In the politics of the 1920s, the Bolsheviks were neither omnipotent nor single-minded. As before, their policy reflected as much mass pressure as Marxist ideology; the problem of discipline was as great as ever. Regional and local institutions were weak, unreliable, even non-existent; considerable segments of intermediate and lower officials resisted central authority and opposed the NEP. When Lenin declared that the party would pursue NEP ‘seriously and for a long time’, he tacitly admitted that Bolshevism had failed to establish a dictatorship of workers and poorer peasants. Rather, Lenin admitted, Soviet power had produced a burgeoning bureaucracy that was staffed largely by officials from the old regime and by opportunists, especially in the local areas.
The Eleventh Party Congress (March–April 1922) specifically addressed this issue. Lenin himself complained that communists frequently adopted the ways of the pre-revolutionary ministries and thus launched the attack on bureaucratism. The delegates resolved to tighten discipline in lower organs and to combat the internal factionalism that had earlier been outlawed but by no means eradicated. Partly in an effort to reach these objectives, the Central Committee elected I. V. Stalin as General Secretary—i.e. head of the Secretariat, a post with extensive appointment powers. Although he would use these prerogatives for his own political advancement, the initial intent was to reform the personnel apparatus of the party.
Lenin’s partial incapacitation by a cerebral haemorrhage in May 1922 seriously altered the dynamics of Soviet politics, however, and the reformism adopted at the Eleventh Congress never ran its intended course. Lenin’s deteriorating health—he suffered additional strokes in December 1922 and March 1923—triggered a succession crisis and exacerbated factional conflict that lasted well beyond his death in January 1924. Uncertainty and instability prevailed at the top. Lenin’s authority, unparalleled if not always unchallenged, was personal rather than institutional. His dominance derived from his experience, intellect, and political acumen, not any title or office. To replace Lenin, it was necessary not just to name a successor, but to reconsider the very concept of leadership in the party.
Lenin himself contributed to the contentiousness when he dictated his so-called ‘testament’ in December 1922, emphasizing the shortcomings of all major political figures. It declared that Nikolai Bukharin was ‘the favourite of the whole party’ and its ‘most significant theoretician’, but weak on dialectics and somewhat scholastic. Lenin noted that Grigorii Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev had wavered at the time of the October Revolution—which was ‘not, of course, accidental’. Of the younger Bolsheviks, G. L. Piatakov was too preoccupied with administration ‘to be relied on in a serious political situation’. And Lenin especially feared that a rivalry between Stalin and Leon Trotsky might split the party. Although Trotsky was ‘certainly the most able man in the present Central Committee’, he was given to ‘excessive self-confidence’ and an exaggerated concern with ‘the administrative aspect of affairs’. Stalin as General Secretary ‘had concentrated boundless power in his hands’, and Lenin worried whether Stalin would ‘always know how to use this power with sufficient caution’. In a postscript he added that ‘Stalin is too rude’ to be General Secretary and recommended that ‘the comrades consider removing Stalin from this post’.
The succession struggle commenced even before Lenin died. In 1923 and despite a pledge of collective leadership, a triumvirate of Stalin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev accused Trotsky of Bonapartist aspirations. At the same time, Lenin launched his own assault against Stalin: he strongly criticized Stalin’s treatment of minority nationalities and threatened to sever relations for Stalin’s insulting behaviour towards Nadezhda Krupskaia, Lenin’s wife. Lenin also asked Trotsky, Stalin’s most bitter rival, to represent his views at the forthcoming Twelfth Party Congress of April 1923. But Trotsky, for reasons still unclear, chose not to present Lenin’s case against Stalin and thereby squandered a unique opportunity to use Lenin’s authority against Stalin. By December 1923 the triumvirs had prevailed in party infighting and put Trotsky and his followers on the defensive.
Lenin’s death in January 1924 had a mixed impact. Publicly, it signalled the beginning of a cult of Lenin: thousands viewed the open coffin, Petrograd became Leningrad, and quasi-religious symbolism of Russian Orthodoxy crept into the funeral. And over the objections of Krupskaia, the Central Committee placed the embalmed body on permanent display in Red Square. Behind the scenes, however, Lenin’s death—long anticipated—did not interrupt adversarial high politics. In February 1924 the Central Committee launched a recruitment campaign, the Lenin Enrolment, to ‘proletarianize’ the party by admitting more actual industrial workers. Although this step would ultimately erode the meaning and significance of party membership, in the short term it added primarily to the numerical strength of Stalin’s supporters. By the time the Thirteenth Party Congress opened at the end of May 1924, over 128,000 new candidates had joined. That number would soon surpass 240,000, thus increasing the size of the party by more than half. The triumvirate also fortified itself in other ways. Krupskaia pressed the leadership to make public the criticisms in Lenin’s testament, which had been kept secret (even from the party members for over a year), but was rebuffed. When Trotsky attacked Zinoviev and Kamenev in his Lessons of October, published for the anniversary of the revolution, he succeeded only in driving them back into a closer alliance with Stalin. And in December 1924 Stalin cast down an ideological challenge to Trotsky, counterposing his own idea of ‘socialism in one country’ to Trotsky’s concept of ‘permanent revolution’. Stalin’s argument—that the Soviet Union could create a socialist state without an international proletarian revolution—directly controverted Trotsky’s belief that the final victory of socialism depended on successful revolutions in the West. With the prospects of international revolution clearly receding (especially after the Ruhr débâcle of 1923), Stalin’s view resonated strongly with the rank and file.
With Trotsky weakened, the struggle entered a second phase in early 1925 when the triumvirs turned against one another. In 1924 Stalin had already begun to use his appointment powers as General Secretary to replace followers of Zinoviev and Kamenev with his own. This rivalry now intensified, just as the character of NEP itself became the central public issue. Indeed, 1925 would prove to be the apogee of private economic initiative during NEP. Zinoviev, ostensibly alarmed at capitalist ‘excesses’ in a socialist state, went on the attack. That impelled Bukharin, NEP’s strongest advocate in the top leadership, to join forces with Stalin. Ultimately however, this phase of the struggle was decided more along factional than policy lines. At the Central Committee meeting of October 1925 and again at the Fourteenth Party Congress in December, the more numerous Stalin–Bukharin bloc simply ran roughshod over the Zinoviev–Kamenev group.
The third phase of the succession produced an unlikely alliance: the ‘united opposition’ of Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev in 1926–7. Seeking to offset the support for Stalin (and, to a lesser degree, Bukharin) in the rank and file, these former foes resorted to direct action to achieve what they had been unable to gain in internal party politics. This strategy unravelled even before it was implemented. When one of the opposition’s conspiratorial meetings was easily uncovered in mid-1926, the Central Committee charged Zinoviev with violating the party ban on factions and removed him from the Politburo. In late September, the ‘united opposition’ took their case directly to the factories by staging public demonstrations, but without success. As the party press mobilized its full wrath against them, in early October 1926 the trio capitulated and publicly recanted. Trotsky was removed from the Politburo, and Kamenev lost his place as candidate member. After further machinations and conflicts, in October 1927 the trio was dropped from the Central Committee, followed by the expulsion of Trotsky and Zinoviev from the party itself in November. One month later, the Fifteenth Congress revoked the party membership of Kamenev. Zinoviev and Kamenev would be readmitted in 1928 following a humiliating recantation, but Trotsky was first exiled and then forcibly deported in 1929.