The death of Lenin brought into the open the issue which had long preoccupied the party leaders. Zinoviev had already assumed without hesitation the provisional mantle of the succession. Stalin had studiously refrained from disclosing his ambitions. At a commemorative session of the Union Congress of Soviets on January 26, 1924, the eve of the funeral, Stalin’s tribute was distinguished from those of his colleagues by a fervent strain of worshipful devotion still unfamiliar in the Marxist or Bolshevik vocabulary: “we communists” were humble and loyal disciples, pledged to carry out every injunction of the dead master. Two notable decisions were taken. One was to re-name Petrograd “Leningrad”; Lenin had superseded and eclipsed Peter in moulding the fortunes of the fatherland. The other was to strengthen the party by a mass recruitment of “workers from the bench”, which was dubbed “the Lenin enrolment”. The demand for a larger representation of workers in the party had figured in Trotsky’s letter of October 8 and in the Politburo resolution of December 5, 1923 (see p. 66 above), and could be justified by much that Lenin himself had written. Its execution was now in the hands of Stalin, the general secretary of the party.
The Bolshevik party in 1917 had a membership of not more than 25,000. During the revolution and the civil war its numbers were progressively swelled by mass admissions. Statistics for this early period are unreliable. But early in 1921 it had reached a total of 600,000 or perhaps 700,000. The purge ordered by the tenth party congress in March 1921 was drastic. Some members, recruited in the enthusiasm of the revolution and the civil war, drifted away; others were expelled as unsuitable. By the beginning of 1924, the membership had been reduced to 350,000. The Lenin enrolment, which in two years added 240,000 new members to the party, increasing its numbers by more than two-thirds, was hailed both as a move towards more democracy and as an assertion of the rightful predominance of genuine workers in the party, though its later stages also included a substantial enrolment of peasants. Its historical role was quite different. It was the symbol of a gradual change in the character of the party which had deeper causes. Almost unnoticed a new conception emerged which differentiated the party of Stalin from the party of Lenin.
Lenin before the revolution had envisaged the party as a small homogeneous group of devoted revolutionaries pledged to the overthrow of a regime of inequality and oppression. Even after the revolution, he continued to think of the party as an 61ite group of dedicated workers; and he was more concerned to purge the unfit than to open a wide door to recruitment. The sharp reduction in the number of party members between 1921 and 1924 was certainly due to his insistence. Lenin, though he had moved a long way from the Utopian views expressed in State and Revolution, still looked forward, in the words of the party programme of 1919, to “a simplification of the functions of administration, accompanied by a rise in the cultural level of the workers”, and seemed unaware, till the very end of his life, of the vast complexities and problems of public administration. By this time the conception of an elite party was an anachronism. In 1920, 53 per cent of party members were said to be working in Soviet institutions of one kind or another, and 27 per cent were in the Red Army. Gradually and insensibly, the party had been transformed into a machine geared to conduct and supervise the affairs of a great state. It was the plain duty of rank-and-file members-—and especially of new members who lacked the revolutionary grounding of the pre-1917 generation—to support the leaders loyally in this formidable task; and party membership carried with it certain undeclared privileges which made the performance of this duty worth while. The Lenin enrolment was accompanied by a further purge of undesirable members; and, since both the purge and the enrolment were controlled by the party secretariat, it may be guessed that adherence to the nefw party orthodoxy was one of the main criteria applied. The Lenin enrolment, and the whole process of which it formed part, enhanced the power of the party machine and of the general secretary who manipulated it. Molotov spoke no more than the truth when he observed at the party congress of 1924 that “the development of the party in the future will undoubtedly be based on this Lenin enrolment’.
Another and more subtle change followed the replacement of Lenin’s elite party by the mass party of Stalin. The party statute imposed on members the obligation, once a policy decision had been taken, to speak in support of it with a united voice. Loyalty to the party meant acceptance of its discipline. But it was assumed that the decision would have been taken by democratic procedures after free discussion among party members. Nor did anyone suggest that the party was infallible; Lenin often drew attention to mistakes that had been made, and admitted errors of his own. When his fiftieth birthday was celebrated in April 1920, at the moment of victory in the civil war, he rather strangely spoke, in his reply to the greeting of his comrades, of the danger of the party “giving itself airs”. The angry controversies which divided the party on the eve of the introduction of NEP shocked Lenin and other party leaders into a realization of the hazards involved in the unfettered toleration of dissent; and the Kronstadt mutiny increased the sense of alarm. The disciplinary measures adopted by the tenth congress were an ominous landmark in party history. But Lenin never made his peace with the conception of a central party organization announcing infallible edicts and imposing silence on all dissent within the party and outside it. When at the last party congress which he was to attend, in March 1922, he observed that the party had enough political and enough economic power, and that “what is lacking is culture”, he already showed a troubled consciousness of the dangers that lay ahead. In the last tormented months of Lenin’s active life he was preoccupied both by mistrust of Stalin’s personality and by the need to struggle against “bureaucracy” in the party as well as in the state. Belief in the infallibility of the party, in the infallibility of Lenin, and eventually in the infallibility of Stalin himself, was a later development, the seeds of which were sown in the first weeks after Lenin’s death.
While the Lenin enrolment was in progress, Stalin took a further step to distinguish himself as Lenin’s most faithful disciple. He delivered at the Sverdlov University six lectures “On the Foundations of Leninism”, which were published in Pravda. They were clear, schematic and entirely conventional. One sentence only might, in the light of subsequent developments, have attracted attention:
For the final victory of socialism, for the organization of socialist production, the efforts of one country, particularly of a peasant country like Russia, are insufficient; for that, the efforts of the proletarians of several advanced countries are required.
But this was merely the recital of a familiar item in the party creed. The lectures passed without comment. The other leaders showed no interest in Stalin’s incursion into the field of theory where he had hitherto rarely sought to shine. What was significant in Stalin’s initiative was the consecration of a specific cult of “Leninism”. If the term was current during Lenin’s lifetime, it was used, like “Trotskyism” later, as a term of opprobrium by opponents eager to discredit it. Henceforth, on the lips of Stalin and of other party leaders, Leninism was a vaguely defined, but infallible, body of doctrine, which distinguished the official party line from the heresies of its critics.
The embarrassment of Lenin’s testament had still to be overcome. Fortunately for Stalin, his embarrassment was shared by the other leaders, none of whom escaped unscathed. At what precise moment they became aware of its contents is not recorded. But on May 22, 1924, on the eve of the thirteenth party congress, a gathering of prominent party members heard it read by Kamenev, who presided. Then Zinoviev spoke, in terms of fulsome devotion to the dead leader, ending with the verdict that “on one point” Lenin’s apprehensions had proved unfounded, and that it was not necessary to remove Stalin from his post. Kamenev supported Zinoviev. Nobody expressed any other view. Trotsky, just back from the Caucasus, sat silent through the proceedings.
The only clash arose over Krupskaya’s insistent demand that the testament should be read to the congress. The meeting decided, by a majority of 30 to 10, that it would be sufficient to communicate it confidentially to the leading delegates.
The problem of the opposition loomed large at the congress. Zinoviev restrained himself in his main report, ending with a rhetorical appeal to members of the opposition to come to the tribune to confess their error, and admit that the party was right. Many delegates denounced the opposition, and Trotsky by name. Trotsky rose painfully and reluctantly to meet Zinovigv’s challenge. “One cannot be right against the party,” he now proclaimed. The party could make “particular mistakes”; and he continued to believe that the resolution of the January conference condemning him was “incorrect and unjust”. Nevertheless as a loyal party member he was bound to say: “Just or unjust, this is my party, and I bear the consequences of its decision to the end.” Whether one regards it as the source of the inhibition which prevented Trotsky from giving battle, or as the rationalization of an inhibition which had deeper psychological roots, this declaration of submission, coupled with a refusal to confess error, was significant for his attitude at this time. It was only two years later—when it was already too late—that he regained his freedom of action, struck boldly at his enemies, and rallied his friends for his defence. The congress heard a plea from Krupskaya for peace between the factions and for “an end to further discussion”. This went unheeded. Stalin and Zinoviev wound up the proceedings with speeches full of vituperation of Trotsky. He was, however, re-elected to the party central committee—apparently by a narrow margin. It is said that Zinoviev and Kamenev sought to exclude Trotsky from the Politburo, but that the proposal foundered on the opposition of Stalin, anxious to preserve his reputation as a moderate.
During the rest of the year Trotsky’s literary prowess added fuel to the flames. In a commemorative pamphlet On Lenin he described his close personal association with Lenin at the time of the revolution in terms which seemed to inflate his own importance, and to relegate other participants to a secondary place. In October 1924, he published a long essay entitled Lessons of October, pillorying Kamenev and other “old Bolsheviks” for their resistance to Lenin’s April theses on Lenin’s return to Petrograd in April 1917, and the opposition of Zinoviev and Kamenev to the seizure of power in October, which had been cited by Lenin in the testament, with the qualification equating it with Trotsky’s non-Bolshevik record as things which should not be brought up against them (see p. 62 above). This onslaught provoked a spate of controversial replies, and encouraged the triumvirate and their followers to delve, deeply and spitefully, into Trotsky’s own record. Kamenev delivered a lengthy speech, published as a pamphlet under the title Leninism or Trotskyism?, in which he accused Trotsky of Menshevism, recounted his many sharp exchanges with Lenin, and added the henceforth familiar charge of “under-estimating the peasantry”. Stalin followed, more briefly and incisively, in the same vein. Denunciation of Trotsky became a routine exercise in the press and in party meetings. The most savage blow was the discovery and publication of a forgotten letter written by Trotsky in 1913, full of crude and angry invective against Lenin. No further evidence was required to prove the incompatibility of “Trotskyism” with “Leninism”.
Overwhelmed by this flood of invective Trotsky remained silent. He succumbed once more to the mysterious malady which had afflicted him in the previous winter, and doctors advised his removal to a milder climate. He did not attend the session of the party central committee in January 1925. He addressed a letter to it in which he claimed that his silence in face of “many untrue and even monstrous charges” had been “correct from the standpoint of the general interests of the party”; and “in the interest of our cause” he asked to be released from his duties as president of the Military-Revolutionary Council. He left for the Caucasus while the session was in progress. The committee hesitated over what sanctions to apply to him. Extremists, who included Zinoviev and the Leningrad delegation, proposed to expel him from the party, from the party central committee, or at the very least from the Politburo. Moderates, supported by Stalin, were content to relieve him of his military functions. The latter view prevailed; Trotsky was removed from the post of president of the Military-Revolutionary Council and People’s Commissar for War. H e was succeeded by Frunze, whose appointment was, the signal for a powerful campaign to build up the Red Army, neglected since the end of the civil war.
The controversy provoked by Lessons of October led, almost casually, to an important innovation in party doctrine. One of the items on which Lenin and Trotsky had once differed, and which was now brought up against Trotsky by his critics, was the so-called theory of “permanent revolution”—a phrase originally used by Marx. Trotsky in 1905 argued that a revolution breaking out in backward Russia, while in its first stage it would remain a bourgeois anti-feudal revolution, would automatically pass over into the stage of a socialist anti-capitalist revolution. Lenin was unwilling to accept the prospect of this transition unless, as both he and Trotsky expected, revolution in Russia kindled the flame of revolution in the advanced countries of the west. The dispute was of little importance, and had been forgotten long, before 1917, when Lenin in his April theses appeared to adopt a position nearer to that of Trotsky. But nobody displayed any interest in the issue till Bukharin, in December 1924, made his contribution to the campaign against Trotsky in an article on “The Theory of Permanent Revolution”. Bukharin was concerned merely to spotlight Lenin’s dissent from Trotsky, and drew no positive conclusion. But when, a few days later, Stalin also published a lengthy essay on the theme, written as an introduction to a collection of his speeches and articles, he used his denunciation of Trotsky’s theory as the springboard for a new doctrine of “socialism in one country”.
Stalin now abandoned what he later called “the incomplete and therefore incorrect” formula in his lectures of the previous spring, in which he had held that the efforts of one country were “insufficient for the organization of socialism”. Having declared that “Trotsky’s ‘permanent revolution’ is the negation of Lenin’s theory of proletarian revolution”, he proceeded to argue that Lenin had in several passages in his writings contemplated the possibility of a victory of socialism in one country. Stalin admitted that “for a complete victory of socialism, for a complete guarantee against a restoration of the old order of things, the combined efforts of the proletariat of several countries are indispensable”. But did this mean that “revolutionary Russia could not stand up against conservative Europe”, and build a socialist regime in the USSR?
Stalin’s answer was a resounding negative. The argument was complicated and casuistical, resting extensively on quotations taken out of context. It was also somewhat unreal, since it was conducted in conditions which neither Lenin nor Trotsky had considered possible—the survival of the revolutionary regime in Russia in the absence of revolution in other countries. But psychologically its impact was enormous. It supplied a positive and definable goal. It dispensed with vain expectations of help from abroad. It flattered national pride by presenting the revolution as a specifically Russian achievement, and the building of socialism as a lofty task in the fulfilment of which the Russian proletariat would set an example to the world. Hitherto the dependence of the prospect for socialism in Russia on socialist revolution in other countries had occupied a central place in party doctrine. Now the order of priority was reversed. Stalin boasted that the victory of the revolution in Russia was “the beginning and the premiss of world revolution”. Critics of Stalin’s doctrine were, implicitly and explicitly, revealed as faint-hearted, timid and mistrustful of the Russian people, sceptical of their capacity and determination. Socialism in one country was a powerful appeal to national patriotism. Indisputably it put Russia first.
Stalin had created a climate of opinion which he was to exploit to the utmost in his struggle against his rivals. But for the moment nobody took his abstruse excursion into theory very seriously. At the session of the party central committee in January 1925, which condemned Trotsky, socialism in one country was not mentioned. Bukharin hesitatingly reverted to it in a speech three months later, without mentioning Stalin, and in terms which suggested that he himself was one of its authors. It appeared, not very prominently, in the main resolution of the party conference in April 1925, which, on the strength of quotations from Lenin, announced that “in general the victory of socialism {not in the sense of final victory) is unconditionally possible in one country”. When the triumvirate broke up some months later, it was alleged that this passage had been the subject of a clash in the Politburo on the eve of the conference. But the evidence suggests that Zinoviev and Kamenev raised no strong objection, and were indifferent rather than hostile. When Stalin celebrated this modest victory in a speech after the conference, he produced yet another quotation from Lenin:
Only when the country is electrified, only when industry, agriculture and transport have been put on the technical basis of modern large-scale industry, only then shall we be finally victorious.
Hitherto socialism in one country might have been seen as a continuation of NEP, which had also turned its back on the bleak prospect of international revolution, and marked out the road to socialism through an alliance with the Russian peasant. Now Stalin was groping his way to the very different conception of a self-sufficient Russia, transformed and rendered economically independent through a modernized industry and agriculture. Stalin did not press the point, and was perhaps not yet fully conscious of its implications. But it was a dazzling long-term vision; and it fitted in with changes which were beginning to make themselves felt on the economic scene.
World History
