Against the likely wishes of Lenin, who had yet to show his face in Russia, Stalin threw in his lot with the Petrograd Soviet, apparently on the theory that “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.” In his Pravda editorials Stalin, in typical Bolshevik style, urged all democratic groups to come together to run the country, while also sanctioning a continuation of the war on the grounds that too much sacrifice had been made to enter into a dishonorable and costly surrender.
In the middle of this political upheaval Stalin found the time to fall in love. The object was the fifteen-year-old Nadezhda Sergeevna Alliluyeva, in whose family’s apartment Stalin had been residing. The favor was returned by the gregarious, mature student, who found the now graying Bolshevik revolutionary, twenty-three years her senior, both exciting and irresistible. When her parents at last figured it out they were aghast and—even though they considered Comrade Stalin a friend—tried to end the affair on grounds that Stalin’s personality was prone to violence. But she would not be shaken. In fact, it would be a dark hereditary mental affliction of Nadya’s that would bring the affair to tragedy.
It was Easter Sunday when Lenin and a number of other self-exiled revolutionaries at last arrived in Russia via a secret German-armored train from Switzerland, loaded with German gold to boost a Russian revolution. They were met by the tempestuous cheering of Socialist throngs. Lenin, who had worried about getting a cab because it was Easter, immediately startled the crowds by declaring there would be no supporting the provisional government and no supporting the war. Socialist revolution was immediately at hand, he avowed. The Bolshevik cells must rise up across the land and become Red Guards, seizing power in the country. Lenin promised that his revolution would be “peaceful,” but that was the furthest thing from his mind. Stalin instantly changed the course of his Pravda editorials to parrot Lenin’s preachings.
About the same time, the former Menshevik Leon Trotsky arrived on the scene. Hated by both Lenin and Stalin, Trotsky nevertheless held enormous sway within the party. Lenin decided to court his old enemy by suggesting to Trotsky that he become a Bolshevik and agitate for the revolution. Trotsky told Lenin to change the name of the Bolsheviks, which Lenin refused to do. Trotsky nevertheless became a kind of quasi-member, asserting that he was an equal co-leader with Lenin. Things were happening quickly now, and former alliances shifted.
The newly reconstituted Bolsheviks attempted to assemble a Bolshevik-riddled army machine-gun regiment, along with a band of heavily armed sailors who had recently mutinied and executed 120 of their officers (including several admirals) to participate in a large “solidarity” demonstration in St. Petersburg on July 4, 1917. In fact, the demonstration was designed to turn into a coup that would give Lenin total power. But the event was put down by large numbers of loyal army troops who had been hastily called back from the front.
After this defeat of the Socialists, the provisional government issued arrest warrants for the Bolshevik leaders, with Lenin and Trotsky topping the list. Lenin escaped but Trotsky was thrown in jail. Lenin, in hiding, felt he should leave St. Petersburg and enlisted Stalin to spirit him away. As Lenin’s train rolled out of sight, Stalin stood watching it for a long while, absorbing the fact that he was, by default, in control of the Bolshevik Party.
His leadership did not last long. Lenin, hiding in a shack in a countryside hayfield, was soon sending political slogans, propaganda, and other double-talk for the Bolshevik Central Committee to employ. What none of the Socialist groups realized, however, was the growing weakness of the provisional government. As Bolshevik cells began rising up all over the empire, a colossal amount of looting took place. The palaces of princes, dukes, viscounts, earls, landowners, and business magnates were raided, and priceless heirlooms were soon being peddled in the streets; dealers in antiquities, fine arts, and jewelry sellers did a land-office business. At length, after endless arguing and counterarguing over the course of weeks, a secret time for the mass uprising was set: October 24. Despite the fact that this date was supposed to be secret, it was already rumored all over St. Petersburg.
The post office was seized, as were the central telephone exchange, the state bank, the main railroad station, and the bridges into town. Lenin sneaked back into the city, disguised with a wig and fancy women’s makeup, his trademark goatee shaven clean. “He looked like a Lutheran priest,” said one old Bolshevik. Lenin declared that the provisional government no longer existed. Democracy in Russia was dead.
At dawn on October 25, Bolsheviks, including disgruntled members of the Russian army and navy, laid siege to the provisional government’s seat of power: the czar’s Winter Palace. The siege lasted throughout the day and into the next, when the final troops occupying the palace—a women’s battalion and something less than a platoon of military cadets—surrendered.
The Bolsheviks proceeded to loot the czar’s last home. Precious items were taken and fine wines consumed. According to the first sergeant of the women’s battalion, which had been charged with defending the palace, the drunken Bolsheviks then “hunted women down, raped them, and threw them from the upper stories of houses into the street.”25
Except for the women soldiers, there was surprisingly little bloodshed. The leader of the provisional government, Alexander Kerensky, fled the city. A new day had dawned but the ghastly horrors of the twentieth century were just beginning to throb over the vast Russian Empire.
* * *
STALIN WAS NOW IN QUASI-LEGITIMATE power, meaning that the police could not arrest him, for the police had been killed or driven away. But it was not the kind of power with which he felt comfortable. All these years since he had first gone underground as a Bolshevik, Stalin had been used to life on the run—hiding in people’s apartments, printing Socialist propaganda leaflets and newspapers, getting arrested, escaping, planning robberies and murders, dodging the police, using disguises and aliases. Now, here he was, almost forty years old and an upstanding party member with credentials, able to walk the streets without fear. He missed the shadows. It was maddening. Sitting in a restaurant gave him the heebie-jeebies. He always sat with his back to the wall, facing the door. Loud, unfamiliar shouts made him cringe. Now he could walk in the sunshine in a public park, eat out, maybe take in a movie. It was going to take some getting used to.
During these perilous times, two enormous events would convulse Russia. The first was the Great War with Germany; the second was the imposition of the Bolshevik will over the people, which became known as the Red Terror.
Lenin was adamant that the war must be stopped, no matter the consequences. He used a radio address to decree that the commander in chief of the Russian armies must be removed for failing to negotiate an armistice. A “detachment” was subsequently dispatched by Lenin that same day to the army’s general headquarters, led by a Bolshevik naval ensign. Upon arrival, he made a speech calling on soldiers to revolt and surround the general. They did, and then murdered him on the spot.
* * *
THE REVOLUTIONARIES FACED many urgent political questions: How can we stop the war and on what terms? Who would lead the country now that the czar was gone? How would the citizens of the cities be fed? How will everyone get back to work? Though Lenin was interested in solving these problems, he saw with ruthless and inescapable insight that the main problem was hanging on to his power, no matter what.
Opposing socialist parties were then allowed within the soviet, but Lenin saw to it that their members were given unimportant posts. The Bolsheviks moved their headquarters to Moscow, where they formed a secret security force of thugs, drunks, sadists, and killers known as the Cheka to combat “counterrevolutionaries.” It was nothing more than an execution squad of extraordinary size and power. The Socialists also changed the name of their group to the Communist Party, shortening a very long acronym.
At first the Cheka killed those thought to be enemies of the revolution; then they began killing peopl
e who simply might be, or might become, enemies, including aristocrats, business owners, bureaucrats, industrialists, army officers, professors: Marx’s wretched bourgeoisie. Then they began killing people for no reason at all, except to show that they could do it: to prove that men had no rights whatsoever and that their very lives were served only at the pleasure of the party.
The Cheka killed millions; the favorite method was a shot to the back of the head or neck while the victim kneeled. When there were mass executions, the condemned were lined up in front of graves they themselves had dug and either fell or were pushed in after the fatal shot. Stalin underlined a passage in his copy of Marx that he kept in his library: “There is only one way to shorten and ease the convulsions of the old society and the bloody birth pangs of the new: revolutionary terror.” Beside it, Stalin wrote: “Terror is the quickest way to the new society.”
United States president Woodrow Wilson, a former college administrator, sent the Communists a congratulatory telegram expressing sympathy with the Russian people for “casting off the yoke of autocracy.” The Soviet Congress composed an ungracious reply in which it promised to overthrow the United States government and liberate the American people from “the yoke of capitalism.” Indeed, it went on to threaten worldwide revolution that would establish Communism as the only true political system.
In the big Russian cities—Moscow, Petrograd—people were starving because the entire distribution system, a capitalist one, had been disrupted. It was determined by Communists that the kulaks—the better class of farmers—were hiding their grain and other foodstuffs from revolutionary confiscation. The Cheka opened a land-office extermination business, and soon the kulak class was almost entirely wiped out in the new Soviet Union.
Stalin was sent to Georgia to make sure its grain and oil were getting into the Soviet pipeline. He had a private train to transport and house him, along with his typist, Nadya Alliluyeva, who would soon be his wife.
In Georgia, Stalin was basically a supply officer, but he established himself as a sort of general, affecting a costume consisting of a light-colored tunic with a leather belt, high polished boots, and a military cap with a polished bill. He immediately picked a fight over military authority with Trotsky, who was running the Bolshevik army. Both appealed to Lenin to have the other recalled. For his part, Trotsky considered Stalin a “clerk” and “a stooge for Lenin.”26
* * *
AT THE SAME TIME THAT THE Cheka was wiping out entire classes of people, peasants and others rose up to begin a genocide of their own. Soon the country was in the throes of a civil war that eventually organized itself beneath the banners of Red (Communists, Socialists) and White (capitalists, democrats, free traders, czarists). Generals from the former Russian military led these armies, which killed far more savagely than those of the world war.
In the meantime, the czar and his entire family—four young daughters and a son—who had been under house arrest in the Urals were taken to a filthy cellar in their home in the town of Ekaterinburg. There, they were murdered by gunfire on orders of the Bolsheviks. Their bodies were set on fire and thrown down a well. Thus was Lenin’s “peaceful” revolution exposed. When some Mensheviks raised the proposition of outlawing capital punishment, Lenin had replied, “Nonsense. How can you have a revolution without shooting people?”
In October 1917 the Russian army had effectively ceased fighting the Germans. Five months later, in March 1918, the Communist government signed the humiliating Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, surrendering to Germany. This act, freeing more than a million German soldiers to bolster the huge German attack against the Allies on the Western Front, ceded to the Germans large portions of the former Russian Empire including the Baltic states, Ukraine, and parts of Georgia. The Communists got them all back in November when the Central Powers collapsed, but it did buy the Bolsheviks time to organize their army and begin fighting the Russian Civil War. Before it was done, some 60 million Russians who had lived under the auspices of the Romanov dynasty found themselves under German or Turkish control. Stalin was not involved in these proceedings.
The Russian Civil War wore on for three years, horrifying the world. More than 3 million soldiers were killed in clashes between the White and Red Armies. An additional 5 million citizens died of murder or starvation during the famine caused by the war. In late 1918 a dozen nations of the Allies—the United States included—sent troops into Russia’s northern ports. The initial goal was to secure munitions being produced in Czechoslovakia, as well as to try and reestablish the Eastern Front that the Bolsheviks had abandoned. In the end they stayed until 1920, fighting on the side of the White Russians, but without much success. There was little that 175,000 British, Czech, French, Japanese, Australian, Canadian, Polish, Italian, and U.S. troops could achieve against 3 million soldiers of Lenin’s Red Army.
All but the most personal private property was confiscated. Land, factories, and businesses became the property of the state. It was illegal to own a weapon, even for hunting to feed one’s family. The party began laying plans for how to distribute essentials such as food, medical care, and education and to advance transportation, foreign relations, and the military. Beyond complicated, their new world would require a vast new bureaucracy that the country was unprepared to provide.
In the summer of 1918 Lenin believed that the Bolshevik Party’s hold over the Russian people was insufficient. The czars had ruled since the year 1547, and revolutionary fervor had abated. People began asking themselves what was to happen next. For Lenin and Stalin this was not good news, mainly because the people might want a say in the matter or even a democracy. So it was decided to bring them all under total control by unleashing what became known as the Red Terror.
Those members of the royalty, aristocracy, or peerage who were not already slain or had escaped into Europe were now hunted down and killed. It was the same with the remaining bourgeois class, hundreds of thousands more of whom were marked for death, along with their families. The Cheka—the Bolsheviks’ brutal counterrevolutionary force—was efficient in eliminating these unfortunates. Most were dispatched quickly in groups by a shot to the back of the head, hanging, or strangulation with wire. They were then buried in mass graves dug by those in the forced labor camps.
Others were put to death in more shocking ways: a carnival of perversion so breathtaking as to be almost unbelievable, except for the many files that recorded it. Condemned men, women, and children were incinerated in furnaces or flayed alive, their skin made into clothing. Others were fiendishly dunked into vats of boiling water. Crucifixions were commonplace, especially for members of the clergy. One appalling practice was to tie naked people to stakes in the cold of the Russian winter and douse them with water until they became human icicles; another was to seal naked prisoners into barrels studded with inward-pointing nails that would then be rolled around for sport until the victims died from shock or loss of blood. Some were sealed in casks with rats that eventually ate them; others were thrown through holes in icy lakes to drown or boiled in tar or melted lead.
It was Stalin’s and Lenin’s aspiration for the terror to cow the entire Russian population—not only wiping out entire classes of people but, while they were at it, most of the rival revolutionary parties. To justify this butchery, Lenin in particular relied on what he said were the teachings of Karl Marx, offering a quote attributed to Marx following the failed Socialist uprising in Vienna: “There is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified, and concentrated—and that way is revolutionary terror.” Joseph Stalin concurred with all of this, and was complicit in it.27
When the civil war finally ended in 1922, the Russian people were prostrated, which is just what Lenin (and Stalin) wanted. Lenin had never tried to prevent a civil war, because he was convinced it would be the only way the Communists could consolidate absolute con
trol over the country. The Communists began to ease the food shortage and soon the people—many of them, at least—began to feel grateful to them: a sad and frightening syndrome that would permeate the country throughout the existence of the Communist regime.
Stalin, whose role by now was as a bureaucrat of variously important diktats and a chief flunky of Lenin, would pace the floor of his study sucking on his pipe, trying to grasp the enormity of the thing he’d inherited. One by one, he had eliminated his rivals through power plays, sleight of hand, and in some cases murder; now, much of the power was in his hands. Only Trotsky remained a threat, and a weak one at that. He could deal with him later. For now, he had to form a vision, a picture, of how the world would look once things were in place. The mighty state would contain “a single bank, a single economic plan, a peasantry organized on collective farms. There would be ruthless discipline, ruthless punishments, gigantic resources concentrated in the hands of the state, a huge industrial economy and a huge army above which would be a pyramid of lesser leaders, and atop which would stand the Supreme Leader, himself!”28
Once again, the killing began in earnest. Hundreds of thousands were executed as enemies, or potential enemies, of the state; millions were enslaved in the gulags of Siberia. Lenin, for example, sent a telegram ordering local revolutionaries in the city of Penza to hang “no fewer than one hundred” of the wealthier farmers suspected of hoarding grain. In the end, five hundred were hanged; others were woefully tortured. It has been estimated that for the next twenty years an average of a million Russian people a year were executed by the Communist regime, which, for much of that time, would be headed by the dictator of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics: Joseph V. Stalin.29
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