Stalin: A Biography

Bolsheviks had always talked casually about terror and its uses for a revolutionary administration. Yet until power had come into their hands it was unclear how keenly they would resort to it. If there were any doubts about this, Lenin and Trotski quickly dispelled them in the weeks after they overthrew the Provisional Government. Lenin established an Extraordinary Commission for the Struggle with Counter-revolution and Sabotage (Cheka in its Russian acronym) — and he ensured that it would remain beyond regular supervision by Sovnarkom. In subsequent years he supported nearly all pleas by Felix Dzierżyń ski and other Cheka leaders for permission to expand the application of methods of state terror. Not every Bolshevik leader approved this development. Kamenev on the right and Bukharin on the left of the ascendant party leadership urged that violence should be deployed on a more predictable basis and should be reduced in scope. Stalin was never one of these. Terror attracted him like a bee to a perfumed flower. Not once had he offered an opinion on the matter before the October 1917 Revolution, yet his preference for arbitrary state violence was speedily evident. When Bolsheviks in Estonia telegraphed him about eradicating ‘counterrevolutionaries and traitors’, he replied with hot approval: ‘The idea of a concentration camp is excellent.’²⁸

State terrorism had already been installed as a permanent item in his mental furniture. It appealed to his coarse personality. But the attraction was not just psychological; it was also based on observation and ideology. Stalin and other Bolsheviks had grown up in an age when the world’s great powers had used terror against the people they conquered; and even when terror was excluded as a method, these powers had had no scruples about waging wars at huge cost in human lives. By such means they had spread a superior economic system around the world. This system had been defended by the application of harsh authority. Colonial peoples had suffered. The working classes of the imperial powers themselves were exploited and oppressed. The Great War had impoverished the many while enriching the few. The point for Stalin was that violence was an effective weapon for capitalism and had to be adopted by the Soviet revolutionary state for its own purposes. Coming to power in Russia, the Bolsheviks had to be realistic. The Bolshevik leadership believed that the Paris Commune of 1871 had failed for want of ruthlessness. Bolsheviks would not repeat the mistake. Even if they had expected their revolution to be easier than it turned out to be, they had always been willing to meet fire with fire. Stalin needed no one to persuade him about this.

Yet it was in foreign policy that Lenin most appreciated Stalin. Lenin and Trotski around the turn of the New Year understood that they lacked the armed forces to carry socialism into central Europe by ‘revolutionary war’. Yet whereas Trotski wished to stick by the party’s commitment to revolutionary war, Lenin concluded that policy ought to be changed. When Germany and Austria–Hungary delivered ultimatums to Sovnarkom, Lenin urged the Bolshevik Central Committee to sign a separate peace. Most Central Committee members — as well as the entire Left Socialist-Revolutionary Party — rejected his argument that the priority should be the preservation of the Soviet state. For them, a separate peace would involve the betrayal of internationalist ideals. Better to go down fighting for European socialist revolution than to collude with the robber-capitalist governments of the Central Powers.

Stalin had always been sceptical about the prognosis of imminent revolutions in the rest of Europe and the failure of the proletariats elsewhere in Europe to rise against their governments did not surprise him. The propensity for strategic and tactical compromise he had always shown in internal party affairs was now applied to the policy of the revolutionary state. If the Central Powers could not be overthrown by revolution or defeated in war, the sensible alternative was to sign a peace with them. This was in fact already the opinion of Lenin, whose reputation for compromise in the party’s internal quarrels was slighter than Stalin’s but who had always insisted on the need for flexibility of manoeuvre in the wider field of politics. Sverdlov, Kamenev, Zinoviev and a few others in the Central Committee stood shoulder to shoulder with Lenin. But the voting in the Central Committee was heavily against them at the preliminary discussion on 11 January 1918. Trotski won the day by arguing for a policy based on the following formula: ‘We’re stopping the war, we aren’t concluding peace, we’re demobilising the army.’ This, he suggested, had the merit of avoiding an intolerable compromise with the forces of international imperialism.²⁹