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

by Stephen Kotkin

Dada had arisen in neutral Switzerland during the Great War, largely among Jewish Romanian exiles,

Dada and Bolshevism arose out of the same historical conjuncture.

The Bolshevik dictatorship was not an utter accident, of course. Russia’s political landscape had become decisively socialist, as we have seen. The right-wing ranks of the army and officer corps were weaker in Russia than in every other predominantly peasant country, and unlike everywhere else, Russia lacked a non-socialist peasants’ party, a circumstance partly derived from the intransigence and sheer daftness of the old rightist establishment on the land question.

But in no way should any of this be taken to mean the Bolsheviks established effective structures of governance. Far from it: the Bolshevik monopoly went hand in hand with administrative as well as societal chaos, which Lenin’s extremism exacerbated, causing an ever-deepening crisis, which he cited as justification for his extremism.

The catastrophic collapse of the old world, however debilitating for millions of real people, was taken as progress by the Bolsheviks: the deeper the ruin, the better.

Accusing close comrades who had spent years in the underground, prison, and exile of treason over policy differences was typical Lenin.

Stalin, as nationalities commissar, was drawn into trying to manage this dissolution, signing, for example, a treaty fixing a border with newly independent Finland

Mezynski finally just robbed the State Bank and laid 5 million rubles on Lenin’s table in Smolny.

By February, the Cheka proclaimed the power of summary execution against “the hydra of counter-revolution”—a

The ironies would be rich: Russia’s Constitutional Democrats had hesitated to allow democratic elections to go forward, fearing the consequences of a vote by peasants, soldiers, sailors, and workers, but now the dictatorial Lenin decided to let the democratic elections proceed.

Amid the atmosphere of “revolutionary democracy,” land redistribution, and peace, Russia’s electorate overwhelmingly voted socialist—socialist parties of all types collectively garnered more than 80 percent of the vote.

That was Lenin for you: rabidly against any concessions whatsoever to moderate Russian socialists, but demanding the Communists make abject concessions to German militarists.

The Central Rada representatives promised Germany and Austria Ukrainian grain, manganese, and eggs in exchange for military assistance against Bolshevik forces and the establishment of a Ruthenian (Ukrainian) autonomous region in Austrian Galicia and the Bukovina.

The promised grain stocks that had lured a nearly half-million-man German occupation army failed to materialize.

Volunteers taken prisoner had their eyes gouged out—and they responded in kind.

Kornilov was killed when a shell struck his headquarters in a farmhouse on April 12, 1918, and buried him under the collapsed ceiling.

On May 29, the Council of People’s Commissars appointed Stalin a special plenipotentiary for South Russia to obtain food for the starving capitals Moscow and Petrograd.

At this point, however, mid-May 1918, when they stood fewer than 100 miles from Petrograd (at Narva), and 300 miles from Moscow (at Mogilyov), the Germans stopped advancing.274 Why? Lenin’s continued appeasement of Berlin played a part. Equally important, German ruling circles deemed an invasion superfluous: Bolshevism seemed doomed.

But the Left SRs lacked something critical: will. Lenin was fanatically committed to seizing and holding power, and his will had proved decisive in the Bolshevik coup, just as its absence now proved decisive in the Left SR non-coup.

Lenin had relentlessly pursued personal power, though not for power’s sake: he, too, was moved by visions of social justice via revolution, as well as an allegedly scientific (Marxist) conviction in his rightness, even as he continued to strike many contemporaries as mad.

But time and again, Lenin and Sverdlov had manipulated her earnestness. Now, in July 1918, she unexpectedly had them in her grasp, but did not evolve her initial strategy and seize the opportunity.

Bolshevik officials also began requesting diplomatic passports and travel documents for Germany for their families; money was transferred to Swiss banks.

The August 27 treaty was a worse capitulation than Brest-Litovsk, and one that Lenin voluntarily sought.

Fridays were “party day” in Moscow and officials dispersed around town to address mass meetings of workers and soldiers in the evenings. Lenin addressed some 140 such meetings in Moscow and its immediate environs between his arrival in March and July.

The Bolsheviks worked to survive

even as the new regime set about ripping tsarist insignia off buildings and taking down old statues, such as Alexander II inside the Kremlin and Alexander III outside Christ the Redeemer Cathedral.

There were at least 6,185 summary executions in the Red Terror of 1918—in two months. There had been 6,321 death sentences by Russian courts between 1825 and 1917, not all of them carried out.

Bolshevism’s core convictions about capitalism and class warfare were held to be so incontrovertible that any and all means up to lying and summary executions were seen as not just expedient but morally necessary.

Faced with extinction, the Bolsheviks wielded the specter of “counterrevolution” and the willingness of masses of people to risk their lives defending “the revolution” against counterrevolution in order to build an actual state.

What in summer and fall 1918 looked for all the world like political Dadaism would soon become an enduring, ambitious dictatorship.

Civil war was not something that deformed the Bolsheviks; it formed them, indeed it saved them from the Dada and near oblivion of 1918.

Pitiless class warfare formed the core of Lenin’s thought—the Great War, to his mind, had irrevocably proven that capitalism had forfeited its right to further existence—but

But within the utopia, the class principle, fundamentally, was intolerant. Many Bolsheviks who were bursting with conviction to serve humanity began to see that their dedicated efforts to end suffering and level social hierarchies were producing the opposite. This realization proved shattering for some, but for most it constituted a way station on the ladder of revolutionary career advancement.

Meanwhile, in trying to manage industry, transport, fuel, food, housing, education, culture, all at the same time, during a time of war and ruin, the revolutionaries came face to face with their own lack of expertise, and yet the solution to their woes struck them with ideological horror: They had to engage the class enemy—“bourgeois specialists”—inherited from tsarist times, who often detested socialism but were willing to help rebuild the devastated country.

The technically skilled, who were distrusted politically, were paired with the politically loyal, who lacked technical competence, first in the army and then in every institution, from railroads to schools.

Many of these tsarist officers of humble origin morphed into petty tyrants who abused the common soldier worse than had upper-class military men.

In other words, the Great War catastrophe had not only made possible the far-fetched Bolshevik coup, it had also rendered conservative armed opposition to Bolshevism more difficult.

This question had prompted the Provisional Government to introduce “commissars” alongside the inherited tsarist officer corps to prevent counterrevolution, and the Bolsheviks expanded the practice.

It was in such a context that Trotsky scorned “papist-Quaker babble about the sanctity of human life,” and Lenin approvingly quoted Machiavelli to the effect that “violence can only be met with violence.”

Contemporaries widely remarked on the similarities in the methods of Ludendorff (b. 1865) and Lenin (b. 1870), as well as wartime German and Bolshevik policies generally.

In addition, contrasting Ludendorff’s private kingdom in Lithuania, western Belorussia, and Latvia with Stalin’s in Tsaritsyn, we can see that Stalin exhibited the exact opposite talents of Ludendorff: military amateurism but political cunning.

176 A punitive peace is punitive only if there is the unity of will to enforce it, which was lacking.

Lenin knew he would have to sway the hall full of Communists, whose class ideology he shared but whose flexibility he greatly exceeded.

They “neither understood nor showed any interest in societal problems,” one White political activist complained. “All of their interests were on military power, and all of their hopes were focused on military victory.”

Between 1918 and 1920 in Ukraine alone, more than 1,500 pogroms resulted in the deaths of up to 125,000 Jews, who “were killed on the roads, in the fields, on trains; sometimes whole families perished, and there was no one left to report on their fate.”

Kolchak’s advance was halted by May 1919, however, thanks to Mikhail Frunze, a thirty-four-year-old millworker turned commander, who reestablished discipline and led a counterattack.

All told, in 1919, Denikin would annihilate Red armies numbering close to 200,000 poorly led, equipped, and often starving troops.

One could call at 2 or 3 in the morning, and find him at his desk,” Trotsky would write.)

Trotsky lived on his armor-plated train, which had been thrown together in August 1918 when he raced to Sviyazhsk.

While on board, he would issue more than 12,000 orders and write countless articles, many for the train’s newspaper (En Route).

It also evolved into an independent military unit (taking part in combat thirteen times), and took on mythic status.