Stalin: A Biography

The travellers from Moscow, after many halts on the way, reached their destination on 6 June.² Tsaritsyn, later called Stalingrad and now — ever since Khrushchëv’s posthumous denunciation of Stalin — Volgograd, was one of the cities on the River Volga built in the late seventeenth century as Cossack outposts. In most ways it was an unremarkable place. It was not even a provincial capital but was subject to the administrative authorities in Saratov. Yet geographically and economically Tsaritsyn was of strategic importance. The city handled regional trade in grain, timber and livestock. It was also a vital entrepôt. Situated at the first great angle of the Volga for ships heading upriver towards central Russia from the Caspian Sea, Tsaritsyn had been a great staging post since its foundation. The construction of rail links increased its significance. A main line ran directly south from Moscow to Rostov-on-Don and a branch was built from Kozlov down to Tsaritsyn and on to Astrakhan on the Caspian coast. Tracks had also been laid from Tsaritsyn west to Rostov-on-Don and south-east to Tikhoretskaya junction and the mountains of the north Caucasus. Control over Tsaritsyn and its environs would enable Sovnarkom to gain food supplies over a vast area.

Sovnarkom’s brief to Stalin was to improve the supply of grain. He had been preceded to Tsaritsyn by Andrei Snesarev, a former Imperial Army general who had enlisted with the Reds. The functions of Stalin and Snesarev were meant to complement each other. The combined application of political and military muscle was thought the best method of securing bread for Moscow and Petrograd.³

Sovnarkom had misjudged its People’s Commissar. Stalin interpreted his duties in grain procurement, which relied on the use of the Red Army, as entitling him to impose himself over all the military commanders in the region. Rejection for service as a private in the Imperial Army had not made him diffident about taking charge of the North Caucasus Front. A month later he informed Lenin:⁴

The food-supplies question is naturally entwined with the military question. For the good of the cause I need full military powers. I’ve already written about this and received no answer. Very well, then. In this case I myself without formalities will overthrow those commanders and commissars who are ruining the cause. That’s how I’m being nudged by the interests of the cause and of course the absence of a scrap of paper from Trotski won’t stop me.

Stalin was greedily seizing his opportunity. His renown in Moscow came nowhere near to matching that of his most eminent comrades in Sovnarkom and the Party Central Committee. This was a situation for him to prove his mettle militarily and politically. He was determined to rise to the challenge.

There were several threats to the Bolsheviks across the Soviet republic by the middle of 1918. A Russian ‘Volunteer Army’ was being trained in Novocherkassk. It was led by Generals Alexeev and Kornilov, who had escaped from Petrograd and planned to march on Moscow. The Volunteer Army was the first of the self-styled White armies which objected to socialism and internationalism and sought the restoration of the pre-1917 social order through the military destruction of the Reds. In September, another armed force under the Socialist-Revolutionaries had been forced out of Kazan — seven hundred miles to the north of Tsaritsyn — by the Red Army. Trotski’s reorganised system of command and recruitment was already proving effective. Yet the regiments of the Socialist-Revolutionaries had not been crushed. Retreating to the Urals, they regrouped and were joined by officers of the type being gathered by Alexeev and Kornilov in the south. In November a coup took place in Omsk, and Admiral Kolchak got rid of the Socialist-Revolutionaries and reorganised the army on his own terms. These armies denounced Bolshevism as a betrayal of Mother Russia. Cossacks led by General Krasnov were attacking the Bolsheviks and their sympathisers in the area south of Tsaritsyn. They were well equipped and had high morale; they detested Lenin’s Sovnarkom for its socialism, atheism and hostility to national traditions. Stalin’s assignment had put him in personal danger — and he and his Alliluev companions were never unaware of the risks.⁵