Lenin's Testament was not read at the Twelfth Congress, although heads of delegations were allowed to see it. Later there arose a legend that Stalin had concealed the letter from the party by not allowing it to be read to the Congress. It is true that within a few years the Testament became an illegal document, possession of which was punished by prison or a labor camp. But there is no question that in 1923 the "outstanding members of the Central Committee" had no desire to see it published. For several years even Trotsky denied the existence of Lenin's Testament—until Max Eastman published it in the United States in October 1926. Boris Souvarine likewise published it in France.
The message of the Testament leaves no room for doubt. Lenin was urging insistently that he be replaced by a collective leadership. Only then would the deficiencies of each member of the leadership be compensated for by the merits of the others. It is true that none of them had very great merits, but the leader of the party had no one but himself to blame for that. He had raised and trained those who were to replace him and in the process had gotten rid of any who showed the least bit of independence.
In 1920 at the Ninth Congress one of the democratic centralists, Valerian Osinsky, spoke of the dictatorship that was threatening the party and named three potential candidates for supreme dictator: Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin. During the revolution and civil war the Soviet government was identified with two names by its supporters and enemies alike, Lenin and Trotsky.
Chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, leader of the October insurrection, first people's commissar of foreign affairs, who issued inflammatory manifestos ('To All, to All, to All") calling for world revolution, the first representative of the "new world" to engage in talks with the imperialists (at Brest-Litovsk), organizer of the Red Army, and brilliant orator, Leon Trotsky was considered by many the natural successor to Lenin. He too considered himself such. This conviction was one of the main reasons for his defeat as the battle for Lenin's mantle began.
General secretary of the Central Committee, member of the Politburo and the Orgburo, people's commissar of nationalities, and people's commissar of the Workers' and Peasants' Inspectorate, Joseph Stalin was known only to the narrow circles of the party and military leadership. He rarely spoke at meetings. His articles did not sparkle with professional craftsmanship. John Reed did not even mention him in Ten Days That Shook the World, Reed's chronicle of the October revolution. But at the beginning of 1918, when Lenin became fed up with the endless discussions in the Central Committee and sought to have a special bureau created "for solving urgent questions," it consisted of four men: Lenin, Trotsky, Sverdlov, and Stalin. Stalin was also a member of the editorial board of Pravda, along with Trotsky, Bukharin, and Sokolnikov.
Lenin had complete confidence in Stalin and indulged all his caprices, while Stalin, aware of his importance, behaved like a prima donna. When at the Eleventh Party Congress Preobrazhensky listed all of Stalin's duties and questioned whether it was possible for one man to handle this vast amount of work on the Politburo, the Orgburo, two commissariats, and a dozen subcommittees of the Central Committee, Lenin immediately spoke up in Stalin's defense, calling him irreplaceable as commissar of nationalities and adding: 'The same thing applies to the Workers' and Peasants' Inspectorate. This is a vast business; but to be able to handle investigations we must have at the head of it a man who enjoys high prestige."140 After the Eleventh Congress (March—April 1922), Lenin proposed Stalin for the post of general secretary, only to complain eight months later, as though he had forgotten what he had done, that Stalin had concentrated too much authority in his hands. Lenin also made the sudden discovery that there were major defects in the functioning of the Workers' and Peasants' Inspectorate and that Stalin was the main source of the monstrous growth of bureaucracy.
Stalin did not make himself general secretary. Lenin did. Lenin had been his mentor, protector, and constant model. According to Boris Sou- varine, Victor Adler once chided Plekhanov jokingly, "Lenin's your son." Plekhanov retorted, "If he's my son, he's an illegitimate one." Souvarine adds: "Lenin might have said the same about Stalin."141 The question of whether Lenin was the legitimate or illegitimate son of Plekhanov and Marx continues to stir debate among philosophers, historians, and specialists in family law, but the question of whether Stalin was Lenin's son is disputed less and less. Stalin was not only his legitimate heir but his only one. The fact that the father, at the end of his life, got angry at his son and tried to disinherit him is nothing unusual.
Many reasons are given to explain Stalin's rise to power. The main reason was that he was Lenin's legitimate heir. The majority of the party perceived the situation that way. This was a necessary condition for his success, but as the logicians say, it was not by itself sufficient reason.
Stalin displayed brilliant strategy in the struggle for power. First of all, he pretended not to want the power and formed an alliance with two other hopefuls, Zinoviev and Kamenev, letting them act as senior partners in a triumvirate. Trotsky, on the other hand, tended to alienate all who were not his loyal allies.
The Bolsheviks, who looked at themselves in the mirror of the French revolution, saw in Trotsky, the commissar of war and chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council, a potential Bonaparte. Trotsky knew this and yet in a pamphlet entitled Lessons of October, which he published after Lenin's death, he wrote: "Robespierre never had the chance to acquaint himself with the Plekhanovian philosophical idea. He violated all the laws of sociology and instead of exchanging handshakes with the Girondists he cut off their heads."142 Trotsky committed an irreparable error in threatening to use the guillotine when he was unable to make good his threat. By bringing up the question of Zinoviev's and Kamenev's conduct in October 1917, Trotsky seemes to have forced the triumvirs to drag up his own non- Bolshevik past.
On October 8, 1923, Trotsky sent a letter to the Central Committee. Lest he be accused of factionalism, he signed it alone. A week later the Central Committee received the so-called Platform of the Forty-Six, which discussed the same issues Trotsky had brought up. Among the signers were Preobrazhensky, Pyatakov, Antonov-Ovseenko, Vladimir Kosior, and Osinsky. Both letters sharply criticized "the policies of the majority of the Politburo."
The first part of the Platform of the Forty-Six spoke of a grave economic crisis: strikes, growing unemployment, production breakdowns, and the inefficiency of most of heavy industry. The blame for the catastrophic situation was laid on the majority faction in the Politburo. The second part of the platform spoke of a crisis within the party: "We observe the ever increasing, and scarcely concealed, division of the party between a secretarial hierarchy and 'the quiet folk,' between professional party officials recruited from above and the general mass of the party, which does not participate in party life."143 The Platform of the Forty-Six made the same arguments as Trotsky's letter. Both asserted that the source of the party crisis lay in the system by which all secretaries of local party organizations were appointed from above rather than elected by the organization.