ROBERT C. TUCKER

Stalin’s Revolutionary Career Before 1917

Stalin joined the Georgian Social Democratic organization in 1898 at the age of eighteen, while attending the theological seminary in Tiflis. Not long after his expulsion from the seminary the following year, he went underground. Thus his entire adult life was devoted to the movement. He knew no other calling than that of revolutionary politics, and he endured his full share of the experience of prison and exile that normally befell those who pursued this hazardous profession in Russia.

His long and arduous revolutionary career was not, however, a distinguished one. For more than a decade he remained a provincial revolutionary operating in his native Transcaucasus. He had no dramatic anti-tsarist exploits to his credit. With the exception of his short treatise on Marxism and The National Question (1913), he contributed no writings that helped shape Bolshevism as an ideological current. Stalin was one of the party’s practical workers: a committeeman, organizer, conspirator, propagandist, and journalist. But his services to the movement in these capacities, and subsequently as one of the party’s leaders during the revolution and the civil war, were not of such magnitude or brilliance as to make him a figure of renown among the Bolsheviks. Lunacharskii, for example, did not include him among the ten subjects of his widely read Revolutionary Silhouettes (1923), and his name was notably inconspicuous in the authoritative party histories that began to appear in the mid-1920s. He was not once mentioned, for example, in a lengthy essay by Andrei Bubnov on the history of the party from its founding to the death of Lenin, and merely mentioned in the pioneering works on party history by V. I. Nevskii.¹ In the early twenties he was still all but unknown to the Soviet public, and not at all well known to the rank-and-file membership of the very party of which he was already General Secretary. “I will probably not sin against the truth,” remarked Khrushchev in his secret report to the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, “when I say that 99 percent of the persons present here heard and knew very little about Stalin before the year 1924 . . . ,”² Stalin was a political figure who accumulated great power before he acquired fame.

It was on the morrow of Lenin’s death that he began to embellish his revolutionary biography. At a memorial meeting of the Kremlin military school on January 28, 1924, he told the cadets that he had first made contact with Lenin by correspondence from Siberian exile in 1903. Writing to a close friend then living abroad as a political exile, Stalin had expressed enthusiasm for Lenin as the party’s outstanding leader. At the end of 1903 he had received a reply from his friend and a simple but profoundly expressive message from Lenin himself, to whom the friend had shown his letter. Lenin’s message had contained both a criticism of the party’s practical work and a concise plan for its operations in the immediate future. Commenting that he could not forgive himself for having yielded to the habit of an old underground worker and consigned Lenin’s letter to the flames, Stalin said: “My acquaintance with Lenin dates from that time.” He then added that he had first met Lenin personally at the time of the Bolshevik conference in Tammerfors in December, 1905.³

Quite apart from the fact that no copies of the alleged correspondence were ever found in the party’s archives or those of the tsarist police and published, Stalin could not have received the letters in question at his place of exile, where he remained only a month before escaping. Prisoners never knew in advance to which place they would be banished, and there could not have been enough time to write from Siberia and receive a reply.⁴ It has been conjectured that Stalin’s story about a message from Lenin may have had a real basis in the fact that hectographed copies of a Lenin document entitled “Letter to a Comrade” were then circulating in Siberia, where a copy may have come into Stalin’s hands. That hypothesis is all the more plausible in view of the contents of “Letter to a Comrade,” which resemble Stalin’s description of the supposed message from Lenin.⁵ It is also a fact that Stalin expressed great admiration for Lenin in two letters that he wrote to a Georgian Bolshevik friend living in Leipzig. Those letters were written, however, from Kutais, a provincial town in Georgia, in the fall of 1904. Thus, what he did in his talk to the military cadets was to weave historical facts into a fantasy that predated his relationship with Lenin to 1903, the year of Bolshevism’s beginnings as a political current within the Russian Marxist movement. He thereby bolstered symbolically his qualification for the succession.

In June, 1926, while on a visit to Tiflis, Stalin gave a sketch of his revolutionary biography as he liked to view it. Replying to acclaim from workers of the local railway shops, he chided them for flattery. It was quite an unnecessary exaggeration, he said, to picture him as a hero of the October Revolution, leader of the party and Communist International, a legendary warrior-knight, etc. That was how people usually spoke at the graveside of departed revolutionaries—and he had no intention of dying yet. The true story of his revolutionary career, he explained, was one of apprenticeship, of learning from worker-teachers first in Tiflis, then in Baku, and finally in Leningrad. In 1898, when he was put in charge of a study circle of workers from the Tiflis railway yards, elder comrades like Djibladze, Chodrishvili and Chkheidze, who perhaps had less book learning than he but possessed more experience, had given him practical instruction in propaganda activity. That was his first “baptism” in the revolutionary struggle. Here, among his first teachers, the Tiflis railroaders, he had become an “apprentice of revolution.” Then in the years 1907-1909, spent in Baku, he had learned to lead large masses of workers in the oilfields, and had received his second baptism in the revolutionary struggle; he had now become a “journeyman of revolution.” And in Leningrad in 1917, operating among the Russian workers and in direct proximity to the great teacher of the proletarians of all countries, Lenin, in the maelstrom of class war, he had learned what it means to be one of the leaders of the party. That had been his third revolutionary baptism. In Russia, under Lenin’s leadership, he had become a “master-workman of revolution.” He concluded that: “such, comrades, without exaggeration and in all conscience, is the true picture of what I was and what I became.”⁶

This revealing essay in revolutionary autobiography laid the groundwork for a full biography of Stalin by his assistant, Ivan Tovstukha. Prepared for a special volume of the Granat Encyclopedia containing the autobiographies or authorized biographies of some 250 Soviet leading figures, the Tovstukha biography was also published in 1927 as a separate fourteen-page pamphlet in an edition of 50,000 copies. Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin (Djugashvili), it began, was born in 1879 in Gori, a Georgian by nationality, son of a Tiflis shoemaker and worker at the Adelkhanov shoe factory who was listed in his passport as a peasant from the village of Didi-Lilo in Tiflis province. After completing the Gori theological school in 1893, Stalin entered the Tiflis Orthodox theological seminary, then a hotbed of student radicalism. In 1897 he took the lead in the Marxist circles in the seminary and participated in illegal meetings of workers in the Tiflis railway yards. The following year he formally joined the Tiflis Social Democratic organization, and was later expelled from the seminary for “unreliability.” In 1899-1900 he devoted himself to propaganda activity in worker circles, and became a member and one of the outstanding leaders of the new Tiflis Social Democratic Committee, championing the side of the younger elements who wanted the movement to go beyond the old clandestine propaganda methods into a new “street” phase based on mass agitation. In 1901 he had to go underground to evade arrest. In Batum, where he moved at the end of 1901, he founded the Batum Social Democratic Committee, led strikes at the Rothschild and Mantashev plants, and organized the political demonstration of Batum workers in February and March, 1902. He was arrested a month later.

While in prison in 1903—the Tovstukha biography went on—Stalin learned of the Bolshevik-Menshevik division at the Second Party Congress and resolutely espoused the Bolshevik position. Following his return to Tiflis in January, 1904, after escaping from Siberia, he resumed party work as a member of the Transcaucasian Union Committee. Throwing himself into the struggle against Menshevism, he made the rounds of the main Transcaucasian centers in 1904-1905, debating the Mensheviks both orally and in the press. He took his place at the head of the Transcaucasian Bolsheviks, directed the underground Bolshevik paper Proletariatis brdzola, and agitated for Bolshevik slogans of the revolution during the upheavals of 1905 in the Transcaucasus. At the end of 1905 he finally met Lenin while attending the Tammerfors party conference as a delegate of the Transcaucasian Bolsheviks. In Tiflis during the ensuing period of reaction, he was at the center of the fight against Menshevism and the anarcho-syndicalist elements active in the movement at that time: his series of articles, “Anarchism and Socialism,” written in Georgian, was aimed at the latter group. He went to Stockholm in 1906 and to London in 1907 to attend the Fourth and Fifth Party Congresses, both times as a delegate of the Bolshevik section of the Tiflis organization.

On his return from the London Congress he settled in Baku, edited the illegal Bolshevik paper Baku Worker, and ran a campaign for a collective contract between the oil workers and employers. His successful fight against Menshevik influence secured the complete victory of Bolshevism in the Baku organization and made the oil city a citadel of Bolshevism. Arrested in March, 1908, he was held in prison for eight months and then banished for three years to Sol’vychegodsk in Vologda province, but escaped some months later and returned to underground work in Baku. Another round of arrest and exile in 1910 was followed by another escape in 1911, after which he settled in Petersburg on instructions of the party Central Committee. Between successive further rounds of arrest and exile, he was elected in absentia a member of the Central Committee at the Prague Bolshevik conference in 1912, took a leading part in the founding of Pravda in Petersburg, went abroad to meet with Lenin in Cracow, produced his work on the national question, and participated in directing the Bolshevik fraction in the Duma. Arrested once again in the spring of 1913, he was this time exiled to the Turukhansk territory in northeastern Siberia, where he remained until early 1917.⁷

Reading this account of Stalin’s pre-1917 years, and comparing it with the careers of other prominent Bolsheviks recounted in the same biographical volume, one is struck by several distinctive features of Tovstukha’s treatment. True, it followed a general stylization that was visible in this Bolshevik “lives of the revolutionaries”; in substance it was a laconic listing of revolutionary actions participated in, conferences attended, punishments suffered, etc. What distinguished the Stalin biography from the others was a solemnity of tone, a reaching for superlatives, and even in places a certain grandiloquence that deviated from the volume’s general tendency to understatement. Stalin, for example, did not simply move at one point to Baku. Rather, “From 1907 commences the Baku period in the revolutionary activity of Stalin,” and his arrival in Petersburg in 1911 marked the beginning of “the Petersburg period in the revolutionary activity of Stalin.” This is the three-stage progress to “master-workman of revolution” which Stalin had related to the Tiflis railroaders in 1926; we sense that a revolutionary biography is being recast in retrospect according to certain canons of drama. It is notable too that Tovstukha’s portrait modified historical reality in a number of ways flattering to its subject.

First, Stalin had not become by 1900 “one of the outstanding leaders” of the Tiflis Social Democrats. His friends Lado Ketskhoveli and Alexander Tsulukidze were seniors and mentors to him even within the radical minority. Nor is it true, as Tovstukha clearly suggested without actually saying, that he was elected a member of the Tiflis Social Democratic Committee when it was organized in that year. He was at that time a rather minor figure among Tiflis Social Democrats, and did not become a member of the Committee until the fall of 1901.⁸ His move from Tiflis to Batum shortly afterward took place under circumstances which, although not fully clarified to this day, did not reflect credit upon him. Emigre Georgian Menshevik sources have persistently reported that he moved after being expelled from the Tiflis organization by a party tribunal on charges of intrigue and slander against a senior comrade, Sylvester Djibladze.⁹ According to another version, the move was precipitated by an altercation over the admission of workers to membership in the Tiflis Committee, Stalin having unsuccessfully opposed this on the grounds that it would complicate conspiratorial operation and that the workers themselves were not yet sufficiently developed for the role of committeemen.¹⁰ Furthermore, it is not clear that Stalin, after moving to Batum, actually played the part of strike-leader and demonstration-leader that Tovstukha ascribed to him. No reference was made to him, for example, in the detailed description of the Batum events of February-March, 1902, in Makharadze’s authoritative history of the revolutionary movement in the Transcaucasus.¹¹

Whether or not one accepts Tovstukha’s assertion that Stalin espoused Bolshevism while in prison in 1903, when the party schism was still merely nascent, the evidence does indicate that he gravitated to the Bolshevik position without hesitation as soon as the issues became clear to him.¹² If he did in fact become acquainted with Lenin’s views by reading the “Letter to a Comrade” during his first short sojourn in exile, he must have returned to Tiflis in early 1904 primed to join the intra-party fray on the side of Bolshevism, as in fact he did; and his own “Letters from Kutais” in the autumn of that year show him as an ardent Leninist.¹³ On the other hand, Tovstukha’s biography misrepresented fact when it stated that Stalin took his place “at the head of the Transcaucasian Bolsheviks” upon his return from exile. He did not at first even become a leading figure among them. Kamenev, who had spent his boyhood in Tiflis, was at that time Lenin’s principal envoy and Bolshevik organizer in the Transcaucasus; and the other leaders of first rank included Leonid Krasin, Stepan Shaumian, Alyosha Djaparidze, Alexander Tsulukidze, and Mikha Tskhakaia. It is a measure of Stalin’s relative unimportance that he was not one of the fifteen delegates from local groups who gathered in Tiflis in November, 1904, for the first conference of Transcaucasian Bolsheviks. Nor did he travel to London in April, 1905, as one of the four Transcaucasian delegates to the All-Bolshevik Third Party Congress, which has been described as “the constituent congress of Bolshevism.”¹⁴ The Tammerfors meeting later that year marked his debut in higher Bolshevik councils.

Tovstukha also inflated the significance of Stalin’s Baku period. The founders of the Social Democratic organization in Baku at the beginning of the century were Abel Enukidze, Lado Ketskhoveli, and Leonid Krasin. When Stalin settled there in 1907 following the London congress, he was only one of several leaders of the Baku Bolsheviks. The principal Bolshevik organizer of trade union activity in Baku at that time was Eijaparidze rather than Stalin; Shaumian, too, played a major role in the worker movement.¹⁵ Moreover, Stalin’s Baku period appears to have been clouded by a rivalry that developed between himself and Shaumian, and he was reportedly suspected by local Bolsheviks of causing Shaumian’s arrest in 1909 by informing on him to the police.¹⁶ However that may have been, Tovstukha had no basis for depicting Stalin as supreme leader of the Baku Bolsheviks in 1907-10. Nor was Baku itself transformed during that time into a “citadel of Bolshevism.” There, as elsewhere, party activity and the revolutionary movement were in a state of depression.¹⁷

A comment on the moot question of Stalin’s relations with the police is appropriate at this point. The report just mentioned is one of a number— chiefly emanating from Georgian Menshevik circles—which show that Stalin was suspected in certain quarters of informing the police about persons whom he wished to see removed from the scene. According to Semeon Vereshchak, a one-time member of the Socialist Revolutionary party and a fellow political prisoner of Stalin’s in the Bailov prison in Baku in 1908, Stalin began the practice of informing (although not in this instance to the police) shortly after leaving the Tiflis theological seminary in 1899. In reminiscences published in a Paris Russian paper in 1928, Vereshchak cited other prisoners who had been schoolmates of Stalin as sources for the story that soon after being expelled he caused the expulsion of the other members of his secret socialist group in the seminary by reporting their names to the rector. According to these sources, he admitted his action and justified it to the expelled boys on the ground that they would become good revolutionaries now that they had lost the opportunity for careers as priests.¹⁸ Although further evidence of Stalin’s involvement is lacking, we do have confirmation that a group of forty or so students was forced to leave the seminary in the fall of 1899 in a manner very strongly suggesting that the school authorities found them to be engaged in forbidden clandestine activities.¹⁹

Stalin came to maturity in an extremely rough political milieu, and his lack of squeamishness in the choice of means is well attested. The above-mentioned suspicions do not, therefore, strain our credulity. In his early years as a revolutionary he may have resorted to police informing now and then for political purposes of his own. But we can make allowance for this possibility without accepting the view—to which two Western writers have devoted whole books in recent years—that he became a professional agent provocateur in the service of the tsarist police. No evidence of such a relationship was turned up by the Extraordinary Investigatory Commission of the Provisional Government which from March to November, 1917, investigated the relations between the Okhrana and the revolutionary movement. Stalin’s name did not appear on the detailed list of police agents which the Commission compiled on the basis of its study of the archives and interrogation of prominent former police officials.²⁰ The only specific documentary evidence so far advanced in support of the thesis that Stalin was a police agent is the so-called “Yeremin document,” which has been convincingly shown to be a forgery.²¹ For the remainder, the case rests upon a series of speculative interpretations of Stalin’s early actions and events in his life. To cite an illustrative example, it has been argued that the Tiflis Gendarme Administration may have approached Stalin shortly after his departure from the seminary in May, 1899, with a proposal that he become a secret agent; and that he, being unemployed, penniless, alone and friendless, had no alternative but to accept the proposal. The six-month period of his unemployment, it is added, would have been about the right amount of time for the training of the new recruit by one of the Tiflis gendarme officers.²² But there is no proof that Stalin was so down and out at that time, and so bereft of the companionship of friends, that it would have been possible for the police (assuming they did approach him) to force him to enter their service. Nor, given his bitterly rebellious attitude toward the established order, can we imagine him doing such a thing unless compelled to it for the sake of survival. To this it may be added that according to the testimony of a companion in the seminary who later wrote as a hostile witness, in the period after he left the seminary, some of his former comrades “stood together to support him now and then in his need.”²³

That Stalin in the early years of his career had some connections with the Tsarist police, connections that he tried to use to his own and the movement’s advantage while the police tried to use them to their advantage, seems probable. That he became a professional secret police agent working against the movement from within is an hypothesis that remains unsolved and seems quite improbable.

Since Stalin’s early revolutionary career was not an outstanding one, the question arises: how did he come to be elevated to the Bolshevik Central Committee? To be sure, he was not elected to this post in absentia by the Prague Bolshevik conference of January, 1912, as asserted by Tovstukha, but coopted by the Central Committee elected there.²⁴ Since this was Lenin’s doing, the question touches upon the history of his relationship with Stalin. How did he come to regard Stalin as suitable for membership in the inner circle of Bolshevik leaders?

There is a story, possibly but not necessarily apocryphal, that Stalin first came to Lenin’s attention when the enthusiastically pro-Lenin letters that he wrote from Kutais in late 1904 were forwarded by his Leipzig friends to Lenin, who in reply called their Georgian correspondent “the fiery Colchian.”²⁵ Direct correspondence dates from May, 1905, when Stalin, writing as a member of the Transcaucasian Union Committee, reported to Lenin on the comparative influence of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in the party organizations of the region.²⁶ Meanwhile, he came out as a zealous disciple of Lenin in polemics against the Georgian Mensheviks. In Briefly about the Disagreements in the Party, a pamphlet issued in Georgian, Armenian, and Russian in the spring of 1905 by the Avlabar underground printing press in Tiflis, he assailed the leader of the Georgian Mensheviks, Noah Zhordania, for criticizing the views that Lenin had presented in his “remarkable book” What Is To Be Done? The chief issue was Lenin’s contention that revolutionary (as opposed to trade-unionist) consciousness had to be instilled in the working class by organized social democracy. Marshalling quotations from Karl Kautsky and from Marx and Engels, Stalin stoutly maintained that Lenin’s position was not in fundamental contradiction with Marxism, as Zhordania had argued, but fully in accord with it. In July, Krupskaia wrote from abroad to Tiflis requesting copies of the pamphlet, from which we may surmise that Lenin was informed about it. In August, Stalin returned to the subject in a polemical refutation of Zhordania’s reply to his pamphlet. This so pleased Lenin that in his contribution to a review of the Russian-language edition of the Georgian party paper in which Stalin’s second piece had appeared, he especially praised, and then paraphrased, its “splendid formulation of the question of the celebrated ‘introduction of consciousness from without.’”²⁷

What impression Stalin made upon Lenin when they first met face to face is not known. But he must have made a definite (if not wholly happy) impression when, at the Stockholm congress in 1906, in a session over which Lenin presided, he took the floor in the debate on agrarian policy to support neither the platform of land nationalization, which Lenin favored, nor the Menshevik platform of municipalization, but rather the confiscation and division of the landed estates among the peasants—a position that received majority support in the Bolshevik delegation though not in the congress as a whole.²⁸ In spite of, and perhaps also because of, their difference over the question at hand, Lenin may have come to realize by this time that in “Ivanovich” (Stalin’s pseudonym at the congress) he had a forceful and incisive young Georgian follower who was worth watching.

Such a reaction would have been all the more understandable in view of a further general circumstance: Bolshevism’s failure in Georgia. There the Mensheviks emerged from the revolution of 1905 as the dominant Social Democratic faction, and their decision to contest rather than boycott the subsequent Duma elections enhanced their position in Georgian public life. The result was that five of the eight Georgian deputies to the first Duma, and all of the deputies to the second Duma, were Mensheviks. The special success of Georgian Menshevism derived in part from its more nationalist orientation and in part from the fact that its principal representatives were more genuinely revolution-minded than the Russian Menshevik leaders. So overwhelming was the Menshevik influence among Georgian Social Democrats that the sixteen delegates elected from Georgia to the Stockholm congress included but one Bolshevik—Stalin himself. Moreover, at the London congress the following year, all the voting delegates from Georgia were Mensheviks. Lacking sufficient local bases of support for similar mandates, Stalin and Tskhakaia, the two Bolshevik representatives from Georgia, were admitted only in the lower category of delegates with advisory vote, and at that only over protests from the Menshevik side. ²⁹

In addition to the fact that Stalin stood out as one of the few prominent Georgian Social Democrats adhering to Bolshevism, he appears to have shown his usefulness to Lenin in a practical way at this time. During the 1905 upheaval, fighting groups of the party carried out a series of so-called “expropriations,” i.e., armed robberies of banks, mail coaches, etc. in various sections of the country, including the Transcaucasus. Despite the fact that these armed operations aroused much opposition in the party, especially from the Mensheviks, Lenin approved and relied heavily upon them as a source of funds to finance political activity. With his connivance they continued in the aftermath of 1905 despite the passage of a Menshevik-sponsored resolution forbidding them at the Stockholm congress. One of the most notorious was a raid carried out in the Erevan Square in Tiflis in June, 1907, which netted a huge sum of money for the Bolshevik treasury. The Tiflis operation was led by a daring adventurer, S. A. Ter-Petrosian (“Kamo”). Stalin, however, is believed to have played a covert directing role in this and other “exes” in the Transcaucasus. It is true that neither Tovstukha nor any of his later official biographers ever alluded to this facet of his revolutionary career, and that he himself evaded a direct reply when Emil Ludwig, interviewing him in 1931, observed: “Your biography contains instances of what may be called acts of ‘highway robbery’.”³⁰ Nonetheless, it is fairly well attested that Stalin, while never a direct participant, played a part behind the scenes as planner and organizer of various “expropriations.”³¹ He must have thereby recommended himself to Lenin as an underground worker who could safely be entrusted with secret assignments of great delicacy and importance.

Such an individual was all the more certain to come to the fore in Lenin’s circle under the conditions of party crisis that prevailed from 1907 to 1912. The period of post-revolutionary reaction saw a catastrophic decline in party fortunes. Discouragement, apathy, and political quietism took over. The party practically fell apart as erstwhile activists deserted it en masse and arrests took a heavy toll of those still willing to carry on. By the summer of 1909, not more than five or six of the Bolshevik underground committees were still functioning regularly in Russia.³² Meanwhile, those in the party whom Lenin contemptuously dubbed “liquidators” took the view that instead of rebuilding the illegal party, Social Democrats should now concentrate on such limited legal activities—in the Duma for example—as conditions allowed. It was a time, then, when Lenin felt an acute need for men who were absolutely unswerving in their dedication to revolutionary politics and to the illegal party as its organizational medium; in short, for men like Stalin, who during those years, between arrests and periods of exile, went on doggedly working in what was left of the underground organization to prepare for a new revolutionary period. And writing now in the Russian language in party organs read by Lenin, Stalin strongly espoused the cause of orthodox revolutionary politics. To make the party’s activity as legal as possible and abandon revolutionary demands, he wrote in the Baku Proletarian in August, 1909, would bury the party rather than renovate it. In order to overcome the present state of party crisis, it was necessary, first, to end the isolation from the masses and, second, to unify party activities on a nationwide basis. And writing like the Lenin of What Is To Be Done?, Stalin suggested that the latter objective could best be achieved by creating an all-Russian party newspaper. There was, however, one difference: Stalin insisted upon the paper’s being based inside the country rather than abroad, where party organs, being “far removed from Russian reality,” could not effectively fulfill the unifying function.³³

A seasoned professional revolutionary, a completely committed Bolshevik whose whole world lay in party affairs and who found his element in clandestine activity, Stalin was too rare a resource for Lenin to ignore. Nor did Stalin permit himself to be ignored. The proposal for a Russian-based party organ carried an overtone of self-nomination to the editorial role that Stalin in fact came to play when Pravda was founded in Petersburg three years later. And in a resolution of January 22, 1910, written by Stalin, the Baku party committee not only repeated the proposal for an all-Russian party organ but called for “the transfer of the (directing) practical center to Russia.”³⁴ The implicit bid for inclusion in such a practical center became virtually explicit in a letter that Stalin sent abroad at the end of 1910 from his exile in the town of Sol’vychegodsk. Although addressed to a Comrade Simeon, the letter was clearly meant for Lenin, to whom Stalin at the outset sent hearty greetings. He argued in it that there was urgent need to organize a central coordinating group in Russia, to be called something like “Russian section of the Central Committee” or “auxiliary group of the Central Committee,” and he offered his services upon expiration of his term of exile in six months’ time, or sooner if necessary.³⁵ The proposal may have taken on added weight from the fact that Stalin by this time had been appointed an “agent” of the Central Committee, that is, a roving official maintaining liaison with and giving guidance to local party organizations on behalf of the Bolshevik center.³⁶ In any event, when the Bolshevik faction was recast as a separate party at the Prague conference in 1912, the Central Committee, now exclusively Bolshevik in composition, not only coopted Stalin but also elected him as one of the four members of a “Russian Bureau” for direction of party activities inside Russia. Indeed, it is possible that Lenin brought Stalin into the Central Committee primarily so that he could become a member of this auxiliary organ whose creation he had persistently solicited.³⁷

Lenin appears to have had certain reservations concerning the young man he was sponsoring for these high posts. For he had learned of some letters of Stalin’s commenting on developments in the emigration in a way that he found objectionable. Writing in June, 1908, to Mikha Tskhakaia, who was then living in Switzerland, Stalin had characterized Lenin’s philosophical polemics with the Bogdanov group over Machism (“empiriocriticism”) as a “tempest in a teacup,” and had found some “good sides” in Machism itself. Later, after Materialism and Empiriocriticism came out, he had written to a certain M. Toroshelidze (also in Switzerland) a letter in which, while praising Lenin’s book as a compendium of the tenets of materialist epistemology, he also commended Bogdanov for pointing up some “individual faults of Ilich,” and for correctly noting that “Ilich’s materialism differs in many ways from Plekhanov’s, which Ilich, contrary to the demands of logic (for diplomatic reasons?) tries to cover up.” Then, on January 24, 1911, Stalin had written a letter from Sol’vychegodsk to Vladimir Bobrovskii saying:

We have of course heard about the “tempest in a teacup” abroad: the blocs of Lenin-Plekhanov on the one hand and Trotsky-Martov-Bogdanov on the other. So far as I know, the workers’ attitude toward the first bloc is favorable. But in general the workers are beginning to look upon the emigration with disdain: “Let them crawl on the wall to their hearts’ content; but as we see it, let anyone who values the interests of the movement work, the rest will take care of itself.”³⁸

Ordzhonikidze, while attending the party school at Longjumeau in the summer of 1911, learned directly from Lenin that Stalin’s letters had come to his attention and had vexed him greatly. While strolling with Ordzhonikidze one day, Lenin suddenly asked him whether he was familiar with the expression “tempest in a teacup abroad.” Ordzhonikidze, who knew about the letters and immediately saw Lenin’s point, tried to defend his Georgian friend from Baku days, but Lenin continued: “You say, ‘Koba is our comrade,’ as if to say, he’s a Bolshevik and won’t let us down. But do you close your eyes to his inconsistency? Nihilistic little jokes about a ‘tempest in a teacup’ reveal Koba’s immaturity as a Marxist.” Lenin softened the reproof by saying that he had the most favorable memories of Stalin and had commended some of his earlier writings from Baku, especially the previous year’s “Letters from the Caucasus.”³⁹ In view of this, and the fact that Ordzhonikidze was about to return to Russia, it seems likely that Lenin was taking the opportunity to communicate to Stalin his strong feeling about the letters. Perhaps he hoped to clear the way for collaboration with a man whom he saw as very valuable for the movement even if immature as a Marxist.

Not long after Stalin’s cooptation into the new all-Bolshevik Central Committee, his political relationship with Lenin was cemented by their joint work on the national question. This question was very much on Lenin’s mind when Stalin came to Cracow in November, 1912, to confer with him on party business. Lenin had written an article that same month expressing adamant opposition to what he called “the adaptation of socialism to nationalism” and an “Austrian federation” within the party.⁴⁰ The latter phrase referred to the situation in the Austrian Social Democratic party, which had evolved over the years into a federation of autonomous Social Democratic groups organized along national lines (German, Czech, Polish, Ruthenian, Italian, and South Slav). Lenin feared that a similar tendency could gain the upper hand in Russia. There the Social Democratic party had originally been conceived as a nonfederal association of workers of all nationalities in the Russian Empire.⁴¹ In practice, however, the Jewish Workers’ Bund (after its return to the party fold in 1906) and the Social Democratic organizations of Poland, Latvia, and Lithuania had enjoyed autonomy within the Russian party, introducing into the latter what a resolution of the Bolshevik conference in Prague called “a federation of the worst type.” And now, in 1912, attempts were being made in certain Social Democratic quarters, notably the Bund and the Georgian Mensheviks, to gain acceptance by the Russian party of the Austro-Marxist slogan of “national-cultural autonomy.” Lenin, for whom national separatism had no place within Social Democracy, was infuriated at what he saw as one more manifestation of “liquidationism.” Any move to divide Russian Social Democracy along national lines could only hurt it as a class-conscious revolutionary movement against Tsarism. All Social Democrats regardless of nationality should work together in the party organization of their territory. The Transcaucasian organization, uniting revolutionaries of Georgian, Armenian, Russian, and other nationalities, could be taken as a model.⁴²

Stalin’s arrival in Cracow at just this time must have struck Lenin as very opportune. For if views being fostered by non-Russian “nationals” of the Social Democratic movement needed combating, other “nationals”—being least suspect of indifference to the concerns of national minorities—were good ones to do it. Moreover, Lenin may have seen in Stalin a potential source of light on the complexities of the nationality problem in the Transcaucasus. If so, he was not disappointed, for Stalin was well informed on this subject. More important (as Lenin may now have learned for the first time), he had a long record of opposition to local nationalism in the Transcaucasian revolutionary movement. In what was probably his first published article, he had taken a strong stand against the nationalist tendencies of certain Georgian and Armenian socialist groups, and championed the idea of a centralized Russian (“Rossiiskaia”) Social Democratic party that would gather the proletarians of all Russia’s nationalities under its banner and work to destroy the national barriers dividing them.⁴³ He had continued to adhere to this position when, in 1906, a group of Social Democrats from Kutais raised the question of national-cultural autonomy at a Transcaucasian regional party conference; and again, in 1912, when Zhordania and the Georgian Mensheviks veered in that same direction. So Lenin encountered in Stalin a “national” who would eagerly take his side in the fight over the national question and do so out of long-standing personal conviction. The gratification this gave him was reflected in his well-known letter of February, 1913, to Maxim Gorky: “About nationalism, I fully agree with you that we have to bear down harder. We have here a wonderful Georgian who has undertaken to write a long article for Prosveshchenie after gathering all the Austrian and other materials. We will take care of this matter.” ⁴⁴

Stalin wrote the bulk of the work during his stay in Vienna in January, 1913. After a theoretical section defining the concept of nation and surveying the characteristics of national movements, he opened fire on the Austro-Marxist concept of “national-cultural autonomy” as developed by its two chief exponents, Karl Renner and Otto Bauer. It was not the business of Social Democrats to organize nations or to “preserve and develop the national attributes of peoples” (as the Austrian Social Democratic program expressed it), but to organize the proletariat for class struggle. “National-cultural autonomy” was a masked form of nationalism, and (here Stalin mixed his metaphors) all the more dangerous because it was encased in socialist armor. It was an anachronism in an age when, as Marx had prophesied, national barriers were everywhere falling. Moreover, it created the psychological prerequisites for a division of a single workers’ party into a group of parties organized on national lines, and for similar national separatism within a country’s trade union movement. Such had been the experience of Austrian Social Democracy, and menacing tendencies in that direction were visible in Russia. Although Marx, Kautsky, and even Bauer had envisaged for the Jews not nationhood but assimilation, the Bund had broken with internationalist Social Democracy in an effort to take the Jewish workers of Russia down the road of national separatism. Now some Transcaucasian Social Democrats were raising a demand for national-cultural as well as regional autonomy for their area.

Trying to reduce such a demand to an absurdity, Stalin argued that it would entail the granting of national-cultural autonomy also to many small Transcaucasian nationalities of primitive culture, like the Osetians and Mingrelians, which in turn would reinforce them in their cultural primitivism and assist the local forces of political reaction. Regional autonomy was acceptable for the Transcaucasus because it would help the backward nations there to cast off the shell of small-nation insularity. But national-cultural autonomy would work in the opposite direction, shutting up these nations in their old shells. The national question in the Transcaucasus could only be resolved by drawing the backward nations and nationalities into the common stream of a higher culture. As for the argument that the demand for national-cultural autonomy was not in contradiction with the right of national selfdetermination proclaimed in the Social Democracy’s program, it was of course true that nations have a right to arrange their affairs as they please. But Social Democracy, while proclaiming and upholding this right, ought nevertheless to fight and agitate against harmful institutions and inexpedient demands of nations, just as it ought to agitate against Catholicism, Protestantism, and Orthodoxy while upholding the right of all people to freedom of religious worship. The duty of Social Democracy was to influence the will of nations to arrange their affairs in a manner in keeping with the interests of the proletariat. For example, Social Democrats would agitate against Tartar secession or against cultural-national autonomy for the Transcaucasian nations. The correct general solution for the national question in Russia was regional autonomy, with full provision for national minorities in every region to use their native language, possess their own schools, and so on. And on the party side, the workers should not be organized according to nationality. Workers of all nationalities should be locally organized within the single integral party, thus becoming conscious of themselves not primarily as members of a given nation but as members of one class family, the united army of socialism.⁴⁵

In a conversation with Milovan Djilas in 1948, Stalin said that he had expressed Lenin’s views in Marxism and the National Question, and that Lenin had edited the work.⁴⁶ It is very likely, indeed, that Stalin, in addition to writing it on Lenin’s suggestion, benefited greatly from the discussions in Cracow on the nationality problem and even incorporated various specific points that Lenin had made in those discussions. On the other hand, there is no good reason to credit Lenin (as Trotsky has done) with virtual authorship of the work.⁴⁷ Stalin’s polemic against national-cultural autonomy flowed easily from views on the national question that he had expressed in writing as early as 1904. The language of the work and its style of argumentation are consistently recognizable as Stalin’s. Footnotes to the work show that most of the required Austrian materials on the national question were available to him in Russian translation.⁴⁸ And he certainly needed no assistance in those important sections of the work that dealt with the Bund and the national question in the Transcaucasus. Finally, Lenin, although he had begun intensive thinking on the national question by 1912, had not yet produced any writings on it and may not yet have worked his thoughts into a systematic whole. And when he came out in 1915 with his most significant contribution, The Right of Nations to Self-Determination, his treatment of the national question was strikingly different from Stalin’s in underlying emphasis. The theme of national self-determination—in the meaning of secession and the formation of an independent nation-state—was not at all stressed by Stalin. Indeed, he seemed to give it no more than a grudging recognition in those very few passages of the work that spoke of this right.

Marxism and the National Question was basically Stalin’s, and it is a moot question which one—Lenin or Stalin—benefited most from the collaboration. Lenin, at any rate, was greatly pleased by the work. When Troianovskii suggested that it be published in Prosveshchenie under the editorially noncommittal heading “discussion” (explaining that his wife, E. Rozmirovich, was for national-cultural autonomy!), Lenin wrote to Kamenev: “Of course, we are absolutely against that. The article is very good. The issue is a fighting one and we will not surrender one iota of our principled opposition to the Bundist trash.”⁴⁹ Clearly, Stalin was no longer an immature Marxist in Lenin’s eyes.

By his work on the national question Stalin established himself in Lenin’s eyes as a developed Marxist. It may be more than a fanciful comparison to say that he presented his mentor with a successful dissertation. Yet this coming together of the two men, milestone though it was in Stalin’s party career, was not yet the beginning of a close personal association. Stalin was arrested at a St. Petersburg concert hall before seeing his work in print, and spent the next four years in Siberian exile. His name appears a few times in Lenin’s wartime correspondence, but in a manner that illustrates the absence of a close relationship. “Koba” and “Koba Ivanovich” were the names by which Lenin had come to know Stalin, who only in 1912-13 began to use the pseudonym “Stalin” in signing his articles. He had only a vague memory of Stalin’s real last name. “Do you remember the last name of Koba?,” he inquired in a letter of 1915 to Zinoviev, and later that year he wrote the following to V. A. Karpinskii: “Big request: find out (from Stepko or Mikha, etc.) the last name of ‘Koba’ (Joseph Dj . . . . . . ? ? have forgotten). It’s very important! !”⁵⁰

Furthermore, Stalin’s arrest in February, 1913, removed him for a long time from the role in the Bolshevik command that he had finally achieved only a year earlier. And this led to an embarrassing episode on his reappearance in the capital in March, 1917. By then the party was emerging from underground, and its directorate, the Russian Bureau of the Central Committee, was taking in various leading figures as they returned from prison or exile. Protocols of its meetings, first published in 1962, show that the question of Stalin’s admission came up during the meeting of March 12. The Bureau heard a report that Stalin had earlier been an agent of the Central Committee and would on that account be desirable as a Bureau member. However, “in view of certain qualities inherent in him, the Bureau expressed itself to the effect that he should be invited with advisory vote.”⁵¹ The protocols did not elaborate on the nature of Stalin’s objectionable qualities.

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Copyright © 1971 by Robert C. Tucker. This essay is drawn from a larger work in progress on Stalin and Russian Communism. I am grateful to Stephen F. Cohen for critical comments on the original version.