Stalin, Volume 1

PART II DURNOVÓ’S REVOLUTIONARY WAR

The trouble will start with the blaming of the government for all disasters. In the legislative institutions a bitter campaign against the government will begin, followed by revolutionary agitation throughout the country, with socialist slogans, capable of arousing and rallying the masses, beginning with the division of land and succeeded by a division of all valuables and property. The defeated army, having lost its most dependable men, and carried away by the tide of primitive peasant desire for land, will find itself too demoralized to serve as a bulwark of law and order. The legislative institutions and the intellectual opposition . . . will be powerless to stem the popular tide, aroused by themselves.

Pyotr Durnovó, February 1914 memorandum to Nicholas II, on the consequences of a possible war against Germany

BETWEEN 1905 AND 1911, revolutions broke out in Mexico, Qajar Iran, the Ottoman empire, China, and Portugal, as well as Russia—countries that together accounted for one quarter of the earth’s population. Each led to the introduction of constitutions. It was a global moment, akin in some ways to the 1780s, when revolutions broke out in the United States, France, and the Caribbean. But the early-twentieth-century constitutional experiments were quickly undermined or reversed in every single case. (Only Portugal’s lasted a bit longer, through thirty-eight prime ministers, until a 1926 military coup.) Liberty exerted a powerful pull, but institutionalizing liberty was another matter. The push for constitutionalism usually entailed intellectual types—such as the leader of Russia’s Constitutional Democrat Party (Cadets), Paul Miliukov—coming to power and then looking to wield the state as an instrument to modernize what they perceived as backward societies. But the dream of an intellectual-led, classically liberal leap to modernity ran into a social wall made up of urban laboring populations and communally oriented rural majorities. In the tantalizing examples of Britain and the United States, classical liberal orders were institutionalized long before the dawn of mass politics.1 By the early twentieth century, the introduction of constitutionalism proved too narrow to satisfy the masses. The positive aspects of the changes involved in constitutionalism were often discredited by social disorder. (Russia recorded some 17,000 peasant disturbances between 1910 and 1914 just in the European part of the empire.)2 Furthermore, even though liberalizing intellectuals were inspired by the advanced countries of Europe, the European powers helped suppress the political openings, aiding the “forces of order” in China, Mexico, Iran, and elsewhere. In the Ottoman empire, the would-be modernizers backed away from liberalization. China’s constitutional experiment yielded to warlordism; Mexico erupted into civil war.3 In Russia, too, there was de facto civil war (1905–7), which was won by the forces of order.

If Russia stood out at the dawn of the twentieth century, it was because its forces of order were demoralized in victory: they hated the outcome, “constitutional autocracy,” and had come to disrespect the tsar, even though they were joined to him at the hip.4 At the same time, Russia’s would-be radical socialist revolution was mired in perhaps even greater disarray than the fraught constitutionalism. Socialists were dragged down by a harsh police regime and their own factionalism. More fundamentally, most Russian socialists supported the constitutionalism (“bourgeois” democracy) rather than socialism, as a necessary stage of history, while despising the bourgeoisie.

“Socialism,” concretely, meant a life in Siberia. True, thanks to the Romanov three-hundredth jubilee amnesty in 1913, many were released from internal exile. Lev Rozenfeld (Kamenev) returned to St. Petersburg to take up the editorship of Pravda. The newspaper had been established at the Bolshevik-dominated party conference in Prague in January 1912 and had commenced publication on April 22, 1912; Koba Jughashvili had written the lead article in the first issue, calling for “proletarian unity no matter what.”5 Jughashvili, newly a member of the illegally formed all‒Bolshevik Central Committee, had illegally sneaked back to St. Petersburg after escaping internal exile. The day of his article’s appearance, however, the okhranka ambushed him, and by summer he was deported to the remote far northern Siberian village of Kolpashëvo, near Narym (“marsh” in the Khanty language).6 In September 1912, before winter set in, he escaped by boat and made his way to Lenin in Habsburg Krakow, carrying the passport of a Persian merchant. Lenin considered himself one of the party’s top experts on national affairs. But Jughashvili surprised him with his own work on the nationalities, prompting Lenin to write to Gorky, “We have a marvelous Georgian who has sat down to write a big article for Enlightenment, for which he has collected all the Austrian and other materials.”7 “Marxism and the National Question,” not unlike Jughashvili’s only other lengthy publication (“Anarchism or Socialism?”), was partly derivative, defining “a nation” in terms of three characteristics borrowed from the German Karl Kautsky (common language, territory, and economic links), and one from the Austrian Marxist Otto Bauer (common national character).8 But the work was significant for confronting a crucial aspect of revolution in the polyglot Russian empire and largely repudiating the views of the Austro-Marxists and their Georgian Menshevik emulators. It was also significant for its signature—“Stalin” (“Man of Steel”).9 That strong, sonorous pseudonym was not only superior to Oddball Osip, Pockmarked Oska, or the very Caucasus-specific Koba, but also Russifying. By the time the essay came out in Russia, in the March-May 1913 issue of the journal Enlightenment, “Stalin” had again returned to St. Petersburg. There, at a fund-raising ball for International Women’s Day, he was ambushed yet again, betrayed by another member of the Bolshevik Central Committee, Roman Malinowski, a thief who had risen to head of the metalworkers’ union but who was also a secret okhranka agent.10 Stalin was deported back to Siberia, where Kamenev, too, would end up.

Malinowski became the only high-level Bolshevik inside Russia left at liberty. Lenin had placed him in charge of directing the entire apparatus of Bolshevik activity inside the Russian empire.11 The Bolshevik leader’s vision of a party membership restricted to professional revolutionaries, a narrowness supposedly necessary in conditions of illegality—a stance Stalin, too, supported—had failed spectacularly. In fairness, the okhranka also ran the similarly hyperconspiratorial Socialist Revolutionary terror organization.12 Russia’s increasingly paranoid revolutionaries “looked in the mirror,” the Bolshevik Nikolai Bukharin would later recall, “and wondered if they themselves were provocateurs.”13

Despite the okhranka’s virtuosity, however, the autocracy remained under threat of nitroglycerine. In connection with the Romanov tercentenary, the St. Petersburg okhranka had bulked itself up while forbidding any appearance of crowds, fearing they would morph into demonstrations of workers carrying red flags, and that the tsar, like his grandfather Alexander II, might be assassinated.14 “The city,” recalled the chief of the Corps of Gendarmes, “was literally turned into an armed camp.” An “autocrat” unsafe in his own capital? The unseemly clampdown in the capital cast a pall over the celebrations. Despite the wide acclaim during the 1913 Romanov jubilee for the first-ever exhibition of Russian icons, the revivals of Modest Mussorgsky’s operas Boris Godunov and Khovanshchina, and the gala culmination of the tercentenary in Moscow in May 1913, elites understood full well that the autocrat could not go about in public.

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GERMANY’S WILHELM II—who was Nicholas II’s cousin—launched his own “festive year” of pomp in 1913. It was the kaiser’s fifty-fourth birthday, the silver jubilee of his reign, and the centenary of the Prussian defeat of Napoleon. Never mind that it had been the Russians who had vanquished Napoleon and occupied Paris. Germany wanted to showcase its dynasty and impressive modernity.15 The combination of German power on the continent and terror dread in St. Petersburg was uppermost in the mind of the man who in 1905–6 had saved the Romanov dynasty.

Pyotr Durnovó viewed foreign affairs through the eyes of a policeman.16 Back in 1904, at the outbreak of what he had dismissed as the “senseless” Russo-Japanese War, he told his predecessor as Russia’s interior minister, “A naïve idea: to fix internal disorder with a foreign success!”17 After Durnovó’s April 1906 dismissal from the interior ministry, he served as leader of the rightist bloc in Russia’s upper house (State Council), a perch from which he went about subverting the post-1905 constitutional experiment (such as it was), and affording special grief to Stolypin.18 Durnovó became well known for expressing unwelcome views to people’s faces, rather than just behind their backs—and this applied even to the tsar.19 In February 1914, he submitted a long memorandum to Nicholas II, and some fifty recipients in the upper elite, seeking to reorient Russian policy.20 Durnovó scoffed at those who asserted that mere displays of Russian power and Anglo-French-Russian unity would deter Germany.21 “The central factor of the period of world history through which we are now passing is the rivalry between England and Germany,” he explained, adding that between them “a struggle for life and death is inevitable.” He argued that what had originally been just a Russian “understanding” (entente) with England had somehow become a formal alliance, and that taking the side of Britain in its confrontation with Germany was unnecessary, because there was no fundamental clash of interests between Germany and Russia. Further, unlike the foreign ministry personnel far removed from the roiling class hatreds that this ex-policeman had confronted, Durnovó emphasized how a war would be catastrophic domestically and the government blamed. “In the event of defeat,” he wrote in the February 1914 memorandum to Nicholas II, “social revolution in its most extreme form is inevitable.” Durnovó specifically forecast that the gentry’s land would be expropriated and that “Russia will be flung into hopeless anarchy, the issue of which cannot be foreseen.”22

The analysis—an avoidable war against a too-powerful Germany; Russia’s defeat; Russian elites heedlessly pressuring the autocracy only to be engulfed by extreme social revolution—was as hard-boiled as it was blunt. Nothing penned by Vladimir Lenin, not even his later celebrated polemic State and Revolution (August 1917), approached the clairvoyance of Durnovó. “Tsarism was victorious,” Lenin would write of the years prior to 1917. “All the revolutionary and opposition parties were smashed. Dejection, demoralization, schisms, discord, desertion, and pornography took the place of politics.”23 That was essentially correct as far as the revolutionaries went. But although the police had contained the revolutionary parties, the socialist militancy of the workers (revived during the Lena massacre of 1912) and especially the waves of peasant land-hunger unrest (which affected the army) constituted an ongoing, far greater threat. This was something the archconservative Durnovó saw better than the would-be professional revolutionaries. From 1900 through 1917, except for two years (1905–7), Lenin lived entirely outside Russia, mostly in Switzerland. Trotsky was in foreign exile from 1902 to 1903 and 1907 to 1917. Kamenev and Grigory Radomylsky (Zinoviev) each spent long stretches of the pre-1917 period in prison, Siberia, or Europe. The same was true of the diehard opponents of Lenin among the Social Democrats, such as Martov and Pavel Axelrod. Victor Chernov—the leader of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, Russia’s most populous party on the left—was in emigration without interruption from 1899 until 1917. Durnovó knew the tsarist system not from Geneva, Paris, or Berlin, but from the inside, and in particular from inside the interior ministry. He understood better than outsiders or even most insiders that the autocracy was hollowing out.24 Equally important, while members of Russia’s establishment dreaded a new “Pugachev-style” riot from below, Durnovó condemned Russia’s upper classes, especially the Constitutional Democrats, who pushed for political rights against the autocracy without realizing, as he saw it, that the militant masses would be incited to go much further and deluge them all.25

But what did the prescient Durnovó propose? Instead of autocratic Russia’s “unnatural alliance” with parliament-ruled Britain, he was urging a birds-of-a-feather alliance with Germany, a conservative monarchy, as part of an eventual continental bloc that would also include France (somehow reconciled to Germany) and Japan.26 But how was that to happen? The German kaiser was set on imposing German control over the Turkish Straits, through which passed up to 75 percent of Russian grain exports, the key to the empire’s prosperity.27 Moreover, domestically, Durnovó inclined toward a new state of emergency, which he had enforced in 1905, but at the time of his memorandum, some two fifths of the Russian empire’s 130 million subjects already lived under martial law or special regime (“reinforced protection”). True to his principles, Durnovó had refused the temptation of a rightist populism to win over the peasants with property redistributions, not because, like most members of the State Council or Duma, he owned generous land allotments (he did not), but because he feared the disorder.28 Nor would he condemn democracy outright, allowing that it might be appropriate for some countries. Still, he argued that democracy would bring disintegration to Russia, which needed “firm authority.”29 But his strategy of keeping a lid on—retaining as much centralized power as possible, refusing cooperation with the Duma, waiting for a real autocrat to take charge—was a policy of stasis.30 He himself grasped the core dilemma: The government needed repression to endure, yet repression alienated ever more people, further narrowing the social base of the regime, thereby requiring still more repression. “We are in a blind alley,” Durnovó had lamented in 1912. “I fear that we all, along with the tsar, will not succeed in getting out.”31

If it came to war against Germany, not even the tsarist regime’s greatest living policeman could rescue the autocracy a second time.32 Stolypin, too, not just Durnovó, had been warning that another major war would “prove fatal for Russia and for the dynasty.”33 Durnovó understood, still more fundamentally, that a downfall during a world war would shape everything that followed.34 Just as he prophesied, the new war, against Germany, did become a revolutionary war, which did redound to the socialists, and did produce anarchy. “However paradoxical it sounds,” recalled the Menshevik Social Democrat Fyodor Gurvich (aka Fyodor Dan), “the extreme reactionaries in the Tsarist bureaucracy grasped the movement of forces and the social content of this coming revolution far sooner and better than all the Russian ‘professional revolutionaries.’”35

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NOSTALGIA FOR TSARIST RUSSIA, however understandable, is misplaced: “constitutional autocracy” was never viable and not evolving into something better, and the development of civic associations could never substitute for Russia’s missing liberal political institutions or overcome the illiberal ones.36 When a rush of political parties had suddenly sprung into being, illegally, the leftist ones had come first: the Revolutionary Armenian Federation (Dashnaks) (1890), the Polish Socialist Party (1892), the Jewish Bund (1897), the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (1898), which split into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks (1903), the Jewish Social Democratic Workers’ Party or Poale-Zion (1900), the Socialist Revolutionary Party (1901). In 1905 were born the Constitutional Democrats or Cadets (classic liberals) and the Union of the Russian People (proto-fascists), among others.37 All of these organized parties, even the anti-socialists, were anathema to the autocracy, and the autocracy’s intransigence stamped them all, including the constitutionalists. The wartime radicalization would further tilt Russia’s peculiar political spectrum further left, while furnishing a cornucopia of violent practices. “The Bolshevik Revolution,” one scholar shrewdly observed, “fixed the near-ubiquitous, but transitory practices of the trans-European 1914–21 catastrophe as a permanent feature of the Soviet state.” Of course, as that scholar adds, those violent practices, that state building, would be driven by ideas.38 And not just any ideas, but visions of remaking everything, from top to bottom, ushering in the socialist kingdom of heaven on earth. The transcendentally powerful ideas, in turn, were carried forward by new people thrust onto the political landscape by revolution, such as Stalin.

For a Georgian from small-town Gori—via Tiflis, Chiatura, Baku, and Siberian exile—to rise anywhere near the summit of power, and seek to implement Marxist ideas, the whole world had to be brought crashing down. And it was. Stalin had little role in those momentous events. Unlike the wild years of 1905–8, or the period after March 1917, his life story from 1909 through early 1917 contains few moments of note. Most accounts either embroider these years, rendering them more dramatic than they were, or skip them. But this long stretch of time, in which Stalin did little or nothing, was colossally significant for Russia, and indeed the world. To make sense of Stalin’s role in the sudden, stunning episode of 1917, and above all to understand his entire later regime, the momentous history in which he had little noteworthy part must be described and analyzed in depth. But once Stalin did get near power, he battled indefatigably, like a man with a sense of destiny, and demonstrated revolutionary talents that proved especially apt in the Eurasian setting.

Modern revolutions are spectacular events, awesome in the millions who rise up and stake a claim to control their destiny, exhilarating in their new solidarities and sense of unlimited possibility. But revolutions are also signs of decay and breakdown, the cracking of one ruling system and the untidy formation of another. Whatever does or does not happen in the streets, the barracks, the factories, the fields, it is in the corridors of power, centrally and provincially, where the revolution finds an outcome. One must therefore study the high politics and the nitty-gritty of institutional formation, the practices and procedures of governance, the ways of thinking and being that inform the exercise of power. High politics is, of course, shaped by social forces, by the actions and aspirations of the broad masses, but politics is not reducible to the social. Indeed, although born of the most popular revolution in history, the new regime in the former Russian empire became unaccountable to the people, and even to itself. A mass participatory revolutionary process not only can, but frequently does, culminate in a narrow regime, and not because the revolution has “degenerated,” or because good intentions and a good beginning are ruined by malefactors or unlucky circumstances, but because the international situation impinges at every turn, institutions are formed out of the shards of the old as well as the maw of the new, and ideas matter. Dictatorship can be seen by revolutionaries as criminal or as an invaluable tool; human beings can be seen as citizens or chattel, convertible foes or congenital enemies; private property can be seen as the cornerstone of freedom or of enslavement. A profound, genuine upsurge for social justice can—depending on the overarching ideas and accompanying practices—institutionalize the gravest injustices. A successful revolution can be a tragedy. But tragedies can still be grand geopolitical projects. Russia’s revolution became inseparable from long-standing dilemmas and new visions of the country as a great power in the world. That, too, would bring out Stalin’s qualities.