Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him

At first Stalin let Zinoviev and Kamenev, who envied Trotsky his military laurels, do the dirty work. On January 4, 1925, Zinoviev drafted a proposal: “To deem it impossible, in the present condition of things that Trotsky has created, for Trotsky to hold such posts as the Chairman of the Military Council and member of the Politburo. . . . ” Stalin and Bukharin meanwhile wore masks of neutrality. Trotsky reacted wildly: he declared himself too ill to take part in the plenum and published in Pravda a defense against “monstrous accusations,” but his sense of party discipline was so entrenched that he obeyed the Central Committee.

wrote Trotsky off. “The party has had to dethrone Trotsky solely because he, by virtually attacking Zinoviev and Kamenev and other members of the Central Committee of our party, has raised his hand against party unity . . . ”he wrote to Stalin and Orjonikidze on October 6, 1925. By now Stalin could dispose of his temporary allies: Zinoviev and Kamenev, used by Stalin to weaken Trotsky’s grip, were themselves declared to be a faction. , as unhappy as a sheep-dog whose flock has scattered, hated factional infighting; he accused Zinoviev and Kamenev of self-serving cowardice, of setting the workers against the peasants. He and OGPU were now entirely Stalin’s men— there was no other shepherd for the sheepdogs to follow.

The dispute in 1925 and 1926 between Zinoviev and Kamenev on the one hand, and Stalin and Bukharin on the other had real basis. Zinoviev and Kamenev’s supporters were Leningrad (as Petrograd had been renamed in 1924) and Moscow factory workers, aggrieved by unemployment and by the low purchasing power of their wages when in work; their real income was half what it had been before the revolution. “What did we struggle for?” was the workers’ slogan. The prosperity of the NEP men, who lived by retail trade, gambling, and racketeering, and the peasantry, too poor to purchase manufactured goods but self-sufficient, made the workers resentful. They supported Zinoviev and Kamenev who, within a few months of disarming Trotsky, were arguing for Trotsky’s program: winding up the NEP and dispossessing the peasantry for the sake of the urban proletariat who had made the revolution.

In December 1925 at the fourteenth party congress Zinoviev spoke out against Stalin’s moderate line on agriculture and industrialization but the brilliance of his oratory was useless. Stalin, not Zinoviev, received an orchestrated “storm of applause.” Zinoviev was removed from the Politburo, from his chairmanship of the Comintern, and from his power base in Leningrad. Too late, Zinoviev saw Stalin for what he was: “a bloodthirsty Osetian who doesn’t know what conscience is . . . ” That remark sealed his fate.

Stalin kicked hardest when his opponent was down; he turned on Zinoviev for neglecting his job in the state planning office. Zinoviev tried to rouse the rabble in his fiefdom in Leningrad.²⁹ But Stalin’s cronies had grudges against Zinoviev and Stalin himself loathed the whole of Leningrad as a nest of opposition vipers.

Opposing Stalin at the party congress, Kamenev chose words more judicious but just as damning as Zinoviev’s: “We are against the theory of single rule, we are against creating a ‘leader.’ . . . I think that our general secretary is not the person who can unite the old Bolshevik headquarters around himself.” Kamenev first lost his full membership in the Politburo and then, in January 1926, was made commissar for trade. A few months later he was ambassador to Italy and out of the Politburo.

During their struggle Stalin and the Zinoviev–Kamenev duo had both made conciliatory overtures toward Trotsky.³⁰ Trotsky was still tempted by power, but his last conversation with Stalin disabused him and he looked for other straws to clutch at. However, ’s death in July 1926 removed the last influential Bolshevik who truly believed in reconciliation. In his letter to Stalin and Orjonikidze of October 1925 he had warned them, and Zinoviev and Kamenev:

Without unity, without this condition, Thermidor is inevitable. . . . The result is inevitable: Leninists, like spiders, will devour each other, as foreseen by the Mensheviks and by Trotsky, who are now coming onto the scene, the first as “equality and democracy,” the other as a “communist” Bonaparte. . . . You claim to be the official and sole heirs of the leader [Lenin] of the workers and peasants. Ambition is killing you. . . .³¹

It was too late: the spiders were set to devour each other.