Russia's People of Empire: Life Stories from Eurasia, 1500 to the Present

22Joseph Stalin

Stalin in 1902. Wikimedia Commons. •• • 22 Joseph Stalin (1878–1953) RONALD GRIGOR SUNY Three imperial leaders of modern Europe came from the peripheries of the empires they would rule and expand—Napoléon, Hitler, and Stalin. Born on December 6 (19), 1878, in the Georgian town of Gori, in a country exoticized as dramatically beautiful, fatally attractive, and savage as Corsica—and as far from the centers of political power as the hinterlands of Austria—Joseph Stalin (Ioseb Jughashvili) rose from impoverished son of a shoemaker to become one of the most powerful men in the world. He forged two empires—one internal between the metropole of Communist Party power in Moscow and the peoples and republics of the USSR (including the Russians!); the other in east Central Europe and Mongolia made up of subordinate satellite states ruled by communist satraps. Historians have linked his Georgian origins to his brutal political style, either as a “man of the borderlands” (Alfred Rieber) or as adolescent poet turned gangster (Simon Sebag Montefiore).1 His dissolute father, Bessarion Jughashvili, and his religious mother, Ekaterina (Keke) Geladze, fought over their son’s education; his mother ultimately triumphed, sending the boy to a Georgian Orthodox seminary. Stalin’s first immersion in culture and politics was in a Georgian milieu, but in the cosmopolitan city of Tiflis (Tbilisi), young Joseph turned away from the church toward Marxism and a career as a professional revolutionary. Somewhat romantic as a youth—he wrote nationalist poetry in his native Georgian language—Soso Jughashvili embraced the hero of a Georgian novella, and to his closest friends and comrades he was known as “Koba.”2 As a member of the Marxist Social Democratic Party, he organized workers in the port town of Batumi, but his impetuous nature led to a reckless strike that ended with the police killing protesters. Never comfortable under the tutelage of the older generation of Georgian Marxists (Noe Zhordania and the mesame dasi [third generation]), Jughashvili gravitated after his first arrest and exile to Siberia toward the more militant wing of social democracy, the Bolsheviks, cutting himself off from most of his fellow Georgian revolutionaries, who preferred the more moderate Mensheviks. 244 Ronald Grigor Suny From 1907 he worked largely outside Georgia, moving first to the oil-producing center at Baku, where he engaged in underground party work rather than the open labor movement. Taking the name “Stalin,” from the Russian word stal' (steel), he met the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin, whom he admired but not uncritically. Lenin commissioned Stalin to write a pamphlet on the problem of non-Russian peoples in the Russian empire, the so-called national question, and in 1913 he published his first major work, Marxism and the National Question, thus earning a reputation as an expert on the problem of the non-Russian peoples. Yet ethnic identification was unimportant to Stalin, like other Bolsheviks, and he projected a future state in which nationalism and national identity would eventually dissolve under the solvent power of socialism. Liberated from his last Siberian exile by the Revolution of February 1917, he returned to Petrograd and soon became a leading figure in the Bolshevik party. At first his positions on key issues of the day were more moderate than Lenin’s, but Stalin soon readjusted his views to conform to Lenin’s line. After the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917, he was named people’s commissar of nationalities, responsible for the policies of the new Soviet state toward the non-Russians. Although he preferred spending his time and energy on matters outside his commissariat, Stalin was a principal architect of what became the Soviet Union. Russian Bolsheviks repeatedly proclaimed the principal of national self-determination of peoples, which in Lenin’s understanding permitted full secession of non-Russians from the Russian state. Stalin was more reluctant to permit the fragmentation of the country and pushed to have only the voice of the “proletariat” and its representatives count in the calculation of which peoples might go their own way. As Soviet power expanded thanks to the success of the Red Army, the actual resolution of the question came not in deliberation and negotiation, but on the battlefield. Some peoples—Finns, Poles, Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians—achieved independence in large part because of European support, whereas others—the bulk of the Ukrainians and Belorussians, Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Georgians, and the Muslims of Central Asia—experienced...