Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

Having been elected to the party Central Committee on 5 August 1917 (and subsequently, from 25 March 1919, its Politbiuro, Orgbiuro, and Secretariat), wherein he would remain until his death, during the civil wars Stalin occupied more important governmental and military posts than any other leading Bolshevik. He worked as People’s Commissar for Nationality Affairs (26 October 1917–7 July 1922), which made him automatically a member of Sovnarkom and gave him an important role in drafting the Constitution of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic in 1918; a member of the Revvoensovet of the Republic (8 October 1918–8 July 1919 and 18 May 1920–1 April 1922); a member of the Central Committee and the foreign committee of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine (22 October 1918–1 March 1919); chairman of the Central Bureau of Muslim Organizations of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) (from November 1918); People’s Commissar for State Control of the RSFSR (9 April 1919–7 February 1920); People’s Commissar of Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection (Rabkrin) of the RSFSR (24 February 1920–27 December 1922); member of the Revvoensovets of the Southern Front (17 September–12 October 1918), the Western Front (6 July–30 September 1919), again the Southern Front (3 October 1919–10 January 1920), and the South-West Front (10 January–1 September 1919); a candidate member of the Executive Committee of the Komintern (August 1920–June 1921); and a member of the Council of Labor and Defense of the RSFSR (from October 1920). He also performed innumerable ad hoc functions, such as overseeing the defense of Tsaritsyn against the attacks on it of the Don Cossack Host in summer–autumn 1918 and making a tour of inspection of the 1st Red Army, following its disastrous surrender of Perm′ to the Whites in December 1918.

In all these capacities, what is noticeable about Stalin’s civil-war career is the frequency with which he clashed with L. D. Trotsky (notably during the Tsaritsyn affair of 1918 and the Soviet–Polish War in August 1920), his distaste for the use of military specialists in the Red Army, and his currying of cliques of support in diverse institutions and regions of Soviet Russia. (Among his chief supporters, or clients, were K. E. Voroshilov, A. I. Egorov, and S. M. Budennyi.) He was also closely involved in framing the Treaty on the Creation of the USSR and in forcing (by methods that aroused Lenin’s hostility) Soviet Georgia to join the Transcaucasian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (the “Georgian affair”). Thus, when he was made General Secretary of the RKP(b) on 3 April 1922, and his support against Trotsky was sought by Kamenev and G. E. Zinov′ev in the political battles to succeed the ailing Lenin, Stalin was well placed to begin the campaign that would obliterate not just Trotsky and his supporters in 1926–1927, but also Kamenev, Zinov′ev, and almost the entire generation of Old Bolsheviks during the Great Purges of the 1930s. (This was despite Lenin’s calls, in January 1923, to have Stalin removed from his post as General Secretary.) Notable, however, among the first wave of Stalin’s victims once his power was firmly established, were the thousands of former military specialists who lost their posts (mostly in military-educational establishments) in 1930 as part of Operation “Spring.” Most were imprisoned and later killed; some were executed immediately. What remained of the Soviet military elite of the civil-war era was then slaughtered during the purge of the Red Army in 1937 (including M. N. Tukhachevskii, I. E. Iakir, I. P. Uborovich, A. I. Kork, and thousands of others).

Stalin was also the moving force behind the industrialization of the USSR and the collectivization of its agriculture, as well as the castration of the Komintern, as he pursued the goal of “Socialism in One Country.” Stalin’s subsequent posts and honors were many (he made himself Marshal of the Soviet Union in 1943 and then Generalissimo of the Soviet Union in 1945, despite his frequently disastrous handling of the war against Hitler), but he is chiefly remembered as the ruthless dictator who spread a reign of terror across the USSR (and after 1945, Eastern Europe), who was responsible for the deaths of untold millions of people and who discredited the Communist movement in the eyes of millions more.