Stalin, Volume 1

by Stephen Kotkin

  Alexeyev, informed by Ruzsky, now took it upon himself to contact all the front commanders and urge them to support Nicholas II’s abdication “to save the army.” Each commander—sharing a general staff esprit de corps—was to telegraph his request for Nicholas to step down directly to Pskov, with copies to Alexeyev. Later that morning of March 2, 1917, General Ruzsky, as per Alexeyev’s instructions, reported to the tsar’s imperial train carrying the tapes of the conversation with Rodzyanko urging abdication in favor of Tsarevich Alexei and Grand Duke Mikhail as regent.185 Nicholas II read, walked to the carriage window, went silent, then stated he “was prepared, if necessary for Russia’s welfare, to step aside.” Nothing was decided. Around 2:00 p.m., however, the telegrams arrived from the front commanders—Brusilov and all the rest, plus Alexeyev—unanimously urging abdication; Ruzsky took them to the tsar, who made the sign of the cross and soon emerged to request that HQ prepare an abdication manifesto. Whether Nicholas II would have renounced his sacred calling had he made it to Tsarskoe Selo and the arms of Alexandra can never be known. (“And you, who are alone, no army behind you, caught like a mouse in a trap, what can you do?” Old Wify cabled him on March 2.)186 Stoic, as ever, the now-former tsar was quietly anguished. “All around me,” Nicholas II confided to his diary, “there is nothing but treason, cowardice, and deceit!”187 The tsar’s diaries indicate that only the urging of his generals persuaded him to abdicate.188

  And so, in the guise of patriotism, it had come to treason after all.

  In violating their oaths—sworn to the tsar, after all—the high commanders could imagine they were saving the army. Desertions were running at 100,000 to 200,000 per month, swelling the ranks of protesting crowds and criminal bands, and clogging the critical railroad stations.189 In addition, the February rebellion had spread from Petrograd to Moscow and the Baltic fleet, threatening the front.190 As far back as the disturbances during the Russo-Japanese War, Alexeyev had concluded that “a revolution from above is always less painful than one from below.”191 But though “military dictatorship” crossed the lips of many civilian elites, and contemporary examples existed—General Ludendorff, de facto, in Germany; the young Turk officers in the Ottoman Empire—Alexeyev and Russia’s military men refrained from claiming power themselves.192 It cannot be that Russian generals lacked confidence in their ability to take over civilian affairs (they had already usurped much civilian operational authority to manage the war). Moreover, Alexeyev had very good information from the general staff and the naval staff in the capital about the incompetence and prevarication of Russia’s civilian leaders. But the officers detested the dirty work of serving as an auxiliary police force and crushing domestic rebellion, a task that undermined the army’s military function and tarnished it in society. Steeped in their military general staff ethos, moreover, they had not developed broad political horizons.193 And so, needing to quell the disorders engulfing the wartime capital and save the army and war effort, Alexeyev saw—or imagined—a solution in the Duma’s Provisional Committee, aided by the figurehead of a new tsar, Aleksei, a darling-looking boy.194 Their calculations were destined to be upended.

  • • •

  RUSSIA WAS a genuine great power, but with a tragic flaw. Its vicious, archaic autocracy had to be emasculated for any type of better system to emerge. Unmodern in principle, let alone in practice, the autocracy died a deserving death in the maelstrom of the Anglo-German antagonism, the bedlam of Serbian nationalism, the hemophilia bequeathed by Queen Victoria, the pathology of the Romanov court, the mismanagement by the Russian government of its wartime food supply, the determination of women and men marching for bread and justice, the mutiny of the capital garrison, and the defection of the Russian high command. But the Great War did not break a functioning autocratic system; the war smashed an already broken system wide open.

  Not knowing that the military brass had already successfully pressured Nicholas II into abdicating, the self-appointed Provisional Committee of the Duma had sent two deputies to Pskov to do so. The emissaries were both lifelong monarchists, and inveterate palace coup plotters: Alexander Guchkov and Vasily Shulgin. They were unshaven; Shulgin in particular was said to resemble a convict.195 “Having given my consent to abdication, I must be sure that you have considered what impression this will make on all of the rest of Russia,” Nicholas II said to the pair. “Will this not carry dangerous consequences?”196 Consequences there would be.

  By February 1917, Pyotr Durnovó was a year and a half in his grave, but his February 1914 prophecies were already on their way to fulfillment: the constitutionalists’ revolt against the autocracy was accelerating a mass social revolution. Lenin—for the time being—lived outside Russia, behind German lines, in neutral Switzerland. Stalin was holed up in the Siberian backwater of Achinsk, one of myriad internal political exiles. There, as almost everywhere in the Russian empire (including in his native Georgia), the February Revolution arrived by telegraph (“All is in the hands of the people”). On March 3, a local soviet assumed power in Krasnoyarsk city, the regional center, and began arresting local tsarist officials. Stalin—suddenly a free man, for the first time in nearly seventeen years—boarded the Trans-Siberian Railway bound for Petrograd. It was some 3,000 miles away. He traveled in the company of fellow Bolshevik exile Lev Kamenev as well as his own latest girlfriend, Vera Schweitzer, the widow of the Bolshevik Central Committee member Suren Spandaryan, who had perished in the wastes of Stalin’s place of exile, Turukhansk, Siberia, at age thirty-four of lung problems. The future dictator arrived in the imperial capital on March 12, 1917, wearing Siberian valenki (felt boots) and carrying little more than a typewriter.197

  CHAPTER 6

  KALMYK SAVIOR

  Some comrades said it is utopian to advance the question of the socialist revolution, because capitalism is weakly developed with us. They would be correct if there were no war, if there were no disintegration, if the foundations of the economy were not shattered.

  Iosif Stalin, Bolshevik Party Congress, late July 19171

  Save Russia and a grateful people will reward you.

  A shout-out to General Lavr Kornilov, supreme commander, by a Constitutional Democrat, August 19172

  “IT’S STAGGERING!” exclaimed one exiled revolutionary at the newspaper reports of the February downfall of the monarchy in Russia. “It’s so incredibly unexpected!”3 That exile was forty-seven years old and named Vladimir Ulyanov, better known as Lenin. For nearly seventeen years straight he had been living outside Russia. After tsarism’s coercive and corrupt rule, its narrow privilege and pervasive poverty, and above all its relentless denial of human dignity, hope for new horizons understandably soared. The entire empire, while at war, became embroiled in one gigantic, continuous political meeting, with a sense anything might be possible.4 The removal of tsar and dynasty during the monumental war, it turned out, would exacerbate nearly every governing problem it had been meant to solve. The downfall of any authoritarian regime does not ipso facto produce democracy, of course. A constitutional order must be created and sustained by attracting and holding mass allegiance, and by establishing effective instruments of governance. The Provisional Government, which replaced the tsar, would achieve none of that.

  As both anarchy and hope erupted in the war-torn land, new and transformed mass organizations proliferated.5 These included not just revolutionary movements, such as the Bolsheviks and others, and not just grassroots soviets and soldiers’ committees but, even more basically, the army and navy. In 1914, imperial Russia’s population of 178 million had been dispersed across 8.5 million square miles of territory, but the war recruited some 15 million imperial subjects into a mass organization—the Russian “steamroller.” This unprecedented concentration would permit, once the tsar had vanished, an otherwise unattainable degree of political activity, right up to full-fledged congresses of elected deputies at the front itself. In mid-1917, some 6 million troops were at the front. Addition
ally, 2.3 million thoroughly politicized soldiers were deployed in sprawling rear garrisons, in almost every urban center of the empire.6 To these millions, the February Revolution meant “peace”—an end to the seemingly endless Great War—and the dawn of a new era.

  Well before 1917, ordinary people readily accepted the idea of an irreconcilable conflict between labor and capital, but rather than speak of classes per se, they tended to speak of light versus darkness, honor versus insult. A trajectory of suffering, redemption, and salvation was how they made sense of the struggle with their masters, not capital accumulation, surplus value, and other Marxist categories.7 This would change as languages of class came to suffuse all printed and spoken public discourse in revolutionary Russia, from farms and factories to the army, fleet, and corridors of power. Even the classically liberal Constitutional Democrats, who strove to be above class (or nonclass), fatally accepted the definition of February as a “bourgeois” revolution.8 This step conceded, implicitly, that February was not in itself an end, but a way station to an eventual new revolution, beyond liberal constitutionalism. As 1917 saw the mass entrance into politics of soldiers and sailors, brought together into a giant organization, Russia’s army would steamroll not Germany but the country’s own political system.

  Given the role that the army had played in 1905–6 in saving the regime, and given the role it could be expected to have to play again, the tsar’s decision to roll the iron dice had been an all-in gamble on the masses’ patriotism. The fatal flaw of the tsarist regime had proven to be its inability to incorporate the masses into the polity, but the widespread politicization of the masses by the war meant that the constitutional experiment of 1917—if it was to have any chance whatsoever of surviving—needed to incorporate not just any masses, but mobilized soldiers and sailors. But if the Great War in effect restructured the political landscape, vastly deepening social justice currents that had already made visions of socialism popular before 1917, the Provisional Government proved no match for that challenge. On top of its feeble governing structures, its entire symbolic universe failed miserably, from the use of a tsarist eagle, uncrowned, as state symbol to its new national anthem, “God Save the People,” sung to the Glinka melody of “God Save the Tsar.” Caricatures of the Provisional Government were accompanied by popular pamphlets, songs, and gestures that discredited all things bourgeois, attacking the educated, the decently dressed, the literate, as fat cats, swindlers—even Russia’s Stock Market Gazette poked fun at the bourgeoisie.9 At the same time, in 1917, far more even than in 1905–6, Russia’s constitutional revolution was deluged by a multifaceted leftist revolutionary culture enacted in evocative gestures and imagery: the “Internationale,” red flags and red slogans, and a vague yet compelling program of people’s power: “All Power to the Soviets.” The potent hammer-and-sickle symbol appeared in spring 1917 (well before the Bolshevik coup), and it would soon capture the linkage—or the hoped-for linkage—between the aspirations of urbanites and the aspirations of country folk, joined in possibilities for social justice (socialism). The political mood in 1917, as one contemporary observer rightly noted, was characterized by “a general aspiration of a huge mass of Russians to declare themselves, no matter what, to be absolute socialists.”10

  How “socialism” came to be Bolshevism, and how the Bolsheviks came to be Leninist, are separate questions. Lenin and the Bolsheviks neither invented nor made broadly popular in Russia European socialism’s long-developing symbolic repertoire, to which the war and then the February Revolution added profound extra impetus. But if the Russian empire experienced a mind-and-spirit mass socialist revolution—in the city streets and villages, at the front and in the garrisons, in the borderlands and even in adjacent regions beyond the state border—well before the Bolshevik coup in October 1917, the Bolsheviks in 1917 (and beyond) would manage to claim the socialist revolutionary repertoire, indeed, relatively quickly, almost to monopolize it. “The revolution” came to Lenin, and he proved ready to seize it, even against much of the Bolshevik inner circle.

  Stalin’s role in 1917 has been a subject of dispute. Nikolai Sukhanov (Himmer), the ubiquitous chronicler of revolutionary events who was a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party and had a Bolshevik wife, forever stamped interpretations, calling Stalin in 1917 “a grey blur, emitting a dim light every now and then and not leaving any trace. There is really nothing more to be said about him.”11 Sukhanov’s characterization, published in the early 1920s, was flat wrong. Stalin was deeply engaged in all deliberations and actions in the innermost circle of the Bolshevik leadership, and, as the coup neared and then took place, he was observed in the thick of events. “I had never seen him in such a state before!” recalled David Sagirashvili (b. 1887), a fellow Social Democrat from Georgia. “Such haste and feverish work was very unusual for him, for normally he was very phlegmatic no matter what he happened to be doing.”12 Above all, Stalin emerged as a powerful voice in Bolshevik propaganda. (For all the talk, most of it negative, about his involvement in expropriations during the wild days of 1905–8, in the underground, from the very beginning, he had really been an agitator and propagandist.) On May Day 1917, he noted that “the third year approaches since the rapacious bourgeoisie of belligerent countries dragged the world into the bloody slaughterhouse”—one of his typically incendiary editorials.13 To party circles as well as public audiences, he delivered speech upon speech, many of which were published in the press. Stalin wrote often in the main Bolshevik newspaper, while editing and shepherding into print far more.14 Between August and October—the critical months—he authored some forty lead articles in Pravda and its temporary replacements Proletariat or Workers’ Path.15 This outpouring—a sharp contrast to his silence during the first nearly three years of the war—stressed the need to seize power in the name of the soviets, which to Lenin meant in the hands of the Bolsheviks.

  The reestablishment of functional institutions and a new authority to fill an immense void was a staggering task, which the ongoing war made still vaster, narrowing the possible political options. All this might appear to have rendered the onset of a new dictatorship a foregone conclusion. But countries do not descend into dictatorship any more than they burst into democracy. A dictatorship, too, must be created, and sustained. And modern dictatorship—the rule of the few in the name of the many—requires not only the incorporation of the masses into a polity but a powerful symbolic repertoire and belief system, in addition to effective instruments of governance and well-motivated repression.16 Amid the kind of state breakdown Russia underwent in 1917, the idea—or fear—that a strong modern dictatorship would be created out of the rampant chaos could only seem farfetched. One key to Bolshevik power, however, lay in the Russian establishment’s tireless search for a savior. Diverse efforts to stave off the triumph of Bolshevism, particularly those centered on Supreme Commander General Lavr Kornilov, would end up having the perverse effect of decisively strengthening Bolshevism. The outcome of the mass participatory process after February 1917 remained dependent on the war and the fundamental structure of soldiers’ moods, but also the specter of counterrevolution, analogized from the French Revolution after 1789. For the Bolsheviks, the idea of counterrevolution was a gift.

  FREEDOM VERSUS FIRM AUTHORITY

  Russia’s constitutional revolution got a second chance, this time, unlike 1905–6, without the autocrat. Mishap and illegitimacy, however, shadowed the Provisional Government from its birth. Nicholas II had agreed to abdicate in favor of thirteen-year-old Alexei and to name Grand Duke Mikhail, his brother, as regent. The high command and Duma president Rodzyanko—monarchists all—counted on the cherubic Alexei to rally the country, while affording them a free hand. But the tsar, conferring once more with his court physician, heard again that hemophilia was incurable and that once the fragile boy took the crown, Nicholas would have to part with him and go into exile, and so, the fatherly tsar impetuously renounced Alexei’s right to the throne, too
, naming Mikhail outright.17 By the 1797 succession law, however, a tsar could be succeeded only by his rightful heir, in this case Nicholas II’s firstborn son, and a minor such as Alexei had no right to renounce the throne.18 Beyond the illegality of naming Grand Duke Mikhail, no one had bothered to consult him; on March 3, a hasty summit took place with him in Petrograd. Paul Miliukov, leader of the Constitutional Democrats (Cadets), argued for retention of the monarchy, stressing tradition and the need to preserve the state; Alexander Kerensky, then a Duma deputy of the left, urged Mikhail to renounce, stressing popular moods.19 Mikhail listened, mulled, and decided not to accept unless a forthcoming Constituent Assembly (or constitutional convention) summoned him to the throne.20 Thus, what the generals had started—Nicholas II’s abdication—the politicians finished: namely, Russia’s de facto conversion into a republic. Two jurists hastily drafted an “abdication” manifesto in which Mikhail transferred “plenary powers” to the Provisional Government, even though the grand duke had no such authority to convey. In the chaos of regime change, the “abdication” manifesto of non-Tsar Mikhail Romanov provided the only “constitution” that would ever undergird the unelected Provisional Government.21

  Revolution, by definition, entails violation of legal niceties. But in this case, eleven men—essentially handpicked by the fifty-eight-year-old Miliukov, who took the foreign ministry—replaced not just the hollowed-out autocracy but also the Duma, whence they emerged.22 This was not because the Duma had become illegitimate. Among most frontline troops as of March 1917, acceptance of, if not confidence in, the Duma remained.23 The Duma, for all its flaws, had earned some stripes by clashing with the autocracy over the years. After being prorogued, some members had convened in defiance of the tsar. But a draft protocol of the Provisional Government’s first session (March 2) indicates that the group of assembled men contemplated resorting to the infamous Article 87 of the tsarist Fundamental Laws to rule without a parliament, a move for which the constitutionalists had viciously denounced Stolypin. The first meeting protocol also specified that “the full plenitude of power belonging to the monarch should be considered as transferred not to the State Duma but to the Provisional Government.”24 In fact, the Provisional Government laid claim to the prerogatives of both legislature and executive: the former Duma (the lower house) as well as the State Council (the upper house, abolished by government decree); the former Council of Ministers (the executive, dismissed by Nicholas II’s order of abdication) and, soon, the abdicated tsar. Initially, the Provisional Government met in the Duma’s Tauride Palace but quickly relocated to the interior ministry and then settled in the gilded imperial Mariinsky Palace, where the Council of Ministers and the State Council had held formal sessions. Poorly attended “private” meetings of the Duma (with Mikhail Rodzyanko still president) would continue through August 20, 1917, and from time to time, ministers of the Provisional Government would trek over to the Tauride to chat privately with members of the aimless Duma. But there was no legislature. Duma members pleaded to have the legislature legally reinstated, but Miliukov and the rest of the Provisional Government refused.25