Young Stalin (56 page)

*
On 17 March, in his article “The War,” Stalin merely called for “pressure on the Provisional Government” about ending the war, while Lenin was already demanding its “overthrow.” He did not attack the Mensheviks but only wanted alliance with those who backed his belief in a defensist war. He wanted the Soviet to keep mastery over the Provisional Government and he demanded the urgent calling of a Constituent Assembly. On one hand, he only proposed “pressure” on the government; on the other, when the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks held a joint debate on the Provisional Government, he damned it as the organ of “the elites” who simply substituted “one Tsar for another.” He was still a Conciliator, as he explained at a Party conference at the end of March, held in the mansion and then in the Taurida.

39

1917 Summer: Sailors on the Streets

O
n 27 March 1917, Lenin, Krupskaya, Zinoviev and Stalin’s Georgian patron Tskhakaya boarded their famous Sealed Train. Almost a month after the February Revolution, Lenin had finally found a way to return to Russia. In the interim, he had entertained fantasies of taking a train pretending to be a deaf-and-dumb Swede or hitching a ride on a rickety biplane across central Europe. “We must get home,” he said. “But how?” Fortunately, the German High Command believed that the clinical insertion of Lenin and his revolutionary bacillus might infect Russia with the virus of pacifism, thereby knocking her out of the war.
¹

Lenin dominated the Sealed Train as he would Russia herself: he would have approved the smoking-bans of our era and insisted on dictating the smoking rules and lavatorial visitation rights of the entire train—in preparation, the Bolshevik Karl Radek joked, “for assuming the leadership of the Revolutionary Government.” Smokers were allowed to light up only in the lavatory, whereas non-smokers were issued with special “first-class” lavatory passes that gave them priority access.

On 3 April, they stopped at the Beloostrov Station on the Finnish-Russian border in what Krupskaya grandly called “those dear wretched little third-class railroad cars.” Stalin’s friend Ludmilla Stal welcomed Krupskaya with a delegation of women. Kamenev blithely climbed aboard to greet Lenin, but got a shock.

“What the hell have you been writing?” barked Lenin. “We’ve read a few issues of
Pravda
and we cursed you roundly.”

The train steamed into Petrograd’s Finland Station. Stalin boarded the carriage to greet “the Old Man,” who was still only forty-six. With his Homburg hat, tweed suit and bourgeois umbrella, this bald little man was a stranger to Russia, new and old. Yet this was an angrier Lenin, more violent, merciless and impatient than the man who had gone into exile a decade earlier: if he lacked Soso’s vindictive personal malice, he more resembled Stalin than the gentle fatherly image later peddled by Soviet propaganda. “I can’t listen to music too often,” he said after hearing Beethoven’s Appassionata Sonata. “It makes me want to say kind stupid things and pat the heads of people. But now you have to beat them on the head, beat them without mercy.” Lenin was buzzing with this next battle. “One fighting campaign after another,” as he told his sometime mistress Inessa Armand. “That’s my life.” Stalin would have said the same things. Hailing from such different worlds—one with the manners of a nobleman, the other those of a peasant—they shared the same sentiments and favoured identical methods.

We do not know what Lenin said to him in the carriage,
^*
but virtually as soon as they met, Stalin abandoned the “flabby” Kamenev and backed the Old Man.

Just before midnight, Lenin “alighted from the carriage with Stalin,” observed Molotov, who was present. The famous yet mysterious Lenin found Finland Station in revolutionary fiesta. A military band burst into “The Marseillaise;” searchlights scanned the avid crowds. Lenin reviewed an honour guard of revolutionary sailors from the Kronstadt Base, 2,000 Putilov plant workers, a crowd waving red banners and an array of armoured cars.

A phalanx of Red Guards—armed Bolshevik workers—escorted Lenin into the station’s Imperial Lounge, where he was greeted by the Soviet chairman, Chkheidze. But Lenin bounded onto an armoured car, telling the crowd (including Molotov, Voroshilov and Alliluyev) that the Provisional Government, with their “sweet speeches and great promises,
are deceiving you just as they are deceiving the entire Russian people.” The speech, writes one witness, “shook and astonished the Faithful . . . like a clap of thunder.” The Bolsheviks must overthrow the government, end the “predatory imperialist war” and immediately transfer power to the soviets.

Many thought the Old Man was mad and out of touch. “Lenin is a has-been,” the Menshevik Skobelev told Prince Lvov. Yet even his opponents could only marvel at his raging certainty: “Lenin,” says Sukhanov, “displayed such amazing force, such superhuman power of attack.”

Lenin rode his armoured car through the streets, surrounded by the blaring band, and the workers and soldiers, towards the Kseshinskaya Mansion, where, in the ballerina’s white-columned drawing-room, he harangued incredulous Bolsheviks. The next morning, he addressed them in Room 13 of the Taurida Palace. “Everyone was dumbfounded,” said Molotov. At first, only Alexandra Kollontai supported him unreservedly. The Bolsheviks, said Trotsky, “were as unprepared for Lenin as they had been for the February Revolution.”

Lenin’s
tour deforce
won over Stalin, who confessed: “Many things became clearer.” The people longed for peace and land, but the well-intentioned government insisted on honouring the Tsar’s promises to fight on against Germany and foolishly delayed settling the land question until the election of a Constituent Assembly, months away. Lenin alone grasped that this interval was his unique opportunity to seize Russia. After 6 April, Lenin and Stalin started working closely together at
Pravda.
²

On 18 April, Lenin was helped by the blunder of Foreign Minister Milyukov, who issued a diplomatic note informing Britain and France that Russia intended to annex Ottoman territories, an imperial war without an emperor. The Soviet had backed the Provisional Government only providing it waged a defensive war. A wave of revulsion shattered the fragile ministry. Prince Lvov formed a new coalition with Kerensky as Minister of War.

Radical Bolsheviks called for an armed uprising. Lenin, in the first of many such retreats after arriving with all ideological guns blazing, had to restrain his own hotheads: the uprising was “incorrect . . . at present.” When the Bolshevik Conference started on 24 April in Kseshinskaya’s ballroom, Lenin “entered like an inspector coming into a classroom.” Until Lenin’s arrival, thought Ludmilla Stal, “all comrades wandered in the darkness.” Stalin was firmly out of the darkness. When Kamenev
attacked Lenin, Stalin mocked his erstwhile ally. He was a Leninist again—but that did not mean they agreed on everything.
^*

Stalin gave the report on the national question. He won the debate, but he was still best known for Caucasian banditry, and needed Lenin’s support. “We’ve known Comrade Koba for very many years,” Lenin declared. “We used to see him in Cracow where we had our Bureau. His activity in the Caucasus was important. He’s a good worker in all sorts of responsible work.” Molotov remembered Lenin explaining the essence of Stalin’s attraction for him: he was a “commanding figure—you could assign Stalin any task.”

On 29 April, Stalin came third with ninety-seven votes in the CC elections, just after Lenin and Zinoviev, a result that showed his standing in the Party. Stalin now spent most of his time at the Soviet, editing
Pravda
or working at the Central Committee with Lenin. The Central Committee chose Lenin, Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev as a decision-making Bureau for the first time, a precursor of the all-powerful Politburo.
³

On 4 May, Trotsky finally arrived from America and immediately dazzled Petrograd, speaking almost nightly at the “packed-out” Cirque Moderne, where “he was often carried to the stage” by the crowd. He was, noticed Sukhanov, “intoxicated with his popularity.”

Lenin recognized Trotsky’s worth and courted him, inviting him to join the Bolsheviks a week later. The only thing that divided them, said Lenin, was “ambition.” Stalin must have resented the return of this revolutionary star. He was to write more than sixty articles in 1917, but Trotsky sneered that he just produced “dull comments on brilliant events.” When Lenin appointed a delegation to negotiate with Trotsky, Stalin was understandably left out.

Unlike Trotsky, Stalin did not make his mark in 1917. He put it best himself: “Before the Revolution, our Party led an underground existence—a secret Party. Now circumstances have changed”—and they did not really suit him. He flourished in the shadows.

Nineteen-seventeen was really Stalin’s only experience of open democratic politics, hardly the ideal environment for someone trained in the
cutthroat clan intrigues of the Caucasus. He spoke quietly with a comical Georgian accent. “I didn’t make out much of what he said,” reports a witness, “but one thing I noticed: all of Stalin’s sentences were sharp and crisp statements distinguished by clarity of formulation.” A worker who saw him speak thought that “what he said sounded all right, understandable and simple, but somehow one couldn’t remember his speech afterwards.” He “avoided making speeches at mass meetings,” but the plain, modest delivery of his anti-oratory proved to be surprisingly impressive and convincing for the many who distrusted showy intellectuals.

When Lenin seized power and, beleaguered on all sides, ran his government like a conspiratorial camarilla, Stalin was again in his element.

On 3 June, Soso’s young fans Anna and Nadya Alliluyeva came to admire their hero at the First Congress of the Soviets in the Military School on Vasilevsky Island. “Stalin and Sverdlov attended the opening sessions—they were the first to arrive with Lenin. I saw the three of them enter the empty hall,” reports Anna Alliluyeva, who was working for the Party. “We had not seen Stalin for many days and his room in the flat stood empty.”

“We must call on him,” whispered the schoolgirl Nadya. “Perhaps he’s changed his mind about coming to live in our apartment.” Next day, they witnessed the most dramatic moment of the Congress.

“There’s no party in Russia that dares say, ‘Just place power in our hands,’” boomed the Menshevik Tsereteli.

At this, Lenin leaped out of his chair and shouted: “There
is
such a party!”

Vereshchak, Stalin’s Bailovka cell mate, noticed that “Lenin, Zinoviev and Kamenev were the main speakers” but “Sverdlov and Stalin silently directed the Bolshevik Faction—the first time I realized the full significance of the man.”

Stalin impressed Trotsky, whose description reveals why he lost their struggle for power. “Stalin was very valuable behind the scenes,” he wrote. “He did have the knack of convincing the average run of leaders, especially the provincials.” He “wasn’t regarded as the official leader of the Party,” says Sagirashvili, another Georgian Menshevik in Petrograd throughout 1917, but “everyone listened to what he had to say, including Lenin—he was a representative of the rank and file, one who expressed its real views and moods,” which were unknown to émigrés like Trotsky. Soso was the “unquestioned leader” of the Caucasians. Lenin, says Sagirashvili,
“felt that behind him stood countless leaders from the provinces.”
^*
While Trotsky was prancing on the stage at the Circus, Stalin was finding new allies such as the young man he had unceremoniously kicked off the Buro, Molotov.
⁴

Stalin moved in with Molotov, who lived at a spacious flat on Shirokaya Street, across the Neva on the Petrograd side, with three other comrades. “It was like a kind of commune,” said Molotov. Stalin, unusually, apologized to Molotov for what the latter called “Stalin’s big mistake.” “You were the nearest of all to Lenin in the initial stage in April,” confessed Stalin. The two became friends. Besides, Molotov, who had not been elected to the Central Committee in April, was in need of a patron. They were opposites: the sturdy, stammering and bespectacled Molotov was ponderous, correct, rather bourgeois. But they shared Marxist fanaticism, a head for boozing, a Robespierrean belief in Terror, a vindictive inferiority-complex—and a beliefin Stalin’s mastery.

Stalin had been constantly moving home, working at night and then grabbing sleep at friends’ places. He often slept where he worked at the Kseshinskaya Mansion. Tatiana Slavatinskaya worked there as an assistant at the Central Committee under Sverdlov and Stasova. Ludmilla Stal helped edit
Rabotnitsa
(Working Woman) and manage relations with the Kronstadt sailors: they must have seen each other. It was said that Stalin reheated his romance with Stal. If so, she was not the only one.