Stalin, Volume 1

by Stephen Kotkin

  KERENSKY’S FIRST FAILED COUP

  In the spring of 1917, after he had arrived back in Russia, Lenin occupied the fringe in Russia’s politics—the fringe of the left—sniping at Kerensky, badmouthing the other Marxists in the Soviet, but the June 1917 offensive—launched by Kerensky, supported by the Soviet—vindicated Lenin’s extremism, which was no longer extreme. Tellingly, even the talented Lev Trotsky signed on.

  Trotsky was a shooting star. Nearly Stalin’s exact contemporary, he hailed from a different corner of the empire—southern Ukraine, in the Pale of Settlement, 200 miles up from the Black Sea port of Odessa. His father, David Bronstein, was illiterate but by dint of hard work had become such a successful farmer that by the time his son was born, the family owned 250 acres outright and leased another 500.154 Trotsky’s mother, Aneta, also a loyal subject of the tsar, was a cultured woman who chose the life of a farmer’s wife and imparted a love of learning to her four children (survivors of eight births). The young Leib—Lev in Russian—had been sent to a heder, a Jewish primary school, even though he did not know Yiddish, but he was switched to a German school attached to a Lutheran Church in Odessa, where he studied at the top of his class, despite being suspended for a year as a result of a student imbroglio with a French teacher from Switzerland. At his next school, in the city of Nikolayev, he devoted himself to literature and mathematics; eyewitnesses recalled him having no close friends. “The fundamental essence of Bronstein’s personality,” explained G. A. Ziv, who knew him then, “was to demonstrate his will, to tower above everyone, everywhere and always to be first.”155 Around age seventeen, Bronstein became a revolutionary. Like Stalin, he was arrested when still a teenager (in 1898) and exiled to Siberia. In 1902 he adopted the family name of one of his jailers, becoming Trotsky, and escaped, meeting Lenin and Martov, then allies, in London as a twenty-three-year-old. The next year, at the fateful 2nd Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party, Trotsky sided with Martov in the controversy over party organization and soon blasted Lenin in print. Still, Trotsky never drew especially close to the Mensheviks: he had kept his distance from all groups. For long stretches he lived in Europe, where he contributed to German Social Democrat periodicals and enjoyed the company of the Marxist pope, Karl Kautsky, whom he called “a white-haired and very jolly little old man,” and with whom he famously polemicized on the necessity of terror (“Terror can be a very effective weapon against a reactionary class that does not want to leave the scene”).156

  By chance in New York when the tsar fell, Trotsky had set off for Russia in April 1917, was released from arrest en route in Canada—thanks to then‒foreign minister Miliukov—and arrived at Petrograd’s Finland Station on May 4, a month later than Lenin.157 Immediately, the muscular, spirited, intransigent Trotsky, with pince-nez, became a sensation, making the rounds of the biggest factories as well as the garrison barracks, ending up most nights at the capital’s Cirque Moderne, across the river from the Winter Palace, electrifying huge crowds with political oratory. The “bare, gloomy amphitheater, lit by five tiny lights hanging from a thin wire, was packed from the ring up the steep sweep of grimy benches to the very roof—soldiers, sailors, workmen, women, all listening as if their lives depended upon it,” wrote John Reed, the former Harvard cheerleader.158 Trotsky recalled that “every square inch was filled, every human body compressed to its limit. Young boys sat on their fathers’ shoulders; infants were at their mothers’ breasts. . . . I made my way to the platform through a narrow human trench, sometimes I was borne overhead.”159 One Social Democrat commented at the time, “Here’s a great revolutionary who’s arrived and one gets the feeling that Lenin, however clever he may be, is starting to fade next to the genius of Trotsky.”160 In fact, on May 10 Lenin had asked Trotsky to join the Bolsheviks.161 Having mocked Lenin mercilessly for years, and during the war grown intellectually further apart from him, in summer 1917 Trotsky agreed to join the Bolsheviks, converting to Leninism—that is, to an immediate transfer of power to the soviets.

  Underlying structural shifts were still more momentous. The splintering off of large parts of the Russian imperial army accelerated, with the formation of de facto national armies—especially Ukrainian and Finnish, but also Estonian, Lithuanian, Georgian, Armenian, Crimean Tatar—thereby prefiguring the empire’s dissolution.162 The Provisional Government had become even more of a shell. The Petrograd Soviet and especially soldiers’ committees had been deeply discredited. But in July 1917, even as the political scene continued to move swiftly toward Lenin, the Bolshevik party was almost annihilated. The Constitutional Democrats resigned from the coalition Provisional Government on July 2; between July 3 and 5, amid rumors that the capital garrison would be deployed to the front, a confused uprising took place in Petrograd involving a machine-gun regiment and Kronstadt sailors. The soldiers and sailors, working with radical lower-level Bolsheviks under the slogan “All Power to the Soviets,” managed to seize key junctions in the capital. Hundreds were killed or wounded. Kerensky was at the front. On July 4, a huge crowd at the Tauride Palace demanded a meeting with a leader of the Soviet; when the Socialist Revolutionary Party leader Victor Chernov emerged, a sailor shouted, “Take power, you son of a bitch, when it’s handed to you.” The rebels took Chernov into custody and he had to be rescued.163 But an early evening blinding downpour dispersed the crowds.164 Top Bolsheviks had hesitated to seize the moment, and Kerensky swiftly counterattacked, charging them with treason for the armed insurrection and for receiving funds from a foreign enemy. It was a brilliant move, taking advantage of a situation he did not create.

  That the Bolsheviks were receiving smuggled German funds is beyond doubt. Somehow, the party managed to publish newspapers with a combined print run of more than 300,000 per day; Pravda alone circulated 85,000 copies. Compared with the bourgeois press (1.5 million per day in the capital), or the combined SR-Menshevik press (700,000), Bolshevik publications could look like small change, but the party also published scores of pamphlets and hundreds of thousands of leaflets, which required financing.165 Documents showing Lenin and other Bolsheviks in the pay of the Germans appeared on July 5 in Russian newspapers. “Now they are going to shoot us,” Lenin told Trotsky. “It is the most advantageous time for them.”166 On the morning of July 6, the Provisional Government’s Counter-Espionage Bureau smashed Pravda’s editorial offices and printing presses. Russian troops raided the Bolshevik “fortress” (Krzesinska’s mansion) where some 400 Bolsheviks, despite being heavily armed inside, surrendered. Andrei Vyshinsky, the chief of the citizens’ militia in central Moscow—and Stalin’s future hangman judge in the terror—signed arrest warrants for 28 of the highest-level Bolsheviks, including Lenin.167 Tipped off, Lenin fled, slipping away to the Alliluyev family flat with Stalin’s assistance, then on to Russian Finland with Zinoviev. The folklore has it that Stalin personally shaved Lenin’s beard so he would look like a Finnish peasant.168 Lenin requested that his notebooks be brought to him, and in this sanctuary he wrote State and Revolution; he would complete the text in August-September 1917. It argued that all states were instruments for the domination of some classes over others, so that any new class power (like the working class) needed to create its own state form—“the dictatorship of the proletariat”—to suppress the remnants of the old ruling classes and distribute resources during the transition.169 Meanwhile, two agencies of the Provisional Government gathered volume upon volume of case materials in preparation for a public trial of Lenin and his comrades for treason.170

  Thus, notwithstanding the disaster of War Minister Kerensky’s military offensive, July 1917 looked like a turning point, thanks to Kerensky’s offensive against the Bolsheviks. He was going to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Altogether, nearly 800 Bolsheviks and radicals would be imprisoned, including Kamenev, who was nearly lynched, but not Stalin (for reasons that remain unclear).171 On July 6, the war minister returned from the front to the capital, amid the publicized
arrests, and the next day took over the entire government when the nominal prime minister, Prince Georgy Lvov, resigned. Lvov observed that “in order to save the country, it is now necessary to shut down the Soviet and shoot at the people. I cannot do that. Kerensky can.”172

  Lvov, who disappeared into a Moscow sanitorium, was wrong, however: Not Kerensky’s but Lavr Kornilov’s moment had arrived. On July 7, Kerensky promoted Kornilov to command the southwestern front. On July 12, Kerensky announced the restoration of the death penalty at the front for indiscipline, and two days later the tightening of military censorship. Who might enforce these measures remained unclear, but on July 18, Kerensky sacked General Brusilov and proposed Kornilov as army supreme commander. Before accepting Kerensksy’s offer, Kornilov consulted the other generals. Back in March 1917, when Kornilov had replaced the arrested Sergei Khabalov as Petrograd military district commander, it had fallen to him to implement the order to arrest the tsaritsa Alexandra, but in April 1917, when Kornilov tried to use troops to quell disturbances in the capital, the Soviet forced him to reverse his order, claiming sole right to command the garrison; disgusted, Kornilov had requested a transfer to a command at the front. There, enlisted men issued demands to their officers, and his June 1917 success in punching a hole through the Austrian lines vanished when Russian troops refused to advance. Resorting to terror at the front against Russia’s soldiers had spiraled into looting, atrocities against civilians, and even greater indiscipline.173 Nonetheless, Kornilov now put forward demands to emasculate the soldiers’ committees and reinstitute the death penalty in the rear garrisons. Kerensky had already heard similar demands even from moderates on the general staff at a conference at headquarters on July 16.174 Kornilov further demanded complete autonomy in military operations and in personnel decisions, as well as a war mobilization plan for industry, just as General Ludendorff had in Germany.175 On July 21, Kornilov’s ultimatum-like terms were leaked to the press—and his popularity on the political right soared.176 Verbally, Kerensky assented to Kornilov’s conditions, so the latter took over supreme command, but when the war ministry drew up the documents to meet Kornilov’s conditions, Kerensky delayed signing them, dragging the process into August, raising Kornilov’s ire and suspicions, even as Kerensky’s own fears of the man he had promoted escalated.177

  The Bolsheviks convoked a Party Congress between July 26 and August 3, 1917, their first since 1907. (It was the sixth overall, counting the founding Russian Social Democrat Party Congress in Minsk in 1898, which had been the last to take place on Russian territory.) Some 267 attendees, including 157 voting delegates, many from the provinces, assembled under threat of arrest in the sanctuary of Petrograd’s factory-laden Vyborg district. With Lenin and Zinoviev in hiding and Kamenev and Trotsky in prison, Sverdlov, assisted by Stalin, organized the gathering. They did yeoman work, turning out representatives from nearly thirty front-line army regiments and ninety Petrograd factories and garrison units, whose moods were radical. Stalin gave the opening greeting and the main political report, the highest profile assignment. “He had on a gray modest jacket and boots, and was speaking in a low, unhurried, completely calm voice,” noted one eyewitness, who added, of Stalin’s Georgianness that another comrade in the same row “could not suppress a slight smile when the speaker uttered a certain word in a somehow especially soft tone with his special accent.”178 Stalin admitted the severe damage done by the “premature” July uprising. Defiantly, however, he asked “What is the Provisional Government?” and answered, “It is a puppet, a miserable screen behind which stand the Constitutional Democrats, the military clique, and Allied capital—three pillars of counterrevolution.” There would be explosions, he predicted.

  On the final day of the congress, in the discussion of the draft resolution following from his report, Stalin objected to a proposal by Yevgeny Preobrazhensky that they include a reference to revolution in the West. “The possibility cannot be excluded that Russia will be the country that blazes the trail to socialism,” he interjected. “No country has hitherto enjoyed such freedom as exists in Russia; none has tried to realize workers’ control over production. Besides, the base of our revolution is broader than in Western Europe, where the proletariat stands utterly alone face to face with the bourgeoisie. Here the workers have the support of the poorest strata of the peasantry. Finally, in Germany the machinery of state power is functioning incomparably better than the imperfect machinery of our bourgeoisie. . . . It is necessary to give up the antiquated idea that only Europe can show us the way. There is dogmatic Marxism and creative Marxism. I stand by the latter.”179

  This remarkable exchange evidenced a level of astuteness almost always denied to Stalin. His argument carried, and an amendment on the victory of socialist revolution in Russia “on condition of a proletarian revolution in the West” was voted down.

  Thanks to Stalin’s shrewd analysis as well as his generally high regard for Russia, which Lenin did not share, Lenin’s militancy was ascendant even in his absence.180 Lenin still faced the threat of a trial, however, and when Stalin had told the congress delegates that under certain conditions Lenin along with Zinoviev might submit to the courts, he was roundly rebuked. But the promised trial of the Bolsheviks would never materialize. Kerensky allowed his duel with Kornilov to eclipse his battle with Lenin.181

  KERENSKY’S SECOND FAILED COUP

  In mid-July, Kerensky had put out the call for a state conference for mid-August in Moscow, the ancient capital, with invitations to industrialists, landowners, all former Duma representatives, local governing bodies, higher education institutions, representatives of soviets and peasant bodies, and the military brass—some 2,500 participants, who met inside the Bolshoi Theater.182 And grand theater it was. Kerensky’s opening-day speech onAugust 12 made a powerful impression, seeming to confirm his authority. He appears to have intended the conference to “consolidate” Russia’s political forces, although newspapers half-joked that he arrived in Moscow, site of tsarist coronations, “to crown himself.” The newspaper of the Soviet, employing class markers, complained that “morning coats, frock coats, and starched shirts predominate over side-fastening Russian [folk] shirts.”183 But the Soviet, for its part, had excluded the Bolsheviks from its allotted delegation for the latter’s refusal to promise to abide by the Soviet’s collective decisions (including whether or not to walk out). Moscow workers defied the Soviet, undertaking a one-day wildcat strike on opening day, for which the Bolsheviks claimed credit.184 “The trams are not running,” Izvestiya reported, “coffee shops and restaurants are closed”—including the buffet inside the Bolshoi. Gas workers struck, too, and the city went dark.185

  Kornilov arrived in the light of day from the front on August 13, a Sunday. At the Alexandrovsky (later Belorussian) Station, his red-robed Turcomans leapt out onto the platform with sabers drawn, forming eye-catching rows. Amid a sea of smart-looking military cadets and Russian tricolor flags, the diminutive Kornilov emerged in full-dress uniform and was showered with flowers. Like a tsar, he received waiting ministers, soldiers, dignitaries, after which his twenty-sedan motorcade—the general in an open car—paraded through the city, sparking ovations, including when he stopped to pray to the Mary, Mother of God, icon at the Iverskaya shrine (as all tsars had done). In the evening, a further cavalcade of well-wishers—former chief of staff and supreme commander General Alexeyev, Cadet leader Miliukov, far right-wing leader Purishkevich—were received by Russia’s ethnic Kalmyk supreme commander.186

  The moment was riveting: a state assembly of Russia’s entire battered establishment, representatives of the left who themselves had ostracized the Bolsheviks, a motherland in genuine danger of foreign conquest, and rival would-be saviors.

  At the August 14 session, Kerensky, in the chair, invited the supreme commander to the rostrum. An intentionally inflammatory speech by a Kornilov Cossack ally had been staged to make Kornilov appear eminently reasonable.187 “We have lost a
ll Galicia, we have lost all Bukovina,” the Kalmyk savior told the hall, warning that the Germans were knocking at the gates of Riga, on a path to the Russian capital. Kornilov demanded strong measures.188 The right-side aisles in the Bolshoi exploded in ovation, while the left kept silent or made catcalls. This could have been the opportunity to reverse Russia’s slide and consolidate the establishment: Some industrialists wanted the State Conference to become a permanent body. Members of the Soviet supportive of order and authority could have been targeted for co-optation and a split of the left. Back on August 9, Stalin, writing in the periodical Worker and Soldier, had warned that “the counter-revolution needs its own parliament,” a bourgeois-landowner organ, formed without the peasant vote and intended to displace the still-unsummoned Constituent Assembly, “the single representative of the entire laboring people.”189 Four days later, on the opening day of the Moscow State Conference, Stalin had written that “the saviors’ make it seem that they are calling a ‘simple gathering,’ which will decide nothing, . . . but the ‘simple gathering’ little by little will be transformed into a ‘state gathering,’ then into a ‘great assembly,’ then into . . . a ‘long parliament.’”190 Kerensky, however, had no strategy for the Moscow State Conference other than three days of speechifying.191 Nothing institutional endured.