Lev Kamenev, Speech to the Fourteenth Party Congress. December 1925

In this speech, Lev Kamenev offered a carefully calibrated defense of Party unity at the moment Lenin’s death opened a struggle over succession. Praising Stalin’s organizational role while warning against personal rule, Kamenev tried to channel authority back into collective leadership and institutional discipline. The document is revealing precisely because of its balancing act. It shows a senior Bolshevik attempting to manage the emerging Stalin phenomenon from within, treating the General Secretary as both indispensable apparatus man and a potential source of dangerous concentration of power.

Original Source: XIV s"ezd Vsesoiuznoi Kommunisticheskoi partii (b) 18-31 dekabria 1925 g. (Moscow: GIZ, 1926), pp. 273-75.

I turn to intraparty questions. To these questions I give three answers.

The first concerns the organizational forms of our intraparty life. Comrade Bukharin has said that we bought the controversy with Comrade Trotsky at the price, as he expressed it, of a convulsion in intraparty life. You must resolve this question in the sense that in the background of a general enlivening and heightening of the activity of all strata of the population, intraparty democracy is essential, its further development is essential. According to the testament of Lenin this has now become possible precisely because the de-classing of the proletariat has ceased.

In the contrary case with this background you will inevitably have a new convulsion in intraparty life. This will be a phenomenon on a catastrophic order. I appeal to you not to choose this path, but the other path.

The things you hear about that path at the congress--about defeatists, liquidators, Axelrodists, etc.--cannot be true; such things had not entered the party's head even after it assembled at the congress. This must be avoided. This can be avoided only if the minority, which is not made up of newcomers, which you know about fully, if this minority is given an opportunity to defend its views in the party, of course with the full responsibility which the party and the dictatorship impose upon us.

Second: Besides the invigoration of party discussion, besides granting the minority an opportunity to express it's views to the whole party, as becomes Bolsheviks, within those limits which are set by the party statutes and the dictatorship of the party and the proletariat, it seems to me that you must resist this new tendency in the party which I have tried to sketch out to you. I am sure that if you find it impossible to do this now because of some organizational consideration or another, the facts of life, the course of the class struggle in our country, the growth of differentiation in the village will compel you to do this, and to say that the school which Bukharin has established is based on a departure from Lenin. What we need right now is in the slogan, back to Lenin! (Voice from a seat: "Why back?") Because this is going forward. Comrades, I know that in the first part of my speech you tried to attribute the matter to malice. We see that the matter is not one of malice, and I hope you will say this after a few months.

And finally, the third point: We are against creating a theory of the "Chief", we are against establishing a "Chief." We are against the Secretariat, which has in practice combined both policy and organization, standing over the political organ. We are for our upper level being organized in such a fashion that there would be a really all-powerful Politbiuro, bringing together all our party's policies, and at the same time the Secretariat would be subordinate to it and execute the technical aspects of its decisions. (Noise) We cannot consider it normal but think it harmful to the party, if such a situation is continued where the Secretariat combines both policy and organization, and in fact pre-decides policy. (Noise) Here, Comrades, is what we need to do. Everyone who does not agree with me will draw his own conclusions. (Voice from a seat: "You should have begun with this:') The speaker has the right to begin with what he wants. You think I ought to have begun with what I have said, that personally I assert that our General Secretary is not the kind of figure that can unite the old Bolshevik staff around himself. I don't consider this a basic political question. I don't consider this question more important than the question of the theoretical line. I feel that if the party adopted (Noise) a definite political line which was clearly marked off from those deviations which part of the Central Committee is now supporting, this question would not now be on the agenda. But I must say this out to the end. Precisely because I more than once told Comrade Stalin this, precisely because I more than once told a group of Leninist comrades, I repeat it here at the congress: I have arrived at the conviction that Comrade Stalin cannot fill the role of unifier of the Bolshevik staff. (Voices from the audience: "Untrue!" "Nonsense!" "So that's what it is!" "He's shown his cards!" Noise. Applause by the Leningrad delegation. Shouts: "We won't surrender the commanding heights to you." "Stalin! Stalin!" The delegates stand and cheer Comrade Stalin. Stormy applause. Shouts: "Here's where the party has become united. Now the Bolshevik staff must be united.")

(Evdokimov, from his seat) "Long live the Russian Communist Party! Hurrah! Hurrah!" (The delegates stand and shout "Hurrah!" Noise. Stormy, long-sustained applause)

(Evdokimov, from his seat) "Long live the Central Committee of our party! Hurrah!" (The delegates shout "Hurrah!") "The party above all! Right!" (Applause and shouts, "Hurrah!")

(Voice from a seat) "Long live Comrade Stalin!" (Stormy, continued applause, shouts) "Hurrah!" (Noise)

(Chairman) "Comrades, I beg you to quiet down. Comrade Kamenev will now finish his speech."

I began this part of my speech with the words, "We are against the theory of individual preeminence, we are against creating a Chief!" With these same words I end my speech. (Applause by the Leningrad delegation)

(Voice from a seat) "And who do you propose?"

(Chairman) I declare a ten minute recess." ...

Source: Robert V. Daniels, ed., A Documentary History of Communism (Hanover: Published for the University of Vermont by University Press of New England, 1984), pp. 183-186.