Stalin: A Biography

by Robert Service

  Lenin had got his information from Budu Mdivani and other Georgian communists. Stalin was losing his grip. Mdivani had previously been in his good books; it was Stalin who had arranged for him to become Chairman of the Georgian Revolutionary Committee in July 1921 instead of Stalin’s internal party critic Pilipe Makharadze.34 Lenin began to take the side of the Georgian communist leaders when they disagreed with Stalin. Yet Lenin did not go all the way with Mdivani. He still supported Stalin on the need for a Transcaucasian Federation as a device to damp down the manifestations of nationalisms in the south Caucasus; and Stalin, from his side, retracted his demand for the RSFSR to ‘autonomise’ the other Soviet republics. He did this reluctantly: when Kamenev advised compromise, he replied: ‘What is required, in my view, is firmness against Ilich.’ Kamenev, who knew his Lenin, demurred and argued that this would merely make matters worse. Stalin at last conceded to Kamenev: ‘I don’t know. Let him do as he thinks sensible.’35 The agreed name of the state was to be the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (or USSR). Stalin did not like the idea but he ceased to raise objections.

  He had cause to feel let down by Lenin. The matters dividing them were not of primary importance despite what was said by Lenin at the time (and despite what was written by historians ever after).36 Stalin and Lenin agreed about basic politics. Neither questioned the desirability of the one-party state, its ideological monopoly or its right to use dictatorial and terrorist methods. They concurred on the provisional need for the NEP. They had also reached an implicit agreement that Stalin had an important job in the central party apparatus to block the advance of the Trotskyists and tighten the whole administrative order. Lenin had trusted him with such tasks. Stalin had also been the comrade in whom he had confided when he wanted to commit suicide. Whenever toughness or underhandedness was needed, Lenin had turned to him. Not once had there been a question of basic principle dividing them, and they had worked well together since the trade union dispute. Lenin had been behaving bizarrely in summer 1922 before he fell out with Stalin. But it was Stalin who had to deal with him. His difficulties with Lenin would have tested the patience of a saint.

  Their quarrels about Georgia and about the state monopoly of foreign trade touched matters of secondary importance. Lenin was not demanding independence for Georgia; his pleas on behalf of Georgian communists related to the degree of autonomy they should be permitted: it was almost a dispute about political cosmetics. Stalin also had a reasonable case that the Georgian communist regime had been far from even-handed in its treatment of the non-Georgians. The Transcaucasian Federation was a plausible scheme to prevent national oppression in Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. The foreign trade dispute, too, was nowhere near as clear-cut as Lenin claimed. The state monopoly had failed to thwart the growth of smuggling and currency speculation; and Stalin and his supporters had a point that this led to a loss of state revenues. Yet although Stalin resented Lenin’s intervention, he could not stop the Old Man of Bolshevism carrying on as he liked to the extent that his physical condition permitted.

  18. NATION AND REVOLUTION

  It was galling for Stalin that Lenin had turned against him on the national question. Their collaboration in trying to solve it had begun before the Great War, and Lenin could not have coped without him. Although Stalin did not look for gratitude, he had cause to expect a more reasoned exchange of opinions. Disagreements between them about policy were not new.1 But Lenin and Stalin had concurred about the strategic orientation of rule in the Soviet multinational state. Stalin was the People’s Commissar for Nationalities’ Affairs and the Politburo’s specialist on the nexus of matters touching on nationhood, religion and territorial boundaries throughout the Civil War. As his military duties ended, he maintained control over decisions on the nationalities. When the leadership began to plan the country’s permanent constitutional structure, he was given a central role. The task was taken up in earnest in 1922.

  Sovnarkom had long ago settled its viewpoint on several aspects of ‘national’ policy. Non-Russians were allowed their own schools and press and promising young supporters of the Bolsheviks of each national and ethnic group were trained to occupy leading political positions. Stalin supervised the policy even though, during the Civil War, he was often away from Moscow. Meetings of the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities’ Affairs collegium in his absence had been chaotic. Sometimes they were also noisy and over-long when he was present. His deputy Stanislaw Pestkowski recalled:2

  It is hardly surprising that he sometimes lost patience. But on no occasion did he show this at the meetings themselves. In those instances where his supply of patience had been exhausted as the result of our interminable arguments at our gatherings he would suddenly vanish. He used to do this extraordinarily deftly. He would say: ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’ Then he would disappear from the room and go off and hide in one of the cubby holes of the Smolny [Institute] or the Kremlin.

  The time had not arrived when anticipation of Stalin’s displeasure caused all to shiver in their boots. Stalin was but one Bolshevik leader among others. Only Lenin with his greater personal prestige could get away with rebuking miscreants.

  When Stalin got very fed up he crept out of Sovnarkom itself. (So much for the myth of the grand bureaucrat with inexhaustible patience.) Pestkowski, who knew Stalin’s habits better than most, would receive instructions to flush him out of his lair: ‘I caught him a couple of times in comrade-sailor Vorontsov’s apartment where Stalin, stretched out on a divan, was smoking his pipe and thinking over his theses.’3 There were times when Stalin longed to be reassigned to the fronts of the Civil War and get away from the palaver in his Commissariat.

  The cardinal decisions on the national question had anyway been taken by the central party leadership. As the Red Army reimposed central authority over the outlying regions of the former Russian Empire, the Kremlin leadership needed to clarify and disseminate policy in order to maximise its appeal to non-Russians. This was a difficult task. In 1917 it had been the workers and soldiers of Russia who had voted most strongly for the Bolsheviks. The Red Army on the rampage failed to allay suspicions about Russian imperialism, and the stream of decrees from the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities’ Affairs took time to have a positive impact. A further problem was caused by the international situation. Although the Western Allies pulled out of the former Russian Empire at the end of 1919, regional powers in eastern Europe and western Asia continued to pose a military threat, and the Politburo was concerned that Britain and France might use such powers to overthrow Soviet communism. Turkey, Finland and Poland were feared as potential invaders. In these circumstances the Central Committee and Politburo in 1919 set up independent Soviet states in Ukraine, Lithuania and Belorussia — and in 1920–1 in Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia. Communist leaders in Moscow hoped by such means to prove that their commitment to national self-determination was genuine.

  The division of Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia into separate states had occurred because of inter-national enmities in the anti-Bolshevik Transcaucasian Federation established after the October Revolution. Before the pan-Turkic Musavatist party came to power in Baku in 1918 there had formally been no such place as Azerbaijan.4 The frontiers of Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia remained contentious under the early Soviet administration. Yet rudiments of statehood had been acquired. The invading Bolsheviks intended to build on them.

  It had been Stalin who drew up the decrees recognising the Soviet republics in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in December 1918.5 He accepted them as a temporary expedient; later he referred to this as a policy of ‘national liberalism’.6 Practical implementation was tricky. There was a shortage of local Bolshevik leaders and activists, and often those Bolsheviks who came from the locality were Jewish rather than of the titular nationality. Stalin was brought into the discussion even when he could not attend sessions in the capital. He was given the right of personal veto over whether to designate the Hümmet organisation as t
he new Communist Party of Azerbaijan. Only Stalin was thought to know whether the Hümmetists could be trusted as the territorial power.7 As the Civil War drew to an end, the question arose of the permanent constitutional future. Stalin had no doubt. Until then there had been bilateral treaties between the RSFSR and the Soviet republics. These had been tilted in favour of the RSFSR’s hegemony; and in any case the Party Central Committee controlled the communist parties in those other republics.8 A centralised state run from Moscow was already a reality. Stalin wished to bring the governmental structures into line with those of the party by incorporating the Soviet republics in the RSFSR.

  Initially he got his way. The ‘union treaty’ negotiated between the RSFSR and the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic after the Civil War unified their People’s Commissariats in military, economic and transport affairs — and the RSFSR People’s Commissariats were given authority over the Ukrainian ones. Yet the Central Committee stopped short of approving his fundamental objective of comprehensive incorporation.9 Kamenev was his chief opponent on that occasion. But Lenin too became a critic. A fault-line in their long-lasting collaboration was being disclosed. Lenin had drawn the conclusion from the history of the Civil War that the formal constitutional concessions to the borderlands had to be maintained. Soviet republics in Ukraine and elsewhere had to be preserved. What Stalin desired was to expand the RSFSR and turn Ukraine into one of its internal ‘autonomous republics’. An immense dispute was in the making.

  The establishment of autonomous republics had begun in the Civil War, and the policy was widely implemented from 1920 as the nationalterritorial principle of local government was extended to the Bashkirs, the Tatars, the Kirgiz, the Chuvash, the Mari, the Kalmyks, the Vots and the Karelian Finns.10 This was not achieved without controversy. The granting of authority to indigenous national and ethnic groups annoyed the Russian inhabitants of autonomous regions and provinces who felt they were being reduced to second-class status as citizens of the RSFSR. Yet the Politburo bent over backwards to be seen to enhance conditions for non-Russians. Not a few towns with a mainly Russian population were included in an autonomous republic specifically so that the republic might become economically and administratively self-standing.11 All this made for complex discussions in Moscow, and easy answers were seldom on offer. The Bolsheviks were trying to de-imperialise an old empire without allowing its disintegration into separate nation-states. There were no models to copy. They were setting the precedent, and Stalin was the Politburo’s acknowledged specialist in this matter.

  His involvement was often a troubled one. The Tatar–Bashkir Republic, installed in the RSFSR in 1919, had quickly come to grief. The Tatars and the Bashkirs were not the best of friends, and the local Russian residents disliked feeling excluded from influence. Inter-ethnic violence scarred the entire region. The Red Army had to be deployed to restore order and Stalin reasonably decided that the Tatars and Bashkirs should have separate national-territorial units. The basic orientation of policy was maintained. Stalin went on establishing autonomous republics even if this meant offending the local Russians.12

  No region presented him with trickier problems than did his native Caucasus. The ethnic intermingling — on both the north and south sides of the mountain range — was intense and the chronic rivalries were acute. Stalin could not deal with this exclusively from the Kremlin and on 14 September the Politburo assigned him a mission to the north Caucasus. After the disappointments of the Soviet–Polish War, he was given much scope for initiative.13 This was the kind of mission he liked. Reaching the region, he gave approval to the existing Mountain Republic: he liked its capacity to unite Chechens, Ossetians, Kabardians and others. But he did not include the Cossacks.14 Much of the trouble in the north Caucasus derived from the Imperial practice of settling Cossacks, descendants of Russian peasant refugees, in villages as a means of controlling the indigenous nations. A Mountain Republic with their participation would scarcely be effective. Stalin boasted to Lenin in October 1920 that that he had meted out ‘exemplary punishment to several Cossack settlements’ for their rebellious activity.15 Despite his later reputation, Stalin had no special fondness for Russians and his continuation of the ethnic cleansing of the Cossacks reflected this.16

  Attending the Congress of Peoples of the Terek in November 1920, Stalin considered future constitutional arrangements:17

  What type of autonomy is going to be given to the Mountain Republic?… Autonomy can be diverse: there’s administrative autonomy such as is possessed by the Karelians, Cheremis, Chuvash and Volga Germans; there’s also political autonomy such as the Bashkirs, Kirgiz and Tatars have. The Mountain Republic’s autonomy is political.

  He clearly meant that the peoples of the north Caucasus would be allowed not only to manage their own territorial units but also to pursue their national and ethnic interests within them.

  Stalin explained his policy to the Tenth Party Congress in March 1921 when introducing the debate on the national question. His speech contrasted western Europe where nation-states were the norm and eastern Europe where the Romanovs, Habsburgs and Hohenzollerns had ruled vast multinational states. Stalin exaggerated the national homogeneity of states in the West but he was right that the mixture of nations was denser to the East. At any rate he declared that the anti-imperial struggle had intensified after the Great War as Turkey in particular supported movements for national liberation in the colonies of the European powers. But supposedly only Soviet Russia could do anything practical. Stalin declared:18

  The essence of the national question in the RSFSR consists in eliminating the backwardness (economic, political, cultural) of nationalities which has been inherited from the past in order to give an opportunity to backward peoples to catch up with central Russia in relation to statehood, culture and economy.

  He identified two dangers. The first was obvious to anyone like himself from the borderlands of the Russian Empire. This was ‘Russian great-power chauvinism’. The other was the nationalism of non-Russians outside Russia, and Stalin stressed that it was a nationalism widely shared by local communists. Both dangers had to be confronted by the Russian Communist Party.

  ‘Under the Soviet federative state,’ Stalin declared, ‘there are no longer either oppressed nationalities or ruling ones: national oppression has been liquidated.’19 The speech was uncharacteristically vague in content. Stalin may have been too busy to prepare it properly while organising the Leninist faction in the trade union controversy. He was also suffering from agonising stomach pains.20 Then again, he had a huge capacity for work and had always summoned up the strength for a big speech. The probability is that, knowing how quickly passions were ignited by the national question, he sought to damp things down.

  If this was his intention, it was unsuccessful. Critics lined up to attack. They assailed Stalin for making an abstract report ‘outside time and space’ and for yielding too much to ‘petit-bourgeois’ nationalist demands while not struggling hard enough against Russocentrism.21 In fact Stalin had problems regardless of what he said. Some delegates wanted decentralisation and greater room for national self-expression. Others, wanting firmer centralisation in Moscow, attacked the alleged indulgence shown to nationalism since the October Revolution. Stalin himself was accused of ‘artificially implanting Belorussian nationhood’. This comment roused him to fury. His reply went:22

  This is untrue because Belorussian nationhood does exist; it has its own language which is different from Russian, in view of which it’s possible to raise higher the culture of the Belorussian people only in its own language. Such speeches were given five years ago about Ukraine, about Ukrainian nationhood. And it’s not so long ago that people used to say that the Ukrainian republic and Ukrainian nationhood were a German invention. Meanwhile it’s clear that Ukrainian nationhood exists and that the development of its culture constitutes a duty for communists.

  Stalin was not going to allow the entire policy developed by himself and Lenin to be deri
ded, defamed or ditched.

  His arguments were demographic and political. The towns of Ukraine, he predicted, would soon cease to be Russian when flooded with Ukrainian newcomers, just as Riga had once been predominantly a German city and had gradually been Latvianised. Secondly, he maintained that if ever the message of Marxism was to be accepted in the borderlands of the former Russian Empire, it had to be conveyed in languages which were comprehensible and congenial to the recipients. The idea that Stalin was a ‘Great Russian chauvinist’ in the 1920s is nonsense. More than any other Bolshevik leader, including Lenin, he fought for the principle that each people in the Soviet state should have scope for national and ethnic self-expression.

  Yet it was fiendishly difficult to turn principle into practice. The Caucasus continued to worry the Politburo; and whatever general scheme was applied to it would have consequences for the entire constitutional structure of the Soviet state (or states). When Georgia fell to the Red Army in March 1921, the Bolsheviks had reclaimed as much of the former Russian Empire as they would possess until the annexations of 1939–40. Poland had thrown back the Reds at the battle of the Vistula. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania had abolished their Soviet republics and grasped their independence. The Politburo was determined that this should not happen in the Caucasus. Soviet republics in Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia had been established and Moscow steadily increased its control over the region. All the old problems, however, were replicated there. Veteran Bolsheviks were few and popular support for the communist regimes was frail. Religious traditions were strong. Customary social hierarchies were tenacious. What is more, the Red Army had marched into a region which had been tearing itself apart with vicious armed conflict since 1918. There had been wars across borders. There had also been persecution of national and ethnic minorities within each state. Ethnic cleansing had been perpetrated.23 The Politburo had yet to bring about a final settlement.