Stalin, Volume 1

by Stephen Kotkin

  The SRs had won the election. But the split in the SR Party showed the strong trend moving still more toward the radical socialist variant (the SRs in Ukraine were already further left than their counterparts in Russia). The Social Democratic vote was substantial, too, though not for the Menshevik wing; only the Georgian Mensheviks did well, amassing 660,000 votes (30 percent of the ballots in the Caucasus); Russia’s Mensheviks won just 1.3 million votes, under 3 percent of the total vote. By contrast, around 10.6 million people voted for the Social Democrat‒Bolsheviks—24 percent of the votes counted. Eight provinces voted more than 50 percent Bolshevik. The Bolsheviks and SRs split the military vote, each taking about 40 percent, but tellingly, the Black Sea fleet, distant from Bolshevik agitation, voted 2 to 1 SRs over Bolsheviks, while the Baltic fleet, reached easily by Bolshevik agitators, went 3 to 1 Bolshevik. The Bolsheviks overwhelmingly won the Western Army Group and the Northern Army Group, as well as the big urban garrisons, reaching 80 percent among the soldiery stationed in Moscow and in Petrograd. Thus, the votes of soldiers and sailors (peasants in uniform) in and near the capital saved Bolshevism from an even more overwhelming defeat by the SRs, as Lenin himself later admitted.111

  The non-socialist vote came in at only 3.5 million, some 2 million of which went to the Constitutional Democrats. That put the Cadets under 5 percent. Significantly, though, almost one third of the Cadet vote was recorded in Petrograd and Moscow—around half a million ballots. The Bolsheviks garnered nearly 800,000 votes in the two capitals, but the Cadets came in second there (while besting the Bolsheviks in eleven of thirty-eight provincial capitals). Thus, the supreme strongholds of Bolshevism were also strongholds of the “class enemy,” a source of unrelenting Bolshevik anxiety about imminent “counterrevolution.”112 And perhaps the most important fact of all: organized right-wing politics were nowhere to be seen. Amid the atmosphere of “revolutionary democracy,” land redistribution, and peace, Russia’s electorate overwhelmingly voted socialist—socialist parties of all types collectively garnered more than 80 percent of the vote.113

  Bolshevism did better than non-Bolsheviks expected. In one sense, around half the former Russian empire voted for socialism but against Bolshevism: the electorate seemed to want people’s power, land, and peace without Bolshevik manipulation. In another sense, however, the Bolsheviks had secured an electoral victory in the strategic center of the country (Petrograd and Moscow), as well as among crucial armed constituencies (capital garrisons and Baltic sailors). For Lenin, that was sufficient. Other parties and movements remained slow to take his full measure, and even more important, this mass political power of Bolshevism (already visible at the front in summer 1917). “Who cannot see that what we have is nothing like a ‘Soviet’ regime, but is instead a dictatorship of Lenin and Trotsky, and that their dictatorship relies on the bayonets of the soldiers and armed workers whom they have deceived,” the Socialist Revolutionary Nikolai Sukhanov lamented in November 1917 in the newspaper he edited, New Life, which Lenin soon shut down.114 But it was not primarily deception, even though Bolshevik prevarication and legerdemain were bountiful. In fact, Lenin’s dictatorship shared with much of the mass a popular maximalism, an end to the war come what may, a willingness to see force used to “defend the revolution,” and an unapologetic class warfare of the have-nots against the haves—positions that were divisive, but also attractive. Lenin drew strength from the popular radicalism.115

  On January 5, 1918, at 4:00 p.m., the long-awaited Constituent Assembly opened in the old White Hall of the Duma’s Tauride Palace, but in a menacing atmosphere. The Bolsheviks had flooded the streets with armed loyalists and artillery. Rumors spread that the electricity would be turned off—Socialist Revolutionary delegates had come with candles—and of paddy wagons en route. Inside, the spectators’ gallery overflowed with raucous sailors and provocateurs. Ear-splitting heckling, clanking rifle bolts, and snapping bayonets punctuated the speechifying.116 Close to 800 delegates had won seats, including 370–380 for Socialist Revolutionaries, 168–175 for Bolsheviks, another 39–40 for Left SRs, as well as 17 each for Mensheviks and Constitutional Democrats, but the latter were outlawed and not seated, and many of the Mensheviks did not attend.117 Crucially, the Ukrainian SRs stayed away. Because of these no-shows and arrests, actual attendees numbered between 400 and 500.118 Lenin observed from the curtained seclusion of the former government box.119 On the floor, the Bolshevik caucus was led by the thirty-year-old Nikolai Bukharin, well described by John Reed as “a short red-bearded man with the eyes of a fanatic—‘more left than Lenin,’ they said of him.”120 The delegates elected SR party chairman Victor Chernov as Assembly chairman; the Bolsheviks backed the Left SR Maria Spiridonova, a renowned terrorist, who won an impressive 153 votes, 91 fewer than Chernov. A Bolshevik motion to limit the scope of the Constituent Assembly failed (237 to 146). Lenin had one loyalist, the leader of the Baltic sailors, announce that Bolshevik delegates were walking out; the Left SR delegates, including Spiridonova, walked out later.121 Some twelve hours in, around 4:00 a.m., a sailor of the Baltic fleet mounted the stage, tapped Chernov’s shoulder (or pulled his sleeve) and bellowed that the Bolshevik navy commissar “wants those present to leave the hall.” When Chernov answered, “That is for the Constituent Assembly to decide, if you don’t mind,” the sailor responded, “I suggest you leave the hall, as it’s late and the guards are tired.”122 Chernov rushed through snap votes on laws and adjourned at 4:40 a.m. Later that afternoon (January 6), when delegates arrived to resume, sentries refused them entry.123 Russia’s Constituent Assembly ended after a single day, never to meet again. (Even the original of the meeting protocols would be stolen from Chernov’s emigre residence in Prague.)124

  Bolshevik threats had been no secret.125 “We are not about to share power with anyone,” Trotsky wrote of the Constituent Assembly before it opened. “If we are to stop halfway, then it wouldn’t be a revolution, it would be an abortion . . . a false historical delivery.”126 The Socialist Revolutionary Party had carried the Southwestern, Romanian, and Caucasus fronts decisively, yet the SR leadership failed to bring troops to the capital or even to accept an offer of armed aid from the Petrograd garrison.127 Some SR leaders abjured the use of force on principle; most fretted that attempts to mobilize willing soldiers to defend the elected legislature would serve as a pretext for the Bolsheviks to close it down, which the Bolsheviks did anyway.128 No imperative to defend the Constituent Assembly was felt in the countryside, where the peasant revolution had helped sweep away the full panoply of tsarist officialdom, from provincial governors to local police and the land captains, who were replaced by peasant self-governance.129 In the capital, tens of thousands of protesters, including factory workers, marched to the Tauride Palace to try to save the Constituent Assembly, but Bolshevik loyalists fired on them.130 This was the first time civilians in Russian cities had been gunned down for political reasons since February and July 1917, but the Bolsheviks got away with it.

  The Petrograd Soviet’s existence helped diminish popular attachment to a Constituent Assembly.131 Lenin characterized the Bolshevized Soviet as a “higher form” of democracy, not the procedural or bourgeois kind celebrated in Britain and France, but the democracy of social justice and (lower class) people’s power. This view resonated widely in Russia, even if far from everyone accepted Lenin’s tendentious equation of the overwhelmingly socialist Constituent Assembly with “bourgeois” democracy.132 Reinforcing the point, the Sverdlov-dominated central executive committee of the Soviet had prescheduled a Third All-Russia Congress of Soviets for January 10, which happened to be immediately after the Constituent Assembly would be dispersed.133 Many of the delegates boycotted the gathering in protest, but those present retroactively legalized the forced closure of the Constituent Assembly.134

  TROTSKY’S FAILURE

  Peace! Immediate, universal peace, for all countries, for all peoples: Bolshevism’s popularity had been propelled, above all
else, by a promised extrication from the hated war. At the Second Congress of Soviets, however, Lenin had suddenly equivocated. “The new power would do everything,” he promised, “but we do not say that we can end the war simply by sticking our bayonets in the ground . . . we do not say that we shall make peace today or tomorrow.”135 (Newspaper accounts of his remarks omitted these words.) The “Decree on Peace”—which mentioned England, France, and Germany, but not the United States, “as the mightiest powers taking part in the present war”—by the congress had invited all belligerents to observe a three-month armistice and negotiate a “just democratic . . . immediate peace, without annexations and without indemnities.” (Other Bolshevik proclamations invited citizens of those belligerents to overthrow their governments.)136 Lenin and Stalin radioed instructions to Russia’s troops—hardly necessary—to desist from fighting. Lenin sent German military headquarters an uncoded offer of unconditional cease-fire, knowing that the Entente, too, would receive the message (when they did, they felt confirmed in their belief he was a German agent). Britain and France refused to recognize the Bolshevik regime and did not respond either to the Peace Decree or to formal notes from Trotsky. The Entente did send communiques to Russia’s military field headquarters.137 A sailor working for Trotsky, meanwhile, was rifling Russian foreign ministry vaults and located the secret annexationist tsarist war treaties with Britain and France; Trotsky published the documents damning the Entente, referred to as “the imperialists.”138 (Newspapers in the Allied countries almost universally failed to reproduce the exposed texts.)139 What, if anything, could be done about the ever more proximate German army remained unclear.

  Russia’s high command at Mogilyov, 400 miles southwest of Petrograd, had taken no part in the October coup, but they had been devastated by the revolution they had accelerated with their request in February 1917 for the tsar’s abdication. On November 8, 1917, Lenin and Trotsky had radioed Russia’s acting supreme commander, forty-one-year-old General Nikolai Dukhonin—Kornilov’s former chief of staff—to enter into separate peace negotiations with the Germans. Dukhonin refused the order to betray Russia’s allies. Lenin had the correspondence distributed to all units to show that the “counterrevolution” wanted to continue the war. He also dismissed Dukhonin in favor of thirty-two-year-old Nikolai Krylenko, who heretofore had held the lowest rank in Russia’s officer corps (ensign). 140 On November 20, 1917, he arrived at Mogilyov with a trainload of pro-Bolshevik soldiers and sailors. Dukhonin duly surrendered to him.141 Having chosen not to flee, Dukhonin had nonetheless not prevented the escape of General Kornilov and other top tsarist officers who had been held in the nearby monastery prison since they had surrendered to Kerensky’s people (in September 1917). Upon discovering the escape, furious soldiers and sailors shot and bayoneted Dukhonin while he lay face down on the ground, and then for several days used his naked corpse for target practice.142 Krylenko was either unable or unwilling to stop them. Unlike generals Alexeyev and Brusilov before him, the ensign did not tour the full battlefields. But he got the picture nonetheless: the Russian army was not demoralized; it effectively no longer existed.

  Germany also had reasons to seek accommodation, however. Self-negotiated cease-fires between German and Russian soldiers began to spread up and down the eastern front. Some experts were predicting food shortages and civil unrest on the German homefront that winter of 1917–18, troubles that loomed even more gravely for Austria-Hungary. The ferocious battles against France and Britain on the western front continued, now with the United States having joined the Entente. Ludendorff had decided to gather all his forces for a great spring offensive in the west—and troops that were, presumably, released from the east would come in handy. All of these considerations, and a desire to consolidate its immense gains on the eastern front, induced the Central Powers on November 15, 1917 (November 28 in the West) to accept the Bolshevik offer of armistice as a prelude to negotiations.143 Although the Bolsheviks had advocated for a general, not a separate, peace, the Entente repeatedly refused to participate in talks, and that same day Trotsky and Lenin announced that “if the bourgeoisie of the Allied countries force us to conclude a separate peace [with the Central Powers], the responsibility will be theirs.”144 For the site of negotiations, the Bolsheviks had proposed Pskov, which remained under Russian control (and where Nicholas II had abdicated), but Germany chose the Brest-Litovsk fortress, in a tsarist territory now serving as a German command site.145 The armistice was quickly signed there on December 2 (December 15 in the West). (In immediate violation of the terms, Germany moved six divisions back to the western front.)146 One week later the peace talks opened.

  Upon arrival, the Bolshevik Karl Radek—born Karl Sobelsohn in Habsburg Lemberg (Lwów)—had hurled antiwar propaganda out the train window at rank-and-file German soldiers, urging them to rebel against their commanders.147 Seated across the table from the German state secretary for foreign affairs, Baron Richard von Kuhlmann, and the chief of staff of German armies in the East, Major General Max Hoffman, Radek leaned forward and blew smoke. At the opening dinner in the officers’ mess, one member of the Russian delegation, a Left SR, kindly reenacted her assassination of a tsarist governor for the meeting’s host, Field Marshal Prince Leopold of Bavaria. The head of the Bolshevik delegation, Adolf Joffe—whom the Austrian foreign minister, Count Ottokar Czernin, pointedly noted was a Jew—observed that “I very much hope that we will be able to raise the revolution also in your country.”148 Thus did the leftist plebes of the Russian Pale of Settlement and Caucasus square off against titled German aristocrats and warlords of the world’s most formidable military caste.149 After some initial misunderstandings, it soon became evident that the Bolshevik demand for “peace without indemnities and annexations” would never be met; the German and Austrian delegations, invoking “self-determination,” demanded Russian recognition of the independence of Poland, Lithuania, and western Latvia, all of which the Central Powers had occupied in 1914–16.150 The Bolsheviks’ only salvation appeared to be waiting for war strains to precipitate revolution in Germany and Austria-Hungary (if the war did not cause the Entente homefronts to collapse first).151 For a second round of “negotiations,” Lenin sent Trotsky to grandstand and stall.152 The Bolsheviks had gotten the Germans to permit publicity about the talks, which encouraged much public posturing, and Trotsky’s performance at Brest-Litovsk catapulted him to international renown. Smiling through a long German diatribe about Bolshevik repression of political opponents, Trotsky, at his turn, unloaded: “We do not arrest strikers but capitalists who subject workers to lock-outs. We do not shoot peasants who demand land, but arrest the landowners and officers who try to shoot peasants.”153

  Trotsky soon telegrammed Lenin to advise that the talks be cut off without a treaty. “I’ll consult with Stalin and give you my answer,” Lenin cabled. The answer turned out to be a recess in early January 1918, during which Trotsky returned to Petrograd for consultations.

  The Bolshevik Central Committee met on January 8 to discuss Germany, two days after the forcible dispersal of the Constituent Assembly and right after an official report, delivered by Mikhail Bonch-Bruevich, the brother of Lenin’s fixer Vladimir, warning that “the onset of total famine in the army is a matter of the next few days.”154 Back when Lenin had pushed for a coup he had insisted that Germany stood close to revolution, but now he changed his tune: the world revolution remained a dream, he observed, while Russia’s socialist revolution was a fact; to save the latter, he urged accepting whatever terms the Germans offered.155 Trotsky countered that Germany would not resume fighting, obviating any need to capitulate. But a self-styled leftist Bolshevik group led by Nikolai Bukharin and including Dzierzynski, Mezynski, and Radek, argued for a Russian resumption of hostilities. They deemed Lenin’s position defeatist. Thus the Central Committee split three ways: capitulation (Lenin); stall and bluff (Trotsky); revolutionary partisan warfare to accelerate revolution in Europe (Bukharin). Of the sixt
een voting Central Committee members present on January 9, only three—most prominently Stalin—sided with Lenin.

  Stalin objected that “Trotsky’s position is no position,” adding “there is no revolutionary movement in the West, nothing exists, only potential, and we cannot count on potential. If the Germans begin an offensive, it will strengthen the counter-revolution here.” He further noted that “in October we spoke of a holy war, because we were told that merely the word ‘peace’ would provoke a revolution in the West. But this was wrong.”156 Bukharin, by contrast, came around to conceding that “Trotsky’s position”—waiting for the workers in Berlin and Vienna to strike—“is the most correct.” Trotsky’s proposal (“end the war, do not sign a peace, demobilize the army”) carried the day, 9–7.157 After the meeting, Lenin wrote that the majority “do not take into consideration the change in conditions that demand a speedy and abrupt change in tactics.”158 That was Lenin for you: rabidly against any concessions whatsoever to moderate Russian socialists, but demanding the Communists make abject concessions to German militarists.

  A Third Congress of Soviets assembled on January 10, 1918 (lasting until the eighteenth), with Bolshevik delegates in a slight majority (860 of 1,647 by the end, as more delegates kept arriving). Meeting at the Tauride Palace, it passed a resolution to erase all references in any future compendia of Soviet decrees to the recently dispersed Constituent Assembly. Stalin gave a report as commissar of nationalities, and the congress formally established the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR). Commenting on the Constituent Assembly, Stalin concluded, “In America they have general elections, and the ones who end up in power are attendants of the billionaire Rockefeller. Is that not a fact? We buried bourgeois parliamentarism, and the Martovites want to drag us back to the period of the February Revolution. (Laughter, applause.) But as representatives of the workers, we need the people to be not merely voters but also rulers. The ones who exercise authority are not those who elect and vote but those who rule.”159 Trotsky reported on Brest-Litovsk. “When Trotsky ended his great speech,” one British enthusiast reported, “the immense assembly of Russian workmen, soldiers and peasants rose and . . . sang the Internationale.”160 Despite a mood for revolutionary war, however, the congress avoided a binding resolution one way or the other. Trotsky returned to Brest-Litovsk on January 17 (January 30 in the West) to stall further.