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January 1, 2022 - March 31, 2023
Lenin decided to co-opt Jughashvili (in Vologda exile) in absentia as a new Central Committee member.
Stalin became one of twelve top Bolshevik insiders, and one of three such from the Caucasus.
“This means nothing!” Lenin is said to have exclaimed. “This is exactly the kind of person I need!”155 If Lenin said it, he was praising how Stalin recognized few if any limits on what he would do for the cause.
The 1912 elevation to the Central Committee would become a momentous breakthrough in Stalin’s rise, allowing him to join the likes of Zinoviev, Lenin’s shadow in Genevan exile, as well as Lenin himself.
The young Italian socialist radical Benito Mussolini (b. 1883), the son of an impoverished artisan who named his boy for a Mexican revolutionary, relocated in 1902 to Switzerland, where he worked as a casual laborer, and might have met Lenin; Mussolini certainly read some Lenin.
Stalin’s vault from godforsaken Vologda to the pinnacle of the new all‒Bolshevik Central Committee in 1912 would have been unthinkable without Lenin’s patronage. And yet, it must be said, Lenin was a user, using absolutely everyone, Stalin, too, as a non-Russian to afford his faction appeal.
Still, Stalin’s elevation went beyond tokenism or expediency. Stalin was loyal as well as effective: he could get things done. And, also important, he was a Bolshevik in the heavily Menshevik Caucasus milieu.
Stalin, in other words, contrary to what would later be asserted, was no accidental figure raised up by circumstances. Lenin put him in the inner circle, but Stalin had called attention to himself and, moreover, would go on to prove his worth. He endured.
163 Later that very same month, Jughashvili escaped Vologda again, returning to Tiflis, where by summer 1912 there were no more than perhaps 100 Bolsheviks.
From the height of mass disturbances of only five years before, Stolypin’s left-right political demobilization of imperial Russian had been breathtakingly successful, but at the expense of establishing an enduring polity. On the latter score, many observers, especially in hindsight, have attributed Russia’s lack of a polity to an inherent inability to forge a nation.
Rancid horse penises, sold as meat at the company store, triggered the walkout.
Confronted by a peaceful crowd of perhaps 2,500 gold miners, a line of 90 or so soldiers opened fire at their officer’s command, killing at least 150 workers and wounding more than 100, many shot in the back trying to flee.
The vast strikes caught the beaten-down socialist parties largely by surprise.
“The Lena shots broke the ice of silence, and the river of popular resentment is flowing again,” Jughashvili noted in the newspaper. “The ice has broken. It has started!”
167 Conservatives lashed out at the government for the massacre, as well as at the gold company’s Jewish director and foreign shareholders.
But by 1913, when the empire celebrated three centuries of Romanov rule with spectacular pageantry, the frail dynasty was the only overarching basis for loyalty that the autocracy permitted.
Despite the pageantry, many people in Russia’s upper and lower orders alike had come to doubt Nicholas II’s fitness to rule.
The immense Russian empire was ultimately a family affair, and the family appeared doomed.
Because of a genetic mutation that the German princess Alexandra had inherited from her grandmother Britain’s Queen Victoria, the Russian tsarevich Alexei came into the world with hemophilia, an incurable disease that impaired the body’s ability to stop bleeding.
Nor was there a way around the improbability that a boy walking on eggshells, subject to death from internal bleeding by bumping into furniture, could ever serve as a vigorous, let alone autocratic, ruler.
Blaming the failings of imperial Russia on “backwardness” and peasants, therefore, is misguided.
In international affairs, Stolypin had been unable to avoid a de facto posture of alignment with Britain against Germany.
Beginning just three years after Stolypin’s death, a world war would break out that, when combined with Russia’s alienated conservatives and the Romanov’s secret hemophilia, would sweep aside Russia’s constitutional autocracy and, in very short order, Russia’s constitutionalism entirely.
A focus not on leftist revolutionary activity but on geopolitics and domestic high politics reveals the central truth about imperial Russia: The tsarist regime found itself bereft of a firm political base to meet its international competition challenges.
who would study the files of the tsarist police after the revolution, deemed them Russia’s “only properly functioning institution,”
In modern times, it was not enough to demobilize opponents; a regime had to mobilize proponents. A system deliberately limited to the narrow privileged strata, backed by police and a peasant army, was, in the modern age, no polity at all, certainly not for a would-be great power competing against the strongest states.
Durnovó, in leading the rescue of the autocracy in 1905–6, had proved able to reset the political moment in Russia, but unable to alter the fundamental structures. Stolypin, equally ready to wield repression yet also far more creative politically, bumped up against tsarism’s political limits. Of all the failures of Russia’s autocracy with regard to modernity, none would be as great as its failure at authoritarian mass politics.
And yet, within a mere decade of Stolypin’s demise, the Georgian-born Russian Social Democrat Iosif “Koba” Jughashvili, a pundit and agitator, would take the place of the sickly Romanov heir and go on to forge a fantastical dictatorial authority far beyond any effective power exercised by imperial Russia’s autocratic tsars or Stolypin. Calling that outcome unforeseeable would be an acute understatement.
Liberty exerted a powerful pull, but institutionalizing liberty was another matter.
In the tantalizing examples of Britain and the United States, classical liberal orders were institutionalized long before the dawn of mass politics.
By the early twentieth century, the introduction of constitutionalism proved too narrow to satisfy the masses.
Too little too late by countries attempting to modernize. They let the problem fester too long.
In Russia, too, there was de facto civil war (1905–7), which was won by the forces of order.
But not the next time
More fundamentally, most Russian socialists supported the constitutionalism (“bourgeois” democracy) rather than socialism, as a necessary stage of history, while despising the bourgeoisie.
No skipping steps for most communists in the Russian Empire.
“Socialism,” concretely, meant a life in Siberia.
emulators. It was also significant for its signature—“Stalin” (“Man of Steel”).
Malinowski became the only high-level Bolshevik inside Russia left at liberty. Lenin had placed him in charge of directing the entire apparatus of Bolshevik activity inside the Russian empire.
An “autocrat” unsafe in his own capital?
“A naïve idea: to fix internal disorder with a foreign success!”
Durnovó became well known for expressing unwelcome views to people’s faces, rather than just behind their backs—and this applied even to the tsar.
“The central factor of the period of world history through which we are now passing is the rivalry between England and Germany,” he explained, adding that between them “a struggle for life and death is inevitable.”
He argued that what had originally been just a Russian “understanding” (entente) with England had somehow become a formal alliance, and that taking the side of Britain in its confrontation with Germany was unnecessary, because there was no fundamental clash of interests between Germany and Russia.
“In the event of defeat,” he wrote in the February 1914 memorandum to Nicholas II, “social revolution in its most extreme form is inevitable.”
The analysis—an avoidable war against a too-powerful Germany; Russia’s defeat; Russian elites heedlessly pressuring the autocracy only to be engulfed by extreme social revolution—was as hard-boiled as it was blunt. Nothing penned by Vladimir Lenin, not even his later celebrated polemic State and Revolution (August 1917), approached the clairvoyance of Durnovó.
Dejection, demoralization, schisms, discord, desertion, and pornography took the place of politics.”
From 1900 through 1917, except for two years (1905–7), Lenin lived entirely outside Russia, mostly in Switzerland. Trotsky was in foreign exile from 1902 to 1903 and 1907 to 1917. Kamenev and Grigory Radomylsky (Zinoviev) each spent long stretches of the pre-1917 period in prison, Siberia, or Europe. The same was true of the diehard opponents of Lenin among the Social Democrats, such as Martov and Pavel Axelrod. Victor Chernov—the leader of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, Russia’s most populous party on the left—was in emigration without interruption from 1899 until 1917. Durnovó knew the
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Most revolutionionaries had been succesedful exiled or contained from Russia by the police. They were unable to see the facts on the ground unlike the conservative ministers in the cabinent.
Equally important, while members of Russia’s establishment dreaded a new “Pugachev-style” riot from below, Durnovó condemned Russia’s upper classes, especially the Constitutional Democrats, who pushed for political rights against the autocracy without realizing, as he saw it, that the militant masses would be incited to go much further and deluge them all.
Increased Liberalism eventually doomed all the elite, even those that sought to comprimise.
But his strategy of keeping a lid on—retaining as much centralized power as possible, refusing cooperation with the Duma, waiting for a real autocrat to take charge—was a policy of stasis.
For a Georgian from small-town Gori—via Tiflis, Chiatura, Baku, and Siberian exile—to rise anywhere near the summit of power, and seek to implement Marxist ideas, the whole world had to be brought crashing down. And it was.
Unlike the wild years of 1905–8, or the period after March 1917, his life story from 1909 through early 1917 contains few moments of note.
But once Stalin did get near power, he battled indefatigably, like a man with a sense of destiny, and demonstrated revolutionary talents that proved especially apt in the Eurasian setting.
