Stalin, Volume 1

by Stephen Kotkin

  During Stolypin’s ultimately futile effort to impose order on the government, let alone the country, Koba Jughashvili experienced a long stretch of squalor, years full of disappointment, and often desperation. To be sure, thanks to the Party Congresses or the common fate of exile, the future Stalin had come to know nearly everyone high up in the Bolshevik revolutionary milieu—Lenin, Kamenev, Zinoviev—and numerous others, such as Feliks Dzierzynski. But Stalin’s dabbling in banditry in 1907 in Tiflis had afforded him notoriety of a mostly negative sort, which he would have to work hard to suppress, and led to his decampment to Baku. There, in 1910, he had tried but failed to obtain permission in time to marry a woman, Stefania Petrovskaya, evidently in order to remain legally resident in the city; instead, he was deported north back to internal exile in Solvychegodsk. In late 1911, the landlady of his latest exile hut, the widow Matryona Kuzakova, gave birth to a son, Konstantin, likely Jughashvili’s.147

  By then, the future Stalin was already gone from Solvychegodsk, having been allowed to relocate to Vologda, the northern province’s “capital,” where he continued to chase peasant skirts. He took up with another landlady’s divorcee daughter, the servant Sofia Kryukova, and briefly cohabitated with Serafima Khoroshenina, until her exile sentence ended and she left. Jughashvili bedded the teenage school pupil Pelageya Onufrieva as well. He further busied himself collecting postcards of classical Russian paintings. Vologda, unlike Solvychegodsk, at least had a public library, and the police observed him visiting the library seventeen times over a stretch of 107 days. He read Vasili Klyuchevsky, the great historian of Russia, and subscribed to periodicals that were mailed to him in Siberia.148 Still, thinning from a meager diet, hounded by surveillance, humiliated by surprise searches, the “Caucasian”—as the Vologda police called him—led a destitute existence. The okhranka’s handiwork had reduced the future Stalin’s life, yet again, to the offerings of a provincial library as well as an underaged girl (born 1892), to whom he moaned about his dead wife Kato. Young Pelageya—known in okhranka code as “the fashion plate”—was actually the girlfriend of Jughashvili’s closest Vologda comrade, the Bolshevik Pyotr Chizikov, whose period of exile had ended but who had stayed behind with her. Chizikov not only “shared” his girlfriend, he was tasked by the higher-ups with assisting “Comrade Koba’s” escape.149 In September 1911, carrying Chizikov’s legal papers, Jughashvili slipped out of Vologda and again made his way to St. Petersburg. In the boondocks of Vologda (or Siberia), tsarist police surveillance was laughable, but in the capital and large cities, such as St. Petersburg, Baku, or Tiflis, the okhranka proved vigilant and effective. In the capital, the okhranka tailed Jughashvili immediately, and arrested him three days after his arrival.

  That same September 1911, while Jughashvili was being rearrested in St. Petersburg, farther south, at the Kiev Opera House during a performance of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Tale of Tsar Saltan, Mordekhai “Dmitry” Bogrov, a twenty-four-year-old lawyer and anarchic terrorist—in the clandestine pay of the okhranka—assassinated Stolypin. Russia’s top statesman, by then in near isolation, amid rumors of his imminent transfer to the Caucasus or Siberia, had followed the imperial family southward for the dedication of a monument to Alexander II.150 Stolypin had been forewarned, again, of plots against him, yet he traveled anyway, without bodyguards, which he never used, or even a bullet-proof vest (such as they were at the time). “We had just left the box,” Nicholas II wrote to his mother of the second intermission, “when we heard two sounds as if something had dropped. I thought an opera glass might have fallen on somebody’s head, and ran back into the box to look.” When the tsar glanced down into the orchestra, he saw his prime minister standing in a bloodstained uniform; Stolypin, upon seeing Nicholas II, raised his hand to motion the tsar away to safety, then made the sign of the cross. He died a few days later in a hospital. This was the eighteenth attempt on Stolypin’s life. His assassin, Bogrov, was convicted and hanged in his jail cell ten days after the shooting. It became public knowledge that Bogrov had been suspected of police collaboration by his leftist terrorist colleagues and that he had entered the premises with a police-supplied pass, delivered to him a mere one hour before the performance. These circumstances fomented speculation that via the okhranka, Russia’s far right had finally dispatched the conservative prime minister they reviled. This unproven yet widely believed account testified to the fact that the prime minister never found the conservative political base he sought for the autocratic regime. Even before he was killed, Stolypin had been politically destroyed by the very people he was trying to save.151

  As the tsarist government’s incoherence proceeded apace in Stolypin’s absence, and Russia’s still unreconciled political right wing continued to denounce the “constitutional monarchy,” Koba Jughashvili had been deported back to internal exile by December 1911.152 He found himself, once again, in remote Vologda. But suddenly the Georgian revolutionary rose to the pinnacle of Russian Bolshevism (such as it was), thanks to yet another underhanded internal party action. In January 1912, the Bolsheviks called a tiny party conference—not a congress—in Prague, where Lenin’s faction managed to claim eighteen of the twenty delegates; aside from two Mensheviks, most of the non-Bolshevik faction of Social Democrats refused to attend. On the dubious grounds that the party’s old Central Committee had “ceased to function,” the conference assigned itself the powers of a congress and named a new (and all-Bolshevik) Central Committee.153 In effect, the Bolshevik faction formally asserted a claim over the entire Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party. Immediately thereupon, at the first plenum of the new Central Committee, Lenin decided to co-opt Jughashvili (in Vologda exile) in absentia as a new Central Committee member. The Prague gathering also created a Central Committee “Russia bureau” (for those located on Russian territory), which Stalin had been insisting upon, and on which he was now placed. Stalin became one of twelve top Bolshevik insiders, and one of three such from the Caucasus.154 Lenin’s motives in promoting him are not well documented. Given their different places of exile (Western Europe versus eastern Russia), they had seen little of each other in the six odd years since their first meeting in December 1905. But already in 1910, when Stalin was part of the Baku underground, the Bolshevik leadership in exile had wanted to co-opt him into the Central Committee. For whatever reason it did not happen then. In 1911, Grigol Urutadze, the Georgian Menshevik who had once sat in prison with Jughashvili, poured poison into Lenin’s ear about Jughashvili’ s illegal expropriations and his supposed past expulsion from the Baku organization. “This means nothing!” Lenin is said to have exclaimed. “This is exactly the kind of person I need!”155 If Lenin said it, he was praising how Stalin recognized few if any limits on what he would do for the cause. The 1912 elevation to the Central Committee would become a momentous breakthrough in Stalin’s rise, allowing him to join the likes of Zinoviev, Lenin’s shadow in Genevan exile, as well as Lenin himself.

  Splittism and a hard line against “reformist” socialists were not peculiar to Lenin.156 The young Italian socialist radical Benito Mussolini (b. 1883), the son of an impoverished artisan who named his boy for a Mexican revolutionary, relocated in 1902 to Switzerland, where he worked as a casual laborer, and might have met Lenin; Mussolini certainly read some Lenin.157 But he came up with his rejection of Italian economic anarcho-syndicalism and parliamentary socialism on his own. In 1904, Mussolini called for “an aristocracy of intelligence and will,” a vanguard to lead workers (a position that would remain with him into fascism).158 He pounded this theme in newspapers. At the Italian Socialist Party Congress in July 1912, a few months after Lenin had forced through the formation of a self-standing Bolshevik party, Mussolini, a delegate from the small town of Forlì who was not yet thirty years old, catapulted himself into the Italian Socialist Party leadership by leading the expulsion of moderate reformist socialists (Mussolini’s supporters, known as intransigents, included Antonio Gramsci).159 “A split
is a difficult, painful affair,” Lenin, hailing Mussolini’s action, wrote in Pravda (July 15, 1912). “But sometimes it is necessary, and in such circumstances every weakness, every ‘sentimentality’ . . . is a crime. . . . When, to defend an error, a group is formed that spurns all the decisions of the party, all the discipline of the proletarian army, a split becomes indispensable. And the party of the Italian socialist proletariat has taken the right path by removing the syndicalists and Right reformists from its ranks.”160 Outre radicalism, whether Bolshevik or incipient fascist, was both political program and an impatient street-fighting disposition.

  Stalin’s vault from godforsaken Vologda to the pinnacle of the new all‒Bolshevik Central Committee in 1912 would have been unthinkable without Lenin’s patronage. And yet, it must be said, Lenin was a user, using absolutely everyone, Stalin, too, as a non-Russian to afford his faction appeal. The rash of arrests, furthermore, made promotion of some people a necessity. Still, Stalin’s elevation went beyond tokenism or expediency. Stalin was loyal as well as effective: he could get things done. And, also important, he was a Bolshevik in the heavily Menshevik Caucasus milieu. True, two other Caucasus figures, Sergo Orjonikidze and the truly infamous womanizer Suren Spandaryan (about whom it was said, “all the children in Baku who are up to three years old look like Spandaryan”), were also in the top Bolshevik stratum at this time. Orjonikidze served as Lenin’s chief courier to Bolsheviks in the Russian empire, and he was the one who was tasked in early February 1912 with informing Koba of his Central Committee membership and his new 50-ruble monthly party allowance—a sum, however welcome, that would not free Jughashvili from continuing to scrounge and beg for handouts.161 Be that as it may, Stalin would come to dominate Orjonikidze; Spandaryan would die an early death. Consider further that Ivan “Vladimir” Belostotsky, a metalworker and labor-insurance clerk, was co-opted to the Bolshevik Central Committee at the same time, but he soon disappeared.162 Stalin, in other words, contrary to what would later be asserted, was no accidental figure raised up by circumstances. Lenin put him in the inner circle, but Stalin had called attention to himself and, moreover, would go on to prove his worth. He endured.

  Predictably, Lenin’s socialist opponents—Bundists, Latvian Social Democrats, Mensheviks—denounced the Prague conference for the illegitimate maneuver that it was. Equally predictably, however, their own efforts to answer with their own Party Congress in August 1912 disintegrated into irreconcilable factionalism.163 Later that very same month, Jughashvili escaped Vologda again, returning to Tiflis, where by summer 1912 there were no more than perhaps 100 Bolsheviks. Nearly his entire adult life had been consumed in factional infighting, yet now even he took to advocating for unity among Social Democrats “at all costs” and, what is more, for reconciliation and cooperation with all forces opposed to tsarism.164 His head-snapping about-face testified to the dim prospects of all the leftist parties. In fairness, though, even the political forces nominally supporting the autocracy could not come together.

  From the height of mass disturbances of only five years before, Stolypin’s left-right political demobilization of imperial Russian had been breathtakingly successful, but at the expense of establishing an enduring polity. On the latter score, many observers, especially in hindsight, have attributed Russia’s lack of a polity to an inherent inability to forge a nation. Ethnic Russians made up just 44 percent of the empire’s 130 million people, and even though the Orthodox numbered close to 100 million, they divided into Russian, Ukrainian, and Belorussian speakers—and they were not concentrated territorially. Every would-be internal nationalist mobilization inside Russia had to somehow manage substantial internal national minorities, too. But Stalin’s regime would find a way to cultivate loyalties through and across the different language groups of a reconstituted Russian empire. The biggest problem for imperial Russia was not the nation but the autocracy.

  The autocracy integrated neither political elites nor the masses, and, meanwhile, the waves of militancy that Durnovó and Stolypin had crushed erupted again in a remote swath of deep Siberian forest in late February 1912. More than 1,000 miles north and east of Irkutsk on the Lena River—the source of Lenin’s pseudonym from his Siberian exile days—gold-mine workers struck against the fifteen-to-sixteen-hour workdays, meager salaries (which were often garnished for “fines”), watery mines (miners were soaked to the bone), trauma (around 700 incidents per 1,000 miners), and the high cost and low quality of their food. Rancid horse penises, sold as meat at the company store, triggered the walkout. The authorities refused the miners’ demands and a stalemate ensued. In April, as the strike went into its fifth week, government troops subsidized by the gold mine arrived and arrested the elected strike committee leaders (political exiles who, ironically, wished to end the strike). This prompted not the strike’s dissipation but a determined march for the captives’ release. Confronted by a peaceful crowd of perhaps 2,500 gold miners, a line of 90 or so soldiers opened fire at their officer’s command, killing at least 150 workers and wounding more than 100, many shot in the back trying to flee.

  The image of workers’ lives extinguished for capitalist gold proved especially potent: among the British and Russian shareholders were banking clans, former prime minister Sergei Witte, and the dowager empress. Word of the Lena goldfields massacre spread via domestic newspaper accounts—overwhelming, in Russia, news of the Titanic’s contemporaneous sinking—and spurred empirewide job actions encompassing 300,000 workers on and after May Day 1912.165 The vast strikes caught the beaten-down socialist parties largely by surprise. “The Lena shots broke the ice of silence, and the river of popular resentment is flowing again,” Jughashvili noted in the newspaper. “The ice has broken. It has started!”166 The okhranka concurred, reporting: “Such a heightened atmosphere has not occurred for a long time. . . . Many are saying that the Lena shooting is reminiscent of the January 9 [1905] shooting” (Bloody Sunday).167 Conservatives lashed out at the government for the massacre, as well as at the gold company’s Jewish director and foreign shareholders. A Duma commission on the goldfields massacre deepened the public anger, thanks to the colorful reports provided by the commission chairman, a leftist Duma deputy and lawyer named Alexander Kerensky.

  TRAGIC SECRET

  Even as rightists demanded unconditional obedience to the autocrat, behind closed doors some of them took to fantasizing about his assassination. They contemplated regicide despite the fact that Nicholas II’s son, Alexei, was a toddler—Russian law required a tsar to be sixteen—and most rightists viewed the regent, the tsar’s younger brother, Grand Duke Mikhail Aleksandrovich, as no better, and probably worse than Nicholas II.168 But by 1913, when the empire celebrated three centuries of Romanov rule with spectacular pageantry, the frail dynasty was the only overarching basis for loyalty that the autocracy permitted. The tercentenary celebrations opened on February 21 with a twenty-one-gun salute from the cannons of the Peter and Paul fortress—the same guns that had announced Tsarevich Alexei’s birth nine years earlier. Next came an imperial procession from the Winter Palace to Our Lady of Kazan Cathedral. Amid the clattering hoofs, fluttering banners, and peeling church bells, the noise grew deafening at sightings of the emperor and little Alexei riding in an open carriage. At the Winter Palace ball that evening, the ladies wore archaic Muscovite-style gowns and kokoshniks, the tall headdresses of medieval Russia. The next night at the capital’s storied Mariinsky Theater, the conductor Eduard Napravnik, the lyric tenors Nikolai Figner and Leonid Sobinov, and the ballerinas Anna Pavlova and Matylda Krzesinska (a one-time teenage lover of Nicholas II), joined in a glittering performance of Mikhail Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar.

  Public involvement in the tercentenary was kept conspicuously slight. The celebrations, moreover, focused not on the state (gosudarstvo) but on the grand Romanov personages who had ruled (gosudar). At the same time, Russia’s immense size was the main device used to burnish the dynasty. At the Kazan Cathedral—decorated w
ith more than 100 of Napoleon’s state symbols captured by Russia—the Orthodox services had been accompanied by an imperial manifesto, read out at all the empire’s churches. “Muscovite Rus expanded and the Great Russian Empire now stood in the ranks of the first powers of the world,” proclaimed Nicholas II, the eighteenth Romanov.169 On the tercentenary Easter egg manufactured by special order in the workshops of Peter Carl Faberge, double-headed eagles as well as diamond-framed miniature portraits of all eighteen Romanov rulers graced the outer shell. The tiny egg’s customary “surprise” proved to be an interior rotating globe, which contrasted Russia’s boundaries of 1613 with the much-expanded empire of 1913.170 Whether the Romanov House was up to defending that patrimony, however, was widely doubted.

  After Easter 1913, the imperial family devoted a celebratory fortnight to retracing the route of the first Romanov, Mikhail Fyodorovich, in reverse, from Moscow through the heartland to the ancient Romanov patrimony of Kostroma, and back to a triumphal entrance to Moscow. The face of the Our Lady of St. Theodore icon in Kostroma, the Romanov dynasty’s patron icon, had become so badly blackened, the image was nearly invisible, a terrible omen.171 But Nicholas II, emboldened by the renewal of seventeenth-century roots, renewed his scheming to end the constitutional autocracy by canceling the Duma’s legislative rights, rendering it purely advisory “in accordance with Russian tradition.” He shrank, however, from attempting what he and so many conservatives desperately craved.172 Amid the cult of autocratism, moreover, disquiet spread among the monarchy’s staunchest advocates. Despite the pageantry, many people in Russia’s upper and lower orders alike had come to doubt Nicholas II’s fitness to rule. “There is autocracy but no autocrat,” General Alexander Kireev, the Russian courtier and pundit, had complained in a diary entry as early as 1902, a sentiment that over the years had only widened, like a rock-thrown ripple across the entire pond of the empire.173 An imperial court hofmeister observing the Romanov processional to the Kazan Cathedral concluded that “the group had a most tragic look.”174 The immense Russian empire was ultimately a family affair, and the family appeared doomed. It was not simply that Nicholas II, a traditionally conservative man of family, duty, and faith, was piously committed to the “autocratic idea” without the personal wherewithal to realize it in practice. Had the hereditary tsar been a capable ruler, the future of Russia’s dynasty still would have been in trouble.175