The party apparatus, Stalin's instrument for taking power, was an outgrowth of the party, but the character of the party had been shaped by Lenin more than anyone else. In 1926 Stalin's opponents—Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Krupskaya, Pyatakov, and others—formed the United Opposition. In July they addressed a letter to the joint plenum of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission. They denounced the situation in which "all discussion is from the top down and the ranks below merely listen, thinking for themselves only in isolated cases and on the sly. Those who are dissatisfied, have doubts, or disagree are afraid to raise their voices at party meetings. ... Party members are afraid."187
The United Opposition sought to portray all this as the result of Stalin's policies. However, during the discussion held on the pages of Pravda in 1923, when the Oppositionists were still in power, the situation was the same. "Party members have forgotten how to think for themselves. They are afraid to 'yaP' about anything until orders come from above. They wait for ready-made decisions to be handed down and even for the ready-made explanations for those decisions."188 'There is self-seeking, sycophancy, and fear of expressing one's own opinion. ... Everyone is pretty much preoccupied with the question of assignments and transfers."189 "Under the system of command from above there is no party life for the ranks. The bureaucratic atmosphere, with official circulars setting the tone, pushes the ranks out of the picture. ... Tale bearing, informing, and bootlicking are increasing, and careerism thrives on this soil."190 "Some party officials use 'comrade' only in addressing someone of lower rank. They invariably address their superiors (ingratiatingly) by their first and middle names."191 All of this was printed in the pages of Pravda during a brief moment of freedom for party members when a discussion was allowed by the top brass. They were talking about Lenin's party.
At the Fourteenth Congress in 1925 a member of the oppositional Leningrad delegation complained about the widespread practice of informing, which had taken "such forms and such characteristics that a comrade cannot tell his friend his most intimate thoughts."192 The complaining comrade was justly reprimanded by Sergei Gusev: "You're faking, Bakaich, you're faking, believe me. In the past Lenin taught us that every member of the party has to be an agent of the Cheka; in other words, keep his eyes open and act as an informer. ... I think that every party member must report on others. If we have a problem, it is not informing but the lack of informing."193 Ten years later both of these men were able to return to the question of informing because both the complainer and the reprimander were in Lu- byanka prison. But Gusev was absolutely right to accuse Ivan Bakaev (familiarly called Bakaich) of faking. It was hardly appropriate for Bakaev, one-time head of the Petrograd Cheka, to complain about informing. And Gusev was a hundred times right to recall that informing became a party norm under Lenin.
Stalin did not invent the party; he inherited it from Lenin. But he perfected it and embellished upon it in his own way, discarding everything extraneous or incidental. He enlarged the Central Committee to sixty-three full members and forty-two alternate members in 1925, thereby carrying out Lenin's recommendation that a struggle between Stalin and Trotsky could be prevented in this way. He carried out what was called the Lenin enrollment, bringing 203,000 new members into the party from February to August 1924, increasing the membership by 50 percent. Earlier, at the end of 1923, the question of holding a "party week" for the recruitment of 100,000 new members was discussed. The prevailing opinion at that time was that "our cadres are not equipped to integrate such a large number of new recruits. Our Martin ovens, the party cells, don't have the capacity to refine and temper this quantity of youthful raw material."194 Yet within a few months 200,000 members were admitted. The party underwent a drastic change. Its new members were ignorant of the extraneous or incidental traditions which Stalin was energetically uprooting. The aim of the Lenin enrollment was to bring workers from the factory floor into the party. But the flood of new recruits mainly consisted of privilege seekers. "Many of them," a party member complained in Pravda, December 8, 1924, "view the party as some sort of pancake covered with sour cream." The new recruits were looking for jobs and got them. Workers from the factory floor became workers with briefcases, and party members from the countryside were promoted just as readily. But they had to pay for these privileges. The members of the party became vassals. They forfeited even those minimal liberties which Soviet citizens still enjoyed at the time.
The party, despite this rejuvenation, was led by the so-called Old Guard, the veteran party members. In January 1924 the Old Guard of those who had joined before 1917, those with experience in the tsarist underground, numbered only 8,249. The total party membership was 401,481, 56.6 percent of whom had joined between 1920 and 1924.195
The struggle for power was waged among the numerically insignificant number of former underground activists. It was in those circles that the political combinations, coalitions, and blocs were formed. It was there that Stalin showed his remarkable abilities at political maneuvering, employing others to do his dirty work. The main burden of the assault on Trotsky in 1923—1924 was eagerly assumed by Zinoviev and Kamenev. Later, in fighting those two, Stalin used Bukharin and enjoyed the benevolent neutrality of Trotsky. Unlike Trotsky, who referred darkly to the guillotine, or Zinoviev, who demanded Trotsky's arrest for publishing his article "Lessons of October," Stalin wore the mask of moderation. Recalling that his fellow triumvirs had demanded the arrest and expulsion of Trotsky, he uttered these remarkable words:
We did not agree with Zinoviev and Kamenev because we knew that a policy of amputation is fraught with grave dangers for the party, that the method of amputation and of bloodletting—for they demanded blood—is dangerous and contagious. Today you cut off one member of the party, tomorrow another, the next day a third, and soon what will be left of our party?196
Stalin fought his opponents with deeds, not words. Many years later the phrase "salami tactics" became famous. Stalin deprived his opponents of power little by little, cutting off tiny slices, one at a time. In January 1925 Trotsky was removed as commissar of war, after which he lost the support of the army apparatus, especially with the removal of his close ally Antonov- Ovseenko as head of the Political Directorate of the Red Army. Similarly, Kamenev was removed as head of the Moscow party organization at the end of 1925.
But Stalin also used words to fight his enemies. He had no trouble showing that they were unprincipled politicians, that at one time they had supported and defended Stalin only to turn against him later and say, as Kamenev did at the Fourteenth Congress: "We are against the creation of a 'Leader.'... I suggest that our general secretary is not a figure who can unite the Old Bolshevik general staff around himself." In reply to demands for party democracy, Mikoyan defended Stalin with the acid comment that when the Oppositionists were in power they were against democracy, but when they went into opposition they suddenly became its champions. Stalin himself did not hesitate to remind those who called for democracy of their own past.