Stalin, Volume 1
Page 22
For two years, the British had mostly allowed the French and Russians to absorb the brunt of Germany’s blows.56 But in July 1916, during the bloodbath at Verdun—launched by the Germans in a new strategy of attrition to overcome the stalemate by bleeding the French to death—the British countered with an offensive on the Somme farther west in France. At least 20,000 British soldiers were killed and another 40,000 wounded during the first twenty-four hours. This was the greatest loss of life—working class and aristocrat—in British military history. Before the Battle of the Somme, just like Verdun, ended in stalemate, it would claim 430,000 British killed and mutilated (3,600 per day), along with 200,000 French and perhaps 600,000 Germans.57 On the western front overall, 8 million of 10 million battlefield deaths were caused not by “industrial killing” but by long established technologies: small arms and artillery.58 Still, artillery barrages now shredded men on impact from more than twenty-five miles away (territorial gains were measured in yards). Machine guns had not only become easily portable but could now fire 600 rounds per minute, and for hours on end without pausing, a hail of metallic death.59 Poison gas seared the lungs of the troops in trenches, until shifting winds often brought the lethal clouds right back against the side that had launched the chemical weapons. (Of all the belligerents, the Russian army suffered the worst from the chlorine and mustard gas because of insufficient masks.)60 In the Ottoman empire, which had joined the side of Germany and Austria-Hungary, Armenian subjects were accused en masse of treason—collaborating with Russia to break away eastern Anatolia—and were massacred or force-marched away from border areas, resulting in 800,000 to 1.5 million Armenian civilian deaths. In Serbia, losses were fully 15 percent of the population, a monstrous price even for a heedless assassination; Serbian incursions into Habsburg territories, meanwhile, failed to ignite a South Slav uprising, demonstrating that the fears in Vienna that had prompted the showdown were exaggerated.61 And what of that vaunted German navy, whose construction had done so much to incite the British and drive Europe toward the precipice? During the entire Great War, the German fleet fought a single engagement against Britain, in summer 1916, off the Danish coast, where the British lost more ships, but the Germans withdrew and chose not to risk their precious navy again.
The war itself, not the subsequent bungled Peace of Versailles, caused the terrible repercussions for decades. “This war is trivial, for all its vastness,” explained Bertrand Russell, a logician at Cambridge University and the grandson of a British prime minister. “No great principle is at stake, no great human purpose is involved on either side. . . . The English and the French say they are fighting in defence of democracy, but they do not wish their words to be heard in Petrograd or Calcutta.”62 Beyond the murderous hypocrisy, it was the fact that men could dispose of the destiny of entire nations that Lenin, leader of the Bolsheviks, now assimilated. But whereas European rulers and generals knowingly sent millions to their deaths for God knows what, Lenin could assert that he was willing to sacrifice millions for what now, thanks to the imperialist war, looked more than ever like a just cause: peace and social justice. Marx, in The Communist Manifesto, had celebrated the intense dynamism of capitalism, but Lenin emphasized its limitless destructiveness: the war, in his view, showed that capitalism had irrevocably exhausted whatever progressive potential it once had. And Europe’s Social Democrats who had failed to oppose the war, despite being Marxists, became similarly irredeemable in his eyes.63 Among socialists internationally, Lenin now stood out, radically. “I am still ‘in love’ with Marx and Engels, and I cannot calmly bear to hear them disparaged,” Lenin wrote from Zurich to his mistress Inessa Armand in January 1917. “No really—they are the genuine article. One needs to study them.” He concluded the letter by disparaging “Kautskyites,” that is, followers of Karl Kautsky, the German Social Democrat and towering figure of the socialist Second International (1889–1916), which the war destroyed.64
Lenin added a politics of imitative war techniques to his Marxist ideology, which the wartime slaughterhouse helped to validate in ways that the prewar never did.65 His propaganda work would be almost too easy. With the war raging, he wrote his foundational Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), adapting the ideas of the Brit John Hobson and the Austrian Rudolf Hilferding, arguing that capitalism was doomed but for its recourse to exploitation abroad. But it was hardly necessary to read Lenin to appreciate the link between the Great War and colonial rapaciousness. Between 1876 and 1915, gigantic swaths of the world’s territory had changed hands, usually violently.66 France had amassed a global empire 20 times its size, and Britain 140 times, colonizing hundreds of millions of people. Outside Europe, only Japan had managed to stave off the European onslaught and, with its own overseas colonies, emulate Europe’s rapaciousness. In German-controlled South-West Africa, when the colonized Herrero rebelled (1904–7), suppression escalated into extermination—and almost succeeded: Germany wiped out up to 75 percent of the natives.67 The most notorious of all was tiny Belgium’s empire—80 times its size—which, in the pursuit of rubber and glory, enslaved, mutilated, and slaughtered perhaps half of Congo’s population, as many as 10 million people, in the decades before 1914.68 But this was the thing about the Great War: even in countries that practiced rule of law, politicians and generals used their own citizens no better, and often worse, than they had their colonial subjects. The British commander at the Somme, General Sir Douglas Haig, demonstrated no concern for human life, neither the enemy’s nor that of his own men. “Three years of war and the loss of one-tenth of the manhood of the nation is not too great a price to pay in so great a cause,” Haig wrote in his diary. When British casualties were too low, the general saw a sign of loss of will.69 Of the 3.6 million men under arms in 1914 in democratic France—the only republic among the great powers—fewer than 1 million remained by 1917. Some 2.7 million had been killed, wounded, taken prisoner, or gone missing. Civilians died en masse, too. No large European city was laid waste—mostly, the Great War was fought in villages and fields—but state “security” now meant the destruction of the enemy culturally, as the Germans had demonstrated from the outset in Belgium: libraries, cathedrals, and the civilians who embodied the enemy nation were made targets of bombing and deliberate starvation.70 “This is not war,” a wounded Indian soldier wrote home from the carnage of France in 1915, “it is the ending of the world.”71
CONSCRIPTS AND THE AWOL
Stalin missed the war. That summer of 1914, at age thirty-six, he was serving the second year of a four-year term of internal exile in the northeastern Siberian wastes of Turukhansk. This was the longest consecutive term of banishment he would serve, wallowing near the Arctic Circle right into 1917. This time, the authorities had moved him too far beyond the railhead for escape. While two generations of men, the flower of Europe, were fed into the maw, he battled little more than mosquitoes and boredom.
None of the top Bolsheviks saw action at the front. Lenin and Trotsky were in comfortable foreign exile. In July 1915, Lenin wrote to Zinoviev, “Do you remember Koba’s name?” Lenin obviously meant Koba’s real name or surname. Zinoviev did not recall. In November 1915 Lenin wrote to another comrade, “Do me a big favor: find out from Stepko [Kiknadze] or Mikha [Tskhakaya] the last name of ‘Koba’ (Iosif J—??). We have forgotten. Very important!” What Lenin was after remains unknown.72 He was soon busy wrongly attributing the conquest of 85 percent of the globe to inexorable economic motivations. Trotsky, who dashed from country to country during the conflict, was writing journalistic essays about trench warfare and the war’s sociopsychological impact, political life in many European countries and in the United States, and the politics of socialist movements in relation to the war, calling for a “United States of Europe” as a way to halt the conflict.73 But Stalin, Trotsky would later observe, published absolutely nothing of consequence during the greatest conflict of world history, a war that roiled the international socialist movement. The future
arbiter of all thought left no wartime thoughts whatsoever, not even a diary.74
Extreme isolation appears to have been a factor. Stalin wrote numerous letters from godforsaken Siberia to Bolsheviks in European exile begging for books that he had already requested, particularly on the national question. He contemplated assembling a collected volume of his essays on that topic, building on his 1913 article “Marxism and the National Question.” Before the war commenced, in early 1914, Stalin completed and sent one long article, “On Cultural Autonomy,” but it was lost (and never found).75 He wrote to Kamenev (in February 1916) that he was at work on two more, “The National Movement in Its Historical Development” and “War and the National Movement,” and provided an outline of the content. He was aiming to solve the relationship between imperialist war and nationalism and state forms, developing a rationale for large-scale multinational states.
“Imperialism as the political expression [. . .] The insufficiency of the old frameworks of the ‘national state’. The breaking up of these frameworks and the tendency to form states of [multiple] nationalities. Consequently the tendency to annexation and war. [. . .] Consequently the belief in nat[ional] liberation. The popularity of the principle of nat. self-determination as a counterweight to the principle of annexation. The clear weakness (economic and otherwise) of small states . . . The insufficiency of a completely independent existence of small and medium-sized states and the fiasco of the idea of nat. separation [. . . ] A broadened and deepened union of states on the one hand and, on the other, autonomy of nat. regions within states. [. . .] it should express itself in the proclamation of the autonomy of a nat. territory within multinational states in the struggle for the united states of Europe.”76
These thoughts predated publication of Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, and dovetailed somewhat with Trotsky’s writings on a United States of Europe (which Lenin had attacked). But Stalin’s promised wartime articles, which he told Kamenev were “almost ready,” never materialized.
Severe isolation cannot be the whole explanation. In Siberian exile Stalin made the acquaintance of a future rival, Yankel “Yakov” Sverdlov (b. 1885), the son of a Jewish engraver from Nizhny Novgorod, who had completed four years of gymnasium. Like Stalin, Sverdlov had been co-opted in absentia into the Bolshevik Central Committee after the 1912 party gathering in Prague. The two had been betrayed by the same okhranka agent within Bolshevik ranks, Malinowski, and overlapped for several years in Turukhansk, including in remote Kureika, a settlement of perhaps thirty to forty inhabitants. During the war in remote Siberia, Sverdlov managed to complete a pamphlet history titled Mass Exile, 1906–1916 and a number of articles: “Essays on the History of the International Worker Movement,” “Essays on Turukhansk Region,” “The Downfall of Capitalism,” “The Schism in German Social Democracy,” “The War in Siberia.”77 He also wrote letters that revealed a rivalry with Stalin. “My friend [Stalin] and I differ in many ways,” Sverdlov wrote in a letter postmarked for Paris on March 12, 1914. “He is a very lively person and despite his forty years has preserved the ability to react vivaciously to the most varied phenomena. In many cases, he poses new questions where for me there are none any more. In that sense he is fresher than me. Do not think that I put him above myself. No, I’m superior [krupnee], and he himself realizes this. . . . We wagered and played a game of chess, I checkmated him, then we parted late at night. In the morning, we met again, and so it is every day, we are our only two in Kureika.” For a brief time, they roomed together. “There are two of us” in a single room, Sverdlov wrote to his second wife, Klavdiya Novogorodtseva. “With me is the Georgian Jughashvili, an old acquaintance . . . He’s a decent fellow, but too much of an egoist in everyday life.” Soon enough, Sverdlov could not take it anymore and moved out. “We know each other too well,” he wrote on May 27, 1914, to Lidiya Besser, the wife of an engineer revolutionary. “The saddest thing is that in conditions of exile or prison a man is stripped bare before you and revealed in all petty respects. . . . Now the comrade and I are living in different quarters and rarely see each other.”78
Stalin took to indulging in the desolate circumstances of his profound isolation. When a fellow Siberian exile drowned, Stalin seized the man’s library for himself alone, violating the exiles’ code, and cementing his reputation for self-centeredness. Stalin also continued to engage in the exiled revolutionary’s pastime of seducing and abandoning peasant girls. He impregnated one of his landlord’s daughters, the thirteen-year-old Lidiya Pereprygina, and when the police intervened he had to vow to marry her, but then betrayed his promise; she gave birth to a son, who soon died. (Stalin would later recall his dog in Siberia, Tishka, but not his female companions and bastards.) During Turukhansk’s eight months of winter, the future dictator cut holes through the river ice to fish for sustenance, like the indigenous fur-clad tribesmen around him, and went on long, solitary hunts in the dark, snowed-in forests. (“If you live among wolves,” Stalin would later say, “you must behave like a wolf.”)79 Sudden, blinding snowstorms nearly took his life. Ever the agitator and teacher, he also harangued the local indigenous people, Yakut and Evenki, in his cold, cramped rented room, whose windows had no glass, vainly trying to recruit them to the revolutionary struggle. He had an audience but few genuine interlocutors, let alone followers. (Stalin’s supposed Caucasus gang, never more than a tiny band of irregular followers, had long ago dispersed, never to be assembled again.) He did manage to turn the pitiful gendarme assigned to guard him into a subordinate who fetched his mail and accompanied him on unsanctioned trips to meet fellow exiles in the scattered settlements.80 And his Armenian fellow exile, Suren Spandaryan, accompanied by his girlfriend, Vera Schweitzer, did make a long trek northward on the frozen Yenisei River to visit. But, dirt poor, Stalin mainly wrote to everyone he knew begging for money as well as for books. “My greetings to you, dear Vladimir Ilich, warm-warm greetings,” he wrote to Lenin. “Greetings to Zinoviev, greetings to Nadezhda! How are things, how is your health? I live as before, I gnaw my bread, and am getting through half my sentence. Boring—but what can be done?” In his supplication to the Alliluyev sisters (in Petrograd), Stalin complained of “the incredible dreariness of nature in this damned region.”81 He fathered a second son by Lidiya, Alexander, who survived—his second surviving bastard—but, like his first, Konstantin, in Solvychegodsk, he left the boy behind.
In late 1916, Stalin received a draft notice. But in January 1917, after a six-week trip by reindeer-pulled sleds from Turukhansk through the tundra down to the induction center at Krasnoyarsk in southern Siberia, the future dictator was disqualified from army service because of his physical deformities.82
What was the tsarist state doing trying to induct riffraff like Stalin and his fellow internal exiles? Russia, like most of the Great Powers, had mandated universal conscription in the 1870s. For some time thereafter, states did not wield the governing capacity or financial wherewithal to realize such complete mobilizations. In France, half the second-year call-ups would be given noncombatant jobs, while in Germany about half the possible conscripts were often missing from the ranks. In Russia, two thirds of the eligible pool had been exempted from conscription. As the Great War approached, the imperatives heightened to fulfill the universal call to the colors, but states still fell short.83 Still, at the war’s outbreak Russia fielded the world’s largest force, 1.4 million in uniform. Britain and France referred to their ally’s mass army as “the steamroller.” Despite draft riots, moreover, another 5 million Russian subjects were conscripted in the second half of 1914 alone.84 But just as the war killed or wounded nearly the entire 1914 officer corps, it chewed through conscripts. At least 2 million Russian troops met death over the course of hostilities.85 The tsarist authorities were forced to dig ever deeper.86 Of imperial Russia’s 1914 estimated population of 178 million, nearly 18 million were eligible for service, and 15 million of them would be conscripted. This was a huge numbe
r, but proportionately smaller than in France (8 million of 40 million) or Germany (13 million of 65 million). To be sure, during the war, hired labor on Russian farms fell by almost two thirds, and Russian factories were frequently emptied of skilled labor, too. The call-ups also took away half of Russia’s primary schoolteachers (who were not in abundance to start with). And yet, the relative limits in Russian numbers indicated limits to the tsarist regime’s reach over the vast empire. Russia could not manage to take full advantage of what had so terrified the German high command: namely, the gigantic population.87
That said, once on the battlefield, Russian troops and field officers acquitted themselves well, despite initial shortages—more severe than suffered by the other belligerents—of shells, rifles, bullets, uniforms, and boots.88 Between August and December 1914, Russian armies drove into Germany’s eastern flank and over time managed to crush Austria-Hungary. Against Ottoman armies, Russia did far better than the British, emerging victorious after the Ottomans had invaded Russia in winter 1914–15 expecting, erroneously, to ignite Russia’s Muslims. The problem, however, was that the Germans recovered to repel Russia’s early advances and encircle Russian troops at Tannenberg (southeast of Danzig), then forced a 300-mile Russian retreat.89 By late 1915, German-led forces had not only reversed the Russian conquests of the previous year in Habsburg Galicia, but had overrun Russian Poland, with its vital industry and coal mines; much of Belorussia; and Courland (on the Baltic), thereby threatening Petrograd. Nonetheless, from 1914 to 1916, the Russian army tied down more than 100 Central Powers’ divisions on the eastern front; until 1917, Russia captured more German prisoners than Britain and France combined.90