The decree announcing his appointment as People’s Commissar for Nationalities’ Affairs gave his surname as Dzughashvili-Stalin. The publicity gratified a man as yet unknown to most citizens. Lenin and Trotski were the outstanding figures in Sovnarkom and the Bolshevik Central Committee; Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin and Lunacharski were also famous. Despite his newly achieved prominence, however, Stalin continued to work in the shadow of the other leaders. Fëdor Alliluev, who was his first personal assistant, was to recall:1
In those days comrade Stalin was genuinely known only to the small circle of people who had come across him in work in the political underground or had succeeded – after October [1917] – in distinguishing real work and real devotion to the cause from chatter, noise, meaningless babble and self-advertisement.
Stalin acknowledged that others had gained greater acclaim between the February and October Revolutions. He admitted he was not much of an orator. But he turned this into a scalpel to cut his rivals. In his estimation, he did not boast or show off but concentrated on practical deeds.2 But Stalin liked to say such things about himself rather than hear them from other people, and Fëdor’s writing was consigned to the archives unpublished.
Stalin needed his cunning. His institution not only lacked personnel: it did not even have finance or its own offices. Its staff had to work from rooms in the Smolny Institute for want of anything more spacious. Funds remained short because all the bank workers were on strike. Stalin sent his deputy Stanisław Pestkowski to plead for a subvention from Trotski, who had got hold of the banknotes from the main safe at the former Ministry of Foreign Affairs. When Stalin and Pestkowski at last sequestered a suitable building, they pinned a crude notice on the wall to claim it for the People’s Commissariat of Nationalities’ Affairs.3
Things were no better after the Soviet government transferred itself to Moscow in March 1918 in order to move out of the range of Germany’s immediate military menace. Offices were assigned to the People’s Commissariat in two separate buildings on different streets despite Stalin’s protest. He resorted to the desperate measure of commandeering the Great Siberian Hotel on Zlatoustinskaya Street. But the Supreme Council of the People’s Economy, headed by Nikolai Osinski, had beaten him to it. Stalin and Pestkowski did not take this lying down. They tore down Osinski’s notice and put up their own. Lighting matches to find their way, they entered the building from the back. But Osinski complained to Sovnarkom and Stalin had to move out. ‘This was one of the few cases,’ Pestkowski recalled, ‘when Stalin suffered defeat.’4 It was even difficult to gather personnel. Most Bolshevik militants wanted nothing to do with a body whose brief involved concessions to national sensitivities – even Pestkowski disliked being attached to it.5Stalin relied increasingly on the Alliluev family and asked Fëdor’s younger sister Nadya to work as his secretary.6 One day she was a schoolgirl bored with lessons at the gimnazia,7 the next she was an employee of the revolutionary government.
The vagueness of party policy remained troublesome. Although Bolshevik objectives had been declared, detailed measures had never been formulated. Stalin was left to sort out the detailed implementation of policy on the national question on his own. His great asset in this task was that he enjoyed Lenin’s trust. When Lenin went off on vacation to Finland at the end of 1917, the government’s dealings with the Ukrainian regional authority – the Rada – were tense in the extreme. General Kaledin was assembling and training a counter-revolutionary force in south Russia. The situation in the south Caucasus was boiling up. Revolutionary stirrings in Estonia needed attention. Some Bolshevik leaders rose to the level of the duties assigned to them in Sovnarkom; others could not cope or messed up their jobs. Stalin thrived on his responsibilities.
It was of course Lenin who headed the Bolshevik collective leadership. Even Trotski stood in his shadow. Stalin ungrudgingly acknowledged that Lenin was the hub of the Sovnarkom governmental machine, and on 27 December he sent an urgent request for him to come back from his holiday in Finland to help in Petrograd.8 Lenin insisted on Stalin coping on his own; he continued his brief holiday with wife Nadezhda and sister Maria. Stalin went on reaffirming the objectives which he and Lenin had been espousing before the October Revolution. There was to be national self-determination for all the peoples of the former Russian Empire. Confirmation should be given that no privileges would be accorded to the Russians. Each people would have the right and the resources to develop its own culture, set up schools in its own language and operate its own press. Freedom of religious belief and organisation would be guaranteed. (The exception would be that churches, mosques and synagogues would lose their extensive landed property.) For those national and ethnic groups living concentratedly in a particular area there would be regional self-administration. The Russians as a people were hardly mentioned. The era of empire was declared at an end.
Lenin and Stalin designed these extraordinary promises to allay suspicions among non-Russians that the Bolsheviks would discriminate against them. By offering the right of secession, Sovnarkom tried to reassure the non-Russians that the revolutionary state would treat each national and ethnic group equally. The consequence, it was firmly expected, would be that the other nations would decide that the Russians could be trusted. The huge multinational state was to be preserved in a new and revolutionary form.
There were exceptions to this pattern. Following the Provisional Government’s precedent, Lenin and Stalin accepted the case for Polish independence. It would have been fatuous to act otherwise. All Poland was under German and Austrian rule. Sovnarkom was recognising a fait accompli; it was also trying to make the point that, whereas the Central Powers had subjugated the Poles, the revolutionary government in Petrograd sought their political and economic liberation. There was one domain of the Romanovs where practical proof could be given of such a commitment. This was Finland. Relations between Russian and Finnish Marxists had always been warm, and the Bolsheviks had benefited from safe-houses provided for them. The Bolshevik party had supported the steady movement of popular opinion in Finland towards a campaign for massive autonomy from the Russian government. Outright independence was not widely demanded. Yet Lenin and Stalin, to the world’s amazement, encouraged the Finns to take up such a position. A delegation of Finnish ministers was invited to the Russian capital and a formal declaration of secession was signed on 23 November (or 6 December according to the Gregorian calendar adopted by Sovnarkom in early 1918). This was a policy without parallel in history. A former imperial power was insisting that one of its dependencies, whether it liked it or not, should break away from its control.
The motives of Lenin and Stalin were less indulgent than they seemed. Both felt that the Finnish Marxists would stand an excellent chance of achieving dominance in an independent Finland. This would enable the Bolsheviks and their comrades in Finland to resume close operational ties and, eventually, to re-include Finland in the multinational state governed from Petrograd. There was a further aspect to Sovnarkom’s policy. This was the calculation that a single act of secession from the former Russian Empire would constitute wonderful propaganda in favour of socialist revolution elsewhere, especially in eastern and east-central Europe.
Lenin and Stalin also began to modify their ideas so as to increase the party’s appeal to regions inhabited mainly by peoples who were not Russian. Dropping old Bolshevik arguments, they came to espouse the federalist cause. They held back from explaining what they meant by federalism. Their enemies pointed out that the new policy sat uneasily alongside Bolshevism’s permanent commitment to centralism and dictatorship; but neither Lenin nor Stalin was troubled by the criticism: they had come to the conclusion that if the Bolsheviks were to expand their authority into the borderlands of the former Russian Empire, they had to espouse federalism. Stalin’s old Gori friend Davrishevi, the Social-Federalist, had always wanted to turn the Russian Empire into a socialist federation. In fact Lenin and Stalin had not been converted to federalist principles. They had no intention of turning Ukraine, Georgia and other countries into equal members of a federal union. But they wished their propaganda to make an impact and were willing to change their terminology. Central control over the ‘borderlands’ remained an imperative. Essentially Lenin and Stalin hoped to charm them and bring them back under rule from the Russian capital. They stole slogans; but their own basic ideas and purposes remained intact.
As the area under Soviet control expanded, at least in the towns, the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities’ Affairs acquired additional importance. Stalin chaired the meetings when his other duties in government and party did not distract him, and he empowered Stanislaw Pestkowski and Ivan Tovstukha to handle business in his absence. Dozens of departments were founded in the People’s Commissariat to take care of specific nationalities. Stalin’s energetic leadership surmounted the teething problems and the provinces began to experience the results in the early months of 1918. He sent out funds for national and ethnic groups to set up presses in their languages. Schools were established on the same lines. This trend had begun under the Provisional Government; the Bolsheviks vigorously reinforced it and put it at the core of their propaganda. A central newspaper, Zhizn natsionalnostei (“Nationalities’ Life”), was created to spread the message to the parts of the country where the Bolshevik presence was weak. A plan was developed for local self-administration to be granted to nations which constituted a majority in any particular region, and Stalin hoped to found a Tatar–Bashkir Republic by the River Volga. He was going out of his way, on behalf of the Central Committee, to show that an authentically internationalist state was being constructed.9
Other Bolsheviks were introduced to represent the interests of the nations to which they belonged.10 But membership was fluid and sessions were chaotic, and often the appointees were newcomers to the party. Departments often failed to co-operate with each other. It was soon recognised too that functionaries might use the People’s Commissariat to push the case for their nations more assertively than Sovnarkom had envisaged.11
The danger existed that things might get out of hand. Stalin discovered this early on. A bright young Tatar called Sultan-Galiev joined the party in November 1917. A fluent writer and speaker, he was an obvious man to recruit to the People’s Commissariat. Sultan-Galiev was eager to raise the banner of Revolution among Moslems in general. Unfortunately he proved difficult to regulate. As Commissar of Moslems’ Affairs in Inner Russia he quickly annoyed other members of the People’s Commissariat of Nationalities’ Affairs by his initiatives, and his loyalty to Bolshevism was questioned.12 Indeed his campaign to spread socialism among Moslem believers eventually led him to propose a pan-Turkic republic separate from Sovnarkom’s control. (He was arrested in 1923 and executed in the Great Terror.) Although Sultan-Galiev was a notorious source of trouble for the Bolsheviks, he was not the only recruit to the party who was thought excessively tolerant of nationalism and religion. Stalin and Lenin had taken a risk in insisting on trying to attract the non-Russians to Bolshevism through various concessions. In 1917 they had earned criticism at the April Party Conference; and in 1918–19 the difficulties of realising the policy were already manifest. Work in the People’s Commissariat was a bed of nails.
Stalin did not flinch. At the Third Congress of Soviets in January 1918 he took pride in the government’s proclamation of ‘the right of all peoples to self-determination through to complete secession from Russia’. He compared Sovnarkom favourably on the national question with the Provisional Government and its ‘repressive measures’. According to Stalin, such conflicts as had broken out since the October Revolution arose from clashes about class and power rather than about nationhood.13 Nevertheless his attitude was castigated by the Socialist-Revolutionaries for being ‘infused with a centralist power’. He gave no ground: he said the country faced a simple choice between ‘nationalist counter-revolution on one side and Soviet power on the other’.14
His capacity to stand up to leaders of other parties as well as his editorial experience and expertise on the national question made Stalin an obvious choice – along with Sverdlov – to chair sessions of the commission drafting the Constitution of the Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic (or RSFSR). There had been no thought about the details before the October Revolution. Even general principles had been left unclear: Lenin and Stalin had advocated federalism while skirting round what this would involve. Out of the hearing of the zealots in his People’s Commissariat for Nationalities’ Affairs, Stalin admitted that many non-Russian groups were making no demands at all for autonomy: Russia was not tormented by nationalist strife. Stalin admitted that even the Tatars and Bashkirs, to whom he wanted to grant an autonomous republic, were displaying ‘complete indifference’. He therefore wished to avoid specifying the national aspects of the Constitution while this situation persisted.15 But something of substance had to be inserted if the non-Russians were to be won over, and Sverdlov and Stalin insisted on this in the teeth of opposition from the Bolshevik left.16 Bolsheviks had to be pragmatic in spreading the power and ideology of the Revolution. The national question offered an opportunity to win converts to socialism.
This did not save Stalin from personal attack. The Left Socialist-Revolutionaries had representatives on the commission, and they did not hold back from criticising him. A. Shreider objected that he had no principled commitment to national rights and used federalist rhetoric to disguise an imperialist purpose. Official Bolshevik policy was allegedly little different from the measures of Nicholas II:17
Stalin’s structures are a typical imperialist construction; he’s a typical kulak [rich peasant] who without embarrassment declares he’s not a kulak. Comrade Stalin has got so used to such a position that he’s even assimilated imperialist jargon to perfection: ‘They beg from us and we grant to them.’ And of course – according to Stalin – if they don’t make the request, then we don’t give them anything!
This was calumny; for Stalin was offering autonomy even to national groups not demanding it. It is readily imaginable what happened to Shreider in later years. Stalin did not forget much in life. As the chief persecutor of the kulaks from the late 1920s he did not take kindly to being compared to a kulak or to any other ‘enemy of the people’; and he never forgave a slight.
His sensitivity was exposed in March 1918. It was then that Menshevik leader Yuli Martov published an article on the past sins of the Bolsheviks, mentioning that Stalin had been expelled from his own party organisation before the Great War for organising armed bank robberies. Stalin arraigned Martov before the Moscow Revolutionary Tribunal for slander.18 That Stalin should have expended so much energy in trying to refute Martov’s allegation was a sign of his continuing feeling of insecurity at the apex of politics. He had a Georgian sense of personal honour; indeed he had it in an exaggerated form. Martov had besmirched his reputation. Stalin got his name cleared by a Bolshevik-run court. (It was noticeable that Stalin did not deny involvement in the organisation of the robberies: he did not chance his arm by risking the possibility that Martov might summon witnesses.)19 The Moscow Revolutionary Tribunal found in Stalin’s favour, but not before Martov dredged up other embarrassing episodes from Stalin’s past. He mentioned that comrades in prison in Baku had tried Stalin for participation in the robbery campaign; and Isidore Ramishvili was called as a witness. Martov also brought up the story that Stalin had had a worker beaten to within an inch of his life.20
The libel case was the overreaction of a hypersensitive man. If Stalin had not made a fuss, hardly anyone would have noticed what Martov had written. Stalin’s resentment did not end with the conclusion of the trial. When in 1922 Lenin asked him to transfer funds to Berlin for the medical care of the dying Martov, Stalin refused point-blank: ‘What, start wasting money on an enemy of the working class? Find yourself another secretary for that!’21
This was not the only aspect of his inner life revealed in these months. Debating nations and administrative structures in the Constitution commission, he forcefully declared: ‘The Jews are not a nation!’ Stalin contended that a nation could not exist without a definable territory where its people composed the majority of inhabitants. This had always been his opinion,22 and it ruled out the possibility of granting the Jews an ‘autonomous regional republic’ such as he was proposing for others.23 Was this evidence of a hatred of Jews for being Jews? Stalin differed from Lenin inasmuch as he never – not even once – commented on the need to avoid anti-semitic impulses. Yet his People’s Commissariat for Nationalities’ Affairs had its own Jewish section and funded Yiddish newspapers, clubs and folk-singing ensembles. Many Jews belonged to his entourage over the next two decades. To a considerable extent he was just sticking to a dogmatic version of Marxism. But there was probably more to it than that. Nothing can be proved, but probably he felt uneasy in dealing with Jews because they were unamenable to administrative control on a simple territorial basis – and he also had a growing rivalry with several leaders of Jewish origin in his party: Trotski, Kamenev and Zinoviev.
At any rate the commission’s records scarcely refer to Lenin. Matters were debated on their merits within the frame of Bolshevik and Left Socialist-Revolutionary ideas. Stalin was his own man. Indeed it was the Left Socialist-Revolutionary M. A. Reisner who brought up Lenin’s name. His objection was that Stalin’s project reflected the ‘anarchic’ tendencies embodied in Lenin’s recently published The State and Revolution. Stalin’s response was a distinctly sniffy one:24 ‘Here there’s been mention of comrade Lenin. I’ve decided to permit myself to note that Lenin as far as I know – and I know very well – said that [Reisner’s own] project is no good!’ The rest of the commission agreed and accepted Stalin’s draft with its advocacy of national-territorial administrative units.25His colleague Sverdlov’s phrasings were pushed back in favour of those proposed by Stalin.26 Sverdlov had been the individual most responsible for embedding the general structures of administration in the Soviet republic after the October Revolution. This was yet another sign of Stalin’s ever-rising importance among the Bolsheviks, and his expertise on the national question gave him a ladder to climb higher and higher.
If he was a rare Bolshevik moderate on the national question, though, he was constantly extreme in his advocacy of state violence and dictatorship. Stalin was convinced that severe measures should be applied against the enemies of Sovnarkom. He was in apocalyptic mood: ‘We definitely must give the Kadets a thorough beating right now or else they’ll give us a thorough beating since it’s they who have opened fire on us.’27 Violence, dictatorship and centralism slept lightly in the Russian political mind – and many conservatives, liberals and social-democrats were already beginning to think that they had been wrong to stick after the February Revolution to principles of universal civil rights, gradualism and democracy. Bolshevism had never carried such an inhibiting legacy. Those Bolsheviks who had yearned for a gentle revolution could usually be persuaded to accept the case for authoritarianism. There was no need to persuade Stalin.
Bolsheviks had always talked casually about terror and its uses for a revolutionary administration. Yet until power had come into their hands it was unclear how keenly they would resort to it. If there were any doubts about this, Lenin and Trotski quickly dispelled them in the weeks after they overthrew the Provisional Government. Lenin established an Extraordinary Commission for the Struggle with Counter-revolution and Sabotage (Cheka in its Russian acronym) – and he ensured that it would remain beyond regular supervision by Sovnarkom. In subsequent years he supported nearly all pleas by Felix Dzierżyń ski and other Cheka leaders for permission to expand the application of methods of state terror. Not every Bolshevik leader approved this development. Kamenev on the right and Bukharin on the left of the ascendant party leadership urged that violence should be deployed on a more predictable basis and should be reduced in scope. Stalin was never one of these. Terror attracted him like a bee to a perfumed flower. Not once had he offered an opinion on the matter before the October 1917 Revolution, yet his preference for arbitrary state violence was speedily evident. When Bolsheviks in Estonia telegraphed him about eradicating ‘counterrevolutionaries and traitors’, he replied with hot approval: ‘The idea of a concentration camp is excellent.’28
State terrorism had already been installed as a permanent item in his mental furniture. It appealed to his coarse personality. But the attraction was not just psychological; it was also based on observation and ideology. Stalin and other Bolsheviks had grown up in an age when the world’s great powers had used terror against the people they conquered; and even when terror was excluded as a method, these powers had had no scruples about waging wars at huge cost in human lives. By such means they had spread a superior economic system around the world. This system had been defended by the application of harsh authority. Colonial peoples had suffered. The working classes of the imperial powers themselves were exploited and oppressed. The Great War had impoverished the many while enriching the few. The point for Stalin was that violence was an effective weapon for capitalism and had to be adopted by the Soviet revolutionary state for its own purposes. Coming to power in Russia, the Bolsheviks had to be realistic. The Bolshevik leadership believed that the Paris Commune of 1871 had failed for want of ruthlessness. Bolsheviks would not repeat the mistake. Even if they had expected their revolution to be easier than it turned out to be, they had always been willing to meet fire with fire. Stalin needed no one to persuade him about this.
Yet it was in foreign policy that Lenin most appreciated Stalin. Lenin and Trotski around the turn of the New Year understood that they lacked the armed forces to carry socialism into central Europe by ‘revolutionary war’. Yet whereas Trotski wished to stick by the party’s commitment to revolutionary war, Lenin concluded that policy ought to be changed. When Germany and Austria–Hungary delivered ultimatums to Sovnarkom, Lenin urged the Bolshevik Central Committee to sign a separate peace. Most Central Committee members – as well as the entire Left Socialist-Revolutionary Party – rejected his argument that the priority should be the preservation of the Soviet state. For them, a separate peace would involve the betrayal of internationalist ideals. Better to go down fighting for European socialist revolution than to collude with the robber-capitalist governments of the Central Powers.
Stalin had always been sceptical about the prognosis of imminent revolutions in the rest of Europe and the failure of the proletariats elsewhere in Europe to rise against their governments did not surprise him. The propensity for strategic and tactical compromise he had always shown in internal party affairs was now applied to the policy of the revolutionary state. If the Central Powers could not be overthrown by revolution or defeated in war, the sensible alternative was to sign a peace with them. This was in fact already the opinion of Lenin, whose reputation for compromise in the party’s internal quarrels was slighter than Stalin’s but who had always insisted on the need for flexibility of manoeuvre in the wider field of politics. Sverdlov, Kamenev, Zinoviev and a few others in the Central Committee stood shoulder to shoulder with Lenin. But the voting in the Central Committee was heavily against them at the preliminary discussion on 11 January 1918. Trotski won the day by arguing for a policy based on the following formula: ‘We’re stopping the war, we aren’t concluding peace, we’re demobilising the army.’ This, he suggested, had the merit of avoiding an intolerable compromise with the forces of international imperialism.29
Lenin kept to his argument without personalising his critique. Stalin was less inhibited. Like most other leading Bolsheviks, he disliked and distrusted Trotski, and at the same meeting he let his feelings show:30
Comrade Trotski’s position is not a position at all. There’s no revolutionary movement in the West: the facts are non-existent and there’s only potential – and we can’t operate on the basis of mere potential. If the Germans start to attack, it will reinforce the counter-revolution here [in Russia]. Germany will be able to attack since it possesses its own Kornilovite armies, its guard. In October we were talking about our ‘crusade’ because we were told that mere mention of the word ‘peace’ would stir up revolution in the West. But this has proved unjustified.
This was the first blow in a political contest which ended only in August 1940 when Soviet agent Ramón Mercader drove an ice-pick into Trotski’s cranium in Coyoacán in Mexico.
Even so, Stalin’s supportive statement irked Lenin. He objected to the comment that ‘a mass movement’ did not exist in the West, and said that the Bolsheviks would be ‘traitors to international socialism if [they] altered [their] tactics because of this’. Lenin wanted to reassure the advocates of revolutionary war that if ever it looked as if a rupture of peace talks would serve to stir up the German working class to revolution, then ‘we have to sacrifice ourselves since the German revolution in force will be much higher in strength than ours’.31 It was not so much that Stalin had said that revolutionary initiatives were impossible in the West. Nor had he claimed this in 1917.32 Yet he was loath to gamble on ‘European socialist revolution’ – and for Lenin this was one compromise too many with the revolutionary strategy he had elaborated in the party before October 1917. These tensions did not much matter at the time. Lenin needed every supporter he could get. Again and again in ensuing days Stalin voted on Lenin’s side.33 Always his line was that Bolsheviks needed to be practical: they could not beat the Germans militarily and the newly born Soviet state would be crushed unless a separate peace was concluded with the Central Powers.
He was as frantic as Lenin. On 18 February 1918 he protested to the Central Committee: ‘The formal question is superfluous. A statement must be made directly on the essence of the matter; the Germans are attacking, we don’t have the forces; it’s high time to say directly that negotiations have to be resumed!’34 He vividly appreciated the armed might of the enemy: ‘They only need to open their hurricane-like fire for five minutes and we shan’t have a soldier left standing at the front. We must put an end to the nonsense.’35 On 23 February he expostulated: ‘The question stands like this: either the defeat of our revolution and the unravelling of the revolution in Europe or we obtain a breathing space and strengthen ourselves. This is not what’s holding up the revolution in the West. If it’s the case that we lack the means to halt a German attack by armed might, we must use other methods. If Petrograd has to be surrendered, it would not amount to a full surrender or to the rotting away of the Revolution. There’s no way out: either we obtain a breathing space or else it’s the death of the Revolution.’36
The Leninists did not gain a majority in the Central Committee until 23 February. By that time the German terms had hardened. The separate peace would require Sovnarkom to disclaim sovereignty over the western borderlands of the former Russian Empire. It was, in Lenin’s phrase, an obscene peace. Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia were to be allowed to fall into the grasp of the Central Powers. Half the human, industrial and agricultural resources of the domains of Nicholas II were to be forsworn at the little frontal town of Brest-Litovsk if Sovnarkom wished to avoid being overthrown by the Germans. No other political party in Russia would accede to such terms. The Left Socialist-Revolutionary Party, already annoyed by the forcible local expropriations of peasant-produced grain, walked out of the Sovnarkom coalition and organised an unsuccessful coup d’état against the Bolsheviks in July 1918. Nevertheless Lenin and his followers pressed forward with their chosen strategy. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed on 3 March 1918. For Lenin, the peace offered a ‘breathing space’ for the Bolsheviks to strengthen and expand the Revolution at home and to prepare the revolutionary war in central Europe that had hitherto been impractical. A Red Army started to be formed; and Trotski, who had condemned the separate peace, agreed to become People’s Commissar for Military Affairs. Other Bolshevik opponents of the treaty drifted back to the Central Committee and Sovnarkom.
Stalin’s assignments in spring 1918 confirmed his high status in the ascendant party leadership. In internal and external affairs he had stuck by Lenin. He had not done this subserviently. In the Brest-Litovsk dispute he had taken an angle of argument different from Lenin’s; and, contrary to the conventional stereotype of him, this continued to be true after the signature of the treaty. When the German armies overran the agreed demarcation line between Russia and Ukraine in May, he reconsidered the whole peace deal. Unlike Lenin, he suggested a resumption of armed hostilities. He put this case at the Central Committee and Sovnarkom.37 But Lenin won the discussion without Stalin by his side, and the dissension between them faded. Lenin, in the light of future events, should have learned from the episode that his People’s Commissar for Nationalities’ Affairs was a politician who knew his own value and was determined to stand up for himself. Stalin fought his corner in the Central Committee and dominated his People’s Commissariat. His competence and adaptability had been tested in the fire of an October Revolution which had yet to be secured. His advocacy of ruthless measures was as ferocious as anything put forward by Lenin, Trotski or Dzierżyński. He expected others to recognise what he could offer for the good of the cause.