After the Revolution (2): the New Economic Policy and the rise of Stalin

Stalin confers with an ailing Lenin
at Gorki in September 1922.

The failure of War Communism

By the end of 1920 War Communism had reached such an extreme that all enterprises that employed more than five people had been nationalised and over 60 per cent of these factories had officially instituted ‘workers’ control’. In the rural areas, large estates were dismantled and the number of farms belonging to the wealthier peasants (kulaks) was reduced. The result of these policies was a steep decline in productivity and an intensification of class warfare.

The New Economic Policy

In March 1921 the Tenth Party Congress, in effect, abandoned the central planks of War Communism, replacing it with the New Economic Policy. Pleasants were allowed to sell their surplus through the free market and a limited amount of private enterprise returned to industry.  NEP was a gigantic gamble, a tactical retreat from economic orthodoxy. Agricultural and industrial production increased, and by 1927 wages and grain production were back to tsarist levels.  For the first time, financial relief was provided for the unemployed. In the new climate, small-time 'nepmen' tried to increase their profits - they and their fur-coated wives becoming deeply unpopular in the process. The most dramatic project of the NEP era is seen in the massive state electrification programme. This was accompanied by the building of  hospitals, theatres, cinemas and libraries. 

Economically, therefore, NEP was a success. But politically, it was a failure, leaving many Communists deeply disillusioned. 

Stalin

Stalin (Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhughashvili) was born in Gori, Georgia, on 6 December 1878, the son of a cobbler and his wife. In 1888 he entered the Gori Church School to train as a priest. In 1894 he entered the Tiflis (Tbilisi) Spiritual Seminary, where he became an atheist with revolutionary leanings and consistently misbehaved. In May 1899 he left suddenly just before taking his final exam. He was already a member of a Marxist revolutionary group, and had taken the name Koba from a favourite poem. Stalin’s appearance was unremarkable. He was 5 feet 4 inches, stocky, had yellow-grey eyes, a face pockmarked from smallpox in his youth, and one arm longer than another. He never lost his Georgian accent and unlike Hitler, Mussolini and Trotsky, he was an uninspiring public speaker. 

Stalin in 1902, when his 
revolutionary pseudonym
was Koba

Revolutionary

In April 1902 he was arrested and imprisoned. In the autumn of 1903 he was dispatched to Siberia, but he escaped in early 1904. By this time the split between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks had taken place and he identified with the Bolsheviks. In December 1905 he was in Finland, where he met Lenin for the first time. The following years were spent in terrorism and also in raising money through criminal activities such as protection rackets and extortion - something that was only revealed by Khrushchev in 1956.  On 16 July 1906 he secretly married a seamstress, Kato (Ketevan Svanidze, and in March 1907 their son, Yacov, was born. After Kato's death in November 1907 he had virtually no contact with him. (He was shot by the Germans in 1943.)  In the same year Dzhughashvili was imprisoned a second time, but he escaped in 1909. 

Man of Steel 

At the end of 1911 on Lenin's orders, he was made a member of the Bolshevik Central Committee.  From 1912 he adopted the pseudonym ‘Stalin’ (‘man of steel’). He became the founder and editor of Pravda, which appeared for the first time on 22 April. On the same day he was arrested again, and again escaped (this was the fifth time).  In November he fled to Kraków in Austrian Poland. In January 1913 he travelled to Vienna where he worked on his booklet, ‘The National Question and Social Democracy’, later re-published as Marxism and the National Question.  When he returned to St Petersburg he was arrested once more (2 July) and banished for four years to the Turukhansk region beyond the Arctic Circle, the bleakest place in the imperial penal system, for four years, to join other Bolsheviks such as Yakov Sverdlov, the man who later organised the murder of the Romanovs. 

1917
With the setting up of the Provisional Government, Stalin and some of his fellow Bolshevik prisoners, including Lev Kamenev, returned to Petrograd, arriving there on 12 March. He and Kamenev joined the Pravda editorial board, and he later resumed his position as editor of the newspaper. At the end of April, on Lenin’s recommendation, he was elected to the Bolshevik Central Committee, though most delegates hardly knew him. He visited Lenin in his exile in Finland after the July Days. At the crucial meeting of 10 October that set in train the events that led to the Bolshevik Revolution, he voted for the uprising, against the dissenting voices of Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev. 

During the October Revolution he played a major role behind the scenes. When the Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom) was formed, he was given the newly created post of Commissar for Nationalities. In this position, Lenin found him a useful counterweight to the more charismatic Trotsky. 

Tsaritsyn
As representative of the Military Committee, Stalin was sent to Tsaritsyn on the Volga in June 1918 to requisition grain. He shot everyone involved in black-marketing, and instituted a reign of terror without consulting the authorities in Moscow. His enthusiasm for violence made even Trotsky seem restrained. (The city was renamed Stalingrad in 1925.) 

By this time he had married Nadya (Nadezhda Alliluyeva, who had become his secretary. The exact date of their marriage is not known. 

Nadezhda Alliluyeva, Stalin's second wife.

On 25 March 1919 a Politburo was elected from among the members of the Central Committee. They were to meet once a year to act as the real government of the country. Trotsky, Kamenev and Stalin were all members. 

General Secretary 
In April 1922, Stalin was elected to the new post of General Secretary of the Party. 

Why Stalin? It used to be supposed that he was chosen simply because he was a low-profile bureaucrat with a taste for administrative work, but the facts do not bear this out. He had been editor of Pravda, was a policy-intimate of Lenin’s, and had spent most of the Civil War as a political commissar. The functions of the Secretariat were left deliberately vague, and, under Stalin, the office began to control all appointments within the Party. Its powers of patronage were enormous. By the time Lenin realized this, it was too late. 

Stalin also gained considerable influence over the GPU (the newly re-formed Cheka). They kept him informed of the private lives of members of the Party hierarchy and sent him monthly reports on the activities of the provincial leaders. Under the guise of enforcing Leninist orthodoxy, Stalin was able to gather information about all his rivals. 

Lenin's first illness 
On 25 May 1922, Lenin suffered his first major stroke, leaving his right side virtually paralysed and depriving him for a while of speech. He was nursed by his wife, Krupskaya, and his sister Maria Ulyanovna. During the summer, as he recovered at his country house at Gorki south of Moscow, he concerned himself with the question of the succession. All his writings show that he favoured a collective leadership to succeed him. He was particularly afraid of the personal rivalry between Stalin and Trotsky. By the autumn of 1923 he had become suspicious of Stalin's ambitions and aware of the extent of his power within the party. He was also troubled about the way Stalin had handled events in Transcaucasia . Stalin wanted Georgia to become a semi-independent republic within a federal system, but the Georgians wanted to become a full republic (not ruled by Moscow). Lenin sided with the Georgians, accusing Stalin of greater-Russian chauvinism. 

Lenin's Testament 
On 15 December, Lenin suffered a second stroke. Stalin immediately took charge of his doctors and on the pretext of speeding his recovery ordered his isolation from politics. One of Lenin's secretaries was Stalin’s wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva.  

In the brief spells in which he was allowed to work, Lenin dictated the fragmentary notes, which became known as his Testament between 23 December 1922 and 4 January 1923. They were headed ‘Letter to the Congress’ because he wanted them to be read out at the next Party Congress. In his notes of 25 December he voiced his worry about the succession. 

Comrade Stalin having become General Secretary, has concentrated boundless power in his hands, and I am not convinced that he will always manage to use this power with adequate care. On the other hand, Comrade Trotsky…is personally the most able individual in the current Central Committee but he has an excessive self-confidence and an excessive preoccupation with the purely administrative side of affairs.

On 4 January, he dictated an addendum: 

Stalin is too crude, and this defect … becomes intolerable in the post of General Secretary. I therefore make a proposal for comrades to think of a way to remove Stalin and in his place appoint someone else who is distinguished from Comrade Stalin in all other respects… of being more loyal, more courteous, and more attentive to comrades, less capricious etc. 

Lenin's secretaries were disturbed about his Testament and informed Stalin of its contents.

In the meantime Stalin quarrelled with Krupskaya. On discovering that she had been helping Lenin communicate with Trotsky, he made an abusive phone call, which she reported to Lenin on 5 March 1923. He dictated a sharp letter to Stalin. When Stalin gave only a half-hearted apology, he suffered a heart attack on 10 March. In May he was moved to Gorki never to return. 

Lenin and Krupskaya at Gorki.

Although Lenin was removed as a direct threat, the Politburo knew of the existence of his dictated thoughts, now typed up in multiple copies. However, Stalin had allies in Zinoviev and Kamenev, who shared his fear of Trotsky. At the next Party Congress - the Twelfth - in April, the Testament remained under lock and key. Trotsky was unpopular and isolated, increasingly seen as a Bonaparte-like figure, and he was aware that any bid to unseat another Politburo member would be seen as a bid for supreme power.

The succession struggle
During 1923 a succession struggle took place in which an informal troika of Zinoviev, Kamenev and Stalin were pitted against Trotsky. Within the leadership, there was an argument over foreign policy. Trotsky had never abandoned the communist ambition of a world-wide revolution and he believed that in 1923 the time was ripe for exporting revolution to Germany. Stalin, on the other hand, argued for 'Socialism in One Country': the Revolution had to be thoroughly embedded in the Soviet Union before it could be exported. This dispute played into the hands of Trotsky's enemies, and led to accusations of factionalism - the supreme Communist sin. The Party Congress in January 1924  denounced ‘Trotskyism’ as ‘a petty-bourgeois deviation’. 

The death of Lenin
Lenin died on 21 January 1924. By this time his cult was already developing. The body was temporarily embalmed on the morning of 22 January. It was agreed, against Krupskaya’s wishes, to place the body in a mausoleum and to rename Petrograd Leningrad. The funeral took place on 27 January. Stalin was a pallbearer, while Trotsky was absent, convalescing in the south. This was to prove a fatal absence. At the funeral, Stalin delivered a speech in which he pledged the party to follow Lenin's example - this was another stage in the creation of the cult. After frantic efforts by scientists, a means was found to embalm the body permanently. Lenin's tomb was opened to the public on 2 August. 

Conclusion

1. In the mid-1920s the economic policy of the Soviet Union underwent a dramatic reversal with the introduction of the New Economic Policy. The policy made economic sense, but it was profoundly distasteful to many orthodox Communists. 
2. Joseph Stalin rose within the Party ranks through his closeness to Lenin. He used the post of General Secretary to build up a patronage network.
3. With Lenin's last illness, a succession struggle developed. His dictated criticisms of Stalin were known but not made public because of the fear of Trotsky. The way was open for Stalin to take over.