‘an armed uprising is inevitable, and that the time for it is fully ripe’. Stalin, bruised from his altercation with Lenin, was among the ten.
The October Revolution
On 7 November (25 October Old Style) the Bolsheviks’ armed wing, the Military Revolutionary Council, commanded by Trotsky, took control of Petrograd, then overran the Winter Palace, overthrowing the Provisional Government. The Soviets had obtained power. Lenin then ensured that the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries were sidelined and that effective power lay in the hands of the Bolsheviks only. Lenin then instituted the new government, the Council of People’s Commissars, abbreviated as Sovnarkom. Trotsky was made the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, and Stalin, by dent of being a Georgian, was appointed the People’s Commissar of Nationalities, established specifically to ensure that the former tsarist empire remained as one, resisting the demands for national self-determination.
Civil War
The Bolsheviks’ hold on power was tenuous. Across Russia, groups opposed to Lenin’s new autocracy joined forces to oppose by violent means the Bolshevik government. This jumbled alliance of ex-tsarist officers, monarchists, disillusioned socialists, and various ethnic groups – collectively the ‘Whites’, had nothing in common but its shared hatred of the Bolsheviks. As the Russian Civil War broke out, Stalin was appointed as a Political Commissar leading the defence of the city of Tsaritsyn (renamed Stalingrad in 1925 and now called Volgograd).
Stalin aged 40, 1918
Stalin frequently clashed with Leon Trotsky, his military superior and recently appointed the People’s Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs. Trotsky – who deservedly took much of the credit for winning the ‘Reds’ the Civil War – exploited the expertise and experience of former officers of the Tsar’s army, holding their families hostage to ensure their active participation. Stalin, who had no truck with anything related to tsarism – preferring to have them shot – devoted as much energy to fighting Trotsky’s supporters as the Whites. He once, infamously, imprisoned a group of Trotskyites on a leaky barge on the River Volga and left them to drown.
Stalin’s rise through the ranks of the Communist Party (the Bolshevik party had changed its name to the Russian Communist Party in March 1918) and onto ultimate power was impressive. He owed it all to the support of Lenin who, in March 1919, appointed him to both the five-man Politburo, responsible for policy, and to the Orgburo ‘organisational bureau’, which dealt with administrative matters and party personnel – such as appointing managers of regional party branches. It was in this latter role that Stalin’s methodical organisation and indexing of members earned him the contemptuous nickname Comrade Card Index. But in their facetiousness, his rivals underestimated one of Stalin’s strengths – he got to know the blemishes on everyone’s records and, never one to forget a name, exploited this information to full effect. The top promotion came in April 1922, when Lenin, acting on a proposal put forward by Kamenev and Zinoviev, made Stalin General Secretary of the Communist Party’s Central Committee, a post he held until 1952, a year before his death.
Lenin soon regretted his haste in over-promoting Stalin, falling out with his General Secretary over the latter’s handling of Georgia. Originally, the Bolsheviks had promised the Russian nations self-determination but, once in power, they reneged on that promise, wanting to keep all nations of the former Russian Empire within the Soviet orbit.
Stalin and Lenin, March 1919
The Civil War had intensified these hopes and Georgia had enjoyed a brief spell of independence from May 1918 until February 1921 when the Red Army re-asserted Moscow’s control. Lenin advised a conciliatory approach, advice that Stalin, along with his fellow countryman, Sergo Ordzhonikidze, ignored by imposing a crackdown on Georgian autonomy and executing its leaders in 1922.
Lenin’s Testament
Lenin was furious with his ‘wonderful Georgian’ but in May 1922 he suffered the first of three strokes, greatly diminishing his ability to maintain command. In December 1922, Lenin wrote his Testament, in which he commented on individual members of the Party’s Central Committee. His most damning judgement was reserved for his General Secretary, whom he described as having ‘unlimited authority concentrated in his hands … I am not sure whether he will always be capable of using that authority with sufficient caution’. Stalin’s bullish behaviour in Georgia was Lenin’s case-in-point. More damning still for Stalin was Lenin’s addendum to his Testament, written ten days later, in which he declared:
‘Stalin is too rude and this defect, although quite tolerable in our midst and in dealing among us Communists, becomes intolerable in a Secretary-General. That is why I suggest the comrades think about a way of removing Stalin from that post and appointing another man in his stead who in all other respects differs from Comrade Stalin in having only one advantage, namely, that of being more tolerant, more loyal, more polite, and more considerate to the comrades, less capricious, etc.’
Although the Central Committee had made Stalin their main contact with Lenin during his illness, the doctors had agreed that Lenin should be permitted no visitors. Stalin began to suspect, correctly, that Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, whom Stalin had never liked, was feeding her husband pro-Trotsky and anti-Stalinist information. On 22 December, Stalin telephoned Krupskaya, called her a ‘syphilitic whore’ and, in her words, ‘subjected me to a storm of the coarsest abuse’. Krupskaya was a resilient woman but Stalin’s tirade reduced her to a nervous wreck. Stalin was unrepentant: ‘just because she uses the same toilet as Lenin doesn’t mean she understands Marxism–Leninism’. Lenin didn’t find out about the call until three months later and when he did, he wrote a letter to Stalin:
You have been so rude as to summon my wife to the telephone and use bad language ... what has been done against my wife I consider having been done against me. I ask you, therefore, to think it over whether you are prepared to… make your apologies, or whether you prefer that relations between us should be broken off.
The next day, 6 March 1923, Lenin suffered his third stroke, which left him bedridden and mute. He died ten months later, on 21 January 1924, aged fifty-three.
Stalin visits Lenin during Lenin’s convalescence
Krupskaya remained a thorn in Stalin’s side, demanding that Lenin’s Testament be read out, as her husband had wished, at the forthcoming Thirteenth Party Congress, due in May 1924. Determined to suppress it, Stalin silenced her by threatening to find Lenin a ‘new widow’; Krupskaya was to die, a frightened woman, aged seventy in 1939.
Stalin took the lead in organising Lenin’s funeral and appeared as the chief pallbearer. Trotsky, who was recovering from illness near the Black Sea, missed the funeral – Stalin having deliberately told him the wrong date. Stalin initiated the deification of Lenin, in which the great leader’s image was seen everywhere and his memory held in reverential terms. Within days of his death, Petrograd was renamed Leningrad. Stalin’s broken relationship with Lenin was quietly forgotten and he reinvented himself as the bearer of Lenin’s legacy. To doubt Stalin was to doubt Lenin and question the whole legitimacy of the Revolution.
Opposition
Kamenev and Zinoviev, motivated by their fear of the arrogant Trotsky, joined forces with Stalin and together the three men assumed unofficial leadership of the Party as a troika. Between them they managed to get the Central Committee to agree on suppressing Lenin’s Testament. Stalin had offered to resign over the issue. The committee,