Display of Modesty Helped Stalin to Top, Memoir Says : Disclosures by Mikoyan Seek to Explain Dictator’s Triumph Despite Lenin’s Criticism

An answer to one of the more perplexing questions in Soviet Communist history--how Josef Stalin rose to power despite a warning from Lenin--was revealed this week with the publication of excerpts of a long-suppressed memoir of the late Anastas I. Mikoyan.

Mikoyan was a key figure in the Communist leadership in the 1920 and ‘30s. He died in 1978 at the age of 83, having survived all the vagaries and bloody purges of Communist Party politics while holding high positions, including a seat on the ruling Politburo and the ceremonial post of the presidency.

During his lifetime, he published two volumes of memoirs, but they were heavily edited and revised, and he did not bother trying to have a third volume printed.

In the excerpts from the material, finally published Monday in the nation’s leading liberal magazine, Ogonyek, Mikoyan described the crucial 13th party congress in 1924 after the death that year of V. I. Lenin, founder of the Soviet state.

In the last years of his life, afflicted by strokes, Lenin had warned the party about Stalin, describing him as a man “not always able to use rationally the tremendous power he concentrated in his hands.” The career of Stalin, then party secretary, thus seemed on the verge of extinction when the party met to choose a successor to the revered Lenin.

Puzzling Questions

Mikoyan deals with the paramount questions that have puzzled historians: How could Stalin usurp power despite the warning from Lenin himself? And why did the party Central Committee allow him to continue in power and become dictator?

The reason, according to Mikoyan, who was a member of the Central Committee at the time, was that Stalin comported himself with modesty and tact “designed to win trust.”

“He always listened and did not speak and did not show his capriciousness and haughtiness and did not even use his gavel during sessions. I was not alone to notice his emphatically humble behavior,” Mikoyan recalled.

For months on end, Mikoyan said, Stalin maintained this subterfuge--being respectful, courteous, repentant, and, most importantly, seemingly prepared to resign if requested to do so.

But every time Stalin made an offer to step down, Mikoyan noted, it seemed to come at a time when the party was in danger of splitting apart, and Stalin was allowed to hang on. Finally, the other party leaders no longer saw Stalin as a great danger, so preoccupied were they with their own power struggles.

Intra-Party Squabbles

So Stalin kept his important position presumably until such time as intra-party squabbles could be settled, and a permanent successor to Lenin appointed.

While Mikoyan readily admitted that he and others had been duped by Stalin’s cunning tactics, he also blamed Lenin for not having left an appointed successor.

“Lenin never proposed a specific person to replace Stalin as the general secretary of the Central Committee,” Mikoyan wrote. “Were he to have done so, the Politburo and the delegates to the (party) congress would never dream of defying Lenin’s proposal.”

Stalin’s position remained insecure for another decade, said Mikoyan, until the 17th party congress in 1934. At that meeting, there were 1,225 voting delegates, and Stalin received at least 300 negative votes, while the popular Leningrad leader, Sergei M. Kirov, had only three negative ballots.

The party apparatchiks trusted with counting the ballots secretly informed Stalin of the negative ballots, wrote Mikoyan, and Stalin then demanded that only three negative ballots be registered against himself.

Start of Bloody Purges

So Stalin remained in power and soon had Kirov assassinated. Not much later, the vast, bloody purges of senior Communist Party officials began. Of the 1,966 delegates, voting and non-voting, who attended the 1934 congress, 1,108 were arrested and later killed, imprisoned, sent to labor camps or exiled. Mikoyan was one of the few survivors.

Mikoyan, an Armenian born in a village in what is now the Armenian Soviet Republic, is popularly perceived to have survived so long because of his ability to play along--and the fact that he deliberately chose less controversial jobs in the party and government apparatus, specializing in foreign trade.

Mikoyan had said elsewhere that he believed his life was in jeopardy shortly before Stalin’s death in 1953 and had contemplated suicide.

After the death of the dictator, Mikoyan rose eventually to become chairman of the Supreme Soviet in 1964-65, nominally equivalent of the presidency but largely ceremonial.

‘Negative Traits’

Looking back, Mikoyan wrote: “By the end of the 1920s and especially in the early 1930s, those negative traits in Stalin’s character, to which Lenin pointed, became fully evident, and was on the scale which simply could not be foreseen at the time.

“In the 1920s, I would never have believed that Stalin was capable of committing such crimes and on such a scale. We thought the Central Committee would always be able to keep the situation under control and secure the Lenin line in its policy.

“That was our horrible, tragic reckoning for the failure to adhere to Lenin’s testament,” Mikoyan concluded.