Stalin, Volume 1

CHAPTER 4

CONSTITUTIONAL AUTOCRACY

We are tired of everything. We are loyal people and cannot go against the Government, but neither can we support the current Government. We are forced to step to the side and be silent. This is the tragedy of Russian life.

A. I. Savenko, political rightist and anti-Semite, private letter intercepted by the okhranka, 19141

Looking at that low and small head, you had the feeling that if you pricked it, the whole of Karl Marx’s Capital would come hissing out of it like gas from a container. Marxism was his element, there he was invincible. No power on earth could dislodge him from a position once taken, and he could find an appropriate Marx formula for every phenomenon.”

A former fellow tsarist political prisoner speaking about the young Stalin in Baku prison, 19082

RUSSIA’S STATE HAD ARISEN out of military exigencies, in an extraordinarily challenging geopolitical environment, but also out of ideals, above all the autocratic ideal, yet Russia’s long-enduring autocracy was anything but stable. Nearly half the Romanovs, following Peter the Great, left their thrones involuntarily, as a result of coups or assassinations. Peter himself had his eldest son and heir killed for disobedience (thirteen of Peter’s fifteen children by two wives predeceased him). Peter was succeeded by his second wife, a peasant girl from the Baltic coast, who took the name Catherine I, and then by his grandson, Peter II. In 1730, when Peter II died from smallpox on the day of his wedding, the Romanov male line expired. The throne passed to Peter II’s relations, first to his father’s cousin Anna (r. 1730–40), and then, in a palace coup, to his half aunt Elizabeth (r. 1741–61). Neither produced a male heir. The Romanov House avoided perishing altogether only thanks to the marriage of one of Peter the Great’s two surviving daughters to the Duke of Holstein-Gottorp. This made the Romanovs a Russian-German family. Karl Peter Ulrich, the first Holstein-Gottorp-Romanov—who became Peter III—was an imbecile. He wore a Prussian military uniform to Russian state functions and lasted six months before being deposed in a putsch by his wife, a minor German princess named Sophie Auguste Frederike von Anhalt-Zerbst, who assumed the throne as Catherine II (or the Great). She fancied herself an enlightened despot, and made high culture a partner in the autocracy (something Stalin would emulate, ruling as he would from Catherine’s imperial Senate in Moscow). The German Catherine was a Romanov only by marriage, but Russia’s ruling family continued to emphasize its links, via the female line, back to Peter and to employ the Russian surname only. In 1796, Catherine was succeeded by her son Paul, who was assassinated in 1801; then came Paul’s son Alexander I (r. 1801–25); Alexander’s brother Nicholas I (r. 1825–55); Alexander II, who died in agony in 1881, his legs shattered by a terrorist’s bomb; Alexander III, who became heir following the sudden death of his elder brother and who, in power, succumbed to kidney disease (nephritis) at age forty-nine in 1894; and finally, Nicholas II.3

Except for Alexander III, who married a Danish princess—his deceased elder brother’s fiancee—all the “Romanov” descendants of the German Catherine took German-born wives. Such intermarriage transformed almost all of Europe’s royalty into relations. Nicholas II’s German spouse—Alix Victoria Helena Louise Beatrice, Princess of Hesse-Darmstadt—was the favorite granddaughter of Queen Victoria of England. Born in 1872, the year after German unification, Alix first met the tsarevich “Nicky” when she was eleven and he fifteen, during the wedding of her sister, Ella, to Nicholas’s uncle. They met again six years later and fell madly in love. Tsar Alexander III and his wife, Empress Consort Maria Fyodorovna, initially opposed their son Nicholas’s marriage to the shy, melancholic Alix, despite the fact that she was their goddaughter. Russia’s monarchs preferred the daughter of the pretender to the French throne, to solidify Russia’s new alliance with France. Queen Victoria, for her part, had favored Alix for the Prince of Wales of the United Kingdom, but she, too, came around. Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany supported the Alix-Nicky match from the get-go, hoping to strengthen German-Russian bonds. Alix’s arrival in Russia, however, proved ill starred, coinciding with the early death of Emperor Alexander III. “She has come to us behind a coffin,” the crowd noted in their first glimpse of her, at the state funeral. “She brings misfortune with her.”4 The new empress consort dutifully converted to Orthodoxy (from Lutheranism) and took the name Alexandra. Her honeymoon with Nicholas II consisted of twice-daily Orthodox services and visits by notables to convey condolences about her father-in-law’s untimely passing. She gave birth to four daughters in succession, which also set everyone on edge, because an imperial succession law passed in 1797 under Paul I (r. 1796–1801), the son of Catherine the Great, forbade another female to occupy the throne. Finally, in August 1904, in the tenth year of marriage, Alexandra produced a long-awaited male heir. Nicholas II named the boy for his favorite early Romanov ruler, Alexei, Peter the Great’s father, harkening back to the Moscow days before the building of St. Petersburg.

Possessing an heir, finally, Nicholas II reveled in Interior Minister Pyotr Durnovó’s tenacious crackdown a little more than a year later, but the tsar had not retracted the October Manifesto. And so, on April 27, 1906, the newly created State Duma opened in the Winter Palace with the monarch’s (terse) address from the throne, in emulation of British custom. Nicholas II uncannily resembled his cousin King George V. But facing all the standing dignitaries, domestic and foreign, as well as the commoner-elected representatives, who had gathered in St. George’s Hall, the tsar, raised on a dais, spoke a mere 200 words, which were followed by a tomblike silence.5 Russia had become something that had never before existed: a constitutional autocracy, in which the word “constitution” was forbidden.6 It was a liberal-illiberal muddle. The Duma met in the Tauride Palace, which had been given by the autocrat Catherine the Great to her court favorite, Prince Potëmkin, in 1783, for his conquest of Crimea; it had been repossessed from his family after his death, and used, most recently, to warehouse props of the imperial theater. The Tauride’s interior winter garden was converted into a nearly 500-seat chamber, christened the White Hall. Despite the exclusion from the Duma of the small central Asian “protectorates” of Khiva and Bukhara as well as the Grand Duchy of Finland (which had its own legislature), many of the Russian delegates experienced shock at the stunning diversity of the empire’s representatives, as if elites in the capital had been living somewhere other than imperial Russia. Inside the White Hall, under a gigantic portrait of Nicholas II, the principal advocates for constitutionalism, the Constitutional Democrats (Cadets)—a group led by Moscow University history professor Paul Miliukov—constituted the opposition.7 Who, if anyone, supported the new constitutional autocracy remained unclear.

Prime Minister Sergei Witte, who had done more than anyone to urge the Duma on the tsar, at its successful launch handed in his resignation, exhausted, infirm, and scorned.8 Witte earned no special dispensation from the fact that he had been the lead locomotive behind Russia’s spectacular industrial surge from the 1890s, or had helped bridge the chasm of 1905 between regime and society. Nicholas II found Witte devious and unprincipled (“Never have I seen such a chameleon of a man.”).9 The tsar immediately and everlastingly regretted the political concessions that Witte had helped wring. With Witte’s fall, Durnovó, too, was obliged to step down, his historic service as interior minister having also lasted a mere six months, although Nicholas II allowed Durnovó to continue receiving his salary of 18,000 rubles per annum and awarded him a staggering cash gift of 200,000 rubles. (Witte received the Order of St. Alexander Nevsky, with diamonds.)10 Durnovó yielded his portfolio to the Saratov province governor, Pyotr Stolypin, who in July 1906 managed to add the post of prime minister, thereby replacing both Durnovó and Witte.11

Tall, with blue eyes and a black beard, a figure of immense charm and sensitive to form—so unlike the abrasive Witte—Stolypin was a discovery. He had been born in 1862 in Dresden (where his mother was visiting relatives abroad) to an ancient Russian noble family. His father, who was related to the renowned writer Mikhail Lermontov, owned a Stradivarius that he himself played, and had served as adjutant to Alexander II and as commandant of Moscow’s Grand Kremlin Palace; Stolypin’s well-educated mother was the daughter of the general who had commanded the Russian infantry during the Crimean War and rose to viceroy of tsarist Poland. The boy grew up on his wealthy family’s estates in tsarist Lithuania, territories of the bygone Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and graduated in natural sciences (not law) from St. Petersburg Imperial University. (Dimitri Mendeleev, of the periodic table, was one of Stolypin’s teachers.) Like Stalin, Stolypin suffered a withered arm, from a mysterious teenage malady; he wrote by using his good left hand to guide his right. The deformity precluded following his father and mother’s relatives into a military career.12 But in 1902, at age forty, Stolypin became governor of Grodno, in the Polish-Lithuanian western borderlands, encompassing his own properties. He was the youngest person in the Russian empire to hold a governorship. In 1903, he had been transferred to governor of Saratov, in central Russia’s Volga valley, whose villages, unlike those in the western borderlands, had communes that periodically redistributed strips of land among peasants (the “repartitional” commune). Saratov also became known for political turbulence. The tsar had had occasion to tour the province, and Stolypin toiled indefatigably to ensure he would be surrounded by admiring subjects. During the brutal 1905–6 crackdown, Stolypin proved to be imperial Russia’s most energetic governor, as well as an executive of courage and vision, willing to explain to assembled crowds his rationale for upholding the law and, if that failed, personally leading troops in repression. Stolypin’s performance impressed the courtiers; Nicholas II telegrammed congratulations for “exemplary efficiency.”

When Nicholas II had summoned him to his Alexander Palace residence in Tsarskoe Selo, just outside St. Petersburg, to inform him of his elevation to the premiership in the capital, Stolypin protested that he was unfit for such a high post and did not know the capital’s elites. The tsar, tears in his eyes, grateful, perhaps, for the professed modesty and deference, grasped Stolypin’s hand with both of his.13 This handclasp has been seen, even more in retrospect than in prospect, as a historic opportunity that might have saved imperial Russia. Stolypin certainly stands out as one of the most commanding officials ever to hold a position of power in Russia: self-confident in a milieu of toadying, an accomplished orator as well as manager, a rare state official with a longer-term perspective. “If the state does not retaliate against evil deeds,” Stolypin stated upon his appointment, “then the very meaning of the state is lost.”14 The provincial proved himself adept at gaining the tsar’s confidence, and he quickly came to overshadow the entire establishment in St. Petersburg.15 But the tasks before him were daunting. The critical keys to unlocking modernity included not just steel output and mass production, which Russia more or less did manage to attain, but also the successful incorporation of the masses into political systems, that is, mass politics.

Stolypin was determined to take full advantage of the new lease on life afforded to the regime by Durnovó’s bravura crackdown, within the new situation created by Witte’s successful urging on Nicholas II of the October Manifesto quasi-constitutionalism. During Stolypin’s premiership (1906–1911), he endeavored, in his way, to reinvent the Russian political system. But Russia’s conservative political establishment, furious at the constitutional autocracy, opposed outright Stolypin’s efforts to conjure into being a polity on their behalf. The left, for different reasons—they were sobered by the defeat of the 1905 uprising and Stolypin’s repression—would fall into despair as well. To be sure, our leftist protagonist Iosif “Koba” Jughashvili would perpetrate his most infamous revolutionary exploits under Stolypin. But whether those incendiary activities amounted to much remains questionable. By contrast, the aims and frustrations of Stolypin’s reform programs, like those of Witte before him, tell us a great deal about the future Stalin’s regime. At the time, viewing the world through a canonical Marxist prism, the future Stalin comprehended next to nothing of what Stolypin went through at the time. Stalin never met the tsarist prime minister, but to a very great extent he would later walk in his shoes.

RUSSIA’S (SECOND) WOULD-BE BISMARCK

Two attributes seemed to define imperial Russia. First, its agriculture fed both Germany and England via exports but remained far from efficient: Russia had the lowest harvest yields in Europe (below Serbia, considered merely a “little brother”); its per-acre grain yields remained less than half those of France or even Austria-Hungary.16 This made the peasants seem like an urgent problem that had to be addressed. Second, Russian political life had become riotous, self-defeating, insane. Many in the elite, not least Nicholas II, had expected the initial 1906 elections to yield a conservative peasant-monarchist Duma. Instead, the Constitutional Democrats enjoyed electoral success, which surprised even the Cadets. Once empowered by the ballot box, Russia’s classical liberals showed no intention of cooperating with the autocracy, and Nicholas II had no intention of compromising with them.17 Moreover, although the socialist parties had boycotted the First Duma elections, they changed their stance and got dozens of deputies elected to the Second Duma (thanks partly to peasant ballots). The okhranka, naturally, kept the deputies under surveillance, using informants and listening in on telephone conversations.18 But the political police had no answer to the political intransigence on all sides. The latter, moreover, was greatly facilitated by the Duma’s abysmal legislative procedures. No mechanisms existed to distinguish major from minor matters, so all were taken up as legislation rather than via mundane government regulations. Also, incredibly, the Duma lacked any fixed timetable for the progression of legislation; populous commissions of deputies would handle bills before they could be brought to the floor, and some commissions would deliberate on a single bill for eighteen months. When the bills did finally move to the next stage, they would be debated in the full Duma again without time limits.19 In such procedural minutiae can institutions founder, especially when opposing political forces prove beyond reconciliation.

From the point of view of the Constitutional Democrats, the problem was that Russia’s constitutional revolution had not removed the autocracy. And indeed, Nicholas II used his prerogative to dismiss the Duma’s first convocation after a mere seventy-three days. The autocrat was able, thanks to Article 87 of the Fundamental Laws, to issue laws by fiat during legislative recess. (Such laws were in theory supposed to be confirmed when the legislature resumed, but they remained in force while debate proceeded.)20 The Second Duma in 1907, which served even more as a platform of antigovernment speechifying, was tolerated for fewer than ninety days. Then, on June 3, 1907, Stolypin unilaterally narrowed Duma suffrage still further by having Nicholas II employ Article 87 to alter the electoral provisions, a step that the Fundamental Laws expressly forbade.21 “Coup d’etat!” screamed the Constitutional Democrats, one of Stolypin’s two main targets in the maneuver (the other target were those further to the left). It was a coup. But from Stolypin’s point of view, the Cadets were hardly angels: in 1905–7, they colluded in antistate terrorism, condemning it publicly but covertly encouraging it, in order to weaken the autocracy. Many humble tsarist officials were killed in that collusion.22 But whereas the intriguers at court egged on Nicholas II to terminate the Duma “experiment,” Stolypin was trying to work with the legislature in order to root Russia’s suspended-in-the-air government in some kind of political base that was compatible with the autocracy. “We want not professors, but men with roots in the country, the local gentry, and such like,” Stolypin told the professor Bernard Pares, the founder of Russian studies in Britain, in May 1908.23

Stolypin was correct that passing legislation necessitated more than some “mystical union” between tsar and people. He imagined himself, like his very short-lived predecessor, Sergei Witte, as a Russian Bismarck. “I am in no way in favor of an absolutist government,” the Iron Chancellor had told the German Reichstag. “I consider parliamentary cooperation—if properly practiced—necessary and useful, as much as I consider parliamentary rule harmful and impossible.”24 Russia’s prime minister, too, accepted a parliament but not parliamentarism (a government controlled by parliament), and the Russian Duma, like the German Reichstag, was a representative institution that expressly strove not to be representative. To be sure, the German franchise had been much more inclusive: all German males over twenty-five had the right to vote. Moreover, thanks to its June 3, 1907, origins, imperial Russia’s Third Duma would be relentlessly shadowed by predictions of new coups, a source of instability. But in Stolypin’s calculation, all this was a necessary price to pay for acquiring the legal wherewithal to modernize the country.

In Saratov, Stolypin had observed the same injustices the radical young Stalin had observed in the Caucasus: workers suffering frequent trauma and long hours for low pay, nobles owning enormous tracts of land while peasants in rags worked tiny plots. As prime minister, Stolypin embarked on far-reaching social reforms. German industrial workers, thanks to the second plank of Bismarck’s strategy (stealing the thunder of the left), had come to enjoy sickness, accident, and old-age insurance as well as access to subsidized canteens; Stolypin, at a minimum, wanted to introduce workmen’s social insurance.25 Most prominently, though, he wanted to encourage peasants to abandon the repartitional commune and consolidate farm land into more productice units.

Russian elites tended to view peasant society as backward and alien, and shared a determination to transform it.26 (In fact, an observer could have looked at the Russian government as a distinct society alienated from the empire at large, especially from peasant society—the vast majority of the population.)27 This elite view took on a predominantly economic inflection as the Russian establishment came to believe the peasants were becoming increasingly impoverished; a few officials, like Witte, back in his days as finance minister, had blamed “the poor condition of our peasantry” as the main brake on the Russian state’s industrialization and geopolitical aggrandizement.28 Stolypin went further, treating the peasantry as a regime-defining political problem. Such an analysis was not unique to Russia. In Prussia, reformers in the 1820s, seeking to counter the influence of the French Revolution, had argued that peasant property owners were the only reliable defenders of law and order and the state.29 This was precisely Stolypin’s view as well. Instead of blaming outside “revolutionary agitators” for rural disturbances, Stolypin pinpointed low rural living standards, and further noted that much of the peasant unrest in 1905–6 had been communally organized.30 On the basis of his experience in the communeless western borderlands, moreover, he concluded that a prosperous individualist village was a peaceful village. Thus, his agrarian reforms, enabled by a November 9, 1906, decree, aimed to drive agricultural productivity and remove the basis for peasant unrest by creating an independent property-owning class among the peasants, who, once furnished with state credits and access to technology, would strike out on their own. In other words, Stolypin sought to transform both the physical rural landscape, overcoming the separated communal strips of land with consolidated farms, and the psychology of the rural inhabitant.31

Globally, the period of Stolypin’s premiership was one of heightened striving to enlarge the capacities of the state. From the French Third Republic to the Russian empire, states of all types pursued ambitious projects such as the building of canals, roads, and railroads to integrate their territories and markets. They also promoted the settlement of new lands via subsidizing homesteading, draining marshes, damming rivers, and irrigating fields. Such statist transformationalism—building infrastructure, managing populations and resources—was often tested first in overseas possessions (colonies), then reapplied back home; sometimes it was developed first at home, then taken abroad, or to what were designated as imperial peripheries. Rule-of-law states when governing abroad often implemented many of the social engineering practices characteristic of non-rule-of-law states, but at home liberal orders differed from authoritarian ones in what practices were deemed acceptable or possible.32 What stands out in all cases of state-led social engineering, though, was how the would-be “technocrats” rarely perceived the benefits, let alone the necessity, of converting subjects (domestic or imperial) into citizens. Technocrats generally saw “politics” as a hindrance to efficient administration. In that regard, Stolypin’s idea of incorporating peasants—at least the “strong and the sober” among the peasantry—into the sociopolitical order on equal terms with other subjects was radical. To be sure, he intended property ownership to impart a stake more than a formal voice. Still, one adviser to the prime minister called him a “new phenomenon” on the Russian scene for seeking political support in parts of the wider populace.33

The reform proved to be a flexibly designed experiment, amalgamating years of prior discussion and effort, and allowing for adjustments along the way.34 But both the political boost from newly created loyal yeoman and the full economic takeoff that Stolypin envisioned proved elusive. Of course, in any political system, major reforms are always fraught because institutions are more complex than perceived. Russia’s peasant communes, in practice, were actually more flexible institutions than their critics understood.35 But the commune’s division of land into separated strips required coordination with others in the village, and rendered impossible the sale, lease, mortgage, or legal transfer of land by individuals, while inhibiting investment in lands that might be taken away. Communes did shield peasants from catastrophe in hard times, although that, too, depended on permanently pooling resources, inducing communes to resist any loss of members. With the reform, the formal consent of the commune was no longer required for exit. Exits were still complicated by red tape (court backlogs), as well as social tensions, but a substantial minority, perhaps 20 percent of European Russia’s 13 million peasant households, would manage to leave the commune during the reform. These new small private landowners, however, generally did not escape commune-style strip farming.36 (A single holding could sometimes be divided into forty or fifty strips.) A shortage of land surveyors, among other factors, meant that many peasants who had privatized could not always consolidate.37 Often, the most individually oriented peasants just decamped for Siberia, as the reform’s enhancement of secure property rights significantly spurred migration in search of new land, but that reduced productivity at the farms they left.38 The land question’s complexity could be stupefying. But where privatized or even non-privatized farms were consolidated—the key aim of Stolypin’s economic reforms—productivity rose significantly.39

In the end, however, Stolypin’s economic and other reforms came up against the stubborn limits to structural reform imposed by politics. Stolypin had to initiate his bold agrarian transformation with the Fundamental Law’s emergency Article 87, during a Duma recess, and the changes sparked deep resistance among the propertied establishment. They, as well as others, blocked Stolypin’s related modernization efforts.40

Russia’s prime minister would attempt not just to rearrange peasant landholdings and credit and introduce workers’ accident and sickness insurance, but also to expand local self-government to the empire’s Catholic west, lift juridical restrictions on Jews, broaden civil and religious rights, and overall invent a workable central government and general polity.41 But his government found it had to bribe many of the elected conservative Duma deputies for votes on bills. And even then, Stolypin could not get the votes for his key legislation. Only the agrarian reforms and a watered down version of worker insurance made the statute books. Conservatives circumscribed Stolypin’s room for maneuver. He was partly the victim of his own success: he had garroted the 1905–6 revolution and, the next year, emptied the Duma of many liberals and socialists, thereby making possible a working relationship between the quasi-parliament and the tsar’s appointed government, but the urgency had vanished. At a deeper level, he had miscalculated. In Stolypin’s June 1907 new franchise, the societal groups that had the most to gain from his reform programs were either excluded from the Duma or outnumbered in it by traditional interests—the landholding gentry—that had the most to lose but that Stolypin’s electoral coup had entrenched.42 To put the matter another way, the political interests that most accepted autocracy least accepted modernizing reforms.

RUSSIA’S PROTO-FASCISM

That the Russian autocracy would experience severe difficulties developing a political base is not self-evident. The number of Social Democrats shot up from a mere 3,250 in 1904 to perhaps 80,000 by 1907—a vault, to be sure, but less impressive in relative terms. The Social Democratic Workers’ Party achieved little success among Ukrainian speakers, especially peasants, publishing next to nothing in the Ukrainian language. On the territory of what would become Ukraine, the party had no more than 1,000 members.43 The leftist Jewish Labor Bund drew most of its membership not from the empire’s southwest (Ukraine) but the northwest (Belorussia, tsarist Poland). Be that as it may, even adding the Bund—with whom most Russian Social Democrats did not desire a close relationship—and adding the empire’s separate Polish and Latvian Social Democrat‒equivalent parties as well as the semiautonomous Georgian Social Democrats, the combined Social Democratic strength in imperial Russia probably did not exceed 150,000.44 By comparison, the classical liberal (proprivate property, proparliament) Constitutional Democrats—said to have no real social base in Russia—grew to around 120,000, and another constitutionalist party (Octobrists) just to the right of the Cadets enrolled 25,000 more.45 The Socialist Revolutionaries who aimed to represent the agricultural proletariat, failed to achieve mass peasant support in 1905–7, though the SRs did attract urban workers and attained a formal membership of at least 50,000.46 Dwarfing them all, however, was the staunchly monarchical and national chauvinist Union of the Russian People, founded in November 1905, with rallies under the roof at the Archangel Michael Riding Academy as a church choir sang “Praise God” and “Tsar Divine”; already by 1906, it had ballooned to perhaps 300,000, with branches across the empire—including in small towns and villages.47

During the revolutionary uprising, in which liberal constitutionalism was pushed to the forefront, while socialism emerged as an empirewide aspiration, the rise of the illiberal Union of the Russian People constituted a remarkable story. Until 1905, self-styled patriotic elements faced legal limitations in expressing themselves publicly, having to be content with religious processionals, military-victory commemorations, imperial funerals and coronations. That revolutionary year, moreover, most conservatives found themselves caught out, unwilling to enter, let alone master, the political arena. But the Union of the Russian People was different.48 As the most prominent of many upstart rightist organizations in Russia, the Union brought together courtiers, professionals, and churchmen—including many from the young Stalin’s old Tiflis seminary—with townspeople, workers, and peasants. Drawing in the disaffected and the disoriented, as well as the patriotic, the Union managed to sweep in the lower orders and middle strata “for Tsar, faith, and fatherland,” stealing a march on the left.49 The tsarist regime, stymied by rightist establishment opposition in the Duma and State Council, appeared to have the option of grassroots mobilization.

The Union of the Russian People helped invent a new style of right-wing politics—novel not just for Russia but for most of the world—a politics in a new key oriented toward the masses, public spaces, and direct action, a fascism avant la lettre.50 The Union’s members and leaders, such as the grandson of a Bessarabian village priest, Vladimir Purishkevich—who liked to exclaim, “To the right of me there is only the wall”—were antiliberal, anticapitalist, and anti-Semitic (the triad being redundant, in their eyes).51 They emphasized the uniqueness of Russia’s historical trajectory, rejected Europe as a model, preached the need for Orthodox primacy over Jews and Catholics (Poles), and demanded “restoration” of Russia’s traditions. The Union disdained the Russian government’s cowardly preoccupation with its own security, which they saw as indicative of a lack of will to crush the liberals (and socialists). The Union also abhorred the modernizing state as tantamount to socialist revolutionaries. Union members held that the autocrat alone must rule, not the bureaucracy, let alone the Duma. Unionists overlapped with right-wing vigilantes known as Black Hundreds, who became notorious for pogroms against the Jews in the Pale of Settlement and for fighting alongside imperial troops in crackdowns against rebellious peasants and workers. Russian rightists of all stripes, after a slow start, mobilized to a stunning degree, widely disseminating pamphlets and newspapers, organizing rallies in the name of defending autocracy, Orthodoxy, and nationality against Jews and European encroachments such as Western-style constitutionalism.

The empire’s socialists did not shrink from confronting the rightist upsurge. The socialists often forced the Union of the Russian People to hold rallies indoors, under the threat of leftist counterdemonstrations, and then, to use ticket checkers to keep out leftist terrorists who would blow the rightists to smithereens. The left also drew considerable strength and cohesion of its own from Karl Marx and his “Song of Songs” Communist Manifesto (1848). Still, Russia’s rightists possessed real Biblical scripture and what should have been genuinely electrifying material—a Russian right-wing newspaper had introduced the world to the so-called Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This fabricated transcript of a purported Jewish organization’s meetings portrayed Jews as a global conspiracy—visible yet somehow invisible—preying on Christians while plotting to dominate the world.52 It was first published in Russian, serialized over nine days (August 28 through September 7, 1903), in Znamya (St. Petersburg), which was financed by Interior Minister Vyacheslav von Plehve and published by the anti-Semitic Moldavian Pavalаchii Cruseveanu (b. 1860). Known as Pavel Krushevan, he not only oversaw the text’s compilation in 1902–3 but instigated the major pogrom in Kishenëv (Chişinau) in 1903 and founded the Bessarabian branch of the Union of the Russian People in 1905.53 Anti-Semitism, whether in earnest or in cynicism, could serve as a political elixir: everything that went awry could be, and was, blamed on the Jews. In the Pale of Settlement and western borderlands (Volhynia, Bessarabia, Minsk), the rightists nearly took the entire peasant vote, and in the central agricultural heartland (Tula, Kursk, Oryol), site of major agrarian disturbances, rightists won around half the peasant vote.54 In fact, across the expanse of imperial Russian, sympathy for the political right was there to be galvanized.55

Just as the autocracy had refused to use the word “constitution” (or even “parliament”), from the start, the “Union” of the Russian People had abjured the designation “political party” and presented itself as a spontaneous movement, an organic union of the people or folk (narod). Even so, senior government officials in St. Petersburg were unwilling to accept the movement on a permanent basis. Stolypin maintained the expedient of surreptitiously financing the rightist organizations and their anti-Semitic publications, among many newspapers that his government funded, but Stolypin’s deputy in the interior ministry from 1906 to 1911, Sergei Kryzhanovsky, who handled the disbursements to the Union of Russian People and similar organizations, saw no distinction between the political techniques and social program of the far right—redistribution of private property from plutocrats to the poor—and that of the leftist revolutionary parties.56 The government had not created these mass movements and remained wary of them. Thus, even if the far right’s calls for social leveling seemed mostly bluff, the policy of the okhranka was still to treat right-wing organizations as another revolutionary movement. Some factions inside the okhranka ignored or subverted this policy. But mostly, okhranka operatives deemed the far right’s leaders “uncultured” and “unreliable” and kept them under close surveillance, with good reason. Exactly like the radical left, the Union of the Russian People compiled lists of current and former government officials to be assassinated.57 Stolypin was one of their targets.58 His influential top domestic adviser, a former rabbi converted to Orthodoxy, was an anti-Semite, but the prime minister also tried to ease residence, occupational, and educational restrictions on Jews, for both principled and instrumentalist reasons, to diminish the perceived cause of Jewish radicalism and improve Russia’s image abroad.59 Stolypin succeeded in enraging the hard right.

Many rightist movements, refraining from hyperinflammatory rhetoric or arming vigilante “brotherhoods” to combat leftists and Jews and assassinate public figures, were considerably less volatile than the Union of the Russian People. And yet, Nicholas II and others throughout the regime continued to look askance on large public gatherings by supporters. The tsar and most government officials, including Stolypin, frowned on the public “disorder” of political mobilization, and wanted politics to return from the street to the corridors of power. This rebuff of the street held even though the supportive conservative movements pushed not for a right-wing revolution but, mostly, for a restoration of the archaic autocracy that had existed prior to the advent of the Duma.60 No less fundamentally, many rightist organizations themselves would have refrained from mobilizing patriotic social constituencies on behalf of the regime even if they had been permitted, or encouraged, to do so: After all, what kind of autocracy needed help? The autocracy’s very existence in a sense handcuffed the Russian right, both moderate and radical.61

Most rightists wanted an autocracy without asterisk—that is, a mystical unity of monarch and folk—and they rejected anything more than a consultative Duma, but the autocrat himself had created the Duma. This circumstance confused and divided the right. Almost all rightists believed that autocracy ipso facto ruled out opposition, which of course ruled out their own opposition. “In the West, where the government is elected, the concept of ‘opposition’ makes sense; there it refers to ‘opposition to the government’; this is both clear and logical,” explained the editor of the rightist Petersburg weekly Unification. “But here, the government is appointed by the monarch and invested with his confidence. . . . To be in opposition to the imperial government means to oppose the monarch.”62 Still, many rightists despised Stolypin merely for his willingness to engage with the Duma, even though that was the law and the prime minister’s manipulations of the Duma were government triumphs. For some, including Nicholas II, the mere existence of a prime minister was an affront to autocracy.63 In August 1906, assassins dressed in state uniforms nearly killed Stolypin by dynamiting his state dacha where he received petitioners. “Everywhere one could see shreds of human flesh and blood,” one witness recalled of the twenty-seven instant deaths. Another witness observed how Stolypin “came into his half-demolished study, with plaster stains on his coat and an ink spot on the back of his neck. The top of his writing desk had been lifted off by the explosion, which took place in the hall at a distance of about thirty feet from the study, and the inkstand had hit his neck.” A few months later, a time bomb was discovered in former Prime Minister Witte’s home, although it failed to detonate (the clock had stopped). Both acts against proautocratic, conservative prime ministers went unsolved; circumstantial evidence pointed to possible involvement of right-wing circles.64

Stolypin gained in stature from the failed assassination, thanks to his display of composure and resolve, but he felt constrained to move his family into the Winter Palace (near his offices), which was considered more secure than the prime minister’s official residence on the Fontanka Canal. Even then, the police compelled the Russian prime minister to constantly alter the exits and entrances he used. Unsafe leaving or entering the Winter Palace! Many disgusted rightists, at a minimum, hoped Stolypin would be replaced by Durnovó or another hardliner who would emasculate or outright abolish the Duma. At the same time, other diehard monarchists—who in principle were no less against voting and political parties—found themselves organizing to compete in the elections they rejected if only to deny use of the Duma to the “opposition” (liberals and socialists, lumped together). But the rightists who accepted the Duma became anathema to the rest. Modern street politics fractured the Russian right.65 The gulf between the politics of parliament participation and of assassination was never bridged.66

A PUNDIT

When first subjected to Durnovó’s ferocious assault, the factionalized Social Democrats had tried to close ranks. In the two weeks before the first Duma opened, between April 10 and 25, 1906, the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party convoked its 4th Congress under the slogan of “unity.” Held across the border in the safety of Stockholm, which allowed emigres to attend, the gathering brought together, at least physically, the recently divided Mensheviks (62 delegates) and Bolsheviks (46 delegates), as well as the separate parties of Latvian and Polish Social Democrats and the Bund.67 Among Caucasus Social Democrats, the second most numerous contingent in the empire after the Russian Social Democrats, there was already near unity because Caucasus Bolsheviks were so few.68 Unity, however, proved elusive in policy. Jughashvili turned out to be the only Bolshevik among the eleven Caucasus delegates in Stockholm, but, taking the congress podium to speak on the vexing agrarian question, he boldly rejected the Bolshevik Lenin’s proposal for complete land nationalization as well as a Russian Menshevik call for land municipalization. Instead, the future collectivizer of agriculture recommended that the peasants get the land. Land redistribution, Jughashvili argued, would facilitate a worker-peasant alliance, an unacknowledged tip of his hat to his Georgian Menshevik adversaries. More than even that, Jughashvili argued, reiterating the comment of another speaker, offering the land to the peasants would rob the peasant Socialist Revolutionary Party—the Social Democrats’ competition on the left—of its platform.69 What impression these suggestions made at the 4th Congress remains unclear. 70 For the time being, among Russian Social Democrats, the decisive issue of a land redistribution to the peasants—in the overwhelmingly peasant Russian empire—would go unresolved.

What could not be left unresolved was the survival of their party. In 1905, both Menshevik and Bolshevik factions had concurred on the need to form combat squads for self-defense: after all, the unjust tsarist system used terror. The factions also agreed, in order to obtain weapons and party funds, on conducting “expropriations,” often in concert with the criminal underworld.71 As a result, the Russian empire became even more of a cauldron of political terrorism after it had become a quasi-constitutional order.

Until this time, imperial Russia’s regular police had been remarkably few and far between. In towns the police presence was often sparse, and outside the towns in 1900 Russia had fewer than 8,500 constables and sergeants (uriadniki) for the rural population of nearly 100 million. Many constables (assisted by a handful of sergeants) “oversaw” 50,000 to 100,000 subjects, over more than 1,000 square miles. In 1903, the state created the position of guardsmen (strazhniki), deploying some 40,000 in the countryside, which brought the ratio of state officers to rural inhabitants only to roughly 1 for every 2,600 inhabitants. Salaries rose but remained low, as did levels of education and training. Abusive, arbitrary behavior, and graft, rendered the police profoundly unpopular. The regular police routinely brought criminal cases or detained people without incidence of a crime, and resorted to physical abuse in what they called “the law of the fist.” Peasant-born sergeants acted like petty tyrants toward villagers, boasting of their power, under the theory that the more severe they were, the greater would be their authority.72

The mass revolts beginning in 1905 precipitated a vast increase in police personnel. But between 1905 and 1910, more than 16,000 tsarist officials, from village policemen up to ministers, would be killed or wounded by terrorist-revolutionaries (including in many cases by Menshevik assassins).73 Countless carriage drivers and railway personnel—proletarians—perished as well. One top police official complained that the details of bombmaking “became so widespread that practically any child could produce one and blow up his nanny.”74

This leftist political terror instilled fear throughout tsarist officialdom, but the regime fought back savagely.75 Stolypin “seized the revolution by the throat.” His government deported tens of thousands to forced labor or internal exile. It also introduced special field courts that used summary justice to send more than 3,000 accused political opponents to the gallows, strung up in demonstrative public executions, a deterrent that became known as the Stolypin necktie.76 No regime could let go unanswered the pervasive assassination of its officials, but the courts bore little resemblance to due process. Be that as it may, people got the point. Lenin, who named Stolypin Russia’s “hangman-in-chief,” and other prominent revolutionaries fled, having only just returned to Russia in 1905’s (briefly) freer circumstances.77 The would-be revolutionaries rejoined some 10,000 expatriates already resident in Russian colonies around Europe as of 1905. The emigre leftists fell under the surveillance of the 40 operatives and 25 informants in the okhranka’s foreign department, run out of Russia’s Paris embassy, which amassed dramatic documentation on the exiles’ often pathetic endeavors.78

Koba Jughashvili was among those committed socialists who did not seek to flee abroad. In Stockholm, he had met not only Klimenty “Klim” Voroshilov, a lifelong acquaintance, but also the Polish nobleman and Bolshevik Felix Dzierzynski and the Russian Bolshevik Grigory Radomylsky (better known as Zinoviev). And Jughashvili had encountered his old Tiflis seminary nemesis Seid Devdariani, by now a Georgian Menshevik. From Stockholm Jughashvili returned to the Caucasus in spring 1906. He wore a suit with a real hat, and carried a pipe, like a European. Only the pipe would last.

Back home, in a pamphlet in Georgian (1906) reporting on the Stockholm Congress, Jughashvili stridently dismissed Russia’s first-ever legislative body. “Who sits between two stools betrays the revolution,” he wrote. “Who is not with us is against us! The pitiful Duma and its pitiful Constitutional Democrats got stuck precisely between two stools. They want to reconcile the revolution with the counter-revolution, so that the wolves and the sheep can pasture together.”79

Jughashvili also got married.80 Ketevan “Kato” Svanidze, then twenty-six, was the youngest of the three Svanidze sisters of Tiflis, whom Jughashvili had met either through the Svanidzes’ son, Alyosha, a Bolshevik (married to a Tiflis opera singer), or through Mikheil Monoselidze, an old seminary friend who had married another Svanidze sister, Sashiko.81 The Svanidzes’ apartment stood right behind the South Caucasus military district headquarters, in the heart of the city, and thus was considered an ultrasafe shelter for revolutionaries: no one would suspect. In the hideaway, the scruffy Jughashvili wrote articles, regaled the sisters with talk of books and revolution, and brazenly received members of his small revolutionary posse. Koba and Kato also evidently met for lovemaking in the Atelier Madame Hervieu, the private salon where the sisters, all expert seamstresses, worked. Sometime during that summer of 1906, Kato informed him she was pregnant. He agreed to marry her. But because Jughashvili had false papers and was wanted by the police, a legal marriage faced complications. They lucked upon a former seminary classmate, Kita Tkhinvaleli, who had become a priest and agreed to perform the ceremony, in the dead of night (2:00 a.m., on July 15–16, 1906). At the “banquet” for ten, where the bridegroom showed off his voice and charm, the honored role of toastmaster (tamada) was performed by Mikho Tskhakaya, the former Tiflis seminarian and Bolshevik elder statesmen (then aged thirty-nine). Jughashvili seems not to have invited his mother, Keke, though it could hardly escape notice that the old woman shared a given name—Ketevan (Ekaterina in Russian)—with the young bride.82 In fact, just like Keke, Kato was devout, and she, too, prayed for Jughashvili’s safety, but unlike Keke, Kato was demure.

The beautiful and educated Kato—a world away from the Chiatura manganese dust—was a class above the future Stalin’s usual girlfriends, and she evidently pierced his heart.83 “I was amazed,” Mikheil Monoselidze observed, “how Soso, who was so severe in his work and to his comrades, could be so tender, affectionate and attentive to his wife.”84 That said, the shotgun marriage did not alter his obsession with revolution. Almost immediately after the conspiratorial summer 1906 wedding, he took off on underground business, abandoning his pregnant wife in Tiflis. As a precaution, she had not recorded the marriage in her internal passport as required by law. Still, the gendarmerie, somehow tipped off, arrested Kato on a charge of sheltering revolutionaries. She was four months pregnant. Her sister Sashiko, appealing to the wife of a top officer whose gowns the girls made, managed to get Kato released—after a month and a half in jail—into the custody of the police chief’s wife. (The Svanidze sisters made her gowns, too.) On March 18, 1907, some eight months after her wedding, Kato gave birth to a son. They christened the boy Yakov, perhaps in honor of Yakov “Koba” Egnatashvili, Jughashvili’s surrogate father. The future Stalin was said to be over the moon. But if so, he continued to be rarely home. Like other revolutionaries—at least those still at large—he was constantly on the run, rotating living quarters and battling his leftist rivals. The Georgian Mensheviks controlled most of the revolutionary publications in the Caucasus, but he came to play an outsized role in the small-circulation Bolshevik press, becoming editor of Georgian Bolshevik periodicals one by one. On the eve of Yakov’s birth, Jughashvili, together with Suren Spandaryan (b. 1882) and others, established the newspaper Baku Proletarian. He had found a calling in punditry.

Stolypin’s resolute campaign of arrests, executions, and deportations crippled the revolutionary movement, however. Instead of the grand May Day processionals of recent years, displays of proletarian power, leftists had to content themselves with collecting pitiful sums for the families of the legions who were arrested, and staging “red funerals” for the prematurely departed. Among those lost to the struggle was Giorgi Teliya (1880–1907). Born in a Georgian village, Teliya completed a few years of the village school and, in 1894, at age fourteen, made his way to Tiflis, where he was hired by the railway and, still a teenager, helped organize strikes in 1898 and 1900. He was fired, then arrested. Like Jughashvili, Teliya suffered lung problems, but his proved far more serious: having contracted tuberculosis in a tsarist prison, he succumbed to the disease in 1907.85 “Comrade Teliya was not a ‘scholar,’” the future Stalin remarked at the funeral in Teliya’s native village, but he had passed through the “school” of the Tiflis railway workshops, learned Russian, and developed a love for books, exemplifying the celebrated worker-intelligentsia.86 “Inexhaustible energy, independence, profound love for the cause, heroic determination, and an apostolic gift,” Jughashvili said of his martyred friend.87 He further divulged that Teliya had written a major essay, “Anarchism and Social Democracy,” which remained unpublished supposedly because the police confiscated it. Georgian anarchists had made their appearance in late 1905, early 1906—yet another challenge on the fractious left—and the topic of how to respond was widely discussed.88 From June 1906 to January 1907, Jughashvili published his own articles under a nearly identical rubric as Teliya, “Anarchism or Socialism?,” and for the very same Georgian periodicals.

“Anarchism or Socialism?” was nowhere near the level of The Communist Manifesto (1848) or The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louís Bonaparte (1852), which the pundit Karl Marx (born in 1818) had written when similarly youthful. Still Jughashvili’s derivative antianarchist essays dropped a plethora of names: Kropotkin, Kautsky, Proudhon, Spencer, Darwin, Cuvier, in addition to Marx.89 It also showed that in Marxism he had found his theory of everything. “Marxism is not only a theory of socialism, it is a complete worldview, a philosophical system,” he wrote. “This philosophical system is called dialectical materialism.”90 “What was materialism?” he asked in the catechism style for which he would later become famous. “A simple example,” he wrote: “Imagine a cobbler who had his own modest shop, but then could not withstand the competition from big shops, closed his and, say, hired himself out to the Adelkhanov factory in Tiflis.” The goal of the cobbler, Jughashvili continued, without mentioning his father, Beso, by name, was to accumulate capital and reopen his own business. But eventually, the “petit-bourgeois” cobbler realized he would never accumulate the capital and was in fact a proletarian. “A change in the consciousness of the cobbler,” Jughashvili concluded, “followed a change in his material circumstances.”91 Thus, in order to explain Marx’s concept of materialism (social existence determines consciousness), the future Stalin had rendered his father a victim of historical forces. Moving to the practical, he wrote that “the proletarians worked day and night but nonetheless remain poor. The capitalists do not work but nonetheless they get richer.” Why? Labor was commodified and the capitalists owned the means of production. Ultimately, Jughashvili asserted, the workers would win. But they would have to fight hard—strikes, boycotts, sabotage—and for that they needed the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party and a “dictatorship of the proletariat.”92

Here we see more than a glimpse of the future Stalin: the militancy, the confident verities, the ability to convey, accessibly, both a worldview and practical politics. His ideational world—Marxist materialism, Leninist party—emerges as derivative and catechismic, yet logical and deeply set.

Right after the essay series appeared, Jughashvili stole across the border to attend the 5th Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party Congress, held between April 30 and May 19, 1907, in north London’s Brotherhood Church. Congress luminaries were lodged in Bloomsbury, but Jughashvili stayed with the mass of delegates in the East End. One night, utterly drunk, he got into a pub scrape with a drunken Brit, and the owner summoned the police. Only the intercession of the quick-witted, English-speaking Bolshevik Meir Henoch Mojszewicz Wallach, known as Maxim Litvinov, saved Jughashvili from arrest. In the capital of world imperialism, the future Stalin also encountered Lev Bronstein (aka Trotsky), the high-profile former head of the 1905 Petrograd Soviet, but what impression the two might have made on each other remains undocumented. Stalin did not speak from the dais; Trotsky maintained his distance even from the Mensheviks.93

According to Jordania, Lenin was pursuing a back-room scheme: if the Georgian Mensheviks would refrain from taking sides in the Bolshevik-Menshevik dispute among the Russians in the party, Lenin would offer them carte blanche at home at the expense of Caucasus Bolsheviks. No other evidence corroborates this story of Lenin’s possible sellout of Jughashvili, who had expended so much blood and sweat fighting for Bolshevism in the Caucasus.94 Lenin often proposed or cut deals that he had no intention of honoring. Whatever the case here, Jordania, in later exile, was trying to distance Stalin from Lenin. What we know for sure is that when shouts at the congress were raised because Jughashvili, along with a few others, had not been formally elected a delegate—which provoked the Russian Menshevik Martov to exclaim, “Who are these people, where do they come from?”—the crafty Lenin, chairing a session, got Jughashvili and the others recognized as “consultative” delegates.

GEOPOLITICAL ORIENTATION

Alongside everything else, Stolypin had to work diligently to keep Russia out of foreign trouble. Tensions with Britain were particularly high, and Britain was a preeminent global power. Britons invested one fourth of their country’s wealth overseas, financing the building of railroads, harbors, mines, you name it—all outside Europe. Indeed, even as American and German manufacturing surpassed the British in many areas, the British still dominated the world flows of trade, finance, and information. On the oceans, where steamship freighters had jumped in size from 200 tons in 1850 to 7,500 tons by 1900, the British owned more than half of world shipping. In the early 1900s, two thirds of the world’s undersea cables were British, affording them a predominant position in global communications. Nine tenths of international transactions used British pounds sterling.95 Reaching an accord with Britain seemed very much in the Russian interest, provided that such a step did not antagonize Germany.

In the aftershock of the defeat by Japan in 1905–6, Russia had undergone a vigorous internal debate about what was called foreign orientation (what we would call grand strategy). St. Petersburg already had a defensive alliance with Third Republic France, dating to 1892, but Paris had not helped in Russia’s war in Asia. By contrast, Germany had offered Russia benevolent neutrality during the difficult Russo-Japanese War, and Germany’s ally, Austria-Hungary, had refrained from taking advantage in southeastern Europe. A space had opened for a conservative reorientation away from democratic France toward an alliance based on “monarchical principle”—meaning a Russian alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary, something of a return to Bismarck’s old Three Emperors’ League. Arrayed against this, however, stood Russia’s Constitutional Democrats, Anglophiles who wanted to preserve the alliance with republican France and achieve rapprochement with liberal Britain in order to strengthen Russia’s Duma at home.96 In August 1907, just two months after Stolypin’s constitutional coup d’etat introducing narrower voting rules for the Duma, he opted for an Anglo-Russian entente.97 Stolypin was something of a Germanophile and no friend of British-style constitutional monarchy, but in foreign policy, the Constitutional Democrats, his sworn enemies, had gotten their way because rapprochement with Britain seemed Russia’s best path for securing external peace while, in Stolypin’s mind, not precluding friendly relations with Germany, too.98 This was logical enough. And the content of the 1907 Anglo-Russian Entente was modest, mostly just delimitation of spheres of influence in Iran and Afghanistan.99 But without a parallel treaty with Germany, even on a symbolic level, the humble 1907 Anglo-Russian Entente constituted a tilt.

Nicholas II, in fact, had signed a treaty with Germany: A scheming Wilhelm II, on his annual summer cruise in 1905, which he took in the Baltic Sea, had invited Nicholas II on July 6 (July 19 in the West) to a secret rendezvous, and Nicholas had heartily agreed. The kaiser aimed to create a continental bloc centered on Germany. “Nobody has slightest idea of [the] meeting,” Wilhelm II telegrammed in English, their common language. “The faces of my guests will be worth seeing when they behold your yacht. A fine lark . . . Willy.”100 On Sunday evening July 23, he dropped anchor off Russian Finland (near Vyborg), close by Nicholas II’s yacht. The next day the kaiser produced a draft of a short secret mutual defense accord, specifying that Germany and Russia would come to each other’s aid if either went to war with a third country. Nicholas knew that such a treaty with Germany violated Russia’s treaty with France and had urged Wilhelm to have it first be shown to Paris, a suggestion the kaiser rejected. Nicholas II signed the Treaty of Bjorko, as it was called, anyway. The Russian foreign minister as well as Sergei Witte (recently returned from Portsmouth, New Hampshire) went into shock, and insisted that the treaty could not take effect until France signed it, too. Nicholas II relented and signed a letter, drafted by Witte, for Wilhelm II on November 13 (November 26 in the West), to the effect that until the formation of a Russian-German-French alliance, Russia would observe its commitments to France. This provoked Wilhelm II’s fury. The German-Russian alliance, although never formally renounced, was aborted.101

This fiasco inadvertently reinforced the importance of Russia’s signing of the entente with Britain, which seemed to signal a firm geopolitical orientation and, correspondingly, the defeat of the conservatives and Germanophiles. Moreover, given that Britain and France already had concluded an entente cordiale, Russia’s treaty with Britain in effect created a triple entente, with each of the three now carrying a “moral obligation” to support the others if any went to war. And because of the existence of the German-led Triple Alliance with Austria-Hungary and Italy, the British-French-Russian accord gave the impression of being more of an alliance than a mere entente. Events further solidified this sense of the two opposed alliances. In 1908, Austria-Hungary annexed the Slavic province of Bosnia-Herzegovina from the Ottoman empire, and although Austria had been in occupation of Bosnia-Herzegovina since 1878, apoplectic Russian rightists denounced the failure of a strong Russian response to the formal annexation, calling it a “diplomatic Tsushima” (evoking the ignominious sinking of Russia’s Baltic fleet by Japan).102 But Stolypin, despite being charged by some rightists with abandoning Russia’s supposed “historic mission” in the world, had told a conference of Russian officials that “our internal situation does not allow us to conduct an aggressive foreign policy,” and he held firm.103 Still, given the Anglo-German antagonism as well as the opposing European alliance system, Russia’s entry into the Triple Entente carried risks driven by world events beyond its control.

In Asia, Russia remained without help to deter possible further Japanese aggression. The British-Japanese alliance, signed in 1902 and extended in scope in 1905, would be renewed again in 1911.104 The two Pacific naval powers, although wary of each other, had been thrust together by a British sense that their Royal Navy was overstretched defending a global empire as well as a joint Anglo-Japanese perception of the need to combat Russian expansion in Asia, in Central Asia, and in Manchuria. And so, when the Japanese had promised not to support indigenous nationalists in British India, Britain had assented to the Japanese making Korea a protectorate, or colony. Besides Korea, which bordered Russia, the Imperial Japanese Army had also pushed as far north as Changchun during the Russo-Japanese war, conquering southern Manchuria (provinces of China). Even though the United States had acted as something of a constraining influence in the Portsmouth treaty negotiations, Japan had nonetheless gotten Russia evicted from southern Manchuria and claimed the Liaodung region (with Port Arthur), which the Japanese renamed Kwantung Leased Territory, and which commanded the approaches to Peking. Japan also took over the Changchun‒Port Arthur stretch of the Chinese Eastern Railway, which the Russians had built and which was recast as the Southern Manchurian Railway. The Japanese civilian population of both the Kwantung Leased Territory and the Southern Manchurian Railway zone would increase rapidly, reaching more than 60,000 already by 1910. Predictably, a need to “defend” these nationals, the railroad right of way, and sprouting economic concessions spurred the introduction of Japanese troops and, soon, the formation of a special Kwantung army. China’s government was forced to accept the deployment of Japanese troops on Chinese soil, hoping their presence would be temporary. But as contemporaries well understood, Japan’s sphere of influence in southern Manchuria would be a spearhead for further expansion on the Asian mainland, including northward, in the direction of Russia.105

Thus did foreign policy entanglements pose a dilemma at least as threatening as the autocracy’s absence of a reliable domestic political base. In combination, each dilemma made the other far more significant. Both of Russia’s effective strategic choices—line up with France and Britain against Germany, or accept a junior partnership in a German-dominated Europe that risked the wrath of France and Britain—contained substantial peril. Stolypin had been right to ease tensions with Britain while trying to avoid a hard choice between London and Berlin, but in the circumstances of the time he had proved unable to thread this needle. Japan’s posture compounded the Russian predicament. After 1907, Britain carried no obligations toward Russia should the Japanese ramp up their aggressiveness, but Russia was on the hook should the Anglo-German antagonism heat up. Stolypin’s determined stance of nonintervention in the Balkans in 1908 did not alter the underlying strategic current toward foreign imbroglio.

DEAD-END BANDITRY

Having arrived back in Baku, in May 1907, Jughashvili reported on the 5th Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party in the pages of the Bolshevik-faction underground newspaper Baku Proletarian. He noted that the congress had been dominated by Mensheviks, many of whom were Jews. “It wouldn’t hurt,” he wrote in the report, recalling another Bolshevik’s remarks at the congress, “for us Bolsheviks to organize a pogrom in the party.”106 Such a remark—which had been made by someone from the Russian empire’s Pale of Settlement, and which Jughashvili was repeating—indicated the animosities and high level of frustration that by 1907 accompanied the now frayed unity hopes of 1905. Significantly, this was the future Stalin’s first signed article in Russian; he would never publish anything in the Georgian language again. The historical record contains no explanation for this shift. One hypothesis may be the future Stalin’s desire for assimilation. The great triangle of social democracy encompassing the Russian empire’s northwest—St. Petersburg down to Moscow, and over to tsarist Poland and Latvia—was European in culture and physiognomy. Below that, in the southwest (lower half of the Pale of Settlement), social democracy was largely absent; farther south, it was strongly present, in the Caucasus, but predominantly of the Menshevik persuasion. The upshot was that every time Jughashvili attended a major Party Congress in the company of his Bolshevik faction, he would be confronted with a thoroughly Europeanized culture, against which his Georgian features and heavy Georgian accent stood out. The Jews among the Bolshevik faction of Social Democrats were often deeply Russified, as were many of the Poles (some of them Jewish) and the Latvians; but even when the latter were not deeply Russified, they were still recognizably European. Thus, although the other non-Russian Bolsheviks also stood apart from the ethnic Russians to an extent, Jughashvili was a recognizable Asiatic. That may explain why he returned from the 1906 Party Congress in a European suit. More enduringly, this circumstance may have motivated his 1907 abrupt abandonment of the Georgian language in favor of Russian in his punditry.

Asiatic pedigree was not the only way this Caucasus Bolshevik stood out, or tried to stand out. The Menshevik-dominated Social Democratic Workers’ Party 5th Congress in 1907 was notable for a decision to change tactics. Even though the autocracy continued to prohibit normal legal politics—beyond the very narrow-suffrage Duma, which hardly met—the Mensheviks argued that the combat-squad/expropriation strategy had failed to overturn the existing order. Instead, the Mensheviks wanted to emphasize cultural work (workers’ clubs and people’s universities) as well as standing for Duma elections. Martov observed that the German Social Democrats had survived Bismarck’s antisocialist laws by engaging in legal activities in the Reichstag and other venues.107 Five Caucasus Social Democratic representatives would get elected to the Duma, including the patriarch Noe Jordania. In the meantime, a resolution to ban “expropriations” was put to a vote at the 5th Congress. Lenin and thirty-four other Bolsheviks voted against it, but it became party law. Still, just as Lenin had refused to abide the 1903 vote won by Martov on party structure, now Lenin plotted with Leonid Krasin, an engineer and skilled bomb maker, as well as with Jughashvili, on a big expropriation in the Caucasus in violation of party policy.108

On June 13, 1907, in broad daylight in the heart of Tiflis, on Yerevan Square, two mail coaches delivering cash to the Tiflis branch of the State Bank were attacked with at least eight homemade bombs and gunfire. The thieves’ take amounted to around 250,000 rubles, a phenomenal sum (more than Durnovó had gotten in a prize the year before for having saved tsarism). The scale of the brazen heist was not unprecedented: the year before in St. Petersburg, Socialist Revolutionaries had stormed a heavily guarded carriage en route from the customs office to the treasury and looted 400,000 rubles, the greatest of the politically motivated robberies in 1906.109 Still, the 1907 Tiflis robbery—one of 1,732 that year in the province by all groups—was spectacular.110

Koba Jughashvili did not risk coming out onto the square himself. Nonetheless, he was instrumental in plotting the heist. The brigands (up to twenty) included many members of his squad from the bang-bang Chiatura days, and in some cases, before that. On the square that day the man who took the lead was Simon “Kamo” Ter-Petrosyan (b. 1882), a half-Armenian, half-Georgian gunrunner, then twenty-five, whom the future Stalin had known since Gori days.111 Kamo was said to be “completely enthralled” by “Koba.”112 That June 13, 1907, Kamo’s “apples” blew to pieces three of the five mounted Cossack guards, the two accompanying bank employees, and many bystanders. At least three dozen people died; flying shrapnel seriously wounded another two dozen or so.113 Amid the blinding smoke and confusion, Kamo himself seized the bloodstained loot. Traveling by train (first class) disguised as a Georgian prince with a new bride (one of the gang), Kamo delivered the money to Lenin, who was underground in tsarist Finland. (According to Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, Kamo also brought candied nuts and a watermelon.)114 The bravado and defiance of Social Democratic party policy notwithstanding, the robbery resembled an act of desperation, threatening to elide completely the Social Democrats’ cause with banditry. No less important, the Russian State Bank had been prepared: it had recorded the serial numbers of the 500-ruble notes and sent these to European financial institutions. How much—if any—of the Yerevan Square loot proved useful to the Bolshevik cause remains unclear. “The Tiflis booty,” Trotsky would write, “brought no good.”115

Stool pigeons eager to ingratiate themselves with the tsarist authorities offered up a welter of conflicting theories about who had perpetrated the theft, but the okhranka, rightly, surmised that the plot went back to Lenin. Feeling the heat, Lenin would flee his sanctuary in tsarist Finland back into European exile in December 1907, seemingly for good. Several Bolsheviks, such as Maxim Litvinov, whom Lenin tasked with fencing the stolen rubles in Europe on the party’s behalf, were arrested.116 That arrest provoked three different Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party investigations, which lasted years. The inquisitions were sponsored by the Mensheviks, who saw an opportunity to strike at Lenin’s leadership. Jordania led one internal investigation. Silva Jibladze, the old Jughashvili nemesis from the Tiflis and Batum days, led another. The Mensheviks obtained the testimony of a bribed tsarist postal clerk who had provided inside information on the mail coach schedule and fingered Jughashvili. The future Stalin may have been expelled temporarily from the party. Into old age, he would smart from the rumors of having been a common criminal and suffered party expulsion.117 Whatever the outcome of the purported party disciplinary hearing, Jughashvili would never reside in Tiflis again. He decamped to Baku, with his wife, Kato Svanidze, and infant son, Yakov.118

Baku was Chiatura all over again, only on a far grander scale. Situated on a peninsula jutting out into the Caspian, the oil port offered a combination of spectacular natural amphitheater, labyrinthine ancient Muslim settlement, violent boomtown of casinos, slums, vulgar mansions—one plutocrat’s villa resembled playing cards—and oil derricks.119 By the early 1900s, tsarist Russia was producing more than half the global oil output, much of it in Baku, and as the oil bubbled up, and the surrounding sea burned, staggering fortunes were made. East of Baku’s railway station lay the refineries built by the Swedish Nobel brothers, and farther east lay the Rothschilds’ petroleum and trading company. Workers toiled twelve-hour shifts, suffering deadly chemical exposure, rabbit-hutch living quarters, and miserly wages of 10 to 14 rubles per month, before the “deductions” for factory-supplied meals. By Caucasus standards, the oppressed proletariat in Baku was immense: at least 50,000 oil workers. That mass became the special focus of radical Bolshevik agitators like Jughashvili.120

Jughashvili’s Baku exploits included not just propagandizing and political organizing, but also hostage taking for ransom, protection rackets, piracy, and, perhaps, ordering a few assassinations of suspected provocateurs and turncoats.121 How distinctive was he in this regard? Even by the wild standards of the 1905–8 Russian empire, political murder in the Caucasus was extraordinary. That said, the majority of Caucasus revolutionary killings were the work not of Bolsheviks but of the Armenian Dashnaks. The Dashnaks—the Armenian Revolutionary Federation—had been founded in Tiflis in the 1890s, initially to liberate their compatriots in the Ottoman empire, but soon enough they rocked the Russian empire as well.122 The okhranka also feared the anarchists. Still, even if the future Stalin’s mayhem was hardly the most impressive, he would recall his Baku bandit days with gusto. “Three years of revolutionary work among the workers of the oil industry forged me,” he would observe in 1926. “I received my second baptism in revolutionary combat.”123 The future dictator was fortunate not to be treated to a “Stolypin necktie.”

“On the basis of the Tiflis expropriations,” Trotsky would write, Lenin “valued Koba as a person capable of going or conducting others to the end.” Trotsky added that “during the years of reaction, [the future Stalin] belonged not to those thousands who quit the party but to those few hundreds who, despite everything, remained loyal to it.”124

Baku’s toxic environment, meanwhile, exacerbated his young wife Kato’s frailty and she died a frightful death in December 1907 from typhus or tuberculosis, hemorrhaging blood from her bowels.125 At her funeral, the future Stalin is said to have tried to throw himself into her grave. “My personal life is damned,” one friend recalled him exclaiming in self-pity.126 Belatedly, he is said to have reproached himself for neglecting his wife, even as he abandoned his toddler son, Yakov, to Kato’s mother and sisters for what turned out to be the next fourteen years.

As for his exhilarating revolutionary banditry, it was over, quickly. Already by March 1908, Jughashvili was back in a tsarist jail, in Baku, where he studied Esperanto—one fellow inmate recalled him “always with a book”—but was again dogged by accusations of betraying comrades (other revolutionaries were arrested right after him).127 By November, he was on his way, once more, to internal exile, in Solvychegodsk, an old fur-trading post in northern Russia and “an open air prison without bars.”128 There, hundreds of miles northeast of St. Petersburg in the taiga forest, every tiresome argumentative political tendency, and every variety of criminal career, could be found among the 500-strong exile colony living in log houses. Nearly succumbing to a serious bout of typhus, Jughashvili romanced Tatyana Sukhova, another exile, who would recall his poverty and his penchant for reading in bed, in the daytime. “He would joke a lot, and we would laugh at some of the others,” she noted. “Comrade Koba liked to laugh at our weaknesses.”129 Comrade Koba’s life had indeed become a sad, even bitter affair following the failed 1905 experience of a socialist breakthrough. His beautiful, devoted wife was dead; his son, a stranger to him. And all the exploits of the heady years—Batum (1902), Chiatura (1905), Tiflis (1907), and Baku (1908), as well as the Party Congresses in Russian Finland (1905), Stockholm (1906), and London (1907)—had come to naught. Some, such as the mail coach robbery, had boomeranged.

In summer 1909, Jughashvili found himself dependent on Tatyana Sukhova to escape woebegone Solvychegodsk by boat. He was always something of a brooder, like his father Beso, and increasingly took to nursing perceived slights. Grigol “Sergo” Orjonikidze, who would come to know his fellow Georgian as well as anyone, remarked upon Stalin’s “touchiness” (obidchivy kharakter) many years before he had become dictator.130 (The hothead Orjonikidze knew whereof he spoke—he was one of the touchiest of all.) Jughashvili seems to have been prone to outbursts of anger, and many contemporaries found him enigmatic, although none (at the time) deemed him a sociopath. But brooding, touchy, and enigmatic though the future Stalin might have been, his life was unenviable. Not long after his escape, on August 12, 1909, his father, Beso, died of cirrhosis of the liver. The funeral service was attended by a single fellow cobbler, who closed Beso’s eyes. The father of the future dictator was buried in an unmarked grave.131

And what had the younger Jughashvili himself achieved?

Soberly speaking, what did his life amount to? Nearly thirty-one years of age, he had no money, no permanent residence, and no profession other than punditry, which was illegal in the forms in which he practiced it. He had written some derivative Marxist journalism. He had learned the art of disguise and escape, whether in hackneyed fashion (female Muslim veil) or more inventive ways, and like an actor, he had tried on a number of personas and aliases—“Oddball Osip,” “Pockmarked Oska,” “the Priest,” “Koba.”132 Perhaps the best that could be said about Oddball, Pockmarked Oska, and Koba the Priest was that he was the quintessential autodidact, never ceasing to read, no doubt as solace, but also because he remained determined to improve and advance himself. He could also exude charm and inspire fervid loyalty in his small posse. The latter, however, were now dispersed, and none of them would ever amount to much.

Just as the older vagrant Beso Jughashvili passed unnoticed from the world, his son, the fugitive vagrant Iosif Jughashvili made for St. Petersburg. He took refuge that fall of 1909 in the safe-house apartment of Sergei Alliluyev, the machinist who had been exiled to Tiflis but then returned to the capital where he would often shelter Jughashvili. (Sergei’s daughter, Nadya, would eventually become Stalin’s second wife.) From there, Jughashvili soon returned to Baku, where the okhranka tailed him for months—evidently to trace his underground network—before rearresting him in March 1910. Prison, exile, poverty: this had been his life since that day in March 1901 when he had had to flee the Tiflis Meteorological Observatory and go underground, and it would remain this way right through 1917. But Jughashvili’s marginal existence was not a personal failing. The empire’s many revolutionary parties all suffered from considerable frailty, despite the radicalism of Russia’s workers and the volatility of its peasants.133 But the okhranka had managed to put the revolutionary parties on a short leash, creating fake opposition groups to dilute them.134 The infiltrated Socialist Revolutionaries, especially their terrorist wing, had declined precipitously by 1909. (Their most accomplished terrorist, Evno Azef, a former embezzler nicknamed “Golden Hands,” was unmasked as a paid police agent.)135

Later, the failures and despondency would be forgotten when, retrospectively, revolutionary party history would be rewritten, and long stints in prison or exile would become swashbuckling tales of heroism and triumph. “Those of us who belong to the older generation . . . are still influenced up to 90 percent by the . . . old underground years,” Sergei Kostrikov, aka Kirov, would later muse to the Leningrad party organization that he would oversee. “Not only books but each additional year in prison contributed a great deal: it was there that we thought, philosophized, and discussed everything twenty times over.” And yet, details of Kostrikov’s life demonstrate that the underground was at best bittersweet. Not only were party ranks riddled with police agents, but blood feuds often ruined personal relations, too. The biggest problem was usually boredom. After a series of arrests, Kostrikov settled in Vladikavkaz, in the North Caucasus (1909–17), which is where he adopted the sonorous alias Kirov—perhaps after the fabled ancient Persian King Cyrus (Kir, in Russian). He managed to get paid for permanent work at a legal Russian-language newspaper of liberal bent (Terek), whose proprietor proved willing to endure many police fines, and he mixed in professional and technical circles while reading some Hugo, Shakespeare, Russian classics, as well as Marxism. Kirov was arrested again in 1911, for connections to an illegal printing press discovered back in Tomsk (where he had originally joined the Social Democrats), but acquitted. He later confessed that prior to 1917 he felt remote from the intellectual life of the rest of the empire and suffered terrible ennui—and he was not even in some frozen waste but in a mild clime, and drawing a salary, luxuries of which the forlorn Jughashvili could only dream.136

PARALLEL SELF-DEFEAT

Thanks to the okhranka, the years between 1909 and 1913 would prove relatively peaceful, certainly compared with the madness of the preceding few years.137 Social Democratic party strength, which had peaked at perhaps 150,000 empirewide in 1907, had fallen below 10,000 by 1910. Members of the Bolshevik wing were scattered in European or Siberian exile. A mere five or six active Bolshevik committees existed on imperial Russian soil.138 At the same time, by 1909, the Union of the Russian People had splintered, and the entire far right had lost its dynamism.139 That year, Stolypin began to align himself overtly with Russian nationalists and to promote Orthodoxy as a kind of integrating national faith. He did so out of his own deep religious conviction as well as political calculation. Imperial Russia counted nearly 100 million Eastern Orthodox subjects, some 70 percent of the empire’s population. But Eastern Orthodoxy did not unite to a sufficient degree. “The mistake we have been making for many decades,” Sergei Witte recorded in his diary in 1910, “is that we have still not admitted to ourselves that since the time of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great there has been no such thing as Russia: there has only been the Russian empire.”140 To be sure, non-Russian nationalist and separatist movements remained relatively weak; armed rebellion had largely been confined to the Poles, who in retribution lost their separate constitution, and the Caucasus mountain tribes. Imperial loyalties remained strong, and Russia’s loyal ethnically diverse elites constituted an enormous asset, even in the global age of nationalism. But the very constituency to which Stolypin appealed, Russian nationalists, caused the greatest political disruption precisely for wanting to compel non-Russians to become a single Russian nation. In aiming for a single “Russian” nation defined in faith (Orthodoxy)—imagined to comprise Great Russians, Little Russians (Ukrainians), and White Russians (Belorussians)—the nationalists had imposed severe prohibitions against Ukrainian language and culture. Predictably, this only stoked Ukrainian national consciousness further—and in the guise of opposition, rather than loyalty. These were the same detrimental processes that we have seen at work in the Caucasus at the Tiflis seminary and elsewhere, whereby hard-line Russifiers infuriated an otherwise loyal, and largely cultural, nationalism. It was the Russian nationalists, more than non-Russian nationalisms, who helped destabilize the Russian empire.141

Stolypin’s turn to Orthodoxy as nationalism, after his reform efforts had stalled, testified to weakness and reconfirmed the lack of an effective political base for the regime. Bismarck had managed for more than two decades to wield control over the legislative agenda, despite the growing power of Germany’s middle and working classes and the absence of his own political party. Stolypin’s herculean efforts at forging Bismarck-like parliamentary coalitions without his own political party failed. But if Stolypin’s ambitious (for Russia) modernization schemes were stymied by the Duma, they had ultimately depended abjectly on the whim of the autocrat. To be sure, notwithstanding Bismarck’s shrewdness vis-à-vis the Reichstag, the Iron Chancellor’s handiwork, too, had ultimately hung on his relationship with a single man, Wilhelm I. But Bismarck, a master psychologist, had managed to make the kaiser dependent on him for twenty-six years. (“It’s hard to be kaiser under Bismarck,” Wilhelm I once quipped.)142 Stolypin had to operate within a more absolute system and with a less-qualified absolutist, a figure more akin to Wilhelm II (who dismissed Bismarck) than Wilhelm I. Nicholas II and his German wife, Alexandra, were jealous of the most talented official who would ever serve them or imperial Russia. “Do you suppose I liked always reading in the papers that the chairman of the Council of Ministers had done this . . . the chairman had done that?” the tsar remarked pathetically to Stolypin’s successor. “Don’t I count? Am I nobody?”143 With Stolypin gone, “the autocrat” would reassert himself, appointing lesser prime ministers, and encouraging Russia’s ministers to obviate their own government. These actions flowed, in part, from Nicholas II’s personality. Whereas Alexander III would flatly state his faltering confidence to any given official, Nicholas II would say nothing but then secretly intrigue against the objects of his displeasure. He invariably sought escape from the incessant ministerial disputes even as he egged them on. Such behavior provoked officials’ quiet, and sometimes not so quiet, fury, and eroded their commitment not just to him personally but to the autocratic system.144 Nonetheless, the deeper patterns were systemic, not personal.

Nicholas II could not act as his own prime minister in part because he was not even part of the executive branch—the autocrat, by design, stood above all branches—while the Russian government he named, oddly, was never an instrument of his autocratic power, only a limitation on it. Nor had Nicholas begun the practices of deliberately exacerbating institutional and personal rivalries, encouraging informal advisers (courtiers) to wield power like formal ministers, playing off courtiers against ministers and formal institutions, in loops of intrigues, and making sure jurisdictions overlapped.145 The upshot was that some Russian ministries would prohibit something, others would allow it, intentionally stymying or discrediting each other. Russian officials even at the very top chased the least little gossip, no matter how third hand or implausible; those trafficking in rumors allegedly from “on high” could access the most powerful ears. Everyone talked, yet ministers, even the nominal prime minister, would often not know for sure what was being decided, how, or by whom. Officials tried to read “signals”: Were they in the tsar’s confidence? Who was said to be meeting with the tsar? Might they soon obtain an audience? In the meantime, as one high-level Russian official noted, the ministries felt constantly impelled to enlarge their fields of sway at others’ expense in order to get anything done at all. “There was really a continually changing group of oligarchs at the head of the different branches of administration,” this high official explained, “and a total absence of a single state authority directing their activities toward a clearly defined and recognizable goal.”146

During Stolypin’s ultimately futile effort to impose order on the government, let alone the country, Koba Jughashvili experienced a long stretch of squalor, years full of disappointment, and often desperation. To be sure, thanks to the Party Congresses or the common fate of exile, the future Stalin had come to know nearly everyone high up in the Bolshevik revolutionary milieu—Lenin, Kamenev, Zinoviev—and numerous others, such as Feliks Dzierzynski. But Stalin’s dabbling in banditry in 1907 in Tiflis had afforded him notoriety of a mostly negative sort, which he would have to work hard to suppress, and led to his decampment to Baku. There, in 1910, he had tried but failed to obtain permission in time to marry a woman, Stefania Petrovskaya, evidently in order to remain legally resident in the city; instead, he was deported north back to internal exile in Solvychegodsk. In late 1911, the landlady of his latest exile hut, the widow Matryona Kuzakova, gave birth to a son, Konstantin, likely Jughashvili’s.147

By then, the future Stalin was already gone from Solvychegodsk, having been allowed to relocate to Vologda, the northern province’s “capital,” where he continued to chase peasant skirts. He took up with another landlady’s divorcee daughter, the servant Sofia Kryukova, and briefly cohabitated with Serafima Khoroshenina, until her exile sentence ended and she left. Jughashvili bedded the teenage school pupil Pelageya Onufrieva as well. He further busied himself collecting postcards of classical Russian paintings. Vologda, unlike Solvychegodsk, at least had a public library, and the police observed him visiting the library seventeen times over a stretch of 107 days. He read Vasili Klyuchevsky, the great historian of Russia, and subscribed to periodicals that were mailed to him in Siberia.148 Still, thinning from a meager diet, hounded by surveillance, humiliated by surprise searches, the “Caucasian”—as the Vologda police called him—led a destitute existence. The okhranka’s handiwork had reduced the future Stalin’s life, yet again, to the offerings of a provincial library as well as an underaged girl (born 1892), to whom he moaned about his dead wife Kato. Young Pelageya—known in okhranka code as “the fashion plate”—was actually the girlfriend of Jughashvili’s closest Vologda comrade, the Bolshevik Pyotr Chizikov, whose period of exile had ended but who had stayed behind with her. Chizikov not only “shared” his girlfriend, he was tasked by the higher-ups with assisting “Comrade Koba’s” escape.149 In September 1911, carrying Chizikov’s legal papers, Jughashvili slipped out of Vologda and again made his way to St. Petersburg. In the boondocks of Vologda (or Siberia), tsarist police surveillance was laughable, but in the capital and large cities, such as St. Petersburg, Baku, or Tiflis, the okhranka proved vigilant and effective. In the capital, the okhranka tailed Jughashvili immediately, and arrested him three days after his arrival.

That same September 1911, while Jughashvili was being rearrested in St. Petersburg, farther south, at the Kiev Opera House during a performance of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Tale of Tsar Saltan, Mordekhai “Dmitry” Bogrov, a twenty-four-year-old lawyer and anarchic terrorist—in the clandestine pay of the okhranka—assassinated Stolypin. Russia’s top statesman, by then in near isolation, amid rumors of his imminent transfer to the Caucasus or Siberia, had followed the imperial family southward for the dedication of a monument to Alexander II.150 Stolypin had been forewarned, again, of plots against him, yet he traveled anyway, without bodyguards, which he never used, or even a bullet-proof vest (such as they were at the time). “We had just left the box,” Nicholas II wrote to his mother of the second intermission, “when we heard two sounds as if something had dropped. I thought an opera glass might have fallen on somebody’s head, and ran back into the box to look.” When the tsar glanced down into the orchestra, he saw his prime minister standing in a bloodstained uniform; Stolypin, upon seeing Nicholas II, raised his hand to motion the tsar away to safety, then made the sign of the cross. He died a few days later in a hospital. This was the eighteenth attempt on Stolypin’s life. His assassin, Bogrov, was convicted and hanged in his jail cell ten days after the shooting. It became public knowledge that Bogrov had been suspected of police collaboration by his leftist terrorist colleagues and that he had entered the premises with a police-supplied pass, delivered to him a mere one hour before the performance. These circumstances fomented speculation that via the okhranka, Russia’s far right had finally dispatched the conservative prime minister they reviled. This unproven yet widely believed account testified to the fact that the prime minister never found the conservative political base he sought for the autocratic regime. Even before he was killed, Stolypin had been politically destroyed by the very people he was trying to save.151

As the tsarist government’s incoherence proceeded apace in Stolypin’s absence, and Russia’s still unreconciled political right wing continued to denounce the “constitutional monarchy,” Koba Jughashvili had been deported back to internal exile by December 1911.152 He found himself, once again, in remote Vologda. But suddenly the Georgian revolutionary rose to the pinnacle of Russian Bolshevism (such as it was), thanks to yet another underhanded internal party action. In January 1912, the Bolsheviks called a tiny party conference—not a congress—in Prague, where Lenin’s faction managed to claim eighteen of the twenty delegates; aside from two Mensheviks, most of the non-Bolshevik faction of Social Democrats refused to attend. On the dubious grounds that the party’s old Central Committee had “ceased to function,” the conference assigned itself the powers of a congress and named a new (and all-Bolshevik) Central Committee.153 In effect, the Bolshevik faction formally asserted a claim over the entire Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party. Immediately thereupon, at the first plenum of the new Central Committee, Lenin decided to co-opt Jughashvili (in Vologda exile) in absentia as a new Central Committee member. The Prague gathering also created a Central Committee “Russia bureau” (for those located on Russian territory), which Stalin had been insisting upon, and on which he was now placed. Stalin became one of twelve top Bolshevik insiders, and one of three such from the Caucasus.154 Lenin’s motives in promoting him are not well documented. Given their different places of exile (Western Europe versus eastern Russia), they had seen little of each other in the six odd years since their first meeting in December 1905. But already in 1910, when Stalin was part of the Baku underground, the Bolshevik leadership in exile had wanted to co-opt him into the Central Committee. For whatever reason it did not happen then. In 1911, Grigol Urutadze, the Georgian Menshevik who had once sat in prison with Jughashvili, poured poison into Lenin’s ear about Jughashvili’ s illegal expropriations and his supposed past expulsion from the Baku organization. “This means nothing!” Lenin is said to have exclaimed. “This is exactly the kind of person I need!”155 If Lenin said it, he was praising how Stalin recognized few if any limits on what he would do for the cause. The 1912 elevation to the Central Committee would become a momentous breakthrough in Stalin’s rise, allowing him to join the likes of Zinoviev, Lenin’s shadow in Genevan exile, as well as Lenin himself.

Splittism and a hard line against “reformist” socialists were not peculiar to Lenin.156 The young Italian socialist radical Benito Mussolini (b. 1883), the son of an impoverished artisan who named his boy for a Mexican revolutionary, relocated in 1902 to Switzerland, where he worked as a casual laborer, and might have met Lenin; Mussolini certainly read some Lenin.157 But he came up with his rejection of Italian economic anarcho-syndicalism and parliamentary socialism on his own. In 1904, Mussolini called for “an aristocracy of intelligence and will,” a vanguard to lead workers (a position that would remain with him into fascism).158 He pounded this theme in newspapers. At the Italian Socialist Party Congress in July 1912, a few months after Lenin had forced through the formation of a self-standing Bolshevik party, Mussolini, a delegate from the small town of Forlì who was not yet thirty years old, catapulted himself into the Italian Socialist Party leadership by leading the expulsion of moderate reformist socialists (Mussolini’s supporters, known as intransigents, included Antonio Gramsci).159 “A split is a difficult, painful affair,” Lenin, hailing Mussolini’s action, wrote in Pravda (July 15, 1912). “But sometimes it is necessary, and in such circumstances every weakness, every ‘sentimentality’ . . . is a crime. . . . When, to defend an error, a group is formed that spurns all the decisions of the party, all the discipline of the proletarian army, a split becomes indispensable. And the party of the Italian socialist proletariat has taken the right path by removing the syndicalists and Right reformists from its ranks.”160 Outre radicalism, whether Bolshevik or incipient fascist, was both political program and an impatient street-fighting disposition.

Stalin’s vault from godforsaken Vologda to the pinnacle of the new all‒Bolshevik Central Committee in 1912 would have been unthinkable without Lenin’s patronage. And yet, it must be said, Lenin was a user, using absolutely everyone, Stalin, too, as a non-Russian to afford his faction appeal. The rash of arrests, furthermore, made promotion of some people a necessity. Still, Stalin’s elevation went beyond tokenism or expediency. Stalin was loyal as well as effective: he could get things done. And, also important, he was a Bolshevik in the heavily Menshevik Caucasus milieu. True, two other Caucasus figures, Sergo Orjonikidze and the truly infamous womanizer Suren Spandaryan (about whom it was said, “all the children in Baku who are up to three years old look like Spandaryan”), were also in the top Bolshevik stratum at this time. Orjonikidze served as Lenin’s chief courier to Bolsheviks in the Russian empire, and he was the one who was tasked in early February 1912 with informing Koba of his Central Committee membership and his new 50-ruble monthly party allowance—a sum, however welcome, that would not free Jughashvili from continuing to scrounge and beg for handouts.161 Be that as it may, Stalin would come to dominate Orjonikidze; Spandaryan would die an early death. Consider further that Ivan “Vladimir” Belostotsky, a metalworker and labor-insurance clerk, was co-opted to the Bolshevik Central Committee at the same time, but he soon disappeared.162 Stalin, in other words, contrary to what would later be asserted, was no accidental figure raised up by circumstances. Lenin put him in the inner circle, but Stalin had called attention to himself and, moreover, would go on to prove his worth. He endured.

Predictably, Lenin’s socialist opponents—Bundists, Latvian Social Democrats, Mensheviks—denounced the Prague conference for the illegitimate maneuver that it was. Equally predictably, however, their own efforts to answer with their own Party Congress in August 1912 disintegrated into irreconcilable factionalism.163 Later that very same month, Jughashvili escaped Vologda again, returning to Tiflis, where by summer 1912 there were no more than perhaps 100 Bolsheviks. Nearly his entire adult life had been consumed in factional infighting, yet now even he took to advocating for unity among Social Democrats “at all costs” and, what is more, for reconciliation and cooperation with all forces opposed to tsarism.164 His head-snapping about-face testified to the dim prospects of all the leftist parties. In fairness, though, even the political forces nominally supporting the autocracy could not come together.

From the height of mass disturbances of only five years before, Stolypin’s left-right political demobilization of imperial Russian had been breathtakingly successful, but at the expense of establishing an enduring polity. On the latter score, many observers, especially in hindsight, have attributed Russia’s lack of a polity to an inherent inability to forge a nation. Ethnic Russians made up just 44 percent of the empire’s 130 million people, and even though the Orthodox numbered close to 100 million, they divided into Russian, Ukrainian, and Belorussian speakers—and they were not concentrated territorially. Every would-be internal nationalist mobilization inside Russia had to somehow manage substantial internal national minorities, too. But Stalin’s regime would find a way to cultivate loyalties through and across the different language groups of a reconstituted Russian empire. The biggest problem for imperial Russia was not the nation but the autocracy.

The autocracy integrated neither political elites nor the masses, and, meanwhile, the waves of militancy that Durnovó and Stolypin had crushed erupted again in a remote swath of deep Siberian forest in late February 1912. More than 1,000 miles north and east of Irkutsk on the Lena River—the source of Lenin’s pseudonym from his Siberian exile days—gold-mine workers struck against the fifteen-to-sixteen-hour workdays, meager salaries (which were often garnished for “fines”), watery mines (miners were soaked to the bone), trauma (around 700 incidents per 1,000 miners), and the high cost and low quality of their food. Rancid horse penises, sold as meat at the company store, triggered the walkout. The authorities refused the miners’ demands and a stalemate ensued. In April, as the strike went into its fifth week, government troops subsidized by the gold mine arrived and arrested the elected strike committee leaders (political exiles who, ironically, wished to end the strike). This prompted not the strike’s dissipation but a determined march for the captives’ release. Confronted by a peaceful crowd of perhaps 2,500 gold miners, a line of 90 or so soldiers opened fire at their officer’s command, killing at least 150 workers and wounding more than 100, many shot in the back trying to flee.

The image of workers’ lives extinguished for capitalist gold proved especially potent: among the British and Russian shareholders were banking clans, former prime minister Sergei Witte, and the dowager empress. Word of the Lena goldfields massacre spread via domestic newspaper accounts—overwhelming, in Russia, news of the Titanic’s contemporaneous sinking—and spurred empirewide job actions encompassing 300,000 workers on and after May Day 1912.165 The vast strikes caught the beaten-down socialist parties largely by surprise. “The Lena shots broke the ice of silence, and the river of popular resentment is flowing again,” Jughashvili noted in the newspaper. “The ice has broken. It has started!”166 The okhranka concurred, reporting: “Such a heightened atmosphere has not occurred for a long time. . . . Many are saying that the Lena shooting is reminiscent of the January 9 [1905] shooting” (Bloody Sunday).167 Conservatives lashed out at the government for the massacre, as well as at the gold company’s Jewish director and foreign shareholders. A Duma commission on the goldfields massacre deepened the public anger, thanks to the colorful reports provided by the commission chairman, a leftist Duma deputy and lawyer named Alexander Kerensky.

TRAGIC SECRET

Even as rightists demanded unconditional obedience to the autocrat, behind closed doors some of them took to fantasizing about his assassination. They contemplated regicide despite the fact that Nicholas II’s son, Alexei, was a toddler—Russian law required a tsar to be sixteen—and most rightists viewed the regent, the tsar’s younger brother, Grand Duke Mikhail Aleksandrovich, as no better, and probably worse than Nicholas II.168 But by 1913, when the empire celebrated three centuries of Romanov rule with spectacular pageantry, the frail dynasty was the only overarching basis for loyalty that the autocracy permitted. The tercentenary celebrations opened on February 21 with a twenty-one-gun salute from the cannons of the Peter and Paul fortress—the same guns that had announced Tsarevich Alexei’s birth nine years earlier. Next came an imperial procession from the Winter Palace to Our Lady of Kazan Cathedral. Amid the clattering hoofs, fluttering banners, and peeling church bells, the noise grew deafening at sightings of the emperor and little Alexei riding in an open carriage. At the Winter Palace ball that evening, the ladies wore archaic Muscovite-style gowns and kokoshniks, the tall headdresses of medieval Russia. The next night at the capital’s storied Mariinsky Theater, the conductor Eduard Napravnik, the lyric tenors Nikolai Figner and Leonid Sobinov, and the ballerinas Anna Pavlova and Matylda Krzesinska (a one-time teenage lover of Nicholas II), joined in a glittering performance of Mikhail Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar.

Public involvement in the tercentenary was kept conspicuously slight. The celebrations, moreover, focused not on the state (gosudarstvo) but on the grand Romanov personages who had ruled (gosudar). At the same time, Russia’s immense size was the main device used to burnish the dynasty. At the Kazan Cathedral—decorated with more than 100 of Napoleon’s state symbols captured by Russia—the Orthodox services had been accompanied by an imperial manifesto, read out at all the empire’s churches. “Muscovite Rus expanded and the Great Russian Empire now stood in the ranks of the first powers of the world,” proclaimed Nicholas II, the eighteenth Romanov.169 On the tercentenary Easter egg manufactured by special order in the workshops of Peter Carl Faberge, double-headed eagles as well as diamond-framed miniature portraits of all eighteen Romanov rulers graced the outer shell. The tiny egg’s customary “surprise” proved to be an interior rotating globe, which contrasted Russia’s boundaries of 1613 with the much-expanded empire of 1913.170 Whether the Romanov House was up to defending that patrimony, however, was widely doubted.

After Easter 1913, the imperial family devoted a celebratory fortnight to retracing the route of the first Romanov, Mikhail Fyodorovich, in reverse, from Moscow through the heartland to the ancient Romanov patrimony of Kostroma, and back to a triumphal entrance to Moscow. The face of the Our Lady of St. Theodore icon in Kostroma, the Romanov dynasty’s patron icon, had become so badly blackened, the image was nearly invisible, a terrible omen.171 But Nicholas II, emboldened by the renewal of seventeenth-century roots, renewed his scheming to end the constitutional autocracy by canceling the Duma’s legislative rights, rendering it purely advisory “in accordance with Russian tradition.” He shrank, however, from attempting what he and so many conservatives desperately craved.172 Amid the cult of autocratism, moreover, disquiet spread among the monarchy’s staunchest advocates. Despite the pageantry, many people in Russia’s upper and lower orders alike had come to doubt Nicholas II’s fitness to rule. “There is autocracy but no autocrat,” General Alexander Kireev, the Russian courtier and pundit, had complained in a diary entry as early as 1902, a sentiment that over the years had only widened, like a rock-thrown ripple across the entire pond of the empire.173 An imperial court hofmeister observing the Romanov processional to the Kazan Cathedral concluded that “the group had a most tragic look.”174 The immense Russian empire was ultimately a family affair, and the family appeared doomed. It was not simply that Nicholas II, a traditionally conservative man of family, duty, and faith, was piously committed to the “autocratic idea” without the personal wherewithal to realize it in practice. Had the hereditary tsar been a capable ruler, the future of Russia’s dynasty still would have been in trouble.175

Because of a genetic mutation that the German princess Alexandra had inherited from her grandmother Britain’s Queen Victoria, the Russian tsarevich Alexei came into the world with hemophilia, an incurable disease that impaired the body’s ability to stop bleeding. The tsarevich’s illness remained a state secret. But secrecy could not alter the likelihood that Alexei would die at a relatively early age, perhaps before fathering children. Nor was there a way around the improbability that a boy walking on eggshells, subject to death from internal bleeding by bumping into furniture, could ever serve as a vigorous, let alone autocratic, ruler. Nicholas II and Alexandra remained in partial denial about the dynasty’s full danger. The hemophilia, an unlucky additional factor piled on the autocracy’s deep structural failures, was actually an opportunity to face the difficult choice that confronted autocratic Russia, but Nicholas II and Alexandra, fundamentally sentimental beings, had none of the hard-boiled realism necessary for accepting a transformation to a genuine constitutional monarchy in order to preserve the latter.176

• • •

CONSTITUTIONAL AUTOCRACY was self-defeating. Nicholas II worked assiduously not just to stymie the realization of the parliament he had granted, but even to block the realization of a coordinated executive branch, as an infringement on autocracy. “Autocratic government” constituted an oxymoron, a collision of unconstrained sacral power with legal forms of administration, a struggle among functionaries to decide whether to heed the “will” of the autocrat or act within the laws and regulations.177 Blaming the failings of imperial Russia on “backwardness” and peasants, therefore, is misguided. Stolypin was undone primarily by the autocracy itself as well as by Russia’s uncomprehending elites. He wielded an arsenal of stratagems and possessed tremendous personal fortitude, but he met relentless resistance from the tsar, the court, and the rightist establishment, including from Sergei Witte, who now sat in the State Council.178 The establishment would not allow Stolypin to push through a full program of modernization to place Russia on the path of strength and prosperity in order to meet the array of geopolitical challenges. “I am certainly sorry for Stolypin’s death,” Pyotr Durnovó, another Stolypin nemesis in the State Council, remarked at a meeting of rightist politicians in 1911. “But at least now there is an end to the reforms.”179 True enough: reform died. At the same time, it was notable that Stolypin had not for the most part attempted to outflank the recalcitrant establishment by appealing directly to the masses, despite his eventual promotion of a broad Eastern Orthodox “nation.” Devoted to the monarchy, he sought to fuse divinely ordained autocratic power and legitimate authority, caprice and law, tradition and innovation, but he relied upon a deliberately antimass-politics Duma, aiming for a regime of country squires (like himself). In the emigration in 1928, a refugee forced to flee Russia would celebrate Stolypin as Russia’s Mussolini, the first “Eastern Orthodox fascist,” a national social leader.180 Not in the least. Stolypin’s contradictory five-year premiership lacked a radical ideology, and he remained a corridor politician even when he went out to address the people.

In international affairs, Stolypin had been unable to avoid a de facto posture of alignment with Britain against Germany. True, he did achieve an improbable and important policy victory at conservative expense, and despite lacking formal foreign affairs jurisdiction, by restraining Russian passions over the Balkans and elsewhere.181 That hard-won restraint, however, was destined not to last. Beginning just three years after Stolypin’s death, a world war would break out that, when combined with Russia’s alienated conservatives and the Romanov’s secret hemophilia, would sweep aside Russia’s constitutional autocracy and, in very short order, Russia’s constitutionalism entirely. Even then, a Russian fascism would not take hold.182 If anyone alive had been informed during the Romanov tercentenary celebrations of 1913 that soon a fascist right-wing dictatorship and a socialist left-wing dictatorship would assume power in different countries, would he or she have guessed that the hopelessly schismatic Russian Social Democrats dispersed across Siberia and Europe would be the ones to seize and hold power, and not the German Social Democrats, who in the 1912 elections had become the largest political party in the German parliament? Conversely, would anyone have predicted that Germany would eventually develop a successful anti-Semitic fascism rather than imperial Russia, the home of the world’s largest population of Jews and of the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion?183

A focus not on leftist revolutionary activity but on geopolitics and domestic high politics reveals the central truth about imperial Russia: The tsarist regime found itself bereft of a firm political base to meet its international competition challenges. That circumstance made the regime more and more reliant on the political police, its one go-to instrument for every challenge. (Alexander Blok, the poet, who would study the files of the tsarist police after the revolution, deemed them Russia’s “only properly functioning institution,” marveling at their ability “to give a good characterization of the public moods.”)184 Indulgence of the police temptation did not result from any love of the okhranka or of police methods; on the contrary, the tsar and others roundly despised their ilk.185 Rather, the overreliance on the political police stemmed from an irreconcilable antagonism between the autocracy and the Constitutional Democrats, and from the tsarist system’s profound distaste for street mobilization on its behalf. In modern times, it was not enough to demobilize opponents; a regime had to mobilize proponents. A system deliberately limited to the narrow privileged strata, backed by police and a peasant army, was, in the modern age, no polity at all, certainly not for a would-be great power competing against the strongest states. A modern integrated polity needed more than gonfalons, processionals holding icons, polyphonic hymns (“Christ Is Risen”), and the retracing in 1913 of a pilgrimage to Moscow originally undertaken in the seventeenth century. Durnovó, in leading the rescue of the autocracy in 1905–6, had proved able to reset the political moment in Russia, but unable to alter the fundamental structures. Stolypin, equally ready to wield repression yet also far more creative politically, bumped up against tsarism’s political limits. Of all the failures of Russia’s autocracy with regard to modernity, none would be as great as its failure at authoritarian mass politics.

Autocratic Russia’s discouragement of modern mass politics would leave the masses—and the profound, widespread yearning among the masses in Russia for social justice—to the leftists. The latter, for their part, including the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party, were riven by extreme factionalism, and crippled by the state’s severe repression. Under the autocracy, not just a Russian fascism but also opposition leftist parties largely failed. And yet, within a mere decade of Stolypin’s demise, the Georgian-born Russian Social Democrat Iosif “Koba” Jughashvili, a pundit and agitator, would take the place of the sickly Romanov heir and go on to forge a fantastical dictatorial authority far beyond any effective power exercised by imperial Russia’s autocratic tsars or Stolypin. Calling that outcome unforeseeable would be an acute understatement.