Stalin, Volume 1

19. Quoted in Stites, Revolutionary Dreams, 39. In a book Isaac Steinberg completed in Bolshevik prison in 1919, he called the revolution “a great tragedy in which both the hero and the victim often appear to be the people.” Ot fevralia po oktiabr’ 1917 g., 128–9.

20. McAuley, Bread and Justice, 3–6, 427–8.

21. One writer, in his diary, observed that “even the best and cleverest people, scholars included, are beginning to behave as if there were a mad dog in the courtyard outside.” Prishvin, Dnevniki, II: 169 (September 1918).

22. Holquist, “‘Information Is the Alpha and Omega”; Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines, 5–8, 104–5, 149–55. See also the document collection of Voronovich, Zelenaia kniga. Specialists in the Soviet state knew about requisition practices during the Great War among both Entente and Central Powers. Viz. Vishnevskii, Printsipy, 65.

23. Novaia zhizn’, November 2, 1917, reprinted in Lelevich, Oktiabr’ v stavke, 147–8.

24. Lenin, in the Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government (presented April 7 and published three weeks later), proposed “utilization of bourgeois specialists” in every field. PSS, XXXVI: 178. In 1920, Trotsky sought to introduce “political departments” in place of party cells on the railways to make the trains run, but his proposal failed. Soon enough, however, party cells came to resemble the appointed political departments.

25. Otchet VChK za chetyre gody ee deiatel’nosti, 82, 274.

26. Iu. M. Shashkov, “Model’ chislennosti levykh eserov v tsentral’nom apparate VChk v 1918 g.,” Aktual’nye problem politicheskoi istorii Rossii: tezisy dokladovi soobshchenii (Briansk, 1992), II: 70.

27. Iz istorii VChK, 174.

28. He also made note of how the Cheka “disposed of a reserve of vodka, which enabled it, as occasion arose, to loosen tongues.” Agabekov, OGPU, 3, 6–7, 10.

29. On July 25, 1918, the chairman (Vetoshkin) of the “extraordinary revolutionary headquarters” in Vologda complained to Lenin that “comrades come through often with written mandates from the Extraordinary Commission [Cheka] giving them unusually broad powers that disorganize the work of the local Cheka and evince a tendency to make the Cheka the lead political organ standing above the executive committee.” They engaged in activities said to compromise Soviet power, such as financial machinations and arresting anyone who got in their way. He concluded: “God save us from such archrevolutionary friends and we will handle our enemies ourselves.” RGASPI, f. 17, op. 109, d. 13, l. 24–5.

30. “The only temperaments that devote themselves willingly and tenaciously to this task of ‘internal defense’ were those characterized by suspicion, embitterment, harshness and sadism,” wrote Victor Khibalchich, known as Victor Serge, who was born in Belgium to Russian emigres, psychologizing the secret police operatives he observed in Petrograd in 1919. “Long-standing inferiority complexes and memories of humiliation and sufferings in the Tsar’s jails rendered them intractable, and since professional degeneration has rapid effects, the Chekas inevitably consisted of perverted men tending to see conspiracy everywhere and to live in the midst of perpetual conspiracy themselves.” Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, 80; Leggett, The Cheka, 189.

31. Trotsky, Stalin, [1968], 385.

32. Brinkley, Volunteer Army; Kenez, Civil War in South Russia; Lehovich, White Against Red.

33. Drujina, “History of the North-West Army,” 133.

34. Guins, Sibir’, II: 368

35. Kvakin, Okrest Kolchaka, 124, 167–8. See also Berk, “The Coup d’État of Admiral Kolchak.” “Izvestiya wrote an obscene article saying: ‘Tell us, you reptile, how much did they pay you for that?’” Ivan Bunin, the writer, recorded in his diary. “I crossed myself with tears of joy.” Bunin, Cursed Days, 177 (June 17, 1919).

36. Restoration remained impossible as a matter of practical poltics. Some monarchist attitudes were found among some White-movement officers. Ward, With the “Die-Hards” in Siberia, 160.

37. Kavtaradze, Voennye spetsialisty, 21–4.

38. Kavtaradze, Voennye spetsialisty, 176–7.

39. Golovine, Russian Army, 278; Kenez, “Changes in the Social Composition of the Officer Corps”; Bushnell, “Tsarist Officer Corps.” In 1917, almost the only educated privates in the Russian army were Jews, who rose to the fore when soldiers formed soviets because of their education. Shklovsky, Sentimental Journey, 66–7.

40. Shklovsky, Sentimental Journey, 8.

41. John Erickson, “The Origins of the Red Army,” in Pipes, Revolutionary Russia, 224–58. The official date for the founding of the Red Army would become February 23, 1918, which in fact had been a failed attempt.

42. Gorodetskii, Rozhdenie, 399–401; Dekrety Sovetskoi vlasti, II: 334–5.

43. Trotskii, “Krasnaia armiia,” in Kak vooruzhalas’ revoliutsiia, I: 101–22 (April 22, 1918: at 117–8). The French socialist Jean Jaures had asserted, back in 1911, that a democratic army would be fully compatible with combat effectiveness. Jaures, L’Organisation socialiste.

44. Dekrety Sovetskoi vlasti, II: 63–70.

45. Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, I: 289.

46. Golub, “Kogda zhe byl uchrezhden institut voennykh kommissarov Krasnoi Armi?,” 157.

47. Rabochaia i Krest’ianskaia krasnaia armiia i flot, March 27, 1918; Pravda, March 28, 1918. Benvenuti (Bolsheviks and the Red Army, 29–30) points out that Trotsky omitted this interview from his comprehensive compendium Kak vooruzhalas’ revoliutsiia.

48. Trotskii, “Vnutrennie i vneshnie zadachi Sovetskoi vlasti,” in Kak vooruzhalas’ revoliutsiia, I: 46–67 (April 21, 1918: at 63–4).

49. V. I. Lenin, “Uderzhat li bol’sheviki gosudarstvennuiu vlast’?,” in PSS, XXXIV: 289–39 (at 303–11); Rigby, “Birth of the Central Soviet Bureaucracy.” Even during Lenin’s prerevolutionary lyricism about smashing the state, such as State and Revolution [1903] in which he had denounced as “opportunist” the view that the “bourgeois” state could be taken over and put to use by the proletariat, he had made clear the Bolsheviks should seek to retain valuable “bourgeois” expertise.

50. “The Soviet Government,” Denikin would bitterly complain, “may be proud of the artfulness with which it has enslaved the will and the brains of the Russian generals and officers and made of them its unwilling but obedient tool.” Denikin, Ocherki russkoi smuty, III: 146.

51. Istoriia grazhdanskoi voiny, III: 226.

52. Kavtaradze, Voennye spetsialisty, 175–8, 183–96. How many of the generals and staff officers deserted to the Whites or quit and emigrated remains unknown. Altogether, some 70 percent of the tsarist officer corps (250,000) served on either the Red side (75,000) or the White side (100,000).

53. Already the 2nd Congress of Soviets in October 1917, at which the seizure of power had been pronounced, called for new commissars. Von Hagen, Soldiers in the Proletarian Dictatorship, 27. Bolshevik political commissars would be subordinated to the all-Russia Bureau of Military Commissars in the Council of People’s Commissars, not to the party (which as yet had no bureaucracy).

54. Political departments essentially replaced party cells in the army already by January 1919; they were appointed, not elected, and subordinated to the military experts. Benvenuti, Bolsheviks and the Red Army, 52–64 (citing Pravda, January 10, 1919); Petrov, Partiinoe stroitel’stvo, 58–9.

55. Voenno-revoliutsionnye komitety deistviiushchei armii, 30–1, 75–6. See also Kolesnichenko and Lunin, “Kogda zhe byl uchrezhden institut voennykh kommissarov Krasnoi Armi?,” 123–6.

56. “The commissar is not responsible for purely military, operational, or combat orders,” Trotsky wrote (April 6, 1918), in one of the very few central directives (signed by him alone) to clarify the commissar’s powers. Only detection of “counter-revolutionary intentions” was to induce a commissar to prevent a commander’s military directives. Izvestiia, April 6, 1918, reprinted in Savko, Ocherki po istorii partiinykh organiizatsii, 73–4.

57. As one scholar has explained, “The potential for confusion and conflict in the army was heightened by the party workers’ formal right to interfere in virtually all command matters through their powers of checking and co-signature.” Colton, “Military Councils,” 37, 56.

58. Argenbright, “Bolsheviks, Baggers and Railroaders.”

59. Gill, Peasants and Government.

60. Lih, Bread and Authority, 95–6, 106–8. Earlier in August, the Provisional Government had averred that it would not raise state prices paid for grain procurements. Pethybridge, Spread of the Russian Revolution, 99 (citing Vestnik vremennogo praveitel’stva, August 5, 1917).

61. Sergei Prokopovich, quoted in Holquist, Making War, 81.

62. Carr, Bolshevik Revolution, II: 227–44; Malle, Economic Organization of War Communism, 322–6; Perrie, “Food Supply.”

63. Holquist, Making War, 108–9 (citing Kondrat’ev, Rynok khlebov, 222).

64. Nash vek, July 10, 1918: 4.

65. Mary McAuley, “Bread Without the Bourgeoisie,” in Koenker, Party, State, and Society, 158–79

66. Svoboda Rossii, April 18, 1918: 5; Bunyan and Fisher, Bolshevik Revolution, 666–8.

67. Pavliuchenkov, Krest'ianskii Brest, 26–9 (citing RGASPI, f. 158, op. 1, d. 1, l. 10). Tsyurupa outmaneuvered Trotsky, whose Extraordinary Commission lapsed.

68. “O razrabotke V. I. Leninym prodovol’stvennoi politiki 1918 g.,” 77.

69. Gulevich and Gassanova, “Iz istorii bor’by prodovol’stvennykh otriadov rabochikh za khleb” at 104; Lih, Bread and Authority, 126–37; Malle, Economic Organization of War Communism, 359–61.

70. Protokoly zasedanii VsTsIK, 47–8.

71. One scholar has argued that “the actual relation between military necessity and ideological radicalism is the reverse of this supposed chain: the outbreak of civil war caused a conscious retreat from ideological ambitiousness,” which is true at the level of rhetorical flourish, though less at the level of practices. Lih, “Bolshevik Razvesrtka,” 684–5.

72. “There remains only one solution,” Lenin concluded in spring 1918: “to meet the violence of grain owners against the starving poor with the violence against grain owners.” Strizhkov, Prodovol’stvennye otriady, 56. “We did not hesitate to wrest land away from landlords . . . and by force of arms to tear the crown from the stupid tsar’s head,” Trotsky thundered. “Why then should we hesitate to take the grain away from the kulaks?” Trotskii, Kak vooruzhalas’ revoliutisiia, I: 81–2. See also Iziumov, Khleb i revoliutsiia.

73. Figes, Peasant Russia.

74. Vodolagin, Krasnyi Tsaritsyn, 10; Raleigh, “Revolutionary Politics.”

75. Kakurin, Kak srazhalas’, I: 261.

76. RGASPI, f. 2, op. 1, d. 6157; Iudin, Lenin pisal v Tsaritsyn, 3–12; Pravda, May 31, 1918; Genkina, Tsaritsyn v 1918, 73 (citing GARF, f. 1235, op. 53, d. 1, l. 106), 75; Trotsky, Stalin, 283. Stalin’s appointment took place just weeks after he had won his April 1918 slander case against the Menshevik leader Yuly Martov.

77. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 109, d. 3, l. 5–10 (devastating May 29, 1918, report by Snesarev and Nosovich), reprinted—without mention of Nosovich—in Goncharov, Vozvyshenie Stalina, 361–7 (at 365). The latter is a reissue of Melikov, Geroicheskaia oborona Tsaritsyna, with additional documents in an appendix. See also RGASPI, f. 17, op. 109, d. 3, l. 17–20 (June 30, 1918, report by Snesarev); and Dobrynin, Bor’ba s bol’shevizmom na iuge Rossii, 111.

78. Iz istorii grazhdanskoi voiny v SSSR, I: 563–4 (quoting K. Ia. Zedin).

79. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 4, d. 668, l. 35–9 (F. S. Alliluev, “Vstrechi s Stalinym”).

80. Pravda, December 21, 1929; Voroshilov, Lenin, Stalin, i krasnaia armiia, 43; “Pis’mo V. I. Leninu,” Sochineniia, IV: 118–9.

81. Pravda, June 11, 1918.

82. Pravda, January 3, 1935; Genkina, Tsaritsyn v 1918, 87–8. In May 1918 the Caucasus Bolshevik Sergo Orjonikidze, who had just fled Rostov, helped put down an anarchic revolt inside Tsaritsyn; he telegrammed Lenin that “the most decisive measures are necessary, but the local comrades are too flaccid, every offer to help is taken as interference in local affairs.” By contrast, Stalin imposed his will. GARF, f. 130, op. 2, d. 26, l. 12; Sergo Ordzhonikidze; Genkina, Tsaritsyn v 1918, 59–64. Sergei Minin, the top Tsaritsyn Bolshevik, had feared Stalin’s interference in local affairs, too, but Minin could not overcome Stalin’s will and authority. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 4, d. 668, l. 57 (F. S. Alliluev, “Obed u Minina”).

83. Gerson, The Secret Police, 139–43 (citing Denikin Commission reports, U.S. National Archives, Washington, D.C., RG 59, roll 36, frames 0248–0250).

84. Bullock, Russian Civil War, 36.

85. Gerson, The Secret Police, 142–3 (citing U.S. National Archives, Washington, D.C., RG59, roll 36, frames 0248–0250).

86. Chervyakov had been expelled under the tsarist regime from the military medical academy in St. Petersburg for political activity, but completed the law faculty (!) at Moscow University and served as an inspector at the School of Trade in his native city of Lugansk, in the Donetsk basin. In 1918, he had evacuated Ukraine eastward ahead of the advancing Reichswehr, ending up in Tsaritsyn, and bringing along a Lugansk crony who became the local Cheka “investigator.” http://rakurs.myftp.org/61410.html; Argenbright, “Red Tsaritsyn,” 171. After Alfred Karlovich Borman, head of the Tsaritsyn Cheka, had the Chervyakov crony Ivanov arrested, Chervyakov arrested Borman and released Ivanov. Nevskii, Doklad ot narodnogo kommissara putei soobshcheniia, 28.

87. Raskol’nikov, Rasskazy michmana Il’ina, 31–3. See also Genkina, “Priezd tov. Stalina v Tsaritsyn,” 82.

88. “The enemy consists of remnants of Kornilov’s army, Cossack and other counter-revolutionary units and possibly German troops,” a July 10 report observed: RGASPI, f. 17, op. 109, d. 3, l. 23–5 (Z. Shostak, a North Caucasus military inspector).

89. “Pis’mo V. I. Leninu,” Sochineniia, IV: 120–1. Stalin called Snesarev a “flaccid military leader” in a telegram to Trotsky (July 11, 1918) copied to Lenin and asked “don’t you have other candidates?” Kvashonkin, Bol’shevistskoe rukovodstvo, 42–4 (RGASPI, f. 558, op. 1, d. 1812, l. 1–3). Stalin had noted to Lenin and Trotsky (June 22, 1918) that Snesarev, traveling to the front lines, had barely escaped arrest, as if he were concerned about Snesarev’s welfare, but was in fact raising doubts about him. Bol’shevistskoe rukovodstvo, 40–41 (RGASPI, f. 558, op. 1, d. 5404, l. 3). See also Kliuev, Bor’ba za Tsaritsyn.

90. Trotsky further allowed that command over military operations could be transferred to a new military council. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 109, d. 3, l. 44. On July 18, Stalin sent a telegram to Moscow demanding that Snesarev be dismissed. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 1, d. 258, l. 1; Vodolagin, Krasnyi Tsaritsyn, 80 (RGVA, f. 6, op. 3, d. 11, l . 92, July 17, 1918, resolution in Tsaritsyn).

91. Golikov, Vladimir Il’ich Lenin, V: 645–6. The original composition was Stalin, Minin, and a “military leader who will be named by the recommendation of People’s Commissar Stalin and Military Commissar Minin.” That person, initially, was A. N. Kovalevsky, but from August 5 would be Voroshilov. Kovalevsky was arrested. Golubev, Direktivy glavnogo komandovaniiai, 74–5 (RGVA, f. 3, op. 1, d. 90, l. 268–9); RGASPI, f. 17, op. 109, d. 3, l. 14; Goncharov, Vozvyshenie Stalina, 391–2 (RGVA, f. 6, op. 4, d. 947, l. 71–71a); Kvashonkin, Bol’shevistskoe rukovodstvo, 40–41 (RGASPI, f. 558, op. 1, d. 5404, l. 3: June 22, 1918); Karaeva, Direktivy komandovaniia frontov, I: 289–90 (RGVA, f. 6, op. 4, d. 947, l. 71–71a). The decree (by telegram) of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic was dated July 24, which appears to have been issued in connection with an on-site investigation by Nikolai Podvoisky, the head of the Red Army Inspectorate.

92. On July 24, over the Hughes apparatus from Moscow, Lenin told Stalin, “I must say that neither in Piter nor Moscow is bread being distributed. The situation is terrible. Let us know if you can undertake extreme measures, because if not from you, we have nowhere else to obtain food.” But Stalin was hard-pressed to deliver. The Whites were closing the noose. Stalin personally rode out in an armored train to inspect rail line repairs. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 4, d. 668, l. 90 (F. S. Alliluev, “T. Stalin na bronepoezde”). On July 26, 1918, following a reconnaissance to the Kuban (“Until now we only had unproven information, but now there are facts”), Stalin deemed the situation critical (“the entire Northern Caucasus, the purchased grain and all the customs duties, the army created by inhuman exertions, will be lost irrevocably”) and begged for a division to be sent immediately (the one designated for Baku). “I await the answer. Your Stalin.” RGASPI, f. 17, op. 109, d. 3, l. 35. Bonch-Bruevich, sending some troops from Voronezh, a division from Moscow, would hold out until then. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 109, d. 3, l. 37–8.

93. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 109, d. 3, l. 47. A second Remington was added to the inventory sheet by hand.

94. Kvashonkin, Bol’shevistskoe rukovodstvo, 41, n2; Genkina, Tsaritsyn v 1918, 121.

95. K. E. Voroshilov, “Avtobiografiia,” in Gambarov, Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’, XLI/i: 96.

96. V. Pariiskii and G. Zhavaronkov, “V nemilost’ vpavshii,” Sovetskaia kul’tura, February 23, 1989.

97. Leninskii sbornik, XVIII: 197–99; Sochineniia, IV: 122–6.

98. Colton, “Military Councils,” 41–50.

99. Chernomortsev [Colonel Nosovich], “Krasnyi Tsaritsyn.” The date of this telegram is not specified. Khmel’kov, K. E. Voroshilov na Tsaritsynskom fronte, 64 (October 3, Stalin and Voroshilov to Lenin, Sverdlov, and Trotsky). Okulov became a member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Southern Front in Tsaritsyn (October–December 1918); Lenin recalled him to Moscow “in view of the extremely sharp relations between Voroshilov and Okulov.” Volkogonov, Triumf i tragediia, I/i: 94 (citing RGASPI, f. 558, op. 1, d. 486).

100. Argenbright, “Red Tsaritsyn”; Golikov, Vladimir Il’ich Lenin, V: 630, 640; Iz istorii grazhdanskoi voiny v SSSR, I: 290; Iudin, Lenin pisal v Tsaritsyn, 61–2; Sochineniia, IV: 116–7; Leninskii sbornik, XXXVIII: 212.

101. Argenbright, “Red Tsaritsyn,” 165.

102. Argenbright, “Red Tsaritsyn,” 166 (citing Nevskii, Doklad ot narodnogo komissara putei soobshcheniia, 17–18). Appended to a report by the People’s Transport Commissar (V. I. Nevskii), Makhrovsky’s report was presented to Lenin.

103. On August 27, 1918—the same day the Supplementary Treaty with Germany was signed in Berlin—Lenin ordered the local Cheka head to release Makhrovsky and the non-party specialist Alekseev, but the Cheka replied that the latter had already been shot. On September 4, Sverdlov would repeat the order to release Makhrovsky; he would be freed on September 21 by a former Baku Chekist who worked in the central fuel supply department. Argenbright, “Red Tsaritsyn,” 175–6 (citing Sal’ko, “Kratkii otchet o deiatel’nosti Glavnogo Neftianogo Komiteta”). In May 1921, Makhrovsky would be tried for embezzlement in the fuel industry and sentenced to be shot, a sentence commuted to five years. His wife (Burtseva) also received a prison term. Gudok, May 20, 1921.

104. The Tsaritsyn Cheka, in its newsletter, claimed to have arrested “around 3,000 Red Army men,” but executed only twenty-three leaders: Izvestiia Tsaritsynskoi gubernskoi chrezvychainoi komissii, October 1918: 16–22, and November 1918: 36, in Hoover Institution Archives, Nicolaevsky Collection, no. 89, box 143, folder 11.

105. Magidov, “Kak ia stal redaktorom ‘Soldat revoliutsii,’” 30.

106. Meijer, Trotsky Papers, I: 134–7; Trotsky, Stalin, 288–9.

107. If the city fell to the Cossacks, the prisoner barge was to be blown up and sunk—the source, evidently, for the subsequent rumor that Stalin had had it deliberately sunk to drown the prisoners. Chernomortsev [Colonel Nosovich], “Krasnyi Tsaritsyn”; Khrushchev, Memoirs, II: 141, n2. Izvestiia KPSS, 1989, no. 11: 157, 161–2.

108. Izvestiia Tsaritsynskoi gubernskoi chrezvychainoi komissii, November 1918: 16, in Hoover Institution Archives, Nicolaevsky Collection, no. 89, box 143, folder 11; Genkina, Tsaritsyn v 1918, 126, 154.

109. In a newspaper interview at the time, Stalin praised “two happy phenomena: first, the emergence in the rear of administrators from the workers who are able not only to agitate for Soviet power but build a state on new, communist foundations, and secondly the appearance of a new corps of commanders consisting of officers promoted from the ranks who have practical experience in the imperialist war and enjoy the full confidence of Red Army soldiers.” Izvestiia, September 21, 1918; Sochineniia, IV: 131.

110. The appointment (on September 6, 1918) was sparked by a report, dated August 23, 1918, from Alexander Yegorov about the need for unified command. Krasnov and Daines, Neizvestnyi Trotskii, 72–5.

111. Deutscher, Prophet Armed, 420. Nikolai Krylenko, the former tsarist ensign, had resigned as Red supreme commander over the decision to build a permanent standing army; he went over to the justice commissariat.

112. Trotsky also decreed that White Army captives who signed an oath to the Reds should be sent into battle, as long as their family members were held as hostages. Izvestiia, August 11, 1918; Trotskii, “Prikaz” [August 8, 1932], in Kak vooruzhalas’ revoliutsiia, I: 232–3. That fall of 1918, at the suggestion that barges carrying grain up the Volga fly the Red Cross flag, to make sure they were not sunk, Trotsky exploded. “The charlatans and fools,” he telegrammed Lenin, “will think the delivery of grain means that there is a chance of conciliation and that civil war is not a necessity.” Volkogonov, Trotsky, 125 (citing RGVA, f. 4, op. 14, d. 7, l. 79).

113. Volkogonov, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy, 40.

114. Chernomortsev [Black Sea Man], “Krasny Tsaritsyn,” reprinted in Nosovich, Krasnyi Tsaritsyn. It was Voroshilov who identified Black Sea Man as “General [sic] Nosovich.” Voroshilov, Lenin, Stalin, i krasnaia armiia, 45–7. Nosovich asserted that the specialist Alekseev really was plotting with Serbian officers, but that they did not understand each other well. Nosovich falsely claimed he had been a spy in the Red camp, rather than a willing collaborator (the Whites remained suspicious of him). A prevaricator, he nonetheless should go down as having written the first accurate portrait of one of the most important figures in world history. On White suspicions of Nosovich, see Meijer, Trotsky Papers, I: 178–9. Soviet works accepted Nosovich’s claims at face value: Genkina, Tsaritsyn v 1918, 126–7 (citing a Nosovich report to Denikin of December 1918); Izvestiia TsK KPSS, 1989, no., 11: 177 no., 20. Nosovich soon emigrated to France, lived a long life, and died in Nice (1968). Nosovich, Zapiski vakhmistra Nosovicha.

115. No known record has survived of Stalin’s emotions at that moment. He, Minin, and Voroshilov issued a public order in Tsaritsyn “that deserters from the White side who voluntarily surrender their weapons are not to be executed or abused”—this was regime policy, but evidently not Tsaritsyn practice. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 109, d. 3, l. 114; Soldat revoliutsii (September 1, 1918).

116. Denikin would later write that in 1917 Sytin had approached him and other generals with a proposal to save Russia by turning over land—be it gentry, state, or church—gratis to the peasants who were fighting. General Kaledin, who shot himself in early 1918, is said to have replied, “Pure demagogy!” Denikin, Ocherki russkoi smuty, I: 93.

117. Kvashonkin, Bol’shevistskoe rukovodstvo, 51 (RGASPI, f. 558, op. 1, d. 5412, l. 2); Khmel’kov, Stalin v Tsaritsyne, 50–1; Lipitskii, Voennaia deiatel’nost’ TsK RKP (b), 126–9. Invariably Trotsky’s answer to these incessant requests—not just for ammunition but also guns, armored vehicles, airplanes, pilots—was to cite profligacy in the expenditure of materiel, likely true but no solution to immediate needs. Meijer, Trotsky Papers, I: 162; Golubev, Direktivy glavnogo komandovaniia, 89–90; Velikii pokhod K. E. Voroshilova, 175.

118. Volkogonov, Trotsky, 262 (citing RGVA, f. 33987, op. 2, d. 19, l. 16–7).

119. Karaeva, Direktivy komandovaniia frontov, I: 345–8 (RGVA, f. 10, op. 1, d. 123, l. 29–30); Volkogonov, Triumf i tragediia, I/i: 91.

120. Kolesnichenko, “K voprosu o konflikte,” 44.

121. Sverdlov, Izbrannye porizvedennye, III: 28.

122. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 109, d. 4, l. 60.

123. Kvashonkin, Bol’shevistskoe rukovodstvo, 52–3 (RGASPI, f. 558, op. 1, d. 5413, l. 1–2).

124. Knei-Paz, Social and Political Social Thought.

125. Meijer, Trotsky Papers, I: 134–6; Kvashonkin, Bol’shevistskoe rukovodstvo, 54, n2 (RGASPI, f. 5, op. 1, d. 2433, l. 33); Trotsky, My Life, 443. Trotsky’s frustrations went beyond Stalin (“Send me communists who know how to obey,” he telegrammed Lenin from the front in 1918). Schapiro, Communist Party, 262.

126. Kenez, Civil War in South Russia, I: 176. The Cossack leader Krasnov had founded a “Don republic,” which Germany promptly recognized, but Denikin deplored this as separatism. When Germany capitulated in November 1918, Krasnov’s army disintegrated; he was forced to subordinate himself to Denikin but soon quit the South and joined Yudenich’s northern forces operating out of Estonia. He emigrated West in 1920, and would later collaborate with the Nazis.

127. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 109, d. 4, l. 64; Volkogonov, Trotsky, 132 (citing RGVA, f. 33987, op. 2, d. 40, l. 29); Kvashonkin, Bol’shevistskoe rukovodstvo, 54 (RGASPI, f. 558, op. 1, d. 5414, l. 2–4: Oct. 5, 1918); Meijer, Trotsky Papers, I: 134–6. See also Trotskii, “Prikaz” [November 4, 1918], in Kak vooruzhalas’ revoliutsiia, I: 350–1. Trotsky would later write that “the atmosphere of Tsaritsyn, with its administrative anarchy, guerilla disrespect for the Center, . . . and provocative boorishness toward military specialists was naturally not conducive to winning the good-will of the latter and making them loyal servants of the regime.” Trotsky, Stalin, 273, 280–1, 288–9.

128. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 109, d. 4, l. 68. Trotsky had reported to Sverdlov on October 5, 1918, that “yesterday I spoke on the direct line and laid the responsibility on Voroshilov as the commander of the Tsaritsyn Army. Minin is in the Military rev Soviet of the 10th Tsaritsyn Army. I did not raise the question of Stalin.” RGASPI, f. 17, op. 109, d. 4, l. 67.

129. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 109, d. 3, l. 46–7. See also Sverdlov’s note to Lenin (October 5, 1918): Sverdlov, Izbrannye proizvedenniia, III: 36.

130. Golikov, Vladimir Il’ich Lenin, VI: 156; Genkina, Tsaritsyn v 1918, 183. Stalin telegrammed Voroshilov and Minin that day (October 8, 1918), suggesting all could be settled “noiselessly.” Kolesnichenko, “K voprosu o konflikte,” 45–6. Lenin commented that hiding the money from Stalin was improper: “L. A. Fotievoi i L. V. Krasinu,” PSS, L: 187 (October 9, 1918).

131. Danilevskii, V. I. Lenin i voprosy voennogo stroitel’stva, 37–8.

132. Dekrety Sovetskoi vlasti, V: 663; Trotsky, Stalin, 291–2; A. L. Litvin et al., “Grazhdanskaia voina: lomka starykh dogm i stereotypov,” in Istoriki sporiat (Moscow, 1969), 63; Iuzhnyi front, 19.

133. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 109, d. 1, l. 20 (October 16, 1919).

134. Meijer, Trotsky Papers, I: 158–64, 196.

135. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 109, d. 4, l. 71; Golubev, Direktivy glavnogo komandovaniia, 84–5.

136. Trotskii, “Prikaz” [October 5, 1918], in Kak vooruzhalas’ revoliutsiia, I: 347–8. A caravan went to Moscow to try to bring back some supplies, especially ammunition. On October 24, a Red Army regiment arrived from Moscow consisting of workers from two factories. The next day, in Moscow the Central Committee considered a letter from Stalin demanding a trial of the Southern Front commander (Sytin) and others (Okulov) for sabotaging the supply of the Tenth Army in Tsaritsyn; Sverdlov brushed off the request. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 109, d. 4, l. 71, 79, 82; Volkogonov, Triumf i tragediia, I/i: 101. In Moscow, Lenin received Stalin on October 23, and evidently brokered a peace, which Sverdlov, in Lenin’s name, telegrammed to Trotsky. Meijer, Trotsky Papers, I: 158–60; Leninskii sbornik, XXXVII: 106.

137. D. P. Zhloba, “Ot nevinnomyskoi do Tsaritsyna,” in Bubnov, Grazhdanskaia voina, I: 28–34, 32–4; Azovtsev, Grazhdanskaia voina v SSSR, I: 229; V. Shtyrliaev, “Geroi grazhdanskoi voiny Dmitrii Zhloba,” Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal, 1965, no. 2: 44–6; Sukhorukhov, XI Armiia, 81, 83–95. On the military situation, see Vacietis’s report to Lenin (August 13, 1918): RGASPI, f. 17, op. 109, d. 8, l. 51–66.

138. P. N. Krasnov, “Velikoe voisko donskoe,” in Gessen, Arkhiv russkoi revoliutsii, V: 190–320 (at 244–5).

139. Izvestiia, October 30, 1918; Sochineniia, IV: 146–7. Zhloba (b. 1887), the kind of peasant autodidact commander Stalin usually favored, proved to be one of the few people unafraid to argue with the Tsaritsyn warlord—a greater sin for Stalin than Zhloba’s soon-to-be-revealed limits as a military leader. Nosovich, Krasnyi Tsaritsyn, 60–1. Before the end of 1918, Zhloba’s Steel Division was dispersed into the cavalry commanded by Boris Dumenko, against whom Zhloba then intrigued, taking his place. (Dumenko was arrested and executed by his own side on apparently false charges of murder.) In 1920, fighting Wrangel in the Crimea, Zhloba’s Red cavalry was surrounded. In 1922, he quit the Red Army. Stalin would have Zhloba executed in 1938.

140. Almost simultaneously, Roman Malinowski, the okhranka agent in Bolshevik ranks, faced a revolutionary tribunal on charges of treason at the end of October 1918. The prosecution established that he had betrayed eighty-eight revolutionaries to the tsarist authorities, but the defendant voiced contrition only for two, “my best friends, Sverdlov and Koba. These are my two real crimes.” The six judges sentenced Malinowski to death and in the wee hours of November 6, one day before the first anniversary of the seizure of power, he was executed by firing squad. He was the original traitor within Bolshevik ranks. Halfin, Intimate Enemies, 7–17 (citing Delo provokatora Malinovskogo [Moscow: Respublika, 1992], 159, 216, 108). Minin (Pravda, January 11, 1919) began the portrayal of the bungled near-fall of Tsaritsyn in 1918 as a surpassing Red victory, a depiction that only gained in strength under Stalin’s rule: Voroshilov, Lenin, Stalin, i krasnaia armiia, 42–8; Melikov, Geroicheskaia oborona Tsaritsyna, 138–9; Genkina, “Bor’ba za Tsaritsyn v 1918 godu.”

141. On the German military’s inveterate high-risk gambling, see Hull, Asbolute Destruction, 291ff.

142. Deist and Feuchtwanger, “Military Collapse of the German Empire.”

143. Lieven, “Russia, Europe, and World War I,” 7–47; Jones, “Imperial Russia’s Forces,” I; Pearce, How Haig Saved Lenin, 7.

144. Koehl, “Prelude to Hitler’s Greater Germany,” 65. See also Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front; Kitchen, Silent Dictatorship; Lee, The Warlords; and Ludendorff, My War Memories. Compare the Russian army occupation of Galicia in 1915: Von Hagen, War in a European Borderland.

145. Quoted in Denikin, Ocherki Russkoi smuty, I: 48–9. Germany’s naval chief of staff, Admiral Georg von Muller, railed at Hindenburg and Ludendorff in his contemporaneous diary: “Mistake after mistake has been made, above all the casual handling of the peace with Russia, whose collapse had been a boon of immeasurable value to us and should have been exploited to release troops for the West. But instead of this we conquered Latvia and Estonia and became involved with Finland—the results of an excess of megalomania.” Von Muller, The Kaiser and His Court, 398 (September 29, 1918). Similarly, Major-General Hoffmann would complain of the units desperately needed in the West who remained in the East that “our victorious army on the Eastern Front became rotten with Bolshevism.” Wheeler-Bennet, Forgotten Peace, 352 (citing Chicago Daily News, March 13, 1919).

146. Wheeler-Bennet, Forgotten Peace, 327; Wheeler-Bennet, “The Meaning of Brest-Litovsk Today.”

147. Geyer, “Insurrectionary Warfare.”

148. PSS, XXXVII: 150, 164. On November 7, 1918, the first anniversary of the October Revolution, Lenin had made a point of visiting the Cheka club (at Lubyanka, 13). His appearance was unexpected, and greeted with wild applause. Lenin returned the next day to answer questions for two hours. Izvestiia, November 9, 1918; Vinogradov, Arkhiv VChK, 92–3 (citing internal publication); Latsis, Otchet Vserossiiskoi chrevzyvhanoi kommissi, 81; V. I. Lenin v vospominaniiakh chekistov, 111–2. See also Pravda, December 18, 1927; and PSS, XXXVII: 174.

149. On November 18, 1918, Max, Prince of Baden, imperial chancellor, announced the kaiser’s abdication of nine days before. Wilhelm lived out his life in comfortable Dutch exile and died from natural causes in June 1941, after the Netherlands fell under Nazi German occupation. Hull, Entourage of Kaiser Wilhelm II; Clark, Kaiser Wilhelm II.

150. Stevenson, Cataclysm, 379–406.

151. Wheeler-Bennet, Forgotten Peace, 370–1, 450–3.

152. “The period of sharp divergences between our proletarian revolution and the Menshevik and SR democracy was a historical necessity,” Lenin wrote, adding that “it would be preposterous to insist solely on tactics of repression and terror toward petty-bourgeois democracy when the course of events is forcing the latter to turn toward us.” Pravda, November 21, 1918. See also PSS, XXXVII: 207–33 (speech of November 27, 1918).

153. Broadberry and Harrison, Economics of World War I.

154. Bond, War and Society in Europe, 83–4.

155. Knobler, Threat of Pandemic Influenza, 60–1. Russia’s 15 million, Germany’s 13.1 million, France’s 8 million (nearly 80 percent of the prewar population aged 15–49), Britain’s 5.25 million (almost half the prewar population of men aged 15–49) plus 3.7 million from the empire, Austria-Hungary’s 7.8 million, Italy’s 5.6 million, the United States’ 4.3 million, the Ottoman empire’s 2.9 million, Romania’s 750,000, and Bulgaria’s 1.2 million all contribute to these estimates.

156. Perhaps 775,000 were killed in action; another 2.6 million were wounded, of whom up to 970,000 died.

157. Some 182,000 Russian POWs died. Peter Gatrell, Russia’s First World War, 255, 259; Rossiia v mirovoi voine 1914–1918 goda, 4 and 4n; Krivosheev, Rossiia i SSSR, 101–96. Britain, France, and Germany suffered 1.3 million taken prisoner—combined; Austria-Hungary, 2.2 million POWs.

158. PSS, XXXVII: 260.

159. PSS, XXVI: 16 (March 15, 1918).

160. “What you intend is being carried out by us; what you call ‘communism’ we call ‘state control,’” a German economic negotiator in Berlin in 1918 told the Polish Bolshevik Mieczysław Bronski, who had an economics doctorate from Zurich (and had accompanied Lenin on the German-supplied sealed train from Switzerland to Russia). Trudy i Vserossiiskogo S”ezda Sovetov Narodnogo Khoziiastva, 157. (Bronski, born in 1882 in Lodz, was the father of Wolfgang Leonhard.) Ludendorff went on to coin the expression “total war.” Honig, “The Idea of Total War,” 29–41; Chickering, “Sore Loser,” esp. 176–7.

161. “The Germans,” recalled one Jewish imperial Russian subject originally from Vilna/Wilno, “treated the local population as if they were animals that were of use to their master but had no rights whatever themselves.” This applied not merely to Jews. Under Russian rule, pogroms became more prevalent during the Great War and immediately after. Abramowicz, Profiles of a Lost World, 199; Roshwald, Ethnic Nationalism, 122–4.

162. Holquist, Making War, 205, 285–7.

163. Genkina, Tsaritsyn v 1918, 202. The Tenth Army was only one of several Red forces engaged on the southern front. Nadia, O nekotorykh voprosakh istorii grazhdanskoi voiny 106–11.

164. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 109, d. 4, l. 93. Trotsky “declared to Voroshilov and me,” Minin stated at the 8th Party Congress, “that I will conduct you back to Moscow by convoy.” Izvestiia TsK KPSS, 1989, no. 9: 153. Minin was soon moved to the interior commissariat (Decemeber 1918). Sytin was transferred to Moscow (mid-November).

165. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 109, d. 4, l. 117 (December 12, 1918).

166. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 109, d. 14, l. 65, and RGVA, f. 33 987, op. 2, d. 96, l. 10, Hoover Institution Archives, Volkogonov papers, container 17 (telegram from Pyatakov in Kursk to Stalin in the Kremlin, copies to Lenin and Sverdlov); Kvashonkin, Bol’shevistskoe rukovodstvo, 75 (RGASPI, f. 17, op. 109, d. 12, l. 70: January 4, 1919).

167. For Ukraine, Trotsky recommended anyone else, even Moisei Rukhimovich (whom he also held in low regard). In the event, both Voroshilov and Rukhimovich were appointed in Ukraine. Deutscher alleges that Trotsky would reproach himself for not having dealt more harshly with his intriguing critics, especially Voroshilov, but in fact Trotsky tried to deal harshly with them. Deutscher, Prophet Armed, 431–2 (no citation). Fyodor Sergeyev (“Artyom”) was named head of government in Ukraine, replacing Pyatakov, who wrote to Trotsky asking about this: RGASPI, f. 17, op. 109, d. 14, l. 78. Fyodor Sergeyev had met Stalin in 1906; he had lived together with Stalin (and Nadya) in the same railcar in Tsaritsyn. Alexander Yegorov took over the Tenth Army in Tsaritsyn.

168. Deutscher, Prophet Armed, 425–6.

169. Pravda, December 25, 1918.

170. Trotskii, “Po nauke ili koe-kak?” [January 10, 1919], in Kak vooruzhalas’ revoliutsiia, I: 169–73 (at 170–2).

171. Robert MacNeal understood that Stalin managed to secure some grain, fulfilling his war-hanging-in-the-balance task, that Lenin hesitated to remove Stalin despite Trotsky’s insistence, and that Lenin went on to use Stalin in additional critical assignments. MacNeal, Stalin, 55–8. Robert Conquest, by contrast, merely condemned Stalin’s insubordination and egoism. Conquest, Stalin, 81, 85.

172. Benvenuti, Bolsheviks and the Red Army, 89–91. The three reports (January 1, January 13, and January 31, 1919) can be found in Sochineniia, IV: 197–224; and Perepiska sekretariata TsK RKP (b), V: 182–3.

173. Volkogonov, Lenin: Life and Legacy, 230 (citing RGASPI, f. 2, op. 1, d. 26388, l. 1–2); Ul’ianova, O Lenine i sem’e Ul’ianovykh, 113–7; Gil’, Shest' let s V. I. Leninym, 28–34; Malkov, Reminiscences, 190–2; “Kak grabili Lenina.” A far more inventive version can be found in Radzinsky, The Last Tsar, 247 (no citation). The case was cracked when Lenin’s Rolls was found crashed into a wall near Moscow’s Church of Christ the Savior, and Cheka operatives traced footprints in the snow away from the car, across the frozen Moscow River, to an apartment where the chief bandit, Yashka Koshelkov, barricaded himself. Koshelkov’s gang had killed around two dozen regular police and Chekists since the revolution. “He gave desperate resistance,” the Kremlin commandant, Pyotr Malkov, would write, “and was taken only after he had emptied his Mauser and had no more bullets.” Mal’kov, Zapiski, 159. After the assassination attempt on Lenin in August 1918, a seventeen-man rotating bodyguard detail had been assigned to him, but Lenin disliked bodyguards and had only one that day. Abram Belenky, who had taken part in the interrogation process following the assassination attempt, had become Lenin’s head bodyguard (from October 1918), but he was not with him that day. Supposedly, according to a November 1919 report of the political department of the Thirteenth Army, twelve spies had been sent to assassinate Lenin: GARF, f.3, op. 22, d. 306, l. 4, Hoover Institution Archives, Volkogonov papers, container 21.

174. The value of 132 billion gold marks in 1919 would be roughly $442 billion (£284) in 2013. Twice, in 1924 and in 1929, the Germans negotiated the amount down. In 1933, Hitler unilaterally suspended the payments. In 2010, Germany finally finished paying off the levy. Overall, taking inflation into account, Germany paid less to Britain and France than France had paid to Germany after losing the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71).

175. MacMillan, Paris 1919. Harold Nicolson, in Peacemaking, portrayed a bunch of old men out of their depth (his last chapter was entitled “Failure”).

176. Steiner, The Lights That Failed, 772.

177. In an all too typical passage, the British ambassador to France had written in his diary in April 1916, “Although the Russians perhaps will have to lose two men for every one German, Russia has sufficient numbers of men to endure disproportionate losses.” Quoted in Karliner, “Angliia i Petrogradskaia konferentsiia Antanty 1917 goda,” 329.

178. Neilson, Strategy and Supply.

179. Thompson, Russia, Bolshevism and the Versailles Peace, 398.

180. Thompson, Russia, Bolshevism and the Versailles Peace, 310, 395.

181. One of John Maynard Keynes’s arguments against Versailles had been that a pariah Germany and a pariah Russia might embrace each other; Lenin had taken favorable note. Keynes warned that Germany might go leftist as well. Keynes, Economic Consequences, 288–9; PSS, XLII: 67, 69, XLIV: 294–5.

182. Sadoul waxed that “from beginning to end the delegates were in the best of spirits,” and singled out “Lenin’s never-ending and resonant laughter, which makes his shoulders shake and his belly quiver—the lofty, majestic laugh of a Danton or a Jaures; Trotsky’s piercing irony; Bukharin’s mischievous jocularity; Chicherin’s mocking humor. Mixed with these nuances of Russian joy was the boisterous gaiety of the beer drinkers—[Fritz] Platten, [Hugo] Eberlein, Gruber [Karl Steinhardt]—and [Krastyo] Rakovski’s subtle wit, more Parisian than Romanian” (Rakovski was Bulgarian). Sadoul, “La Fondation de la Troisieme international,” at 180. See also the British journalist Ransome, Russia in 1919, 215, 217.

183. Vatlin, Komintern, 57 (RGASPI, f. 488, op. 1, d. 13, l. 13–9).

184. “Rozhdenie tret’ego internatsionala,” Pravda, March 7, 1919 (Osinsky).

185. Pravda, March 6, 1919, reprinted in Trotskii, Piat’ let Kominterna, II: 28–30.

186. Riddell, Founding the Communist International, 8.

187. Schurer, “Radek and the German Revolution.”

188. The delegates also approved Trotsky’s manifesto narrating the degradation of capitalism and march of Communism. Pervyi kongress Kominterna, esp. 250–1 (list of delegates); Riddell, Founding the Communist International, esp. 18–9; Carr, Russian Revolution, 14.

189. Arkadii Vaksberg offers a variant of the blunt trauma thesis, claiming it was motivated by Sverdlov’s Jewishness. Vaksberg, Iz ada (citing RGASPI, f. 5, op. 1, d. 2159, l. 36–7).

190. Trotsky, March 13, 1925, printed in Fourth International, 7/11 (1946): 327–30. Lenin went to Petrograd by train on March 11, returning on March 14, for the funeral of M. T. Yelizarov.

191. Izvestiia TsK KPSS, 1989, no. 8: 164.

192. VIII s”ezd RKP (b), 18–23 marta 1919g. in PSS, XXXVIII: 127–215 (Lenin made ten interventions at the congress). Two years later, at the 10th Party Congress in March 1921, Krestinsky rose in remembrance of Sverdlov, recalling his importance as all the delegates stood. X s”ezd [1921], 267–70; X s”ezd [1933], 499–504.

193. Soviet Russia had about 8,000 party committees, organized in around 40 provincial party organizations, with a total membership of 220,495. Party organizations in the Red Army claimed another 29,706 members. Party organizations of Finland, Lithuania, Latvia, Belorussia, and Poland counted for another 63,565 members. VIII s”ezd RKP (b) [1959], 274. See also Istoriia grazhdanskoi voiny, III: 312–3 (Stasova).

194. In addition, 7 percent were Latvian, 4 percent were Ukrainian, and 3 percent were Polish, VIII s”ezd RKP (b) [1959], 451. These numbers would change little at the 9th Party Congress in 1920, except that Russians would reach 70 percent and Jews would fall to 14.5 percent of the 500-plus attendees: IX s”ezd RKP (b), 551. On the Jewish issue, see Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, 99–114.

195. The Times of London (March 5, 1919) asserted that Jews held 75 percent of top positions. Medvedev, Let History Judge, 560; Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, I: 225–6.

196. A version of the proceedings was published three times (1919, 1933, 1959), but none was complete; all left out the separate military sessions of March 20–21. Lenin’s speech to the closed session on March 21, however, was published (Leninskii sbornik, XXXVII: 135–40). Fragments of Stalin’s speech were published much later (Sochineniia, IV: 249–50). See also Benvenuti, Bolsheviks and the Red Army, 106. The military discussion was finally published during glasnost: Izvestiia TsK KPSS, 1989, no. 9: 134–90, no. 10: 171–89, no. 11: 144–78.

197. PSS, XXXVIII: 137–8.

198. Aralov, Lenin vel nas k pobede, 96–7. Aralov was a member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic.

199. Trotsky wrote that on the eve of the congress, under the barrage of talk about tsarist officer treason, he had informed Lenin that at least 30,000 former tsarist officers were serving in Red ranks, making the instances of treason minuscule by comparison. Lenin supposedly expressed surprise. (He could feign surprise.) Deutscher, Prophet Armed, 429–30. Lenin, Sobranie sochinenii [1920–26], XVI: 73.

200. Trotskii, Sochineniia, XVII/i: 362.

201. Pravda and Izvestiia, February 25, 1919, reprinted in Izvestiia TsK KPPS, 1989, no. 9: 175–81. The military opposition included Smirnov, Georgy Safarov (Voldin), Grigory “Yuri” Pyatakov, Andrei Bubnov, Emelyan Yaroslavsky, V. G. Sorin, Voroshilov, Sergei Minin, Filippr Goloshchyoëkin, Alexander Myasnikov, N. G. Tolmachëv, R. S. Samoilova (Zemlyachka), and others.

202. Izvestiia TsK KPSS, 1989, no. 8: 171–3.

203. Some noted that the solution would be to train young Red commanders, but Sergei Minin, of Tsaritsyn, objected that “White Guardism”—former tsarist officers in Red service—blocked young proletarian commanders from rising up. By contrast, Semyon Aralov, a member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic in Moscow, argued the opposite: “in whatever area you take, supply, technology, communications, artillery, we need military specialists for it, and we do not have them.” Izvestiia TsK KPSS, 1989, no. 9: 153, 1989, no. 10: 183–9, 1989, no. 11: 156–9, 159–66; Danilevskii, V. I. Lenin i voprosy voennogo stroitel’stva, 76.

204. Pokrovskii and Iakovlev, Gusdarstvennoe soveshchanie, 61–6.

205. Izvestiia TsK KPSS, 1989, no. 11: 162–4.

206. Trotsky, too, believed the peasantry would betray the revolution as soon as its own inteests had been secured. Meyer, Leninism, 142. On the near universal Russian Social Democrat hostility toward peasants, see Deutscher, Unfinished Revolution, 17.

207. Aralov, Lenin vel nas k pobede, 101–2.

208. In August 1919, Lenin instructed Mikhail Frunze, commander of the Turkestan front, “to exterminate every Cossack to a man if they set fire to the oil.” Pipes, Unknown Lenin, 69. On Lenin’s hardness, see also Proletarskaia revoliutsiia, 1924, no. 3: 168–9; also in Pipes, Unknown Lenin, 50.

209. Izvestiia TsK KPSS, 1989, no. 11: 170; Leninskii sbornik, XXX: 138–9.

210. Danilevskii, V. I. Lenin i voprosy voennogo stroitel’stva, 88. Some delegates supporting the position of Trotsky/Sokolnikov walked out after Grigory Yevdokimov’s speech.

211. VIII s”ezd RKP (b), 273, 339–40, 412–23.

212. Izvestiia TsK KPSS, 1989, no. 9: 173.

213. It was Zinoviev, who in his congress speech had attacked Trotsky—a large, inviting target useful for raising his own profile—who now telegrammed him that concessions had been made to the military opposition and instructed him to treat this as a “warning.” In a speech (March 29, 1919) to the Leningrad party organization he oversaw, Zinoviev indicated that Trotsky needed to absorb the message that in the army the party needed to play a bigger role, because “military specialists” could not be trusted. Izvestiia TsK KPSS, 1989, no. 8: 185–98 (at 192–5).

214. Pravda, March 1, 1919; Benvenuti, Bolsheviks and the Red Army, 72–4.

215. VIII s”ezd RKP (b) [1959], 177. On food scarcity, see also Brovkin, “Workers’ Unrest.”

216. On the army’s share (25 percent of all flour, 40 percent of fodder), see Osinskii, “Glavnyi nedostatok,” 236.

217. Piat’ let vlasti Sovetov, 377; Malle, Economic Organization of War Communism, 407, 425.

218. Scheibert, Lenin an der Macht.

219. Krasnaia Moskva, 54. Rationing, which had been introduced by the Provisional Government, had become class-based: workers in heavy physical labor comprised the top category, followed by workers not in physical labor (this included officials), and lastly non-laboring elements or exploiters, those who lived off the labor of others (i.e., the bourgeoisie), who were small in number but conspicuous in symbol. Individuals connived to raise their designations. Before the civil war was out, the “class ration” would give way to the “labor ration,” or how much labor a recipient had recently performed.

220. Borrero, Hungry Moscow. Potatoes would be the sole important crop over which the government did not declare a monopoly (as of late 1919).

221. Emmons, Time of Troubles, 237 (January 31, 1919), 392 (December 6, 1920).

222. VIII s”ezd RKP (b) [1933], 170.

223. Istoriia grazhdanskoi voiny, IV: 46.

224. Francesco Benvenuti established the depth and breadth of animosity to Trotsky early on, writing, “For his contribution to the creation of the Soviet armed forces, Trotsky was rewarded with the distrust and hatred of a great many of his party comrades.” Benvenuti, Bolsheviks and the Red Army, 216.

225. Schapiro, Commmunist Party (citing Lenin, Sochineniia, XXV: 112).

226. The political bureau was already functioning by December 1918; the organizational bureau dated from January 1919. Golikov, Vladimir Il’ich Lenin, VI: 284, 319, 328, 435, 577, 588.

227. Sverdlov’s safe was not opened until 1935, and duly reported to Stalin: “Kuda khotel bezhat’ Sverdlov?,” Istochnik, 1994, no. 1: 3–4. Rumors in 1919 circulated that the Bolsheviks were transferring money and gold abroad, as if readying their possible flight. Stasova, Stranitsy zhizni i bor’by, 103. Boris Bazhanov claimed that during the civil war, confiscated gems were hoarded just in case, and that Klavdiya Novgorodtseva, Sverdlov’s widow, was one of those entrusted with the jewels, locked in a desk, including large diamonds evidently taken from the State Diamond Fund. Bazhanov, Vospominaniia [1990], 96.

228. Carsten, Revolution in Central Europe.

229. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg.

230. Luxemburg, Die russische Revolution, 109.

231. Weitz, Creating German Communism, 93.

232. Pravda, April 22, 1930.

233. Mitchell, Revolution in Bavaria; Waite, Vanguard of Nazism.

234. Weitz, Weimar Germany; Mawdsley, Russian Civil War, 15.

235. Hoover Institution Archives, Thomas T. C. Gregory Papers, box 2: Hungarian Political Dossier, vol. 1: Alonzo Taylor to Herbert Hoover, March 26, 1919.

236. Degras, The Communist International, I: 52.

237. Kun telegrams of February 2 and April 19, 1919: RGASPI, f. 17, op. 109, d. 46, l. 1–2; Trotsky’s message to Kh. G. Rakovski, N. I. Podvoiski, and V. A. Antonov-Ovseenko: RGASPI, f. 325, op. 1, d. 404, l. 86 (April 18, 1919); Lenin’s telegram to S. I. Aralov and J. Vacietis: l. 92 (April 21, 1919); telegram of J. Vacietis and S. I. Aralov to V. A. Antonov-Ovseenko, op. 109, d. 46, l. 3–5 (April 23, 1919).

238. Mitchell, 1919: Red Mirage, 221 (quoting Manchester Guardian correspondent, no citation).

239. Tokés, Béla Kun; Janos and Slottman, Revolution in Perspective.

240. Bortnevskii, “White Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence”; Kenez, Civil War in South Russia, I: 65–78; Holquist, “Anti-Soviet Svodki.”

241. Bortnevskii, “White Administration,” 360 (citing N. M. Melnikov, “Pochemu belye na Iuge Rossiin e pobedili krasnykh?,” 29, in N. M. Melnikov Collection, Bakhmetev Archives, Columbia University).

242. Mawdsley, Russian Civil War, 275–81.

243. Baron, The Russian Jew, 219.

244. Quotation and statistics in Budnitskii, Rossiiskie evrei mezhdu krasnymi, 275–6. Antisemitism cut both ways, attracting (especially in Ukraine) and repulsing followers. Kenez, “The Ideology of the White Movement,” 83.

245. Kenez, Civil War in South Russia, I: 281–4; Filat’ev, Katastrofa Belogo dvizheniia, 144.

246. Exchanging messages between Denikin and Kolchak could take up to one month. Denikin, Ocherki russkoi smuty, V: 85–90.

247. Kenez, Civil War in South Russia, II: xiii. Former tsarist diplomats still resident in Allied capitals—Sergei Sazonov (Paris), Boris Bakhmeteff (Washington), Vasily Maklakov (London)—transferred funds from the Provisional Government’s old accounts to the White armies, even as the diplomats viewed the anti-Bolsheviks as incompetent.

248. Erickson, Soviet High Command, 59–63.

249. Kenez, Civil War in South Russia, I: 90.

250. See also Smilga’s telegrams to Lenin and Trotsky in October 1919 on saving the Tsaritsyn front: RGASPI, f. 17, op. 109, d. 3, l. 48–50.

251. Lincoln, Red Victory, 217 (citing “Rech’ generala Denikina v Tsaritsyne, 20 iiunia 1919 g.,” Bakhmeteff Archive, Denikin Collection, box 20); Denikin, Ocherki russkoi smuty, V: 108–9; Piontkowski, Grazhdanskaia voina v Rossii, 515–6. The Whites refused to recognize the Bolshevik-decreed change to the Gregorian calendar and remained thirteen days behind.

252. Suvenirov, Tragediiv, RKKA 1937–1938, Medvedev, Oni okruzhali Stalina, 229–30; Rapoport and Geller, Izmena rodine, 385.

253. Trotskii, Sochineniia, VIII: 272–81.

254. Trotsky, My Life, 359.

255. Argenbright, “Documents from Trotsky’s Train,” which includes Trotsky’s farewell letter to the staff of his train (July 15, 1924).

256. Trotsky, My Life, 411–22 (esp. 413); Volkogonov, Trotsky, 164 (citing RGVA, f. 33987, op. 1, d. 25, l. 16–44). Many of the crew were Latvians and headed by Rudolf Peterson. Eventually, Trotsky’s train had to be divided in two.

257. Tarkhova, “Trotsky’s Train,” 27–40.

258. Lunacharsky, Revolutionary Silhouettes, 68.

259. Argenbright, “Honour Among Communists,” 50–1.

260. Vospominaniia o Vladimire Il’iche Lenine [1979], III: 446 (K. Danilevsky).

261. Benvenuti, Bolsheviks and the Red Army, 123–8. Trotsky had written urgently to Lenin to remove Antonov, Podvoisky, and Bubnov from overseeing military engagements in Ukraine on May 17, 1919. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 109, d. 12, l. 17 (sent via Sklyansky for Lenin).

262. Meijer, Trotsky Papers, I: 578–80 (minutes of the July 3 plenum).

263. Sochineniia, IV: 273; Kornatovskii, Stalin—rukovoditel' oborony Petrograda; Kornatovskii, Razgrom kontrrevoliutsionnykh zagovorov. Stalin had wanted the plenum immediately in June. Naida, O nekotorykh voprosakh, 183–5. Over Petrograd, Stalin clashed again with Alexei Okulov, and Lenin recalled Okulov for a second time (the first having been over Tsaritsyn). Volkogonov, Triumf i tragediia, I/i: 94–5.

264. Erickson, Soviet High Command, 63. See also the memoirs of the errant brief replacement, Samoilo, Dve zhizni, 250ff.

265. Trotsky, Stalin, 313–4. The pursuit of Kolchak into the Urals would have the unexpected bonus of expanding Red ranks with Urals factory workers.

266. Close Trotsky supporters removed were Ivan Smirnov and Arkady Rosengoltz; another Trotsky man, Fyodor Raskolnikov, had already been removed in May 1919. Others taken off included Konstantin Mekhonoshin, Semyon Aralov, Nikolai Podvoisky, Konstantin Yurenev, Alexei Okulov. Stalin was returned May 18, 1920 (through April 1, 1922). Bonch-Bruevich’s account of the expanded session of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic is largely fanciful. Bonch-Bruevich, Vsia vlast’ sovetam, 351–2. Bonch-Bruevich and Vacietis had bad blood (ibid., 334–5).

267. Meijer, Trotsky Papers, I: 590–3; Trotsky, My Life, 453.

268. Kamenev’s command of the eastern front was assumed by Mikhail Frunze.

269. Izvestiia, July 8 and 10, 1919; Trotsky, My Life, 398, 452.

270. There are indications Trotsky refused to continue in his work as head of the military, and had to be begged to do so. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 705 (September 8, 1927, politburo stenogram).

271. The information could hardly have been the surprise Trotsky asserts it was. Trotsky, My Life, 448–9.

272. PSS, XXXVII: 525–7; Bubnov, Grazhdanskaia voina, I: 246–9.

273. Deutscher, Prophet Armed, 413.

274. Benvenuti, Bolsheviks and the Red Army, 143–61, 216–7.

275. Gorky, Lenine et la paysan russe, 95–6. This passage disappeared from Soviet republications of Gorky’s work.

276. In the spring of 1919, Lenin had disparaged the tsarist officers (“the old command staff was made up mainly of the spoiled and depraved sons of capitalists”) and contemplated making a party official, Mikhail Lashevich, military commander in chief, but gave in to Trotsky’s demand for a real military specialist; still, now Lenin supported Sergei Kamenev, with whom Trotsky had clashed. Mawdsley, Russian Civil War, 178–9.

277. Stalin would soon cover up his earlier opposition. Stalin, “Novyi pokhod Antanty na Rossiiu,” Pravda, May 26, 1920, in Sochineniia, IV: 275–7. Stalinist historiography would use Trotsky’s theory of hospitable versus inhospitable terrain, without mentioning Trotsky, to mitigate the embarrassment that Tsaritsyn had fallen. Genkina, Tsaritsyn v 1918.

278. Nash vek, July 10, 1918: 4.

279. Williams, The Russian Revolution, 63.

280. He added that “in spite of my special rations as a Government official, I would have died of hunger without the sordid manipulations of the black market, where we traded the petty possessions we had brought in from France.” Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, 70–1, 79.

281. Deutscher, Prophet Armed, 442–3.

282. Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, 93–5.

283. Zinov’ev, Bor’ba za Petrograd, 52–3. Deutscher, Prophet Armed, 445. In 1925 Lashevich became deputy commissar for the army and navy. That year, he would side with Zinoviev and, in 1926, with the United opposition (Zinov’ev and Trotsky); Stalin sent him to Harbin as representative of the Soviet-controlled Chinese Eastern Railroad (1926–8). He was expelled at the 15th Party Congress in 1927. He died the next year in Harbin, China, under mysterious circumstances.

284. Yudenich would die in quiet exile on the French Riviera in 1933. Rutych, Belyi front generala Iudenicha.

285. Trotskii, Sochineniia, XVII/ii: 196–7.

286. Kakurin, Kak srazhalas’, II: 242–5, 306.

287. Trotsky, My Life, 432–3; Trotskii, Sochineniia, XVII/ii: 310. Trotsky is the only source for the November 1919 Order of the Red Banner episode; his civil war account stands up everywhere it can be confirmed by other documents.

288. Kvakin, Okrest Kolchaka, 175–6.

289. New York Times, September 30, 1919.

290. Budnitskii, Den’gi russkoi emigratsii.

291. Litvin, Krasnyi i belyi terror, 55–6; Holquist, “State Violence,” 19–45 (at 27, citing Kvashonkin, Bol’shevistskoe rukovodstvo, 150).

292. Krivosheev, Grif sekretnosti sniat, 54.

293. “We took too long over every battle, every war, every campaign,” Trotsky conceded. Trotskii, “Rech’” [November 2, 1921], in Kak vooruzhalas’ revoliutsiia, III/i: 57–71 (at 60).

294. The Whites read intercepts of Red wireless communications yet still lost; each side maintained spies in the other camp, but each had difficulty identifying which, if any, were not double agents.

295. Already in September 1918, Trotsky had argued that because a new and potentially long war was again on the horizon, the Bolsheviks had to plan for equipping the army, restoring all existing military factories to production, and mobilizing society for military needs. (RGASPI, f. 17, op. 109, d. 6, l. 10.) Sometimes locals managed to restore some production. Sokolov, Ot voenproma k VPK, 8–28.

296. Manikovskii, Boevoe snabzhenie russkoi armii [1930], II: 332–5.

297. Mawdsley, Russian Civil War, 184–5.

298. Even with tsarist stockpiles, the Reds were hard-pressed to mount operations. Some tsarist stockpiles were said to be still serving the Reds in 1928: A. Volpe, in Bubnov, Grazhdanskaia voina, II: 373.

299. Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, 89–90.

300. Mel’gunov, Tragediia Admirala Kolchaka, III/i: 69–70; Mawdsley, Russian Civil War, 214. Pipes deems the White burden “insuperable.” Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, 10.

301. Kakurin, Kak srazahals’, I: 135.

302. Von Hagen, Soldiers in the Proletarian Dictatorship, 69–79; Schapiro, “The Birth of the Red Army,” 24–32.

303. Gaponenko and Kabuzan, “Materialy sel’sko-khoziastvennykh perepisei 1916–1917 gg,” 102-3.

304. The Bolsheviks, for their part, did not send enough troops to win civil wars in the Baltic states or Finland, but the fact that they did send troops damaged the defense of the Red heartland. Mawdsley, Russian Civil War, 123.

305. Chamberlin, Russian Revolution, II: 268–9; Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, 119–21.

306. Leninskii sbornik, XXXVII: 167.

307. Pravda, September 23, 1919; Izvestiia, September 27, October 5, and October 12, 1919. See also Dzerzhinskii, Izbrannye proizvedennye, I: 197–8 (speech of September 24, 1919, to Moscow party committee); and Fomin, Zapiski starogo chekista, 108.

308. Makintsian, Krasnaia kniga VChK, 315–6; Iz istorii VChK, 325–6, 349–54 (internal Cheka report, December 28, 1919).

309. Once, sometime after December 11, 1919, Lenin, unannounced, turned up at the offices of Supreme Commander Sergei Kamenev at 2:00 in the morning, asked some questions, spoke on the direct wire with Kharkov, and returned to the Kremlin.

310. In the hagiography, not one major decision of the civil war was taken without Lenin. Aralov, Lenin i Krasnaia Armiia, 32.

311. Volkogonov judged Trotsky a military “dilettante.” Volkogonov, Trotskii, I: 254. Mikhail Bonch-Bruevich, a former tsarist officer close to Trotsky, judged his boss to be lacking interest in the technical side of military art but an effective high-profile spokesman for the military. Bonch-Bruevich, Vsia vlast' sovetam, 269–71.

312. The contrast between Trotsky and Kolchak could not have been starker. “He is bursting to be with the people, with the troops,” one eyewitness remarked of Kolchak, “but when he faces them, has no idea what to say.” Guins, Sibir’, II: 367.

313. Trotsky, “Hatred of Stalin?,” in Writings of Leon Trotsky, 67–71; Medvedev, Let History Judge, 64–5 (translator’s note, 72).

314. Trotsky, Stalin, 243, 270 (quoting Leonid Serebryakov).

315. Kenez, Civil War in South Russia, II: 61. E. H. Carr’s harsh judgment still stands: “It is no longer possible for any sane man to regard the campaigns of Kolchak, Yudenich, Denikin and Wrangel otherwise than as tragic blunders of colossal dimensions. They were monuments of folly in conception and of incompetence in execution; they cost, directly and indirectly, hundreds of thousands of lives; and except in so far as they may have increased the bitterness of the Soviet rulers against the ‘White’ Russians and the Allies who half-heartedly supported them, they did not deflect the course of history by a single hair’s breadth.” If Carr had only been as clear-eyed on Bolshevism. Davies, “Carr’s Changing Views,” 95.

316. Soviet officials who returned from China saw parallels. The Karakhan Declaration (July 25, 1919) characterized Kolchak as a “counterrevolutionary tyrant who depends upon military might and foreign capital for the strengthening of his own position in Russia.” Waldron, “The Warlord.” See also Sanborn, “Genesis of Russian Warlordism.”

317. An embittered Alexeyev had told the British agent Bruce Lockhart in 1918 that he would sooner cooperate with Lenin and Trotsky than with Kerensky. Lockhart, British Agent, 288. Throughout the civil war, Kerensky, whose Soviet police code name was “Clown,” hid inside Russia or neighboring Finland. He would depart for good in 1922 for Berlin, and then for Paris.

318. Mawdsley, Russian Civil War, 99.

319. Pereira, White Siberia.

320. Budberg, “Dnevnik,” 269; Mawdsley, Russian Civil War, 155.

321. Denikin, Ocherki russkoi smuty, III: 262–3, IV: 45–8.

322. Mawdsley, Russian Civil War, 215 (citing “Final Report of the British Military Mission, South Russia” [March 1920], PRO, WO 33/971: 29).

323. Ushakov, Belyi iug; Slashchov-Krymskii, Belyi Krym, 185–93. Wrangel’s civilian ministers included Pyotr Struve and Alexander Krivoshein, the head of agriculture and land resettlement who had accompanied Stolypin to Siberia in 1910.

324. Lazarski, “White Propaganda Efforts.” Boris Bakhmeteff, the Provisional Government’s ambassador to the United States, who was still in the embassy in Washington, wrote to Vasily Maklakov on January 19, 1920, that the anti-Bolshevik movements failed because they lacked a compelling counter-ideology. Bakhmeteff yearned for a “platform of the national-democratic revival of Russia” based upon private property, genuine sovereignty of the people, democracy, patriotism, and a decentralized political system. Such was the classical liberal view of the failure. Budnitskii, “Sovershenno lichno i doveritel’no!,” I: 160–5 (at 161).

325. Denikin, Ocherki russkoi smuty, V: 118.

326. Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, 14 (citing Russkaia mysl’, May–July 1921: 214). “The country needed victory at any costs, and every effort had to be exerted to secure it,” Kolchak told a Bolshevik inquisition right before his death. “I had absolutely no political objectives.” Of course, military victory could only be achieved with successful politics. Varneck, Testimony of Kolchak, 187. Similarly, Denikin later wrote that he had tried “to fence off ourselves and the army from the raging, struggling political passsions and to base ideology on simple, incontestable national symbols. This proved extraordinarily difficult. ‘Politics’ burst into our work.” Denikin, Ocherki russkoi smuty, III: 129.

327. Notes for a speech to the Tenth Congress of Soviets, scheduled for December 1922: Getzler, “Lenin’s Conception”; “Za derev’iami ne vidiat lesa,” PSS, XXXIV: 79–85 (at 80); “Tretii vserossiiskii s”ezd sovetov rabochikh, soldatskikh i krest’ianskikh deputatov,” PSS, XXXV: 261–79 (at 268); “I vserossiiskii s”ezd po vneshkol’nomy obrazovaniiu,” PSSS, XXXVIII: 329–72 (at 339); “Konspekt rechi na X vserossiiskom s”ezde sovetov,” PSS, XLV: at 440–1 (440). Usually, scholars quote Lenin complaining about the “bureaucratic deformities” and stifling qualities of the apparatus that socialism conjured into being, but such complaints would emerge mostly during his period of illness and incapacitation. During the civil war, Lenin’s views on state building were militant. “It was a great and exalting work,” he rhapsodized about the civil-war administrative machinery. PSS, XLIV: 106.

328. Keep, Russian Revolution, ix–x, 471.

329. McAuley, Bread and Justice.

330. Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism, 162.

331. Thomas F. Remington, “The Rationalization of State Kontrol,” in Koenker, Party, State, and Society, 210–31.

332. MChK, 247; Bazhanov, Bazhanov and the Damnation of Stalin, 136.

333. Krasnaia Moskva, 631.

334. Trotsky, My Life, 477.

335. The Menshevik Martov, in a private letter, pointedly used the old-regime social vocabulary, noting that “as far as the ‘commissars’ estate’ [soslovie] is concerned, its superior standard of living is almost out in the open.” Brovkin, Dear Comrades, 210 (Martov to David Schupack, June 20, 1920). Lenin was sensitive to perceptions; in a letter to Molotov (May 4, 1921), Lenin, noting that he had discovered a resort (dom otdykha) expressly in the name of the Council of People’s Commissars, wrote, “I fear that this may cause complaints.” The facility was renamed Recreation Building no. 9, and was supposed to be shared with the agriculture commissariat. RGASPI, f. 2, op. 1, d. 18552, l. 1–2.

336. Similarly, Adolf Joffe wrote confidentially to Trotsky in May 1920, “There is enormous inequality, and one’s material position largely depends on one’s post in the party; you’ll agree that this is a dangerous situation.” Joffe added of Communists in power that “the old party spirit has disappeared, the spirit of revolutionary selflessness and comradely devotion!” The Tula Bolshevik and Joffe quoted in Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 695–6 (citing GARF, f. 5972, op. 1, d. 245, l. 397–8; RGVA, f. 33987, op. 3, d. 46, l. 143).

337. PSS, XVL: 14–15; Rykov, Izbrannye proizvedenniia, 10; Iroshnikov, “K voprosu o slome burzhuaznoi gosudarstvennoi mashiny v Rossii.”

338. Annenkov, Dnevnikh moikh vstrech, II: 120–8; Fulop-Miller, Mind and Face of Bolshevism [1928], 136. See also Piotrovskii, Za sovetskii teatr!; Nikulin, Zapiski sputnika; Evreinoff, Histoire du Theâtre Russe; Petrov, 50 i 500. Sponsored by the Political Administration of the Red Army, the show was choreographed by a non-Bolshevik, Nikolai Yevreinov, who lost his voice screaming instructions, but was awarded a fur coat (fox); others got tobacco or frozen apples. The battleship Aurora, brought in specially from Kronstadt, was supposed to give off three shots, after which the orchestra would play the victory music, but even though technicians kept pressing the button to halt the cannonade, it would not stop firing. Yevreinov burst out laughing.

339. Trotsky, Stalin, 279.

340. In late 1919, Ivar Smilga, at a meeting of political workers in the army, stated: “We must now consider how to abolish the institution of the commissar.” His proposal did not carry. Pravda, December 13, 1919; Benvenuti, Bolsheviks and the Red Army, 155–7.

341. Molotov, Na shestoi god.

342. Tucker came close to the mark when he wrote that “Whereas Trotsky emerged from the [civil] war with much glory and little power, Stalin emerged with little glory and much power,” but Tucker underestimated the negativity toward Trotsky. Tucker also applied a perhaps false standard: “Although Stalin acquired valuable military experience in the civil war, he did not emerge from it with a party reputation for having a first-class military mind.” But who did? Lenin? Zinoviev? Kamenev? Even Trotsky? Tucker did, though, underscore that Stalin had “recommended himself by his wartime service as a forceful leader with an ability to size up complex situations quickly and take decisive action.” Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary, 206, 209.

343. “Tomorrow,” he told the new lower-order commanders in the fall of 1918, “you will be at the head of platoons, companies, battalions, regiments, and you will be recognized as real exemplars of a newly forming army.” Trotskii, “Unter-ofitsery” [fall 1918], in Kak vooruzhalas’ revoliutsiia, I: 176–80.

344. Trotsky, Stalin, 279. Other estimates of the continuing weight of military specialists are higher. Bubnov, Grazhdanskaia voina, II: 95; Erickson, Soviet High Command, 33.

345. MacNeal understood that Stalin’s “contribution to the Red victory was second only to Trotsky’s.” McNeal, Stalin, 50. In the civil war, Moshe Lewin argued, “Stalin learned the secret of victorious politics in the most daunting situations: State coercion as the secret of success; mobilization, propaganda, military might, and terror were the ingredients of power.” Of course, nearly every Bolshevik had learned this lesson, some already from the Great War. Moshe Lewin, “Stalin in the Mirror of the Other,” in Lewin, Russia/USSR/Russia, 214.

346. Valentinov, Novaia ekonomicheskaia politika, 88.

347. America’s Red Cross chief in Russia supposedly called Trotsky “the greatest Jew since Christ.” Lockhart, Memoirs of a British Agent, 225.

348. Volkogonov, Trotsky, 23 (citing RGVA, f. 33987, op. 1, d. 21, l. 35–41). The ethnic Korean, Nigay, advised “to create a mighty Jewish army and arm it to the teeth.”

349. Kartevskii, Iazyk, voina i revoliutsiia, 36.

350. RGVA, f. 33987, op. 3, d. 13s, Hoover Institution Archives, Volkogonov papers, container 19 (Otto von Kurfell). The Nazi Alfred Rosenberg wrote in a pamphlet that “from the day of its inception, Bolshevism was a Jewish enterprise,” and that “the proletarian dictatorship over the dazed, ruined, half-starved people was devised in the Jewish lodges of London, New York, and Berlin.” Rosenberg, Der jüdische Bolschewismus. See also Bazhanov, Bazhanov and the Damnation of Stalin, 144.

351. Valentinov, Novaia ekonomicheskaia politika, 88.

352. Carr, Socialism in One Country, I: 157.

353. The Ulyanov family’s Jewish ancestry would be discovered by Lenin’s sister Anna Ulyanova (1864–1935), who conveyed it to Stalin in a 1932 letter stressing how beneficial it would be to reveal Lenin’s one-quarter Jewish ancestry. Stalin forbid public mention. Volkogonov, Lenin: Life and Legacy, 9. In 1972, all extant documents on Lenin’s origins were transferred to the “special file.”

354. Volkogonov, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy, 44–5.

355. Bortnevskii and Varustina, “A. A. Borman,” I: 115–49 at 119. Borman escaped via Finland. (The Chekists, he later boasted, “mostly were involved in arrests of innocent people, but their real enemies traveled in commissar’s trains, occupied important positions in people’s commissariats and military staffs.”) Bortnevskii, “White Intelligence and Counter-intelligence,” 16; GARF, f. 5881, op. 1, d. 81 (Borman, “V stane vragov: vospominaniia o Sovetskoi strane v period 1918 goda”), l. 42.

CHAPTER 9: VOYAGES OF DISCOVERY

1. Gor’kii, “V. I. Lenin” [1924, 1930], in Sobranie sochinenii, XVII: 5–46, reprinted in Bialika, V. I. Lenin i A. M. Gor’kii, 238–78 (at 262). Gorky lived on Capri from 1907 to 1913; Lenin stayed with him in 1908. Lenin also visited Gorky in 1910.

2. X s”ezd [1933], 573–83; Vsesoiuznaia Kommunisticheskaia Partiia (b) v rezoliutsiiakh [5th ed.], I: 393.

3. Stolypin had sketched some ideas for a state reorganization, in May 1911, four months before his assassination, according to a financial expert in local self-government with whom he periodically consulted. The sketch has not been found in the state archives and the consultant’s notes of the purported conversation have not been preserved; all we have is the consultant’s memoir. Stolypin, in this account, envisioned expansion and strengthening of self-government in localities and expansion and reorganization of the central ministerial system, including a number of new ministries: labor, social security, natural resources, religion, and, most unusually, nationalities. On the latter, Stolypin is said to have envisioned that “all persons, residing in Russia, independent of their nationality and religious beliefs, should be completely equal citizens,” and that the new ministry of nationalities “should create the conditions so that the cultural and religious desires of each nation should, when possible, be fully satisfied.” But he also thought some minorities, such as Poles and Ukrainians, with co-ethnics in neighboring states, posed a special threat. Therefore, the new ministry “must not ignore all the external and internal enemies who strive to dismember Russia. Any kind of Government vacillation and hesitation toward those nationalities who fall under the influence of propaganda by Russia’s enemies might easily create complications in the State.” Aleksandr V. Zen’kovskii, Pravda o Stolypine (New York: Vseslovianskoe, 1956), 79–81, translated, inadequately, as Stolypin, Russia’s Last Great Reformer (Princeton, N.J.: Kingston Press, 1986), 33–4. Zenkovsky worked as the chief financial expert in the Kiev Zemstvo from 1903 through 1919.

4. PSS, XXXVII: 153; Debo, Revolution and Survival, 408 (quoting Lenin at the 6th All-Russia Congress of Soviets).

5. Carr, Bolshevik Revolution, III: 231–7.

6. White, Siberian Intervention; Teruyuki, Shibberia shuppei; Stephen, Russian Far East, 132, 142–5; Coox, Nomonhan, 9.

7. “The civil war between the Reds and Whites was always conducted by relatively insignificant minorities, against the astounding passivity of the population,” observed Pyotr Struve, an assessment Pipes accepts: Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, 136–8 (citing Russkaia mysl, May–June 1921: 211). By contrast, Figes asserts that “as long as the peasants feared the whites, they would go along, feet dragging, with the demands of the Soviet regime . . . Thus the Bolshevik dictatorship climbed up on the back of the peasant revolution.” Figes, Peasant Russia, 354.

8. Adelman, “Development of the Soviet Party Apparat,” 97.

9. Laruelle, L’ideologie eurasiste russe; Widerkehr, “Forging a Concept.”

10. Iskhod k vostoku, vii.

11. Riasanovsky, “The Emergence of Eurasianism,” 57. See also Glebov, “The Challenge of the Modern.” The politics of the self-proclaimed Eurasianists varied—from national Bolshevism (Petr Savitskii) to Trotskyism (Petr Suvchinskii) to anti-Sovietism (Prince Nikolai Trubetskoi).

12. McNeal, “Stalin’s Conception.” Stalin on Russianism: Carr, Bolshevik Revolution, I: 102.

13. “Soviet power must become as dear and close to the masses of the borderlands of Russia,” he wrote in Pravda (October 10, 1920). “But in order to make it dear, Soviet power must above all be understandable to them. Therefore it is necessary that soviet organs in the borderlands, the court, administration, organs of the economy, organs of direct rule (and organs of the party) consist when possible of local people, who know the daily life, mores, customs, and language of the local population.” “Politika sovetskoi vlasti po natsional’nomu voprosu v Rossii,” in Sochineniia, IV: 351–63 (at 358–60).

14. Rieber, “Stalin: Man of the Borderlands.”

15. Stalin’s writings on the colonial and national questions predate Lenin’s: Boersner, The Bolshevik, 32–58.

16. Gellner, Encounters with Nationalism, 13, quoting “Draft of an Article on Friedrich List’s Book: Das nationalische System der politischen Ökonomie” (1845).

17. Smith, Bolsheviks and the National Question, 9.

18. Luxemburg wrote a series of six articles for her Krakow-based journal, Przeglad socialdemokratyczny, five of which are available in translation at: http://www.marxists.org/archive/lux emburg/1909/national-question/.

19. Bauer, “The Nationalities Question.”

20. Rieber, “Stalin, Man of the Borderlands,” n. 113. The Georgian Pilipe Makharadze had advanced a similar critique of the Austrian position on cultural autonomy. Jones, Socialism, 228. Stalin’s work recalled that of the Dutch social democrat Anton Pannekoek. Van Ree, Political Thought of Joseph Stalin, 67.

21. Stalin’s article existed in draft before he arrived in Krakow in early January 1913, where he stayed briefly; he also stayed only briefly in Vienna. Van Ree, “Stalin and the National Question,” at 220–1. In private letters Lenin described Stalin’s 1913 essay as “very good,” but did not see fit to mention it in his own. PSS, XLVIII: 169 (February 25, 1913), 173 (March 29, 1913). Another of Lenin’s writings on the national question one year later also omitted any reference to Stalin or his work: “O prave natsii na samoopredeleniia,” in Lenin, Sochineniia, 2nd and 3rd eds., XVII: 427–74. Following publication of Stalin’s essay, Lenin wrote to Stepan Shaumyan, who had published a long article in 1906 attacking federalism in the South Caucasus: “Do not forget also to seek out Caucasian comrades who can write articles on the national question in the Caucasus. . . . A popular brochure on the national question is very necessary.” It is hard to imagine what Stalin’s essay was if not a “popular brochure.” Lenin, Sochineniia, XVII: 91.

22. V. I. Lenin, “O natsional’noi gordosti Velikorossov,” Sotsial-Demokrat, December 2, 1924, PSS, XXVI: 106–10. See also Smith, Bolsheviks and the National Question, 7–28. Over the years, many changes were made to the corpus of Lenin’s writings on the nation, especially those of the years 1915–18; sometimes it is necessary to use earlier editions of his works, rather than the PSS.

23. Trotskii, Literatura i revoliutsiia, 68.

24. PSS, XXVI: 109.

25. “Rossiiskaia Sotsial-demokraticheskaia partiia i ee blizhaishie zadachi,” Sochineniia, I: 11–31 (at 11, 22).

26. Sochineniia, I: 32–55; RGASPI, f. 558, op. 1, d. 7 (drafts).

27. Van Ree, “Stalin and the National Question,” 218 (citing RGASPI, f. 71, op. 10, d. 183, l. 106–7).

28. Smith, “Stalin as Commissar for Nationality Affairs,” 54. On occasion, Stalin paid lip service to Great Russian chauvinism. But more typically, in a speech to Turkic Communists on January 1, 1921, he called Great Russians the ruling nation for whom nationalism was beside the point. Turkic Communists, however, “sons of oppressed peoples,” had to be vigilant against their nationalist sentiments, “which serves as a break against communism’s crystallization in the East of our country.” Pravda, January 12, 1921, in Sochineniia, V: 1–3.

29. Because Lenin’s many pre-October writings, as well as Lev Karakhan’s description of Bolshevik plans to John Reed, had made no mention of a special agency for nationalities, this has been deemed a mystery rather than an obvious reaction to events by people who did not fully understand them. Blank, Sorcerer as Apprentice; Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary, 181. See also Rigby, Lenin’s Government, 5; Reed, Ten Days [1960], 77.

30. Blank, Sorcerer as Apprentice, 13–6; Pestkovskii, “ob ktiabr’skie dniakh v Pitere,” 101–5; Pestkovskii, “Vospominaniia o rabote v Narkmonatse,” 124–31; Istoriia natsional’no-gosudarstvennogo stroitel’stva, I: 48; Manusevich, “Pol’skie sotsial-demokraticheskie,” 131–33.

31. Pravda, May 19, 1918; Sochineniia, IV: 88 ff.

32. Carr, Bolshevik Revolution, I: 135–6.

33. Carr, Bolshevik Revolution, I: 137.

34. “Protiv federalizma,” Pravda, March 28, 1917, in Sochineniia, III: 23–8 (at 27).

35. Sochineniia, IV: 32–3, IV: 66–73, 79–80; Gurvich, Istoriia sovetskoi konstitutsii, 147–8 (Stalin’s draft).

36. Gurvich, Istoriia sovetskoi konstitutsii, 33, 146–7 (Stalin’s theses).

37. Hardy, “The Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic”; Chistiakov, “Obrazovanie Rossiiskoi Federatsii, 1917-1920 gg.”; Chistiakov, “Formirovanie RSFSR kak federativnoe gosudarstvo.”

38. Carr, Bolshevik Revolution, I: 124–50, esp. 139.

39. “Odna iz ocherednikh zadach,” Pravda, April 9, 1918, in Sochineniia, IV: 74–8. “See also Organizatsiia Rossiiskoi federativnoi respubliki,” Pravda, April 3 and April 4, 1918, in Sochineniia, IV: 66–73. Stalin, Works, IV: 372.

40. This point was made by Isabelle Kreindler, who, wrongly, attributed its discovery and realization to Lenin: Kreindler, “A Neglected Source of Lenin’s Nationality Policy.”

41. VIII s”ezd RKP (b) [1959], 46–48, 77–81. See also Nenarokov, K edinstvu ravnykh, 91–2 (Latsis), 92–3 (Joffe); and Slezkine, “USSR as a Communal Apartment,” 420–1. Before 1917 many liberals, too, had regarded the idea of a federation as a utopia. See the arguments of Baron B. E. Nolde, the offspring of a Baltic German father and Ukrainian mother who from 1907 to 1917 helped formulate and implement state policy: Holquist, “Dilemmas,” 241–73. Stalin sought a middle ground, reiterating his call to have nation serve class, arguing that the slogan of national self-determination “should be subordinated to the principles of socialism.” Sochineniia, IV: 158.

42. VIII s”ezd RKP (b) [1959], 55.

43. VIII s”ezd RKP (b) [1919], 343–4.

44. VIII s”ezd RKP (b) [1959], 425; Izvestiia TsK KPSS, 1989, no. 8: 177.

45. Davies, White Eagle, Red Star, 23.

46. De Gaulle, Lettres, II: 27–8 (May 23, 1919, to his mother).

47. The Bolshevik “Western Front,” created in late 1918, counted fewer than 10,000 soldiers. Kakurin, Russko-pol'skaia kampaniia 1918–1920, 14. Around the same time a German general staged a coup in Latvia; Finland declared war with Russia over Karelia.

48. Debo, Survival and Consolidation, 191–212 (esp. 202), 191 (citing DBFP, I: 694, 696–8, 689–91, 710–5); Davies, White Eagle, Red Star, 91; Dokumenty i materialy po istorii sovetsko-pol’skikh otnoshenii, II: 339–43.

49. Carley, “The Politics of Anti-Bolshevism.”

50. Debo, Survival and Consolidation, 191–212 (esp. 202), 404, 406. See also Korbel, Poland Between East and West, 79–93.

51. Borzecki, Soviet-Polish Treaty of 1921; Wandycz, Soviet-Polish Relations. See also D’Abernon, The Eighteenth Decisive Battle of the World. Polish troops fought six concurrent wars between 1918 and 1922: Pogonowski, Historical Atlas of Poland.

52. The Baedeker guide to the Russian empire (1914) stated that “the Western Provinces (the former kingdom of Poland), the Baltic Provinces, and Finland have all preserved their national idiosyncracies,” adding that “Russia proper begins at the line drawn from St. Petersburg via Smolensk and Kiev to Bessarabia.” This view turned out to be prescient. Baedeker, Russia, with Teheran, xv.

53. V. I. Lenin, “Telegramma L. D. Trotskomu,” PSS, LI: 145–6, February 27, 1919; Davies, White Eagle, Red Star, 98. Kostiushko, Pol’sko-Sovetskaia voina, I: 40, 43, 47; Blank, “Soviet Nationality Policy.” On March 17, 1920, a jumble of Freikorps and other paramilitary ruffians led by the conservative monarchist Wolfgang Kapp attempted a putsch in Germany; Lenin telegrammed Stalin to accelerate the mopping up of the Whites in Crimea, “in order to have our hands entirely free, given that civil war in Germany could oblige us to move west to assist the Communists.” Kapp’s putsch failed and to Lenin it looked like a replay of the Kornilov Affair, presaging a decisive shift leftward to revolution. Lenin, V. I. Lenin, 330–1 (March 17, 1920); Adibekov and Shirinia, Politbiuro TsK RKP (b)—VKP (b) i Komintern, 39; PSS, XL: 235–6 (speech to 9th Party Congress, March 29, 1920), XL: 332 (April 29, 1920). See also Balabanoff, Impressions of Lenin, 109–12; and Buber-Neumann, Von Potsdam nach Moskau, 8.

54. Chamberlin, Russian Revolution, II: 301; Wandycz, Soviet-Polish Relations, 94–100; Borzecki, Soviet-Polish Treaty of 1921, 27–9. See also Dziewanowski, Joseph Piłsudski. The Poles were quick to point out in upholding their claims to the borderlands (kresy wschodnie, in Polish) that in the summer of 1918, the Bolsheviks repudiated all imperial Russian treaties, which included those that had legalized the partitions of Poland. Horak, Poland’s International Affair, doc. 223.

55. Reshetar, The Ukrainian Revolution, 301–2; Wandycz, Soviet-Polish Relations, 191–2; Palij, The Ukrainian-Polish Defensive Alliance.

56. Pravda, April 23, 1920. At the Moscow gathering one of the speakers, Mikhail Olminsky [Vitimsky], a long-time worshipper of Lenin, recalled the ill will that Lenin had generated before the revolution. “Lenin was known then (18 years ago) as a person who loved power, strived for dictatorship, rejected the best old leaders of the social democracy movement, criticized everyone and was at war with everyone,” Olminsky noted, before adding that Lenin “was right in promoting the organizing principle of non-democracy and the principle of a military organization.” Velikanova, Making of an Idol, 34 (citing Bukov, Nedorisovannyi portret, 1920). See also Tumarkin, Lenin Lives!, 103.

57. Velikanova, Making of an Idol, 34 (citing Nedorisovannyi portret, 1920).

58. RGASPI, f. 44, op. 1, d. 5, l. 11 (Lenin, political report to the 9th Party Conference).

59. Borzecki, Soviet-Polish Treaty of 1921, 63–8.

60. Trotskii, “Smert’ pol’skoi burzhuazii” [April 29, 1920], in Kak vooruzhalas’ revoliutsiia, II: 91. See also Lenin’s speech, that same day, to the All-Russian congress of glass workers: PSS, XL: 331–2.

61. Trotsky, Stalin, 328. But see also Pravda, May 6, 1920.

62. Stalin, “Novyi pokhod Antanty na Rossiiu,” Pravda, May 25 and May 26, 1920; Sochineniia, IV: 319. For Stalin on Polish nationalism, see also Pravda, March 14, 1923, in Sochineniia, IV: 167.

63. Tiander, Das Erwachen Osteuropas, 137.

64. Zamoyski, Warsaw 1920, 25–6.

65. Budennyi, Proidennyi put’, I: 245.

66. Kuz’min, Krushenie poslednego pokhoda Antanty, 133–5; Yiulenev, Sovetskaia kavaleriia v boiakh za Rodinu, 169–74.

67. Davies, White Eagle, Red Star, 120.

68. Dirketivy glavnogo komandovaniia Krasnoi Armii, 735.

69. Kantor, Voina i mir, 13–36.

70. Rubtsov, Marshaly Stalina, 72–3 (recollections of V. N. Postoronkin, who would join the Whites).

71. One of his recommenders was Avel Yenukidze, secretary of the Soviet’s central executive committee. V. O. Daines, “Mikhail Tukhachesvkii,” Voprosy istorii, 1989, no, 10: day 41; Volkov, Tragediia russkogo ofitserstva, 314.

72. Easter, Reconstructing the State, 98, citing RGASPI, f. 124, op. 1, d. 302, l. 4.

73. Gul’, Krasnye marshaly, 23. Ivan Smirnov led Kolchak’s detstruction in Siberia.

74. PSS, LI: 206–8.

75. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 109, d. 74, l. 28.

76. Zamoyski, Warsaw 1920, 60.

77. Sochineniia, IV: 336–41; Mikhutina, Pol’sko-Sovetskaia voina, 182–3.

78. Reproduced in the appendices to Skvortsov-Stepanov, S Krasnoi Armiei, 78.

79. Budennyi, Proidennyi put’, II: 168–210.

80. L. D. Trotsky to S. S. Kamenev, copied to E. M. Sklyanskii, Lenin and the Central Committee, July 17, 1920: Krasnov and Daines, Neizvestnyi Trotskii, 307.

81. Radek, Voina pol’skikh belogvardeitsev protiv Sovetskoi Rossii, 17; Karl Radek, “Pol’skii vopros i internatsional,” Kommunisticeskii internatsional, 1990, no. 12: 2173–88; Zetkin, Reminiscences of Lenin (London: Modern Books, 1929), 20 (omitted in subsequent editions); Lerner, Karl Radek, 100–1; Carr, Bolshevik Revolution, III: 321. Retrospectively, Radek covered over the differences and aligned himself with Lenin: “Session of the Zentrale with the Representative of the Executive Committee for Germany, Friday, January 28, 1921,” in Drachkovitch and Lazitch, The Comintern, 285. See also Radek, Vneshniaia politika sovetskoi Rossii, 62.

82. Pravda, July 11, 1920; Sochineniia, IV: 324, 333, 336–41. See also Ullman, Anglo-Soviet Accord, 166.

83. Hooker, “Lord Curzon and the ‘Curzon Line,’” 137.

84. Borzecki, Soviet-Polish Treaty of 1921, 79–82; Wandycz, Soviet-Polish Relations.

85. Meijer, Trotsky Papers, II: 228–31; Trotsky, My Life, 455–7. Lenin sent a phonegram on July 12–13 asking for Stalin’s analysis of the Curzon Note, commenting: “I think this is complete theft for the annexation of Crimea, which is insolently mentioned in the Note. We want a victory to snatch the means of thieving promises.” PSS, LI: 237–8.

86. Babel, 1920 Diary; Babel, Konarmiia.

87. Airapetian, Legendarnyi Gai, 51.

88. Pipes, Unknown Lenin, 85–8. The treaty was signed July 12, 1920: Gerutis, Lithuania, 164–5; Debo, Survival and Consolidation, 222–3.

89. Senn, “Lithuania’s Fight for Independence.”

90. Airapetian, Legendarnyi Gai, 124.

91. Mikhutina, Pol’sko-Sovetskaia voina, 303–5 (AVP RF, f. 04, op. 32, d. 25, pap. 205, l. 30–1).

92. Meijer, Trotsky Papers, II: 228–31; Deutscher, Prophet Armed, 463–7.

93. Izvestiia TsK KPSS, 1991, no. 2: 117; Dokumenty vneshnei politiki, III: 47–53; Mikhutina, Pol’sko-Sovetskaia voina, I: 143, n1, 142–3.

94. PSS, LI: 240. Lenin had telegrammed Unszlicht in Minsk (July 15, 1920), asking if he considered “a soviet seizure of power in Poland probable?” Unszlicht answered ingratiatingly that he “considered a soviet seizure of power in Poland in connection with our troops’ approach to the border utterly probable in the nearest time,” but admitted that he could not be sure when the uprising in Poland could be expected. Mikhutina, Pol’sko-Sovetskaia voina, 173–4; Golikov, Vladimir Il’ich Lenin, IX: 102. Bolshevik propaganda insisted this was not an invasion. “To push westward not with the goal of conquering Poland, Germany, France, but to unite with the Polish, German, French workers—that’s our main goal,” explained the newspaper Red Army Man to the invading Soviet troops. “That is why White Poland must be destroyed, to establish a proletarian Poland, and fly the red colors above Warsaw.” Quoted in Wyszczelski, Varshava 1920, 67.

95. Golubev, Direktivy glavnogo komandovaniia, 643–4.

96. Iz istoriii grazhdanskoi voiny v SSSR, III: 326; Karaeva, Direktivy komandovaniia frontov, III: 225–6.

97. Karaeva, Direktivy komandovaniia frontov, III: documents 260, 227.

98. Borzecki, Soviet-Polish Treaty of 1921, 87 (citing RGASPI, f. 2, op. 1, d. 14673: Kamenev on July 13). Trotsky’s note on Romania: July 17, 1920.

99. Pipes, Unknown Lenin, 90–1; Kvashonkin, Bol’shevistskoe rukovodstvo, 148. See also Volkogonov, Lenin: Life and Legacy, 388 (citing RGASPI, f. 2, op. 1, d. 348); Service, Lenin, III: 120.

100. A census in 1921 gave the city’s population of Jews as 39,602 out of a total of 79,792, or 51.6 percent, which was thought to be a decrease from previous years. Poles came in at 46.6 percent, Germans 1.9 percent, Russians 1.8 percent, and Belorussians 0.8 percent. Bender, Jews of Bialystok, 18.

101. Julian Marchlewski, the head of the imported Revolutionary Committee, could not establish contact with the city’s Polish Communist party (which had 80 members). Mikhutina, Pol’sko-Sovetskaia voina, 190.

102. Lerner, “Attempting a Revolution”; Kostiushko, Pol’skoe biuro TsK RKP (b); Materialy “Osoboi papki” Politbiuro TsK RKP (b); Ulam, Expansion and Coexistence, 109.

103. Skvortsov-Stepanov, S Krasnoi Armiei, 92–5. Skvortsov, an eyewitness who recorded his thoughts in real time, noted indigenous anti-Semitism: “During the German occupation the Jews worked on the railroads. Now the Polish railroad workers of Belostok Junction refuse to take them on” (S Krasnoi Armiei, 29). He failed to mention the Jewish exodus on the eve (and during) the Red presence, the expropriation and looting of Polish businesses and property, and the Cheka’s dissolution of Jewish communal organizations. Bender, Jews of Bialystok, 20 (citing Heschel Farbstein, Invazja Bolszewicka a Zydzi: Zbior dokumentow [Warsaw, 1921], I: 13–5).

104. Davies, “Izaak Babel’s ‘Konarmiya’ Stories,” 847; Golubev, Direktivy glavnogo komandovaniia, 643–4, 649.

105. Zamoyski, Warsaw 1920, 64, 69. See also Putna, K Visle i obratno, 31.

106. Erickson, Soviet High Command [1962], 101.

107. PSS, LI: 248.

108. Iz istorii grazhdanskoi voiny v SSSR, III: 338–9; Karaeva, Direktivy komandovaniia frontov, III: 244–5; Naida, O nekotorykh voprosakh, 224.

109. Mikhutina, Pol’sko-Sovetskaia voina, 196; Iz istorii grazhdanskoi voiny v SSSR, III: 336. Leninskii sbornik, XXXVI: 115–6.

110. Budennyi, Proidennyi put’, II: 281.

111. Redirected to Crimea to fight Wrangel, Yegorov wanted to take Budyonny’s cavalry with him. Budyonny, Voroshilov, and Minin tried to make excuses in a telegram to Trotsky (August 10), pleading to reverse the directive to subordinate themselves to the western front (they cited the danger of exacerbating supply problems). In a conversation over the direct line between Kamenev and Tukhachevsky, the latter held firm: he wanted the First Cavalry Army. Kakurin and Melikov, Voina s belopoliakami, 504–6; Kuz’min, “Ob odnoi ne vypolnenoi direktive Glavkoma,” 62.

112. Golubev, Direktivy glavnogo komandovaniia, 707–8.

113. Tukhachevsky and Kamenev, communicating over the direct line around midnight on August 9–10, disagreed over the location of the bulk of Polish forces: north of the Bug (Tukhachevsky) or south (Kamenev). Golubev, Direktivy glavnogo komandovaniia, 650–2.

114. Brown, “Lenin, Stalin and the Failure.”

115. Golubev, Direktivy glavnogo komandovaniia, 709–10; Karaeva, Direktivy komandovaniia frontov, III: 258–9 (Yegorov-Kamenev conversation over the direct wire, August 18, just after midnight).

116. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary, 205.

117. Trotsky, Stalin, 329. The literature has picked up on this: Seaton, Stalin as Military Commander, 72.

118. Budennyi, Priodennyi put’, II: 204, 294.

119. Egorov, L’vov-Varshava, 97; Naida, O nekotorykh voprosakh, 226. Note that on August 12, Lenin showed he understood, writing to Sklyansky: “Is it not time to direct Smilga that it is necessary to take every adult male without exception (after the harvest) into the army? It is time. Since Budyonny is in the South, it’s necessary to strengthen the North.” Naida, O nekotorykh voprosakh, 228; Golubev, Direktivy glavnogo komandovaniia, 615. Eventually, Yegorov yielded to the supreme commander’s insistence, but Stalin, the commissar, refused to co-sign Yegorov’s order of transfer for the First Cavalry Army, so Budyonny chose to disregard it.

120. Volkogonov, Triumf i tragediia, I/i: 103 (citing RGVA, f. 104, op. 4, d. 484, l. 11).

121. Davies, White Eagle, Red Star, 217; Budennyi, Proidennyi put,’ II: 191–339; Egorov, L’vov-Varshava, 26–7. See Gerasimov painting of 1935, First Cavalry Army, vol. I, between 288–9.

122. Quoted in von Riekhoff, German-Polish Relations, 30.

123. Golubev, Direktivy glavnogo komandovaniia, 655; RGASPI, f. 5, op. 1, d. 2136 (Victor Kopp to Lenin, August 19, 1920); Borzecki, Soviet-Polish Treaty of 1921, 86; Himmer, “Soviet Policy,” 672; Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, 189–90.

124. 217 delegates, 36 countries, 169 eligible to vote: Riddell, Workers of the World, I: 11.

125. PSS, XLI: 219.

126. Kommunisticheskii trud, July 29, 1920; Farbman, Bolshevism in Retreat, 137. For a romantic view on the 2nd Comintern Congress, see Carr, Bolshevik Revolution, III: 196.

127. Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, 177; Degras, Communist International [London], I: 111–13.

128. F. Isserson, “Sud’ba polkovodtsa,” Druzhba naorodov, 1988, no. 5: 184, 187.

129. Golubev, Direktivy glavnogo komandovaniia, 662.

130. PSS, LI: 264.

131. PSS, LI: 266–7; Meijer, Trotsky Papers, II: 260–1.

132. Debo, Survival and Consolidation, 243 (citing Lloyd George Papers, F/203/1/9, F/203/1/10, August 24).

133. Putna, K Visle i obratno, 242. The Polish marshal’s redemption following his colleagues’ refusal of his offer to resign (twice), a Red Army temporary loss of radio contacts at a critical moment of advantage, and Tukhachevsky’s dismissal are as absurd as a copy of Piłsudski’s battle plan recovered from a Polish POW.

134. Borzecki, Soviet-Polish Treaty of 1921, 95.

135. Brown, “Lenin, Stalin and the Failure,” 43; Karaeva, Direktivy komandovaniia frontov, IV: 180–2; Meijer, Trotsky Papers, II: 240; Melikov, Srazhenie na Visle, 125–7. “The catastrophe on the front was prepared long ago,” one commander reported to Trotsky. “In this operation [Warsaw] the Polish forces exceeded ours by a factor of more than three, and in places by six times.” Simonova, “Mir i schast’e na shtykakh,” 63 (quoting N. Muranov).

136. Kratkaia istoriia grazhdanskoi voiny v SSSR, 444. Stalin was replaced as commissar of the Southwestern Front Revolutionary Military Council by Sergei Gusev.

137. Sumbadze, Sotsial’no-ekonomicheskie predposylki pobedy Sovetskoi vlasti, 211 (Mikoyan to Lenin), 212 (local representative to Stalin); Grazhdanskaia voina v SSSR, II: 330.

138. Meijer, Trotsky Papers, II: 147 (Trotsky to Lenin and Chicherin, April 20, 1920).

139. Reissner, Oktober, 163–5. Orjonikidze had participated in the Tabriz revolts of 1906–11 in northern Iran.

140. The Soviets understood Kuchek to be a nationalist, not a Communist. Izvestiia, June 16, 1920 (Vozhnesensky); Krasnaia gazeta, June 20, 1920 (Soltanğaliev).

141. Zabih, Communist Movement in Iran, 18; Lenczowski, Russia and the West in Iran, 9–10, 52–9; Komintern i Vostok, 75; Chaquèri, The Soviet Socialist Republic of Iran, 166–213. Soltanğaliev wanted a self-standing Comintern of the East and a Muslim Red Army, with Azerbaijan as a springboard, for spreading revolution. Armenian Communists also wanted to Sovietize Iran. Nariman Narimanov, party leader of Azerbaijan, was opposed, viewing Iranian leftists as weak, and advocated for maintaining an anti-imperialist coalition with bourgeois nationalists.

142. Volodarskii, Sovety i ikh iuzhnye sosedi Iran i Afganistan, 67–72.

143. Chaquèri, The Soviet Socialist Republic of Iran, 214–75.

144. Orjonikidze and Stasova had helped organize the congress. Gafurov, Lenin i natsional’no-osvoboditel’noe dvizhenie, 77.

145. Zinoviev admitted, elsewhere, that a majority of attendees were non-party. Carr, Bolshevik Revolution, III: 261, n1 (citing Kommunisticheskii internatsional, November 6, 1920). See also Fischer, Soviets in World Affairs, I: 283–4.

146. Riddell, To See the Dawn, 45–52, 231–2.

147. Congress of the Peoples of the East. Baku, September 1920: Stenographic Report, 21–3.

148. “Mustafa Kemal’s Movement is a national liberation movement,” one delegate from Turkey stated at Baku. “We support it, but, as soon as the struggle with imperialism is finished, we believe this movement will pass over to social revolution.” Pervyi s”ezd narodov vostoka, 159.

149. Zinoviev’s reckless summons to holy war against British imperialism could have backfired, potentially embroiling the Bolsheviks in a major war thanks to Muslim jihadists whom Moscow did not control, while giving free rein to pan-Turkic nationalists and others whose political agendas were their own. Blank, “Soviet Politics,” 187.

150. Smith, “Stalin as Commissar for Nationality Affairs,” 58; Smith, Bolsheviks and the National Question, 32–4.

151. Trotsky, Stalin [1968], 255–62.

152. “‘Fate’ did not permit Stalin once in three and a half years to function either as commissar of control or commissar of nationalities,” Lenin would write to another functionary, Adolf Joffe, in 1921. PSS, LII: 99–101. Stephen Blank, although offering no comparisons to the operation of other commissariats with similar-level resources, asserts that Stalin wanted the nationalities’ commissariat to fail to avoid investing national minority Communists with a strong instrument to pursue their own agendas. Blank, Sorcerer as Apprentice, 53, 64, 223–4.

153. Filomonov, Obrazovanie i razvitie RSFSR, 163. In July 1919, the commissariat’s ruling board even proposed its own abolition, but the Council of People’s Commissars rejected self-liquidation. At the same time, some province soviets had already closed down nationalities commissariat branch offices in their territories. Smith, Bolsheviks and the National Question, 33 (citing GARF, f. 1318, op. 1, d. 2, l. 104). See also Makarova, Narodnyi Komissariat. Stalin would continue to lobby Lenin: “I insist on abolition (after the Union of Republics we do not need NKnats),” but Lenin wrote on Stalin’s note, “Nknats is necessary for the satisfaction of the nats [national minorities]”. APRF, f.3, op. 22, d. 97, l. 136–7, 137ob., Hoover Institution Archives, Volkogonov papers, container 23.

154. Gizzatullin and Sharafutdinov, Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev, 386.

155. Gizzatullin and Sharafutdinov, Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev, 52.

156. Togan, Vospominaniia, 197. Stalin wrote other civil war articles on the national question, often in a pandering tone. In Izvestiya (February 22, 1919), for example, he repeated Lenin’s two-camp imagery that divided the world into “the camp of imperialism and the camp of socialism,” placing in the first “the United States and Britain, France, and Japan,” and in the second “Soviet Russia with the young Soviet republics, and the growing proletariat revolution in the European countries.” Stalin claimed to be confident that imperialism was “headed for its inevitable doom,” and accorded European revolutions the highest probability for success, but he also noted that the “roar” of the socialist revolutions could be “heard in the countries of the oppressed East.” Reprinted, without much context, in Eudin and North, Soviet Russia and the East, 45–6.

157. Togan, Vospominaniia, 199, 229–30, 256.

158. A petition from the Central Bureau of Communist Organizations of the Peoples of the East, which was headed by Soltanğaliev, had been sent to Trotsky on January 2, 1920, requesting Stalin’s recall from the civil war front so that he could “directly oversee internal national policy and foreign policy of Soviet power in the East,” in order to quell dissatisfaction and overcome chaos. Jughashvili, they wrote, had “colossal authority” among easterners as a man of the Caucasus and an expert on the national question. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 109, d. 76, l. 1–1ob.

159. Schafer, “Local Politics,” passim. See also Pipes, “First Experiment”; Zenkovsky, “The Tataro-Bashkir Feud”; Zenkovsky, Pan-Turkism, 161–9; and Blank, “Struggle for Soviet Bashkiria.”

160. Togan, Vospominaniia, 193.

161. On the Bashkirs, see Steinwedel, “Invisible Threads of Empire.”

162. Even if Stalin had not blocked the formation of a Greater Tataria in 1918, it would not have survived the exigencies of the civil war and the need to win Bashkir allegiance. The March 1918 decree calling for a joint Tatar-Bashkir republic was formally annulled only in December 1919. Iuldashbaev, Obrazovanie Bashkirskoi Avtonomnoi Sovetskoi Sotsialisticheskoi Respubliki, 423.

163. Schafer, “Local Politics,” 165–90.

164. Schafer, “Local Politics,” 176 (citing GARF, f. 1318, op. 1, d. 45, l. 9 , 44; RGASPI, f. 17, op. 65, d. 22, l. 218); Togan, Vospominaniia, 293; Sultan-Galiev, Stat’i, vtystupleniia, dokumenty, 437.

165. Schafer, “Local Politics,” 176; Kul’sharipov, Z. Validov, 128–39 (Validi to Stalin, May 3, 1919); Murtazin, Bashkiriia i bashkirskie voiska, 207–11; Togan, Vospominaniia, 292–5.

166. Togan, Vospominaniia, 250–1.

167. Togan, Vospominaniia, 251.

168. Izvestiia, May 20 and May 29, 1920; Pravda, May 29, 1920; Politika Sovetskoi vlasti, 101–2; Batsell, Soviet Rule in Russia, 142.

169. Smith, Bolsheviks and the National Question, 47–8 (citing RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 68, l. 4).

170. Magerovskii, Soiuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik, 16n; Pipes, Formation of the Soviet Union, 247.

171. Rorlich, Volga Tatars, 137–8, 146–9.

172. TsK RKP (b)—VKP (b) i natsional’nyi vopros, 42–3 (RGASPI, f. 17, op. 112, d. 100, l. 83–83ob, 4).

173. Stalin had supposedly told his deputy Semyon Dimanshtein in 1919, “Soltanğaliev had long looked askance at us and has only recently been somewhat tame.” Blank, “Struggle for Soviet Bashkiria.”

174. Dakhshleiger, V. I. Lenin, 186–7; Murtazin, Bashkiria i Bashkirskie voiska, 187–8; Proletarskaia Revoliutsiia, 1926, no. 12: 205–7; Zenkovsky, Pan-Turkism, 205–6.

175. Togan, Vospominaniia, 265–7.