The Times Great Lives

A Man of Authority

Public Enthusiasm

In Russia and the adjacent Communist States Marshal Stalin at the time of his death occupied a position of personal eminence almost without parallel in the history of the world. His rare public appearances provoked scenes of tremendous enthusiasm; his speeches and writings on any subject – linguistics, the art of war, biology and history, as well as on the theory of Communism – were treated as virtually inspired texts and analysed in meticulous detail by hundreds of commentators. A quotation from the works of Stalin was the irrefutable end to any argument. The mere mention of his name at a political conference in any of the satellite States was sufficient to bring all present to their feet by a prolonged ovation. The Stalin legend became an integral part of the chain which united orthodox Communists all over the world. In appearance Stalin was grey; his hair grey and stiff as a badger’s; his nostrils and lower cheeks greyish white; his moustache, too, though in youth it had been richly brown and still showed some traces of that colour, was grey. He spoke softly, moved slowly, but his expression was quizzical, like a man enjoying a hidden joke, at times softening into abroad smile. Often as he spoke his look was oddly remote and withdrawn, the look of a man thinking through two or three processes at once. His expression was above all confident, without a trace of nerves; strong, calm or suddenly watchful in an amused kind of way. Tough, yet unathletic, dignified yet self-conscious, he dominated any group of which he formed a part for all his small stature.

Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, known to the world as Stalin, one of his many revolutionary noms de guerre, was born at Gori, in Georgia, on December 21, 1879. His father, a cobbler of peasant origin, died when he was 11. Joseph was sent to the church school in his native town, where he remained until 1893. It was here that he learned to use Russian as an instrument of expression, since all ecclesiastical schools in Georgia at that time were the implements of the Tsarist policy of Russification. He emerged from the school at Gori sharply conscious of the suppression of Georgian nationalism and not unaware of the social inequalities and injustices prevailing in his native Georgia. Such feelings were never revealed however to the school staff, and in view of the fact that he was invariably the best pupil in his form, the head master and the local priest had no hesitation in recommending him for a scholarship at the seminary in Tiflis following upon his matriculation there in the autumn of 1894.

‘A Model Pupil’; Clandestine Socialist

In his early period at the seminary Dzhugashvili was a model pupil, able and diligent at his work, but towards the end of his first year, unbeknown to his tutors, he was already in contact with opposition groups in Tiflis and published some patriotic radical verses in the Liberal newspaper Iberya. His contact with radical groups in Tiflis, headed by former seminarists, continued to develop until finally in August, 1898, he joined the clandestine Socialist organization known as Mesamé-Dasi. Thenceforward he began to lead a kind of dual existence. His few leisure hours were spent in lecturing on Socialism to small groups of working men in Tiflis; discussion in a secret debating society, formed by himself inside the seminary, and the reading of radical books. This state of affairs eventually came to the notice of the seminary authorities and in May, 1899, the 20-year-old Dzhugashvili was expelled. He then embarked on a revolutionary career, but was faced with the immediate problem of employment. For a few months he made a little money giving lessons to the children of middle-class families and at the end of 1899 found a job as a clerk in the observatory at Tiflis – an occupation which seems to have afforded him much free time for political activity. He remained in this employment until March, 1901, when his political activities forced him to go underground completely.

In November, 1901, he was elected to membership of the Social Democratic committee of Tiflis and a few weeks later was sent to Batum, where he proceeded with the establishment of a vigorous clandestine organization and an illegal printing press. The influence of this organization, under his leadership, on the oil workers of Batum was so remarkable in its manifestations that ‘Koba’ (as Dzhugashvili was then known) was arrested, and imprisoned in the spring of 1902 as a dangerous agitator. From his exile in Siberia he escaped a few weeks later and reappeared in Tiflis to find that the great schism which divided the Social Democratic Party in 1903 had left the Mensheviks in virtual control of the Caucasian party. A few months after his return, with some hesitation, Koba took the side of Lenin and the Bolsheviks and proceeded to agitate energetically against the Mensheviks and other political groupings.

First Meeting with Lenin

Koba’s role during the ‘general rehearsal’ of 1905 was a local rather than a national one. Apart from organizing the ‘fighting squads’ (later to be a subject of considerable controversy within the party) and the editing of the newspaper Kavkaski Rabochi Listok (Caucasian Workers’ News-sheet), which enjoyed temporary legality, he continued to conduct a vigorous onslaught against the Mensheviks. When he attended the party conference in Tammerfors in December, 1905, as a delegate of the Caucasian Bolsheviks (a group of uncertain credentials, since most of the local leaders were Mensheviks), Koba emerged for the first time from the provincial arena of Caucasian politics into the atmosphere of a truly national gathering. Here, too, he first met Lenin. In the following year he attended the Stockholm Congress and in 1907 the London Party Congress as a Caucasian delegate, where he encountered Trotsky.

Soon after his return from the London Congress he was elected to membership of the Baku Committee, and it was in the oil wells of Baku that Stalin, on his testimony, first learned to lead great masses of workers. He was arrested in November, 1908, and deported to Vologda province. A few months later, however, he escaped and appeared again in the south, under the name of Melikyants. His period of freedom was brief, for he was re-arrested in March, 1910, and sent back to Vologda to complete his sentence of 1908. Released in June, 1911, he settled in Petersburg at the home of his future father-in-law, Alliluyev, although he had been forbidden to live in most large towns. In consequence, he was again arrested. Reaction was now at its height and the party fortunes at their lowest ebb. A small conference of Bolshevik stalwarts in Prague in January, 1912, coopted Stalin as a member of the central executive committee of the party; and on his escape a few weeks later he helped to found the new party journal Pravda in Petersburg.

A Turning-point

Lenin’s ‘Wonderful Georgian’

It was in the winter of 1912-13 that Stalin made his only extended visit abroad, spending some months with Lenin in Cracow and some time in Vienna. This was a turning-point in his career. Ten years earlier Lenin, in his famous pamphlet ‘What is to be Done?’ had first stated the case, on which he never ceased to insist, for a centrally directed party of professional revolutionaries, organized and disciplined in thought and deed, as the essential instrument of social revolution. Stalin had all the marks of Lenin’s ideal professional revolutionary: he was intrepid, orderly and orthodox. It was a further asset that though born a Georgian and a member of one of the ‘subject races’ Stalin had had no truck with separatist or ‘federalist’ ideas within the party and was an out-and-out ‘centralist’. Not for nothing therefore did Lenin at this time refer to Stalin in a letter to Maxim Gorky as ‘a wonderful Georgian’ who was writing an essay on the national question. The essay, eventually published under the title ‘Marxism and the National Question’ in a party journal, was an attack on the ‘national’ heresies of the Austrian Marxists Bauer and Renner and a statement of accepted Bolshevik doctrine, steering a cautious middle course between those who regarded any kind of nationalism as incompatible with international socialism and those who regarded nationalism as an essential element in it. It was the first of his writings to be signed by the name under which he was to become famous.

Back in Russia, Stalin underwent in February, 1913, his sixth and last imprisonment and exile. The revolution of February, 1917, released him, and he was probably the first member of the central committee of the party to reach Petersburg. In this capacity he temporarily took over the editorship of Pravda. This was the occasion of a short-lived deviation to which Stalin afterwards frankly confessed. In common with the other leading Bolsheviks then in the capital – excluding Molotov and Shlyapnikov – Stalin believed that the right tactics for the Bolsheviks were to support the provisional Government and rally to the defence of the fatherland; and this line, which would have assimilated the policy of the Bolsheviks to that of the Social-Democratic parties of the Second International, was taken editorially in Pravda. Lenin, chafing inactively in Switzerland, denounced in his ‘Letters from Afar’ the weak-kneed Bolsheviks of the capital. When later he reached Petrograd in the sealed train and propounded his famous ‘April theses’ of no cooperation with the provisional Government or with any policy that would keep Russia in the war, he quickly rallied his faltering party, and geared it for the second revolution. Thereafter Stalin remained a faithful and undeviating disciple.

1917 Revolution

Enhanced Status in the Party

The difficulty for the biographer of this as of the earlier period of Stalin’s life is to disentangle the authentic contemporary evidence from the mass of more recent and largely apocryphal accretions. It seems that he first became a figure familiar to party cadres at the time of his election to a new central committee of nine members in April, 1917, and after the difficult July days, when Lenin and Zinoviev were compelled to retreat to Finland and Kamenev, Trotsky and others were arrested, Stalin emerged to lead the party. On their return to the political scene, he retired again into the shadows. While there is but little information relating to any participation by him in the work of the Revolutionary Military Committee during the actual rising, he nevertheless undoubtedly performed an important function in the editorial office of Pravda. He supported Lenin against Zinoviev and Kamenev in the controversy over the preparation and timing of the October revolution and against Trotsky over Brest-Litovsk; and though his interventions recorded in the minutes of the central committee were on both occasions brief and inconspicuous, his fidelity to Lenin in these troubled times must have won the gratitude of the leader and greatly enhanced his status in the party. He was appointed People’s Commissar for Nationalities in October, 1917, and in this capacity one of his first measures was to proclaim Finland’s independence from Russia, at a conference in Helsinki. In spite of the opposition of elements within the party, who regarded this as an unwarranted concession to bourgeois nationalism, the decree was officially signed by Lenin and Stalin in December. He also played an active part in the drafting of the 1918 constitution of the Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic and he was still more closely concerned four years later in framing the federal constitution of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics.

Breach with Trotsky

The civil war provided fresh scope for Stalin’s unflagging energy and undoubted administrative talents. That the civil war provided the occasion of Stalin’s first open breach with Trotsky; that Stalin and Voroshilov intrigued busily against Trotsky, criticizing both his disposition of his armies and his use of former Tsarist officers; that recriminations flared up to a dangerous point over the defence of Tsaritsin (renamed Stalingrad some years later) against Denikin; that Lenin tried to smooth over these animosities and to retain the services of two invaluable though quarrelsome lieutenants – so much is clear. But the historian of the future may well find it a superhuman task to extract the grain of truth from the chaff of subsequent controversy and the haystack of misrepresentation beneath which Trotsky’s achievements have been hidden. For the rest Stalin’s name figures little in the literature of the period. At any time up to 1922 the general impression which he made on his colleagues was apparently one of undistinguished competence; though admitted to the first rank of Bolshevik leaders he seemed the least remarkable of them, the most lacking in personality. But his capacity for hard and regular work more than balanced the more spectacular talents of his rivals, and indeed it could not have escaped the notice of a few that Stalin’s influence in the state and his hold on the party machine had grown enormously. At the end of the civil war he filled three significant posts: membership of the Politburo, Commissar of Nationalities, and Commissar for Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection (Rabkrin).

In March, 1922, he was appointed Secretary-General of the party – a newly created post obviously suited to his rather pedestrian gifts. Though not regarded by anyone as a potential stepping-stone to supreme power, nevertheless this post, considered in conjunction with his other spheres of influence, rendered his personal position most formidable. Although Lenin still held the reins, Stalin’s influence was becoming comparable to that of Lenin. In May of the same year Lenin had a first stroke from which he recovered, temporarily and incompletely, to be finally stricken by a second in March, 1923. From this moment, though Lenin lingered on, totally incapacitated, till January, 1924, the succession was open. Had anyone seriously canvassed Stalin’s chances, a letter from Lenin to the central committee of the party – commonly, though unwarrantably, known as Lenin’s testament – might have seemed a decisive obstacle. Writing at the end of December, 1922, with a postscript of January 4, 1923, Lenin who evidently knew that his days were numbered, passed in review the principal party leaders. He noted that Stalin since he had become Secretary-General had ‘concentrated in his hands an immense power’, and expressed the fear that he might not always use it prudently. He described Stalin as ‘too rough,’ and proposed that he should be replaced by someone ‘more patient, more loyal, more polite, more attentive to the comrades, less capricious, &c.’ Fortunately for Stalin, the letter also treated Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Bukharin with scant respect, so that there was a powerful interest in limiting its circulation – though it was familiar to all members of the central committee, and its authenticity has never been contested. But Stalin must be credited with extraordinary skill in surmounting so formidable an obstacle. When the twelfth party congress met in April, 1923, Lenin was known, though not yet publicly admitted, to be past recovery. The talk was of a group of three (‘troika’) to take over his authority; and the names of Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Stalin were freely mentioned. Stalin, with consummate tact, defended Zinoviev and Kamenev rather than himself from attacks made jointly on all three of them. Trotsky was gradually edged on one side. Attacks on him for undermining the unity of the party began in the autumn of that year.

The year 1924 was decisive for Stalin’s ascent to power. During this year he for the first time exhibited to the full that amazing political dexterity which made all his rivals look like bunglers and amateurs. In the first place he brought about what may not unfairly be called the ‘canonization’ of Lenin. From the moment of Lenin’s death, and almost entirely as the result of Stalin’s initiative, every word that Lenin had uttered or written came to be treated as sacrosanct – as Lenin himself had treated the works of Marx and Engels; and everyone who had differed from him was now suspect not merely as a heretic in the past, but as a potential heretic in the future. This weapon was aimed primarily at Trotsky, whose impetuous character and long record of past bickerings with Lenin made him highly vulnerable. But it could also serve against Zinoviev and Kamenev, who had more than once been severely castigated by Lenin for their backslidings. Stalin had been too prudent or not conspicuous enough to come under the lash – except in the unofficial ‘testament’ now being gradually consigned to oblivion. This was a negative asset. But immense pains were taken, both at this time and afterwards, to build up a positive picture of Stalin as Lenin’s ablest coadjutor, most faithful disciple, and chosen political executor.

Control of Party Machine Power Strengthened

Secondly, Stalin, well aware of the prestige attaching in the party to the master of Marxist theory, set out to establish his credentials in that field. In the spring of 1924 he delivered at the Sverdlov University in Moscow a course of lectures on ‘The Foundations of Leninism’ – a competent exposition of the development and application by Lenin of Marxist doctrine. He went on to take the offensive against Trotsky. In the lectures themselves he had followed the usual view that the ultimate success of the Russian revolution depended on the spread of revolution elsewhere in Europe. But the revolutionary failures of 1923 in Germany suggested that this consummation was remote; and the new international status of the Soviet Union, which had been recognized in 1924 by all the principal Powers except the United States, made the encouragement of world revolution an increasingly inconvenient policy. At the end of 1924 Stalin issued a revised edition of his lectures in which he proclaimed the doctrine of ‘Socialism in one country’. Trotsky could thus be branded as an internationalist, a champion of the outmoded slogan of ‘permanent revolution’.

Thirdly, Stalin strengthened his control of the party machine and discovered how to use it for the discomfiture of his enemies. As Secretary-General he was already master of all promotions and appointments to key positions in the party. Lenin’s memory was now honoured by the admission of a large number of new members; and this admission, managed by Stalin and his supporters, brought a mass of recruits to the new orthodoxy. Whatever opinions were held among the leaders the weight of numbers must begin to tell. Before long Trotsky was being shouted down at party meetings by enthusiastic young Stalinists.

Trotsky’s Expulsion

By January, 1925, the campaign against Trotsky had gathered sufficient momentum to permit of his deposition from his office as People’s Commissar for War. Before the end of the year Zinoviev and Kamenev, taking fright at Stalin’s growing power, were seeking a rapprochement with Trotsky. But the move came too late to save them. In 1926 Stalin secured a condemnation of Trotskyites and Zinovievites alike both by a party conference and by the Comintern; and in November, 1927, Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev were formally expelled from the party. Two months later Trotsky was forcibly removed from Moscow and sent to Alma-Ata in central Asia. He was finally expelled from Russia in January, 1929.

In the struggle thus concluded personal rivalries had been intertwined not only with the issue of foreign policy already referred to but with internal political controversies. Trotsky had always been an advocate of industrialization and planning. Stalin opened the campaign against him with the nep slogans of conciliating the peasant and with the charge, repeated and illustrated ad nauseam, that Trotsky was guilty of ‘underestimating the peasant’. But Stalin soon saw the dangers of going too far, and from the end of 1925 onwards cleverly steered a middle course between the ‘left’ opposition of Trotsky and Zinoviev, who were accused of ignoring the peasant, and the ‘right’ opposition of Rykov and Bukharin, who exaggerated the policy of appeasing the peasant.

After the rout of Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev, Stalin’s position was not yet supreme in the Politburo. He still had to deal with the ‘right’ opposition of Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky. Contrary to the prophecies of the recently defeated opposition, the influence of the Bukharin group did not overshadow that of Stalin. The fifteenth Congress elected a new Politburo of nine and in the new line-up Stalin had a majority of votes, among them Kaganovich and Mikoyan. The flaring up of conflicting forces inside the Politburo did not come until 1928, when in view of the grain famine ‘emergency measures’ were instituted by the Politburo, resulting in Stalin’s call for ‘the elimination of the kulaks as a class’. Although in the councils of the Politburo these measures were opposed by Bukharin and his group, it was not until April, 1929, that Stalin openly denounced Bukharin as the leader of the ‘right’ opposition to his policy in the countryside. Soon after, Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky were excluded from the Politburo and other significant posts. Stalin’s ascendancy in the Politburo was now complete, and from this moment he was recognized as the virtual ruler of the Soviet Union – a position consecrated by the unusual demonstrations with which his fiftieth birthday was celebrated in December, 1929. At the very moment of Trotsky’s expulsion Stalin was preparing a powerful swing-over towards industrialization. The first Five-year Plan was launched by him in 1928. Its inevitable concomitant, the collectivization of agriculture, though not seriously taken in hand till 1931, had been on the party agenda since the end of 1927. Throughout this period, though mistakes were made (notably in the estimate of the pace at which collectivization could be carried out), Stalin’s sense of timing was on the whole superb. Few, if any, of the policies which he applied were original to himself; but he was unique in his sense of when to act and when to wait.

In the middle thirties, with industrialization well on the way and collectivization a fait accompli, the Soviet Union may well have seemed to be sailing out into smoother waters. The second Five-year Plan promised an increased output of consumer goods. Stalin’s public pronouncements assumed a more optimistic tone, and he may well have originally conceived the ‘Stalin constitution’, promulgated in 1936, as the crown of his work. Socialism had been achieved; the road to Communism, however distant the goal, lay open; increased material prosperity and broader constitutional liberties were a vision of the immediate future. These expectations, if they were entertained, were not fulfilled. In the middle thirties the Soviet Union entered a new period of storm and stress. The murder of Kirov at the end of 1934 was the symptom or starting-point of a grave internal crisis; and in international affairs Germany regained her power in a form particularly menacing to the Soviet Union. The internal crisis was obscure, the evidence relating to it contentious, and it was dealt with by methods which left a lasting cloud on Stalin’s name. The growing-pains of collective farming, the liquidation of the kulaks, the need – in face of the Nazi menace – to increase the pace of industrialization had all imposed severe strains on the population and bred discontent, sometimes in high places. Stalin decided to strike hard. In the panic which followed old scores were paid off and new grudges indulged, and things probably went a good deal farther than Stalin or anyone else intended at the start.

Treason Trials

In 1935 and 1936 successive trials were held in which all those prominent Bolsheviks who had at one time or another been implicated in ‘Trotskyism’ or other forms of opposition to the regime – Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Bukharin among them – were condemned and shot for self-confessed treason. In 1937 a number of the leading generals were shot on similar charges without public trial. Of the leading Bolsheviks of the first generation hardly any survived except Stalin, Molotov, and Voroshilov. In 1938 the purge was at last stayed. Yagoda, long the head of the gpu and its successor the nkvd, who had been removed from office at the end of 1936, was now himself executed; and Yezhov, his successor, formerly an influential party leader, disappeared from the scene about the same time. Judgment on the purge will depend partly on the amount of credence given to reports and confessions of active treason on the part of the accused; and it has to be admitted that the Soviet polity afterwards survived the almost intolerable strains of war with fewer breaks and fissures than most observers had been prepared to predict. Nevertheless it is certain that the damage done by the purges to Soviet prestige in the west was a fatal handicap to the foreign policy of a common defensive front with the western Powers to which Soviet diplomacy was at that time committed. This was probably the gravest and most disastrous miscalculation of that period.