WAR AND REVOLUTION
The First World War broke out a year after Stalin was exiled to Turukhansk. It caused a split in the international socialist movement, with many parties rallying to their country’s defence. As radical and intransigent as ever, Lenin not only opposed the war but called for socialists to work for the defeat of their own country. Lenin’s idea was to turn the international war into a civil war and into a class war that would trigger revolution in Russia and in all the warring states.
Stalin’s exile, scheduled to end in summer 1917, was cut short by a dramatic and unexpected event: the fall of the Tsar, Nicholas II. Forced to abdicate by a garrison mutiny and popular uprising in the Russian capital of Petrograd (formerly St Petersburg), the Tsar had also been under pressure from Duma politicians seeking democratic reform and from military leaders who hoped a dramatic gesture would stabilise the home front. The Tsarist administration was taken over by a Provisional Government intending to hold free elections to a constituent assembly charged with adopting a new, democratic constitution. Also vying for power were the Soviets, organs of popular mobilisation that had first appeared during the 1905 revolution and were rapidly revived in 1917. Dominated by socialists, they consisted of worker, peasant and soldier delegates and claimed to represent the population at large, unlike the elitist Duma, which, in any event, had not sat since December 1916.
When Stalin returned to Petrograd in March 1917, the most pressing political issue facing the Bolsheviks was their attitude to the Provisional Government: should they support it or not? Should they continue to oppose the war against Germany and its allies now that the Tsar was gone? Some Bolsheviks wanted to support the Provisional Government as the embodiment, together with the Soviets, of the ongoing democratic revolution in Russia and to moderate the party’s anti-war position. Others wanted to have nothing to do with the new government and to continue with Lenin’s ‘defeatist’ position. Initially, Stalin opted for a centrist stance that entailed supporting the Provisional Government as long as it fulfilled the demands of the Soviets while at the same time pressing the new regime to end Russia’s participation in the war.
Lenin returned to Russia from exile in Switzerland in April to demand outright opposition to the war and to the Provisional Government. He wanted the Soviets to take power and effect a rapid transition to a socialist revolution. Stalin initially resisted Lenin’s radical stance but was soon persuaded by him to change his position.
While Stalin did not go along with everything Lenin said or proposed in 1917, he sided with him at every major turning point. However, Stalin stood his ground on the question of land distribution to individual peasants as against the socialisation of agriculture.55 Bolshevik support for peasant land seizures in 1917 was crucial to gaining a foothold of popular support in the countryside.
Like Lenin, Stalin thought the Russian Revolution could be the catalyst for European and world revolution: ‘The possibility is not excluded that Russia will be the country that will lay the road to socialism. . . . We must discard the antiquated idea that only Europe can show us the way. There is dogmatic Marxism and creative Marxism. I stand by the latter.’56
Stalin did oppose Lenin on one important matter: the expulsion of Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev from the party because of their public opposition to Lenin’s call for a Bolshevik insurrection in Petrograd in October 1917 – a proposal they believed was adventurist and would result in defeat and counter-revolution. Stalin was quite close to Kamenev before the revolution, having spent time in exile with him. On grounds of party unity, Stalin insisted that both men remain in the organisation and retain their membership of the Bolshevik central committee, as long as they agreed to abide by CC decisions. That was another attitude of Stalin’s that derived from his long experience in the revolutionary underground, one that was not shared by some ‘émigré’ Bolsheviks or many of the newer members of the rapidly expanding party – the importance of central control and member discipline in carrying out decisions: ‘Once a decision of the Central Committee is made, it must be carried out without any discussion.’57 This was the basis of the so-called ‘democratic centralism’ that governed the operation of the party.
The much-quoted observation that in 1917 Stalin was a ‘grey blur, looming up now and then dimly and without leaving without any trace’ comes from the 1922 memoirs of the Menshevik Nikolai Sukhanov. Often counterposed to Sukhanov’s perception of Stalin as a drab and uninteresting individual is Trotsky’s dramatic impact after he returned to Russia in May 1917. Elected to the Petrograd Soviet, he joined up with the Bolsheviks in July and in September was elected chairman of the Soviet’s Executive Committee. He supported Lenin’s call for a Bolshevik insurrection and established a Military-Revolutionary Committee as the armed wing of the Petrograd Soviet. It was this body that carried out the Bolshevik coup in Petrograd in November 1917 when it forcibly seized control of key buildings and communications infrastructure. The following day Trotsky told delegates to the Second Congress of Soviets that the Provisional Government had been overthrown, and jeered the moderate socialists who opposed the seizure of power as belonging ‘in the dustbin of history’.
Lenin’s Soviet-based government was a coalition of the Bolsheviks and Left Socialist Revolutionaries, who represented militant peasants. Its ministers were called commissars because Lenin thought that sounded more revolutionary. Lenin was chair of the Council of Commissars, Trotsky was people’s commissar for foreign affairs and Stalin filled the entirely new post of commissar for the nationalities. Upon taking office, Trotsky famously said: ‘I will issue a few revolutionary proclamations to the peoples of the world and then shut up shop.’58
Though overshadowed by Trotsky in historical memory, there were few Bolsheviks more important than Stalin in 1917. One of the first Bolshevik leaders to reach Petrograd from exile, he was a member of the editorial board of the party’s newspaper Pravda, contributing numerous articles to the Bolshevik press. When Pravda was supressed by the authorities, he edited the paper issued by the party as a substitute. When the Provisional Government clamped down on the Bolsheviks in summer 1917 and Trotsky was gaoled, while Lenin fled to Finland, Stalin remained at large. He spoke at all the party’s major meetings and in Lenin’s absence presented the main report to the 6th congress of the Bolshevik party in July–August 1917. This was a tough assignment, coming as it did in the wake of the party’s setbacks following the radical demonstrations of the July days that had provoked the Provisional Government’s crackdown. Stalin supported Lenin’s proposal for an insurrection and was one of seven party leaders entrusted with overseeing its preparation. As Chris Read puts it, ‘If Stalin was a blur it might seem to be a result of his constant activity rather than indistinctiveness!’59
Having grabbed power, Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky were determined to retain it at all costs. At stake, they believed, was not just the fate of the Russian Revolution but also the socialist future of all humanity. Scheduled elections to a Constituent Assembly were permitted at the end of November but when they produced an anti-Bolshevik majority the first democratically elected parliament in Russian history was not allowed to function. The Bolsheviks claimed the Soviets, which they and their allies controlled, were more representative of public opinion and better placed to protect the interests of the people.60