Stalin: A Biography

Telegrams preceded him, and the Russian Bureau prepared a suitable greeting. Kamenev together with other leading Bolsheviks from Petrograd travelled out to meet him at Beloostrov as the train stopped briefly at the Finnish–Russian administrative frontier on 3 April. Lenin did not mince his words. He picked on Kamenev as the originator of the Russian Bureau’s conditional support for the Provisional Government and cursed him heartily.³⁴ (Stalin avoided such a tirade only because he had not gone to Beloostrov with the welcoming group.)³⁵ Lenin’s mood had not lightened when the train arrived after midnight at the Finland Station in Petrograd. He angrily denounced the Lvov cabinet yet again, and was brusque towards Menshevik leader Nikolai Chkheidze, who headed the Petrograd Soviet delegation deputed to greet him as a renowned returning revolutionary. Then he went off to the Tauride Palace, where he addressed a Bolshevik factional gathering and called for a transformation of strategy. Lenin was heard with incredulity. But he would not be thwarted; again at a joint session of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks he declared that all compromise with the Provisional Government was intolerable. Lenin was on the rampage all through 4 April and Kamenev and Stalin watched impotently. From being dominant leaders they had become spectators.

To the Russian Bureau members who had been pushed aside by Kamenev and Stalin this brought delight. At last they had someone of sufficient standing among Bolsheviks to demand ultra-radicalism. They were enraptured by Lenin and his ideas, which he reduced to a few hundred words and published as his April Theses. There were plenty of others in the faction elsewhere in the country who were equally annoyed with the policy of conditional support for the Provisional Government. Bolshevism had always stood for revolutionary extremism. For those Bolsheviks, in Petrograd and across the country, who approved of giving conditional support to the Provisional Government, the arrival of Lenin was akin to a bull crashing into a china shop. Every Bolshevik, on both sides of the debate, was transfixed by the sight of a returning leader full of bile and confidence; and already it was clear that party members had to choose definitively between the rival strategies of Kamenev and Lenin.

Stalin, like many others, went over straightaway to Lenin’s standpoint. He never bothered to justify the decision. Hurtling from meeting to meeting in those early days after his arrival in Petrograd, Lenin rallied the ultra-radicals and cajoled the doubters. It was a political tour de force. Yet at the same time there was less difficulty for Lenin than appeared at the time. Bolshevism had always cleaved to an extremist agenda. Until 1917, indeed, the faction had anticipated forming a ‘provisional revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’ in the event of the Imperial monarchy’s overthrow. A government of Kadets had always been a hateful possibility in the mind of Bolsheviks. Kamenev and Stalin, the advocates of a deal with elements in the Menshevik faction, had always had an ulterior motive. Stalin shifted his ground on 4 April, but not to the extent that he abruptly turned from a ‘moderate’ into an ‘extremist’. And in bending to the Leninist wind, he did not accept Lenin’s proposals in their entirety. He continued to believe that Lenin had much to learn about revolutionary Russia (and even about non-revolutionary Europe!).

Yet he could not fail to see the difference between Kamenev and Lenin. Kamenev had been Stalin’s senior Bolshevik, his friend and his ally. But Lenin was a real leader. From April 1917 until Lenin’s medical incapacitation in 1922 Stalin gave him allegiance. It was often a troubled relationship. They had disputes every year through to Lenin’s death. But they got on well between February and October; and Lenin took Stalin under his patronage and promoted his career in Bolshevism.

PART TWO Leader for the Party

12. THE YEAR 1917