Stalin, Volume 1

by Stephen Kotkin

  Stolypin’s resolute campaign of arrests, executions, and deportations crippled the revolutionary movement, however. Instead of the grand May Day processionals of recent years, displays of proletarian power, leftists had to content themselves with collecting pitiful sums for the families of the legions who were arrested, and staging “red funerals” for the prematurely departed. Among those lost to the struggle was Giorgi Teliya (1880–1907). Born in a Georgian village, Teliya completed a few years of the village school and, in 1894, at age fourteen, made his way to Tiflis, where he was hired by the railway and, still a teenager, helped organize strikes in 1898 and 1900. He was fired, then arrested. Like Jughashvili, Teliya suffered lung problems, but his proved far more serious: having contracted tuberculosis in a tsarist prison, he succumbed to the disease in 1907.85 “Comrade Teliya was not a ‘scholar,’” the future Stalin remarked at the funeral in Teliya’s native village, but he had passed through the “school” of the Tiflis railway workshops, learned Russian, and developed a love for books, exemplifying the celebrated worker-intelligentsia.86 “Inexhaustible energy, independence, profound love for the cause, heroic determination, and an apostolic gift,” Jughashvili said of his martyred friend.87 He further divulged that Teliya had written a major essay, “Anarchism and Social Democracy,” which remained unpublished supposedly because the police confiscated it. Georgian anarchists had made their appearance in late 1905, early 1906—yet another challenge on the fractious left—and the topic of how to respond was widely discussed.88 From June 1906 to January 1907, Jughashvili published his own articles under a nearly identical rubric as Teliya, “Anarchism or Socialism?,” and for the very same Georgian periodicals.

  “Anarchism or Socialism?” was nowhere near the level of The Communist Manifesto (1848) or The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louís Bonaparte (1852), which the pundit Karl Marx (born in 1818) had written when similarly youthful. Still Jughashvili’s derivative antianarchist essays dropped a plethora of names: Kropotkin, Kautsky, Proudhon, Spencer, Darwin, Cuvier, in addition to Marx.89 It also showed that in Marxism he had found his theory of everything. “Marxism is not only a theory of socialism, it is a complete worldview, a philosophical system,” he wrote. “This philosophical system is called dialectical materialism.”90 “What was materialism?” he asked in the catechism style for which he would later become famous. “A simple example,” he wrote: “Imagine a cobbler who had his own modest shop, but then could not withstand the competition from big shops, closed his and, say, hired himself out to the Adelkhanov factory in Tiflis.” The goal of the cobbler, Jughashvili continued, without mentioning his father, Beso, by name, was to accumulate capital and reopen his own business. But eventually, the “petit-bourgeois” cobbler realized he would never accumulate the capital and was in fact a proletarian. “A change in the consciousness of the cobbler,” Jughashvili concluded, “followed a change in his material circumstances.”91 Thus, in order to explain Marx’s concept of materialism (social existence determines consciousness), the future Stalin had rendered his father a victim of historical forces. Moving to the practical, he wrote that “the proletarians worked day and night but nonetheless remain poor. The capitalists do not work but nonetheless they get richer.” Why? Labor was commodified and the capitalists owned the means of production. Ultimately, Jughashvili asserted, the workers would win. But they would have to fight hard—strikes, boycotts, sabotage—and for that they needed the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party and a “dictatorship of the proletariat.”92

  Here we see more than a glimpse of the future Stalin: the militancy, the confident verities, the ability to convey, accessibly, both a worldview and practical politics. His ideational world—Marxist materialism, Leninist party—emerges as derivative and catechismic, yet logical and deeply set.

  Right after the essay series appeared, Jughashvili stole across the border to attend the 5th Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party Congress, held between April 30 and May 19, 1907, in north London’s Brotherhood Church. Congress luminaries were lodged in Bloomsbury, but Jughashvili stayed with the mass of delegates in the East End. One night, utterly drunk, he got into a pub scrape with a drunken Brit, and the owner summoned the police. Only the intercession of the quick-witted, English-speaking Bolshevik Meir Henoch Mojszewicz Wallach, known as Maxim Litvinov, saved Jughashvili from arrest. In the capital of world imperialism, the future Stalin also encountered Lev Bronstein (aka Trotsky), the high-profile former head of the 1905 Petrograd Soviet, but what impression the two might have made on each other remains undocumented. Stalin did not speak from the dais; Trotsky maintained his distance even from the Mensheviks.93

  According to Jordania, Lenin was pursuing a back-room scheme: if the Georgian Mensheviks would refrain from taking sides in the Bolshevik-Menshevik dispute among the Russians in the party, Lenin would offer them carte blanche at home at the expense of Caucasus Bolsheviks. No other evidence corroborates this story of Lenin’s possible sellout of Jughashvili, who had expended so much blood and sweat fighting for Bolshevism in the Caucasus.94 Lenin often proposed or cut deals that he had no intention of honoring. Whatever the case here, Jordania, in later exile, was trying to distance Stalin from Lenin. What we know for sure is that when shouts at the congress were raised because Jughashvili, along with a few others, had not been formally elected a delegate—which provoked the Russian Menshevik Martov to exclaim, “Who are these people, where do they come from?”—the crafty Lenin, chairing a session, got Jughashvili and the others recognized as “consultative” delegates.

  GEOPOLITICAL ORIENTATION

  Alongside everything else, Stolypin had to work diligently to keep Russia out of foreign trouble. Tensions with Britain were particularly high, and Britain was a preeminent global power. Britons invested one fourth of their country’s wealth overseas, financing the building of railroads, harbors, mines, you name it—all outside Europe. Indeed, even as American and German manufacturing surpassed the British in many areas, the British still dominated the world flows of trade, finance, and information. On the oceans, where steamship freighters had jumped in size from 200 tons in 1850 to 7,500 tons by 1900, the British owned more than half of world shipping. In the early 1900s, two thirds of the world’s undersea cables were British, affording them a predominant position in global communications. Nine tenths of international transactions used British pounds sterling.95 Reaching an accord with Britain seemed very much in the Russian interest, provided that such a step did not antagonize Germany.

  In the aftershock of the defeat by Japan in 1905–6, Russia had undergone a vigorous internal debate about what was called foreign orientation (what we would call grand strategy). St. Petersburg already had a defensive alliance with Third Republic France, dating to 1892, but Paris had not helped in Russia’s war in Asia. By contrast, Germany had offered Russia benevolent neutrality during the difficult Russo-Japanese War, and Germany’s ally, Austria-Hungary, had refrained from taking advantage in southeastern Europe. A space had opened for a conservative reorientation away from democratic France toward an alliance based on “monarchical principle”—meaning a Russian alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary, something of a return to Bismarck’s old Three Emperors’ League. Arrayed against this, however, stood Russia’s Constitutional Democrats, Anglophiles who wanted to preserve the alliance with republican France and achieve rapprochement with liberal Britain in order to strengthen Russia’s Duma at home.96 In August 1907, just two months after Stolypin’s constitutional coup d’etat introducing narrower voting rules for the Duma, he opted for an Anglo-Russian entente.97 Stolypin was something of a Germanophile and no friend of British-style constitutional monarchy, but in foreign policy, the Constitutional Democrats, his sworn enemies, had gotten their way because rapprochement with Britain seemed Russia’s best path for securing external peace while, in Stolypin’s mind, not precluding friendly relations with Germany, too.98 This was logical enough. And the content of the 1907 Anglo-Russian Entente was
modest, mostly just delimitation of spheres of influence in Iran and Afghanistan.99 But without a parallel treaty with Germany, even on a symbolic level, the humble 1907 Anglo-Russian Entente constituted a tilt.

  Nicholas II, in fact, had signed a treaty with Germany: A scheming Wilhelm II, on his annual summer cruise in 1905, which he took in the Baltic Sea, had invited Nicholas II on July 6 (July 19 in the West) to a secret rendezvous, and Nicholas had heartily agreed. The kaiser aimed to create a continental bloc centered on Germany. “Nobody has slightest idea of [the] meeting,” Wilhelm II telegrammed in English, their common language. “The faces of my guests will be worth seeing when they behold your yacht. A fine lark . . . Willy.”100 On Sunday evening July 23, he dropped anchor off Russian Finland (near Vyborg), close by Nicholas II’s yacht. The next day the kaiser produced a draft of a short secret mutual defense accord, specifying that Germany and Russia would come to each other’s aid if either went to war with a third country. Nicholas knew that such a treaty with Germany violated Russia’s treaty with France and had urged Wilhelm to have it first be shown to Paris, a suggestion the kaiser rejected. Nicholas II signed the Treaty of Bjorko, as it was called, anyway. The Russian foreign minister as well as Sergei Witte (recently returned from Portsmouth, New Hampshire) went into shock, and insisted that the treaty could not take effect until France signed it, too. Nicholas II relented and signed a letter, drafted by Witte, for Wilhelm II on November 13 (November 26 in the West), to the effect that until the formation of a Russian-German-French alliance, Russia would observe its commitments to France. This provoked Wilhelm II’s fury. The German-Russian alliance, although never formally renounced, was aborted.101

  This fiasco inadvertently reinforced the importance of Russia’s signing of the entente with Britain, which seemed to signal a firm geopolitical orientation and, correspondingly, the defeat of the conservatives and Germanophiles. Moreover, given that Britain and France already had concluded an entente cordiale, Russia’s treaty with Britain in effect created a triple entente, with each of the three now carrying a “moral obligation” to support the others if any went to war. And because of the existence of the German-led Triple Alliance with Austria-Hungary and Italy, the British-French-Russian accord gave the impression of being more of an alliance than a mere entente. Events further solidified this sense of the two opposed alliances. In 1908, Austria-Hungary annexed the Slavic province of Bosnia-Herzegovina from the Ottoman empire, and although Austria had been in occupation of Bosnia-Herzegovina since 1878, apoplectic Russian rightists denounced the failure of a strong Russian response to the formal annexation, calling it a “diplomatic Tsushima” (evoking the ignominious sinking of Russia’s Baltic fleet by Japan).102 But Stolypin, despite being charged by some rightists with abandoning Russia’s supposed “historic mission” in the world, had told a conference of Russian officials that “our internal situation does not allow us to conduct an aggressive foreign policy,” and he held firm.103 Still, given the Anglo-German antagonism as well as the opposing European alliance system, Russia’s entry into the Triple Entente carried risks driven by world events beyond its control.

  In Asia, Russia remained without help to deter possible further Japanese aggression. The British-Japanese alliance, signed in 1902 and extended in scope in 1905, would be renewed again in 1911.104 The two Pacific naval powers, although wary of each other, had been thrust together by a British sense that their Royal Navy was overstretched defending a global empire as well as a joint Anglo-Japanese perception of the need to combat Russian expansion in Asia, in Central Asia, and in Manchuria. And so, when the Japanese had promised not to support indigenous nationalists in British India, Britain had assented to the Japanese making Korea a protectorate, or colony. Besides Korea, which bordered Russia, the Imperial Japanese Army had also pushed as far north as Changchun during the Russo-Japanese war, conquering southern Manchuria (provinces of China). Even though the United States had acted as something of a constraining influence in the Portsmouth treaty negotiations, Japan had nonetheless gotten Russia evicted from southern Manchuria and claimed the Liaodung region (with Port Arthur), which the Japanese renamed Kwantung Leased Territory, and which commanded the approaches to Peking. Japan also took over the Changchun‒Port Arthur stretch of the Chinese Eastern Railway, which the Russians had built and which was recast as the Southern Manchurian Railway. The Japanese civilian population of both the Kwantung Leased Territory and the Southern Manchurian Railway zone would increase rapidly, reaching more than 60,000 already by 1910. Predictably, a need to “defend” these nationals, the railroad right of way, and sprouting economic concessions spurred the introduction of Japanese troops and, soon, the formation of a special Kwantung army. China’s government was forced to accept the deployment of Japanese troops on Chinese soil, hoping their presence would be temporary. But as contemporaries well understood, Japan’s sphere of influence in southern Manchuria would be a spearhead for further expansion on the Asian mainland, including northward, in the direction of Russia.105

  Thus did foreign policy entanglements pose a dilemma at least as threatening as the autocracy’s absence of a reliable domestic political base. In combination, each dilemma made the other far more significant. Both of Russia’s effective strategic choices—line up with France and Britain against Germany, or accept a junior partnership in a German-dominated Europe that risked the wrath of France and Britain—contained substantial peril. Stolypin had been right to ease tensions with Britain while trying to avoid a hard choice between London and Berlin, but in the circumstances of the time he had proved unable to thread this needle. Japan’s posture compounded the Russian predicament. After 1907, Britain carried no obligations toward Russia should the Japanese ramp up their aggressiveness, but Russia was on the hook should the Anglo-German antagonism heat up. Stolypin’s determined stance of nonintervention in the Balkans in 1908 did not alter the underlying strategic current toward foreign imbroglio.

  DEAD-END BANDITRY

  Having arrived back in Baku, in May 1907, Jughashvili reported on the 5th Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party in the pages of the Bolshevik-faction underground newspaper Baku Proletarian. He noted that the congress had been dominated by Mensheviks, many of whom were Jews. “It wouldn’t hurt,” he wrote in the report, recalling another Bolshevik’s remarks at the congress, “for us Bolsheviks to organize a pogrom in the party.”106 Such a remark—which had been made by someone from the Russian empire’s Pale of Settlement, and which Jughashvili was repeating—indicated the animosities and high level of frustration that by 1907 accompanied the now frayed unity hopes of 1905. Significantly, this was the future Stalin’s first signed article in Russian; he would never publish anything in the Georgian language again. The historical record contains no explanation for this shift. One hypothesis may be the future Stalin’s desire for assimilation. The great triangle of social democracy encompassing the Russian empire’s northwest—St. Petersburg down to Moscow, and over to tsarist Poland and Latvia—was European in culture and physiognomy. Below that, in the southwest (lower half of the Pale of Settlement), social democracy was largely absent; farther south, it was strongly present, in the Caucasus, but predominantly of the Menshevik persuasion. The upshot was that every time Jughashvili attended a major Party Congress in the company of his Bolshevik faction, he would be confronted with a thoroughly Europeanized culture, against which his Georgian features and heavy Georgian accent stood out. The Jews among the Bolshevik faction of Social Democrats were often deeply Russified, as were many of the Poles (some of them Jewish) and the Latvians; but even when the latter were not deeply Russified, they were still recognizably European. Thus, although the other non-Russian Bolsheviks also stood apart from the ethnic Russians to an extent, Jughashvili was a recognizable Asiatic. That may explain why he returned from the 1906 Party Congress in a European suit. More enduringly, this circumstance may have motivated his 1907 abrupt abandonment of the Georgian language in favor of Rus
sian in his punditry.

  Asiatic pedigree was not the only way this Caucasus Bolshevik stood out, or tried to stand out. The Menshevik-dominated Social Democratic Workers’ Party 5th Congress in 1907 was notable for a decision to change tactics. Even though the autocracy continued to prohibit normal legal politics—beyond the very narrow-suffrage Duma, which hardly met—the Mensheviks argued that the combat-squad/expropriation strategy had failed to overturn the existing order. Instead, the Mensheviks wanted to emphasize cultural work (workers’ clubs and people’s universities) as well as standing for Duma elections. Martov observed that the German Social Democrats had survived Bismarck’s antisocialist laws by engaging in legal activities in the Reichstag and other venues.107 Five Caucasus Social Democratic representatives would get elected to the Duma, including the patriarch Noe Jordania. In the meantime, a resolution to ban “expropriations” was put to a vote at the 5th Congress. Lenin and thirty-four other Bolsheviks voted against it, but it became party law. Still, just as Lenin had refused to abide the 1903 vote won by Martov on party structure, now Lenin plotted with Leonid Krasin, an engineer and skilled bomb maker, as well as with Jughashvili, on a big expropriation in the Caucasus in violation of party policy.108

  On June 13, 1907, in broad daylight in the heart of Tiflis, on Yerevan Square, two mail coaches delivering cash to the Tiflis branch of the State Bank were attacked with at least eight homemade bombs and gunfire. The thieves’ take amounted to around 250,000 rubles, a phenomenal sum (more than Durnovó had gotten in a prize the year before for having saved tsarism). The scale of the brazen heist was not unprecedented: the year before in St. Petersburg, Socialist Revolutionaries had stormed a heavily guarded carriage en route from the customs office to the treasury and looted 400,000 rubles, the greatest of the politically motivated robberies in 1906.109 Still, the 1907 Tiflis robbery—one of 1,732 that year in the province by all groups—was spectacular.110