Stalin, Volume 1

by Stephen Kotkin

  330. Gleb Maksimilianovich Krzhizhanovskii, 33–4.

  331. David Dallin, “Between the World War and the NEP,” in Haimson, The Mensheviks, 191–239 (at 236). Dallin, a Menshevik, attended the congress.

  332. Smith, Bolsheviks and the National Question, 4 (citing RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 74, l. 3; d. 122, l. 2; d. 46, l. 3; d. 55, l. 5).

  333. Boersner, The Bolsheviks, 63.

  334. Sochineniia, IV: 408. In Pravda (December 4) Stalin called the Dashnaks “agents of the Entente.” Sochineniia, IV: 413–4.

  335. Sochineniia, IV: 162, 237, 372. Further impetus may have come from the specter of Karl Kautsky, the bête noire of Bolshevism and hero of Georgian Menshevism, who was visiting the non-Bolshevik socialist republic from late September 1920 through January 1921, and found that independent “Georgia lacks nothing to make her not only one of the most beautiful, but also one of the richest countries in the world.” Kautsky, Georgia, 14.

  336. Jones, “Establishment of Soviet Power,” 620–1.

  337. Smith, “The Georgian Affair of 1922,” 523 (citing RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 122, l. 2; op. 2, d. 46, l. 3; d. 55, l. 5; d. 56, l. 1); Makharadze, Pobeda sotsialisticheskoi revoliutsii v Gruzii, 420–3; Zhordania, Moia zhizn’, 109–12. Trotsky, away in the Urals, demanded an investigation. Makharadze complained in late 1921 to Tskhakaya, the Georgian representative in Moscow: “In the Caucasus bureau there are comrades, even now, who do not recognize the formal existence of Transcaucasus republics, but rather see them as provinces of the RSFSR.” Smith, “The Georgian Affair of 1922,” 524 (citing RGASPI, f. 157, op. 1/c, d. 14, l. 1–5).

  338. PSS, XLII: 367. On March 2, Lenin wrote Orjonikidze ordering “a special policy of concessions for the Georgian intelligentsia and small traders. . . . It is hugely important to seek an acceptable compromise with Jordania or Georgian Mensheviks like him. . . . I ask you to understand that both the internal and international aspects of Georgia demand that the Georgian Communists do not apply the Russian pattern, but that they skillfully and flexibly create a particular tactic based on concessions to all kind of petty-bourgeois elements.” Lenin, Collected Works, 32: 362.

  339. Ordzhonikidze, Stat’i i rechi, I: 172.

  340. Orjonikidze wanted “with red-hot irons,” in Stalin’s words, “to burn down the remains of nationalism,” as he stated in Tiflis in late November 1921. Ordzhonikidze, Stat’i i rechi, I: 216.

  341. King, Ghost of Freedom, 173; Avalov, Nezavisimosti Gruzii, 285.

  342. King, Ghost of Freedom, 171.

  343. See Churchill’s August 16, 1919, long memorandum, excerpted in Churchill, World Crisis, 251–3.

  344. Avalov, Nezavisimosti Gruzii, 288–9; Avalishvili, Independence of Georgia, 266–8. Oliver Wardrop, a scholar of Georgian literature and history, was British commissioner.

  345. Dokumenty vneshnei politiki, II: 755; Garafov, “Russko-turetskoe sblizhenie,” 247.

  346. The Georgians could not manage to create a cultural center abroad. Rayfield, Literature of Georgia, 234.

  347. More than 150,000 Georgians had fought in the tsarist army during the Great War, but after battlefield deaths, captures, and desertions, General Kvinitadze managed to muster a mere 10,000. General Giorgi Kvinitadze [Chikovani] (1874–1970) was born in Daghestan and graduated from the St. Constantine Infantry School in St. Petersburg and later the General Staff Academy. He did not speak Georgian. He did not get along with Jordania, but the latter invited him to become supreme commander. He was put off by the Georgian Mensheviks’ abuses of power, amid rhetorical flourishes about socialism and internationalism, and their flirtation with a “people’s militia” rather than a real army. They let him go, then turned to him again at crisis time. In 1922 in Paris he wrote memoirs; he would be buried in the same cemetery as Jordania. Kvinitadze, Moi vospominaniia.

  348. On March 17–18, Jordania had sent emissaries to negotiate with the Bolsheviks located just outside Batum (Stalin’s brother-in-law Alyosha Svanidze, Avel Yenukidze, and Mamiya Orakhelashvili); the Mensheviks agreed to allow the Red Army to enter via the port of Batum to prevent its seizure by the Turks, and to provide wagons for Dmitry Zhloba’s cavalry. The Bolsheviks promised amnesty and positions in a Soviet government. The Mensheviks distrusted the offer.

  349. Jordania would set up south of Paris; eventually, he would find a patron in Piłsudski.

  350. Kuleshov, “Lukollov mir,” 72–3 (RGASPI, f. 78, op. 1, d. 46, l. 1, 3).

  351. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 4, d. 675, l. 1–23.

  352. RGASPI, f. 2, op. 1, d. 24278, l. 1–2.

  353. Golikov, Vladimir Il’ich Lenin, VI: 390, IX: 348, 618, X: 348, 566, 588, 639, XI: 47, 113, 128; Meijer, Trotsky Papers, II: 26–9, 66–7; McNeal, Stalin, 50. Trotsky was given an eight-week holiday at the same time: RGASPI, f. 17, op. 112, d. 149, l. 93.

  354. TsK RKP (b)—VKP (b) i natsional’nyi vopros, 47–9 (RGASPI, f. 558, op. 1, d. 3530, l. 1–2; Kommunist [Baku], July 31, 1921). Amayak Nazaretyan, one of the five members of the Caucasus bureau, in 1922 became Stalin’s top assistant in Moscow.

  355. De Lon, “Stalin and Social Democracy,” 125.

  356. Trotsky, Stalin, 359–60; Lang, Modern History, 238–9 (no citations, evidently relying on Menshevik emigre accounts); Payne, The Rise and Fall of Stalin, 275–6 (repeating Lang’s account).

  357. Iremashvili, Stalin und die Tragodie, 57–62.

  358. Pravda Gruzii, July 1921, 13; Stalin, “Ob ocherednykh zadachakh kommunizma v Gruzii i Zakavka’e,” in Sochineniia, V: 88–100 (at 95).

  359. Belov, Baron Ungern fon Shternberg; Palmer, Bloody White Baron.

  360. Alioshin, Asian Odyssey, 167, 183–7. A sensational insider account of the baron, by a Polish professor at Omsk University, became a bestseller: Ossendowski, Beasts, Men, and Gods.

  361. Tornovskii, “Sobytiiia v Mongolii-Khalkhe,” 168–328 (at 208–13); Alioshin, Asian Odyssey, 231.

  362. Kuz’min, Istoriia barona Ungerna, 184–5.

  363. Iuzefovich, Samoderzhets pustyni, 3, 133–7.

  364. Kuz’min, Istoriia barona Ungerna, 410–13; Alioshin, Asian Odyssey, 229.

  365. The Anglophobe Chicherin played a lead role, insisting that the Peoples of the East consisted not only of Muslims but also Buddhists. Mongolia and Tibet were potential thorns in the side of British India. Amur Sanai, “Kloiuchki k vostokou,” Zhizn’ natsional’nostei, May 26, 1919.

  366. For a Soviet account of them, see Genkin, Severnaia Aziia, 1928, no. 2: 79–81.

  367. Baabar, Twentieth-Century Mongolia, 202; Roshchin, Politicheskaia istoriia Mongolii, 35–6.

  368. Murphy, Soviet Mongolia, 13–4.

  369. Rupen, Mongols of the Twentieth Century, I: 139; Sumiatskii, “Na zare osvobozhdeniii Mongolii,” Pravda, July 26, 1920, in Eudin and North, Soviet Russia and the East, 203–4.

  370. Baabar, Twentieth-Century Mongolia, 216; Rupen, Mongols of the Twentieth Century, I: 141, 155. Retrospectively, this conference became the 1st Party Congress.

  371. I. I. Lomakina, “Kommentarii,” in Pershin, Baron Ungern, 189–259 (at 176–7).

  372. Lepeshinskii, Revoliutsiia na Da’lnem vostoke, 429–32; Kuz’min, Istoriia barona Ungerna, 238.

  373. The Warsaw-born Red Army commander Konstanty Rokossowski (b. 1896) joined his substantial cavalry to the Mongol forces led by Sukhbaatar, but Rokossowski was wounded and left the field. Roshchin, Politcheskaia istoriiia Mongolii, 20–1; Kuz’min, Istoriia barona Ungerna, 244–5, 263.

  374. Pravda, July 9, 1921; Eudin and North, Soviet Russia and the East, 196–7. The 3rd Congress met in Moscow from June 22 to July 12, 1921. Stalin was not among the five Soviets (Zinoviev, Bukharin, Radek, Lenin, and Trotsky) elected to the Comintern executive committee. During the congress he was recuperating down south.


  375. Morozova, Comintern and Revolution in Mongolia, 16 (citing RGASPI, f. 495, op. 154, d. 20, l. 1–7).

  376. Alioshin, Asian Odyssey, 266.

  377. Kuz’min, Istoriia barona Ungerna, 287–8.

  378. Palmer, Bloody White Baron, 228 (citing GARF, f. 9427, op. 1, d. 392, l. 36). See also Kuz’min, Baron Ungern v dokumentakh i memuarakh, 199–242 (RGVA, f. 16, op. 3, d. 222, l. 123–4ob., 125, 1–19; f. 16, op. 1, d. 37, l. 128, 337, 333, 329; GARF, f. 9427, op. 1, d. 392, l. 7–13, 47–60, 35–46); Sovetskaia Sibir’, September 13, 1921 (Ivan Pavlunovsky, Siberian Cheka).

  379. Kuz’min, Baron Ungern v dokumentakh i memuarakh, 198–9 (RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 195, l. 1; op. 163, d. 178, l. 5; op. 163, d. 180, l. 3–3ob.). To ensure nothing went wrong, Moscow sent Minei Gubelman, known as Emilyan Yaroslavsky, as prosecutor; he happened to be Jewish, though this appears not to have factored into the decision of who would condemn the rabidly anti-Semitic baron, for Yaroslavsky was from Eastern Siberia (the son of an exile) and had recently been named a Central Committee secretary.

  380. Sovetskaia Sibir’, September 16, September 17, September 18, and September 20, 1921; Da’lnevostochnaia pravda, September 25, 1921; Kuz’min, Baron Ungern v dokumentakh i memuarakh, 242–63; Kuz’min, Istoriia barona Ungerna, 294–304.

  381. Kuz’min, Baron Ungern v dokumentakh i memuarakh, 263 (RGVA, f. 16, op. 1, d. 37, l. 330).

  382. Misshima and Tomio, Japanese View of Outer Mongolia, 27.

  383. Nyamaa, Compilation of Some Documents, 7–8.

  384. Slavinskii, Sovetskii Soiuz i Kitai, 51–3 (AVP RF, f. 08, op. 5, psap. 3, d. 17, l. 1–2; d. 18, l. 4–5); Tsziun, “Sovetskaia Rossiia i Kitai,” 54–5.

  385. Roshchin, Politicheskaia istoriia Mongolii, 37 (citing RGASPI, f. 495, op. 152, d. 9, l. 12–4: Boris Shumyatsky to Chicherin, August 12, 1921); Kuz’min, Baron Ungern v dokumentakh i memuarakh, 264 (RGASPI, f. 5, op. 1, d. 145, l. 38: Joffe letter); Kuz’min, Istoriia barona Ungerna, 199. See also Murphy, Soviet Mongolia; Hammond, “Communist Takeover of Outer Mongolia.”

  386. RGASPI, f. 495, op. 152, d. 11, l. 19–23.

  387. Chicherin favored a meeting, writing to Lenin that Mongolia’s “revolutionary government is the ace of spades in our hands. Its creation foils the plans of Japan to set up an anti-revolutionary front stretching from the Pacific to the Caspian. With a friendly Mongolia our border becomes utterly safe.” Luzyanin, “Mongolia,” 76.

  388. Roshchin, Politicheskaia istoriia Mongolii, 70 (citing RGASPI, f. 495, op. 152, d. 9, l. 65); Baabar, Twentieth-Century Mongolia, 222 (citing central archives of foreign relations, F-117, H/N-01); Morozova, Comintern and Revolution in Mongolia, 43, RGASPI, f. 495, op. 152, d, 9, l. 63–4).

  389. Only in early January 1922, some two months later, did the Peking government even begin to hear rumors concerning the contents of the Soviet-Mongolian treaty. Elleman, “Secret Sino-Soviet Negotiations.”

  390. Bolshevik officials were aware that Mongolia had little class differentiation or upper-class wealth to expropriate (as reported by the scholar Ivan Maisky, who had been part of a Soviet expedition to Outer Mongolia). Maiskii, Sovremennaia Mongoliia, 127.

  391. Malle, Economic Organization of War Communism, 506–11.

  392. Lih, Bread and Authority; Narskii, Zhizn’ v katastrofe, 5.

  393. PSS, XLIII: 18, 24, XLIV: 159.

  394. Vaisberg, Den’gi i tseny’, 10.

  395. NEP decrees continued right through 1923, legalizing private activity in publishing, credit, and savings and loans; leasing factories from the state; and allowing state factories to do business with private traders, scorned as NEPmen.

  396. A decree of October 17, 1921, on confiscation and requisition mandated that a protocol be made at the time of any confiscation, with the names of those whose goods were seized, those who enacted the seizure, and those who received the goods for storage at a warehouse, as well as a full inventory of the articles. The protocol had to be signed, including by at least two witnesses (often neighbors). It also established the principle of compensation for requisitions and restrictions on the use of confiscation solely to legitimate punitive contexts. Izvestiia, October 26, 1921; Timashev, Publichno-pravovoe polozhenie lichnosti, I: 177–8. The instructions for implementation tried to draw a firm line underneath everything, stipulating an end to fruitless efforts to adjudicate prior legal claims for confiscations. Yet another decree on seizures would follow in 1922, in a further attempt to draw a line under the revolutionary dispossession whirlwind of 1917–22 by allowing those who possessed confiscated goods to retain them. Izvestiia, March 29, 1922.

  397. Smith, “Stalin as Commissar for Nationality Affairs.”

  398. VIII s”ezd RKP (b), 82.

  399. The Treaty of Riga (1921), which ended the Polish-Soviet War, reinforced the path to a federal structure—Belorussia and Ukraine were signatories. Working with Alexander Myasnikov (Myasnikyan), a Russified Armenian Bolshevik, Stalin played a significant role in the “annexation” of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Belorussia in Minsk in December 1919. The proclamation was issued in Russian, Polish, and Yiddish, but not Belorussian, the language of the peasants. Izvestiia, December 18, 1919; Kvashonkin, Bol’shevistskoe rukovodstvo, 71–5.

  400. In October 1920 Stalin had noted that “the demand for the secession of the border regions from Russia . . . must be rejected not only because it runs counter to the very formulation of the question of establishing a union between the center and the border regions, but mainly because it fundamentally runs counter to the interests of the mass in both center and border regions.” Sochineniia, IV: 352.

  401. PSS, LIII: 189–90. The two warring officials were Mikhail Tomsky and Georgy Safarov. The matter was taken up at the politburo on September 13, and within a month personnel in Turkestan were changed.

  402. It was in this context that Kamenev, in 1922 (with a second edition in 1923), would publish a fat compendium of his various journalistic articles, Between Two Revolutions. Belatedly, it looked like Kamenev had won that famous April 1917 debate with Lenin, when the Bolshevik leader had returned from exile to the Finland Station, railing at Kamenev (and Stalin), who were arguing against the seizure of class power, insisting that the “bourgeois democratic” revolution still had a long way to go. Lih, “The Ironic Triumph of ‘Old Bolshevism.’”

  403. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 3, d. 299, l. 55.

  404. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 3, d. 68, l. 47.

  405. Tucker, Stalin in Power, 45–9.

  406. Kvashonkin, Bol’shevistskoe rukovodstvo, 223–7 (RGASPI, f. 5, op. 2, d. 315, l. 252–3, 260).

  407. Sochineniia, V: 117–27 (at 118–19); Carr, Bolshevik Revolution, III: 349–50.

  PART III: COLLISION

  1. Stalin, “O Lenine,” reprinted in Sochineniia, VI: 52–64 (at 61).

  2. Sering, Die Umwalzung der osteuropaischen Agrarverfassung, 5–6; Antsiferov, Russian Agriculture During the War, 382–3.

  3. For these and many other intolerant Lenin utterances, see Getzler, “Lenin’s Conception” (citing PSS, XXXV: 268, XXXVIII: 339). To be sure, once famine broke out in mid-1921 and Lenin was appealing for international food aid, he asserted that the civil war “had been forced upon the workers and peasants by the landowners and capitalists of all countries.” Lenin, Collected Works, 32: 502.

  4. Lenin, “O vremennom revoliutsionom pravitel’stve [May 1905],” PSS, X: 227–50; “Sed’maia (aprels’skaia) vesrossiiskaia konferentsiia RSDRP (b)” [April 1917], PSS, XXXI: 339–81 (esp. 353–4). Incredibly, Rabinowitch (again) argues that dictatorship was forced upon Lenin and the Bolsheviks, even as Rabinowitch shows, time and again, that in response to crises, often precipitated by the Bolsheviks themselves, they resorted to arrests and dirty tricks (e.g., voter fraud), which they always sought to justify by invoking “class war”
and the battle against “counterrevolution” (e.g., anyone who opposed them). Rabinowitch, Bolsheviks in Power.

  5. Pravda, August 28, 1919; Lenin, Collected Works, 29: 559.

  6. Polan, Lenin and the End of Politics.

  7. Marx, too, never developed a theory of politics. He never explicitly embraced the possibility of rival political platforms competing in open politics; when critics, such as Mikhail Bakunin, spelled out the likely consequences of such a position, Marx went silent. For Marx, the only consideration was representation of the “interests” of the proletariat, for which he (and Engels) were the spokesmen; they denounced other socialists who claimed to express the interests of the proletariat differently. Politics for Marx was never a legitimate pursuit in itself, let alone a necessity.

  8. PSS, XXXIII: 109; Pravda, January 15, 1919 (Osinsky, a Left Communist). In notes to himself (in power), he wrote of the state as “a tool of the proletariat in its class struggle, a special bludgeon, rien de plus!” “O diktature proletariat,” Leninskii sbornilk, III (1925), reprinted in PSS, XXXIX: 261–9 (at 262). Lenin never completed the pamphlet “On the Dictatorship of the Proletariat” for which he composed these notes.

  9. Carr, Bolshevik Revolution, I: 155 (citing a justice commissariat official).

  10. Polan, Lenin and the End of Politics, esp. 91–2.

  11. Voprosy istorii KPSS, 1988, no. 10: 6. See also Izvestiia TsK KPSS, 1991, no. 2: 128.

  12. Volkogonov, Lenin: Life and Legacy, 410.

  13. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 21, l. 18; d. 71, l. 2; op. 3, d. 174, l. 5; Izvestiia TsK KPSS, 1991, no. 2: 129, 130, 137; Golikov, Vladimir Il’ich Lenin, XI: 47.

  14. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 240, l. 1.

  15. Ogonek, 1990, no. 4: 6 (Doctor Osipov). See also, PSS, LIV: 203 (Lenin to Varga).

  16. Izvestiia, TsK KPSS, 1991, no. 2: 131–2 (Darkshevich). On March 6, Lenin told the Communist faction at the metal workers trade union congress, “My illness . . . for several months has not permitted me to take part in political affairs”—divulging a state secret. PSS, XLV: 6.