The point is that this configuration of tendencies in ideology and policy had growing appeal for party leaders in Moscow and the provinces. Stalin did not rise to supreme power exclusively by means of the levers of bureaucratic manipulation. Certainly he had an advantage inasmuch as he could replace local party secretaries with persons of his choosing. It is also true that the regime in the party allowed him to control debates in the Central Committee and at Party Congresses. But such assets would have been useless to him if he had not been able to convince the Central Committee and the Party Congress that he was a suitable politician for them to follow. Not only as an administrator but also as a leader — in thought and action — he seemed to fit these requirements better than anyone else.
Stalin and Bukharin prepared themselves for a last decisive campaign against the internal party opposition. They had always hated Trotski and, in their private correspondence, they took delight in their growing success in humbling him. But they also retained a certain fear of him. They knew him to be talented and determined; they were aware that he had kept a personal following in the party. Trotski remained a dangerous enemy. They had less respect for Zinoviev but saw that he too was still a menace. Even more perilous was the effect of the rapprochement of Trotski and Zinoviev. As Zinoviev criticised Bukharin and Stalin from a left-wing position, the differences among the oppositionists lessened. A United Opposition was formed in mid-1926. When Stalin heard that Krupskaya had sympathies with Zinoviev, he wrote to Molotov: ‘Krup-skaya’s a splitter. She really needs a beating as a splitter if we wish to conserve party unity.’12 Two years earlier he had welcomed her support as he defended himself against the effects of Lenin’s Testament. Having survived that emergency, he intended to deal with her as severely as with other leading members of the United Opposition.
By mid-1926 the scene was set for the settling of accounts and Stalin was spoiling for a fight. When Trotski muttered to Bukharin that he expected to have a majority of the party on his side, the General Secretary wrote to Molotov and Bukharin: ‘How little he knows and how low he rates Bukharin! But I think that soon the party will punch the snouts of Tr[otski] and Grisha [Zinoviev] and Kamenev and will turn them into renegades like Shlyapnikov.’13 He accused them of behaving even less loyally than Shlyapnikov’s Workers’ Opposition. They needed to be confronted. Zinoviev should be sacked from the Politburo. The ascendant party leadership need have no fear: ‘I assure you that this matter will proceed without the slightest complications in the party and the country.’14 Zinoviev should be picked off first. Trotski could be left for later.15
The Stalin group in the leadership was by then well organised. Stalin himself could afford to stay by the Black Sea while, on 3 June 1926, a terrific dispute raged for six hours about theses proposed by Zinoviev.16 Stalin wanted total control of his group. He wanted to be kept abreast of developments and relayed regular instructions to his subordinates. But he had created a system which permitted him to be the master even while he was on vacation. He asserted himself to an ever greater extent. In September 1926 he wrote to Molotov indicating substantial reservations about his ally and supposed friend Bukharin: ‘Bukharin’s a swine and surely worse than a swine because he thinks it below his dignity to write a couple of lines.’17 Around that time he also said of his associate Mikoyan: ‘But Mikoyan’s a little duckling in politics, an able duckling but nevertheless a duckling.’18 From all this it appeared that Stalin saw himself as the single indispensable force in the campaign against the United Opposition. In his own eyes, no one else could successfully coordinate and lead the ascendant party leadership in the coming factional conflicts. He made it his aim to send Trotski and Zinoviev down to permanent defeat.
Yet the strain of constant polemics took its toll on him. Free in his accusations against the United Opposition, he was hurt by the tirade of personal abuse he himself had to endure. He was an extremely sensitive bully. When the situation got too much for him, he followed his pattern in the early years after October 1917 and sought to resign. On 27 December 1926 he wrote to Sovnarkom Chairman Alexei Rykov saying: ‘I ask you to release me from the post of Central Committee General Secretary. I affirm that I can no longer work at this post, that I’m in no condition to work any longer at this post.’ He made a similar attempt at resignation on 19 December 1927.19 Of course he wanted to be persuaded to withdraw such statements of intent — and indeed his associates did as he wished. But the mask of total self-control and self-confidence had slipped in these moments.
Stalin’s vacillation was temporary and fitful. The United Opposition had yet to be defeated and he returned to work as Party General Secretary with the pugnacity for which his associates admired him. Stalin and Bukharin were ready for the fight (although Bukharin had the disturbing tendency to go on talking to their opponents in a friendly fashion). The political end for Trotski, Zinoviev and Kamenev came surprisingly quickly. In spring 1927 Trotski drew up an ambitious ‘platform’, signed by eighty-three oppositionists (including himself), offering a fulminating critique of the sins of the ascendant party leadership. He demanded a more ‘revolutionary’ foreign policy as well as more rapid industrial growth; and whereas previously he had expressed concern about the ‘bureaucratisation’ of the party, he and his supporters now insisted that a comprehensive campaign of democratisation needed to be undertaken not only in the party but also in the soviets. The claim was made that only through such a set of measures would the original goals of the October Revolution be achievable. For the United Opposition, then, the Politburo was ruining everything Lenin had stood for. A last-ditch fight was required for the re-elevation of the party’s principles to the top of the current political agenda.
Stalin and Bukharin led the counter-attacks through the summer of 1927. Their belligerent mood was strengthened by their acute awareness that the United Opposition, while hurling accusations about the Politburo’s dereliction of revolutionary duty, was also indicting its members for simple incompetence. The Politburo was determined to hold firm as international complications intensified. The British Conservative government had been looking for a scrap for some months and when a police search of the Anglo-Soviet trading company Arcos came up with compromising evidence, the United Kingdom broke diplomatic relations entirely and expelled the Soviet ambassador in May. Next month the Soviet ambassador to Poland was assassinated. Not for the first time there were war scares in the USSR. The OGPU reinforced its vigilance against subversion and sabotage. Troubles came thick and fast. In mid-July the news had come from China that the nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek had massacred communists in Shanghai in April. Whereas nothing which happened in London and Warsaw was the Politburo’s fault, Stalin and Bukharin were directly responsible for the policies imposed by the Comintern on the Chinese communist leadership. Until recently they had insisted on an alliance with Chiang Kai-shek against the wishes of the Chinese communists; now, in August 1927, they licensed them to organise an uprising against Chiang Kai-shek. The United Opposition upbraided the Politburo for a total lack of effective supervision of the USSR’s foreign policy.