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

by Stephen Kotkin

Jughashvili did not discover Marxism on his own. A headstrong twentysomething militant, Vladimir “Lado” Ketskhoveli (b. 1876) would serve as the revolutionary mentor for the future Stalin, who in looking back would call himself a disciple of Lado.

the kingdom of Georgia had converted to the Christian faith half a millennium before the Russians did, and more than a century before the Romans.

Jughashvili’s discovery of inconsistencies in the Bible, his poring over a translation of Ernest Renan’s atheistic Life of Jesus, and his abandonment of the priesthood did not automatically mean he would become a revolutionary. Revolution was not a default position. Another major step was required. In his case, he spent the 1897 summer vacation in the home village of his close friend Mikheil “Mikho” Davitashvili, “where he got to know the life of the peasants.”33 In Georgia, as in the rest of the Russian empire, the flawed serf emancipation had done little for the peasants, who found themselves trapped between land “redemption” payments to their former masters and newly uninhibited bandits who descended from mountain redoubts to exact tribute.34 The emancipation did “liberate” the children of the nobility, who, without serfs to manage, quit their estates for the cities and, alongside peasant youth, took up the peasantry’s cause.35 Jughashvili’s Georgian awakening evolved toward recognition of Georgian landlord oppression of Georgian peasants:

his sense of violated social justice linked up with what appears to be his ambition for leadership. In the illegal circle at the seminary, Jughashvili and the elder Devdariani were boon companions but also competitors for top position.

Late in life, though, Marx did seem to admit that England’s experience, from which he had generalized, might not be universal; that the bourgeoisie might not be uniquely progressive (in historical terms); and that Russia might be able to avoid the full-blown capitalist stage.51

When all is said and done, the future Stalin may have just outgrown the seminary, being two years older than his cohort and already deeply involved in Lado’s revolutionary activities.

Tiflis Committee decided to send Jughashvili to agitate among workers in the Black Sea port of Batum.101 Batum was a high-profile assignment. Just twelve miles from the Ottoman border, the port had been seized from the Ottomans with the rest of Islamic Adjara (Ajaria) in the 1877–78 war and, after being joined to Russia’s Transcaucasus Railway, became the terminal for exporting Russia’s Caspian Sea oil.

Mantashov—endeavored to break U.S. Standard Oil’s near-monopoly in supplying kerosene to Europe.102 Jughashvili, too, sought to ride the oil boom, for leftist purposes.

(The Russian empire’s per capita alcohol consumption was lower than elsewhere in Europe but the state ran a monopoly on sales.)

because Japan could not replace its losses, its big victories like Mukden may have actually edged Tokyo closer to defeat.

By December 1905, the worker Red Hundreds, assisted by young radical thugs, seized control of Chiatura and thus of half of global manganese output.

The Romanov House avoided perishing altogether only thanks to the marriage of one of Peter the Great’s two surviving daughters to the Duke of Holstein-Gottorp.

Except for Alexander III, who married a Danish princess—his deceased elder brother’s fiancee—all the “Romanov” descendants of the German Catherine took German-born wives.

an imperial succession law passed in 1797 under Paul I (r. 1796–1801), the son of Catherine the Great, forbade another female to occupy the throne. Finally, in August 1904, in the tenth year of marriage, Alexandra produced a long-awaited male heir. Nicholas II named the boy for his favorite early Romanov ruler, Alexei, Peter the Great’s father, harkening back to the Moscow days before the building of St. Petersburg.

scheming Wilhelm II, on his annual summer cruise in 1905, which he took in the Baltic Sea, had invited Nicholas II on July 6 (July 19 in the West) to a secret rendezvous, and Nicholas had heartily agreed. The kaiser aimed to create a continental bloc centered on Germany. “Nobody has slightest idea of [the] meeting,” Wilhelm II telegrammed

The next day the kaiser produced a draft of a short secret mutual defense accord, specifying that Germany and Russia would come to each other’s aid if either went to war with a third country. Nicholas knew that such a treaty with Germany violated Russia’s treaty with France and had urged Wilhelm to have it first be shown to Paris, a suggestion the kaiser rejected. Nicholas II signed the Treaty of Bjorko, as it was called, anyway. The Russian foreign minister as well as Sergei Witte (recently returned from Portsmouth, New Hampshire) went into shock, and insisted that the treaty could not take effect until France signed it, too. Nicholas II relented and signed a letter, drafted by Witte, for Wilhelm II on November 13 (November 26 in the West), to the effect that until the formation of a Russian-German-French alliance, Russia would observe its commitments to France. This provoked Wilhelm II’s fury. The German-Russian alliance, although never formally renounced, was aborted.101

Stolypin had been right to ease tensions with Britain while trying to avoid a hard choice between London and Berlin, but in the circumstances of the time he had proved unable to thread this needle.

By the early 1900s, tsarist Russia was producing more than half the global oil output, much of it in Baku, and as the oil bubbled up, and the surrounding sea burned, staggering fortunes were made. East of Baku’s railway station lay the refineries built by the Swedish Nobel brothers, and farther east lay the Rothschilds’ petroleum and trading company. Workers toiled twelve-hour shifts, suffering deadly chemical exposure, rabbit-hutch living quarters, and miserly wages of 10 to 14 rubles per month, before the “deductions” for factory-supplied meals.

Baku’s toxic environment, meanwhile, exacerbated his young wife Kato’s frailty and she died a frightful death in December 1907 from typhus or tuberculosis, hemorrhaging blood from her bowels.125 At her funeral, the future Stalin is said to have tried to throw himself into her grave. “My personal life is damned,” one friend recalled him exclaiming in self-pity.126 Belatedly, he is said to have reproached himself for neglecting his wife, even as he abandoned his toddler son, Yakov, to Kato’s mother and sisters for what turned out to be the next fourteen years.

the police observed him visiting the library seventeen times over a stretch of 107 days. He read Vasili Klyuchevsky, the great historian of Russia, and subscribed to periodicals that were mailed to him in Siberia.148

Nicholas II and Alexandra remained in partial denial about the dynasty’s full danger. The hemophilia, an unlucky additional factor piled on the autocracy’s deep structural failures, was actually an opportunity to face the difficult choice that confronted autocratic Russia, but Nicholas II and Alexandra, fundamentally sentimental beings, had none of the hard-boiled realism necessary for accepting a transformation to a genuine constitutional monarchy in order to preserve the latter.176

BETWEEN 1905 AND 1911, revolutions broke out in Mexico, Qajar Iran, the Ottoman empire, China, and Portugal, as well as Russia—countries that together accounted for one quarter of the earth’s population.

Modern revolutions are spectacular events, awesome in the millions who rise up and stake a claim to control their destiny, exhilarating in their new solidarities and sense of unlimited possibility. But revolutions are also signs of decay and breakdown, the cracking of one ruling system and the untidy formation of another.

A mass participatory revolutionary process not only can, but frequently does, culminate in a narrow regime, and not because the revolution has “degenerated,” or because good intentions and a good beginning are ruined by malefactors or unlucky circumstances, but because the international situation impinges at every turn, institutions are formed out of the shards of the old as well as the maw of the new, and ideas matter.

Alliances by themselves never cause war; calculation and miscalculation do.13

Never? How about... Usually?

But while the Anglo-German antagonism was the underlying cause of the Great War and Russia the critical complicating factor, the detonator was supplied not by rivalries over African colonies, where the leftists and others expected it, but in Eastern Europe, where Bismarck had warned in 1888 that war might happen over “some damned foolish thing in the Balkans.”18 Here, as the Ottoman empire contracted, the other big land empires—Austria-Hungary, Russia, Germany—ground up against one another like tectonic plates, which is how the fault line of tiny Serbia precipitated a world war and, on the eastern front, a revolution in the Russian empire.

Wilhelm II had a low opinion of Nicholas II, telling Britain’s foreign secretary at Queen Victoria’s funeral in 1901 that the tsar was “only fit to live in a country home and grow turnips.”25 The kaiser had no insight into Russian grand strategy. Nicholas II, for his part, temporized, observing that “war would be disastrous for the world, and once it had broken out would be difficult to stop.”26

Russia and Serbia did not even have a formal alliance, and Cousin Nicky would never go to war out of some supposed Pan-Slavic romantic nonsense.28

Russia was no innocent victim, however. The perpetual machinations to have the tsar abolish the Duma, or downgrade it to a mere consultative body, had heated up. In effect, the decision for war was Nicholas II’s sideways coup against the Duma he despised.

politicians, military men, and particularly rulers hankered after territory and standing and believed (or hoped) that war would solve all manner of their international and domestic problems, reinvigorating their rule, at what each believed was, for them, a favorable moment.52

Marx, in The Communist Manifesto, had celebrated the intense dynamism of capitalism, but Lenin emphasized its limitless destructiveness: the war, in his view, showed that capitalism had irrevocably exhausted whatever progressive potential it once had.

In German-controlled South-West Africa, when the colonized Herero rebelled (1904–7), suppression escalated into extermination—and almost succeeded: Germany wiped out up to 75 percent of the natives.67

Stalin—suddenly a free man, for the first time in nearly seventeen years—boarded the Trans-Siberian Railway bound for Petrograd. It was some 3,000 miles away. He traveled in the company of fellow Bolshevik exile Lev Kamenev as well as his own latest girlfriend, Vera Schweitzer, the widow of the Bolshevik Central Committee member Suren Spandaryan, who had perished in the wastes of Stalin’s place of exile, Turukhansk, Siberia, at age thirty-four of lung problems. The future dictator arrived in the imperial capital on March 12, 1917,

“God Save the People,” sung to the Glinka melody of “God Save the Tsar.”

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.

Kerensky’s August move against Kornilov constituted his own second failed coup, following his aborted July coup against Lenin and the Bolsheviks.

Bolshevism did better than non-Bolsheviks expected. In one sense, around half the former Russian empire voted for socialism but against Bolshevism: the electorate seemed to want people’s power, land, and peace without Bolshevik manipulation. In another sense, however, the Bolsheviks had secured an electoral victory in the strategic center of the country (Petrograd and Moscow), as well as among crucial armed constituencies (capital garrisons and Baltic sailors).

it soon became evident that the Bolshevik demand for “peace without indemnities and annexations” would never be met; the German and Austrian delegations, invoking “self-determination,” demanded Russian recognition of the independence of Poland, Lithuania, and western Latvia, all of which the Central Powers had occupied in 1914–16.150

Trotsky soon telegrammed Lenin to advise that the talks be cut off without a treaty. “I’ll consult with Stalin and give you my answer,” Lenin cabled.

Lenin had pushed for a coup he had insisted that Germany stood close to revolution, but now he changed his tune: the world revolution remained a dream, he observed, while Russia’s socialist revolution was a fact; to save the latter, he urged accepting whatever terms the Germans offered.155 Trotsky countered that Germany would not resume fighting, obviating any need to capitulate.

On February 14, the Tashkent Soviet mobilized local garrison troops, other soldiers from the Orenburg steppes, Armenian Dashnaks, and armed Slavic workers to crush the “counterfeit autonomy,” setting siege to Qoqand’s old city. Within four days they breached the walls and set about massacring the population. An estimated 14,000 Muslims were slaughtered, many of them machine-gunned; the city was looted, then burned.183 The Tashkent Soviet used the moment to step up requisitions of food stocks, unleashing a famine, in which perhaps 900,000 people would perish, as well as mass flight toward Chinese Turkestan.184 Stalin and the Bolsheviks would have their work cut out in marrying the revolution and the anti-colonial question in practice.

German forces began intervening in the Finnish civil war, where the October coup had split officers of the imperial Russian army. (German troops would help nationalist Finns led by General Carl Gustav Mannerheim rout Red Guards and overthrow a Bolshevik-backed Finnish Socialist Workers Republic.)190

Lenin stated that “the terms must be accepted,” otherwise, he would resign, a threat he put in writing (in Pravda).195 Sverdlov backed Lenin. But Trotsky and Dzierzynski urged rejection. So did Bukharin. Another hard-line leftist called Lenin’s bluff, stating, “There is no reason to be frightened by Lenin’s threat to resign. We must take power without V.I. [Lenin].” Even Stalin—among Lenin’s staunchest allies throughout Brest-Litovsk—blinked. He suggested that “it’s possible not to sign, but to begin peace negotiations,” adding that “the Germans are provoking us into a refusal.” This could have been a breakthrough moment, when Stalin tipped the balance, breaking Lenin’s hold on power. But Lenin countered that “Stalin is mistaken,” and repeated his insistence on accepting the German diktat to save the Soviet regime. Stalin’s brief vacillation ended. Partly that was because Trotsky swung Lenin’s way. Trotsky pointed out that the terms “were best of all when Kamenev made the first trip [to Brest-Litovsk] and it would have been better if Kamenev and Joffe had signed the peace” back then.

signing took place on March 3. “It is your day now,” Radek snapped bitterly at Major General Hoffmann, “but in the end the Allies will put a Brest-Litovsk treaty upon you.”200 Radek was right: the Allies did become convinced, largely as a result of Brest-Litovsk, that imperial Germany was incapable of moderation and a negotiated peace, and needed to be defeated.

On February 26, Lenin had approved a secret order to abandon the capital of Russia’s revolution. It was a rich irony. After Kerensky’s Provisional Government had decided to relocate from Petrograd to Moscow for safety in early October 1917, the Bolshevik newspaper Workers’ Path—edited by Stalin—had accused Kerensky of treason for surrendering the capital to the Germans.207 Kerensky had backed down.208 But now—again, just as Lenin’s accusers had long predicted—he had not only handed the Germans everything but was preparing to desert the Russian capital.

Unbeknownst to the Congress of Soviets delegates, Lenin had authorized Trotsky to conspire with American, British, and French representatives in Russia to obtain pledges of Entente support against the Germans, for which Lenin had promised to sabotage ratification of Brest-Litovsk. Still viewing Lenin and Trotsky as German agents, Entente governments failed to respond to the offer.238

Lenin and Trotsky, for their part, had welcomed the Entente’s military landing on Russian soil as a counter to Germany. Stalin, at a Council of People’s Commissars meeting on April 2, 1918, with the Germans about to capture Kharkov, proposed shifting policy to seek an anti-German military coalition with the Ukrainian Central Rada, which the Bolsheviks had overthrown just two months before, and which Germany had restored one month before.241

Germany, which was eager to break Japan’s alliance with Britain, had encouraged the Japanese intervention against Russia, a landing that raised the prospect of a west-east flanking occupation, based on a common interest, to reduce Russia to a colonial dependency. Lenin, notwithstanding all the fog of his class categories, understood well the possibility of a German-Japanese alliance, just as he had grasped the antagonism of state interests between Germany and Britain on the one hand and, on the other, Japan and the United States.242

Despite the 1917 rupture, Soviet Russia’s strategic position bore resemblance to imperial Russia’s. A big difference between past and present, however, was that parts of imperial Russia had broken off, and they could be used by hostile foreign powers against Russia.

On April 23, 1918, the forty-seven-year-old Count Wilhelm Mirbach (b. 1871), who had been in Petrograd to negotiate prisoner exchanges with the Bolsheviks and had worked at the embassy in the tsarist period, arrived back in Moscow as ambassador with a mission to ensure that no Russian rapprochement with the Entente took place. Mirbach had been reporting that the Bolshevik regime was “not for long,” and that all it would take to sweep it away would be “light military pressure” by German forces sent via Estonia. The count openly courted monarchist groups as Bolshevik replacements, and behaved as if Moscow were already under German occupation.270