Stalin: A Biography полностью

Conventionally it has been supposed that Stalin was put in office because he was an experienced bureaucrat with an unusual capacity for not being bored by administrative work. The facts do not bear this out. He was an editor of Pravda in 1917 and a policy-making intimate of Lenin immediately after the October Revolution. He had spent most of the Civil War as a political commissar. He went on military campaign in Ukraine and Poland in 1920; and although he had posts in Moscow in the Party Orgburo, the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities’ Affairs and Rabkrin, he had never had much time to devote to them. What is more, Stalin was known for his restlessness when administrative meetings in the capital were dragged out. But of course he had to sit through a lot of them, as did Lenin, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Trotski and the other leaders. They headed a state that had yet to be consolidated. Unless they saw to implementation and supervision of administrative decisions as much as to the making of policy, the state would fall apart before it was made. The reason why Lenin chose Stalin was less administrative than political. He wanted one of his allies in a post crucial to the maintenance of his policies.

Lenin stressed that the General Secretaryship was not equivalent to the supreme party leadership and that the party had never had a chairman.¹⁴ He was being mealy-mouthed. What he meant was that he himself would remain the one dominant leader. Lenin and Stalin had fallen out many times before, during and after the October Revolution.¹⁵ This was the norm in the Central Committee. Lenin had confidence that he would not lose control of things.

Stalin agreed with the broad lines of the NEP. He did not see himself as a mere administrator and freely offered his opinions across the range of debates within the leadership; and, contrary to later depictions of him, his caution in foreign policy did not reconcile him to total abstention from taking risks abroad. Even after the Anglo-Soviet Treaty of March 1921, he favoured sending military instructors and supplies to Afghanistan with the objective of undermining the British Empire.¹⁶ He also continued to regard the new Baltic states — especially Latvia and Estonia — as territories illegitimately torn away from Russia ‘which enter our arsenal as integral elements vital for the restoration of Russia’s economy’.¹⁷ The idea is false that Stalin could hardly care less if the Soviet state remained permanently isolated. He accepted isolation as a fact of political and military life that could not yet be altered. In such a situation, he considered, it behoved the Politburo to get on with post-war reconstruction as best it could until such time as fresh revolutionary opportunities abroad arose. This remained his attitude in subsequent years.

But Stalin, like Lenin, wanted to avoid trouble for the foreseeable future. Lenin saw a chance for the Soviet state to come to an understanding with Germany. Talks among the European powers had been convened at Genoa in northern Italy. The RSFSR and Germany were treated as pariah states, and Lenin made overtures for a separate commercial treaty between them. This was duly signed at nearby Rapallo in April 1922. Both states had more in mind than mere trade. Germany, prevented by the Treaty of Versailles from rearming itself, arranged to test military equipment and train army units secretly on Soviet soil. Others in the Politburo, especially Zinoviev, were reluctant to accept that the ‘revolutionary upsurge’ had subsided in Europe. Despite the Treaty of Rapallo, the Comintern in 1923 at Zinoviev’s behest encouraged an armed rising against the German government on the sixth anniversary of the Bolshevik seizure of power in Petrograd. Stalin had nothing to do with such adventures.

Yet the working arrangement between Lenin and Stalin had already been put to an acute test. The occasion was the sudden deterioration in Lenin’s health on 25 May 1922, when he suffered a massive stroke while recuperating from surgery to remove a bullet lodged in his neck since the attempt on his life in August 1918. Lenin lost mobility on the right side of his body; he could not speak clearly and his mind was obviously confused. Groups of doctors, including well-rewarded specialists brought from Germany, consulted among themselves on the nature of Lenin’s illness. Opinion was divided. Among the possibilities considered were hereditary cardiac disease, syphilis, neurasthenia and even the effects of the recent operation on his neck. There were times when Lenin gave up hope entirely and thought his ‘song was sung’. But, helped by his wife Nadya and sister Maria Ulyanova, he pulled himself together psychologically. He welcomed visitors to keep abreast of public affairs.