classroom.” Until Lenin’s arrival, thought Ludmilla Stal, “all comrades wandered in the darkness.” Stalin was firmly out of the darkness. When Kamenev attacked Lenin, Stalin mocked his erstwhile ally. He was a Leninist again—but that did not mean they agreed on everything.[162]
Stalin gave the report on the national question. He won the debate, but he was still best known for Caucasian banditry, and needed Lenin’s support. “We’ve known Comrade Koba for very many years,” Lenin declared. “We used to see him in Cracow where we had our Bureau. His activity in the Caucasus was important. He’s a good worker in all sorts of responsible work.” Molotov remembered Lenin explaining the essence of Stalin’s attraction for him: he was a “commanding figure—you could assign Stalin any task.”
On 29 April, Stalin came third with ninety-seven votes in the CC elections, just after Lenin and Zinoviev, a result that showed his standing in the Party. Stalin now spent most of his time at the Soviet, editing
On 4 May, Trotsky finally arrived from America and immediately dazzled Petrograd, speaking almost nightly at the “packed-out” Cirque Moderne, where “he was often carried to the stage” by the crowd. He was, noticed Sukhanov, “intoxicated with his popularity.”
Lenin recognized Trotsky’s worth and courted him, inviting him to join the Bolsheviks a week later. The only thing that divided them, said Lenin, was “ambition.” Stalin must have resented the return of this revolutionary star. He was to write more than sixty articles in 1917, but Trotsky sneered that he just produced “dull comments on brilliant events.” When Lenin appointed a delegation to negotiate with Trotsky, Stalin was understandably left out.
Unlike Trotsky, Stalin did not make his mark in 1917. He put it best himself: “Before the Revolution, our Party led an underground existence—a secret Party. Now circumstances have changed”—and they did not really suit him. He flourished in the shadows.
Nineteen-seventeen was really Stalin’s only experience of open democratic politics, hardly the ideal environment for someone trained in the cutthroat clan intrigues of the Caucasus. He spoke quietly with a comical Georgian accent. “I didn’t make out much of what he said,” reports a witness, “but one thing I noticed: all of Stalin’s sentences were sharp and crisp statements distinguished by clarity of formulation.” A worker who saw him speak thought that “what he said sounded all right, understandable and simple, but somehow one couldn’t remember his speech afterwards.” He “avoided making speeches at mass meetings,” but the plain, modest delivery of his anti-oratory proved to be surprisingly impressive and convincing for the many who distrusted showy intellectuals.
When Lenin seized power and, beleaguered on all sides, ran his government like a conspiratorial camarilla, Stalin was again in his element.
On 3 June, Soso’s young fans Anna and Nadya Alliluyeva came to admire their hero at the First Congress of the Soviets in the Military School on Vasilevsky Island. “Stalin and Sverdlov attended the opening sessions—they were the first to arrive with Lenin. I saw the three of them enter the empty hall,” reports Anna Alliluyeva, who was working for the Party. “We had not seen Stalin for many days and his room in the flat stood empty.”
“We must call on him,” whispered the schoolgirl Nadya. “Perhaps he’s changed his mind about coming to live in our apartment.” Next day, they witnessed the most dramatic moment of the Congress.
“There’s no party in Russia that dares say, ‘Just place power in our hands,’” boomed the Menshevik Tsereteli.
At this, Lenin leaped out of his chair and shouted: “There
Vereshchak, Stalin’s Bailovka cell mate, noticed that “Lenin, Zinoviev and Kamenev were the main speakers” but “Sverdlov and Stalin silently directed the Bolshevik Faction—the first time I realized the full significance of the man.”
Stalin impressed Trotsky, whose description reveals why he lost their struggle for power. “Stalin was very valuable behind the scenes,” he wrote. “He did have the knack of convincing the average run of leaders, especially the provincials.” He “wasn’t regarded as the official leader of the Party,” says Sagirashvili, another Georgian Menshevik in Petrograd throughout 1917, but “everyone listened to what he had to say, including Lenin—he was a representative of the rank and file, one who expressed its real views and moods,” which were unknown to emigres like Trotsky. Soso was the “unquestioned leader” of the Caucasians. Lenin, says Sagirashvili, “felt that behind him stood countless leaders from the provinces.”[163] While Trotsky was prancing on the stage at the Circus, Stalin was finding new allies such as the young man he had unceremoniously kicked off the Buro, Molotov.{235}
Stalin moved in with Molotov, who lived at a spacious flat on Shirokaya Street, across the Neva on the Petrograd side, with three other comrades. “It was like a kind of commune,” said Molotov. Stalin, unusually, apologized to Molotov for what the latter called “Stalin’s big mistake.” “You were the nearest of all to Lenin in the initial stage in April,” confessed Stalin. The two became friends. Besides, Molotov, who had not been elected to the Central Committee in April, was in need of a patron. They were opposites: the sturdy, stammering and bespectacled Molotov was ponderous, correct, rather bourgeois. But they shared Marxist fanaticism, a head for boozing, a Robespierrean belief in Terror, a vindictive inferiority-complex—and a beliefin Stalin’s mastery.
Stalin had been constantly moving home, working at night and then grabbing sleep at friends’ places. He often slept where he worked at the Kseshinskaya Mansion. Tatiana Slavatinskaya worked there as an assistant at the Central Committee under Sverdlov and Stasova. Ludmilla Stal helped edit
Stalin did not just avail himself of Molotov’s political fidelity and domestic residence. “He stole my girl, Marusya,” Molotov laughed. Marusya was not the last woman whom Molotov would sacrifice to Stalin’s will.
Early one evening, Anna and Nadya Alliluyeva arrived at
“Well, hello,” said Soso, smiling affectionately, “I’m glad you’ve come. How are things at home?”
“Your room’s waiting for you,” said the girls.
“How kind, but I’m terribly busy,” he said. “But keep that room for me.”
Then “someone came up to him and Stalin hurriedly shook hands with us”—and rushed back to work.{236}
Nineteen-seventeen was, to paraphrase Lenin, a game of two steps forward, one step back. During June, the radicals in the armed wing of the Bolshevik Party—the Military Organization, which now claimed the allegiance of 60,000 troops—demanded an armed demonstration. The date was set for this accidental revolution: 10 June. At a Party meeting, Lenin supported them. It was “wrong to force matters, equally wrong to let the opportunity slip,” opined Stalin, who helped plan the demonstration and wrote its proclamation: “At the sight of armed workers, the bourgeois will take cover.” Zinoviev and Kamenev opposed it.
On 9 June at the Soviet, the Mensheviks read out Stalin’s appeal and Tsereteli railed against “the Bolshevik conspiracy to seize power.” Lenin needed Soviet support—he hoped to use its legitimacy as cover for his Bolshevik coup. Instead the Soviet banned the demonstration. After hours of panic, Lenin agreed to call it off: “One wrong move on our part can wreck everything.” He now became as cautious as Kamenev and Stalin had been in March. On the eleventh, Stalin, criticizing this “intolerable wavering,” threatened to resign.
The Soviet defiantly held its own demonstration on 18 June, but the Bolsheviks hijacked it, with Stalin publishing his proclamation in
