Stalin: A Biography полностью

Trotski passed up his opportunity to cause an upset. In subsequent years his supporters criticised his failure to grab his chance at the Twelfth Party Congress. Undoubtedly he had little tactical finesse in internal party business. Yet it is questionable whether he would have done himself a favour by breaking with the rest of the Politburo. Too many leaders at the central level and in the provinces had identified him as the Bonaparte-like figure who might lead the armed forces against the Revolution’s main objectives. His anti-Bolshevik past counted against him. His Civil War record, which involved the policy of shooting delinquent Bolshevik leaders in the Red Army, had not been forgotten. Furthermore, several of his admiring subordinates in the Revolutionary-Military Council of the Republic had — like him — not belonged to the Bolsheviks before 1917; and some of them had not been revolutionaries at all. Trotski had an intermittent tendency towards nervousness in trials of strength in the party. He was also aware that any attempt to unseat a Politburo member would have been interpreted as a bid for supreme power even before Lenin had passed away. Trotski decided to wait for a better chance in the months ahead.

Rivalry in fact grew among his enemies as soon as the Congress was over. Kamenev and Zinoviev had protected Stalin because they wanted help against Trotski. But they were disconcerted by the individual initiatives taken by Stalin in the weeks since Lenin’s heart attack. Zinoviev, based in faraway Petrograd, objected to decisions being taken without consultation. In the Civil War and afterwards it had been normal for Lenin to seek the opinion of Politburo members by phone or telegram before fixing policy. Stalin had gone ahead with his preferences on the Pravda editorial board, on the national question in the USSR, on the Middle East and on the Comintern. He was getting too big for his Tsaritsyn boots, and Zinoviev aimed to treat him firmly. While in Kislovodsk in the north Caucasus, Zinoviev called a meeting with other leading Bolsheviks on vacation near by. These included Bukharin, Voroshilov, Lashevich and Yevdokimov. Although Lashevich and Yevdokimov were his trusted supporters working with him in Petrograd, Voroshilov was a client of Stalin who was likely to relay the content of the conversations to the General Secretary. Perhaps (as most have supposed) Zinoviev was naïve. More likely, though, he thought that Voroshilov would be the intermediary who would carry the message back to Stalin that he had to change his behaviour or suffer the negative consequences.

On 30 July he wrote to Kamenev:¹⁷