But when asked by Lenin how the government should respond to a ceasefire proposal from Curzon, Stalin cabled, on 13 July, that
the Polish armies are completely falling apart. . . . I don’t think imperialism has ever been as weak as it is now, at the moment of Poland’s defeat, and we have never been as strong as we are now, so the more resolutely we behave ourselves, the better it will be for Russia and for international revolution.64
The party central committee duly decided to invade Poland. And on 23 July the Politburo established a Provisional Polish Revolutionary Committee.65
The Red Army’s thrust into Poland was initially quite successful. As it approached Warsaw, delegates to the Second World Congress of the Communist International (Comintern) meeting in Moscow were thrilled by Lenin’s charting of the Red Army’s progress on a large-scale war map.66
Stalin got rather carried away, too. On 24 July he wrote to Lenin:
It would be a sin not to encourage revolution in Italy now that we have the Comintern, a beaten Poland and a reasonable Red Army while the Entente is trying to obtain a breathing space for the Polish army so it can be reorganised and rearmed. . . . The Comintern should consider organising an uprising in Italy and in weak states such as Hungary and Czechoslovakia (Romania has to be smashed, too).67
Among the formations under Stalin’s remit as the South West Front’s Bolshevik commissar was Semen Budenny’s First Cavalry Army. In mid-August Budenny was ordered by Moscow (the Bolshevik capital since March 1918) to support the Red Army’s campaign to capture Warsaw. Amid continuing concerns about the threat from Wrangel, Stalin, who had his eye on taking Lvov not Warsaw, refused to counter-sign the order.68 While the delay in Budenny’s redeployment did not help matters, the Red Army’s offensive was probably doomed anyway, not least because the anticipated proletarian insurrection in Poland failed to materialise. By the end of August the Poles had repulsed the attack on Warsaw and the Red Army was in full-scale retreat. Lenin was forced to sue for peace and then, in March 1921, to sign the Treaty of Riga, an agreement that imposed severe territorial losses on Soviet Russia, notably the incorporation into Poland of western Belorussia and western Ukraine, territories that were populated mainly by Belorussians, Ukrainians and Jews.
Stalin’s actions during the Polish campaign became a cause of considerable controversy. An early contributor to the debate was Boris Shaposhnikov, who later served as Stalin’s chief of the General Staff. In his 1924 book, Na Visle: K Istorii Kampanii 1920 (On the Vistula: Towards a History of the 1920 Campaign), a copy of which may be found in Stalin’s library, he concluded that while Budenny’s delay did have a negative impact on the Red Army’s march on Warsaw, his army would not, in any event, have arrived in time to save the Soviets’ West Front from defeat by the Poles.69 In his study of Stalin as a military commander, British military historian Albert Seaton arrived at a similar verdict:
The extent to which Stalin’s refusal or delay in carrying out orders was indirectly responsible for the defeat of the West Front and the consequent loss of the Russo-Polish war is a question which can only be examined by considering the . . . war as a whole. Many other factors contributed to the defeat: political misjudgement, military misdirection, poor training and organisation, indiscipline in the West as well as the South-West Front, over-confident and inexpert commanders and inadequate signals communications. It seems probable, however, that . . . [the West Front] might have been saved from so overwhelming a defeat.70
Stalin responded to the unfolding Polish debacle by submitting a memorandum to the Politburo that argued the defeat resulted from a ‘lack of effective fighting reserves’ (Trotsky thought that supplies were the main problem). Stalin also called for a high-level investigation of the reasons for the defeat in Poland.71 This created tension with Lenin as well as Trotsky, both of whom had a vested interest in avoiding too deep a discussion of the failed Polish adventure. Together with Trotsky, Lenin successfully manoeuvred within the Politburo to stymie Stalin’s proposed investigation.
At the Bolsheviks’ 9th party conference in September 1920, Stalin was criticised by Lenin and Trotsky for his ‘strategic errors’ during the Polish campaign. He responded with a dignified statement which pointed to his publicly expressed doubts about the ‘march on Warsaw’ and reiterated the call for a commission to examine the reasons for the catastrophe.72
By this time Stalin had, at his own request, been relieved of military responsibilities. The civil war was nearly over and he had plenty of other work to do. Throughout the conflict he had remained nationalities commissar and in March 1919 was appointed head of the People’s Commissariat of State Control, later renamed the Worker-Peasant Inspectorate, whose job it was to protect state property and to keep wayward officials in line.
Stalin played little direct role in the day-to-day operations of either commissariat, which he delegated to officials. But he kept his finger on the policy pulse in relation to the national question. Lenin’s was still the dominant Bolshevik voice on this matter, and Stalin did not always agree with him. He favoured a future confederation of socialist states rather than the more tightly knit world federation proposed by Lenin. Stalin argued that advanced and well-established nations would want to have their own independent states for the foreseeable future. Their new socialist rulers would not accept Lenin’s proposal to universalise the federal relations between nationalities that prevailed within Soviet Russia. Of more practical import, though, was Stalin’s preference for a highly centralised Soviet state. When the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was created in 1922 it reflected a compromise with Lenin in which behind a façade of the federalism there was the highly centralised state preferred by Stalin.
Georgia was the most serious source of tension between Stalin and Lenin. Stalin’s native land was ruled by a Menshevik government headed by Noe Zhordania, an old adversary of his from the underground days. The Georgian Menshevik state was recognised by the Bolsheviks in May 1920, who pledged non-interference in its internal affairs in return for the legalisation of communist party activity. Lenin favoured a more conciliatory approach to Georgia than Stalin and Trotsky, who both wanted to occupy the country militarily. In February 1921 the Red Army marched in.
In the early weeks of the Bolshevik takeover in Georgia, Stalin was ill and he spent the summer recuperating at a spa in the North Caucasus. In July he crossed the mountains to support the Georgian Bolsheviks in rallying the masses to their new regime. Appalled by the nationalist fervour he encountered, he ordered the Cheka to quell resistance to Bolshevik rule. Among the more than 100 arrestees was Stalin’s childhood friend Joseph Iremashvili.73
It was not only Georgian nationalism that worried Stalin. His solution was a Transcaucasian Socialist Federation as a container for all the region’s nationalisms and ethnic differences. That federation, which consisted of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, was established at the end of 1921 and was a signatory of the treaty that established the USSR in 1922 (the other signatories being Russia, Ukraine and Belorussia).74
THE GENERAL-SECRETARY
Differences over the Polish war, the national question and the Georgian crisis did some damage to Stalin’s personal relations with Lenin. But it was Lenin who pushed through Stalin’s appointment as general-secretary of the communist party in April 1922, a post that involved oversight of the central committee apparatus, allocation of key personnel and agenda-setting for Politburo meetings. A praktik as well as an intellectual, Stalin’s appointment to the post made a lot of sense, particularly since he had again proved himself to be Lenin’s loyal lieutenant. At the 10th party congress in March 1921 he backed Lenin in a dispute about the role of Soviet trade unions. Trotsky wanted to subordinate unions to state commands, while the leftist Workers Opposition wanted prolet-arians to directly control their factories. Stalin agreed with Lenin that the role of trade unions was to protect workers’ interests in accordance with the party’s political directives. He also sided with Lenin on the introduction of the New Economic Policy – the party’s retreat from the draconian ‘war communism’ of the civil war years. As a consistent advocate of party unity, Stalin supported the congress’s ban on factions – groups within the party that operated with their own internal organisation and discipline. However, that ban did not prevent Lenin from asking Stalin to secure control of the central party apparatus for their group.75