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

by Stephen Kotkin

Witte further anticipated Stalin by a habit of pacing his office while others in attendance had to sit.

Moreover, as an ally of Britain, rather than be subjected to informal imperialism, Japan led a shift in East Asia toward free trade, the ideology of the strong.

In June 1905, sailors seized control of the battleship Potemkin, part of the Black Sea fleet—which was all Russia had left after the loss of its Pacific and Baltic fleets—and bombarded Odessa before seeking asylum in Romania.

On August 23, 1905 [September 5, in the West], Russia and Japan signed a peace treaty in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, brokered by U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt.

In a typical contemporary assessment, one observer called news of the victory “of a non-white people over a white people” nothing less than “the most important event which has happened, or is likely to happen, in our lifetime.”

While Russia’s army, the empire’s main forces of order, had been removed beyond its borders—for a war with Japan on the territories of China and Korea—Russia’s revolutionaries were kept out of the battle. Even married peasants more than forty years old were targets of military recruiters, but subjects without permanent residence and with a criminal record were free to pursue rebellion at home.

All Russian Social Democrats viewed capitalism as an evil to be transcended, but Marxism held that history was supposed to proceed in stages and most of Russia’s Marxists, following the elder statesman Plekhanov, held to the proposition that socialist revolution could triumph only after a “bourgeois revolution” had first taken place and accelerated Russia’s capitalist development.

But what if the workers proved unable to take up this role?

Lenin admired Kautsky, but went further, arguing for a conspiratorial approach because imperial Russia was different from Germany in the severity of the restrictions on freedom.

True, Lenin did at times seem to be saying, like Bernstein, that workers, left to their own devices, would develop only trade union consciousness. But this made Lenin more, not less, radical. Most fundamentally, Lenin sought a party of professional revolutionaries to overcome the well-organized tsarist state, whose hyperrepressiveness militated against ordinary organizational work.

Lenin refused to accept the result and announced the formation of a faction, which he called Bolsheviks (majoritarians) because he had won a majority on other, secondary questions.

Martov’s majority, incredibly, allowed itself to become known as Mensheviks (minoritarians).

Language has power

Jughashvili had already clashed with Jordania as early as November 1901 by championing a narrower intelligentsia-centric party.

Doctrinally, the Leninist position of favoring professional revolutionaries over workers also suited Jughashvili’s temperament and self-image.

Lenin.) Eventually, of course, Lenin would become Stalin’s indispensable mentor, but it would take time for the Georgian—and most everyone else on the left—to appreciate Lenin’s history-bending force of will.

Around October 13, a St. Petersburg soviet (or council) was established as a strike-coordinating committee; it would last some fifty days, and for two weeks of that period be headed by Lev Trotsky, a prolific writer and prominent Social Democrat who recently had returned from exile.

Soviet=Council

In all of Europe, only the Ottoman empire, the Principality of Montenegro, and the Russian empire still lacked a parliament.

Far less dramatically, but no less consequentially, the tsar also conceded—for the first time—a unified government with a prime minister.

legislature. The model that Witte had in mind was Prussia’s, which afforded the minister-president the authority—used to great effect by Bismarck—to control all contact between individual ministers and the monarch.

A strong cabinet coordinated by a prime minister might seem an obvious necessity in any modern state, but globally it had arisen relatively recently.

These circumstances allowed Nicholas II, not without Witte’s connivance, to delude himself into thinking the concessions had not contravened his coronation oath to uphold autocracy. But he had: the work of Russia’s then fourteen ministers—with the enumerated exceptions—would be coordinated by someone other than the tsar.

Nonetheless, by sheer force of personality, especially his drive to be informed, Witte proved able to impose coordination on much of the government, even in foreign policy and military affairs, whose ministers technically did not even report to the prime minister.

Durnovó showed initiative.

RUSSIA’S AUTOCRACY had undergone a near-death experience. Altogether, an army of nearly 300,000, a size close to the land force that had battled the Japanese, was needed to suppress domestic unrest.

This is one of those moments in the play of large-scale historical structures when personality proved decisive: a lesser interior minister could not have managed.

But this was also a moment when a statesman’s talent, rather than shortcomings, proved detrimental to his country. Durnovó’s rescue of Russia’s autocracy—when it should have fallen—would end up having the perverse consequence of preparing the country for a far worse crash during a far worse war, which would serve as a template for a radical new order.

The tsar immediately and everlastingly regretted the political concessions that Witte had helped wring. With Witte’s fall, Durnovó, too, was obliged to step down, his historic service as interior minister having also lasted a mere six months, although Nicholas II allowed Durnovó to continue receiving his salary of 18,000 rubles per annum and awarded him a staggering cash gift of 200,000 rubles.

Durnovó yielded his portfolio to the Saratov province governor, Pyotr Stolypin, who in July 1906 managed to add the post of prime minister, thereby replacing both Durnovó and Witte.

Stolypin certainly stands out as one of the most commanding officials ever to hold a position of power in Russia: self-confident in a milieu of toadying, an accomplished orator as well as manager, a rare state official with a longer-term perspective.

The critical keys to unlocking modernity included not just steel output and mass production, which Russia more or less did manage to attain, but also the successful incorporation of the masses into political systems, that is, mass politics.

well. To be sure, our leftist protagonist Iosif “Koba” Jughashvili would perpetrate his most infamous revolutionary exploits under Stolypin.

Stalin never met the tsarist prime minister, but to a very great extent he would later walk in his shoes.

Russia had the lowest harvest yields in Europe (below Serbia, considered merely a “little brother”); its per-acre grain yields remained less than half those of France or even Austria-Hungary.

Second, Russian political life had become riotous, self-defeating, insane.

Once empowered by the ballot box, Russia’s classical liberals showed no intention of cooperating with the autocracy, and Nicholas II had no intention of compromising with them.

From the point of view of the Constitutional Democrats, the problem was that Russia’s constitutional revolution had not removed the autocracy.

“We want not professors, but men with roots in the country, the local gentry, and such like,”

Russia’s prime minister, too, accepted a parliament but not parliamentarism (a government controlled by parliament),

In Saratov, Stolypin had observed the same injustices the radical young Stalin had observed in the Caucasus: workers suffering frequent trauma and long hours for low pay, nobles owning enormous tracts of land while peasants in rags worked tiny plots. As prime minister, Stolypin embarked on far-reaching social reforms.

Russian elites tended to view peasant society as backward and alien, and shared a determination to transform it.

What stands out in all cases of state-led social engineering, though, was how the would-be “technocrats” rarely perceived the benefits, let alone the necessity, of converting subjects (domestic or imperial) into citizens.

But both the political boost from newly created loyal yeoman and the full economic takeoff that Stolypin envisioned proved elusive.

Stolypin sought to create a potical class he could rely on for state support in mould of the Jefforsonian Yeomen farmer.

In the end, however, Stolypin’s economic and other reforms came up against the stubborn limits to structural reform imposed by politics.

To put the matter another way, the political interests that most accepted autocracy least accepted modernizing reforms.

Unionists overlapped with right-wing vigilantes known as Black Hundreds, who became notorious for pogroms against the Jews in the Pale of Settlement and for fighting alongside imperial troops in crackdowns against rebellious peasants and workers.

a Russian right-wing newspaper had introduced the world to the so-called Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This fabricated transcript of a purported Jewish organization’s meetings portrayed Jews as a global conspiracy—visible yet somehow invisible—preying on Christians while plotting to dominate the world.

Thus, even if the far right’s calls for social leveling seemed mostly bluff, the policy of the okhranka was still to treat right-wing organizations as another revolutionary movement.

The tsar and most government officials, including Stolypin, frowned on the public “disorder” of political mobilization, and wanted politics to return from the street to the corridors of power.

After all, what kind of autocracy needed help? The autocracy’s very existence in a sense handcuffed the Russian right, both moderate and radical.

Jughashvili turned out to be the only Bolshevik among the eleven Caucasus delegates in Stockholm, but, taking the congress podium to speak on the vexing agrarian question, he boldly rejected the Bolshevik Lenin’s proposal for complete land nationalization as well as a Russian Menshevik call for land municipalization.