This analysis commended itself to leading Bolsheviks who knew the history of the French Revolution. A military leader, Napoleon Bonaparte, had seized power and rejected much of the social radicalism introduced by Maximilien Robespierre. Trotski seemed the likeliest military candidate for such a role in the drama of Russia’s October Revolution. There was acute annoyance among party members about his insistence on employing former Imperial Army officers. Trotski was also reviled for shooting political commissars for disobedience or cowardice. An informal Military Opposition began to coalesce against him in late 1918.
Yet Trotski had grounds to be horrified by events in Tsaritsyn. Lenin began to take his side. Stalin was a law unto himself on the Southern Front. It was not always a law shared by the official party leadership. Lenin insisted that if the Civil War was to be won, the average Russian peasant (and not just the poorest of them) had to be won over to the side of the Reds. Persuasion rather than violence had to be the priority. Lenin’s declarations were riddled with contradiction. He had set up the hugely unpopular ‘committees of the rural poor’ in order to introduce ‘class struggle’ to the countryside and had also conscripted peasants and expropriated grain by means of armed urban squads. But certainly at the same time he was minded to win support among the mass of the peasantry.
Stalin was less ambiguous than Lenin. Might, for him, was right, effective and economical of resources. He put villages to the torch to intimidate neighbouring ones to obey the demands of the Reds. Terror was undertaken against the very peasants who were being depicted in official propaganda as one of the twin pillars of the Soviet state. Stalin treated the Cossacks in particular as enemies. The term de-Cossackisation was in currency.22 Stalin wrote in a letter to his old Bolshevik rival Stepan Shaumyan:23
In relation to the Dagestani and other bands which obstruct the movements of trains from the North Caucasus, you must be absolutely merciless. A number of their villages should be set on fire and burned to the ground so as to teach them not to make raids on trains.
This was in the fiercest Imperial Army tradition under General Yermolov in the Caucasus in the early nineteenth century and General Alikhanov in Georgia in 1905.24 Stalin was ordering Shaumyan to conduct a campaign of exemplary terror. When ‘bands’ operated against trains, the nearby villages were to be razed to the ground. The message was to go out that complete compliance alone would save localities from the Red Army’s savagery. Wanting to conciliate the non-Russian national groups across the country, he nevertheless prescribed brutal measures against those among them who failed to restrain anti-Bolshevik outbursts.
He subjected his own Red Army conscripts — including Russians — to severe discipline. Bothering little with persuasion, he assumed they would never help the Reds unless force was used.25 He threw armies into action with little caution. He acted as if sheer numerical superiority would bring victory. He did not care that a vastly greater proportion of Red than White soldiers died. Lenin commented on the reckless disregard for lives on the Southern Front; and although he did not mention Stalin by name, it was obvious whom he held responsible.26 Lenin cleared Trotski of any blame for the running of the Red Army and confirmed the Central Committee’s policy on the recruitment of Imperial officers.27 Trotski sent his aide Alexei Okulov to find out what was happening in Tsaritsyn. His report was disturbing. Stalin, having sacked Imperial officers from their posts of command, had arrested dozens of them and held them on a barge on the River Volga. Among them was Snesarev, whom he accused of heading a conspiracy to sabotage the Red war effort and aid the Whites.28 Stalin’s apparent intention had been to sink the barge and drown all on board.29 Snesarev on Moscow’s orders was released and the Revolutionary-Military Council of the Republic transferred him to the command of the Western Front. Stalin, infuriated, continued with Voroshilov to demand sanctions against the allegedly counter-revolutionary officers. Voroshilov was to claim that, if he and Stalin had not acted as they did in Tsaritsyn, the Whites would have overrun all Ukraine.30
Stalin passionately believed that conspiracies were ubiquitous in Russia. He already had a tendency to suspect that plots existed even when no direct evidence was available. He was not alone in this. Lenin and Trotski too referred in a casual manner to the organised linkages among the enemies of the party; and Trotski had a notorious willingness to treat even Bolshevik party activists as traitors if they belonged to regiments in the Red Army which had failed to obey his orders. Stalin was more like Trotski than he pretended. When an adequate supply of munitions did not come through to Tsaritsyn in September 1918, he howled to Lenin: ‘It’s some kind of casualness or treachery in official uniform [formennoe predatel’stvo].’31 To Stalin’s way of thought there always had to be an agency of deliberate maleficence at work when things went wrong. Traitors therefore had to exist even in the leadership of the People’s Commissariats in Moscow.
Stalin applied violence, including terror, on a greater scale than most other central communist leaders approved of. Only Trotski with his demands for political commissars to be shot alongside army officers if unsanctioned retreats occurred was remotely near to him in bloodthirstiness — and Trotski also introduced the Roman policy of decimating regiments which failed to carry out higher commands. Stalin and Trotski invariably ignored pleas to intervene on behalf of individuals arrested by the Cheka. Even Lenin, who resisted most attempts by Kamenev and Bukharin to impose control over the Cheka, sometimes helped in such cases.32 Yet Stalin’s enthusiasm for virtually indiscriminate violence made even Trotski seem a restrained individual. This was a feature that his comrades forgot at their peril in the 1930s.
A contrast also existed between Stalin and Trotski in their basic attitude to Bolshevism. Trotski, who had joined the Bolsheviks late in his career, paid little attention to the party. Stalin pondered much on the party’s place in the Soviet state. He took a copy of the second edition of Lenin’s The State and Revolution around with him in the Civil War. This book says nothing about the communist party in the transition to socialism. Stalin was aware of this lacuna. Making notes in the margins, he asked himself: ‘Can the party seize power against the will of the proletariat? No, it cannot and must not.’33 He added: ‘The proletariat cannot attain its dictatorship without a vanguard, without a party as the only [party].’34 Lenin had said no such thing in The State and Revolution. But Stalin, like Lenin, had modified and developed his ideas since October 1917. The party had become the supreme institution of state. Stalin was among the many Bolsheviks who sought to incorporate this into communist doctrine. The theory had been that the proletariat would run its own socialist state. Stalin’s unease was reflected in his comment that ‘the party cannot simply replace the dictatorship of the proletariat’.35
In the Civil War, however, he lacked the time to write pamphlets; and not one of his articles for Pravda had the range of those composed by Lenin, Trotski, Zinoviev and Bukharin. But he went on thinking about large subjects. Party policy on the national question was prominent among them. Another was the institutional framework of the Soviet state. The report he wrote in January 1919 with Dzierżyński on a military disaster at Perm was a disquisition on the chaotic relations within and among the armed forces, the party and the government. Their recommendations had an influence on the decisions taken to establish the party as the supreme agency of the state and to regularise the lines of command from the party to all public institutions.36 Only the fact that Stalin’s later propagandists made exaggerated claims for the report has induced historians to overlook its importance. In truth he was a reflective and decisive political operator and Lenin appreciated him for this.