Stalin: A Biography

The point is that Trotski, generally speaking, cannot get by without noisy gestures. At Brest[-Litovsk] he delivered a blow to the cause by his incredibly ‘leftist’ gesturing. On the question of the Czechoslovaks he similarly harmed the common cause by his gesturing with noisy diplomacy in the month of May. Now he delivers a further blow by his gesturing about discipline, and yet all this Trotskyist discipline amounts in reality to the most prominent leaders on the war front peering up the backside of military specialists from the camp of ‘non-party’ counter-revolutionaries…

Stalin reminded Lenin that Trotski had an anti-Bolshevik past; his resentment of the haughty political interloper was unmistakable. Trotski in his view was not to be trusted.

Stalin called for stern measures:

Therefore I ask you in due time, while it’s still not too late, to remove Trotski and put him in a fixed frame since I’m afraid that Trotski’s unhinged commands, if they are repeated… will create dissension between the army and the command staff and will totally destroy the front…

I’m not a lover of clamour and scandal but feel that if we don’t immediately produce the reins to put a constraint on Trotski, he’ll ruin our whole army in favour of ‘leftist’ and ‘Red’ discipline which will sicken even the most disciplined comrades.

This analysis commended itself to leading Bolsheviks who knew the history of the French Revolution. A military leader, Napoleon Bonaparte, had seized power and rejected much of the social radicalism introduced by Maximilien Robespierre. Trotski seemed the likeliest military candidate for such a role in the drama of Russia’s October Revolution. There was acute annoyance among party members about his insistence on employing former Imperial Army officers. Trotski was also reviled for shooting political commissars for disobedience or cowardice. An informal Military Opposition began to coalesce against him in late 1918.

Yet Trotski had grounds to be horrified by events in Tsaritsyn. Lenin began to take his side. Stalin was a law unto himself on the Southern Front. It was not always a law shared by the official party leadership. Lenin insisted that if the Civil War was to be won, the average Russian peasant (and not just the poorest of them) had to be won over to the side of the Reds. Persuasion rather than violence had to be the priority. Lenin’s declarations were riddled with contradiction. He had set up the hugely unpopular ‘committees of the rural poor’ in order to introduce ‘class struggle’ to the countryside and had also conscripted peasants and expropriated grain by means of armed urban squads. But certainly at the same time he was minded to win support among the mass of the peasantry.

Stalin was less ambiguous than Lenin. Might, for him, was right, effective and economical of resources. He put villages to the torch to intimidate neighbouring ones to obey the demands of the Reds. Terror was undertaken against the very peasants who were being depicted in official propaganda as one of the twin pillars of the Soviet state. Stalin treated the Cossacks in particular as enemies. The term de-Cossackisation was in currency.²² Stalin wrote in a letter to his old Bolshevik rival Stepan Shaumyan:²³

In relation to the Dagestani and other bands which obstruct the movements of trains from the North Caucasus, you must be absolutely merciless. A number of their villages should be set on fire and burned to the ground so as to teach them not to make raids on trains.