Stalin: A Biography

Yet Stalin was not a blindly obedient Leninist. On several important questions he thought Lenin to be misguided and said so. At the Bolshevik Conference in the Finnish industrial city of Tampere in December 1905 he had objected to Lenin’s plan for the party to put up candidates in the forthcoming elections to the First State Duma. Like most delegates, Stalin thought it a waste of time for the Bolshevik faction to participate in the electoral campaign — only later, like many Bolsheviks, did he come over to Lenin’s idea.⁷ He did not change his mind, however, on the ‘agrarian question’. Lenin advocated that the ‘revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’, after the monarchy’s overthrow, should turn all agricultural land into state property. Stalin continued to reckon this naïve and unrealisable. He proposed instead that the dictatorship should let the peasants grab the land and do with it whatever they wanted.⁸ He also believed that Lenin’s demand for a radical break with Mensheviks in the State Duma would simply confuse and annoy the Duma’s Bolsheviks. Both Lenin and Stalin were zealots and pragmatists. In important instances they disagreed about where zeal should end and pragmatism begin. Their mutual dissent touched on matters of operational judgement, not on revolutionary principles. Yet such matters were intensely debated within Bolshevism. Lenin hated his followers interpreting Leninism without his guidance. Stalin was one of those leading Bolsheviks who was unafraid to stand up for his opinions without walking out of the faction.

He also had reservations about Lenin’s intellectual priorities in philosophy. In 1908 Lenin published a work of epistemology, Materialism and Empiriocriticism. At its core was a ferocious attack on his close collaborator Alexander Bogdanov. He objected to Bogdanov’s apparent philosophical relativism. For Lenin it was axiomatic that the ‘external world’ existed independently of its cognition by the individual human mind. ‘Reality’ was therefore an objective, discernible phenomenon. Lenin contended that Marxism constituted an irrefutable corpus of knowledge about society. He insisted that the mind functioned like a photographic apparatus accurately registering and relaying data of absolute truth. Any derogation from such premises, he asserted, implied a movement away from Marxist materialism and opened the intellectual gates to philosophical idealism and even to religion. Bogdanov, whose commitment to each and every statement of Marx and Engels was far from absolute, was castigated as an enemy of Marxism.

Stalin thought Lenin was wasting his time on topics of marginal importance for the Revolution. In a letter to Vladimir Bobrovski from Solvychegodsk in January 1911 he declared the epistemological controversy ‘a storm in a tea-cup’. Generally he ridiculed the émigrés.⁹ Stalin thought that Bogdanov had done a convincing philosophical job and that ‘some particular mistakes of Ilich [were] correctly noted’.¹⁰ He wanted all Bolsheviks to concentrate on the large practical topics, and there were plenty of these needing to be discussed before appropriate policies could be formulated. Stalin was willing to criticise ‘the organisational policy of the editorial board’ of Proletari.¹¹ This board at Lenin’s behest had expelled Bogdanov from its membership. Stalin was indicating his dissent not only from Lenin’s epistemology but also from his enthusiasm for splitting the faction into ever tinier bits. He advised a moderation of polemics. Stalin counselled the leaders of the two sides in the factional controversy — Lenin and Bogdanov — to agree that ‘joint work is both permissible and necessary’.¹² Such an idea motivated Stalin in the next few years. Indeed he maintained it throughout 1917; for when Lenin was to demand severe disciplinary measures against Kamenev and Zinoviev, it was Stalin who led the opposition to him.

So at that time he was what was known as a Conciliator inside Bolshevism. He despised the émigré shenanigans and wanted the Bolsheviks, wherever they lived, to stick together. It was a question of priorities. Philosophy was not as important as the making of revolution. For this purpose it was essential to keep Bolsheviks together, and Lenin must not be allowed to endanger such an objective.