Stalin: A Biography

by Robert Service

  There were several possibilities. Each little area could have been transformed into a province of the RSFSR. This would have the advantage of administrative neatness and centralist control. Another option would be to establish several Soviet republics on the model of Ukraine in the Civil War. Not only Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan but also Abkhazia, Dagestan, Chechnya and other parts of the north Caucasus could have been handled in this fashion. Yet another possibility was to resurrect the short-lived anti-Bolshevik Transcaucasian Federation of 1918 as a pro-Soviet entity — and, perhaps, to add the north Caucasus to its composition. No plan existed before or after the October Revolution. Stalin in 1920–1, though, came to advocate placing the north Caucasus inside the RSFSR; he also aimed to maintain the Soviet republics of Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan while compelling them to enter a Transcaucasian Federation (which itself would become a subordinate part of the RSFSR). He never spelled out why he excluded the north Caucasus from his scheme for the rest of the Caucasus. But probably he wanted a defensible border for the RSFSR against a potential invasion by the Turks or the Allies. The reason why he inclined towards a Transcaucasian Federation is easier to understand: it was a device to ensure an end to the inter-state and inter-ethnic conflicts in the region. Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan were not to be trusted as separate Soviet republics.

  In summer 1921 Stalin, who had been convalescing in Nalchik in the north Caucasus,24 paid a trip at last to the south Caucasus. Until then the affairs of the region had been handled by himself in the Kremlin and by the Party Caucasian Bureau based in Tbilisi. The Bureau’s leaders were his friends Sergo Ordzhonikidze and Sergei Kirov, and Ordzhonikidze insisted that Stalin’s presence was required if the many pressing problems were to be resolved.25 It was his first visit to Georgia since before the Great War. He had no illusions about the kind of welcome he would receive. Even many among Georgia’s Bolsheviks had always disliked him, and his identification with the ‘Russian’ armed forces of occupation — the Red Army — did little to improve his standing among Georgians in general. But Stalin was undeterred. If Ordzhonikidze and Kirov as the Kremlin’s representatives could not do this, Politburo member Stalin would force through the necessary decisions.

  The Caucasian Bureau had been divided over various territorial matters. As well as the recurrent pressures from the Georgian communist leadership to incorporate Abkhazia in the Georgian Soviet Republic there was a demand from the Azerbaijani communist leadership in Baku for Karabagh, an Armenian-inhabited enclave butting into Azerbaijan, to be made part of Azerbaijan; and the Armenian communists fiercely opposed this on the ground that Karabagh should belong to Armenia. Ruling the Caucasus was never going to be easy after the wars fought between the Azeris and Armenians from 1918. But on balance it was Stalin’s judgement that the Azerbaijani authorities should be placated. Revolutionary pragmatism was his main motive. The Party Central Committee in Moscow gave a high priority to winning support for the Communist International across Asia. Bolshevik indulgence to ‘Moslem’ Azerbaijan would be noted with approval in the countries bordering the new Soviet republics. In any case, the Turkish government of Kemal Pasha was being courted by Moscow; armies of Turks had rampaged into Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan in recent years and continued to pose a threat to Soviet security: the appeasement of Azerbaijan was thought an effective way of keeping Istanbul quiet.

  This stored up trouble for the future. If the matter had been decidable without reference to the situation in the rest of Asia, Stalin would probably have left Karabagh inside Armenia despite Azerbaijani protests. He would also, if he had had his way at the same meeting of the Caucasian Bureau, have handed Abkhazia to Georgia with rights of internal autonomy.26 But Abkhazian Bolshevik leaders Yefrem Eshba and Nestor Lakoba, who had negotiated a treaty between the RSFSR and Kemal Pasha’s Turkey,27 had lobbied hard in Moscow and set up their Abkhazian Soviet Republic. Georgia’s Menshevik government had annexed Abkhazia and maltreated its people. Eshba and Lakoba insisted that their country’s reincorporation in Georgia would cast an odour of unpopularity on Bolshevism; and faced with this campaign, Stalin backed down and allowed them their Soviet republic. He could only do this, however, at the cost of annoying the Georgian Party Central Committee (which likewise argued that Bolshevism would incur popular hostility if he gave in to Eshba and Lakoba).

  He was given proof of this when he addressed the Party City Organisation in Tbilisi on 6 July. This audience was already angry with him and his speech made everything worse. Stalin argued that the Georgian economy was incapable of post-war recovery without the specific assistance of Russia.28 This was both untrue and offensive; for Western investment and trade could have helped to regenerate industry and agriculture in the country. Intellectually he was on firmer ground when he asserted:29

  Now, on arriving in Tiflis [Tbilisi], I’ve been struck by the absence of the old solidarity among the workers of the various nationalities of the Caucasus. Nationalism has developed among workers and peasants and distrust has been strengthened towards comrades of a different nationality; anti-Armenian, anti-Tatar, anti-Georgian, anti-Russian and any other nationalism you like to mention.

  But this argument, too, failed to go down well. Essentially Stalin was warning the Georgian communist leaders and activists that they had to show themselves worthy of Moscow’s support. Abkhazians, Ossetians and Adzharians had indeed suffered under the Menshevik government, which had treated their lands as provinces of historical Georgia. They had insisted that the Abkhazians were a Georgian tribe despite the fact that their language is entirely unrelated. If harmony was to be attained, the Georgian communist leadership had to set an example.

  Stalin ran into still worse trouble at a workers’ mass meeting he addressed in Tbilisi. Georgia’s returning son was heard in silence as he explained the case for Sovietisation. This contrasted with the attitude to Isidore Ramishvili, the deposed Menshevik Interior Minister and old personal enemy of Stalin, who was greeted with a lengthy ovation.30 Stalin’s temper had a fast fuse and, protected by his Cheka guards, he stormed out. His entire political career in Tbilisi had been full of rejections. This latest episode was one humiliation too many. As usual he sublimated his resentment by attacking others. He held Pilipe Makharadze, Chairman of the Georgian Revolutionary Committee, personally responsible for the fracas. Makharadze was sacked and replaced by Budu Mdivani.31 At the time Stalin felt he had promoted a more loyal and compliant Bolshevik to power in Georgia. And of course he misjudged his man. Mdivani turned out to be a far from pliable appointee; and it was he who had agitated Lenin into action from his sickbed against Stalin on the national question.

  The tempestuous dispute between Lenin and Stalin in 1922–3 tended to hide the fact that Stalin stood by the general agreement they reached after he had made the concessions that Lenin demanded. The decision to form the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was ratified on 31 December 1922 and the new Constitution came formally came into force at the beginning of 1924. The federal system was a mere screen. The Politburo of the Russian Communist Party took the main decisions about each Soviet republic. Stalin had his own growing bias in favour of Russia and the Russians. Yet the grant of authority, prestige and enhancement to the other peoples remained intact. The Soviet republics were conserved and the autonomous republics proliferated. National and ethnic groups enjoyed the freedom to run presses and schools in their own languages — and Stalin and his associates gave resources for philologists to develop alphabets for the languages of several small peoples in the Caucasus and Siberia so that schooling might commence. The party also tried to attract indigenous young recruits to the party. Stalin spelled this out to a conference held by the Central Committee with ‘national’ republican and provincial communist leaders in June 1923.32

  It was an extraordinary experiment. The Politburo, while setting its face against the possibility that any region of the USSR might secede, continued to try to demonstrate to everyone at home and abroad that the October Rev
olution had set the conditions for the final solution of the national problems. Stalin was not just following policy. He believed in it and was one of its most committed exponents. His Georgian origins and early Marxist activity had moored him to the idea that the peoples of the former Russian Empire needed to be schooled, indoctrinated and recruited if Marxism was to take root among them. He and Lenin had got together about this in 1912–13. Stalin was not just playing with such ideas. Since before 1917 he had understood the importance of national languages and national personnel for the advancement of communism. He had sloughed off some early ideas but continued to insist that Marxism had to incorporate a serious commitment to solving the national question. His altercations with Mdivani and the Georgian communist leadership derived not from ‘chauvinism’ (as Lenin had claimed at the time and Trotski repeated later) but from a specific set of objections to Mdivani’s reckless disregard for the wishes of Moscow and the interests of the non-Georgians in Georgia.33

  Official measures on the national question had always been distasteful to many communist leaders, and it was Stalin who had to shoulder the bulk of the opprobrium. Trotski, Zinoviev and Kamenev agreed with the official line. Being Jews, however, they felt inhibited from taking a prominent role in debates about nationhood. Although Bukharin made the occasional comment, he too kept out of the spotlight. And so Stalin, despite Lenin’s accusation that he was a Great Russian chauvinist, remained chiefly responsible for party policy. Mdivani and other Georgian communist leaders quickly fell out with him. The imposition of a Transcaucasian Federation was too bitter a cup for them to drink from, and Stalin’s manipulations in 1922 permanently offended them. Not for the first time since 1917 he was undertaking uncongenial tasks which others shunned.

  19. TESTAMENT

  Tensions between Stalin and Lenin went on rising in autumn 1922. Stalin was not in a conciliating mood. He rebuked Lenin for garbling the contents of party policy in an interview for the Manchester Guardian:1 the pupil was telling off his teacher. No Politburo member except Trotski wrote so bluntly to Lenin. These niggles added to Lenin’s set of concerns about the General Secretary, and he became agitated about leaving the communist party to Stalin. As his hope of physical recovery slipped away, he dictated a series of notes to be made public in the event of his death.2 They were headed ‘Letter to the Congress’ because he wanted them to be read out to the next Party Congress. These are the notes known to history as Lenin’s Testament.

  The gist lay in the sentences he composed on 25 December 1922 about fellow party leaders Stalin, Trotski, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin and Pyatakov. Molotov was one of the leaders peeved to have been left out of the list:3 Lenin was leaving a record for history. In fact the Testament’s main concern was with two individuals on the list:4

  Comrade Stalin, having become General Secretary, has concentrated boundless power in his hands and I am not convinced that he will always manage to use this power with adequate care. On the other hand comrade Trotski, as has been shown by his struggle against the Central Committee in connection with the People’s Commissariat of the Means of Communication, is distinguished not merely by his outstanding talents. He surely is personally the most able individual in the current Central Committee but he has an excessive self-confidence and an excessive preoccupation with the purely administrative side of affairs.

  Lenin dwelt on rivalry between Trotski and Stalin:5 ‘These two qualities of the two outstanding leaders of the present Central Committee have the capacity to bring about an unintended split [in the party], and unless the party takes measures to prevent this, a split could happen unexpectedly.’ A split in the party, he argued, would imperil the existence of the Soviet regime.

  Lenin went on: ‘Our party rests upon two social classes and this is what makes possible its instability and makes inevitable its collapse unless agreements can take place between these two classes.’6 The danger he had in mind was that Trotski and Stalin would promote policies favouring different classes — the working class and the peasantry — and that this would induce strife that would undermine the regime.

  To many party officials who were privy to the Testament this seemed an eccentric analysis. They recognised the isolation of the Soviet state in the international system and had not forgotten about the foreign intervention in the Civil War. They could also understand why Lenin picked out Trotski as someone who might bring disunity to the central party leadership. But Lenin’s preoccupation with Stalin caused surprise. Popular opinion, according to reports of the GPU (as the Cheka had been known since 1921), suggested Trotski, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Rykov, Bukharin or even Dzierżyń ski as the likeliest winner of the contest for the political succession.7 Even within the ruling group Stalin was still not taken as seriously as he should have been. Lenin, though, had at last got his measure; and on 4 January 1923, as the dispute over Georgia grew bitter, he dictated an addendum to his characterisation:8

  Stalin is too crude; and this defect, which is wholly bearable inside our milieu and in relations among ourselves, becomes intolerable in the post of General Secretary. I therefore make a proposal for comrades to think of a way to remove Stalin and in his place appoint someone else who is distinguished from comrade Stalin in all other respects through having the single superior feature of being more patient, more loyal, more courteous and more attentive to comrades, less capricious, etc.

  Lenin’s meaning pierced its way through his shaky syntax: he wanted to remove Stalin from the General Secretaryship.

  His scheme was limited in scope. He was not proposing Stalin’s removal from the central party leadership, still less from the party as a whole. Such an idea would have been treated with the disdain which had met his request in July 1922 to dismiss most members of the Central Committee.9 Nor was Lenin the perfect political astrologer of his time. There was absolutely nothing in the Testament predicting the scale of terror which ensued in the years from 1928. Lenin, the leading proponent of state terror in the Civil War, failed to detect Stalin’s potential to apply terror-rule still more deeply in peacetime. The Testament of 1922–3 was limited to an effort to deprive Stalin of his most important administrative post.10

  Files on the Georgian Affair were brought out for Lenin to examine. He had made up his mind about the verdict: Stalin and his associates were guilty of Great Russian chauvinism even though Stalin, Ordzhonikidze and Dzierżyń ski themselves were not Russians. Already at the end of the previous year, in an article on the national question, Lenin had acknowledged:11

  I am, it seems, immensely guilty before the workers of Russia for not intervening sufficiently energetically and sufficiently sharply in the notorious question of autonomisation, officially known, it seems, as the question of the union of soviet socialist republics.

  He also dictated an article on bureaucracy in the organs of party and government, making strong criticisms of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate. It was obvious to informed observers that Stalin, who headed the Inspectorate, was his principal target. Pravda’s editors blunted Lenin’s article in its published form;12 but the general intent was conserved. Lenin composed a further article, ‘Better Fewer But Better’, demanding the immediate promotion of ordinary industrial workers to political office. His rationale was that they alone had the attitudes necessary to create harmony in the Party Central Committee and put an end to bureaucratic practices. Once again it was a message that was meant to damage Stalin.

  Lenin went on giving dictation to Maria Volodicheva and Lidia Fotieva. Although he seems to have stopped mentioning sensitive matters in front of Nadya Allilueva, he took no other precaution beyond telling his secretaries to keep everything to themselves and to lock up his papers. This was how he plotted the downfall of an individual whom he considered the greatest danger to the Revolution. Lenin’s excessive self-confidence — the very defect he ascribed to Trotski — had not left him.

  He would have been less insouciant if he had known his secretaries better. Volodicheva was disconcerted by the co
ntents of his dictated notes on 23 December and she consulted her colleague Fotieva, who advised her to take a copy to none other than Stalin. Stalin was shocked but not deterred. He had had an altercation with Krupskaya the previous day on discovering that she had been helping Lenin to communicate with Trotski and others about current politics. Krupskaya’s behaviour contravened the Politburo’s orders, and Stalin, who had been asked to ensure observance of the regimen specified by Lenin’s doctors, directed verbal obscenities at her. Krupskaya declared that she alone knew what was medically best for Lenin. If Lenin were to be denied political contact with other leaders, his recovery would be delayed still further. She wrote in these terms to Kamenev, adding that nobody in the party had ever addressed her as foully as Stalin. But she did not tell Lenin for fear of upsetting him; and Stalin had not sought to withhold the right to dictate from Lenin. He resented being picked out for blame when he was only carrying out Politburo orders;13 but he reasonably assumed that the matters dividing him from Lenin were amenable to eventual resolution.