A people's tragedy

Stalin’s plans were bitterly opposed by the Georgian Bolsheviks, whose attempts to build up their own fragile political base depended on the concession of these national rights. Already, in March 1922, Stalin and his fellow-Georgian, Ordzhonikidze, head of Moscow’s Caucasian Bureau, had forced Georgia, much against its leaders’ will, to merge with Armenia and Azerbaijan in a Transcaucasian Federation. It seemed to Georgia’s leaders that Stalin and his henchman were treating Georgia as their fiefdom and riding roughshod over them. They rejected the autonomization plan and threatened to resign if Moscow forced it through.fn3

It was at this point that Lenin intervened. To begin with he took Stalin’s side. Although his proposals were undesirable — Lenin forced them to be dropped in favour of the federal union that later became known as the Soviet Union Treaty ratified in 1924 — the Georgians had been wrong to issue ultimatums and he told them so in an angry cable on 21 October. The next day the entire Central Committee of the Georgian Communist Party resigned in protest. Nothing quite like it had ever happened before in the history of the party. From late November, however, when Lenin was generally beginning to turn against Stalin, his position changed. New evidence from Georgia made him think again. He despatched a fact-finding commission to Tiflis, headed by Dzerzhinsky and Rykov, from which he learned that during the course of an argument Ordzhonikidze had beaten up a prominent Georgian Bolshevik (who had called him a ‘Stalinist arsehole’). Lenin was outraged. It confirmed his impressions of Stalin’s growing rudeness and made him see the Georgian issue in a different light. In his notes to the Party Congress on 30–1 December he compared Stalin to an old-style Russian chauvinist, a ‘rascal and a tyrant’, who could only bully and subjugate small nations, such as Georgia, whereas what was needed from Russia’s rulers was ‘profound caution, sensitivity, and a readiness to compromise’ with their legitimate national aspirations. Lenin even claimed that in a socialist federation the rights of ‘oppressed nations’, such as Georgia, should be greater than those of the ‘oppressor nations’ (i.e. Russia) so as to ‘compensate for the inequality which obtains in actual practice’. On 8 January, in what was to be the final letter of his life, Lenin promised the Georgian opposition that he was following their cause ‘with all my heart’.38

Lenin’s second major concern in his Testament was to check the growing powers of the party’s leading organs, which were now under Stalin’s control. Two years earlier, when his own command had been supreme, Lenin had condemned the proposals of the Democratic Centralists for more democracy and glasnost in the party; but now that Stalin was the great dictator Lenin put forward similar plans. He proposed to democratize the Central Committee by adding 50 to 100 new members recruited from the ordinary workers and peasants in the lower organs of the party. To make the Politburo more accountable he also suggested that the Central Committee should have the right to attend all its meetings and to inspect its documents. Moreover, the Central Control Commission, merged with Rabkrin and streamlined to 300 or 400 conscious workers, should have the right to check the Politburo’s powers. These proposals were a belated effort (similar in many ways to Gorbachev’s perestroika) to bridge the widening gap between the party bosses and the rank and file, to make the leadership more democratic, more open and efficient, without loosening the party’s overall grip on society.

The final issue of Lenin’s last writings — and also by far the most explosive — was the question of the succession. In his notes of 24 December Lenin voiced his worry about a split between Trotsky and Stalin — it was partly for this reason that he had proposed to enlarge the size of the Central Committee — and, as if to underline his preference for a collective leadership, pointed out the faults of the major party leaders. Kamenev and Zinoviev were compromised by their stand against him in October. Bukharin was ‘the favourite of the whole Party, but his theoretical views can only be classified as Marxist with reserve’. As for Trotsky, he ‘was 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 work’. But it was for Stalin that Lenin’s most devastating criticisms were reserved. Having become the General Secretary, he had ‘accumulated unlimited power in his hands, and I am not sure that he will always know how to use this power with sufficient caution’. On 4 January Lenin added the following note: