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

by Stephen Kotkin

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 a Soviet state was not born fully armed from Lenin’s forehead. Among the broad masses there was an intuitive antibourgeois ethos—exploiters versus the exploited, haves versus have-nots—which could both motivate and justify an all-out mobilization to combat counterrevolution and defend the revolution. Consider a revolutionary episode in late summer 1918 in Kamyshinsk, on the Volga, a merchant town of sawmills, windmills, and watermelons. “The Cheka has registered all the big bourgeoisie, and at the moment they are being kept on a barge,” proudly proclaimed a group that had constituted itself as the local political police. “During the day the [prisoners] work in town.” No one had to explain to these local defenders of the revolution who the “bourgeoisie” were or why they were the enemy. And when members of the “bourgeoisie” on the Kamyshinsk barge suddenly fell ill, and the Cheka consented to an inspection by a physician from nearby Saratov, who prescribed better rations and release from forced labor, the suspicious Chekists decided to investigate the doctor’s background and discovered he was an impostor. “Now,” the operative gloated, “he too is on the barge.”14 Such prison barges for “class aliens” arose up and down the Volga—none more impressive than under Stalin at Tsaritsyn—as did barge equivalents a...