Austria, where his title became Emperor. The realm had two Prime Ministers who were really less premiers than governors of their respective imperial or royal sub-realms. On the other rather dizzying hand, there was only one Foreign Minister; in a number of ways his power and prestige exceeded that of the Prime Ministers because he formed the chief link between the monarch and the twin cabinets. A further incongruity distinguished him above all other panjandrums. In addition to the conduct of Exterior Affairs he was also charged with 'participating in family celebrations of His Majesty's household,' as if these duties were complementary.
Constitutional wonders did not end there. The two premiers shared between them one common Minister of Finance and one common Minister of War who commanded the common armed forces. The two men headed these departments as Imperial Excellencies in Vienna, as Royal Excellencies in Budapest. To endow Hungary with the dignity of being a separate country, all other, less essential, ministries were separately headed and staffed; so were the judiciaries and the civil services on both sides of the Austro-Hungarian hyphen.
As for the legislatures, their doubleness came with an extra dollop of paradox. In Budapest, the Parliament of the Kingdom of Hungary convened. But in Vienna there was no such thing as an Austrian Parliament. Officially speaking, there was no such thing as 'Austria.' Yes, Habsburg was known as the House of Austria. Yes, the world knew Franz Joseph as the Austrian Emperor. Yet nowhere in the constitution of his empire did an entity named 'Austria' appear. 'Austria' seemed to be a grandiose ghost whose radiance must not be bounded by definition. The non-Hungarian portion of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was not called Austria. The constitution referred to it obliquely and indirectly as 'the lands and provinces represented in the Imperial Council.'
The Imperial Council was the Parliament sitting in Vienna. And the Parliament in Vienna was at least in part another feat of illusion. It was not very parliamentary. Electoral districting and balloting procedures gave Austria's German-speaking citizens proportionally more representation than Slav voters. What's more, one stroke of the Imperial pen could dissolve the Imperial Council at any time. Until the next elections (whose date the Emperor determined), the Emperor could rule and legislate by decree. Usually he refrained. The option always loomed. The Vienna parliament was a masterpiece of that famous Austrian speciality, latent absolutism.
In physical terms, too, it was an interesting deception. On a Ringstrasse rampant with architectural heroics, Parliament looked like a temple of calm. Its granite ramps, huge but gently angled, led up to the serenity of a colonnade. It was guarded by the monumental poise of a statue of Pallas Athene. The facade breathed neoclassic serenity.
Inside seethed a witches' sabbath of nationalisms. Here the ethnic groups of the Empire's non-Hungarian part went at each other through their representatives. Six million Czechs attacked ten million Germans for under- financing Czech schools in Bohemia and Moravia. Five million Galician Poles banged desks to demand greater administrative independence. Three and a half million Ukrainians stamped feet for a Russian-language university to counteract the Poles' cultural domination. Deputies from the South Slav area contributed to the multinational brawl. Through their representatives' throats, over a million Slovenes and three-quarters of a million Serbo-Croats shouted their grievances. German-speaking deputies split bitterly into Socialist and Conservative movements, the latter divided still further into the anti-Semitic Christian Socialist and pan-German parties. Such schisms inspired similar front lines within other ethnic factions. Occasionally all groups joined to excoriate Hungarian politics as practiced by the sister parliament in Budapest.
It was less a legislature than a cacophony. But since it was a Viennese cacophony it shrilled and jangled with a certain flair. Polemics were delivered through clenched teeth. Yet the vitriol came with whipped-cream rhetoric: 'If Your Ministerial Excellency would finally condescend to reason!' Friction ran red hot without becoming altogether raw. Instead of exploding the Empire, nationalist fury spent itself in theater. Representatives bristled so histrionically against each other that often they had little energy left to use against the Emperor's Double Eagle under whose wings they were allowed to stage their confrontation.
Vladimir Lenin, resident in the Austrian province of Galicia, followed parliamentary performances in Vienna through the Cracow papers. The way Habsburg survived the ethnic imbroglio impressed him. In an article he sent to the St. Petersburg Pravda he declared that 'Austria handles the national problem far better than the Tsar.'
As a matter of fact, Lenin admitted that he himself, as the leader of a revolutionary movement composed of different Slavic as well as non-Slavic elements, had things to learn about handling the ethnic problem. 'As to nationalism,' he wrote Maxim Gorki in February 1913, 'I am fully in agreement that it is necessary to pay more serious attention to it. We have here a wonderful Georgian who is writing a long article for Prosveshchenye, for which he has gathered all the Austrian and other material.'
The 'wonderful Georgian'-Stalin-had been entrusted with a task in Vienna that was vital to the Party. To Stalin himself it was a breakthrough opportunity. True, by 1913 he had already become something of a Bolshevist journalist through his contributions to the legally published Pravda in St. Petersburg. But his initial and still primary reputation among comrades was quite different. He had made his mark as a rough-and-ready activist, a fomenter of strikes, an organizer of bank robberies on behalf of the party's treasury-in brief, a red buccaneer who did not shrink from gun or bomb. His challenge in Vienna involved much subtler aspects of the cause. Socialism was international and supra-national by its very motto: 'Workers of All Countries, Unite!' Yet in 1913 Europe's workers were subject to divisive nationalisms. Even the proletariat longed for national identity. How could that need be fulfilled without setting the oppressed of one land against the oppressed of another? This was the question worrying Lenin. During his Austrian mission, Stalin was to answer it by way of an essay in Prosveshchenye, the Party's sociological journal.
The Wonderful Georgian had to address a complex issue in a foreign city under unfamiliar circumstances. Especially unfamiliar were Stalin's hosts in Vienna. They didn't resemble the underground comrades he had known in Georgia or the tough pamphleteers of St. Petersburg or the better educated but blunt and hard-eyed pragmatists around Lenin in Cracow. The Troyanovskys who took in Stalin at Schonbrunner Schlossstrasse 20 were elegants. Alexander Troyanovsky, a son of a high Tsarist officer, graduate of Voronezh Cadet School, destined to be Soviet Ambassador to Washington, spoke an aristocratic Russian and played a brilliant game of bridge when partnered with his wife Elena, who was a lawyer born of a noble family. 'They have money,' Lenin said in a letter describing the couple. Of course they also had impeccable party credentials including some years in Siberia, a region not known for its bridge tournaments. At any rate, the Troyanovskys were the most comme it faut comrades in Vienna. Quite possibly Lenin sent the Wonderful Georgian to them as to a finishing school. They were to polish this diamond in the rough.
It proved unpolishable. The Troyanovskys failed to civilize their guest. He ignored Vienna's cafes, its suavities, frivolities, balls-even those given by trade unions. With a surly, even pace he kept tramping through the city's gayest month in pursuit of nothing but his mission.
'I was in conversation over tea with a comrade,' Trotsky would recall of a very cold day in Vienna, 'when suddenly, without knocking at the door, there entered from another room a man of middle height, haggard, with a swarthy grayish face showing marks of smallpox. The stranger, as if surprised by my presence, stopped a moment at the door and gave a guttural grunt which might have been taken for a greeting. Then, with an empty glass in his hand, he went to the samovar, filled his glass with tea, and went out without saying a word.'
Not that Stalin meant to be rude to Trotsky specifically. The two men had clashed in print before; within ten years they would begin the world-famous duel destined to split Communism on all continents. But on that January afternoon of 1913, when they first came face to face in Vienna, each did not know who the other one was. Stalin took in that dainty comrade with the French novel under his arm and proceeded to behave-like Stalin.
Frills or manners were not for him. Nor did he bother with pleasantries when talking about his own work. 'Greetings, friend,' he said early in February 1913 in a letter to a fellow Bolshevik in St. Petersburg, 'I am still sitting in Vienna and writing all sorts of rubbish.'
'Rubbish' turned out to be a strategic milestone. In Vienna, Stalin was researching and composing a treatise calculated to enrich his party image. His Marxism and the National Question examined (for its relevance to Russia) the position of prominent Austrian Socialist thinkers like Karl Renner and Otto Bauer. They favored cultural autonomy for minorities under a federalist charter. But Stalin marshalled evidence to conclude that a Socialist commonwealth must go further-far enough to grant nationalities the right to secession.
This argument had to please Lenin because it suited an imperative he'd often discussed with his disciples: the need to entice more non-Slavic Socialists within the Tsarist empire into the Bolshevist camp, that is, into Lenin's wing of the Party. Stalin's essay thus further increased the wonderfulness of the Georgian (non-Slavic himself) in the eyes of the master.
And the Vienna essay did more. It established Stalin as a theoretician eligible to participate in ideological
