Stalin, Volume 1

by Stephen Kotkin

  10. Holquist, Making War. Elsewhere, in the best short treatment of the war, revolution, and civil war, Holquist advances the suggestive thesis that Russia’s staus as a domestic colonial empire led it to develop counterinsurgency governing techniques, which were brought out by the violent episode of 1905–7 and then by the world war conjuncture. Moreover, he adds a sophisticated statement of the critical role of Marxist ideas. Holquist, “Violent Russia.”

  11. Reginald E. Zelnik, “Commentary: Circumstance and Political Will in the Russia Civil War,” in Koenker, Party, State, and Society, 374–81 (at 379).

  12. For example, Trotsky’s decree, in the name of the Soviet central executive committee, dated October 29, 1917: RGASPI, f. 17, op. 109, d. 1, l. 3.

  13. He added that “every day there are 20–35 cases of typhus.” Nielsen and Weil, Russkaia revoliutsiia glazami Petrogradskogo chinovnika, 46 (March 12, 1918).

  14. Gerson, The Secret Police, 147–8 (citing Ezhedel’nik VCheka, October 13, 1918: 25).

  15. Raleigh, Experiencing Russia’s Civil War, 262ff.

  16. See the case of Dmitry Oskin (b. 1892), a peasant from near Tula, a factory town just south of Moscow, who had volunteered for the tsarist army in 1913, earned four St. George’s crosses for bravery at the front, and rose up through the army as his superiors—syphilitics and cowards—fell to death or crippling wounds. Oskin himself lost a leg to amputation. Throughout 1917, he tacked ever leftward, like the masses generally, and by 1918 had become “commissar” at Tula. He defended “the revolution” against “counter-revolution” at all costs. When anti-Bolshevik forces closed in on the city, Oskin eagerly imposed martial law, forced the populace to dig trenches, and conducted himself like a despot. Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 264–5; Os’kin, Zapiski soldata. Oskin would rise to become a high military official.

  17. Pravda, October 18, 1918: 1 (Dukhovskii, an official in the interior ministry or NKVD, separate from the Cheka).

  18. Gerson, The Secret Police, 195.

  19. Quoted in Stites, Revolutionary Dreams, 39. In a book Isaac Steinberg completed in Bolshevik prison in 1919, he called the revolution “a great tragedy in which both the hero and the victim often appear to be the people.” Ot fevralia po oktiabr’ 1917 g., 128–9.

  20. McAuley, Bread and Justice, 3–6, 427–8.

  21. One writer, in his diary, observed that “even the best and cleverest people, scholars included, are beginning to behave as if there were a mad dog in the courtyard outside.” Prishvin, Dnevniki, II: 169 (September 1918).

  22. Holquist, “‘Information Is the Alpha and Omega”; Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines, 5–8, 104–5, 149–55. See also the document collection of Voronovich, Zelenaia kniga. Specialists in the Soviet state knew about requisition practices during the Great War among both Entente and Central Powers. Viz. Vishnevskii, Printsipy, 65.

  23. Novaia zhizn’, November 2, 1917, reprinted in Lelevich, Oktiabr’ v stavke, 147–8.

  24. Lenin, in the Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government (presented April 7 and published three weeks later), proposed “utilization of bourgeois specialists” in every field. PSS, XXXVI: 178. In 1920, Trotsky sought to introduce “political departments” in place of party cells on the railways to make the trains run, but his proposal failed. Soon enough, however, party cells came to resemble the appointed political departments.

  25. Otchet VChK za chetyre gody ee deiatel’nosti, 82, 274.

  26. Iu. M. Shashkov, “Model’ chislennosti levykh eserov v tsentral’nom apparate VChk v 1918 g.,” Aktual’nye problem politicheskoi istorii Rossii: tezisy dokladovi soobshchenii (Briansk, 1992), II: 70.

  27. Iz istorii VChK, 174.

  28. He also made note of how the Cheka “disposed of a reserve of vodka, which enabled it, as occasion arose, to loosen tongues.” Agabekov, OGPU, 3, 6–7, 10.

  29. On July 25, 1918, the chairman (Vetoshkin) of the “extraordinary revolutionary headquarters” in Vologda complained to Lenin that “comrades come through often with written mandates from the Extraordinary Commission [Cheka] giving them unusually broad powers that disorganize the work of the local Cheka and evince a tendency to make the Cheka the lead political organ standing above the executive committee.” They engaged in activities said to compromise Soviet power, such as financial machinations and arresting anyone who got in their way. He concluded: “God save us from such archrevolutionary friends and we will handle our enemies ourselves.” RGASPI, f. 17, op. 109, d. 13, l. 24–5.

  30. “The only temperaments that devote themselves willingly and tenaciously to this task of ‘internal defense’ were those characterized by suspicion, embitterment, harshness and sadism,” wrote Victor Khibalchich, known as Victor Serge, who was born in Belgium to Russian emigres, psychologizing the secret police operatives he observed in Petrograd in 1919. “Long-standing inferiority complexes and memories of humiliation and sufferings in the Tsar’s jails rendered them intractable, and since professional degeneration has rapid effects, the Chekas inevitably consisted of perverted men tending to see conspiracy everywhere and to live in the midst of perpetual conspiracy themselves.” Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, 80; Leggett, The Cheka, 189.

  31. Trotsky, Stalin, [1968], 385.

  32. Brinkley, Volunteer Army; Kenez, Civil War in South Russia; Lehovich, White Against Red.

  33. Drujina, “History of the North-West Army,” 133.

  34. Guins, Sibir’, II: 368

  35. Kvakin, Okrest Kolchaka, 124, 167–8. See also Berk, “The Coup d’État of Admiral Kolchak.” “Izvestiya wrote an obscene article saying: ‘Tell us, you reptile, how much did they pay you for that?’” Ivan Bunin, the writer, recorded in his diary. “I crossed myself with tears of joy.” Bunin, Cursed Days, 177 (June 17, 1919).

  36. Restoration remained impossible as a matter of practical poltics. Some monarchist attitudes were found among some White-movement officers. Ward, With the “Die-Hards” in Siberia, 160.

  37. Kavtaradze, Voennye spetsialisty, 21–4.

  38. Kavtaradze, Voennye spetsialisty, 176–7.

  39. Golovine, Russian Army, 278; Kenez, “Changes in the Social Composition of the Officer Corps”; Bushnell, “Tsarist Officer Corps.” In 1917, almost the only educated privates in the Russian army were Jews, who rose to the fore when soldiers formed soviets because of their education. Shklovsky, Sentimental Journey, 66–7.

  40. Shklovsky, Sentimental Journey, 8.

  41. John Erickson, “The Origins of the Red Army,” in Pipes, Revolutionary Russia, 224–58. The official date for the founding of the Red Army would become February 23, 1918, which in fact had been a failed attempt.

  42. Gorodetskii, Rozhdenie, 399–401; Dekrety Sovetskoi vlasti, II: 334–5.

  43. Trotskii, “Krasnaia armiia,” in Kak vooruzhalas’ revoliutsiia, I: 101–22 (April 22, 1918: at 117–8). The French socialist Jean Jaures had asserted, back in 1911, that a democratic army would be fully compatible with combat effectiveness. Jaures, L’Organisation socialiste.

  44. Dekrety Sovetskoi vlasti, II: 63–70.

  45. Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, I: 289.

  46. Golub, “Kogda zhe byl uchrezhden institut voennykh kommissarov Krasnoi Armi?,” 157.

  47. Rabochaia i Krest’ianskaia krasnaia armiia i flot, March 27, 1918; Pravda, March 28, 1918. Benvenuti (Bolsheviks and the Red Army, 29–30) points out that Trotsky omitted this interview from his comprehensive compendium Kak vooruzhalas’ revoliutsiia.

  48. Trotskii, “Vnutrennie i vneshnie zadachi Sovetskoi vlasti,” in Kak vooruzhalas’ revoliutsiia, I: 46–67 (April 21, 1918: at 63–4).

  49. V. I. Lenin, “Uderzhat li bol’sheviki gosudarstvennuiu vlast’?,” in PSS, XXXIV: 289–39 (at 303–11); Rigby, “Birth of the Central Soviet Bureaucracy.” Even during Lenin’s prerevolutionary
lyricism about smashing the state, such as State and Revolution [1903] in which he had denounced as “opportunist” the view that the “bourgeois” state could be taken over and put to use by the proletariat, he had made clear the Bolsheviks should seek to retain valuable “bourgeois” expertise.

  50. “The Soviet Government,” Denikin would bitterly complain, “may be proud of the artfulness with which it has enslaved the will and the brains of the Russian generals and officers and made of them its unwilling but obedient tool.” Denikin, Ocherki russkoi smuty, III: 146.

  51. Istoriia grazhdanskoi voiny, III: 226.

  52. Kavtaradze, Voennye spetsialisty, 175–8, 183–96. How many of the generals and staff officers deserted to the Whites or quit and emigrated remains unknown. Altogether, some 70 percent of the tsarist officer corps (250,000) served on either the Red side (75,000) or the White side (100,000).

  53. Already the 2nd Congress of Soviets in October 1917, at which the seizure of power had been pronounced, called for new commissars. Von Hagen, Soldiers in the Proletarian Dictatorship, 27. Bolshevik political commissars would be subordinated to the all-Russia Bureau of Military Commissars in the Council of People’s Commissars, not to the party (which as yet had no bureaucracy).

  54. Political departments essentially replaced party cells in the army already by January 1919; they were appointed, not elected, and subordinated to the military experts. Benvenuti, Bolsheviks and the Red Army, 52–64 (citing Pravda, January 10, 1919); Petrov, Partiinoe stroitel’stvo, 58–9.

  55. Voenno-revoliutsionnye komitety deistviiushchei armii, 30–1, 75–6. See also Kolesnichenko and Lunin, “Kogda zhe byl uchrezhden institut voennykh kommissarov Krasnoi Armi?,” 123–6.

  56. “The commissar is not responsible for purely military, operational, or combat orders,” Trotsky wrote (April 6, 1918), in one of the very few central directives (signed by him alone) to clarify the commissar’s powers. Only detection of “counter-revolutionary intentions” was to induce a commissar to prevent a commander’s military directives. Izvestiia, April 6, 1918, reprinted in Savko, Ocherki po istorii partiinykh organiizatsii, 73–4.

  57. As one scholar has explained, “The potential for confusion and conflict in the army was heightened by the party workers’ formal right to interfere in virtually all command matters through their powers of checking and co-signature.” Colton, “Military Councils,” 37, 56.

  58. Argenbright, “Bolsheviks, Baggers and Railroaders.”

  59. Gill, Peasants and Government.

  60. Lih, Bread and Authority, 95–6, 106–8. Earlier in August, the Provisional Government had averred that it would not raise state prices paid for grain procurements. Pethybridge, Spread of the Russian Revolution, 99 (citing Vestnik vremennogo praveitel’stva, August 5, 1917).

  61. Sergei Prokopovich, quoted in Holquist, Making War, 81.

  62. Carr, Bolshevik Revolution, II: 227–44; Malle, Economic Organization of War Communism, 322–6; Perrie, “Food Supply.”

  63. Holquist, Making War, 108–9 (citing Kondrat’ev, Rynok khlebov, 222).

  64. Nash vek, July 10, 1918: 4.

  65. Mary McAuley, “Bread Without the Bourgeoisie,” in Koenker, Party, State, and Society, 158–79

  66. Svoboda Rossii, April 18, 1918: 5; Bunyan and Fisher, Bolshevik Revolution, 666–8.

  67. Pavliuchenkov, Krest'ianskii Brest, 26–9 (citing RGASPI, f. 158, op. 1, d. 1, l. 10). Tsyurupa outmaneuvered Trotsky, whose Extraordinary Commission lapsed.

  68. “O razrabotke V. I. Leninym prodovol’stvennoi politiki 1918 g.,” 77.

  69. Gulevich and Gassanova, “Iz istorii bor’by prodovol’stvennykh otriadov rabochikh za khleb” at 104; Lih, Bread and Authority, 126–37; Malle, Economic Organization of War Communism, 359–61.

  70. Protokoly zasedanii VsTsIK, 47–8.

  71. One scholar has argued that “the actual relation between military necessity and ideological radicalism is the reverse of this supposed chain: the outbreak of civil war caused a conscious retreat from ideological ambitiousness,” which is true at the level of rhetorical flourish, though less at the level of practices. Lih, “Bolshevik Razvesrtka,” 684–5.

  72. “There remains only one solution,” Lenin concluded in spring 1918: “to meet the violence of grain owners against the starving poor with the violence against grain owners.” Strizhkov, Prodovol’stvennye otriady, 56. “We did not hesitate to wrest land away from landlords . . . and by force of arms to tear the crown from the stupid tsar’s head,” Trotsky thundered. “Why then should we hesitate to take the grain away from the kulaks?” Trotskii, Kak vooruzhalas’ revoliutisiia, I: 81–2. See also Iziumov, Khleb i revoliutsiia.

  73. Figes, Peasant Russia.

  74. Vodolagin, Krasnyi Tsaritsyn, 10; Raleigh, “Revolutionary Politics.”

  75. Kakurin, Kak srazhalas’, I: 261.

  76. RGASPI, f. 2, op. 1, d. 6157; Iudin, Lenin pisal v Tsaritsyn, 3–12; Pravda, May 31, 1918; Genkina, Tsaritsyn v 1918, 73 (citing GARF, f. 1235, op. 53, d. 1, l. 106), 75; Trotsky, Stalin, 283. Stalin’s appointment took place just weeks after he had won his April 1918 slander case against the Menshevik leader Yuly Martov.

  77. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 109, d. 3, l. 5–10 (devastating May 29, 1918, report by Snesarev and Nosovich), reprinted—without mention of Nosovich—in Goncharov, Vozvyshenie Stalina, 361–7 (at 365). The latter is a reissue of Melikov, Geroicheskaia oborona Tsaritsyna, with additional documents in an appendix. See also RGASPI, f. 17, op. 109, d. 3, l. 17–20 (June 30, 1918, report by Snesarev); and Dobrynin, Bor’ba s bol’shevizmom na iuge Rossii, 111.

  78. Iz istorii grazhdanskoi voiny v SSSR, I: 563–4 (quoting K. Ia. Zedin).

  79. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 4, d. 668, l. 35–9 (F. S. Alliluev, “Vstrechi s Stalinym”).

  80. Pravda, December 21, 1929; Voroshilov, Lenin, Stalin, i krasnaia armiia, 43; “Pis’mo V. I. Leninu,” Sochineniia, IV: 118–9.

  81. Pravda, June 11, 1918.

  82. Pravda, January 3, 1935; Genkina, Tsaritsyn v 1918, 87–8. In May 1918 the Caucasus Bolshevik Sergo Orjonikidze, who had just fled Rostov, helped put down an anarchic revolt inside Tsaritsyn; he telegrammed Lenin that “the most decisive measures are necessary, but the local comrades are too flaccid, every offer to help is taken as interference in local affairs.” By contrast, Stalin imposed his will. GARF, f. 130, op. 2, d. 26, l. 12; Sergo Ordzhonikidze; Genkina, Tsaritsyn v 1918, 59–64. Sergei Minin, the top Tsaritsyn Bolshevik, had feared Stalin’s interference in local affairs, too, but Minin could not overcome Stalin’s will and authority. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 4, d. 668, l. 57 (F. S. Alliluev, “Obed u Minina”).

  83. Gerson, The Secret Police, 139–43 (citing Denikin Commission reports, U.S. National Archives, Washington, D.C., RG 59, roll 36, frames 0248–0250).

  84. Bullock, Russian Civil War, 36.

  85. Gerson, The Secret Police, 142–3 (citing U.S. National Archives, Washington, D.C., RG59, roll 36, frames 0248–0250).

  86. Chervyakov had been expelled under the tsarist regime from the military medical academy in St. Petersburg for political activity, but completed the law faculty (!) at Moscow University and served as an inspector at the School of Trade in his native city of Lugansk, in the Donetsk basin. In 1918, he had evacuated Ukraine eastward ahead of the advancing Reichswehr, ending up in Tsaritsyn, and bringing along a Lugansk crony who became the local Cheka “investigator.” http://rakurs.myftp.org/61410.html; Argenbright, “Red Tsaritsyn,” 171. After Alfred Karlovich Borman, head of the Tsaritsyn Cheka, had the Chervyakov crony Ivanov arrested, Chervyakov arrested Borman and released Ivanov. Nevskii, Doklad ot narodnogo kommissara putei soobshcheniia, 28.

  87. Raskol’nikov, Rasskazy michmana Il’ina, 31–3. See also Genkina, “Priezd tov. Stalina v Tsaritsyn,” 82.

  88. “The enemy consists of remnants of
Kornilov’s army, Cossack and other counter-revolutionary units and possibly German troops,” a July 10 report observed: RGASPI, f. 17, op. 109, d. 3, l. 23–5 (Z. Shostak, a North Caucasus military inspector).

  89. “Pis’mo V. I. Leninu,” Sochineniia, IV: 120–1. Stalin called Snesarev a “flaccid military leader” in a telegram to Trotsky (July 11, 1918) copied to Lenin and asked “don’t you have other candidates?” Kvashonkin, Bol’shevistskoe rukovodstvo, 42–4 (RGASPI, f. 558, op. 1, d. 1812, l. 1–3). Stalin had noted to Lenin and Trotsky (June 22, 1918) that Snesarev, traveling to the front lines, had barely escaped arrest, as if he were concerned about Snesarev’s welfare, but was in fact raising doubts about him. Bol’shevistskoe rukovodstvo, 40–41 (RGASPI, f. 558, op. 1, d. 5404, l. 3). See also Kliuev, Bor’ba za Tsaritsyn.

  90. Trotsky further allowed that command over military operations could be transferred to a new military council. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 109, d. 3, l. 44. On July 18, Stalin sent a telegram to Moscow demanding that Snesarev be dismissed. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 1, d. 258, l. 1; Vodolagin, Krasnyi Tsaritsyn, 80 (RGVA, f. 6, op. 3, d. 11, l . 92, July 17, 1918, resolution in Tsaritsyn).

  91. Golikov, Vladimir Il’ich Lenin, V: 645–6. The original composition was Stalin, Minin, and a “military leader who will be named by the recommendation of People’s Commissar Stalin and Military Commissar Minin.” That person, initially, was A. N. Kovalevsky, but from August 5 would be Voroshilov. Kovalevsky was arrested. Golubev, Direktivy glavnogo komandovaniiai, 74–5 (RGVA, f. 3, op. 1, d. 90, l. 268–9); RGASPI, f. 17, op. 109, d. 3, l. 14; Goncharov, Vozvyshenie Stalina, 391–2 (RGVA, f. 6, op. 4, d. 947, l. 71–71a); Kvashonkin, Bol’shevistskoe rukovodstvo, 40–41 (RGASPI, f. 558, op. 1, d. 5404, l. 3: June 22, 1918); Karaeva, Direktivy komandovaniia frontov, I: 289–90 (RGVA, f. 6, op. 4, d. 947, l. 71–71a). The decree (by telegram) of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic was dated July 24, which appears to have been issued in connection with an on-site investigation by Nikolai Podvoisky, the head of the Red Army Inspectorate.