Young Stalin

33. “Darling, I’m in Desperate Straits”

The steamer that slowly conveyed Stalin up the Yenisei River from Krasnoyarsk in mid-June 1913 revealed a Siberia of inconceivable remoteness and wild vastness. His destination, Turukhansk, was larger than Britain, France and Germany combined, yet contained just 12,000 people.

The Yenisei flowed through narrow valleys with high terraces until it widened so far that he could peer across its glistening flatness and see no land at all. The Siberian taiga was hilly and forested with dense larch climbing to ridges of flat alpine tundra. It was green and lush in summer, but severe and icily white in a winter that lasted nine months a year, sinking to temperatures as low as—60°. Between villages of peasants and convicts, the colossal spaces were only rarely dotted with the tents and reindeer of the shamanistic Tungus and Ostyak nomads.

The game of escape, capture and escape again was over. This was, as Robert Service puts it, “a landbound Devil’s Island.” This time, though Stalin did not yet realize it, the Autocracy meant business. From Petersburg it took just over a week to reach the regional capital, Krasnoyarsk, whence he was despatched northwards into Turukhansk. It was Stalin’s home for four years but would enter his heart and never leave it.

After travelling for twenty-six days, he disembarked on 10 August at the village of Monastyrskoe,[142] the “capital” of Turukhansk Province. “As you see I’m in Turukhansk,” he wrote to Zinoviev (and Lenin) in Cracow. “Did you get my letter sent on the way? I’ve fallen ill. I need to recover. Send me some money.” He was already planning his escape: “If you need my help, let me know and I’ll come immediately.”

Lenin did need his help. On 27 July, he had held a CC meeting at which he had ordered that Stalin and Sverdlov be sprung from exile. Each was sent sixty roubles, but once again Malinovsky betrayed the plan to the Okhrana, which telegraphed Turukhansk police chief Ivan Kibirov, warning that Stalin was an escape-artist. The officers in such places were themselves effectively exiled: Kibirov, an Ossetian, had been removed from the Baku police and posted to Turukhansk for misdemeanours unknown. Possibly because of their shared Ossetian origins, he favoured Stalin.

Soso was assigned to stay in Miroedikha, a hamlet to the south where he soon made himself felt. An exile named Innokenti Dubrovinsky had drowned in the river that summer, leaving an impressive library. Exile etiquette decreed the sharing of the libraries of the dead, but typically Stalin “expropriated” the books, refused to share them and started to read them ravenously. The life of the exiles rotated around just this sort of petty quarrel which Stalin was so expert at provoking. The other exiles were outraged—they complained, and blackballed him. Philip Zakharov, a Bolshevik, confronted the book-thief, but Stalin treated his impertinent visitor “like a Tsarist General would receive a private soldier who had the insolence to appear before him with a request.” Stalin behaved like the Khoziain, the Master, long before he was dictator of Russia—indeed he had done so since childhood.

After just two weeks, he had to be moved (no doubt with his new library) to another hamlet, Kostino. There he found four other exiles, and this pedagogue manqué spent his time teaching two Georgian criminals to read. Soon he learned that his old roommate Sverdlov was nearby in Selivanikha.^{216}

Around 20 September, Stalin visited Sverdlov, who lived in a peasant bathhouse. Staying together in the converted banya, they dreamed of escape. “I’ve just bidden farewell to Vaska [Stalin], my guest here for a week,” Sverdlov told Malinovsky, the last Bolshevik leader at liberty inside Russia. “If you have money for me or ‘Vaska’ (they might have sent some), then send it… Last week, we wrote asking for some newspapers and magazines. Do what you can.” Malinovsky was certainly doing what he could to betray the two hopeful escapees.

On 1 October, Lenin and the CC, reacting to Stalin’s offer to Zinoviev, again proposed to spring him and Sverdlov, assigning one hundred roubles to the project. Within nineteen days, Stalin had “received an offer from a comrade in Petersburg to escape to the capital.” Stalin and Sverdlov prepared for this challenging escape, spending all their money and credit. The Bolshevik manager of the Canadian fur-trading company Revelion provided flour, sugar, tea and tobacco; the local doctor donated medicines; others forged passports.

The “doctor of escapology” was almost ready, but now winter was descending on the taiga. It was harsher and more desolate than anything the Georgian had experienced before. He was soon at the lowest ebb of his life so far. Daily life in Turukhansk was meant to be a struggle. If most Tsarist exiles were like holidays, Turukhansk was a slow death: many exiles perished out there from the extremities of weather. By early November, it was -33°, heading for -50°. Saliva froze on the lips, breath crystallized. And the cold made living much more expensive. Stalin appealed to his girlfriend Tatiana Slavatinskaya. His panic is obvious:

Tatiana not only sent him his old clothes but also bought him winter underwear. When it arrived, he was thrilled: “Darling dear Tatiana, I got your parcel. But I didn’t ask for new clothes, just the old ones, yet you’ve spent your money on new ones. Dear darling, it’s a shame because you’re short of money, but I don’t know how to thank you!” Even with his new clothes, Stalin begged Tatiana for money: “Darling, My need is more urgent with every passing hour. I’m in desperate straits: on top of every thing, I got ill, a cough on the lungs. I need milk, money. I have none. My dear, if you find money, send it immediately. It’s unbearable to wait any longer…”

He must have been sending out letters to all his friends, particularly Malinovsky, the very man who had put him in Siberia:

Stalin suggested that Malinovsky appeal to the Menshevik Karlo Chkheidze, whom he had tormented in Batumi, “not only as my compatriot but as Chairman of the faction. I don’t want to die out here without even writing you a letter. The matter is urgent because waiting means starving when I am already weak and sick.” He had got “44 roubles from abroad,” from Berne, Switzerland—and nothing else. He tried to raise money another way. Zinoviev claimed they were publishing his nationalities essay as a pamphlet:

Malinovsky replied in transparent code: “Dear brother, I’ll sell the horse: I’ve asked 100 roubles for it.”

Yet when the hundred-rouble escape fund arrived, it was sent to Sverdlov. Stalin took umbrage: did they only want Sverdlov and not him? But things looked up a little. Zinoviev replied that they were publishing Stalin’s pamphlet. He got twenty-five roubles from Badaev, the Duma deputy, but he needed more. He must have written to Georgia, to his mother and the Svanidzes, because he received a parcel from Tiflis, and he appealed to the Alliluyevs too.

The books and money demanded from Zinoviev did not arrive. Stalin again became desperate: “You wrote that you’d be sending the ‘debt’ in small bits. Send it as soon as possible however small the bits. I terribly need the money. It would be fine without my damn illness which requires money… I’m waiting.”

Stalin was writing another article entitled “Cultural-National Autonomy,” which he sent, via Sergei Alliluyev, to Troyanovsky for his journal Prosveshchenie. But he became ever more irritated with Zinoviev, writing on 11 January 1914, referring to himself in the third person: “Why are you keeping silent, my friend? I haven’t had a letter from you for three months. Stalin… hoped to get the relevant fee, and thus wouldn’t need to ask anyone for money any more. I think he has a right to think like that.” Stalin never forgot his treatment at the hands of Zinoviev, showy orator and supercilious Jewish émigré, things he despised.

In January 1914, after six months of anxiety and struggle, money started arriving: the policeman Kibirov reported to his superiors that Stalin had received 50 roubles from Petersburg, 10 roubles from Sashiko (Svanidze) Monoselidze in Tiflis, 25 from Badaev, plus another 55 from Petersburg, almost enough for an escapee’s “boots.”

The Imperial Police director, Beletsky, learned (probably from Malinovsky) that an escape was imminent. He telegraphed Turukhansk that Stalin and Sverdlov had each received another 50 roubles “to organize their escape.” A local Okhrana informer confirmed that “Djugashvili and Sverdlov are thinking of escaping… on the very first steamboat down the Yenisei this summer.” Beletsky ordered: “Take all measures to prevent this!” The Okhrana decided “to place Djugashvili and Sverdlov in a northern village where there are no other exiles and to attach two inspectors specially to watch them.”

This was dire news. “Djugashvili and I are being moved 180 versts northwards, 80 versts north of the Arctic Circle,” a downhearted Sverdlov told his sister Sara. “We’re torn away even from the post office. The mail only comes once a month by foot and really only eight or nine times a year… The name of the place is Kureika.”

Stalin was being moved to the very edge of the Arctic Circle.^{217}[143]

34. 1914: Arctic Sex Comedy

If Stalin called Kostino “an ill-fated place,” Kureika was a freezing hellhole, the sort of place where a man could believe himself utterly forgotten and even lose his sanity: its desolate solitude and obligatory self-containment were to remain with Stalin throughout his life. In March 1914, he and Sverdlov were transported northwards on a horse-drawn cart by their armed personal Gendarmes, Laletin and Popov.

They arrived to find that Kureika barely merited the name of hamlet, and it seemed that virtually all its inhabitants were related. Sixty-seven villagers, thirty-eight men and twenty-nine women, were packed into just eight ramshackle izbas, wooden peasant bungalows, more like huts than houses. Most of the citizens of this interbred settlement belonged to three families; these were the Taraseevs, the Saltykovs and the seven Pereprygin orphans.^{218}

“One Monday, I was just boiling water for the washing,” said Anfisa Taraseeva,[144] “when I saw a man—with thick dark beard and hair—come in with a small case and some knotted bedding. ‘Hello, khoziaika [housewife], I’m staying with you,’ he said. He put down his suitcase as if he’d always lived with us. He played with the children and… when the men came back, he said, ‘I’m from Petersburg. My name is Josef Djugashvili.’”

Stalin and Sverdlov moved into the izba of Alexei and Anfisa Taraseev. At first all went well. The exiles got on easily with Taraseev, who agreed to receive their money orders. It was still cold there, but the ice was thawing. Life in Kureika was governed by the weather: when the Yenisei River froze, locals travelled on the icy river in sleighs, pulled by teams of reindeer and dogs. Then there was the “bad roads season” when the roads were so muddy that they were impassable. In May, the steamships started to ply the Yenisei for a few months; then the locals would boat downriver, tugged from the banks by dog-teams—until the freeze came.

Only the reindeer, snow-foxes and Tungus indigenous tribesmen could really function in deep midwinter. Everyone had to wear reindeer fur. The thirteen-year-old Lidia Pereprygina, one of the family of orphans, noticed that Stalin was underdressed with only a light coat. Soon he sported a full outfit—from boots to hat—of reindeer fur.

“In the new place, it’s much harder to settle,” Sverdlov wrote on 22 March. “It was bad enough I didn’t have a room to myself.” The two Bolshevik roommates were friendly enough at first: “We’re two of us sharing. My old friend, the Georgian, Djugashvili, is here with me: we met before in earlier exiles. He’s a good fellow but”—even after barely ten days together, there was a big “but”—“he is too much of an individualist[145] in everyday life.”

Worse, the Taraseevs had a noisy brood of children. “Our room adjoins the hosts,” complained Sverdlov in a letter, “we’ve no separate entrance. The children hang around the whole day, disturbing us.” But Sverdlov was also infuriated by the silent Tungus tribesmen, who visited the exiles. Dressed from head to food in reindeer furs, the Tunguses would become part of Stalin’s life. They were tough, nomadic fishermen and herdsmen with Oriental features who lived in harmony with their reindeer, believing in a mixture of primitive Orthodoxy and ancient spiritualism, interpreted by shamans—indeed “shaman” is a Tungus word.

The Tunguses “sat down, and kept silent for half an hour before standing up and saying, ‘Goodbye, we’ve got to go.’ They come in the evening, the best time for studying,” sighed Sverdlov. But Stalin befriended these men, as laconic as himself.

The tension was not just about children and housework. The touchy, vindictive Stalin brooded about the money sent to Sverdlov, and not to himself, as an escape fund. Days after his arrival, he had received neither the hundred roubles promised by Malinovsky nor the fees and the books from Zinoviev. Was Zinoviev disrespecting him? Was Sverdlov double-crossing him?

The Georgian and the Jew, the lost fulcrum of the Bolshevik Party in the Russian Empire, captive in their eight-shack village many time-zones from Europe, soon started to aggravate each other. On one side of their tiny dark room, Sverdlov scribbled about his roommate’s egotism, while on the other Stalin, at his nitpicking, seething worst, wrote to Malinovsky demanding that he sort out what had happened to the hundred roubles:

Stalin concluded that they had “chosen another man” to spring—Sverdlov. “Am I right, brother? I ask, dear friend, for a direct precise answer because I like clarity just as I hope you like clarity.”^{219}

No two men liked clarity less than Stalin and Malinovsky, expert conspirators and dissimulators. But while the former stewed in distant frustration, the latter’s entire world was falling apart. There was a good reason Malinovsky had neither sold the “horse” nor answered Stalin’s letters. Stalin’s “dear friend Roman” was now an “hysterical” alcoholic doubleagent swigging vodka out of a teapot—and on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Finally, a new Interior Minister and police director sacked Malinovsky, who resigned from the Duma on 8 May 1914. The Malinovsky case exploded very publicly in the faces of the government and police.

Malinovsky’s strongest defenders in the Party had been Lenin—and Stalin. “Lenin must have known,” Malinovsky said later, but he was wrong. Lenin would not believe the truth. But he weighed up the kudos won by Malinovsky in the Duma and his help in defeating (or removing, by arrest) the Conciliators (including Stalin) to conclude that “if he is a provocateur, the secret police gained less from it than our Party did.”[146]

Stalin, paranoia personified, did not suspect the greatest traitor of his political career. The Malinovsky case played its role in making him—and his comrades—obsessively paranoid. Malinovsky entered the Bolshevik consciousness. Like Banquo’s ghost, he haunted Soviet history. Henceforth, in the Bolshevik world of konspiratsia, nothing was too outlandish. If Malinovsky could be a traitor, why not the Soviet marshals, why not the entire General Staff, why not Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin and most of the Central Committee, all shot as spies during the 1930s on Stalin’s orders?^{220}

On the Arctic Circle, Stalin tormented himself and his roommate about the missing hundred roubles. “There’s a comrade [in Kureika],” reflected Sverdlov. “We know each other very well, but the saddest thing is that in exile a person appears bare, revealed in all his little idiosyncracies. The worst thing is that these ‘little things’ dominate a relationship. There’s little chance to show one’s better side.”

As the winter thawed, the Okhrana again warned on 27 April 1914 that the Bolsheviks were going “to organize the escapes of well-known Party men, Sverdlov and Djugashvili.” Stalin and Sverdlov frequently borrowed Fyodor Taraseev’s boat, but now the Gendarmes banned river expeditions. In May, when the steamboats again plied the Yenisei, Kureika’s tedium changed from an agony of cold to a plague of mosquitoes.

Soon Stalin “stopped talking to me,” wrote Sverdlov, “and let me know that I had to leave him alone and live separately.” Both moved out, Stalin temporarily finding refuge in Philip Saltykov’s izba. Moving out did not end Stalin’s Arctic sulk. “You know what nasty conditions I have in Kureika,” Sverdlovtold his wife, Klavidia, who was in exile nearby. “The companion… appears to have such a sense of his own personality that we don’t talk and meet one another.” Sverdlov’s letters capture the stress, depression (and bland menu) of this aimless existence.

Stalin must have lived the same way: he never lost the nocturnal hours of Siberia.

In this eight-hut universe, the entire population must have been aware of this schism. “We just couldn’t harmonize our characters,” regretted Sverdlov. But there was probably another big but unspeakable reason for their fallout: a girl.^{221}

No sooner had Stalin and Sverdlov settled with the Taraseevs than the Georgian must have noticed the youngest girl among the Pereprygin orphans. There were five brothers and two sisters, Natalia and Lidia. We know no details of how this developed. But some time in early 1914 Stalin, now thirty-four, embarked on an affair with Lidia, aged thirteen.

We catch a glimpse of Stalin and Lidia together staggering from drinking-bout to drinking-bout because we have her memoirs of their boozy carousals: “In his spare time, Stalin liked to go to evening dances—he could be very jolly too. He loved to sing and dance. He especially liked the song ‘I’m guarding the gold, the gold… I’m burying the gold, burying the gold, Guess where, pure damsel with your golden hair’… He often joined birthday dinners.” The memoirs of Stalin’s thirteen-year-old mistress were recorded twenty years later at the height of his dictatorship while she remained a Siberian housewife. The official who recorded her reminiscences would not have dared record the seduction, but the memoirs are still tactless. “He often liked to drop in on some people,” says Lidia, meaning herself. “And he also drank.” Was this how he seduced her—or she him? Girls in places like Kureika matured early—and Lidia does not sound like a shrinking violet.

Sverdlov may have disapproved of Stalin’s seduction of the thirteen-year-old, the latest in a line of adolescent girls romanced by the thirty-something Georgian. And Stalin may well have thrown him out in order to enjoy more privacy with his little mistress. But this was far from the end of the scandal.

The two Bolsheviks, now ignoring each other, were carefully watched by their own Gendarme inspectors, Laletin and Popov, whose sole job was to ensure that they did not escape. In cases of such close proximity, the policemen either became the companions, if not personal servants, of the exiles—or their mortal foes. The red-bearded, red-tempered Ivan Laletin soon became Stalin’s enemy.

Once Stalin was going out hunting with his rifle when he was challenged by the Gendarme. He was allowed to handle hunting-rifles with permission, but he refused to surrender his gun to the policeman. In the ensuing fracas, “Gendarme Laletin swooped on Josef Vissarionovich and tried to disarm him.” A fight started. The Gendarme “drew his sabre and managed to cut Stalin on the hand.” Stalin reported Laletin to Captain Kibirov.

By early summer, no matter how furtive the creeping around the eight huts, almost everyone must have known about Stalin’s little mistress. The sabrerattling Gendarme surely saw his chance to nail the insolent Georgian.

“One day,” recalls Fyodor Taraseev, the only villager who dared record the story, “Stalin was staying at home, working, and not leaving the house. The Gendarme found this suspicious and decided to check up on him. Without knocking on the door, he burst into the room.”

Taraseev prudently claims that Stalin was just “working,” yet the inspector found this oddly “suspicious.” And Stalin was furious at being interrupted. The memoirs unanimously emphasize his calmness during searches: so was there something unusual about this one? After all, the policeman deliberately surprised him “without knocking.” It sounds very much as if the policeman caught Stalin and Lidia in flagrante delicto.

Stalin attacked him. The policeman again drew his sabre. In the ensuing fight, Stalin was wounded in the neck by the sabre, which so inflamed his anger that “he kicked out the rogue!”

“We witnessed this scene,” says Taraseev. “The Gendarme was running away towards the Yenisei river, cravenly waving his sabre in front of him while Comrade Stalin was pursuing him in a state of high excitement and fury, with his fists clenched.”

If it was a secret, it was out. Even though local lore discouraged affairs with exiles, the local girls were bound to be attracted to these worldly, educated revolutionaries in their midst. This statutory rape was not rape by force but an old-fashioned seduction because, according to the later investigation by KGB Chairman Ivan Serov, “J. V. Stalin started living together with her.” Presumably she was sharing his room, which is how the policeman had caught them together. In his report to Nikita Khrushchev and the Politburo in 1956, which remained secret until the twenty-first century, General Serov implied that the living together was almost as shocking as the seduction.[147]

Stalin moved into the Pereprygin izba. There were two rooms and a shed for cattle in winter. The seven siblings were crammed into one fuggy, cow-dungy room; Stalin rented the filthy second chamber that could only be reached through the cowshed and family room. It contained just a “table covered in newspapers, wooden trestle bed, and tangle of fishing and hunting nets, tackle and hooks, all made by Stalin himself.” Everything was covered in soot from the black tin chimney in the middle of the room.

The glass in the windows was broken, so Stalin sealed the cracks with old newspapers or boarded them up. The only light in this Arctic twilight, where night often lasted throughout the day, was a lamp, but he often lacked kerosene. The lavatory was an outhouse. The Pereprygins were dirt poor, “one day eating shchi [cabbage broth], the next day the holy spirit [nothing], but they owned one cow.”

At night, Lidia would creep into his room, recounts Stalin’s first biographer, Essad Bey, who must have talked to fellow exiles. Certainly she was not shy about recalling what underwear he favoured—“He wore white underwear and a sailor-striped vest,” she confided to her interviewer in 1952 when Stalin was almost worshipped as a demi-god.

The brothers were not happy about the seduction. There are hints of their disapproval: Stalin got his food and bread from his old landlady, not from the Pereprygins, though Lidia claimed that “this was because the girls were too young to cook.” Yet as orphans the girls had cooked for their brothers from an early age. More likely, Soso and his moll were banned from family meals.

The affair might have remained tolerable, but there was worse to come: Lidia fell pregnant with Stalin’s child. The Pereprygin brothers were angry, even though the exact law of consent was hardly enforced in distant communities in the Arctic Circle, where girls married and had children in their early teens. According to General Serov, Gendarme Laletin, despite having fled from the irate Stalin, threatened “to instigate criminal proceedings for living together with an underage girl. J. V. Stalin promised the Gendarme to marry Pereprygina when she came of age.” So, once again, Stalin became engaged—and the family, whether gratefully or begrudgingly, accepted the relationship.[148] In return, Stalin “shared his fish with them” as one of the family. Indeed he treated Lidia almost as his young wife. When his friend the elderly Elizaveta Taraseeva visited, Stalin commanded: “Lidia, Lidia, babushka’s come to tea! Feed her well.”

The policeman’s interference was the final straw. Stalin complained to Captain Kibirov, who favoured his fellow Caucasian. Stalin had a village of witnesses to the hapless Gendarme drawing his sword on an exile and the ignominious chase along the riverbank. Yet it took considerable chutzpah for Stalin to complain about the policeman when he had impregnated an underaged girl. As so often with Stalin’s self-righteous indignation, it worked.

That summer of 1914, around June, Kibirov agreed to replace Laletin, telling his deputy, “All right, let’s send Merzliakov to Kureika. Since Djugashvili is so keen to replace his inspector, let’s get him out of harm’s way.” In a reversal of roles, Gendarme Laletin was afraid of his prisoner—and with good reason. His replacement, Mikhail Merzliakov, now arrived. Stalin immediately assumed the role of quasi-aristocratic master, while the Gendarme became a cross between valet, batman and bodyguard for the rest of his sentence.

Stalin kept studying the nationalities issue, and English and German. “Dear friend,” a rather more cheerful Stalin wrote to Zinoviev on 20 May, “my warmest greetings to you… I’m waiting for the books… I also ask you to send me some English journals (an old or new issue doesn’t matter—it’s for reading since there’s nothing in English here and I’m afraid I’m losing all my acquired English skills without any practice…”

Soso’s engagement to Lidia, indeed the relationship itself, was a transitory amusement to be abandoned by the wayside of his revolutionary mission. The pregnancy was presumably an irritant. Yet the locals claim that Lidia was in love with Stalin. It was not her last pregnancy by him.^{222}

In late summer, Sverdlov left Kureika and moved to Selivanikha, while Suren Spandarian, Stalin’s best friend, arrived in nearby Monastyrskoe.

In late August 1914, Stalin took the boat downriver for a reunion with Spandarian—just as the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Habsburg throne, was assassinated in Sarajevo, a shot that sent Russia and the Great Powers lurching into the Great War. “The bourgeois vampires of the belligerent countries plunged the world into a bloody shambles,” wrote Stalin. “Wholesale slaughter, ruin, starvation and… savagery—so that a handful of crowned and uncrowned robbers may pillage foreign lands and rake in untold millions.”

As the lights went out all over Europe, Stalin found himself irrelevant, forgotten, frustrated and engaged against his will to a pregnant adolescent peasant-girl, at the centre of nothing—except an Arctic sex scandal. Nineteen-fourteen was not his finest hour. As the Great Powers fought, the snows obscured the sun and the news from the outside world. Stalin disappeared into the Siberian winter.^{223}

35. The Hunter

Now the only exile in ice-bound, twilighted Kureika, Stalin started to live closely with aboriginal Tunguses and Ostyaks. There was little to do, but survival was a struggle: tundra wolves howled at the edge of the village. When Stalin visited the outhouse lavatory, he fired a rifle to keep the wolves at bay. When he travelled, the sleigh “dashed along under the interminable howls of wolves.” The wolf-packs of Kureika entered Stalin’s consciousness, the enemies always circling his Siberian hut. He sketched them on documents during meetings, especially towards the end of his life as he orchestrated a last Terror campaign, the Doctors’ Plot. In his last exile, he told visitors, “The peasants used to shoot mad wolves.”

Yet somehow it suited Stalin: he began to enjoy Kureika. Strangely, it became one of the happiest times in his morose life. His favourite companions were a little dog called Stepan Timofeevich, or Tishka for short, which the locals gave him as a present, a Tungus fisherman named Martin Peterin, and his police inspector, Merzliakov. Lidia’s pregnancy was increasingly visible. Siberia became more bearable because Stalin now began to receive regular money orders: during 1915–16, he received ten, worth more than one hundred roubles in all, so he could buy food and clothes and pay bribes where necessary.[149]

He became the solitary hunter, a role that suited his self-image as a man on a sacred mission, riding out into the snows with a rifle for company, but no attachments except his faith, lacking all bourgeois sentimentality but always displaying Arctic stoicism even when beset by tragedy. For the rest of his life, he regaled Alliluyevs or Politburo grandees with tales of his Siberian adventures. Even when he ruled Russia he was still that solitary hunter.

“Osip” or “Pockmarked Oska,” as they called him, venturing out alone in a head-to-foot reindeer-fur outfit, became a skilled hunter and close companion of the tribesmen. Laletin did not permit him to own a rifle, so, one local remembers, “We took the rifle to the woods and left it on a pre-agreed tree so he’d find it.” He shot Arctic foxes, partridges and ducks on long expeditions.

The villagers began to respect Pockmarked Oska, with his pipe and books. “The locals liked him,” says Merzliakov. “They visited him and sat all night with him. He visited them too and attended their merry parties.” They brought him fish and venison, which he purchased. He appreciated their laconic tranquillity and was amused by their respect for shamans and by their persistent belief, despite nominal Orthodoxy, in the masters and spirits who inhabited the spaces of Siberia. Above all, he studied and copied their fishing and hunting techniques.

Fish and reindeer were their staples. The reindeer, who are able to live on blankets of lichen, were treated with sacred respect by the tribesmen, providing transport (pulling sleighs), clothing (furs), investment (the wealthiest chiefs owned herds of 10,000) and food (boiled reindeer meat), all in one. Peterin, probably an Ostyak creole, taught his friend the art of Yenisei fishing. Stalin made his own fishing-line and dug his own personal ice-hole, remembers Merzliakov, whose memoir, recorded in 1936, is the best account of his life in Kureika. According to Stalin’s own somewhat Gothic account, he learned to fish with such dexterity at his ice-hole that the Ostyak whispered awestruck: “Thou ist possessed by the Word.” Stalin enjoyed the fish diet: “There were lots of fish, but salt was as precious as gold, so they just threw the fish into their outhouse where in the—20° freeze they piled up like frozen pieces of wood. Then we’d break flakes off and let them melt in our mouths.” He started to catch huge sturgeons.

“Once,” he recounted, “a tempest caught me on the river. It seemed I was done for, but I made it to the bank.” Another time, he was coming home with Ostyak friends with a good catch of sturgeon and sea-salmon when he got separated from the others. A purga, the blinding blizzard of the tundra, blew up suddenly. Kureika was far away, but he could not abandon his fish, sustenance for weeks, so he trudged on until he saw figures ahead. He called after them, but they disappeared: they were his companions but, seeing him embroidered from beard to feet in white ice, they believed him a demon spirit and fled. When he finally reached a hut and burst in, the Ostyaks cried out: “Is that you, Osip?”

“Of course it’s me and I’m not a wood-spirit!” he retorted, before falling into a deep sleep for eighteen hours.

He was not imagining that he was in danger—the tribesmen were accustomed to losing men on their fishing expeditions. “I remember in spring at high water, thirty men went out fishing and in the evening when we came back, one was missing,” Stalin recounted. They casually explained that their companion had “remained out there.” Stalin was puzzled until one said that “He drowned.” Their nonchalance perplexed Stalin, but they explained: “Why should we have pity for men? We can always make more of them, but a horse, try to make a horse!” Stalin used this in a 1935 speech to illustrate the value of human life, but actually it must have been another experience that taught him its cheapness.

“I went on a hunt one winter,” Stalin told his magnates Khrushchev and Beria at one of his dinners after the Second World War, “took my gun, and crossed the Yenisei on skis for about 12 versts and saw some partridges on a tree. I had twelve rounds and there were twenty-four partridges. I killed twelve and the rest just sat there, so I thought I’d go back for twelve more rounds. When I came back they were still sitting there.”

“Still sitting there?” prompted Khrushchev. Beria urged Stalin to continue.

“That’s right,” boasted Stalin, “so I killed the remaining twelve, tied them to my belt and dragged them home with me.” By the time he told this to his son-in-law Yuri Zhdanov, he boasted he had shot thirty birds, the temperature was -40° and another wild storm forced him to abandon partridges and gun—and even hope. But luckily, the women (possibly Lidia) found him swooning in a snowdrift and rescued him—and he slept for thirty-six hours.[150]

Stalin amassed a little medicine cabinet and became the closest thing Kureika had to a doctor: “J. V. helped people with medicine, dressed wounds with iodine and gave drugs.” He “taught the tribesmen to wash,” says Merzliakov, “and I remember how he washed one of them with soap.” He suffered from rheumatism, which he eased in the bathhouse, but the pain remained into old age, when he used to perch on the Kremlin’s heaters during long meetings. He was good at playing with the Tungus children, singing and romping with them, sometimes telling them about his own unhappy childhood. Little Dasha Taraseeva “used to ride on his back, pulling his thick dark hair and crying, ‘Neigh like a horse, uncle!’” When Fyodor Taraseev’s cow sickened with colic, Stalin impressed him with the skills he had learned as a boy in Georgia: he “slaughtered the cow and carved the meat like a real master.”

Stalin still enjoyed partying. “At the Taraseevs’ place, the young gathered in a circle for a party—Stalin danced in the middle beating time, then he started singing,” recalls a visitor to Kureika, Daria Ponamareva, “‘I’m burying the gold, burying the gold,’” always that favourite song. “He was expert in dancing,” says Anfisa Taraseeva, “and taught the young.”

Sometimes, the Georgian from the lush mountainous Caucasus peered out at the taiga. “In this damned land, nature is abominably barren—the river in summer, snow in winter, that’s all that nature provides here,” he wrote poignantly to Olga Alliluyeva on 25 November 1915, “and I’m driven mad with longing for scenes of nature…”

He also spent much time alone, writing at night. “My dog Tishka was my companion,” Stalin reminisced. “In winter nights, if I had kerosene and could read and write, he’d come in, press close to my legs and whimper as if he was talking to me. I leaned down patting his head, saying, ‘Are you frozen, Tishka? Warm yourself up!’” He joked that he “liked to discuss international politics with the dog, Stepan Timofeevich,” clearly the world’s first canine pundit. For Stalin, pets had advantages over people: they provided selfless affection and passionate admiration yet never betrayed their masters (nor became pregnant by them), and yet they could be abandoned without guilt.

The inactivity, isolation from the political game and lack of reading materials sometimes depressed him bitterly, especially when he brooded about Lenin and Zinoviev. Had they forgotten him? Where was his latest article? And why had he not been paid? In the winter of 1915, he sarcastically asked them: “How am I? What am I doing? I’m not all right. I’m doing almost nothing. And what can I do with a complete lack of serious books?… In all my exiles, I’ve never had such a miserable life as here.”

Even this fanatical Marxist, convinced that the progress of history would bring about revolution and dictatorship of the proletariat, must have sometimes doubted if he would ever return. Even Lenin doubted the Revolution, asking Krupskaya, “Will we ever live to see it?” Yet Stalin never seems to have lost faith. “The Russian Revolution is as inevitable as the rising of the sun,” he had written back in 1905 and he had not changed his view. “Can you prevent the sun from rising?”

When he could get his hands on newspapers, the future Supreme Commander-in-Chief eagerly discussed “the ulcers of war” with Merzliakov. During the Second World War, he sometimes quoted examples from the battles of the First that he had followed in Kureika.[151] As the Tsar tottered from one bungled defeat to another, Stalin must have anticipated that this war would, like that of 1904, finally bring Revolution. Perhaps he was not just misleading the Okhrana when he told Petrovsky in Petersburg: “Someone spread a rumour that I wouldn’t be staying for my whole sentence. What nonsense! I swear and I’ll be damned if I don’t keep my word, that this won’t happen. I’ll remain in exile until my sentence ends [in 1917]. At times I’ve considered escaping but now I’ve finally rejected the idea.” One senses his weariness: if Lenin and Zinoviev would not help him, then he would not help them.

Somewhere around December 1914, Lidia gave birth to a baby.^{224}

36. The Robinson Crusoe of Siberia

The child died soon afterwards. Stalin made no comment about this, but he was definitely in Kureika at the time and the whole settlement must have been aware of it. Whether or not Lidia’s brothers forgave their libidinous tenant, the relationship with Lidia continued.

Stalin’s new policeman, Merzliakov, made his life much more pleasant. He did not spy on his charge, follow him or search him, and he allowed him to meet friends, go on long hunting expeditions and even disappear for weeks on end. “In the summer we went by boat… pulled by dogs and on return we rowed back. In winter we went on horseback,” and the fur-clad, pipe-puffing Stalin would despatch the half-policeman, half-valet Merzliakov to collect his mail. Almost twenty years later, Stalin was still grateful to Merzliakov—and probably saved his life.[152]

In February 1915, “during the months when it was always dark with no distinction between day and night,” he was visited by Spandarian and his mistress Vera Shveitzer. They had driven 125 miles up the frozen Yenisei on sledges, propelled by dog-power, harrassed by wolves. At last they had seen the tiny settlement from afar and Soso’s snow-covered izba, whence he emerged, smiling, to greet them. Most of the inhabitants and the Gendarme welcomed them too.

“We stayed at Josef Vissarionovich’s place for two days.” Vera noticed that Soso, suffering from arthritis, was “wearing a jacket but he had only one ofhis arms through the sleeve. Later I realized he likes to dress in such a way so as to keep his right arm free.” Stalin, who was delighted to see them, went out to the river and proudly returned with an enormous three-pud sturgeon over his shoulder: “There are no small fish in my ice-hole.”

Spandarian and Shveitzer came to discuss the trial in Petersburg of the five Bolshevik Duma deputies and Pravda editor Kamenev. Lenin had declared that he wished the Germans to defeat Russia, thereby accelerating the Revolution and a “European civil war.” The Mensheviks supported Russia’s patriotic war providing it was “defencist.” In November 1914, Kamenev and the deputies were arrested for treason; during his trial Kamenev refused to follow Lenin’s unpatriotic defeatism, but was still found guilty and exiled to Siberia.

Stalin and Spandarian were disgusted by Kamenev’s behaviour. “That man’s not trustworthy,” declared Stalin, “he could betray the Revolution,” whereupon, wrapped in tarpaulins, dressed head to foot in reindeer furs and guided by Tungus tribesmen, Spandarian and Vera took Stalin back with them to Monastyrskoe, the Northern Lights gorgeously illuminating the tundra. “Suddenly Stalin started singing,” writes Shveitzer. “Suren joined in and it was so lovely to hear well-known melodies carrying me away” as the sleigh rushed for two days across the ice in that endless twilight.

Spandarian and Stalin wrote to Lenin. Stalin, the Bolshevik hunter, no longer whining about owed money and unsent books, struck the very pose of militant virility that would be the Bolshevik style in power:

Lenin remembered his “fiery Colchian” in exile. “Koba is well,” he informed his comrades; then a few months later, he asked: “Big request—find out last name of Koba (Josef Dj—? Have forgotten). It’s important.”

When Stalin’s exeat was over, he returned to Kureika for the rest of the long winter. The ice thawed on the Yenisei. In May 1915, the steamboats brought interesting companions upriver from Krasnoyarsk. Kamenev arrived in Monastyrskoe with the Duma deputies. Sverdlov and Spandarian were nearby. During July 1915, Stalin was summoned to a meeting at the house shared by Kamenev and Petrovsky in Monastyrskoe.

The Bolsheviks enjoyed an idyllic summer reunion. They even took group photographs.[153] But for the Bolsheviks even the picnics were political, involving denunciations and trials. Stalin and Spandarian supported Lenin and decided to put Kamenev on trial in Monastyrskoe.

Kamenev gave Stalin The Prince by Machiavelli, perhaps an unwise gift for someone who was already Machiavellian enough. At a boozy dinner, Kamenev asked everyone round the table to declare their greatest pleasure in life. Some cited women, others earnestly replied that it was the progress of dialectical materialism towards the workers’ paradise. Then Stalin answered: “My greatest pleasure is to choose one’s victim, prepare one’s plans minutely, slake an implacable vengeance, and then go to bed. There’s nothing sweeter in the world.”[154]

At Kamenev’s “trial,” Stalin had the casting vote. Slippery as ever and always building new alliances, he attacked Kamenev and then departed for Kureika before the final vote, thus saving the victim. Kamenev patronized the cruder Georgian, while Stalin found him congenial but disdained him as a man and politician: “I saw Gradov [Kamenev] and company in the summer,” he wrote to Zinoviev. “They all rather resemble wet hens. So these are our ‘hawks’ are they!”

Stalin returned to another long winter in Kureika. In early November, after the snows had descended, he got permission to see the doctor in Monastyrskoe. Arriving in full furs on a four-dog sleigh, he burst into Spandarian’s house and kissed his friend on the cheeks—and Vera twice on the lips.

“Oh Koba!” she exclaimed, delighted to see him. “Oh Koba!”

Spandarian, consumptive and suffering from nervous tension, was “sometimes so frantic that a gnat bite would drive him to tear his clothes to shreds. Suren was depressed,” but “Stalin was very cheerful,” recalls a fellow exile, Boris Ivanov, “and his arrival always reinvigorated him.”

Stalin collected a letter from Zinoviev, to which he replied sarcastically:

On arrival, Stalin helped embitter a local feud, the sort that he always relished, both as mean-spirited sport and political stimulant. The Bolshevik exiles in Monastyrskoe, led by Spandarian, had found themselves so short of sugar and furs that winter that they robbed the local Revelion trading shop of its precious goodies. When the police investigated, an exile named Petukhov sneaked on the thieves. Isolated and paranoid in their Siberian time warp, exiles took sides with either the robbers or the informer. Spandarian wanted to punish Petukhov and try him at another Party trial. Sverdlov backed Petukhov and wanted to try Spandarian for the robbery itself. But Sverdlov himself had become too close to the local police, giving officers German lessons. Spandarian and his allies accused Sverdlov of being a “morally tainted” Okhrana spy.

Sverdlov boycotted the Party trial at which Spandarian, Vera and five others voted to condemn Petukhov. Stalin, who had himself faced expulsion at similar sittings, grandly sat on the fence, abstaining from the vote for Petukhov’s expulsion, explaining that “they should expel both Petukhov and Sverdlov.” The row became so heated that some of Sverdlov’s group were beaten up.

“Exile is the worst,” wrote Sverdlov, “there’s no trace of community or comradeship: isolation and distance are infernal and murderous.” Now Spandarian “fell seriously ill… starting to cough blood.”^{225}

“We spent a long time in the village,” says Stalin’s police-batman, Merzliakov. “I had no idea who he was seeing. J. V. [Stalin] eventually returned to the police station himself to say that we could go back.”

In Kureika again, Stalin survived the winter of 1915–16 in his sooty room chez Pereprygin, continuing his sexual relationship with Lidia. He was delighted to receive a parcel from Olga Alliluyeva in Petersburg that inspired a rare sentimentality:

Anna and Nadya Alliluyeva, the latter now fourteen, also sent their exiled hero a new suit, and hid a little note to him in the pocket.

In March 1916, when it was possible to use the sledge on the Yenisei, Stalin headed back to see Spandarian in Monastyrskoe “to send his letters,” recalls Vera. “By the way,” he complained to a comrade on 25 February, “tell me please what is going on with an article by K. Stalin ‘On Cultural-National Autonomy’—was it published or somehow lost? I’ve been trying to find out for more than a year and have found out nothing… What am I doing? Certainly I’m not wasting my time! Yours Josef.” The article had been sent to Lenin via Alliluyev—but somewhere it was lost forever.

Stalin found Spandarian seriously ill with TB and heart failure: the Armenian petitioned to be moved from Turukhansk. Worried about Spandarian, Stalin also petitioned the authorities. After a few days, he sledged back to Kureika. “That,” says Vera Shveitzer, “was the last time he met Suren Spandarian.”[155]

During the summer, the Georgian lodger impregnated Lidia for the second time—and then typically made himself scarce. Local exiles, wrote one of them, Ivanov, “got to know that [Stalin] had disappeared from Kureika—he escaped,” for some months. Where was he? Merzliakov was not quite sure himself. He allowed “JV” to fish alone downstream on Polovinka Island in the Yenisei River “for the whole summer… I just followed the rumours that he hadn’t escaped yet.” The policeman did wonder what Stalin could be doing on this remote island. “It’s an empty (uninhabited) place, this Polovinka. Just sand. Where was he fishing? There was nobody else there.” But it turns out Stalin did spend time on the “empty Polovinka.”

Only a few local hunters stayed on this remote island, which was rich in game. Stepanida Dubikova reveals that “Osip” spent much of the summer there. “We helped him build a small hut for just one person out of birch branches.” Stepanida and her family, who built their own birch hut, were the only others on Polovinka. “Osip used to visit our hut and I’d cook him his favourite, grilled sterlet.” Stalin spent weeks totally alone in this one-man hut, fishing for himself, content in the extreme solitude. But sometimes he was not on his island either.

“Stalin arrived to see us,” reports Badaev, the Duma deputy, in Yeniseisk, “and we met there… Despite the secrecy of his visit, all the exiles got to hear Comrade Stalin was here and dropped in to see us.” He must have visited Kostino too, because on his way back he called in at Miroedikha, where he partied with a Georgian exile, Nestor Rukhadze, who “played the accordion and balalaika.” Stalin, in “long coat, hat with earflaps and red galoshes,” joined the local youths who “spent the evenings talking, singing and dancing.”

Merzliakov had not kept his Captain Kibirov informed of Stalin’s summer disappearance. The news spread, but Kibirov, whether bribed or charmed, the latest in a line of policemen to be suborned by Stalin, did nothing until his superiors heard that the Georgian exile had vanished, whereupon he arrested Fyodor Taraseev. Taraseev got one and a half years in prison for aiding an escape by lending his boat. Stalin was not punished.[156]

What was Stalin doing in the summer of 1916? Most likely, his need to get out of Kureika was connected with Lidia’s second pregnancy, hence Merzliakov’s suspicious but tactful vagueness. The Pereprygin brothers may have been cross again: when Stalin returned in early autumn he moved out of the Pereprygins’ into Alexei Taraseev’s house before returning to the Pereprygins’ again where Lidia, now aged fifteen, was heavily pregnant. He seems to have caroused and visited friends on his local tour as far as Yeniseisk and Krasnoyarsk, but locals claim that he was devising a way to avoid marrying his pregnant teenage mistress.^{226} By 1916, the rot at the head of the Empire had reached its outlying limbs—the Siberian police were loosening their grip. “We managed to escape all police officers and guards,” said Badaev.

The war was not going well. The Emperor had left Petersburg (renamed Petrograd to sound less Germanic) and taken command of his armies. In Petrograd, his foolish, neurotic and ham-handed Empress, Alexandra, dominated the government. Prompted by Rasputin and a mediocre crew of mountebanks and war-profiteers, she hired and fired her ever more corrupt and inept ministers. No one knew it, but three centuries of Romanov rule had only months to run.

37. Stalin’s Reindeer-Propelled Sleigh and a Siberian Son

In October 1916, Stalin, a fanatical Marxist with a damaged arm, was conscripted with his fellow exiles. He had successfully dodged the draft for over a decade. The call-up of exiles shows the manpower shortage of the Romanov war machine, but both Stalin and local officials must have known that his arm would not pass the medical examination. Turukhansk locals claim that Stalin persuaded Kibirov to put his name on the conscription list with “a false certificate,” a shenanigan he may have arranged on his long summer exeat. Had he volunteered in order to escape his marital obligations and last months of exile in Kureika?

“Police Chief Kibirov,” recalls Vera Shveitzer, “formed the first group of nine exiles to be sent to Krasnoyarsk.” Stalin did not hang around in Kureika. He quickly said goodbye, giving one lady who had looked after him the “present of a signed photograph and two overcoats.” Then, “seen off like a real hero,” he set out with Merzliakov for Monastyrskoe.

After he was gone, in roughly April 1917, Lidia gave birth to a son whom she named Alexander. She did not inform the father for a long time—and Stalin never contacted her. But somehow he heard: he told the Alliluyev sisters that he had fathered a Siberian son during his last exile. He was utterly unfettered by paternal feelings, or even sentimental curiosity.

Stalin abandoned his son, but Turukhansk somehow made him more of a Russian. Perhaps Siberia froze some of the Georgian exoticism out of him. He brought the self-reliance, vigilance, frigidity and solitude of the Siberian hunter with him to the Kremlin. Generalissimo Stalin told the truth when in 1947 he wrote to one of his Kureika fishing pals: “I have not forgotten you and my friends in Turukhansk. Probably I’ll never forget you.” Molotov put it best: “A little piece of Siberia remained lodged in Stalin for the rest of his life.”^*

Around 12 December 1916, Kibirov put together the two groups of exiles, twenty in all, for the trip to Krasnoyarsk—“Stalin,” writes Sverdlov, “was among the comrades.” Sverdlov was barred from the glory of almost certain death on some forgotten field of the Eastern Front because he was a Jew, one of the few benefits of Romanov anti-Semitism. The others begged Stalin to make up with Sverdlov and shake hands. Stalin refused.

The conscripts departed in a picturesque parade of bunting-emblazoned sleighs, pulled by reindeer. The exiles, waving mandolins and balalaikas, “were given a Siberian sakun, which was a fur coat, reindeer bokari—fur boots—and gloves and hats made of reindeer fur,” remembers another passenger, Boris Ivanov. “Only one person travelled in each sledge in a kind of linen cradle,” but the policemen accompanied them as they galloped down the frozen Yenisei, passing through twenty-five little settlements which were all ordered to provide “beds, plump feather pillows, milk, meat and fish. In some places we stayed for days.”

Stalin, taking command, decided that “we had no reason to hurry. We were exhausted but why should we hurry to be drafted?” records a fellow traveller. “‘There’ll be plenty of time,’ he said, ‘for the Germans to make mincemeat of us.’”

The exiles sometimes had “a party on two or three nights” with Stalin leading the singing. The policemen complained and telegraphed Kibirov, who threatened to “send the Cossacks after us but we telegraphed back: ‘We’re ready for your Cossacks.’ Stalin took part in wording the telegram.” He had managed to turn the trip into an almost two-month reindeer-propelled debauch. Somewhere along the way, the carousing convicts celebrated the New Year: 1917.

Finally, around 9 February, the sleighs arrived in Krasnoyarsk. On their word of honour, the police let the exiles settle for a few days before reporting to the Military Command. Stalin moved into the apartment of Ivan Samoilov, a Bolshevik, then he summoned Vera Shveitzer over from Achinsk. She told him Spandarian was dead.

Stalin reported to the medical examiner, who found him “unfit for military service” because of his arm. This was convenient but embarrassing for a future Supreme Commander-in-Chief who in his own eyes was as much a soldier as a politician. When Anna Alliluyeva revealed he was “unfit” in memoirs published just after the Second World War, Stalin never forgave her.

On 16 February, he applied to the Yeniseisk governor to spend the last four months of his exile in nearby Achinsk, “a large village of 6,000 inhabitants, two churches, and one-storey cottages,” further west along the Trans-Siberian Railway, where Vera Shveitzer and Kamenev were living.

On 21 February, he moved into Vera Shveitzer’s Achinsk apartment—just as, thousands of miles to the west, the Empress Alexandra started to lose control of Petrograd. On the 23rd, crowds rioted in the capital as Stalin settled into one of Achinsk’s cottages. “He had no stuff,” recalls his landlady’s daughter, “just wearing a black overcoat, grey Astrakhan hat. He left the house after lunch and returned late at night.” But he was often visited by “a swarthy woman with a Greek nose and yellow jacket and they spent much time together—he used to see her to the door, closing the doors himself.” The woman was Vera Shveitzer, from whom he was inseparable during these ten days: “She was staying with him.” The memoirs imply that they were living together, but we do not know if they were anything other than roommates—though Shveitzer always greeted him with kisses on the lips: “Oh Koba! Oh Koba!”

On Sunday, 26 February, fifty people were killed in fighting between Petrograd crowds and Cossacks. Bloodshed emboldened the throng, and soldiers began to desert the Tsar. The next day, crowds stormed the Arsenal, seizing 150,000 guns, burning down police headquarters and lynching policemen. One was tossed from a fourth-storey window, before the mob, using sticks and rifle-butts, smashed him into a bloody pulp.

Achinsk was oblivious. Kamenev and his wife, Olga, who was Trotsky’s sister, held a salon. “I used to spend the evenings at the Kamenevs’,” reminisces Anatoly Baikalov, exiled son of a goldmining tycoon. “Djugashvili, or Osip as we called him, was a frequent guest at their home.” Kamenev, a “brilliant speaker and accomplished conversationalist,” overshadowed the “dull and dry Stalin, devoid of colour or witticisms.” When he did say something, “Kamenev dismissed it with brief, almost contemptuous remarks.” The “taciturn and morose” Stalin just puffed on his pipe while its “poisonous smoke irritated Kamenev’s pretty but vain and capricious wife,” who “coughed and implored Stalin to stop. But he never paid any attention to her.”

In Petrograd, the Tsar no longer reigned. On 1 March, in the Taurida Palace, a Provisional Government was formed under a new Premier, Prince Georgi Lvov. In the same building, a Soviet of Workers and Soldiers elected an Executive Committee, chaired by the Georgian Menshevik Karlo Chkheidze. These two parallel institutions took power. The Emperor, isolated, ill-informed, depressed, belatedly tried to return to the capital. But as the imperial train was stranded at Pskov, he haemorrhaged the support of his generals.

On 2 March, Nicholas II, declaring that “he was firmly convinced he had been born for unhappiness and that he had brought unhappiness to Russia,” abdicated in favour not of his haemophiliac son, Alexei, but of his brother Grand Duke Michael, who succeeded as Michael II. But only technically.

The new Justice Minister, Alexander Kerensky, telegraphed Achinsk to order the release of the exiled Duma deputies: “All is in the hands of the people. Prisons are empty, ministers arrested, Empress guarded by our people.” By that night, Achinsk knew that the Revolution had come at last—“but everyone spoke in whispers.”

“The day we received the telegram, it was market-day and I decided that the local peasants shouldn’t leave the market unawares… so I ran to tell them… there was no Tsar any more,” recalls a Bolshevik librarian named Alexandra Pomerantseva, who shared Stalin’s house. “On my way, I met Comrade Stalin” who “looked at my excited face.”

“Where are you running?” he asked.

“I’m running to the market to tell peasants about the Revolution.”

Stalin “approved of this”—and she headed for the marketplace.

On 3 March, Michael II abdicated when the government could not guarantee his safety. On the fourteenth, the Achinsk mayor opened a town meeting at which Kamenev proposed to send a telegram acclaiming Grand Duke Michael for his civic decency. Kamenev would live to regret his un-Bolshevik instinct for thanking Romanovs. “The next morning,” Stalin, who was away in Krasnoyarsk that day, recalled in the 1920s, “I got to hear about it from Comrade Kamenev himself who came to tell me that he had done a foolish thing.” Kamenev denied signing it and accused Stalin of lying.

Stalin telegraphed the Alliluyevs in Petrograd: he was on his way. He spent his last evening in Achinsk with Shveitzer. On 7 March, carriages took Kamenev, Shveitzer and Stalin to the station, whence they jubilantly departed. The trip took four days. At every station, the homecoming Bolsheviks competed with excited local orators to address crowds. Kamenev gave speeches; Stalin watched. He laughed at these speakers, later mimicking their overenthusiastic naivety: “Holy revolution, long-awaited, dear revolution has finally arrived!”

On the morning of 12 March 1917, Stalin, wearing the suit he had worn for that party in July 1913, and valenki (long padded Russian boots), and carrying just a small wicker suitcase and a typewriter, arrived in Petrograd.^{227}

* Some of Stalin’s Kureika fishing friends kept in contact: V. G. Solomin wrote to ask for help, reminiscing about a giant sturgeon he caught for Stalin and Sverdlov. “Comrade Solomin,” answered Stalin on 5 March 1947, “I send you 6,000 roubles from my [Supreme Soviet] deputy’s salary. This sum is not so big, but it’ll be useful. J Stalin.” Molotov recalled how Stalin continued into old age to eat frozen nuggets of fish just as he had in Turukhansk. In 1934, a Stalin museum was founded in Stalin’s love nest, the Pereprygin izba, which was expanded on his official seventieth birthday in 1949 into a pillared pavilion with the hut preserved in a glass bell. A giant statue of Stalin was built. Upriver, Stalin developed the Norilsk nickel-mining and smelting plant into a vast Gulag prison-city. In 1949, he ordered the creation of an Arctic railway and port which he personally supervised: 200,000 prisoners worked in terrible conditions there with many dying, though the Railway of Death was never completed. In 1961, during de-Stalinization, the museum was destroyed, the statue pushed through a hole in the ice, the izba burned. The once deserted region is now dominated by a hydroelectric dam that powers Norilsk Nickel, which has become a multi-billion-dollar conglomerate controlled by one of Russia’s new oligarchs. As for the fate of Stalin’s Siberian mistress and son, see the Epilogue.