Stalin, Volume 1

by Stephen Kotkin

  Likewise, assertions of a Bolshevik collective leadership predating Stalin ring hollow. Lenin’s secretariat took on an essentially limitless range of issues, setting a precedent, and no one did more than Lenin to establish a living example of one-man rule at the top. (When the other “collective leaders” disagreed with Lenin, he threatened to expel them or, failing that, to quit the party and form a new one.) Beyond the red herring of Stalin’s alleged usurpation and supposedly unprecedented unilateralism, Trotsky and other critics of Stalin’s regime also asserted that his triumph reflected no special abilities, just special circumstances. This is manifestly false. Still, we must be careful not to err in the opposite direction and lionize him. He was brilliantly adept at administration and manipulation, but we shall observe Stalin learning on the job, and often failing. That was not merely because of his plentiful shortcomings but also because Lenin had helped conjure into being both an ideologically blinkered dictatorship and a costly global antagonism. Managing the severely difficult challenge of Russian power in the world, now further complicated by the Leninist Communist dictatorship, would have confounded any would-be successor. Stalin’s efforts were strenuous but the results decidedly mixed.

  Part III will examine Stalin’s creation of a personal dictatorship within the Bolshevik dictatorship, and the ways he put that remarkable power to use. It was Stalin who formed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, helped make the recuperative New Economic Policy work, and spelled out the nature of Leninism for the party mass. Stalin not only managed to implant and cultivate immense numbers of loyalists, but also to invent for himself the role of Lenin’s faithful pupil. Stalin’s role as guardian of the ideology was as important in his ascendancy as brute bureaucratic force. In the 1920s, Communist party plenums, conferences, and congresses constituted the core of Soviet political life and of Stalin’s biography; the political brawling shaped not just his methods of rule, but also his character, and image. To an extraordinary extent, it was skirmishes over ideas not solely personal power that preoccupied him and his rivals in the struggle to define the revolution going forward. Ideology was Bolshevik reality: The documents, whether those made public at the time or kept secret, are absolutely saturated with Marxist-Leninist ways of thinking and vocabulary—the proletariat, Bonapartism, the petit bourgeoisie, imperialism, capitalist encirclement, class enemies, military specialists, NEPmen, kulaks, socialism. Mastery and control over the ideology turned out to be a key to unlocking ultimate power, but at the same time the content of the ideology proved to be tragically for real, in domestic and foreign affairs.

  The Bolshevik dictatorship was not the only outcome of the revolution and civil war. What had emerged on the ground was two parallel revolutions: one in the northern cities, where an expanding functionary class—the regime’s social base—and proliferating, overlapping institutions scratched and clawed among themselves for power and spoils; and another in the countryside, where smallholding peasant households had seized the land, still by far the country’s principal source of wealth. (“The revolution,” Molotov would recall later in life, “had taken place in a petty-bourgeois country.”)79 These two revolutions were set on a collision course. The entrenched peasant revolution could not hold back entrenchment of the Communist dictatorship, but, no less than the international environment, it acted as a severe constraint on Bolshevik ambitions. Accommodation to the peasant, in turn, proved extremely difficult to stomach for many party stalwarts. Indeed, over time, exactly as the militants feared, the forced accommodation of the New Economic Policy would begin to change the composition and political mood in the Communist party, much to Stalin’s alarm. His collision with Trotsky in the wake of Lenin’s illness would turn out to be mere prelude. More profoundly, the stage was set for one of the truly manifold collisions in Russian and indeed world history—between Stalin’s personal dictatorship and the entire Russian-Eurasian peasantry.

  That Stalin would end up launching a violent reversal of the peasant revolution was literally fantastic. A perspicacious German scholar of Russian agriculture, Max Sering, had concluded in an analysis in 1921 that “a regime in Russia under which the peasants would not independently own the land they cultivate is now inconceivable.”80 Sering erred in that the peasants did not, de jure, own the land, but they did assume that their usage rights were tantamount to ownership, and overturning that did seem inconceivable. Stalin, however, would prove Sering, as well as a mostly disbelieving Communist party, wrong. Collectivization and the violent expropriation of better-off farmers (dekulakization)—Stalin’s revolutionary shock of 1928–30—would turn out to be significantly more ramified even than Lenin’s shock coup of 1917. What stands out in Stalin’s action is not just his desire to launch a socialist transformation of the countryside, which all Bolsheviks expected to see eventually, but the fact that when the gamble met mass resistance and caused unfathomable ruin, Stalin saw it through to completion. No one else in or near the Bolshevik leadership, Trotsky included, could have stayed the course on such a bloody social-engineering escapade on such a scale. The personal dictatorship that Stalin painstakingly built, he would, beginning in January 1928, use to enact a vision of anti-capitalist socialism, utterly transforming and shattering Eurasia.

  CHAPTER 10

  DICTATOR

  This was a time when we worked initially on Vozdvizhenka, and then relocated to Old Square. We would work together until midnight, 12:30 am, 1:00 am, and then we’d walk on foot to the Kremlin along Ilinka St. Me, Molotov, Kuibyshev, others. We were walking along the street, I recall, one winter, he [Stalin] wore a hat with earflaps, his ears flapping. . . . We laughed and laughed, he would say something, we would respond, tossing jokes at one another . . . totally free [volnitsa]. . . . Those watching off to the side would ask: who were this company? We had practically no bodyguards. Very few. Maybe one or two people walking, that was it. . . . It was a happy time of life. And Stalin was in a good mood.

  Lazar Kaganovich, reminiscing about the period 1922–241

  Everything in the Soviet Union depends in the last resort on the harvest.

  British diplomatic report, December 19242

  STALIN’S CREATION OF A DICTATORSHIP within the dictatorship was unforeseen. Lenin was undisputed leader (vozhd’) and no one imagined he might become incapacitated. When that suddenly happened, most everyone assumed collective leadership would prevail: even if other top Bolsheviks believed in their heart of hearts they might be Lenin’s equal, they understood no one else would perceive them as such. Also, Stalin’s considerable political gifts were underappreciated or even contemptuously scorned. Trotsky, in a brilliant phrase, would dismiss Stalin as the “outstanding mediocrity of our party,” while Kamenev, according to Trotsky, deemed Stalin “a small-town politician.”3 Finally, there was one other lesser known factor that made a Stalin ascendancy appear unlikely: several individuals had preceded him as head of the party and, after the first one died, skepticism set in that anyone could cope with the job, to say nothing of transforming it into the focal point of the entire regime.

  Yakov Sverdlov, the party’s original lead administrator or “secretary” (from April 1917), had been renowned for the fact that, as one official gushed, “he knew our party better than anyone else.”4 In fact, with a staff of just six, Sverdlov had had his hands full as party committees mushroomed around the vast country, from under 600 in 1917 to 8,000 by 1919, and he simultaneously served as chairman of the Soviet central executive committee (head of state), manipulating relations with non-Bolshevik socialists.5 When Sverdlov died in 1919 at age thirty-three—having spent twelve of those years in tsarist prisons and exile—Lenin despaired of finding a replacement.6 For the central executive committee of the Soviet, Lenin even proposed returning Kamenev, the person he had shunted aside from that post in 1917. In the event, Mikhail Kalinin, an ethnic Russian, the son of a poor peasant, and a peasant in visage, got the nod, but the Soviet central executive committee had already cease
d to be a locus of power.7 At the party apparatus, Yelena Stasova, a code specialist, took over as secretary, but after a few months “judged herself insufficiently competent in political questions” and in late 1919, stepped aside.8 Her replacement, the third Stalin predecessor, was Nikolai Krestinsky, a graduate of the law faculty of St. Petersburg University and the finance commissar. Krestinsky was an original member of both the politburo and the orgburo, positions he held concurrently while taking over the secretariat, a unique commanding position atop the party. He had a legendary memory, but the scope of the work seems to have overwhelmed him.9 In April 1920, Leonid Serebryakov and Yevgeny Preobrazhensky were added alongside Krestinsky, charged with improving contact with local party organizations.10 But no one in the threesome proved adept or diligent, as demonstrated by runaway complaints in the party press (something similar dogged Krestinsky at the finance commissariat).11 Files piled up unexamined, and officials lamented that nasty scrums over power (skloki) paralyzed party work nearly everywhere.12 Rather than their incompetence, however, the Krestinsky-Serebryakov-Preobrazhensky trio was done in by its support for Trotsky in the trade union row of 1920–21. Lenin cleaned house, ensuring at the 10th Party Congress that none of the three was even reelected to the Central Committee.13

  As the party’s new “responsible secretary,” Lenin elevated Vyacheslav Molotov, the fourth Stalin before Stalin. “Unexpectedly for me in 1921,” Molotov would recall, “I became a Central Committee secretary.”14 Two others were appointed alongside him, Yemelyan Yaroslavsky and Vasily Mikhailov, both middling organizers. Neither lasted. The hours were long and the work tough: the secretariat was besieged with both reports of functionaries’ drunkenness, bribe taking, and political illiteracy, and requests to supply competent cadres, while appointees or prospective appointees showed up in droves looking for guidance, permissions, or favors. The party secretariat reported that in 1921 it issued passes for 254,468 visitors to its offices, or an average of nearly 700 per day, including weekends.15 But when Lenin made Stalin “general secretary” in April 1922, in place of Yaroslavsky and above Molotov, he was compensating for the redoubtable Molotov’s lack of sufficient political heft and looking for high-level leadership as well as efficiency.16 “The power [vlast’] of the Central Committee is colossal,” Lenin wrote in spring 1922, just before promoting Stalin. “We dispose of 200,000–400,000 party functionaries, and through them thousands upon thousands of nonparty people. And this gigantic Communist cause is utterly befouled by foggy bureaucratism!” Lenin demanded rising above “trifles, push them onto aides and deputy aides,” and taking on the really surpassing challenges.17 Stalin now became the only person simultaneously in the politburo, orgburo, and secretariat—and he endured.

  Explanations for Stalin’s aggrandizement have rightly pointed to notable qualities of the Communist party, particularly its centralized appointments and conspiratorial secrecy, which afforded incomparable sway over information, agendas, links to the grassroots, and supervision of every state body.18 Certainly all of that could be used for institutional and personal aggrandizement, but those mechanisms had to be further built up and taken advantage of. Trotsky famously wrote that “Stalin did not create the apparatus. The apparatus created him.”19 This was exactly backward. Stalin created the apparatus, and it was a colossal feat.20 To be sure, we shall see him learning on the job, committing significant mistakes, and it would be a while before he emerged as the recognized Leader (vozhd’) not just of the party but of the country. But he demonstrated surpassing organizational abilities, a mammoth appetite for work, a strategic mind, and an unscrupulousness that recalled his master teacher, Lenin.21 Stalin proved capable of wielding the levers he inherited, and of inventing new ones. Admittedly, too often his power, including over personnel, has been viewed as that of an impersonal machine. What Trotsky and others missed or refused to acknowledge was that Stalin had a deft political touch: he recalled names and episodes of people’s biographies, impressing them with his familiarity, concern, and attentiveness, no matter where they stood in the hierarchy, even if they were just service staff. Stalin, in his midforties, found his calling at the party apparatus: he was, for all his moodiness, a people person, a ward-boss-style politician, albeit one in command of instruments beyond a ward boss’s dreams—the Communist party’s reach, discipline, and radiant-future ideology.

  But what stands out most about Stalin’s ascendancy is that, structurally, he was handed the possibility of a personal dictatorship, and he began to realize that potential just by fulfilling the duties of general secretary.

  Stalin had exceptional power almost instantaneously. When he took over in 1922, the Central Committee apparatus, secretariat and orgburo, already numbered some 600 people, up from just 30 two years before. No one else commanded anything like this personal staff: Lenin’s chancellery in the Council of People’s Commissars numbered 102.22 Unlike the government, the party was not merely an executive body, but a mass organization, and one deliberately intended to shadow all other institutions. Stalin’s impact on this machine was immediate. Molotov had instituted important improvements, such as a rudimentary catalogue of party personnel, but Stalin would see all this vastly expanded.23 All through spring and summer 1922, he brought in energetic people from the provinces, and obliged local party organizations to send bimonthly reports in the form of two-page personal letters. In the six months from May 1, 1922, through January 15, 1923, the apparatus recorded receiving 13,674 local meeting protocols, 1,737 summary reports, 324 reports on the political mood, and 6,337 other pieces of information, while itself sending out 141 directive circulars.24 At the 12th Party Congress (1923), the first after Stalin’s appointment, speakers marveled at how the secretariat had vastly improved.25 Stalin had a phenomenal memory, like Krestinsky, but Stalin banged heads and brought order. He liked the job. Above all, he did the job. “Ilich has in him unquestionably the most reliable Cerberus, fearlessly guarding the gates of the Central Committee,” Stalin’s first top aide, Amayak Nazaretyan, an Armenian whom he imported from the Caucasus, wrote to Sergo Orjonikidze in Tiflis (August 9, 1922). “The work of the Central Committee has significantly mutated now. What we encountered here was indescribably bad. And what were the views in the locales about the Central Committee apparatus? Now everyone has been shaken up.”26

  The regime’s very physical geography spoke to the stunning strengths of Stalin’s position. The addresses in themselves appear to mean little—Vozdvizhenka, 5, and then Old Square, 4; Znamenka, 23; Bolshaya Lubyanka, 2; Blacksmith Bridge, 15; Ilinka, 9—but they reveal the crucial lines of contact among the security police and the military.27 Scholars long ago established that the provincial party machines became a cornucopia of recruits for the central apparatus and of Stalin loyalists in locales, but we shall also see how early Stalin, as head of the party, began to exercise his authority via the secret police, bringing some of them into the party apparatus and maintaining very tight contact with the police over at Lubyanka. Stalin also imposed effective control over the military. After the politiburo or Central Committee meetings took place, whatever might be decided, Stalin went back to his office and implemented the decisions—or chose not to do so. From his party office he initiated schemes outside meetings via party apparatchiks and secret police operatives. He achieved a free hand in making appointments to his own staff.28 But he also implanted his loyalists everywhere else, and found or cultivated enemies for them, too, in order to keep loyalists under watch. This went well beyond just fulfilling the duties of the general secretary position, but again, this was structurally baked into that position. Stalin would have had to show uncommon restraint, deference, and lack of ambition not to build a personal dictatorship within the dictatorship.

  A geography of authority, however, also exposes limits to the power of the regime and of Stalin’s personal dictatorship, particularly the near absence of the party in the vast countryside, where four fifths of the population lived. On the eve of t
he October coup, the Bolsheviks had counted a mere four rural party cells and 494 peasant members, in a two-continent country.29 By 1922, after mass demobilizations of the Red Army soldiers back to their native villages, the number of party members in the countryside reached 200,000, out of 515,000 total Communists.30 But of the total rural population of nearly 120 million, party members were still less than one tenth of 1 percent. Only one of every twenty-five or so villages had a party cell. Provincial capitals were festooned with red flags and Communist slogans, but just ten minutes’ walk beyond a city’s limits, an observer would have been hard pressed to find visible evidence of the regime.31 This did not mean party rule in the cities was all well. In elections to urban soviets, the regime felt constrained to switch from secret to open balloting, with secret police monitors present, and the results were predictable, as shown in December 1922 at Moscow’s Guzhon Works (soon renamed Hammer and Sickle): Bolshevik candidates were elected by a margin of 100 votes to 2—with 1,900 abstentions.32 Beyond intimidation, the regime co-opted workers into administration, offering regular salaries, housing, special shops, and other perquisites, but also tasking them with conducting the harangues of workers riled by perceptions of Communist privilege and corruption.33 The Communist regime’s social base was itself. That meant the expanding regime was itself a society, and this society’s center was Stalin.