waging wars at huge cost in human lives. By such means they had spread a superior economic system around the world. This system had been defended by the application of harsh authority. Colonial peoples had suffered. The working classes of the imperial powers themselves were exploited and oppressed. The Great War had impoverished the many while enriching the few. The point for Stalin was that violence was an effective weapon for capitalism and had to be adopted by the Soviet revolutionary state for its own purposes. Coming to power in Russia, the Bolsheviks had to be realistic. The Bolshevik leadership believed that the Paris Commune of 1871 had failed for want of ruthlessness. Bolsheviks would not repeat the mistake. Even if they had expected their revolution to be easier than it turned out to be, they had always been willing to meet fire with fire. Stalin needed no one to persuade him about this.
Yet it was in foreign policy that Lenin most appreciated Stalin. Lenin and Trotski around the turn of the New Year understood that they lacked the armed forces to carry socialism into central Europe by ‘revolutionary war’. Yet whereas Trotski wished to stick by the party’s commitment to revolutionary war, Lenin concluded that policy ought to be changed. When Germany and Austria–Hungary delivered ultimatums to Sovnarkom, Lenin urged the Bolshevik Central Committee to sign a separate peace. Most Central Committee members — as well as the entire Left Socialist-Revolutionary Party — rejected his argument that the priority should be the preservation of the Soviet state. For them, a separate peace would involve the betrayal of internationalist ideals. Better to go down fighting for European socialist revolution than to collude with the robber-capitalist governments of the Central Powers.
Stalin had always been sceptical about the prognosis of imminent revolutions in the rest of Europe and the failure of the proletariats elsewhere in Europe to rise against their governments did not surprise him. The propensity for strategic and tactical compromise he had always shown in internal party affairs was now applied to the policy of the revolutionary state. If the Central Powers could not be overthrown by revolution or defeated in war, the sensible alternative was to sign a peace with them. This was in fact already the opinion of Lenin, whose reputation for compromise in the party’s internal quarrels was slighter than Stalin’s but who had always insisted on the need for flexibility of manoeuvre in the wider field of politics. Sverdlov, Kamenev, Zinoviev and a few others in the Central Committee stood shoulder to shoulder with Lenin. But the voting in the Central Committee was heavily against them at the preliminary discussion on 11 January 1918. Trotski won the day by arguing for a policy based on the following formula: ‘We’re stopping the war, we aren’t concluding peace, we’re demobilising the army.’ This, he suggested, had the merit of avoiding an intolerable compromise with the forces of international imperialism.29
Lenin kept to his argument without personalising his critique. Stalin was less inhibited. Like most other leading Bolsheviks, he disliked and distrusted Trotski, and at the same meeting he let his feelings show:30
Comrade Trotski’s position is not a position at all. There’s no revolutionary movement in the West: the facts are non-existent and there’s only potential — and we can’t operate on the basis of mere potential. If the Germans start to attack, it will reinforce the counter-revolution here [in Russia]. Germany will be able to attack since it possesses its own Kornilovite armies, its guard. In October we were talking about our ‘crusade’ because we were told that mere mention of the word ‘peace’ would stir up revolution in the West. But this has proved unjustified.
This was the first blow in a political contest which ended only in August 1940 when Soviet agent Ramon Mercader drove an ice-pick into Trotski’s cranium in Coyoacan in Mexico.
Even so, Stalin’s supportive statement irked Lenin. He objected to the comment that ‘a mass movement’ did not exist in the West, and said that the Bolsheviks would be ‘traitors to international socialism if [they] altered [their] tactics because of this’. Lenin wanted to reassure the advocates of revolutionary war that if ever it looked as if a rupture of peace talks would serve to stir up the German working class to revolution, then ‘we have to sacrifice ourselves since the German revolution in force will be much higher in strength than ours’.31 It was not so much that Stalin had said that revolutionary initiatives were impossible in the West. Nor had he claimed this in 1917.32 Yet he was loath to gamble on ‘European socialist revolution’ — and for Lenin this was one compromise too many with the revolutionary strategy he had elaborated in the party before October 1917. These tensions did not much matter at the time. Lenin needed every supporter he could get. Again and again in ensuing days Stalin voted on Lenin’s side.33 Always his line was that Bolsheviks needed to be practical: they could not beat the Germans militarily and the newly born Soviet state would be crushed unless a separate peace was concluded with the Central Powers.
He was as frantic as Lenin. On 18 February 1918 he protested to the Central Committee: ‘The formal question is superfluous. A statement must be made directly on the essence of the matter; the Germans are attacking, we don’t have the forces; it’s high time to say directly that negotiations have to be resumed!’34 He vividly appreciated the armed might of the enemy: ‘They only need to open their hurricane-like fire for five minutes and we shan’t have a soldier left standing at the front. We must put an end to the nonsense.’35 On 23 February he expostulated: ‘The question stands like this: either the defeat of our revolution and the unravelling of the revolution in Europe or we obtain a breathing space and strengthen ourselves. This is not what’s holding up the revolution in the West. If it’s the case that we lack the means to halt a German attack by armed might, we must use other methods. If Petrograd has to be surrendered, it would not amount to a full surrender or to the rotting away of the Revolution. There’s no way out: either we obtain a breathing space or else it’s the death of the Revolution.’36
The Leninists did not gain a majority in the Central Committee until 23 February. By that time the German terms had hardened. The separate peace would require Sovnarkom to disclaim sovereignty over the western borderlands of the former Russian Empire. It was, in Lenin’s phrase, an obscene peace. Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia were to be allowed to fall into the grasp of the Central Powers. Half the human, industrial and agricultural resources of the domains of Nicholas II were to be forsworn at the little frontal town of Brest-Litovsk if Sovnarkom wished to avoid being overthrown by the Germans. No other political party in Russia would accede to such terms. The Left Socialist-Revolutionary Party, already annoyed by the forcible local expropriations of peasant- produced grain, walked out of the Sovnarkom coalition and organised an unsuccessful
Stalin’s assignments in spring 1918 confirmed his high status in the ascendant party leadership. In internal and external affairs he had stuck by Lenin. He had not done this subserviently. In the Brest-Litovsk dispute he had taken an angle of argument different from Lenin’s; and, contrary to the conventional stereotype of him, this continued to be true after the signature of the treaty. When the German armies overran the agreed demarcation line between Russia and Ukraine in May, he reconsidered the whole peace deal. Unlike Lenin, he suggested a resumption of armed hostilities. He put this case at the Central Committee and Sovnarkom.37 But Lenin won the discussion without Stalin by his side, and the dissension between them faded. Lenin, in the light of future events, should have learned from the episode that his People’s Commissar for Nationalities’ Affairs was a politician who knew his own value and was determined to stand up for himself. Stalin fought his corner in the Central Committee and dominated his People’s Commissariat. His competence and adaptability had been tested in the fire of an October Revolution which had yet to be secured. His advocacy of ruthless measures was as ferocious as anything put forward by Lenin, Trotski or Dzierzynski. He expected others to recognise what he could offer for the good of the cause.
15. TO THE FRONT!
On 31 May 1918 Stalin was given an important fresh assignment. Food supplies for Russia had reached a critically low point and Sovnarkom was close to panic. The decision was to send two of the party’s most able
