396. Stalin: The Bolshevik Revolution (Part 2)

Empire: World History

This episode explores Stalin's rise during the Russian Civil War and his early consolidation of power within the Bolshevik regime, highlight

Key takeaways

• Stalin was largely invisible during the 1917 Revolution, lacking charisma or public presence.
• His true power emerged not through military leadership but through his role as a ruthless political commissar enforcing ideological purity.

Main topics

• Stalin's role during the Russian Civil War
• The rise of political repression and violence under Bolshevik rule

Notable quotes

He was not one of the battlefield commanders, but he was appointed as a political commissar... anyone who stepped out of line was likely to be tortured and then executed.

Conclusion

Stalin's ascent during the civil war was not through battlefield glory but through calculated

Transcript preview

Speaker 6 (0:00) This episode is brought to you by our friend Plaud, the world's number one AI note-taker brand. Now, when it comes to research, we all have our own methods, sitting for hours in the archive, reading the secondary works, capturing every detail, grilling top scholars. But often we have to lose material in order to remain engaged when doing an interview. We've all been there, sitting there with our notes, missing half the vital bits of conversation, and that no longer needed. happen ever again, because now you just put Plaud on your collar and bingo, it records everything you say and transcribes it into sensible action points that you can refer to afterwards. I only picked up Plaud a few weeks ago and already it's changing the way that I work. With OnePress, the device transcribes those real conversations and turns them into clear actions. It also has a brilliant feature called Ask Plaud. which calls up details of hazy, long-gone conversations in seconds. Empire listeners can go to uk.plaud.ai forward slash empire. That's uk.plaud.ai forward slash empire and use the promo code empire to get 10 % off any Plaud device. Speaker 1 (1:25) From the Russian Civil War in 1918 to Lenin's death in 1924, this is the story of how Joseph Stalin went from brutal subordinate to master of the party machine. Now, the Bolsheviks had only just seized power when the country collapsed into a conflict that pitted Russian against Russian. Why did the revolution descend into civil war? And how did Stalin position himself as Lenin's successor, even after Lenin rebuked him? and called for his removal. Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnand. Speaker 6 (1:58) And me, William Durham-Poole. Speaker 1 (2:00) Now, last time we left Stalin in 1917, and he was, do you remember, a rather unimpressive man, the man nobody noticed in the room, a poor orator, a plodding theorist, nobody's idea of the next dictator. And we are, I'm delighted to say, joined by Giles Milton, friend of the show and author of The Stalin Affair, the impossible alliance that won the war, to discuss Stalin's rise in the shadow of Lenin. And Giles, first of all, I just want to know, were we unfair? describing him as sort of like a lacklustre bean counter pre-1917. Speaker 3 (2:35) No, I think you are absolutely right. He very rarely appeared in public as well, was not known generally in Russia, hated public speaking because he had quite a thick Georgian accent. And so, no, I think he was unremarkable. And who could have predicted the future that is about to unfold for him? And we'll look at why and how that might have come about and whether it was his force of personality, whether he got lucky or what it was. Giles. Speaker 6 (3:02) Just sketch for us the start of the Civil War. I'm so full of it at the moment, having just watched Dr. Zhivago for the 15th time. So I have a very clear sort of fictional version of it in my head. Give us the facts. What should we be thinking of when we think of the start of the Civil War? What caused Russian to Speaker 3 (3:20) turn on Russian in 1918? Well, Lenin and his revolutionary Bolsheviks have seized power, the Russian Revolution, and they've seized power in Petrograd, now St. Petersburg, in Moscow, and in various towns and cities across the country. But the whole country is by no means with them at all. There are still very, very powerful forces, which we now call white Russians and the white Russian armies, who absolutely detested this revolutionary new regime and were prepared to do absolutely anything they could do to crush it. And on paper, they were very powerful. They had some of the leading generals from the First World War. They had big armies. And crucially, they also had the support of quite a number of the Western powers. Many people forget this now, but Britain, France, America, Japan were all throwing their weight behind the white Russian armies to try and snuff out Lenin, Stalin and his new regime before they got too powerful. Speaker 6 (4:18) Giles, just to... Give a picture of who they are. Are they all monarchists in the old establishment or are they a whole mixture of other people too who don't like the look of the Bolsheviks? Speaker 1 (4:28) And just adding to that, I mean, can you say, look, one side is... is more ruffian than the other. One side is intellectual and the other side is anti-intellectual. I mean, is any of that rearing its head in the white-red split? Speaker 3 (4:38) I mean, the white Russian generals tended to be aristocratic, of good breeding. They were also reactionary, anti-Semitic, generally. Nonetheless, they were supported by the Western governments. And I think, notably, and this is going to be extremely important for the future. Who sends British troops and munitions into Russia to try and fight the Russian Red Army? None other than Winston Churchill, who in 1919 was Minister of Munitions, and he pushed the government into sending troops and weaponry into Russia to fight the Red Army. And notably, an extraordinary fact, that towards the end of the First World War, the British had developed a new lethal chemical weapon. Winston Churchill was a great fan of chemical weapons. He believed they were more humane. than the bloodshed of the trenches in the First World War. And so he sent this chemical weapon, which was a very powerful toxic gas, to be used against Trotsky and his Red Army. It didn't work very well in the atmosphere in northern Russia. And in fact, the whole stockpile ended up being dumped in the White Sea. But it gives some idea. of the lengths to which Churchill was prepared to go to to try and destroy this regime. And this will account when we wind forwards to the Second World War, to 1941, where Churchill goes into an alliance with Stalin. It shows just how fraught and difficult it was to construct this alliance because Churchill had been one of the people back in 1919 who tried to get rid of Stalin, Trotsky, Lenin and the rest of them in the Red Movement. Speaker 1 (6:08) The civil war that followed, let's talk about that for a little while now, because the Bolsheviks do emerge victorious. It is at an enormous human cost that they do. And you have all of this bedrock is laid for what Russia is going to experience, the Soviet Union is going to experience for decades to come. Violence, secrecy, political repression, recrimination, sending people off to gulags, that kind of thing. Now, when it comes to the civil war's great... battlefield commanders. Was Stalin one of them? Speaker 3 (6:39) No, he was not. Very much not so. The man in charge of the Red Army was Trotsky. And Trotsky proved his worth. He was a brilliant commander. He was brilliant at picking men to serve under him. Remember, just as you touched upon, to give some idea of the scale of this fight, this covers the whole entirety of Russia. Every single bit of the Russian empire, as it used to be, is going to be included. So now all the countries we know as the Stans, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Georgia, Ukraine, these are all dragged into this. unbelievably bloody conflict. There's going to be famine, there's going to be disease, but there's also going to be political repression. So you mentioned Stalin. No, he was not one of the battlefield commanders, but he was appointed as a political... commissar. And his role was to make sure everyone on the red side in the Red Army was politically correct, if you like, is following the revolutionary tenets. And he proved himself exceptionally good and brutal in this role. Anyone who stepped out of line was likely to be tortured and then executed. Peasantry who didn't obey his orders would be summarily executed. Their farms would be burnt. Entire villages would be burned. This was a brutal time for Russians across the old Russian Empire. But it also gives us the first signs of a Stalin we haven't necessarily seen before, prepared to use absolute brutality against his own people if it serves his own ends. Speaker 1 (8:13) And also you've got now a rivalry that is established. In the last episode, we talked about Trotsky really baiting. Stalin saying, you know, where were you during the revolution? Oh, somewhere counting paper clips, you know, that kind of taunting. And so these clashes now with Trotsky, he's got muscle now to be a real threat to Trotsky because he has the power to take out enemies of the ideology. Speaker 3 (8:37) He does, but he has a formidable enemy as well, because Trotsky is also politically shrewd. He's powerful. Remember, he's leading a victorious Red Army. And so, yeah, well, this sets the ground, really, for what is going to be a great battle for supremacy between Trotsky on one hand and Stalin on the other. Where does Lenin Speaker 6 (9:00) sit in the rivalry? Does he rate both men or Speaker 3 (9:05) does he lean towards one or other? Well, I think in these early days, he realises that both men have their uses and therefore he's going to use them for their respective purposes. I mean, Stalin often gets accused of setting up at this... period, the architecture of what is going to become the sort of hallmarks of the repressive Soviet regime. So people might be familiar with the Cheka. The Cheka was the secret police, which would then become the much more familiar KGB. There would be the forced labour camps, there'd be, you know, the one party state that was set up. And everyone sort of nowadays says, well, this was Stalin who set this up while he was acting as political commissar during the civil war. But this, I think, shows a complete misunderstanding, actually, of Lenin's role, because it was Lenin. who set up the architecture and it was Stalin who then exploited it for his own political fortunes and future. So the Cheka, of course, is a very interesting organisation because it will become... the absolute sort of benchmark of state brutality, listening in on people, arresting them, torturing them and executing them. I Speaker 1 (10:12) think it's really important what you've just said, because, you know, in our retrospective history, it's often said, you know, actually Stalin was the corrupting influence. It was Stalin who brought the terror. It was Stalin who did all of these things. But you're saying the architecture was actually a lead-in bequest. Brutality, though, is associated with Stalin because of his conduct. as a Civil War commander. Can you give us some of the things he did? And I'm particularly interested in what he did in Tsaritsyn, which would later take his name. Yeah, Speaker 3 (10:40) Tsaritsyn was one of the big battles that took place in the Civil War. This was really, Trotsky was, his fingerprints were all over this, partly because he appointed a general called Snezarev, General Snezarev, who was, had been serving in the Imperial Tsarist Army. Now, this was something, a hallmark of Trotsky's running of the Red Army