Stalin as Revolutionary by Tucker Robert C

Stalin as Revolutionary by Tucker Robert C

Author:Tucker, Robert C.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lume Books
Published: 2019-09-15T16:00:00+00:00


Chapter Eight – Power and The Lenin Succession

The Stalin Machine

Like the manner of starting biographies of Stalin, the manner of treating his rise to supremacy in the twenties is governed by certain conventions. One point regularly emphasized is that he succeeded in building the Orgburo-Secretariat complex into a formidable base of party power. Another is that he undid his principal opponents by a series of adroitly executed factional maneuvers in the intra-party politics of the post-Lenin period. Without minimizing the force of these considerations, both of which are true and important, I shall argue that they do not suffice to explain the events of that period in Bolshevism’s history.

In Lenin’s mind the party secretaryship was a technician’s office. Reporting to the Ninth Party Congress in 1920 on how the Central Committee bodies instituted a year earlier were working, he pointedly described the secretary (Krestinsky held the office then) as strictly an executor of the will of the Central Committee, and declared that “only collegial decisions of the Central Committee, taken in the Orgburo or in the Politburo or by the Central Committee plenum, such questions exclusively were implemented by the secretary of the party Central Committee. The Central Committee cannot otherwise do its work properly.”[478] But this overlooked the secretaryship’s potentialities as a focal point of power, especially if occupied by a politically ambitious man like Stalin. The Secretariat’s capacity to influence the policy-makers’ agenda placed it in a highly strategic relationship to the party’s higher deliberative organs, and its appointive powers made it an ideal instrument of machine politics. Lenin later showed his realization of these facts when he referred in the testament to the “boundless power” that Stalin had concentrated in his hands by becoming general secretary.

Others, too, although unaware of the testament, began to grow apprehensive over the extent of Stalin’s secretarial power. Zinoviev and Kamenev were among them as they watched the junior member of the Politburo triumvirate become the dominant member during 1923–24. While seeking to use Stalin as a counterweight to Trotsky, Zinoviev became so worried by the counterweight’s growing political power that in the autumn of 1923 he made a move to curb it. He called a number of vacationing party leaders to an informal meeting in a cave near the North Caucasian resort town of Kislovodsk; there he outlined a plan to “politicize” the Secretariat. He wanted to subordinate the Secretariat to the Politburo’s direct control by appointing two other Politburo members—Trotsky and either Kamenev, Bukharin, or himself—as secretaries with authority coequal to Stalin’s. Nothing came of this venture, however, beyond an invitation from Stalin (who knew about the meeting) to Zinoviev, Trotsky, and Bukharin to attend sessions of the Orgburo. Without a footing in the Secretariat, participation in the Orgburo’s deliberations meant very little.[479]

Further moves, similarly abortive, followed in 1925. In January of that year Kamenev suggested Stalin for the post—just vacated by Trotsky—of chairman of the Revolutionary War Council of the Republic, which would have involved his departure from the secretaryship; he was not interested.



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