Stalin and Stalinism

Alan Wood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134398058
• Subtopic: 20th Century History

The second edition of a best-selling pamphlet, Stalin and Stalinism has been fully updated to take in new debates and controversies which have emerged since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Considering the ways in which Stalin's legacy still affects attitudes in and towards post-Soviet Russia, Stalin and Stalinism examines Stalin's ambiguous personal and political legacy, his achievements, and his crimes - all now the subject of major reappraisal both in the West and in the former Soviet Union.

Joseph Stalin's twenty-five-year dictatorship is without doubt one of the most controversial periods in the history of the Soviet Union, and it is brought to life here for all students of European history and politics.

1
The historical setting

Background

The internal social and economic conditions, the oppressive political system, the national tensions and the class conflicts within the Russian Empire which led to the revolution of 1917 have been described elsewhere in this series.* However, it is worth recalling some of the salient features of the tsarist social and political order into which Joseph Stalin was born and in which he served his revolutionary apprenticeship.

At the end of the nineteenth century, the Russian Empire was the largest continuous land-empire in the world, covering approximately one-sixth of the earth’s land surface. In 1897 it contained a population of over 125 million people, of which only two-fifths were Russian. The other 60 per cent was made up of a multinational, multilingual and multireligious conglomeration of Slavs, Jews, Balts, Finns, Georgians, Armenians, Azeris, Turkic-speaking Muslim peoples of Central Asia, and a whole patchwork of aboriginal ethnic groups and tribes in Siberia and the Far East. Many of them suffered from various forms of racial discrimination and religious persecution and actively struggled to liberate themselves from Russian imperialism. Stalin, himself a non-Russian, made the nationalities problem of the Russian Empire one of his special areas of expertise, and it was in fact as People’s Commissar for Nationalities that he made his political debut in the very first Soviet government.

From 1894 to 1917, this empire was ruled over by Tsar Nicholas II, the last representative of the Romanov dynasty, which had governed Russia for the past three centuries as absolute autocrats. Until as late as 1906 the country had neither parliamentary institutions nor legal political parties through which the will, or even the grievances, of the people could be expressed. Members of the government were appointed by the emperor and were directly responsible to his person; he consequently had the power to hire and fire them at will. There were no constitutional constraints on the tsar’s authority and even the Fundamental Laws of the Russian Empire, which were promulgated after the revolutionary upheavals of 1905, stated unequivocally that the God-given supreme power lay with the Sovereign Autocrat. Russia therefore had a long and deeply ingrained tradition of political subservience to a single, all-powerful ruler. Many historians consider that this autocratic tradition, which in some ways Stalin inherited, had its roots in the imperial power-structure of the Byzantine Empire, from which Russia adopted its Orthodox Christianity, and in the ‘oriental despotism’ of the Mongol khans who occupied Russia in the early middle ages.

The overwhelming majority of Nicholas’s subjects (over 80 per cent) were peasants, with only 13 per cent of the population living in towns or cities. Despite a remarkable burst of industrial growth at the turn of the century, Russia was still therefore an unmistakably agrarian society. Most of the peasants lived in village communes which closely regulated their activities and in many areas periodically redistributed land allotments among the peasant households. This redistributional system of land tenure and usage, combined with primitive farming techniques and a rapidly expanding rural population, led to agricultural underproduction, land hunger and occasional famine. The emancipation of the peasantry from serfdom in 1861 had miserably failed to solve the country’s agrarian problems, and in the early years of the twentieth century there was a recrudescence of peasant violence that finally forced the government to introduce a new series of reforms in the village economy. The reforms were, however, ‘too little and too late’ and the rebellious peasantry continued to be a major thorn in the government’s flesh before, during and until well after the 1917 Revolution. Stalin was later to tackle the peasant problem in his own inimical and inimitable manner, with devastating consequences.

Stalin’s great rival, Lev Davidovich Trotsky (1879–1940), described the Russian peasantry as ‘the subsoil of the Revolution’. The topsoil was provided by the industrial working class, or proletariat. Although only small in numbers compared with the peasants, the Russian workers had developed in a remarkably short period of time into a highly militant and class-conscious force in both economic and political terms. This was vividly demonstrated by the general strike of October 1905, which paralysed the country’s economy and administration, and by the formation of the St Petersburg Soviet (Council) of workers’ deputies, a kind of popular parliament that commanded the loyalty of the capital’s workers in defiance of the bewildered government during the nationwide disorders of that year. The radicalization of the working class was partly a consequence of the appalling conditions in which they lived and worked, and partly a result of the propaganda and organization of Marxist revolutionary activists who welcomed the development of capitalist relationships in the Russian economy and looked beyond the overthrow of tsarism by a ‘bourgeois-democratic revolution’ to the time when the working class would rise and destroy capitalism and the bourgeois state in the inevitable ‘proletarian-socialist revolution’.

In 1903 a newly formed underground revolutionary party, the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (RSDRP), had split into two mutually antagonistic factions known as the Bolsheviks (‘majority-ites’) and the Mensheviks (‘minority-ites’). The Bolsheviks were led by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870–1924), who in a pamphlet written in 1902, entitled What’s to be Done?, had argued for a disciplined, centralized party organization of professional revolutionaries that would form the leadership – the ‘vanguard’ – of the proletariat in the socialist revolution. The Mensheviks, headed by Yulii Osipovich Martov (1873–1923), were in favour of a broader, mass party and generally held more moderate views on most practical and ideological issues than Lenin’s hard-line Bolsheviks. It was of course the Bolsheviks who were to seize political power in the name of the workers’ soviets in October 1917, and it was this party’s bureaucratic machinery which was later to serve as the vehicle for Stalin’s political ambition in his seemingly inexorable rise to supreme power during the 1920s.

That process is examined in Chapter 3.

Revolution

The many conflicts and contradictions at work within the tsarist social and political structure were placed under intolerable strain as a result of Russia’s entry into the First World War in August 1914. The short-lived jingoistic euphoria that initially greeted the declaration of hostilities rapidly gave way to a mood of frustration, despair and anger at the government’s bungling mismanagement of the military and civilian war effort. Millions were conscripted and marched into the trenches of Eastern Europe with only a rudimentary training and often with inadequate weapons and ammunition. At the front, whole armies of these ‘peasants in uniform’ were defeated, decimated or taken as prisoners of war by the superior German and Austrian forces. In the rear, the unpopularity of the tsar and his government was exacerbated by Nicholas’s foolish decision to take over personal command of the Russian army, and by the public scandal caused by the royal family’s involvement in the sordid Rasputin affair. Members of the elected national assembly, the State Duma, called on the emperor to dismiss his incompetent ministers and replace them with a government that would enjoy the confidence of the people. Secret-police reports reinforced the politicians’ fears with daily information of violent incidents on the streets and prophetic warnings about the increasingly revolutionary temper of the masses. Nicholas, however, paid no heed as the chorus of popular disaffection and war-weariness reached a dramatic crescendo in the early weeks of 1917.

At the end of February, striking workers, demonstrating women and mutinous soldiers held the capital in their grip and the authorities seemed powerless to re-establish order and control. The tsar, foiled by railway workers from returning to Petrograd (as St Petersburg had now been renamed) from army headquarters and faced with increasing pressure from his senior military advisers to step down, finally bowed to the inevitable and abdicated the throne in favour of his brother, Grand Duke Michael. Michael refused, and the three-hundred-year rule of the Romanov tsars was at a sudden end. The political vacuum created by the collapse of the autocracy was quickly, though confusingly, filled by the creation of two independent organs of authority, the self-styled Provisional Government, composed of moderate Duma politicians, and the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, which represented the interests of the revolutionary workers and troops of the capital. Similar soviets were soon established throughout the country, replacing in a somewhat anarchical fashion the now defunct authority of the imperial administration. This situation was later described by Lenin as one of ‘dual power’.

The socialist parties, including both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, naturally welcomed the collapse of tsarism as the predicted ‘bourgeois-democratic revolution’, and although their attitude to the relationship between the Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet was somewhat equivocal, none of the parties’ leaders was yet thinking seriously about the possibility of a ‘proletarian-socialist revolution’ in the immediate future. Stalin was one of the first senior Bolsheviks to return to Petrograd from exile after the February Revolution, but it was really the arrival of Lenin on 3 April that introduced a new and ultimately decisive factor into the highly volatile political atmosphere. The Bolshevik leader announced that there should be no collaboration with the bourgeois government, no reunification of the Bolshevik and Menshevik parties, and no further participation by Russia in the imperialist war. He characterized the current situation as a period of transition from the bourgeois-democratic to the proletarian-socialist phase of the revolutionary process and called on the party to prepare the masses for an armed insurrection that would transfer ‘all power to the soviets’. From early April, therefore, barely one month after the collapse of the Romanov autocracy, a workers’ revolution, led by the Bolsheviks in the name of the Soviets, was squarely in Lenin’s sights. His April Theses, as Lenin’s proposals came to be called, were initially repudiated by other leading Bolsheviks, including Stalin, as not only premature, but even preposterous, but eventually became accepted as the Party’s ‘order of the day’.

It was not, however, for another six months that circumstances were deemed to be sufficiently favourable to put that order into effect. Only in September, after the collapse of two provisional governments, continuing military disasters at the front, an abortive right-wing coup led by the army’s commander-in-chief, widespread peasant disorders, and a renewed upswing in Bolshevik support and membership in the Petrograd Soviet, did Lenin decide to strike. Lev Trotsky had joined the Bolsheviks in August and was now chairman of both the Soviet and its Military Revolutionary Committee, which controlled the garrison’s troops. On the night of 24–25 October platoons of armed workers, soldiers and sailors under the command of the Military Revolutionary Committee took over key installations in the capital.

On the following night they attacked the Winter Palace and arrested the members of the last provisional government. The insurrection was later announced at a meeting of the second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, which was then in overnight session; and, following the withdrawal of Mensheviks and the peasant-based Socialist Revolutionary Party delegates, the now Bolshevik-dominated congress voted into office a new revolutionary government called the Council of People’s Commissars, or Sovnarkom. Lenin was its chairman, and included in its initial membership with the brand new portfolio of nationalities policy was his loyal lieutenant, Joseph Stalin.

Four more years of bloody civil war were to elapse before the Red Army’s victory over the counter-revolutionary Whites and the interventionist forces of their foreign backers finally established Soviet power throughout most of the old Russian Empire. Another year later, in 1922, Stalin was elected to the party office, which he would use to make that empire his own. But how was it that this little-known revolutionary from Georgia came to be appointed General Secretary of the All-Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks)?

* Alan Wood, The Origins of the Russian Revolution 1861–1917, Lancaster Pamphlets, Routledge, London, 3rd edn, 2003.

2
The underground revolutionary

Schooling

Lying just beyond the spectacular Caucasus Mountains on the broad isthmus between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, the ancient Orthodox Christian kingdom of Georgia had been absorbed into the Russian Empire in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Russian tutelage was initially welcomed as it afforded the Georgian people a measure of protection from their traditional Muslim enemies, Persia and the Ottoman Empire. As the nineteenth century progressed, the Russian colonial administration introduced a process of gradual industrialization, economic modernization, education and urbanization that stimulated the growth of a vigorous nationalist movement among the Georgian intelligentsia. The fact that most native Georgians were at the bottom of the social heap, while Armenians and Russians dominated respectively the commercial middle classes and the governing bureaucracy, meant that nationalist sentiments were closely bound up with social divisions and class-consciousness. Socialism and nationalism were therefore natural allies in the struggle against the Russian imperial regime. For this reason many young Georgian radicals, as well as Jews and Poles, came to play a leading role in the all-Russian Marxist revolutionary movement in the early years of the twentieth century, and it was out of their ranks that Stalin was to emerge as one of the most powerful dictators of that century. His future eminence, however, was belied by his obscure origins.

He was born Iosif Vissarionovich Djugashvili on 9 December 1879 in the small town of Gori, about sixty kilometres west of the Georgian capital, Tiflis, now known as Tbilisi. He spent his infancy with his impoverished parents in a ramshackle hovel that also served as his shoemaker father’s workshop. Many years later the place of his humble nativity was to be refurbished, immured within a magnificent, marble-colonnaded pavilion, and turned into a national shrine. Very little of any significance is known about his early childhood and it was therefore in all probability totally unremarkable. We know that he was a generally robust, intelligent and devout young boy, though short in stature and facially scarred by the pit-marks of an early smallpox attack. He was also slightly lame in his left arm, though sources vary as to the cause. His father was something of a drunkard and in 1884 he left his failed cobbler’s business to find employment as a worker in a Tiflis shoe factory. Stalin could therefore claim both artisanal and proletarian parentage. Rather than following his father’s footsteps into the shoe trade, little Joseph (‘Soso’) was very fortunate, as the child of near-paupers, to be enrolled at the local elementary school run by the Orthodox Church. By all accounts he was a bright, diligent pupil and eventually completed his course with sufficient distinction for his teachers to recommend his matriculation into the Tiflis Orthodox Theological Seminary, one of the foremost higher-educations institutions in the whole Transcaucasian region.

The move to the capital (in 1894) was to be a momentous step for the young Djugashvili. In the absence of any university in the area, the Tiflis Seminary attracted many of the most intelligent and independent-minded youth of Georgia into its austere surroundings, where a highly rigorous, if naturally heavily ecclesiastical, education was to be acquired. Tiflis was also then the centre of Georgian intellectual unrest, where narrow national dissidence jostled with a growing awareness of more cosmopolitan radical philosophies through the medium of the Russian language. As part of the St Petersburg government’s heavy-handed campaign of ‘Russification’, restrictions on the use of native languages in the non-Russian borderlands and the compulsory use of Russian in many schools and official institutions were widespread. While the authorities hoped that this would result in a greater degree of cultural, intellectual and political conformity, it also had the unlooked-for consequence of making available to a wider readership not only the works of Russian authors, but also Russian translations of the artistic, scientific, secular and subversive literature of the West. Although such books were banned to the seminarists, it was through his illicit reading of proscribed texts from the city library that the future Stalin first came into conflict with the seminary authorities. A series of punishments failed to dampen his intellectual curiosity and served only to reinforce the spirit of rebelliousness and anti-authoritarianism now growing inside him. The combination of resentment at his personal treatment and the actual contents of the forbidden literature gradually caused him to question not only the authority of the monks and priests who taught him, but also the very religious principles on which their teaching was based. Exactly when Djugashvili abandoned his faith in Christianity is as unclear as the precise timing of his espousal of revolutionary Marxism as his new, alternative orthodoxy, but it was certainly some time during his five years at the Tiflis Seminary, from which he was duly expelled in May 1899.

The official reason for his expulsion was not the dissemination of Marxist propaganda, as he was later to maintain; but obviously his deteriorating conduct and academic performance were not unlinked to his increasing involvement in illegal political activities among the capital’s radical intelligentsia and working class. His experience at the seminary was not, however, wasted. Throughout his life the former theological seminarist can be detected in his rigid dogmatism, his rhetorical and literary style, his capacity for diligent and repetitive work, and also in his duplicity and deceitfulness – first developed in his relations with the seminary authorities and later to became one of the hallmarks of his political style. So Djugashvili’s formal education was now over; his political education in the revolutionary underground was just about to begin.

Struggle

In 1898 the first, founding congress of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party was held in the town of Minsk in Belorussia. Only a handful of delegates attended and it achieved almost nothing in concrete results. It was, however, one of the first, hesitant steps of the infant party, which was soon to grow into such a potent force in Russian history. In the same year Djugashvili joined a small social-democratic organization in Tiflis called Messame Dassy (‘The Third Group’). Of course the 19-year-old seminary student had only a rudimentary knowledge of Marxist philosophy, and his receptiveness to socialism was the result more of an instinctive awareness and practical experience of the Georgian workers’ grievances than of an intellectual understandin...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Foreword
• Author’s Preface
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Notes and Acknowledgements
• Chronological Guide
• Introduction
• 1. The Historical Setting
• 2. The Underground Revolutionary
• 3. The General Secretary
• 4. The Totalitarian Dictator
• 5. The Military Leader
• 6. The Cold Warrior
• 7. The Ambiguous Legacy
• Suggestions for Further Reading
• Glossary of Russian Technical Terms and Abbreviations
• Biographical Notes