Ioseb Dzhugashvili, also known by his pseudonyms "Stalin" and "Koba", is a Georgian Old Guard Bolshevik who has been active in Russian socialist circles for more than 35 years. With most of his old comrades either dead (like Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky), politically irrelevant (like Nikolai Bukharin or Lev Kamenev) or defected to more moderate political movements to be able to actively participate in Russian politics (like Alexandra Kollontai or Alexei Rykov), Dzhugashvili remains one of the most influential Bolsheviks still alive, mainly because of military skills.
Since the mid-1920s, he has been in service of the Armed Forces of the Commune of France, mainly as an advisor and army commander. In 1931 however, he was sent as the leader of a military expedition on behalf of the Syndicalist International to Patagonia, with the goal to establish a modern army to be able to counter the Argentinian military in a potential future conflict. Other famous commanders of this military mission include fellow Russian socialists Mikhail Tukhachevsky, Georgy Zhukov and Vasily Chuikov.
Biography[]
Early Life[]
Ioseb Dzhugashvili was born in the Central Georgian town of Gori, then part of the Tiflis Governorate of the Russian Empire, on 18 December 1878 into a lower class family. His father Besarion, a shoemaker, was employed in a workshop owned by another man; When the workshop went bankrupt, Besarion became unemployed and an alcoholic. Dzhugashvili's Ekaterine mother eventually took her son and fled, leaving the drunkard father behind.
In 1886, they moved into the house of a family friend, Father Christopher Charkviani. Ekaterine worked as a house cleaner and launderer and was determined to send her son to school. In September 1888, Dzhugashvili enrolled at the Gori Church School, a place secured by Charkviani. Although he got into many fights, he excelled academically, displaying talent in painting and drama classes, writing his own poetry, and singing as a choirboy.
Dzhugashvili in 1893. Photo taken at Gori Church School.
In August 1894, Dzhugashvili enrolled in the Orthodox Spiritual Seminary in Tiflis, enabled by a scholarship that allowed him to study at a reduced rate. He joined 600 trainee priests who boarded there, and he achieved high grades. But as he grew older, Dzhugashvili lost interest in priestly studies, his grades dropped, and he was repeatedly confined to a cell for his rebellious behaviour. The seminary's journal noted that he declared himself an atheist, stalked out of prayers and refused to doff his hat to monks.
At school, Dzhugashvili joined a forbidden book club; He was particularly influenced by Nikolay Chernyshevsky's 1863 pro-revolutionary novel What Is To Be Done? Another influential text was Alexander Kazbegi's The Patricide, with Dzhugashvili adopting the nickname "Koba" from that of the book's bandit protagonist. He also became fascinated with Karl Marx's Capital and would soon devote himself to Marxism, which was then on the rise in Georgia. At night, he attended secret workers' meetings and was introduced to Silibistro Jibladze, the Marxist founder of Mesame Dasi, a Georgian socialist group. Dzhugashvili left the priest seminary in April 1899 and never returned.
Bolshevik Agitator[]
At the turn of the century, Dzhugashvili had become an important member of the Tiflis revolutionary milieu and was active as a strike organizer and political agitator. By this point, the empire's secret police, the Okhrana, were aware of Dzhugashvili's activities in Tiflis' revolutionary milieu. They attempted to arrest him in March 1901, but he escaped and went into hiding, living off the donations of friends and sympathisers. He continued to evade arrest by using aliases and sleeping in different apartments. In November 1901, he was elected to the Tiflis Committee of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP), a Marxist party founded in 1898.
Police photograph of Dzhugashvili taken in 1902 at age 23.
After being a leading figure of a worker strike in Batumi in late 1901, which would lead to the storming of the local prison and to 13 deaths, Dzhugashvili was arrested by Tsarist authorities in early 1902 and sent to Eastern Siberia, where he remained for only a few months before escaping back to Tiflis. There, he co-edited a Georgian Marxist newspaper, Proletariatis Brdzola ("Proletarian Struggle") and began to meddle in Georgian nationalist circles, calling for the Georgian Marxist movement to split from its Russian counterpart, resulting in several RSDLP members accusing him of holding views contrary to the ethos of Marxist internationalism and calling for his expulsion from the party; he soon recanted his opinions.
During his exile, the RSDLP had split between Vladimir Lenin's "Bolsheviks" and Julius Martov's "Mensheviks". Dzhugashvili detested many of the Mensheviks in Georgia and aligned himself with the Bolsheviks. Although he established a Bolshevik stronghold in the mining town of Chiatura, Bolshevism would remain a minority force in the Menshevik-dominated Georgian revolutionary scene.
1905 Revolution and Rise to Prominence[]
In January 1905, government troops massacred protesters in Saint Petersburg, triggering the Russian Revolution of 1905; Unrest soon spread across the Russian Empire, and Georgia was particularly affected. At the time, Dzhugashvili was on a visit in Baku and became a witness of the ethnic violence that broke out between Armenians and Azerbaijanis; at least 2,000 were killed. He publicly lambasted the "pogroms against Jews and Armenians" as being part of Tsar Nicholas II's attempts to "buttress his despicable throne".
Illustration of the 1905 Baku pogrom, which targeted the city's Armenian and Jewish population. Dzhugashvili was present during the pogrom and formed a Bolshevik paramilitary group to prevent further ethnic violence.
Dzhugashvili formed a Bolshevik Battle Squad which he used to try to keep Baku's warring ethnic factions apart; he also used the unrest as a cover for stealing printing equipment. Amid the growing violence throughout the Caucasus in general he formed further Battle Squads, with the Mensheviks doing the same. Dzhugashvili's squads disarmed local police and troops, raided government arsenals, and raised funds through protection rackets on large local businesses and mines. They launched attacks on the government's Cossack troops and pro-Tsarist Black Hundreds, co-ordinating some of their operations with the Menshevik militias.
In November 1905, the Georgian Bolsheviks elected Dzhugashvili as one of their delegates to a Bolshevik conference in Tampere, Grand Duchy of Finland. At the conference Dzhugashvili met Vladimir Lenin for the first time. In April 1906, Dzhugashvili attended the RSDLP 4th Congress in Stockholm, Sweden on the side of Lenin; this was his first trip outside the Russian Empire. At the conference, Lenin, encouraged by Dzhugashvili, proposed the idea of robbing post offices, railway stations, trains, and banks to finance the socialist cause, which was however rejected by the Mensheviks. Therefore, Lenin and Dzhugashvili privately discussed how they could use robberies for the Bolshevik cause.
Painting of the November 1905 Tampere Conference, where Lenin and Dzhugashvili met for the first time.
By 1907, Dzhugashvili had established himself as "Georgia's leading Bolshevik". He attended the RSDLP 5th Congress, held in London in early summer 1907. After returning to Tiflis, Dzhugashvili organised the robbing of a large delivery of money to the Imperial Bank in June 1907. His gang ambushed the armed convoy in Yerevan Square with gunfire and home-made bombs. Around 40 people were killed, but all of his gang escaped alive - The robbery would further increase Dzhugashvili's infamous reputation, and many Mensheviks openly opposed his actions, to no avail.
Later that year, Dzhugashvili edited two Bolshevik newspapers in Baku and would continue to expand his gang, called "The Outfit", which continued to attack Black Hundreds and raised finances by running protection rackets, counterfeiting currency, and carrying out robberies. They also kidnapped the children of several wealthy figures to extract ransom money. In early 1908, he travelled to the Swiss city of Geneva to meet with Lenin an various other influentail Russian socialist emigres.
In March 1908, Dzhugashvili was arrested and interned in Bailov Prison in Baku. There he led the imprisoned Bolsheviks, organised discussion groups, and ordered the killing of suspected informants. He was eventually sentenced once again to two years Siberian exile, but could escape after disguising himself as a woman. However, upon arriving in St. Petersburg, he was arrested again and sent back to Siberia. He managed to escape a third time, only to be arrested in St. Petersburg for yet another time, being sentenced to a further three-year exile in Vologda.
Elevation to the Central Committee[]
A mugshot of Dzhugashvili made in 1911 by the Tsarist secret police (Okhrana), shortly before he was sentenced to Siberian exile for the second time.
In January 1912, while Dzhugashvilin was in exile, the first Bolshevik Central Committee was elected in Prague. Shortly after the conference, Lenin and Grigory Zinoviev decided to co-opt Dzhugashvili to the committee. Lenin believed that Dzhugashvili, as a Georgian, would help to secure the support for the Bolsheviks from the empire's minority ethnicities. In February 1912, Dzhugashvili again managed to escape to Saint Petersburg, where he was tasked with converting the Bolshevik weekly newspaper, Zvezda ("Star") into a daily, Pravda ("Truth"). The new newspaper was launched in April 1912, although Dzhugashvili's role as editor was kept secret.
Apart from his work for the Pravda editorial board, he would also continue his criminal activities in the Caucasus. However, when he and the Outfit planned an ambush of a mail coach, the whole group was apprehended by the authorities. Most of the gang members were arrested, but Dzhugashvili managed to evade the authorities and retuned to St. Petersburg, where he continued editing and writing articles for Pravda.
After the October 1912 Duma elections, where six Bolsheviks and six Mensheviks were elected, Dzhugashvili wrote articles calling for reconciliation between the two Marxist factions, for which Lenin criticised him. In late 1912, Dzhugashvili twice crossed into Austria-Hungary to visit Lenin in Galicia-Lodomeria, eventually bowing to Lenin's opposition to reunification with the Mensheviks. In January 1913, he travelled to Vienna, where he researched the 'national question' of how the Bolsheviks should deal with the Russian Empire's national and ethnic minorities. Lenin, who encouraged Dzhugashvili to write an article on the subject, wanted to attract those groups to the Bolshevik cause by offering them the right of secession from the Russian state, but also hoped they would remain part of a future Bolshevik-governed Russia.
Dzhugashvili's famous work "Marxism and the National Question"; His publishing pseudonym "K. Stalin", became one of his longest enduring nicknames and is still used till this day by his old party colleagues.
Dzhugashvili's article Marxism and the National Question was first published in spring 1913 and Lenin was very pleased with it. The article was published under the pseudonym "K. Stalin", a name he had used since 1912. Derived from the Russian word for steel (stal), this has been translated as "Man of Steel"; Dzhugashvili may have intended it to imitate Lenin's pseudonym. Dzhugashvili still uses this name on various occasions til today, possibly because it was used on the article that established his reputation among the Bolsheviks in the first place.
In February 1913, Dzhugashvili was arrested once again while back in Saint Petersburg. He was sentenced to four years exile in Turukhansk, a remote part of Siberia from which escape was particularly difficult. In March 1914, concerned over a potential escape attempt, the authorities moved Dzhugashvili to the hamlet of Kureika on the edge of the Arctic Circle. In Kureika, Dzhugashvili lived closely with the indigenous Tunguses and Ostyak, and spent much of his time fishing - Therefore, he did not even learn about the horrors that enfolded on the other side of the Empire: The Weltkrieg, which would eventually plunge the once proud Russia into eternal chaos and civil unrest.
February Revolution of 1917[]
In October 1916, Dzhugashvili and other exiled Bolsheviks were forcefully conscripted into the Russian Army, leaving for Krasnoyarsk, where they arrived in February 1917. A medical examiner however ruled Dzhugashvili unfit for military service because of his crippled arm, an injury he got after being hit by a carriage in his youth. Therefore, he got sent back to Siberia, this time to Achinsk - He would still be there when the February Revolution broke out in Petrograd early 1917.
With the Tsarist authorities now gone and a liberal Republican Provisional Republic in charge, Dzhugashvili travelled by train to Petrograd in March in a celebratory mood. There, Dzhugashvili and fellow Bolshevik Lev Kamenev assumed control of Pravda, and Dzhugashvili was appointed the Bolshevik representative to the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet, an influential council of the city's workers. In April, Dzhugashvili came third in the Bolshevik elections for the party's Central Committee; Lenin came first and Zinoviev came second. This reflected his senior standing in the party at the time.
Bolshevik-agitated violence on the streets of Petrograd during the July Days of 1917. Dzhugashvili was one of the main agitators behind the failed uprising.
While Lenin was on holiday in Finland, Dzhugashvili helped organise the July Days uprising, an armed display of strength by Bolshevik supporters. After the demonstration was suppressed, the Provisional Government initiated a crackdown on the Bolsheviks, raiding Pravda. During this raid, Dzhugashvili smuggled Lenin, who had returned to Petrograd to calm down the masses, out of the newspaper's office and took charge of the Bolshevik leader's safety, moving him between Petrograd safe houses before smuggling him out of the city In Lenin's absence, Dzhugashvili continued editing Pravda and served as acting leader of the Bolsheviks, overseeing the party's Sixth Congress, which was held covertly. Lenin began calling for the Bolsheviks to seize power by toppling the Provisional Government in a coup d'état. Dzhugashvili and a fellow senior Bolshevik Leon Trotsky both endorsed Lenin's plan of action, but it was initially opposed by Kamenev and other party members. Lenin returned to Petrograd and secured a majority in favour of a coup at a meeting of the Central Committee on 10 October.
October Revolution of 1917[]
On 24 October, police raided the Bolshevik newspaper offices, smashing machinery and presses; Dzhugashvili salvaged some of this equipment to continue his activities. In the early hours of 25 October, Dzhugashvili joined Lenin in a Central Committee meeting in the Smolny Institute, from where the Bolshevik coup — the October Revolution — was directed. Bolshevik militia seized Petrograd's electric power station, main post office, state bank, telephone exchange, and several bridges, while the Winter Palace was stormed and all ministers put under arrest. While not publicly visible, Dzhugashvili played a crucial role in planning and orchestrating the coup as well as handling the needed logistics during the event.
RSFSR-era depiction of the Red Terror acts regularly practiced by the Soviet Secret Service (Cheka) to root out "counterrevolutionary movements". Dzhugashvili was one of the main supporters of the Red Terror and was in favor of establishing "concentration camps" for political enemies.
On 26 October 1917, Lenin declared himself chairman of a new government, the Council of People's Commissars ("Sovnarkom"). Dzhugashvili backed Lenin's decision not to form a coalition with the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionary Party, although they did form a coalition government with the Left Socialist Revolutionaries. Soon, Dzhugashvili had become one of the four leading Bolsheviks, together with Lenin, Trotsky and Yakov Sverdlov - all of them would die in the next three years, eventually leaving Dzhugashvili as one of the last remaining high-ranking Bolsheviks still alive.
Even though Dzhugashvili was one of the most influential Bolsheviks at that time, he was not as publicly known as Lenin or Trotsky; This would change in the following months. He co-signed Lenin's decrees shutting down hostile newspapers, and along with Sverdlov, he chaired the sessions of the committee drafting a constitution for the new Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. He strongly supported Lenin's formation of the Cheka security service and the subsequent Red Terror that it initiated; noting that state violence had proved an effective tool for capitalist powers, he believed that it would prove the same for the Soviet government. Unlike senior Bolsheviks like Kamenev and Nikolai Bukharin, Dzhugashvili never expressed concern about the rapid growth and expansion of the Cheka and Red Terror; In response to a message from Estonian Bolsheviks suggesting how they could deal with opponents, he stated that "the idea of a concentration camp is excellent".
People's Commissar for Nationalities of the RSFSR[]
Having dropped his editorship of Pravda, Dzhugashvili was appointed the People's Commissar for Nationalities of the RSFSR of the new Bolshevik government (under the name of "J. V. Djugashvili-Stalin") and signed the Decree on Nationality, according ethnic and national minorities living in Russia the right of secession and self-determination. The decree's purpose was primarily strategic; the Bolsheviks wanted to gain favour among ethnic minorities but hoped that the latter would not actually desire independence.
Dzhugashvili as People's Commissar for Nationalities of the RSFSR, 1918
That month, he travelled to Helsinki to talk with the Finnish Social-Democrats, granting Finland's request for independence in December - Something that would bite the Bolsheviks in the future, as Finland became more and more aligned to the German sphere of influence. Dzhugashvili's department also allocated funds for establishment of presses and schools in the languages of various ethnic minorities. Socialist revolutionaries accused Dzhugashvili's talk of federalism and national self-determination as a front for Sovnarkom's centralising and imperialist policies.
After the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in early March, the Bolsheviks relocated their headquarters to Petrograd, which was in a much more protected geographical position. Dzhugashvili, Trotsky, Sverdlov, and Lenin lived and worked at the Kremlin. From the beginning, Dzhugashvili had supported Lenin's desire to sign an armistice with the Central Powers regardless of the cost in territory, even though the topic was quite controversial even within the Bolshevik leadership. Dzhugashvili thought it necessary because he was unconvinced that Europe was on the verge of proletarian revolution, and continued war with the Germans would only be dangerous for the Bolsheviks' still relatively unstable political position.
Role in the Russian Civil War[]
After the Bolsheviks seized power, both right and left-wing armies rallied against them, triggering the Russian Civil War. To secure access to the dwindling food supply, in May 1918 Sovnarkom sent Dzhugashvili to Tsaritsyn to take charge of food procurement in southern Russia. Eager to prove himself as a commander, once there he took control of regional military operations. While in Tsaritsyn, he befriended two local military leaders, Kliment Voroshilov and Semyon Budyonny, who would form the nucleus of his military and political support base while in southern Russia.
Believing that victory was assured by numerical superiority, he sent large numbers of Red Army troops into battle against the region's anti-Bolshevik White armies, resulting in heavy losses; Lenin was concerned by this costly tactic. In Tsaritsyn, Dzhugashvili commanded the local Cheka branch to execute suspected counter-revolutionaries, sometimes without trial and — in contravention of government orders — purged the military and food collection agencies of middle-class specialists, some of whom he also executed. His use of state violence and terror was at a greater scale than most Bolshevik leaders approved of; for instance, he ordered several villages to be torched to ensure compliance with his food procurement program. In July Lenin granted his request for official control over military operations in the region to fight the Battle for Tsaritsyn.
Dzhugashvili challenged many of the decisions of Trotsky, who at this time was Chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic and thus his military superior. He ordered the killings of many former Tsarist officers in the Red Army; Trotsky, in agreement with the Central Committee, had hired them for their expertise, but Dzhugashvili distrusted them, seizing documents which showed many were agents for the White Army. This created friction between Dzhugashvili and Trotsky. Dzhugashvili even wrote to Lenin asking that Trotsky be relieved of his post.
In late August 1918, Lenin was shot after a speech in Moscow and died two days later, on 1 September 1918, from his wounds; The death of Lenin would trigger the beginning of crippling factionalism in the highest ranks of the Bolshevik Party, something that would be one of many reasons for the defeat of the Bolsheviks against the Whites a few years later.. However, while Dzhugashvili was still one of the most influential Bolsheviks, he was not able to actively take advantage of Lenin's death and rise to the top, as he was still occupied with leading the defense of Tsaritsyn, which was under the siege of the Don Cossacks. The Don Army’s first attempt to take Tsaritsyn in September was repulsed by Dzhugashvili's and Voroshilov's forces and two another attempts in October and February would fail as well.
WORK IN PROGRESS. THE REST OF STALIN'S INVOLVEMENT IN THE CIVIL WAR IS TBA ONCE THE RUSSIA REWORK IS REVEALED
Post-Civil War[]
With the fall of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic at the hands of the Whites, Dzhugashvili and many other high-ranking Bolshevik politicians and military leaders evacuated Russia via Arkhangelsk and resettled to the Commune of France. Most Bolsheviks would soon fall into obscurity; While former Soviet army commanders were able to enroll at French military academies or become commanders for the newly established Communard armed forces, most Bolshevik political theorists spent their exile as semi-successful newspaper editors within the Red Russian emigré community.
Dzhugashvili was lucky and cursed at the same time that he had been one of the most high-ranking representatives of the late RSFSR; While his political position allowed him to exert large influence on the Bolshevik community in France (for example, he would serve as General Secretary of the Russian Communist Party in Paris throughout the 1920s, until getting ousted by internal opposition and replaced by Nikolai Bukharin), the fact that many deem him one of the main figures responsible for the defeat of the Reds in the civil war hampered him from continuing his career in France; Many syndicalist theorists look upon the Russian Revolution as a failed revolution, mainly due to its excessive violence and autocratic tendencies that differ substantially from socialist ideals developed in the west.
After being ousted as General Secretary, Dzhugashvili began to work with high-ranking representatives of the Syndicalist International, representing the Bolshevik faction. The main task of this trans-border organization is to spread the ideals of syndicalism and socialism to the world and create a common platform for left-leaning parties from all around the globe - true to the motto "international solidarity". Former Bolshevik army commanders and politicians with experience were therefore most appreciated by the Synintern. In 1931, shortly after the coup of the Argentinian revanchist José Félix Uriburu in Buenos Aires, Dzughashvili was sent as the leader of a military expedition on behalf of the Syndicalist International to Patagonia, with the goal to establish a modern army to be able to counter the Argentinian military in a potential future conflict. Dzhugashvili mainly represents the political interests of the International in Puerto Madryn, while fellow Bolshevik Mikhail Tukhachevsky, a highly-renowned military officer, is responsible for the formation for the Patagonian Armed Forces.
Works[]
- Marxism and the National Question, 1913