On April 3, 1922, in the aftermath of the Eleventh Party Congress, a new Politburo was elected, consisting of Lenin, Kamenev, Trotsky, Stalin, Zinoviev, Rykov, and Tomsky. Bukharin, Molotov, and Kalinin were elected as alternate members of this top leadership body. The youngest of them all, Bukharin, was thirty-four. Stalin was forty-three and Trotsky forty-two. The dying Lenin had just turned fifty-two.
A Soviet poet, Nikolai Aseev celebrated October with the words: "Long live the revolution that has thrown down the power of the old." The old rulers who had been "thrown down" were really not that old; the century was still young. The leaders of the Bolshevik party, on the other hand, were middle-aged men who expected to live for a long time.
Lenin himself limited the number of those who aspired to his mantle or to a share of it. In his "Letter to the Congress," which he dictated from December 23 to December 25, 1922, and which is commonly called Lenin's Testament, he wrote: "I would strongly urge that at this congress [the Twelfth Congress—M. H.] a number of changes be made in our political structure."137 For Lenin "an increase in the number of Central Committee members to a few dozen or even a hundred represented a significant change in the political structure. He placed such an increase "at the head of the list." The Central Committee elected at the Eleventh Congress had twenty- seven full members and nineteen alternates. If we add to that the Control
Commission, with five full members and two alternates, we get a total of fifty-three. That is, the central leadership already consisted of "several dozen." To increase it to a hundred would have meant doubling its size. The new members were to come, as Lenin advised, from among the rank- and-file workers in the party. However, he himself had written a little earlier, "Is it really true that every worker knows how to run the state? People working in the practical sphere know that this is a fairy tale."138
Enlarging the Central Committee was intended to heighten its authority and improve the machinery of party and state in general. If we keep in mind the fact that Lenin was recommending the election of workers from the factory floor to the Central Committee, that is, people completely unfamiliar with the administrative work of the party, the absurdity of the advice becomes clear, despite its author's conviction that this measure could work a miraculous cure.
The miracle cure was supposed to transform the "political structure" of the party. Lenin knew perfectly well that he was the real leader of the party. He tried to lead like the conductor of an orchestra and avoid brutal repressive measures against his comrades. If necessary, when controversies became too sharp, he used the weapon of his personal authority as the party's founder and leader, the man who had made the revolution against the advice of many of his lieutenants and whose far-sightedness had been confirmed by the Brest-Litovsk treaty. At the Ninth Party Congress in March—April 1920 a group of Old Bolsheviks called for a broadening of party democracy. These democratic centralists reproached Lenin for the fact that "a tiny handful of party oligarchs decide everything" and that the Central Committee had imposed a system of "bureaucratic centralism." Lenin replied with a theoretical explanation of the necessity for one-man dictatorship: "Soviet socialist democracy and individual management and dictatorship are in no way contradictory. ... The will of a class may sometimes be carried out by a dictator, who sometimes does more alone and is frequently more necessary."139
In 1920 Lenin had spoken in favor of a dictator, but in the last weeks of his conscious life in 1922—23 he was in despair because he saw several candidates for dictator. A conflict among them meant the danger of a split in the party. This was something Lenin feared greatly. He who had never hesitated to split if he was not obeyed unquestioningly now feared the deadly consequences of a split after his death.
In his Testament, Lenin gave his assessment of the six leading figures in the Central Committee. In Gogol's Dead Souls Sobakevich gave Chichikov the following brief description of the inhabitants of their provincial capitaclass="underline" "The only decent man in town is the prosecutor, and he too is a swine." This was the immortal model Lenin followed in characterizing his associates on the Central Committee.
First Lenin took up the "two outstanding leaders of the present Central Committee," Stalin and Trotsky. He regarded the possibility of a clash between these two potential dictators as "the greater part of the danger of a split." Lenin continued: "Comrade Stalin, having become general secretary, has unlimited authority concentrated in his hands, and I am not sure whether he will always be capable of using that authority with sufficient caution." On the other hand, Trotsky "is distinguished not only by outstanding ability. He is personally perhaps the most capable man in the present Central Committee. But he has displayed excessive self-assurance and shown excessive preoccupation with the purely administrative side of the work." Then came Zinoviev and Kamenev, Lenin's closest comrades in the prerevolutionary days of exile. He commented meaningfully that "the October episode with Zinoviev and Kamenev [that is, their opposition to the October revolution] was, of course, no accident, but neither can the blame for it be laid upon them personally, any more than nonbolshevism can upon Trotsky." The Testament then devoted a "few words" to Bukharin and Pyatakov, "the most outstanding figures among the younger party members." Of Bukharin, Lenin said, "[He] is not only a major and most valuable party theorist; he is also rightly considered the favorite of the whole party, but his theoretical views can be classified as fully Marxist only with great reserve." As for Pyatakov, "he is unquestionably a man of outstanding will and outstanding ability, but he shows too much zeal for administration and the administrative side of the work to be relied upon in a serious political matter."
Ten days later Lenin dictated an "Addition to the Letter," stating in part:
Stalin is too rude, and this defect, although quite tolerable in our midst and in dealings among us Communists, becomes intolerable in a general secretary. That is why I suggest the comrades think about a way of removing Stalin from that post and appointing another man in his stead who in all other respects differs from Comrade Stalin in having only one advantage, namely, that of being more tolerant, more loyal, more polite, more considerate to the comrades, less capricious, etc.
The direction of Lenin's thinking is obvious. Not one of the "outstanding members of the Central Committee" was worthy of succeeding him; none of them had the necessary abilities to act as dictator, to exercise one-man rule over the party. Lenin disqualified the two most outstanding leaders,
Stalin and Trotsky, because one had concentrated unlimited authority in his hands and might not always be capable of using it with sufficient caution while the other displayed excessive self-assurance and was excessively preoccupied with the purely administrative side of things. (The recollection that Trotsky had had a Communist commissar, Panteleev, shot was also very much alive among the Old Bolsheviks.) Besides, the author of the Testament did not fail to mention Trotsky's non-Bolshevik past. To be sure, he urged that Trotsky not be blamed for that any more than Zinoviev and Kamenev for their opposition to the October revolution, but it is unclear what Lenin meant when he suggested they should not be blamed personally for those errors. What is clear is that Lenin never forgot anything about anyone. In regard to Bukharin, although Lenin called him a major theoretician of the party, he also reproached him for theoretical views that were not fully Marxist, rather a serious defect for a major theoretician of a Marxist party. Pyatakov, too, had outstanding abilities but could not be relied on in serious political questions, another contradiction that Lenin did not explain.