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

by Stephen Kotkin

In exile, living in Zurich, in a single room, near a sausage factory, Lenin had been calling for the defeat of his own country in war, but suffered no legal consequences. On the contrary, he fell under the Provisional Government’s March 1917 general amnesty for victims of tsarism.

Berlin was showering money on Russia’s radicals, especially the Socialist Revolutionaries, in order to overturn the Provisional Government and force Russia out of the war on German terms, and was sold on assisting the fanatical Bolshevik leader, too—referred to as “a Tatar by the name of Lenin.”

The train departed Zurich on March 27, 1917 (by the Russian calendar), for Berlin and then the Baltic coast with thirty-two Russian emigres, nineteen of them Bolsheviks (including Lenin, his wife, Nadzehda Krupskaya; his onetime French mistress, Inessa Armand; and Zinoviev with wife and child) as well as other radicals.

The Menshevik Social Democrats Martov and Axelrod chose not to risk treason charges by accepting a German deal without having obtained the permission of the Provisional Government (the Mensheviks ended up traveling on a later train).

Lenin’s only obligation in the bargain was to agitate for release of Austrian and German...

Lenin never admitted the truth about receiving German money, but he was not a German agent; he had his own agenda.

But Lenin was not arrested at Petrograd’s Finland Station (in the Vyborg district “Bolshevik Commune”), where he arrived at 11:10 p.m. on April 3, 1917, the day after Easter Sunday. Lenin climbed atop an armored vehicle, illuminated by specially wheeled-in spotlights, to speak at the station to a sizable crowd of workers, soldiers, and sailors, who were seeing him for the first time.

Many of the hundreds of thousands of villages had not learned of the February Revolution until April and the spring thaw. Lenin’s April 3 return coincided with the onset of mass land seizures in Russia, a phenomenon unknown in the French Revolution of 1789.

Compared with this immense upheaval—the peasants’ own revolution—Lenin was a single person. And yet, his role in 1917 was pivotal. Marxist theory held that history moved in stages—feudalism, capitalism, socialism, communism—such that before advancing to socialism, it was necessary to develop the bourgeois-capitalism stage.

revolution. Lenin was not proposing an immediate leap into socialism, which would have been blasphemy, but an acceleration of the move toward socialism—what he would call “one foot in socialism”—by not waiting for the full development of the bourgeois revolution and instead seizing political power now.

An April 6, 1917, Bolshevik Central Committee meeting outright rejected Lenin’s theses. After all, the bourgeois-democratic revolution had only just begun, the country needed land reform, an exit from the war, economic reform, and how would the proletariat, by overturning the Provisional Government, advance all that?

The next day, at a meeting of the Petrograd Soviet in the Tauride Palace, he reiterated his radical “April Theses,” arguing that the pathetic Russian bourgeoisie was incapable of carrying through its historical tasks, which compelled Russia to accelerate from the bourgeois-democratic toward the proletarian-socialist revolution.

Stalin did not buckle under abjectly, however: whereas Lenin sought land nationalization, Stalin insisted the peasantry get the land—a position that eventually won out.

Stalin also rejected Lenin’s slogan of turning the “imperialist war” into a “European civil war,” reasoning that besides land, the masses desired peace—and Lenin, too, now called for an immediate peace.

As editor and pundit, Stalin revealed a talent for summarizing complicated issues in a way that could be readily understood.

He therefore opposed land reforms and convocation of a constituent assembly before military victory, and even refused to allow revision of tsarism’s imperialist war aims, which secretly entailed annexation of Constantinople and the Turkish Straits, German and Austrian Poland, and other foreign territories.

He being Miliukov

Russia’s political figure who most embodied the moderate socialist line from the start was Kerensky, who aimed to bridge Russia’s “bourgeois” and “proletarian” revolutions, to stand above parties, to balance left and right by tilting one way, then the next. Straining to be indispensable to each side, he came, predictably, to be seen as anathema to both.

Kerensky’s political failing in 1917 was partly personal but partly structural: he had thrown in his lot not with the Petrograd Soviet but with the Provisional Government and, as the Provisional Government’s impotence became ever more brutally exposed, his own authority disintegrated.

Lenin’s Bolshevik agitators swarmed the regiments at the front, along with some thirty urban garrisons, to undermine the army but also to trump their main targets: Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary agitators.

And where Bolsheviks did not reach, German propaganda did.

No less stunning, however, the Petrograd Soviet, controlled by a Menshevik-Socialist Revolutionary bloc, as well as even the elected soldiers’ committees, supported the June military offensive, and did so against the wishes of the soldiers and sailors they claimed to represent.

The non-Bolshevik socialists were lethally wrong.

Because the Allies refused to negotiate an end to the meat-grinder war short of an elusive decisive victory, a posture of strategic defense was the only survivable policy for both the Provisional Government and the Soviet.

Russia’s gratuitous offensive drew the Germans much farther onto Russia’s territory—Germany seized Ukraine—while tearing Russia’s army to pieces.

The offensive also shattered the authority of the moderate socialist representatives in the Soviet and the soldiers’ committees.

“The whole of 1917,” one historian has aptly written, “could be seen as a political battle between those who saw the revolution as a means of bringing the war to an end and those who saw the war as a means of bringing revolution to an end.”

In the spring of 1917, after he had arrived back in Russia, Lenin occupied the fringe in Russia’s politics—the fringe of the left—sniping at Kerensky, badmouthing the other Marxists in the Soviet, but the June 1917 offensive—launched by Kerensky, supported by the Soviet—vindicated Lenin’s extremism, which was no longer extreme.

Top Bolsheviks had hesitated to seize the moment, and Kerensky swiftly counterattacked, charging them with treason for the armed insurrection and for receiving funds from a foreign enemy. It was a brilliant move, taking advantage of a situation he did not create.

Andrei Vyshinsky, the chief of the citizens’ militia in central Moscow—and Stalin’s future hangman judge in the terror—signed arrest warrants for 28 of the highest-level Bolsheviks, including Lenin.

There is dogmatic Marxism and creative Marxism. I stand by the latter.”

Thanks to Stalin’s shrewd analysis as well as his generally high regard for Russia, which Lenin did not share, Lenin’s militancy was ascendant even in his absence.

An intentionally inflammatory speech by a Kornilov Cossack ally had been staged to make Kornilov appear eminently reasonable.

A full collapse at the front continued to threaten the very survival of the Russian state, and many constitutionalists—Miliukov, Lvov, Rodzyanko—leaned toward a military coup by Kornilov, even if they worried he lacked mass popular support and ignored the practical aspects of power. The idea, or fantasy, was to have Kornilov “restore order” by force, possibly with a military dictatorship and, later, to summon a constituent assembly under favorable conditions.

The moderate socialists were still arguing for neither/nor: neither truck with the extreme right counterrevolution, nor truck with the extreme left seizure of power.198 But the Bolsheviks embraced the polarization as welcome and inevitable. “Either, or!”

This is a great quote.

Kerensky turned to the Soviet to muster forces to subvert the “counterrevolution.”

Trotsky would write that “the army that rose against Kornilov was the army-to-be of the October Revolution.”

“Marx explained the weakness of the 1848 revolution in Germany with the absence of a powerful counter-revolution that might have whipped up the revolution and strengthened it in the fire of battle.”

Hegel's dialetic is crucial to Marx's interpretation to history, is it throwing a dart and painting a bullseye, or is it true?

“The fundamental question of revolution is the question of power,” he explained. “The character of a revolution, its path and outcome, is completely determined by which class is in power,”

This is Machelvelli

Trotsky, even more than the Central Committee, became the key instrument of Lenin’s will.

All that the hollow Provisional Government managed to muster in its defense were women and children: that is, an all-female “Death Battalion” (140 strong) and a few hundred unenthusiastic young military cadets, who were assisted by a bicycle unit; some stray Cossacks; and forty war invalids whose commander had artificial legs.

Most political figures who succeed on a dizzying trajectory almost always do so by cobbling broad coalitions, often with very unlikely bedfellows, but not Lenin. He succeeded despite refusing cooperation and creating ever more enemies. Of course, he cultivated allies among the class of professional revolutionaries, loyalists such as Trotsky, Sverdlov, and Stalin.

But whatever Lenin’s charisma and encapsulation talents, much of his power would derive from events going his way. Again and again, he stubbornly insisted on what appeared to be a crazy course of action, which then worked to his advantage. Lenin seemed to incarnate political will.

Freedom and state breakdown became synonymous and, in that context, the classical liberals got their chance. The February 1917 liberal coup, nominally against the autocracy but really against the Duma, presaged the Bolshevik October 1917 coup, nominally against the Provisional Government but really against the Soviet.

When Stalin’s mediation efforts were slapped down by Trotsky, Stalin’s resentment at the upstart, high-profile intellectual Trotsky boiled over.

Stalin’s publications explained the revolution in simple, accessible terms, including during the Congress of Soviets.

The would-be “regime” consisted, at the top, of just four people: Lenin, Trotsky, Sverdlov, and Stalin, each of whom had a criminal record for political offenses and none of whom had any administrative experience.

That such lowly beginnings would soon become one of the world’s strongest dictatorships is beyond fantastic. Lenin was essentially a pamphleteer.

Stalin was also an organizer, a rabble-rouser, and, briefly, a bandit, but primarily a periodicals editor—commissar of nationalities was effectively his first regular employment since his brief stint as a teenage Tiflis weatherman.

In the meantime, the regime had no finances or functionaries. Trotsky failed in multiple efforts to take over the ministry of foreign affairs’ building and personnel.

Pestkowski soon let on that he had studied some economics in London and was decreed “head of the State Bank.”21 The employees laughed him away, which is how he instead ended up working for Stalin.