Stalin: A Biography полностью

He laid out Lenin’s ‘teaching’ with catechistic neatness. It was this quality which provoked his rivals’ condescension; but it elicited approval from the young Marxists listening to the lectures. Not that the booklet was unambiguous in content. Stalin’s summary of Leninist theory indeed displayed a veritable precision of vagueness. He emphasised certain topics. Quoting from Lenin, he argued for the ‘peasant question’ to be solved by a steady movement towards large-scale farming co-operatives.¹³ He urged the party to ignore the sceptics who denied that this transition would end with the attainment of socialism. He also looked at the national question, maintaining that only the establishment of a socialist dictatorship could eliminate the oppression of nations. Capitalism allegedly disseminated national and ethnic hatreds as a means of dividing and ruling the planet.

Stalin had little to say about topics of conventional significance for Marxists. He seldom referred to the ‘worker question’. He offered just a few brief comments on worldwide socialism. But he had started again, for the first time since before the Great War, to make his mark as a contributor to Marxist theoretical discussions. He was making progress in his career. Yet there was a fly in the ointment. Lenin had laid down that his Testament should be communicated to the next Party Congress in the event of his death. Krupskaya, despite her reconciliation with Stalin, felt a higher duty to her husband’s memory and raised the question with the central party leadership.¹⁴ The Thirteenth Party Congress was scheduled for May 1924. Stalin had reason to be concerned. Even if Krupskaya had not made a move, the danger existed that Trotski would see tactical advantage in doing it for her. Stalin could not automatically rely on support from Kamenev and Zinoviev: the Kislovodsk saga had showed as much. All his gains over the past few months would be lost if an open debate were to be held at the Congress and a resolution was passed to comply with Lenin’s advice to appoint a new general secretary.

Stalin was lucky since the Party Central Committee, with the encouragement of Kamenev and Zinoviev, ruled that the Testament should be read out only to the heads of the provincial delegations. If Kamenev and Zinoviev had not still been worried about Trotski, they might have done for Stalin. But instead they spoke up for him. Stalin sat pale as chalk as the Testament was revealed to the restricted audience. But the sting was extracted from Stalin’s political flesh. Trotski, scared of appearing divisive so soon after the death of Lenin, declined to take the fight to the ‘troika’ of Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev. Zinoviev’s amour propre was coddled by the decision that he should deliver the Central Committee political report which had regularly been given by Lenin until his final illness. Thus was lost the best opportunity to terminate Stalin’s further rise to power. Perhaps Stalin would have defended himself effectively. Zinoviev and Kamenev were not very popular and Stalin’s behaviour was not widely in disrepute in the party at this stage. Yet Stalin liked to fight from a position of strength and he was at his weakest in those few days at the Congress. The notion that he owed his survival to his antics as a trapeze artist is wrong. What saved him was the safety net provided by provisional allies Zinoviev and Kamenev and Trotski’s failure to attack.

His own moments of prominence were few. He gave the organisational report with the usual dour assemblage of structural and numerical details; but he made no interventions in the rest of the open proceedings. The most perilous time occurred when he reported on the national question at lengthy closed sessions. Now that leading delegates knew about Lenin’s deathbed criticisms this was a sensitive topic. His Georgian communist enemies were lining up to take pot-shots at him. Yet Stalin did not flinch. Rather than apologise, he gave a spirited apologia of official policy.

The sense of hurt diminished but did not disappear. The internal strains of the troika irked him: he knew that Zinoviev and Kamenev looked down on him and that, given a chance, they would ditch him. His health, too, was poor. Feeling humiliated, Stalin followed his usual course: he requested release from his duties. In a letter to the Central Committee on 19 August 1924 he pleaded that ‘honourable and sincere’ work with Zinoviev and Kamenev was no longer possible. What he needed, he claimed, was a period of convalescence. But he also asked the Central Committee to remove his name from the Politburo, Orgburo and Secretariat:¹⁵