Stalin was well aware of these moods, and along with the rest of the Seven, he opposed Zinoviev’s proposal, cunningly presenting himself as a supporter of unity and collective leadership. “We plan to take all measures that preserve the unity of the Seven come what may,” he wrote to Ordzhonikidze in February 1925.87 In actuality, the situation was coming to a head. New jabs were being exchanged between the Seven majority, on the one hand, and Zinoviev and Kamenev on the other, and Stalin’s skilled hand could be seen in these intrigues. By late 1925 Zinoviev and Kamenev had formed a faction that threw down a gauntlet before Stalin, Bukharin, Rykov, and their followers.
At first the struggle for control centered on procedural matters—how and by whom the Politburo’s agenda should be set, as well as how the matter of Trotsky should be handled. These seemingly innocuous questions actually expressed a heated struggle for dominance within the collective leadership, but in order for this struggle to be taken beyond the bounds of the Seven, it needed a program. One could not gain the support of party functionaries, as Zinoviev and Kamenev counted on doing, with talk of winning control of the Politburo. Zinoviev, Kamenev, and their supporters chose a more respectable theme: the struggle against the “rightist” threat of allowing the NEP—which supposedly would strengthen “capitalist elements” and prosperous peasants (kulaks)—to become entrenched. Coming from the “moderate” Kamenev and Zinoviev, who were opposing the “leftist” Trotsky, or from Lenin’s widow Krupskaia (who, out of long-standing friendship, supported Zinoviev and Kamenev over Stalin), this program looked out of place, even absurd. But they had no other choice. The Politburo majority was following a “rightist” course, so in order to oppose it, they were forced to move leftward. Probably Zinoviev and Kamenev also counted on recruiting to their cause the rather sizable subset of party functionaries who were inclined against the NEP.
They miscalculated. Even those party leaders who may have felt opposed to the NEP knew on which side their bread was buttered: all power flowed downstream from the Politburo. Everything was decided by this supreme body and transmitted to the local level through the top leaders’ client networks. During the Fourteenth Party Congress in December 1925, when Zinoviev and Kamenev launched a determined attack against the Politburo majority in general and Stalin in particular, they were able to count on only the Leningrad delegation, which had been handpicked by Zinoviev, the region’s party boss. This backing was not enough: they suffered a crushing defeat. Furthermore, the move cost Zinoviev his Leningrad fiefdom. Immediately after the congress a large group of Central Committee members was sent to Leningrad to make sure that Stalin’s protégé, Sergei Mironovich Kirov, became Leningrad’s new boss. Kirov’s letters indicate that this takeover did not go particularly smoothly:
The situation is heated. There’s a lot of work to be done, and even more yelling.
Here, you get nothing without a battle. And what battles! Yesterday we were at Triangle [a reference to the party organization of the Triangle rubber factory], a collective of 2,200 people. The fighting was incredible. I haven’t seen a meeting like that since the days of October, and I never even imagined that there could be such a meeting of party members. At times, it even came to fistfights in some corners of the meeting!88
Zinoviev’s loyal party followers in Leningrad and the local party apparat were dealt with ruthlessly—although by the standards of the time, “ruthless” did not extend beyond large-scale firings and transfers to remote regions of the country. This heavy-handed purge escalated the conflict between the opposition and the majority, which continued through 1926 and 1927. After a period of relative calm, in the spring of 1926 the majority found itself confronted with a newly unified opposition headed by Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev. This “marriage of convenience” (though no more so than the other alliances within the top leadership) was doomed to failure, but it made life difficult for the majority. The united opposition provided a rallying point for the dissatisfied, of whom there was no shortage. Keeping the opposition at bay demanded time, effort, and resourcefulness. Someone had to make this struggle his primary focus. By position and temperament, the best man for the job was Stalin.
The full range of intrigues perpetrated by both camps deserves a thorough study, which remains to be undertaken. Particularly worthy of attention is one basic and potent ingredient in this toxic brew: the use of state security to suppress the opposition. Gradually, with increasing frequency, the party opposition was branded the “enemy,” a label the Bolsheviks had previously reserved for outsiders such as the bourgeoisie, Mensheviks, or SRs. The historical record allows us to trace the origins of this practice to Stalin, who employed it not just in the mid-1930s, when the fight against the opposition reached its bloody apogee, but also much earlier.
On 6 June 1926, approximately seventy Moscow Bolsheviks with oppositionist sympathies gathered in a dacha community outside the capital. They chose this setting because they had been banned from holding meetings and needed to gather out of sight of the authorities. The gathering was addressed by a supporter of Zinoviev, Mikhail Lashevich, a longtime Bolshevik who had managed to keep his post as deputy head of the military commissariat. As might have been expected, an undercover agent was present at the meeting, possibly a specially infiltrated agent of the OGPU. The matter was placed in the hands of the party’s investigative commission, which, try as it might, was not able to prove that the opposition’s leaders had helped organize the meeting. This did not stop Stalin. In a 25 June 1926 letter to the Politburo, written while on vacation, he proposed using the “Lashevich Affair” as a pretext for destroying the Zinoviev group and expelling Zinoviev himself from the Politburo.89 The ideological justification for this cynical move rested on the idea that the opposition was breaking the party apart. An exceptionally stormy Central Committee plenum in July 1926, during which the opposition attempted to make a decisive stand, ended in accordance with Stalin’s script. The plenum passed a resolution asserting that “the opposition had decided to cross the line from legally advocating its views to creating an all-union illegal organization.”90 The next step—casting this “all-union illegal organization” as an “all-union counterrevolutionary and terrorist organization”—would take Stalin another ten years, by which time his hold on power would be firm and his opponents executed.
Stalin’s plan to expel only Zinoviev from the Politburo was a diversion, an attempt to divide the opposition and demonstrate objectivity. Just months later, in October 1926, Trotsky and Kamenev were also removed. Yet the oppositionists did not lay down their arms: they used every opportunity to do battle, denouncing the Politburo majority and its policies. The mutual animosity finally reached its pinnacle when, with no other options left to them, the oppositionists resorted to an underground propaganda campaign, to which the Politburo responded with a sting operation. In September 1927 the OGPU sent an agent posing as a former officer from Wrangel’s army to a printing press that, despite the official prohibition, was still publishing opposition materials. Fabricated materials were used to charge the oppositionists with belonging to a “counterrevolutionary organization” that was supposedly plotting a military coup. The OGPU carried out the arrests. This police operation was organized by Stalin. While other Politburo members were vacationing in the south, he remained in Moscow and kept the others informed.91
In October 1927, Zinoviev and Trotsky were removed from the Central Committee in a particularly ugly plenary session. When Trotsky attempted to address the plenum with a question, he had a book and a glass thrown at him and was forcibly pushed from the podium as shouting erupted in the hall. On 7 November, the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution, the oppositionists attempted to hold their own demonstrations in parallel with the official ones but were forcibly dispersed. These demonstrations served as an excuse for new reprisals: many opposition members were arrested and sent into exile. In December, the crushing of the opposition was officially sanctioned at the Fifteenth Party Congress. Some publicly capitulated, but Trotsky and his closest associates did not back down. Trotsky was sent to Kazakhstan and later expelled from the USSR. The majority of oppositionists, both those who had relented and those who had not, were killed during the second half of the 1930s. In 1940, on Stalin’s orders, Trotsky was killed by a Soviet agent in Mexico.