Stalin: A Biography

Evidently his presence in St Petersburg was no secret. At any time he could be arrested. With Lenin’s blessing, he was directing the faction’s activity in the capital. He could hardly, however, strut about. He had to be wary. The fact of his voluntary obscurity in 1912–13 led many to go on supposing that he was a nonentity among Bolsheviks before the Great War. Such an idea was seriously awry. He had risen to the summit of the Central Committee and saw his talents as lying in the work he could do in the Russian Empire.

The inevitable happened on 23 February 1913. Stalin went to a ball for International Women’s Day at the Kalashnikov Exchange. It was a big occasion and many militants were heading for the same destination. The Okhrana, however, had decided that the time had come to arrest him. Apparently Malinovski had tipped off his controllers about Stalin’s whereabouts that day, and he was grabbed and handcuffed on arrival. He had finished his lengthy article on ‘The National Question and Social-Democracy’ (which was later republished as Marxism and the National Question) and delivered it to the offices of Prosveshchenie in the capital.³³ This was a legally published Marxist journal that carried items of doctrinal theory and contemporary analysis. The fact that its editors welcomed his article was a signal of his rising importance among Marxists of the Russian Empire. The piece was thought sufficiently impressive to be turned out as a booklet. Stalin had also left behind an article, much briefer, for Pravda.³⁴ This was a report on ‘The Situation in the Social-Democratic Group in the Duma’. Its contents justified the harsh line taken by the Bolsheviks in comparison with the Mensheviks. Stalin himself was out of action in the capital’s House of Preliminary Detention.

He was not to know that he would not taste freedom’s delights again for exactly four years; for it was to be precisely on International Women’s Day in 1917 that female textile workers went on strike in the capital and forged the first link in a chain that pulled down the Imperial monarchy some days later. No further works by Stalin were printed between his arrest and Nicholas II’s abdication. Scarcely had he penetrated the central precincts of the Bolshevik faction when he was cast to the winds of tsarist justice. He had known the risks. Recurrent arrest and exile were the norm for the revolutionaries who did not emigrate. He must have hoped that he would be sent again to somewhere like Solvychegodsk or Narym and that the Central Committee would enable him to escape and resume his important political functions. He would not be put on trial. His immediate future depended on the police. Stalin awaited the decision with his customary fortitude.

9. KOBA AND BOLSHEVISM

Dzhughashvili was by no means an outstanding thinker. This would not raise an eyebrow if his followers had not gone on to laud him as a figure of universal intellectual significance. He always had plenty of detractors. Most of the early ones were persons who — at least by implication — suggested that they themselves were thinkers of distinction. They deluded themselves. Scarcely any leading figure in the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party made an original intellectual contribution. Plekhanov, Lenin and Trotski were brilliant synthesisers of the ideas of others — and not all of those others were Marxists. Each took his personal synthesis to an idiosyncratic extreme. This was also true of Bukharin, who tried his hardest to effect a deepening of the Marxist perspective in the light of contemporary philosophy, sociology and economics. Only Bogdanov can be categorised as an original thinker. Bogdanov’s amalgam of Marx and Engels with the epistemology of Ernst Mach led him to reject economic determinism in favour of a dynamic interplay of objective and subjective factors in social ‘science’. He made a serious contribution through his work on the importance of ideas for the control of societies by their elites across the course of human history. Bogdanov’s Empiriomonism was a tour de force.¹