Young Stalin

26. Two Lost Fiancées and a Pregnant Peasant

Stalin at first pretended he had never used the name Totomiants, and insisted that he could not have committed any crimes during the 1905 Revolution because he had been in London for a year—though he admitted his escape from exile. When Lieutenant Podolsky asked him about Stefania, Soso, now thirty, admitted meeting her in Solvychegodsk, but “I never cohabited with her,” he said. Whether this was clandestine craft, caddish abandonment or chivalrous care for her reputation, he was capable of all three. But she did not deny him. Four days earlier, Stefania, aged twenty-four, had told Podolsky, “Yes, I know Djugashvili. I’m living with him.”

Three months later, the Gendarmes decided to free her, but “in view of [Stalin’s] tenacious participation in the revolutionary parties and his high position, despite all previous administrative punishments, and his two escapes from exile, I propose the extreme penalty of five years’ Siberian exile.” That was the maximum. Unfortunately, the corrupt Captain Zaitsev had just been dismissed and the new ranking officer was less flexible.

With Soso stuck in prison, his comrades procured the phlegm of a prisoner with TB and bribed a doctor to get him transferred to the prison hospital, whence he appealed to the governor of Baku with a romantic request:

Stefania, now released, must have visited him in prison and received a proposal because the next day, Soso wrote again, this time calling her his “wife”: “I have learned from my wife who visited the Gendarmes Department that Your Excellency considers it necessary to deport me to Yakutsk. I do not understand such a severe measure and wonder if insufficient knowledge of my case might have led to some misunderstanding…”

These appeals were against revolutionary rules, but Stalin’s wheedling lies did not move Colonel Martynov, who still recommended five years. But the liberal viceroy’s office in Tiflis watered down the punishment. On 13 September, Stalin was sentenced to complete his exile in Solvychegodsk and banned for five years from the Caucasus. Though he would return again to Baku, the Tsar’s officials ironically forced Stalin to escape the periphery and concentrate on the greater stage of Russia itself.

On 31 August, the deputy prosecutor wrote to the Baku governor: “Jailed prisoner J. V. Djugashvili petitions to allow him to marry Baku resident Stefania Petrovskaya. Does Your Excellency have any objections to my allowing Djugashvili’s request?” Whether out of sloppy paperwork, bureaucratic mistake or deliberate malice, it was only on 23 September that Bailov Prison’s governor received this: “Prisoner Djugashvili is permitted to marry Stefania Petrovskaya: the prisoner is to be informed. The ceremony will be in the presence of the Governor in the Prison Church.”

When the warders brought this joyous news to Stalin’s cell, he was gone: on that very day, “23 September 1910, Josef Djugashvili was deported to Vologda Province.” By the end of October, he was back in Solvychegodsk. Not only did he not marry his fiancée and unofficial wife, he never saw her again.^{196}

Solvychegodsk[117] had not improved in his absence. There were fewer exiles and the police regime under the ridiculous River Cock was tighter than ever. There was even less to do. We do not know if Stalin ever thought again about his fiancée in Baku, but he was to console himself for the dreariness of exile with another bout of skirt-chasing that led to a forgotten semi-official marriage, and an illegitimate son.

“It was bad living in Solvychegodsk,” recalls a fellow exile named Serafima Khoroshenina, then aged about twenty-two, a well-educated teacher’s daughter from Perm Province. “The police surveillance was bearable but the exiles aren’t alive—they’ve actually died. Everyone lives inside themselves… with nothing to say. There wasn’t even common entertainment so the exiles drowned their sorrows in drink.” She might have added that the other main pastime, after feuding with other exiles and hitting the bottle, was fornication. After the Second World War when the Soviet dictator was discussing a diplomatic sex scandal with the British Ambassador, Stalin laughed knowingly that “such questions arise from boredom.”

He first stayed with the Grigorov family. While he was there, he started an affair with the young teacher Serafima Khoroshenina. They moved in together, staying in a single room in the house of a young widow, Maria Kuzakova.

Stalin was not the only one who found sexual adventure as a consolation. He spent much time with a flamboyant Menshevik in a white suit named Lezhnev, “who had been deported to this backwater from Vologda Town because he had seduced the Town Prosecutor’s wife,” according to their fellow exile Ivan Golubev. “He used to tell us about his Vologda adventures and it was impossible not to fall about with laughter—Stalin almost died laughing!”

However much he was carousing in the Kuzakova household, Soso’s mind was elsewhere. Always green-fingered, he started to plant pine trees. And he read frantically, history books and more novels including those by Tolstoy, whose politics he loathed but whose literature he admired. But he was soon ready to escape, bored to tears and desperate to get news of developments from Lenin.

On 10 December, a letter arrived from the Bolshevik Centre. Stalin replied, sending “warm greetings to Lenin,” whom he backed as “the only correct” one against the “Liquidationist trash” and “Trotsky’s base lack of principle… Lenin’s a shrewd fellow who knows a thing or two.” But “the immediate task, which will stand no delay, is to organize a central [Russian] group which would command all illegal, semi-legal and legal work… Call it whatever you like. It doesn’t matter. Yet it’s as urgent as the bread of life itself. It would begin the Party’s revival.” As for himself, “I have six months left to serve. After that I’m at your service,” but “if the need is urgent, I can weigh my anchor immediately…” He was ready to escape—but needed the funds.

Faced with the SD meltdown inside Russia, Lenin tried one last time to reunite with the Mensheviks. Stalin, half-Conciliator, half-Leninist, approved. When the wooing came to naught, Lenin returned to his natural state of exuberant feuding.

“Dressed in a beaverskin hat,” Soso presided over secret meetings of the seven exiles in a dovecote. He was “often very cheerful, laughing and singing in his magical mountain voice,” recalled Ivan Golubev, “but he despised toadies.” Once, he revealed a truth about himself: “We must remain illegal until the Revolution because going legal would mean turning into a normal person.” Stalin had no wish to be a “normal person.” In normal life, his peculiarities would have been intolerable, but in the revolutionary underground (and later the idiosyncratic, paranoiac and conspiratorial Soviet leadership), they were virtues of a “Knight of the Grail.”

“I’m suffocating here without active work, literally suffocating,” he wrote on 24 January 1911, in another letter to a Moscow comrade, whom he hailed: “A Caucasian Soso is writing to you—remember me from Baku and Tiflis in 1904.” The tedium was tormenting him. He talked constantly about escape. Seething about the factional time-wasting of the feuding émigrés, he vented his disdain for both sides, even Lenin: “Everybody heard about the storm in a teacup abroad: the bloc of Lenin-Plekhanov on one hand and the bloc of Trotsky-Martov-Bogdanov on the other. As far as I know, the workers favour the first bloc but generally they disdain those abroad…”

Stalin’s outburst soon reached Lenin in exile: he was displeased. At the time, Lenin was holding a Party school at Longjumeau near Paris, and had invited Sergo to study there. Sergo talked up his ally Stalin. One day, Lenin and Sergo were strolling the boulevards.

“Sergo, do you recognize the phrase ‘storm in a teacup’?”

“Vladimir Illich,” replied Sergo, knowing that Lenin had somehow heard of Stalin’s letter, “Koba’s our friend. A lot of things connect us.”

“I know,” said Lenin. “I also remember him well. But the Revolution’s not yet won. Its interests must come before personal likes and dislikes. You say Koba’s our comrade as if you mean he’s a Bolshevik and won’t let us down. But do you close your eyes to inconsistency? Such nihilistic jokes… reveal Koba’s immaturity as a Marxist.”

Lenin fired a shot across Stalin’s bows, but soon forgave “Soso of the Caucasus.” Soon afterwards, the Menshevik Uratadze told Lenin about Stalin’s expulsion in Baku. “It’s not worth ascribing too much significance to such things,” answered Lenin, laughing it off. That prompted Uratadze to sneak to him about Stalin’s brutal outrages. “That,” said Lenin, “is exactly the sort of person I need.”

The escape funds—seventy roubles—arrived in Solvychegodsk, but they were almost instantly stolen from Stalin. The money was telegraphed to an exiled student in Vologda named Ivanian. It was usual to despatch such funds to a third party because otherwise exiles lost their allowances. But there was always the risk of theft.

In late January to mid-February, Stalin invented a medical appointment in order to get to the provincial capital, planning to drop by Ivanian’s place, collect the money and catch the train to Petersburg. But the student had other ideas. When Stalin reached Vologda, Ivanian moved him to the house of another exile, Count Alexei Dorrer. First, however, according to Stalin, “Ivanian didn’t pass me the money but just showed me the telegram about sending it (with various words obliterated…). He himself couldn’t explain either the ‘loss’ of the money or the missing words in the telegram.”

Soso, according to some accounts, nonetheless took the train to Petersburg, undeterred by the lost money. After walking around all day exhausted, he noticed a pharmacy bearing the Georgian name Lordkipanidze, staggered inside and confessed he was an escapee. The Georgian took pity on his compatriot, hiding and feeding him. Stalin was always amazed how complete strangers helped him.

But a fuming Stalin had to return to Solvychegodsk—and he never forgot Ivanian, “guffawing about the ‘bandit who stole the money and when I met the rascal after the Revolution, he had the nerve to ask me for help.’” If Ivanian really did steal Stalin’s money, it was an act of astonishing courage—and folly. Still protesting his innocence, he was shot in 1937.[118]

“I also used to hit the bottle,” Serafima Khoroshenina writes laconically. Perhaps it was the drinking-bout to recover from this frustrating interlude that led Stalin to formalize his relations with her. Some time before 23 February, he and Serafima Khoroshenina registered as cohabiting partners, a sort of civil marriage (because only religious marriage existed in the Orthodox Empire). It is an alliance entirely lost or omitted from Stalin’s biography.

The couple were not to enjoy their blissful honeymoon for long. “On 23 February, by order of the Governor of Vologda Province, Serafima Khoroshenina was despatched to serve her time in Nikolsk.” Such were the caprices of Tsarist Autocracy—she was not even given time to bid goodbye to her partner. But she left Stalin a farewell note. To paraphrase Wilde: to lose one fiancée almost on the day of the wedding may be regarded as a misfortune but to lose a new “wife” a week afterwards looks like carelessness. Merry word had spread of this sudden alliance, regarded as a semi-marriage, because a Bolshevik named A. P. Smirnov cheekily probed him in a letter that inquired: “I’ve heard you got married again.”

No sooner was Serafima out of his bed than his landlady, Maria Kuzakova, took her place. “He was a very polite lodger,” she recalls. “Quiet and gentle. Always in his black fedora and autumn coat. He spent most of his time at home reading and writing, and I could hear the floor creaking at night because he liked to pace as he worked.” One day she asked him his age.

“Guess,” he said.

“Forty?”

“No, I’m twenty-nine,” he laughed. Kuzakova, whose husband had been killed in the Russo-Japanese War, had three marauding children. “Sometimes they made such an unbearable rumpus that he’d open the door smiling and he’d sing with them.” It is hard to believe Soso was that good-tempered, but Maria became devoted to him, listening to his stories of the seminary.

River Cock, perhaps discovering his near escape, intensified his searches of Stalin’s room, which infuriated Kuzakova. The police knocked on the windows in the middle of the night. This woke the children, who sobbed while Stalin watched with absolute calm. They confiscated some letters from Serafima, including her farewell note, but he continued to meet up for picnics and parties to discuss politics with the other exiles. This irked Zivilev, but Stalin got his revenge. “Once, among the promenading public,” remembers Golubev, “Stalin gave him such a dressing-down that he became terrified of bumping into Stalin, who used to joke that he hardly saw him.” Indeed Kuzakova says, “I’d never seen the police so afraid of one man.”

Stalin was now so close to the end of his two-year sentence that there was no point in escaping, however much he was “suffocating.” He was bored enough to attend the local theatre, for which he was fined twenty-five kopecks. Presumably, Maria Kuzakova was another consolation. By the time he left, it seems she was pregnant with his child. According to her family, she told him she was expecting. He claimed he could not marry but promised to send money, which of course he never did.

On 25 May, River Cock arrested Stalin for attending a meeting of other revolutionaries, sentencing him to three days in the local jail. But Soso had survived his full term. When he was released on 26 June, he never even returned to bid goodbye to his pregnant landlady. “She came home and found her tenant and his stuff gone and only the rent on the table under a napkin.” This was the reason that locals were discouraged from having affairs with exiles: they tended to leave suddenly.[119]

On 6 July 1911, Soso travelled by steamer down the river to Kotlas and thence to Vologda, where he was ordered to reside for two months. He was under Okhrana surveillance from the moment he settled at various addresses in Vologda. Now the police spies gave him a new code name—“the Caucasian.”

His prolific skirt-chasing was not over. Under the eyes of the Okhrana’s spooks, the Caucasian passed the time in the seduction of a saucy schoolgirl who was the mistress of one of his comrades. When it suited him, he borrowed both the man’s girlfriend and his passport.^{197}

27. The Central Committee and “Glamourpuss” the Schoolgirl

I am ready. The rest is up to you,” Stalin wrote to Lenin once he was settled in Vologda, but he wanted to make sure that henceforth he was assigned to the centre. “I want to work but I’d work only in Petersburg or Moscow. I’m free again!”

Stalin treated his own feuds with lethal seriousness, but still sneered at Lenin’s émigré rows. “Koba wrote that he can’t be bothered to bark at the Liquidators or Vperod [the factions of Krasin and Gorky respectively, both opposed to Lenin], because he’ll only mock those who are barking,” wrote one Bolshevik to his comrades in Paris—where Lenin probably heard about Stalin’s latest “immaturity.” Nonetheless, in Paris at the end of May, the Central Committee (CC) appointed a Russian Organizational Committee, with Sergo as a member and Stalin as a special travelling envoy, a promotion soon known to the Okhrana.

Sergo set off for Russia to brief the ragged Bolshevik organization on the new appointments. The Okhrana watched the Caucasian even more closely, but he was an expert dodger of police spies. In early August, he managed to slip out of Vologda and reach Petersburg on a flying visit to meet Sergo. “Sergo gave Stalin Lenin’s directive… and Lenin’s request that he come abroad to discuss Party activities.” Here was another minor escape, but Stalin managed to return to Vologda without the spooks even realizing he had gone.

Vologda was a metropolis compared to Solvychegodsk, with 38,000 citizens, libraries, theatres, a cathedral dating from the 1580s, a house that had belonged to Peter the Great and a grand governor’s mansion. Stalin spent a month gathering funds for a longer excursion, and he read voraciously, visiting the library seventeen times. “I’d have thought you’d been strolling some other city’s streets,” his fellow exile from Solvychegodsk, Ivan Golubev, wrote teasingly, “but I… learn you’ve not budged, wallowing in semi-exile conditions. That’s sad if true. So what are you going to do now? Wait? You might go insane with idleness!”

Yet Stalin seemed to be indulging the sybarite hidden within his steely ascetic for perhaps the only time in his life. His Okhrana surveillance soon divined the reason: a runaway schoolgirl who was the live-in mistress of Stalin’s fellow exile Peter Chizhikov. Aged just sixteen, she was Pelageya Onufrieva, a pupil at the Totma Gymnasium and daughter of a prosperous Solvychegodsk smallholder. She had embarked on an affair with Chizhikov when he was exiled to Totma and eloped with him to Vologda, where she met the Caucasian. Chizhikov, who had encountered Soso in prison a few years earlier, soon fell under his spell, running his errands and raising money for his next escape. He did not seem to mind when this friendship developed into a ménage à trois with Soso.

Pelageya was just a frivolous and rebellious schoolgirl, but she somehow managed to impress the Okhrana agents with her fine clothes. They code-named her “Nariadnaya”—the Well-Dressed One, or Glamourpuss. No wonder even the obsessionally ambitious and committed Stalin was happy to waste a month in her company. “I always knew him as Josef,” she recalls. The serpent literally offered Eve the forbidden fruit: “In those days one wasn’t supposed to eat in the street but there was a shady avenue lined with trees. I went there with Stalin who often invited me… Once we sat on a bench and he offered me the fruit: ‘Eat some. No one will see you here…’”

His friend Chizhikov worked during the day at the Colonial Goods Store. As soon as he left his home to go to work at 9 a.m., the spooks watched Stalin turn up and disappear inside. “We were quite happy when we were at home,” Glamourpuss recounts, “we’d read quietly. He knew I loved literature. We talked a lot about books. We used to have lunch together, walked around town for hours and visited the library and we joked a lot. I was silly but so young.” Soso, ever the teacher, lectured her on Shakespeare (including literary criticisms of The Tempest) and the paintings of the Louvre (which he must have visited during his week in Paris). Most touchingly he poured out his heart about Kato: how he had loved her, how he had wanted to shoot himself after her death, how his friends had taken away his gun and what beautiful dresses she made—and he mentioned his son Yakov. Stalin “had lots of friends. He had good taste—despite being a man,” jokes Glamourpuss. “He talked about southern landscapes, how beautiful were the gardens, how elegant the buildings. He’d often say to me, ‘I know you’d love it in the south. Come and see it for yourself… You’ll be treated as one of the family!’”

Glamourpuss was cheeky and intelligent. Stalin was attracted to strong women, but ultimately preferred submissive housekeepers or teenagers. He undoubtedly enjoyed adolescent and teenage girls, a taste that later was to get him into serious trouble with the police. Even though the rules in Tsarist Russia were much laxer than they are today, particularly far away from the capital, this must reveal, at least, a need to dominate and control on Stalin’s part. But it was not an obsession—some of his girlfriends were older than him.

Pelageya seemed to have understood the Caucasian better than most. She was probably the only person in his life to have teased him about his strangeness; he opened up to her. Even this most thin-skinned and touchy of men enjoyed Glamourpuss’s mischief. He nicknamed her “Polya;” she called him “Oddball Osip.”

“It was a long hot summer,” she reminisces, but when it was over she felt “she would never see him again.” One senses that Stalin had women in every town at this point. He told Glamourpuss that he was engaged to another girl in St. Petersburg, later writing to her: “You know I travelled to St. Petersburg to get married, but finally I ended up in prison…” If Oddball Osip had another woman, Polya the Glamourpuss, at the centre of a ménage à trois, could hardly complain. But who was the woman in Petersburg?

Glamourpuss “always knew he was going to leave. I wanted to see him off but he wouldn’t let me, saying he was being followed.” But “just before he left, he came over that morning” for a tender parting.

“I want to give you this as a present,” he said, handing her a book, “to remember me by. It’ll interest you.”

“It certainly will,” said Glamourpuss.

“Give me something to remember you by,” asked Oddball Osip.

She gave him as a keepsake the cross that hung around her neck, but he would not take it. Instead he accepted the chain and “hung it on his watch.” She asked for a photograph of him, but Stalin, about to plunge again into his secret life, refused: “No one photographs me. Only in prison by force. One day, I’ll send you my photograph, but for now, it would just get you into trouble.”

The book he gave her was A Study of Western Literature by Kogan, a special present from an autodidactic bibliophile, dedicated:

They never met again but he kept writing. His letters, reported Pelageya, “were always very witty—he knew how to be funny even in the difficult moments of life.” But when he was exiled in 1913, “I lost contact with him for ever.”

However delightful the Glamourpuss, Oddball Osip could linger no longer. At 3:45 p.m. on 6 September 1911, the Okhrana spies reported that, accompanied by Chizhikov, “the Caucasian arrived at the station with two pieces of luggage—a little trunk and a bundle, apparently of bedclothes, and boarded the train for Petersburg.” The spooks noticed that Stalin twice checked all the carriages, pretending to miss his tails.

“Djugashvili went by train Number Three under observation of agent Ilchykov,” the Vologda Okhrana telegraphed Petersburg. “I ask you to meet him. Captain Popel.” Yet Soso outwitted the reception party at the station: when he arrived at 8:40 p.m., he had shaken off the agents.

“The provincial,” sneers the snobbish Trotsky, “arrived in the territory of the capital.” Stalin first searched for Sergei Alliluyev, but he was not home. So he just strolled up and down Nevsky Prospect until he bumped into Silva Todria, his Georgian printing expert.

Just before Stalin’s arrival, Stolypin, the Russian Premier, was assassinated right in front of the Emperor’s box at the theatre in Kiev. The assassin was a rogue secret-police informer, who again personified the dangers of konspiratsia. The victim was the last great statesman of the Russian Empire.

“Dangerous times,” Todria warned Soso. “After Stolypin’s murder, the police are everywhere. Concierges check all papers.”

“Let’s find a boarding-house near by,” suggested Soso. The boarding-house “Russia” accepted his Chizhikov passport.

At the Alliluyev home, the doorbell rang. “I was very happy to see our friend Silva Todria,” writes Anna, “but he wasn’t alone. Behind him stood a thin man named Soso in a black coat and fedora.” They asked for Sergei Alliluyev, but he was not home—so they waited. Soso read the newspapers. When Alliluyev got home, they peered out of the window: the police spies had picked up his trail when he collected his luggage. Now they watched the street.

Alliluyev called in his daughters, Anna and Nadya: “Go outside into the courtyard and see if there are two spooks in bowler hats.” The excited girls spotted one agent in the courtyard, another in the street and two more at the corner.

Stalin returned for the night to the Russia guesthouse. At 7: 50 a.m. on 9 September, there was a banging on his door.

“Let me sleep!” shouted Soso, always the nocturnal creature. The police burst in and arrested him, finding maps, photographs, letters, a German phrasebook (suggesting he was hoping to travel to Lenin’s imminent Prague Conference) and the passport of Chizhikov, who had thus lent Stalin not just his girlfriend but his name too.^{198}

Locking him up in the Petersburg House of Detention to await sentence, the Okhrana took charge of the Caucasian, keeping him for three weeks, neither informing the local police department nor handing him over to the Gendarmes. Probably they were making the usual attempt to turn him into a double-agent, but on 2 October they eventually informed the Petersburg Gendarmerie, whose Colonel Sobelev thereupon recommended exile “to eastern Siberia… for five years.”

The Interior Minister, A. A. Makarov, reduced the sentence to three years. Stalin was allowed to suggest Vologda as his place of residence and to travel by his own means, instead of in a cluster of convicts. The physical description on his file was so inconsistent it might have belonged to another man. Was this just another case of the Tsarist regime’s lenient muddle? Had palms been greased in 16 Fontanka or at the Interior Ministry? Did Stalin make some duplicitous deal or was the Okhrana hoping he would unconsciously lead them to his comrades? We do not know—but, the moment he was released with his travel-pass back to Vologdan exile, he slipped his Okhrana tails and disappeared for ten days into the streets of Petersburg, technically escaping again.

He met up with his friends Sergo and Spandarian. “In December 1911, Stalin was hiding from the police on Petersburgskaya Storona in the apartment of the Tsimakov family,” says Vera Shveitzer, Spandarian’s chief mistress, “and we went to see him. He lived in a cold room in a wooden glass-roofed house in a courtyard.” They got an exuberant reception: Stalin “ran up to us and took our hands and dragged us into the room, roaring with laughter; we laughed back.”

“You know how to enjoy yourselves,” he said.

“Yes, we’ll dance to celebrate your release!” answered Spandarian.

Sergo and Spandarian were about to travel to Lenin’s Prague Conference, which marked the formal birth of the Bolshevik Party—and the divorce from the Mensheviks. Stalin had been invited but, after his new sentence, he was unable to go. Sergo and Spandarian took his messages to Lenin. “There was a small meeting in my apartment,” recalls Shveitzer, attended by the three Caucasians. Sergo gave Stalin fifty roubles. On the run, “Stalin spent every night in a different place.”

On Christmas Day, he was back in Vologda. He walked the streets in black coat and fedora looking for lodgings. His new landlord was a retired Gendarme who “didn’t like Josef Vissarionovich”—for paternal as well as political reasons. The old Gendarme and his wife had a divorced daughter named Maria Bogoslovskaya with three young children and a sixteen-year-old maid named Sophia Kryukova. Soso lived on a little bed behind the curtain next to the stove in the kitchen, but he evidently entered into another affair with the divorcee Maria. Even though she wrote her memoirs in 1936, when nothing explicit could be recorded about the private foibles of the Leader, Sophia the maid implies that the exile and the divorcee had a relationship. “He and Maria often used to argue and she used to cry. They shouted and were almost at each other’s throats. During their rows, the names of other women could often be heard.”

Stalin flirted with the maid while fending off the jealous Gendarme’s daughter. “Once after a public holiday,” says Sophia the maid, “I noticed Josef Vissarionovich was watching me from behind the curtain. I had long black hair and wore an attractive dress with a long skirt of flowered Japanese cloth.”

“That dress really suits you,” said Stalin. “In my homeland, Georgia, girls your age wear dresses like that.” Sophia was sensible in 1936 not to reveal how well she knew Stalin, but they obviously spent some time together because she introduced him to her boozy father, who embarrassed her.

“Don’t worry,” Stalin comforted her, “my father was a drunkard too. Mother brought me up.” He clearly enjoyed showing off about his education and foreign languages. When he read Zvezda (the Bolshevik Star) and foreign newspapers, he impressed her by translating passages into Russian. “It really made me laugh,” she recalls.

Stalin usually came home late at night and was visited only by a tall dark man, possibly Shaumian or Yakov Sverdlov, a rising young Bolshevik. He met up again with his cuckolded friend Chizhikov. Their ménage à trois was not resuscitated because Glamourpuss had gone back to school. But she was on his mind. On arrival, he sent an erotic postcard of Aphrodite to his teenage Venus in Totma: “Well, fiery Polya, I’m stuck in Vologda and hugging your ‘dear’ ‘nice’ Petenka [Chizhikov]. So drink the health of your famous Oddball Osip.”[121]

Romancing the landlord’s daughter and her maid, Stalin was killing time while awaiting developments in Prague. There, the Conference of just eighteen delegates, a sign of how much the Party had shrunk, chose the first true Bolshevik Central Committee. Sergo and Spandarian were elected, but the rising star was a stirring, working-class orator named Roman Malinovsky. Lenin was thrilled by this genuine proletarian talent. “He makes an excellent impression,” he exulted; “the soil is rich!” Malinovsky looked the part: “tall, strongly built and dressed almost fashionably” with “thick reddish hair and yellow eyes,” his pockmarks gave him “a fierce expression as if he’d been through fire.” But he had one serious drawback: when arrested some time earlier and convicted of rape and burglary, he was recruited by the Okhrana and code-named “Portnoi” (the Tailor). He was their highest-paid agent.

At the first Central Committee, Lenin and Zinoviev proposed the co-option of Stalin.[122] He had gained a new importance for Lenin as a nationalities expert. Lenin now recognized that Stalin was one of the few Bolsheviks who shared his keenness to formulate policies that would win followers amongst the non-Russian peoples of the Empire, but without promising them independence. The Tailor dutifully reported to his Okhrana paymasters that Stalin, Spandarian and Sergo “were elected to the Russian Bureau to be paid 50 roubles monthly wages.” Unlike the Okhrana, Stalin took some time to find out about Prague and wrote to Krupskaya to learn more. “I got a letter from Ivanovich [Stalin’s Party code name],” Krupskaya told Sergo, but “it’s immediately obvious he’s terribly cut off from everything, head in the clouds… What a pity he couldn’t attend the Conference.” In a coded letter, Stalin begged Shveitzer for news of Prague.

The isolation was about to end. Sergo was already on his way to Vologda.

On 18 February 1912, the Vologda police spies reported that the Caucasian met “an unknown man”—surely Sergo—who announced his promotion to the Central Committee, the highest organ of the Party, a status he would hold for the rest of his life, and handed over his salary, secret addresses and codes. It was probably now that Stalin agreed with Krupskaya, chief code maker as well as Lenin’s wife, to use Gorky’s poem “Oltenian Legend,” as their code. His handwritten copy of the poem survives.

Meanwhile Lenin, back in Paris, panicked at the lack of news: “There’s no word of Ivanovich. What’s happened to him? Where is he now? How is he?” Sergo finally reported to Lenin that he had met Soso: “I made a final agreement with him. He is satisfied.”

It was time to disappear again. Whenever he wanted to vanish from Vologda, Soso bribed the local police with five gold roubles and, according to Vera Shveitzer, escaped five times.

His landlady, Gavrilova, found him packing. “Are you going away?”

He hesitated: “Yes I am.”

She said she would have to inform the police.

“Could you do it tomorrow?” he asked. She agreed.

At 2 a.m. on 29 February, his tails reported him boarding the train for Moscow without permission. But first he received a last letter from his schoolgirl. He bought another sensual postcard, showing a sculpture of a couple wildly kissing and wrote this to Glamourpuss:

So, on the last night of February 1912, Stalin surreptitiously caught the train, via Moscow, to the capital. Lenin’s new CC member was on the road.^{199}

28. “Don’t Forget That Name and Be Very Wary!”

On one cold gloomy Petersburg winter day, I was studying when there was a knock at the door,” says Kavtaradze, who was attending Petersburg University while giving maths lessons to the Alliluyev sisters. “Suddenly in came Stalin. I knew he’d been exiled. He was as friendly and merry as usual, wearing a light overcoat despite the biting frost but… he wouldn’t take his coat off. ‘I’ll be here for a bit… I’ll just rest a while. I came straight from Moscow and I noticed I was being tailed in Moscow and when I got off the train, I spotted the same spook… he’s lurking right outside your place!”

“This was serious,” notes Kavtaradze. The two Georgians waited until darkness. Kavtaradze decided that there was only one way to escape: Stalin would have to dress up in drag. Kavtaradze procured some dresses and Stalin modelled them—but the look just did not work. “I could get women’s dresses,” said Kavtaradze, “but it was impossible to make Stalin look like a woman.”

The spook, reflected Stalin, “doesn’t want to arrest me—he wants to observe. So I’ll get some sleep.”

“Yes, sleep: maybe he won’t be able to take the frost. Like Napoleon’s army,” joked Kavtaradze.

“He will,” replied Soso, who slept all day. But when they emerged onto the streets, the agent was still there. “Let’s walk a little,” said Soso.

He was hungry, so they ate at Fedorov’s restaurant, but the spy reappeared. “Damn!” swore Stalin. “He pops up from nowhere!”

A cab clattered down the street. Stalin hailed the carriage and leaped on, but the spook hailed another. The galloping phaetons chased each other down Liteiny, but, realizing he was close to a safe house, Stalin jumped out of the moving cab into a snowdrift, which enveloped him completely. The spy’s galloped past, following the now empty carriage.[123]

Stalin dressed up “in the uniform of the Army Medical College and went out.” This was his favoured disguise in Petersburg that year. He stayed about a week. His new assignment was to convert the Bolshevik weekly Zvezda into a daily, Pravda (Truth).

Stalin was brought to the flat of Tatiana Slavatinskaya, aged thirty-three, a cultured and good-looking Bolshevik, an orphan who had educated herself and studied at the Conservatoire, becoming a fan of Chaliapin’s singing. One of Lenin’s covert operatives, Elena Stasova, trained her in code making. Married to a Jewish revolutionary named Lurye and mother of two children, Tatiana sheltered various Bolsheviks on the run, one of whom “brought a Caucasian with the codename ‘Vasily’ who lived with us for a while.”

She did not much like “Vasily”—Stalin’s latest alias. “Initially, he seemed too serious, too closed and shy, and his only concern was not to bother us. It was very hard to make him sleep in a bigger, more comfortable room, but on going out to work I always ordered the housemaid[124] to cook him dinner along with the children. He stayed a week and I ran his errands as messenger.” Stalin appointed her his secretary for the Duma elections. Slavatinskaya seems to have been fairly liberated, in the style of these early feminists. He started an affair with his “dear darling Tatiana” that was “well known” among Soviet grandees during Stalin’s rule.

Sometimes Stalin stayed with the Alliluyevs. The Venice of the North was a picture of “frosts, snowdrifts, icy sledge paths,” writes Anna Alliluyeva. “Its streets were filled with low Finnish sleighs decorated with ribbons and jingly bells” pulled by “stumpy little horses,” bearing “loads of laughing passengers.” Anna and her younger sister Nadya were glued to their windows longing for a ride—when Soso appeared: “Who’d like a sleigh-ride? Well, get dressed and hurry up, we’re leaving straight away!” The girls were delighted. “We all jumped up shouting with excitement,” recounts Anna. “Now we were invited”—and by none other than “Soso himself,” whose articles they loyally read. The girls knew him better now: “Usually uncommunicative, he can also laugh and joke boyishly and tell amusing stories. He sees the funny side of people and imitates them to such perfection that everyone roars with laughter.” But now he was in a hurry.

“Come on! Fedya [their brother Fyodor], Nadya! Get dressed”—and he ordered their maid, Fenya: “Get the fur coats!”

In the street, Soso called out to the driver: “How about giving us a ride!”

Stalin was in good spirits: “Every word… makes us laugh. Soso laughs with us all as the sleigh glides down Sampsonevsky Prospect past the station” with its “small steam trains.” Suddenly, Soso jumped off the sleigh and back into his secret life: “Stop, I’ll get off here, you can ride home”—and, just like that, the Bolshevik Macavity vanished into the station. Was he really having fun with the girls, or was the whole outing a cover to shake off a spook?

Soso disappeared again. The police spies lost him but guessed correctly that he would resurface in the Caucasus.^{200}

On 16 March 1912, the Okhrana’s double-agent “Fikus” reported that Stalin was back in Tiflis, where he was staying with a singing teacher who worked at the Teachers’ Society School, directed by the severe Elena Stasova.[125] His hostess was told “not to ask the name of her visitor,” but Stalin, perhaps missing home, sang Georgian songs with her.

Soso met up with his playboy friend and CC member Spandarian, and with Stasova. He visited his son, Yakov, whom the Svanidzes were bringing up “as their own with our own children.” The Monoselidzes remained shocked by his callous neglect. “My nephew, having been left an orphan by his mother,” complains Sashiko, “was also almost orphaned by his father.” Soso did not stay long, rushing over to Batumi and then back to Baku.^{201}

There he found another witch hunt for traitors: the Mensheviks were investigating Spandarian, hoping to prove that he had either falsified a Party stamp or that he was an Okhrana spy. Stalin defended his friend. The Mensheviks refused to let him attend their investigation but agreed to send an envoy to hear Stalin’s side of the story. The envoy was Boris Nikolaevsky, the Menshevik who would, in sunny Californian exile, become the chronicler of the underground. Nikolaevsky consulted a Bolshevik, Abel Yenukidze, genial godfather to Nadya Alliluyeva, Svanidze friend and sceptical acquaintance of Stalin, who ultimately destroyed him.

“Have you ever heard the name ‘Koba’?” Yenukidze asked Nikolaevsky, in a Baku café.

“No,” replied Nikolaevsky.

“Koba,” explained Yenukidze, “is a dangerous fellow who’s capable of anything!” The Georgians were different from Russians: “We’re a vengeful people.”

Nikolaevsky laughed and asked in a mock-Caucasian accent: “Will he cut me with his dagger just a little bit?”

“Don’t laugh,” replied Yenukidze seriously. “He’ll cut your throat if he believes it necessary. It’s not Great Russia here: this is Old Asia. Don’t forget that name and be very wary.” Yenukidze would pay dearly for such outspokenness about his “dangerous” comrade.

Stalin was “waiting when I arrived, sitting in the shadows so he could easily observe me,” recounts the wary Nikolaevsky. They may have cleared up the question of Spandarian, but while in Baku Stalin ordered his Mauserists to kill a former sailor of the battleship Potemkin whom he accused of being an Okhrana spy. “He was shot,” notes Nikolaevsky, “and left for dead, but he regained consciousness and claimed rehabilitation.”

The Mensheviks ordered Nikolaevsky, who now became “very interested in old Koba’s deeds,” to investigate. But Nikolaevsky was arrested. Stalin vanished again.^{202}

“We need to send ‘Ivanovich’ [Stalin] to Petersburg immediately,” Krupskaya told Sergo, who was in Kiev. Stalin and Sergo, those two highhanded Georgians, who would later dominate the USSR together, revelled in their new CC eminence. Stasova grumbled that “Sergo and ‘Ivanovich’ keep giving orders but say nothing about what is happening around us.” Days later, Spandarian was arrested.

Stalin rushed northwards, pausing for a quick chat with Spandarian’s girlfriend, Vera Shveitzer, in the station buffet at Rostov-on-Don, to meet Sergo in Moscow,[126] where they visited Malinovsky. He betrayed them. As the Georgians left Moscow, they noticed their Okhrana tails. The agents saw them onto the train, but Stalin then jumped off outside the station. In Petersburg, it took the Okhrana six days to realize that Soso had never arrived.

The secret police, aided by Malinovsky and other double-agents, had decided to mop up the CC. On 14 April, Sergo was arrested too, but Soso the super-conspirator managed to outwit the spooks just a little longer, surrepticiously reaching the capital.

Suddenly the Revolution received a bloody boost. On 4 April, troops on the river Lena’s Siberian goldfields fired on workers, killing 150. “The Lena shots broke the ice of silence,” Stalin exulted in Zvezda, “and the river of popular resentment is flowing again. The ice has broken. It has started!” Strikes broke out across the Empire. Challenged in the Duma, Maklakov, the Interior Minister, arrogantly replied: “So it was. So it will be.”

Stalin was beside himself with excitement. “We live!” he boomed in an article. “Our scarlet blood seethes with the fire of unspent strength!” Lenin declared that “the Revolution is resurgent.”

In Petersburg, Stalin stayed with N. G. Poletaev, proletarian poet and Bolshevik Duma deputy, whose house enjoyed parliamentary immunity, and saw Tatiana Slavatinskaya, his assistant. From the “untouchable Poletaev’s house,” Stalin “started to run the weekly Zvezda,” writing a stream of passionate articles. Trotsky dismisses them as “the language of Tiflis Seminary homilectics,” but they were stirring stuff, not at all like the leaden ideological claptrap of the future. The Alliluyev girls read them aloud to each other. Their favourite began: “The country lay in chains at the feet of its enslavers.” With his “scarlet blood seething,” Soso wrote a much admired May Day appeal that was a surprising hymn to his beloved Nature, the last throwback to his days as a romantic poet: “Nature is awakening from its winter dream. The forests and mountains are turning green. Flowers adorn meadows and pastures. The sun shines more warmly. We feel in the air the pleasure of new life and the world is beginning to dance for joy.”[127]

“In April 1912,” recalled Stalin, “we agreed on the Pravda platform and worked out the first issue.” Founded in three little rooms, the first Bolshevik daily was legal—but its illegal editor-in-chief, Stalin, had to run it from the shadows. Pravda was funded by Victor Tikhomirnov, son of a Kazan tycoon who left him 300,000 roubles and whose childhood friend was Vyacheslav Scriabin—“Molotov.” Tikhomirnov channelled thousands of roubles through Molotov, a founder of Pravda.

Stalin decided it was time to meet this young man. Molotov was told to wait in a courtyard behind a dentist’s apartment near their printing-press. Stalin suddenly emerged, as if out of nowhere, from behind a pile of firewood. Soso liked to cultivate this mystery: his feline charisma certainly dazzled the ponderous but younger Molotov, who had never met a real CC member.

“I didn’t see how he appeared, but he wore the uniform of a psy-choneurology student. We introduced ourselves.” Molotov noticed the pockmarks and the Georgian accent. “He discussed only the most important issues without wasting a second on anything unnecessary. He delivered some Pravda materials. No superfluous gestures. Then he vanished just as suddenly as he had appeared. He climbed over the fence and all this was done with classic simplicity and grace.”

The next day, Molotov, almost lovestruck, gushed to a friend: “He’s astonishing, he possesses internal revolutionary beauty, a Bolshevik to the marrow, clever, cunning as conspirator…” When they met again, they talked all night. It was the beginning of a partnership that would last for the next forty-one years.

Soso’s vigilance was sensible: he was virtually the last CC member at liberty. Sergo and Spandarian were behind bars. On 22 April 1912, the first Pravda was published. When Stalin strolled out of the parliamentary sanctuary of Poletaev’s apartment, the Okhrana arrested him. By June, thanks to Malinovsky’s betrayals, only one ineffectual CC member was at liberty. The organization was again in ruins. Stasova rushed up from Tiflis to repair some of the damage, but she too was arrested.

On 2 July, Stalin, sentenced to three years’ exile, was despatched to Siberia.^{203} His courtiers later flattered him with the nickname “the Doctor of Escapology.” This was to be his shortest exile.

29. The Escapist: Kamo’s Leap and the Last Bank Robbery

On the way to Tomsk, somewhere near Vologda, Stalin encountered Boris Nikolaevsky, the Mensheviks’ Baku investigator. Soso gave nothing away but borrowed Nikolaevsky’s treasured blue tea mug, which he then pinched.

On 18 July 1912 he arrived in Tomsk and was placed on a steamship up the Ob to Kolpashevo, where he disembarked for a week and met Simon Vereshchak, his Menshevik cell mate in Bailov Prison. Stalin dined with Vereshchak and Simon Surin, a Menshevik and Okhrana agent, before boarding another steamer upriver to his destination, Narym, where he was welcomed by Yakov Sverdlov, another young CC member.

Narym could have been worse. A settlement of 1,000 people with 150 houses, it was just within the agricultural belt. Its forests teemed with life, but it was high summer and the marshy landscape swarmed with mosquitoes—and with too many exiles, who even ran their own café, butcher’s shop and colonial goods store, plus, more important for Stalin, two escape bureaux.

“He arrived at my home,” remembers his landlady Yefrosina Alexeyeva, “in a Russian embroidered open-necked white shirt which left his chest exposed.” She tried to put him off because there were already two exiles living in her spare room, but “he went into the exiles’ room, looked around, talked with his comrades, then moved in” with Sverdlov.

Son of a wealthy Jewish printer from Nizhny Novgorod, the twenty-seven-year-old Yakov Sverdlov sported round spectacles and “black luxuriant hair,” but his most surprising feature was that out of this apparently meek figure of “remarkable gentleness” burst a “thunderous voice—the Devil knows how that monstrous voice could come from such a small man,” laughed Molotov. “A Jericho trumpet!” He looked like the sort of Jewish intellectual that Stalin loathed, but actually Sverdlov was a ruthless and unpretentious organizer. The two most impressive Bolsheviks in Russia shared a room and irritated each other.

Stalin, always the lazy egotist, avoided his share of the housework. The meticulous Sverdlov ended up doing it himself. “I liked to creep out for the post on Sverdlov’s day to do it,” chuckled Stalin when he recounted memories to Sverdlov and the Alliluyev girls. “Sverdlov had to look after the house whether he liked it or not—keep the stove alight and do the cleaning… How many times I tried to trick you and get out of the housework. I used to wake up when it was my turn and lie still as if asleep.”

“And do you think I didn’t notice?” replied Sverdlov. “I noticed only too well.”

The local Georgians, led by an exile known as “the Prince,” had heard of Soso, “a great man,” for whom they threw a Georgian feast. The guests sang in Russian and Georgian, dancing the lesginka. At the dance, a local housewife named Lukeria Tihomirova, aged twenty-five, bumped into “the Georgian in a double-breasted black coat,” who introduced himself as Djugashvili. But this time he did not bother to flirt, just sitting with Lukeria’s two-year-old niece on his knee, not even drinking.

“So young and already smoking a pipe,” she said flirtatiously. But Soso did not take the bait. The CC member had much on his mind: Pravda, the Duma elections—and a big bank robbery. He did not intend to stay long.

Lenin and Krupskaya, who had moved from Paris to Cracow, encouraged Soso and Sverdlov to escape. Sverdlov set off first but was recaptured. Then it was Soso’s turn.

“My sons took him by boat to the riverport,” says his landlady Alexeyeva.

“I’m leaving my books for my comrades,” Soso told her, doling out “apples and sugar and two bottles of good vodka from the parcel he’d received.” Then he set out with Yakov and Agafon Alexeyev in their canoe. At “dusk on a dark overcast night, no moonlight,” remembers Yakov Alexeyev, they paddled him to the river jetty, asking when he would return.

“Expect me,” he replied, “when you see me.” On 1 September, he caught the steamboat to Tomsk. Sverdlov followed and they travelled together. Stalin, always selfish and in command, posed as a commercial traveller on the train. So he bought a first-class ticket, mischievously forcing the diminutive Sverdlov to hide in his dirty laundry basket. They were confronted by a Gendarme, who, suspicious of the laundry, was just about to stab it with his bayonet when Sverdlov cried: “There’s a man in here!” A grinning Stalin bribed the policeman just in time. They reached Petersburg.[128] The prolific escapist had spent just thirty-eight days in Narym.^{204}

Around 12 September, an unkempt Stalin with “a long beard, crumpled cap, worn shoes and an old jacket with a black shirt” was again strolling up and down Nevsky Prospect, looking suspiciously like an escaped convict among the dapper boulevardiers and fashionable ladies, when he saw Kavtaradze.

“I’ve escaped from Narym,” said Stalin. “I arrived safely but nobody is at the safe house… Just as well I at least met you.” Kavtaradze was alarmed by this dishevelled Siberian vision—“his look was inappropriate for Nevsky Prospect”—but immediately led him to a new safe house belonging to “a certain Rear-Admiral’s widow,” probably Baroness Maria Shtakelberg, descendant of a Catherine the Great courtier, who rented rooms to Georgian students. Presently Stalin and Sverdlov moved in with the Alliluyevs.

Stalin visited the Stasova apartment, where he collected the CC treasury which Elena had left with her brother on her arrest. He then bumped into an old girlfriend.

“I was on my way to teach down Nevsky Prospect,” says Tatiana Sukhova, “when suddenly I felt a man’s hand on my shoulder. It made me jump but a familiar voice addressed me: ‘Don’t be afraid, Comrade Tatiana, it’s me!’ And there was Comrade Osip Koba standing next to me.” They arranged to meet at “some workers’ meeting.” Later they walked together and, “as we passed a café, Comrade Koba took a red carnation and gave it to me.”

Days later, he arrived in Tiflis, where his Bolshevik gangsters were assembling. Kamo was out.^{205}

Stalin had kept a distant eye on his demented brigand, Kamo. In Tiflis, Budu Mdivani and Tsintsadze were preparing to spring the prisoner from the Metekhi Fortress’s Unit for the Criminally Insane, where a doctor recorded Kamo’s bizarre behaviour: “Complains that mice bother him, though his building has no mice. Patient suffers from hallucinations. He hears strange voices, talks with someone, and is answered.” The guard who watched him “noticed that Ter-Petrossian rises during the night, catches something in the air, crawls under the table, trying to find something… complains someone is throwing stones in the room and when asked who, replies, ‘The devil’s brother.’” In fact, Kamo was planning his escape.

Kamo’s warder was a simpleton named Bragin whom he gradually charmed and then recruited as courier. Mdivani and Kamo’s sisters met Bragin and gave him escape tools, saws and ropes, which he smuggled in to his patient. Kamo sawed through the bars, replacing them with paste made from his bread. It took him five days to sever his shackles, which he held in place with wire.

On 15 August 1912, Mdivani and Tsintsadze’s Mauserists waved a handkerchief three times from the street. Kamo broke the shackles and bars and abseiled down the walls. The rope snapped and Kamo, who felt little pain, toppled into the Kura. Clambering out, he tossed his shackles into the river and walked to the nearest street, where he boarded a tram (to confuse search dogs) before making the rendezvous with the Mauserists.

One night, recalls Sashiko Svanidze, while police combed the city and the press sensationalized the escape, “Comrade Budu Mdivani came and told Misha [Monoselidze, her husband] that they’d sprung Kamo from the Mental Hospital the night before… They brought Kamo, who stayed for a month at our place.” Sashiko, Stalin’s son and her own children were then staying in the country, but Kamo looked after Mono selidze for a month by cooking him delicious meals. Kamo, in disguise, then escaped abroad via Batumi and Istanbul.

“Kamo came to us in Paris,” recalls Krupskaya. “He suffered greatly from the split between Illich [Lenin] on one hand, and Bogdanov and Krasin[129] on the other,” bewildered by the schism between the three heroes for whom he had performed his most outrageous bank robberies. Kamo wavered and Lenin “listened with great pity for this extremely daring but na’ive man with a fiery soul.” Lenin, like Stalin, knowing that concern and health care offered ways ofcontrolling his political protégés, offered to pay for an operation on Kamo’s damaged eye. After surgery in Brussels, Kamo set off to smuggle arms into Russia. He was arrested in Bulgaria and Istanbul, each time managing to charm his way to freedom. Back in Tiflis, Kamo assembled the Outfit. A mail coach with a huge sum of cash was expected to gallop down the main highway into the city. Around 22 September, Stalin, in charge of Party financial matters inside Russia, also arrived in Tiflis.

It was probably now that Tsintsadze, as Stalin recalled after the Second World War, gave the gangsters his pep talk in a private room at the Tamamshev Caravanserai on Yerevan Square before they rode up the Kadzhorskoe Highway.

On 24 September, Kamo and Tsintsadze, with Kupriashvili and about eighteen gunmen, ambushed the mail coach three miles outside Tiflis. The highwaymen tossed bombs at the police and Cossacks: three policemen and a postilion were killed. A fourth policeman was wounded but opened fire on the bank robbers. The holdup escalated into a brutal fire-fight. The gunmen failed to grab the money; the Cossacks rallied. When the Outfit eventually retreated, the Cossacks gave chase but Tsintsadze and Kupriashvili, both crack shots, covered their retreat, picking off seven Cossacks in a galloping battle down the Kadzhorskoe Highway.

It was the last bow of the Outfit. Kamo was tracked down to his hideout with eighteen of his gangsters. They were arrested. Kamo received four death sentences.

“I’m resigned to death,” Kamo wrote to Tsintsadze, “I’m absolutely calm. On my grave there should already be grass growing six feet high. One can’t escape death for ever. One must die one day. But I’ll try my luck once more and perhaps one day, we’ll laugh at our enemies again…”^{206} This seemed highly unlikely.[130]

Soso did not linger in Tiflis.

30. Travels with the Mysterious Valentina

Stalin was back in Petersburg, editing Pravda and staying with Molotov and Tatiana Slavatinskaya, within days of the failed robbery. He poured out articles,[131] drafted the Manifesto and presided over the nomination for the Duma elections. After supervising the selection of the Bolshevik candidates in Petersburg in mid-October, he oversaw Malinovsky’s nomination in Moscow.

Soso’s life on the run was an exhausting series of “sleepless nights… He flitted from one place to another, crossing street after street to confuse the Okhrana, making his way through back alleys,” explains Anna Alliluyeva. “If happening to pass a workman’s café,” he “would sit there over a cup of tea until 2 a.m.,” or if noticed by a Gendarme, “he’d pretend to be tipsy and dive into a café, sitting it out until dawn with the cab-drivers amid the stench of cheap tobacco before coming to sleep in a friend’s place”—especially the Alliluyev apartment with the sensual Olga and her lively daughters. Stalin often “dropped in,” sitting on the sofa in their dining-room “looking very tired.”

The girls were always delighted to see him; their mother, Olga, looked after him. “If you feel like taking a rest, Soso,” said Olga, “go and lie on the bed. It’s no good trying to catch a nap in this bedlam…” Reading between the lines of Anna’s accounts, Soso still had a special relationship with Olga, at least in their devotion to the cause. When leaving their place, he would say to Olga, “Come out with me.” Olga “didn’t ask any questions. She put on her coat and went out with Stalin. Having plotted their course of action, they hired a cab and drove off. Stalin made a sign and Mother got out. He was evidently shaking the police off his tracks. Stalin continued his journey alone.”

Stalin invited Olga to the Mariinsky Theatre: “Please, Olga, let’s go to the Theatre immediately—you’ll just be in time for the opening performance.” But, just before the play, he added, “I did so want to see a play even just once, but I can’t.” Olga had to go on her own and deliver a message to a box at the Mariinsky.

On 25 October 1912, six Bolsheviks and six Mensheviks were elected to the Imperial Duma—not a bad result. Karlo Chkheidze, the Menshevik whom Stalin had outraged in Batumi in 1901, was elected Chairman of the SD faction with Malinovsky as his deputy. Among the “Bolshevik Six,” the Okhrana had managed to get two agents elected to the Duma, quite an achievement of konspiratsia. They took the Okhrana right into Lenin’s inner circle.

In Pravda, Stalin pushed for conciliation with the Mensheviks. When the Bolsheviks planned a demonstration outside the Duma, the Mensheviks persuaded them to abandon it. This alarmed Lenin, who bombarded Stalin with articles attacking his conciliatory policy. Remarkably, Stalin turned down forty-seven of Lenin’s articles. Lenin, now in Cracow, summoned Stalin and the Six. “Comrade Stalin,” remembered one of the Bolshevik Six, “immediatedly stated that the Bolshevik delegates had to visit Lenin abroad.”

On 28 October, the spooks observed Stalin visiting his friend Kavtaradze. They followed them when they went to eat in Fedorov’s restaurant, a favourite haunt, but after dinner the police agents realized that he had disappeared. They searched for Soso, but he had vanished.^{207}

Lenin ordered Valentina Lobova, another of the liberated, capable girls of the Bolshevik generation, to accompany Stalin. She commissioned Lenin’s “foreign minister” and secret fixer Alexander Shotman to get Stalin to Cracow “with maximum speed and absolute security. This is a directive from Lenin.” Stalin “had arrived in Petersburg in the company of Valentina Lobova,” in Shotman’s tactful words, “staying in a hotel as a Persian citizen with a good Persian passport in his pocket.”

Shotman explained the covert routes to Cracow—the riskier southerly route via Abo, or the longer, safer route by foot across the Swedish border at Haparanda. Stalin chose the Abo route. Then Stalin set off with Valentina Lobova, smuggled out of Petersburg in a covered cart. They caught the train to Finland from Levashovo Station, using Russian passports. In Finland, Eino Rakhia, later Lenin’s bodyguard, delivered a Finnish passport and accompanied the couple to the Abo steam-ferry. “Two policeman verified documents… Although Comrade Stalin… did not at all resemble a Finn, everything happily went off without a hitch.” Stalin and Valentina boarded the ferry across the Baltic to Germany.

This was another of Soso’s mysterious relationships. Valentina, code-named “Comrade Vera,” was a beauty married to a Bolshevik who was yet another Okhrana mole: the Party had never been more riddled with traitors. We do not know if she was aware that her husband was a doubleagent, but she was totally trusted by Lenin. Shotman’s memoir shows that Soso (on Persian papers, name unknown) had been travelling with Valentina for some time. They first came to Helsinki, sharing a room in a guesthouse, in “late summer,” possibly September, right after his escape from Narym. Shotman implies that they were together. Travelling hundreds of miles after September 1912, they were apparently lovers, one of those little affairs between comrades thrown together on dangerous missions. When Valentina’s husband was later executed as a traitor, it must have contributed to Stalin’s growing distrust of perfidious wives.[132]

The pair caught the train to Cracow in Galicia, a province of the Dual Monarchy of the Habsburg Emperor-King Franz-Josef.^{208}

Lenin adored Cracow. The Galician capital was an ancient Polish city. The sarcophagi of the Polish kings lay in the Royal Castle. And it was here that the Jagellonian University had been founded in 1364.

Lenin, Krupskaya, and her mother shared an apartment at 49 Lubomirski Road with CC member Zinoviev, his wife and son, Stepan. Lenin and Zinoviev formed the Party’s Foreign Bureau with Krupskaya as Secretary. Cracow crackled with political intrigue, and reminded Lenin of home. “Unlike exile in Paris or Switzerland,” said Krupskaya, “there was a close connection with Russia”—4,000 of its 150,000 inhabitants were exiles from the Russian Empire, mainly Poles. “Illich liked Cracow very much. It was almost Russia.”

Lenin enjoyed himself ice-skating, while Krupskaya did the shopping in the ancient Jewish Quarter, where prices were lower. “Illich praised the Polish sourmilk and corn whisky.” He played hide-and-seek with Zinoviev’s son under the furniture. “Stop interfering, we’re playing,” he would say, dismissing interruptions—but he was eagerly awaiting Stalin and the Six.

Arriving in the first week of November, Stalin met up with the Lenins, sleeping on the sofa in their kitchen. Stalin, Malinovsky and another Duma deputy, Muranov, were charmed and berated by Lenin, who vigorously argued against any reunion or conciliation with the Mensheviks: his Bolsheviks had to remain a separate party.

Lenin may have been a highly educated nobleman but, with simple joviality and iron will, he was adept at handling tough men of action. He welcomed Stalin and put him at his ease: food brought them closer. Krupskaya served sausagey “German” food, which Stalin suffered for two days but then could not resist saying to Lenin: “I’m hungry—I crave shashlik!” Lenin agreed, “Me too, I’m ravenous, but I’m afraid of offending Nadya. Have you got money? Come on, let’s go eat somewhere…” Yet they disagreed on tactics. It was one of the many occasions when Lenin was more hard-line than Stalin, who grumbled that “Illich recommends a hardline policy for the Six, a policy of threatening the majority of the faction [Mensheviks] but Illich will give way…”

After ten days, Stalin returned to Petersburg, probably on apolupaska pass, that allowed families with relatives over the border to cross back and forth. He thought Lenin clumsily out of touch and remained an obstinate Conciliator; Lenin considered removing Stalin from Pravda.^{209} When the new Duma convened, Malinovsky read out a manifesto, probably written by Stalin, that was friendly to their estranged Menshevik brethren. In defiance of Lenin, Stalin even secretly met up with Jordania and Jibladze, those long-standing Menshevik enemies.[133]

Lenin bombarded Stalin with demands for another trip to Cracow to discuss the national question—and the Pravda problem. First Krupskaya tried to lure Stalin to Cracow to save him from arrest: “Kick Vasiliev [Stalin] out as soon as possible, otherwise we won’t save him. We need him and he’s already done his main job.” Stalin wriggled out of the trip, citing his health.

“To K.St. Dear friend,” Krupskaya wrote to Stalin, on 9/22 December, for the first time using an abbreviation of his new name, Koba Stalin. “It seems you aren’t planning to come here… If so, we protest against your decision… We absolutely insist on your visit here… regardless of your health. We demand your presence categorically. You have no right to act differently.” Stalin prepared his trip, again with Lobova. Lenin and Krupskaya were delighted: “We hope Vasia [Stalin] and Vera [Valentina] are coming soon with the children [the Duma Six].”

On 15 December, the Duma broke for Christmas.^{210} Stalin and Valentina left for Cracow,[134] probably taking the most direct but riskier route. On the train westwards, two passengers were reading aloud from a nationalist newspaper. “Why do you read such rubbish!” Stalin shouted at them. He and Valentina disembarked at a Polish frontier-town on the Russian-Austrian border and prepared to cross on foot—like smugglers.

This was to be Stalin’s longest ever trip abroad—and would bring him to Vienna, that crossroads of civilization, on the eve of the Great War.

31. Vienna, 1913: The Wonderful Georgian, the Austrian Artist and the Old Emperor

Stalin knew no one at the small frontier-town, but he was an expert at the art of riding the random. He walked the streets until a Polish cobbler asked him: “You’re a stranger?”

“My father was a cobbler in Georgia,” replied Stalin, knowing that the Georgians and Poles shared the chains of Russia’s Prison of Nations. “I must cross the border.” The Pole offered to take him, accepting no payment. Telling this story after the Revolution, Stalin paused, “as if trying to peer into the past,” then added: “I’d like to know where that man is now and what happened to him. What a pity I forgot his name and can’t trace him.” Like many of those who helped Stalin in his youth, the cobbler may well have wished he had buried the Georgian in the forests between empires. Stalin never mentioned that he had a companion at the time, Valentina Lobova.

Across the border in Polish Galicia, Stalin was desperate to get to Lenin, but “I was terribly hungry.” He went into the station restaurant in Trzebinia, where he soon made a mockery of himself. He summoned the Polish waiter in Russian. “The waiter carted around lots of food,” but Stalin was ignored until he lost his temper: “This is scandalous! Everyone else has been served except me!” The Pole did not serve his soup; Stalin had to fetch it himself. “In my fury, I threw the plate on the floor, flung a rouble at the waiter, and flew out!” He was ravenous by the time he reached the Lenins.

We’d hardly greeted each other when I burst out,

“Lenin, give me something to eat at once. I’m half-dead. I’ve had nothing to eat since yesterday evening.”

“Why didn’t you eat at Trzebinia? There’s a good restaurant there.”

“The Poles wouldn’t give me anything to eat,” said Stalin.

“What a fool you are, Stalin!” laughed Lenin. “Didn’t you know Poles regard Russian as the language of oppression?”^{211}

Lenin must have wondered at this blindness—or “greater Russian chauvinism”—in his supposed “expert” on nationalities, but Stalin would adopt a deeply Russian hostility to any sort of Polish independence.[135]

The two men bonded as never before. “They met me in such a hospitable manner,” Stalin reported in old age. “He [Lenin] wouldn’t let me go anywhere, he persuaded me to stay with his family; I had breakfast, lunch and supper there. I broke the established rule only twice: I warned Krupskaya that I’d be out for dinner and visited the old parts of Cracow where there were lots of cafés.” Stalin’s favourite restaurant was Hawelka, which still stands on the central Market Square. When Stalin dined out, Lenin was concerned.

“Listen, old chap, that’s twice you’ve dined out—aren’t we treating you right?”

“No, Comrade, I’m delighted with everything, but I feel uneasy that you provide everything.”

“But you’re our guest,” insisted Lenin. “How was dinner in your restaurant?”

“The food was fine but the beer was excellent.”

“Ah, now I understand,” answered Lenin. “You miss your beer. Now you’ll have beer at home too,” and “he asked his mother-in-law to provide two or three bottles of beer for the guest every day.” Stalin was again touched by Lenin’s solicitude.

“Illich was very nervous about Pravda,” recalls Krupskaya. Lenin was actually exasperated with Stalin’s conciliatory editorials. “Stalin was also nervous. They were planning how to adjust matters.” Lenin mulled over his dual problems of asserting control over Pravda, creating a nationalities policy and promoting his valued henchman. He needed a Bolshevik expert on nationalities who was not Russian—and certainly not Jewish. Three years earlier, he had hailed Stalin as more of an expert on nationality than Jordania. Here was a solution that would kill two birds with one stone.

Lenin proposed that, instead of returning to Petersburg, Stalin stay on to write an essay laying out their new Bolshevik nationalities policy. Stalin accepted.

Around 28 December 1912, Lenin, Stalin and Zinoviev were joined by Malinovsky and two other Duma deputies, Stalin’s friend Valentina Lobova and a wealthy Bolshevik couple who lived in Vienna, Alexander and Elena Troyanovsky, along with their child’s Latvian nanny. “Koba didn’t speak very loudly” but “in a deliberate measured manner… with indisputable logic,” recalls the nineteen-year-old nanny, Olga Veiland. “Sometimes he went through to the other room so he could pace up and down listening to the speeches.”

Stalin still resisted Lenin, who was now vociferously backed by Malinovsky—for the most dubious reasons. Lenin and the Okhrana shared their opposition to any SD reunification. Thus the secret police ordered Malinovsky to push this hard line, while Stalin still argued he could convert a few Mensheviks. He hoped Lenin would see that “it was better to co-operate and postpone hardline politics for a while.” Besides, the Duma Six needed a real leader: himself, no doubt.

“There’s an insufferable atmosphere here,” Stalin grumbled in a letter to Petersburg. “Everyone’s impossibly busy, goddamned busy, [but] my situation isn’t actually too bad.” He then wrote an almost loving letter to his old friend Kamenev: “I give you an Eskimo kiss on the nose. The Devil take me! I miss you—I swear it like a dog! There’s no one, absolutely no one to have a heart-to-heart conversation with, damn you. Can’t you somehow make it over here to Cracow?”

Yet Stalin did make a new friend in Cracow: Malinovsky. The convicted rapist and Okhrana traitor, two years older than Stalin, was now enjoying a lavish Okhrana salary of 8,000 roubles per annum—more than the director of Imperial Police, who got only 7,000.

“He was lively, resourceful, handsome,” remembered Molotov, “and he looked a bit like Tito.” Henceforth Stalin wrote to him warmly, sending love to “Stefania and the kids.” Malinovsky slyly denounced other Bolsheviks as traitors to distract attention from himself, but the pressure of a double life was beginning to drive him to breakdown.

At the last meeting on New Year’s Eve 1912, Stalin caved in to Lenin. “All decisions are being accepted unanimously,” enthused Lenin to Kamenev. “A huge success.” But Stalin’s retreat was far from bitter. The meeting, as Malinovsky reported to his Okhrana paymasters, reestablished the Bolshevik machine: a Foreign Bureau (Lenin and Zinoviev with Krupskaya as Secretary) alongside a Russian Bureau, dominated by Stalin and Sverdlov, now Pravda’s chief editor, with Valentina Lobova as secretary.[136] Stalin was moved from Pravda yet emerged as the senior Bolshevik in Russia (salary: sixty roubles a month), on a prestigious mission to play the theoretician. Stalin was writing hard on the nationalities question, Lenin making suggestions. Stalin sent off his first draft to Petersburg.

Afterwards, Lenin and the Bolsheviks went out to the theatre to celebrate the New Year, “but the play was very bad,” recalls Olga Veiland. “Vladimir Illich walked out with his wife.” Lenin, Stalin and the others saw in the New Year 1913 in a private room at a restaurant. When she was an old lady, Veiland confided that Stalin had started to become flirtatious. “Lenin seemed very cheerful, joking and laughing. He started singing and even joined in the games we were playing.”^{212}

Soon afterwards, Stalin arrived at the apartment of the Troyanovskys in a frozen Vienna, shrouded in snow. Lenin called them “good people… They have money!” Alexander Troyanovsky was a handsome young nobleman and army officer: his service in the Russo-Japanese War had converted him to Marxism and now he edited and funded Prosveshchenie (Enlightenment)—which was to publish Soso’s essay. Fluent in German and English, he lived with his beautiful noble-born wife, Elena Rozmirovich, in a large, comfortable apartment at 30 Schönbrunnerschloss Strasse,[137] the boulevard along which the old Emperor Franz-Josef travelled back and forth every day from his residence at the Schönbrunn Palace to his office at the Hofburg.

The antique, bewhiskered Habsburg Kaiser, who had reigned since 1848, travelled in a gilded carriage drawn by eight white horses, manned by postilions decked out in black-and-white-trimmed uniforms and white perukes, escorted by Hungarian horsemen with yellow-and-black panther furs over their shoulders. Stalin would not have been able to miss this vision of obsolescent magnificence—and he was not the only future dictator to see it: the cast of twentieth-century titans in Vienna that January 1913 belongs in a Tom Stoppard play.[138] In a men’s dosshouse on Meldemannstrasse, in Brigettenau, another world from Stalin’s somewhat grander address, lived a young Austrian who was a failed artist: Adolf Hitler, aged twenty-three.

Soso and Adolf shared one of the sights of Vienna: Hitler’s best friend Kubizek recalls, “We often saw the old Emperor when he rode in his carriage from Schönbrunn to the Hofburg.” But both future dictators were unmoved, even disdainful: Stalin never mentioned it and “Adolf did not make much ado of it for he wasn’t interested in the Emperor, just the state which he represented.”

In Vienna, both Hitler and Stalin were obsessed, in different ways, with race. In this city of antiquated courtiers, Jewish intellectuals and racist rabble-rousers, cafés, beer halls and palaces, only 8.6 percent were actually Jews but their cultural influence, personified by Freud, Mahler, Wittgenstein, Buber and Schnitzler, was much greater. Hitler was formulating the anti-Semitic völkische theories of racial supremacy that, as Führer, he would impose on his European empire; while Stalin, researching his nationalities article, was shaping a new idea for an internationalist empire with a central authority behind an autonomous façade, the prototype of the Soviet Union. Almost thirty years later, their ideological and state structures were to clash in the most savage conflict of human history.

The Jews did not fit into either of their visions. They repelled and titillated Hitler but irritated and confounded Stalin, who attacked their “mystical” nature. Too much of a race for Hitler, they were not enough of a nation for Stalin.

But the two nascent dictators shared a Viennese pastime: both liked to walk in the park around Franz-Josef’s Schönbrunn Palace, close to where Stalin stayed. Even when they became allies in the 1939 Molotov—Ribbentrop Pact, they never met. Those walks were probably the closest they ever came.

“Those few weeks that Comrade Stalin spent with us were devoted entirely to the national question,” says the Troyanovskys’ nanny, Olga Veiland. “He involved everyone around him. Some analysed Otto Bauer, others Karl Kautsky.” Despite intermittent study, Stalin could not read German, so the nanny helped—as did another young Bolshevik whom he met now for the first time: Nikolai Bukharin, an intellectual pixie with sparkling eyes and a goatee beard. “Bukharin came to our apartment every day,” says Olga Veiland, “as Stalin lived there too.” While Stalin flirted hopefully with the nanny, she preferred the witty, puckish Bukharin. Besides, it was her job to clean Stalin’s shirts and underwear, which, she complained after his death, was something of a challenge.

Stalin and Bukharin got on well. Stalin would write to him from exile, the start of an alliance that culminated in a political partnership in the late 1920s. But Soso came, suffocatingly, to adore and, fatally, to envy Bukharin. The friendship that began in Vienna ended in the 1930s with a bullet in Bukharin’s head.

“I was sitting at the table beside the samovar in the apartment of Skobelev… in the ancient capital of the Habsburgs,” reports Trotsky, also living in Vienna, “when suddenly the door opened with a knock and an unknown man entered. He was short… thin… his greyish-brown skin covered in pockmarks… I saw nothing in his eyes that resembled friendliness.” It was Stalin, who “stopped at the samovar and made himself a cup of tea. Then as silently as he had come, he left, leaving a very depressing but unusual impression on me. Or perhaps later events cast a shadow over our first meeting.”

Stalin already despised Trotsky, whom he had called a “noisy phoney champion with fake muscles.” He never changed his view. Trotsky, for his part, was chilled by Stalin’s yellow eyes: they “glinted with malice.”

Stalin’s stay with Troyanovsky was a revelation—it was his first and last experience ofcivilized European living, as he himself admitted. He lived in the room that overlooked the street and “worked there for entire days.” At dusk, he would stroll around Schönbrunn Park with the Troyanovskys. At dinner, he sometimes talked about his past, reminiscing about Lado Ketskhoveli and how he was shot in prison. He was characteristically morose. “Hello, my friend,” he wrote to Malinovsky, now back in Petersburg. “So far I’m living in Vienna and writing some rubbish. See you soon.” But he improved. “Shy and solitary at first,” says Olga Veiland, “he became more relaxed and fun.” He did not feel uneasy with Troyanovsky’s genteel style. On the contrary, he remained fond of him throughout his life.

Little Galina Troyanovskaya was a spirited child who got on well with Stalin. “She loved being in adult company,” and Stalin played with her, promising to bring her “mountains of green chocolate from the Caucasus.” He “used to laugh very loudly” when she did not believe him. But she often teased him back: “You’re always talking about the nations!” she groused. Stalin bought the child sweets in Schönbrunn Park. Once he made a bet with her mother that if they both called to Galina, she would go to Stalin for the sweets. They tested his theory: Galina ran to Soso, confirming his cynical view of human nature.[139]

Stalin now asked Malinovsky to return the first draft of his article so he could revise it, adding, “Tell me 1. How is Pravda? 2. How is your faction? 3. How is the group doing?… Yours Vasily.” He rewrote the article before he left Vienna forever.[140]

Lenin awaited him in Cracow; betrayal lurked in Petersburg.^{213}

32. The Secret Policeman’s Ball: Betrayal in Drag

I returned to Cracow to show Lenin,” Stalin recounted. “Two days later, Lenin invited me over and I noticed the manuscript lying open on the desk. He asked me to sit next to him.”

Lenin was impressed. “Is it you who really wrote this?” he asked Stalin, a little patronizingly.

“Yes, Comrade Lenin, I wrote it. Did I get something wrong?” “No, on the contrary, it’s really splendid!”

Lenin was determined to publish the piece as policy. “The article is very good!” he told Kamenev. “It’s a fighting issue and we won’t surrender one iota of our principled opposition to the Bundist trash!” In a letter to Gorky, he acclaimed Stalin as his “wonderful Georgian.”

Soso published the article in March 1913 under his new byline “K. Stalin,” the second time he had used it. It had been evolving since 1910 when he started signing articles as “K.St.,” then “K. Safin” and “K. Solin.”

The conspiratorial life required a roster of aliases, often chosen at random. Ulyanov may have taken “Lenin” from the Siberian river Lena, but he used 160 aliases altogether. He kept “Lenin” because it happened to be his byline on the article, “What Is to Be Done?,” made his name. Similarly Soso used “Stalin” when he published the article on nationalities that made his reputation, which was one reason that it stuck. If he had not been such a self-obsessed melodramatist, he might have been known to history as “Vasiliev” or “Ivanovich.”

Its other attraction was the vague similarity to “Lenin” itself, but Stalin also fashioned aliases out of the names of his women: it is plausible that his girlfriend Ludmilla Stal helped inspire this one. He would never have admitted it. “My comrades gave me the name,” he smugly told an interviewer. “They thought it suited me.” Molotov knew this was not true, saying, “That’s what he called himself.” But this flint-hearted “industrial name,” meaning Man of Steel, did suit his character—and was a symbol of everthing a Bolshevik should be.[141]

The name was Russian, though he never ceased to be Caucasian, combining the Georgian “Koba” with the Slavic “Stalin” (though his friends still called him “Soso”). Henceforth he adopted what the historian Robert Service calls a “bi-national persona.” After 1917, he became quadri-national: Georgian by nationality, Russian by loyalty, internationalist by ideology, Soviet by citizenship.

It started as a byline—and ended as an empire and a religion. When he was dictator, Stalin shouted at his feckless son Vasily for exploiting their surname: “You’re not Stalin and I’m not Stalin! Stalin is Soviet power!”

By mid-February 1913, the newly minted “Koba Stalin” was back in Petersburg, where the Bolsheviks, betrayed at every turn by Malinovsky, were on the run.^{214}

“It’s a total Bacchanalia of arrests, searches and raids,” Stalin reported to the Troyanovskys in a letter opened by the Okhrana. He added that he had not forgotten his promise to six-year-old Galina: “I’ll send the chocolate to Galochka.”

Stalin, now empowered by Lenin, but beleaguered by vigorous Okhrana action, did not even try to hide. He stayed on Shpalernaya Street in the town centre at the apartment of Duma deputies Badaev and Samoilov, attending meetings at the home of their fellow deputy Petrovsky. Stalin sighs, in another letter, “There aren’t any competent people. I can hardly keep up with everything.”

His first challenge was to defend his parliamentary star, Malinovsky, from a shocking accusation. An article identified Malinovsky as an Okhrana spy. Since the article was signed “Ts,” the Bolsheviks believed that the libeller was a Menshevik, Martov (real name Tsederbaum), or his brother-in-law Fyodor Dan. “The Bolshevik Vasiliev [Stalin] came to my apartment (he was known as ‘Ioska Koriavyi’ [Joe Pox]) trying to stop the rumours about Malinovsky,” said Fyodor Dan. Joe Pox warned Dan’s wife, Lidia, that she would regret it if the Mensheviks tried to smear Malinovsky.

Yet, thanks to Malinovsky, Stalin’s every move was now monitored by the Imperial Police director himself. On 10 February, Sverdlov was arrested, betrayed by Malinovsky. Now Stalin decided to appoint his Baku comrade Shaumian as Pravda’s editor, but Malinovsky persuaded Lenin that the Armenian would be too conciliatory, like Stalin himself. Lenin backed Malinovsky’s candidate, Chernomazov, who, as Stalin had divined back in Baku, was another Okhrana double-agent.

By February 1913, Malinovsky had betrayed the whole CC in Russia, except Stalin and the ineffectual Petrovsky. The Okhrana were determined to stop any SD reunion: Stalin the Conciliator was next.

On Saturday night, 23 February, Bolshevik sympathizers held a fund-raising concert and masquerade ball at the Kalashnikov Exchange, hardly Stalin’s usual scene. But the Alliluyev girls were excited about it. Stalin and their maths tutor, Kavtaradze, talked about going.

That afternoon, Stalin visited Malinovsky. The double-agent demanded he come to the ball. Stalin—as he later told Tatiana Slavatinskaya—refused, saying, “He wasn’t in the mood and didn’t have the right clothes. But Malinovsky kept insisting,” even reassuring him about security. The dapper traitor opened his dandyish wardrobe to Stalin, producing a stiff collar, dress shirt and silk cravat which he tied around Stalin’s neck.

Malinovsky had come almost directly from a meeting with his Okhrana controller, Imperial Police director Beletsky, probably promising to deliver Stalin.

“Vasily [Stalin] and I went to the party,” wrote his mistress, Tatiana Slavatinskaya, “and the party was nice.” Stalin, in his fancy cravat, sat at a table with the Bolshevik Duma deputies. “I was really surprised to see… our dear Georgian boy… at such a crowded party,” Demian Bedny, a proletarian bard, who in the 1920s became one of Stalin’s closest courtiers, informed Lenin afterwards. “It was really impudent to go there—was it the devil’s work or some fool who invited him? I told him, ‘You won’t escape.’” Bedny hinted that there was a traitor in their midst.

At about midnight, plainclothed Okhrana officers, backed by Gendarmes, took up positions at the back of the concert hall where the guests sat at tables. “Stalin was actually chatting to Malinovsky himself,” noticed Tatiana, when “he spotted that he was being followed.”

The detectives approached Stalin’s table and asked his name. He denied he was Djugashvili. Comrades stood up around him and tried to smuggle him to safety behind the stage. “He went into the artists’ dressing-room,” says Slavatinskaya, “and asked them to get me.” Once again, Stalin resorted to dressing up in drag, but he managed to tell Tatiana that he had “visited Malinovsky before the party and been followed from there.” Stalin was made up and decked out in a long dress. As he was being led out through the dressing room, a secret policeman spotted his big shoes (and surely his moustache). The policeman “seized him with a yell.”

“Djugashvili, we’ve finally got you!”

“I’m not Djugashvili. My name is Ivanov,” replied Stalin.

“Tell those stories to y’grandmother!”

It was over.

“Two plain-clothed agents asked him to go with them. All was done quietly. The ball went on.” Malinovsky hurried “after Comrade Stalin ‘protesting’ his arrest and promising to take measures to free him…”

Lenin innocently wrote to the traitor to “discuss how to forestall more arrests.” Lenin and Krupskaya fretted that “Vasily” (Stalin) must be “well protected.” It was too late: “Why is there no news of Vasily? What has happened to him? We’re worried.”

Stalin’s arrest was regarded as enough of a success for Police Director Beletsky to inform Interior Minister Maklakov himself, who on 7 June 1913 confirmed the Special Committee’s recommendation: J. V. Djugashvili was condemned to four years in Turukhansk, an obscure Siberian realm of frozen twilights, forgotten by civilization.^{215}