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

by Stephen Kotkin

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Bolshevism’s popularity had been propelled, above all else, by a promised extrication from the hated war.

Thus the Central Committee split three ways: capitulation (Lenin); stall and bluff (Trotsky); revolutionary partisan warfare to accelerate revolution in Europe (Bukharin).

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 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.

On February 21, 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.)

Finally, on the morning of February 23, the German response to the Bolshevik capitulation arrived by courier: It took the form of an ultimatum whose terms were far more onerous than before Trotsky’s posturing of neither war, nor peace. That same afternoon the Central Committee grimly assembled. Sverdlov detailed the German conditions: Soviet Russia would also have to recognize the independence—under German occupation—of the breadbasket of Ukraine, as well as the oil of the Caspian Sea and the strategic Baltic ports of Finland and Estonia, all to be dominated by Germany. Further, the Bolsheviks would have to disarm all Red Guards, decommission their navy, and pay a colossal indemnity. In other words, the Germans were continuing to place a large bet on Bolshevism, while at the same time containing it and extracting advantage.

The 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.

But Lenin had been the one who had maniacally pushed for the October coup, and he was the one now vilified for the capitulatory peace.201 Russia was compelled to renounce 1.3 million square miles of territory—lands more than twice the size of Germany, and lands imperial Russia had spilled blood and treasure to conquer over centuries from Sweden, Poland, the Ottoman empire, and others. The amputation removed a quarter of Russia’s population (some 50 million people), a third of its industry, and more than a third of its grain fields.202 Germany now sat in titular command of a vast eastward wedge, stretching from the Arctic to the Black Sea. Equally spectacular, subjects of imperial Germany and Austria-Hungary received exemptions from Bolshevik nationalization decrees, meaning they could own private property and engage in commercial activities on Soviet Russian soil, and German nationals who had lost property from tsarist confiscations were now owed compensation. The Bolsheviks became duty bound to demobilize their army and navy and cease international propaganda (the Germans considered Bolshevik propaganda far more dangerous than any Russian troops).203 No Russian government had ever surrendered so much territory or sovereignty.

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Still, suspecting the Bolsheviks intended to turn them over to Germans, the Czechoslovak Legion seized Chelyabinsk and then one town after another: Penza (May 29), Omsk (June 7), Samara (June 8), Ufa (July 5), Simbirsk (July 22), and so on, until they held the entire Trans-Siberian Railway as well as much of the Volga valley, more than two thirds of the former Russian empire.265 They conquered more territory than anyone else in the Great War.

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As for Nicholas, the Provisional Government had decided to exile him and his family abroad, but the Soviet had objected, and in any case, British king George V—who was a cousin to both Nicholas and Alexandra—rescinded an offer to shelter them.

Bolshevism’s core convictions about capitalism and class warfare were held to be so incontrovertible that any and all means up to lying and summary executions were seen as not just expedient but morally necessary.

The new state took shape by means of the predation, confiscation, and redistribution of material things (grain, buildings, valuables) as well as the intimidation or conscription of people, refracted through notions of revolutionary class warfare.

Above all, the new state owed its existence to civil war, as most states do, but it remained in peacetime a counterinsurgency.5 Civil war was not something that deformed the Bolsheviks; it formed them, indeed it saved them from the Dada and near oblivion of 1918.

Here was the eureka moment: from bottom to top, and places in between, the ideas and practices of revolutionary class war produced the Soviet state. Marx had written about emancipation, freedom—but he had also written about class war. For the revolution to succeed, for humanity to break free and advance, everything connected to “the bourgeoisie” and to capitalism had to be smashed. Everything that hindered annihilation of the bourgeoisie and capitalism also had to be cleared away, including other socialists.

Kolchak (east), Denikin (south), and Yudenich (northwest) led three separate anti-Bolshevik groupings, vilifying the “commissars” as German agents and Jews, desecrators of all that was dear to Russian patriots and Orthodox believers. The Bolsheviks, in turn, pilloried their foes as “Whites,” evoking the color of supporters of monarchical restoration against the revolution in France after 1789. None of the “White” leaders sought to restore the monarchy.36 But they did seek to turn back the socialist revolution.

In other words, the Great War catastrophe had not only made possible the far-fetched Bolshevik coup, it had also rendered conservative armed opposition to Bolshevism more difficult. At the same time, the Whites greatly complicated their difficult task by refusing to acknowledge peasant land seizures, thereby alienating their potential mass base. Had

But Trotsky—who became the new war and naval commissar, and who had no special training in the military arts (he had never served in the army)—came out strongly in favor of a professisonal army led by real military men.44 Trotsky would deem the famously democratizing Order No. 1 of 1917 “the single worthy document of the February Revolution,” but he afforded no quarter to democracy in a Red Army.

Most former tsarist officers who took part in the civil war gravitated toward the anti-Bolshevik forces, some 60,000 to Denikin, 30,000 to Kolchak, and 10,000 to other commanders.51 But by the end of the fighting, around 75,000 were serving in the Red Army, composing more than half the Bolsheviks’ officer corps of approximately 130,000. Even more strikingly, around 775 generals and 1,726 other officers of the tsarist general staff would serve in the Red Army at one time or another.52 Their motives varied from patriotism, preservation of the military establishment, and generous pay and rations, to concern for their family members kept as hostages.

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.

Stalin stole 10 million rubles and a fleet of vehicles from his own (Red) side not for personal luxuries, but for defense of the revolution; he was executing “counterrevolutionaries” without proof or trial, not from sadism or panic, but as a political strategy, to galvanize the masses.

Tsaritsyn would be saved—just barely—not by Trotsky but by Dmitry Zhloba, whose “Steel Division” of 15,000 men had left the Caucasus front, covered 500 miles in sixteen days, and surprised the Whites’ unguarded rear.137 On October 25, the Steel Division pushed the Cossacks back across the Don.138 Four days later, Stalin reported to a plenum of the Moscow soviet how dicey the situation had been.139 Indeed, had Tsaritsyn fallen that autumn of 1918, he might have faced a government inquiry and disciplinary action, as well as permanent reputational damage.

Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, and South Africa, meanwhile, put even more men into military action on behalf of Britain than would the United States, and in August 1918, the reinforced Allies counterattacked.

True, thanks to Brest-Litovsk—or rather, to Berlin’s willingness to violate its own treaty prohibitions—Germany shifted half a million troops to the western front, increasing its strength there to 192 divisions from 150.143 But by September 28, 1918, Deputy Chief of Staff General Erich Ludendorff, the man responsible for the western offensive, informed his superior, Field Marshall Paul von Hindenburg, that the Reich had no prospect of winning: Germany lacked reserves to send into battle. What Ludendorff did not say was that during the western offensive, nearly a million Reichswehr soldiers were bogged down in a disorganized occupation of the east that instead of extracting resources consumed them.

The repercussions of the war were immense, and enduring. Wartime GDP had increased in the United States and in the United Kingdom, but in Austria, France, the Ottoman empire, and Russia it cratered by between 30 and 40 percent.

Other war-influenced emergency social policies included emergency housing decrees, which willy-nilly introduced permanent government regulation. Unemployment insurance, cash sickness benefits, birth and burial grants were expanded into a proto-welfare state, spurred by warfare.

The seventy-eight-year-old Clemenceau aimed to counteract Germany’s superior economic might and population; Lloyd George to attain Britain’s colonial and naval aims at German expense; and Wilson to imagine a secure permament peace, though he abetted the French imposition of punishment on Germany. The final text contained 440 clauses, the first 26 of which concerned a new League of Nations, while the remaining 414 took up Germany’s alleged sole war guilt.

To fund the reconstruction of French and Belgian territory, and the British war-loan debt to the United States, Germany was ordered to pay 132 billion gold marks, then equivalent to $31.4 billion or £6.6 billion. (Approximately $440 billion in 2013.)174

A punitive peace is punitive only if there is the unity of will to enforce it, which was lacking. All that was fatal enough, but even before the powers bailed on the Versailles structure, it was being erected on the basis of a temporary anomaly: the simultaneous disintegration of both German power and Russian power. Both of those conditions could not last; in the event, neither would.

The Congress also formalized the existence of a small “political bureau” (politburo) and party secretariat, alongside a recently created larger “organization bureau” (orgburo). As Lenin explained, “the orgburo allocates forces [personnel], while the politburo decides policy.”225 The politburo had five voting members—Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Lev Kamenev, Nikolai Krestinsky—and three candidate (non-voting) members: Zinoviev, Kalinin, Bukharin.226

A related scenario unfolded in Italy, which, though nominally a Great War victor, had suffered casualties totaling 700,000 of 5 million men drafted to the colors and a budget deficit of 12 billion lira, saw mass strikes, factory occupations, and, in some cases, political takeovers in northern cities. This spurred an embryonic movement on the right called fascism—a closely knit combat league to defend the nation against the socialist threat.

The Whites acted self-righteously toward their British and French patrons, and never moderated their hostility to Germany.245 Additionally, the Whites were arrayed outside the heartland in a 5,000-mile interrupted loop—from the Urals and Siberia, westward across the southern steppes, up to Petrograd’s outskirts—which presented immense logistical and communications challenges.

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No one attributed the victory to him. But Lenin’s crucial leadership in the struggle against the Whites was felt at three significant moments: his support for Trotsky’s recruitment of former tsarist officers, including those of high rank, beginning in early 1918; his refusal to allow Trotsky to destroy Stalin definitively in October 1918; and, above all, his refusal to allow Stalin to rout Trotsky definitively in July 1919.310 As for Trotsky, his contribution, too, was equivocal. He committed mistakes when he intervened in operational questions, and his meddling angered many commissars and commanders alike, but he also organized, disciplined, and inspired the fighting masses.311 Trotsky excelled at agitation, and in the agitation he loomed large, which, however, became a source of resentment among insiders, but provided tremendous strength to the regime.312 Stalin’s role remains a tangle. Despite the Tsaritsyn shambles, Lenin still sent him on critical troubleshooting assignments (the Urals, Petrograd, Minsk, Smolensk, the south). Genuine shortcomings and bottlenecks were rampant, but in Stalin’s reports it became impossible to sort fact from exaggeration or invention. Each time he unmasked anti-Soviet “conspiracies”; each time he disobeyed direct orders from Moscow; each time he criticized everyone save himself, while nursing grievances as if he were the victim of miscomprehension and slander.

“The ability ‘to exert pressure,’” Trotsky would conclude, “was what Lenin prized so highly in Stalin”—a backhanded, yet accurate compliment.314

When all is said and done, however, White political failings were epic.315 The Whites never rose above the level of anarchic warlordism, worse even than General Ludendorff’s occupation.

A debilitating absence of government machinery was compounded by White failure in the realm of ideas. Red propaganda effectively stamped the Whites as military adventurists, lackeys of foreign powers, restorationists. The Whites mounted their own propaganda, military parades, and troop reviews blessed by Orthodox priests. Their red, white, and blue flags, the national colors of pre-1917 Russia, often had images of Orthodox saints; others had skulls and crossbones. The Whites copied the Bolshevik practice of the agitation trains. But their slogans—“Let us be one Russian people”—did not persuade.324 Elsewhere, when leftist revolutions or minirevolutions had erupted—Roman Catholic Bavaria, Hungary, and Italy—these places shifted rightward, galvanized partly by the specter of Bolshevism. Indeed, across Europe, the forces of order, including Social Democrats opposed to Communism, were ascendant. Clearly, the keys to political outcomes were not wartime ruin, the downfall of a monarchy, military mutinies, strikes, the formation of local soviets, or direct-action efforts by the left to seize power, but the strength, or weakness, of organized rightist movements and reliable peasant armies. The outnumbered Whites, despite thoroughly alienating the peasants, had counted on popular uprisings to join them.325 But unlike in Italy, Germany, and Hungary, the Whites failed even to try to reinvent an antileftist movement on the basis of right-wing populism, and not even a Horthy, emerged am...

Lenin’s regime set as its raison d’être not maximizing freedom but maximizing production.

At the finance commissariat more than 287 million rubles disappeared in a single robbery in October 1920, a heist accomplished with the aid of insider employees.332 A regime created by confiscation had begun to confiscate itself, and never stopped.

The reconstitution of functioning state power turned out to be the primary task after the Bolshevik coup, and what saved the Bolsheviks from oblivion, but the upkeep of the beneficiaries consumed a substantial part of the state budget, independent of their self-dealing. Around 5,000 Bolsheviks and family members had taken up residence in the Kremlin and the best hotels in the heart of Moscow. Collectively, they acquired a sizable service staff and swallowed considerable resources during the civil war. Their apartments, not just Lenin’s, were heated by furnaces even though fuel was hard to come by. Inside the Kremlin they enjoyed access to a children’s nursery, club, ambulatory, and bathhouse as well as “closed” distribution centers for food and clothing.

Compared with the tsarist royal court and high nobility, Bolshevik elite perquisites were hardly extravagant—an apartment, a dacha, a motor car, food packets—but amid the rubble and penury, such advantages were significant and conspicuous.335 Privileges for functionaries became a sore point well beyond the central regime.

There was abundant idealism in the apparatus, too, but the epidemic of “bureaucratism” shocked revolutionaries. Suddenly, “bureaucrats” were everywhere: boorish, spiteful, prevaricating, embezzling, obsessed with crushing rivals and self-aggrandizing.

Traditionally, Russia’s civil war, even more than the October coup, has been seen as Trotsky’s time. He was ubiquitous in the public imagination, and his train encapsulated the Red Army and its victory. But the facts do not bear out the long-held notion that Trotsky emerged significantly stronger than Stalin.342 Both Stalin and Trotsky were radicals to the core, but on the issue of former tsarist officers Stalin pushed a “proletarian” line, infuriating Trotsky (Trotsky’s rage was Stalin’s inspiration).

Lenin also was not naïve: he saw through Stalin’s self-centered, intrigue-prone personality, but Lenin valued Stalin’s combination of unwavering revolutionary convictions and get-things-done style, a fitting skill set for all-out revolutionary class warfare.

Appealing to Lenin, Stalin managed during the civil war to escape subordination to Trotsky despite the latter’s position as chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council.

they would be lucky to see a bourgeois revolution, let alone a socialist one, for Mongolia lagged Soviet Russia by two centuries: nearly half the male population was composed of monks in lamaseries, and the only figure of authority was the Bogd Gegen, a Living Buddha.

Compared with the Great War, none of the military battles in Russia’s civil war or wars of territorial reconquest were significant in scale, but nonetheless, 8 to 10 million people would perish here between 1918 and 1923. Probably nine tenths were civilians. Typhus, typhoid, cholera, influenza, and hunger may have killed more than enemy fire.

Wealth destruction, too, was epic. In 1921, economic output did not even reach one sixth of the pre-1914 level; the 1921 grain harvest came in at one half of the 1913 level.391 Russia would go from world grain exporter (1913) to cannibalism (1923).392 Additionally, doctors, scientists, teachers, artists, and others emigrated en masse, perhaps 1.5 million total, most of whom (unlike France after 1789) would not return—extending the civilization of Russian Eurasia across the globe and shaping Soviet Russia’s foreign policy.