He was highly conspiratorial. According to Politburo secretary Boris Bazhanov, Stalin’s desk had four telephones but inside the desk was a further apparatus giving him the facility to eavesdrop on the conversations of dozens of the most influential communist leaders. He could do this without going through the Kremlin switchboard, and the information he gathered must have alerted him to any manoeuvres being undertaken against him.29 Personal assistants such as Lev Mekhlis and Grigori Kanner carried out whatever shady enterprise he thought up.30 He was ruthless against his enemies. When Kamenev asked him about the question of gaining a majority in the party, Stalin scoffed: ‘Do you know what I think about this? I believe that who votes how in the party is unimportant. What is extremely important is who counts the votes and how they are recorded.’31 He was implying that he expected the central party apparatus to fiddle the voting figures if ever they went against him.
This sort of remark gave Stalin the reputation of an unprincipled bureaucrat. He revelled in his deviousness when talking to his associates. But there was much more to him. He had the potential of a true leader. He was decisive, competent, confident and ambitious. The choice of him rather than Zinoviev or Kamenev to head the charge against Trotski at the Thirteenth Party Conference showed that this was beginning to be understood by other Central Committee members. He was coming out of the shadows. From the last months of 1924 he showed a willingness to go on attacking Trotski without keeping Zinoviev and Kamenev at his side. Kamenev had made a slip by referring to ‘nepman Russia’ instead of ‘NEP Russia’. The so-called nepman was typically a private trader who took advantage of the economic reforms since 1921 and who was resented by Bolsheviks. Stalin made a meal of Kamenev’s slip in the party press. Around the same time Zinoviev had described the Soviet regime as ‘a dictatorship of the party’. Stalin as Party General Secretary vigorously repudiated the term as a description of political reality.32 Kamenev and Zinoviev were put on notice that they should look out for themselves. In autumn 1924 Stalin moved against their leading supporters. I. A. Zelenski was replaced as Moscow City Party Secretary by Stalin’s supporter Nikolai Uglanov.33
Strategic factors were coming between Stalin on one side and Zinoviev and Kamenev on the other. Stalin wanted to defend the case for the possibilities of ‘building socialism’ in the USSR even during the NEP. This countered Trotski’s argument, fleshed out in The Lessons of October in 1924, that the October Revolution would expire unless sustained by co-operation with socialist regimes in Europe. Trotski was extending his pre-revolutionary ideas about the need for ‘permanent revolution’. To Stalin his booklet seemed both anti-Leninist in doctrine and pernicious in practice to the stability of the NEP. Bukharin, an arch-leftist in the Bolshevik leadership in the Civil War, agreed with Stalin and was rewarded with promotion to full membership of the Politburo after the Thirteenth Party Congress. He and Stalin began to act together against Zinoviev and Kamenev. Bukharin, as he pondered party policy after Lenin, believed that the NEP offered a framework for the country’s more peaceful and evolutionary ‘transition to socialism’. He disregarded traditional party hostility to kulaks and called on them to ‘enrich themselves’. He sought a moderation of repressive methods in the state’s handling of society and wished to put the emphasis on indoctrinating the urban working class. He saw peasant co-operatives as a basis for ‘socialist construction’.
Stalin and Bukharin rejected Trotski and the Left Opposition as doctrinaires who by their actions would bring the USSR to perdition. The leftist push for a more active foreign policy might provoke a retaliatory invasion by the Western powers. Trade would be ruined along with Soviet capital investment plans. The Trotskyist demand for an increased rate of industrial growth, moreover, could be realised only through the heavier taxation of the better-off stratum of the peasantry. The sole result would be the rupture of the linkage between peasants and working class recommended by Lenin. The recrudescence of social and economic tensions could lead to the fall of the USSR.
Zinoviev and Kamenev felt uncomfortable with so drastic a turn towards the market economy. They still feared Trotski. They also wanted to maintain the peasant–worker linkage. But they were unwilling to give their imprimatur to Bukharin’s evolutionary programme; they disliked Stalin’s movement to a doctrine that socialism could be built in a single country — and they simmered with resentment at the unceasing accumulation of power by Stalin. Zinoviev and Kamenev were vulnerable to the charge of having betrayed the Bolshevik Central Committee in October 1917. They had to prove their radicalism. It was only a matter of time before they challenged their anti-Trotski allies Stalin and Bukharin. Stalin was ready and waiting for them. To most observers he seemed calmer than during those earlier disputes when he had flown off the handle in internal party disputes. But this was not the case. Stalin was just as angry and ferocious as ever. What had changed was that he was no longer the outsider and the victim. Stalin dominated the Orgburo and the Secretariat. With Bukharin he led the Politburo. He could afford to maintain an outward tranquillity and catch his enemies unawares.
He continued to act in such a fashion. He had survived Lenin’s criticism by the skin of his teeth. He had to show others that he was not as black as he had been painted. His gang in the central party leadership would help him. But he had to watch out for others. Dzierżyński did not owe him any favours. Krupskaya, after her early overtures to Stalin, kept her own counsel. Bukharin himself was not dependable; he went on talking amicably to Trotski, Zinoviev and Kamenev even while castigating their policies. Bolshevik politics were in dangerous flux.
21. JOSEPH AND NADYA
The struggles among the communist party factions were also a contest for individual supremacy. Trotski, Zinoviev, Bukharin and Stalin each felt worthy to succeed Lenin, and even Kamenev had ambition. Stalin was tired of seeing his rivals strutting on the public stage. He accepted that they were good orators and that he would never match them in this. Yet he was proud — in his brittle, over-sensitive way — that his contribution to Bolshevism was mainly practical in nature: he thought praktiki like himself were the party’s backbone. The praktiki looked up to Lenin as the eagle who scattered his opponents like mere chickens. Stalin seemed unimpressive to those who did not know him and indeed to many who did; but he was already determined to fly into history as the party’s second eagle.1 He did not just scatter his rivals for the succession: whenever possible, he swooped down and tore them to bits. Chatting to Kamenev and Dzierżyński in 1923, he had explained his general attitude: ‘The greatest delight is to pick out one’s enemy, prepare all the details of the blow, to slake one’s thirst for a cruel revenge and then go home to bed!’2