Stalin: A Biography

by Robert Service

  The libel case was the overreaction of a hypersensitive man. If Stalin had not made a fuss, hardly anyone would have noticed what Martov had written. Stalin’s resentment did not end with the conclusion of the trial. When in 1922 Lenin asked him to transfer funds to Berlin for the medical care of the dying Martov, Stalin refused point-blank: ‘What, start wasting money on an enemy of the working class? Find yourself another secretary for that!’21

  This was not the only aspect of his inner life revealed in these months. Debating nations and administrative structures in the Constitution commission, he forcefully declared: ‘The Jews are not a nation!’ Stalin contended that a nation could not exist without a definable territory where its people composed the majority of inhabitants. This had always been his opinion,22 and it ruled out the possibility of granting the Jews an ‘autonomous regional republic’ such as he was proposing for others.23 Was this evidence of a hatred of Jews for being Jews? Stalin differed from Lenin inasmuch as he never — not even once — commented on the need to avoid anti-semitic impulses. Yet his People’s Commissariat for Nationalities’ Affairs had its own Jewish section and funded Yiddish newspapers, clubs and folk-singing ensembles. Many Jews belonged to his entourage over the next two decades. To a considerable extent he was just sticking to a dogmatic version of Marxism. But there was probably more to it than that. Nothing can be proved, but probably he felt uneasy in dealing with Jews because they were unamenable to administrative control on a simple territorial basis — and he also had a growing rivalry with several leaders of Jewish origin in his party: Trotski, Kamenev and Zinoviev.

  At any rate the commission’s records scarcely refer to Lenin. Matters were debated on their merits within the frame of Bolshevik and Left Socialist-Revolutionary ideas. Stalin was his own man. Indeed it was the Left Socialist-Revolutionary M. A. Reisner who brought up Lenin’s name. His objection was that Stalin’s project reflected the ‘anarchic’ tendencies embodied in Lenin’s recently published The State and Revolution. Stalin’s response was a distinctly sniffy one:24 ‘Here there’s been mention of comrade Lenin. I’ve decided to permit myself to note that Lenin as far as I know — and I know very well — said that [Reisner’s own] project is no good!’ The rest of the commission agreed and accepted Stalin’s draft with its advocacy of national-territorial administrative units.25 His colleague Sverdlov’s phrasings were pushed back in favour of those proposed by Stalin.26 Sverdlov had been the individual most responsible for embedding the general structures of administration in the Soviet republic after the October Revolution. This was yet another sign of Stalin’s ever-rising importance among the Bolsheviks, and his expertise on the national question gave him a ladder to climb higher and higher.

  If he was a rare Bolshevik moderate on the national question, though, he was constantly extreme in his advocacy of state violence and dictatorship. Stalin was convinced that severe measures should be applied against the enemies of Sovnarkom. He was in apocalyptic mood: ‘We definitely must give the Kadets a thorough beating right now or else they’ll give us a thorough beating since it’s they who have opened fire on us.’27 Violence, dictatorship and centralism slept lightly in the Russian political mind — and many conservatives, liberals and social-democrats were already beginning to think that they had been wrong to stick after the February Revolution to principles of universal civil rights, gradualism and democracy. Bolshevism had never carried such an inhibiting legacy. Those Bolsheviks who had yearned for a gentle revolution could usually be persuaded to accept the case for authoritarianism. There was no need to persuade Stalin.

  Bolsheviks had always talked casually about terror and its uses for a revolutionary administration. Yet until power had come into their hands it was unclear how keenly they would resort to it. If there were any doubts about this, Lenin and Trotski quickly dispelled them in the weeks after they overthrew the Provisional Government. Lenin established an Extraordinary Commission for the Struggle with Counter-revolution and Sabotage (Cheka in its Russian acronym) — and he ensured that it would remain beyond regular supervision by Sovnarkom. In subsequent years he supported nearly all pleas by Felix Dzierżyń ski and other Cheka leaders for permission to expand the application of methods of state terror. Not every Bolshevik leader approved this development. Kamenev on the right and Bukharin on the left of the ascendant party leadership urged that violence should be deployed on a more predictable basis and should be reduced in scope. Stalin was never one of these. Terror attracted him like a bee to a perfumed flower. Not once had he offered an opinion on the matter before the October 1917 Revolution, yet his preference for arbitrary state violence was speedily evident. When Bolsheviks in Estonia telegraphed him about eradicating ‘counterrevolutionaries and traitors’, he replied with hot approval: ‘The idea of a concentration camp is excellent.’28

  State terrorism had already been installed as a permanent item in his mental furniture. It appealed to his coarse personality. But the attraction was not just psychological; it was also based on observation and ideology. Stalin and other Bolsheviks had grown up in an age when the world’s great powers had used terror against the people they conquered; and even when terror was excluded as a method, these powers had had no scruples about waging wars at huge cost in human lives. By such means they had spread a superior economic system around the world. This system had been defended by the application of harsh authority. Colonial peoples had suffered. The working classes of the imperial powers themselves were exploited and oppressed. The Great War had impoverished the many while enriching the few. The point for Stalin was that violence was an effective weapon for capitalism and had to be adopted by the Soviet revolutionary state for its own purposes. Coming to power in Russia, the Bolsheviks had to be realistic. The Bolshevik leadership believed that the Paris Commune of 1871 had failed for want of ruthlessness. Bolsheviks would not repeat the mistake. Even if they had expected their revolution to be easier than it turned out to be, they had always been willing to meet fire with fire. Stalin needed no one to persuade him about this.

  Yet it was in foreign policy that Lenin most appreciated Stalin. Lenin and Trotski around the turn of the New Year understood that they lacked the armed forces to carry socialism into central Europe by ‘revolutionary war’. Yet whereas Trotski wished to stick by the party’s commitment to revolutionary war, Lenin concluded that policy ought to be changed. When Germany and Austria–Hungary delivered ultimatums to Sovnarkom, Lenin urged the Bolshevik Central Committee to sign a separate peace. Most Central Committee members — as well as the entire Left Socialist-Revolutionary Party — rejected his argument that the priority should be the preservation of the Soviet state. For them, a separate peace would involve the betrayal of internationalist ideals. Better to go down fighting for European socialist revolution than to collude with the robber-capitalist governments of the Central Powers.

  Stalin had always been sceptical about the prognosis of imminent revolutions in the rest of Europe and the failure of the proletariats elsewhere in Europe to rise against their governments did not surprise him. The propensity for strategic and tactical compromise he had always shown in internal party affairs was now applied to the policy of the revolutionary state. If the Central Powers could not be overthrown by revolution or defeated in war, the sensible alternative was to sign a peace with them. This was in fact already the opinion of Lenin, whose reputation for compromise in the party’s internal quarrels was slighter than Stalin’s but who had always insisted on the need for flexibility of manoeuvre in the wider field of politics. Sverdlov, Kamenev, Zinoviev and a few others in the Central Committee stood shoulder to shoulder with Lenin. But the voting in the Central Committee was heavily against them at the preliminary discussion on 11 January 1918. Trotski won the day by arguing for a policy based on the following formula: ‘We’re stopping the war, we aren’t concluding peace, we’re demobilising the army.’ This, he suggested, had the merit of avoiding an intolerable compromise with the forces of international imperialism.
29

  Lenin kept to his argument without personalising his critique. Stalin was less inhibited. Like most other leading Bolsheviks, he disliked and distrusted Trotski, and at the same meeting he let his feelings show:30

  Comrade Trotski’s position is not a position at all. There’s no revolutionary movement in the West: the facts are non-existent and there’s only potential — and we can’t operate on the basis of mere potential. If the Germans start to attack, it will reinforce the counter-revolution here [in Russia]. Germany will be able to attack since it possesses its own Kornilovite armies, its guard. In October we were talking about our ‘crusade’ because we were told that mere mention of the word ‘peace’ would stir up revolution in the West. But this has proved unjustified.

  This was the first blow in a political contest which ended only in August 1940 when Soviet agent Ramón Mercader drove an ice-pick into Trotski’s cranium in Coyoacán in Mexico.

  Even so, Stalin’s supportive statement irked Lenin. He objected to the comment that ‘a mass movement’ did not exist in the West, and said that the Bolsheviks would be ‘traitors to international socialism if [they] altered [their] tactics because of this’. Lenin wanted to reassure the advocates of revolutionary war that if ever it looked as if a rupture of peace talks would serve to stir up the German working class to revolution, then ‘we have to sacrifice ourselves since the German revolution in force will be much higher in strength than ours’.31 It was not so much that Stalin had said that revolutionary initiatives were impossible in the West. Nor had he claimed this in 1917.32 Yet he was loath to gamble on ‘European socialist revolution’ — and for Lenin this was one compromise too many with the revolutionary strategy he had elaborated in the party before October 1917. These tensions did not much matter at the time. Lenin needed every supporter he could get. Again and again in ensuing days Stalin voted on Lenin’s side.33 Always his line was that Bolsheviks needed to be practical: they could not beat the Germans militarily and the newly born Soviet state would be crushed unless a separate peace was concluded with the Central Powers.

  He was as frantic as Lenin. On 18 February 1918 he protested to the Central Committee: ‘The formal question is superfluous. A statement must be made directly on the essence of the matter; the Germans are attacking, we don’t have the forces; it’s high time to say directly that negotiations have to be resumed!’34 He vividly appreciated the armed might of the enemy: ‘They only need to open their hurricane-like fire for five minutes and we shan’t have a soldier left standing at the front. We must put an end to the nonsense.’35 On 23 February he expostulated: ‘The question stands like this: either the defeat of our revolution and the unravelling of the revolution in Europe or we obtain a breathing space and strengthen ourselves. This is not what’s holding up the revolution in the West. If it’s the case that we lack the means to halt a German attack by armed might, we must use other methods. If Petrograd has to be surrendered, it would not amount to a full surrender or to the rotting away of the Revolution. There’s no way out: either we obtain a breathing space or else it’s the death of the Revolution.’36

  The Leninists did not gain a majority in the Central Committee until 23 February. By that time the German terms had hardened. The separate peace would require Sovnarkom to disclaim sovereignty over the western borderlands of the former Russian Empire. It was, in Lenin’s phrase, an obscene peace. Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia were to be allowed to fall into the grasp of the Central Powers. Half the human, industrial and agricultural resources of the domains of Nicholas II were to be forsworn at the little frontal town of Brest-Litovsk if Sovnarkom wished to avoid being overthrown by the Germans. No other political party in Russia would accede to such terms. The Left Socialist-Revolutionary Party, already annoyed by the forcible local expropriations of peasant-produced grain, walked out of the Sovnarkom coalition and organised an unsuccessful coup d’état against the Bolsheviks in July 1918. Nevertheless Lenin and his followers pressed forward with their chosen strategy. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed on 3 March 1918. For Lenin, the peace offered a ‘breathing space’ for the Bolsheviks to strengthen and expand the Revolution at home and to prepare the revolutionary war in central Europe that had hitherto been impractical. A Red Army started to be formed; and Trotski, who had condemned the separate peace, agreed to become People’s Commissar for Military Affairs. Other Bolshevik opponents of the treaty drifted back to the Central Committee and Sovnarkom.

  Stalin’s assignments in spring 1918 confirmed his high status in the ascendant party leadership. In internal and external affairs he had stuck by Lenin. He had not done this subserviently. In the Brest-Litovsk dispute he had taken an angle of argument different from Lenin’s; and, contrary to the conventional stereotype of him, this continued to be true after the signature of the treaty. When the German armies overran the agreed demarcation line between Russia and Ukraine in May, he reconsidered the whole peace deal. Unlike Lenin, he suggested a resumption of armed hostilities. He put this case at the Central Committee and Sovnarkom.37 But Lenin won the discussion without Stalin by his side, and the dissension between them faded. Lenin, in the light of future events, should have learned from the episode that his People’s Commissar for Nationalities’ Affairs was a politician who knew his own value and was determined to stand up for himself. Stalin fought his corner in the Central Committee and dominated his People’s Commissariat. His competence and adaptability had been tested in the fire of an October Revolution which had yet to be secured. His advocacy of ruthless measures was as ferocious as anything put forward by Lenin, Trotski or Dzierżyński. He expected others to recognise what he could offer for the good of the cause.

  15. TO THE FRONT!

  On 31 May 1918 Stalin was given an important fresh assignment. Food supplies for Russia had reached a critically low point and Sovnarkom was close to panic. The decision was to send two of the party’s most able organisers, Stalin and his previous Bolshevik opponent Alexander Shlyapnikov, to procure grain in the south of the Soviet republic. The Volga region and the north Caucasus were traditional areas of agricultural abundance, and Stalin and Shlyapnikov were given full powers to obtain food wherever it could be found. Stalin was to make for Tsaritsyn, Shlyapnikov for Astrakhan.

  His Alliluev assistants in the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities’ Affairs would accompany him. Fëdor would come as his aide and Nadya as his secretary. They arrived with their luggage at the Kazan Station in Moscow two days later. Chaos awaited them and their Red Army guards. Beggars and pickpockets swarmed in the booking hall and on the platforms. There were also the many ‘sack-men’ who travelled to Moscow to sell flour, potatoes and vegetables on the black market. Sometimes passengers had to sit around for days before they could board a train. The atmosphere was frantic. When announcements of departure were made, a rush occurred to get a seat or a space in the corridor. Every compartment would be crammed with people and it was common for the disappointed ticket holders to clamber to the tops of carriages and ride unsheltered from summer heat or winter cold. Stalin had a sheaf of documents indicating his priority over other passengers. But the People’s Commissar for Nationalities’ Affairs had to lose his temper before the station officials granted a compartment to him and his party. He was being given yet another display of the extreme disorder of revolutionary Russia.1

  The travellers from Moscow, after many halts on the way, reached their destination on 6 June.2 Tsaritsyn, later called Stalingrad and now — ever since Khrushchëv’s posthumous denunciation of Stalin — Volgograd, was one of the cities on the River Volga built in the late seventeenth century as Cossack outposts. In most ways it was an unremarkable place. It was not even a provincial capital but was subject to the administrative authorities in Saratov. Yet geographically and economically Tsaritsyn was of strategic importance. The city handled regional trade in grain, timber and livestock. It was also a vital entrepôt. Situated at the first great angle of the Volga for ships heading upriver towards centra
l Russia from the Caspian Sea, Tsaritsyn had been a great staging post since its foundation. The construction of rail links increased its significance. A main line ran directly south from Moscow to Rostov-on-Don and a branch was built from Kozlov down to Tsaritsyn and on to Astrakhan on the Caspian coast. Tracks had also been laid from Tsaritsyn west to Rostov-on-Don and south-east to Tikhoretskaya junction and the mountains of the north Caucasus. Control over Tsaritsyn and its environs would enable Sovnarkom to gain food supplies over a vast area.

  Sovnarkom’s brief to Stalin was to improve the supply of grain. He had been preceded to Tsaritsyn by Andrei Snesarev, a former Imperial Army general who had enlisted with the Reds. The functions of Stalin and Snesarev were meant to complement each other. The combined application of political and military muscle was thought the best method of securing bread for Moscow and Petrograd.3

  Sovnarkom had misjudged its People’s Commissar. Stalin interpreted his duties in grain procurement, which relied on the use of the Red Army, as entitling him to impose himself over all the military commanders in the region. Rejection for service as a private in the Imperial Army had not made him diffident about taking charge of the North Caucasus Front. A month later he informed Lenin:4

  The food-supplies question is naturally entwined with the military question. For the good of the cause I need full military powers. I’ve already written about this and received no answer. Very well, then. In this case I myself without formalities will overthrow those commanders and commissars who are ruining the cause. That’s how I’m being nudged by the interests of the cause and of course the absence of a scrap of paper from Trotski won’t stop me.

  Stalin was greedily seizing his opportunity. His renown in Moscow came nowhere near to matching that of his most eminent comrades in Sovnarkom and the Party Central Committee. This was a situation for him to prove his mettle militarily and politically. He was determined to rise to the challenge.