Stalin, Volume 1

by Stephen Kotkin

  In Moscow there were no easy answers for the circumstance that the USSR was a would-be alternative global order, but the existing order had not gone away.163 By the mid-1920s, around twenty countries, including almost all the major powers—Germany, Britain, France, Italy (but not the United States)—as well as Japan and Poland would recognize the Soviet state, but none saw a close, reliable partner in the Communist dictatorship. How could they, given Soviet behavior?164 In one sense, the USSR was no different from all countries of the day, working to intercept and decode foreigners’ radio signals and mail. A special cryptology department proved able to read the ciphered telegrams of foreign embassies from Moscow to Berlin and to Ankara from 1921, while Polish codes were broken in 1924 (in 1927 Japanese codes would be broken); access to this traffic fed an already deep Soviet cynicism about “diplomatic relations” as intercourse with the enemy.165 At the same time, the British had broken Soviet codes and could compare internal Communist discourse with the external prevarication, which shredded already low Soviet credibility. Stalin, however, unlike his prying foreign counterparts, had little understanding of or interest in the simultaneous need for trust building in international affairs. While foreign embassies on Soviet soil were treated as Trojan horses of imperialism—even vital trade pacts were dogged by assumptions of spying and subversion by “agents of imperialism”—Soviet embassies abroad were headquarters for instigating Communist coups abroad, even as the USSR was conducting diplomatic and economic relations with those same countries.166

  Mongolia occupied a special place as the sole other country to have had a Communist-style “revolution.” At Lenin’s death, the German ambassador Count Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau had laid a wreath in the name of the entire diplomatic corps in Moscow, but the Mongolian ambassador laid a separate wreath “to the world leader of the toilers, friend and defender of the lesser peoples.”167 In 1924, the Bogd Gegen, the quasi-monarchical head of state, died; he was fifty-five. No traditional determination of his reincarnation was allowed. Instead, the Soviets oversaw proclamation of a “Mongolian People’s Republic.”168 Soviet “advisers” were already pulling the strings behind nominal Mongol leaders.169 Following the establishment of a Mongol version of the OGPU, membership in the Mongol party shrank by half from purges; many mysterious deaths ensued, including those of several of the original Mongol revolutionaries who had sought Soviet aid. A German foreign ministry official, on a visit, found Mongolia to be “practically on the way to becoming a Russian province.”170 Although Soviet-led attempts to create a single centralized trade cooperative failed and a mere 400 Mongol children were enrolled in schools, instruments of political indoctrination were being created: on November 10, 1924, the first issue of a Mongol-language newspaper, the organ of the Mongolian People’s Party, was published—in Irkutsk, Siberia.171 Building a socialist order in a nation of shepherds and monks presented profound problems for Communist ideology as well as practice. Most immediately, though, the Mongolian satellite was meant to serve Soviet security interests as a forward base of national liberation in Asia.

  For Europe, the dream of additional Communist coups had not died in the German and Bulgarian fiascos. Peteris Kuzis, known as Jan Berzin, a former member of the Latvian Riflemen and the head of Soviet military intelligence, had infiltrated some threescore operatives into Estonia in spring 1924 to prepare a seizure of power with Estonian Communists.172 Estonian counterintelligence had stepped up infiltration of the local Communist underground, however, and in a November 10–27, 1924, trial, 149 indigenous Communists stood accused of participation in a clandestine Communist organization (the party had been banned) and of being agents of the USSR. Seven were acquitted but for those convicted sentences were severe: one got death; thirty-nine, life; twenty-eight, fifteen years.

  Moscow’s putsch went ahead anyway.173 Before dawn on Monday, December 1, a few hundred men in small squads—underground Baltic Communists, armed longshoremen from the Soviet merchant marine, Soviet consulate personnel—assaulted strategic positions in Tallinn, the Estonian capital.174 The putschists chased half-dressed military men around their barracks in the darkness, threw grenades without having pulled the pins, and climbed into tanks not realizing the exits of the tank garages were blocked.175 Still, the squads managed to occupy the main railway station for almost two hours, where they killed the railway minister (who arrived to investigate the commotion), and seized the residence of the head of government (state elder) and a military airfield. But the accompanying worker uprising never materialized. By 10:00 a.m. the coup was over.176 Officially, 12 of the more than 250 putschists were killed in the fighting; more would die and around 2,000 would be arrested during a multimonth manhunt. Some escaped to the USSR. The Soviet press wrote fancifully of a rising of Estonian workers put down by a “White Guardist bourgeois clique.”177

  Right at this time, Stalin issued yet another anti-Trotsky broadside in Pravda (December 20, 1924), which he republished as the preface to his collection On the Path to October (January, 1925), with the title “Socialism in One Country,” pointing out that the latter was possible.178 Stalin had already said as much at the 6th Party Congress in August 1917, and now, essentially, was just affirming the seven-year existence of the Soviet Union. Lenin had quietly come around to the view that, if necessary, socialism could be built in one country.179 Even Trotsky, in an unpublished lecture at the Sverdlov Communist University in spring 1923, had stated that “if the whole world collapsed except for Russia, would we perish? . . . No, we would not perish, given our resources, given the circumstance that we constitute a sixth of the earth.”180 True, Stalin’s “Foundations of Leninism,” when serialized in Pravda back in April and May 1924 and published in stand-alone form as On Lenin and Leninism (May 1924), had contained a passage denying the possibility of socialism in one country, but that was excised in a second edition in late 1924.181 Stalin, moreover, was only declaring the possibility of socialism in one country first, for he noted that the “final” victory of socialism required the help of the proletariat of several countries and that world revolution would still occur, most likely as a result of uprisings in countries under the yoke of imperialism, and they could expect help from the USSR. This meant that the victory of socialism in one country actually “bore an international character,” and that Russia had a special mission, now in revolutionary guise.182 The essay became his most misunderstood piece of writing, but when initially published, aroused no controversy.183

  The Menshevik newspaper in Europe Socialist Herald would later sensationalize Stalin’s position as “A fig for Europe—we shall manage by ourselves.”184 Such a sentiment did have deep roots in Russia. Imperial Russia’s international posture had vacillated between the pursuit of validating Western alliances and pursuit of a special, messianic mission in a space all its own, as heir to both the Byzantine empire and the grand Eurasian empires of the Mongols. Stalin’s statement on socialism in one country superficially looked like just such a declaration of independence—the Soviet Union could go forward without waiting for revolution in the West—and therefore like an indulgence of the old saw of the expansive self-contained space. But hunkering down did not actually emancipate Russia from the West: the latter remained stronger, and therefore a geopolitical threat, while also possessing the advanced machines indispensable to Russia (and now the USSR). A “fortress Russia” stance had never worked, despite the temptation, as Stalin, no less than Trotsky, knew. The key to his “socialism in one country” article lay not in some imagined nose-thumbing of the West, but in a passage in which he explained the relative ease of the Bolshevik victory with reference to three conditions, all related to the Great War: the existence of two “imperialist blocs, the Anglo-French and Austro-German,” whose all-out clash distracted them from giving serious attention to the revolution in Russia; the hated war’s spawning in Russia of a profound longing for peace, which made proletarian revolution seem the pathway out of the conflict; and the war’s spu
rring of strong movements of workers in imperialist countries who sympathized with the revolution in Russia.185 In other words, even as Stalin had shown a primitive understanding of fascism derived from class analysis, he achieved an ideological breakthrough in linking revolution to war, rather than just class.

  Additionally, Stalin recognized that world revolution afforded the Soviet Union a tool to pursue a special global mission and to break out of its enclosed geopolitical space. From the days of ancient Muscovy, Russia had expanded at the expense of weaker neighbors (Sweden, Poland, the Ottoman empire, China), always in the guise of seeking security amid wide-open frontiers. What had smacked of pure adventurism—the thrust into Central Asia and then Manchuria, where Russia had built a railroad to shorten the route to Vladivostok—could be seen as the logical completion of an advance that otherwise would have had to stop in the middle of nowhere.186 Bolshevik instigation of world revolution, in a way, was the ultimate “defensive” expansionism. But while the tsarist borderlands had been vulnerable to foreign powers stirring up trouble among the domestic enemies of tsarism, now many of the borderlands were full-fledged anti-Soviet states: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, Poland, Romania. Known in Soviet parlance as the “limitrophe,” they imposed the burden on the great powers of securing small state cooperation for any repeat military intervention in the USSR, but in Soviet eyes, this made the small states nothing more than playthings in the designs of world imperialism. Part of Stalin’s calculation for the putsch in Estonia had entailed a desire to deny anti-Soviet forces a base of operations in the Baltics.187 One Soviet intelligence analysis reported that Finland had held a conference in 1924 with the three Baltic countries to exchange intelligence about the USSR, relying upon the listening posts in Helsinki, Riga, Tallinn (Revel), Lwów, and Wilno, and recruiting agents among emigres’ family members who hoped to join their loved ones in emigration.188 (Such intelligence reinforced the inclination to see as illegitimate the independence of the former imperial Russian territories.)189 Considerations of Russia’s position in the world had also motivated Stalin’s otherwise inexplicable wild enthusiasm for the Communist coup in Germany, which he saw as a strike against independent Poland and the Baltics as well.

  Stalin made revealing remarks about the failed coup in Estonia at a January 19, 1925, Central Committee plenum in a discussion of the defense budget. He had inserted the question of Trotsky’s continuation as war commissar and head of the Revolutionary Military Council on the plenum’s agenda.190 Trotsky, not waiting to be sacked, had submitted his resignation on January 15 and departed for subtropical Abkhazia again.191 Kamenev slyly proposed that Stalin replace Trotsky in the military; Stalin was not about to move out of or dilute his command of the party apparatus.192 Mikhail Frunze, a recently named candidate member of the politburo and already the day-to-day operations head of the war commissariat, was promoted from first deputy to commissar.193 But the plenum was no less noteworthy for the Estonia analysis. Stalin argued that “people there began to take action, made some noise, and tried to gain something, but all facts show that without the presence of the Red Army, standing united and vigilant and creating facts [on the ground], nothing serious will be achieved.” He added that “our banner, as of old, remains the banner of peace, but if war begins, then we must not sit with folded arms—we must act, but act last. And we will act in order to throw the decisive weight on the scales, a weight that might be dominant. Hence my conclusion: be ready for everything, prepare our army, shoe and clothe it, train it, improve its technology, improve its chemical weapons, aviation, and in general lift our Red Army to the requisite heights. This is demanded of us by the international situation.”194

  Stalin reiterated his war-revolution theme following the anniversary of Lenin’s death (January 21, 1925), when the Red Army Political Administration, just days after ceasing to report to Trotsky, issued a list of recommended readings with Stalin’s On Lenin and Leninism as number one.195 “This may seem strange but it is a fact, comrades,” Stalin told a Moscow party conference on January 27. “If the two main coalitions of capitalist countries during the imperialist war in 1917 had not been engaged in mortal combat against each other, if they had not been at one another’s throat, not been preoccupied and lacking in time to enter a contest with the Soviet regime, the Soviet regime would hardly have survived then. Struggle, conflicts, and wars between our enemies are, I repeat, our greatest ally.”196 Soviet geopolitics had been born.

  BRUSHING OFF EUROPEAN RAPPROCHEMENT

  That Stalin would be enticed by a vision of an opportunistic windfall dropping into his arms from an intracapitalist war is understandable. The Communists seemed to be staring into the very dilemma that had bedeviled tsarist Russia’s foreign policy: namely, whether to seek a German orientation, the way Durnovó had advocated, or an Anglo-French one, the path the ill-starred tsarist regime had chosen.197 Like Lenin, Stalin saw Britain as the principal pillar of global imperialism, refracting a familiar imperial-Russian Anglophobia through the prism of Marxism-Leninism. Moreover, a reprise of the Franco-Russian alliance waned not only because the Communist regime was anathema to France, but Russia’s strategic value had declined thanks to the resurrection of a Polish state on the other side of Germany; to contain Berlin, Paris set its sights on partnership with Warsaw. Stalin, for his part, worried less about containing German power, the rationale for the tsarist alliance with France, than benefitting from Germany as a source of solidarity against Versailles and technology transfer. But Stalin was in for a nasty surprise: the two opposing blocs that had offered tsarist Russia a fateful choice snatched that choice away from the USSR.

  First came some Soviet maneuvering. Stalin despised the demands of the capitalist powers, especially the British, for such things as anti-propaganda clauses in bilateral agreements—the British incessantly propagandized against internal Soviet politics such as the repressions, as if their police did not beat striking workers—but the Soviets swallowed and symbolically foreswore Comintern propaganda in the British empire.198 This secured coveted diplomatic recognition in February 1924 and, on August 8, 1924, the agreement of Britain’s first ever Labour government to a draft commercial treaty that afforded British goods most-favored-nation status in exchange for which the USSR was to receive significant loans, albeit only after successful conclusion of negotiations over the status of tsarist debts.199 Before the latter deal was sealed, on October 29 Britain held parliamentary elections and Labour lost (covertly subverted by the British intelligence services). The Tory Stanley Baldwin became prime minister and the new British foreign secretary Austen Chamberlain delivered an official note to Moscow stating, “The government of his majesty finds that it cannot recommend these treaties for consideration by parliament or propose them to the king for ratification by his majesty.” A forged letter attributed to Zinoviev surfaced seeming to confirm Comintern subversion on the British Isles as well as Labour’s political flirtations with Moscow.200 While anti-Communist interests were at work in the UK, in the USSR far from all Communists appreciated the value to be gained from repaying the debts to blood-sucking British capitalists incurred by the bloody tsarist regime.201 Still, the power of the major capitalist countries could not be wished away.202 The West had the technology.

  Moscow had also achieved commercial relations with Berlin, which were capped by diplomatic recognition, and the prospect loomed of modernizing Soviet industry with German help, but here, too, the Comintern cast a long shadow, especially the attempted Communist putsch in Germany.203 While Berlin deplored how German Communists secretly trucked with German right-wing nationalists against the Weimar Republic, the Soviets were maddened by German pursuit of Western rapprochement. Pro-Western elements in Germany, in a secret document captured by Soviet military intelligence, asserted that “without doubt Moscow is prepared to sacrifice the interests of Germany.”204 But there was also an “Eastern School” of German diplomacy, represented by the German ambassador to Moscow, Count Ul
rich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, who had supported Kolchak and other anti-Bolshevik forces, but even before their final defeat sought to make the most of the Bolshevik regime.205 Back when he was Weimar Germany’s first foreign minister, Brockdorff-Rantzau had led the German delegation to the Versailles talks in 1919 and publicly declared that a German admission of sole guilt would constitute a lie and warned that the Versailles terms would generate a German combination of nationalism and socialism.206 He saw close ties with the Soviets as a way to overcome France’s Versailles diktat and revive Germany’s special mission in the world. To be sure, he was disgusted by Bolshevism, but he resented everything French, save cognac, and worried that his colleagues in Berlin would align Germany with Britain, thereby pushing the Soviets into the arms of France, a repeat of the fatal Great War two-front scenario. The count and Chicherin, also an aristocrat, found common cause, even observing similar nocturnal schedules (the two often met after midnight).207 Most important, the Chicherin‒Brockdorff-Rantzau pas de deux fit Stalin’s Leninist Anglophobic, Germanophile inclinations.

  A hidden dimension to German-Soviet ties entailed clandestine military cooperation, initiated under Lenin.208 Versailles had imposed severe restrictions on the German military’s size, training, weapons production, and even the ability to send military attachés abroad, but the Soviets offered to allow Germany to violate these restrictions. Major German manufacturers (Blohm & Voss, Krupp, Albatrosswerke) were able to build submarines, aircraft, and artillery on Soviet territory, and the Reichswehr obtained secret training facilities. The Soviets, for their part, sought to attract German firms through leases, or concessions, to take over and revive moribund weapons factories. Moscow welcomed an “unofficial” German military mission in the form of a commission for the verification of German economic concessions on USSR territory, known as Moscow Center in secret documents, and headed by Oskar von Niedermeyer, a Lawrence of Arabia type who had led missions during the Great War to Afghanistan and the Ottoman empire to rally tribes against the British. The Germans used the Moscow Center to gather intelligence as well as to cooperate, but Junkers did reopen an airplane plant just outside Moscow (at Fili).209 And Germany held out the promise of coveted advanced and financial credits for Soviet industrial purchases well beyond the military sphere. Chicherin, knowing that von Brockdorff-Rantzau reported directly to the German chancellor, in fall 1924 offered the ambassador an enlargement of the Rapallo partnership into a “continental bloc” with France against Britain, emphasizing the clash of Soviet and British interests in Asia.210