Stalin: A Biography

Stalin passionately believed that conspiracies were ubiquitous in Russia. He already had a tendency to suspect that plots existed even when no direct evidence was available. He was not alone in this. Lenin and Trotski too referred in a casual manner to the organised linkages among the enemies of the party; and Trotski had a notorious willingness to treat even Bolshevik party activists as traitors if they belonged to regiments in the Red Army which had failed to obey his orders. Stalin was more like Trotski than he pretended. When an adequate supply of munitions did not come through to Tsaritsyn in September 1918, he howled to Lenin: ‘It’s some kind of casualness or treachery in official uniform [formennoe predatel’stvo].’³¹ To Stalin’s way of thought there always had to be an agency of deliberate maleficence at work when things went wrong. Traitors therefore had to exist even in the leadership of the People’s Commissariats in Moscow.

Stalin applied violence, including terror, on a greater scale than most other central communist leaders approved of. Only Trotski with his demands for political commissars to be shot alongside army officers if unsanctioned retreats occurred was remotely near to him in bloodthirstiness — and Trotski also introduced the Roman policy of decimating regiments which failed to carry out higher commands. Stalin and Trotski invariably ignored pleas to intervene on behalf of individuals arrested by the Cheka. Even Lenin, who resisted most attempts by Kamenev and Bukharin to impose control over the Cheka, sometimes helped in such cases.³² Yet Stalin’s enthusiasm for virtually indiscriminate violence made even Trotski seem a restrained individual. This was a feature that his comrades forgot at their peril in the 1930s.

A contrast also existed between Stalin and Trotski in their basic attitude to Bolshevism. Trotski, who had joined the Bolsheviks late in his career, paid little attention to the party. Stalin pondered much on the party’s place in the Soviet state. He took a copy of the second edition of Lenin’s The State and Revolution around with him in the Civil War. This book says nothing about the communist party in the transition to socialism. Stalin was aware of this lacuna. Making notes in the margins, he asked himself: ‘Can the party seize power against the will of the proletariat? No, it cannot and must not.’³³ He added: ‘The proletariat cannot attain its dictatorship without a vanguard, without a party as the only [party].’³⁴ Lenin had said no such thing in The State and Revolution. But Stalin, like Lenin, had modified and developed his ideas since October 1917. The party had become the supreme institution of state. Stalin was among the many Bolsheviks who sought to incorporate this into communist doctrine. The theory had been that the proletariat would run its own socialist state. Stalin’s unease was reflected in his comment that ‘the party cannot simply replace the dictatorship of the proletariat’.³⁵

In the Civil War, however, he lacked the time to write pamphlets; and not one of his articles for Pravda had the range of those composed by Lenin, Trotski, Zinoviev and Bukharin. But he went on thinking about large subjects. Party policy on the national question was prominent among them. Another was the institutional framework of the Soviet state. The report he wrote in January 1919 with Dzierzynski on a military disaster at Perm was a disquisition on the chaotic relations within and among the armed forces, the party and the government. Their recommendations had an influence on the decisions taken to establish the party as the supreme agency of the state and to regularise the lines of command from the party to all public institutions.³⁶ Only the fact that Stalin’s later propagandists made exaggerated claims for the report has induced historians to overlook its importance. In truth he was a reflective and decisive political operator and Lenin appreciated him for this.

This was the trip on which Stalin became friends with Dzierzynski’s personal assistant Stanislaw Redens. Nadya accompanied Stalin to Perm, and soon Redens had fallen in love with her elder sister Anna and married her. Redens became a leading figure in the Cheka.³⁷ Personal, political and military life was intertwined for Bolsheviks in the Civil War and Stalin was no exception. His recent marriage had no impact on his public activities; he spent the Civil War mainly on or near the fighting fronts. Recalled to Moscow in October 1918, he resumed his work in the Party Central Committee and Sovnarkom. But by December he was off again. The White Army of Admiral Kolchak had swept into the Urals city of Perm and destroyed the Red Army units there. Stalin and Dzierzynski were sent to conduct an enquiry into the reasons for the military disaster. They returned and made their report at the end of January 1919. Stalin stayed in Moscow again until being dispatched in May to Petrograd and the Western Front against the invasion by General Yudenich from Estonia. In July he moved on to a different sector of the same front at Smolensk. In September he was transferred to the Southern Front, where he stayed into 1920.³⁸

Stalin was a law unto himself. When transferred to Petrograd on the Western Front in mid-1919, he showed macabre inventiveness in dealing with disorder and disobedience. The Red Army on the Western Front entirely failed to impress him. Almost as soon as he arrived, the Third Regiment went over to the Whites. Stalin was merciless. On 30 May he telegraphed Lenin from the Smolny Institute that he was rounding up the renegades and deserters, charging them collectively with state treason and making their execution by firing squads into a public spectacle. Now that everyone saw the consequences of betrayal, he argued, acts of treachery had been reduced.³⁹ Not everyone enthused about Stalin’s intervention. Alexei Okulov, transferred to the Western Front after exposing Stalin’s misdeeds in Tsaritsyn, put a spoke in his wheel yet again. Stalin telegraphed angrily on 4 June demanding that Lenin should choose between Okulov and himself. Existing conditions, he ranted, were ‘senseless’; he threatened to leave Petrograd if his ultimatum was not complied with.⁴⁰

His military activity was centred in the Revolutionary-Military Councils attached to the various fronts, and from 1919 he joined them as the Party Central Committee’s appointee. His kind of fighting involved giving orders: he was never directly involved in physical violence. His inexperience was total and nobody has been able to find evidence that he looked at books on warfare⁴¹ (whereas Lenin had studied Clausewitz, and Trotski had reported the Balkan wars before 1914 as a newspaper correspondent). But he was madly eager to prove himself as a commander. The Central Committee recognised his worth by its successive use of him on the Southern Front, the Western Front, again the Southern Front, the South-Western Front and the Caucasian Front. Qualities which earned him praise were his decisiveness, determination, energy and willingness to take responsibility for critical and unpredictable situations.

There was a price to pay. Stalin hated to operate in a team unless he was its leader. There was only one fellow communist to whom he would defer and that was Lenin. Even Lenin found him a handful. Stalin was vainglorious and extremely touchy. He detested Trotski. He hated the entire Imperial officer elite. He had an almost pathetic need to feel appreciated, and at the drop of his Red Army peaked cap he would announce his resignation. Such was his egotism that he was willing to disregard orders even if they came from the Central Committee or its inner subcommittees. He was capricious in the extreme. Once determined upon a course of action, he steered as he pleased. He wasted an inordinate amount of the Central Committee’s time with his demands for commanders to be sacked and for strategy and tactics to be altered. His application of repressive measures to the social groups hostile to the Soviet state was excessive even by the standards of the communist leadership in wartime Russia; and, still more than Trotski, he had a tendency to regard anyone who failed to show him respect as an enemy of the people.

The conventional image of Stalin’s ascent to supreme power does not convince. He did not really spend most of his time in offices in the Civil War period and consolidate his position as the pre-eminent bureaucrat of the Soviet state. Certainly he held membership of the Party Central Committee; he was also People’s Commissar for Nationalities’ Affairs. In neither role were his responsibilities restricted to mere administration. As the complications of public affairs increased, he was given further high postings. He chaired the commission drafting the RSFSR Constitution. He became the leading political commissar on a succession of military fronts in 1918–19. He was regularly involved in decisions on relations with Britain, Germany, Turkey and other powers; and he dealt with plans for the establishment of new Soviet republics in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. He conducted the enquiry into the Red Army’s collapse at Perm. When the Party Central Committee set up its own inner subcommittees in 1919, he was chosen for both the Political Bureau (Politburo) and the Organisational Bureau (Orgburo). He was asked to head the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate at its creation in February 1920.

Far from fitting the bureaucratic stereotype, he was a dynamic leader who had a hand in nearly all the principal discussions on politics, military strategy, economics, security and international relations. Lenin phoned or telegraphed Politburo members whenever a controversial matter was in the air.⁴² There were few corners of high public affairs where Stalin’s influence was unknown; and the Politburo frequently turned to him when a sudden emergency arose. The other great leaders — Lenin, Trotski, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Sverdlov, Dzierzynski and Bukharin — had settled jobs that they held for the duration of the Civil War and beyond. In most cases these jobs involved making public appearances — and Trotski in the Red Army did this with relish and to huge acclaim. There