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

by Stephen Kotkin

The Cheka relied on its fearsome reputation. Pravda carried reports of Cheka victims being flayed alive, impaled, scalped, crucified, tied to planks that were pushed slowly into roaring furnaces or into containers of boiling water.

Rumors circulated that the Cheka ranks overflowed with veterans of the hated okhranka, which was false—the Cheka mounted manhunts for them—but damaging to its reputation all the same.

Nor did it help reputationally that a substantial proportion of Soviet Russia’s jailers, interrogators, and executioners were non-ethnic Russians, often Poles and Jews, a circumstance derived partly from the categories of those who had been oppressed under tsarism, and partly from methods of recruitment (Jews and Poles recruited their own).

Kamenev, the leading politburo proponent of a police overhaul, told a meeting of metalworkers that year that “there are people who justly hate the Lubyanka.”

the Cheka was replaced by the so-called State Political Administration (GPU),

Still, Lenin personally also forced through the deportation in fall 1922 of theologians, linguists, historians, mathematicians, and other intellectuals on two chartered German ships, dubbed the Philosophers’ Steamers.

“Those elements we are dispatching or will dispatch are in themselves politically worthless,” Trotsky told a leftist foreign journalist, Louise Bryant, widow of John Reed, who published the interview in Pravda (August 30, 1922). “But they are potential weapons in the hands of our possible enemies. In the event of new military complications . . . we would be compelled to shoot them according to the regulations of war.” Here is the view later attributed to Stalin that the Soviets could not tolerate potential enemies in their midst, because their presence would encourage and facilitate foreign intervention.

Additionally, however, Stalin, in the name of the Central Committee, pursued special firsthand reports outside normal channels, recruiting his own networks of informants.

The French refusal to acknowledge German grievances, the British inability to tame the French, and the Soviets’ manipulation of Article 116—a French invention—had led to France’s nightmare and Lenin’s fantasy: an apparent Soviet-German axis.

In fact, ties between the Red Army and the Reichswehr were already intimate and on August 11, 1922, the two countries signed a secret formal agreement on military cooperation.

Lenin believed that the capitalist powers would be compelled to revive the Russian economy by the logic of global capitalist development, and thus he had allowed the unique moment for a possible reintegration of Russia into the European community to be lost. (The next such gathering for the Soviets would be at Helsinki in 1975.)

Once Lenin became incapacitated, Stalin became the central figure in foreign policy, inheriting all these challenges of the intransigent Leninist legacy. In international relations, Stalin was anything but a dictator.

Stalin’s power flowed from attention to detail but also to people—and not just any people, but often to the new people.

Each group had gone through the same civil war experience and the younger ones came out confident they did not need to know multiple foreign languages or be university educated to get things done. Stalin, although of course an Old Bolshevik himself, favored the upstarts.

“The new political elite was not predominantly proletarian in origin,” one scholar has written. “It was, however, predominantly plebeian.”

The revolution was carried by the partially educated who often continued to study at night after long hours on the job.219 Stalin identified with them; they were younger versions of himself. Still, the people closest to him presented an eclectic mix.

Countless new people entered Stalin’s circle in these early years, some who would fall by the wayside, some who would make remarkable careers, such as Georgy Malenkov (1902–1988),

It was Chicherin, not Stalin, who was the regime’s original night owl: he lived in an apartment adjacent to his office at Blacksmith Bridge, 15, and worked through the wee hours, being known to telephone subordinates at 4:00 or 5:00 a.m.

Litvinov never became reconciled to the fact that Chicherin, who had joined the Bolsheviks only in January 1918, rather than himself, an original member of the Russian Social Democrats dating to 1898, had been named foreign affairs commissar.

Stalin pushed to replace the Armenian, insisting that the regime needed a Muslim more amenable to Eastern peoples.

Stalin pushing diversitt quotas

This dynamic could be seen all across the Soviet system—Stalin looking for personal animosities to manipulate to his benefit; officials appealing for his favor against political rivals.

He reported to Lenin personally and once Lenin became incapacitated, got still closer to Stalin. Stalin was neither threatened by Dzierzynski nor fully dependent on him for secret police favors.

In fact, Mezynski did receive people while lying on a couch. An automobile accident in Paris had severely damaged his hearing and nerves, leaving him with degenerative osteoarthritis of the spine.

Yagoda became Stalin’s secret weapon, but the dictator took no chances. He cultivated Yagoda’s enemies inside the secret police, such as Artur Fraucci.

At Lubyanka HQ, struggles often took place among rival Cheka clans as much as against “counters” (counterrevolutionaries), and Artuzov and his professional staff disdained Yagoda and his people for their limited counterintelligence tradecraft.

Yagoda also made it easy for Stalin to manage him by his high living and compromising activities.

But while Stalin was proud of his immersion in the Marxist and Russian intelligentsia traditions, he was also a self-styled praktik: a practitioner, a doer, the closest a non-proletarian revolutionary could get to assuming the identity of a proletarian.

That said, Stalin returned again and again to the touchstone of Lenin’s writings. The fundamental fact about him was that he viewed the world through Marxism.

Stalin was a true beliver, he returned to Lenin's guidance through his writings over the course of his life.

Beyond doubt, Stalin possessed a searing ambition to be a person of consequence; indeed, he worked at it relentlessly.

Assertions regarding Stalin’s sense of inferiority reveal at least as much about others’ sense of superiority—and not just in the case of Trotsky.

Bazhanov said. “He would sit there, watching the way the discussion was going. When everyone had spoken, he would say: Well comrades, I think the solution to the problem is such and such—and he would then repeat the conclusions towards which the majority had been drifting. And, as time passed, it came to be said of Stalin that . . . he had a fundamental wisdom of sorts which led him to propose the right answers to difficult questions.”

Nazaretyan had caught Stalin to a T: both solicitous and demanding, and above all doggedly hardworking.

Stalin could be very closed and inaccessible, yet he could also switch on the charm, and he proved to be a loyal patron to those “under his wing.”

Stalin identified with these people, he listened to their concerns and, although perhaps not capable of genuine empathy, worked to enable mid- and lower-level functionaries to raise their abilities, to master Marxism and administration.

Thrust into power, Stalin found himself on a lifelong quest not only for personal glory but also for deciphering the secrets to ruling over men and things in order to further Russian power in the world.

To be sure, the capacity of the dictatorship as of 1922–24 was limited, but it was greater than that of tsarism, for unlike the autocracy, the Soviet regime actively promoted mass mobilization on its behalf.

Often this period is narrated in terms of the formation of a ruling triumvirate of Stalin, Kamenev, and Zinoviev arrayed against Trotsky.

The triumvirate narrative should not be allowed to eclipse the far more important story: namely, the attempts in the Bolshevik inner circle to overcome the unforeseen yet inbuilt structural circumstance of the ability of the party’s general secretary to build a dictatorship within the dictatorship.

Lenin had never set foot in Georgia, or even Ukraine, for that matter; Stalin had far greater firsthand experience of the varied realm, and, while cognizant of the need to indulge nationalism in order to secure political allegiance, recognized a state need to tame nationalism. Unlike Lenin, who viewed Georgians as a small-nation victim of imperial Russia, Stalin knew that Georgian national chauvinism oppressed the other peoples of the Caucasus.

Stalin reasoned that as the case of Georgian Menshevism had proven, socioeconomic “backwardness” spawned “opportunists” who, wittingly or even unwittingly, used nationalism to separate territories from Soviet Russia, which played into the hands of the international bourgeoisie by creating “a zone of foreign intervention and occupation.”

True, because of the party, the federative nature of the USSR was overridden, but the fact that, as Lenin insisted, the Soviet Socialist republics such as Ukraine formed a joint federation with the RSFSR would have immense consequences one day. The USSR would dissolve into its constituent republics, but the RSFSR would remain intact. Lenin’s preferred form of a USSR was ultimately a bet on world revolution, while Stalin’s proposal—annexation into the RSFSR—would have been a bet on historic Russia, without excluding world revolution.

Trotsky’s appearance, amid blazing lights and rolling movie cameras, provoked a thunderous ovation.

Stalin delivered a second report, on nationalities, and being unable to outdo Trotsky in theatrics, concentrated on substance and delivered the speech of his career to that date.

He was reconfirmed as general secretary. In the elections to the new Central Committee, Trotsky came in thirty-fifth place in the total number of positive votes, as opposed to second, where he had stood in the elections at the previous Party Congress. Kamenev came in twenty-fourth, Zinoviev thirty-second, and Stalin tied for first (384 votes out of 386) with Lenin.

Lenin’s life work, the fate of the revolution, would have to be carried forward by others, and while she spent her days with a hopeless invalid, Stalin had emerged as successor.

Later, titles would be affixed—Lenin’s Testament or “Letter to the Congress”—and an elaborate mythology would be concocted about how the dictation had been placed in a wax-sealed envelope with Lenin’s instructions that it be opened only after his death. Of course, Krupskaya had given the typescript to Zinoviev while Lenin was still alive.

Several top officials were omitted, however, including Rykov, Tomsky, and Kalinin, all full members of the politburo, and Molotov, a candidate member of the politburo and someone who worked very closely with Lenin.

Zinoviev and Bukharin had misjudged Kamenev, who in turn misjudged Stalin, but Zinoviev’s behavior is the grand mystery.

And in that summer of 1923, Krupskaya had handed him a letter from Lenin advising that they remove Stalin. But Zinoviev did no such thing. He had been afforded an opportunity to alter the course of history, and did not seize it.

Of course, such a combination of aggressive ambition and siege mentality was well known from the long sweep of Russia’s history, a great power whose aspirations always seemed to exceed its capabilities in that complicated Eurasian space.