Stalin, Volume 1

by Stephen Kotkin

  63. Tiander, Das Erwachen Osteuropas, 137.

  64. Zamoyski, Warsaw 1920, 25–6.

  65. Budennyi, Proidennyi put’, I: 245.

  66. Kuz’min, Krushenie poslednego pokhoda Antanty, 133–5; Yiulenev, Sovetskaia kavaleriia v boiakh za Rodinu, 169–74.

  67. Davies, White Eagle, Red Star, 120.

  68. Dirketivy glavnogo komandovaniia Krasnoi Armii, 735.

  69. Kantor, Voina i mir, 13–36.

  70. Rubtsov, Marshaly Stalina, 72–3 (recollections of V. N. Postoronkin, who would join the Whites).

  71. One of his recommenders was Avel Yenukidze, secretary of the Soviet’s central executive committee. V. O. Daines, “Mikhail Tukhachesvkii,” Voprosy istorii, 1989, no, 10: day 41; Volkov, Tragediia russkogo ofitserstva, 314.

  72. Easter, Reconstructing the State, 98, citing RGASPI, f. 124, op. 1, d. 302, l. 4.

  73. Gul’, Krasnye marshaly, 23. Ivan Smirnov led Kolchak’s detstruction in Siberia.

  74. PSS, LI: 206–8.

  75. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 109, d. 74, l. 28.

  76. Zamoyski, Warsaw 1920, 60.

  77. Sochineniia, IV: 336–41; Mikhutina, Pol’sko-Sovetskaia voina, 182–3.

  78. Reproduced in the appendices to Skvortsov-Stepanov, S Krasnoi Armiei, 78.

  79. Budennyi, Proidennyi put’, II: 168–210.

  80. L. D. Trotsky to S. S. Kamenev, copied to E. M. Sklyanskii, Lenin and the Central Committee, July 17, 1920: Krasnov and Daines, Neizvestnyi Trotskii, 307.

  81. Radek, Voina pol’skikh belogvardeitsev protiv Sovetskoi Rossii, 17; Karl Radek, “Pol’skii vopros i internatsional,” Kommunisticeskii internatsional, 1990, no. 12: 2173–88; Zetkin, Reminiscences of Lenin (London: Modern Books, 1929), 20 (omitted in subsequent editions); Lerner, Karl Radek, 100–1; Carr, Bolshevik Revolution, III: 321. Retrospectively, Radek covered over the differences and aligned himself with Lenin: “Session of the Zentrale with the Representative of the Executive Committee for Germany, Friday, January 28, 1921,” in Drachkovitch and Lazitch, The Comintern, 285. See also Radek, Vneshniaia politika sovetskoi Rossii, 62.

  82. Pravda, July 11, 1920; Sochineniia, IV: 324, 333, 336–41. See also Ullman, Anglo-Soviet Accord, 166.

  83. Hooker, “Lord Curzon and the ‘Curzon Line,’” 137.

  84. Borzecki, Soviet-Polish Treaty of 1921, 79–82; Wandycz, Soviet-Polish Relations.

  85. Meijer, Trotsky Papers, II: 228–31; Trotsky, My Life, 455–7. Lenin sent a phonegram on July 12–13 asking for Stalin’s analysis of the Curzon Note, commenting: “I think this is complete theft for the annexation of Crimea, which is insolently mentioned in the Note. We want a victory to snatch the means of thieving promises.” PSS, LI: 237–8.

  86. Babel, 1920 Diary; Babel, Konarmiia.

  87. Airapetian, Legendarnyi Gai, 51.

  88. Pipes, Unknown Lenin, 85–8. The treaty was signed July 12, 1920: Gerutis, Lithuania, 164–5; Debo, Survival and Consolidation, 222–3.

  89. Senn, “Lithuania’s Fight for Independence.”

  90. Airapetian, Legendarnyi Gai, 124.

  91. Mikhutina, Pol’sko-Sovetskaia voina, 303–5 (AVP RF, f. 04, op. 32, d. 25, pap. 205, l. 30–1).

  92. Meijer, Trotsky Papers, II: 228–31; Deutscher, Prophet Armed, 463–7.

  93. Izvestiia TsK KPSS, 1991, no. 2: 117; Dokumenty vneshnei politiki, III: 47–53; Mikhutina, Pol’sko-Sovetskaia voina, I: 143, n1, 142–3.

  94. PSS, LI: 240. Lenin had telegrammed Unszlicht in Minsk (July 15, 1920), asking if he considered “a soviet seizure of power in Poland probable?” Unszlicht answered ingratiatingly that he “considered a soviet seizure of power in Poland in connection with our troops’ approach to the border utterly probable in the nearest time,” but admitted that he could not be sure when the uprising in Poland could be expected. Mikhutina, Pol’sko-Sovetskaia voina, 173–4; Golikov, Vladimir Il’ich Lenin, IX: 102. Bolshevik propaganda insisted this was not an invasion. “To push westward not with the goal of conquering Poland, Germany, France, but to unite with the Polish, German, French workers—that’s our main goal,” explained the newspaper Red Army Man to the invading Soviet troops. “That is why White Poland must be destroyed, to establish a proletarian Poland, and fly the red colors above Warsaw.” Quoted in Wyszczelski, Varshava 1920, 67.

  95. Golubev, Direktivy glavnogo komandovaniia, 643–4.

  96. Iz istoriii grazhdanskoi voiny v SSSR, III: 326; Karaeva, Direktivy komandovaniia frontov, III: 225–6.

  97. Karaeva, Direktivy komandovaniia frontov, III: documents 260, 227.

  98. Borzecki, Soviet-Polish Treaty of 1921, 87 (citing RGASPI, f. 2, op. 1, d. 14673: Kamenev on July 13). Trotsky’s note on Romania: July 17, 1920.

  99. Pipes, Unknown Lenin, 90–1; Kvashonkin, Bol’shevistskoe rukovodstvo, 148. See also Volkogonov, Lenin: Life and Legacy, 388 (citing RGASPI, f. 2, op. 1, d. 348); Service, Lenin, III: 120.

  100. A census in 1921 gave the city’s population of Jews as 39,602 out of a total of 79,792, or 51.6 percent, which was thought to be a decrease from previous years. Poles came in at 46.6 percent, Germans 1.9 percent, Russians 1.8 percent, and Belorussians 0.8 percent. Bender, Jews of Bialystok, 18.

  101. Julian Marchlewski, the head of the imported Revolutionary Committee, could not establish contact with the city’s Polish Communist party (which had 80 members). Mikhutina, Pol’sko-Sovetskaia voina, 190.

  102. Lerner, “Attempting a Revolution”; Kostiushko, Pol’skoe biuro TsK RKP (b); Materialy “Osoboi papki” Politbiuro TsK RKP (b); Ulam, Expansion and Coexistence, 109.

  103. Skvortsov-Stepanov, S Krasnoi Armiei, 92–5. Skvortsov, an eyewitness who recorded his thoughts in real time, noted indigenous anti-Semitism: “During the German occupation the Jews worked on the railroads. Now the Polish railroad workers of Belostok Junction refuse to take them on” (S Krasnoi Armiei, 29). He failed to mention the Jewish exodus on the eve (and during) the Red presence, the expropriation and looting of Polish businesses and property, and the Cheka’s dissolution of Jewish communal organizations. Bender, Jews of Bialystok, 20 (citing Heschel Farbstein, Invazja Bolszewicka a Zydzi: Zbior dokumentow [Warsaw, 1921], I: 13–5).

  104. Davies, “Izaak Babel’s ‘Konarmiya’ Stories,” 847; Golubev, Direktivy glavnogo komandovaniia, 643–4, 649.

  105. Zamoyski, Warsaw 1920, 64, 69. See also Putna, K Visle i obratno, 31.

  106. Erickson, Soviet High Command [1962], 101.

  107. PSS, LI: 248.

  108. Iz istorii grazhdanskoi voiny v SSSR, III: 338–9; Karaeva, Direktivy komandovaniia frontov, III: 244–5; Naida, O nekotorykh voprosakh, 224.

  109. Mikhutina, Pol’sko-Sovetskaia voina, 196; Iz istorii grazhdanskoi voiny v SSSR, III: 336. Leninskii sbornik, XXXVI: 115–6.

  110. Budennyi, Proidennyi put’, II: 281.

  111. Redirected to Crimea to fight Wrangel, Yegorov wanted to take Budyonny’s cavalry with him. Budyonny, Voroshilov, and Minin tried to make excuses in a telegram to Trotsky (August 10), pleading to reverse the directive to subordinate themselves to the western front (they cited the danger of exacerbating supply problems). In a conversation over the direct line between Kamenev and Tukhachevsky, the latter held firm: he wanted the First Cavalry Army. Kakurin and Melikov, Voina s belopoliakami, 504–6; Kuz’min, “Ob odnoi ne vypolnenoi direktive Glavkoma,” 62.

  112. Golubev, Direktivy glavnogo komandovaniia, 707–8.

  113. Tukhachevsky and Kamenev, communicating over the direct line around midnight on August 9–10, disagreed over the location of the bulk of Polish forces: north of the Bug (Tukhachevsky) or south (Kamenev). Golubev, Direktivy glavnogo komandovaniia, 650–2.

  114. Brown, “Lenin, Stalin and the Failure.”

  115. Golubev, Direktivy glavnogo komandova
niia, 709–10; Karaeva, Direktivy komandovaniia frontov, III: 258–9 (Yegorov-Kamenev conversation over the direct wire, August 18, just after midnight).

  116. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary, 205.

  117. Trotsky, Stalin, 329. The literature has picked up on this: Seaton, Stalin as Military Commander, 72.

  118. Budennyi, Priodennyi put’, II: 204, 294.

  119. Egorov, L’vov-Varshava, 97; Naida, O nekotorykh voprosakh, 226. Note that on August 12, Lenin showed he understood, writing to Sklyansky: “Is it not time to direct Smilga that it is necessary to take every adult male without exception (after the harvest) into the army? It is time. Since Budyonny is in the South, it’s necessary to strengthen the North.” Naida, O nekotorykh voprosakh, 228; Golubev, Direktivy glavnogo komandovaniia, 615. Eventually, Yegorov yielded to the supreme commander’s insistence, but Stalin, the commissar, refused to co-sign Yegorov’s order of transfer for the First Cavalry Army, so Budyonny chose to disregard it.

  120. Volkogonov, Triumf i tragediia, I/i: 103 (citing RGVA, f. 104, op. 4, d. 484, l. 11).

  121. Davies, White Eagle, Red Star, 217; Budennyi, Proidennyi put,’ II: 191–339; Egorov, L’vov-Varshava, 26–7. See Gerasimov painting of 1935, First Cavalry Army, vol. I, between 288–9.

  122. Quoted in von Riekhoff, German-Polish Relations, 30.

  123. Golubev, Direktivy glavnogo komandovaniia, 655; RGASPI, f. 5, op. 1, d. 2136 (Victor Kopp to Lenin, August 19, 1920); Borzecki, Soviet-Polish Treaty of 1921, 86; Himmer, “Soviet Policy,” 672; Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, 189–90.

  124. 217 delegates, 36 countries, 169 eligible to vote: Riddell, Workers of the World, I: 11.

  125. PSS, XLI: 219.

  126. Kommunisticheskii trud, July 29, 1920; Farbman, Bolshevism in Retreat, 137. For a romantic view on the 2nd Comintern Congress, see Carr, Bolshevik Revolution, III: 196.

  127. Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, 177; Degras, Communist International [London], I: 111–13.

  128. F. Isserson, “Sud’ba polkovodtsa,” Druzhba naorodov, 1988, no. 5: 184, 187.

  129. Golubev, Direktivy glavnogo komandovaniia, 662.

  130. PSS, LI: 264.

  131. PSS, LI: 266–7; Meijer, Trotsky Papers, II: 260–1.

  132. Debo, Survival and Consolidation, 243 (citing Lloyd George Papers, F/203/1/9, F/203/1/10, August 24).

  133. Putna, K Visle i obratno, 242. The Polish marshal’s redemption following his colleagues’ refusal of his offer to resign (twice), a Red Army temporary loss of radio contacts at a critical moment of advantage, and Tukhachevsky’s dismissal are as absurd as a copy of Piłsudski’s battle plan recovered from a Polish POW.

  134. Borzecki, Soviet-Polish Treaty of 1921, 95.

  135. Brown, “Lenin, Stalin and the Failure,” 43; Karaeva, Direktivy komandovaniia frontov, IV: 180–2; Meijer, Trotsky Papers, II: 240; Melikov, Srazhenie na Visle, 125–7. “The catastrophe on the front was prepared long ago,” one commander reported to Trotsky. “In this operation [Warsaw] the Polish forces exceeded ours by a factor of more than three, and in places by six times.” Simonova, “Mir i schast’e na shtykakh,” 63 (quoting N. Muranov).

  136. Kratkaia istoriia grazhdanskoi voiny v SSSR, 444. Stalin was replaced as commissar of the Southwestern Front Revolutionary Military Council by Sergei Gusev.

  137. Sumbadze, Sotsial’no-ekonomicheskie predposylki pobedy Sovetskoi vlasti, 211 (Mikoyan to Lenin), 212 (local representative to Stalin); Grazhdanskaia voina v SSSR, II: 330.

  138. Meijer, Trotsky Papers, II: 147 (Trotsky to Lenin and Chicherin, April 20, 1920).

  139. Reissner, Oktober, 163–5. Orjonikidze had participated in the Tabriz revolts of 1906–11 in northern Iran.

  140. The Soviets understood Kuchek to be a nationalist, not a Communist. Izvestiia, June 16, 1920 (Vozhnesensky); Krasnaia gazeta, June 20, 1920 (Soltanğaliev).

  141. Zabih, Communist Movement in Iran, 18; Lenczowski, Russia and the West in Iran, 9–10, 52–9; Komintern i Vostok, 75; Chaquèri, The Soviet Socialist Republic of Iran, 166–213. Soltanğaliev wanted a self-standing Comintern of the East and a Muslim Red Army, with Azerbaijan as a springboard, for spreading revolution. Armenian Communists also wanted to Sovietize Iran. Nariman Narimanov, party leader of Azerbaijan, was opposed, viewing Iranian leftists as weak, and advocated for maintaining an anti-imperialist coalition with bourgeois nationalists.

  142. Volodarskii, Sovety i ikh iuzhnye sosedi Iran i Afganistan, 67–72.

  143. Chaquèri, The Soviet Socialist Republic of Iran, 214–75.

  144. Orjonikidze and Stasova had helped organize the congress. Gafurov, Lenin i natsional’no-osvoboditel’noe dvizhenie, 77.

  145. Zinoviev admitted, elsewhere, that a majority of attendees were non-party. Carr, Bolshevik Revolution, III: 261, n1 (citing Kommunisticheskii internatsional, November 6, 1920). See also Fischer, Soviets in World Affairs, I: 283–4.

  146. Riddell, To See the Dawn, 45–52, 231–2.

  147. Congress of the Peoples of the East. Baku, September 1920: Stenographic Report, 21–3.

  148. “Mustafa Kemal’s Movement is a national liberation movement,” one delegate from Turkey stated at Baku. “We support it, but, as soon as the struggle with imperialism is finished, we believe this movement will pass over to social revolution.” Pervyi s”ezd narodov vostoka, 159.

  149. Zinoviev’s reckless summons to holy war against British imperialism could have backfired, potentially embroiling the Bolsheviks in a major war thanks to Muslim jihadists whom Moscow did not control, while giving free rein to pan-Turkic nationalists and others whose political agendas were their own. Blank, “Soviet Politics,” 187.

  150. Smith, “Stalin as Commissar for Nationality Affairs,” 58; Smith, Bolsheviks and the National Question, 32–4.

  151. Trotsky, Stalin [1968], 255–62.

  152. “‘Fate’ did not permit Stalin once in three and a half years to function either as commissar of control or commissar of nationalities,” Lenin would write to another functionary, Adolf Joffe, in 1921. PSS, LII: 99–101. Stephen Blank, although offering no comparisons to the operation of other commissariats with similar-level resources, asserts that Stalin wanted the nationalities’ commissariat to fail to avoid investing national minority Communists with a strong instrument to pursue their own agendas. Blank, Sorcerer as Apprentice, 53, 64, 223–4.

  153. Filomonov, Obrazovanie i razvitie RSFSR, 163. In July 1919, the commissariat’s ruling board even proposed its own abolition, but the Council of People’s Commissars rejected self-liquidation. At the same time, some province soviets had already closed down nationalities commissariat branch offices in their territories. Smith, Bolsheviks and the National Question, 33 (citing GARF, f. 1318, op. 1, d. 2, l. 104). See also Makarova, Narodnyi Komissariat. Stalin would continue to lobby Lenin: “I insist on abolition (after the Union of Republics we do not need NKnats),” but Lenin wrote on Stalin’s note, “Nknats is necessary for the satisfaction of the nats [national minorities]”. APRF, f.3, op. 22, d. 97, l. 136–7, 137ob., Hoover Institution Archives, Volkogonov papers, container 23.

  154. Gizzatullin and Sharafutdinov, Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev, 386.

  155. Gizzatullin and Sharafutdinov, Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev, 52.

  156. Togan, Vospominaniia, 197. Stalin wrote other civil war articles on the national question, often in a pandering tone. In Izvestiya (February 22, 1919), for example, he repeated Lenin’s two-camp imagery that divided the world into “the camp of imperialism and the camp of socialism,” placing in the first “the United States and Britain, France, and Japan,” and in the second “Soviet Russia with the young Soviet republics, and the growing proletariat revolution in the European countries.” Stalin claimed to be confident that imperialism was “headed for its inevitable doom,” and accorded European
revolutions the highest probability for success, but he also noted that the “roar” of the socialist revolutions could be “heard in the countries of the oppressed East.” Reprinted, without much context, in Eudin and North, Soviet Russia and the East, 45–6.

  157. Togan, Vospominaniia, 199, 229–30, 256.

  158. A petition from the Central Bureau of Communist Organizations of the Peoples of the East, which was headed by Soltanğaliev, had been sent to Trotsky on January 2, 1920, requesting Stalin’s recall from the civil war front so that he could “directly oversee internal national policy and foreign policy of Soviet power in the East,” in order to quell dissatisfaction and overcome chaos. Jughashvili, they wrote, had “colossal authority” among easterners as a man of the Caucasus and an expert on the national question. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 109, d. 76, l. 1–1ob.

  159. Schafer, “Local Politics,” passim. See also Pipes, “First Experiment”; Zenkovsky, “The Tataro-Bashkir Feud”; Zenkovsky, Pan-Turkism, 161–9; and Blank, “Struggle for Soviet Bashkiria.”

  160. Togan, Vospominaniia, 193.

  161. On the Bashkirs, see Steinwedel, “Invisible Threads of Empire.”

  162. Even if Stalin had not blocked the formation of a Greater Tataria in 1918, it would not have survived the exigencies of the civil war and the need to win Bashkir allegiance. The March 1918 decree calling for a joint Tatar-Bashkir republic was formally annulled only in December 1919. Iuldashbaev, Obrazovanie Bashkirskoi Avtonomnoi Sovetskoi Sotsialisticheskoi Respubliki, 423.

  163. Schafer, “Local Politics,” 165–90.

  164. Schafer, “Local Politics,” 176 (citing GARF, f. 1318, op. 1, d. 45, l. 9 , 44; RGASPI, f. 17, op. 65, d. 22, l. 218); Togan, Vospominaniia, 293; Sultan-Galiev, Stat’i, vtystupleniia, dokumenty, 437.

  165. Schafer, “Local Politics,” 176; Kul’sharipov, Z. Validov, 128–39 (Validi to Stalin, May 3, 1919); Murtazin, Bashkiriia i bashkirskie voiska, 207–11; Togan, Vospominaniia, 292–5.

  166. Togan, Vospominaniia, 250–1.

  167. Togan, Vospominaniia, 251.

  168. Izvestiia, May 20 and May 29, 1920; Pravda, May 29, 1920; Politika Sovetskoi vlasti, 101–2; Batsell, Soviet Rule in Russia, 142.