Stalin: A Biography

1. STALIN AS WE HAVE KNOWN HIM

Joseph Stalin is one of the most notorious figures in history. He ordered the systematic killing of people on a massive scale. In his years of power and pomp, from the late 1920s until his death in 1953, he personified the Soviet communist order. The October Revolution of 1917 in Russia had given rise to a one-party, one-ideology dictatorship serving as a model for the transformation of societies across a third of the globe’s surface after the Second World War. Although Lenin had founded the USSR, it was Stalin who decisively strengthened and stabilised the structure. Without Stalin, the Soviet Union might have collapsed decades before it was dismantled in 1991.

After Lenin died in 1924, most people were surprised when Stalin emerged the victor from the ensuing conflict among the party’s leaders. By the end of the decade he had rejected the compromises the party had reluctantly accepted in order to survive in power after the Civil War in the former Russian Empire. Stalin marched the Soviet Union in the direction of industrialisation. Millions of peasants died while agriculture was collectivised. The network of labour camps was expanded and Stalin reinforced his despotism through the Great Terror of the late 1930s. Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa against the USSR in 1941 caught Stalin disastrously off guard. But the Red Army fought back and, with Stalin as supreme commander, defeated the Wehrmacht. After the Second World War the USSR asserted its dominion across the eastern half of Europe. Stalin’s reputation, for good or evil, rose to its climax. When he died in 1953, he was mourned by millions of fellow citizens who had abundant reason to detest him and his policies. He left the Soviet Union as a world power and an industrial colossus with a literate society. He bequeathed institutions of terror and indoctrination with few rivals in their scope. The history of the USSR after his death was largely a series of attempts to conserve, modify or liquidate his legacy.

Stalin left no memoirs. Before the late 1920s no one troubled to write more than a brief sketch of him. Those who did put words into print scorned him. The unsurpassed chronicler of Russia in the year 1917, Nikolai Sukhanov, dismissed him as ‘a grey, dull blank’.¹ Trotski and his sympathisers such as Boris Souvarine and Isaac Deutscher ridiculed Stalin as a bureaucrat without an opinion or even personality of his own; this had also been the line taken by leaders of other revolutionary parties — Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries — who had been forced into foreign exile.² Despite the diversity of their political orientations, all such writers agreed when characterising Lenin’s successor. Stalin’s lack of talent appeared to them as axiomatic. His defects were thought obvious. Stalin had not lived as an émigré before the fall of the Imperial monarchy in the February Revolution! He was neither a polyglot nor a decent orator! He was a mere administrator! Such features were offered as proof that he deserved second-rate status among the party’s leaders. Even friendly comrades in the decade after the October Revolution thought that his only strong suit was administration and that the important decisions of state should be left to them and not to Stalin.³

Ambitious and resentful, Stalin set about embellishing his reputation. In 1920 he stressed that Lenin, at their first meeting in 1905, had struck him as an unobtrusive figure. The aim was clear. Stalin was indicating that this was the kind of man who had founded the communist party and whom he sought to emulate: he was offering a self-portrait. But showiness was not for him. Stalin’s aide Ivan Tovstukha produced a biographical sketch in 1924, mentioning his postings in the October Revolution and Civil War;⁴ but this was hardly a coloratura piece of writing. Always Stalin and his associates stressed his eagerness to fit into a political collective. The self-preening political protagonists in the Soviet Union — Lev Trotski, Grigori Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev and Nikolai Bukharin — were contrasted with the modest Party General Secretary.

Resuming his ascent to the political summit, Stalin arranged for weightier claims to be made on his behalf. Approved biographies appeared, each more hagiographical than the previous one. In 1938 a grandiose account was published, written by Party Central Committee stooges and anonymously edited by Stalin.⁵ The chapters represented him as the contemporary genius of world communism; and the growing tendency was to depict him as the equal of Lenin as party leader, exponent of Marxist theory and global statesman. This image was picked up in the West by commentators impressed by the industrial and educational progress made in the USSR in the 1930s. From 1941, when the USSR entered the struggle against Nazi Germany, the praise for Stalin was unstinted. Time magazine fêted him as its Man of the Year, who alone had the tenacity to lead his country to military triumph. After the Second World War, when the Cold War broke out and the Western Allies turned him from hero into villain, the number of Stalin’s admirers fell drastically away. Yet among his critics there were few who still thought him a mediocrity. Revered or detested, he was recognised as one of the twentieth century’s outstanding politicians.

Some saw him as Lenin’s authentic successor who drove the automobile of Revolution along a road mapped out by Lenin. Others regarded him as Leninism’s great betrayer. Playing up Russian national interests, he was painted as little different from the emperors of old. Supposedly Stalin wanted to achieve chiefly the objectives that had eluded the greatest of the Romanovs.⁶ Such a desire was reflected in Stalin’s foreign policy of westward expansion. In the USSR this took the form of privileging the ethnic Russians in postings, education and status. Stalin was depicted as an exponent of traditional Russian imperialism.

Another image of Stalin had him mainly as a power-hungry killer. Once having gained supreme authority, supposedly, the latent psychotic urges were released and the carnage of the 1930s began. Some contended that this could not have happened unless the doctrines and practices of the Soviet one-party state had already been put in place; but they also insisted that the mayhem would not have occurred in 1937–8 unless an unhinged dictator had controlled the party and the political police.⁷ Stalin did not just incarcerate and murder. In applying physical and mental torment to his victims, he degraded them in the most humiliating fashion. He derived deep satisfaction from this. Although he himself did not beat those whom the police held in the Lubyanka prison, he encouraged the most brutal measures. He delighted in keeping even his closest associates in unrelieved fear. Definitions of insanity are controversial, but undeniably Stalin’s personality was a dangerously damaged one and this personality supplied the high-octane fuel for the journey to the Great Terror.

Or was he just a bureaucratic mediocrity protecting the interests of the administrative cadres of the one-party state? According to this interpretation, the administrators in party, police and economic commissariats aspired to expand their authority and privileges. Already in the 1920s they had abandoned their revolutionary commitment. Thus Stalin understood what they wanted and used his position in the Central Committee Secretariat to fulfil their desires. As the USSR’s supreme bureaucrat he too was bound to benefit from such an outcome. That the administrative cadres should have come to wield this power was attributed to deep tensions in Soviet state and society. The October 1917 Revolution had been made in the name of the working class and the poorest sections of the peasantry. But these groups failed to confirm themselves in power. The resultant tensions made for a situation that gave opportunities to the ‘bureaucracy’. Unscrupulous and well disciplined, the functionaries of party and state steadily formed themselves into a caste separate from the rest of society, and Stalin’s grey eminence was their leading incarnation.⁸

Hardly a year has passed since Stalin’s death in 1953 without the publication of yet another biography. For three decades the material was common to all: the memoirs, old and new, together with the files excavated from the archives at the command of Nikita Khrushchëv — Stalin’s successor in the Kremlin — as he shoved Stalin off the pedestal of communist esteem from the mid-1950s. Then in 1985 Mikhail Gorbachëv became Party General Secretary. Gorbachëv resumed the campaign against Stalin and all his works and a flood of documentary data was released. But it took the rise to power of Boris Yeltsin in 1991 for most scholars to gain access to the archives. It was a heady period in which to carry out research. The inconceivable had become reality: the Central Party Archive on Pushkin Street in Moscow was opened to independent scholarship and a vast number of holdings were declassified.⁹ This is a process with a long road yet to travel, and there has been occasional regression. But any comparison with earlier years is salutary. It is now possible to explore the political, ideological, cultural and private life of Joseph Stalin to a degree of intimacy that was previously impossible.

Writers in Russia have taken their opportunity. Their forerunner was the Soviet communist dissenter Roy Medvedev, who wrote a denunciation of Stalin in the mid-1960s.¹⁰ The book was refused publication in the USSR and was circulated there only in illicit copies. Its basic analysis was not novel: Medvedev argued that Stalin was a cynic and a bureaucrat with a maladjusted personality who suffocated the revolutionary ideals of Lenin. Under Gorbachëv there were further attempts to analyse Stalin. Dmitri Volkogonov, while showing that Stalin was a murderous dictator, called for his virtues as an industrialiser and a military leader also to be acknowledged.¹¹ Later biographers in Russia objected to such equivocation, and Edvard Radzinski produced a popular account that focused attention on the psychotic peculiarities of his subject.¹² While adding new factual details, Volkogonov and Radzinski offered nothing in their analyses not already available in the West.

Western historians themselves largely ceased to reconsider the basic conventional wisdom developed between the 1920s and 1950s. The differences between accounts centred on particular aspects of his personality, attitudes or policies. The disputes have been highly charged. There has even been controversy about whether Stalin was responsible for the lunges towards the Great Terror. American scholar J. Arch Getty proposed that the state’s terrorist measures sprang not from Stalin’s initiative but from pressures applied by a group of Politburo members aiming always to raise the rate of industrial expansion and resenting the passive resistance of the lower echelons of the party and governmental official-dom.¹³ It was alleged that Stalin was merely a power broker among the Kremlin’s politicians. Supposedly he only instigated the mass killings in order to comply with the strong opinions expressed in the supreme ruling group. This was an extraordinary claim. Even the long line of writers who denied that the Gulag victims were truly to be numbered in the millions had assigned decisive responsibility to Stalin.

Nowadays virtually all writers accept that he initiated the Great Terror. The exceptions, however, do not lack support. Among them are those Russian nationalists who feel nostalgic about the Soviet victory in the Second World War and regret the collapse of the USSR. Many Georgians, too, resent any attack on their most famous compatriot even if they recognise that he committed appalling abuses against Soviet society. Yet among the rest of us there remains much controversy. There are several ways in which I hope to illuminate the murky corners of Joseph Stalin’s life. One involves looking closely at his upbringing, family life, wives, children and other relatives. This was difficult until recently: Stalin had taken care to excise references to his private life from published material. He also executed or imprisoned many who knew him well. Even his sister-in-law Anna Allilueva, who carefully submitted her draft memoir for his comments, was thrown into the Lubyanka. Stalin’s personality was mysterious in his lifetime, as he meant it to be; and many of the best-known sources on him, especially the memoirs by Trotski and Khrushchëv, offered accounts pervaded by political hostility.

Since the late 1980s it is has been possible to make a closer analysis. Stalin’s private life and entourage have been investigated by Simon Sebag Montefiore and Miklós Kun.¹⁴ His preferences in food and leisure were not drastically abnormal, at least until he achieved despotic power. Many in his entourage felt that his enemies had exaggerated his defects of personality. Such information provides an avenue towards understanding his public career. I make no apology for intensifying the examination of him at school, in the seminary, in early party groups and in the intimacy of his family. His medical condition and psychological profile also deserve attention. Such material contributes to an assessment of his motives and comportment in his public career.

Another theme of the book is the degree of Stalin’s influence before Lenin’s death. No biography fails to depreciate his already developed skills as a politician. This book benefits from the political and psychological insights of Robert Tucker, Adam Ulam, Robert McNeal and Ronald Hingley.¹⁵ Yet even these works assumed that Stalin did not count for much among Bolsheviks before 1917. Tucker contended that Stalin’s attitude to Lenin amounted to mere hero-worship through to the 1930s.¹⁶ Lenin’s unchallenged dominance is also the key theme of the study by Robert Slusser, who characterised Stalin in 1917 as ‘the man who missed the Revolution’.¹⁷ Purportedly Stalin was Lenin’s errand boy before and during 1917. The same approach has been maintained with reference to the years after the October Revolution as biographers have insisted that Stalin was a dour bureaucrat in the backrooms of Bolshevism. At most, he has been depicted as Lenin’s trouble-shooter — the man who was sent into emergency situations with a specific brief from the Kremlin. But credence is rarely given to the possibility that Stalin’s membership of the supreme bodies of the Bolshevik party and the Soviet government shows that he was already an established member of the communist ruling group. The following chapters question this long-established historical opinion.

And the biographers, while rightly stressing that Stalin came to wield enormous power from the 1930s, have usually omitted to note that he was not omnipotent. He had to operate the machinery of the system of power he inherited. He could modify it, but he was unable to transform it without shattering the basis of ‘Soviet power’. In the Great Terror of 1937–8 he strove to eliminate tendencies in politics that restricted the impact of central commands: clientelism, localism and administrative passive resistance. He also tried to liquidate the obstructive trends pervading Soviet society which counteracted the Kremlin’s policies. Not only administrators but also workers and collective-farm labourers found ways to defend themselves against Moscow and its requirements. Stalin’s introduction of fresh policies from the late 1920s was accompanied by adjustments to the communist order. But these adjustments induced a syndrome of interests which obstructed further basic change. It is conventional to depict Stalin as an unimpeded despot. Without doubt he could introduce internal and external policies without contradiction in the Politburo. But I shall show that his personal rule depended upon his willingness to conserve the administrative system he had inherited. He also had to assimilate himself in many ways to the mental outlook of the people of the Soviet Union if he wanted to go on ruling them without provoking revolt.

Stalin, custodian-in-chief of the Soviet order, was also its detainee. In order to rule despotically through the communist dictatorship, he had to restrict his impulse to eliminate practices which inhibited the imposition of a perfect system of vertical command. Powerful though he was, his powers were not limitless. This consideration is not a fine scholarly point but helps towards an understanding of the vicissitudes of his career. To the end of his life he sought to keep the Soviet order in a condition of controlled agitation. Aiming to conserve personal despotism and party dictatorship, he strove to disrupt trends towards a stabilisation which might conflict with his larger purposes. But constraints of power existed even for Stalin.

The purposes of Stalin at any rate sprang not only from his psychological drives and practical calculations but also from his world view. Marxism was a guiding philosophy throughout his adult life. But it was not the only ingredient in his thinking. His Georgian origin, his cultural interests and his ecclesiastical training left their mark. Russian national traditions also had a growing importance, especially from the 1930s. He was not an original scholar. Far from it: his few innovations in ideology were crude, dubious developments of Marxism. Sometimes the innovations arose from political self-interest more than intellectual sincerity. But about the genuineness of Stalin’s fascination with ideas there can be no doubt. He read voraciously and actively. His insertion of nationalist themes into official Soviet ideology ought to be seen for what it was. Stalin deployed the nationalism he found congenial. This was not the nationalism of Church, peasant and village. It was not even the nationalism of the tsars; for although he extolled Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great, he excoriated most other past rulers. Stalin’s was a Russian nationalism of the state, of technology and intolerance, of atheism, of cities, of military power. It was so idiosyncratic a compilation as to be virtually his own invention — and it overlapped substantially with Soviet Marxism as it had been developed since the death of Lenin.

Yet he continued to be pragmatic, and his ability to decide large international questions with the leaders of the world’s great powers led some historians to conclude that Stalin was a statesman in the tradition of the tsars. There was something in this. Stalin was eager to be taken seriously by American and European leaders and to secure concessions to Soviet interests at the conference table. He also strained to understand the complexities of the problems of the USSR itself in administration, economy and society. He was a ruler of great assiduity and intervened in the minutiae of policy whenever he could.

The question, however, has remained about his sanity. Stalin’s obsession with personal control was so extreme and brutal that many have pondered whether he was psychotic. Roy Medvedev, the Soviet historian–dissenter, denied that Stalin was insane.¹⁸ Robert Tucker too maintained a cautious stance and argued that Stalin, while not being clinically mad, had a personality damaged by his experiences as a child. Robert Conquest agreed but stressed the unhealthy appetite Stalin had for vengeance and murder. All this brings up the matter of the nature of the ‘enemies’ whom Stalin sought to eliminate. Were they phantoms of his imagination without existence in objective reality? Medvedev, Tucker and Conquest agree that his was a deeply maladjusted personality. Quite how peculiarly he behaved in his intimate circle has become ever clearer since the doors of the archives have opened. The atmosphere in his family in the 1920s was highly charged and the fact that his wife Nadezhda was mentally unstable made things worse. In politics he was exceptionally suspicious, vengeful and sadistic. Stalin had a gross personality disorder.

But was his behaviour merely the reflection of a Georgian upbringing? Ideas of personal dignity and revenge were widespread in his native land, especially in the rural areas. Practically every biographer has assumed that this had an influence on his subsequent career. But Georgia’s culture was neither uniform nor unchanging. Stalin imbibed ideas in Gori and Tbilisi which were rejected by others, and an exclusive ascription of his personal and political comportment to his national origins is inappropriate. The dysfunctionality of the Dzhughashvili family was remarked upon by his friends. His own odd character was worsened by his later experience of being underappreciated by his comrades in the revolutionary movement; and the tenets and practices of communism confirmed his harsher tendencies. (All leading Bolsheviks condoned the Red Terror in 1918: this was yet another reason why they tended to ignore Stalin’s extremism until the late 1920s.) He was also influenced by the books he read about previous Russian rulers, especially Ivan the Terrible; and he annotated Machiavelli’s The Prince. There were many interacting factors which contributed to Stalin’s extraordinary ferocity.

Yet although he exaggerated the strength and intent of the opposition to him, such opposition was not insignificant in its potential. There was method in Stalin’s alleged madness. Conquest and Medvedev have pointed to the existence of groupings of internal party critics.¹⁹ Getty has indicated that Stalin was unhappy with passive resistance to his policies among the party’s officials in the provinces.²⁰ Khlevnyuk has indicated his persistent concern about past and current members of the communist central leadership.²¹

This book is intended to show that Stalin’s worries went wider and deeper than his concern about internal party critics. He really did have a multitude of enemies. None of them had much chance against him. His defeated opponents gossiped against him, and some subordinates in the party formed little groups to conspire against him. There were plenty of delegates to Party Congresses who felt that his power had become overmagnified after the First Five-Year Plan of 1928–32. More broadly, outside the party, multitudes of people had reason to bear him a grudge: Bolsheviks expelled from the party; priests, mullahs and rabbis; Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries; nationalists among the non-Russians — and indeed among the Russians; peasants; even workers and soldiers. His unpopularity was as great as his power at its peak, and the fact that he fostered a cult of the individual for himself meant that no one in the country could fail to identify him as being personally responsible for the policies that had brought suffering to the country. This was a situation that was unlikely to improve in the near future. At the very moment of his political victory Stalin had much cause to be worried.

The following chapters offer a comprehensive portrait of Stalin in his time. They investigate not only what he did but also why he did it and how he was allowed to do it. He is examined simultaneously as leader, administrator, theorist, writer, comrade, husband and father. His social background, schooling, nationality and ways of work and leisure are analysed. Stalin as a psychological type also needs to be considered — and his habits of daily life as well as the large scale of his political manoeuvres and statesmanship enter the account.

The charge has been laid that such an approach runs the risk of ‘humanising’ the communist leaders. I plead guilty. Stalin carried out campaigns of carnage which have been described with words outside the lexicon of our species: monstrous, fiendish, reptilian; but the lesson to be learned from studying several of the twentieth century’s most murderous politicians is that it is wrong to depict them as beings wholly incomparable to ourselves. Not only is it wrong: it is also dangerous. If the likes of Stalin, Hitler, Mao Tse-tung and Pol Pot are represented as having been ‘animals’, ‘monsters’ or ‘killing machines’, we shall never be able to discern their successors. Stalin in many ways behaved as a ‘normal human being’. In fact he was very far from being ‘normal’. He had a vast desire to dominate, punish and butcher. Often he also comported himself with oafish menace in private. But he could also be charming; he could attract passion and admiration both from close comrades and from an immense public audience. On occasion he could be modest. He was hard-working. He was capable of kindliness to relatives. He thought a lot about the good of the communist cause. Before he started killing them, most communists in the USSR and in the Comintern judged him to be functioning within the acceptable bounds of political conduct.

Of course, they overlooked the other side of Stalin. It was a side that had been plentifully evident after the October Revolution. He had killed innumerable innocents in the Civil War. He had gone on to cause hundreds of thousands of deaths in the First and Second Five-Year Plans. He was a state murderer long before instigating the Great Terror. The neglect of his propensities appears inexplicable unless account is taken of the complex man and politician behind the ‘grey blur’ he presented to a multitude of observers. Stalin was a killer. He was also an intellectual, an administrator, a statesman and a party leader; he was a writer, editor and statesman. Privately he was, in his own way, a dedicated as well as bad-tempered husband and father. But he was unhealthy in mind and body. He had many talents, and used his intelligence to act out the roles he thought suited to his interests at any given time. He baffled, appalled, enraged, attracted and entranced his contemporaries. Most men and women of his lifetime, however, underestimated Stalin. It is the task of the historian to examine his complexities and suggest how better to understand his life and times.

2. THE FAMILY DZHUGHASHVILI

Stalin’s official biography appeared in 1938. His early life was described in the five opening sentences:¹

The Soviet media at the time of the book’s publication deluged citizens of the USSR with extravagant claims on his behalf; but the years of boyhood and adolescence attracted meagre attention.

Communists of Stalin’s vintage discouraged accounts which dwelt on the personal aspects of their lives. For them, politics mattered above all else. But Stalin had a fastidiousness which was extreme even by the standards of his party, and he summoned the authors of his biography to the Kremlin to discuss their draft.² It was evidently at his insistence that just two short paragraphs covered his early years. The last thing he wanted, as a Georgian ruling over Russians, was to shine a bright light on his national origins. There were other reasons why his childhood embarrassed him. As a man from an unhappy family he did not intend the world to know about the damage it had done to him — and he was very far from being proud of his father. As a revolutionary and militant atheist he disdained to acknowledge the contribution made by the Imperial regime and the Orthodox Church to his personal development. Frugality with facts served a further purpose. By wrapping himself in mystery in the eyes of Soviet citizens, Stalin hoped to enhance popular admiration for himself as a ruler. From his studies of Russian history he knew that the most effective tsars had restricted knowledge about their private lives and opinions. By limiting what his biographers could write, he aspired to rise in the esteem of Soviet citizens.

Falsification came easily to him. The first sentence of that official biography was a lie because Joseph Dzhughashvili entered this life not on 21 December 1879 but on 6 December 1878. The truth has been ascertained by searches in the parochial records in Gori.³ It is uncertain why he practised this deceit. But it was not a mistake: Stalin was always careful about such details. We can only speculate at this distance in time. Apparently he started to fib about his birthday after leaving the Spiritual Seminary in Tbilisi, and it may be that his motive was to avoid military conscription: certainly many Georgians in those years tampered with the records for this purpose. Another possibility is that he was simply trying to confuse the police as to when he entered the revolutionary movement.⁴

About some things he told the truth. His father Besarion (or Vissarion in Russian) was indeed a cobbler married to Ketevan (or Yekaterina in Russian) and they lived in Gori. The Dzhughashvilis were subjects of the Russian tsars. The completed conquest of the Caucasus region had occurred only in the mid-1860s after the capture of the Islamist rebel Shamil from Dagestan Imperial forces in 1859. Parts of Georgia had not altogether lost their autonomous status until the second half of the nineteenth century. It had been the east Georgian ruler Irakli II who in 1783 had requested that his kingdom should become a Russian protectorate. Further territorial adhesions followed from the territory of the Georgians. Steadily the tsars repealed the agreements to grant exemptions from the pattern of rule in the rest of their empire. Garrisons were established. The Georgian Orthodox Church’s autocephaly was abolished in 1811. Russian peasants were given land in Georgia. The teaching of the Georgian language was restricted in schools and seminaries. The Georgian press was cramped. Georgians were robbed of their national dignity by the Russian administrators and commanders sent to the south Caucasus.

The little town of Gori in central Georgia lies by the fast-flowing River Mtkvari (or Kura, as the Russians call it). It is surrounded by hills. On the highest of them, to the north, there perches a large medieval fort — Goristikhe — which in the nineteenth century was almost as big as the town it overlooked: its crenellated walls and towers stretch like a huge octopus down the slopes. The valley is wide at Gori and the nearby hills are wooded with hazel, walnut, fir and chestnut trees. On clear days the mountains of the Caucasus are visible in the distance. When Joseph was a boy, the population tipped a little over twenty thousand. Most churches in the town belonged to the Georgian Orthodox Church; but many Armenians, a few hundred Russians and some Jews also lived there — and there was even a religious colony of Dukhobors.⁵ The best local education, available only to boys, was offered at the Spiritual School. Most employment in Gori was connected to trade with peasants who came to the town with sacks of grapes, potatoes, tomatoes, nuts, pomegranates and wheat as well as their cattle, pigs and sheep. The town is over fifty miles by road from the Georgian capital Tbilisi, which it took two days to reach on foot. There was much poverty in Gori. This had been the norm for peasants for centuries; but most nobles too in the late nineteenth century had fallen on hard times.

Gori had no large enterprises; its economy was dominated by handicrafts and trade. Onions, garlic, cucumbers, sweet peppers, cabbages, radishes, potatoes and aubergines grew in a perfect climate, and the Atenuri wine produced from the Ateni grape was highly appreciated. The sheep and cattle kept on the little hillside farms were famous for their succulence. In Gori itself there was a flourishing commerce in leather and wool, and craftsmen made shoes, coats and carpets. Shops and stalls were everywhere. Most of the owners were tailors, cobblers and carpenters. Professional employment was mainly confined to the priests and teachers. Policemen kept order. There were several taverns where men took solace in the bottle. It was a scene that had changed little since the Russians had entered Georgia at the request of its various rulers from the late eighteenth century. Yet even Gori was changing. In 1871 it acquired a railway station down by the River Mtkvari. The trains enabled passengers to get to Tbilisi in two or three hours. Commercial and industrial penetration of the area was just a matter of time.

Georgians like the Dzhughashvilis dressed plainly. Women wore long black skirts and, when they were in church, they donned head-scarves. The priests had black cassocks. The other men were no more colourful. Black jackets, shirts and trousers were customary and there was no pressure on working-class males to look smart. Men expected to rule their households with their wives’ complete obedience — and Besarion was notorious for his bad temper and violence. Women carried out all the domestic chores, including the cooking. This was one of the glories of old Georgia, whose cuisine was a stunning combination of the tastes of the eastern Mediterranean and the Caucasus. Outstanding dishes included sturgeon in pomegranate sauce, spicy pork kebabs and aubergines with walnut paste. The basic salads were also excellent. The Kutaisi combination of tomatoes, onions, coriander and ground walnuts was a meal in itself. But poor families, even if they retained links with the countryside, would rarely have the opportunity to eat such a diet in full. In fact people like the Dzhughashvilis would subsist mainly on beans and bread. Life for most inhabitants of Gori was hard and there was little prospect of betterment.

Besarion married nineteen-year-old Ketevan Geladze on 17 May 1874. Her father had died when she was young and she and her mother had had to get by as best they could in the little village of Gambareuli.⁶ Ketevan — known to family and acquaintances as Keke — quickly became pregnant. In fact she had two sons before Joseph’s arrival. The first was Mikhail, who died when only one year old. Then came Giorgi, but he too died young. Joseph alone survived early childhood. Taken to church on 17 December 1878, he was baptised by archpriest Khakhanov and catechist Kvinikadze.⁷

Christened Joseph, he was known to everyone by the diminutive Soso. Little else — in fact nothing at all — is known about the very earliest years of his life. It might have been expected that Joseph’s mother and father, having suffered the loss of two sons in infancy, would have treated their third with special care and affection. This would also have been in keeping with the Georgian tradition to dote on a new baby in the family. The Georgians are more like the Italians and Greeks than the peoples of northern Europe in child rearing. Besarion Dzhughashvili was an exception because he never showed his son any kindliness. Keke tried to make up for this. Though a strict and demanding mother, she made him feel special and dressed him as well as her finances allowed. Besarion resented this. Keke set her heart on Joseph becoming educated and entering the priesthood whereas Besarion wanted him to be a cobbler like himself. Almost from the beginning the Dzhughashvilis had an unhappy relationship; and far from alleviating the situation, Joseph’s arrival exacerbated the tension between them.

Besarion had a temperament that often flared up into angry violence against his wife. His commercial ambitions did not meet with success. His cobbler’s shop failed to move with the times by producing the European-style shoes — rather than traditional Georgian footwear — which were becoming the popular norm.⁸ Whatever he tried always ended in failure, and his lack of success as an independent artisan and his loss of local esteem probably aggravated his tendency to volcanic outbursts. His drinking got out of control. He spent more time guzzling wine at Yakob Egnatashvili’s tavern than tending to his family obligations.⁹

Keke according to most accounts was a devout woman. She attended church, consulted priests and was eager for her son to become one of them. But there were rumours which placed her in a different light. Sergo Beria, son of Stalin’s police chief from 1938, wrote that his grandmother — who befriended Keke in old age — told of a loose-living woman with a line in smutty talk: ‘When I was young I cleaned house for people and when I came upon a good-looking boy I didn’t waste the opportunity.’ When Besarion could not supply money for the family’s needs, Keke allegedly went out and sold her body.¹⁰ A less extreme version was that, although she was not serially promiscuous, she had an affair with one of Gori’s prominent personalities. The usual candidates were tavern keeper Yakob Egnatashvili and local police chief Damian Davrishevi.¹¹ As is not unusual in such a situation, proof is lacking; but circumstantial evidence filled the gap for the gossip-mongers. When Stalin attained supreme power, he promoted the sons of Egnatashvili to high rank and this is sometimes taken as a sign of special kinship with them.¹²

Soso’s paternity was also sometimes ascribed to Damian Davrishevi. Damian’s son Joseph, a childhood friend of Joseph Dzhughashvili, could not help noticing their physical likeness; and in later life Joseph Davrishevi did not exclude the possibility that they were half-brothers.¹³ Enquiries were made in the late 1950s in order to gather damning evidence on Stalin; and the authorities were not averse to discovering whether the image of Keke as a God-fearing, simple peasant woman was a myth. If mud could be thrown at his mother, some of it would land on him. But nothing of the kind was found.

Yet if rumours of this kind were rife during Stalin’s childhood, they can hardly have calmed Besarion’s troubled mind. They may well have been the fundamental motive behind his descent into drunkenness, hooliganism and domestic violence. Known as Mad Beso, he got into scrapes as his business went into decline. He was going to the bad, and Keke took what solace she could in the local church. She also eked out a living by working as a cleaner and seamstress: she was determined that the family should not be dragged down by her bad-tempered, incompetent husband. Beso himself saw that there was no commercial future for him in Gori. Like other artisans, he sought work in the growing industrial sector in Tbilisi. There he became employed as a labourer in Emile Adelkhanov’s large shoe factory in 1884. The hours were long, the pay low. Beso continued to drink heavily and there is no sign that he remitted much money home to Keke. His visits to Gori brought wife and son no solace: drunkenness and violence were all they could expect from the wastrel. The more he degenerated, the more Keke took emotional and spiritual refuge within the walls of the parish church.

Other versions exist of Joseph’s ancestry. The most bizarre suggests that one of the most famous ethnographers and explorers of the day, the noble Nikolai Przewalski, had an illicit liaison with Keke Dzhughashvili and that Joseph was the product. This is not only unlikely: it is physically impossible. Przewalski was not even present in Georgia at the time when Joseph Dzhughashvili was conceived.¹⁴ None of this is very surprising. As rulers from obscure backgrounds become famous it is conventional for legends to grow up about them, and often the rumour starts that in reality their parentage was more illustrious than it seemed.

A variant of this is that the leader was not of the nationality that was claimed. In Stalin’s case the word was that he was not Georgian at all but an Ossetian. This would trace the ancestry of the Dzhughashvili family (but not the Geladze) to the mountains beyond Georgia’s northern frontier. The name itself could well have a non-Georgian root of precisely this kind. The peoples of the Caucasus had moved around the region for centuries and even the sleepy town of Gori had its interlopers long before the Russians imposed themselves. Behind the story of Ossetian descent, though, lies the innuendo that this explains the wildness of Stalin’s later tyranny since the mountain peoples are widely regarded as less civilised than the town dwellers of the valleys. For some Georgians, moreover, such a genealogy expunges their shame in being associated with so notorious a despot. None of his school friends mentions any of this in his memoirs, but attention was almost certainly drawn to it in his childhood.¹⁵ Although Joseph Dzhughashvili grew up proud of belonging by birth and culture to the Georgian people, he may have disguised an early sense of being different from most other boys in the town.

The stories told by Stalin to friends and relatives from the 1930s onwards are one of the main sources for what happened in his childhood. Yet it hardly needs to be emphasised that he was an inveterate liar — and even when not lying directly, he often exaggerated or distorted the truth. His usual tale of childhood was filled with outbursts of drunken violence by Besarion, but all his stories have to be treated with caution. When in 1931 Stalin was asked about his childhood by the writer Emile Ludwig, he strenuously rebuffed suggestions of mistreatment: ‘No,’ he asserted, ‘my parents were uneducated people but they didn’t handle me at all badly.’¹⁶ This was out of line with his other recollections. He told his daughter Svetlana about how he stood up to his father and threw a knife at him when Keke was taking yet another beating. The knife missed its aim. Besarion hurled himself at young Joseph but was too slow to catch him. Joseph ran off and was hidden by neighbours until his father’s rage had spent itself.¹⁷

The memoirs of his friends without exception affirm that Beso was a brute to his son. Keke too was reportedly not averse to giving him a thrashing.¹⁸ If this was true, the Dzhughashvili household was filled with violence, and little Joseph must have grown up assuming that this was in the natural order of things. Perhaps he contradicted this when being interviewed by Ludwig because he sensed that he was being probed for a psychological origin of his political severity. No psychoanalytical sophistication is required. Like many who have been bullied in childhood, Joseph grew up looking for others whom he could bully. Not everyone beaten by parents acquires a murderous personality. Yet some do, and it would seem that more do than is true for general society. What made things worse for Joseph’s subsequent development was that his father’s violence was neither merited nor predictable. It is scarcely astounding that he grew up with a strong tendency towards resentment and retaliation.

Keke Dzhughashvili was strict with him but also smothered him with attention and affection. In an unguarded moment with Soviet army commander Georgi Zhukov in the Second World War he said that she never let him out of her sight till he was six years old. He also said that he had been a sickly infant.¹⁹ This was putting it mildly. Around the age of six he fell victim to smallpox. His mother was frantic. Smallpox was often a fatal disease and for a time it looked as if she would lose him. Poor families like the Dzhughashvilis could not afford doctors’ visits and their medicines. Most people in Gori in any case retained faith in the rural ways of dealing with disease. A female healer — Stalin was later to call her a znakharka when speaking in Russian — was summoned to treat Joseph. Against the odds, he recovered. The after-effects were limited to facial pockmarks. Joseph Dzhughashvili had had a narrow escape. This was to be a pattern in years to come. Although Joseph was prone to illnesses, his physical resilience saw him through.²⁰

It would not be a surprise if the crisis strengthened maternal protectiveness. Keke’s disappointment in her husband was sublimated into high expectations of her Joseph — and the fact that he was her only surviving child intensified her preoccupation with him. Keke was a typical Georgian woman of the period. There was no realistic opportunity for her to break out of the vicious circle of poverty. The best she could do was to earn a little from cleaning and sewing for better-off families. This would alleviate the poverty. But basic improvement would have to wait until the next generation. Joseph was her sole hope.

Yet she could not keep him in the house for ever. Joseph had a mind of his own and wanted to be accepted by the other boys. Once Joseph started to go out on to the streets, however, he had to cope with another challenge. The boys in Gori formed gangs in each little district. There was a lot of rough-and-tumble. There was much mixing of the various national groups. Respect accrued to those lads who could look after themselves in wrestling contests organised out of sight of the adults. Fist fights were common. Joseph, who had been tied to his mother’s apron strings, took time to assert himself. His contemporary Kote Charkviani wrote: ‘Before he was enrolled at school, not a day passed without someone thumping him, and he would either go back home in tears or else he himself would rough someone up.’²¹ But as Charkviani noted, Joseph was determined to prevail. No matter how many times he was knocked down, he got back up and fought on. He broke the rules if it helped him to win. Joseph was sly. He was also ambitious: he wanted to lead the gang and was resentful when he did not get his way.

But his mother continued to adore him and point him in the direction of an ecclesiastical career; and he was obliged to conform whenever she was near him. Regular church attendance was obligatory. Soon he caught the attention of influential figures in the town. Joseph was God-fearing and bright. He was exactly the sort of boy whom the priests wanted to admit to the Gori Spiritual School, especially in the light of his mother’s wish for him to enter the clergy. Joseph was given a place in summer 1888 in his tenth year. His studies would start in September.

Poor though the Dzhughashvili family was, Joseph was being given a chance only a few dozen boys got in the town: he was going to be educated. He would receive a small stipend of three rubles a month.²² A portrait of him as he commenced his studies comes from a memoir by Vano Ketskhoveli:²³

No one else wore either an akhalukhi or such boots, and the other pupils pressed around him out of curiosity. Obviously his mother was very eager to dress her son as well as possible; she had coddled him since birth. She herself had never been to school, and probably she did not understand that by dressing him up differently, she did him no favours with his fellow pupils.

Gradually he began to stand up to her. When out of her sight, he pulled off his white collar and mixed with the other boys on the streets.²⁴ He adopted the same routines at school. All first-hand accounts recorded his pugnacity towards rivals. But he was also devout, hard-working and determined to succeed, and the path on which he was stepping offered the chance for him to move out of the poverty he endured at home.

His intelligence and diligence had been recognised. His peculiarities were noted by acquaintances: he was volatile, sly and resentful. But nobody yet felt that these features existed to an abnormal degree. He had had a rougher upbringing than most other boys in the town and much was forgiven him. It was only in retrospect that the cocktail of permanent harm to his personality became detectable. He was mistreated by his father, and detested him. At the same time his mother handled him as a very special person; much was expected of him. Being an only child, he was spoiled. This can only have increased his resentment at the way his father behaved towards him. The fuss made of him by Keke protected him for a while against the rough games of the local boys. But the will to prove himself had not been cosseted out of him, and his father’s recurrent violence gave him a competing model of the kind of man he wanted to be. Although he desired to become a priest, he also wished to prove his toughness. He had known no fairness from his father; he would show none to those contemporaries who got in his way. He was not the strongest fighter on his streets but compensated by using methods that others avoided. His constant wish was to get on top and stay there: this was one of the few attitudes shared by his father and mother, albeit in their different ways.

The upbringing of young Dzhughashvili did not predetermine the career of Joseph Stalin. There were too many contradictions in his personality and parental treatment for a single possible result to be predictable. A lot more had to happen before psychological settlement occurred, and this included his particular experiences as well as events in the wider world. Yet without the childhood experienced by Joseph there would have been no Stalin. For the tree to grow there had to be a seed.

3. THE SCHOOLING OF A PRIEST

Joseph took time to benefit fully from his educational opportunity. Not having spoken Russian at home, he stayed in the preparatory classes for two years. But he proved a quick learner and already knew enough of the language to leap over the beginners’ class. He started the full course in September 1890.¹ Beso Dzhughashvili had never liked the idea of his boy becoming a scholar. At some early stage of Joseph’s course at the Gori Spiritual School,² there was a terrible row between Beso and Keke. The angry Beso triumphed and took Joseph back to Tbilisi with him to work at the Adelkhanov Shoe Factory. Joseph was to become an apprentice and drop Keke’s plan for him to enter the priesthood.³ Beso was a drunk and a failed artisan; but his attitude was not unusual. He insisted that what was good enough for him in employment was equally appropriate for his offspring.

The authorities categorised the Adelkhanov Shoe Factory as among the most decent in Georgia towards its eighty workers since, unlike rival factories, it had its own medical facilities. Yet most people thought Emile Adelkhanov, who had opened his enterprise in 1875, a harsh exploiter of his workforce. Wages were low and the conditions were especially harsh for young boys — indeed the same authorities worried about the large number of youngsters employed by Adelkhanov and about the effects on their health and upbringing in the grim, rectangular building.⁴ Adelkhanov was no philanthropist. When the terms of trade turned against him at the end of the century, he instantly cut wages. The result was a bitterly fought strike.⁵ For Beso Dzhughashvili, however, Adelkhanov’s cost-cutting recruitment of minors was a definite attraction. The extra money, however small initially, would come in useful: Joseph could start to pay his own way. He would not see much of the centre of Tbilisi with its palaces, cathedrals and grand shops. They lodged in a cheap room in the Avlabari district on the left bank of the River Mtkvari and each day walked down past the Metekhi Prison and over the bridge into the winding, cobbled streets of the Ortachala district where the factory stood. Joseph’s first encounter with capitalism was raw, harsh and dispiriting.

Yet he cannot have failed to note how different Tbilisi was from Gori. A mixture of cultures existed around the Adelkhanov Shoe Factory. Apart from the rival Mantashëv Shoe Factory there were synagogues for the Tbilisi Jews, several Armenian churches and half a dozen Georgian churches. Near by there were the sulphur baths used by the great Russian poet Alexander Pushkin earlier in the century. The entire area, including the gently bubbling stretch of the River Mtkvari, lay across hot springs valued for their medicinal properties. During his time in the factory, Joseph Dzhughashvili was being shown that a wider world of experience existed than he could possibly have imagined as a schoolboy in Gori.

If Beso had continued to prevail, there would have been no Stalin — and world history would have been different. To rise to the peak of the Russian Communist Party in the 1920s it was to be essential to have a fluent and plausible pen; and much as he resented the priests who taught him, Joseph owed them a lasting debt for his education. He was also beholden to his mother’s refusal to accept defeat. Doting on her departed son, she went to the priests in Gori and got them to help her to constrain Beso to release Joseph from factory work. Beso relented, and after a few months Joseph returned to his desk at the Spiritual School. Unsurprisingly he had not become a proficient cobbler in that brief period. His tasks had been limited to fetching and carrying for the adults in the factory. But he had seen enough of contemporary manufacturing to avoid a repetition of the experience. It proved to be his only opportunity to know industrial work directly, but not once did he refer to it in print. Although he was to write in later years about ‘the working class’ and ‘the factory system’, he was mostly drawing on conversations he had with workers of the sort he never became.

Beso Dzhughashvili began to fade from the lives of Keke and Joseph. It is not known how many times, if any, he returned to Gori. What is sure is that he never lived there for any lengthy time again. His drinking seems to have taken him over as he moved from job to job. There is a legend that Joseph murdered Beso. Not a scrap of evidence has been found for this and the truth was probably much more prosaic. Beso, having made a mess of his life, coped on his own. He worked in factories, drank in taverns and eventually lost all control of his life. According to some accounts, he died before the turn of the century; but the likelihood is that Beso, alone and destitute, died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1909.⁶

In Beso’s absence, Joseph reverted to the exclusive care of his mother. Quite how Joseph dealt with the breakdown in his parents’ marriage and his father’s departure is unclear. But clues survive. When he published poems in 1895–6, ‘Besoshvili’ was among his pseudonyms. This was clearly not an accidental choice. Nor was the reference in one of his early articles to how the capitalist economy put independent craftsmen under huge commercial pressure and forced most of them to give up their workshops and enter factory employment. The conclusion is irresistible. Joseph did not share his father’s ambition for him. He did not like being beaten. He had erupted in fury at Beso’s ill-tempered demands and behaviour. But Joseph was a thoughtful as well as sensitive child. When he started to think as a Marxist, he came to see Beso as a victim of history.⁷ This would surely not have happened if, at the back of his mind, Joseph had not retained a feeling of affection and understanding for his father. This may appear paradoxical. Stalin, Beso’s victim, kept fond thoughts of the man who had maltreated him. This is not an unusual reaction. The fact that Beso had passed out of his life probably helped Joseph to sanitise his recollections.

Back in Gori, Joseph resumed the life of church, school and the streets. It was an eventful period. While standing outside church one day, Joseph was knocked down by a phaeton. This was a horse-drawn trap, typically with two or three seats for its occupants, primitive suspension-hoops and a simple set of shafts. Open to the air, it was one of the cheapest forms of carriage. The driver that day in Gori lost control of his horse. The phaeton careered towards the crowd by the church wall and young Joseph Dzhughashvili did not move out of the way in time. It could have been a fatal accident.⁸

Although the boy’s left arm and his legs were badly damaged, he quickly recovered.⁹ Soon he was attending school again. The physical harm, however, was permanent. Joseph’s arm was left shortened and lacking in flexibility. It was to be the reason why he was not called up into the Imperial Army in 1916–17. Thus an unruly horse, by trampling the Gori youngster, was instrumental in saving him from potential annihilation in the Great War. The accident made him ungainly and apparently embarrassed about his appearance. Another point of psychological stress was added to the list. Nor did the injury enhance his prowess in the trials of strengths among the boys of the town. But he was determined to prove himself. Schoolmate Joseph Iremashvili recalled how young Dzhughashvili continued to use dirty methods to win his wrestling bouts.¹⁰ Nothing satisfied him except the leading position. He could not abide his friend David Machavariani heading their street gang. Sometimes he went off and joined another gang rather than accept orders from Machavariani. It was this kind of behaviour that led him to become known for his ‘bad character’.

When this got him nowhere, he accepted David Machavariani’s leadership. Like everyone else, he had to pass a series of initiation tests in order to join the gang. Would-be members needed to prove their mettle by going for a long run, carrying out an act of theft and submitting to be beaten with a strap. Others in the gang were Peter Kapanadze and Joseph Davrishevi.¹¹ Young Dzhughashvili never forgot these days and was to keep in touch with Peter when they were old men.¹² These friends remembered Joseph as rather gawky. He never mastered Georgia’s traditional dances. The lekuri (which was known in Russia as the lezginka) remained beyond his powers. There was competition among the town boys to perform it well. When another fellow did it better, Joseph moved over to his rival and deadlegged him.

His mother started working as a seamstress at the Davrishevis, and Joseph Dzhughashvili began to see a lot of Joseph Davrishevi. Some days they climbed up to the fortress above the town to see the birds living in the walls. But they did not always get on well. Joseph Dzhughashvili was not averse to stealing his friend’s food. When a dispute broke out, Davrishevi’s father came out and gave them another dish. Dzhughashvili justified his misdemeanour by telling his friend that it had ensured that they should receive double the normal amount.¹³ Sometimes, though, he pushed his luck too hard. Keen to show how tough he was, he challenged stronger boys to fight. Downed ten times in a tussle with a lad from another gang, he was badly beaten up. His mother fetched him home and complained to police chief Davrishevi, but he replied: ‘When an earthenware pot clashes with an iron pot, it’s the earthenware pot which gets cracked and not the iron one.’¹⁴

Joseph’s misdemeanours were not confined to his fights with other boys. The bright student at school was a scamp on the streets. Among his victims was a mentally deficient woman called Magdalena. His partner in crime was young Davrishevi. Magdalena possessed a Persian cat, and the two lads teased her by tying a pan to its tail. On her name day they crept into her kitchen while she was at church and stole an enormous cake.¹⁵ The affair was resolved without undue fuss but Davrishevi, who could hardly claim innocence, concluded that it showed that Joseph Dzhughashvili was a queer and nasty piece of work from the beginning. Another boyhood memoirist, Joseph Iremashvili, came to the same opinion. Both Davrishevi and Iremashvili imputed primary responsibility to their friend. By the same token they asserted that Dzhughashvili had a leading role even if he never achieved his goal of gang leadership. Young Dzhughashvili was cantankerous, volatile and ambitious; he was also frustrated: he never supplanted David Machavariani in the gang. But apparently this was not a situation he accepted. He resented it. He had talent and wanted others to recognise it. He was reluctant to bide his time. Others ought to show him greater respect than he currently received.

There was also a wider aspect to his character’s formation. He was brought up near the mountains of Georgia where traditions of blood feud persisted, and it has been suggested that his propensity for violence, conspiracy and revenge sprang from this culture. There is an obvious difficulty here. Most Georgians entering educational institutions in the late Imperial period tended to accommodate themselves to a less traditional worldview. If indeed the culture of the mountainside was an influence upon him, Joseph was peculiar in failing to evolve away from it. Not all Georgians were obsessively vengeful. The customary stress on compensation for injury did not have to involve the principle of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Negotiations between the perpetrator and the victim of hurt — or their relatives — were another way of dealing with the problem. There was something quite extraordinary about Joseph’s vindictiveness. As he grew up, he was notorious for this characteristic: he enjoyed crushing his rivals — it was never enough simply to defeat them. Georgian popular culture had a broad emphasis on honour. This involved loyalty to family, friends and clients. Joseph by contrast felt no lasting obligation to anybody. He was later to execute in-laws, veteran fellow leaders and whole groups of communists whose patron he had been. On the surface he was a good Georgian. He never ceased to revere the poetry he loved as a youth. He hosted lavish dinner parties after the Caucasian manner once he was in power. He liked to carouse; he dandled children on his knee. But his sense of traditional honour was non-existent. If he retained a number of attitudes and customs from his childhood, there were many which he abandoned. The history of the twentieth century would have been a lot less bloody if Joseph Dzhughashvili had been a better Georgian.

Not only popular culture but also Georgian literature had an influence on him. He loved the national classics, especially the thirteenth-century epic poetry of Shota Rustaveli (who was revered by Georgians as their Dante).¹⁶ Another favourite was Alexander Qazbegi’s story The Patricide, which had been published to much acclaim in 1883: Joseph loved it. The main character was called Koba. The plot involved episodes from the history of the great resistance led by Shamil against Russian Imperial power in the 1840s. Koba was an abrek. The term implies not just a robber but a man of the mountains with fearless hostility to all authority. Abreks live by their cunning as well as violence but do not prey upon ordinary people. Their code of honour allows and encourages them to be ruthless. What they punish is treachery. They do not expect life to be easy or God to rescue them from misfortune; and The Patricide suggested that betrayal by friends and acquaintances is something only to be expected. But revenge is sweet; the abreks will always pursue to the death those who have wronged them. Koba declares: ‘I’ll make their mothers weep!’

The abreks caused greater damage to civil society than Qazbegi allowed. As a Georgian urban story-teller he strove to suggest that the old ways of the Caucasus had a certain nobility. Russian writers such as Pushkin, Lermontov and Tolstoi also put Caucasian robbers into their works but seldom — until Tolstoi’s Hadji Murat in 1912 — gave a convincing interior view of the mind of mountain outlaws. Qazbegi was not in their class as a literary figure, but his immediate popularity with Georgian readers was enormous. His treatment of the Shamil resistance ignored reference to its Islamist purpose. He provided Georgians with a sense of national worth. Qazbegi was offering an admiring portrait of the violent traditions of the mountains: blood feud, vengeance, personal honour and life beyond the law. This was a romantic view more extreme in its particular aspects than anything offered in Walter Scott, Lord Byron or Alexander Pushkin. Qazbegi implied that the dominant values in cities and towns in Georgia — Christianity, commerce, education, law and administration — were inferior to the savage beliefs and customs of the mountains.

Gori lies in a valley and its inhabitants were not the rough mountaineers who lived by thievery, kidnapping and murder. One of his school friends, however, recalled how impressed Joseph was by Qazbegi’s work:¹⁷

Works of literature allow for diverse interpretations. Qazbegi’s story is unusually straightforward, and Stalin’s subsequent preoccupation with revenge and personal honour indicate that the basic message was successfully transmitted.

It is in this connection that one of the most gruesome events of Joseph’s childhood should be interpreted. While he was a schoolboy, two ‘bandits’ were hanged on the gibbet in the centre of Gori.¹⁸ The event left a deep imprint on the boy’s mind, and many years later — when biographical details about him were published — he allowed an account of the hanging to be reproduced. His biographers have frequently adduced his remembrance of the events as evidence of his psychological peculiarity. That Joseph developed a gross personality disorder can hardly be denied. But he was not alone in witnessing or remembering the hanging. It was the most remarkable event in Gori of the last quarter of the nineteenth century. What happened was as follows. Two men of the mountains were being pursued by a policeman on horseback who tried to take possession of their cow. They resisted. In the ensuing altercation they shot him. Strife between brigands and the police was not unknown in Gori and the surrounding area. Shoot-outs occurred not infrequently. Urban inhabitants more often than not took the side opposed to the police. Hatred of the authorities was widespread. Defence of family, property and native village was thought justifiable regardless of Imperial legislation. So when the captured brigands were sentenced to death, the popular interest — and not just Joseph’s — was intense.¹⁹

Police chief Davrishevi had anticipated the potential for unrest near the gibbet and forbade his own son to go outdoors. Joseph Dzhughashvili went accompanied by two other friends. What did they see? The popularity of the convicts led the authorities to order drummers to march to the square and to keep up a din. The sentence was announced in Russian. This too was scarcely well designed to quieten the mood of spectators. Someone tossed a stone from the crowd as the executioner, defended by soldiers, went about his business. A disturbance broke out. The police were on the point of panic as the brigands were strung up. Death was not swift in coming. The ropes had been tied inefficiently and the victims took an unbearably long time to expire.²⁰ The town’s inhabitants did not think the punishment fitted the crime. The miscreants had not offended the local honour code: they were protecting what they thought was their own. They were local heroes. Young Davrishevi, himself the son of one of the town’s highest officials, described them as ‘holy martyrs’.²¹ When Joseph and his mates attended the hanging, they partook of the general atmosphere.

This is not to deny that Joseph had an unusual attraction to violence in dealing with enemies. The Empire was meting out punishment to its recalcitrant subjects. The inhabitants of Gori resented this but could do nothing to stop the process. Neither Joseph nor his friends left a record of his impressions. But it would not be improbable that he concluded that state power was a crucial determining factor in the life of society and that, if any basic change was going to happen in society, force would be needed to countervail against the status quo. He may also have thought that the drastic punishment of delinquents helped to secure a regime. Certainly there was little in his early years that discouraged a viewpoint on human affairs without a place for purposive violence.

Joseph completed his course at the end of the summer term 1894 and the Board of the Gori Spiritual School recommended him for transfer to the Tiflis Spiritual Seminary, and the paperwork was put in hand.²² His behaviour on the streets was not reproduced in the classroom, where he was a well-behaved boy as well as a quick learner who earned warm plaudits. He swiftly picked up Russian even if his accent remained heavily Georgian; he assimilated arithmetic and literature and the Bible. His schoolwork in Gori had been exemplary and he had a stupendous memory and agile intellect. He attended church regularly and had a decent singing voice, an asset for an aspiring priest as Orthodox Church services have always involved an emphasis upon choral chants. Sermons were rare and pastoral duties outside the liturgy were few. Joseph was dutiful. In Gori he was remembered as ‘very devout’. One of his fellow students, when asked for his memories in 1939, said that Joseph had punctually attended all divine services and had led the church choir: ‘I remember that he not only performed the religious rites but also always reminded us of their significance.’²³

Despite the disruption caused by illness and factory employment, he had caught up with other pupils. The School Board was impressed. The scroll he received gave him the highest marks in every subject except arithmetic. (This was not a permanent defect: in later life he was in fact careful and effective at checking the statistical tables proffered to him by subordinates.)²⁴ The Board Chairman inscribed the scroll with ‘excellent’ against the behaviour category. For other subjects, too, he got top marks: Old Testament, New Testament, Orthodox catechism, liturgy, Russian with Church-Slavonic, Georgian, geography, handwriting and Russian and Georgian church music. He obtained a four instead of a five in ancient Greek.²⁵ But the blemishes were minor. Joseph Dzhughashvili had completed the course at the Gori Spiritual School with distinction. The Georgian ecclesiastical world lay at his feet. But he was a boy with a complex personality that made many acquaintances feel uncomfortable. Academically talented, he wanted to be admired as a tough lad on the streets. He loved his mother and accepted her ambitions for him and yet he was bright and had a mind of his own. Priests wrote highly of him. Yet his friends, when they came to write memoirs, recalled things about him which had echoes in his later career. They may have invented or exaggerated everything. But probably they were right that Joseph Dzhughashvili was demonstrably Stalin in the making.

4. POET AND REBEL

Joseph Dzhughashvili, aged fifteen, left for Tbilisi in September 1894. This time he went not to the Adelkhanov Shoe Factory but to the Tiflis Spiritual Seminary. Tiflis was the conventional foreign variant of the Georgian name Tbilisi; it was used not only in Russian but also in other European languages. Founded by the Russian Imperial authorities, the Tiflis Spiritual Seminary was at the top of Pushkin Street in the heart of the city. Although provided with board and lodging free of charge, Joseph Dzhughashvili had to pay for his tuition. This would have been a problem if he had not been able to earn a regular five rubles for singing in the Zion Cathedral down by the River Mtkvari.¹ He was not the only alumnus of the Gori Spiritual School who left for Tbilisi. Along with him at the Seminary were friends of his own age from Gori, including Peter Kapanadze, Joseph Iremashvili, Vano Ketskhoveli and M. Davitashvili.² (Joseph Davrishevi, whose father earned a decent salary, could afford the fees at the First Classical Gimnazia in Tbilisi.) Loneliness was not going to be a problem for Joseph Dzhughashvili.

He was arriving in the capital of Russian Imperial power in the south Caucasus. Tbilisi at the end of the nineteenth century was the largest city in that region of the Russian Empire with 350,000 inhabitants — only Baku on the Caspian Sea with 220,000 came remotely near in size. The Viceroy lived there and governed the dozens of peoples of the region, from the northern slopes of the Caucasus range down to the Ottoman border, on behalf of Emperor Nicholas II. The east Georgian kings had chosen Tbilisi as their capital for good reason. Like Gori, it straddled the River Mtkvari, which ran north from the mountains of Turkey; still more important in earlier centuries had been the fact that it lay across one of the ancient caravan routes that had enabled trade between central Asia and Europe. Consolidating Georgia’s permanent place in the Russian Empire, the St Petersburg government built the Georgian Military Road from Vladikavkaz to Tbilisi. This route went from north to south. (The railway linking the south Caucasus with Russia went from Baku up the Caspian coast.) Two army corps were based in the garrison on Tbilisi’s east bank. Having completed the conquest of the region in the first half of the nineteenth century, the Romanovs allocated the personnel, communications and force needed to retain it.

Tbilisi, unlike Gori, had a multinational population wherein the Georgians themselves were a minority. Along with them were Russians, Armenians, Tatars, Persians and Germans. Russians lived in the centre on the west bank. Armenian and Persian bazaars lay near by. Georgians had their district on the other side of the river. To the north of them lived German immigrants who had moved there, mainly from Württem-berg, at Emperor Alexander I’s invitation.

Joseph therefore faced a conflict of cultures much more intense than in Gori. The Russian quarter in the centre contained the City Hall, the Viceroy’s Palace, the General Staff headquarters, the Orthodox Cathedral and other churches, the Imperial Bank, the Public Library and the Military Museum. The streets were straight, the buildings tall and recently built. The German quarter was distinguished by its cleanliness and social order. The Armenians and Persians, who were the city’s great entrepreneurs, had noisy, bustling bazaars trading in silverware, carpets and spices. Georgian shopkeepers specialised in groceries, fish and footwear. On the south-eastern side of the town there were the factories and the prison which were familiar from his time working for Adelkhanov. There was also a large railway depot and repair works in the capital’s Didube district. The city bustled with high-booted Russian soldiers, Tatar men in their green and white turbans (and their becowled wives) and Germans carefully attired in the mid-European style. These inhabitants themselves were outshone by the resplendence of the traders from the heights of the Caucasus in their traditional costumes: Ossetians, Kabardians, Chechens and Ingush.

Georgians had only a limited influence over the city’s affairs. St Petersburg’s appointees, usually Russians, ran the administration and led the armed forces. Banking was in Russian and Jewish hands and the largest commercial enterprises were owned by Armenians. The Russian hierarchy dominated the Georgian Orthodox Church since, in 1811, Emperor Alexander I had sanctioned its incorporation into the Russian Orthodox Church. The Tiflis Spiritual Seminary entered by Joseph was subject to the ecclesiastical authorities in St Petersburg.

The Seminary was a large building with a raised portico of Ionic columns surmounted by a pediment. Built by the sugar millionaire Zubalishvili, it had been bought from him in 1873 by the Russian Orthodox Church and converted to ecclesiastical use. The frontage was architecturally crude. There were no steps to the portico, which had been included for display rather than practical function. The peoples of the Caucasus were meant to be impressed with the grandeur of Imperial power, and the Seminary symbolised the suzerainty of the Romanovs over the spiritual as well as the temporal affairs of the region. The rest of the building was like a barracks.³ There were four floors. Near the entrance were the cloak room and the refectory. The first floor contained a large hall which had been converted into a chapel. The second and third floors consisted of classrooms and the fourth was given over to dormitories. The décor was plain and there was no privacy for the seminarists. An open corridor connected the dormitories; personal belongings were on open view. Cassocks, textbooks and Bible were standard issue. Like their fellows halfway down Golovin Prospect at the First Classical Gimnazia, the seminarists were being trained to serve God, Tsar and Empire.

At the time of Dzhughashvili’s arrival the Exarch of Georgia was Archbishop Vladimir. The Rector from 1898 was Germogen, a Russian. The Seminary Inspector was a Georgian called Abashidze. The Russian priesthood was not known for liberal political and social convictions. The appointees to the Georgian Exarchate were even more reactionary than the norm in Russia and several were to identify themselves publicly with the cause of Russian nationalism in later years. Many were virulent anti-semites propagating notions that can now be recognised as proto-fascist. While functioning in Georgia, they regarded it as their duty to stamp out signs of Georgian national assertiveness.⁴ They carried this intolerance to an extreme. The Georgian language was severely restricted in the Tiflis Spiritual Seminary and students were required to speak and write Russian or else face punishment. Archpriest Ioann Vostorgov, who influenced ecclesiastical educational policy across the Russian Empire, gave the rationale for this. He argued that Tbilisi was highly multiethnic and that there was no sense in privileging Georgian over other languages.⁵ Some priests less courteously referred to Georgian as ‘a filthy language’.⁶

The rules were strict. Seminarists were allowed into the city for just an hour a day. Gestures of respect were demanded for the Rector and his staff. Discipline was administered from Inspector Abashidze’s office to the left of the foyer. Miscreants were punishable by solitary confinement. The authorities recruited informers from among the seminarists to stamp out insubordination. Only approved books were allowed into the building. Regular inspections were made of the lockers. The food was plain, and only those who lived in lodgings got relief from a diet heavily reliant on beans and bread. Seminarists went to bed early in the evening and rose early in the morning. The shock to Joseph and his fellow newcomers can hardly be exaggerated. Always in Gori they could come and go as they pleased after school. Rector Germogen’s regime prohibited all that. What made things worse for Joseph was his age. He was already in the second half of his adolescence when he left Gori. Often the Seminary took in boys in their thirteenth year. Being three years older than the normal first-year seminarists, Joseph was less easily malleable.

His biographers have tended to underrate the quality of the curriculum. The reason is the usual one: they have uncritically reproduced what Stalin’s enemies in the revolutionary movement published on the topic. For them, he was an ignoramus with inadequate schooling. Stalin himself reinforced this impression. As a revolutionary he disliked drawing attention to the benefits he derived from the Imperial order. In fact only very bright boys were admitted to the Tiflis Spiritual Seminary and the schooling was pitched at a higher level than in less prestigious ecclesiastical institutions. There were two such seminaries in Tbilisi: one for Georgians, the other for Armenians; they attracted youths who lacked the finance to enter the First Classical Gimnazia. Indeed some parents entered their boys for the seminaries in the knowledge that the course could be used as a qualification to go on to secular higher education.

The curriculum helped to form the person who became Stalin. It was taken for granted that the Russian and Church-Slavonic languages had already been mastered.⁷ Students at the Tiflis Spiritual Seminary, being the best recruits from the local Georgian schools, were expected to tackle a wide range of subjects. Christian vocational training was not predominant at first: not only Russian literature and history but also Greek and Latin were studied.⁸ Of course, the pedagogy had a political orientation. Secular literature was chosen from works thought to support the Imperial government; and the course in history was based on the textbook by D. I. Ilovaiski, whose priority was to praise the tsars and their conquests.⁹ The standard curriculum required pupils to master Xenophon’s Anabasis and, by the fourth year, to come to terms with Plato’s Apology and Phaedo.¹⁰ Although the curriculum in secular subjects was not as expansive as in the gimnazias it gave pupils a fairly broad education by the European standards of the time.

Joseph started well. In his first-year exams he scored the highest marks in all but one subject:¹¹

His Gori schooling had left him weaker in Greek than in other subjects (and perhaps his late entrance to the Seminary precluded him from starting Latin).

The later years of the Seminary curriculum increased its emphasis on the Christian faith and on practical preparation for the priesthood. In the sixth year Joseph Dzhughashvili had only one weekly period of Greek and no Russian secular literature or history nor any science or mathematics. The gap was filled by ecclesiastical history, liturgy, homiletics, dogma, comparative theology, moral theology, practical pastoral work, didactics and, as before, Holy Scripture and church singing.¹² The curriculum irked the young seminarists. All the allowable works of Russian literature predated Alexander Pushkin. Other banned classics were the novels of Lev Tolstoi, Fëdor Dostoevski and Ivan Turgenev. Georgian poetry and prose were proscribed. Even Shota Rustaveli, the thirteenth-century poet, was prohibited.¹³ National sensitivities and cultural aspirations were affronted by the curriculum and rules of the Tiflis Spiritual Seminary, and the Rector had no answer other than to reinforce his reliance on surveillance and punishment. As Joseph Dzhughashvili progressed from year to year, his sympathies moved towards those who kicked against the regulations. Intelligent and patriotic, he refused to accept the conditions. Secretly he talked to seminarists who felt the same. Whenever they could, they undermined the imposed regime.

Joseph’s personal development had a long tradition. Within a few years of its foundation the Seminary had given trouble to the authorities. Rebelliousness was constant. Silva Dzhibladze, a future Marxist, was expelled in 1884 for physically assaulting the Rector. Two years later a certain Largiashvili, a seminarist from Gori, went a step further and stabbed the Rector to death.¹⁴ During Lent in 1890, while Joseph Dzhughashvili was still at the Gori Spiritual School, the Tbilisi seminarists went on strike. Bored by the endless meals of beans, they refused to attend lessons unless the diet was changed. Among the strike leaders were Noe Zhordania and Pilipe Makharadze.¹⁵ Zhordania was to become the leader of Georgian Menshevism and Makharadze a leading Georgian Bolshevik. Their demands were expanded to include teaching in the Georgian language and courses in Georgian history and literature. The boycott of classes went on for a week and Zhordania and Makharadze produced a handwritten journal to agitate for sustained support.¹⁶ Another food strike broke out in 1893 and led to the expulsion of Akaki Chkhenkeli, Vladimir Ketskhoveli and Severian Dzhugheli. They all became famous as Marxists. Mikha Tskhakaya and Isidore Ramishvili also entered the Marxist movement after leaving the Seminary.¹⁷

The Russian Orthodox Church had become the finest recruiting agency for the revolutionary organisations. Each year the specific complaints of the seminarists were the same: the restricted curriculum, the denigration of Georgian culture, the harsh discipline and the grim meals at Lententide. The antagonism of the priests to all things secular, national and modern was simply counter-productive. Rector Germogen and Inspector Abashidze did Karl Marx’s work for him.

There was no strike in Joseph’s time at the Seminary. But resistance to the rules was systematic and he was quick to join the rebels. Their minds thirsted for intellectual nourishment beyond the menu of the official curriculum. Out and about in the city they found what they wanted. Seminarists feared denunciation if they borrowed disapproved books from the nearby Public Library. Instead they sought out the Iveria and Kvali editorial offices and Zakaria Chichinadze’s bookshop. There they could read and talk about things banned by the priests. Iveria was edited by the poet and commentator Ilya Chavchavadze. While calling for Georgian cultural freedom, Chavchavadze eschewed anything but the mildest demands for social and economic reform. Giorgi Tsereteli’s Kvali was more radical. Coming out every Saturday, it attracted contributions from critical intellectuals across a wide range which included both agrarian socialists and Marxists (and in January 1898 Tsereteli handed over the editorship lock, stock and barrel to Noe Zhordania without any political conditions).¹⁸ Zakaria Chichinadze was a socialist sympathiser. Chavchavadze, Tsereteli and Chichinadze had many disagreements while concurring on the need for some reform and for Georgians to struggle to that end. They understood that the key to success lay in their campaign to win the hearts and minds of youths like Joseph.

As editors and publishers they were very enterprising. The Imperial censorship was a patchy phenomenon. Tight and intrusive in St Petersburg, it was slacker in Georgia and Finland. The harsh control over ideas in the Seminary was not replicated outside its walls. Although overtly nationalist works were picked out for attention, pieces on social, economic and historical themes were permitted to appear. Before the turn of the century, moreover, the chief perceived danger to the Romanovs was thought to come from those intellectuals who called for armed struggle, regional autonomy or even secession from the Russian Empire. Chavchavadze offered no direct challenge to the monarchy or the social order. But the Marxists too were deemed to be not unduly menacing since they appeared to be preoccupied with social and economic grievances; none of them demanded Georgian territorial autonomy, far less independence. The chief censor in Tbilisi, Giorgi Zhiruli, cheerfully admitted to his ignorance of Marxism. In such an environment it was possible to have a lively public debate. Marxists in Russia had to content themselves with thick journals published in St Petersburg and with intermittently appearing émigré newspapers.¹⁹ The debate for the soul of the Georgian nation was intense as conservatives, liberals and socialists contended with each other.

Joseph Dzhughashvili was more confident than most first-year seminarists. He had begun to write his own verses, and quickly after arriving in Tbilisi he set about trying to get them published. His themes were nature, land and patriotism. Ilya Chavchavadze appreciated his talent. Joseph’s first printed poem, ‘To the Moon’, appeared in the magazine Iveria in June 1895. Giorgi Tsereteli’s Kvali was no less enthusiastic about his work, and Joseph — writing under pseudonyms such ‘I. Dzh-shvili’ and ‘Soselo’ to avoid detection by the Rector and the Inspector — had six poems published in 1895–6.²⁰

The poem ‘Morning’ was a touching work written in the romantic literary style then conventional in Georgian literary circles:²¹

Nobody would claim that this in translation is high art; but in the Georgian original it has a linguistic purity recognised by all. The themes of nature and nation commended themselves to readers. The educationist Yakob Gogebashvili, who had contacts with revolutionaries in Tbilisi,²² valued the poem so highly that he included it in the later editions of his school textbook, Mother Tongue (deda ena).²³

There was a nationalist edge to Joseph’s poems even though he restrained himself in order to avoid annoying the Tbilisi censor. His images were those of many writers in the oppressed countries of Europe and Asia of that time: mountain, sky, eagle, motherland, songs, dreams and the solitary traveller. The closest he came to disclosing his political orientation was in an untitled work dedicated to ‘the poet and singer of peasant labour, Count Rapael Eristavi’. For Joseph, Eristavi had identified himself with the plight of the poor toilers of the Georgian countryside.²⁴

Eristavi, born in 1824, was an ethnographer and folklorist as well as poet. His focus on the need for social and economic reform made him an unmistakable opponent of the status quo in the Russian Empire. According to one of Joseph’s fellow seminarists, the poem dedicated to Eristavi was interpreted as revolutionary in content.²⁵ This may be an exaggeration. But Joseph was undeniably offering a work intended to criticise the status quo.

The legend of a rejected Georgian youth was a figment of Stalin’s imagination. He was welcomed by the Georgian cultural elite. As soon as he left Gori, there was no going back except for holidays. Tbilisi offered the promise of realised ambition. His friends, whether they had come from rich or poor backgrounds, felt the same. They had an eagerness to make a mark in the world outside the town of their birth.

Stalin later made out that he and his comrades crept into Chichinadze’s shop and, short of funds, surreptitiously copied out the forbidden texts into their notebooks. Supposedly they did this in relays to relieve the pain to their hands. A less likely situation is hard to imagine in a well-ordered enterprise. (Not that this has stopped biographers from taking the story at its face value.) Chichinadze was on the side of those who opposed the Russian establishment in Tbilisi. When the seminarists came on to his premises, he surely greeted them warmly; and if copying took place, it must have been with his express or implicit permission.²⁶ The spread of ideas was more important to the metropolitan intellectual elite than mere profit. It was a battle the liberals could scarcely help winning. Chichinadze’s shop was a treasure house of the sort of books the youngsters wanted. Joseph Dzhughashvili was fond of Victor Hugo’s The Year Ninety-Three. He was punished for smuggling it into the Seminary; and when in November 1896 an inspection turned up Hugo’s Toilers of the Sea, Rector Germogen meted out a ‘lengthy stay’ in the solitary cell.²⁷

According to his friend Iremashvili, the group also got hold of texts by Marx, Darwin, Plekhanov and Lenin.²⁸ Stalin told of this in 1938, claiming that each member paid five kopeks to borrow the first volume of Marx’s Capital for a fortnight.²⁹ Much as they liked Ilya Chavchavadze and Giorgi Tsereteli, they were not in intellectual thrall to them. Some works by Marx and his followers were legally published in the Russian Empire. Others were passed secretly from hand to hand. The Orthodox Church had lost the contest to retain the loyalty of its livelier seminarists in the Georgian capital. The true struggle was among the various political and cultural trends outside the Seminary. Chavchavadze, a conservative reformer, hoped for a revival of national culture; Tsereteli, a radical liberal, aimed at basic socio-economic reform. By the 1890s, though, they were having to compete with advocates of diverse strands of socialism. Marxism was on the rise in Georgia and Joseph Dzhughashvili was already becoming attracted to its tenets.

As his time in the Tiflis Spiritual Seminary drew to an end, Joseph had become thoroughly alienated from the authorities. He had ceased to study hard from his second year when he became involved in writing and publishing.³⁰ He was also drawing back from the world of literature. Despite the patronage of Ilya Chavchavadze and Giorgi Tsereteli, he no longer sought to be a poet. He tossed aside the opportunity to join the Georgian cultural elite. Instead he intensified his studies of socialism, politics and economics. Having hurtled like a small meteor across the Tbilisi literary scene in 1895–6, he just as suddenly disappeared. It would appear that he entirely stopped composing poetry. Few people apart from his publishers and his close friends at the Seminary had an inkling that he had ever published any. (When Yakob Gogebashvili reprinted ‘Morning’ in 1912, it was under the original pseudonym.)³¹ Dzhughashvili searched for a different way of life from the kind offered either by the priesthood or Tbilisi literary circles. His alter ego as a rough-voiced militant from the depths of society was beginning to emerge; and as far as most people knew, this persona was the only Dzhughashvili who existed.

He detested the disciplinary regime at the Seminary. On 28 September 1898 he was the centre of a group found to be reading prohibited material. Joseph had even taken notes on it.³² Inspector Abashidze, exasperated by infringements, reported:

Joseph’s behaviour was almost asking for trouble and the Rector’s reaction aggravated the tension in the young man. It was only a matter of time before Joseph threw up his priestly vocation.

He stuck it out almost to the end of the course. There were pragmatic reasons for this. A piece of paper attesting completion of the seminary training, even if he declined to enter the priesthood, would have given him the qualifications (if he had the necessary money) to become a student in one of the Russian Empire’s universities. But Joseph had no private source of income and had no connection with any organisation which might support him. He would have to make his living for himself from scratch. Consequently his disappearance from the Tiflis Spiritual Seminary in May 1899, as the last examinations were about to be sat, was an act of existential choice. He left no explanation of his decision to the authorities. In later years he pretended that he had been expelled for carrying out ‘Marxist propaganda’;³³ but the reality was that he had left of his own accord. His was a wilful spirit. He had lost his religious faith and was beginning to discover a different way of interpreting the world in Marxism. He was also impulsive. Joseph Dzhughashvili had had enough: he left the priestly environment on his own terms. Always he wanted the world to function to his wishes. If he left a mess behind him, too bad. He had made his decision.

He abhorred the Imperial authorities. He had national pride. In Tbilisi he responded to the intellectual effervescence of Georgian public life at the end of the nineteenth century. He already considered himself a man of outstanding ability. He had already shown his ambition by getting his poems published.

The contours of Joseph’s later personality were already disclosing themselves. He was dedicated to self-improvement through daily study. His capacity for hard work, whenever he thought such work was useful, was immense. The Imperial order had given him a usefully wide education, albeit an education underpinned by Christian liturgy and tsarist loyalism. He was literate and numerate; he had a pleasing style in poetry. In his spare time he had started to acquaint himself with broader ideas about society and to study Marxist texts. He also read Russian and European classic novels. He was obviously capable of going on to university and had an acute analytical mind. His problem was what to do with his life. Having abandoned Christianity, he had no career ahead of him; and his family lacked the resources and desire to enable him to enter an alternative profession. For the next few years he was to expend much energy trying to decide the fundamental question for rebels in the Russian Empire: what is to be done? Another question also exercised his mind: with whom to do it? Young Dzhughashvili, fresh out of the Tiflis Spiritual Seminary, had yet to formulate his answers.

5. MARXIST MILITANT

Leaving the Seminary, Joseph Dzhughashvili had to find paid employment without delay. Gori held no attraction. Only Tbilisi offered serious opportunities and Joseph anyway wanted to combine work with revolutionary activity. For a while he eked out a living by giving private lessons;¹ but on 28 December 1899 his friends helped to get him a job at the Physical Observatory in Mikhailovski Street. He worked there for three months. It was his only period of sustained employment until after the October Revolution. Joseph bought the Russian translation of Sir Norman Lockyer’s Astronomy, first published in 1874, for reference.² His daily duties required him to record the temperature and weather four times. The only technical necessity was to read the magnetic tape, which he needed to sign each day before consigning it to the Observatory files.³

He had been sleeping at the Observatory off and on since October when Vano Ketskhoveli — his school friend in Gori — started work there. By the end of the year M. Davitashvili, yet another Gori school friend and former seminarist, had joined them in the same single room.⁴ The cramped conditions were alleviated by the fact that Davitashvili often stayed with relatives in the city. Then in January 1900 Joseph and Vano were given a two-room flat on the ground floor overlooking the pleasant garden at the back of the building. Soon they had welcomed ex-seminarist V. Berdzenishvili as fellow tenant.⁵ All were hostile to the Imperial order and wanted revolutionary change. The flat became a meeting place for other dissenters. Mikhailovski Street was the busiest left-bank thoroughfare in Tbilisi so that friends could come and go without attracting suspicion. Among those who made contact was Vano Ketskhoveli’s elder brother Lado (who had been expelled from the Seminary in 1893).⁶ Joseph and Lado hit it off despite the difference in years. Both were strong-willed and ambitious. They were practical organisers in the making. It was a matter of time before they would want to move beyond their discussions in the Physical Observatory.

Having repudiated the Seminary and its regulatory code, Joseph wanted to look the part of a tough, unsentimental revolutionary. His father had worked in a factory. So, too, had Joseph briefly: he needed no one to teach him the mores of the working class in the Russian Empire. Joseph refused to wear the typical three-piece suit of the Marxist theoretician:⁷

His slovenliness signalled a deliberate rejection of ‘middle-class’ values. Yet at the same time there was a complication. The cut of his shirt was Russian but the fact that it was black marked him out as a Georgian. The national ambiguity reflected a will to live on his own terms. He wanted to appear ‘proletarian’ while also being taken for an ‘intellectual’. To workers he was a teacher and an organiser; to educated comrades he was an organiser and a potential pupil.

Groups of Marxists in Tbilisi scrabbled around to obtain the political texts they needed. Works by Marx, Engels, Lassalle and Dickstein as well as Georgi Plekhanov and Alexander Bogdanov were carefully studied in the 1890s.⁸ Works on earlier generations of Russian revolutionaries, on the Paris Commune of 1871 and on the French Revolution were also examined.⁹ Among the Marxist groups was one led by Lev Rozenfeld and Suren Spandaryan. Rozenfeld was to become better known under his pseudonym Kamenev. Kamenev and Spandaryan would later become comrades of Dzhughashvili. Kamenev had been a pupil at the First Classical Gimnazia. His father was a leading engineer and entrepreneur who helped to construct the oil pipeline from Baku to Batumi. Confidently he gave talks on Marxist theory. Dzhughashvili attended one of them at the suggestion of his Gori friend Davrishevi and was impressed.¹⁰ It was a situation of historical irony: Kamenev, who played a part in attracting him to Marxism, was to be shot by Stalin’s political police (known at that time as the NKVD) in 1936. At any rate these ex-students of the Seminary and the Classical Gimnazia felt there was a world to be explored. Workers were at its analytical core but were not yet a fulcrum of Marxist activity.

Although he was tied to the Observatory premises for long hours each day, Joseph’s tasks were hardly onerous; he could read what he wanted while he was on duty. It was a welcome change from the Seminary. He used his leisure productively. Among the recently published books he acquired was Alexander Bogdanov’s Short Course in Economic Science. Not all the works in his growing library were Marxist. Joseph also bought General Philosophy of the Soul by the mid-nineteenth-century exiled Russian aristocrat Alexander Herzen. Nor did he give up his interest in Georgian, Russian and European literature. But Marxism was at the centre of his plans for his future. He always did things with a definite purpose. In this case the purpose was clear. Joseph planned to revive his writing career with contributions to Marxist discussions in Georgia.

The best among the possibilities for him at the turn of the century was the newspaper Kvali, which had been handed over to a surprised Noe Zhordania in 1898 (and which had published some of Dzhughash-vili’s poems before he abandoned literary ambition). Kvali made an impact on the Georgian intelligentsia with its critical analysis of social and economic conditions. The Caucasian office of the Imperial censorship took a gentle approach to Kvali, and Zhordania directly upbraided the chief censor when he objected to a particular issue of the news-paper.¹¹ Yet it was Joseph Iremashvili, who like Dzhughashvili had declined to complete his priest’s training, who first offered an article to Kvali. Dzhughashvili congratulated his friend on his piece on the agrarian question.¹² Meanwhile Iremashvili noted how hard Dzhughashvili was studying. On the table in the Observatory flat lay a pile of works by Plekhanov and Lenin (whose real name was Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov) — already Dzhughashvili was Lenin’s admirer.¹³ Dzhughashvili was not yet ready with something to say. He had become cautious. Instead he threw himself into propaganda activity among the workers of Tbilisi. This was the norm for Marxist intellectuals. While educating themselves through the works of Marx and Engels, they popularised Marxist ideas among railwaymen, shoemakers and textile-factory labourers. Dzhughashvili was given two workers’ circles to lead.¹⁴

Joseph’s progress was disturbed on the night of 21–22 March 1901. The police raided several homes inhabited by Marxists, and the Observatory was on their list. Joseph had been under surveillance virtually since starting work there.¹⁵ Several of his friends across the city were arrested but he was untouched. It was not the last time that he was lucky (which later gave rise to the suspicion that he was an agent of the Imperial political police, the Okhrana).¹⁶ But obviously he could not return to the Observatory without the risk of being detained. He opted for an existence on the run. His mind was made up. He lived for revolution and knew that this would bring frequent uncomfortable episodes along with it. Prison and exile were eventually inevitable. For the next few weeks he moved from house to house of political associates.

The Georgian Marxists took their nation’s development seriously. But Georgia posed problems. Most Georgians did not think of themselves first and foremost as Georgians. They saw themselves as belonging to one or other of the large ethnic groups in Georgia and some of them, especially the Mingrelians, spoke their own different language. But Georgian Marxists believed that encouragement of a national consciousness would enhance political development and, ultimately, the dissemination of socialist ideas. Another difficulty was geopolitical. The Marxists could see that Georgia’s independence would put the country at the mercy of the Ottoman Empire. Marxism in any case taught them to see salvation not by means of secession from Russia but through the advancement of the working classes in all countries. All of them wanted Marxism to become a united force regardless of national backgrounds across the entire Caucasus. Georgians, Armenians and Azeris should be encouraged to struggle together against the Romanov monarchy and its political and social order. The Marxists of the Caucasus should also adhere to the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party, founded in 1898, which covered the entire Russian Empire.

Marxism had been growing in influence among dissenting intellectuals and workers from the mid-1880s. They were inspired by ideas developed by the political émigré Georgi Plekhanov, who suggested that capitalism was developing fast across the empire and that the working class was the group in society best able to bring about an end to the Romanov monarchy and to initiate changes which eventually would lead to the achievement of socialism. Other socialists stuck to an earlier Russian tradition which Plekhanov had abandoned. These were revolutionaries who looked mainly to the peasantry to bring down the oppressive order of state and society. Such revolutionaries, guided by Viktor Chernov, were to form the Party of Socialist-Revolutionaries in 1901. Chernov shared ideas with Marxists but claimed that the social structure of the Russian Empire had not yet changed as much as Plekhanov asserted; he also saw the industrial workers as being little different, socially and culturally, from the peasantry. Also active in the Russian Empire were liberal political groups. Initially they were headed by Pëtr Struve, who had started public life as a Marxist. In 1905 they were to establish the Constitutional-Democratic Party. The Constitutional-Democrats (or Kadets) advocated liberal democracy and capitalism as the solution to the problems of the country.

The Marxists, though, dominated public debate in Georgia. They triumphed over the liberals and conservatives who already existed there. Socialist-Revolutionaries acquired no following in the south Caucasus. The main rivals to Marxism were the Social-Federalists, who were Georgian socialists with a strongly nationalist orientation which demanded the transformation of the Russian Empire into a federal state with Georgia as one of its constituent subjects. But the Social-Federalists failed to win over the majority of dissenting opinion. Noe Zhordania’s was the dominant voice among Georgia’s Marxists. He had a strong personality, moral force and flair with the pen.¹⁷ Marxism in Georgia was largely the product of his ideas and activity. Zhordania, too, understood that independence for the Georgians would expose them to invasion by the Ottoman Empire. He was not invulnerable to challenge to his authority. Pilipe Makharadze, Mikha Tskhakaya and other Marxists thought him too soft on Georgian liberals. But Zhordania saw Georgia’s Marxists as the leaders of a national movement against the political and economic system of tsarism. To this end he co-operated with all trends of anti-Romanov opinion in Georgia. It was this that had induced the liberal Giorgi Tsereteli to transfer possession of Kvali to him.

Dzhughashvili’s friend Lado Ketskhoveli agreed with Zhordania’s critics and was keen to counteract the trend by practical action. Ketskhoveli argued for the establishment of a clandestine newspaper. Although Kvali had its uses, it could not propagate a full revolutionary message for fear of the Imperial censorship.¹⁸ Ketskhoveli and Dzhughashvili generally advocated tighter forms of ‘underground’ organisation than Zhordania approved. Whereas Zhordania hoped to broaden the opportunity for ordinary workers to join the Marxists and contribute actively to party life, his younger critics thought it risky to let authority slip from the hands of experienced organisers such as themselves. This dispute affected the whole Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party at the turn of the century. The beginnings of the split which occurred in 1903 between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks were already detectable. Agreement existed that the techniques of clandestine party activity had to be respected. Beyond this point there were the symptoms of a split which became a gaping wound in Georgian Marxism in the years ahead.

Lado Ketskhoveli shrugged off Zhordania’s control by setting up an illegal Marxist newspaper, Brdzola (‘Struggle’), in Baku on the Caspian coast. Zhordania had obstructed any such venture in Georgia for fear of jeopardising the publication of Kvali. For Ketskhoveli, Zhordania’s reaction was a further indication that the Tbilisi Marxist leadership was making too many compromises. Baku’s population included Russians, Armenians and Georgians as well as an Azeri majority. He quickly found a press in Baku¹⁹ and by forging documents purporting to come from the governor of Yelizavetgrad he was able to get the owners to go ahead with the printing.²⁰ Cunning and strong-minded, he set up the kind of Georgian-language newspaper he wanted. Copies were sent to Marxist groups throughout the Caucasus. Later in life Dzhughashvili pretended that he had co-founded Brdzola. In reality it was exclusively Ketskhoveli’s work. Dzhughashvili also overstated the degree of antagonism between the two of them and Zhordania. Tensions certainly existed and were increasing; but co-operation persisted, and Ketskhoveli eventually turned to Zhordania to write the editorial for one of Brdzola’s issues.²¹

Meanwhile Dzhughashvili was making a nuisance of himself in the Georgian capital. The Tiflis Committee of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party was riddled with political and personal disputes. (Georgia’s Marxists, never aspiring to secession from the Russian Empire, referred to their capital by the Russian name Tiflis.) But Dzhughashvili made everything worse. One memoir, without directly naming him, identifies a ‘young, muddled comrade from the intelligentsia, “energetic” in all matters’. According to this account, the individual, ‘invoking conspiratorial considerations as well as the unpreparedness and lack of [political] consciousness among workers, came out against admitting workers to the committee’.²² The Marxists of Tbilisi took this to be an unpleasant opinion unpleasantly delivered — and the context makes it virtually certain that Dzhughashvili was the comrade in question. Another contemporary, Grigol Uratadze, wrote more directly that Dzhughashvili was arraigned before his comrades and found guilty as a ‘slanderer’.²³

In November 1901, after being withdrawn from propaganda work in Tbilisi by the City Committee, Dzhughashvili left for Batumi on the Black Sea coast seeking to spread his ideas in a more receptive milieu. But many Marxists in Batumi did not take to him. Dzhughashvili kept ranting about the sins of commission and omission of the Tiflis Committee. This was bad enough. But the comrades in Batumi could not stand his ‘personal capriciousness and his tendency to despotic behaviour’.²⁴ What is notable here is that objections were made less to policy than to attitude and comportment. Nastiness to acquaintances had been his hallmark since he had been a youngster. Ambition too had been a characteristic. But he wanted to rise to revolutionary eminence on his own terms; and whenever others baulked him, he told them they were wrong and stupid. He was a clever young man who thought he had the answers to the difficulties experienced by Marxist propagandists in the south Caucasus. Stressing the need for clandestine activity, illegal propaganda and control over the workers, Dzhughashvili was a Bolshevik in waiting.

He was not ineffective in Batumi. He worked with fellow Marxists and pipeline and port workers to stir up revolt against the employers. Contact was made with likely recruits to the party. The Rothschild and Mantashëv enterprises were his favourite spots. At the same time he kept in contact with Ketskhoveli hundreds of miles east in Baku. Strikes broke out in Batumi and Dzhughashvili and his group were involved. He was doing what his ideology and policies induced him to do. He was involved, too, in the organisation of a protest demonstration by workers on 8 March 1902. They were demanding the release of strike leaders imprisoned a few days earlier. The demonstration had fatal consequences. The town authorities panicked at the sight of six thousand angry marching workers and troops fired on them. Fifteen demonstrators were killed. A massive Okhrana investigation followed. There were hundreds of arrests. Police spies had penetrated the Batumi Marxist organisation and it was only a matter of time before Dzhughashvili’s whereabouts were discovered. He was taken into custody on 5 April and detained in Batumi Prison.

One resident, Hashim Smyrba, regretted Dzhughashvili’s departure. Dzhughashvili had stayed for a while in hiding with him. Hashim, a peasant who was probably an Abkhazian, took to him and expressed regret that he wasn’t a Moslem: ‘Because if you adopted the Moslem faith, I’d find you seven beautiful women to marry.’²⁵ The scene was recounted to indicate that Dzhughashvili had always had the common touch. But Smyrba was an elderly peasant outside the revolutionary movement. The fact that few workers testified on Dzhughashvili’s behalf decades after his stay in Batumi was surely significant. He kept himself to himself. He was self-sufficient and did not want to rely on others when he did not need to. Already he was something of a loner.

Dzhughashvili in any case no longer depended on the goodwill of comrades in Batumi or Tbilisi. He kept in close contact with his friend Ketskhoveli in Baku. His article on ‘The Russian Social-Democratic Party and its Immediate Tasks’, covering many political and organisational questions of the day, was the main item in the second issue of Brdzola.²⁶ Ketskhoveli did not mind. Although he remained chief editor he recognised that he was better at organising than at writing or editing. They made a dynamic pair. Brdzola became a publishing success in the clandestine Marxist movement across the south Caucasus. According to Stalin’s own account, he became drawn to the writer’s life and seriously contemplated abandoning clandestine political activity and entering university — and not just as a student but as a professor.²⁷ (He never explained who would have paid his way for him.) Another aspect of his early literary career continued to exercise him in old age. This was the ‘peaceful’ content of several of his writings. Even in Brdzola, unworried about the censor’s office, he had avoided a direct summons to revolution.

Reportedly Ketskhoveli swore at him for being too moderate; but Dzhughashvili was to claim that until the shooting of workers in Batumi in March 1902 he had been justified in his measured tone. All then changed: ‘The tone was altered.’ Never again did Dzhughashvili hold back in contest with the opponents of Marxism in Georgia or the Russian Empire as a whole.²⁸ Ketskhoveli and Dzhughashvili were discovering for themselves that their basic inclinations were not peculiar to them or to Georgia. In December 1900 some Russian émigré Marxists, on the initiative of Lenin, had founded Iskra (‘The Spark’) in Munich. Its supporters advocated clandestine political activity as the key to future impact. One of Iskra’s contacts in the south Caucasus was Lev Galperin, who worked for Brdzola. Material started to arrive from Germany at Batumi in 1901–2.²⁹ Iskra was campaigning for control over the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party. Its ideas were more developed than those of Ketskhoveli. Lenin and his comrades wanted no compromise with the middle class. They urged the formation of militant, tightly organised groups. They stood for centralisation, discipline and doctrinal orthodoxy. Brdzola, however, was wrecked by the Okhrana even before Dzhughashvili’s arrest: on 14 March 1902 the entire editorial and supporting group except for Abel Enukidze and Bogdan Knunyants were taken into custody in Baku.³⁰

While the Brdzola group languished in the gaols of Batumi and Baku, Noe Zhordania continued to elaborate the strategy and tactics of Georgian Marxism. Both Zhordania and Lenin felt that the founding parents of Marxism in the Russian Empire — Georgi Plekhanov, Pavel Axelrod and Vera Zasulich — had failed to discern the advantages of appealing to the peasantry. Lenin was out to attract peasant sympathy by offering to restore the strips of land lost to the gentry landlords through the Emancipation Edict of 1861. Many Russian Marxists thought the proposal too indulgent to the peasantry; they preferred the orthodox emphasis on campaigning among the working class. But Zhordania criticised Lenin for insufficient audacity. Instead he urged that all agricultural lands should pass into the hands of peasants. Dynastic, ecclesiastical and noble estates should be expropriated. Most Georgian workers had ties with the countryside. Georgia was a predominantly agrarian society. Not only that: Zhordania urged Georgian Marxists to go out among the peasants and recruit them to the ranks of organised Marxism.³¹ Very quickly his comrades answered his call. The campaign paid off. Nowhere else in the Russian Empire were peasants so ready to hearken to Marxists. Marxists could boast of their hegemony over the Georgian political opposition to the Romanov monarchy.

Dzhughashvili did not approve of Zhordania’s strategy. He agreed that the peasants should be promised the transfer of all agricultural lands and that Lenin’s proposal was too timid. But he disliked the idea of diverting so much propaganda and organisation to the peasants. He insisted on the need to operate among the ‘workers’. He also made a point of the need for Marxists to report on and explain the vicissitudes of the labour movement outside the Russian Empire, especially in central and western Europe.³²

About a further point of dissent with Zhordania, however, he was always to show extraordinary reticence. Dzhughashvili was still far from abandoning all his Georgian patriotism. He wished a distinct Marxist party to be formed in Georgia. Whereas Zhordania aimed for a regional organisation covering the entire Caucasus regardless of its ancient national and ethnic boundaries, Dzhughashvili demanded a Georgian territorial demarcation in the party.³³ The difference between Zhordania and Dzhughashvili was large; it was even larger between Dzhughashvili and those other comrades such as Mikha Tskhakaya who were to become Bolsheviks. Tskhakaya agreed that the books, pamphlets and newspapers had to be written in the Georgian language — otherwise no Georgian workers would get acquainted with Marxism — but like other radical Marxists, he felt that Zhordania’s preoccupation with Georgia’s national and cultural development gave off a whiff of nationalism. Dzhughashvili’s idea for a territorially demarcated organisation in the south Caucasus seemed equally malodorous to radicals who espoused Marxism because it offered a path to modernity and away from nationalist strife.

Such an idea in fact had echoes more widely in the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party. The Jewish Bund — the Marxist organisation based in the western borderlands of the Russian Empire and dedicated exclusively to work among Jews — was criticized by the Iskra group for demanding territorial autonomy inside the party despite the fact that other ethnic groups lived in the same region. (Marxists in the south Caucasus avoided such requests on behalf of a single national or ethnic group.) This request was discussed at the Second Party Congress in August 1903. When Iskra’s representatives opposed any such nationalterritorial principle for organisation, the Bundists walked out. Wilful and independently minded, Dzhughashvili was risking being classified as a Marxist who could not accept the Russian Social-Democratic Party’s commitment to internationalism.

Dzhughashvili, though, was undeterred. He had begun to make a mark for himself. Having moved involuntarily from Tbilisi, he did not gain a reputation as a congenial comrade; but this did not prevent him from imposing himself. In Batumi he found a set of workers ripe for being influenced by his summons to revolutionary activity; and he helped to organise the strikes and demonstrations against the monarchy. From Batumi he kept in touch with Baku, and Dzhughashvili was developing his skills in Marxist propaganda. Detention in Batumi Prison cut short his literary career, but he went on discussing his controversial strategic inclinations and giving papers on them.³⁴ He was held there for a year before being transferred to Kutaisi. Transferred back to Batumi, he was finally — in autumn 1903 — dispatched to the southern part of mid-Siberia. The destination was Novaya Uda in Irkutsk Province, where he arrived on 27 November. He escaped in early 1904 and made for Tbilisi. (This required two attempts. On the first occasion he foolishly failed to kit himself out with warm clothing for the Siberian winter and he was recaptured with badly frozen ears and face.)³⁵ The second attempt succeeded. From Tbilisi he travelled the length and breadth of the south Caucasus.

Grigol Uratadze, fellow prisoner in Kutaisi Prison, left a helpful memoir of Dzhughashvili in these years. He wrote long after Dzhughashvili had become Stalin and dictator of the USSR; and the two men were long-standing political opponents. Nevertheless the memoir has some credibility since Uratadze made no pretence that Dzhughashvili already seemed a potential dictator. Uratadze started by saying: ‘As an individual Stalin had no special distinguishing features.’ But then he contradicted himself:³⁶

He was a very dry person; one might even say that he was desiccated. For example, when we were let outside for exercise and all of us in our particular groups made for this or that corner of the prison yard, Stalin stayed by himself and walked backwards and forwards with his short paces, and if anyone tried speaking to him, he would open his mouth into that cold smile of his and perhaps say a few words. And this unsociability attracted general attention.

This was extraordinary behaviour for a prisoner with only a limited opportunity to talk to others. He had arrived in Kutaisi Prison as the sole ‘intellectual’ in the group of prisoners transferred from Batumi.³⁷ Yet he neither helped to keep up their morale nor sought out contact with intellectuals from his own party.³⁸

Kutaisi Prison was nostalgically remembered as a ‘university’ for its inmates.³⁹ Marxist prisoners read books and discussed ideas. Dzhughashvili, however, kept to himself. His strangeness impressed Uratadze:⁴⁰

If this were to be the only such testimony about him, it would be easily dismissed. But it fits with everything said about his personality before and after his period of confinement.

Escaping at last from Novaya Uda, he returned to his Bolshevik comrades in a mood to impose his vision.⁴¹ In his absence there had been fundamental changes in the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party and Lenin, for a while, emerged the victor. At the Second Party Congress, which was held in Brussels and London from July to August 1903, Lenin’s Iskra group had trounced the other trends. But at the moment of their triumph the Iskraists fell apart. Lenin’s supporters advocated a particularly exigent set of conditions for party membership. His erstwhile associate Yuli Martov, who had helped him to drive out the Bund, found himself in a minority. Martov agreed on the need for clandestinity, centralism, discipline and ideological unity. But, like Zhordania in Georgia, he frowned on policies designed to restrict the number of party members. It was Martov’s belief that Lenin had gone over to an authoritarian and counter-productive organisational campaign. They and their supporters voted against each other. Lenin won and called his followers the Majoritarians (bol’sheviki or Bolsheviks), and Martov in a fit of self-abnegation allowed his men and women to be known as the Minoritarians (men’sheviki or Mensheviks).

Detailed news of the dénouement at the Second Party Congress took time to filter back to Georgia. The split between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks among the exiles was not reproduced in Tbilisi. The same was true in most Russian cities. But two general trends nevertheless emerged across the Russian Empire, and Georgia was no exception. Misha Tskhakaya was among the first to declare himself a Bolshevik. Dzhughashvili too sided with Lenin. But having fled from Novaya Uda, he was not met warmly in Tbilisi. The reason was his oft-repeated call for an autonomous Georgian party. A vigorous rebuke was prepared for him and he faced the threat of being drummed out of the Bolshevik faction before it was properly formed. He was given a choice: if he wanted to stay with the Bolsheviks, he had to write out a statement of his beliefs to be vetted by leading comrades for orthodoxy.⁴² This was a humiliating experience for a man as proud as Dzhughashvili. But he was realistic. He had to prove himself a disciplined, orthodox Bolshevik. If he wanted to regain acceptance, he had to recant, to engage in what later, when he ruled the USSR, became known as self-criticism. Seventy copies of his ‘Credo’ were produced and sent to other radical Marxists in Georgia. The ‘Credo’ definitively repudiated the campaign for Georgian Marxists to have their own autonomous party — and his recantation was a success: he survived the expected censure.

In the 1920s he was to send emissaries to the Caucasus to trace the copies made of the ‘Credo’ he had written in 1904.⁴³ Almost certainly he had them all destroyed. (In the preface to the first volume of his collected works, writing in 1946, the editors claimed that every single copy had been lost.)⁴⁴ But the unpublished memoirs of Sergei Kavtaradze, who was a Tbilisi Bolshevik and was associated with Stalin after the October Revolution, broadly indicate what had been in Dzhughashvili’s ‘Credo’.⁴⁵ After he had recanted, a cloud of suspicion still swirled around his head. Even his promise to avoid repeating his mistakes failed to quieten criticism. He was called a ‘Georgian Bundist’⁴⁶ (which was a peculiar appellation for a person whom many subsequently branded as an antisemite). Tskhakaya went the rounds of the radical Marxists and pleaded on Dzhughashvili’s behalf.⁴⁷ He survived and went on to flourish in the Bolshevik faction. He was energetic, determined and ambitious. He was quirky: he did not accept ideas just on the say-so of others; he changed his policies only when extreme pressure was put upon him. He was cantankerous and conspiratorial. He retained a strong feeling that the national sensitivities of the Georgians and other peoples should be respected. He had started out in Lado Ketskhoveli’s shadow but had begun to distinguish himself by his own opinions and activity. No one among Georgian Marxists doubted his talent.

Events in the Russian Empire were about to test his revolutionary mettle. Peasants since the turn of the century had been buffeted by adverse commercial conditions; they also continued to resent the amount of land held by the gentry. Workers demanded higher wages. Among the intelligentsia there was frustration about the refusal of the Emperor and his government to reform the political system. Several non-Russian nationalities — especially the Poles, Finns and Georgians — chafed against their treatment by St Petersburg. Rural unrest was growing. Industrial strikes rose in frequency and intensity. Clandestine political parties and trade unions were being formed. It was in this situation, in 1904, that Nicholas II decided to go to war with Japan. One of his calculations was that a short, victorious war would revive the prestige of the Romanov monarchy. It was a foolish mistake. All too quickly the Russian armed forces found that the Japanese, who had built up their military and industrial capacity in recent years, were more than a match for them.

6. THE PARTY AND THE CAUCASUS

The Imperial monarchy confronted an emergency situation by early 1905. On 9 January there had been a political demonstration in St Petersburg. Its purpose was to present the Emperor with a petition for the granting of general civic rights. The result was a massacre when the security forces were ordered to fire on the demonstrators. Scores of people were killed. Nicholas II was not to blame for the carnage, but across the country he was held responsible. Police and army stood by helplessly as protest meetings were held. Strikes broke out. Poland and Georgia were focal points of unrest. Peasants moved to assert themselves against the landed gentry. The monarch and his ministers, already discredited by the defeats in the unfinished war with Japan, suddenly looked vulnerable. Workers elected their own councils (or ‘soviets’). The armed forces along the Trans-Siberian Railway were in mutinous mood. The efforts of the Okhrana were futile: political parties operated with decreasing fear of arrest, and although their contact with most people had been frail in previous years, they quickly attained popular confidence. This was a trial of strength with the Romanov regime unprecedented since the Pugachëv revolt of 1773–5.

For the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party the surprise was as great as it was for every other political group. Lenin in Switzerland was taken aback; so too were his followers in St Petersburg and the rest of the Russian Empire. Yet most émigrés were cautious about returning until after Nicholas II issued his October Manifesto promising reforms. In the meantime the revolutionary militants were left to their own devices. The Bolsheviks held a self-styled Third Party Congress in London in April 1905 and fixed their general strategy. They aimed at armed uprising and the formation of a provisional revolutionary dictatorship. They aspired to the total expropriation of land belonging to the monarchy, Church and gentry.

Dzhughashvili was not among the Georgian participants: he had not yet allayed the doubts about him among Bolsheviks. It was his friend and senior comrade Mikha Tskhakaya who headed the country’s group, and Tskhakaya did not fail to criticise the growing cult of Lenin in the Bolshevik faction. There was a practical aspect to this. Many Congress delegates, objecting to Lenin’s reluctance to shift the Central Committee’s base to Russia, thought the émigrés had become too comfortable abroad; and they succeeded in getting a commitment to such a transfer. Dzhughashvili, back in Georgia, was among those who argued that, if revolution was to succeed, maximum resources had to be concentrated in the Russian Empire. He had been coming back into his own before the revolutionary outbreaks. He travelled to Baku and Kutaisi before basing himself in Tbilisi. He published articles in the recently founded Proletarians Brdzola (‘Proletarian Struggle’), including one on the national question which stayed within official Bolshevik lines. He wrote to the Bolsheviks in emigration. When strikes and demonstrations were held after Bloody Sunday on 9 January 1905, he threw himself into a frenzy of writing and organising — and he was a leader of the Bolshevik Tiflis Committee whose policy of armed uprising separated them definitively from the city’s Mensheviks. Sometimes this involved him in open disputations about the respective merits of Bolshevism and Menshevism; on other occasions he put the general Marxist case against the party’s local rivals: the Anarchists, the Social-Federalists and the Socialist-Revolutionaries. Everywhere he went in the Georgian capital he was in the thick of things.

For many of his comrades, though, he was still excessively willing to make compromises on the ‘national question’. When he refused to help them in their dispute in the party’s Caucasian Union Committee in line with local Bolshevik policy, Sergei Kavtaradze accused him of being a ‘traitor’. But Dzhughashvili was unmoved. For him, Kavtaradze and others failed to separate matters of primary and secondary importance. ‘I don’t intend to have a dispute with the Union Committee over this… But you do as you like.’ With that he lit up a cheap cigarette and stared unblinkingly at Kavtaradze; he wanted his critics to know that he would not be pushed around again. Kavtaradze understood the gesture and never forgot it.¹ Dzhughashvili was a fellow who would fight battles only when there was a decent chance of winning them. Ideological rectitude was all very well. But practical results were also important, and unnecessary squabbles should be avoided. His difficulty lay in his inability to gather a group of followers around him. In his eyes, the Georgian Bolsheviks were too rigid in their Leninism whereas the Georgian Mensheviks had the wrong policies.

When revolution had come to the south Caucasus, it took the regional authorities as much by surprise as it did elsewhere. I. I. Vorontsov-Dashkov was sent as viceroy and found himself in an invidious situation. Strikes and demonstrations affected nearly all towns and industrial settlements. Resistance to the Imperial forces was widespread. The strongest revolutionary impetus came from Noe Zhordania and the Georgian Mensheviks, who put themselves forward as both Marxists and national defenders against Russian power. The villages of Guria in western Georgia were especially responsive to the appeal of Menshevism. But everywhere in the Caucasus there were national and ethnic stirrings. On both sides of the mountain chain previously suppressed leaders emerged to challenge Nicholas II and his government. Not everywhere was the conflict characterised by tensions with St Petersburg. Inter-ethnic tensions, long contained by Russian armed forces and the straitjacket of the growing capitalist economy, snapped the patience of society. In the north Caucasus, religious traditionalism came to the fore and violence between Islamists and their rivals grew in intensity. Around the great oil city of Baku the mutual hatred of Armenians and Azeris burst into terrible violence as the Moslem Azeris massacred the Christian Armenians despite the precautions taken by Vorontsov-Dashkov.²

The Armenians in Baku, as in Tbilisi, were led by persons of the greatest wealth, whereas Azeris were typically the poorest section of the labour force. Vorontsov did not underestimate the difficulties and decided to minimise the use of violence to secure the restoration of Imperial order in the south Caucasus.³ Elsewhere in the Russian Empire in the last quarter of 1905 the armed forces were intensively at work. The workers’ soviets were being vigorously suppressed and the armed uprising of the Moscow Soviet was ruthlessly put down. Peasant rebels were being rounded up. The rebel cities in ‘Russian’ Poland were brought to heel. Mutineers in army and navy were arrested and shot. Georgia revolted. Zhordania and his Mensheviks, as well as Bolsheviks such as Dzhughashvili, exulted. Their organisations swelled with recruits. They ceased to hide their activities and the Viceroy moved steadily to a combination of force and consultation. Georgian Marxists dominated the political scene. They did not aim at secession any more than the Bolsheviks. Georgia’s fate in their estimation was tied up with revolutionary developments in Russia.

But Dzhughashvili had made his choice: the Bolshevik strategy seemed the most commendable to him. What struck his acquaintances about him was his extraordinary polemical crudity. He had little in the way of wit. His speeches, such as he gave, were dry and aggressive. He aligned himself strongly with Bolshevism and deeply detested the Mensheviks he encountered. ‘Against them,’ he declared, ‘any methods are good!’⁴ He distinguished himself in his practical capacities; and, with the exception of Lev Trotski who led the Petersburg Soviet from autumn 1905, he had a much more influential role in the events of that turbulent year than any other member of the first Party Politburo formed after the October Revolution. Dzhughashvili debated frequently with the Georgian Mensheviks. He talked at workers’ meetings. He was one of the most productive writers for Proletarians Brdzola. Always he urged Marxists to oppose outbreaks of inter-national violence. He vigorously promoted Bolshevik policies and called for the monarchy’s overthrow by an uprising which would bring a provisional revolutionary government to power. Marxists should unite workers and peasants in a political alliance. Compromise with the middle class on the Menshevik model was to be rejected.

Yet the prospects for Bolshevism in the south Caucasus had never been bleaker. Dzhughashvili wrote dispiritedly to Lenin in May:⁵

Evidently he thought the comrade in Geneva ought to know the bitter truth about the factional balance among Marxists in the south Caucasus. Throughout the year Menshevism under Zhordania’s aegis thrust itself forward as the leading agency of Georgia’s rebellion against the Imperial monarchy. Bolshevism was in a small minority among the Georgian revolutionaries. Thus Dzhughashvili had chosen a factional allegiance which seemed to doom him to obscurity. The peasantry across Georgia followed the Mensheviks; and although he continued to argue that their strategy diverted attention from propaganda and organisation among the working class, he was a voice crying in the wilderness. He must have blamed Bolshevism’s weakness in Georgia to some extent on its failure — despite his advice in 1904 — to present the faction as a champion of national interests. He himself, however, was not infinitely flexible. He too wished to focus revolutionary activity on the towns, the workers and Marxist orthodoxy. Bolshevism did best in the south Caucasus where industry was well developed. This was the case in Baku. But Dzhughashvili did not despair: he had taken a deliberate decision that the basic strategy of the Bolsheviks was correct and that sooner or later it would triumph. For the rest of the year he predicted the imminence of the Romanov monarchy’s overthrow. Like all Bolsheviks, he declared that violent uprising and a revolutionary dictatorship were essential for this end.

Nicholas II started to panic in October 1905. Workers had formed their own councils (or ‘soviets’) which began by organising strikes and came to supplant the official bodies of self-government. Peasants moved against the landed gentry by illegal pasturing of livestock and stealing wood from forests. In Poland and Georgia the authorities were coming close to losing control. On advice from Count Witte, Nicholas II issued his ‘October Manifesto’ promising reform. In subsequent weeks it became clear that this would involve an elected parliament to be known as the State Duma as well as a Basic Law which would establish the framework that would define and constrain the powers of the Emperor, the government and the Duma. These concessions bought time and support for the monarchy; and although the Bolsheviks proceeded to organise an insurrection in Moscow, the armed forces steadily reasserted authority across the empire.

Stalin’s revolutionary impatience had not faded: he continued to argue for uncompromising adherence to the strategy of Bolshevism. Such was his growing success in Tbilisi that he was a natural choice as delegate to the factional conference held by the Bolsheviks in Tampere (Tammer-fors) in Finland in mid-December 1905. It was there he met Lenin at last. According to his later account, he was taken aback by the unprepossessing appearance of the leader of Bolshevism. Dzhughashvili had been expecting a tall, self-regarding person. Instead he saw a man no bigger than himself and without the hauteur of the prominent émigré figures.⁶ The Tampere Conference proved awkward for Lenin. Most Bolsheviks, including Dzhughashvili, rejected his preference for the faction to take part in the elections to the State Duma. They aimed at armed insurrection and the establishment of a ‘revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’, and they saw no point in wasting energy on elections called on Nicholas II’s terms. Lenin’s demand for tactical finesse left them cold. Having become Bolsheviks because they liked Leninist radicalism, they were disappointed that their leader was already compromising with the institutions of the Imperial order. Lenin himself backed down rather than lose his following at the Conference.⁷

Dzhughashvili was infused with the current factional mood. He was still developing as a politician. His difficulties with fellow Georgian Bolsheviks in 1904 showed that he was not lacking in strategic flexibility (and he continued to suggest compromises in policy in the years ahead). But in 1905 he lived and breathed ideas of armed insurrection and revolutionary dictatorship. He genuinely thought that the Imperial monarchy could be replaced. He therefore refused to countenance a policy of settling for a political order prescribed by Nicholas II. In fact a growing number of Bolsheviks came to recognise their mistake in not following Lenin’s advice. Lenin himself decided to put further pressure on his faction by agreeing to reunification with the Mensheviks at a Party Congress — he could not stand so many Bolsheviks purporting to be more ‘Leninist’ than himself. Such a move was also precipitated by the fact that the two factions, despite maintaining a separate existence in emigration, often co-operated in the Russian Empire.

The venue chosen for this Fourth Party Congress was Stockholm. Dzhughashvili was the only Bolshevik among sixteen delegates selected to represent Georgia. They made their way secretly via Moscow and St Petersburg to Helsinki. From there, disguised as teachers on an excursion, they took a steamer to the port of å bo. At that point they split into smaller groups.⁸ Dzhughashvili caught the steamship Wellamo and sailed to the Swedish capital. Arrangements had been made for him to stay at the Hotel Bristol with fellow Bolshevik Kliment Voroshilov. Bolshevik ‘conspiratorial’ schemes had been rumbled by the Stockholm police. Scores of alien-looking newcomers without obvious commercial or professional purposes were bound to attract attention. Dzhughashvili was apprehended and interrogated by Commissioner Mogren, a constable and an interpreter called Alexei. He gave his name as Ivan Ivanovich Vissarionovich and claimed he was a political refugee and a national democrat. He reassured the police that he was not being funded by Finns (which was a worry for the Swedish security agencies in those years). He also promised to report regularly to them during his stay. He indicated that he intended to go to Berlin before returning home. Dzhughashvili, like others, was released as a harmless visitor.⁹

He then enjoyed himself with the rest of the Bolshevik factional delegation. His modest expenses were covered by the party. This was the first period he spent outside the Russian Empire. The party had fraternal relations with the Swedish social-democrats and with their help had obtained the use of the People’s House for the Congress proceedings. Little attempt was made to prevent the Okhrana from knowing about the event — and anyway the Okhrana had plenty of informers and received detailed reports on proceedings at the apex of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party regardless of precautions taken by the revolutionaries. Each faction discussed its internal affairs. There were also negotiations among the factions. The atmosphere was convivial even though there was no time for delegates to see much of the city beyond their hotels and the People’s House. For Dzhughashvili, though, this did not matter. He had read articles by the luminaries of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party — Plekhanov, Axelrod, Lenin, Martov, Bogdanov and Maslov — over many years. (Alexander Bogdanov, a philosopher and organiser, had become almost as influential among Bolsheviks as Lenin himself.) Now Dzhughashvili saw them gathered together in a single large hall. The agreed task was to sort out the problems between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks as well as to settle a common set of policies, and Dzhughashvili was able to play his part.

While advocating reunification, Lenin did not disarm himself politically. He maintained a Bolshevik Centre separate from any party body involving the Mensheviks. He also continued to sanction armed robberies by Bolsheviks as a means of raising cash for political purposes. The Fourth Congress prohibited both these things. Lenin and his associates acceded in public while ignoring the ban in reality — and Dzhughashvili, as the main organiser of the Bolshevik campaign of robbery and extortion in Georgia, was an integral figure in this systematic deceit.

It was at the Fourth Congress that Dzhughashvili — using Ivanovich as his pseudonym — advanced his claim to be taken seriously by the ascendant party leaders. He was elected to the commission which checked the mandates of delegates. He also challenged the reliability of Georgian Menshevik reports on the situation in Georgia. This stirred controversy. His own speech, though, was questioned by Mensheviks and he was asked to justify himself. He shouted back: ‘I’ll give you my answer in my own time!’¹⁰ He declared: ‘It’s no secret to anyone that two paths have been marked out in the development of Russia’s sociopolitical life: the path of qua si-reforms and the path of revolution.’ For Dzhughashvili, the Mensheviks had foolishly adopted ideas diverting them from a Marxist strategy:¹¹

With a zealot’s confidence he freely attacked veterans of the Russian Marxist movement, including Plekhanov and Axelrod.¹²

He also participated robustly in the debate on the ‘agrarian question’, and his contributions were mentioned by other contributors.¹³ The Menshevik specialist Pëtr Maslov had proposed campaigning for the ‘municipalisation’ of the land as a means of appealing to the peasantry. Such a scheme would transfer arable soil to the property of district councils. Lenin by contrast had expanded his ideas by suggesting land nationalisation; he wanted the central government to own the land. Both Maslov and Lenin desired to expropriate the landed gentry without compensation and to put all fields cheaply at the disposal of the peasantry. They aimed to stipulate the terms of this tenure. But most Bolsheviks, following a certain S. A. Suvorov, regarded Lenin’s proposal as being as impractical as Maslov’s. Among them was Dzhughashvili. Stepping up to the platform, he made a case for simply letting the peasants take over the land without restrictions. This would enable the alliance of working class and peasantry to become a reality, and Marxists would succeed in competing with the Socialist-Revolutionaries for rural popular support.¹⁴ Suvorov and Dzhughashvili wanted the land to be declared ‘the common property of the entire people’. The internal Bolshevik dispute, however, did not get out of hand because the Mensheviks held a majority at the Congress and land municipalisation became official party policy.

Yet again Dzhughashvili had spoken confidently for Bolshevism without automatically consenting to everything advocated by Lenin. He acknowledged him as his faction’s leader. But his obedience was not blind: Dzhughashvili thought his direct daily experience of the Russian Empire kept him in closer touch with revolutionary possibilities than the émigrés.

There was anyway a reason outside politics for Dzhughashvili to feel cheery: he had found a woman he wanted to marry. He was in his late twenties and most of his friends were already in wedlock. The woman who caught his eye was Ketevan Svanidze. This was a sister of Alexander, a friend from the Spiritual Seminary. Alexander Svanidze, like Dzhughashvili, was a Bolshevik; Dzhughashvili would therefore be able to rely on her understanding of the demands of the life of a revolutionary. The courtship was a rapid one. Ketevan worked as a seamstress for the French dressmaker Mme Hervieu in Tbilisi’s Sololaki district. Wanted by the police, Dzhughashvili needed to be careful about his assignations with her; but luckily for him Ketevan’s employer was a kindly soul and let him meet his love in the back room of the shop. On one occasion, though, Mme Hervieu nearly regretted her indulgence when Lieutenant Pëtr Stroev strode into sight accompanied by two snarling German dogs bred for manhunts. She raced to warn him, and he escaped in the nick of time by the back entrance.¹⁵ Ketevan had a fine figure and was a sympathetic and kindly woman; and she was content with a life of hearth and home: she had no ambition to become active in the revolutionary movement. What she saw in him is not known. No one in the Svanidze family, which became prominent in Soviet public life in the 1930s, mentioned the subject. Perhaps she thought him very dashing after the derring-do in the couturier’s. At any rate he was physically slim and mentally intense and, as he showed in the years after her death, his appearance and personality had appeal for many women.

Ketevan and Joseph complied with religious propriety and on 16 July 1906 they took their marriage vows in a full Georgian Orthodox ceremony at the Zion Cathedral on the north bank of the Mtkvari. If the priest knew that several witnesses in the congregation were militant atheists (and failed seminarists), he kept quiet about it. After the wedding there was the conventional Georgian reception. Food and wine were plentiful, and the tamada (toastmaster) was the oldest Bolshevik in Georgia, Mikha Tskhakaya.¹⁶ Dzhughashvili’s expectations were conventional: Ketevan’s function was to cook for him, clean and sweep their rooms and supply him with offspring — and it would seem that Ketevan was entirely content with the arrangement. This was in character for Dzhughashvili. It was never to his liking that relatives or friends might have an intellectual edge over him. A son was duly born to the couple on 18 March 1907. They named him Yakob.¹⁷

The role of husband did not tie him down and he remained busy writing and organising in Tbilisi. Among his written pieces was a lengthy series of articles on ‘Anarchism or Socialism’.¹⁸ Among the results of his organisational activity were the proceeds of crime, as Dzhughashvili, using Semën Ter-Petrosyan as Bolshevik robber-in-chief, presided over a series of armed thefts.¹⁹ At the beginning of 1907, still based in the Georgian capital, he helped to found the newspaper Mnatobi (‘The Torch’). Like Lenin, he welcomed German Marxist theoretician Karl Kautsky’s pamphlet on The Driving Forces and Prospects of the Russian Revolution, which inadvertently lent support to the Bolshevik case for a revolutionary alliance of workers and peasants; and Dzhughashvili wrote a preface for the Georgian edition. By then Dzhughashvili was Georgia’s leading Bolshevik. Doubts about his doctrinal orthodoxy were a thing of the past. Both in Georgia and Finland, where the Bolshevik Centre continued to function, his merits were acknowledged by fellow members of the faction. However, the political fortunes of Bolshevism in his homeland were dispiriting; and when he heard that the Fifth Party Congress was to be held in April 1907 in London, he knew the Menshevik participants would challenge his right to represent Tbilisi Marxist groups. He had worked intensively for little practical reward except a rise in esteem among Bolsheviks.

Expecting a wrangle over his mandate as a delegate, Dzhughashvili travelled to London on the papers of ‘Mr Ivanovich’. Since he was not yet a prominent party figure outside Georgia, the Congress organisers had no reason to lodge him near the leaders — Plekhanov, Axelrod, Lenin and Martov — in middle-class Bloomsbury. Instead he joined the mass of delegates in the East End. Jewish immigrant families from the Russian Empire lived there in their thousands at the turn of the century (and, like the Irish, were a substantial minority).²⁰ This was the best spot for delegates to avoid attention from the Special Branch. They could also get cheap lodgings and it would not much matter if they could speak no English.

He never spoke of his London impressions. Perhaps his visit was too fleeting and busy for him to form much of an opinion. He had been allocated a room at 77 Jubilee Street in Stepney. The Congress was held at the Brotherhood Church three miles to the north on the corner of Southgate Road and Balmes Road.²¹ Thus the militant atheists in the Russian Empire debated the overthrow of the Romanovs in a place of Christian worship whose usual congregation consisted of pacifists and followers of the artist, writer and moderate socialist William Morris.²² Returning to his room each night, he occupied himself with writing and planning. His landlord was a Russian-speaking cobbler, probably Jewish, who had fled the Russian Empire. A witness of his brief stay has left us his account. This was a lad called Arthur Bacon, who earned halfpennies in the district for running errands and carrying out little tasks. He often came to the cobbler’s home to rake out the grate and fill it with coal and kindling, and Dzhughashvili used him to take messages to the various Bolshevik delegates staying in the vicinity. The cobbler’s wife addressed the envelopes since Dzhughashvili’s English did not stretch to writing out names.

Although young Bacon voted Conservative on growing up, he remembered Mr Ivanovich with affection. Dzhughashvili liked the toffees the boy brought with him. The boy had financial reason for gratitude: instead of the usual halfpenny, he received a two-bob piece for conveying a message to a comrade.²³ Since this was 4,700 per cent above the going rate, Dzhughashvili’s financial acumen was not all it might have been.

Whereas he had made his mark at the Stockholm Congress by harrying the Menshevik leaders and distancing himself from Lenin’s agrarian policy, he did little to distinguish himself in London. As expected, a dispute broke out over his mandate. In the end he was allowed to attend the Congress without a vote.²⁴ There were further procedural disputes. Three days were spent in arguing about the agenda. The situation was complicated by the inclusion of various organisations from the ‘national’ borderlands — the Poles, the Latvians, the Armenians and the Bundist Jews — in the proceedings. Consequently neither the Bolsheviks nor the Mensheviks held a firm majority and there was much discussion behind the scenes to secure agreement. Lenin offered Zhordania and the Georgian Mensheviks a deal whereby they could run party business in Georgia without interference in return for their not taking sides against the Bolsheviks in the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party as a whole. Zhordania refused.²⁵ If Dzhughashvili had heard of the proposal, he would scarcely have been pleased. Lenin’s collusion with Zhordania would have ruined everything Dzhughashvili had fought for in the south Caucasus since becoming a Bolshevik. It would also have taught him that the region was not hugely important to Bolshevism’s leadership. A clash between Lenin and Dzhughashvili would have been inevitable.

The Bolsheviks at the Congress anyway came under fire for maintaining their separate Centre, for carrying out armed robberies and for failing to share party funds with the Mensheviks. The Bolsheviks, though, were equally aggressive. Although they now thought it desirable to participate in Duma elections, they rejected the idea of co-operating with liberals in the chamber; they accused Mensheviks of selling out the revolutionary cause. The proceedings were intensely controversial. A Central Committee of fifteen members was formed. Five were Bolsheviks and there were four Mensheviks. The balance of power was held by the ‘national’ organisations in the party. A joint central newspaper, Sotsial-demokrat, was to be revived. But this fooled no one. The Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party was a house divided against itself.

7. ON THE RUN

Joseph Dzhughashvili returned from the London Congress to a revolution which was on the retreat. His career over the next few years reflected the situation. He fixed Baku as his base and for several months organised, wrote and edited on the faction’s behalf among the oilfield workers. It had become the opinion of leading Bolsheviks of the south Caucasus that Tbilisi, while being the administrative and cultural centre of the Caucasus, was inferior in the opportunities it offered for propaganda and organisation of the kind likely to advance the Bolshevik cause. He went there with Stepan Shaumyan.¹ He mocked the Mensheviks of Georgia for their preoccupation with the more backward inhabitants and economy of his homeland: his own political development was continuing.² But the Okhrana caught up with him. On 25 March 1908 he was arrested while operating under the alias of Gaioz Nizheradze and locked up in Bailov Prison on the outskirts of Baku.

Years of imprisonment, exile, escape and rearrest followed. On 9 November he was escorted to Vologda in the Russian north. This was a small provincial capital, famous only for its lacemaking, 370 miles to the east of St Petersburg. On arrival he was ordered to move over four hundred miles east to Solvychegodsk, an old town fifteen miles from the nearest railway on the River Vychegda. Arriving on 27 February 1909, he immediately plotted an escape. On 24 June he succeeded and, after staying for a few days in St Petersburg, returned to the south Caucasus and worked again as a clandestine Bolshevik organiser in Baku and Tbilisi. But he was not long at liberty. On 23 March 1910 he was seized by the police and confined in Bailov Prison. This time his pseudonym was Zakhar Melikhyants. It took six months before the authorities decided on his sentence (and in the meantime he managed to write a ‘Letter from the Caucasus’ which he got published in the party’s central organ Sotsial-demokrat in Paris).³ On 23 September he was sent back to Solvychegodsk. On 27 June 1911 he was allowed to move to Vologda.⁴ On 6 September he made yet another escape disguised as a certain P. A. Chizhikov. He arrived in St Petersburg, where he contacted his old friend from Tbilisi, Sergei Alliluev.⁵ The Okhrana, however, had been informed. He was arrested on 9 September and, on 25 December, redispatched under guard to Vologda.

The Imperial authorities were crushing the revolutionary movement. Peasant rebels were subjected to courts martial and executed. Industrial strikes were suppressed. Mutinies in the Imperial Army and Navy were savagely put down. Where provinces remained restless, emergency powers were granted to governors and military commanders. Revolutionary agitation was ruthlessly quelled, and the main leaders of the socialist parties — the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party and the Party of Socialist-Revolutionaries — returned to Switzerland and other European countries to regroup their forces until the next great political crisis.

Nicholas II did not revoke the Basic Law he had sanctioned in early 1906. But he regretted allowing an electoral system which returned a large socialist contingent in both the First and Second State Dumas. On 3 June 1907 Pëtr Stolypin, his Prime Minister, redrafted the system so as to produce a conservative majority in the Third State Duma which would convene in November. Stolypin, however, also saw that agrarian reform was essential. Having worked as a governor in Saratov Province, he saw the village land commune as a source of chronic social instability; he introduced legislation to allow peasants to set up by themselves as independent farmers. He financed schemes to encourage migration to virgin lands in Siberia. Stolypin with the Emperor’s consent strove for a working relationship with the Third State Duma, especially with the Octobrist party led by Alexander Guchkov. He also permitted the continued existence of local trade unions and a press which was no longer as hobbled as before 1905. Out-and-out revolutionary propaganda and organisation, however, continued to be quashed. Stolypin’s rule was a forceful, intelligent attempt to conserve the Imperial order. He was detested not only by the revolutionaries but also by those at court who suspected that his collaboration with the Duma derogated from the powers of the Emperor. But Stolypin survived. The Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party, which had 150,000 members in spring 1907, was quickly reduced to a handful of thousands as the state resumed control.⁶

Dzhughashvili’s was an existence populated by comrades, spies, policemen, girlfriends and peasant landlords. Everything was done on the assumption that an unwary word might result in arrest. Friendly acquaintances might turn out to be police informers. The Okhrana, despite being a small organisation, husbanded its resources well and infiltrated all the revolutionary parties. Dzhughashvili could trust only his oldest friends and his immediate family.

He had got used to fending for himself; and although he had a wife and baby son, his party duties continued to keep him away from home after his return from the Fifth Party Congress. Such domestic peace as he had was abruptly brought to an end on 22 November 1907 when Ketevan, after weeks of suffering, died. The probable cause was tuberculosis. Joseph and Ketevan had been married for less than two years. Her death shattered his poise. His schoolmate Joseph Iremashvili accompanied him at the church funeral, and recorded the scene in Tbilisi when the widower took him firmly by the arm: ‘Soso, this being softened my heart of stone; she’s passed away and with her have gone my last warm feelings for people!’ Then Dzhughashvili laid his right hand across his chest and declared: ‘In here everything is so empty, so unutterably hollow!’⁷ Iremashvili concluded:⁸

Bereavement, according to Iremashvili, had the profound consequence of hardening his attitudes to the rest of humanity.⁹

Iremashvili wrote his memoir years after fleeing from Soviet Georgia; he can hardly have remembered Joseph’s exact words in the churchyard. He had also become Stalin’s personal and political enemy and wanted to sell as many copies of his book as he could. Did he perhaps embroider the truth? In other memoirs about the period before 1917 a different Joseph Dzhughashvili is depicted: introverted, secretive, taciturn and unemotional.¹⁰ Yet even if Iremashvili exaggerated or invented a little, he should not be dismissed. He had known Dzhughashvili since early childhood and knew all about the emotional side of his personality. They had been seminarists together when Dzhughashvili was writing poems in a romantic vein. Moreover, they were Georgians attending an Orthodox funeral and Joseph Dzhughashvili acted conventionally in showing family and friends how deeply he mourned his wife.

Dzhughashvili’s reported comment is anyway a clichéd one which indicates a widower more concerned with himself than with Ketevan or his son. He had not even bothered to live with her throughout the last months of her illness. That Joseph was shaken by her death, though, is beyond dispute. What is less plausible is that this single event was the decisive one in turning him into a man seeking murderous revenge on humanity in general. There were many such events in his long life. His friends and associates noted how each event made him harsher in his dealings with the world. Iremashvili stated that even before Ketevan’s death it was obvious that Joseph acted with contempt towards everyone except his mother, wife and son.¹¹ Her passing left him with his young son Yakob. Yet he did not let bereavement get in the way of political activity. Having chosen the life of a full-time revolutionary, he was not going to let parenthood burden him. Total personal freedom was required for this, and he asked his in-laws, the Svanidzes, to take Yakob off his hands. Ketevan had three sisters and a brother. To Joseph’s relief, these relatives were happy to foster the lad. They also stood by Joseph when he ran out of money.¹²

He must have compared himself ruefully with émigré Bolsheviks in their little colonies in Switzerland and France. Most leading emigrants could live off private incomes. They could visit libraries, write letters to each other and go on holidays without worrying whether the Okhrana was tailing them. (The police agents in their midst did not much alter the daily habits of the émigrés even though everyone knew they existed.) They had time to write and opportunities to publish. They could meet foreign revolutionaries. They did not need to grub out a life while being constantly on the run. They were not threatened by prison or Siberian exile.

Apart from his comrades, Dzhughashvili was alone in the world. He saw nothing of his mother who was still in Gori. His father had long passed out of contact. Not that this stopped Joseph thinking about him. In one of his early articles he offered the following account:¹³

These details are so near to the pattern of his father’s life that Joseph must surely have been describing him. Beso’s fate was an unhappy one. After splitting from Keke and Joseph he had gone on working and drinking in Tbilisi, and Joseph later claimed that he was stabbed to death in a tavern brawl in 1909.¹⁴

If Joseph mourned him, he left no sign of it; indeed it is not even known how quickly he learned of Beso’s death. Dzhughashvili’s focus in this period was on evading arrest. He was adept at the techniques. But his recurrent success at foiling the police again led to the rumour that he had a dubious association with the Imperial authorities. Was he an employee of the Okhrana? The Menshevik Isidore Ramishvili in 1905 had accused him of being ‘a government agent, spy and provocateur’.¹⁵ Such unsubstantiated tales were repeated down the years. There has even been an allegation that the Okhrana file on him was passed around the party in the 1920s and that Stalin instigated the Great Terror in the late 1930s mainly in order to eliminate those who had been initiated into knowledge of his employment.¹⁶ In fact the most exigent analysis of the evidence gives no serious grounds for thinking that Dzhughashvili was a police agent. This does not mean that he failed to exploit whatever links he had with the Okhrana. He was arrested and interrogated many times. It is easily credible that he let drop information which would incriminate the enemies of his faction or even his rivals inside the faction. There were recurrent queries in particular about Stepan Shaumyan’s arrest and apparently some fellow Bolsheviks sought to call Dzhughashvili before a party tribunal. Arrest and exile spared Dzhughashvili this fate.¹⁷ Shaumyan was the other towering figure of Bolshevism in the south Caucasus; it would have been in character for the ambitious Dzhughashvili to get him out of the way.

Yet the Okhrana preferred to keep its main informers out of prison; and Dzhughashvili, although he sometimes received light sentences, was incarcerated or exiled too frequently and lengthily to have been a police employee. He was to spend the Great War through to the February 1917 Revolution in Siberia even though the state authorities could have used him productively if he really had been working for them.

Clandestine political activity was complex and demanding, and Dzhughashvili’s leading position required that he kept a wide range of acquaintances and sources of information. Comrades were among these; they were indispensable if a solid revolutionary core was going to be maintained. But he also had to seek information on a wider plain. Inhabiting working-class areas where informers were many and where imprisonment was a constant danger, a revolutionary leader had to live on his wits — and Dzhughashvili was remarkable for his number of contacts. The Georgian Menshevik Artëm Gio left an account of the rounding up of Marxist militants in Tbilisi. Bursting into a friend’s flat, Dzhughashvili was astonished to find Gio waiting for him there. ‘I just wasn’t expecting it,’ he exclaimed: ‘How has it happened? Haven’t you been arrested?’¹⁸ Gio was explaining how he had evaded the fate of others, when in walked a stranger. Dzhughashvili reassured Gio: ‘You can talk freely and boldly… He’s a comrade of mine.’ The newcomer turned out to be a Georgian who worked as a police interpreter. He had rushed over to tell Dzhughashvili the latest news: several close comrades (including Dzhughashvili’s future father-in-law Sergei Alliluev) had been taken into custody. In fact a detachment had already been assigned to arrest Dzhughashvili in the evening. The interpreter, however, was disconcerted by Gio’s presence and, once he had passed on his information, he ran off.¹⁹

This was an obscure but significant episode in Dzhughashvili’s career. It showed that he got up to pretty unorthodox business; for his interpreter was not a Marxist militant but — in Dzhughashvili’s words — ‘a great nationalist’.²⁰ The interpreter so hated Russian Imperial rule that he willingly helped other opponents of tsarism: he deliberately mistranslated words so as to save Georgian militants from trouble. Gio’s memoir was an unusual one. Bolsheviks were conventionally depicted as having nothing to do with the police, and it cannot be discounted that his book was published in 1925 in Leningrad only because Stalin’s factional adversary Zinoviev controlled the press in that city and wanted to besmirch his reputation. Yet the making of revolution in the Russian Empire required multifarious talents and a flexible moral code. Dzhughashvili possessed the qualifications.

It was nevertheless a dangerous game. Another of Dzhughashvili’s contacts was a certain Kornev. Dzhughashvili gave the code words to be used by Gio when meeting Kornev. Yet Kornev seemed shifty to Gio, who thought to himself: ‘Either he’s an Okhrana agent or a great coward!’²¹ Although he was working in a tailor’s workshop, Kornev obviously had no experience of cutting and sewing. Everything about him was suspicious. From this it was a small step to conclude that ‘in his hands was the thread by which he [thought] to infiltrate our organisations’.²² Gio made his excuses and went into hiding; his instincts told him that Dzhughashvili’s trusted contact was a police spy and that Dzhughashvili himself had been fooled. This may have been the case. Another possibility is that Dzhughashvili was more willing than most revolutionaries to take risks with the lives of his comrades. Egotistical and calculating, he judged situations in terms of his self-interest. People mattered to him only in so far as he could use them for the good of the cause or for his own political advancement and private comfort and pleasure. His recklessness in clandestine revolutionary work was of a piece with the other manifestations of his personality.

If Dzhughashvili’s relationship with the police retains some mystery, there need no longer be any doubt about another murky aspect of his activities. Before the Great War the accusation was made that he was involved in organising armed robberies and that he continued this activity even after the Fifth Party Congress banned it. The evidence for this remained shaky for a long time. Dzhughashvili, though, never expressly denied having participated in this criminal activity. For years he simply discouraged public interest in the matter; and when he mounted to supreme power, he suppressed all mention of it.

His duties in Georgia on behalf of Bolshevism stretched far beyond purely political activity. He was also involved in the organisation of ‘exes’. This was the party abbreviation for expropriations or, more directly, robberies. During the 1905–6 Revolution there were many Marxist groups across the Russian Empire involved in attempts to fund the party by thefts from banks. The Bolsheviks were among them, and Georgia was a centre for their efforts. There were good reasons for this. Banditry was common in the mountains and popular opinion was very far from regarding it as contemptible. The tradition of the abrek, who stole and murdered while cocking a snook at official authority and distributing some of his ill-gotten gains to the local poor, remained strong. (This was at the core of the novel by Alexander Qazbegi, The Patricide, which the young Joseph Dzhughashvili had so much admired.) Bolsheviks in Georgia saw themselves as canalising such customs towards a similarly altruistic purpose: the seizure of the profits of capitalism for the benefit of a party dedicated to the cause of the people. The recent Party Congress had firmly banned the organisation of exes. But the Bolshevik Centre continued to demand that they should be undertaken. Lenin and his comrades needed the money.

Dzhughashvili was the man in charge of the Georgian Bolshevik operations and the practitioner was the Armenian Semën Ter-Petrosyan who masqueraded under the pseudonym Kamo.²³ Dzhughashvili and his friend from school Joseph Davrishevi led rival groups of political robbers from houses on Mount David in Tbilisi. The police knew what was happening. One of the protégés of Joseph Davrishevi’s father Gori gendarme chief Damian Davrishevi, a certain Davydov, was in charge of policing the area. Wanting a peaceful life, Davydov asked Joseph Davrishevi to avoid making trouble on his pitch — and Davrishevi assumed that a similar approach had been made to Dzhughashvili. Davrishevi was able and daring and, although he belonged to the Social-Federalists (who were socialists but also anti-Marxists and overt nationalists), Dzhughashvili tried to get him to cross over to the Bolsheviks. Davrishevi refused. (Georgia’s Bolsheviks of course had suspected Dzhughashvili of being attracted to Georgian nationalism. Was his appeal to Davrishevi yet another piece of evidence for them?) Dzhughashvili and his fellow Bolsheviks at any rate took no notice of Davydov’s request. Incidents recurred on Mount David. The two groups went on raising their respective party finance by persuasion, fraud, extortion and armed robbery. Owners of businesses were easily intimidated. Even the entrepreneurial family of the Zubalovs, who had constructed the building that later became the Spiritual Seminary, made financial subventions to Davrishevi.²⁴ Dzhughashvili kept quiet about the names of his providers. Yet it is not unlikely that the Zubalovs, one of whose dachas in the Moscow countryside he was to occupy with his second wife from 1919, yielded to Bolshevik demands in the period of revolutionary upsurge.

They pulled off their greatest coup on Erevan Square almost within sight of the Spiritual Seminary in Tbilisi on 12 June 1907. Kamo arrived in the disguise of an Imperial general in a comfortable horse-drawn carriage. They knew that a large quantity of banknotes was about to be delivered by stagecoach. Bombs were thrown at the guards. Kamo and his accomplices picked up linen bags with a quarter of a million rubles inside, and Kamo himself drove his coach away at full speed, taking advantage of the chaotic, bloody scene. He brought the proceeds of the robbery to the Bolshevik Centre base in Kuokkala in Finland. Lenin was delighted.

Dzhughashvili had taken a brief trip to Berlin shortly beforehand²⁵ — probably this involved some consultation with the Bolshevik leadership abroad. Afterwards Lenin, Dzhughashvili and Kamo wished to keep everything about the robbery strictly secret. Dzhughashvili and Kamo felt especially vulnerable since several Marxists in Tbilisi knew who had been organising the robberies. The Mensheviks, still outweighing the Bolsheviks in Georgia, set about their enquiries in November 1907. Silva Dzhibladze was put in charge of the commission set up to try the suspected participants. Dzhibladze himself had a less than saintly past; he had been expelled from the Tiflis Spiritual Seminary for a physical assault on the Rector.²⁶ But he drew the line at breaking party policy. Dzhughashvili was identified beyond all reasonable doubt as the éminence grise behind the Erevan Square affair.²⁷ By then, though, Dzhughashvili was nowhere to be found. Worried about being sought by the police or being asked to account for himself to the Mensheviks, he had fled into hiding in Baku.²⁸ Mensheviks were to claim that he was expelled from the party.²⁹ What is clear is that the Bolsheviks, having made so much money from the robberies, ceased this criminal activity and that Dzhughashvili became ever more prominent in the politics of Bolshevism in the south Caucasus. He and Kamo remained friends and saw each other often during and after 1917. They justifiably felt they had carried out Lenin’s instructions with great diligence.

Dzhughashvili made it his task to harry Menshevism in the south Caucasus. This factional strife mattered as much to him as the organising of revolutionary activity among the Baku workers and the oversight of the expropriations. His zeal and intelligence had brought him to the forefront of Bolshevism in the region. In Georgia he was ‘famous as the second Lenin’.³⁰ He regularly derided the pride taken by Mensheviks in their successes with the Georgian peasantry in 1905–6. Thus he declared that class struggle was better organised in Baku on the Caspian coast with its great concentration of working-class inhabitants. While Zhordania and the Mensheviks directed their energy at activity among Georgians in Georgia, Dzhughashvili moved among Russians, Armenians and Azeris as well as people of his own nationality. He had genuine chutzpah, even claiming that the Mensheviks in Tbilisi were reluctant to take on the Bolsheviks in debate. This was unfair: Zhordania was always willing to accept any such challenge. But Dzhughashvili was not trying to be fair. He wanted to discredit Menshevism and would use any material that lay to hand. Generally he accused Zhordania of an obsession with legal activity which was tantamount to a policy of closing down the clandestine party network.³¹

Zhordania retorted that the Mensheviks had overlooked neither Baku nor the working class but were actually stronger than the Bolsheviks there.³² The truth lay somewhere between Zhordania and Dzhughashvili. The Mensheviks regarded Georgia as their citadel. Yet they also worked in other places, including Baku, and at times were more effective than the Bolsheviks. But the differences in strategy held the factions apart. Whereas Bolsheviks operated almost exclusively among the workers, the Mensheviks took other classes such as the peasantry very seriously. The Mensheviks were much more willing than the Bolsheviks to use the State Duma as an instrument of political organisation and propaganda. The Bolsheviks, despite the failure of revolution in 1905–6, kept alive the dream of organising an armed uprising against the Imperial monarchy.

Dzhughashvili was a frontline attacker of Menshevism in one of the regions most important for the revolutionary cause in the Russian Empire. His intransigence was just what Lenin wanted in a follower. Dzhughashvili himself had acquired a broader perspective on politics since attending great party gatherings in Tampere, Stockholm and London, and his preference for working in Baku rather than in Tbilisi was a significant one. He no longer saw himself as primarily a Georgian Marxist; his role had become one of a Marxist who could work anywhere in the south Caucasus or in the empire as a whole. When reporting on the Fifth Party Congress, he commented:³³

This is one of the first signs that Dzhughashvili recognised the importance of revolutionary propaganda, recruitment and organisation among the largest national group in the empire, the Russians.

Dzhughashvili’s comments were later used against him as proof of anti-semitism. They were certainly crude and insensitive. But they scarcely betokened hatred of all Jews — or indeed of all Georgians. He, a Georgian, was repeating something that a Russian Bolshevik had said about Russians and Jews. For many years into the future he would be the friend, associate or leader of countless individual Jews. What counted for Dzhughashvili was the march of history; he recognised that, if the Imperial monarchy was going to be overthrown, Russians as well as Jews and Georgians had to be encouraged to play an active part. What is more, he was publishing his comment three decades before Hitler’s extermination of eastern Europe’s Jews. Dzhughashvili before the Great War may not have had a special fondness for Jews as Jews, but he did not object to them either. Indeed this was his attitude to all humanity. He neither liked nor hated particular peoples; his guiding principle was to judge how they could be encouraged or compelled to abet the achievement of the kind of state and society he approved. Despite these reservations, the comment had an insensitive undertone. A pogrom was a pogrom. It signified popular mass violence against Jews. Dzhughashvili at the very least had made an unpleasant political jest. He was also implicitly suggesting that the Jewish influence in the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party should be counteracted. His internationalism was not an unambiguous commitment.

Nevertheless his own national assertiveness was on the decline and he began to write not in Georgian but in Russian. His first such article appeared, after his return from London, in the Baku Bolshevik newspaper Bakinski rabochi.³⁴ From then onwards he confined his Georgian writings to letters to comrades and relatives. He largely ceased to write in his native tongue for the political public. It was a familiar step for Georgian Bolsheviks to take. To belong to the ranks of Bolshevism involved a commitment to internationalism and to the medium of Russian in the framework of organised Marxism across the empire. For a while he taught himself Esperanto. For Dzhughashvili and many young revolutionaries this language, invented by the Polish Jewish scholar Ludwig Zamenhoff, would provide one of the cultural underpinnings for the socialist order which they wanted to create around the world.³⁵

At any rate it was not suspicion of Dzhughashvili’s anti-semitism which most disturbed his acquaintances at the time. Semën Vereshchak knew him in Bailov Prison outside Baku and was struck by his personal nastiness. Dzhughashvili kept putting one prisoner against another. On two occasions this involved violence:³⁶

On another occasion a criminal known as Mitka Grek stabbed to death a young worker. Allegedly Dzhughashvili had told Grek that the man was a spy.³⁷

Revolutionaries had no compunction about eliminating those who were informing on them or disrupting their activity. The point about Dzhughashvili, however, was that he did this sort of thing on the quiet. The customary examination of the accused was not made. Dzhughashvili simply made up his mind and instigated action.³⁸ He put his fellow conspirators in the path of danger while keeping clear of the deed. He was decisive, ruthless and supremely confident. Yet he was also brave. This is usually overlooked by those who seek to ascribe every possible defect to him. Even his detractor Semën Vereshchak conceded that Dzhughashvili carried himself with courage and dignity in the face of the authorities. On Easter Day in 1909 a unit of soldiers burst into the political block to beat up all the inmates. Dzhughashvili showed no fear. He resolved to show the soldiers that their violence would never break him. Clutching a book in his hand, he held his head high as they laid into him.³⁹

Such behaviour was extraordinary enough for Vereshchak to remember with awe. Other usual aspects of Dzhughashvili’s comportment were less endearing. He got over his wife’s death with unseemly haste and, whenever he was out of prison, chased skirt with enthusiasm. Slim, silent and confident, he had always been attractive to women. He acquired a girlfriend, Tatiana Sukhova, in Solvychegodsk in 1909. He had arrived there with southern clothing unsuitable for the bleak winter of the Russian north. Sukhova helped him out; she even gave him money and helped him to escape.⁴⁰ On another of his stays in Solvychegodsk he went out with local schoolgirl Pelageya Onufrieva. She was only seventeen years old at the time. This was not the last of his sexual conquests of adolescents⁴¹ and not all his comrades approved then or later. Still less desirable was his handling of Maria Kuzakova. She owned one of the large wooden houses in Solvychegodsk where he found lodgings. Kuzakova was a young peasant widow. In due time she produced a baby whom she christened Konstantin. There was little doubt on the question of paternity. Those who saw Konstantin as an adult recorded how like Stalin he was in appearance and even in physical movement.⁴²

Dzhugashvili did not intend to stand by mother and child. He regarded women as a resource for sexual gratification and domestic comfort. He liked to relax with them socially only if they had the characteristics he found congenial. His partners had to be supportive and unchallenging. His requirement of a woman was that she should be devoted to him alone, and Kuzakova suited him for a while. Yet his liaison broke a code. Like other revolutionaries, Bolsheviks believed they had a mission to build a better world on principles of collective good. Dzhughashvili had selfishly used Kuzakova to gratify his lust, and neither then nor later did he think his attitude objectionable. This was the way he whiled away his sentence by the River Vychegda until 27 June 1911 when he was allowed to move to Vologda. He travelled to Kotlas and took the new railway westward. He never saw Solvychegodsk again.

8. AT THE CENTRE OF THE PARTY

Émigré leaders of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party had been slow to recognise Joseph Dzhughashvili as a leader of any talent. The elite’s composition was not fixed in stone, but without patronage from one of its members it was difficult for anyone to join it. Dzhughashvili did not help himself by staying in the south Caucasus and Russia. At gatherings in Tampere and Stockholm he had been forthright in his opinions. On each occasion he had made objection to Lenin,¹ who was the only leader who was ever likely to suggest including him in the Central Committee. Lenin’s focus remained on Russia; he was even willing to leave Georgia to the local Mensheviks if only they agreed to keep their noses out of Russian Marxist affairs.² Dzhughashvili dissented. For him, the industrial and commercial expansion in Baku, Tbilisi and Batumi gave the region an importance equal to the regions of central and northern Russia; and he did not change this attitude until the Bolshevik faction gave him jobs elsewhere. What was already clear was his willingness to stand up for his opinions at party gatherings outside the region. He had not joined the Marxist movement to bury his mind under the bushel of official policy.

Promotion, when it came, proceeded from the hands of Lenin. After years of uneasy and patchy co-operation with the Mensheviks Lenin had had enough. By 1911 the disadvantages of sharing a party with them as well as with the various non-Russian regional organisations outweighed the advantages. Essentially he was planning to turn the Bolshevik faction — or rather those Bolsheviks who stayed loyal to him — into the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party and to treat all other factions as if they had placed themselves outside the party’s ranks.

The Mensheviks had denounced Lenin’s sanctioning of bank robberies as a means of financing Bolshevism. They also wanted their share of the money owed to the party as a whole from the legacies inherited from two sisters called Schmidt. But Lenin aimed to hold all the funds in Bolshevik hands. This was not the only problem. The non-Russian Marxist parties — the Poles, Latvians and Lithuanians and the Jewish Bund — were causing trouble by criticising his policies. Even inside the Bolshevik faction there was dissent. Lenin had expelled Alexander Bogdanov from its midst only to find that many Bolsheviks continued to regard such schismatism as unnecessary and counter-productive. Never having been short of confidence and cunning, Lenin convoked a gathering in Prague. Despite ensuring that all but a couple of participants would be Leninist loyalists, he called it a Party Conference. Essentially he was abandoning even the semblance of collaboration within the same party as the Mensheviks. Proceedings started in January 1912. Lenin’s divisive tactics disconcerted delegates and some did not shirk from condemning his obsessive émigré polemics. But he got his way. A Party Central Committee was elected and Lenin set about acting as if the Mensheviks did not exist.

Dzhughashvili was stranded at the time in Vologda; but the town was on a direct rail route to St Petersburg and Lenin was far from having forgotten him. A ‘party school’ had been held by Lenin in 1911 at Longjumeau outside Paris, and Dzhughashvili was one of the individuals he had wanted to have with him. ‘People like him’, he said to the Georgian Menshevik Giorgi Uratadze, ‘are exactly what I need.’³ Longjumeau was a quiet village where Lenin had devised a programme of lectures and recruited several Marxist lecturers, in addition to himself, to train younger Bolsheviks in the niceties of party doctrines and history. The objective was to inculcate an unflinching loyalty to Bolshevism among the students; and Dzhughashvili, who had yet to make his mark as a Bolshevik writer at the faction’s higher levels, was a natural choice. Another Georgian Bolshevik in Lenin’s sights was Dzhughashvili’s future associate Sergo Ordzhonikidze, who studied at Longjumeau and impressed him. Somehow or other, though, Dzhughashvili did not receive an invitation. Perhaps Lenin simply failed to get anyone to go with the message to Vologda. Ordzhonikidze at any rate impressed Lenin in Longjumeau to such an extent that he entrusted him with the practical arrangements of convoking the Prague Conference.⁴

Had Dzhughashvili attended the Longjumeau course, he would perhaps have been given this task. He would almost certainly have gone to Prague and might even have been elected to the Central Committee. He had a broader range of skills, especially as a writer and editor, than his friend Ordzhonikidze. Yet such an election would not have done him a favour. The new Central Committee included a certain Roman Malinovski, who was a paid agent of the Okhrana. All those Central Committee members who returned to the Russian Empire, except for Malinovski, had been arrested within weeks. It was also in 1912 that Malinovski, a leading trade-unionist among the metalworkers of St Petersburg, stood as Bolshevik candidate for the Fourth State Duma and won a handsome victory. The Okhrana was able to stay informed about the most influential bodies of Bolshevism — the Central Committee and the Duma faction — and to influence their discussions.

The arrest of most returning members of the Central Committee, however, turned the fortunes of Joseph Stalin. Having missed the chance to attend the Longjumeau party school or the Prague Conference, he was available for activity at the highest level of the Bolshevik faction. Lenin saw him as a man who could act for him in several capacities. Dzhughashvili was an organiser of good repute. He never complained about assignments: already his capacity for hard work was well known. Although he had had disagreements with Lenin on policy, he was not unusual in this, and anyway they concurred in 1911–12 on most practical matters affecting the Bolsheviks. He had a basic understanding of Marxist theory. He was a fluent writer and an able editor. He had a forthright manner whenever someone had to pull an individual or committee into compliance with the faction’s official line. Lenin and Grigori Zinoviev, who were temporarily in Paris before moving the Central Committee’s foreign base to Kraków in the Polish lands of the Habsburg Monarchy, decided to co-opt Dzhughashvili (or Ivanovich, as they currently referred to him) to the Central Committee. Sergo Ordzhonikidze was sent in February 1912 to Vologda to tell him the news in person.⁵

Communication with the emigration was slow and Lenin fretted: ‘There’s no word of Ivanovich. What’s happened to him? Where is he now? How is he?’⁶ By then Dzhughashvili was classified as one of the rare useful comrades. But Lenin need not have worried. Ordzhonikidze easily found the co-opted comrade in Vologda and informed him that the Central Committee wanted him to flee the town and work as one of its main leaders in the Russian Empire. At last he had joined the elite of the Bolshevik faction.

Dzhughashvili left Vologda with false papers on 29 February 1912. His first stay was in the Caucasus. There he wrote material justifying the formation of the new Central Committee despite the fact that the Mensheviks and other factions of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party had been illegitimately excluded from membership. He concentrated his efforts in Baku and Tbilisi. But his fresh duties meant that he was no longer to confine himself to one region of the Russian Empire. On 1 April he left by arrangement with Lenin for Moscow, where he met up with Ordzhonikidze. Then he went on to St Petersburg. His duties were onerous and important. He wrote for and helped to edit the Bolshevik newspaper Zvezda (‘The Star’); his literary fluency was much appreciated by the hard-pressed metropolitan Bolsheviks. At the same time he liaised with Bolshevik deputies to the Third State Duma seeking to found a more popular daily, Pravda (‘The Truth’). Dzhughashvili became its editor. There were three working rooms at the newspaper’s headquarters and the printing press had two rooms elsewhere.⁷ He can hardly be said to have kept out of sight of the Okhrana. He had to hope that the police, for reasons of their own, would not want to arrest him.

Pravda appeared for the first time on 22 April 1912, and Dzhughashvili had contributed an article, ‘Our Aims’, to the issue. He had done as he was told from Kraków and inserted himself into the core of the St Petersburg Bolshevik leadership. Pravda was the faction’s legal daily newspaper. Its objective was to gather support among industrial workers for Bolshevism at a time of rising popular discontent with the Tsar and employers. Miners on strike in the Lena goldfields in Siberia had been shot by the authorities on 4 April. A wave of protest demonstrations swept across the empire. St Petersburg was in tumult. The long period of quiescence in the labour movement since 1906 was at an end. Bolshevik militants started to outmatch the Mensheviks in political appeals. Consequently the Bolsheviks ceased to be of use to the Okhrana as a divisive force in the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party. It may have been no coincidence that orders were put out for Dzhug-hashvili’s arrest as soon as Pravda started to be sold. The truth has not yet been unearthed from the files of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Dzhughashvili was arrested on 22 April and confined in the House of Preliminary Detention in the capital. On 2 July he was sent under escort to Narym District near Tomsk in western Siberia, where he was sentenced to remain for three years. After the long journey by ‘arrest wagon’ on the Trans-Siberian Railway to Tomsk he was put on board the Kolpashevets steamer and taken down the great River Ob towards Narym.

Until his confinement Dzhughashvili had been writing more intensively than in any previous period of his life. It was also in this period that some of his adolescent verses were reprinted in the latest edition of Yakob Gogebashvili’s Georgian literary anthology Mother Tongue.⁸ But he told no one about this. (It is not even certain that he himself knew about the publication.) Just a few flashes of his poetic side still occurred. In a proclamation he wrote for May Day 1912 he declared:⁹ ‘Nature is waking from its winter’s sleep. The forests and mountains are turning green. Flowers adorn the meadows and pastures. The sun shines more warmly. We feel in the air new life, and the world is beginning to dance for joy.’ This was the last romantic outburst he made in print. For the rest of his life he never repeated such gushing verbosity. Indeed it had been a long time since he had indulged himself in this way.¹⁰

The same proclamation referred to none of the regions of the Russian Empire except Russia. It was aimed exclusively at Russian workers and called on them to ‘raise the banner of the Russian [russkoi] revolution’. Too much weight of interpretation cannot be placed on this. (Not that this has stopped some biographers from trying.) Dzhughashvili was working in the Russian capital, writing in Russian and appealing to Russian industrial workers. Naturally Russia was at the core of his message, as would not have been the case if he had still been in Tbilisi. Nevertheless there was a detectable shift in his political persona around this time. His main pseudonym from 1912 was Stalin. This was an unmistakably Russian name derived from the word for steel (stal). Although it was not the first time he had turned to the Russian tongue for a false identity, he had usually reverted to Georgian ones. Now, though, he was building up his image in the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party and no longer wanted to be known merely as a man from the Caucasus. He was laying ever greater emphasis on the need for a general solution to the problems of the Russian Empire; and he wanted to play an integrated part in that solution.

Stalin in person, of course, was not credible as a Russian. He knew he looked, sounded and behaved in a ‘southern’ manner. He revered Georgian literary classics. He would never be Russian. And, contrary to what is widely suggested, he did not really try.¹¹ If he had really desired to de-Georgianise his political profile among Bolsheviks he would have ceased to write on the ‘national question’. Jews like Zinoviev and Kamenev wanted to be known as internationalists and hardly ever drew attention to their ethnic ancestry. Stalin too wished to be regarded as an internationalist; he also aimed to be taken seriously in Russian socialist politics. But he continued to urge the party to promote the interests of the non-Russians under a future socialist administration. His 1913 booklet The National Question and Social-Democracy was to do much to raise his reputation in the party; it also solidified his relationship with Lenin, who described him in a letter to the writer Maxim Gorki as ‘the wonderful Georgian’.¹² What is clear is that Stalin had long ceased to make a special case for the Georgians in his statements on the national question. When he wrote or said anything, he treated them no better or worse than other non-Russian peoples. He offered his co-nationals no prospect of preferment, while himself remaining a Georgian in appearance, accent, demeanour and residual culture.

This meant little to Stalin as he made his way under guard to Narym. He stayed for a few days in Kolpashevo, a village where several leading Bolsheviks were living in exile. They included Mikhail Lashevich and Ivan Smirnov. Stalin also came across his Bolshevik friend Semën Surin as well as his Bailov Prison acquaintance Semën Vereshchak: he had supper with them, recuperated and then set out north-east along the River Ob to his assigned destination in Narym.¹³ It was not quite the worst place of exile in the Russian Empire. Narym, unlike towns at a more northerly latitude, lay just within the zone of agriculture. But conditions could have been better. The winter was bleak. Economic life largely revolved around hunting and fishing. Contact with St Petersburg was infrequent and subject to police surveillance.

Fellow Central Committee member Yakov Sverdlov greeted Stalin in Narym and offered him a room. They did not get on well. Even the agreement on housework broke down. Whereas Sverdlov aimed at a modicum of order, Stalin was slovenly and selfish. They had agreed to fetch the post, and whoever stayed behind was expected to tidy the house. Years later they compared memories about how Stalin got out of this arrangement:¹⁴

Although Sverdlov laughed good-naturedly, he had not thought it pleasant at the time. Stalin’s behaviour was doubly selfish. Whoever walked to the post office would meet up with other comrades and gain a respite from the dreariness of exile. Everyone found the conditions depressing and Stalin’s egocentricity was widely resented.

The two of them planned to flee from Narym to resume clandestine political activity. They were encouraged in this by the Central Committee in Kraków. Two escape ‘bureaux’ existed, one in Kolpashevo, the other in Narym. Sverdlov made the first attempt but was caught near Tomsk. Then Lashevich made a dash, followed by Stalin and Sverdlov on 1 September.¹⁵ It was an eventful trip. They had devised a clever scheme requiring the diminutive Sverdlov to hide in a laundry basket. Stalin was accosted by a gendarme who made a move to examine the basket by pushing his bayonet into it. Stalin got him to desist by bribing him. This story, told by Stalin three decades later, cannot be verified.¹⁶ But it is not implausible. Fugitive revolutionaries regularly exploited inefficiency and venality among the Imperial agencies of law and order.

Stalin and Sverdlov stayed with the Alliluev family in St Petersburg.¹⁷ Quickly they restored links with party organisations in the empire and with the ‘foreign’ part of the Central Committee in Kraków. All this time they had to keep at least one step in front of the Okhrana. The electoral campaign for the Fourth State Duma was in full cry and Stalin stayed in the capital to help and direct Bolshevik activities. He also began writing again for Pravda. On 19 October he contributed the leading article on ‘The Will of the Voters’ Delegates’; and Lenin printed his piece ‘The Mandate of the St Petersburg Workers’ in the émigré newspaper Sotsial-demokrat. On election day, 25 October, the Bolsheviks did well by securing six seats. The need for co-ordination was paramount and Stalin made a last-minute trip to Bolsheviks in Moscow to confer with Roman Malinovski and other newly elected individuals. With the ending of the electoral campaign it was equally urgent to strengthen contact with Kraków. Stalin, after briefly returning to St Petersburg and assuring himself that arrangements for the Duma were in place, bought train tickets for Poland in early November. He was going to consult Lenin. For the first time they would meet as fellow members of the Central Committee.

The trip was memorable for Stalin. As the train approached the border with Austrian Poland, he found himself in a carriage with a passenger reading aloud from a Russian nationalist newspaper. He could not stop himself from shouting across at him: ‘Why are you reading that rubbish? You should read other newspapers!’¹⁸ Alighting from the train, he had to get help in crossing the border to Kraków. He wandered around the market till he bumped into a friendly cobbler. Stalin used his charm: ‘My father was also a cobbler, back in my homeland, Georgia.’ The cobbler, refusing any recompense, took Stalin to his home, fed him and at dusk escorted him by a winding route across the hills into Austrian Poland.¹⁹

He arrived in time for a meeting between the Central Committee members and three Bolshevik Duma deputies. Stalin did not enjoy the experience. In November there had been a Bolshevik plan to organise a one-day political strike and demonstration outside the Tauride Palace in St Petersburg. When the Mensheviks opposed this as being dangerous and unproductive, the Bolshevik faction had backed down. Lenin heard about this in Kraków and drafted an angry article.²⁰ His ill temper had not spent itself before the three Duma deputies arrived in Poland. Stalin agreed that the Bolshevik faction had made a mistake, but he doubted that the best way to bring them into line was to browbeat them:²¹

Stalin believed that the Bolsheviks could win over the Mensheviks in the Duma faction. He had attended a faction meeting and could testify that this was feasible. Persuasion really could work. Stalin thought Lenin inept and ill informed to insist on tactical intransigence.²²

On much friendlier terms with Stalin was Lev Kamenev, an acquaintance from their Tbilisi days as well as a Central Committee member. Feeling lonely in Kraków, Stalin wrote him what can only be called a billet-doux:²³ ‘I give you an Eskimo kiss on the nose. The Devil take me! I miss you — I swear to it like a dog. There’s no one, absolutely no one, to have a heart-to-heart conversation with, damn you. Can’t you somehow or other make it over here to Kraków?’ Still strengthening his position in the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party leadership, he was reaching out to potential friends who could help him.

Having returned briefly to St Petersburg, Stalin worked with the six Bolshevik Duma deputies before travelling again to Kraków at the end of December for a further meeting of the Central Committee with the Bolshevik Duma group. He stayed abroad for the longest time in his life and got on to more amicable terms with Lenin. Yet despite being invited to eat with Lenin and his wife Nadezhda Krupskaya, he insisted on finding a restaurant. Puzzled by this reaction, Lenin went in search of him. He found him eating with a bottle of beer on the table. From then onwards Lenin ensured that alcohol was provided at his home and they resumed their political conversations in a social setting. Meanwhile Stalin’s behaviour became material for local ribaldry. Ordering a meal in Russian at a train station on the line between Kraków and Zakopane, he noticed that other customers entered the restaurant and got served while he was kept waiting. He received his soup after an inordinate wait. Offended, he turned the bowl upside down and walked out. Lenin had to explain to him, supposedly the party expert on the national question, that Poles disliked having to speak Russian.²⁴

Lenin had the knack of putting Bolsheviks at their social ease, and Stalin steadily settled down. The two of them conversed endlessly. Stalin fitted Lenin’s bill as a quintessential Bolshevik. He was tough and uncomplaining. (As yet Stalin had not displayed his self-pitying, ranting side.) He appeared to conform to a working-class stereotype. He was also a committed revolutionary and a Bolshevik factional loyalist. Stalin was obviously bright and Lenin, who was engaged in controversy with Zhordania and other Mensheviks on the national question, encouraged Stalin to take time out from his duties to write up a lengthy piece on the subject. Already in 1910 Lenin had cited Stalin (under the pseudonym K.S.) as a more authoritative commentator on the Caucasus than the more famous Zhordania.²⁵ Now he encouraged him to deepen his researches and publish the result.

With this in mind Stalin in the second half of January 1913 travelled on to Vienna, where he could use libraries with fuller holdings in Marxist literature than were available in Kraków. He stayed for a few weeks with fellow Bolsheviks on the southern edge of the city, not far from the palace of Schönbrunn, in a first-floor flat on the Schönbrunnerschlosss-trasse. Stalin’s comrades had got lots of books ready for him. He was given a desk and a divan.²⁶ (Stalin never objected to sleeping on the simplest frames.)²⁷ For several weeks he read in Viennese libraries and wrote up his work in the flat. He frequently consulted local comrades about the German-language texts of Bauer, Kautsky and the Marxist journal Die Neue Zeit.²⁸ Stalin was a man on a mission. He lived the national question and expatiated about it even on social occasions. Six-year-old Galina, the daughter of his Bolshevik hosts, got thoroughly bored on their walks in Vienna’s well-kept parks: ‘You’re not talking about the nation again!’²⁹ Stalin, cut off from his son Yakob in Georgia, took to Galina as he did to other lively children. She was his match: she did not believe him when, with his heavy accent, he teasingly promised to bring her some ‘green chocolate’ from the Caucasus.³⁰

He took extensive notes and wrote up most of the text of his booklet before returning to Russia. Initially he published ‘The National Question and Social-Democracy’ in the St Petersburg Marxist journal Prosveshchenie (‘Enlightenment’).³¹ Back in the capital in mid-February 1913, Stalin resumed his part in the complex game played between the revolutionary parties and the Okhrana. The police had long ago accepted that a policy of total suppression of the revolutionary movement would not work, and indeed they had acted on this awareness since the 1880s. (The problem was that the Okhrana could change the rules of the game at will, and the result could be prison or exile for individual revolutionaries.) Stalin had to take the usual risks. This time he stayed not in the less savoury districts of the capital but in the centre, at 44 Shpalernaya Street, in the rented apartment of the Bolshevik Duma deputies F. Samoilov and Alexander Badaev.³² The Okhrana was aware that Stalin was carrying out instructions of the émigré leadership in Kraków — or at least that he was doing so to the degree that he wished. Stalin realised that the Okhrana knew who he was and what he was up to. The Okhrana hoped to get clues about wider circles of Bolshevik activity; Stalin aimed to give no clues while continuing to guide the Duma faction towards the desired end.

Evidently his presence in St Petersburg was no secret. At any time he could be arrested. With Lenin’s blessing, he was directing the faction’s activity in the capital. He could hardly, however, strut about. He had to be wary. The fact of his voluntary obscurity in 1912–13 led many to go on supposing that he was a nonentity among Bolsheviks before the Great War. Such an idea was seriously awry. He had risen to the summit of the Central Committee and saw his talents as lying in the work he could do in the Russian Empire.

The inevitable happened on 23 February 1913. Stalin went to a ball for International Women’s Day at the Kalashnikov Exchange. It was a big occasion and many militants were heading for the same destination. The Okhrana, however, had decided that the time had come to arrest him. Apparently Malinovski had tipped off his controllers about Stalin’s whereabouts that day, and he was grabbed and handcuffed on arrival. He had finished his lengthy article on ‘The National Question and Social-Democracy’ (which was later republished as Marxism and the National Question) and delivered it to the offices of Prosveshchenie in the capital.³³ This was a legally published Marxist journal that carried items of doctrinal theory and contemporary analysis. The fact that its editors welcomed his article was a signal of his rising importance among Marxists of the Russian Empire. The piece was thought sufficiently impressive to be turned out as a booklet. Stalin had also left behind an article, much briefer, for Pravda.³⁴ This was a report on ‘The Situation in the Social-Democratic Group in the Duma’. Its contents justified the harsh line taken by the Bolsheviks in comparison with the Mensheviks. Stalin himself was out of action in the capital’s House of Preliminary Detention.

He was not to know that he would not taste freedom’s delights again for exactly four years; for it was to be precisely on International Women’s Day in 1917 that female textile workers went on strike in the capital and forged the first link in a chain that pulled down the Imperial monarchy some days later. No further works by Stalin were printed between his arrest and Nicholas II’s abdication. Scarcely had he penetrated the central precincts of the Bolshevik faction when he was cast to the winds of tsarist justice. He had known the risks. Recurrent arrest and exile were the norm for the revolutionaries who did not emigrate. He must have hoped that he would be sent again to somewhere like Solvychegodsk or Narym and that the Central Committee would enable him to escape and resume his important political functions. He would not be put on trial. His immediate future depended on the police. Stalin awaited the decision with his customary fortitude.

9. KOBA AND BOLSHEVISM

Dzhughashvili was by no means an outstanding thinker. This would not raise an eyebrow if his followers had not gone on to laud him as a figure of universal intellectual significance. He always had plenty of detractors. Most of the early ones were persons who — at least by implication — suggested that they themselves were thinkers of distinction. They deluded themselves. Scarcely any leading figure in the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party made an original intellectual contribution. Plekhanov, Lenin and Trotski were brilliant synthesisers of the ideas of others — and not all of those others were Marxists. Each took his personal synthesis to an idiosyncratic extreme. This was also true of Bukharin, who tried his hardest to effect a deepening of the Marxist perspective in the light of contemporary philosophy, sociology and economics. Only Bogdanov can be categorised as an original thinker. Bogdanov’s amalgam of Marx and Engels with the epistemology of Ernst Mach led him to reject economic determinism in favour of a dynamic interplay of objective and subjective factors in social ‘science’. He made a serious contribution through his work on the importance of ideas for the control of societies by their elites across the course of human history. Bogdanov’s Empiriomonism was a tour de force.¹

Yet the other leading figures succeeded in persuading their comrades that they too were of exceptional cultural significance. Stalin before the Great War made no such claim for himself. Nor in subsequent years did he suggest that he had made an original contribution. He always claimed to have been merely a loyal Leninist.² He called himself a praktik, meaning that he was more a practical revolutionary than a theoretician. When he published ‘Anarchism or Socialism’ in 1906–7, many readers thought he could hardly have been the authentic author. His school friend Davrishevi assumed that another Bolshevik, perhaps Dzhughash-vili’s comrade Suren Spandaryan, had written it. But Spandaryan put Davrishevi right. It really was Stalin’s article.³ ‘Anarchism or Socialism’ was not a coruscating work. Stalin privately admitted this after the Second World War (when his comment was treated as extraordinarily modest).⁴ It was nevertheless a work of practical importance at the time of publication. This has been overlooked by his biographers, who have ignored the fact that anarchists were active in Tbilisi after the turn of the century. Georgia was recognised as a place where a fundamental challenge to the Imperial monarchy would take place. émigré anarchist leaders had sent propagandists on missions to Tbilisi. Stalin flung himself on the available literature on Marxism before writing his urgent reply.⁵

In fact he kept to Bolshevism’s general line before the Great War. He endorsed the precepts of strict party discipline as formulated in Lenin’s What Is To Be Done?; he also shared the Leninist viewpoint on revolutionary stages, dictatorship and class alliances in 1905. Rival versions of Marxism in the Russian Empire, he declared, were betrayals of the faith. He accentuated the need for leadership and a revolutionary vanguard and for the avoidance of ‘tailism’. The vanguard should organise insurrection and seize power. He was also unafraid to oppose projects put forward by Lenin himself and to do this in open debate. On most matters, though, he agreed with Lenin; and Lenin for his own part badly needed Dzhughashvili’s contributions on the national question. Whereas the Mensheviks had several theorists who wrote about the nationalities in the empire, the Bolsheviks had only Dzhughashvili (or Stalin, as he was invariably known in public from this period onwards). No wonder Lenin warmed to him.

Although several aspects of his thought surfaced only in his years of power, it is unlikely that they did not already exist. Stalin had grown up when imperial countries around the world were applying naked military force. Force based upon technological and organisational superiority ruled supreme. The British Empire covered a fifth of the world’s land surface. The age of blood and steel had arrived. Capitalism was triumphant. Marxists believed that socialism would achieve a further victory and that capitalism itself was destined for defeat. A new stage in the history of humankind was believed imminent. Radical Marxists anticipated civil war between the middle classes and the working classes on a global scale. From such conflict there would come good for following generations. Marxism justified the sacrifice of millions of human beings in the pursuit of revolution.

The perfect society was anticipated once the military conflict was ended. The poor would inherit the earth. This would be achieved through ‘proletarian dictatorship’. The need for repressive methods would persist until the resistance of the old propertied classes had been crushed. Although the dictatorship would be ruthless, Stalin and other Bolsheviks expected little trouble. The numerical and organisational weight of the proletariat, they believed, would soon crush all opposition. The old society would be eliminated and class privileges would be eradicated. The state would embed ‘modernity’ in all sectors of life, and it would be a modernity superior to the existing capitalist variants.⁶ Universal free schooling would be established. Material production would be standardised; the wastefulness of capitalism would be surmounted. Every citizen would enjoy access to work, food, shelter, healthcare and education. This militant set of ideas suited Stalin. He lived for conflict. He constantly wanted to dominate those around him. He had also found an ideology that suited this inclination. Everything about Bolshevism fitted his purposes: struggle, repression, proletarian hegemony, internal party rivalry, leadership and modernity; and already he saw himself as a true leader within a party which itself sought to lead the ‘proletarian masses’ into the brave new world.

Yet Stalin was not a blindly obedient Leninist. On several important questions he thought Lenin to be misguided and said so. At the Bolshevik Conference in the Finnish industrial city of Tampere in December 1905 he had objected to Lenin’s plan for the party to put up candidates in the forthcoming elections to the First State Duma. Like most delegates, Stalin thought it a waste of time for the Bolshevik faction to participate in the electoral campaign — only later, like many Bolsheviks, did he come over to Lenin’s idea.⁷ He did not change his mind, however, on the ‘agrarian question’. Lenin advocated that the ‘revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’, after the monarchy’s overthrow, should turn all agricultural land into state property. Stalin continued to reckon this naïve and unrealisable. He proposed instead that the dictatorship should let the peasants grab the land and do with it whatever they wanted.⁸ He also believed that Lenin’s demand for a radical break with Mensheviks in the State Duma would simply confuse and annoy the Duma’s Bolsheviks. Both Lenin and Stalin were zealots and pragmatists. In important instances they disagreed about where zeal should end and pragmatism begin. Their mutual dissent touched on matters of operational judgement, not on revolutionary principles. Yet such matters were intensely debated within Bolshevism. Lenin hated his followers interpreting Leninism without his guidance. Stalin was one of those leading Bolsheviks who was unafraid to stand up for his opinions without walking out of the faction.

He also had reservations about Lenin’s intellectual priorities in philosophy. In 1908 Lenin published a work of epistemology, Materialism and Empiriocriticism. At its core was a ferocious attack on his close collaborator Alexander Bogdanov. He objected to Bogdanov’s apparent philosophical relativism. For Lenin it was axiomatic that the ‘external world’ existed independently of its cognition by the individual human mind. ‘Reality’ was therefore an objective, discernible phenomenon. Lenin contended that Marxism constituted an irrefutable corpus of knowledge about society. He insisted that the mind functioned like a photographic apparatus accurately registering and relaying data of absolute truth. Any derogation from such premises, he asserted, implied a movement away from Marxist materialism and opened the intellectual gates to philosophical idealism and even to religion. Bogdanov, whose commitment to each and every statement of Marx and Engels was far from absolute, was castigated as an enemy of Marxism.

Stalin thought Lenin was wasting his time on topics of marginal importance for the Revolution. In a letter to Vladimir Bobrovski from Solvychegodsk in January 1911 he declared the epistemological controversy ‘a storm in a tea-cup’. Generally he ridiculed the émigrés.⁹ Stalin thought that Bogdanov had done a convincing philosophical job and that ‘some particular mistakes of Ilich [were] correctly noted’.¹⁰ He wanted all Bolsheviks to concentrate on the large practical topics, and there were plenty of these needing to be discussed before appropriate policies could be formulated. Stalin was willing to criticise ‘the organisational policy of the editorial board’ of Proletari.¹¹ This board at Lenin’s behest had expelled Bogdanov from its membership. Stalin was indicating his dissent not only from Lenin’s epistemology but also from his enthusiasm for splitting the faction into ever tinier bits. He advised a moderation of polemics. Stalin counselled the leaders of the two sides in the factional controversy — Lenin and Bogdanov — to agree that ‘joint work is both permissible and necessary’.¹² Such an idea motivated Stalin in the next few years. Indeed he maintained it throughout 1917; for when Lenin was to demand severe disciplinary measures against Kamenev and Zinoviev, it was Stalin who led the opposition to him.

So at that time he was what was known as a Conciliator inside Bolshevism. He despised the émigré shenanigans and wanted the Bolsheviks, wherever they lived, to stick together. It was a question of priorities. Philosophy was not as important as the making of revolution. For this purpose it was essential to keep Bolsheviks together, and Lenin must not be allowed to endanger such an objective.

Yet Lenin tolerated Stalin, and much of his positive attitude is attributable to Stalin’s booklet Marxism and the National Question. Stalin’s later enemies unceremoniously dismissed the work. It was said that Stalin either did not really write it or wrote it only with decisive help from others. Supposedly his ghost writer was Lenin. That Lenin and others assisted with their suggestions about the draft is undeniable. This is a quite normal procedure for sensible writers: it is better to have necessary criticism before than after publication. Another hypothesis was that Stalin’s inability to read foreign languages, except for a few phrases with the help of a German–Russian dictionary, meant that he could not have read the works by Austrian Marxists appearing in his footnotes. Anyone who has read Marxism and the National Question, however, will know that most of the references to books by Otto Bauer, Karl Renner and others are made to the widely available Russian translations. The other point is that Lenin was a proud author. If he had really written the book, he would have published it under one of his own pseudonyms.

Lenin liked Marxism and the National Question because Stalin agreed with him about the basic solution. An additional advantage was that Stalin was not a Russian but a Georgian. After the turn of the century the Marxists of the Habsburg Monarchy — especially Bauer and Renner — argued that the empire was a patchwork quilt of nationalities and that nation-states could not neatly be cut out of it. Their answer was to offer every nation a representative body of its own at the centre of the empire with the mission to enhance national interests. The Mensheviks, with encouragement from the Jewish Bund as well as from Noe Zhordania, adopted Bauer’s plan as the future basis of state structure in the Russian Empire once the Romanovs had been overthrown. Stalin, however, adhered to the official Bolshevik position that administrative autonomy should be given to non-Russians in areas where they lived in concentration. The Finns in Finland and the Ukrainians in Ukraine were the usual examples. Thus the Bolsheviks hoped to maintain a centralised state while acceding to national and ethnic aspirations.

Stalin was not simply parroting Lenin’s earlier writings. There is a passage in Marxism and the National Question which merits close attention since it deals with Georgia. It deserves to be quoted in full:¹³

So much for the idea that Georgians were a primordial nation, fully developed before their incorporation in the Russian Empire.

Stalin’s argument continued as follows:¹⁴

This is crude materialist history, but it has a cogency within the analytical frame constructed by Stalin for the examination of nationhood. In order to be considered a nation the Georgians had to share not only their ‘psychic’ background and territory but also their economic life.

This was not an original point among Georgian Marxists. Zhordania, too, had always stressed that sharp contrasts separated the many regions of tiny Georgia.¹⁵ There was a difference in emphasis, however, between Zhordania and Stalin. Whereas Zhordania wanted most inhabitants of Georgia to assimilate themselves to a Georgian identity, Stalin continued to acknowledge that Georgianisation was nowhere near fulfilment. Both Zhordania and Stalin were socialist internationalists. Yet Stalin was not off the mark when highlighting the nationalist ingredients in the outlook — however unconsciously held — of his Menshevik adversaries. Stalin questioned in particular whether the Mingrelians and Adzharians, who lived in western Georgia, should be regarded as Georgians.¹⁶ What are we to make of this? The first lesson is surely that Stalin was a more sensitive analyst of his native Georgia and the surrounding region than is usually thought. (Not that we should feel too sorry for him: in later years he turned into the most brutal ruler the Caucasus had known since Tamurlane — and this of course is why his earlier sophistication has been overlooked.) In any case he rejected Menshevik policy as offering simplistic solutions based on inaccurate demographic data.

Stalin stressed that nationhood was a contingent phenomenon. It could come with capitalism. But under changing conditions it could also fade. Some national groups might assimilate to a more powerful nation, others might not. Stalin was firm on the point:¹⁷

It would consequently be senseless for Marxists of any nation to identify themselves permanently with that particular nation. History was on the march. The future lay with socialism, with multinational states and eventually with a global human community.

In writing about Marxists, Stalin was saying much about himself and his developing opinions. The young poet who had called on fellow Georgians to ‘make renowned our Motherland by study’ had vanished.¹⁸ In his place there was an internationalist struggling for the cause of the proletariat of all nations. The Stalin of Marxism and the National Question did not regard the Russians as a problem. Describing contemporary Georgia, he asserted:¹⁹

Stalin’s analysis pointed to the complexity of the national question in the Russian Empire. It anticipated the bringing together of Russians and Georgians in harmony within the same multinational state.

Evidently he assumed that the Russian Empire, when revolution at last overthrew the Romanovs, should not be broken up into separate states. Even Russian Poland, which Marx and Engels had wanted to gain independence along with other Polish-inhabited lands, should in Stalin’s opinion stay with Russia.²⁰ His rule of thumb was that ‘the right of secession’ should be offered but that no nation should be encouraged to realise it.

What motivated Stalin was the aim to move ‘the backward nations and nationalities into the general channel of a higher culture’. He italicised this phrase in his booklet. The Menshevik proposal for ‘national-cultural autonomy’ would permit the most reactionary religious and social forces to increase their influence and the socialist project would be set back by years:²¹

Stalin’s point was not without plausibility.

He then posed some pertinent questions:²²

Zhordania had no answer to such questions.

Stalin’s counter-proposal was for regional self-rule, as Lenin had counselled since 1903. This would be undertaken in such a fashion as to give each ethnic group, however small, the right to use its own language, have its own schools, read its own press and practise its own faith.²³ The response to Stalin and Lenin was acerbic, and it was led by Stalin’s Georgian antagonist Zhordania. For Zhordania the important point was that capitalist economic development had scattered nations over vast areas. It was therefore impractical to protect national and ethnic rights on a purely territorial basis. Leninism was therefore a doctrine from ‘the old world’.²⁴ Another claim by Zhordania was that ‘the Russian part of the party’, by which he meant the Bolsheviks, was insensitive to the acuteness of national oppression in the Russian Empire.²⁵ In truth Bolsheviks and Mensheviks were better at criticising each other than at providing a solution which would not lead somehow to oppressive results. If the Ukrainians were offered Bolshevik-style regional self-rule, Jews and Poles in Ukraine would have reason for concern. If Ukrainians acquired the right to Menshevik-style cross-territorial self-organisation, the prospects for central supranational government would become chaotic. Stalin and Zhordania were wrestling with a question with no definitive theoretical solution.

By and large, though, the dispute was conducted with intellectual rigour even though the language on both sides was intemperate. Stalin’s commentary on the Caucasus was taken seriously even by those who disagreed with him. He had said nothing offensive except to the ears of the most extreme nationalists. Indeed little attention was later drawn to his booklet when his enemies were searching for dirt on him.

The exception was the passages in Marxism and the National Question on the Jews. According to his categories, the Jews could not be considered as a nation because they did not live in a discrete territory. They had a language — Yiddish — and a religion of their own; and they were conscious of their Jewishness. But the matter of territory was crucial for Stalin and he took Bolshevik ideas on nationhood to their logical conclusion. his attack on the Jewish Bund was direct:²⁶

Stalin noted that whereas other Marxist parties had called for the general right of nations to speak their own language, have their own schools and follow their own customs, the Bund mentioned only the Jews. It had therefore, in his opinion, become a nationalist organisation.²⁷

He excoriated the Bund’s preoccupation with Yiddish and with the Jewish Sabbath. He noted that some Bundists even wanted separate hospitals for Jews. All this flew in the face of the wish of Marxists to bring national and ethnic groups of workers together in a single political organisation. For Stalin it was going altogether too far to suggest that all Jewish workers should be allowed to take off the hours of work from twilight on Friday to twilight on Saturday.²⁸

All this threw petrol on to the flames of controversy: Mensheviks and Bundists were infuriated by his analysis. But Stalin stood his ground and published an explanatory self-defence in the same journal.²⁹ Most of the Menshevik leaders happened to be Jews. Lenin’s attacks on them had invited the accusation that the Bolsheviks were anti-semitic.³⁰ This overlooked the fact that several Bolshevik leaders too were Jews — Lenin himself had a Jewish grandfather.³¹ But appearances in politics mattered as much as reality, and Stalin’s repudiation of Jewish demands for recognition of nationhood and of entitlement to self-rule seemed another case of Bolshevik hostility to Jews. Stories also surfaced that Stalin made anti-semitic remarks in private. Against this is the incontrovertible fact that Jews were among Stalin’s friends and associates before and after the Great War. However, the Jewish Bund was on the other side from the Bolsheviks in most disputes in the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party before the Great War. Stalin and Lenin were eager to attack the Bundists and their aspirations. Factional considerations as well as ideology were involved in the Bolshevik–Menshevik controversy. It would be difficult to find Stalin guilty of anti-semitism simply for what he wrote in his Meisterwerk on the national question.

10. OSIP OF SIBERIA

The months of waiting ended when the St Petersburg police sentenced Joseph Stalin to four years of exile. Marched from prison on 2 July 1913, he was taken to an arrest wagon bound for Siberia. Convicts were usually accompanied by friends and relatives who shouted support from the platform through the barred slits in the sides of the wagon. Nobody in the capital, however, was willing to bid Stalin farewell. His wife Ketevan was dead and his mother far away in Gori; and the Alliluev family, known to be active Bolshevik supporters, would have been ill advised to come to the station. No sooner had he risen to the crest of the Bolshevik faction than his fortunes fell to the ground. From having been leader of Bolshevism in St Petersburg with responsibility for both the Duma faction’s activities and the editorial line of Pravda he was reduced to being one arrested revolutionary among hundreds. Stalin was put in manacles. He slept on a hard wooden bunk. He and his comrades were fed and watered like cattle as the train made its way eastwards across the Eurasian plain. They peered through the barred slits as the train pulled out. Within minutes of departure they lost sight of the last feature of the Russian capital, the cupola on St Isaac’s Cathedral. The tundra and taiga of Siberia awaited them.¹

The government was watching with concern as the slogans of Bolshevism attracted discontented factory workers, and Bolsheviks like Stalin were a threat to the Imperial order as the industrial strike movement expanded. Stalin’s convict record was also noted. The Minister of Internal Affairs had no reason to show indulgence to this leading revolutionary who had escaped several times from previous places of exile. He and his comrades were sent to Turukhansk District in Yenisei Province in Siberia’s far north-east. Turukhansk’s reputation was a dreadful one. It was the place of detention for those revolutionaries in previous decades who had broken their terms of punishment. Stalin’s periods in exile in Novaya Uda, Solvychegodsk, Vologda and Narym were going to seem pleasant in comparison. No place under Imperial administration was bleaker than Turukhansk.²

At nearly six hundred thousand square miles, Yenisei Province was larger than Britain, France and Germany combined. It stretched from the town of Yeniseisk north down the River Yenisei to the Arctic Ocean. Population was sparse in Turukhansk District. Before the First World War there were fewer than fifteen thousand inhabitants and most of these belonged to tribes which had lived there for centuries. Monastyrskoe, the district capital, had fewer than fifty houses (although the New York and Montreal fur company Revillion had a branch there and graphite mining took place further north).³ The climate was harsh. Winter with its frequent snowstorms lasted nine months; the temperature sometimes fell to sixty degrees below zero and the daylight was of short duration. Summer brought its own discomforts because the sun hardly set and the mosquitoes bit through clothing. Agriculture was impossible since the ground remained frozen regardless of season. Flour and vegetables were imported from Russia’s gentler climes and livestock husbandry was unknown. The people of Turukhansk District hunted and fished for subsistence.⁴

Escape from the far-flung villages was exceptionally difficult. The telegraph line, ending at Monastyrskoe, facilitated police surveillance.⁵ The tundra was so heavy that flight west to the River Ob or east to the River Lena was not a realistic option. Those trying to flee by river faced hazards of a different nature. The route to the north was arduous, especially in the vast stretch above the Arctic Circle. Authorities checked the identities of all passengers, boats were few and the water melted for only a few weeks annually. The southward alternative was little better. The steamship was under constant watch; and when anyone took a boat or dog-sleigh from village to village, peasants were under orders to report this to the police.⁶ It was over six hundred miles from Monastyrskoe to Yeniseisk and 170 miles from Yeniseisk to Krasnoyarsk. The chances of getting unnoticed all the way upriver to Krasnoyarsk were small. As a place of detention, Monastyrskoe was almost as effective as Devil’s Island or Alcatraz.⁷ Stalin and his fellow prisoners had plenty of time to ponder this on the journey along the Trans-Siberian Railway until they reached Krasnoyarsk.

From there they travelled downriver by steamship. Stalin had been preceded to Monastyrskoe by Yakov Sverdlov, fellow member of the Russian Bureau of the Central Committee and an acquaintance from an earlier period of exile. Both were assigned by administrative order to villages around Monastyrskoe: Stalin went to Kostino, Sverdlov to Selivanikha.⁸ Kostino was ten miles and Selivanikha three miles from Monastyrskoe.

A large colony of revolutionaries lived in the neighbouring villages. Most had recently arrived. Until the 1905 Revolution the Ministry of Internal Affairs had sent such convicts to Tobolsk, Narym or Yakutia. Such places had proved easy to flee from. Ill-paid policemen and impoverished peasants were seldom difficult to suborn with a small bribe. Turukhansk District had been used fitfully in the 1890s — the future Menshevik leader Yuli Martov had served his sentence there. By the time Stalin arrived, the revolutionary colony had grown. Resident exiles belonged mainly to those parties regarded as the greatest threat to political and civil order; these included not only Bolsheviks and Mensheviks but also Anarchists and Socialist-Revolutionaries. Monastyrskoe was consequently a hive of ideological variety. Dispute usually took place without undue polemics. Exiles had made up their mind about party allegiance. Each party maintained shared books and facilities among its members. Messages from Russia were passed on; pleas were made on behalf of individuals who were in poor health or who ran out of money. The revolutionaries kept intellectually alert in anticipation of eventual return to political work upon release.

Although the conditions of detention were bad under the Romanovs, they were nowhere near as oppressive as Stalin made out in the 1930s. The revolutionaries could keep up their spirits through social gatherings. Someone even composed a ‘Turukhansk March’. Its words were more stirring than poetic and the refrain went as follows:⁹

The ‘evil storm’ referred less to the local weather than to the oppressive tsarist regime. Every exiled militant, while yearning to leave Siberia and overthrow the Romanovs, easily found rooms to rent. Each had a stipend of fifteen rubles a month. This was enough to cover rent, which cost about two rubles, and basic food requirements.¹⁰ But game was plentiful and the revolutionaries bought the equipment to fish and trap. They could also work for local peasants.¹¹ Many exiles had family members in Russia who sent money; others — one of whom was Stalin — relied predominantly on being subsidised by their party. Turukhansk did not have the harshest penal regime, but it was not an easy one either.

Central Committee member Sverdlov welcomed Stalin. They knew and disliked each other from their shared exile in Narym District in 1912. Stalin was as self-absorbed as before and shut himself away from everyone. He ignored the custom of giving a detailed report on general politics and the prospects of revolution on the basis of recent direct experience in Russia. The other exiled Bolsheviks were deprived of up-to-date information which only he could supply.

Within months of Stalin’s arrival, both Stalin and Sverdlov were ordered further north. The new governor of Yenisei Province in mid-March 1914 transferred his two Bolsheviks to a still more distant place. He had been alerted to their plans to escape.¹² Stalin had tried to allay suspicion by writing to Malinovski on 10 April 1914:¹³

In the same letter he offered to supply articles to Pravda on ‘The Foundations of Marxism’ and ‘The Organisational Side of the National Question’.¹⁴ But the Okhrana was not fooled. Lenin wanted Stalin and Sverdlov to be helped to leave Siberia, and quantities of money had been arriving for them at Monastyrskoe from party comrades in Russia.¹⁵

Stalin and Sverdlov would have been better served if the Central Committee had sent money not directly to them but to intermediaries. In any case the Central Committee was penetrated by spies. Okhrana agent Malinovski, with whom Stalin corresponded, told the Department of Police in St Petersburg in November 1913 about the intention to organise an escape. Stalin and Sverdlov were important detainees. By administrative order they were to be moved to the bleak hamlet of Kureika.¹⁶ There they would be the sole convicts and most of the residents would be Ostyaks.

Both were depressed. Whatever chance they had of making it up-river to Krasnoyarsk would all but disappear in Kureika. Sverdlov had particular cause to feel downcast as he explained in a letter to his sister Sarra:¹⁷

Their geographical knowledge was faulty. There were two places called Kureika north of Monastyrskoe. The one which Sverdlov had in mind was by the river of the same name far beyond the Arctic Circle. The governor had specified another Kureika, which stood on the western bank of the River Yenisei just below the line. Even so, it was seventy-five miles downriver from Monastyrskoe, and that was quite far enough to lower their spirits.¹⁸

Although the location was not as bad as they had feared, it was quite bad enough. Stalin made his own contribution to the unpleasantness. In Monastyrskoe he had taken possession of books bequeathed to resident Bolsheviks by fellow exile Innokenti Dubrovinski. When Stalin moved on to Kureika, he simply took the books off with him. Another Bolshevik, Filip Zakharov, went out to remonstrate with him and was treated ‘more or less as a tsarist general would receive a rank-and-file soldier who had dared to appear before him with a demand’.¹⁹

Stalin and Sverdlov disliked the noisiness of the Kureika family they lodged with. They had no kerosene and had to use candles if they wanted to read during the long winter.²⁰ But the worst thing was the relationship between them. Sverdlov wrote:²¹ ‘One thing is that I don’t have a room to myself. There are two of us. I’ve got the Georgian Dzhughashvili with me, an old acquaintance whom I met in a previous exile. He’s a fine fellow but too big an individualist in daily life.’ ‘Individualist’ was a damning word among Marxists, who required the subordination of personal inclinations to collective needs. Driven to distraction, Sverdlov decided to move house; he wrote to a friend in May 1914:²²

Sverdlov got himself transferred back to Selivanikha at the end of September on grounds of ill health.²³

Stalin meanwhile got on with life in his own egocentric fashion. He had always had an eye for adolescent girls but when he moved in as a lodger with the Pereprygin family, he behaved quite scandalously by seducing the fourteen-year-old daughter. Not only that: he made her pregnant. Even in that lightly administered area it was impossible to keep things quiet. The police became involved. Stalin was interviewed, and had to agree in due course to marry the unfortunate girl. This saved him from prosecution in the courts.²⁴ He subsequently abrogated the accord. For Stalin, the relationship was no more than a way of relieving the sexual frustrations of exile. He lived like a feudal knight among the impoverished Pereprygin family and took what he fancied whenever he liked. He acted as if he had rights without obligations. He had contempt for all human conduct but his own.

His political activity was weakened by the fact that his postal contact with the world outside Kureika was intermittent.²⁵ This was intensely irritating because war had broken out in Europe. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria by a Serbian nationalist in July 1914 had provoked a general diplomatic crisis. The Austrian government had delivered a humiliating ultimatum to Serbia. Russia, which had stepped back from the brink in previous emergencies in the Balkans, decided to take the Serbian side. Austria’s expansion into the region was to be resisted at last. The complication was that Germany had opted to stand by Austria in the event of a Balkan crisis. The Russian Imperial Army mobilised and Nicholas II refused to stand it down when the Germans delivered an ultimatum to St Petersburg. Russian forces poured through East Prussia towards Berlin. Austria occupied Serbia. France and the United Kingdom honoured their treaty obligations and declared war on Russia’s side against Germany and Austria–Hungary. The German Imperial Army defended itself in the east and, violating the neutrality of Belgium, thrust across into northern France. Without anyone having intended it, a European war had broken out.

This was happening while Stalin and his fellow exiles could have no part in the campaign waged by Lenin and his supporters against Russian participation in the war against the Central Powers. Indeed Lenin from the safety of Switzerland urged all Marxists to work for the defeat of Nicholas II’s forces. Strikes were organised in factories, especially in the capital (which was renamed Petrograd because St Petersburg was thought to sound too Germanic). Bolsheviks sent antiwar propaganda to Russian POWs in German and Austrian camps. The leading Bolshevik writers debated the political and economic motivations of the belligerents in the Petrograd press. The Okhrana was active in retaliation, and the local Bolshevik groups were repeatedly broken up; and although Lenin was indefatigable, he lost many supporters to demoralisation as well as to the prison system.

Stalin, however, did not worry about such dangers; he wanted to get back into action in Russia and was intensely frustrated by his continued exile. He wrote to Malinovski appealing for help from the party:²⁶

He requested that these Bolshevik Duma deputies — Malinovski, Petrovski and Badaev — should send money from the ‘fund of the repressed’ which they and the Menshevik deputies maintained. Perhaps they could send him sixty rubles?

Stalin expressed his hope that Nikolai Chkheidze — leader of the Menshevik Duma deputies — might look kindly on him as a fellow Georgian.²⁷ This was a message of despair: no one was more hated by the Georgian Mensheviks than Stalin. Meanwhile he was sorting out his thoughts in Siberia. He read voraciously; there was no time to feel sad about his fate.²⁸ Co-opted to the Central Committee in 1912, he continued to receive financial assistance by bank transfers from Petrograd. Despite the Okhrana’s persecuting attentiveness, the Bolshevik faction did not cease to tend to Stalin, Sverdlov and others.²⁹ The local police oversaw such transactions. The regularity of the transfers, being no secret to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, naturally gave rise to the suspicion that Stalin was secretly planning an escape. He would need to bribe policemen and pay for rail tickets if this was to be successful.

If ever he made it back to Petrograd, he knew he could count on help from Sergei and Olga Alliluev (whose youngest daughter Nadya was to become his second wife after the October Revolution). He wrote affectionately to Olga on 25 November 1915:³⁰

Stalin did not often behave gracefully, but he could when he wanted.

He was not entirely removed from active politics. The trial of the Bolshevik Duma faction and its adviser Lev Kamenev in early 1915 in Petrograd had brought disruption to Bolshevism. The charges related to both politics and revolutionary etiquette. Instead of just denouncing the Imperial government, Kamenev had distanced himself from Lenin’s policy that the best result in the war for the European Marxist movement would be the defeat of the Russian armed forces by the Germans. Even so, Kamenev could not escape a sentence of Siberian exile. On arrival in Turukhansk District he was again put on ‘party trial’. The proceedings took place in Monastyrskoe, and Sverdlov and Stalin were present, as were the members of the Bolshevik Duma fraction. Most participants chose to support Lenin’s policy.³¹ Stalin was friends with Kamenev; they remained on these terms throughout their Siberian exile and for several years subsequently. Stalin, though, jibbed at Kamenev’s failure in open court in Petrograd to show solidarity with the faction’s official policy. Probably Stalin had reservations about Lenin’s calls for ‘European Civil War’ as a realistic policy both militarily and politically; but Kamenev needed to be pulled back into line. Discipline was discipline. Kamenev had committed an infringement and had to be punished.

Stalin started to enjoy life in Kureika. He took up fishing: this brought an enhancement of his diet as well as genuine pleasure. He had had lessons from the Ostyak men and soon, according to his own account, got better at it than the Ostyaks themselves. Supposedly they asked him what his secret was.³² In any case, he was locally accepted and became known as Osip (or, less pleasantly, as Pockmarked Oska).³³

Fishing in Siberian exile could be dangerous, as he later recalled:³⁴ ‘It happened that the tempest caught me on the river. At one time it seemed that I was done for. But I made it to the bank. I didn’t believe I’d get there: the river was in great tumult.’ On another occasion a snowstorm blew up. He had had a good day by the water along with Ostyaks from his village and had a large haul of sturgeon and sea-salmon.³⁵ Foolishly he went off home before the others. The storm — known in Siberia as a purga — blew up suddenly. It was too late to turn back and it was a long way in nearly blinding conditions to Kureika. If he had been sensible, he would have abandoned the fish. But the fish were his food for the month; and anyway Stalin was stubborn. He trudged through the heavy snow, head down into the bitter wind. By the light of a new moon he thought he glimpsed shadowy figures near by; he called out to them, relying on the local tradition of helping strangers in a mess. But the figures moved on. They were in fact the villagers with their dogs whom he had left earlier; and when they saw the snow-covered, gesticulating form, they credulously assumed it was a water demon. Stalin himself was not sure that the figures had been human beings and did not try to catch up with them.³⁶

He trudged on by himself. There was a distinct possibility he would not be able to find the village even if he survived the cold. But he got there. Unfortunately he was still an apparition in white, from his bearded face down to his boots. Dragging himself to the nearest hut, he was a bizarre sight. ‘Osip,’ one of the villagers cried, pressing himself against the wall in fright, ‘is that you?’ Stalin replied: ‘Of course it’s me. And it’s not a wood spirit!’³⁷ For millions of peasants in the Russian Empire retained the ancient pagan superstitions even if they belonged to the Orthodox Church or some other Christian denomination. Belief in spirits, devils and witches was widespread, and in eastern Siberia the Church had made little impact upon popular notions. Stalin had yet again been reminded that he lived in a society where the ideas of the Enlightenment were as yet thinly spread. He thawed out; he ate and drank. Then he took to his bed and slept for eighteen hours.³⁸

He told another of his stories many years later. At a 1935 Kremlin reception he narrated how he was sitting on the river bank as men of the village went off fishing at the start of the spring floods on the River Yenisei. When they returned, they were one man short. They did not draw attention to this; but Stalin questioned them and was told the missing man had drowned. What struck Stalin, he said, was how little they thought about the death. If he had not mentioned the subject, they would have gone back to their huts without comment. Stalin pondered the event. He felt sure that if a cow had been sick, they would have gone out and tried to save it. But the loss of a man for them was a ‘triviality’. The point was, he said, that it was easy to make a man whereas animals were a more complex task.³⁹ This was nonsense. Perhaps Stalin thought so too; but the fact that he repeated it about two decades later meant that he either believed it or had invented it and decided it suited his current political interest: in the mid-1930s he wished to stress the importance of conserving Bolshevik cadres.⁴⁰

Stalin remembered his time in exile with fondness. Despite what he claimed in his begging letters to party comrades, he was generally healthy. He was treated as a respected visiting member of a community. For the first time he was living closely for a lengthy period with non-Georgians and non-intellectuals. Most were Ostyaks, but a number were Russians. This experience would serve him well when, years later, he became their political overlord. For the rest of his life he talked about his days in Siberia, the fishing, the climate, the conversations and the people. These experiences, even though he was there against his will, uplifted him. He enjoyed the wonder and admiration shown him by the Kureika villagers. They knew he was a ‘southerner’, but had no idea where Georgia was. They saw he loved books: in a culture of oral tradition this in itself marked him off as a man apart. Even his pipe was an object of awe. Sitting in the hut in the evening, he would pass it round for others to take a puff. Visitors to the villagers popped round specifically to try out this locally unusual mode of smoking. Having chatted with the renowned revolutionary in their midst, they departed happy.⁴¹

Obviously contact with the central leadership of the Bolshevik faction grew ever trickier in the Great War. In 1915 Stalin and Suren Spandaryan, a fellow Central Committee member, wrote to Lenin. Stalin’s part of the letter went as follows:⁴²

This was the rant of a man wanting to show off his militant style to his leader. The references to beating were repetitious. The frustrations of exile leaped off the page. Stalin hoped to impress on Lenin that, when his term of exile ended, he could be a useful right-hand man for him in the Russian political underground; but he did not miss the opportunity to remind Lenin how different their circumstances were.

Exile had its bright moments for Stalin, but generally it brought the worst out of him. He was an emotionally needy person: people around him were also liable to be subjected to the lash of his tongue or simply to daily insensitivity and egotism. He belonged to a revolutionary party which made a virtue of placing individual satisfaction below the needs of the collective good. It was a party which also cherished comradely good humour. Stalin was not really unsociable. He had friends. He liked a joke and was an amusing mimic. But his friends had to acknowledge his primacy. Stalin had a deep need to dominate. This was why his fellow exiles found him exasperating. At close quarters he was painful to deal with; the Siberian sojourn concentrated everyone’s attention on the uncongenial sides of his character which in other circumstances they overlooked because of the perceived benefits he brought to the cause of Revolution.

11. RETURN TO PETROGRAD

The kaleidoscope of Stalin’s life was given two abrupt twists in the winter of 1916–17. The first was an unpleasant experience, the second brought delight. In December, as the Imperial Army replenished itself with fresh levies, the government threw the net of conscription wider. Ministers decided to use even political convicts. This was a difficult step. Such people had been exempted from call-up in the war on the ground that they would conduct hostile propaganda among the troops. Compulsory enlistment had always been problematic. In 1915 the conscription of Moslems had touched off an uprising in Russian central Asia. Meanwhile the fighting against the Central Powers had settled down to a fairly static contest and the losses were enormous on both sides of the trenches. Yet morale in the Imperial Army remained robust. The early bottlenecks in military production, transport and supply had been unblocked. The Supreme Command was planning to innovate in a bid to organise a successful offensive, and General Brusilov was being given his chance to prove himself. There was no shortage of food or equipment at the front. But more men were needed. Stalin was among those revolutionaries ordered to submit himself for a medical check with a view to his inclusion in the army of Nicholas II.

They had to travel to Achinsk. This was a town lying a mile north of the Trans-Siberian Railway and a hundred miles to the west of Krasnoyarsk. Stalin, Kamenev and other Bolsheviks — as well as scores of Mensheviks, Socialist-Revolutionaries and Anarchists in exile in Turukhansk District — had to make the arduous journey up the Yenisei to Krasnoyarsk in north Siberia’s coldest months. It would take weeks. None of the selected men supported the Imperial government’s military objectives (although many Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries would have readily supported a democratic post-Romanov government in defending the country).¹

Stalin said his goodbyes in Kureika and set off for Monastyrskoe. There is no sign that he gave any thought to the emotional wreckage he left behind in the Pereprygin family. In Monastyrskoe he joined a group of fellow potential conscripts. The police chief lined them up on the street, and they were cheered by comrades who knew they might never see them again. Steamships could not operate in the winter and the trip up the Yenisei would be made by dog-drawn sleighs from village to village. Before the departure someone ran over to them. This was the deputy accountant in the Revillion company office who had fetched a mandolin and a guitar which the Bolsheviks had forgotten to take.² Stalin loved to sing. The trip was not going to be without recreation. Yet the temperature was always several degrees below zero and the wind cut into the faces of the travellers. The long journey from Kureika to Achinsk was one of the most exhausting that Stalin ever made. On reaching Achinsk, he was leaner than for many years; and the long nights of the deep north in winter had given his complexion a distinct pallor.³ But he had enjoyed himself. The party had stopped at many small hamlets. Stalin had sung to his heart’s content and, despite the rules, delivered political speeches at open meetings.⁴

His mood sank on his arrival in Krasnoyarsk as he faced the possibility of conscription. He had just one option left. This was to ask permission from his guard Kravchenko to spend a week there before moving on to the enlistment headquarters.⁵ The request was granted. (Did he bribe Kravchenko?) Yet he worried in vain. Army doctors rejected him for military service because of his damaged right arm. He never carried a rifle for Tsar and Motherland.

Since his term of exile was due to end in mid-1917 he was allowed to stay in Achinsk with other revolutionaries rejected for military service. These included his friend Lev Kamenev. Stalin went frequently to Kamenev’s rented house. The Bolshevik Anatoli Baikalov later gave an unappealing picture of the scene. Stalin had his pipe perpetually on the go. He stuffed it with makhorka, the pungent tobacco favoured by workers and peasants. The smoke and smell annoyed Kamenev’s wife Olga. According to Baikalov, ‘she sneezed, coughed, groaned, implored’ Stalin to put out his pipe, but he ignored her. This was typical behaviour. He turned curmudgeonly conduct into an art form when women made unwelcome demands. He expected admiration and compliance from them — and then he could be charming. But no one in a skirt, not even pretty Olga, was going to order him around.⁶ It may not have helped that Olga was intelligent and articulate and that she was the sister of Trotski, sworn enemy of the Bolsheviks. The end of his isolation in Kureika had not improved his mood or his manners; his uncouthness increased in direct proportion to the lowering of the appreciative respect he craved.

His acquaintances found little to appreciate. Stalin was taciturn and morose. Although he listened intently, he barely contributed to discussions on the war and international relations. Instead Baikalov was attracted to Kamenev’s lively presence and grasp of the arguments;⁷ and writing over two decades later, Baikalov recalled that Kamenev dismissed Stalin’s rare comments ‘with brief, almost contemptuous remarks’.⁸

The Kamenevs and Baikalov had prejudices that disabled them from appreciating that Stalin was no ignoramus. They were fluent conversationalists. They came from well-to-do families in which such exchanges were normal: Kamenev’s father was an engineer and businessman, Baikalov’s the owner of a gold mine. Both Kamenev and Baikalov had been educated in gimnazias.⁹ They were culturally confident in public whereas Stalin still spoke haltingly in Russian,¹⁰ and four years among the Ostyaks had done nothing to enhance his linguistic facility. Baikalov deplored Stalin’s failure to be witty. (Intellectuals were meant to be scintillating conversationalists.) Kamenev and Baikalov also underestimated the virtues of silence. When listening to Kamenev, Stalin felt he was learning. All his life he devoted himself to accumulating knowledge. His attentiveness, memory and analytical skill were razor-sharp even if he did not brag about this to others; and although his Marxism lacked the range of other Bolshevik leaders, he was working to extend himself. At any rate when Stalin was among individuals who encouraged him to relax, he was a delightful purveyor of jokes and mimicry. He also understood Russian perfectly on the page and was an excellent editor of Russian-language manuscripts.¹¹ He was undervalued, and quietly he resented the fact.¹²

This would not have mattered in the annals of Russian and global history if a second event had not spun him around in the winter of 1916–17. The cause was political tumult in Petrograd. Nicholas II spent an unhappy Christmas. The one bright spot was Brusilov’s December 1916 offensive, which pushed the Germans back several miles. It was a long-overdue Russian military success. But the rest of the news was grim. Leaders of the conservative and liberal parties in the Fourth State Duma murmured ever more openly about the need for a change of regime if the armed forces were ever to defeat the Central Powers. One of them, Alexander Guchkov, sounded out the generals for a coup d’état. The dynasty’s reputation was in tatters. Rasputin, the ‘holy man’ who had helped to alleviate the effects of the haemophilia of the heir to the throne Alexei, had been assassinated in December but the stories about him — his gambling, philandering, blaspheming and political venality — continued to cling to Nicholas and Empress Alexandra. In fact it is doubtful that the liberals or conservatives could have done much better. The prolongation of the war put immense and inevitable strain on transport and administration; it also made unavoidable the printing of money to finance the war effort, and this was bound to cause inflation. Nicholas II dispersed the Duma on 26 February 1917. He was determined to keep hold of the situation.

This might have worked if popular opinion had not been so hostile to the Romanovs. Peasants were complaining about fixed grain prices and about the deficit in industrial goods as the result of the priority given to the production of armaments and military equipment. Garrison soldiers disliked the possibility that they might be mobilised to the front. Workers were angry about the deterioration of living and working conditions. Even if they had gained higher wages, the effect was ruined by the devalued currency. Factory strikes occurred in December 1916 and were put down with severity. Yet the grievances remained.

Unbeknown to the revolutionaries in Achinsk, industrial conflict recurred in Petrograd in the last week of February 1917. Trouble erupted among female textile workers on International Women’s Day and quickly spread to the workforces in the Putilov armaments plant. The dispatch of garrison troops to control the crowds was counterproductive because soldiers took the side of the strikers and either joined them or handed over their weapons. Order collapsed in the capital. Police fled, generals panicked. The politicians in the dispersed Fourth State Duma sensed that an opportunity to settle accounts with the Romanov monarchy had at last arrived, but lacked the nerve to take action. Even the revolutionary parties were in a quandary. The suppression of the December strikes made them pause for thought. The clandestine networks of Mensheviks, Bolsheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries had not yet been repaired and morale was still at a low ebb. But the fervour of the strikers was unquenchable, and soon there were demands for the formation of a Petrograd Soviet.

Nicholas II was late in comprehending the scale of the opposition. Hurrying back from Mogilëv towards Petrograd, he was told the game was already up. He took the advice of the Supreme Command; he consulted the speaker of the dispersed State Duma, Mikhail Rodzyanko. At first he wanted to preserve the dynasty by transferring the throne to his haemophiliac son Alexei. No one at court thought this sensible. Then he approached his brother Grand Duke Mikhail, but Mikhail refused the offer. Nicholas II succumbed and on 2 March abdicated to public delight across the empire. Euphoric crowds took to the streets of every town and city.

News travelled to Siberia along the telegraph lines faster than newspapers could be carried by rail. The Bolshevik group in Achinsk was jubilant. Nicholas the Bloody had been overthrown. The dynasty was at an end. The revolutionaries in the town gathered together regardless of party affiliation just after Grand Duke Mikhail’s refusal was made known. A spirited discussion followed. Feeling the need to contribute actively to the political outcome, many exiles signed a telegram congratulating the Grand Duke on his civic gesture. Stalin later claimed that his friend Kamenev appended his signature. Kamenev vehemently rejected the accusation; and even Stalin admitted that Kamenev had immediately regretted his action. In March 1917, in any case, Kamenev and Stalin agreed on their strategic objectives. A Provisional Government was formed on 3 March with the sanction of the Menshevik-led Petrograd Soviet. The Prime Minister would be the liberal Prince Georgi Lvov and liberals, especially the Constitutional-Democrats (or Kadets), dominated the cabinet. Only one socialist, the Socialist-Revolutionary Alexander Kerenski, became a minister. The original Bolshevik scheme for the establishment of a ‘revolutionary democratic dictatorship’ had been thwarted, and Kamenev and Stalin were willing — like most Mensheviks, most Socialist-Revolutionaries and many Bolsheviks — to give the Provisional Government their support conditional on ministers promulgating the basic civil freedoms and limiting themselves to a defensive war against the Central Powers.

As quickly as they could get tickets, the Bolsheviks in Achinsk made their way from Krasnoyarsk along the Trans-Siberian Railway to Moscow and then onwards to Petrograd. Chief among them were Kamenev, Stalin and former Duma deputy Matvei Muranov. The experience was very different from the earlier trip each had made towards their place of exile. They travelled as normal passengers rather than in the arrest wagon. Because of their recent detention near the main line they were going to reach Petrograd before most other leading exiles, not to mention the émigrés. Kamenev and Stalin in particular were committed allies; they agreed on policy, and Stalin was not keen to resurrect the old business of Kamenev’s behaviour at the 1915 trial. Their intention was to seize control of the Bolshevik Central Committee in the capital. They aimed to make up for years lost in Siberian detention.

On 12 March 1917 the three of them stepped off the train at the Nicholas Station in east-central Petrograd. Light snow was falling, but Stalin and his companions hardly noticed. Kureika had accustomed them to a lot worse. They were back in Petrograd at last! In his hands Stalin carried a wicker suitcase of medium size; his personal possessions were few and he had no savings to his name. He was wearing the same suit he had worn on his departure in July 1913.¹³ The one sartorial difference was that he had valenki on his feet. These were the long padded boots worn by Russians in the winter.¹⁴ He was pinched-looking after the long train trip and had visibly aged over the four years in exile. Having gone away a young revolutionary, he was coming back a middle-aged political veteran. Stalin had written to alert his old friend Sergei Alliluev of their arrival.¹⁵ He expected him to be at the station and, perhaps, to have passed on the message to the Russian Bureau of the Central Committee. Fellow passengers and railway personnel had been fêting Stalin, Kamenev and Muranov as heroic fighters against the fallen regime. An honorific reception in Petrograd was anticipated.

In fact no one turned up at the Nicholas Station. There were no bands, no speeches, and no ceremonial escort to party headquarters at the house of the Emperor’s former mistress Matilda Kseshinskaya.¹⁶ They had to fend for themselves. When they had left the capital for Siberia, they had been Central Committee members and they expected to be treated with due decorum. They had a rude surprise.

The fact that Shlyapnikov and Molotov, who led the Bureau, had not greeted them was not an accident. Kamenev, Muranov and Stalin expected to be given seats on the Bureau alongside the existing members who had much lower standing in Bolshevism; but the Bureau had other thoughts. If Stalin was willing to overlook Kamenev’s breach of revolutionary etiquette, the Bureau was not so indulgent. He had sinned; he had shown no repentance. It would also seem that Stalin’s reputation for uncomradely behaviour had preceded him. A struggle for leadership in the Russian Bureau was unavoidable. There was also a political angle to this. The Russian Bureau under Shlyapnikov and Molotov had objected to any support, however conditional, for the Provisional Government. They advocated outright opposition. They also knew that there were many Bolshevik militants not only in the districts of the capital but also in the provinces who felt the same. They edited the new factional newspaper Pravda on this basis and strove to win all Bolsheviks to their side. They were already not best pleased by Kamenev’s arrival, and when they discovered which side he — together with Stalin and Muranov — was taking in the current political debate they were determined to avoid having rank pulled on them.

The position was clarified on 12 March when the Bureau decided to include only those new members ‘whom it considers useful according to its political credo’.¹⁷ Muranov fell easily into this category and was given a place. Then Stalin’s case came up for consideration:¹⁸

Stalin had been snubbed. Even his career had been misrepresented; for he had not been a mere ‘agent’ of the Central Committee but a co-opted full member since 1912. Exactly which ‘features’ had riled the Bureau was not specified. His underhandedness in political and personal dealings had probably done for him. Kamenev, though, was entirely rejected for membership: he was allowed to contribute to Pravda only on condition that he did this anonymously; he was also required to give a satisfactory explanation of his past behaviour.¹⁹

Stalin made his way to the Alliluev apartment after the Bureau meeting. He had written to Olga Allilueva in 1915 saying that he would visit them as soon as his exile was over.²⁰ When he paid his call, only daughter Anna was at home. Her parents and brother Pavel were out at work and the younger daughter Nadya was having a piano lesson elsewhere. Her brother Fëdor (or Fedya) too was out.²¹ By the end of the day the whole Alliluev family had returned. They talked with their visitor late into the night. A bed was offered to him in the sitting room, where Sergei also slept; and Olga and the girls went off to the bedroom. Joseph made a positive impression on everybody. Anna and Nadya were very taken with him. Sixteen-year-old Nadya especially enjoyed his jollity. The noise from the bedroom disturbed Sergei, who had to work next day at the electricity station. But Joseph intervened on the girls’ behalf: ‘Leave them alone, Sergei! They’re only youngsters… Let them have a laugh!’ Next day, before he left for the Russian Bureau, he asked if he could lodge with them. The apartment was not big enough for all of them but he was held in such affection that the family decided to look for a larger one. Anna and Nadya were given the task. Joseph was equally keen: ‘Do please make sure you keep a room for me in the new apartment.’²²

Stalin’s priority was to sort out his position in the Russian Bureau. After leaving the Alliluevs, he hurried to headquarters and raised a fuss. This time he was more successful. The result was an agreement to find work for Kamenev on the ground that Bolshevik émigrés, presumably including Lenin, continued to value him highly. Stalin was added to the Pravda editorial board. Kamenev joined him on 15 March and Stalin was appointed to the Presidium of the Bureau on the same day.²³ Persistence and experience were paying off. Molotov was pushed out of the Bureau.²⁴ Evidently there had been a fierce dispute and Shlyapnikov and Molotov had lost. Pravda began to toe a line approved by Stalin and Kamenev, and the Russian Bureau ceased to demand the Provisional Government’s removal.

The position of Stalin and Kamenev was soon to be a matter of shame for them, and Stalin apologised for his failure to take a more radical view; but he had not been as moderate as his later enemies, especially Trotski, liked to suggest. It is true that he refused to attack the Mensheviks in public. Equally undeniable is Stalin’s espousal of a policy of mere ‘pressure’ upon the Provisional Government.²⁵ Yet he consistently denounced those Mensheviks who advocated straightforward defence of the country. Stalin demanded more; he proposed that Bolsheviks should co-operate only with Mensheviks who accepted the line of the Zimmerwald and Kienthal Conferences and actively campaigned for an end to the Great War. He did not want unity at any cost.²⁶ Moreover, he wanted the Petrograd Soviet to go on intimidating the Provisional Government. The Soviet, he declared, should work to bind ‘metropolitan and provincial democracy’ together and ‘turn itself at the necessary moment into an organ of revolutionary power mobilising all the healthy forces of the people against counter-revolution. The immediate objective was to ensure that the Provisional Government did not go over to the side of the counter-revolution. The speedy convocation of a constitutional assembly was essential.²⁷

Nor did Stalin fail to introduce a theme untouched by Pravda before he returned: the national question. He demanded linguistic equality for the non-Russian nations. He called for regional self-rule. More than any other Bolshevik in Petrograd in March 1917 he understood that Bolshevism had to appeal to the peoples of the borderlands. Deliberately he opposed talk of federalism.²⁸ Orthodox Bolsheviks aimed at forming a unitary state and Stalin agreed with this; but ‘self-determination’ was possible within the framework of the policy he and Lenin had proposed before the war. ‘National oppression’ had to be eradicated, and the Provisional Government as a cabinet pursuing the interests of capitalism had not shown the necessary sympathy.²⁹

Kamenev and Stalin continued with their combative programme at the unofficial gathering of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks from across the country which was held at the end of March 1917. The Russian Bureau selected him to speak to the joint debate on the Provisional Government. His criticism of the post-Romanov regime was a damning one:³⁰

Stalin finished by saying that political rupture with the ‘bourgeoisie’ was desirable and that ‘the sole organ capable of taking power is the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies on an All-Russia scale’.³¹

A separate session of Bolsheviks took place. It was here that Kamenev denounced the warmth of official Menshevik support for the Provisional Government and urged the need to back the Petrograd Soviet.³² The Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, after all their organisational divisions since 1903, belonged to the same party once again. They were the largest two factions in the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party. At the central level they maintained separate bodies, but across the country — especially outside Petrograd — they worked together. This was an unsustainable situation. The right wing of Menshevism advocated vigorous national defence whereas all Bolsheviks wanted a robust campaign for a multilateral peace. Kamenev and Stalin planned to resolve matters by calling upon the anti-defencist Mensheviks to split themselves off from their faction’s right wing.

Among Bolsheviks, Kamenev was frank about his calculations:³³

Such a statement, made three days before Lenin’s arrival in Petrograd, indicates that Kamenev and Stalin were very far from having a gentle attitude to Menshevism. Implicitly they aimed at schism on the basis of a policy on war and peace which was bound to bring the party into direct conflict with the Provisional Government.

This was a plausible strategy, and it is only because the Bolsheviks within weeks had started to go it alone and then, months later, made their October Revolution that the audacity of the Kamenev–Stalin strategy became forgotten. Both Kamenev and Stalin after 1917 had to forswear their strategy as the more radical policy of seizing power without Menshevik assistance was turned into one of the sacred items of Bolshevik history. The episode is anyway important for the light it sheds on Stalin’s career. He and Kamenev, despite the Russian Bureau’s hostility, had barged their way into the leadership of the faction and elaborated a strategy which, if it had been continued, could have produced a party of radical opposition to the Provisional Government. Factional allegiances were extremely fluid in March and April. The clever idea of tempting left-wing Mensheviks into a Bolshevik embrace had solid political potential. Kamenev and Stalin had been both nimble and determined. They had seen much more of Russia in the twentieth century than Lenin; they had experienced the atmosphere of revolutionary politics in Petrograd since the February Revolution. Their plan for a campaign for radical policies on peace, bread, land and government had the potential for huge popularity.

Lenin violently disagreed. Based in Switzerland, he wrote his ‘Letters from Afar’ which demanded the overthrow of the Provisional Government. The original strategy of Bolshevism, enunciated since 1905, had been for the workers to overthrow the monarchy and establish a temporary revolutionary dictatorship, uniting all socialist parties, which would implement all imaginable civic freedoms and establish a capitalist economy. Leninist strategy had been made obsolete by the formation of the liberal-led Provisional Government and its promulgation of civic freedoms. Lenin never properly explained why he suddenly thought Russia to be ready for the second great projected stage in its revolutionary development — namely the ‘transition to socialism’. But he insisted that this was the only true policy for Bolshevism. He got his chance to fight for his ideas when, at the end of March, the German government allowed him and a group of anti-war Russian Marxists to travel across Germany to Scandinavia before making their way to Petrograd.

Telegrams preceded him, and the Russian Bureau prepared a suitable greeting. Kamenev together with other leading Bolsheviks from Petrograd travelled out to meet him at Beloostrov as the train stopped briefly at the Finnish–Russian administrative frontier on 3 April. Lenin did not mince his words. He picked on Kamenev as the originator of the Russian Bureau’s conditional support for the Provisional Government and cursed him heartily.³⁴ (Stalin avoided such a tirade only because he had not gone to Beloostrov with the welcoming group.)³⁵ Lenin’s mood had not lightened when the train arrived after midnight at the Finland Station in Petrograd. He angrily denounced the Lvov cabinet yet again, and was brusque towards Menshevik leader Nikolai Chkheidze, who headed the Petrograd Soviet delegation deputed to greet him as a renowned returning revolutionary. Then he went off to the Tauride Palace, where he addressed a Bolshevik factional gathering and called for a transformation of strategy. Lenin was heard with incredulity. But he would not be thwarted; again at a joint session of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks he declared that all compromise with the Provisional Government was intolerable. Lenin was on the rampage all through 4 April and Kamenev and Stalin watched impotently. From being dominant leaders they had become spectators.

To the Russian Bureau members who had been pushed aside by Kamenev and Stalin this brought delight. At last they had someone of sufficient standing among Bolsheviks to demand ultra-radicalism. They were enraptured by Lenin and his ideas, which he reduced to a few hundred words and published as his April Theses. There were plenty of others in the faction elsewhere in the country who were equally annoyed with the policy of conditional support for the Provisional Government. Bolshevism had always stood for revolutionary extremism. For those Bolsheviks, in Petrograd and across the country, who approved of giving conditional support to the Provisional Government, the arrival of Lenin was akin to a bull crashing into a china shop. Every Bolshevik, on both sides of the debate, was transfixed by the sight of a returning leader full of bile and confidence; and already it was clear that party members had to choose definitively between the rival strategies of Kamenev and Lenin.

Stalin, like many others, went over straightaway to Lenin’s standpoint. He never bothered to justify the decision. Hurtling from meeting to meeting in those early days after his arrival in Petrograd, Lenin rallied the ultra-radicals and cajoled the doubters. It was a political tour de force. Yet at the same time there was less difficulty for Lenin than appeared at the time. Bolshevism had always cleaved to an extremist agenda. Until 1917, indeed, the faction had anticipated forming a ‘provisional revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’ in the event of the Imperial monarchy’s overthrow. A government of Kadets had always been a hateful possibility in the mind of Bolsheviks. Kamenev and Stalin, the advocates of a deal with elements in the Menshevik faction, had always had an ulterior motive. Stalin shifted his ground on 4 April, but not to the extent that he abruptly turned from a ‘moderate’ into an ‘extremist’. And in bending to the Leninist wind, he did not accept Lenin’s proposals in their entirety. He continued to believe that Lenin had much to learn about revolutionary Russia (and even about non-revolutionary Europe!).

Yet he could not fail to see the difference between Kamenev and Lenin. Kamenev had been Stalin’s senior Bolshevik, his friend and his ally. But Lenin was a real leader. From April 1917 until Lenin’s medical incapacitation in 1922 Stalin gave him allegiance. It was often a troubled relationship. They had disputes every year through to Lenin’s death. But they got on well between February and October; and Lenin took Stalin under his patronage and promoted his career in Bolshevism.