Stalin, Volume 1

by Stephen Kotkin

  The decree naming the unemployed Pestkowski as central bank governor, and many similar pronouncements, had an absurdist quality reminiscent of the provocations of the new performance art known as Dadaism. A perfectly apt nonsense term, Dada had arisen in neutral Switzerland during the Great War, largely among Jewish Romanian exiles, in what they called the Cabaret Voltaire, which, coincidentally, lay on the same street in Zurich (Spiegelgasse, 1) as Lenin’s wartime exile apartment (Spiegelgasse, 14). Tristan Tzara, a Dada poet and provocateur, and Lenin may have played chess against each other.22 Dada and Bolshevism arose out of the same historical conjuncture. Dada’s originators cleverly ridiculed the infernal Great War and the malevolent interests that drove it, as well as crass commercialism, using collage, montage, found objects, puppetry, sound poetry, noise music, bizarre films, and one-off pranks staged for the new media they mocked. Dada happenings were also transnational, and would flourish in Berlin, Cologne, Paris, New York, Tokyo, and Tiflis. The Dada artists—or “anti-artists” as many of them preferred to be known—did not conflate, say, a urinal repurposed as a “fountain” with a new and better politics.23 Tzara composed poems by cutting newspaper articles into pieces, shaking the fragments in a bag, and emptying them across a table. Another Dadaist read a lecture whose every word was purposefully drowned out by the shattering noise of a train whistle. Such tactics were a world away from the pedantic, hyperpolitical Lenin: He and his decrees about a new world order were issued without irony. But Bolshevik decrees were also issued into Dada-esque anarchy.

  If the collapse of the tsarist order was a revolution, the revolution was a collapse. The immense vacuum of power opened up by the tsar’s wartime abdication had stunned the Provisional Government like a blow to its professorial head. “General Alexeyev characterized the situation well,” a Provisional Government finance official wrote in his diary on the eve of the Bolshevik coup. “The essence of the evil lay not in the disorder but in the absence of political authority [bezvlastii].”24 After October, organizations claiming broad authority proliferated, just as before, but the “absence of authority” worsened. Bolshevism, too, roiled with deep internal fractures, riotousness, and turnover, and Lenin’s superior political instincts—when compared with other leaders of Russia’s revolution—could not overcome the functional equivalent of the Dadaist’s deafening train whistle: namely, the man-made destruction and chaos that brought the Bolsheviks to nominal authority. Some powerful groups, notably the railway workers union, would insist on a government without Lenin and Trotsky; Germany, militarily victorious on the eastern front, looked to be on the verge of completely conquering Russia; the chief of the new Bolshevik political police would be taken hostage in a near leftist coup against Bolshevism; and an assassin would pump two bullets into Lenin. By summer 1918, armed insurrection against the regime would open on four fronts. And yet Lenin and his inner circle of Trotsky, Sverdlov, and Stalin had already managed to assert a Bolshevik political monopoly.

  The Bolshevik dictatorship was not an utter accident, of course. Russia’s political landscape had become decisively socialist, as we have seen. The right-wing ranks of the army and officer corps were weaker in Russia than in every other predominantly peasant country, and unlike everywhere else, Russia lacked a non-socialist peasants’ party, a circumstance partly derived from the intransigence and sheer daftness of the old rightist establishment on the land question. Russia’s other socialist parties, moreover, contributed mightily to the Bolsheviks’ opportunities to monopolize the socialist cause. Lenin was not a lone wolf among political sheep. He sat atop a large, centrally located Bolshevik political base in the biggest cities and the Russian heartland. That said, the Bolsheviks’ dictatorship did not arise automatically, even in the parts of imperial Russia that nominally fell under their jurisdiction. The dictatorship was an act of creation. That creation, in turn, was not a reaction to unforeseen crisis, but a deliberate strategy, and one that Lenin pursued against the objections of many top Bolsheviks. The drive for dictatorship began well before the full-scale civil war—indeed, the dictatorial drive served as a cause of the armed conflict (a fact universally noted by contemporaries). But in no way should any of this be taken to mean the Bolsheviks established effective structures of governance. Far from it: the Bolshevik monopoly went hand in hand with administrative as well as societal chaos, which Lenin’s extremism exacerbated, causing an ever-deepening crisis, which he cited as justification for his extremism. The catastrophic collapse of the old world, however debilitating for millions of real people, was taken as progress by the Bolsheviks: the deeper the ruin, the better.

  One would think the bedlam would have been more than enough to topple the playacting government. Food supply problems alone had helped precipitate the autocracy’s downfall and revealed the Provisional Government’s hollowness. But monopoly and anarchy proved compatible because the Bolshevik monopoly entailed not control but denying others a role in presiding over chaos.25 Bolshevism was a movement, a capacious, freewheeling, armed anarchy of sailors and street squads, factory hands, ink-stained scribes and agitators, would-be functionaries wielding wax seals. Bolshevism was also a vision, a brave new world of abundance and happiness, a deep longing for the kingdom of heaven on earth, accompanied by absurdist efforts at enactment. In 1918, the world experienced the pointed irreverence of Dada as well as an unintentionally Dada-esque Bolshevik stab at rule, performance art that involved a substantial participatory audience. At the center, Lenin persisted in his uncanny determination, and Stalin hewed closely to him. Stalin assumed the position of one of Lenin’s all-purpose deputies, prepared to take up any assignment.

  MONOPOLY

  Marxism’s theory of the state was primitive, affording little guidance beyond the Paris Commune (1870–71), which Marx had both praised and denigrated. The Commune, which lasted all of seventy-two days, had inspired the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat (in the 1891 preface to a reissue of the Civil War in France, Engels had written, “Do you want to know what this dictatorship looks like? Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat”).26 The Commune also afforded inspiration because of its mass participatory character. Still, Marx had noted that the Communards had “lost precious time” organizing democratic elections when they should have been busy gathering forces to finish off the “bourgeois regime” in Versailles, and had failed to seize the French National Bank to expropriate its vaults; the money was moved to pay for the army in Versailles that crushed the Commune.27 Lenin, at a gathering in Geneva in 1908 on the thirty-seventh anniversary of the Commune, and the twenty-fifth of Marx’s death, had reiterated Marx’s point that the Commune had stopped halfway, failing to extirpate the bourgeoisie.28 Nonetheless, its romantic allure persisted. In 1917 and into early 1918, Lenin imagined a “state of which the Paris Commune was the prototype,” with “democracy from below, democracy without an officialdom, without a police, without a standing army; voluntary social duty guaranteed by a militia formed from a universally armed people.”29 This, too, constituted a part of the unintentional resemblance to Dadaism. As late as April 1918, Lenin would be urging that “all citizens must take part in the work of the courts and in the government of the country. It is important for us to draw literally all working people into the government of the state. It is a task of tremendous difficulty. But socialism cannot be implemented by a minority, by a party.”30 Once the sense of siege set in that the Bolshevik coup had itself precipitated, however, Lenin ceased to uphold the Commune as inspirational model, and that episode became solely a cautionary tale about decisively eliminating enemies.31 And there was no end to enemies.

  Behind their winning slogans about peace, land, bread, and all power to the Soviets, and their machine guns, Lenin and the adherents of Bolshevism felt perpetually under threat. On the morning of the coup during the Second Congress of Soviets on October 25, 1917, Alexander Kerensky, nominally aiming to return with reliable units from the front, had fl
ed Petrograd in a pair of automobiles, one “borrowed” from in front of the nearby U.S. embassy.32 “Resist Kerensky, who is a Kornilovite!” Bolshevik appeals proclaimed; in fact, at the front Kerensky found only a few hundred Cossack troops of the Third Cavalry Corps of Lieutenant General Krymov—the very Kornilov subordinate whom Kerensky had accused of treason and who, after a conversation with Kerensky, had committed suicide.33 On October 29, in combat outside Petrograd, at least 200 were killed and wounded—more than in either the February or October revolutions—but the demoralized remnant cavalry proved no match for the several thousand motley Red Guards and garrison soldiers mustered by the Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee.34 Kerensky narrowly evaded capture and fled again, into foreign exile.35 Other anti-Bolsheviks had rallied military school cadets in the capital who seized the Hotel Astoria (where some top Bolsheviks resided), the State Bank, and the telephone exchange, but the schoolboys, too, were easily beaten back.36 Still, the Bolsheviks never stopped fearing “counterrevolution,” on the example of the French Revolution, especially the episode in August 1792 when external aggression appeared to facilitate internal subversion.37 “I can still remember,” recalled David Sagirashvili, “the anxious faces of the Bolshevik leaders . . . whom I saw in the corridors at the Smolny Institute.”38 That anxiety only deepened.

  Despite the formation of an all-Bolshevik Council of People’s Commissars, a majority of Russia’s socialists continued to favor the formation of an all-socialist government, a sentiment also evident among many Bolsheviks. Lev Kamenev, a member of the Bolshevik Central Committee, had become the new chairman of the Soviet central executive committee, the standing body of the Congress of Soviets, in whose name power had been seized. During the coup, Kamenev had sought to bring the most left-leaning Socialist Revolutionaries and possibly other socialists into a revolutionary government, and he continued to do so afterward, fearing that a Bolshevik-only regime was doomed. The latter prospect heightened on October 29, when the leadership of the Union of Railroad Employees laid down an ultimatum, backed by the threat of a crippling strike, demanding an all-socialist government to prevent civil war.39 This occurred during the uncertainty of a possible Kerensky return. A rail strike had paralyzed the tsarist authorities for a time in 1905 and it would stymie Bolshevik efforts to defend themselves. At a meeting of garrison troop representatives, also on October 29, Lenin and Trotsky rallied support against “counterrevolution” from the twenty-three units that were represented that day (out of fifty-one).40 But Kamenev, joined by Zinoviev and other top Bolsheviks, formally agreed to allow Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks into the Council of People’s Commissars.41 While the Menshevik Central Committee agreed to negotiations for an all-socialist government with Bolsheviks in it by a single vote, the railway union insisted on a government entirely without Trotsky and Lenin. Kamenev and his allies proposed to the Bolshevik Central Committee that Lenin would remain in the government but yield the chairmanship to someone like the leader of the Socialist Revolutionary party, Victor Chernov. The Bolsheviks would keep only minor portfolios.42

  Lenin appeared to be losing his grip on the party. On November 1, 1917, the lead editorial in a Bolshevik-controlled newspaper announced “agreement among all factions” across the socialist left, adding that “the Bolsheviks” always understood “revolutionary democracy” to mean “a coalition of all socialist parties . . . not the domination of a single party.”43 Kamenev stood ready to yield what, in Lenin’s mind, were the fruits of the October coup. But Trotsky, Sverdlov, and Stalin enabled Lenin to beat back the challenge. Also on November 1, at the autonomous Petersburg Committee of Bolsheviks—which, unusually, was attended by Central Committee members—Lenin condemned Kamenev’s efforts to ally with the SRs and Mensheviks as treasonous, saying, “I can’t even talk about this seriously. Trotsky long ago said such a union was impossible. Trotsky understood this and since then there hasn’t been a better Bolshevik.” Lenin had once divided the Social Democrats, and now threatened to divide the Bolsheviks. “If there is to be a split, let it be so,” he said. “If you have a majority, take power . . . and we shall go to the sailors.”44 Trotsky proposed negotiating only with the left wing of the Socialist Revolutionaries, who were in the process of splitting off to form a separate party, and could be junior partners to the Bolsheviks. “Any authority [vlast’] is force,” Trotsky thundered. “Our authority is the force of the majority of the people over the minority. This is unavoidable, this is Marxism.”45 That same day, at a follow-up meeting of the Bolshevik Central Committee—with Moscow still not in Bolshevik hands but with the threat (more apparent than real) of a Kerensky-led Cossack march on Petrograd having subsided—Lenin exploded at Kamenev for carrying out coalition negotiations in earnest, rather than as cover to send military reinforcements to seize power in Moscow. Lenin demanded that the negotiations cease altogether, and that the Bolsheviks appeal directly to the masses. Kamenev retorted that the railway union had “huge power.” Sverdlov argued against breaking off the negotiations, from a tactical point of view, but also recommended arresting members of the railway union leadership.46 (Stalin did not attend the November 1 meeting; he did appear later that night at a delayed meeting of the Soviet’s central executive committee, where the battle continued.)47

  Lenin’s uncompromising stance was strengthened on November 2, 1917, when pro-Bolshevik forces definitively seized the Moscow Kremlin in the name of “soviet power.” The back-and-forth week-long armed clashes in the central district of Moscow involved a tiny fraction of the overall population, perhaps 15,000 on each side; the Bolshevik side lost 228 killed, more than in any other locale, while government defenders lost an unknown number. “Artillery fire directed on the Kremlin and the rest of Moscow is not causing any damage to our troops but is destroying monuments and sacred places and is bringing death to peaceful citizens,” observed their cease-fire proclamation, which amounted to surrender.48 The next day, back in Petrograd, Kamenev and Zinoviev got the Soviet’s central executive committee to endorse continued negotiations on an all-socialist government, but with Kerensky turned back and Moscow in hand, Lenin met individually with Trotsky, Sverdlov, Stalin, Dzierzynski, and five others, getting them to sign a resolution denouncing as “treason” the efforts of a Bolshevik Central Committee “minority” to relinquish monopoly power.49 Accusing close comrades who had spent years in the underground, prison, and exile of treason over policy differences was typical Lenin.

  History might have been different had Kamenev called Lenin’s bluff and told him to go to the sailors. But instead of denouncing Lenin as a deranged fanatic, seizing control over the Central Committee, and himself trying to rally the factories, streets, local Bolshevik party organizations, and other socialist parties in behalf of the overwhelmingly popular idea of an all-socialist government, Kamenev yielded his place on the Bolshevik Central Committee. Zinoviev and three others resigned as well.50 Several Bolsheviks resigned from the Council of People’s Commissars, including Alexei Rykov (interior affairs commissar). “We stand for the necessity of forming a socialist government of all soviet parties,” they declared. “We submit that other than that, there is only one path: the preservation of a purely Bolshevik government by means of political terror.”51 And so, Lenin’s Bolshevik opponents ceded two key institutions—the Central Committee and the government—to him.

  There was still the Petrograd Soviet central executive committee, which Kamenev chaired and which many saw as the new supreme body: Lenin himself had drafted a resolution, approved by the Second Congress of Soviets in October 1917, subordinating the Council of People’s Commissars to the Soviet.52 But on November 4, Lenin went to the Soviet central executive committee to tell its members they did not legally have jurisdiction over the Council of People’s Commissars. The vote to decide the matter was set to go against Lenin, but suddenly he insisted that he, Trotsky, Stalin, and one other people’s commissar in attendance would also vote. The four people’s commis
sars voted yes, on what was essentially a vote of confidence in their own government, while three moderate Bolsheviks abstained, allowing Lenin’s motion to pass 29 to 23.53 Thus did the all-Bolshevik government free itself from legislature oversight. Lenin was not finished: on November 8, at the Bolshevik Central Committee, he forced Kamenev to resign as chairman of the Soviet’s central executive committee.54 (That same day, Zinoviev recanted and rejoined the Bolshevik Central Committee. Before the month was out, Kamenev and Rykov would also recant, but Lenin would not accept them back right away.) Lenin quickly maneuvered to have Sverdlov nominated as the new Soviet chairman; Sverdlov won the critical post by a mere five votes.

  Sverdlov emerged more than ever as the indispensable organizational man. He now served simultaneously as secretary of the Bolshevik party and chairman of the Soviet central executive committee, and deftly transformed the latter into a de facto Bolshevik organ, “orienting” its meetings to obtain the desired results.55 At the same time, Sverdlov managed what Kamenev had been unable to do: he coaxed the Left Socialist Revolutionaries into a Bolshevik-controlled Council of People’s Commissars, in a minority role, with the aim of dividing the anti-Bolshevik socialists.56 The meteoric rise of the Left SRs between the end of 1917 and early 1918 was perhaps second only to that of the Bolsheviks in summer and fall 1917. The reason was obvious: the imperialist war continued, and so did the lurch toward ever more radical leftism. There were even rumors in December-January that some leftist Bolsheviks wanted to join the Left SRs in a new coup, arrest Lenin and form a new government, perhaps under the Left Communist Grigory “Yuri” Pyatakov. The Left SR entrance into the Council of People’s Commissars robbed the railway workers union of a united front opposed to Bolshevik monopoly, and its efforts to force a genuine all-socialist coalition fizzled. The Left SR entrance into the central government also buttressed the Bolshevik position in the provinces.57 The Bolsheviks essentially had had no agrarian program when they lifted that of the SRs in October 1917; Sverdlov flat out admitted that prior to the revolution the Bolsheviks had “conducted absolutely no work among the peasantry.”58 In this context the Left SRs offered not just immediate tactical advantage but far-reaching political promise.59