More languages
More actions
Stalin's Rise to Power | |
|---|---|
| Author | James Harris |
| Audiobook | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWdqFFnIRqY |
Do Stalin's strengths or his opponent's weaknesses better explain his victory in the struggle for power after Lenin's death? I'll start with a little context, an outline of the key events between the bolshevik seizure of power in November 1917 and Lenin's death in January 1924. I'll then say something about how historians have disagreed about why Stalin won the power struggle and look at some of the key approaches to the question. In particular: the importance of Stalin's position as general secretary of the party, the policy debates of the 1920s and the Soviet political culture.
Key events from Nov. 1917 to Jan. 1924
So we'll start with a little context.
The bolsheviks, a group of 20 000 or so committed revolutionaries, led a coup d'etat in St Petersburg, the capital of the Russian empire, on November 7, 1917.
Taking power in the capital was the easy bit, after that, they had to take power in the rest of the world's largest country. And they had to do that while fighting a war against Russian and foreign armed forces determined to stop them. They succeeded in the course of the following two and a half years but not without very real costs.
Infrastructure was devastated and the economy was running at about 5% of capacity. The working class was upset with the regime. The army was beginning to mutiny and the peasantry were on the verge of rebellion.
In order to ensure the survival of the new state and to reinvigorate the economy, bolshevik leaders accept the need for a partial restoration of capitalism: the New Economic Policy (or NEP, as this shift was known) quickly generated substantial economic growth such that what had begun as a retreat was gathering supporters.
The story of the power struggle and of Stalin's rise begins when the universally acknowledged leader of the bolsheviks, Vladimir Lenin, who had spoken out both for and against NE died, as I said in January 1924. The struggle took place against the background of debate over policy over NEP and over the future of communism.
So why did Stalin succeed Lenin and not Trotsky, or Zinoviev or Bukharin?
Historians on Stalin’s rise and the role of ideas
So I'll talk a bit now about historians on Stalin's rise, and particularly on their thoughts on the role of ideas versus machine politics in Stalin's victory.
So let me take a few minutes to discuss the different ways this question has been answered by historians since the events themselves.
From the early 1930s friends of the Stalin regime insisted that their leader won because he stuck most closely to Lenin's ideas, and because his opponents drifted away from leninism towards counter-revolution. They insisted that policy debate and ideas were the key to the struggle.
The losers in the struggle insisted that ideas didn't matter because Stalin was party general's secretary. The general secretary had the power to appoint all top party officials. Ideas didn't matter because Stalin had stacked the party with officials personally loyal to him, people who would support him regardless of the policy options. They insisted that Stalin's control of the party machine was what mattered in the struggle.
Whereas Henri Barbusse represents the first group, Leon Trotsky perhaps best represents the second. That is, whereas on Henri Barbusse represents the friends of Stalin, Leon Trotsky his opponents.
So from the 1930s until the late 1960s the consensus among historians roughly aligned with Trotsky's view; that is, Stalin's control of the party machine played the decisive role in the power struggle. Among those historians putting forward this view are for example: Isaac Deutscher, Merle Fainsod, Leonard Schapiro, Robert Daniels...
But in the late 1960s when cold war tensions were relaxing, the Soviet Union had reformed substantially since Khrushchev came to power, and the younger generation in the western democracies was going through a period of rebellious idealism, such that the role of ideas in Soviet politics was once again taken more seriously. Stalin's control over the party machine still mattered to historians, but it was thought that the fact that Stalin appointed top officials didn't itself guarantee total loyalty. So to quote Robert Tucker in his book Stalin a political biography (1973):
"a would-be party chief had to develop a politically persuasive program and to be convincing in his way of presenting it in higher party circles"
In the 1970s and 80s social historians added a new twist to the story. They observed how social conditions, popular culture, and the culture of the bolshevik party favored Stalin's victory: Russian backwardness, low levels of literacy and the weight of Russian autocratic tradition meant that most of Russians were tolerant of Stalin's heavy-handed ways. Meanwhile the bolshevik party which had grown from a 20 000 strong underground to a 1.2 million member super bureaucracy was now much less educated on average and had a much weaker understanding of marxism-leninism. Stalin's simple formulations of leninism appealed to them. His presentation of his opponents as splitters and party debate as a dangerous luxury hit accord with the party rank and file.
Since the 1980s almost nothing has been written on the subject, such that the current consensus is that all these factors: policy debate and ideas, control of the political machine, political culture... all of these played a role in Stalin's rise to power.
An answer to the question of whether Stalin's strengths or his opponent's weaknesses better explain Stalin's victory demands that all of them be given some consideration, so let's look at each in turn, starting with Stalin's role as general secretary of the party.
Factor 1: Stalin's role as general secretary of the party
If the party general secretary was such an important job, so important to the struggle for power... why did Stalin's opponents let him take it without any resistance? The short answer is because it was a job no one wanted.
Stalin took over responsibility for the appointment of senior party officials at a time when the party bureaucracy was expanding faster than it had ever done or ever would. Appointing the right people to the right jobs was extremely important and before Stalin took over, the secretariat had not been coping with its task. It's worth observing here that Lenin offered the job of general secretary to Stalin and no one else because Stalin was the most able administrator in the party.
Do not fall for Trotsky's characterization of Stalin as a mediocrity. He had been a member of Lenin's inner circle for years and not for nothing. No one else wanted the job because they saw it as a dreadful bureaucratic burden.
But did they not see that the job was an opportunity to promote friends and followers. You need to think about that. In the late 1940s the historian Isaac Deutscher argued that Stalin "pack political offices with friends henchmen and followers". In the 1950s and 1960s Robert Daniels suggested a more subtle version of this: that there existed what he called a "circular flow of power" in which Stalin offered officials security of tenure if they supported him at major party meetings.
But as I mentioned, by the 1970s and 80s historians began to doubt that the fact of appointment by the secretariat was enough to guarantee political loyalty. Research in the archives of the party secretariat has finally established that the idea that Stalin controlled the party apparatus by appointing his followers is largely a myth spread by Stalin's opponents. In fact, through the 1920s the secretary was appointing thousands of officials every year. Stalin did not and could not know in detail personally or politically who was being appointed. What's more, there isn't the scrap of evidence that Stalin tried to use his role as general secretary to remove those who sympathized with his opponents.
But you should be careful here. I don't mean to suggest that the secretary had played no role in his rise to power, indeed it played an important role. But one that didn't involve any control over party officials. The secretary provided Stalin not with control but rather with information. In the course of its work the secretariat received a steady stream of reports from party institutions all over the country. Consequently, Stalin knew the preferences, wants and fears of senior party officials better than any of his opponents. He was in a better position than his opponents to gain their support by catering to those wants and fears.
You can see then, that historians views of the secretariat have changed radically since the 1950s. In the 1950s historians thought that Stalin controlled senior party officials, in the 1970s and 80s historians had a hunch that Stalin could not rely on the loyalty of senior officials; and this has been confirmed by the recent research, but in a way that suggests a very different role for the secretariat and Stalin's rise, one that makes the role of ideas and policy debate seem ever more important.
Factor 2: Policy debates of the 1920s
So let's talk about that debate for a minute. In preparing for your A levels you should have a sense of the broad differences of opinion among the contenders for power, and who was in the politburo majority when... but it becomes kind of tedious and unnecessary if you go into too much detail, so I'll keep my review very simple
The single most important issue in the policy debate was NEP and how best to build a socialist society.
In the first phase of the succession struggle Trotsky was the first to argue that the mixed economy of NEP was leading to capitalism and not to socialism. He proposed accelerating the growth of socialist industry by increasing the taxes on the capitalist peasantry. He and his followers, notably Yevgeni Preobrazhensky, refer to this as “primitive socialist accumulation”.
That much is straightforward but you must keep two things in mind: first, all the contenders for power twisted and caricatured their opponent's ideas if it gave them an advantage; second, policy positions were dynamic, changing, logically, as circumstances changed, so did the views of politicians.
Now, Stalin's program which is referred to as “socialism in one country” was intended as a dig on Trotsky who had argued after the revolution that to build a socialist society in Russia there would need to be revolution abroad, that is, that Russia would need assistance from abroad.
Now, Trotsky no longer pressed this idea after it had become clear that there was no prospect of revolution in Europe... but Stalin did not let him forget his earlier words, because it made him look like a defeatist.
Meanwhile, Stalin also responded to Trotsky's idea of “primitive socialist accumulation” with a defense of NEP and a warning that increasing taxes on the peasantry would put the very real successes of the NEP economy at risk. It seemed a sensible position in the early 1920s when NEP was generating double-digit growth.
By 1925, Trotsky had been isolated. Was that because of the inferiority of his ideas? Probably not. The reason for Trotsky's isolation were more personal than political or ideological. The fact of the matter is: nobody in the politbureau liked him. He was arrogant, he was not a team player. The members of the politbureau couldn't imagine running the country under his leadership. That, rather than his policies was Trotsky's main weakness.
Meanwhile, things in the rest of the politburo were not especially happy:
- Nikolai Bukharin had become perhaps an over-enthusiastic supporter of NEP, and a reliance on its capitalist elements, that is, the well-to-do peasant (the kulak) and the petty trader (the nepman).
- Zinoviev and Kamenev did not share Bukharin’s willingness to embrace NEP capitalism. They also worried that Stalin was accumulating too much personal power. And the combination of the personal and political encouraged them to break with the politburo majority and joined their old enemy Trotsky and form the United Opposition. Together they attacked NEP; and together, the majority, defended NEP thought not exactly in the same terms.
NEP was still generating substantial rates of growth... though everyone knew that substantial new investment in industry would be necessary for those rates of growth to remain high.
- Stalin emphasized the importance of central planning and measures to improve industrial efficiency in generating new investment.
- Bukharin acknowledged these but insisted that capitalist elements would have to continue to play an important role in the economy.
Now many historians have argued that Stalin used the policies of the right to defeat the left; and then, adopted the policies of the left to defeat the right. That Stalin in this sense was an unprincipled political opportunist.
These historians fail to see that by the mid-1920s, as the prospective of the first five-year plan came to be seen as providing solutions to the problems of NEP, the whole of the party elite was moving to the left. Stalin and the politburo majority defeated the United Opposition because in 1927 there was little to separate the promise of their economic policies. Why risk a change when the majority was achieving good results? Again, Stalin was able to present his opponents as splitters, as pointlessly challenging central policy.
The last phase of the policy debate was between Stalin and Bukharin both of whom continued to drift to the left. Stalin shared with the politburo majority a growing enthusiasm about the potential of the five-year plan. Bukharin was willing to accept that more would have to be done to contain capitalist elements, but he thought that Stalin was going too far, that Stalin's harsh measures against wealthy peasants in 1928 and after were dangerous. He also publicly worried that enthusiasm for the plan was going too far, that plans were not realistic, “you cannot -to use his words- build today's factories with tomorrow's bricks”. Bukharin’s worries were well placed, the plans were unrealistic, the confrontation with the peasantry proved devastating, but he predicted a crisis that didn't come until the early 1930s, and while he issued warnings of doom output figures continued to rise beyond expectations. Yet again, Stalin could present his opponents as blind to the correctness of central policy, as unnecessary ballast best cast overboard, in short, again, as splitters. In 1929 Bukharin and his followers were cast aside, and from that point Stalin's rule never again faced a serious challenge.
Factor 3: The political culture
Now that takes us to our next factor, that is the political culture of the bolshevik party... of Bolshevism.
Remember that in the 1950s and 1960s historians only really ever looked at high politics. If Stalin controlled the party machine, as they believed through the secretariat, then there was no point in looking anywhere else. But when in the 1970s and 80s historians started to take policy debates seriously, then suddenly it mattered who those policies were being presented to. Was it to the millions strong party rank-and-file? Was it being presented to the several thousand top party officials?
Twenty years after the revolution, at a small get-together in the Kremlin after the red square parade, Stalin reminisced about the power struggle to his close associates in the politburo. There he stressed the importance of his overwhelming popularity among the broad party rank-and-file. He was almost certainly right about this. The rank-and-file were for the most part barely literate, and knew little of marxism-leninism, they were the most comfortable with the authoritarian traditions of czarism, and the least likely to understand the complexities of the policy debates, they were likely to be the most happy for those policy debates to come to an end, they appreciated Stalin's efforts to explain leninism in very simple terms, and were drawn to his self-presentation as Lenin’s one true disciple. It is not difficult to see how Stalin could rely on their support.
But what's more striking about Stalin's reminiscences, is that his praise for the rank-and-file implies a criticism of… a lack of trust, in senior officialdom. This group had higher levels of education, they understood the terms of the policy debates, they did not need Stalin's simplifications of leninism, they knew that Trotsky and Bukharin were more sophisticated thinkers than Stalin. Now this didn't mean that they naturally opposed Stalin. Stalin had always presented himself as representing the middle ground, as leader of the majority: he moved to the left as they moved to the left... and his policies were generally successful: the economy continued to grow rapidly through the 1920s despite predictions to the contrary from his opponents (from the left and from the right). Stalin seemed to be a safe pair of hands. He carried the support of the party elite too, but he was aware that their support was conditional, less certain, more measured. The support of the party elite was most important to the leadership struggle because they, or at least the top 175 or 200 officials represented within the party central committee, they were empowered by party rules to elect the politburo, they had it in their power to remove Stalin... but they did not, they supported Stalin. But Stalin knew it was a close-run thing. The great terror of 1936-38 was in no small part driven by Stalin's fear that he could not rely on their loyalty.
Summary
So by way of a summary let's return to the question: Do Stalin's strengths or his opponent's weaknesses better explain his victory? In short, Stalin's strengths mattered more. What were they?
- his position as general secretary of the party,
- his ability to hold the majority of the politburo,
- his ceaseless attention to the details of factional politics,
- the success of his policies and
- his popularity among the rank-and-file of the party.
And briefly on his opponent's weaknesses
- Trotsky was unpopular and distrusted within the politburo,
- neither he nor Zinoviev and Kamenev within the United Opposition... none of them removed Stalin when they had the chance,
- Trotsky didn't play the game of factional politics, he lost opportunities,
- Bukharin's ideas later in the 1920s were out of tune with a party drifting to the left.