Stalin, Volume 1

by Stephen Kotkin

  Most Left SRs recognized themselves as junior partners, not as members of a genuine coalition, and they largely occupied positions in the Cheka (All-Russia Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-revolution and Sabotage) or as military commissars in the army. Lenin’s monopolistic political offensive, meanwhile, continued unabated, targeting the public sphere. Before the October coup, he had denounced censorship as “feudal” and “Asiatic,” but now he deemed the “bourgeois” press “a weapon no less dangerous than bombs or machine guns.”60 Lenin bullied shut some sixty newspapers in late October and November 1917. True, in a cat-and-mouse game—as Isaiah Berlin quipped—Day, the liberal newspaper, was shuttered, briefly reappeared as Evening, then as Night, then Midnight, and finally Darkest Night, after which it was shuttered for good.61 Recognizably leftist newspapers were also targeted. “History repeats itself,” complained the Right Socialist Revolutionary newspaper the People’s Cause, which had been closed down under tsarism.62 Some Left SRs also joined the cries of outrage at Bolshevik press censorship. According to the Bolshevik decree, the repressions were “of a temporary nature and will be removed by a special degree just as soon as normal conditions are reestablished,” but, of course, “normal” conditions never returned.63

  STATELESSNESS

  Trotsky would unabashedly recall that “from the moment the Provisional Government was declared deposed, Lenin acted in matters large and small as the Government.”64 True enough, but even as Lenin maniacally imposed political monopoly in the Petrograd neighborhood containing Smolny and the Tauride Palace, authority in the wider realm fragmented still further. The coup accelerated the empire’s disintegration. Between November 1917 and January 1918, chunk after chunk of imperial Russia broke off like an iceberg collapsing into the sea—Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan. The conversion of these former borderland provinces into self-declared “national republics” left a truncated “Soviet Russia” in uncertain relation to most of the realm’s most developed territories. Stalin, as nationalities commissar, was drawn into trying to manage this dissolution, signing, for example, a treaty fixing a border with newly independent Finland (the frontier ran precariously close to Petrograd). Inside the Russian heartland, too, provinces declared themselves to be “republics”—Kazan, Kaluga, Ryazan, Ufa, Orenburg. Sometimes, this was pushed from above, as in the case of the Don Soviet Republic, which, it was hoped, would forestall German assertions of military intervention on the basis of “self-determination.”65 Whatever their origins, province republics hardly ruled their nominal territories: counties and villages declared themselves supreme. Amid the near total devolution, copycat “councils of people’s commissars” proliferated. A Moscow “council of people’s commissars” showed no intention of subordinating itself to Lenin’s Council of People’s Commissars and claimed jurisdiction over more than a dozen surrounding provinces. “Due to parallel commissariats, people and [local] offices do not know where to turn and have to do business with the two levels simultaneously,” one observer complained, adding that petitioners “regularly appeal to both province and central commissariats, accepting as legal whichever decision is more beneficial.”66

  While basic governing functions were taken up by very local bodies—or not at all—the nominal central authorities hunted for money. Already on the afternoon of October 25, and multiple times thereafter, Wiaczeysław Mezynski, another Polish Bolshevik (normally Russified as Menzhinsky), had taken an armed detachment over to the Russian State Bank.67 Mezynski, who had for a time worked as a bank teller for Credit Lyonnais in Paris, was the new “people’s commissar for finance ministry affairs”—as if there would be no enduring financial commissariat in the new order, just confiscations. His actions prompted finance ministry and Russian State Bank personnel to strike.68 Private banks shut their doors, too, and, when forced by armed threats to reopen, refused to honor checks and drafts from the Bolshevik government.69 Mezynski finally just robbed the State Bank and laid 5 million rubles on Lenin’s table in Smolny.70 His heist inspired Bolshevik officials—and impostors—to seize more bank holdings. Holders of deposit boxes, meanwhile, under threat that their valuables would be confiscated, were compelled to appear for “inventories,” but when they showed up with their keys, their valuables were confiscated anyway: foreign currency, gold and silver, jewelry, unset precious stones.71 As of December 1917, bond interest payments (coupons) and stock dividends essentially ended.72 By January 1918, the Bolsheviks would repudiate all tsarist internal and external state debt, estimated at some 63 billion rubles—a colossal sum, including about 44 billion rubles in domestic obligations, and 19 billion foreign.73 Whatever the ideological fulminations, they were wholly incapable of servicing the debt.74 Shock waves hit the international financial system, the ruble was removed from European markets, and Russia was cut off from international financing. The country’s financial system ceased to exist. Credit to industry was shut off.75 A paper money “famine” soon plagued the country.76

  All the while, Russia’s hundred-million-plus peasants were engaged in a redistribution of lands owned by gentry, the imperial household, the Orthodox Church, and peasants themselves (beneficiaries of Stolypin’s reforms, many of whom were now expropriated).77 Boris Brutzkus, a contemporary Latvian-born economist in Russia, deemed the 1917–18 peasant revolution “a mass movement of an elemental fury, the likes of which the world has never seen.”78 On average, however, peasants seem to have acquired a mere one extra acre of land. Some showed canny skepticism regarding the new strips, keeping them separate from their previous holdings, in the event someone came to take them away. (Sometimes they had to travel such distance to work the new allotments that they gave them up on their own.)79 Still, peasants ceased paying rent and had their debts to the peasant land bank canceled.80 Overall, the upheavals strengthened the redistributive commune and the ranks of middling peasants who neither hired others nor sold their own labor.81 How much credit the Bolsheviks received for the land redistribution remains uncertain, even though Lenin had expediently lifted the popular Socialist Revolutionary Land Decree. (The SRs, serving in coalition with the Cadets in the Provisional Government, had essentially abandoned their plank for immediate land redistribution.) The Bolshevik agriculture commissar, pronouncing the Land Decree in “the nature of a battle cry intended to appeal to the masses,” revealingly added that “the seizure is an accomplished fact. To take back the land from the peasants is impossible under any condition.”82 The decree was trumpeted in all the newspapers and published as a booklet (soldiers returning to native villages were given calendars with their copies, so that they would have something other than the Land Decree for rolling cigarettes).83 But the greatest concentrations of private land in the Russian empire were in the Baltic areas, the western provinces, Ukraine, and North Caucasus, all of which fell outside Bolshevik control. It would take a lot more than paper decrees to push the peasants toward Bolshevism.

  Rural tumult and violence worsened the already severely war-disrupted urban food supply. Petrograd, which lay distant from the main farming regions, and even Moscow were forced onto starvation rations, some 220 grams of bread per day.84 Fuel and raw materials started to vanish altogether, prompting workers to go from helping run their factories to taking them over (“workers’ control”), if only just to try to keep them operating, acts that more often than not failed. The entire proletariat—dwindling from its peak of perhaps 3 million—was dwarfed by at least 6 million internal refugees, a number that ballooned to perhaps 17 million when counting soldier deserters and POWs.85 This immense transient population frequently morphed into armed bands that pillaged small towns as well as the countryside.86 In the cities, Red Guard irregulars and garrison troops continued to incite public disorder—and Bolshevism had no police force, other than the Red Guards. Frontline soldiers were supposed to receive around 5 rubles per month, while Red Guards were paid 10 rubles per day, about the daily wage of fact
ory workers, but many factories had closed and ceased paying wages. And so the ranks of Red Guards—factory workers who were handed rifles or just looted arsenals—swelled.87 With or without red armbands, looters targeted the wine cellars of the capital’s countless palaces; some “suffocated and drowned in the wine,” an eyewitness recorded, while others went on shooting sprees.88 On December 4, 1917, the regime announced the formation of the Commission Against Wine Pogroms under a tsarist officer turned Bolshevik, Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich. “Attempts to break into wine-cellars, warehouses, factories, stalls, shops, private apartments,” the Soviet’s newspaper threatened, “will be broken up by machine-gun fire without any warning”—a stark indication of the uninhibited violence.89

  But the regime discovered a greater threat: the functionaries of the old regime were rumored to be plotting “a general strike.” Many holdover officials were already on strike, as were telephone workers, even pharmacists and schoolteachers; mostly just cleaning people and doormen were showing up for work at ministries.90 On December 7, the Council of People’s Commissars created a second emergency force, the “temporary” All-Russia Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-revolution and Sabotage, known by its Russian acronym as the Cheka, and headquartered at Gorokhovaya, 2. “It is war now—face to face, a fight to the finish, life or death!” the Cheka head, Felix Dzierzynski, a Polish Bolshevik of noble lineage, told the Council of People’s Commissars. “I propose, I demand an organ for the revolutionary settlement of accounts with counterrevolutionaries.”91 Dzierzynski (b. 1877) had endured eleven years in tsarist prisons and Siberian exile, emerging with few teeth, a partially paralyzed face with a lopsided smile, and a burning passion for justice.92 Within its first two weeks, the Cheka arrested some thirty alleged plotters said to belong to a “Union of Unions of State Functionaries” and used their confiscated address books to make additional arrests. Other functionaries—whose wages, apartments, food rations, and freedom were on the line—reconsidered their opposition to the new government.93 The Bolsheviks then spent much of January debating whether to allow these “tools of capitalism” and “saboteurs” to resume their state positions.

  Most of Russia’s revolutionaries, even many hard-core Bolsheviks, found the new political police anathema.94 Many unscrupulous types, including criminal elements, joined the Cheka and they often became preoccupied not solely or exclusively with political repression. The Cheka had added combating “speculation” to its mandate, but the agency itself emerged as a grand speculator.95 “They looked for counterrevolutionaries,” wrote an early eyewitness to Cheka raids, “and took the valuables.”96 Warehouses filled up with goods seized as “state property,” coercively acquired without recompense, which were then distributed as favors to officials and friends or sold. In mid-May 1918, a Cheka was established in Bogorodsk, a center of the tanning industry on the Volga with a population of 30,000, but on May 29 an attack destroyed the Cheka building. A detachment from Nizhny Novgorod, the provincial capital, arrived and conducted executions. “We confiscated two hundred thousand rubles’ worth of gold and silver articles and one million rubles’ worth of sheep wool,” the Cheka reported. “The factory owners and the bourgeoisie are in flight. The Commission decided to confiscate the property of those who fled and sell it to workers and peasants.”97 (“Workers and peasants” could include party bosses and police officials.) When the Cheka and the Bolshevik authorities were accused of looting, they often issued blanket denials, although Lenin hit upon the convenient slogan, “We loot the looters.”98

  The Cheka was far from alone in wheeling and dealing. “Everyone who wished to ‘nationalize’ did so,” recalled one official in the new Supreme Council of the Economy.99 The chaos of seizures and speculation in some ways proved more destabilizing than any genuine plots of counterrevolution. The Cheka’s role in providing security, meanwhile, remained doubtful. Back in January 1918, Lenin’s car was strafed from behind (two bullets passed through the windshield) and Smolny was subjected to bomb scares.100 By February, the Cheka proclaimed the power of summary execution against “the hydra of counter-revolution”—a declaration that looked like panic, as much as contempt for “bourgeois” liberties.101 A secret mid-1918 Cheka self-assessment would observe that “we did not have the strength, ability, or knowledge, and the [Extraordinary] Commission’s size was insignificant.”102

  BALLOTING

  Such was the Bolshevik monopoly in the stateless anarchy: idle factories, gun-toting drunks and marauding Red Guards, a deliberately shattered financial system, depleted food stocks, an ambiguous junior partnership for the Left SRs, and an ineffectual secret police busy with property theft and the very speculation it was supposed to combat—and on top of it all, the Provisional Government, just before its death, had finally set elections for a Constituent Assembly to begin on November 12, 1917.103 The ironies would be rich: Russia’s Constitutional Democrats had hesitated to allow democratic elections to go forward, fearing the consequences of a vote by peasants, soldiers, sailors, and workers, but now the dictatorial Lenin decided to let the democratic elections proceed.104 The prospect of a pending constitutional convention would blunt some of the fiercest socialist opposition to the all-Bolshevik Council of People’s Commissars and, anyway, not a few top Bolsheviks imagined they might win. The party certainly tried, suppressing the propaganda of other contenders and, in their own press, ripping into the alternatives, denouncing the Socialist Revolutionaries (“wolves in sheep’s clothing”), the Menshevik Social Democrats (“slaves of the bourgeoisie clearing the path for the counterrevolution”), and the Constitutional Democrats (“capitalist pillagers”). The stage seemed set for mass intimidation and fraud. Incredibly, however, Russia experienced its first ever genuine universal-suffrage elections.

  Work to organize the vote proved to be immense, perhaps the largest civic undertaking in the realm since the peasant emancipation half a century before. A genuinely independent sixteen-member All-Russia Election Board oversaw the process, with local supervision performed by regional, county, and communal boards staffed by representatives of the judiciary, local government bodies like tsarist-era zemtsvos but also the soviets, as well as by members of the voting public. The town, township, and county election boards drew up lists of voters: everyone, male and female, above twenty years of age.105 Around 44.4 million people voted by secret paper ballot, across vast distances, during wartime, in seventy-five territories, as well as at the front and naval fleets (nearly 5 million soldiers and sailors voted). No voting took place in territories under German occupation (tsarist Poland, Finland, the Baltic littoral), or in woefully undergoverned Russian Turkestan, and returns from some regions ended up lost. As of November 28, 1917, the original date for convocation, the balloting remained incomplete, so the announced opening was postponed, which provoked defenders of the Constituent Assembly to march that day on the Tauride Palace. Lenin responded by proposing a decree to arrest the main Constitutional Democratic politicians as “enemies of the people” (a term that Bolshevik opponents had first applied to Lenin’s gang) even before they had taken up their seats.106 Lenin’s resolution against the Cadets on November 28 was supported by every member of the Bolshevik Central Committee except one—Stalin.107 Stalin’s reasons remain obscure. Be that as it may, the next day the Bolshevik Central Committee—characteristically using a secret decree—formalized the new political order by awarding Lenin, Trotsky, Sverdlov, and Stalin the right to decide “all emergency questions.”108 And what was not an emergency?

  Despite the repression and assertion of dictatorial powers, however, the election produced an expression of popular will.109 To be sure, taking in the full measure of Eurasia, beyond the two capitals, one scholar has argued that through mid-1918 most people remained far more committed to particular institutions (soviets, soldiers’ committees, factory committees) than to specific parties.110 This was changing, however, for in the voting the populace was presented choices of parties. The four
fifths of the population who lived in the countryside, and who had no non-socialist farmers’ party to vote, cast their ballots for the peasant-oriented Socialist Revolutionaries in a strong plurality, just under 40 percent of the total ballots recorded, nearly 18 million, while another 3.5 million voted for the Socialist Revolutionaries of Ukraine. Another 450,000 voted for Russia’s Left Socialist Revolutionaries (they had split off only after the electoral lists had been formed). The overall SR vote proved strongest in the most fertile agricultural territories and in villages overall, where turnout proved extraordinarily high: 60 to 80 percent, versus around 50 percent in cities. The SRs won their highest percentage in Siberia, a land of farming and little industry.