Even as they recognized Trotsky’s value to the party, Lenin’s long-standing comrades could not have been happy about his meteoric ascent. To them he was an ambitious interloper. Stalin would surely have felt a certain sting of envy, if only because this rising Bolshevik star was everything he was not. During the fevered lead-up to revolution, when oratorical gifts were in demand, Trotsky could keep a crowd of thousands spellbound, while Stalin was a lackluster speaker. Trotsky was a brilliant and compelling writer, while Stalin lacked the talent for inspiring slogans or mobilizing catchphrases.
Trotsky’s ascent prompted Lenin’s long-term comrades-in-arms to close ranks, a realignment complicated by Kamenev’s and Zinoviev’s diminished standing. It was during these tumultuous months that the seeds of the anti-Trotsky alliance were sown; they would sprout shortly after Lenin’s demise. Lenin must have understood the clashes taking place around him in 1917, but what he cared about most was party unity and, undoubtedly, a distribution of counterpoising power within the party leadership. He put up with the internal divisions. Kamenev and Zinoviev kept their posts, and events soon overtook intraparty strife. In the early hours of 26 October 1917, the Bolsheviks arrested members of the Provisional Government and formed their own Council (or Soviet) of People’s Commissars, with Lenin as its chairman. Stalin was named people’s commissar for nationalities.
After Stalin achieved power, official Soviet propaganda proclaimed him and Lenin the leaders of the revolution. His political opponents, Trotsky especially, argued that his role had actually been insignificant. The truth lies somewhere between these highly politicized interpretations. Stalin did not lead the revolution, but as a senior Bolshevik, member of the party’s Central Committee, and editor of its main newspaper, he filled an important role. His choice to follow Lenin determined his place within the revolution.
What lessons did Stalin draw from his first experience in fighting to attain power? He seems to have been greatly impressed by Lenin’s decisiveness, his stubborn and relentless insistence on his own program of action. Years later, when Stalin carried out his “revolution from above,” one of many crises in the history of long-suffering Russia, he fully demonstrated his own talent for decisive action. Borrowing from Lenin a dogged and unscrupulous political modus operandi, he strove to seize and maintain power without worrying about what effect his actions would have on others. This principle allowed him to act with maximal ruthlessness and little constraint. Pushing his own revolution in the 1920s, Stalin, like Lenin, bet on a strategy of unrestrained radicalism.
One aspect of Lenin’s ruthlessness that put him in a particularly strong position was his utter lack of reluctance to provoke a civil war, which he saw as a natural element of the transition to socialism. There was no reason to expect that all of Russia, to say nothing of its allies, would compliantly accept the supremacy of radical Bolshevism. The unexpectedness of their uprising and the fatigue of the masses initially bought the Bolsheviks some time, but the situation soon changed. The illegitimacy of the new government, its crude and cynical actions, and social experiments that turned the existing order on its head inevitably met with mass resistance. The Provisional Government was toppled and replaced by a Bolshevik Council of People’s Commissars. In January 1918, the Constituent Assembly disbanded. In March 1918, a humiliating and predatory separate peace with Germany was concluded. All these events paved the way toward a civil war that soon engulfed the country. Aligned against the Bolsheviks were members of the upper and middle classes (“the White movement”), persecuted socialists, and peasants angry over the confiscation of their crops. The peace with Germany also brought Russia’s former allies into the Civil War. War furthermore presented opportunities for ultra-radical elements and ordinary criminals. Peasants rose up against both the Bolsheviks and the Whites, and soon innumerable groups were fighting one another. The new wave of bloodletting unleashed by the Bolsheviks grew with amazing speed and continued more or less unabated for three years, from 1918 through 1920.
In scale and loss of life, the Civil War greatly exceeded Russian casualties during World War I and the February Revolution. Of the 16 million people within the Russian Empire and Soviet Russia who demographers estimate died of wounds, hunger, or disease during 1914–1922, at least half (8 million) perished during the three years of the Civil War. Another 2 million fled the country. The horrific famine of 1921–1922, largely a by-product of the Civil War, took some 5 million lives. By comparison, “only” slightly more than 2 million Russians were killed in World War I (1914–1917).16 These gruesome statistics set Russia apart from the other countries ravaged by World War I. War, famine, epidemics, and civil strife persisted there twice as long and took a much greater toll.
Even these awful numbers do not fully reflect the Civil War’s horrors. Statistics cannot capture the pervasive misery, the numbing of human feelings, and the destruction of any sense of right and wrong. Savage murders and mass terror became commonplace. The epidemic of savagery inevitably engulfed the Bolsheviks themselves. The Civil War shaped the new state and largely determined its trajectory.
Stalin was a typical product of his time. As he did before the revolution, he continued to follow Lenin. Part of an exclusive group of influential Soviet functionaries, Stalin was a member of the government, a member of the party’s Central Committee, and a member of the top leadership. He spoke with Lenin almost daily. In 1919 he was elected to the Politburo, the body that remained at the center of power in Soviet Russia and the USSR for the next seventy years, until the collapse of the Communist system. Stalin had his own area of expertise: smoothing relations between the Bolshevik center and the outlying ethnic entities that comprised the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union. But as with all Bolshevik leaders, his “portfolio” would remain subordinate to the primary imperative of retaining power. He spent his time from 1918 to 1920 on various fronts. He was away from Moscow so often that of the fifty-one Politburo meetings held in 1919, he took part in only fourteen; in 1920 he attended thirty-three out of seventy-five.17
His first mission on behalf of the Soviet government came in June 1918. As hunger swept central Russia, Stalin was sent to Tsaritsyn (later Stalingrad, now Volgograd) to acquire grain from southern Russia for the country’s starving center. This economic mission quickly turned into a military one. Tsaritsyn was under attack by forces hostile to the Bolsheviks. Railway lines connecting the cities of central Russia with agricultural areas were constantly being cut. Bolshevik armed forces in Tsaritsyn were organized on a model that became widespread during the early stages of the Civil War, a model that relied primarily on poorly disciplined and unprofessional partisan detachments. Aware that no successful war could be waged without a regular army, the Bolshevik leaders in Moscow—primarily Trotsky, who was in charge of the Red Army—decided to use officers from the former tsarist army and place them under the control of party commissars. This policy met with serious resistance. Newly appointed revolutionary commanders had little desire to subordinate themselves to former officers, whom they did not trust. The feeling was mutual. Indignities and mistreatment drove many officers to defect to the other side. Gradually, military necessity and pressure from Moscow forced the army to become more professional and tolerant of former officers.