Stalin, Volume 1

by Stephen Kotkin

  Tsaritsyn would be saved—just barely—not by Trotsky but by Dmitry Zhloba, whose “Steel Division” of 15,000 men had left the Caucasus front, covered 500 miles in sixteen days, and surprised the Whites’ unguarded rear.137 On October 25, the Steel Division pushed the Cossacks back across the Don.138 Four days later, Stalin reported to a plenum of the Moscow soviet how dicey the situation had been.139 Indeed, had Tsaritsyn fallen that autumn of 1918, he might have faced a government inquiry and disciplinary action, as well as permanent reputational damage.140

  A WORLD TURNING (NOVEMBER 1918-JANUARY 1919)

  Lenin was hardly the only high stakes gambler. Germany’s high command had attempted one immense gamble after another: the Schlieffen Plan (1914) to win a war of mobility; Verdun (1916) to bleed the enemy white in a new strategy of attrition; unrestricted U-boat warfare (1917) to break the stranglehold of the British naval blockade; sending Lenin home to foment chaos and knock Russia out of the war; and, following a German victory on the eastern front, an all-out offensive on the western front launched March 21, 1918.141 By June, the German army in the west had come within thirty-seven miles of Paris, close enough to strike it with Big Bertha heavy artillery. But the Reichswehr failed to take the French capital, after suffering one million casualties.142 United States troops, provoked into the war by the U-boats, had begun arriving in France at the rate of 120,000 per month (the United States had entered the war in early 1917 with 150,000 men under arms total). Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, and South Africa, meanwhile, put even more men into military action on behalf of Britain than would the United States, and in August 1918, the reinforced Allies counterattacked. True, thanks to Brest-Litovsk—or rather, to Berlin’s willingness to violate its own treaty prohibitions—Germany shifted half a million troops to the western front, increasing its strength there to 192 divisions from 150.143 But by September 28, 1918, Deputy Chief of Staff General Erich Ludendorff, the man responsible for the western offensive, informed his superior, Field Marshall Paul von Hindenburg, that the Reich had no prospect of winning: Germany lacked reserves to send into battle. What Ludendorff did not say was that during the western offensive, nearly a million Reichswehr soldiers were bogged down in a disorganized occupation of the east that instead of extracting resources consumed them.144 (Germany had to export 80,000 tons of coal just to get railways in Ukraine restarted.) Ludendorff would scapegoat Bolshevism and its “infection” of German troops, lamenting, “I often dreamed of this [Russian] revolution, which would so lighten the burden of our war, but today the dream is suddenly realized in an unanticipated way.”145 But as one scholar explained, “The man who defeated Ludendorff the soldier, was not so much [Allied Supreme Commander] Marshal Foch, as Ludendorff the politician.”146

  Meanwhile, to salvage the retreating Reichswehr—which was everywhere on foreign soil, from France to Ukraine—a broken Ludendorff proposed importuning the Allies for an immediate cease-fire, but the civilians in a new German cabinet refused while contemplating an all-out mobilization of the civilian population for a last stand—exactly the opposite of the future stab-in-the-back legend.147 Ludendorff soon changed his mind about begging for an armistice and resigned; the cabinet never managed the civilian mobilization.

  On November 9, inside the neoclassical Bolshoi Theater, Lenin crowed to the delegates to the Sixth All-Russia Congress of Soviets, “we have never been so near to international proletarian revolution as we are now.”148 That same day, as it turned out, the staunch monarchist Hindenburg and others in the German high command, fearing a domestic version of the kind of revolution they had sent Lenin to incite in Russia, pressed the kaiser to abdicate. Wilhelm II had his imperial train shunted across the border into the Netherlands and, once in personal safety, signed a formal abdication.149 (Unlike his executed cousin Nicky, Willy would live a long life and die peacefully in exile.) An armistice followed on November 11, 1918, signed in Marshal Foch’s railway carriage in a French forest near the front lines. The armistice called for the immediate withdrawal of German troops everywhere, except in the former Russian empire, where the Germans were to remain until further instructed by the Entente.150 Two days later, Moscow unilaterally repudiated the Brest-Litovsk Treaty as well as the August 1918 Supplementary Treaty (wih its 6 billion ruble indemnity, already partially paid).151 (The victorious Allies would soon compel Germany to renounce Brest-Litovsk.) After fifty-two gruesome months, the Great War was over. Lenin was in such a good mood he released non-Bolshevik socialists from prison and, on November 30, 1918, relegalized the Menshevik party.152

  The repercussions of the war were immense, and enduring. Wartime GDP had increased in the United States and in the United Kingdom, but in Austria, France, the Ottoman empire, and Russia it cratered by between 30 and 40 percent.153 The Great War required unprecedented levels of taxation and state economic control across belligerent countries, most of which would not be rolled back.154 Beyond the 8.5 million war dead and the nearly 8 million taken prisoner or missing, an influenza epidemic would infect 500 million people globally and kill at least 50 million, fully 3 percent of the global population (some estimates range up to 100 million).155 Some 20 million people returned home maimed in some fashion. One and a half million Brits were crippled (the disabled received compensation: 16 shillings a week for a lost right arm, 11 shillings sixpence for a lost right hand and forearm, 10 for a lost left arm, nothing for a disfigured face). In Germany, around 2.7 million people returned with war-related disabilities, alongside half a million war widows and 1.2 million orphans. In the interest of maintaining public order, let alone to repay a debt, soldiers and widows were granted war-related pensions. Other war-influenced emergency social policies included emergency housing decrees, which willy-nilly introduced permanent government regulation. Unemployment insurance, cash sickness benefits, birth and burial grants were expanded into a proto-welfare state, spurred by warfare. The Russian empire lost 2 million dead and 2.5 millon wounded.156 An estimated 2.4 million Russian subjects contracted disease, while 3.9 million were taken prisoner, a massive surrendering equal to all the POWs of other belligerents combined.157 It was in such a context that Trotsky scorned “papist-Quaker babble about the sanctity of human life,” and Lenin approvingly quoted Machiavelli to the effect that “violence can only be met with violence.”158

  Lenin’s big gambles—accepting imperial German aid to return to Russia; the coup in Petrograd; the capitulatory separate peace with Germany—had paid off. Russia and Germany, on opposing sides in the war but now both vanquished, provided an illuminating contrast. He would admit that “the war taught us much, not only that people suffered, but that those who have the best technology, discipline, and machinery come out on top.”159 Contemporaries widely remarked on the similarities in the methods of Ludendorff (b. 1865) and Lenin (b. 1870), as well as wartime German and Bolshevik policies generally.160 The German military occupiers of Eastern Europe had resorted to population registration, property confiscation, conscription, and promiscuous issuance of decrees, claiming an unlimited mandate while foundering in self-made administrative chaos. But unlike Bolshevism, German wartime rule in Eastern Europe did not organize the populace politically and culturally. No native-language newspapers or native-language schools had been established to involve and shape the local societies. Instead, the Germans obsessed over how to keep their German staff awash in Kultur, lest they go native. If not for the local Jews who spoke Yiddish and adapted quickly to German as translators, the German overlords would have been unable to communicate.161 The Germans put forth no narratives of overarching purpose that elicited mass involvement, and they did not build mass organizations. Germany’s experience in Eastern Europe demonstrated not only how much Bolshevism owed to the Great War, but how much Bolshevism transcended a military-style occupation.162 In addition, contrasting Ludendorff’s private kingdom in Lithuania, western Belorussia, and Latvia with Stalin’s in Tsaritsyn, we can see that Stalin exhibited the exact opposite talen
ts of Ludendorff: military amateurism but political cunning.

  Voroshilov, Stalin’s protégé, was hanging on as commander of the Tenth Army in Tsaritsyn.163 At first, Supreme Commander Vacietis wanted him sacked, but Trotsky, while insisting on the immediate removal of Sergei Minin (“conducts extremely harmful policies”), allowed Voroshilov to remain, provided someone competent could be assigned alongside him.164 Soon, however, Trotsky telegrammed Sverdlov demanding Voroshilov’s removal, too (“shows no initiative, trivialities, talentless”).165 Vacietis, meanwhile, had softened, indicating he was not strongly against Voroshilov being appointed to a Red Army command in Ukraine (he may have had no other candidate for the post).166 Trotsky exploded. “A compromise is necessary but not a rotten one,” he pleaded to Lenin (January 11, 1919). “Essentially, all the Tsaritsyn-ites have assembled in Kharkov. . . . I consider Stalin’s protection of the Tsaritsyn tendency a dangerous ulcer, worse than the betrayal and treason of military specialists. . . . Voroshilov, along with Ukrainian partisan warfare-ism, a lack of culturedness, demagoguery—that is something we cannot have under any circumstances.”167

  The enmity between Voroshilov and Trotsky rendered the former that much more valuable to Stalin. Voroshilov, Minin, and their subordinates engaged in a revenge whispering campaign against Trotsky, spreading word that the war commissar was in bed with tsarist generals and sending Communists to the firing squad—a whiff of treason.168 (Stalin could pour his anti-Trotsky poison directly into Lenin’s ear.) Left Communists, such as Nikolai Bukharin, who edited Pravda, used the Tsaritsynites to further their own anti-Trotsky campaign to “democratize” military organization.169 Impelled to respond, Trotsky in early 1919 derided “the new Soviet bureaucrat, who, trembling over his job,” envious of the competent, unwilling to learn, sought a scapegoat for his own shortcomings. “This is the genuine menace to the cause of communist revolution . . . the genuine accomplices of counter-revolution.”170 Here was the gist of Trotsky’s future critique of Stalinism.

  Lenin continued to show confidence in his Georgian protégé despite having abruptly removed him from Tsaritsyn, and in January 1919, he sent Stalin to a new hotspot, Vyatka, in the Urals, to investigate why Perm and the surrounding region had fallen to Admiral Kolchak.171 Stalin traveled together with the Cheka’s Dzierzynski and was again accompanied by his wife, Nadya, as well as her sister Anna Alliluyeva (b. 1896); Dzierzynski’s personal secretary, Stanisław Redens (b. 1892), another Pole, fell in love with and would soon marry Stalin’s sister-in-law. As for the Red debacle in Perm, Stalin and Dzierzynski issued three separate reports, noting the Reds’ abject disorganization and the local population’s hostility to the regime (over food requisitioning), but shifting the blame each time, first impugning Trotsky, then Vacietis. Their reports pointedly listed the former tsarist officers on the Red side who had defected to the Whites. They also allowed that the Bolshevik regime should avoid posting as overseers of tsarist-era commanders comrades who were “too young” or party “demogogues,” a slight backtracking on Stalin’s earlier hard line, evidence perhaps of Lenin’s intervention.172 Lenin, meanwhile, on January 19, a Sunday, heading out to meet Krupskaya convalescing in the fresh air and woods outside of Moscow, had his Rolls-Royce hijacked by three armed men. The revolution’s leader, his sister, driver (Stepan Gil), and one bodyguard trudged the rest of the way on foot.173

  VERSAILLES 1919: THE ANOMALY

  Few peace treaties have gone down in history less favorably than that of Versailles. The talks opened in Paris on January 18, 1919, the anniversary of Germany’s unification, and concluded in Versailles’ Hall of Mirrors—where the German Reich had been proclaimed—on June 28, 1919, five years to the day after Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination. Thirty-seven countries sent delegations (some more than one); myriad expert commissions worked on ethnic and territorial claims; and 500 journalists reported on the proceedings, but just three people determined the outcome: David Lloyd George (Britain), Georges Clemenceau (France), and Woodrow Wilson (United States), a former Princeton professor who became the first sitting American president to travel to Europe. The seventy-eight-year-old Clemenceau aimed to counteract Germany’s superior economic might and population; Lloyd George to attain Britain’s colonial and naval aims at German expense; and Wilson to imagine a secure permament peace, though he abetted the French imposition of punishment on Germany. The final text contained 440 clauses, the first 26 of which concerned a new League of Nations, while the remaining 414 took up Germany’s alleged sole war guilt. Germany was forbidden to maintain more than 100,000 troops or any military aircraft, and lost 13 percent of its territory, including Alsace and Lorraine to France, its foreign colonies, and its merchant fleet. France had wanted to detach the Rhineland, too, but Lloyd George objected; the Rhineland was instead demilitarized. A newly reconstituted Poland was awarded most of German West Prussia, while Danzig, predominantly ethnic German, was made a “free city” and a so-called Polish Corridor was created between German territories, isolating German East Prussia. To fund the reconstruction of French and Belgian territory, and the British war-loan debt to the United States, Germany was ordered to pay 132 billion gold marks, then equivalent to $31.4 billion or £6.6 billion. (Approximately $440 billion in 2013.)174

  Germany’s imposition of Brest-Litovsk on Russia served as one rationale for the expressly punitive Versailles Peace—exactly as the impudent Bolshevik Karl Radek had predicted to Germany’s Brest negotiators. Versaillies’ terms, meanwhile, were publicly assailed even in the West. France’s Marshall Foch commented, “This is not a peace; it is an armistice for twenty years.”175 Still, unlike imperial Russia under Brest-Litovsk, Germany was not dismembered. (Lloyd George remarked of Germany, “we cannot both cripple her and expect her to pay.”) Moreover, the treaties that followed with the other defeated belligerents—St. Germain with Austria (September 10, 1919), Neuilly with Bulgaria (November 27, 1919), Trianon with Hungary (June 4, 1920), Sevres with Turkey (August 10, 1920)—were in some ways harsher. (The Turks alone, taking up arms, managed to revise their treaty terms.) The victors’ Peace of Versailles certainly had flaws, irrespective of its attribution of sole war guilt to Germany. It enshrined self-determination and the nation while promoting territorial revisionism: Versailles and its sister treaties approved the award to 60 million people of states of their own, while making another 25 million into national minorities. (There was also a jump in the number of stateless persons.) Edvard Beneš and Tomáš Masaryk managed to extract extra territory, at the expense of Hungary, for the new Czechoslovakia, even though both had fought on the losing Austrian side. Romania obtained significant ethnically mixed lands at Hungarian expense. But if Hungary was the legitimate homeland of the Hungarians, according to national self-determination, why were so many Hungarians stuck elsewhere? Jews had no separate homeland, becoming a minority in every state. Self-determination did not apply to any of the colonial peoples under the British and French empires, both of which expanded: in 1919 the British empire alone grew to one quarter of the earth. Many war spoils were colonial: new mineral-rich possessions in Africa, new oil fields in the Middle East. Masaryk, who served as the first president of the new Czechoslovakia, dubbed the Versailles Peace Conference a “laboratory built over a vast cemetery.”

  Whatever Versailles’ deep flaws on principle, it failed utterly in terms of power politics: the United States would go home, the British would back away, and the French—who shared a land border with Germany—could not bear the burden of enforcing the treaty provisions.176 A punitive peace is punitive only if there is the unity of will to enforce it, which was lacking. All that was fatal enough, but even before the powers bailed on the Versailles structure, it was being erected on the basis of a temporary anomaly: the simultaneous disintegration of both German power and Russian power. Both of those conditions could not last; in the event, neither would.

  Russia’s contribution to the Allied effort in the Great War (through 191
7) remained unacknowledged. The British had imagined that to defeat Germany, the Russian “steamroller,” together with France, would do the bulk of the fighting (and dying), leaving supply and finance to Britain, but the treatment of Russians as British mercenaries and cannon fodder had to be abandoned, even as it generated lasting resentment.177 At the same time, Britain had found itself in what was an unaccustomed dependence on its allies’ strategic imperatives and, in the postwar, London would seek an arm’s-length grand strategy, derived from long-standing preferences (to have others fight) and priorities (the empire), as well as the Great War experience.178 As for Bolsevik Russia in the here and now, the Allies were at a loss. While Foch argued for a preemptive war, Clemenceau advocated containment (a cordon sanitaire); while Lloyd George imagined moderating Bolshevism through trade, other British political figures wanted to roll back the leftist menace.179 Some British imperialists, for their part, smiled upon the forced retreat of Russian sovereignty from the Caucasus and hoped to consolidate Ludendorff’s policy of imperial partition in the East, but other Brits, with a wary eye on Germany, preferred a reunified Russia as a counterweight. In the end, for all the talk of the possible spread of the “Bolshevik bacillus,” Versailles showed itself far less concerned with Russia than with Germany. Still, the two turned out to be inseparable.180 Much of Germany’s political class would refuse to accept the verdict of Versailles; Soviet Russia’s exclusion from the peace conference—delegations were received from Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Ukraine—gave Moscow additional grounds for treating the result as illegitimate. Directed against Germany and in disregard of Russia, Versailles would push the two pariahs into each other’s arms, as each would strive to resurrect its world power, forming a foundation of Stalin’s world.181