Stalin

by Edvard Radzinsky

  The senior leaders moved into the Cavalry Block opposite the Poteshny Palace. The previous occupants were evicted, or passed on to the Cheka. The chimes from the Spassky Tower were adjusted: the “Internationale” replaced “God Save the Tsar.” The new potentates’ cars drove into the Kremlin through the Spassky Gate, under an icon with an extinguished lamp behind shattered glass.

  Trotsky wrote: “The furniture in my room was of Karelian birch, there was a clock with Cupid and Psyche on the mantel shelf.… We ironically asked the Cupids and Psyches whether they’d been expecting us.” Trotsky tells a funny story about a certain Stupishin, an old Kremlin retainer, who one dinnertime served buckwheat gruel in plates decorated with imperial eagles, and carefully turned the plates so that the eagles looked the eaters straight in the eye. Trotsky shouldn’t have found it so funny. The old servant Stupishin, the Cupids and Psyches sensed at once that their new masters had arrived. Lenin’s favorite words of reproach to his fellow warriors then were: “Wake up, old fellow, we aren’t in the Smolny now.”

  Lenin of course saw to it that another new resident would be right beside him in the Kremlin—faithful Koba. Koba too was given a Kremlin apartment with Cupids and Psyches and mirrors. Koba knew, though, that the Party rank and file looked askance at the rapid rise of their leaders to this lordly lifestyle. When he first set foot in his Kremlin apartment, Koba said, “Why all this upper-class luxury?” and smashed an antique mirror with a kick. The bourgeois Cupids and Psyches soon winged their way to the scrap heap.

  ANOTHER LESSON FROM THE LEADER

  Once settled in Moscow, Lenin got to work on the Left SRs. The Fourth Congress of Soviets—the first held in Moscow—met in the Hall of Columns of the House of Unions. The Congress was held to ratify the Brest treaty. Lenin was in no doubt that there would be a fierce fight, ending in the restoration of undivided power to his Party. The Congress opened with the reading of a message from President Woodrow Wilson, expressing his sympathy with the Russian people, which had cast off the yoke of autocracy The Congress adopted a reply in which it promised Wilson speedy liberation from the yoke of capital and the establishment of socialism throughout the world. They had their fun with Wilson, and then joined battle. After a statement from Lenin, B. Kamkov, a Left SR ideologist never seen without a revolver dangling at his side, declared that his party did not want to share responsibility for the disgraceful Brest treaty. He condemned the Bolsheviks’ ties with the Germans, calling Lenin’s party “counterhands for German imperialism.” Lenin gave as good as he got. He called the Left SRs “soap bubbles” and “accomplices of the bourgeoisie.” The docile Congress (there were nearly 800 Bolsheviks present to 284 Left SRs) of course passed a resolution approving the peace, and the Left SRs had to withdraw from the government.

  The settlement of accounts by installments—using one enemy to destroy another—was almost over. Koba would take to heart all that he learned in Lenin’s universities. “We learn, bit by bit, we learn.”

  Once again the Bolshevik leaders were jubilant, this time because they had knocked the stupid SRs out of the game. (Twenty years later, most of those rejoicing would be sitting in the Hall of Columns again. That was the place in which Koba would stage his trials of Old Bolsheviks, the place from which they would be taken under sentence of death by shooting. But for the present they were jubilant.)

  Lenin, though, knew that the SR militants would not leave it at that. He had to hurry, before the enraged countryside exploded. He knew that the peasant world would shortly become his enemy. For hunger was advancing on Petrograd and Moscow. And with it—civil war.

  IN THE FIERY CAGE

  The prophecy of those who had urged Lenin not to take power had come true. The breathing space turned out to be a short one. Civil War broke out over the great expanses of Russia. Or rather a multitude of wars. One of them was the war with foreign interventionists: all the powers that had fought each other in the World War began helping themselves to pieces of the dying Romanov empire.

  In spring 1918 the Germans occupied the newly independent Ukraine. German troops also headed southward to the Caucasus, where they controlled part of the territory of the Georgian, Armenian, and Azerbaijani republics.

  The Turks also invaded Transcaucasia and seized a number of Black Sea ports, including Batum, the city in which Koba had begun his revolutionary career.

  Four hundred thousand square miles of the dismembered empire’s territory, and sixty million of its subjects, were now in the hands of the Germans and their allies.

  The Entente countries, still at war with the Germans, naturally could not remain mere observers of these events. In March 1918 British and French troops landed at Murmansk in northern Russia.

  Lenin and Koba contacted the chairman of the Murmansk Soviet, Alexeyev (Yuryev) on the direct line. (A transcript of this conversation can be found in volume 1 of the collection Documents on the Foreign Policy of the USSR.) Alexeyev explained that the Soviet had reached an agreement with the British, who had undertaken to defend the North from German incursions and to provision the hungry city of Murmansk.

  Koba’s reply to Alexeyev was that “the British never give their help gratis, nor do the French.… It seems to us that you have to some extent let yourself be taken in.” He recommended annulling the agreement, but the hungry people of Murmansk refused to budge. (Koba did not forget this exchange with Alexeyev, who was shot once the war was over.)

  As early as July 1, four thousand British, French, American, Italian, and Serbian soldiers disembarked at Murmansk and began to spread out over northern Russia. Archangel was occupied in August 1918.

  The Americans, as Louis Fischer correctly writes in his Lenin, were extremely reluctant to take part in the intervention. The “Russian question” tormented President Wilson for almost a year before he wrote to Colonel House that “I have been sweating over the question of what is right and feasible to do in Russia.”

  But in the end Wilson had to agree, and not only because the Bolshevik usurpers had allied themselves with the Ententes German enemies. He was also alarmed by the prospect of a universal conflagration, of that world revolution for which Lenin was tirelessly calling, the persistent Bolshevik threat to plunge a war-ruined world into chaos.

  Luckily for the Allies, there were at the time some fifty thousand well-armed and well-trained foreign soldiers in Siberia—Czechs and Slovaks taken prisoner by the tsar’s army. The Czech lands and Slovakia had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which had fought on the German side against Russia. But Czechs and Slovaks, unwilling to fight against brother Slavs, had surrendered to the Russians in their thousands. They had been released immediately after the February Revolution. France, which was running short of manpower, rearmed the Czechoslovak Legion and was preparing to transfer it to the western front when the October Revolution took place. The allies now found a different use for the Czechs and Slovaks. The Legion troops were traveling along the Trans-Siberian Railway at the time. The Bolsheviks demanded that they should surrender their arms. On May 14, the Legion mutinied. The troops refused to disarm, and made their way across Siberia toward the Urals, sweeping away Soviet authorities as they went. They were joined by Cossacks also in revolt against the Bolsheviks, and tsarist officers who had taken refuge in Siberia.

  Ekaterinburg, the capital of the Red Urals, fell to the Legion on July 25. (The Bolsheviks had shot the tsar and his family on the eve of the city’s surrender.) The Czechs and Slovaks crossed the Urals and seized Samara and Simbirsk (Lenin’s birthplace) and occupied Kazan.

  In July of that same summer, a terrible one for the Bolsheviks, an invasion force landed from British and Japanese vessels at anchor at Vladivostok, capital of the Russian Far East. Japanese troops entered the city on August 3. Under an agreement between the United States and Japan, seven thousand soldiers from each country were to take part in the Far Eastern operation, but by August there were no fewer than seventy thousand Japanese on Russian soil.

 
; Foreign intervention was the background to the most terrible, ruthless, and bestial of wars within Russia itself—a war fought by Russians against Russians.

  BROTHER AGAINST BROTHER

  On the eve of the October Revolution the Russian army had been plunged into chaos. The White general Denikin described the situation in his memoirs: “Armed robbery and looting is rife on all the railroads and waterways.” Reports from the front said in so many words that “we no longer have the strength to fight with people who have neither conscience nor sense of honor. The units passing through sweep everything away, destroy crops, cattle, and poultry, break into government ware-houses, drink themselves unconscious, set fire to houses.…”

  The armed rabble of ex-soldiers, intoxicated with their new freedom and brutalized by drink, and the anarchic mass of rebellious peasants were the main props of the Bolsheviks after their seizure of power.

  “There is nothing more terrible than a Russian peasant rebellion. It is mindless and ruthless.” That is how Russia’s greatest poet, Alexander Pushkin, described it. “Mindless and ruthless”—his words were echoed by many writers describing the Civil War. After centuries of slavery and brutal treatment by their masters, the pent-up brute force of the Russian people found its outlet in hideous atrocities. In the 1920s, the famous Russian writer Alexei Tolstoy, then living in Berlin, liked to show people a photograph taken during the Civil War. A giant of a man, armed to the teeth, reclined picturesquely in an armchair. At his side, on a little table, stood a severed human head. This was the pose chosen by Ataman Angel, leader of one of the innumerable gangs that raped and robbed peaceful citizens in the years of the Civil War.

  Revolts broke out in southern Russia immediately after the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks. The Cossacks—a privileged military caste which had always been regarded as the main prop of tsardom—were up in arms. (Before the Revolution there had been eleven Cossack “armies”—those of the Don, the Kuban, Orenburg, the Urals, and Siberia among them.) As early as November 1917 the tsarist general Kaledin, ataman of the Don Cossacks, had raised a rebellion against the Bolsheviks. In the same month in the southern Urals, the Orenburg Cossacks had revolted under the leadership of General Dutov. Kaledin was crushed in January 1918, and Dutov in April, by the revolutionary armies.

  General Kaledin, reporting his defeat to the “government” on the Don, uttered ominous words: “Our situation is hopeless. The population denies us its support.” He interrupted those who tried to argue: “Gentlemen, keep it short. Idle talk is what has destroyed Russia.” Kaledin shot himself that same day, January 29.

  These Cossack revolts were only the beginning. Officers from all over Russia fled to the Don and the Kuban.

  On November 2, 1917, coincidentally with the Kaledin rebellion, General Alexeyev, a former chief of staff, began recruiting in southern Russia a “volunteer army” to fight the Bolsheviks. This event is regarded as the beginning of the White movement. The Bolsheviks, who fought under the Red Flag, were henceforward referred to as “the Reds,” and those who rose against them called themselves “the Whites,” or “White Guard.” “Whiteness” was thought of as a symbol of spiritual purity, of freedom from blood-guilt.

  In January 1918 General Anton Denikin announced the creation of the Armed Forces of South Russia, with which the volunteer army and the Don army shortly merged, under Denikin as commander-in-chief.

  Another group of White forces began to take shape in the northwest. The anti-Bolshevik movement there was headed by Nikolai Yudenich, a front-line general in the First World War. For exceptional valor he had been decorated with the most prestigious of Russian military awards, the Order of St. George First Class. (Only one other White Guard commander, General N. Ivanov, shared this distinction.) Yudenich’s army was joined by White officers who had fled to newly independent Estonia, and by some Estonians.

  The White armies absorbed many of the finest officers schooled by the First World War. But outstanding former tsarist officers and generals were also found in the Red army. In some cases brothers found themselves on opposite sides. Thus, General Y. Plyushchik-Plyushchevsky served with the Whites, and his brother Grigori, also a general, with the Reds. General P. Makhrov was in the volunteer army, while his brother Major-General N. Makhrov fought for the Bolsheviks. M. Berens was a White admiral under General Wrangel, while his brother Evgeny Berens commanded all the Bolshevik naval forces in April 1919.

  Brother made war on brother. The capture and execution of brother by brother, father by son would be unremarkable events in the years of Civil War.

  Having lost three-quarters of the country’s territory, Lenin and the Bolsheviks were trapped in a cage of fire, with the Germans to the west and south, the Entente powers to the east, Denikin’s forces to the south, and Yudenich’s army to the northwest.

  The Bolsheviks were left with only a small area around Moscow and Petrograd. But both capitals remained in their hands and from this vantage point they could continue proudly representing themselves as the legitimate government, fighting against mutineers and foreign invaders.

  From March 1918 Trotsky commanded the republic’s armed forces. Inside the cage of fire his armored train sped from one forward position to another. Until October 1917 the Bolsheviks had supported those anarchic elements which threatened to reduce the army to a rabble of looters. Now they had turned full circle. Trotsky began hastily reconstituting the regular army which revolutionaries had so hated and the destruction of which was part of the Utopian dream.

  Trotsky realized that such an army could not be created without military experts. So, to the amazement and fury of revolutionary soldiers, former tsarist officers who agreed to cooperate with the Bolsheviks reappeared in the Red army, insisting, as before, on the discipline which the rank and file detested. Trotsky did not entirely trust these military experts—voenspetsy, as the Reds called them for short. Their families became in effect hostages. But Trotsky’s most important innovation was the institution of “military commissars.” Every decision made by a voenspets was subject to the approval of a military commissar, who also assisted in reinforcing what was now called “revolutionary discipline.”

  Trotsky tirelessly harangued the troops to raise morale. My father heard him speak on a number of occasions. He looked like a typical intellectual, but when he began to speak his face became almost Mephistophelian, and the crowd was spellbound.

  Magnetic as he was, Trotsky’s rhetoric would have been less effective if his speeches had not been accompanied by the sound of rifle fire. For desertion, for indiscipline, for cowardice—the penalty was execution by shooting. “One of the most important principles in the training of our army,” said Trotsky, “is that no offense should go unpunished. The penalty must follow immediately.”

  Koba could not help being impressed by the results. Within a very short time, Trotsky converted an exhausted rabble of barrack-room lawyers into a Bolshevik army.

  But Trotsky was following an example set by someone else. Koba remembered that after the October coup Kamenev, trying to curry favor with the soldiers, had proposed that the new regime’s first decree should abolish capital punishment in the army. Trotsky had agreed. But when Lenin arrived in the Smolny and heard about the proposed decree he was indignant: “What nonsense! How can you carry out a revolution without shooting people?” The decree was buried. Another lesson learned.

  8

  THE CRISIS MANAGER

  The sufferings of war were compounded by a cruel famine. The countryside refused to surrender its grain to the Bolsheviks for nothing. Kulaks, as the wealthier—that is, the ablest—peasants were called, began hiding the grain they had produced by the sweat of their brows. Lenin organized his Committees of the Village Poor. The “poor”—the laziest, most resentful peasants—were given power in the villages. Armed squads of workers were dispatched from the towns to the countryside. Together with the village poor they were to confiscate the grain held by kulaks. In the event, “food squads” di
d not collect very much grain, but quickly turned into gangs of drunken marauders.

  Petrograd and Moscow were dying of hunger. Lenin had posted Trotsky to the front, and now he dispatched his second hope, Koba, to bring in the grain. On May 24, Koba was put in charge of food stocks. In southern Russia he set off for Tsaritsyn, the most important Bolshevik outpost in the south, through which a thin trickle of grain from the northern Caucasus was still reaching the center. It was Koba’s job to turn the trickle into a flood.

  NIGHTS IN AN OVERHEATED RAILCAR

  “In 1918 Comrade Stalin said, ‘Come and work with me, as secretary in the People’s Commissariat,’ ” Fyodor Alliluyev wrote in his memoirs. “Comrade Stalin’s staff consisted at the time of one secretary—myself—and one typist—my sister.” And so, at the end of May 1918, the People’s Commissariat was deserted: the whole trio was getting ready for its journey. “Comrade Stalin only gave me a couple of days’ notice that we were about to leave,” Alliluyev continued. “I was used to obeying him without argument.”

  The Kazan station was packed with “bag people” (speculators, usually peasants, who carried sacks of fresh food to hungry towns or sold it at railroad stations) and half-starved homeless children when this trio turned up—a girl not yet sixteen, a tall young man, and a short, middle-aged Georgian, with a squad of Red army men to see them off.

  In spite of “instructions from the Council of People’s Commissars” and Koba’s awesome credentials, a train was found for them only after a lengthy altercation between Koba and the Stationmaster. Not many people knew as yet who this Georgian was.