Stalin, Volume 1

by Stephen Kotkin

  LENIN’S HELPMATES

  Lenin’s faction of Bolsheviks showed themselves in 1917 to be a disorganized yet tough street-fighting group.58 The Bolsheviks now claimed some 25,000 members, a number impossible to verify (membership was often not formalized), but hard-core activists numbered closer to 1,000, and the top insiders could fit around a conference table (if they were not in exile or jail). Still, after February, Bolshevism had become a mass phenomenon in the capital: in the armaments and machine factories along Petrograd’s Lesser Neva River, in the huge Franco-Russian shipyard, in the sprawling Putilov Works, in the Petrograd neighborhood known as the Vyborg side, there were large concentrations of industrial workers and they fell under a barrage of Bolshevik agitation. Workers’ radical moods, in other words, were tied to radical stances of the Bolshevik Party. The Vyborg district especially became, in effect, an autonomous Bolshevik commune.59

  Bolshevik party headquarters, where Stalin was also holed up, was initially established at a “requisitioned” art nouveau mansion whose chandeliered interiors and excellent garages were perfectly situated—not only close to the Vyborg district, but right across from the Winter Palace. The compound had been seized from the Polish-born prima ballerina of Russia’s Imperial Mariinsky Theater, Matylda Krzesinska, who had acquired the property thanks to her lovers, Nicholas II (before his marriage), and then, simultaneously, two Romanov grand dukes.60 (She later claimed to have spotted the Bolshevik Alexandra Kollontai in the mansion’s garden wearing her left-behind ermine coat.)61 Such house seizures were illegal but difficult for the policeless Provisional Government to reverse. The Federation of Anarchist-Communists, sprung from prison, seized the former villa of the deceased Pyotr Durnovó in a beautiful park abutting the factories of the Vyborg side.62 Beyond Vyborg, Bolshevism developed key strongholds in the Baltic fleet, stationed in Helsinki and Kronstadt near Petrograd and accessible to Bolshevik (as well as anarchist-syndicalist) agitators. Where Bolshevik agitators did not reach—factories in Ukraine, the Black Sea fleet—the socialist-leaning masses did not identify with the party. In the vast countryside, Bolshevism achieved little presence through most of 1917 (of the 1,000 delegates to the First All-Russia Congress of Peasants’ Deputies, perhaps 20 identified as Bolsheviks).63 And in 1917 there were between one and two dozen Muslim Bolsheviks in all of Russia.64 Still, Bolshevik strongholds were strategic—the capital, the capital garrison, and the front near the capital.

  The Bolsheviks had to earn their standing, and in pockets they did so. For those within earshot of the message that Stalin and others were tirelessly propagating, Bolshevism possessed nonpareil recruiting tools: the absolutely hated war and the all-purpose explanation of class exploitation of haves and have-nots, which resonated beyond anyone’s wildest imagination. That said, the war did not inevitably provide for Bolshevik triumph. The Provisional Government, as we shall see, chose not just to remain in the war but to launch a catastrophic offensive in June 1917.65 This decision became an opportunity for those most radical, and Lenin had set up the Bolshevik party to benefit from it.

  In exile, living in Zurich, in a single room, near a sausage factory, Lenin had been calling for the defeat of his own country in war, but suffered no legal consequences. On the contrary, he fell under the Provisional Government’s March 1917 general amnesty for victims of tsarism. But he had no official permission to return and, in any case, was trapped behind German lines.66 To get back to Russia he quietly solicited Germany’s help through intermediaries, thereby risking charges of being a German agent—the devastating accusation that had fatally punctured the tsarist autocracy.67 Berlin was showering money on Russia’s radicals, especially the Socialist Revolutionaries, in order to overturn the Provisional Government and force Russia out of the war on German terms, and was sold on assisting the fanatical Bolshevik leader, too—referred to as “a Tatar by the name of Lenin.”68 Both sides, however, aimed to blunt accusations of serving the enemy Germans and so Lenin traveled through German lines to Russia on what has been called a sealed train—that is, his carriage was locked and neutral Swiss intermediaries handled all contact with German authorities en route. The train departed Zurich on March 27, 1917 (by the Russian calendar), for Berlin and then the Baltic coast with thirty-two Russian emigres, nineteen of them Bolsheviks (including Lenin, his wife, Nadzehda Krupskaya; his onetime French mistress, Inessa Armand; and Zinoviev with wife and child) as well as other radicals.69 The Menshevik Social Democrats Martov and Axelrod chose not to risk treason charges by accepting a German deal without having obtained the permission of the Provisional Government (the Mensheviks ended up traveling on a later train).70 Lenin’s only obligation in the bargain was to agitate for release of Austrian and German civilians held in Russia. He had no compunction about availing himself of imperial Germany’s logistical assistance and finances in order to subvert Russia; he anticipated revolution in Germany, too, as a result of the war. Lenin never admitted the truth about receiving German money, but he was not a German agent; he had his own agenda.71 Lenin had the Bolsheviks discuss how they would conduct themselves in the event they were taken into custody at the Russian border on orders of the Provisional Government and subjected to interrogation, fears that did not materialize.72 (Karl Radek, who held an Austro-Hungarian passport, was denied entry into Russia as a subject of an enemy country.) The worried ambassador of France, Russia’s ally, listening to Foreign Minister Miliukov—who could have blocked Lenin’s return—saw the Bolshevik leader’s arrival as a radical new danger.73 But Lenin was not arrested at Petrograd’s Finland Station (in the Vyborg district “Bolshevik Commune”), where he arrived at 11:10 p.m. on April 3, 1917, the day after Easter Sunday. Lenin climbed atop an armored vehicle, illuminated by specially wheeled-in spotlights, to speak at the station to a sizable crowd of workers, soldiers, and sailors, who were seeing him for the first time.

  In the vast expanses of the Russian empire very few had any knowledge of Lenin.74 Many of the hundreds of thousands of villages had not learned of the February Revolution until April and the spring thaw. Lenin’s April 3 return coincided with the onset of mass land seizures in Russia, a phenomenon unknown in the French Revolution of 1789. On the eve of the Great War, Russia’s peasants had owned roughly 47 percent of the empire’s land, including forests and meadows, having purchased land from nobles in the four decades following emancipation, often as a collective (commune), sometimes individually, especially beginning with Stolypin’s 1906 reforms.75 But if gentry holdings had been reduced to roughly equal that of peasant holdings, the peasantry still composed 80 percent of the population, the gentry a mere 2 percent.76 Peasant expectations of a total land redistribution were intense, and the wartime tsarist government had helped spur them, confiscating land from ethnic Germans living in imperial Russia, which was supposed to be redistributed to valiant Russian soldiers or landless peasants. The army, on its own, promised free land to winners of medals, spurring rumors that all soldiers would receive land at war’s end.77 Total tsarist government confiscations of agricultural land during the war—which was seized with minimal or zero compensation from some of the empire’s most productive farmers, and contributed to the severe shortage of grain in 1916 and the bread riots in 1917—amounted to at least 15 million acres.78 Now, the peasants began to follow suit, seizing crop lands, draft animals, implements, in what they called the Black Repartition. The Provincial Government tried to resist, arguing that decisions on land reform had to await the forthcoming Constituent Assembly. Indeed, even after the seizures became a mass phenomenon, and even though it could never muster the force to prevent or reverse such seizures, the Provisional Government refused to accede to uncompensated peasant expropriation of land.

  Years of colossal peasant effort to realize Stolypin’s dream of a stratum of independent, well-off yeoman on large enclosed farms vanished nearly overnight in 1917–18, without resistance; on the contrary, many peasants deliberately reduced the size of their farms.79 Even sma
ller enclosed farms underwent redistributions. The commune reasserted itself.80 Even as peasants engaged in illegalities, they employed a vocabulary of rights and citizenship.81 Gentry-owned estates were the main targets. They had in many cases survived during the Great War only because of an ability to call upon the labor of 430,000 prisoners of war and, in peasant logic, after February 1917, if an estate had been deprived of peasant labor and was idle, its takeover was legitimate.82 Indeed, many of the land seizures did not occur in one fell swoop; rather, peasants spoke of “excess” gentry lands and of putting “idle” land to the plow—and took more and more. But because most peasant land seizures were carried out collectively, as a village, in which all shared responsibility and all divided up the plunder into their carts, the assembled peasants usually became as radical as the most radical members present. Invariably, the radicals urged their country folk to carry off still more and even to burn down the valuable manor houses. Harvesters and winnowing machines were too big to cart off and were left behind, sometimes vandalized. As for animals, often peasants heated the oven, butchered the sheep, geese, ducks, and hens, and laid on a feast.83 But in the end, far from all peasants ended up with their own dreams fulfilled: around half of peasant communes gained no land at all from the revolution, while much of the land peasants did “obtain” they had already been leasing. One scholar has estimated that around 11 percent of gentry landowners would remain into the 1920s, tending remnants of their lands.84 Still, that means the vast majority were expropriated. Peasants stopped making payments to the big landowners, and collectively expropriated around 50 million acres of gentry land.85

  Compared with this immense upheaval—the peasants’ own revolution—Lenin was a single person. And yet, his role in 1917 was pivotal. Marxist theory held that history moved in stages—feudalism, capitalism, socialism, communism—such that before advancing to socialism, it was necessary to develop the bourgeois-capitalism stage. Almost all Bolsheviks expected that the revolution would move toward socialism eventually, but the issue was when: they argued vehemently about whether the “bourgeois” or “democratic” revolution phase was complete or had to go further in order to prepare the way for the socialist revolution. Lenin was not proposing an immediate leap into socialism, which would have been blasphemy, but an acceleration of the move toward socialism—what he would call “one foot in socialism”—by not waiting for the full development of the bourgeois revolution and instead seizing political power now.86

  In Petrograd, the Bolshevik Russia Bureau—“Russia” as opposed to foreign exile (Lenin)—was led by the thirty-two-year-old Alexander Shlyapnikov and the twenty-seven-year-old Vyacheslav Molotov, and they (especially Molotov) had been dismissive of the Provisional Government as counterrevolutionary. By contrast, Stalin and Kamenev called for conditionally supporting the “democratic” revolution, meaning the Provisional Government, in order that the democratic revolution would go through to the end. When the pair had returned from Siberia to Petrograd on March 12, 1917, neither was invited to join the Russia Bureau, although Stalin was offered “advisory status.” (He was rebuked for “certain personal features that are basic to him,” evidently negative personal behavior toward fellow Siberian exiles.)87 The next day Molotov, an early and lifelong hard-liner, like Lenin, was elbowed out, and Stalin became a proper member of the Russia Bureau, while Kamenev became editor of Pravda.88 Kamenev and Stalin immediately turned Pravda away from absolute repudiation of the Provisional Government toward opportunistically working with it, arguing that it was doomed but in the meantime had significant historical work to carry out. This provoked Lenin’s ire from afar. His first angry missive was printed in Pravda with distorted editing, his second was suppressed entirely.89 But then he showed up.

  Lenin had greeted Kamenev at the border in smiling rebuke: “What’s this you’re writing in Pravda?”90 Even now, the Bolshevik organ refused to publish its own leader’s theses. An April 6, 1917, Bolshevik Central Committee meeting outright rejected Lenin’s theses. After all, the bourgeois-democratic revolution had only just begun, the country needed land reform, an exit from the war, economic reform, and how would the proletariat, by overturning the Provisional Government, advance all that? (As one Bolshevik commented, “How can the democratic revolution be over? The peasants do not have the land!”)91 Kamenev especially pointed out that the bourgeois classes in the towns and the better-off peasants had a great deal of historical work still to bear on behalf of the socialist revolution, by carrying the bourgeois-democratic revolution through to the end.92 Stalin deemed Lenin’s theses “a schema, there are no facts in them, and therefore they do not satisfy.”93 Pravda finally published the ten “April Theses” (some 500 words) on April 7, under Lenin’s name, but accompanied by an editorial note by Kamenev distancing the party from its leader.94

  If the top Bolsheviks had not been inclined to force a seizure of power, the same was even truer of the Petrograd Soviet. Before Lenin’s arrival back in Russia, in late March, representatives of the Soviet had gathered to establish a new seventy-two-person All-Russia central executive committee, as well as various departments for food supply, the economy, foreign affairs, thereby asserting the Petrograd Soviet’s writ over the whole of Russia. The Soviet also pledged conditional support for the “bourgeois” Provisional Government (about half the Bolshevik delegates voted in favor).95 At the Finland Station on April 3, Nikoloz “Karlo” Chkheidze, the Georgian Menshevik Social Democrat who had become chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, had greeted Lenin on behalf of that body in the former tsar’s reception room. Outside, after Lenin denounced the Petrograd Soviet’s cooperation with the Provisional Government, concluding “Long live the world socialist revolution!,” he had ridden the armored vehicle to Bolshevik HQ at the Krzesinska mansion. There, well after midnight, he gave a “thunder-like speech” to about seventy members of his faction, arranged on chairs in a circle.96 The next day, at a meeting of the Petrograd Soviet in the Tauride Palace, he reiterated his radical “April Theses,” arguing that the pathetic Russian bourgeoisie was incapable of carrying through its historical tasks, which compelled Russia to accelerate from the bourgeois-democratic toward the proletarian-socialist revolution.97 One Bolshevik took the floor to liken Lenin to the anarchist Bakunin (who had fought bitterly with Marx). Another speaker called Lenin’s theses “the ravings of a madman.”98 Even Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, who had known him since 1894, observed according to a friend that “I am afraid it looks as if Lenin has gone crazy,” one reason perhaps that he ceased to use her as his principal secretary.99 Yet another Bolshevik advised that “after Lenin becomes acquainted with the state of affairs in Russia, he himself will reject all these constructions of his.”100 When Irakli Tsereteli, the chairman of the Soviet’s central executive committee (and a Georgian Menshevik), offered a reasoned refutation of Lenin’s views while extending an olive branch—“however irreconcilable Vladimir Ilich may be, I am convinced we’ll be reconciled”—Lenin leaned over the balustrade and shouted, “Never!”101

  Lenin browbeat his inner circle relentlessly, while also occasionally addressing outdoor crowds from the Krzesinska mansion balcony. By the end of April 1917, at a Bolshevik party conference, a majority voted for Lenin’s resolutions, thanks partly to the voices of the sometimes more radical provincials who were brought to the fore, as well as to other loyalists who supported their leader.102 Despite Lenin’s formal policy victory in late April, however, the Bolshevik inner circle remained divided over when, and even whether, to push for soviet power as opposed to completing the bourgeois-democratic revolution. As Lenin continued to press his views for embracing the moment, he insisted that the Bolshevik Central Committee lagged far behind the masses. (That would prove true: the mobilization of the masses did mobilize would-be elites, including the Bolshevik leadership.)103 Meanwhile, Stalin, initially an ally of Kamenev, emerged as a crucial ally of Lenin.

  Stalin has wrongly been dismissed as the man who “
missed” the October Revolution. True, he does appear to have missed Lenin’s arrival at the Finland Station (perhaps because he was at a meeting trying to convert left-wing Mensheviks to the Bolshevik side.)104 Also, Stalin initially resisted Lenin’s heretical April 3 radicalism (for which he would publicly apologize in 1924).105 But at the late April conference, Stalin gave his first-ever political report to an official Bolshevik gathering and broke with Kamenev and sided with Lenin. “Only a united party can lead the people to victory,” Stalin wrote of the April conference in Soldiers’ Pravda.106 Stalin did not buckle under abjectly, however: whereas Lenin sought land nationalization, Stalin insisted the peasantry get the land—a position that eventually won out.107 Stalin also rejected Lenin’s slogan of turning the “imperialist war” into a “European civil war,” reasoning that besides land, the masses desired peace—and Lenin, too, now called for an immediate peace.108 Thus Stalin managed to become loyal to Lenin while defending positions that he, among others, held to. When Stalin’s candidacy for a new nine-member party Central Committee came under criticism from Caucasus comrades who claimed to know him well, Lenin vouched for him. “We’ve known Com. Koba for very many years,” Lenin told the voting delegates. “We used to see him in Krakow where we had our Bureau. His activity in the Caucasus was very important. He’s a good official in all sorts of responsible work.”109 In the Central Committee elections, Stalin claimed the third most votes, 97, behind only Lenin and Zinoviev (both of whom would soon become fugitives). Stalin also replaced Kamenev as editor of Pravda.