I can’t take offence. There’s much to be learned from him. Having got to know him at close hand, I have developed an extraordinary respect towards him. He has a character that one can only envy. I can’t take offence. His strictness is covered by attentiveness to those who work with him.
On another occasion he added:22
He’s very cunning. He’s hard as a nut and can’t be broken at one go. But I have a completely different view of him now from the one I had in Tiflis. Despite his rational wildness, so to speak, he’s a soft individual; he has a heart and knows how to value the merits of people.
Lazar Kaganovich shared this endorsement:23
In the early years Stalin was a soft individual… Under Lenin and after Lenin. He went through a lot.
In the early years after Lenin died, when he came to power, they all attacked Stalin. He endured a lot in the struggle with Trotski. Then his supposed friends Bukharin, Rykov and Tomski also attacked him…
It was difficult to avoid getting cruel.
For Kaganovich, Stalin’s personality responded to circumstances not of his making.
He discouraged attention to his national origin. In the provinces his supporters played up the fact that his main opponents — at first Trotski and then Kamenev and Zinoviev — were Jews. He himself never mentioned this, but he did not stop others from bringing it up.24 He had his own reasons for caution. Not only Jews but also Poles, Georgians and Armenians had a presence in the Bolshevik party central and local leadership out of proportion to the USSR’s demography, and there was growing resentment of the fact in the country. Stalin, moreover, still spoke with a heavy accent. Trotski put this with typical cattiness: ‘The Russian language always stayed for him not only a language half-foreign and improvised but — much worse for his awareness — conventional and strained.’25 Snubs about his linguistic facility were not uncommon in the 1920s.26
Yet no one else in the ascendant central leadership set himself up quite so effectively. Bukharin had a following in the party but no consolidated network of clients. Zinoviev had such a network but most of his clients were based in Leningrad. Kamenev had never been much of a patron. The sole leader to match Stalin’s ability in forming a cliental group was Trotski. He still appealed to members of the Inter-District group which had joined the Bolsheviks in May 1917, and he had attracted admirers in the Civil War as People’s Commissar for Military Affairs. The Left Opposition, when attacking the Politburo in the last quarter of 1923, looked to him for inspiration. Among them were Yevgeni Preobrazhenski, Leonid Serebryakov, Nikolai Krestinski, Adolf Ioffe and Christian Rakovski. Yet Trotski lacked Stalin’s day-to-day accessibility. He had the kind of hauteur which peeved dozens of potential supporters. He was also devoid of Stalin’s tactical cunning and pugnacity, and there was a suspicion among Trotski’s followers that their idol’s illnesses at crucial conjunctures of factional struggle had a psychosomatic dimension. Yet he had a large enough following to take on and beat Stalin if the situation had been different. The trouble was that Trotski had lost the early rounds of the contest. He was always coming from behind on points.
