Stalin: A Biography

People’s Economy, headed by Nikolai Osinski, had beaten him to it. Stalin and Pestkowski did not take this lying down. They tore down Osinski’s notice and put up their own. Lighting matches to find their way, they entered the building from the back. But Osinski complained to Sovnarkom and Stalin had to move out. ‘This was one of the few cases,’ Pestkowski recalled, ‘when Stalin suffered defeat.’⁴ It was even difficult to gather personnel. Most Bolshevik militants wanted nothing to do with a body whose brief involved concessions to national sensitivities — even Pestkowski disliked being attached to it.⁵ Stalin relied increasingly on the Alliluev family and asked Fedor’s younger sister Nadya to work as his secretary.⁶ One day she was a schoolgirl bored with lessons at the gimnazia,⁷ the next she was an employee of the revolutionary government.

The vagueness of party policy remained troublesome. Although Bolshevik objectives had been declared, detailed measures had never been formulated. Stalin was left to sort out the detailed implementation of policy on the national question on his own. His great asset in this task was that he enjoyed Lenin’s trust. When Lenin went off on vacation to Finland at the end of 1917, the government’s dealings with the Ukrainian regional authority — the Rada — were tense in the extreme. General Kaledin was assembling and training a counter-revolutionary force in south Russia. The situation in the south Caucasus was boiling up. Revolutionary stirrings in Estonia needed attention. Some Bolshevik leaders rose to the level of the duties assigned to them in Sovnarkom; others could not cope or messed up their jobs. Stalin thrived on his responsibilities.

It was of course Lenin who headed the Bolshevik collective leadership. Even Trotski stood in his shadow. Stalin ungrudgingly acknowledged that Lenin was the hub of the Sovnarkom governmental machine, and on 27 December he sent an urgent request for him to come back from his holiday in Finland to help in Petrograd.⁸ Lenin insisted on Stalin coping on his own; he continued his brief holiday with wife Nadezhda and sister Maria. Stalin went on reaffirming the objectives which he and Lenin had been espousing before the October Revolution. There was to be national self-determination for all the peoples of the former Russian Empire. Confirmation should be given that no privileges would be accorded to the Russians. Each people would have the right and the resources to develop its own culture, set up schools in its own language and operate its own press. Freedom of religious belief and organisation would be guaranteed. (The exception would be that churches, mosques and synagogues would lose their extensive landed property.) For those national and ethnic groups living concentratedly in a particular area there would be regional self-administration. The Russians as a people were hardly mentioned. The era of empire was declared at an end.

Lenin and Stalin designed these extraordinary promises to allay suspicions among non-Russians that the Bolsheviks would discriminate against them. By offering the right of secession, Sovnarkom tried to reassure the non-Russians that the revolutionary state would treat each national and ethnic group equally. The consequence, it was firmly expected, would be that the other nations would decide that the Russians could be trusted. The huge multinational state was to be preserved in a new and revolutionary form.

There were exceptions to this pattern. Following the Provisional Government’s precedent, Lenin and Stalin accepted the case for Polish independence. It would have been fatuous to act otherwise. All Poland was under German and Austrian rule. Sovnarkom was recognising a fait accompli; it was also trying to make the point that, whereas the Central Powers had subjugated the Poles, the revolutionary government in Petrograd sought their political and economic liberation. There was one domain of the Romanovs where practical proof could be given of such a commitment. This was Finland. Relations between Russian and Finnish Marxists had always been warm, and the Bolsheviks had benefited from safe-houses provided for them. The Bolshevik party had supported the steady movement of popular opinion in Finland towards a campaign for massive autonomy from the Russian government. Outright independence was not widely demanded. Yet Lenin and Stalin, to the world’s amazement, encouraged the Finns to take up such a position. A delegation of Finnish ministers was invited to the Russian capital and a formal declaration of secession was signed on 23 November (or 6 December according to the Gregorian calendar adopted by Sovnarkom in early 1918). This was a policy without parallel in history. A former imperial power was insisting that one of its dependencies, whether it liked it or not, should break away from its control.

The motives of Lenin and Stalin were less indulgent than they seemed. Both felt that the Finnish Marxists would stand an excellent chance of achieving dominance in an independent Finland. This would enable the Bolsheviks and their comrades in Finland to resume close operational ties and, eventually, to re-include Finland in the multinational state governed from Petrograd. There was a further aspect to Sovnarkom’s policy. This was the calculation that a single act of secession from the former Russian Empire would constitute wonderful propaganda in favour of socialist revolution elsewhere, especially in eastern and east-central Europe.

Lenin and Stalin also began to modify their ideas so as to increase the party’s appeal to regions inhabited mainly by peoples who were not Russian. Dropping old Bolshevik arguments, they came to espouse the federalist cause. They held back from explaining what they meant by federalism. Their enemies pointed out that the new policy sat uneasily alongside Bolshevism’s permanent commitment to centralism and dictatorship; but neither Lenin nor Stalin was troubled by the criticism: they had come to the conclusion that if the Bolsheviks were to expand their authority into the borderlands of the former Russian Empire, they had to espouse federalism. Stalin’s old Gori friend Davrishevi, the Social-Federalist, had always wanted to turn the Russian Empire into a socialist federation. In fact Lenin and Stalin had not been converted to federalist principles. They had no intention of turning Ukraine, Georgia and other countries into equal members of a federal union. But they wished their propaganda to make an impact and were willing to change their terminology. Central control over the ‘borderlands’ remained an imperative. Essentially Lenin and Stalin hoped to charm them and bring them back under rule from the Russian capital. They stole slogans; but their own basic ideas and purposes remained intact.

As the area under Soviet control expanded, at least in the towns, the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities’ Affairs acquired additional importance. Stalin chaired the meetings when his other duties in government and party did not distract him, and he empowered Stanislaw Pestkowski and Ivan Tovstukha to handle business in his absence. Dozens of departments were founded in the People’s Commissariat to take care of specific nationalities. Stalin’s energetic leadership surmounted the teething problems and the provinces began to experience the results in the early months of 1918. He sent out funds for national and ethnic groups to set up presses in their languages. Schools were established on the same lines. This trend had begun under the Provisional Government; the Bolsheviks vigorously reinforced it and put it at the core of their propaganda. A central newspaper, Zhizn natsionalnostei (“Nationalities’ Life”), was created to spread the message to the parts of the country where the Bolshevik presence was weak. A plan was developed for local self-administration to be granted to nations which constituted a majority in any particular region, and Stalin hoped to found a Tatar– Bashkir Republic by the River Volga. He was going out of his way, on behalf of the Central Committee, to show that an authentically internationalist state was being constructed.⁹

Other Bolsheviks were introduced to represent the interests of the nations to which they belonged.¹⁰ But membership was fluid and sessions were chaotic, and often the appointees were newcomers to the party. Departments often failed to co-operate with each other. It was soon recognised too that functionaries might use the People’s Commissariat to push the case for their nations more assertively than Sovnarkom had envisaged.¹¹

The danger existed that things might get out of hand. Stalin discovered this early on. A bright young Tatar called Sultan-Galiev joined the party in November 1917. A fluent writer and speaker, he was an obvious man to recruit to the People’s Commissariat. Sultan-Galiev was eager to raise the banner of Revolution among Moslems in general. Unfortunately he proved difficult to regulate. As Commissar of Moslems’ Affairs in Inner Russia he quickly annoyed other members of the People’s Commissariat of Nationalities’ Affairs by his initiatives, and his loyalty to Bolshevism was questioned.¹² Indeed his campaign to spread socialism among Moslem believers eventually led him to propose a pan-Turkic republic separate from Sovnarkom’s control. (He was arrested in 1923 and executed in the Great Terror.) Although Sultan-Galiev was a notorious source of trouble for the Bolsheviks, he was not the only recruit to the party who was thought excessively tolerant of nationalism and religion. Stalin and Lenin had taken a risk in insisting on trying to attract the non-Russians to Bolshevism through various concessions. In 1917 they had earned criticism at the April Party Conference; and in 1918–19 the difficulties of realising the policy were already manifest. Work in the People’s Commissariat was a bed of nails.

Stalin did not flinch. At the Third Congress of Soviets in January 1918 he took pride in the government’s proclamation of ‘the right of all peoples to self-determination through to complete secession from Russia’. He compared Sovnarkom favourably on the national question with the Provisional Government and its ‘repressive