Another view of Stalin Read Online Free PDF

editorial secretary, Molotov.  They were denounced by Malinovsky,  an agent provocateur elected to the Central Committee! Shernomazov,  who replaced Molotov  as secretary, was also a police agent. Banished for three years to Siberia, Stalin once again escaped and took up the leadership of Pravda.
     
    Convinced of the necessity of a break with the Mensheviks, he differed with Lenin  about tactics. The Bolshevik line had to be defended, without directly attacking the Mensheviks, since the workers sought unity. Under his leadership, Pravda developed a record circulation of 80,000 copies.
     
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    Ibid. , pp. 71--73.
     
     
    At the end of 1912, Lenin  called Stalin and other leaders to Cracow to advocate his line of an immediate break with the Mensheviks, then sent Stalin to Vienna so that he could write Marxism  and the National Question. Stalin attacked `cultural-national autonomy' within the Party, denouncing it as the road to separatism and to subordination of socialism to nationalism. He defended the unity of different nationalities within one centralized Party.
     
    Upon his return to St. Petersburg, Malinovsky  had him arrested a fifth time. This time, he was sent to the most remote regions of Siberia, where he spent five years.
     
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    Ibid. , pp. 75--79.
     
     
    It was only after the February 1917 Revolution that Stalin was able to return to St. Petersburg, where he was elected to the Presidium of the Russian Bureau, taking up once again the leadership of Pravda. In April 1917, at the Party Conference, he received the third largest number of votes for the Central Committee. During the month of July, when Pravda was closed by the Provisional Government and several Bolshevik leaders were arrested, Lenin  had to hide in Finland; Stalin led the Party. In August, at the Sixth Congress, he read the report in the name of the Central Committee; the political line was unanimously adopted by 267 delegates, with four abstentions. Stalin declared: `the possibility is not excluded that Russia will be the country that blazes the trail to socialism .... It is necessary to give up the outgrown idea that Europe alone can show us the way'.
     
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    Ibid. , pp. 88--96.
     
     
    At the time of the October 25 insurrection, Stalin was part of a military revolutionary `center', consisting of five members of the Central Committee. Kamenev  and Zinoviev  publicly opposed the seizing of power by the Bolshevik Party; Rykov,  Nogin,  Lunacharsky  and Miliutin  supported them. But it was Stalin who rejected Lenin's  proposal to expel Kamenev  and Zinoviev  from the Party. After the revolution, these `Right Bolsheviks' insisted on a coalition government with the Mensheviks and the Social-Revolutionaries. Once again threatened with expulsion, they toed the line.
     
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    Ibid. , pp. 97--98.
     
     
    Stalin became the first People's Commissar for Nationality Affairs. Quickly grasping that the international bourgeoisie was supporting the local bourgeoisies among national minorities, Stalin wrote: `the right of self-determination (was the right) not of the bourgeoisie but of the toiling masses of a given nation. The principle of self-determination ought to be used as a means in the struggle for socialism, and it ought to be subordinated to the principles of socialism'.
     
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    Ibid. , pp. 103--104.
     
     
    Between 1901 and 1917, right from the beginning of the Bolshevik Party until the October Revolution, Stalin was a major supporter of Lenin's  line. No other Bolshevik leader could claim as constant or diverse activity as Stalin. He had followed Lenin  right from the beginning, at the time when Lenin  only had a small number of adherents among the socialist intellectuals. Unlike most of the other Bolshevik leaders, Stalin was constantly in contact with Russian reality and with activists within Russia. He knew these militants, having met them in open and clandestine struggles, in prisons and in Siberia.