Stalin: A Biography

His military activity was centred in the Revolutionary-Military Councils attached to the various fronts, and from 1919 he joined them as the Party Central Committee’s appointee. His kind of fighting involved giving orders: he was never directly involved in physical violence. His inexperience was total and nobody has been able to find evidence that he looked at books on warfare⁴¹ (whereas Lenin had studied Clausewitz, and Trotski had reported the Balkan wars before 1914 as a newspaper correspondent). But he was madly eager to prove himself as a commander. The Central Committee recognised his worth by its successive use of him on the Southern Front, the Western Front, again the Southern Front, the South-Western Front and the Caucasian Front. Qualities which earned him praise were his decisiveness, determination, energy and willingness to take responsibility for critical and unpredictable situations.

There was a price to pay. Stalin hated to operate in a team unless he was its leader. There was only one fellow communist to whom he would defer and that was Lenin. Even Lenin found him a handful. Stalin was vainglorious and extremely touchy. He detested Trotski. He hated the entire Imperial officer elite. He had an almost pathetic need to feel appreciated, and at the drop of his Red Army peaked cap he would announce his resignation. Such was his egotism that he was willing to disregard orders even if they came from the Central Committee or its inner subcommittees. He was capricious in the extreme. Once determined upon a course of action, he steered as he pleased. He wasted an inordinate amount of the Central Committee’s time with his demands for commanders to be sacked and for strategy and tactics to be altered. His application of repressive measures to the social groups hostile to the Soviet state was excessive even by the standards of the communist leadership in wartime Russia; and, still more than Trotski, he had a tendency to regard anyone who failed to show him respect as an enemy of the people.

The conventional image of Stalin’s ascent to supreme power does not convince. He did not really spend most of his time in offices in the Civil War period and consolidate his position as the pre-eminent bureaucrat of the Soviet state. Certainly he held membership of the Party Central Committee; he was also People’s Commissar for Nationalities’ Affairs. In neither role were his responsibilities restricted to mere administration. As the complications of public affairs increased, he was given further high postings. He chaired the commission drafting the RSFSR Constitution. He became the leading political commissar on a succession of military fronts in 1918–19. He was regularly involved in decisions on relations with Britain, Germany, Turkey and other powers; and he dealt with plans for the establishment of new Soviet republics in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. He conducted the enquiry into the Red Army’s collapse at Perm. When the Party Central Committee set up its own inner subcommittees in 1919, he was chosen for both the Political Bureau (Politburo) and the Organisational Bureau (Orgburo). He was asked to head the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate at its creation in February 1920.

Far from fitting the bureaucratic stereotype, he was a dynamic leader who had a hand in nearly all the principal discussions on politics, military strategy, economics, security and international relations. Lenin phoned or telegraphed Politburo members whenever a controversial matter was in the air.⁴² There were few corners of high public affairs where Stalin’s influence was unknown; and the Politburo frequently turned to him when a sudden emergency arose. The other great leaders — Lenin, Trotski, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Sverdlov, Dzierżyński and Bukharin — had settled jobs that they held for the duration of the Civil War and beyond. In most cases these jobs involved making public appearances — and Trotski in the Red Army did this with relish and to huge acclaim. There was also prestige for the prominent leaders of the October 1917 seizure of power: Lenin, Trotski and Sverdlov were examples. Since the Bolsheviks were led by doctrinaires, prestige also accrued to those who wrote fluently and often. Lenin, Trotski, Kamenev, Zinoviev and Bukharin continued to publish books in the Civil War. Stalin could not compete in these arenas. He was always on the move. He was a poor orator in any formal sense and had little opportunity to write.