A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

Both men had virtues in his eyes. Trotsky was a brilliant orator and administrator: he more than anyone had won the civil war. But his pride and arrogance — not to speak of his past as a Menshevik or his Jewish-intellectual looks — made him unpopular in the party (both the Military and the Workers' Oppositions had to a large extent been against him personally). Trotsky was not a natural 'comrade'. He would always rather be the general of his own army than a colonel in a collective command. It was this which gave him the position of an 'outsider' to the rank and file. Although a member of the Politburo, Trotsky had never held a party post. He rarely attended party meetings. Lenin's feelings towards Trotsky were summarized by Maria Ul'ianova: 'He did not feel sympathy for Trotsky — he had too many characteristics that made it extraordinarily hard to work collectively with him. But he was an industrious worker and a talented person, and for V I. that was the main thing, so he tried to keep him on board. Whether it was worth it is another question.'³¹

Stalin, by contrast, seemed at first much more suited to the needs of a collective leadership. During the civil war he had taken on himself a huge number of mundane jobs that no one else had wanted — he was the Commissar for Nationalities, the Commissar of Rabkrin, a member of the Revolutionary Military Council, of the Politburo and the Orgburo, and the Chairman of the Secretariat — with the result that he soon gained a reputation for modest and industrious mediocrity. Here was the 'grey blur' whom Sukhanov had described in 1917. All the party leaders made the same mistake of underestimating Stalin's potential power, and his ambition to exercise it, as a result of the patronage he had accrued from holding all these posts. Lenin was as guilty as the rest. For a man of such intolerance, he proved remarkably tolerant of Stalin's many sins, not least his growing rudeness towards himself, in the belief that he needed Stalin to maintain unity in the party. It was for this reason that, on Stalin's own urging, and apparently backed by Kamenev, he agreed to make Stalin the party's first General Secretary in April 1922. It was to prove a crucial appointment — one that enabled Stalin to come to power. Yet by the time Lenin came to realize this, and tried to have Stalin removed from the post, it was already too late.³²

The key to Stalin's growing power was his control of the party apparatus in the provinces. As the Chairman of the Secretariat, and the only Politburo member in the Orgburo, he could promote his friends and dismiss opponents.

During the course of 1922 alone more than 10,000 provincial officials were appointed by the Orgburo and the Secretariat, most of them on Stalin's personal recommendation. They were to be his main supporters during the power struggle against Trotsky in 1922—3. Most of them came, like Stalin himself, from very humble backgrounds and had received little formal education. Mistrusting intellectuals such as Trotsky, they preferred to place their trust in Stalin's wisdom, with his simple calls for proletarian unity and Bolshevik discipline, when it came to matters of ideology.

Lenin had gone along with Stalin's growing powers of 'appointmentism' from Moscow as an antidote to the formation of provincial opposition factions (the Workers' Opposition, for example, remained strong in the Ukraine and Samara until 1923). As the Chairman of the Secretariat, Stalin spent much of his time rooting out potential troublemakers from the provincial party apparatus. He received monthly reports from the Cheka (renamed the GPU in 1922) on the activities of the provincial leaders. Boris Bazhanov, Stalin's personal secretary, recalls his habit of pacing up and down his large Kremlin office, puffing on his pipe, and then issuing the curt command to remove such and such a Party Secretary and send so and so to replace him. There were few party leaders, including members of the Politburo, whom Stalin did not have under surveillance by the end of 1922. Under the guise of enforcing Leninist orthodoxy, Stalin was thus able to gather information about all his rivals, including many things they would rather have kept secret, which he could use to secure their loyalty to himself.³³