Lenin arranged things so that he sat in the Kremlin throughout the Civil War. While Stalin’s lot for three whole years was that of a nomad, scouring the whole country, shaken to bits on horseback or in an unsprung cart, frozen half the time, trying to thaw out by a campfire. Stalin, of course, admired himself in those years: He was a sort of young general without formal rank, elegant and smart, wearing a leather cap with a star, a cavalry officer’s double-breasted coat of fine cloth, unbuttoned, and soft leather riding boots, made to order. The clever young face was clean-shaven except for the flowing mustache. No woman could resist him (and his third wife was a beauty).
Of course, he never held a saber, never got in the way of bullets; he was too valuable to the Revolution. He was not like that muzhik Budenny. Whenever you arrived somewhere new—Tsaritsyn, Perm, or Petrograd—you would keep quiet for a while, then ask a few questions, stroke your mustache, write “to be shot” on a list or two, and people would soon begin to show you great respect.
Besides, if the truth be told, he had shown himself to be a great soldier and the architect of victories.
The whole gang who had scrambled to the top and crowded around Lenin, struggling for power, all thought themselves very clever, very subtle, very complex. Their complexity in fact was what they particularly boasted about. Where twice two clearly made four, they would shriek in a chorus that you were zero point one two short. The worst of the lot, the foulest of them all, was Trotsky. Stalin had simply never met such a loathsome person in all his life, with his insane conceit, his oratorical pretensions. And he never would argue honestly; there was never a straight yes or no; it always had to be both yes and no, or neither yes nor no. “Neither peace nor war”—what rational human being could make sense of that? And his arrogance? Rolling around like the tsar himself in a sitting room on wheels. What sort of Supreme Commander could he make, with no strategic flair at all?
This Trotsky’s behavior so galled and annoyed him that Stalin at first lost control and broke rule no. 1 for all politicians: Never let a man see that you are his enemy; never let your irritation show. Stalin, instead, was openly insubordinate, abused Trotsky in letters and in conversation, and missed no opportunity to complain about him to Lenin. As soon as he heard about Trotsky’s opinion or decision on any matter whatsoever, he would immediately put forward reasons for doing just the opposite. But that was no way to win. Trotsky bowled him over like a ninepin. Trotsky chased him out of Tsaritsyn and out of the Ukraine. And on one occasion Stalin was taught the harsh lesson that not all means of struggle are good, that some holds are barred. At a Politburo meeting he and Zinoviev joined in complaining about Trotsky’s unauthorized executions. Whereupon Lenin took several blank sheets of paper, signed at the bottom of each page with the words “approved in advance,” and in their presence handed these to Trotsky to fill in when he pleased.
He learned his lesson! He was ashamed! What had he been complaining about? Lenin was right, and so, just for once, was Trotsky: If you couldn’t shoot people without trial, you would never be able to make history at all.
We are all human, and our senses are quicker to prompt us than our reason. Every man gives off a scent, and that scent tells you how to act before your head does. Stalin, of course, had made a mistake in openly opposing Trotsky too soon (it was a mistake he never made again). But he sensed correctly that he should stand up to Lenin. His reason would have told him to truckle to Lenin, always to say, “Oh, how right you are! I’m with you there!” But Stalin’s unerring instinct found a very different way: to speak to Lenin as roughly as he could, to resist as stubbornly as a Georgian donkey. I’m an uneducated man, a rough diamond, a bit of a savage; you’ll have to take me as I am or not at all. He wasn’t just rough, but boorishly insolent. (“I can only stay another two weeks at the front, and then you’d better give me some leave.” Would Lenin have forgiven anyone else for such a thing?) This inflexible, intransigent Stalin it was who won Lenin’s respect. Lenin realized that this “marvelous Georgian” was a strong personality, that such people were much needed, and that as time went by, they would be needed more and more. Lenin listened readily to Trotsky, but he also gave Stalin a hearing. If he curbed Stalin, he reined in Trotsky, too. The first was to blame for Tsaritsyn, the second for Astrakhan. “You must learn to cooperate,” he would urge, but he had to accept their inability to get along. Trotsky came running to complain that although prohibition was in force throughout the republic, Stalin was drinking his way through the tsar’s cellar in the Kremlin; what if the soldiers at the front came to know of it? Stalin turned it into a joke; Lenin laughed; Trotsky stopped pointing his beard at them and went away empty-handed. When Stalin was removed from the Ukraine, he was given a second commissariat (Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate) to make up for it.
That was in March 1919. Stalin was into his fortieth year. For anybody else the WPI would have been a shabby little snooping operation, but under Stalin it rose to become the most important people’s commissariat! (That was just what Lenin wanted. He knew Stalin’s firmness, his unswerving sense of purpose, his incorruptibility.) It was to Stalin that he entrusted the tasks of seeing justice done in the Republic, of keeping an eye on the morality of Party officials, even the most important of them. If Stalin understood the nature of his work correctly and was prepared to devote himself to it body and soul, with no thought for his health, he could now surreptitiously (but quite legally) gather incriminating evidence against all responsible officials, dispatch investigators, collect denunciations, and take charge of the ensuing purges. To do all this, he must create an apparatus, selecting from all over the country people as selfless, as unyielding, as himself, and who, like him, were prepared to toil in obscurity for no visible reward. It was slow, demanding, painstaking work, but Stalin welcomed it.
It is rightly said that we reach maturity at forty. Only then do we finally understand how to live and how to behave. Only then did Stalin become aware of his greatest strength: the power of the unspoken verdict. Your mind is made up, but the person whose head depends on your decision must not learn it too soon. Time enough for that when his head rolls! Another strength was his habit of disbelieving what others said and attaching no importance to his own words. Say not what you mean to do (you may not know it until the moment comes) but what puts the other person at ease. A third rule for the strong man is never to forgive anyone who betrays you, and if your teeth are in someone’s throat, never to let go, though the sun rises in the west and portents appear in the heavens. A fourth rule for the strong man is not to rely on theory. Theory never helped anyone; you can always produce some sort of theoretical justification after the event. What you must always keep in mind is what fellow traveler you need for the present and at which milestone you must part company.
These rules helped him in due course to regularize the Trotsky situation. With the help of Zinoviev to begin with, and later that of Kamenev, too. (Cordial relations were established with both of them.) It became obvious to Stalin that he need not have worried so much about Trotsky: No need to shove him into the ditch; he would jump and land in it unassisted. Stalin knew his business and worked away quietly, unhurriedly selecting cadres, trying people out, committing every one of them to memory so that he would know who could be relied on, looking for opportunities to promote and place them. The time came when, just as he had expected, Trotsky took a tumble, unaided. In the trade union controversy. His exhibitionist ravings infuriated Lenin—he shows no respect for the Party!—and Stalin was, conveniently, in a position to replace Trotsky’s people: Krestinsky with Zinoviev, Preobrazhensky with Molotov, Serebryakov with Yaroslavsky. Voroshilov and Ordzhonikidze, Stalin’s own men, were hoisted into the Central Committee. The illustrious Commander in Chief was now unsteady on his heron’s legs! And Lenin realized that Stalin was the unshakable defender of Party unity and that he asked for nothing, wanted nothing for himself. What won over all the leading comrades was the nice, guileless Georgian’s refusal to j
oin in the scramble for the platform, to court popularity, as all the others did. He never flaunted his knowledge of Marx; he worked away modestly, handpicking party apparatchiks, a solitary comrade, true as steel, honest as the day was long, self-denying, diligent, a little undereducated, perhaps, a bit crude, rather limited. . . . So when Lenin became ill, they elected Stalin secretary-general, rather as Mikhail Romanov was elected tsar.
That was in May 1922. Anybody else would have been satisfied with that much and sat silently rejoicing. Not Stalin, though. Anybody else might have set about reading Das Kapital and making excerpts. Stalin, though, sniffed the air and knew that it was now or never: The conquests of the Revolution were in danger; there was not a minute to lose. Lenin could not hang on to power and, left to himself, would not transfer it to safe hands. Lenin’s health was precarious, and maybe that was for the best. If he survived as leader, there was no knowing what might happen; nothing was certain. Erratic, bad-tempered, and now sick into the bargain, he was more irritating every day; he was simply a hindrance. In everybody’s way! He could abuse a man, make him feel small, dismiss him from an elected post for no reason at all.
Stalin’s first idea was to dispatch Lenin to, say, the Caucasus for a rest cure. The air was good; there were out-of-the-way places which were without phone connections to Moscow and to which telegrams traveled slowly. A place like that, with no official business to be done, would steady his nerves. A tried and trusted comrade, the former expropriator (bank-raider Kamo), could be on hand to keep an eye on his health. Lenin was willing, and arrangements were discussed with Tiflis, but there were inexplicable delays. In the meantime, Kamo was run over and killed. (He had been talking too much about the “ex-es.”)
Whereupon Stalin, concerned for his leader’s life, raised the question with the Commissariat of Health and the professor of surgery: The bullet fired by Fanny Kaplan had never been extracted; it was poisoning Lenin’s organism. Should he not have another operation for its removal? The doctors were persuaded. They said as one man that it was necessary, and Lenin consented. But once again there were delays. And all that happened was that Lenin went off to Gorky.
“We must be firm with Lenin,” Stalin wrote to Kamenev. Kamenev and Zinoviev, his best friends at the time, agreed completely. Firm about his treatment, firm about his routine, firm about excluding him from official business, for the sake of his precious life. And of course firm about keeping him away from Trotsky. Krupskaya, too, must be curbed; she was only an ordinary Party member. Stalin was made officially “responsible for the health of Comrade Lenin,” and he did not consider it beneath him to deal directly with the doctors in charge, and even with nurses, to give them instructions on the most beneficial regimen for Lenin, which was to say no to him and keep saying no even if he got upset. In political matters the prescription was the same: Lenin doesn’t like the draft law on the Red Army—right, push it through; Lenin doesn’t like what we’re doing about the Central Executive Committee—right, push it through. Don’t give way at any price; remember he’s a sick man; he can’t possibly know best. If he insists on something being done urgently, take your time over it, postpone it. The secretary-general can even answer back, very rudely—it just means he’s a straight shooter; he can’t force himself to behave unnaturally, to do violence to his own character.
Still, for all Stalin’s exertions, Lenin made a slow recovery: His illness dragged on till autumn, when the argument about the Central Executive Committee grew heated, and dear Ilyich was up and about only briefly. He left his bed only to resurrect in December 1922 his entente cordiale with Trotsky, and against Stalin, of course. If that was all he had gotten up for, he had better go back to bed. Medical surveillance now became stricter. He was forbidden to read or write or be told anything about official business; he must just eat his gruel. But dear Ilyich took it into his head to write his political testament, behind the secretary-general’s back, another move against Stalin. He dictated for five minutes a day, which was all he was allowed, all Stalin allowed him. But Stalin grinned into his mustache as the stenographer came clippety-clop along the corridor in her high heels, bringing him the obligatory copy. Next Krupskaya had to be pulled up sharply, as she deserved, whereupon dear Ilyich got overheated and suffered his third stroke! All Stalin’s efforts had failed to save his life.
He had chosen a good time to die. Trotsky, as luck would have it, was in the Caucasus, and Stalin gave him the wrong date for the funeral, because there was no need for him to attend: It was much more fitting for the secretary-general to pronounce the oath of loyalty (and very important that he should).
But Lenin had left that will. It could set comrade against comrade; it might be misunderstood. Some people even wanted to replace the secretary-general. So Stalin drew even closer to Zinoviev, assuring him that he was now the obvious leader of the Party, and urging him as future leader to present the Central Committee’s report to the Thirteenth Congress, while Stalin retained his humble post of secretary-general, which was all he wanted. So Zinoviev lorded it on the Congress platform, delivered his report and . . . and that was all. (He could hardly be elected to the nonexistent post of “leader of the Party.”) But in return for this privilege, he persuaded the Central Committee that Lenin’s testament would not even be read out at the Congress and that Stalin would not be dismissed, since he had now mended his ways.
The members of the Politburo were all of one mind at the time, all against Trotsky. They made a good job of rejecting his proposals and removing his supporters from their posts. Any other secretary-general might have been satisfied. But Stalin the indefatigable, the unblinking, knew that it was far too soon to relax.
Would it be a good thing if Kamenev took Lenin’s place as chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars? (When Stalin and Kamenev had visited the sick man together, reports in Pravda had made it appear that Stalin had gone alone. Just in case. He foresaw that Kamenev, too, was not eternal.) Maybe Rykov would be better? Well, Kamenev himself agreed, and so did Zinoviev, such was the harmony among them all!
But before long a great blow was struck at this friendship. It transpired that Zinoviev and Kamenev were humbugs and double-dealers: They were intent only on power; they did not cherish Lenin’s ideas. They had to be cut down to size. They became the “new opposition” (and the garrulous Krupskaya found herself in their company), while Trotsky, after all the punishment he had taken, held his peace for the time being. The situation thus created was a very favorable one. The dawn of Stalin’s friendship with the amiable Bukharin, the Party’s leading theorist, conveniently supervened at this point. Dear little Bukharin did the speechmaking: Dear little Bukharin provided the theoretical foundations and justifications (the other lot called for “an offensive against the kulak,” so our slogan was “Alliance Between Town and Country”). Stalin himself was not the least bit ambitious for fame, for authority; he just looked after the voting and made sure that the right man was in the right place. A lot of the right comrades were already in the posts where they were needed, and voting correctly. Zinoviev was dismissed from the Communist Internationale; Leningrad was taken away from the opposition.
You would have thought that they would have resigned themselves to the situation, but no: They now joined forces with Trotsky, and that poseur had one last inspiration, the slogan “Industrialization.” So Stalin and dear little Bukharin came out with “Party unity!” For unity’s sake all must knuckle under! Trotsky was banished; Zinoviev and Kamenev were gagged.
Another great help was the “Lenin draft”: After that, the majority of the Party consisted of people untainted with the vices of the intelligentsia, uncontaminated by the squabbles which went on in the underground and in emigration, people to whom the former importance of Party leaders meant nothing and their current image everything. Sound people, dedicated people were rising from the depths of the Party to occupy important posts. Stalin had never doubted that he would find such people and that it was they who would save the
conquests of the Revolution. But fate had another surprise in store: Bukharin, Tomsky, and Rykov also proved to be two-faced. They did not stand up for the unity of the Party! And Bukharin proved to be not the no. 1 theorist but the no. 1 muddlehead. His crafty slogan “Alliance Between Town and Country” had a hidden significance: It hinted at the restoration of the old order, capitulation to the kulak, the abandonment of industrialization!
Valid slogans were finally discovered. Only Stalin had been capable of formulating them: “Attack the Kulak and Force the Pace of Industrialization!” And of course “For Party Unity.”
It was the turn of this vile rightist gang to be swept out of the leadership.
Bukharin, flattering himself, had once quoted some sage’s dictum that “inferior minds make better administrators.” Wide of the mark, Nikolai Ivanovich, you and your sage: sound minds, it should be, not inferior minds.
In the First Circle Page 18
