SEMYA VERESTCHAK, a fellow-prisoner and political opponent of Stalin, writing of their days in the Baku prison, says:
One day a new face appeared in the Bolshevik camp. I enquired who the comrade was, and in great secrecy was told “It is Koba [Stalin]”. . . . Koba stood out among the various circles as a Marxist student. He wore a blue satin smock with a wide open collar, and no belt. His head was bare. A bashlik—a sort of detached hood with two tapering scarves—was thrown across his shoulders. He always carried a book. Of more than medium height, he walked with a slow cat-like tread. He was slender, with pointed face, pockmarked skin, sharp nose, and small eyes looking out from a narrow forehead, slightly indented. He spoke little and sought no company.
The Stalin of these days was defiant; he submitted to no regulations. The political prisoners at Baku endeavoured to segregate themselves as much as possible from the criminals, and the younger among them were punished if they infringed this unwritten law. Openly flouting the custom, Koba was constantly to be seen in the company of bandits, swindlers and thieves. He chose as his cell-mates the Sakvadelidze brothers, one a counterfeiter, the other a well-known Bolshevik. Active people, people who did things, attracted him. . . . .
At a time when the whole prison was upset, sleepless, tense, in expectation of a night execution, Koba would calmly compose himself in slumber. . . . He generally enjoyed in the Caucasus the reputation of a second Lenin. He was regarded as the leading Marxist expert. Hence his very special hatred of Menshevism. . . .
He was still in the Baku gaol when his wife gave birth to a son. The boy was named Jacob, but is now popularly known as Yasha. He saw very little of his father in his childhood, for Stalin could rarely reach home, and until the great release of political prisoners caused by the Revolution, he spent more time in prison and exile than anywhere else. After eight months in the Baku prison he was exiled to Vologda, in the north of Russia. In June 1909 he escaped, made his way to St. Petersburg, and then returned to Baku to resume his work with the Bolshevik organisation. And it was always the Mensheviks of varying shades who received the maximum of his attention.
This may seem like an obsession on his part, and of the Bolsheviks in general, unless it is realised that the Mensheviks were their nearest rivals for the confidence of the workers. The Bolsheviks regarded them as an extraordinary danger because they gave coherence and a certain rationality to the mood of the masses. At one time they were classified as “softs” and the Bolsheviks as “hards”; and there was much that was appropriate in these respective characterisations. For it invariably happened that the Mensheviks expressed all the doubts and fears and weaknesses which beset the workers and the peasants. For them the defeat of the 1905 revolution was overwhelming. “The workers ought not to have taken up arms,” they said. “The workers could not lead the Revolution. It is a bourgeois revolution and must be led by the bourgeoisie.” The Bolsheviks regarded these declarations as the language of despair.
The Bolsheviks agreed that the Revolution was defeated, but said “Next time we will have more arms and fight better. The workers must lead the revolution, for with the peasants as their allies they hold the future in their hands.” Their faith was unbounded. “Get ready,” they called, “for the next revolution, which is on the way, and the Bolsheviks will lead you to Socialism.”
The fight of the Bolsheviks against the Mensheviks was thus a fight for the soul of the working-class, and in such a contest they would give no quarter.
As soon as Stalin again arrived in Baku he plunged into the fray with unabated vigour. His Letters from the Caucasus appearing in the central Party press soon earned the applause of Lenin. It was in these letters that his struggle with Trotsky began—a struggle which never ceased until the firing-squads of the revolution settled the argument for many of Trotsky’s supporters and an assassin’s blow cut short his own career in far-away Mexico. At this time he and Stalin were both members of an illegal movement. Trotsky was with other exiled Social Democrats in Europe. In his first efforts to conduct Social Democratic agitation he had been arrested in 1898, spent a year in prison and then been exiled to Siberia. From there in igo1 he had escaped and gone abroad, and had only returned to St. Petersburg on the day of the first meeting of the St. Petersburg Soviet in 1905. After his imprisonment, following his arrest with the Soviet deputies, he had been again banished to Siberia, and from there had escaped and gone straight out of Russia into European exile, where he had made a name for himself as a brilliant journalist and orator. But his experience in the Russian working-class movement prior to 1917 was essentially the experience of an émigré.
Nevertheless, with voice and pen he played an important rôle. From the outset of his acquaintance with Lenin he became an opponent of the Bolsheviks in general and of Lenin in particular. At first he was definitely on the side of the Mensheviks. Then he broke with them to take up a position between the two contending forces, calling for unity where unity was impossible, while reserving for Lenin and the Bolsheviks the most bitter of his polemics. On the wave of the Revolution of 1917 he capitulated to Lenin as the master revolutionary, in the Elisha hope that in due time the master’s mantle would fall upon him.
At the period when Stalin was organising in Baku, Trotsky was busy in Europe attacking the Bolsheviks for their intransigence. But Stalin did not continue for long. On March 23rd, 1910, he was again arrested, served another six months in the Baku prison, and was exiled once more to Solovychegodsk. In the summer of 1911 he escaped for the third time, and at the request of the Party leadership went to St. Petersburg to strengthen the Bolshevik Organisation. Hardly, however, had he got into his stride there than in September he was caught by the police and returned to Vologda. He was annoyed beyond measure to be so soon in their hands again. For months he had been agitating for the convocation of a new Party conference, the publication of a legal newspaper and the formation of an illegal centre to conduct the practical work in Russia. He had no quarrel with Lenin’s leadership from abroad. To Lenin he was giving unswerving loyalty and expounding his views with all the fervour of a devotee. But he knew that the party of revolution must be organised in Russia. And, now, just when the vital conference was about to be held—in January, 1912—he is again immobilised.
The conference was held at Prague, and represents a decisive stage in the history of the split within the Social Democratic Labour Party. Lenin had come to the conclusion that the time for further manœuvring with the Mensheviks in the Party was ended. He was convinced that a new wave of revolution was pending, and that it would be fatal if the party of revolution was to be hampered by faint hearts and muddleheaded leadership. Everything that had happened since he wrote his book What is to be Done? had endorsed the convictions expressed within its pages. Henceforth therefore the Mensheviks and the like of Trotsky were to be treated not as fellow-travellers, but as enemies of the Party and outside the ranks of organised revolutionary Marxism.
This proposal the Prague Conference put into effect. The Mensheviks were expelled, and on Lenin’s instructions Serge Ordjonikidze was sent to see Stalin in exile, to tell him of the decisions of the Conference and that he, Stalin, had been put in charge of the Russian Bureau of the Central Committee working within Russia.
Thus Stalin became second-in-command of the Bolshevik Party. To have held him in Vologda after receiving this news it would have been necessary to put him in chains. In the bitter winter days of February, 1912, he again escaped and made his way to St. Petersburg, there to begin energetically to carry out the decisions of the Prague Conference, and especially to launch the Party’s legal newspaper.
His existence was precarious in the extreme. The police were hot on his trail, and he feared to stay in one abode more than a night at a time. He was not aware that a fellow-member of the Party’s central committee was also a member of the Okhrana (the secret police), and was constantly giving hints to headquarters as to where the police would be likely to find him.
There was one bright patch in the heart of this grimness. A friend he had known in the Caucasus had become a foreman in an electrical station in St. Petersburg. His name was Alleluiev, and his wife was a native of Georgia. They had two daughters, Hura and Nadya, twelve and ten years old respectively. Stalin was a great friend of the whole family and stayed with them frequently. He was, too, the hero of little Nadya. Perhaps it was here that there began the romance of Stalin’s life, for years later it was Nadya, grown to be a beautiful woman who became Stalin’s second wife. After the first few months of married life in Baku he saw very little of his first wife, who because of his imprisonment went to live with her parents, and in their house brought up the boy Yasha. A few years later, while her husband was still in exile, she died of tuberculosis, and thereafter the lad’s grandparents had charge of his upbringing until the Bolshevik leaders were installed in the Kremlin.
It was in the midst of the great preparations for the publication of Pravda (“Truth”), the first legal newspaper of the Bolsheviks, that rifle-fire in far-away Siberia echoed round the world and set in motion Russia’s millions who for years had appeared to be sunk in silent despair. In the Lena goldfields Czarist soldiers had opened fire upon strikers, and hundreds were shot down. Immediately, in protest against the bloodbath, a spontaneous wave of strikes swept through the industrial towns and cities of Russia. The workers were on the march again. This is how Stalin describes the effect of the Lena shootings:
The superficial observer might have thought that the day of revolution had been lost for ever, that the period of constitutional development of Russia along the lines of Prussia had arrived. And certain old Bolsheviks, sympathising at heart with preachings to that effect, were at that time leaving the ranks. The triumph of the knout and of darkness was complete.
The Lena Days broke upon this malodorous morass like a hurricane, and revealed a new scene to everybody. It appeared that the Stolypin régime was was not so solid. The Duma had aroused contempt in the masses, and the workers had stored up sufficient energy to throw themselves into battle for a new revolution.
It was enough to shoot down workers in the depths of Siberia for Russia to be inundated by strikes and for the St. Petersburg proletariat to pour into the streets and wipe out with one stroke, the impudent slogan of the braggart Minister Makarov that “it has always been so and will always remain so.” . . .
On April 22nd, 1912, Pravda appeared. On that day too, Stalin was arrested once more. Again he was sent to Siberia, this time to the Narym district. By September he had escaped and was back once more in St. Petersburg in time to direct the Bolsheviks during the elections for the Fourth Duma. Six Bolsheviks were elected. He then worked out the policy they should pursue within the Duma, and had a difficult time convincing the half-dozen that they would do better not to associate themselves with the seven Mensheviks who also had been elected. All the Bolsheviks were working-men and rather conscious of the advantages held by the Menshevik intellectuals. After days and nights of discussion with his group Stalin secured an agreement and then proposed that the deputies should meet with the central committee of the Party. Lenin had moved to Cracow to be near the Russian frontier, and the meeting with the deputies was held without a great deal of difficulty.
But more important than the meeting was its sequel. Stalin remained in Cracow and Vienna for two months. For several weeks he stayed with Lenin and there for the first time the two leaders had the opportunity freely to exchange their views on all the problems before them. What was outstanding in these discussions and occupied Stalin most of the time he was abroad, is revealed in a letter of Lenin to Gorki written in February, 1913. It said: “I agree with you that it is time to take up seriously the national question. We have here with us a wonderful Georgian who has collected all the Austrian and other materials and settled down to prepare a big article on the subject.” The article was later published in three parts, and still later as a book.
At first this may appear to be of little account. Actually its influence on the Russian Revolution was far-reaching and may yet prove of far-reaching importance to the rest of the world. Published finally under the title Marxism and the National and Colonial Question, it was undoubtedly the product of much discussion with Lenin, but that it was wholly written by Stalin is clear enough. Every paragraph bears the imprint of his character. How frequently it was drafted and discussed neither of them subsequently attempted to recall. It is more than probable that both made notes, but I am confident that within a few minutes of their meeting they would be so completely absorbed in the subject that their relative contributions to it would be forgotten. This happened with everyone who met Lenin. It happened with me, and I am sure it happened with Stalin, for Lenin had been Stalin’s hero ever since the latter’s early years at Tiflis. To spend days on end with Lenin and become a collaborator with him in leadership was to fulfil the dream of his young manhood.
They had worked together on the political commissions of the Tammerfors and London Conferences, but this was the first time the elder man had called in a colleague to undertake so important a task as that of exploring a theoretical problem which was soon to be among the greatest practical political problems to precede the Revolution. I do not know of Lenin taking this course on any other question or with any other of his colleagues. That he had great confidence in Stalin’s theoretical opinions and sound judgement as a Marxist I do know, for I well remember that in one of my conversations with Lenin in 1921 he referred to Stalin as “our nutcracker” and explained that if the “political bureau were faced with a problem which needed a lot of sorting out Stalin was given the job.” It says much for Lenin’s estimate of Stalin and his work that from this time onward Joseph is the outstanding exponent of “National and Colonial” questions. As soon as the Bolsheviks came to power Lenin secured his comrade’s appointment as the first minister of the Soviet State to have the practical handling of this subject, and in every subsequent conference he was the reporter on it, drafted every relevant resolution for the Central Committee, and adapted the Soviet Constitution to the principles he had expounded with conviction and lucidity.
The problems the two leaders set out to solve on this now famous occasion were beset with more confusion than any other in the realm of revolutionary politics. Within the Russian Empire were over 60,000,000 “foreigners” in varying stages of development, split into national groups, oppressed, exploited, forbidden to use their own languages, and in many instances without any political rights whatever. Outside Russia, Europe itself was a jigsaw puzzle of nationalities in varying degrees of liberation, while in the world at large the Great Powers had almost completed the acquisition of colonial territory and held hundreds of millions of colonial peoples in complete subjection. Other hundreds of millions occupied great stretches which were only partly independent; there were now no new lands to discover and no new peoples to be enslaved. We were hastening towards the clash of empires and a lethal struggle for the redivision of the world.
In the evolution of Socialist thought certain definite principles had long been firmly established. Marx for example, years earlier, had affirmed the principle that “no nation could itself be free as long as it held another in bondage.” The Marxists stood firmly for the principle of “self-determination of nations.” The Austrian Socialists had written a great deal about the “National Question,” and with the Poles and Jews had rung the changes on schemes of “national autonomy,” “cultural autonomy” and so on. A special problem had been created in Russia by the formation of Labour Parties according to national groupings, thus cutting right across the efforts of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party to include in its ranks all social democrats within the Russian Empire. Working-class organisations were still being urged to separate the nationalities and organise on racial lines. The need for clear guidance through this maze of confusion was urgent.
The result of Stalin’s labour will always stand high among the records of scientific Socialism. His method of analysis is exceedingly lucid. He leaves no loose ends to entangle the enquirer. He begins by asking “What is a nation?” and searches for a fool-proof definition. He proceeds:
A nation is primarily a community, a definite community of people.
This community is not racial, nor is it tribal. . . . The modern Italian nation was formed from Romans, Teutons, Etruscans, Greeks, Arabs, and so forth. The French nation was formed from Gauls, Romans, Britons, Teutons, and so on. The same should be said of the British, the Germans and others, who were formed into nations from peoples of different races and tribes.
From this he draws a conclusion—“Thus, a nation is not a racial or tribal, but a historically constituted community of people.” That is clear enough. But he adds:
It is unquestionable that the great empires of Cyrus and Alexander could not be called nations, although they came to be constituted historically and were formed out of different tribes and races. They were not nations, but casual and loosely connected conglomerations of groups, which fell apart or joined together, depending upon the victories or defeats of this or that conqueror.
So he draws another conclusion. “Thus,” he says, “a nation is not a casual or ephemeral conglomeration, but a stable community of people.” We are a step further on, but only a step. For he adds lest we stay satisfied . . . “not every stable community constitutes a nation. Austria and Russia are also stable communities, but nobody calls them nations.” He says these are political communities and not national communities, and before we can enquire further he puts the question for us: “What distinguishes a national community from a political community?”
This starts a new train of enquiry. He says:
One of the distinguishing features is that a national community is inconceivable without a common language, while a state need not have a common language. The Czech nation in Austria and the Polish in Russia would be impossible if each did not have a common language, whereas the integrity of Russia and Austria is not affected by the fact that there are several, different languages within their borders. . . .
We are thus driven to another conclusion: “Community of language is one of the characteristic features of a nation.” That also is clear. But our enquiry must not stay here. He carries us further by drawing our attention to the fact that
this does not mean that different nations always and everywhere necessarily speak different languages, or that all who speak one language necessarily constitute one nation. A common language for every nation, but not necessarily different languages for different nations. There is no nation which at one and the same time speaks several languages, but this does not mean that there may not be two nations speaking one language. Englishmen and Americans speak one language, but they do not constitute one nation.
So there is something more required to constitute a nation? Yes.
Differences of territory led to the formation of different nations. Thus community of territory is one of the characteristic features of a nation. . . . Community of territory requires, in addition, an internal economic bond which welds the various parts of a nation into a single whole.
Relentlessly he drives us on until he has exhaustively examined the argument, and then he summarises his definition thus:
A nation is a historically evolved, stable community of language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a community of culture. . . . It goes without saying that a nation, like every other historical phenomenon, is subject to the law of change, has its history, its beginning and end. . . . It must be emphasised that none of the above characteristics is by itself sufficient to define a nation. On the other hand it is sufficient for a single one of these characteristics to be absent and the nation ceases to be a nation.
Stalin then proceeds to analyse the definitions of the Austrian Socialists and others. Having shown what he considers to be their total inadequacy and the political futilities into which they are thereby drawn, he examines the growth of nations and shows how one becomes subject to another in consequence of their class stratification. Hence it becomes necessary to examine them and their “rights” in relation to the inter-class struggles within them.
One by one he examines the ideas of the various schools of nationalism, the Poles, the Jews, the Georgians, etc., and always relates the question at issue to the revolutionary struggle of the workers against Czarism. He argues with relentless persistence that none of the nations under Czarism has the slightest possibility of securing its rehabilitation unless it joins with Social Democracy in Czarism’s overthrow. Then he formulates a solution, which has the superior value over others, that it has been applied and works. It reads:
. . . the right of Self-Determination is an essential element in the solution of the national problem. Further. What must be our attitude towards nations which for one reason or another will prefer to remain within the general framework? . . . The only real solution is regional autonomy, autonomy for such crystallised units as Poland, Lithuania, the Ukraine, the Caucasus, etc. The advantage of regional autonomy consists firstly in the fact that it does not deal with a fiction deprived of territory, but with a definite population inhabiting a definite territory. Secondly it does not divide people according to nation, it does not strengthen national partitions; on the contrary, it only serves to break down these partitions and unites the population in such a manner as to open the way for division of another kind, division according to class. . . .
Of course not one of the regions constitutes a compact homogeneous nation, for each is interspersed by national minorities. Such are the Jews in Poland, the Latvians in Lithuania, the Russians in the Caucasus, the Poles in the Ukraine, and so on. . . . What is it that agitates a national minority? A minority is discontented not because there is no national union but because it does not possess the right to use its own language. Permit it to use its own language and the discontent will pass of itself. . . . Thus national equality in all forms (language, schools, etc.) is an essential element in the solution of the national question. . . .
We know whither the division of workers along national lines leads. The disintegration of a united working-class party, the division of the trade unions along national lines, the aggravation of national friction, national strike breaking, complete demoralisation within the ranks of the Social Democratic movement—such are the results of organisational federalism. . . . The only cure for this is organisation on internationalist lines. The aim must be to unite the workers of all nationalities within Russia into united and integral collective bodies in the various localities and to unite those collective bodies into a single party. . . . Thus the principle of international solidarity of the workers is an essential element in the solution of the national problem. . . .
The preciseness of the language, with its complete absence of loose phrases, the clarity with which he shows the relationship of principles to practice, combine to make this document outstanding among all Stalin’s writings. And it has stood the test of time and experience.
As soon as he had finished this work, he prepared to go back to St. Petersburg and resume the greater duties of central leadership which the Party had thrust upon him since the Prague Conference. Hardly had he got there than he noticed he was being more closely shadowed than ever before. Malinovsky, the police spy within the central committee, had also been in Cracow, knew all the new developments, and was ably assisting the police in their relentless policy of depriving the Social Democratic Labour Party of its leaders. Now they were after Stalin and Sverdlov, who was on the central bureau with him. At a concert for the benefit of Pravda held in St. Petersburg on February 23rd, 1913, Stalin was again arrested. This raid was the beginning of a series, in which Sverdlov, Kamanev, Spandaryan and the Bolshevik deputies in the Duma were finally rounded up and exiled to Siberia.
This time Stalin was sent for a term of four years, to the remote region of Turukhansk. At first he was in the village of Kostine, but early in 1914 he was sent farther north to the village of Kareika, Siberia, within the Arctic Circle. The Czar’s officials were determined he should not escape this time; and within this wilderness of ice and snow he was kept under close observation until Czardom itself crumbled under the impact of war and revolution.
Twice in the months following their arrest Lenin made efforts to free Stalin and Sverdlov. On each occasion Malinovsky informed the police department and the guards were strengthened. Now Stalin’s capacity to wait on events would be tested as never before. A thin, frequently-interrupted line of contact with the world beyond the Arctic Circle was maintained, through which he could occasionally influence the course of events, but his main task was to wait and watch as best he might; and a fierce sombre mood took hold of him as he brooded over the course of events.
But suddenly a revolver shot at Serajevo exploded the powder magazines of the world. The barricades of the Russian working-class fell. The war-drums rolled, and the armies dutifully assembled and marched under the banners of the Kings and Emperors and Presidents of the world of capitalism. As the shadows of the autumn days of 1914 lengthened across the Arctic wilderness, the revolutionary prospects of the Bolshevik leaders seemed to be vanishing. The lights of Europe had indeed been dimmed; all the resolutions of the international Socialist movement as to what the workers must do in the event of war had vanished into air.
And yet really the course of history had speeded up to a degree surpassing imagination. Mankind was about to crowd centuries into years, years into months, rushing toward the very dawn for which the men and women in exile had worked and dreamed.
Next: VII. A Long Interlude and How it Ended