Stalin: A Biography

scale’.³¹

A separate session of Bolsheviks took place. It was here that Kamenev denounced the warmth of official Menshevik support for the Provisional Government and urged the need to back the Petrograd Soviet.³² The Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, after all their organisational divisions since 1903, belonged to the same party once again. They were the largest two factions in the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party. At the central level they maintained separate bodies, but across the country — especially outside Petrograd — they worked together. This was an unsustainable situation. The right wing of Menshevism advocated vigorous national defence whereas all Bolsheviks wanted a robust campaign for a multilateral peace. Kamenev and Stalin planned to resolve matters by calling upon the anti-defencist Mensheviks to split themselves off from their faction’s right wing.

Among Bolsheviks, Kamenev was frank about his calculations:³³

It’s wrong to run ahead of things and pre-empt disagreements. There’s no party life without disagreements. Within the party we’ll survive petty disagreements. But there is one question where it’s impossible to unify the non-unifiable. We have a single party together with those who come together on the basis of Zimmerwald and Kienthal, i.e. those who are against revolutionary defencism.

We need to announce to the Mensheviks that this wish is only the wish of the group of people gathered here and is not obligatory for all Bolsheviks. We must go to the meeting and avoid presenting particular platforms. [We should do this] within the framework of a wish to call a conference on the basis of anti-defencism.

Such a statement, made three days before Lenin’s arrival in Petrograd, indicates that Kamenev and Stalin were very far from having a gentle attitude to Menshevism. Implicitly they aimed at schism on the basis of a policy on war and peace which was bound to bring the party into direct conflict with the Provisional Government.

This was a plausible strategy, and it is only because the Bolsheviks within weeks had started to go it alone and then, months later, made their October Revolution that the audacity of the Kamenev–Stalin strategy became forgotten. Both Kamenev and Stalin after 1917 had to forswear their strategy as the more radical policy of seizing power without Menshevik assistance was turned into one of the sacred items of Bolshevik history. The episode is anyway important for the light it sheds on Stalin’s career. He and Kamenev, despite the Russian Bureau’s hostility, had barged their way into the leadership of the faction and elaborated a strategy which, if it had been continued, could have produced a party of radical opposition to the Provisional Government. Factional allegiances were extremely fluid in March and April. The clever idea of tempting left-wing Mensheviks into a Bolshevik embrace had solid political potential. Kamenev and Stalin had been both nimble and determined. They had seen much more of Russia in the twentieth century than Lenin; they had experienced the atmosphere of revolutionary politics in Petrograd since the February Revolution. Their plan for a campaign for radical policies on peace, bread, land and government had the potential for huge popularity.

Lenin violently disagreed. Based in Switzerland, he wrote his ‘Letters from Afar’ which demanded the overthrow of the Provisional Government. The original strategy of Bolshevism, enunciated since 1905, had been for the workers to overthrow the monarchy and establish a temporary revolutionary dictatorship, uniting all socialist parties, which would implement all imaginable civic freedoms and establish a capitalist economy. Leninist strategy had been made obsolete by the formation of the liberal-led Provisional Government and its promulgation of civic freedoms. Lenin never properly explained why he suddenly thought Russia to be ready for the second great projected stage in its revolutionary development — namely the ‘transition to socialism’. But he insisted that this was the only true policy for Bolshevism. He got his chance to fight for his ideas when, at the end of March, the German government allowed him and a group of anti-war Russian Marxists to travel across Germany to Scandinavia before making their way to Petrograd.

Telegrams preceded him, and the Russian Bureau prepared a suitable greeting. Kamenev together with other leading Bolsheviks from Petrograd travelled out to meet him at Beloostrov as the train stopped briefly at the Finnish–Russian administrative frontier on 3 April. Lenin did not mince his words. He picked on Kamenev as the originator of the Russian Bureau’s conditional support for the Provisional Government and cursed him heartily.³⁴ (Stalin avoided such a tirade only because he had not gone to Beloostrov with the welcoming group.)³⁵ Lenin’s mood had not lightened when the train arrived after midnight at the Finland Station in Petrograd. He angrily denounced the Lvov cabinet yet again, and was brusque towards Menshevik leader Nikolai Chkheidze, who headed the Petrograd Soviet delegation deputed to greet him as a renowned returning revolutionary. Then he went off to the Tauride Palace, where he addressed a Bolshevik factional gathering and called for a transformation of strategy. Lenin was heard with incredulity. But he would not be thwarted; again at a joint session of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks he declared that all compromise with the Provisional Government was intolerable. Lenin was on the rampage all through 4 April and Kamenev and Stalin watched impotently. From being dominant leaders they had become spectators.

To the Russian Bureau members who had been pushed aside by Kamenev and Stalin this brought delight. At last they had someone of sufficient standing among Bolsheviks to demand ultra-radicalism. They were enraptured by Lenin and his ideas, which he reduced to a few hundred words and published as his April Theses. There were plenty of others in the faction elsewhere in the country who were equally annoyed with the policy of conditional support for the Provisional Government. Bolshevism had always stood for revolutionary extremism. For those Bolsheviks, in Petrograd and across the country, who approved of giving conditional support to the Provisional Government, the arrival of Lenin was akin to a bull crashing into a china shop. Every Bolshevik, on both sides of the debate, was transfixed by the sight of a returning leader full of bile and confidence; and already it was clear that party members had to choose definitively between the rival strategies of Kamenev and Lenin.

Stalin, like many others, went over straightaway to Lenin’s standpoint. He never bothered to justify the decision. Hurtling from meeting to meeting in those early days after his arrival in Petrograd, Lenin rallied the ultra- radicals and cajoled the doubters. It was a political tour de force. Yet at the same time there was less difficulty for Lenin than appeared at the time. Bolshevism had always cleaved to an extremist agenda. Until 1917, indeed, the faction had anticipated forming a ‘provisional revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’ in the event of the Imperial monarchy’s overthrow. A government of Kadets had always been a hateful possibility in the mind of Bolsheviks. Kamenev and Stalin, the advocates of a deal with elements in the Menshevik faction, had always had an ulterior motive. Stalin shifted his ground on 4 April, but not to the extent that he abruptly turned from a ‘moderate’ into an ‘extremist’. And in bending to the Leninist wind, he did not accept Lenin’s proposals in their entirety. He continued to believe that Lenin had much to learn about revolutionary Russia (and even about non-revolutionary Europe!).

Yet he could not fail to see the difference between Kamenev and Lenin. Kamenev had been Stalin’s senior Bolshevik, his friend and his ally. But Lenin was a real leader. From April 1917 until Lenin’s medical incapacitation in 1922 Stalin gave him allegiance. It was often a troubled relationship. They had disputes every year through to Lenin’s death. But they got on well between February and October; and Lenin took Stalin under his patronage and promoted his career in Bolshevism.

PART TWO Leader for the Party

12. THE YEAR 1917

The months between the February and October Revolutions were momentous for Russia. Politics became free and visible. Petrograd was festooned with red flags and devoid of police. Its festivals were those of the socialist leadership of the capital’s Workers’ and Soldiers’ Soviet. The ‘Internationale’ was sung on ceremonial occasions. There was bravado everywhere and socialism was at a peak of popularity. The Provisional Government under the liberal Georgi Lvov ruled only by leave of the Petrograd Soviet. The political far right vanished after the fall of the