Stalin: A Biography полностью

Stalin continued to box warily. The defeat of the Left Opposition in the winter of 1923–4 had been achieved in open combat. Trotski and the Left Opposition had attacked and Stalin, Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin had retaliated. Stalin had had little need to sack Trotskyists and replace them with individuals loyal to the ascendant party leadership.²⁷ Yet the Orgburo and the Secretariat — as well as the Politburo in the highest instance — used their right to change postings in the following months. The ascendant party leadership manipulated the various administrative levers to its advantage. Steadily the Left lost its remaining key jobs in party, government, army and police. The sackings were accompanied by demotions which frequently involved relocation to distant parts of the USSR. This was really a light form of exile whereby the ascendant leadership consolidated its grip on power. The Left was also doctrinally undermined. The Agitprop Department of the Secretariat publicised past disputes between Lenin and Trotski. Its various adjuncts printed dozens of anti-Trotski pamphlets; and Stalin as an avid reader scribbled an aide-mémoire on the cover of a work on the October Revolution: ‘Tell Molotov that Tr[otski] lied about Lenin on the subject of ways to make an insurrection.’²⁸

He was highly conspiratorial. According to Politburo secretary Boris Bazhanov, Stalin’s desk had four telephones but inside the desk was a further apparatus giving him the facility to eavesdrop on the conversations of dozens of the most influential communist leaders. He could do this without going through the Kremlin switchboard, and the information he gathered must have alerted him to any manoeuvres being undertaken against him.²⁹ Personal assistants such as Lev Mekhlis and Grigori Kanner carried out whatever shady enterprise he thought up.³⁰ He was ruthless against his enemies. When Kamenev asked him about the question of gaining a majority in the party, Stalin scoffed: ‘Do you know what I think about this? I believe that who votes how in the party is unimportant. What is extremely important is who counts the votes and how they are recorded.’³¹ He was implying that he expected the central party apparatus to fiddle the voting figures if ever they went against him.

This sort of remark gave Stalin the reputation of an unprincipled bureaucrat. He revelled in his deviousness when talking to his associates. But there was much more to him. He had the potential of a true leader. He was decisive, competent, confident and ambitious. The choice of him rather than Zinoviev or Kamenev to head the charge against Trotski at the Thirteenth Party Conference showed that this was beginning to be understood by other Central Committee members. He was coming out of the shadows. From the last months of 1924 he showed a willingness to go on attacking Trotski without keeping Zinoviev and Kamenev at his side. Kamenev had made a slip by referring to ‘nepman Russia’ instead of ‘NEP Russia’. The so-called nepman was typically a private trader who took advantage of the economic reforms since 1921 and who was resented by Bolsheviks. Stalin made a meal of Kamenev’s slip in the party press. Around the same time Zinoviev had described the Soviet regime as ‘a dictatorship of the party’. Stalin as Party General Secretary vigorously repudiated the term as a description of political reality.³² Kamenev and Zinoviev were put on notice that they should look out for themselves. In autumn 1924 Stalin moved against their leading supporters. I. A. Zelenski was replaced as Moscow City Party Secretary by Stalin’s supporter Nikolai Uglanov.³³