Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler

by Robert Gellately

  Instead of being set free, prisoners were transferred to the north, where the Cheka began setting up more camps. Dzerzhinsky used the Solovetski Islands—Solovki for short—to establish what later became known as the “northern camps of special significance.” Boris Sapir, a political prisoner sent to Solovki in 1923, said that when he left in 1925, there were around seven thousand in the camp. By 1929–30 the Solovki system had been extended to the mainland, and the number of prisoners had increased to over a hundred thousand.57

  The Russian organization Memorial estimates that for the Russian Republic alone in the years 1924 to 1927, the number of prisoners in the camps grew from 78,000 to 111,000.58 If we extrapolate from the Russian Republic to all republics of the USSR, we might conclude that perhaps 200,000 people were then in the camps. An amnesty to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Russian Revolution led to the release of half of them, but in 1929 the NKVD counted 118,000 prisoners in their camps and a year later 179,000.59

  According to one survivor of the northern camps, until the mid-1920s prisoners met the needs of the camp itself but soon had to provide goods or services for the national economy. The contradiction at the heart of this system was that prisoners were treated so poorly that productivity wasted away to nothing.60

  RED ARMY

  The Bolsheviks created the Red Army as their other arm to defend the revolution. What was left of the tsarist armies dwindled away with the October Revolution, and the new regime had to find a way to mobilize a new force. In early 1918, Leon Trotsky took over the task, and by summer, as the situation on all fronts deteriorated, he had recruited former officers of the tsarist army. From the first days of the revolution under Kerensky, special political commissars had been appointed, and Trotsky continued this procedure. The commissars were there to maintain vigilance on the morale and “political reliability” of the troops and discourage desertions—which were and remained endemic.61

  Trotsky pushed for universal conscription because there were not enough volunteers for the Red Army. The ruling Party disdained and distrusted the peasants, and the first call-ups in the summer of 1918 were directed at the cities and working classes. By November the Communist Party itself “volunteered” forty thousand of its own members, many of whom were lost in the war almost immediately. Inevitably, the draft had to be extended into the countryside, a move much resented by peasants.62

  The number of deserters ran up to one million in 1918, and the next year went higher. Nevertheless, by the fall of 1920 the strength of the Red Army had reached an astounding five million. It prevailed against the Whites and all other forms of opposition. Thereafter the army was reduced in size but played a key role in socializing the population by schooling millions in reading and writing, thus winning many over.63

  Although the Communists did not kill off all their opponents in 1917 or during the civil war, sooner or later they tracked down many. In wave after wave of terror they gradually destroyed all or most of the groups and individuals who opposed them during the revolutionary upheaval. The stain of opposition was indelible. It might amount to no more than the accident of being born a member of the bourgeoisie—the son or daughter of a shopkeeper, for example—but the mark could never be erased.

  Such thinking was inherent in Lenin’s project from the start. In a tract written two months after the October coup, he laid out what he wanted.

  The old elites were supposedly waiting for the revolution to fail and thought the economy could not survive without them and without competition. Lenin said the workers and peasants still did not realize that as the new ruling class, they had to learn about accounting and control, particularly as concerned “the rich, the rogues, the idlers, and the rowdies.” The people had to figure out what to do with such hangers-on. His language oozed with venom, and his imperative was

  to clean Russia of all vermin, fleas, bugs—the rich, and so on. In one place a handful of rich, a dozen rogues, or a half-dozen lazy workers will be put in prison. In another place they will have to clean toilets. In a third place they will be given “yellow tickets” after serving their time, so that everyone can keep an eye on them, as harmful persons, until they reform. In a fourth place one out of every ten idlers will be shot on the spot. In a fifth place a mixture of methods may be adopted.64

  The Communists meant to abolish private property, collectivize farms, nationalize industry and banking, and eliminate religion. To introduce such changes against the will of so many was bound to foster resistance. Lenin counted on this turn of events to lead to violent clashes, but coldly and falsely calculated that the misery, suffering, and death would be offset in the long run by the establishment of the Socialist “new way of life.”

  3

  CIVIL WARS IN THE SOVIET UNION

  Lenin, and Karl Marx before him, said that the ruling class would never give in without a fight. Not only did the prospect of such an upheaval not give Lenin cause for concern, but he took civil war—with all the horror that would entail—as a sign the revolutionaries were on track. He had often said that such a conflict was the logical and inevitable extension of class war and thus a vital phase of the revolution.1

  Marx was quoted by revolutionaries like Stalin as saying it might be necessary to go through fifteen or twenty years of “civil war and international conflicts” in order to gain and exercise political power.2 Lenin was driven to distraction when other Bolsheviks did not grasp or agree that Communism could be realized only by paying a heavy price in human lives.3

  The continuing war with Germany disrupted food production, and soon there was a specter of famine. Lenin’s reflexive response, as indicated in a January 14, 1918, Sovnarkom decree, was to use force against private trade, speculation, and profiteering. He favored requisitioning food from better-off peasants—the so-called kulaks. These people were not an ethnic group, but negative attitudes toward them went back for decades. Anyone could be labeled a kulak, from the person who lent neighbors money to one who kept a tidy garden.

  The demands made by the new interventionist state rose as food stocks fell, and in the spring the Food Supply Commissariat began using force to get supplies from the peasants. After Lenin spoke of a “crusade for bread” on May 24, local branches of the commissariat, along with the Cheka and volunteers, created a veritable “food dictatorship.” The system of setting grain quotas and extracting grain from peasants became known as prodrazverstka and was nothing less than outright confiscation. The authorities incited poorer peasants to a “merciless war on the kulaks,” the latter termed the “village bourgeoisie.” Anyone so stigmatized was in trouble if suspected of hoarding. In early June, Committees of the Poor (Komitety Bednoty, or kombedy) were set up to find hidden grain. The recruits from the urban unemployed were promised a share of anything they gathered. Special detachments set out to get food for the cities; by July there were nearly twelve thousand in this “food army,” and by 1920 it may have been forty-five thousand strong.4

  In the heady days of late 1917 and early 1918, peasants had been enthusiastic about Bolshevism, which promised them land without payment and encouraged them to pillage the bourgeoisie and nobility. By mid-1918 much of that support had faded. Over the next two years there were thousands of riots and revolts as the peasants fought back. What most of them wanted, as they had for generations, was free title to their own land. All such attitudes, however, as well as protests, were now labeled “kulak rebellions” and savagely repressed.5

  ARMED OPPOSITION TO THE BOLSHEVIKS

  The greatest internal threats to the revolution were in the Don region to the southeast, where in the spring and summer of 1918 several well-known generals assembled troops, particularly Cossacks, who were famous for their independent ways and fighting traditions. The White generals in that area included Lavr Kornilov, Mikhail Alekseyev—former army chief of staff under Nicholas II—and Anton Denikin, who was briefly succeeded by General Peter Wrangel.

  A second front threatened from Ukraine in the west, wh
ere the Germans continued to menace until the war ended in November 1918. Another point of attack was from the east, where in July 1918 a small Czechoslovak legion of former prisoners of war (about forty thousand) caused havoc along the Trans-Siberian Railway. There were centers of opposition in the vast area from the Volga to the Pacific, including one controlled by the Committee for the Constituent Assembly in Samara and the so-called Provisional All-Russian Government in Omsk. There Admiral A. V. Kolchak took over after a coup in November 1918, with vague intentions about getting rid of the Bolsheviks and saving Russia. In early autumn 1919 there was still another threat by the former tsarist general N. N. Yudenich from the Baltic.

  Stalin’s first role of note in the revolution, apart from his scrupulous support of Lenin, came on May 29, 1918, when Sovnarkom put him in charge of procuring food in the south. In June, Stalin went off to Tsaritsyn (renamed Stalingrad in 1925). The city on the Volga stood at the gateway to the North Caucasus grain-growing region. When Stalin arrived, it was defended by the Red Army under Kliment Voroshilov, later one of his allies, who recalled that Stalin took immediate control and demanded “open and systematic mass terror.” He told Voroshilov to hold the Red banners high and “mercilessly root out the counterrevolution of landlords, generals, and kulaks and prove to the world that Socialist Russia is invincible.”6

  Stalin complained to Lenin that military leaders had devised a “bungler’s” plan to defend Tsaritsyn. He organized a local Cheka to execute “traitors,” and new plots were discovered daily. Stalin’s orders were simple: “Shoot!”7

  He craved military command and appointed himself head of the armed forces after arresting those who stood in his way. He devised a plan to defend the city, which failed and caused many casualties. New leaders were sent out, and they eventually drove the White Cossack forces back across the Don. Lenin would always forgive the sins of the overzealous, especially those of someone like Stalin, who declared his personal loyalty so often.

  Stalin claimed to want to work with Trotsky, who had enormous prestige. Trotsky was the brains behind the Red Army and distrustful of Stalin, and by early October he wrote Lenin to have Stalin recalled to Moscow. Trotsky said Stalin was responsible for the “total anarchy at the top” in Tsaritsyn. Lenin went along but as compensation gave Stalin something of a promotion by appointing him to the Revolutionary War Council of the Republic.8

  In his brief stint on the front lines, Stalin showed self-confidence, determination, and brutality. He never forgot those who stood by him, like Voroshilov or the cavalry leader and later marshal Semyon Budenny. Their personal loyalty mattered more than their competence.

  WIPING OUT THE TSARIST DYNASTY

  Lenin was uncertain about the fate of the Romanov dynasty, which was exiled to Yekaterinburg. Amid growing concern that the family might be liberated by armies from the east, Lenin opted for execution. The decision was meant to rob White counterrevolutionaries of a figurehead and to put an end to the question of a restoration in Russia. He ordered the executions, which were carried out on July 18 with the utmost savagery.9

  Once the Red terror was declared in September 1918, the radicalization process quickly accelerated. Peasants were killed if suspected of holding back grain, and workers were shot if they protested. In the first two months of the terror some ten to fifteen thousand summary executions were carried out. In the Crimea, when the White Army withdrew in the early summer of 1920, an estimated fifty thousand people who remained were slaughtered by the Reds. Far from trying to cover up the crimes, the Bolsheviks lauded them as heroic deeds, sung praises in the press, and promoted the officers in charge.10

  The Cheka killed and abused their victims without mercy. They robbed and plundered and in drunken orgies raped and killed their way through one village after the next. Completely innocent family men were arrested so that Cheka officers could take their wives as mistresses. Daughters were blackmailed into trying to save their families by offering themselves for the pleasures of some drunken official.

  Suspected enemies could expect cruel torture, flogging, maiming, or execution. Some were shot, others drowned, some frozen or buried alive, and still others were hacked to death by swords. Just who all these “enemies” were depended on the whim of someone in the Cheka, the Red Guard, or the Red Army. The killers honed the practice of having those about to be executed dig their own graves.

  The Cheka and Red Army faced a wide spectrum of revolt. In the coal-mining and metallurgical Donbass, or Donets Basin, an area that straddled Ukraine and Russia in the south, the Reds fought not only the Whites but also the Blacks (or anarchists) and the Greens (peasant armies). More than twenty different regimes were set up one after another in this area, and in the first months of 1919 alone some cities changed hands dozens of times. The victors carried out reprisals, tortures, mutilations, and massacres.11

  The Bolsheviks also had to deal with Allied intervention. Troops came in the autumn of 1918 mainly from Britain, France, Japan, and the United States, but Germany continued to represent a threat even after the Treaty of Brest Litovsk. In early 1918 the Allies had sent small numbers of troops to Murmansk at Russia’s invitation. The Western powers had hoped Russia could still be brought back into war against Germany, with or without the Bolsheviks in power.

  When Germany was defeated in November 1918, the rationale for sending Allied troops to Russia changed, and they turned against the Bolshevik regime. Some Western soldiers assisted the Whites, but after the long struggle of the First World War there was little enthusiasm for a prolonged effort, particularly in the face of staunch resistance.12

  The White armies kept up the pressure on the Reds until the end of 1919, by which time the major armed threats had been defeated and the Allies had withdrawn. The Whites who were mostly on the outside fringes of Russia, while the Reds held the vast center, were unable to gain and hold a real base of support but came to stand for restoring the old system, including returning lands to their “rightful owners.”

  The majority regarded the civil war, no matter who was winning, “as a plague that brought only death and destruction.”13 The Reds represented “no return to the past,” and enough peasants took consolation in that. It meant they could hold on to personal gains made in the revolutions, but of course the Communists wanted more.

  The first issue of the Cheka newspaper in Kiev from mid-August 1919 printed an article on the universal mission of the revolution:

  For us there do not, and can not exist the old systems of morality and “humanity” invented by the bourgeoisie for the purpose of oppressing and exploiting the “lower classes.” Our morality is new, our humanity is absolute for it rests on the bright ideal of destroying all oppression and coercion. To us all is permitted, for we are the first in the world to raise the sword not in the name of enslaving and oppressing anyone, but in the name of freeing them from all bondage…. Blood? Let there be blood, if it alone can turn the grey-white-and-black banner of the old pirate’s world to a scarlet hue, for only the complete and final death of that world will save us from the return of the flag of the old jackals!14

  “JEWISH-BOLSHEVIK PLOTS” AND POGROMS

  A major problem faced by the Bolsheviks in their multiethnic country was the nationality question. Stalin was the main theorist of Bolshevik nationality policies and in a 1913 book established the fundamentals of what would later become official doctrine. Socialists felt that anti-Semitism would disappear, like all other prejudices, with the great revolution. What was to happen in the meantime?

  Following Stalin’s theory, the Bolsheviks opted for giving the nationalities and ethnic groups in Russia regional self-determination or autonomy, but within a unified national context. The dilemma was how to avoid separatism. Stalin later tried to get around the problem with the 1925 slogan “Socialist in content and national in form.” Boiled down to essentials, the idea was to allow all nationalities their language and culture, but not at the expense of the disintegration of the country or the communal
effort to introduce Socialism.15

  Stalin proposed granting cultural rights to Jews and treating them as a nationality like all the others. The Jewish minority in Russia came under pressure during the revolution and especially during the civil war. At the turn of the century there were 5.2 million Jews in the Russian Empire, roughly 4 percent of the population. Since 1791 and the reign of Catherine the Great, Jews were forced to live in what was called the Pale of Settlement and generally not allowed to reside in Petrograd or Moscow. Persecution led many to emigrate—over one million in the period 1897–1915. The provisional government in 1917 put an end to what remained of restrictions, and Jews began to move from the countryside to urban areas.16

  Some Jews were drawn to the revolutionary movement. Their participation in the Bolshevik Revolution in absolute terms was not great, but five of the twelve members at the Bolshevik Central Committee meeting on October 23, 1917, were Jews. The Politburo that led the revolution had seven members, three of whom were Jews. During the stormy years 1918–21, Jews generally made up one-quarter of the Central Committee and were active in other institutions as well, including the Cheka.17

  It was not that all the Jews were Bolsheviks but that many leading Bolsheviks were—or at least had been raised as—Jews. Inside Russia, and not only among the Whites, they became identified with the Reds and the terror. Indeed, the propaganda of the Whites in the civil war against the Reds “portrayed the Bolshevik regime as a Jewish conspiracy and spread the myth that all its major leaders were Jews.” Many among the White armies came to accept it as axiomatic that the Jews deserved to pay with their lives.18