Specialists are lifeless pen-pushers, completely ill-suited to civil war.
18
If our military “specialists” (cobblers!) weren’t sleeping and loafing, the [railway] line would not have been cut, and if the line is restored, it won’t be because of the military men, but despite them.
19
They, as “headquarters” workers, capable only of “drafting plans” and submitting plans for reorganization, are absolutely indifferent to operational actions, to the matter of supplies, to the control of different army commanders and generally feel like outsiders, like guests.
20
Our new army is being built thanks to the fact that side-by-side with new soldiers, new revolutionary commanders are being born. Imposing known traitors on them [Stalin goes on to list a number of military professionals] disrupts the entire front.
21
These comments (there are many more examples) accurately reflect Stalin’s philosophy of how the Soviet military should be developed. His words were matched by actions. Stalin dismissed the experienced officers and took operational command into his own hands. His dispatches to the capital were filled with glowing reports of the results brought about by this decision. It is difficult to imagine, however, that Stalin, who had no military experience, had never served in the army, and was relying on dilettantes like himself for guidance, was able to quickly acquire the complicated skills needed to run an effective military force. Common sense and revolutionary fervor could have taken him only so far. Indeed, the Stalin-Voroshilov partisan army was not able to withstand attacks by the enemy’s regular units.
In August 1918, after two months under his command, Tsaritsyn was on the verge of falling. Stalin responded to the threat of defeat with a maneuver that would later become his political signature: a hunt for “counterrevolutionary plots.” A wave of arrests in Tsaritsyn swept up former tsarist officers (including those currently serving in the Red Army), former tsarist officials, businessmen, and ordinary citizens unfortunate enough to find themselves in the path of the purge. A “plot” headed by an employee of the People’s Commissariat for Railroads, N. P. Alekseev, was alleged to be at the center of the counterrevolutionary movement. Alekseev was a “bourgeois specialist,” a former nobleman and officer working for the Soviet government who had been sent to Tsaritsyn from Moscow on commissariat business. In short, he perfectly fit the preconceived profile of someone who would mastermind a counterrevolutionary conspiracy. The accusations leveled against the “conspirators” were boilerplate and not terribly persuasive. A case was thrown together in a matter of days, culminating in executions and an announcement in the local newspaper.
This incident might have been just another chapter in the annals of the “Red Terror” had Alekseev not been accompanied on his trip to Tsaritsyn by Konstantin Makhrovsky, a senior official from the Supreme Economic Council and a long-standing member of the Bolshevik party. In the heat of the moment, Makhrovsky was also arrested and imprisoned for several months. He was not shot, however, and eventually was released under pressure from Moscow. This left an unwanted witness eager to relate what he had observed. The indignant Makhrovsky wrote a long report chronicling how things were being done in Tsaritsyn. He made it clear that the Alekseev case had been fabricated by members of the secret police “obsessed,” he wrote, “with hunting down counterrevolution.” Makhrovsky’s portrait of life in Tsaritsyn probably shocked some senior officials in Moscow who had been following the war from their offices:
Here is the picture I saw: … N. P. Alekseev, whose face was totally covered by a mask of blood.… One eye was completely closed, and you could not tell if it had been beaten out of him or was just covered by swelling.… They were beating Alekseev with the butt of a revolver and their fists, and, after he collapsed, they trampled him with their feet.…
Returning to the gallery of types, in regard to those arrested and detained by the Cheka whom I happened to see, I must make the following comment: most of them were arrested by chance, shot, and some time later notices appeared in the local paper listing those who had been shot as all sorts of criminals.…
Two arrestees were brought into my cell who had been held on a barge. One of them told me about the barge on the Volga holding 400 people. Using a barge as a prison started during the evacuation of Tsaritsyn. When the [anti-Bolshevik] Cossacks attacked, they put arrestees from prisons on one, and the assortment of arrestees was extremely diverse. There were 30 from a labor camp, 70 former officers, 40 members of the bourgeoisie, and the rest were arrested for a wide variety of reasons, mostly workers and peasants. The barge packed with all these people had only one latrine, and people had to stand in line for four hours and fainted. The prisoners were not given anything to eat.
22
Makhrovsky accused not only the Cheka of abuses, but also Tsaritsyn’s political leaders, including Stalin. He provided examples of people being arrested for merely arguing with Stalin.
23
Several months later, Voroshilov confirmed Stalin’s leading role in organizing the terror. “These ‘gentlemen,’” Voroshilov said of the former officers, “were arrested [by me] and Comrade Stalin.”
24
Having developed a taste for the Tsaritsyn approach, Stalin requested that it be applied in surrounding areas. On 31 August 1918 he asked Lenin to authorize a “group of reliable people” from Tsaritsyn to “purge” the city of Voronezh of “counterrevolutionary elements.” The request was granted.
25
Stalin apparently sent his request to Lenin before he heard that the previous day, 30 August, the Bolshevik leader had been wounded by an act of terrorism attributed to the SRs. The assassination attempt opened up new prospects for Stalin and the Bolshevik party overall: the Red Terror became official policy. In early September Stalin sent a report to Moscow on behalf of the leadership of the North Caucasus District outlining plans to organize “open, mass, systematic terror against the bourgeoisie and its agents.” In September and October, the Tsaritsyn Cheka, according to some sources, executed 102 people, of whom 52 were former tsarist army officers or former members of the tsarist security police.
26
Whether the scale of the terror was due to the panic triggered by military defeat or whether it was premeditated, the threat of terror made it easier to keep the unruly Red Army in line. Furthermore, the discovery of “plots” offered convenient excuses for military failures and opportunities to demonstrate decisiveness and efficiency to the top leadership. Stalin used the threat of growing counterrevolution to demand special powers and justify his refusal to subordinate himself to the military authorities in his district.
It is not known through what channels and in what form information about the Tsaritsyn atrocities reached Moscow or how widely the Makhrovsky report and other firsthand accounts were circulated. There is evidence that the top leadership knew about Stalin’s initiatives. Several months later, in March 1919, Lenin said at the Eighth Party Congress, “When Stalin was shooting people in Tsaritsyn, I thought this was a mistake; I thought that they were shooting incorrectly.” (He did not, apparently, object to the executions in principle, only that they were being carried out in a disorderly manner.) Lenin even claimed he sent a telegram to Stalin asking him to be careful, although no such telegram has been discovered. Another speaker mentioned the “famous” barge in Tsaritsyn “that did so much to prevent military specialists from being assimilated.”
27
Apparently, Stalin’s executions were no secret, but he suffered no serious consequences as a result. The Bolshevik leaders took a relaxed attitude toward excesses committed in defense of the revolution. During the same speech to the Eighth Congress, Lenin even said that in the end the Tsaritsyners were right. Why condemn comrades over a few “holdovers of the bourgeoisie”?
While mass shootings did not much trouble Lenin, military setbacks did. As head of the Red Army, Trotsky took an implacable position toward the Tsaritsyn events. His feelings were influenced both by a strong personal dislike for Stalin and by pragmatic concerns. In his eyes, the measures taken in Tsaritsyn were a dangerous example of unconstrained action that would hinder the professionalization of the army through the institution of strict discipline and the recruitment of military professionals. He made his position clear to Lenin in a telegram dated 4 October 1918:
I categorically insist that Stalin be recalled. Things are not going well on the Tsaritsyn front, despite an abundance of forces. Voroshilov can command a regiment, but not an army of fifty thousand soldiers.… Tsaritsyn must either submit [to its ranking commanders] or get out of the way. We are seeing success in all armies except the Southern one, especially in Tsaritsyn, where we have a colossal superiority of forces but total anarchy at the top. We could get this under control in 24 hours with your firm and decisive support; in any event, this is the only way forward I see for myself.
28
Stalin began to campaign against Trotsky. In telegrams to Lenin, he and Voroshilov accused Trotsky of making a mess of the front and behaving disrespectfully toward “prominent members of the party to please traitors from among military specialists.”
29
He traveled to Moscow, hoping to talk to Lenin personally and tip the scales in his favor, but his trip was in vain. The leadership supported Trotsky’s efforts to consolidate the army. In October 1918 Stalin was forced to leave Tsaritsyn. Soon thereafter, Voroshilov and other Stalin allies were also removed. From that point forward, Stalin took every opportunity to scheme against Trotsky and advance the careers of his Tsaritsyn comrades.
The experience acquired in Tsaritsyn seems to have guided Stalin throughout the remaining years of the Civil War. Although he was compelled to recognize the party policy of recruiting military professionals, Stalin apparently remained hostile toward it. He had little respect for professional military men, whom he considered politically suspect, and preferred the enthusiasm and “common sense” of true revolutionaries. In a 16 June 1919 telegram to Lenin from the Petrograd front, he wrote with slightly comical bravado and arrogance: “Naval experts assert that the capture of Krasnaya Gorka [a Petrograd fort] from the sea runs counter to naval science. I can only deplore such so-called science. The swift capture of Gorka was due to the grossest interference in the operations by me and civilians generally, even to the point of countermanding orders on land and sea and imposing our own. I consider it my duty to declare that I shall continue to act in this way in future, despite all my reverence for science.”
30
Lenin, who knew that the fort had not, despite Stalin’s claim, fallen from a naval attack, seems to have been amused by Stalin’s swagger. He left a notation on the telegram: “??? Krasnaya Gorka was taken by
land.
”
31
Stalin’s bravado stayed with him through the war’s concluding stages. In the spring and summer of 1920 he was on the Southwestern Front, where the Soviet-Polish War was raging and Soviet forces were facing General Petr Wrangel, the commander of what was left of the White Army who had moved beyond his main stronghold in Crimea. At first the Polish forces dealt the Red Army crushing defeats, but the situation soon changed. The Red Army went on the offensive, made its way to Warsaw, and prepared to take it. Bolshevik leaders were euphoric. They anticipated that revolution would not only prevail in Poland, but (finally!) would also spread to other European countries. “Through Warsaw to Berlin!” was the watchword. On 13 July 1920, in response to Lenin’s question about the advisability of concluding a truce with Poland, Stalin wrote: “The Polish armies are completely falling apart; the Poles have lost communication lines and management; Polish orders, instead of reaching their recipient, are increasingly falling into our hands. In a word, the Poles are experiencing a breakdown from which they won’t soon recover.… I don’t think that imperialism has ever been as weak as it is now, at the moment of Poland’s defeat, and we have never been as strong as we are now, so the more resolutely we behave ourselves, the better it will be for Russia and for international revolution.”
32
Stalin’s writings from this period are permeated with the hope that Red Army bayonets would coax along world revolution. On 24 July, in a telegram to Lenin that treated victory over Poland as a foregone conclusion, he proposed “raising the question of organizing an insurrection in Italy and in such still precarious states as Hungary and Czechoslovakia (Romania will have to be crushed).”
33
Stalin backed up his words with actions. On the Southwestern Front that had been entrusted to him, he was especially anxious to capture the important city of Lvov. He pressed the leaders of the First Cavalry, urging them to make a decisive charge, but in vain: Lvov evaded his grasp. The Soviet military effort was not going well in another sector of the Southwestern Front, Crimea. Units of Wrangel’s army were entrenched there, and with the Red Army busy on the Polish front, Wrangel undertook successful attacks beyond the peninsula. Stalin, as one of the main officials responsible for the failures outside Lvov and in Crimea, sent reports to Moscow citing objective difficulties and blaming the inaction of the Red Army’s central command. He clearly felt uncomfortable as a military commander incapable of achieving decisive success. This failure was particularly mortifying given the rapid advance on Warsaw by the Red Army that was taking place on the neighboring Western Front.
But the situation soon took another sharp turn. The invasion of Poland bogged down, the Red Army suffered heavy casualties, and the Poles ended up imposing humiliating peace terms on the Bolsheviks. Defeat on the Polish front had a number of causes, one of which can be traced directly to Stalin. It has been suggested the Red Army spread itself too thin by carrying out offensive actions in too many areas at once. For example, the First Cavalry Army, an important force, was trying to take Lvov instead of supporting the troops marching on Warsaw. Not long before the Red Army’s defeat, a decision was made to move the First Cavalry Army west from Lvov, but it was never implemented. Stalin played a part in this failure. On 13 August 1920 he sent the Red Army Main Command a telegram asserting that the redeployment of the cavalry would be harmful, in that it had already begun a new offensive against Lvov. The redeployment should have been ordered earlier, he maintained, when the army was still in reserve. “I refuse to sign the order,” he wrote.
34