Stalin: A Biography

Rabkrin — Abbreviated name of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate. Set up in 1920, it was headed by Stalin till December 1922.

Red Army — The Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army, formed in 1918.

Right Deviation — The supporters of Bukharin who opposed the abandonment of the NEP in 1928.

RSFSR — The Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic. Established in 1918, it became a constituent republic of the USSR in 1924. It was renamed the Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic in 1936.

Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) — The name of the Bolshevik party from 1918.

Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party — The Marxist party of the Russian Empire, formed in 1898. In 1903 its leadership split into two factions, the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. After recurrent attempts at reunification the party fell apart into two separate parties in 1917.

Social-Federalists — Georgian socialist party which opposed Marxism and advocated Georgian national and territorial unity in a federal state within the boundaries of the Russian Empire.

Socialist-Revolutionaries — Party formed by Viktor Chernov and others in 1901 in the tradition of those revolutionaries of the Russian Empire who looked mainly to the peasants as the guiding force of revolution and to the village land commune as the future basis of a socialist society.

Soselo — One of Stalin’s youthful nicknames.

Soso — Stalin’s main youthful nickname.

Soviet Army — The name of the Red Army from 1946.

Sovnarkom — The government established by Lenin and the Bolsheviks through the October Revolution. Acronym for the Council of People’s Commissars.

Ulyanov, Vladimir Ilich — Original name of Lenin before he adopted revolutionary pseudonyms.

United Opposition — The faction formed from a combination of the Left Opposition and the Leningrad Opposition in 1926.

Wehrmacht — The German army.

White Armies — The various armies which were ranged against the Red Army from 1918. Their commanders and soldiers were both anti-socialist and distrustful of liberalism and parliamentarism.

Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate — The full name of the institution usually known as Rabkrin.

Workers’ Opposition — Bolshevik faction which emerged at the end of the Civil War and called both for the internal democratisaton of the party and for the granting of authority to workers and peasants to control their sectors of the economy.

NOTES

1. Stalin as We Have Known Him

1. N. Sukhanov, Zapiski o russkoi revolyutsii.

2. See in particular B. Souvarine, Staline: aperçu historique du bolchévisme; L. Trotsky, Stalin. An Appraisal of the Man and His Influence; T. Dan, Proiskhozhednie bol’shevisma: k istorii demokraticheskikh i sotsialisticheskikh idei v Rossii posle osvobozdeniya krest’yan.

3. No one apart from Lenin and Trotski was more condescending to him in the 1920s than Bukharin, who paid the ultimate price. It remains to be explained why fellow leaders omitted to recognise his potential importance in due time. The answer they themselves gave at the time was that they had overlooked his political cunning. Having dismissed Stalin as an ignorant office clerk, they did not anticipate his ruthless skills in conspiracy and manoeuvre. This will not do. The rudimentary point must be made that Stalin’s defeated rivals had an incentive to suggest they had been worsted by a master-deceiver who bore no similarity to themselves and had no talents of his own.

4. ‘Stalin (Dzhughashvili), Iosif Vissarionovich’.

5. Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin (1st edn).

6. G. Gorodetsky, The Grand Delusion.

7. R. Conquest, The Great Terror. Conquest, while highlighting Stalin’s psychological oddity, affirms that he was not insane.