Stalin: architect of the first workers state

On the 50th anniversary of the death of Stalin, Alf Browne makes the
following appraisal

THERE is one sure test of a political leader’s success: how he or she is
vilified by those opposed to their success. Judged on that, Iosif
Vissarionovitch Djugashvili - Joseph Stalin, the architect of the first
workers’ state - stands on his own.
At the end of World War Two he was lauded worldwide. A few years later, by
the time of his death 50 years ago, those fearful of the spread of
socialism had coined the words Stalinist as an expression of utter, if
unthinking, condemnation.
That was and remains a measure of their fear of socialism but also of his
success in its cause.
That success should be measured not just by the heights reached but the
depths from which they were achieved. His origins were probably the
humblest of any of the great men of history: his father worked in a boot
factory, his mother was a washerwoman. They were members of a subject
people, a Georgian in the 19th century Russian Empire.
His parents were poor peasants. Released from serfdom, his father had an
ambition: to succeed as a shoemaker. His mother had one too, to see her
son, born on 21 December 1879 and he only survivor of her four children,
educated as a priest.
Stalin’s father failed in his. His mother devoted her earnings as a
washerwoman to see hers fulfilled in part. When he was nine, she secured
his entry to the Russian Orthodox church school in his birthplace, Gori,
just opened to the sons of peasants.
Iosif, “Soso” to his friends, was at an immediate disadvantage. Lessons
were not in his native Georgian but a foreign language: Russian, which he
had to learn alongside Latin and Greek - standard subjects in an Orthodox
school.
Soon he was seen to be outstandingly bright, the cleverest of his year. He
matriculated at 15 and the headmaster and local priest secured him a
scholarship to the Georgian university, the Theological Seminary of Tiflis,
far beyond his mother’s means.
Influences there were not just educational but also national and economic.
These were not unfamiliar to him. Georgia had a rich folklore of Robin
Hood-like patriots, fighting against the oppressors of the poor. Soon after
reaching university, aged 15, he had patriotic poems published in the
Georgian periodicals.
A clandestine library ticket enabled him to read widely in such matters as
Darwinian biology and economic history. His monkish teachers would not have
approved. He got away with it for three years but then joined a socialist
organisation, Messame Dassy. A close watch was kept on him and he was
expelled in May 1899, when he was 19.
For some months he depended on earnings from giving lessons but then he
got a job at the Tiflis Observatory. Officially he was described as a clerk
but it is known he carried out scientific studies on magnetism. Whatever
his work, it gave him an office, away from police eyes, for his political
work.
Messame Dessy, like the Russian Social Democratic Party, was split into
two groups, both claiming to be Marxist. One believed a bourgeois
capitalist epoch must precede a true workers’ socialist state. They, the
Economists, held that improvements in workers’ pay and conditions were all
that could be done.
Soso, like Lenin in the Russian party, believed in the possibility of a
true socialist revolution and fought for it

struggle in the Caucasus

In the Russian party the Economists, including Trotsky, were the
Mensheviks - Lenin and his supporters, the Bolsheviks.
In Georgia, the Economists had a large majority. Soso, barely out of his
teens, put the real socialist view in articles of remarkable maturity in
the workers’ newspaper.
His was to be an important role as a journalist until the revolution was
won. But action, in he form of strikes and street demonstrations, was the
main way to win support.
While at the Observatory he prepared, with others, the first May Day
demonstration in the Caucasus in 1900 on the outskirts of Tiflis, making
his first public speech. The next May Day march was planned for the centre
of Tiflis, in defiance of the secret police, the Okhrana. The Okhrana
struck first, raiding offices, including Soso’s room at the Observatory and
arresting leaders. Soso escaped to hold that second May Day demonstration
of 2,000 workers in the city centre.
Soon afterwards he was elected to the Social Democratic Committee of
Tiflis, his first political position. He was sent to the growing industrial
centre of Batum to organise political and industrial activity.
It was then he took the name Koba, the outlaw hero of one of those
folklore Georgian poems. It took just four and a half months to transform
political activity in Batum. As the police report put it: “As a result of
Djugashvili’s activities, social democratic organisations began to spring
up in all the factories of Batum ... prolonged strike in the Rothschild
factory and street demonstrations...”
He spent 18 months in Caucasian prisons and was then exiled to Siberia.
Almost immediately he prepared his escape and in January 1904 he made his
way back to Tiflis, suffering frostbite as he journeyed through the
Kuznetsk basin, then the arid wilderness which he was later to transform
into the industrial area which made the weapons that defeated Hitler.
Now 25 years old, he was ready for the 1905 dress rehearsal of the October
Revolution. The workers’ risings in Petrograd and Moscow reverberated
throughout the Russian empire.
But nowhere did they resound louder than in the Caucasus. Indeed, they had
been preceded by an oil workers’ strike in Baku, which led to the first
collective agreement between workers and employers in Russia.
Koba had interrupted a lecture tour to advise its leaders. His role as a
propagandist is well documented in the pamphlets he wrote and the
newspapers he edited. His work in political and industrial organisation
was, of necessity, less open. His doings in the so-called Technical Branch
were particularly sensitive.

revolution

Revolution relies on action and action needs finance. Both need
organisation. Koba proved it in a fashion which belied the public,
folk-hero nature of his name. The police never cottoned on to that one of
his roles.
But his fellow revolutionaries knew his qualities. That explains why an
underground worker, on the distant fringe of the empire, speaking and
writing in a foreign language, became a national leader of the Russian
party within the next 10 years, who went to Moscow in the summer of 1917 to
lead the Bolsheviks waiting for Lenin.
Until those last reverberations of the 1905 revolution in the Caucasus,
the words he used in brochures and newspapers in the political fights were
in his native Georgian. But in 1907 he was instrumental in setting up the
first industry-wide union in Russia, among the oil workers of Baku, as
distinct from those limited to a single trade.
Newspapers founded with it had to be in Russian and so, henceforth, were
most of his writings. That made his writings and their quality more
available to Lenin the Bolshevik leader, living in Western Europe.
At Lenin’s behest, Koba was co-opted onto the party’s central committee.
His role was to liaise with the party’s MPs and bring out its newspaper,
Pravda.

man of steel

It was about this time his writings began to be signed with a Russian
pseudonym: Stalin (Steel). He had just time later that year; after another
arrest, exile and escape; to prepare the party’s election campaign in
Petrograd, the capital, write the election address and organise a strike to
force the government to retreat from its decision to annul early election
results favouring workers.
By now he was well known, not just among the revolutionaries but their
opponents. February 1917 saw him in Siberia. For seven of the previous 10
years he had been in exile or escaping from it.
He hurried to Petrograd where he arrived as the senior Bolshevik - Lenin
and the others were still abroad. He took on the joint jobs of running the
party and editing Pravda, trebling the party’s membership before Lenin’s
arrival.
He remained the organiser of socialist revolution throughout that summer
and autumn. Others might play more flamboyant roles as tribunes and orators
- his was the spadework, which smoothed the path to success.
His was constantly the sensible, logical line in central committee
discussions. His Pravda editorials made the party line clear to his
readers. He was one of the small group explaining it to members of the
Petrograd Soviet, through which the bloodless revolution was eventually won.
Before then, in July, when premature revolt and counter-revolution both
threatened, he was a restraint, preaching sense, even on Lenin.
For Lenin came to realise that the clear thinking and organising ability
of this son of Georgian peasants were of greater value to the common cause
than perhaps the showier qualities of other colleagues with more
intellectual backgrounds.
The year after the revolution, when civil war broke out, Stalin sent Lenin
his first secure food supplies from the south, then to military trouble
spots as they arose.

his achievements
Stalin’s achievements had two effects: the back-room organiser became a
public figure with growing fame; and he was continually voted by his
colleagues into positions demanding his particular talents. “Who else could
do it?” as Lenin once asked.
This account has dealt at length with Stalin’s rise from the depths. The
peaks of his achievements: the socialist industrialisation of the Soviet
Union; victory in the Second World War; and the establishment of the Soviet
Union - which were then yet to come - are better known.
But they can only be valued when seen against the background of his
country’s position. It had been impoverished by the war and further
impoverished by civil war and the intervention of capitalist countries,
horrified by the thought of socialism.
Industrialisation, bourgeois or socialist, depends on a productive
agriculture. Agriculture has to provide industry’s workers yet continue to
feed them.
To win peasant support for the revolution, the land had been shared out in
small packages. First attempts to proclaim a socialist economy failed in
the face of agriculture’s own failure to supply workers and food.
Industrialisation also demands managers, which were also lacking. By the
late 1920s this had changed. In agriculture, human nature led to another
revision of land ownership.
Farms grew; some peasants prospered and became kulaks at the expense of
others. But collectivisation gave the poor peasants the opportunity for
both fairness and further growth.
Stalin’s work as arch organiser, general secretary of the party and head
of the national inspectorate was already meeting that of other needs of
industry: trained organisers.
To universal surprise and disbelief he launched the drive for socialist
industrialism.
Again to universal surprise and disbelief it was an unparalleled success.
In 10 years, the increases in outputs from the mines and factories were
achieved which had taken other countries a century or more - 75 years in
the nearest rival in rapid industrialisation: Germany.
Nor was it just a material success. Growth in books, education and medical
services were equally without precedent. It had not however lasted quite
long enough. In the face of anti-communist enmity, the Nazi Germany backed
by many in the West, Stalin had warned of the need for military strength
and begun to provide it in new tanks, planes, gun and rocket artillery,
which were to prove their superiority.
The attack on the Soviet Union came six months to a year too soon for
them. So once more to universal surprise and disbelief, while its generals
were told to delay the Germans, Stalin concentrated on shifting to the east
the factories, which would provide those war-winning weapons.
Altogether 1,523 industrial plants, including 1,360 major armaments
factories were evacuated, necessarily delaying the main body of new weapons.
In the end the war was won and nobody doubted that Stalin had played the
largest individual role in winning it. Nowadays attempts are made to play
down his role but the facts are clear. He consulted; he demanded opinions
as well as information but in the end every major operation was under his
overall control.
He was commander-in-chief on an unprecedented scale for modern war. As one
military historian has stated: “He must be give credit for the amazing
successes ... when the whole German army groups were obliterated with
lightning blows. Some of these victories must be reckoned among the most
outstanding in world military history.”
After the war the Soviet Union recovered fastest of the war-ravaged
countries, despite Truman’s breaking of economic agreements and supplies.
It overtook the United States in production of “recovery goods”, building
materials and such.
Stalin’s policies probably saved the world from a third and final world
war. It is now known that Churchill’s own plans for an assault on the
Soviet Union, while still in power, were ditched by his own chief of staff,
General Alan Brooke, who had a higher regard for Stalin’s ability - “a
first class military brain” - than he had for his own boss’s.
It was Stalin’s foresight in depriving the west of Poland to use as an
advanced base, which probably prevented the use of the atom bomb in such an
assault until his own programme for nuclear parity made it impossible.
Interestingly, among that current vilification, the Encyclopaedia
Britannica described Stalin as “possessed of a superlative and
all-transcending talent” as a politician.
His achievements, from the depths to the heights, were probably unmatched.
He was beyond any doubt a man of success. It is unfortunate the same cannot
be said of his successors.

more features about stalin here
front page New Worker 24th January 2003