Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute

Stalin


Chapter IV

THE PRAGUE Conference had predicted a revolutionary revival in the near future and had taken all measures to prepare the Party for it. It elected a Bolshevik Central Committee, set up a practical centre to direct the revolutionary work in Russia (The Russian Bureau of the Central Committee), and decided to publish the Pravda newspaper. Stalin, who had been an agent of the Central Committee since 1914, was elected to the Central Committee in his absence. On Lenin’s proposal, he was put in charge of the Russian Bureau of the Central Committee. But Stalin was in exile, and arrangements for his flight had to be made. On Lenin’s instructions, Sergo Orjonikidze went to Vologda to inform Stalin of the decisions of the Prague Conference. Then, on February 29, 1912, Stalin again escaped from exile. He had a brief spell of liberty, which he turned to good account. On the instructions of the Central Committee, he toured the most important districts of Russia, made preparations for the coming May Day demonstration, wrote the well-known May Day leaflet of the Central Committee, and edited the Bolshevik weekly Zvezda in St. Petersburg during the strikes that followed the shooting down of the workers in the Lena gold fields.

A powerful aid to the Bolshevik Party in strengthening its organizations and spreading its influence among the masses was the Bolshevik daily newspaper Pravda, published in St. Petersburg. It was founded according to Lenin’s instructions, on the initiative of Stalin. It was under Stalin’s direction that the first issue was prepared and the character of the paper decided.

Pravda was born simultaneously with the new rise of the revolutionary movement. Its first issue appeared on April 22 (May 5, New Style), 1912. This was a day of real celebration for the workers. It is in honour of Pravda’s appearance that it was later decided to celebrate May 5 as Workers’ Press Day.

“The Pravda of 1912,” Comrade Stalin wrote on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the paper, “was the laying of the cornerstone of the victory of Bolshevism in 1917.”1

On April 22, 1912, Stalin was arrested on the streets of St. Petersburg. After several months in prison, he was exiled again, for a term of three years, this time to the remote region of Narym. But on September 1 he once more escaped and returned to St. Petersburg. Here he edited the Bolshevik Pravda and directed the Bolshevik campaign in the elections to the Fourth Duma. At great risk, for the police were constantly on his track, he addressed a number of meetings at factories. But the workers and their organizations kept close guard on Stalin and protected him from the police.

A great part in this campaign, which culminated in a victory for the Party, was played by the “Mandate of the Workingmen of St. Petersburg to their Labour Deputy,” written by Stalin. Lenin attached the highest importance to the Mandate; when sending the copy to the press, he wrote on the margin: “Return without fail!! Keep clean. Highly important to preserve this document!” In a letter to the editors of Pravda, he wrote: “Publish this Mandate to the St. Petersburg Deputy without fail, in a prominent place in large type.”2 Stalin’s Mandate reminded the workers of the unaccomplished tasks of the 1905 Revolution and summoned them to a revolutionary struggle, a struggle on two fronts—against the tsarist government and against the liberal bourgeoisie, which was seeking to come to terms with tsardom. After the elections Stalin guided the activities of the Bolshevik group in the Duma. With Stalin in St. Petersburg worked Y. Sverdlov and V. Molotov, who took an active part in the editorship of the Pravda, in the election campaign and in the guidance of the Bolshevik group in the Duma. At this period contact between Lenin and Stalin became closer than ever. In his letters Lenin expressed his entire approval of Stalin’s activities and of his speeches and articles. On two occasions Stalin went abroad to Cracow, where Lenin was then residing: once in November 1912, and again at the end of December 1912, to attend a conference of the Central Committee with leading Party members.

It was while he was abroad that Stalin wrote Marxism and the National Question, on which Lenin set the highest value. “The principles of the Social-Democratic national program,” Lenin wrote, “have already been dealt with recently in Marxian literature (in this connection Stalin’s article stands in the forefront).”3 This treatise was one of the major Bolshevik pronouncements on the national question in the international arena in the pre-war period. It was a formulation of the Bolshevik theory and program on the national problem. Two methods, two programs, two outlooks on the nationals question were sharply contrasted in this work that of the Second International and that of Leninism. Stalin worked with Lenin to demolish the opportunist views and dogmas of the Second International on this question. It was Lenin and Stalin who worked out the Marxist program on the national problem. Stalin’s treatise formulates the Marxist theory of nations, outlines the principles of the Bolshevik solution of the national problem (which demands that it be treated as part of the general problem of the revolution and inseparably from the entire international situation in the era of imperialism), and lays down the Bolshevik principle of international working-class solidarity.

On February 23, 1913, Stalin was arrested at an evening arranged by the St. Petersburg Bolshevik Committee in the Kalashnikov Hall. This time the tsarist government exiled Stalin to the remote region of Turukhansk, for a term of four years. At first he lived in the village of Kostino; but, at the beginning of 1914, fearful lest he should escape again, the tsarist gendarmes transferred him still further north, to the village of Kureika, on the very fringe of the Arctic Circle, where he lived for three years—right down to 1916. Severer conditions of political exile could scarcely have been found in all the remote expanses of the Siberian wilderness.

In the summer of 1914, the imperialist war broke out. The parties of the Second International shamefully betrayed the proletariat and joined the camp of the imperialist bourgeoisie. Only the Bolsheviks, headed by Lenin, remained true to the banner of internationalism. Immediately and unhesitatingly, the Bolsheviks, alone of all. parties, called for a resolute struggle against the imperialist war. And Stalin, cut off though he was from the outside world and isolated from Lenin and the Party centres, took up the same international stand as Lenin, on the questions of war, peace, and revolution. He wrote letters to Lenin. He addressed meetings of exiled Bolsheviks in the village of Monastyrskoye (1915) where he stigmatized the cowardly and treacherous behaviour of Kamenev at the trial of the five Bolshevik members of the Fourth Duma. In 1916, he and other Bolshevik exiles sent a message of greetings to the legally published Bolshevik magazine Voprosy Strakhovania (Insurance Questions), pointing out that it was the duty of this magazine “to devote all its efforts and energies to the ideological insurance of the working class of our country against the deeply corrupting, anti-proletarian preaching of gentry like Potressov, Levitsky and Plekhanov, preaching running directly counter to the principles of internationalism.”

In December 1916 Stalin, having been called up to the army, was sent under escort to Krasnoyarsk, and thence to Achinsk. There it was that he heard the first tidings of the revolution of February 1917. On March 8, 1917, he bade farewell to Achinsk on the way wiring a message of greetings to Lenin in Switzerland.

On March 12, 1917, Stalin, not a whit the worse for the hardships of exile so bravely endured in Turukhansk, again set foot in Petrograd-the revolutionary capital of Russia. The Central Committee of the Party instructed him to take charge of the Pravda.

The Bolshevik Party had just emerged from underground. Many of its most prominent and active members were still on their way back from remote prisons and places of exile. Lenin was abroad, and the bourgeois Provisional Government was putting every obstacle in the way of his return. The moment was critical, and Stalin set to work to rally the Party and fit it for the fight for the transition from the bourgeois-democratic revolution to the Socialist revolution. Together with Molotov, he directed the activities of the Central Committee and the Petrograd Committee of the Bolshevik Party. In his articles the Bolsheviks found the guiding principles they needed in, their work. The very first article he wrote on his return from exile, “The Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies,” spoke of the main task of the Party, which, Stalin said, was “to consolidate these Soviets, make them universal, and link them together under the aegis of a Central Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies as the organ of revolutionary power of the people,”4

In an article “The War,” Stalin showed that the character of the imperialist war had not changed with the assumption of power by the Provisional Government, and that under the bourgeois Provisional Government the war of 1914-17 remained a predatory and unjust war.

Stalin and Molotov, supported by the majority of the Party members, advocated a policy of “no confidence” in the imperialist Provisional Government, and denounced both the defencism of the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries and the semi-Menshevik position of conditional support for the Provisional Government advocated by Kamenev and other opportunists.

 

Notes

1.  Pravda, No. 98, May 5, 1922.

2.  Lenin, Collected Works, 3rd Russ. ed., Vol. XXIX, p. 78.

3.  V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, 3rd Russ. ed., Vol XVII, p. 116.

4.  Lenin and Stalin, 1917, p. 12, Moscow, 1938.



Next: Chapter V