Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

CHAPTER 3

READING, WRITING AND REVOLUTION

Among the best-known stories about Stalin’s childhood is that he was beaten and brutalised by his drunken father, Vissarion Dzhugashvili (Beso). The source of this story is Joseph Iremashvili, a Georgian childhood friend of Stalin’s. Like Stalin, Iremashvili became a member of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, but he was allied with the Mensheviks, the opponents of Lenin’s (and Stalin’s) Bolshevik faction. By the time the memoir was published in 1932, he was living in exile in Germany. According to Iremashvili, ‘undeserved beatings made the boy as hard and heartless as his father himself. Since all men who had authority over others either through power or age reminded him of his father there soon arose a feeling of revenge against all men who stood above him.’¹

Another boyhood friend of Stalin’s, Soso Davrishev, who had emigrated to France, also recalled that Beso beat his son, but his memoir was not published until many years after Iremashvili’s. Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana, recalled he’d told her that as a child he was beaten by his mother. Svetlana repeated this claim in a second memoir but also highlighted Beso’s violent behaviour:

Fights, crudeness were not a rare phenomenon in this poor, semi-literate family where the head of the family drank. The mother beat the little boy, the husband beat her. But the boy loved his mother and defended her, once he threw a knife at his father [who] then chased him.²

Based on these reports, innumerable pathological theories of Stalin’s personality have been constructed. The most extreme is Roman Brackman’s, who speculates it was Stalin’s patricide that started him down the path of a mass-murderous political life. But medical records show Beso was not murdered but died in hospital of TB, colitis and chronic pneumonia in 1909 – the year of death stated by Stalin in the personal questionnaire for ROSTA that he completed in 1920.

Brackman is also a leading exponent of another conspiracy theory: that Stalin was, in fact, an agent of the Okhrana, the Tsarist security police. The point of departure for this hypothesis is the so-called ‘Eremin letter’ of July 1913, in which a Tsarist police colonel of that name recorded that Stalin was one of his agents. The source of the document, published in English by Life magazine in 1956, was Alexander Orlov, an officer in Stalin’s security police who defected to the west in the 1930s. While Brackman, like most scholars, accepted that the Eremin letter was an obvious forgery, he argued that the document was, in fact, manufactured by Stalin himself as a means of discrediting the idea that he actually was a police agent. For Brackman, the Great Terror of the 1930s is above all a cover-up operation by Stalin, designed to kill anyone who had knowledge of his past treachery. All the evidence he adduces in support of this hypothesis is circumstantial and speculative but for Brackman the absence of direct evidence is in itself proof of cover-up and conspiracy.³

More credible, but no less speculative, is Robert Tucker’s synthesis of political biography and insights gleaned from the German psychoanalyst Karen Horney’s analysis of the neurotic personality. According to Tucker, Stalin was a neurotic who responded to childhood trauma by creating an idealised image of himself. Far from being merely a political device to manipulate and mobilise the masses, the Stalin personality cult reflected ‘Stalin’s own monstrously inflated vision of himself as the greatest genius of Russian and world history’. Stalin’s lust for power and the purging of his political enemies was psychodynamic and reflected the striving for the fame and glory that would match his exalted self-image.

Tucker formulated this hypothesis in the early 1950s while serving as a diplomat in the US embassy in Moscow. As he admitted himself, there was no direct evidence to support his theory and the prevailing wisdom among his then colleagues was that neither Stalin nor other Soviet leaders took the personality cult too seriously. But Tucker took heart from Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin at the 20th party congress. Included in Khrushchev’s indictment was, to use Tucker’s words, a depiction of Stalin ‘as a man of colossal grandiosity’ who had ‘a profound insecurity that caused him to need constant affirmation of his imagined greatness’.⁴

Evidence cited by Khrushchev and highlighted by Tucker was Stalin’s editing of his official Soviet biography, in which he marked passages containing insufficient praise. Like many of Khrushchev’s claims about Stalin, this was way off the mark. Stalin did indeed edit the second, postwar edition of his Short Biography but he actually toned down the adulation and insisted that other revolutionaries should be accorded more prominence. The same was true of many other texts that Stalin edited. While Stalin had a high opinion of himself, it fell far short of the extremities of his personality cult.

Stalin’s own view of his family history was much more relaxed than many of his biographers. In a March 1938 speech to a meeting of high-ranking air force officers, he used his own background to illustrate the point that class credentials were no guarantee of honesty. Workers could be scoundrels and non-proletarians could be good people:

For example, I’m not the son of workers. My father was not born a worker. He was a master with apprentices, he was an exploiter. We didn’t live badly. I was ten when he went bust and had to join the proletariat. I couldn’t say that he was glad to join the workers. He cursed his bad luck all the time, but for me it turned out to be a good thing. For sure, that is funny [laughter]. When I was ten I was not happy that my father had lost everything. I didn’t know that 40 years later it would be a plus for me. But in no way was it an advantage I had earned.⁵

SOSO THE STUDIOUS

Stalin’s benign recollection chimes with the views of those historians who believe he had a relatively privileged childhood. While both his parents had been born serfs and his family was not well off, it was not among the poorest and it had the connections to secure Stalin entry into a church school in his home-town of Gori in Georgia and then into a prestigious seminary in the province’s capital, Tbilisi. His father had a drink problem and his parents’ marriage broke up, but he was the only surviving child of a doting and strong-willed mother who wanted him to become a priest. As a young child, Stalin, or Soso as he was then called, suffered from smallpox and was left with a permanently pockmarked face. He also had an abnormality which reduced the use of his left arm, a condition that may have been genetic or the result of an accident. Adding to Soso’s woes was an accident he had aged eleven, when a runaway horse-drawn carriage ran over his legs, which left him with a permanently inhibited gait.

Stalin is said to have been the leader of a children’s street-gang in Gori but, as Stephen Kotkin has pointed out, Soso was one of the town’s best pupils. Far from being a street ruffian, he was a dedicated ‘bookworm’ and ‘autodidact’, which turned out to be a lifelong trait.⁶ This fundamental fact about Stalin’s early life was captured in a cult painting by the Georgian artist Apollon Kutateladze, Comrade Stalin with Mother (1930), which shows a well-dressed, studious boy reading a book, while being overlooked by an encouraging and supportive mother.

Born in 1878, Stalin entered the church school in Gori in 1888, having passed the entrance exam with flying colours. According to his mother, Keke, Soso was a good boy who ‘studied hard, was always reading and talking, trying to find out everything’.⁷ He excelled at singing and was known among his teachers as bulbuli (the nightingale). Keke was a devout Christian, and so was her son. As one of his schoolmates recalled, Stalin ‘was very believing, punctually attending all the divine services’. According to the same informant, ‘Books were Joseph’s inseparable friends; he would not part with them even at meal times.’⁸

Because he was such a good pupil, the church assembly waived tuition fees, gave him free textbooks and a stipend of three roubles a month. He was also awarded an inscribed Georgian version of the Psalms, the davitni, that praised him as an intelligent and successful pupil. Soso matriculated in May 1894 and on the basis of his results was recommended for entry into a seminary. His marks were (with five being the highest):

Conduct: 5

Sacred History and Catechism: 5

Liturgical Exegesis and Ecclesiastical Typikon: 5

Russian, Church Slavonic and Georgian: 5

Greek and Arithmetic: 4

Geography and Handwriting: 5

Liturgical Chant: 5⁹

That same year, Stalin took his first step on the road to his revolutionary conversion when he visited a recently opened radical bookshop in Gori. There, in its reading room, he encountered an alternative literature to that prescribed by the school, notably the classics of Georgian and Russian literature.

At fifteen, Stalin moved to the capital to enter the Tbilisi Spiritual Seminary which, like his school, was run by the Georgian branch of the Russian Orthodox Church. There were two such seminaries in Tbilisi, one for Georgians and the other for Armenians; both were reserved for bright boys destined for the priesthood. He did very well in the entrance exams, excelling across the board in Bible studies, church Slavonic, Russian, Greek, catechism, geography and penmanship (though not in arithmetic), and was awarded a state subsidy. As Robert Service has commented, Stalin’s biographers have tended to underrate the high-quality education he received from the Orthodox Church.¹⁰

The Georgian seminary had only recently reopened after being shut for a year because of a protest strike about student conditions and restrictions. By the time Stalin arrived at the seminary, there was a well-established tradition of student protest and intellectual rebellion. Students especially resented the ‘Russification’ policies implemented by the church authorities, which included teaching only through the medium of Russian and suppressing any study of Georgia’s language, history and culture.

In Soso’s class were students who should have started the year before as well as nine other boys from his school in Gori. Stalin did well academically, scoring fours and fives in most of his subjects, even though the instruction was in Russian, a foreign language with which he was still grappling. Among the secular subjects studied by Stalin were Russian history and literature, logic, psychology, physics, geometry and algebra. Diligent and obedient, he still found the time and spirit to write some patriotic poetry (in Georgian) that he submitted to a nationalist newspaper called Iveria.

Five poems were published in 1895 under the pen-name of ‘Soselo’. In the longest, ‘To the Moon’, which had six four-line stanzas, the boy Stalin wrote:

Know well, those who once

Fell to the oppressors

Will rise again with hope

Above the holy mountain

His life as a poet was short lived. Another poem was published in 1896 in a Georgian progressive newspaper, and that was it.¹¹ In Soviet times his poems were secretly translated into Russian, but there was no question of them being published or included in his collected works. They were far too nationalistic. For Stalin, the political utility of literature was always paramount and their publication would have served no purpose except to complicate his life story. Or, maybe, they no longer pleased him aesthetically and didn’t translate well into Russian.

In 1896–7 Soso joined a secret study group organised by an older seminarian, Seit Devdariani. According to Devdariani, the plan was to study natural science, sociology, Georgian, Russian and European literature and the works of Marx and Engels. This subversive involvement impacted on Stalin’s grades, which dropped to twos and threes.¹²

One source of forbidden secular books was the Georgian Literary Society’s ‘Cheap Library’ run by Iveria editor Ilia Chavchavadze. In November 1896 the seminary inspector wrote in the conduct book: ‘It appears that Dzhugashvili has a ticket to the Cheap Library, from which he borrows books. Today I confiscated Victor Hugo’s Toilers of the Sea in which I found the said library ticket.’ In response the principal confined Stalin to the punishment cell for a ‘prolonged period’, noting that he had already warned him about the possession of Hugo’s book on the French Revolution, Ninety-Three. Another entry into the conduct book, dated March 1897, stated:

At 11 p.m. I took away from Joseph Dzhugashvili Letourneau’s Literary Evolution of the Nations, which he had borrowed from the Cheap Library . . . Dzhugashvili was discovered reading the said book on the chapel stairs. This is the thirteenth time this student has been discovered reading books borrowed from the Cheap Library.¹³

One writer favoured by rebellious students like Soso was the Georgian Alexander Qazbegi, whose fictional hero Koba was an outlaw who resisted Russian rule in Georgia. That character provided Soso with his first pseudonym when he joined the illegal revolutionary underground. Not until 1913 did Koba become the more Bolshevik-sounding Stalin – the ‘man of steel’.

According to his official Soviet Short Biography (1939), Stalin led Marxist study circles in his third and fourth years at the seminary and it was this subversive activity that led him to join the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) in 1898 and then to his expulsion from the seminary in May 1899. However, as Alfred J. Rieber has highlighted, the seminary’s records show Soso was a troublesome student but not a radical activist.¹⁴ He was not expelled from the seminary for political activity but dismissed for failing to appear at examinations.¹⁵ When Soso dropped out, the seminary issued him with a document testifying to his good behaviour during his four years as a student priest. Four months later the seminary authorities, at Soso’s own request, issued a final report card on him, which showed a marked improvement in his grades.¹⁶

Exegesis of the Holy Script: 4

History of the Bible: 4

Ecclesiastical history: 3

Homiletics: 3

Russian literature: 4

History of Russian literature: 4

Universal secular history: 4

Russian secular history: 4

Algebra: 4

Geometry: 4

Easter liturgy: 4

Physics: 4

Logic: 5

Psychology: 4

Greek: 4

Ecclesiastical singing (Slavic): 5

Ecclesiastical singing (Georgian): 4

Since he had failed to graduate, Stalin could neither go to university nor become a priest. He was qualified to teach in a church school but instead got himself a job at the Tbilisi Meteorological Observatory, where he lived on the premises and kept records of instrument readings. This was the first and last normal job he ever had.

Stalin continued his studies of radical thought and extended the scope of his political involvement. A key influence was Lado Ketskhoveli, whose younger brother Vano also worked at the Observatory. Lado, from Gori, had been expelled from the Tbilisi seminary for leading a student strike in 1893. In 1896 he was expelled from a seminary in Kiev and the next year he returned to Tbilisi where he joined a group of Georgian Marxists and contacted Stalin’s cohort of seminarians. Lado became the young Stalin’s mentor, and the conduit for his connection to both the illegal revolutionary movement and workers’ study circles. An intellectual as well as an activist, Lado was Stalin’s first political role model.

AN ORTHODOX STALIN?

By the time he dropped out of the seminary, Stalin had spent a decade being educated by the church. There was no book that he studied more intensively than the Bible. He was well versed on matters theological, had a detailed knowledge of church history and an intimate acquaintance with the rituals of Eastern Orthodoxy. While his education had a significant secular component, immersion in Christian thinking was at its core.

Many have wondered about the long-term impact on Stalin of his religious education, the most radical claim being that he remained a secret believer who continued to pray and read the Bible. Like the conspiracy theory that he was a secret police agent, the hypothesis of a hidden ‘Orthodox Stalin’ has no evidentiary basis. When it came to religion, Stalin was a model of Bolshevik orthodoxy.

Having left the seminary, he turned his back on all religion. As a Marxist socialist he was a self-proclaimed atheist and the movement to which he belonged made no bones about its anti-clericalism or that it wanted to destroy organised religion and eradicate supernatural thinking at all levels of society. The Bolsheviks saw the Russian Orthodox Church as integral to the capitalist status quo and a fundamental obstacle to their modernising project of socialist enlightenment.

The Bolsheviks espoused religious freedom but reserved the right to campaign against religion. As Stalin himself wrote in 1906:

Social-Democrats will combat all forms of religious persecution . . . will always protest against the persecution of Catholicism or Protestantism; they will always defend the right of nations to profess any religion they please; but at the same time . . . they will carry on agitation against Catholicism, Protestantism and the religion of the Orthodox Church in order to achieve the triumph of the socialist world outlook.¹⁷

The Bolsheviks’ leader, Lenin, was among the most implacable opponents of the church and was fond of quoting Marx’s aphorisms that religion was the sigh of the oppressed, the opium of the people and so on. Opposed to Lenin on the religion question was Anatoly Lunacharsky, a socialist poet, philosopher and lover of the arts who described himself as intellectual among Bolsheviks and a Bolshevik among intellectuals. He was an exponent of what he called ‘god-building’ (Bogostroitel’stvo). Lunacharsky believed that socialism was a secular religion and that socialists should seek to build bridges to Christians. Christian doctrine was scientifically false and the church was indeed a reactionary institution, but the ethics, values and sentiments of Christianity were laudable and overlapped with those of socialist humanism. In Lunacharsky’s version of Christian socialism there was no deity. Socialism was an anthropocentric religion whose God was humanity: ‘It is not necessary to look for God. Let us give him to the world! There is no God in the world, but there might be. The road of struggle for socialism . . . is what is meant by God-building.’¹⁸

Lunacharsky’s views were set out in a two-volume work, Religion and Socialism, published in 1908 and 1911. Stalin possessed a number of Lunacharsky’s books and pamphlets but Religion and Socialism is not recorded as being among them. Still, it seems likely that Stalin read or was at least familiar with the two books.¹⁹

God-building never did gain much traction among the Bolsheviks and Lunacharsky reconciled with Lenin in 1917. As the Bolsheviks’ commissar of enlightenment from 1917 to 1929, he abandoned god-building but strove to moderate the Bolsheviks’ anti-religious fervour. Even so, Bolshevik policy towards the church was highly repressive.²⁰ Soon after they seized power, they separated church from the state and schools from the church. While freedom of religious conscience was guaranteed by a constitution adopted in 1918, so too was the right to anti-religious propaganda. Priests, capitalists, criminals and other undesirables were categorised as second-class citizens with limited political rights. In 1922 the Bolsheviks expropriated church valuables and responded to popular opposition to their confiscation decrees with show trials and executions of priests and lay believers.²¹

Anti-religious propaganda and the promotion of Soviet atheism was a major Bolshevik priority from the early 1920s. It included sponsorship of an anti-religious newspaper, Bezbozhnik (Godless), and the creation of a League of the Godless, both of which were headed by that ubiquitous Stalin acolyte, Yemel’yan Yaroslavsky. Stalin was not enamoured of some of the propaganda, which he considered ‘anti-religious trash’, and in 1924 he decreed ‘hooliganish escapades under the guise of so-called anti-religious propaganda – all this should be cast off and liquidated immediately’.²²

In 1927 Stalin explained to a visiting American labour delegation that while the communist party stood for religious freedom, it ‘cannot be neutral towards religion, and it conducts anti-religious propaganda against all religious prejudices because it stands for science . . . because all religion is the antithesis of science’. Referring to the recent Scopes trial in Tennessee about the illegality of teaching evolution theory, Stalin assured the delegation that Darwinists could not be prosecuted in the USSR because communists defended science. But he was unapologetic about the continuing persecution of priests: ‘Have we repressed the clergy? Yes, we have. The only unfortunate thing is that they have not yet been completely eliminated.’²³

The Bolsheviks’ anti-religion campaign moderated in the mid-1920s in the context of ‘NEP socialism’.²⁴ The New Economic Policy, introduced by Lenin after the end of the civil war, permitted a revival of private peasant agriculture and was accompanied by some social and cultural relaxation, although no independent political activity outside the communist party was permitted. The Bolsheviks sought to persuade believers by propaganda and education until the return to a more coercive approach at the end of the 1920s when Stalin launched the campaign to forcibly collectivise Soviet agriculture. Peasant adherence to religion was deemed as pernicious as their attachment to land ownership. In 1929 the party declared a ‘merciless war’ against counter-revolutionary religious organisations.²⁵

Another ebb in the tide of anti-religious militancy came in the mid-1930s with the introduction of the so-called ‘Stalin Constitution’ of 1936, which guaranteed religious freedom and restored the voting rights of priests. But the church suffered again in the Great Terror of 1937–8, when 14,000 churches were closed and 35,000 ‘servants of religious cults’ were arrested. By 1939 there were fewer than a thousand Orthodox churches in the USSR compared to 50,000 in Tsarist Russia.²⁶

The great turning in Stalin’s policy on religion was his famous meeting with the leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church in September 1943. The meeting took place in his Kremlin office and he began by noting with approval the church’s patriotic support for the Soviet war effort. In the course of a meeting that lasted an hour and twenty minutes, Stalin readily agreed to the appointment of a new patriarch, the opening of more churches, the freeing of arrested priests and the organisation of courses, seminaries and academies to educate the clergy. He even offered state financial support for the church and promised to allow the creation of candle factories to mass-produce a religious prop that had hitherto been handmade.

The record of the meeting was drawn up by Georgy Karpov, a former NKVD officer, whom Stalin subsequently appointed head of a Council for the Affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church.²⁷ Reported in the press the next day, the meeting signalled peaceful co-existence between organised religion and the Soviet regime. In return for political fealty, the Orthodox Church and its followers were allowed to practise their religion, though without too much active pros-elytising.²⁸

Had Stalin perhaps returned to the religious fold? That was certainly the impression given by the patriarchy, who henceforth referred to him as ‘deeply revered and ‘beloved by all’, and as a ‘wise, divinely appointed leader’ who had become so through ‘God’s Providence’.²⁹ However, there were plenty of pragmatic reasons for Stalin to invite the church into his tent. It played well with public opinion in Britain and the United States, allies in the struggle against Hitler. Stalin didn’t need the church’s support to win the war, which had decisively turned in his favour since the Soviet victory at Stalingrad in January 1943, but every little helped. There had been a popular religious revival in the Soviet Union since the German invasion of June 1941 and it was more expedient to recognise and channel the phenomenon into a mainstream church than to repress it. As Victoria Smolkin has pointed out, Stalin made similar moves in relation to Muslims and Baptists.³⁰ Above all, Russian Orthodoxy would be a powerful ally when the vast territories occupied by the Germans between 1941 and 1944 were recaptured and reintegrated into the Soviet system.³¹

Another way of viewing Stalin’s relationship with his religious upbringing is to see communism as a ‘political religion’. The idea that when Stalin became a communist he swapped one faith for another is intuitively appealing. Certainly, the parallel between communism and Christianity is compelling. Communism had its sacred texts and ritual practices, its heretics, martyrs, sinners and saints. It also had a secularised eschatology of progress to heaven on earth through predetermined stages of history – slavery, feudalism, capitalism, socialism and communism. Communism, like Christianity, rested on an emotive, faith-based commitment from its adherents.

Stalin’s writings were ‘sprinkled with biblical allusions, invocations and inflections’, noted Roland Boer.³² Trotsky was labelled a Judas in the Short Course History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and Stalin was prone to invoke God in his everyday speech: ‘God bless’, ‘God only knows’, ‘it is for God to forgive’ and so on. In a speech to the Baku Soviet in November 1920 on the third anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, Stalin alluded to Martin Luther’s famous statement to the Diet of Worms in 1521:

Here I stand on the border line between the old capitalist world and the new socialist world. Here, on this border line, I unite the efforts of the proletarians of the West and the peasants of the East in order to shatter the old world. May the god of history be my aid!³³

But the political religion analogy cannot be pushed too far. Communism had no deity, not even Stalin at the peak of his personality cult was deemed a god. The agent of humanity’s fate was the party and the people, according to communist ideology. Communism had no churches or temples. Lenin’s body was embalmed and put on public display in Red Square, as was Stalin’s for a time, but their bodies were not deified like the remains of saints. For a conscious, committed Marxist like Stalin, communism was based on science and empirically verifiable laws of social development. To paraphrase Lenin, Marxism was not deemed true because it was omnipotent; it was omnipotent because it was true, or so Stalin believed.³⁴

BOLSHEVIK INTELLECTUAL

According to Napoleon, understanding a person requires you to know something about their world when they were twenty years old.³⁵ Stalin’s world at that age was the fringe of a vast land empire that stretched thousands of miles across ten time zones from Warsaw to Vladivostok, from the Arctic Ocean to the Caspian and Black Seas. According to the 1897 census, 125 million people lived in Russia, most of them peasants, although state-led industrialisation was creating a significant urban working class. Within Russia’s borders were more than 100 nationalities and ethnic groups. Nearly half the population were ethnic Russians, but there were also large numbers of Ukrainians, Belorussians and Jews, as well as various Turkic and central Asian groups. Stalin’s Georgians, whose territory had been a Russian protectorate since 1783, numbered about a million. Nearly 70 per cent of Tsarist Russia’s population were affiliated to the Eastern Orthodox Church, though there were many adherents of other Christian traditions, and of Islam and other faiths.

The Russian Tsarist Empire, ruled by the Romanov dynasty for nearly 300 years, was an autocracy in which there was no parliament and political parties were banned. Radical opponents of the Tsar were subject to surveillance, harassment, arrest, imprisonment and exile. Strikes were illegal, as were trade unions, and the nascent underground labour movement was riddled with spies and informers, and plagued by fake organisations set up by the Okhrana. Insidious misinformation was spread by Tsarist agents that named leftist activists as being in cahoots with the authorities, while labour unrest was met with violence and harsh repression. Stalin observed and experienced this first-hand as a political agitator in Tbilisi, Baku and Batumi. Indeed, his first arrest – in Batumi in 1902 – was the result of a strike and demonstration in which many protesters were killed or wounded. While Stalin was under arrest, his childhood friend and close comrade Lado Ketskhoveli was shot and killed by a prison guard.

The political movement Stalin joined believed the working masses were exploited and oppressed by a capitalist system that must be overthrown by a democratic revolution followed by a socialist one. While some radicals thought peasant revolts were the key to revolutionary change in Russia, Marxists like Stalin looked to the urban working class as agents of social transformation. The role of political activists like himself was to educate and recruit workers to the socialist cause and to encourage, support and guide their social, political and economic struggles.

Quite early on in Stalin’s political life, the party that he had joined – the RSDLP – split into two main factions. Stalin sided with Lenin’s Bolshevik faction, so called because it claimed a majority at the party’s second congress in 1903 when the first split occurred. Opposed were the Mensheviks, the supposed minority headed by Julius Martov. In truth, support for each faction was quite evenly balanced and many party members, Leon Trotsky, for example, preferred not to choose between them.

Disagreement about the conditions of party membership was the initial reason for the split. Should the RSDLP be a relatively open party, broad-based and engaged in as much legal activity as possible, as the Mensheviks argued? Or should it be the disciplined, highly centralised and clandestine cadre party that Lenin favoured? In part, this was a dispute about tactics in conditions of illegality and Tsarist repression. But more important were underlying differences about the role of the party. While the Mensheviks envisaged socialist consciousness spreading and embedding spontaneously through the experience of popular struggles to improve conditions and rights, the Bolsheviks thought party members should transmit ‘scientific socialism’ to the masses. A related issue was assessment of the prospects for socialist revolution in Russia. Socialism was a distant goal for the Mensheviks, hence spreading socialist consciousness and recruiting advanced workers into the party was less important to them than day-to-day social and economic struggles and the agitation for political reform that would feed into a democratic revolution in Russia. Believing that socialist revolution could occur sooner than the Mensheviks thought, the Bolsheviks sought a higher level of socialist consciousness among the toiling masses. Lenin believed there were good prospects for an effective alliance between the working class and the poorer peasants. Stalin’s spin on Lenin’s position was expressed in a letter written in 1904: ‘We must raise the proletariat to a consciousness of its true interests, to a consciousness of the socialist idea, and not break this idea up into small change, or adjust it to the spontaneous movement.’³⁶

Stalin’s support for Lenin was by no means obvious and automatic. In his neck of the woods – Georgia and Transcaucasia – the Mensheviks were the dominant faction. Much of Stalin’s early political life was devoted to fighting and losing factional battles with the local Mensheviks. It was the Mensheviks who came to power in Georgia as result of the 1917 revolutions, where they remained in control until forced out of office by the Bolsheviks in 1921.

While Stalin could easily have found favour with Mensheviks as an authentic man of the people immersed in the daily class struggles of the toiling masses, he was highly educated and committed to proselytising socialism. Stalin saw himself as neither a worker nor a peasant but as, in effect, an intellectual whose task it was to spread enlightenment and socialist consciousness. It was this fundamental choice of an intellectual identity that motivated his fanatical, lifelong commitment to reading and self-improvement. While Stalin respected ordinary workers, he did not revere them like some middle-class socialists. The good worker was someone like himself, an educated person who was able to grasp the truth proffered by the party. And it was through such workers that the larger population of the working class could be reached and educated.³⁷

Stalin’s biographers have tended to neglect the niceties of the politics, day-to-day struggles, factions and personalities of the Russian revolutionary underground. Yet this constituted nearly half his adult life. That was the political and social environment in which his character and personality was formed. As a young revolutionary, Stalin adopted beliefs, acquired attitudes, underwent experiences and made choices.

There is no shortage of evidence about the life of the young Stalin. The problem is that much of it consists of highly partisan and biased memoirs, very little of his primary personal documentation from this early period having survived. Typically, how memoirists recall Stalin correlates with how they see and judge his later life. Perceptions of Stalin, even by those who knew him personally, are overdetermined by later knowledge of his life and persona after the Bolsheviks seized power, and clung to it through civil war, terror and mass violence.

Historians are as divided as the memoirists in assessing the young Stalin’s personality. Most agree that while many traits of the mature Stalin may be detected as nascent in his youth, he continued after the revolution to embrace new roles and identities.

As a young man, Stalin was confident and self-assured. He was a faithful member of Lenin’s Bolshevik faction and an intriguer and conspirator in internal party battles with the Mensheviks. He was loyal to his comrades and contemptuous of political opponents. He was not shy coming forward but could be low key and reserved when the occasion demanded. Though well capable of anger, he mostly kept his cool. Not much of an orator, he was a skilled polemicist in print. Dogmatic in his political beliefs, he could change his mind in the light of experience, be pragmatic as well as intransigent. His personal life – there was one short-lived marriage and a few dalliances with other women – was strictly subordinate to his all-consuming political passions. Stalin saw little or nothing of his mother after 1904 and did not even write her a letter until 1922. Much of Stalin’s youthful political style derived from that of his mentor and exemplar, Lenin. ‘Conciliation was in Lenin’s view a negative quality for a militant revolutionary,’ writes Ronald Suny. ‘Sharp ideological distinctions, principled divisions, and purity of position were turned into virtues. Accommodation, compromise and moderation were thrown aside in favour of impatient commitment to action.’³⁸

The documentary record of Stalin’s political activities is fairly detailed and the evolution of his political views reasonably clear. However, there remain some contentious issues. To what extent was Stalin involved in robberies and extortion to raise funds for the party? Was he the true author of his famous 1913 tract on Marxism and the National Question? Was he as loyal to Lenin as he later claimed to be? Was he a ‘grey blur’, ‘the man who missed the revolution’ in 1917,³⁹ notwithstanding cultic claims about his prominence in the Bolshevik seizure of power? Was he the most ruthless of Bolshevik leaders during the Russian Civil War? Did he undermine the Red Army’s attempt to capture Warsaw in 1920 and thereby subvert the spread of Bolshevik revolution to Europe?

During the Russian revolutionary upheavals of 1905–7, Stalin was involved in the organisation of Bolshevik armed gangs who took violent actions on behalf of the party. The revolt against the Tsar had been sparked by the Bloody Sunday shooting of peaceful demonstrators in St Petersburg in January 1905. Political assassinations in Russia were nothing new and thousands of Tsarist officials were killed by leftist-led armed groups during the popular disturbances of this period.

In July 1905 Stalin published an unsigned newspaper article on ‘Armed Insurrection and Our Tactics’ in which he decried the Menshevik view that an insurrection would arise spontaneously from the actions of the masses. On the contrary, argued Stalin, an insurrection had to be prepared and implemented on a co-ordinated basis, including by the advance organisation of armed groups that would protect the people and stockpile arms.⁴⁰

Stalin was peripheral to the Tbilisi coach robbery of June 1907 that features so prominently in Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Young Stalin.⁴¹ This violent robbery, which netted 250,000 roubles but resulted in a number of deaths, was controversial within the RSDLP because it took place after the party had voted to end such ‘expropriations’. While Stalin was blamed by Menshevik opponents for his involvement in the robbery, he was not a direct participant in the heist and may not have even been in the town at all that day. In all probability, Stalin’s involvement was limited to providing information and lending moral support to the operation.

Stalin never denied or admitted any connection to the so-called Tbilisi ‘Ex’ (expropriation). The German writer Emil Ludwig recalled that when he asked Stalin about his role in bank robberies, he ‘began to laugh, in that heavy way of his, blinked several times and stood up for the first and only time in our three-hour interview. The question of the bank robbery was the only one he would not answer – except to the extent that he answered it by passing it over.’⁴²

Stalin’s silence was criticised by Trotsky, who complained that it was ‘cowardly’ to exclude this ‘bold’ action from his official biography. It was excluded not because there was anything wrong with robbing banks on behalf of the party, which, Trotsky said, testified to Stalin’s ‘revolutionary resoluteness’, but to cover up a political miscalculation by Stalin – the fact that in 1907 the revolutionary tide was receding and such expropriations had ‘degenerated into adventures’.⁴³

Stalin’s general attitude to political violence was the same as Lenin’s: instrumental. Violence was generally abhorrent but acceptable if it furthered the revolutionary cause. Individual acts of terror were only permissible if part of a mass terror campaign underpinned by a popular movement. Moreover, individual assassinations and expropriations were less important than organised guerrilla warfare and preparations for armed insurrection.⁴⁴

When the 1905–7 revolutionary period passed, the Bolsheviks abjured armed struggle in favour of non-violent political agitation, notably during elections to the State Duma or parliament established by Tsar Nicholas II as concession to the popular revolt. Duma elections were indirect rather than based on universal suffrage and the institution itself was pretty powerless. Leftist parties boycotted elections to the first Duma, which sat in 1906, but participated in those for the second Duma in 1907. For the third Duma the franchise was rigged in favour of conservative parties, but social democrats, including the Bolsheviks, were able to contest the fourth Duma elections in 1912.

The Bolsheviks secured mandates for six deputies, while the Mensheviks won seven seats. Roman Malinovsky, the leader of the Bolshevik Duma faction, proved to be highly effective. Unfortunately, he was also an agent of the Okhrana. Among his many betrayals was one of his ‘best friends’, Joseph Stalin, who was arrested in St Petersburg in February 1913. Malinovsky resigned his Duma role in 1914 but was not definitively unmasked as a police spy until 1917, when documentary proof was discovered in Tsarist archives. A year later he was tried and executed by the Bolsheviks. Malinovsky was not the first police spy caught by the Bolsheviks, but his exposure was the most shocking, not least to Stalin.⁴⁵

The idea that Lenin not Stalin was the true author of Marxism and the National Question derives from Trotsky’s biography of his arch-enemy, which was published posthumously in 1941, a text that Isaac Deutscher, who wrote biographies of both men, described as ‘a book of queer fascination, full of profound insight and blind passion’.⁴⁶

The article was Lenin’s idea and he edited Stalin’s draft. Stalin also had some help with the translation of German-language sources; though Stalin studied English, French, German and Esperanto, he never mastered any foreign language except Russian. But there is no doubt that Stalin was the prime author of this Marxist classic, which set out the fundamentals of Bolshevik policy on the national question.⁴⁷

As internationalists, the Bolsheviks opposed nationalism because they believed it was divisive and diverted from class struggle. But they acknowledged the appeal of nationalist sentiment and accepted the political utility of nationalist-motivated mobilisation against capitalist and imperialist oppression. Hence the Bolsheviks supported the right to national self-determination and would fight for it themselves if national independence ended oppression and, as Stalin put it, ‘removed the grounds of strife between nations’.

Stalin’s piece was published in three parts in the pro-Bolshevik journal Prosveshchenie (Enlightenment) in early 1913. It was signed ‘K. Stalin’ – a pseudonym he had just started to use but which became permanent and displaced Koba as his underground party name.

After seizing power in 1917, the Bolsheviks continued to uphold the right to national self-determination, and enshrined it in successive versions of the Soviet constitution. However, an important shift in Bolshevik discourse effectively ruled out secession by the nations that constituted the Soviet Union. As people’s commissar for nationality affairs, Stalin was the chief articulator of the caveat that national self-determination would not be allowed to endanger the revolution or impede the development of socialism.⁴⁸

While Stalin did not have any really major disagreements with Lenin before 1917, there were some important differences of emphasis and perspective.⁴⁹ Stalin spent a lot of time in prison and in internal exile; unlike Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders, he was never an émigré revolutionary living abroad. It was Stalin’s presence on the ground in Russia and his work as a grassroots agitator, propagandist and journalist, that made him so valuable to Lenin and lubricated his rise to the top of the Bolshevik party. None was fiercer in their criticism of the Mensheviks, but for practical reasons Stalin often favoured party unity. He disdained internal splits within the Bolshevik faction and his attitude to schisms on matters of theory was much the same. Responding to a philosophical dispute about the nature of Marxist materialism, Stalin described it as ‘a storm in a glass of water’. As Ronald Suny has noted, Stalin ‘worked through these philosophical distinctions . . . and came to his own conclusions. But his paramount concern was that these disputes over materialism and perception not lead to further factional fractures.’ Philosophical discussion was important, wrote Stalin in a 1908 letter from prison, ‘but I think that if our party is not a sect – and it has not been a sect for a long time – it cannot break up into groups according to philosophical (gnoseological) tendencies’.⁵⁰

Stalin spent several years in exile. Opportunities for political activity were limited, which meant there was plenty of time for reading and study. During his time in Vologda (northern Russia) between 1908 and 1912, the police observed him entering and spending time in local libraries on numerous occasions. Another witness to his activities in Vologda was Polina Onufrieva, the girlfriend of Petr Chizhikov, a political activist who worked closely with Stalin. According to her 1944 testimony, the three of them spent a lot of time together and talked at length about literature and art. Stalin, recalled Polina, was very well informed about both Russian and foreign literature. He became her intellectual mentor and gave her a copy of P. S. Kogan’s Ocherki po Istorii Zapadno-Evropeiskikh Literatur (1909) (Essays on the History of West European Literature), which he inscribed: ‘To intelligent, nasty Polia from oddball Joseph’.⁵¹

In February 1912 Stalin disappeared from his digs in Vologda. A few weeks later his landlady informed the police and enclosed a list of the things he had left behind in his room, which included quite a few books. Among them were books about accountancy, arithmetic, astronomy and hypnotism. The philosophy texts included works by or about Voltaire, Auguste Comte, Karl Kautsky and the Menshevik philosopher Pavel Yushkevich. Literature was represented by a Russian poets’ collection and an unnamed work by Oscar Wilde.⁵²

Stalin’s longest exile was to Turukhansk in Siberia. He was deported there in July 1913 and stayed for nearly four years. A few of Stalin’s letters from this period have survived, including some that he wrote to his great friend Roman Malinovsky. It was a harsh place of confinement and Stalin was often in bad health. As you might expect, he complained about his material conditions to his friends and comrades and pleaded for their financial support. But most of all he badgered them to send him books and journals, especially those necessary to continue his studies of the national question.⁵³

As Stalin’s landlady’s list indicates, he had various interests and read many different kinds of books. But it was Marxist literature that preoccupied him, especially the classic works of Marx and Engels. His first major published work was a series of newspaper articles on Anarchism or Socialism? (1906–7) in which he deployed their views to counter the argument of anarchist philosophers that Marxism was too metaphysical. In Marxism and the National Question (1913), he criticised the so-called Austro-Marxist view that nations were a psychological construct rather than, as he believed, historical entities based on land, language and economic life. Apart from Lenin, his favourite Russian Marxist was Georgy Plekhanov, one of the founders of Russia’s revolutionary socialist movement, who wrote a highly influential historical theory text that Stalin read again in later life – The Monist View of History.⁵⁴

WAR AND REVOLUTION

The First World War broke out a year after Stalin was exiled to Turukhansk. It caused a split in the international socialist movement, with many parties rallying to their country’s defence. As radical and intransigent as ever, Lenin not only opposed the war but called for socialists to work for the defeat of their own country. Lenin’s idea was to turn the international war into a civil war and into a class war that would trigger revolution in Russia and in all the warring states.

Stalin’s exile, scheduled to end in summer 1917, was cut short by a dramatic and unexpected event: the fall of the Tsar, Nicholas II. Forced to abdicate by a garrison mutiny and popular uprising in the Russian capital of Petrograd (formerly St Petersburg), the Tsar had also been under pressure from Duma politicians seeking democratic reform and from military leaders who hoped a dramatic gesture would stabilise the home front. The Tsarist administration was taken over by a Provisional Government intending to hold free elections to a constituent assembly charged with adopting a new, democratic constitution. Also vying for power were the Soviets, organs of popular mobilisation that had first appeared during the 1905 revolution and were rapidly revived in 1917. Dominated by socialists, they consisted of worker, peasant and soldier delegates and claimed to represent the population at large, unlike the elitist Duma, which, in any event, had not sat since December 1916.

When Stalin returned to Petrograd in March 1917, the most pressing political issue facing the Bolsheviks was their attitude to the Provisional Government: should they support it or not? Should they continue to oppose the war against Germany and its allies now that the Tsar was gone? Some Bolsheviks wanted to support the Provisional Government as the embodiment, together with the Soviets, of the ongoing democratic revolution in Russia and to moderate the party’s anti-war position. Others wanted to have nothing to do with the new government and to continue with Lenin’s ‘defeatist’ position. Initially, Stalin opted for a centrist stance that entailed supporting the Provisional Government as long as it fulfilled the demands of the Soviets while at the same time pressing the new regime to end Russia’s participation in the war.

Lenin returned to Russia from exile in Switzerland in April to demand outright opposition to the war and to the Provisional Government. He wanted the Soviets to take power and effect a rapid transition to a socialist revolution. Stalin initially resisted Lenin’s radical stance but was soon persuaded by him to change his position.

While Stalin did not go along with everything Lenin said or proposed in 1917, he sided with him at every major turning point. However, Stalin stood his ground on the question of land distribution to individual peasants as against the socialisation of agriculture.⁵⁵ Bolshevik support for peasant land seizures in 1917 was crucial to gaining a foothold of popular support in the countryside.

Like Lenin, Stalin thought the Russian Revolution could be the catalyst for European and world revolution: ‘The possibility is not excluded that Russia will be the country that will lay the road to socialism. . . . We must discard the antiquated idea that only Europe can show us the way. There is dogmatic Marxism and creative Marxism. I stand by the latter.’⁵⁶

Stalin did oppose Lenin on one important matter: the expulsion of Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev from the party because of their public opposition to Lenin’s call for a Bolshevik insurrection in Petrograd in October 1917 – a proposal they believed was adventurist and would result in defeat and counter-revolution. Stalin was quite close to Kamenev before the revolution, having spent time in exile with him. On grounds of party unity, Stalin insisted that both men remain in the organisation and retain their membership of the Bolshevik central committee, as long as they agreed to abide by CC decisions. That was another attitude of Stalin’s that derived from his long experience in the revolutionary underground, one that was not shared by some ‘émigré’ Bolsheviks or many of the newer members of the rapidly expanding party – the importance of central control and member discipline in carrying out decisions: ‘Once a decision of the Central Committee is made, it must be carried out without any discussion.’⁵⁷ This was the basis of the so-called ‘democratic centralism’ that governed the operation of the party.

The much-quoted observation that in 1917 Stalin was a ‘grey blur, looming up now and then dimly and without leaving without any trace’ comes from the 1922 memoirs of the Menshevik Nikolai Sukhanov. Often counterposed to Sukhanov’s perception of Stalin as a drab and uninteresting individual is Trotsky’s dramatic impact after he returned to Russia in May 1917. Elected to the Petrograd Soviet, he joined up with the Bolsheviks in July and in September was elected chairman of the Soviet’s Executive Committee. He supported Lenin’s call for a Bolshevik insurrection and established a Military-Revolutionary Committee as the armed wing of the Petrograd Soviet. It was this body that carried out the Bolshevik coup in Petrograd in November 1917 when it forcibly seized control of key buildings and communications infrastructure. The following day Trotsky told delegates to the Second Congress of Soviets that the Provisional Government had been overthrown, and jeered the moderate socialists who opposed the seizure of power as belonging ‘in the dustbin of history’.

Lenin’s Soviet-based government was a coalition of the Bolsheviks and Left Socialist Revolutionaries, who represented militant peasants. Its ministers were called commissars because Lenin thought that sounded more revolutionary. Lenin was chair of the Council of Commissars, Trotsky was people’s commissar for foreign affairs and Stalin filled the entirely new post of commissar for the nationalities. Upon taking office, Trotsky famously said: ‘I will issue a few revolutionary proclamations to the peoples of the world and then shut up shop.’⁵⁸

Though overshadowed by Trotsky in historical memory, there were few Bolsheviks more important than Stalin in 1917. One of the first Bolshevik leaders to reach Petrograd from exile, he was a member of the editorial board of the party’s newspaper Pravda, contributing numerous articles to the Bolshevik press. When Pravda was supressed by the authorities, he edited the paper issued by the party as a substitute. When the Provisional Government clamped down on the Bolsheviks in summer 1917 and Trotsky was gaoled, while Lenin fled to Finland, Stalin remained at large. He spoke at all the party’s major meetings and in Lenin’s absence presented the main report to the 6th congress of the Bolshevik party in July–August 1917. This was a tough assignment, coming as it did in the wake of the party’s setbacks following the radical demonstrations of the July days that had provoked the Provisional Government’s crackdown. Stalin supported Lenin’s proposal for an insurrection and was one of seven party leaders entrusted with overseeing its preparation. As Chris Read puts it, ‘If Stalin was a blur it might seem to be a result of his constant activity rather than indistinctiveness!’⁵⁹

Having grabbed power, Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky were determined to retain it at all costs. At stake, they believed, was not just the fate of the Russian Revolution but also the socialist future of all humanity. Scheduled elections to a Constituent Assembly were permitted at the end of November but when they produced an anti-Bolshevik majority the first democratically elected parliament in Russian history was not allowed to function. The Bolsheviks claimed the Soviets, which they and their allies controlled, were more representative of public opinion and better placed to protect the interests of the people.⁶⁰

In March 1918 Lenin’s government signed the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty with Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and the Turkish Ottoman Empire. The treaty negotiations provoked a deep split in the Bolsheviks’ ranks and broke up the alliance with the Left Socialist Revolutionaries.

One of the very first acts of Lenin’s regime had been the proclamation of a Decree on Peace which called for a general armistice and negotiations for ‘a just and democratic peace’. When the fighting continued, Lenin agreed a separate ceasefire with the Germans and started the negotiations at Brest-Litovsk. Foreign Commissar Trotsky, who led the Soviet negotiations, had no intention of actually concluding a peace treaty. Instead, he aimed to spin out the negotiations and to use them as a platform for propaganda, the hope being that the revolutionary situation in Europe would mature and the war could be stopped by mass action. The Germans played along with this charade for a while but in January 1918 issued an ultimatum that demanded the annexation of large chunks of the western areas of the former Tsarist Empire in return for a peace deal.

Lenin and Stalin wanted to accept the German terms on grounds that the alternative was losing the war and with it the revolution. Opposed were Nikolai Bukharin and ‘Left Communist’ supporters of a revolutionary war against Germany, who argued that the European proletariat would rise in support of Bolshevik Russia. The Left Socialist Revolutionaries also favoured a revolutionary war. Trotsky proposed a compromise formula of ‘neither war nor peace’ – a unilateral declaration of an end to hostilities. Trotsky’s proposal was accepted and this is what he told the astonished German negotiators at Brest-Litovsk.

Trotsky’s calculation that the Germans would acquiesce in such a peace because it would enable them to concentrate on defeating their western enemies proved to be disastrously wrong when Berlin launched an Eastern Front offensive that achieved rapid success. Faced with the prospect of military collapse, the Bolsheviks had little choice but to accept the Germans’ terms, which had hardened considerably. Even so, it was only after a sharp debate at a specially convened party congress in March 1918 that the Bolsheviks voted in favour of the peace treaty. At the same gathering they changed their name to the All-Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks).

CIVIL WAR COMMISSAR

The Brest peace paved the way for the Russian Civil War. Now Russia was no longer at war, the Bolsheviks’ opponents did not hesitate to use force in an attempt to topple them from power. The deal also provided a pretext for foreign intervention as Russia’s former allies moved to stop supplies they had sent to the Tsar and the Provisional Government from falling into German hands. More allied troops poured into Russia when the First World War ended in November 1918 and foreign military intervention became part of an anti-Bolshevik crusade aimed at regime change in Russia.

The civil war was a close-run thing. At its height in 1919, the Bolsheviks were corralled in central Russia, under attack from all sides by ‘White Armies’ led by former Tsarist generals and admirals. Having resigned from the Foreign Commissariat as a result of the Brest-Litovsk debacle, Trotsky played a central role in the Bolshevik victory over the Whites. As commissar for war, he raised a 5-million-strong Red Army, controversially recruiting to its ranks 50,000 former Tsarist officers and NCOs.

During the civil war, Stalin was Lenin’s troubleshooter-in-chief on the front line. Stalin’s contribution to the Red victory was, as Robert McNeal has observed,

second only to Trotsky’s. Stalin had played a smaller role in the overall organisation of the Red Army, but he had been more important in providing direction on crucial fronts. If his reputation as a hero was far below Trotsky’s, this had less to do with objective merit than with Stalin’s lack of flair, at this stage of his career, for self-advertisement.⁶¹

In June 1918 Stalin was sent to Tsaritsyn (renamed Stalingrad in 1924) to protect food supply lines from southern Russia. With the city about to fall to the enemy, Stalin responded with a wave of arrests and executions of those deemed disloyal and traitorous. He was outraged by the attempted assassination of Lenin in August 1918 by Fanny Kaplan, a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, which had been banned by the Bolsheviks. Stalin cabled to Moscow that he was responding to this ‘vile’ act by ‘instituting open and systematic mass terror against the bourgeoisie and its agents’.⁶²

While in Tsaritsyn, Stalin clashed with Trotsky over the role of the bourgeois military specialists who had sided with the Bolsheviks. Stalin was all in favour of using whatever expertise was available but he distrusted these specialists and preferred to rely on those with established political loyalties. When Stalin obstructed Trotsky’s appointment of a former Tsarist general to command the Bolsheviks’ Southern Front, the war commissar demanded his immediate recall to Moscow. Lenin, who agreed with Trotsky on the use of bourgeois military specialists, acceded to this but retained his confidence in Stalin.

In January 1919 Stalin was sent to the Urals to investigate why the Perm region had fallen to Admiral Kolchak’s White Army. Stalin was accompanied by Felix Dzerzhinsky, the fearsome head of the Cheka – the agency of the Bolsheviks’ ‘Red Terror’ during the civil war. Reporting back to Moscow, they highlighted the number of former Tsarist officers who had defected to the Whites.

Trotsky’s recruitment of former Tsarist officers was debated at the Bolshevik party’s 8th congress in March 1919. Since Trotsky was at the front, it fell to Lenin to defend his war commissar’s position. Notwithstanding his own doubts, Stalin sided with Lenin against those who wanted to stop employing bourgeois military specialists.

In the spring Stalin was sent to bolster the defence of Petrograd, which was threatened by General Yudenich’s White Army based in Estonia. For several months he was a highly visible figure of authority in the Petrograd area, touring the front line and inspecting military bases. In October 1919 Stalin went to the Southern Front to help with the defence of the southern approaches to Moscow, which were threatened by General Denikin’s troops.

Stalin’s next assignment was the South-West Front, whose forces were attacked by the armies of newly independent Poland in April 1920. Recreated in the aftermath of the First World War, the new Polish state was carved out of territory that belonged to Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Tsarist Russia. Its border with Russia was demarcated by an international commission headed by the British foreign secretary, Lord Curzon. This border, which became known as the ‘Curzon Line’, was unacceptable to the Poles, who decided to grab as much territory as they could while civil war raged in Russia.

Headed by Marshal Józef Piłsudski, the Poles’ campaign went well at first, but the Red Army soon halted and then reversed their advances. The question arose of taking the fight into Polish territory, with the aim of defeating Piłsudski and inspiring a proletarian revolution in Poland that would then spread to Germany and the rest of Europe. Stalin was cautious as he had already experienced many rapid advances and reverses during the civil war. His front had to contend also with Baron Wrangel’s White forces based in Crimea. In an interview with Pravda in mid-July, Stalin said:

our successes on the anti-Polish Front are unquestionable. . . . But it would be unbecoming boastfulness to think that the Poles are as good as done with, that all that remains for us to do is to ‘march on Warsaw’. . . . It is ridiculous to talk of a ‘march on Warsaw’ . . . as long as the Wrangel danger has not been eliminated.⁶³

But when asked by Lenin how the government should respond to a ceasefire proposal from Curzon, Stalin cabled, on 13 July, that

the Polish armies are completely falling apart. . . . I don’t think imperialism has ever been as weak as it is now, at the moment of Poland’s defeat, and we have never been as strong as we are now, so the more resolutely we behave ourselves, the better it will be for Russia and for international revolution.⁶⁴

The party central committee duly decided to invade Poland. And on 23 July the Politburo established a Provisional Polish Revolutionary Committee.⁶⁵

The Red Army’s thrust into Poland was initially quite successful. As it approached Warsaw, delegates to the Second World Congress of the Communist International (Comintern) meeting in Moscow were thrilled by Lenin’s charting of the Red Army’s progress on a large-scale war map.⁶⁶

Stalin got rather carried away, too. On 24 July he wrote to Lenin:

It would be a sin not to encourage revolution in Italy now that we have the Comintern, a beaten Poland and a reasonable Red Army while the Entente is trying to obtain a breathing space for the Polish army so it can be reorganised and rearmed. . . . The Comintern should consider organising an uprising in Italy and in weak states such as Hungary and Czechoslovakia (Romania has to be smashed, too).⁶⁷

Among the formations under Stalin’s remit as the South West Front’s Bolshevik commissar was Semen Budenny’s First Cavalry Army. In mid-August Budenny was ordered by Moscow (the Bolshevik capital since March 1918) to support the Red Army’s campaign to capture Warsaw. Amid continuing concerns about the threat from Wrangel, Stalin, who had his eye on taking Lvov not Warsaw, refused to counter-sign the order.⁶⁸ While the delay in Budenny’s redeployment did not help matters, the Red Army’s offensive was probably doomed anyway, not least because the anticipated proletarian insurrection in Poland failed to materialise. By the end of August the Poles had repulsed the attack on Warsaw and the Red Army was in full-scale retreat. Lenin was forced to sue for peace and then, in March 1921, to sign the Treaty of Riga, an agreement that imposed severe territorial losses on Soviet Russia, notably the incorporation into Poland of western Belorussia and western Ukraine, territories that were populated mainly by Belorussians, Ukrainians and Jews.

Stalin’s actions during the Polish campaign became a cause of considerable controversy. An early contributor to the debate was Boris Shaposhnikov, who later served as Stalin’s chief of the General Staff. In his 1924 book, Na Visle: K Istorii Kampanii 1920 (On the Vistula: Towards a History of the 1920 Campaign), a copy of which may be found in Stalin’s library, he concluded that while Budenny’s delay did have a negative impact on the Red Army’s march on Warsaw, his army would not, in any event, have arrived in time to save the Soviets’ West Front from defeat by the Poles.⁶⁹ In his study of Stalin as a military commander, British military historian Albert Seaton arrived at a similar verdict:

The extent to which Stalin’s refusal or delay in carrying out orders was indirectly responsible for the defeat of the West Front and the consequent loss of the Russo-Polish war is a question which can only be examined by considering the . . . war as a whole. Many other factors contributed to the defeat: political misjudgement, military misdirection, poor training and organisation, indiscipline in the West as well as the South-West Front, over-confident and inexpert commanders and inadequate signals communications. It seems probable, however, that . . . [the West Front] might have been saved from so overwhelming a defeat.⁷⁰

Stalin responded to the unfolding Polish debacle by submitting a memorandum to the Politburo that argued the defeat resulted from a ‘lack of effective fighting reserves’ (Trotsky thought that supplies were the main problem). Stalin also called for a high-level investigation of the reasons for the defeat in Poland.⁷¹ This created tension with Lenin as well as Trotsky, both of whom had a vested interest in avoiding too deep a discussion of the failed Polish adventure. Together with Trotsky, Lenin successfully manoeuvred within the Politburo to stymie Stalin’s proposed investigation.

At the Bolsheviks’ 9th party conference in September 1920, Stalin was criticised by Lenin and Trotsky for his ‘strategic errors’ during the Polish campaign. He responded with a dignified statement which pointed to his publicly expressed doubts about the ‘march on Warsaw’ and reiterated the call for a commission to examine the reasons for the catastrophe.⁷²

By this time Stalin had, at his own request, been relieved of military responsibilities. The civil war was nearly over and he had plenty of other work to do. Throughout the conflict he had remained nationalities commissar and in March 1919 was appointed head of the People’s Commissariat of State Control, later renamed the Worker-Peasant Inspectorate, whose job it was to protect state property and to keep wayward officials in line.

Stalin played little direct role in the day-to-day operations of either commissariat, which he delegated to officials. But he kept his finger on the policy pulse in relation to the national question. Lenin’s was still the dominant Bolshevik voice on this matter, and Stalin did not always agree with him. He favoured a future confederation of socialist states rather than the more tightly knit world federation proposed by Lenin. Stalin argued that advanced and well-established nations would want to have their own independent states for the foreseeable future. Their new socialist rulers would not accept Lenin’s proposal to universalise the federal relations between nationalities that prevailed within Soviet Russia. Of more practical import, though, was Stalin’s preference for a highly centralised Soviet state. When the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was created in 1922 it reflected a compromise with Lenin in which behind a façade of the federalism there was the highly centralised state preferred by Stalin.

Georgia was the most serious source of tension between Stalin and Lenin. Stalin’s native land was ruled by a Menshevik government headed by Noe Zhordania, an old adversary of his from the underground days. The Georgian Menshevik state was recognised by the Bolsheviks in May 1920, who pledged non-interference in its internal affairs in return for the legalisation of communist party activity. Lenin favoured a more conciliatory approach to Georgia than Stalin and Trotsky, who both wanted to occupy the country militarily. In February 1921 the Red Army marched in.

In the early weeks of the Bolshevik takeover in Georgia, Stalin was ill and he spent the summer recuperating at a spa in the North Caucasus. In July he crossed the mountains to support the Georgian Bolsheviks in rallying the masses to their new regime. Appalled by the nationalist fervour he encountered, he ordered the Cheka to quell resistance to Bolshevik rule. Among the more than 100 arrestees was Stalin’s childhood friend Joseph Iremashvili.⁷³

It was not only Georgian nationalism that worried Stalin. His solution was a Transcaucasian Socialist Federation as a container for all the region’s nationalisms and ethnic differences. That federation, which consisted of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, was established at the end of 1921 and was a signatory of the treaty that established the USSR in 1922 (the other signatories being Russia, Ukraine and Belorussia).⁷⁴

THE GENERAL-SECRETARY

Differences over the Polish war, the national question and the Georgian crisis did some damage to Stalin’s personal relations with Lenin. But it was Lenin who pushed through Stalin’s appointment as general-secretary of the communist party in April 1922, a post that involved oversight of the central committee apparatus, allocation of key personnel and agenda-setting for Politburo meetings. A praktik as well as an intellectual, Stalin’s appointment to the post made a lot of sense, particularly since he had again proved himself to be Lenin’s loyal lieutenant. At the 10th party congress in March 1921 he backed Lenin in a dispute about the role of Soviet trade unions. Trotsky wanted to subordinate unions to state commands, while the leftist Workers Opposition wanted prolet-arians to directly control their factories. Stalin agreed with Lenin that the role of trade unions was to protect workers’ interests in accordance with the party’s political directives. He also sided with Lenin on the introduction of the New Economic Policy – the party’s retreat from the draconian ‘war communism’ of the civil war years. As a consistent advocate of party unity, Stalin supported the congress’s ban on factions – groups within the party that operated with their own internal organisation and discipline. However, that ban did not prevent Lenin from asking Stalin to secure control of the central party apparatus for their group.⁷⁵

Stalin’s ascendancy to the general-secretaryship coincided with the culmination of the party’s encroachment on state functions which had begun during the civil war. When Lenin seized power in 1917 he intended to govern through state institutions, i.e. the Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom) and its respective departments and subunits. But that did not work out too well. Within Sovnarkom there was too much talk and too little action. It was not well suited to rapid and decisive decision-making, especially during the civil war. Sovnarkom’s democratic legitimacy rested on the Soviets, which it supposedly represented, but these had collapsed during the civil war. Gradually, the party took over many state functions. The Politburo took all the important decisions and the Soviet regime rapidly evolved into a hybrid ‘party-state’ in which the party’s power predominated at every level of state and society. The party did not just control or occupy the state – its organisation and personnel were the most important arm of the state.⁷⁶

Lenin had intended to counter-balance Stalin’s power as general-secretary by appointing Trotsky one of his deputies in Sovnarkom, but in May 1922 he had the first of a series of debilitating strokes.⁷⁷

The succession struggle began while Lenin was ailing and one of the early salvos was fired by his soon-to-be widow, Nadezhda Krupskaya, when she revealed the existence of what became known as ‘Lenin’s Testament’ – a series of notes dictated by him from his sickbed in late 1922 and early 1923. Doubts have been expressed about the provenance of the testament and it may be that Krupskaya and the staff who wrote down Lenin’s utterings put some words into his mouth but, crucially, no one questioned the authenticity of Lenin’s notes at the time.⁷⁸

About Stalin and Trotsky, Lenin supposedly said:

Comrade Stalin, having become General-Secretary, has concentrated enormous power in his hands, and I am not sure that he always knows how to use that power with sufficient caution. On the other hand, Comrade Trotsky . . . is distinguished not only by his exceptional ability – personally, he is, to be sure, the most able man in the present CC – but also by his too far-reaching self-confidence and a disposition to be far too much attracted by the purely administrative side of affairs. These two qualities of the two most able leaders of the present CC might, quite innocently, lead to a split, and if our Party does not take measures to prevent it, a split might arise unexpectedly.⁷⁹

Even more damning was this addendum to Lenin’s testament:

Stalin is too rude and this defect, although quite tolerable in our midst and in dealing among us Communists, becomes intolerable in a General-Secretary. That is why I suggest that the comrades think about a way of removing Stalin from that post and appointing another man . . . more tolerant, more loyal, more polite and more considerate to the comrades, less capricious, etc. This circumstance may appear to be a negligible detail. But I think that from the standpoint of safeguards against a split and from the standpoint of what I wrote about the relationship between Stalin and Trotsky . . . it is a detail which can assume decisive importance.⁸⁰

Lenin’s proposal to remove Stalin as general-secretary was not as drastic as it might appear in retrospect since the post was still predominantly administrative. Being relieved of such a burden might even have suited Stalin, as long as he remained one of the party’s top leaders.

Lenin’s testament provoked little more than a storm in a political teacup. Identifying Trotsky as the main danger to their own leadership ambitions, Stalin’s Politburo comrades backed the nascent dictator and efforts to use the testament to whip up opposition to Stalin among party activists did not get very far. Stalin offered on more than one occasion to accede to Lenin’s wishes and resign as the party’s general-secretary, but there was never any question his resignation would be accepted.

Stephen Kotkin is convinced that Stalin found the Lenin Testament episode profoundly psychologically disturbing and harboured a deep sense of victimhood and self-pity.⁸¹

Stalin may have been peeved by the testament and irritated by Lenin’s words, but there is no evidence the episode had any lasting impact on his psychological make-up. Stalin was not the self-pitying type, did not see himself as a victim and remained loyal to Lenin’s memory. When he commented on Lenin’s remarks about him at the central committee plenum in July 1927, he was unrepentant. Having quoted in full the testament’s passage about his rudeness, Stalin said: ‘Indeed, I am rude, Comrades, to those who rudely and perfidiously destroy and split the party. I have not hidden this, and still do not.’⁸²

Stalin was well placed to emerge as Lenin’s successor. After Lenin’s death in January 1924 he gradually established himself as the pre-eminent party leader. He helped create a Lenin cult and projected himself as Lenin’s most faithful pupil. He positioned himself as a centrist in the various policy disputes that beset the party. He used the patronage of official appointments to gather support. He paid attention to the needs and interests of regional party officials. Most importantly, he gave meaning to the lives of party officials and activists by prioritising the construction of socialism at home over the spread of revolution abroad.

When the Bolsheviks took power they expected their revolution to be bolstered by revolutions in more advanced countries. The failure of the revolution to spread abroad prompted Stalin to fashion a new doctrine – Socialism in one country – which proclaimed that Soviet Russia could build a socialist state that would safeguard both the Russian Revolution and the future world revolution. ‘Internationalism’ was reformulated to serve the interests of the one successful revolution. ‘An internationalist’, said Stalin in 1927, ‘is one who is ready to defend the USSR without reservation, without wavering, unconditionally; for the USSR is the base of the world revolutionary movement, and this revolutionary movement cannot be defended and promoted unless the USSR is defended.’⁸³

Stalin’s own explanation for his success in the factional battles of the 1920s was that he had secured the support of middle-ranking party and state officials: ‘Why did we prevail over Trotsky and the rest?’ he asked in 1937. ‘Trotsky, as we know, was the most popular man in our country after Lenin. Bukharin, Zinoviev, Rykov, Tomsky were all popular. We were little known. . . . But the middle cadres supported us, explained our positions to the masses. Meanwhile Trotsky completely ignored those cadres.’⁸⁴

Stalin’s workload as general-secretary was enormous and continued to grow as the party-state bureaucracy expanded. The paper trail of reports, resolutions and stenograms passing through his office was endless, as were the frequent visitors, and the numerous meetings he had to attend. But he proved a highly capable administrator, one measure of his success being the scale of the task he faced: ‘The General-Secretary had to establish a system that tracked the skills and experience of hundreds of thousands of officials . . . to organise 350,000 mostly poorly qualified . . . “staff”, who together had to bring the world’s largest country, with a population of almost 140 million, out of an appalling economic crisis amidst serious political divisions.’⁸⁵

As for many political leaders, the vast bulk of Stalin’s reading life was taken up by reports, briefings and correspondence. When President Barack Obama left office, he complained that while such material was good for working the analytical side of the brain he sometimes lost track of ‘not just the poetry of fiction, but also the depth of fiction. Fiction was useful as a reminder of the truths under the surface of what we argue about every day.’ In a similar vein, President Vladimir Putin said that he kept a volume of Mikhail Lermontov’s poetry on his desk in order ‘to have something to think about, to take my mind off things and, generally speaking, to find myself in a different world – a worthwhile, beautiful and interesting one’.⁸⁶

Stalin certainly shared Obama’s liking for Shakespeare and, quite possibly, Putin’s penchant for Lermontov. But armed with his Marxist outlook on life, he found the poetry of non-fiction equally appealing.