Nothing we know about Dzhugashvili’s character forbids us to draw this conclusion: He was always a man to hedge his bets until the winning horse broke from the pack. The ambiguity of his character, however, also allows us to speculate that if he did—as seems likely from the evidence—betray some of his “socialist brothers” into Okhrana dungeons and death, he did it in order to get rid of colleagues he considered to be otherwise immovable obstacles on his own path to success.
Presumably, it became clear to Dzhugashvili soon enough that the Czar and his regime were not the horses to back. For once he met Lenin at a Party conference in Tammerfors, Finland, in 1905, Dzhugashvili became his close adherent and a dedicated Marxist.
With Lenin, he attended Party Congresses in Stockholm and London. He became a specialist in raiding Czarist treasury transports to secure working funds for the Bolshevik Party. Like any good revolutionary, he underwent imprisonment and deportation. Like any clever revolutionary, he always managed to escape. Like any canny revolutionary, he never engaged in hand-to-hand combat. And over the years he steadily built up a record as a fantastically skilled organizer with a cool, calculating head, a mind tenaciously attuned to the long term, and nerves of steel.
Dzhugashvili was married three times and fathered two sons and a daughter. The day he buried his first wife, Ekaterina Svanidze, he stood beside a boyhood friend at the edge of the cemetery, and through the already blackened stumps of his teeth spat out the oath that was perhaps the most revealing commentary on his whole life to come. Defeated in his personal choice and deeply angry, he swore, “I will never again love anybody in this life.”
It may be that he never did. His second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, unable to withstand his hardness and hate, committed suicide. His third wife was Rosa Kaganovich, sister of Lazar Moiseyevich Kaganovich, a fellow revolutionary and one of Dzhugashvili’s trusted lieutenants; they were divorced, and Rosa disappeared into total obscurity.
Even his mother seemed never to have received the slightest token of positive feeling from Dzhugashvili. Despite her son’s rise to dictatorial glory, she lived all her life in poverty and obscurity. Content with her icons and medals and devotional activities, Keke died in the reassurance of her Russian Orthodox faith in Christ.
Like many of his revolutionary comrades, Dzhugashvili collected a bevy of aliases over the years—“Ivanovich,” “Koba,” “Comrade K,” “Vassily.” His earliest klechka, or nickname, among his comrades spoke of a chilling side to his character. “Demonschile,” they called him. “Devil.”
When he was thirty-four, after some eight years of outstanding Bolshevik activity, Dzhugashvili was co-opted by Lenin into the Central Committee of the CP. It was then that he changed his name once and for all to Joseph Stalin. “Man of Steel.”
Having served by that time as the first editor of Pravda—then as now, the newspaper mouthpiece of the Party regime—and in several other important posts in the Party and its state apparatus, Stalin was increasingly privy to all the inner councils of Lenin’s Bolsheviks.
By the spring of 1922, Stalin did appear to be the most capable man to put in temporary charge of the Party machinery as General Secretary. In any case, it would only be for a short while. Lenin would be back in shape and in charge again in no time, after all. But the first stroke hit Lenin on May 26, 1922. It left him with his right arm and leg partially paralyzed, and with some speech disturbance. Determined not to give in, he was back in his office by October. But on December 15, a second stroke meant that Lenin’s work was effectively over.
Lenin had seen enough even in those six months, however, to draw the same conclusion as Antonio Gramsci, who soon chose to take his chances in Fascist Italy. Stalin was not to be trusted.
Matters came to a head as Lenin sided with Stalin’s rivals in a Central Committee clash over economic measures. Rather than attack Lenin directly, Stalin aimed an extraordinarily abusive attack against Lenin’s most visible surrogate, his ever-loyal wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya. He even went so far as to threaten to have Krupskaya tried for treason. Presumably, Stalin sought to cow Lenin through Krupskaya; but whatever his reasoning, it was a needless tactical mistake for which he paid a price.
Lenin dictated what has since been called his last will and testament—his famous “Letter to the Congress” (of Party Delegates)—in which he recommended that the Party set Stalin aside. “Comrade Stalin has concentrated boundless power in his hands,” warned Lenin, “and I am not certain he can always use his power with sufficient caution.”
Lenin recommended that Stalin be replaced by either of his two great rivals, one of whom Lenin pointedly praised. “Comrade Trotsky … is distinguished by remarkable abilities…. [He] is the most able person on the present Central Committee.”
Lenin made a point of being present when his “Letter” was read to a plenary meeting of the Party. Stalin sat beneath the podium, a suitably miserable, repentant and unhappy look on his face. For Stalin, however, it was all theater. And for Lenin it was all over. The Man of Steel—an organizational genius in his own right—understood all the byways of the revolutionary structure he now controlled. He had locked his power center away from any tampering, even by Lenin.
Several old colleagues of Lenin, whom Stalin had already recruited to his own support, rose to lead a “boys-will-be-boys” defense of this remarkable comrade, Joseph Stalin. There did remain the matter of Stalin’s inflamed attack against Krupskaya—a prematurely intemperate act that had to be normalized to satisfy Lenin’s power bloc.
As Lenin had once observed, however, Comrade Stalin was not a man for petty intrigues. It cost him little to make a public apology to Krupskaya. There were more important things to attend to, and Stalin meant to get on with it. From that point on, it does not seem to have mattered what Lenin thought or wished in Stalin’s regard.
Had Lenin’s physicians been right—had he regained but half his strength, in fact, and lasted just two or three more years—the matter of Stalin’s rise would have been disposed of, and world history might have taken a different course. But Lenin’s day was spent. There remained for him only lingering hours with his beloved Nadezhda at their villa in Gorki, the honorable attention of his followers, and the smiling stare of Stalin’s dark brown eyes watching every move by everyone.
If Antonio Gramsci understood at least as well as Lenin what lay in store for the Soviet Union and the proletarian revolution under Stalin, Stalin himself understood Lenin’s structural invention of the supreme Party-State—including its geopolitical potential—to a fare-thee-well.
Lenin had been driven by his ideal of the world proletarian revolution, and by his goal of the Workers’ Paradise. Stalin was driven by perhaps the most grasping and possessive personal ambition in the annals of great leaders. He would be master of all nations. Of all the earth, in fact. For, like it or not, Lenin’s monolith—the geopolitical institutional organization he had created—now belonged to Stalin. And Stalin knew what he had to do: transform Leninist Marxism with his own ideas.
Given the shift in Stalin’s intended use of that monolith, there were three basic elements that were liabilities from his point of view. Three elements that would have to be eliminated.
First, Leninist Marxism advocated inner-Party democracy. Limited as it was, that freedom of opinion and expression always supported by Lenin and his Bolsheviks within their own ranks could mean nothing but trouble for Stalin’s personal rule. He wanted no one doing to him what he had done to Lenin, after all. He needed the Party apparatus to be a monolith of another sort, a body not primarily at the service of the proletariat, but completely subservient to him personally.
The second liability of the Leninist setup was that it was internationalist. Stalin had no altruism. He never indulged in messianic dreams or poetry. The “pie-in-the-sky” dimension of Leninism, even if the sky were proletarian, was so much idealistic poppycock. And, in any case, a worldwide dictatorship of the proletariat, followed by the disappearance of all
government and statist control, would mean simply and clearly that Stalin himself would fade from central importance.
The third liability was that the Leninist monolith incorporated no ultimate plan to place the Soviet Party-State—and Stalin as its leader—at the forefront of nations. For that, and not some messianic promise of earthly Paradise, was the goal at the end of Stalin’s proletarian rainbow. And already he was aware of disturbing information about certain foreign leaders of Communist parties in Europe—some Germans, French and Yugoslavs, for example—whose analysis of the world situation, and whose expectations in their own countries, seemed more in line with Antonio Gramsci’s ideas than with Lenin’s. Obviously, then, and whatever the details, there were certainly socialist ideas circulating abroad that did not square with the revised monolith Stalin now proposed to fashion.
Lenin was still alive when Stalin moved to eliminate the first Leninist liability—inner-Party democracy. It was a simple and ingenious matter of a turnabout of Lenin’s priorities.
Lenin’s last important structural change in his monolith, made in February 1922, had been to replace the all-powerful CHEKA with a purged GPU. In July of 1923, under Stalin’s guiding hand, GPU was replaced in its turn by the United State Directorate (OGPU), whose membership was purged again—this time of Leninist Bolsheviks.
More important, the new charter of OGPU implied the reversal of Lenin’s dictum that the Party was supreme. For OGPU was no longer under control of the Central Committee, and certainly not of the Party. Instead, it was placed under the direct control of the General Secretary, Joseph Stalin. And to its duties of border control and internal security was added the duty of surveillance of Party leaders themselves.
Inner-Party democracy was a dead letter.
Stalin took one more stunning step in his re-creation of the Party-State before Lenin died, a step with implications for Stalin’s solution of the second liability of Leninist internationalism, as well as the third liability that would allow the Soviet Party-State to slip from world dominance, and Stalin along with it.
Lenin’s constitution adopted in 1918 by the RFSR applied only to the territory encompassed by the traditional Russian heartland and Siberia. The RFSR did not include, or make constitutional provision for, the Transcaucasian Federation composed of the Ukraine, Byelorussia, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. As a practical fact, however, the Red Army was in control of those territories. Moreover, Lenin’s Bolsheviks dominated all the soviets, or workers’ assemblies, in those areas, as well as the Council of Soviet Commissars elected by the soviets. Structurally, in other words, the CPSU already dominated the politics and policies of those nominally “independent” regions.
It required only the expedient of rubber-stamp approval by the Central Committee on July 6, 1923, for Stalin to inhale those territories into the USSR. It was just one more proletarian victory that came without the glory of a proletarian revolution, or even the pretense of proletarian consent.
There has always been a suspicion that a slow-acting poison was the cause of Lenin’s death in January of 1924, and that Stalin had Lenin’s viscera removed and cremated—against the violently expressed wishes of his widow, Nadezhda Krupskaya—to avoid later forensic medical detection.
Whatever the truth may have been, Lenin was dead. The childless Krupskaya was reduced to a living cipher, and would remain so until her own death in 1939. Feliks Dzerzhinsky might have meant trouble for Stalin. As the first head of CHEKA, he was the one man who knew everybody’s secrets, including Stalin’s. But Dzerzhinsky’s sudden death on July 20, 1926, guaranteed his silence.
Stalin now had no worthwhile opponents left.
· · ·
With that farsightedness Lenin had once so admired, Stalin now set in earnest about the job of securing the whole of the Party and the whole of the State as one monolithic body subservient completely and personally to himself.
At first, he stayed with inner-Party maneuvers—another skill Lenin had admired. Later, there were direct assassinations through paid henchmen. Finally, Stalin’s Great Purges and Mock Trials of the thirties would transform Soviet society, and achieve Stalin’s objective at home. His cult would be securely established. The “Miraculous Georgian,” as Lenin had once called Stalin, would eliminate what dissension remained, would once and for all secure the Communist Party as the only party in the Soviet state, and would secure his own position as that Party’s only leader.
At about the same time he set out on his course of securing complete power at home, the means fell into Stalin’s hands to tackle the second major problem of the Leninist structure—its “altruistic” internationalism. In this area, in fact, he had the greatest ally he could want: the timing of events over which he had no control.
The proletarian revolutions that had been fomented by Lenin in China and Germany were in shambles by 1923. There had been no uprising of the proletariat in either country. In fact, the chief architect of the Leninist plan for China, Mikhail Markovich Borodin, had been brought home and garroted for his failure. And the decisive defeat of the German Communist Party in the elections of 1923 spelled failure for revolutionary success in that country. In the thirties, Stalin would make Lenin’s mistake all over again in Spain, and would find out at a terrible cost that even he could not make a badly based formula for revolution pan out. On this occasion, however, he made such failure work for him.
Less than a year after Lenin’s death, with the full support of his bloc on the Central Committee behind him, Stalin was able to announce that true Leninism did not insist on internationalism, after all, for this moment of history.
What it did insist upon, Stalin declared, was something he called “socialism in one country”—a phrase that came to be as renowned around the world as its portentous meaning: Soviet predominance. The Russian Revolution was “self-sufficient,” Stalin announced to the CC. It needed no bolstering by socialism in other countries. The perfecting of “socialism” in the USSR (the “one country”) was the quickest path to worldwide “socialism.”
Stalin insisted further, and truthfully, that this was not a repudiation of the proletarian revolution. It meant simply this: The Russian Revolution was supreme; and Stalin was its supreme leader. Neither he nor the Soviet Party-State was the mere equal of anyone in the worldwide “socialist fraternity.”
That much settled in the Central Committee of the CPSU—for settled it was—every trait of the Leninist brand of Soviet internationalism was eliminated from the Soviet Party’s pronouncements, discussions and ideology. Only the practical matter of its complete burial around the world remained to be accomplished.
For that purpose, Stalin turned to another of Lenin’s structures, the Comintern. By means of the troika of tactics at which he was so adept—parliamentary maneuvers, bribery and forceful elimination—Stalin first transformed the still weakling Comintern into an interim body through which to channel his domestic dogmas and his foreign policies. When it suited him later, he would simply eliminate the Comintern altogether. But during the twenties and thirties, Stalinist activities were extended through the refurbished Comintern to the colonies of the capitalist empires—British, Dutch, French, Portuguese.
Such moves made perfect Stalinist sense. For the proletarian fact of life now was that any Communist revolution that produced a possible rival to Stalin in the matter of total and worldwide control was unacceptable. In time, such men as Tito in Yugoslavia, Mao Zedong in China, Enver Hoxha in Albania, all became examples of what lay in store for Communist revolutionaries who refused to accept a properly subservient place within the Stalinist monolith.
Even in the interim, however, Stalin could not rely totally for his international power base on so weak an organization as the Comintern. Nor did he have to. He had the three Moscow-based networks Lenin had set in place to carry out intelligence and counterespionage abroad. Under Stalin’s control, the coordination of those three Leninist networks was raised to an unprecedented level of efficiency.
“Wherever Soviet clone states emerge”—American analyst John Dziak’s words again—“the same pattern repeats itself—whether it is Cuba or Nicaragua in Latin America, or Ethiopia or Angola in Africa, or Afghanistan or China in Asia. The first products exported to such states invariably are a Party or Party-type movement to organize and focus political power; and a state security apparatus to secure the monopoly of that power, to organize society in an atomized manner in order to facilitate control, and to commence the search for ‘enemies of the people.’ … General impoverishment soon follows…. The counter-intelligence state can generate power…. It cannot generate economic welfare for the common good.”
That is a fair description of the Stalinist version of Lenin’s Workers’ Paradise.
Control and authority were everywhere paramount for Stalin, no doubt about that. But by 1931, it became clear that he had to give priority to another liability—a purely domestic one—that he had inherited from Lenin.
“We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries,” Stalin declared to a conference of industrial managers in that year. “We must make good this lag in ten years,” he warned. “Either we do it, or they crush us.” Democratic capitalism was not dying after all, it seemed.
The cost of Stalin’s plan to transform the Soviet Union from a backward nation into a twentieth-century power was horrific to a degree unparalleled in human history. Stalin called that plan the Second Revolution. It was beside the point by that time that there had been no First Revolution.
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