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WHO'S WHO IN SOVIET RUSSIA

BY WILLIAM HENRY CHAMBERLIN

THERE is something very conservative about the composition of the Russian revolutionary government. Under the Communist dictatorship there are no cabinet crises. The same Commissars hold their posts year in and year out; the same men are to be seen presiding at Party and Soviet Congresses. One can undertake to sketch the leading personalities of the Soviet régime without fearing that the outcome of an unfavorable election will banish them to private life and bring a new set of figures on the political stage. There may be minor changes and reshufflings now and then; but on the whole one can foresee pretty accurately who will be directing the various Russian governmental departments for years to come. For only old revolutionists are eligible for the highest administrative posts in Russia; and the strenuous experiences of the last seven years have pretty well sifted out the old revolutionists with practical ability from those who are only capable of agitation and propaganda.

Leon Trotzky is unquestionably the outstanding individual figure in Russian public life to-day. No one can rival him in personal magnetism, in widespread popular reputation, in capacity for inspiring prolonged ovations. That Trotzky to-day is not a member of the inmost Communist ruling group is only a sign that personal distinction does not necessarily involve political success. Trotzky owes his fame chiefly to his achievements in the civil war. Organizer of the Red Army that successfully defended the Soviet power against the

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attacks of the Allies and the Whites, Trotzky's part in the military victory of the Revolution can scarcely be overestimated. Almost legendary anecdotes have grown up about his reckless personal bravery and superhuman energy, about his spectacular trips in special trains from one front to another, often under fire.

As the civil war came to an end and the Soviet Government turned to the work of peace-time reconstruction, it became more and more clear that the War Commissariat scarcely afforded a sufficient outlet for Trotzky's abounding energy. Dzerzhinsky, the other outstanding man of action among the revolutionary leaders, delegated much of his work as head of the secret police to subordinates and threw himself into reconstruction activity, first as head of the transportation system, later as chief of the state industries. But Trotzky remained in glittering isolation in his post as War Commissar in a country where economic hardships made war, except in elementary self-defense, an almost impossible contingency. In the spring of 1923 rumors were circulated to the effect that Trotzky was destined for an extremely important post in the field of economic administration. But time passed; the rumors were not realized in fact.

Last winter, in December and January, Trotzky for the first time came openly into sharp conflict with the other leading members of the Communist Party Central Committee, such as Stalin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and

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Bukharin. The Party had just passed through a period of intense internal discussion about the problem of making the Party organization more democratic. The Central Committee unanimously adopted a resolution prescribing certain democratic reforms in the constitution and management of the Party. Almost immediately after the publication of this resolution Trotzky published an open letter to the Moscow Party organizations expressing doubt whether the present personnel of the Party officialdom would carry out the resolution which had been adopted. This was the signal for a bitter struggle between Trotzky's partisans and those of the Central Committee majority. The issue of this struggle showed that in Russia, as elsewhere, personal ovations do not necessarily connote the ability to secure votes at the decisive time and place. Trotzky's point of view was solemnly condemned both at the Communist Party Conference in January and at the recent Party Congress late in May.

The defeat of Trotzky in the Party controversy can largely be explained by his failure to win over the ten or fifteen thousand prerevolutionary Communist Party members who control the machinery and dominate the conventions and conferences of the Party. There were several reasons for this failure. Perhaps because he had occupied such a commanding position in the early years of the Revolution, Trotzky has never troubled to build up any kind of personal political machine within the Party. He can go to a factory and carry thousands of workers off their feet with a fiery oration. But he would not be as likely as his Party opponents to know personally the little group of leading Communists in the factory who wield a decisive voice when it comes to electing delegates to a Party Congress or Conference. Then Trotzky labors

under the disadvantage of having joined the Communist Party only in 1917, while his leading opponents can all boast themselves 'old Bolsheviki' of at least twenty years' standing. Then, deservedly or not, Trotzky has the reputation of being somewhat mercurial and quick to fly off at a tangent on any new idea. The seasoned old Communists generally prefer to follow leaders whom they regard as possessing more solid, if less brilliant attainments.

At the same time, despite his setback last winter, Trotzky is distinctly a figure to be reckoned with in Russian political life. He has accepted his temporary defeat gracefully, professing entire loyalty to the Party and thereby depriving his opponents of an excuse for accusing him of factionalism or breach of Party discipline. At the same time, in the course of his recent speech before the Party Congress, he nowhere conceded that he had been wrong in the controversy last winter. For the time being the leadership of the Communist Party seems securely lodged in the hands of his opponents. But a political or economic crisis sufficiently significant to change the mood of the Party might conceivably bring Trotzky to the fore as a successor to Lenin.

In a room in the huge building of the Communist Party Tseka, or Central Committee, a tall dark man paces up and down incessantly, like a caged lion, occasionally pausing to jot down a note or send off a message. This man is the Georgian Djugashvili, more generally known by his appropriate Russian revolutionary pseudonym of Stalin steel. Stalin is Secretary of the Russian Communist Party and, although he occupies no official position, he holds in his hands more of the threads of the Russian revolutionary government than any other individual.

Stalin has always been a power be

hind the throne in the Russian Communist Party. In prerevolutionary days, when most of the Party leaders were abroad in exile, Stalin superintended the work of the Party in Russia. Following the Revolution he held the relatively inconspicuous post of Commissar for Nationalities until the adoption of the federal constitution brought about the abolition of this Commissariat as superfluous. But as Party Secretary the secretary in Russian political organizations has wide executive powers - he was in a position to know the most intimate secrets of the Russian state organism and to exert a powerful influence upon the currents of political power.

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'Lenin trusts Stalin; Stalin trusts no one,' was a current saying two years ago, and it adequately expressed the impression created by this silent and potent Caucasian, who has exploited his personality most effectively by consistently suppressing all visible manifestations of it. It was inevitable that Stalin, staunchest upholder of Party orthodoxy and the principles of 'Leninism,' should have come into conflict with Trotzky when the latter published his open letter with its spirit of criticism and innovation; and the conflict derived added piquancy because of the strikingly contrasted personalities of the two opponents.

Trotzky is a man of fire; Stalin is a man of ice. Trotzky is a frequent speaker and prolific writer; Stalin constantly holds himself behind a veil of reserve, only expressing himself on occasions of the first importance. Trotzky, himself a former journalist, has often chosen the press, even the foreign 'bourgeois' press, as a medium for declarations; Stalin has the reputation of never having granted an interview to anyone on any subject. If Trotzky is a figure who might fit into any great revolution, Stalin is a symbol and product of the

Russian Bolshevist Revolution, with its emphasis on iron discipline and strict subordination of the individual to the Party organization. Just for this reason he will be a power in the Russian Communist Party as long as it retains anything like its present form.

One of the cleverest cartoons recently published in the Moscow newspapers showed a thickset man making an impassioned oration, while in the background Foreign Commissar Chicherin appeared in an attitude of extreme anxiety, wiping beads of perspiration from his forehead. The caption under the cartoon read: 'Comrade Zinoviev Makes a Speech.' Because of his propensity for breathing fire and slaughter against the capitalist world in his speeches Zinoviev is something of an enfant terrible in the eyes of the Soviet diplomacy. Perhaps with a view to quieting the apprehensions of the Foreign Office, Zinoviev has recently made a point of emphasizing in his speeches that he is speaking only on behalf of the Communist International, of which he is President, and not of the Soviet Government.

That Zinoviev is a powerful figure in the councils of the Communist Party can scarcely be doubted. He delivered the leading reports at the two most important Congresses that have taken place in Russia recently, the Communist Party Congress late in May and the Congress of the Communist International in June and July. His control of the deliberations of the latter body has developed almost to perfection; and anyone with an eye for the technique of political steam-rollering must have admired the skill with which Zinoviev prepared and steered the proceedings of the Congress, isolating and suppressing, with an unerring eye, every deviation, either to the 'right' or to the 'left' of the programme which he advocated.

At first sight Zinoviev's eminence in the Party is a little difficult to understand. He has neither the personal magnetism of Trotzky nor the stubborn strength of Stalin. His name is not associated with any of the great military achievements of the Revolution, and he has taken little part in the adminstrative work of the reconstruction period. But he possesses a certain faculty for appealing to the Communist rank-and-file, for exciting and exploiting to the utmost degree the mass emotions of class consciousness, fanaticism, hatred of the bourgeoisie, of the Mensheviki, of the intelligentsia, of any group that he denounces as hostile or lukewarm to the Party and the Revolution. Add to this a considerable skill in Communist political manipulation and the prestige which he derives from his years of prerevolutionary close association with Lenin, and one gets an idea of the secret of Zinoviev's steady rise to his present position of commanding leadership of the Party.

Leo Kamenev, third member of the Communist Party triumvirate of leaders that also includes Stalin and Zinoviev, is a brother-in-law of Trotzky. This circumstance, however, has not the slightest political significance, and Kamenev was quite as active as his two associates in rebutting Trotzky's arguments during the period of the Party controversy.

A stout man of medium height, with spectacles and a pointed professorial beard of moderate dimensions, Kamenev suggests a savant, rather than a revolutionary leader, when one sees him presiding over a formal meeting of the Moscow Soviet, of which he is President. Kamenev now has little to do with the local affairs of the Moscow municipality. In his capacity as one of Russia's three Vice-Premiers the other two were Rykov and Tsurupa - Kamenev

has taken on his shoulders an increasing share of the general administrative work of the Soviet Government. Following Lenin's death he became chairman of the Sto, or Council of Labor and Defense, a sort of inner cabinet which occupies itself with the consideration of economic affairs. During Rykov's absence last spring, due to ill health, Kamenev acted as Premier.

Kamenev conveys the impression of being a conciliatory, cautious, discreet personality. He showed conspicuous success in handling the relations between the Soviet Government and the American Relief Administration during the period of the famine, when the tense situation and the psychology produced in Russia by years of blockade and isolation made coöperation between the Soviet Government and representatives of a foreign relief organization, that was regarded as distinctly conservative in its political tendencies, more difficult than it might have been under more normal conditions. He probably owes his rise to power in large measure to the reputation which he enjoys as a level-headed man who can be relied on to look the facts of Russian reconstruction squarely in the face and not fly off on any eccentric economic tangents.

In the stormy early days of the Revolution a foreigner had business of a sufficiently pressing nature to warrant an interview with the head of the Chekha, or secret police. Ushered into a room he found himself face to face with a tall fair man, with furrowed countenance and deep-set blueeyes, sitting on a chair, his feet thrust into slippers. Within easy reach stood a machine-gun. After the effect of this somewhat startling introduction had worn off Dzerzhinsky explained the reason for his attire, remarking with a half-apologetic smile: "You see, I never stir out of the office. I sleep here.'

Felix Dzerzhinsky suffered perhaps more than any other prominent Bolshevist leader for his activities in the days before the Revolution. He went through the horrors of penal servitude in Siberia. Liberated by the overthrow of the Tsarist régime, this Polish revolutionist returned to become one of the great active figures of the Soviet régime. By organizing the Chekha, or Extraordinary Commission, the famous espionage organ of the Revolution, he made a contribution to the victory of the Communists in the civil war scarcely second to that of Trotzky. The Chekha discovered and broke up plot after plot organized by the Allied Powers and the Whites; it preserved order mercilessly in the large centres and safeguarded the rear and the lines of communication while the Red Army was defeating Kolchak and Denikin, Yudenitch and Wrangel.

After the civil war was over Russia was faced with another great crisis in the winter of 1921-1922. A huge famine was raging in the Volga region; American Relief Administration food-supplies were arriving at the ports; but the Russian railroad system, crippled beyond imagination as a result of years of war and blockade, was broken down and almost hopelessly clogged up. It seemed as if millions of lives might be lost because of defective transport. In this emergency Dzerzhinsky was thrown into the breach and nominated as Commissar for Transport. He immediately made a trip to the most congested traffic points, living in a box car and studying the situation on the ground. He introduced the principle of strictest accountability for all railroad officials. Any branch manager who promised more cars for food transportation than he actually delivered was to be handed over to a revolutionary tribunal, and, if the offense involved flagrant neglect of duty, was to be shot. As a result of

Dzerzhinsky's merciless, devoted, driving leadership the worst of the transportation difficulties were surmounted and a regular flow of food from the ports to the famine area was assured.

Since Lenin's death Dzerzhinsky has occupied another difficult and responsible post as head of the Supreme Economic Council, the body which manages the Russian state industries. Here he has been at work for the last few months, hacking away at graft and bureaucracy on the part of management and at low productivity on the part of labor, shouldering the Herculean task of putting the Russian industries on their feet without the help of foreign capital.

Dzerzhinsky never takes any part in Party controversies. He is absolutely absorbed in his work and has no time for politics. No one is more universally respected by his Party associates; and even the non-Communists, who look on him with horror as head of the dreaded Chekha, concede his dauntless, fanatical singleness of character and purpose.

Shortly after Lenin's death, before the name of his successor had been announced, the writer was discussing the requisite qualifications of the future Premier with a member of the Communist Party Central Committee.

'A Russian Premier first of all has to be a Christian,' said this Communist with a smile. Of course this statement should not be taken literally, for no Communist Party member is permitted to profess any form of religion. But religion and race in Eastern Europe are carelessly interchangeable terms, and what the Communist meant was that the head of the Soviet State, out of deference to the susceptibilities of the vast masses of illiterate peasants, must be of Slavic Russian origin.

It is to his origin, perhaps, that Alexei Ivanovitch Rykov owes his eleva

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