HARVARD UKRAINIAN STUDIES - See also - Harvard University

PIATAKOV: A MIRROR OF SOVIET HISTORY 131by the fact that, until 1922, the KP(b)U was, as Bohdan Krawchenko haswritten, an "urban military bureaucratic non-Ukrainian apparatus." As earlyas 1919-1921, however, certain elements had emerged that foreshadowedthe reasons for that alliance between Stalin and the Ukrainian wing of theleadership of the KP(b)U, reached in 1923 after the great clashes of late1922 (to which we will return in the next section). I have in mind, for example,the polemics surrounding the KP(b)U's agreement with the "Soviet"Ukrainian parties, the Borotbists first of all, opposed by Piatakov and theLeft but supported by Artem and approved by Stalin. Another contributingfactor was fear of the militarist Trotsky and his hypercentralism—a fearconfirmed in the eyes of Ukrainians when Piatakov became one ofTrotsky's followers and behaved as he did in the Donbass. Here, to quoteaccusations of the time, Piatakov acted like "a conquistador among thePapuans," uniting the front of his adversaries (Russian workers, localbureaucracies, Ukrainian leaders et al.). As Trotsky had done in 1919, Piatakovthus paved the way for the victory of his enemies and served asconfirmation to the majority of local leaders that the centralist danger lay inTrotskyism, against which Stalin might be the antidote, however bitter.These conclusions, paradoxical in the light of later developments, mustat the time have seemed sensible to many republican and local leaders.What Sergo Mikoian has called Stalin's 1920s "reasonableness" can beseen at work here, in the ability with which the network of alliances waswoven which led to Piatakov's removal, in the contradictions and "barter"at the narkomnats with the "republican powers," and, above all, in the pactwith the strong nationalities of 1923. It is probable that Stalin already worethis reasonableness as a mask, but it is certain that it convinced many andthat it was one of the tools that enabled him to take power. This reasonableness,the willingness to reach agreement even with those who representedinterests he actually despised and was later quick to crush, shows us, Ibelieve, one reason for Stalin's superiority over other contenders during theyears of the power straggle. I have in mind his "freedom,"— meaning hislack of principles—in the fields of both ideology and behavior ("vsiakomuovoshu svoe vremiia" was indeed Stalin's motto), which contrasts sharplywith Trotsky's many ideological constraints and close friendships anddiffers, too, from Kamenev's and Zinov'ev's more circumscribed cynicism.In the early 1920s, as we know, the group that had emerged from theCivil War was joined by the "secretaries," Kaganovich first of all (he, too,by the way, was a "Ukrainian" and an old friend of Voroshilov and Kviring),who helped Stalin in his conquest of the party apparatus. StudyingPiatakov we see little of it. But from the history of the spread of Lenin's"Testament," in which, as we have said, Piatakov was cited as one of the six