Stalin: A Biography

Lenin kept to his argument without personalising his critique. Stalin was less inhibited. Like most other leading Bolsheviks, he disliked and distrusted Trotski, and at the same meeting he let his feelings show:³⁰

Comrade Trotski’s position is not a position at all. There’s no revolutionary movement in the West: the facts are non-existent and there’s only potential — and we can’t operate on the basis of mere potential. If the Germans start to attack, it will reinforce the counter-revolution here [in Russia]. Germany will be able to attack since it possesses its own Kornilovite armies, its guard. In October we were talking about our ‘crusade’ because we were told that mere mention of the word ‘peace’ would stir up revolution in the West. But this has proved unjustified.

This was the first blow in a political contest which ended only in August 1940 when Soviet agent Ramón Mercader drove an ice-pick into Trotski’s cranium in Coyoacán in Mexico.

Even so, Stalin’s supportive statement irked Lenin. He objected to the comment that ‘a mass movement’ did not exist in the West, and said that the Bolsheviks would be ‘traitors to international socialism if [they] altered [their] tactics because of this’. Lenin wanted to reassure the advocates of revolutionary war that if ever it looked as if a rupture of peace talks would serve to stir up the German working class to revolution, then ‘we have to sacrifice ourselves since the German revolution in force will be much higher in strength than ours’.³¹ It was not so much that Stalin had said that revolutionary initiatives were impossible in the West. Nor had he claimed this in 1917.³² Yet he was loath to gamble on ‘European socialist revolution’ — and for Lenin this was one compromise too many with the revolutionary strategy he had elaborated in the party before October 1917. These tensions did not much matter at the time. Lenin needed every supporter he could get. Again and again in ensuing days Stalin voted on Lenin’s side.³³ Always his line was that Bolsheviks needed to be practical: they could not beat the Germans militarily and the newly born Soviet state would be crushed unless a separate peace was concluded with the Central Powers.

He was as frantic as Lenin. On 18 February 1918 he protested to the Central Committee: ‘The formal question is superfluous. A statement must be made directly on the essence of the matter; the Germans are attacking, we don’t have the forces; it’s high time to say directly that negotiations have to be resumed!’³⁴ He vividly appreciated the armed might of the enemy: ‘They only need to open their hurricane-like fire for five minutes and we shan’t have a soldier left standing at the front. We must put an end to the nonsense.’³⁵ On 23 February he expostulated: ‘The question stands like this: either the defeat of our revolution and the unravelling of the revolution in Europe or we obtain a breathing space and strengthen ourselves. This is not what’s holding up the revolution in the West. If it’s the case that we lack the means to halt a German attack by armed might, we must use other methods. If Petrograd has to be surrendered, it would not amount to a full surrender or to the rotting away of the Revolution. There’s no way out: either we obtain a breathing space or else it’s the death of the Revolution.’³⁶