The events described in this chapter are intimate facts in the minds of all well-informed Marxists. Communists often base their arguments on their interpretation of these events and therefore the student should find this historical background helpful.
This chapter also includes the biographies of the principal Communist leaders—Nikolai (V.I.) Lenin, Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin.
A review of the following questions will indicate some of the answers which this chapter is designed to provide.
• Who launched Marxism in Russia in 1868? Why did Marx consider this man his “enemy”? After the assassination of Alexander II what did Marx say about the possibility of a Communist revolution in Russia?
• What kind of environment produced Nikolai Lenin? Why was his brother hanged?
• Who organized the Bolsheviks? What does the name mean? What did they call their enemies? Was this an accurate designation or a matter of strategy?
• What was the background of Leon Trotsky? How did he get this name? How did he escape from Siberia? Why did he oppose Lenin in 1903?
• Was the Russian Revolution of 1905 led by a few radicals or was it a general uprising of the whole people? Why did Lenin and the Bolsheviks oppose the “October Manifesto” which promised the people representative government?
• From what kind of home did Joseph Stalin come? Why was he expelled from the seminary where he was being trained as a priest? What did the criminal activities of Joseph Stalin during 1907 reveal about his personality? How extensive were Stalin’s activities as a union organizer, propagandist and revolutionary leader during this period? What was his relationship to Lenin?
• What brought Russia to the brink of another general uprising during the First World War? What was the Tsar’s attitude during this crisis?
In 1885 a U.S. citizen, Andrew D. White, returned from a tour of duty as attache in the American Embassy at St. Petersburg and described the Russian situation as follows: “The whole governmental system is the most atrociously barbarous in the world. There is on earth no parallel example of a polite society so degraded, a people so crushed, an official system so unscrupulous.”{65}
When White made this statement, the population of Russia was slightly over 70,000,000. Of these, 46,000,000 were in virtual captivity as serfs.
It will be recalled that Marx and Engels had been aroused to wrathful vehemence when they saw conditions among the industrial workers of England, but the status of life among the English was far above that of the peasants in Russia. The Russian serfs were not only starved, exploited and pauperized, but they were subjected to an iron-clad system of feudal political suppression. Always there was the plague of the secret police, the threat of arrest and sentencing to forced labor camps in Siberia and the cruel indecencies imposed upon them by the Tsar’s everpresent military. A Russian serf seemed to enjoy no sacred immunities whatever, neither in his person, his possessions, his children, nor, sometimes, his wife. All were subject to the petty whims of grasping officials in the Tsar’s corrupt bureaucracy.
Between 1861 and 1866, Tsar Alexander II sincerely attempted to do away with the institution of serfdom by approving several acts of emancipation. However, for all practical purposes, the impoverished lives of the peasants continued to be insecure, harsh and austere. Circumstances leading to a revolution were in the making.
Marxism came to Russia in 1868 when Bakunin’s translation of Capital escaped the Tsar’s censors and passed among liberals and radicals like a choice morsel of spiritual meat. For Russia it meant the kindling of the bright red flame in the original Communist Manifesto: “Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains…. Working men of all countries, unite!”
Russian revolutionary movements soon began to take shape and by 1880 Marxism could be described as definitely taking hold. The first significant violence came in 1881 when Tsar Alexander II fell dying beneath the shattering impact of a bomb which was hurled into the royal carriage by Ignatius Grinevitsky, a member of a revolutionary group called “The People’s Will.”
The successful murder of the Tsar led many Marxists to feel that the hour for unrestricted revolution might be very near. Over in London, the aging Marx began receiving inquiries from his Russian disciples. They wanted to know whether or not it might be possible to have a revolution in Russia even though the Russian economy had never passed through the capitalistic development which Marx had always said was a prerequisite. Marx studied the problem diligently. Finally, he gave it as his opinion that Russia had “the rarest and most suitable opportunity ever offered to any country to avoid (skip) the phase of capitalistic development.” In other words, Marx was suggesting the possibility of an early revolution in Russia.
This was a complete theoretical switch for Marx. He was also admitting the error of one of his earlier prophecies; namely, that the revolution would come first among highly developed capitalistic nations such as Germany and England. Among his friends he declared: “It is an irony of fate that the Russians, whom I have fought for twenty-five years, and not only in German (publications), but in French and English, have always been my patrons.”
It was indeed ironical that the Russian Marxists had remained loyal to Marx and his theories in spite of the verbal and editorial abuse he had heaped upon them. This was never truer than in the case of Bakunin, the first Russian Marxist, who promoted the theories of Marx and Engels with such zeal, that they both feared he might take over the First International. They, therefore, marked him for political liquidation.
Even at the end, however, Bakunin reaffirmed his faith in Marxism, and after referring to the “furious hatred” of Marx toward himself, he concluded: “This has given me an intense loathing of public life. I have bad enough of it, and after devoting all my days to the struggle, I am weary…. Let other and younger persons put their hands to the work. For my own part, I no longer feel strong enough…. I therefore, withdraw from the arena, and ask only one thing of my dear contemporaries—oblivion.”
In 1876 Bakunin laid down the burden of his life, but the “younger persons” to whom he bequeathed Marxism and the Russian people’s revolution were already commencing to make their appearance among men.
In 1870, Nikolai Lenin was born, and in the year 1879, there arrived on earth both Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky. Others would come, but these three were to be the principal leaders in carrying forward the traditions of Bakunin and at the same time doing for Marx what he was never able to do for himself; these three would convulse a great nation in a revolution and would serve as midwives at the birth of the world’s first Communist dictatorship.
Marx would hardly have guessed that the first Communist dictator would be a man like Lenin, who was born on April 22, 1870, in Simbirsk, on the Volga. His father was a Councilor of State with a hereditary title of nobility while his mother was a German of the Lutheran faith. Lenin had red hair, high cheek bones, and the slanting eyes of his Tartar ancestors from Astrakhan.
Originally, Lenin was named Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov, but “Nikolai Lenin” is the revolutionary pseudonym under which he became famous. As a boy he had strict training under a father who was called a “liberal” even though he was a Councilor of State. His father was a man of humanitarian ideals who worked himself to death setting up four-hundred and fifty primary schools during a period of seventeen years. Lenin was fifteen when his father died, and soon afterwards an even greater tragedy struck the family—his older brother was hanged.
This brother, named Alexander, was nearing twenty-one. He had lost his religious faith some time before and had become deeply impressed with the philosophy of materialism. He had also come to feel the need for direct and decisive action in getting social reforms in Russia.
While attending the University at St. Petersburg (now Leningrad), Alexander agreed with several associates to construct a bomb which could be used to kill Tsar Alexander III. The bomb was built inside a bogus medical dictionary and consisted of dynamite and strychnine-treated bullets. The police discovered the assassination plot just before it was to have been executed and the entire group was summarily arrested. Trials and convictions soon followed, and in May, 1887, the St. Petersburg papers announced that Lenin’s older brother had gone to the gallows.
When the excitement subsided, Lenin, who had just turned 17, went back to reading Marx and other revolutionary writers in deadly earnest. Like his brother, Lenin had lost his religious faith two or three years before and was becoming reconciled to the cynicism of the Marxist interpretation of life. Furthermore, the death of his brother accelerated his determination to become an active revolutionist as soon as possible.
To give himself some kind of professional status, Lenin made an intensive study of law. Through the intercession of his mother, he was allowed to take his final examinations at the Univerity in St. Petersburg and came out first among one hundred and twenty-four students. Lenin then attempted to practice law, but for some reason lost nearly all his cases and, therefore, abandoned the law and never returned to it.
In 1891-92 the Russian famine and cholera epidemic broke out. Lenin was living in a region where Tolstoy, the famous Russian writer and philanthropist, was trying to sustain the courage of the people by organizing hundreds of soup kitchens and distributing seed-grain and horses to the impoverished peasants. But Lenin would have none of it. He would not help set up soup-kitchens nor join a relief committee. Later he was accused of welcoming the famine as a means of accentuating the suffering of the people and firing up their revolutionary will to act. There is no doubt that during these years the Marxist program was ram-rodding Lenin’s thinking into that of an uncompromising revolutionist.
Shortly after this, Lenin took up residence in St. Petersburg. He was now twenty-three and anxious to begin active revolutionary work. He therefore joined the “Fighting Union for the Liberation of the Working Class.” However, in 1895 Lenin learned that he had tuberculosis of the stomach. This made it necessary for him to go to Switzerland and undergo a cure at a special sanitarium. While in Western Europe, he made contact with George Plekhanov, the leader of the exiled Russian Marxists.
Lenin spent long hours with Plekhanov and felt highly flattered that the big man among the exiled Russian radicals would share with a newcomer his plans for a violent revolution and the overthrow of the Tsar. Plekhanov was equally impressed with Lenin. He felt the heat of Lenin’s glowing hatred for everything tainted by the Tsar’s regime, and therefore decided that Lenin should return to Russia, rally the Marxists, and organize a national Communist political party patterned after the highly successful Social Democrats in Germany. Lenin was also asked to begin publishing a revolutionary periodical.
This assignment was accepted by Lenin as a heroic mission for which fate had predestined him. Upon returning to Russia, he organized strikes, trained recruits, formulated political strategy and wrote inflammatory articles. But in the midst of this promising campaign, a police agent betrayed the group and Lenin found himself sentenced to exile in faraway Siberia. Lenin accepted this interruption of his revolutionary career with bitter resignation.
Soon after his arrival in Siberia Lenin was joined by a Marxist girl, whom he had met in 1894, named Nadezhda Krupskaya. She was allowed to come, at Lenin’s request, on condition that she and Lenin legalize their union with a marriage ceremony. This violated their Marxist principle of “abolition of the family,” but they consented in order to remain together. Lenin now had a companion as dedicated to the revolution as himself. They had no children, and close associates stated that they intentionally planned against children because they both felt their missions in life would not permit them to be thus encumbered.
Lenin spent his time in Siberia studying, writing reams of letters in secret ink, solidifying the program of the new Social-Democratic Party of Russia and completing his book called, Capitalism in Russia.
When he was released in 1900, Lenin had become a cautious, calculating, full-fledged, conspiratorial revolutionist. He immediately headed for Munich, Germany, where he started printing a paper called The Spark, which could be smuggled into Russia. Thus began seventeen years of almost continuous exile in Western Europe for Lenin and his wife. Only on rare occasions did they secretly visit Russia. They lived modestly and traveled light. It was as though they were waiting for the voice of history to assign them to their revolutionary roles.
By 1903 Lenin and his wife had set up headquarters in London. They had the feeling they were carrying on where Marx had left off. Marx had been dead seventeen years and often they made pilgrimages to the cemetery where the grave of Marx is located.
In July of that year a Russian-Social-Democratic congress convened in London. Forty-three delegates came from Russia as well as from various groups of Russian exiles in Western Europe. As chairman of the congress, Lenin started off with a moderate and impartial attitude, but as the discussions continued he was horrified to discover that the congress was moving toward pacifistic socialism rather than militant revolution. Lenin immediately gathered his friends and followers around him. He split the congress wide open on the issue of whether party membership should be limited to hard-core revolutionists (as advocated by Lenin) or broadened to include anyone who felt sympathy for the movement.
In this dispute Lenin temporarily rallied around him a majority of the congress and thereafter used this as a basis for calling those who supported him “Bolsheviks” (which comes from a Russian word meaning “majority”), while those who opposed him were called “Mensheviks” (which is taken from the Russian word meaning “minority”). The propaganda value of a party title meaning “majority” will be quickly recognized. It was another illustration of Lenin’s absolute determination to exploit every situation so as to make it a tool to further his over-all political strategy.
At this particular congress, however, Lenin’s victory was short-lived. Several groups combined their strength against him and before long he found himself representing the minority view on most matters. Nevertheless, Lenin continued calling his followers “the Bolsheviks” and any who opposed him “the Mensheviks.”
One of those who now opposed Lenin was a young, twenty-three-year-old zealot named Leon Trotsky. At a future day Lenin and Trotsky would join forces, but at this congress of 1903 they stood in opposite camps. Let us pause in our narration to consider briefly the early life of Trotsky.
In many respects the background of Lenin and Trotsky was similar. Both had come from substantial families, both had been well-educated, both had become disillusioned and had engaged in revolutionary activity and both had served sentences in Siberia.
Leon Trotsky had been born to the name of Lev Bronstein. His father was a Kulak or rich peasant. Originally, Trotsky’s father had been a fugitive from the Tsar’s anti-Jewish campaign and had fled from city life to settle in a farming district near the Black Sea, where there was more religious tolerance. However, as the members of the family prospered, they gradually dropped the local synagogue as well as the observance of the Jewish Sabbath. Finally, the father came out openly in favor of atheism.
When Trotsky went away to school, he carried along with him these sympathies for materialism which he had gained from his father. These attitudes soon began to bear fruit. Toward the completion of his school, Trotsky was not only exhibiting the cynicism of a confirmed materialist, but he was also showing strong signs of becoming a political radical. Although this tendency was most displeasing to Trotsky’s father, nothing would dissuade him. Boisterous scenes erupted between the two whenever Trotsky went home for vacations and after a few years Trotsky was completely alienated from his family.
Under these circumstances it was not at all difficult for Trotsky to find a place in his mind for Marxism when it was finally presented to him. His conversion was further facilitated by the fact that he was taught Marxism by an attractive young woman six years his senior whom he later married. Her name was Alexandra Lvovna.
Trotsky was only nineteen when he and Alexandra decided to help organize the South Russian Workers’ Union. Among other things, Trotsky was assigned the task of printing an illegal paper. As might have been expected, this soon led to his arrest. Trotsky spent the next three months in solitary confinement and after a series of assignments to various prisons; he ended up in Siberia where he was joined eventually by Alexandra. They were both sentenced to serve four years in a cold, barren region where there were few settlements. Two children were born to them during this exile.
Trotsky escaped in 1902 by burying himself in a peasant’s load of hay. He reached the Siberian railroad and then used a fake identification paper to pass himself off as “Trotsky”—the name of his late jailer! He used this name from then on. With the help of several Marxist comrades, he made his way to London and arrived there in time to participate in the Social-Democratic Congress which we have already mentioned. Sometime later he was joined by his wife and children.
Upon their first meeting Lenin and Trotsky struck it off well. Lenin described Trotsky as a revolutionist of “rare abilities.” Trotsky reciprocated by suggesting that Lenin be made the chairman of the congress. During the congress, however, Trotsky saw enough of Lenin to make him apprehensive about the cold, blue-steel razor edge of Lenin’s mind. He was shocked by the reckless indifference Lenin exhibited as he lopped off some of the oldest and most respected members of the party when they opposed his views. (Trotsky’s gentle concern for the feelings of fellow comrades in 1903 stands in sharp contrast to his position in 1917-1922 when he personally supervised the ruthless liquidation of many hundreds of comrades whom he suspected of deviating from established party policy.)
As it turned out, Trotsky’s temporary opposition to Lenin in 1903 did not hurt his revolutionary career. In the years immediately following, Trotsky developed into a brilliant writer and public speaker and he became a well-known personality in Western Europe long before Lenin. He is described as a handsome, arrogant, anti-social intellectual who sometimes offended his fellow-Marxists because of his flare for elegant clothes. The down-sweep of his nose and moustache won for him the title of “The Young Eagle.”
Now let us return to the swift course of events in the history of the Russian revolutionary movement.
By 1903 the political situation in Russia had become explosive, Tsar Nicholas II did not realize it, but he was to be the last of the Tsars. As an administrator, he had turned out to be amazingly weak. When he was a young man he had been very pleasant and friendly, and Russian liberals had hoped that after he ascended the throne he would adopt the badly needed reforms which his country required in order to take its place among the progressive nations of the world. But in this they were disappointed. Nicholas II perpetuated the imperialistic policies of his father, Alexander III, and enforced the stringent domestic policies of his grandfather who was assassinated. In fact, to satisfy his own expansive ambitions, Nicholas II plunged Russia into a senseless war with Japan in 1903. Almost immediately he found the Russian forces suffering humiliating defeat.
This Russo-Japanese War lasted a little over two years and as it neared its mortifying conclusion, the economic and political pressure on the Russian people split the seams of the Empire asunder. Government officials were assassinated, mass demonstrations were held, and a general strike was called which eventually idled more than 2,500,000 workers. The Tsar used every form of reprisal available to suppress the uprising, but mass arrests, mass imprisonment, and mass executions failed to stem the tide. The entire population was up in arms; bankers, peasants, professors, and illiterates walked side by side in the demonstration parades.
A typical example of the Tsar’s clumsy maneuvering which brought on the revolution was the Winter Palace Massacre. This event occurred on Sunday, January 22, 1905, when a priest named Father George Gapon led a parade of several thousand unarmed workers to the front of the Winter Palace to present a peaceful petition for the amelioration of labor conditions. As the marchers drew near they could be seen carrying large portraits of Nicholas II which they waved back and forth while lustily singing “God Save the Tsar.” It was a strange scene. The obvious poverty of the workers stood out in vivid contrast to the magnificent splendor of the Tsar’s Winter Palace, which was a large and extravagant structure capable of housing more than 6,500 guests in its richly decorated apartments.
But the Tsar did not come out to welcome them. Instead the marchers found the palace completely surrounded by massed troops. At first the workers were apprehensive about the situation, but they felt reassured when there was no command to disperse. Then suddenly they heard the hoarse shout of a staccato military command. Immediately the Tsar’s troops opened direct fire on the crowd. The withering volley leveled the front ranks to the ground while the remaining marchers trampled one another as they fled in terror trying to escape. The troops continued firing until the crowd completely dispersed. Approximately 500 were killed outright and 3,000 were wounded. This became notorious in Russian history as “Bloody Sunday.”
News of this atrocity spread like a tidal wave across the steppes and plains of Russia. Already the people were bristling with resentment against the burden of the Russo-Japanese War, and this new outrage was sufficient to trigger a universal revolt. At first a few of the people tried to use violence, but generally speaking, the principal method of retaliation was one which paralyzed the Tsar’s wartime economy—the people stopped working. In a matter of months the entire economic machinery of Russia came to a standstill. Factories were closed, stores were empty, newspapers were not printed, dry-goods and fuel were not moved and newly harvested crops were left rotting on the loading docks. For the first time in his career, Tsar Nicholas II was deeply frightened. He abandoned the Russo-Japanese War and agreed to hear the people’s demands.
These consisted of four things:
1. Protection of the individual, allowing freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and the right to form unions.
2. The right of the people of all classes to vote for the Duma (the people’s assembly.)
3. The automatic repeal of any law enacted by the Tsar without the consent of the people’s assembly.
4. The right of the people’s assembly to pass on the legality of any decrees issued by the Tsar.
These demands were set in a document called “The October Manifesto.” This Manifesto clearly illustrates that the masses of the people had no intention of destroying the Tsar, but merely wanted to set up a limited monarchy similar to England. Such a compromise infuriated the Marxists. They wanted the revolution continued until the Tsar was forced to surrender unconditionally and abdicate. Not until then could they set up a Communist dictatorship.
Leon Trotsky, who had hastened to Russia when the uprising started, stood before a crowd of people who were celebrating the Tsar’s acceptance of the Manifesto and tore up a copy of it, declaring that the Manifesto was a betrayal of the revolution. He immediately joined with other Marxists in setting up political machinery to fan the flame of renewed revolutionary activity. This was done primarily by organizing a great many soviets (workers’ councils in the various labor unions). Lenin arrived belatedly in November, 1905, and agreed to join with Trotsky for an “a second revolution.” After sixty days, however, the Marxist movement collapsed. Trotsky was caught and arrested while Lenin fled in the night to safer regions.
Thus ended fourteen months of desperate revolt against the Tsar; the first twelve belonged to the whole people, the last two to the Marxists. Altogether, the troops throughout the Empire had been called out more than 2,500 different times. In these battles between the people and the troops, fourteen thousand had been killed, approximately one thousand had been executed, twenty thousand had been wounded or injured, and seventy thousand had been arrested.
Trotsky’s leadership in the final stages of the revolution won him a stiff sentence from the Tsar’s court. He was convicted of revolutionary violence and exiled to Siberia for an indefinite period. But Trotsky never reached Siberia. He made a daring escape in midwinter and, after traveling four hundred and thirty miles in a deer-sleigh, crossed the Ural Mountains on horseback and then escaped to Finland where he joined Lenin and several other Marxists.
It was while Trotsky was staying in Finland that he carefully worked out his theory of “Perpetual Revolution.” This theory advocated a continuous Communist attack on all existing governments until they were overthrown and the dictatorship of the proletariat established. This brought Trotsky into nearly perfect focus with Lenin. Perhaps, without quite realizing it, he had talked himself into becoming a full-fledged Bolshevik.
At this particular time, the Bolshevik movement was at its lowest ebb. The Bolshevik leaders had failed in their promises to force the Tsar to abdicate, and their continuation of the revolution after the October Manifesto had embittered the Tsar to the point where he had practically repudiated the Manifesto. He allowed the people to elect a Duma (people’s assembly) but he managed to strip it of all its real powers. The people knew they were being defrauded, but there was no way to enforce the Manifesto without fomenting another revolution, and at the moment this seemed unlikely. Individual groups did continue agitating against the Tsar and his ministers, but most of these, like the Bolshevik leaders, were forced to flee to Western Europe for safety.
To rejuvenate the dwindling influence of the Bolshevik party, Lenin began holding a series of meetings. At one of these conclaves, a new revolutionary figure appeared on the scene. It was Joseph Stalin. Stalin came as an obscure delegate from a small Bolshevik group in Transcaucasia. Lenin immediately recognized him as a true revolutionary member of the peasant class—a rough, unrelenting, two-listed man of ruthless action. Lenin had a place for such a personality and therefore enlisted Stalin in his service.
This brings us to the third important personality who figured prominently in the revolutionary movement in Russia.
Joseph Stalin was originally named Djugashvili. He was born December 21, 1879, in the little town of Gori near the border of Turkey. Today the humble wooden house which first sheltered him has been made into a national monument with a marble canopy covering it.
Stalin’s father was a shoemaker with an addiction for alcohol which eventually cost him his life. Stalin was only eleven years old when his father died. Thereafter, Stalin’s mother washed, scrubbed, sewed, and baked to earn enough money to put Stalin through school. Since his mother wanted him to be a priest, he was enrolled in the nearby theological seminary at Tiflis.
As he learned his way around, Stalin discovered that the seminary was honeycombed with secret societies. Many of them were fostering the atheistic writings of Feuerbach and Bauer and the revolutionary writings of Marx and Engels. Before long Stalin convinced himself that he had a preference for revolution rather than religion and he therefore became vigorously active in the clandestine organizations which existed among the students of the seminary. He continued these activities for nearly three years, but he was finally exposed in May, 1899, and was expelled from the seminary for “lack of religious vocation.”
Once he joined the outside world, Stalin spent his full time as a professional Marxist revolutionary. He organized strikes, conducted illegal May Day festivities, and finally fled to Batumi where he became the principal labor agitator for the Social-Democratic party. Eventually he was arrested and after remaining in prison until 1903, he was sentenced to three years of exile in Siberia.
He was still in Siberia when he heard about the split between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. Stalin almost instinctively felt himself to be a hard-core Bolshevik and after successfully escaping from Siberia the following year, he returned to Tiflis and became the leader of the Transcaucasian Bolsheviks. During the Revolution of 1905 he led an abortive revolution in his home province of Georgia and then departed immediately for Finland to attend a Bolshevik conference and make contact with Lenin.
From then on Stalin remained the aide-de-camp to Lenin whom he deeply admired. It was not long before his zeal for the Communist cause began to forcefully manifest itself.
In the summer of 1907 Joseph Stalin held a secret meeting with Lenin in Berlin. Afterwards he returned to Tiflis and organized a holdup. It was no mere Robin Hood adventure to steal money from the rich, but a major gangster operation with complete disregard for the lives of men, women, and children in Stalin’s own home-town.
A powerful bomb was thrown in front of a convoy carrying money from the post office to the Tiflis Branch of the State Bank. The bomb destroyed the horses pulling the carriage, killed several by-standers, and wounded more than fifty children and adults. In the hysteria which followed, the moneybags containing 341,000 rubles (about $170,000) were snatched from the carriage by the bomb-throwers and hurriedly carried away.
The crime reflected such complete disregard for human life that authorities both inside and outside of Russia attempted to run down every possible clue which would disclose the identities of the criminals. Finally, the money was found in the possession of a close associate of Stalin named Maxim Litvinov (the man Stalin later sent to the United States in 1933 to seek U.S. recognition for Soviet Russia). Litvinov and a companion were arrested in Paris by the French authorities when they tried to change the rubles into francs before sending the money on to Lenin. Details of the crime were finally unraveled by the authorities, and the names of original perpetrators were disclosed. Nevertheless, Stalin succeeded in remaining at large for several more years and continued his revolutionary activities.
The years 1907-1913 were pick-and-shovel years for Joseph Stalin. No one could accuse him of being merely an “intellectual Communist” as they sometimes described Lenin. Stalin learned every trick of propaganda, pressure politics, mass communications, strike techniques and labor agitation. Some of his most significant experiences occurred in the highly active industrial district at Baku. There he was assigned to organize tens of thousands of oil well and refinery workers. To do this he set up a triple-system of legal, semi-legal, and totally illegal organizations. He imposed his leadership so completely on the workers in this large industrial center that he was able to organize a powerful industrial soviet (workers’ council) dominated from top to bottom by his own loyal Bolshevik colleagues.
Stalin was never very effective as a speaker because of his strong Georgian accent, but between 1907 and 1913, he became proficient as a revolutionary writer. For awhile he edited a Socialist newspaper in Tiflis called Dio (Time) in which he aroused astonishment even among Bolsheviks because of his bitterness in attacking the Mensheviks. In 1910 he went to St. Petersburg (now Leningrad) and wrote for the Social Democrat, the Zvezda (Star), and later for Pravda (Truth). It was in these periodicals that Joseph Djugashvili first became known by his pen name, “Man of Steel,” or Stalin.
In 1912 Stalin received special recognition when Lenin broke away completely from the Social Democrats and set up an independent Bolshevik Party. In the new organization Lenin appointed Stalin to the Central Committee.
The very next year, however, Stalin’s career was interrupted when he was arrested and sent to Siberia. For Stalin it was an old story. Since 1903 he had been arrested eight times, exiled seven times, and escaped six times. But there was to be no escape on this latest arrest. He was sent to one of the most remote regions of Siberia.
With the arrival of World War I, Stalin had no particular desire to escape. He told his friends he would relax and enjoy his “vacation” in Siberia since escape might result in his being drafted into the armed services. He wanted no part of military service.
It will be recalled that the year 1914 found all the major nations of Europe flexing their military muscles. It was inevitable that the slightest miscalculation in diplomatic relations might turn loose a churning volcano of human destruction. The spark in the powder keg was the assassination of the heir to the Austria-Hungarian throne by a member of a Serbian secret society. This occurred June 28, 1914.
Austria-Hungary had been looking for an excuse to take over Serbia, and therefore her troops began marching in. This angered the Tsar because Serbia was on his own calendar of conquest so he declared war on Austria-Hungary. Germany came to the defense of Austria-Hungary and declared war on Russia. At the time France was an ally of Russia, so Germany used this as an excuse to declare war on France. This brought England into the War as an ally of France. Thus the machine of war began to roll.
From the point of view of the Russian Tsar, the First World War did not come as any particular surprise. For years he had been busily preparing for it by building a powerful military machine. Nevertheless, the Russian people were not psychologically prepared for war.
For nearly a decade there had been a growing tension between the people and the Tsar because he had failed to provide them with the constitutional government which he had promised in the October Manifesto of 1905. Of course, when the people were threatened by attack at the outbreak of World War I, they instinctively banded together in the common defense, and Tsar Nicholas promptly took this as an omen that they would support him loyally throughout the conflict.
But within a few months the strain of war began to tell. By 1915 there were widespread complaints, and by 1916 the Tsar’s war machine was sputtering and jerking as it bordered on collapse. In three years Russia had mobilized more than 13,000,000 fighting men, but of these approximately 2,000,000 were killed, approximately 4,000,000 were wounded, and 2,500,000 were taken prisoners. For 24 months the news from the front was consistently bad. Russian armies were pushed out of Galicia, Russian Poland, and part of Lithuania, Serbia and the Dardanelles.
When the Ottoman Empire entered the war it cut Russian foreign trade to a trickle and thereby isolated Russia from the arms and munitions of her allies. Replacement troops sent to the front were often so ill-equipped that some of them had to pick up their rifles from dead soldiers along the way. Lack of ammunition often forced commanding officers to restrict the infantry to a daily ration of no more than four shells per gun.
At this juncture the Tsar was warned by the British Ambassador that the whole Eastern Front might collapse if things did not improve. Desertions from the Russian Army] had reached scandalous proportions and the workers and peasants were threatening revolt. Food shortages were growing because the government was buying grain with paper money which was practically worthless. In the cities the cost of living had tripled while wages had risen only slightly.
But the Tsar could not see any reason for alarm. He had ridden out the revolt of 1905; he intended to do the same now. To demonstrate his complete confidence in the situation, he announced that he would go to the front to cheer the troops with his presence.
What he seemed to forget was the fact that conditions among the people were almost identical with those which precipitated the revolution of 1905. It was far too late to cheer the troops with the Tsar’s presence Already the reign of the Tsar was doomed. Though he did not know it, Nicholas II was going to lose the throne in a matter of months, and shortly thereafter, his life.