Stalin, Volume 1

CHAPTER 8

CLASS WAR AND A PARTY-STATE

The world war formally ended with the conclusion of the armistice. . . . In fact, however, everything from that point onward that we have experienced and continue to experience is a continuation and transformation of the world war.

Pyotr Struve, Rostov-on-the-Don (held by the Whites), November 19191

Every military specialist must have a commissar on his right and on his left, each with a revolver in his hand.

Lev Trotsky, Commissar of War, 19182

BEYOND THEIR MONOPOLY OF 1917–18, the Bolsheviks created a state in 1918–20. The distinction is often lost. Forcibly denying others a right to rule is not the same as ruling and controlling resources. The new state took shape by means of the predation, confiscation, and redistribution of material things (grain, buildings, valuables) as well as the intimidation or conscription of people, refracted through notions of revolutionary class warfare. The resulting regime, one scholar observed, “necessarily also meant a burgeoning bureaucracy, needed both to expropriate the old owners and to administer the newly expropriated property.”3 In many cases, the bureaucrats, even when they themselves were not holdovers, continued to use the letterhead of the tsarist regime or Provisional Government. That said, this was a very particular state: an armed political police that resembled criminal bandits; a sprawling food procurement commissariat, which bested numerous rivals in a battle for bureaucratic aggrandizement; a distribution apparatus to allocate the spoils and to feed off them itself; an immense desertion-beset Red Army; an inefficient but—thanks to the aura of emergency—increasingly hierarchical party hydra, which absorbed and deployed personnel; and a propaganda machinery, with an estimated 50,000 activists already in 1918, wielding newspapers, posters, skits, films, and agitation trains, albeit largely confined to the towns and the army.4 Despite the existence of soviets as well as revolutionary tribunals, this was almost entirely an executive-branch state, but it roiled with rival executive claimants to power, as “commissars” went up against “commissars,” nationally and locally, those who were appointed and those self-appointed. Above all, the new state owed its existence to civil war, as most states do, but it remained in peacetime a counterinsurgency.5 Civil war was not something that deformed the Bolsheviks; it formed them, indeed it saved them from the Dada and near oblivion of 1918.6 To be sure, even before the onset of full-fledged civil war, the Bolsheviks had not been shy about expropriation and terror. But the civil war provided the opportunity to develop and to validate the struggle against “exploiting classes” and “enemies” (domestic and international), thereby imparting a sense of seeming legitimacy, urgency, and moral fervor to predatory methods.7 “The ruling class,” as Lenin explained, “never turns its power over to the downtrodden class.”8 And so, power had to be claimed by force in an ongoing, not one-off, process. The “seizure of power” would be enacted anew, every day.9

Stalin, like Lenin, is rightly seen as an admirer of the grand trappings of statehood, but an idolatry of the state did not initially drive Bolshevik state building.10 Nor was the driver the shattering conditions of world war and revolution. Rather, it was a combination of ideas or habits of thought, especially profound antipathy to markets and all things bourgeois, as well as no-holds-barred revolutionary methods, which exacerbated the catastrophe in a self-reinforcing loop.11 Plenty of regimes justify martial law, summary shootings, roundups, and confiscations by citing emergency circumstances, but they do not, as a rule, completely outlaw private trade and declare industry nationalized, ration food by class (workers versus “non-laboring elements”), summon “poor peasants” and workers to dispossess “kulaks,” and try to subvert major world powers because they are capitalist (“imperialists”). Bolshevik state building was launched with desperate measures to address inherited, and then severely aggravated, urban food shortages, but every challenge was cast as a matter of counterrevolution, on the part of someone, somewhere. “In the name of saving the revolution from counter-revolution”: so began countless documents from the period, followed by directives to “requisition” flour, petrol, guns, vehicles, people.12 “Today is the first year anniversary of the Revolution,” remarked one former tsarist official (referring to the February Revolution). “A year ago nearly everyone became revolutionaries; and now, counterrevolutionaries.”13 The idea of counterrevolution was the gift that kept on giving.

Pitiless class warfare formed the core of Lenin’s thought—the Great War, to his mind, had irrevocably proven that capitalism had forfeited its right to further existence—but a Soviet state was not born fully armed from Lenin’s forehead. Among the broad masses there was an intuitive antibourgeois ethos—exploiters versus the exploited, haves versus have-nots—which could both motivate and justify an all-out mobilization to combat counterrevolution and defend the revolution. Consider a revolutionary episode in late summer 1918 in Kamyshinsk, on the Volga, a merchant town of sawmills, windmills, and watermelons. “The Cheka has registered all the big bourgeoisie, and at the moment they are being kept on a barge,” proudly proclaimed a group that had constituted itself as the local political police. “During the day the [prisoners] work in town.” No one had to explain to these local defenders of the revolution who the “bourgeoisie” were or why they were the enemy. And when members of the “bourgeoisie” on the Kamyshinsk barge suddenly fell ill, and the Cheka consented to an inspection by a physician from nearby Saratov, who prescribed better rations and release from forced labor, the suspicious Chekists decided to investigate the doctor’s background and discovered he was an impostor. “Now,” the operative gloated, “he too is on the barge.”14 Such prison barges for “class aliens” arose up and down the Volga—none more impressive than under Stalin at Tsaritsyn—as did barge equivalents all across the former Russian empire.15 The ideologically inflected practices that generated the barges enabled tens of thousands of new people in thousands of locales to entrench a new unaccountable power.16 (Apolitical gangsters and profiteers got into the act, too, to rob the “bourgeoisie.”) Violent actions against “counterrevolution” that flowed from the logic of socialist revolution also provoked outrage. “To whom does power in the provinces belong?” one angry commissariat official asked in fall 1918. “To the soviets and their executive committees, or to the Chekas?”17 The answer could not have been plainer: when villagers in Samara Province, also in the Volga valley, revealed that they wanted to hold a new election for the local Cheka’s leadership, the Chekists readied their weapons. As a frightened peasant ran away, a sixteen-year-old Chekist shot him in the back. “Pay special attention to this and write in the newspaper,” one peasant urged, “that here is a fellow who can kill whomever he wants.”18

Here was the eureka moment: from bottom to top, and places in between, the ideas and practices of revolutionary class war produced the Soviet state. Marx had written about emancipation, freedom—but he had also written about class war. For the revolution to succeed, for humanity to break free and advance, everything connected to “the bourgeoisie” and to capitalism had to be smashed. Everything that hindered annihilation of the bourgeosie and capitalism also had to be cleared away, including other socialists. True, far from everyone leapt into the mayhem. The vast majority of inhabitants just sought to survive by scavenging, finagling, uprooting. At the same time, substantial numbers of people also sought to live the revolution right here and now, organizing communes, building children’s nurseries, writing science fiction. “All aspects of existence—social, economic, political, spiritual, moral, familial—were opened to purposeful fashioning by human hands,” wrote Isaac Steinberg. “Everywhere the driving passion was to create something new, to effect a total difference with the ‘old world.’”19 But within the utopia, the class principle, fundamentally, was intolerant. Many Bolsheviks who were bursting with conviction to serve humanity began to see that their dedicated efforts to end suffering and level social hierarchies were producing the opposite. This realization proved shattering for some, but for most it constituted a way station on the ladder of revolutionary career advancement.20 True believers mixed with opportunists, revolutionary ascetics with swindlers, and together, in the name of social justice and a new world of abudance, they drove ineptitude, corruption, and bluster to heights scarcely known even in tsarist Russia.21

Peasant partisan armies fighting against Bolshevism forcibly requisitioned grain from villages under their control, while denouncing the injustices of the market, and instituted an organization similar to that of the Red Army, right down to the formation of units for deployment against the civilian population and the use of political commissars to ensure loyalty. The anti-Bolshevik Whites, too, had internal-order battalions, grain requisitioning, political commissars, and terror, as civilians lamented.22 But the Bolsheviks, unlike their enemies, boasted that they had an all-encompassing, scientific answer to everything, and they expended considerable resources to disseminate their ideology. Party thinking equated Bolshevism with the movement of history and thereby made all critics into counterrevolutionaries, even if they were fellow socialists. Meanwhile, in trying to manage industry, transport, fuel, food, housing, education, culture, all at the same time, during a time of war and ruin, the revolutionaries came face to face with their own lack of expertise, and yet the solution to their woes struck them with ideological horror: They had to engage the class enemy—“bourgeois specialists”—inherited from tsarist times, who often detested socialism but were willing to help rebuild the devastated country. “These people,” Alexander Verkhovsky, tsarist general and Provisional Government war minister, presciently wrote of the Bolsheviks immediately after the October coup, “while promising everything, will give nothing—instead of peace, civil war; instead of bread, famine; instead of freedom, robbery, anarchy and murder.”23 But Verkhovsky soon joined the Red Army. This provides a striking contrast to the extreme hesitancy of almost any German old-regime holdovers to cooperate with the Weimar Republic. But the cooperative tsarist experts were not trusted even if they were loyal, because they were “bourgeois.” Dependency on people perceived as class enemies shaped, indeed warped, Soviet politics and institutions. The technically skilled, who were distrusted politically, were paired with the politically loyal, who lacked technical competence, first in the army and then in every institution, from railroads to schools.24 The unintentional upshot—a Communist watchdog shadowing every “bourgeois expert”—would persist even after the Reds were trained and became experts, creating a permanent dualist “party-state.”

The revolutionary state became ever more powerful without ever overcoming its improvised, chaotic nature. Supervision was ad hoc, intermittent. Steinberg, a Left Socialist Revolutionary who served as justice commissar during the short-lived coalition government of 1918, tried but failed to curb the arbitrary power of the Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-revolution, Sabotage, and Speculation. Bureaucratic infighting alone did not defeat him, however. When the capital had shifted to Moscow in March 1918, the central Cheka had a mere 131 employees, 35 of whom were rank-and-file soldiers, 10 chauffeurs, and many others who were secretaries or couriers, leaving no more than around 55 operatives.25 They carried the “budget” around in their pockets and holsters. Moreover, the carving out of a separate Cheka for Moscow came at the expense of the central apparatus. True, as of August 1918, even after the mass eviction from the Cheka of the Left SRs, the political police in the capital had grown to 683.26 But more important, by summer’s end 1918, Izvestiya would report the existence of local Chekas in 38 provinces and, lower down, in 75 counties (uezd).27 Also, a separate Railroad Cheka took shape to battle “counterrevolution” across the far-flung rail network, and Cheka “special departments” arose for security in the Red Army. No one coordinated or controlled these political policemen. The local Chekas and the sundry parallel Chekas formed largely on their own. One example was that Kamyshinsk barge, another, the Yekaterinburg Cheka, which “was quartered at No. 7 Pushkin Street; a two-story building of no great size, with a deep cellar into which the prisoners were stuffed,” wrote one operative who served there. “White Officers and priests [were] packed sardine-wise along with peasants who had concealed their grain against the requisitions. Every night we had a ‘liquidation’ of ‘parasites’”—that is, the prisoners were brought up from the dungeon, made to cross a courtyard, and gunned down. This operative added that, as a result of confiscations from “the bourgeoisie,” “there was a great mass of miscellaneous stuff: jewelry, banknotes, trinkets, garments, provisions. We brought it all together into one place and divided it up.”28 Overall, the political police were a mess, corrupt and at cross-purposes.29 But “the Cheka” constituted not just a formal state agency; it was also a deadly mind-set, a presupposition of the existence of class enemies and an injunction to employ any and all means in their eradication.30 Socialist critics of the political police, like Steinberg, were invariably told that the summary executions were “temporary,” until the class war had been won, or the world revolution had taken place, or some other point on the horizon had been attained. In the meantime, Chekists said, history would forgive an excess of harshness but not of weakness. Lynch law and self-dealing—otherwise known as class war—simultaneously discredited the cause and galvanized militants. Violent chaos was a form of “administration,” driven by a zealously held vision.

The fracturing of the imperial Russian geopolitical space, as well as the simultaneity of many civil war events from one end of Eurasia to another, militates against ease of narration. (Einstein once said that “the only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.”) Below we take up the dictatorship of Stalin in Tsaritsyn (1918), the founding of the Communist International (1919), the Versailles Treaty (1919), the leftist revolutions or near revolutions in Germany, Hungary, and Italy (1919), and the shifting combat between Reds and Whites (1918–20). The next chapter continues the civil war story with examination of the Soviet-Polish War (1919–20), the Congress of the Peoples of the East (1920), the reconquest of Turkestan (1920), the mass peasant uprisings in Tambov and elsewhere (1920–21), the Kronstadt sailor revolt (1921), the 10th Party Congress, the war of reconquest in Georgia (1921), and the creation of the first Soviet satellite in Mongolia. Even all that—a vast panaorama—falls short of a comprehensive account of what transpired. A single Russia ceased to exist, replaced by a proliferation of states, in which would-be governments rose and fell (Kiev changed hands nineteen times). What knit together the fractured space were the reconstitution of state authority, deep legacies of Russification, ideas, and accompanying intrigues and personal networks. Here we shall see Stalin emerging as the dominant force in the regime, second only to Lenin. “There is no doubt,” Trotsky later wrote, “that Stalin, like many others, was molded in the environment and experiences of the civil war, along with the entire group that later enabled him to establish a personal dictatorship . . . and a whole layer of workers and peasants raised to the status of commanders and administrators.”31 Russia’s civil war produced a surge of people, institutions, relationships, and radicalism. Inside the whirlwind could be discerned the possibilities of Stalin’s future personal dictatorship.

WHITES AND REDS, OFFICERS AND GRAINS

After General Lavr Kornilov’s death in April 1918, one of his ex‒jail mates, Lieutenant General Anton Denikin (b. 1872), had assumed military command of the Volunteer Army. The son of an ethnic Polish seamstress and an ethnic Russian serf whose “emancipation” had come in the form of military conscription (for the usual term of twenty-five years), Denikin had served as chief of staff in succession to generals Alexeyev, Brusilov, and finally Kornilov. Initially he sought to keep the charismatic Kornilov’s demise a secret from the Volunteers, fearing mass defections.32 But the forces under Denikin, now numbering more than 10,000, held together and secured the southern Kuban River basin as a base. After the cancerous Alexeyev also died (October 8, 1918), Denikin catapulted to political command, too. His ascent in the south was paralleled in the northwest by that of General Nikolai Yudenich (b. 1862), the son of a minor court official, who was a former commander of Russian forces against the Ottoman empire, and “a man five foot two inches in height weighing about 280 pounds, [his] body shaped like a coupe, with unnoticeable legs.”33 Yudenich took advantage of sanctuary in breakaway Estonia to set up a second, smaller anti-Bolshevik base. Finally, there was Alexander Kolchak (b. 1874), the son of a major general in the artillery and himself the youngest vice admiral in Russian history (promoted in 1916), a man of valor and patriotism whose favorite reading was said to be the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.34 In 1918, he returned from a futile mission to the United States via Vladivostok, but, as he was en route to joining the Volunteer Army in the south, on November 16 a coup in Omsk (Western Siberia) brought Socialist Revolutionaries to power. Two days later, Siberian Cossacks arrested the socialists and invited Kolchak to take charge as “Supreme Ruler” of Russia. Kolchak did so, calling his new duties “a cross,” but he promoted himself to full admiral—3,500 miles from the nearest port, and without a fleet.35

Kolchak (east), Denikin (south), and Yudenich (northwest) led three separate anti-Bolshevik groupings, vilifying the “commissars” as German agents and Jews, desecrators of all that was dear to Russian patriots and Orthodox believers. The Bolsheviks, in turn, pilloried their foes as “Whites,” evoking the color of supporters of monarchical restoration against the revolution in France after 1789. None of the “White” leaders sought to restore the monarchy.36 But they did seek to turn back the socialist revolution.

The White leaders’ task of forming an army might have seemed within reach, but they had to attract officers who were utterly unlike them. Entering the Great War in 1914, the Russian officer corps had been dominated by General Staff Academy graduates (like Alexeyev, Kornilov, Denikin), as well as by the elite Imperial Guards, and 87.5 percent of the generals and 71.5 percent of the staff officers had been descendants of noble families. (Never mind that most owned no property.)37 But Russia lost more than 60,000 officers during just the first two years of the Great War. At the same time, the officer ranks of imperial Russia, and then the Provisional Government, swelled to a quarter million. Both the replacements and the new recruits came overwhelmingly from the peasants and urban lower orders.38 (Jews excluded, just about any male of military age in Russia who had the slightest bit of formal education could become an officer.)39 Many of these tsarist officers of humble origin morphed into petty tyrants who abused the common soldier worse than had upper-class military men.40 But their social backgrounds meant they were not preternaturally inclined to an antisocialist orientation. In other words, the Great War catastrophe had not only made possible the far-fetched Bolshevik coup, it had also rendered conservative armed opposition to Bolshevism more difficult. At the same time, the Whites greatly complicated their difficult task by refusing to acknowledge peasant land seizures, thereby alienating their potential mass base. Had it not been for the Cossacks, who eventually supported Denikin in numbers but remained reluctant to fight beyond their home territories of the Don and Kuban; the Czechoslovak Legionnaires, who remained reluctant to leave the Urals and Siberia unless it was for home but sometimes fought for Kolchak; and the Entente, which supplied military aid, there would have been no White movement.

Everything about the Red Army’s birth proved difficult, too.41 The Bolsheviks had wanted no part of peasant conscripts, a class they distrusted, and initially sought to recruit only workers, a fantasy that had to be relinquished.42 In addition, the vast majority of Bolsheviks wanted no part of former tsarist officers: the revolution had been launched by soldiers and sailors in revolt against their authority. In fact, leftists in the Communist party, as well as Menshevik critics, repudiated a standing army with “a Bonaparte,” calling for a democratic militia loyal to the soviets.43 But Trotsky—who became the new war and naval commissar, and who had no special training in the military arts (he had never served in the army)—came out strongly in favor of a professisonal army led by real military men.44 Trotsky would deem the famously democratizing Order No. 1 of 1917 “the single worthy document of the February Revolution,” but he afforded no quarter to democracy in a Red Army.45 The soldiers’ committees that had brought down the tsar were formally abolished in March 1918.46 Trotsky also issued a service appeal to former tsarist officers, even generals (March 27), and stated in a newspaper interview published the next day that “the tsarist legacy and deepening economic disarray have undermined people’s sense of responsibility. . . . This has to stop. In the army as in the Soviet fleet, discipline must be discipline, soldiers must be soldiers, sailors sailors, and orders orders.”47 He also continued to insist that “we must have teachers who know something about the science of war.”48 Stalin would be among the most emphatic in rejection of these “military specialists.” But Lenin shared Trotsky’s view on the necessity of expertise, making it official policy.49 Stalin and other opponents of bourgeois experts, however, continued the fight.50

Thus, the keys to the possibility of Red victory—military experts and peasant conscripts—remained under suspicion of treason. In the event, while the peasant revolution in many ways structured the entire civil war, the fraught incorporation of former tsarist officers structured the entire Soviet state.

Most former tsarist officers who took part in the civil war gravitated toward the anti-Bolshevik forces, some 60,000 to Denikin, 30,000 to Kolchak, and 10,000 to other commanders.51 But by the end of the fighting, around 75,000 were serving in the Red Army, composing more than half the Bolsheviks’ officer corps of approximately 130,000. Even more strikingly, around 775 generals and 1,726 other officers of the tsarist general staff would serve in the Red Army at one time or another.52 Their motives varied from patriotism, preservation of the military establishment, and generous pay and rations, to concern for their family members kept as hostages. Would they be loyal? This question had prompted the Provisional Government to introduce “commissars” alongside the inherited tsarist officer corps to prevent counterrevolution, and the Bolsheviks expanded the practice.53 Every commander at every level was supposed to be paired with at least one commissar, alongside of which were instituted appointed “political departments” for clerical and propaganda work.54 Bolshevik political commissars’ powers included “preventing any counterrevolutionary move, wherever it might come from” and arresting “those who violate the revolutionary order.”55 The officers alone were supposed to make all operational decisions, but in practice these began to be considered as valid only with both the commander’s and the commissar’s signatures, opening the way to commissar involvement in purely military matters.56 Both political and military tensions became endemic.57

An odd civil war it would be, then: Whites pushing peasants away and attempting to recruit officers from the lower orders to fight the socialists; Reds giving command posts to tsarist officers, albeit only under armed guard and recruiting peasants only reluctantly. Had the Whites embraced the peasant revolution, or the Reds driven all former tsarist officers into White hands, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and the rest would have been delivered back into exile or hung from the lampposts.

Within this electrified political atmosphere, Russia’s civil war was in many ways a war of town against country, a scramble for grains (wheat, rye, oats, barley).58 Neither food supply failures nor even recourse to requisitioning originated with Bolshevism, however. The tsarist agricultural ministry, back in fall 1916, had introduced a grain-quota system (prodrazverstka), under which quotas at fixed prices were assessed on provincial authorities, who in turn assessed the county authorities, down to the villages. Predictably, this failed. In March 1917, after marches for bread helped precipitate the tsar’s downfall, the Provisional Government had founded a stand-alone ministry for the food supply and declared a state “grain monopoly” over distribution, except for a fixed minimum to be left with the growers, but provincial and district supply committees could not extract the grain, while inflation debased the currency offered to peasants (in any case, consumer goods were largely unavailable for purchase).59 Petrograd ate, meagerly, only because bagmen flouted the monopoly and jammed the river ports, roads, and rail lines, often forced to ride dangerously on the roofs of the train cars, to haul foodstuffs back from villages for resale. In late August 1917, during the Kerensky-Kornilov showdown, the Provisional Government suddenly doubled the price its state agents paid to the peasants for grain, a concession internal critics called a “complete capitulation,” but supplies of paper money, not to mention sacks and railcars, were insufficient. The Provisional Government found itself dependent on peasant cooperation to feed the cities and army, but unwilling to indulge peasant desires on the land question.60 On October 16, 1917, normally a month of abundance following the harvest, a desperate-sounding (last) minister of food supply for the Provisional Government observed, “We must cease our attempts at persuasion . . . a shift to compulsion is now absolutely necessary.”61 War and attempted state administration of food supply had pushed toward still greater clumsy state action in the form of confiscations and distributions.62

The Bolsheviks, who had even less tolerance for private traders, resolved to enforce the Provisional Government’s failed state grain monopoly, while reinventing it in class terms, seeking to enlist “poor” peasants in locating grain stores. The poor peasants did not rise to the summons, but the Bolshevik ability to enforce compulsion proved far more vigorous.63 Still, the underlying policy of assigned delivery quotas at artificially set prices to be exchanged for nonexistent industrial goods was not going to feed the cities and army. The Red Army grew from nonexistent in early 1918 to a staggering 600,000 troops already by December of that year, at least in terms of the rations being requested; idled people were hungry.64 The promise of food helped drive recruitment, but delivering on the promise was another matter. In the event, many soldiers and most ordinary people ate because much of the population was turned into illegal private traders (not always willingly).65 A non-Bolshevik newspaper, wryly noting that “hundreds of thousands of members of different committees have to be fed,” offered a logical suggestion: legal restoration of free trade and free prices in grain.66 That indeed would have been the answer, but it remained heresy.

Lenin understood next to nothing of Russian agriculture, land utilization, migrant labor, or the actual operations of the peasant commune, let alone market incentives. In late January 1918, he had appointed Trotsky chairman of a short-lived Extraordinary Commission for Food and Transport; not long thereafter a food commissariat was established, and on February 25 Alexander Tsyurupa, an agricultural academy graduate, was appointed commissar. Lenin suggested that all peasants be compelled to deliver grain by name, and that those who failed to do so “be shot on the spot.” Tsyurupa and even Trotsky balked.67 Lenin continued to fulminate (May 9, 1918) against “those who have grain and fail to deliver it to properly designated rail stations and shipping points,” declaring them to be “enemies of the people.”68 That same month the regime proclaimed a “food dictatorship” and “a great crusade against grain speculators, kulaks, bloodsuckers, disorganizers, bribe-takers,” who had grown “fat and rich during the war” and “now refuse to give bread to starving people.”69 Dzierzynski and Lunacharsky warned this assault would imperil Bolshevik relations with the peasantry, but Lenin ignored their objections.70 By winter, with civil war in full swing, the Bolsheviks would climb down from an official policy of war against kulaks and speculators back to one of obligatory delivery quotas of foodstuffs at fixed prices in exchange for industrial goods.71 Still, in practice, they continued to employ blocking detachments to interdict private traders and to requisition food at gunpoint in the name of class warfare, a platform for Stalin’s blossoming.72

MORE THAN A BARGE: STALIN IN TSARITSYN (1918)

No region would prove more decisive in the civil war than the Volga valley, a premiere source of food and recruits as well as the strategic separator between the two large White armies of Kolchak (Urals-Siberia) and Denikin (Don-Kuban).73 No locale better encapsulated the class warfare revolutionary dynamic than Tsaritsyn, on the confluence of the Volga and the Tsaritsa rivers. It had become the largest industrial center in Russia’s southeast (population 150,000) and had traced the revolution in telescoped fashion, going from an absence of Bolsheviks (February 1917) to domination by Bolsheviks (September 1917) even before the coup in Petrograd.74 Red Tsaritsyn was a critical rail junction for grain and raw materials linking the Caucasus and Moscow, but it lay just east of the expansive Don and Kuban valleys, Cossack lands where the Volunteer Army‒White southern base formed.75 The military situation around Red Tsaritsyn had grown precarious, but workers in Moscow and Petrograd were receiving just four ounces of bread every other day, and Tsaritsyn, situated amid grain-growing regions, looked like a solution. To lead a southern food expedition, Lenin selected a tough worker Bolshevik, Alexander Shlyapnikov, the labor commissar. Tsyurupa, who had become close to Lenin, suggested sending along Stalin as well. In the event, Shlyapnikov became bogged down in Moscow, and Stalin ended up going without him, departing Moscow with 460 armed men on June 4, 1918, and arriving two days later at Tsaritsyn’s train station.76 His role, in essence, was Bolshevik bandit-in-chief in the south to feed the northern capital. Already a top member of the central government (or Council of People’s Commissars), Stalin was concomitantly named “director for food affairs in South Russia.” The food crisis, and Stalin’s chance appointment as sole head of an armed expedition to relieve it, enabled him to reprise his exploits at Batum (1902), Chiatura (1905), and Baku (1907), but this time with greater consequence.

Lenin had already appointed someone as Red Tsaritsyn’s supreme military commander: Andrei Snesarev (b. 1865), a tsarist staff officer who had risen to the rank of lieutenant general under the Provisional Government and volunteered to the Reds. He had arrived in Tsaritsyn on May 27, 1918, with a Council of People’s Commissar mandate signed by Lenin as the newly named head of the new Military Commissariat of the North Caucasus. With Red forces melting away, Snesarev set about creating a real army out of ragtag local partisan warfare units, many of which had recently been driven from Ukraine by the advancing Reichswehr and resembled roaming bandits. His first report to the center (May 29) indicated a dire need for more tsarist military specialists.77 But on June 2, a political commissar in Tsaritsyn informed Moscow that locals “have heard little about the formation of a Red Army. . . . Here we have a mass of staff headquarters and bosses, beginning with basic ones right through extraordinary ones and supreme command ones.”78 It was four days later that Stalin arrived.

Stalin set up residence not in the local Hotel France, but in a parked railway carriage and like a commander, donned a collarless tunic—the quasi-military style of attire made famous by Kerensky—and ordered a local cobbler to fashion him a pair of high black boots.79 Stalin also had his teenage wife, Nadya, in tow; she wore a military tunic and worked in his traveling “secretariat.” Already on his first workday, June 7, he boasted to Lenin that he would send eight express trains loaded with grain as he “pumped out” the fertile region, adding, “Be assured, our hand will not tremble.” At the same time, Stalin complained, “If our military ‘specialists’ (cobblers!) had not been asleep or idle, the railway line would not have been cut, and if the line is restored, it will not be because but in spite of them.”80 On June 10, Lenin issued a proclamation “to all toilers” reporting that food help was on the way: “People’s Commissar Stalin, located in Tsaritsyn and leading all food provisioning from the Don and Kuban, has telegraphed us about the immense grain reserves he soon hopes to send northwards.”81 In fact, within a few weeks, Stalin dispatched the first trainloads of grain northward, said to be about 9,000 tons, although how much total grain Stalin managed to forward northward overall remains unclear. Still, he spared nothing and no one in trying. His frequent telegrams to Lenin promised further food shipments, and dripped with venom against other regime officials operating in parallel, whom he depicted as saboteurs.82

Among the key instruments of the swaggering cobbler’s son was a Tsaritsyn Cheka, which had just announced its existence in May 1918 when it took over a two-story mansion overlooking the Volga. It made the top floor into offices and living quarters, and partitioned the lower floor into cells, which were soon stuffed with prisoners beaten unconscious to “confess.” Targets included “bourgeois,” clergy, intelligentsia, and tsarist officers, many of whom had answered a local appeal to join the Red Army. Workers and peasants were also arrested as counterrevolutionaries if they dared to criticize the arbitrary arrests and torture, or if someone said they had.83 Rumors of atrocities constituted part of the Cheka’s mystique: the Kharkov Cheka was said to scalp victims, the Yekaterinoslav Cheka to stone or crucify them, and the Kremenchug Cheka to impale them on stakes.84 In Tsaritsyn, the Cheka was said to cut through human bones with handsaws.85 Alexander I. Chervyakov (b. 1890), who had emerged as the regional Cheka boss in Tsaritsyn, conducted himself like a tyrant, and he and his leather-clad thugs settled their own scores, including with other Cheka operatives, but now they answered to Stalin.86 An eyewitness, the Bolshevik Fyodor Ilin, who had taken the name Raskolnikov from the Dostoevsky character, recalled that “Stalin in Tsaritsyn was everything”—de facto boss of the regional Cheka, and soon, of the regional Red Army.87

Snesarev had built a local Red Army of 20,000 and organized the defenses of Tsaritsyn’s perimeter as fighting raged along the Tsaritsyn-Yekaterinodar railway.88 Stalin, however, was angling to displace the former tsarist officer. On July 10, he telegrammed Lenin that “there is plenty of grain in the South, but in order to get it, we need a functioning apparatus that does not meet obstacles on the part of [military] echelons, commanders, and such.” Therefore, Stalin concluded, “For the good of the cause, I need military powers. I have already written about this, but have received no reply. Very well. In that case, I shall myself, without formalities, dismiss army commanders and commissars damaging the cause. . . . The absence of a paper from Trotsky will not stop me.”89 Here was brazen insubordination of the war commissar’s authority, which Trotsky took surprisingly well. He telegrammed Stalin on July 17 indicating that Snesarev ought to be retained as commander (voenruk), but that “if you consider it undesirable to retain Snesarev as military commissar, inform me and I will remove him. Your Trotsky.”90 Stalin leapt at the offer. On July 19, approval came for the replacement of Snesarev and his Military Commissariat of the North Caucasus by a local Revolutionary Military Council consisting of three people: Stalin; the top Tsaritsyn Bolshevik, Sergei Minin, who was the son of a priest and, like Stalin, a former seminary student; and one other local official. The order from Moscow bore the notation: “The present telegram is sent with Lenin’s approval.”91 Lenin needed food.92 Stalin wanted autonomy from Trotsky.

Stalin now expropriated Snesarev’s operations department: a July 22 inventory yielded typewriter (Remington), one; telephone (city line), one; telephone (Tsaritsyn HQ), one; desks, four; wicker chairs, seven; pens, three; pencils, five; folders, one; trash can, one.93 Stalin had forced Snesarev, whom he viewed as Trotsky’s man, to unite two armies under the command of Klim Voroshilov.94 Born in Lugansk, the same Donbass coal-mining hometown as Alexander Chervyakov of the Tsaritsyn Cheka, Voroshilov had met Stalin at the 4th Party Congress in 1906 (they shared a room). His origins were similarly humble: the son of a washerwoman and a peasant who worked the mines and railways. Voroshilov had ended his formal schooling at age eight, tended animals, and trained as a locksmith. In August 1917, he took over the Lugansk City Duma from Chervyakov, heading it through February 1918, when the Germans began to overrun Ukraine and he turned to partisan warfare, which constituted his first military experience.95 He had retreated from Ukraine to Tsaritsyn with other Red Guards. Although a fine horseman and marksman, and a genuine proletarian, which garnered him some popularity with rank-and-file troops, he was no strategist. “Personally Voroshilov does not sufficiently possess the characteristics necessary for a military chief,” Snesarev had written to Trotsky in July 1918, adding that he “does not observe elementary rules of commanding troops.”96 But Stalin, with Voroshilov, pushed a defense plan that stipulated removing troops from Tsaritsyn’s northern defenses to its southern and western side for an offensive. It was duly launched on August 1. Within three days Tsaritsyn had lost contact with Moscow; units had to be transferred back to the city’s north. Stalin wrote to Lenin (August 4) blaming his “inheritance” from Snesarev.97

Stalin had Snesarev and various tsarist-era military men arrested, part of a sweep of “military specialists” that included the entire local artillery directorate down to the scribes.98 They were imprisoned on a barge moored in the river in front of Cheka HQ. Trotsky sent an aide, the Siberian Alexei Okulov, to investigate, and he freed Snesarev (who was reassigned elsewhere), while criticizing Stalin and Voroshilov. Trotsky also sent a stern telegram ordering Tsaritsyn to allow tsarist officers to do their jobs, but Stalin wrote on it, “Take no account.”99 Many of the 400 or so arrestees crammed onto the barge would die of starvation or a bullet to the neck that summer of 1918.

Stalin was conducting a parallel incandescent intrigue against a high-level fuel expedition. Fuel, too, was scarce in Moscow and Lenin had tasked the Bolshevik K. E. Makhrovsky of the Supreme Council of the Economy with mounting an expedition to the Grozny refinery in the North Caucasus with 10 million rubles in cash to secure petroleum. Accompanied by the non-Communist technical expert N. P. Alekseev of the transport commissariat, as well as Sergei Kirov, head of the Terek province (North Caucasus) soviet, Makhrovsky’s special tanker train reached Tsaritsyn around July 23, passing through on its way to Grozny. Stalin informed them that the rail lines farther south had fallen into the hands of rebellious Chechens and Terek Cossacks. Makhrovsky, after also failing to lay claim even to the fuel supplies he spotted in Tsaritsyn, returned to Moscow to report, leaving behind his empty fuel train and the 10 million rubles in a locked suitcase with his wife and the non-party specialist Alekseev. On August 13, Kirov accosted Makhrovsky’s wife and demanded the money, in Stalin’s name. She refused, then privately discussed with Alekseev how to hide it at a new location. Makhrovsky arrived back in Tsaritsyn on August 15. After further back and forth about the 10 million and related matters, on the night of August 17–18, Stalin had Alekseev arrested and driven to the Cheka, accompanied by Makhrovsky, to face charges of masterminding a wide conspiracy to seize power. His coconspirators were said to be, variously, ex-tsarist officers, Serbian officers, Socialist Revolutionaries, trade unionists, one of Trotsky’s “generals,” ex-Provisional Government officials.100 “All specialists,” the Cheka chief Chervyakov is said to have remarked, “are bourgeois and most are counterrevolutionary.”101

Makhrovsky, too, found himself under arrest. Tsaritsyn’s Cheka refused to recognize his government mandate signed by Lenin. “Comrade, give up talking about the center and the necessity of the localities’ subordination to it,” the interrogator Ivanov told Makhrovsky, according to the latter’s account (submitted to Lenin). “In Moscow they do things their way, and here we do it all afresh in our own fashion. . . . The center cannot dictate anything to us. We dictate our will to the center, for we are the power in the localities.”102 Later that same month, when the local soviet sought to investigate unfounded arrests and summary executions by the Tsaritsyn Cheka, the latter fended them off by claiming that their mandate came from the center. In fact, they followed Stalin’s orders. Stalin would eventually let Makhrovsky go, but he got what he sought: the fuel expedition’s money, vehicles, and all other property.103

Stalin had his prisoner barge, like his local counterparts up and down the Volga, but he had more than a barge. With fanfare, the Stalin-directed Tsaritsyn Cheka proclaimed the discovery of millions of rubles aimed at funding counterrevolution; mass arrests followed, and the execution of twenty-three leaders of an “Alekseev counter-revolutionary-White Guard plot of Right SRs and Black Hundred officers.”104 No trial took place. Alekseev was beaten to a bloody pulp, then shot, along with his two sons (one a teenager); others in custody for whatever reason, or for no reason, were rolled into the “plot.” Stalin made energetic use of the press, having changed (on August 7) the local newspaper News of the North Caucasus Military District into the mass-oriented Soldier of the Revolution; the foiling of the Alekseev “conspiracy” was duly proclaimed in an “extra” edition (August 21, 1918). “Stalin placed high hopes on agitation,” wrote Colonel Anatoly Nosovich, a former tsarist officer and a member of the command staff in the Red Army in Tsaritsyn. “He frequently remarked in arguments over the military arts that everything being said concerning the necessity of the military arts is fine, but if the most talented commander in the world lacked politically conscious soldiers properly prepared by agitation, then, believe me, he would not be able to do anything against revolutionaries who were small in number but highly motivated.”105

When news of the grand “Alekseev plot” broke, General Pyotr Krasnov, the recently elected ataman (leader) of the Don Cossacks, and his army had surrounded Tsaritsyn, but Stalin’s executions did not flow from panic.106 Many were panicking at the prospect of the Cossacks’ entrance into the Red city, but Stalin was enacting a strategy, wielding the specter of “counterrevolution” to galvanize the workers and intimidate would-be anti-Bolsheviks. In a political spectacle, the Cheka forced “the bourgeoisie” to dig defense trenches around the city, and conspicuously frog-marched inmates from “the barge” to the prison, accompanied by whispers they were being led to their deaths. Informants were said to be everywhere.107 Above all, the Stalin-directed Cheka’s extermination of “enemies” was given a strong propaganda message: it was said that while Krasnov’s White forces surrounded Tsaritsyn, the internal foes of the revolution were planning to stage an uprising to enable the Cossacks to capture the city.108 (Later, this would be called a fifth column.) Here, in tiniest embryo, was the scenario of countless fabricated trials of the 1920s and 30s, culminating in the monstrous terror of 1937–38.

So entrenched was Stalin’s class-inflected modus operandi that he sought to restore make-or-break rail lines by the arrest or summary execution of the few technical specialists who actually knew something about rail lines, because they were class aliens, saboteurs by definition. Admittedly, he was not so improvident as to be against all former tsarist officers.109 But he relied on upstarts, those who, like himself, had emerged from “the people,” so long as they remained loyal to him. The proletarian Voroshilov (b. 1881) showed no inclination to pursue his own ambitions at Stalin’s expense. Voroshilov would deem Stalin’s actions “a ruthless purge of the rear, administered by an iron hand”—hardly a vice among Bolsheviks.

Around this time (August 1918), after Kazan had fallen to the Whites, Trotsky had gone to Sviyazhsk, near Kazan, where he got to know the former tsarist colonel and Latvian commander Jukums Vacietis, whom he promoted to Red supreme commander (a position that had been vacant).110 Trotsky also got to know Fyodor Raskolnikov, commander of the Volga Flotilla, and two commissars, Ivan Smirnov (the “Siberian Lenin”) and Arkady Rozengolts, a Kazan-battle group that would form something of Trotsky’s counterpart to Stalin’s Tsaritsynites.111 To save the collapsing front, Trotsky ordered that “if any unit retreats of its own accord, the first to be shot will be the commissar, the second, the commander . . . cowards, self-seekers, and traitors will not get away from a bullet.”112 Trotsky’s objections about Stalin did not, therefore, involve the latter’s excess of inhumanity, but his military amateurism and insubordination. Stalin, for his part, bristled at the military orders from afar, which, to him, took no account of “local conditions.” He was illegally diverting supplies sent from Moscow for the Caucasus front farther south, locking up and shooting military specialists, and aiming to have armed workers hold the city, Red Guard style.

In Tsaritsyn, Stalin revealed himself in depth: rabidly partisan toward class thinking and autodidacts; headstrong and prickly; attentive to political lessons but militarily ignorant. Trotsky perceived the martial dilettantism, willfulness, and prickliness, but little else. Few besides Voroshilov caught the full Stalin. But one person who “got” Stalin was the former tsarist officer Nosovich (b. 1878), a descendant of nobility who had joined the Reds in 1918 and escaped Stalin’s guillotine for class aliens and critics by defecting to the Whites that fall, an act that reconfirmed Stalin in his view about military specialists.113 “Stalin does not hesitate in the choice of paths to realize his aims,” Nosovich (under the pseudonym A. Black Sea Man) wrote in his real-time expose of the Red camp. “Clever, smart, educated and extremely shifty, [Stalin] is the evil genius of Tsaritsyn and its inhabitants. All manner of requisitioning, apartment evictions, searches accompanied by shameless thievery, arrests, and other violence used against civilians became everyday phenomena in the life of Tsaritsyn.” Nosovich correctly explained the true nature of the Georgian’s assignment—grain at any cost—and the real threats Red Tsaritsyn faced. He captured not only Stalin’s thirst for absolute power but his absolute dedication to the cause: Stalin stole 10 million rubles and a fleet of vehicles from his own (Red) side not for personal luxuries, but for defense of the revolution; he was executing “counterrevolutionaries” without proof or trial, not from sadism or panic, but as a political strategy, to galvanize the masses. “To be fair,” Nosovich concluded, “Stalin’s energy could be envied by any of the old administrators, and his ability to get things done in whatever circumstances was something to go to school for.”114 Nonetheless, Tsaritsyn hung by a thread.

STALIN’S RECALL AND CLOSE CALL

When Lenin was shot at the Mikhelson factory in Moscow on August 30, 1918, Stalin exchanged telegrams with Sverdlov about his patron’s precarious condition.115 With Stalin and Trotsky absent from Moscow, Sverdlov took charge; slight in physical stature yet with a booming baritone, he was authoritative in a meeting hall but commanded nothing of the stature of a Lenin. Trotsky had the highest profile after Lenin, while Stalin’s profile was growing, but the two had developed deep mutual enmity; Sverdlov could neither resolve their differences nor rise above either of the two. All three had to pray for Lenin’s recovery: Bolshevik survival depended on it.

As Lenin convalesced, Trotsky and Stalin deepened their antagonism. On September 11, 1918, a “southern front” replaced the North Caucasus military district and Sverdlov summoned Stalin to Moscow; he arrived on September 14 and the day after that had an audience with Sverdlov and Lenin. Trotsky, at a session of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic on September 17, which Stalin attended, appointed Pavel Sytin, a former major general in the tsarist army, above Voroshilov as commander of the southern front (not merely a place, but like an army group).116 Stalin arrived back in Tsaritsyn on September 24; three days later, he complained to Lenin that Tsaritsyn wholly lacked ammunition and nothing was arriving from Moscow (“some kind of criminal negligence, outright treachery. If this persists, we will for sure lose the war in the South.”)117 That same day, Stalin demanded from the military a load of new weapons and 100,000 full sets of uniforms (more than the number of troops locally), and, in purple ink, threatened, “we declare that if these demands (which are the minimum considering the number of troops on the Southern Front) are not met with the utmost urgency, we shall be forced to cease military action and withdraw to the left bank of the Volga.”118

Major General Sytin arrived in Tsaritsyn on September 29, 1918; immediately Stalin and Minin obstructed his prerogative to name commanders or issue operational orders, and objected to his plan to ensure contact with Moscow by moving the front headquarters outside Tsaritsyn.119 On October 1, Stalin formally requested that Sytin be replaced by Voroshilov.120 Sverdlov telegrammed sternly that same day: “All decisions of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic”—Trotsky—“are binding on the Revolutionary Military Councils of the front.”121 Trotsky complained to Sverdlov (October 2), and sent a direct order (October 3) to Stalin and Voroshilov not to interfere in military matters.122 That same day, Stalin wrote to Lenin excoriating his nemesis at length. “The point is that Trotsky generally speaking cannot get by without noisy gestures,” Stalin wrote. “At Brest-Litovsk he delivered a blow to the cause by his far-fetched ‘leftist’ gesturing. On the question of the Czechoslovaks he similarly harmed the cause by his gesturing with noisy diplomacy. . . . Now he delivers a further blow by his gesturing about discipline, and yet all that this Trotskyite discipline amounts to in reality is the most prominent leaders on the war front peering up the backside of military specialists from the camp of ‘nonparty’ counter-revolutionaries.”123 In fact, although Trotsky argued that revolution would radically change everything, even speech, he insisted that revolution had not changed war: the same operational tactics, logistics, basic military organization still held.124 On military matters, Stalin was the leftist, waging relentless class warfare against former tsarist officers, regardless of their behavior. Disingenuously, Stalin concluded his October 3 telegram to Lenin, “I am no lover of noise and scandal,” and “right now, before it’s too late, it’s necessary to bridle Trotsky, bringing him to heel.” Sverdlov counseled diplomacy, but on October 4, Trotsky, from elsewhere in the south, telegrammed Sverdlov, with a copy to Lenin, “I categorically insist on Stalin’s recall.”125

And so the clash had come to its logical conclusion: Trotsky and Stalin each appealing to Lenin for the other’s removal.

In his incredulous fury, Trotsky pointed out that the Red Army outnumbered the Whites three to one on the southern front, yet Tsaritsyn remained in grave danger.126 “Voroshilov could command a regiment, but not an army of 50,000 soldiers,” Trotsky wrote in his October 4 telegram demanding Stalin’s recall. “Nonetheless, I will leave him [Voroshilov] as commander of the Tenth Tsaritsyn Army on the condition that he is subordinated to the [overall] Southern Front Commander Sytin.” Trotsky threatened that “if this order is not implemented by tomorrow, I will remand Voroshilov and Minin to court martial and publish this fact in an order to the army. . . . No more time for diplomacy. Tsaritsyn should either follow orders or get out.”127 On October 5, Sverdlov again directed Stalin, Minin, and Voroshilov to fulfill Trotsky’s orders.128

Lenin acceded to Trotsky’s demand to recall Stalin—Tsaritsyn could not be lost—but refused Trotsky’s demand to punish Stalin. “I received word of Stalin’s departure from Tsaritsyn for Moscow,” Sverdlov telegrammed Trotsky (October 5). “I consider maximum caution necessary right now regarding the Tsaritsynites. There are many old comrades there. Everything must be done to avoid conflict without retreating from conducting a hard line. Needless to say I am communicating only my opinion.”129 Sverdlov had tactfully revealed his judgment of Stalin, while imposing limits on Trotsky. On October 6, Stalin departed for Moscow, meeting Lenin on the eighth.130 In Tsaritsyn, on October 7, an assembly of more than fifty local party, soviet, and trade union activists chaired by Minin approved a resolution recommending “a national congress to reexamine and assess the policy of the center” on hiring former tsarist military brass. This act—provincials calling upon the Central Committee to reverse policy—demonstrated both the decentralization of power in 1918 and the locals’ confidence in having a “roof” (or protector) in Stalin.131 In Moscow, however, Stalin failed to get his way: he was relieved of his post on the southern front, although he was appointed a member of the central Military Council of the Republic, an obvious attempt to mollify him.132 Stalin would now have to communicate with Trotsky by addressing telegrams to the “Chairman of the Military Council” from “Member of the Military Council Stalin.”133

Stalin returned to Tsaritsyn around October 11, evidently in the company of Sverdlov, who aimed to impose a local diplomatic resolution on the daggers-drawn Red camp.134 The Whites reached Tsaritsyn’s outskirts on October 15, 1918, a day on which the situation was described as “catastrophic” in a telegram sent by Red supreme military commander Vacietis to Voroshilov, with copies to Sytin and Trotsky; Vacietis blamed Voroshilov’s refusal to cooperate with his superior, Sytin.135 Stalin departed Tsaritsyn for good on October 19–20, in the heat of the decisive battle. Trotsky arrived to replace him and salvage the city’s defense.136

Tsaritsyn would be saved—just barely—not by Trotsky but by Dmitry Zhloba, whose “Steel Division” of 15,000 men had left the Caucasus front, covered 500 miles in sixteen days, and surprised the Whites’ unguarded rear.137 On October 25, the Steel Division pushed the Cossacks back across the Don.138 Four days later, Stalin reported to a plenum of the Moscow soviet how dicey the situation had been.139 Indeed, had Tsaritsyn fallen that autumn of 1918, he might have faced a government inquiry and disciplinary action, as well as permanent reputational damage.140

A WORLD TURNING (NOVEMBER 1918-JANUARY 1919)

Lenin was hardly the only high stakes gambler. Germany’s high command had attempted one immense gamble after another: the Schlieffen Plan (1914) to win a war of mobility; Verdun (1916) to bleed the enemy white in a new strategy of attrition; unrestricted U-boat warfare (1917) to break the stranglehold of the British naval blockade; sending Lenin home to foment chaos and knock Russia out of the war; and, following a German victory on the eastern front, an all-out offensive on the western front launched March 21, 1918.141 By June, the German army in the west had come within thirty-seven miles of Paris, close enough to strike it with Big Bertha heavy artillery. But the Reichswehr failed to take the French capital, after suffering one million casualties.142 United States troops, provoked into the war by the U-boats, had begun arriving in France at the rate of 120,000 per month (the United States had entered the war in early 1917 with 150,000 men under arms total). Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, and South Africa, meanwhile, put even more men into military action on behalf of Britain than would the United States, and in August 1918, the reinforced Allies counterattacked. True, thanks to Brest-Litovsk—or rather, to Berlin’s willingness to violate its own treaty prohibitions—Germany shifted half a million troops to the western front, increasing its strength there to 192 divisions from 150.143 But by September 28, 1918, Deputy Chief of Staff General Erich Ludendorff, the man responsible for the western offensive, informed his superior, Field Marshall Paul von Hindenburg, that the Reich had no prospect of winning: Germany lacked reserves to send into battle. What Ludendorff did not say was that during the western offensive, nearly a million Reichswehr soldiers were bogged down in a disorganized occupation of the east that instead of extracting resources consumed them.144 (Germany had to export 80,000 tons of coal just to get railways in Ukraine restarted.) Ludendorff would scapegoat Bolshevism and its “infection” of German troops, lamenting, “I often dreamed of this [Russian] revolution, which would so lighten the burden of our war, but today the dream is suddenly realized in an unanticipated way.”145 But as one scholar explained, “The man who defeated Ludendorff the soldier, was not so much [Allied Supreme Commander] Marshal Foch, as Ludendorff the politician.”146

Meanwhile, to salvage the retreating Reichswehr—which was everywhere on foreign soil, from France to Ukraine—a broken Ludendorff proposed importuning the Allies for an immediate cease-fire, but the civilians in a new German cabinet refused while contemplating an all-out mobilization of the civilian population for a last stand—exactly the opposite of the future stab-in-the-back legend.147 Ludendorff soon changed his mind about begging for an armistice and resigned; the cabinet never managed the civilian mobilization.

On November 9, inside the neoclassical Bolshoi Theater, Lenin crowed to the delegates to the Sixth All-Russia Congress of Soviets, “we have never been so near to international proletarian revolution as we are now.”148 That same day, as it turned out, the staunch monarchist Hindenburg and others in the German high command, fearing a domestic version of the kind of revolution they had sent Lenin to incite in Russia, pressed the kaiser to abdicate. Wilhelm II had his imperial train shunted across the border into the Netherlands and, once in personal safety, signed a formal abdication.149 (Unlike his executed cousin Nicky, Willy would live a long life and die peacefully in exile.) An armistice followed on November 11, 1918, signed in Marshal Foch’s railway carriage in a French forest near the front lines. The armistice called for the immediate withdrawal of German troops everywhere, except in the former Russian empire, where the Germans were to remain until further instructed by the Entente.150 Two days later, Moscow unilaterally repudiated the Brest-Litovsk Treaty as well as the August 1918 Supplementary Treaty (wih its 6 billion ruble indemnity, already partially paid).151 (The victorious Allies would soon compel Germany to renounce Brest-Litovsk.) After fifty-two gruesome months, the Great War was over. Lenin was in such a good mood he released non-Bolshevik socialists from prison and, on November 30, 1918, relegalized the Menshevik party.152

The repercussions of the war were immense, and enduring. Wartime GDP had increased in the United States and in the United Kingdom, but in Austria, France, the Ottoman empire, and Russia it cratered by between 30 and 40 percent.153 The Great War required unprecedented levels of taxation and state economic control across belligerent countries, most of which would not be rolled back.154 Beyond the 8.5 million war dead and the nearly 8 million taken prisoner or missing, an influenza epidemic would infect 500 million people globally and kill at least 50 million, fully 3 percent of the global population (some estimates range up to 100 million).155 Some 20 million people returned home maimed in some fashion. One and a half million Brits were crippled (the disabled received compensation: 16 shillings a week for a lost right arm, 11 shillings sixpence for a lost right hand and forearm, 10 for a lost left arm, nothing for a disfigured face). In Germany, around 2.7 million people returned with war-related disabilities, alongside half a million war widows and 1.2 million orphans. In the interest of maintaining public order, let alone to repay a debt, soldiers and widows were granted war-related pensions. Other war-influenced emergency social policies included emergency housing decrees, which willy-nilly introduced permanent government regulation. Unemployment insurance, cash sickness benefits, birth and burial grants were expanded into a proto-welfare state, spurred by warfare. The Russian empire lost 2 million dead and 2.5 millon wounded.156 An estimated 2.4 million Russian subjects contracted disease, while 3.9 million were taken prisoner, a massive surrendering equal to all the POWs of other belligerents combined.157 It was in such a context that Trotsky scorned “papist-Quaker babble about the sanctity of human life,” and Lenin approvingly quoted Machiavelli to the effect that “violence can only be met with violence.”158

Lenin’s big gambles—accepting imperial German aid to return to Russia; the coup in Petrograd; the capitulatory separate peace with Germany—had paid off. Russia and Germany, on opposing sides in the war but now both vanquished, provided an illuminating contrast. He would admit that “the war taught us much, not only that people suffered, but that those who have the best technology, discipline, and machinery come out on top.”159 Contemporaries widely remarked on the similarities in the methods of Ludendorff (b. 1865) and Lenin (b. 1870), as well as wartime German and Bolshevik policies generally.160 The German military occupiers of Eastern Europe had resorted to population registration, property confiscation, conscription, and promiscuous issuance of decrees, claiming an unlimited mandate while foundering in self-made administrative chaos. But unlike Bolshevism, German wartime rule in Eastern Europe did not organize the populace politically and culturally. No native-language newspapers or native-language schools had been established to involve and shape the local societies. Instead, the Germans obsessed over how to keep their German staff awash in Kultur, lest they go native. If not for the local Jews who spoke Yiddish and adapted quickly to German as translators, the German overlords would have been unable to communicate.161 The Germans put forth no narratives of overarching purpose that elicited mass involvement, and they did not build mass organizations. Germany’s experience in Eastern Europe demonstrated not only how much Bolshevism owed to the Great War, but how much Bolshevism transcended a military-style occupation.162 In addition, contrasting Ludendorff’s private kingdom in Lithuania, western Belorussia, and Latvia with Stalin’s in Tsaritsyn, we can see that Stalin exhibited the exact opposite talents of Ludendorff: military amateurism but political cunning.

Voroshilov, Stalin’s protégé, was hanging on as commander of the Tenth Army in Tsaritsyn.163 At first, Supreme Commander Vacietis wanted him sacked, but Trotsky, while insisting on the immediate removal of Sergei Minin (“conducts extremely harmful policies”), allowed Voroshilov to remain, provided someone competent could be assigned alongside him.164 Soon, however, Trotsky telegrammed Sverdlov demanding Voroshilov’s removal, too (“shows no initiative, trivialities, talentless”).165 Vacietis, meanwhile, had softened, indicating he was not strongly against Voroshilov being appointed to a Red Army command in Ukraine (he may have had no other candidate for the post).166 Trotsky exploded. “A compromise is necessary but not a rotten one,” he pleaded to Lenin (January 11, 1919). “Essentially, all the Tsaritsyn-ites have assembled in Kharkov. . . . I consider Stalin’s protection of the Tsaritsyn tendency a dangerous ulcer, worse than the betrayal and treason of military specialists. . . . Voroshilov, along with Ukrainian partisan warfare-ism, a lack of culturedness, demagoguery—that is something we cannot have under any circumstances.”167

The enmity between Voroshilov and Trotsky rendered the former that much more valuable to Stalin. Voroshilov, Minin, and their subordinates engaged in a revenge whispering campaign against Trotsky, spreading word that the war commissar was in bed with tsarist generals and sending Communists to the firing squad—a whiff of treason.168 (Stalin could pour his anti-Trotsky poison directly into Lenin’s ear.) Left Communists, such as Nikolai Bukharin, who edited Pravda, used the Tsaritsynites to further their own anti-Trotsky campaign to “democratize” military organization.169 Impelled to respond, Trotsky in early 1919 derided “the new Soviet bureaucrat, who, trembling over his job,” envious of the competent, unwilling to learn, sought a scapegoat for his own shortcomings. “This is the genuine menace to the cause of communist revolution . . . the genuine accomplices of counter-revolution.”170 Here was the gist of Trotsky’s future critique of Stalinism.

Lenin continued to show confidence in his Georgian protégé despite having abruptly removed him from Tsaritsyn, and in January 1919, he sent Stalin to a new hotspot, Vyatka, in the Urals, to investigate why Perm and the surrounding region had fallen to Admiral Kolchak.171 Stalin traveled together with the Cheka’s Dzierzynski and was again accompanied by his wife, Nadya, as well as her sister Anna Alliluyeva (b. 1896); Dzierzynski’s personal secretary, Stanisław Redens (b. 1892), another Pole, fell in love with and would soon marry Stalin’s sister-in-law. As for the Red debacle in Perm, Stalin and Dzierzynski issued three separate reports, noting the Reds’ abject disorganization and the local population’s hostility to the regime (over food requisitioning), but shifting the blame each time, first impugning Trotsky, then Vacietis. Their reports pointedly listed the former tsarist officers on the Red side who had defected to the Whites. They also allowed that the Bolshevik regime should avoid posting as overseers of tsarist-era commanders comrades who were “too young” or party “demogogues,” a slight backtracking on Stalin’s earlier hard line, evidence perhaps of Lenin’s intervention.172 Lenin, meanwhile, on January 19, a Sunday, heading out to meet Krupskaya convalescing in the fresh air and woods outside of Moscow, had his Rolls-Royce hijacked by three armed men. The revolution’s leader, his sister, driver (Stepan Gil), and one bodyguard trudged the rest of the way on foot.173

VERSAILLES 1919: THE ANOMALY

Few peace treaties have gone down in history less favorably than that of Versailles. The talks opened in Paris on January 18, 1919, the anniversary of Germany’s unification, and concluded in Versailles’ Hall of Mirrors—where the German Reich had been proclaimed—on June 28, 1919, five years to the day after Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination. Thirty-seven countries sent delegations (some more than one); myriad expert commissions worked on ethnic and territorial claims; and 500 journalists reported on the proceedings, but just three people determined the outcome: David Lloyd George (Britain), Georges Clemenceau (France), and Woodrow Wilson (United States), a former Princeton professor who became the first sitting American president to travel to Europe. The seventy-eight-year-old Clemenceau aimed to counteract Germany’s superior economic might and population; Lloyd George to attain Britain’s colonial and naval aims at German expense; and Wilson to imagine a secure permament peace, though he abetted the French imposition of punishment on Germany. The final text contained 440 clauses, the first 26 of which concerned a new League of Nations, while the remaining 414 took up Germany’s alleged sole war guilt. Germany was forbidden to maintain more than 100,000 troops or any military aircraft, and lost 13 percent of its territory, including Alsace and Lorraine to France, its foreign colonies, and its merchant fleet. France had wanted to detach the Rhineland, too, but Lloyd George objected; the Rhineland was instead demilitarized. A newly reconstituted Poland was awarded most of German West Prussia, while Danzig, predominantly ethnic German, was made a “free city” and a so-called Polish Corridor was created between German territories, isolating German East Prussia. To fund the reconstruction of French and Belgian territory, and the British war-loan debt to the United States, Germany was ordered to pay 132 billion gold marks, then equivalent to $31.4 billion or £6.6 billion. (Approximately $440 billion in 2013.)174

Germany’s imposition of Brest-Litovsk on Russia served as one rationale for the expressly punitive Versailles Peace—exactly as the impudent Bolshevik Karl Radek had predicted to Germany’s Brest negotiators. Versaillies’ terms, meanwhile, were publicly assailed even in the West. France’s Marshall Foch commented, “This is not a peace; it is an armistice for twenty years.”175 Still, unlike imperial Russia under Brest-Litovsk, Germany was not dismembered. (Lloyd George remarked of Germany, “we cannot both cripple her and expect her to pay.”) Moreover, the treaties that followed with the other defeated belligerents—St. Germain with Austria (September 10, 1919), Neuilly with Bulgaria (November 27, 1919), Trianon with Hungary (June 4, 1920), Sevres with Turkey (August 10, 1920)—were in some ways harsher. (The Turks alone, taking up arms, managed to revise their treaty terms.) The victors’ Peace of Versailles certainly had flaws, irrespective of its attribution of sole war guilt to Germany. It enshrined self-determination and the nation while promoting territorial revisionism: Versailles and its sister treaties approved the award to 60 million people of states of their own, while making another 25 million into national minorities. (There was also a jump in the number of stateless persons.) Edvard Beneš and Tomáš Masaryk managed to extract extra territory, at the expense of Hungary, for the new Czechoslovakia, even though both had fought on the losing Austrian side. Romania obtained significant ethnically mixed lands at Hungarian expense. But if Hungary was the legitimate homeland of the Hungarians, according to national self-determination, why were so many Hungarians stuck elsewhere? Jews had no separate homeland, becoming a minority in every state. Self-determination did not apply to any of the colonial peoples under the British and French empires, both of which expanded: in 1919 the British empire alone grew to one quarter of the earth. Many war spoils were colonial: new mineral-rich possessions in Africa, new oil fields in the Middle East. Masaryk, who served as the first president of the new Czechoslovakia, dubbed the Versailles Peace Conference a “laboratory built over a vast cemetery.”

Whatever Versailles’ deep flaws on principle, it failed utterly in terms of power politics: the United States would go home, the British would back away, and the French—who shared a land border with Germany—could not bear the burden of enforcing the treaty provisions.176 A punitive peace is punitive only if there is the unity of will to enforce it, which was lacking. All that was fatal enough, but even before the powers bailed on the Versailles structure, it was being erected on the basis of a temporary anomaly: the simultaneous disintegration of both German power and Russian power. Both of those conditions could not last; in the event, neither would.

Russia’s contribution to the Allied effort in the Great War (through 1917) remained unacknowledged. The British had imagined that to defeat Germany, the Russian “steamroller,” together with France, would do the bulk of the fighting (and dying), leaving supply and finance to Britain, but the treatment of Russians as British mercenaries and cannon fodder had to be abandoned, even as it generated lasting resentment.177 At the same time, Britain had found itself in what was an unaccustomed dependence on its allies’ strategic imperatives and, in the postwar, London would seek an arm’s-length grand strategy, derived from long-standing preferences (to have others fight) and priorities (the empire), as well as the Great War experience.178 As for Bolsevik Russia in the here and now, the Allies were at a loss. While Foch argued for a preemptive war, Clemenceau advocated containment (a cordon sanitaire); while Lloyd George imagined moderating Bolshevism through trade, other British political figures wanted to roll back the leftist menace.179 Some British imperialists, for their part, smiled upon the forced retreat of Russian sovereignty from the Caucasus and hoped to consolidate Ludendorff’s policy of imperial partition in the East, but other Brits, with a wary eye on Germany, preferred a reunified Russia as a counterweight. In the end, for all the talk of the possible spread of the “Bolshevik bacillus,” Versailles showed itself far less concerned with Russia than with Germany. Still, the two turned out to be inseparable.180 Much of Germany’s political class would refuse to accept the verdict of Versailles; Soviet Russia’s exclusion from the peace conference—delegations were received from Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Ukraine—gave Moscow additional grounds for treating the result as illegitimate. Directed against Germany and in disregard of Russia, Versailles would push the two pariahs into each other’s arms, as each would strive to resurrect its world power, forming a foundation of Stalin’s world.181

LIGHTNING ROD COMMISSAR

The Bolsheviks attempted to counter Versailles immediately. On January 24, 1919, a letter of invitation was issued by wires to the world and on March 2 a semi-international group of some fifty Communists and other leftists attended a gathering in Moscow that became the Third (Communist) International or Comintern. The floors in the long, narrow Mitrofanov Hall of the Kremlin’s Imperial Senate were covered in extravagant carpets and the windows in brilliant drapes, but the stove heaters in the frigid space sat idle for lack of fuel. Some fifty guests from the Moscow party organization sat in a kind of gallery. “The delegates took their seats on flimsy chairs at rickety tables obviously borrowed from some cafe,” recalled a French Communist. “On the walls were photographs: the founders of the First International Marx and Engels; the still honored leaders of the Second, mostly those no longer with us.”182 Travel to Soviet Russia had proved difficult because of the Allied blockade and the civil war’s disruptions; a mere nine delegates made it from abroad. Several leftist parties extended “mandates” to individuals already resident in Moscow. Even so, just thirty-four attendees held credentials to represent Communist parties, or almost Communist parties, from about twenty countries (many of which had once been part of the tsarist empire). Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Chicherin, Bukharin, and Zinoviev were made voting delegates (six people sharing five votes; Stalin signed their mandates).183 “Anyone who had attended the old Congresses of the Second International,” a Russian Communist observed in Pravda, “would have been quite disappointed.”184 As more attendees showed up, however, the assembly boldly voted itself the founding congress of the Comintern. Trotsky’s pen let out a burst of rapture. “The tsars and the priests, ancient rulers of the Moscow Kremlin, never, we must assume, had a premonition that within its gray walls would one day gather the representatives of the most revolutionary section of modern humanity,” he wrote on the Comintern Congress’s closing day (March 6), adding that “we are witnesses to and participants of one of the greatest events in world history.”185 Lenin had planned to hold the assembly openly in Berlin, but the German Social Democrats were hostile.186 In Moscow, Lenin made Zinoviev (who spoke some German) chairman of an executive committee, which also included Radek, who had been educated at German and Swiss universities and influenced by Rosa Luxemburg, before turning against her, then turning back to her to help establish the German Communist party.187 The “delegates” approved Lenin’s theses denouncing “bourgeois democracy” and upholding “proletarian dictatorship”—precisely the point of dispute with the German Social Democrats. That rift on the left, now institutionalized globally, would never be healed.188

The 8th Congress of the Russian Communist Party, meanwhile, had been planned to commence right after the Comintern gathering, on the evening of March 16, with a half session, so that the delegates could attend a commemoration of the 1871 Paris Commune, but Yakov Sverdlov returned to Moscow from a trip to Oryol on March 8 with a raging fever; he never properly recovered. Conflicting rumors had him either giving a speech to workers outside in the cold, or killed by a blow to the head with a heavy object administered by a worker at a factory—revenge against Bolshevik deprivation and repression. In fact, Sverdlov died of typhus or influenza.189 From his Kremlin apartment, Lenin, according to Trotsky, phoned the war commissariat on March 16: “‘He’s gone. He’s gone. He’s gone.’ For a while each of us held the receiver in our hands and each could feel the silence at the other end. Then we hung up. There was nothing more to say.”190

Sverdlov was buried on Red Square, near the Kremlin Wall, in the Bolsheviks’ first major state funeral. His death prompted the cancellation of the Paris Commune tribute and a two-day delay in the Party Congress. It opened in the evening after the funeral, on March 18, in the Imperial Senate’s rotund Catherine Hall (which would be renamed for Sverdlov). Trotsky, too, was absent: he had obtained Central Committee permission to return to the front, given the “extremely serious” situation. Although he had also wanted all Red Army delegates returned to the front, the soldiers protested and were allowed to decide for themselves; many stayed at the Congress.191 Lenin’s opening night speech hailed Sverdlov as “the most important organizer for the party as a whole.” Everyone stood.192 Thanks partly to Sverdlov’s skills, but also to the formation of a Red Army, the party had doubled in size since the previous congress a year before. In attendance were invited guests, 301 voting delegates, and 102 non-voting delegates, representing 313,766 party members in Soviet Russia (220,495), Finland, Lithuania, Latvia, Belorussia, and Poland, which were not under Soviet rule.193 A survey of the 500-plus attendees established that 17 percent were Jewish and nearly 63 percent Russian—information that did little to alter perceptions.194 The Whites and other Bolshevik opponents slurred the regime as “Kike Bolshevik” with a “Kike” Red Army (Trotsky).195

Among the principal agenda items at the congress was the widespread employ of former tsarist officers, a controversial policy identified with Trotsky, whom Lenin had to defend over his absence. Debate was prolonged and heated (March 20–21).196 Lenin had explained the matter on the opening day. “Military organization was completely new, it had not been posed before even theoretically,” he stated on March 18, adding that the Bolsheviks were experimenting, but that “without an armed defense the socialist republic could not exist.”197 Soviet Russia, therefore, needed a regular, disciplined army, and it needed knowledgeable military specialists. Lenin knew he would have to sway the hall full of Communists, whose class ideology he shared but whose flexibility he greatly exceeded. And so, the Bolshevik leader had instructed one person whom he tasked with reporting to the congress to employ the word “threatening [grozno]” for the situation at the front, illustrate it with a large color-coded map visible to the whole auditorium, and blame informal partisan-warfare tactics.198 Even so, the talk was of the treason committed by former tsarist officers admitted into Red ranks (a handful of cases, among tens of thousands of serving officers).199

Moreover, Trotsky had published several defenses of using former tsarist officers, but their brutal logic came across as politically tone deaf, and further incensed opponents. (“So, can you give me ten divisional commanders, fifty regimental commanders, two army commanders and one front commander—today? And all of them Communists?”)200 Trotsky had also published “theses” on the eve of the congress defending military policy and now tapped Grigory Sokolnikov to defend them; Vladimir Smirnov, a Left Communist, offered the rebuttal.201 Sokolnikov tried to argue that the danger lay not in former tsarist officers but in the peasantry. The critics, dubbed the “military opposition,” could offer up few proletarians—other than Voroshilov—to substitute for former tsarist officers in command posts, and instead proposed strengthening the role of commissars and the Communist party in the Red Army, a point that Trotsky, through Sokolnikov, conceded. The policy issue, therefore, subtly shifted to whether stronger commissars meant merely greater political control, or in the words of Smirnov, “a larger part in the direction of the armies.”202 Despite this narrowing of the disagreement, inflamed speeches of principle (for and against use of “military specialists”) continued to dominate the sessions.203

Stalin allowed Voroshilov to bear the brunt of criticism for Tsaritsyn, then took the floor to aver that Europe had real armies and “one can resist only with a strictly disciplined army” as well as “a conscious army, with highly developed political departments.” Not long ago, none other than Kornilov, at the Moscow State Conference in August 1917, had insisted to wide applause that “only an army welded together by iron discipline” could save Russia from ruin.204 Second, Stalin revealed a hostile attitude toward the peasantry, stating “I must say that the nonworker elements, which constitute a majority of our army, peasants, will not fight for socialism, will not! Voluntarily they will not fight.”205 In accentuating discipline and dismissing the peasantry, he had assumed a position close to Trotsky’s. But Stalin did not mention him by name.206

Lenin took the floor again on March 21, 1919. “Sometimes he took a step or two forward toward the audience, then stepped back, sometimes he looked down at his notes on the table,” one witness recalled. “When he wanted to punctuate the most important point or express the unacceptability of the military opposition’s position, he raised a hand.”207 Lenin conceded that “when Stalin had people shot at Tsaritsyn I thought it was a mistake.” This was a telling observation—a mistake, not a crime.208 But now, upon further information, Lenin conceded that Stalin’s Tsaritsyn executions were not a mistake. Still, Lenin rejected Stalin’s insinuation that the war commissariat had persecuted Voroshilov, and rebuked Stalin’s protégé by name: “Comrade Voroshilov is guilty for refusing to relinquish the old partisan warfare [partizanshchina].”209 Lenin’s offensive threw the “military opposition” on the defensive, and probably turned the tide in the vote. On March 21, 174 voted for the Central Committee theses (drafted by Trotsky and backed by Lenin) and 95 for the military opposition theses, with 3 abstentions.210 After the vote, victory in hand, Lenin formed a five-person reconciliation commission—3 from the winning side, 2 from the losing side—who together confirmed some tweaks to Trotsky’s theses on March 23.211

Stalin had voted with Lenin.212 Stalin also signed the telegram (March 22–23) informing Trotsky at the front that his theses had been approved, a sign no doubt of Lenin’s efforts at reconciling the two.213 The policy compromise had been foretold by a party official from Nizhny Novgorod named Lazar Kaganovich, in an article in his local press that was summarized in Pravda, which rebuked critics of military specialists but also cautioned against “an excessive faith” in them, proposing they be watched closely by the party.214 Kaganovich, an early admirer of Trotsky, would soon become one of Stalin’s most important lieutenants.

Military controversy almost eclipsed another major issue at the Congress: the lack of fuel or food. Opponents were deriding Bolshevism as banditry, as well as “the socialism of poverty and hunger.” Suren Martirosyan (known as Varlaam Avanesov), newly named to the collegium of the Cheka, told the delegates that “now the broad masses . . . demand not that we agitate about bread but that we provide it.”215 Food extracted from a radically contracting economy was going mostly to two “armies”: one in the field and one behind desks.216 Ration cards stipulated a right to specific amounts of food, on a class basis, but often the provisions were unavailable: the Bolshevik food commissariat did not attain the level of food procured by the tsarist state in 1916–17.217 However much grain might be procured by state agents, ruined railways could not transport it all to the cities, labor was insufficient to unload the grain that did get transported, and functioning mills were too few. At the same time, perhaps 80 percent of the grain requisitioned in the name of the state was being diverted for private sale to black markets.218 In a mass exodus for survival, Moscow’s population, which had swelled during the Great War to 2 million, declined to under 1 million.219 Even so, urban food shortages remained chronic.220 Remaining urbanites had little choice but to try to obviate the blocking detachments and venture into the countryside to purchase and haul back food, which was known as “bagging.” (When the historian Yuri Gothier, an official at Moscow’s Rumyantsev Museum—later the Lenin Library—returned from a series of lectures in Tver in 1919, he recorded “the balance for the trip” in his diary as “30 pounds of butter.”)221

Illegal petty private trade kept the country alive, but bureaucratic self-dealing threatened to smother it. Viktor Nogin, a member of the Central Committee, tried to call the Congress delegates’ attention to “horrifying facts about drunkenness, debauchery, corruption, robbery, and irresponsible behavior of many party workers, so that one’s hair stands on end.”222 The Congress authorized a new commissariat for state control (it would be renamed the workers’ and peasants’ inspectorate); a few weeks after the Congress, Stalin would be appointed its commissar, concurrent with his post as nationalities commissar, with broad investigatory powers to oversee state administration centrally and locally.

The Congress, as the highest organ of the party by statute, also elected a new Central Committee, the party’s executive between Congresses. The new Central Committee consisted of nineteen members—Lenin was listed first, the rest in alphabetical order—as well as eight candidate members. The Congress adopted a new party statute (which would endure to 1961). Fully fifty delegates voted against Trotsky’s inclusion in the Central Committee, a number far exceeding the negative votes of any other nominee.223 One of his closest loyalists, Adolf Joffe, was not reelected (and would never again serve on the Central Committee). Trotsky had emerged as a lightning rod, and the antagonism to his imperious “administrative-ness” would extend beyond the delegates in the hall, cropping up in discussions at primary party organizations.224

The Congress also formalized the existence of a small “political bureau” (politburo) and party secretariat, alongside a recently created larger “organization bureau” (orgburo). As Lenin explained, “the orgburo allocates forces [personnel], while the politburo decides policy.”225 The politburo had five voting members—Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Lev Kamenev, Nikolai Krestinsky—and three candidate (non-voting) members: Zinoviev, Kalinin, Bukharin.226 Krestinsky replaced Sverdlov as secretary of the party. Sverdlov’s fireproof safe, meanwhile, was delivered to the Kremlin commandant warehouse, still locked. It contained tsarist gold coins in the amount of 108,525 rubles, gold articles, and precious jewels (705 items in total), tsarist banknotes in the amount of 750,000 rubles, and nine foreign passports, one in Sverdlov’s name, as if the Bolsheviks feared they might have to flee the Whites.227

FORCES OF ORDER

All during the cacophony of Versailles, the world was shifting, and it would shift still more, in ways that escaped the major protagonists of France, Britain, and the United States. As 1919 dawned, war-induced inflation obliterated middle-class savings, prompting many to barter the family furniture, down to the piano, for sacks of flour or potatoes, even as war veterans loitered outside restaurants, begging for scraps. “Councils” (soviets) formed in Berlin and dozens of cities in Central Europe, mostly with the aim of reestablishing public order and distributing food and water, but revolution was in the air, too.228 People dreamed not just of getting something in their empty stomachs but of an end to militarism and war, police batons and political repression, extremes of obscene wealth and poverty. A German Communist party was founded in December 1918, from the Spartacist movement, led by Rosa Luxemburg, a Polish-Jewish revolutionary born in tsarist Russia.229 From Germany’s Breslau Prison, just before being released and helping found the German Communists, she attacked Lenin and Bolshevism, writing that “freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for members of one party—however numerous they may be—is no freedom at all. Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for one who thinks differently.”230 But Luxemburg went after the reformism of the German Social Democrats with even greater verve.231 She never had the opportunity to show how her rhetorical commitment to freedom would work in practice as a result of socialist revolution. In January 1919, worker actions, joined by the German Communists, led to a general strike—half a million workers marched in Berlin—and then a controversial armed uprising, which provoked a crackdown; Karl Liebknecht, who had pushed for the armed uprising, and Luxemburg, who had opposed it, were assassinated. This reminds us that Lenin and Trotsky were not assassinated in 1917. The executioners of the two leading German Communists were so-called Freikorps, a right-wing nationalist militia of returning frontline soldiers called in by the shaky postkaiser government against the leftists. Altogether, around 100 people were killed; 17 Freikorps members died as well.

By contrast, in Munich, Kurt Eisner, a German journalist of Jewish extraction, attempted to reconcile the new grassroots councils-soviets with parliamentarism, Kerensky style, but he, too, failed. Instead, on April 7, 1919, a new party that broke away from the Socialist Democrats, joined by groups of anarchists, declared a Bavarian Soviet Republic. Six days later, German Communists took it over, emptied the prisons, began to form a Red Army (recruiting from the unemployed), and sent telegrams of victory to Moscow. On April 27, Lenin replied with greetings and advice: “Have the workers been armed? Have the bourgeoisie been disarmed? . . . Have the capitalist factories and wealth in Munich and the capitalist farms in its environs been confiscated? Have mortgage and rent payments by small peasants been cancelled? Have all paper stocks and all printing-presses been confiscated? . . . Have you taken over all the banks? Have you taken hostages from the ranks of the bourgeoisie?”232 In very short order, however, beginning on May Day 1919, some 30,000 Freikorps, together with 9,000 regular German army troops crushed the Bavarian Soviet Republic.233 More than 1,000 leftists were killed in bitter fighting. (Eisner was assassinated by a right-wing extremist). Instead of a Bolshevik-style far-left revolution, Germany convened a Constituent Assembly in Weimar (February to August 1919) that produced a center-left parliamentary republic. Antiliberal rightist forces continued their mobilization.234

A related scenario unfolded in Italy, which, though nominally a Great War victor, had suffered casualties totaling 700,000 of 5 million men drafted to the colors and a budget deficit of 12 billion lira, saw mass strikes, factory occupations, and, in some cases, political takeovers in northern cities. This spurred an embryonic movement on the right called fascism—a closely knit combat league to defend the nation against the socialist threat. In rump Hungary, which was undergoing severe territorial truncation, a Soviet Socialist Republic was declared on March 21, 1919, under the leadership of the Communist Bela Kun [Kohn], who had been in Russia as a POW and met Lenin. Kun and the nucleus of a Hungarian party had been brought together a few months before in a Moscow hotel, but upon return to Hungary he and other leaders had been thrown into prison. Hungary’s Social Democrats, appointed to form a government, decided to merge with the Communists in hopes of obtaining military aid from Russia in order to restore Hungary’s pre-1918 imperial borders. Kun “walked straight from the cells into a ministerial post,” one observer wrote. “He had been badly beaten while incarcerated and his face showed the wounds that he received and fully intended to avenge.”235 Lenin hailed the Hungarian revolution, and, on May Day 1919, the Bolsheviks promised that “before the year is out the whole of Europe will be Soviet.”236 The Budapest government issued a welter of decrees nationalizing or socializing industry, commercial enterprises, housing, transport, banking, and landholdings greater than forty hectares. Churches and priests, manor houses and gentry, came under assault. The Communists also established a Red Guard under Mátyás Rákosi, which the police and gendarmerie joined, and Kun attempted a coup in Vienna (his mercenaries managed to set fire to the Austrian parliament). But when Kun sought formal alliance with Moscow and Red Army troops, Trotsky replied that he could not spare any.237 No matter: Kun had the Red Guard invade Czechoslovakia to reclaim Slovakia, and Romania to reclaim Transylvania. A foreign correspondent noted, “again and again, he [Kun] rallied the masses by a hypodermic injection of mob oratory.”238 But the “revolutionary offensive” failed, and the Communists resigned on August 1, 1919. Kun fled to Vienna. The 133-day Communist republic was over. (“This proletariat needs the most inhumane and cruel dictatorship of the bourgeoisie to become revolutionary,” Kun complained, just before fleeing into exile.) Romanian forces entered Budapest on August 3–4. Rear Admiral Miklós Horthy, in landlocked Hungary (like “Admiral” Kolchak in Siberia), formed an embryonic National Army, whose units instituted a White Terror against leftists and Jews, killing at least 6,000 in cold blood. As the departing Romanians cleaned out everything, from sugar and flour to locomotives and typewriters, Horthy soon styled himself “His Serene Highness the Regent of the Kingdom of Hungary” and formed a right-wing dictatorship.239

WHITE OFFENSIVE OF 1919—FALL AND RISE OF TROTSKY

Russia’s would-be forces of order, the three different armies of the Whites in the east, south, and northwest, fought with one hand, sometimes both, behind their backs. Just like the Bolsheviks (and the okhranka before them), the Whites formed “information departments” to compile reports on the prevailing political mood from secret informants—refugees, actors, railway employees, obstetricians—but they made no effective use of the intelligence.240 They “neither understood nor showed any interest in societal problems,” one White political activist complained. “All of their interests were on military power, and all of their hopes were focused on military victory.”241 Under the slogan “Russia, One and Indivisible,” the Whites refused to acknowledge the aspirations of national minorities in whose territories they operated, precluding an alliance with Ukrainian or other anti-Bolshevik forces.242 Anti-Semitic outrages perpetrated by Denikin’s army, and especially by Ukrainian anti-Bolshevik troops, stamped the White movement.243 Between 1918 and 1920 in Ukraine alone, more than 1,500 pogroms resulted in the deaths of up to 125,000 Jews, who “were killed on the roads, in the fields, on trains; sometimes whole families perished, and there was no one left to report on their fate.”244 The Whites acted self-righteously toward their British and French patrons, and never moderated their hostility to Germany.245 Additionally, the Whites were arrayed outside the heartland in a 5,000-mile interrupted loop—from the Urals and Siberia, westward across the southern steppes, up to Petrograd’s outskirts—which presented immense logistical and communications challenges. The two main fronts, Denikin’s south and Kolchak’s east, never linked up.246 Denikin and Kolchak never met.

And yet, despite their lack of unity, alliances, or popular support, the Whites mounted an offensive in 1919 that threatened the Bolshevik grip on the Muscovite heartland.247 The offensive occurred in three separate advances: Kolchak’s from the east toward Moscow in spring 1919; Denikin’s from the south, also toward Moscow, in spring-summer 1919; and Yudenich’s from the north, toward Petrograd, in fall 1919. Each effort commenced only after the preceding one had fallen short.

Kolchak commanded around 100,000 men and even though the admiral lacked familiarity with land operations, his forces managed to advance westward, surprising the Reds by seizing Ufa in March 1919, splitting the Bolsheviks’ eastern lines, and threatening Kazan and Samara in the Middle Volga. (This is why Trotsky had received permission to skip the 8th Party Congress and return to the front.) Kolchak’s advance was halted by May 1919, however, thanks to Mikhail Frunze, a thirty-four-year-old millworker turned commander, who reestablished discipline and led a counterattack.248 But right then, Denikin, whose Volunteer Army—now renamed the Armed Forces of South Russia—had increased to 150,000 with the Cossacks as well as conscripted peasants in Ukraine, and whose supplies came from the Entente, made his move.249 A staff officer, Denikin had never commanded a large army in the field, but he proved a formidable soldier. On June 12, 1919, his forces captured Kharkov, in Ukraine. On June 30, they captured Tsaritsyn. (“The hordes surrounded it,” howled Pravda [July 1, 1919]. “The English and French tanks captured the worker fortress. . . . Tsaritsyn fell. Long live Tsaritsyn.”)250 All told, in 1919, Denikin would annihilate Red armies numbering close to 200,000 poorly led and equipped and in many cases starving troops. After Denikin triumphantly entered Tsaritsyn and attended services in its Orthodox cathedral, on July 3, he “ordered our armed forces to advance on Moscow.”251 Trotsky, as always, blamed Red partisan-warfare tactics for the establishment of an anti-Bolshevik front from the Volga to the Ukrainian steppes. And he had a point. Although he had issued a decree forbidding Voroshilov from commanding an army again, in June 1919 Voroshilov had received command of the Fourteenth Army in Ukraine—and promptly surrendered Kharkov to Denikin’s forces. This prompted Voroshilov’s remand to revolutionary tribunal, which would conclude that he was unfit for a high command. (“We all know Klim,” Moisei Rukhimovich, the military commissar in Ukraine and a Voroshilov friend, noted, “he’s a brave guy, but come on with commanding an army. A company, at most.”)252 As for captured Tsaritsyn, it had been Voroshilov’s recent previous command. But the twin setbacks against the Whites only emboldened Voroshilov’s clique—that is, Trotsky’s Bolshevik enemies.

Trotsky was rarely seen at the war commissariat, which was managed by Yefraim Sklyansky, a graduate of the Kiev medical faculty and a chain-smoker, still in his twenties, who proved an able administrator, and remained in constant contact with the front via the Hughes apparatus.253 (“One could call at 2 or 3 in the morning, and find him at his desk,” Trotsky would write.)254 Trotsky lived on his armor-plated train, which had been thrown together in August 1918 when he raced to Sviyazhsk.255 It required two engines and was stocked with weapons, uniforms, felt boots, and rewards for valiant soldiers: watches, binoculars, telescopes, Finnish knives, pens, waterproof cloaks, cigarette cases. The train acquired a printing press (whose equipment occupied two carriages), telegraph station, radio station, electric power station, library, team of agitators, garage with trucks, cars, and petrol tank, track repair unit, bathhouse, and secretariat. It also had a twelve-person bodyguard detail, which chased down food (game, butter, asparagus). Trotsky’s living quarters, a long and comfortable carriage, had previously belonged to the imperial railroad minister. Conferences were held in the dining car.256 The men were clad in black leather, head to toe. Trotsky, then with jet black hair to go with his blue eyes, wore a collarless military-style tunic (now known as a vozhdevka). While on board, he would issue more than 12,000 orders and write countless articles, many for the train’s newspaper (En Route).257 Stalin, too, spent virtually the entire civil war in motion, and he too had a train, but without cooks, stenographers, or a printing press. Trotsky’s train would log 65,000 miles, mobilizing, imposing discipline, boosting morale.258 It also evolved into an independent military unit (taking part in combat thirteen times), and took on mythic status. “News of the arrival of the train,” Trotsky would recall, “would reach the enemy lines as well.”259 Trotsky’s arrival, however, also meant a cascade of orders often issued without even informing, let alone consulting, the local Red commanders.260 Voroshilov was far from the only person with whom Trotsky clashed.261

Matters came to a head at a rancorous Central Committee plenum on July 3, 1919, the same day Denikin issued his order to advance on Moscow.262 Stalin had been clamoring for the dismissal of Jukums Vacietis, the Red supreme commander who had become close to Trotsky. On the Petrograd front in late May-early June 1919, Stalin unmasked a “conspiracy” of military specialists, a claim that helped set the July plenum in motion.263 Vacietis, for his part, was angered by the incessant accusations that former tsarist officers like himself were saboteurs, but he also clashed with another former tsarist colonel, Sergei Kamenev (no relation to Lev), who had his own ambitions. Kamenev, as the Red commander of the eastern front, had wanted to pursue a retreating Kolchak into Siberia, while his superior Vacietis, supported by Trotsky, feared being lured into a trap. Trotsky had Kamenev removed as eastern front commander, but after his replacement, a former tsarist general, changed the direction of the main attack five times over ten days, Trotsky agreed to reinstate Kamenev.264 (On the larger strategy issue, Trotsky would later admit that Kamenev had been correct.) Now, it was Vacietis who was sacked. Trotsky evidently suggested as his replacement Mikhail Bonch-Bruevich, but he lost the vote. Sergei Kamenev became the new commander in chief.265 Unlike the Latvian Vacietis, Kamenev was an ethnic Russian and eight years younger. Lenin also unilaterally overhauled the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic, sharply reducing its membership, from around fifteen to six, relocating its headquarters to Moscow from Serpukhov (sixty miles south of the capital), so that he could assert greater control; and expelling its ardent Trotsky supporters. Stalin, too, was taken off. Trotsky was to remain as chairman, and Sklyansky as deputy chairman; the additions were Sergei Kamenev; Yakov Drabkin, known as Sergei Gusev, a Kamenev man and, initially, a Stalin nemesis; Ivar Smilga (another Latvian); and Alexei Rykov, Lenin’s deputy.266 Having lost the fight over the commander in chief, and having had the body under his chairmanship purged without his consultation, Trotsky submitted his resignation from all military and party posts. On July 5, the Central Committee refused to accept it.267

Sergei Kamenev’s promotion took effect on July 8, 1919.268 The next day, Trotsky, by then back at the front (in Voronezh), was notified that Vacietis had been arrested—nearly one year to the day after the Latvian saved the Bolshevik regime from the Left SRs. Whereas Stalin’s surrogate, Voroshilov, had been disciplined for cause (surrendering Kharkov), Vacietis, Trotsky’s surrogate, had been arrested for murky accusations of White Guard associations. Vacietis was soon released—someone at the top thwarted Stalin’s machination—but the shot across Trotsky’s bow had been delivered.269 It was an extraordinary added humiliation.270

Trotsky liked to portray himself as above it all, as if politics in the Bolshevik regime did not involve constant backbiting and smearing. A top Cheka official, Wiaczesław Mezynski, had confidentially informed Trotsky on a visit to his armored train that Stalin was “insinuating to Lenin and to some others that you are grouping men about you who are especially hostile to Lenin.” Instead of recruiting the powerful, sympathetic Chekist on the spot—as Stalin would have done—Trotsky claims he rebuked Mezynski.271 Be that as it may, Stalin was hardly the sole intriguer badmouthing Trotsky by pointing out that former tsarist officers were deserting the Red Army and taking their troops along. Denunciations of the war commissar flowed to Moscow, incited by his personal haughtiness and strident defense of old-regime officers’ supremacy in military decision making, which seemed to betray the absence of a class outlook.272 Trotsky even managed to anger the very tsarist officers he was accused of championing in his disdain for their proceduralism and narrow intellectual horizons, compared with his.273 Summer 1919’s battlefield crisis had enabled Trotsky’s opponents to claw back from their defeat only four months before at the 8th Party Congress, thanks to Lenin; belatedly, he got the Central Committee, if not to subordinate the military to the party, at least to affirm the party-military dual command as a special achievement of the revolution.274 But if Lenin sensed that his war commissar had gotten too big for his britches, the Bolshevik leader continued to give every indication that Trotsky remained indispensable. Trying to win over a skeptical Maxim Gorky in 1919, for example, Lenin said, “Show me another man able to organize almost a model army within a single year and win the respect of the military specialists. We have such a man.”275 Had Lenin allowed Stalin and his band a complete victory over Trotsky in July 1919, the outcome of the other battle—the civil war against the Whites—might have turned out differently.276

Trotsky rushed to the faltering southern front against Denikin as Sergei Kamenev, a graduate of the imperial General Staff Academy, devised a plan of counterattack down the Don toward Tsaritsyn, to outflank and cut Denikin off from his main base. Vacietis, supported by Trotsky, had argued for a drive down through the Donetsk coal basin, more hospitable territory (full of workers as well as railroads), rather than through the Cossack lands, where a Red offensive would rally the population against Bolshevism. The politburo, including Stalin, had supported Sergei Kamenev’s plan. The upshot was that Denikin seized Kiev and captured nearly all of Ukraine, even as he was advancing against the Red Army’s weakened center on Moscow. On October 13, Denikin’s forces seized Oryol, just 240 miles from the capital (about as far as from the German border to Paris, giving a sense of the distances involved in Russia). On October 15, the politburo reversed itself, belatedly endorsing the original battle plan of Vacietis and Trotsky; Stalin, too, now agreed that Trotsky had been right.277 With the engagement north of Oryol in full force, Trotsky rallied the Red side, which was twice as numerous, and began to take advantage of White overextension and other vulnerabilities. Right then, Yudenich’s forces, 17,000 troops along with six British-supplied tanks, advanced from Estonia on Petrograd, capturing Gatchina (October 16–17) and then Tsarskoe Selo, on the outskirts of Petrograd. The city, frozen and famished, had seen its population dive from 2.3 million to 1.5 million as workers fled idle factories for villages.278 The famed working-class Vyborg district, the “Bolshevik Commune” of 1917, had withered from 69,000 to 5,000 people.279 “Squads of half-ragged soldiers, their rifles hanging from their shoulders by a rope, tramped under the red pennants of their units,” one eyewitness said of Petrograd in 1919. “It was the metropolis of Cold, of Hunger, of Hatred, and of Endurance.”280 Lenin proposed the former capital be abandoned so that Red forces could be swung to Moscow’s defense; he was supported by Petrograd’s party boss, Zinoviev. Trotsky, along with Stalin, insisted that “the cradle of the revolution” be defended to the last drop of blood, with hand-to-hand combat in the streets, if necessary.281

Crucially, Admiral Kolchak, the White “supreme ruler,” refused to recognize Finnish independence, and so the Finnish leader Karl Mannerheim refused to provide troops or a Finnish base of operations for Yudenich’s assault on Petrograd, while the Entente withheld support as well.282 Trotsky rushed to the northwest, followed by reinforcements—Yudenich’s forces had failed to secure the rail line—and halted the Whites’ offensive. “Trotsky’s presence on the spot at once showed itself: proper discipline was restored and the military and administrative agencies rose to the task,” explained Mikhail Lashevich (b. 1884), a leading political commissar. “Trotsky’s orders, clear and precise, sparing nobody, and exacting from everybody the utmost exertion and accurate, rapid execution of combat orders, at once showed that there was a firm directing hand. . . . Trotsky penetrated into every detail, applying to every item of business his seething, restless energy and his amazing perseverance.”283 Yudenich went down to defeat, his troops driven back into Estonia, disarmed, and interned. He himself emigrated to the French Riviera.284 Denikin, despite having 99,000 combat troops, could muster just 20,000 to spearhead the assault on Moscow, and with his entire front distended—700 miles, from their base in the Kuban—great gaps had opened when his men advanced.285 Near Oryol, Denikin’s overextended, all-out gamble for Moscow went down to defeat as well.286 By November 7, 1919, the revolution’s second anniversary, Trotsky, having just turned forty, was suddenly, resplendently triumphant. His colleagues fêted both his armored train and his personage with the Order of the Red Banner, Soviet Russia’s highest state award. Lev Kamenev, according to Trotsky, proposed that Stalin receive the same distinction. “For what?” Mikhail Kalinin objected, according to Trotsky. Following the meeting, Bukharin took Kalinin aside and said, “Can’t you understand? This is Lenin’s idea. Stalin can’t live unless he has what someone else has.” Stalin did not attend the ceremony at the Bolshoi, and at the announcement of his Red Banner award almost no one clapped. Trotsky received an ovation.287

WHITE FAILURES

Petrograd and Moscow were held. Kolchak was taken prisoner in Irkutsk (Eastern Siberia) and, without trial, executed by firing squad at 4:00 a.m. on February 7, 1920, his body kicked down a hole cut in the frozen Ushakovka River, a tributary of the Angara—a watery river grave for the admiral.288 The “supreme ruler” would be the only top White leader captured. With Kolchak disappeared imperial Russia’s gold. Tsarist Russia had possessed some 800 tons of gold on the eve of the Great War, one of the largest reserves in the world, which had been evacuated from the State Bank vaults beginning in 1915 to Kazan and other locations for safekeeping, but the bulk of it was seized by the Czechoslovak Legion in 1918. (Trotsky summarily shot the Red commander and commissar who had surrendered Kazan and the imperial gold.) Eventually, the cache had made its way into Kolchak’s custody—480 tons of ingots as well as coins from fourteen states, more than 650 million rubles’ worth, shipped in thirty-six freight cars to Omsk, Siberia. Rumors had it sunk in Lake Baikal or seized by the Japanese government.289 In fact, Kolchak had chaotically doled out nearly 200 million rubles’ worth on his campaigns; most of the rest was spirited out via Vladivostok to the Shanghai Bank, and would be consumed in the emigration.290 Denikin had made no move to try to rescue Kolchak. His own armies, following their trouncing north of Oryol, undertook an uninterrupted retreat southward, and by March 1920, they had straggled onto the Crimean peninsula, salvaging a rump of perhaps 30,000 troops. Denikin, compelled to relinquish command to Lieutenant General Baron Pyotr Wrangel, fled to Paris. The baron, from a family with German roots, until relatively recently had commanded only a cavalry division. Tall and lanky, he theatrically wore a cherkeska, the North Caucasus long black caftan with bullet cartridges across the outside. Despite the change in leadership and the (temporary) Crimean refuge, the Whites were spent.

On this last foothold of the White movement, Stalin reported to Trotsky that a directive would be issued for a “total extermination of the Wrangelite officer corps.” The order was issued and carried out. An Order of the Red Banner was awarded to a Red commander for “having cleansed the Crimean peninsula of White officers and counterintelligence agents who had been left behind, removing up to 30 governors, 50 generals, more than 300 colonels and as many counterintelligence agents, for a total of up to 12,000 of the White element.”291 Overall, no reliable casualty counts exist for the Red-White skirmishes. Red deaths from combat have been estimated to have been as high as 701,000; White deaths, anywhere from 130,000 to many times that.292 The absence of reliable figures is itself indicative of the nature of the antagonists, not just the low value they placed on human life but also the severe limits of each side’s governing capacities.

The Red military victory cannot be attributed to impressive strategy; mistakes were plentiful.293 Nor did intelligence win the war.294 Nor did victory derive from homefront production. To revive military industry and supply, the Bolsheviks formed innumerable “central” commissions, which underwent perpetual reorganization, often deepening the ruin.295 They had mocked tsarist supply problems, but the tsarist state had equipped a force ten times larger than the Red Army in the field—and the tsarist state supplied the Red Army, too. Anywhere from 20 to 60 percent of the old regime’s accumulated 11 million rifles, 76,000 machine guns, and 17,000 field guns survived the Great War, an invaluable inheritance, almost all of which came into Red hands.296 In 1919, Soviet Russia manufactured just 460,000 rifles (compared with 1.3 million by tsarist Russia in 1916), 152 field guns (versus 8,200 in 1916), and 185,000 shells (versus 33 million in 1916).297 As of 1919, the Red Army possessed perhaps 600,000 functioning rifles, 8,000 machine guns, and 1,700 field guns. The Tula plant (founded by Peter the Great) was producing around 20 million rounds of ammunition monthly, while Red forces were firing 70 to 90 million.298 A keen Polish oberserver of Soviet affairs, Józef Piłsudski (whom we shall meet in the next chapter) correctly told the British ambassador, before the major Red-White clashes of 1919, that the armies of both sides were of similarly low quality, but that the Reds would nonetheless push the Whites back toward the Black Sea.299

Crucially, the Bolsheviks needed only to hold on; the Whites needed to dislodge them.300 Railroad junctions, depots, barracks, and the central administrative core of the old tsarist army were located in the Red-held capitals and heartland.301 In addition, the Whites fielded fewer than 300,000 soldiers (160,000 in the south, not quite 20,000 in the north, and perhaps 100,000 in the east), while Red combatants at peak reached 800,000. True, perhaps up to half of Soviet Russia’s registered population for mobilization—5.5 million, including 400,000 in so-called labor armies—failed to report or deserted between 1918 and 1920, but conscripts defected not to the other side but from the war (particularly at harvest time).302 Moreover, the Red Army could replenish because, occupying the heartland, it drew upon some 60 million people, a majority of them ethnic Russian, a greater population at the time than any state in Europe. The Whites, mostly in the imperial borderlands, had perhaps 10 million people underfoot, including many non-Russians.303 As for the British, French, and U.S. interventions, they did not send enough soldiers to overturn Bolshevism, but the fact that they did send troops proved a propaganda boon for Bolshevism.304

The Red rear also held. Many people anticipated strong efforts to subvert the regime, especially the regime itself. In summer 1919, through informants and perlustration, the Cheka had belatedly hit upon an underground network known as the National Center, comprising former politicians as well as tsarist officers in Moscow and St. Petersburg who were plotting on behalf of Denikin.305 Lenin, when informed of the National Center’s discovery, instructed Dzierzynski “to capture [suspects] rapidly and energetically and widely.”306 On September 23, 1919, the Cheka announced the executions of 67 spies and saboteurs.307 Two days later, two bombs crashed through the ballroom window of the Moscow party HQ, a two-story mansion on Leontyev Lane, the former Countess Uvarova mansion, which the Bolsheviks had seized in 1918 from the Left SRs after the latter’s failed pseudo-coup; some 120 Communist party activists and agitators from around the city’s wards were gathered for a lecture about the unmasking of the National Center. By some accounts Lenin was due to show (he did not). Twelve people (including the Moscow party secretary Vladimir Zagorsky) were killed and 55 wounded (including Bukharin). The Cheka immediately suspected White Guard revenge, and on September 27 announced executions in connection with a “White Guard conspiracy.” The Cheka soon discovered the bomb culprit was an anarchist (assisted by a Left SR familiar with the building). A vast sweep took place to root out anarchist hiding places throughout the capital, accompanied by exhortations to the working class to maintain vigilance.308 The mass internal subversion never materialized.

Red leadership, too, made a contribution, albeit in a complicated way. Lenin never once visited the front. He followed the civil war with maps, the telegraph, and the telephone from the Imperial Senate.309 He refrained from assuming the title of supreme commander and generally kept out of operational planning, yet he managed to commit or support several of the biggest mistakes. No one attributed the victory to him. But Lenin’s crucial leadership in the struggle against the Whites was felt at three significant moments: his support for Trotsky’s recruitment of former tsarist officers, including those of high rank, beginning in early 1918; his refusal to allow Trotsky to destroy Stalin definitively in October 1918; and, above all, his refusal to allow Stalin to rout Trotsky definitively in July 1919.310 As for Trotsky, his contribution, too, was equivocal. He committed mistakes when he intervened in operational questions, and his meddling angered many commissars and commanders alike, but he also organized, disciplined, and inspired the fighting masses.311 Trotsky excelled at agitation, and in the agitation he loomed large, which, however, became a source of resentment among insiders, but provided tremendous strength to the regime.312 Stalin’s role remains a tangle. Despite the Tsaritsyn shambles, Lenin still sent him on critical troubleshooting assignments (the Urals, Petrograd, Minsk, Smolensk, the south). Genuine shortcomings and bottlenecks were rampant, but in Stalin’s reports it became impossible to sort fact from exaggeration or invention. Each time he unmasked anti-Soviet “conspiracies”; each time he disobeyed direct orders from Moscow; each time he criticized everyone save himself, while nursing grievances as if he were the victim of miscomprehension and slander. That said, Trotsky would recall asking another Central Committee member in the Revolutionary Military Council of the Southern Front if they could manage without Stalin. “No,” came the reply, “I cannot exert pressure like Stalin.”313 “The ability ‘to exert pressure,’” Trotsky would conclude, “was what Lenin prized so highly in Stalin”—a backhanded, yet accurate compliment.314

When all is said and done, however, White political failings were epic.315 The Whites never rose above the level of anarchic warlordism, worse even than General Ludendorff’s occupation.316 “Politicians,” in the White mental universe, signified the likes of Kerensky: bumblers, betrayers.317 Kolchak formed a “military dictatorship” that reaffirmed tsarist state debts and tsarist laws, condemned “separatism,” and ordered factories returned to their owners and farm lands to the gentry.318 But there was no government, military or otherwise, as cliques of officers and politicians engaged in political murders and self-dealing.319 “In the army, disorganization,” wrote one observer of Kolchak’s abysmal 1919 offensive, “at the Supreme Headquarters illiteracy and hare-brained schemes; in the Government moral decay, discord, and the dominance of the ambitious and egotistical; . . . in society panic, selfishness, graft and all kinds of loathesomeness.”320 Yudenich only belatedly formed any government at all in the northwest under intense British pressure, and produced an ideological Frankenstein of monarchists and socialists (Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, who distrusted each other, let alone the monarchists). Denikin’s political vision consisted of “temporary” military rule aiming to stand above politics; 1917 had convinced him that in Russia democracy equaled anarchy (the Constituent Assembly, he said, had arisen “in the days of popular insanity”).321 The British mission—Denikin’s patron—told him in February 1920 that it would have been a “complete shipwreck if you had reached Moscow, because you would have left behind you an occupied area which would not have been consolidated.”322 Only Wrangel, when it had become too late, appointed genuine civilian ministers, supported local self-government, formally recognized the separatist governments on former imperial Russian territory, and acknowledged peasant ownership of the land—but his land decree (May 25, 1920) required that tillers pay his government for land they already controlled.323

A debilitating absence of government machinery was compounded by White failure in the realm of ideas. Red propaganda effectively stamped the Whites as military adventurists, lackeys of foreign powers, restorationists. The Whites mounted their own propaganda, military parades, and troop reviews blessed by Orthodox priests. Their red, white, and blue flags, the national colors of pre-1917 Russia, often had images of Orthodox saints; others had skulls and crossbones. The Whites copied the Bolshevik practice of the agitation trains. But their slogans—“Let us be one Russian people”—did not persuade.324 Elsewhere, when leftist revolutions or minirevolutions had erupted—Roman Catholic Bavaria, Hungary, and Italy—these places shifted rightward, galvanized partly by the specter of Bolshevism. Indeed, across Europe, the forces of order, including Social Democrats opposed to Communism, were ascendant. Clearly, the keys to political outcomes were not wartime ruin, the downfall of a monarchy, military mutinies, strikes, the formation of local soviets, or direct-action efforts by the left to seize power, but the strength, or weakness, of organized rightist movements and reliable peasant armies. The outnumbered Whites, despite thoroughly alienating the peasants, had counted on popular uprisings to join them.325 But unlike in Italy, Germany, and Hungary, the Whites failed even to try to reinvent an antileftist movement on the basis of right-wing populism, and not even a Horthy, emerged among them. “Psychologically, the Whites conducted themselves as if nothing had happened, whereas the whole world around them had collapsed,” observed Pyotr Struve. “Nothing so harmed the ‘White’ movement as this very condition of psychologically staying put in previous circumstances, circumstances that had ceased to exist . . . in a revolution, only revolutionaries can find their way.”326

FUNCTIONARIES SHALL INHERIT THE EARTH

Lenin, in notes for a speech he would not be able to deliver, embraced the civil war: “The Civil War has taught and tempered us (Denikin and others were good teachers; they taught seriously; all our best functionaries [rabotniki] were in the army).”327 Lenin was right. Authoritarianism, moreover, was not a by-product. The sad fate of the factory committees, grassroots soviets, peasant committees, trade unions and other structures of mass revolution can hardly be considered mysterious. Bolshevik types worked strenuously to take over or crush grassroots organizations, in an energetic Gleichschaltung (as one historian of early Bolshevik state building aptly dubbed the process, analogizing to the later Nazi regime).328 Even many delegates elected to the soviets came to see the elected grassroots bodies as hindrances to administration.329 But the targeting of grassroots and often independent forms of political expression was rooted in core beliefs. Lenin’s regime set as its raison d’être not maximizing freedom but maximizing production. “The dictatorship of the proletariat,” as Trotsky thundered, “is expressed in the abolition of private property in the means of production”—not in workers control over industry or other participatory forms of decision making.330 The very meaning of controle, a French word adapted into Russian, shifted from spontaneous workers’ control over factory operations to bureaucratic control over factories and worker.331 The driving idea was transcendence of capitalism and construction of socialism; the nonpareil instrument was centralized state power.

The administrative machine was created from chaos, and in turn fomented chaos. The striving for hierarchy, to a great extent, stemmed from a desire for regularization, predictability. The regime was having a trying time not just governing but managing itself. At the finance commissariat more than 287 million rubles disappeared in a single robbery in October 1920, a heist accomplished with the aid of insider employees.332 A regime created by confiscation had begun to confiscate itself, and never stopped. The authors of Red Moscow, an urban handbook published at the conclusion of the civil war, observed that “each revolution has its one unsightly, although transient, trait: the appearance on the stage of all kinds of rogues, deceivers, adventurists, and simple criminals, attaching themselves to power with one kind of criminal goal or another. Their danger to the revolution is colossal.”333 The line between idealism and opportunism, however, was often very fine. The revolution was a social earthquake, a cracking open of the earth that allowed all manner of new people to rise up and assume positions that otherwise they would have waited decades to fill, or never been able to fill at all, and the revolutionary mission overlapped their sense of their own destiny.

The reconstitution of functioning state power turned out to be the primary task after the Bolshevik coup, and what saved the Bolsheviks from oblivion, but the upkeep of the beneficiaries consumed a substantial part of the state budget, independent of their self-dealing. Around 5,000 Bolsheviks and family members had taken up residence in the Kremlin and the best hotels in the heart of Moscow. Collectively, they acquired a sizable service staff and swallowed considerable resources during the civil war. Their apartments, not just Lenin’s, were heated by furnaces even though fuel was hard to come by. Inside the Kremlin they enjoyed access to a children’s nursery, club, ambulatory, and bathhouse as well as “closed” distribution centers for food and clothing. (Trotsky claimed that he found Caucasus wines in the Council of People’s Commissars “cooperative” in 1919 and tried to have them removed, since the sale of alcohol was technically banned, telling Lenin, in Stalin’s presence, but Stalin supposedly retorted that the Caucasus comrades could not make do without wine.)334 Compared with the tsarist royal court and high nobility, Bolshevik elite perquisites were hardly extravagant—an apartment, a dacha, a motor car, food packets—but amid the rubble and penury, such advantages were significant and conspicuous.335 Privileges for functionaries became a sore point well beyond the central regime. “We have cut ourselves off from the masses and made it difficult to attract them,” a Tula Bolshevik wrote to Lenin in July 1919. “The old comradely spirit of the party has died completely. It has been replaced by a new one-man rule in which the party boss runs everything. Bribe-taking has become universal: without it our Communist cadres would simply not survive.”336

There was abundant idealism in the apparatus, too, but the epidemic of “bureaucratism” shocked revolutionaries. Suddenly, “bureaucrats” were everywhere: boorish, spiteful, prevaricating, embezzling, obsessed with crushing rivals and self-aggrandizing.337 But one of the many revolutionary paradoxes was that although all “social forces” were understood in class terms—whether alien (bourgeoisie, kulaks, petit bourgeois) or friendly (workers and sometimes peasants)—the one class that could not be so called was the one in power.

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SYMBOLICALLY, A RED-WHITE BINARY—Bolsheviks against everyone else, including those who made the February Revolution and the non-Bolshevik socialists—defined the new regime. This was dramatically captured on the revolution’s third anniversary (November 7, 1920) in a reenactment of the “storming of the Winter Palace” staged in Petrograd, which involved far more people than the original event—around 6,000 to 8,000 participants and 100,000 spectators. In the show, on the immense square in front of the baroque edifice, one of the world’s grandest public spaces, two large stages (red and white) were set, and connected by an arching bridge. At 10:00 p.m., trumpets announced the beginning of the action and an orchestra of perhaps 500 played a symphonic composition titled “Robespierre,” which segued into “La Marseillaise.” Floodlights shone on the right platform, revealing the Provisional Government, Kerensky on a throne (!), and various ministers, White generals, and fat-cat capitalists. Gesticulating, Kerensky gives a windy speech and receives large sacks of money. Suddenly searchlights illuminate the left platform, showing the masses, exhausted from factory work, many maimed from the war, in a chaotic state, but to cries of “Lenin” and strains of the “Internationale,” they cluster around a Red flag and form into disciplined Red Guard units. On the connecting bridge, an armed struggle commences, during which the Reds gain the upper hand. Kerensky flees in a car toward the Winter Palace, bastion of the old regime, but is pursued by Red Guards—and the audience. He escapes, dressed as a woman, but the masses “storm” the Palace. Some 150 powerful projector lights illuminate the Winter Palace, through whose colossal windows can be seen pantomime battles, until the lights in every window glow red.338 Those who questioned any aspects of that glow might find themselves, like Kerensky and the moderate socialists, in the White camp, which proved to be ever expandable.

Institutionally, the Bolshevik monopoly regime not only formed a state, but with the mass assimilation of former tsarist officers, became a party-state. “The institution of commissars” in the Red Army, Trotsky had explained of the political watchdogs, was “to serve as a scaffolding. . . . Little by little we shall be able to remove this scaffolding.”339 That dismantling never happened, however, no matter how often commissars themselves called for their own removal.340 On the contrary, soon Vyacheslav Molotov, a central apparatchik, bragged in a pamphlet about how the task of governing had rendered the Soviet Communist party distinct from others. Among other innovations, he singled out the implantation of political commissars alongside technical experts—and not solely in the Red Army, but throughout the economic and administrative apparatus as well.341 Nothing like the party-state had existed in tsarist Russia. The Red expert dualism would endure even after the overwhelming majority of state officials, army officers, or schoolteachers were party members, becoming an added sourge of bureaucratic proliferation and waste.

Traditionally, Russia’s civil war, even more than the October coup, has been seen as Trotsky’s time. He was ubiquitous in the public imagination, and his train encapsulated the Red Army and its victory. But the facts do not bear out the long-held notion that Trotsky emerged significantly stronger than Stalin.342 Both Stalin and Trotsky were radicals to the core, but on the issue of former tsarist officers Stalin pushed a “proletarian” line, infuriating Trotsky (Trotsky’s rage was Stalin’s inspiration). To be sure, Stalin did not reject all military specialists, just “class aliens,” which for him included those of noble descent and those who had attained a high rank before 1917, while Trotsky, in turn, also advocated for the training of former non-commissioned officers as well as pure neophytes from the bench.343 In that connection, Trotsky claimed that in 1918 former tsarist officers composed three quarters of the Red commanding and administrative staffs, by civil war’s end they composed, according to him, only one third.344 Whatever the precise totals, however, the engagement of former tsarist officers, and of “bourgeois” specialists in other realms, helped focus the widely gathering negativity about Trotsky, who became a lightning rod, widely disliked inside the regime that he helped bring to victory, much earlier than usually recognized, right in the middle of his civil war exploits. At the same time, Stalin’s role in the civil war—knocking heads—was substantial, as even Trotsky acknowledged.345 And the Tsaritsyn episode of 1918, in what had been a desperate situation for the Reds and for Stalin personally, provided a preview of Stalin’s recourse to publicizing conspiracies by “enemies” and enacting summary executions in order to enforce discipline and rally political support.

Trotsky was Jewish but, like almost all intellectuals and revolutionaries in the Russian empire, wholly assimilated into Russian culture, and to boot, he had striking blue eyes and an unprominent nose, yet he claimed to feel his Jewishness as a political limitation. Peasants certainly knew he was a Jew.346 America’s Red Cross chief in Russia called Trotsky “the greatest Jew since Christ.” White-Guard periodicals roiled with evocations of “Kike-Bolshevik commissars” and the “Kike Red Army” led by Trotsky.347 In 1919, Trotsky received a letter from an ethnic Korean member of the Russian Communist party concerning rumors that “the motherland has been conquered by Yid commissars. All the country’s disasters are being blamed on the Jews. They’re saying the Communist regime is supported by Jewish brains, Latvian rifles, and Russian idiots.”348 The London Times asserted (March 5, 1919) that three quarters (!) of the leading positions in Soviet Russia were held by Jews. Many Soviet Communists themselves could be overheard to say Shmolny for Smolny (Jewish “sh”) or prezhidium (Jew-sidium) for presidium.349 Trotsky kept a copy of a 1921 German book of drawings of all the Jewish Bolsheviks, with a preface to the text by Alfred Rosenberg, in his files.350 Peasants, too, knew he was a Jew.351 Retrospectively, he would cite the perception of him as a Jew to explain why he had declined Lenin’s proposal in 1917 to become commissar for the interior (i.e., regime policeman).352 All the same, he had accepted other high-profile appointments, and the degree to which his Jewishness constituted a genuine handicap remains unclear. At the top, only the Georgian Jughashvili-Stalin was not partly Jewish. The Jewishness of Lenin’s maternal grandmother was then unknown, but other leaders were well known to be Jews and it did not inhibit them: Zinoviev had been born Ovsei-Gershon Radomylsky and used his mother’s surname Apfelbaum; Kamenev, born Lev Rozenfeld, had a Jewish father; both had Jewish wives.353 Trotsky-Bronstein managed to be a lightning rod not just in his Jewishness but in all ways.

Stalin, unlike Trotsky, had not made so bold as to challenge Lenin publicly in high-profile debates, such as Brest-Litovsk, as if he were Lenin’s equal, provoking Lenin’s ire. True, Stalin often engaged in disruptive political mischief.354 But Lenin could not have been put off by Stalin’s use of indiscriminate terror designed to deter enemies and rally the worker base because Lenin was the principle promoter of shoot first, ask questions later as a way to impart political lessons. (Lenin backed Trotsky’s severe measures of shooting deserters, even if they were party members.) Lenin also was not naïve: he saw through Stalin’s self-centered, intrigue-prone personality, but Lenin valued Stalin’s combination of unwavering revolutionary convictions and get-things-done style, a fitting skill set for all-out revolutionary class warfare. Stalin’s role for Lenin was visible in the regime’s internal groupings. “All Bolsheviks who occupied high posts,” recalled Arkady Borman, a deputy trade commissar, “could be divided into two categories: Lenin’s personal protégés and the rest. The former felt firm and secure in the intraagency clashes and always held the upper hand.”355 Stalin was both the highest ranking member of Lenin’s grouping and the belated builder of his own faction, which overlapped Lenin’s. A parallel Trotsky faction did not overlap Lenin’s and instead became a target of the Bolshevik leader. (The ambitious Zinoviev had his own grouping, in Petrograd.) Appealing to Lenin, Stalin managed during the civil war to escape subordination to Trotsky despite the latter’s position as chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council. Going forward, as we shall see, the tables would be turned, and Trotsky would find himself appealing to Lenin to try to escape subordination to Stalin in the party. Stalin’s aggrandizement was already well advanced, yet only really beginning.