Stalin, Volume 1

by Stephen Kotkin

  Kolchak (east), Denikin (south), and Yudenich (northwest) led three separate anti-Bolshevik groupings, vilifying the “commissars” as German agents and Jews, desecrators of all that was dear to Russian patriots and Orthodox believers. The Bolsheviks, in turn, pilloried their foes as “Whites,” evoking the color of supporters of monarchical restoration against the revolution in France after 1789. None of the “White” leaders sought to restore the monarchy.36 But they did seek to turn back the socialist revolution.

  The White leaders’ task of forming an army might have seemed within reach, but they had to attract officers who were utterly unlike them. Entering the Great War in 1914, the Russian officer corps had been dominated by General Staff Academy graduates (like Alexeyev, Kornilov, Denikin), as well as by the elite Imperial Guards, and 87.5 percent of the generals and 71.5 percent of the staff officers had been descendants of noble families. (Never mind that most owned no property.)37 But Russia lost more than 60,000 officers during just the first two years of the Great War. At the same time, the officer ranks of imperial Russia, and then the Provisional Government, swelled to a quarter million. Both the replacements and the new recruits came overwhelmingly from the peasants and urban lower orders.38 (Jews excluded, just about any male of military age in Russia who had the slightest bit of formal education could become an officer.)39 Many of these tsarist officers of humble origin morphed into petty tyrants who abused the common soldier worse than had upper-class military men.40 But their social backgrounds meant they were not preternaturally inclined to an antisocialist orientation. In other words, the Great War catastrophe had not only made possible the far-fetched Bolshevik coup, it had also rendered conservative armed opposition to Bolshevism more difficult. At the same time, the Whites greatly complicated their difficult task by refusing to acknowledge peasant land seizures, thereby alienating their potential mass base. Had it not been for the Cossacks, who eventually supported Denikin in numbers but remained reluctant to fight beyond their home territories of the Don and Kuban; the Czechoslovak Legionnaires, who remained reluctant to leave the Urals and Siberia unless it was for home but sometimes fought for Kolchak; and the Entente, which supplied military aid, there would have been no White movement.

  Everything about the Red Army’s birth proved difficult, too.41 The Bolsheviks had wanted no part of peasant conscripts, a class they distrusted, and initially sought to recruit only workers, a fantasy that had to be relinquished.42 In addition, the vast majority of Bolsheviks wanted no part of former tsarist officers: the revolution had been launched by soldiers and sailors in revolt against their authority. In fact, leftists in the Communist party, as well as Menshevik critics, repudiated a standing army with “a Bonaparte,” calling for a democratic militia loyal to the soviets.43 But Trotsky—who became the new war and naval commissar, and who had no special training in the military arts (he had never served in the army)—came out strongly in favor of a professisonal army led by real military men.44 Trotsky would deem the famously democratizing Order No. 1 of 1917 “the single worthy document of the February Revolution,” but he afforded no quarter to democracy in a Red Army.45 The soldiers’ committees that had brought down the tsar were formally abolished in March 1918.46 Trotsky also issued a service appeal to former tsarist officers, even generals (March 27), and stated in a newspaper interview published the next day that “the tsarist legacy and deepening economic disarray have undermined people’s sense of responsibility. . . . This has to stop. In the army as in the Soviet fleet, discipline must be discipline, soldiers must be soldiers, sailors sailors, and orders orders.”47 He also continued to insist that “we must have teachers who know something about the science of war.”48 Stalin would be among the most emphatic in rejection of these “military specialists.” But Lenin shared Trotsky’s view on the necessity of expertise, making it official policy.49 Stalin and other opponents of bourgeois experts, however, continued the fight.50

  Thus, the keys to the possibility of Red victory—military experts and peasant conscripts—remained under suspicion of treason. In the event, while the peasant revolution in many ways structured the entire civil war, the fraught incorporation of former tsarist officers structured the entire Soviet state.

  Most former tsarist officers who took part in the civil war gravitated toward the anti-Bolshevik forces, some 60,000 to Denikin, 30,000 to Kolchak, and 10,000 to other commanders.51 But by the end of the fighting, around 75,000 were serving in the Red Army, composing more than half the Bolsheviks’ officer corps of approximately 130,000. Even more strikingly, around 775 generals and 1,726 other officers of the tsarist general staff would serve in the Red Army at one time or another.52 Their motives varied from patriotism, preservation of the military establishment, and generous pay and rations, to concern for their family members kept as hostages. Would they be loyal? This question had prompted the Provisional Government to introduce “commissars” alongside the inherited tsarist officer corps to prevent counterrevolution, and the Bolsheviks expanded the practice.53 Every commander at every level was supposed to be paired with at least one commissar, alongside of which were instituted appointed “political departments” for clerical and propaganda work.54 Bolshevik political commissars’ powers included “preventing any counterrevolutionary move, wherever it might come from” and arresting “those who violate the revolutionary order.”55 The officers alone were supposed to make all operational decisions, but in practice these began to be considered as valid only with both the commander’s and the commissar’s signatures, opening the way to commissar involvement in purely military matters.56 Both political and military tensions became endemic.57

  An odd civil war it would be, then: Whites pushing peasants away and attempting to recruit officers from the lower orders to fight the socialists; Reds giving command posts to tsarist officers, albeit only under armed guard and recruiting peasants only reluctantly. Had the Whites embraced the peasant revolution, or the Reds driven all former tsarist officers into White hands, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and the rest would have been delivered back into exile or hung from the lampposts.

  Within this electrified political atmosphere, Russia’s civil war was in many ways a war of town against country, a scramble for grains (wheat, rye, oats, barley).58 Neither food supply failures nor even recourse to requisitioning originated with Bolshevism, however. The tsarist agricultural ministry, back in fall 1916, had introduced a grain-quota system (prodrazverstka), under which quotas at fixed prices were assessed on provincial authorities, who in turn assessed the county authorities, down to the villages. Predictably, this failed. In March 1917, after marches for bread helped precipitate the tsar’s downfall, the Provisional Government had founded a stand-alone ministry for the food supply and declared a state “grain monopoly” over distribution, except for a fixed minimum to be left with the growers, but provincial and district supply committees could not extract the grain, while inflation debased the currency offered to peasants (in any case, consumer goods were largely unavailable for purchase).59 Petrograd ate, meagerly, only because bagmen flouted the monopoly and jammed the river ports, roads, and rail lines, often forced to ride dangerously on the roofs of the train cars, to haul foodstuffs back from villages for resale. In late August 1917, during the Kerensky-Kornilov showdown, the Provisional Government suddenly doubled the price its state agents paid to the peasants for grain, a concession internal critics called a “complete capitulation,” but supplies of paper money, not to mention sacks and railcars, were insufficient. The Provisional Government found itself dependent on peasant cooperation to feed the cities and army, but unwilling to indulge peasant desires on the land question.60 On October 16, 1917, normally a month of abundance following the harvest, a desperate-sounding (last) minister of food supply for the Provisional Government observed, “We must cease our attempts at persuasion . . . a shift to compulsion is now absolutely necessary.”61 War and attempted state administration of food supply had pushed toward still greater clumsy
state action in the form of confiscations and distributions.62

  The Bolsheviks, who had even less tolerance for private traders, resolved to enforce the Provisional Government’s failed state grain monopoly, while reinventing it in class terms, seeking to enlist “poor” peasants in locating grain stores. The poor peasants did not rise to the summons, but the Bolshevik ability to enforce compulsion proved far more vigorous.63 Still, the underlying policy of assigned delivery quotas at artificially set prices to be exchanged for nonexistent industrial goods was not going to feed the cities and army. The Red Army grew from nonexistent in early 1918 to a staggering 600,000 troops already by December of that year, at least in terms of the rations being requested; idled people were hungry.64 The promise of food helped drive recruitment, but delivering on the promise was another matter. In the event, many soldiers and most ordinary people ate because much of the population was turned into illegal private traders (not always willingly).65 A non-Bolshevik newspaper, wryly noting that “hundreds of thousands of members of different committees have to be fed,” offered a logical suggestion: legal restoration of free trade and free prices in grain.66 That indeed would have been the answer, but it remained heresy.

  Lenin understood next to nothing of Russian agriculture, land utilization, migrant labor, or the actual operations of the peasant commune, let alone market incentives. In late January 1918, he had appointed Trotsky chairman of a short-lived Extraordinary Commission for Food and Transport; not long thereafter a food commissariat was established, and on February 25 Alexander Tsyurupa, an agricultural academy graduate, was appointed commissar. Lenin suggested that all peasants be compelled to deliver grain by name, and that those who failed to do so “be shot on the spot.” Tsyurupa and even Trotsky balked.67 Lenin continued to fulminate (May 9, 1918) against “those who have grain and fail to deliver it to properly designated rail stations and shipping points,” declaring them to be “enemies of the people.”68 That same month the regime proclaimed a “food dictatorship” and “a great crusade against grain speculators, kulaks, bloodsuckers, disorganizers, bribe-takers,” who had grown “fat and rich during the war” and “now refuse to give bread to starving people.”69 Dzierzynski and Lunacharsky warned this assault would imperil Bolshevik relations with the peasantry, but Lenin ignored their objections.70 By winter, with civil war in full swing, the Bolsheviks would climb down from an official policy of war against kulaks and speculators back to one of obligatory delivery quotas of foodstuffs at fixed prices in exchange for industrial goods.71 Still, in practice, they continued to employ blocking detachments to interdict private traders and to requisition food at gunpoint in the name of class warfare, a platform for Stalin’s blossoming.72

  MORE THAN A BARGE: STALIN IN TSARITSYN (1918)

  No region would prove more decisive in the civil war than the Volga valley, a premiere source of food and recruits as well as the strategic separator between the two large White armies of Kolchak (Urals-Siberia) and Denikin (Don-Kuban).73 No locale better encapsulated the class warfare revolutionary dynamic than Tsaritsyn, on the confluence of the Volga and the Tsaritsa rivers. It had become the largest industrial center in Russia’s southeast (population 150,000) and had traced the revolution in telescoped fashion, going from an absence of Bolsheviks (February 1917) to domination by Bolsheviks (September 1917) even before the coup in Petrograd.74 Red Tsaritsyn was a critical rail junction for grain and raw materials linking the Caucasus and Moscow, but it lay just east of the expansive Don and Kuban valleys, Cossack lands where the Volunteer Army‒White southern base formed.75 The military situation around Red Tsaritsyn had grown precarious, but workers in Moscow and Petrograd were receiving just four ounces of bread every other day, and Tsaritsyn, situated amid grain-growing regions, looked like a solution. To lead a southern food expedition, Lenin selected a tough worker Bolshevik, Alexander Shlyapnikov, the labor commissar. Tsyurupa, who had become close to Lenin, suggested sending along Stalin as well. In the event, Shlyapnikov became bogged down in Moscow, and Stalin ended up going without him, departing Moscow with 460 armed men on June 4, 1918, and arriving two days later at Tsaritsyn’s train station.76 His role, in essence, was Bolshevik bandit-in-chief in the south to feed the northern capital. Already a top member of the central government (or Council of People’s Commissars), Stalin was concomitantly named “director for food affairs in South Russia.” The food crisis, and Stalin’s chance appointment as sole head of an armed expedition to relieve it, enabled him to reprise his exploits at Batum (1902), Chiatura (1905), and Baku (1907), but this time with greater consequence.

  Lenin had already appointed someone as Red Tsaritsyn’s supreme military commander: Andrei Snesarev (b. 1865), a tsarist staff officer who had risen to the rank of lieutenant general under the Provisional Government and volunteered to the Reds. He had arrived in Tsaritsyn on May 27, 1918, with a Council of People’s Commissar mandate signed by Lenin as the newly named head of the new Military Commissariat of the North Caucasus. With Red forces melting away, Snesarev set about creating a real army out of ragtag local partisan warfare units, many of which had recently been driven from Ukraine by the advancing Reichswehr and resembled roaming bandits. His first report to the center (May 29) indicated a dire need for more tsarist military specialists.77 But on June 2, a political commissar in Tsaritsyn informed Moscow that locals “have heard little about the formation of a Red Army. . . . Here we have a mass of staff headquarters and bosses, beginning with basic ones right through extraordinary ones and supreme command ones.”78 It was four days later that Stalin arrived.

  Stalin set up residence not in the local Hotel France, but in a parked railway carriage and like a commander, donned a collarless tunic—the quasi-military style of attire made famous by Kerensky—and ordered a local cobbler to fashion him a pair of high black boots.79 Stalin also had his teenage wife, Nadya, in tow; she wore a military tunic and worked in his traveling “secretariat.” Already on his first workday, June 7, he boasted to Lenin that he would send eight express trains loaded with grain as he “pumped out” the fertile region, adding, “Be assured, our hand will not tremble.” At the same time, Stalin complained, “If our military ‘specialists’ (cobblers!) had not been asleep or idle, the railway line would not have been cut, and if the line is restored, it will not be because but in spite of them.”80 On June 10, Lenin issued a proclamation “to all toilers” reporting that food help was on the way: “People’s Commissar Stalin, located in Tsaritsyn and leading all food provisioning from the Don and Kuban, has telegraphed us about the immense grain reserves he soon hopes to send northwards.”81 In fact, within a few weeks, Stalin dispatched the first trainloads of grain northward, said to be about 9,000 tons, although how much total grain Stalin managed to forward northward overall remains unclear. Still, he spared nothing and no one in trying. His frequent telegrams to Lenin promised further food shipments, and dripped with venom against other regime officials operating in parallel, whom he depicted as saboteurs.82

  Among the key instruments of the swaggering cobbler’s son was a Tsaritsyn Cheka, which had just announced its existence in May 1918 when it took over a two-story mansion overlooking the Volga. It made the top floor into offices and living quarters, and partitioned the lower floor into cells, which were soon stuffed with prisoners beaten unconscious to “confess.” Targets included “bourgeois,” clergy, intelligentsia, and tsarist officers, many of whom had answered a local appeal to join the Red Army. Workers and peasants were also arrested as counterrevolutionaries if they dared to criticize the arbitrary arrests and torture, or if someone said they had.83 Rumors of atrocities constituted part of the Cheka’s mystique: the Kharkov Cheka was said to scalp victims, the Yekaterinoslav Cheka to stone or crucify them, and the Kremenchug Cheka to impale them on stakes.84 In Tsaritsyn, the Cheka was said to cut through human bones with handsaws.85 Alexander I. Chervyakov (b. 1890), who had emerged as the regional Cheka boss in Tsaritsyn, conducted himself like a tyrant, and
he and his leather-clad thugs settled their own scores, including with other Cheka operatives, but now they answered to Stalin.86 An eyewitness, the Bolshevik Fyodor Ilin, who had taken the name Raskolnikov from the Dostoevsky character, recalled that “Stalin in Tsaritsyn was everything”—de facto boss of the regional Cheka, and soon, of the regional Red Army.87

  Snesarev had built a local Red Army of 20,000 and organized the defenses of Tsaritsyn’s perimeter as fighting raged along the Tsaritsyn-Yekaterinodar railway.88 Stalin, however, was angling to displace the former tsarist officer. On July 10, he telegrammed Lenin that “there is plenty of grain in the South, but in order to get it, we need a functioning apparatus that does not meet obstacles on the part of [military] echelons, commanders, and such.” Therefore, Stalin concluded, “For the good of the cause, I need military powers. I have already written about this, but have received no reply. Very well. In that case, I shall myself, without formalities, dismiss army commanders and commissars damaging the cause. . . . The absence of a paper from Trotsky will not stop me.”89 Here was brazen insubordination of the war commissar’s authority, which Trotsky took surprisingly well. He telegrammed Stalin on July 17 indicating that Snesarev ought to be retained as commander (voenruk), but that “if you consider it undesirable to retain Snesarev as military commissar, inform me and I will remove him. Your Trotsky.”90 Stalin leapt at the offer. On July 19, approval came for the replacement of Snesarev and his Military Commissariat of the North Caucasus by a local Revolutionary Military Council consisting of three people: Stalin; the top Tsaritsyn Bolshevik, Sergei Minin, who was the son of a priest and, like Stalin, a former seminary student; and one other local official. The order from Moscow bore the notation: “The present telegram is sent with Lenin’s approval.”91 Lenin needed food.92 Stalin wanted autonomy from Trotsky.