Stalin’s ascendancy to the general-secretaryship coincided with the culmination of the party’s encroachment on state functions which had begun during the civil war. When Lenin seized power in 1917 he intended to govern through state institutions, i.e. the Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom) and its respective departments and subunits. But that did not work out too well. Within Sovnarkom there was too much talk and too little action. It was not well suited to rapid and decisive decision-making, especially during the civil war. Sovnarkom’s democratic legitimacy rested on the Soviets, which it supposedly represented, but these had collapsed during the civil war. Gradually, the party took over many state functions. The Politburo took all the important decisions and the Soviet regime rapidly evolved into a hybrid ‘party-state’ in which the party’s power predominated at every level of state and society. The party did not just control or occupy the state – its organisation and personnel were the most important arm of the state.76
Lenin had intended to counter-balance Stalin’s power as general-secretary by appointing Trotsky one of his deputies in Sovnarkom, but in May 1922 he had the first of a series of debilitating strokes.77
The succession struggle began while Lenin was ailing and one of the early salvos was fired by his soon-to-be widow, Nadezhda Krupskaya, when she revealed the existence of what became known as ‘Lenin’s Testament’ – a series of notes dictated by him from his sickbed in late 1922 and early 1923. Doubts have been expressed about the provenance of the testament and it may be that Krupskaya and the staff who wrote down Lenin’s utterings put some words into his mouth but, crucially, no one questioned the authenticity of Lenin’s notes at the time.78
About Stalin and Trotsky, Lenin supposedly said:
Comrade Stalin, having become General-Secretary, has concentrated enormous power in his hands, and I am not sure that he always knows how to use that power with sufficient caution. On the other hand, Comrade Trotsky . . . is distinguished not only by his exceptional ability – personally, he is, to be sure, the most able man in the present CC – but also by his too far-reaching self-confidence and a disposition to be far too much attracted by the purely administrative side of affairs. These two qualities of the two most able leaders of the present CC might, quite innocently, lead to a split, and if our Party does not take measures to prevent it, a split might arise unexpectedly.79
Even more damning was this addendum to Lenin’s testament:
Stalin is too rude and this defect, although quite tolerable in our midst and in dealing among us Communists, becomes intolerable in a General-Secretary. That is why I suggest that the comrades think about a way of removing Stalin from that post and appointing another man . . . more tolerant, more loyal, more polite and more considerate to the comrades, less capricious, etc. This circumstance may appear to be a negligible detail. But I think that from the standpoint of safeguards against a split and from the standpoint of what I wrote about the relationship between Stalin and Trotsky . . . it is a detail which can assume decisive importance.80
Lenin’s proposal to remove Stalin as general-secretary was not as drastic as it might appear in retrospect since the post was still predominantly administrative. Being relieved of such a burden might even have suited Stalin, as long as he remained one of the party’s top leaders.
Lenin’s testament provoked little more than a storm in a political teacup. Identifying Trotsky as the main danger to their own leadership ambitions, Stalin’s Politburo comrades backed the nascent dictator and efforts to use the testament to whip up opposition to Stalin among party activists did not get very far. Stalin offered on more than one occasion to accede to Lenin’s wishes and resign as the party’s general-secretary, but there was never any question his resignation would be accepted.
Stephen Kotkin is convinced that Stalin found the Lenin Testament episode profoundly psychologically disturbing and harboured a deep sense of victimhood and self-pity.81
Stalin may have been peeved by the testament and irritated by Lenin’s words, but there is no evidence the episode had any lasting impact on his psychological make-up. Stalin was not the self-pitying type, did not see himself as a victim and remained loyal to Lenin’s memory. When he commented on Lenin’s remarks about him at the central committee plenum in July 1927, he was unrepentant. Having quoted in full the testament’s passage about his rudeness, Stalin said: ‘Indeed, I am rude, Comrades, to those who rudely and perfidiously destroy and split the party. I have not hidden this, and still do not.’82
Stalin was well placed to emerge as Lenin’s successor. After Lenin’s death in January 1924 he gradually established himself as the pre-eminent party leader. He helped create a Lenin cult and projected himself as Lenin’s most faithful pupil. He positioned himself as a centrist in the various policy disputes that beset the party. He used the patronage of official appointments to gather support. He paid attention to the needs and interests of regional party officials. Most importantly, he gave meaning to the lives of party officials and activists by prioritising the construction of socialism at home over the spread of revolution abroad.
When the Bolsheviks took power they expected their revolution to be bolstered by revolutions in more advanced countries. The failure of the revolution to spread abroad prompted Stalin to fashion a new doctrine – Socialism in one country – which proclaimed that Soviet Russia could build a socialist state that would safeguard both the Russian Revolution and the future world revolution. ‘Internationalism’ was reformulated to serve the interests of the one successful revolution. ‘An internationalist’, said Stalin in 1927, ‘is one who is ready to defend the USSR without reservation, without wavering, unconditionally; for the USSR is the base of the world revolutionary movement, and this revolutionary movement cannot be defended and promoted unless the USSR is defended.’83
Stalin’s own explanation for his success in the factional battles of the 1920s was that he had secured the support of middle-ranking party and state officials: ‘Why did we prevail over Trotsky and the rest?’ he asked in 1937. ‘Trotsky, as we know, was the most popular man in our country after Lenin. Bukharin, Zinoviev, Rykov, Tomsky were all popular. We were little known. . . . But the middle cadres supported us, explained our positions to the masses. Meanwhile Trotsky completely ignored those cadres.’84
Stalin’s workload as general-secretary was enormous and continued to grow as the party-state bureaucracy expanded. The paper trail of reports, resolutions and stenograms passing through his office was endless, as were the frequent visitors, and the numerous meetings he had to attend. But he proved a highly capable administrator, one measure of his success being the scale of the task he faced: ‘The General-Secretary had to establish a system that tracked the skills and experience of hundreds of thousands of officials . . . to organise 350,000 mostly poorly qualified . . . “staff”, who together had to bring the world’s largest country, with a population of almost 140 million, out of an appalling economic crisis amidst serious political divisions.’85