more prominent Soviet leaders still overshadowed
him. He supported a moderate internal economic
policy, upheld NEP and identified himself with
Lenin’s policies after the latter’s death. Appealing
to party unity, while packing key positions with
his supporters, Stalin was ready to take on the
most prestigious of the old Bolshevik leaders. The
big quarrel with Trotsky occurred at the end of
1923 and early 1924 after Trotsky’s attacks on
the old guard. Trotsky was effectively defeated
at the Thirteenth Party Congress in January
- Together with Zinoviev, president of the
Comintern, whose power base was the Leningrad
party, and Kamenev, chairman of the Moscow
Soviet, Stalin had already made himself the
leading member of the triumvirate controlling the
party, the key to controlling the country. Trotsky
had published a book, Lessons of October, in which
he bitterly attacked the credentials of Zinoviev
and Kamenev, who had been ‘Right’ Bolsheviks
opposed to the October Revolution in 1917.
In his denunciation Trotsky implied that such
shortcomings were responsible for the failure of
revolution beyond the Soviet Union, for instance
in Germany. The triumvirate countered by stress-
ing the longstanding quarrel between Trotsky
and Lenin about ‘permanent’ revolution, which
Trotsky had fervently advocated; and Stalin enun-
ciated the slogan ‘socialism in one country’. Stalin
declared more realistically that the Soviet Union
had survived and claimed that the conditions
existed in Russia for the complete construction of
socialism; this he saw as the primary task. The
policies of communists in other countries, too,
were therefore expected in practice to make this
their primary objective, subordinating national
considerations to the strengthening of the Soviet
Union.
Trotsky and Stalin were not so far apart as their
polemics made it appear. At moments of great
danger, such as the Soviet leaders believed existed
in 1927 and 1928, Trotsky was just as ready as
Stalin to place the safety of the Soviet Union first.
In this respect they were both heirs of Lenin’s
Realpolitik. In the power struggle in the top
echelon of the party, Stalin calculated that a mod-
erate line would be the most successful, while
Trotsky assumed the mantle of the ardent,
unquenchable revolutionary and the champion of
‘democracy’ within the party. The genuineness of
Trotsky’s democratic sentiments was never tested,
for he never wielded supreme power. He was cer-
tainly no less ruthless than Stalin in his readiness
to subordinate means to an end. But Stalin’s
control of the party machine secured Trotsky’s
gradual elimination. In January 1925 Trotsky lost
the argument of his Lessons of October and the
Central Committee deprived him of his nominal
leadership of the Red Army.
Stalin now pushed from key control two other
members of the Politburo, his fellow triumvi-
rates, Kamenev and Zinoviev. Instead he allied
with those who fully backed the NEP, Nikolai
Bukharin, a longstanding companion of Lenin and
editor of Pravda, and two other Politburo mem-
bers, Aleksei Rykov and Mikhail Tomsky. But
Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev still retained their
places on the Politburo, at least until 1926. That
year the three men, calling themselves the United
Opposition, mounted attacks on Comrade Stalin’s
capacity to unite the party and on the economic
state of the country and bureaucracy. Stalin
expelled all three from the Politburo and purged
their supporters. Trotsky’s further attacks on
Stalin, and the organisation of an open demon-
stration against the leadership in November 1927
led to his and Zinoviev’s and many of their
followers’ exclusion from the party in December- A year later Trotsky was expelled from
Russia.
Two years later it was the turn of the ‘right’
opposition. Bukharin lost control of the Com-
intern at the end of 1928, and in 1929 and 1930
Tomsky and Rykov were replaced. All eventually
died violently, victims of Stalin’s purges of the
mid-1930s. But it is simplistic to reduce the
struggles at the centre of power to Stalin’s com-
pletely cynical manoeuvrings to reach the top.
Three deep concerns formed just a part of the
immense nexus of problems associated with ‘com-
munism in transition’: transforming a predomin-
antly peasant society into an industrial power
capable of catching up with the capitalist West,
while keeping the goal of a communist society in
view; at the same time the leadership was anx-
iously scanning the international horizon for an