He would have been less insouciant if he had known his secretaries better. Volodicheva was disconcerted by the contents of his dictated notes on 23 December and she consulted her colleague Fotieva, who advised her to take a copy to none other than Stalin. Stalin was shocked but not deterred. He had had an altercation with Krupskaya the previous day on discovering that she had been helping Lenin to communicate with Trotski and others about current politics. Krupskaya’s behaviour contravened the Politburo’s orders, and Stalin, who had been asked to ensure observance of the regimen specified by Lenin’s doctors, directed verbal obscenities at her. Krupskaya declared that she alone knew what was medically best for Lenin. If Lenin were to be denied political contact with other leaders, his recovery would be delayed still further. She wrote in these terms to Kamenev, adding that nobody in the party had ever addressed her as foully as Stalin. But she did not tell Lenin for fear of upsetting him; and Stalin had not sought to withhold the right to dictate from Lenin. He resented being picked out for blame when he was only carrying out Politburo orders;13 but he reasonably assumed that the matters dividing him from Lenin were amenable to eventual resolution.
Some weeks later, however, Krupskaya blurted out to Lenin how Stalin had behaved towards her. Lenin was infuriated. Although he himself often swore,14 he drew the line at the verbal abuse of women. Stalin’s comportment offended him, and on 5 March 1923 he dictated a sharp letter:
You had the uncouthness to summon my wife to the telephone and swear at her. Although she has even given you her agreement to forget what was said, this fact has nevertheless become known through her to Zinoviev and Kamenev. I do not intend to forget so easily what has been done against me, and it goes without saying that I consider something done against my wife to be something also done against me. I therefore ask you to consider whether you agree to retract what you said and apologise or you prefer to break relations between us.
Stalin was stupefied. He had tried to mend bridges with Lenin by letting him continue dictating and researching even though the resultant articles hurt him. He had asked Lenin’s sister Maria Ulyanova to plead his case: ‘I love him with all my heart. Tell him this in some way.’ With the letter in his hands Stalin tried to tell himself: ‘This isn’t Lenin who’s talking, it’s his illness!’
He scribbled out a half-hearted compromise. ‘If my wife had behaved incorrectly and you had had to punish her,’ he wrote, ‘I would not have regarded it as my right to intervene. But inasmuch as you insist, I am willing to apologise to Nadezhda Konstantinovna.’ On reflection Stalin redrafted the message and admitted to having bawled at Krupskaya; but he added that he had only been doing his duty as given him by the Politburo. He added:
Yet if you consider that the maintenance of ‘relations’ requires me to ‘retract’ the above-mentioned words, I can retract them, while nevertheless refusing to understand what the problem is here, what my ‘guilt’ consists of and what in particular is being demanded of me.
Whenever he started to apologise, he ended up rubbing salt in the wound. How on earth Stalin thought such a message would placate Lenin is hard to imagine. But he was a proud man. He could not bring himself to show any greater contrition, and was on the point of paying dearly.
Yet this did not happen. On 10 March, agitated by the dispute, Lenin suffered a heart attack. Suddenly Stalin no longer needed to concern himself about Lenin directly leading a campaign against him. Lenin was taken off to the Gorki mansion outside Moscow, never to return. He was a helpless cripple tended by his wife Nadya and sister Maria; and although the doctors told them that all was not lost, Nadya ceased to believe them. His medical condition remained subject to security surveillance. The reports of GPU operatives to the Kremlin let Stalin know he was in the clear: Lenin was beyond recovery; it was only a matter of time before he died.
Lenin’s dictated thoughts, however, remained a threat. The dying leader had had them typed up in multiple copies and their existence was known to Politburo members and to the secretaries in Lenin’s office. Not everyone in the Politburo was friendly to Stalin. Relations between Trotski and Stalin had never been good, and Stalin could expect trouble from that quarter. What counted in Stalin’s favour, though, was that Kamenev, Zinoviev and others anticipated a strong bid from Trotski for supreme power. Stalin was a valuable accomplice whom they were disinclined to remove from the General Secretaryship. They knew his defects as well as Lenin did; they were also less aware of his capacities and ambition than Lenin had become: they therefore underestimated the difficulty they might have in handling him in the years ahead. This meant that if Stalin played his hand skilfully, he might yet survive the storm. The next Party Congress — the Twelfth — was scheduled for April 1923. The Politburo aimed to show that the regime could function effectively in Lenin’s absence. Trotski was offered the honour of delivering the political report on behalf of the Central Committee, but refused. Instead it was Zinoviev who gave it. Among themselves Zinoviev, Kamenev and Stalin arranged the rest of the proceedings in advance.
Stalin, though, gave the organisational report. Cleverly he accepted Lenin’s proposal for structural reforms to the Party Central Committee and the Central Control Commission; but whereas Lenin had wished to promote ordinary workers to membership of these bodies, Stalin gave preference to local party leaders of working-class origin who no longer worked in factories or mines. By this means Stalin would control the process and emasculate Lenin’s intentions.
He also delivered the report on the national question. He crafted his words with cunning and spoke like a man on the attack. He condemned both Great Russian nationalism and the nationalisms of the non-Russian peoples. He suggested that party policy had been correct in doctrine, policy and practice — and by implication he suggested that he was merely progressing along a line marked out by Lenin. Budu Mdivani got up to say that Stalin and his associates had handled affairs unfairly.15 By then, however, Stalin had had time to organise his defence and to get leaders from the south Caucasus to put Mdivani under fire. Zinoviev, too, rallied to Stalin’s side, demanding that Mdivani and his supporters should dissociate themselves from Georgian nationalism. Bukharin asserted the need to avoid giving offence to non-Russian national sensibilities; but he too failed to indicate that Stalin had acted as an obstacle to the success of official policy. Even Trotski refrained from an open attack on the General Secretary despite the encouragement he had been given by Lenin. Yet the pressure on Stalin had been intense, and with a degree of self-pity he claimed he had not wanted to deliver the report on the national question. As usual he represented himself as simply carrying out duties assigned to him by the leadership.
And he survived the ordeal. He paid a price: he had to accept several amendments to the draft resolution and most of these gave greater rights to the non-Russians than he liked. Yet the Georgian case was rejected and Stalin survived the Congress. The Testament remained under lock and key. It could have been revealed to the Congress, but his allies Zinoviev and Kamenev had blocked such a move.16 For a general secretary who had been on the brink of being removed from the Central Committee this was worth celebrating as a victory. Zinoviev, Kamenev and Stalin appeared to run party and state like a triumvirate.
Trotski passed up his opportunity to cause an upset. In subsequent years his supporters criticised his failure to grab his chance at the Twelfth Party Congress. Undoubtedly he had little tactical finesse in internal party business. Yet it is questionable whether he would have done himself a favour by breaking with the rest of the Politburo. Too many leaders at the central level and in the provinces had identified him as the Bonaparte-like figure who might lead the armed forces against the Revolution’s main objectives. His anti-Bolshevik past counted against him. His Civil War record, which involved the policy of shooting delinquent Bolshevik leaders in the Red Army, had not been forgotten. Furthermore, several of his admiring subordinates in the Revolutionary-Military Council of the Republic had — like him — not belonged to the Bolsheviks before 1917; and some of them had not been revolutionaries at all. Trotski had an intermittent tendency towards nervousness in trials of strength in the party. He was also aware that any attempt to unseat a Politburo member would have been interpreted as a bid for supreme power even before Lenin had passed away. Trotski decided to wait for a better chance in the months ahead.