Joseph Stalin was a truly brilliant politician. First of all, because he knew how this policy itself worked. He is similar to Machiavelli in this regard. The post of general secretary of the Central Committee, which had arisen as a result of complex intra-party intrigues, when Stalin was elected on April 3, 1922, was not considered significant at that time. It was Stalin who made him the most important member of the Bolshevik Party. Because it was he who, in time, understood the main principle that he would later express with the slogan “Staff decides everything”.
The Bolsheviks, who came to rule the country in the first years of Soviet power, did not attach much importance to party bureaucratic and organizational issues. After all, each of the RCP(b) leaders considered himself so distinguished and grand that he did not require any official endorsement in the form of official positions, including party. Everything was very clear: Trotsky, who solemnly demanded the place of Lenin against the background of his terminal illness, was considered the leader and direct organizer of the October Revolution and the creator of the Red Army Zinoviev (the same person as Lenn). in a cottage in Razliv on the eve of the revolution) was the head of the Comintern – and yet the Bolsheviks were preparing for a world revolution. Bukharin was the editor-in-chief of the newspaper Pravda and thus the leading ideologue after Lenin. Kamenev played a large role in the government (as Lenin’s deputy in the Council of People’s Commissars) and enjoyed great prestige as the oldest member of the party.
Stalin looked like a gray horse against their background. He was also equally friendly with almost everyone except Trotsky, and in that sense, he was harmless as a political rival. Such gray horses turning into political monsters are almost a classic case in history.
Party leader and “leader of the world proletariat” Vladimir Lenin did not hold a leading post in the party, except for one of the Politburo members of the RCP(b) Central Committee. He was also the head of the Council of People’s Commissars, that is, the government. And for a time, it was likely that it would be government structures that would run the country. However, gradually and personally without the active participation of Stalin, the real leadership passed to the party structures and, accordingly, to the party structures. As so often in history, a number of accidents played their part.
Until the beginning of 1919, Yakov Sverdlov was the original chairman of the Central Committee of the party, but officially no one elected or appointed him as chairman. It happened suddenly. In fact, the Central Committee dealt with matters of personnel, which were not given decisive importance in the hustle and bustle of everyday revolutionary life. After Sverdlov’s death in the spring of 1919, the Spaniard felt irreplaceable. They immediately formed within the Central Committee three leaders, or rather coordinating bodies – the Politburo, the Orgburo and the Secretariat, among which there was no clear division of tasks and responsibilities.
In this sense, the passionate Bolsheviks were still ‘technocrats’.
And when Stalin was nominated as general secretary at the April plenary meeting of the Central Committee, a separate resolution was stipulated: “To confirm the unanimous tradition of the Central Committee not having a chairman. The only officials of the Central Committee are the secretaries, and the chairman is elected at each meeting. By the way, by that time Stalin could not be alive: a year ago he suffered from severe purulent appendicitis and barely survived. In the spring of 1921, Vyacheslav Molotov was appointed executive secretary of the Central Committee, who could theoretically later become the general secretary. Krestinsky, Secretary of the Central Committee, had a good chance of holding the same post.
Officially, the Central Committee Secretariat dealt with bureaucracy: it prepared agendas for Politburo and Orgburo meetings, sent materials to local party organizations. However, Molotov did not burn out from this work and easily left him in the spring of 1922. To some extent, Stalin’s seminary background also had an effect. He attached great importance to documents, formulations and other formalities, and at the same time managed to saturate all this tedious bureaucratic process with a fundamentally new political content, which later led him to the zenith of power.
At the time Stalin assumed the post of general secretary, actual party work, we repeat, was by no means considered prestigious by the Bolshevik leaders.
It is symbolic that at the XI Congress, when they voted for Stalin to be elected General Secretary of the Central Committee, only 193 out of 522 delegates voted “against” with the decisive vote, while the rest abstained. he simply did not understand what this incomprehensible, newly established position was about. . Indeed, in many respects, this is why the famous scheming Lenin arranged for the vote to be held precisely at the party congress, and not, as expected, at the plenary session of the Central Committee. So that no one would understand.
It was Stalin who turned bureaucratic routine into a powerful weapon to rise to power. While the main “leaders” enjoyed their greatness and publicly dreamed of a world revolution, Stalin and his loyal colleague at the Secretariat, Lazar Kaganovich, were engaged in the rough work of building filing cabinets for loyal staff (including potentially disloyal ones). it had its own filing cabinet). In the first year of Stalin’s work as General Secretary, the Secretariat made more than 10 thousand appointments in the party and state apparatus, replacing 42 secretaries of the provincial committees of the RCP (b). In just a few months, Stalin was able to establish working ties with both local party organizations and the state apparatus. Quite quickly, he formed an obedient clap at party conventions, booing and slamming speakers he didn’t like. Such methods allowed him to hide the impartial “Letter to Congress” (Lenin’s unofficial political testament to XII) from the intended persons. However, not all of his defendants (and all of them were the main leaders of the party) were against it, because the dying Lenin surpassed everyone in the letter.
In the last months of his life, Lenin did not think that anyone would be his only successor. He did not see those around him: all the main leaders were somehow bad, as Stalin wrote in the “Letter to Congress”, which he also understood – a person who “concentrates enormous power” was not his best personal qualities.
At the same time, a very cynical politician, Lenin contributed to the rise of Stalin and his appointment as General Secretary of the Central Committee – primarily against Trotsky, whose legacy he absolutely did not want to leave the country.
Even after Lenin’s death, Stalin was not seen by anyone as the main rival of the leadership in the party. Zinoviev and Kamenev treated him with sarcasm and contempt. Bukharin – a little contemptuously as a “leader”, but said: “Nothing, we need such people, and if he is ignorant and uncultured, then we will help him.” Ah, if they only knew who to raise. But at that moment they all had to prevent the authoritarian and impulsive Trotsky from coming to power.
However, it is very likely that the Great Terror, later orchestrated by Stalin, was a “childish joke on the grass”, compared to what Bronstein-Trotsky, who by the way was the first to propose the concentration camp system, could have done. to the country.
All Bolshevik leaders were united in a common disregard for the value of human life in the country where they gained undivided power. For them, people were just consumables on the road to a brighter future and communism on a global scale. After all, it was Trotsky who formulated the slogan: “We must stop forever the priest-Quaker chatter about the sacred value of human life.”
And the long-time union leader, Mikhail Tomsky, declared from a congressional rostrum: “There can only be two parties in a Soviet country: one in power, the other in prison.”
Here he was wrong: he himself will not go to jail when he is removed from power. After 1936, during the trial of the “Trotskyist-Zinoviev anti-Soviet centre”, Zinoviev and Kamenev, unable to withstand the torture of the NKVD, suddenly began to testify that Tomsky, Rykov and Bukharin were involved in counter-revolutionary activities. Bolshevo, who shot himself out of fright in a hut in the Moscow region of Tomsky. As they write in the newspapers – “they are confused in their affiliation with counter-revolutionary and Trotskyist-Zinovievist terrorists.”
Stalin was no more bloodthirsty and cynical in this matter than those with whom he had ruthlessly dealt with. Or maybe softer than others. Only if some Zinoviev and Kamenev came to power, unless they put such brutal pressure on the top of the party, which would later be referred to as the “old Bolsheviks”, if they were not.
In 1934, Stalin, who by that time had dealt with almost all his main rivals in the party and finished the rest, stopped signing documents as General Secretary and remained only as Secretary of the Central Committee, in addition to other posts until his death.
The post of general secretary will be returned by Brezhnev in 1966 in the context of the moderate rehabilitation of Stalinism.
Shortly before the collapse of the Soviet Union, history rather maliciously mocks this position. The penultimate general secretary of the CPSU Central Committee was Konstantin Chernenko, who by that time was almost in a coma, and before that for a long time under Brezhnev was only the Central Committee secretary, performing purely organizational and clerical duties. He spent 13 months in the post of general secretary without actually coming out of his semi-comatose state. Gorbachev tried to shift the focus of the country from party leadership to non-party leadership, introduced the post of President of the USSR and became its sole holder. But it’s too late now. The harmfulness of “Partocracy” should have been considered in 1922. But they didn’t think.
The author expresses his personal opinion, which may not coincide with the editors’ position.