Young Stalin (57 page)

Stalin did not just avail himself of Molotov’s political fidelity and domestic residence. “He stole my girl, Marusya,” Molotov laughed. Marusya was not the last woman whom Molotov would sacrifice to Stalin’s will.

Early one evening, Anna and Nadya Alliluyeva arrived at
Pravda
to
see him. “The offices were crowded and filled with cigarette smoke.” An aide told them that “Stalin was busy,” says Anna, so “we sent a message saying we’d like to see him and he came out to meet us.”

“Well, hello,” said Soso, smiling affectionately, “I’m glad you’ve come. How are things at home?”

“Your room’s waiting for you,” said the girls.

“How kind, but I’m terribly busy,” he said. “But keep that room for me.”

Then “someone came up to him and Stalin hurriedly shook hands with us”—and rushed back to work.
⁵

Nineteen-seventeen was, to paraphrase Lenin, a game of two steps forward, one step back. During June, the radicals in the armed wing of the Bolshevik Party—the Military Organization, which now claimed the allegiance of 60,000 troops—demanded an armed demonstration. The date was set for this accidental revolution: 10 June. At a Party meeting, Lenin supported them. It was “wrong to force matters, equally wrong to let the opportunity slip,” opined Stalin, who helped plan the demonstration and wrote its proclamation: “At the sight of armed workers, the bourgeois will take cover.” Zinoviev and Kamenev opposed it.

On 9 June at the Soviet, the Mensheviks read out Stalin’s appeal and Tsereteli railed against “the Bolshevik conspiracy to seize power.” Lenin needed Soviet support—he hoped to use its legitimacy as cover for his Bolshevik coup. Instead the Soviet banned the demonstration. After hours of panic, Lenin agreed to call it off: “One wrong move on our part can wreck everything.” He now became as cautious as Kamenev and Stalin had been in March. On the eleventh, Stalin, criticizing this “intolerable wavering,” threatened to resign.

The Soviet defiantly held its own demonstration on 18 June, but the Bolsheviks hijacked it, with Stalin publishing his proclamation in
Pravda
. It was a propaganda triumph. “Bright sunny day,” reported Stalin the next day, “the column of demonstrators is endless. From morn to eve, the procession files towards the Field of Mars, a forest of banners . . . a steady roar from the crowd . . . the Marseillaise and Internationale gave place to ‘You Have Fallen Victims.’” There were “cries of ‘All power to the Soviets!’ . . . but not a single regiment or factory displayed ‘Confidence in the Provisional Government!’” Meanwhile in the continuing war against Imperial Germany, Kerensky, War Minister, ordered an offensive that he hoped would bolster the government. The offensive, Russia’s last of the war, was a disaster.
⁶

Lenin was exhausted; suffering headaches, he retreated to sunbathe at a lakeside villa in Finland. Then the government faltered again: Kerensky’s offensive ground to a halt while Finland and Ukraine moved towards independence. The Kadet ministers resigned in protest.

In Lenin’s absence, his Military Organization
^*
decided to seize power. The “night sky was lit up so brightly by the Aurora Borealis,” writes Sagirashvili, “that one could read a newspaper outdoors. Men didn’t sleep and some unknown force drew them out of doors to roam the streets. They could raise their eyes to this heavenly spectacle. A grandiose struggle of Darkness and Light.”

On 3 July, masses of soldiers, sailors and workers, toting machine-guns with bandoliers of ammo criss-crossing their chests, marched on the Taurida Palace, the Bolshevik First Machine-Gun Regiment in the vanguard. Cars were held up at gunpoint and requisitioned. As armoured cars and trucks full of gunmen raced around the streets, some of the troops started firing haphazardly at
burzoi
shoppers on Nevsky Prospect. Gunfights broke out. Out at the Kronstadt naval base, Bolshevik sailors rose up, murdered 120 officers, including their admiral, and then demanded that Lenin, Zinoviev and Kamenev give them their orders to take the capital. When they received no answers, they telephoned Stalin, sitting at his
Pravda
desk with the Bolshevik bard Demian Bedny: should they march with their guns?

“Rifles?” replied Stalin. “You comrades know best . . . As for we scribblers, we always take our guns, our pencils, everywhere with us, [but] as for you and your arms, you know best!” Stalin had half encouraged this semi-accidental coup, asking, “Did the Party have the right to wash its hands and stand apart?” Trotsky was probably right that Stalin was one of the organizers of the July uprising: “Wherever a fight started, whether on a square in Tiflis, in Baku Prison, on a Petrograd street, he always strove to make it as sharp as possible.”

The gun-toting mob seethed around the Taurida Palace, expecting the Soviet to seize power as in Lenin’s slogan: “All Power to the Soviets.” But inside, Chkheidze and the Soviet, discussing the formation of a new
ministry, did not want power. They feared it. The mob was inflamed by the Soviet’s reluctance. Meanwhile Stalin’s ambiguous answer had worked: the Kronstadt sailors were on their way.

At the Kseshinskaya Mansion, Stalin and the Central Committee suddenly lost their nerve and summoned Lenin back from holiday. “We could have seized power,” Stalin said, “but against us would have risen the fronts, the provinces, the Soviets.” Stalin rushed to the Taurida to reassure Chkheidze and the Soviet—but the genie was out of the bottle.

Lenin was on the train bound for Petrograd when Stalin heard that Justice Minister Pavel Pereverzev was about to accuse the Bolshevik leader of treason, revealing that he had been funded by Imperial Germany. This was partly true, but Stalin returned to the Taurida Palace and appealed to his Georgian compatriot Chkheidze to suppress the story. Chkheidze agreed, but it was too late.

In the early hours of 4 July, Lenin rushed to the mansion. “You should be thrashed for this!” he yelled at the Bolshevik hotheads.

In the overcast morning, 400,000 workers and soldiers ruled the deserted streets, soon joined by 20,000 heavily armed sailors who landed in a flotilla of boats. They had no plan: the cock-of-the-walk sailors with brass bands playing were more interested in parading their girlfriends through the boulevards and terrorizing the
burzois:
“Sailors with scantily dressed and high-heeled ladies were seen everywhere.” The streets, recalled Stalin, “were scenes of jubilation.” The sailors gathered outside the Kseshinskaya Mansion to demand some leadership: where was Lenin? He tried to hide in the mansion before emerging sheepishly to give a short speech that settled nothing.

The sailors, boosted by another 20,000 Putilov workers, headed for the Taurida Palace to sort out the diffident Soviet whose members had disappointed them. There were ugly scenes
^*
—but at 5 p.m. the heavens opened: rain doused the accidental revolution. The crowds dispersed. The loyal Izmailovsky Guards relieved the besieged Soviet, now exposed as a toothless talking-shop. Lenin and the dispirited Bolshevik Central Committee retreated pathetically. The July Days were over.

The government, strengthened by Kerensky’s growing popularity,
decided to destroy the Bolsheviks. Despite Stalin’s pleading, Justice Minister Pereverzev published evidence of Lenin’s German financial backing. Many of the soldiers were swayed by this talk of treason.

At dawn on 5 July, government troops raided
Pravda
, just missing Lenin who was smuggled out by Stalin only minutes earlier. Overnight, howitzers and eight armoured cars took up positions to storm the Kseshinskaya Mansion, but the Bolsheviks had no will to defend their strongholds. Stalin speeded to the Bolshevik stronghold, the Peter and Paul Fortress, “where I managed to persuade the sailors not to accept battle;” shuttled between the soldiers and the Kseshinskaya Mansion to avoid a massacre; then asked Chkheidze and Tsereteli at the Taurida Palace for a guarantee of no bloodshed if the Bolsheviks surrendered the mansion and the fortress. Tsereteli agreed: “Stalin gave me a puzzled look and left.” On 6 July, the 500 Bolsheviks inside the ballerina’s mansion gave themselves up. Then Stalin returned to the Peter and Paul Fortress to oversee its surrender.

Lenin appreciated Stalin’s tireless troubleshooting. But, “as a result of their disastrous failure,” wrote John Reed, a socialist journalist from Portland, Oregon, “public opinion turned against them. Their leaderless hordes slunk back into the Vyborg Quarter, followed by a savage hunt of the Bolsheviki.”

The thirty-five-year-old Kerensky, the only man who could unite left and right, assumed the premiership. Ironically the son of Lenin’s headmaster in Simbirsk, he was a speaker of “burning intensity”—“the sudden fits and starts, the twitching of lips and the somnambulistic deliberation of his gestures make him like one possessed.” Kerensky’s Justice Minister ordered Lenin’s arrest.
^*

The Bolsheviks were on the verge of destruction. Lenin was on the run. Stalin took charge of his safety.
⁷

*
The seductive Bolshevik Alexandra Kollontai had just delivered Lenin’s furious
Letters from Afar
to the defiant Stalin and Kamenev. Even as the Old Man approached, Stalin had shortened or refused to publish Lenin’s articles, which he criticized as “unsatisfactory . . . a sketch with no facts.” Lenin called for immediate power seizure but did not deign to explain how he had decided to jump the first formal stage of Marxist development and jump straight to the second—“the transition to socialism.”

*
Lenin’s retreat from his extremism had brought him much closer to Stalin’s often-denounced policies. Stalin felt that Lenin’s insistence on “European civil war” was over the top, talk of “dictatorship” impolitic, and demands for “land nationalization” insensitive to peasant hopes. Lenin, attuning himself to the real demands of Russian politics, gradually altered these policies in public.

*
These “provincials” were the tough Committeemen who loathed Trotsky and would become the Stalinists of the future, many of them friends from the Caucasus. Such Bolshevik
praktiki
certainly knew Stalin’s faults but they had much more in common with him than with Zinoviev or Trotsky. There was the excitable Sergo, the handsome Shaumian, the blond playboy Yenukidze, the easygoing ex-butler Kalinin and Voroshilov. Yet many Caucasians, especially the Mensheviks, hated Stalin. And he also had his Bolshevik critics from the Caucasus. Makharadze and Japaridze, old comrades from Tiflis and Baku, attacked Stalin’s approach to the Caucasian peoples at the April Conference, as did the Pole Felix Dzerzhinsky. Yet Stalin befriended Dzerzhinsky, founder of the secret police, perhaps because Poles and Georgians identified with one another as proud peoples colonized by Russia. Both men studied for the priesthood, wrote poetry, were obsessed with loyalty and betrayal. Both were skilled practitioners of secret-police work. Both were dominated by powerful mothers and suffered from dour fathers. Both were terrible parents; both fanatical and solitary creatures. Surprisingly for two so similar, they became allies.

*
The Bolshevik Military Organization ignored Lenin’s caution, showing that the Bolsheviks were still far from a disciplined force under a single leader. On the contrary, they remained insubordinate and fractious. The slavish monolith of the Party of Stalin was still years in the future.

*
Some broke into the palace where the Soviet sat under siege, refusing to take power. The mob seized Chernov, the frail SR leader, and started to lynch him until, in a virtuoso performance, Trotsky intervened, leaped onto a limousine, addressed the sailors and rescued the terrified politician.

*
Stalin’s Menshevik henchman from Baku, Vyshinsky, was head of Moscow’s Arbat region militia under Kerensky and signed arrest warrants for top Bolsheviks, including Lenin. After October, he joined the Bolsheviks. His shameful obedience to Kerensky ensured canine submission to Stalin to whose whim he owed his very survival.

40

1917 Autumn: Soso and Nadya

S
talin moved Lenin five times in three days as Kerensky hunted down the Old Man. Trotsky and Kamenev were arrested, but Lenin, escorted by Stalin, returned to the underground. The police raided the house of Lenin’s sister. Krupskaya hastened to Stalin’s and Molotov’s place on Shirokaya Street to learn where Lenin was.

On the night of 6 July, Stalin rustled Lenin to his fifth hiding-place, the Alliluyevs’ smart new apartment, at Tenth Rozhdestvenskaya Street, where they had a uniformed doorman and a maid.