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

by Stephen Kotkin

The conflict of August 1914 escalated into a world war partly because of the expectation that states were vulnerable to conquest, but it was protracted because of the circumstance that they were not.54 Already by late fall 1914 the Great War had become a stalemate: Britain, and to a lesser extent Russia, had foiled Germany’s attempted preemptive conquest of France. From that point—and every day thereafter—the further choice, for all belligerents, could not have been starker: Negotiate an end to the stalemate, admitting that millions of soldiers had been hurled to futile deaths; or continue searching for an elusive decisive blow while dispatching millions more. Each belligerent chose the latter course.

For two years, the British had mostly allowed the French and Russians to absorb the brunt of Germany’s blows.56 But in July 1916, during the bloodbath at Verdun—launched by the Germans in a new strategy of attrition to overcome the stalemate by bleeding the French to death—the British countered with an offensive on the Somme farther west in France. At least 20,000 British soldiers were killed and another 40,000 wounded during the first twenty-four hours. This was the greatest loss of life—working class and aristocrat—in British military history. Before the Battle of the Somme, just like Verdun, ended in stalemate, it would claim 430,000 British killed and mutilated (3,600 per day), along with 200,000 French and perhaps 600,000 Germans.

The war itself, not the subsequent bungled Peace of Versailles, caused the terrible repercussions for decades. “This war is trivial, for all its vastness,” explained Bertrand Russell, a logician at Cambridge University and the grandson of a British prime minister. “No great principle is at stake, no great human purpose is involved on either side. . . . The English and the French say they are fighting in defence of democracy, but they do not wish their words to be heard in Petrograd or Calcutta.”

But whereas European rulers and generals knowingly sent millions to their deaths for God knows what, Lenin could assert that he was willing to sacrifice millions for what now, thanks to the imperialist war, looked more than ever like a just cause: peace and social justice. Marx,

With the war raging, he wrote his foundational Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), adapting the ideas of the Brit John Hobson and the Austrian Rudolf Hilferding, arguing that capitalism was doomed but for its recourse to exploitation abroad. But it was hardly necessary to read Lenin to appreciate the link between the Great War and colonial rapaciousness. Between 1876 and 1915, gigantic swaths of the world’s territory had changed hands, usually violently.66 France had amassed a global empire 20 times its size, and Britain 140 times, colonizing hundreds of millions of people. Outside Europe, only Japan had managed to stave off the European onslaught and, with its own overseas colonies, emulate Europe’s rapaciousness. 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 The most notorious of all was tiny Belgium’s empire—80 times its size—which, in the pursuit of rubber and glory, enslaved, mutilated, and slaughtered perhaps half of Congo’s population, as many as 10 million people, in the decades before 1914.68 But this was the thing about the Great War: even in countries that practiced rule of law, politicians and generals used their own citizens no better, and often worse, than they had their colonial subjects.

Stalin also continued to engage in the exiled revolutionary’s pastime of seducing and abandoning peasant girls. He impregnated one of his landlord’s daughters, the thirteen-year-old Lidiya Pereprygina, and when the police intervened he had to vow to marry her, but then betrayed his promise; she gave birth to a son, who soon died. (Stalin would later recall his dog in Siberia, Tishka, but not his female companions and bastards.)

In late 1916, Stalin received a draft notice. But in January 1917, after a six-week trip by reindeer-pulled sleds from Turukhansk through the tundra down to the induction center at Krasnoyarsk in southern Siberia, the future dictator was disqualified from army service because of his physical deformities.

Still, at the war’s outbreak Russia fielded the world’s largest force, 1.4 million in uniform. Britain and France referred to their ally’s mass army as “the steamroller.”

And yet, the relative limits in Russian numbers indicated limits to the tsarist regime’s reach over the vast empire. Russia could not manage to take full advantage of what had so terrified the German high command: namely, the gigantic population.

Between August and December 1914, Russian armies drove into Germany’s eastern flank and over time managed to crush Austria-Hungary. Against Ottoman armies, Russia did far better than the British, emerging victorious after the Ottomans had invaded Russia in winter 1914–15 expecting, erroneously, to ignite Russia’s Muslims. The problem, however, was that the Germans recovered to repel Russia’s early advances and encircle Russian troops at Tannenberg (southeast of Danzig), then forced a 300-mile Russian retreat.89 By late 1915, German-led forces had not only reversed the Russian conquests of the previous year in Habsburg Galicia, but had overrun Russian Poland, with its vital industry and coal mines; much of Belorussia; and Courland (on the Baltic), thereby threatening Petrograd. Nonetheless, from 1914 to 1916, the Russian army tied down more than 100 Central Powers’ divisions on the eastern front; until 1917, Russia captured more German prisoners than Britain and France combined.

He identified with the outlawed sect of Khlysty, who taught rejoicing (radenie), or “sinning in order to drive out sin”; Rasputin advised followers to yield to temptations, especially of the flesh, asking, “How can we repent if we have not first sinned?”

Prewar Russia had fed both Germany and England, accounting for 42 percent of global wheat exports.

Revolution results not from determined crowds in the streets but from elite abandonment of the existing political order.

RUSSIA WAS a genuine great power, but with a tragic flaw. Its vicious, archaic autocracy had to be emasculated for any type of better system to emerge.

But the Great War did not break a functioning autocratic system; the war smashed an already broken system wide open.

The downfall of any authoritarian regime does not ipso facto produce democracy, of course. A constitutional order must be created and sustained by attracting and holding mass allegiance, and by establishing effective instruments of governance. The Provisional Government, which replaced the tsar, would achieve none of that.

Lenin and the Bolsheviks neither invented nor made broadly popular in Russia European socialism’s long-developing symbolic repertoire, to which the war and then the February Revolution added profound extra impetus.

Stalin was deeply engaged in all deliberations and actions in the innermost circle of the Bolshevik leadership, and, as the coup neared and then took place, he was observed in the thick of events.

Above all, Stalin emerged as a powerful voice in Bolshevik propaganda.

But countries do not descend into dictatorship any more than they burst into democracy. A dictatorship, too, must be created, and sustained. And modern dictatorship—the rule of the few in the name of the many—requires not only the incorporation of the masses into a polity but a powerful symbolic repertoire and belief system, in addition to effective instruments of governance and well-motivated repression.

prorogued,

But freedom without effective governing institutions is, ultimately, not enduring. It is an invitation to all manner of adventurists and would-be saviors.50 February’s delirium of freedom, in just a few months, metamorphosed into a desperate longing for “firm authority.”

Still, Bolshevik strongholds were strategic—the capital, the capital garrison, and the front near the capital.

That said, the war did not inevitably provide for Bolshevik triumph. The Provisional Government, as we shall see, chose not just to remain in the war but to launch a catastrophic offensive in June 1917.65 This decision became an opportunity for those most radical, and Lenin had set up the Bolshevik party to benefit from it.

Total tsarist government confiscations of agricultural land during the war—which was seized with minimal or zero compensation from some of the empire’s most productive farmers, and contributed to the severe shortage of grain in 1916 and the bread riots in 1917—amounted to at least 15 million acres.78 Now, the peasants began to follow suit, seizing crop lands, draft animals, implements, in what they called the Black Repartition.

Marxist theory held that history moved in stages—feudalism, capitalism, socialism, communism—such that before advancing to socialism, it was necessary to develop the bourgeois-capitalism stage. Almost all Bolsheviks expected that the revolution would move toward socialism eventually, but the issue was when: they argued vehemently about whether the “bourgeois” or “democratic” revolution phase was complete or had to go further in order to prepare the way for the socialist revolution. Lenin was not proposing an immediate leap into socialism, which would have been blasphemy, but an acceleration of the move toward socialism—what he would call “one foot in socialism”—by not waiting for the full development of the bourgeois revolution and instead seizing political power now.

schema,

He evidently apologized to Molotov for stabbing him in the back in March—“You were nearest of all to Lenin in the initial stage”—and then took advantage of their communal-style living arrangements to steal Molotov’s girlfriend.

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bedlam.

But the Menshevik leadership adhered to the core Marxist idea whereby socialism had to await the full development of Russian capitalism, for which a “bourgeois revolution” was necessary.

Kerensky could certainly feel confident. In the elections to the June 1917 First Congress of Soviets, the Bolshevik party won a mere 105 of the 777 delegates with a right to vote, versus 285 by Socialist Revolutionaries and 248 by Mensheviks.127 Only something extremely dramatic could have possibly reversed Bolshevik fortunes. But just such a head-spinning turnabout transpired right in the middle of that First Congress of Soviets: namely, a Russian military offensive.

Back in September-October 1916, after the momentum of the Brusilov offensive had been broken, tsarist Russia and Germany had held secret talks for a separate peace in Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, and Kovno (a territory of imperial Russia under German occupation). Britain and France, after catching wind of the Russo-German talks, had moved to sign new financial agreements with Russia, finally conceding some long-standing Russian requests.148 Russia depended on its Allied partners for finance and materiel, but Russian leverage was perhaps even greater in 1917. Be that as it may, a strictly defensive posture would have allowed a wait-and-see respite while the U.S. entry on the western front got into high gear. Instead, the lunatic gamble of the Kerensky-Soviet offensive commenced on June 18 (July 1 in the West) with the greatest artillery barrage in Russian history to that point:

“The whole of 1917,” one historian has aptly written, “could be seen as a political battle between those who saw the revolution as a means of bringing the war to an end and those who saw the war as a means of bringing revolution to an end.”

in summer 1917 Trotsky agreed to join the Bolsheviks, converting to Leninism—that is, to an immediate transfer of power to the soviets.

It argued that all states were instruments for the domination of some classes over others, so that any new class power (like the working class) needed to create its own state form—“the dictatorship of the proletariat”—to suppress the remnants of the old ruling classes and distribute resources during the transition.

Kerensky’s suicidal June offensive, and his August encouragement and then betrayal of Kornilov, delivered the Soviet to the Bolsheviks. That meteoric political gain was consolidated by Trotsky’s idea to use the recently formed Military Revolutionary Committee to present the Second Congress of Soviets with the fait accompli of a Bolshevik seizure of power.

But whatever Lenin’s charisma and encapsulation talents, much of his power would derive from events going his way. Again and again, he stubbornly insisted on what appeared to be a crazy course of action, which then worked to his advantage. Lenin seemed to incarnate political will.

That such lowly beginnings would soon become one of the world’s strongest dictatorships is beyond fantastic. Lenin was essentially a pamphleteer. In 1918 he was identified as “Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars and journalist,” and earned more money from publication honoraria (15,000 rubles) than from his salary (10,000 rubles).17 Trotsky was a writer as well, and a grandiloquent orator, but similarly without experience or training in statecraft. Sverdlov was something of an amateur forger, thanks to his father’s engraving craft, and a crack political organizer but hardly an experienced policy maker. Stalin was also an organizer, a rabble-rouser, and, briefly, a bandit, but primarily a periodicals editor—commissar of nationalities was effectively his first regular employment since his brief stint as a teenage Tiflis weatherman.

Lenin imagined a “state of which the Paris Commune was the prototype,” with “democracy from below, democracy without an officialdom, without a police, without a standing army; voluntary social duty guaranteed by a militia formed from a universally armed people.”

Sverdlov emerged more than ever as the indispensable organizational man. He now served simultaneously as secretary of the Bolshevik party and chairman of the Soviet central executive committee, and deftly transformed the latter into a de facto Bolshevik organ, “orienting” its meetings to obtain the desired results.

The coup accelerated the empire’s disintegration. Between November 1917 and January 1918, chunk after chunk of imperial Russia broke off like an iceberg collapsing into the sea—Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan.

By January 1918, the Bolsheviks would repudiate all tsarist internal and external state debt, estimated at some 63 billion rubles—a colossal sum, including about 44 billion rubles in domestic obligations, and 19 billion foreign.

Shock waves hit the international financial system, the ruble was removed from European markets, and Russia was cut off from international financing. The country’s financial system ceased to exist. Credit to industry was shut off.75 A paper money “famine” soon plagued the country.

Still, peasants ceased paying rent and had their debts to the peasant land bank canceled.80 Overall, the upheavals strengthened the redistributive commune and the ranks of middling peasants who neither hired others nor sold their own labor.81 How much credit the Bolsheviks received for the land redistribution remains uncertain, even though Lenin had expediently lifted the popular Socialist Revolutionary Land Decree.

The chaos of seizures and speculation in some ways proved more destabilizing than any genuine plots of counterrevolution.

The party certainly tried, suppressing the propaganda of other contenders and, in their own press, ripping into the alternatives, denouncing the Socialist Revolutionaries (“wolves in sheep’s clothing”), the Menshevik Social Democrats (“slaves of the bourgeoisie clearing the path for the counterrevolution”), and the Constitutional Democrats (“capitalist pillagers”). The stage seemed set for mass intimidation and fraud. Incredibly, however, Russia experienced its first ever genuine universal-suffrage elections.

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). For Lenin, that was sufficient.

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In the capital, tens of thousands of protesters, including factory workers, marched to the Tauride Palace to try to save the Constituent Assembly, but Bolshevik loyalists fired on them.130 This was the first time civilians in Russian cities had been gunned down for political reasons since February and July 1917, but the Bolsheviks got away with it.