The railwaymen failed to show the required determination, and Kerenski was defeated on the Pulkovo Heights. The collapse of the coalition talks, however much he himself had been to blame, gave Lenin the pretext to consolidate a purely Bolshevik central government. In November the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries recognised the practical situation and agreed to join Sovnarkom as the junior partner in a two-party coalition. Lenin came to see Stalin in an ever brighter light. Stalin never wavered. Lenin asked him to explain the official party line to Bolsheviks who had come to Petrograd for the Second Congress of Soviets.29 He also got him to co-sign Sovnarkom decrees confirming the closure of newspapers hostile to the revolutionary government.30 Stalin had resisted the calls to walk out of Sovnarkom when the Bolsheviks attained a monopoly of power. Such individuals were not legion in the Bolshevik Central Committee. Lenin needed all the available talent; and being keen to dominate Sovnarkom, he did not find it disadvantageous to have Stalin and others as a counterweight to the charismatic Trotski.
14. PEOPLE’S COMMISSAR
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 recalclass="underline" 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such things about himself rather than hear them from other people, and Fëdor’s writing was consigned to the archives unpublished.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 personneclass="underline" 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.
It was of course Lenin who headed the Bolshevik collective leadership. Even Trotski stood in his shadow. Stalin ungrudgingly acknowledged that Lenin was the hub of the Sovnarkom governmental machine, and on 27 December he sent an urgent request for him to come back from his holiday in Finland to help in Petrograd.8 Lenin insisted on Stalin coping on his own; he continued his brief holiday with wife Nadezhda and sister Maria. Stalin went on reaffirming the objectives which he and Lenin had been espousing before the October Revolution. There was to be national self-determination for all the peoples of the former Russian Empire. Confirmation should be given that no privileges would be accorded to the Russians. Each people would have the right and the resources to develop its own culture, set up schools in its own language and operate its own press. Freedom of religious belief and organisation would be guaranteed. (The exception would be that churches, mosques and synagogues would lose their extensive landed property.) For those national and ethnic groups living concentratedly in a particular area there would be regional self-administration. The Russians as a people were hardly mentioned. The era of empire was declared at an end.
Lenin and Stalin designed these extraordinary promises to allay suspicions among non-Russians that the Bolsheviks would discriminate against them. By offering the right of secession, Sovnarkom tried to reassure the non-Russians that the revolutionary state would treat each national and ethnic group equally. The consequence, it was firmly expected, would be that the other nations would decide that the Russians could be trusted. The huge multinational state was to be preserved in a new and revolutionary form.
There were exceptions to this pattern. Following the Provisional Government’s precedent, Lenin and Stalin accepted the case for Polish independence. It would have been fatuous to act otherwise. All Poland was under German and Austrian rule. Sovnarkom was recognising a fait accompli; it was also trying to make the point that, whereas the Central Powers had subjugated the Poles, the revolutionary government in Petrograd sought their political and economic liberation. There was one domain of the Romanovs where practical proof could be given of such a commitment. This was Finland. Relations between Russian and Finnish Marxists had always been warm, and the Bolsheviks had benefited from safe-houses provided for them. The Bolshevik party had supported the steady movement of popular opinion in Finland towards a campaign for massive autonomy from the Russian government. Outright independence was not widely demanded. Yet Lenin and Stalin, to the world’s amazement, encouraged the Finns to take up such a position. A delegation of Finnish ministers was invited to the Russian capital and a formal declaration of secession was signed on 23 November (or 6 December according to the Gregorian calendar adopted by Sovnarkom in early 1918). This was a policy without parallel in history. A former imperial power was insisting that one of its dependencies, whether it liked it or not, should break away from its control.