Yet the other leading figures succeeded in persuading their comrades that they too were of exceptional cultural significance. Stalin before the Great War made no such claim for himself. Nor in subsequent years did he suggest that he had made an original contribution. He always claimed to have been merely a loyal Leninist.2 He called himself a praktik, meaning that he was more a practical revolutionary than a theoretician. When he published ‘Anarchism or Socialism’ in 1906–7, many readers thought he could hardly have been the authentic author. His school friend Davrishevi assumed that another Bolshevik, perhaps Dzhughash-vili’s comrade Suren Spandaryan, had written it. But Spandaryan put Davrishevi right. It really was Stalin’s article.3 ‘Anarchism or Socialism’ was not a coruscating work. Stalin privately admitted this after the Second World War (when his comment was treated as extraordinarily modest).4 It was nevertheless a work of practical importance at the time of publication. This has been overlooked by his biographers, who have ignored the fact that anarchists were active in Tbilisi after the turn of the century. Georgia was recognised as a place where a fundamental challenge to the Imperial monarchy would take place. émigré anarchist leaders had sent propagandists on missions to Tbilisi. Stalin flung himself on the available literature on Marxism before writing his urgent reply.5
In fact he kept to Bolshevism’s general line before the Great War. He endorsed the precepts of strict party discipline as formulated in Lenin’s What Is To Be Done?; he also shared the Leninist viewpoint on revolutionary stages, dictatorship and class alliances in 1905. Rival versions of Marxism in the Russian Empire, he declared, were betrayals of the faith. He accentuated the need for leadership and a revolutionary vanguard and for the avoidance of ‘tailism’. The vanguard should organise insurrection and seize power. He was also unafraid to oppose projects put forward by Lenin himself and to do this in open debate. On most matters, though, he agreed with Lenin; and Lenin for his own part badly needed Dzhughashvili’s contributions on the national question. Whereas the Mensheviks had several theorists who wrote about the nationalities in the empire, the Bolsheviks had only Dzhughashvili (or Stalin, as he was invariably known in public from this period onwards). No wonder Lenin warmed to him.
Although several aspects of his thought surfaced only in his years of power, it is unlikely that they did not already exist. Stalin had grown up when imperial countries around the world were applying naked military force. Force based upon technological and organisational superiority ruled supreme. The British Empire covered a fifth of the world’s land surface. The age of blood and steel had arrived. Capitalism was triumphant. Marxists believed that socialism would achieve a further victory and that capitalism itself was destined for defeat. A new stage in the history of humankind was believed imminent. Radical Marxists anticipated civil war between the middle classes and the working classes on a global scale. From such conflict there would come good for following generations. Marxism justified the sacrifice of millions of human beings in the pursuit of revolution.
The perfect society was anticipated once the military conflict was ended. The poor would inherit the earth. This would be achieved through ‘proletarian dictatorship’. The need for repressive methods would persist until the resistance of the old propertied classes had been crushed. Although the dictatorship would be ruthless, Stalin and other Bolsheviks expected little trouble. The numerical and organisational weight of the proletariat, they believed, would soon crush all opposition. The old society would be eliminated and class privileges would be eradicated. The state would embed ‘modernity’ in all sectors of life, and it would be a modernity superior to the existing capitalist variants.6 Universal free schooling would be established. Material production would be standardised; the wastefulness of capitalism would be surmounted. Every citizen would enjoy access to work, food, shelter, healthcare and education. This militant set of ideas suited Stalin. He lived for conflict. He constantly wanted to dominate those around him. He had also found an ideology that suited this inclination. Everything about Bolshevism fitted his purposes: struggle, repression, proletarian hegemony, internal party rivalry, leadership and modernity; and already he saw himself as a true leader within a party which itself sought to lead the ‘proletarian masses’ into the brave new world.
Yet Stalin was not a blindly obedient Leninist. On several important questions he thought Lenin to be misguided and said so. At the Bolshevik Conference in the Finnish industrial city of Tampere in December 1905 he had objected to Lenin’s plan for the party to put up candidates in the forthcoming elections to the First State Duma. Like most delegates, Stalin thought it a waste of time for the Bolshevik faction to participate in the electoral campaign — only later, like many Bolsheviks, did he come over to Lenin’s idea.7 He did not change his mind, however, on the ‘agrarian question’. Lenin advocated that the ‘revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’, after the monarchy’s overthrow, should turn all agricultural land into state property. Stalin continued to reckon this naïve and unrealisable. He proposed instead that the dictatorship should let the peasants grab the land and do with it whatever they wanted.8 He also believed that Lenin’s demand for a radical break with Mensheviks in the State Duma would simply confuse and annoy the Duma’s Bolsheviks. Both Lenin and Stalin were zealots and pragmatists. In important instances they disagreed about where zeal should end and pragmatism begin. Their mutual dissent touched on matters of operational judgement, not on revolutionary principles. Yet such matters were intensely debated within Bolshevism. Lenin hated his followers interpreting Leninism without his guidance. Stalin was one of those leading Bolsheviks who was unafraid to stand up for his opinions without walking out of the faction.
He also had reservations about Lenin’s intellectual priorities in philosophy. In 1908 Lenin published a work of epistemology, Materialism and Empiriocriticism. At its core was a ferocious attack on his close collaborator Alexander Bogdanov. He objected to Bogdanov’s apparent philosophical relativism. For Lenin it was axiomatic that the ‘external world’ existed independently of its cognition by the individual human mind. ‘Reality’ was therefore an objective, discernible phenomenon. Lenin contended that Marxism constituted an irrefutable corpus of knowledge about society. He insisted that the mind functioned like a photographic apparatus accurately registering and relaying data of absolute truth. Any derogation from such premises, he asserted, implied a movement away from Marxist materialism and opened the intellectual gates to philosophical idealism and even to religion. Bogdanov, whose commitment to each and every statement of Marx and Engels was far from absolute, was castigated as an enemy of Marxism.
Stalin thought Lenin was wasting his time on topics of marginal importance for the Revolution. In a letter to Vladimir Bobrovski from Solvychegodsk in January 1911 he declared the epistemological controversy ‘a storm in a tea-cup’. Generally he ridiculed the émigrés.9 Stalin thought that Bogdanov had done a convincing philosophical job and that ‘some particular mistakes of Ilich [were] correctly noted’.10 He wanted all Bolsheviks to concentrate on the large practical topics, and there were plenty of these needing to be discussed before appropriate policies could be formulated. Stalin was willing to criticise ‘the organisational policy of the editorial board’ of Proletari.11 This board at Lenin’s behest had expelled Bogdanov from its membership. Stalin was indicating his dissent not only from Lenin’s epistemology but also from his enthusiasm for splitting the faction into ever tinier bits. He advised a moderation of polemics. Stalin counselled the leaders of the two sides in the factional controversy — Lenin and Bogdanov — to agree that ‘joint work is both permissible and necessary’.12 Such an idea motivated Stalin in the next few years. Indeed he maintained it throughout 1917; for when Lenin was to demand severe disciplinary measures against Kamenev and Zinoviev, it was Stalin who led the opposition to him.
So at that time he was what was known as a Conciliator inside Bolshevism. He despised the émigré shenanigans and wanted the Bolshev
iks, wherever they lived, to stick together. It was a question of priorities. Philosophy was not as important as the making of revolution. For this purpose it was essential to keep Bolsheviks together, and Lenin must not be allowed to endanger such an objective.
Yet Lenin tolerated Stalin, and much of his positive attitude is attributable to Stalin’s booklet Marxism and the National Question. Stalin’s later enemies unceremoniously dismissed the work. It was said that Stalin either did not really write it or wrote it only with decisive help from others. Supposedly his ghost writer was Lenin. That Lenin and others assisted with their suggestions about the draft is undeniable. This is a quite normal procedure for sensible writers: it is better to have necessary criticism before than after publication. Another hypothesis was that Stalin’s inability to read foreign languages, except for a few phrases with the help of a German–Russian dictionary, meant that he could not have read the works by Austrian Marxists appearing in his footnotes. Anyone who has read Marxism and the National Question, however, will know that most of the references to books by Otto Bauer, Karl Renner and others are made to the widely available Russian translations. The other point is that Lenin was a proud author. If he had really written the book, he would have published it under one of his own pseudonyms.
Lenin liked Marxism and the National Question because Stalin agreed with him about the basic solution. An additional advantage was that Stalin was not a Russian but a Georgian. After the turn of the century the Marxists of the Habsburg Monarchy — especially Bauer and Renner — argued that the empire was a patchwork quilt of nationalities and that nation-states could not neatly be cut out of it. Their answer was to offer every nation a representative body of its own at the centre of the empire with the mission to enhance national interests. The Mensheviks, with encouragement from the Jewish Bund as well as from Noe Zhordania, adopted Bauer’s plan as the future basis of state structure in the Russian Empire once the Romanovs had been overthrown. Stalin, however, adhered to the official Bolshevik position that administrative autonomy should be given to non-Russians in areas where they lived in concentration. The Finns in Finland and the Ukrainians in Ukraine were the usual examples. Thus the Bolsheviks hoped to maintain a centralised state while acceding to national and ethnic aspirations.
Stalin was not simply parroting Lenin’s earlier writings. There is a passage in Marxism and the National Question which merits close attention since it deals with Georgia. It deserves to be quoted in full:13
Let us take the Georgians. The Georgians of the years before the Great Reforms [of the 1860s] lived in a common territory and spoke a common language but strictly speaking they did not constitute a nation since, being split into a whole range of principalities cut off from each other, they could not live a common economic life and they waged wars among themselves for centuries and devastated each other, fomenting trouble between the Persians and the Turks. The ephemeral and accidental unification of the principalities which a successful tsar was occasionally able to carry out at best covered only the surface of the administrative sphere — and it was quickly wrecked on the caprices of the dukes and the indifference of the peasants.
So much for the idea that Georgians were a primordial nation, fully developed before their incorporation in the Russian Empire.
Stalin’s argument continued as follows:14
Georgia as a nation made its appearance only in the second half of the nineteenth century when the collapse of feudal law and the rise of the country’s economic life, the development of the means of communication and the birth of capitalism established a division of labour among Georgia’s regions, finally shattered the economic isolation of the principalities and bound them together as a single whole.
This is crude materialist history, but it has a cogency within the analytical frame constructed by Stalin for the examination of nationhood. In order to be considered a nation the Georgians had to share not only their ‘psychic’ background and territory but also their economic life.
This was not an original point among Georgian Marxists. Zhordania, too, had always stressed that sharp contrasts separated the many regions of tiny Georgia.15 There was a difference in emphasis, however, between Zhordania and Stalin. Whereas Zhordania wanted most inhabitants of Georgia to assimilate themselves to a Georgian identity, Stalin continued to acknowledge that Georgianisation was nowhere near fulfilment. Both Zhordania and Stalin were socialist internationalists. Yet Stalin was not off the mark when highlighting the nationalist ingredients in the outlook — however unconsciously held — of his Menshevik adversaries. Stalin questioned in particular whether the Mingrelians and Adzharians, who lived in western Georgia, should be regarded as Georgians.16 What are we to make of this? The first lesson is surely that Stalin was a more sensitive analyst of his native Georgia and the surrounding region than is usually thought. (Not that we should feel too sorry for him: in later years he turned into the most brutal ruler the Caucasus had known since Tamurlane — and this of course is why his earlier sophistication has been overlooked.) In any case he rejected Menshevik policy as offering simplistic solutions based on inaccurate demographic data.
Stalin stressed that nationhood was a contingent phenomenon. It could come with capitalism. But under changing conditions it could also fade. Some national groups might assimilate to a more powerful nation, others might not. Stalin was firm on the point:17
There can be no disputing that ‘national character’ is not some permanent given fact but changes according to the conditions of life… And so it is readily understandable that the nation like any historical phenomenon has its own history, its beginning and its end.
It would consequently be senseless for Marxists of any nation to identify themselves permanently with that particular nation. History was on the march. The future lay with socialism, with multinational states and eventually with a global human community.
In writing about Marxists, Stalin was saying much about himself and his developing opinions. The young poet who had called on fellow Georgians to ‘make renowned our Motherland by study’ had vanished.18 In his place there was an internationalist struggling for the cause of the proletariat of all nations. The Stalin of Marxism and the National Question did not regard the Russians as a problem. Describing contemporary Georgia, he asserted:19
If campaigns of repression [by the government] touch ‘land’ interests, as has happened in Ireland, the broad peasant masses will soon gather under the banner of the national movement.
If, on the other hand, there is no truly serious anti-Russian nationalism in Georgia, this is above all because no Russian landlords or Russian big bourgeoisie exist there who might feed such nationalism among the [Georgian] masses. What exists in Georgia is anti-Armenian nationalism but this is because there is an Armenian big bourgeoisie which, by crushing the small and as yet weak Georgian bourgeoisie, thrusts the latter towards anti-Armenian nationalism.
Stalin’s analysis pointed to the complexity of the national question in the Russian Empire. It anticipated the bringing together of Russians and Georgians in harmony within the same multinational state.
Evidently he assumed that the Russian Empire, when revolution at last overthrew the Romanovs, should not be broken up into separate states. Even Russian Poland, which Marx and Engels had wanted to gain independence along with other Polish-inhabited lands, should in Stalin’s opinion stay with Russia.20 His rule of thumb was that ‘the right of secession’ should be offered but that no nation should be encouraged to realise it.
What motivated Stalin was the aim to move ‘the backward nations and nationalities into the general channel of a higher culture’. He italicised this phrase in his booklet. The Menshevik proposal for ‘national-cultural autonomy’ would permit the most reactionary religious and social forces to increase their influence and the socialist project would be set back by years:21
Where does [‘national-cultural autonomy’] lead and what are its results? Let’s take as an example the Transcaucasian Tatars wit
h their minimal percentage of literacy, their schools headed by omnipotent mullahs and with their culture pervaded by the religious spirit… It is not difficult to understand that organising them into a cultural-national union means to put their mullahs in charge of them, to proffer them up to be devoured by reactionary mullahs and to create a new bastion for the reactionary stultification [zakabalenie] of the Tatar masses by their very worst enemy.
Stalin’s point was not without plausibility.
He then posed some pertinent questions:22
What about the Mingrelians, Abkhazians, Adzharians, Svans, Lez-gins and others speaking different languages but not having their own literature? How to relate to such nations? Is it possible to organise them into national unions? But around which ‘cultural matters’ can they be ‘organised’?
What about the Ossetians, of whom the Transcaucasian Ossetians are assimilating (but as yet are far from having assimilated entirely) as Georgians while the Ossetians of the North Caucasus are partly assimilating as Russians and partly developing further by creating their own literature? How can they be ‘organised’ into a single national union?
To which national union should the Adzharians be ascribed who speak Georgian but live by Turkish culture and profess Islam? Shouldn’t they be ‘organised’ separately from the Georgians on the basis of religious matters and together with the Georgians on the basis of other cultural matters? And what about the Kobuletsy? The Ingush? The Ingiloitsy?
Zhordania had no answer to such questions.
Stalin’s counter-proposal was for regional self-rule, as Lenin had counselled since 1903. This would be undertaken in such a fashion as to give each ethnic group, however small, the right to use its own language, have its own schools, read its own press and practise its own faith.23 The response to Stalin and Lenin was acerbic, and it was led by Stalin’s Georgian antagonist Zhordania. For Zhordania the important point was that capitalist economic development had scattered nations over vast areas. It was therefore impractical to protect national and ethnic rights on a purely territorial basis. Leninism was therefore a doctrine from ‘the old world’.24 Another claim by Zhordania was that ‘the Russian part of the party’, by which he meant the Bolsheviks, was insensitive to the acuteness of national oppression in the Russian Empire.25 In truth Bolsheviks and Mensheviks were better at criticising each other than at providing a solution which would not lead somehow to oppressive results. If the Ukrainians were offered Bolshevik-style regional self-rule, Jews and Poles in Ukraine would have reason for concern. If Ukrainians acquired the right to Menshevik-style cross-territorial self-organisation, the prospects for central supranational government would become chaotic. Stalin and Zhordania were wrestling with a question with no definitive theoretical solution.
Stalin: A Biography Page 13