Lenin’s physical debility and political inactivity frustrated him. His tirades stemmed from irritation with what he heard about shifts in official policy. In each instance he found Stalin in disagreement with him. A dispute had been brewing about foreign trade since November 1921.26 Although Lenin had promoted the expansion of the private sector under the NEP, he drew the line at ending the state’s monopoly on commercial imports and exports. Others in the Central Committee, led by Finance Commissar Sokolnikov and supported by Stalin, regarded this as impractical. Sokolnikov had a point. The creaky state bureaucracy was incapable of pursuing all opportunities for trade abroad. The frontiers were not effectively sealed; smugglers were doing business unimpeded and untaxed by the authorities. If the purpose of the NEP was to regenerate the economy, then permission for a widening of the limits of legal private engagement in foreign trade would help. Lenin refused to listen. It had become an article of faith for him to turn the Soviet state into an economic fortress against infiltration by unsupervised influences from abroad.
Lenin had to seek friends outside his previous group. Sokolnikov was with him. Also strongly on his side was the People’s Commissar for Foreign Trade Lev Krasin; but Krasin carried little weight in the Party Central Committee. The most influential advocate of a position similar to Lenin’s was in fact the person who himself had argued that Lenin had removed too much state regulation from the running of the economy at home: Trotski.
The growing alliance of convenience between Lenin and Trotski came into existence only slowly. Suspicion persisted on both sides about current economic measures. But a second matter meanwhile unsettled Lenin’s relationship with Stalin in summer 1922 when the constitutional discussions about the future of the Soviet state came to a head. To Lenin it seemed crucial that the Soviet republics established since 1918 should be joined on equal terms in a federal structure. Formally, the impression had to be given that, although the state would be run from Moscow, the communist rulers rejected all tendencies of ‘Great Russian chauvinism’. The RSFSR, vast as it was, would be but one Soviet republic alongside the Soviet republics of Ukraine, Belorussia and the Transcaucasian Federation. Lenin wanted the new federal state to be called the Union of Soviet Republics of Europe and Asia. This had always been his goal. (He had explained this in his confidential correspondence with Stalin in mid-1920.)27 Lenin was not aiming to run down the influence of the Bolsheviks in the Comintern. But his medium-term objective was genuinely internationalist, and he thought that the name and structure of the projected federal state ought to mirror this.
Stalin, however, wished to expand the RSFSR over the entire territory held by Soviet republics and to provide Ukraine, Belorussia and the Transcaucasus with the same status as existing ‘autonomous republics’ of the RSFSR such as the Bashkirian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. The state would remain designated as the RSFSR. Stalin could argue that he was only proposing what the Bolsheviks had always said they would supply in their socialist state: ‘regional autonomy’. Lenin and Stalin had long asserted, since before the Great War, that this would be the party’s solution to the yearnings of the ‘national minorities’. Stalin wanted to prevent the Soviet republics from privileging those nations after which each such republic had been named. It was for this reason that he had proposed that the Soviet republics formed in Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia in 1920–1 should be gathered together in a Transcaucasian Federation within the RSFSR. This was his device to stop local nationalisms getting further out of hand as had happened in previous years. He regarded Lenin’s demand for a formal federal structure as having the potential to undermine the whole state order. With characteristic brusqueness he dismissed it as ‘liberalism’.
