Читать книгу Stalin: History in an Hour - Rupert Colley - Страница 9

Revolutions and Civil War

The outbreak of the First World War in July 1914 accelerated the collapse of Tsar Nicholas II’s rule. Defeat on the Eastern Front, the loss of large swathes of Russia’s western territory to Germany, food shortages and economic hardship took its toll on Russia’s fragile infrastructure.

The February Revolution

In early March (late February by the Old-Style Julian Calendar), strikes broke out in Petrograd – the Tsar renamed St Petersburg to the less Germanic-sounding Petrograd in August 1914. Much of the population took to the streets and demonstrators formed councils of workers, or ‘Soviets’. On 15 March, former members of the Duma, Russia’s parliament, formed a Provisional Government. On the same day, Nicholas II was forced to abdicate. After 304 years, the Romanov dynasty was no more. The Tsar and his family were kept in various safe houses and were at Yekaterinburg in the Urals when Lenin finally ordered their murder on the night of 17 July 1918.

Together, in an uneasy alliance, the Provisional Government and the Soviets – comprising mainly Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries – ran the country. This dual power was necessary as the Government needed the support of the Soviets, and the Soviets felt unprepared to take on full power.

Stalin, in common with all leading Bolsheviks, missed the February Revolution. He was still living in Siberian exile. He returned to Petrograd on 12 March with his friend Lev Kamenev, wearing the same suit in which he was arrested four years earlier. He lodged with the Alliluyevs, a family he had known since 1904, when he first met the two-year-old Nadya, his future wife. Stalin, it was said, saved the infant from drowning. He may have had an affair with Olga Alliluyeva, his future mother-in-law. Now, in 1917, the sixteen-year-old Nadya was attracted to the thirty-eight-year-old daring revolutionary with his sweep of jet-black hair. Two years later, in 1919, the couple would be married.

Now resident in Petrograd, Stalin took over the editorship of the Bolshevik newspaper, Pravda (‘Truth’), from Vyacheslav Molotov. Molotov had used Pravda to criticise the Provisional Government which many in the Bolshevik party saw as little better than the autocratic Tsar it had replaced. But the Bolsheviks were a minority party, even within the Soviets, and Stalin, in an attempt to augment the Party’s standing, advocated a degree of cooperation with the Provisional Government. In April, Lenin returned from exile in Switzerland. Mocking the February Revolution and condemning the new government as ‘imperialistic through and through’ he censured Stalin for his conciliatory attitude towards it.

Vladimir Lenin, 1920

Stalin took heed and, in a rare occurrence, offered an apology. Throwing his full support behind Lenin, he toughened his stance not only against the Government but against other socialist parties.

In July, demonstrations against the Provisional Government broke out in Petrograd. The Bolsheviks, feeling the time was not yet ready for an uprising, distanced themselves from the ‘July Days’ demonstrators. Leon Trotsky and other leading Bolsheviks were arrested – but not Stalin, who was considered of little importance. Stalin hid Lenin in the Alliluyev home and, advising Lenin to shave off his trademark beard, helped him disappear into hiding – first into some woods outside the city, then into Finland.

In late October, Lenin returned to Petrograd and urged an immediate seizure of power. He was opposed by two leading Bolsheviks, Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev, who advised restraint. Surprisingly, Stalin sided with the moderates and even argued their case to Lenin, threatening to resign his position as editor of Pravda. Lenin, angered at this reticence, pressed on. On 23 October at a meeting of the Bolshevik Party Centre Committee in Petrograd, the party voted ten to two that, ‘an armed uprising is inevitable, and that the time for it is fully ripe’. Stalin, bruised from his altercation with Lenin, was among the ten.

The October Revolution

On 7 November (25 October Old Style) the Bolsheviks’ armed wing, the Military Revolutionary Council, commanded by Trotsky, took control of Petrograd, then overran the Winter Palace, overthrowing the Provisional Government. The Soviets had obtained power. Lenin then ensured that the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries were sidelined and that effective power lay in the hands of the Bolsheviks only. Lenin then instituted the new government, the Council of People’s Commissars, abbreviated as Sovnarkom. Trotsky was made the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, and Stalin, by dent of being a Georgian, was appointed the People’s Commissar of Nationalities, established specifically to ensure that the former tsarist empire remained as one, resisting the demands for national self-determination.

Civil War

The Bolsheviks’ hold on power was tenuous. Across Russia, groups opposed to Lenin’s new autocracy joined forces to oppose by violent means the Bolshevik government. This jumbled alliance of ex-tsarist officers, monarchists, disillusioned socialists, and various ethnic groups – collectively the ‘Whites’, had nothing in common but its shared hatred of the Bolsheviks. As the Russian Civil War broke out, Stalin was appointed as a Political Commissar leading the defence of the city of Tsaritsyn (renamed Stalingrad in 1925 and now called Volgograd).

Stalin aged 40, 1918

Stalin frequently clashed with Leon Trotsky, his military superior and recently appointed the People’s Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs. Trotsky – who deservedly took much of the credit for winning the ‘Reds’ the Civil War – exploited the expertise and experience of former officers of the Tsar’s army, holding their families hostage to ensure their active participation. Stalin, who had no truck with anything related to tsarism – preferring to have them shot – devoted as much energy to fighting Trotsky’s supporters as the Whites. He once, infamously, imprisoned a group of Trotskyites on a leaky barge on the River Volga and left them to drown.

Stalin’s rise through the ranks of the Communist Party (the Bolshevik party had changed its name to the Russian Communist Party in March 1918) and onto ultimate power was impressive. He owed it all to the support of Lenin who, in March 1919, appointed him to both the five-man Politburo, responsible for policy, and to the Orgburo ‘organisational bureau’, which dealt with administrative matters and party personnel – such as appointing managers of regional party branches. It was in this latter role that Stalin’s methodical organisation and indexing of members earned him the contemptuous nickname Comrade Card Index. But in their facetiousness, his rivals underestimated one of Stalin’s strengths – he got to know the blemishes on everyone’s records and, never one to forget a name, exploited this information to full effect. The top promotion came in April 1922, when Lenin, acting on a proposal put forward by Kamenev and Zinoviev, made Stalin General Secretary of the Communist Party’s Central Committee, a post he held until 1952, a year before his death.