Stalin, Volume 1

by Stephen Kotkin

  LIGHTNING ROD COMMISSAR

  The Bolsheviks attempted to counter Versailles immediately. On January 24, 1919, a letter of invitation was issued by wires to the world and on March 2 a semi-international group of some fifty Communists and other leftists attended a gathering in Moscow that became the Third (Communist) International or Comintern. The floors in the long, narrow Mitrofanov Hall of the Kremlin’s Imperial Senate were covered in extravagant carpets and the windows in brilliant drapes, but the stove heaters in the frigid space sat idle for lack of fuel. Some fifty guests from the Moscow party organization sat in a kind of gallery. “The delegates took their seats on flimsy chairs at rickety tables obviously borrowed from some cafe,” recalled a French Communist. “On the walls were photographs: the founders of the First International Marx and Engels; the still honored leaders of the Second, mostly those no longer with us.”182 Travel to Soviet Russia had proved difficult because of the Allied blockade and the civil war’s disruptions; a mere nine delegates made it from abroad. Several leftist parties extended “mandates” to individuals already resident in Moscow. Even so, just thirty-four attendees held credentials to represent Communist parties, or almost Communist parties, from about twenty countries (many of which had once been part of the tsarist empire). Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Chicherin, Bukharin, and Zinoviev were made voting delegates (six people sharing five votes; Stalin signed their mandates).183 “Anyone who had attended the old Congresses of the Second International,” a Russian Communist observed in Pravda, “would have been quite disappointed.”184 As more attendees showed up, however, the assembly boldly voted itself the founding congress of the Comintern. Trotsky’s pen let out a burst of rapture. “The tsars and the priests, ancient rulers of the Moscow Kremlin, never, we must assume, had a premonition that within its gray walls would one day gather the representatives of the most revolutionary section of modern humanity,” he wrote on the Comintern Congress’s closing day (March 6), adding that “we are witnesses to and participants of one of the greatest events in world history.”185 Lenin had planned to hold the assembly openly in Berlin, but the German Social Democrats were hostile.186 In Moscow, Lenin made Zinoviev (who spoke some German) chairman of an executive committee, which also included Radek, who had been educated at German and Swiss universities and influenced by Rosa Luxemburg, before turning against her, then turning back to her to help establish the German Communist party.187 The “delegates” approved Lenin’s theses denouncing “bourgeois democracy” and upholding “proletarian dictatorship”—precisely the point of dispute with the German Social Democrats. That rift on the left, now institutionalized globally, would never be healed.188

  The 8th Congress of the Russian Communist Party, meanwhile, had been planned to commence right after the Comintern gathering, on the evening of March 16, with a half session, so that the delegates could attend a commemoration of the 1871 Paris Commune, but Yakov Sverdlov returned to Moscow from a trip to Oryol on March 8 with a raging fever; he never properly recovered. Conflicting rumors had him either giving a speech to workers outside in the cold, or killed by a blow to the head with a heavy object administered by a worker at a factory—revenge against Bolshevik deprivation and repression. In fact, Sverdlov died of typhus or influenza.189 From his Kremlin apartment, Lenin, according to Trotsky, phoned the war commissariat on March 16: “‘He’s gone. He’s gone. He’s gone.’ For a while each of us held the receiver in our hands and each could feel the silence at the other end. Then we hung up. There was nothing more to say.”190

  Sverdlov was buried on Red Square, near the Kremlin Wall, in the Bolsheviks’ first major state funeral. His death prompted the cancellation of the Paris Commune tribute and a two-day delay in the Party Congress. It opened in the evening after the funeral, on March 18, in the Imperial Senate’s rotund Catherine Hall (which would be renamed for Sverdlov). Trotsky, too, was absent: he had obtained Central Committee permission to return to the front, given the “extremely serious” situation. Although he had also wanted all Red Army delegates returned to the front, the soldiers protested and were allowed to decide for themselves; many stayed at the Congress.191 Lenin’s opening night speech hailed Sverdlov as “the most important organizer for the party as a whole.” Everyone stood.192 Thanks partly to Sverdlov’s skills, but also to the formation of a Red Army, the party had doubled in size since the previous congress a year before. In attendance were invited guests, 301 voting delegates, and 102 non-voting delegates, representing 313,766 party members in Soviet Russia (220,495), Finland, Lithuania, Latvia, Belorussia, and Poland, which were not under Soviet rule.193 A survey of the 500-plus attendees established that 17 percent were Jewish and nearly 63 percent Russian—information that did little to alter perceptions.194 The Whites and other Bolshevik opponents slurred the regime as “Kike Bolshevik” with a “Kike” Red Army (Trotsky).195

  Among the principal agenda items at the congress was the widespread employ of former tsarist officers, a controversial policy identified with Trotsky, whom Lenin had to defend over his absence. Debate was prolonged and heated (March 20–21).196 Lenin had explained the matter on the opening day. “Military organization was completely new, it had not been posed before even theoretically,” he stated on March 18, adding that the Bolsheviks were experimenting, but that “without an armed defense the socialist republic could not exist.”197 Soviet Russia, therefore, needed a regular, disciplined army, and it needed knowledgeable military specialists. Lenin knew he would have to sway the hall full of Communists, whose class ideology he shared but whose flexibility he greatly exceeded. And so, the Bolshevik leader had instructed one person whom he tasked with reporting to the congress to employ the word “threatening [grozno]” for the situation at the front, illustrate it with a large color-coded map visible to the whole auditorium, and blame informal partisan-warfare tactics.198 Even so, the talk was of the treason committed by former tsarist officers admitted into Red ranks (a handful of cases, among tens of thousands of serving officers).199

  Moreover, Trotsky had published several defenses of using former tsarist officers, but their brutal logic came across as politically tone deaf, and further incensed opponents. (“So, can you give me ten divisional commanders, fifty regimental commanders, two army commanders and one front commander—today? And all of them Communists?”)200 Trotsky had also published “theses” on the eve of the congress defending military policy and now tapped Grigory Sokolnikov to defend them; Vladimir Smirnov, a Left Communist, offered the rebuttal.201 Sokolnikov tried to argue that the danger lay not in former tsarist officers but in the peasantry. The critics, dubbed the “military opposition,” could offer up few proletarians—other than Voroshilov—to substitute for former tsarist officers in command posts, and instead proposed strengthening the role of commissars and the Communist party in the Red Army, a point that Trotsky, through Sokolnikov, conceded. The policy issue, therefore, subtly shifted to whether stronger commissars meant merely greater political control, or in the words of Smirnov, “a larger part in the direction of the armies.”202 Despite this narrowing of the disagreement, inflamed speeches of principle (for and against use of “military specialists”) continued to dominate the sessions.203

  Stalin allowed Voroshilov to bear the brunt of criticism for Tsaritsyn, then took the floor to aver that Europe had real armies and “one can resist only with a strictly disciplined army” as well as “a conscious army, with highly developed political departments.” Not long ago, none other than Kornilov, at the Moscow State Conference in August 1917, had insisted to wide applause that “only an army welded together by iron discipline” could save Russia from ruin.204 Second, Stalin revealed a hostile attitude toward the peasantry, stating “I must say that the nonworker elements, which constitute a majority of our army, peasants, will not fight for socialism, will not! Voluntarily they will not fight.”205 In accentuating discipline and dismissing the peasantry, he had assumed a position close to Trotsky’s. But Stalin did not mention him by
name.206

  Lenin took the floor again on March 21, 1919. “Sometimes he took a step or two forward toward the audience, then stepped back, sometimes he looked down at his notes on the table,” one witness recalled. “When he wanted to punctuate the most important point or express the unacceptability of the military opposition’s position, he raised a hand.”207 Lenin conceded that “when Stalin had people shot at Tsaritsyn I thought it was a mistake.” This was a telling observation—a mistake, not a crime.208 But now, upon further information, Lenin conceded that Stalin’s Tsaritsyn executions were not a mistake. Still, Lenin rejected Stalin’s insinuation that the war commissariat had persecuted Voroshilov, and rebuked Stalin’s protégé by name: “Comrade Voroshilov is guilty for refusing to relinquish the old partisan warfare [partizanshchina].”209 Lenin’s offensive threw the “military opposition” on the defensive, and probably turned the tide in the vote. On March 21, 174 voted for the Central Committee theses (drafted by Trotsky and backed by Lenin) and 95 for the military opposition theses, with 3 abstentions.210 After the vote, victory in hand, Lenin formed a five-person reconciliation commission—3 from the winning side, 2 from the losing side—who together confirmed some tweaks to Trotsky’s theses on March 23.211

  Stalin had voted with Lenin.212 Stalin also signed the telegram (March 22–23) informing Trotsky at the front that his theses had been approved, a sign no doubt of Lenin’s efforts at reconciling the two.213 The policy compromise had been foretold by a party official from Nizhny Novgorod named Lazar Kaganovich, in an article in his local press that was summarized in Pravda, which rebuked critics of military specialists but also cautioned against “an excessive faith” in them, proposing they be watched closely by the party.214 Kaganovich, an early admirer of Trotsky, would soon become one of Stalin’s most important lieutenants.

  Military controversy almost eclipsed another major issue at the Congress: the lack of fuel or food. Opponents were deriding Bolshevism as banditry, as well as “the socialism of poverty and hunger.” Suren Martirosyan (known as Varlaam Avanesov), newly named to the collegium of the Cheka, told the delegates that “now the broad masses . . . demand not that we agitate about bread but that we provide it.”215 Food extracted from a radically contracting economy was going mostly to two “armies”: one in the field and one behind desks.216 Ration cards stipulated a right to specific amounts of food, on a class basis, but often the provisions were unavailable: the Bolshevik food commissariat did not attain the level of food procured by the tsarist state in 1916–17.217 However much grain might be procured by state agents, ruined railways could not transport it all to the cities, labor was insufficient to unload the grain that did get transported, and functioning mills were too few. At the same time, perhaps 80 percent of the grain requisitioned in the name of the state was being diverted for private sale to black markets.218 In a mass exodus for survival, Moscow’s population, which had swelled during the Great War to 2 million, declined to under 1 million.219 Even so, urban food shortages remained chronic.220 Remaining urbanites had little choice but to try to obviate the blocking detachments and venture into the countryside to purchase and haul back food, which was known as “bagging.” (When the historian Yuri Gothier, an official at Moscow’s Rumyantsev Museum—later the Lenin Library—returned from a series of lectures in Tver in 1919, he recorded “the balance for the trip” in his diary as “30 pounds of butter.”)221

  Illegal petty private trade kept the country alive, but bureaucratic self-dealing threatened to smother it. Viktor Nogin, a member of the Central Committee, tried to call the Congress delegates’ attention to “horrifying facts about drunkenness, debauchery, corruption, robbery, and irresponsible behavior of many party workers, so that one’s hair stands on end.”222 The Congress authorized a new commissariat for state control (it would be renamed the workers’ and peasants’ inspectorate); a few weeks after the Congress, Stalin would be appointed its commissar, concurrent with his post as nationalities commissar, with broad investigatory powers to oversee state administration centrally and locally.

  The Congress, as the highest organ of the party by statute, also elected a new Central Committee, the party’s executive between Congresses. The new Central Committee consisted of nineteen members—Lenin was listed first, the rest in alphabetical order—as well as eight candidate members. The Congress adopted a new party statute (which would endure to 1961). Fully fifty delegates voted against Trotsky’s inclusion in the Central Committee, a number far exceeding the negative votes of any other nominee.223 One of his closest loyalists, Adolf Joffe, was not reelected (and would never again serve on the Central Committee). Trotsky had emerged as a lightning rod, and the antagonism to his imperious “administrative-ness” would extend beyond the delegates in the hall, cropping up in discussions at primary party organizations.224

  The Congress also formalized the existence of a small “political bureau” (politburo) and party secretariat, alongside a recently created larger “organization bureau” (orgburo). As Lenin explained, “the orgburo allocates forces [personnel], while the politburo decides policy.”225 The politburo had five voting members—Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Lev Kamenev, Nikolai Krestinsky—and three candidate (non-voting) members: Zinoviev, Kalinin, Bukharin.226 Krestinsky replaced Sverdlov as secretary of the party. Sverdlov’s fireproof safe, meanwhile, was delivered to the Kremlin commandant warehouse, still locked. It contained tsarist gold coins in the amount of 108,525 rubles, gold articles, and precious jewels (705 items in total), tsarist banknotes in the amount of 750,000 rubles, and nine foreign passports, one in Sverdlov’s name, as if the Bolsheviks feared they might have to flee the Whites.227

  FORCES OF ORDER

  All during the cacophony of Versailles, the world was shifting, and it would shift still more, in ways that escaped the major protagonists of France, Britain, and the United States. As 1919 dawned, war-induced inflation obliterated middle-class savings, prompting many to barter the family furniture, down to the piano, for sacks of flour or potatoes, even as war veterans loitered outside restaurants, begging for scraps. “Councils” (soviets) formed in Berlin and dozens of cities in Central Europe, mostly with the aim of reestablishing public order and distributing food and water, but revolution was in the air, too.228 People dreamed not just of getting something in their empty stomachs but of an end to militarism and war, police batons and political repression, extremes of obscene wealth and poverty. A German Communist party was founded in December 1918, from the Spartacist movement, led by Rosa Luxemburg, a Polish-Jewish revolutionary born in tsarist Russia.229 From Germany’s Breslau Prison, just before being released and helping found the German Communists, she attacked Lenin and Bolshevism, writing that “freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for members of one party—however numerous they may be—is no freedom at all. Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for one who thinks differently.”230 But Luxemburg went after the reformism of the German Social Democrats with even greater verve.231 She never had the opportunity to show how her rhetorical commitment to freedom would work in practice as a result of socialist revolution. In January 1919, worker actions, joined by the German Communists, led to a general strike—half a million workers marched in Berlin—and then a controversial armed uprising, which provoked a crackdown; Karl Liebknecht, who had pushed for the armed uprising, and Luxemburg, who had opposed it, were assassinated. This reminds us that Lenin and Trotsky were not assassinated in 1917. The executioners of the two leading German Communists were so-called Freikorps, a right-wing nationalist militia of returning frontline soldiers called in by the shaky postkaiser government against the leftists. Altogether, around 100 people were killed; 17 Freikorps members died as well.

  By contrast, in Munich, Kurt Eisner, a German journalist of Jewish extraction, attempted to reconcile the new grassroots councils-soviets with parliamentarism, Kerensky style, but he, too, failed. Instead, on April 7, 1919, a new party that broke away from the Socialist Democr
ats, joined by groups of anarchists, declared a Bavarian Soviet Republic. Six days later, German Communists took it over, emptied the prisons, began to form a Red Army (recruiting from the unemployed), and sent telegrams of victory to Moscow. On April 27, Lenin replied with greetings and advice: “Have the workers been armed? Have the bourgeoisie been disarmed? . . . Have the capitalist factories and wealth in Munich and the capitalist farms in its environs been confiscated? Have mortgage and rent payments by small peasants been cancelled? Have all paper stocks and all printing-presses been confiscated? . . . Have you taken over all the banks? Have you taken hostages from the ranks of the bourgeoisie?”232 In very short order, however, beginning on May Day 1919, some 30,000 Freikorps, together with 9,000 regular German army troops crushed the Bavarian Soviet Republic.233 More than 1,000 leftists were killed in bitter fighting. (Eisner was assassinated by a right-wing extremist). Instead of a Bolshevik-style far-left revolution, Germany convened a Constituent Assembly in Weimar (February to August 1919) that produced a center-left parliamentary republic. Antiliberal rightist forces continued their mobilization.234

  A related scenario unfolded in Italy, which, though nominally a Great War victor, had suffered casualties totaling 700,000 of 5 million men drafted to the colors and a budget deficit of 12 billion lira, saw mass strikes, factory occupations, and, in some cases, political takeovers in northern cities. This spurred an embryonic movement on the right called fascism—a closely knit combat league to defend the nation against the socialist threat. In rump Hungary, which was undergoing severe territorial truncation, a Soviet Socialist Republic was declared on March 21, 1919, under the leadership of the Communist Bela Kun [Kohn], who had been in Russia as a POW and met Lenin. Kun and the nucleus of a Hungarian party had been brought together a few months before in a Moscow hotel, but upon return to Hungary he and other leaders had been thrown into prison. Hungary’s Social Democrats, appointed to form a government, decided to merge with the Communists in hopes of obtaining military aid from Russia in order to restore Hungary’s pre-1918 imperial borders. Kun “walked straight from the cells into a ministerial post,” one observer wrote. “He had been badly beaten while incarcerated and his face showed the wounds that he received and fully intended to avenge.”235 Lenin hailed the Hungarian revolution, and, on May Day 1919, the Bolsheviks promised that “before the year is out the whole of Europe will be Soviet.”236 The Budapest government issued a welter of decrees nationalizing or socializing industry, commercial enterprises, housing, transport, banking, and landholdings greater than forty hectares. Churches and priests, manor houses and gentry, came under assault. The Communists also established a Red Guard under Mátyás Rákosi, which the police and gendarmerie joined, and Kun attempted a coup in Vienna (his mercenaries managed to set fire to the Austrian parliament). But when Kun sought formal alliance with Moscow and Red Army troops, Trotsky replied that he could not spare any.237 No matter: Kun had the Red Guard invade Czechoslovakia to reclaim Slovakia, and Romania to reclaim Transylvania. A foreign correspondent noted, “again and again, he [Kun] rallied the masses by a hypodermic injection of mob oratory.”238 But the “revolutionary offensive” failed, and the Communists resigned on August 1, 1919. Kun fled to Vienna. The 133-day Communist republic was over. (“This proletariat needs the most inhumane and cruel dictatorship of the bourgeoisie to become revolutionary,” Kun complained, just before fleeing into exile.) Romanian forces entered Budapest on August 3–4. Rear Admiral Miklós Horthy, in landlocked Hungary (like “Admiral” Kolchak in Siberia), formed an embryonic National Army, whose units instituted a White Terror against leftists and Jews, killing at least 6,000 in cold blood. As the departing Romanians cleaned out everything, from sugar and flour to locomotives and typewriters, Horthy soon styled himself “His Serene Highness the Regent of the Kingdom of Hungary” and formed a right-wing dictatorship.239