Stalin: A Biography

12. THE YEAR 1917

The months between the February and October Revolutions were momentous for Russia. Politics became free and visible. Petrograd was festooned with red flags and devoid of police. Its festivals were those of the socialist leadership of the capital’s Workers’ and Soldiers’ Soviet. The ‘Internationale’ was sung on ceremonial occasions. There was bravado everywhere and socialism was at a peak of popularity. The Provisional Government under the liberal Georgi Lvov ruled only by leave of the Petrograd Soviet. The political far right vanished after the fall of the monarchy. Order on the streets was maintained by ‘mass organisations’ such as the Red Guard. Military officers learned to consult their troops. Public life was dedicated to the service of the people. Camaraderie was demanded on all official occasions. If decisions had to be taken, the assumption was that they would be preceded by debate and that workers, peasants and soldiers should have influence over what was resolved. Soviets sprang up in towns across the country. Elected by the lower social orders, they intervened in public affairs whenever their leaders — the Mensheviks and the Social-Revolutionaries — felt that the bodies of central or local government contravened the agreement with the Provisional Government on universal civil freedom and defensive war.

Stalin worked with Lenin to prepare a conference of Bolsheviks later in April. He was one of many leading Bolsheviks in Petrograd and the provinces shifting their opinions under the impact of the debate started by Lenin. They were joining those other Bolsheviks who had always resented giving the slightest support to the Provisional Government. Several Mensheviks even converted to Bolshevism in disdain for their official leadership’s policy, and the entire Inter-District Organisation, which had previously been anti-Bolshevik, joined the Bolsheviks in May.¹ The gap between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks had always been wide but the original émigré split in 1903 had been followed by several attempts at reunification; and although the Prague Conference of 1912 had divided the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party yet again, Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in many Russian cities continued to co-operate with each other for many weeks after the February Revolution. But steadily the radical difference in policies counted and the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions definitively became entirely separate parties.

Stalin, even after accepting Lenin’s April Theses, did not adopt all the leader’s policies. Lenin demanded state ownership of the land. Stalin continued to argue that it would alienate the peasants who wished to have total control over the countryside.² The land, he insisted, should be transferred to the peasantry without conditions,³ and perhaps he thought that once Lenin gained direct experience of Russian conditions he would see the point. Stalin also shunned the more provocative of Lenin’s slogans on the war. Like Kamenev, Stalin omitted to call on soldiers and workers to turn the existing ‘imperialist war’ into a ‘European civil war’ between Europe’s proletariats and its bourgeoisies.⁴ Kamenev and Stalin understood that if the Bolsheviks were to increase their popularity, they had to stress that they were the only party in Russia which could bring about peace. Equally noteworthy was Stalin’s avoidance of terms such as ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’.⁵ He had his ears open to attitudes in society. Workers and soldiers saw the downfall of the monarchy as inaugurating an order of freedom and democracy. Ideas of dictatorship were regarded as characteristic of the monarchy overthrown in February 1917. Stalin defended his ideas — and it was not he but Lenin who eventually had to amend his position.⁶

Meanwhile the Provisional Government plunged into difficulties. The war dragged on and Russia’s armies appeared increasingly inferior to their German enemy. The dislocation of the economy worsened. Food supplies fell. Factories faced closures as metal, oil and other raw materials failed to be delivered. Banks ceased to bail out industrial enterprises. The civilian administrative system, which was already creaking under wartime strains, started to collapse. Transport and communication became unreliable. At the same time the demands of popular opinion intensified. Workers called for higher pay and secure employment. Soldiers in the garrisons supported a peace policy: they were horrified by the possibility of being transferred to the front line. Peasants wanted higher prices for their harvest; they also insisted on possession of all agricultural land and an end to the war. Shopkeepers and artisans demanded protection against the interests of big business. Ukrainians, Finns and Georgians wanted proof that the authorities in Petrograd were not putting them at a disadvantage. The Provisional Government made concessions. It introduced arbitration tribunals to industrial disputes. It increased prices paid for grain. It overlooked the insubordination of the garrisons. It granted massive autonomy to local organs of self-rule. It promised to hold elections to a constituent assembly at the earliest opportunity.

Ministers refused to sanction further reforms until after the defeat of the Central Powers. The problem manifest since the February Revolution was that the Provisional Government lacked the capacity to restrain those groups in society which demanded that reforms be introduced immediately. The Petrograd Soviet’s permission had been crucial in the establishment of the first cabinet, and the soviets, factory–workshop committees, army committees and village land communes proceeded to restrict the capacity of ministers to govern. The armed forces were disabled from enforcing the Provisional Government’s will by the insistence of garrison soldiers on ignoring orders they disliked. The police had always been useless at confronting civil disobedience — and anyway they had virtually disbanded themselves on the Imperial monarchy’s overthrow.

If Stalin had any doubts about following Lenin, they were dispelled by events in Petrograd. Minister of External Affairs Pavel Milyukov had sent a diplomatic note to London and Paris affirming that Russian war aims remained what they had been under Nicholas II. Since these aims included territorial expansion at the expense of the Ottoman Empire there was much popular revulsion among the workers and soldiers of the capital. The Provisional Government had come to power with the Petrograd Soviet’s support on the clear understanding that the war would be fought defensively and that expansionism had been disavowed. On 20–21 April a political demonstration against the cabinet was held by the Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionary leadership of the Petrograd Soviet. Similar demonstrations occurred in cities across the country. Some Bolsheviks in Petrograd called for armed uprising against the Provisional Government, and Lenin had to disown them as his party’s representatives. All the same the whole Milyukov affair played into Lenin’s hands. To many as yet unpersuaded Bolsheviks as well as to a rising number of workers and soldiers it appeared that he had been proved right and that the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries were to blame for having trusted the Provisional Government.

Opinion in Bolshevism turned definitively in Lenin’s favour as he gathered support from those who had been pushed aside by Kamenev and Stalin in March. Lenin achieved this by imposing his status and personality on listeners and readers, and he had the advantage that many veteran Bolsheviks, although they had not developed exactly his ideas on strategy, felt uneasy about offering even conditional support to the liberal-led Provisional Government.⁷ Kamenev too aligned himself with him. Lenin for his part abandoned some of his more outrageous slogans. He no longer demanded the transformation of ‘the imperialist war into a European civil war’. He temporarily ceased in public to urge ‘dictatorship’ and ‘revolutionary war’.⁸ Although Lenin had not yet made all the adjustments required by the Russian political environment, Kamenev believed that he was not the revolutionary fanatic he had seemed at the Finland Station. Stalin formed the same opinion. Putting aside his previous conciliatory attitude to the Provisional Government, he became an unequivocal advocate of Leninism. Milyukov completed the job for Lenin; and when the Bolshevik Party Conference started on 24 April, he knew that victory would be his.

There was a coming together of Lenin and Kamenev at the Conference to advocate unconditional opposition to the Provisional Government. They also demanded drastic measures to end the Great War. Lenin continued to promote his policy of land nationalisation and the Conference voted in his favour. Stalin, despite having put an opposing case in Pravda, held his tongue. He soon felt vindicated: Lenin became convinced in midsummer that the land should be handed over to the peasantry through ‘land socialisation’.

Stalin and Lenin had been allies on the national question since before the Great War and it was Stalin who gave the report to the Conference. Both sought to make the Bolsheviks attractive to non-Russians in the former Russian Empire. The result, though, was the Conference’s most contentious debate. The majority in the preparatory commission voted against Stalin and for Georgi Pyatakov. Most Bolsheviks did not like the commitment of Lenin and Stalin to national self-determination, including even the possibility of secession from the former Russian Empire. It seemed that official policy ignored internationalist principles and indulged nationalism; this appeared to neglect both global economic trends and the interests of the world’s working classes. Bolshevik policy supposedly ought to give proletarian revolution precedence over national self-determination. According to Lenin, Pyatakov underestimated the hatred for Russia and Russians in the borderlands. Hostility would be dissipated only if the Ukrainians and Finns were told they had the right to independence. He predicted that such an offer would allay anti-Russian feelings and reconcile not only Ukraine and Finland but also other non-Russian territories to continued union with Russia.

Stalin picked up these themes and added another. Whatever policy was formulated for the former Russian Empire, he maintained, would have implications abroad. If the Bolsheviks were seen to treat their national minorities decently, they would encourage movements of national liberation around the world. The policy would act as a ‘bridge between West and East’. Stalin’s stirring contribution won the day.⁹ He had needed support from Lenin and Zinoviev. Nevertheless he had acquitted himself well in the first report he had delivered to a party conference. He had not flinched when picked out for personal criticism. This had come from the veteran Georgian Bolshevik Pilipe Makharadze, who queried how Stalin would handle the ‘separatist aspirations’ of nations in the south Caucasus. Makharadze also wondered whether the establishment of local administrations on a national-territorial basis could solve the problem of the complex national intermingling in Georgia and elsewhere.¹⁰ At the very moment Stalin was enjoying himself as the party’s expert on the national question, another Georgian had got to his feet to challenge him. Stalin did not let his irritation show. He concentrated his fire on Pyatakov and Dzierżyński and ignored Makharadze’s barbed questions. Pyatakov was a young Bolshevik theorist who had criticised Lenin’s revolutionary strategy throughout the Great War; Dzierżyński had only recently joined the Bolsheviks from the Polish Marxist organisation and had never accepted Bolshevik official policy on the national question.

Without Lenin’s support, however, Stalin might still not have been elected to the Central Committee. Most delegates hardly knew him; it had to be spelled out that one of his other pseudonyms was Koba: not everyone yet knew him as Stalin. But his basic problem was the possibility that someone might repeat the objections made about him in March. Lenin stepped in: ‘We’ve known com[rade] Koba for very many years. We used to see him in Kraków where we had our Bureau. His activity in the Caucasus was important. He’s a good official in all sorts of responsible work.’ With this recommendation he could breathe again and did not have to face the opposition confronting lesser-known but still controversial candidates such as Teodorovich, Nogin, Bubnov and Glebov-Avilov. Nor did Lenin have to make quite the lengthy speech of defence he had to devote to Kamenev’s candidature. Stalin had climbed to the party’s summit: he came third after Lenin and Zinoviev in the votes for the Central Committee.¹¹

The intensity of political work had been hectic from the moment Stalin had reached Petrograd. A typical day would involve meetings at the Central Committee’s offices at the Kseshinskaya mansion. Often these would last into the night. Stalin was not one of the party’s orators; according to one of his associates, ‘he avoided making speeches at mass meetings’.¹² His failings were obvious. His voice did not carry without a microphone¹³ and he spoke with a thick accent. He did not declaim or swagger like a natural actor. If a speaker from the Central Committee was required, the choice would usually fall upon Grigori Zinoviev (or Lev Trotski and Anatoli Lunacharski who joined the Bolsheviks in summer). Occasionally Lenin, too, turned out for an open meeting after conquering his own initial diffidence. Stalin steered clear of such functions unless specially requested by the Central Committee. Policy-making and organisation were his preferred activities. He also liked tasks associated with the editing of Pravda. Although his work was done behind the scenes, it was not limited to the internal administration of the party. That role fell to Yakov Sverdlov, who headed the Central Committee Secretariat. Stalin was rising in the party without the rest of the party yet noticing. But those who concluded that he was a ‘grey blank’ simply demonstrated their ignorance of central party life.¹⁴

He did not get round to moving in with the Alliluev family as agreed in March.¹⁵ Yet they had kept the room free for him, and the Alliluev youngsters — especially Anna and Nadya — were eagerly looking forward to his coming. Like other Bolshevik leaders, he slept where and when he could. He was making new friends. He also took out women he fancied. It was a disorderly, exhausting existence, but it was not one without its social pleasures.

Meanwhile the Provisional Government failed to keep clear of trouble after April. Among its problems was conflict between its liberal and socialist members. The Mensheviks Irakli Tsereteli and Mikhail Skobelev and the Socialist-Revolutionary Viktor Chernov insisted that regional self-rule should be granted to Finland and Ukraine. The Kadets walked out on 2 July rather than accept cabinet responsibility. The Socialist-Revolutionary Minister of Military Affairs, Alexander Kerenski, had started an offensive against the Central Powers a few days earlier. Political crisis ensued. The Bolsheviks, having embarrassed the Provisional Government in spring, wanted to test the political waters again. They organised a massive protest demonstration on 4 July. Their slogan was ‘All Power to the Soviets!’ and they aimed to supplant the government. Kronstadt garrison sailors were invited to participate with their weapons in hand. The Provisional Government, supported by the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, banned the demonstration. But such was the popular discontent that crowds went on gathering in Petrograd. At the last moment the Bolshevik Central Committee feared the use of superior force by the authorities and strove to call off the demonstration. Yet the Provisional Government had had enough. Lenin’s financial connections with the German government were exposed and a warrant was issued for his arrest. Petrograd Bolsheviks went into hiding as leading figures such as Lev Trotski, Lev Kamenev and Alexandra Kollontai were taken into custody.

The Alliluevs put their vacant room at Lenin’s disposal. On the run from the authorities in the ‘July Days’ he took refuge at first with the Bolshevik activist Nikolai Poletaev. But Poletaev as a former Duma deputy was well known, and Lenin was grateful to move in with the Alliluevs. He stayed there for a few days before arranging to flee north to the countryside at Razliv. Disguise was essential. He decided to get rid of his beard and moustache. Stalin, who arrived at the Alliluevs’ to see him off, performed the task of the party’s barber-in-chief.¹⁶ (It would be some years before he became its master butcher.) When Lenin looked in the mirror he was pleased: ‘It’s very good now. I look just like a Finnish peasant, and there’s hardly anyone who will recognise me.’¹⁷ While Lenin stayed with the Alliluevs, Stalin moved in with fellow bachelors Vyacheslav Molotov and Pëtr Zalutski — as well as with Ivan Smilga and his wife — in a largish apartment on Petrograd Side.¹⁸ Molotov and Stalin put their disputes behind them after Stalin admitted: ‘You were the nearest of all to Lenin in the initial stage, in April.’¹⁹ There were new strains, however, on their relationship. In old age Molotov recalled that when they shared a flat, Stalin poached a girlfriend — a certain Marusya — off him.²⁰

A week or so after Lenin’s departure Stalin, despite concern that his presence might endanger the family,²¹ moved in with the Alliluevs. By then they had relocated to a more central district and were renting a bigger apartment at 17 Tenth Rozhdestvenskaya Street. There were three rooms, a kitchen and bathroom and the steps into the whole building were ‘luxurious’ and were manned by a uniformed concierge. There was a lift to the fifth floor where the Alliluevs lived. Stalin was given his own room.²² A lot of the time he was alone, as Anna and Nadya had left Petrograd for the summer vacation and Fedya was working as hard as their parents Sergei and Olga.²³ He brought his few possessions — manuscripts, books and a few clothes — in a wicker suitcase. Olga fussed over Joseph (as she called him), insisting that he get a new suit. When Joseph pleaded lack of time, she and her sister Maria went out and bought him one. He asked them to put some thermal pads into the jacket. He also said his throat infection made it uncomfortable to wear a normal collar and tie. Olga and Maria were more than happy to indulge him, and Maria sewed two vertical velvet collars on to the suit. Although he looked no dandy, his appearance certainly became smarter.²⁴

Nadya returned to Petrograd for the start of the school term at summer’s end. She turned sixteen only in September but was already fed up with schooling and had to put up with a certain amount of teasing because of her family’s Bolshevik sympathies.²⁵ Coming back to the flat on Tenth Rozhdestvenskaya, she developed a passion for housework. One day the noise of the tables and chairs being moved around brought Stalin out from his room: ‘What’s happening here? What’s all the commotion? Oh, it’s you! Now I can see that a real housewife has got down to work!’ This flummoxed Nadya, who asked: ‘What’s up? Is that a bad thing?’ Quickly Stalin reassured her: ‘Definitely not! It’s a good thing! Bring some order, go ahead… Just show the rest of them!’²⁶

Stalin liked a woman who looked after the household. He also expected and needed to be admired, and was searching for an enclave in his very busy political life where he could relax. Perhaps he was beginning to take a fancy to Nadya. He might be more than twice her age, but this had not inhibited him with adolescent girls in Siberia. For the time being, however, he went on acting almost as a father to her in the evenings. He read Chekhov’s ‘Chameleon’ and other short stories to the young Alliluevs and recited Pushkin. Maxim Gorki was another favourite. When friends of the youngsters turned up, he was fun with them too.²⁷ Before turning into bed, he resumed his work; and sometimes he was so tired that he dropped off to sleep with pipe still alight: he once singed the sheets and nearly set the flat ablaze.²⁸ But the blend of work and family atmosphere was congenial to him. It was a new experience (if we except the periods of exile). He was in his late thirties. He had seldom had a settled life among people who were fond of him. Among the Alliluevs he found a sanctuary at last. A gap in his feelings was being closed; it was scarcely a surprise that he soon took one of the family as his wife.

Still, though, he had to do much for himself. The Alliluev family was busy every day, and Stalin’s movements were anyway unpredictable. He therefore bought his food on the way back from work. At the corner of Tenth Rozhdestvenskaya Street he would stop at a stall and buy a loaf of bread and some smoked fish or a sausage. This would constitute his dinner — or, if party business had been hectic, his missed lunch.²⁹

Politics, though, was the greater object of his affections. He found his deepest urges satisfied in power and prestige. He had not given up his ambitions as a Marxist theorist. But his current inclinations were towards practical matters such as helping to lead the Central Committee, edit Pravda and plan the manoeuvres of the Bolsheviks in Petrograd. The unpleasantness of his reception by the Russian Bureau in March was far behind him; he was solidly established in the central party leadership. He worked madly. His jobs in the Central Committee and at Pravda involved so much writing with pen or pencil that calluses appeared on the fingers of his right hand.³⁰ With the work came authority. Lenin and Zinoviev were fugitives. Trotski, Kamenev and Kollontai were in prison. The party leadership fell into the hands of Stalin and Sverdlov since they were the only members of the inner core of the Central Committee who were still at liberty. Such a situation would have disconcerted many. But Stalin and Sverdlov overbrimmed with confidence as they sought to repair the damage caused to the party by the July Days — and Stalin relished the chance to show that he had political skills which few in the party had as yet detected in him.

By the start of the clandestine Sixth Party Congress in late July there was no doubt about Stalin’s eminence among Bolsheviks. He was chosen by the Central Committee to give its official report as well as another ‘on the political situation’. Frissons of past mutual hostility no longer bothered Stalin and Sverdlov. As Central Committee Secretary, Sverdlov did not represent a proper rival to Stalin. Indeed Sverdlov was an administrator par excellence and although could also be called upon to give rousing speeches in his booming bass voice, he had no aspirations to an independent political persona: he left it to others to think up policies. This was a partner after Stalin’s own heart as he sought the limelight in the Bolshevik party.

The July Days in Petrograd had had a damaging impact on the party in the provinces, and delegates from the provinces grumbled that the Central Committee had mishandled affairs in the capital and overlooked the needs of the rest of the party. Stalin stood up undaunted. The criticism, he noted:

Having dealt with the objections, he insisted that the Congress should focus on future strategy. At present the soviets remained under the control of the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, and Lenin — still hiding in Finland — wanted to drop the slogan of ‘All Power to the Soviets!’ Stalin quietly resisted this move. He understood that if the party was going to gain popularity it needed to project itself as the eager agent of the ‘mass organisations’.

Stalin also made a notable contribution to the debate ‘on the political situation’. Yevgeni Preobrazhenski, a promising young delegate (who was to join the Central Committee in 1919), wanted a greater emphasis on the need for revolutions elsewhere in Europe. Stalin disagreed:³¹

This statement acquired significance several years later when Stalin, by then the Party General Secretary, demanded that the focus of party policies should be directed at constructing ‘socialism in a single country’.³²

Politics were changing fast outside the Bolshevik party. Alexander Kerenski, who became premier after the July Days, sought to restore political order. He held a State Conference to rally support from parties and other public organisations. Among those who were well received at the State Conference in right-wing political circles was Kerenski’s Commander-in-Chief Lavr Kornilov. Kerenski and Kornilov hatched a plan to transfer frontline units to Petrograd (where the troops in the garrisons were notoriously unreliable). At the last moment, on 28 August, Kerenski unjustifiably suspected Kornilov of plotting a coup d’état. Kornilov was ordered to keep his forces at the front. This convinced Kornilov that Kerenski was no longer fit to govern the country at war, and he decided to overthrow him. Panic ensued in Petrograd. Kerenski’s military resources were weak and he relied on socialist agitators to meet the trains and dissuade the troops from obeying Kornilov. Among the much-needed agitators were Bolsheviks as well as Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries. Kornilov was arrested. Kerenski survived, but already his days looked numbered.

And Bolshevism grew again as an open political force. Yet it did not do this any longer under the dual leadership of Stalin and Sverdlov. On 30 August the Central Committee considered a confidential request from Zinoviev to return to work. There were risks in this. Not only might Zinoviev be arrested but also his restoration to the Central Committee might provoke a renewed attack on the party by the authorities. Zinoviev was told that the Central Committee was ‘making every effort for him to be as close as possible to party and newspaper work’.³³ This did not put off Zinoviev, and he attended the meeting of the Central Committee the very next day.³⁴ The Central Committee recognised it needed a revolutionary leader of his talent. The same was true of Trotski even if many Bolsheviks continued to regard him with hostility. Released from prison, he was itching to have a public impact. On 6 September the Central Committee made fresh dispositions of personnel. The Pravda editorial board, previously led by Stalin, was expanded to include Trotski, Kamenev, Sokolnikov and a Petersburg Committee representative. Trotski was also assigned to help edit Prosveshchenie and to join the Central Executive Committee of the Congress of Soviets. Although Stalin too was assigned to the Central Executive Committee, his deficiencies as an orator meant that Trotski would be the party’s leading figure on it.³⁵

Stalin’s weeks in the political sun were over. The next task for the Central Committee was to organise the Bolsheviks for the Democratic Conference convoked by Alexander Kerenski. This was set to occur in the Alexandrinski Theatre on 14 September and Kamenev was selected as the main Bolshevik speaker. Stalin joined Trotski, Kamenev, Milyutin and Rykov on the commission which drew up the party’s declaration.³⁶ The Democratic State Conference brought together the socialist parties from across the former empire. Among Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries there was rising discontent about the Provisional Government’s incapacity to alleviate social distress and refusal to intensify reform. Alexander Kerenski was becoming almost as much their bête noire as he already was for the Bolsheviks. The Central Committee’s strategy was to persuade delegates to the Democratic State Conference that Kerenski needed to be replaced by a socialist government. The Mensheviks and the Socialist-Revolutionaries remained in charge of most soviets in urban Russia even though both the Petrograd Soviet and Moscow Soviet had fallen into the hands of the Bolsheviks. The declaration therefore called on all socialists, including Bolsheviks, to unite their forces in pursuit of common objectives. This was agreed on the assumption that it was in line with the strategic compromise accepted by Lenin in Finland.

The specific demands of the Bolsheviks were comprehensive, and these would inevitably lead to disputes with the Mensheviks and the Socialist-Revolutionaries. While aiming to set up an all-socialist administration, the Bolshevik Central Committee insisted that the policies should be radical. The landed gentry needed to be expropriated. Workers’ control should be introduced and large-scale industry nationalised. A ‘universal democratic peace’ should be offered to the peoples of the world. National self-determination had to be proclaimed. A system of comprehensive social insurance should be established.³⁷

What the Central Committee had not bargained for was that Lenin had ceased to believe — if ever he had believed — in the possibility of peaceful revolutionary development. On 15 September the Central Committee discussed a letter from him demanding the start of preparations for armed insurrection.³⁸ He said nothing about an all-socialist coalition. The thing for him was to overthrow Kerenski and set up a revolutionary administration. His frustrations in hiding were poured into writing. Articles flowed from his pen in Helsinki, each stipulating that the Bolshevik caucus should make no compromise at the Democratic State Conference: the time for talking had ended. In ‘Marxism and Insurrection’ he called for ‘the immediate transfer of power to the revolutionary democrats headed by the revolutionary proletariat’.³⁹ His summons to uprising caused consternation among several Central Committee members. At the same Central Committee meeting there was heated discussion, and Stalin confirmed his support for Lenin by proposing that the letter be sent to the most important party organisations for discussion; but the Central Committee in the end decided to burn the letter and keep only one copy for the records. This was agreed by a vote of six to four.⁴⁰

Bolshevik party policy on the central question of governmental power was in flux. Radical opinion was strengthened by Trotski’s return to open activity. Throughout the country, moreover, there were many socialist leaders and activists who sought the Provisional Government’s removal. More and more city soviets, trade unions and factory-workshop committees were acquiring Bolshevik majorities in late September and early October. Sooner or later the question had to be answered: were the Bolsheviks going to seize power? If so, when would they do it? And if they did it, would they act alone or in some kind of socialist alliance? Stalin, though, had made his choice. He no longer saw the point of compromise of any kind with the Mensheviks. (Trotski had made the same transition.) His future lay with the Bolsheviks and with them alone. His position in the Bolshevik Central Committee was firmly held but he had next to no political authority outside its framework. He was one of the most influential yet one of the most obscure of Bolsheviks. If he had died in September 1917, no one — surely — would have written his biography.

13. OCTOBER

Petrograd in October 1917 was more placid than at any time since the fall of the Romanovs. The schools and offices functioned without interruption. Shops opened normally. The post and tram systems operated smoothly. The weather was getting brisk; people were wrapping up well before going outdoors but as yet there was no snow. Calm prevailed in the Russian capital and heady mass meetings were a thing of the past. Leading Bolsheviks who plotted insurrection had reason to worry. What if Lenin was wrong and the popular mood had turned away from supporting a revolutionary change of regime?

Yet the subterranean strata of politics were shifting. Lenin, holed up in Helsinki since mid-July, was frustrated by the Bolshevik Central Committee’s refusal to organise an uprising against the Provisional Government. Instinct told him the time for action had arrived, and he decided to take a chance and return secretly to Petrograd. Bolshevik leaders who met him secretly in the capital had to weather the anger of his demands for an insurrection. He was softening them up for a confrontation at the Central Committee on 10 October. Twelve members attended. Everyone knew there would be trouble. The minutes of the meeting were skimpily recorded — and this means that no trace survives of Stalin’s contribution. At any rate the crucial statements appear to have been made by Sverdlov and Lenin. Sverdlov as Central Committee Secretary was keeper of information on the party’s organisational condition and political appeal across the country. Convinced by Lenin’s arguments in favour of an uprising, he put a positive gloss on his report by stressing the rise in party membership. This gave Lenin his chance: ‘The majority of the population is now behind us. Politically the situation is entirely mature for a transfer of power.’¹

Two Bolshevik Central Committee members opposed Lenin. One was Kamenev, who had never been a radical among Bolsheviks either in 1917 or earlier in the war. The other, surprisingly, was Zinoviev, who had been Lenin’s adjutant in the emigration before the February Revolution.² Kamenev and Zinoviev together carried the dispute to Lenin. They dismissed his extreme optimism and pointed out that many urban soviets had yet to be won by the Bolsheviks. They stressed that the party’s electoral following was all but confined to the towns. They cast doubt on the assumption that the rest of Europe was on the brink of revolution. They feared the outbreak of civil war in Russia.³

Yet the vote went in favour of Lenin by ten votes to two. Stalin was among his supporters; he had left his association with Kamenev entirely behind him. He was convinced that the time had come to seize power. His mood can be gauged by the article he published in Rabochi put (‘The Workers’ Way’ — this was the successor to Pravda and was under his editorial control). Stalin had high hopes:⁴

This was not an explicit call for insurrection. Stalin did not want to present Kerenski with a motive to close down the Bolshevik press again; but he warned that Kornilov’s action had been the first attempt at counter-revolution and that more would follow. Collaborationism, by which he meant the assistance given to the Provisional Government by Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, had been found politically bankrupt. The Kadets had been shown to be ‘a nest of and a spreader of counter-revolution’. Soviets and army committees should prepare themselves to repel ‘a second conspiracy of the Kornilovshchina’. Stalin was adamant that ‘the full might of the great Revolution’ was available for the struggle.⁵

The Central Committee met again on 16 October. Representatives of Bolshevik party bodies in Petrograd and the provinces were invited to attend. Lenin again made the case for insurrection. He claimed that the moment was ripe even though there were reports that workers were unenthusiastic about a seizure of power. Lenin argued that ‘the mood of the masses’ was always changeable and that the party should be guided by evidence that ‘the entire European proletariat’ was on its side. He added that the Russian working class had come over to the Bolsheviks since the Kornilov Affair. Ranged against him were Central Committee members inspired by Kamenev and Zinoviev. Lenin’s critics denied that the Bolsheviks were strong enough to move against the Provisional Government and that a revolutionary situation existed elsewhere in Europe. Even Petrograd was an insecure citadel for Bolshevism. Zinoviev maintained: ‘We don’t have the right to take the risk and gamble everything at once.’⁶

Stalin supported Lenin:⁷

He called upon the Central Committee to have ‘more faith’: ‘There are two lines here: one line holds a course for the victory of revolution and relies on Europe, the other doesn’t believe in revolution and counts merely upon staying as an opposition.’⁸ Sverdlov and other Central Committee members also came to Lenin’s aid; and although Trotski was absent because of his duties in the Military-Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet, Lenin won the debate after midnight. The voting again went ten to two in his favour.

Lenin went back into hiding and sent furious letters to comrades in the Smolny Institute. This was the former girls’ secondary school in the centre of the capital where the Petrograd Soviet and the central bodies of the various parties — including the Bolsheviks — were based. Lenin was keeping up the pressure for armed action. Kerenski was considering his options and came to the conclusion that drastic action was required before the Bolsheviks moved against him. Tension rose on 18 October when Kamenev breached party discipline by stating the case against insurrection in the radical left-wing newspaper Novaya zhizn (‘New Life’).⁹ While not revealing precisely what the Bolshevik Central Committee had decided, he dropped very heavy hints. Lenin wrote to the Smolny Institute demanding the expulsion of the ‘strike-breakers’ Kamenev and Zinoviev from the party.¹⁰ On 19 October Zinoviev entered the proceedings with a letter to Rabochi put. Its contents were at variance with the position he had so recently espoused. Zinoviev claimed that Lenin had misrepresented his position and that Bolsheviks should ‘close ranks and postpone our disputes until circumstances are more propitious’.¹¹ Quite what was intended by Zinoviev is unclear. Perhaps he wanted to be able to go on arguing the case in the Central Committee (whereas Kamenev had undeniably breached confidentiality and jeopardised the party’s security).

This spat fell into the lap of Stalin as chief editor of Rabochi put. He decided to accept Zinoviev’s conciliatory move and print his letter.¹² But neither Zinoviev nor Stalin explained how Kamenev and Zinoviev as opponents of armed action could work with Lenin, Trotski and those committed to insurrection. On 20 October the Central Committee adjudicated. It was a fiery session and the first occasion when Stalin and Trotski seriously fell out with each other. Trotski was blunt. Stalin, he insisted, had been out of order in publishing Zinoviev’s letter. Sokolnikov, Stalin’s editor of Rabochi put, denied involvement in the editorial decision. Stalin stood exposed as the person responsible.¹³ Kamenev resigned from the Central Committee in despair at the policy of insurrection. Stalin continued to support Lenin’s policy, but the indignities of the debate induced him to present his resignation from the editorial board.¹⁴

He recovered his poise only when his request was rejected. This seemed the end of the matter; nobody knew how deeply he resented any shock to his self-esteem — and Trotski in 1940 was to pay the ultimate personal price. In terms of Bolshevik political strategy it remains unclear why Stalin was indulgent to Kamenev and Zinoviev. He never explained his thinking. But it would be in accord with his usual attitude to regard Kamenev and Zinoviev as allies in the struggle to reduce Trotski’s influence to a minimum. Lenin’s growing penchant for Trotski was a threat to the authority of Central Committee veterans. Another possibility is that Stalin sensed that the opponents of insurrection would ultimately stay with the party. Milyutin quickly moved back into line with official policy. Perhaps Stalin believed that a disunited party could not carry through the necessary armed manoeuvres against the Provisional Government. At any rate it was on his best form that he returned to the Central Committee on 21 October. Stalin, not Trotski, drew up the agenda for the forthcoming Second Congress of Soviets. His scheme marked down Lenin to speak on ‘land, war and power’, Milyutin on workers’ control, Trotski on ‘the current situation’ and Stalin himself on the ‘national question’.¹⁵

At the same Central Committee meeting Stalin was included in the list of ten members deputed to reinforce the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet. He was at the centre of political operations.¹⁶ Already he belonged to the Military-Revolutionary Committee. He also had a vibrant influence in the Party Central Committee and, despite the contretemps over Zinoviev, was among its most trusted leaders.

The Provisional Government was the first to act in the contest with the Bolsheviks. On the morning of 24 October, on Kerenski’s orders, troops arrived at the premises of Soldat and Rabochi put, broke some machinery and seized equipment. Stalin was present. He watched as the edition which he had signed into print was seized and an armed guard stationed at the door. He can hardly have been surprised by Kerenski’s measures. Stalin’s anonymous editorial had stated:¹⁷

Kishkin was Minister of Internal Affairs, Konovalov the Minister of Industry. Stalin recommended readers to ‘organise your meetings and elect your delegations’, ending with the invocation: ‘If all of you act solidly and staunchly, nobody will dare to resist the will of the people.’¹⁸ The revolutionary intent was obvious even if Stalin pragmatically refrained from spelling it out.

Presumably it was his editorial duties that prevented him from attending the Central Committee on the same day. Trotski too was absent, but this did not inhibit him from denigrating Stalin as a man who avoided participation in the decisions and activities connected with the seizure of power.¹⁹ The story got around — and has kept its currency — that Stalin was ‘the man who missed the revolution’.²⁰ Proof was thought to lie in the assignments given by the Central Committee to its own members. Here is the list of assignments:²¹

Trotski thought this demonstrated the marginality of Joseph Stalin to the historic occasion being planned.

Yet if inclusion on the list was crucial, why were Trotski and Lenin omitted? And if commitment to the insurrection was a criterion, why did the Central Committee involve Kamenev? The point was that Lenin had to remain in hiding and Trotski was busy in the Military-Revolutionary Committee. Stalin as newspaper editor also had tasks which preoccupied him, and these tasks were not unimportant. As soon as he had the time, he returned to the Smolny Institute and rejoined his leading comrades. There he was instantly given a job, being sent with Trotski to brief the Bolshevik delegates who had arrived in the building for the Second Congress of Soviets. Stalin spoke about information coming into the Central Committee offices. He emphasised the support available for the insurrection from the armed forces as well as the disarray in the Provisional Government. Stalin and Trotski performed their task well. There was recognition in the Central Committee of the need for tactical finesse. A premature rising was to be avoided; and in order to gain the acquiescence of the Left SRs it was sensible to act as if every measure was merely an attempt to defend the interests of the Revolution against its militant enemies.²²

The Petrograd situation was dangerously fluid. Troops were on their way from outside the capital to help the Military-Revolutionary Committee, which already controlled the central post office. Stalin was confident that facilities could be established to restore Rabochi put despite the raid on the press earlier in the day.²³ Everything would depend on the balance of forces assembled next day by the Military-Revolutionary Committee and the Provisional Government. Kerenski faced a decisive trial of strength.

Stalin went back to the Alliluevs’ apartment for the night. There was no time for jokes or story-telling. He was tired out. Yet he had carried out his duties more than satisfactorily. Anna Allilueva heard him saying: ‘Yes, everything’s ready. We take action tomorrow. We’ve got all the city districts in our hands. We shall seize power!’²⁴ He lay down for the last few hours of undisturbed rest he would have for several days. He did not sleep very long. An emergency Central Committee meeting was called before dawn on 25 October and Stalin had to be present. Even the ‘strike-breakers’ Kamenev and Zinoviev attended. The minutes have not survived the October Revolution, but the agenda must surely have been devoted to the practical side of seizing power. The military planning was finalised and discussion took place about the new revolutionary government, its personnel and its decrees. Lenin was charged with drafting decrees on land and peace. When the moment came, the Council of People’s Commissars had to be able to make its purposes clear.²⁵

The fact that Stalin was not asked to direct any armed activity has perpetuated a legend that he counted for nothing in the Central Committee. This is to ignore the broader scope of the meeting. The Military-Revolutionary Committee had already made its dispositions of the garrisons and Red Guards. Stalin’s functions had previously precluded him from involvement in such activity and it would have been folly to insert him at the last moment. Yet the meeting also deliberated on what was to happen when the Provisional Government was declared overthrown later in the day. Stalin took part in the deliberations as light began to dawn. Already he knew he would have immense tasks to discharge when daylight came.²⁶ Expectancy intensified. He and his Central Committee comrades snatched food and drink as they talked. They went on consulting each other. They greeted messengers from all over Petrograd and sent others out on errands. Although their eyes were red with lack of sleep, their concentration was acute. This was the time of their lives. The Dictatorship of the Proletariat was about to be proclaimed and Revolution was going to spread across Russia and would soon break out in Europe.

The events of 25 October 1917 were historic by any standard. Acting through the Military-Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet, Trotski and other Bolshevik leaders controlled the garrisons of the capital and directed troops loyal to them to seize post and telegraph offices, government buildings and the Winter Palace. In the night of the 24th– 25th Lenin returned to the Smolny Institute to resume command of the Central Committee. It was he who coaxed and ordered Bolsheviks to stick to the agreed purpose. Power had to be seized without delay. Across the capital the Military-Revolutionary Committee secured important buildings of administration and communications. Meanwhile hundreds of delegates had gathered for the opening of the Second Congress of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. At Lenin’s insistence the overthrow of the Provisional Government was brought forward. He sensed there might be trouble at the Congress if the seizure of power were not a fait accompli, and he continued to cajole his Central Committee comrades into action. The Provisional Government was no more. Although the Bolsheviks were not an absolute majority at the Congress, they were easily the largest party — and the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries were so annoyed by the night’s events that they walked out. Power fell comfortably into the hand of the Bolshevik party.

Stalin had no role visible to the public eye. He did not speak at the Congress. He did not direct the Military-Revolutionary Committee. He did not move around Petrograd. Much as he had enjoyed the politics of revolution in earlier months, he was little to be seen on that historic night. Characteristically he got on with his assignments and did not poke his nose into the business of others. Here is the testimony of Fëdor Alliluev:²⁷

Such joviality seems odd only if the later myths about him are believed. When he came back from Siberia, acquaintances had warned of the unpleasant features in his character, and these had been discussed at the April Party Conference. But he had gained a better reputation in following months. Not once did he come to notice for bad temper, insensitivity or egocentricity. If anything was held against him, it was that he was too supportive towards Lenin on the national question.

He had done his jobs — important party jobs — with diligence and efficiency. With Sverdlov he had run the Central Committee in July and August. He had edited the central party newspaper through to the seizure of power in October. Since April he had helped to bring about the pragmatic adjustment of party policy to popular demands. He felt at home in the environment of revolutionary Russia; and when he came back to the Alliluev flat he was greeted by admirers. He wrote, edited, discussed and planned with eagerness.

The composition of the new revolutionary authority reflected this. The Council of People’s Commissars — or Sovnarkom in its Russian acronymic form — was announced on 26 October. The title was a joint idea of Lenin and Trotski. Lenin was delighted: ‘That’s wonderful: it has the terrible smell of revolution!’²⁸ The Bolsheviks wanted to avoid associating themselves with ‘capitalist’ political culture with its cabinets, ministers and portfolios. There would not be a premier but a chairman. This would be Lenin. The People’s Commissar for External Affairs would be Trotski. Rykov, Shlyapnikov, Lunacharski, Milyutin and Nogin were other original members. Stalin too was on the list. His post was newly invented and had no precedent under Nicholas II or Kerenski. Stalin was to be People’s Commissar for Nationalities’ Affairs. Although his functions and powers were yet to be defined, the basic objective was to set up an institution with a view towards winning over the non-Russians in the former empire to the side of Sovnarkom. When Pravda resumed publication, Stalin was relieved of the editorship. His energies had to be reserved for the Central Committee, Sovnarkom and his own People’s Commissariat. Stalin’s position at the centre of revolutionary politics was confirmed.

Initially it had been Lenin’s hope to share posts with the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, who were impressed by the determination of the Bolsheviks to impose immediate agrarian reform benefiting the peasantry. But negotiations quickly stalled. Lenin was less eager to have a coalition with the Mensheviks and the other Socialist-Revolutionaries. But many in the Bolshevik Central Committee felt otherwise; indeed most Bolsheviks in Petrograd as well as in the provinces assumed that the overthrow of the Provisional Government had been made in the cause of establishing a revolutionary government uniting all socialist parties. For several days the Bolshevik Central Committee engaged in talks with them. Lenin and Trotski wanted them to break down; and when this duly occurred, several People’s Commissars indicated their disgust by resigning from Sovnarkom. These included Rykov, Milyutin and Nogin. All this occurred against a background of political and military emergency. The Menshevik-led railwaymen’s union threatened to strike until such time as a broad coalition was formed. Kerenski, having escaped from the Winter Palace, rallied a force of Cossacks and moved on Petrograd. In the provincial cities there was armed conflict as Bolsheviks seeking to support Sovnarkom confronted their adversaries.

The railwaymen failed to show the required determination, and Kerenski was defeated on the Pulkovo Heights. The collapse of the coalition talks, however much he himself had been to blame, gave Lenin the pretext to consolidate a purely Bolshevik central government. In November the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries recognised the practical situation and agreed to join Sovnarkom as the junior partner in a two-party coalition. Lenin came to see Stalin in an ever brighter light. Stalin never wavered. Lenin asked him to explain the official party line to Bolsheviks who had come to Petrograd for the Second Congress of Soviets.²⁹ He also got him to co-sign Sovnarkom decrees confirming the closure of newspapers hostile to the revolutionary government.³⁰ Stalin had resisted the calls to walk out of Sovnarkom when the Bolsheviks attained a monopoly of power. Such individuals were not legion in the Bolshevik Central Committee. Lenin needed all the available talent; and being keen to dominate Sovnarkom, he did not find it disadvantageous to have Stalin and others as a counterweight to the charismatic Trotski.

14. PEOPLE’S COMMISSAR

The decree announcing his appointment as People’s Commissar for Nationalities’ Affairs gave his surname as Dzughashvili-Stalin. The publicity gratified a man as yet unknown to most citizens. Lenin and Trotski were the outstanding figures in Sovnarkom and the Bolshevik Central Committee; Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin and Lunacharski were also famous. Despite his newly achieved prominence, however, Stalin continued to work in the shadow of the other leaders. Fëdor Alliluev, who was his first personal assistant, was to recall:¹

Stalin acknowledged that others had gained greater acclaim between the February and October Revolutions. He admitted he was not much of an orator. But he turned this into a scalpel to cut his rivals. In his estimation, he did not boast or show off but concentrated on practical deeds.² But Stalin liked to say such things about himself rather than hear them from other people, and Fëdor’s writing was consigned to the archives unpublished.

Stalin needed his cunning. His institution not only lacked personnel: it did not even have finance or its own offices. Its staff had to work from rooms in the Smolny Institute for want of anything more spacious. Funds remained short because all the bank workers were on strike. Stalin sent his deputy Stanisław Pestkowski to plead for a subvention from Trotski, who had got hold of the banknotes from the main safe at the former Ministry of Foreign Affairs. When Stalin and Pestkowski at last sequestered a suitable building, they pinned a crude notice on the wall to claim it for the People’s Commissariat of Nationalities’ Affairs.³

Things were no better after the Soviet government transferred itself to Moscow in March 1918 in order to move out of the range of Germany’s immediate military menace. Offices were assigned to the People’s Commissariat in two separate buildings on different streets despite Stalin’s protest. He resorted to the desperate measure of commandeering the Great Siberian Hotel on Zlatoustinskaya Street. But the Supreme Council of the People’s Economy, headed by Nikolai Osinski, had beaten him to it. Stalin and Pestkowski did not take this lying down. They tore down Osinski’s notice and put up their own. Lighting matches to find their way, they entered the building from the back. But Osinski complained to Sovnarkom and Stalin had to move out. ‘This was one of the few cases,’ Pestkowski recalled, ‘when Stalin suffered defeat.’⁴ It was even difficult to gather personnel. Most Bolshevik militants wanted nothing to do with a body whose brief involved concessions to national sensitivities — even Pestkowski disliked being attached to it.⁵ Stalin relied increasingly on the Alliluev family and asked Fëdor’s younger sister Nadya to work as his secretary.⁶ One day she was a schoolgirl bored with lessons at the gimnazia,⁷ the next she was an employee of the revolutionary government.

The vagueness of party policy remained troublesome. Although Bolshevik objectives had been declared, detailed measures had never been formulated. Stalin was left to sort out the detailed implementation of policy on the national question on his own. His great asset in this task was that he enjoyed Lenin’s trust. When Lenin went off on vacation to Finland at the end of 1917, the government’s dealings with the Ukrainian regional authority — the Rada — were tense in the extreme. General Kaledin was assembling and training a counter-revolutionary force in south Russia. The situation in the south Caucasus was boiling up. Revolutionary stirrings in Estonia needed attention. Some Bolshevik leaders rose to the level of the duties assigned to them in Sovnarkom; others could not cope or messed up their jobs. Stalin thrived on his responsibilities.

It was of course Lenin who headed the Bolshevik collective leadership. Even Trotski stood in his shadow. Stalin ungrudgingly acknowledged that Lenin was the hub of the Sovnarkom governmental machine, and on 27 December he sent an urgent request for him to come back from his holiday in Finland to help in Petrograd.⁸ Lenin insisted on Stalin coping on his own; he continued his brief holiday with wife Nadezhda and sister Maria. Stalin went on reaffirming the objectives which he and Lenin had been espousing before the October Revolution. There was to be national self-determination for all the peoples of the former Russian Empire. Confirmation should be given that no privileges would be accorded to the Russians. Each people would have the right and the resources to develop its own culture, set up schools in its own language and operate its own press. Freedom of religious belief and organisation would be guaranteed. (The exception would be that churches, mosques and synagogues would lose their extensive landed property.) For those national and ethnic groups living concentratedly in a particular area there would be regional self-administration. The Russians as a people were hardly mentioned. The era of empire was declared at an end.

Lenin and Stalin designed these extraordinary promises to allay suspicions among non-Russians that the Bolsheviks would discriminate against them. By offering the right of secession, Sovnarkom tried to reassure the non-Russians that the revolutionary state would treat each national and ethnic group equally. The consequence, it was firmly expected, would be that the other nations would decide that the Russians could be trusted. The huge multinational state was to be preserved in a new and revolutionary form.

There were exceptions to this pattern. Following the Provisional Government’s precedent, Lenin and Stalin accepted the case for Polish independence. It would have been fatuous to act otherwise. All Poland was under German and Austrian rule. Sovnarkom was recognising a fait accompli; it was also trying to make the point that, whereas the Central Powers had subjugated the Poles, the revolutionary government in Petrograd sought their political and economic liberation. There was one domain of the Romanovs where practical proof could be given of such a commitment. This was Finland. Relations between Russian and Finnish Marxists had always been warm, and the Bolsheviks had benefited from safe-houses provided for them. The Bolshevik party had supported the steady movement of popular opinion in Finland towards a campaign for massive autonomy from the Russian government. Outright independence was not widely demanded. Yet Lenin and Stalin, to the world’s amazement, encouraged the Finns to take up such a position. A delegation of Finnish ministers was invited to the Russian capital and a formal declaration of secession was signed on 23 November (or 6 December according to the Gregorian calendar adopted by Sovnarkom in early 1918). This was a policy without parallel in history. A former imperial power was insisting that one of its dependencies, whether it liked it or not, should break away from its control.

The motives of Lenin and Stalin were less indulgent than they seemed. Both felt that the Finnish Marxists would stand an excellent chance of achieving dominance in an independent Finland. This would enable the Bolsheviks and their comrades in Finland to resume close operational ties and, eventually, to re-include Finland in the multinational state governed from Petrograd. There was a further aspect to Sovnarkom’s policy. This was the calculation that a single act of secession from the former Russian Empire would constitute wonderful propaganda in favour of socialist revolution elsewhere, especially in eastern and east-central Europe.

Lenin and Stalin also began to modify their ideas so as to increase the party’s appeal to regions inhabited mainly by peoples who were not Russian. Dropping old Bolshevik arguments, they came to espouse the federalist cause. They held back from explaining what they meant by federalism. Their enemies pointed out that the new policy sat uneasily alongside Bolshevism’s permanent commitment to centralism and dictatorship; but neither Lenin nor Stalin was troubled by the criticism: they had come to the conclusion that if the Bolsheviks were to expand their authority into the borderlands of the former Russian Empire, they had to espouse federalism. Stalin’s old Gori friend Davrishevi, the Social-Federalist, had always wanted to turn the Russian Empire into a socialist federation. In fact Lenin and Stalin had not been converted to federalist principles. They had no intention of turning Ukraine, Georgia and other countries into equal members of a federal union. But they wished their propaganda to make an impact and were willing to change their terminology. Central control over the ‘borderlands’ remained an imperative. Essentially Lenin and Stalin hoped to charm them and bring them back under rule from the Russian capital. They stole slogans; but their own basic ideas and purposes remained intact.

As the area under Soviet control expanded, at least in the towns, the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities’ Affairs acquired additional importance. Stalin chaired the meetings when his other duties in government and party did not distract him, and he empowered Stanislaw Pestkowski and Ivan Tovstukha to handle business in his absence. Dozens of departments were founded in the People’s Commissariat to take care of specific nationalities. Stalin’s energetic leadership surmounted the teething problems and the provinces began to experience the results in the early months of 1918. He sent out funds for national and ethnic groups to set up presses in their languages. Schools were established on the same lines. This trend had begun under the Provisional Government; the Bolsheviks vigorously reinforced it and put it at the core of their propaganda. A central newspaper, Zhizn natsionalnostei (“Nationalities’ Life”), was created to spread the message to the parts of the country where the Bolshevik presence was weak. A plan was developed for local self-administration to be granted to nations which constituted a majority in any particular region, and Stalin hoped to found a Tatar–Bashkir Republic by the River Volga. He was going out of his way, on behalf of the Central Committee, to show that an authentically internationalist state was being constructed.⁹

Other Bolsheviks were introduced to represent the interests of the nations to which they belonged.¹⁰ But membership was fluid and sessions were chaotic, and often the appointees were newcomers to the party. Departments often failed to co-operate with each other. It was soon recognised too that functionaries might use the People’s Commissariat to push the case for their nations more assertively than Sovnarkom had envisaged.¹¹

The danger existed that things might get out of hand. Stalin discovered this early on. A bright young Tatar called Sultan-Galiev joined the party in November 1917. A fluent writer and speaker, he was an obvious man to recruit to the People’s Commissariat. Sultan-Galiev was eager to raise the banner of Revolution among Moslems in general. Unfortunately he proved difficult to regulate. As Commissar of Moslems’ Affairs in Inner Russia he quickly annoyed other members of the People’s Commissariat of Nationalities’ Affairs by his initiatives, and his loyalty to Bolshevism was questioned.¹² Indeed his campaign to spread socialism among Moslem believers eventually led him to propose a pan-Turkic republic separate from Sovnarkom’s control. (He was arrested in 1923 and executed in the Great Terror.) Although Sultan-Galiev was a notorious source of trouble for the Bolsheviks, he was not the only recruit to the party who was thought excessively tolerant of nationalism and religion. Stalin and Lenin had taken a risk in insisting on trying to attract the non-Russians to Bolshevism through various concessions. In 1917 they had earned criticism at the April Party Conference; and in 1918–19 the difficulties of realising the policy were already manifest. Work in the People’s Commissariat was a bed of nails.

Stalin did not flinch. At the Third Congress of Soviets in January 1918 he took pride in the government’s proclamation of ‘the right of all peoples to self-determination through to complete secession from Russia’. He compared Sovnarkom favourably on the national question with the Provisional Government and its ‘repressive measures’. According to Stalin, such conflicts as had broken out since the October Revolution arose from clashes about class and power rather than about nationhood.¹³ Nevertheless his attitude was castigated by the Socialist-Revolutionaries for being ‘infused with a centralist power’. He gave no ground: he said the country faced a simple choice between ‘nationalist counter-revolution on one side and Soviet power on the other’.¹⁴

His capacity to stand up to leaders of other parties as well as his editorial experience and expertise on the national question made Stalin an obvious choice — along with Sverdlov — to chair sessions of the commission drafting the Constitution of the Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic (or RSFSR). There had been no thought about the details before the October Revolution. Even general principles had been left unclear: Lenin and Stalin had advocated federalism while skirting round what this would involve. Out of the hearing of the zealots in his People’s Commissariat for Nationalities’ Affairs, Stalin admitted that many non-Russian groups were making no demands at all for autonomy: Russia was not tormented by nationalist strife. Stalin admitted that even the Tatars and Bashkirs, to whom he wanted to grant an autonomous republic, were displaying ‘complete indifference’. He therefore wished to avoid specifying the national aspects of the Constitution while this situation persisted.¹⁵ But something of substance had to be inserted if the non-Russians were to be won over, and Sverdlov and Stalin insisted on this in the teeth of opposition from the Bolshevik left.¹⁶ Bolsheviks had to be pragmatic in spreading the power and ideology of the Revolution. The national question offered an opportunity to win converts to socialism.

This did not save Stalin from personal attack. The Left Socialist-Revolutionaries had representatives on the commission, and they did not hold back from criticising him. A. Shreider objected that he had no principled commitment to national rights and used federalist rhetoric to disguise an imperialist purpose. Official Bolshevik policy was allegedly little different from the measures of Nicholas II:¹⁷

This was calumny; for Stalin was offering autonomy even to national groups not demanding it. It is readily imaginable what happened to Shreider in later years. Stalin did not forget much in life. As the chief persecutor of the kulaks from the late 1920s he did not take kindly to being compared to a kulak or to any other ‘enemy of the people’; and he never forgave a slight.

His sensitivity was exposed in March 1918. It was then that Menshevik leader Yuli Martov published an article on the past sins of the Bolsheviks, mentioning that Stalin had been expelled from his own party organisation before the Great War for organising armed bank robberies. Stalin arraigned Martov before the Moscow Revolutionary Tribunal for slander.¹⁸ That Stalin should have expended so much energy in trying to refute Martov’s allegation was a sign of his continuing feeling of insecurity at the apex of politics. He had a Georgian sense of personal honour; indeed he had it in an exaggerated form. Martov had besmirched his reputation. Stalin got his name cleared by a Bolshevik-run court. (It was noticeable that Stalin did not deny involvement in the organisation of the robberies: he did not chance his arm by risking the possibility that Martov might summon witnesses.)¹⁹ The Moscow Revolutionary Tribunal found in Stalin’s favour, but not before Martov dredged up other embarrassing episodes from Stalin’s past. He mentioned that comrades in prison in Baku had tried Stalin for participation in the robbery campaign; and Isidore Ramishvili was called as a witness. Martov also brought up the story that Stalin had had a worker beaten to within an inch of his life.²⁰

The libel case was the overreaction of a hypersensitive man. If Stalin had not made a fuss, hardly anyone would have noticed what Martov had written. Stalin’s resentment did not end with the conclusion of the trial. When in 1922 Lenin asked him to transfer funds to Berlin for the medical care of the dying Martov, Stalin refused point-blank: ‘What, start wasting money on an enemy of the working class? Find yourself another secretary for that!’²¹

This was not the only aspect of his inner life revealed in these months. Debating nations and administrative structures in the Constitution commission, he forcefully declared: ‘The Jews are not a nation!’ Stalin contended that a nation could not exist without a definable territory where its people composed the majority of inhabitants. This had always been his opinion,²² and it ruled out the possibility of granting the Jews an ‘autonomous regional republic’ such as he was proposing for others.²³ Was this evidence of a hatred of Jews for being Jews? Stalin differed from Lenin inasmuch as he never — not even once — commented on the need to avoid anti-semitic impulses. Yet his People’s Commissariat for Nationalities’ Affairs had its own Jewish section and funded Yiddish newspapers, clubs and folk-singing ensembles. Many Jews belonged to his entourage over the next two decades. To a considerable extent he was just sticking to a dogmatic version of Marxism. But there was probably more to it than that. Nothing can be proved, but probably he felt uneasy in dealing with Jews because they were unamenable to administrative control on a simple territorial basis — and he also had a growing rivalry with several leaders of Jewish origin in his party: Trotski, Kamenev and Zinoviev.

At any rate the commission’s records scarcely refer to Lenin. Matters were debated on their merits within the frame of Bolshevik and Left Socialist-Revolutionary ideas. Stalin was his own man. Indeed it was the Left Socialist-Revolutionary M. A. Reisner who brought up Lenin’s name. His objection was that Stalin’s project reflected the ‘anarchic’ tendencies embodied in Lenin’s recently published The State and Revolution. Stalin’s response was a distinctly sniffy one:²⁴ ‘Here there’s been mention of comrade Lenin. I’ve decided to permit myself to note that Lenin as far as I know — and I know very well — said that [Reisner’s own] project is no good!’ The rest of the commission agreed and accepted Stalin’s draft with its advocacy of national-territorial administrative units.²⁵ His colleague Sverdlov’s phrasings were pushed back in favour of those proposed by Stalin.²⁶ Sverdlov had been the individual most responsible for embedding the general structures of administration in the Soviet republic after the October Revolution. This was yet another sign of Stalin’s ever-rising importance among the Bolsheviks, and his expertise on the national question gave him a ladder to climb higher and higher.

If he was a rare Bolshevik moderate on the national question, though, he was constantly extreme in his advocacy of state violence and dictatorship. Stalin was convinced that severe measures should be applied against the enemies of Sovnarkom. He was in apocalyptic mood: ‘We definitely must give the Kadets a thorough beating right now or else they’ll give us a thorough beating since it’s they who have opened fire on us.’²⁷ Violence, dictatorship and centralism slept lightly in the Russian political mind — and many conservatives, liberals and social-democrats were already beginning to think that they had been wrong to stick after the February Revolution to principles of universal civil rights, gradualism and democracy. Bolshevism had never carried such an inhibiting legacy. Those Bolsheviks who had yearned for a gentle revolution could usually be persuaded to accept the case for authoritarianism. There was no need to persuade Stalin.

Bolsheviks had always talked casually about terror and its uses for a revolutionary administration. Yet until power had come into their hands it was unclear how keenly they would resort to it. If there were any doubts about this, Lenin and Trotski quickly dispelled them in the weeks after they overthrew the Provisional Government. Lenin established an Extraordinary Commission for the Struggle with Counter-revolution and Sabotage (Cheka in its Russian acronym) — and he ensured that it would remain beyond regular supervision by Sovnarkom. In subsequent years he supported nearly all pleas by Felix Dzierżyń ski and other Cheka leaders for permission to expand the application of methods of state terror. Not every Bolshevik leader approved this development. Kamenev on the right and Bukharin on the left of the ascendant party leadership urged that violence should be deployed on a more predictable basis and should be reduced in scope. Stalin was never one of these. Terror attracted him like a bee to a perfumed flower. Not once had he offered an opinion on the matter before the October 1917 Revolution, yet his preference for arbitrary state violence was speedily evident. When Bolsheviks in Estonia telegraphed him about eradicating ‘counterrevolutionaries and traitors’, he replied with hot approval: ‘The idea of a concentration camp is excellent.’²⁸

State terrorism had already been installed as a permanent item in his mental furniture. It appealed to his coarse personality. But the attraction was not just psychological; it was also based on observation and ideology. Stalin and other Bolsheviks had grown up in an age when the world’s great powers had used terror against the people they conquered; and even when terror was excluded as a method, these powers had had no scruples about waging wars at huge cost in human lives. By such means they had spread a superior economic system around the world. This system had been defended by the application of harsh authority. Colonial peoples had suffered. The working classes of the imperial powers themselves were exploited and oppressed. The Great War had impoverished the many while enriching the few. The point for Stalin was that violence was an effective weapon for capitalism and had to be adopted by the Soviet revolutionary state for its own purposes. Coming to power in Russia, the Bolsheviks had to be realistic. The Bolshevik leadership believed that the Paris Commune of 1871 had failed for want of ruthlessness. Bolsheviks would not repeat the mistake. Even if they had expected their revolution to be easier than it turned out to be, they had always been willing to meet fire with fire. Stalin needed no one to persuade him about this.

Yet it was in foreign policy that Lenin most appreciated Stalin. Lenin and Trotski around the turn of the New Year understood that they lacked the armed forces to carry socialism into central Europe by ‘revolutionary war’. Yet whereas Trotski wished to stick by the party’s commitment to revolutionary war, Lenin concluded that policy ought to be changed. When Germany and Austria–Hungary delivered ultimatums to Sovnarkom, Lenin urged the Bolshevik Central Committee to sign a separate peace. Most Central Committee members — as well as the entire Left Socialist-Revolutionary Party — rejected his argument that the priority should be the preservation of the Soviet state. For them, a separate peace would involve the betrayal of internationalist ideals. Better to go down fighting for European socialist revolution than to collude with the robber-capitalist governments of the Central Powers.

Stalin had always been sceptical about the prognosis of imminent revolutions in the rest of Europe and the failure of the proletariats elsewhere in Europe to rise against their governments did not surprise him. The propensity for strategic and tactical compromise he had always shown in internal party affairs was now applied to the policy of the revolutionary state. If the Central Powers could not be overthrown by revolution or defeated in war, the sensible alternative was to sign a peace with them. This was in fact already the opinion of Lenin, whose reputation for compromise in the party’s internal quarrels was slighter than Stalin’s but who had always insisted on the need for flexibility of manoeuvre in the wider field of politics. Sverdlov, Kamenev, Zinoviev and a few others in the Central Committee stood shoulder to shoulder with Lenin. But the voting in the Central Committee was heavily against them at the preliminary discussion on 11 January 1918. Trotski won the day by arguing for a policy based on the following formula: ‘We’re stopping the war, we aren’t concluding peace, we’re demobilising the army.’ This, he suggested, had the merit of avoiding an intolerable compromise with the forces of international imperialism.²⁹

Lenin kept to his argument without personalising his critique. Stalin was less inhibited. Like most other leading Bolsheviks, he disliked and distrusted Trotski, and at the same meeting he let his feelings show:³⁰

This was the first blow in a political contest which ended only in August 1940 when Soviet agent Ramón Mercader drove an ice-pick into Trotski’s cranium in Coyoacán in Mexico.

Even so, Stalin’s supportive statement irked Lenin. He objected to the comment that ‘a mass movement’ did not exist in the West, and said that the Bolsheviks would be ‘traitors to international socialism if [they] altered [their] tactics because of this’. Lenin wanted to reassure the advocates of revolutionary war that if ever it looked as if a rupture of peace talks would serve to stir up the German working class to revolution, then ‘we have to sacrifice ourselves since the German revolution in force will be much higher in strength than ours’.³¹ It was not so much that Stalin had said that revolutionary initiatives were impossible in the West. Nor had he claimed this in 1917.³² Yet he was loath to gamble on ‘European socialist revolution’ — and for Lenin this was one compromise too many with the revolutionary strategy he had elaborated in the party before October 1917. These tensions did not much matter at the time. Lenin needed every supporter he could get. Again and again in ensuing days Stalin voted on Lenin’s side.³³ Always his line was that Bolsheviks needed to be practical: they could not beat the Germans militarily and the newly born Soviet state would be crushed unless a separate peace was concluded with the Central Powers.

He was as frantic as Lenin. On 18 February 1918 he protested to the Central Committee: ‘The formal question is superfluous. A statement must be made directly on the essence of the matter; the Germans are attacking, we don’t have the forces; it’s high time to say directly that negotiations have to be resumed!’³⁴ He vividly appreciated the armed might of the enemy: ‘They only need to open their hurricane-like fire for five minutes and we shan’t have a soldier left standing at the front. We must put an end to the nonsense.’³⁵ On 23 February he expostulated: ‘The question stands like this: either the defeat of our revolution and the unravelling of the revolution in Europe or we obtain a breathing space and strengthen ourselves. This is not what’s holding up the revolution in the West. If it’s the case that we lack the means to halt a German attack by armed might, we must use other methods. If Petrograd has to be surrendered, it would not amount to a full surrender or to the rotting away of the Revolution. There’s no way out: either we obtain a breathing space or else it’s the death of the Revolution.’³⁶

The Leninists did not gain a majority in the Central Committee until 23 February. By that time the German terms had hardened. The separate peace would require Sovnarkom to disclaim sovereignty over the western borderlands of the former Russian Empire. It was, in Lenin’s phrase, an obscene peace. Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia were to be allowed to fall into the grasp of the Central Powers. Half the human, industrial and agricultural resources of the domains of Nicholas II were to be forsworn at the little frontal town of Brest-Litovsk if Sovnarkom wished to avoid being overthrown by the Germans. No other political party in Russia would accede to such terms. The Left Socialist-Revolutionary Party, already annoyed by the forcible local expropriations of peasant-produced grain, walked out of the Sovnarkom coalition and organised an unsuccessful coup d’état against the Bolsheviks in July 1918. Nevertheless Lenin and his followers pressed forward with their chosen strategy. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed on 3 March 1918. For Lenin, the peace offered a ‘breathing space’ for the Bolsheviks to strengthen and expand the Revolution at home and to prepare the revolutionary war in central Europe that had hitherto been impractical. A Red Army started to be formed; and Trotski, who had condemned the separate peace, agreed to become People’s Commissar for Military Affairs. Other Bolshevik opponents of the treaty drifted back to the Central Committee and Sovnarkom.

Stalin’s assignments in spring 1918 confirmed his high status in the ascendant party leadership. In internal and external affairs he had stuck by Lenin. He had not done this subserviently. In the Brest-Litovsk dispute he had taken an angle of argument different from Lenin’s; and, contrary to the conventional stereotype of him, this continued to be true after the signature of the treaty. When the German armies overran the agreed demarcation line between Russia and Ukraine in May, he reconsidered the whole peace deal. Unlike Lenin, he suggested a resumption of armed hostilities. He put this case at the Central Committee and Sovnarkom.³⁷ But Lenin won the discussion without Stalin by his side, and the dissension between them faded. Lenin, in the light of future events, should have learned from the episode that his People’s Commissar for Nationalities’ Affairs was a politician who knew his own value and was determined to stand up for himself. Stalin fought his corner in the Central Committee and dominated his People’s Commissariat. His competence and adaptability had been tested in the fire of an October Revolution which had yet to be secured. His advocacy of ruthless measures was as ferocious as anything put forward by Lenin, Trotski or Dzierżyński. He expected others to recognise what he could offer for the good of the cause.

15. TO THE FRONT!

On 31 May 1918 Stalin was given an important fresh assignment. Food supplies for Russia had reached a critically low point and Sovnarkom was close to panic. The decision was to send two of the party’s most able organisers, Stalin and his previous Bolshevik opponent Alexander Shlyapnikov, to procure grain in the south of the Soviet republic. The Volga region and the north Caucasus were traditional areas of agricultural abundance, and Stalin and Shlyapnikov were given full powers to obtain food wherever it could be found. Stalin was to make for Tsaritsyn, Shlyapnikov for Astrakhan.

His Alliluev assistants in the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities’ Affairs would accompany him. Fëdor would come as his aide and Nadya as his secretary. They arrived with their luggage at the Kazan Station in Moscow two days later. Chaos awaited them and their Red Army guards. Beggars and pickpockets swarmed in the booking hall and on the platforms. There were also the many ‘sack-men’ who travelled to Moscow to sell flour, potatoes and vegetables on the black market. Sometimes passengers had to sit around for days before they could board a train. The atmosphere was frantic. When announcements of departure were made, a rush occurred to get a seat or a space in the corridor. Every compartment would be crammed with people and it was common for the disappointed ticket holders to clamber to the tops of carriages and ride unsheltered from summer heat or winter cold. Stalin had a sheaf of documents indicating his priority over other passengers. But the People’s Commissar for Nationalities’ Affairs had to lose his temper before the station officials granted a compartment to him and his party. He was being given yet another display of the extreme disorder of revolutionary Russia.¹

The travellers from Moscow, after many halts on the way, reached their destination on 6 June.² Tsaritsyn, later called Stalingrad and now — ever since Khrushchëv’s posthumous denunciation of Stalin — Volgograd, was one of the cities on the River Volga built in the late seventeenth century as Cossack outposts. In most ways it was an unremarkable place. It was not even a provincial capital but was subject to the administrative authorities in Saratov. Yet geographically and economically Tsaritsyn was of strategic importance. The city handled regional trade in grain, timber and livestock. It was also a vital entrepôt. Situated at the first great angle of the Volga for ships heading upriver towards central Russia from the Caspian Sea, Tsaritsyn had been a great staging post since its foundation. The construction of rail links increased its significance. A main line ran directly south from Moscow to Rostov-on-Don and a branch was built from Kozlov down to Tsaritsyn and on to Astrakhan on the Caspian coast. Tracks had also been laid from Tsaritsyn west to Rostov-on-Don and south-east to Tikhoretskaya junction and the mountains of the north Caucasus. Control over Tsaritsyn and its environs would enable Sovnarkom to gain food supplies over a vast area.

Sovnarkom’s brief to Stalin was to improve the supply of grain. He had been preceded to Tsaritsyn by Andrei Snesarev, a former Imperial Army general who had enlisted with the Reds. The functions of Stalin and Snesarev were meant to complement each other. The combined application of political and military muscle was thought the best method of securing bread for Moscow and Petrograd.³

Sovnarkom had misjudged its People’s Commissar. Stalin interpreted his duties in grain procurement, which relied on the use of the Red Army, as entitling him to impose himself over all the military commanders in the region. Rejection for service as a private in the Imperial Army had not made him diffident about taking charge of the North Caucasus Front. A month later he informed Lenin:⁴

Stalin was greedily seizing his opportunity. His renown in Moscow came nowhere near to matching that of his most eminent comrades in Sovnarkom and the Party Central Committee. This was a situation for him to prove his mettle militarily and politically. He was determined to rise to the challenge.

There were several threats to the Bolsheviks across the Soviet republic by the middle of 1918. A Russian ‘Volunteer Army’ was being trained in Novocherkassk. It was led by Generals Alexeev and Kornilov, who had escaped from Petrograd and planned to march on Moscow. The Volunteer Army was the first of the self-styled White armies which objected to socialism and internationalism and sought the restoration of the pre-1917 social order through the military destruction of the Reds. In September, another armed force under the Socialist-Revolutionaries had been forced out of Kazan — seven hundred miles to the north of Tsaritsyn — by the Red Army. Trotski’s reorganised system of command and recruitment was already proving effective. Yet the regiments of the Socialist-Revolutionaries had not been crushed. Retreating to the Urals, they regrouped and were joined by officers of the type being gathered by Alexeev and Kornilov in the south. In November a coup took place in Omsk, and Admiral Kolchak got rid of the Socialist-Revolutionaries and reorganised the army on his own terms. These armies denounced Bolshevism as a betrayal of Mother Russia. Cossacks led by General Krasnov were attacking the Bolsheviks and their sympathisers in the area south of Tsaritsyn. They were well equipped and had high morale; they detested Lenin’s Sovnarkom for its socialism, atheism and hostility to national traditions. Stalin’s assignment had put him in personal danger — and he and his Alliluev companions were never unaware of the risks.⁵

Later enemies overlooked the nerve he showed in the Civil War. He was not a physical coward; he put Lenin, Kamenev, Zinoviev and Bukharin in the shade by refusing to shirk wartime jeopardy. Yet he was hardly a war hero, and his subsequent eulogists overdid their depiction of him as a commander of genius who saved the October Revolution from the banks of the Volga.

Stalin’s assignment in the south was important. Without food the Soviet regime was doomed. The German occupation of Ukraine as well as the presence of Alexeev and Kornilov in Rostov-on-Don had perilously narrowed the Soviet state’s agricultural base. Krasnov’s raids by late July had disrupted communication with Tsaritsyn. South Russia and the north Caucasus were crucial areas of wheat production, and Lenin in Moscow was determined to clear the bottlenecks in procurement and shipment. White armies were not the only menace. Many local armed groups also interfered with trade and traffic; and although some of them were mere bandits, others had a political or religious motive. The nationalities of the area wanted autonomy from Moscow. The disintegration of the Russian state in 1917 had given them an opportunity to revert to self-rule as well as brigandage. Charged with restoring the passage of grain from this turbulent region, Stalin shouldered a weighty burden. But he never flinched; he carried his responsibilities with pride and imparted his determination to his fellow travellers.

Tsaritsyn’s authorities had thought he would function as the baleful ‘eye of Moscow’.⁶ They were wrong. Stalin showed total disregard for instructions from the capital. Immediately upon arrival he set about purging the Red Army and the food-collection agencies of the middle-class ‘specialists’ he collectively detested. This was in blatant contravention of official policy. Stalin did not trouble himself with Lenin’s potential objections: ‘I drive everyone onwards and curse everyone I need to.’ He referred to the specialists as ‘cobblers’.⁷ This was a significant metaphor for the cobbler’s son who wanted to prove his prowess as an army commander; it was also a breach with the line approved by the Central Committee.

Despite having only the powers of a food-supplies commissar, Stalin imposed himself on all the military and civil authorities in the vicinity: Andrei Snesarev, commander of the North Caucasus Front; Sergei Minin, chair of the Tsaritsyn Soviet; and Kamil Yakubov, leader of the food-supplies missions in the region. If Stalin wanted to be known as a fighting man, he had to do something unusual. The Whites had cut the railway line between Tsaritsyn and Kotelnikovo. Stalin braved danger by going out to inspect the situation. This was not typical of him: during the rest of the Civil War and throughout the Second World War he avoided any such venture.⁸ But from Tsaritsyn he took an armoured train down to Abganerovo-Zutovo where a railway-repair brigade was at work restoring the line. Putting his life at risk, he returned two days later with his reputation enhanced.⁹ Back in Tsaritsyn Stalin called together the city functionaries and, parading his authority as a member of the Party Central Committee and Sovnarkom, announced a total reorganisation of the military command in Tsaritsyn. He was making his bid for supremacy on the North Caucasus Front.

Shrewdly he got fellow Bolsheviks on his side. Sergei Minin was one. Another was Kliment Voroshilov, who was itching to take command in the field despite his lack of military experience. Both were more than happy to join Stalin in forming their own Military Council to oversee operations in the region (which was renamed the Southern Front). On 18 July Stalin and his new associates sent a telegram to Lenin demanding the sacking of Snesarev and confirmation of their Military Council.¹⁰

The request was granted. Lenin and his comrades in Moscow accepted that tighter co-ordination of military and economic measures was vital in Tsaritsyn for the security of food supplies. Stalin was delighted. Setting himself up not in a hotel but in a sequestered railway carriage halted outside the city station, he looked a new man. On arriving in Tsaritsyn, he called for a cobbler to order a pair of black, knee-length boots to go with his black tunic. The cobbler arrived at the railway carriage and took the measurements. ‘Well,’ asked Stalin, ‘when will they be ready?’ ‘In five days,’ replied the cobbler. Stalin exclaimed: ‘No, you can’t mean that! Come on! My father could make two pairs of such boots a day!’¹¹ The anecdote shows how little Stalin had learned about shoemaking. Nevertheless from summer 1918 till the day he died, military-style clothing was normal for him. Stalin became known not only for his long boots but also for his light-coloured, collarless tunic. He abandoned suits, ordinary shirts and shoes for ever.¹² He started to comport himself with a soldierly bearing. He carried a gun. He adopted a brisk way of carrying himself as a commander. This was a deeply congenial development for him; Stalin enjoyed himself in Tsaritsyn despite the dangers.¹³

He also gained contentment in his personal life. Nadya Allilueva, who had accompanied him from Moscow, was no longer merely his secretary but had become his wife. According to their daughter’s account many decades later, they had already been living as a married couple in Petrograd after the October Revolution.¹⁴ Chronological exactitude is impossible. Bolsheviks in those days rejected weddings as bourgeois flummery. What is certain is that on his return from Siberia he did not intend to remain celibate. There were plenty of Bolshevik women to take his eye and he went out with a few in 1917.¹⁵ But he wanted the settled home life which his nomadic existence had prevented. (His cohabitations in Siberia had been of the seigneurial variety.) In the flush of their passion they went off to serve the Revolution together on the North Caucasus and Southern Fronts.

Joseph was a communist party leader and Nadya’s family were dedicated to the party’s cause. He was amusing and still in his physical prime, and probably his talent for handling political business appealed to Nadya. The fact that Alliluev family life had been constantly disrupted by revolutionary commitments may also have drawn Nadya towards an older man who seemingly offered dependability. She may have seen him as the father she had seen little of when growing up.¹⁶ Nadya had not discerned Joseph’s curmudgeonly egotism. Joseph, though, had yet to witness the symptoms of Nadya’s mental volatility.¹⁷ So while he glowed in the warmth of her admiration of him, she enjoyed his attentions. Without being a beauty, she had long dark hair parted down the middle and tied up in a bun; her lips were broad and her eyes friendly even if her teeth ‘gappy’.¹⁸ He liked women with a full figure like Nadya’s. He did not worry that she was less than half his age. He had read more than her and seen more of life, and he surely thought he would always dominate the marriage. The Alliluevs had given him succour and all of them got on well with him. He was gaining not only a wife but also — at last — a stable and supportive wider family.¹⁹

There was only one thing about his situation in Tsaritsyn that annoyed Stalin. This was the interference in his activities from Moscow, and nobody irritated more than Trotski. Stalin had formed the Revolutionary Council of the Southern Front on 17 September. Immediately he received orders from Trotski, his military superior as Chairman of the Revolutionary-Military Council of the Republic, to cease challenging his decisions.²⁰ Stalin telegraphed to Lenin that Trotski was not on the spot and failed to understand conditions across the region:²¹

Stalin reminded Lenin that Trotski had an anti-Bolshevik past; his resentment of the haughty political interloper was unmistakable. Trotski in his view was not to be trusted.

Stalin called for stern measures:

This analysis commended itself to leading Bolsheviks who knew the history of the French Revolution. A military leader, Napoleon Bonaparte, had seized power and rejected much of the social radicalism introduced by Maximilien Robespierre. Trotski seemed the likeliest military candidate for such a role in the drama of Russia’s October Revolution. There was acute annoyance among party members about his insistence on employing former Imperial Army officers. Trotski was also reviled for shooting political commissars for disobedience or cowardice. An informal Military Opposition began to coalesce against him in late 1918.

Yet Trotski had grounds to be horrified by events in Tsaritsyn. Lenin began to take his side. Stalin was a law unto himself on the Southern Front. It was not always a law shared by the official party leadership. Lenin insisted that if the Civil War was to be won, the average Russian peasant (and not just the poorest of them) had to be won over to the side of the Reds. Persuasion rather than violence had to be the priority. Lenin’s declarations were riddled with contradiction. He had set up the hugely unpopular ‘committees of the rural poor’ in order to introduce ‘class struggle’ to the countryside and had also conscripted peasants and expropriated grain by means of armed urban squads. But certainly at the same time he was minded to win support among the mass of the peasantry.

Stalin was less ambiguous than Lenin. Might, for him, was right, effective and economical of resources. He put villages to the torch to intimidate neighbouring ones to obey the demands of the Reds. Terror was undertaken against the very peasants who were being depicted in official propaganda as one of the twin pillars of the Soviet state. Stalin treated the Cossacks in particular as enemies. The term de-Cossackisation was in currency.²² Stalin wrote in a letter to his old Bolshevik rival Stepan Shaumyan:²³

This was in the fiercest Imperial Army tradition under General Yermolov in the Caucasus in the early nineteenth century and General Alikhanov in Georgia in 1905.²⁴ Stalin was ordering Shaumyan to conduct a campaign of exemplary terror. When ‘bands’ operated against trains, the nearby villages were to be razed to the ground. The message was to go out that complete compliance alone would save localities from the Red Army’s savagery. Wanting to conciliate the non-Russian national groups across the country, he nevertheless prescribed brutal measures against those among them who failed to restrain anti-Bolshevik outbursts.

He subjected his own Red Army conscripts — including Russians — to severe discipline. Bothering little with persuasion, he assumed they would never help the Reds unless force was used.²⁵ He threw armies into action with little caution. He acted as if sheer numerical superiority would bring victory. He did not care that a vastly greater proportion of Red than White soldiers died. Lenin commented on the reckless disregard for lives on the Southern Front; and although he did not mention Stalin by name, it was obvious whom he held responsible.²⁶ Lenin cleared Trotski of any blame for the running of the Red Army and confirmed the Central Committee’s policy on the recruitment of Imperial officers.²⁷ Trotski sent his aide Alexei Okulov to find out what was happening in Tsaritsyn. His report was disturbing. Stalin, having sacked Imperial officers from their posts of command, had arrested dozens of them and held them on a barge on the River Volga. Among them was Snesarev, whom he accused of heading a conspiracy to sabotage the Red war effort and aid the Whites.²⁸ Stalin’s apparent intention had been to sink the barge and drown all on board.²⁹ Snesarev on Moscow’s orders was released and the Revolutionary-Military Council of the Republic transferred him to the command of the Western Front. Stalin, infuriated, continued with Voroshilov to demand sanctions against the allegedly counter-revolutionary officers. Voroshilov was to claim that, if he and Stalin had not acted as they did in Tsaritsyn, the Whites would have overrun all Ukraine.³⁰

Stalin passionately believed that conspiracies were ubiquitous in Russia. He already had a tendency to suspect that plots existed even when no direct evidence was available. He was not alone in this. Lenin and Trotski too referred in a casual manner to the organised linkages among the enemies of the party; and Trotski had a notorious willingness to treat even Bolshevik party activists as traitors if they belonged to regiments in the Red Army which had failed to obey his orders. Stalin was more like Trotski than he pretended. When an adequate supply of munitions did not come through to Tsaritsyn in September 1918, he howled to Lenin: ‘It’s some kind of casualness or treachery in official uniform [formennoe predatel’stvo].’³¹ To Stalin’s way of thought there always had to be an agency of deliberate maleficence at work when things went wrong. Traitors therefore had to exist even in the leadership of the People’s Commissariats in Moscow.

Stalin applied violence, including terror, on a greater scale than most other central communist leaders approved of. Only Trotski with his demands for political commissars to be shot alongside army officers if unsanctioned retreats occurred was remotely near to him in bloodthirstiness — and Trotski also introduced the Roman policy of decimating regiments which failed to carry out higher commands. Stalin and Trotski invariably ignored pleas to intervene on behalf of individuals arrested by the Cheka. Even Lenin, who resisted most attempts by Kamenev and Bukharin to impose control over the Cheka, sometimes helped in such cases.³² Yet Stalin’s enthusiasm for virtually indiscriminate violence made even Trotski seem a restrained individual. This was a feature that his comrades forgot at their peril in the 1930s.

A contrast also existed between Stalin and Trotski in their basic attitude to Bolshevism. Trotski, who had joined the Bolsheviks late in his career, paid little attention to the party. Stalin pondered much on the party’s place in the Soviet state. He took a copy of the second edition of Lenin’s The State and Revolution around with him in the Civil War. This book says nothing about the communist party in the transition to socialism. Stalin was aware of this lacuna. Making notes in the margins, he asked himself: ‘Can the party seize power against the will of the proletariat? No, it cannot and must not.’³³ He added: ‘The proletariat cannot attain its dictatorship without a vanguard, without a party as the only [party].’³⁴ Lenin had said no such thing in The State and Revolution. But Stalin, like Lenin, had modified and developed his ideas since October 1917. The party had become the supreme institution of state. Stalin was among the many Bolsheviks who sought to incorporate this into communist doctrine. The theory had been that the proletariat would run its own socialist state. Stalin’s unease was reflected in his comment that ‘the party cannot simply replace the dictatorship of the proletariat’.³⁵

In the Civil War, however, he lacked the time to write pamphlets; and not one of his articles for Pravda had the range of those composed by Lenin, Trotski, Zinoviev and Bukharin. But he went on thinking about large subjects. Party policy on the national question was prominent among them. Another was the institutional framework of the Soviet state. The report he wrote in January 1919 with Dzierżyński on a military disaster at Perm was a disquisition on the chaotic relations within and among the armed forces, the party and the government. Their recommendations had an influence on the decisions taken to establish the party as the supreme agency of the state and to regularise the lines of command from the party to all public institutions.³⁶ Only the fact that Stalin’s later propagandists made exaggerated claims for the report has induced historians to overlook its importance. In truth he was a reflective and decisive political operator and Lenin appreciated him for this.

This was the trip on which Stalin became friends with Dzierżyński’s personal assistant Stanisław Redens. Nadya accompanied Stalin to Perm, and soon Redens had fallen in love with her elder sister Anna and married her. Redens became a leading figure in the Cheka.³⁷ Personal, political and military life was intertwined for Bolsheviks in the Civil War and Stalin was no exception. His recent marriage had no impact on his public activities; he spent the Civil War mainly on or near the fighting fronts. Recalled to Moscow in October 1918, he resumed his work in the Party Central Committee and Sovnarkom. But by December he was off again. The White Army of Admiral Kolchak had swept into the Urals city of Perm and destroyed the Red Army units there. Stalin and Dzierżyński were sent to conduct an enquiry into the reasons for the military disaster. They returned and made their report at the end of January 1919. Stalin stayed in Moscow again until being dispatched in May to Petrograd and the Western Front against the invasion by General Yudenich from Estonia. In July he moved on to a different sector of the same front at Smolensk. In September he was transferred to the Southern Front, where he stayed into 1920.³⁸

Stalin was a law unto himself. When transferred to Petrograd on the Western Front in mid-1919, he showed macabre inventiveness in dealing with disorder and disobedience. The Red Army on the Western Front entirely failed to impress him. Almost as soon as he arrived, the Third Regiment went over to the Whites. Stalin was merciless. On 30 May he telegraphed Lenin from the Smolny Institute that he was rounding up the renegades and deserters, charging them collectively with state treason and making their execution by firing squads into a public spectacle. Now that everyone saw the consequences of betrayal, he argued, acts of treachery had been reduced.³⁹ Not everyone enthused about Stalin’s intervention. Alexei Okulov, transferred to the Western Front after exposing Stalin’s misdeeds in Tsaritsyn, put a spoke in his wheel yet again. Stalin telegraphed angrily on 4 June demanding that Lenin should choose between Okulov and himself. Existing conditions, he ranted, were ‘senseless’; he threatened to leave Petrograd if his ultimatum was not complied with.⁴⁰

His military activity was centred in the Revolutionary-Military Councils attached to the various fronts, and from 1919 he joined them as the Party Central Committee’s appointee. His kind of fighting involved giving orders: he was never directly involved in physical violence. His inexperience was total and nobody has been able to find evidence that he looked at books on warfare⁴¹ (whereas Lenin had studied Clausewitz, and Trotski had reported the Balkan wars before 1914 as a newspaper correspondent). But he was madly eager to prove himself as a commander. The Central Committee recognised his worth by its successive use of him on the Southern Front, the Western Front, again the Southern Front, the South-Western Front and the Caucasian Front. Qualities which earned him praise were his decisiveness, determination, energy and willingness to take responsibility for critical and unpredictable situations.

There was a price to pay. Stalin hated to operate in a team unless he was its leader. There was only one fellow communist to whom he would defer and that was Lenin. Even Lenin found him a handful. Stalin was vainglorious and extremely touchy. He detested Trotski. He hated the entire Imperial officer elite. He had an almost pathetic need to feel appreciated, and at the drop of his Red Army peaked cap he would announce his resignation. Such was his egotism that he was willing to disregard orders even if they came from the Central Committee or its inner subcommittees. He was capricious in the extreme. Once determined upon a course of action, he steered as he pleased. He wasted an inordinate amount of the Central Committee’s time with his demands for commanders to be sacked and for strategy and tactics to be altered. His application of repressive measures to the social groups hostile to the Soviet state was excessive even by the standards of the communist leadership in wartime Russia; and, still more than Trotski, he had a tendency to regard anyone who failed to show him respect as an enemy of the people.

The conventional image of Stalin’s ascent to supreme power does not convince. He did not really spend most of his time in offices in the Civil War period and consolidate his position as the pre-eminent bureaucrat of the Soviet state. Certainly he held membership of the Party Central Committee; he was also People’s Commissar for Nationalities’ Affairs. In neither role were his responsibilities restricted to mere administration. As the complications of public affairs increased, he was given further high postings. He chaired the commission drafting the RSFSR Constitution. He became the leading political commissar on a succession of military fronts in 1918–19. He was regularly involved in decisions on relations with Britain, Germany, Turkey and other powers; and he dealt with plans for the establishment of new Soviet republics in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. He conducted the enquiry into the Red Army’s collapse at Perm. When the Party Central Committee set up its own inner subcommittees in 1919, he was chosen for both the Political Bureau (Politburo) and the Organisational Bureau (Orgburo). He was asked to head the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate at its creation in February 1920.

Far from fitting the bureaucratic stereotype, he was a dynamic leader who had a hand in nearly all the principal discussions on politics, military strategy, economics, security and international relations. Lenin phoned or telegraphed Politburo members whenever a controversial matter was in the air.⁴² There were few corners of high public affairs where Stalin’s influence was unknown; and the Politburo frequently turned to him when a sudden emergency arose. The other great leaders — Lenin, Trotski, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Sverdlov, Dzierżyński and Bukharin — had settled jobs that they held for the duration of the Civil War and beyond. In most cases these jobs involved making public appearances — and Trotski in the Red Army did this with relish and to huge acclaim. There was also prestige for the prominent leaders of the October 1917 seizure of power: Lenin, Trotski and Sverdlov were examples. Since the Bolsheviks were led by doctrinaires, prestige also accrued to those who wrote fluently and often. Lenin, Trotski, Kamenev, Zinoviev and Bukharin continued to publish books in the Civil War. Stalin could not compete in these arenas. He was always on the move. He was a poor orator in any formal sense and had little opportunity to write.

His merits tended to be overlooked even though he was an integral part of the ascendant political group. The trouble was that he had yet to realise his importance in the eyes of the group, the party or society at large. Just occasionally he allowed his resentment to show. In November 1919 he tried to resign his job as Chairman of the Revolutionary-Military Council of the Southern Front. Lenin, alarmed, rushed to get a Politburo decision to implore him to reconsider. Stalin was too useful to be discarded. Yet what was attractive to Lenin was horrific to the enemies of Bolshevism. Stalin in the Civil War was an early version of the despot who instigated the Great Terror of 1937–8. It was only because all the other communist leaders applied the politics of violence after the October Revolution that his maladjusted personality did not fully stand out. But this is no excuse. No one acquainted with Stalin in 1918–19 should have been surprised by his later ‘development’.

16. THE POLISH CORRIDOR

The Civil War in Russia between the Reds and the Whites was over by the end of 1919. Once the Red Army had conquered the Russian lands it was a matter of time before the outlying regions of the former empire were overrun. Reds drove the last White army, under General Anton Denikin, into the Crimean peninsula. Denikin handed his command to Pëtr Wrangel, who instantly changed policies towards civilian society. Among these was a promise to the peasants that land would not be restored to the gentry after the Civil War. Realpolitik was overdue if the Whites were to improve their military prospects. Nevertheless the material and logistical position of the forces under Wrangel was hopeless unless the Red political and military command made a fundamental mistake. Wrangel’s men were preparing for their escape abroad.

Victory in the Civil War encouraged communist leaders to seek opportunities to expand ‘Soviet power’ to the West. They itched to spread revolution. In March 1918 Lenin — with help from Stalin, Kamenev, Zinoviev and Sverdlov — had adjured the party to be patient at a time when most Bolsheviks had wanted a ‘revolutionary war’. But even before the German military collapse in November 1918 Lenin had given orders to assemble massive supplies of conscripts and grain so that the Red Army might intervene in strength in Germany.¹ Expansionist ideas did not disappear with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. The Communist International (known as the Comintern) had been formed on Lenin’s initiative in Petrograd in March 1919 to inaugurate, expand and coordinate the activities of communist parties in Europe and around the world. The Bolshevik party leadership in the Kremlin sent advisers and finance to the governments briefly established in Munich and Budapest, and the Red Army would have been made available if the fighting in the Civil War in Russia had permitted.² In summer 1920 Lenin wet his lips as he contemplated the situation in Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary and northern Italy. It seemed that the chain of Western capitalism in Europe would at last be broken. A military campaign to ‘sovietise’ such countries was anticipated.³

Did Bolshevik leaders genuinely have the resources to instigate the creation of fraternal socialist states? Their answer should have been no: the former Russian Empire was in an economic and administrative mess. But triumph in the Civil War had bred overconfidence among Bolsheviks. They had seen off the Whites, and the British and French expeditionary forces had been withdrawn. Who could now resist them? There was also a second consideration in their minds. The Soviet state was isolated. The expansion of the October Revolution was not just an aim: it was a basic need deriving not only from ideology but also from a practical dilemma. The Politburo — and even the cautious Stalin agreed on this — recognised that the Revolution would remain imperilled until it acquired allied states in the West.

During the early campaigns of the Civil War the operational assumption was that foreign territory began at the borders of the former Russian Empire. For this reason the Politburo acted as if it expected the Red Army to reconquer the borderlands as soon as the fighting in Russia was brought to completion. Progress seemed very satisfactory in 1920. Azerbaijan and Armenia were brought to heel — and Stalin and his friend Sergo Ordzhonikidze were regularly involved in strategic and political discussions at the highest level.⁴ But the Baltic region remained a problem. Attempts had been made to establish Soviet republics in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania; but in each case there were counter-coups, and these countries regained their independence in 1918–19.⁵ Estonia inaugurated full diplomatic relations with the RSFSR in February 1920. The international situation was unstable. The Bolsheviks did not perceive the western borderlands, any more than those to the south, as foreign places, and Stalin held to this viewpoint with noticeable tenacity.⁶ But what happened to such countries would depend on what occurred in the broader framework of war and peace in Europe. Bolshevik leaders had to decide on a permanent policy.

Things were brought to a head by armed conflict between Poland and the RSFSR. Clashes had taken place while the Civil War was in spate, and the Polish commander-in-chief Josef Piłsudski had long aspired to form a federal union with Ukraine. In spring 1920 Piłsudski struck deep into Ukrainian territory. On 7 May his forces occupied Kiev, surprising Red Army officers as they waited at bus stops. Sovnarkom appealed for a patriotic war of defence. Sergei Kamenev took supreme military command and his main front commander was the twenty-five-year-old Mikhail Tukhachevski. Volunteers rallied to the Red Army’s banners. Kiev was retaken on 10 June and, after an agreement with the Lithuanian government, a joint offensive seized Vilnius and transferred it to Lithuania. The advance of the Reds was practically unopposed. The British government warned the Soviet leadership to halt its troops, but the Party Central Committee on 16 July took the strategic decision to take the war on to Polish territory, and Lenin informed Stalin and others on the same day.⁷ (Stalin, based in Kharkov in eastern Ukraine, had been unable to attend.)⁸ The military command of the Western Front prepared to cross the River Bug and move on Warsaw. European socialist revolution beckoned, and on 23 July the Politburo set up a Provisional Polish Revolutionary Committee under Julian Marchlewski.⁹

The British government tried to prevent the spead of communism by calling for peace negotiations and suggesting a new border between the Soviet state and Poland. This was the Curzon Line, named after the British Foreign Secretary in 1920. The advance of the Red Army into central Europe had to be halted. The Politburo had taken such overtures more seriously earlier in the war when Piłsudski looked like winning. But the rapid march of the Reds across Ukraine changed Lenin’s stance and he started to advocate an invasion of Poland.

Stalin was unenthusiastic. He had been warning all summer about the resurgence of White military capacity in the Crimea, and he questioned the wisdom of taking on the Poles while Wrangel remained a threat.¹⁰ Even Trotski and Radek, who had opposed Lenin over Brest-Litovsk, were disconcerted by Lenin’s position.¹¹ Stalin’s objections were not confined to his chronic scepticism about European socialist revolution and his concern about Wrangel. He doubted that the Red Army was adequately co-ordinated and organised. He worried about the length and strength of the lines of supply.¹² From his base with Red forces in Ukraine he had reason to think he knew what he was writing about. The Soviet state was insecure from attack by the Whites. Plans for a military breakthrough to Poland and Germany were unrealistic. Stalin repeatedly mentioned the danger posed by Wrangel from the Crimea.¹³ He also reminded Lenin not to underestimate the strength of nationalism among the Polish working class. Stalin was surprised that Lenin, usually his ally on the national question, failed to sense the danger awaiting the Red Army in this respect. He wanted the care used at Brest-Litovsk in 1918 to be applied to the decision on war or peace with Poland.

Lenin would not be thwarted. He had never envisaged revolutionary war as a crude war of conquest. It was rather his assumption that workers across Europe were expected to rise up in support of the Red Army. The leftist elements in the European socialist parties, he anticipated, would rally to the communist cause and the obstacles to the establishment of revolutionary governments would be removed. The Red Army had only thirty-five divisions. The Imperial Army had assembled nearly a hundred divisions against Germany and Austria– Hungary at the outbreak of the First World War. Lenin brushed this aside. Class conflict in Europe would more than make up for the inadequacies of the Red Army. The die was cast by the Politburo. Warsaw would be taken and the way cleared for an advance on Berlin where, as Lenin believed, the Reds would find political disarray they could exploit. The German communists should make an alliance with the German far right to sweep away the Treaty of Versailles of 1919 which had taken territory and colonies from Germany, imposed heavy reparations and restricted its military reconstruction. Then they should turn against their right-wing enemies, and a revolutionary state would be installed.¹⁴

Having lost the discussion at long distance from the Politburo, Stalin accepted the decision. Indeed he developed an eagerness to prove himself in the campaign. He had been spending much time in previous months on yet another dispute about his posting and its responsibilities. In November 1919 he had made a characteristic attempt to intimidate Lenin and the Politburo by threatening to resign.¹⁵ His explanation was more colourful than usual: ‘Without this, my work on the Southern Front will become pointless and unnecessary, which gives me the right or rather the duty to move away anywhere — to the Devil even — rather than stay on the Southern Front.’¹⁶ The Politburo, already habituated to his tantrums, rejected his ultimatum.¹⁷ In January 1920 the Southern Front was re-formed as the South-Western Front with the task of defending Ukraine against both the Poles and Wrangel’s Crimean forces. But Stalin was transferred in February to the Caucasian Front. He did not like this;¹⁸ he wanted to be active where the fortunes of the Revolution were crucially threatened: he resented being regarded as the man from the Caucasus whose expertise was limited to Caucasian affairs. On 26 May Stalin’s tenacity was rewarded when he was assigned to the South-Western Front, where battles with the Poles were anticipated.

On 12 July Lenin sent a message to him in Kharkov:¹⁹

Previously sceptical about the Polish campaign, Stalin telegraphed his euphoric agreement:²⁰

Stalin scoffed at Lord Curzon’s proposal of a truce followed by peace talks in London:²¹

Lenin and Stalin, advocates of caution at Brest-Litovsk in 1918, had become the warmongers of the Bolshevik leadership.

In Stalin’s opinion it was imperative ‘to seize the maximum we can’ before any cease-fire might occur. He aimed to take Lwów.²² This was a personal preference: the fall of Lwów would not only benefit the Soviet cause but also bring him kudos as the city’s conqueror. The trouble was that, as Stalin had warned, Wrangel’s forces remained a serious threat. Stalin typically called for a policy of executing White officer POWs to a man.²³ Learning that things were not going well for the Red Army in the Crimea,²⁴ he put this failure down to the cowardice of the Soviet Commander-in-Chief Sergei Kamenev. His mind was focused on glory in Poland as he and his command staff moved westward.²⁵

Stalin and Lenin also undertook preliminary planning for the kind of Europe they expected to organise when socialist seizures of power took place. Their grandiose visions take the breath away. Before the Second Comintern Congress, Lenin urged the need for a general federation including Germany, and he made clear that he wanted the economy of such a federation to be ‘administered from a single organ’. Stalin rejected this as impractical:²⁶

Lenin was angry. The implication of Stalin’s comment was that considerations of national pride would impel Russia and Germany to remain separate states for the foreseeable future. Lenin sent him a ‘threatening letter’ which charged him with chauvinism.²⁷ It was Lenin’s objective to set up a Union of Soviet Republics of Europe and Asia. His vision of ‘European socialist revolution’ was unchanged since 1917. But Stalin held his ground. The Politburo had to acknowledge the realities of nationhood if the spread of socialism in Europe was to be a success.

These discussions were hypothetical since the Red Army had not yet reached Poland, far less set up a revolutionary government in Warsaw. Stalin himself had caused one of the operational snags. This occurred when he ordered his military and political subordinates to regard Lwów as their priority. He failed to mention that such a command would disrupt the general strategic plan approved by Trotski and Tukhachevski on campaign and by Lenin in Moscow. Stalin was ignoring the precedence given by these others to the capture of Warsaw; instead he diverted the armed forces of the South-Western Front away from a line of convergence with those of the Western Front.

The battle for Warsaw took place across four sectors. Lasting from 12 to 25 August, it settled the outcome of the war.²⁸ Tukhachevski’s original plan had been to attack even sooner, before the Poles had time to regroup for defence of their capital. His losses had been substantial. Supplies and reinforcements were unlikely to be forthcoming. The exhausted Red Army, harassed by the Polish inhabitants, had to win a very quick victory or else lose everything.²⁹ Piłsudski grabbed his chance. In successive sectors he repulsed the Red advance. Sergei Kamenev, the Supreme Commander, had planned to move forward on two fronts: the Western under Tukhachevski and Smilga and the South-Western under Yegorov and Stalin. Kamenev failed to co-ordinate them. The South-Western Front was still charged with protecting the Soviet state against Wrangel from the Crimea: it was therefore aimed in two different directions at once. On 22 July, furthermore, Yegorov had pointed his line of march towards Lublin and Lwów and daily increased the gap between himself and Tukhachevski. This was a recipe for confusion and dispute, and Stalin was never one to hold back from aggravating a difficult situation.

The Red Army had urgent need of a revised strategic plan. Such a plan could be devised only at the highest political level. On 2 August the Politburo resolved to split the South-Western Front into two and give half its forces to the Western Front and the other half to a reformed Southern Front tasked with defending Ukraine against Wrangel.³⁰ Yet no action followed until 14 August, when Sergei Kamenev ordered the transfer of forces from the South-Western Front with immediate effect.³¹

The impracticality of Kamenev’s injunction infuriated Stalin. Yegorov and Stalin were already engaged in their attack on Lwów before the start of the battle of Warsaw. Although the distance between Warsaw and Lwów as the crow flies is two hundred miles, the geography of the region made quick movements of troops impossible. It was swampy and roadless. The Polish inhabitants were almost universally hostile to the Reds, who were regarded as yet another Russian invading force. Stalin, who was always quick to criticise the professional military men inherited from the Imperial Army, told Kamenev in no uncertain terms: ‘Your order pointlessly frustrates the operations of the South-Western Front, which had already started its advance.’³² When Yegorov dutifully complied with Kamenev’s order, Stalin refused to counter-sign the latest dispositions and left the task to his deputy R. Berzins.³³ But the Cavalry Army of Stalin’s associate Semën Budënny was heavily involved in fighting in the vicinity and it was not until 20 August that the attack on Lwów was abandoned. By then the battle of Warsaw was nearing its catastrophic conclusion for Tukhachevski and the Western Front.

That Stalin had been obstreperous when reacting to the change in strategy is indisputable. But he was soon accused of something more serious. It came to be said that an obsession with military glory had caused him to withhold forces from Tukhachevski. He therefore appeared to be the culprit for the defeat of the Reds. This is too strong a verdict. In fact he did not block the transfer of troops: he simply refused to give his personal counter-signature. Certainly he was not guiltless. On 12 August he had supported the deployment of the Cavalry Army against Lwów despite knowing about the Politburo’s intention to divide the South-Western Front’s forces between a Western Front and a Southern Front. Even so, it is hardly likely that the forces reassigned to the Western Front would have reached Warsaw in time for the battle even if Stalin had not approved the Lwów operation.³⁴ Yet without acting insubordinately, he undoubtedly did much — and must have done it knowingly — to make it next to impossible for Kamenev and Tukhachevski to carry out any further redeployments of the South-Western Front’s forces. To that extent he acted as he had done throughout the Civil War. He behaved as though he had a monopoly on military judgement and that those who opposed him were either fools or knaves.

By the time the siege of Lwów was lifted, Stalin was far away. Returning to Moscow for the Politburo meeting on 19 August, he was raging to justify himself. Both Lenin and Trotski were present. The fighting before Warsaw was continuing; Wrangel was moving north from the Crimea. At the same time there was an opening for the Red units on the Caucasian Front to push down through Azerbaijan into Persia. The entire military situation was in flux in three directions. Item number one, however, was the strategic confusion left behind at Lwów. Stalin decided that political attack was the best form of defence: he castigated the entire campaign. He stressed the neglect suffered by the armies facing Wrangel, and noted that the result could be a resumption of the Civil War in Russia. His blistering onslaught produced a result; for despite a counter-report from Trotski, the Politburo decided ‘to recognise the Wrangel Front as the main one’.³⁵ In a week when the fate of the Polish campaign was in the balance, this was extraordinary phrasing. To outward appearances Stalin had trounced his enemy Trotski at the Politburo and secured the strategic reorientation he favoured.

Yet his triumph was not what it seemed. There was no acknowledgement in the Politburo that Stalin’s plans and behaviour in the Soviet–Polish War had been appropriate. Lenin and Trotski continued to blame him. A clue to the intensity of the dispute was given by an item further down the agenda sheet, which related to Stalin’s position. After some discussion he was formally awarded a fortnight’s holiday.³⁶ Yet again he was claiming exhaustion and, no doubt, was feeling under-appreciated. This was the pattern of behaviour established in the Civil War whenever he failed to get his way.³⁷

Stalin’s anger went on simmering. He neither took his holiday³⁸ nor dropped his case against the Supreme Command and its patron Trotski. He felt humiliated, and when he went back to the Politburo on 1 September he demanded his own demission from ‘military activity’. No one seriously expected him to serve in the Red Army after the end of armed hostilities in Poland; but the plea was granted and Stalin left the Revolutionary-Military Council of the Republic.³⁹ He had craved to be a member since its creation. But he would no longer serve on it if his counsel was going to be overridden. He refused to forget what he took to be the slights he had suffered. At the same Politburo session there had been hurried discussion about foreign policy, and Trotski had successfully proposed a ‘policy of compromise peace with Poland’.⁴⁰ For Stalin, this was hard to bear. Trotski and the Supreme Command were in his eyes co-responsible for the war’s mismanagement. Now Trotski apparently wanted to enjoy the plaudits of peacetime. Stalin had warned against the whole Polish campaign. He had sounded the alarm about Wrangel. He had been asked to deal with two military fronts as if they had been one and then been asked to cope with yet another front.

For some days he buried himself in those affairs for which he had been most respected before the Civil War. The Politburo at his instigation was planning to appeal to the indigenous peoples of the Caucasus at the expense of the Cossacks. The decision was taken in principle, and Stalin was asked to supervise implementation on Moscow’s behalf.⁴¹ He also took charge of the complex Bashkirian affair. The Bashkirian Revolutionary Committee had behaved disloyally to the Soviet state and several members had been arrested. Stalin proposed to transfer them to Moscow for interrogation.⁴² This was important political work. Yet at the same time Stalin did not want to be known as a Georgian who specialised in the national question. He belonged to the Central Committee and Sovnarkom in his own right, and he wanted this recognised. He had opinions about general policy. He felt he knew as much as anyone about politics and society in the provinces. Resentment grew like rust on an iron nail. Like everyone in the Politburo, he was also feeling the physical and emotional impact of his exertions of the past few years. Unlike the others, he felt under-appreciated. Nothing indicated that his feelings were going to be spared as the Ninth Party Conference approached.

Lenin arrived at the Conference on 22 September and showed unwonted contrition. Reality had to be faced: it was ‘a deep defeat, a catastrophic situation’. The secret project for the ‘Sovietization of Poland’ had been disastrous. The Red Army, instead of being greeted by Polish workers and peasants, had been repulsed by a ‘patriotic upsurge’. So how had the miscalculation occurred? Lenin admitted that he had thought that Germany was on the boil and that Poland would be a mere bridgehead towards Berlin. He also admitted: ‘I absolutely do not pretend in the slightest fashion to knowledge of military science.’ The Red Army, he conceded, had been set an impossible task. Probably the Politburo should have accepted Curzon’s proposal and parleyed for peace. The best option was to sue for a treaty and wait for a turn of events ‘at the first convenient opportunity’.⁴³

Stalin’s latest resignation was one too many for the stressed Lenin. Stalin’s imperiousness and volatility appeared excessive; Trotski by contrast seemed at least dependable in a crisis. Trotski took his chance and bluntly criticised Stalin’s record in the Soviet–Polish War and accused him of ‘strategic mistakes’.⁴⁴ Information from returning political commissars confirmed this accusation and Lenin repeated it in the early sessions.⁴⁵ The Politburo was revealed as a nest of jealousies and criticisms. Several in the audience were aware that Lenin had been less than frank about his own part in the débâcle. The fundamental blunder had been to invade Poland at all and this was primarily Lenin’s error. Indeed he had been warned of the likely consequences by Trotski and Stalin. Trotski had argued that the Red Army was already exhausted, Stalin that the Poles would rise up against the invasion.⁴⁶ Some Conference delegates indeed castigated Lenin directly and the session ended in an angry dispute. When proceedings were resumed next day, Stalin insisted on the right of reply. It was a brief speech. Having pointed out that he had expressed early doubts about the invasion, he made no defence of his behaviour on campaign, and the Conference moved on to other business.⁴⁷

From Stalin’s viewpoint, this was very unsatisfactory. He had had his chance to make his case and at the last moment he had thrown it away. And the lasting effect was to fix the primary responsibility for the disastrous campaign in Poland solely on himself. There had been searing controversies in the past. The October 1917 decision to seize power and the November 1917 rejection of a broad socialist coalition government had caused uproar in the Central Committee, and for some weeks a number of Central Committee members refused to sit in government with Lenin. The Brest-Litovsk dispute had been still more raucous: Bukharin and his supporters had seriously contemplated forming a government without Lenin. But the controversy over the Soviet–Polish War introduced a fresh element. Stalin, a leading member of the ruling group, was accused of insubordination, personal ambition and military incompetence. It was a remarkable list of faults.

Stalin’s half-cocked reaction is difficult to explain. He was an extremely proud man. He was jealous too — jealous to an inordinate extent. He deeply resented criticism and was easily slighted. He was also very pugnacious. So why did he decide to mumble a few words about the prehistory of the invasion and then go back to his seat? If the boot had been on the other foot, neither Lenin nor Trotski would have failed to give a lengthy speech of self-justification.⁴⁸ Probably Stalin felt himself on weak ground and had suffered a last-minute collapse of confidence. The evidence was incontrovertible that he had behaved badly, and in any case it was not the first time that his contumacy had been mentioned. At the Eighth Party Congress he had been reprimanded by Lenin for using tactics that led to far too many Red Army soldiers being killed.⁴⁹ The difference at the Ninth Party Conference was that nothing positive was said about him to balance the negative. He had been disgraced; none of his friends had taken the trouble to speak on his behalf. He saw no point in prolonging his misery by dragging out the discussion. He hated to be seen whingeing.⁵⁰ His constant need was to appear tough, determined and practical.

Yet he did not intend to forgive and forget. Trotski’s accusation had added yet another grievance to the list of things for Stalin to brood about. The only wonder about this episode is that he did not cultivate a grudge against Lenin. Stalin continued through to the end of his days to express admiration for him. It has been mooted that Stalin regarded Lenin not just as a hero but also as a substitute father to be emulated.⁵¹ This is going beyond the evidence. There were many occasions before and after October 1917 when Stalin clashed virulently with Lenin. But about his fundamental esteem for Lenin there is no serious doubt. There was no deference, still less servility; but Stalin exempted Lenin from the treatment he reserved for the rest of the human race — and he was biding his time to take his revenge on Trotski.

17. WITH LENIN

The contretemps between Lenin and Stalin vanished like snow in the sun. The reason was political. In November 1920 Trotski attacked the Soviet trade unions, and suddenly Lenin needed Stalin’s assistance. Conventional trade unionism, according to Trotski, had no place in the revolutionary state; his case was that Sovnarkom safeguarded workers’ interests and that trade unions should be constitutionally subordinated to its commands. This suggestion riled the Workers’ Opposition, which was campaigning to enable the working class to control factories, mines and other enterprises. Lenin objected to the Workers’ Opposition and in practice expected the trade unions to obey the party and government. Yet Trotski’s demand for the formal imposition of this arrangement would affront workers unnecessarily. Lenin vainly tried to get Trotski to back down. Factions gathered around Trotski and Lenin as they wrote furious booklets and addressed noisy meetings. Although Bukharin formed a ‘buffer group’ between the two sides, this group too became a faction. Not only the Workers’ Opposition but also the Democratic Centralists (who, since 1919, had campaigned for a restoration of democratic procedures in party life) entered the fray. The party was enveloped in a bitter conflict lasting the long winter of 1920–1.

Lenin enlisted Stalin to organise supporters in the provinces. Stalin was carrying out the function discharged by Sverdlov in the Brest-Litovsk dispute in 1918. A particular effort was made to discredit the other factions. Party rules were bent but not broken; Lenin knew that Stalin, whom he teased as a ‘wild factionalist’, would do whatever was necessary for victory.¹ The Central Committee Secretariat was led by Preobrazhenski, Krestinski and Serebryakov, who were sympathisers of Trotski and Bukharin. Stalin therefore sent trusted supporters of Lenin into the provinces to drum up a following for him and indicate how to organise the campaign against Trotski. While Stalin arranged things in Moscow, Zinoviev travelled the country giving speeches on Lenin’s behalf. Trotski made a similar tour; but as the time of the Tenth Party Congress approached in March 1921, it was clear that victory would lie with the Leninists. Stalin co-ordinated the faction as its delegates assembled in Moscow. The Leninists drew up their own list of candidates for election to the Central Committee. This was gratifying for Stalin. Trotski, who had been in Lenin’s good books in the Soviet–Polish War, had fallen into disfavour.

Factionalism had distracted the Bolsheviks from recognising a fundamental menace to their power. Garrisons of troops were mutinying. Factory workers in the main Russian industrial cities went on strike. And across the entire state there was trouble with the peasantry. Whole provinces in Ukraine, the Volga region and west Siberia rose against the Bolshevik party dictatorship. The demands of mutineers, strikers and village fighters were broadly the same. They wanted a multi-party democracy and an end to grain requisitioning. The revolt of the Tambov province peasantry at last brought the Politburo to its senses, and on 8 February 1921 its members decided on a momentous change in policy. Grain requisitioning would be replaced by a graduated tax in kind. Peasants would be left to trade the rest of their harvest on local markets. This New Economic Policy would take the sting out of rural discontent and allow the Red Army to mop up rebellions. There would be no political concessions: the objective was to save the Soviet state in its existing form from destruction. A commission was established to draft a full policy for consideration at the Tenth Party Congress. There was no dispute in the Politburo. Measures needed to be changed for disaster to be avoided.

The Party Congress, starting on 8 March, was surprisingly quiet. The New Economic Policy (or NEP) in its rudimentary form was approved almost on the nod and the Leninists won the debate on the trade unions without difficulty. Stalin organised the faction as supporters arrived in Moscow. Criticism from the Workers’ Opposition was easily rebuffed; neither Alexander Shlyapnikov nor Alexandra Kollontai managed to stir the Congress with pleas for the working class to have greater direct influence on policy in the Kremlin and on conditions in the workplace. The reason for the easy victory of Lenin’s faction had little to do with Lenin’s eminence or Stalin’s cunning.² On 28 February the Kronstadt naval garrison, thirty-five miles off the Petrograd coast, had started a mutiny. These sailors in 1917 had been among the party’s most eager supporters. The mutiny shocked the Congress into recognising that the entire Soviet regime was under fundamental threat. Congress delegates volunteered to join the troops sent to suppress the Kronstadters. Trotski led the military offensive on Kronstadt. Unity was everything. Lenin was virtually unopposed when stating that the NEP — a retreat from the economic system of the Civil War years which was becoming known as ‘War Communism’ — should be accompanied by a political clampdown. No factional activity in the party would be permitted and all factions were required to dissolve themselves.

After the Congress, Lenin asked Stalin to secure the control of Lenin’s group over the central party apparatus. Because of his other obligations — in the Politburo, the Orgburo, the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities’ Affairs and the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate — this was not going to be his prime task but would add substantially to his heavy workload. It was with some reluctance that he agreed to supervise the Department of Agitation and Propaganda in the Central Committee Secretariat.³

This aspect of political activity, though, was vital for a ruling party in a state dedicated to imposing a single ideology. Among the problems was the large number of institutions involved. The most influential was the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment, whose deputy leader was Lenin’s wife Nadezhda Krupskaya. Resenting Stalin’s attempt to assert the party’s authority, she appealed to Lenin. Stalin wrote bluntly to Lenin:⁴

Stalin’s patience had snapped. This was obvious in his simultaneous request to step down from the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities’ Affairs.⁵ He wanted and needed to be appreciated. Asking to resign was his usual way of signalling this. Lenin understood the code and backed down. Stalin was too important a member of his team to be allowed to leave.

Lenin distrusted Trotski after the trade union dispute. What also worried him was that Trotski wished to raise the influence of state economic planning in the NEP. Trotski was not the only problem for Lenin; the entire central leadership made life difficult for him. When even the head of the Soviet trade union movement Mikhail Tomski refused to toe the party line, Lenin called for his expulsion from the Central Committee.⁶ The leading group had not been so fissiparous since 1918. When Lenin’s request was turned down, he was at his wits’ end and did not mind saying so. The ill health of several of his comrades, as the immense physical strain of recent years took its toll, aggravated the situation. Zinoviev had two heart attacks. Kamenev had a chronic cardiac condition. Bukharin had been very poorly and Stalin had suffered from appendicitis. In the absence of these strong supporters of the NEP, Lenin alone had had to implement the measures decided by the Politburo.⁷ He was eager to have Stalin back at his side. Having recruited him to the Leninist cause in the trade union dispute, Lenin supported a proposal to make him General Secretary of the Russian Communist Party.

Molotov’s year in charge of the Secretariat had not been a success;⁸ indeed no one since Sverdlov’s death in March 1919 had got on top of the job.⁹ Lenin was disappointed. He and Molotov had regularly conspired at Central Committee meetings. Passing a message to Molotov, he ordered: ‘You’re going to make a speech — well, speak out as sharply as possible against Trotski!’ He added: ‘Rip up this note!’ A furious row followed between Molotov and Trotski, who knew that Molotov had been put up to it.¹⁰ Lenin’s own health gave him trouble in 1921. He doubted Molotov’s ability to rein back Trotski in his absence. Lenin concluded that a firmer grip should be applied in the Party Orgburo and Secretariat.

It was in this atmosphere that Stalin’s candidature as Party General Secretary with Vyacheslav Molotov and Valeryan Kuibyshev as his Assistant Secretaries was informally canvassed at the Eleventh Party Congress in March–April 1922. Yevgeni Preobrazhenski, one of Trotski’s allies, saw what was coming. Taking the platform, he took exception to Stalin’s multiplicity of posts.¹¹ Preobrazhenski was complaining about the way that Stalin was accumulating excessive central power; but above all he was arguing that someone with so many posts could not carry out all his functions effectively. At any rate there was no formal decision at the Congress about the General Secretaryship; and when the matter was discussed at the next Central Committee plenum, on 3 April, the complaint was made that Lenin and his close associates had preempted debate by agreeing to pick Stalin for the job. Apparently Lenin had written ‘General Secretary’ next to Stalin’s name in the list of candidates he put forward for election to the Central Committee.¹² But Kamenev smoothed things over and Stalin’s appointment was confirmed on condition that he delegated much more to his deputies in the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate (or Rabkrin) and the Nationalities’ Affairs Commissariat. The party had to come first.¹³

Conventionally it has been supposed that Stalin was put in office because he was an experienced bureaucrat with an unusual capacity for not being bored by administrative work. The facts do not bear this out. He was an editor of Pravda in 1917 and a policy-making intimate of Lenin immediately after the October Revolution. He had spent most of the Civil War as a political commissar. He went on military campaign in Ukraine and Poland in 1920; and although he had posts in Moscow in the Party Orgburo, the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities’ Affairs and Rabkrin, he had never had much time to devote to them. What is more, Stalin was known for his restlessness when administrative meetings in the capital were dragged out. But of course he had to sit through a lot of them, as did Lenin, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Trotski and the other leaders. They headed a state that had yet to be consolidated. Unless they saw to implementation and supervision of administrative decisions as much as to the making of policy, the state would fall apart before it was made. The reason why Lenin chose Stalin was less administrative than political. He wanted one of his allies in a post crucial to the maintenance of his policies.

Lenin stressed that the General Secretaryship was not equivalent to the supreme party leadership and that the party had never had a chairman.¹⁴ He was being mealy-mouthed. What he meant was that he himself would remain the one dominant leader. Lenin and Stalin had fallen out many times before, during and after the October Revolution.¹⁵ This was the norm in the Central Committee. Lenin had confidence that he would not lose control of things.

Stalin agreed with the broad lines of the NEP. He did not see himself as a mere administrator and freely offered his opinions across the range of debates within the leadership; and, contrary to later depictions of him, his caution in foreign policy did not reconcile him to total abstention from taking risks abroad. Even after the Anglo-Soviet Treaty of March 1921, he favoured sending military instructors and supplies to Afghanistan with the objective of undermining the British Empire.¹⁶ He also continued to regard the new Baltic states — especially Latvia and Estonia — as territories illegitimately torn away from Russia ‘which enter our arsenal as integral elements vital for the restoration of Russia’s economy’.¹⁷ The idea is false that Stalin could hardly care less if the Soviet state remained permanently isolated. He accepted isolation as a fact of political and military life that could not yet be altered. In such a situation, he considered, it behoved the Politburo to get on with post-war reconstruction as best it could until such time as fresh revolutionary opportunities abroad arose. This remained his attitude in subsequent years.

But Stalin, like Lenin, wanted to avoid trouble for the foreseeable future. Lenin saw a chance for the Soviet state to come to an understanding with Germany. Talks among the European powers had been convened at Genoa in northern Italy. The RSFSR and Germany were treated as pariah states, and Lenin made overtures for a separate commercial treaty between them. This was duly signed at nearby Rapallo in April 1922. Both states had more in mind than mere trade. Germany, prevented by the Treaty of Versailles from rearming itself, arranged to test military equipment and train army units secretly on Soviet soil. Others in the Politburo, especially Zinoviev, were reluctant to accept that the ‘revolutionary upsurge’ had subsided in Europe. Despite the Treaty of Rapallo, the Comintern in 1923 at Zinoviev’s behest encouraged an armed rising against the German government on the sixth anniversary of the Bolshevik seizure of power in Petrograd. Stalin had nothing to do with such adventures.

Yet the working arrangement between Lenin and Stalin had already been put to an acute test. The occasion was the sudden deterioration in Lenin’s health on 25 May 1922, when he suffered a massive stroke while recuperating from surgery to remove a bullet lodged in his neck since the attempt on his life in August 1918. Lenin lost mobility on the right side of his body; he could not speak clearly and his mind was obviously confused. Groups of doctors, including well-rewarded specialists brought from Germany, consulted among themselves on the nature of Lenin’s illness. Opinion was divided. Among the possibilities considered were hereditary cardiac disease, syphilis, neurasthenia and even the effects of the recent operation on his neck. There were times when Lenin gave up hope entirely and thought his ‘song was sung’. But, helped by his wife Nadya and sister Maria Ulyanova, he pulled himself together psychologically. He welcomed visitors to keep abreast of public affairs.

As General Secretary, Stalin was the most frequent of these. He was not a friend. Lenin did not think highly of him outside their political relationship. He told Maria that Stalin was ‘not intelligent’. He also said Stalin was an ‘Asiatic’. Nor could Lenin abide the way Stalin chewed his pipe.¹⁸ Lenin was a fastidious man typical of his professional class; he expected comrades to behave with the politesse of the European middle class. He turned to the language of national superiority. Stalin was not merely a Georgian but an Oriental, a non-European and therefore an inferior. Lenin was unconscious of his prejudices: they emerged only when he was off his guard. These prejudices contributed to his failure until then to spot that Stalin might be a leading candidate to succeed him. When he thought of power in parties, Lenin had the tendency to assume that only those well grounded in doctrine stood much chance. He assumed that the sole figures worth consideration in any party were its theorists. The classic instance was his obsession with Karl Kautsky. Both before and during the Great War he overrated Kautsky’s influence over the German Marxist movement. Although Kautsky was an influential figure, he was very far from moulding the policies of the German Social-Democratic Party.¹⁹

At any rate Stalin was Lenin’s intermediary with the distant world of Kremlin politics while Lenin convalesced at the village of Gorki, twenty miles south of Moscow. When Stalin was set to arrive there for one of their conversations, Lenin would tell his sister Maria to fetch a bottle of decent wine for the guest. Stalin was a busy man; he needed to be treated properly. Maria had recently studied photography in order to catch Lenin on camera, and she snapped Stalin with him on one of his frequent visits.²⁰ The two of them got along fine and sat out on the terrace for their discussions. There were a few matters that in other circumstances would have been resolved in Lenin’s favour at the Central Committee; his absence compelled him to entrust his cases to Stalin. But there was one request which caused Stalin much trepidation. Lenin before his stroke had asked Stalin to supply him with poison so that he might commit suicide if ever he became paralysed. He repeated the request on 30 May. Stalin left the room. Outside was Bukharin. The two of them consulted Maria. They agreed that Stalin, rather than refuse point-blank, should go back to Lenin and say that the doctors were offering an optimistic diagnosis which made suicide wholly inappropriate.²¹ The episode passed, and Stalin resumed his trips to keep Lenin up to date with politics in the capital.²²

Lenin was a cantankerous patient and sought Stalin’s assistance in sacking those doctors who annoyed him:²³

Trotski praised Lenin’s ‘vigilance’, but — like the whole Politburo — he voted to reject the request. Eighty other leading Bolsheviks were being treated by the Germans. Deportation would have been a ludicrous measure.²⁴ Lenin’s capriciousness grew. Exasperated by his comrades’ refusal to accede to his preferences on policy, he proposed a total reorganisation of the Central Committee. His preposterous suggestion was to sack most of its members. The veterans should be removed forthwith and replaced by Vyacheslav Molotov, Alexei Rykov and Valeryan Kuibyshev. Out, then, would go not only Stalin but also Trotski, Kamenev and Zinoviev.²⁵

Lenin’s physical debility and political inactivity frustrated him. His tirades stemmed from irritation with what he heard about shifts in official policy. In each instance he found Stalin in disagreement with him. A dispute had been brewing about foreign trade since November 1921.²⁶ Although Lenin had promoted the expansion of the private sector under the NEP, he drew the line at ending the state’s monopoly on commercial imports and exports. Others in the Central Committee, led by Finance Commissar Sokolnikov and supported by Stalin, regarded this as impractical. Sokolnikov had a point. The creaky state bureaucracy was incapable of pursuing all opportunities for trade abroad. The frontiers were not effectively sealed; smugglers were doing business unimpeded and untaxed by the authorities. If the purpose of the NEP was to regenerate the economy, then permission for a widening of the limits of legal private engagement in foreign trade would help. Lenin refused to listen. It had become an article of faith for him to turn the Soviet state into an economic fortress against infiltration by unsupervised influences from abroad.

Lenin had to seek friends outside his previous group. Sokolnikov was with him. Also strongly on his side was the People’s Commissar for Foreign Trade Lev Krasin; but Krasin carried little weight in the Party Central Committee. The most influential advocate of a position similar to Lenin’s was in fact the person who himself had argued that Lenin had removed too much state regulation from the running of the economy at home: Trotski.

The growing alliance of convenience between Lenin and Trotski came into existence only slowly. Suspicion persisted on both sides about current economic measures. But a second matter meanwhile unsettled Lenin’s relationship with Stalin in summer 1922 when the constitutional discussions about the future of the Soviet state came to a head. To Lenin it seemed crucial that the Soviet republics established since 1918 should be joined on equal terms in a federal structure. Formally, the impression had to be given that, although the state would be run from Moscow, the communist rulers rejected all tendencies of ‘Great Russian chauvinism’. The RSFSR, vast as it was, would be but one Soviet republic alongside the Soviet republics of Ukraine, Belorussia and the Transcaucasian Federation. Lenin wanted the new federal state to be called the Union of Soviet Republics of Europe and Asia. This had always been his goal. (He had explained this in his confidential correspondence with Stalin in mid-1920.)²⁷ Lenin was not aiming to run down the influence of the Bolsheviks in the Comintern. But his medium-term objective was genuinely internationalist, and he thought that the name and structure of the projected federal state ought to mirror this.

Stalin, however, wished to expand the RSFSR over the entire territory held by Soviet republics and to provide Ukraine, Belorussia and the Transcaucasus with the same status as existing ‘autonomous republics’ of the RSFSR such as the Bashkirian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. The state would remain designated as the RSFSR. Stalin could argue that he was only proposing what the Bolsheviks had always said they would supply in their socialist state: ‘regional autonomy’. Lenin and Stalin had long asserted, since before the Great War, that this would be the party’s solution to the yearnings of the ‘national minorities’. Stalin wanted to prevent the Soviet republics from privileging those nations after which each such republic had been named. It was for this reason that he had proposed that the Soviet republics formed in Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia in 1920–1 should be gathered together in a Transcaucasian Federation within the RSFSR. This was his device to stop local nationalisms getting further out of hand as had happened in previous years. He regarded Lenin’s demand for a formal federal structure as having the potential to undermine the whole state order. With characteristic brusqueness he dismissed it as ‘liberalism’.

Stalin continued to plan for ‘autonomisation’. His associates Sergei Kirov and Sergo Ordzhonikidze successfully put pressure on the communist leaderships of Azerbaijan and Armenia to approve his scheme in September 1922. So did the Transcaucasian Regional Committee.²⁸ But the Georgian Central Committee, which had always disliked the scheme and knew it would diminish its low popularity in Georgia still further, rejected it. There were also signs that the Ukrainian and Belorussian communist leaderships — and even, in its quiet way, the Armenian one — accepted it only with great reluctance.²⁹ Stalin struck back, claiming that failure to follow his proposals would lead to a continuation of ‘sheer chaos’ in Soviet governmental affairs.³⁰ He pushed the scheme through a commission of the Party Orgburo on 23 September.³¹ News of this reached Lenin, who spoke with Stalin directly on 26 September.³² Lenin insisted that changes should be made to the draft accepted by the Orgburo commission. He called for an abandonment of ‘autonomisa-tion’. Lenin again demanded a Union of Soviet Republics of Europe and Asia; he continued to insist that Russia (in the form of the RSFSR) should join this federation on an equal basis with the other Soviet republics.³³

Lenin had got his information from Budu Mdivani and other Georgian communists. Stalin was losing his grip. Mdivani had previously been in his good books; it was Stalin who had arranged for him to become Chairman of the Georgian Revolutionary Committee in July 1921 instead of Stalin’s internal party critic Pilipe Makharadze.³⁴ Lenin began to take the side of the Georgian communist leaders when they disagreed with Stalin. Yet Lenin did not go all the way with Mdivani. He still supported Stalin on the need for a Transcaucasian Federation as a device to damp down the manifestations of nationalisms in the south Caucasus; and Stalin, from his side, retracted his demand for the RSFSR to ‘autonomise’ the other Soviet republics. He did this reluctantly: when Kamenev advised compromise, he replied: ‘What is required, in my view, is firmness against Ilich.’ Kamenev, who knew his Lenin, demurred and argued that this would merely make matters worse. Stalin at last conceded to Kamenev: ‘I don’t know. Let him do as he thinks sensible.’³⁵ The agreed name of the state was to be the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (or USSR). Stalin did not like the idea but he ceased to raise objections.

He had cause to feel let down by Lenin. The matters dividing them were not of primary importance despite what was said by Lenin at the time (and despite what was written by historians ever after).³⁶ Stalin and Lenin agreed about basic politics. Neither questioned the desirability of the one-party state, its ideological monopoly or its right to use dictatorial and terrorist methods. They concurred on the provisional need for the NEP. They had also reached an implicit agreement that Stalin had an important job in the central party apparatus to block the advance of the Trotskyists and tighten the whole administrative order. Lenin had trusted him with such tasks. Stalin had also been the comrade in whom he had confided when he wanted to commit suicide. Whenever toughness or underhandedness was needed, Lenin had turned to him. Not once had there been a question of basic principle dividing them, and they had worked well together since the trade union dispute. Lenin had been behaving bizarrely in summer 1922 before he fell out with Stalin. But it was Stalin who had to deal with him. His difficulties with Lenin would have tested the patience of a saint.

Their quarrels about Georgia and about the state monopoly of foreign trade touched matters of secondary importance. Lenin was not demanding independence for Georgia; his pleas on behalf of Georgian communists related to the degree of autonomy they should be permitted: it was almost a dispute about political cosmetics. Stalin also had a reasonable case that the Georgian communist regime had been far from even-handed in its treatment of the non-Georgians. The Transcaucasian Federation was a plausible scheme to prevent national oppression in Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. The foreign trade dispute, too, was nowhere near as clear-cut as Lenin claimed. The state monopoly had failed to thwart the growth of smuggling and currency speculation; and Stalin and his supporters had a point that this led to a loss of state revenues. Yet although Stalin resented Lenin’s intervention, he could not stop the Old Man of Bolshevism carrying on as he liked to the extent that his physical condition permitted.

18. NATION AND REVOLUTION

It was galling for Stalin that Lenin had turned against him on the national question. Their collaboration in trying to solve it had begun before the Great War, and Lenin could not have coped without him. Although Stalin did not look for gratitude, he had cause to expect a more reasoned exchange of opinions. Disagreements between them about policy were not new.¹ But Lenin and Stalin had concurred about the strategic orientation of rule in the Soviet multinational state. Stalin was the People’s Commissar for Nationalities’ Affairs and the Politburo’s specialist on the nexus of matters touching on nationhood, religion and territorial boundaries throughout the Civil War. As his military duties ended, he maintained control over decisions on the nationalities. When the leadership began to plan the country’s permanent constitutional structure, he was given a central role. The task was taken up in earnest in 1922.

Sovnarkom had long ago settled its viewpoint on several aspects of ‘national’ policy. Non-Russians were allowed their own schools and press and promising young supporters of the Bolsheviks of each national and ethnic group were trained to occupy leading political positions. Stalin supervised the policy even though, during the Civil War, he was often away from Moscow. Meetings of the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities’ Affairs collegium in his absence had been chaotic. Sometimes they were also noisy and over-long when he was present. His deputy Stanislaw Pestkowski recalled:²

It is hardly surprising that he sometimes lost patience. But on no occasion did he show this at the meetings themselves. In those instances where his supply of patience had been exhausted as the result of our interminable arguments at our gatherings he would suddenly vanish. He used to do this extraordinarily deftly. He would say: ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’ Then he would disappear from the room and go off and hide in one of the cubby holes of the Smolny [Institute] or the Kremlin.

The time had not arrived when anticipation of Stalin’s displeasure caused all to shiver in their boots. Stalin was but one Bolshevik leader among others. Only Lenin with his greater personal prestige could get away with rebuking miscreants.

When Stalin got very fed up he crept out of Sovnarkom itself. (So much for the myth of the grand bureaucrat with inexhaustible patience.) Pestkowski, who knew Stalin’s habits better than most, would receive instructions to flush him out of his lair: ‘I caught him a couple of times in comrade-sailor Vorontsov’s apartment where Stalin, stretched out on a divan, was smoking his pipe and thinking over his theses.’³ There were times when Stalin longed to be reassigned to the fronts of the Civil War and get away from the palaver in his Commissariat.

The cardinal decisions on the national question had anyway been taken by the central party leadership. As the Red Army reimposed central authority over the outlying regions of the former Russian Empire, the Kremlin leadership needed to clarify and disseminate policy in order to maximise its appeal to non-Russians. This was a difficult task. In 1917 it had been the workers and soldiers of Russia who had voted most strongly for the Bolsheviks. The Red Army on the rampage failed to allay suspicions about Russian imperialism, and the stream of decrees from the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities’ Affairs took time to have a positive impact. A further problem was caused by the international situation. Although the Western Allies pulled out of the former Russian Empire at the end of 1919, regional powers in eastern Europe and western Asia continued to pose a military threat, and the Politburo was concerned that Britain and France might use such powers to overthrow Soviet communism. Turkey, Finland and Poland were feared as potential invaders. In these circumstances the Central Committee and Politburo in 1919 set up independent Soviet states in Ukraine, Lithuania and Belorussia — and in 1920–1 in Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia. Communist leaders in Moscow hoped by such means to prove that their commitment to national self-determination was genuine.

The division of Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia into separate states had occurred because of inter-national enmities in the anti-Bolshevik Transcaucasian Federation established after the October Revolution. Before the pan-Turkic Musavatist party came to power in Baku in 1918 there had formally been no such place as Azerbaijan.⁴ The frontiers of Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia remained contentious under the early Soviet administration. Yet rudiments of statehood had been acquired. The invading Bolsheviks intended to build on them.

It had been Stalin who drew up the decrees recognising the Soviet republics in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in December 1918.⁵ He accepted them as a temporary expedient; later he referred to this as a policy of ‘national liberalism’.⁶ Practical implementation was tricky. There was a shortage of local Bolshevik leaders and activists, and often those Bolsheviks who came from the locality were Jewish rather than of the titular nationality. Stalin was brought into the discussion even when he could not attend sessions in the capital. He was given the right of personal veto over whether to designate the Hümmet organisation as the new Communist Party of Azerbaijan. Only Stalin was thought to know whether the Hümmetists could be trusted as the territorial power.⁷ As the Civil War drew to an end, the question arose of the permanent constitutional future. Stalin had no doubt. Until then there had been bilateral treaties between the RSFSR and the Soviet republics. These had been tilted in favour of the RSFSR’s hegemony; and in any case the Party Central Committee controlled the communist parties in those other republics.⁸ A centralised state run from Moscow was already a reality. Stalin wished to bring the governmental structures into line with those of the party by incorporating the Soviet republics in the RSFSR.

Initially he got his way. The ‘union treaty’ negotiated between the RSFSR and the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic after the Civil War unified their People’s Commissariats in military, economic and transport affairs — and the RSFSR People’s Commissariats were given authority over the Ukrainian ones. Yet the Central Committee stopped short of approving his fundamental objective of comprehensive incorporation.⁹ Kamenev was his chief opponent on that occasion. But Lenin too became a critic. A fault-line in their long-lasting collaboration was being disclosed. Lenin had drawn the conclusion from the history of the Civil War that the formal constitutional concessions to the borderlands had to be maintained. Soviet republics in Ukraine and elsewhere had to be preserved. What Stalin desired was to expand the RSFSR and turn Ukraine into one of its internal ‘autonomous republics’. An immense dispute was in the making.

The establishment of autonomous republics had begun in the Civil War, and the policy was widely implemented from 1920 as the nationalterritorial principle of local government was extended to the Bashkirs, the Tatars, the Kirgiz, the Chuvash, the Mari, the Kalmyks, the Vots and the Karelian Finns.¹⁰ This was not achieved without controversy. The granting of authority to indigenous national and ethnic groups annoyed the Russian inhabitants of autonomous regions and provinces who felt they were being reduced to second-class status as citizens of the RSFSR. Yet the Politburo bent over backwards to be seen to enhance conditions for non-Russians. Not a few towns with a mainly Russian population were included in an autonomous republic specifically so that the republic might become economically and administratively self-standing.¹¹ All this made for complex discussions in Moscow, and easy answers were seldom on offer. The Bolsheviks were trying to de-imperialise an old empire without allowing its disintegration into separate nation-states. There were no models to copy. They were setting the precedent, and Stalin was the Politburo’s acknowledged specialist in this matter.

His involvement was often a troubled one. The Tatar–Bashkir Republic, installed in the RSFSR in 1919, had quickly come to grief. The Tatars and the Bashkirs were not the best of friends, and the local Russian residents disliked feeling excluded from influence. Inter-ethnic violence scarred the entire region. The Red Army had to be deployed to restore order and Stalin reasonably decided that the Tatars and Bashkirs should have separate national-territorial units. The basic orientation of policy was maintained. Stalin went on establishing autonomous republics even if this meant offending the local Russians.¹²

No region presented him with trickier problems than did his native Caucasus. The ethnic intermingling — on both the north and south sides of the mountain range — was intense and the chronic rivalries were acute. Stalin could not deal with this exclusively from the Kremlin and on 14 September the Politburo assigned him a mission to the north Caucasus. After the disappointments of the Soviet–Polish War, he was given much scope for initiative.¹³ This was the kind of mission he liked. Reaching the region, he gave approval to the existing Mountain Republic: he liked its capacity to unite Chechens, Ossetians, Kabardians and others. But he did not include the Cossacks.¹⁴ Much of the trouble in the north Caucasus derived from the Imperial practice of settling Cossacks, descendants of Russian peasant refugees, in villages as a means of controlling the indigenous nations. A Mountain Republic with their participation would scarcely be effective. Stalin boasted to Lenin in October 1920 that that he had meted out ‘exemplary punishment to several Cossack settlements’ for their rebellious activity.¹⁵ Despite his later reputation, Stalin had no special fondness for Russians and his continuation of the ethnic cleansing of the Cossacks reflected this.¹⁶

Attending the Congress of Peoples of the Terek in November 1920, Stalin considered future constitutional arrangements:¹⁷

He clearly meant that the peoples of the north Caucasus would be allowed not only to manage their own territorial units but also to pursue their national and ethnic interests within them.

Stalin explained his policy to the Tenth Party Congress in March 1921 when introducing the debate on the national question. His speech contrasted western Europe where nation-states were the norm and eastern Europe where the Romanovs, Habsburgs and Hohenzollerns had ruled vast multinational states. Stalin exaggerated the national homogeneity of states in the West but he was right that the mixture of nations was denser to the East. At any rate he declared that the anti-imperial struggle had intensified after the Great War as Turkey in particular supported movements for national liberation in the colonies of the European powers. But supposedly only Soviet Russia could do anything practical. Stalin declared:¹⁸

He identified two dangers. The first was obvious to anyone like himself from the borderlands of the Russian Empire. This was ‘Russian great-power chauvinism’. The other was the nationalism of non-Russians outside Russia, and Stalin stressed that it was a nationalism widely shared by local communists. Both dangers had to be confronted by the Russian Communist Party.

‘Under the Soviet federative state,’ Stalin declared, ‘there are no longer either oppressed nationalities or ruling ones: national oppression has been liquidated.’¹⁹ The speech was uncharacteristically vague in content. Stalin may have been too busy to prepare it properly while organising the Leninist faction in the trade union controversy. He was also suffering from agonising stomach pains.²⁰ Then again, he had a huge capacity for work and had always summoned up the strength for a big speech. The probability is that, knowing how quickly passions were ignited by the national question, he sought to damp things down.

If this was his intention, it was unsuccessful. Critics lined up to attack. They assailed Stalin for making an abstract report ‘outside time and space’ and for yielding too much to ‘petit-bourgeois’ nationalist demands while not struggling hard enough against Russocentrism.²¹ In fact Stalin had problems regardless of what he said. Some delegates wanted decentralisation and greater room for national self-expression. Others, wanting firmer centralisation in Moscow, attacked the alleged indulgence shown to nationalism since the October Revolution. Stalin himself was accused of ‘artificially implanting Belorussian nationhood’. This comment roused him to fury. His reply went:²²

Stalin was not going to allow the entire policy developed by himself and Lenin to be derided, defamed or ditched.

His arguments were demographic and political. The towns of Ukraine, he predicted, would soon cease to be Russian when flooded with Ukrainian newcomers, just as Riga had once been predominantly a German city and had gradually been Latvianised. Secondly, he maintained that if ever the message of Marxism was to be accepted in the borderlands of the former Russian Empire, it had to be conveyed in languages which were comprehensible and congenial to the recipients. The idea that Stalin was a ‘Great Russian chauvinist’ in the 1920s is nonsense. More than any other Bolshevik leader, including Lenin, he fought for the principle that each people in the Soviet state should have scope for national and ethnic self-expression.

Yet it was fiendishly difficult to turn principle into practice. The Caucasus continued to worry the Politburo; and whatever general scheme was applied to it would have consequences for the entire constitutional structure of the Soviet state (or states). When Georgia fell to the Red Army in March 1921, the Bolsheviks had reclaimed as much of the former Russian Empire as they would possess until the annexations of 1939–40. Poland had thrown back the Reds at the battle of the Vistula. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania had abolished their Soviet republics and grasped their independence. The Politburo was determined that this should not happen in the Caucasus. Soviet republics in Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia had been established and Moscow steadily increased its control over the region. All the old problems, however, were replicated there. Veteran Bolsheviks were few and popular support for the communist regimes was frail. Religious traditions were strong. Customary social hierarchies were tenacious. What is more, the Red Army had marched into a region which had been tearing itself apart with vicious armed conflict since 1918. There had been wars across borders. There had also been persecution of national and ethnic minorities within each state. Ethnic cleansing had been perpetrated.²³ The Politburo had yet to bring about a final settlement.

There were several possibilities. Each little area could have been transformed into a province of the RSFSR. This would have the advantage of administrative neatness and centralist control. Another option would be to establish several Soviet republics on the model of Ukraine in the Civil War. Not only Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan but also Abkhazia, Dagestan, Chechnya and other parts of the north Caucasus could have been handled in this fashion. Yet another possibility was to resurrect the short-lived anti-Bolshevik Transcaucasian Federation of 1918 as a pro-Soviet entity — and, perhaps, to add the north Caucasus to its composition. No plan existed before or after the October Revolution. Stalin in 1920–1, though, came to advocate placing the north Caucasus inside the RSFSR; he also aimed to maintain the Soviet republics of Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan while compelling them to enter a Transcaucasian Federation (which itself would become a subordinate part of the RSFSR). He never spelled out why he excluded the north Caucasus from his scheme for the rest of the Caucasus. But probably he wanted a defensible border for the RSFSR against a potential invasion by the Turks or the Allies. The reason why he inclined towards a Transcaucasian Federation is easier to understand: it was a device to ensure an end to the inter-state and inter-ethnic conflicts in the region. Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan were not to be trusted as separate Soviet republics.

In summer 1921 Stalin, who had been convalescing in Nalchik in the north Caucasus,²⁴ paid a trip at last to the south Caucasus. Until then the affairs of the region had been handled by himself in the Kremlin and by the Party Caucasian Bureau based in Tbilisi. The Bureau’s leaders were his friends Sergo Ordzhonikidze and Sergei Kirov, and Ordzhonikidze insisted that Stalin’s presence was required if the many pressing problems were to be resolved.²⁵ It was his first visit to Georgia since before the Great War. He had no illusions about the kind of welcome he would receive. Even many among Georgia’s Bolsheviks had always disliked him, and his identification with the ‘Russian’ armed forces of occupation — the Red Army — did little to improve his standing among Georgians in general. But Stalin was undeterred. If Ordzhonikidze and Kirov as the Kremlin’s representatives could not do this, Politburo member Stalin would force through the necessary decisions.

The Caucasian Bureau had been divided over various territorial matters. As well as the recurrent pressures from the Georgian communist leadership to incorporate Abkhazia in the Georgian Soviet Republic there was a demand from the Azerbaijani communist leadership in Baku for Karabagh, an Armenian-inhabited enclave butting into Azerbaijan, to be made part of Azerbaijan; and the Armenian communists fiercely opposed this on the ground that Karabagh should belong to Armenia. Ruling the Caucasus was never going to be easy after the wars fought between the Azeris and Armenians from 1918. But on balance it was Stalin’s judgement that the Azerbaijani authorities should be placated. Revolutionary pragmatism was his main motive. The Party Central Committee in Moscow gave a high priority to winning support for the Communist International across Asia. Bolshevik indulgence to ‘Moslem’ Azerbaijan would be noted with approval in the countries bordering the new Soviet republics. In any case, the Turkish government of Kemal Pasha was being courted by Moscow; armies of Turks had rampaged into Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan in recent years and continued to pose a threat to Soviet security: the appeasement of Azerbaijan was thought an effective way of keeping Istanbul quiet.

This stored up trouble for the future. If the matter had been decidable without reference to the situation in the rest of Asia, Stalin would probably have left Karabagh inside Armenia despite Azerbaijani protests. He would also, if he had had his way at the same meeting of the Caucasian Bureau, have handed Abkhazia to Georgia with rights of internal autonomy.²⁶ But Abkhazian Bolshevik leaders Yefrem Eshba and Nestor Lakoba, who had negotiated a treaty between the RSFSR and Kemal Pasha’s Turkey,²⁷ had lobbied hard in Moscow and set up their Abkhazian Soviet Republic. Georgia’s Menshevik government had annexed Abkhazia and maltreated its people. Eshba and Lakoba insisted that their country’s reincorporation in Georgia would cast an odour of unpopularity on Bolshevism; and faced with this campaign, Stalin backed down and allowed them their Soviet republic. He could only do this, however, at the cost of annoying the Georgian Party Central Committee (which likewise argued that Bolshevism would incur popular hostility if he gave in to Eshba and Lakoba).

He was given proof of this when he addressed the Party City Organisation in Tbilisi on 6 July. This audience was already angry with him and his speech made everything worse. Stalin argued that the Georgian economy was incapable of post-war recovery without the specific assistance of Russia.²⁸ This was both untrue and offensive; for Western investment and trade could have helped to regenerate industry and agriculture in the country. Intellectually he was on firmer ground when he asserted:²⁹

But this argument, too, failed to go down well. Essentially Stalin was warning the Georgian communist leaders and activists that they had to show themselves worthy of Moscow’s support. Abkhazians, Ossetians and Adzharians had indeed suffered under the Menshevik government, which had treated their lands as provinces of historical Georgia. They had insisted that the Abkhazians were a Georgian tribe despite the fact that their language is entirely unrelated. If harmony was to be attained, the Georgian communist leadership had to set an example.

Stalin ran into still worse trouble at a workers’ mass meeting he addressed in Tbilisi. Georgia’s returning son was heard in silence as he explained the case for Sovietisation. This contrasted with the attitude to Isidore Ramishvili, the deposed Menshevik Interior Minister and old personal enemy of Stalin, who was greeted with a lengthy ovation.³⁰ Stalin’s temper had a fast fuse and, protected by his Cheka guards, he stormed out. His entire political career in Tbilisi had been full of rejections. This latest episode was one humiliation too many. As usual he sublimated his resentment by attacking others. He held Pilipe Makharadze, Chairman of the Georgian Revolutionary Committee, personally responsible for the fracas. Makharadze was sacked and replaced by Budu Mdivani.³¹ At the time Stalin felt he had promoted a more loyal and compliant Bolshevik to power in Georgia. And of course he misjudged his man. Mdivani turned out to be a far from pliable appointee; and it was he who had agitated Lenin into action from his sickbed against Stalin on the national question.

The tempestuous dispute between Lenin and Stalin in 1922–3 tended to hide the fact that Stalin stood by the general agreement they reached after he had made the concessions that Lenin demanded. The decision to form the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was ratified on 31 December 1922 and the new Constitution came formally came into force at the beginning of 1924. The federal system was a mere screen. The Politburo of the Russian Communist Party took the main decisions about each Soviet republic. Stalin had his own growing bias in favour of Russia and the Russians. Yet the grant of authority, prestige and enhancement to the other peoples remained intact. The Soviet republics were conserved and the autonomous republics proliferated. National and ethnic groups enjoyed the freedom to run presses and schools in their own languages — and Stalin and his associates gave resources for philologists to develop alphabets for the languages of several small peoples in the Caucasus and Siberia so that schooling might commence. The party also tried to attract indigenous young recruits to the party. Stalin spelled this out to a conference held by the Central Committee with ‘national’ republican and provincial communist leaders in June 1923.³²

It was an extraordinary experiment. The Politburo, while setting its face against the possibility that any region of the USSR might secede, continued to try to demonstrate to everyone at home and abroad that the October Revolution had set the conditions for the final solution of the national problems. Stalin was not just following policy. He believed in it and was one of its most committed exponents. His Georgian origins and early Marxist activity had moored him to the idea that the peoples of the former Russian Empire needed to be schooled, indoctrinated and recruited if Marxism was to take root among them. He and Lenin had got together about this in 1912–13. Stalin was not just playing with such ideas. Since before 1917 he had understood the importance of national languages and national personnel for the advancement of communism. He had sloughed off some early ideas but continued to insist that Marxism had to incorporate a serious commitment to solving the national question. His altercations with Mdivani and the Georgian communist leadership derived not from ‘chauvinism’ (as Lenin had claimed at the time and Trotski repeated later) but from a specific set of objections to Mdivani’s reckless disregard for the wishes of Moscow and the interests of the non-Georgians in Georgia.³³

Official measures on the national question had always been distasteful to many communist leaders, and it was Stalin who had to shoulder the bulk of the opprobrium. Trotski, Zinoviev and Kamenev agreed with the official line. Being Jews, however, they felt inhibited from taking a prominent role in debates about nationhood. Although Bukharin made the occasional comment, he too kept out of the spotlight. And so Stalin, despite Lenin’s accusation that he was a Great Russian chauvinist, remained chiefly responsible for party policy. Mdivani and other Georgian communist leaders quickly fell out with him. The imposition of a Transcaucasian Federation was too bitter a cup for them to drink from, and Stalin’s manipulations in 1922 permanently offended them. Not for the first time since 1917 he was undertaking uncongenial tasks which others shunned.

19. TESTAMENT

Tensions between Stalin and Lenin went on rising in autumn 1922. Stalin was not in a conciliating mood. He rebuked Lenin for garbling the contents of party policy in an interview for the Manchester Guardian:¹ the pupil was telling off his teacher. No Politburo member except Trotski wrote so bluntly to Lenin. These niggles added to Lenin’s set of concerns about the General Secretary, and he became agitated about leaving the communist party to Stalin. As his hope of physical recovery slipped away, he dictated a series of notes to be made public in the event of his death.² They were headed ‘Letter to the Congress’ because he wanted them to be read out to the next Party Congress. These are the notes known to history as Lenin’s Testament.

The gist lay in the sentences he composed on 25 December 1922 about fellow party leaders Stalin, Trotski, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin and Pyatakov. Molotov was one of the leaders peeved to have been left out of the list:³ Lenin was leaving a record for history. In fact the Testament’s main concern was with two individuals on the list:⁴

Lenin dwelt on rivalry between Trotski and Stalin:⁵ ‘These two qualities of the two outstanding leaders of the present Central Committee have the capacity to bring about an unintended split [in the party], and unless the party takes measures to prevent this, a split could happen unexpectedly.’ A split in the party, he argued, would imperil the existence of the Soviet regime.

Lenin went on: ‘Our party rests upon two social classes and this is what makes possible its instability and makes inevitable its collapse unless agreements can take place between these two classes.’⁶ The danger he had in mind was that Trotski and Stalin would promote policies favouring different classes — the working class and the peasantry — and that this would induce strife that would undermine the regime.

To many party officials who were privy to the Testament this seemed an eccentric analysis. They recognised the isolation of the Soviet state in the international system and had not forgotten about the foreign intervention in the Civil War. They could also understand why Lenin picked out Trotski as someone who might bring disunity to the central party leadership. But Lenin’s preoccupation with Stalin caused surprise. Popular opinion, according to reports of the GPU (as the Cheka had been known since 1921), suggested Trotski, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Rykov, Bukharin or even Dzierżyń ski as the likeliest winner of the contest for the political succession.⁷ Even within the ruling group Stalin was still not taken as seriously as he should have been. Lenin, though, had at last got his measure; and on 4 January 1923, as the dispute over Georgia grew bitter, he dictated an addendum to his characterisation:⁸

Lenin’s meaning pierced its way through his shaky syntax: he wanted to remove Stalin from the General Secretaryship.

His scheme was limited in scope. He was not proposing Stalin’s removal from the central party leadership, still less from the party as a whole. Such an idea would have been treated with the disdain which had met his request in July 1922 to dismiss most members of the Central Committee.⁹ Nor was Lenin the perfect political astrologer of his time. There was absolutely nothing in the Testament predicting the scale of terror which ensued in the years from 1928. Lenin, the leading proponent of state terror in the Civil War, failed to detect Stalin’s potential to apply terror-rule still more deeply in peacetime. The Testament of 1922–3 was limited to an effort to deprive Stalin of his most important administrative post.¹⁰

Files on the Georgian Affair were brought out for Lenin to examine. He had made up his mind about the verdict: Stalin and his associates were guilty of Great Russian chauvinism even though Stalin, Ordzhonikidze and Dzierżyń ski themselves were not Russians. Already at the end of the previous year, in an article on the national question, Lenin had acknowledged:¹¹

He also dictated an article on bureaucracy in the organs of party and government, making strong criticisms of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate. It was obvious to informed observers that Stalin, who headed the Inspectorate, was his principal target. Pravda’s editors blunted Lenin’s article in its published form;¹² but the general intent was conserved. Lenin composed a further article, ‘Better Fewer But Better’, demanding the immediate promotion of ordinary industrial workers to political office. His rationale was that they alone had the attitudes necessary to create harmony in the Party Central Committee and put an end to bureaucratic practices. Once again it was a message that was meant to damage Stalin.

Lenin went on giving dictation to Maria Volodicheva and Lidia Fotieva. Although he seems to have stopped mentioning sensitive matters in front of Nadya Allilueva, he took no other precaution beyond telling his secretaries to keep everything to themselves and to lock up his papers. This was how he plotted the downfall of an individual whom he considered the greatest danger to the Revolution. Lenin’s excessive self-confidence — the very defect he ascribed to Trotski — had not left him.

He would have been less insouciant if he had known his secretaries better. Volodicheva was disconcerted by the contents of his dictated notes on 23 December and she consulted her colleague Fotieva, who advised her to take a copy to none other than Stalin. Stalin was shocked but not deterred. He had had an altercation with Krupskaya the previous day on discovering that she had been helping Lenin to communicate with Trotski and others about current politics. Krupskaya’s behaviour contravened the Politburo’s orders, and Stalin, who had been asked to ensure observance of the regimen specified by Lenin’s doctors, directed verbal obscenities at her. Krupskaya declared that she alone knew what was medically best for Lenin. If Lenin were to be denied political contact with other leaders, his recovery would be delayed still further. She wrote in these terms to Kamenev, adding that nobody in the party had ever addressed her as foully as Stalin. But she did not tell Lenin for fear of upsetting him; and Stalin had not sought to withhold the right to dictate from Lenin. He resented being picked out for blame when he was only carrying out Politburo orders;¹³ but he reasonably assumed that the matters dividing him from Lenin were amenable to eventual resolution.

Some weeks later, however, Krupskaya blurted out to Lenin how Stalin had behaved towards her. Lenin was infuriated. Although he himself often swore,¹⁴ he drew the line at the verbal abuse of women. Stalin’s comportment offended him, and on 5 March 1923 he dictated a sharp letter:

Stalin was stupefied. He had tried to mend bridges with Lenin by letting him continue dictating and researching even though the resultant articles hurt him. He had asked Lenin’s sister Maria Ulyanova to plead his case: ‘I love him with all my heart. Tell him this in some way.’ With the letter in his hands Stalin tried to tell himself: ‘This isn’t Lenin who’s talking, it’s his illness!’

He scribbled out a half-hearted compromise. ‘If my wife had behaved incorrectly and you had had to punish her,’ he wrote, ‘I would not have regarded it as my right to intervene. But inasmuch as you insist, I am willing to apologise to Nadezhda Konstantinovna.’ On reflection Stalin redrafted the message and admitted to having bawled at Krupskaya; but he added that he had only been doing his duty as given him by the Politburo. He added:

Whenever he started to apologise, he ended up rubbing salt in the wound. How on earth Stalin thought such a message would placate Lenin is hard to imagine. But he was a proud man. He could not bring himself to show any greater contrition, and was on the point of paying dearly.

Yet this did not happen. On 10 March, agitated by the dispute, Lenin suffered a heart attack. Suddenly Stalin no longer needed to concern himself about Lenin directly leading a campaign against him. Lenin was taken off to the Gorki mansion outside Moscow, never to return. He was a helpless cripple tended by his wife Nadya and sister Maria; and although the doctors told them that all was not lost, Nadya ceased to believe them. His medical condition remained subject to security surveillance. The reports of GPU operatives to the Kremlin let Stalin know he was in the clear: Lenin was beyond recovery; it was only a matter of time before he died.

Lenin’s dictated thoughts, however, remained a threat. The dying leader had had them typed up in multiple copies and their existence was known to Politburo members and to the secretaries in Lenin’s office. Not everyone in the Politburo was friendly to Stalin. Relations between Trotski and Stalin had never been good, and Stalin could expect trouble from that quarter. What counted in Stalin’s favour, though, was that Kamenev, Zinoviev and others anticipated a strong bid from Trotski for supreme power. Stalin was a valuable accomplice whom they were disinclined to remove from the General Secretaryship. They knew his defects as well as Lenin did; they were also less aware of his capacities and ambition than Lenin had become: they therefore underestimated the difficulty they might have in handling him in the years ahead. This meant that if Stalin played his hand skilfully, he might yet survive the storm. The next Party Congress — the Twelfth — was scheduled for April 1923. The Politburo aimed to show that the regime could function effectively in Lenin’s absence. Trotski was offered the honour of delivering the political report on behalf of the Central Committee, but refused. Instead it was Zinoviev who gave it. Among themselves Zinoviev, Kamenev and Stalin arranged the rest of the proceedings in advance.

Stalin, though, gave the organisational report. Cleverly he accepted Lenin’s proposal for structural reforms to the Party Central Committee and the Central Control Commission; but whereas Lenin had wished to promote ordinary workers to membership of these bodies, Stalin gave preference to local party leaders of working-class origin who no longer worked in factories or mines. By this means Stalin would control the process and emasculate Lenin’s intentions.

He also delivered the report on the national question. He crafted his words with cunning and spoke like a man on the attack. He condemned both Great Russian nationalism and the nationalisms of the non-Russian peoples. He suggested that party policy had been correct in doctrine, policy and practice — and by implication he suggested that he was merely progressing along a line marked out by Lenin. Budu Mdivani got up to say that Stalin and his associates had handled affairs unfairly.¹⁵ By then, however, Stalin had had time to organise his defence and to get leaders from the south Caucasus to put Mdivani under fire. Zinoviev, too, rallied to Stalin’s side, demanding that Mdivani and his supporters should dissociate themselves from Georgian nationalism. Bukharin asserted the need to avoid giving offence to non-Russian national sensibilities; but he too failed to indicate that Stalin had acted as an obstacle to the success of official policy. Even Trotski refrained from an open attack on the General Secretary despite the encouragement he had been given by Lenin. Yet the pressure on Stalin had been intense, and with a degree of self-pity he claimed he had not wanted to deliver the report on the national question. As usual he represented himself as simply carrying out duties assigned to him by the leadership.

And he survived the ordeal. He paid a price: he had to accept several amendments to the draft resolution and most of these gave greater rights to the non-Russians than he liked. Yet the Georgian case was rejected and Stalin survived the Congress. The Testament remained under lock and key. It could have been revealed to the Congress, but his allies Zinoviev and Kamenev had blocked such a move.¹⁶ For a general secretary who had been on the brink of being removed from the Central Committee this was worth celebrating as a victory. Zinoviev, Kamenev and Stalin appeared to run party and state like a triumvirate.

Trotski passed up his opportunity to cause an upset. In subsequent years his supporters criticised his failure to grab his chance at the Twelfth Party Congress. Undoubtedly he had little tactical finesse in internal party business. Yet it is questionable whether he would have done himself a favour by breaking with the rest of the Politburo. Too many leaders at the central level and in the provinces had identified him as the Bonaparte-like figure who might lead the armed forces against the Revolution’s main objectives. His anti-Bolshevik past counted against him. His Civil War record, which involved the policy of shooting delinquent Bolshevik leaders in the Red Army, had not been forgotten. Furthermore, several of his admiring subordinates in the Revolutionary-Military Council of the Republic had — like him — not belonged to the Bolsheviks before 1917; and some of them had not been revolutionaries at all. Trotski had an intermittent tendency towards nervousness in trials of strength in the party. He was also aware that any attempt to unseat a Politburo member would have been interpreted as a bid for supreme power even before Lenin had passed away. Trotski decided to wait for a better chance in the months ahead.

Rivalry in fact grew among his enemies as soon as the Congress was over. Kamenev and Zinoviev had protected Stalin because they wanted help against Trotski. But they were disconcerted by the individual initiatives taken by Stalin in the weeks since Lenin’s heart attack. Zinoviev, based in faraway Petrograd, objected to decisions being taken without consultation. In the Civil War and afterwards it had been normal for Lenin to seek the opinion of Politburo members by phone or telegram before fixing policy. Stalin had gone ahead with his preferences on the Pravda editorial board, on the national question in the USSR, on the Middle East and on the Comintern. He was getting too big for his Tsaritsyn boots, and Zinoviev aimed to treat him firmly. While in Kislovodsk in the north Caucasus, Zinoviev called a meeting with other leading Bolsheviks on vacation near by. These included Bukharin, Voroshilov, Lashevich and Yevdokimov. Although Lashevich and Yevdokimov were his trusted supporters working with him in Petrograd, Voroshilov was a client of Stalin who was likely to relay the content of the conversations to the General Secretary. Perhaps (as most have supposed) Zinoviev was naïve. More likely, though, he thought that Voroshilov would be the intermediary who would carry the message back to Stalin that he had to change his behaviour or suffer the negative consequences.

On 30 July he wrote to Kamenev:¹⁷

According to Zinoviev, the time to act was overdue.

He exaggerated the power of the General Secretary. A simple vote in the Politburo, chaired by Kamenev, could still restrain Stalin; and when Zinoviev was unable to attend sessions, it would not have been difficult to insist on preliminary consultation of his opinions. Yet he was right about Stalin’s growing desire to get his way without reference to fellow Politburo members. Stalin saw the need for tactical retreat. He agreed to — and indeed appeared to encourage — changes in the composition of central party bodies. His critics had seen how often he had placed his supporters in posts of authority outside Moscow. He sat through Orgburo meetings which decided such matters. The solution was obvious. Trotski, Zinoviev and Bukharin were appointed to the Orgburo. They could oppose Stalin’s schemes whenever they wanted.¹⁸

It made little difference. The reason usually given is that Trotski and Zinoviev failed to appreciate the importance of attending the Orgburo whereas Stalin was a contented participant. Yet the basic question is why Trotski and Zinoviev, having identified the source of Stalin’s bureaucratic power and demanded Orgburo membership for themselves, failed to follow through with their action against him. This question, though, raises yet another one. Was Stalin’s willingness to sit through meeting after meeting the most important reason for his capacity to defeat them? The answer must surely be no. It was not as if Trotski, Kamenev and Zinoviev spent their time untroubled by the duty to attend bureaucratic meetings. The entire Soviet order was bureaucratic, and meetings of administrative officials were the norm. The leading organs of the Central Committee had been recomposed mainly with a view towards administering a shock to the General Secretary. His fellow Politburo members thought they could get on with their individual campaigns to succeed Lenin. Each expected to run his administrative hierarchy without interference from the others. Stalin’s career had not been extinguished but his political capital had been reduced to a minimum.

He was helped by events. All Politburo members, including Trotski, wanted to keep unity in the central party leadership. Isolated and resented across the country outside the party, they eagerly presented a front of agreement in public. Lenin was not yet dead even though leaders in the Kremlin knew that his chances of recovery were remote. Stalin’s adversaries in the Politburo did not want to rock the communist party boat by trying to throw Stalin overboard.

Yet the disagreements continued behind the scenes. They were exacerbated by the handling of economic policy by Kamenev, Zinoviev and Stalin. In mid-1923 there was suddenly a deficit in food supplies to the towns. This was the result of what Trotski called the ‘scissors crisis’. Prices of industrial goods had increased three times over prices paid for agricultural products since 1913. Thus the blades of the economy’s scissors opened. Peasants preferred to keep grain in the countryside rather than sell to government procurement agencies. They hoarded some of their harvest. They fed themselves and their animals better. They made more vodka for themselves. What they refused to do was to give way to the Bolsheviks, who had made the goods of manufacturing industry so expensive. The members of the Politburo majority gave ground to rural demands and reduced industrial prices. The wheels of exchange between town and village started to move again. Trotski did not fail to criticise his rivals for economic mismanagement; he saw them as having fulfilled his fears about the NEP as a potential instrument for turning away from the objectives of the October Revolution and towards the requirements of the peasantry.

Trotski’s fellow leftists in the party made a move against the developing nature of the New Economic Policy in October 1923. Yevgeni Preobrazhenski and others signed the Platform of the Forty-Six, criticising the organisational and economic policies of the ascendant party leadership. They demanded wider freedom of discussion and deeper state intervention in industrial development. In November 1923 Trotski joined the dissenters with a series of articles entitled ‘The New Course’. The Thirteenth Party Conference in December had arraigned this Left Opposition for disloyalty. The ascendant leaders needed Stalin more than ever as a counterweight to Trotski; all the criticisms of the summer were mothballed — and Zinoviev no longer talked of the need to restrain Stalin’s administrative autonomy. The suppression of factional activity in the provinces, they thought, was best left in his hands. They also entrusted him with putting the case against Trotski at the Conference. For once they did not want this honour. They knew that Stalin could look Trotski in the eye and smack him politically in the face — and perhaps they calculated that Stalin would do himself no favours by appearing divisive while they seemed above the demands of factional struggle.

Stalin was more than willing to oblige with a castigation of Trotski. His words were incisive:¹⁹

The Conference was a triumph for Stalin. Lenin ailed while Trotski wavered and Kamenev and Zinoviev applauded. Stalin had secured his rehabilitation.

And although the Testament had warned against a split between himself and Trotski, Stalin had gone ahead and denounced Trotski. Lenin, if he had recovered, would not have accepted Stalin’s excuse that he was only doing what the rest of the Politburo had asked. Yet Stalin had never prostrated himself before Lenin and had reason to feel wronged by him. He had kept a grip on his resentment at his treatment; this was not a comportment he often displayed. Presumably he understood that the chances were that Lenin was too ill to make a physical recovery; and anyway he continued to feel a genuine admiration for the sinking Leader. Stalin limited himself to monitoring what went on at the Gorki mansion, where bodyguards and nurses were reporting to Dzierżyński, who in turn kept him informed.²⁰ Stalin was not yet out of trouble. Nadezhda Krupskaya could be up to her old tricks by reading out the Pravda editorials on the divisive proceedings at the Thirteenth Conference. By this means it would be possible for Lenin to learn that his predicted spat between Stalin and Trotski had already occurred. Yet Stalin was registering an impact. Proud of his performance at the Conference, he was a supreme Leader in the making and was beginning to stand tall.

20. THE OPPORTUNITIES OF STRUGGLE

Lenin died of a heart attack on 21 January 1924. Stalin, who was given the honour of organising the funeral, gained further security in his post. The Politburo had decided on extraordinary treatment of the corpse. It was to be embalmed and put on permanent display in a mausoleum to be erected on Red Square. Krupskaya objected in vain to the quasi-religious implications. Stalin was determined upon the ‘mausoleumisa-tion’ of the founder of Bolshevism. Several scientists volunteered their services and the race was joined to find a chemical process to do the job. Trotski enquired whether he should come back from Tbilisi, where he had arrived en route for Sukhum on the Black Sea to convalesce from a severe bout of influenza. Stalin telegraphed that his return was neither necessary nor possible since the funeral would be held on 26 January. The advice had hostile intent: Stalin knew Trotski would attract all the attention if he appeared in Moscow for the ceremony. Trotski travelled on to Sukhum, where Stalin’s supporter Nestor Lakoba welcomed him. Dzierżyński, who had taken Stalin’s side in the Georgian Affair, had already sent instructions that nobody should bother Trotski during his stay at the state dacha.¹

Much has been made of Stalin and Dzierżyń ski’s wish to keep Trotski out of the way. Purportedly Trotski’s absence from the funeral ruined his chances of succeeding Lenin as supreme party leader whereas Stalin’s leadership of the funeral commission put him at a crucial advantage. This is unconvincing. Although Trotski years later was to complain about Stalin’s trickery, he did not claim it had made much difference. Placing his premium on his own convalescence, Trotski stayed in Sukhum for weeks before making the train journey back to Moscow.

In fact the funeral took place on 27 January, and Stalin was a pallbearer with Kamenev, Zinoviev, Bukharin, Molotov, Dzierżyński, Tomski and Rudzutak. He turned out in his quasi-military tunic. Along with others he gave a speech. It included a series of oaths ending with the words:²

He was not alone in using religious imagery³ and his delivery was still not that of a polished orator. The significance of the speech lay elsewhere. Stalin was at last talking like someone who could speak to the party as a whole. Indeed he spoke as if on the party’s behalf. He was emerging on to centre-stage — and he had the nerve to drape himself in a flag of loyalty to the man who had wished to shatter his career. Few had imagined he would act with such aplomb.

The Central Committee put aside its disputes, at least in public. Bolsheviks had often talked about the threat posed by other political parties. This was an exaggerated fear after the Civil War; organised opposition to Bolshevism was at its nadir. Yet GPU head Felix Dzierżyń-ski and Stalin did not drop their guard, believing that Mensheviks, Socialist-Revolutionaries or even ‘Black Hundreds’ (who had organised anti-semitic pogroms before the Great War) might arrange ‘counterrevolutionary’ outbreaks against the Bolsheviks.⁴ Their attitude mirrored the beleaguered, suspicious outlook of the communist leaders. They had surprised their opponents by seizing power in the October Revolution and were concerned lest something similar might happen to themselves.

Stalin had worked closely with the GPU since returning from the Soviet–Polish War.⁵ This reflected the interdependence of party and police as well as his personal preoccupation with considerations of security. The Soviet dictatorship was maintained by repression, and no Bolshevik — not even ‘softer’ ones like Kamenev and Bukharin — failed to appreciate the regime’s dependence on the GPU. As Stalin began to show his confidence, Lenin’s widow Krupskaya temporarily changed her behaviour towards the General Secretary. She no longer said what she thought of him. Nor could she prevent historical confections about his career from appearing in print. Her authority in the People’s Commissariat for Enlightenment was on the wane.⁶ In order to reassert herself she presented herself as the prime annalist of Lenin in his time. She undertook this also as a means of coping with bereavement: she had written a sketch for Lenin’s biography within weeks of his death. In May she sent it to Stalin asking what he thought of her project.⁷ Stalin, who had his own reasons to build a bridge towards her, wrote back approvingly. Certainly he read the piece carefully since he took the trouble to correct a mistaken date.⁸

Stalin and Krupskaya were setting themselves up as the high priest and priestess of the Lenin cult. Lenin’s image was ubiquitous. Petrograd was renamed Leningrad and books and articles on him were produced in vast quantities. Paradoxically this new cult required the censoring of Lenin’s works. Comments by Lenin at variance with Stalin’s policies were banned. Lenin could not be allowed to appear as having ever made mistakes. An example was the speech to the Ninth Party Conference in which Lenin admitted that the Polish War had been a blunder and declared that ‘Russian forces’ alone were insufficient for the building of communism in Russia.⁹ It was withheld from publication. Stalin also censored his own works so as to enhance his reputation for consistent loyalty. At Lenin’s fiftieth-birthday celebration in 1920 Stalin’s eulogy had included a reference to past failures of judgement. A decade later when Stalin was approached for permission to reprint the speech, he refused: ‘Comrade Adoratski! The speech is accurately transcribed in essence although it does require some editing. But I wouldn’t want to publish it: it’s not nice to talk about Ilich’s mistakes.’¹⁰ Christianity had to give way to communism and Lenin was to be presented to society as the new Jesus Christ. He also had to be displayed as quintessentially Russian if communism’s appeal was to spread among the largest national group. Stalin forbade mention of Lenin’s mixed ethnic ancestry — the fact that Lenin’s great-grandfather had been Jewish was kept secret.¹¹

Meanwhile Stalin was eager to put himself forward as a theorist. He had had no time to write a lengthy piece since before 1917; and no Bolshevik leader was taken seriously at the apex of the party unless he made a contribution on doctrinal questions. Despite the many other demands on his time and intellect, he composed and — in April 1924 — delivered a course of nine lectures for trainee party activists at the Sverdlov University under the title Foundations of Leninism.

Quickly brought out as a booklet, it was a work of able compression. Stalin avoided the showiness of similar attempts by Zinoviev, Trotski, Kamenev and Bukharin, who in private liked to disparage him. The rumour was also put about that, in so far as Stalin’s words had merit, he had plagiarised the contents of a booklet by a certain F. Xenofontov. In fact Stalin was a fluent and thoughtful writer even though he was no stylist. His exegesis of Lenin’s doctrines was concise and to the point and his lectures were organised in a logical sequence. He was doing what Lenin had not undertaken on his own behalf, and by and large he succeeded in codifying the ragbag of writings, speeches and policies of Lenin’s lifelong oeuvre. He denied that Bolshevik ideas were applicable exclusively to ‘Russian reality’. For Stalin, Lenin had developed a doctrine of universal significance: ‘Leninism,’ he proclaimed,¹²

Stalin contended that Lenin was the sole great heir to the traditions of Marx and Engels.

He laid out Lenin’s ‘teaching’ with catechistic neatness. It was this quality which provoked his rivals’ condescension; but it elicited approval from the young Marxists listening to the lectures. Not that the booklet was unambiguous in content. Stalin’s summary of Leninist theory indeed displayed a veritable precision of vagueness. He emphasised certain topics. Quoting from Lenin, he argued for the ‘peasant question’ to be solved by a steady movement towards large-scale farming co-operatives.¹³ He urged the party to ignore the sceptics who denied that this transition would end with the attainment of socialism. He also looked at the national question, maintaining that only the establishment of a socialist dictatorship could eliminate the oppression of nations. Capitalism allegedly disseminated national and ethnic hatreds as a means of dividing and ruling the planet.

Stalin had little to say about topics of conventional significance for Marxists. He seldom referred to the ‘worker question’. He offered just a few brief comments on worldwide socialism. But he had started again, for the first time since before the Great War, to make his mark as a contributor to Marxist theoretical discussions. He was making progress in his career. Yet there was a fly in the ointment. Lenin had laid down that his Testament should be communicated to the next Party Congress in the event of his death. Krupskaya, despite her reconciliation with Stalin, felt a higher duty to her husband’s memory and raised the question with the central party leadership.¹⁴ The Thirteenth Party Congress was scheduled for May 1924. Stalin had reason to be concerned. Even if Krupskaya had not made a move, the danger existed that Trotski would see tactical advantage in doing it for her. Stalin could not automatically rely on support from Kamenev and Zinoviev: the Kislovodsk saga had showed as much. All his gains over the past few months would be lost if an open debate were to be held at the Congress and a resolution was passed to comply with Lenin’s advice to appoint a new general secretary.

Stalin was lucky since the Party Central Committee, with the encouragement of Kamenev and Zinoviev, ruled that the Testament should be read out only to the heads of the provincial delegations. If Kamenev and Zinoviev had not still been worried about Trotski, they might have done for Stalin. But instead they spoke up for him. Stalin sat pale as chalk as the Testament was revealed to the restricted audience. But the sting was extracted from Stalin’s political flesh. Trotski, scared of appearing divisive so soon after the death of Lenin, declined to take the fight to the ‘troika’ of Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev. Zinoviev’s amour propre was coddled by the decision that he should deliver the Central Committee political report which had regularly been given by Lenin until his final illness. Thus was lost the best opportunity to terminate Stalin’s further rise to power. Perhaps Stalin would have defended himself effectively. Zinoviev and Kamenev were not very popular and Stalin’s behaviour was not widely in disrepute in the party at this stage. Yet Stalin liked to fight from a position of strength and he was at his weakest in those few days at the Congress. The notion that he owed his survival to his antics as a trapeze artist is wrong. What saved him was the safety net provided by provisional allies Zinoviev and Kamenev and Trotski’s failure to attack.

His own moments of prominence were few. He gave the organisational report with the usual dour assemblage of structural and numerical details; but he made no interventions in the rest of the open proceedings. The most perilous time occurred when he reported on the national question at lengthy closed sessions. Now that leading delegates knew about Lenin’s deathbed criticisms this was a sensitive topic. His Georgian communist enemies were lining up to take pot-shots at him. Yet Stalin did not flinch. Rather than apologise, he gave a spirited apologia of official policy.

The sense of hurt diminished but did not disappear. The internal strains of the troika irked him: he knew that Zinoviev and Kamenev looked down on him and that, given a chance, they would ditch him. His health, too, was poor. Feeling humiliated, Stalin followed his usual course: he requested release from his duties. In a letter to the Central Committee on 19 August 1924 he pleaded that ‘honourable and sincere’ work with Zinoviev and Kamenev was no longer possible. What he needed, he claimed, was a period of convalescence. But he also asked the Central Committee to remove his name from the Politburo, Orgburo and Secretariat:¹⁵

He would be going back to Turukhansk as an ordinary provincial militant and not as the Central Committee leader he had been in 1913. Stalin was requesting a more severe demotion than even the Testament had specified.

He was psychologically complex. That he contemplated going back to northern Siberia may be doubted. But he was impulsive. When his pride was offended, he lost his composure. Even by offering his resignation, he was taking a huge risk. He was gambling on his exhibition of humility inducing the Central Committee, which included some of his friends, to refuse his request. He needed to put his enemies in the wrong. The ploy worked perfectly.

The Central Committee retained him as General Secretary and the final settling of accounts among Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev was yet again postponed. Coming back from vacation in the autumn, he had recovered his self-possession. In advance of Politburo meetings he consulted Kamenev and Zinoviev. If Zinoviev was in Moscow, the three of them met privately and then, in conspiratorial fashion, arrived at the Politburo separately. Stalin brazened it out, shaking hands with his archenemy Trotski as they greeted each other. He also restrained any display of personal ambition. Kamenev, not Stalin, chaired the Politburo after Lenin’s death.¹⁶ Yet already Stalin was taking care of his future. When his rivals fail to join him in the Orgburo, he was free to replace them with appointees more to his liking. The Stalin group formed itself under his leadership; it was like the street gang which he had been thwarted from leading as a boy in Gori.¹⁷ None was more important than Vyacheslav Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich. Both were Secretaries of the Central Committee; they also intermittently headed one or another of its departments and helped Stalin in the Orgburo. And when Ukrainian communist politics became troublesome for the Kremlin in April 1925, Kaganovich was dispatched to Kiev to become First Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine.

Stalin also built up a retinue of supporters in the Central Committee. Among them were Sergo Ordzhonikidze, Kliment Voroshilov, Semën Budënny, Sergei Kirov and Andrei Andreev. All these men were loyal to him without being servile and called him Koba.¹⁸ Some had had disputes with him in the past. Molotov had fallen out with him in March 1917. Kaganovich had criticised the Central Committee’s organisational policy in 1918–19 and Ordzhonikidze could never button his lip when he had something on his mind.¹⁹ Andreev had even been a Workers’ Oppositionist. Budënny and Voroshilov had served under him in Tsaritsyn; Ordzhonikidze and Kirov had been his subordinates in the Caucasus. Andreev had impressed him with administrative work in the early 1920s. The gang took time to coalesce, and Stalin never allowed its members to take their positions for granted. Even the Tsaritsynites needed to keep proving their worth in his eyes. Sergei Minin and Moisei Rukhimovich, cronies on the Southern Front, came to seem as useless as hardened paint. Minin sided with the opposition to the ascendant party leadership and Stalin had nothing more to do with him. Minin committed suicide in 1926. When Rukhimovich’s incompetence at organising transport was exposed, Stalin sacked him as ‘a self-satisfied bureaucrat’.²⁰

He demanded efficiency as well as loyalty from the gang members. He also selected them for their individual qualities. He wanted no one near to him who outranked him intellectually. He selected men with a revolutionary commitment like his own, and he set the style with his ruthless policies. None earned disapprobation for mercilessness towards enemies. He created an ambience of conspiracy, companionship and crude masculine humour. In return for their services he looked after their interests. He was solicitous about their health. He overlooked their foibles so long as their work remained unaffected and they recognised his word as law.

This is what Amakyan Nazaretyan wrote about working ‘under Koba’s firm hand’:²¹

On another occasion he added:²²

Lazar Kaganovich shared this endorsement:²³

For Kaganovich, Stalin’s personality responded to circumstances not of his making.

He discouraged attention to his national origin. In the provinces his supporters played up the fact that his main opponents — at first Trotski and then Kamenev and Zinoviev — were Jews. He himself never mentioned this, but he did not stop others from bringing it up.²⁴ He had his own reasons for caution. Not only Jews but also Poles, Georgians and Armenians had a presence in the Bolshevik party central and local leadership out of proportion to the USSR’s demography, and there was growing resentment of the fact in the country. Stalin, moreover, still spoke with a heavy accent. Trotski put this with typical cattiness: ‘The Russian language always stayed for him not only a language half-foreign and improvised but — much worse for his awareness — conventional and strained.’²⁵ Snubs about his linguistic facility were not uncommon in the 1920s.²⁶

Yet no one else in the ascendant central leadership set himself up quite so effectively. Bukharin had a following in the party but no consolidated network of clients. Zinoviev had such a network but most of his clients were based in Leningrad. Kamenev had never been much of a patron. The sole leader to match Stalin’s ability in forming a cliental group was Trotski. He still appealed to members of the Inter-District group which had joined the Bolsheviks in May 1917, and he had attracted admirers in the Civil War as People’s Commissar for Military Affairs. The Left Opposition, when attacking the Politburo in the last quarter of 1923, looked to him for inspiration. Among them were Yevgeni Preobrazhenski, Leonid Serebryakov, Nikolai Krestinski, Adolf Ioffe and Christian Rakovski. Yet Trotski lacked Stalin’s day-to-day accessibility. He had the kind of hauteur which peeved dozens of potential supporters. He was also devoid of Stalin’s tactical cunning and pugnacity, and there was a suspicion among Trotski’s followers that their idol’s illnesses at crucial conjunctures of factional struggle had a psychosomatic dimension. Yet he had a large enough following to take on and beat Stalin if the situation had been different. The trouble was that Trotski had lost the early rounds of the contest. He was always coming from behind on points.

Stalin continued to box warily. The defeat of the Left Opposition in the winter of 1923–4 had been achieved in open combat. Trotski and the Left Opposition had attacked and Stalin, Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin had retaliated. Stalin had had little need to sack Trotskyists and replace them with individuals loyal to the ascendant party leadership.²⁷ Yet the Orgburo and the Secretariat — as well as the Politburo in the highest instance — used their right to change postings in the following months. The ascendant party leadership manipulated the various administrative levers to its advantage. Steadily the Left lost its remaining key jobs in party, government, army and police. The sackings were accompanied by demotions which frequently involved relocation to distant parts of the USSR. This was really a light form of exile whereby the ascendant leadership consolidated its grip on power. The Left was also doctrinally undermined. The Agitprop Department of the Secretariat publicised past disputes between Lenin and Trotski. Its various adjuncts printed dozens of anti-Trotski pamphlets; and Stalin as an avid reader scribbled an aide-mémoire on the cover of a work on the October Revolution: ‘Tell Molotov that Tr[otski] lied about Lenin on the subject of ways to make an insurrection.’²⁸

He was highly conspiratorial. According to Politburo secretary Boris Bazhanov, Stalin’s desk had four telephones but inside the desk was a further apparatus giving him the facility to eavesdrop on the conversations of dozens of the most influential communist leaders. He could do this without going through the Kremlin switchboard, and the information he gathered must have alerted him to any manoeuvres being undertaken against him.²⁹ Personal assistants such as Lev Mekhlis and Grigori Kanner carried out whatever shady enterprise he thought up.³⁰ He was ruthless against his enemies. When Kamenev asked him about the question of gaining a majority in the party, Stalin scoffed: ‘Do you know what I think about this? I believe that who votes how in the party is unimportant. What is extremely important is who counts the votes and how they are recorded.’³¹ He was implying that he expected the central party apparatus to fiddle the voting figures if ever they went against him.

This sort of remark gave Stalin the reputation of an unprincipled bureaucrat. He revelled in his deviousness when talking to his associates. But there was much more to him. He had the potential of a true leader. He was decisive, competent, confident and ambitious. The choice of him rather than Zinoviev or Kamenev to head the charge against Trotski at the Thirteenth Party Conference showed that this was beginning to be understood by other Central Committee members. He was coming out of the shadows. From the last months of 1924 he showed a willingness to go on attacking Trotski without keeping Zinoviev and Kamenev at his side. Kamenev had made a slip by referring to ‘nepman Russia’ instead of ‘NEP Russia’. The so-called nepman was typically a private trader who took advantage of the economic reforms since 1921 and who was resented by Bolsheviks. Stalin made a meal of Kamenev’s slip in the party press. Around the same time Zinoviev had described the Soviet regime as ‘a dictatorship of the party’. Stalin as Party General Secretary vigorously repudiated the term as a description of political reality.³² Kamenev and Zinoviev were put on notice that they should look out for themselves. In autumn 1924 Stalin moved against their leading supporters. I. A. Zelenski was replaced as Moscow City Party Secretary by Stalin’s supporter Nikolai Uglanov.³³

Strategic factors were coming between Stalin on one side and Zinoviev and Kamenev on the other. Stalin wanted to defend the case for the possibilities of ‘building socialism’ in the USSR even during the NEP. This countered Trotski’s argument, fleshed out in The Lessons of October in 1924, that the October Revolution would expire unless sustained by co-operation with socialist regimes in Europe. Trotski was extending his pre-revolutionary ideas about the need for ‘permanent revolution’. To Stalin his booklet seemed both anti-Leninist in doctrine and pernicious in practice to the stability of the NEP. Bukharin, an arch-leftist in the Bolshevik leadership in the Civil War, agreed with Stalin and was rewarded with promotion to full membership of the Politburo after the Thirteenth Party Congress. He and Stalin began to act together against Zinoviev and Kamenev. Bukharin, as he pondered party policy after Lenin, believed that the NEP offered a framework for the country’s more peaceful and evolutionary ‘transition to socialism’. He disregarded traditional party hostility to kulaks and called on them to ‘enrich themselves’. He sought a moderation of repressive methods in the state’s handling of society and wished to put the emphasis on indoctrinating the urban working class. He saw peasant co-operatives as a basis for ‘socialist construction’.

Stalin and Bukharin rejected Trotski and the Left Opposition as doctrinaires who by their actions would bring the USSR to perdition. The leftist push for a more active foreign policy might provoke a retaliatory invasion by the Western powers. Trade would be ruined along with Soviet capital investment plans. The Trotskyist demand for an increased rate of industrial growth, moreover, could be realised only through the heavier taxation of the better-off stratum of the peasantry. The sole result would be the rupture of the linkage between peasants and working class recommended by Lenin. The recrudescence of social and economic tensions could lead to the fall of the USSR.

Zinoviev and Kamenev felt uncomfortable with so drastic a turn towards the market economy. They still feared Trotski. They also wanted to maintain the peasant–worker linkage. But they were unwilling to give their imprimatur to Bukharin’s evolutionary programme; they disliked Stalin’s movement to a doctrine that socialism could be built in a single country — and they simmered with resentment at the unceasing accumulation of power by Stalin. Zinoviev and Kamenev were vulnerable to the charge of having betrayed the Bolshevik Central Committee in October 1917. They had to prove their radicalism. It was only a matter of time before they challenged their anti-Trotski allies Stalin and Bukharin. Stalin was ready and waiting for them. To most observers he seemed calmer than during those earlier disputes when he had flown off the handle in internal party disputes. But this was not the case. Stalin was just as angry and ferocious as ever. What had changed was that he was no longer the outsider and the victim. Stalin dominated the Orgburo and the Secretariat. With Bukharin he led the Politburo. He could afford to maintain an outward tranquillity and catch his enemies unawares.

He continued to act in such a fashion. He had survived Lenin’s criticism by the skin of his teeth. He had to show others that he was not as black as he had been painted. His gang in the central party leadership would help him. But he had to watch out for others. Dzierżyński did not owe him any favours. Krupskaya, after her early overtures to Stalin, kept her own counsel. Bukharin himself was not dependable; he went on talking amicably to Trotski, Zinoviev and Kamenev even while castigating their policies. Bolshevik politics were in dangerous flux.

21. JOSEPH AND NADYA

The struggles among the communist party factions were also a contest for individual supremacy. Trotski, Zinoviev, Bukharin and Stalin each felt worthy to succeed Lenin, and even Kamenev had ambition. Stalin was tired of seeing his rivals strutting on the public stage. He accepted that they were good orators and that he would never match them in this. Yet he was proud — in his brittle, over-sensitive way — that his contribution to Bolshevism was mainly practical in nature: he thought praktiki like himself were the party’s backbone. The praktiki looked up to Lenin as the eagle who scattered his opponents like mere chickens. Stalin seemed unimpressive to those who did not know him and indeed to many who did; but he was already determined to fly into history as the party’s second eagle.¹ He did not just scatter his rivals for the succession: whenever possible, he swooped down and tore them to bits. Chatting to Kamenev and Dzierżyński in 1923, he had explained his general attitude: ‘The greatest delight is to pick out one’s enemy, prepare all the details of the blow, to slake one’s thirst for a cruel revenge and then go home to bed!’²

Such was the man who had taken Nadya Allilueva as his wife after the October Revolution. There had been no wedding ceremony, but their daughter Svetlana was told that her parents lived as spouses from some unspecified time before the Soviet government’s transfer from Petrograd to Moscow in 1918. (Apparently the official registration did not take place until 24 March 1919.)³ Nadya was less than half his age at the time and he was her revolutionary hero; and she had yet to learn that the harsh features of his character were not reserved exclusively for the enemies of communism.

At first things went well. Alexandra Kollontai, who got to know Nadya in the winter of 1919–20, was impressed by her ‘charming beauty of soul’ as well as by Stalin’s demeanour: ‘He takes a great deal of notice of her.’⁴ But trouble was already in the air. Joseph wanted a wife who took household management as her priority; this was one of Nadya’s accomplishments which had caught his eye in 1917.⁵ Nadya, however, wanted a professional career. As the daughter of a Bolshevik veteran, she had carried out important technical tasks on the party’s behalf in the Civil War. Although she had no professional qualifications, she had a grammar school education and proved a competent clerk at a time when politically reliable secretaries were few.⁶ She soon learned how to decode telegrams transmitting confidential information among Soviet leaders, including her husband.⁷ Lenin employed her on his personal staff.⁸ Joseph was more often absent on campaign than at home until autumn 1920, leaving Nadya to devote herself to her Sovnarkom duties. She became so close to the Lenins that if Nadezhda Krupskaya was going away on a trip, she would ask her to feed their cat. (Lenin could not be depended upon.)⁹ Nadya joined the party, assuming that her involvement in Bolshevik administration at the highest level would continue.

Her hope was dashed when Joseph returned from the Soviet–Polish War and family chores increased. Joseph wanted a settled domesticity at the end of his working day, whenever that might be. Matters came to a head late in the winter of 1920–1. Nadya, pregnant since June 1920, had gone on working while carrying the child. Joseph himself had fallen badly ill. In the Civil War he had frequently complained of his aches and pains as well as his ‘exhaustion’.¹⁰ No one had taken him seriously because he had usually done this when trying to resign in high dudgeon. Brother-in-law Fëdor Alliluev, seeing him before the Tenth Party Congress, remarked how tired he looked. Stalin agreed: ‘Yes, I’m tired. I need to go off to the woods, to the woods! To relax and have a proper rest and sleep as one ought!’¹¹ He took a few days off. It was only when he retired to his bed after the Congress that medical attention became an obvious necessity. Professor Vladimir Rozanov, one of the Kremlin doctors, diagnosed chronic appendicitis. Rozanov said the problem might have existed for a dozen years; he could barely believe Stalin had been able to stand upright. Instant surgery was vital.

Operations for appendicitis in that period were often fatal. Rozanov worried that the procedure could infect Stalin’s peritoneum; he also thought him dangerously thin.¹² Initially a local anaesthetic was administered because of his weakened condition. Yet the pain became unbearable and the operation was not completed until after a dose of chloroform. Allowed home afterwards, Stalin lay on a divan reading books and convalesced over the next two months. As he got better, he went out in search of company. By June he had been passed fit. Coming upon Mikhail Kalinin in discussion with other Bolsheviks about the NEP, he announced his return to work: ‘It’s oppressive to lie around by yourself and so I’ve got up: it’s boring without one’s comrades.’¹³ This sentiment might easily have been included in any collection of memoirs about Stalin; but the rest of Fëdor Alliluev’s story was too embarrassing for Stalin to allow publication. He would not permit people to discover that he had ever been anything but tough in mind and body.

Joseph’s illness and recuperation coincided with the arrival of their first child. Vasili Stalin was born in Moscow on 21 March 1921. Delight at his safe delivery was tempered for Nadya by the fact that Joseph increased pressure on her to dedicate herself to domesticity. No one on her side of the family helped her out: all of them, including her mother Olga, were immersed in political activity. Olga was anyway hardly a model for child rearers. When Nadya and the other Alliluev children had been young, they had often had to fend for themselves while their parents went about their professional lives and revolutionary activity.

Nadya could not turn for help to the other side of the family: Joseph’s mother Keke adamantly refused to move to Moscow. In June 1921, after recovering from the appendicitis operation, Stalin had headed south on party business to Georgia and visited Keke. The son greeted his mother without the warmth that might have been expected after their long separation.¹⁴ She knew her own mind and did not flinch from enquiring: ‘Son, there’s none of the tsar’s blood on your hands, is there?’ Shuffling on his feet, he made the sign of the cross and swore that he had had no part in it. His friend Sergo Ordzhonikidze expressed surprise at this religious recidivism; but Stalin exclaimed: ‘She’s a believer! I wish to God that our people believed in Marxism as they do in God!’¹⁵ They had been apart from each other for many years; and even though he had wriggled out of answering her straightforwardly, her question to him showed she knew a gulf of belief would continue to keep them apart. As a Christian Keke had reason to tell her son that the Red Kremlin was no place for her. For her safety and comfort, Stalin moved her into one of the servants’ apartment in the old Viceroy’s palace in Tbilisi. Budu Mdivani commented that the local authorities increased the guard on her: ‘This is so that she doesn’t give birth to another Stalin!’¹⁶

But Joseph did not come back unaccompanied. In Georgia he also sought out his son Yakov by his first wife Ketevan. Yakov had been looked after by Ketevan’s brother Alexander Svanidze and his wife Maria. Joseph hardly knew the thirteen-year-old Yakov but wished to take him at last into his care — or at least into Nadya’s. Nor was this the end of the family’s expansion. The leading Bolshevik F. A. Sergeev, alias Artëm, perished in a plane crash in July 1921 leaving a young son. It was the custom in the party for such orphans to be fostered by other Bolsheviks, and this is what the Stalins did. The lad Artëm Sergeev lived with them until manhood (and became a major-general in the Red Army in the Second World War).¹⁷ Stalin also interested himself in the upbringing of Nikolai Patolichev, the son of a comrade who reportedly had died in his arms in the Soviet–Polish War of 1920.¹⁸ Young Patolichev was not brought into the family. Nevertheless in the space of a few months the Stalin household had grown in number from two to five.

Nadya brought in domestic assistance while her busy husband focused his energies on politics. She hired a nanny for Vasili; she also employed servants. She herself was like a terrier in getting raw materials for the kitchen. The Kremlin administrative regime, run by Stalin’s old friend Abel Enukidze, assigned a quota of food products for each resident family. Joseph, whose health had troubled him throughout the Civil War, had been recommended a diet with plenty of poultry. As a result he had acquired the monthly right to fifteen chickens, a head of cheese and fifteen pounds of potatoes. By mid-March 1921, days before the new baby was due, the family had already eaten its way through ten of its fifteen chickens. (Either the birds were unusually small and thin or the Stalins had the appetite of horses.) Nadya wrote a request for an increased quota.¹⁹ (Even before she married Joseph she had known how to handle the Soviet bureaucracy: in November 1918, after the Alliluevs moved to Moscow, she wrote to Yakov Sverdlov asking for a better room for them.)²⁰ In later years she made further pleas. One of them was a request for a new kindergarten; she was turned down on that occasion.²¹

Nadya’s wish to work outside the home was conventional among young Bolshevik women, who combined a dedication to the revolutionary cause and to women’s emancipation. She did not object to supervising household management so long as she had servants and could continue to be employed in Lenin’s office. The double role was very heavy and the lack of support from Joseph made it scarcely bearable. He was frequently late in getting back to the Kremlin flat. He was uncouth in manners and had an obscene tongue when irritated. Nor was his language confined to phrases like ‘Go to the Devil!’ Hating to be contradicted, he used the foulest swear-words on his wife. His rough manner was extreme, and it cannot be discounted that he was compensating to some degree for personal insecurities. After hurting his arm as a boy, he had been unable to join in the normal rough-and-tumbles of childhood. He had been rejected on physical grounds by the Imperial Army in the Great War. Stalin wanted to be thought a man’s man. In fact, according to his grand-nephew Vladimir Alliluev, he had carefully manicured nails and ‘almost a woman’s fingers’.²² Did he have some residual doubts about his manliness by contemporary criteria? If he did, it was Nadya who paid the price.

Like most of his male contemporaries, Stalin expected a wife to obey. Here he was disappointed, for Nadya refused to be meek. Disputes between them were frequent more or less from the start of their sustained cohabitation. She too had her moods. Indeed it is now clear that she had mental problems. Perhaps they were hereditary. Schizophrenia of some kind seems to have affected previous generations of her mother’s side of the family; and her brother Fëdor, after an acutely traumatic event after the Civil War when the former bank robber Kamo stage-managed a scene in which he threatened to shoot him, had a breakdown from which he never recovered.²³ Nadya had a volatile temperament and, although she remained in love with Joseph, the marriage continued to be rancorous between the patches of tranquillity.

Someone in the central party apparatus decided that Nadya was unsuitable for party membership. The rumour was that it was none other than Joseph. In December 1921 she was excluded from the party: this was a disgrace for anyone working as she did in the offices of Sovnarkom. Eventually she could have lost her job. The charge was that she had not passed the various tests applied to all party members and had not bothered to prepare herself for them. Nor had she helped with mundane party work; this was all the less acceptable inasmuch as she was ‘a person of the intelligentsia’. Only one Central Control Commission member spoke up for her even though Lenin himself had written warmly in her support.²⁴ Nadya begged for another chance and promised to make a greater effort in the way that was demanded. Initially the decision was made to ‘exclude her as ballast, completely uninterested in party work’; but finally the Central Control Commission allowed her to keep the secondary status of a ‘candidate’ party member.²⁵ She could have done without this contretemps in a year full of problems; but at least the eventual decision enabled her to go on working for Lenin’s office without a blemish on her record.

It cannot be proved that Joseph had been behind the move to take away her party card; and Nadya never expressly blamed him. But he belonged to the Politburo and the Orgburo and was already intervening in the Secretariat’s work in 1921:²⁶ he could have put in a good word for her if he had wanted. But she had survived. Stalin accepted the situation and avoided interfering with her professional aspirations again. She functioned as one of Lenin’s secretaries even while Lenin and Stalin were falling out. Krupskaya even asked her to liaise with Kamenev on Lenin’s behalf about the Georgian Affair.²⁷ It would be strange if Nadya kept this a secret from her husband. Perhaps he at last began to see the advantages of having a working wife.

At home Nadya was a severe mother and denied to the children the open affection she directed at Joseph. Strict standards of behaviour were enforced. Yakov, who hardly knew his father before moving to Moscow, reacted badly to this. Joseph’s work kept him away from the apartment and the bond between them never solidified. Such interest as he took in his son tended to involve pressure. He pushed books at him and expected him to read them. ‘Yasha!’ he wrote on the cover of B. Andreev’s The Conquest of Nature, ‘Read this book without fail!’²⁸ But it was Nadya who had to handle Yakov on a daily basis and, as her letter to Joseph’s mother in October 1922 indicated, she found him exasperating:²⁹

A papiroska is a cigarette with an empty tube at the end which acts like a cigarette-holder to allow smoking while wearing gloves in sub-zero temperatures. It was in character for Joseph to expect Nadya to enforce discipline while he himself disrupted it.

Life nevertheless had its pleasant side. The Stalins lived in two places after the Soviet–Polish War: their Kremlin flat and the dacha they called Zubalovo near the old sawmill at Usovo outside Moscow. By a bizarre coincidence, the dacha’s owner had belonged to the Zubalishvili business family which had built the hostel that became the Tiflis Spiritual Seminary. Probably it tickled the fancy of Stalin and his neighbour Mikoyan that they were living in homes put up by an industrialist from the south Caucasus against whom they had once helped to lead strikes.³⁰

Several dachas were made state property in the same district in 1919 and the Stalins occupied Zubalovo-4. Stalin, who had never had a house of his own,³¹ cleared the trees and bushes to turn his patch into a spot to his liking. Near by was the River Moskva, where the children could swim in the summer. It was a beautiful spot which might have appeared in the plays of Anton Chekhov; but whereas Chekhov described how the old rural gentry were supplanted by the nouveaux riches, this was a case of the nouveaux riches being expelled by revolutionaries. While gloating over the Zubalishvilis’ forced departure, Stalin had no inhibition about creating a style of life that was similarly bourgeois. When they could, the entire Stalin family went out to Zubalovo. They gathered honey. They searched for mushrooms and wild strawberries. Joseph took pot-shots at pheasants and rabbits and the family ate what he killed. The Stalins kept open house and visitors stayed as long as they wanted. Budënny and Voroshilov often popped over to drink and sing with Joseph. Ordzhonikidze and Bukharin were others who spent time there. Gentle-mannered Bukharin was a particular favourite with Nadya and the children: he even brought a tame grey fox with him and did a painting of the trees by the dacha.³²

In the summers they holidayed in the south of the USSR, usually in one of the many state dachas by the Black Sea. Stalin had material couriered to him whenever he needed to be consulted. But he knew how to enjoy himself. There were always plenty of Caucasian dishes and wines on his table and the visitors were many. Georgian and Abkhazian politicians queued to ingratiate themselves. His Moscow cronies, if they were staying in nearby dachas, called on the family; and picnics were arranged in the hills or by the seaside. Although Stalin could not swim, he loved the fresh air and the beach as well.

He also used the vacations as a time to allow his body to recuperate. Joseph’s health had always troubled him and since 1917 he had resorted to various traditional cures. The rheumatism in his arm and his bothersome cough — probably caused by his pipe-smoking — figured often in his letters.³³ Once he had stopped at Nalchik high up in the north Caucasus. It was a place visited by tuberculosis patients.³⁴ But Stalin’s specific complaints were different; and for his rheumatism, which affected his arm every spring, he was advised by Mikoyan to try the hot baths at Matsesta near Sochi on the Black Sea coast.³⁵ Stalin tried this and found the waters at Matsesta to work ‘a lot better than the Essentuki muds’.³⁶ Essentuki was one of the spa towns of the north Caucasus famous for the medical benefits of its soil. Stalin mostly, in any case, preferred to go to Sochi for his summer vacations.³⁷ From 1926 he put himself in the hands of Dr Ivan Valedinski, a great believer in ‘balneology’. When Stalin made his way south in the summer, he pocketed instructions from Valedinski: he was told to take a dozen baths at Matsesta before returning home. Stalin asked for permission to enliven his stay with a glass or two of brandy at weekends. Valedinski was stern: Stalin could take a glass on Saturdays but definitely not on Sundays.³⁸

Perhaps the doctor forgot that Sundays were not sacred for an atheist. In any case Stalin was never a trusting patient; he had his own pack of medicines and used them as he saw fit regardless of advice from doctors.³⁹ It is doubtful that he went along with everything that Valedinski specified. But undoubtedly he felt better than earlier. The hot baths eased the pain in his joints and the aspirin prescribed by Valedinski reduced the pain in his neck. A heart check-up in 1927 confirmed him as generally robust.⁴⁰

More worrisome to Stalin than his recurrent ill health were his growing difficulties with Nadya. Periods of calm and tenderness were interrupted by explosions of mutual irritation. Nadya and the children spent time with him in the south; and she and Joseph wrote to each other if for some reason she could not stay there.⁴¹ Her absence became normal once she started a student’s course at the Industrial Academy: the beginning of term coincided with her husband’s annual holiday leave. Their letters to each other were tender. He called her Tatka and she called him Joseph. She was solicitous about him: ‘I very much beg you to look after yourself. I kiss you deeply, deeply, as you kissed me when we said goodbye.’⁴² She also wrote to his mother on Joseph’s behalf, giving news of the children and passing on little details about life in Moscow. Stalin himself wrote to Georgia only infrequently. He was too preoccupied with political business, and anyway he had hardly bothered about his blood relatives for many years. Usually his letters to his mother were brief to the point of curtness and ended with a phrase such as ‘Live a thousand years!’⁴³ Nadya was doing her best for him, but she could never get the appreciation and understanding from her husband that she craved.

His harshness would have demoralised the most optimistic spirit. Nadya’s mental condition worsened and she was given to episodes of despair. Stalin’s flirtations with other women probably played a part in this. On the secretarial staff of the Politburo was a beautiful young woman, Tamara Khazanova, who befriended Nadya; she came round to the Kremlin flat and helped with the children. At some point it would seem that Stalin took a fancy to her and pursued his interest.⁴⁴

Nadya descended into gloom. She expressed her thoughts in a letter to her friend Maria Svanidze, the sister of Joseph’s first wife:⁴⁵

‘New family matters’ was Nadya’s odd way of referring to her latest pregnancy. Because of this she had to delay getting the requisite qualifications for professional employment. Enrolment on some training course remained her ambition. She told Maria to take the same attitude or else spend her time running errands for others.⁴⁶

The child she was expecting was born on 28 February 1926; it was a girl, and they named her Svetlana. Nadya, however, remained determined to free herself of domesticity and in autumn 1929 she got herself enrolled at the Industrial Academy in central Moscow on a course specialising in artificial fibres. The Stalin household was left to servants and nannies.

Each morning she left the Kremlin and made for the Industrial Academy. She left behind all privilege. She was also leaving a middle-aged environment and joining people of her own age. Most of the students were unaware that Nadya Allilueva was the wife of the Party General Secretary — and even if they knew this, they did not act much differently towards her. Off set Nadya without chauffeur or bodyguard, taking the same forms of transport as her fellow students. She wrote to Joseph about a very tedious journey on 12 September 1929:⁴⁷

While claiming to find this catalogue of service breakdowns funny she pleaded a bit too hard for this to convince. Nadya had high standards in everything and was annoyed by the deterioration in conditions. She was making sure that Joseph learned something about the kind of life facing ordinary metropolitan inhabitants: the noise, mess and disorder.⁴⁸

Even Joseph sometimes encountered such unpleasantness for himself. On one occasion in the late 1920s he and Molotov were walking outside the Kremlin on some business or other. Molotov never forgot what ensued:⁴⁹

But generally he was insulated from experiences of this kind.

What worried Nadya, though, was that he had cut himself off from a sustained family commitment. He was bad-tempered and domineering at home. She suspected him of having flings with attractive women who came his way. And he otherwise seldom thought of anything but politics. He felt fulfilled not in their Kremlin flat or at Zubalovo but in his office a few hundred yards across Red Square on Old Square. This was where the Central Committee was situated from 1923. He had his office on an upper floor near Molotov, Kaganovich and others.⁵⁰ Stalin spent most of the day and often a large part of the evening there. Nadya did not nag him about being left on her own, but she did feel that his behaviour at home — when he was there — left a lot to be desired. Her unhappiness was understandable. Stalin had no interests outside work and study apart from the occasional hunting expedition. Unlike Molotov and his other cronies, he did not play tennis or skittles. He did not even go to the cinema. The marriage of Joseph and Nadya looked like a divorce waiting to happen.

22. FACTIONALIST AGAINST FACTIONS

The year 1925 brought the disputes in the Politburo to a head. Personal bickering became all-out factional conflict as Zinoviev and Kamenev moved into open opposition to Bukharin and Stalin. They wrangled over the party’s internal organisation as well as over international relations. Official agrarian measures were also highly controversial. Bukharin in his enthusiasm for the New Economic Policy had said to the more affluent peasants: ‘Enrich yourselves!’¹ This hardly coincided with Lenin’s comments on kulaks over the years. Even in his last dictated articles Lenin had envisaged a steady movement by the peasantry towards a system of farming co-ops; he had never expressly advocated the profit motive as the motor of agricultural regeneration. Stalin’s ally Bukharin appeared to be undermining basic Leninist ideas, and Zinoviev and Kamenev were not just being opportunistic in castigating this. They generally objected to the growing compromises of the New Economic Policy as it had been developed. Stalin and Bukharin stuck together to see off their factional adversaries. Having fought against Trotski and the Left Opposition, they battled against Zinoviev and Kamenev when they called for a more radical interpretation of the ‘union of the working class with the peasantry’. The survival of the NEP was at stake.

Clashes occurred at the Central Committee in October 1925. Zinoviev and Kamenev had arrived with assurances of support from Grigori Sokolnikov, the People’s Commissar of Finances, and Lenin’s widow Nadezhda Krupskaya. Stalin and Bukharin carried the majority on that occasion. But neither Zinoviev nor Kamenev had lost their following at the party’s highest level. Stalin therefore decided to attack them openly at the Fourteenth Party Congress in December 1925. He did this deftly by revealing that they had once tried to get him to agree to Trotski’s expulsion from the party. Sanctimoniously disclaiming his own propensity for butchery, Stalin announced:²

We are for unity, we’re against chopping. The policy of chopping is repugnant to us. The party wants unity, and it will achieve this together with comrades Kamenev and Zinoviev if this is what they want — and without them if they don’t want it.

Although his own personality had been criticised by Lenin as crude and divisive, he contrived to suggest that the menace of a party split was embodied by what was becoming known as the Leningrad Opposition.

Kamenev put things starkly:³

This warning appeared extravagant to the supporters of Stalin and Bukharin. But Kamenev had a point. He understood that, beneath the surface of amity between Stalin and Bukharin, Stalin aspired to become the party’s unrivalled leader.

Zinoviev repaid Stalin for breaching the secrecy of their conversations by divulging details of the Kislovodsk episode, when even some of Stalin’s friends had discussed the desirability of trimming his powers;⁴ but he was relying on his rhetorical flourishes to get his way and the usual applause was no longer forthcoming. Although Zinoviev had been outmanoeuvred, he could not blame all his misfortune on the General Secretary. It had been Zinoviev who had started up the engine of mutual suspicion. If anyone had shown overweening ambition it was him. As yet he had little to counterpose to the policies of the Stalin– Bukharin duumvirate running the Politburo. Zinoviev and Kamenev might mumble about the inadequacies of the regime, but they had until recently been pillars supporting its pediment. When Zinoviev delivered a co-report to Stalin’s official report for the Central Committee, he complained about his treatment at Stalin’s hands and warned against the further compromises with the peasantry promoted by Stalin and Bukharin. But quite what he would do in their place was not made clear.

Zinoviev and Kamenev had put themselves in the wrong with most party leaders and militants. They had restored factionalism to the party at a dangerous time. Scarcely had Trotski been defeated than they split the ascendant party leadership. The party was insecure across the USSR. Its victory over the Whites in the Civil War left it without illusions about its isolation in the country. Workers outside the Bolshevik ranks were widely disgruntled. Peasants were far from being grateful to the Bolsheviks for the NEP; a deep resentment existed about the continuing attacks on the Russian Orthodox Church. Many members of the technical professions, while operating in Soviet institutions, yearned for the very ‘Thermidorian degeneration’ which the party feared. Thermidore had been the month in 1794 when the Jacobins who had led the French revolutionary government were overthrown and radical social experiments were brought to an end. Most creative intellectuals continued to regard Bolshevism as a plague to be eliminated. Many non-Russians, having experienced independence from Russia in the Civil War, wished to assert their national and ethnic claims beyond the bounds allowed by the USSR Constitution. ‘Nepmen’ made big money during the NEP but yearned for a more predictable commercial environment. The richer peasants — the so-called kulaks — had the same aspiration. In the shadows of public life, too, lurked the legions of members of the suppressed political parties: the Mensheviks, Socialist-Revolutionaries, Kadets and the many organisations established by various nationalities.

The party felt surrounded by enemies in its own country, and the Soviet communist leadership — including Stalin — was acutely aware that the imposition of a centralised one-party state had not yet led to a revolutionary change in attitudes and practices at lower levels of the party, the state and society. Policies were formulated largely without consultation outside the Kremlin. Overt opposition was restricted to the successive internal Bolshevik party oppositions. Other tendencies, whenever they came into the open, were suppressed with vigour by the OGPU (as the GPU was renamed in 1924). Politburo members without exception were aware that they presided over a state with imperfect methods of rule. Social, national and religious antagonism to Bolshevism was widespread. Even the party had its defects: factional strife and administrative passive disobedience as well as a decline in ideological fervour at the very lowest echelons was evident. Whoever won the struggle to succeed Lenin would immediately face a graver task: to make the governance of the USSR denser and irreversible. Stalin had power over the formulation of policy and the choice of personnel; he had managed to trounce his main individual enemies in the party. He had not yet turned the Soviet order into a system of power enshrining pervasive obedience and enthusiasm.

The sense that at any time a capitalist ‘crusade’ might be declared against the USSR added to his fundamental concern. Foreign states had intervened in Soviet Russia in 1918–19 and might do so again. Admittedly the USSR had trade treaties with the United Kingdom and other states. It had signed the Treaty of Rapallo with defeated Germany. The Comintern was gradually building up the number and strength of affiliated communist parties. Ostensibly there was no threat to peace. Even the French, who had made trouble over the Soviet renunciation of the debts of Nicholas II and the Provisional Government, were in no mood to start an invasion. Yet so long as the USSR was the sole socialist state in the world, there would be diplomatic tension which could abruptly turn the situation on its head and the Soviet Union could be invaded. Bolsheviks were on the alert for military outbreaks on their borders. They believed that the Poles would not have moved into Ukraine in 1920 unless the incursion had been instigated by the Western Allies (and although this was untrue, there was indeed military collusion with French military advisers and diplomatic negotiation with the British). If the British and French themselves did not crusade against the USSR in the 1920s, Bolsheviks thought, they might well arm and deploy proxy invading armies. The armed forces of Poland, Finland, Romania and even Turkey were regarded as candidates for such a role.

Yet it was in such a situation, with the USSR pressed by enemies from within and outside its frontiers, that Zinoviev and Kamenev were choosing to take the path already trodden by Trotski. Even without Stalin’s speeches against them, they appeared menacingly disloyal. In 1925 there were 1,025,000 Bolsheviks in a population of 147 million.⁵ As Bolsheviks conceded, they were a drop in the ocean; and it was admitted that the mass recruitment campaigns during and after the Civil War had created a party which had a few thousand experienced leaders and militants and a vast majority which differed little in political knowledge and administrative expertise from the rest of society. Zinoviev and Kamenev seemed to be self-indulgently ambitious and they were about to pay the price.

Stalin continued to issue works explaining his purposes. He had to prove his ideological credentials; and among his various accomplishments was a sequel to his lectures at the Sverdlov University: in 1926 he published On Questions of Leninism. (This is conventionally translated as Problems of Leninism.) Its contents did little to change the consensus among leading Bolsheviks that Stalin was an unimaginative interpreter of Lenin’s doctrines. The more exploratory pamphlets and articles were produced by others. Trotski wrote on problems of everyday life, Preobrazhenski on economic development, Bukharin on epistemology and sociology. There was scarcely anything in Problems of Leninism that could not easily be found in the main published works of Lenin. It was indeed a work of codification and little else. Just one ingredient of the book held attention at the time: Stalin’s claim that socialism could be constructed in a single country. Until then it had been the official Bolshevik party assumption that Russia could not do this on its own. Indeed it had been taken for granted that while capitalism remained powerful around the globe, there would be severe limits on the achievability of immense social and economic progress in even the most advanced socialist country.

Such had been Lenin’s opinion, and he had expressed it in his foreign policy. Whenever possible, he had tried to spread Revolution westwards by propaganda, financial subsidy, advice or war. Repeatedly he had urged that Russian economic reconstruction would be a chimerical objective unless German assistance, whether socialist or capitalist, were obtained. Consequently his programme involved Bolsheviks beginning to build socialism in Russia in the expectation that states abroad, especially Germany, would eventually aid the task of completing the construction. In September 1920 he stated this at the Ninth Party Conference. ‘Russian forces’ alone, Lenin insisted, would be inadequate for that purpose; even economic recovery, far less further economic development, might take ten to fifteen years if Soviet Russia were to remain isolated.⁶

Stalin, however, argued that the construction of socialism was entirely feasible even while no fraternal socialist state existed. The great codifier had to engage in subterfuge here. He had to misquote Lenin’s published texts and, using his organisational authority, prevent embarrassing unpublished speeches and writings from appearing. Such was the contempt in which his enemies held his writings that they did not deign to expose his unorthodoxy; and indeed it is only in retrospect that his heretical teaching came to have any practical significance. In the 1920s it had no direct impact on practical politics. All supporters of the NEP took it for granted that the USSR had to get on with ‘socialist construction’ on its own at a time when no other socialist state existed. The question of how far the Bolsheviks would be able to succeed in this seemed unnecessarily abstract.

The other contenders for the leadership also produced books explaining Leninism to the rest of the party: Trotski, Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin. Each invoked the authority of Lenin and claimed to have produced a coherent Leninist strategy. There was nothing intellectually astounding in any of these works, but each author had the knack of giving the impression of being an outstanding intellectual. Trotski, when bored in the Politburo, would pull out a French novel and read it to himself ostentatiously. He was arrogant even by the Politburo’s standards. But his contempt for ‘ignorant’ and ‘ill-educated’ Stalin was universally shared. What they failed to understand was that Problems of Leninism, apart from the heretical point on ‘socialism in one country’, was a competent summary of Lenin’s work. It was well constructed. It contained clear formulations. It was a model of pedagogical steadiness: ideas were introduced and carefully explained from various angles. Nearly all the main themes of Lenin’s life’s work were dealt with. The book’s succinct exposition was recognised at the time, and it went into several subsequent printings.

Stalin’s rivals quite underestimated his determination to prove them wrong in their low opinion of him. He understood where his deficiencies lay. He knew little German, less English and no French. He therefore resumed his attempt to teach himself English.⁷ He had no oratorical flourish. He therefore worked hard on his speeches and let nobody write them for him or edit his drafts. His Marxism lacked epistemological awareness. He therefore asked Jan Sten to tutor him on a weekly basis in the precepts and methods of contemporary Marxist philosophy.⁸

Stalin was meanwhile marking out a distinct profile for himself at the apex of the party. His idea about ‘socialism in one country, taken separately’ was poor Leninism; but it struck a chord with many party committee members who disliked Trotski’s insistence that the October Revolution would wither and die unless socialist seizures of power took place in other powerful countries on the European continent. Stalin, steady advocate of the NEP, contrived to suggest that he deeply believed in the basic potential of progress in the USSR without foreign assistance. Socialism in one country was an exposition of ideological inclination.⁹ Equally important were certain tendencies in Stalin’s thought. His commitment to the NEP was increasingly equivocal. He never followed Bukharin in giving it a rousing endorsement; and increasingly he stipulated the need for higher levels of investment in state industry and for ever heavier taxation of the more affluent peasants. He also continued to insist that workers should be promoted from the factory into administrative posts; his detestation of ‘bourgeois specialists’ remained constant.¹⁰ In line with official party policy he made appointments to party posts on the basis of demonstrable allegiance to Bolshevism before 1917.¹¹

The point is that this configuration of tendencies in ideology and policy had growing appeal for party leaders in Moscow and the provinces. Stalin did not rise to supreme power exclusively by means of the levers of bureaucratic manipulation. Certainly he had an advantage inasmuch as he could replace local party secretaries with persons of his choosing. It is also true that the regime in the party allowed him to control debates in the Central Committee and at Party Congresses. But such assets would have been useless to him if he had not been able to convince the Central Committee and the Party Congress that he was a suitable politician for them to follow. Not only as an administrator but also as a leader — in thought and action — he seemed to fit these requirements better than anyone else.

Stalin and Bukharin prepared themselves for a last decisive campaign against the internal party opposition. They had always hated Trotski and, in their private correspondence, they took delight in their growing success in humbling him. But they also retained a certain fear of him. They knew him to be talented and determined; they were aware that he had kept a personal following in the party. Trotski remained a dangerous enemy. They had less respect for Zinoviev but saw that he too was still a menace. Even more perilous was the effect of the rapprochement of Trotski and Zinoviev. As Zinoviev criticised Bukharin and Stalin from a left-wing position, the differences among the oppositionists lessened. A United Opposition was formed in mid-1926. When Stalin heard that Krupskaya had sympathies with Zinoviev, he wrote to Molotov: ‘Krup-skaya’s a splitter. She really needs a beating as a splitter if we wish to conserve party unity.’¹² Two years earlier he had welcomed her support as he defended himself against the effects of Lenin’s Testament. Having survived that emergency, he intended to deal with her as severely as with other leading members of the United Opposition.

By mid-1926 the scene was set for the settling of accounts and Stalin was spoiling for a fight. When Trotski muttered to Bukharin that he expected to have a majority of the party on his side, the General Secretary wrote to Molotov and Bukharin: ‘How little he knows and how low he rates Bukharin! But I think that soon the party will punch the snouts of Tr[otski] and Grisha [Zinoviev] and Kamenev and will turn them into renegades like Shlyapnikov.’¹³ He accused them of behaving even less loyally than Shlyapnikov’s Workers’ Opposition. They needed to be confronted. Zinoviev should be sacked from the Politburo. The ascendant party leadership need have no fear: ‘I assure you that this matter will proceed without the slightest complications in the party and the country.’¹⁴ Zinoviev should be picked off first. Trotski could be left for later.¹⁵

The Stalin group in the leadership was by then well organised. Stalin himself could afford to stay by the Black Sea while, on 3 June 1926, a terrific dispute raged for six hours about theses proposed by Zinoviev.¹⁶ Stalin wanted total control of his group. He wanted to be kept abreast of developments and relayed regular instructions to his subordinates. But he had created a system which permitted him to be the master even while he was on vacation. He asserted himself to an ever greater extent. In September 1926 he wrote to Molotov indicating substantial reservations about his ally and supposed friend Bukharin: ‘Bukharin’s a swine and surely worse than a swine because he thinks it below his dignity to write a couple of lines.’¹⁷ Around that time he also said of his associate Mikoyan: ‘But Mikoyan’s a little duckling in politics, an able duckling but nevertheless a duckling.’¹⁸ From all this it appeared that Stalin saw himself as the single indispensable force in the campaign against the United Opposition. In his own eyes, no one else could successfully coordinate and lead the ascendant party leadership in the coming factional conflicts. He made it his aim to send Trotski and Zinoviev down to permanent defeat.

Yet the strain of constant polemics took its toll on him. Free in his accusations against the United Opposition, he was hurt by the tirade of personal abuse he himself had to endure. He was an extremely sensitive bully. When the situation got too much for him, he followed his pattern in the early years after October 1917 and sought to resign. On 27 December 1926 he wrote to Sovnarkom Chairman Alexei Rykov saying: ‘I ask you to release me from the post of Central Committee General Secretary. I affirm that I can no longer work at this post, that I’m in no condition to work any longer at this post.’ He made a similar attempt at resignation on 19 December 1927.¹⁹ Of course he wanted to be persuaded to withdraw such statements of intent — and indeed his associates did as he wished. But the mask of total self-control and self-confidence had slipped in these moments.

Stalin’s vacillation was temporary and fitful. The United Opposition had yet to be defeated and he returned to work as Party General Secretary with the pugnacity for which his associates admired him. Stalin and Bukharin were ready for the fight (although Bukharin had the disturbing tendency to go on talking to their opponents in a friendly fashion). The political end for Trotski, Zinoviev and Kamenev came surprisingly quickly. In spring 1927 Trotski drew up an ambitious ‘platform’, signed by eighty-three oppositionists (including himself), offering a fulminating critique of the sins of the ascendant party leadership. He demanded a more ‘revolutionary’ foreign policy as well as more rapid industrial growth; and whereas previously he had expressed concern about the ‘bureaucratisation’ of the party, he and his supporters now insisted that a comprehensive campaign of democratisation needed to be undertaken not only in the party but also in the soviets. The claim was made that only through such a set of measures would the original goals of the October Revolution be achievable. For the United Opposition, then, the Politburo was ruining everything Lenin had stood for. A last-ditch fight was required for the re-elevation of the party’s principles to the top of the current political agenda.

Stalin and Bukharin led the counter-attacks through the summer of 1927. Their belligerent mood was strengthened by their acute awareness that the United Opposition, while hurling accusations about the Politburo’s dereliction of revolutionary duty, was also indicting its members for simple incompetence. The Politburo was determined to hold firm as international complications intensified. The British Conservative government had been looking for a scrap for some months and when a police search of the Anglo-Soviet trading company Arcos came up with compromising evidence, the United Kingdom broke diplomatic relations entirely and expelled the Soviet ambassador in May. Next month the Soviet ambassador to Poland was assassinated. Not for the first time there were war scares in the USSR. The OGPU reinforced its vigilance against subversion and sabotage. Troubles came thick and fast. In mid-July the news had come from China that the nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek had massacred communists in Shanghai in April. Whereas nothing which happened in London and Warsaw was the Politburo’s fault, Stalin and Bukharin were directly responsible for the policies imposed by the Comintern on the Chinese communist leadership. Until recently they had insisted on an alliance with Chiang Kai-shek against the wishes of the Chinese communists; now, in August 1927, they licensed them to organise an uprising against Chiang Kai-shek. The United Opposition upbraided the Politburo for a total lack of effective supervision of the USSR’s foreign policy.

Stalin, however, went off as usual to the south for his vacation. His assumption was that he could leave the Central Control Commission, chaired by Ordzhonikidze, to handle the disciplining of the Opposition. Papers were couriered to him regularly. What he read threw him into a rage. Somehow Zinoviev and Trotski had succeeded in turning the Central Control Commission’s enquiries into an opportunity to challenge the Central Committee. And Ordzhonikidze seemed to have lost control of developments. ‘Shame!’ wrote Stalin to Molotov in anticipation of a more aggressive stance being taken by the men he had left in charge of Moscow.²⁰

In June and July he peppered his letters with detailed instructions on both Britain and China.²¹ Yet he did not lift his eyes from the internal threat: Trotski had to be dealt with. Stalin raised with Molotov and Bukharin the question of whether their enemy would be best deported to Japan.²² The decision was taken to proceed in stages. At the joint plenum of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission in October 1927, some of Trotski’s followers shouted out that the Politburo was burying Lenin’s Testament. Stalin was ready for them:²³

His handling of the plenum was a masterpiece of persuasion. He reminded the Opposition that previously he had rejected calls for the expulsion of Trotski and Zinoviev from the Central Committee. ‘Perhaps,’ he waspishly suggested, ‘I overdid the “kindness” and made a mistake.’

The joint plenum excluded Trotski, Zinoviev and Kamenev from the Central Committee. On 14 November 1927 Trotski and Zinoviev were expelled from the party entirely, and this decision was ratified by the Fifteenth Party Congress in December. The Stalin–Bukharin axis had triumphed. Their version of revolutionary policies at home and abroad had prevailed after a decade of constant factional strife among Bolsheviks. Bukharin maintained friendly relations with his defeated adversaries. But Stalin refused to compromise. At the Fifteenth Party Congress the further exclusion of seventy-five oppositionists, including Kamenev, was announced. Stalin and Bukharin had seen off the acute threat to the NEP. No one imagined that within a month the political settlement would be destroyed and that the two victors would become enemies. In January 1928 the New Economic Policy was about to be torn apart by the Party General Secretary.