‘Stalin: Passage to Revolution’ by Ronald Grigot Suny reviewed by Chris Beausang


Stalin: Passage to Revolution

Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2022. 912 pp., $29.95 pb
ISBN 9780691202716

Reviewed by Chris Beausang

About the reviewer

Chris Beausang was born, and continues to live, in Dublin. His first novel, Tunnel of Toads, is …

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Ronald Grigor Suny appends an overview of a number of genres and methods which have characterised biographies written about Joseph Stalin to the conclusion of Stalin: Passage to Revolution. In this book, Suny presents his work as attempting to avoid the pitfalls of a psychologistic approach that might over-emphasise the influence of Stalin’s loving mother and absent father, the mass-market pulp biographies written by the likes of Simon Sebag Montefiore, accounts written in the Trotskyist tradition coloured by polemic, and finally those less equipped to speak to Stalin’s personal development as an individual and theorist, as is the case in the work of Stephen Kotkin, whose books are as much a synoptic history of the Russian state from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century as they are a biography.

In focusing on Stalin’s formative years in the regional sections of the Russian Social Democratic and Labour Party (RSDLP), with particular attention to the memoirs of his acquaintances, most of which are unavailable in English, Suny has produced an exceptional biography with an unparalleled account of Stalin’s intellectual development contained within a formidable work on the history of the Georgian and Caucasian labour movements, defined as they were by far more fractious ethnic, linguistic and religious divisions than those which emerged in Petrograd or Moscow. With his understanding of Marxism as internally heterogenous, as well as a capacity for close and attentive readings of theoretical works, Suny is a far more precise biographer than Kotkin, whose tendency to glibly admonish Lenin, Trotsky or Stalin for perceived factual oversights mar his otherwise worthwhile scholarship.

Almost all production in Gori, the town in which Stalin was born, was conducted by small-scale artisans, Stalin’s father, Besarion (‘Beso’) Jughashvili among them. Finding his capacity to earn a living as a cobbler undermined by mass production, Beso wanted the young Stalin to begin work in a factory, but his mother insisted that he be educated. In an experience that aligned with many other Bolshevik leaders, Stalin’s schooling proved to be an incubator of revolution; Suny describes how Stalin and his fellow students at a seminary in Tiflis transcribed the writings of Marx, Engels and Kautsky by hand to allow for their circulation within clandestine reading groups. Marxism appealed to these young intellectuals for its capacity to explain the processes of social change they were witnessing, as well as a more concrete and strategic approach to achieving a new social order in a way that followed the path of modernisation previously beaten by the European powers to its rational conclusion, rather than seeking to preserve the peasant smallholding as the populists had.

Some Georgians looked towards the Russian working class in fulfilment of aspirations for a new social order, while for others, the bureaucratic absolutism and condescension of the Russian state to cultural difference fed more nationalist sentiments, rendering the division between the internationalist idiom of Marxism and Georgian nationalism somewhat fraught. Following the Polish rebellion of 1863, the Russian state had initiated a policy of Russification, one component of which was ending the use of non-Russian languages in state institutions. When Stalin first attended school in Gori, some teachers still spoke Georgian. By the time he had finished the Russian authorities had replaced the Georgian teachers and instruction in the Georgian language had been significantly reduced. However, state interpolation did not succeed in civilising the masses as obedient subjects of Empire, but rather as opponents, particularly as means of transportation, and communication developed, accelerating the production of Georgian-language newspapers, journals and books, the raw materials of national identity.

The first in-roads into the Georgian working class were developed with the aims of elevating worker demands, raising them from an economic horizon to a willingness to confront, or even overthrow, the state. These initial engagements took the form of reading groups, reading lessons or lectures on the natural sciences. It is around the time of Stalin’s first engagements with Georgian social democracy, emphasising the immediate requirements of educating the workers for struggle rather than providing them with basic schooling, that Stalin’s specific personality and identity begin to take shape. Stalin’s ability to inspire loyalty in others due to his wide reading, competence and enthusiasm for organising are noteworthy, as well as his capacity for ruthless factionalising, often in opposition to the leadership. Though as Suny points out, there was a significant gap between regional branches and the social democratic leaders in exile – splitting at congresses in distant European cities on issues only conveyed obscurely in the party press. Stalin was, in his preference for militancy, illegal work and a centralised party organisation, a Leninist by instinct; it was not until ‘What is to be Done?’ actually reached Stalin in 1902 that we could refer to him as a Leninist in the sense that he adhered to a coherent ideological or strategic doctrine.

One of Suny’s great contributions here is his capacity to imbue the three main industrial centres in which the young Stalin was active with a distinctive character. Tiflis, with its highly conscious and internationalist working class was held up as a model by Lenin for intra-community organising, even if workers’ demands were sometimes more economistic than revolutionary. Baku’s ethnic tensions were far more difficult to surmount, and its workers were so radical the social democratic leaders often found themselves unable to channel in their preferred directions. The extent of deprivation faced by workers in Batumi rendered it a fertile ground for Stalin’s more confrontational approach to industrial action, which extended to refusing to meet the existing social democratic organisation when he first arrived, dismissing them as too timid.

Within this attention to the Caucasus, Suny also brings a new clarity to the Bolshevik position on the national question, a policy on which Stalin exerted a significant amount of influence, both due to his being the Bolshevik’s selected expert witness on the Empire’s peripheries, as well as his work, Marxism and the National Question, written at Lenin’s request to clarify the party’s stance. Though Marx and Engels both supported national liberation movements while they were alive, self-determination remained a vague formula and the contradictions between a programme sympathetic to nations emerging from feudalism, while reserving a decisive priority to class, were not resolved, either in the Second International or among the Bolsheviks, despite their immediate strategic importance. The Bolsheviks oscillated as to whether or not organisations organised on a national basis were permitted, opposing the Bund in 1903, but then permitting them in 1906, along with Latvian, Polish and Lithuanian sections. Lenin denounced federalism in 1913, the same year the Bolsheviks reaffirmed their commitment to an internationalist line but the concrete nature of how minorities were to be accommodated was never broached. Stalin defined the nation as a social, historical and cultural construct to which socialists must be willing to grant civil and cultural privileges. In this formulation is a fundamental ambivalence; while Lenin and others were willing to wage internal struggle in favour of self-determination to the point of separation, their hope was that with the right of separation granted, it would not be availed, particularly as the party looked forward to communism establishing itself on a global basis in the medium term. This confusion was to have significant consequences when retaining internationalist commitments would have entailed significant territorial losses during the civil war.

The inaccuracy of Trotsky’s dismissal of Stalin as a direct participant in the 1905 and 1917 revolutions has been well documented. While Suny grants that Stalin did not take a leading role in the war of manoeuvre – leading the Petrograd soviet or touring the factories, making speeches in front of crowds of workers – he was very much involved with Caucasian Bolsheviks during the revolutionary upsurge in 1905. When Tiflis rose in a general strike, a ten-day battle between the army led to the death of sixty workers and twenty-nine social democrats were killed when the Cossacks burned down their printing offices, in retaliation for a bombing of a Cossack barrack. Stalin was involved in these attacks, as well as executions of state collaborators or agents and protected Jewish districts from counter-revolutionary militias. It was primarily as a party bureaucrat and member of the Pravda editorial board that Stalin made his contribution in the 1917 revolution and it is at the point where Lenin denounces Pravda’s censure of his articles, as well as its conciliatory attitude towards the Mensheviks and the Provisional Government, that Stalin begins to fade out from the events of October, shortly before the book comes to an end.

This reviewer is more than confident that Suny would be capable of writing many more outstanding studies of Stalin’s role in Soviet state formation, collectivisation and the purges, and hopes that Russia’s current status as a pariah state does not inhibit his access to the primary documents, should he take on such a project in the future.

17 February 2023

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