The Red Flag: A History of Communism

by Priestland, David

  To plunge the abstract reflective process into the fervour of practical action.2

  His film is a brilliant rendering of the Radical Marxist temper. His account of 1917 contrasted the inertia and decadence of the Provisional Government with the vibrant energies of the people. And as Eisenstein made clear, the heroism was not individual but collective. The conventional ‘leading men’ of Hollywood, and indeed of The End of St Petersburg, were absent; Lenin’s role was fairly minor. The famous storming of the Winter Palace scene, where the masses breached the gates and poured ecstatically into the seat of power, was based not on the revolution itself, but on the carefully choreographed mass festivals of the civil-war period, such as the 1920 ‘Storming of the Winter Palace’, which had deployed its own cast of 10,000. Eisenstein himself had some 5,000 extras at his disposal, live weaponry and the extraordinary tolerance of the authorities. Pudovkin relates how his and Eisenstein’s rendering of the iconic storming differed:

  I bombarded the Winter Palace from the [ship] Aurora, whilst Eisenstein bombarded it from the Fortress of St Peter and Paul. One night I knocked away part of the balustrade of the roof, and was scared I might get into trouble, but, luckily enough, that same night Sergei Mikhailovich [Eisenstein] broke 200 windows in private bedrooms.3

  Eisenstein’s deputy joked that more people were injured in the cinematic storming (largely the victims of mishandled bayonets) than in the Bolsheviks’ actual assault of ten years earlier. The result was a film of extraordinarily propaganda power that did much to create the myth of October 1917.4 Eisenstein’s imagery penetrated global popular culture; indeed only recently it was used in a Western advertising campaign for vodka.

  But less appealing today is the real Radical Marxist theme in the film – class struggle. In one of the film’s most powerful scenes, a worker flees from the troops after the break-up of the July Days demonstrations. An officer and his girlfriend in a nearby boat spot him and call on a number of well-dressed bystanders to stop the ‘Bolshevik’. In the ensuing melee the muscular proletarian is murdered by the violent and angry bourgeois ‘mob’ – the wealthy women are particularly aggressive, stabbing him viciously with their parasols. As often in Eisenstein’s films, the imagery is suffused with machismo, and even misogyny. Eisenstein also insisted on transporting the centrality of conflict to the art of cinema itself: film-making, he argued, must be Marxist and ‘dialectical’. His ‘montage’ technique juxtaposed jarring and paradoxical images to create a new ‘synthesis’ in the audience, in sharp contrast to Pudovkin’s smooth and more conventional ‘linkage’ method.5

  However, Eisenstein’s film was considerably less well received in the USSR than Pudovkin’s. It was deemed to be inaccessible to ordinary people, and his decision to portray Lenin was regarded as an affront to his dignity. Nevertheless, Eisenstein’s themes were much more in tune with the developing political order under Stalin than Pudovkin’s. The film, a celebration of the energy of revolution, was completed just as Stalin consolidated his power and launched his ‘second revolution’, and it was screened in the same month as the so-called Shakhty show trial of ‘bourgeois specialists’ from the Donbass mines was staged. This affair, like October, was pure political theatre designed to mobilize the masses against the supposedly continuing influence of the bourgeoisie.

  The background of Eisenstein, the Jewish architect’s son from Baltic Riga, could not have been more different from Stalin’s, the offspring of a shoemaker from Caucasian Georgia. But both were escaping from the more pragmatic Marxism to which Lenin had ‘retreated’ in 1921 and which seemed to have reached a cul-de-sac by 1927–8. And both were trying to revive the revolution and the class struggles of the civil war, engaging the popular enthusiasm which the regime believed it had once had, and now had lost.

  Stalin, predictably, soon abandoned radical class struggle, concluding that it was too divisive, and the message of October had soon become outdated. But his use of mobilization and the manipulation of mass emotion continued, despite the twists and turns of party policy. Eisenstein also made efforts to follow the party line, and oddly, given their difficult personal relations, it is by watching the corpus of Eisenstein’s films – from the revolutionary Radicalism of October (1928), to the more inclusive patriotism of Aleksandr Nevskii (1938), to the paranoid search for purity shown in his Ivan the Terrible (1944 and 1946) – that one can gain insights into the shifting culture of the Communist Party and the ideas of Stalin himself.

  Stalin, of course, did not create Stalinist Communism alone, and we should not exaggerate the role of his personality or background. Stalinism’s seeds were embedded in a number of forces, including Bolshevik culture, civil war, and the crises that gripped Russia in the late 1920s, both the fear of a military threat from abroad and disillusionment with Lenin’s NEP. But Stalin was able to take advantage of these crises more effectively than any of his rivals. And to understand why requires an understanding of his approach to politics, and a journey back to the region where he spent the first twenty-six years of his life. For in contrast to Lenin, scion of a professional, assimilated cosmopolitan minority within the Russian empire, Stalin had emerged from a veritable cauldron of nationalist and class resentments: Russian Georgia.

  II

  At the centre of Gori, a provincial town 86 kilometres from Georgia’s capital, Tiflis (Tbilisi), is a romantic hill-top fortress. Gorky described it as a place of ‘picturesque wildness’. In its courtyard is a spherical stone, from which Amiran – a Georgian Prometheus – is said to have thrown his sword before his cliff-chained incarceration as punishment for challenging the gods (or, in the Georgian legend, Jesus Christ). Each Maundy Thursday Gori’s blacksmiths would hammer their anvils to symbolize the renewal of his chains and thus prevent him wreaking revenge on his oppressors.6

  Ioseb Djugashvili was born in 1878 in the shadow of this castle. He was the son of Beso, a poor artisanal cobbler, and his mother was the daughter of a serf. Georgia was a society awash with stories of Promethean rebellion and vengeance, unsurprisingly given its history. A mountainous borderland, sandwiched between empires, it had a long history of foreign invasion, culminating with the Russians, who had ruled for the previous eighty years. Periodically it had attempted liberation and therefore acquired a well-established warrior tradition, idealized, Walter Scott-style, by romantic nationalist writers.

  Ioseb grew up at a time of particularly high tension between colonizers and colonized, as Tsar Alexander III sought to impose Russian over local cultures. When Ioseb entered the religious school in Gori, the teaching medium was still Georgian, but within two years Georgian teachers had been displaced by Russians; Georgian was only permitted to be taught twice a week.7 His next school, the seminary in Tiflis and the main higher-education institution in Georgia, was run by Russian priests in a reactionary disciplinarian style: any progressive thinking was extinguished by censorship and the Georgian pupils were regarded as inferior. Stalin remembered them ‘snooping, spying, prying into one’s soul, humiliation’.8 This priestly regime became an ideal breeding ground for Georgian revolutionaries. As another Bolshevik alumnus commented, ‘not one lay school, nor any other type of school produced so many atheists… as did the Tiflis seminary’.9 The seminary was also a highly effective manufacturer of Georgian nationalists, the young Djugashvili amongst them. At the age of sixteen he had several romantic nationalist poems published in the nationalist journal Iveria, and when this was closed down by the authorities, he published in a more leftist journal.

  Yet Georgia was not only a land of resentful nationalists resisting oppressive Russians. It was also one of the most ethnically diverse regions of the empire, where Armenian and Jewish merchants, Georgian nobles, peasants and artisans, and Georgian, Russian, Azeri and Turkish workers all rubbed shoulders with Russian officials and soldiers. It was, moreover, riven by class and status tensions. The emancipation of serfs had been fiercely resisted by the impoverished Georgian nobility, and nobody was satisfied by the r
esulting settlement.10 Ioseb was therefore adrift in a highly stratified society in which he suffered social humiliations. In June 1891, for instance, he was not allowed to matriculate because his family could not pay his fees; it was only the charity of the hated priests that allowed him to continue his education. He was also keenly aware of the social failures of his uneducated father, of whom he spoke with some contempt. Although Beso was clearly ambitious and had, by moving from country to town, raised the status of the family, he also drank, went bankrupt and was forced into lowly factory work in Tiflis. He died in a drunken brawl when Ioseb was eleven.11

  It is no surprise, then, that Ioseb’s early nationalism was intertwined with an entrenched resentment of elites, as was suggested by his choice of Koba, the bandit hero of Georgian legend, as a hero. Like many Georgian nationalists, he revelled in the medieval Georgian epics about heroic knights and the romantic novels based on them. And Patricide by the nobleman Aleksandr Qazbegi was a particular influence, its hero Koba, according to a friend, becoming a ‘God for him’. Ioseb ‘wanted to become another Koba, a fighter and hero as famous as he’, and he was later to take the name as his revolutionary nom de guerre.12 Qazbegi had something in common with Bakunin – an aristocrat who romanticized the peasantry – and he even abandoned his privileged life to live with the mountain Georgians. In Patricide, Koba joins a group of outlaws-cum-adopted brothers, who avenge the poor but virtuous mountain dwellers by defeating the brutal Russian officials and their Georgian noble collaborators who oppress them. For Ioseb, Koba was a suitable role-model, for several reasons. He had little respect for his weak father and was therefore reliant on the male ‘brotherhood’ networks that were so important in the South Caucasus.13 He was also a confident, domineering child, who had to be the boss in any group – the head of a new family of brothers. Banditry, moreover, was not just something to be enjoyed in bygone chivalric romances – it was rife in rural Georgia. Stalin’s behaviour as an adult makes it difficult to avoid the conclusion that he was unusually vindictive, suspicious and willing to engage in violence. But he also grew up in an environment where rebelliousness and violence were commonplace.

  Despite this violent and picturesque background, it is important to be wary of exaggerating Stalin’s image as a reckless, unfettered ‘Bandit King’. Stalin had a calculating, devious side, and was by no means the most radical amongst the seminary students. He also admired modernity, and Marxism became for him, as for his fellow Georgian Marxists, a way of transforming an angry resentment of injustice with a strategy for achieving that modernity. And in the Georgian context, modernity meant Russia. For although the radical Georgian intelligentsia loathed Russian imperialism, they regarded its culture as superior to their own, as it embodied the modernity the Georgian radicals craved. The future of Georgia lay in casting off a past of warring nobles and fractious clans, and embracing a unified state within a socialist Russia. For such radicals, an internationalist Marxism was infinitely preferable to a chauvinist nationalism that might, in the Georgian context, spark civil war and invasion from the South.14 The Georgian Stalin always had a very firm grasp of the lessons of colonial subordination. As a member of a ‘backward’, stratified society confronting a much more powerful foreign empire, he was to stress the importance of national spirit and unity, even when he had transferred his allegiance from Georgia to Russia.

  Despite emerging as a star pupil, excelling in Logic and Slavonic ecclesiastical singing, Ioseb remained a rebel, and could not escape the seminary quickly enough.15 The Georgian Marxist underground was his natural home. Yet he found his party colleagues, most of whom backed the Mensheviks in downplaying social division, complacent, and he was soon looking for a new political home.16 Lenin’s Bolsheviks provided an ideal new brotherhood. They were more militant and radical than the Mensheviks – especially Bogdanov and the Bolshevik left, with whom Stalin sided in 1905.17 Moreover, they were more Russian than the largely Georgian and Jewish Mensheviks. Stalin rapidly assimilated himself to the more ‘modern’ culture, and from 1907 never again published in Georgian. In nineteen years the ambitious boy from provincial Gori had made the enormous cultural journey to national Tiflis, and onwards to imperial Petersburg. Ioseb had become Iosif.

  After the 1905 revolution Stalin stuck closely to Lenin, making himself useful as a man with influence amongst Georgian and Azeri workers, though even then his brittle egocentricity made him unpopular with many of his fellow revolutionaries.18 He was effective, and became known as the party’s expert on the minority nationalities. He was also willing to do Lenin’s bidding. Even when he seemed to be closer to the Koba of old rather than the new Marxist man, organizing the ‘expropriations’, or armed robberies in Georgia, to bolster Bolshevik funds, he was doing so at the behest of Lenin. In 1912 he was rewarded by appointment to the party’s Central Committee, and, after a lengthy period in Siberian exile, he returned to the centre of the leadership in 1917. After the seizure of power, he was made Commissar for Nationalities.

  The contrast between Lenin and Stalin – ‘man of steel’ – is a subject on which much ink has been spilt. Whilst some have denied any real divisions, others have detected in Lenin a more liberal figure.19 The most influential contrast, first drawn by Trotsky, set Lenin the intellectual revolutionary against Stalin the dull but cunning bureaucrat. The views of both, of course, changed over time, but some differences are evident, less in their ideology than in their broader political and cultural outlook. Both Lenin and Stalin were revolutionaries, both saw the party as a conspiratorial, vanguard organization, and both were prepared to use violence to achieve their goals – though Stalin was undoubtedly the more brutal of the two. However, Stalin, whilst accepting the Bolshevik vision of a disciplined, industrial society, tended to stress the power of ideological or emotional commitment, whereas for the more Modernist Lenin ‘organization’ was more central.20 Stalin was therefore more comfortable than Lenin with using the campaigning methods of the Radical left, whilst at other times, he was willing to exploit the powerful force of nationalism – a force he understood well as a former Georgian nationalist.21 By the late 1920s he had also become much more hostile to any sign of ideological disunity than Lenin had ever been.

  Stalin’s image of the future society also departed from Lenin’s. When Lenin tried to describe the party or the socialist future, he often looked to the factory or the machine. Stalin’s default model, however, was much more militaristic, and his favoured political metaphors were military, religious or organic.22 His vision of the party was the product of an odd encounter between The Communist Manifesto and chivalric romance. As early as 1905 he called for the party to lead a ‘proletarian army’, in which every member would cultivate a belief in the party programme. It was to be a ‘fortress’, ‘vigilant’ against alien ideas. Its gates were only to be open to the truly faithful, those who had been ‘tested’; to accept people who lacked commitment was tantamount to the ‘desecration of the holy of holies of the party’.23 Stalin’s party was one of warrior monks, and in 1921 he compared it to the ‘sword-brothers’ (Schwertbrüder), the crusading order founded by the Baltic Bishop of Livonia in 1202 to convert the Slavs.24

  By the time of the civil war, Stalin’s approach to the party had been transferred to the field of geopolitics.25 If the party was the seat of ideological purity, the holy of holies, the rest of the world was arranged around it in Dantean concentric circles, with virtue diminishing with distance from the centre – geographically, ideologically and socially. Russia was near the divine centre, advanced, cohesive and on the right side of history; the periphery of the USSR – Ukraine, the Caucasus, Central Asia – was in purgatory, more backward, nationalistic and peasant-dominated; and beyond purgatory lay the inferno of hell, the lands of the evil, foreign bourgeoisie. The main goal of the party – that band of knightly brothers – was to purify itself, imbibe the spirit of militant and transformative Marxism, and then disseminate it across the USSR, before venturing abroad at some time
in the future. In the meantime, the priority was self-defence against the pernicious foreign and bourgeois influences penetrating its unstable borderlands.

  Stalin had a particular interest in geopolitics and Russia’s borderlands, but his view of the world had much in common with the culture of the party that emerged from the civil war. His belief in the centrality of ideas and ideological commitment made sense to the Red Army Bolsheviks, who understood the vital importance of morale in war. Any chink in ideological unity could lead to defeat.

  It is therefore not surprising that Stalin relished war when it came; even though his role was merely to collect food supplies in Southern Russia, he quickly transformed himself into a military commissar, substituting suit and tie for the martial attire of collarless tunic, breeches and tall boots – an ensemble he favoured thereafter.26 His behaviour was brutal and cruel, and in some ways his militaristic, mobilizing political style was closest to Trotsky’s.27 This may have been one reason for their mutual loathing, but there were others: he was deeply hostile to Trotsky’s (and indeed Lenin’s) use of upper-class tsarist officers.

  Stalin accepted the NEP retreat. But contemporaries should not have been entirely surprised when he eventually emerged as the destroyer of NEP. As disillusionment with NEP spread throughout the party, Stalin was ideally poised to devise an alternative course with appeal within the party. And that new path amounted to nothing less than a second Bolshevik revolution.

  III

  In the classic Soviet novel Cement, written between 1922 and 1924, the proletarian writer Fedor Gladkov tells the story of Gleb Chumalov, a civil-war hero, who returns home from the fighting to find that his beloved cement factory is idle and decaying. The locals have turned to goat-herding and selling cigarette-lighters (typical petty-bourgeois activities in the Bolshevik imagination). Gleb sets about trying to restore the factory, applying the radical heroism imbibed during the war to economic reconstruction. One of his fellow Communists, an anti-NEP utopian, is prone to reminisce about the war: ‘If you only knew how I love the army. Those were the most unforgettable of my life, like the October days in Moscow. Heroism? It’s the fire of revolution.’ To which Gleb replies: