Rivalry in fact grew among his enemies as soon as the Congress was over. Kamenev and Zinoviev had protected Stalin because they wanted help against Trotski. But they were disconcerted by the individual initiatives taken by Stalin in the weeks since Lenin’s heart attack. Zinoviev, based in faraway Petrograd, objected to decisions being taken without consultation. In the Civil War and afterwards it had been normal for Lenin to seek the opinion of Politburo members by phone or telegram before fixing policy. Stalin had gone ahead with his preferences on the Pravda editorial board, on the national question in the USSR, on the Middle East and on the Comintern. He was getting too big for his Tsaritsyn boots, and Zinoviev aimed to treat him firmly. While in Kislovodsk in the north Caucasus, Zinoviev called a meeting with other leading Bolsheviks on vacation near by. These included Bukharin, Voroshilov, Lashevich and Yevdokimov. Although Lashevich and Yevdokimov were his trusted supporters working with him in Petrograd, Voroshilov was a client of Stalin who was likely to relay the content of the conversations to the General Secretary. Perhaps (as most have supposed) Zinoviev was naïve. More likely, though, he thought that Voroshilov would be the intermediary who would carry the message back to Stalin that he had to change his behaviour or suffer the negative consequences.
On 30 July he wrote to Kamenev:17
You’re simply letting Stalin make a mockery of us.
Facts? Examples?
Allow me!
1) The nat[ional] question.
… Stalin makes the appointment of the Central Committee plenipotentiaries (instructors)
2) The Gulf Convention. Why not consult the two of us and Trotski about this important question? There was sufficient time. By the way, I’m meant to be responsible for the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs…
3) Comintern…
V.I. [Lenin] dedicated a good 10 per cent of his time to the Comintern… And Stalin turns up, takes a quick look and makes a decision. And Bukh[arin] and I are ‘dead souls’: we’re not asked about anything.
4) Pravda
This morning — and it was the last straw — Bukharin learned from Dubrovski’s personal telegram that the ed[itorial] board had been replaced without informing him or asking Bukh[arin]…
We won’t tolerate this any longer.
If the party is doomed to go through a period (probably very brief) of Stalin’s personal despotism, so be it. But I for one don’t intend to cover up all this swinish behaviour. All the platforms refer to the ‘triumvirate’ in the belief that I’m not the least important figure in it. In reality there’s no triumvirate, there is only Stalin’s dictatorship.
According to Zinoviev, the time to act was overdue.
He exaggerated the power of the General Secretary. A simple vote in the Politburo, chaired by Kamenev, could still restrain Stalin; and when Zinoviev was unable to attend sessions, it would not have been difficult to insist on preliminary consultation of his opinions. Yet he was right about Stalin’s growing desire to get his way without reference to fellow Politburo members. Stalin saw the need for tactical retreat. He agreed to — and indeed appeared to encourage — changes in the composition of central party bodies. His critics had seen how often he had placed his supporters in posts of authority outside Moscow. He sat through Orgburo meetings which decided such matters. The solution was obvious. Trotski, Zinoviev and Bukharin were appointed to the Orgburo. They could oppose Stalin’s schemes whenever they wanted.18
It made little difference. The reason usually given is that Trotski and Zinoviev failed to appreciate the importance of attending the Orgburo whereas Stalin was a contented participant. Yet the basic question is why Trotski and Zinoviev, having identified the source of Stalin’s bureaucratic power and demanded Orgburo membership for themselves, failed to follow through with their action against him. This question, though, raises yet another one. Was Stalin’s willingness to sit through meeting after meeting the most important reason for his capacity to defeat them? The answer must surely be no. It was not as if Trotski, Kamenev and Zinoviev spent their time untroubled by the duty to attend bureaucratic meetings. The entire Soviet order was bureaucratic, and meetings of administrative officials were the norm. The leading organs of the Central Committee had been recomposed mainly with a view towards administering a shock to the General Secretary. His fellow Politburo members thought they could get on with their individual campaigns to succeed Lenin. Each expected to run his administrative hierarchy without interference from the others. Stalin’s career had not been extinguished but his political capital had been reduced to a minimum.
He was helped by events. All Politburo members, including Trotski, wanted to keep unity in the central party leadership. Isolated and resented across the country outside the party, they eagerly presented a front of agreement in public. Lenin was not yet dead even though leaders in the Kremlin knew that his chances of recovery were remote. Stalin’s adversaries in the Politburo did not want to rock the communist party boat by trying to throw Stalin overboard.
Yet the disagreements continued behind the scenes. They were exacerbated by the handling of economic policy by Kamenev, Zinoviev and Stalin. In mid-1923 there was suddenly a deficit in food supplies to the towns. This was the result of what Trotski called the ‘scissors crisis’. Prices of industrial goods had increased three times over prices paid for agricultural products since 1913. Thus the blades of the economy’s scissors opened. Peasants preferred to keep grain in the countryside rather than sell to government procurement agencies. They hoarded some of their harvest. They fed themselves and their animals better. They made more vodka for themselves. What they refused to do was to give way to the Bolsheviks, who had made the goods of manufacturing industry so expensive. The members of the Politburo majority gave ground to rural demands and reduced industrial prices. The wheels of exchange between town and village started to move again. Trotski did not fail to criticise his rivals for economic mismanagement; he saw them as having fulfilled his fears about the NEP as a potential instrument for turning away from the objectives of the October Revolution and towards the requirements of the peasantry.
Trotski’s fellow leftists in the party made a move against the developing nature of the New Economic Policy in October 1923. Yevgeni Preobrazhenski and others signed the Platform of the Forty-Six, criticising the organisational and economic policies of the ascendant party leadership. They demanded wider freedom of discussion and deeper state intervention in industrial development. In November 1923 Trotski joined the dissenters with a series of articles entitled ‘The New Course’. The Thirteenth Party Conference in December had arraigned this Left Opposition for disloyalty. The ascendant leaders needed Stalin more than ever as a counterweight to Trotski; all the criticisms of the summer were mothballed — and Zinoviev no longer talked of the need to restrain Stalin’s administrative autonomy. The suppression of factional activity in the provinces, they thought, was best left in his hands. They also entrusted him with putting the case against Trotski at the Conference. For once they did not want this honour. They knew that Stalin could look Trotski in the eye and smack him politically in the face — and perhaps they calculated that Stalin would do himself no favours by appearing divisive while they seemed above the demands of factional struggle.