He would be going back to Turukhansk as an ordinary provincial militant and not as the Central Committee leader he had been in 1913. Stalin was requesting a more severe demotion than even the Testament had specified.
He was psychologically complex. That he contemplated going back to northern Siberia may be doubted. But he was impulsive. When his pride was offended, he lost his composure. Even by offering his resignation, he was taking a huge risk. He was gambling on his exhibition of humility inducing the Central Committee, which included some of his friends, to refuse his request. He needed to put his enemies in the wrong. The ploy worked perfectly.
The Central Committee retained him as General Secretary and the final settling of accounts among Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev was yet again postponed. Coming back from vacation in the autumn, he had recovered his self-possession. In advance of Politburo meetings he consulted Kamenev and Zinoviev. If Zinoviev was in Moscow, the three of them met privately and then, in conspiratorial fashion, arrived at the Politburo separately. Stalin brazened it out, shaking hands with his archenemy Trotski as they greeted each other. He also restrained any display of personal ambition. Kamenev, not Stalin, chaired the Politburo after Lenin’s death.16 Yet already Stalin was taking care of his future. When his rivals fail to join him in the Orgburo, he was free to replace them with appointees more to his liking. The Stalin group formed itself under his leadership; it was like the street gang which he had been thwarted from leading as a boy in Gori.17 None was more important than Vyacheslav Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich. Both were Secretaries of the Central Committee; they also intermittently headed one or another of its departments and helped Stalin in the Orgburo. And when Ukrainian communist politics became troublesome for the Kremlin in April 1925, Kaganovich was dispatched to Kiev to become First Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine.
Stalin also built up a retinue of supporters in the Central Committee. Among them were Sergo Ordzhonikidze, Kliment Voroshilov, Semën Budënny, Sergei Kirov and Andrei Andreev. All these men were loyal to him without being servile and called him Koba.18 Some had had disputes with him in the past. Molotov had fallen out with him in March 1917. Kaganovich had criticised the Central Committee’s organisational policy in 1918–19 and Ordzhonikidze could never button his lip when he had something on his mind.19 Andreev had even been a Workers’ Oppositionist. Budënny and Voroshilov had served under him in Tsaritsyn; Ordzhonikidze and Kirov had been his subordinates in the Caucasus. Andreev had impressed him with administrative work in the early 1920s. The gang took time to coalesce, and Stalin never allowed its members to take their positions for granted. Even the Tsaritsynites needed to keep proving their worth in his eyes. Sergei Minin and Moisei Rukhimovich, cronies on the Southern Front, came to seem as useless as hardened paint. Minin sided with the opposition to the ascendant party leadership and Stalin had nothing more to do with him. Minin committed suicide in 1926. When Rukhimovich’s incompetence at organising transport was exposed, Stalin sacked him as ‘a self-satisfied bureaucrat’.20
He demanded efficiency as well as loyalty from the gang members. He also selected them for their individual qualities. He wanted no one near to him who outranked him intellectually. He selected men with a revolutionary commitment like his own, and he set the style with his ruthless policies. None earned disapprobation for mercilessness towards enemies. He created an ambience of conspiracy, companionship and crude masculine humour. In return for their services he looked after their interests. He was solicitous about their health. He overlooked their foibles so long as their work remained unaffected and they recognised his word as law.
This is what Amakyan Nazaretyan wrote about working ‘under Koba’s firm hand’:21
I can’t take offence. There’s much to be learned from him. Having got to know him at close hand, I have developed an extraordinary respect towards him. He has a character that one can only envy. I can’t take offence. His strictness is covered by attentiveness to those who work with him.
On another occasion he added:22
He’s very cunning. He’s hard as a nut and can’t be broken at one go. But I have a completely different view of him now from the one I had in Tiflis. Despite his rational wildness, so to speak, he’s a soft individual; he has a heart and knows how to value the merits of people.
Lazar Kaganovich shared this endorsement:23
In the early years Stalin was a soft individual… Under Lenin and after Lenin. He went through a lot.
In the early years after Lenin died, when he came to power, they all attacked Stalin. He endured a lot in the struggle with Trotski. Then his supposed friends Bukharin, Rykov and Tomski also attacked him…
It was difficult to avoid getting cruel.
For Kaganovich, Stalin’s personality responded to circumstances not of his making.
He discouraged attention to his national origin. In the provinces his supporters played up the fact that his main opponents — at first Trotski and then Kamenev and Zinoviev — were Jews. He himself never mentioned this, but he did not stop others from bringing it up.24 He had his own reasons for caution. Not only Jews but also Poles, Georgians and Armenians had a presence in the Bolshevik party central and local leadership out of proportion to the USSR’s demography, and there was growing resentment of the fact in the country. Stalin, moreover, still spoke with a heavy accent. Trotski put this with typical cattiness: ‘The Russian language always stayed for him not only a language half-foreign and improvised but — much worse for his awareness — conventional and strained.’25 Snubs about his linguistic facility were not uncommon in the 1920s.26
Yet no one else in the ascendant central leadership set himself up quite so effectively. Bukharin had a following in the party but no consolidated network of clients. Zinoviev had such a network but most of his clients were based in Leningrad. Kamenev had never been much of a patron. The sole leader to match Stalin’s ability in forming a cliental group was Trotski. He still appealed to members of the Inter-District group which had joined the Bolsheviks in May 1917, and he had attracted admirers in the Civil War as People’s Commissar for Military Affairs. The Left Opposition, when attacking the Politburo in the last quarter of 1923, looked to him for inspiration. Among them were Yevgeni Preobrazhenski, Leonid Serebryakov, Nikolai Krestinski, Adolf Ioffe and Christian Rakovski. Yet Trotski lacked Stalin’s day-to-day accessibility. He had the kind of hauteur which peeved dozens of potential supporters. He was also devoid of Stalin’s tactical cunning and pugnacity, and there was a suspicion among Trotski’s followers that their idol’s illnesses at crucial conjunctures of factional struggle had a psychosomatic dimension. Yet he had a large enough following to take on and beat Stalin if the situation had been different. The trouble was that Trotski had lost the early rounds of the contest. He was always coming from behind on points.
Stalin continued to box warily. The defeat of the Left Opposition in the winter of 1923–4 had been achieved in open combat. Trotski and the Left Opposition had attacked and Stalin, Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin had retaliated. Stalin had had little need to sack Trotskyists and replace them with individuals loyal to the ascendant party leadership.27 Yet the Orgburo and the Secretariat — as well as the Politburo in the highest instance — used their right to change postings in the following months. The ascendant party leadership manipulated the various administrative levers to its advantage. Steadily the Left lost its remaining key jobs in party, government, army and police. The sackings were accompanied by demotions which frequently involved relocation to distant parts of the USSR. This was really a light form of exile whereby the ascendant leadership consolidated its grip on power. The Left was also doctrinally undermined. The Agitprop Department of the Secretariat publicised past disputes between Lenin and Trotski. Its various adjuncts printed dozens of anti-Trotski pamphlets; and Stalin as an avid reader scribbled an aide-mémoire on the cover of a work on the October Revolution: ‘Tell Molotov that Tr[otski] lied about Lenin on the subject of ways to make an insurrection.’28