Stalin: A Biography

The decree announcing his appointment as People’s Commissar for Nationalities’ Affairs gave his surname as Dzughashvili-Stalin. The publicity gratified a man as yet unknown to most citizens. Lenin and Trotski were the outstanding figures in Sovnarkom and the Bolshevik Central Committee; Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin and Lunacharski were also famous. Despite his newly achieved prominence, however, Stalin continued to work in the shadow of the other leaders. Fëdor Alliluev, who was his first personal assistant, was to recall:¹

In those days comrade Stalin was genuinely known only to the small circle of people who had come across him in work in the political underground or had succeeded — after October [1917] — in distinguishing real work and real devotion to the cause from chatter, noise, meaningless babble and self-advertisement.

Stalin acknowledged that others had gained greater acclaim between the February and October Revolutions. He admitted he was not much of an orator. But he turned this into a scalpel to cut his rivals. In his estimation, he did not boast or show off but concentrated on practical deeds.² But Stalin liked to say such things about himself rather than hear them from other people, and Fëdor’s writing was consigned to the archives unpublished.

Stalin needed his cunning. His institution not only lacked personnel: it did not even have finance or its own offices. Its staff had to work from rooms in the Smolny Institute for want of anything more spacious. Funds remained short because all the bank workers were on strike. Stalin sent his deputy Stanisław Pestkowski to plead for a subvention from Trotski, who had got hold of the banknotes from the main safe at the former Ministry of Foreign Affairs. When Stalin and Pestkowski at last sequestered a suitable building, they pinned a crude notice on the wall to claim it for the People’s Commissariat of Nationalities’ Affairs.³

Things were no better after the Soviet government transferred itself to Moscow in March 1918 in order to move out of the range of Germany’s immediate military menace. Offices were assigned to the People’s Commissariat in two separate buildings on different streets despite Stalin’s protest. He resorted to the desperate measure of commandeering the Great Siberian Hotel on Zlatoustinskaya Street. But the Supreme Council of the People’s Economy, headed by Nikolai Osinski, had beaten him to it. Stalin and Pestkowski did not take this lying down. They tore down Osinski’s notice and put up their own. Lighting matches to find their way, they entered the building from the back. But Osinski complained to Sovnarkom and Stalin had to move out. ‘This was one of the few cases,’ Pestkowski recalled, ‘when Stalin suffered defeat.’⁴ It was even difficult to gather personnel. Most Bolshevik militants wanted nothing to do with a body whose brief involved concessions to national sensitivities — even Pestkowski disliked being attached to it.⁵ Stalin relied increasingly on the Alliluev family and asked Fëdor’s younger sister Nadya to work as his secretary.⁶ One day she was a schoolgirl bored with lessons at the gimnazia,⁷ the next she was an employee of the revolutionary government.

The vagueness of party policy remained troublesome. Although Bolshevik objectives had been declared, detailed measures had never been formulated. Stalin was left to sort out the detailed implementation of policy on the national question on his own. His great asset in this task was that he enjoyed Lenin’s trust. When Lenin went off on vacation to Finland at the end of 1917, the government’s dealings with the Ukrainian regional authority — the Rada — were tense in the extreme. General Kaledin was assembling and training a counter-revolutionary force in south Russia. The situation in the south Caucasus was boiling up. Revolutionary stirrings in Estonia needed attention. Some Bolshevik leaders rose to the level of the duties assigned to them in Sovnarkom; others could not cope or messed up their jobs. Stalin thrived on his responsibilities.