Lenin went on: ‘Our party rests upon two social classes and this is what makes possible its instability and makes inevitable its collapse unless agreements can take place between these two classes.’6 The danger he had in mind was that Trotski and Stalin would promote policies favouring different classes — the working class and the peasantry — and that this would induce strife that would undermine the regime.
To many party officials who were privy to the Testament this seemed an eccentric analysis. They recognised the isolation of the Soviet state in the international system and had not forgotten about the foreign intervention in the Civil War. They could also understand why Lenin picked out Trotski as someone who might bring disunity to the central party leadership. But Lenin’s preoccupation with Stalin caused surprise. Popular opinion, according to reports of the GPU (as the Cheka had been known since 1921), suggested Trotski, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Rykov, Bukharin or even Dzierżyń ski as the likeliest winner of the contest for the political succession.7 Even within the ruling group Stalin was still not taken as seriously as he should have been. Lenin, though, had at last got his measure; and on 4 January 1923, as the dispute over Georgia grew bitter, he dictated an addendum to his characterisation:8
Stalin is too crude; and this defect, which is wholly bearable inside our milieu and in relations among ourselves, becomes intolerable in the post of General Secretary. I therefore make a proposal for comrades to think of a way to remove Stalin and in his place appoint someone else who is distinguished from comrade Stalin in all other respects through having the single superior feature of being more patient, more loyal, more courteous and more attentive to comrades, less capricious, etc.
Lenin’s meaning pierced its way through his shaky syntax: he wanted to remove Stalin from the General Secretaryship.
His scheme was limited in scope. He was not proposing Stalin’s removal from the central party leadership, still less from the party as a whole. Such an idea would have been treated with the disdain which had met his request in July 1922 to dismiss most members of the Central Committee.9 Nor was Lenin the perfect political astrologer of his time. There was absolutely nothing in the Testament predicting the scale of terror which ensued in the years from 1928. Lenin, the leading proponent of state terror in the Civil War, failed to detect Stalin’s potential to apply terror-rule still more deeply in peacetime. The Testament of 1922–3 was limited to an effort to deprive Stalin of his most important administrative post.10
Files on the Georgian Affair were brought out for Lenin to examine. He had made up his mind about the verdict: Stalin and his associates were guilty of Great Russian chauvinism even though Stalin, Ordzhonikidze and Dzierżyń ski themselves were not Russians. Already at the end of the previous year, in an article on the national question, Lenin had acknowledged:11
I am, it seems, immensely guilty before the workers of Russia for not intervening sufficiently energetically and sufficiently sharply in the notorious question of autonomisation, officially known, it seems, as the question of the union of soviet socialist republics.
He also dictated an article on bureaucracy in the organs of party and government, making strong criticisms of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate. It was obvious to informed observers that Stalin, who headed the Inspectorate, was his principal target.
