Stalin is too rude and this defect, although quite tolerable in our midst and in dealings between Communists, becomes intolerable in a General Secretary. For this reason I suggest that the comrades think about a way to remove Stalin from that post and replace him with someone who has only one advantage over Comrade Stalin, namely greater tolerance, greater loyalty, greater courtesy and consideration to comrades, less capriciousness, etc.39
Lenin was making it clear that Stalin had to go.
Lenin’s resolve was further strengthened at the start of March, when he learned about an incident which had taken place between Stalin and Krupskaya several weeks before but which had been kept secret from him. On 21 December Lenin had dictated to Krupskaya a letter to Trotsky congratulating him on his successful tactics in the battle against Stalin over the foreign trade monopoly. Stalin’s informers told him of the letter, which he seized upon as evidence of Lenin’s ‘bloc’ with Trotsky against him. The next day he telephoned Krupskaya and, as she herself put it, subjected her ‘to a storm of coarse abuse’, claiming she had broken the party’s rules on Lenin’s health (although the doctors had authorized her dictation), and threatening to start an investigation of her by the Central Control Commission. When she put the phone down, Krupskaya apparently went pale, sobbed hysterically and rolled around on the floor. Stalin’s reign of terror had begun. When Lenin was finally told about this incident, on 5 March, he dictated a letter to Stalin demanding that he should apologize for his ‘rudeness’ or else risk a ‘breach of relations between us’. Stalin, who had become completely arrogant with power, could hardly mask his contempt for the dying Lenin in his ungracious reply.fn4 Krupskaya, he reminded him, ‘is not just your wife but my old Party comrade’. In their ‘conversation’ he had not been ‘rude’ and the whole incident was ‘nothing more than a silly misunderstanding … However, if you consider that for the preservation of “relations” I should “take back” the above words, I can take them back, although I fail to understand what all this is supposed to be about, or where I am at “fault”, or what, exactly, is wanted of me.’40
Lenin was devastated by the incident. He became ill overnight. One of his doctors described his condition on 6 March: ‘Vladimir Ilich lay there with a look of dismay, a frightened expression on his face, his eyes sad with an inquiring look, tears running down his face. Vladimir Ilich became agitated, tried to speak, but the words would not come to him and he could only say: “Oh hell, oh hell. The old illness has come back.” ’ Three days later Lenin suffered his third major stroke. It robbed him of the power to speak and thus to contribute to politics. Until his death, ten months later, he could only utter single syllables: ‘vot-vot’ (‘here-here’) and ‘s’ezd-s’ezd’ (‘congress-congress’).41
In May Lenin was moved to Gorki, where a team of doctors was placed at his disposal. On fine days he would sit outside. There a nephew found him one day ‘sitting in his wheelchair in a white summer shirt with an open collar … A rather old cap covered his head and the right arm lay somewhat unnaturally on his lap. [He] hardly noticed me even though I stood quite plainly in the middle of the clearing.’ Krupskaya read to him — Gorky and Tolstoy gave him the most comfort — and strove in vain to teach him how to speak. By September, with the help of a cane and a pair of orthopaedic shoes, he was just able to walk again. Sometimes he pushed his wheelchair round the grounds. He began to read papers sent from Moscow and, with Krupskaya’s help, learned to write a little with his left hand. Bukharin visited in the autumn and, as he later told Boris Nikolaevsky, found Lenin deeply worried about who was to succeed him and about the articles he could not write. But there was no question of him ever returning to politics. Lenin, the politician, was already dead.42
*
Getting Lenin out of the way was just what Stalin needed. Through his spies Stalin had learned of Lenin’s secret letter to the Twelfth Party Congress. If he was to survive in office, he had to prevent it from being read out there. On 9 March Stalin used his power as the General Secretary to put off the Congress from mid-March until mid-April. Trotsky, although he stood to gain most from Stalin’s likely downfall at the Congress, readily agreed to its delay. He even reassured Kamenev that, whilst he agreed ‘with Lenin in substance’ (i.e. on the Georgian question and party reform), he was ‘for preserving the status quo’ and ‘against removing Stalin’ provided there was a ‘radical change’ of policies. Trotsky concluded with the hope that: ‘There should be no more intrigues but honest co-operation.’ The outcome of this ‘rotten compromise’ — just what Lenin had warned him not to make — was that the Party Congress witnessed Stalin’s triumph rather than his final defeat. Lenin’s notes on the nationality question and the reform of the party were distributed among the delegates, discussed, and then dismissed by the leadership. Most of the delegates, in any case, probably shared the view expressed by Stalin that at a time when unity was needed in the party above all else there was no need to waste time discussing democracy. The urge to silence Trotsky, and all criticism of the Politburo, was in itself a crucial factor in Stalin’s rise to power.43 Lenin’s notes on the question of the succession, including his demand that Stalin be removed, were not read out at the Congress and remained suppressed until 1956.fn5
It is difficult to explain Trotsky’s conduct. At this crucial moment of the power struggle, when he could have won a major victory, he somehow engineered his own defeat. Among the forty members of the new Central Committee, elected at the Congress, he could count only three supporters. Perhaps, sensing his growing isolation, especially after Lenin’s stroke, Trotsky had decided that his only hope lay in trying to appease the triumvirate. His memoirs are filled with the conviction that he had been brought down by a conspiracy of its three leaders. There was certainly a very real danger that, if he had opted to defy them, Trotsky would have been accused of ‘factionalism’ — and after 1921 this was a political death sentence. But there is also some truth in the claim that Trotsky lacked the stomach for a fight. There was an inner weakness to his character, one that stemmed from his pride. Faced with the prospect of defeat, Trotsky preferred not to compete. One of his oldest friends tells the story of a chess game in New York. Trotsky had challenged him to a game, ‘evidently considering himself a good chess player’. But it turned out that he was weak and, having lost the game, went into a temper and refused to play another game.44 This small episode was typical of Trotsky: when he came up against a superior rival, one who was able to out-manœuvre him, he chose to retreat and sulk in glorious isolation rather than lose face by trying to confront him on disadvantageous terms.
This was, in a sense, what Trotsky did next. Rather than fight Stalin in the highest party organs he took up the standard of the Bolshevik rank and file, posing as the champion of party democracy against the ‘police regime’ of the leadership. It was a desperate gamble — Trotsky was hardly known for his democratic habits and he ran the deadly risk of ‘factionalism’ — but then he was in desperate straits. On 8 October he addressed an Open Letter to the Central Committee in which he accused it of suppressing all democracy within the party:
The participation of the party masses in the actual formation of the party organization is becoming increasingly marginal. A peculiar secretarial psychology has been established in the past year or so, its main feature is the belief that the [party] secretary is capable of deciding every and any question, without even knowing the basic facts … There is a very broad stratum of party workers, both in the government and party apparatus, who completely abnegate their own party opinion, at least as expressed openly, as if assuming that it is the apparatus of the secretarial hierarchy which formulate party opinion and policy. Beneath this stratum of abstainers from opinion lies the broad party masses, for whom every decision already comes down in the form of a summons or command.