Stalin: A Biography

by Robert Service

  He was a very dry person; one might even say that he was desiccated. For example, when we were let outside for exercise and all of us in our particular groups made for this or that corner of the prison yard, Stalin stayed by himself and walked backwards and forwards with his short paces, and if anyone tried speaking to him, he would open his mouth into that cold smile of his and perhaps say a few words. And this unsociability attracted general attention.

  This was extraordinary behaviour for a prisoner with only a limited opportunity to talk to others. He had arrived in Kutaisi Prison as the sole ‘intellectual’ in the group of prisoners transferred from Batumi.37 Yet he neither helped to keep up their morale nor sought out contact with intellectuals from his own party.38

  Kutaisi Prison was nostalgically remembered as a ‘university’ for its inmates.39 Marxist prisoners read books and discussed ideas. Dzhughashvili, however, kept to himself. His strangeness impressed Uratadze:40

  He was scruffy and his pockmarked face made him not particularly neat in appearance… In prison he wore a beard and had long hair brushed back. He had a creeping way of walking, taking short steps. He never opened his mouth to laugh but only at most to smile. And the size of the smile depended on the volume of emotion evoked in him by a specific event; but his smile never turned into a full-mouthed laugh. He was completely imperturbable. We lived together in Kutaisi Prison for more than half a year and not once did I see him get agitated, lose control, get angry, shout, swear or — in short — reveal himself in any other aspect than complete calmness. And his voice exactly corresponded to the ‘glacial character’ which those who knew him well attributed to him.

  If this were to be the only such testimony about him, it would be easily dismissed. But it fits with everything said about his personality before and after his period of confinement.

  Escaping at last from Novaya Uda, he returned to his Bolshevik comrades in a mood to impose his vision.41 In his absence there had been fundamental changes in the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party and Lenin, for a while, emerged the victor. At the Second Party Congress, which was held in Brussels and London from July to August 1903, Lenin’s Iskra group had trounced the other trends. But at the moment of their triumph the Iskraists fell apart. Lenin’s supporters advocated a particularly exigent set of conditions for party membership. His erstwhile associate Yuli Martov, who had helped him to drive out the Bund, found himself in a minority. Martov agreed on the need for clandestinity, centralism, discipline and ideological unity. But, like Zhordania in Georgia, he frowned on policies designed to restrict the number of party members. It was Martov’s belief that Lenin had gone over to an authoritarian and counter-productive organisational campaign. They and their supporters voted against each other. Lenin won and called his followers the Majoritarians (bol’sheviki or Bolsheviks), and Martov in a fit of self-abnegation allowed his men and women to be known as the Minoritarians (men’sheviki or Mensheviks).

  Detailed news of the dénouement at the Second Party Congress took time to filter back to Georgia. The split between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks among the exiles was not reproduced in Tbilisi. The same was true in most Russian cities. But two general trends nevertheless emerged across the Russian Empire, and Georgia was no exception. Misha Tskhakaya was among the first to declare himself a Bolshevik. Dzhughashvili too sided with Lenin. But having fled from Novaya Uda, he was not met warmly in Tbilisi. The reason was his oft-repeated call for an autonomous Georgian party. A vigorous rebuke was prepared for him and he faced the threat of being drummed out of the Bolshevik faction before it was properly formed. He was given a choice: if he wanted to stay with the Bolsheviks, he had to write out a statement of his beliefs to be vetted by leading comrades for orthodoxy.42 This was a humiliating experience for a man as proud as Dzhughashvili. But he was realistic. He had to prove himself a disciplined, orthodox Bolshevik. If he wanted to regain acceptance, he had to recant, to engage in what later, when he ruled the USSR, became known as self-criticism. Seventy copies of his ‘Credo’ were produced and sent to other radical Marxists in Georgia. The ‘Credo’ definitively repudiated the campaign for Georgian Marxists to have their own autonomous party — and his recantation was a success: he survived the expected censure.

  In the 1920s he was to send emissaries to the Caucasus to trace the copies made of the ‘Credo’ he had written in 1904.43 Almost certainly he had them all destroyed. (In the preface to the first volume of his collected works, writing in 1946, the editors claimed that every single copy had been lost.)44 But the unpublished memoirs of Sergei Kavtaradze, who was a Tbilisi Bolshevik and was associated with Stalin after the October Revolution, broadly indicate what had been in Dzhughashvili’s ‘Credo’.45 After he had recanted, a cloud of suspicion still swirled around his head. Even his promise to avoid repeating his mistakes failed to quieten criticism. He was called a ‘Georgian Bundist’46 (which was a peculiar appellation for a person whom many subsequently branded as an antisemite). Tskhakaya went the rounds of the radical Marxists and pleaded on Dzhughashvili’s behalf.47 He survived and went on to flourish in the Bolshevik faction. He was energetic, determined and ambitious. He was quirky: he did not accept ideas just on the say-so of others; he changed his policies only when extreme pressure was put upon him. He was cantankerous and conspiratorial. He retained a strong feeling that the national sensitivities of the Georgians and other peoples should be respected. He had started out in Lado Ketskhoveli’s shadow but had begun to distinguish himself by his own opinions and activity. No one among Georgian Marxists doubted his talent.

  Events in the Russian Empire were about to test his revolutionary mettle. Peasants since the turn of the century had been buffeted by adverse commercial conditions; they also continued to resent the amount of land held by the gentry. Workers demanded higher wages. Among the intelligentsia there was frustration about the refusal of the Emperor and his government to reform the political system. Several non-Russian nationalities — especially the Poles, Finns and Georgians — chafed against their treatment by St Petersburg. Rural unrest was growing. Industrial strikes rose in frequency and intensity. Clandestine political parties and trade unions were being formed. It was in this situation, in 1904, that Nicholas II decided to go to war with Japan. One of his calculations was that a short, victorious war would revive the prestige of the Romanov monarchy. It was a foolish mistake. All too quickly the Russian armed forces found that the Japanese, who had built up their military and industrial capacity in recent years, were more than a match for them.

  6. THE PARTY AND THE CAUCASUS

  The Imperial monarchy confronted an emergency situation by early 1905. On 9 January there had been a political demonstration in St Petersburg. Its purpose was to present the Emperor with a petition for the granting of general civic rights. The result was a massacre when the security forces were ordered to fire on the demonstrators. Scores of people were killed. Nicholas II was not to blame for the carnage, but across the country he was held responsible. Police and army stood by helplessly as protest meetings were held. Strikes broke out. Poland and Georgia were focal points of unrest. Peasants moved to assert themselves against the landed gentry. The monarch and his ministers, already discredited by the defeats in the unfinished war with Japan, suddenly looked vulnerable. Workers elected their own councils (or ‘soviets’). The armed forces along the Trans-Siberian Railway were in mutinous mood. The efforts of the Okhrana were futile: political parties operated with decreasing fear of arrest, and although their contact with most people had been frail in previous years, they quickly attained popular confidence. This was a trial of strength with the Romanov regime unprecedented since the Pugachëv revolt of 1773–5.

  For the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party the surprise was as great as it was for every other political group. Lenin in Switzerland was taken aback; so too were his followers in St Petersburg and the rest of the Russian Empire. Yet most émigrés were cautious about returning until after Nicholas II issued his Octo
ber Manifesto promising reforms. In the meantime the revolutionary militants were left to their own devices. The Bolsheviks held a self-styled Third Party Congress in London in April 1905 and fixed their general strategy. They aimed at armed uprising and the formation of a provisional revolutionary dictatorship. They aspired to the total expropriation of land belonging to the monarchy, Church and gentry.

  Dzhughashvili was not among the Georgian participants: he had not yet allayed the doubts about him among Bolsheviks. It was his friend and senior comrade Mikha Tskhakaya who headed the country’s group, and Tskhakaya did not fail to criticise the growing cult of Lenin in the Bolshevik faction. There was a practical aspect to this. Many Congress delegates, objecting to Lenin’s reluctance to shift the Central Committee’s base to Russia, thought the émigrés had become too comfortable abroad; and they succeeded in getting a commitment to such a transfer. Dzhughashvili, back in Georgia, was among those who argued that, if revolution was to succeed, maximum resources had to be concentrated in the Russian Empire. He had been coming back into his own before the revolutionary outbreaks. He travelled to Baku and Kutaisi before basing himself in Tbilisi. He published articles in the recently founded Proletarians Brdzola (‘Proletarian Struggle’), including one on the national question which stayed within official Bolshevik lines. He wrote to the Bolsheviks in emigration. When strikes and demonstrations were held after Bloody Sunday on 9 January 1905, he threw himself into a frenzy of writing and organising — and he was a leader of the Bolshevik Tiflis Committee whose policy of armed uprising separated them definitively from the city’s Mensheviks. Sometimes this involved him in open disputations about the respective merits of Bolshevism and Menshevism; on other occasions he put the general Marxist case against the party’s local rivals: the Anarchists, the Social-Federalists and the Socialist-Revolutionaries. Everywhere he went in the Georgian capital he was in the thick of things.

  For many of his comrades, though, he was still excessively willing to make compromises on the ‘national question’. When he refused to help them in their dispute in the party’s Caucasian Union Committee in line with local Bolshevik policy, Sergei Kavtaradze accused him of being a ‘traitor’. But Dzhughashvili was unmoved. For him, Kavtaradze and others failed to separate matters of primary and secondary importance. ‘I don’t intend to have a dispute with the Union Committee over this… But you do as you like.’ With that he lit up a cheap cigarette and stared unblinkingly at Kavtaradze; he wanted his critics to know that he would not be pushed around again. Kavtaradze understood the gesture and never forgot it.1 Dzhughashvili was a fellow who would fight battles only when there was a decent chance of winning them. Ideological rectitude was all very well. But practical results were also important, and unnecessary squabbles should be avoided. His difficulty lay in his inability to gather a group of followers around him. In his eyes, the Georgian Bolsheviks were too rigid in their Leninism whereas the Georgian Mensheviks had the wrong policies.

  When revolution had come to the south Caucasus, it took the regional authorities as much by surprise as it did elsewhere. I. I. Vorontsov-Dashkov was sent as viceroy and found himself in an invidious situation. Strikes and demonstrations affected nearly all towns and industrial settlements. Resistance to the Imperial forces was widespread. The strongest revolutionary impetus came from Noe Zhordania and the Georgian Mensheviks, who put themselves forward as both Marxists and national defenders against Russian power. The villages of Guria in western Georgia were especially responsive to the appeal of Menshevism. But everywhere in the Caucasus there were national and ethnic stirrings. On both sides of the mountain chain previously suppressed leaders emerged to challenge Nicholas II and his government. Not everywhere was the conflict characterised by tensions with St Petersburg. Inter-ethnic tensions, long contained by Russian armed forces and the straitjacket of the growing capitalist economy, snapped the patience of society. In the north Caucasus, religious traditionalism came to the fore and violence between Islamists and their rivals grew in intensity. Around the great oil city of Baku the mutual hatred of Armenians and Azeris burst into terrible violence as the Moslem Azeris massacred the Christian Armenians despite the precautions taken by Vorontsov-Dashkov.2

  The Armenians in Baku, as in Tbilisi, were led by persons of the greatest wealth, whereas Azeris were typically the poorest section of the labour force. Vorontsov did not underestimate the difficulties and decided to minimise the use of violence to secure the restoration of Imperial order in the south Caucasus.3 Elsewhere in the Russian Empire in the last quarter of 1905 the armed forces were intensively at work. The workers’ soviets were being vigorously suppressed and the armed uprising of the Moscow Soviet was ruthlessly put down. Peasant rebels were being rounded up. The rebel cities in ‘Russian’ Poland were brought to heel. Mutineers in army and navy were arrested and shot. Georgia revolted. Zhordania and his Mensheviks, as well as Bolsheviks such as Dzhughashvili, exulted. Their organisations swelled with recruits. They ceased to hide their activities and the Viceroy moved steadily to a combination of force and consultation. Georgian Marxists dominated the political scene. They did not aim at secession any more than the Bolsheviks. Georgia’s fate in their estimation was tied up with revolutionary developments in Russia.

  But Dzhughashvili had made his choice: the Bolshevik strategy seemed the most commendable to him. What struck his acquaintances about him was his extraordinary polemical crudity. He had little in the way of wit. His speeches, such as he gave, were dry and aggressive. He aligned himself strongly with Bolshevism and deeply detested the Mensheviks he encountered. ‘Against them,’ he declared, ‘any methods are good!’4 He distinguished himself in his practical capacities; and, with the exception of Lev Trotski who led the Petersburg Soviet from autumn 1905, he had a much more influential role in the events of that turbulent year than any other member of the first Party Politburo formed after the October Revolution. Dzhughashvili debated frequently with the Georgian Mensheviks. He talked at workers’ meetings. He was one of the most productive writers for Proletarians Brdzola. Always he urged Marxists to oppose outbreaks of inter-national violence. He vigorously promoted Bolshevik policies and called for the monarchy’s overthrow by an uprising which would bring a provisional revolutionary government to power. Marxists should unite workers and peasants in a political alliance. Compromise with the middle class on the Menshevik model was to be rejected.

  Yet the prospects for Bolshevism in the south Caucasus had never been bleaker. Dzhughashvili wrote dispiritedly to Lenin in May:5

  I’m overdue with my letter, comrade. There’s been neither the time nor the will to write. For the whole period it’s been necessary to travel around the Caucasus, speak in debates, encourage comrades, etc. Everywhere the Mensheviks have been on the offensive and we’ve needed to repulse them. We’ve hardly had any personnel (and now there are very few of them, two or three times fewer than the Mensheviks have), and so I’ve needed to do the work of three individuals… Our situation is as follows. Tiflis is almost completely in the hands of the Mensheviks. Half of Baku and Batumi is also with the Mensheviks… Guria is in the hands of the Conciliators, who have decided to go over to the Mensheviks.

  Evidently he thought the comrade in Geneva ought to know the bitter truth about the factional balance among Marxists in the south Caucasus. Throughout the year Menshevism under Zhordania’s aegis thrust itself forward as the leading agency of Georgia’s rebellion against the Imperial monarchy. Bolshevism was in a small minority among the Georgian revolutionaries. Thus Dzhughashvili had chosen a factional allegiance which seemed to doom him to obscurity. The peasantry across Georgia followed the Mensheviks; and although he continued to argue that their strategy diverted attention from propaganda and organisation among the working class, he was a voice crying in the wilderness. He must have blamed Bolshevism’s weakness in Georgia to some extent on its failure — despite his advice in 1904 — to present the faction as a champion of national interests. He himself, however, was not
infinitely flexible. He too wished to focus revolutionary activity on the towns, the workers and Marxist orthodoxy. Bolshevism did best in the south Caucasus where industry was well developed. This was the case in Baku. But Dzhughashvili did not despair: he had taken a deliberate decision that the basic strategy of the Bolsheviks was correct and that sooner or later it would triumph. For the rest of the year he predicted the imminence of the Romanov monarchy’s overthrow. Like all Bolsheviks, he declared that violent uprising and a revolutionary dictatorship were essential for this end.

  Nicholas II started to panic in October 1905. Workers had formed their own councils (or ‘soviets’) which began by organising strikes and came to supplant the official bodies of self-government. Peasants moved against the landed gentry by illegal pasturing of livestock and stealing wood from forests. In Poland and Georgia the authorities were coming close to losing control. On advice from Count Witte, Nicholas II issued his ‘October Manifesto’ promising reform. In subsequent weeks it became clear that this would involve an elected parliament to be known as the State Duma as well as a Basic Law which would establish the framework that would define and constrain the powers of the Emperor, the government and the Duma. These concessions bought time and support for the monarchy; and although the Bolsheviks proceeded to organise an insurrection in Moscow, the armed forces steadily reasserted authority across the empire.

  Stalin’s revolutionary impatience had not faded: he continued to argue for uncompromising adherence to the strategy of Bolshevism. Such was his growing success in Tbilisi that he was a natural choice as delegate to the factional conference held by the Bolsheviks in Tampere (Tammer-fors) in Finland in mid-December 1905. It was there he met Lenin at last. According to his later account, he was taken aback by the unprepossessing appearance of the leader of Bolshevism. Dzhughashvili had been expecting a tall, self-regarding person. Instead he saw a man no bigger than himself and without the hauteur of the prominent émigré figures.6 The Tampere Conference proved awkward for Lenin. Most Bolsheviks, including Dzhughashvili, rejected his preference for the faction to take part in the elections to the State Duma. They aimed at armed insurrection and the establishment of a ‘revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’, and they saw no point in wasting energy on elections called on Nicholas II’s terms. Lenin’s demand for tactical finesse left them cold. Having become Bolsheviks because they liked Leninist radicalism, they were disappointed that their leader was already compromising with the institutions of the Imperial order. Lenin himself backed down rather than lose his following at the Conference.7