Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928

by Stephen Kotkin

“Trotsky’s orders, clear and precise, sparing nobody, and exacting from everybody the utmost exertion and accurate, rapid execution of combat orders, at once showed that there was a firm directing hand. . . . Trotsky penetrated into every detail, applying to every item of business his seething, restless energy and his amazing perseverance.”

This is Lenin’s idea. Stalin can’t live unless he has what someone else has.” Stalin did not attend the ceremony at the Bolshoi, and at the announcement of his Red Banner award almost no one clapped. Trotsky received an ovation.

Tsarist Russia had possessed some 800 tons of gold on the eve of the Great War, one of the largest reserves in the world, which had been evacuated from the State Bank vaults beginning in 1915 to Kazan and other locations for safekeeping, but the bulk of it was seized by the Czechoslovak Legion in 1918.

The absence of reliable figures is itself indicative of the nature of the antagonists, not just the low value they placed on human life but also the severe limits of each side’s governing capacities.

“Psychologically, the Whites conducted themselves as if nothing had happened, whereas the whole world around them had collapsed,” observed Pyotr Struve. “Nothing so harmed the ‘White’ movement as this very condition of psychologically staying put in previous circumstances, circumstances that had ceased to exist . . . in a revolution, only revolutionaries can find their way.”

But the targeting of grassroots and often independent forms of political expression was rooted in core beliefs. Lenin’s regime set as its raison d’être not maximizing freedom but maximizing production.

Compared with the tsarist royal court and high nobility, Bolshevik elite perquisites were hardly extravagant—an apartment, a dacha, a motor car, food packets—but amid the rubble and penury, such advantages were significant and conspicuous.

The Red expert dualism would endure even after the overwhelming majority of state officials, army officers, or schoolteachers were party members, becoming an added sourge of bureaucratic proliferation and waste.

Here was the Communist version of a discovery that had been made by Russian Orthodox missionaries in remote areas of the empire: namely, that the Bible had to be taught in the empire’s vernacular languages, in order to get non-Christians to read it and convert. So it would be with Communism.

Stalin insisted on replying to Trotsky and Lenin, and divulged to the conference that he had voiced doubts about a campaign into Poland.194 In truth, the march on Warsaw had been the work of Tukhachevsky and Sergei Kamenev. But of course Lenin was the prime mover behind the debacle, and now he pulled the rug out from under Stalin, shifting the blame from his own too-optimistic reading of the revolutionary situation to the excessive pace of the military advance.

So there it was: Lenin madly miscalculating; the tsarist aristocrat Tukhachevsky helping blunder Soviet Russia into an offensive war to ignite “revolution from abroad,” then claiming years later it had not been a blunder; and the proletarian Stalin, having warned against such adventurism, scapegoated for insubordination.207

But the deprivation and to an extent the disillusionment may have been even worse than they had been four years earlier under Nicholas II, on the eve of the February Revolution.

The Whites had been scattered—in the ground, prison, or exile—but large-scale industry had fallen 82 percent since 1913, coal output was one quarter of the 1913 level, electricity, one third.

From the rostrum the Georgian spoke slowly, in his characteristically accented and soft voice—there were no microphones yet.

Above all, he pointed out that the Mensheviks had been right all along—socialist revolution in Russia had been premature, as demonstrated by Lenin’s mistakes, recourse to political repression, and policy shifts over the peasantry.

And yet, Martov was back in exile, while Lenin sat in the Kremlin.

In exchange, however, the Georgian government—in a codicil that remained secret—agreed to legalize Communist party activity on its territory, and Bolshevik agents in the Caucasus, including a young operative named Lavrenti Beria,

Beria's First Appearance

Above all, Stalin argued, Menshevik Georgia provided “a zone of foreign intervention and occupation”—a stepping zone for aggressors to attack the Soviet heartland, lending apparent urgency to the matter.

Moderate socialists, in his mind, were more dangerous than open counterrevolutionaries, whom the moderates abetted with their “ornate Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik phraseology about a people’s government, a constituent assembly, liberties, and the like.

Lenin railed against the idea that every society was made up of multiple interests that deserved competitive political representation and balancing as naively inviting in the “wrong” interests

Rarely in world history has one man played such an outsized role and, suddenly, been sidelined—an outcome evocative, in very different political ways, of Abraham Lincoln’s civil war victory and emancipation of the slaves, followed by his assassination.

Gorki acquired a staff, including the worker-cook Spiridon Putin (grandfather of Vladimir Putin),

Trotsky famously wrote that “Stalin did not create the apparatus. The apparatus created him.”19 This was exactly backward. Stalin created the apparatus, and it was a colossal feat.20

But he demonstrated surpassing organizational abilities, a mammoth appetite for work, a strategic mind, and an unscrupulousness that recalled his master teacher, Lenin.

What Trotsky and others missed or refused to acknowledge was that Stalin had a deft political touch: he recalled names and episodes of people’s biographies, impressing them with his familiarity, concern, and attentiveness, no matter where they stood in the hierarchy, even if they were just service staff.

This is an excellent leadership quality, probably one Trotsky did not share

But what stands out most about Stalin’s ascendancy is that, structurally, he was handed the possibility of a personal dictatorship, and he began to realize that potential just by fulfilling the duties of general secretary.

A geography of authority, however, also exposes limits to the power of the regime and of Stalin’s personal dictatorship, particularly the near absence of the party in the vast countryside, where four fifths of the population lived.

but it overlooked Stalin’s immersion in Marxism, a key source of his power. And it left open the question of why so many people proved susceptible to him.

Naked careerism was one reason they sought to attach themselves to the general secretary, but many were attracted to Stalin because of his tenacious dedication to the revolutionary cause and to the state’s power.

“The anterooms were crowded with callers; numerous clerks, mostly young girls in abbreviated skirts and high-heeled lacquered shoes, flitted about with arms full of documents,”

Vozdvizhenka, 5, was near the historic location of a monastery that had been burned down in the fires that had helped drive out Napoleon. Before that, it had been the site of Ivan the Terrible’s Oprichnina. Here, in the jammed neoclassical edifice, Stalin would have his inaugural general secretary’s office.

He was not the night owl he would become. “Stalin arose usually around 9:00 a.m., and arrived at the Central Committee on Old Square by 11:00,” according to a long-serving bodyguard. “Stalin frequently worked until late at night, especially in those years after Lenin’s death

As of 1922, there were only seven full members (Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Rykov, Tomsky)

That being the Politburo

His office door was unlocked.

Power accrued to Stalin’s apparatus in the first instance thanks to leverage over personnel.

What stands out is not that local party organizations often managed to reject candidates to top party posts proposed by the center, but that the central apparatus managed to impose itself to a high degree.

Appointments and transfers of senior functionaries were systematized with the development, on the initiative of Stalin’s orgburo, of a “nomenklatura” (from the Latin nomenclatura, for a list of names).

but the invention of the nomenklatura system, and its demand for up-to-date personnel data, was a remarkable patronage mechanism in energetic hands.

Stalin put a premium on competence, which he interpreted in terms of loyalty.

“We need to assemble functionaries so that people who occupy these positions are capable of implementing directives, comprehending those directives, accepting those directives as their own and bringing them to life,” he observed at the 12th Party Congress (April 1923).

Commanders intent

Yet another key device was the government phone system. Worried that switchboard operators could listen in on calls, the regime developed a “vertushka,” so named because it had dials, then a novelty. At first, the self-dialed government network linked around sixty people, but soon it grew to a few hundred, and served as a mark of power (or lack thereof for those without).

The regime also established a special cipher unit, which, though nominally a division of the Cheka, in practice was autonomous, so that politburo telegrams did not pass through the secret police leadership.

The Old Square mail room resembled a military operation with secret police couriers gluing, sewing, sealing, and unsealing envelopes;

Hypersecrecy became an unquenchable thirst that strengthened Stalin’s grip.

Dictatorship unwittingly imposes limits on itself.

Principles of Organization,

He constantly urged, as he wrote in 1919 referring to Bolshevik subversion of Turkestan, that things had to be carried out “in an extremely conspiratorial manner (as we knew how to work under the tsar).”

If the military was politically weak in the Soviet party-state, unlike the case in most dictatorships, the military also suffered from the weak condition of society.

Stalin, predictably, sought to seize this issue, telling the 12th Party Congress that whereas others tended to see the Red Army through the lens of military offense and defense, he saw “a collection point of workers and peasants.”

That said, the general secretary’s subordination of the military to the party apparatus was very far along, with the exception that Trotsky remained its nominal head. Already in late 1923, however, the workers’ and peasants’ inspectorate—controlled by Stalin—had pointed out, accurately, that Trotsky did not really manage the everyday work of the war and navy commissariat.