Chapters 6–11 of Edvard Radzinsky, Stalin — 1917 in Petrograd, the utopia in the smoke-filled room, the grain expedition to Tsaritsyn, the invention of the General Secretaryship, Lenin's last letters, and the making of a god out of a corpse. Read from
RAW/books/Stalin.md. One full archaeology pass per chapter, sweeping all seven dimensions in every run.Siblings: Part 1 — Preface to Chapter 5 · Part 3 — Chapters 12–18 · Part 4 — Chapters 19–23 and the Interlude · Part 5 — Chapters 24–28 and the Afterword · What Runs Through All of It. See Part 1's banner for the note on chapter boundaries in this OCR-derived file.
⚠ Supersedes the original whole-book report, which merged the whole book into one account.
Source ingest: Edvard Radzinsky, Stalin
He arrived in Petrograd and immediately started writing things his teacher did not believe. His Pravda articles are so forgetful of Lenin's views that they have astounded historians ever since, and together with Kamenev he turned the Petrograd Bolsheviks' policy upside down.1 Trotsky later wrote that Koba had lost his head and was promoting Menshevik ideas, and the chapter says Trotsky was right about the fact and wrong about the reason.
The reason is that there were two governments in the city and he had worked out which one was rising. Beside the Provisional Government stood the Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, elected in barracks and factories by a show of hands.2 With the soldiers' deputies the Soviet controlled the garrison, and it issued Order Number 1: army units were to be run by soldiers' committees and officers supervised.
What that meant in practice was visible within days. Troops presented themselves at the Tavrida Palace ostensibly to support the Duma, and by 3 March the Duma's president was calling it a farce.3 The Soviet made the Provisional Government arrest the tsar despite his abdication. So the man who had spent fifteen years as somebody's loyal instrument wrote what the people with power wanted read. He forgot Lenin's nationalities line and came out for preserving a unitary Russian state, which naturally pleased the Provisional Government — and they naturally took notice of an influential radical with such comfortable views.4
The signature on those articles is where the chapter locates the change: Koba Stalin.5 The old Koba, the pathetic loyal fool who had been ruthlessly exploited and easily forgotten, was left behind in Turukhansk. From now on he served himself, and the Revolution just so far as the Revolution could be of service. Two weeks in the city bought him a newspaper, a leading position among the city's Bolsheviks, and a place in the leadership of the Soviet, which was the effective holder of power.6
Then Lenin's letters arrived by hand, carried by Alexandra Kollontai, a tsarist general's daughter, and to Kamenev they read like the ravings of an emigre long divorced from Russia.7 Marx or no Marx, Lenin would not wait for democratic changes to finish in a backward peasant country.
What kept the Party solvent is set down without euphemism and without outrage. German money had been coming in since the start of the war, and there was nothing strange about it: Lenin was agitating for the defeat of tsarist Russia and for turning the war into a civil war, which was exactly what Germany wanted.8 Koba could deduce the scale from the subsidies to his own newspaper and the funds for arms going to the Party's military organisation.
The shack in Finland is where the leadership actually was, and later it became a shrine. Lenin ran the Party from it and Koba read his key points aloud at the Congress.9 In 1947 Stalin had the shack encased in marble and installed a live exhibit in it — the aged Yemelyanov, who had hidden Lenin there.
He moved in with the Alliluyevs, into the room that had just hidden Lenin and Zinoviev, and the family decided that a man directing the workers' revolution could not do it in one cotton shirt.10 The chapter's phrase for what happened next is a stage direction: Othello, no longer young, telling the youthful Desdemona stories of his ordeals. Anna Alliluyeva wrote all of it down conscientiously and published her reminiscences in 1947, and neither she nor her publishers realised how unwelcome that would be.
Meanwhile the country talked itself apart. The Romanovs had ruled for three hundred years while Russia stayed silent, and now it seemed likely to talk for another three hundred.11 Workers were not working, peasants were not farming, and the Galician offensive cost a hundred thousand men from an army that wanted to go home.
And then Lenin allied with the government he intended to destroy. When Kornilov moved on Petrograd, Kerensky called on all democratic forces including the Bolsheviks, and Lenin's decision was instantaneous.12 He used the alliance to arm his supporters in every urban centre, and once the mutiny was put down the Bolshevik leaders came out of prison. One of the ships called in against Kornilov was the Aurora.
Trotsky's return cost Koba his eminence. The Central Committee members who had been forcibly removed came back, and his work went on in the shadows.13
Read: lines 1576–1949.
They did not leave the Smolny for three days. Molotov remembered the room: himself, Zinoviev and Trotsky, with Stalin and Kamenev opposite.14 An armchair utopia had become reality, in a former school for young ladies, and they were not merely holding power but proposing to build the new world at once.
The design, stated as they stated it, is short. Everything monopolised in the interests of the victorious people; a single State Bank, a Leviathan over the whole country; everybody taking a turn at governing everybody else.15 Cooks would learn to administer the state. And gradually people would reach the point where nobody governed anybody, and the hateful state would wither. The chapter's own line on that is the shortest sentence in the run: this was the dream which would lead them to create the most monstrous state of all.16
The land decree was a confidence trick and the book says so plainly. The fair redivision of land proclaimed on the night of the coup was not the goal; the goal was collective farms in which nobody could say this is mine.17 What the objection to property actually is gets illustrated from an unexpected quarter. St Francis taught men to live without property, and when a monk asked whether he might at least have a Bible of his own, the answer was that if today you have your own Bible, tomorrow you will start giving orders.18
Loathsome trading, that seedbed of capitalism, was to be replaced by universal state distribution, so that the power of money would end.19
Then the first two weeks, in which they expected to be finished. An old emigre told the author that everyone knew the army might intervene at any moment and the Bolsheviks would be done for; the intelligentsia sat in unlit apartments waiting for liberators.20 Kerensky moved on the capital immediately, Trotsky and Lenin organised the defence, and Koba was at Lenin's side throughout as his inseparable shadow.
A single domestic detail carries the whole change. The author's grandfather described driving Kerensky's Cossacks out of Tsarskoe Selo, where Plekhanov — the father of Russian Marxism — was living, and whose home was searched several times not because they did not know who he was.21 He left Russia and died the following year.
The machinery of the state simply refused. Civil servants struck repeatedly; Gippius noted that the civil servants would not serve, the ministers were not working, the banks did not open and the telephone did not ring.22 Lenin's commissars found nobody in their ministries but cleaners and messengers. Koba's People's Commissariat existed at first only in a decree, until one man turned up to work in it.
Then the lesson in tactics that the chapter says was Koba's education. Lenin had promised to abide by the results of the elections to the Constituent Assembly, knew the results would be unfavourable, and had no intention of surrendering power.23 So he bought an ally: seats in government for the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, on conditions.
The dispersal itself shows an expert organiser of mass demonstrations at work. Latvian snipers, soldiers and sailors round the Tavrida Palace, every street packed.24 And the reaction was muted, which is the lesson Koba took: how quickly the spirit of the intelligentsia could be broken by stern measures. Twenty years later he would bury the same men who had cheerfully dispersed Russia's helpless assembly.25
Brest-Litovsk is where the chapter shows him learning what dogma is worth. Lenin needed peace to get breathing space, demobilise an unruly army and build one of his own.26 Radek threw leaflets from the train window urging German soldiers to stop the war with their Russian brothers. Lenin argued that if we do not conclude peace, peace will be concluded for us — and that there would be a world revolution without fail, but there already was a Russian one. Koba held his tongue and drew his own conclusion. Listening to the furious arguments about world revolution, he saw that it was superstitious nonsense: Marx's dogmas were now the Old Testament, and Lenin served the New.27
Read: lines 1950–2209.
Famine did what the war had not. The countryside would not surrender grain for nothing, and the abler peasants began hiding it, so Petrograd and Moscow were starving.28 Lenin had sent Trotsky to the front; on 24 May 1918 he put Koba in charge of food stocks and sent him south.
Who went with him is the run's best detail. His staff at the People's Commissariat consisted of one secretary — Fyodor Alliluyev — and the party that assembled at the Kazan station was a girl not yet twenty, her brother, and the commissar.29 The station was packed with bag people and half-starved homeless children, and it took a lengthy argument with the stationmaster to get a train at all, because not many people yet knew who this man was.
The train they got had belonged to a gypsy singer and was upholstered accordingly. It moved by fits, stopping at every signal, on a single southbound track jammed with troops.30 At night it ran blacked out, hurrying through stations or hiding on sidings. With him went four hundred armed men, among them Latvian riflemen who had been hardened in execution squads. What he found at Tsaritsyn was a robbery with a public meeting in it. The local authorities had tried to evacuate the gold and the valuables taken from the safes of the bourgeoisie; an anarchist force ambushed the train, seized the money, and then — obeying what was then the general rule — held a political meeting among the corpses and the burning railcars, and ruled that the money belonged to the people.31
His answer is stated in one sentence and the chapter does not dress it. He began with a round of executions, just to inspire respect for his decisions.32 Everybody involved in black marketeering or counterrevolution was shot, and so was anybody who might be.
Barbusse, an admirer, records that not a day passed without shootings at the local Cheka headquarters.33 Trucks kept their engines running at night to drown the noise of the shots and the screams. Bodies went into sacks and were buried by moonlight, and at dawn the relatives came to dig at the communal graves.
One case shows where the limit was, and where it was not. He ordered the engineer Alexeyev shot on suspicion of conspiring; Alexeyev's mother was a well-known Populist revolutionary; Lenin was told and telegraphed orders.34 Then Koba wired Lenin that in spite of the muddle it was possible to restore order, and that in a week they would be sending about a million poods — eighteen thousand tons — to Moscow.
And the marriage happened in that railcar, in the same weeks, after the shootings by night.35 In a time of revolution no ceremony was needed; they simply declared themselves married. His secretary Nadya Alliluyeva was nineteen.
In the same year her brother Fyodor, whose memoirs supply most of this run, suddenly and mysteriously lost his mind, after a shock of some sort, and had bouts of insanity for the rest of his life.36 The first anniversary in Moscow was celebrated on a platform built by intellectuals under compulsory labour education, and finished by eight in the morning so Lenin could speak from it.37 Trotsky stood at the front as Lenin's heir, and Koba saw the platform and understood exactly what it was — a public declaration of the order of precedence.
What ordinary people wanted that week was bread and firewood. Doorways and basements were full of children whose parents had vanished, and homeless little girls were sold for bread.38
Then the miracle they had all been promised arrived. Revolution broke out in Germany on 9–10 November, the Hohenzollern monarchy collapsed, and Liebknecht proclaimed a Soviet republic from the palace balcony.39 Austria followed on 12 November. Exactly one year after October, world revolution had come.
It lasted weeks. The Spartacus rising was suppressed and Luxemburg and Liebknecht were murdered by officers.40 The chapter notes what Koba took from that procedure — he admired it, and it is something else he would take over from the Leader.
And by 1920 the same reasoning was running the other way. After a putsch was crushed in Berlin, Lenin decided events were repeating themselves and that Germany's October was next, and told the Ninth Congress the time had come.41 Koba, who wanted to go back to Moscow, spoke out against comrades who would make peace only in a Red Soviet Warsaw.
The Crimea is where the run ends and the arithmetic is left standing. The instruction was that the Crimea was three years behind in its revolutionary development and would be brought up to date quickly.42 Machine guns chattered for months on end and tens of thousands perished. Koba watched how it was managed.
Read: lines 2210–2700.
The office was created for a purpose and the purpose was not clerical. In spring 1922 Lenin introduced the post of General Secretary and had Koba elected to it in April.43 Some suppose it was meant to be purely executive; the chapter's reading is that the job was to tame the Party — and that Lenin defined the Secretariat's functions in disingenuously vague terms.
Inside the vagueness sits the mechanism. Any decision of the Secretariat unchallenged by the Orgburo automatically became a decision of the Orgburo, and any decision of the Secretariat unchallenged by the higher body became that body's decision.44 Silence was consent, and the Secretariat controlled what anybody was told.
The lever itself is one sentence and it explains the next thirty years. The power to appoint congenial provincial Party leaders and to inspect their work.45 Kaganovich set about installing the right people and checking their loyalty, and in less than a year forty-three provincial secretaries were replaced. His own marginal note settles what he thought he was building. Beside a sentence of Trotsky's about the Party's leadership of the state machinery, Koba wrote one word: indivisible.46
Trotsky understood what was happening, said so, and was ignored.47 Then the instrument. In February 1922 Lenin reformed the Cheka into the GPU, and the essential function survived the renaming: the collegium retained the right to shoot any Russian citizen without exception and with no questions asked.48
And it was pointed inward, at the Party, by a Central Committee decision. All Party members were obliged to inform the GPU of anti-Party talk and of opposition groups within the Party.49 After the privations of the underground years the senior functionaries were enjoying life greedily, and the GPU kept the General Secretary regularly informed about it.
The expulsions of 1922 are the other half of the same policy. A steamship put into Stettin with no one waiting to meet it, carrying the men Lenin had decided to remove from Russia.50 Pravda headlined the article about it First Warning, and the chapter says it was exactly that: throughout the year in which he was liberalising the economy, Lenin was systematically purging the country of people who thought. What that felt like from inside is one sentence from the daughter of an expelled agricultural scientist: we thought we should be returning in a year's time, and that was all we lived for.51
Read: lines 2701–2886.
The whole chapter turns on a phone call. Stalin rang Krupskaya and rudely berated her, and according to Lenin's sister she came home quite unlike herself and rolled about the floor, sobbing.52
Lenin was enraged and wrote to Stalin breaking off relations. Then Krupskaya recovered her composure and began to appreciate the new situation and how helpless she was.53 She begged the secretary not to send the letter. In the middle of the night Kamenev told Trotsky that Stalin had accepted their conditions and that Krupskaya would get a written apology, and she persuaded Lenin not to send his. Stalin's message to her is quoted and it is worth having. What does Ilyich think I am, treating me as some sort of traitor, when I love him with all my heart — try and let him know what I've said.54
And the lesson he took is the operative sentence of the chapter. Trotsky and Kamenev hated each other so much, and each so feared the other's elevation, that they would both support him.55
Then Lenin's letter to the Congress, written at the end of December. Relations between Stalin and Trotsky account for more than half the danger of a schism; since becoming Gensek, Comrade Stalin has concentrated unlimited power in his hands.56 The original drafts were burned, copies went in envelopes marked strictly secret to Krupskaya, to be opened only after his death. One copy, sealed with wax, stayed in the Secretariat, and the chapter asks the obvious question: why did an obsessively secretive man behave so naively?57 Had he no inkling of the rule that servants do not keep their masters' secrets?
The answer arrives as a document. Fotieva's letter to Kamenev survives in the Party Archive: Comrade Stalin was given the letter on Saturday 23 December, and it transpired afterwards that Lenin had wanted it kept strictly secret.58 She had failed to understand the instruction and had happened to pass it straight to Stalin, who passed it to Trotsky and Kamenev — because the unflattering characterisations in it were not only of him. The supplement is the famous one and it is short. Stalin is too rude, which can be tolerated among Communists and becomes intolerable in the office of Gensek — so find a way of transferring him and appoint someone differing in one respect only, more tolerant, more loyal, more polite, more considerate, less capricious.59
What happened next is a medical instruction. Lenin began a series of articles, one sharply critical of Stalin's former Commissariat, and in February 1923 the doctor forbade him newspapers, visits and political information.60
His attempt to break out of that is a deliberate provocation. On 5 March he sent Stalin a furious letter about the Krupskaya incident which had supposedly been laid to rest, with copies to Kamenev and Zinoviev.61 The reasoning is that a man with whom he had broken off relations could not go on keeping watch over him. He did not know that Stalin had anticipated it a month earlier. And the letter did not need answering, because Lenin's rage had cost him the gift of speech during the night.62
Read: lines 2887–3080.
The dying man's legacy was a weapon aimed at Trotsky. The secret resolution against factionalism, ordered by Lenin and adopted in 1921, was what made it possible for Trotsky's enemies to shut his mouth.63
And the strength of the new machine was demonstrated once, in January 1924, and never needed demonstrating again. The first Party conference Stalin organised condemned Trotsky without sparing him.64 Bukharin's line in the debate is the whole of it: Bolshevism always did, and still does, value the machinery.
Then the funeral, planned months in advance by a man who had been a brilliant seminarist. The chapter calls the campaign a Departure of the God and says what it was for: a new god in place of the one the Bolsheviks had overthrown, an atheist Messiah.65 Delegations were sent to Nizhny Novgorod. Ritual farewells were instituted, in which representatives of the toiling masses vowed to the departing God that they would keep his commandments. Stalin raised the question of the funeral in the Politburo while Lenin still had months to live, reporting that provincial comrades were concerned about it.66
Then the guest list, managed like a stage. Trotsky's doctors advised a cure at Sukhumi; once he had gone, Stalin saw to it that none of the remaining leaders visited Lenin.67 Bukharin, being treated nearby, got there anyway and was present at the death — and was afterwards simply wiped out of the deathbed scene and relocated in the record to Moscow, so that Zinoviev's published account has him arriving with the rest.
Trotsky was told by telegram that the funeral was on Saturday and he could not get there in time.68 It had been postponed to Sunday. The chapter reads that as theology rather than spite: where there is a god there are loyal and disloyal disciples, and the disloyal must not be present at the burial.
The body was embalmed on 22 January as a temporary job, to last a few days in the Hall of Columns.69 Then Stalin decided the Bolsheviks would conquer death, and the God would be imperishable. A wooden mausoleum went up by the end of January, and Red corners in Lenin's honour were established all over the country.
What the letter to the Congress did when it was finally read is the chapter's flattest anticlimax. Krupskaya presented the sealed packets on the eve of the Thirteenth Congress; Yaroslavsky remembered that the reaction of the Central Committee was incomprehension and alarm.70 The hand-picked Congress swallowed it without difficulty, with support from Kamenev and Zinoviev. Trotsky remained silent. And the electorate had already been changed underneath them. On 31 January 1924 Stalin announced the Leninist draft, a mass recruitment as if the God were appealing to his people from the grave, and the Party gained 240,000 new members.71
Trotsky then destroyed himself in print. Lessons of October praised the dead God for resurrecting Trotsky's own theory and for acting, together with Trotsky, against an inert Party.72 Zinoviev and Kamenev fell on him; Stalin joined in; and Bukharin found the deadly ammunition — Lenin's own repeated assertion that socialism could not be built in one country, which Trotsky had faithfully echoed.
Then Stalin refused to expel him, against allies who wanted blood.73 The scene that follows is the one the author's father also used to tell: Trotsky made a thunderous speech, rushed for the exit, and found the door of the Throne Room too heavy to slam. He ended up wrestling with the handle.
And immediately the same method turned on the men who had just helped him. Bukharin, now heading the faction the Party called rightist, published a slogan addressed to the peasants in Pravda on 14 April 1925: enrich yourselves, develop your holdings, and don't worry that they may be taken away from you.74 The country sighed with relief and the old Party members were flabbergasted, because a rich peasant was a knockout blow to the utopia. Kamenev asked Stalin to explain it, and Stalin puffed at his pipe enigmatically and said nothing.
Read: lines 3081–3310.
Everything from here down is speculative by design. Above the line, every claim carries a footnote and a line range. Below it, the writing is allowed to weigh alternatives, run counterfactuals and hand the decision to advisors from other traditions — because that is the job of these sections.
[SPECULATIVE]Paradigm-obvious. Taking German money, which the chapter itself says was nothing strange given what Lenin was publicly agitating for. Dispersing the Constituent Assembly, which Lenin planned and the Left SRs voted for. Shooting speculators at Tsaritsyn in 1918, when the Cheka was doing it everywhere and Lenin had sent him with the widest discretionary powers. Building a Lenin cult, which the whole leadership took part in. None of these needs a special explanation and reading them as personal wickedness is the biographer's error the book keeps naming.
Paradigm-breaking, and each one cost him or nearly did.
Writing Menshevik-flavoured articles in March 1917 in his own Leader's newspaper. That is the single most dangerous thing a Bolshevik could do that spring, and it is on the record under a signature. It nearly ended him when Lenin arrived, and the chapter's reading is that he did it deliberately because he had identified where power actually sat.
Taking the General Secretaryship seriously. Everyone else in the leadership treated it as clerical, which is precisely why he got it. Turning an executive post into the machine that appointed and inspected every provincial leader was not what the job was for, and Trotsky said so at the time and was ignored.
Refusing to expel Trotsky when Zinoviev and Kamenev demanded it. He spent capital with his own allies to keep alive a man who was useful as a threat. That is a cost paid deliberately, and it is the clearest single instance of the technique the whole run displays.
[SPECULATIVE]A live alternative, and Lenin was still alive to take it. The letter to the Congress named the problem and proposed the remedy: find a way of transferring Stalin from that post and appoint someone differing in one respect only, that he was more polite. The Congress read it. The Central Committee heard it. Nobody moved.
A constructed alternative. Suppose the Thirteenth Congress had acted on it. The forecast is not that the Soviet Union becomes a different kind of state — the Cheka's right to shoot without questions, the ban on factions, the dispersed Assembly and the informer duty on Party members were all in place before Stalin held the office, and all of them were Lenin's. What changes is who runs the machine, not whether the machine exists. The chapter's own construction of the post — created to tame the Party, with functions deliberately left vague — makes it an instrument waiting for whoever picks it up. The remedy Lenin proposed treats the man as the danger and leaves the office intact, which is the smaller half of the problem he had himself identified.
Scope condition, since it is the transferable part. A warning about a person is only useful where the person's advantage is personal. Where the advantage sits in an office — appointment, inspection, and control of what the body is told — removing the occupant returns the same problem with a different name on the door.
[SPECULATIVE]Take Lenin's decision to leave a sealed copy of the letter in the Secretariat that Stalin ran.
A Stoic advisor, working from the dichotomy of control, would put the failure earlier than the envelope. What a dying man can control is what he writes and to whom he entrusts it. What he cannot control is a household staffed by people whose careers run through the man he is writing about — and by March 1923 the doctors' orders about newspapers and visits show that his information had already been taken out of his hands.
An advisor working from deniable power reads the whole sequence as competent and would find nothing to add. Fotieva does not act against Lenin; she misunderstands an instruction. The doctor does not silence him; the doctor prescribes rest. Trotsky is not excluded from the funeral; he is given a date and told his health matters. Every single step has an innocent description available, and that is what makes the chain unbreakable.
They do not converge and the gap is the finding. One says the letter was written too late by a man who had already lost the ability to deliver it. The other says the letter's fate was never the point, because a document that names one man as too rude cannot compete with an office that appoints forty-three provincial secretaries in a year.
[SPECULATIVE]Decision type: changing the electorate before you need its vote.
The letter to the Congress was survivable because of a decision taken independently of it. The Leninist draft brought 240,000 new members into the Party in the year the letter was read, at the invitation of a dead god whose cult was being built at the same time. Those members owed their membership to the machine that had enrolled them, and knew nothing of the quarrels of 1917.
Scope conditions. This works where the body's own rules let it enlarge itself, where the enlargement can be justified on grounds nobody can oppose — here, honouring the dead founder — and where the new entrants have no prior loyalties. It fails where admission is controlled by somebody else, and it fails where the new members arrive with an existing allegiance. And it is slow: the draft was announced in January 1924 and the effect the chapter measures is at 1930, by which time almost the whole Party was people who had joined after the Revolution.
The paired mechanism is worth naming with it. Enlarging the electorate is only half; the other half is the ban on factions adopted in 1921, which meant that anyone who organised against the new majority was, by definition, committing the offence. One rule made opposition illegal and one operation made it a minority, and neither was aimed at Trotsky when it was made. Modern equivalent: any organisation where the power to admit members and the power to define dissent as procedural misconduct sit in the same hands. The vote when it comes is a formality, and the work was done years earlier by people filling in forms.
Read from RAW/books/Stalin.md, lines 1576–3310: ch. 6 (1576–1949), ch. 7 (1950–2209), ch. 8 (2210–2700), ch. 9 (2701–2886), ch. 10 (2887–3080), ch. 11 (3081–3310).
The strongest documentation in this part. Fotieva's letter to Kamenev in the Party Archive, which explains how Lenin's secret letter reached the man it was about. Lenin's letter of 5 March 1923 about the insult to Krupskaya, with its copy list. The text of the supplement proposing Stalin's transfer. Koba's one-word marginal note in his copy of Trotsky. The mechanism by which unchallenged Secretariat decisions became decisions of the higher body.
Where the material is memoir and family talk. Fyodor Alliluyev's notes supply most of the Tsaritsyn journey and are used heavily; the author records that Fyodor went mad later the same year. Anna Alliluyeva's 1947 reminiscences supply the courtship. Bazhanov, Stalin's secretary who escaped to the West, supplies the door-slamming scene, which the author's father also used to tell — and the author says so, which is the right way to handle it.
Where the author reasons rather than documents. That Koba's March 1917 articles were a deliberate reading of where power sat, rather than confusion, is an interpretation set explicitly against Trotsky's. That the funeral date was moved to exclude Trotsky is an inference from the postponement. Both are marked here as inference.
On the poison rumour. Trotsky's later suggestion is raised and dismissed on medical testimony found in a physician's records. Reported here at that weight. Bounded absence. No claim is made about material outside lines 1576–3310.