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Bolshevik leadership Correspondence. 1912-1927
Collection of documents 1996.
Compiled by: A.V.Kvashonkin, L.P.Kosheleva, L.A.Rogovaya, O.V.Khlevnyuk.
Section I 1912 - 1921
The documents placed in the first section mainly cover the period of the civil war. Several letters for December 1912 - February 1916. play the role of a kind of introduction, demonstrate the initial level of relations between the leaders of the Bolsheviks on the eve of the revolution. During this period, in particular in 1912, the RSDLP was going through hard times. Most of its leaders were in exile. The struggle on tactical and organizational issues intensified in the party. The most important task for the Leninist majority was the struggle against the "liquidators" and "otzovists", who advocated the liquidation of illegal forms of party work and the recall of Social Democratic deputies from the Duma.
At the same time, the ascent of the steps of the party career of I.V. Stalin began. In January 1912, Stalin was co-opted into the Central Committee of the RSDLP and the Russian Bureau of the Central Committee. His work in St. Petersburg in November-December 1912 was closely connected with the editors of Pravda and the Bolshevik faction of the Fourth State Duma. Therefore, questions of the Duma policy of the faction and the struggle against the liquidators occupied a leading place in the correspondence between Stalin and Lenin during this period. The wrong, according to Lenin, position of the Bolshevik faction in relation to the labor strike on November 15 (28) (the opening day of the Duma), the participation of the Bolshevik deputies in the liquidators' print organ, the Luch newspaper, concessions to the Menshevik deputies on issues of national policy aggravated the situation. On December 7, 1912, V. I. Lenin, and on December 9, N. K. Krupskaya, in letters to the Russian Bureau of the Central Committee, insisted on the arrival of Stalin and all six members of the Bolshevik faction of the Duma for a meeting of the Central Committee with party workers in Krakow. At the conference that took place from December 26, 1912 to January 1, 1913 (January 8-14, 1913), Lenin sharply criticized the actions of the faction. Under his leadership, the meeting adopted a number of decisions aimed at a political and organizational break with the liquidators and a change in Duma policy. To understand the informal atmosphere of the meeting, as well as the nature and tone of Stalin's relations with individual party leaders at this time, Stalin's letter to L. B. Kamenev (document No. 1) allows.
In February 1913, Stalin was arrested and exiled to the Turukhansk region, where he remained until December 1916. Being excluded from political life, he tried to follow the events in the newspapers, read accessible literature and worked on a series of short articles on the national question. His letters to party comrades and just acquaintances are not distinguished by a variety of topics (documents No. 2-4). Responses to the Duma policy of the Bolshevik faction, complaints about the hardships of life in exile, interspersed with small lyrical digressions about the meager and colorless nature of the region, usually end with a request to send money. Even articles on which he works are mentioned in the context of the possibility of an early fee. The exception, perhaps, is the joint letter with S. Spandaryan to Lenin, written with some bravado (document No. 5).
February 1917 took the Russian political emigration by surprise. The hasty preparations for the return and the search for ways to travel to Russia in the context of the ongoing world war gave rise to many disagreements among the Russian Social Democrats. The fear of being accused of betrayal forced the emigrants to look for official channels of return. The Entente countries did not give consent to the passage of political emigration through the territories controlled by them. Appeal to the Petrograd Soviet required time, and Lenin could not afford this. Having organized negotiations with the German command through the German and Swiss Social Democrats, Lenin and his group obtained permission to travel to Russia through Germany and Sweden. Some light on the circumstances and atmosphere of preparations for the departure of the Leninist group to Russia is shed by Karpinsky's letter to Lenin (document No. 6).
Despite a significant amount of literature and publications on the history of the Civil War, correspondence (official and, especially, personal) relating to this period does not lose its significance. It not only supplements the known data on the situation on the fronts, on the military and personnel policy of the party leadership, on the state of individual armies, etc., but allows us to trace how personal relations developed between the leaders of the Bolsheviks, how political groups were born that formed the basis of a special type of statehood emerging from the bowels of the civil war. The published documents provide an opportunity to clarify and supplement a number of such subjects. First of all, this concerns the relations between Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin, which were one of the important elements of balance in the system of party-state power of the Leninist period.
In the summer and autumn of 1918, a conflict between Stalin's group and Trotsky broke out on the Southern Front on issues of military leadership and attitude towards military experts (documents No. 22-24). Ignoring Trotsky's orders to give General Sytin full power in matters of military operational leadership, Stalin, Minin and Voroshilov repeatedly appealed to Lenin in the hope of supporting their line. On October 3, Stalin openly stated his position to Lenin in a personal letter. After listing all, from his point of view, Trotsky's sins since March 1918, he accused the latter of partiality to loud gestures, referring to them the policy towards military experts. “I’m not talking about that,” Stalin wrote with resentment, “that Trotsky, who had just joined the party yesterday, is trying to teach me party discipline [...] I’m not a fan of noise and scandals, but I feel that if we do not create a bridle for Trotsky now, he will ruin our entire army [...]” (Document No. 22). However, after discussing the issue in the Central Committee, Lenin supported Trotsky's line.
Another important conflict that flared up in Ukraine after the revolution in Germany and the fall of the occupying German regime was also resolved in favor of Trotsky. In November 1918, the Provisional Workers' and Peasants' Government headed by Pyatakov was formed in Ukraine, after which the question arose of the commander of the new Ukrainian Front. Stalin nominated Voroshilov for this post. Trotsky, referring to the Tsaritsyn (1918) events, opposed and proposed the candidacy of Antonov-Ovseenko. Pyatakov, who initially supported Voroshilov, soon went over to Trotsky's side. Then a group of "Tsaritsytsy" with the support of Stalin went to the unauthorized removal of Pyatakov and the appointment of Artyom (Sergeev), Rukhimovich, Mezhlauk and Voroshilov to the highest military and political positions in the Ukrainian government. At the insistence of Trotsky, the issue was considered in the Central Committee, who decided to remove Voroshilov and Rukhimovich from military work. Antonov-Ovseenko remained in command of the Ukrainian Front, while his former opponents took positions in the government of Ukraine (Documents No. 40-44).
This situation irritated Stalin. He often broke down, resigned. His relationship with Trotsky became increasingly strained. Any, even a minor issue, became the reason for the conflict. In February 1920, the telegraphers of the headquarters of the Southwestern Front, of which Stalin was a member of the Revolutionary Military Council, refused to accept a telegram in Ukrainian. Trotsky bluntly demanded that the Ukrainian language be used in office work. Having declared about the unforeseen staffing of the corresponding apparatus, Stalin refused to obey 1 . After Trotsky’s complaint, Lenin telegraphed Stalin about the need to “immediately get interpreters in all institutions, obliging everyone unconditionally to accept applications and papers in Ukrainian [...]”, and asked him to personally answer the telegram by phone 2. Kamensky, who received the telegram, informed Lenin: “Your telegram about language and other things was communicated to Stalin. Stalin reports that he is not aware of the questions you have raised, and your telegram, apparently, was sent to the wrong address. Stalin cannot answer the phone because he is not healthy .
Demonstrating his independence, Stalin increased his political activity. In the summer and autumn of 1920, he advises Lenin to leave the policy of maneuvering in the foreign policy sphere and prepare uprisings in Italy, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Romania (document No. 91), interferes in the military leadership on the Crimean and Polish fronts, conflicts with Commander-in-Chief S. S. Kamenev (documents No. 96, 98-99), patronizes Voroshilov and Budyonny, and after the failure of the Polish campaign on August 30, 1920, he was the first to raise the issue of creating a commission of the Defense Council to find out the reasons for the failure (document No. 100). When discussing this issue at the 9th All-Russian Conference of the RCP(b) in September 1920, Lenin and Trotsky spoke, among other things, about Stalin's guilt in distorting the real state of affairs on the Polish front, his personal mistakes and biased attitude towards the military command. In response, Stalin wrote an extremely irritated statement, which ended with the words: “T. Lenin, apparently, spares the command, but I think that it is necessary to spare the cause, and not the command ”(document No. 103).
The politicization of military administration, the personal ambitions of individual members of the Central Committee, could not but give rise to group action and squabbles at all levels of power. Among other things, this contributed to the formation of various groupings, the importance of which was fully manifested in the post-war years. Correspondence makes it possible to trace how the core of the future "Stalin's group" was formed. Against this background, Trotsky looked like a rather lonely political figure. Trotsky's bright personality and ambitions, combined with the highest military position in the republic, contributed to the fact that during the war he was in conflict even with those figures who would provide him political support in the future. For example, almost simultaneously with Trotsky's conflict with Stalin's group on the Tsaritsyn Front, in October 1918 Trotsky's scandal broke out with the leadership of the Eastern Front. Demanding an explanation of the reasons for the failures of the 3rd Army, Trotsky ordered its command to investigate cases of desertion in the Perm division and shoot the commissars responsible for this. Refusing to carry out the execution order, Smilga and Lashevich sent a letter to the Central Committee, in which they accused Trotsky of a frivolous attitude “to such things as execution” and demanded that only the Central Committee give an assessment of their activities (documents No. 25-28, 30). As a result, Trotsky had to justify himself. Later this conflict, like many others, was used against Trotsky by political opponents.
Correspondence clearly shows that personal contradictions often led to the disorganization of fronts and destroyed the military command and control system. In December 1918, Gusev and Smilga wrote to the Central Committee about a “completely wrong system of command”, about directly opposite directives coming from the center, about the interference of various persons and authorities in the operational management of fronts and individual units (documents No. 33-34). In April 1919, Vatsetis informed Lenin that, as a result of the arbitrariness of certain party leaders in relation to military specialists, there were not enough combat commanders in the army, and experienced specialists in the headquarters (document No. 46). Complementing this picture is evidence of direct disobedience to the High Military Command and appeals to the Central Committee and to Lenin by members of the Revolutionary Military Council of the fronts and individual army commanders. Trotsky's orders The commanders-in-chief Vatsetis and Kamenev, individual front commanders in a number of cases were simply sabotaged. In this sense, the Stalinist group stood out especially (documents No. 22-24, 104, 105).
A significant part of the documents of the section is devoted to the issues of Sovietization. As the fronts stabilized and the main armies of the white movement were defeated by the end of 1919, the Bolshevik leadership, feeling its strength, undertook a number of large-scale actions to collect the lands of the empire that had crumbled in October 1917. The solution of this task, the theoretical justification of which was the idea of a "world revolution", was facilitated both by the presence of an incredibly expanded army, and by the presence of party structures that were preserved somewhere openly, and somewhere underground, playing the role of a "fifth column". Fully coordinating their actions with Moscow, local communists often deliberately escalated the situation. Their desire to Sovietize their country as quickly as possible, in addition to communist convictions, was largely caused by the desire to gain power.
Ukraine and Belarus were the first to be sovietized. The Sovietization of Ukraine has become a kind of model for working out a scenario for the forceful replacement of national regimes by Soviet ones. The basic tenets of this scenario—a communist takeover in the capital, the creation of a revolutionary committee, the appeal to Soviet Russia for help, the introduction of the Red Army, and the greeting of the "liberated people" from Moscow—remained stable. Only the degree of preparedness for such actions and the number of victims of Sovietization were different. Relatively peaceful at the turn of 1918-1919. only Belarus was Sovietized. In Poland, the Bolsheviks failed. But in the Caucasus, Transcaucasia and Central Asia, they took revenge. From the beginning of 1920 to the end of 1921, Chechnya (No. 68), Azerbaijan (No. 68-71, 74), Armenia (No. 73, 74, 76, 79-80, 88, 97, 107-110), Georgia (No. 71-74, 79-80, 111-116, 118-120). In 1922, the sovietization of Turkestan was completed (No. 151-152, 154-156). Going beyond the former empire, Sovietization attempts also affected the territories of Turkey (No. 83, 122), Persia (No. 77-78, 83, 85, 102, 137), Afghanistan (No. 83, 117, 135, 153), etc. The correspondence contains significant information on these issues, showing how concretely certain actions were prepared, personnel were selected, and Moscow's line was drawn.
Notes:
1 RTSHIDNI. F. 558. On. 1. D. 5467. L. 3.
2 Lenin V.I. PSS. T. 51. S. 141-142.
3 RTSHIDNI. F. 558. On. 1. D. 5457. L. 4.
Section I 1912 - 1921