WHY DID STALIN WIN?

(INstead of a conclusion)

In April 1929, from the Leninist Politburo, which was formed in the early 1920s, only Stalin remained in this highest body of power of the ruling party. Why did Stalin manage to prevail over all other inhabitants of the Soviet political Olympus?

From the point of view of some of the vanquished, it turned out that their defeat was accidental, since Stalin had no merits. One of the prominent Trotskyists, I. Smirnov, in a conversation with Trotsky, said that Stalin was “a completely gray and insignificant person,” L.B. Kamenev considered Stalin “a leader of a district scale,” and Trotsky called Stalin “the most outstanding mediocrity.”

In his unfinished book about Stalin, Trotsky wrote: “He has neither theoretical imagination, nor historical farsightedness, nor the gift of anticipation... In the field of knowledge, especially linguistics, Stalin’s sedentary mind always looked for the line of least resistance... Stalin’s willpower is not inferior , perhaps, Lenin's willpower. But his mental abilities will be measured by some ten to twelve percent, if we take Lenin as the unit of measurement. In turn, in the field of intelligence, Stalin has a new disproportion: the extraordinary development of practical insight and cunning at the expense of the ability to generalize and creative imagination.” Trotsky assured that Stalin’s “primitiveness of mind” was also combined with many spiritual shortcomings that manifested themselves in his behavior: “He feels like a provincial, moves forward slowly, steps heavily and looks around enviously.” “Rudeness represents Stalin’s organic quality.” From the reasoning of Trotsky, who rated himself very highly, it turned out rather illogically that he was defeated by a man distinguished by many mental and spiritual defects.

In order to somehow explain his defeat, his opponents often repeated that Stalin achieved victories over them thanks to secret

ny behind-the-scenes intrigues. Bukharin spoke about Stalin’s “intrigue.” Trotsky assured: “The apparatus created Stalin.” There is no doubt that, having learned the precept “be wise as serpents” back in theological schools, Stalin showed exceptional ingenuity when he needed to isolate his political opponents and deprive them of the levers of control. However, its success can hardly be attributed solely to hardware games.

Stephen Cohen also rejected this explanation: “Stalin’s triumph was ensured not only by the political machine. As far as the Central Committee is concerned, it could count on the loyalty or benevolent neutrality of the delegates of lower and middle rank, nominated thanks to Stalin's patronage... However, despite the fact that these junior party workers were members of the Central Committee, in 1928-1929 their role was secondary. In fact, they only approved decisions made by a narrower, unofficial group of senior members of the Central Committee - an oligarchy of twenty to thirty influential persons, such as senior party leaders and heads of the most important delegations to the Central Committee (representing, first of all, Moscow, Leningrad, Siberia , North Caucasus, Urals and Ukraine)... As administrators and politicians, they were often associated with the General Secretary, but for the most part they were not thoughtless political creatures, but were themselves major, independently-minded leaders... By April 1929, these influential people preferred Stalin and provided him with a majority in the top leadership.”

Last but not least, the choice in favor of Stalin was made because he was much more responsible for his work and coped with it much better than his opponents. While they were relaxing at resorts and writing articles about art, he was forced to deal alone with difficult issues of the national economy. Stalin's opponents often avoided solving complex issues, preferring bright declarations from the stands.

People who were accustomed to seeing Trotsky, Zinoviev, Bukharin and others not only in the stands, but where the most important decisions for the Soviet state were made, had no illusions about their business qualities. They knew that Trotsky's noisy reputation was largely exaggerated, and his organizational "talents" were manifested mainly in orders threatening executions. Roy Medvedev cited an excerpt from a letter from army worker V. Trifonov, who at the height of the Civil War called Trotsky “a most mediocre organizer” and emphasized: “The army was not created by Trotsky, but by us, ordinary army workers. Where Trotsky tried to work, confusion immediately began. Confusion has no place in an organism, and military affairs is precisely such an organism.”

Zinoviev was also characterized as a weak worker. Trotsky was not exaggerating much when he said: “In favorable periods... Zinoviev very easily climbed to seventh heaven. When things went badly, Zinoviev lay down on the sofa, not in a metaphorical, but in a real sense.” Trotsky confirmed this characterization with the words of Sverdlov: “Zinoviev is panic.” Summarizing these and other assessments of Zinoviev, Roy Medvedev, who was by no means inclined to denigrate Stalin’s opponents, wrote: “Many people who knew Zinoviev well, not without reason, noted not only his great activity, but also his lack of restraint, unscrupulousness in means, and a tendency to demagoguery.” , as well as exceptional ambition and vanity. “He was a man who few people aroused sincere sympathy.”

Having rated Zinoviev's business qualities low, Medvedev rated Kamenev's abilities even lower, noting that he was "inferior to them (Zinoviev and Stalin) as an administrator." Although Lenin relied on his diligence, Kamenev was not distinguished by business zeal and more than once stated among his friends that it would be much better if the Bolsheviks did not take power, but limited themselves to remaining in the parliamentary opposition. Prone to sybarism, Kamenev believed that it would be easier for him to make an accusatory speech in the Duma and then take a break from righteous labors than to solve the endless business of governing the country, which did not give a moment of rest.

Regarding why members of the party leadership preferred Stalin to Bukharin, S. Cohen wrote: “To some extent, their choice was certainly determined by the fact that they felt a kinship with the General Secretary, as with a strong-willed “practical politician,” while a soft, immersed in theory, Bukharin could perhaps seem “just a boy” in comparison. Stalin had a huge advantage over Bukharin, who characterized himself as “the worst organizer in Russia.” Commenting on this remark by Bukharin about himself, Cohen wrote: “Although this is undoubtedly an exaggeration, Bukharin appears to have greatly skimped on his organizational responsibilities.”

People who constantly observed the top Soviet leaders could not help but notice that, unlike his rivals, Stalin took upon himself a huge burden of assignments, the execution of which was often associated with intense and often thankless work. It was for these qualities that Lenin valued Stalin.

Stalin's passion for work was organically combined with his efficiency and willingness to discuss complex state issues with people of different positions. Deutscher wrote: “His appearance and behavior personified modesty. He was more accessible to the average clerk or party worker than other leaders... Although reserved, he was an unrivaled master of listening patiently to others.

Sometimes you could see him sitting in the corner, puffing on his pipe and not moving, listening to the excited narrator for an hour, or even two hours, only occasionally breaking his silence with a couple of questions. This was one of his qualities that demonstrated his lack of selfishness.”

Many testified to Stalin’s high demands on himself and in his personal life. Deutscher noted that “Stalin’s personal life was impeccable and did not arouse suspicion.” His personal secretary, who fled abroad, Bazhanov wrote: “This passionate politician has no other vices. He does not like money, pleasures, sports, or women. Women other than his wife do not exist.”

Although Stalin’s position did not allow him to devote much time to his family and raising children, as was almost always the case with major statesmen, he was an exemplary family man and tried his best to fulfill parental responsibilities even after the suicide of Nadezhda Alliluyeva in 1932. Stalin's kind and gentle attitude towards children did not prevent him from being strict towards his children, especially when he saw that they took for granted the benefits due to their family. In June 1938, he sent a letter to V.V. Martyshin, a teacher at the flight school where his son Vasily studied. Stalin regretted that his son was “spoiled by all sorts of godfathers and godmothers,” who constantly emphasized that he was “Stalin’s son.” He gave the teacher “advice: demand stricter from Vasily and not be afraid of the capricious man’s false, blackmailing threats about “suicide.” You will have my support in this."

His nephew Vladimir Alliluyev recalled how indignant Stalin was when, while visiting his relatives, he discovered that the chocolates in the box were covered with mold. “Then everyone got it - the children for being too greedy and not eating even such sweets, the adults for not taking care of the children well and rotting food that was not yet abundant in the country.” Stalin believed that his children and the children of his relatives should not perceive themselves as “special” due to the position of their parents.

Stalin's lifestyle corresponded to popular ideas about a proletarian leader, unlike, for example, Trotsky, who loved to organize noisy parties in the Kremlin, which were crowned with collective hunting trips in the Moscow region. Deicher wrote that Stalin and Alliluyeva “lived in a small apartment in a house that was intended for servants in the Kremlin... The stamp of everyday life and even asceticism lay on the personal life of the General Secretary, and this circumstance made a favorable impression on the party, whose members were guided by Puritan principles.” morals and therefore were concerned about the first signs of corruption and debauchery in the Kremlin.”

The fact that this style of behavior of the spouses was preserved even after Stalin became the first leader of the party and the country confirms the transfer.

squeak between Nadezhda Alliluyeva and Stalin. So, in September 1929, Alliluyeva, who at that time was studying at the Industrial Academy, wrote from the Kremlin: “Joseph, send me, if you can, rubles. 50, they will give me money only on 15/IX at the Industrial Academy, and now I’m sitting without a penny. If you send it, it will be good. Nadia". Ten days later, Stalin answers her from Sochi: “I forgot to send you money. I am sending them (120 rubles) with a comrade who is leaving today, without waiting for the next courier. Kiss. Your Joseph." Since we are talking about an amount that amounted to about a month's salary of a skilled worker, it is quite clear that the spouses did not have any cash savings. And apparently, Stalin’s wife did not even think about purchasing anything on credit.

From the correspondence it is clear that in many cases spouses are accustomed to doing without outside help. So, while in Sochi, Stalin asked not the secretaries serving him, but Alliluyeva, so that she could find him an English language self-instruction manual, a textbook on metallurgy and a textbook on electrical engineering, and she, without turning to anyone for help, looked for these books herself. At the same time, Stalin sent his letters to his wife by regular mail. One day, Stalin’s letter from Sochi disappeared, and the search for it led nowhere.

Of course, the financial situation of the spouses was incomparably better than that of ordinary Soviet citizens. And yet, many aspects of the family’s life were no different from the lives of most Muscovites. From Alliluyeva’s letters it follows that members of Stalin’s family used public transport, and not personal cars, to move around Moscow, like other residents of the capital. Alliluyeva shared with Stalin her impressions of her trips on the Moscow tram. She informed Stalin about the queues for milk that arose at the end of 1929, and about the mood of people in the fall of 1930, about construction in Moscow and the condition of Moscow streets. She also wrote to Stalin in Sochi that, despite the sub-zero temperature at the beginning of October 1930, the Moscow authorities ordered not to heat houses until October 15 and she, like the rest of the Industrial Academy students, had to wear a coat to class.

After Alliluyeva's death, Stalin did not change his lifestyle. He, as before, made do with a minimum of servants. Security guard M. Starostin recalled: “I worked under Stalin from 1937 to 1953... I declare that Stalin never had an orderly.” A. Rybin testifies: “Stalin usually did not bother others, serving himself. He shaved with a safety razor and trimmed his mustache with scissors.” He mentioned only Matryona Butuzova, who “was in charge of the dishes in the closet at the nearby dacha, looked after Stalin’s shoes, ironed his jacket and cleaned the office. Stalin respected her very much for her hard work and even gave her his portrait with the inscription.”

Marshal Zhukov recalled: “As you know, Y.V. Stalin led a very modest lifestyle. The food was simple - from Russian cuisine, sometimes Georgian dishes were prepared. There are no frills in the furnishings, clothing and life of I.V. Stalin was not there." Air Chief Marshal Golovanov had a similar impression: “I had the opportunity to observe Stalin in everyday life. This life was amazingly modest. Stalin owned only what he was wearing. He didn’t have any wardrobes.”

Stalin was completely unpretentious in his clothes. In his diary M.A. Svanidze wrote on November 4, 1934 about Stalin: “He always has difficulty changing clothes according to the seasons, wears summer clothes for a long time, which he obviously gets used to, and the same story in the spring and also with suits, when they wear out and you need to put on a new one.” A. Rybin told what tricks the service staff of Stalin’s dacha had to go to in order to change the collapsed furniture or at least force the generalissimo to put on new low shoes. In response, Stalin sternly demanded that his old, worn-out shoes be returned to him, and the maids had difficulty “managing to hide the dilapidation of the shoes with the shine of cream.”

Referring to the memoirs of the chief of government security, General B.C. Ryasny, Felix Chuev wrote that after his death “it became clear that there was nothing to bury Stalin in. Ryasnoy opened the closet, and there were only four suits - two Generalissimo and two civilian, gray and black. They made it black when Mao Zedong came, it was specially made, by force, and Stalin never wore it. Moreover, there was a bekesha hanging - old, shabby, faded. “She was probably a hundred years old, by God,” says Ryasnoy. - He would put on a bekesha or an arkhaluk, like a fur coat, and walk around the garden. (Apparently, Ryasnoy meant the famous Turukhansk dokha. - Note auto) One Generalissimo jacket was all dirty and greasy, and the other was shredded... A new suit was not sewn. Stalin lay in a coffin in his old, but tolerable one: the sleeves had been hemmed, the jacket had been cleaned.”

It is unlikely that such unpretentiousness in clothing could be explained by the desire to cultivate asceticism for show, if only because the personal lives of leaders in Soviet times were hidden from the public. Stalin led a lifestyle that basically met the needs of a person brought up in poverty and taught in theological schools to moderation and modesty, which was very different from many leaders who had the opportunity, due to their position, to satisfy any desires. Considering his work to be the most important thing in his life, Stalin did not attach much importance to how he looked from the outside and whether his outfit corresponded to ideas about fashion or not. For example, his reluctance to buy new shoes was explained by his chronic pain in his feet. Therefore he probably

I preferred worn-out shoes. He even made holes in his boots himself so as not to injure his sore feet.

He preferred cheap and simple convenience. Rybin wrote about Stalin’s “nearby” dacha: “There were no swimming pools or massage rooms at the dacha. No luxury either.” Although Stalin used state cars and lived in various dachas, they were not his personal property. Not a single one of the expensive gifts presented to him as the leader of the country, not a single one of the household items from the Kremlin apartment or dachas remained the property of his children. Stalin's monetary savings, inherited by his children, also turned out to be small. A. Rybin said that after Stalin’s death, an employee of his personal security, Starostin, “discovered a savings book. Only nine hundred rubles had accumulated there - all the leader’s wealth (at that time such an amount was approximately half a month’s wages of a skilled worker. - Note ed.). Starostin handed over the savings book to Svetlana.”

Summarizing his impressions of Stalin’s life and personal life, Air Chief Marshal Golovanov noted: “There was nothing remarkable or special in his personal life. It seemed gray and colorless to me. Apparently because, in our usual understanding, he simply did not have it.”

However, Stalin was valued not only as a modest and conscientious worker who devoted himself entirely to work. Prominent leaders of the USSR saw in him the author of original and necessary government decisions. S. Cohen wrote: “It seems clear that they did so not because of the bureaucratic power that he possessed, but because they preferred his leadership and his policies.”

This opinion was shared by other Sovietologists. Without discounting the importance of the post of General Secretary for Stalin’s success, Robert Tucker pointed out that only this circumstance “cannot explain the events of that time. A candidate for the role of leader would need to propose an attractive program and make it convincing to the highest party circles.” Agreeing with him, Jerry Hough noted that “only 45 percent of the members of the Central Committee were party functionaries, while the industrialization program proposed by Stalin was attractive to the growing number of economic leaders on the Central Committee. (They were 20 percent of the total number of members of the Central Committee in 1927.)"

It should be taken into account that the struggle on the Soviet political Olympus required considerable knowledge of Marxist theory and good knowledge of current information on various domestic and foreign policy issues. In addition, the guidelines in the internal party struggle were constantly changing. At first, Zinoviev, Kamenev and Stalin branded Trotsky for

betrayal of Leninism, and Trotsky accused members of the triumvirate of the same sedition, but soon Zinoviev, Kamenev and Trotsky renounced their accusations against each other. At first, Bukharin accused Kamenev and Zinoviev of apostasy from Leninism, and they saw Bukharin as a dangerous “deviator” from Lenin’s course, but then these former opponents created a common bloc against Stalin.

During the internal party struggle, Stalin also changed his position more than once. Either he condemned Trotsky for his attacks on Zinoviev and Kamenev on the eve of the October uprising, or he spoke of the justice of Lenin’s accusations of “strikebreaking” against Zinoviev and Kamenev. Either Stalin defended Bukharin from Zinoviev and Kamenev’s accusations of “kulak deviation” and said that he would not give them “Bukharin’s blood,” then he himself accused Bukharin of encouraging the kulaks and demanded his resignation from prominent posts. Either Stalin condemned Preobrazhensky for his calls for the robbery of the village, then he announced the need to impose a “tribute” on the peasantry. To understand these disputes, it was necessary not only to have great general cultural knowledge and to be well informed, but also to understand the true background of the positions of political leaders. And to do this, one had to be a member of the Central Committee, as D. Hough believed, or be part of a narrow circle of the most influential persons in the party leadership, as S. Cohen believed.

And yet there were issues that were equally acute for both the party elite and ordinary party members. From its very beginning, the history of the Bolshevik Party was marked by incessant intra-party struggle, fraught with splits. The prospect of a split in the party, which had overcome the enormous difficulties of underground life, and after coming to power found itself surrounded by the overwhelming non-party majority of the country, caused alarm among all its members, and therefore the “schismatics” were resolutely condemned by its majority. Mensheviks, otzovists, liquidators, ultimatists, left communists, the military opposition, the workers' opposition, decisists, all kinds of "national deviationists", the authors of various "letters" and "platforms", that is, everyone who, for several decades, opposed "general line" of the party.

Since the early 1920s Trotsky had been such a troublemaker, and it is not surprising that the vast majority of party members at various levels opposed him and his supporters. Zinoviev and Kamenev were the first to oppose Stalin, Bukharin and other members of the Politburo and organized a “revolt” of the Leningrad organization against the majority of the congress delegates. Their association with Trotsky, that eternal rebel against Lenin and then against Stalin, the renunciation of the decisions for which they voted, the refusal of their own fierce criticism of Trotsky only strengthened the impression of them as schismatics.

kakh party and unprincipled politicians seeking to usurp power, regardless of the will of the majority.

Likewise, Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky were the first to oppose the Politburo's decisions on emergency measures for which they had recently voted. It seemed that they were sabotaging coordinated work aimed at resolving state issues, dragging the party into an unconstructive discussion. Negotiations with Kamenev showed the unscrupulousness of Bukharin and his supporters in his struggle for personal power. Stalin’s opponents’ violation of agreed decisions, their opposition of their “platforms” to the “general line” of the party, their alliances with former political opponents prevented the attraction of wavering members of the Politburo and the Central Committee, and then the rest of the party members, to their side.

In contrast to his opponents, Stalin for the overwhelming majority of the party leadership and its ordinary members personified unity in the party. This position flowed organically from all his party activities. He stood firmly in the position of the Leninist majority since 1903. In 1909, in Baku, he sounded the alarm about the threat of the party splitting “into separate organizations.” Then he constantly supported the Leninist majority, even in those cases when he clearly did not agree with the prevailing opinion.

To ensure party unity during the discussions of the 1920s, Stalin repeatedly demonstrated his readiness to overcome differences, seek compromise and the ability to forget past heated disputes in the name of a common cause. Deutscher wrote that “at that time it seemed to many people that, compared with other Bolshevik leaders, Stalin was not the most intolerant. He was less vicious in his attacks on his opponents compared to the other triumvirs. His speeches always contained notes of good-natured and slightly cheerful optimism, which corresponded to the prevailing complacent mood. In the Politburo, when important political issues were discussed, he never imposed his views on his colleagues. He followed the debate closely to see which way the wind was blowing, and invariably voted with the majority unless he first ensured that the majority acted as he saw fit. Therefore, it has always been acceptable to the majority. To the party audience, he did not seem like a man who had personal gain or harbored a personal grudge. He seemed to be a devoted Leninist, a guardian of doctrine who criticized others solely in the name of the cause. He gave such an impression even when he spoke behind closed doors of the Politburo.”

While being active in the fight against Trotsky, Stalin at the same time objected to harsh measures that could provoke

unnecessary unrest among party members, and, contrary to the position of Zinoviev and Kamenev, insisted on leaving Trotsky in the Politburo. From the very first days of the emergence of the “new” opposition, Stalin tried to stop the development of the conflict, offering a compromise before the start of the XIV Congress. In his report at this congress, he ignored the differences that had arisen and drew attention to the common features that united the party. Although Stalin was harsh in his assessments and accusations, during two years of polemics with the “new” and then “united” opposition, he more than once advocated compromise solutions, objecting to the immediate expulsion of Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev from the party.

Party members saw that Stalin dealt with his opponents in much the same way as they always dealt with “deviators” in the past history of the party. After being severely condemned and admitting their mistakes, opposition leaders could expect to be retained in their previous posts. At first, Stalin refrained from “cutting off” prominent figures, and only a protracted struggle with Trotsky, Zinoviev and their supporters led to a change in the methods of punishing them. In addition, it was obvious that no matter what accusations were thrown at him, Stalin was ready to turn a blind eye to it if the discussion was of a private nature and “the dirty linen was not washed in public.” For this reason, he was ready to forgive Bukharin both “Genghis Khan” and the “schemer” and offer him a compromise.

Later, these actions of Stalin were regarded as a manifestation of Jesuit cunning, aimed at breaking up his rivals piece by piece and then destroying them. However, in contrast to this statement, examples can be given that Stalin was ready to ignore past participation in the opposition, hesitations, behind-the-scenes intrigues and harsh words addressed to him and leave people in high positions if they stopped the internal party struggle. Despite the fact that N.S. Khrushchev was a Trotskyist, and A.A. Andreev played a prominent role in the Trotskyist opposition, Stalin contributed to their election to the Politburo. And although Andreev promised support to the “right,” as follows from Bukharin’s conversation with Kamenev, he remained in the Politburo until 1952, until he lost his ability to work. Both Kalinin, who was considered “right,” and Kuibyshev, who “vacillated” between Stalin and the “right,” remained the leaders of the country until their death. Stalin did not try to get rid of Ordzhonikidze, who more than once “abusively scolded” him and insisted on removing Stalin from the post of General Secretary, or Voroshilov, who had a reputation as either “right-wing” or “vacillating” (and Trotsky even saw in him a potential Bonaparte, who will overthrow Soviet power). Only Jesuit cunning cannot explain why Rykov, who together with Bukharin participated in the opposition protests of 1928-

1929, remained as chairman of the Council of People's Commissars until the end of 1930. Of course, this post could have been occupied by many of Stalin’s consistent supporters already at the beginning of 1929.

It is unlikely that Stalin’s willingness to compromise with yesterday’s opponents or to forget past hesitations and harsh words addressed to himself was explained by his kindness or gentleness. Most likely it was a sober political calculation. Firstly, it was obvious to Stalin that if the party’s “general line” failed, those who were not involved in its implementation would get trump cards. Therefore, it was important to achieve not the overthrow of one’s opponents from the political Olympus, but their renunciation of political views, to ensure that they support the “general line” of the party and even actively participate in the work of a single “team.” Secondly, Stalin was aware that the expulsion from the leadership of everyone who had ever shown hesitation or spoken out against him could turn unsteady supporters into fierce enemies not only of him personally, but also of the government, and then of the system. Thirdly, frequent and large-scale overthrows of the country’s illustrious leaders from the political Olympus would indicate the instability of the “general line” and would discredit the party. The position of the party in the country has never been absolutely unshakable, and discord in the leadership could become a reason for protests against the system. Therefore, even in cases where separation from former Politburo colleagues was inevitable, Stalin tried to make it gradual and not turn it into a group exile.

Fourthly - no matter how much it contradicts the most stable ideas about Stalin - he was not interested in being surrounded by those who agreed with him on everything. Contrary to popular belief, Stalin not only did not suppress dissent in the process of discussing various issues, but actively encouraged it. This was recognized even by his opponents, such as Mikoyan and Khrushchev after his death. Describing the course of Politburo meetings under Stalin, A.I. Mikoyan testified: “Each of us had every opportunity to express and defend our opinion or proposal. We openly discussed the most complex and controversial issues (for myself, I can speak about this with full responsibility), meeting Stalin’s understanding, reasonable and tolerant attitude in most cases, even when our statements were clearly not to his liking. He was also attentive to the generals' suggestions. Stalin listened to what he was told and advised, listened with interest to the debates, skillfully extracting from them the very truth that later helped him formulate the final, most appropriate decisions, thus born as a result of collective discussion. Moreover, it often happened when,

Convinced by our arguments, Stalin changed his initial point of view on this or that issue.”

Even a memoirist as averse to Stalin as Khrushchev admitted: “And here’s what’s interesting (which was also characteristic of Stalin): this man, in an angry outburst, could cause great evil. But when you prove that you are right and if at the same time you give him sound facts, he will eventually understand that the person is defending a useful cause and will support... There have been cases when you persistently object to him, and if he is convinced that you are right, he will retreat from his point of view and will accept the point of view of his interlocutor. This is, of course, a positive quality.”

Stalin's concern for party unity ensured him widespread support among ordinary communists. Jerry Hough had reason to recognize Stalin as “the exponent of powerful tendencies in Bolshevism (especially the nationalist trend and the desire for industrialization).”

The defeat of the opposition leaders was explained by the fact that they did not understand these tendencies and sentiments in the party, opposing them with theoretical schemes of the world revolution and purely personal political interests. Explaining Trotsky's defeat, Stalin, unlike his opponent, first of all spoke about his merits: “Does Trotsky have no will, no desire to lead?.. Is he a lesser speaker than the current leaders of our party? Would it not be more correct to say that, as an orator, Trotsky stands above many of the current leaders of our party? How can we explain in this case that Trotsky, despite his oratory, despite his will to lead, despite his abilities, found himself thrown away from the leadership of the great party called the CPSU (b)? Stalin believed that all of Trotsky’s merits were negated by his separation from ordinary party members. Assessing Trotsky’s arrogant statements about the party masses, Stalin said: “Only people who despise it and consider it the rabble can speak about our party in this way. This is the view of a seedy party aristocrat on the party as a voting baranta.”

Stalin was always alien to “aristocrats”, divorced from life, but imagining themselves as “high priests”. Coming from the people, Stalin, from the time of his underground revolutionary activities, tried to take into account the aspirations of the working people and respond to them. (Trotsky noted with contempt: “Only in the circle of primitive people, decisive and not bound by prejudices, did he become smoother and more friendly.”)

Of course, Stalin’s opponents, whom he condemned for “deviating” from proletarian positions, and later for betraying the cause of the working class, also considered themselves spokesmen for the interests of the proletariat. However, unlike Stalin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin perceived

The Mali proletariat is largely in a bookish way, in isolation from Russian reality. This was greatly facilitated by the fact that they lived abroad for a long time and formed as prominent party figures in foreign emigration, where they were also divorced from the real life of the workers. In accordance with their purely theoretical ideas, only the proletariat of a highly developed capitalist country, which constituted the majority of its population and had accumulated centuries of experience in class struggle, could carry out a socialist revolution and, relying on the help of the proletarians of the same developed countries, build socialism. The Russian proletariat did not meet these ideas.

Knowing the theoretical principles of Marxism and possessing book information about the labor movement of Western countries, Stalin's most prominent opponents had no experience in fighting for the rights of Russian workers. They knew little about the problems of Russian workers, had a more abstract idea of ​​the characteristics of the Russian proletariat, and therefore underestimated its capabilities. To a large extent for this reason, Trotsky and Bukharin, during the negotiations in Brest, proceeded from the fact that the fate of the Russian revolution would be decided by the international proletariat. Disbelief in the ability of the working people of the Soviet country to build a developed socialist society lay at the heart of the platforms of the united opposition of Trotsky, Kamenev, and Zinoviev.

Trotsky wrote that the Russian proletariat “was formed under the barbaric conditions of tsarism and backward capitalism, and therefore in no way corresponded to the tasks of the socialist revolution.” The “backward” proletariat of Russia, according to Trotsky, exhausted its potential in the October Revolution, after which came “a long period of fatigue, decline and disappointment in the results of the revolution.”

Unlike Trotsky and other oppositionists, Stalin saw enormous creative potential in the country's working class. He declared “the question of the cultural forces of the working class... one of the decisive issues,” and “therefore, any means that can raise the level of development of the cultural forces of the working class, any means that can facilitate the development of skills and ability in the working class to manage the country and industry , - any such means must be used to the fullest by us.” The country's working class, which Stalin tried to rely on, was a minority of the population, but a rapidly growing minority. As Stalin noted in his report at the XV Congress, in just two years (from the 1924/25 economic year to the 1926/27 economic year) the number of hired workers increased from 8,215,000 to 10,346,000. “An increase of 25 percent,” summarized Stalin. During the same period, the number of manual workers, including agricultural and seasonal workers, increased from 5,448,000 to 7,060,000 - an increase of 29.6 percent.

cent." During these same years, the number of workers in large-scale industry increased from 1,794,000 to 2,388,000, and Stalin summed up: “An increase of 33 percent.”

Millions of recent inhabitants of peasant communities came to the country's rapidly growing cities and new enterprises. They brought with them to the cities and factories many outdated and erroneous ideas about the world, absurd prejudices against “outsiders.” At the same time, they were carriers of the powerful “cultural forces” that Stalin spoke about. They entered the new Soviet life with enormous potential for physical and mental health, possessing powerful fortitude. Stalin contributed to the development of the “cultural forces” of the working class, encouraging the “Leninist call”, the study of party members of this call, and promoting the most talented people from the people to responsible positions. The new bosses, like the new employees and workers, were free from many rigid and conservative habits, but at the same time, being people from the people, they brought into city life a love of folk culture, a commitment to traditional moral principles, and deep patriotism. .

It can hardly be considered that AC. Ratiev, a descendant of the Russian branch of the ancient Georgian family of Ratishvili, greatly distorted the words of L.D. Trotsky in a speech he gave in December 1918 in Kursk: “Patriotism, love for the homeland, for one’s people, for those around him, distant and close, for those living at this very moment, for those thirsting for small, imperceptible happiness, self-sacrifice, heroism - what value are all these empty words!..”

Trotsky particularly disliked the pride of the Russian people for the achievements of their national culture. He wrote that Russia was “sentenced by nature itself to a long period of backwardness,” that the pre-revolutionary culture of Russia “was only a superficial imitation of the highest Western models and contributed nothing to the treasury of humanity.” Although Bukharin acted as an opponent of Trotsky, he was also inclined to belittle the importance of the Russian people and their potential, which was clearly manifested in his attacks on Yesenin’s work, and in his thesis about the need to put the Russian people, that is, the majority of the country’s population, in an unequal position on on the basis that before the revolution the Great Russians were an “oppressive nation.”

Being a recognized party expert on the national issue, Stalin understood the role and importance of the national factor and condemned the nihilistic attitude towards national culture and patriotism. Stalin rejected the disdain for the Russian historical and cultural heritage, so widespread in the country after 1917, seeing this as a humiliation and insult to the Russian proletariat. In a letter to the poet Demyan Bedny dated December 12, 1930, Stalin wrote:

“The whole world now recognizes that the center of the revolutionary movement has moved from Western Europe to Russia... The revolutionary workers of all countries unanimously applaud the Soviet working class, and above all Russian to the working class, the vanguard of Soviet workers, as their recognized leader... And you? Instead of comprehending this greatest process in the history of the revolution and rising to the height of the tasks of the singer of the advanced proletariat, they went somewhere into the hollow and, confused between the most boring quotes from the works of Karamzin and no less boring sayings from Domostroi, began to proclaim to the whole world , that Russia in the past represented a vessel of abomination and desolation, ... that “laziness” and the desire to “sit on the stove” is almost a national trait of Russians in general, and therefore of Russian workers, who, having carried out the October Revolution, of course, did not stopped being Russian." The value of these remarks was enhanced by the fact that they were written by a Georgian, addressing a Russian intellectual.

Being a bearer of the traditions of folk culture, Stalin was well aware that pride in his people, in his culture, in the history of his country was a powerful driving force, more effective than the dream of a world revolution. Party members of the “Leninist call” and Stalin’s nominees were the same people who came from the people’s environment. Their thoughts and moods were consonant with the sentiments of Stalin, and therefore they supported the course of building a prosperous society of social justice in their country, without waiting for the victory of the world revolution.

Their peasant social origin and their current social status as urban workers and employees were reflected in the contradictions and zigzags of the party's policy on the peasant question. Like yesterday's peasants, they supported Stalin when he condemned the course of exploitation of the countryside, advocated a “connection with the countryside,” for caring for the peasant economy and attentive attitude towards the peasants. At the same time, leaving the village, they were leaving the attraction of property and market relations. By becoming city dwellers, they gained a sense of superiority over the peasants, who remained in the vicious circle of their village ideas and the hardships of peasant labor. They willingly accepted Soviet ideology, which convinced them of the superiority of the urban worker over the rural owner, and quickly turned into supporters of deep socialist transformations in the countryside.

The zigzags of the general party line pursued by Stalin, as well as the contradictory justifications for its implementation, ultimately reflected the changeable and contradictory reality of those years. The policy of “war communism”, NEP, and then the transition from NEP to building socialism in one country were perceived by a significant part of the country’s population as necessary ways to strengthen the situation

Soviet power and solving important problems of society in a specific historical situation.

When NEP helped to get out of the devastation after the Civil War, it suited all the working people of the country. However, in the late 1920s it became obvious to Stalin and his supporters that the interests of the rapidly growing working class were in conflict with the new economic policy. Food shortages in many cities in 1927 increased dissatisfaction with the NEP on the part of the working class. Remembering his youth in the 1920s, member of the Brezhnev Politburo K.T. Mazurov said: “The NEP brought prosperity to trade and small business, and peasants began to live better. But it was still very difficult for the workers. There was often no bread on their table. Their discontent grew... The workers thought: let them put pressure on those who are hiding the bread, and it will appear to us.” As historians G.A. noted. Bordyugov and V.A. Kozlov: “The working class did not become the social force that clung to and fought for the principles of NEP... When social problems worsened in 1927, food difficulties arose, when “fence books” (ration card system of food supply) were introduced in 1928, “Nothing tied the workers to the NEP anymore.” However, a significant part of the peasantry did not support the NEP and market relations. Bordyugov and Kozlov wrote that “35% of peasants exempt from paying agricultural taxes, proletarian, semi-proletarian and poor elements of the village - were they interested in preserving the NEP? Those benefits and class guarantees that the rural poor enjoyed in the 1920s were guaranteed to them by direct government intervention in the economy.”

The transition of the party leadership from defending NEP in the fight against the Trotskyists, and then Zinovievites, to abandoning NEP was perceived positively by the majority of the country's working class when the NEP crisis began. By proposing a radical solution: to build socialism in one country in the shortest possible time, Stalin received the support of the most dynamic and least affluent sections of the population. Stalin's successes in this activity were the successes of these strata, his failures and failures were largely a consequence of the class and social psychology of those who represented his main social support.

Stalin was supported not only by the party and the proletariat, but also by patriotic representatives of the peasantry, scientific and creative intelligentsia, military specialists, and civil servants, who saw in Stalin a consistent and decisive defender of the country's national interests.

This can be doubted, citing the fact that at that time in the USSR there were no real opportunities for expressing public views through representative elections. However, this doubt is refuted

contradicts the opinion of such an opponent of Soviet power as Pitirim Sorokin, who believed that the stability of any system serves as the best evidence that it enjoys the support of the most politically active part of the population. He wrote: “It is naive to believe that the so-called absolute despot can afford whatever he pleases, regardless of the desires and pressure of his subordinates. To believe that there is such an “omnipotence” of despots and their absolute freedom from public pressure is nonsense.” At the same time, Pitirim Sorokin referred to Herbert Spencer, who argued: “As practice shows, the individual will of despots is an insignificant factor, its authority is proportional to the degree of expression of the will of others.” P. Sorokin also referred to Renan, who noted that every day of the existence of any social order is in fact a constant plebiscite of members of society, and if society continues to exist, this means that the stronger part of society answers the question posed with a silent “yes”. Commenting on these words, P. Sorokin stated: “Since then, this statement has become a banality.” In fact, Stalin was elected with the tacit consent of the “stronger part” of Soviet society.

It should be taken into account that Stalin was chosen by the ruling party and politically active forces of Soviet society when the threat of a new world conflict arose and an arms race began in capitalist countries. In this situation, political leaders who had risen in the wake of the First World War began to come to the political forefront.

Despite his partial paralysis, F.D. returned to active political life. Roosevelt, who in November 1928, having received powerful financial support from billionaire B. Baruch, won the election for governor of New York State. He soon became the most likely contender for the presidency of the United States, which meant that the world's leading financial magnates were betting on Roosevelt as a potential leader of the most powerful country in the world. Like many politicians born of the First World War, F.D. Roosevelt saw his goal as defeating communism. In mid-1930, he wrote: “There is no doubt that communist ideas will gain strength in our country if we fail to maintain the old ideals and original goals of democracy.”

The ardent enemy of Soviet power and communists around the world, W. Churchill, intensified his political activity, calling for tough methods of strengthening the British Empire, which continued to remain the largest in the world. At the invitation of Benito Mussolini, Churchill visited Italy (and did not hide his delight at the fascist regime). Later, at the invitation of B. Baruch, he arrived to lecture in the USA.

At the same time, plans for a new world war were being developed at headquarters and military academies. One of the prominent theorists of the upcoming tank battles was Charles de Gaulle, who at that time served on the staff of the vice-chairman of the Supreme Military Council of France, Henri Pétain, and taught at various military educational institutions. De Gaulle's theoretical works on the creation of a maneuverable shock army became widely known outside France and especially in Germany. Soon de Gaulle's ideas were picked up by Guderian and other theorists of lightning war - "blitzkrieg".

Politicians from a number of powers did not hide their intentions to reshape the world in their favor at the expense of our country. In 1927, Japanese Prime Minister Baron Giichi Tanaka prepared a memorandum stating that within the next ten years, "Japan should adopt a policy of Blood and Iron." This meant that Japan intended to conquer all of Asia or a significant part of it, half of which was within the USSR.

Shortly before this memorandum, in December 1926, the second volume of A. Hitler’s book “Mein Kampf” was published in Munich, which proclaimed: “We stop the eternal German movement to the south and west of Europe and turn our gaze to the lands in the east... When we talk today about territory in Europe, we can think first of all about Russia and the border states that are its vassals.” In May 1928, in the elections to the Reichstag, Hitler's National Socialist Party, which no one had taken seriously until now, received 800 thousand votes. With the support of influential German industrialists, the Nazis had become the country's leading political force by July 1932, ranking first in the number of votes cast for them and the number of seats in the Reichstag.

These internal political processes in the leading countries of the world and the foreign policy statements of their leaders indicated that the world was on the verge of a new, even more destructive war, which would not bypass the USSR. Since the Crimean War of 1853-1856, Russia has had the opportunity to verify the readiness of the leading countries of the world to rally against it, speaking under the banner of the struggle against “Russian despotism.” The leading Western European countries, which Russia had saved more than once from external aggression or internal revolts, invariably expressed their readiness to stab them in the back in “gratitude” for Russian help. The moral support of the world powers for the Japanese aggression of 1904, their reluctance to help Russia during the First World War, the desire of these countries to take advantage of the Civil War in Russia to plunder and weaken it - all this left an indelible mark on the minds of politically active people in Russia. The overthrow of the monarchy did not change anything in the attitude towards our country of the leading

Marx, Engels and Lenin never believed that the victory of the proletarian revolution guarantees the inevitable victory of socialist society over the capitalist world.

“Creating world history,” wrote K. Marx in a letter to L. Kugelman, “it would, of course, be very convenient if the struggle were undertaken only under the condition of infallibly favorable chances. On the other hand, history would have a very mystical character if” “accidents” did not play any role. These accidents, of course, are themselves an integral part of the general course of development, balanced by other accidents.” (PSS, vol. 33, p. 175)

The fact of the existence of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, their hostile clashes, as well as the contradiction between the development of the productive forces and arbitrariness! relations, do not in themselves predetermine the victory of one and the defeat of another social system.

The birth of a new socialist society can occur only through class struggle (during which the proletariat accumulates the necessary experience, goes through the stage of organizing its forces, forms trade unions and a revolutionary party, etc.) and the victory of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie - through revolutionary or parliamentary means. But this does not mean at all that the victory of the working class in one country or another will necessarily ensure the spread of the socialist revolution to all capitalist countries that are ripe for the transition to socialism. The experience of both the Paris Commune and the October Revolution in Russia proves that there is no such predetermination. The accomplished proletarian revolution, isolated from other countries, without receiving the support of the world proletariat, may then suffer defeat or degenerate.

Taking power in October 1917, the Bolsheviks, in accordance with Lenin’s strategy, believed that the world had entered an era of wars and socialist revolutions, that capitalism was in a state of collapse and was no longer able to lead humanity out of a period of permanent crises. Therefore, they believed, the socialist revolution in backward Russia, although it would not have independent significance, could not be premature, for it would be a prologue, a torch that would ignite the world revolution.

In the internal party struggle that unfolded in the RCP(b) after Lenin’s illness and death and resulted in a struggle for power, the initial significance was irreconcilable differences regarding the “questioning about the nature of the October Revolution.

Trotsky and the group of Central Committee members adjacent to him continued to take a traditional Marxist position, viewing the October Revolution as the first stage of the world revolution. Stalin and the majority of members of the Central Committee began to assign an independent role to the October Revolution, a self-sufficient intranational and intrastate significance. They argued that Lenin and the party viewed the Russian revolution, first of all, as opening the way to the direct construction of socialism in Russia, that a new socialist society could be created in Russia regardless of the coming of the world revolution.

From two opposing positions flowed two different tactics formulated by Stalin and Trotsky.

It followed from Trotsky’s position that the internal tasks of socialist construction in Russia must be subordinated to the main task - the world revolution. The spearhead of Trotsky’s tactics was aimed at strengthening the role of the Comintern, at preparing and organizationally strengthening the communist parties of capitalist (especially Western European) countries to prepare

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ki them to the second, after the October Revolution, assault on capitalism. Trotsky’s tactics in relation to internal construction in the USSR were no different from the plan set out by Lenin in his articles and letters to the Party Congress. In them, Vladimir Ilyich recommended using the time before the approach of the revolution in Western countries for the industrialization of the country and a powerful rise in agriculture through the gradual cooperation of peasant farms, to raise the cultural level of the working people and to involve the broad masses in governing the country, which was supposed to serve as the best means for a decisive fight against bureaucracy.

The tactics of Stalin and the majority of the Central Committee he headed were based on the belief that the world revolution was a chimera, that capitalism had emerged from the crisis and had finally stabilized. Therefore, Stalin’s foreign policy was aimed mainly at making it clear to the powerful capitalist countries surrounding the USSR that the USSR had moved away from its adventurist bet on world revolution. Stalin's domestic policy was aimed, first of all, at strengthening the country's state power, at increasingly centralizing the management of economic, political and social activities, and at increasingly tightening the methods of this management.

In the letter to L. Kugelman quoted above, Marx, speaking about “accidents” that can eliminate or slow down the revolution, mentions among them “such a “case” as the character of the people standing ... at the head of the movement.” The theoretical and tactical differences between the two factions of Bolshevism were immeasurably complicated and aggravated by the fact that such an immoral person as Stalin was at the head of the party.

Stalin caused incalculable harm to the cause of communism. Not only because he carried out the Thermidorian coup in the USSR, destroyed the old Bolshevik guard and most of the ideological communists in the USSR (as well as the main cadres of the Comintern) and disintegrated most of the rest. His main crime is the destruction of millions of innocent people - and in the name of communism, the destruction of the party, communist ideas. Thus, he discredited communist ideology in the eyes of the people of the whole world (especially advanced, developed countries), equating it with totalitarianism, calling a socialist society anti-democratic, inhumane, built on violence and exploitation of workers. The damage inflicted on the world labor movement by Stalin is incomparable to any other.

And in the times we are talking about here, and even now, there is a widely spread point of view that identifies Stalinism with Bolshevism and with Marxism, from which Bolshevism grew. This point of view, according to which Stalinism is a legitimate product of Bolshevism, is shared by the entire world reaction, and all the socialist parties that opposed Bolshevism were proclaimed by Stalin himself, and are now proclaimed by both his modern followers and supporters of Solzhenitsyn’s point of view. It was consistently defended, in particular, by Russian Mensheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries and anarchists.

We always predicted this, they said. Having started with the prohibition of other socialist parties, with the establishment of the dictatorship of the Bolsheviks in the Soviets, the October Revolution could not help but lead to the dictatorship of the bureaucracy. Stalinism is a continuation and at the same time the bankruptcy of Bolshevism.

Trotsky strongly objected to the identification of Stalinism with Bolshevism. The error of such reasoning, he said, begins with the silent identification of the October Revolution and the Soviet Union. The historical process, consisting in the struggle of hostile forces, is thus replaced, in his opinion, by the evolution of Bolshevism in an airless space.

Meanwhile, Bolshevism was only a political movement that closely merged with the labor movement, but was not even identical with it. And besides the working class in the USSR there were then more than a hundred million peasants, heterogeneous nationalities, as well as a legacy of oppression, poverty and ignorance. The state created by the Bolsheviks reflected not only the thought and will of Bolshevism, but also everything that resulted from the above: the cultural level of the country, the social composition of the population, the pressure of the barbaric past and no less barbaric world capitalism. Therefore, Trotsky believed, to portray the process of degeneration of the Soviet state as the evolution of pure Bolshevism means to ignore social reality in the name of one logically isolated element. When the Bolsheviks made concessions to the possessive tendencies of the peasants, established strict rules for joining the party, purged this party of alien elements, banned other parties, introduced the NEP, resorted to

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When they granted concessions to enterprises or entered into diplomatic agreements with imperialist governments, they, the Bolsheviks, drew particular conclusions from the basic fact that was clear to them from the very beginning. This fact can be formulated as follows: the conquest of power, no matter how important it is in itself, does not at all transform the party into the absolute master of the historical process.

Having taken possession of the state, the party, however, receives the opportunity to influence the development of society with a force previously inaccessible to it, but it itself is subject to tenfold influence from all its other elements. It can be thrown out of power by a direct blow from hostile forces; at a more protracted pace, it, having retained power, may degenerate. The Bolsheviks always took this theoretical possibility into account and spoke openly about it. Let us recall Lenin's forecast on the eve of the October Revolution and his statements after its occurrence. A special grouping of forces on a national and international scale created the preconditions for the fact that the proletariat was able to come to power in such a backward country as Russia. But the same grouping of forces testifies that without a more or less rapid victory of the proletariat in the advanced countries, the workers’ state will not survive. Left to its own devices, the Soviet regime will fall or degenerate. More precisely: first it will degenerate, then it will fall. Not only can the Soviet state leave the socialist path, but also the Bolshevik Party can, under unfavorable historical conditions, lose its Bolshevism.

From a clear understanding of such a danger, said L.D. Trotsky, came the left opposition, which finally took shape in 1923.

Registering the symptoms of degeneration day after day, she sought to oppose the approaching Thermidor with the conscious will of the proletarian avant-garde. However, this subjective factor was not enough. Those “giant masses” who, according to Lenin, decide the outcome of the struggle, are tired of internal deprivation and from waiting too long for the world revolution. The masses lost heart. Bureaucracy took over. She forced the proletarian vanguard to come to terms, trampled Marxism, and prostituted the Bolshevik Party. Stalinism won. In the person of the opposition, real Bolshevism broke with the Soviet bureaucracy and its Comintern. This is the actual course of development.

True, in a formal sense, Stalinism emerged from Bolshevism. The Moscow bureaucracy even today continues to call itself the Bolshevik party. True, she rarely uses this label now, but on occasion she uses it in order to better deceive the masses, passing off the shell as the core, the appearance as the essence.

The elimination of all other parties from the political arena would inevitably lead to the fact that the contradictory interests and tendencies of different sections of the population, to one degree or another, began to find their expression within the ruling party. As the political center of gravity moved from the proletarian vanguard to the bureaucracy, the party changed - both in social composition and in ideology. Thanks to the rapid course of events, it (the party) underwent a much more radical degeneration within 15 years (from 1922 to 1937) than Social Democracy did in half a century.

The “purge” that Stalin carried out in 1936-937 paved not even a bloody line between Bolshevism and Stalinism, but a whole river of blood. The extermination of the entire old generation of Bolsheviks, a significant part of the middle generation who participated in the civil war, and that part of the youth who most seriously took the Bolshevik traditions, clearly showed not only the political, but also the almost physical incompatibility of Stalinism and Bolshevism.

Above I outlined the views of L.D. Trotsky on the reasons for the degeneration of the party. But, as it seems to me now, there is a fair amount of fatalism in these views.

“Anyone who is at all familiar with history,” he writes in the article “Why Stalin defeated the opposition,” “knows that each the revolution gave rise to a counter-revolution, which... Always took away from the people a significant, sometimes the lion's share of their political gains. As a general rule, the victim of the first reactionary wave was that layer of revolutionaries who stood at the head of the masses in the first, offensive, “heroic” period of the revolution. This is already a general historical observation must lead us to think that it is not just a question of dexterity, cunning, skill of two or more persons, but about reasons an incomparably deeper order.

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Marxists, unlike superficial fatalists... do not at all deny the role of the individual, his initiative and courage in the social struggle. But unlike idealists, Marxists know that consciousness in the end subordinate to being."

There is a lot of truth in this. However, Trotsky did not provide here a specific analysis of the positions taken by individual prominent members of the Party’s Central Committee, nor did he examine the balance of forces that had developed in the Central Committee before and after Lenin’s death. In his analysis of the reasons for the defeat of the opposition and Stalin’s victory, he proceeds only from the objective conditions prevailing in the world and in the USSR - and therefore his explanations smack of fatalism.

“The fact is absolutely undeniable and full of significance,” wrote L.D. Trotsky, “that the Soviet bureaucracy became more powerful the more severe the blows fell on the world working class. The defeat of the revolutionary movements in Europe and Asia gradually undermined the workers’ faith in an international ally. There was always an acute need inside the country.The most courageous and selfless representatives of the working class either managed to die in the civil war, or rose several levels higher and for the most part assimilated into the ranks of the bureaucracy, having lost the revolutionary spirit.

Tired of the terrible tension of the revolutionary years, having lost perspective, poisoned by the bitterness of a series of disappointments, the broad masses fell into passivity. This kind of reaction was observed, as already said, after every revolution. The immeasurable historical advantage of the October Revolution as a proletarian revolution lies in the fact that the fatigue and disappointment of the masses was taken advantage not by the class enemy in the person of the bourgeoisie and the nobility, but by the upper layer of the working class itself and the intermediate groups associated with it, which joined the Soviet bureaucracy."

It is true that the Bolsheviks, Lenin and Trotsky himself foresaw the possibility of such a version of history when the proletarian revolutionary party, having taken power in an isolated and, moreover, backward country, with the world revolution delayed and under the influence of tired and passive masses, forced will cede power to another class or be degenerated.

But was there really such a situation in Russia after Lenin’s illness and death?

If Trotsky at the Tenth Party Congress, as Lenin insisted on this, had spoken on behalf of Lenin and his own against Stalin on organizational and national issues, would he have been able to remove Stalin from the post of General Secretary?

Or, if all members of the Politburo did the same. Couldn't they have fulfilled Lenin's will and removed Stalin from the post of General Secretary?

And if this had happened, a completely different situation could have developed in the party, a different atmosphere, which Lenin wanted to create and which he outlined in his letters to the congress. And this, in turn, could change both the international situation and the internal situation in the USSR in a revolutionary direction.

“Our party relies on two classes, and therefore its instability is possible and its fall is inevitable if an agreement could not take place between these two classes. In this case, it is useless to take certain measures, in general it is useless to talk about the stability of our Central Committee. No measures in this regard In any case, they will not be able to prevent a split. But I hope that this is too distant a future and too incredible an event to talk about...

I think that the main ones on the issue of sustainability from this point of view are such members of the Central Committee as Stalin and Trotsky. The relationship between them, in my opinion, constitutes more than half the danger of a split that could have been avoided..." (PSS, vol. 45, pp. 344-345)

Consequently, Vladimir Ilyich at that time saw the immediate danger threatening the party not in the prolongation of the world revolution, not in the backwardness of the country and not in the decline in the mood of the tired masses, but in the likelihood of personal struggle between the party leaders. Trotsky himself in the twenties and early thirties in the book "My Life" and in articles published

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In "Bulletins" during these years, he repeatedly expressed himself in the sense that if he had acted in a bloc with Lenin at the Tenth Congress, then their victory would have been completely assured. And it is true. After all, their joint action in defense of the monopoly of foreign trade quickly ended in their victory. Trotsky's speech in a bloc with Lenin on the organizational issue would undoubtedly have ended with the same victory. This would mean the removal of Stalin from the post of General Secretary, which would immediately deprive him of what he was strong at - his connection with the apparatus.

In the article “Why Stalin defeated the opposition” quoted above, Trotsky wrote:

“One of the most important achievements of the proletarian leadership must be the ability to distinguish when it is possible to advance and when it is necessary to retreat. This ability constituted Lenin’s main strength. The success or failure of the left opposition against the bureaucracy, of course, depended to one degree or another on the quality of the leadership of both fighting camps.” .

This one quality, Trotsky did not have this ability at the decisive moment. Despite the fact that on the eve of Lenin’s death the two of them examined the situation in detail and agreed on tactics, Trotsky was unable to bring the line they adopted to a victorious end. A negative role here was played, of course, by the behavior of the remaining members of the Politburo, who were carried away by their personal interests and therefore did not follow Lenin’s advice - to remove Stalin from his post at the only favorable time when this was still possible.

This seemingly “private” question, this “accident” of history (who will be the general secretary?) had a huge impact on the entire subsequent history of the party and the country. Therefore, we consider it necessary to specifically examine the question of what position each of the political leaders took in this short but decisive period of time.

Readers who wish to become more familiar with the political situation and balance of power on the eve of the XII Party Congress, with the nature of the disagreements discussed then in the party leadership (about the monopoly of foreign trade, about national and organizational problems, etc.), should study Lenin’s letters during this period (to Trotsky , Stalin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Mdivani, N. Okudzhava, K. Tsintsadze); his own letters addressed to the XII Congress; records of V.I.’s secretaries Lenin; his notes to L. Fotieva. All this is contained in vol. 45 and 54 of the Fifth Complete Works of V.I. Lenin. You should also read the IML editorial notes to these documents.

From these documents we learn, in particular, that on March 5, 1923, V.I. Lenin dictated to M.A. Volodicheva two letters: one to Trotsky with a request to take upon himself the defense of his views on the national question at the plenum of the Central Committee and at the XII Party Congress, and the other to Stalin regarding his rude behavior towards N.K. Krupskaya. The next day, March 6, he inquired whether a response had been received from Trotsky, looked again at yesterday’s letter to Stalin and gave instructions to send it.

On the same day, Lenin suffered a blow, after which he never returned to political life.

This outcome favored Stalin's intentions. People close to Lenin had the impression that, under the pretext of following the advice of doctors, Stalin was trying to isolate Lenin from his comrades, from the flow of information to him. This system of prohibitions worried Lenin and harmed him more than any information. So, in the recording of L.A. Fotieva dated February 12, 1923 says:

“Vladimir Ilyich is worse. Severe headache... According to Maria Ilyinichna, the doctors upset him to such an extent that his lips were trembling... ... the impression was created that it was not the doctors who gave instructions to the Central Committee, but the Central Committee gave instructions to the doctors,”(emphasis mine, PSS, vol. 45, p. 485)

It was at this time that Stalin took decisive measures to take control of the central apparatus, carefully studied every major party worker, his weaknesses and strengths, and all this from the angle that was most important to him: how this comrade treated him, Stanin, and other members of the Politburo (especially to Trotsky). For such a study, methods such as eavesdropping on telephone conversations were used, as described above. The formation of the “troika”, directed against Trotsky, also dates back to this time.

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On the eve of the Twelfth Congress, Stalin suddenly made a proposal: in the face of Vladimir Ilyich’s illness, stop the feuds and go to the congress united.

It sounded very noble. But what did this mean practically? This meant: in view of Lenin’s mortal illness, to stop the struggle for Lenin’s principled position on national and organizational issues, to approve the theses of Stalin’s reports on these issues, directly directed against Lenin’s views expressed in his letters to the congress, to leave Stalin as General Secretary and thereby hand over his hands are the fate of the party and the country.

It’s strange how Trotsky could fall for such a primitive bait! And, nevertheless, he agreed with Stalin’s proposal not to bring disagreements to the congress and, together with other members of the Politburo, approved the theses of Stalin’s reports on national and organizational issues.

This was Trotsky's biggest political mistake. And he did it, despite the fact that Lenin warned him: do not make any compromise with Stalin. This mistake played a fatal role in the life of the party and the country; it allowed Stalin to retain his post, gain time and consolidate his power in the party and state apparatus.

What was the root of the mistake? Why did Trotsky make concessions to Stalin?

It seems to me that during that period several unfavorable circumstances (“accidents”) immediately coincided with some of Trotsky’s individual traits, which in his personal life are positive, but for a political figure they certainly turn out to be disadvantages.

Trotsky underestimated the organizational side of the activities of the leading bodies of the party in comparison with the political, and even more so did not attach importance to behind-the-scenes intrigues, which, in his opinion, could not have a decisive influence on politics. Therefore, he did not attach the same importance to the post of General Secretary and to the person who occupied it as Lenin did. Moreover, he underestimated Stalin’s personality, considering him a secondary figure, and assigned the main role in distorting the fundamental policy of the party to Zinoviev. In the conditions of Lenin’s mortal illness, he considered it impossible to reject Stalin’s proposal for a “truce”, for the party leadership to come out united for the congress, and postponed fundamental disputes.

This delay became fatal. Accustomed to open political struggle, Trotsky was not sufficiently experienced in the intricacies of the behind-the-scenes game of political figures, he was disdainful of all kinds of organizational and political combinations, and even more so he considered it beneath his dignity to delve into the intricacies of such combinations or to participate in them. Stalin, on the other hand, played his entire game behind the scenes; in this area he was extremely cunning and dexterous, had a taste for intrigue and maneuvers, and attached decisive importance to the organizational consolidation of his power in the post of General Secretary.

Not seeing the main danger for the party in the continuation of Stalin’s activities as General Secretary, Trotsky did not understand and did not feel that it was precisely in this and precisely at the moment when Lenin was already irretrievably lost for political life that it was impossible to give in and retreat. It was at this moment that Trotsky had to take upon himself both at the plenum of the Central Committee and at the congress to openly and actively defend Lenin’s views on changing the organizational structure and composition of the central institutions of the party, and on the removal of Stalin, and on the national question. Moreover, he had in his hands such a document as Lenin’s letter dated March 5, 1923, which allowed him to speak not only on his own behalf, but also on Lenin’s behalf:

"Dear comrade Trotsky!

I would ask you very much to take upon yourself the defense of the Georgian cause at the Party Central Committee. This matter is now under persecution by Stalin and Dzerzhinsky, and I cannot rely on their impartiality. Quite the opposite. If you agreed to take on his protection, then I could be calm. If for some reason you do not agree, then return the whole matter to me. I will take this as a sign of your disagreement. With best comradely greetings Lenin. March 5, 1923." (PSS, vol. 54, p. 329).

Trotsky did not have time to respond to this letter: the next day Lenin suffered an irreversible blow. But he still has the letter!

Perhaps Trotsky did not share Lenin’s views on the National Question? Judging by his subsequent speeches, this is not the case. In 1926, listing at the VII plenum of the ECCI

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Stalin's mistakes, he mentions his mistakes in the national question. In 1930, in Bulletin No. 14, outlining the history of Stalin’s political mistakes, Trotsky writes: “On the national question, he took a position that Lenin accused of bureaucratic and chauvinistic tendencies...”

So, Trotsky understood everything, but on the eve of the XII Congress, and during the congress, and after it, he was silent about Stalin’s mistakes. Neither during the discussion of Stalin's theses at the pre-congress plenum, nor at the congress itself, nor after it did Trotsky come out with support for Lenin's anti-Stalinist views and did not report Lenin's letter to him on the national question. He was not even present at the congress meeting that adopted the resolution on this issue. Some of the major party workers (Bukharin, Rakovsky, Skrypnik, Mdivani and others) tried to introduce amendments to this resolution proposed by Stalin in the spirit of Lenin’s views expressed in his letter “On Autonomization...”. But these attempts were not successful: the congress considered both the report and the resolution not as Stalin’s personal opinion, but as the opinion of the Central Committee. Trotsky's speech and his publication of Lenin's letter could have played a decisive role in the turning point at the congress. But Trotsky did not speak.

After the XII Party Congress, when Zinoviev felt that the power of Stalin, who held the apparatus in his hands, had grown enormously, he turned to Trotsky with a proposal to unite to fight for such a change in the structure of the central institutions of the party that would put the secretariat (and therefore Stalin) under control Politburo.

One can understand that L.D. Trotsky did not trust G.E. Zinoviev. It is impossible not to take into account the fact that Zinoviev, like Stalin, viewed the organizational principles of Bolshevism exclusively pragmatically: as the most effective means of mastering the party machine - voting, elections, selecting the “right” people. Both of them cared very little about increasing the activity and initiative of party members, although only this could be the only guarantee against the degeneration of the leadership.

All this is true. But Trotsky did not understand that the position of General Secretary and Stalin’s personal qualities made him more dangerous than Zinoviev. Up until the XIV Party Congress, Trotsky associated the opportunist policy of the Central Committee with Zinoviev and Kamenev, and considered the role of Stalin to be secondary. Therefore, seeing another combination in Zinoviev’s proposal, he rejected it.

Only when, after the Tenth Party Congress, it becomes clear to Trotsky that time has been lost and victory went to his opponents, he, under pressure from his like-minded people, launches an attack. The 1923 debate begins.

How did L.D. behave then? Trotsky?

He did not openly lead the left opposition, did not actively participate in the discussion, in the struggle of the party masses, among whom he enjoyed enormous authority. Having withdrawn from direct participation in the discussion, he shifted this task onto the shoulders of his supporters - Preobrazhensky, Radek, Pyatakov, I.N. Smirnov, Mrachkovsky, Beloborodov and others.

This line of behavior was based on his fear of a split in the party. His closest associates believed that there was no need to fear a split and did not approve of his behavior.

The discussion is over. On January 16, 1924, the Tenth Party Conference met, at which Stalin and Zinoviev accused the opposition of petty-bourgeois deviation. The conference adopts a resolution “On petty-bourgeois deviation”, as well as a decision to publish the previously unpublished paragraph 7 of the resolution of the Tenth Party Congress “On Unity” - a point directly directed against any criticism of the Central Committee. And this despite the fact that less than a month ago, on December 5, 1923, the Central Committee adopted the resolution “On Workers’ Democracy” agreed upon between the majority and the opposition.

In addition, the conference decides to purge military and university cells, the majority of which voted for the left opposition.

How does Trotsky react to all these events? He is not present at the conference, does not speak anywhere, does not protest anywhere against the treacherous policy of the majority, that is, in essence, he betrays his like-minded people.

Three days after the end of the XIII Conference, Lenin died. Four months later, in May 1924, the XIII Party Congress convened.

How did Trotsky behave at the congress that confirmed the resolution of the Thirteenth Party Conference “On the petty-bourgeois deviation”?

As a soldier, not as a party leader. He declared that “the party is always right” and called on his like-minded people to discipline and submit to the party. Notes of justification prevailed in his speech, although he later argued that the degeneration of the party was predetermined

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already at the XII Congress.

When was Trotsky right?

Then, when he argued that his victory would have been ensured at the Twelfth Party Congress if he had opposed Stalin on his and Lenin’s behalf (and even only on his own behalf)?

Or when he began to assert that the defeat of the opposition was predetermined by the historical course of events?

In 1935, in the same article “Why Stalin defeated the opposition,” Trotsky wrote:

“Stalin, a minor figure of the proletarian revolution, revealed himself as the undisputed leader of the Thermidorian bureaucracy - nothing more... Those sages who retroactively accuse us of losing power due to indecision...they think that there are some these are special technical “secrets” with the help of which one can win or maintain revolutionary power, regardless of the action of the greatest objective factors: victory or defeat of the revolution in the West and East, the rise or decline of the mass movement in the country, etc.

Power is not a prize that goes to the more dexterous. Power is a relationship between people, and ultimately between classes. Proper leadership, as already said, is an important lever for success. But this does not mean at all that the leadership can ensure victory under all conditions."

True, not in front of everyone. But given the specific conditions that developed in the country and in the party at the time of Lenin’s illness, before the Twelfth Party Congress, it was possible to certainly ensure Trotsky’s victory if he had taken the correct and decisive line that Lenin intended to take when preparing for the congress.

Apparently, Trotsky himself thought so when he wrote his book “My Life,” but by 1935 he changed his point of view. Here is what he writes about this in the mentioned article:

“The question of how the course of the struggle would have developed if Lenin had remained alive cannot, of course, be answered with mathematical precision. That Lenin was an irreconcilable opponent of the greedy conservative bureaucracy and the policies of Stalin, who increasingly linked his fate with it, is indisputably clear from a number of letters, articles and proposals of Lenin for the last period of his life, in particular from his “Testament”, in which he recommended removing Stalin from the post of General Secretary, and finally, from his last letter, in which he broke off with Stalin “all personal and comradely relations." In the period between the two attacks, Lenin invited me to create a faction with him to fight against the bureaucracy and its main headquarters, the Organizing Bureau of the Central Committee, where Stalin led. For the 12th Party Congress, Lenin, in his own words, was preparing a "bomb" against Stalin. All this is told on the basis of accurate and indisputable documents - in my autobiography and in a separate work, “Lenin’s Testament.”

So, Trotsky himself declares that Lenin was preparing a “bomb” against Stalin at the XII Party Congress, recommended Stalin’s removal from the post of General Secretary and proposed a bloc against Stalin to Trotsky.

Why didn’t Trotsky implement this Leninist plan either at the next plenum of the Central Committee or at the XII Party Congress?

Maybe he tried to do this, spoke on these points, but remained in the minority, was defeated for reasons of an objective nature?

No, as we know, nothing like that happened. Trotsky's behavior throughout this entire period, from the December plenum of the Central Committee of 1922 to the XIV Party Congress (1925) inclusive, was, as I have shown with specific examples, passive and indecisive. And this is precisely why he suffered defeat, and also because he treated his opponent superficially and arrogantly.

We see that subsequently Trotsky not only overlooked his mistakes, but also misjudged Lenin. He argues that Lenin, if he had remained alive and entered into the fight with Stalin, most likely would have been defeated.

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“Lenin’s preparatory measures show,” writes Trotsky, “that he considered the upcoming struggle very difficult - not because, of course, he was afraid of Stalin personally as an enemy (it’s ridiculous to talk about this), but because behind Stalin’s back he clearly discerned a network of blood relations interests of the powerful layer of the ruling bureaucracy (when did it manage to form and gain strength?).

It is safe to say that if Lenin had lived longer, the onslaught of bureaucratic omnipotence would have been achieved - at least in the first years - more slowly. But already in 1926, Krupskaya said in a circle of left-wing oppositionists: “If Ilyich were alive, he would probably already be in prison.” Lenin’s fears and alarming foresights were then still fresh in her memory, and she had no illusions at all about Lenin’s personal omnipotence, understanding, in his own words, the dependence of the best helmsman on fair or headwinds and currents.”

Of course, if Lenin had behaved as passively and indecisively as Trotsky, if he had not achieved the removal of Stalin from the post of General Secretary, the same thing that happened to his comrades in the Politburo could have happened to him. But I think that Lenin, by the very nature of his character, could not do this.

The facts presented, I think, are enough to confirm the main idea of ​​this chapter: Stalin’s victory over the opposition was not predetermined by the nature of the era, as Trotsky later claimed. This victory - over Trotsky and other members of the Politburo - was thought out, organized and carried out by Stalin.

This is not contradicted by Trotsky’s statement - very precise and correct - that the era was working towards a decline in the revolutionary movement, that fatigue was increasingly affecting the mood of the working masses. The fact of fatigue and passivity of the working masses does not at all imply the predetermination of Stalin's victory. With the correct policy of the party towards the peasantry and industrialization, with an improvement in the material situation of the working class, with a decisive struggle against bureaucracy on the basis of broad internal party democracy, the party could lead the country along the path of socialist construction without abandoning its main goal - world revolution.

Lenin, in his letters to the congress and in his last, dying articles, outlined a plan, the implementation of which would give the Russian proletariat the opportunity to hold out until the approach of the world revolution. Stalin, having seized power, gave the party's policy the opposite direction, oriented not towards the world revolution, but towards strengthening the Russian state, towards strengthening the new bureaucracy. The reactionary tendencies of the era contributed to this direction and made it easier for Stalin to defeat his revolutionary opponents. His desire for personal power coincided with the reactionary tendencies of the era.

It is characteristic that Stalin shunned international problems, had little understanding of the issues of the international labor movement, did not study them and, due to his narrow-mindedness and provincialism, did not even have a taste for them. If he had to touch on these problems in his speeches, he either unsuccessfully copied Lenin, or used the analysis of his more educated allies. His suspicious, distrustful character could not have been more in keeping with the xenophobia, dislike and distrust of everything foreign that had been instilled in Russia for centuries. This also fit well with distrust of foreign communist parties, of foreign communists.

Trotsky put it this way: Stalin “sought a simpler, more national, more reliable policy.” The reactionary course of abandoning the international goals of the revolution and building socialism in one country was not predetermined by the internal situation in the country; it was a consequence of a turn in party policy, outlined and prepared by Statny during Lenin’s lifetime and carried out by him at the XII-XVII party congresses.

Let us once again summarize the means by which he achieved this and the circumstances that made his task easier.

First of all - the enormous power of the General Secretary of the Party Central Committee. Using it, Stalin gradually, day after day, month after month, year after year, strengthened his undivided influence in the party apparatus. The party masses gradually withdrew from participation in party life; from the local and central bodies of the party, at first slowly, then more quickly, cadres of old ideological Bolsheviks were forced out; an obedient majority was formed through various organizational measures; expelled from leadership positions

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there were thinking and dissenting communists.

Then - carefully studying your opponents, present and potential, capable of interfering with his sole power, and the skillful use of both their positive qualities (gullibility, devotion to the party) and personal weaknesses.

Stalin skillfully created situations for them to clash with each other, for a sharp aggravation of relations between them, and thus prepared the ground for their discredit and gradual removal from the political arena.

To what extent all opponents of Stalin turned out to be inexperienced and gullible politicians!

At first, L.D. showed his shortsightedness and indecisiveness. Trotsky, who, for fear of disrupting the unity of the party, withdrew from the struggle at the XII Party Congress, and then refused first the alliance with Zinoviev (in 1923 and 1925), and then the alliance with Bukharin (1928).

In all of the above cases, Trotsky remains a passive contemplator of Stalin’s reprisal against his opponents - yesterday’s allies in the fight against Trotsky. Finding themselves in trouble, they should have become natural allies of Trotsky and indeed offered him this alliance. Trotsky's decisive intervention on the side of the minority could lead to success in the fight against Stalin. However, Trotsky was unable to rise above yesterday’s disputes and infighting; he could not draw the line between Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin on the one hand, and Stalin on the other. And he silently allowed reprisals against them, which subsequently facilitated the final defeat of all Stalin’s opponents - and, above all, the defeat and physical destruction of the left opposition.

The behavior of Zinoviev and Kamenev was even less principled. If we carefully analyze all their speeches during the period of struggle against the left opposition, it will become clear that these speeches were not caused by serious theoretical or practical disagreements. But the struggle for power, for the “inheritance” to Lenin, is clearly visible, especially inflamed on the eve of the imminent death of the recognized leader of the party. The most authoritative member of the Politburo after Lenin was then Trotsky - and that is why Zinoviev and Kamenev directed a blow against him, concluding an alliance with Stalin, who seemed to them a harmless “practitioner”. That is why Trotsky’s historical “non-Bolshevism,” which Lenin in his “Testament” did not consider possible to blame, began to be exaggerated and propagated in the party. It was precisely in order to isolate and eliminate Trotsky and those who supported him that Zinoviev and Kamenev, disregarding Lenin’s advice, defended the retention of Stalin as General Secretary, which Zinoviev later belatedly repented of.

In 1926, Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev finally came to their senses and formed a bloc. But it's' too late. Zinoviev and Kamenev believed then that in an alliance with the opposition of 1923 they would be able to quickly take control of the situation, restore the Leninist line in the party and their personal prestige. They were wrong this time too. Time had already been lost; Stalin had already taken complete control of the apparatus, and through it the majority of the party.

The last fatal and shameful mistake was made by Zinoviev and Kamenev immediately after the XV Congress, capitulating on an issue in which no self-respecting politician has the right to capitulate: renouncing their views. Having achieved this from them, Stalin achieved his main goal: he publicly humiliated and discredited them before the party and the working class and established himself in the eyes of those old Bolsheviks who wavered in their attitude towards the “new opposition”. This capitulation, which Zinoviev and Kamenev thoughtlessly considered a means of preventing a split in the party and a condition for their return to political activity, was essentially their political suicide, which came long before Stalin killed them physically. All their (especially Zinoviev’s) further behavior is the result of demoralization, the beginning of which was their rejection of their views.

As for the “right opposition,” Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky were used three times by Stalin: first against Trotsky, then against the Leningrad opposition, and finally against the united opposition.

It should be noted here that, unlike others, between Bukharin and Trotsky there really were fundamental, ideological, theoretical disagreements. It was Bukharin, and not Stalin at all, who was the author of the theory of building socialism in one single country, which

When someone reproached Zinoviev and Kamenev for abandoning their ally Trotsky after the XV Congress, Kamenev replied, “Trotsky was needed to form a government, and he is ballast for returning to the party.”

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which Trotsky considered anti-revolutionary and nationalist. It was Bukharin who acted as its defender during the struggle with Zinoviev: Stalin was incapable of this even at his theoretical level; but he was perfectly suited to pitting first Zinoviev and Kamenev against Trotsky, then Bukharin against Zinoviev and Kamenev, and, in the end, one by one removing all his rivals with each other’s hands.

After all, the “right” not only conducted theoretical discussions with the left oppositionists, they helped Stalin justify the need for police repressions against his party comrades, covered up with their authority this dirty deed, of which, in the end, they themselves became victims. The reprisal against Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev and their supporters (arrests and exiles) until 1928 took place not only before the eyes of the right, but also with their direct participation.

Could it be that they really considered “Trotskyism” a petty-bourgeois deviation, and Trotsky and the Trotskyists as anti-Leninists? I think it's possible. But what is seemingly impossible is to continue to trust Stalin, to continue to consider him a Bolshevik, a Leninist, observing his political kitchen from day to day at close range, his treachery towards yesterday’s allies, his unprincipledness and cruelty.

However, until 1928, when it was the turn of Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky to be squeezed out by Stalin and thrown out of the leadership - right up to these very times they marched with Stalin against their old party comrades. And they also realized that they had made a major political miscalculation only when it was too late.

But Trotsky, back in 1926, repeatedly invited Bukharin to join him “in the general demand to restore a healthy internal party regime.”

In the party under Lenin, over the years of joint work, a core of middle-level leadership cadres formed and grew. These were workers and proletarian intellectuals, most of them devoted to the cause of the proletarian revolution, ideological, selfless, many very capable people. After the revolution, it was they who took the posts of people's commissars, secretaries of national communist parties, provincial committees (later regional committees and regional committees), major military and economic leaders. The internal party regime created by Stalin disintegrated them. At first, Stalin temporarily used these people in the fight against the opposition under the guise of fighting for party unity, and then destroyed them.

I am constantly tormented by the question: why did Stalin manage to carry out his plan so relatively easily? How and with what did he seduce some in order to set them against others? Why didn’t any of the members of the Politburo, who worked with Stalin for many years, suspect the provocative nature of Stalin’s activities?

Svetlana Alliluyeva wrote about her father in her book “Only One Year”:

“He treated people without any romanticism: there are strong people who are needed, equal people who get in the way, and weak people who are not needed by anyone.”

I think that these words of Stalin’s daughter contain the seed of an answer to the question that is tormenting me.

Here I am reading how Stalin charmed his famous guests: H. Wells, L. Feuchtwanger, R. Rolland, B. Shaw, F. Roosevelt, W. Churchill and others who enjoyed enormous influence in their countries and throughout the world. These were all strong people, and he needed them. And he knew how to find the key to their hearts, he knew how to make them believe in themselves when he needed stumps. He charmed some with his Georgian hospitality and cordiality, playing a sincere and broad-minded person, he knew how to convince others of his devotion to the ideas of socialism, and he impressed others as a statesman.

Wasn’t this the way he attracted members of the Politburo to his side, taking turns pitting members of the Politburo against each other, playing an attentive friend, a sympathetic like-minded person, whose support against ideological opponents you can count on? After all, when he entered the fight, these were strong people who he “really needed.”

When Stalin was preparing an attack against Trotsky in 1922-923, in order to win over Zinoviev, he frightened him with the “non-Bolshevism” of Trotsky, who, after Lenin’s death, could seize the leadership of the party and, using the mistake of Zinoviev and Kamenev in October 1917, remove him from this leadership both of them. At the same time, Stalin presented his own plan (which he later implemented) as Trotsky’s plan, and presented himself as a modest

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a person who does not pretend to be the first role, but only cares about the outstanding leader Zinoviev.

When Stalin set Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky against Zinoviev and Kamenev, he presented himself as a person who most of all defended the unity of the party and wanted to retain all members of the Politburo in the leadership. Hypocritically objecting to the demands of Zinoviev and Kamenev to expel Trotsky from the Central Committee and intensify the struggle against Bukharin, Stalin seemed to be saying to Bukharin:

You see, today they demand to cut off Trotsky, tomorrow, when they deal with Trotsky, they will demand your blood... Don’t trust them, trust only me...

Of course, that was only a rough scheme, everything was subtler, more complicated, but this was precisely the basis of Stalin’s tactics and strategy in his struggle for power: to set one against the other, and with a cue to throw away his yesterday’s allies when they were used. This is the tactics and strategy of all unprincipled politicians, all tyrants and dictators, all mafia leaders - political and criminal.

The biggest mistake of Lenin's former comrades - and the mistake was not only political, but also psychological - was that they all viewed Stalin as a member of the same party, as their ideological comrade, even if he stood on erroneous positions. And he never was. Its goal was not socialism, it was not a world revolution, it was not the liberation of working humanity from social and national oppression. He had one goal - power. Personal, unlimited power, power as such, regardless of its social content.

I don’t know whether he was ever a communist or whether he joined the revolutionary movement, guided by the same basic passion. Let us quote his daughter’s book again:

“... My father had the wounded pride of a poor man, capable of moving mountains in his path... The firm conviction that any means are good to achieve the goal promised more real results than political ideals... My father remained internally the same as he walked out of the doors of the seminary. Nothing was added to his character, only the same qualities developed to the limit."

He dreamed of emerging from the bottom, and not just emerging to a more worthy human life, but rising to the top, achieving higher power. He had no hope of achieving this under the old regime; instinctively sensing the proximity of the fall of the monarchy, he realized that the revolutionary era provides unlimited opportunities for advancement. So he became a Bolshevik.

An interesting detail that Trotsky notes more than once in his articles, books and memoirs: Stalin, who many times took a position opposite to Lenin’s, never entered into a fight with Lenin. He always, as Trotsky put it, “rebounded in time.” Not because Lenin convinced him, but because Stalin was really afraid of him. He was afraid that Lenin would recognize him and unravel his inner essence.

Unfortunately, it did not happen. Only shortly before his death did Lenin come closer to solving this phenomenon. He approached, but did not fully recognize him.

And then death came.

After the death of V.I. Lenin (January 1924), the struggle over issues of further development of the country intensified in the party and state leadership. The desire to establish control over the party and the state, to seize full power was characteristic of the 20s pp.

Rivals for power in the USSR

The main rivals in the struggle for political leadership were Stalin and Trotsky.

In the party, Trotsky led the “left opposition,” which criticized the bureaucratic party apparatus and I. Stalin’s attempts to concentrate power in his own hands.

January 1925 Plenum of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks condemned the position of Trotsky, who was removed from his post as a member of the Politburo and chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council.

After the XIV Party Congress (December 1925), G. Zinoviev and L. Kamenev, who had previously opposed Trotsky, united. They criticized the growing bureaucratization of the party and state apparatus, advocated accelerating the pace of capital construction in industry, and for industrialization, which was to be carried out at the expense of the peasantry. October 1927 The theses of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks were published at the XIV Party Congress, criticizing Trotsky and his supporters. December 1927 At the XV Congress of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, L. Trotsky and all his supporters were expelled from the party.

Also expelled from the party were 75 active opposition figures, including G. Pyatakov, K. Radek, and X. Rakovsky.

1928 p. L. Trotsky was expelled from the USSR.

So-called " right opposition"(N. Bukharin, A. Rykov, M. Tomsky) accused Stalin of “military-feudal methods of exploitation of peasants” during the years of “war communism”, insisted on maintaining and expanding market relations, balanced development of all sectors of the national economy, reasonable rates of industrialization etc.

N. Bukharin and his supporters were accused of capitulating to the kulaks, intending to restore capitalism and split the Bolshevik Party.

November 1929 Plenum of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks removed N. Bukharin from the Politburo.

30s. All active members of the opposition of the 20s were arrested and physically destroyed by order of Stalin. They became "enemies of the people" and "foreign spies."

1988 Convictions against former members of opposition blocs were overturned as groundless.

Conclusions:

1. Political discussions of the 20s pp. reflected the complex process of socialist construction and the intense struggle for power.
2. Stalin's political opponents were deprived of power.
3. Stalin received dictatorial power in the party and state.

Why did Stalin win in the struggle for leadership after Lenin's death (January 1924)?

Contenders:

1. I. Stalin (Dzhugashvili)

2. Leon Trotsky (Leiba Bronstein)

3. L. Kamenev (Rosenfeld)

4. E. Zinoviev (Radomylsky-Apfelbaum)

5. N. I. Bukharin.

After the death of Lenin, at least four main ideological movements emerged in the party - Trotskyists, Zinovievites, Stalinists, Bukharinists. Each of the groupings within the party was based on a specific ideological platform. And each had influential supporters in the party, highest government bodies, regions, public organizations, etc.

The Trotskyists, who had the strongest positions in the army, advocated pushing the world revolution to revolution by any means, the accelerated introduction of socialist principles in the economy, including the curtailment of the NEP, industrialization and the fight against the kulaks. The Zinoviev-Kamenev faction, which dominated in the capitals - especially in Leningrad - and in the Comintern and the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, considered Trotsky's views too radical, disagreeing with him on the pace and means of achieving the same goals. The Stalin faction, which controlled, first of all, the party apparatus (it was in the hands of Molotov) and the special services (Dzerzhinsky), had already cooled to the ideas of world revolution and until the end of the 1920s did not believe that the time to curtail the NEP had come. The Bukharinites, who had support in the government (led by Rykov), trade unions (led by Tomsky), as well as in the party press and the university sphere, were supporters of continuing the NEP policy with its reliance on the potential of the private sector and the growing rich peasantry. Today, many of the disagreements of those years seem microscopic or strange, but then in the eyes of leading Bolsheviks they were of great importance.

And this would be another reason for the growing influence of the Stalinists - their line was quite in tune with the sentiments of the party masses, tired of the troubles.

Pitirim Sorokin, expelled from the country and later making Harvard famous, at the same time identified a general pattern: “People, taught by an inexorable teacher - hunger, cold, disease, poverty and death, are faced with a dilemma: die, continuing the revolutionary debauchery, or all find another way out. Bitter and tragic experience forces people to look at the world differently... And so the demand for unlimited freedom is replaced by a thirst for order; praise to the “liberators” from the old regime is replaced by praise to the “liberators” from the revolution, in other words, the organizers of order. "Order!" and “Long live the creators of order!” - such is the general impulse of the second stage of the revolution.”

In the mid-1920s, it was the Stalinist group that did NOT have a strong desire, unlike the more left-wing factions, to continue the “revolutionary debauchery.” This was the basis of the short-term “thaw” of the mid-1920s. Signs of the “thaw” were noticeable in the 1924 USSR Constitution, which lacked a special chapter on the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The intensification of the struggle between the Stalinists and Zinovievites in 1925 changed the situation on the Bolshevik chessboard. The main stumbling block was the theory of building socialism in one country. In April 1925, at a meeting of the Politburo, Kamenev, supported by Zinoviev, stated that “the technical and economic backwardness of the USSR is an insurmountable obstacle to building socialism.” Help and loans from the West could come to the USSR only if the proletarian revolutions won there. On the eve of the XIV Party Conference, Zinoviev proposed at the Plenum of the Central Committee theses “On the tasks of the Comintern and the RCP(b)”, where he argued that the victory of socialism is possible only on a global scale, and at the Party Conference itself he almost openly went into battle against Stalin, warning about the danger of a “national limitations”: “We are talking about sentiments that can be reduced to the formula: what do we care about the international revolution, we can build ourselves a cell under a spruce tree.” The commission of the Central Committee (Stalin) for drafting the resolution, also without naming the names of Zinoviev and Kamenev, rejected as “Trotskyist” the opinion that building a complete socialist society is impossible in the USSR without the help of more developed countries. On the contrary, “the party of the proletariat must make every effort to build a socialist society in the confidence that this construction can and will certainly be victorious if it is possible to defend the country from any attempts at restoration.” The Zinovievites’ offensive was undermined by the obvious decline in the revolutionary wave in the world and was easily repulsed.

The XIV Congress was one of the hottest in the history of the party. At the forum, which went down in history as the industrialization congress, little was said about industrialization itself. Stalin’s main strategic idea: “We must make every effort to make our country an economically self-sufficient country, independent, based on the domestic market, a country that will serve as a center of attraction for all other countries that are gradually falling away from capitalism and joining the mainstream of socialism.” farms." At the same time, Stalin spoke about two deviations: one is pulling towards the world revolution and reprisals against the NEP, meaning the Trotskyists and Zinovievites; the other is the defense of the kulak, the denial of industrialization and planning, meaning the Bukharinites. Stalin said: “You ask, which deviation is worse? You can't pose the question like that. Both of them are worse, the first and second slopes.” But at the same time he emphasized that the party must concentrate its efforts on combating the deviation that exaggerates the kulak danger, since these ideas are much more popular in the party and behind them stands the authority of prominent leaders, meaning Kamenev and Zinoviev.

Stalin's line was supported by the congress, which marked the beginning of the ousting of the Zinoviev group from power, which would be forced to draw closer to Trotsky, which would predetermine their joint decline. Then it was the turn of the rightists - the Bukharinites.

“Russia would not have experienced many of the terrible misfortunes that befell it if it had been led by right-wing communists (proponents of the market) rather than Stalin.” Many authors agree with these words of the Menshevik Nikolai Valentinov, who emigrated to Paris in 1928. But this is unlikely to be the case. The market could not carry out forced modernization. Besides, did the Bukharinites have a chance to lead the country? There are different opinions on this topic. Such experts of the era as V.L. Danilov and E.N. Gimpelson, we are confident that the “Bukharin alternative” (refusal of accelerated industrialization, collectivization and a course towards world revolution through market development) was initially doomed to failure, since by the end of the 20s the balance of forces in the leadership of the party, and therefore the country, was completely in favor of the Stalinist majority.

The “right” (i.e., Bukharinites) capitulated at the 16th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in June 1930.

The defeat of the “right” helped clear the way for the “great turning point” - complete collectivization - which became the final moment in the establishment of Stalin’s sovereignty. However, it is hardly a matter of Stalin alone. The tightening of government regimes was not only a Soviet phenomenon, but almost universal. The interwar period was marked by an increasing narrowing of the scope of democracy in Europe. It was dealt a crushing blow by the Great Depression of 1929-1933, which deprived people of their savings and discredited the postulates of the free capitalist market. While in 1920 constitutional and elected representative bodies existed throughout the continent west of Soviet Russia, by the outbreak of World War II they had been dissolved or stripped of effective powers in 17 of the 27 European states, and in another five they had ceased to have powers when the war began. In many countries, fascists came to power. Only Britain and Finland, as well as Ireland, Sweden and Switzerland, which remained neutral, supported the activities of democratic institutions all this time.

The final completion of the process of subordination of the Politburo to Stalin can be dated to approximately 1930.

Based on materials from the book “Russian Matrix” by V. A. Nikonov. M. 2014.

Lenin died on January 21, 1924; in principle, he had been ill recently and could not deal with his affairs at full capacity. Other leaders gained more and more power; Among the figures of the first magnitude: Trotsky - People's Commissar of Military and Naval Affairs, member of the Presidium of the Supreme Economic Council and the Politburo; Zinoviev - Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Comintern, Chairman of the Northern Commune (Petrograd), member of the Politburo; Kamenev - Chairman of the STO (Council of Labor and Defense), head of the Moscow Party organization, member of the Politburo; Stalin - People's Commissar of the Rabkrin for Nationalities, General Secretary of the Central Committee, member of the Politburo. The figures of the “second row” who could influence the outcome of the struggle for power were: Bukharin, Dzerzhinsky, Tomsky, Pyatakov, Molotov, Rykov, Kalinin and others.

The death of a country's leader is always a blow, even in the Russian Empire anything happened, an example is the uprising of the “Decembrists” in 1825, but here there is no heir. Trotsky was ruined by conceit and pride; could he have thought that he, the “leader of the revolution”, behind whom stood simply colossal forces of the “world behind the scenes”, and his people occupied key positions throughout Russia, would be beaten by some Georgian peasant?

Back in the spring of 1923, a “signal” was given - on the eve of the XII Party Congress, the newspaper Pravda (controlled by Bukharin) published an article by Radek “Leon Trotsky – the organizer of victory.” This was an indication to the Bolsheviks who would be the new leader. Another signal: in 1923, when Petrograd had not yet been renamed Leningrad, Gatchina became Trotsky. On the eve of the congress, there was a spread of “black PR”, the so-called first part of Lenin’s testament - the article “On the issue of nationalities and “autonomization”,” where Stalin, Ordzhonikidze, and Dzerzhinsky were thrown with mud. But the congress did not become a triumph for Trotsky; Stalin was much closer to the military, workers, and peasants. The article with accusations of “Great Russian chauvinism” was perceived as a thing of the past.

It was not possible to win at the congress, then they began to act using hidden methods: Krupskaya “remembered” about another part of Lenin’s “testament” (“Letter to the Congress”). In July-August, a conspiracy was hatched: Bukharin, Zinoviev and others at a meeting near Kislovodsk decided to reorganize the party leadership, take away management functions from the Secretariat of the Central Committee or introduce Trotsky and Zinoviev into it. An ultimatum letter was sent to Stalin, in which they mentioned Lenin’s demand of January 4 to remove Stalin from the post of Secretary General. Stalin was forced to maneuver, eventually agreeing to introduce Zinoviev, Bukharin and Trotsky into the Organizing Bureau.

At this time, a severe political and economic crisis began in Germany, the value of the mark fell a thousand times, industry was paralyzed. Trotsky was fired up with the idea of ​​a German revolution, and after victory in Germany, Europe would be in the hands of revolutionaries. Trotsky already saw himself as a leader at the pan-European level. The “showdowns” at the Russian level were curtailed for a while - the Politburo voted “for”. Huge funds and thousands of revolutionaries were sent to Germany, secret negotiations began with Warsaw on the passage of Red Army troops to Germany, they promised to give East Prussia to it (Poland). Although at the same time it was decided to “revolutionize” Poland. At the same time, the Comintern received instructions to start a revolution in Bulgaria.

But the “world behind the scenes,” or rather its European clans, did not need the European Revolution, so there were continuous overlaps and mistakes. And in Russia, Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev went over to the side of Stalin, who opposed this adventure, and then the Politburo decided that the preparation for the revolution in Germany was not completed, the revolutionary situation was overestimated, and therefore the uprising was canceled. Trotsky was furious; all his “Napoleonic” plans collapsed.

Then Trotsky launched an attack along the “revolutionaries” - “bureaucrats” line, accusing Stalin and others of degeneration and betrayal of the cause of the revolution. Trotsky demands the expansion of party democracy. He was caught doing this and a party-wide discussion was announced. Trotsky was reminded of his disputes with Lenin. As a result, at the 13th party conference (opened on January 16, 1924), his supporters were defeated, accused of “anti-Leninist deviationism” and “revisionism.” Trotsky didn’t even come to it, he “fell ill.”

The possibility of a military coup was also neutralized, and it could have been organized; Trotsky had a strong position in the army: his deputy in the military people’s commissariat, Sklyansky, was transferred to the Supreme Economic Council by decision of the Politburo, and Frunze, popular in the army and hostile to Trotsky, was appointed in his place. The Trotskyist Antonov-Ovseenko was removed from his post as head of the Political Directorate of the Red Army, and Tukhachevsky’s Western Front was disbanded.

Moreover, apparently, one of the main reasons for Trotsky’s loss was the position of his foreign “masters”, and therefore he was carried away. But Stalin was not considered dangerous, he served Lenin, and now, they say, his entourage will “correct” him...

Sources:
Sakharov V.A. Lenin's "Political Testament": the reality of history and the myths of politics. M., 2003.
Shambarov V. Anti-Soviet. M., 2011.
Shubin A.V. Leaders and conspirators. M., 2004.
http://publ.lib.ru/ARCHIVES/K/KPSS/_KPSS.html#012
http://magister.msk.ru/library/trotsky/trotl026.htm