Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

It was not only Georgian nationalism that worried Stalin. His solution was a Transcaucasian Socialist Federation as a container for all the region’s nationalisms and ethnic differences. That federation, which consisted of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, was established at the end of 1921 and was a signatory of the treaty that established the USSR in 1922 (the other signatories being Russia, Ukraine and Belorussia).⁷⁴

THE GENERAL-SECRETARY

Differences over the Polish war, the national question and the Georgian crisis did some damage to Stalin’s personal relations with Lenin. But it was Lenin who pushed through Stalin’s appointment as general-secretary of the communist party in April 1922, a post that involved oversight of the central committee apparatus, allocation of key personnel and agenda-setting for Politburo meetings. A praktik as well as an intellectual, Stalin’s appointment to the post made a lot of sense, particularly since he had again proved himself to be Lenin’s loyal lieutenant. At the 10th party congress in March 1921 he backed Lenin in a dispute about the role of Soviet trade unions. Trotsky wanted to subordinate unions to state commands, while the leftist Workers Opposition wanted prolet-arians to directly control their factories. Stalin agreed with Lenin that the role of trade unions was to protect workers’ interests in accordance with the party’s political directives. He also sided with Lenin on the introduction of the New Economic Policy – the party’s retreat from the draconian ‘war communism’ of the civil war years. As a consistent advocate of party unity, Stalin supported the congress’s ban on factions – groups within the party that operated with their own internal organisation and discipline. However, that ban did not prevent Lenin from asking Stalin to secure control of the central party apparatus for their group.⁷⁵

Stalin’s ascendancy to the general-secretaryship coincided with the culmination of the party’s encroachment on state functions which had begun during the civil war. When Lenin seized power in 1917 he intended to govern through state institutions, i.e. the Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom) and its respective departments and subunits. But that did not work out too well. Within Sovnarkom there was too much talk and too little action. It was not well suited to rapid and decisive decision-making, especially during the civil war. Sovnarkom’s democratic legitimacy rested on the Soviets, which it supposedly represented, but these had collapsed during the civil war. Gradually, the party took over many state functions. The Politburo took all the important decisions and the Soviet regime rapidly evolved into a hybrid ‘party-state’ in which the party’s power predominated at every level of state and society. The party did not just control or occupy the state – its organisation and personnel were the most important arm of the state.⁷⁶

Lenin had intended to counter-balance Stalin’s power as general-secretary by appointing Trotsky one of his deputies in Sovnarkom, but in May 1922 he had the first of a series of debilitating strokes.⁷⁷

The succession struggle began while Lenin was ailing and one of the early salvos was fired by his soon-to-be widow, Nadezhda Krupskaya, when she revealed the existence of what became known as ‘Lenin’s Testament’ – a series of notes dictated by him from his sickbed in late 1922 and early 1923. Doubts have been expressed about the provenance of the testament and it may be that Krupskaya and the staff who wrote down Lenin’s utterings put some words into his mouth but, crucially, no one questioned the authenticity of Lenin’s notes at the time.⁷⁸

About Stalin and Trotsky, Lenin supposedly said:

Comrade Stalin, having become General-Secretary, has concentrated enormous power in his hands, and I am not sure that he always knows how to use that power with sufficient caution. On the other hand, Comrade Trotsky . . . is distinguished not only by his exceptional ability – personally, he is, to be sure, the most able man in the present CC – but also by his too far-reaching self-confidence and a disposition to be far too much attracted by the purely administrative side of affairs. These two qualities of the two most able leaders of the present CC might, quite innocently, lead to a split, and if our Party does not take measures to prevent it, a split might arise unexpectedly.⁷⁹

Even more damning was this addendum to Lenin’s testament: