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

by Stephen Kotkin

Germany occupied seventeen former tsarist provinces as well as tsarist Poland.

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. Mirbach, received by Lenin in the Kremlin on May 16, reported that same day to Berlin that the Bolshevik leader “continues to maintain his inexhaustible optimism,” but, Mirbach added, Lenin “also concedes that even though his regime still remains intact, the number of its enemies has grown. . . . He bases his self-confidence above all on the fact that the ruling party alone disposes of organized power, whereas the other [parties] agree only in rejecting the existing regime.” On Mirbach’s May 16 report of Lenin’s difficulties, Kaiser Wilhelm II wrote: “He is finished.”275

German diplomats were contacting political has-beens of both the tsarist regime and the Provisional Government about a restoration.279 On June 25, in another note to Berlin, Mirbach again predicted Bolshevism’s imminent demise.280

If during the wild rumors of 1914–17, the imagined treason of the tsarist court to the Germans had never been real, in 1918, the abject sellout to the Germans by the Bolsheviks was all too real. The August 27 treaty was a worse capitulation than Brest-Litovsk, and one that Lenin voluntarily sought. He was bribing his way to what he hoped was safety from German overthrow as well as the right to call upon German help against attempted Entente overthrow. “There was a coincidence of interests,” Lenin wrote by hand—avoiding secretaries—to the Bolshevik envoy to Sweden. “We would have been idiots not to have exploited it.”359

An odd civil war it would be, then: Whites pushing peasants away and attempting to recruit officers from the lower orders to fight the socialists; Reds giving command posts to tsarist officers, albeit only under armed guard and recruiting peasants only reluctantly. Had the Whites embraced the peasant revolution, or the Reds driven all former tsarist officers into White hands, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and the rest would have been delivered back into exile or hung from the lampposts.

No region would prove more decisive in the civil war than the Volga valley, a premiere source of food and recruits as well as the strategic separator between the two large White armies of Kolchak (Urals-Siberia) and Denikin (Don-Kuban).

Among the key instruments of the swaggering cobbler’s son was a Tsaritsyn Cheka, which had just announced its existence in May 1918 when it took over a two-story mansion overlooking the Volga. It made the top floor into offices and living quarters, and partitioned the lower floor into cells, which were soon stuffed with prisoners beaten unconscious to “confess.” Targets included “bourgeois,” clergy, intelligentsia, and tsarist officers, many of whom had answered a local appeal to join the Red Army. Workers and peasants were also arrested as counterrevolutionaries if they dared to criticize the arbitrary arrests and torture, or if someone said they had.83 Rumors of atrocities constituted part of the Cheka’s mystique: the Kharkov Cheka was said to scalp victims, the Yekaterinoslav Cheka to stone or crucify them, and the Kremenchug Cheka to impale them on stakes.84 In Tsaritsyn, the Cheka was said to cut through human bones with handsaws.85 Alexander I. Chervyakov (b. 1890), who had emerged as the regional Cheka boss in Tsaritsyn, conducted himself like a tyrant, and he and his leather-clad thugs settled their own scores, including with other Cheka operatives, but now they answered to Stalin.86 An eyewitness, the Bolshevik Fyodor Ilin, who had taken the name Raskolnikov from the Dostoevsky character, recalled that “Stalin in Tsaritsyn was everything”—de facto boss of the regional Cheka, and soon, of the regional Red Army.87

As for Bolshevik Russia in the here and now, the Allies were at a loss. While Foch argued for a preemptive war, Clemenceau advocated containment (a cordon sanitaire); while Lloyd George imagined moderating Bolshevism through trade, other British political figures wanted to roll back the leftist menace.179 Some British imperialists, for their part, smiled upon the forced retreat of Russian sovereignty from the Caucasus and hoped to consolidate Ludendorff’s policy of imperial partition in the East, but other Brits, with a wary eye on Germany, preferred a reunified Russia as a counterweight. In the end, for all the talk of the possible spread of the “Bolshevik bacillus,” Versailles showed itself far less concerned with Russia than with Germany. Still, the two turned out to be inseparable.180 Much of Germany’s political class would refuse to accept the verdict of Versailles; Soviet Russia’s exclusion from the peace conference—delegations were received from Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Ukraine—gave Moscow additional grounds for treating the result as illegitimate.

Under the slogan “Russia, One and Indivisible,” the Whites refused to acknowledge the aspirations of national minorities in whose territories they operated, precluding an alliance with Ukrainian or other anti-Bolshevik forces.242 Anti-Semitic outrages perpetrated by Denikin’s army, and especially by Ukrainian anti-Bolshevik troops, stamped the White movement.243 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.”244

By 1921, with the outcomes of the wars of reconquest more or less clear, the population of the Soviet republics amounted to perhaps 140 million, including about 75 million Russians and, among the 65 million non-Russians, around 30 million Turkic and Persian speakers.

Bolshevik ranks embodied the wildly multinational character of imperial Russia (as the names, given in this book in the original, demonstrate) but the Bolsheviks were thoroughly Russified, too (as shown by the more typical spellings of their names). Still, they were conscious of the difference between ethnic Russia and imperial Russia. Trotsky, a Russified Jew, painted Russia in profoundly negative cultural terms, demanding a “final break of the people with Asianism, with the seventeenth century, with holy Russia, with icons and cockroaches.”23 Lenin, vehemently excoriating Great Russian chauvinism as a special evil that “demoralizes, degrades, dishonors and prostitutes [the toiling masses] by teaching them to oppress other nations and to cover up this shame with hypocritical and quasi-patriotic phrases,” still allowed that a popular nationalism could emerge among ethnic Russians.24

whereas Lenin railed against Russian chauvinism, Stalin worried about non-Russian backwardness and came to see Russian tutelage as a lever to lift other nations up—an echo perhaps of his personal experience in Russian Orthodox schools.28 This difference would prove consequential.

As the recognized expert in the party’s innermost circle on the national question, by virtue of his Georgian heritage and 1913 essay, Stalin emerged as the most significant figure in determining the structure of the Soviet state.

Stalin’s understanding went beyond mentorship: even if Great Russia as a higher culture extended a helping hand to the various peoples, the latter still needed education and propaganda in their native tongues and participation in managing their own affairs.

Lenin viewed “bourgeois” Poland as the key battleground for the revolution against the Versailles Order: either an Entente springboard for intervention in socialist Russia—which had to be prevented—or a potential corridor for Bolshevik fomenting of revolution in Germany.53 Piłsudski, a Social Democrat and Polish nationalist who now added the title of marshal, sought a truncated Russia and a Greater Poland in the form of a Polish-dominated “federation” with Belorussia and Lithuania, allied with a small independent Ukraine.54

French government, still angry at Piłsudski’s recklessness, nonetheless suggested an anti-Bolshevik operation; the British government, on July 11, sent the Bolsheviks a note signed by Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon proposing an armistice on western territorial terms favorable to Soviet Russia, an armistice with Wrangel and a neutral zone in Crimea (Wrangel’s sanctuary), accompanied by a stern warning not to cross into “ethnographical” Polish territory. The note seemed to establish a Polish-Soviet boundary some fifty miles east of the Bug (essentially the 1797 border between Prussia and imperial Russia); it would become known as the Curzon Line.83 The Poles were taken aback: the British appeared to be giving away eastern territories the Poles viewed as their “historic” patrimony (whoever might be living there as of 1920).84 To Lenin, it looked like the British wanted, Gibraltar style, to annex the Crimean peninsula, pointing a dagger, like White Poland, at the Reds; on July 12–13, he urged “a frantic acceleration of the offensive against Poland.”

Lenin had ridden to power by denouncing the “imperialist” war. Had he accepted the Curzon Note as a basis for a peace settlement—whether of his own volition or, because the unthinkable happened and Trotsky and Stalin teamed up to impose their well-founded skepticism upon the politburo—then the Poles reluctantly would have been forced to accept the Curzon Note as well. This would have put Ukraine, most of Belarus, and Lithuania in Soviet hands. Instead, Lenin dreamed of igniting a pan-European revolutionary blaze. He rolled the iron dice.

Georgian Bolshevik Grigol “Sergo” Orjonikidze (the main political commissar) and none other than Tukhachevsky (the military commander) had found an opportune moment to attack when the Azerbaijanis decided to send 20,000 units of their 30,000-troop army to respond to communal clashes between Armenians and Azeris in a disputed mountain region known as Karabakh.137

so, not long after “White” Poland’s ambitions to displace Soviet Russia as the great power in Eastern Europe had been checked, the Whites inside Russia had been definitively vanquished. There was no glory for Stalin: he had originally been assigned Wrangel’s destruction, but had resigned his military posts over the Polish campaign.

Soviet Ukraine, like Soviet Russia, would go on to sign a plethora of state-to-state treaties—with Poland, Austria, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia—right through late 1921.259 Ukraine maintained missions abroad in Prague, Berlin, Warsaw, Vienna, often in the same building as the RSFSR missions; Ukraine also had a representative office in Moscow.260

“Here I have a written note to the effect that we, Communists, supposedly artificially forced a Belorussian nation,” he stated. “This is false, because a Belorussian nation exists, which has its own language, different from Russian, and that the culture of the Belorussian nation can be raised only in its own language. Such speeches were made five years ago about Ukraine, concerning the Ukrainian nation. . . Clearly, the Ukrainian nation exists and the development of its culture is a duty of Communists. One cannot go against history.”268

Stalin said that!

Thanks to Trotsky’s relentless propensity to polemicize and exasperate, Lenin was helping to form an anti-Trotsky faction at the pinnacle of power that would fall into Stalin’s hands.

Reza Khan in Persia, who had seized power in Tehran in a putsch on February 21, 1921, with the aid of White Cossack troops and British assistance, promptly denounced the existing Anglo-Persian Treaty and signed a Soviet-Persian Treaty of Friendship, which specified both Soviet and British troop withdrawals. Independent Afghanistan signed a treaty with Soviet Russia, too, as insurance against a renewed British invasion.

Turkey began talks with the Soviets, which would result in a pact three weeks later.293 All three treaties—Persia (February 26), Afghanistan (February 28), and Turkey (March 16)—conveyed diplomatic recognition on Soviet Russia.

Lenin and Chicherin, as part of their pursuit of formal recognition from Britain, had recognized the independent Georgian Menshevik state with a treaty on May 7, 1920, pledging noninterference in its affairs.328 In exchange, however, the Georgian government—in a codicil that remained secret—agreed to legalize Communist party activity on its territory, and Bolshevik agents in the Caucasus, including a young operative named Lavrenti Beria, promptly set about subverting the Menshevik state.329

Stalin argued, Menshevik Georgia provided “a zone of foreign intervention and occupation”—a stepping zone for aggressors to attack the Soviet heartland, lending apparent urgency to the matter.335

Turkey’s Mustafa Kemal prioritized annexation of Armenian-inhabited provinces (Kars, Ardahan) over aiding the brethren Azerbaijani Turks, and he saw an ally in Soviet Russia against Versailles (a parallel to the emerging German-Soviet rapprochement).345

When biographers write about Stalin, projecting backward in time an early psychopath and murderer, they are, in effect, describing the Stalin contemporary, Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg.359 The savage, demented baron had been born in Austria in the 1880s to a German aristocrat mother and a Baltic German father from an ancient noble family, but the boy, like his crusading ancestors, grew up on imperial Russia’s Baltic littoral.

Von Ungern-Sternberg’s contribution was historic both to Mongol independence and the creation of the first Soviet satellite—long before post‒World War II Eastern Europe—for after his defeat, the Red Army stayed.

What Trotsky and others missed or refused to acknowledge was that Stalin had a deft political touch: he recalled names and episodes of people’s biographies, impressing them with his familiarity, concern, and attentiveness, no matter where they stood in the hierarchy, even if they were just service staff.

Red Army shrank from around 5 million to 600,000 troops by the end of 1923. (Desertions drove a significant part of the reductions.)

Lenin argued that the international “bourgeoisie” could never accept the permanent existence of a workers’ state, but the truth was the opposite: although Western hostility toward the Soviet regime was often intransigent and some Western individuals were committed to Soviet overthrow, Western government hostility was mostly “sporadic, diffused, disorganized,” as George Kennan explained. He added that while “many people in the Western governments came to hate the Soviet leaders for what they did,” the Communists “hated the Western governments for what they were, regardless of what they did.”149 Thus, Moscow could view a Labour government and a Tory government as in essence identical: both imperialist and, therefore, both perfidious.

Prime Minister Lloyd George, a liberal in the classic nineteenth-century sense of laissez-faire and free trade, advanced the idea of an international conference to rehabilitate Russia and Germany in an improved peace settlement aiming at European economic reconstruction, which could profit Britain and perhaps shore up his fragile coalition government with a bold act.154

ties between the Red Army and the Reichswehr were already intimate and on August 11, 1922, the two countries signed a secret formal agreement on military cooperation.

the formal proposal for the RSFSR to absorb Ukraine, Belorussia, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan was accepted only by the Central Committees of Azerbaijan, which faced an Iranian state that used to rule it, and Armenia, which faced Turkey, where Armenians had been massacred.

Lenin had never set foot in Georgia, or even Ukraine, for that matter; Stalin had far greater firsthand experience of the varied realm,

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Also lost in the swirling passions was the circumstance that Stalin was the would-be centralizer in Eurasia, but Lenin was the centralizer globally. He had wanted during the Polish War not just to Sovietize but also to incorporate a number of states on the heels of a Red Army sweep westward into Europe. Stalin had responded that “for the nations that formed part of old Russia, we can and should consider our (Soviet) type of federation as an appropriate path to international unity,” but not so for “a future Soviet Germany, Poland, Hungary, Finland. These peoples . . . would scarcely agree to enter straight into a federative bond with Soviet Russia on the Bashkir or Ukrainian model.”

Stalin proposed that Trotsky become head of the state planning commission as well as deputy chairman of the government.91 Trotsky refused this, too.92 By refusing to become Lenin’s top deputy with Lenin seriously ill, Trotsky in effect was refusing to take over the government.

Stalin drove home the point by noting that the Georgians oppressed national minorities, and not just the tribals (Abkhazians and Ossetians), but also Armenians—look at Georgian officials’ efforts to deport local Armenians and “transform Tiflis into a real Georgian capital.”160 Great Russians, in other words, had no monopoly on chauvinism. Anyway, not chauvinism but backwardness and the need for development were the salient issues. The party needed to employ the instruments of regional autonomy and native language education, which would now consolidate the nations, so that they could be developed, a policy confirmed at the congress as “indigenization” (korenizatsiia).161

he revealed that in 1917 he had declined Lenin’s request to serve as interior minister. “The fact is, comrades, there is one personal aspect of my work, which although playing no role in my personal life and my day-to-day existence, is nonetheless of great political significance,” he stated. “This is my Jewish origin. . . . I firmly turned down his offer on the grounds, as before, that we should not give our enemies the opportunity to say that our country was being ruled by a Jew.”301 More recently, when Lenin proposed that he become his deputy in the government, Trotsky said, he refused on the same grounds. This revelation is hard to credit. Trotsky accepted other high-profile appointments in the government.

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BOLSHEVIK REGIME was suffocating the country and itself in paperwork and red tape, presiding over mass embezzlement amid impoverishment, hostile to, yet dependent upon, the market, fearful not only of peasants’ political leanings but of workers’ as well. Inside the roiling mess, however, Stalin was building a personal dictatorship. His was a life of theses and countertheses, compilation and dissemination of meeting protocols, intense orgburo drudgery of the expanding personnel machine, and absorption of the denunciations and secret reports forwarded by and about the OGPU, the military, foreign embassies, newspaper correspondents. More than anyone he had brought the USSR into being.

But during these years, his power was gravely threatened by a sheet of paper calling for his removal. Volodicheva’s and Fotiyeva’s memoirs, composed after Stalin’s death (for obvious reasons), contain a number of implausible or outright impossible details. Lenin’s doctors also never clarified the origins of the dictation.318 Krupskaya, as far as the record indicates, never publicly explained the specific circumstances of the dictation’s generation. Molotov would recall that “Krupskaya had a big grudge against Stalin. But he had a grudge against her, too, because Lenin’s signature to his Testament was supposedly affixed under Krupskaya’s influence. Or so Stalin believed.”319 This was an odd formulation because the dictation lacks Lenin’s signature, but it indicated that Stalin believed Krupskaya was complicit in the content, and possibly even the very existence, of the documents.

what may be less well appreciated is that Trotsky proved to be less the obstacle to than the instrument of Stalin’s aggrandizement. Just as the Bolshevik regime needed the civil war to form a state, so Stalin needed “opposition” to consolidate his personal dictatorship—and he found it. Compared with Trotsky’s delight in polemicizing against this or that regime policy, which lent itself to accusations of schism and factionalism, Stalin presented himself as the faithful defender of the Central Committee and Lenin’s legacy.

A hidden dimension to German-Soviet ties entailed clandestine military cooperation, initiated under Lenin.208 Versailles had imposed severe restrictions on the German military’s size, training, weapons production, and even the ability to send military attachés abroad, but the Soviets offered to allow Germany to violate these restrictions. Major German manufacturers (Blohm & Voss, Krupp, Albatrosswerke) were able to build submarines, aircraft, and artillery on Soviet territory, and the Reichswehr obtained secret training facilities. The Soviets, for their part, sought to attract German firms through leases, or concessions, to take over and revive moribund weapons factories.

Locarno Peace Pact consisted of a clutch of seven agreements negotiated at a resort on Lake Maggiore (October 5–16, 1925) between Britain, France, Italy, Belgium, and Germany as well as Poland and Czechoslovakia. Germany recognized its borders in the west (the Rhineland frontier), effectively ceding Alsace-Lorraine to France, and agreed to vague arbitration over its borders to the east, effectively allowing for future revision. Germany was given a path to admission into the League of Nations, shedding its pariah status. “The gates of war are closed,” declared France’s foreign minister Aristide Briand (who had headed the government back during the siege of Verdun). But no comparable non-aggression pledges or mutual guarantees were issued for Germany’s relations with its smaller eastern neighbors. Polish foreign minister Józef Beck would complain that “Germany was officially asked to attack the east, in return for peace in the west.” The retired former head of state Józef Piłsudski observed that “every honest Pole spits when he hears this word [Locarno].”217 Still, all three principals (Briand, Stresemann, and Chamberlain) would be awarded Nobel Prizes. The Soviets, who had not been invited, were alarmed that Germany had apparently been drawn back into the western orbit as part of a presumed British-led anti-Soviet coalition.

Stalin had also been relentlessly accusing Trotsky of underestimating the peasantry, and in the speech characterized “Trotskyism” as the “disbelief in the forces of our revolution, disbelief in the alliance [smychka] between workers and peasants,” which was indispensable to the success of the NEP and the revolution’s ultimate triumph.254 Attacks on Trotsky, in other words, translated into strong support for the NEP.

what is certain is that he exercised his personal dictatorship amid a profound structural hostility: Stalin was the disciple of a man who seemed to have called for his removal. This state of siege mirrored the position of the revolution as a whole. Stalin’s geopolitical vision of a Soviet Union able to avoid entanglement in what he saw as the inevitable next interimperialist war, which would produce new revolutions, was put in doubt by the apparent rapprochement of the two capitalist blocs at Locarno, as well as by the hostile posture of newly independent Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, expanded Romania, and Japan.

Stalin’s absolute power did not delight him absolutely. He exulted in it, yet it roused his self-pity. He thrilled to being the center of attention, the decision maker, the successor to Lenin, the leader, but it ate at him that everyone knew Lenin’s Testament called for his removal.

Yekaterinoslav, the country’s tenth biggest city, was renamed Dnepropetrovsk in 1926.

it would take him through the end of 1927, when the 15th Party Congress would finally be held, to drive the Zinoviev-Trotsky opposition out of the party entirely and into internal exile.