This imperative clashed so blatantly with the party’s basic ideology that Bukharin had to retract his words; and it was Stalin who supplied a doctrine capable of competing with the Left’s criticisms. In December 1924 he announced that it was a perfectly respectable tenet of Leninism that the party could complete the building of ‘Socialism in One Country’. This was a misinterpretation of Lenin; but it was a clever political move at the time. Trotski’s appeal to Bolshevik functionaries in the party, the Komsomol, the armed forces and the security police derived in part from his urgent will to industrialize the USSR and create a socialist society. Stalin’s doctrinal contribution reflected his long-held opinion that Europe was not yet ‘pregnant with socialist revolution’; and he maintained that Trotski’s insistence on the need for fraternal revolutions in the West underestimated the Soviet Union’s indigenous revolutionary potential. Stalin, by talking up the achievability of socialism without Trotskyist policies, was offering an encouraging alternative.
As Stalin began to add an ideological dimension to his bureaucratic authority, he was also contriving to clear his name of the taint applied to it by the deceased Lenin. At the Twelfth Party Congress in April 1923 Stalin leant on Kamenev and Zinoviev, who still preferred Stalin to Trotski, to restrict knowledge of Lenin’s political testament to the leaders of provincial delegations.
He worked hard to win the confidence of such leaders and their fellow committee-men, putting aside time at Congresses and in his Secretariat office to converse with them. Yet abrasiveness, too, remained part of his style when he attacked oppositionists. His language was sarcastic, repetitious and aggressive; his arguments were uncompromising and schematic. At the Party Conference in January 1924 it had been he who had lined up the speakers for the assault upon Trotski, Preobrazhenski and the so-called Left Opposition. Stalin’s ability to run the Secretariat was well attested; the surprise for his rivals, inside and outside the Left Opposition, was his talent at marshalling the entire party. He personified the practicality of those Bolsheviks who had not gone into emigration before 1917; and his recent military experience increased his image as a no-nonsense leader.
Stalin stressed that the party was the institutional cornerstone of the October Revolution. This had been Lenin’s attitude in practice, but not in his theoretical works. Stalin gave a series of lectures in 1924 on The Foundations of Leninism that gave expression to this.14 As General Secretary he derived advantage from the absolutizing of the communist party’s authority and prestige. Yet this served to aggravate again the worries of Kamenev and Zinoviev. Kamenev was Moscow Soviet chairman and Zinoviev headed both the Comintern and the Bolshevik party organization of Leningrad. They were unreconciled to seeing Stalin as their equal, and continued to despise his intellectual capacity. The rumour that Stalin had plagiarized material from F. A. Ksenofontov in order to complete The Foundations of Leninism was grist to the mill of their condescension.15 Now that Trotski had been pulled off his pedestal, Stalin had exhausted his usefulness to them; it was time to jettison him.
The struggle intensified in the ascendant party leadership about the nature of the NEP. Bukharin and Zinoviev, despite advocating measures at home that were substantially to the right of Trotski’s, were adventuristic in foreign affairs. Not only had they prompted the abortive March Action in Berlin in 1921, but also Zinoviev had compounded the blunder by impelling the Communist Party of Germany to make a further ill-judged attempt to seize power in November 1923. This attitude sat uncomfortably alongside Stalin’s wish to concentrate on the building of socialism in the USSR.
The issues were not clear cut. Bukharin and Zinoviev, while itching to instigate revolution in Berlin, wanted to negotiate with Western capitalist powers. After signing the trade treaties with the United Kingdom and other countries in 1921, the Politburo aimed to insert itself in European diplomacy on a normal basis. The first opportunity came with the Genoa Conference in March 1922. Under Lenin’s guidance, the Soviet negotiators were not too ambitious. Lenin had given up hoping for diplomatic recognition by the Allies as long as the French government demanded the de-annulment of the loans to Russia made by French investors before the October Revolution. People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs Georgi Chicherin was instructed to seek a separate deal with Germany. And so the two pariah powers after the Great War got together. They agreed, at the Italian resort of Rapallo, to grant diplomatic recognition to each other and to boost mutual trade; and, in a secret arrangement, the Soviet authorities were to help Germany to obviate the Treaty of Versailles’s restrictions on German military reconstruction by setting up armaments factories and military training facilities in the USSR.16
The Rapallo Treaty fitted with Lenin’s notion that economic reconstruction required foreign participation. But German generals proved more willing partners than German industrialists. Lenin’s scheme for ‘concessions’ to be used to attract capital from abroad was a miserable failure. Only roughly a hundred agreements were in operation before the end of 1927.17 Insofar as Europe and North America contributed to the Soviet Union’s economic regeneration, it occurred largely through international trade. But the slump in the price of grain on the world market meant that revenues had to be obtained mainly by sales of oil, timber and gold; and in the financial year 1926–7 the USSR’s exports were merely a third in volume of what they had been in 1913.18
Bukharin by the mid-1920s had come over to Stalin’s opinion that capitalism was not yet on the verge of revolutionary upheaval. The intellectual and political complications of the discussion were considerable. Trotski, despite castigating Stalin’s ideas about ‘Socialism in One Country’, recognized the stabilization of capitalism as a medium-term fact of life.19 In criticizing the March Action of 1921 and the Berlin insurrection of November 1923, he was scoffing at the Politburo’s incompetence rather than its zeal to spread revolution; and his ridicule was focused upon Zinoviev, whom he described as trying to compensate for his opposition to Lenin’s seizure of power in Russia in October 1917 with an ultra-revolutionary strategy for Germany in the 1920s. Bukharin and Stalin replied to Trotski that their own quiescence in foreign policy by 1924 had yielded an improvement in the USSR’s security. A Soviet-Chinese treaty was signed in the same year and relations with Japan remained peaceful. The Labour Party won the British elections and gave de jure recognition to the Soviet government.
This bolstered the Politburo’s case for concentrating upon economic recovery. A further adjustment of the NEP seemed desirable in order to boost agricultural output, and Gosplan and the various People’s Commissariats were ordered to draft appropriate legislation. After a wide-ranging discussion, it was decided in April 1925 to lower the burden of the food tax, to diminish fiscal discrimination against better-off peasants, and to legalize hired labour and the leasing of land.