Stalin

by Edvard Radzinsky

  By the beginning of 1920 the Civil War had been won by the Bolsheviks. After a series of defeats Kolchak had also retreated, into Siberia. His shattered army melted away. As a favor from the Czechoslovak Legion, the former Supreme Ruler of Russia was given a railroad car, in which he got as far as Irkutsk. The Bolsheviks were there before him, and in return for permission to leave Russia without hindrance the Czechoslovak Legion had to hand over the luckless admiral to them. Kolchak listened calmly as he was sentenced to death by shooting, and asked permission to smoke one last pipe. A platoon of Red army soldiers executed the admiral at dawn, and his body was pushed through a hole in the ice on the river Angara.

  Meanwhile, after withdrawing into the Crimea, Denikin had resigned and had been replaced as commander-in-chief by Baron Wrangel, who continued the struggle to hold on to the peninsula. The Crimea was the last stronghold of a vanishing Russia. The Bolsheviks had already occupied the Ukraine.

  The incredible had happened: the Reds, half-starved, wretchedly uniformed, many of them without boots, had defeated the best tsarist officers, a magnificently equipped regular army, and elite Cossack units. How can we explain this miracle? Why were both Kolchak and Denikin suddenly pulled up short and routed on their victorious progress toward Moscow?

  Roman Gul, a White Guard officer, wrote in his book Campaign on the Ice, “The people did not want to join the Whites … after all, they were the former masters.… The peasant did not trust us. That was disastrous for the peasant and for Russia as a whole.” The same class hatred of peasants for their former masters helped the Bolsheviks. As soon as the “masters” reappeared, the peasants forgot Bolshevik oppression completely. The masters made this easier for them—they tried to reintroduce tsarist laws and took land away from the peasants to restore it to the landowners. As a result, the might of Denikin’s and Kolchak’s armies was destroyed by the merciless peasant war that flared up in their wake.

  In addition to this, the White armies were fatally weakened by an age-old Russian ill: thievery. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the Russian writer and historian Karamazin was asked for a succinct description of his country. He summed it up in a single word (in Russian): “They steal.”

  General Denikin complained in his memoirs that “after the glorious victories at Kursk and Kharkov … the area to the rear of the White army was clogged with trains which the regiments had loaded with goods of all kinds.” “Goods and chattels,” we may add, “taken from the population.” Brutality and looting helped to demoralize the White movement and to alienate peaceful civilians. “A wave of violence and pillage swept over the whole theater of the Civil War,” Denikin wrote sadly, “often effacing the differences between the savior and the enemy.”

  Add to all this another typically Russian failing: the jealous hostility between Generals Wrangel and Denikin, the endless squabbling between generals on Kolchak’s and on Yudenich’s staff. A good deal has been written about this.

  One other factor was disastrous for the Whites: killing fellow countrymen, brothers, their “own people,” inspired in them a horror which they could not suppress. The Bolsheviks, Koba, Lenin, the political commissars in the Red army had no such feeling: their “people” was the world revolution, and they were at war not with fellow countrymen but with “exploiters,” whom they were killing to bring happiness to the dispossessed everywhere on earth. This was what the political commissars taught Red soldiers. In one of the most popular Red army songs of the day, “Granada,” the singer gives as his reason for leaving a little cottage and going to war his desire to endow the Spanish peasant with land.

  The country, bled dry by fratricidal strife, lay in ruins.

  But “the worse, the better.” The dream of which the Bolsheviks sang in their anthem, the “Internationale,” had come true. The old Russia had been “razed to its foundations” in total war. The tsar and his family had perished, the most illustrious families of old Russia had either been wiped out or had fled abroad, the old order had been completely destroyed. Nothing but “naked human beings on naked earth” remained.

  It was possible now to resume building a Bolshevik world.

  Victory forced Lenin to think about relations with other countries. He had to rescue his country from a universal boycott. But the regime was compromised by the Red Terror. Nor were Western socialists overjoyed with it. The beginning of 1920 saw the abandonment of capital punishment by order of the Cheka. This was an action intended for Western eyes. The night on which the decision came into force was uniquely horrible. The regime had no intention of letting its enemies go free, and that night many “former persons” were shot in the country’s jails. The Cheka’s day of clemency had become a day of blood. This was another lesson for Koba: you can forgive your enemy, but you must destroy him first.

  THE EXPERT ON CATASTROPHES OFFERS TO RESIGN

  From autumn 1919 onward, Koba sent one stinging missive after another to the Central Committee asking to be recalled from the front. Such as:

  To begin with I am a little overtired, and should like permission to detach myself for a certain time from the hectic work at the most dangerous points in the front line, where rest is out of the question, and to concentrate for a little while on “quiet work” in the rear (I’m not asking a lot, I don’t want a holiday in a dacha somewhere, I just want a change of work—that would be holiday enough).

  And a telegram to Lenin:

  May I remind you again of my request to you to recall me and send someone else worthy of the Central Committee’s trust. In the event of obstinacy on your part I shall be compelled to leave without authorization.

  He refuses to back down, grumbles all the time, shows how offended he is by the Central Committee’s refusal to retire his enemy Trotsky, and says that because of this he no longer wants to be “the expert at mucking out the war department’s stables.”

  In reality, he was making a new move before anyone else could. He had been quick to realize that the war was won. Tomorrow all those bemedaled cavalrymen would count for nothing, and so would Trotsky with his Commissariat of War. It was high time to hurry back to the home front. That was where the power lay now—in the rear.

  He was mistaken. The war was not yet over. At the end of April Poland attacked Soviet Russia. It had failed to do so earlier, when the Bolsheviks were on the brink of the abyss and the blow might have been fatal. The Poles had been too afraid that the tsarist generals might win and that their country, robbed of its independence so often in the past, would revert to the Russian Empire.

  The death penalty was reintroduced immediately.

  “Any scoundrel who urges retreat will be shot. Any soldier who abandons his post will be shot,” read a directive from Trotsky.

  The Poles got as far as Kiev and were driven back.

  Then in the spring of 1920 a military putsch in Berlin was crushed and Lenin decided that events were repeating themselves: after the suppression of “Germany’s General Kornilov,” its October Revolution was next on the agenda. Lenin announced to the Ninth Party Congress that “the time is not far off when we shall be walking hand in hand with a German Soviet government.” That was why after the Red army had driven the Poles out of the Ukraine Lenin was in favor of attacking Poland. The Red army would march across that country to aid a Soviet Germany.

  Koba, who was eager to return to Moscow, spoke out against “certain comrades who not content just to defend our republic … declare that they can make peace only in a Red Soviet Warsaw.” Trotsky, knowing how weary the army was, also opposed the war. But Lenin was adamant, and at the beginning of July an army 150,000 strong under the command of the twenty-seven-year-old Tukhachevsky advanced from the Smolensk region. “Give us Warsaw” was the favorite slogan at the time. Covering twelve miles a day, they marched in quest of the world revolution. Wearing dirty foot rags and broken boots or bast clogs, many of them without uniform, they reached the Vistula. The buildings of Warsaw could already be seen from the nearest hill. But
the peasants whose grain they confiscated were for some reason less than delighted by their presence. Nor did the Germans raise the expected revolt. Meanwhile the Polish army had pulled itself together and began spilling a great deal of blood in self-defense.

  Koba fought against the Poles in the South. He was the commissar responsible for the southern army group jointly with army commander Yegorov. Budenny’s First Cavalry Army was their main striking force. In an attempt to reinforce Tukhachevsky’s attack, Trotsky ordered the southern front to transfer Budenny’s cavalry to him. Koba refused. He had long ago lost all enthusiasm for “pulling chestnuts out of the fire for other people,” and he had grandiose plans of his own. He had decided that while Tukhachevsky was trying to take Warsaw he himself would take Lvov, strike at Warsaw from there, and then, in a lightning move through Austria, break through into Germany to support the revolution. In the end, both armies—that of Tukhachevsky and that of Koba and Yegorov—would be repulsed and driven back into Russia.

  Lenin, however, forgave Koba even this and decided to send him against the Crimea. While the fighting was going on in Poland, Wrangel had emerged from the Crimea to occupy adjacent regions. In August 1920 it was decided to unite the two armies operating against Poland on the western front under Tukhachevsky’s command and at the same time to open up a southern front against Wrangel. Lenin instructed Koba to set up his headquarters on the southern front as a matter of urgency: “We have just put the separation of fronts through the Politburo. You are to concern yourself solely with Wrangel. The Wrangel danger is becoming enormous and there is a growing inclination in the Central Committee to make peace with bourgeois Poland. I beg you to consider the Wrangel situation carefully and let us know your conclusion.”

  Koba, however, was in such a hurry to get to Moscow that he replied almost rudely: “I got your note about the separation of fronts. The Politburo ought not to occupy itself with trivialities. I can go on working at the front here for two weeks at the maximum. Look for a replacement.” The familiar tone of the brave slave to duty offended by the unrelenting intrigues of his enemies. Lenin took pity on him. We hear echoes of his compassion in a letter to A. Joffe: “Take Stalin, for instance.… Fate has not once in the last three years permitted him to be Peoples Commissar either of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate or of the Commissariat for Nationalities.” Lenin corrected fate’s error. In September 1920 he recalled faithful Koba to Moscow.

  If Koba was eager to get back to the home front it was not just to be closer to the center of power. He was forty years old, and it was time he had a home of his own. His young wife was expecting a child. And it was high time to summon from Georgia that other child, the half-forgotten son born in that other life which had vanished forever. Back in Moscow, Koba heard that the Crimea had fallen. A line of unassailable trenches and the marshes of the sluggish river Sivash had barred the entry to the Crimea, but an avalanche of Red soldiers, using mountains of their own dead for cover, had launched a frontal attack and poured into the peninsula. Koba again learned the important lesson: Trotsky knew how to use people ruthlessly, and that was how he won his victories.

  Someday I will describe in full the exodus from the Crimea: the milling crowds in the ports, the embarkment on ships bound for Constantinople, the despair of those left behind, and my father, there on the quayside, deciding after all not to leave Russia. And how he managed to survive afterward. Because afterward came the massacre. Bela Kun, the leader of the Hungarian Revolution, who had taken refuge in Russia, wrote that “the Crimea is a bottle from which not a single counterrevolutionary will escape. The Crimea is three years behind in its revolutionary development, but we will quickly bring it up to date.” Koba saw how they managed it. Machine guns chattered for months on end and tens of thousands perished. Many of those executed were thrown into old wells dug long ago by the Genoese. Some victims-in-waiting were forced to dig their own graves. The stench of corpses hung over the Crimea. But the Crimea was purged of Whites.

  At the end of the year Koba had to endure yet another of Trotsky’s triumphs—the celebrations on the third anniversary of the October Revolution. They celebrated extravagantly, because this event coincided with victory in the Civil War and the final conquest of the country. A grandiose pageant was organized, with “The Night the Winter Palace Was Taken” as its theme. Ballet dancers, circus artists, machine gunners and other soldiers all had parts in it. The Aurora was to open the proceedings with a historic single round, but unfortunately it began firing shot after shot without a break: the cease-fire signal could not be given, because the telephone was out of order. It required a messenger on a bicycle to put an end to this farce. While the Aurora boomed away, soldiers of the Red army stormed the palace, over a barricade behind which ballerinas cast as members of the Women’s Battalion and circus artists impersonating the kadets were sheltering. At that point the palace was suddenly illuminated. Shadows appeared behind the white-curtained windows to produce the effect of fighting. A battle of silhouettes! By way of finale all the searchlights were beamed onto the banner, now red, fluttering over the Winter Palace.

  Those who had played a major part in the coup were all invited to the show. Koba was not among them. Next came a succession of formal meetings, and the newspapers published the reminiscences of heroes of the coup. Koba’s name was nowhere to be found. But he was unperturbed. He knew that the past had died along with the great utopia. All that was left was a ballet-and-circus extravaganza, with the Aurora’s cannon going mad. And shadows.

  THE LEADER’S LOVE

  The Leader knew how unfair it was. Lenin loved Koba. He knew that Trotsky and all the petty intellectuals of the Party only tried to be cruel. Their harshness was unnatural, hysterical, like their love for the Revolution. Had not Zinoviev said, “Revolution? The International? These are great events, but if they touch Paris I shall cry my eyes out.” But Koba was genuinely cruel, like the Revolution itself. He was as rough, as bloodthirsty, as treacherous as revolution itself, and as single-minded and primitive. For the sake of the Revolution he would set fire not just to Paris but to the whole world. Such was the picture of Koba drawn for Lenin by Koba himself. And there was something else just as important. The true revolutionary Koba never missed a chance to show his contempt for that caricature of a revolutionary Trotsky, forever Lenin’s brother and Lenin’s foe.

  No sooner had he returned from the front than Lenin’s favorite fell dangerously ill. For a time, Koba seemed likely to die. He was laid low by an acute attack of septic appendicitis. His exhausted organism had no resistance. He had spent his whole life languishing in exile, on the run, stumbling from jail to jail, and then on the front line. And always—work, work, work.

  Dr. V. Rozanov, who attended Koba, recalled that “the operation was a very serious one. As well as removing the appendix we had to carry out a major resection of the blind gut. It was difficult to guarantee the result of the operation.” Fyodor Alliluyev tells us that “the patient was so weak that they decided to operate on him under local anesthetic. But he was in so much pain that they were compelled to suspend the operation and give him chloroform. After that he lay there as gaunt and pale as death, almost transparent, bearing the imprint of a terrible weakness.” Dr. Rozanov adds, “Vladimir Ilyich rang me at the local hospital twice a day—morning and evening. He did not merely inquire about Stalin’s health, he asked for the most thorough report possible.” After the operation, when the danger was past, Lenin himself consulted Rozanov about Koba’s convalescence. He insisted on sending him to the mountains of his homeland, the Caucasus, “somewhere so remote that no one can bother him.”

  By 1921 Koba’s native Caucasus had been reconquered by the Bolsheviks. Armenia and Azerbaijan fell first, then came the end of independent Georgia. Koba’s old acquaintances Chkeidze and Tsereteli emigrated. Toward the end of May Koba, newly risen from his sickbed, flew to Nalchik, a town in the mountains of the northern Caucasus, to recuperate in a sanatorium.


  After nearly a month breathing the mountain air, he was his old self again. At the beginning of July he finally set out for Tiflis, at the request of Ordzhonikidze, the Bolshevik leader in the Caucasus. A turbulent plenary meeting of the Caucasian Bureau of the Party was in progress when he arrived. Koba supported Ordzhonikidze, who was devoted to him. While in Tiflis he saw his mother, for the first time in many years. And also his older son.

  Lenin, always solicitous, sent an angry telegram to Ordzhonikidze on July 4, inquiring by what right Stalin’s convalescence had been interrupted and asking to be sent the doctors’ report on his state of health. On August 8, Koba left for Moscow after making a full recovery.

  Throughout 1921 Lenin was tireless in his concern for Koba. Now that he had a newborn son, Vasily, in Moscow, Koba asked for a quieter apartment without explaining the situation. Lenin himself joined in his search for a new home:

  To Comrade Belenki, Guard Commander: Stalin’s present apartment in the Kremlin is one in which he can get no sleep.… I’m told that you have undertaken to move him to a quieter apartment. Please do this quickly.

  But the Kremlin was overpopulated by the new lords and masters, and Lenin decided to install Koba in the Great Kremlin Palace, in the historic state rooms. Nothing was too good for Koba. This was too much for Trotsky. His wife, who was in charge of the Kremlin museums, also protested. Lenin wrote her a placatory letter and suggested moving valuable furniture out of the rooms in question. In the end, Lenin’s obliging friend Serebryakov gave up his own apartment to Koba. In his tender concern for Koba Lenin had the Politburo adopt a special resolution “obliging Comrade Stalin to spend three days a week at his dacha.” It was in this period of tender affection that Lenin—half-joking, half in earnest—offered to marry Koba to his sister Maria. He was very surprised to learn that Koba was already married.