening would have heightened his concerns about foreign
spying and the growth of private economic activity. He probably would also have been
receptive to Lenin’s argument that the radical alterations proposed by Sokolnikov would
permit “foreigners to buy up and carry away everything of value.”
61
The equivocal nature
of Stalin’s position is evidenced by an exchange of correspondence with Lenin in May
after the second defeat of the anti-monopoly group. Lenin asked Stalin to support “an
official ban on all talks and conversations and commissions, etc., about weakening the
foreign trade monopoly.” Stalin replied that “at the present stage” he did not object to
such a ban; he added, however, that he thought “a relaxation is becoming inevitable.”
With Stalin’s apparent support, the Politburo adopted Lenin’s ban on May 22.
62
Four and a half months later, however, Stalin decided that the time for the
inevitable had finally come: on October 6 a Central Committee plenum (which a toothache
prevented Lenin from attending) adopted proposals to loosen the monopoly. A week later
Lenin wrote a long letter attacking the decision and asking the Politburo to suspend
implementation of the October 6 decision for two months, during which time he could
assemble materials with which to persuade the Central Committee to reverse itself. Stalin
commented that “Comrade Lenin’s letter has not made me change my mind about the
correctness of the decision of the plenum of the Central Committee of October 6
concerning foreign trade.” Nonetheless, he came out for the postponement Lenin
requested.
63
Lenin got his delay and he made good use of the opportunity. Though illness
again prevented him from attending the next Central Committee plenum on December 18,
he was able to arm Trotsky with the materials necessary to win a definitive endorsement of
the monopoly.
64
Stalin lost in the struggle over the monopoly of foreign trade, but throughout it he
displayed a remarkable equanimity in dealing with Lenin. In May, even though he favored
relaxing the monopoly somewhat, he backed Lenin’s call for ban on discussion of antimonopoly projects. In October, when the anti-monopoly side had finally carried the day,
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21
he supported Lenin’s plea for a second chance to present his case. Throughout, it seems
likely that, not agreeing with either a strict monopoly or with abolition of the monopoly, he
floated between the two camps, leaning toward which ever position seemed less harmful
at the moment. In any event, his willingness to accord Lenin a fair hearing testifies to an
evenhandedness which suggests both that he regarded the issue as relatively minor and
that he must have been wholly confident that his ultimate power over Lenin was secure.
1
See the chronologies in Vladimir Il'ich Lenin: Biograficheskaia khronika (hereafter
VILBK), 12 vols. (Moscow, 1970-1982), 11:11; and PSS, 44:663-73.
2
Leon Trotsky, “Did Stalin Poison Lenin?” Liberty 17, no. 32 (August 10, 1940):24; also
Leon Trotsky, Trotsky’s Diary in Exile, 1935 (New York, 1958), 64. Trotsky also comments
on Stalin’s “strong will and persistence in carrying out his aims,” in My Life, 506.
3
E. Lyons, Stalin: Czar of All the Russias (New York, 1940), 37; on Georgian vindictiveness
see Lang, Modern History of Georgia, 18.
4
Boris Bajanov, Avec Staline dans le Kremlin (Paris, 1930), 28.
5
SW, 5:136-39.
6
LCW, 5:355.
7
SW, 5:138.
8
1938 Trial, especially 26, 103-4, 450-51, 510-11. Mention of Kazakov’s lysates is made in
Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago, 1:5.
9
For analyzing the bits of information I could provide about possible toxins and Lenin’s
symptoms to determine whether this information might either confirm or contradict the
conclusions I have drawn from the literary evidence, I am especially thankful to Carolyn H.
Lingeman, M. D., who also provided me with the reference to Solzhenitsyn in the
preceding note.
10
Yves Delbars, The Real Stalin (London, 1953), 129-30.
11
Boris Souvarine, “Les faux dans la guerre politique,” Le Contrat Social 12 (1968):267-71.
12
See Bazhanov’s Avec Staline dans le Kremlin and his Bajanov révèle Staline; also the
interview with him in G.R. Urban, ed., Stalinism. Its Impact on Russia and the World
(Cambridge, 1986), 6-30.
13
1938 Trial, 22-28, 34-35, and (for the bulk of Yagoda’s testimony) 568-79.
14
Trotsky, Stalin, 372.
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22
15
Trotsky, “Poison,” 24-25; Trotsky, Stalin, 378-80. Trotsky’s claim that Yagoda was a
“former pharmacist” finds confirmation in the recollections of American correspondent
William Reswick, who knew Yagoda and reports that Yagoda administered medication to
Dzerzhinsky during the civil war. See Reswick, 92-93, and Simon Wolin and Robert M.
Slusser, eds., The Soviet Secret Police (Westport, Connecticut, 1974), 41.
16
On Yagoda’s ties with the “Right Opposition,” see Wolin and Slusser, 43-46; George
Katkov, The Trial of Bukharin (New York, 1969), 228; and Medvedev, Judge, 195.
17
Trotsky, Stalin, 367; Trotsky, My Life, 507; and Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed.
Trotsky: 1921-1929 (New York, 1965), 118, 131-32.
18
Suspicion must also attach to Dr. O. R. Förster; see chapter 8, below.
19
1938 Trial, 577.
20
1938 Trial, 29-34, 439-47, 458-69.
21
Trotsky, “Poison,” 25.
22
Tucker, Stalin, 457-58.
23
1938 Trial, 377-78, 447-48, 473, 483, 503-4, 770-79.
24
1938 Trial, 773-74, also 448, 473.
25
1938 Trial, 117.
26
1938 Trial, 77-78.
27
1938 Trial, 773. Interestingly, Bukharin named V. V. Kuibyshev, Emilian Yaroslavsky,
and V. R. Menzhinsky as among those “Left Communists” who would have made better
co-conspirators. Menzhinsky served as head of the secret police under Stalin from 1926
to 1934; Yaroslavsky was a Stalin supporter from the 1920s and a key figure in the writing
of Stalinist history; and Kuibyshev was an important supporter of Stalin from the early
1920s for which he was named to the Politburo, and who played leading roles in
electrification and economic planning until his death in 1935. Bukharin’s naming of these
individuals may have been intended to point a finger at Stalin.
28
Stalin used the pseudonym Ivanovich at the Tammerfors Conference in 1905. That he
was playing games with names in the 1938 show trial is indicated by the use of “Ulyanov”
to describe a Russian traitor in Polish service (see chapter 18, above); for another
example, involving the names of co-defendants I. A. Zelensky and V. I. Ivanov, see 1938
Trial, 7-8, 110-14, 144-45, and 314-24.
29
Though there were two other defendants whose patronymic was Ivanovich, neither
could have been acceptable to Stalin as a stand-in for himself in this context. The first was
Bukharin; the second was Rykov, whom Stalin associated with Lenin and had used as a
surrogate for Lenin in the March 1921 letter.
30
Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution. A Political Biography 18881938 (New York, 1975), 83-87.
31
Ibid., 103-6.
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32
A. I. Mikoian, Mysli i vospominaniia o Lenine (Moscow, 1970), 156-57.
33
See Cohen, Bukharin, 13-15, 17-18, 21-24, 34-41, 58, 62-69, 75-78.
34
SW, 5:4-15.
35
Trotsky also ruled out Bukharin on the grounds that Bukharin “worshipped” and
“venerated Lenin” (“Poison,” 25). On Bukharin’s affection for Lenin see also Cohen,
Bukharin, 40-41, 151-53, and Boris I. Nicolaevsky, Power and the Soviet Elite (New York,
1965), 11-12.
36
“I refute the accusation of having plotted against the life of Vladimir Ilyich,” said
Bukharin in his final plea (1938 Trial, 778).
37
1938 Trial, 446-47.
38
1938 Trial, 448-49.
39
We know this because of two inquiries Lenin made about Stalin’s health (SW, 5:437-38).
Mentioning these two inquiries in his Works was probably Stalin’s private joke, based on
the fact that it was his own health about which Lenin should have been worrying.
40
SW, 5:63-89.
41
SW, 5:89; for the texts of the latter two works, see SW, 5:163-83 AND 6:71-196,
respectively. Medvedev, Judge, 509-10, has produced evidence showing that a significant
role in preparing Foundations was played by F. A. Ksenofontov; see also Tucker, Stalin,
324-29.
42
SW, 5:69-71. All emphases are Stalin’s.
43
SW, 5:103-14.
44
PSS, 44:663-73; VILBK, 11:11.
45
SW, 5:108 (Stalin’s emphases).
46
SW, 5:111.
47
Some of the more interesting of the many allusions to singing in Stalin’s writings can be
found in SW, 1:30, 40; 2:124-27, 286; 7:123; 9:201; and 12:56.
48
Svetlana Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters to a Friend (New York, 1967), 31. See also Ludwig,
Nine, 349, and Aino Kuusinen, Before and After Stalin (London, 1974), 30.
49
Milovan Djilas, Conversations with Stalin (New York, 1962), 161. Stalin’s attitude toward
opera and his demeaning treatment of opera singers is discussed by Galina Vishnevskaya,
Galina (New York, 1984), 94-96, 208.
50
SW, 5:112.
51
SW, 5:109. The text in SW tends to mask Stalin’s point by spelling out “Russian
Communist Party” instead of using the acronym “RCP” as given in SS, 5:107.
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24
52
SW, 5:119-29.
53
SW, 5:126.
54
As does Adam Ulam, Stalin, 204.
55
SW, 5:129.
56
Trotsky, Life, 467; Trotsky, Stalin, 357; Medvedev, Judge, 16-18.
57
Wolin and Slusser, 12, 47-48.
58
Wolin and Slusser, 375-76; Neils Erik Rosenfeldt, Knowledge and Power. The Role of
Stalin’s Secret Chancellery in the Soviet System of Government (Copenhagen, 1978), 16667.
59
SW. 5:119-29.
60
Moshe Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle (New York, 1968), 35-37.
61
LCW, 45:496-99, also 500.
62
LCW, 45:549-50, 739-40.
63
LCW, 33:375-79, 528-29; Lewin, 151-52. Years later Stalin admitted that at one time he
had mistakenly advocated “that one of our ports should be temporarily opened for the
export of grain,” but that he “did not persist in my error and, after discussing it with Lenin,
at once corrected it.” (SW, 9:78.)
64
LCW, 45:601-2, 604-6; Trotsky, School, 58-63; Lewin, 38-40.
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