Stalin, Volume 1

by Stephen Kotkin

  As editor and pundit, Stalin revealed a talent for summarizing complicated issues in a way that could be readily understood. He evidently apologized to Molotov for stabbing him in the back in March—“You were nearest of all to Lenin in the initial stage”—and then took advantage of their communal-style living arrangements to steal Molotov’s girlfriend.110 Soon, though, Stalin would move into the apartment of the Alliluyev family, bringing all his worldly possessions: his typewriter as well as books and some clothes in the same wicker suitcase with which he had returned from Siberia. The Alliluyev daughter Nadya had turned sixteen, and she returned to the apartment in late summer 1917 for the pending school year. Stalin had known the Alliuluyevs since 1900 (Tiflis days), the year before Nadya was born. He treated her like a daughter, reading stories by Chekhov (“Chameleon,” “Dushechka”) to her, her sister Anna, and their friends.111 Charming the girls right through their nightshirts, Stalin turned the boredom, loneliness, and despair of his Siberian exile into dramatic tales of revolutionary exploits. They called him Soso, and he reciprocated with nicknames for them. Their mother, Olga Alliluyeva, was fond of Stalin—they may have had a liaison—but not fond of her teenage daughter falling for the thirty-eight-year-old widower.112 Nadya could be defiant, including to Stalin, but she was also, he noticed, attentive to housework. Within ten months, their courtship would become public.113 All that was in the future, however. For now, Stalin had become a proto-apparatchik and defender of the Leninist line. Even Trotsky would allow, later, that “Stalin was very valuable behind the scenes in preparing the [Bolshevik] fraction for balloting,” adding, condescendingly, that “he did have the knack of convincing the average run of leaders, especially the provincials.”114

  Alongside Stalin, though, another Central Committee figure emerged that April: the thirty-two-year-old Yakov Sverdlov, whom Lenin had finally met in person on April 7, 1917, and began to assign various tasks, which Sverdlov managed handily. Born in 1885, wispy, with a scraggly goatee and glasses, he had joined the Russian Social Democrats in 1902 in Nizhny Novgorod and taken part in the 1905 events while in the Urals. In 1917, Sverdlov, even more than Stalin, remained almost entirely behind the scenes. Not an orator, he nonetheless possessed an authoritative basso voice, and a steely demeanor. Lenin placed him in charge of a small “secretariat” formally created at the April 1917 party conference.115 During Sverdlov’s years in tsarist jails or Siberian exile (1906–17), he had proved able to memorize the real names, noms de guerre, locations, and characteristics of scattered fellow exiles, putting nothing incriminating to paper. He had also twice shared quarters with Stalin (in Narym and Kureika), which resulted in sharp personal conflicts and a certain rivalry.116 Now, however, the two worked side by side. In fact, the younger Sverdlov provided a kind of school in party building for Stalin as they left the speechifying to the orators, such as Zinoviev. With a mere half dozen female clerks at the Krzesinska mansion, Sverdlov, assisted by Stalin, worked to coordinate far-flung party organizations. He received a parade of visitors and, in turn, sent emissaries to Bolshevik committees in the provinces, to jump-start local periodicals and membership, demonstrating a deft touch with provincials. Sverdlov obsessed over details, forcing everything to come to his attention, while placing a premium on concrete actions. Of course, like all political movements in 1917, Bolshevism incarnated bedlam. The organizing was not—and could not have been—directed at producing a centralized, let alone “totalitarian,” party in the conditions of 1917, but at effecting majorities at the gatherings of party representatives in the capital on behalf of Lenin’s positions. In other words, through manipulation of rules, suasion, and favors, Sverdlov showed his helpmate Stalin how to organize a loyal Leninist faction.117

  ZEALOTRY

  Lenin’s zealotry became an instant (and everlasting) legend, but nearly everyone on Russia’s political scene lived under the tyranny of idées fixes. Miliukov, having fought tooth and nail in the Duma against the autocracy’s poor conduct of the war, mulishly clung to the notion that the February Revolution signified a universal desire to conduct the war more successfully. He therefore opposed land reforms and convocation of a constituent assembly before military victory, and even refused to allow revision of tsarism’s imperialist war aims, which secretly entailed annexation of Constantinople and the Turkish Straits, German and Austrian Poland, and other foreign territories. The damage from this zealotry proved as severe as the damage from his March 1917 ditching of the Duma. Leaders of the Menshevik wing of the Social Democrats, for their part, stubbornly stuck to the notion that the Revolution was “bourgeois” in character and therefore they refused to push for socialism, despite insistent prodding from the broad masses they supposedly represented. The Mensheviks soon joined the Provisional Government, in coalition with the Cadets, as did the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs), the party that added the most members in 1917. Theory alone did not motivate them. Partly the crushing defeat in 1905–6 hung over the moderate socialists, a cautionary tale against provoking “counterrevolution” with radicalism.118 But the Menshevik leadership adhered to the core Marxist idea whereby socialism had to await the full development of Russian capitalism, for which a “bourgeois revolution” was necessary.119 They zealously clung to the “bourgeois revolution” and supported the “bourgeois” Provisional Government even as their propaganda often hammered “the bourgeoisie.”120

  Russia’s political figure who most embodied the moderate socialist line from the start was Kerensky, who aimed to bridge Russia’s “bourgeois” and “proletarian” revolutions, to stand above parties, to balance left and right by tilting one way, then the next. Straining to be indispensable to each side, he came, predictably, to be seen as anathema to both.121 Bolshevik propaganda spread rumors that Kerensky was addicted to cocaine and morphine, dressed in women’s clothing, embezzled from state coffers—a smear campaign that would come to seem plausible (and that took in the British War Office).122 It bears recalling, however, that initially Kerensky had attracted widespread praise from diverse quarters, including Romanov grand dukes and leaders of the Soviet.123 Kerensky’s political failing in 1917 was partly personal but partly structural: he had thrown in his lot not with the Petrograd Soviet but with the Provisional Government and, as the Provisional Government’s impotence became ever more brutally exposed, his own authority disintegrated.124 Thus did Kerensky acquire a reputation as spineless, a professional “windbag,” in the mocking phrase of his nemesis, Lenin, who had little contact with the high-profile leader. Lenin and Kerensky met for the first and only time at the First All-Russia Congress of Soviets (June 3–24, 1917) at a military school in Petrograd. Kerensky showed himself to be under the spell, if not the tyranny, of the French Revolution.125 “How did 1792 end in France? It ended in the fall of the republic and the rise of a dictator,” Kerensky said in response to Lenin at the Congress of Soviets, referring to the episode of Robespierre’s self-defeating terror and the rise of Napoleon. “The problem of the Russian socialist parties and of Russian democracy is to prevent such an outcome as there was in France, to hold on to the revolutionary conquests already made; to see to it that our comrades who have been released from prison do not return there; that a Lenin, who has been abroad, may have the opportunity to speak here again, and not be obliged to flee back to Switzerland. We must see to it that historic mistakes do not recur.”126

  ROLLING THE IRON DICE

  Kerensky could certainly feel confident. In the elections to the June 1917 First Congress of Soviets, the Bolshevik party won a mere 105 of the 777 delegates with a right to vote, versus 285 by Socialist Revolutionaries and 248 by Mensheviks.127 Only something extremely dramatic could have possibly reversed Bolshevik fortunes. But just such a head-spinning turnabout transpired right in the middle of that First Congress of Soviets: namely, a Russian military offensive.

  Perhaps the central riddle of 1917 is why the Provisional Government decided in June to attack the Central Powers. Russia’s to
wns overflowed with the maimed; the countryside had begun to suffer starvation in places from the disorganization of agriculture, the incomprehensible sacrifice of so many males, and grain requisitions. One might think that for Provisional Government officials, especially classical liberals like the Cadets who sincerely believed in liberty, the use of state power for soldier conscription and coercive grain extraction to feed the army would have been abhorrent.128 But one would be wrong. Nor did the Provisional Government’s relentless invocation of democracy entail following soldiers’ antiwar sentiment, which had been universally on display since the downfall of the tsar and “Order No. 1.” Still, one would expect that the politicians would at least heed careerist self-interest. Paul Miliukov had been forced on May 2 to quit the Provisional Government that he himself had named (leaving Kerensky preeminent in the cabinet) just for stating that Russia “has no desire to enslave or degrade anyone” in the war but would nonetheless “fully stand by its obligations to our allies.”129 Even the most successful allied offensive of the entire war, Brusilov’s in 1916, had ultimately failed. And the German high command planned no new military actions on the eastern front in 1917. How did anyone in their right mind imagine that the Russian army should—or could—undertake an offensive in 1917?

  No small part of the offensive’s rationale had been inherited. Back in November 1916, at a meeting in France, the Western Allies had, once again, pressured the government of the tsar to commit to an offensive, in this case for spring 1917, to relieve pressure on the western front.130 Nicholas II had agreed, and the Provisional Government, which shared the values of and indeed looked up to the rule-of-law Allies, resolved to honor this commitment. By now, however, the French themselves were no longer capable of an offensive: in late May 1917, following a failed attack on the German lines, the French army suffered a full-scale mutiny, affecting 49 infantry divisions out of 113. General Philippe Petain, the newly appointed commander, restored discipline, but he recognized that the French rank and file and field officers would continue to defend the homeland, but no more.131

  Even without the incongruous Allied pressure, however, Kerensky would likely have gone forward. Just before France’s mutinies, Russia’s supreme commander Mikhail Alexeyev—who had pushed to make Kerensky war minister—toured his own front, finding a collapse of discipline, with desertions running at more than 1 million (out of 6–7 million).132 But Alexeyev, underscoring Russian obligations to its allies, also wrote in a confidential memorandum summarizing the views of the top commanders, which he shared, that “disorder in the Army will have no less a detrimental effect on defense than on offense. Even if we are not fully confident of success, we should go on the offensive.”133 Kerensky nonetheless dismissed Alexeyev as a “defeatist” and replaced him with General Brusilov, the hero of 1916, but then Brusilov toured the front and found the selfsame demoralization.134 To be sure, hope springs eternal. Russian intelligence surmised that the Austro-Hungarian army was highly vulnerable, and that even the German army could not survive another winter, so a knockout blow might be possible. And if that was true, Russia did not want to be left out of the presumed Central Powers defeat, in order to have a say in the peace: a good Russian show on the battlefield would force the Allies to take Russia’s diplomatic notes more seriously.135 Still, Kerensky’s chief motivation appears to have been domestic politics: he as well as some Russian generals thought—or hoped—that an offensive would restore the collapsing army and squelch the domestic rebellion. In other words, the very collapse of Russia’s army served as the key rationale for the offensive.136 “War at the front,” went the saying, “will buy peace in the rear and at the front.”137

  Thus did the Provisional Government willingly make the tsar’s fatally unpopular war its own. Kerensky, then merely the war minister, departed for the front, to rally the army like Nicholas II had done, making himself hoarse with harangues of the troops about the offensive for “freedom.” More than one soldier interjected, “What’s the point of this slogan about land and freedom if I have to die?” Lenin’s Bolshevik agitators swarmed the regiments at the front, along with some thirty urban garrisons, to undermine the army but also to trump their main targets: Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary agitators. Bolsheviks flooded highly receptive soldiers and sailors with easily digested radical materials characterizing the war as a sacrifice of Russian blood for English and French moneybags.138 “A single agitator,” lamented one Russian frontline general, “can set back on its heels an entire regiment with the propaganda of Bolshevik ideals.”139 And where Bolsheviks did not reach, German propaganda did. “The English,” one Russian soldier read aloud from a Russian-language German newspaper, the Russian Messenger, “want the Russians to shed the last drop of their blood for the greater glory of England, who seeks her profit in everything.”140 Not just the horrendous war, which had precipitated the downfall of the autocracy, but the military offensive enabled the Bolsheviks to associate their party with the moods in the country’s single biggest mass organization, the 6–7 million soldiers at the front, achieving a spectacular breakthrough to “trench Bolshevism.”141

  It would be easy to pin all the domestic blame on Kerensky. His insistence on a military offensive against the external foe in order to defeat the internal foe rendered him, the “revolutionary democrat,” no better than the tsar and the “reactionaries” who had begun the slaughter in 1914. No less stunning, however, the Petrograd Soviet, controlled by a Menshevik-Socialist Revolutionary bloc, as well as even the elected soldiers’ committees, supported the June military offensive, and did so against the wishes of the soldiers and sailors they claimed to represent. Irakli Tsereteli, the Georgian Menshevik, had risen to the top of the Soviet by putting forward a position he had called “revolutionary defensism”: if Russia’s army would (somehow) continue to fight, the Soviet would (somehow) organize a negotiated peace “without annexations” by pressuring the public in the Allied countries.142 Victor Chernov, head of the Socialist Revolutionaries, signed on, and so did prominent Mensheviks in the Soviet (though not the skeptical Yuly Martov). But a proposed international conference in Stockholm of socialists for peace in June 1917 failed to take place: Britain and France had no interest in a “democratic” peace, they wanted Germany defeated.143 Without the “peace” part, Tsereteli’s position, despite his repudiation of annexations, amounted to a continuation of the war, the same policy as the Provisional Government’s. Pravda relished publishing figures for the wartime profits of privately owned factories and placing the Soviet alongside the Provisional Government as “executive organ” of “Messieurs capitalists and bankers.”144 To the masses, the position of the Petrograd Soviet and the soldiers’ committees became incomprehensible: the war was imperialist yet should continue?145 But worse, a majority in the Soviet agreed that Russia ought to attack? The moderate socialists clung to the principle of cooperating with “the bourgeois revolution,” that is, with the Provisional Government and Constitutional Democrat Party. Partly, too, in their minds the offensive would help increase Russia’s bargaining power vis-à-vis recalcitrant Britain and France.146 The non-Bolshevik socialists were lethally wrong.

  Because the Allies refused to negotiate an end to the meat-grinder war short of an elusive decisive victory, a posture of strategic defense was the only survivable policy for both the Provisional Government and the Soviet. Simultaneously, the Russian government could have stolen the thunder of the extreme left by attempting to negotiate an acceptable separate peace with Germany. If such an effort failed, the Germans would have been blamed, buying the government some legitimacy for nominally staying in the war. But even if a consensus in the Russian establishment could not be reached to break with the Allies and approach Germany separately, a threat of doing so could have been wielded as a bargaining chip to force the Allies to accept the Provisional Government’s belated desire, as publicly professed at least, for a formal inter-Allied conference to discuss and perhaps redefine war aims.147
<
br />   Back in September-October 1916, after the momentum of the Brusilov offensive had been broken, tsarist Russia and Germany had held secret talks for a separate peace in Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, and Kovno (a territory of imperial Russia under German occupation). Britain and France, after catching wind of the Russo-German talks, had moved to sign new financial agreements with Russia, finally conceding some long-standing Russian requests.148 Russia depended on its Allied partners for finance and materiel, but Russian leverage was perhaps even greater in 1917. Be that as it may, a strictly defensive posture would have allowed a wait-and-see respite while the U.S. entry on the western front got into high gear.

  Instead, the lunatic gamble of the Kerensky-Soviet offensive commenced on June 18 (July 1 in the West) with the greatest artillery barrage in Russian history to that point: two nonstop days, drawing on a colossal supply of heavy guns and shells produced by Russia’s working classes (80 percent of whom worked in war production). Despite some initial success, especially by troops under General Kornilov’s command, many Russian units refused to advance; some sought to kill their commanders, while others held meetings to discuss how to escape the inferno.149 The main Russian thrust aimed at the “soft target” of Austria-Hungary—a lesson from the 1916 Brusilov offensive—but the awakened beast of the German army counterattacked mercilessly.150 Russia’s gratuitous offensive drew the Germans much farther onto Russia’s territory—Germany seized Ukraine—while tearing Russia’s army to pieces.151 The offensive also shattered the authority of the moderate socialist representatives in the Soviet and the soldiers’ committees.152 In trying to cajole soldiers to obey orders and return to battle, members of the Soviet Executive Committee were beaten and taken into custody, including Nikolai Sokolov, one of the drafters of Order No. 1. “The whole of 1917,” one historian has aptly written, “could be seen as a political battle between those who saw the revolution as a means of bringing the war to an end and those who saw the war as a means of bringing revolution to an end.”153