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

by Stephen Kotkin

“The essence of the evil lay not in the disorder but in the absence of political authority [bezvlastii].”24 After October, organizations claiming broad authority proliferated, just as before, but the “absence of authority” worsened. Bolshevism, too, roiled with deep internal fractures, riotousness, and turnover, and Lenin’s superior political instincts—when compared with other leaders of Russia’s revolution—could not overcome the functional equivalent of the Dadaist’s deafening train whistle: namely, the man-made destruction and chaos that brought the Bolsheviks to nominal authority. Some powerful groups, notably the railway workers union, would insist on a government without Lenin and Trotsky; Germany, militarily victorious on the eastern front, looked to be on the verge of completely conquering Russia; the chief of the new Bolshevik political police would be taken hostage in a near leftist coup against Bolshevism; and an assassin would pump two bullets into Lenin. By summer 1918, armed insurrection against the regime would open on four fronts. And yet Lenin and his inner circle of Trotsky, Sverdlov, and Stalin had already managed to assert a Bolshevik political monopoly.