Stalin: A Biography

But [national-cultural autonomy] becomes even more dangerous when it is imposed on a ‘nation’ whose existence and future is subject to doubt. In such circumstances the supporters of national autonomy need to guard and conserve all the peculiarities of ‘the nation’ including not only useful ones but also those which are harmful so long as ‘the nation might be saved’ from assimilation and ‘might be protected’.

The Bund inevitably was obliged to start down this dangerous road. And down that road it actually has gone.

Stalin noted that whereas other Marxist parties had called for the general right of nations to speak their own language, have their own schools and follow their own customs, the Bund mentioned only the Jews. It had therefore, in his opinion, become a nationalist organisation.²⁷

He excoriated the Bund’s preoccupation with Yiddish and with the Jewish Sabbath. He noted that some Bundists even wanted separate hospitals for Jews. All this flew in the face of the wish of Marxists to bring national and ethnic groups of workers together in a single political organisation. For Stalin it was going altogether too far to suggest that all Jewish workers should be allowed to take off the hours of work from twilight on Friday to twilight on Saturday.²⁸

All this threw petrol on to the flames of controversy: Mensheviks and Bundists were infuriated by his analysis. But Stalin stood his ground and published an explanatory self-defence in the same journal.²⁹ Most of the Menshevik leaders happened to be Jews. Lenin’s attacks on them had invited the accusation that the Bolsheviks were anti-semitic.³⁰ This overlooked the fact that several Bolshevik leaders too were Jews — Lenin himself had a Jewish grandfather.³¹ But appearances in politics mattered as much as reality, and Stalin’s repudiation of Jewish demands for recognition of nationhood and of entitlement to self-rule seemed another case of Bolshevik hostility to Jews. Stories also surfaced that Stalin made anti-semitic remarks in private. Against this is the incontrovertible fact that Jews were among Stalin’s friends and associates before and after the Great War. However, the Jewish Bund was on the other side from the Bolsheviks in most disputes in the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party before the Great War. Stalin and Lenin were eager to attack the Bundists and their aspirations. Factional considerations as well as ideology were involved in the Bolshevik–Menshevik controversy. It would be difficult to find Stalin guilty of anti-semitism simply for what he wrote in his Meisterwerk on the national question.

10. OSIP OF SIBERIA

The months of waiting ended when the St Petersburg police sentenced Joseph Stalin to four years of exile. Marched from prison on 2 July 1913, he was taken to an arrest wagon bound for Siberia. Convicts were usually accompanied by friends and relatives who shouted support from the platform through the barred slits in the sides of the wagon. Nobody in the capital, however, was willing to bid Stalin farewell. His wife Ketevan was dead and his mother far away in Gori; and the Alliluev family, known to be active Bolshevik supporters, would have been ill advised to come to the station. No sooner had he risen to the crest of the Bolshevik faction than his fortunes fell to the ground. From having been leader of Bolshevism in St Petersburg with responsibility for both the Duma faction’s activities and the editorial line of Pravda he was reduced to being one arrested revolutionary among hundreds. Stalin was put in manacles. He slept on a hard wooden bunk. He and his comrades were fed and watered like cattle as the train made its way eastwards across the Eurasian plain. They peered through the barred slits as the train pulled out. Within minutes of departure they lost sight of the last feature of the Russian capital, the cupola on St Isaac’s Cathedral. The tundra and taiga of Siberia awaited them.¹