Lenin drove ahead with his radical and repressive measures: “Peace, Land, Bread!” He opened peace talks with Kaiserine Germany. When Trotsky, People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, reported on progress, Lenin replied: “I’ll consult with Stalin and give you my answer.” On 27 October, opposition press was banned. At the Central Committee on 2 November, Lenin effectively created the dictatorship of the Bolshevik oligarchs. On the fourth, Sovnarkom gave itself the power to rule without the Soviets. The MRC initially acted as Lenin’s enforcers, but on 7 December he created an All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for the Struggle Against Counter-revolution and Sabotage, known by its acronym “Cheka,” with Dzerzhinsky as Chairman. The Cheka, precursor of the OGPU, NKVD, KGB and today’s FSB, had absolute supralegal power over life and death.
“In that case why should we bother with a People’s Commissar for Justice?” Isaak Shteinberg, a Left-SR, challenged Lenin. “Let’s honestly call it the Commissariat of Social Annihilation!”
“Well said!” replied Lenin. “That’s exactly how it’s going to be!”
He told another acquaintance: “We’re engaged in annihilation. Don’t you recall what Pisarev said: ‘Break, beat up everything, beat and destroy! Everything that’s being broken is rubbish and has no right to life! What survives is good.’” Lenin’s handwritten notes demanded the shooting, killing, hanging of “bloodsuckers… spiders… leeches.” He asked, “How can you make a revolution without firing-squads? If we can’t shoot White Guard saboteurs, what kind of revolution is this? Nothing but talk and a bowl of mush!” He demanded they “find tougher people.” But Stalin and Trotsky were tough enough. “We must put an end once and for all,” said Trotsky, “to the Papist-Quaker babble about the sanctity of human life.” Stalin showed a similar taste for Terror. When Estonian Bolsheviks proposed liquidating “traitors” in the earliest days of the Revolution, he replied swiftly: “The idea of a concentration camp is excellent.”
He “began to feel more sure of himself,” writes Trotsky. “I soon noticed Lenin was ‘advancing’ Stalin, valuing his firmness, grit, stubbornness and slyness as qualities necessary in the struggle.”[182] Molotov, who loathed Trotsky, judges that “it was not without reason that Lenin recognized Stalin and Trotsky as the leaders who stood out from the rest as the most talented.” Soon even Sukhanov understood that Stalin “holds in his hands the fate of the Revolution and state.” The Georgian, says Trotsky, “became accustomed to power.”
Yet Stalin was never inevitable. The brains, confidence, intellectual intensity, political talents, faith in and experience of violence, touchiness, vindictiveness, charm, sensitivity, ruthlessness, lack of empathy, the sheer weird singularity of the man, were in place—but lacking a forum. In 1917, he found the forum.
He could not have risen to power at any other time in history: it required the synchronicity of man and moment. His unlikely rise as a Georgian who could rule Russia was only made possible by the internationalist character of Marxism. His tyranny was made possible by the beleaguered circumstances of Soviet Russia, the utopian fanaticism of its quasi-religious ideology, the merciless Bolshevik machismo, the slaughterous spirit of the Great War, and Lenin’s homicidal vision of a “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Stalin would not have been possible if Lenin had not, in the first days of the regime, defeated Kamenev’s milder way to create the machinery for so boundless and absolute a power. That was the forum for which Stalin was superbly equipped. Now Stalin could become Stalin.
Within months of October, Lenin and his magnates used that power to fight the Civil War. It was then that Stalin, along with his cohorts, experienced that unrestrained power to wage war and change society by random killing. Like boys on their first foxhunt, they were blooded by the exhilaration and swagger. Stalin’s character, damaged yet gifted, was qualified for, and fatally attracted to, such pitiless predations. Afterwards, the machine of repression, the flinthearted, paranoid psychology of perpetual conspiracy and the taste for extreme bloody solutions to all challenges, were not just ascendant but glamorized, institutionalized and raised to an amoral Bolshevik faith with messianic fervour. In a colossal bureaucracy run like a nepotistic village, Stalin showed himself a master of personal politics.[183] He was the patron of these brutal tendencies but also their personification: he was right when he blasphemously declared in 1929 that “the Party has made me in its own image.” He and the Party had developed together, but this creature of covert but boundless extremism and brooding, malevolent darkness could always go further still.
He grew up in the clannish Caucasus; he had spent his entire maturity in the conspiratorial underground, that peculiar milieu where violence, fanaticism and loyalty were the main coinage; he flourished in the jungle of constant struggle, drama and stress; he came to power as that rare thing—both man of violence and of ideas, an expert in gangsterism, as well as a devout Marxist; but, above all, he believed in himself and in his own ruthless leadership as the only way to govern a country in crisis and to promote a mere ideal to a real utopia.
In a limitless government run as a giant conspiracy of bloodletting and clan patronage, who was the most qualified to prosper?
The dance of power between Trotsky and Stalin started at the very beginning, at the first meeting of the new government, a historic occasion at which the personal peccadilloes and political wheeler-dealering clashed with the sanctity of dialectical materialism.
The first Cabinet—the Sovnarkom in Bolshevik acronym—was held in Lenin’s office in the Smolny, which was still so makeshift and amateurish that the only link with his new empire was a “cubby-hole for his telephone girl and typist” behind an unpainted wooden partition. It was surely no coincidence that Lenin’s two outstanding magnates, “Stalin and I,” writes Trotsky, “were the first to arrive.”
Then, from behind the wooden partition, the two of them overheard seductive and affectionate sighs: “a conversation of a rather tender nature” in the “thick basso of [People’s Commissar of the Navy] Dybenko, a blackbearded sailor, twenty-nine years old, a jolly and self-confident giant” who had recently “become intimate with Alexandra Kollontai, a woman of aristocratic antecedents approaching her forty-sixth year.” At this epoch-making moment, Stalin and Trotsky found themselves eavesdropping on Kollontai’s latest scandalous affair, about which “there’d been much gossip in Party circles.”
Trotsky and Stalin, two arrogant self-annointed Marxist messiahs, two magnificent administrators, deep thinkers, murderous enforcers, rank outsiders, a Jew and a Georgian, looked at each other. Stalin was amused, but Trotsky was shocked. “Stalin came up to me with a kind of unexpected jauntiness and pointing his shoulder towards the partition said, smirking: ‘That’s him with Kollontai, with Kollontai!’”[184] Trotsky was not amused:
“His gesture and laughter seemed to me out of place and unendurably vulgar especially on that occasion and in that place.”
“That’s their affair!” snapped Trotsky, at which “Stalin sensed he’d made a mistake.”
The amazing and unthinkable had happened: Stalin, the Georgian cobbler’s son, was close to the peak of a Russian oligarchical government, and almost instantly Trotsky was his natural rival.
Stalin, says Trotsky, “never again tried to engage me in conversation of a personal nature. Stalin’s face changed. His yellow eyes flashed with the glint of malice.”{252}
182
It is still widely believed that Stalinism was a distortion of Leninism. But this is contradicted by the fact that in the months after October they were inseparable. Indeed for the next five years Lenin promoted Stalin wherever possible. Lenin single-handedly pushed the Bolsheviks to frenzied bloodletting on orders that have recently been revealed in the archives and published in Richard Pipes’s Unknown Lenin. He knew what he was doing with Stalin, even though he realized that “that chef will cook up some spicy dishes.” Stalinism was not a distortion but a development of Leninism.
183
Trotsky later claimed that Stalin amassed power as a bureaucratic mediocrity, but it was actually Yakov Sverdlov, assisted by Elena Stasova, who ran the Party machine. Stalin was not a born bureaucrat at all. He was a hard worker utterly dedicated to politics; indeed everything with Stalin was political, but he worked in an eccentric, structureless, unbureaucratic, almost bohemian, style that would not have succeeded in any other government, then or now. Lenin’s trust was won in the bank robberies and intrigues of the early years and, later, on the battlefields of the Civil War: Stalin was hardly in his office before 1920.
184
Alexandra Kollontai always treated Stalin with old-world courtesy: she served as his Swedish Ambassador and died naturally. Dybenko was shot in the Great Terror.