Stalin, Volume 1

by Stephen Kotkin

  Germany, which was eager to break Japan’s alliance with Britain, had encouraged the Japanese intervention against Russia, a landing that raised the prospect of a west-east flanking occupation, based on a common interest, to reduce Russia to a colonial dependency. Lenin, notwithstanding all the fog of his class categories, well understood the possibility of a German-Japanese alliance, just as he had grasped the antagonism of state interests between Germany and Britain on the one hand and, on the other, Japan and the United States.242 But Lenin struggled to induce Britain and France, let alone the far-off United States, to align with Communist Russia against Germany and Japan. Despite the 1917 rupture, Soviet Russia’s strategic position bore resemblance to imperial Russia’s. A big difference between past and present, however, was that parts of imperial Russia had broken off, and they could be used by hostile foreign powers against Russia.

  Stalin was busy with these lost territories. On March 19, 1918, he wrote to Caucasus Bolsheviks urging them to strengthen the defenses of Baku, and a week later an article of his appeared in Pravda denouncing non-Bolshevik leftists (“South Caucasus Counter-Revolutionaries under a Socialist Mask”).243 On March 30, Stalin spoke on the Hughes apparatus to the head of the Tashkent Soviet about developments in Turkestan. On April 3–4, Pravda carried an interview with him on a draft constitution on which he was working, based upon a proposed federal structure and new name for Soviet Russia—the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR).244 On April 9, Stalin dispatched a message, published in Pravda, to the soviets of Kazan, Ufa, Orenburg, and Tashkent, indicating that the principle of self-determination had “lost its revolutionary meaning” and could be overridden. On April 29, the Council of People’s Commissars appointed Stalin RSFSR plenipotentiary to negotiate a peace treaty with the Ukrainian Central Rada. That same day the Germans, further improvising in the East, betrayed their Ukrainian Central Rada treaty partners, installing a puppet Ukrainian “Hetmanate,” a deliberately archaic name, under General Pavlo Skoropadskyj. But his misrule, alongside the Austro-German occupation, provoked peasant insurrections and a many-sided armed conflict.245 “When the German forces entered Ukraine they found absolute chaos,” a German official reported. “Not infrequently, one came across neighboring villages surrounded by trenches and fighting each other for the land of the former landlords.”246 The promised grain stocks that had lured a nearly half-million-man German occupation army failed to materialize.

  Stalin had no better success organizing pro-Bolshevik actions on the territory of Ukraine, but in a sign of his increasing visibility and importance—and of Yuly Martov’s frustration at Lenin—Martov revived accusations of Stalin’s complicity in the spectacular 1907 Tiflis mail coach robbery and the 1908 robbery of a steamship, writing in a Menshevik periodical that Stalin “had been expelled by the party organization for his involvement in expropriations.”247 Stalin sued Martov for slander in a Revolutionary Tribunal and, on April 1, denied the charges in Pravda, stating “that, I, Stalin, was never called before the disciplinary committee of any party organization. In particular, I was never expelled.” He added—in exquisite irony—that “one has no right to issue accusations like Martov’s except with documents in one’s hand. It is dishonest to sling mud on the basis of mere rumors.”248 The tribunal convened on April 5 before a full house. Martov was denied a shift to a civil court with jury trial, but he went on the offensive, requesting time to produce documents, explaining that for conspiratorial purposes, no written party records had been kept, but witnesses could back up his claims, and so he would gather affidavits from Georgian Bolsheviks such as Isidor Ramishvili, who had headed the disciplinary body for Stalin’s case in 1908, regarding Stalin’s participation in a 1908 steamship armed robbery and the near-fatal beating of a worker familiar with Stalin’s murky past. Stalin objected that there would be insufficient time to wait for the witnesses. Still, the court postponed its proceedings against Martov for a week and, by some accounts, the Menshevik Boris Nicolaevsky went to collect testimony in the Caucasus, returning with affidavits from Ramishvili as well as Silva Jibladze and others. Once back in Moscow, however, Nicolaevsky is said to have discovered that all other records of the case had vanished. Sverdlov as well as Lenin—who admired Martov, for all their differences—had helped to close out the inquiry.249 On April 18, 1918, the tribunal found Martov guilty of slander, but only assessed him a reprimand; before the month was out the verdict had been annulled.250 On May 11, Sverdlov, who oversaw the Martov case from behind the scenes, did have the Soviet’s central executive committee approve closure of the Menshevik newspaper for generally printing false information.251 But Stalin’s bandit past would never go away.252

  CZECHOSLOVAK LEGION REVOLT

  General Alexeyev, Nicholas II’s former chief of staff and then supreme commander, had formed a clandestine network of officers after February 1917; following the Bolshevik coup, he summoned them to constitute a Volunteer Army among the Don Cossacks at Novocherkassk.253 The Volunteer Army began with a mere 400 to 500 officers. Among them was Kornilov, himself of Cossack pedigree, who, upon release from the prison near Mogilyov, traveled south disguised in peasant rags with a forged Romanian passport.254 Because the sixty-one-year-old Alexeyev had cancer, he assigned the military command to the forty-eight-year-old Kornilov, even though the two never really got along. Kornilov’s forces—former tsarist officers, Cossacks, military school cadets (teenagers)—came under heavy assault from mid-February 1918. He sought sanctuary, marching a few thousand Volunteers southeastward toward the Kuban through heavy snow and barren steppes with little shelter or food other than what they plundered. Volunteers taken prisoner had their eyes gouged out—and they responded in kind. (“The more terror, the more victories!” Kornilov exhorted.)255 After the frightful “ice march,” 700 miles in eight days, wearied survivors arrived near Yekaterinodar, the Kuban capital, only to discover it was held not by the Cossacks but by Reds in superior numbers. One general (Kaledin) had already shot himself. Kornilov was killed when a shell struck his headquarters in a farmhouse on April 12, 1918, and buried him under the collapsed ceiling. “A cloud of white plaster streamed forth,” one staff officer recalled of Kornilov’s room; when they turned the general over, they saw shrapnel lodged in his temple.256 The Whites quickly decamped, and pro-Bolshevik units exhumed his shattered body, dragged it to Yekaterinodar’s main square, and burned it on a rubbish pile.257 “It can be said with certainty,” an elated Lenin boasted, “that, in the main, the civil war has ended.”258 Russia’s civil war was about to begin.

  Kornilov’s was not the only notable death that month: Gavrilo Princip passed away at the Habsburg’s Terezin Fortress prison (the future Nazi Theresienstadt), where he was serving 20 years for the murder of the Austrian heir. The tubercular Princip, weakened by malnutrition, disease, and blood loss from an amputated arm, weighed eighty-eight pounds and was 23 years old. The 700-year-old Habsburg empire would outlive him by just a few months.259

  As for Russia’s civil war, it was precipitated from utterly unexpected quarters. In the Great War, Russia had captured around 2 million Central Power prisoners, mostly Austro-Hungarian subjects.260 Later in the Great War, in anticipation of gaining a new Czechoslovak homeland in an Entente victory, the Czechoslovak Legion, which came to comprise some 40,000 POWs as well as deserters, served the tsar and took part in Kerensky’s June 1917 offensive. In December 1917 they had been placed under French command.261 Trotsky schemed to use the Legionnaires (who leaned Social Democratic) as the nucleus for a new Red Army, but Paris insisted that the Legionnaires be transferred to France, on the western front.262 Russia’s closest port in the west, at Arkhangelsk (750 miles north of Petrograd), was ice bound in March, so the armed troops were sent via Siberia to Vladivostok, whence they were supposed to sail to France.263 But Germany had demanded that the Bolsheviks halt and disarm the Czechoslovak Legion, an obligation inserted into Brest-Litovsk. The Entente, for its part, requested that the tro
ops who had not yet reached Omsk, in Western Siberia, be turned around and sent northwest to Murmansk and Arkhangelsk after all, to fight off the Germans nearby. The Japanese suddenly refused to transport Legionnaires from Vladivostok on boats for the west, assisting the Germans and keeping Siberia for themselves. The Legionnaires, for their part, wanted only to fight the Austrians and Germans, and were understandably wary about the meaning of all the back and forth. Amid suspicions, trouble broke out in Chelyabinsk (eastern Urals) on May 14, 1918, when a Russian train with ethnic Hungarian POWs of Austria-Hungary pulled up alongside a train of the Czechoslovak Legion troops. Insults flew. A Hungarian threw a metal object, wounding a Czech; the Czechs assaulted the other train and strung up the Hungarian object thrower. The Chelyabinsk soviet detained several Czechs and Slovaks in an investigation. On May 25, Trotsky cabled: “Every armed Czechoslovak found on the railway is to be shot on the spot.”264 That stupid order could never have been carried out. Still, suspecting the Bolsheviks intended to turn them over to Germans, the Czechoslovak Legion seized Chelyabinsk and then one town after another: Penza (May 29), Omsk (June 7), Samara (June 8), Ufa (July 5), Simbirsk (July 22), and so on, until they held the entire Trans-Siberian Railway as well as much of the Volga valley, more than two thirds of the former Russian empire.265 They conquered more territory than anyone else in the Great War.266

  The Czechoslovak Legion had harbored no special desire to fight or overthrow the Bolsheviks, but in the vacuum opened up by their self-defense conquests, more than a dozen anti-Bolshevik movements, from late May through June 1918, proclaimed their existence throughout the Volga region and Siberia.267 Governments also sprouted in the tsarist lands under German occupation and those not under German occupation, including the Caucasus, where the British landed an expeditionary force near the oil fields. With the Germans in possession of Ukraine; the Czechoslovaks, Western Siberia; the Cossacks, the Don; and the Volunteer Army, the Kuban, the heartland of Russia, where the Bolsheviks were ensconced, had run out of food—and the fall harvest remained a long way off. On May 29, the Council of People’s Commissars appointed Stalin a special plenipotentiary for South Russia to obtain food for the starving capitals Moscow and Petrograd. “He equipped an entire train,” recalled Pestkowski. “He took with him a Hughes apparatus, airplanes, cash in small notes, a small military detachment, some specialists. I accompanied him to the station. He was in a very jolly mood, fully confident of victory.”268 On June 6, Stalin arrived in Tsaritsyn, on the Volga. If anti-Bolshevik forces captured Tsaritsyn, they could cut off all food and establish a united front from Ukraine through the Urals and Siberia.269 The assignment would entail a vast expansion from his managing contacts with the various non-Russian nationalities, and a transformation of his role in the Bolshevik regime. But in the meantime, with the Czechoslovak Legion revolt, and the absence of any genuine Bolshevik army, the regime’s survival seemed ever more in doubt.

  NON-COUP

  Alone among the powers, Germany recognized the Bolshevik regime and maintained a real embassy in Moscow in a luxury private residence once owned by a German sugar magnate, on a quiet lane near the Arbat. On April 23, 1918, the forty-seven-year-old Count Wilhelm Mirbach (b. 1871), who had been in Petrograd to negotiate prisoner exchanges with the Bolsheviks and had worked at the embassy in the tsarist period, arrived back in Moscow as ambassador with a mission to ensure that no Russian rapprochement with the Entente took place. Mirbach had been reporting that the Bolshevik regime was “not for long,” and that all it would take to sweep it away would be “light military pressure” by German forces sent via Estonia. The count openly courted monarchist groups as Bolshevik replacements, and behaved as if Moscow were already under German occupation.270 Most Bolsheviks responded in kind. “The German ambassador has arrived,” Pravda wrote, “not as a representative of the toiling classes of a friendly people but as plenipotentiary of a military gang that, with boundless insolence, kills, rapes, and pillages every country.”271 On May 1, International Workers’ Day, German troops reached the Sevastopol naval base in Crimea, headquarters of the Black Sea fleet. On May 8, the Germans seized Rostov, in the Don River basin, where they abetted the gathering anti-Bolshevik forces. Pro-Bolshevik forces had to evacuate; they managed to transfer to Moscow confiscated gold coins, jewels, and other valuables that filled three wooden crates, one metal container, and six leather pouches.272 Two days later, at a Central Committee meeting attended by a mere half a dozen members, Grigory Sokolnikov, signatory of Brest-Litovsk, argued that Germany’s post-Brest offensive had violated the treaty and urged a renewed Anglo-French formal alliance.273

  Germany occupied seventeen former tsarist provinces as well as tsarist Poland. Amid rumors of secret clauses in Brest-Litovsk and of Germans dictating Soviet government policies, newspapers warned of an imminent German conquest of Moscow and Petrograd. In fact, the German high command did consider a narrow thrust for the two capitals feasible. At this point, however, mid-May 1918, when they stood fewer than 100 miles from Petrograd (at Narva), and 300 miles from Moscow (at Mogilyov), the Germans stopped advancing.274 Why? Lenin’s continued appeasement of Berlin played a part. Equally important, German ruling circles deemed an invasion superfluous: Bolshevism seemed doomed. Mirbach, received by Lenin in the Kremlin on May 16, reported that same day to Berlin that the Bolshevik leader “continues to maintain his inexhaustible optimism,” but, Mirbach added, Lenin “also concedes that even though his regime still remains intact, the number of its enemies has grown. . . . He bases his self-confidence above all on the fact that the ruling party alone disposes of organized power, whereas the other [parties] agree only in rejecting the existing regime.” On Mirbach’s May 16 report of Lenin’s difficulties, Kaiser Wilhelm II wrote: “He is finished.”275

  In this context Yakov Sverdlov sought to drive a revival of the Communist party, which appeared to be atrophying. On May 18, 1918, he circulated a resolution that urged “the center of gravity of our work be shifted somewhat towards building up the party,” and stipulated that “all party members, irrespective of their employment or their positions, are obliged to participate directly in party organizations and must not deviate from party instructions issued by the relevant party center.”276 Subordination to the center, however, remained elusive. In the meantime, Lenin’s strategy was to impress a cost-benefit analysis on Berlin. “If the Germans-merchants take economic advantages, comprehending that via war they will get nothing from us, that we will burn everything, then your policy will be successful,” he instructed the new Soviet envoy to Berlin, Adolf Joffe, on June 2, 1918. “We can supply raw materials.”277 But for the German government, which had already claimed Ukraine’s breadbasket, the grand prize remained Paris. The German embassy in Moscow warned Berlin on June 4 that the Bolsheviks might tear up the Brest-Litovsk agreement (“These people’s actions are absolutely unpredictable, particularly in a state of desperation”), yet the embassay’s chief message was that Bolshevism was at the end of its rope (“famine is encroaching upon us. . . . Fuel reserves are waning. . . . The Bolsheviks are terribly nervous, probably feeling their end approaching, and therefore the rats are beginning to flee from the sinking ship. . . . It may be they will attempt to flee to Nizhny Novgorod or Yekaterinburg. . . .”).278 German diplomats were contacting political has-beens of both the tsarist regime and the Provisional Government about a restoration.279 On June 25, in another note to Berlin, Mirbach again predicted Bolshevism’s imminent demise.280

  Mirbach’s high-handed antics in Moscow, meanwhile, were more than matched by the Bolsheviks in Berlin. Thanks to Brest-Litovsk, the hammer and sickle flew on Unter den Linden, 7, the old tsarist embassy. Joffe, the son of a rich merchant and himself a firebrand Left Communist, had refused to present his credentials to the kaiser, held dinners on embassy territory for the Spartacus League and other German leftists, and funneled money to German Social Democrats, openly aiming to bring down the imperial German regime. The Soviet embassy amassed
a staff of several hundred, including agitators listed as attachés who fanned out to meetings of German socialist organizations. Joffe spread weapons, too, often imported via diplomatic pouch.281 General Ludendorff, for his part, on June 28 again urged that the Bolsheviks be cleared out of Russia so that Germany could set up a puppet regime. Never mind that the Germans lacked reserves even for the western front. A more sober-minded German foreign ministry argued against such cockamamie recommendations: the Bolsheviks already supported Brest-Litovsk, what more did Berlin need? And, the foreign ministry personnel added, the various anti-Bolshevik forces inside Russia did not conceal their sympathy for the Entente. What was Ludendorff’s alternative for a pro-German group with which to replace the Bolsheviks? The kaiser declined Ludendorff’s pleadings and even permitted the Bolsheviks to redeploy many of their Latvian Riflemen against internal enemies to the east, in the Volga valley.282 Lenin’s German loyalties paid off.283 But in Moscow people knew nothing of the kaiser’s decision to rebuff Ludendorff against an invasion to finish off Bolshevism. What people in Moscow saw was the imperious Mirbach, physical symbol of detested partnership with German militarism—a circumstance that provoked the Left Socialist Revolutionaries to action.