people?” Lenin meant it.
The coup had been surprisingly easy, but the life-and-death struggle to keep power started immediately. Lenin did not wish to share his government with the Mensheviks and SRs, but Kamenev insisted on opening negotiations to do just that. When these failed, he resigned. Meanwhile, Kerensky rallied Cossack forces on the Pulkovo Heights outside the city and the Menshevik-led railwaymen went on strike, demanding a coalition. Stalin, along with Sverdlov, Sergo and Dzerzhinsky, organized the defence of Petrograd.
Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin formed an inseparable troika in those first months in power. Besieged from outside and within, undermined by compromisers, bunglers and windbags inside his own Party, Lenin divided his grandees into “men of action” versus “tea-drinkers.” There were too many “tea-drinkers.” Had the Soviet Republic settled into peaceful stability, the tea-drinking tendency, represented by men like Kamenev and Bukharin, might have given it a very different direction. But it was not to be. Lenin spent almost every hour together with his grittiest henchmen. In these first hours, Lenin dictated an undated decree that reveals Stalin’s and Trotsky’s special place as follows:
Instructions to the guards at the reception of Sovnarkom
No one is permitted to enter without specific invitation except for:
President of Sovnarkom Lenin…
Then before the typed names of Lenin’s personal assistants is written in handwriting that is probably that of Lenin himself:
Narkom Foreign Affairs Trotsky
Narkom Nationalities Stalin
“Lenin could not get along without Stalin for even a single day,” wrote Stanislaw Pestkovsky, the Polish Bolshevik who now became Stalin’s chief assistant at the Commissariat of Nationalities. Lenin sometimes asked Stalin to countersign his Sovnarkom decrees. “Our Smolny office was under Lenin’s wing. In the course of the day, he’d call Stalin an endless number of times and would appear in our office and lead him away.” Once, Pestkovsky found both men up ladders examining maps together.
Stalin’s two Caucasian gangsters, Kamo and Tsintsadze, came to Petrograd. “I found Stalin alone in a room,” says Tsintsadze. “We were so happy to see one another.” But just then, Lenin wandered into the room.
“Meet Kote Tsintsadze,” Stalin said to Lenin (who already knew Kamo), “the old bank robber—terrorist of the Caucasus.”
Yet Stalin communicated with his assistant Pestkovsky only in “grunts,” and was too moody and taciturn to gossip with him, unlike the other loquacious Bolshevik magnates.[181]
On 29 November 1917 the Central Committee created the core leadership Bureau—the Chetverka, the Foursome, with Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky and Sverdlov as the most powerful men in Russia, authorized “to decide all emergency questions.” But Sverdlov, who became nominal head of state (Chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the Soviet), spent his time running the Party Secretariat. As a result, as Trotsky recalls, “The Four became a troika.”
Lenin drove ahead with his radical and repressive measures: “Peace, Land, Bread!” He opened peace talks with Kaiserine Germany. When Trotsky, People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, reported on progress, Lenin replied: “I’ll consult with Stalin and give you my answer.” On 27 October, opposition press was banned. At the Central Committee on 2 November, Lenin effectively created the dictatorship of the Bolshevik oligarchs. On the fourth, Sovnarkom gave itself the power to rule without the Soviets. The MRC initially acted as Lenin’s enforcers, but on 7 December he created an All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for the Struggle Against Counter-revolution and Sabotage, known by its acronym “Cheka,” with Dzerzhinsky as Chairman. The Cheka, precursor of the OGPU, NKVD, KGB and today’s FSB, had absolute supralegal power over life and death.
“In that case why should we bother with a People’s Commissar for Justice?” Isaak Shteinberg, a Left-SR, challenged Lenin. “Let’s honestly call it the Commissariat of Social Annihilation!”
“Well said!” replied Lenin. “That’s exactly how it’s going to be!”
He told another acquaintance: “We’re engaged in annihilation. Don’t you recall what Pisarev said: ‘Break, beat up everything, beat and destroy! Everything that’s being broken is rubbish and has no right to life! What survives is good.’” Lenin’s handwritten notes demanded the shooting, killing, hanging of “bloodsuckers… spiders… leeches.” He asked, “How can you make a revolution without firing-squads? If we can’t shoot White Guard saboteurs, what kind of revolution is this? Nothing but talk and a bowl of mush!” He demanded they “find tougher people.” But Stalin and Trotsky were tough enough. “We must put an end once and for all,” said Trotsky, “to the Papist-Quaker babble about the sanctity of human life.” Stalin showed a similar taste for Terror. When Estonian Bolsheviks proposed liquidating “traitors” in the earliest days of the Revolution, he replied swiftly: “The idea of a concentration camp is excellent.”
He “began to feel more sure of himself,” writes Trotsky. “I soon noticed Lenin was ‘advancing’ Stalin, valuing his firmness, grit, stubbornness and slyness as qualities necessary in the struggle.”[182] Molotov, who loathed Trotsky, judges that “it was not without reason that Lenin recognized Stalin and Trotsky as the leaders who stood out from the rest as the most talented.” Soon even Sukhanov understood that Stalin “holds in his hands the fate of the Revolution and state.” The Georgian, says Trotsky, “became accustomed to power.”
Yet Stalin was never inevitable. The brains, confidence, intellectual intensity, political talents, faith in and experience of violence, touchiness, vindictiveness, charm, sensitivity, ruthlessness, lack of empathy, the sheer weird singularity of the man, were in place—but lacking a forum. In 1917, he found the forum.
He could not have risen to power at any other time in history: it required the synchronicity of man and moment. His unlikely rise as a Georgian who could rule Russia was only made possible by the internationalist character of Marxism. His tyranny was made possible by the beleaguered circumstances of Soviet Russia, the utopian fanaticism of its quasi-religious ideology, the merciless Bolshevik machismo, the slaughterous spirit of the Great War, and Lenin’s homicidal vision of a “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Stalin would not have been possible if Lenin had not, in the first days of the regime, defeated Kamenev’s milder way to create the machinery for so boundless and absolute a power. That was the forum for which Stalin was superbly equipped. Now Stalin could become Stalin.
Within months of October, Lenin and his magnates used that power to fight the Civil War. It was then that Stalin, along with his cohorts, experienced that unrestrained power to wage war and change society by random killing. Like boys on their first foxhunt, they were blooded by the exhilaration and swagger. Stalin’s character, damaged yet gifted, was qualified for, and fatally attracted to, such pitiless predations. Afterwards, the machine of repression, the flinthearted, paranoid psychology of perpetual conspiracy and the taste for extreme bloody solutions to all challenges, were not just ascendant but glamorized, institutionalized and raised to an amoral Bolshevik faith with messianic fervour. In a colossal bureaucracy run like a nepotistic village, Stalin showed himself a master of personal politics.[183] He was the patron of these brutal tendencies but also their personification: he was right when he blasphemously declared in 1929 that “the Party has made me in its own image.” He and the Party had developed together, but this creature of covert but boundless extremism and brooding, malevolent darkness could always go further still.
He grew up in the clannish Caucasus; he had spent his entire maturity in the conspiratorial underground, that peculiar milieu where violence, fanaticism and loyalty were the main coinage; he flourished in the jungle of constant struggle, drama and stress; he came to power as that rare thing—both man of violence and of ideas, an expert in gangsterism, as well as a devout Marxist; but, above all, he believed in himself and in his own ruthless leadership as the only way to govern a country in crisis and to promote a mere ideal to a real utopia.
In a limitless government run as a giant conspiracy of bloodletting and clan patronage, who was the most qualified to prosper?
The dance of power between Trotsky and Stalin started at the very beginning, at the first meeting of the new government, a historic occasion at which the personal peccadilloes and political wheeler-dealering clashed with the sanctity of dialectical materialism.
The first Cabinet—the Sovnarkom in Bolshevik acronym—was held in Lenin’s office in the Smolny, which was
