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132 ANDREA GRAZIOSImain leaders of the party, it clearly emerges that in January 1923 Stalin wasalready, in Fotieva's expression, the "Big Stalin," to whom everything wasreferred, even against Lenin's instructions. Piatakov was aware of this, and,despite his ties with Trotsky (politically, a finished man at the very momentof Lenin's death), he was already beginning to fear and respect Stalin. Heknew, by the way, that at least in terms of respect, Stalin and his groupreturned the sentiment: for example, during the "intrigues" to remove Piatakovfrom the Donbass, Ordzhonikidze, even while attacking him stressedhis great administrative abilities in the economic field. These contradictorysentiments perhaps emerged already during Trotsky's replacement asCommissar of War by Frunze, when Piatakov behaved ambiguously.In the following years, this mutual appreciation grew perceptibly if notopenly. As we have said, the Piatakov who was preparing the great fixedcapital investments plan for industry at the OSVOK (the Conference forInvestments in Fixed Capital) was looking carefully at Stalin's socialism inone country. And perhaps the fact that Piatakov was left at the VSNKh untilJuly 1926, one of the few opposition leaders who kept any great executivepowers, shows that the other side, too, was looking "carefully" at his work.Between 1926 and 1929, as we know, "Big Stalin"'s personal powerincreased enormously, entering a new phase at the end of that period.Piatakov's life gives us only some glimpses of the first part of this evolution:of the convergence of vast sectors of the party around a new version ofsocialism in one country; of the last stages of Trotsky's marginalization,linked partly to his insistence on the importance of international questions(which by now even people like Preobrazhenskii were putting in secondplace); and of the growth in the party, even at its highest levels, of fear forthe gensek.Glimpses of the genetic mutation of 1928-1929 however, are moreinteresting. As we have seen in the previous sections, Stalin was then"crowned," through a pre-arranged operation, as the new vozhd' of theparty and of the country. This involved, and was made possible by, asignificant enlargement of his following, which, for example, the majorityof the ex-Trotskyites, including Piatakov, now joined. Stalin thus foundhimself at the head of a much larger and more varied group than that of afew years previously, temporarily united by that ideology of the will, of theparty and the state as that will's tools, and of the leader as its embodiment.But if the Stalin of 1929 was a vozhd' and a khoziain for everyone, hewas not these things in the same way for everyone. And he did not embodystate and party in the same way in the eyes of all of his followers. This canbe seen, for example, in the relationship between Stalin and Ordzhonikidzeand in that between Stalin and Piatakov in the early 1930s. For Ordzhoni-