Stalin, Volume 1

by Stephen Kotkin

  Later, Stalin would not erase Lado’s independent revolutionary exploits or existence, even as almost everyone else connected to the dictator at one time or another would be airbrushed.130 (Lado’s birth house would be included in newsreels featuring Soviet Georgia.)131 The earliness of Lado’s martyrdom certainly helped in this regard. But that circumstance highlights the fact that Iosif Jughashvili himself could have suffered the same fate as his first mentor: early death in a tsarist prison.

  CHAPTER 3

  TSARISM’S MOST DANGEROUS ENEMY

  The Russian empire is everywhere in ferment. Unrest and apprehension prevail in all classes. This applies equally to labor, students, the nobility, including the highest Court society, industrialists, merchants, shopkeepers, and, last but not least, the peasants . . . The only proven method of dealing with this situation, which is often proposed abroad, is the granting of a constitution; if this were done here, the consequences would almost certainly be revolution.

  Austro-Hungarian attache in St. Petersburg, memo to Vienna, 19021

  RUSSIAN EURASIA—104 NATIONALITIES SPEAKING 146 languages, as enumerated in the 1897 census—was the world’s most spectacular kaleidoscope, but in truth, empire everywhere presented a crazy patchwork.2 The key to empire in Russia, too, was not the multinationalism per se but the political system. The onset of Russia’s modern state administration is usually attributed to Peter I, or Peter the Great (r. 1682–1725), even though major changes attributed to him often had roots in his father’s and even his grandfather’s reign.3 Peter is also credited with Westernization, even though he distrusted the West and used it as a means to an end: namely, the source of technical skills.4 Peter, whose mother was a (distant) Tatar descendant, did render Russia even more European culturally. Institutionally, he regularized a state administration on the Swedish model. And he introduced a Table of Ranks, a ladder of incentives to enhance competition for honor and privilege and to open state service to new men. By detaching status from birthright—or to put it another way, by making birthright a reward conferred by the state—Peter extended the governing authority’s capacity. But he undercut all his own state building by involving himself in everything. As one foreign ambassador observed, Peter “finds daily, more and more, that in the whole realm not one of his blood relatives and boyars can be found to whom he can entrust an important office. He is therefore forced to take over the heavy burden of the realm himself, and to put his hand to a new and different government, pushing back the boyars (whom he calls disloyal dogs).”5 In 1722, Peter unilaterally upgraded himself to “Emperor” (Imperator), a claim of parity with the (nonreigning) Holy Roman emperor. (He opted for “Emperor of All the Russias” rather than a proposed “Emperor of the East.”) Above all, Peter built up his own persona, partly via court hazing rituals—dildo debauches, mock weddings—which accentuated the centrality of and access to the autocrat’s person.6 The drive for a strong state became conflated with an intense personalism.

  Peter’s method of state building also reinforced the circumstance whereby Russia’s elites remained joined at the hip to the autocratic power. Russia never developed a fully fledged aristocracy with its own corporate institutions that would, eventually, decapitate the absolutism (although, finally, in 1730 some nobles in Russia did try).7 True, Russia’s gentry accumulated as much wealth as their counterparts in Austria or even England. And unlike in Austria or England, the Russian gentry also produced cultural figures of world distinction—Lermontov, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Glinka, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, Skryabin, Mussorgsky. Further, Russia’s gentry was an open estate: even bastards (such as Alexander Herzen) could attain noble status. But a still greater difference was that England’s aristocracy acquired political experience as a ruling class in a constitutional monarchy. Russia’s serf owners were all-powerful on their estates, but, ultimately, they lived under the autocrat’s sufferance. Elite status in Russia was predicated on rendering service in exchange for rewards—which could be withdrawn.8 In addition to serving the sovereign by employment in the state, Russian nobles had to work constantly just to maintain their standing in the hierarchy. True, most of Russia’s privileged families managed to survive through the centuries under the autocrats. Still, not all Russia’s elite clans did survive, and the difference between prosperous endurance versus exile or imprisonment could seem arbitrary.9 Russia’s high and mighty needed still higher-placed patrons to protect their property holdings and, sometimes, their very persons.

  Multitudes of observers, including Karl Marx, asserted that “modern Russia is but a metamorphosis of Muscovy.”10 They were wrong: the post-Petrine Russian state and its capital, St. Petersburg, more closely resembled European absolutism than ancient Muscovy. But that circumstance was obscured. Russia’s “soulless” pushers of paper, “brainless” bootlickers, and “craven” collectors of state decorations took an immortal drubbing in belles lettres, nowhere better than in Nikolai Gogol’s Inspector General. Court circles too mocked Russia’s parvenu “Your Excellencies.” Aside from these memoirs and Gogol’s sublime pen, which continue to beguile historians, we can find other important voices. Prince Boris A. Vasilchikov, for example, an aristocrat elected to the local governing council (zemstvo) near his estate, and later the governor of Pskov, had shared the contempt for imperial officialdom before he got inside. “During my two years’ service as a minister I gained a very high opinion of the qualities of Petersburg officialdom,” he wrote. “The level of personnel of the Petersburg chancelleries and ministries was extremely high as regards knowledge, experience and fulfillment of official duties . . . besides this, I was struck by their immense capacity for hard work.”11 To be sure, Vasilchikov also observed that few imperial Russian functionaries possessed broad horizons and many officials who did have vision remained averse to risk, unwilling to venture their views against opinions expressed above them.12 Sycophancy could reach breathtaking heights. And officials relied upon school ties, blood and marriage relations, cliques, all of which could cover for mistakes and incompetence. Nonetheless, the authority of all-important patrons and protectors often stemmed from accomplishments, not just connections. Facts cannot compete with great stories from Gogol but they can be stubborn: imperial Russia developed a formidable fiscal-military state that proved capable of mobilizing impressive resources, certainly compared with its rivals the Ottoman or Habsburg empires.13

  As late as the 1790s, when Prussia—with 1 percent of Russia’s size in land—had 14,000 officials, the tsarist empire had only 16,000 and just a single university, which was then a mere few decades old, but over the course of the 1800s, Russian officialdom grew seven times more rapidly than the population, and by 1900 had reached 385,000, leaping some 300,000 only since 1850. True, although many of Russia’s maligned provincial governors developed great administrative experience and skill, the low-prestige provincial apparatuses under them continued to suffer an extreme dearth of competent and honest clerks.14 And some territories were woefully undergoverned: in the Ferghana valley, for example, the most populous district of tsarist Turkestan, Russia posted just 58 administrators and a mere 2 translators for at least 2 million inhabitants.15 Overall, in 1900, while imperial Germany had 12.6 officials per 1,000 people, imperial Russia still had fewer than 4, a proportion reflecting Russia’s huge population—130 million versus Germany’s 50 million.16 The Russian state was top heavy and spread thin.17 Most of the provincial empire was left to be governed by local society, whose scope of governance, however, was restricted by imperial laws and whose degree of organization varied widely.18 Some provinces, such as Nizhny Novgorod, did remarkably well.19 Others, such as Tomsk, were mired in disabling corruption. Incompetence flourished most at the very top of the system. Many a deputy undertook machinations to depose his superior, which reinforced the inclination to hire mediocrities into the upper ranks, at least as top deputies, nowhere more so than in the tsars’ appointments of ministers.20 But despite the absence of a civil service examinati
on in Russia—such as the one that guided recruitment of officialdom in imperial Germany and Japan—administrative needs did slowly begin to dictate hiring on the basis of university education and expertise.21 Russia’s functionaries (chinovniki) began to be recruited from all social ranks, and countless thousands of plebeians became nobles because of their state service, a path upward that would be tightened but never closed.

  At the same time, unlike the absolutism in Prussia, Austria, Britain, or France, Russia’s autocracy endured deep into modern times. Prussia’s Frederick the Great (r. 1772–86) had called himself “the first servant of the state,” thereby marking the state’s separate existence from the sovereign. Russia’s tsars would hand out a Siberian silver mine’s worth of medals to state officials but, jealous of their autocratic prerogatives, they hesitated to recognize a state independent of themselves. The “autocratic principle” held even through the gravest crises. In 1855, when Alexander II succeeded his father, a dying Nicholas I had said to his son, “I want to take with me all the unpleasantness and the troubles and pass on to you an orderly, calm and happy Russia.”22 But Nicholas I had embroiled the empire in a costly Crimean War (1853–56), seeking to take advantage of a contracting Ottoman empire. Britain led a European concert against St. Petersburg, and Alexander II, at a loss of 450,000 imperial Russian subjects, found himself forced to accept defeat just before the conflict tipped into a world war.23 After the debacle—Russia’s first lost war in 145 years—Alexander II was constrained to countenance a series of Great Reforms, including a belated serf emancipation. (“It is better that this come from above than from below,” the tsar warned the unconvinced nobles, who were scarcely mollified by the huge redemption payments the state collected on their behalf from peasants.)24 But the tsar’s own autocratic prerogatives remained sacrosanct. Alexander II permitted an unprecedented degree of domestic freedom in the universities, the press, the courts, but as soon as Russian subjects exercised that civil freedom, he pushed back.25 The Tsar-Liberator—as he came to be known—refused a constitution, because, as his interior minister noted, Alexander II “was genuinely convinced that it would harm Russia and would lead to its dissolution.”26 But the tsar would not even let state law be applied to state officials, lest that diminish the autocrat’s dispensation.27 On the contrary, the granting of some local self-rule, some independence to the judiciary, and some autonomy to universities, alongside the freeing of the serfs, made a reassertion of autocratic power seem all the more urgent to Alexander II. Thus, the Great Reform moment to establish a parliament when it might have stuck—in the 1860s, and again in the 1880s—was fatally missed.28

  Russia lacked not only a parliament but even a coordinated government, so as not to infringe on the autocrat’s prerogatives. To be sure, Alexander II had approved a Council of Ministers to coordinate government affairs, but the effort (1857) was stillborn. In practice, the tsar shrank from relinquishing the power of having individual ministers obviate the collective body and report to him directly, and privately; the ministers colluded in the government reform’s sabotage, not wanting to forgo the influence gained via private access to the autocrat.29 Meetings of the Council, like any imperial audiences, mostly involved efforts to divine the “autocratic will,” to avoid the catastrophe of being on the wrong side of decisions. Only the most skillful could manage, every now and then, to implant an idea as the tsar’s own.30 Courtiers and “unofficial” advisers, meanwhile, continued to make policy, even for the ministries, and the Russian government’s operation remained uncoordinated and secretive—from officialdom. Tsarism suffered a debilitation it could not overcome: the imperatives of autocracy undermined the state. Of the resulting political regime, wags called it fairly simple: autocracy, tempered by occasional assassination. Open season had commenced in 1866, with the first of six attempts on Alexander II. He was finally blown to bits in 1881. Alexander III survived several close calls, including one in the company of his son Nicholas, the future tsar. In 1887, after a failed plot on Alexander III, Alexander Ulyanov, a member of the underground People’s Will—and the elder brother of the-then seventeen-year-old Vladimir Ulyanov (the future Lenin)—refused an offer of clemency and was hanged. The inflexible autocracy had many enemies, including Iosif Jughashvili. But its most dangerous enemy was itself.

  MODERNITY AS GEOPOLITICAL IMPERATIVE

  By the turn of the century, at least 100 political murders had been notched in imperial Russia. After that the pace picked up, as terrorist-assassins pursued what they called disorganization—provoking the police to make arrests and shed blood, which, in twisted terrorist logic, would galvanize society to revolt. The next royal family member hit was Moscow’s governor, Grand Duke Sergei, a younger son of Alexander II (and an uncle of Nicholas II), who was decapitated by a bomb right inside the Kremlin in 1905. Until that year, politics in Russia was essentially illegal: political parties and trade unions were banned; censorship meant that few options for political discourse existed, other than tossing a “pomegranate” at an official’s carriage and watching the body parts fly. (Grand Duke Sergei’s fingers were found on a nearby rooftop.)31 In response, the tsarist authorities had reorganized the political police, creating a formidable new body, the Okhrannoe otdelenie, which the terrorists promptly dubbed the okhranka— meaning, pejoratively, “the little security agency.” Of course, not only Russia but also the European dynasties (Bourbon France, Habsburg Austria) had invented the practice of “policing,” that is, using the institution of the police to help direct society; by comparison with its European peers, Russia’s political police were not especially nefarious.32 The okhranka intercepted mail via secret “black cabinets”—modeled on France’s cabinets noires—where operatives steamed open letters, read invisible ink, and cracked revolutionaries’ codes (such as they were).33 Inevitably, Russia’s police chiefs discovered their mail was perlustrated, too, and some tsarist officials took to sending letters to third parties that obsequiously flattered their bosses.34 Even working along with Russia’s regular Department of Police and Special Corps of Gendarmes, the shadowy okhranka never attained the societal coverage of its better-endowed French counterpart.35 But the okhranka’s mystique enhanced its reach.

  Many okhranka operatives were highly educated, forming a kind of “police intelligentsia,” compiling libraries of revolutionary works in order to discredit the revolutionaries’ ideas.36 Operatives incorporated the latest international tradecraft, using E. R. Henry’s book on fingerprinting from the London police and file methods from the German police.37 Terror fighting proved sullying, however: the okhranka often felt constrained to allow terrorists to complete their assassinations so the police could track terror networks as fully as possible.38 Worse, many okhranka infiltrators carried out the political murders themselves, to prove their bona fides and remain in a position to continue surveillance. Tsarist police assassinating other tsarist officials was a nasty business that exacerbated the internal divisions of rivalrous police cabals. The upshot was that senior okhranka operatives themselves were placed under surveillance, though fewer of them turned rogue than were murdered by their own turncoat agents.39 The okhranka also suffered the disdain of Tsar Nicholas II, who almost never deigned to meet his okhranka chief.40 And yet, though almost entirely without connections at court, the okhranka was the only part of the state genuinely moored in society. Moreover, despite the police agency’s entanglement with the terrorists it was supposed to fight, and its alienation from the regime it was supposed to protect, the okhranka scored success after success.41 It cast effective clouds over genuine revolutionaries by falsely naming them as police agents, and supported those revolutionary elements whose ascendancy would hurt the terrorist organizations. Stalin would be dogged his entire life, and beyond, by rumors that he was an undercover police agent (accusations his many enemies failed to prove).42 Lev Trotsky, too, came under suspicion of police collaboration.43 As one former okhranka chief boasted, “the revolutionaries . . . fell to
suspecting each other, so that in the end no conspirator could trust another.”44

  Adroitly sowing discord among naturally fractious revolutionaries and stage-managing terrorists, however, could never redress the tsarist order’s most profound vulnerability. The autocracy’s core problem was not that it fell under political assault, or that authoritarianism was ipso facto incompatible with modernity, but that Russia’s autocracy was deliberately archaic. Tsarism choked on the very modernity that it desperately needed and, to an extent, pursued in order to compete as a great power.45

  What we designate modernity was not something natural or automatic. It involved a set of difficult-to-attain attributes—mass production, mass culture, mass politics—that the greatest powers mastered. Those states, in turn, forced other countries to attain modernity as well, or suffer the consequences, including defeat in war and possible colonial conquest. Colonies, from the point of view of the colonizers, were not just geopolitical assets (in most cases), but in the words of one historian, also “a form of conspicuous consumption on a national scale”—markers of geopolitical status, or the lack thereof, which drove an aggressiveness in state-to-state rivalries, as those on the receiving end could attest.46 Modernity, in other words, was not a sociological process—moving from “traditional” to “modern” society—but a geopolitical process: a matter of acquiring what it took to join the great powers, or fall victim to them.47