up not in a hotel but in a sequestered railway carriage halted outside the city station, he looked a new man. On arriving in Tsaritsyn, he called for a cobbler to order a pair of black, knee-length boots to go with his black tunic. The cobbler arrived at the railway carriage and took the measurements. ‘Well,’ asked Stalin, ‘when will they be ready?’ ‘In five days,’ replied the cobbler. Stalin exclaimed: ‘No, you can’t mean that! Come on! My father could make two pairs of such boots a day!’11 The anecdote shows how little Stalin had learned about shoemaking. Nevertheless from summer 1918 till the day he died, military-style clothing was normal for him. Stalin became known not only for his long boots but also for his light-coloured, collarless tunic. He abandoned suits, ordinary shirts and shoes for ever.12 He started to comport himself with a soldierly bearing. He carried a gun. He adopted a brisk way of carrying himself as a commander. This was a deeply congenial development for him; Stalin enjoyed himself in Tsaritsyn despite the dangers.13
He also gained contentment in his personal life. Nadya Allilueva, who had accompanied him from Moscow, was no longer merely his secretary but had become his wife. According to their daughter’s account many decades later, they had already been living as a married couple in Petrograd after the October Revolution.14 Chronological exactitude is impossible. Bolsheviks in those days rejected weddings as bourgeois flummery. What is certain is that on his return from Siberia he did not intend to remain celibate. There were plenty of Bolshevik women to take his eye and he went out with a few in 1917.15 But he wanted the settled home life which his nomadic existence had prevented. (His cohabitations in Siberia had been of the seigneurial variety.) In the flush of their passion they went off to serve the Revolution together on the North Caucasus and Southern Fronts.
Joseph was a communist party leader and Nadya’s family were dedicated to the party’s cause. He was amusing and still in his physical prime, and probably his talent for handling political business appealed to Nadya. The fact that Alliluev family life had been constantly disrupted by revolutionary commitments may also have drawn Nadya towards an older man who seemingly offered dependability. She may have seen him as the father she had seen little of when growing up.16 Nadya had not discerned Joseph’s curmudgeonly egotism. Joseph, though, had yet to witness the symptoms of Nadya’s mental volatility.17 So while he glowed in the warmth of her admiration of him, she enjoyed his attentions. Without being a beauty, she had long dark hair parted down the middle and tied up in a bun; her lips were broad and her eyes friendly even if her teeth ‘gappy’.18 He liked women with a full figure like Nadya’s. He did not worry that she was less than half his age. He had read more than her and seen more of life, and he surely thought he would always dominate the marriage. The Alliluevs had given him succour and all of them got on well with him. He was gaining not only a wife but also — at last — a stable and supportive wider family.19
There was only one thing about his situation in Tsaritsyn that annoyed Stalin. This was the interference in his activities from Moscow, and nobody irritated more than Trotski. Stalin had formed the Revolutionary Council of the Southern Front on 17 September. Immediately he received orders from Trotski, his military superior as Chairman of the Revolutionary-Military Council of the Republic, to cease challenging his decisions.20 Stalin telegraphed to Lenin that Trotski was not on the spot and failed to understand conditions across the region:21
The point is that Trotski, generally speaking, cannot get by without noisy gestures. At Brest[-Litovsk] he delivered a blow to the cause by his incredibly ‘leftist’ gesturing. On the question of the Czechoslovaks he similarly harmed the common cause by his gesturing with noisy diplomacy in the month of May. Now he delivers a further blow by his gesturing about discipline, and yet all this Trotskyist discipline amounts in reality to the most prominent leaders on the war front peering up the backside of military specialists from the camp of ‘non-party’ counter- revolutionaries…
Stalin reminded Lenin that Trotski had an anti-Bolshevik past; his resentment of the haughty political interloper was unmistakable. Trotski in his view was not to be trusted.
Stalin called for stern measures:
Therefore I ask you in due time, while it’s still not too late, to remove Trotski and put him in a fixed frame since I’m afraid that Trotski’s unhinged commands, if they are repeated… will create dissension between the army and the command staff and will totally destroy the front…
I’m not a lover of clamour and scandal but feel that if we don’t immediately produce the reins to put a constraint on Trotski, he’ll ruin our whole army in favour of ‘leftist’ and ‘Red’ discipline which will sicken even the most disciplined comrades.
This analysis commended itself to leading Bolsheviks who knew the history of the French Revolution. A military leader, Napoleon Bonaparte, had seized power and rejected much of the social radicalism introduced by Maximilien Robespierre. Trotski seemed the likeliest military candidate for such a role in the drama of Russia’s October Revolution. There was acute annoyance among party members about his insistence on employing former Imperial Army officers. Trotski was also reviled for shooting political commissars for disobedience or cowardice. An informal Military Opposition began to coalesce against him in late 1918.
Yet Trotski had grounds to be horrified by events in Tsaritsyn. Lenin began to take his side. Stalin was a law unto himself on the Southern Front. It was not always a law shared by the official party leadership. Lenin insisted that if the Civil War was to be won, the average Russian peasant (and not just the poorest of them) had to be won over to the side of the Reds. Persuasion rather than violence had to be the priority. Lenin’s declarations were riddled with contradiction. He had set up the hugely unpopular ‘committees of the rural poor’ in order to introduce ‘class struggle’ to the countryside and had also conscripted peasants and expropriated grain by means of armed urban squads. But certainly at the same time he was minded to win support among the mass of the peasantry.
Stalin was less ambiguous than Lenin. Might, for him, was right, effective and economical of resources. He put villages to the torch to intimidate neighbouring ones to obey the demands of the Reds. Terror was undertaken against the very peasants who were being depicted in official propaganda as one of the twin pillars of the Soviet state. Stalin treated the Cossacks in particular as enemies. The term de-Cossackisation was in currency.22 Stalin wrote in a letter to his old Bolshevik rival Stepan Shaumyan:23
In relation to the Dagestani and other bands which obstruct the movements of trains from the North Caucasus, you must be absolutely merciless. A number of their villages should be set on fire and burned to the ground so as to teach them not to make raids on trains.
This was in the fiercest Imperial Army tradition under General Yermolov in the Caucasus in the early nineteenth century and General Alikhanov in Georgia in 1905.24 Stalin was ordering Shaumyan to conduct a campaign of exemplary terror. When ‘bands’ operated against trains, the nearby villages were to be razed to the ground. The message was to go out that complete compliance alone would save localities from the Red Army’s savagery. Wanting to conciliate the non-Russian national groups across the country, he nevertheless prescribed brutal measures against those among them who failed to restrain anti-Bolshevik outbursts.
He subjected his own Red Army conscripts — including Russians — to severe discipline. Bothering little with persuasion, he assumed they would never help the Reds unless force was used.25 He threw armies into action with little caution. He acted as if sheer numerical superiority would bring victory. He did not care that a vastly greater proportion of Red than White soldiers died. Lenin commented on the reckless disregard for lives on the Southern Front; and although he did not mention Stalin by name, it was obvious whom he held responsible.26 Lenin cleared Trotski of any blame for the running of the Red Army and confirmed the Central Committee’s policy on the recruitment of Imperial officers.27 Trotski sent his aide Alexei Okulov to find out what was happening in Tsaritsyn. His report was disturbing. Stalin, having sacked Imperial officers from their posts of command, had arrested dozens of them and held them on a barge on the River Volga. Among them was Snesarev, whom he accused of heading a conspiracy to sabotage the Red war effort and aid the Whites.28 Stalin’s apparent intention had been to sink the barge and drown all on board.29 Snesarev on Moscow’s orders was released and the Revolutionary-Military Council of the Republic transferred him to the command of the Western Front. Stalin, infuriated, continued with Voroshilov to demand sanctions against the allegedly counter-revolutionary officers. Voroshilov was to claim that, if he and Stalin had not acted as they did in Tsaritsyn, the Whites would have overrun all Ukraine.30
