Stalin: A Biography

Events in the Russian Empire were about to test his revolutionary mettle. Peasants since the turn of the century had been buffeted by adverse commercial conditions; they also continued to resent the amount of land held by the gentry. Workers demanded higher wages. Among the intelligentsia there was frustration about the refusal of the Emperor and his government to reform the political system. Several non-Russian nationalities — especially the Poles, Finns and Georgians — chafed against their treatment by St Petersburg. Rural unrest was growing. Industrial strikes rose in frequency and intensity. Clandestine political parties and trade unions were being formed. It was in this situation, in 1904, that Nicholas II decided to go to war with Japan. One of his calculations was that a short, victorious war would revive the prestige of the Romanov monarchy. It was a foolish mistake. All too quickly the Russian armed forces found that the Japanese, who had built up their military and industrial capacity in recent years, were more than a match for them.

6. THE PARTY AND THE CAUCASUS

The Imperial monarchy confronted an emergency situation by early 1905. On 9 January there had been a political demonstration in St Petersburg. Its purpose was to present the Emperor with a petition for the granting of general civic rights. The result was a massacre when the security forces were ordered to fire on the demonstrators. Scores of people were killed. Nicholas II was not to blame for the carnage, but across the country he was held responsible. Police and army stood by helplessly as protest meetings were held. Strikes broke out. Poland and Georgia were focal points of unrest. Peasants moved to assert themselves against the landed gentry. The monarch and his ministers, already discredited by the defeats in the unfinished war with Japan, suddenly looked vulnerable. Workers elected their own councils (or ‘soviets’). The armed forces along the Trans-Siberian Railway were in mutinous mood. The efforts of the Okhrana were futile: political parties operated with decreasing fear of arrest, and although their contact with most people had been frail in previous years, they quickly attained popular confidence. This was a trial of strength with the Romanov regime unprecedented since the Pugachëv revolt of 1773–5.

For the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party the surprise was as great as it was for every other political group. Lenin in Switzerland was taken aback; so too were his followers in St Petersburg and the rest of the Russian Empire. Yet most émigrés were cautious about returning until after Nicholas II issued his October Manifesto promising reforms. In the meantime the revolutionary militants were left to their own devices. The Bolsheviks held a self-styled Third Party Congress in London in April 1905 and fixed their general strategy. They aimed at armed uprising and the formation of a provisional revolutionary dictatorship. They aspired to the total expropriation of land belonging to the monarchy, Church and gentry.

Dzhughashvili was not among the Georgian participants: he had not yet allayed the doubts about him among Bolsheviks. It was his friend and senior comrade Mikha Tskhakaya who headed the country’s group, and Tskhakaya did not fail to criticise the growing cult of Lenin in the Bolshevik faction. There was a practical aspect to this. Many Congress delegates, objecting to Lenin’s reluctance to shift the Central Committee’s base to Russia, thought the émigrés had become too comfortable abroad; and they succeeded in getting a commitment to such a transfer. Dzhughashvili, back in Georgia, was among those who argued that, if revolution was to succeed, maximum resources had to be concentrated in the Russian Empire. He had been coming back into his own before the revolutionary outbreaks. He travelled to Baku and Kutaisi before basing himself in Tbilisi. He published articles in the recently founded Proletarians Brdzola (‘Proletarian Struggle’), including one on the national question which stayed within official Bolshevik lines. He wrote to the Bolsheviks in emigration. When strikes and demonstrations were held after Bloody Sunday on 9 January 1905, he threw himself into a frenzy of writing and organising — and he was a leader of the Bolshevik Tiflis Committee whose policy of armed uprising separated them definitively from the city’s Mensheviks. Sometimes this involved him in open disputations about the respective merits of Bolshevism and Menshevism; on other occasions he put the general Marxist case against the party’s local rivals: the Anarchists, the Social-Federalists and the Socialist-Revolutionaries. Everywhere he went in the Georgian capital he was in the thick of things.