Stalin’s Rise to Power: beware the man nobody sees
When Lenin died on January 21st, 1924, the Bolshevik regime was established. It had survived the early days, won the civil war and re-consolidated. The one-party, highly centralised, Marxist state was a reality; the dictatorship of the proletariat was in place.
The overriding issue on Lenin’s death was how the Soviet Union would be governed: by a small group of leaders or by a single leader, and if the latter, who? There was also the matter of Lenin’s testament and its postscript, written by Lenin when he was incapacitated by a stroke, aware that he was probably dying, and was concerned that the Party would split between Trotsky and Stalin factions. I won’t go into that in detail here, I want to focus on how Stalin’s rivals for the “succession” saw him, but Lenin expressed concern that Stalin had too much power already and threw a question over whether he had the right temperament to be a future leader.
So, how was Stalin perceived within the party? Stalin, who was from the most humble background of all the leaders, was also the most poorly educated and, being from Georgia, was something of an outsider. Russian was his second language and he spoke it with a strong Georgian accent. He was intelligent but was no match for the intellectual brilliance of Leon Trotsky or Nikolai Bukharin.
By the age of twenty-one Stalin was a committed Marxist revolutionary, and Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? (published in 1902) had won him over to Lenin’s path to revolution: a tightly knit vanguard party of dedicated revolutionaries. As a committed Bolshevik, before 1917 Stalin focused on raising funds, mostly through bank hold-ups and train robberies. He was arrested, by no means for the first time, in February, 1913, and exiled in Siberia. He was not to return until Nicholas and Tsarism had been overthrown. As for the October Revolution, Stalin was a member of the Bolshevik Central Committee and the Military Revolutionary Committee but did not play a prominent part in the events that led to the Bolshevik seizure of power. Nevertheless, he was made editor of Pravda, the official newspaper of the Communist Party.
Though never a sycophant, Stalin would disagree with Lenin over specific policies, he never questioned Lenin’s leadership. He was a loyal Leninist to the very core. For his part, Lenin, despite his Testament, had taken a great liking to Stalin and valued his commitment, ruthlessness as well as his thinking. He was intimately attuned to the issues people faced and, as a Georgian, was also sensitive to the nationalities issue. In 1912, having talked about the issue at length, Lenin suggested Stalin write an article on it which he duly did. It made Stalin the authority on the subject and led to him being made commissar of nationalities when Lenin formed his government.
As Commissar for Nationalities he was in charge of officials in the many regions and republics that made up the vast USSR or Soviet Union (as it had become in 1922) and, as the Liaison Officer between the Politburo and Orgburo (and Stalin was a member of both), which he had been since 1919, he was in a unique position to monitor both the Party’s policies and its personnel, while as General Secretary of the Party, a position Lenin foisted him into in 1922, he both recorded and conveyed Party policy. So, as Lenin had raised concern in his Testament, Stalin did indeed have ‘unlimited authority concentrated in his hands’. And he used it to greatest effect in his power of patronage, appointing individuals to key positions of power in both Party and government, expecting in return to be able to count on their support when required.
What is more, the so-called ‘Lenin enrolment’, the drive by the Party between 1922 and 1925 to recruit more proletarian members had resulted in Party membership almost doubling to 600,000. The task of vetting the new members fell to the officials of the Secretariat, under Stalin’s direction as General Secretary. These new members were not particularly politically savvy or powerful but they did know that Party membership, and membership of the various Party committees at local and regional level, benefited them (that’s why many had joined in the first place), and they were not going to upset the person at the top of the patronage ladder: Stalin.
So, Stalin’s promotion to, and work as, General Secretary of the Party proved crucial for, no matter the superior intellect or debating skills of his rivals, no matter even if they were right, he could always outmanoeuvre, outvote and so defeat them.
Stalin was described by Nikolai Sukhanov, a Menshevik and author of Russian Revolution, as a ‘grey blur’ (Stalin would have his revenge, having him shot in 1939), whilst Trotsky labelled him, the party’s ‘outstanding mediocrity’ (Stalin had him killed – by an ice axe – in 1940), whilst his nickname was ‘Comrade filing cabinet’[1]. His demeanour was modest and unassuming and he was no great orator, nevertheless he showed himself to be an astute political operator.
After Lenin’s death in 1924, Stalin did everything possible to tie himself to Lenin. Stalin made sure to orchestrate Lenin’s funeral so as to present himself in the best possible light (and Trotsky in the worst). He gave a series of lectures at Moscow university which were published in Pravda before being published in a book, The Foundations of Leninism. It sold more than seventeen million copies and came to be regarded as a “must-read” text. A sign of things to come could have been garnered from a speech he gave just before Lenin’s death which was published as Trotskyism or Leninism? And at the end of 1924, in an article entitled ‘October and Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution’ which was published in newspapers he ridiculed the notion and argued instead that it was ‘perfectly possible and even probable’ that Russia could go it alone. So even before Lenin’s death, Stalin had begun to manipulate the way people were seen as either Leninists or non-Leninists, and a non-Leninist was an anti-Leninist, an enemy of Soviet Russia.
But still he seemed to be the man in the shadows. There are numerous references to how Stalin, at meetings, said little but watched and listened a lot. Boris Bazhanov, Stalin’s secretary for Politburo matters from 1923 to 1925, wrote, ‘Stalin did not confide his innermost thoughts to anybody. Only very rarely did he share his ideas and impressions with his closest associates. He possessed in a high degree the gift of silence, and in this respect he was unique in a country where everybody talked far too much.’[2] He was playing a waiting game, leaving others to make mistakes before exploiting them. As Alan Bullock points out he showed oodles of persistence, patience and caution.[3] And all this led to him being underestimated. Beware the man nobody sees!
[1] Quotes from Richard Overy, The Dictators, p. 9
[2] Alan Bullock, Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives, p. 93
Stalin’s Consolidation of Power: the Ryutin Affair, ‘the original conspiracy’
By 1929 Stalin had seen off his rivals from both the Left and the Right of the Party. He was the leading member of Sovnarkom, the Central Committee, the Politburo and Ogburo, and as General Secretary, headed the Party’s Secretariat. But it wasn’t enough, he wanted to command the Party, dominate it. He wanted to command and direct the Revolution too.
Yet Stalin wasn’t in full control. The process of collectivisation had led to so many riots and demonstrations from peasants that Stalin was obliged to announce a pause, blaming activists in the countryside for being ‘dizzy with success’. His rivals were still around too, the Sixteenth Party Congress meeting June-July, 1930, had re-elected Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky to the Central Committee, and even Trotsky could plausibly still be a threat. Collectivisation and rapid industrialisation had faced criticism at the Sixteenth Party Congress, and there were expulsions from the Central Committee in December, 1930, after criticisms had been made concerning the excesses that had been committed in the process of collectivisation. Workers in the cities were also disgruntled with the long hours, poor conditions, low wages and lack of goods. There was anger at the high handedness of the GPU, the secret police, too.
In June, 1932, with massive famine (between 4-5 million deaths) now a consequence of collectivisation and the backlash from the peasantry, Stalin faced a head-on challenge to his authority when Ryutin, on the Right of the Party, wrote an “Appeal” to all members of the Party and a two-hundred page document, ‘Stalin and the Crisis of the Proletarian Revolution’. It was revised by some ten-to-twelve other prominent communists before being circulated amongst fellow-communists that were thought would be sympathetic (including Kamenev and Zinoviev). Whilst the “Appeal” called for Stalin’s removal by force, the document called for the end of forced collectivisation and reduced investment in industry, as well as the rehabilitation of the defeated United Opposition (including Trotsky). Picking up the baton from Lenin’s Testament, it described Stalin as ‘the evil genius of the Russian Revolution, who, motivated by a personal desire for power and revenge, has brought the revolution to the verge of ruin’[1] It was a damming criticism of Stalin, his policies and the manner in which they were being executed (no pun intended), as well as his pursuit of dictatorial power which had been allowed to get out of control. It pictured him as ‘the evil genius of the Revolution.’ This was the ‘Ryutin Affair’, and its implications were to drag on throughout Stalin’s purges, consistently cited as ‘the original conspiracy’.
In 1932 though, it was a serious indication of the extent of opposition to Stalin. Senior members of the Party began to discuss moderating and slowing down the pace of both collectivisation and industrialisation. The GPU claimed that Ryutin had a group of supporters (a faction) and they were trying to stir up trouble among students and workers, and in Komsomol, the youth movement, too. They recommended the death penalty and when Ryutin, Kamenev Zinoviev, and seventeen others were put on trial (clearly it was enough for Kamenev and Zinoviev to have read Ryutin’s pieces to be guilty), Stalin backed the GPUs recommendation. However, a majority in the Politburo, it is thought led by Kirov, voted against it, and Ryutin got ten years in the Gulag for his pains (he in fact wouldn’t serve the full sentence – he was executed at the beginning of 1937 as the Great Purge raged). The others were expelled from the Party. But clearly, in 1932, Stalin did not yet have the complete control he so desired, and the orchestrated actions he took to secure his grip on power show that he felt so too.
This would only cause him later to push harder for total control and in the next two years nearly one million people were expelled from the Party for being ‘Ryutinites’. This meant that they were denied voting rights and also the privileges that went with Party membership: preferential treatment with regard to employment, housing and food rations. Others went missing (most probably executed), again for being ‘Ryutinites’. Dedicated members of the ‘Old Guard’ weren’t safe either – all eventually confessing to ‘crimes against the state’ after unlimited torture and public humiliation.
The Ryutin Affair is significant for three reasons: It was the last real conspiracy to overthrow Stalin, It was also the beginning of Stalin’s repression of all opposition, real or imagined. And it served to show that in 1932 Stalin was right to feel worried that he hadn’t yet got full control of “his” party.
[1] Quoted in Alan Bullock, Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives, p. 320 and Geoffrey Hosking, A History of the Soviet Union, p. 184
The Significance of the Seventeenth Party Congress
The Seventeenth Party Congress which was held a little more than a year after the Ryutin Affair, in January-February, 1934 was a pivotal moment for Stalin and the history of the Bolshevik Revolution. Alan Bullock certainly sees it as such in his book, ‘Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives’. Officially known as the ‘Congress of Victors’ it could equally be known as the ‘congress of mind games’ or in George Orwell’s terms, the congress of “doublespeak”. For the congress was at one and the same time an attempt by Stalin to regain control of the Party whilst the Party, or at least the congress, sought to gain control of Stalin. And what was said, was certainly not what was meant!
The power to call the Congress was in the hands of Stalin. It had been suspended for four years because of the economic chaos and the social unrest caused by collectivisation and rapid industrialisation. Even then, it was only called after the Party began to be purged after the Ryutin Affair and after A.P. Smirnov, a former Commissar of Agriculture who had formed an anti-Party group and produced and circulated a manifesto similar to Ryutin’s “Appeal” to try and remove Stalin, had been expelled (again, the Politburo blocking attempts to have him shot). However, Stalin probably could not have delayed calling it much longer.
Leading up to the congress Stalin’s comrades on the Politburo were trying to send a carefully balanced message that whilst they didn’t like the excesses that had resulted from the forced collectivisation and rapid industrialisation, neither did they want to reverse the policies. And whilst they wanted those who had opposed Stalin to be reconciled back into the Party (for example, Kamenev and Zinoviev were brought back from internal exile and back into the Party), they didn’t want to challenge Stalin’s leading position, just rein him in somewhat. It is also important to put the dilemma facing the Party at this time in a much wider context and note that not only was Hitler Chancellor of Germany at this point but the Japanese were occupying Manchuria and so were a threat to the Soviet Union’s eastern borders. The Soviet Union, the Revolution, the Party all needed some stability.
The ‘Congress of Victors’, as the Seventeenth Party Congress was called (celebrating the victory of Leninism after ten years of Stalin’s stewardship), was seen by Stalin as the ideal forum for the Party to unite, but under his firm control. He set a triumphant tone in his report to the congress, claiming that the end of exploitation, unemployment in the towns and poverty in the countryside were ‘historic achievements … beyond the dreams of the workers and peasants in bourgeois countries.’ And he was loudly cheered, leading him to refer to past divisions before declaring: ‘At this Congress, however, there is nothing more to prove, and it seems no one to fight … It must be admitted that the Party today is united as it has never been before.’[1] Again, he was cheered.
Stalin had hoped that speech-makers would apply the Leninist principles of self-criticism in admitting they were wrong, and praise the ‘victories’ of the Party in implementing Socialism, in so doing reinforcing the political unity of the Party. So, past opponents like Bukharin, Kamenev and Zinoviev were allowed to speak to the congress. And Stalin would not have been disappointed with what they had to say. Here’s a flavour:
Bukharin described Stalin ‘as the field marshal of the proletarian forces, the best of the best.’
Kamenev: This era in which we live … will be known as the era of Stalin, just as the preceding era entered history as the time of Lenin.’[2]
But though the vast majority of Party members (some 90%) were new, i.e. joining the Party after the civil war, the Congress was overwhelmingly (some 80%) made up of old Leninist cadres who had joined the Party when it was fighting to assert itself, even survive. Now at any conference or congress, delegates meet formally, in the congress hall or in committees, and informally, in bars, hotel rooms or, in the case of this occasion, in the apartments of Moscow delegates. Significant amongst these informal gatherings were those of regional leaders who were physically much closer to the effects of Stalin’s economic policies. Their conclusion was that it would be best to replace Stalin as General Secretary (though not oust him from power altogether) and elect Kirov in his place. Whether Kirov was made aware of this and refused to take the post, whether he told Stalin or not, we are not sure.
What we most certainly do know is that the congress abolished the post of General Secretary held by Stalin. Instead, Stalin was obliged to share power with the newly elected Party secretaries: Kaganovitch, Kirov and Zhdanov. What is more, Kirov, who was also elected to the Politburo, received votes from almost all the 1,225 delegates with voting rights, while about three hundred delegates did not vote for Stalin at all. Kirov also received more sustained applause than Stalin.
In his speech to the congress, Kirov praised Stalin – ‘Our successes are really huge, colossal …’ and hailed him as ‘the great strategist of the liberation of the working people of our country and the whole world’[3] – but he also expressed worries about tensions within the Party. He felt that they had been caused by forced industrialisation and needed to be addressed. He was also concerned about the excessive measures being taken to discipline Party members in the wake of the Ryutin affair (a general purge of the Party had begun). And his speech was constantly interrupted by loud applause (louder than that given Stalin).
Now if we return to Stalin, it is interesting to note that after he had spoken of a Party ‘united as it has never been before’, he also talked of ‘ideological confusion’ and ‘anti-Bolshevik sentiments’, making the conclusion: ‘That is why we cannot say that the fight is ended and that there is no longer any need for the policy of the Socialist offensive.’[4]
So what do we make of it? Knowing what was to come and knowing something of the man we are dealing with, we can conclude that Stalin was not taken in by the praise he received but was continuing to size up his opponents (some of whom he had thought he was already rid of). As for the Party, they had allowed themselves to be out-manoeuvred by Stalin once before, but how did they expect to recover their position? By heaping praise on a man who didn’t trust anything anybody said? Alan Bullock refers to the conclusions of another biographer of Stalin, Adam Ulam, who suggests there may have been a ‘plot-by-adulation’, an attempt to “promote” Stalin to a position where he would do less damage to the Revolution (and, no doubt, themselves). If it was, it didn’t work.
Jump forward to 1956 and Nikita Khrushchev’s speech to the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956 (Khrushchev’s Secret Speech) when Khrushchev revealed the degree of Stalin’s purge of the delegates who attended the Seventeenth Party Congress, the ‘Congress of Victors’:
‘…of the 139 members and candidates of the Party’s Central Committee who were elected at the Seventeenth Congress 98 persons, i.e. seventy per cent, were arrested and shot…. The same fate met not only the Central Committee members but also the majority of the delegates to the Seventeenth Party Congress. Of 1,966 delegates with either voting or advisory rights 1,108 persons were arrested on charges of counter-revolutionary crimes, i.e. decidedly more than half.’[5]
If the Seventeenth Party Congress was the ‘Congress of Victors’, then there was only one real winner: Stalin.
[1] Quoted in Alan Bullock, Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives, p. 324