Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (52 page)

However, immediately after Lenin’s incapacitation and mindful of his criticisms, Stalin sought power by posing as a moderate and a man of the Centre. His problem was as follows. By controlling the rapidly expanding Secretariat Stalin was already in virtual control of the party machinery and in the process of filling the Central Committee with his creatures. On the Politburo, however, four important figures stood between him and autocracy: Trotsky, the most famous and ferocious of the Bolsheviks, who controlled the army; Zinoviev, who ran the Leningrad party – for which Stalin, then and later, had a peculiar hatred; Kamenev, who controlled the Moscow party, now the most important; and Bukharin, the leading theorist. The first three leaned towards the Left, the last to the Right, and the way in which Stalin divided and used them to destroy each other, and then appropriated their policies as required – he seems to have had none of his own – is a classic exercise in power-politics.

It is important to realize that, just as Lenin was the creator of the new autocracy and its instruments and practice of mass terror, so also there were no innocents among his heirs. All were vicious killers.
Even Bukharin, whom Lenin called ‘soft as wax’ and who has been presented as the originator of ‘socialism with a human face’,
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was an inveterate denouncer of others, ‘a gaoler of the best Communists’ as he was bitterly called.
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Zinoviev and Kamenev were wholly unscrupulous party bosses. Trotsky, who after his fall presented himself as a believer in party democracy and who was apotheosized by his follower and hagiographer Isaac Deutscher as the epitome of all that was noblest in the Bolshevik movement, was never more than a sophisticated political gangster.
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He carried through the original October 1917
putsch
and thereafter slaughtered opponents of the regime with the greatest abandon. It was he who first held wives and children of Tsarist officers hostage, threatening to shoot them for non-compliance with Soviet orders, a device soon built into the system. He was equally ruthless with his own side, shooting commissars and Red Army commanders who ‘showed cowardice’ (i.e. retreated), later to become a universal Stalinist practice; the rank-and-file were decimated.
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Trotsky always took the most ruthless line. He invented conscript labour and destroyed the independent trade unions. He used unspeakable brutality to put down the Kronstadt rising of ordinary sailors and was even preparing to use poison gas when it collapsed.
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Like Lenin, he identified himself with history and argued that history was above all moral restraints.

Trotsky remained a moral relativist of the most dangerous kind right to the end. ‘Problems of revolutionary morality’, he wrote in his last, posthumous book, ‘are fused with the problems of revolutionary strategy and tactics.’
¹⁰
There were no such things as moral criteria; only criteria of political efficacy. He said it was right to murder the Tsar’s children, as he had done, because it was politically useful and those who carried it out represented the proletariat; but Stalin did not represent the proletariat – he had become a ‘bureaucratic excess’ – and therefore it was wrong for him to murder Trotsky’s children.
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Trotsky’s followers are, of course, notorious for their attachment to this subjectively defined code of ethics and their contempt for objective morality.

The term ‘Trotskyist’, first used as a term of abuse by Zinoviev, was defined in its mature form by Stalin, who created the distinction between ‘permanent revolution’ (Trotsky) and ‘revolution in one country’ (Stalin). In fact they all believed in immediate world revolution to begin with, and all turned to consolidating the regime when it didn’t happen. Trotsky wanted to press ahead with industrialization faster than Stalin but both were, from first to last, opportunists. They had graduated in the same slaughterhouse and their quarrel was essentially about who should be its new high priest. Had Trotsky come out on top, he would probably have been even
more bloodthirsty than Stalin. But he would not have lasted: he lacked the skills of survival.

Indeed Stalin found it easy to destroy him. Soviet internal struggles have always been about ambition and fear rather than policies. Although Kamenev and Zinoviev were broadly in agreement with Trotsky’s Left line, Stalin formed a triumvirate with them to prevent him using the Red Army to stage a personal
putsch.
He used the two Leftists to hunt Trotsky down and afterwards was able to present them as violently impetuous and himself as the servant of moderation. All the crucial moves took place in 1923, while Lenin was still in a coma. Stalin flexed his muscles in the summer by getting the
OGPU
to arrest a number of party members for ‘indiscipline’ and persuading his two Leftist allies to endorse the arrest of the first major Bolshevist victim, Sultan-Galiyev (Stalin did not actually murder him until six years later).
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All the time he was building up his following in local organizations and the cc.

Trotsky made every mistake open to him. During his 1920 visit Bertrand Russell had shrewdly noted the contrast between Trotsky’s histrionics and vanity, and Lenin’s lack of such weakness. An put it in 1928: ‘Flushed gentlemen account of the 1923–4 Politburo meetings says that Trotsky never bothered to conceal his contempt for his colleagues, sometimes slamming out or ostentatiously turning his back and reading a novel.
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He scorned the notion of political intrigue and still more its demeaning drudgery. He never attempted to use the army since he put the party first; but then he did not build up a following in the party either. He must have been dismayed when for the first time he attacked Stalin in the autumn of 1923 and discovered how well-entrenched he was. Trotsky wanted the palm without the dust, a fatal mistake for a gangster who could not appeal from the mafia to the public. He was often sick or away; never there at the right time. He even missed Lenin’s state funeral, a serious error since it was Stalin’s first move towards restoring the reverential element in Russian life that had been so sadly missed since the destruction of the throne and church.
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Soon Stalin was resurrecting the old Trotsky—Lenin rows. At the thirteenth Party Congress in May 1924 he branded Trotsky with the Leninist term of ‘fractionalist’. Trotsky refused to retract his criticism that Stalin was becoming too powerful. But he could not dispute Lenin’s condemnation of internal opposition and, like a man accused of heresy by the Inquisition, he was disarmed by his own religious belief. ‘Comrades,’ he admitted, ‘none of us wishes to be right or can be right against the party. The party is in the last resort always right… I know that one cannot be right against the party. One can only be right with the party and through the party, since history has created no other paths to the
realization of what is right.’
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Since Stalin was already in control of the party, Trotsky’s words forged the ice-pick that crushed his skull sixteen years later.

By the end of 1924 Stalin, with Kamenev and Zinoviev doing the dirty work, had created the heresy of ‘Trotskyism’ and related it to Trotsky’s earlier disputes with Lenin, who had been embalmed and put into his apotheosis-tomb five months earlier. In January 1925 Stalin was thus able to strip Trotsky of the army control with the full approval of the party. Party stalwarts were now informed that Trotsky’s part in the Revolution was very much less than he claimed and his face was already being blacked out of relevant photographs – the first instance of Stalinist re-writing of history.
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Trotsky’s first replacement as army boss, Frunze, proved awkward; so it seems Stalin had him murdered in October 1925 in the course of an operation his doctors had advised against.
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His successor, a creature later to be known as Marshal Voroshilov, proved entirely obedient and accepted the rapid penetration of the army by the OGPU, which Stalin now controlled.

With Trotsky destroyed (he was expelled from the Politburo October 1926, from the party the following month, sent into internal exile in 1928 and exiled from Russia in 1929; murdered on Stalin’s orders in Mexico in 1940), Stalin turned on his Leftist allies. Early in 1925 he stole Kamenev’s Moscow party from under his nose by suborning his deputy, Uglanov. In September he brought in Bukharin and the Right to help in a frontal attack on Zinoviev—Kamenev, and had them decisively defeated at the Parry Congress in December. Immediately afterwards, Stalin’s most trusted and ruthless henchman, Molotov, was sent to Leningrad with a powerful squad of party ‘heavies’, to smash up Zinoviev’s party apparatus there and take it over – essentially the same methods, but on a larger scale, that Al Capone was employing to extend his territory in Chicago at that very time.
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Frightened, Zinoviev now joined forces with Trotsky, the man he had helped to break. But it was too late: they were both immediately expelled from the party, and at the fifteenth Party Congress in December 1926, Kamenev’s protest was shouted down by the massed ranks of carefully drilled Stalinists who now filled the party’s ranks. Consciously echoing Lenin, Stalin came out into the open against his old allies: ‘Enough comrades, an end must be put to this game …. Kamenev’s speech is the most lying, pharasaical, scoundrelly and roguish of all the opposition speeches that have been made from this platform.’
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The moment the Left was beaten and disarmed, Stalin began to adopt their policy of putting pressure on the peasants to speed industrialization, thus preparing the means to destroy Bukharin and
the Right. The big clash came on 10 July 1928 at a meeting of the Central Committee, when Bukharin argued that while the
kulak
himself was not a threat – ‘we can shoot him down with machine-guns’ – forced collectivization would unite all the peasants against the government. Stalin interrupted him with sinister piety, ‘A fearful dream, but God is merciful!’
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God might be; not the General-Secretary. The next day, a scared Bukharin speaking on behalf of his allies Rykov, the nominal head of the government, and Tomsky, the hack ‘trade union’ leader, had a secret meeting with Kamenev and offered to form a united front to stop Stalin. He now realized, he said, that Stalin was not primarily interested in policy but in sole power: ‘He will strangle us. He is an unprincipled intriguer who subordinates everything to his appetite for power. At any given moment he will change his theories in order to get rid of someone … [He is] Genghis Khan!’ He seems to have thought that Yagoda, of the
OGPU
, would come over to them; but he was misinformed.
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None of these nervous men had the numerical support in the key party bodies to outvote Stalin; or the means, in the shape of trained men with guns, to overrule him by force; or the skill and resolution – both of which he had shown in abundance – to destroy him by intrigue. In 1929 they were all dealt with: Rykov ousted from the premiership, Tomsky from the trade union leadership, and both, plus Bukharin, forced publicly to confess their errors (Kamenev and Zinoviev had already done so). They could now be tried and murdered at leisure.

Stalin had already begun to perfect the dramaturgy of terror. Drawing on his monkish memories, he arranged party meetings to provide a well-rehearsed antiphonal dialogue between himself and his claque, with Stalin suggesting moderation in dealing with party ‘enemies’ and the claque insisting on severity. Thus, reluctantly demanding the expulsion of Trotsky and Zinoviev, Stalin said he had been against this before and had been ‘cursed’ by ‘honest Bolsheviks’ for being too lenient. The claque: ‘Yes – and we still do curse you for it.’
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In May-July 1929 Stalin staged the first of his show-trials, against a group of Donbass mining engineers charged with ‘sabotage’. The script was written by the
OGPU
official Y.G. Yevdokimov, one of Stalin’s creatures, and featured the twelve-year-old son of one of the accused, who denounced his father and called for his execution.
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The actual head of the
OGPU
, Menzhinsky, opposed this trial, as did some Politburo members.
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But this was the last time Stalin met genuine opposition from within the secret police or security apparatus. Towards the end of the year he ordered the shooting of the senior
OGPU
official Yakov Blyumkin, the first party member to be executed for an intra-party crime.
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Thereafter the trials went exactly as Stalin planned them, down to
the last indignant crowd-scene, like some gigantic production by the Soviet cineaste Sergei Eisenstein. While the trial of the industrial Party’ was taking place the next year, the body of the court shouted, at carefully arranged intervals, ‘Death to the wreckers!’ and in the streets outside, thousands of workers marched past shouting ‘Death, death, death!’
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By 1929 Stalin had the all-purpose term
Stakhtyites
(wreckers) for anyone he wished to destroy. As he put it,
‘Stakhtyites
are now lurking in all branches of our industry. Many, though far from all, have been caught…. Wrecking is all the more dangerous because it is linked with international capital. Bourgeois wrecking is an indubitable sign that capitalist elements… are gathering strength for new attacks on the Soviet Union.’
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He was rapidly moving to the point when he had only to mention a list of names to the Central Committee and would receive the instant instructions: ‘Arrest, try, shoot!’
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