Official measures on the national question had always been distasteful to many communist leaders, and it was Stalin who had to shoulder the bulk of the opprobrium. Trotski, Zinoviev and Kamenev agreed with the official line. Being Jews, however, they felt inhibited from taking a prominent role in debates about nationhood. Although Bukharin made the occasional comment, he too kept out of the spotlight. And so Stalin, despite Lenin’s accusation that he was a Great Russian chauvinist, remained chiefly responsible for party policy. Mdivani and other Georgian communist leaders quickly fell out with him. The imposition of a Transcaucasian Federation was too bitter a cup for them to drink from, and Stalin’s manipulations in 1922 permanently offended them. Not for the first time since 1917 he was undertaking uncongenial tasks which others shunned.
19. TESTAMENT
Tensions between Stalin and Lenin went on rising in autumn 1922. Stalin was not in a conciliating mood. He rebuked Lenin for garbling the contents of party policy in an interview for the Manchester Guardian:1 the pupil was telling off his teacher. No Politburo member except Trotski wrote so bluntly to Lenin. These niggles added to Lenin’s set of concerns about the General Secretary, and he became agitated about leaving the communist party to Stalin. As his hope of physical recovery slipped away, he dictated a series of notes to be made public in the event of his death.2 They were headed ‘Letter to the Congress’ because he wanted them to be read out to the next Party Congress. These are the notes known to history as Lenin’s Testament.
The gist lay in the sentences he composed on 25 December 1922 about fellow party leaders Stalin, Trotski, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin and Pyatakov. Molotov was one of the leaders peeved to have been left out of the list:3 Lenin was leaving a record for history. In fact the Testament’s main concern was with two individuals on the list:4
Comrade Stalin, having become General Secretary, has concentrated boundless power in his hands and I am not convinced that he will always manage to use this power with adequate care. On the other hand comrade Trotski, as has been shown by his struggle against the Central Committee in connection with the People’s Commissariat of the Means of Communication, is distinguished not merely by his outstanding talents. He surely is personally the most able individual in the current Central Committee but he has an excessive self-confidence and an excessive preoccupation with the purely administrative side of affairs.
Lenin dwelt on rivalry between Trotski and Stalin:5 ‘These two qualities of the two outstanding leaders of the present Central Committee have the capacity to bring about an unintended split [in the party], and unless the party takes measures to prevent this, a split could happen unexpectedly.’ A split in the party, he argued, would imperil the existence of the Soviet regime.
Lenin went on: ‘Our party rests upon two social classes and this is what makes possible its instability and makes inevitable its collapse unless agreements can take place between these two classes.’6 The danger he had in mind was that Trotski and Stalin would promote policies favouring different classes — the working class and the peasantry — and that this would induce strife that would undermine the regime.
To many party officials who were privy to the Testament this seemed an eccentric analysis. They recognised the isolation of the Soviet state in the international system and had not forgotten about the foreign intervention in the Civil War. They could also understand why Lenin picked out Trotski as someone who might bring disunity to the central party leadership. But Lenin’s preoccupation with Stalin caused surprise. Popular opinion, according to reports of the GPU (as the Cheka had been known since 1921), suggested Trotski, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Rykov, Bukharin or even Dzierżyń ski as the likeliest winner of the contest for the political succession.7 Even within the ruling group Stalin was still not taken as seriously as he should have been. Lenin, though, had at last got his measure; and on 4 January 1923, as the dispute over Georgia grew bitter, he dictated an addendum to his characterisation:8
Stalin is too crude; and this defect, which is wholly bearable inside our milieu and in relations among ourselves, becomes intolerable in the post of General Secretary. I therefore make a proposal for comrades to think of a way to remove Stalin and in his place appoint someone else who is distinguished from comrade Stalin in all other respects through having the single superior feature of being more patient, more loyal, more courteous and more attentive to comrades, less capricious, etc.
Lenin’s meaning pierced its way through his shaky syntax: he wanted to remove Stalin from the General Secretaryship.
His scheme was limited in scope. He was not proposing Stalin’s removal from the central party leadership, still less from the party as a whole. Such an idea would have been treated with the disdain which had met his request in July 1922 to dismiss most members of the Central Committee.9 Nor was Lenin the perfect political astrologer of his time. There was absolutely nothing in the Testament predicting the scale of terror which ensued in the years from 1928. Lenin, the leading proponent of state terror in the Civil War, failed to detect Stalin’s potential to apply terror-rule still more deeply in peacetime. The Testament of 1922–3 was limited to an effort to deprive Stalin of his most important administrative post.10
Files on the Georgian Affair were brought out for Lenin to examine. He had made up his mind about the verdict: Stalin and his associates were guilty of Great Russian chauvinism even though Stalin, Ordzhonikidze and Dzierżyń ski themselves were not Russians. Already at the end of the previous year, in an article on the national question, Lenin had acknowledged:11
I am, it seems, immensely guilty before the workers of Russia for not intervening sufficiently energetically and sufficiently sharply in the notorious question of autonomisation, officially known, it seems, as the question of the union of soviet socialist republics.
He also dictated an article on bureaucracy in the organs of party and government, making strong criticisms of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate. It was obvious to informed observers that Stalin, who headed the Inspectorate, was his principal target. Pravda’s editors blunted Lenin’s article in its published form;12 but the general intent was conserved. Lenin composed a further article, ‘Better Fewer But Better’, demanding the immediate promotion of ordinary industrial workers to political office. His rationale was that they alone had the attitudes necessary to create harmony in the Party Central Committee and put an end to bureaucratic practices. Once again it was a message that was meant to damage Stalin.
Lenin went on giving dictation to Maria Volodicheva and Lidia Fotieva. Although he seems to have stopped mentioning sensitive matters in front of Nadya Allilueva, he took no other precaution beyond telling his secretaries to keep everything to themselves and to lock up his papers. This was how he plotted the downfall of an individual whom he considered the greatest danger to the Revolution. Lenin’s excessive self-confidence — the very defect he ascribed to Trotski — had not left him.