But Stalin, like Lenin, wanted to avoid trouble for the foreseeable future. Lenin saw a chance for the Soviet state to come to an understanding with Germany. Talks among the European powers had been convened at Genoa in northern Italy. The RSFSR and Germany were treated as pariah states, and Lenin made overtures for a separate commercial treaty between them. This was duly signed at nearby Rapallo in April 1922. Both states had more in mind than mere trade. Germany, prevented by the Treaty of Versailles from rearming itself, arranged to test military equipment and train army units secretly on Soviet soil. Others in the Politburo, especially Zinoviev, were reluctant to accept that the ‘revolutionary upsurge’ had subsided in Europe. Despite the Treaty of Rapallo, the Comintern in 1923 at Zinoviev’s behest encouraged an armed rising against the German government on the sixth anniversary of the Bolshevik seizure of power in Petrograd. Stalin had nothing to do with such adventures.
Yet the working arrangement between Lenin and Stalin had already been put to an acute test. The occasion was the sudden deterioration in Lenin’s health on 25 May 1922, when he suffered a massive stroke while recuperating from surgery to remove a bullet lodged in his neck since the attempt on his life in August 1918. Lenin lost mobility on the right side of his body; he could not speak clearly and his mind was obviously confused. Groups of doctors, including well-rewarded specialists brought from Germany, consulted among themselves on the nature of Lenin’s illness. Opinion was divided. Among the possibilities considered were hereditary cardiac disease, syphilis, neurasthenia and even the effects of the recent operation on his neck. There were times when Lenin gave up hope entirely and thought his ‘song was sung’. But, helped by his wife Nadya and sister Maria Ulyanova, he pulled himself together psychologically. He welcomed visitors to keep abreast of public affairs.
As General Secretary, Stalin was the most frequent of these. He was not a friend. Lenin did not think highly of him outside their political relationship. He told Maria that Stalin was ‘not intelligent’. He also said Stalin was an ‘Asiatic’. Nor could Lenin abide the way Stalin chewed his pipe.18 Lenin was a fastidious man typical of his professional class; he expected comrades to behave with the politesse of the European middle class. He turned to the language of national superiority. Stalin was not merely a Georgian but an Oriental, a non-European and therefore an inferior. Lenin was unconscious of his prejudices: they emerged only when he was off his guard. These prejudices contributed to his failure until then to spot that Stalin might be a leading candidate to succeed him. When he thought of power in parties, Lenin had the tendency to assume that only those well grounded in doctrine stood much chance. He assumed that the sole figures worth consideration in any party were its theorists. The classic instance was his obsession with Karl Kautsky. Both before and during the Great War he overrated Kautsky’s influence over the German Marxist movement. Although Kautsky was an influential figure, he was very far from moulding the policies of the German Social-Democratic Party.19
At any rate Stalin was Lenin’s intermediary with the distant world of Kremlin politics while Lenin convalesced at the village of Gorki, twenty miles south of Moscow. When Stalin was set to arrive there for one of their conversations, Lenin would tell his sister Maria to fetch a bottle of decent wine for the guest. Stalin was a busy man; he needed to be treated properly. Maria had recently studied photography in order to catch Lenin on camera, and she snapped Stalin with him on one of his frequent visits.20 The two of them got along fine and sat out on the terrace for their discussions. There were a few matters that in other circumstances would have been resolved in Lenin’s favour at the Central Committee; his absence compelled him to entrust his cases to Stalin. But there was one request which caused Stalin much trepidation. Lenin before his stroke had asked Stalin to supply him with poison so that he might commit suicide if ever he became paralysed. He repeated the request on 30 May. Stalin left the room. Outside was Bukharin. The two of them consulted Maria. They agreed that Stalin, rather than refuse point-blank, should go back to Lenin and say that the doctors were offering an optimistic diagnosis which made suicide wholly inappropriate.21 The episode passed, and Stalin resumed his trips to keep Lenin up to date with politics in the capital.22
Lenin was a cantankerous patient and sought Stalin’s assistance in sacking those doctors who annoyed him:23
If you have left Klemperer here, then I at least recommend: 1) deporting him from Russia no later than Friday or Saturday together with Förster, 2) entrusting Ramonov together with Levin and others to use these German doctors and establishing surveillance over them.
Trotski praised Lenin’s ‘vigilance’, but — like the whole Politburo — he voted to reject the request. Eighty other leading Bolsheviks were being treated by the Germans. Deportation would have been a ludicrous measure.24 Lenin’s capriciousness grew. Exasperated by his comrades’ refusal to accede to his preferences on policy, he proposed a total reorganisation of the Central Committee. His preposterous suggestion was to sack most of its members. The veterans should be removed forthwith and replaced by Vyacheslav Molotov, Alexei Rykov and Valeryan Kuibyshev. Out, then, would go not only Stalin but also Trotski, Kamenev and Zinoviev.25
Lenin’s physical debility and political inactivity frustrated him. His tirades stemmed from irritation with what he heard about shifts in official policy. In each instance he found Stalin in disagreement with him. A dispute had been brewing about foreign trade since November 1921.26 Although Lenin had promoted the expansion of the private sector under the NEP, he drew the line at ending the state’s monopoly on commercial imports and exports. Others in the Central Committee, led by Finance Commissar Sokolnikov and supported by Stalin, regarded this as impractical. Sokolnikov had a point. The creaky state bureaucracy was incapable of pursuing all opportunities for trade abroad. The frontiers were not effectively sealed; smugglers were doing business unimpeded and untaxed by the authorities. If the purpose of the NEP was to regenerate the economy, then permission for a widening of the limits of legal private engagement in foreign trade would help. Lenin refused to listen. It had become an article of faith for him to turn the Soviet state into an economic fortress against infiltration by unsupervised influences from abroad.
Lenin had to seek friends outside his previous group. Sokolnikov was with him. Also strongly on his side was the People’s Commissar for Foreign Trade Lev Krasin; but Krasin carried little weight in the Party Central Committee. The most influential advocate of a position similar to Lenin’s was in fact the person who himself had argued that Lenin had removed too much state regulation from the running of the economy at home: Trotski.
The growing alliance of convenience between Lenin and Trotski came into existence only slowly. Suspicion persisted on both sides about current economic measures. But a second matter meanwhile unsettled Lenin’s relationship with Stalin in summer 1922 when the constitutional discussions about the future of the Soviet state came to a head. To Lenin it seemed crucial that the Soviet republics established since 1918 should be joined on equal terms in a federal structure. Formally, the impression had to be given that, although the state would be run from Moscow, the communist rulers rejected all tendencies of ‘Great Russian chauvinism’. The RSFSR, vast as it was, would be but one Soviet republic alongside the Soviet republics of Ukraine, Belorussia and the Transcaucasian Federation. Lenin wanted the new federal state to be called the Union of Soviet Republics of Europe and Asia. This had always been his goal. (He had explained this in his confidential correspondence with Stalin in mid-1920.)27 Lenin was not aiming to run down the influence of the Bolsheviks in the Comintern. But his medium-term objective was genuinely internationalist, and he thought that the name and structure of the projected federal state ought to mirror this.