- Kotkin, Stephen.
Stalin, Vol. 1: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928.
New York: Penguin Press, 2014.
ISBN 978-0-14-312786-4.
-
In a
Levada
Center poll in 2017, Russians who responded named
Joseph Stalin the “most outstanding person” in world
history. Now, you can argue about the meaning of “outstanding”,
but it's pretty remarkable that citizens of a country whose chief
of government (albeit several regimes ago) presided over an entirely
avoidable famine which killed millions of citizens of his country,
ordered purges which executed more than 700,000 people, including senior
military leadership, leaving his nation unprepared for the German
attack in 1941, which would, until the final victory, claim the
lives of around 27 million Soviet citizens, military and civilian,
would be considered an “outstanding person” as opposed
to a super-villain.
The story of Stalin's career is even less plausible, and should give
pause to those who believe history can be predicted without the
contingency of things that “just happen”.
Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili (the author uses Roman alphabet
transliterations of all individuals' names in their native
languages, which can occasionally be confusing when they
later Russified their names) was born in 1878 in the town of
Gori in the Caucasus. Gori, part of the territory of Georgia
which had long been ruled by the Ottoman Empire, had been
seized by Imperial Russia in a series of bloody conflicts
ending in the 1860s with complete incorporation of the
territory into the Czar's empire. Ioseb, who was called by
the Georgian dimunitive “Sosa” throughout his youth,
was the third son born to his parents, but, as both of his older
brothers had died not long after birth, was raised as
an only child.
Sosa's father, Besarion Jughashvili (often written in the
Russian form, Vissarion) was a shoemaker with his own shop
in Gori but, as time passed his business fell on hard times
and he closed the shop and sought other work, ending his
life as a vagrant. Sosa's mother, Ketevan “Keke”
Geladze, was ambitious and wanted the best for her son,
and left her husband and took a variety of jobs to support
the family. She arranged for eight year old Sosa to attend
Russian language lessons given to the children of a priest
in whose house she was boarding. Knowledge of Russian was
the key to advancement in Czarist Georgia, and he had a head
start when Keke arranged for him to be enrolled in the parish
school's preparatory and four year programs. He was the first
member of either side of his family to attend school and he
rose to the top of his class under the patronage of a family
friend, “Uncle Yakov” Egnatashvili. After
graduation, his options were limited. The Russian administration,
wary of the emergence of a Georgian intellectual class that
might champion independence, refused to establish a university
in the Caucasus. Sosa's best option was the highly selective
Theological Seminary in Tiflis where he would prepare, in
a six year course, for life as a parish priest or teacher in
Georgia but, for those who graduated near the top, could lead
to a scholarship at a university in another part of the empire.
He took the examinations and easily passed, gaining
admission, petitioning and winning a partial scholarship
that paid most of his fees. “Uncle Yakov” paid
the rest, and he plunged into his studies. Georgia was in
the midst of an intense campaign of Russification, and
Sosa further perfected his skills in the Russian language.
Although completely fluent in spoken and written Russian
along with his native Georgian (the languages are completely
unrelated, having no more in common than Finnish and
Italian), he would speak Russian with a Georgian
accent all his life and did not publish in the Russian
language until he was twenty-nine years old.
Long a voracious reader, at the seminary Sosa joined a
“forbidden literature” society which smuggled in
and read works, not banned by the Russian authorities, but
deemed unsuitable for priests in training. He read classics
of Russian, French, English, and German literature and science,
including Capital by Karl Marx. The latter would
transform his view of the world and path in life. He
made the acquaintance of a former seminarian and committed
Marxist, Lado Ketskhoveli, who would guide his studies.
In August 1898, he joined the newly formed “Third
Group of Georgian Marxists”—many years later
Stalin would date his “party card” to then.
Prior to 1905, imperial Russia was an absolute autocracy. The
Czar ruled with no limitations on his power. What he decreed
and ordered his functionaries to do was law.
There was no parliament, political parties, elected
officials of any kind, or permanent administrative state
that did not serve at the pleasure of the monarch. Political
activity and agitation were illegal, as were publishing and
distributing any kind of political literature deemed to
oppose imperial rule. As Sosa became increasingly
radicalised, it was only a short step from devout seminarian
to underground agitator. He began to neglect his studies,
became increasingly disrespectful to authority figures, and,
in April 1899, left the seminary before taking his final
examinations.
Saddled with a large debt to the seminary for leaving without
becoming a priest or teacher,
he drifted into writing articles for small, underground
publications associated with the Social Democrat movement,
at the time the home of most Marxists. He took to public speaking
and, while eschewing fancy flights of oratory, spoke directly
to the meetings of workers he addressed in their own dialect
and terms. Inevitably, he was arrested for “incitement
to disorder and insubordination against higher authority”
in April 1902 and jailed. After fifteen months in prison at
Batum, he was sentenced to three years of internal exile in
Siberia. In January 1904 he escaped and made it back to
Tiflis, in Georgia, where he resumed his underground career.
By this time the Social Democratic movement had fractured into
Lenin's Bolshevik faction and the larger Menshevik group.
Sosa, who during his imprisonment had adopted the revolutionary
nickname “Koba”, after the hero in a Georgian
novel of revenge, continued to write and speak and, in
1905, after the Czar was compelled to cede some of his
power to a parliament, organised Battle Squads which stole
printing equipment, attacked government forces, and raised
money through protection rackets targeting businesses.
In 1905, Koba Jughashvili was elected one of three Bolshevik
delegates from Georgia to attend the Third Congress of the
Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party in Tampere,
Finland, then part of the Russian empire. It was there
he first met Lenin, who had been living in exile in
Switzerland. Koba had read Lenin's prolific writings
and admired his leadership of the Bolshevik cause, but was
unimpressed in this first in-person encounter. He vocally
took issue with Lenin's position that Bolsheviks should
seek seats in the newly-formed State Duma (parliament). When
Lenin backed down in the face of opposition, he said,
“I expected to see the mountain eagle of our party,
a great man, not only politically but physically, for I had
formed for myself a picture of Lenin as a giant, as a stately
representative figure of a man. What was my disappointment
when I saw the most ordinary individual, below average height,
distinguished from ordinary mortals by, literally, nothing.”
Returning to Georgia, he resumed his career as an underground
revolutionary including, famously, organising a robbery of the
Russian State Bank in Tiflis in which three
dozen people were killed and two dozen more injured,
“expropriating” 250,000 rubles for the Bolshevik
cause. Koba did not participate directly, but he was the
mastermind of the heist. This and other banditry, criminal
enterprises, and unauthorised publications resulted in
multiple arrests, imprisonments, exiles to Siberia, escapes,
re-captures, and life underground in the years that followed.
In 1912, while living underground in Saint Petersburg after
yet another escape, he was named the first editor of the
Bolshevik party's new daily newspaper, Pravda,
although his name was kept secret. In 1913, with the
encouragement of Lenin, he wrote an article titled
“Marxism and the National Question” in which he
addressed how a Bolshevik regime should approach the diverse
ethnicities and national identities of the Russian Empire.
As a Georgian Bolshevik, Jughashvili was seen as uniquely
qualified and credible to address this thorny question. He
published the article under the nom
de plume “K. [for Koba] Stalin”, which literally
translated, meant “Man of Steel” and paralleled
Lenin's pseudonym. He would use this name for the rest
of his life, reverting to the Russified form of his given name,
“Joseph” instead of the nickname Koba (by which his close
associates would continue to address him informally). I shall,
like the author, refer to him subsequently as “Stalin”.
When Russia entered the Great War in 1914, events were set into
motion which would lead to the end of Czarist rule, but Stalin
was on the sidelines: in exile in Siberia, where he spent much
of his time fishing. In late 1916, as manpower shortages became
acute, exiled Bolsheviks including Stalin received notices of
conscription into the army, but when he appeared at the induction
centre he was rejected due to a crippled left arm, the result of a
childhood injury. It was only after the abdication of the Czar
in the February Revolution of 1917 that he returned to Saint
Petersburg, now renamed Petrograd, and resumed his work for the
Bolshevik cause. In April 1917, in elections to the Bolshevik
Central Committee, Stalin came in third after Lenin (who had returned
from exile in Switzerland) and Zinoviev. Despite having been out
of circulation for several years, Stalin's reputation from his
writings and editorship of Pravda, which he resumed,
elevated him to among the top rank of the party.
As Kerensky's Provisional Government attempted to consolidate its
power and continue the costly and unpopular war, Stalin and
Trotsky joined Lenin's call for a Bolshevik coup to seize power,
and Stalin was involved in all aspects of the eventual October
Revolution, although often behind the scenes, while Lenin was
the public face of the Bolshevik insurgency.
After seizing power, the Bolsheviks faced challenges from all
directions. They had to disentangle Russia from the
Great War without leaving the country open to attack and
territorial conquest by Germany or Poland. Despite their
ambitious name, they were a minority party and had to subdue
domestic opposition. They took over a country which the debts
incurred by the Czar to fund the war had effectively
bankrupted. They had to exert their control over a sprawling,
polyglot empire in which, outside of the big cities, their party
had little or no presence. They needed to establish their
authority over a military in which the officer corps largely
regarded the Czar as their legitimate leader. They must
restore agricultural production, severely disrupted by
levies of manpower for the war, before famine brought
instability and the risk of a counter-coup. And for facing these
formidable problems, all at the same time, they were
utterly unprepared.
The Bolsheviks were, to a man (and they were all men), professional
revolutionaries. Their experience was in writing and publishing
radical tracts and works of Marxist theory, agitating and organising
workers in the cities, carrying out acts of terror against the
regime, and funding their activities through banditry and other
forms of criminality. There was not a military man, agricultural
expert, banker, diplomat, logistician, transportation specialist,
or administrator among them, and suddenly they needed all of these
skills and more, plus the ability to recruit and staff an administration
for a continent-wide empire. Further, although Lenin's leadership
was firmly established and undisputed, his subordinates
were all highly ambitious men seeking to establish and increase
their power in the chaotic and fluid situation.
It was in this environment that Stalin made his mark as the
reliable “fixer”. Whether it was securing levies of
grain from the provinces, putting down resistance from
counter-revolutionary White forces, stamping out opposition from
other parties, developing policies for dealing with the diverse
nations incorporated into the Russian Empire (indeed, in a real
sense, it was Stalin who invented the Soviet Union as a nominal
federation of autonomous republics which, in fact, were subject
to Party control from Moscow), or implementing Lenin's orders,
even when he disagreed with them, Stalin was on the job. Lenin
recognised Stalin's importance as his right hand man by creating
the post of General Secretary of the party and appointing him to
it.
This placed Stalin at the centre of the party apparatus. He
controlled who was hired, fired, and promoted. He controlled
access to Lenin (only Trotsky could see Lenin without going
through Stalin). This was a finely-tuned machine which
allowed Lenin to exercise absolute power through a party machine
which Stalin had largely built and operated.
Then, in May of 1922, the unthinkable happened: Lenin was felled
by a stroke which left him partially paralysed. He retreated to
his dacha at Gorki to recuperate, and his communication with the
other senior leadership was almost entirely through Stalin. There
had been no thought of or plan for a succession after Lenin (he was
only fifty-two at the time of his first stroke, although he had
been unwell for much of the previous year). As Lenin's health
declined, ending in his death in January 1924, Stalin increasingly
came to run the party and, through it, the government. He had
appointed loyalists in key positions, who saw their own careers
as linked to that of Stalin. By the end of 1924, Stalin began to
move against the “Old Bolsheviks” who he saw as
rivals and potential threats to his consolidation of power. When
confronted with opposition, on three occasions he threatened to
resign, each exercise in brinksmanship strengthening his grip
on power, as the party feared the chaos that would ensue from
a power struggle at the top. His status was reflected in 1925
when the city of Tsaritsyn was renamed Stalingrad.
This ascent to supreme power was not universally applauded.
Felix Dzierzynski
(Polish born, he is often better known by
the Russian spelling of his name, Dzerzhinsky) who, as the
founder of the Soviet secret police (Cheka/GPU/OGPU) knew
a few things about dictatorship, warned in 1926, the year
of his death, that “If we do not find the correct
line and pace of development our opposition will grow and
the country will get its dictator, the grave digger of the
revolution irrespective of the beautiful feathers on his
costume.”
With or without feathers, the dictatorship was beginning to
emerge. In 1926 Stalin published “On Questions of Leninism”
in which he introduced the concept of “Socialism in One
Country” which, presented as orthodox Leninist doctrine
(which it wasn't), argued that world revolution was unnecessary
to establish communism in a single country. This set the stage
for the collectivisation of agriculture and rapid
industrialisation which was to come. In 1928, what was to
be the prototype of the show trials of the 1930s opened in
Moscow, the
Shakhty
trial, complete with accusations of industrial sabotage
(“wrecking”), denunciations of class enemies,
and Andrei Vyshinsky presiding as chief judge. Of the
fifty-three engineers accused, five were executed and forty-four
imprisoned. A country desperately short on the professionals
its industry needed to develop had begin to devour them.
It is a mistake to regard Stalin purely as a dictator obsessed
with accumulating and exercising power and destroying
rivals, real or imagined. The one consistent theme throughout
Stalin's career was that he was a true believer. He was a
devout believer in the Orthodox faith while at the seminary,
and he seamlessly transferred his allegiance to Marxism once
he had been introduced to its doctrines. He had mastered
the difficult works of Marx and could cite them from memory
(as he often did spontaneously to buttress his arguments
in policy disputes), and went on to similarly internalise
the work of Lenin. These principles guided his actions, and
motivated him to apply them rigidly, whatever the cost may
be.
Starting in 1921, Lenin had introduced the
New
Economic Policy, which lightened state control over
the economy and, in particular, introduced market reforms in
the agricultural sector, resulting in a mixed economy in
which socialism reigned in big city industries, but
in the countryside the peasants operated under a kind of
market economy. This policy had restored agricultural
production to pre-revolutionary levels and largely ended food
shortages in the cities and countryside. But to a doctrinaire
Marxist, it seemed to risk destruction of the regime. Marx
believed that the political system was determined by the means of
production. Thus, accepting what was essentially a
capitalist economy in the agricultural sector was to infect
the socialist government with its worst enemy.
Once Stalin had completed his consolidation of power, he
then proceeded as Marxist doctrine demanded: abolish
the New Economic Policy and undertake the forced collectivisation
of agriculture. This began in 1928.
And it is with this momentous decision that the present volume
comes to an end. This massive work (976 pages in the print
edition) is just the first in a planned three volume biography
of Stalin. The second volume,
Stalin: Waiting for Hitler,
1929–1941,
was published in 2017 and the concluding volume is not yet
completed.
Reading this book, and the entire series, is a major investment
of time in a single historical figure. But, as the author observes,
if you're interested in the phenomenon of twentieth century
totalitarian dictatorship, Stalin is the gold standard. He
amassed more power, exercised by a single person with essentially
no checks or limits, over more people and a larger portion of the
Earth's surface than any individual in human history. He ruled
for almost thirty years, transformed the economy of his country,
presided over deliberate famines, ruthless purges, and pervasive
terror that killed tens of millions, led his country to victory
at enormous cost in the largest land conflict in history and
ended up exercising power over half of the European continent,
and built a military which rivaled that of the West in a
bipolar struggle for global hegemony.
It is impossible to relate the history of Stalin without describing
the context in which it occurred, and this is as much a history of
the final days of imperial Russia, the revolutions of 1917, and the
establishment and consolidation of Soviet power as of Stalin himself.
Indeed, in this first volume, there are lengthy parts of the narrative
in which Stalin is largely offstage: in prison, internal exile, or
occupied with matters peripheral to the main historical events. The
level of detail is breathtaking: the Bolsheviks seem to have been as
compulsive record-keepers as Germans are reputed to be, and not
only are the votes of seemingly every committee meeting recorded, but
who voted which way and why. There are more than two hundred pages
of end notes, source citations, bibliography, and index.
If you are interested in Stalin, the Soviet Union, the phenomenon
of Bolshevism, totalitarian dictatorship, or how destructive
madness can grip a civilised society for decades, this is an
essential work. It is unlikely it will ever be equalled.
December 2018 