Stalin and Stalinism

JOSEF STALIN, known as “the man of steel,” who led the Soviet Union from 1926 to his death in 1953, did more than any other Soviet figure to put his stamp on the Soviet Union. Born on December 21, 1879, he received a full scholarship to study in the Russian Orthodox seminary at Tbilisi in his native Georgia. However, as with many others in his generation, the young Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili entered the revolutionary movement of the Marxist Social-Democratic Party. In 1910, he adopted the shortened name, Josef Stalin.

From the beginning, Stalin's career diverged from those of his future mentor, Vladimir Lenin, and future rival, Leon Trotsky. While both of them spent many years in revolutionary exile outside the then-tzarist Russia, Stalin spent most of his formative years in the Caucasus Mountains and his native Georgia. Between the years 1902 and 1917, while Trotsky and Lenin were broadening their horizons, he was involved in guerrilla activities and periods of exile in Siberia. Instead of developing the progressive, internationalist views that Lenin would show in his classic “What Is to Be Done?” in 1902, Stalin associated with largely an ethnic culture little changed over the centuries.

When revolution came to Russia in 1917, the Bolshevik Party was led by Lenin and Trotsky. Significantly, Stalin did not support the revolution until Lenin came to Russia on April 16 from exile. Stalin only became active afterward, when Lenin had captured the revolutionary momentum with his control of the vital soviets, or councils, of the rebelling soldiers, sailors, and workers in St. Petersburg.

When, in the summer of 1917, Lenin had to flee to Finland during the counterrevolutionary campaign of Alexander Kerensky, head of the Provisional Government, it was Trotsky who served as the loyal lieutenant and strategist in St. Petersburg. When the October [Page 424]Revolution brought Lenin to power, Trotsky again was his capable lieutenant.

When the counterrevolution of the White Russians (loyal to the Tzar) began, Stalin served as a political commissar with the revolutionary troops. He was present at the fighting for Volgograd, which he later had renamed for himself as Stalingrad. By now he had shown himself as a shrewd “party man,” who would align himself with Lenin on the decision to make peace with the Germans at Brest-Litovsk in March 1918. Yet, still he was not in the leadership clique, which really would center around Lenin and Trotsky during the revolution and civil war. Trotsky, as commissar of military and naval affairs, would actually reforge a Russian Army decimated by war and revolution. Indeed, Stalin failed in his work as party commissar because as Roy V. Medvedev wrote in Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism, Stalin's “arbitrary behavior” was one of the reasons that thwarted the “failure of the Soviet advance on Warsaw” in the 1920 war with Marshal Josef Pilsudski's Poland. Nevertheless, Trotsky's leadership would help the Red Army defeat the last of the Bolsheviks' opponents within Russia by March 1921. Lenin, speaking at the Tenth Congress of the Communist Party on March 8, 1921, could say, “The last of the hostile armies has been driven from our territories.”

...