Stalin

by Ian Grey

  Never since the era of Peter the Great, two centuries earlier, had there been such an avalanche of change and reform. The difference now was that the new government was intoxicated with power and desperately trying to gain popular support. Clothed in appealing humanitarian garb, its decrees seemed to herald a new age.

  Lenin had declared repeatedly before October 1917 that on coming to power, the Bolshevik government would propose peace on terms that the imperialist enemy would certainly reject. This would lead to revolution in capitalist countries and the outbreak of “revolutionary war.” Now he realized that this policy was unrealistic. The German High Command knew the Russian Army was demoralized, and the new Soviet government would have to accept German terms of peace.

  The Soviet proposal for an armistice was quickly agreed to by the Germans and signed at Brest-Litovsk on December 2. Negotiations for peace began in earnest on December 9. Trotsky then headed the Soviet delegation. He had come to make fullest use of the conference for revolutionary propaganda, and he fervently believed that revolution was imminent in Germany and elsewhere. At times, he dominated the conference. His country in chaos, its Army mutinous and demoralized, and its new government desperately clinging to power, he was negotiating from a position of weakness against professional diplomats backed by a strong and victorious Army.

  Trotsky’s furious sallies made no impression on his German opponents. They knew the weakness of his position. Suddenly, on January 18, they produced a map of Eastern Europe, showing the new frontiers, which deprived Russia of extensive territories. The ultimatum enraged Trotsky. He swore he would break off negotiations. Then, having received a telegram, signed “Lenin-Stalin,” instructing him to return to Petrograd for discussions, he agreed to an adjournment until January 29. There is further evidence, cited by Trotsky himself, showing how closely Stalin stood to Lenin at this critical time. A certain Dmitrievsky observed that “even Lenin at that period felt the need of Stalin to such an extent that, when communications came from Trotsky at Brest and an immediate decision had to be made, while Stalin was not in Moscow, Lenin would inform Trotsky: ‘I would like first to consult with Stalin before replying to your question.’ And only three days later Lenin would telegraph: ‘Stalin has just arrived. I will consider it with him, and we will at once give you our joint answer.’”

  Leaving Brest-Litovsk on January 6, Trotsky reached Petrograd. He now worked out his peace formula of “no peace no war.” He would announce the end of the war and the demobilization of the Russian Army while refusing to sign a treaty of peace. He was confident that the Germans would be unable to renew their offensive because their troops would refuse to obey orders, and there would be revolution inside Germany. The formula would inspire the proletariats of Europe. He clung to the idea that revolution was imminent in Germany, Austria, and elsewhere.

  In Petrograd, Trotsky argued forcefully for his new approach. Lenin was unconvinced. Stalin stated bluntly that there was no evidence of imminent revolution in Western Europe and that Trotsky’s formula was not a policy. After heated debate in the Central Committee, the decision emerged that Trotsky should prolong the negotiations, and when faced with a showdown, apply his no-peace-no-war formula.

  The German delegation returned to Brest-Litovsk, determined to force an early peace. Their intention was first to sign a separate peace with the Ukrainian Rada, which would presumably compel Trotsky to come to terms. When the conference resumed on January 28, 1918, Trotsky vehemently rejected the separate Ukrainian peace. Again the Germans were unimpressed. With special ceremony on February 9, the treaty was signed by the Ukrainian representatives in Brest-Litovsk. The negotiations then turned to a lengthy exchange between Russian and German delegations on the application of self-determination in territories under German occupation.

  The conference was nearing a crisis. Trotsky decided to make his announcement. On February 10, he delivered a scathing indictment of imperialism. The delegates, having heard it several times already, took it to be a face-saving preliminary to the acceptance of the German terms. Then he proclaimed his formula: “We are removing our armies and our peoples from the war . . . but we feel ourselves compelled to refuse to sign the peace treaty.” He followed this statement with stirring appeals to the working masses of all countries to follow the example of Russia.

  The German and other delegations sat in silence as Trotsky withdrew from the conference room. They were staggered by this preposterous declaration. On the same evening, Trotsky returned to Petrograd with his delegation. He was delighted with his performance and confident the Germans would not dare to renew their offensive. To his colleagues, he reported that he had won a diplomatic victory. Lenin, however, was far from persuaded. Six days later, his fears proved well founded. The German government declared that the armistice would end on February 18, and on that day, the German Army began advancing on a broad front.

  In Petrograd, the Central Committee frantically debated what to do. Lenin made it clear from the start that peace negotiations must be renewed without delay. The no-peace-no-war formula had not only failed but had endangered the Soviet government and the Revolution. Trotsky stubbornly argued that they should wait on the German proletariat, who were surely on the point of revolution. Lenin finally won a bare majority of support from the Committee.

  A message was sent in the early hours of February 19, 1918, that under protest, the Council of People’s Kommissars accepted the German terms. The German reply came four days later. As Lenin had feared, the new peace terms were far harsher. The Central Committee reacted with fury. Bukharin shouted hysterically that they must fight, must wage a holy, revolutionary war to the last man, and most of those present echoed his demands.

  Lenin remained calm in the midst of this emotional outburst. When he spoke, he repeated the hard facts of their predicament. He demanded that the peace treaty be signed, and he added the dire threat that “if this is not done I resign from the government!” The significance of his threat was hardly noticed, as the members continued their debate. Finally, Lenin’s demands were approved. Bukharin voted against them. Trotsky, unable to accept that his negotiations had failed or to realize the gravity of the situation, abstained. Stalin supported Lenin, and it is unlikely he ever forgot the vulnerability of the party and of the nation or the conflict within the Central Committee during these fateful days.

  After stormy meetings, the Petrograd Soviet and the Central Executive Committee of the Congress of Soviets voted to accept the German peace conditions in order to save the Revolution. The treaty was signed on March 3, 1918. By its terms, Russia lost almost 1.27 million square miles of territory, embracing 27 percent of its agricultural land and a population of 62 million, 26 percent of its railways, and 75 percent of its iron and steel industry. The Bolshevik regime was saved, but never under the tsars had the nation suffered such losses and humiliation.

  For a time, a storm raged over the treaty. Most Russians reacted from national pride. Among the revolutionary parties, the reaction was also wildly emotional, but the sense of national humiliation was secondary to their revolt against the betrayal of the Revolution. Revolutionary war was, they argued, the only honorable course; it was possible as a partisan war, for if the Army was demoralized, the people could still fight. But Lenin and Stalin, and even Zinoviev and Trotsky, recognized that such action would spell the death of the party.

  The Left Socialist Revolutionaries at once broke away from the coalition and campaigned for war against the imperialists. Within the party, Bukharin and other prominent Bolsheviks were in revolt. Like the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, they saw themselves as the defenders of the Revolution. Their appeals for a holy revolutionary war aroused enthusiastic responses among ordinary members. Gradually, however, Lenin’s arguments gained support until, at the time of the ratification of the peace treaty at the Seventh Party Congress on March 15, 1918, Bukharin’s resolution for the rejection of the treaty found few supporters.

  In the course of some six m
onths, the party had been shaken by two major revolts. First, there had been the “waverers,” the faction led by Zinoviev and Kamenev, who had opposed the Bolshevik seizure of power. Then, distinct from this faction, had come the left communists, led by Bukharin, who called for a return to the purity of socialist principles. In both cases, there had been free debate within the party. The question was whether at such times of crisis when its survival was at issue, the party could allow itself to be crippled and weakened by internal dissensions. In the disciplined and united party that Lenin had always envisaged, such freedom was a luxury, and inexorably, the party moved toward monolithic unity.

  The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk had presented the first real challenge to the party since the seizure of power. Party members were deeply shaken by the stark realities of Russia’s weakness and isolation. They had not recovered from the shock of this experience when they found themselves overwhelmed by the Civil War. The new revolutionary regime faced annihilation in a struggle in which a dark, destructive force took possession of the Russian people. A storm of violence, hatred, and slaughter swept over the land. It was to be one of the most savage civil wars in history, and, fought in the immensity of the Russian plain and involving millions of people, it was epic in scale.

  The Civil War did not pounce suddenly upon the country. Like the first warning tremors of an earthquake, it started far away in the south. Meanwhile, in Moscow, dogma and cherished policies were pushed aside as Lenin and his government concentrated all their thoughts and energies on survival. Events crowded upon each other, and the significance of many of the actions taken by the government at this time was realized only much later. This was especially true of the removal of the capital from Petrograd to Moscow in March 1918.

  The decision was made hurriedly and as a matter of expediency. “If the Germans at a single bound take possession of Petrograd with us in it,” Lenin argued, “the revolution is lost. If on the other hand the government is in Moscow, then the fall of Petrograd would only mean a serious part-blow.” But it was a change of profound importance in the history of Soviet Russia and in the life of Stalin himself.

  The cities of Moscow and Petrograd had come to symbolize the schism within the Russian nation. Moscow was the ancient capital around which the nation had been brought to birth. In it was enshrined the old patriarchal tsardom of Muscovy with its mixed Asiatic and Orthodox Christian traditions. Through the centuries, Russians had looked toward it in the spirit of pilgrims. The Kremlin, or citadel, a grim, secretive fortress, its savage beauty accentuated by the golden domes of its churches, still retained its character as the residence of the tsars - venerated, feared, and absolute in their powers - and it became the residence of the new Soviet leaders.

  Petrograd, the magnificent city created by Peter the Great early in the eighteenth century, was the gateway for Western ideas and techniques and represented Russia’s kinship with the West. The people of Petrograd scorned Moscow as the center of all that was conservative and backward in Russian life. For their part, the Muscovites, dismissing the Petrogradtsi as dangerous upstarts, viewed the West with suspicion and took pride in their role as the guardians of the old, self-sufficient, and superior Muscovite way of life.

  In every generation, there had been conflict between the conservative Muscovites and the westernizing Petrogradtsi. Peter the Great’s cataclysm of change and reform, symbolized by his new capital, and then the Revolution, had sharpened the conflict. The people of Petrograd, the city of the Revolution, now prided themselves on being the innovators who had brought into Russia the great Western revolutionary doctrine of Marxism. Lenin and most of the Bolshevik leaders belonged in spirit to Petrograd. They were orientated toward the West and looked forward to the union of the international proletariat. But Stalin belonged to the Muscovite tradition, which was Asiatic rather than Western in character. He settled readily into the old city, and like the ancient tsars, he made it the center of his life, becoming known as “the recluse of the Kremlin.”

  On arrival in Moscow, Stalin, like other members of the government, was allocated living quarters within the Kremlin. He found, however, that the Moscow Soviet had set aside two mansions in different streets for his kommissariat, and he wanted it housed in one building. Pestkovsky relates that they tried to secure the Great Siberian Hotel. Stalin and he found a notice on the front doors, stating, “These premises are occupied by the Supreme Council of the National Economy.” They tore it down and put up notices stating, “These premises are occupied by Narkomnats.” The notices had been typed by Nadya Alliluyeva, who had joined the staff as a secretary. His attempt to commandeer this building was unsuccessful. “It was one of the few instances,” Pestkovsky remarked, “when Stalin suffered defeat.”

  The office of his kommissariat was the least of Stalin’s concerns at this juncture. He was directly involved in the government’s desperate measures to survive the tidal wave of disasters. The country was in a state of chaos. Industry was at a standstill and famine threatened the cities and towns. The peasants, now their own masters, had no interest in sending their produce without payment to the urban population. But overshadowing even these problems was the Civil War.

  The first phase of the war had opened in January 1918. General Mikhail Alekseev had escaped to the south and had joined with Hetman A. M. Kaledin, who had established a Cossack regime in the Don area. There Alekseev recruited a Volunteer Army, known as the White Army, composed of former tsarist officers, cadets, and others who opposed the Revolution.

  Lenin entrusted command of the Bolshevik offensives in the Ukraine and the Don region to Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko, an ex-tsarist officer who had become a revolutionary. The Ukrainian Rada had declared Ukrainian independence. In reply to a Soviet ultimatum, sent on December 17, 1917, the Rada Secretariat had pointed out that “The Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia,” signed by Lenin and Stalin, had guaranteed the equality and sovereignty of the Ukrainians as of the other peoples of Russia. It rejected Sovnarkom’s attempt to impose its authority. In an offensive against the Ukrainian nationalists, Kiev was captured on February 9, 1918. Soon afterward, however, German and Austrian troops began by agreement to occupy the Ukraine, which was regarded as independent. The Red forces had to withdraw.

  Antonov-Ovseenko had sent his main forces into the Don region, where they brought about the collapse of the Kaledin regime. Alekseev’s Volunteer Army was forced to retreat to the Kuban, and in the icy cold winter, many lost their lives in the forlorn journey across the steppe. Reinforced by Kuban troops, the Volunteer Army, commanded now by Kornilov, attacked Ekaterinodar, where Red forces were some 30,000 strong. After four days of savage fighting, Kornilov ordered the storming of the town on April 13, 1918. He had every hope of taking it. But the attack had to be abandoned after Kornilov himself was killed by a stray shell. Early in May, German troops occupied Rostov and appointed General P. N. Krasnov as hetman. The Volunteer Army returned to the Don region, where it became the rallying point for antirevolutionaries.

  The war entered a new phase in May–June 1918 as a result of a series of extraordinary events. The Czechoslovak army corps, some 30,000 strong and comprising Czech and Slovak prisoners of war, isolated after the Russian Army’s collapse, seized control of all the main towns and stations, except Irkutsk, along the Trans-Siberian railway. They had refused to take sides with the White or the Red forces, but then, finding themselves menaced by the Soviet government, and especially by Trotsky’s telegrams ordering that they be either taken into labor battalions or recruited into the Red Army, they had resolved to fight their way to the east. They were well armed and disciplined, and there were no Soviet forces capable of preventing their domination of the eastward route.

  Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin now recognized that the survival of their regime depended upon the creation of a disciplined army. It was not a matter to which they had given previous thought. The breakdown of the Brest-Litovsk peace conference and the renewed German advance underlined
the urgent need to raise a regular army. On March 1, 1918, the Supreme War Council was set up in Petrograd and charged with this task. But the move of the government to Moscow, the emergence of small independent units raised by local Soviets, and other factors hampered progress. The Red Army developed slowly and in confusion.

  On March 13, 1918, Trotsky, now the people’s kommissar for War, was appointed chairman of the Supreme War Council. He had long been urging conscription, strict discipline, technical efficiency, and an officer corps as necessities in a regular army. The most striking innovation on which he insisted was that, in the exceptional conditions of the revolutionary era, the technical knowledge and experience of the displaced tsarist officers must be utilized. It was an extremely controversial proposal. Officers were hated as class enemies. Many warned against the danger that such officers would betray the Red Army and desert at times of crisis. Lenin had strong doubts about relying on them. But then he learned that some 40,000 of these “military specialists” were already serving, and the Army would disintegrate if they were withdrawn. Trotsky had his way. He had coerced officers into service and ensured their loyalty by a ruthless system of holding their families as hostages and by placing them under the close supervision of military kommissars. Many officers deserted, but many were converted to the revolutionary cause or gave their service as a duty to the nation.

  Trotsky played an outstanding role in the early phases of the war. Possessed by a demon of energy, he constantly toured the various fronts. The special train from which he operated was a reflection of the man, with his ability and his love of power and ostentation. Drawn by two engines, the train was equipped with a radio and telegraph station, printing press, electrical generator, and a garage with cars which he used to dash to critical points away from the railway line. Trotsky’s staff, bodyguard, and train crew all wore uniforms of black leather. A machine-gun unit was part of its complement. They had to be on guard not only against White forces but also against guerrilla bands which ranged the country.