direct a scorching attack on the General Secretary alone. 'Stalin is too rude', Lenin declared, 'and this shortcoming, though quite tolerable in our midst and in relations among us communists, becomes intolerable in the position of General Secretary.'[199] He urged the party to find a way to remove Stalin from this position.
It is not entirely clear what prompted Lenin to change his assessment of Stalin so dramatically in less than two weeks. Perhaps he was reacting to an abusive phone call made by Stalin to Lenin's wife, who had taken down a note that Lenin asked her to convey to Trotsky (hindering the doctors' efforts to care for Lenin, claimed Stalin). Also, Lenin had probably learned enough by this time to develop vexation over Stalin's bare-knuckled approach to curtailing Georgian autonomy. In any case, through January and February 1923 Lenin grew increasingly concerned with Stalin's treatment of the Georgians. At the beginning of March he contacted Trotsky on the subject of taking up the Georgian case and broached an even more dramatic move to deprive Stalin of his political power. That same day, however, Lenin's health deteriorated sharply. Almost at once another stroke paralysed much of his body and eliminated his power of speech, thereby ending his political career well before he died in January i924.
The final collapse of Lenin's health in the spring of 1923 triggered the decisive phase of the struggle between Trotsky and Stalin, with Stalin gaining the upper hand through his alliance with Politburo colleagues Grigorii Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev. To Stalin's partners in this triumvirate, Trotsky appeared the obvious menace - a high-voltage personality inclined to thrust himself into the position vacated by Lenin. Trotsky mounted an ineffectual effort to challenge the triumvirate and could not dislodge them from their pre-eminent position in the Politburo. Lenin's Testament lay in the shadows until May 1924, when it was disclosed to the Central Committee in what must have been a tense session. After the reading, Zinoviev rose to defuse Lenin's alarm over Stalin. The leadership's harmonious work over the past few months demonstrated that Lenin need not have harboured any anxiety over the party's General Secretary, Zinoviev explained, while Trotsky and Stalin remained silent. The party would not publish Lenin's Testament in Stalin's lifetime.
A few months later, in the autumn of 1924, Trotsky published a long essay titled The Lessons of October in which he discussed mistakes that revolutionaries might make when the moment for action arrived. Here he singled out Zinoviev and Kamenev for their opposition to Lenin's determination to seize power in the October Revolution. They responded in kind by reviewing Trotsky's numerous, often bitter, disputes with Lenin prior to Trotsky's belated entry into the Bolsheviks' ranks. Stalin furthered the campaign to contrast Trotsky and Lenin, notably in a speech titled 'Trotskyism or Leninism?', but he also hounded Trotsky on a broader theoretical plane, dismissing the latter's 'pessimistic' notion of 'permanent revolution'. How could one have so little confidence in the Soviet proletariat and Communist Party to imagine that revolution must spread to the West before the Soviet Union could build socialism, he asked. Surely the nation's progressive forces could build 'socialism in one country' without having to wait for assistance from the West that might be expected following the international triumph of the revolution. The ultimate victory of communism presumed the spread of revolution to the West, of course, but in the meantime, contended Stalin, the Soviet Union could set out to construct socialism on its own.
By the beginning of 1925, Trotsky's position had deteriorated sufficiently for the Central Committee to remove him as commissar of war. The victory, however, did not belong to Zinoviev and Kamenev, for as Trotsky's star dimmed, Stalin began to distance himself from them in order to form a new alliance with another set of Politburo members: Nikolai Bukharin, Aleksei Rykov and Mikhail Tomskii. All three accepted the general assumptions behind the notion of constructing 'socialism in one country', and they believed that the New Economic Policy represented the most prudent course to follow towards this end.
Zinoviev and Kamenev, joined in 1926 by their former adversary Trotsky, were more inclined to view NEP as a retreat from socialism, a dangerous concession to the nation's 'new bourgeoisie', and an inadequate policy for extracting enough grain from the countryside to support a rate of industrial growth that they deemed essential. This 'Left Opposition' became the principal political challenge to Stalin and his new allies in 1926-7, which meant that Stalin emerged as a gradualist and defender of NEP. Whether he was genuinely comfortable in this guise or whether it merely served the temporary requirements of factional struggle, he left most of the public defence of NEP to Bukharin and the others, while he toiled to derail the careers of officials linked to the opposition.
In this respect, the Stalin-Bukharin faction succeeded with such efficiency that the Left Opposition was thoroughly routed by 1927. During the previous year, Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev all lost their Politburo seats, and in 1927 the Central Committee dismissed them as well. In November, after authorities thwarted demonstrations planned by the Left Opposition to marshal popular support on the tenth anniversary of the revolution, Trotsky and Zinoviev were expelled from the party altogether. Two months later, Trotsky and numerous followers found themselves exiled to distant parts of the land, in Trotsky's case the Central Asian city of Alma-Ata. No longer did the party contain a Left Opposition of any potency, and, to some observers, NEP had never appeared more secure.
But just as Stalin had parted company in 1925 with Zinoviev and Kamenev, he now abandoned Bukharin, Rykov and Tomskii to join forces with more recent arrivals at the party's summit, men whose ascent owed much to Stalin's patronage. Among these new supporters - including Viacheslav Molotov, Kliment Voroshilov, Sergei Kirov, Anastas Mikoyan and Lazar Kaganovich - Stalin proceeded to embrace policies in i928 that matched or exceeded the militancy demanded by the Left Opposition just a year or two earlier. Thus began the climactic stage of debate, a struggle in the party over the two policy options recognised by the Bolsheviks throughout the i920s. While the champions of each approach rose and fell (or switched sides) over the years, as did the emphases placed on specific issues, the principal dispute remained recognisable and reached the point of starkest contrast between the contending options in 1928-9. The outcome would put an end to NEP.
By this time, Bukharin's pronouncements had marked him as the most prominent advocate of maintaining NEP for an indefinite period, certain to be measured in years. He could accept such modifications as slightly higher taxes on the peasantry, but nothing that would threaten NEP's original foundation - including a peasant's option to dispose of surplus produce at free-market prices and the opportunity for others to engage in private trade beyond the countryside. In general, Bukharin and colleagues of similar mind believed that NEP should continue until the party succeeded in a number of vital tasks. First, the state had to convince (not force) peasants to join co-operatives or other forms of collective life. As noted previously, this might be accomplished by establishing model co-operatives, supplying them generously with consumer goods and equipment, and letting the peasants see for themselves that the new organisations yielded a more bountiful life. Then it would not be difficult to persuade them to join co-operatives and collective farms, thereby enabling the countryside to make the turn to socialism. Bukharin was confident about the eventual triumph of large-scale, socialist practices, but this outcome would beckon only after the state had learned to manage its own sector of the economy productively enough to supply and distribute a substantial volume of goods to the countryside. Until then, NEP's acceptance of traditional peasant agriculture would have to continue.