Stalin, Volume 1

by Stephen Kotkin

  Stalin did not attend Baku—the Polish war was still on—but by virtue of being nationalities commissar, he had had more contact with the national minority Communists of Soviet Russia than any other top Bolshevik figure.150 Not that he relished the interminable squabbles among national representatives nursing bottomless grievances and boundless claims. His deputy, Stanisław Pestkowski, recalled of the commissariat that Stalin “would suddenly disappear, doing it with extraordinary skill: ‘just for a moment’ he would disappear from the room and hide in one of the recesses of Smolny, and later the Kremlin. It was impossible to find him. In the beginning we used to wait for him. But finally we would adjourn.”151 Later, during the civil war, Stalin was almost always away at the front.152 Even when he did make an appearance at the commissariat, he tended to undercut staff efforts to regularize a policy-making process (his non-consultative decision making provoked them to complain to the Central Committee).153 The commissariat had no jurisdiction over places like Azerbaijan, Belorussia, or Ukraine, all of which, even when re-Sovietized, were formally independent of Soviet Russia. Nor did the commissariat’s writ extend to the majority of Soviet Russia’s population (the Russians); rather, it was concerned with the 22 percent in the RSFSR who were national minorities. In that connection, however, Stalin had cultivated a coterie of Muslim radicals, jokingly called “Soviet sharia-ites,” in particular the ethnic Bashkir Akhmetzaki Validi (b. 1890) and the ethnic Tatar Mirsayet Soltanğaliev (b. 1892).

  Tatars and Bashkirs, who lived north of the Caspian Sea—they were the world’s northernmost Muslims—were both Turkic-speaking peoples, but the Tatars were sedentary, and far more numerous, while the Bashkirs remained seminomadic. They intermingled with each other. The Tatar Soltanğaliev, born in a village near Ufa (Bashkiria), was the son of a teacher at a maktaba, where he studied by the “new method” (Jadid) of the self-styled Muslim modernizer Ismail Gasprinski. In addition to Tatar and Arabic, Soltanğaliev’s father taught him Russian, which allowed him to enter the Pedagogical School in Kazan, an incubator of the Tatar elite, including most of the Tatar Bolsheviks.154 In 1917, responding to fellow Muslims who accused him of betrayal for cooperating with Bolsheviks, Soltanğaliev explained that “they also declared war on English imperialism, which oppresses India, Egypt, Afghanistan, Persia and Arabia. They are also the ones who raised arms against French imperialism, which enslaves Morocco, Algiers, and other Arab states of Africa. How could I not go to them?”155 He helped organize the defense of Kazan against the Whites, and though he was an undisguised Tatar imperialist inside Russia and a pan-Turanian whose ambitions stretched from Kazan to Iran and Afghanistan, Turkey and Arabia, Stalin made him Russia’s highest profile Muslim Communist, appointing Soltanğaliev head of the Central Bureau of Communist Organizations of the Peoples of the East. Informally, he was known as the chairman of the Muslim Communist party, even though no such entity existed. As for the Bashkir Validi, a Turcologist, he was not a Communist but a moderate socialist and Bashkir patriot who took a different path into Stalin’s patronage: during the dark days of the civil war against Kolchak, Validi offered to desist from leading his 6,500 Bashkir troops against the Reds alongside the Whites and instead to turn their weapons against the admiral. Stalin, in connection with the negotiations with Validi in Moscow, published an ingratiating article in Pravda, “Our Tasks in the East” (March 2, 1919), noting that the 30 million Turkic- and Persian-speaking inhabitants of Soviet Russia “present a rich diversity of culturally backward peoples, either stuck in the middle ages or only recently entered into the realm of capitalist development. . . . Their cultural limitations and their backwardness, which cannot be eliminated with one stroke, allowed themselves to be felt (and will continue to let themselves be felt) in the matter of building Soviet power in the East.” This was a challenge to be addressed.156

  The Stalin-Bashkir talks coincided with the First Comintern Congress and then the 8th Party Congress, and in Moscow, Validi discovered that compared with the hard-line antinationalist Luxemburgists he met, “Lenin and Stalin really did seem like very positive people.” Validi also met with Trotsky, and noticed that Stalin and Trotsky hated each other (and competed for his favor). He further came to see that Stalin was a provocateur. Validi would recall how, a bit later, in Ukraine, Stalin invited him to his civil war train, a carriage from the tsarist era. “We drank Georgian wine and ate grilled chicken,” Validi wrote. “Stalin was affectionate. Getting close to my soul, he said that he was an Easterner, that he worked exclusively for us eastern people, representatives of small, downtrodden nations. All our misfortunes derived from Trotsky, whom he called a Jewish internationalist. He [Stalin] understood us well, because he was the son of a Georgian writer and himself had grown up in a national milieu. He accused the Russians of chauvinism and cursed them. He, like Lenin, said that I should work on an all-Russia level, and not get too involved in the management of a small nation: all nations will gradually acquire rights.”157 This Asiatic pose was a side of Stalin almost no one saw.158

  Validi’s reward for betraying Kolchak on the eve of the Whites’ planned spring offensive was the creation of the Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR), with a treaty signed on March 20, 1919—the third day of the 8th Party Congress (Lenin had been rushing to get the agreement as a showpiece for the congress). The Bashkir military commanders who had been White Guards suddenly were constituted as a Bashkir Revolutionary Committee—a turnabout neither side viewed with trust.159 (Validi would admit that he hid the negotiations with the Soviet authorities from his men.)160 The Bashkirs, under imperial Russia, had never been serfs and had been able to maintain their own army, and numbered perhaps 2 million, spread across the southwestern slopes of the Urals. Validi, who drew the map of their autonomy, maximized not territory but ethnic population, and in such a way that he would minimize inclusion of Russian colonists. The result was a Lesser Bashkiria.161 All the same, Tatar nationalists erupted in fury: their dream of a Greater Tataria enveloping Bashkiria had suffered a mortal blow.162

  Stalin’s creation of a Bashkir republic in 1919—just like the earlier failed Tatar-Bashkir expediency—did not derive from a thought-through strategy of national divide and rule; rather, it was an improvisation aimed at dividing anti-Bolshevik forces.163 On the ground, however, disaster ensued. A flood of Russian and other non-ethnic-Bashkir Communists entered the area, and they directly and indirectly sabotaged the autonomy: they were fighting to create a world of Communism, not for some small nation’s “rights.” Local Red Army officers, meanwhile, understood the agreement as a surrender, and proceeded to disarm and imprison the Bashkir fighters, provoking revolt. The Red cavalry horde, moreover, engaged in mass pillage, murder, and rape. Their top commander, none other than the cavalryman Gai, tried to rein in the indiscipline to little avail (later he was blamed as an Armenian likely to have been deliberately anti-Muslim).164 Gai refused Validi’s entreaties to allow the Bashkir units to remain intact, but the result was that the Bashkir First Cavalry regiment managed to reconstitute itself—on the side of Kolchak. Validi desperately telegrammed Stalin about the misunderstandings and atrocities. (Stalin, far away in Moscow, invited him for discussions.)165 Only a White advance put a stop to the Red Army bacchanalia of violence, but after the Whites were driven out again, the Reds enacted “revenge” on the Bashkirs. The bloodshed and bitter recriminations became a matter of national debate, prompting the politburo in April 1920 to appoint a Bashkir commission headed by Stalin. Validi was summoned to Moscow and told he was needed there, evidently to separate him from his base in Bashkiria. Stalin told him that Trotsky was the one who had decided to detain him in Moscow, and that Trotsky and Dzierzynski were worried about Validi’s growing authority in the eastern provinces.166 Validi met with the Bashkir “commission” and Kamenev told him they were expanding Bashkiria to include Ufa and other regions, which happened to have Russian majorities.167 Severe restrictions on Bashkir autonomy were promulgated on May 19
, 1920: the Bashkir military, supply, finance, and much more were subordinated directly to the RSFSR.168 The politburo felt constrained to declare that the Bashkir Autonomous Republic “was not a chance, temporary phenomenon . . . but an organic, autonomous part of the RSFSR”—indicative of the doubters, on all sides.169

  Bashkiria’s circumscribed “autonomy” became a model. Between 1920 and 1923, the RSFSR would establish seventeen autonomous national republics and provinces on its territory.170 The immediate next one was Tataria. Even without Bashkiria (for now), Soltanğaliev tried once more to get Lenin to accept a grand Turkic state of Tataria, linked to Turkestan and the Qazaq steppe, under Tatar leadership, something resembling Piłsudski’s imagined Polish-led federation over Belorussia and Lithuania. Instead, a small Tatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic was declared on May 27, 1920. It included only 1.5 million of the 4.2 million Tatars in Russia (not only were three quarters of the country’s Tatars left out, but Tatars had been made a majority in Bashkiria).171 Moreover, rather than Soltanğaliev, Stalin made Sahib Garei Said-Galiev (b. 1894) head of the Tatar government, a man with far less of a following among Muslims outside Tataria, less nationalist, more obedient, and a diehard enemy of Soltanğaliev. Said-Galiev soon accused Soltanğaliev of attempted assassination; the latter responded that the alleged assassination was simulated to discredit him; a Moscow investigation proved inconclusive, except to establish that Said-Galiev spent a great deal of time sitting around drinking tea and bickering.172 Soltanğaliev and his supporters remained determined to use all levers at their command to transform Kazan into a Muslim capital for the East.173 By contrast, Validi and his supporters secretly plotted to quit their official posts and oppose the Soviet regime by force. In June 1920, they disappeared underground, joining the “Basmachi” in Turkestan. (The epithet likely derived from the Turkic basmacı and connoted frontier freebooters or brigands, analogous to Cossacks; Russian speakers generally applied it to any Muslims conducting partisan war or other resistance against the Bolshevik regime.) In the Bashkir ASSR, furious Russian Communists—who had let the counterrevolutionaries escape—purged the remaining ethnic Bashkir officials and instituted another anti-Bashkir terror.174 The defections raised a scandal that could potentially damage Stalin politically: after all, Validi was seen as his protégé.

  In September 1920, when the Baku Congress of the Peoples of the East opened, Mirsayet Soltanğaliev—who had been one of the original proponents and invited to speak—was nowhere to be found; Stalin had blocked him from even attending. But Validi eluded a Cheka manhunt, traveled all the way from Turkestan by rail and other means to Baku and took part in the Congress of the Peoples of the East even though the political police were combing Baku for him.175 On September 12 Validi wrote a letter to Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, and Rykov, condemning Soviet national minority policy as tantamount to tsarist colonial practice, and complaining that Stalin had tricked him. He deemed the Georgian “an insincere, masked dictator who plays with people.” Stalin tried to lure Validi to Moscow, supposedly getting a message to him that noted how he was “much smarter and more energetic than Soltanğaliev,” how he was “an extraordinary, powerful person, with character, with willpower, a do-er,” who had proven he “could create an army from the Basmachi.” Validi would never be caught.176

  A CENTRAL ASIAN ARK

  In former tsarist Turkestan, multiple centers of would-be authority had arisen. Bolshevik rule among the Turcomans had been quickly overthrown in 1918, in revulsion, and been replaced by an anti-Bolshevik Transcaspian government, which was largely proletarian, but its desperate need to requisition grain also sparked revolt, and the Transcaspian “government” was reduced to a shadowy presence in the cities. It was swept aside by Red Army troops battling Kolchak’s forces in Siberia who swooped in and conquered Merv and Ashkhabad (July 1919), Kizil Arvat (October 1919), and finally the Turcoman capital of Krasnovodsk (February 1920). Farther inland, a second major center of power, Tashkent, was controlled by the Slavic-dominated local Soviet, which, as we saw, had massacred the Muslim Qoqand Autonomy in February 1918. The Tashkent soviet survived an internal putsch in January 1919 by its own commissar of war, who managed to execute fourteen top local Communists, but then “proceeded to get drunk,” according to a British eyewitness, and was undone by a detachment of lingering Hungarian POWs.177 A showy Red Terror killed an estimated 4,000 victims, on top of deaths from food shortages, even as Stalin instructed the Tashkent soviet on February 12, 1919, “to raise the cultural level of the laboring masses and rear them in a socialist manner, promote a literature in the local languages, appoint local people who are most closely connected with the proletariat to the Soviet organizations and draw them into the work of administering the territory.”178 Red Army troops from without arrived in Tashkent, under the command of Mikhail Frunze, a peasant lad who had a Russian mother and a Moldavian father, an army nurse who had served in tsarist Turkestan, where the boy was born. Frunze possessed no special military training, but in November 1919, he set about strengthening the counterinsurgency against Basmachi resistance.179 Turkestan’s final centers of authority were the two small “emirates” of Khiva and Bukhara, which had enjoyed special status in tsarist Russia and after 1917 had not come under Red control. They resembled jewels sparkling under poorly protected glass in front of well-armed thieves.

  Bukhara had iconic status in the Inner Asian Muslim world as a center of traditional Islamic learning and of Sufi masters, and some Bolshevik insiders warned of the consequences of forcible seizure.180 “I think that in the military sense, it would not be difficult to crush their army,” Gersh Broido, the outgoing foreign affairs representative of the Turkestan Commission, wrote to Lenin in spring 1920, “but that would create a situation of prolonged war, in which the Red Army would turn out to be not the liberator but the occupier, and Bukharan partisan warriors will emerge as defenders. . . . Reactionaries will use this situation.” A military takeover, he warned, might even broadly unite Muslim and Turkic peoples against the Soviet regime.181 Frunze, however, would not be deterred. Khiva was seized first, after which, in June 1920, the Khorezm People’s Soviet Republic was declared. Then, on July 24, 1920, Frunze wrote to Lenin explaining that in connection with Bukhara, waiting for revolution from within would take forever, and instead urged “revolution from without.”182 Preparations to storm Bukhara were simultaneous with the Red Army’s final advance on Warsaw. Beginning on August 30, 1920, after a small group of Turkic Communists staged an “uprising” and summoned “help,” Red Army forces assaulted the Bukharan emirate with about 15,000 troops. The Bukharans had at least twice that number, including irregulars, but the Reds had superior weapons, including eleven airplanes, and they bombed the old city’s ancient mosques and minarets, caravansaries, shrines, and tombs. On September 2, the Reds seized the emir’s massive Ark fortress, after which large-scale fires and mass looting ensued—silk caftans, jewels, even stones. The fate of the harem is anybody’s guess. On September 4, Frunze issued an order to halt the pillaging, threatening soldiers with execution, but he helped himself to fine swords and other trophies. The greatest haul was said to come from the emir’s vaults, which the dynasty had accumulated over the centuries and were estimated to hold up to 15 million rubles’ worth of gold; the treasure was loaded for “transfer” to Tashkent. The emir, for his part, escaped to Afghanistan, and may have carted away some portion of his treasure.183 He was the last direct descendant of the twelfth-century Mongol Chinggis Khan to rule anywhere in the world.

  Frunze was transferred to Crimea, to lead the operations that would soon expel Baron Wrangel’s White army into exile, ending the Whites’ resistance for good, and garnering the Red commander surpassing military honors. But Frunze’s transfer out of Turkestan was shadowed by reports to Moscow of his troops’ shameful looting and gratuitous ruination of Bukhara.184 Word of the pillaging of the gold spread throughout the East, damaging the Soviets’ reputation.185 Jekabs Peterss, the Cheka
plenipotentiary in Turkestan, wrote to Dzierzynski and Lenin, behind Frunze’s back, about military misbehavior. All across Eurasia, the Reds were battling among themselves over the spoils of war and prerogatives of unaccountable power—police operatives against army officers, party apparatchiks against the police, central plenipotentiaries against regional potentates. Denunciations swamped Moscow; “inconvenient” people were disgraced or simply shot. But rarely did such score settling reach the level that it did in Turkestan, and rarely did it seem to involve high principle.

  Peterss, an ethnic Latvian (b. 1886) from a region on the Baltic Sea in the country’s far northwest, went up against Frunze, an ethnic Moldovan, from a region on the Black Sea in the country’s far southwest, who had been born (1885) in Pishpek in the shadows of the Pamir Mountains, in the deep east. Peterss was no calculating careerist trying to climb the greasy pole: he was already at the absolute top, carrying the prestige of being a founder of the Cheka; he had even briefly replaced Dzierzynski as Cheka chairman (during the Left SR fiasco when Dzierzynski was taken hostage). True, Peterss was not above shaving the truth, claiming in his party autobiography, for example, to be the son of a poor peasant while earlier he had divulged to an American journalist that his father had plenty of land and hired labor, but everyone did that. (Inevitably, the woman found him “an intense, quick, nervous little chap with a shock of curly black hair, an upturned nose that gave his face the suggestion of a question mark, and a pair of blue eyes full of human tenderness.”)186 Nor was Peterss the least squeamish about prosecution of the revolution and class warfare: he had conducted mass executions in 1919 Petrograd of former old regime personages, identifying them via the phone book and sending men to their door. Corruption, though, he would not tolerate: he was old school. After the sack of Bukhara, he arrested the Red field commander, Belov, who turned out to be in possession of a sack of gold, silver, and money.187 This induced Peterss to have his Chekists stop and surround Frunze’s train. “Yesterday evening,” Frunze wrote in a rage to Tashkent on September 21, 1920, “the entire corps, except for myself and [Gleb] Boki, were subject to searches, discrediting me in the eyes of subordinates.”