Stalin: A Biography

A contrast also existed between Stalin and Trotski in their basic attitude to Bolshevism. Trotski, who had joined the Bolsheviks late in his career, paid little attention to the party. Stalin pondered much on the party’s place in the Soviet state. He took a copy of the second edition of Lenin’s The State and Revolution around with him in the Civil War. This book says nothing about the communist party in the transition to socialism. Stalin was aware of this lacuna. Making notes in the margins, he asked himself: ‘Can the party seize power against the will of the proletariat? No, it cannot and must not.’³³ He added: ‘The proletariat cannot attain its dictatorship without a vanguard, without a party as the only [party].’³⁴ Lenin had said no such thing in The State and Revolution. But Stalin, like Lenin, had modified and developed his ideas since October 1917. The party had become the supreme institution of state. Stalin was among the many Bolsheviks who sought to incorporate this into communist doctrine. The theory had been that the proletariat would run its own socialist state. Stalin’s unease was reflected in his comment that ‘the party cannot simply replace the dictatorship of the proletariat’.³⁵

In the Civil War, however, he lacked the time to write pamphlets; and not one of his articles for Pravda had the range of those composed by Lenin, Trotski, Zinoviev and Bukharin. But he went on thinking about large subjects. Party policy on the national question was prominent among them. Another was the institutional framework of the Soviet state. The report he wrote in January 1919 with Dzierżyński on a military disaster at Perm was a disquisition on the chaotic relations within and among the armed forces, the party and the government. Their recommendations had an influence on the decisions taken to establish the party as the supreme agency of the state and to regularise the lines of command from the party to all public institutions.³⁶ Only the fact that Stalin’s later propagandists made exaggerated claims for the report has induced historians to overlook its importance. In truth he was a reflective and decisive political operator and Lenin appreciated him for this.

This was the trip on which Stalin became friends with Dzierżyński’s personal assistant Stanisław Redens. Nadya accompanied Stalin to Perm, and soon Redens had fallen in love with her elder sister Anna and married her. Redens became a leading figure in the Cheka.³⁷ Personal, political and military life was intertwined for Bolsheviks in the Civil War and Stalin was no exception. His recent marriage had no impact on his public activities; he spent the Civil War mainly on or near the fighting fronts. Recalled to Moscow in October 1918, he resumed his work in the Party Central Committee and Sovnarkom. But by December he was off again. The White Army of Admiral Kolchak had swept into the Urals city of Perm and destroyed the Red Army units there. Stalin and Dzierżyński were sent to conduct an enquiry into the reasons for the military disaster. They returned and made their report at the end of January 1919. Stalin stayed in Moscow again until being dispatched in May to Petrograd and the Western Front against the invasion by General Yudenich from Estonia. In July he moved on to a different sector of the same front at Smolensk. In September he was transferred to the Southern Front, where he stayed into 1920.³⁸

Stalin was a law unto himself. When transferred to Petrograd on the Western Front in mid-1919, he showed macabre inventiveness in dealing with disorder and disobedience. The Red Army on the Western Front entirely failed to impress him. Almost as soon as he arrived, the Third Regiment went over to the Whites. Stalin was merciless. On 30 May he telegraphed Lenin from the Smolny Institute that he was rounding up the renegades and deserters, charging them collectively with state treason and making their execution by firing squads into a public spectacle. Now that everyone saw the consequences of betrayal, he argued, acts of treachery had been reduced.³⁹ Not everyone enthused about Stalin’s intervention. Alexei Okulov, transferred to the Western Front after exposing Stalin’s misdeeds in Tsaritsyn, put a spoke in his wheel yet again. Stalin telegraphed angrily on 4 June demanding that Lenin should choose between Okulov and himself. Existing conditions, he ranted, were ‘senseless’; he threatened to leave Petrograd if his ultimatum was not complied with.⁴⁰