Lenin went on giving dictation to Maria Volodicheva and Lidia Fotieva. Although he seems to have stopped mentioning sensitive matters in front of Nadya Allilueva, he took no other precaution beyond telling his secretaries to keep everything to themselves and to lock up his papers. This was how he plotted the downfall of an individual whom he considered the greatest danger to the Revolution. Lenin’s excessive self-confidence — the very defect he ascribed to Trotski — had not left him.
He would have been less insouciant if he had known his secretaries better. Volodicheva was disconcerted by the contents of his dictated notes on 23 December and she consulted her colleague Fotieva, who advised her to take a copy to none other than Stalin. Stalin was shocked but not deterred. He had had an altercation with Krupskaya the previous day on discovering that she had been helping Lenin to communicate with Trotski and others about current politics. Krupskaya’s behaviour contravened the Politburo’s orders, and Stalin, who had been asked to ensure observance of the regimen specified by Lenin’s doctors, directed verbal obscenities at her. Krupskaya declared that she alone knew what was medically best for Lenin. If Lenin were to be denied political contact with other leaders, his recovery would be delayed still further. She wrote in these terms to Kamenev, adding that nobody in the party had ever addressed her as foully as Stalin. But she did not tell Lenin for fear of upsetting him; and Stalin had not sought to withhold the right to dictate from Lenin. He resented being picked out for blame when he was only carrying out Politburo orders;13 but he reasonably assumed that the matters dividing him from Lenin were amenable to eventual resolution.
Some weeks later, however, Krupskaya blurted out to Lenin how Stalin had behaved towards her. Lenin was infuriated. Although he himself often swore,14 he drew the line at the verbal abuse of women. Stalin’s comportment offended him, and on 5 March 1923 he dictated a sharp letter:
You had the uncouthness to summon my wife to the telephone and swear at her. Although she has even given you her agreement to forget what was said, this fact has nevertheless become known through her to Zinoviev and Kamenev. I do not intend to forget so easily what has been done against me, and it goes without saying that I consider something done against my wife to be something also done against me. I therefore ask you to consider whether you agree to retract what you said and apologise or you prefer to break relations between us.
Stalin was stupefied. He had tried to mend bridges with Lenin by letting him continue dictating and researching even though the resultant articles hurt him. He had asked Lenin’s sister Maria Ulyanova to plead his case: ‘I love him with all my heart. Tell him this in some way.’ With the letter in his hands Stalin tried to tell himself: ‘This isn’t Lenin who’s talking, it’s his illness!’
He scribbled out a half-hearted compromise. ‘If my wife had behaved incorrectly and you had had to punish her,’ he wrote, ‘I would not have regarded it as my right to intervene. But inasmuch as you insist, I am willing to apologise to Nadezhda Konstantinovna.’ On reflection Stalin redrafted the message and admitted to having bawled at Krupskaya; but he added that he had only been doing his duty as given him by the Politburo. He added:
Yet if you consider that the maintenance of ‘relations’ requires me to ‘retract’ the above-mentioned words, I can retract them, while nevertheless refusing to understand what the problem is here, what my ‘guilt’ consists of and what in particular is being demanded of me.
Whenever he started to apologise, he ended up rubbing salt in the wound. How on earth Stalin thought such a message would placate Lenin is hard to imagine. But he was a proud man. He could not bring himself to show any greater contrition, and was on the point of paying dearly.
