Materials that became available after perestroika enable us to appreciate not only how far-reaching the differences were, but also the profound personal hostility that had developed between Lenin and the figure he had himself selected as general-secretary – a post that at the time was not meant to have the importance it subsequently acquired. Stalin’s hostility towards Lenin and Lenin’s growing irritation with Stalin – a deepening personal and ideological divide that was concealed from all but a few insiders – can be sampled, or rather guessed at, from a previously unknown letter by Stalin to Lenin, written some time in 1921.[2] This letter, which deals with the party apparatus, Lenin’s wife Krupskaya, and the Politburo, offers a rare insight into how Stalin’s political mind worked. As it transpires from the text, the story began with a complaint from Krupskaya to Lenin (she kept her ailing husband informed on many subjects): Stalin had created a large party agitprop department that ‘looks like a full-blown new commissariat’, with virtually the same tasks and objectives as the political education department she headed in the education commissariat, thus undermining it. After carefully reading her memo, Lenin forwarded it to Stalin with his remarks, requesting him not to concern himself with agitprop. Stalin’s reply was that of a kinto – Georgian for ‘street-urchin’ (the nickname he had been given in his youth). He behaved like a petty, insolent intriguer, exploiting the fact that his correspondent was not in the best of health. He denied the figures Krupskaya had given for the number of officials recruited to the department. He claimed that he had been forced to take on this department, but now refused to give it up, ‘explaining’ to Lenin that it was in his interests for him to stay on since, if not, ‘Trotsky will conclude that Lenin is only doing this because of Krupskaya’. In short, Stalin refused to knuckle under.
The ruse is obvious. It was not, of course, a question of what Trotsky would say. It was Stalin’s way of telling Lenin that he knew the story came from Krupskaya; and of giving him to understand that faced with the formidable Trotsky, who at the time was in conflict with Lenin on a series of issues, the latter, weakened by illness, could not be certain of commanding a majority in the Politburo without Stalin’s help.
Nineteen twenty-one witnessed more of these skirmishes, which are just as revealing. The Trotsky card that Stalin played to contain Lenin emerged during this period, which was dominated by a rather sterile dispute about the role of trade unions between a Trotsky-led minority and Lenin’s majority in the Politburo. Trotsky, who had been rebuffed that year when he proposed a change of course to an NEP-type system, could see no other way of handling the economic devastation than by temporarily persisting with quasi-military methods for mobilizing manpower. For his part, Lenin could not as yet envisage a new economic policy, but wanted to allow the unions, rooted in the working class, greater autonomy. The two factions manoeuvred to win over a majority of delegates to the upcoming Eleventh Party Congress. As Mikoyan testified in his autobiography Tak Bylo (‘It happened like this’), if Lenin participated in some of the meetings held to refine tactics to counter Trotsky, it was Stalin who conducted the whole operation.
Making common cause with Lenin against his bête noire – Trotsky – seemed to Stalin a good way of manipulating the former. And this is what he was also up to in the ‘Krupskaya affair’. But it is possible that these machinations – and Stalin’s grudge against Lenin himself – developed even earlier, during the Civil War, but had passed unnoticed because of urgent military tasks and the fact that the chief target of Stalin’s intrigues at the time was Trotsky. Stalin’s total lack of respect and, soon, hatred, for Lenin – this is my point here – were indirectly fed by his obsessive hatred of Trotsky, who stood in the way of Stalin’s self-image as a great military strategist and statesman. The object of numerous derogatory (and often unpublishable) epithets directed at him by Stalin and his supporters, Trotsky was the creator of the Red Army, the People’s Commissar for War, and co-leader of the 1917 revolution – nothing to do with Stalin’s depiction of him. Trotsky’s name was associated with Lenin’s – something Lenin never openly disavowed – and this more than anything else irked Stalin. The incessant intrigues and the pressures he and his acolytes brought to bear on Lenin with the aim of eliminating Trotsky from his military post, but also from the leadership tout court (a story long familiar to biographers of Lenin and Stalin), make this interpretation of Stalin’s attitude plausible.
Apart from a few moments of hesitation, this ‘siege’ of Lenin was unsuccessful. Lenin relied on Trotsky and his prestige. He worked closely with him – and not just on military matters. Moreover, he maintained daily, confident contact with Trotsky’s right-hand man on the Military Revolutionary Council and in the Defence Commissariat – Yefraim Skliansky – who doubtless played the role of trusted intermediary between the two men. Documents dating from the Civil War reveal his absolutely critical importance in the everyday activity of the centre. Yet very little is known about him, or the circumstances of his drowning when boating on a river in 1925.
This close network of relationships was bound to fuel Stalin’s profound hostility towards Lenin. But it only emerged when Lenin was dying and Stalin was already in almost total command. Openly attacking a healthy Lenin would not have suited Stalin’s calculating, cautious character, but with Lenin’s illness – of whose details Stalin was fully informed – things changed. As general-secretary, Stalin was charged by the Central Committee with supervising Lenin’s medical treatment, which allowed him unabashedly to spy on the sick man. Lenin’s secretary, Fotieva, may have reported to Stalin about every piece Lenin dictated to her, even though he had stipulated that they were to remain confidential for the time being. One can imagine Stalin’s state of mind when he realized that Lenin wanted to demote him from his current position and perhaps destroy his political career altogether. If Fotieva did not inform him of this earlier, he learnt it at the same time as the Politburo from the text Lenin delivered to them on the eve of the Twelfth Party Congress for which it was intended. Here Lenin demanded the removal of Stalin from his post and explained why. But at precisely this moment Lenin became totally incapacitated and could no longer be consulted on anything. At the time, Lenin’s demand was known only to the Politburo. Not until Khrushchev thirty-three years later was his text revealed to the Soviet public.