Stalin: A Biography

Stalin’s point was not without plausibility.

He then posed some pertinent questions:²²

What about the Mingrelians, Abkhazians, Adzharians, Svans, Lez-gins and others speaking different languages but not having their own literature? How to relate to such nations? Is it possible to organise them into national unions? But around which ‘cultural matters’ can they be ‘organised’?

What about the Ossetians, of whom the Transcaucasian Ossetians are assimilating (but as yet are far from having assimilated entirely) as Georgians while the Ossetians of the North Caucasus are partly assimilating as Russians and partly developing further by creating their own literature? How can they be ‘organised’ into a single national union?

To which national union should the Adzharians be ascribed who speak Georgian but live by Turkish culture and profess Islam? Shouldn’t they be ‘organised’ separately from the Georgians on the basis of religious matters and together with the Georgians on the basis of other cultural matters? And what about the Kobuletsy? The Ingush? The Ingiloitsy?

Zhordania had no answer to such questions.

Stalin’s counter-proposal was for regional self-rule, as Lenin had counselled since 1903. This would be undertaken in such a fashion as to give each ethnic group, however small, the right to use its own language, have its own schools, read its own press and practise its own faith.²³ The response to Stalin and Lenin was acerbic, and it was led by Stalin’s Georgian antagonist Zhordania. For Zhordania the important point was that capitalist economic development had scattered nations over vast areas. It was therefore impractical to protect national and ethnic rights on a purely territorial basis. Leninism was therefore a doctrine from ‘the old world’.²⁴ Another claim by Zhordania was that ‘the Russian part of the party’, by which he meant the Bolsheviks, was insensitive to the acuteness of national oppression in the Russian Empire.²⁵ In truth Bolsheviks and Mensheviks were better at criticising each other than at providing a solution which would not lead somehow to oppressive results. If the Ukrainians were offered Bolshevik-style regional self-rule, Jews and Poles in Ukraine would have reason for concern. If Ukrainians acquired the right to Menshevik-style cross-territorial self- organisation, the prospects for central supranational government would become chaotic. Stalin and Zhordania were wrestling with a question with no definitive theoretical solution.

By and large, though, the dispute was conducted with intellectual rigour even though the language on both sides was intemperate. Stalin’s commentary on the Caucasus was taken seriously even by those who disagreed with him. He had said nothing offensive except to the ears of the most extreme nationalists. Indeed little attention was later drawn to his booklet when his enemies were searching for dirt on him.

The exception was the passages in Marxism and the National Question on the Jews. According to his categories, the Jews could not be considered as a nation because they did not live in a discrete territory. They had a language — Yiddish — and a religion of their own; and they were conscious of their Jewishness. But the matter of territory was crucial for Stalin and he took Bolshevik ideas on nationhood to their logical conclusion. his attack on the Jewish Bund was direct:²⁶

But [national-cultural autonomy] becomes even more dangerous when it is imposed on a ‘nation’ whose existence and future is subject to doubt. In such circumstances the supporters of national autonomy need to guard and conserve all the peculiarities of ‘the nation’ including not only useful ones but also those which are harmful so long as ‘the nation might be saved’ from assimilation and ‘might be protected’.

The Bund inevitably was obliged to start down this dangerous road. And down that road it actually has gone.

Stalin noted that whereas other Marxist parties had called for the general right of nations to speak their own language, have their own schools and follow their own customs, the Bund mentioned only the Jews. It had therefore, in his opinion, become a nationalist organisation.²⁷

He excoriated the Bund’s preoccupation with Yiddish and with the Jewish Sabbath. He noted that some Bundists even wanted separate hospitals for Jews. All this flew in the face of the wish of Marxists to bring national and ethnic groups of workers together in a single political organisation. For Stalin it was going altogether too far to suggest that all Jewish workers should be allowed to take off the hours of work from twilight on Friday to twilight on Saturday.²⁸

All this threw petrol on to the flames of controversy: Mensheviks and Bundists were infuriated by his analysis. But Stalin stood his ground and published an explanatory self-defence in the same journal.²⁹ Most of the Menshevik leaders happened to be Jews. Lenin’s attacks on them had invited the accusation that the Bolsheviks were anti-semitic.³⁰ This overlooked the fact that several Bolshevik leaders too were Jews — Lenin himself had a Jewish grandfather.³¹ But appearances in politics mattered as much as reality, and Stalin’s repudiation of Jewish demands for recognition of nationhood and of entitlement to self-rule seemed another case of Bolshevik hostility to Jews. Stories also surfaced that Stalin made anti-semitic remarks in private. Against this is the incontrovertible fact that Jews were among Stalin’s friends and associates before and after the Great War. However, the Jewish Bund was on the other side from the Bolsheviks in most disputes in the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party before the Great War. Stalin and Lenin were eager to attack the Bundists and their aspirations. Factional considerations as well as ideology were involved in the Bolshevik–Menshevik controversy. It would be difficult to find Stalin guilty of anti-semitism simply for what he wrote in his Meisterwerk on the national question.

10. OSIP OF SIBERIA

The months of waiting ended when the St Petersburg police sentenced Joseph Stalin to four years of exile. Marched from prison on 2 July 1913, he was taken to an arrest wagon bound for Siberia. Convicts were usually accompanied by friends and relatives who shouted support from the platform through the barred slits in the sides of the wagon. Nobody in the capital, however, was willing to bid Stalin farewell. His wife Ketevan was dead and his mother far away in Gori; and the Alliluev family, known to be active Bolshevik supporters, would have been ill advised to come to the station. No sooner had he risen to the crest of the Bolshevik faction than his fortunes fell to the ground. From having been leader of Bolshevism in St Petersburg with responsibility for both the Duma faction’s activities and the editorial line of Pravda he was reduced to being one arrested revolutionary among hundreds. Stalin was put in manacles. He slept on a hard wooden bunk. He and his comrades were fed and watered like cattle as the train made its way eastwards across the Eurasian plain. They peered through the barred slits as the train pulled out. Within minutes of departure they lost sight of the last feature of the Russian capital, the cupola on St Isaac’s Cathedral. The tundra and taiga of Siberia awaited them.¹

The government was watching with concern as the slogans of Bolshevism attracted discontented factory workers, and Bolsheviks like Stalin were a threat to the Imperial order as the industrial strike movement expanded. Stalin’s convict record was also noted. The Minister of Internal Affairs had no reason to show indulgence to this leading revolutionary who had escaped several times from previous places of exile. He and his comrades were sent to Turukhansk District in Yenisei Province in Siberia’s far north-east. Turukhansk’s reputation was a dreadful one. It was the place of detention for those revolutionaries in previous decades who had broken their terms of punishment. Stalin’s periods in exile in Novaya Uda, Solvychegodsk, Vologda and Narym were going to seem pleasant in comparison. No place under Imperial administration was bleaker than Turukhansk.²

At nearly six hundred thousand square miles, Yenisei Province was larger than Britain, France and Germany combined. It stretched from the town of Yeniseisk north down the River Yenisei to the Arctic Ocean. Population was sparse in Turukhansk District. Before the First World War there were fewer than fifteen thousand inhabitants and most of these belonged to tribes which had lived there for centuries. Monastyrskoe, the district capital, had fewer than fifty houses (although the New York and Montreal fur company Revillion had a branch there and graphite mining took place further north).³ The climate was harsh. Winter with its frequent snowstorms lasted