Stalin’s support for Lenin was by no means obvious and automatic. In his neck of the woods – Georgia and Transcaucasia – the Mensheviks were the dominant faction. Much of Stalin’s early political life was devoted to fighting and losing factional battles with the local Mensheviks. It was the Mensheviks who came to power in Georgia as result of the 1917 revolutions, where they remained in control until forced out of office by the Bolsheviks in 1921.
While Stalin could easily have found favour with Mensheviks as an authentic man of the people immersed in the daily class struggles of the toiling masses, he was highly educated and committed to proselytising socialism. Stalin saw himself as neither a worker nor a peasant but as, in effect, an intellectual whose task it was to spread enlightenment and socialist consciousness. It was this fundamental choice of an intellectual identity that motivated his fanatical, lifelong commitment to reading and self-improvement. While Stalin respected ordinary workers, he did not revere them like some middle-class socialists. The good worker was someone like himself, an educated person who was able to grasp the truth proffered by the party. And it was through such workers that the larger population of the working class could be reached and educated.37
Stalin’s biographers have tended to neglect the niceties of the politics, day-to-day struggles, factions and personalities of the Russian revolutionary underground. Yet this constituted nearly half his adult life. That was the political and social environment in which his character and personality was formed. As a young revolutionary, Stalin adopted beliefs, acquired attitudes, underwent experiences and made choices.
There is no shortage of evidence about the life of the young Stalin. The problem is that much of it consists of highly partisan and biased memoirs, very little of his primary personal documentation from this early period having survived. Typically, how memoirists recall Stalin correlates with how they see and judge his later life. Perceptions of Stalin, even by those who knew him personally, are overdetermined by later knowledge of his life and persona after the Bolsheviks seized power, and clung to it through civil war, terror and mass violence.
Historians are as divided as the memoirists in assessing the young Stalin’s personality. Most agree that while many traits of the mature Stalin may be detected as nascent in his youth, he continued after the revolution to embrace new roles and identities.
As a young man, Stalin was confident and self-assured. He was a faithful member of Lenin’s Bolshevik faction and an intriguer and conspirator in internal party battles with the Mensheviks. He was loyal to his comrades and contemptuous of political opponents. He was not shy coming forward but could be low key and reserved when the occasion demanded. Though well capable of anger, he mostly kept his cool. Not much of an orator, he was a skilled polemicist in print. Dogmatic in his political beliefs, he could change his mind in the light of experience, be pragmatic as well as intransigent. His personal life – there was one short-lived marriage and a few dalliances with other women – was strictly subordinate to his all-consuming political passions. Stalin saw little or nothing of his mother after 1904 and did not even write her a letter until 1922. Much of Stalin’s youthful political style derived from that of his mentor and exemplar, Lenin. ‘Conciliation was in Lenin’s view a negative quality for a militant revolutionary,’ writes Ronald Suny. ‘Sharp ideological distinctions, principled divisions, and purity of position were turned into virtues. Accommodation, compromise and moderation were thrown aside in favour of impatient commitment to action.’38
The documentary record of Stalin’s political activities is fairly detailed and the evolution of his political views reasonably clear. However, there remain some contentious issues. To what extent was Stalin involved in robberies and extortion to raise funds for the party? Was he the true author of his famous 1913 tract on Marxism and the National Question? Was he as loyal to Lenin as he later claimed to be? Was he a ‘grey blur’, ‘the man who missed the revolution’ in 1917,39 notwithstanding cultic claims about his prominence in the Bolshevik seizure of power? Was he the most ruthless of Bolshevik leaders during the Russian Civil War? Did he undermine the Red Army’s attempt to capture Warsaw in 1920 and thereby subvert the spread of Bolshevik revolution to Europe?
During the Russian revolutionary upheavals of 1905–7, Stalin was involved in the organisation of Bolshevik armed gangs who took violent actions on behalf of the party. The revolt against the Tsar had been sparked by the Bloody Sunday shooting of peaceful demonstrators in St Petersburg in January 1905. Political assassinations in Russia were nothing new and thousands of Tsarist officials were killed by leftist-led armed groups during the popular disturbances of this period.
In July 1905 Stalin published an unsigned newspaper article on ‘Armed Insurrection and Our Tactics’ in which he decried the Menshevik view that an insurrection would arise spontaneously from the actions of the masses. On the contrary, argued Stalin, an insurrection had to be prepared and implemented on a co-ordinated basis, including by the advance organisation of armed groups that would protect the people and stockpile arms.40
Stalin was peripheral to the Tbilisi coach robbery of June 1907 that features so prominently in Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Young Stalin.41 This violent robbery, which netted 250,000 roubles but resulted in a number of deaths, was controversial within the RSDLP because it took place after the party had voted to end such ‘expropriations’. While Stalin was blamed by Menshevik opponents for his involvement in the robbery, he was not a direct participant in the heist and may not have even been in the town at all that day. In all probability, Stalin’s involvement was limited to providing information and lending moral support to the operation.
Stalin never denied or admitted any connection to the so-called Tbilisi ‘Ex’ (expropriation). The German writer Emil Ludwig recalled that when he asked Stalin about his role in bank robberies, he ‘began to laugh, in that heavy way of his, blinked several times and stood up for the first and only time in our three-hour interview. The question of the bank robbery was the only one he would not answer – except to the extent that he answered it by passing it over.’42
Stalin’s silence was criticised by Trotsky, who complained that it was ‘cowardly’ to exclude this ‘bold’ action from his official biography. It was excluded not because there was anything wrong with robbing banks on behalf of the party, which, Trotsky said, testified to Stalin’s ‘revolutionary resoluteness’, but to cover up a political miscalculation by Stalin – the fact that in 1907 the revolutionary tide was receding and such expropriations had ‘degenerated into adventures’.43