Stalin, Volume 1

by Stephen Kotkin

  On this last foothold of the White movement, Stalin reported to Trotsky that a directive would be issued for a “total extermination of the Wrangelite officer corps.” The order was issued and carried out. An Order of the Red Banner was awarded to a Red commander for “having cleansed the Crimean peninsula of White officers and counterintelligence agents who had been left behind, removing up to 30 governors, 50 generals, more than 300 colonels and as many counterintelligence agents, for a total of up to 12,000 of the White element.”291 Overall, no reliable casualty counts exist for the Red-White skirmishes. Red deaths from combat have been estimated to have been as high as 701,000; White deaths, anywhere from 130,000 to many times that.292 The absence of reliable figures is itself indicative of the nature of the antagonists, not just the low value they placed on human life but also the severe limits of each side’s governing capacities.

  The Red military victory cannot be attributed to impressive strategy; mistakes were plentiful.293 Nor did intelligence win the war.294 Nor did victory derive from homefront production. To revive military industry and supply, the Bolsheviks formed innumerable “central” commissions, which underwent perpetual reorganization, often deepening the ruin.295 They had mocked tsarist supply problems, but the tsarist state had equipped a force ten times larger than the Red Army in the field—and the tsarist state supplied the Red Army, too. Anywhere from 20 to 60 percent of the old regime’s accumulated 11 million rifles, 76,000 machine guns, and 17,000 field guns survived the Great War, an invaluable inheritance, almost all of which came into Red hands.296 In 1919, Soviet Russia manufactured just 460,000 rifles (compared with 1.3 million by tsarist Russia in 1916), 152 field guns (versus 8,200 in 1916), and 185,000 shells (versus 33 million in 1916).297 As of 1919, the Red Army possessed perhaps 600,000 functioning rifles, 8,000 machine guns, and 1,700 field guns. The Tula plant (founded by Peter the Great) was producing around 20 million rounds of ammunition monthly, while Red forces were firing 70 to 90 million.298 A keen Polish oberserver of Soviet affairs, Józef Piłsudski (whom we shall meet in the next chapter) correctly told the British ambassador, before the major Red-White clashes of 1919, that the armies of both sides were of similarly low quality, but that the Reds would nonetheless push the Whites back toward the Black Sea.299

  Crucially, the Bolsheviks needed only to hold on; the Whites needed to dislodge them.300 Railroad junctions, depots, barracks, and the central administrative core of the old tsarist army were located in the Red-held capitals and heartland.301 In addition, the Whites fielded fewer than 300,000 soldiers (160,000 in the south, not quite 20,000 in the north, and perhaps 100,000 in the east), while Red combatants at peak reached 800,000. True, perhaps up to half of Soviet Russia’s registered population for mobilization—5.5 million, including 400,000 in so-called labor armies—failed to report or deserted between 1918 and 1920, but conscripts defected not to the other side but from the war (particularly at harvest time).302 Moreover, the Red Army could replenish because, occupying the heartland, it drew upon some 60 million people, a majority of them ethnic Russian, a greater population at the time than any state in Europe. The Whites, mostly in the imperial borderlands, had perhaps 10 million people underfoot, including many non-Russians.303 As for the British, French, and U.S. interventions, they did not send enough soldiers to overturn Bolshevism, but the fact that they did send troops proved a propaganda boon for Bolshevism.304

  The Red rear also held. Many people anticipated strong efforts to subvert the regime, especially the regime itself. In summer 1919, through informants and perlustration, the Cheka had belatedly hit upon an underground network known as the National Center, comprising former politicians as well as tsarist officers in Moscow and St. Petersburg who were plotting on behalf of Denikin.305 Lenin, when informed of the National Center’s discovery, instructed Dzierzynski “to capture [suspects] rapidly and energetically and widely.”306 On September 23, 1919, the Cheka announced the executions of 67 spies and saboteurs.307 Two days later, two bombs crashed through the ballroom window of the Moscow party HQ, a two-story mansion on Leontyev Lane, the former Countess Uvarova mansion, which the Bolsheviks had seized in 1918 from the Left SRs after the latter’s failed pseudo-coup; some 120 Communist party activists and agitators from around the city’s wards were gathered for a lecture about the unmasking of the National Center. By some accounts Lenin was due to show (he did not). Twelve people (including the Moscow party secretary Vladimir Zagorsky) were killed and 55 wounded (including Bukharin). The Cheka immediately suspected White Guard revenge, and on September 27 announced executions in connection with a “White Guard conspiracy.” The Cheka soon discovered the bomb culprit was an anarchist (assisted by a Left SR familiar with the building). A vast sweep took place to root out anarchist hiding places throughout the capital, accompanied by exhortations to the working class to maintain vigilance.308 The mass internal subversion never materialized.

  Red leadership, too, made a contribution, albeit in a complicated way. Lenin never once visited the front. He followed the civil war with maps, the telegraph, and the telephone from the Imperial Senate.309 He refrained from assuming the title of supreme commander and generally kept out of operational planning, yet he managed to commit or support several of the biggest mistakes. No one attributed the victory to him. But Lenin’s crucial leadership in the struggle against the Whites was felt at three significant moments: his support for Trotsky’s recruitment of former tsarist officers, including those of high rank, beginning in early 1918; his refusal to allow Trotsky to destroy Stalin definitively in October 1918; and, above all, his refusal to allow Stalin to rout Trotsky definitively in July 1919.310 As for Trotsky, his contribution, too, was equivocal. He committed mistakes when he intervened in operational questions, and his meddling angered many commissars and commanders alike, but he also organized, disciplined, and inspired the fighting masses.311 Trotsky excelled at agitation, and in the agitation he loomed large, which, however, became a source of resentment among insiders, but provided tremendous strength to the regime.312 Stalin’s role remains a tangle. Despite the Tsaritsyn shambles, Lenin still sent him on critical troubleshooting assignments (the Urals, Petrograd, Minsk, Smolensk, the south). Genuine shortcomings and bottlenecks were rampant, but in Stalin’s reports it became impossible to sort fact from exaggeration or invention. Each time he unmasked anti-Soviet “conspiracies”; each time he disobeyed direct orders from Moscow; each time he criticized everyone save himself, while nursing grievances as if he were the victim of miscomprehension and slander. That said, Trotsky would recall asking another Central Committee member in the Revolutionary Military Council of the Southern Front if they could manage without Stalin. “No,” came the reply, “I cannot exert pressure like Stalin.”313 “The ability ‘to exert pressure,’” Trotsky would conclude, “was what Lenin prized so highly in Stalin”—a backhanded, yet accurate compliment.314

  When all is said and done, however, White political failings were epic.315 The Whites never rose above the level of anarchic warlordism, worse even than General Ludendorff’s occupation.316 “Politicians,” in the White mental universe, signified the likes of Kerensky: bumblers, betrayers.317 Kolchak formed a “military dictatorship” that reaffirmed tsarist state debts and tsarist laws, condemned “separatism,” and ordered factories returned to their owners and farm lands to the gentry.318 But there was no government, military or otherwise, as cliques of officers and politicians engaged in political murders and self-dealing.319 “In the army, disorganization,” wrote one observer of Kolchak’s abysmal 1919 offensive, “at the Supreme Headquarters illiteracy and hare-brained schemes; in the Government moral decay, discord, and the dominance of the ambitious and egotistical; . . . in society panic, selfishness, graft and all kinds of loathesomeness.”320 Yudenich only belatedly formed any government at all in the northwest under intense British pressure, and produced an ideological Frankenstein of monarchists and socialists (Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, who distrusted
each other, let alone the monarchists). Denikin’s political vision consisted of “temporary” military rule aiming to stand above politics; 1917 had convinced him that in Russia democracy equaled anarchy (the Constituent Assembly, he said, had arisen “in the days of popular insanity”).321 The British mission—Denikin’s patron—told him in February 1920 that it would have been a “complete shipwreck if you had reached Moscow, because you would have left behind you an occupied area which would not have been consolidated.”322 Only Wrangel, when it had become too late, appointed genuine civilian ministers, supported local self-government, formally recognized the separatist governments on former imperial Russian territory, and acknowledged peasant ownership of the land—but his land decree (May 25, 1920) required that tillers pay his government for land they already controlled.323

  A debilitating absence of government machinery was compounded by White failure in the realm of ideas. Red propaganda effectively stamped the Whites as military adventurists, lackeys of foreign powers, restorationists. The Whites mounted their own propaganda, military parades, and troop reviews blessed by Orthodox priests. Their red, white, and blue flags, the national colors of pre-1917 Russia, often had images of Orthodox saints; others had skulls and crossbones. The Whites copied the Bolshevik practice of the agitation trains. But their slogans—“Let us be one Russian people”—did not persuade.324 Elsewhere, when leftist revolutions or minirevolutions had erupted—Roman Catholic Bavaria, Hungary, and Italy—these places shifted rightward, galvanized partly by the specter of Bolshevism. Indeed, across Europe, the forces of order, including Social Democrats opposed to Communism, were ascendant. Clearly, the keys to political outcomes were not wartime ruin, the downfall of a monarchy, military mutinies, strikes, the formation of local soviets, or direct-action efforts by the left to seize power, but the strength, or weakness, of organized rightist movements and reliable peasant armies. The outnumbered Whites, despite thoroughly alienating the peasants, had counted on popular uprisings to join them.325 But unlike in Italy, Germany, and Hungary, the Whites failed even to try to reinvent an antileftist movement on the basis of right-wing populism, and not even a Horthy, emerged among them. “Psychologically, the Whites conducted themselves as if nothing had happened, whereas the whole world around them had collapsed,” observed Pyotr Struve. “Nothing so harmed the ‘White’ movement as this very condition of psychologically staying put in previous circumstances, circumstances that had ceased to exist . . . in a revolution, only revolutionaries can find their way.”326

  FUNCTIONARIES SHALL INHERIT THE EARTH

  Lenin, in notes for a speech he would not be able to deliver, embraced the civil war: “The Civil War has taught and tempered us (Denikin and others were good teachers; they taught seriously; all our best functionaries [rabotniki] were in the army).”327 Lenin was right. Authoritarianism, moreover, was not a by-product. The sad fate of the factory committees, grassroots soviets, peasant committees, trade unions and other structures of mass revolution can hardly be considered mysterious. Bolshevik types worked strenuously to take over or crush grassroots organizations, in an energetic Gleichschaltung (as one historian of early Bolshevik state building aptly dubbed the process, analogizing to the later Nazi regime).328 Even many delegates elected to the soviets came to see the elected grassroots bodies as hindrances to administration.329 But the targeting of grassroots and often independent forms of political expression was rooted in core beliefs. Lenin’s regime set as its raison d’être not maximizing freedom but maximizing production. “The dictatorship of the proletariat,” as Trotsky thundered, “is expressed in the abolition of private property in the means of production”—not in workers control over industry or other participatory forms of decision making.330 The very meaning of controle, a French word adapted into Russian, shifted from spontaneous workers’ control over factory operations to bureaucratic control over factories and worker.331 The driving idea was transcendence of capitalism and construction of socialism; the nonpareil instrument was centralized state power.

  The administrative machine was created from chaos, and in turn fomented chaos. The striving for hierarchy, to a great extent, stemmed from a desire for regularization, predictability. The regime was having a trying time not just governing but managing itself. At the finance commissariat more than 287 million rubles disappeared in a single robbery in October 1920, a heist accomplished with the aid of insider employees.332 A regime created by confiscation had begun to confiscate itself, and never stopped. The authors of Red Moscow, an urban handbook published at the conclusion of the civil war, observed that “each revolution has its one unsightly, although transient, trait: the appearance on the stage of all kinds of rogues, deceivers, adventurists, and simple criminals, attaching themselves to power with one kind of criminal goal or another. Their danger to the revolution is colossal.”333 The line between idealism and opportunism, however, was often very fine. The revolution was a social earthquake, a cracking open of the earth that allowed all manner of new people to rise up and assume positions that otherwise they would have waited decades to fill, or never been able to fill at all, and the revolutionary mission overlapped their sense of their own destiny.

  The reconstitution of functioning state power turned out to be the primary task after the Bolshevik coup, and what saved the Bolsheviks from oblivion, but the upkeep of the beneficiaries consumed a substantial part of the state budget, independent of their self-dealing. Around 5,000 Bolsheviks and family members had taken up residence in the Kremlin and the best hotels in the heart of Moscow. Collectively, they acquired a sizable service staff and swallowed considerable resources during the civil war. Their apartments, not just Lenin’s, were heated by furnaces even though fuel was hard to come by. Inside the Kremlin they enjoyed access to a children’s nursery, club, ambulatory, and bathhouse as well as “closed” distribution centers for food and clothing. (Trotsky claimed that he found Caucasus wines in the Council of People’s Commissars “cooperative” in 1919 and tried to have them removed, since the sale of alcohol was technically banned, telling Lenin, in Stalin’s presence, but Stalin supposedly retorted that the Caucasus comrades could not make do without wine.)334 Compared with the tsarist royal court and high nobility, Bolshevik elite perquisites were hardly extravagant—an apartment, a dacha, a motor car, food packets—but amid the rubble and penury, such advantages were significant and conspicuous.335 Privileges for functionaries became a sore point well beyond the central regime. “We have cut ourselves off from the masses and made it difficult to attract them,” a Tula Bolshevik wrote to Lenin in July 1919. “The old comradely spirit of the party has died completely. It has been replaced by a new one-man rule in which the party boss runs everything. Bribe-taking has become universal: without it our Communist cadres would simply not survive.”336

  There was abundant idealism in the apparatus, too, but the epidemic of “bureaucratism” shocked revolutionaries. Suddenly, “bureaucrats” were everywhere: boorish, spiteful, prevaricating, embezzling, obsessed with crushing rivals and self-aggrandizing.337 But one of the many revolutionary paradoxes was that although all “social forces” were understood in class terms—whether alien (bourgeoisie, kulaks, petit bourgeois) or friendly (workers and sometimes peasants)—the one class that could not be so called was the one in power.

  • • •

  SYMBOLICALLY, A RED-WHITE BINARY—Bolsheviks against everyone else, including those who made the February Revolution and the non-Bolshevik socialists—defined the new regime. This was dramatically captured on the revolution’s third anniversary (November 7, 1920) in a reenactment of the “storming of the Winter Palace” staged in Petrograd, which involved far more people than the original event—around 6,000 to 8,000 participants and 100,000 spectators. In the show, on the immense square in front of the baroque edifice, one of the world’s grandest public spaces, two large stages (red and white) were set, and connected by an arching bridge. At 10:00 p.m., trumpets announced the beginning of the ac
tion and an orchestra of perhaps 500 played a symphonic composition titled “Robespierre,” which segued into “La Marseillaise.” Floodlights shone on the right platform, revealing the Provisional Government, Kerensky on a throne (!), and various ministers, White generals, and fat-cat capitalists. Gesticulating, Kerensky gives a windy speech and receives large sacks of money. Suddenly searchlights illuminate the left platform, showing the masses, exhausted from factory work, many maimed from the war, in a chaotic state, but to cries of “Lenin” and strains of the “Internationale,” they cluster around a Red flag and form into disciplined Red Guard units. On the connecting bridge, an armed struggle commences, during which the Reds gain the upper hand. Kerensky flees in a car toward the Winter Palace, bastion of the old regime, but is pursued by Red Guards—and the audience. He escapes, dressed as a woman, but the masses “storm” the Palace. Some 150 powerful projector lights illuminate the Winter Palace, through whose colossal windows can be seen pantomime battles, until the lights in every window glow red.338 Those who questioned any aspects of that glow might find themselves, like Kerensky and the moderate socialists, in the White camp, which proved to be ever expandable.