Largely thanks to Stalin, Tsaritsyn became a model of revolutionary guerrilla warfare. He wielded his authority as a member of the government and Central Committee and enjoyed unimpeded control not only over the civilian government, but also over the forces of the North Caucasus Military District, headquartered in Tsaritsyn. He found a loyal and obedient helper in Kliment Voroshilov, commander of Red Army detachments retreating to Tsaritsyn from Ukraine, which had been captured by the Germans. The two men shared a mutual hostility and mistrust toward trained military professionals or “specialists.” This theme often came up in Stalin’s telegrams to Moscow:
Specialists are lifeless pen-pushers, completely ill-suited to civil war.18
If our military “specialists” (cobblers!) weren’t sleeping and loafing, the [railway] line would not have been cut, and if the line is restored, it won’t be because of the military men, but despite them.19
They, as “headquarters” workers, capable only of “drafting plans” and submitting plans for reorganization, are absolutely indifferent to operational actions, to the matter of supplies, to the control of different army commanders and generally feel like outsiders, like guests.20
Our new army is being built thanks to the fact that side-by-side with new soldiers, new revolutionary commanders are being born. Imposing known traitors on them [Stalin goes on to list a number of military professionals] disrupts the entire front.21
These comments (there are many more examples) accurately reflect Stalin’s philosophy of how the Soviet military should be developed. His words were matched by actions. Stalin dismissed the experienced officers and took operational command into his own hands. His dispatches to the capital were filled with glowing reports of the results brought about by this decision. It is difficult to imagine, however, that Stalin, who had no military experience, had never served in the army, and was relying on dilettantes like himself for guidance, was able to quickly acquire the complicated skills needed to run an effective military force. Common sense and revolutionary fervor could have taken him only so far. Indeed, the Stalin-Voroshilov partisan army was not able to withstand attacks by the enemy’s regular units.
In August 1918, after two months under his command, Tsaritsyn was on the verge of falling. Stalin responded to the threat of defeat with a maneuver that would later become his political signature: a hunt for “counterrevolutionary plots.” A wave of arrests in Tsaritsyn swept up former tsarist officers (including those currently serving in the Red Army), former tsarist officials, businessmen, and ordinary citizens unfortunate enough to find themselves in the path of the purge. A “plot” headed by an employee of the People’s Commissariat for Railroads, N. P. Alekseev, was alleged to be at the center of the counterrevolutionary movement. Alekseev was a “bourgeois specialist,” a former nobleman and officer working for the Soviet government who had been sent to Tsaritsyn from Moscow on commissariat business. In short, he perfectly fit the preconceived profile of someone who would mastermind a counterrevolutionary conspiracy. The accusations leveled against the “conspirators” were boilerplate and not terribly persuasive. A case was thrown together in a matter of days, culminating in executions and an announcement in the local newspaper.
This incident might have been just another chapter in the annals of the “Red Terror” had Alekseev not been accompanied on his trip to Tsaritsyn by Konstantin Makhrovsky, a senior official from the Supreme Economic Council and a long-standing member of the Bolshevik party. In the heat of the moment, Makhrovsky was also arrested and imprisoned for several months. He was not shot, however, and eventually was released under pressure from Moscow. This left an unwanted witness eager to relate what he had observed. The indignant Makhrovsky wrote a long report chronicling how things were being done in Tsaritsyn. He made it clear that the Alekseev case had been fabricated by members of the secret police “obsessed,” he wrote, “with hunting down counterrevolution.” Makhrovsky’s portrait of life in Tsaritsyn probably shocked some senior officials in Moscow who had been following the war from their offices:
Here is the picture I saw: … N. P. Alekseev, whose face was totally covered by a mask of blood.… One eye was completely closed, and you could not tell if it had been beaten out of him or was just covered by swelling.… They were beating Alekseev with the butt of a revolver and their fists, and, after he collapsed, they trampled him with their feet.…
Returning to the gallery of types, in regard to those arrested and detained by the Cheka whom I happened to see, I must make the following comment: most of them were arrested by chance, shot, and some time later notices appeared in the local paper listing those who had been shot as all sorts of criminals.…
Two arrestees were brought into my cell who had been held on a barge. One of them told me about the barge on the Volga holding 400 people. Using a barge as a prison started during the evacuation of Tsaritsyn. When the [anti-Bolshevik] Cossacks attacked, they put arrestees from prisons on one, and the assortment of arrestees was extremely diverse. There were 30 from a labor camp, 70 former officers, 40 members of the bourgeoisie, and the rest were arrested for a wide variety of reasons, mostly workers and peasants. The barge packed with all these people had only one latrine, and people had to stand in line for four hours and fainted. The prisoners were not given anything to eat.22
Makhrovsky accused not only the Cheka of abuses, but also Tsaritsyn’s political leaders, including Stalin. He provided examples of people being arrested for merely arguing with Stalin.23 Several months later, Voroshilov confirmed Stalin’s leading role in organizing the terror. “These ‘gentlemen,’” Voroshilov said of the former officers, “were arrested [by me] and Comrade Stalin.”24 Having developed a taste for the Tsaritsyn approach, Stalin requested that it be applied in surrounding areas. On 31 August 1918 he asked Lenin to authorize a “group of reliable people” from Tsaritsyn to “purge” the city of Voronezh of “counterrevolutionary elements.” The request was granted.25
Stalin apparently sent his request to Lenin before he heard that the previous day, 30 August, the Bolshevik leader had been wounded by an act of terrorism attributed to the SRs. The assassination attempt opened up new prospects for Stalin and the Bolshevik party overalclass="underline" the Red Terror became official policy. In early September Stalin sent a report to Moscow on behalf of the leadership of the North Caucasus District outlining plans to organize “open, mass, systematic terror against the bourgeoisie and its agents.” In September and October, the Tsaritsyn Cheka, according to some sources, executed 102 people, of whom 52 were former tsarist army officers or former members of the tsarist security police.26
Whether the scale of the terror was due to the panic triggered by military defeat or whether it was premeditated, the threat of terror made it easier to keep the unruly Red Army in line. Furthermore, the discovery of “plots” offered convenient excuses for military failures and opportunities to demonstrate decisiveness and efficiency to the top leadership. Stalin used the threat of growing counterrevolution to demand special powers and justify his refusal to subordinate himself to the military authorities in his district.
It is not known through what channels and in what form information about the Tsaritsyn atrocities reached Moscow or how widely the Makhrovsky report and other firsthand accounts were circulated. There is evidence that the top leadership knew about Stalin’s initiatives. Several months later, in March 1919, Lenin said at the Eighth Party Congress, “When Stalin was shooting people in Tsaritsyn, I thought this was a mistake; I thought that they were shooting incorrectly.” (He did not, apparently, object to the executions in principle, only that they were being carried out in a disorderly manner.) Lenin even claimed he sent a telegram to Stalin asking him to be careful, although no such telegram has been discovered. Another speaker mentioned the “famous” barge in Tsaritsyn “that did so much to prevent military specialists from being assimilated.”27 Apparently, Stalin’s executions were no secret, but he suffered no serious consequences as a result. The Bolshevik leaders took a relaxed attitude toward excesses committed in defense of the revolution. During the same speech to the Eighth Congress, Lenin even said that in the end the Tsaritsyners were right. Why condemn comrades over a few “holdovers of the bourgeoisie”?