Young Stalin

11. The Prisoner

Stalin was imprisoned in Batumi Prison, where he immediately distinguished himself by his surly swagger and arrogant audacity. Prison affected him deeply and remained with him. “I got used to loneliness in prison,” he said much later, though in fact he was rarely alone there.

His fellow prisoners, whether enemies who later denounced him in exile or Stalinists who praised him in official books, agree that Stalin in prison was like a frigid sphinx: “scruffy, pockmarked, with a rough beard and long backcombed hair.” His fellows were most struck by “his complete calmness.” He “never laughed with an open mouth, only smiled coolly” and was “incapable of co-operating with anyone… He walked by himself. Always unruffled.”^{104} But initially he made a foolish mistake.

On 6 April 1902, he faced his first interrogation at the hands of Gendarme captain Jakeli. He denied he had even been in Batumi at the time of the massacre, claiming he had been with his mother in Gori. Two days later, he ordered another prisoner to throw two notes into the prison yard where friends and families of the prisoners gathered to deliver food and messages. But the guards retrieved the notes in Stalin’s handwriting. The first sent a message “to tell the teacher… Josef Iremashvili that Soso Djugashvili’s been arrested and ask him to tell his mother that when Gendarmes ask her ‘When did your son leave Gori?,’ she must reply, ’He was here in Gori all summer and winter until 15 March.’”

The other note summoned his former pupil Elisabedashvili to Batumi to take over his organization. Captain Jakeli had already consulted the Tiflis secret police, who revealed that Stalin had been a leading light on the Tiflis Committee. But now he also briefed Gori, who reported that two men had arrived there from Batumi and talked to Keke, her brother Giorgi Geladze (Stalin’s uncle) and Iremashvili. All three were arrested and interrogated: not a happy day for Keke.^{105}

The men from Batumi had come to collect Stalin’s mother, but the clumsy note-tossing also implicated Elisabedashvili, who was living in Tiflis with Kamo and Svanidze. The Gendarmes arrested Kamo, who reluctantly led them to the Sololaki bathhouse, where they seized a disrobed Elisabedashvili. He was taken to meet the “famous Captain Lavrov,” who handed him over to Captain Jakeli. As Elisabedashvili entered the Batumi prison yard, Stalin rushed past him, whispering: “You don’t know me.”

“I know,” replied Elisabedashvili. “Hello from everyone!”

The next day, Elisabedashvili was interrogated by Captain Jakeli.

“Do you know Josef Djugashvili?”

“No.”

“Nonsense! He says he knows you!”

“He might be insane.”

“Insane?” laughed the captain. “How can such a person be mad? We had Marxists here before but they were quiet enough. This Djugashvili has turned the whole of Batumi upside down.”

When Elisabedashvili was led past Stalin’s cell, he caught a glimpse, through the bars, of “an outraged Soso cursing his cellmate and punching him. Next day, I learned that they had placed a stool-pigeon in his cell.” Elisabedashvili was released—but soon returned, on Stalin’s orders, to direct Batumi’s Sosoists.^{106}

As for Keke, she obeyed Soso’s summons. Around 18 May, she set off from Gori and only returned on 16 June. She visited her son twice in Batumi Prison. On her way via Tiflis, she somehow bumped into Crazy Beso, drunk and angry.

“Stop or I’ll kill you!” he shouted, denouncing his rebel son. “He wants to turn the world upside down. If you hadn’t taken him to school, he’d be a craftsman—now he’s in prison. I’ll kill such a son with my own hands—he’s disgraced me!” A crowd gathered. Keke slipped away, her last encounter with her husband.

Soso’s rebellion was the ruin of Keke’s ambition. She must, in her way, have worried as much as Beso. She applied for his release and probably delivered messages from his comrades. In his egocentricity, old Stalin acknowledged her suffering: “Was she happy? Come on! What happiness for Keke if her son was arrested? We didn’t have much time for our mothers. Such was the fate of mothers!”[49]

Stalin was soon the kingpin of Batumi Prison, dominating his friends, terrorizing the intellectuals, suborning the guards and befriending the criminals.^{107}

The Imperial prisons were a hidden civilization with their own customs and tricks, but Stalin, as ever, ignored the etiquette that did not suit him. The prisons, “like the country itself, combined barbarism with paternalism,” says Trotsky. There was no consistency: sometimes political prisoners were placed in one big cell known as “the Church,” where they would elect “Elders.”

The revolutionaries lived by a set of chivalrous rules. Whenever comrades arrived or departed, it was traditional for the whole prison to sing “The Marseillaise” and wave a red flag. Revolutionaries, sacred intellectuals and self-appointed crusaders, were too elevated to socialize with mere criminals, but, “I preferred them [the criminals],” Stalin said, “because there were so many rats among the politicals.” He loathed the duplicitous chatter of the intellectuals. “Rats” were killed.

If they were in solitary cells, the politicals communicated through a ponderous but simple code of knocks—“the prison alphabet.” Sergei Alliluyev was in prison in the Metekhi Fortress of Tiflis but the tapping on his stove-pipe informed him: “Bad news! Soso arrested!” Then there was the impoverished jailhouse system of communication known as the “prison telegraph” by which prisoners delivered packages to each other by swinging them on strings from their windows whence they were hooked by another string with a stone on the end.

When the prisoners walked in the courtyards, discipline was lax: it was hard to keep any secrets there. Soso always seemed to know who was arriving, how prisoners were behaving. Like American Mafiosi running La Cosa Nostra from prison, Soso swiftly improved his communications with the outside world. “He continued to run things from prison.”[50]

The authorities erred seriously when they allowed their revolutionaries to study in prison. These obsessive autodidacts studied hard there, none more so than Stalin, whose cellmate says, “He spent the whole day reading and writing… His prison day had a strict routine: he woke early in the morning, did morning exercises, then studied German and read economic literature. He never rested and he liked to recommend comrades what books to read…” Another prisoner said that Stalin made “prison into a university.” He called it his “second school.”

The prison guards were lenient, either because the revolutionaries were socially superior “gentlemen,” or because they had been bribed or because they were sympathetic. One of Stalin’s friends was put in a cell near to his and asked him about the Communist Manifesto: “We couldn’t meet,” reminisced Stalin, “but I read it aloud and he could hear it. Once during my reading, I heard some steps outside and stopped. Suddenly I heard the guard say: ‘Please don’t stop. Comrade, please continue.’”^{108}

One article must have been doing the rounds of the “prison telegraph”: in March 1902, the Marxist now using the alias “Lenin” published an essay “What Is to Be Done?: Burning Questions of Our Movement,” which demanded a “new vanguard” of ruthless conspirators—a vision that immediately split the Party. “Give us an organization of revolutionaries,” promised Lenin, “and we shall overturn the whole of Russia!”^{109}[51]

Captain Jakeli rounded up Batumi’s Sosoists, including Stalin’s young landlady and girlfriend Natasha Kirtava. When she appeared in the jailyard, Natasha was swiftly approached by an unknown prisoner: “Comrade Soso asks you to look up at his window.”

Natasha was alarmed in case this prisoner was a stool-pigeon. “I don’t know a Comrade Soso,” she answered.

But when she was locked in her cell, Stalin appeared at her window. “So, comrades, are you bored?” he inquired grandly. She saw that Comrade Soso was still very much in command of the struggle inside and outside the prison. “The prisoners loved him because he took such cordial care of them.” He certainly took good care of Natasha. Once she went to see him in his cell for a chat when one of the prison guards caught her and drove her away with the handle of his sabre. Stalin demanded the dismissal of the guard. His courage won him popularity among the prisoners but also respect from the authorities: he got his way.^{110} It was not only Sosoists who admired him: another prisoner, who shared his cell, admitted that, although Soso later became a monster, he was “a very pleasant and gallant cellmate.”^{111}

The Prosecutor in Tiflis ruled there was not enough evidence to charge Stalin with leading the Batumi riot. Probably witnesses were too afraid to testify. He was off that hook but remained in prison because Captain Lavrov was investigating another case—Stalin’s role on the Tiflis Committee. On 29 August, the Gendarmes indicted Stalin along with his old comrades on the Committee. Yet the bureaucracy muddled along slowly.^{112}

He fell ill with his old chest sickness, which he sometimes claimed was his heart, at other times a shadow on the lung. During October, Soso managed to get the prison doctor to assign him and his sidekick Kandelaki to hospital.^{113} Against revolutionary etiquette, he also appealed three times to Prince Golitsyn, the governor-general himself:

His sickness did not stop him making trouble. When the Exarch of the Georgian Church came to minister to his errant sons on 17 April 1903, the ex-seminarist led a violent protest that got him clapped in solitary confinement. The riot, not the first organized by Stalin, led to his transfer to the stricter Kutaisi Prison, in western Georgia.

Two days later, when the prisoners were mustered for their transfer, Stalin found that Natasha was being transferred with him. The warders started to handcuff him.

“We’re not thieves to be handcuffed!” snapped Stalin. The officer took off the cuffs. The story shows Stalin’s authority over prisoners and officers alike—the Tsarist police were biddable in a way unthinkable for the Soviet secret police. Then the prisoners were gathered for the march through Batumi. Stalin demanded a cart for their belongings and “a phaeton for me, the woman,” recalls Natasha proudly. Incredibly Stalin, that master of the prison system, got his way here too.[52] Only the best for Stalin’s girl: Natasha travelled to the station in a phaeton.

When their train arrived at nearby Kutaisi, Stalin held everyone back: “Let Natasha go in front so everyone can see that women also fight these dogs!”^{115}

At Kutaisi, the authorities tried to force the prisoners to behave. The politicals were split up, but Stalin soon found a way to communicate and plan a counterattack. When Natasha Kirtava was moved out of the collective cell into solitary, “Emotion overcame me. I started crying.” Stalin heard about this on the prison telegraph and had a note delivered to her that read: “What do your tears signify, she-eagle? Is it possible prison has defeated you?”

In the prison yard, Stalin met a moderate comrade, Grigol Uratadze, who hated him but almost admired his “glacial temperament: in six months, I never once saw him crying, angry or indignant—he always conducted himself with total composure” and his “smile was carefully calibrated to his emotions… We used to chat in the courtyard.” But Stalin just “walked alone in strange little short steps… Everyone knew how surly he was,” but he was also “absolutely imperturbable.”

Stalin was hostile to the bumptious intellectuals, but, with the less elevated worker-revolutionaries, who did not arouse his inferiority complex, he played the teacher—the Priest. Soso “organized the reading of newspapers, books and magazines, and gave lectures to the prisoners.” Meanwhile he confronted Kutaisi’s more severe regime. The regional governor refused his demands. On 28 July, Soso gave a sign and the prisoners started a noisy protest, banging the steel doors so loudly that the whole town was alarmed. The governor called for troops, who surrounded the prison, but then he capitulated, agreeing to place all the politicals in one cell. Stalin won, but the governor got his revenge: it was the dreariest dungeon in the bowels of the jail.

When some of the prisoners were swiftly despatched to Siberian exile, Stalin suggested a group photograph. Just as he liked to set up the group photographs when he was in power, so now he directed everyone’s position and placed himself in his favourite place—middle top row: “I’m also one of the soldiers of the Revolution so I’ll stand here in the centre.” There he is: long-haired and bearded, the self-appointed leader.

When his comrades were led out for their long journey, “Comrade Soso stood in the courtyard and raised a red flag… We sang the Marseillaise.”^{116}

The secret police now mislaid Stalin… in their own prison. The Gendarmes and the Okhrana in Tiflis both thought that “Chopura, the Pockmarked One,” had long since been released. Captain Lavrov believed he was again leading the workers in Batumi “under special surveillance.” Clearly the spooks were watching completely the wrong man. Batumi was not too sure either until Lieutenant Colonel Shabelsky settled the case of the lost Pockmarked One by informing everyone that “Djugashvili has been in prison for a whole year already (now in Kutaisi).”^{117}

The grinding mechanisms of Tsarist justice, which sent cases like that of Stalin from local governors to Justice and Interior Ministries in Petersburg, generated a recommendation for three years’ exile in eastern Siberia.[53] On 7 July 1903, the Justice Minister sent this recommendation to the Emperor, who approved Stalin’s sentence with his Imperial stamp. Nicholas II was such a punctilious if unimaginative autocrat that he diligently read even the most trivial paper sent to his office. So there were several occasions when the fate of the future Red Tsar crossed the desk of the last Emperor.

Now the police managed to lose Stalin all over again. The governor of Tiflis thought he was in the Metekhi Fortress, but the prison replied that he had never been there. So the head of the Tiflis police declared: “Location of Djugashvili so far unknown.” The police appealed to the Gendarmes, who revealed that Stalin was back in Batumi Prison, which was well and good—except that he was still in Kutaisi Prison. It took a month and a half to find him: such confusion has fuelled the feverish imagination of conspiracy-theorists ever since. Were the Gendarmes or the Okhrana hiding him from one another because he was a doubleagent? There is no evidence for this. The muddle might be suspicious if it applied only to Stalin, but it was almost universal. In the interlinked worlds of murderous conspiracy and sluggish pen-pushing, there was as much confusion as konspiratsia.

While he waited, he heard terrible news. On 17 August 1903, Soso’s hero, Lado Ketskhoveli, who had been arrested in Baku and incarcerated in the Metekhi Fortress, was standing at his cell-window baiting the guards with shouts of “Down with Autocracy!” when one of them shot him through the heart. Such a fate could easily have befallen Stalin himself. He never forgot Lado.

On 8 October, Stalin finally learned that he was departing on a very long journey. His first stop would be a return to Batumi. He organized another group photograph. As he departed the prison, his comrades waved the flag, singing “The Marseillaise.”

“I’m being exiled,” Stalin wrote to the newly released Natasha Kirtava. “Meet me near the prison.” She raised ten roubles and some food to help him on the cold journey into the Russian winter, but he left wearing just a light Georgian chokha, boots and no gloves. As he was marched onto the prison steamship in Batumi Harbour for the first leg of his journey via Novorossiisk and Rostov, the beautiful Natasha waited on the wharf: “I saw him off.”

This voyage would take a Georgian, accustomed to the singsong, wine-flavoured lushness of Georgia, to another life in a frozen far-off country: Siberia.^{118}

12. The Frozen Georgian: Siberian Exile

The journey to Siberia was often more deadly than the exile itself. Stalin experienced the full gamut of horrors of the dreaded etap, the slow stage-by-stage progress to the east, picking up other prisoners on the way. Stalin claimed that his ankles were sometimes shackled to iron balls and once said emotionally: “There’s no better feeling than straightening your back after wearing shackles.”

When he reached Rostov-on-Don, he was already out of money and telegraphed Batumi to ask for more. Kandelaki sent it. Somewhere not far out, he started to suffer agonizing toothache and consulted a doctor’s assistant. “I’ll give you medicine that’ll cure your tooth for ever,” he promised. “He put the medicine into my rotten tooth himself,” Stalin recalled. “It was arsenic but he never told me you had to take it out of the tooth. So it stopped aching all right but a couple of teeth fell out altogether. He was right—those teeth never ached!” Toothache was just another of the many ailments that tormented Stalin throughout his life.

The farther from civilization they travelled, the more the prisoners were exposed to the extremes of Siberia, disease and violence. Somewhere in Siberia, one of the prisoners “was almost dying of gangrene,” Stalin recounted in his seventies. The closest hospital was 1,000 kilometres away at least. The doctor’s assistant was found and he decided to amputate. He poured spirit on the leg; asked several men to hold him down and started to operate. I couldn’t bear to watch the operation and I sheltered in the barracks, but the man’s bone was sawn without anaesthetic so you couldn’t escape his screams. I can still clearly hear that scream!” En route, he also encountered scores of Gurian peasant-workers, arrested during his Batumi demonstration. Soso admitted a rare moment’s guilt seeing these bewildered Georgians shivering on the road to Siberia—but they assured him of their gratitude.

The criminals were a real hazard. Usually they “respected our struggle,” said Stalin’s henchman Vyacheslav Molotov, who made a similar trip to Irkutsk, but they also terrorized the politicals. “During that etap,” Stalin told one of his adopted sons, “it was my fate to come up against a psychotic safe-breaker, a giant of a man, almost two metres tall. I made some harmless remark to him about my tobacco pouch… The exchange ended in a fight. The idiot forced me to the ground, breaking several ribs. No one helped me.” Stalin was knocked unconscious, but typically drew a political lesson: “As I was coming round, it occurred to me that politicians must always win over allies.” In future, the psychopaths would be on his side.^{119}

On arrival in Irkutsk, the distant capital of Siberia, Stalin was despatched westwards to a regional centre, Balagansk, seventy-five versts from the nearest railway station. Now they travelled by foot and cart: Stalin was absurdly underdressed for the Siberian freeze, still in his white Georgian chokha with its bullet pouches. He found seven exiles in Balagansk and stayed with Abram Gusinsky, a Jewish exile, trying to avoid being sent farther.^{120} But he had been assigned to Novaya Uda. The local police recorded that “Josef Djugashvili, exiled by His Imperial Majesty’s command of 9 July, arrived on 26 November and was taken under police supervision.”

Novaya Uda, 70 versts from Balagansk and 120 from the closest station, thousands of versts from Moscow or Tiflis and his farthest exile, was a tiny town divided into two halves: the poor lived in shacks on a marshy promontory while the marginally better-off lived around a couple of shops, a church and a wooden fortress built to terrify into submission the local shamanistic Mongol tribe, the Buryats. There was little to do in Novaya Uda except read, argue, drink, fornicate and drink more—these were pastimes for locals and exiles alike. The settlement boasted five taverns.

Soso took to all these local pastimes, but he found his fellow exiles intolerable. There were three others in Novaya Uda, Jewish intellectuals who were either Bundists (followers of the Jewish Socialist Party) or SDs. Stalin had met few Jews in the Caucasus but henceforth he encountered many of the Jews who had embraced Marxism as a means of escaping the repression and prejudice of the Tsarist regime.

Stalin opted for the poor part of town, staying in “the beggarly ramshackle two-room house of a peasant, Martha Litvintseva.” One room was a larder where the food was kept, the other, divided by a wooden partition, was the bedroom where the whole family lived and slept around a stove. Stalin slept on a trestle table in the larder on the other side of the partition: “At night, he lit a small lamp and read when the Litvintsevs were asleep.”^{121}

Siberian exile was regarded as one of the most terrible abuses of Tsarist tyranny. It was certainly boring and depressing, but once settled in some godforsaken village, the exiles, intellectuals who were often hereditary noblemen, were usually well treated. Such paternalistic sojourns more resembled dull reading-holidays than the living hell of Stalin’s murderous Gulags. The exiles even received pocket-money from the Tsar—twelve roubles for a nobleman such as Lenin, eleven roubles for a school graduate such as Molotov, and eight for a peasant such as Stalin—with which to pay for clothes, food and rent. If they received too much money from home, they lost their allowance.

Wealthier revolutionaries could travel first-class. Lenin, who enjoyed a private income, financed his own trip to exile and behaved throughout like a nobleman on an eccentric naturalist’s holiday. Trotsky, who was subsidized by his father, a rich farmer, mused pompously that Siberia was a “test of our civic sensibilities” where the exiles could live happily “like gods on Olympus.” But there was a big gap between the well-off like Lenin and the penniless like Stalin.[54]

The behaviour of exiles was governed by a set of rules. Each settlement elected a committee which could try anyone who broke Party rules. Books must be shared. If an exile died, his library was split between the survivors. No consorting with criminals. On departure, the exile was allowed to choose a gift from each fellow exile and should present a keepsake to his host family. Exiles divided the housework and the duty of collecting the mail. The arrival of the post was their happiest moment. “You remember how good it felt in exile to receive a letter from a friend?” recalled Yenukidze when he was in power.

Yet in the Wild East rules were hard to maintain: sexual adventures among the exiles were rife. “Like palms on a Diego Rivera landscape, love struggled towards the sun from under the heaviest boulders,” declaimed Trotsky grandiloquently, “couples came together… in exile.” When Golda Gorbman, who later married Stalin’s lieutenant Klimenti Voroshilov, was in exile, she was seduced and impregnated by Yenukidze, the Georgian who was later one of Stalin’s magnates. In power, the Politburo liked to reminisce about these scandals. Stalin himself never forgot the cheek of the exile Lezhnev, who bedded the local Prosecutor’s lovely wife and was sent to the Arctic as punishment. Molotov quoted the story of the two exiles who fought a duel for a mistress—one was killed and the other got the girl.

Exiles had to rent rooms from local peasants: they found themselves living in cramped and noisy little rooms, irritated by screaming children and lack of privacy. “The worst thing [about exile] was the lack of separation from the hosts,” wrote Yakov Sverdlov, later in exile with Stalin, but this sharing of rooms led also to more sexual temptation. Local custom banned affairs with exiles. But this was impossible to enforce: the local girls found the exiles exotic, educated, affluent and hard to resist—especially when they were often sharing the same bedroom.

Revolutionaries were naturally fractious, but their feuds in the isolation of exile had a malice all of their own. “Men bared themselves before you and showed themselves in their pettiness—there was no room to show decent features.” The exiles behaved appallingly, but Stalin’s conduct as reckless seducer, procreator of illegitimate children, serial feuder and compulsive troublemaker was one of the worst. No sooner had he arrived than Stalin started to break the rules.^{122}

He cut his Jewish fellow exiles but embraced the local hobby: pubcrawls with the criminals. “There were some nice salt-of-the-earth fellows among them and too many rats among the politicals,” he told Khrushchev and the rest of the Politburo at their dinners in the 1940s. “I hung around mostly with the criminals. We’d stop at the saloons in town, see if any of us had a rouble then we’d hold it up to the window, and drink up every kopeck we had. One day I’d pay, next day someone else.” This consorting with criminals was considered beneath the dignity of the snobbish middle-class revolutionaries. “Once they organized a comrade’s court,” says Stalin, “and put me on trial for the offence of drinking with criminals.” This was neither the first nor the last trial that the uncongenial Soso faced from his comrades.^{123}

Yet he did not lose contact with the outside world or settle for a long stay. In December 1903, the mail brought a letter from Lenin. “I first met Lenin in 1903,” said Stalin, “not a personal meeting, more a postal one. It wasn’t a long letter but a bold and fearless critique of our Party.” He exaggerated. This was not a personal letter—Lenin had not yet heard of Stalin—but a pamphlet: “A Letter to a Comrade on Organizational Tasks.” Nonetheless its effect on Stalin was real enough. “That simple bold note reinforced my belief that in Lenin, the Party had a mountain eagle.”

Stalin burned it afterwards but he soon learned that at the SD Party’s Second Congress, held in both Brussels and London, Lenin and Martov had defeated their rivals the Jewish Bundists, who wanted to combine socialism with national territories for minorities. But then the victors had fallen out among themselves, Lenin demanding his exclusive sect of revolutionaries, Martov embracing a wider membership and mass worker participation. Lenin, who revelled in schismatic confrontations, split the Party, claiming that his group were the Majoritarians—Bolsheviki—and Martov’s the Minoritarians—Mensheviki.[55]

Stalin claimed that he wrote immediately to his lame Goreli friend Davitashvili in Leipzig, who was in contact with Lenin—but this was one of his fibs. In fact he did not write for almost a year, but he was already a Leninist. Trotsky believed one could recognize a Bolshevik on sight. Stalin was, says Iremashvili, “an instant Bolshevik.” In 1904, there was a strong sense that something world-shattering was stirring: the movement was flourishing. As Nicholas II blundered closer to “a victorious little war” with Japan in his quest for a Far Eastern empire, the Revolution was suddenly closer than it had ever been. This was no time to be in Novaya Uda.^{124} Soso had no sooner arrived than he started to plan his escape—which was as much part of the revolutionary experience as arrest and exile itself.

Escape was “not too difficult. Everyone tried to escape,” wrote Trotsky. “The exile system was a sieve.”

The escapee needed money to buy his “boots”—the false papers. Usually the full escape kit—“boots,” food, clothes, train tickets, bribes—cost around one hundred roubles. Conspiracy-theorists ask naively how Stalin raised the cash: was he an agent for the Okhrana? Probably Egnatashvili, via Keke, and his Party comrades provided the money. But raising it was hardly unusual: between 1906 and 1909, over 18,000 obscure exiles out of a total of 32,000 somehow raised the money to escape.

Stalin made his record more suspicious by changing the number of his escapes and arrests in his own propaganda. Yet it turns out that he was arrested and escaped more often than he officially claimed. When he personally edited his Short Course biography in the 1930s, he signed off on eight arrests, seven exiles and six escapes, but when he re-edited the book in 1947, using his blue crayon, he reduced the numbers to seven arrests, six exiles and five escapes. In conversation, he claimed, “I escaped five times.” Amazingly, Stalin was being modest or forgetful. There were in fact at least nine arrests, four short detentions and eight escapes.

The last word belongs to Alexander Ostrovsky, expert on Stalin’s secret-police connections: “The fact of Stalin’s frequent escapes might be seen as surprising only to a person who is completely unfamiliar with the specifics of the pre-revolutionary exile system.”

Soso made his first, amateurish attempt after reading Lenin’s pamphlet in December 1903: his landlady and children gave him some bread for the trip. “Initially,” he told Anna Alliluyeva, “I didn’t succeed because the police chief had an eye on me. The freeze set in and then I collected winter supplies and set off on foot. My face almost froze!” As he got older, these tales grew taller. “I fell into a frozen river, the ice gave way,” he told his Soviet henchman Lavrenti Beria. “I was chilled to the bone. I knocked at a door, nobody invited me in. At the end of my strength, I had finally the luck to be welcomed by some poor people who lived in a miserable hut. They fed me, warmed me by the stove and gave me clothes to reach the next village.”

He managed to make it to Abram Gusinsky’s house in Balagansk, seventy versts away.

One night, when there were terrible frosts of -30, we heard a knock.

“Who’s there?”

“Unlock the door, Abram, it’s me, Soso.”

Then an ice-coated Soso entered, dressed very flippantly for Siberian winter in a felt cloak, a fedora and a dandyish Caucasian hood. My wife and daughter so admired the white hood that Comrade Stalin with Caucasian generosity took it off and gave it to them.

He already had the “necessary documents.” But he could go no farther.

“Suffering frostbite on his nose and ears,” according to Sergei Alliluyev, “he couldn’t get anywhere and returned to Novaya Uda.” No doubt, his convict friends warmed him up in the boozing stews of the frontier-town while he planned his second attempt.

Soso wrote to Keke, and she “sewed the right clothes and sent them as soon as she could. Soso escaped wearing them.” He had moved into another house belonging to Mitrofan Kungarov, who, on 4 January 1904, gave Stalin a lift out of Novaya Uda. Arming himself with a sabre, Stalin tricked Kungarov, claiming that he just wanted to reach nearby Zharkovo to complain about the police chief. Kungarov was probably the drunken sledge-driver who demanded to be paid in vodka at every stop. “We travelled in -40 temperatures,” recalled Stalin. “I wrapped myself in furs. The coachman actually opened his coat while driving to let the bitter freezing wind blow against his almost naked belly. Apparently alcohol warmed his body: what healthy people!” But when the peasant realized that Stalin was escaping, he refused to help and stopped the sledge. “At that moment,” said Stalin, “I opened my fur coat and showed my sword and ordered him to drive on… The peasant sighed and made the horses gallop!”[56]

Soso was on his way. Coming up to Orthodox Epiphany, he was hoping the police would be distracted by their celebrations. “Exiled Josef Djugashvili has escaped! Appropriate measures are taken to recapture him!” telegraphed the local police. He made it to Tyret Station and may have gone to Irkutsk before heading back along the Trans-Siberian Railway.

The Siberian stations, even during holidays, were patrolled by uniformed Gendarmes and Okhrana spies, sometimes professionals, frequently informing freelancers, watching for escapees. But Stalin had procured not just the usual “boots” but the ID card of a police agent. In faraway Siberia (as in the Caucasus), any papers could be bought, but this was unusual. Stalin boasted that at one of the stations a real spook was on his tail, following him until the escapee approached a Gendarme, showed him his false ID and pointed out the police spy as an escaping exile. The policeman arrested the protesting spook while Stalin calmly boarded the train for the Caucasus. It is a story that demonstrates the layers of murkiness in which Stalin blossomed. If Soso really was a police spy, it is unlikely he would have told the story at all and, in any case, he might have invented it. But it certainly added to the mystique (and suspicion) of this ace of conspirators.^{125}

Within ten days, he was back in Tiflis. When he burst into a friend’s apartment, they barely knew who he was, as he had lost weight in Siberia.

“Don’t you recognize me, you cowards!” he laughed, whereupon they greeted him and rented him a room.

Stalin’s timing was impeccable. That January 1904, Russia stumbled into war. The Japanese attacked the Russian fleet at Port Arthur in the Far East. The Emperor and his ministers were convinced the primitive Japanese “monkeys” could not defeat civilized Russians. Yet Nicholas’s army was antiquated, his peasant soldiers ill armed, his commanders hapless cronies.

“I remember,” says Stalin’s roommate, “that he was reading History of the French Revolution.” He knew how war and revolution, those horses of the apocalypse, often gallop together.

Georgia was seething. “Georgians are such a political nation,” reflected Stalin later, “I don’t think there’s a Georgian alive who isn’t a member of some political party.” Young Armenians joined the Dashnaks, Georgians joined the Socialist-Federalists, and many others joined the Mensheviks, Bolsheviks, Anarchists or the SRs—the latter were conducting a vicious terrorist campaign against the Tsar and his ministers. As the war strained the sinews of the Empire, the Okhrana tried to suppress the restlessness by arresting droves of revolutionaries.

Not every comrade was delighted at the return of the truculent, aggressive Soso, and his enemies devised a way to rid themselves of him. There was a problem with Stalin’s Marxist orthodoxy: Lenin had defeated the Bundists because he believed in an internationalist party for all the peoples of the Empire. Even Jordania preached Marxism for the whole Caucasian region. Yet young Stalin, clinging to the romantic dreams of his poetry, insisted eccentrically on a Georgian SD Party. So his enemies accused him of Bundist tendencies, not a Marxist internationalist at all. At this time, Stalin adapted Marx to his own instincts. He quoted Marx, observed David Sagirashvili, “but always in his own peculiar way.” Challenged at one meeting, Soso “wasn’t in the least perturbed,” simply saying, “Marx is the son of an ass. What he wrote should be written as I say!” With this, he stormed out.

Fortunately Stalin was vigorously defended by Georgia’s first Bolshevik, Mikha Tskhakaya, one of the founders of Mesame Dasi, who now supported Lenin’s radical approach. Stalin respected the energetic, older Tskhakaya, with his goatee-beard and ideological gravity. He later mocked him, but he was as grateful as a man could be who regarded “gratitude as a dogs’ disease.”

Tskhakaya pleaded for Stalin, saving him from expulsion, but he made him undergo a new introduction to Marxism. “I can’t trust you with much,” he lectured Soso. “You’re still young and need a foundation of stable ideas—or you’ll encounter difficulties.”

Tskhakaya introduced him to a young Armenian intellectual named Danesh Shevardian to lecture him on the “new literature.” Tskhakaya, Stalin laughed later, “began our instruction on the creation of the planets, life on earth, protein and protoplasm and after three hours, we finally reached slave-owning society. We couldn’t stay awake and starting dozing off…”

Yet Stalin’s anecdotes concealed the humiliating truth: Tskhakaya ordered him to write a Credo renouncing his heretical views. The Armenian read it and was satisfied. Seventy printed copies were distributed.[57] Stalin was forgiven, but Tskhakaya said he had to “rest” before he could receive a redemptive mission.^{126}

Soso shamelessly sponged off his friends. “If he visited some guy’s family,” recalled Mikheil Monoselidze, ex-seminarist friend of Kamo and Svanidze, “he behaved as if he was a member of the family. If he noticed they had wine, fruit or sweets that he liked, he wasn’t embarrassed to say, ‘Well, someone said I was invited to drink wine and eat fruit,’ and he’d open the cupboard and help himself…” He believed they literally owed him a living out of gratitude for his sacred mission.

He spent time with his well-off friend Spandarian, who took him to a circle run by Lev Rosenfeld, the future “Kamenev,” Stalin’s co-ruler after Lenin’s death, and later his victim. Kamenev’s father, a rich engineer who built the Batumi—Baku railway, subsidized his Marxist son. Younger than Stalin, though he looked years older, he was red-bearded and schoolmasterly with myopic, watery-blue eyes. He befriended, but always patronized, Stalin—until it was too late. Kamenev was a Bolshevik but a very moderate one, already in conflict with Stalin’s hotheads.

“I often had fights with the intellectuals,” remembers Kamo,” and I had a quarrel with Kamenev who didn’t want to attend a demonstration.” At Kamenev’s, Soso met another old friend—Josef Davrichewy, who had attended the poshest school in Tiflis, the gymnasium on Golovinsky Prospect, with Kamenev and Spandarian.

Davrichewy, flirting with Socialist-Federalism, was “delighted to see Soso for the first time since Gori.” He resembled Stalin (and believed they were half brothers). “We talked for ages,” reminisces Davrichewy, snobbishly adding that Stalin “knew no one in Tiflis.”^{127}

This was not quite true, for he now met up with many of the young revolutionaries who would rule the USSR with him—or at least share his life. One day, Sergei Alliluyev returned from Baku with some printing-press type, and delivered it to Babe Bochoridze’s house, a favourite with the revolutionaries. “I looked round,” wrote Alliluyev.

A young man of twenty-three or-four entered the adjoining room.

“He’s one of us,” said Babe.

“One of us,” the young man repeated, inviting me in. He sat me at the table and asked: “Well what good news have you to tell me?”

Even though he was ten years younger than Alliluyev, the haughty Soso presumed to command, giving orders on the transport of the press. They had already met as conspirators but now Alliluyev invited him into his home to meet his beautiful and notoriously promiscuous wife. Stalin later grumbled that the Alliluyev women “would never leave him alone,” always “wanting to go to bed with him.”

13. Bolshevik Temptress

The Alliluyevs would become family and travel with Stalin from this world of prisons, death and conspiracy to the peak of power—and then back to the world of prisons, death and conspiracy, at the hands of Stalin himself.

Sergei was a “fascinating adventuresome man like his Gypsy forefathers. He got into fights: if anyone ill treated the workers, he’d beat them up.” His wife, Olga, née Fedorenko, “a real beauty with grey-green eyes and blonde hair,” was a highly sexed Marxist temptress. Olga “often fell in love with men,” wrote her granddaughter Svetlana.

Her parents, of German ancestry, were ambitious and hardworking with high hopes for Olga, but Sergei Alliluyev, then twenty-seven, was their lodger, a fitter of serf and Gypsy origins who had worked since he was twelve. Olga, just thirteen, was meant to marry a local sausage-maker but fell in love with the lodger. They eloped. Her father chased Sergei with a whip but it was too late. Sergei and Olga immersed themselves in revolutionary activism while raising a family of two daughters and two sons.

The youngest Alliluyev, Nadezhda, was still a baby, but the older children grew up with this unstable, nymphomaniac mother and a household devoted to the cause, abustle with an ever-changing cast of young conspirators—particularly those who were dark, mysterious and to their mother’s taste. Georgians were her type. “On occasion, she had affairs with a Pole, then a Hungarian, then a Bulgarian, and even a Turkish man,” says Svetlana. “She liked southern men and sometimes huffed ‘Russian men are bumpkins.’”

Olga Alliluyeva favoured Lenin’s brooding envoy Victor Kurnatovsky, now in Siberian exile—and Stalin. Her son Pavel Alliluyev supposedly complained that his mother “chased first Stalin then Kurnatovsky.” It is claimed that Nadya said her mother had admitted sleeping with both. Her granddaughter Svetlana certainly writes that Olga “always had a soft spot for Stalin,” but “the children came to terms with this, the affairs sooner or later ended, family life went on.”[58]

The affair sounds likely; if so, it was typical of its time.

In the underground, the revolutionaries were, under a façade of prudishness, sexually liberal. Married comrades constantly found themselves thrown together in the fever of their revolutionary work.^{128}

When he was not with the Alliluyevs, Soso was again in command of Kamo and his young Sosoist acolytes. If he wanted an order obeyed fast, he would say, “I’ll spit now—and before it’s dry, I want you back here!”

Kamo was rapidly becoming one of the Party’s most useful thugs, expert in enforcement, setting up printing-presses and smuggling leaflets. He never wrote an article or gave a speech, but he was now teaching his craft to other young ruffians. In his tactless (and unpublished) memoirs, Kamo reveals much about how he and Stalin lived at this time. When distributing pamphlets, he worked out that the best place to hide was a brothel, “because there were no spooks there!” He was so short of cash that he virtually had to become a paid gigolo to survive: first there was the doctor’s wife, who let him stay. “I often wondered why my landlady looked after me so diligently. Then I had intimate intercourse with her. I was utterly disgusted—but as I had no other secret apartment, I had to submit and I had to borrow money from her too.”

Another woman, a Jewish nurse, also propositioned him. Kamo succumbed to her too: “Afterwards I went away and tried not to see her any more!” He may not have been the only one reduced to living off women. One unsourced but sometimes well-informed biographer claims that Stalin started an affair with a certain Marie Arensberg, wife of a German businessman in Tiflis, who helped him with tips for extorting money from merchants.

Kamo’s bosom pal was a young, dirt-poor nobleman named Grigory Ordzhonikidze, known as “Sergo.” Trained as a male nurse, Sergo was notoriously pugnacious, tempestuous, handsome and exuberant—a cartoon Georgian with big brown eyes, an aquiline profile and extravagant moustaches.

“Become my assistant!” Kamo urged Sergo.

“Assistant of the prince or the laundrywoman?” bantered Sergo, referring to Kamo’s disguises as a street pedlar with a basket on his head, a prince in Circassian uniform, a poor student or, his masterpiece, a laundrywoman with a bag of washing. Sergo became close to Stalin, an alliance that would take him to the Kremlin but ultimately destroy him.

The schoolboyish stunts of Stalin, Kamo and Sergo caught the town’s attention. Sergo’s cousin, Minadora Toroshelidze,[59] remembers seeing those three in the gallery of the Artistic Society Theatre, which was then presenting Hamlet. Just when Hamlet’s dead father appeared, they threw hundreds of leaflets towards the chandelier, whence they wafted down into the laps of the aristocrats and bourgeoisie. The three then scarpered. At the State Theatre, they dropped the leaflets onto the deputy governor’s head.^{129}

Awaiting the Party’s forgiveness, Soso was drawn back to Batumi, where his reception by the Mensheviks Jibladze and Isidore Ramishvili was glacial.

“I heard a knock on the door,” says Natasha Kirtava. “Who is it?” she asked.

“Me! Soso!”

“Soso, man! I sent you a letter in Irkutsk—how did you manage to turn up here?”

“I escaped!” She welcomed her lover, who was dressed in the military uniform he used as disguise. The Prussianized uniformed hierarchy of the Romanov Empire was one big fancy-dress shop of disguises for the revolutionaries. When Natasha told her comrades of Soso’s return, “some were happy, some were sad.” The Menshevik Ramishvili denounced Stalin to Natasha.

“Throw him out,” he shouted, “or we’ll expel you from the Party.”

Stalin chivalrously left Natasha, but Ramishvili was spreading the rumour that there was something fishy about his escape: Stalin must be a police spy. After moving house eight times in his soldier’s uniform, Soso was forced to return to Natasha, who loyally raised cash for his return to Tiflis.

“Where are you going, Soso, what will we do if you fail again?” she asked him. As she remembered later, he stroked her hair and kissed her, saying, “Don’t be afraid!”

A railwayman lent him another uniform—“the peaked cap, tunic and torch of a train ticket-collector,” recalls the railway conductor, who regularly gave Soso lifts between Tiflis and Batumi. But Stalin did not forget Natasha. Once he was in Tiflis, he wrote using pseudo-medical code to invite her to join him. “Sister Natasha, your local doctors are ridiculous; if your disease is complicated, come here where there are good doctors.”

“I couldn’t go,” she says, “for family reasons.” Was her husband back? Stalin was outraged.^{130}

He and Philip Makharadze, an older Bolshevik and founder of the Third Group, were busy at this time editing and contributing to the Party’s illegal Georgian newspaper, Proletariatis Brdzola (Proletarian Struggle), which was published at their secret press in Avlabar, the workers’ district in Tiflis. But then he returned to Batumi for a month in April, another unhappy visit.

At a May Day celebration at the seaside, Stalin apparently got into a row with some locals, presumably Mensheviks, which led to a Marxist wine-lubricated factional brawl in which he was beaten up.

He encountered Natasha Kirtava, who had turned down his proposal to live together. “I rushed up to greet him,” she writes. “But the angry Soso shouted at me: ‘Get away from me!’”^{131}[60]

Bruised and rejected in Batumi, hunted by the Gendarmes in Tiflis, Soso retreated to Gori, where he hid out with his uncle Giorgi Geladze and presumably saw Keke. Davrichewy says that he got new papers in Gori in the name of “Petrov,” another of his many aliases.^{132}

At the end of July, Tskhakaya despatched Stalin to western Georgia, the old principalities of Imeretia and Mingrelia, where he was to form the new Imeretian-Mingrelian Committee. He headed off to Kutaisi, a Georgian provincial town of 30,000 “chaise-drivers, policemen, tavern-owners, pale bureaucrats and idle petty-nobility.” This was a vital task because the peasants of the west, especially in Guria, had been politicized like no others in the entire Empire. This remote landscape of “mountains, swampy valleys, and gently rolling hills covered by cornfields, vineyards and tea plantations” now buzzed with rebellion. Assisted by the Red Prince, Sasha Tsulukidze, and a new friend, an orotund and grandiloquent young actor named Budu “the Barrel” Mdivani, Stalin was to enjoy a run of luck as a revolutionary in the strangest of times: the Japanese war was bleeding away the lifeblood of the Empire. In July 1904, the terrorists of the SR Fighting Brigade blew to pieces the hardline Interior Minister Plehve, who was succeeded by an inexperienced aristocrat, Prince Sviatopolk-Mirsky. Strikes and unrest spread as Mirsky experimented haplessly with a thaw.

The villages of western Georgia were already alight. In the ensuing jacquerie, peasants attacked the nobility, seized land and drove out the Tsar’s police. Stalin started to travel hectically across the Caucasus, leaving Tiflis more than ten times on trips to organize the Revolution and raise funds from Kutaisi to Vladikavkaz and Novorossiisk. The Okhrana noticed his return to Tiflis, writing in October: “Djugashvili escaped from exile and now is a leader of the Georgian worker’s party.” The Gendarmes tried to ambush him in Tiflis, but he was tipped off and escaped. Arrested again with Budu Mdivani and confined to Ortachala Prison in Tiflis, he and his new friend escaped. The police fired at them but Budu covered Soso with his body.

In western Georgia, he travelled with fishing-rods and tackle, and when arrested by the local police he convinced them he was just fishing. In September and December, he took the train for his first visit to Baku, the oil boomtown, where Bolshevik printing-presses mobilized workers to launch a December strike. The workers won.^{133}

Just when the SDs should have been united, they were tearing themselves apart. While the Bolsheviks concentrated on their revolutionary vanguard, Jordania and the Mensheviks shrewdly appealed to the revolting Georgian peasants, offering them what they really wanted: land. Stalin conducted the feud in his base of Kutaisi with such feline use of slander, lies and intrigue that a local Menshevik wrote a rare letter to a member of the Committee that brilliantly reveals his character and style:

Comrade Koba [Stalin] told you that we were against you and demanded your sacking from the Committee [wrote the Menshevik Noe Khomeriki] but I promise nothing of the sort happened and everything Koba told you is a malicious lie! Yes: a calumny to discredit us! I just wonder at the man’s impudence. I know how worthless he is, but I didn’t expect such “courage.” But it turns out he’ll use any means if the ends justify them. The end in this case—the ambition—is to present himself as a great man before the nation. But… God didn’t grant him the right gifts so he had to resort to intrigues, lies and other “bagatelles.” Such a filthy person wanted to pollute our sacred mission with sewage!

Stalin claimed he had the right to sack whomever he wanted from the Committee, even though he knew this was untrue. Khomeriki called him “Quixote Koba”—but, as so often, Stalin’s shameless “impudence” won the day.[61]

Triumphant at winning control for Lenin, in September 1904 Stalin now wrote two letters to his Gori chum Davitashvili, in Leipzig, praising Lenin the “mountain eagle,” attacking the Mensheviks and boasting that his “committee had been hesitating but I convinced them.” Plekhanov, he wrote, “has either gone off his nut or is showing hatred and hostility,” while Jordania was an “ass.” This obscure Georgian was quite happy to denounce the international sages of Marxism. The letter worked: Lenin heard about Stalin for the first time. The “mountain eagle” acclaimed him as his “fiery Colchian.”[62]

On New Year’s Eve 1904, Soso ordered a small gang of railway workers to meet him outside the Nobleman’s Club on Tiflis’s Golovinsky Prospect. Noble liberals were then holding a so-called Banquet Campaign to canvass the Tsar for a constitution, but the Bolsheviks loathed such half-baked bourgeois liberalism. As soon as the chairman opened the banquet, Stalin, backed by his workers, burst in and demanded to speak. When the banqueters refused, Stalin sabotaged the evening by shouting, “Down with Autocracy,” then led his workers out singing “The Marseillaise” and “The Warsawianka.” On 2 January, the Tsar’s chief Far Eastern port, Port Arthur, still stocked with troops and munitions, surrendered to the Japanese. So began 1905.^{134}

On Sunday, 9 January, when Stalin was in Baku again, the revolutionary-cum-police-agent Father Gapon marched at the head of 150,000 hymn-singing workers to submit a Humble and Loyal Petition to the Tsar at the Winter Palace in Petersburg. Cossacks blocked the way. They fired two warning salvoes, but the workers continued to advance. The troops fired on the crowd, and then charged. Two hundred workers were killed, and hundreds more wounded. “There is no God any longer,” murmured Father Gapon. “There is no Tsar.”

Bloody Sunday shook the Empire, unleashing a tempest of demonstrations, ethnic massacres, killings and open revolution. Strikes mushroomed across the Empire. Peasants burned the palaces and libraries of their masters—3,000 manor houses were destroyed. The unrest spread to the army. “The Tsar’s battalions,” wrote Stalin in an article, “are dwindling, the Tsar’s navy is perishing and now Port Arthur has shamefully surrendered—the senile decreptitude of the Autocracy is revealed again.” But the Tsar still hoped for a miracle. In one of the most extraordinary naval ventures in history, he sent his leaky Baltic Fleet to almost circumnavigate the globe, via Africa, India, Singapore, to fight the Japanese. Had the gamble succeeded, Nicholas II’s victory would have resounded down the ages.

The Tsar sacked his luckless Interior Minister and appointed a new one, who suggested that some political concessions might be necessary. “One would think you’re afraid a revolution will break out,” replied the Emperor.

“Your Majesty, the revolution has already begun”—the 1905 Revolution, which Trotsky later called the “Dress Rehearsal.” At the time, it seemed like the real thing, a savage and exhilarating battle across the Empire, but especially in the Caucasus, where Stalin learned the methods that he would use throughout his life.^{135} He found himself in his element, revelling in the bloodcurdling drama.

“WORKERS OF THE CAUCACUS! TIME FOR VENGEANCE!” he wrote. “They’re asking us to forget the swish of the whips, the whiz of the bullets, the hundreds of our hero-comrades killed, and the hover of their glorious ghosts around us whispering: ‘AVENGE US!’”^{136}

14. 1905: King of the Mountain

Nineteen-hundred-and-five began and ended with slaughter. It was the year of revolution in which young Stalin, for the first time, commanded armed men, tasted power, and embraced terror and gangsterism. On 6 February, he was in Baku when some Armenians shot a Tartar in the centre of the city. Azeri Turks—or “Tartars” as they were often called—retaliated. The news spread. The authorities, who had long resented Armenian wealth and success, encouraged the Muslim Azeri mobs to pour into the city.

For five long days, Azeri gangs killed every Armenian they could find, with the frenzied hatred that comes from religious tension, economic jealousy and neighbourly proximity. While anti-Semitic pogroms broke out across the Empire, Baku descended into an orgy of ethnic killing, burning, raping, shooting and throat-cutting. The governor, Prince Nakashidze, and his police chief did nothing. Cossacks handed over Orthodox Armenians to be slaughtered by Azeri mobs, armed by the police. One Armenian oil baron was besieged in his palace by an Azeri mob, whom he picked off with a Winchester rifle until he ran out of ammunition and was torn to pieces. Eventually, the Armenians, wealthier and better armed, started to fight back and massacre Azeris.

“They don’t even know why they’re killing each other,” said the mayor. “Thousands of dead lay in the streets,” wrote a witness of the Baku slaughters, “and covered the Christian and Mussulman cemeteries. The odour of corpses stifled us. Everywhere women with mad eyes sought their children, and husbands were moving heaps of rotting flesh.” At least 2,000 died.

Stalin was there to see these infernal and apocalyptic sights. He had formed a small Bolshevik Battle Squad in Baku. Now he gathered this mainly Muslim gang and ordered them to divide the two communities wherever possible while simultaneously taking the opportunity to steal any useful printing equipment—and raise money for the Party by protection-rackets. Stalin, according to his first biographer, Essad Bey,[63] who grew up in Baku, “presented himself to the head of the [Armenian] household and gravely informed him that the time was near when the household would fall beneath the knives of the Muslims,” but “after a donation to Bolshevik funds, Stalin conveyed the Armenian merchants to the countryside.”^{137}

Afterwards Soso hurried back to Tiflis, where there was every danger of an ethnic bloodbath between Georgians and Armenians or Christians and Muslims. The city was paralysed by strikes; the police arrested revolutionaries and Cossacks charged demonstrators on Golovinsky Prospect.

Stalin helped organize a demonstration of reconciliation to prevent a massacre and wrote a passionate pamphlet which, printed and distributed by Kamo, warned that the Tsar was using “pogroms against Jews and Armenians” to “buttress his despicable throne on the blood, the innocent blood of honest citizens, the groans of dying Armenians and Tartars.”

Stalin led the demonstration on 13 February “to struggle against the devils sowing strife among us.” He proudly reported that 3,000 of his own pamphlets had been distributed, and that “in the leading core [of the crowd] a banner-bearer was carried shoulder-high to deliver a strong speech”—himself no doubt.^{138} But the bad blood between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks was now thoroughly poisonous.

Jordania, the aristocratic Menshevik leader, returned from exile. His towering authority and sensible pro-peasant policies won over the Georgians, who overwhelmingly embraced Menshevism. At the Tiflis Committee, Isidore Ramishvili, who in Batumi had whispered about Stalin’s suspicious escape, openly accused him of being a government agent, though he apparently had no proof of this. Emboldened by Jordania, Mensheviks and then Bolsheviks each elected their own Committees.^{139}

In April, Stalin headed west, where armed gangs and elected Committees had taken control of government and justice, even though some of the peasants thought “Committee” was actually the name of a new sort of Tsar. Arson and assassination became routine in a “separate republic where police power could not enter.” Stalin wrote frenziedly, and spoke at mass meetings against the Mensheviks in Batumi and Kutaisi. At one debate, “Comrade Koba performed strongly in a session that started at 10 p.m. and lasted until dawn.” Then, dressed in black and grey with his moustache and beard shaved off for disguise, he was smuggled into the forest to hide until he could escape by night.

Stalin’s Menshevik enemy was the charismatic firebrand Noe Ramishvili, “aged 25, tall, thin, with smiling eyes and energetic voice.” Khariton Chavichvili, a Menshevik,[64] saw the duellists face one another like mythical champions. First Ramishvili arrived, then “the famous Soso, Comrade Koba, smaller than Ramishvili but just as thin. His look was calmer, deeper, his face coarser, perhaps due to the pockmarks. His style, manners were totally Georgian, yet there was something utterly original, something hard to fathom, both leonine and feline about him. Under an ordinary appearance, wasn’t there something extraordinary?” Chavichvili was impressed too by the oratory—or lack of it: “He wasn’t an orator” but “a master of the art of dissimulation.” He spoke “with a light smile, eyes fixed… concisely, clearly, and was very persuasive” even though Ramishvili was the better speaker. Even when “the famous Soso” lost to the Mensheviks, which was often, the “workers kissed him with tears in their eyes.”^{140}

Yet an envious fury at the smug, often Jewish Mensheviks seethed beneath Soso’s glacial calm. After one debate, he tore into the Mensheviks: “Lenin’s outraged that God sent him such comrades as the Mensheviks! Who are these people anyway? Martov, Dan, Axelrod are circumcised Yids. You can’t go into a fight with them and you can’t have a feast with them!”^{141}

When Stalin was in Kutaisi, the miners of nearby Chiatura appealed to him. This mountain mining town was the only real Bolshevik stronghold in Georgia. With every intention of holding it, he now began to spend much of his time there. Astride snow-peaked mountains with precipitous cliffs and low clouds, Chiatura was growing fast: Russia’s biggest manganese mine supplied around 60 percent of the world’s production. Dominated by a lunar landscape of ore heaps, its 3,700 “black-skinned” workers toiled eighteen-hour days in choking dust for paltry salaries. Lacking baths or even housing, miners slept down in the mines. “Animals,” wrote Kote Tsintsadze, a gunman who was Stalin’s future bank-robbery supremo, “lived better than Chiatura workers.”^{142}

On a hot summer day, 2,000 miners, covered in dust like blackamoors in a minstrel show, listened to the Mensheviks and then to Stalin. Chavichvili saw how Soso “the ultimate tactician” let the Mensheviks speak first, boring the audience. When his turn came, he said he did not want to tire them and refused to perform. “The workers then begged him to speak,” at which he talked for just fifteen minutes with “striking simplicity.” Stalin “kept a stupefying sang-froid… he talked as if in a fresh and serene conversation… he seemed to see nothing but observed everything.” He won the debate. His plain speaking outflanked the grand oratory of more flamboyant performers whom the workers distrusted. Years later, he worked the same trick with famous orators like Trotsky. He realized his own attraction, explaining to Chavichvili that the Menshevik speaker was a “great orator but your big cannon is no use here when you need to shoot short distances.”

Stalin took control of Chiatura, says Chavichvili, which became “the Bolshevik fortress.” Soso “was very powerful there: he surrounded himself with men twice as old, twice as cultured, but the admiration and affection with which he enveloped himself permitted him to impose his iron discipline on his troops.” Known as “Famous Soso” or “Sergeant-Major Koba,” he set up a printing-press with the help of the pretty young student Patsia Goldava, who later toted a revolver in the 1907 Tiflis bank robbery.^{143}

The Famous Soso was the champion of armed resistance, founding, arming and commanding the Red Battle Squads, half-partisans, half-terrorists, across Georgia. “We must devote serious attention to setting up the Battle Squads,” wrote Stalin, a superb military and terrorist organizer—but the experience gave him not just the taste for military command, but the delusion that he had a gift for it.

Even the Mensheviks were arming, appointing Stalin’s rival Ramishvili to organize their Military Technical Commission and their bomb factories. By mid-1905, these militias were ruling the streets and villages of Georgia—in between raids by Cossacks. Sometimes Stalin and the Bolsheviks cooperated with the Mensheviks, sometimes not.

In Chiatura, Stalin armed miners and local gangsters, appointing Vano Kiasashvili as commander. “Comrade Soso used to arrive to give his orders and we launched the Red Squad,” says Kiasashvili, who trained his partisans, stole guns and smuggled in ammunition over the hills. At Chiatura Station, Chavichvili watched Stalin giving orders to his other Battle Squad chieftain, Tsintsadze, the dashing, red-haired daredevil who recruited as gangsters a handful of female students, most of them in love with him. Tsintsadze’s and Stalin’s gunmen disarmed Russian troops, ambushed hated Cossacks, raided banks and murdered spooks and policemen “until nearly the whole province was in our hands.” Chiatura, boasted Tsintsadze, “became a kind of preparatory military camp.”^{144}

Soso was constantly in and out of Chiatura to oversee this guerrilla war. Oddly, when he was there, the aristocratic manganese-mining tycoons hid and protected him. First he stayed at the mansion of Bartholome Kekelidze, then with the grander Prince Ivan Abashidze, deputy chairman of the Council of Manganese Industrialists, related to Princes Shervashidze, Amilakhvari and Prince David, alias Black Spot, the seminary teacher. (Prince Abashidze was also the great-grandfather of the present President of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili.) What was going on?

All the revolutionaries were funded at least partly by big business and the middle class, many of whom were alienated by the Tsarist regime and in any case excluded from any influence. In Russia itself, the plutocrats, such as the textile tycoon Savva Morozov, were the biggest Bolshevik contributors, while among lawyers, managers and accountants “it was a status symbol to give to the revolutionary parties.” This was especially true in Georgia.

Yet there is more to this than just hospitality and philanthropy. Stalin had probably learned the lucrative art of protection-racketeering and extortion from his criminal acquaintances and from his dealings in Baku and Batumi. Now he offered security in return for money. If the tycoons did not pay, their mines might be blown up, their managers murdered; if they did pay, Stalin protected them.

Two of his fighters recall, in unpublished memoirs, how Stalin kept his side of the bargain, showing that he could really deal with the devil. When the tycoons were robbed, reports G. Vashadze, “it was not local citizens who organized the search for the ‘criminals’ but J. V. Stalin.” Some “thieves robbed the manager of a German manganese company and stole 11,000 roubles,” says N. Rukhadze. “Comrade Stalin commanded us to find the money and get it back. We did so.”

It is not surprising that the tycoons preferred to have Stalin on their side: Chiatura crackled with assassinations. “The capitalists,” wrote Tsintsadze, “were so afraid it didn’t take them long to cough up.” As for any policemen or spooks, “the Chiatura organization decided to get rid of them.” They were hit one by one. Stalin, with his brigands riding shotgun through the hills, his newspapers pumping out his own articles, and his surprisingly impressive performances at mass meetings, became the king of the mountain. “Comrade Koba and [Prince] Sasha Tsulukidze,” wrote a rich young Bolshevik lawyer, Baron Bibeneishvili, “were our big guns.” But the Mensheviks were winning in the rest of the Caucasus.^{145}

“I’ve had to travel all around the Caucasus taking part in debates, encouraging comrades,” Soso recounted to Lenin, who was abroad. “The Mensheviks campaign everywhere and we’ve got to repel them. We’ve almost no people (and still too few, two or three times less than the Mensheviks)… Almost all of Tiflis has fallen into their hands. Half of Baku and Batumi. But the Bolsheviks have the other half of Baku, half of Batumi, some of Tiflis, and all of the Kutaisi Region with Chiatura (the manganese-mining district, 9,000–10,000 workers). Guria belongs to Conciliators who lean towards the Mensheviks.”^{146}

Stalin, wrote one of his Menshevik enemies, “was working very energetically, travelling around Guria, Imeretia, Chiatura, Baku, Tiflis, throwing himself to and fro, but all his work was mainly factional, trying to stamp the Mensheviks into the filth.”[65] He fought the Mensheviks viciously—“Against them,” he said, “any methods are fine.”^{147}

On 5 May 1905, a new—and liberal—viceroy stepped off the train at Tiflis Station to “marching bands, plumed hats, golden epaulettes and bombastic speeches.” Count Illarion Vorontsov-Dashkov, aged sixty-eight, was a “horse-breeder, oil investor, scion of great aristocratic families,” married to a Princess Vorontsov who was descended from one of the famous nieces of Catherine the Great’s partner, Prince Potemkin. Family friend and ex—Court Minister to the Emperor, he was open-minded and fair: one of his first acts was to appoint a liberal to govern Guria. But Count Vorontsov-Dashkov was too late and too inconsistent. In the brutal Battle of Mukden, in Manchuria, the Tsar’s armies had lost tens of thousands of peasant-soldiers yet failed to defeat the Japanese. On 27 May, the Russian Baltic Fleet, after that quixotic round-the-world voyage during which it had succeeded only in sinking an English fishing-boat in the North Sea, was ignominiously routed by the Japanese at the Battle of Tsushima. Even its admiral was captured. These disasters rocked the Empire. Jews were slaughtered in pogroms. On 14 June, the crew of the battleship Prince Potemkin of Taurida, the showpiece of the Black Sea Fleet, mutinied.

Within days of his arrival, Count Vorontsov-Dashkov was faced by the collapse of his power, armed gangs in Tiflis, terrorism at the railway depot, and another bloodbath in Baku. The count could scarcely square his liberal instincts with the brutal reality as his generals and Cossacks launched murderous raids on radicals in Tiflis. He was soon faced with open warfare, wild terrorism and a rash of industrial action. “In 1905,” writes one historian, “everyone from palm-readers to prostitutes went on strike.”^{148}

On 9 June, Sasha Tsulukidze, Stalin’s beloved Red Prince, died of tuberculosis. The funeral at Kutaisi attracted 50,000 people, who followed the open coffin to Khoni singing “The Marseillaise.” Even though he was a wanted man, Stalin delivered the funeral oration, a passionate speech that one spectator could still recite three decades later.[66]

The Famous Soso lived in a frenzy at this time—heading east to Tiflis, west to Batumi, thence to Kutaisi, commanding his Battle Squads. “Terrorism assumed gigantic proportions,” said Baron Bibeneishvili, himself a Bolshevik terrorist. It seemed that every young revolutionary was tinkering with explosive devices, stealing guns and robbing banks. “Almost every day there was a ‘political killing’ or an attack on some representative of the old regime.” Landowners, Gendarmes, officials, Cossacks, police spies and traitors were regularly murdered in broad daylight. In Tiflis, the ex—governor-general, Golitsyn, had survived an Armenian Dashnak assassination attempt only because he wore a chain-mail vest. Between February 1905 and May 1906, the viceroy reported to the Emperor that 136 officials had been assassinated, 72 wounded. Across the Empire, 3,600 officials were killed or wounded—these official figures are probably massive understatements. In Baku, the governor, Prince Nakashidze, was killed by the Dashnaks, his police chief by a Bolshevik hit man.

“There was much competition between the parties in their terroristic antics,” explained Stalin’s Gori friend Davrichewy. In Kutaisi, Soso ordered his Battle Squad there to obtain arms by raiding the Kutaisi Arsenal. They rented a house nearby and mined under it—but the tunnel collapsed.

After Bloody Sunday and a series of massacres in Tiflis, the Cossacks were especially hated. Stalin ordered Kamo and his terrorists to attack them. Between 22 and 25 June, the Tsar’s horsemen were bombed five times.

In his white palace in Tiflis, the sexagenarian viceroy, his decent dreams in tatters, was on the edge of a nervous breakdown, while in the revolutionary bedlam far beneath him, Stalin flourished in a seething atmosphere of relentless struggle. Illiterate ruffians and cutthroats like Kamo always prosper in lawless times, but Stalin was unusual—as adept at debating, writing and organizing as he was at arranging hits and heists. The command, harnessing and provocation of turmoil were his gifts. The viceroy declared martial law and handed over power to his generals.^{149}

One day a young priest in the village of Tseva, between Chiatura and the station at Jirual, was at the bazaar when he was greeted by an unknown man. “I am Koba from Gori,” he said. “I’m not here to shop. I have private business with you.” Taking Father Kasiane Gachechiladze aside,[67] Stalin said he knew that the priest owned some donkeys and asked him how to get over the hills to Chiatura, adding, “No one knows this area better than you.”

The priest realized that the sinister stranger knew a lot about him and his young family. He also noticed that the local Red Battle Squad’s hit man and policemen-slayer was standing guard outside the bazaar. “There weren’t police in Tseva then—the Red Squad was in charge there.” “Koba of Gori,” clearly a Red chieftain, courteously requested the use of the priest’s donkeys and offered the considerable sum of fifty roubles to set up a route over the hills. The money eased the priest’s anxiety.

Stalin insisted on taking the priest for a drink in the local tavern.

“They’ll inform you in advance when I’m coming,” he said before disappearing. “Father, do not be late: I want to make the journey there and back in a day. We’re both young men.”

Soon the priest got the word. Stalin returned with two henchmen who helped him load the donkeys with saddlebags containing money, printing-presses and probably ammunition. Stalin knew the trains to Chiatura were often searched, and had concluded that this was the safest way to reach his “Bolshevik fortress.”

The priest and the ex-seminarist, precisely the same age, chatted as they trekked. Sometimes under a tree, Stalin rested his head on the priest’s knee for a nap. During Stalin’s dictatorship, Father Gachechiladze wished he had murdered his companion, but at the time “he impressed everyone. I even liked him—he was restrained, serious and decent. He even used to recite poetry to me,” adding that they were his own compositions. He was still proud to be a poet.

“Some of my poems were even published in the newspapers,” boasted Stalin, who rarely talked politics but claimed that “the police are after me because a friend of mine got into a fight in Chiatura over a girl—and I oversupported him.” He displayed his stiff arm as evidence of this fight (yet another of his versions). Stalin recited the blessing before meals. “You see, I still remember it,” he laughed. He sang as they walked. “Music has such power to relax the soul!” he reflected.

A peasant invited priest and revolutionary to a feast. The tipsy Stalin sang “with such velvet softness” that the peasants wanted to “marry him to their daughter.”

The priest complimented him: “You’d have made a great priest.”

“I the cobbler’s son competed with noble children and I was superior to all of them,” replied Stalin.

When they arrived in Chiatura, Stalin disappeared with the saddlebags into the bazaar and returned with them empty: “Now at least I can rest my head on them on the train home,” said Stalin.

This was Stalin’s secret life in the revolutionary summer of 1905—an armed chieftain leading packhorses laden with saddlebags of smuggled guns and plundered banknotes over the baking hills to Chiatura.^{150}

In Tiflis, the Cossacks and the terrorists fought for the streets. Thousands met in the City Hall on Yerevan Square every day, barracking the City Council and proposing ever more radical measures. On 29 August, a public meeting of students discussing Nicholas II’s proposal of a compromise parliament named after Interior Minister Bulygin was raided brutally by the Cossacks, who entered the hall shooting. Sixty students were killed,200 wounded.

Stalin rushed back to Tiflis to meet his ally Shaumian and plan a response, on paper and in dynamite. He wrote a leaflet, raced to Chiatura and back again in time to co-ordinate a spectacular vengeance, set for 25 September. “On Stalin’s return,” says Davrichewy, “the signal was given—a red lantern lit atop Holy Mountain. At about 8 p.m., the gangsters opened fire outside the main barracks… When the Cossacks galloped out, grenades were tossed among the child-slayers.” Stalin’s terrorists launched nine simultaneous attacks.

Bolshevik and Menshevik hit men and agitators were already cooperating on the streets. On 13 October, Stalin and the Bolsheviks met the Mensheviks and agreed to coordinate politics and terrorism to redouble the pressure on the Autocracy, which seemed on the verge of collapse. Across the Empire, workers and soldiers elected councils, or “soviets,” the most famous being in Petersburg. The peasants rampaged in the countryside, while on 6 October a strike on the Moscow—Kazan railway escalated into a general stoppage across the Empire. It seemed that Tsardom was finished.

“The coming storm,” wrote Soso, “will break over Russia any day in a mighty cleansing flood to sweep away all that is antiquated and rotten.”

In St. Petersburg, even Nicholas II, whose political antennae were as sensitive as a stone, was forced to understand that he was about to lose his realm. He was ready to make peace with the Japanese, but political concessions went against his deepest convictions of holy Autocracy. He envied and hated his most able ministers, but his mother and uncles forced him to consult the brilliant ex—Finance Minister Sergei Witte. Before leaving to make peace with Japan at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, under the aegis of U.S. President Teddy Roosevelt, Witte forcefully told the Tsar, whom he despised, to concede a constitution. Nicholas II wavered, then asked his tall, soldierly cousin, Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaievich, to become military dictator.

As Romanov Autocracy tottered, we have a rare glimpse of Stalin as gang leader dealing out death in the backstreets of Tiflis.^{151}

15. 1905: Fighters, Urchins and Dressmakers

One night in Tiflis in late 1905, Josef Davrichewy, Stalin’s Goreli friend, who now headed the armed wing of the Georgian Socialist-Federalists, heard fighting in a backstreet at the foot of Holy Mountain. He found Kamo, Stalin’s enforcer, threatening an unknown Armenian with his pistol.

“If you don’t return the banknotes to the safebox you were meant to guard, you’re a dead man!” Kamo was saying. “Think! I’ll count to three. One… two… careful my friend… three!”

Davrichewy ran up and seized Kamo’s arms. “Not here, you idiot. Not in this area. You know we run everything round here.” Those streets were controlled by Davrichewy’s militia. But the “overexcited” Kamo broke free and shot the other man three times.

“At the third blast,” says Davrichewy, “both of us ran for it.” The dying victim slid bleeding to the pavement.

“In God’s name, why stick your nose in our business?” asked Kamo when they were safe. “Koba’ll be furious—you know he’s not always accommodating.” Davrichewy was not happy either: “his” neighbourhood was soon crawling with policemen. But this was not the end of the affair.

Stalin sent Kamo to invite him for a powwow. When they met, Davrichewy “told him off for killing the Armenian in the neighbourhood where we maintain security.”

“Listen,” Stalin replied calmly. “Don’t worry about us. Kamo did what was necessary and you should do the same. Now I have a proposal for you: come with us. Leave the Federalists. We’re old Gorelis, I admire and remember our games. Come while there’s still time? If not…”

“If not, what?” demanded Davrichewy.

Stalin “didn’t answer but his eyes shrank and his expression became hard.”^{152}

Just at that time of world-shattering events, Stalin entered the life of the other family, apart from the Alliluyevs, whose fate would be intertwined with his. He asked his protégé Svanidze to find him somewhere to live.[68] Svanidze, intelligent, blue-eyed and blond, knew just the place. The apartment at the townhouse of 3 Freilinskaya Street was right behind the military headquarters, in the centre of Tiflis, near Yerevan Square. It had many advantages: first it was populated by lovely Georgian girls. Svanidze’s three sisters, Alexandra (Sashiko), Maria (Mariko) and Ekaterina (Kato), ran Atelier Hervieu, a prosperous couture house named after its French couturier Madame Hervieu, making uniforms and dresses.

The girls were Rachvelians from Racha (in western Georgia), famous for its placid and loving beauties. Sashiko had recently married Mikheil Monoselidze, a Bolshevik who knew Stalin from the seminary, but the other two girls were single. The youngest was Kato, a curvaceous, “ravishingly pretty” brunette. Their atelier of young seamstresses made it a sunnily feminine place to be.

One day, Svanidze took Monoselidze aside and “said he wanted to bring Comrade Soso Djugashvili to stay at our place and told me not to say a word to his sisters. I agreed,” says Monoselidze.

“So, in 1905, Alyosha invited to stay in our place a fellow whom everyone considered the leader of the Bolshevik faction,” writes his wife, Sashiko. “He was poorly dressed, thin, with an olive complexion, his face slightly pockmarked, smaller than average: Soso Djugashvili.”

“Our place,” recalls Mikheil Monoselidze, “was above the suspicion of the police. While my fellows did illegal stuff in one room, my wife was fitting the dresses of generals’ wives next door.” The waiting-room was usually full of counts, generals and police officers—the ideal home and headquarters for an underworld boss. Indeed Stalin held many of his gangster and terrorist meetings at Madame Hervieu’s atelier. He hid his secret papers in the bodies of her fashion mannequins.

“Soso,” remembers Sashiko, “would sit and write for days preparing articles for Brdzola and the newspaper Akhali Tskhovreba [New Life], edited by Monoselidze. In the evenings, he would finish his work and disappear, not returning until two or three in the morning.” Stalin’s headquarters was the Mikhailovsky Hospital on the banks of the Kura, where he ran a printing-press in the basement. In such dangerous times, Stalin was, Davrichewy notes, “always ready to draw his gun.” But there was time too for flirtations and Stalin’s cruel games.

When Pimen Dvali, a Bolshevik cousin of the Svanidzes, was staying, he slept all day.

“What can one do with him?” grumbled Stalin, shaking him. Dvali woke up. “Is anything disturbing you?” asked Stalin ironically.

“No, Soso dear,” replied the sleepyhead, falling into another slumber. Stalin “went to him, rolled up cigarette-papers, stuck them between Pimen’s toes—and lit them. Pimen’s toes were burned and he leaped up. We laughed!”[69]

Stalin sat and read socialistic pamphlets or novels to the sisters and seamstresses, says Sashiko, “or he would tell jokes, play the fool or tease sleepy Pimen again.” Once when the girls’ parents were visiting from Kutaisi, “Stalin sang a romantic song with such powerful emotion that all were enchanted, even though they could see he was rough and devoted to revolution,” says one of Kato’s cousins. Being Stalin, he would play mischievous power games. One day, the seamstresses suddenly demanded higher salaries. “My wife and Kato were stunned,” explains Monoselidze, “because these women were working in good conditions. But then everything became clear: Soso had put them up to it. We were very amused and so was Soso…”

Kato, the youngest and prettiest, was especially charmed.^{153}

Far from Soso’s Tiflis atelier, at the court of the Romanovs, Grand Duke Nicholas told the Emperor he would rather shoot himself than become military dictator. Nicholas II had few choices remaining to him. On 17 October, he bitterly agreed to grant Russia’s first ever constitution, an elected parliament, the “Imperial Duma,” and a free press. Nicholas soon regretted this generosity: his manifesto accelerated a haemorrhage of ecstatic turbulence and savage violence across the Empire.

The next day on the Caspian, the paraffin-fuelled tinderbox of Baku burst into flames, figurative and real. The Armenians, led by their well-armed Dashnaks, avenged the pogroms of February, heading into the countryside to massacre Azeri villages. Soon the oilfields were burning. In Russia itself, 3,000 Jews were slaughtered in an orgy of pogroms that climaxed on the streets of Odessa.

Stalin was in the boulevards of Tiflis: “Crowds of demonstrators, brandishing the flags of revolution and free Georgia thronged the streets. A huge crowd assembled before the Opera House and, under an emerald-green shining sky, sang songs of freedom,” recalls Josef Iremashvili. The excitement was “so great,” remembers another participant, “that one richly dressed woman took off her red skirt… and made an impromptu red flag.” Iremashvili spotted his friend Stalin. “I saw him climbing on to the roof of a tram and gesticulating as he addressed the crowd.” But Stalin’s excitement was tempered by distrust of the Tsar’s concession: if it was shoved a little harder, the rotten throne would surely come crashing down.

The Duma was “a negation of the people’s revolution,” wrote Stalin. “Smash this trap and wage a ruthless struggle against liberal enemies of the people.” The Emperor had lost Russia—and to get it back, he would have to start again and “conquer boundless Russia for a second time.”^{154}

Stalin and his friends the Svanidzes and the Alliluyevs were living in special times: the viceroy only controlled central Tiflis and his garrisons. In the rest of the city, “Armed workers patrolled the streets as popular militias,” says Anna Alliluyeva. “Their ranks were swollen by new friends who appeared on the outskirts of Tiflis on short lean little horses. We always stopped to admire these skilled horsemen in their cowls, enormous sheepskin coats and soft high leather boots… peasants and shepherds from the hills.”^{155} Soso gloried in the drama. “The thunder of revolution is roaring!” he wrote. “We hear the call of the brave… Life is seething!”^{156}

In the streets, Jibladze led the Menshevik militias. Stalin, Tskhakaya and Budu Mdivani formed the Bolshevik high command. The factions were allies, each controlling their own working neighbourhoods.^{157} “The Tiflis suburbs,” wrote Trotsky, “were in the hands of armed workers.” Didube and Nadzaladevi were so free they were nicknamed “Switzerland.” Yet even a year after the Credo, Stalin was still deviating towards his Georgian version of Marxism, which was attacked at the Union Committee. The rambunctious Sergo Kavtaradze, one of his Kutaisi henchmen, lost his temper and called Stalin a “traitor.”

“I don’t intend to have a row about this. You do as you like!” answered Stalin calmly. Then he lit a cigarette and stared unblinkingly right into Kavtaradze’s eyes. It was probably then, after the meeting, that the two came to blows. Kavtaradze threw a lamp at Stalin.^{158}[70]

The Svanidze sisters hosted a theatrical fund-raiser for radical causes and proudly introduced Stalin to Minadora Toroshelidze, who was impressed by his speech. “Comrades,” he said, “do you think we can defeat the Tsar with empty hands? Never! We need three things: one—guns, two—guns and three, again and again—guns!” He set about getting them. “One of his first coups—and the most insolent—was the pillage in broad daylight of three arms arsenals in Tiflis,” says Davrichewy. “In those times, everyone was arming themselves no matter how or what the price!”^{159}

The massacres in Baku and the pogroms in Odessa raised the tension in Georgia. Stalin rushed between Baku and Tiflis as mobs in both cities tried to storm the jails. The Revolution seemed on the verge of triumph. In Petersburg, the Soviet, led by Trotsky, defied the Tsar, brazenly promoting itself as a parallel government.[71] In Moscow, the Bolshevik militia fortified the cavernous factories of Presnaya. But the worm was about to turn: the Tsar, planning vengeance, backed the anti-Semitic Black Hundred nationalists who set up their own death squads to kill Jews and socialists all over Russia. Hardline generals were in the ascendant, troops massed. In Georgia, the Emperor ordered Major-General Alikhanov-Avarsky to crush the Gurian peasants and Chanturian miners: the Cossacks were coming.

On 22 October, seven Georgian schoolboys at the smart Tiflis Gymnasium were killed by Russian Black Hundreds. In the ensuing fighting, forty-one died with sixty-five wounded. Stalin’s terrorists repeatedly retaliated against the Russian Cossacks and Black Hundreds.^{160}

On 21 November, a firefight broke out in Tiflis’s Armenian Bazaar between Armenians and Azeris. Twenty-five Muslims were killed. Stalin and the Social-Democrats fielded their gangs to keep the sides apart, believing that the strife was being fomented by the Okhrana. Tiflis was like a “seething cauldron,” wrote Trotsky, on the edge of civil war. The desperate viceroy, acknowledging that he had lost control, offered Jibladze the Menshevik 500 rifles to keep the peace. The Battle Squads kept the two sides apart but refused to return the guns.

Davrichewy noticed that the Bolshevik gangsters did not take part because, without Stalin, Kamo could not decide what to do. “During the conflict, Stalin wasn’t in Tiflis.” Where was he?^{161}

As Nicholas prepared to reconquer his turbulent Empire, as the tide of revolution reached its high-water mark, Stalin travelled to Finland to meet his “mountain eagle” for the first time: Lenin.

16. 1905: The Mountain Eagle—Stalin Meets Lenin

I was happy to meet the mountain eagle of our Party, a great man, not only politically but also physically too,” Stalin reflected, “because Lenin had taken shape in my imagination as a stately and imposing giant.” On 26 November 1905, a Party meeting elected Stalin and two others to represent the Caucasus at a Bolshevik conference in St. Petersburg. On about 3 December, using the alias “Ivanovich,” Stalin set off for the imperial capital—to meet Lenin.

As Soso and his fellow delegates travelled north by train, the Emperor unleashed his backlash: Trotsky and the Soviet were arrested. Stalin reported as instructed to the Petersburg offices of the SD newspaper, Novaya Zhizn (New Life)—but it had been raided. The Georgians wandered the streets until they met a friend on Nevsky Prospect. It is one of the remarkable features of this period that a stranger like Stalin could stroll along the capital’s main boulevard and meet someone he knew. It happened repeatedly. But there was little time to see the sights. The friend put them up for two days until they found Lenin’s wife, Krupskaya, who gave them money, code names and tickets for the new venue, Tammerfors in Finland, the Tsar’s semi-autonomous grand duchy where the freedoms of 1905 survived an extra year.

Stalin and the other forty Bolshevik delegates, poorly disguised as teachers on a day trip, left Petersburg by train and arrived in Tammerfors (now Tampere) at 9:08 a.m. on 24 December, checking into the Hotel Bauer by the station: many of them shared rooms. “How enthusiastic everyone was!” remembers Krupskaya. “The Revolution was reaching its zenith and every comrade seized this with the utmost enthusiasm.”

The next morning, Christmas Day, Lenin opened the conference in the People’s Hall where the Finnish Red Guards—Bolshevik worker-militiamen—were headquartered.[72] Stalin waited to see his hero, expecting him to turn up late, having kept his followers in rapt anticipation: he believed this was the way a leader should behave. But instead he was amazed that Lenin was already there “early, chatting with the most ordinary delegates!” And was he a giant? “Imagine my disappointment when I saw the most ordinary man, below average height, in no way different from ordinary mortals.”

Unimpressive in person but exceptional in personality, Vladimir Illich Ulyanov, known as Lenin, was small and stocky, prematurely bald with a bulging, intense forehead and piercing, slanted eyes. He was genial, his laughter was infectious, but his life was ruled by his fanatical dedication to Marxist revolution, to which he devoted his intelligence, his pitiless pragmatism and his aggressive political will. Back in Tiflis, Stalin told Davrichewy that it was Lenin’s blend of intellectual force and total practicality that made him so remarkable “among all those chatterboxes.”

A hereditary nobleman on both sides, Lenin was raised in a loving squire’s family. His father was the inspector of schools in Simbirsk, his mother the daughter of a landowning doctor raised to the rank of state counsellor. Descended from Jews, Swedes and Tartar Kalmyks (to whom he owed his slanting eyes), Lenin possessed the domineering confidence of a nobleman:[73] as a young man he had even sued peasants for damaging his estates. This helps explain Lenin’s contempt for old Russia—“Russian idiots” was a favourite curse. When criticized for his nobility, he replied: “What about me? I am the scion of landed gentry… I still haven’t forgotten the pleasant aspects of life on our estate… So go on, put me to death! Am I unworthy to be a revolutionary?” He was certainly never embarrassed about living off the income from his estates.

The rustic idyll on the family estate ended in 1887 when his elder brother Alexander was executed—it changed everything. Lenin qualified as a lawyer at Kazan University, where he read Chernychevsky and Nechaev, imbibing the discipline of Russian revolutionary terrorists even before he embraced Marx. After arrest and Siberian exile, he moved to western Europe, where he wrote “What Is to Be Done?”

“Cunts,” “bastards,” “filth,” “prostitutes,” “useful idiots,” “cretins” and “silly old maids” were just some of the insults Lenin heaped on his enemies. Revelling in the fight, he existed in an obsessional frenzy of political vibration, driven by an intense rage and a compulsion to dominate allies—and smash opposition.

He cared little for the arts or personal romance. Stern, bug-eyed Krupskaya was more manager and amanuensis than wife, but he did engage in a passionate romance with the wealthy, liberated and married beauty Inessa Armand. Once in power, Lenin indulged in little affairs with his secretaries, according to Stalin, who claimed that Krupskaya complained about them to the Politburo. But politics was everything to him.

Lenin was not a brilliant speaker. It was hard to hear his voice and he could not pronounce his r’s but “after a minute,” wrote Gorky on first seeing Lenin at this time, “I, like everyone else, was absorbed… as I heard complicated political questions treated so simply.” Stalin, watching Lenin speak, “was captivated by that irresistible force of logic which, though somewhat terse, thoroughly overpowered his audience, gradually electrified it and then carried it completely!”

Yet Stalin was not ever so lovestruck that he was afraid to contradict Lenin. He was unformed as a politician, but he was already distinguished by a haughty and truculent individuality. Once he had observed the “mountain eagle,” he made himself known. Lenin invited him to report on the Caucasus, but when they discussed the elections to the Imperial Duma the two clashed. Lenin advocated participation in the elections, but young Stalin stood up and sharply attacked him. There was silence in the hall until Lenin unexpectedly gave way, proposing that Stalin draft the resolution.

“In intervals of the conference,” writes Krupskaya, “we learned how to shoot” Mausers, Brownings and Winchesters. Indeed Stalin carried a pistol. After one debate, he supposedly stormed out and, in a fury, fired his gun into the air outside the hall, a Georgian hothead in the Finnish freeze. But the conference was already out of time: the Bolshevik militia in Moscow rose, too late, in open revolt. Now the delegates heard that the Tsar’s Semyonovsky Guards were brutally storming Presnaya, the workers’ redoubt. Blood flowed on the streets of Moscow.

Simultaneously in Tiflis, the tough commander of the Caucasus, General Fyodor Griiazanov, and General Alikhanov-Avarsky prepared to retake the Caucasus and destroy the Battle Squads. “The Reaction,” said Trotsky, “was in full swing!” The conference broke up in disarray.

Stalin considered himself superior to all the other delegates[74] except Lenin. “Among all these chatterboxes,” he boasted, “I was the only one who’d already organized and led men in combat.”

Soso headed back to Tiflis in the midst of battle.^{162}

The generals massed their Cossacks, surrounded the workers’ districts, banned meetings, ordered shooting of rebels on sight and forbade anyone to wear Caucasian hoods or the cloaks that concealed weapons. On 18 January 1906, General Griiazanov began his assault. Jordania and Ramishvili ordered their partisans, who included Kamo and the Bolsheviks, to defend the Tiflis workers’ district.

There was still fighting on the streets when Stalin reached the Svanidze apartment around four days later. Anna Alliluyeva now watched from her window as the Cossacks “moved forward, shooting into the night. By dawn, troops had broken into Didube and Cossacks’ horses flashed by our windows, the streets ringed by Cossacks.” Tiflis rocked from “uninterrupted shooting, the rattle of artillery fire and cavalry on the streets.” Sixty rebels were killed, 250 wounded, 280 arrested. The woody hillsides, she recalls, were thick with dead bodies. She saw “two prisoners, one had blood on his face,” and cried out as she recognized “the most courageous and beloved of Stalin’s young pupils.”

“Kamo!”

As Griiazanov crushed Tiflis, General Alikhanov-Avarsky savagely reconquered western Georgia. The Battle Squads tried to block the railway-tunnel to Kutaisi, but the Cossacks shot, looted, burned and hanged as they advanced. They took Kutaisi. Their “troops, killing anyone they recognized, set fire to the city, robbing the taverns and shops,” remembers Tsintsadze. The west was reduced to “ashes and charcoal.” Once all was lost, Stalin, travelling in the west, tried to persuade the peasants to disarm, rather than perish, but they would not listen to him: “I was impotent.” Then Alikhanov-Avarsky moved eastwards to reconquer the lawless, scorched hinterland of Baku and the Tsar’s burning oilfields.

Tsintsadze and his pretty comrade Patsia Goldava arranged a killing-spree of all suspected traitors, who were murdered before they could escape to Tiflis. The gunmen, whom the Cossacks were seeking in the provinces, found refuge in the capital. But the days of Stalin’s Battle Squads were over. They returned to the underground where he re-formed them into a secret squad of assassins. He had a task for them already.^{163}

Back in Tiflis, under the whip of the Cossacks, Stalin and the Mensheviks met to pass a death sentence. General Fyodor Griiazanov—nicknamed General Shitheap, a pun on his name—the nemesis of the Georgian Revolution, was the most hated man in the Caucasus. Stalin summoned chief assassin Tsintsadze. Soso and the Mensheviks, “working together,” jointly ordered another of their hit men, Arsene Jorjiashvili, “who belonged to Stalin’s gangsters,” to kill the General with the assistance of Kamo. But Stalin also simultaneously commissioned Tsintsadze: “Prepare some good fellows, and if Jorjiashvili fails to do the job in a week, we entrust it to you.” Tsintsadze and two of Soso’s best hit men started to stalk the General while the other group raced to kill him first.[75]

Within a few days, there were two abortive assassinations, each cancelled because the General was with his wife. Meanwhile, Griiazanov oversaw yet another massacre on the streets of Tiflis.

On 16 February, the General, flanked by a formidable Cossack bodyguard, galloped out of the military headquarters, ignoring a few Georgian workmen painting the railings around Alexander Gardens opposite the Viceroy’s Palace. As his carriage passed, the workmen dropped their paints and threw “apples”—their homemade grenades—into his lap, tearing the Butcher of Tiflis to pieces. The Cossacks gave chase. The hit men scarpered, but the wounded Jorjiashvili was swiftly caught and executed, an instant hero in Tiflis.

Who else was on the hit-team? Historians used to agree that the Mensheviks carried out the hit, but actually it was a joint effort. Tsintsadze explains that Stalin and the Mensheviks at that time worked together “in the same organization.” An Armenian terrorist said Stalin had commissioned the hit. Davrichewy specifies that the other hit man was Kamo. In the 1920s, two Bolshevik terrorists claimed a pension for killing Griiazanov, their notes recently surfacing in the Georgian archives. Stalin, it seems, commissioned both Menshevik and Bolshevik hit men.

A workman later claimed that he saw Stalin watching nearby, and this rings true because it seems he was injured by bomb fragments or in the rush to escape the Cossacks.

That night, says Sashiko, Stalin did not come home. The girls were worried: had he been arrested? Afterwards, he claimed he had run for a tram, pursued by police, but slipped, hurting himself so badly that Tskhakaya took him to Mikhailovsky Hospital and hid him at Babe Bochoridze’s place, then at another safe house, using an old friend’s passport. But after the assassination the city was under curfew, with checkpoints everywhere. Soldiers raided the apartment and found “Giorgi Berdzenoshvili” (Stalin) in bed with one bandage round his head, another over his right eye and cuts and bruises across his face.

The Russian soldiers were confused because their orders did not specify what action to take on finding a bandaged man in bed. But, as he looked too ill to move, they left to consult their superiors, sending back a cart to convey the suspicious-looking patient to prison. By then, the patient had disappeared into the night. This was neither the first nor the last time he used the mystery-man-in-bandages trick to escape the police.

In the darkness, a comrade smuggled Stalin, “head and face damaged and hidden in a hood and a big cloak,” by phaeton to another safe house.

When Stalin turned up at home with the story of falling off the tram chased by pharaohs, the Svanidze girls were relieved, especially Kato. Sashiko and her husband realized something was happening between the two of them. “Gradually,” writes Monoselidze, “when Soso was living at our place, my wife and I noticed that Soso and Kato liked each other…”^{164}

17. The Man in Grey: Marriage, Mayhem (and Sweden)

On the initiative and orders of Stalin,” said one of his top gangsters, Bachua Kupriashvili,[76] a permanent gang of brigands was now assembled. “Our tasks were procuring arms, organizing prison escapes, holding up banks and arsenals, and killing traitors.” Stalin commissioned Tsintsadze to set up “the Technical Group or the Bolshevik Expropriators Club, it was soon known by another nickname—Druzhina, the Group, or just Outfit.”

The “leader of the heists,” said Stalin later, “was Kote Tsintsadze, together with Kamo.” Stalin’s boyhood friend, arrested in the storming of Didube, had been tortured horribly by the Cossacks, who almost sliced off his nose. But Kamo admitted nothing and was released. “He could bear any pain,” marvelled Stalin, “an astonishing person.”

Soso strained his ingenuity to raise cash for Lenin, travelling widely to Novorossiisk, on the Black Sea, and Vladikavkaz, in Ossetia. In Tiflis, he ordered schools and the seminary to deliver cash from their teachers while he discreetly prepared the Outfit for his gangster rackets.

Stalin would order the delivery of a letter to a businessman, illustrated with “bombs, a lacerated corpse and two crossed daggers,” then come calling with a Mauser in his belt to collect the money, according to several sources. But Stalin’s first biographer, Essad Bey, unreliable though often well informed, claims that “Soso obtained his information” about wealthy targets “through his mistress, Marie Arensberg, [a] German businessman’s wife in Tiflis.” But bank robbery was the fastest way to raise large sums.

“It was Stalin,” says Davrichewy, the other notorious bank robber from Gori, “who really opened the age of bank heists in Georgia.” The Outfit managed to pull off a spree of daring bank robberies in 1906 even though, as the Menshevik Tatiana Vulikh says, “Tiflis was at war; patrols day and night, cordoning off whole city-blocks.”

First, Tsintsadze hit the city pawnshop, bursting in with revolvers blazing, and bagged a few thousand. “One day Stalin’s gangsters hit, pistols firing, the Georgian Bank of Agriculture opposite the Viceroy’s Palace in broad daylight in Tiflis,” recalls Davrichewy. “Shouting ‘Hands up!’ they grabbed bundles of notes and disappeared firing into the air. Kamo was in command according to a plan devised by Stalin, a superb organizer.”

The competition between the bank robbers intensified, but there was a comradeship too. “All the main bank-robbers,” boasted Davrichewy, “were from Gori!” It was Davrichewy who pulled off the biggest heist so far, bagging over 100,000 roubles for the Socialist-Federalists in a robbery at Dusheti. Stalin, Tsintsadze and Kamo responded with robberies of ever increasing daring. They held up a train at Kars, though it went wrong and several of the gang were killed in the shootout. Then, in November 1906, Kote held up the Borzhomi stagecoach, but the Cossack outriders fought back. In the shootout, the stagecoach’s horses bolted with the money.

Next they held up the Chiatura gold train, bearing wages for the mines. Stopping the train, the gangsters and the Cossack guards fought a two-hour gun-battle, killing a soldier and a Gendarme before the Outfit got away with 21,000 roubles, “of which we sent 15,000 to the Bolshevik faction [Lenin in Finland] and kept the rest for our group to plan for future expropriations,” recalls Tsintsadze.

Presently, Stalin’s highwaymen held up the Kadzhorskoe stagecoach, bagging another 20,000 roubles. Some was kept to fund Stalin’s newspaper Brdzola, but most was sent to Lenin, hidden in bottles of Georgian wine.

“All of them were great friends and everyone loved them: sweet, kind, always cheerful… and ever ready to help anyone,” remembers Tatiana Vulikh, who knew the gangsters well. The Outfit was about ten strong, including the guntoting girls Patsia, Anneta and Alexandra. The gangsters lived in a couple of apartments, men in one room, women in another. None of them read much except two of the girls. Mostly consumptive, “They were so poor that they often had to stay in bed because there were not enough trousers to wear between them!”

Stalin socialized with Kamo and Tsintsadze, but he usually gave orders to the Outfit through a bodyguard whom he called his “Technical Assistant,”[77] though his comrades jokingly dubbed him “Soso’s Adjutant.” Thus that “great conspirator who rarely walked with other comrades” usually kept himself at least one remove from the ordinary gangsters. Behind the gunmen themselves, Stalin ran his own intelligence and courier network: the little boys at Tamamshev’s Caravanserai and at various printing-houses ran errands, delivered pamphlets, gathered intelligence.

The gangsters were not stealing for themselves. The gunmen of other gangs spent the cash on clothes, girls and wine, but Stalin never showed any interest in money, always sharing what he had with his comrades. “Stalin dressed poorly,” wrote Jordania, “was constantly in need of money and, in this way, he differed from other Bolshevik intellectuals who enjoyed the good life—such as Shaumian, Makharadze, Mdivani and Kavtaradze.” Soso’s gangsters shared his Marxist faith and ascetism. Their “gospel was Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? They would follow Lenin even against the Party,” says Vulikh. “Their simple-minded goal was to get 200,000–300,000 roubles and give them to Lenin saying, ‘You can do whatever you want with this money.’”

The gangster glamour concealed psychotic Mafia-style brutality: stealing any loot meant death. Stalin ordered Kamo, as Davrichewy witnessed, to execute a comrade suspected of pilfering. The bigger the success, the more dangerous the temptations. After Davrichewy’s 100,000-rouble heist at Dusheti, the Federalist gangsters fell out among themselves, killing to carve up the swag. One of their leaders stole a tranche of cash, trying to cover his tracks by blaming the peasants in whose garden it had been initially buried. Showing the fraternity between bank robbers, the Federalist embezzler asked Stalin’s gunman Eliso Lominadze to recover the proceeds. Lominadze tortured the peasants for an entire night before realizing they had not stolen the cash. “Afterwards he despaired that he’d been so cruel to innocents,” says Vulikh. So he murdered the real culprit who had commissioned him. If he had found the cash, he probably would have stolen it for the Bolsheviks. In any case, the money was lost to the Socialist-Federalists: the Okhrana observed their leaders spending the rest of the booty in the casinos of the Côte d’Azur.

The secret police struggled to pin down the culprits of these heists: once they found out about Josef Davrichewy, they blamed him for most of them. But first they muddled him up with Stalin because they were both Goreli gangsters who shared the diminutive “Soso”—and then confused them both with Kamo and Tsintsadze. “‘Kamo’ is Tsintsadze,” reported the secret police, “who escaped from Batumi Prison and arrived in Tiflis where he co-operated with Josef Djugashvhili (whose alias must be ‘Soso’).”

In this world of swashbuckling heroics and sordid murders, Stalin evolved his stoical views on the value of human life: “When he heard that a comrade had been killed in an expropriation, Soso would say, ‘What can we do? One can’t pick a rose without pricking oneself on a thorn. Leaves fall from the trees in autumn—but fresh ones grow in the spring.’”^{165}

Yet Soso’s heists were a means to an end: the seizure of power. Now the boy, who had studied Napoleon even in the midst of raucous drinking parties, kidded himself that he “could seize Tiflis and wanted to take it in armed rebellion—he found a map somewhere.” He liked to spread the map on the floor of his hideouts, deploying imaginary regiments in the shape of little tin soldiers. The son of one of his hosts ran to his father to tell him that “Uncle Soso” was “playing soldiers.” When the incredulous host peered into the room, he found Stalin lying on the floor moving tin soldiers around the Tiflis map. Stalin looked up and boasted: “I’ve been appointed commander of the Party’s headquarters to devise the plan.” He presumably planned his bank robberies with similar diligence.^{166}

The stories of deluded but ambitious military operations are revealing because Stalin, who bragged that he had now commanded in battle, always regarded himself as a “military man,” a natural commander-inchief, according to his daughter, Svetlana. One day “Uncle Soso” would play real soldiers with the ten-million-strong Soviet armies that took Berlin, but these tin soldiers were the nearest he ever came to military training.

The bank robberies funded Stalin’s newspapers, which were expensively printed at the Party’s secret Avlabar press. Stalin edited them, and contributed articles under the bylines “Besoshvili” (Son of Beso) and “Koba.”

“I remember well,” says Monoselidze, “how Soso entrusted Makharadze [his co-editor] to write two articles and bring them to the press at 9 a.m. but he didn’t appear until midday the next day, saying he still hadn’t written them… Soso came in and he asked why the paper was held up and I told him. He gritted his teeth, stuck a cigarette in his mouth and confronted Makharadze, condemning him… Then Soso took the articles from his own pocket and we printed them.” Stalin had written them himself anyway.

Stalin “was a wonderful organizer,” believed Monoselidze, “and hugely serious, but he’d very rarely lose his temper. Soso often didn’t even have cash to buy cigarettes. Once at midnight Kato let him in. He showed me he had fresh vegetables, cucumbers, heads of boiled lamb and pig, and two bottles of red wine.”

“Come on, man,” exclaimed Stalin. “Let’s have a feast! The Party gave me a salary of 10 roubles!”

At the haute couture—cum—terrorist headquarters, the Revolution affected the sweet-natured Kato too: She was in Yerevan Square the day the Cossacks massacred students and workers there. Her sisters, fearing that she was dead, found her helping the wounded in a scene that resembled a minor battlefield.

Stalin and Kato were falling for one another: even when he was on the run, he crept back for trysts in Madame Hervieu’s salon. At one rendezvous in the atelier, Gendarme lieutenant Stroev approached the house with two man-hunting German dogs. Madame Hervieu rushed in and warned the lovers. Soso jumped out of the back window—though probably the Gendarme was innocently calling to order a new uniform. Stalin revelled in this sort of escapade. He so often visited his Menshevik friend Minadora Toroshelidze after dark that her mother-in-law started to grumble that her reputation would suffer.

“What can I do? If they see me by day they’ll nab me,” laughed Stalin. It was to Minadora that he liked to call himself “the Man in Grey.”^{167}

On 15 April, the Avlabar printing-press, the Party’s most invaluable treasure, was betrayed and raided by the police. Stalin’s Menshevik enemies accused him of turning double-agent, a story repeated as truth in most biographies. But did he really betray the printing-press?

In March 1906, Stalin attended a Party conference in Tiflis and Baku sporting “a great coat, and a beard on his sharp face—for he was all sharpness—and a many-coloured scarf in cross-stripes, resembling a Jewish prayer-shawl[78] plus a sort of bowler-hat.” After the conference, Razhden Arsenidze, a Menshevik, claimed that Stalin was arrested but mysteriously released. “I witnessed,” writes Arsenidze, “how Stalin was freed from the Gendarme Department and didn’t appear at Metekhi Prison despite his stories of his triumphant appearance there to the applause of the other prisoners—that was just the fantasy of a self-enamoured storyteller. There were lots of rumours about his treachery…”

Stalin was surely arrested after the conference, possibly detained in another Tiflis prison such as Ortachala, and then released. Most likely, he used his ill-gotten gains to bribe Gendarmes, who were in any case confused about his identity. But he attracted, almost courted, such accusations because he was rude and arrogant, and he specialized professionally in sailing close to the wind. There is not the slightest evidence of this treachery—and there is a rather large hole in the story.

This arrest was said to be at the time of the Avlabar raid, but in fact by 15 April Stalin was on a long, well-documented journey, a thousand miles away, in Sweden.^{168}

Around 4 April 1906, Stalin left for Stockholm to see Lenin again, and arrived after a comical journey that featured a shipwreck and an onboard factional punch-up.

He took the train to Petersburg and thence to Hangö in Finland with a hundred others who boarded the ship Oihonna for Stockholm. The passengers included Stalin, Krasin and a circus of clowns and performing-horses. The snobbish Mensheviks tried to spend their funds on first-class tickets, despatching the rougher Bolsheviks to third-class. The delegates drank too much and then got into a fistfight, though whether this involved the clowns is not recorded. Sea air seems to have stimulated pugnacity in the revolutionaries.

Then to cap a truly bizarre scene, just outside the harbour, the Oihonna was shipwrecked and the rescue barge Solid was sent out but could do nothing. Stalin spent the night on a sinking ship wearing a life-jacket until rescued. They boarded another ship, the Wellamo, which finally conveyed them to Sweden.

On arrival in Stockholm, Stalin had to report to the police station, where he was interrogated by the walrus-moustached Superintendent Bertil Mogren of the Swedish Criminal Investigation Department, who frequently served as a bodyguard to King Oscar II. Stalin was, he noted, “small, thin, [with] black hair and beard, pockmarked, big nose, grey Ulster coat and leather cap.” Stalin identified himself as “the journalist Ivan Ivanovich Vissarionovich wanted by the [Russian] police,” using his father’s name as his surname—“Son of Vissarion.” He also gave Superintendent Mogren his new birthday—21 December 1879. He had one hundred roubles in his pocket and said he was staying for two weeks at the shabby Hotel Bristol (which no longer exists) near Stockholm Station before heading for Berlin.

The Fourth Congress, opening on 10 April, was a much more important meeting than the Finnish conference because its 156 delegates represented the union of Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, Polish Socialists and Jewish Bundists. Most of the Mensheviks were Georgians: the Bolsheviks were outnumbered. Jordania, Isidore Ramishvili and Uratadze from Kutaisi Prison were among the sixteen Georgians, of whom Stalin was the only Bolshevik.

In Stockholm, he met many of the men[79] who would be important in his own road to power: he shared his hotel room with a metalworker, mounted postman and working-class dandy (who favoured winged-collars and ballroom-dancing) named Klimenti Voroshilov, who would become his Defence Commissar, First Marshal and accomplice in the 1937 slaughter of the Soviet military. Blond, rosy-cheeked and blue-eyed Voroshilov, another choirboy, was charmed by the “jolly and zestful” Stalin, “a bundle of nervous energy” who liked to sit on his bed reciting poems by heart.

At the Congress, Stalin listened to the titans of Marxism, Plekhanov, Martov and Lenin, but remained proudly his own man on the two main issues: on the peasantry, Lenin proposed nationalization of the land, while the Mensheviks suggested municipalization. Stalin rejected both: the man who would one day oversee the deaths of 10 million peasants in his collectivization campaign, at this time proposed giving land to the peasants. Lenin was defeated with Stalin’s help.

When the Congress debated whether to run in elections for the Imperial Duma, most Bolsheviks were against, but Lenin supported the idea and voted with the winning Mensheviks. Stalin abstained. The gathering optimistically called itself the Unity Congress, but the Bolsheviks were simply outvoted. Lenin and Krasin, his urbane money-laundering and terrorism maestro, made themselves scarce when the Congress passed a resolution to ban the bank robberies. Defeat, wrote Stalin, “transformed Lenin into a spring of compressed energy which inspired his followers.” But Lenin had no intention of giving up his bank robbing—he needed the money.

Lenin and Krasin must have discussed more bank robberies with Stalin because he arranged for Kamo to travel north from Tiflis to collect guns and bombs from their Finnish villa. If so, this was the first time that Lenin observed Stalin’s value as a ruthless underground operator as well as a forceful independent politician.^{169}

On the way home, Soso met up in Berlin with Alyosha Svanidze, who was studying at Leipzig University, but he was in Tiflis by June.^{170}

“When Soso returned,” recalls Sashiko, “it was hard to recognize him. In Stockholm, the comrades had made him buy a suit, a felt hat and a pipe so he looked like a real European. It was the first time we saw him well dressed.” Sashiko was not the only sister who was impressed.

“Soso and Kato declared their emotions to us,” says Monoselidze. “We started to take the matter in hand.”

On 15 July, Soso addressed a secret meeting at the Avlabar People’s Theatre until the lookouts ran in to warn that the police were surrounding the building. The Bolsheviks burned their papers. But it was too late to vanish. “When the police asked for an explanation,” writes Minadora Toroshelidze, “they all claimed they were ‘rehearsing a play.’”

“I know very well what kind of actors you are!” replied the police-men—but let them go.

Outside Stalin greeted Minadora Toroshelidze, pulling her aside with his patron Tskhakaya. “Kato Svanidze and I are getting married tonight,” he told them. “You’re both invited to come to the party tonight at their house.”

Kato “was very sweet and beautiful: she melted my heart,” Stalin was to tell his daughter, Svetlana. He later confided in a girlfriend “how much he loved her. You can’t imagine what beautiful dresses she used to make!”

A letter he wrote from Berlin, probably on his way home from Stockholm, shows that he respected her. “The news from here promises nothing good,” he wrote, “but no use dwelling on it. Perhaps I’ll find Alyosha and lead him down the ‘wrong path.’ Unless this would make Ekaterina Semyonovna [Kato] unhappy. Your friend Soso.”

Kato worshipped Soso “like a demigod” but understood him. She “was fascinated by Stalin, and enchanted by his ideas. He was charming and she really adored him,” but she knew he was devoted to the cause and that he had a rough temper. In old age, Stalin reminisced that “she was a Rachvelian you know,” meaning that she was good-hearted, beautiful and devoted—but there was more to her too. Kato was educated and emancipated by Georgian standards, and socially superior to Stalin. She helped organize SD fund-raisers and was capable of rescuing and treating the wounded after a Cossack massacre. As her sister’s memoirs make clear, Kato knew perfectly well that Stalin was organizing his bank robberies, including the Yerevan Square outrage.

She wanted a church wedding—and Soso agreed, even though he was an atheist. But most priests refused to marry him because Stalin, then using the name “Galiashvili,” only had false papers. Finally, Monoselidze found Father Kita Tkhinvaleli, of a nearby church, who knew the groom from the seminary. The priest would marry them only at two in the morning.

On the night of 15–16 July, family and friends saw Kato and Soso married in the romantic flickering of candlelight in a small church with Tskhakaya as the groom’s witness. The scruffy Stalin “wasn’t dressed like a bridegroom,” says Elisabedashvili, “and we all laughed throughout the ceremony especially Comrade Soso himself.”

Afterwards, Sashiko arranged a wedding supper attended by the hit men Kamo and Tsintsadze, with whom Stalin was already beginning to plot the Yerevan Square bank robbery. Tskhakaya, the tamada—the Georgian toastmaster—told jokes; Stalin “sang sweet songs in his sweet voice,” while Kamo laughed: “Where are the idiotic police? All their wanted men are here and they could come and trap us like goats!”

The couple were in love. “I was amazed how Soso, who was so severe in his work and to his comrades, could be so tender, affectionate and attentive to his wife,” said Monoselidze. But within weeks,[80] Kato would learn how hard it was to be married to a man whose real wife and mistress was the Revolution.

She was soon pregnant. “All the time he was thinking how to please her,” wrote Monoselidze, “when he had time… But when he was involved in his work, he forgot everything.” Keke, always the realist, was delighted, but she confided in her niece Anna Geladze: “Soso got married. She’s a little woman but what kind of family life is she supposed to conduct, I wonder?”^{171}

There was no honeymoon. Stalin came alive at night, a risky, trigger-happy existence that stayed with him all his life. The Tsar’s ruthless forces of reaction often killed suspects, no questions asked. “It’s enough,” Soso wrote to the Svanidzes, “just to stay alive and the rest will take care of itself.”

Once, at 5 a.m., he and Monoselidze were locking up their secret printing-press when they were challenged as burglars by a policeman who reached for his revolver. But Stalin was quicker on the draw, pulling out his Berdana gun and shouting: “I’m going to shoot!”^{172}

18. Pirate and Father

Stalin was about to open fire when his brother-in-law grabbed the gun. He recognized the terrified policeman who had been bribed not to interfere with their printing-press. Soso’s edginess was understandable: the Cossacks had crushed the revolutionaries and the Okhrana was hunting him down, as he organized more heists for the Outfit in different parts of the Caucasus to fund the purchase of arms in Europe. Stalin was away from his new wife for weeks, oblivious to the fact that his life put her in real danger.

Around 9 September 1906, Stalin attended Jordania’s SD conference in Tiflis, and then at a Baku hotel. Tsarist repression and Menshevik success had broken the Bolsheviks in Georgia. Besides, the Mensheviks had officially given up terrorism, regarding Stalin and his Outfit as embarrassing bandits. Out of the meagre forty-two delegates, only six, including Stalin, Shaumian and Tskhakaya, were Bolsheviks.

Stalin compensated for this by defiantly sneering at the Mensheviks, on whom he played sinister tricks. “He spent the whole conference smiling ironically,” says Devdariani, his Menshevik seminary friend, “thinking ‘Make whatever resolutions you like, they’re irrelevant to the Revolution.’” Stalin was so “defiant, crude and sullen” that the Menshevik chairman, Arsenidze, accused him of “behaving indecently,” like a whore, a “woman of the streets” who wears no knickers. Stalin “jauntily replied that he hadn’t yet dropped his trousers.” Then, grinning “spitefully from the left side of his mouth,” he stalked out. “After a few minutes, we heard the agreed whistle warning us the police were coming. We scattered,” says Arsenidze. “But there were no police anywhere. It was Koba’s prank.”

Yet Stalin had become “the main financier of the Russian Bolshevik Centre,” according to the Menshevik, Uratadze, and he remained one of Lenin’s chief funders for the next three years. After the conference, it seems likely that Stalin headed west to Sukhum on the Black Sea to open a new front in his campaign of robberies: piracy on the high seas.

On 20 September, the steamship Tsarevich Giorgi, 2,200 tons and 285 feet long, was on its way from Odessa to Batumi, carrying passengers and a considerable treasury. Unknown to the ship’s captain, groups of Bolshevik gangsters, guns and grenades concealed under felt cloaks, boarded the ship when it stopped to deliver wages at Novorossiisk, Sukhum and New Athos.

At 1:15 a.m., as the sleeping ship passed Cape Kodori, the gang of twenty-five pirates, including “workers and intellectuals,” drew Mausers, Berdanas and bombs from their cloaks and held up the ship. The chief gangster, described by the Gendarmes afterwards as a “short Georgian in his twenties with gingerish hair, and freckles,” took over the bridge, training his Mauser on Captain Sinkevich. The duty officer, steersman and crew were held at gunpoint, though four sailors probably assisted the pirates as “inside men.”

The chief pirate, reported the crew later, was glacially calm and courteous throughout the heist. “We’re revolutionaries through and through, not criminals,” he announced. “We need cash for the Revolution and we’ll take only Treasury funds. Obey my commands and there’ll be no bloodshed. But if you’re thinking of resisting, we’ll kill you all and blow up the ship.”

“I submitted,” Captain Sinkevich admitted in an interview with the Tiflissky Listok afterwards. The crew and passengers were gathered and warned “to see nothing.” The captain showed the money to the chief gangster. The police announced officially that the Bolsheviks took 16,000 roubles, but the pirates probably bagged much more.

The gangster boss ordered Captain Sinkevich to lower the lifeboats. The pirates held some of the ship’s officers hostage as they loaded the cash, after which they ordered the sailors to row them ashore. They were conveyed so efficiently that the pirate chief, “being touched by their extremely conscientious obedience to his orders, ordered each sailor to be given a 10-roubles tip.” The Tsarevich Giorgi was free to sail for Batumi.

On raising the alarm seven hours later, Cossacks and Gendarmes hunted the Bolshevik pirates along the coast without finding a single trace of the gang or the loot. Stalin and two Russian Bolsheviks hid at the home of Stepan Kapba, one of the gang—as remembered by his sister years later. Then, the sister testified, they moved on to another safe house belonging to the Atum family, and finally on to the Gvaramia home. As an old man, Kamshish Gvaramia recalled how Stalin arrived at his house. His father was excited at being asked to “hide the pockmarked chieftain of the gang that held up the mail-ship off Cape Kodori who subsequently became leader of this great country.”

Stalin and the gangsters moved westwards through Abkhazia, across the Enguri River, into Guria. Old men told the writer and compiler of Abkhazian history Fasil Iskander how Stalin ordered the murder of seven unreliable gangsters (including the four collaborating sailors) and then led a train of horses packed with cash across the hills, a carbine over his shoulder. Iskander tells the story in his classic Sandro of Chegem. After delivering the cash to henchmen in Kutaisi, Stalin caught the train to Tiflis, leaving the bodies to be “eaten by jackals.”

Did Stalin really lead the pirate heist? The police description of the pirate chieftain fits Stalin in style, looks and speech: he too often insisted that he was “a revolutionary not a criminal.” But the description is very vague. Most memoirs claim that he organized, but did not participate in, the robberies.^*

Yet we know from the memoirs of the Svanidzes and Davrichewy that Stalin carried a gun and was not shy of using it at this time. The well-informed Menshevik Arsenidze explained that Stalin “did not participate” in the notorious Tiflis heist but added, “There were a whole bunch of expropriations.” He heard that “even Stalin had participated” in one of them. Stalin had connections at the ports of Novorossiisk, New Athos and Sukhum, where the pirates boarded the ship—he had visited these places in 1905. Stalin’s practise of leading packponies with saddlebags full of banknotes over the hills is confirmed by Father Gachechiladze’s memoirs cited earlier.

This was not Stalin’s only involvement in piracy. He later orchestrated the robbery of another mail ship and planned several others in Baku.^* The Abkhazian historian Stanislav Lakoba, whose other researches are meticulous, followed the legend to its source and managed to interview, independently of each other, two aged witnesses before they died. They confirmed that he had led the attack and collected the cash.

The dates fit perfectly. Stalin was not at home. The Baku conference had ended. These few days are blank. The ship was robbed on 20 September and it would have taken Stalin a few days to reach Tiflis. As arranged with Lenin and Krasin in Stockholm, Kamo and two of Stalin’s comrades were waiting in Tiflis to set off on a trip to buy weapons for the Party.

There is no documentary proof of Stalin’s role, but his participation is at the very least highly plausible. It certainly looks as if the robbery was timed for a reason—and Kamo received the money.

Five days after the holdup, on 25 September, Kamo left Tiflis with enough cash to travel round Europe and buy arms.^{173}

Kamo, accompanied by the loquacious actor-revolutionary Mdivani and Kavtaradze, who had thrown the lamp at Stalin, first took the train to St. Petersburg. They were met and given instructions by Krasin, who ran the “Bolshevik Centre,” their clandestine headquarters in Finland, with Lenin and his ally Alexander Bogdanov, philosopher and organizer. This threesome were known as the “Small Trinity.”

Krasin knew Stalin from Baku and Stockholm. Always in stiff white collars and sporting a well-tended Charles I beard, he lived a double life: on one hand, he was a socialite womanizer and friend of millionaires; on the other, his bomb factories provided murderous devices for the Bolsheviks and other terrorist groups.^† “His dream,” says Trotsky, “was to create a bomb the size of a walnut.” He never accomplished the walnut-bomb.

Krasin was the first in a line of sophisticated worshippers of violence to “almost fall in love with Kamo,” whom he put in contact with Meyer Wallach,^* a worldly Jewish Bolshevik with spectacles and wavy fair hair.

Kamo and the two Georgians met Wallach in Paris. The Jewish fixer and the Armenian psychopath worked well together, travelling to Liege, in Belgium, Berlin, then Sofia, in Bulgaria, to buy arms, mainly Mausers, Mannlicher rifles and ammo. In Varna on the Black Sea, they bought a leaky yacht, the Zara, loaded it with arms, appointed as captain a revolutionary sailor from the battleship Potemkin, and hired four crew. Kamo volunteered as cook and enforcer, wiring up the boat to his berth so he could blow it up if Tsarist agents tried to board. In the Black Sea, a storm rocked the Zara, which sprang a leak, then ran aground. Kamo ignited his suicidal dynamite—but it failed to explode. The captain tried but failed to commit suicide. Seamen and cook were rescued, freezing, by a passing sailing-boat. The Zara sank, the spoils of Stalin’s piracy returning to the waves.

Kamo made it back to Tiflis, where Stalin had a new idea for a colossal bank robbery. A few months earlier, in Tiflis, he had bumped into a certain Voznesensky who had studied with him at the Gori Church School and the Tiflis Seminary. Voznesensky told his school friend that he now worked in the Tiflis banking mail office with access to the invaluable, secret schedules of the cash stagecoaches. Stalin invited him for a cup of milk at the Adamia milkbar, where he was persuaded to help the Bolsheviks expropriate money that passed through the mail office. Voznesensky, who was interviewed by a secret Party investigation in 1908, confessed that he agreed to help “only for Koba” because “Koba wrote a poem on the death of Prince Eristavi of such revolutionary character: it impressed me so much.” Only in Georgia could a terrorist receive the timing and tip for a robbery because he was such a fine poet!

Stalin introduced Voznesensky to the Outfit, keeping in contact and meeting his inside man every few months. He had last met Voznesensky in late 1906, so it seems the Okhrana was right that the robbery was originally planned for January or February 1907. But it had not happened. In his own surly and laconic answers to a cross-examination by a Menshevik Party inquiry, Stalin confirmed that he had been behind the world’s most notorious heist, running the two “inside men,” including the “one Comrade Koba knows from school,” whom he had introduced to the Outfit.

Stalin’s other “inside man” was Grigory “Gigo” Kasradze, another Goreli, a cousin of Keke and Father Charkviani, who was interviewed by a different Party investigation committee. He too was groomed by Stalin for months before the robbery. Both were part of Stalin’s own private intelligence network.

Kamo, after the sinking of the Zara, lacked the necessary armaments for these new operations so Stalin sent him back to see Krasin. A grand sympathizer, Prince Koki Dadiani, lent him his passport, allowing him to travel to the capital in style. At their Finnish hideout, Kamo met Lenin and Krupskaya. “He was a fearless fighter of limitless audacity and unbreakable willpower,” Krupskaya observes, “but also exceedingly sensitive, somewhat naïve…” Lenin called him his “Caucasian bandit,” thrilled that he always packed two pistols, which he regularly invited Krupskaya’s noble mother to strap on. Lenin and Krupskaya, both brought up with privilege and culture, courted Kamo. They were always drawn to the glamour (and utility) of brutal cutthroats, following the sentiments of the anarchist Bakunin: for the Revolution to triumph, he wrote, “we must join with the swashbuckling robber-world, the true and only revolutionaries in Russia.”

Entranced by Kamo’s simple-eyed sweetness, the Lenins sensed that his strange tranquillity might, at any moment, be shattered by an act of insane violence. He once met the Lenins for lunch saying he had a present for them, which he slowly placed on the table wrapped in a napkin. “Everyone went silent. ‘He’s got a bomb!’ they thought,” recounts Krupskaya. “But it was a watermelon.” Kamo returned to Tiflis with a shipment of grenades.^{174}

Lenin, according to Stalin’s gangster Kupriashvili, ordered Stalin to raise much-needed funds to pay for the coming London Congress. Stalin kept in contact with Kamo and his inside men in the banking system but also travelled back to Baku, where he was busy founding and editing the Russian newspaper Bakinsky Proletary (Baku Worker) with Shaumian and Spandarian. Involved in so much skulduggery, Soso seemed untouchable. But, while he was away, his wife was not so lucky.

During a raid on a Bolshevik in Moscow, the Okhrana found a note that read: “3 Freilinskaya Street, seamstress Svanidze, ask for Soso.” Not long afterwards, Kamo asked the Svanidzes to host a “Moscow Jewish comrade” for two weeks. The sisters welcomed him but soon after his departure, on 13 November 1906, the Gendarmes raided the house asking for Soso and Kato. The sisters realized that the “Moscow Jewish comrade” was a traitor. The Gendarmes fortunately did not find either Soso or his documents hidden inside the fashion mannequins. But Kato was arrested—along with her cousin, the bomb-maker Spiridon Dvali, who was sentenced to death. This was no joke for a girl already four months pregnant.

Sashiko Svanidze sprang into action to help Stalin’s wife, calling in the favours of her clients, who included most of the Gendarme officers: “I went to see the wife of Gendarme Colonel Rechitsky (whose dress I was making at the time) and requested her to reduce Dvali’s death penalty and to release the innocent Kato.” The Colonel’s wife did get Dvali’s sentence reduced and helped the pregnant Kato even more by allowing her to await her release in a police station instead of prison. The sisters were also making the gowns for the wife of the police station chief, who immediately took Kato home with her and looked after her.

On Stalin’s return after his frantic shuttling around the Caucasus, “He was deeply despondent about what had happened,” notes Monoselidze. “He insisted on visiting Kato,” so Sashiko went to see the wife of the police station chief and “told her our cousin from our village had come to visit Kato. The police officer’s wife permitted it, so we took Soso to their apartment at night and they had a rendezvous there. Fortunately none of them knew Soso by sight. The police officer’s wife demanded that Kato be allowed home for two hours every evening. Soso and Kato met every evening like that” until her release two months later.

Soon after her release, on 18 March 1907, Kato was delivered of a son, Yakov.^* According to Kato’s cousin Ketevan Gelovani, Soso was present for the birth along with his mother. Keke and “the little woman” Kato got on very well. Stalin was over the moon at being a father. “After the birth of the baby,” Monoselidze observes, “his love for wife and child became ten times more.” He nicknamed the baby “Patsana” (Laddie). Writing day and night, however, Stalin became “irritated when the baby’s crying disturbed his work. But as soon as the mother fed it and the baby stopped crying, he kissed him, tickling his nose, fondling him.”

Soso had much on his mind. That March 1907, Stalin’s Outfit planned a heist on the Kutaisi stagecoach, but, just before the chosen day, its chieftain, Tsintsadze, was arrested. Stalin appointed Kamo as his successor. Stalin’s pet psychopath was more than capable of controlling the band of bandits, always tottering between simple enthusiasm and frenzied killing. When he heard a Bolshevik, probably Stalin, arguing theory with a Menshevik, he exclaimed: “What are you arguing with him for? Let me slit his throat.” Kamo, with Tsintsadze’s female gunslingers Anneta, Patsia and Alexandra, held up the Kutaisi stagecoach—but the Cossacks fired back. Kamo and the girls found themselves in the midst of a savage fire-fight, but when it was at its most intense the girls swooped in and grabbed the money-bags, which they then smuggled to Tiflis in their lingerie. “Anneta and I wrapped it around our bodies,” recalls Alexandra Darakhe-lidze. Kamo hid the cash in wine-sacks and sent it to Lenin in Finland.

Stalin’s inside men in the banking mail now informed the Outfit that a huge delivery was due in Tiflis—it might be as big as a million roubles, enough to fund Lenin’s expensive organization for years. Stalin and Kamo prepared for a spectacular heist.

Barely a month later, Stalin, elected as non-voting delegate to the Fifth Congress, left Laddie and Kato in Tiflis, setting off on a long journey via Baku, St. Petersburg, Stockholm and Copenhagen. Stalin, travelling under the name “Ivanovich,” was on his way to London.^{175}

Around 24 April, when he was in Denmark, he took the train down to Berlin to meet Lenin. We know they met secretly on this trip and that Stalin visited Berlin. They had one subject to discuss: the imminent Tiflis bank robbery. If Lenin went to Berlin, writes Trotsky, “then it was not for theoretical conversation but was undoubtedly devoted to the impending expropriations and the means of forwarding the money.” The secrecy was aimed as much at their comrades as at the Okhrana: the Party, now dominated by Mensheviks, had banned brigandage.

Lenin and Stalin then proceeded separately to London.^{176}

* This was true especially after the 1907 London Congress banned expropriations and ordered expulsion from the Party for those who disobeyed. But this was September 1906—the London Congress was in the future.

* This piracy was quite common among the revolutionary bandits: Stalin’s Gori alter ego, Davrichewy, chief of the military wing of the Socialist-Federalists, tells how he robbed a ship carrying funds at roughly the same time as the Tsarevich Giorgi heist. Meanwhile, off Odessa, revolutionaries seized a noble dinner-party on a pleasure ship, the Sofia, where they grabbed £5,000 in gold.

† At this time Krasin loaned his most advanced infernal device to the Maximalist-SR terrorists, who used it to blow up the house of the Tsar’s brilliant Premier Stolypin. Many were killed in the inferno but Stolypin survived.

* Later Stalin’s People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs during the 1930s, Maxim Litvinov.

* Known as Yasha to the family, he was christened months later and registered years later—hence confusions about his birth. The name was probably a tribute to Stalin’s protector, Yakov “Koba” Egnatashvili.

19. Stalin in London

On 27 April/10 May 1907, after a tedious journey, Stalin and his companions Tskhakaya and Shaumian disembarked at Harwich, in England. Catching the train to London’s Liverpool Street Station,[81] they were greeted by sensational headlines in the English press, thrilled to have exotic “Anarchists” loose in the capital, which, then as now, was a notorious refuge for murderous extremists.[82]

The delegates were met by an incongruous crew of English reporters and photographers, twelve Special Branch detectives and two Okhrana agents, as well as by local sympathizers who were either English socialists or Russian exiles.

“History is being made in London!” declared the Daily Mirror, which seemed to be most fascinated by the fact that some of the revolutionaries were “women burning with zeal for the great cause”—and by their lack of luggage in that age of stately travel. “There is not a man over forty and many little over twenty”—Stalin was twenty-nine, Lenin was thirty-seven (but “we always called him the Old Man,” Stalin said later). “It was,” concluded the Daily Mirror, “a most picturesque crowd.”

As with the Soviet Union itself, the delegates were meant to be equal but some were more equal than others. Maxim Gorky, “the famous novelist,” said the Mirror, “is in London but where he is staying, only his intimate friends know.” Gorky resided with his actress-mistress in the comfort of the Hotel Imperial in Russell Square, where Lenin and Krupskaya joined them. It was wet and cold when they arrived. The domineering Lenin took charge, checked Gorky’s sheets for dampness and ordered the gasfire lit to warm their wet underwear.

“There’s going to be a right old scuffle here,” Lenin told Gorky as the Leninist socks dried. The delegates with private incomes stayed in small hotels in Bloomsbury, though Lenin and Krupskaya took rooms in Kensington Square, whence he headed out every morning to pick up his favourite takeaway, fish and chips, outside King’s Cross Station. However, money was extremely short for the poor delegates like Stalin.

Legend says he spent the first nights with Litvinov, whom he now met for the first time, in the Tower House hostel on Fieldgate Street, Stepney, which the novelist Jack London called the “monster dosshouse”: it cost sixpence for a fortnight. Its conditions were so dire that Stalin supposedly led a mutiny and got everyone rehoused. He was settled into a cramped first-floor backroom at 77 Jubilee Street in Stepney, which he rented from a Jewish-Russian cobbler and shared with Tskhakaya and Shaumian.

Foggy and wet, London was an intimidating city for a visitor from Georgia. “At the outset I found London swallowed and suffocated me,” wrote another Russian Communist visitor, Ivan Maisky, later Stalin’s Ambassador to London. “I felt lonely and lost in its giant stone ocean… with its grim rows of little houses swallowed up in a black fog.”

If London was foreign, Whitechapel, where Russian was commonly spoken, was more familiar. One hundred and twenty thousand Jewish refugees from the Russian pogroms, gangsters and socialists among them, lived in the East End. Lenin visited Rudolf Rocker’s Anarchist Club, near Stalin’s rooms in Stepney, where he ate Jewish gefilte fish. Stalin probably did so too. Soso also could hardly have missed the savage jungle of Slavic-Hebraic gang-warfare. The East End gangs, all from the Russian Empire, controlled so-called rookeries of “shootflyers” (gold-watch thieves) and “whizzers” (pickpockets). Three gangs vied for supremacy: the Bessarabian Tigers fought the Odessans, who fought the Aldgate Mob led by Darkie the Coon (a swarthy Jewish gangster named Bogard).

On arrival, Stalin and the others registered at the Polish Socialist Club on Fulbourne Street off the Whitechapel Road across from the London Hospital.[83] Observed by Special Branch detectives and excited journalists, they received their sparse allowance of two shillings a day, guidance on how to find the main Congress, and secret passwords to avoid Okhrana infiltration.

Meeting upstairs in “modest premises with little furniture belonging to a socialist club with tables and chairs and foreign autographs on the walls,” the Bolsheviks started the political business with their own factional meeting at which they elected a secret committee, and like all good conferencers, “They studied the city map.” But the Daily Mirror had no time for such mundane details. “The women are said to be conspicuous for their unflinching courage and nerve,” the reporter revealed admiringly. “Revolver practise enters their daily exercise. They drill themselves constantly in front of the mirror by which they become adept in aiming and pulling the trigger… Most of these are young girls, one being eighteen wearing her long fair hair in a long coil down her back.”

The eagle-eyed Daily Express, however, noticed “a sturdy resolute-looking man who… stood at the corner of Fulbourne Street, obviously a foreigner and equally obviously a person of some importance. Apparently unconcerned, he was taking a lively interest… This was Monsieur Seveff, one of Russia’s secret police, and his duty is to keep watch on the Russian Socialists”—who, that paper added significantly, “had little luggage.”

The delegates then proceeded to the SD Fifth Congress, taking the bus or walking to Islington, where they were amazed to find they were meeting in a church, the Brotherhood Church on Southgate Road: “down the dim and dirty streets of working-class quarters, it was like dozens of buildings, soot-grimed walls, high narrow windows, grimy roof with a short steeple.” Inside, the delegates found “a simple bare room that could hold 300–400.” Gorky was unimpressed by the church décor, “unadorned to the point of absurdity.” The vicar, the Reverend F. R. Swan, whose flock included the future Labour Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, was a pacifist follower of William Morris.

On 30 April/13 May 1907, the father of Russian Marxism, Plekhanov, opened the Congress after delegates sang a funeral hymn for fallen comrades. Stalin watched how Lenin often sat with the tall, haunted and spectrethin Gorky, international celebrity and Bolshevik fund-raiser who had once watched a hanging in Gori.[84] The Bolsheviks sat on one side, the Mensheviks on the other; every vote was “ultra tense.”

There were 302 voting delegates representing 150,000 workers, but after the glory days of 1905 the Party was in dire straits, shattered by Nicholas II’s repressions. There were 92 Bolsheviks, most of whom were determined to continue the armed struggle of 1905 and avoid participation in the Duma. They were outnumbered by 85 Mensheviks, 54 Jewish Bundists, 45 Polish-Lithuanians and 26 Letts who supported participation in the Duma elections. Lenin also wanted to adopt the strategy of gun and ballot-box favoured in our time by terrorists from the IRA, Hamas and Hezbollah. So he used Menshevik help to win that battle before turning on them again.

The entire Party was shrinking, but the Bolsheviks had been so routed in Georgia that Stalin, Tskhakaya and Shaumian were only consultative delegates without votes.

“Who is that?” Stalin supposedly asked Shaumian as a new orator took the podium.

“Don’t you know him?” answered Shaumian. “It’s Comrade Trotsky”—real name Lev Bronstein, the undoubted star in London, who had just pulled off an escape from Siberia by dashing 400 miles through the tundra on a reindeer-propelled sleigh. Here Stalin first saw (and probably shook hands with) Trotsky, who for his part did not recall meeting his nemesis until 1913.

While Stalin had been commanding his militias in Chiatura, Trotsky had been Chairman of the Petersburg Soviet. Effortlessly brilliant in writing, dizzyingly eloquent in performance, unmistakably Jewish in accent, and shamelessly vain, Trotsky, with his dandyish suits and plumage of mane-like tresses carefully bouffed, possessed the shine of international radical celebrity, light-years ahead of Stalin. Despite being a rich Jewish farmer’s son from faraway Kherson Province, he was overweeningly arrogant, regarding Georgians as bumpkin “provincials.”

Lenin, who had nicknamed him “the Pen” for his virtuoso journalism, now complained that Trotsky was showing off. Stalin, whose gifts lurked in the shadows while Trotsky’s glittered in the spotlight, hated him on sight: Trotsky was “pretty but useless,” wrote Stalin on his return. Trotsky simply sneered that Stalin “never spoke.”

It was true that Stalin did not speak during the entire Congress. He knew that the Mensheviks, who hated him for his truculence and banditry, were gunning for him as part of their campaign to ban bank robberies and score points off Lenin. When Lenin proposed the vote on credentials, Martov, the Russian Menshevik leader, prompted by Jordania, challenged the three nonvoters, Stalin, Tskhakaya and Shaumian.

“One can’t vote without knowing who’s involved. Who are these people?” asked Martov.

“I really don’t know,” replied Lenin insouciantly, though he had just met Stalin in Berlin. Martov lost his challenge.

“We protest!” shouted Jordania, but to no avail. Stalin henceforth loathed Martov, real name Tsederbaum, who was, like Trotsky, Jewish.

The Jewish presence irked Stalin, who decided that the Bolsheviks were “the true Russian faction” while the Mensheviks were the “Jewish faction.” There must have been some grumbling about this in the pub after the sessions. “It wouldn’t be a bad idea for us Bolsheviks,” said the Bolshevik Alexinsky to Stalin “in jest,” “to organize a pogrom in the Party.” At a time when thousands of Jews had just been slaughtered in pogroms, it was a “jest” in poor taste.[85] Its resentment of Jewish intellectuals exposed Stalin’s burning inferiority complex. But here too is the emergence of Stalin the Russian (for there was no anti-Semitism in Georgia, where Babylonian Jews had lived for two millennia without a single pogrom). Weary of Georgia’s petty squabbles and Menshevik dominance, he was ready to concentrate on Baku and Russia herself. Henceforth he wrote in Russian, not Georgian.

Lenin got his way at the Congress. More Bolsheviks than Mensheviks were elected to the Central Committee, while he continued to keep his secret Bolshevik Centre. “Now,” reflected Stalin later, “I got to see Lenin in triumph.”

However the Mensheviks did achieve one resolution that affected Stalin: they passed a rigorous condemnation of bank robberies that decreed expulsion from the Party for anyone who broke the rules. They appointed the gay Menshevik aristocrat Georgi Chicherin (later the second Soviet People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs) to investigate all the bank robberies since the Stockholm Congress. “Stalin was very reserved during that meeting, mostly silent, keeping himself in the shadows,” noticed Devdariani, his Menshevik friend. Trotsky later understood that Stalin was preoccupied with his bank robberies in May 1907: “Why did he bother to come to London? He must have had other tasks.”

Outside, “Curious Englishmen gathered and just stared at us as if we were animals from faraway lands!” The press besieged the building while the early versions of paparazzi pushily photographed the shy revolutionaries, who begged them to desist. RUSSIAN REVOLUTIONISTS AFRAID OF CAMERA: headlined the Daily Express. “Do you realize that the reproduction of those portraits could mean death?” one Russian told the newspaper, not realizing that all the precautions were irrelevant.

The spooks were already inside the church. The Russian secret police—then as now—was irritated by the English tendency to grant asylum to Russian dissidents. “Because of London’s liberalism, it’ll be impossible to count on co-operation of local police forces,” complained A. M. Garting, the director of the Okhrana Foreign Agency, based in Paris. Two agents followed the revolutionaries to England. Special Branch and the Russian secret policemen lurked in the street to the delight of the press, but the Okhrana did not need outside help—their double-agent Yakov Zhitomirsky, who received 2,000 francs a month, was one of two traitors inside the Congress. In the Okhrana archives, we find the speeches reported as tediously as in the official protocols.

Lenin was at his best in London. Inside the church, the delegates ate during sessions, but funds were dwindling. Lenin worried that his Bolsheviks were not eating enough, so he arranged for Gorky’s mistress to distribute beer and sandwiches.

After sessions, Lenin chatted to delegates on the grass in the sunshine of Hyde Park, lectured them on English pronunciation, laughed with them unaffectedly, gave them tips on cheap accommodation and took them to his favourite pub, the Crown and Woolpack in Finsbury, where a Special Branch detective was said to have hidden in a cupboard to eavesdrop though he spoke no Russian. On 13 May, Stalin may have attended his only Chelsea soirée. In an early case of radical chic, the artist Felix Moscheles invited the Marxists to a reception filled with guests in evening dress at his house at 123 Old Church Street. There Ramsay MacDonald toasted the Russians; Plekhanov and Lenin responded. Their hosts expressed surprise that they were not kitted out in white tie.

Stalin was not in Chelsea most nights—he spent more of his time on the rough side of town. His experience was surely like that of Maisky: “I tramped along dreary streets, feebly lit by antiquated gas-lamps, crossed deserted bridges, seeing glimpses of dark shadowy canals beneath. I saw London’s belly and heard the calls of prostitutes and brazen laughter of their drunken escorts. I nearly fell over homeless creatures sleeping on the steps of closed shops.” At some point, in a pub, Stalin was almost beaten up by East End dockers. Litvinov supposedly rescued him. According to his daughter, Litvinov joked that this was the only reason Stalin later spared him, saying, “I haven’t forgotten that time in London.”

Back in Stepney, Mister Ivanovich (a.k.a. Stalin), who wore a tunic-style jacket, baggy trousers and high boots, spent much time in his room reading, but he also employed a youth named Arthur Bacon to run errands. “Stalin wrote a letter to someone a street or so away,” recalled Bacon in an interview after the Second World War, “and wanted it taken round by hand. He couldn’t write English so the cobbler’s wife addressed the envelope.” Bacon was usually paid a halfpenny per errand, but Stalin gave him two bob: “That was money then, you know,” said Bacon. Stalin, either generous or ignorant, had paid him 4,800 percent above the going rate. “His favourite treat was toffee,” added Bacon. “I bought him some every day.”

While Stalin was living in East End penury, he probably saw little of London. The Bolsheviks were so politically obsessed and culturally parochial, they scarcely noticed either natural or cultural landmarks. To admire a city, wrote Trotsky, “you have to expend too much of yourself. I had my own sphere of activity which brooked no rival: Revolution.” Soso was the same. He hardly had any money, but during the Second World War he confided in one of his young diplomats, Andrei Gromyko, later Soviet Foreign Minister and President, that he had spent his time “in churches listening to the sermons—the best way to learn English.” Despatching Gromyko as Ambassador to Washington, he suggested he do the same.

Meanwhile the Congress had run out of cash to pay the sixty-five roubles for each delegate to get home. Something had to be done. The Russian-Jewish socialist Fyodor Rothstein, who had helped organize the Congress, appealed to the leftist journalist H. N. Brailsford of the Daily News and the Labour MP George Lansbury. They approached the tycoon Joseph Fels, American owner of the Fels-Naphtha Soap Company.

“Before I decide,” replied the soap baron, “I want to see these people.” Brailsford and Lansbury took Fels to the Brotherhood Church to watch a session. “How young they all are, how absorbed!” exclaimed the Philadel-phian, who offered the Party £1,700. Fels’s loan agreement stipulated, “We, the undersigned delegates” must repay him by 1 January 1908. Fels insisted it be signed by every delegate. Lenin agreed but then ordered the revolutionaries to use only aliases. They duly signed this extraordinary document in English, Russian or Georgian. Lenin probably just signed “Vladimir.” It is believed Stalin used a favoured alias: “Vasily from Baku.” Fels died before Lenin came to power, but his heirs were repaid in 1917.

When Churchill[86] met Stalin for the first time in 1942, they bonded, after a frosty start, in a nocturnal Kremlin drinking marathon at which the Prime Minister asked about this London visit.

“Lenin, Plekhanov, Gorky and others were there,” Stalin answered.

“Trotsky?” asked Churchill about the enemy whom Stalin had had assassinated two years earlier.

“Yes, he was there,” replied Stalin, “but went away a disappointed man not having been given any organization to represent such as the Battle Squads which Trotsky hoped for…” Even thirty years later and after murdering his great enemy, Stalin was still proud that he had commanded Battle Squads while the celebrated War Commissar Trotsky had not.

“The London Congress is over,” reported “Koba Ivanovich,” Stalin’s latest pseudonym, in the Bakinsky Proletary, “ending in the victory of Bolshevism.”

However Stalin and Shaumian remained in London to nurse Tskhakaya, who had fallen sick. “I had a temperature of 39 or even more,” recounts Tskhakaya, so Stalin and Shaumian stayed on “to care for me because we all lived in one room.”

There is a legend among Welsh Communists that, after the Congress, Stalin forsook his nursing duties to visit the miners of the Valleys: after all, his 1905 stronghold, Chiatura, was a mining town. But despite a miraculous blossoming of sightings of “Stalin in Wales” among the Communists of the Rhondda during the Second World War, there is not the slightest evidence that he visited Wales.[87] Besides, he had not yet invented the name “Stalin.” But he was also supposedly spotted on the docks of Liverpool, a Scouse version of his encounter with the London dockers. Sadly, “Stalin in Liverpool” belongs with “Stalin in Wales” in that fabulous realm of urban mythology, regional aspirational fantasia and leftist personality cult.^{177}

After about three weeks in London, Soso spent a week in Paris. Then, borrowing the papers of a just-deceased Georgian, Simon Jvelaya, he arrived home in Tiflis on the eve of the big bank robbery.^{178}

20. Kamo Goes Insane: The Game of Bandits and Cossacks

On 10 May 1907, Kamo was setting the fuse on one of Krasin’s bombs when it exploded in his face. He almost lost an eye, but he managed to get secret treatment and recover sufficiently to lead the Outfit on the big day that was getting closer. The other gangsters missed their arrested chief, Tsintsadze, considering Kamo a self-promoting attention-seeker. “Kamo was very pleased with himself,” said Kupriashvili, “showing off his value to important comrades and bragging.”

Stalin got home by 4 June, just after Nicholas II’s energetic Premier, Peter Stolypin, launched his reactionary coup, resetting the Duma election rules to ensure a conservative majority and intensifying his harsh crackdown on the revolutionaries. Many were arrested, many deported to Siberia in prison-trains dubbed “Stolypin carriages,” and so many hanged that the noose was nicknamed “Stolypin’s necktie.” There had been 86,000 political prisoners in 1905; by 1909 there were 170,000.

Kamo gathered a large team of Georgia’s finest hoodlums and bank robbers, including the core of the Outfit and the five female shooters. They lived and waited in a small communal apartment while Kamo himself rented a grand residence, “living under cover as a prince.” The Okhrana believed there were about sixty brigands involved in the heist, so it is likely that the Bolsheviks recruited help from the SRs and other top triggermen: the terrorists often cooperated, most recently when Krasin provided the SRs with the bombs to dynamite Premier Stolypin’s home. If the SRs hoped for a cut of the booty, they were to be disappointed.

Stalin informed the Bolshevik Tiflis Committee of Lenin’s orders given to him in Berlin; they approved the operation. He must have expected local outrage and international scandal: Kamo and the gunmen resigned temporarily from the Party, on Lenin’s suggestion, thus technically liberating themselves from the London resolution. Stalin and Shaumian planned to move to Baku directly afterwards. The Bolsheviks were finished in Georgia, with as few as 500 supporters. Soso was consciously burning his Georgian bridges and starting afresh in a more ambitious enviroment.[88]

Early on 13 June, Kamo confirmed to Stalin and Shaumian that the heist would take place that day. The gangsters waited at the Tilipuchuri Tavern, where Stalin was supposedly seen early that morning.[89] Somewhere before 10 a.m., rigged up in his officer’s uniform, swashbuckling his Circassian sabre, Kamo rode out into Yerevan Square; the gangster boys and girls took up their positions. It was a warm summer’s day.

When the bombs shook the city, Kato Svanidze Djugashvili was cuddling Stalin’s three-month-old baby, Laddie, on the balcony beside her sister, Sashiko. “We rushed inside, absolutely terrified,” says Sashiko Svanidze. For the rest of the day, the wounded were treated in makeshift surgeries. Cossacks and Gendarmes galloped through the city, raiding houses, cordoning off boroughs and blocks in the hope of recovering the money before it left Tiflis.

“That night,” reports Sashiko, “Soso came home and told us that Kamo and his gang had done it, stealing 250,000 roubles for the Party.” He must have told the sisters about Kamo’s playacting because they realized why he had just borrowed their father’s sword. The Svanidze memoirs show that, far from being innocently oblivious of Stalin’s double life, Kato was perfectly aware that she was married to the godfather of bank robberies in the Caucasus. But Stalin suddenly informed the family that his wife and baby were to leave imminently for Baku. The Svanidzes did not approve. They must have felt strongly, because even in the 1930s the family dared criticize Stalin for taking her on the thirteen-hour train ride “in such a hot summer” and with a baby. But it was to no avail: “Soso left for Baku and took Kato,” grabbing 15,000 roubles for his future plans.

Kamo lay low. Before leaving, he graciously offered Stalin’s “inside man” 10,000 roubles for his help. Voznesensky graciously accepted 5,000.

Now things again started to go wrong. The police announced that 100,000 roubles in 500 denomination notes were marked. Some gangsters wanted to burn the notes. Kamo refused. The rest of the cash was in smaller denominations.

All the hoodlums wanted to meet Lenin, but Kamo’s eye needed foreign treatment, so it was he, bearing most of the money, who took the train via Baku to Lenin in Finland. Prince Koki Dadiani, whose family had once ruled Mingrelia, again lent Kamo his passport. Adding a new layer to this favourite disguise, Kamo now posed as the Prince accompanied by his new young bride (one of the female gangsters, ironically, but usefully, a policeman’s daughter) on the day after his wedding. The Outfit’s girls were already experienced in hiding money and dynamite on their persons: the dynamite gave off a harsh acidic stench especially when strapped to a sweating body, so the ladies had to douse themselves in scent. Money was easier, the swag travelled in the bride’s lingerie and clothes. Venal policemen had probably been bribed to turn a blind eye.

Kamo delivered the equivalent of around £1.7 million ($3.4 million) in today’s money to Lenin, enough to fund the faction for some time. Kamo spent the summer with his hero, planning a giant “spectacular.” But the reaction soon caught up with Lenin, who fled to Geneva, where “the Swiss burghers,” writes Krupskaya, “were frightened to death… and could talk of nothing except the Russian expropriations.” “Georgia” became a byword for gangsterism: when Tskhakaya visited them in a chokha coat, their landlady almost fainted with alarm and “with a shriek of fright, she slammed the door in his face.”

This was far from the end of the story: the Tiflis bank robbery made Kamo a legend,[90] but its repercussions would help shatter the Party and were still threatening to damage Stalin as late as 1918.^{179}

As in every successful criminal enterprise, the hoodlums were soon fighting over the spoils. The police had published the serial numbers of 100,000 roubles of the notes. They would be very hard to cash, but Krasin’s Technical Group forger, known as Fat Fanny, changed some of the numbers on the notes. Lenin and Krasin decided to proceed, particularly since the rest of the heist-money was clean. The money was instantly smuggled abroad. Some was laundered through the Credit Lyonnais Bank. Litvinov distributed the cash to his operatives to change the money in different cities.

Meanwhile the secret police frantically pulled out the stops to catch the culprits, but they could discover nothing concrete. Their Tiflis informers, particularly one code-named “the Fat Lady,” revealed that SR gunmen had participated but had been robbed of their share of the spoils.

Their first suspect was the other Gori bank robber, Davrichewy, who was (according to Okhrana reports) “hiding in Lausanne under the name of Kamo.”

The Okhrana knew that “Kamo sent all the money to Krasin and Lenin,” but now the revolutionaries started to fall out. Lenin cashed at least 140,000 roubles from the proceeds of Kamo’s robbery. But in 1908 he embarked on a vicious if esoteric feud that would again tear the Party in half. He broke with Bogdanov and Krasin,[91] who purloined about 40,000 roubles of the Tiflis money for themselves. Litvinov sent “two Georgian terrorists” to tell them that if they did not return it fast, the Georgians would “bump off” one of the Central Committee.

Lenin was soon short of money again. Bank robberies were not his only dubious source of funding. He ordered a pair of roguish Bolshevik con men to seduce two unprepossessing sisters who had inherited the huge fortune of their uncle, Schmidt, the late industrialist. The double seductions were successful, though Lenin admitted that he would not have been able to do it himself. One of the seducers, Victor Taratuta, stole considerable sums of the inheritance to spend on high living before passing on the remainder to Lenin.

Kamo, now in Berlin, decided to help out by pulling off the biggest bank robbery of all, a 15-million-rouble heist “that would fund the Party for six years but cost at least 200 lives.” Hoarding stocks of dynamite and using a passport in the name of Mirsky, an insurance agent, he travelled in August to Berlin to procure explosives. But Lenin’s man in Berlin was Dr. Zhitomirsky, the double-agent who had informed the Okhrana about the London Congress. Zhitomirsky now betrayed Kamo.

On 27 October/9 November 1907, the German police raided Kamo’s hotel room and found numbered banknotes and 200 dynamite fuses, twelve fulminates of mercury and twenty electric batteries. The Okhrana were excited but they still did not know the identity of “Mirsky.” On 31 October/13 November, Garting, director of the Tsar’s Foreign Intelligence Service, announced triumphantly that “Mirsky” was planning a “vast heist” and that he had some of the Tiflis banknotes, but there was no proof of his participation in the actual outrage. The Okhrana still believed that Davrichewy was “Kamo.” So who was “Mirsky”?

Finally the Okhrana got lucky. On 1 March 1908, a former Bolshevik brigand in Kutaisi Prison, Arsen Karsidze, revealed that the chief bank robber was Simon Ter-Petrossian, known as Kamo, now held as “Mirsky” at Berlin’s Alt-Moabit Prison. Another report confirmed that Davrichewy was in exile in Switzerland and was not Kamo after all.

The Tsar’s government applied to extradite Kamo, who would face the death penalty. Krasin rushed to Berlin to orchestrate his defence and hired the German leftist attorney Oscar Kohn. Krasin advised Kamo to feign insanity, a role he was more qualified to play than most.

Kamo started to act like a madman in a way that only someone who had truly cracked could. He managed to maintain it for two whole years. First he started to bawl, cry, tear his clothes, beat the jailers. They moved him to a frozen dungeon where he was kept nude for nine days. He apparently did not sleep and spent the nights standing up for four months. Then he stopped eating; they force-fed him by tube. He pulled the hairs out of his head; tried to hang himself but was cut down; slit his wrists but was resuscitated. In May 1908, they moved him to Berlin’s Bukh psychiatric hospital for diagnosis. He copied other patients and adopted that great cliché of madness: he pretended to be Napoleon. The doctors were still sceptical and decided to put him through a series of torments that would have broken anyone else. He was burned by a red-hot iron and needles were driven under his nails, but he withstood it all. At last the Germans accepted that he was insane and, washing their hands of the troublesome loon, handed him over to the Russians, who, regardless, put him on trial for the Tiflis “outrage” and its fifty casualties. In court, the shambling, raving Kamo suddenly pulled a bird, Petka the greenfinch, out of his sleeve during the trial and talked crazily to his avian friend instead of the lawyers.

Premier Stolypin and the viceroy, Vorontsov-Dashkov, were determined to hang him. But his lawyer, Kohn, orchestrated such a successful European publicity campaign against the execution of a lunatic that Stolypin reluctantly decided that hanging would “unfavourably affect Russian interests.”

In tests, the Russian doctors found that Kamo’s skin did not register pain. They stuck more needles under his fingernails, then electrocuted him. “The burned flesh,” Kamo mused, “stung terribly.” Those doctors too were convinced.

In September 1910, Kamo was declared insane and locked up forever in the Metekhi Fortress’s unit for the criminally insane. The Bolsheviks acclaimed Kamo’s heroism, but one doctor explained that “only a terribly ill patient in a state of madness behaves this way.” Kamo, writes the historian Anna Geifman, was a creature of “unresolved passions and anxieties… unable to function normally… Feigning insanity, he actually was insane.”

Meanwhile the police tracked the marked banknotes which started turning up all over Europe. In Paris Litvinov found a detective under his hotel bed: he was arrested with twelve marked banknotes but was deported to London. Krasin was picked up in Finland. Other moneychangers were arrested in Munich, Zurich, Paris, Berlin and Stockholm.

“The Mensheviks did not get a penny [of the Tiflis heist cash],” reported the gleeful Okhrana, so “they demand on the basis of the resolutions of the London Congress to expel all these expropriators from the Party.”

Stalin was in trouble.^{180}

The outraged Mensheviks commissioned three different committees, operating over two years, to investigate who had organized the Tiflis bank robbery, one headed by Jordania in Tiflis, a second by Jibladze in Baku, and a third abroad, under Chicherin. The murderous heists damaged their reputation, but they also wanted to destroy Lenin, using Stalin and Kamo.

The Mensheviks managed to interrogate virtually all the key culprits, including Stalin himself, interviewed as “Comrade Koba” in Baku. Astonishingly, this survives in the archives, the first direct evidence of his involvement. The “inside men,” Kasradze and Voznesensky, admitted everything, blaming Stalin. Lenin asserted his own innocence to Chicherin, since the heists “had been carried out by non-Party members.” The Committees in Tiflis and Baku, according to Arsenidze and Uratadze, voted to expel Stalin. But the Party was already split, hence it is questionable if the Mensheviks had the power to expel a Bolshevik.

They nonetheless collected the evidence against Stalin to confront Lenin. In August 1908, they met in Geneva, where Martov lambasted Lenin. Noe Ramishvili named names—including the usual suspects Kamo and Tsintsadze—then declared that “all of these acted under the direction of Comrade Koba.”

Lenin jumped up to interrupt. “Don’t give the family name of this last,” he snapped.

“I won’t,” smiled Ramishvili, “because we all know that he’s well known as the Caucasian Lenin.” Stalin would have been proud.

“You take responsibility that these names won’t be divulged to the police?” insisted Lenin. The secrecy of Stalin’s meetings with Lenin had paid off: the Mensheviks could nail Stalin but could not implicate Lenin. But if any proof were needed of their relationship as early as 1907–8, Lenin’s protection of Stalin provides it.

It seems that Stalin was expelled, though surely not by the Central Committee but locally, in Tiflis and Baku. If proven, even this would have been a real blot on his revolutionary legitimacy.

When the Bolsheviks came to power with Stalin as one of Lenin’s closest henchmen, the Mensheviks tried to undermine them by resuscitating the whole affair. Martov published an article in 1918 that listed three examples of Stalin’s banditry—the Tiflis heist, the murder of a Baku worker, and the piratical holdup of another ship called the Nicholas I off Baku. Worse, Martov wrote that Stalin had been expelled from the Party in 1907. In 1918, Stalin needed the credentials of a long-serving Old Bolshevik and sensed danger in the expulsion story. So, somewhat hysterically, he attacked this “contemptible act of an unbalanced, defeated man” and sued Martov for “this filthy libel” before the Revolutionary Tribunal, one of the strangest trials in Soviet history.

Stalin neither denied nor admitted his role in the heists, but insisted, “Never in my life was I tried before any Party organization and expelled,” which was probably literally true because the Committees in Tiflis and Baku were Menshevik, not Bolshevik, and any expulsion was informal. Witnesses were going to be summoned to Moscow, but it was hard to do so during the Civil War. The trial was cancelled, and Martov reprimanded, but Stalin had made his point.

“You’re a wretched individual,” he snarled at Martov, who went into exile.[92] When Stalin returned to Tiflis in 1921 as a conquering Bolshevik, he was booed at a meeting and openly called a “bandit” to his face: he stormed out. Stalin’s brigandage and expulsion were never mentioned again during his reign.

Most important, Lenin did not take Stalin’s local expulsions seriously: “Such expulsions are almost always based on errors, unverified reports or misunderstandings…” Of course he knew more about it than he let on, but he increasingly recognized that Stalin, terrorist, gangster and covert organizer, had the “right stuff.”^{181}

The uproar about the Georgian job had been spectactular, but the heists were not over yet. The game of “bandits and Cossacks” was rougher still in Baku, where the stakes were much higher than in Tiflis. They proved too high for Kato.

21. The Tragedy of Kato: Stalin’s Stony Heart

Stalin settled Kato and Laddie, their baby, in the apartment of an oil worker and plunged himself into a life of banditry, espionage, extortion and agitation, the murkiest years of his entire career. Probably again on the Rothschild payroll, he soon moved his little family outside Baku city into a “Tartar house with a low ceiling on the Bailov Peninsula which he rented from its Turkish owner,” just above a cave, right on the seaside.

Kato, a born homemaker, made the shack cosy, with a wooden bed, curtains and her little sewing-machine in the corner. Visitors noticed the contrast between the sordid exterior and the tidiness inside—but Soso was not often there. Kato did not know many people, but Sergei Alliluyev visited them. He was now the manager of the local power plant and lived with Olga and the children in a villa by the sea. It was here in Baku that their youngest daughter, Nadezhda, wearing a pretty white dress, fell over the edge of their sunny yard into the Caspian Sea. Stalin jumped in and rescued her, a romantic tale, often retold as she grew up.

Always dressed in his trademark black fedora, Stalin gave a speech on 17 June 1907, the very day he arrived, and threw himself into his editing of the two Bolshevik newspapers, Bakinsky Proletary and Gudok (Whistle); he immediately set about dominating the Party there with his brand of aggressive politics, terrorist intimidation and gangster fund-raising.

Everywhere in Russia, “The reaction had triumphed, all liberties destroyed and revolutionary parties smashed,” recalls Tatiana Vulikh, but Baku, ruled as much by the oil companies and corrupt policemen as by the Tsar’s governors, followed its own rules. Stalin was on the run in Tiflis, but for a few months before Stolypin’s next crackdown he could stroll the Baku streets. Tiflis, said Stalin contemptuously, had been a parochial “marsh” but Baku “was one of the revolutionary centres of Russia,” its oil vital to the Tsar and the West, its workers a true proletariat, its streets violent and lawless. Baku, wrote Stalin, “would be my second baptism of fire.”^{182}

Baku was a city of “debauchery, despotism and extravagance,” and a twilight zone of “smoke and gloom.” Its own governor called it “the most dangerous place in Russia.” For Stalin, it was the “Oil Kingdom.”

Baku was created by one dynasty. Swedish by origin, Russian by opportunity and international by instinct, the Nobels made their first fortune selling land mines to Tsar Nicholas I, but in 1879, the year of Baku’s first “fountain” of oil, the brothers Ludwig and Robert Nobel founded the Nobel Brothers Oil Company in the town known mainly for the ancient Zoroastrian temple where Magi priests tended their holy oil-fuelled flames.[93] The drilling had already started; entrepreneurs struck oil in spectacular gushers.

The Nobels started to buy up land particularly in what became the Black City. Another brother, Alfred, invented dynamite, but Ludwig’s invention of the oil tanker was almost as important. The French Rothschilds followed the Nobels into Baku. By the 1880s, Baron Alphonse de Rothschild’s Caspian Black Sea Oil Company was the second biggest producer—and its workers lived in the industrial township called the White City.[94] By 1901, Baku produced half the world’s oil—and the Nobel Prize, established that year, was funded on its profits.

Its oil boom, like the Kimberley Diamond Fever or the California Gold Rush, turned peasants into millionaires overnight. A dusty, windy ex-Persian town, built on the edge of the Caspian around the walls and winding streets of a medieval fortress, was transformed into one of the most famous cities in the world.

Its “barbaric luxury” filled the newspapers of Europe, scintillated by instant riches, remarkable philanthropy and preposterous vulgarity. Every oil baron had to have a palace, many as big as a city block. Even the Rothschilds built one. The Nobels’ palace was called Villa Petrolea, and was surrounded by a lush park. One oil baron insisted on building his palace out of gold but had to agree to cover it with goldplate because the gold would melt; another built his mansion like the body of a giant dragon with the entrance through its jaws; a third created his vast palace in the shape of a pack of cards emblazoned in golden letters: “Here live I, Isa-Bey of Gandji.” A popular singer made his fortune when a performance was rewarded by some land on which oil was struck: his neo-classical palace is now the headquarters of Azerbaijan’s state oil company.

Baku was a melting-pot of pitiful poverty and incredible wealth, its streets, observes Anna Alliluyeva, full of “red-bearded Muslims… street porters called ambals bent under excessive loads… Tartar hawkers selling sweetmeats, strange figures in whispering silks whose fiery black eyes watched through slits, street barbers, everything seemed to take place in the streets,” crowded with tribesmen in pleated coats with jewelled daggers, Persians in waistcoats and felt hats, Mountain Jews in fur hats, and Western millionaires in frock coats, their wives in French fashions. Stalin called its workforce of Turkish Azeris, Persians, Russians, Chechens and Armenians “a national kaleidoscope.” The rich promenaded down the Seaside Esplanade shadowed by carriages of gun-toting bodyguards.

Yet the source of all this money, the derricks and the refineries, poisoned the city and corrupted the people. “The oil seeped everywhere,” says Anna Alliluyeva. “Trees couldn’t grow in this poisonous atmosphere.” Sometimes it bubbled out of the sea and ignited, creating extraordinary waves of fire.

The Black and White Cities and other oil townships were polluted slums. The 48,000 workers toiled in terrible conditions, living and fighting each other in grimy streets “littered with decaying rubbish, disembowelled dogs, rotten meat, faeces.” Their homes resembled “prehistoric dwellings.” Life expectancy was just thirty. The oilfields seethed with “lawlessness, organized crime and xenophobia. Physical violence, rapes and bloodfeuds dominated workers’ everyday lives.”

Baku, states Stalin, was “irrepressible,” its rootless proletariat ideal for the Bolsheviks. It was especially corrupt; its moral ambiguities and duplicitious opportunities suited Stalin’s conspiratorial cynicism. It was said that there were only ten honest men in the entire city (a Swede—Mr. Nobel, of course—an Armenian and eight Tartars).

“Equal parts Dodge City, medieval Baghdad, industrial Pittsburgh and nineteenth-century Paris,” Baku “was too Persian to be European but much too European to be Persian.” Its police chiefs were notoriously venal; its Armenians and Azeris armed and vigilant; its plentiful gunmen, the kochis, either performed assassinations for three roubles a victim, guarded millionaires or became “Mauserists,” gangsters always brandishing their Mausers. “Our city,” writes Essad Bey, “not unlike the Wild West, was teeming with bandits and robbers.”

In Baku, brashly taking on oil barons, and Menshevik and Bolshevik “rightists,” Stalin prospered to become the revolutionary and criminal kingpin of the Oil Kingdom. It was through Baku[95] that he, belatedly, found a national Russian role, graduating from “an apprentice to a craftsman of the Revolution.” Here he became the “second Lenin.”^{183}

In August 1907, when poor Kato was suffering grievously from the stifling, polluted heat of Baku, Stalin returned to Germany to attend the Congress of the Second International in Stuttgart. He met up with Alyosha Svanidze, still studying at Leipzig. Soso and his brother-in-law, writes Monoselidze, “went sightseeing, visiting meetings of German workers in restaurants, and cafés.”

The Germans “are a queer people like sheep,” Stalin later told the Yugoslav leader Milovan Djilas (he told Churchill the same story). “Wherever the ram went, they just followed.” On the way to the conference, some German Communists felt unable to leave the station because there was no ticket-collector. They were so obedient to the rules that, Stalin said, “They actually missed the meeting for which they’d made the entire trip.” He joked that a Russian comrade had shown them a “simple solution: leave the platform without handing in the tickets!”^{184}

Soso was back in Baku in time for another outbreak of ethnic turbulence. On 19 September, an Azeri worker named Khanlar was murdered by Russian nationalists. In protest the workers went on strike. Stalin spoke at the funeral demonstration.

At a meeting soon afterwards, he and the Bolsheviks routed the Mensheviks and took control of the local organization: Baku became a Bolshevik city. Soso concentrated on his work, but, Monoselidze notes, “when he was involved, he forgot everything”—including Kato.

“Soso loved her so much,” says Elisabedashvili, who joined him in Baku. “Wife, child, friend were only okay if they didn’t hinder his work and saw things his way. You had to know Soso to understand his love.”

“It was too hot in Baku” for Kato. “Soso would go early in the morning and return late at night while Kato sat at home with a tiny baby terrified that he would be arrested,” remembers Monoselidze. “Bad diet, little sleep, the heat and stress weakened her and she fell ill. Surrounded by strangers, she had no friends around her. Soso was so busy he forgot his family!”

Stalin knew he was being a neglectful husband and father, but, like many who have suffered broken families, he could not change his behaviour. He must have talked about it with Elisabedashvili: “Soso regretted it and was angry at himself for having married in such circumstances.”

Kato “prayed that Koba would turn away from his ideas and return to a peaceful homelife.” But he had chosen a mission that in many ways let him off the normal responsibilities of a family man. Bolshevik wives knew this. “Am I a martyr?” Spandarian’s much cuckolded wife, Olga, asked of her marriage to Stalin’s friend—but she might have been describing Stalin too. “I make as much as I can of my life. My path is not covered with roses but I chose it… He’s not for family life but that doesn’t diminish his character. He carries out his mission… It’s possible to love a man and forgive him everything for the sake of the good he has inside.” Kato knew that Stalin, like Spandarian, had “sworn to remain for ever a true Knight of the Grail” of Marxism.[96]

The Svanidzes in Tiflis heard first that Kato “was very thin,” recalls her sister Sashiko, who invited her to recuperate in their home village.

“How can I leave Soso?” replied Kato.

Soon the Svanidzes heard from Elisabedashvili that “she was sick and they wrote to ask Soso to bring her back.” Kato begged him. Now she was really ill, “but he kept postponing the trip until she became weak and suddenly he realized he had to act immediately.” In October, Stalin was sufficiently alarmed to escort her back to Tiflis. But the journey itself, more than thirteen hours, was debilitating: “It was too hot on the way and she drank bad water at a station.” Afterwards, Soso hastened back to Baku, leaving her with her family.

Back at home, she deteriorated. Already weak, exhausted and malnourished, she had contracted typhus, which is usually accompanied by a fever and diarrhoea. Its speckled rash showed first red and then darkened ominously. Historians usually diagnose her illness as tuberculosis, but if so it had infected her innards. Family and friends, whose memoirs were not available to previous historians, agree on a diagnosis of typhus along with haemorrhagic colitis. Kato haemorrhaged blood and fluid in miserable spasms of dysentery.

Stalin rushed back again from Baku to find the mother of his Laddie dying. He “nursed her desperately and tenderly, suffering himself,” but it was too late. She supposedly called for a priest to give her final sacraments and Stalin promised her an Orthodox burial. Two weeks after her return home, on 22 November 1907, Kato, aged just twenty-two, “died in his arms.”[97] Stalin was poleaxed.^{185}

22. Boss of the Black City: Plutocrats, Protection-Rackets and Piracy

Soso closed Kato’s eyes himself. Stunned, he managed to stand beside his wife’s body with the family for a photograph but then collapsed. “Nobody could believe Soso was so wounded,” wrote Elisabedashvili. He sobbed that “he couldn’t manage to make her happy.”

Soso was in such despair that his friends were worried about leaving him with his Mauser. “I was so overcome with grief that my comrades took my gun away from me,” he later told a girlfriend. “I realized how many things in life I hadn’t appreciated. While my wife was alive, there were times I didn’t return home at night. I told her when I left not to worry about me but when I got home, she’d be sitting there. She’d wait up all night.”[98]

The death was announced in Tskaro newspaper;[99] and the funeral was held at 9 a.m. on 25 November 1907, at the Kulubanskaya Church, right next to the Svanidze home—where they had married. The body was then conveyed through the town and buried at St. Nina’s Church in Kukia. The Orthodox funeral was both traumatic and farcical. Stalin, pale and tearful, “was very downcast yet greeted me in a friendly way like the old days,” remembers Iremashvili. Soso took him aside. “This creature,” he gestured at the open coffin, “softened my heart of stone. She died and with her died my last warm feelings for humanity.” He placed his hand over his heart: “It’s all so desolate here, so indescribably desolate.”

At the burial, Soso’s habitual control cracked. He threw himself into the grave with the coffin. The men had to haul him out. Kato was buried—but, just then, revolutionary konspiratsia disrupted family grief. Soso noticed some Okhrana agents sidling towards the funeral. He scarpered towards the back of the graveyard and vaulted over the fence, disappearing from his own wife’s funeral—an ironic comment on his marital negligence.

For two months, Stalin vanishes from the record. “Soso sank into deep grief,” says Monoselidze. “He barely spoke and nobody dared speak to him. All the time he blamed himself for not accepting our advice and for taking her to Baku in the heat.” Perhaps sensing the subdued anger in the Svanidze household, Soso went home to his mother in Gori to grieve. When he met one of his school friends, “He cried like a brat, hard as he was.”

“My personal life is shattered,” sobbed Stalin. “Nothing attaches me to life except socialism. I’m going to dedicate my existence to that!” This was the sort of rationalization that he would use to explain ever more unspeakable tragedies which he himself arranged for his family and friends. In old age, he talked wistfully and tenderly about his Kato. He paid her a characteristic compliment. He signed his first articles in tribute to his father (“Besoshvili”), but now he chose a new byline: “K. Kato” (Koba Kato).

Even though his son was in Tiflis, he had no intention of moving back to that parochial “marsh” where he was already a political outcast. So he abandoned his son for more than ten years.

“Kato died,” says Monoselidze, “leaving eight-month-old Laddie to us.” Kato’s mother, Sepora, and the Monoselidzes raised the baby, whom Stalin barely even visited. Perhaps Laddie reminded him of the entire disaster.

This was not the Georgian way. The family, while awed by his conspiratorial competence, were appalled. In their memoirs, the Svanidzes and Elisabedashvili, writing thirty years later during Stalin’s dictatorship, though before the Terror, courageously recorded their disapproval of his behaviour, making it clear they continued to blame his neglect for Kato’s death.

“After that,” Monoselidze concludes tellingly, “Soso went to Baku and I didn’t see him until 1912, though we got a letter from exile asking for some wine and jam.”^{186}

When Stalin emerged from mourning at the end of 1907, he joined decadent Spandarian for a New Year’s Eve dinner in a Baku restaurant. He was among old friends in the revolutionary capital of the Empire. The Bolsheviks there formed a cast reunion of Stalin’s career so far: as the Bolsheviks dwindled in Russia itself, Russian and Caucasian revolutionaries flooded into Baku, often interfering with Stalin’s work.[100] It was probably quite a party because Spandarian, who was “very close to Stalin in moral character,” was also “an incredibly lazy and sybaritic ladies’ man and lover of money.” Spandarian’s womanizing did not worry his wife, Olga, who said, “Suren never swore to be faithful to me, only to remain for ever the Knight of the Idea” of Bolshevism. But the Bolshevik playboy certainly shocked his comrades. “All the children in Baku,” recalls Tatiana Vulikh, “who are up to three years old look like Spandarian!”

Soso threw himself into his work again, reassembling the Outfit. He and Spandarian immediately started to push for more radical strikes and agitation, calling on the often illiterate Azeri and Persian workers to support them. Most intellectuals were too snobbish to bother with these illiterates, but Soso packed meetings with the Muslims, who voted for him en masse. One of his important contributions was to promote and work with the radicals of Himmat (Energy), a Muslim Bolshevik group. The Muslims often hid Stalin in mosques when he was on the run. In a row with Mensheviks, one of Stalin’s Muslim allies drew a dagger on Devdariani.

Through these Muslim connections, Stalin helped arm the Persian Revolution. He sent fighters and arms under Sergo to overthrow the Shah of Persia, Mohammed Ali, whom his Bolsheviks tried to assassinate. Stalin even crossed the border to Persia himself to organize his partisans, visiting Resht: the 1943 Teheran Conference was not his first time in Iran.

Shaumian was rattled by the crushing success of the Tsar’s backlash. He and Yenukidze, who had just returned from exile, took a more “rightist” moderate approach than Stalin, but could not break his dominance. Shaumian urged restraint. Stalin mocked his privileged existence, intriguing against him with his “closest friend and right-hand man, Spandarian.” After Stalin’s death, it was said he feuded with Shaumian, but this tension has been exaggerated. They worked well together—with mutual suspicion.^{187}

Soon after his return, Stalin left on a secret trip to visit Lenin, who had now settled in Geneva. We know they met sometime in 1908, we know Stalin went to Switzerland. Stalin himself mentioned such a meeting in his reminiscences. He also met Plekhanov, who “exasperated” him. Stalin “was convinced he was a congenital aristocrat.” What really turned him against the sage was the fact that “Plekhanov’s daughter had aristocratic manners, dressed in the latest fashions, and wore boots with high heels!” Stalin was already at least partly a sanctimonious ascetic.^{188}

Stalin and Lenin would have discussed money. Lenin was duelling with the Mensheviks while pursuing the fissiparous feud against Bogdanov and Krasin, who had stolen much of his Tiflis-heist booty, which in turn was being vigorously pursued by the European police. Thus the organization, now battered within by Lenin’s schisms and without by Stolypin’s victorious repression, was, explains Vulikh, “desperate for money.”

Sure enough, says Kavtaradze, Stalin’s henchman in Baku, “It was decided once again to get cash for the Party.” When the “chief financier of the Bolshevik Centre” heard the word “money,” he reached for his Mauser.

“In Baku,” says Sagirashvili, who was there too, “Koba was on the lookout for the criminal types, the ‘hotheads’ as he called them, the cutthroats. In America, such men would be gangsters,” but Stalin surrounded them “with the aura of revolutionary fighters.” Stalin “suggested organizing the Bolshevik Battle Squad.” Tsintsadze, Kupriashvili and some new faces joined Stalin’s Outfit of so-called Mauserists.

Kavtaradze assisted Soso with the planning under the aegis of his portentously named Self-Defence Headquarters. Stalin’s other sidekick was a red-haired lawyer, born in Odessa, son of a well-off Baku family with noble Polish antecedents: Andrei Vyshinsky, now twenty-three, a Menshevik, had given up the law, organized terrorist gangs and become a hit man in 1905. But Stalin, perhaps recognizing a usefully ruthless young rogue, relaxed his anti-Menshevik rigour. He commissioned Vyshinsky to procure arms and bombs.

“Politics is a dirty business,” Stalin said later. “We all did dirty work for the Revolution.” Stalin became the effective godfather of a small but useful fund-raising operation that really resembled a moderately successful Mafia family, conducting shakedowns, currency counterfeiting, extortion, bank robberies, piracy and protection-rackets—as well as political agitation and journalism.

Stalin’s aim, says one of his Mauserists, Ivan Bokov,[101] was “to threaten the oil tycoons and Black Hundreds [the right-wing Russian nationalists who had their own armed groups].” He ordered the Mauserists to murder many of the Black Hundreds, according to Bokov. Then the Outfit planned to rob the Baku State Bank. Kavtaradze explains that “we learned that 4 million roubles for the Turkestan Region were being transported by ship via Baku and the Caspian Sea. Therefore at the start of 1908 we started to assemble in Baku.” They would take the captain hostage—echoes of the Tsarevich Giorgi.

An act of piracy took place on a ship named the Nicholas I in Baku port: the Mensheviks investigated Stalin for this outrage, yet another infringement of Party rules. At the 1918 libel trial, Martov had enough evidence of Stalin’s participation in the Nicholas I heist to call for witnesses. Later, the Trotskyite Victor Serge wrote that Vyshinsky, in a rash admission before the Bolsheviks came to power, had said, “Koba was deeply embroiled” in “the expropriation on the steamer Nicholas I in Baku harbour.”

Next, “Stalin thought up the idea” to raid the Baku naval arsenal. As ever, “He took the initiative to make us the [inside] connections with naval people,” reminisced his gunman Bokov. “We organized a gang of comrades… and raided the arsenal,” killing some of the guards. But Soso was also raising money day to day through “contributions from industrialists.”

Many tycoons and middle-class professionals were sympathetic contributors to the Bolsheviks. Berta Nussimbaum, wife of an oil baron and mother of the writer Essad Bey, was a Bolshevik sympathizer. “My mother,” Essad Bey says, “financed Stalin’s illicit communist press with her diamonds.” It remains astonishing how the Rothschilds and other oil barons, among the richest tycoons in Europe, funded the Bolsheviks, who would ultimately destroy their interests. Alliluyev remembered these Rothschild contributions.

The Rothschild managing director, David Landau, regularly contributed to Bolshevik funds, as recorded by the Okhrana—whose agents noted how, when Stalin was running the Baku Party, a Bolshevik clerk in one of the oil companies “was not active in operations but concentrated on collecting donations and got money from Landau of the Rothschilds.” It is likely that Landau met Stalin personally. Another Rothschild executive, Dr. Felix Somary, a banker with the Austrian branch of the family and later a distinguished academic, claims he was sent to Baku to settle a strike. He paid Stalin the money. The strike ended.

Stalin regularly met another top businessman, Alexander Mancho, managing director of the Shibaev and Bibi-Eibat oil companies. “We often got money from Mancho for our organization,” recalls Ivan Vatsek, one of Stalin’s henchmen. “In such cases, Comrade Stalin came to me. Comrade Stalin also knew him well.” Either Mancho was a committed sympathizer or Stalin was blackmailing him, because the businessman coughed up cash on request at even the shortest notice.

Stalin was also running protection-rackets and kidnappings. Many tycoons paid if they did not wish their oilfields to catch fire or “accidents” to befall their families. It is hard to differentiate donations from protection-money, because the felonies Stalin now unleashed on them included “robberies, assaults, extortion of rich families, and kidnapping their children on the streets of Baku in broad daylight and then demanding ransom in the name of some ‘revolutionary committee,’” states Sagirashvili, who knew him in Baku. The “kidnapping of children was a routine matter at the time,” recalls Essad Bey, who as a boy never went out without a phalanx of three kochi bodyguards and a “fourth servant, mounted and armed, who rode behind me.”

Baku folklore claims that Stalin’s most profitable kidnapping was that of Musa Nageyev, the tenth richest oil baron, a notoriously stingy ex-peasant who so admired the Palazzo Cantarini in Venice that he built his own (bigger) copy—the majestic Venetian-Gothic Ismailiye Palace (now the Academy of Sciences). Nageyev was actually kidnapped twice, but his own accounts of these traumas were confused and murky. Neither case was ever solved, but Bolshevik involvement was suspected. Years later, Nageyev’s granddaughter, Jilar-Khanum, claimed that Stalin jokingly sent the oil baron thanks for his generous contributions to the Bolsheviks.[102]

It was said that the millionaires like Nageyev were keen to pay up after a “ten-minute conversation” with Stalin. This was probably thanks to his system of printing special forms that read:

The form was delivered to oil companies and the cash was collected by Soso’s technical assistant—“a very tall man who was known as ‘Stalin’s bodyguard,’ visibly packing a pistol. Nobody refused to pay.”

The Bolshevik boss befriended organized crime in Baku, their operations and those of the Mauserists often overlapping. One gang controlled access to some wasteland in the Black City section. Stalin “made an agreement with the gang only to let through Bolsheviks, not Mensheviks. The Bolsheviks had special passwords.” In Russia’s wildest city, both sides used violence: the oil tycoons employed Chechen ruffians as oilfield guards. One of the richest oil barons, Murtuza Mukhtarov, who resided in Baku’s biggest palace based on a French Gothic château, ordered his kochis to kill the young Stalin. Soso was badly beaten up by Chechens, probably on Mukhtarov’s orders.[103]

Stalin’s secrecy was so absolute that the Mauserist Bokov said, “It was sometimes so conspiratorial that we didn’t even know where he was for six months! He had no permanent address and we only knew him as ‘Koba.’ If he had an appointment he never turned up on time; he turned up either a day early or a day later. He never changed his clothes, so he looked like an unemployed person.” Soso’s comrades noticed that he was different from the usual passionate Caucasian. “Sentiment was foreign to him,” says one. “No matter how much he loved a fellow, he’d never forgive him even the tiniest spoiling of a Party matter—he’d skin him alive.”

So again he succeeded in raising money and guns, but with him there was always a human cost. The traditional Bolsheviks like Alexinsky and Zemliachka were “very indignant at these expropriations” and killings. “Stalin blamed one member for provocation. There was no definite evidence, but that person was forced out of the city, ‘judged,’ condemned to death and shot.”

Stalin prided himself on being what he called a praktik, a practical hard man, an expert on what he called “black work,” rather than a chatty intelligent, but his gift was for being both. Lenin soon heard a storm of complaints about Stalin’s banditry, but by now, writes Vulikh, Stalin “was the true boss in the Caucasus” with “a lot of supporters devoted to him who respected him as the second person in the Party after Lenin. Among the intelligentsia, he was less loved, but everybody recognized that he was the most energetic and indispensable person.”

Soso had an “electrical effect” on his followers, of whom he took good care. He had a talent for political friendship that played a major role in his rise to power. His roommate from Stockholm, Voroshilov, the eager, fair-haired and dandyish lathe-turner,[104] joined him in Baku but fell ill. “He visited me every evening,” said Voroshilov. “We joked a lot. He asked if I liked poetry and recited a whole Nekrasov poem by heart. Then we sang together. He really had a good voice and fine ear.” “Poetry and music,” Stalin told Voroshilov, “elevate the spirit!” When Alliluyev was arrested again, he worried about his family, so once released he came to consult Soso, who insisted he had to leave, giving him cash to move to Moscow. “Take the money, you’ve children, you must look after them.”

The death of Kato was a grievous blow, but even in early 1908 the widower who signed his articles “Koba Kato” found time for partying, and never lacked female company.

23. Louse Racing, Murder and Madness—Prison Games

Whenever the Outfit pulled off a heist, Stalin and Spandarian spent a little of it on a wild party. In a very Bolshevik in-joke on the Party’s endless political schisms, Soso called these festivities uklonenia— deviations.

“When Stalin collected some extra pennies,” reports A. D. Sa-kvarelidze, who ran Stalin’s cash-counterfeiting operations, “we’d hold a ‘deviational’ meeting in a remote bistro or a private room at a gorgeous restaurant, often Svet Restaurant on Trading Street, where we’d have a feast, especially after celebrating the success of some deed. Spandarian especially liked ‘deviations’ where we’d talk frankly, eat deliciously and sing loudly, particularly Stalin.” Wherever Spandarian went, girls usually followed.

A comrade from Batumi introduced his pretty sister, Alvasi Tala-kvadze, to Stalin. She was just eighteen, a self-confessed “spoilt child,” brimming with revolutionary ardour. “Koba—the head of the Baku proletariat—used the backroom of my brother’s flowerstall in the Bibi-Eibat oilfield as his base,” she explains. So Stalin took Talakvadze under his wing, giving her the moniker “Comrade Plus” because of her enthusiasm. Even in absurdly turgid Stalinist jargon, the girl’s memoirs record a close relationship: “Koba was enlightening me ideologically, conducting with me discussions on social-political subjects, and developing in me class-consciousness, introducing me to a faith in victory.” One is tempted to read “developing class-consciousness” and “introducing faith in victory” as euphemisms, because Alvasi Talakvadze later let it be known she was Stalin’s girlfriend in 1908.

His gift for conspiracy was ingenious, if sometimes macabre. This girlfriend became “adept at tricking the spooks, but Koba devised the most original tricks.” One day, he ordered her to take some secret documents to the Balakhana oilfield in a coffin. “You must play the role of a mourning sister who is burying her dead baby brother with her bare hands,” said Stalin, sending her to a cemetery and directing her performance like a playwright. “You’ll loosen your hair, hold the coffin, sob, say you’re left alone and blame yourself for his death. Don’t bury it too deeply.” He handed her a shovel. The “director” praised her performance, covertly observing her. “Even now,” she mused later, “I don’t know how he watched me so acutely.”

Alvasi Talakvadze does not seem to have been his only relationship with a comrade. He also came to know Ludmilla Stal, “a famous activist among women” who was described later as “buxom but pretty.” The daughter of the owner of a steel mill from south Ukraine, six years older than Soso, she was already a prison veteran. Soon afterwards, she went into exile in Paris. The affair was said to be intermittent, but it had an influence on the younger Stalin. They possibly met later during Stalin’s visits abroad to see Lenin, with whom Ludmilla worked closely. They certainly met again in 1917. But nothing survives of their friendship—except one surprising lifelong relic: his renowned name.

The secret police had lost Stalin when he moved cities after the Tiflis spectacular. Now they were back on his case. When Stalin’s hit man Bokov was arrested, “The Gendarme asked me: who was Stalin himself and in particular what was his role in the robbery of the [Baku port] arsenal?”

On 15 March 1908, the Gendarmes raided a Party meeting in the People’s Hall. Stalin, Shaumian and Spandarian escaped, but the Gendarmes were on the trail of the Mauserists. Just as Tsintsadze and the Outfit set the date for the holdups of the State Bank and the gold ship, Cossacks and Gendarmes “attacked our safe house.” In the shootout, several Cossacks were killed, but the Outfit lost its best Mauserist triggerman, Intskirveli, veteran of the Tiflis bank robbery. The plans were abandoned; Kavtaradze left secret work and went to Petersburg University—but he remained in Stalin’s life until the end.

On the night of 25 March, Baku’s police chief raided “several dens of delinquents where certain criminal suspects were arrested including Gaioz Besoevich Nizheradze, bearing criminal papers, who I therefore placed at the disposal of the Gendarmerie.” The man carried the passport of a nobleman named Nizheradze, but perhaps the patronymic “Son of Beso” was a better guide to the real identity of the most prominent Bolshevik in the Caucasus: “the second Lenin.” After four years, the Okhrana had got Stalin.^{189}

When the new prisoner arrived in Baku’s Bailov Prison wearing a blue-satin smock and a dashing Caucasian hood, the other political prisoners passed the word to be careful. “This is secret,” they whispered. “That is Koba!” They feared Stalin “more than the police.”

The bogeyman did not disappoint. He had the “ability quietly to incite others while he himself remained on the sidelines. The sly schemer did not spurn any means necessary but managed to avoid public responsibility.” In his seven months at the famous Bailovka, set amid the oilfields, Stalin dominated its power structures. He read, studied Esperanto, which he regarded as the language of the future,[105] and stirred up a series of witch hunts for traitors that often ended in death. His reign at the Bailovka was a microcosm of his dictatorship of Russia.

Soso was placed in Cell 3 with the mainly Bolshevik politicals (most Mensheviks were in Cell 7). The politicals were so organized in the Bailovka, they even had a Credentials Commission. In his cell, Stalin found his fellow Bolshevik praktik Sergo and his Menshevik henchman Vyshinsky. The latter was elected Elder in charge of food, which was a sensible appointment since he received regular hampers of delicacies from his prosperous wife and parents. He shared these hampers with Stalin, a prudent generosity that may have contributed to his survival in the Terror.

The Elders divided the days into hours for leisure, cleaning and discussion. Bedmates (Stalin shared with a Goreli named Ilia Nadiradze) and domestic chores were assigned by the Elders, including washing up dishes and emptying latrines, but typically, recalls Sakvarelidze, “Stalin was often released from such duties.”

One of his cellmates, Simon Vereshchak, a Menshevik, wrote a penetrating portrait of Stalin in the Bailovka. He hated him for his crude cunning yet, in spite of himself, was fascinated by Stalin’s supreme confidence, vigilant intelligence, machine-like memory and sangfroid: “It was impossible to throw him off balance, nothing could get his goat!” Stalin was the only cellmate who slept soundly even when the prisoners could hear men being hanged in the courtyard.

Soso did not invent the death penalty for traitors. “In the Bailovka,” explains Vereshchak, “provocateurs were usually killed”—but after investigation and trial. Stalin killed by proxy, and stealth. First, “Mitka the Greek stabbed a young worker for being a police spy. Koba had ordered the hit.” Then “a young Georgian was beaten up in the corridor of the political building. The word spread, ‘Provocateur!’ Everyone joined in, beating him with whatever they could, until the walls were spattered in blood. The bloody body was taken away on a stretcher. Later we learned that the rumour had started with Koba.”

The politicals held debates that often turned sour. Stalin most disliked the Christian Socialists, who followed Leo Tolstoy. Sergo, who always hit first and thought afterwards, got into a fight with some SRs. “Sergo really punched but none of the SRs was strong enough to hit Sergo,” Stalin later wrote to Voroshilov, protecting Ordzhonikidze’s amour propre when the three of them were ruling the USSR. In fact, the SRs beat up Sergo.

Stalin dealt with political dilemmas by making himself “the best authority on Marx. Marxism was his element in which he was unconquerable. He knew how to substantiate anything with an appropriate formula from Marx” yet his style was “unpleasant, coarse, devoid of wit, dry and formal.”[106]

Stalin still preferred rogues to revolutionaries. He was “always seen in the company of cutthroats, blackmailers, robbers and the gunslingers—the Mauserists.” Sometimes the criminal prisoners raided the politicals, but the Georgian criminals, probably organized by Stalin, served as their bodyguards. In power, he shocked his comrades by promoting criminals in the NKVD, but he had used criminals all his life.

These two species came together to bet on prison games such as wrestling competitions and louse racing. Stalin did not like chess but “he and Sergo Ordzhonikidze often played backgammon all night.” The cruellest game was “Madness,” in which a young prisoner was placed in the criminals’ cell to be driven mad. Bets were taken on how long it would take for the youngster to crack up. Sometimes the victim really did go crazy.

The prison was overcrowded with victims of Stolypin’s repressions: 1,500 shared cells built for 400. Stalin suffered from a shadow on his lung and found it hard to breathe in the heat. The sturdy “Barrel” Mdi-vani, who was at certain times in the same cell, lifted Soso onto his shoulders to let him breathe at the high window while the rest of the cell laughed and shouted: “Giddy-up, Barrel, giddy-up!” When the Barrel later visited Stalin in the Kremlin, he always greeted him: “Giddy-up, Soso!”

Stalin protested against the conditions and provoked the authorities, who sent a company of soldiers to beat up the politicals. Forced to run the gauntlet, “Koba walked, his head unbowed, under the blows of the riflebutts, a book in his hands,” observed Vereshchak. In response, “He smashed the door of his cell with a slop-bucket, ignoring the threat of the bayonets.”

It was impossible to move “without standing on someone’s toe,” but the overcrowding presented opportunities for shenanigans. Stalin’s bedmate Nadiradze from Gori arranged for his wife to escort Keke on a visit to Baku. The two women visited son and husband. Stalin “greeted her so cordially. His mother burst into tears on seeing her only son,” but he “calmed her saying the revolutionary couldn’t do without prisons… We chatted gaily for two whole hours,” says Nadiradze. Stalin got his mother to deliver secret notes to the Baku revolutionaries—which almost got her arrested.

The Outfit was planning Soso’s escape. At night, he used a hacksaw, smuggled to him by a warder, to cut the bars of his cell. Outside the jail walls, his Mauserists waited on the appointed day with a phaeton to whisk him to freedom. But the plan must have been betrayed because at the last minute incorruptible Cossacks assumed guard duties. Stalin’s escape attempt had to be cancelled.

The slow Tsarist system, creaking along with its usual confusion and leniency, took even longer than usual to sort out his identity and prosecute his case. Finally he was given a surprisingly lax sentence of just two years’ exile in European Vologda Province instead of Asiatic Siberia.

Just before his departure, the disorder in the overcrowded Bailovka gave Stalin the chance to attempt a swap between himself and another prisoner. It seemed to go according to plan:[107] the substitute took his place; Soso kissed his fellow prisoners goodbye and was escorted from his cell.^{190}

24. “River Cock” and the Noblewoman

Yet somewhere the swap was unravelled. Stalin’s attempted substitution must have been unmasked before he even left the Bailovka (betrayed by the same police spy who had informed on his planned escape or foiled by an underbribed guard) in time to be despatched to his place of exile. Vologda was much closer than Siberia, but the etap took over three months including a stay in Moscow’s Butyrki Prison, where so many would perish in Stalin’s Great Terror.

Soso again had no winter clothing and wrote to Shaumian in Baku for help. “We couldn’t even get hold of a second-hand suit,” wrote Shaumian, “but sent him 5 roubles.” Stolypin had tightened up the more relaxed regime in Baku. The police were successfully smashing the Bolsheviks there, its membership withering away, its leaders arrested or killed. “No money,” reported Shaumian. “Revolutionaries hungry and weak.”

In Vologda Prison,[108] Stalin led a protest and defied the authorities. “He didn’t really obey anyone,” says a fellow prisoner. “He only retreated when they used force.” On the way from Vologda town to his place of exile, he either fell sick with typhus or managed to persuade a doctor to park him in the comfort of Viatka Hospital. Finally, travelling by sleigh through frozen landscape, Stalin arrived in late February 1909 at the village of Solvychegodsk.

One of the first to welcome him to the Solvychegodsk community of about 450 exiles was an exiled girl, a teacher named Tatiana Sukhova, with whom it seems he conducted a love affair.

In his short time in Solvychegodsk, he was to find two mistresses among the small group of politicals. Even in these years of penniless obscurity he was never without at least one girlfriend, and often more. Indeed in exile he became almost libertine.

Stalin was “handsome” to women, Molotov recalled, despite his pock-marks and freckles. “Women must have been enamoured by him because he was successful with them. He had honey-coloured eyes. They were beautiful.” Soso was “quite attractive,” Zhenya Alliluyeva, future sister-in-law and probable mistress, told her daughter. “He was a thin man, strong and energetic [with] an incredible shock of hair and shining eyes.” Everyone always mentions those “burning eyes.”

Even his unattractive features had their charms. His enigmatic mien, his arrogance, ruthlessness, feline vigilance, obsessional studying and acute intelligence perhaps made him more compelling to women. His oddness could be seen as eccentric. Maybe his very lack of interest was somehow winning. Certainly, his apparent inability to look after himself—he was lonesome, skinny, scruffy—made women, throughout his life, wish to look after him. And then there was his nationality.

Georgians enjoyed a reputation for being passionate and romantic. When not being a surly brute, Stalin played the chivalrous Georgian suitor, singing songs and admiring girls’ beautiful dresses while presenting them with silk handkerchiefs and flowers. Furthermore, he was sexually competitive, cuckolding his comrades when it suited him, especially in exile. Stalin the flirt, the boyfriend, even the husband, was sometimes tender and humorous. But if the ladies expected a traditional Georgian Casanova they must have been bitterly disappointed when they grew to know him better.

Strange, eccentric and lacking in empathy, he was riddled with complexes about his personality, family and physique. He was so sensitive about his webbed toes that when his feet were later being examined by his Kremlin doctors, he hid the rest of his body—and his face—under a blanket. He later had his pockmarks powdered by his bodyguards and covered in official photographs. He was shy about his own nudity even in the Russian bathhouse, the banya, and uneasy about his stiff arm, which later prevented him from slow-dancing with women: he admitted he “couldn’t take a woman by the waist.” As Kato learned during their marriage, he was impossibly distant and hard to know. His seething, egocentric energy sucked the air from every room and wore down the weak without giving them emotional nourishment. The tender moments could not compensate for the glacial detachment and morose oversensitivity. As Natasha Kirtava discovered, when crossed, he turned nasty.

Women ranked low on his list of priorities, far below revolution, egotism, intellectual pursuits and hard-drinking dinners with male friends. Combining coarse virility with Victorian prudery, he was certainly no sensualist, no epicurean. He rarely talked about his own sex-life, yet he was promiscuous—which may explain his lifelong tolerance of shameless womanizing in his companions. Spandarian in Baku was notorious. Later, as the rulers of Soviet Russia, Yenukidze and Beria were both debauched to the point of priapic degeneracy. Provided they were competent, hardworking and loyal, they were safe. In his own life, he regarded sex less as a moral question than as a security hazard.

On one hand he distrusted strong, clever women like his mother, despised pretentious women “with ideas,” and disliked overscented glamourpusses who, like Plekhanov’s daughter, wore “boots with high heels.” He preferred young, malleable teenagers or buxom peasant women who would defer to him. On the other hand, even as late as the 1930s, he took some of his lovers from the ranks of educated, liberated female revolutionaries, his intellectual equals, sometimes even noblewomen, his social superiors. But the Marxist mission, and his own sense of separateness, always came first.

Women (and children if they inconveniently arrived) were expected to understand when the wandering Marxist crusader chose to vanish into thin air.

Tatiana Sukhova was sitting in her house with some other exiles when someone reported that “a new cluster of convicts had arrived and among them a comrade from Baku, Osip Koba, a professional, a key person.” A little later, furnished with proper clothes by his fellow exiles, Osip (a Russian diminutive for Josef) entered their house “wearing high boots, black overcoat, black satin shirt and a high Astrakhan hat with a white hood around his shoulders in the Caucasian style.”

It was spring in Solvychegodsk, a tiny medieval fur-trading outpost, 700 years old, with a dusty square, a wooden merchant’s mansion, a post office and a beautiful sixteenth-century church. The river Vychegda flowed through the town. Ten of the exiles lived in a communal house—“a real salvation for us,” says Tatiana Sukhova, “because it was a way to keep active. It was like a university—there were even lectures. Those who lived alone often started drinking.”

The district police chief, Zivilev, nicknamed “the River Cock,” was a petty, irascible but comical stickler with a falsetto voice. Known as “God and Tsar of Solvychegodsk,” he banned any meetings of more than five exiles, amateur dramatics and even skating, rowing and mushroom-picking. When he spotted any transgression, he was given to chasing exiles along the riverbank like an irate cockerel, hence the nickname.

Stalin was “cruel, outspoken and disrespectful to superiors,” according to the local policemen. River Cock had him locked up once for reading revolutionary literature aloud and fined him twenty-five kopecks for attending the theatre.[109] Yet there were covert if wild parties among the exiles and the inevitable flirtations. “We were singing—and I began to dance,” remembers a girl, Shura Dobronravova. “Koba clapped his hands and suddenly I heard his voice saying, ‘Shura is the joy of life!’ I saw Koba looking at me with his mysterious smile.” The sequel is not recorded.

Once the exiles went boating together, waving red flags and singing. The River Cock ran along the bank screeching, “Stop singing!” But he could not punish all of them, so they got away with it.

Stalin often organized these secret meetings of exiles, but he “watched every member of the group very carefully,” recalls Alexander Dubrovin, “and demanded a report of every action.” Dubrovin’s memoir implies that Stalin hunted traitors and ordered their killing. “There was an exile called Mustafa. This Mustafa turned out to be a traitor. According to a comrade, he was drowned under the high bank of the Vychegda river.”

“I often visited [Stalin] in his room,” recalls Tatiana Sukhova, a woman of twenty-two, with light-brown hair and grey eyes. “He lived in poverty, sleeping on a wooden crate covered in planks and a bag of straw with a flannel blanket on top and a pink pillowcase.” He was depressed—it was only months since the death of Kato. “I often found him half lying there even in daytime,” but, as ever, books served as his comfort and castle: “Since he was very cold, he lay in his coat and surrounded himself with books.” But she says she cheered him up. They spent more and more time together, laughing at the others and even going on boating dates. It seems the friendship turned into some kind of affair and Stalin remained fond of Sukhova into the 1930s.[110] He later wrote to her, begging forgiveness for never having kept in contact: “Contrary to my promises, which I remember were many, I’ve not even sent you a card! What a beast I am but it’s a fact and if you want, I present my apologies… Keep in touch!” They did not meet again until 1912.

In June, the local police recorded that Soso attended a meeting with all the other exiles, including a girl named Stefania Petrovskaya, who enjoyed a love affair with Stalin sufficiently serious that he decided to marry her.

Stefania, a teacher aged twenty-three, was above Stalin on the social scale, an Odessan noblewoman whose Catholic father owned a house in the centre of the city. She had attended the elite gymnasium there before going into higher education. “Noblewoman Petrovskaya,” as she appears in police reports, had been arrested in Moscow and given two years in Vologda exile, but she had just finished her sentence when she met Osip Koba. Stalin was not there for very long, but the relationship must have been intense because she hung around in godforsaken Solvychegodsk for no good reason—and then followed him back to the Caucasus.

Exiles were isolated from Party politics abroad, but they caught up on the latest schisms from battered back copies of journals that arrived from family and friends. Stalin was irritated by Lenin’s feud with Bogdanov. “How do you like Bogdanov’s new book?” Soso asked his friend Malakia Toroshelidze, in Geneva. “In my view, some of Illich’s [Lenin’s] individual blunders are significantly and correctly noted in it. He also notes that Illich’s materialism is… different from Plekhanov’s which… Illich tries to hide.”

Stalin respected Lenin, but never completely uncritically. The deification only came after Lenin’s death and with a clear political purpose. Now he regarded Lenin’s schisms as the self-indulgence of spoiled émigrés. In Russia, where Bolshevism was in decay, the praktiki could not afford such nonsense. “The Party had as a whole ceased to exist,” admitted Zinoviev. It was so bad that some, the “Liquidators,” proposed winding up the Party. Stalin on the other hand agreed with the so-called Conciliators that the Bolsheviks had to work with the Mensheviks—or disappear altogether.

He was sure the Party needed him and he had no intention of hanging around in Solvychegodsk: the more revolutionaries that Stolypin exiled, the more the system was overwhelmed. Escapes multiplied. Of 32,000 exiles in 1906–9, the authorities could never account for more than about 18,000 at any one time. Soso wrote to Alliluyev in St. Petersburg asking for his address and place of work, obviously planning on a trip to the capital. He started raising funds: some money orders arrived at the post office. The prisoners staged a fake gambling game in which Stalin “won the entire kitty of 70 roubles.”

In late June, after River Cock’s morning inspection, Sukhova helped Stalin don a sarafan, a long, sleeveless Russian dress. We do not know if he shaved his beard, but in full drag, he travelled, accompanied by Sukhova, by steamboat to the local centre, Kotlas. On parting, he managed a romantic flourish, unabashed by his transvestite garb, telling Sukhova: “One day I’ll pay you back by giving you a silk handkerchief.”

Then he caught the train to the Venice of the North.^{191}

“Once, in the evening,” recounts Sergei Alliluyev, still married to the libidinous Olga, “I was strolling along Liteinyi Boulevard [in St. Petersburg] when I suddenly saw Comrade Stalin coming in the opposite direction.” The friends embraced.

Stalin had already visited the Alliluyev flat and workplace but had found no one home. Central Petersburg was a small world, however. Alliluyev recruited a concierge to hide Soso. These concierges were often Okhrana informers, so, if Bolshevik sympathizers, their places were ideal hideouts, never searched.

The concierge hid Stalin in the porters’ lodge of the Horse Guards barracks on Potemkin Street right next to the Taurida Palace, once the home of Catherine the Great’s political partner, Prince Potemkin, and now seat of the Duma. At the barracks, “Cabs would drop off court officials… while Stalin went into the city to visit friends,” says Anna Alliluyeva. He “would stroll serenely by the guard at the barrack gates, holding the regimental rollcall under his arm.”

Stalin, who was on a mission connected to “publishing a newspaper,” made the necessary contacts and swiftly departed for the Caucasus.

In early July 1909, he re-emerged in Baku with yet another name—Oganez Totomiants, Armenian merchant. But the Okhrana noticed his return nonetheless: “The Social-Democrat escapee from Siberia has arrived—he’s known as ‘Koba’ or ‘Soso.’” Two Okhrana agents inside the Bolshevik Party, “Fikus” and “Mikheil,” now informed regularly on Stalin, who gloried in the code name of “the Milkman,”[111] because he used a Baku milkbar as his base. He was intermittently watched, but the secret police took months to identify Soso and hunt him down. Why?

Here is one of the enduring mysteries of young Stalin: was the future Soviet dictator an agent of the Tsar’s secret police?^{192}

25. “The Milkman”: Was Stalin a Tsarist Agent?

In the Oil Kingdom of Baku, the Milkman tried to reinvigorate the shattered Bolsheviks, joining up with Spandarian, Sergo and Budu Mdivani. He rallied the remnants of the Outfit and “started to plan an attack on a mail ship,” says the Mauserist Kupriashvili, to fund their newspaper Bakinsky Proletary.

Yet it was a dark time. “The Party is ailing,” wrote Stalin. “There’s nothing good to write. We’ve no workers,” he complained to Tskhakaya, adding that he now believed in reuniting with the Mensheviks. Conciliation was anathema to Lenin, but dire circumstances had now forced Stalin to become a Conciliator. The tough Komitetchiki, the Committeemen inside Russia, were increasingly frustrated with Lenin and the bickering émigrés: “Why must these damned ‘trends’ split us… what useless skirmishes—both sides deserve a thrashing!” Stalin demanded the appointment of a Russian Bureau to run the Party inside the Empire and the creation of a national paper based in Russia, not in exile. “The Central Committee,” Stalin complained in print, “is a fictitious centre.”

Soso’s ideas for the future of the Party reached the Central Committee in Paris, which, in January 1910, appointed him to the new Russian Bureau, a recognition of his energetic persistence and organizational talents. He had graduated from Caucasian activist to Russian Bolshevik leader—yet in Baku he was playing his own game against Shaumian.

“Stalin and Spandarian concentrated all the power in their hands,” grumbled Shaumian’s wife, Ekaterina, the oil executive’s daughter. Faced with Stalin’s dominance and Tsarist repression, Shaumian, like many others, took a regular job, even working for a sympathetic oil baron, Shibaev: he tried to withdraw from the underground. “Everyone has ‘seen sense’ and got private jobs,” Soso told Tskhakaya. “Everyone except me, that is—I haven’t ‘seen sense.’ The police are hunting me!” Stalin, that sea-green incorruptible, never “saw sense” and hated those that did, like Shaumian, “who gave up our work three months ago!” He tried to tempt Shaumian back into the fold. Alone after Kato, Stalin despised Shaumian’s happy home,[112] blaming his wife, Ekaterina: “Like a doe, she thinks only of nurturing and was often hostile to me because I involved her Stepan in secret business that smelt of prison.” Ekaterina Shaumian complained that Stalin “intrigued against Shaumian and behaved like a termagant.”

Stalin made quick visits to Tiflis “concerned with financial matters,” the euphemism for expropriations and protection-rackets. Unknown to him, his father died, probably while he was there. Beso, by now a dosshouse drunk, was admitted to Mikhailovsky Hospital. Medical records chart his decline from TB, colitis and chronic pneumonia. He died on 12 August, aged fifty-five. He had made no attempt to find Soso. Without relatives or money, he was buried in a pauper’s grave.^{193} For the Bolshevik who signed himself “Son of Beso,” the father had died years before.[113]

Back on the Caspian, Stalin was now joined by his girlfriend from exile, Stefania Petrovskaya, soon described by the Okhrana as “mistress of well-known leader of local RSDWP.” She must have been devoted to him because, on her release from exile, she did not return to either Moscow or Odessa but followed Stalin to Baku.

He now gave her his ultimate compliment: he jettisoned the pen name “K. Kato” and became “K. Stefin,” based on Stefania—and a step nearer “Stalin.” The adoption of the names of lovers as pen names is a peculiarity in such a chauvinist. We have no letters between them. But the “K. Stefin” shows that Stefania was important to him. They moved in together—or, as the secret police noted, the Milkman “cohabited with his concubine.”

There now started a farrago of bewildering scandals that revealed that Stalin’s Party was riddled with Tsarist spies. Stalin reacted by unleashing a hysterical, murderous witch hunt for traitors which only succeeded in destroying the innocent—and drawing suspicion onto himself. It began in September 1909, when Stalin’s own secret-police contacts warned him that his valuable printing-press had been betrayed by an Okhrana doubleagent: it was about to be raided. The press had to be swiftly moved and secretly reassembled in new premises.

Stalin “rushed to me,” recalls his henchman Vatsek, “and asked me to get cash. I got him 600 roubles from Mancho,” the oil baron. But it was not enough. A little later, “Josef Vissarionovich Djugashvili came running with Budu Mdivani.” The tycoon then gave Stalin another 300 roubles.

Stalin found the press a new secret location in the Baku old city, setting it up in the dark cellars and alleyways of the Persian Fortress. But he discovered that the married couple who actually ran the press had embezzled money. He sent his Mauserists after them. The husband got away. The wife was interrogated by Stalin’s gunmen, but she somehow escaped before she could be liquidated.

In October 1909, the police raided a safe house to pick up Stalin’s fellow Baku Bolshevik, Prokofi “Alyosha” Japaridze. The policemen were surprised to find Stalin and Sergo with Japaridze. The ranking detective, as ever incapable of independent thought, left some policemen on guard and went to consult his superiors. Stalin and Sergo bribed the policemen with ten roubles. Japaridze had to stay and face arrest, but Stalin and Sergo were allowed to escape.

Stalin, on a tip-off from another of his contacts in the Baku Okhrana, blamed these betrayals on the Secretary of the Bolshevik Oil Workers Union, Leontiev. Stalin decided that there were five Okhrana double-agents in the Party. He decided to kill Leontiev, but the latter called his bluff, reappearing and demanding a Party trial. Stalin refused to hold a trial since this would reveal his moles inside the Okhrana. Leontiev was let off, raising suspicions about Stalin’s own relationship with the secret police.

“The betrayal of someone with whom you’ve shared everything,” said Stalin later, “is so horrible, no actor or writer can express it—it’s worse than the very bite of Death!” Stalin orchestrated a cannibalistic inquisition in Baku to find traitors, real and imagined, just as he would across the entire USSR in the 1930s. The difference is that in Baku the Party really was infested with police spies.

Stalin printed the names of the five “traitors,” but secret-police archives reveal that only one was, in fact, a spy; all the others were innocent. The witch hunt gathered pace. When Baku was visited by a top Moscow Bolshevik named Chernomazov, “Comrade Koba stared disgustedly at him. ‘You’re a traitor!’ he shouted.” In this case, Stalin was right.

The disarray was reported to the gleeful Baku Okhrana by their real spies code named “Fikus” and “Mikheil,” the traitors who really had infiltrated the Bolsheviks but were never identified by witchfinder-general Stalin. No doubt in Baku he ordered innocent people killed as traitors just as he would in the Terror.

It was a mess. Soso liked to fix such messes with quiet killings, but that did not work this time. He and another comrade accused each other of being spooks. Indeed the Mensheviks, and some Bolsheviks, suspected that Stalin himself, with his secret-police contacts, was the biggest traitor of the lot. So was he betraying the Party to the police? Here is the case against Stalin.

Stalin certainly cultivated shadowy Tsarist connections, receiving a stream of mysterious tip-offs from contacts in the secret police. Once Stalin was walking in Baku’s streets with a comrade when an Okhrana officer approached him. “I know you’re a revolutionary,” he said. “Here’s a list of all your comrades who will be arrested in the near future.” On another occasion, a comrade arrived to meet Stalin at a Party safe house and was startled to pass a senior Gendarme officer on his way out. He challenged Stalin, who said the Gendarme was aiding the Bolsheviks.

In Tiflis, during a roundup of revolutionaries, Stalin was amazed to find a Menshevik, Artyom Gio, in a secret hideout. “I wasn’t expecting it!” Stalin blurted out. “Haven’t you been arrested?” Just then a stranger entered. “You can talk freely,” Stalin reassured Gio. “He’s a comrade of mine.” This “comrade” turned out to be a police interpreter who then recited the list of comrades, including Sergei Alliluyev, who had been arrested that day—and warned Stalin that the police would arrest him that very night.[114]

The Okhrana’s agent “Fikus” reported that an unknown Gendarme officer visited Stalin and Mdivani to warn them about the Gendarme raid on the printing-press. As we saw, they saved the press.

So what was Stalin’s relationship with the secret police?

“Stalin was giving addresses of comrades disagreeable to him to the Gendarmes to get rid of them,” insists Arsenidze. “His comrades decided to put him on Party trial… but, at the trial meeting, Gendarmes appeared and arrested the judges and Koba.” In 1909, adds Uratadze, “the Baku Bolsheviks accused him of denouncing Shaumian to the police.” Jordania claimed that Shaumian even told him, “Stalin denounced me—no one else knew the address of my safe house.” All three of these accusers were Menshevik exiles whose stories have been widely accepted.

Then the secret police always seemed strangely confused about Stalin. The Gendarme chief in Baku, Colonel Martynov, only “discovered” that the Milkman was Soso Djugashvili in December 1909—almost six months after his escape. Was he being protected by his Tsarist controllers?

If one throws into this poisonous cauldron the accusations of betrayal against him as early as 1902, his secret-police contacts and his escapes from exile and prison, it might look plausible that he was a Tsarist agent.^{194} Was the future supreme pontiff of international Marxism an unprincipled megalomaniac traitor? If Stalin was a phoney, was not the entire Soviet experiment a fraud too? And was everything he did, particularly the Great Terror, an attempt to cover up his guilt? It was a tempting theory—especially during the Cold War.

Yet the case against Stalin is actually a weak one. The Menshevik stories of Shaumian’s betrayal do not stand up. There was tension but no feud with Shaumian: the two towering Bolshevik figures in the Caucasus were “friendly but with a shadow.” During 1907–10, Shaumian was only arrested once, on 30 April 1909, when Stalin was still in Solvychegodsk. Shaumian was next arrested, on 30 September 1911, when Stalin was imprisoned in Petersburg. It is unlikely Stalin arranged either arrest.

Stalin was flexible and amoral. His Messiah-complex led him to believe that anyone opposed to him was an enemy of the cause—thus any compact was justified, no matter how Mephistophelian. Yet there is no proof that he betrayed any comrades or that he was tried by a Party court.

Stalin’s secret-police contacts are not as suspicious as they seem. When he visited Tiflis for a short conference in November 1909, we know, ironically from “Fikus,” the Okhrana agent within the Bolsheviks, that “Due to the efforts of Koba (Soso)—Josef Djugashvili, who came from Baku—the conference decided to arrange that Party members should infiltrate different state institutions and collect intelligence for the Party.” So Stalin was in charge of the Party’s intelligence/counterintelligence—the penetration of the secret police.

It was his job to groom Gendarme or Okhrana officers, to generate tip-offs about traitors and police raids, and to engineer quick releases for arrested comrades. If one reads them carefully, every one of the stories of Stalin’s secret-police meetings, even the most hostile ones, reveals that he was actually receiving intelligence, not giving it. Some contacts, like the police interpreter, were sympathizers; most just wanted money.

The secret world is always a marketplace. The Caucasian police were particularly venal, and prices for releasing comrades were well known. The Bailov prison governor charged 150 roubles per prisoner to substitute a stand-in.[115] In Baku, the deputy head of the Gendarmerie, Captain Fyodor Zaitsev, was notorious. “Soon all our comrades were released,” remembers Sergo, “by means of small payments to Captain Zaitsev, who readily accepted bribes.” Shibaev, the Baku oil baron, paid Zaitsev 700 roubles to free Shaumian. Captain Zaitsev was almost certainly the senior Gendarme secretly meeting Stalin. In April 1910, Zaitsev’s venality caught up with him, and he was dismissed.

The money flowed both ways. Virtually all Okhrana agents were paid, but Stalin received no such mysterious income. Even when he was flush with bank-robbery cash, he spent little on himself and was usually penniless, in marked contrast to the real Okhrana agents, who were lavishly rewarded bon viveurs.

The secret police also ensured that their agents were virtually always at liberty: they wanted value for money. Yet Stalin spent only one and a half years at liberty between his arrest in 1908 and 1917. After 1910, he was free for just ten months.

The muddle of the Tsarist secret police is a major plank in the case against Stalin, and the flimsiest. Such mistakes were universal, not restricted to Stalin. The security agencies had totally infiltrated the Bolsheviks, but no organization before computers could have digested their millions of reports and card indexes. Indeed the Okhrana were remarkably successful, emerging well from comparisons with, say, today’s generously funded U.S. security agencies in the age of computers and electronic surveillance.

As for Stalin’s many escapes from exile (and there are more to come), “Those who didn’t escape,” explained one secret policeman, “did not want to, for personal reasons.” Stalin’s covert craft, feline elusiveness, and use of intermediaries made him especially hard to catch; his ruthlessness discouraged witnesses.

Finally, the evidence, in the many surviving secret-police archives, is overwhelming that Stalin was not a Tsarist agent—unless this is overturned by some decisive document[116] lurking undiscovered in provincial Okhrana archives, missed by Stalin himself, his own secret police, his many enemies and the armies of historians who have searched in vain for a smoking gun for almost a century.

Stalin was supremely well qualified for this moral no-man’s-land. On each of his nine or more arrests, the secret police would routinely have tried to turn him into their double-agent. Simultaneously, Stalin, that master of human frailty, would have been assiduously probing, seeking weak or venal policemen to become his agents.

When he did recruit an informer from the secret police, who was playing whom? It is likely that some of the secret policemen were double-crossing Stalin in the spirit of konspiratsia, passing him the names of innocent Bolsheviks as “traitors” in order to sow destructive paranoia within the Party—and protect their real agents. This explains why most of the Baku “traitors” named by Stalin were innocent, while the real Tsarist agents, “Fikus” and “Mikheil,” remained unsuspected.

Yet ultimately Stalin was a devout Marxist “of semi-Islamic fervour,” allowing no friend or family to stand between him and his mission. He regarded himself as an undiscovered but remarkable leader of the working class—a “Knight of the Grail,” in Spandarian’s phrase. As far as we know, he never wavered from this mission even in the worst of times—and in this he was almost unique.

Yet this cesspit of duplicity and espionage helps explain some of the craziness of Soviet history. Here is the origin of the paranoiac Soviet mind-set, the folly of Stalin’s mistrust of the warnings of Hitler’s invasion plans in 1941 and the bloody frenzy of his Terror.

The Okhrana may have failed to prevent the Russian Revolution, but they were so successful in poisoning revolutionary minds that, thirty years after the fall of the Tsars, the Bolsheviks were still killing each other in a witch hunt for nonexistent traitors.^{195}

In the spring of 1910, the Milkman was such a master of evasion that the secret police could no longer cope. “The impossibility of his continued surveillance,” reported the Baku Gendarme commander Colonel Martynov, “makes necessary his detention; all the agents have become known to him and even newly assigned agents failed, while the Milkman managed both to deceive the surveillance and to expose it to his comrades, thus spoiling the entire operation. The Milkman mainly lives with his concubine Stefania Petrovskaya.”

On 23 March 1910, Colonel Martynov arrested the Milkman, now using the alias “Zakhar Melikiants,” and “the noblewoman of Kherson Province, Stefania Petrovskaya.” The couple were interrogated separately in Bailov Prison. The Milkman first denied having a relationship with Stefania. But he then requested permission to marry her. Soon Stalin was calling her “my wife.”