On 31 May 1918 Stalin was given an important fresh assignment. Food supplies for Russia had reached a critically low point and Sovnarkom was close to panic. The decision was to send two of the party’s most able organisers, Stalin and his previous Bolshevik opponent Alexander Shlyapnikov, to procure grain in the south of the Soviet republic. The Volga region and the north Caucasus were traditional areas of agricultural abundance, and Stalin and Shlyapnikov were given full powers to obtain food wherever it could be found. Stalin was to make for Tsaritsyn, Shlyapnikov for Astrakhan.
His Alliluev assistants in the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities’ Affairs would accompany him. Fëdor would come as his aide and Nadya as his secretary. They arrived with their luggage at the Kazan Station in Moscow two days later. Chaos awaited them and their Red Army guards. Beggars and pickpockets swarmed in the booking hall and on the platforms. There were also the many ‘sack-men’ who travelled to Moscow to sell flour, potatoes and vegetables on the black market. Sometimes passengers had to sit around for days before they could board a train. The atmosphere was frantic. When announcements of departure were made, a rush occurred to get a seat or a space in the corridor. Every compartment would be crammed with people and it was common for the disappointed ticket holders to clamber to the tops of carriages and ride unsheltered from summer heat or winter cold. Stalin had a sheaf of documents indicating his priority over other passengers. But the People’s Commissar for Nationalities’ Affairs had to lose his temper before the station officials granted a compartment to him and his party. He was being given yet another display of the extreme disorder of revolutionary Russia.1
The travellers from Moscow, after many halts on the way, reached their destination on 6 June.2 Tsaritsyn, later called Stalingrad and now – ever since Khrushchëv’s posthumous denunciation of Stalin – Volgograd, was one of the cities on the River Volga built in the late seventeenth century as Cossack outposts. In most ways it was an unremarkable place. It was not even a provincial capital but was subject to the administrative authorities in Saratov. Yet geographically and economically Tsaritsyn was of strategic importance. The city handled regional trade in grain, timber and livestock. It was also a vital entrepôt. Situated at the first great angle of the Volga for ships heading upriver towards central Russia from the Caspian Sea, Tsaritsyn had been a great staging post since its foundation. The construction of rail links increased its significance. A main line ran directly south from Moscow to Rostov-on-Don and a branch was built from Kozlov down to Tsaritsyn and on to Astrakhan on the Caspian coast. Tracks had also been laid from Tsaritsyn west to Rostov-on-Don and south-east to Tikhoretskaya junction and the mountains of the north Caucasus. Control over Tsaritsyn and its environs would enable Sovnarkom to gain food supplies over a vast area.
Sovnarkom’s brief to Stalin was to improve the supply of grain. He had been preceded to Tsaritsyn by Andrei Snesarev, a former Imperial Army general who had enlisted with the Reds. The functions of Stalin and Snesarev were meant to complement each other. The combined application of political and military muscle was thought the best method of securing bread for Moscow and Petrograd.3
Sovnarkom had misjudged its People’s Commissar. Stalin interpreted his duties in grain procurement, which relied on the use of the Red Army, as entitling him to impose himself over all the military commanders in the region. Rejection for service as a private in the Imperial Army had not made him diffident about taking charge of the North Caucasus Front. A month later he informed Lenin:4
The food-supplies question is naturally entwined with the military question. For the good of the cause I need full military powers. I’ve already written about this and received no answer. Very well, then. In this case I myself without formalities will overthrow those commanders and commissars who are ruining the cause. That’s how I’m being nudged by the interests of the cause and of course the absence of a scrap of paper from Trotski won’t stop me.
Stalin was greedily seizing his opportunity. His renown in Moscow came nowhere near to matching that of his most eminent comrades in Sovnarkom and the Party Central Committee. This was a situation for him to prove his mettle militarily and politically. He was determined to rise to the challenge.
There were several threats to the Bolsheviks across the Soviet republic by the middle of 1918. A Russian ‘Volunteer Army’ was being trained in Novocherkassk. It was led by Generals Alexeev and Kornilov, who had escaped from Petrograd and planned to march on Moscow. The Volunteer Army was the first of the self-styled White armies which objected to socialism and internationalism and sought the restoration of the pre-1917 social order through the military destruction of the Reds. In September, another armed force under the Socialist-Revolutionaries had been forced out of Kazan – seven hundred miles to the north of Tsaritsyn – by the Red Army. Trotski’s reorganised system of command and recruitment was already proving effective. Yet the regiments of the Socialist-Revolutionaries had not been crushed. Retreating to the Urals, they regrouped and were joined by officers of the type being gathered by Alexeev and Kornilov in the south. In November a coup took place in Omsk, and Admiral Kolchak got rid of the Socialist-Revolutionaries and reorganised the army on his own terms. These armies denounced Bolshevism as a betrayal of Mother Russia. Cossacks led by General Krasnov were attacking the Bolsheviks and their sympathisers in the area south of Tsaritsyn. They were well equipped and had high morale; they detested Lenin’s Sovnarkom for its socialism, atheism and hostility to national traditions. Stalin’s assignment had put him in personal danger – and he and his Alliluev companions were never unaware of the risks.5
Later enemies overlooked the nerve he showed in the Civil War. He was not a physical coward; he put Lenin, Kamenev, Zinoviev and Bukharin in the shade by refusing to shirk wartime jeopardy. Yet he was hardly a war hero, and his subsequent eulogists overdid their depiction of him as a commander of genius who saved the October Revolution from the banks of the Volga.
Stalin’s assignment in the south was important. Without food the Soviet regime was doomed. The German occupation of Ukraine as well as the presence of Alexeev and Kornilov in Rostov-on-Don had perilously narrowed the Soviet state’s agricultural base. Krasnov’s raids by late July had disrupted communication with Tsaritsyn. South Russia and the north Caucasus were crucial areas of wheat production, and Lenin in Moscow was determined to clear the bottlenecks in procurement and shipment. White armies were not the only menace. Many local armed groups also interfered with trade and traffic; and although some of them were mere bandits, others had a political or religious motive. The nationalities of the area wanted autonomy from Moscow. The disintegration of the Russian state in 1917 had given them an opportunity to revert to self-rule as well as brigandage. Charged with restoring the passage of grain from this turbulent region, Stalin shouldered a weighty burden. But he never flinched; he carried his responsibilities with pride and imparted his determination to his fellow travellers.
Tsaritsyn’s authorities had thought he would function as the baleful ‘eye of Moscow’.6 They were wrong. Stalin showed total disregard for instructions from the capital. Immediately upon arrival he set about purging the Red Army and the food-collection agencies of the middle-class ‘specialists’ he collectively detested. This was in blatant contravention of official policy. Stalin did not trouble himself with Lenin’s potential objections: ‘I drive everyone onwards and curse everyone I need to.’ He referred to the specialists as ‘cobblers’.7 This was a significant metaphor for the cobbler’s son who wanted to prove his prowess as an army commander; it was also a breach with the line approved by the Central Committee.
Despite having only the powers of a food-supplies commissar, Stalin imposed himself on all the military and civil authorities in the vicinity: Andrei Snesarev, commander of the North Caucasus Front; Sergei Minin, chair of the Tsaritsyn Soviet; and Kamil Yakubov, leader of the food-supplies missions in the region. If Stalin wanted to be known as a fighting man, he had to do something unusual. The Whites had cut the railway line between Tsaritsyn and Kotelnikovo. Stalin braved danger by going out to inspect the situation. This was not typical of him: during the rest of the Civil War and throughout the Second World War he avoided any such venture.8 But from Tsaritsyn he took an armoured train down to Abganerovo-Zutovo where a railway-repair brigade was at work restoring the line. Putting his life at risk, he returned two days later with his reputation enhanced.9 Back in Tsaritsyn Stalin called together the city functionaries and, parading his authority as a member of the Party Central Committee and Sovnarkom, announced a total reorganisation of the military command in Tsaritsyn. He was making his bid for supremacy on the North Caucasus Front.
Shrewdly he got fellow Bolsheviks on his side. Sergei Minin was one. Another was Kliment Voroshilov, who was itching to take command in the field despite his lack of military experience. Both were more than happy to join Stalin in forming their own Military Council to oversee operations in the region (which was renamed the Southern Front). On 18 July Stalin and his new associates sent a telegram to Lenin demanding the sacking of Snesarev and confirmation of their Military Council.10
The request was granted. Lenin and his comrades in Moscow accepted that tighter co-ordination of military and economic measures was vital in Tsaritsyn for the security of food supplies. Stalin was delighted. Setting himself up not in a hotel but in a sequestered railway carriage halted outside the city station, he looked a new man. On arriving in Tsaritsyn, he called for a cobbler to order a pair of black, knee-length boots to go with his black tunic. The cobbler arrived at the railway carriage and took the measurements. ‘Well,’ asked Stalin, ‘when will they be ready?’ ‘In five days,’ replied the cobbler. Stalin exclaimed: ‘No, you can’t mean that! Come on! My father could make two pairs of such boots a day!’11 The anecdote shows how little Stalin had learned about shoemaking. Nevertheless from summer 1918 till the day he died, military-style clothing was normal for him. Stalin became known not only for his long boots but also for his light-coloured, collarless tunic. He abandoned suits, ordinary shirts and shoes for ever.12 He started to comport himself with a soldierly bearing. He carried a gun. He adopted a brisk way of carrying himself as a commander. This was a deeply congenial development for him; Stalin enjoyed himself in Tsaritsyn despite the dangers.13
He also gained contentment in his personal life. Nadya Allilueva, who had accompanied him from Moscow, was no longer merely his secretary but had become his wife. According to their daughter’s account many decades later, they had already been living as a married couple in Petrograd after the October Revolution.14 Chronological exactitude is impossible. Bolsheviks in those days rejected weddings as bourgeois flummery. What is certain is that on his return from Siberia he did not intend to remain celibate. There were plenty of Bolshevik women to take his eye and he went out with a few in 1917.15 But he wanted the settled home life which his nomadic existence had prevented. (His cohabitations in Siberia had been of the seigneurial variety.) In the flush of their passion they went off to serve the Revolution together on the North Caucasus and Southern Fronts.
Joseph was a communist party leader and Nadya’s family were dedicated to the party’s cause. He was amusing and still in his physical prime, and probably his talent for handling political business appealed to Nadya. The fact that Alliluev family life had been constantly disrupted by revolutionary commitments may also have drawn Nadya towards an older man who seemingly offered dependability. She may have seen him as the father she had seen little of when growing up.16 Nadya had not discerned Joseph’s curmudgeonly egotism. Joseph, though, had yet to witness the symptoms of Nadya’s mental volatility.17 So while he glowed in the warmth of her admiration of him, she enjoyed his attentions. Without being a beauty, she had long dark hair parted down the middle and tied up in a bun; her lips were broad and her eyes friendly even if her teeth ‘gappy’.18 He liked women with a full figure like Nadya’s. He did not worry that she was less than half his age. He had read more than her and seen more of life, and he surely thought he would always dominate the marriage. The Alliluevs had given him succour and all of them got on well with him. He was gaining not only a wife but also – at last – a stable and supportive wider family.19
There was only one thing about his situation in Tsaritsyn that annoyed Stalin. This was the interference in his activities from Moscow, and nobody irritated more than Trotski. Stalin had formed the Revolutionary Council of the Southern Front on 17 September. Immediately he received orders from Trotski, his military superior as Chairman of the Revolutionary-Military Council of the Republic, to cease challenging his decisions.20 Stalin telegraphed to Lenin that Trotski was not on the spot and failed to understand conditions across the region:21
The point is that Trotski, generally speaking, cannot get by without noisy gestures. At Brest[-Litovsk] he delivered a blow to the cause by his incredibly ‘leftist’ gesturing. On the question of the Czechoslovaks he similarly harmed the common cause by his gesturing with noisy diplomacy in the month of May. Now he delivers a further blow by his gesturing about discipline, and yet all this Trotskyist discipline amounts in reality to the most prominent leaders on the war front peering up the backside of military specialists from the camp of ‘non-party’ counter-revolutionaries . . .
Stalin reminded Lenin that Trotski had an anti-Bolshevik past; his resentment of the haughty political interloper was unmistakable. Trotski in his view was not to be trusted.
Stalin called for stern measures:
Therefore I ask you in due time, while it’s still not too late, to remove Trotski and put him in a fixed frame since I’m afraid that Trotski’s unhinged commands, if they are repeated . . . will create dissension between the army and the command staff and will totally destroy the front . . .
I’m not a lover of clamour and scandal but feel that if we don’t immediately produce the reins to put a constraint on Trotski, he’ll ruin our whole army in favour of ‘leftist’ and ‘Red’ discipline which will sicken even the most disciplined comrades.
This analysis commended itself to leading Bolsheviks who knew the history of the French Revolution. A military leader, Napoleon Bonaparte, had seized power and rejected much of the social radicalism introduced by Maximilien Robespierre. Trotski seemed the likeliest military candidate for such a role in the drama of Russia’s October Revolution. There was acute annoyance among party members about his insistence on employing former Imperial Army officers. Trotski was also reviled for shooting political commissars for disobedience or cowardice. An informal Military Opposition began to coalesce against him in late 1918.
Yet Trotski had grounds to be horrified by events in Tsaritsyn. Lenin began to take his side. Stalin was a law unto himself on the Southern Front. It was not always a law shared by the official party leadership. Lenin insisted that if the Civil War was to be won, the average Russian peasant (and not just the poorest of them) had to be won over to the side of the Reds. Persuasion rather than violence had to be the priority. Lenin’s declarations were riddled with contradiction. He had set up the hugely unpopular ‘committees of the rural poor’ in order to introduce ‘class struggle’ to the countryside and had also conscripted peasants and expropriated grain by means of armed urban squads. But certainly at the same time he was minded to win support among the mass of the peasantry.
Stalin was less ambiguous than Lenin. Might, for him, was right, effective and economical of resources. He put villages to the torch to intimidate neighbouring ones to obey the demands of the Reds. Terror was undertaken against the very peasants who were being depicted in official propaganda as one of the twin pillars of the Soviet state. Stalin treated the Cossacks in particular as enemies. The term de-Cossackisation was in currency.22 Stalin wrote in a letter to his old Bolshevik rival Stepan Shaumyan:23
In relation to the Dagestani and other bands which obstruct the movements of trains from the North Caucasus, you must be absolutely merciless. A number of their villages should be set on fire and burned to the ground so as to teach them not to make raids on trains.
This was in the fiercest Imperial Army tradition under General Yermolov in the Caucasus in the early nineteenth century and General Alikhanov in Georgia in 1905.24 Stalin was ordering Shaumyan to conduct a campaign of exemplary terror. When ‘bands’ operated against trains, the nearby villages were to be razed to the ground. The message was to go out that complete compliance alone would save localities from the Red Army’s savagery. Wanting to conciliate the non-Russian national groups across the country, he nevertheless prescribed brutal measures against those among them who failed to restrain anti-Bolshevik outbursts.
He subjected his own Red Army conscripts – including Russians – to severe discipline. Bothering little with persuasion, he assumed they would never help the Reds unless force was used.25 He threw armies into action with little caution. He acted as if sheer numerical superiority would bring victory. He did not care that a vastly greater proportion of Red than White soldiers died. Lenin commented on the reckless disregard for lives on the Southern Front; and although he did not mention Stalin by name, it was obvious whom he held responsible.26 Lenin cleared Trotski of any blame for the running of the Red Army and confirmed the Central Committee’s policy on the recruitment of Imperial officers.27 Trotski sent his aide Alexei Okulov to find out what was happening in Tsaritsyn. His report was disturbing. Stalin, having sacked Imperial officers from their posts of command, had arrested dozens of them and held them on a barge on the River Volga. Among them was Snesarev, whom he accused of heading a conspiracy to sabotage the Red war effort and aid the Whites.28 Stalin’s apparent intention had been to sink the barge and drown all on board.29 Snesarev on Moscow’s orders was released and the Revolutionary-Military Council of the Republic transferred him to the command of the Western Front. Stalin, infuriated, continued with Voroshilov to demand sanctions against the allegedly counter-revolutionary officers. Voroshilov was to claim that, if he and Stalin had not acted as they did in Tsaritsyn, the Whites would have overrun all Ukraine.30
Stalin passionately believed that conspiracies were ubiquitous in Russia. He already had a tendency to suspect that plots existed even when no direct evidence was available. He was not alone in this. Lenin and Trotski too referred in a casual manner to the organised linkages among the enemies of the party; and Trotski had a notorious willingness to treat even Bolshevik party activists as traitors if they belonged to regiments in the Red Army which had failed to obey his orders. Stalin was more like Trotski than he pretended. When an adequate supply of munitions did not come through to Tsaritsyn in September 1918, he howled to Lenin: ‘It’s some kind of casualness or treachery in official uniform [formennoe predatel’stvo].’31 To Stalin’s way of thought there always had to be an agency of deliberate maleficence at work when things went wrong. Traitors therefore had to exist even in the leadership of the People’s Commissariats in Moscow.
Stalin applied violence, including terror, on a greater scale than most other central communist leaders approved of. Only Trotski with his demands for political commissars to be shot alongside army officers if unsanctioned retreats occurred was remotely near to him in bloodthirstiness – and Trotski also introduced the Roman policy of decimating regiments which failed to carry out higher commands. Stalin and Trotski invariably ignored pleas to intervene on behalf of individuals arrested by the Cheka. Even Lenin, who resisted most attempts by Kamenev and Bukharin to impose control over the Cheka, sometimes helped in such cases.32 Yet Stalin’s enthusiasm for virtually indiscriminate violence made even Trotski seem a restrained individual. This was a feature that his comrades forgot at their peril in the 1930s.
A contrast also existed between Stalin and Trotski in their basic attitude to Bolshevism. Trotski, who had joined the Bolsheviks late in his career, paid little attention to the party. Stalin pondered much on the party’s place in the Soviet state. He took a copy of the second edition of Lenin’s The State and Revolution around with him in the Civil War. This book says nothing about the communist party in the transition to socialism. Stalin was aware of this lacuna. Making notes in the margins, he asked himself: ‘Can the party seize power against the will of the proletariat? No, it cannot and must not.’33 He added: ‘The proletariat cannot attain its dictatorship without a vanguard, without a party as the only [party].’34 Lenin had said no such thing in The State and Revolution. But Stalin, like Lenin, had modified and developed his ideas since October 1917. The party had become the supreme institution of state. Stalin was among the many Bolsheviks who sought to incorporate this into communist doctrine. The theory had been that the proletariat would run its own socialist state. Stalin’s unease was reflected in his comment that ‘the party cannot simply replace the dictatorship of the proletariat’.35
In the Civil War, however, he lacked the time to write pamphlets; and not one of his articles for Pravda had the range of those composed by Lenin, Trotski, Zinoviev and Bukharin. But he went on thinking about large subjects. Party policy on the national question was prominent among them. Another was the institutional framework of the Soviet state. The report he wrote in January 1919 with Dzierżyński on a military disaster at Perm was a disquisition on the chaotic relations within and among the armed forces, the party and the government. Their recommendations had an influence on the decisions taken to establish the party as the supreme agency of the state and to regularise the lines of command from the party to all public institutions.36 Only the fact that Stalin’s later propagandists made exaggerated claims for the report has induced historians to overlook its importance. In truth he was a reflective and decisive political operator and Lenin appreciated him for this.
This was the trip on which Stalin became friends with Dzierżyński’s personal assistant Stanisław Redens. Nadya accompanied Stalin to Perm, and soon Redens had fallen in love with her elder sister Anna and married her. Redens became a leading figure in the Cheka.37 Personal, political and military life was intertwined for Bolsheviks in the Civil War and Stalin was no exception. His recent marriage had no impact on his public activities; he spent the Civil War mainly on or near the fighting fronts. Recalled to Moscow in October 1918, he resumed his work in the Party Central Committee and Sovnarkom. But by December he was off again. The White Army of Admiral Kolchak had swept into the Urals city of Perm and destroyed the Red Army units there. Stalin and Dzierżyński were sent to conduct an enquiry into the reasons for the military disaster. They returned and made their report at the end of January 1919. Stalin stayed in Moscow again until being dispatched in May to Petrograd and the Western Front against the invasion by General Yudenich from Estonia. In July he moved on to a different sector of the same front at Smolensk. In September he was transferred to the Southern Front, where he stayed into 1920.38
Stalin was a law unto himself. When transferred to Petrograd on the Western Front in mid-1919, he showed macabre inventiveness in dealing with disorder and disobedience. The Red Army on the Western Front entirely failed to impress him. Almost as soon as he arrived, the Third Regiment went over to the Whites. Stalin was merciless. On 30 May he telegraphed Lenin from the Smolny Institute that he was rounding up the renegades and deserters, charging them collectively with state treason and making their execution by firing squads into a public spectacle. Now that everyone saw the consequences of betrayal, he argued, acts of treachery had been reduced.39 Not everyone enthused about Stalin’s intervention. Alexei Okulov, transferred to the Western Front after exposing Stalin’s misdeeds in Tsaritsyn, put a spoke in his wheel yet again. Stalin telegraphed angrily on 4 June demanding that Lenin should choose between Okulov and himself. Existing conditions, he ranted, were ‘senseless’; he threatened to leave Petrograd if his ultimatum was not complied with.40
His military activity was centred in the Revolutionary-Military Councils attached to the various fronts, and from 1919 he joined them as the Party Central Committee’s appointee. His kind of fighting involved giving orders: he was never directly involved in physical violence. His inexperience was total and nobody has been able to find evidence that he looked at books on warfare41 (whereas Lenin had studied Clausewitz, and Trotski had reported the Balkan wars before 1914 as a newspaper correspondent). But he was madly eager to prove himself as a commander. The Central Committee recognised his worth by its successive use of him on the Southern Front, the Western Front, again the Southern Front, the South-Western Front and the Caucasian Front. Qualities which earned him praise were his decisiveness, determination, energy and willingness to take responsibility for critical and unpredictable situations.
There was a price to pay. Stalin hated to operate in a team unless he was its leader. There was only one fellow communist to whom he would defer and that was Lenin. Even Lenin found him a handful. Stalin was vainglorious and extremely touchy. He detested Trotski. He hated the entire Imperial officer elite. He had an almost pathetic need to feel appreciated, and at the drop of his Red Army peaked cap he would announce his resignation. Such was his egotism that he was willing to disregard orders even if they came from the Central Committee or its inner subcommittees. He was capricious in the extreme. Once determined upon a course of action, he steered as he pleased. He wasted an inordinate amount of the Central Committee’s time with his demands for commanders to be sacked and for strategy and tactics to be altered. His application of repressive measures to the social groups hostile to the Soviet state was excessive even by the standards of the communist leadership in wartime Russia; and, still more than Trotski, he had a tendency to regard anyone who failed to show him respect as an enemy of the people.
The conventional image of Stalin’s ascent to supreme power does not convince. He did not really spend most of his time in offices in the Civil War period and consolidate his position as the pre-eminent bureaucrat of the Soviet state. Certainly he held membership of the Party Central Committee; he was also People’s Commissar for Nationalities’ Affairs. In neither role were his responsibilities restricted to mere administration. As the complications of public affairs increased, he was given further high postings. He chaired the commission drafting the RSFSR Constitution. He became the leading political commissar on a succession of military fronts in 1918–19. He was regularly involved in decisions on relations with Britain, Germany, Turkey and other powers; and he dealt with plans for the establishment of new Soviet republics in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. He conducted the enquiry into the Red Army’s collapse at Perm. When the Party Central Committee set up its own inner subcommittees in 1919, he was chosen for both the Political Bureau (Politburo) and the Organisational Bureau (Orgburo). He was asked to head the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate at its creation in February 1920.
Far from fitting the bureaucratic stereotype, he was a dynamic leader who had a hand in nearly all the principal discussions on politics, military strategy, economics, security and international relations. Lenin phoned or telegraphed Politburo members whenever a controversial matter was in the air.42 There were few corners of high public affairs where Stalin’s influence was unknown; and the Politburo frequently turned to him when a sudden emergency arose. The other great leaders – Lenin, Trotski, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Sverdlov, Dzierżyński and Bukharin – had settled jobs that they held for the duration of the Civil War and beyond. In most cases these jobs involved making public appearances – and Trotski in the Red Army did this with relish and to huge acclaim. There was also prestige for the prominent leaders of the October 1917 seizure of power: Lenin, Trotski and Sverdlov were examples. Since the Bolsheviks were led by doctrinaires, prestige also accrued to those who wrote fluently and often. Lenin, Trotski, Kamenev, Zinoviev and Bukharin continued to publish books in the Civil War. Stalin could not compete in these arenas. He was always on the move. He was a poor orator in any formal sense and had little opportunity to write.
His merits tended to be overlooked even though he was an integral part of the ascendant political group. The trouble was that he had yet to realise his importance in the eyes of the group, the party or society at large. Just occasionally he allowed his resentment to show. In November 1919 he tried to resign his job as Chairman of the Revolutionary-Military Council of the Southern Front. Lenin, alarmed, rushed to get a Politburo decision to implore him to reconsider. Stalin was too useful to be discarded. Yet what was attractive to Lenin was horrific to the enemies of Bolshevism. Stalin in the Civil War was an early version of the despot who instigated the Great Terror of 1937–8. It was only because all the other communist leaders applied the politics of violence after the October Revolution that his maladjusted personality did not fully stand out. But this is no excuse. No one acquainted with Stalin in 1918–19 should have been surprised by his later ‘development’.