Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928

by Stephen Kotkin

On January 17, Stalin proposed that Trotsky become head of the state planning commission as well as deputy chairman of the government.91 Trotsky refused this, too.92 By refusing to become Lenin’s top deputy with Lenin seriously ill, Trotsky in effect was refusing to take over the government. It seems inexplicable. One part of the explanation consists of Trotsky’s continued insistence on replacing Sokolnikov’s “dictatorship of finances” (as Trotsky wrote in this exchange of letters) with a “dictatorship of industry,” which, however, Lenin adamantly refused. No less fundamentally, Trotsky understood that Stalin, as head of the party, could control the government (through the nomenklatura process, among other levers), and he was just not going to take a position subordinated to Stalin, even if Trotsky refrained from saying as much explicitly. Trotsky’s desire for a dictatorship of industry and an end to the party’s oversight of the economy had both a policy aspect (planning, super industrialization) and a political aspect: it was his answer to Stalin’s dictatorship of the party apparatus. But Stalin, who did not like the NEP any more than Trotsky did, crucially, like Lenin, and because of Lenin, understood the necessity of flexible tactics for the greater cause: Stalin accepted the NEP. To put the matter another way, in 1922, Stalin could have his party dictatorship and Lenin’s NEP. Trotsky could not have his economic dictatorship and the NEP.