Stalin, Volume 1

by Stephen Kotkin

  42. Avdeev, Revoliutsiia 1917 goda, IV: 22–3; Protokoly Tsentral’nogo komiteta RSDRP (b), 271–2, n156; Vompe, Dni oktiabr’skoi revoliutsii i zheleznodorozhniki. See also Abramovitch, Soviet Revolution.

  43. Rabochii i soldat, November 1, 1917. See also Delo naroda, October 31, 1917: 2.

  44. The minutes published in 1927 omit the passage praising Trotsky: Pervyi legal’nyi Peterburgskii komitet bol’shevikov. Trotsky reproduced a photograph of the minutes of the Petersburg Committee of Bolsheviks, November 1, 1917. Biulleten’ oppozitsii, 1929, no. 7: 30–2.

  45. Peterburgskii komitet RSDRP (b) v 1917 godu, 546. The young Molotov also backed the hard line (544).

  46. “Zasedanie TsK 1 noiabria 1917 g.,” Protokoly tsentral’nogo komiteta RSDRP (b), 124–30. Stalin is not listed as in attendance.

  47. Protokoly Tsentral’nogo komiteta RSDRP (b), 272, n162; Protokoly zasedanii VTsIK.

  48. Oktiabr’skoe vosstanie v Moskve: Sbornik dokumentov (Moscow: Gosizdat moskovskoe otdelenie, 1922), 97–8, reprinted in Bunyan and Fisher, The Bolshevik Revolution, 179; Pipes, Russian Revolution, 501–3; Koenker, Moscow Workers, 332–4; Pethybridge, Spread of the Russian Revolution, 198. See also Sovety v Oktiabre, 31–86; Mel’gunov, Kak bol’sheviki zakhvlatili vlast’, 277–382; Nikolai N. Ovsiannikov (ed.); Ignat’ev, Oktiabr’ 1917 goda; Grunt, Moskva 1917-i, ch. 6.

  49. Protokoly Tsentral’nogo komiteta RSDRP (b), 133–4; The Bolsheviks and the October Revolution: Central Committee Minutes, 138–40; Lenin v pervye mesiatsy sovetskoi vlasti, 46.

  50. Perepiska sekretariata TsK RSDRP (b), II: 27.

  51. Izvestiia, November 4, 1917; Avdeev, Revoliutsiia 1917 goda, VI: 423–4; Protokoly Tsentral’nogo komiteta RSDRP (b), 133–7; Proletarskaia revoliutsiia, 1927, no. 8–9: 321–51, no. 10: 246–98, no. 11: 202–14; 1928, no. 2: 132–69.

  52. Dekrety Sovetskoi vlasti, I: 20.

  53. Keep, Debate on Soviet Power, 86; Rabinowitch, Bolsheviks in Power, 48–9. A slightly different accounting of the votes is in Pipes, Russian Revolution, 524–5.

  54. Protokoly Tsentral’nogo komiteta RSDRP (b), 146; The Bolsheviks and the October Revolution: Central Committee Minutes, 151–2; Bonch-Bruevich, Na boevykh postakh, 164; Novaia zhizn’, November 9, 1917.

  55. Steklov, Bortsy za sotsializm, II: 400–1; Paustovsky, Story of a Life, 529; Trotskii, Sochineniia, VIII: 254. Sverdlov had the authority to make decisions on his own, yet he consulted Lenin assiduously. Iroshnikov, Predsedatel soveta narodnykh komissarov V. I. Ul’ianov (Lenin), 57 (citing the unpublished memoirs of Paniushkin).

  56. On the rumors to install Grigory Pyatakov as head of a new government, see Pravda, December 15, 1923, December 16, 1923, and January 3, 1924; and Biulleten’ oppozitsii, April 1938, no. 65: 13–4.

  57. Raleigh, Revolution on the Volga, 319.

  58. VII ekstrennyi s”ezd RKP (b), mart 1918 goda, 6. The Soviet editors inserted a note deeming Sverdlov’s accurate statement “not exact” (359).

  59. Fel’shtinskii, Bol’sheviki i levye esery.

  60. Dekrety Sovetskoi vlasti, I: 24–5.

  61. Berlin and Jahanbegloo, Conversations, 4. See also Sorokin, Leaves from a Russian Diary, 105–6.

  62. Delo naroda, November 25, 1917: 4.

  63. Izvestiia, October 28, 1917: 2; Bunyan and Fisher, Bolshevik Revolution, 220.

  64. Trotskii, O Lenine, 102.

  65. Holquist, Making War, 130–1.

  66. Colton, Moscow, 103 (Tikhomirov in Izvestiia, April 30, 1918).

  67. McLellan, Karl Marx: Selected Writings, 592–4. See also V. I. Lenin, “Lessons of the Commune,” Zagranichnaia gazeta, March 23, 1908.

  68. “With the functionaries of our body,” one finance official recorded, “the Bolsheviks in Smolny were unfailingly polite and only upon achieving nothing did they turn to threats that, if we do not hand over 15 million in cash, they will seize the State Bank and take as much as they need,” breaking open the vaults. Finance ministry personnel (on the Moika) went on strike. Nielsen and Weil, Russkaia revoliutsiia glazami Petrogradskogo chinovnika, 14–5 (October 25, 1917), 23 (November 6, 1917).

  69. Bunyan and Fisher, Bolshevik Revolution, 225–31; Vlast’ sovetov, 1919, no. 11: 5; Trotskii, “Vospominaniia ob oktiabr’skom perevorote”; Trotsky, My Life, 293.

  70. Denezhnoe obrashchenie i kreditnaia sistema Soiuza SSR za 20 let, 1–2; Morozov, Sozdanie i ukreplenie sovietskogo gosudarstsvennogo apparata, 52; Novaia zhizn’, November 16, 1917; Ekonomicheskaia zhizn’, November 6, 1918: 2–3 (V. Obolensky-Osinsky). Mezynski is sometimes also given the title “temporary” or “acting” people’s commissar for the finance ministry. The commissar was, nominally, Skortsov-Stepanov. The Bolsheviks did manage to elicit the cooperation of the finance ministry officials and the director of the treasury (P. M. Trokhimovsky). Proletarskaia revoliutsiia, 1922, no. 10: 62–3; Iroshnikov, Sozdanie, 195.

  71. Larsons, Im Sowjet-Labyrinth, 61–6.

  72. Nielsen and Weil, Russkaia revoliutsiia glazami Petrogradskogo chinovnika, 40 (December 29 and 31, 1917). The Council of People’s Commissars issued a decree ordering discontinuance of such payments on January 11, 1918. Obzor finansogo zakonodatel’stva, 1917–1921, gg. (Petrograd, 1921), 15.

  73. Schwittau, Revoliutsiia i narodnoe khoziaisto, 337; D’iachenko, Istoriia finansov SSSR, 24–7; Svoboda Rossii, April 19, 1918: 5; Katzenellenbaum, Russian Currency and Banking, 55–60; Bunyan and Fisher, Bolshevik Revolution, 607–9; Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States: Russia, III: 32–3.

  74. Debt service had amounted to a hefty 345 million rubles per annum from 1909 to 1913, but by 1918 it had exploded because of vast new wartime debt. Dohan, “Foreign Trade,” 218.

  75. The Russian State Bank had a monopoly on the issuance of currency (in 1891). The total gold stock in November 1917 amounted to 1.26 billion rubles. Atlas, Ocherki po istorii denezhnogo obrashcheniia, 16–8; Carr, Bolshevik Revolution, II: 133–7.

  76. Lenin, Collected Works, XLII: 64. As of February 1918, Lenin estimated state expense obligations at 28 billion rubles, and revenues at 8 billion, because of nonpayment of taxes. PSS, XXXV: 326–7, 331. Very soon, the Bolsheviks began to worry that easily available paper money could finance counterrevolution. Pravda, April 19, 1918. Mezynski’s stint at finance was shortlived: by April 1918 he was in the Cheka.

  77. Owen, Russian Peasant Movement.

  78. Brutzkus, “Die russische Agrarrevolution.” In Ukraine, a critical breadbasket feeding tens of millions, the peasant revolution has been likened to a cyclone. Arthur Adams, “The Great Ukrainian Jacquerie,” in Hunczak, The Ukraine, 247–70.

  79. Pipes, Russian Revolution, 718–9. See also Channon, “The Bolsheviks and the Peasantry.”

  80. Conversely, inflation soon obliterated any savings they had in the state savings bank or buried in the ground near their huts. Pipes, Russian Revolution, 719–21.

  81. Atkinson, End of the Russian Land Commune, 185.

  82. Novaia zhizn’, December 31, 1917: 2 (Kolegaev). Liberals in the Provisional Government viewed Victor Chernov, leader of the Socialist Revolutionary party and agricultural minister in the Provisional Government, as the inspiration and embodiment of the chaos caused by land seizures, but in the countryside Chernov and the SR party were seen as traitors for opposing immediate land redistribution. Local SRs broke with the central party hierarchs, but the party as a whole got no credit for it. Chernov called the peasantry “the sphinx in the political history of Russia,” but the characterization applied to himself. Chernov, Rozhednie revoliutsionnoi Rossii, 75. The Bolsheviks borrowed more than the SR land program. “We got a copy of the SR municipal program (they developed it, I believe, in 1905) and began to study it and put together our municipal program in a form much like it,” recalled one Moscow Bolshevi
k of spring 1917. Volin, “Vokrug Moskovskoi Dumy,” 98.

  83. “No law was more widely published than the land law,” recalled Bonch-Bruevich, Na boevikh postakh, 115. The anecdote on the calendars does not appear in the first edition from the previous year of the Bonch-Buevich memoir (Federatsiia, 1930), 125–7. See also Pethybridge, Spread of the Russian Revolution, 154.

  84. Keep, Russian Revolution, 178.

  85. Siegelbaum, “The Workers Group,” at 155.

  86. Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking.

  87. Chugaev, Petrogradskii voenno-revoliutsionnyi komitet, II: 111.

  88. “The drowned were carried out of the cellars and stacked in rows on Palace Square.” Antonov-Ovseenko, Zapiski o grazhdanskoi voine, I: 19–20.

  89. Izvestiia, December 6, 1917; Bonch-Bruevich, Na boevykh postakh, 191. Bonch-Bruevich also collected rumors of enemies in disguise who were stockpiling weapons and counterfeiting documents, to which he responded with peremptory arrests. Zubov, F. E. Dzerzhinskii, 161.

  90. Iroshnikov, Sozdanie, 96, 201, 214–5; Z. Serebrianskii, “Sabotazh i sozdanie novogo gosudarstvennogo apparata,” 8–11.

  91. GARF, f. 130, op. 1, d. 1, l. 29–30, 30 ob; Izvestiia, December 10, 1917; Tsvigun, V. I. Lenin i VChK [1975], 34, n1; Belov, Iz istorii Vserossiiskoi Chrezvychainoi komissii, 72–9; Krasnyi arkhiv, 1924, no. 5: xiv–xv; PSS, XXXV: 156–8; Pogranichnye voiska SSSR 1918–1928, 67; Chugaev, Petrogradskii voenno-revoliutsionnyi komitet, III: 663–4; Latsis, Chrezvychainye komissii, 7–8; Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich, “Kak organizaovalas VChK,” Ogonek, 1927, no. 3, reprinted in Vospominaniia o Lenine, 134–9 (at 137) and expanded in Na boevykh postakh, 193–203 (at 198–9); Carr, “Origins and Status.” The Council of People’s Commissars’ discussion of Dzierzynski’s report was presented as a “decree” (and altered) when later published: Belov, Iz istorii Vserossiiskoi Chrezvychainoi komissii, 78–9. See also Proletarskaia revoliutsiia, 1924, no. 10 (33): 5–6 (Peters) and 1926, no. 9 (58): 82–3 (Vacietis); and Pravda, December 18, 1927: 2. For Lenin’s note to Dzierz˙ynski, see PSS, XXXV: 156–8; Tsvigun, V. I. Lenin i VChK [1975], 37, and [1987], 19, 22. The phrase “proletarian Jacobin” appears in Zubov, F. E. Dzerzhinskii, 162, and appears as “revolutionary Jacobin” in an earlier edition: Feliks Edmundovich Dzerzhinskii: kratkaia biografiia, 2nd ed. (Moscow: OGIZ, 1942), 53. The Cheka technically replaced the MRC, whose power was real and demise sudden on December 5, 1917. Rigby, “The First Proletarian Government”; Pietsch, Revolution und Staat, 44–66. The assertion that Lenin hurriedly founded the Cheka because he worried the Left SRs who had agreed to enter the government would insist on moderation is contradicted by the fact that he allowed the Left SRs into the Cheka’s governing collegium. Latsis, Otchet VChK za chetyre goda ee deiatel’nosti, 20 dekabria 1917–20 dekabria 1921 g. Moscow: VChK, 1922, 8. I: 8; Rabinowitch, Bolsheviks in Power, 81–7, 103. But cf. Pipes, Russian Revolution, 536–7.

  92. RGASPI, f. 76, op. 2, d. 270, l.32–33.

  93. A key instrument in breaking the strike was the closure of the Petrograd City Duma, which had survived the coup and served as a rallying point. Dekrety Sovetskoi vlasti, I: 91.

  94. Peters, “Vospominaniia o rabote VChK,” 10. One of the Provisional Government’s few successes had been the formation of an agency engaged in systematic, sensational leaking of secret files about the okhranka’s dirty tricks. Osorgin, Okhrannoe otdelenie i ego sekrety; Avrekh, “Chrezvychainaia sledstvennaia komissiia vremennogo pravitel’stva”; Peregudova, “Deitel’nost komissii Vremennogo pravtitel’stva i sovetskikh arkhivov”; Ruud and Stepanov, Fontanka 16, 315–21. Police archives had been ransacked and burned by rioters; some top okhranka officials removed their files when they left office, erasing their failures as well as much else. Still, the work of the commission—chaired by Muravyov (formerly known to the okhranka as “The Fly”)—would be published in seven volumes [1927], based on GARF, f. 1647 (Avrekh, “Chrezvychainia sledstvennaia komissiia”); Zhilinskii, Organizatsiia i zhizn’ okhrannago otdeleniia, 4–6. The archive of the Paris branch was thought to have been destroyed by the tsarist ambassador to France, but turned up in 1957 (and is now at the Hoover Institution Archives).

  95. “The enemies of Soviet power,” Dzierzynski explained, “are both our political opponents and all bandits, thieves, speculators, and other criminals.” Novaia zhizn’, June 9, 1918: 4.

  96. Klement’ev, V Bol’shevitskoi Moskve, 53. Klement’ev, an artillery officer in the Russian imperial army, may have owed his presence in Moscow to General Kornilov; those claiming to be connected to Kornilov had ordered Klement’ev and a colonel (Perkhurov) to prepare anti-Bolshevik forces in Moscow, but Klement’ev claims they met indifference.

  97. Bunyan, Intervention, 229 (a translation of Ezhedel’nik chrezvychainoi komissii, 1918, no. 4: 29–30).

  98. Leggett, The Cheka, 56.

  99. Motives in “nationalizations” (plundering, not assumption of state control) could range from professional ambition—a confiscator hoped to stand out as a better manager of the properties—to greed (“sometimes a competing factory owner would pay a special visit to the provincial council of the national economy bringing the necessary presents”). Gessen, Arkhiv russkoi revoliutsii, VI: 310–1 (Gurovich).

  100. On January 1, 1918, Lenin had gotten in his car for the drive back to Smolny from Petrograd’s Archangel Michael Riding Academy, where he had spoken to a motley “socialist army” heading for the front. “They had gone only a few yards when their vehicle was strafed from behind,” Pravda would later report. Inside the car, the Swiss socialist Fritz Platten—an intermediary in the funneling of German money to the Bolsheviks and organizer of Lenin’s sealed-train return to Russia—pushed Lenin’s head down; one of Platten’s hands was said to have been grazed by a bullet. Pravda, January 3, 1918, January 14, 1925 (because of the new calendar, the anniversary of the event became January 14, thirteen days later), January 21, 1926; Zinoviev, “Piat’ let,” manuscript, RGASPI, f. 324, op. 1, d. 267, l. 1–7, in Hoover Institution Archives, Volkogonov papers, container 14; Bonch-Bruevich, Tri pokusheniie na V. I. Lenina, 3–77; Sovetskaia Rossiia, January 3, 1963; Volkogonov, Lenin: Life and Legacy, 229. Lenin’s speech that day was published only many years later (Pravda, January 17, 1929). Who was behind the attempted assassination remains uncertain. The (Right) Socialist Revolutionary Party newspaper first revealed the incident, while hinting that the Bolsheviks had staged it to discredit the SRs, but the Right SRs may have set the assassination in motion, which others clumsily carried out.

  101. Iz istorii VChK, 95–6.

  102. Rabinowitch, Bolsheviks in Power, 97 (citing GARF, f. 130, op. 2, d. 1098, l. 8), 97 (citing TsA FSB RF, f. 1, op. 2, d. 25, l. 1: report of Ivan Polukarov).

  103. Just after the October 25 coup, Lenin’s fixer Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich went over to the Mariinsky Palace to meet the defunct Provisional Government’s head of chancellery, Vladimir Nabokov (father of the future novelist), who had helped write the Provisional Government’s dubious founding document—Mikhail Alexandrovich’s “abdication” manifesto. “He greeted me like an old friend, was ostentatiously polite,” Nabokov wrote, and “tried to convince me that the basis of Bolshevik authority was just as lawful, if not more so than the Provisional Government’s.” Medlin and Powers, V. D. Nabokov, 170–2. See also Izvestiia, Ocober 28, 1917: 2.

  104. Initially, Lenin had contemplated “postponing” the ballot. Trotsky, Lenin, 110. For the October 27, 1917, decree affirming the vote would go forward as scheduled from November 12 to 14, see Dekrety Sovetskoi vlasti, I: 25–6.

  105. There were no returns for Kaluga and Bessarabia regions, three Far Eastern districts of Kamchatka, Yakutsk, and the Chinese Eastern Railroad, even though voting took place there. The Kuban-Black Sea district of the North Caucasus province had elections only in the capital of Yekaterinodar.

  106. Izvestiia
, December 10, 1917: 3; Dekrety Sovietskoi vlasti, I: 165–6; Belov, Iz istorii Vserossiiskoi Chrezvychainoi komissii, 66–8; PSS, XXVI: 315; Tsvigun, V. I. Lenin i VChK, 15–7.

  107. GARF, f. 130, op. 1, d. 1, l. 19–20; Volkogonov, Trotsky, 91.

  108. Protokoly Tsentral’nogo Komiteta RSDRP (b), 157 (November 29, 1917); The Bolsheviks and the October Revolution: Central Committee Minutes, 164; Trotsky, Stalin, 240–1.

  109. Radkey, Russia Goes to the Polls.

  110. Holquist, Making War.

  111. Lenin, Sochineniia 2nd and 3rd eds., XXIV: 631–49 (at 638).

  112. Radkey, Russia Goes to the Polls, 16, 34–5; Znamenskii, Vserossiiskoe Uchreditel’noe Sobranie, 275, 338, 358, tables 1 and 2. Voting took place according to electoral lists, with proportional representation; a candidate was permitted to stand simultaneously in no more than five districts; those elected in more than one district had to choose.

  113. Radkey, Russia Goes to the Polls, 14–23.

  114. Volkogonov, Lenin: Life and Legacy, 252. Sukhanov had taken over the editorship from Maxim Gorky. New Life (Novaya zhizn’) would be closed by Bolsheviks in 1918 after the assassination of the German ambassador Count Mirbach.

  115. As it happened, a revolver was stolen from Lenin’s overcoat, hanging on a hook, during a Bolshevik meeting on the Constituent Assembly; the culprit was found to be a sailor supposed to be guarding the assembly. He was promptly taken out back and shot. Iurii Fel’shtinskii, Brestskii mir, oktiabr’ 1917 goda—noiabr’ 1918 g. (Moscow, 1992), 219.

  116. Pravda, April 20, 1924: 3 (Trotsky).

  117. Sviatitskii, Kogo russkii narod izbral, 10–1.

  118. Znamenskii, Vserossiiskoe, 339; Protasov, Vserossiiskoe Uchreditol’noe Sobranie.

  119. To undercut Bolshevik moderates who had been taking the Constituent Assembly seriously as a people’s parliament, he and Sverdlov had manipulated meeting agendas and attendance for the Bolshevik caucus. Bunyan and Fisher, Bolshevik Revolution, 363; Rabinowitch, Bolsheviks in Power, 88–92.