Stalin in the Russian Civil War

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From May 1918 to August 1920, the future leader of the Soviet Union Joseph Stalin was employed, with only brief gaps, as a military political commissar on various fronts in the Russian Civil War. He was a participant in the defense of Petrograd, and in the Battle for Tsaritsyn, where according to Soviet legend, Stalin saved the day. In honor of his actions Tsaritsyn was renamed Stalingrad ("Stalin City"). He was sent to investigate the Red forces’ reversals at Perm (although he was not, as some Stalinist historians claim, the author of the Perm Report.) Stalin was also blamed for the defeat of Red forces in the Polish-Soviet War.

During this period, while supporting centralized control in principle, Stalin considered himself entitled to call for more men and materiel for his own Front. He also waged an unrelenting war against the “military specialists”— former Tsarist professional military officers— and collected about himself a group of like-minded Bolshevik military leaders, the "Tsaritsyn group," a nucleus of party members personally loyal to Stalin.

Stalin would later be accused by his fellow-Bolshevik rival Leon Trotsky of seeking to build his own reputation by victories on his own front at the expense of operations elsewhere.

In a Pravda interview given just before he left for Kharkov, Stalin said:

"When we have talked of the chances of Russia's victory and have said that those chances are growing and will grow still further, it does not follow that victory is already in our pocket... victory can only have real meaning in conditions where our forces are properly organized, where they are supplied regularly and accurately, where our agitators are able to spread burning enthusiasm among the troops, where our rear is cleansed of filth and corruption and where it is consolidated both morally and materially. . . ."^[1]