In order to understand what V. Lenin really warned the party from in his «Address to the convention» let us consider the testimonial V. Lenin gave to the members of ACP (B) Central Committee unbiased by turbulent emotions. V. Lenin openly describes all the candidates for the post of party leader (no matter what this post is called) apart from J.V. Stalin as non-Bolsheviks (Trotsky), as people unreliable in business (Kamenev, Zinovyev, Trotsky whom V. Lenin called «little Judas» in one of his works), as bureaucrats who can forget about the true cause carried away by administrative formalism (Trotsky, Buharin[238], Pyatakov[239]).
Thus, only J.V. Stalin remains. He has already concentrated in his hands an enormous power on the post of the general secretary [240]which speaks of his professional qualities as an administrator, of his ability to maintain a certain balance between form (administrative issues) and content (i.e. the cause itself) and of his capabilities as a leader. Yet along with that he is sometimes rude, intolerant, capricious.
Given the testimonies of all the other «leaders» the addition to the «Address» of January 4, 1923 is nothing but empty rhetoric: «We should have appointed somebody else instead of Stalin: someone equal to Stalin professionally but who would not be so rude and intolerant. Do you know someone like that? — I don’t». And at the same time this is a hint to Stalin: «Learn to be tolerant, my dear comrade, or it will cost you your head notwithstanding your good professional qualities. You will end the same way as I did: they will destroy you before you will be able to finish our cause. You see for yourself, there are no bolshevist people capable of being in charge among the party «leaders» … yet we must continue with the cause of bolshevism, otherwise masons and empty talkers from among intelligentsia carried along by them will walk all over the common people».
Following these meditations let us comment in greater detail the following phrase of V. Lenin: «the October incident[241] with Zinovyev and Kamenev was of course caused not by chance, yet they personally can be hardly blamed for it, just like Trotsky can be hardly blamed for his non-bolshevism»
The way V. Lenin characterized L.Rosenfeld (Kamenev), G. Apfelbaum (Zinovyev) and L. Bronstein (Trotsky) leads us to compare it with the legal status of slaves in a slave-owning society:
A slave cannot be held responsible for anything by the society of free people. For any damage inflicted by a slave his owner is held responsible. And only the owner has a right of punishing the slave in a way he himself chooses. Nobody from among the free people has a right to impede him in executing that right.[242]
Therefore the testimonial he gave to Bronstein, Rosenfeld, Apfelbaum is synonymous to a definition given to a slave’s legal status, simply in a different wording. Taking this into account and taking into account the knowledge we now have of that era, the above-mentioned testimonial given to that «trio» by V. Lenin can be only understood as a hint that the party «leaders» he mentions are actually puppets, slaves of masonry masters, executive periphery of the «world backstage». And one should not think that this conclusion is a far-fetched one while what V. Lenin meant is something completely different: V. Lenin was a lawyer, he knew legal history starting from the ancient times, and when speaking at the IV Comintern congress in December 1922 he demanded of Communist party members to leave Masonic lodges.[243]
If we attempt to describe how different people not aware of the backstage hidden motives perceive the testimonials of CC members given by V. Lenin in his «Address to the convention» we shall see that they see completely different things as being significant in that address.
That J.V. Stalin is sometimes rude, has the guts not to follow «high society manners» was significant (and is still significant) for representatives of the carelessly babbling intelligentsia among the party ranks and of the leaders who have an intellectual background or have joined intelligentsia while working as professional revolutionaries. They prefer the party leaders to be intelligent talkers like themselves.
But among the common people who are busy doing real vital work (i.e. among the party masses) rudeness was not considered to be a serious vice at the time, like it was the case among the refined intelligentsia. The common people have not paid and do not pay much attention to a man’s rudeness if this man possesses professional qualities useful for the society. The common people are usually intolerant not to rude people but to those who bully others misusing their social status or talents, and one can do this while being at the same time exquisitely polite. Had Lenin written that Stalin mocked and bullied his party comrades, people would have regarded such a warning with an utterly different degree of concern.
Bolshevist party members from among the common people paid attention to the fact that J.V. Stalin had concentrated power in his hands, i.e. he was not afraid of taking the responsibility for their common cause, that he had the qualities of a leader and administrator capable of real work. And rude words and actions do not always reflect spite, and even if they are the case, they have no serious effect… Besides, for a person to lose his temper and start being rude it takes those around him to bring the person into this condition.
One should also bear in mind that the knowledge we have of what Stalin was like in intercourse is based on the reminiscences of his contemporaries. And remember that they were often written down from third persons and were carefully selected by anti-Stalinists later. But in those years not only V. Lenin, N. Krupskaya and other party leaders had a real experience of communicating with Stalin. Therefore there could be opinions on J. Stalin’s «politeness» which were different from the view V. Lenin expressed in his «Address to the convention» and which did not become a part of the cult at the time of the 20th Convention for that very reason.
In the years of Perestroika the «fight against Stalinism» livened up, and the TV broadcast a documentary shot at the place of Stalin’s last exile in the Turukhansky territory. There was nothing underneath the concrete framework of the glass «aquarium» which once protected Stalin’s museum from rough weather. The walls were covered with writings: both condemning Stalin and asking for forgiveness for having not been able to preserve the USSR — the first bolshevist state — after he passed away.
Then they interviewed an old woman, an inhabitant of that village, who remembered Stalin’s living there in exile. She was asked, «What do you remember?» When she heard the question, youth lit up her eyes, and she answered: «He was a kind man. He treated ill people with herbs…»
Thus it seems that J.V. Stalin behaved differently with different people, depending on what those people were like, what their inside was like, and what J.V. Stalin himself thought them to be…
As a result, the Bolsheviks of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) seconded J.V. Stalin and not anyone else as the party leader, judging from the testimonials given to the «leaders» by V. Lenin and from their personal experience of speaking and working with leaders.
Thus both the «world backstage» and Bolsheviks in Russia itself concurred that comrade Joseph Stalin could be entrusted the task of leadership in the cause of building socialism in a separate country. Yet under socialism the «world backstage» and Bolsheviks meant completely different, mutually exclusive ways of socially organizing people’s life. The result of those coinciding social and political processes was J. Stalin’s coming to personify bolshevist statehood in the 20th century.