Stalin
Page 9
Lenin was delighted to discover that Stalin shared his view that such a trend within the party would lead to fatal weakness. In February 1912, he wrote to Maksim Gorky: “About nationalism, I fully agree with you that we have to bear down harder. We have here a wonderful Georgian who has undertaken to write a long article for Prosveshchenie after gathering all the Austrian and other material. We will take care of this matter.”
Stalin spent January 1913 in Vienna, writing his article which was published under the title of Marxism and the National Question. In the introduction, he stated his basic position: “The wave of nationalism has been advancing more strongly all the time, threatening to engulf the working masses. . . . At this difficult stage social democracy has the great mission of repelling nationalism, of protecting the masses from the general infection, for social democracy alone can achieve it, opposing against nationalism the tried weapons of the internationalism, unity and the indivisibility of the class struggle.”
In the first section of the article, he defined the constituent elements of a nation as community of economic life, of language, of territory, and of “national character,” all of which must be present together. Next he explained that every true nation had the right “freely to determine its own fate,” to be autonomous and to secede. But he strongly criticized the Austrian program of “cultural-national autonomy,” which amounted to hidden nationalism and “paves the way not only for the isolation of nations, but also for the breaking-up of the workers’ movement.” He condemned the Jewish Bund and the Caucasian groups which pursued separatism and subordinated socialism to nationalism. The correct solution for the Jews was assimilation, and for the Transcaucasian people, it was regional autonomy. Indeed, regional autonomy was the answer to the national problem in Russia, provided that in permitting freedom for the minorities to use their own languages, run their own schools and cultural activities, the workers were organized within the one Social Democrat party. He ended his article with the assertion that the final answer to the national question lay in “the principle of the international unity of workers.”
Marxism and the National Question was written in his clear and trenchant style. In its approach and arguments, it was recognizably his own work, showing how his thoughts on the subject had developed consistently over the past eight years. Moreover, he wrote it with confidence, for he knew more about the problem than Lenin or Trotsky and Nikolai Bukharin, whom he met in Vienna at this time.
Lenin was pleased with the work. In an editorial on the national program of the party, he wrote that the article “stands out in first place” in recent Marxist theoretical writing on the subject. It gave Stalin a new standing as a Marxist theoretician in party circles.
As soon as this work was done, Stalin returned to St. Petersburg, arriving there in mid-February 1913. He found accommodation in a private apartment, and in reminiscences published many years later, his landlady recalled that he was very earnest, quiet, and considerate. But his stay in St. Petersburg was brief. Jacob Sverdlov, like himself a co-opted member of the Central Committee, had been arrested on February 9, 1913, and informed by Malinovsky, the Okhrana was now rounding up all leading Bolsheviks. On February 23, a musical evening was arranged to raise funds for Pravda. Stalin was uncertain about attending and asked the advice of Malinovsky, who assured him that the police would never arrest him on such a public occasion. He went and was promptly arrested.
For five months, Stalin lay in prison in St. Petersburg. Early in July 1913, he was sent under guard by rail to Krasnoyarsk and then by boat northward along the Yenisei River to Monastyrskoe, a small town which served as the administrative center of the Turukhansk region. His previous sentences of exile had been to places not too far distant and had involved inconvenience rather than hardship. The new sentence marked the end of such lenience. The Okhrana had evidently decided that the Bolsheviks had served their purpose in disrupting the Social Democrat party and were no longer needed. Systematically the police arrested and removed them to distant penal settlements where they could cause no trouble.
The Yenisei-Turukhansk region in northern Siberia, part of which lies within the Arctic Circle, is a vast, remote expanse from which escape was virtually impossible. The savage cold, the extreme monotony of the long dark winters, the brief hot summers when the air was thick with insects, and the greatly feared winter storms, which struck like hurricanes, burying whole villages in whirls of snow, all intensified the sense of isolation. Life was reduced to a primitive struggle against the elements. Men went mad, and the suicide rate among the exiles was high. It was a place where only men with reserves of moral and physical strength survived; and they, too, were marked permanently by the experience.
Stalin was probably in a black thwarted mood as he waited in prison to learn his fate and then set out on the long journey deep into Siberia. Through ability, dedication, and hard work, and certainly not through tact, subservience, or flattery, he had risen in the party hierarchy to a position of authority. As a member of the Central Committee and editor of Pravda, he had much to do, but he was being sent far away into exile and impotence. He may have felt resentful toward Lenin, Trotsky, and others who lived in security abroad, but more probably he despised them for removing themselves from the dangers of the real revolutionary struggle.
Learning that he was to join them, the colony of exiles in Monastyrskoe prepared a separate room and saved food for him from their meager provisions. In the bleak isolation of their lives, a new arrival was an exciting event, especially a member of the Russian Bureau and of the Central Committee. He would bring news of other comrades and of the latest developments in St. Petersburg and Moscow.
Headed by Sverdlov, the exiles assembled to greet him. Stalin did not respond to their welcome. He was surly in manner and evidently not prepared to talk to them. He went into his room and did not reappear. But the account of how he antagonized his fellow exiles should be treated with reserve. It is contained chiefly in the reminiscences of R. G. Zakharova, published more than fifty years later. She herself was not in Turukhansk but heard the details from her husband, a Bolshevik in exile there from 1903 to 1913, who obviously had no liking for Stalin. But with his rough manners and aggressive outlook, and his complete disinterest in personal popularity, Stalin readily made enemies. While the other exiles banded together for companionship, he isolated himself except when official party business was to be transacted. According to his daughter, “He loved Siberia . . .” and “He always looked back on his years of exile as if they were nothing but hunting, fishing, and walks through the taiga.” But he may also have had an instinctive need for solitude in which to think about the future, sensing that he was on the threshold of a new epoch in his life.
Yakov Sverdlov, with whom Stalin was never on friendly terms, was a small, unemphatic man in appearance, but had been since 1902 an indefatigable underground worker. Lunacharsky wrote of him: “The man was like ice . . . like a diamond. His moral nature, too, had a similar quality that was crystalline, cold, and spiky. He was transparently free of personal ambition and any form of personal calculation to such a degree that he was somehow faceless. He never originated anything but merely transmitted what he received from the Central Committee, sometimes from Lenin personally.”
During their Siberian exile, and especially in Kureika, where they were sent to finish their term, Stalin and Sverdlov were thrown into each other’s company, and they became completely estranged. Writing in March 1914 to a friend, Sverdlov commented: “I am much worse off in the new place. Just the fact of not being alone in a room. There are two of us. With me is the Georgian, Dzhugashvili, an old acquaintance whom I already know from another exile. A good fellow, but too much of an individualist in everyday life.” The following May, Sverdlov wrote in another letter that “now the comrade and I are living in different quarters and rarely see each other.”
There is as usual only the scantiest information about Stalin’s own life and outlook in this period. The Alli
luyevs provide some details. Sergei Alliluyev and Stalin had become friends in Baku, and when Sergei moved with his family to St. Petersburg, he and his wife always welcomed Stalin into their home, and helped him when he was on the run. While in Turukhansk he received from them parcels of warm clothing and gifts of money. Later in 1915, he wrote to Olga, Sergei’s wife, expressing thanks and asking them not to spend their much-needed money on him. But he asked them to send him postcards, showing local scenery. “Nature in this accursed region is shamefully poor - in summer the river and in winter the snow, that’s all nature offers here - and I’m crazy with longing for natural scenes, if only on paper.”
Svetlana Alliluyeva related that in later years he would sometimes talk about Siberia, “its stark beauty and its rough silent people.” He was on good terms with the local inhabitants. They showed him how to fish in the Yenisei, but instead of staying in one place, as they did, he moved about until he found a spot where the fishing was good. His catches were often so large that they believed he had magic powers and would exclaim: “Osip [their own name for him], thou knowest the word!” On one occasion, he was overtaken by a snowstorm on the way home and lost his way. Coming upon two local peasants, he was surprised that they ran away from him. He learned later that his face had been so covered with snow and ice that they had thought he was a goblin. Later his own daughter wrote that “my aunts told me that during one of his Siberian exiles [presumably Turukhansk] he had lived with a local peasant woman and that their son was still living somewhere - he had received little education and had no pretensions to the big name.”
In Siberia, Stalin fretted over his inactivity. The Bolshevik organization was disintegrating. Pravda’s circulation fell from 40,000 copies daily to about half this number. The open break by the Bolsheviks from the Mensheviks in the Duma was a major cause of this decline. At the same time, the Okhrana was arresting all Bolshevik activists and depriving party organs of leadership. Then on August 2, 1914, the German declaration of war on Russia united the Russian people in a mood of patriotic fervor and loyalty to the tsar. Support for the Bolsheviks and other revolutionary parties declined even further.
Within Russia, revolutionaries were divided into the defensists, who refused to oppose the national war effort, and the defeatists, who, in Lenin’s words, stood for the defeat of Russia “as the lesser evil” and urged “the conversion of the imperialist war into a civil war.” In the Duma, the Bolshevik and Menshevik deputies refused to vote for the war budget; and in August 1914, they made a public declaration, repudiating the war.
Lenin was not satisfied. He demanded that they should adopt his Theses on the War, which went far beyond their declaration and required them to work for Russia’s defeat. No policy was more calculated to antagonize workers and peasants at this time or to bring the full force of government repression down on the already enfeebled party. In his intransigence, he seemed intent on destroying the party. The fact that he was ordering the deputies to commit treason, for which summary trial and execution were the penalties in wartime, may not have occurred to Lenin, who moved early in September 1914 from Austria to neutral Switzerland for safety.
Soon after the arrest of Sverdlov and Stalin, Lev Kamenev had arrived in St. Petersburg, now called by the Slav name of Petrograd in the wave of anti-German feeling. Kamenev had come as Lenin’s personal representative on the Central Committee. He arranged a meeting of Bolsheviks to discuss the Theses on the War on the night of November 14. The police knew about the meeting through their agents and arrested all present. Aleksandr Kerensky, leader of the socialist revolutionary Trudovik group in the Duma and a prominent advocate, defended them and proposed to the court that Lenin should be tried in his absence and his defeatist views made known more widely. At their trial, Kamenev and the Bolshevik deputies repudiated Lenin’s theses. They were nevertheless found guilty of treason, but escaped the death sentence and were exiled to Turukhansk.
Arriving in Monastyrskoe, Kamenev and the deputies found that their conduct at the trial was being heatedly discussed by the exiles already there. In July 1915, some eighteen Bolsheviks, including four members of the Central Committee, assembled and heard reports on the trial. There was a move to censure Kamenev, but Stalin and others opposed it. According to Trotsky, Lenin remained highly critical of Kamenev’s behavior and demanded a public apology by him and the five deputies, which they never made.
By October 1916, conditions at the front had deteriorated, and casualties were so heavy that the government announced the call-up of political exiles. Stalin was ordered to report in Krasnoyarsk. It meant traveling in winter conditions from Kureika to Monastyrskoe and along the Yenisei to Krasnoyarsk. According to Boris I. Ivanov, “When Dzhugashvili arrived at Monastyrskoe from Kereika . . . [he] remained as proud as ever, as locked up in himself, in his own thoughts and plans.”
Early in 1917, Stalin had his medical examination and was rejected as unfit for service because of the deformity in his left arm and also because, as he told the Alliluyev family, the authorities considered that he would be an “undesirable element” in the Army. Since, however, his sentence had only a few months to run, he was not sent back to Turukhansk, but allowed to settle in Achinsk, a small town on the Trans-Siberian railway line.
Lev Kamenev was then in Achinsk, where he had been joined by his wife, Olga, who was Trotsky’s sister. Stalin was a frequent visitor to their house in the evenings. A. Baikalov, an émigré who published his recollections in Paris thirty-seven years later, was there on occasions. He recalled that Kamenev dominated the conversation and that he did not hesitate to cut short Stalin’s rare contributions with slighting comments. Stalin would then sit in silence, smoking his pipe, occasionally nodding agreement with Kamenev.
One can only speculate about Stalin’s development during the three and a half years spent in Yenisei-Turukhansk. There is no lack of stories of his abrasive behavior, but nearly all were recorded many years later by embittered exiles. The hatreds engendered within the Russian revolutionary movement remained intense and vicious. In fact, this offensive behavior stemmed from his nature as an able and sensitive individual, deeply conscious of his humble background and other disadvantages, who had always felt a driving need to assert himself. With people of similar background, he was friendly, but toward intellectuals and others who patronized him, he was aggressive. But he was capable of close human relationships. Around 1904, he had married Ekaterina Svanidze and had had a child; he was warmly received by the Alliluyev family and other friends. Indeed, he was recognizably a more normal human being than Lenin.
At the time of his Siberian exile, Stalin was in his mid-thirties. He could look back on achievements and valuable experiences. He had watched and listened to Plekhanov, Martov, and other leading Social Democrats, and he had worked closely with the “mountain eagle” himself. He had a sharp, critical eye and was quick to discern the strengths and weaknesses of others. He had realized that he was in no way their inferior, but an equal. It was this realization that softened his abrasiveness, and it also explains his plea for a spirit of comradely understanding within the party which, to Lenin’s disgust, he had expressed in the editorial of the first issue of Pravda. It may partly explain, too, the facts that he was gaining a reputation for being a man of moderation and that at the party conference in July 1917, he was elected to the Central Committee with the third highest number of votes. Alongside this change in conduct, growing out of a new self-confidence, certain ideas were evolving in his mind which were to dominate his thinking in the years to come, and with a dynamic power that was to make him the absolute ruler over the vast Russian empire.
Since the age of nineteen, he had been single-minded in his dedication to Marxist dogma and to the conception of the small party of professional revolutionaries, leading the working class in the complete transformation of society. He never wavered in his conviction that this was the only way to organize and govern people for their own welfare.
Of the other idea
s which were now taking a permanent grip on his mind, the first was a profound sense of Russian nationalism. He began to think of a Russia no longer weak, undeveloped, inefficiently governed, and at the mercy of its enemies, but powerful, dynamic, and able to dominate the world. By an extraordinary process of assimilation, this Georgian embraced Russia with a deep feeling for its historical traditions and strivings. He had read widely in Russian history and had studied the policies and methods of Ivan the Dread and Peter the Great, perhaps seeing himself as their heir. Moreover, the conceptions of Moscow as the Third Rome and of the messianic mission of the Great Russian people, transmuted by Marxism-Leninism, gripped his imagination, revealing themselves in his later policies.
The second idea, probably embryonic at this time and properly realized only years later when Lenin’s health began to fail, was that he himself was the man of history, fated to lead the party and Russia in this momentous mission. He would regenerate and awaken this somnolent giant of a country to its destiny. This, rather than personal lust for power, was the driving motive, the grand purpose, and the main source of the tyranny of his rule.
In his Siberian exile, Stalin was removed from the calamitous events of the war years. But news of the disasters at the front, the ferment in the cities, and the approaching collapse of the tsarist regime all added to his impatience to return to Petrograd. On learning of the amnesty for political prisoners, he set out at once for the city.
The capital to which he returned was confused and chaotic, reflecting the state of the whole country. Law and order had broken down. Anarchy was at hand. But Nicholas II at the Supreme Military Headquarters in Mogilev remained unaware of the gravity of the situation. In spite of appeals and warnings from the president of the Duma and others, he believed that his troops would restore order. On March 12, however, mutiny broke out in certain senior regiments in the capital; this was the turning point. The special guards detachments, ordered from Mogilev to put down the mutiny, joined with the rebels on reaching the city. On March 15, Nicholas II abdicated.