A people's tragedy

Getting Lenin out of the way was just what Stalin needed. Through his spies Stalin had learned of Lenin’s secret letter to the Twelfth Party Congress. If he was to survive in office, he had to prevent it from being read out there. On 9 March Stalin used his power as the General Secretary to put off the Congress from mid-March until mid-April. Trotsky, although he stood to gain most from Stalin’s likely downfall at the Congress, readily agreed to its delay. He even reassured Kamenev that, whilst he agreed ‘with Lenin in substance’ (i.e. on the Georgian question and party reform), he was ‘for preserving the status quo’ and ‘against removing Stalin’ provided there was a ‘radical change’ of policies. Trotsky concluded with the hope that: ‘There should be no more intrigues but honest co-operation.’ The outcome of this ‘rotten compromise’ — just what Lenin had warned him not to make — was that the Party Congress witnessed Stalin’s triumph rather than his final defeat. Lenin’s notes on the nationality question and the reform of the party were distributed among the delegates, discussed, and then dismissed by the leadership. Most of the delegates, in any case, probably shared the view expressed by Stalin that at a time when unity was needed in the party above all else there was no need to waste time discussing democracy. The urge to silence Trotsky, and all criticism of the Politburo, was in itself a crucial factor in Stalin’s rise to power.43 Lenin’s notes on the question of the succession, including his demand that Stalin be removed, were not read out at the Congress and remained suppressed until 1956.fn5

It is difficult to explain Trotsky’s conduct. At this crucial moment of the power struggle, when he could have won a major victory, he somehow engineered his own defeat. Among the forty members of the new Central Committee, elected at the Congress, he could count only three supporters. Perhaps, sensing his growing isolation, especially after Lenin’s stroke, Trotsky had decided that his only hope lay in trying to appease the triumvirate. His memoirs are filled with the conviction that he had been brought down by a conspiracy of its three leaders. There was certainly a very real danger that, if he had opted to defy them, Trotsky would have been accused of ‘factionalism’ — and after 1921 this was a political death sentence. But there is also some truth in the claim that Trotsky lacked the stomach for a fight. There was an inner weakness to his character, one that stemmed from his pride. Faced with the prospect of defeat, Trotsky preferred not to compete. One of his oldest friends tells the story of a chess game in New York. Trotsky had challenged him to a game, ‘evidently considering himself a good chess player’. But it turned out that he was weak and, having lost the game, went into a temper and refused to play another game.44 This small episode was typical of Trotsky: when he came up against a superior rival, one who was able to out-manœuvre him, he chose to retreat and sulk in glorious isolation rather than lose face by trying to confront him on disadvantageous terms.

This was, in a sense, what Trotsky did next. Rather than fight Stalin in the highest party organs he took up the standard of the Bolshevik rank and file, posing as the champion of party democracy against the ‘police regime’ of the leadership. It was a desperate gamble — Trotsky was hardly known for his democratic habits and he ran the deadly risk of ‘factionalism’ — but then he was in desperate straits. On 8 October he addressed an Open Letter to the Central Committee in which he accused it of suppressing all democracy within the party:

The participation of the party masses in the actual formation of the party organization is becoming increasingly marginal. A peculiar secretarial psychology has been established in the past year or so, its main feature is the belief that the [party] secretary is capable of deciding every and any question, without even knowing the basic facts … There is a very broad stratum of party workers, both in the government and party apparatus, who completely abnegate their own party opinion, at least as expressed openly, as if assuming that it is the apparatus of the secretarial hierarchy which formulate party opinion and policy. Beneath this stratum of abstainers from opinion lies the broad party masses, for whom every decision already comes down in the form of a summons or command.

Support for Trotsky came from the so-called ‘Group of 46’ — Antonov-Ovseenko, Piatakov and Preobrazhensky were the best known — who also wrote in protest to the Central Committee. The climate of fear in the party was such, they claimed, that even old comrades had become ‘afraid to converse with one another’.45