Young Stalin

1

In 1903, the Russian Social-Democratic Workers Party, founded in 1898, split into two factions, the Bolsheviks under Lenin and the Mensheviks under Martov, who fought one another but remained part of the same party until 1912 when they formally divided, never to reunite. Lenin organized and led a secret three-man cabal called the Bolshevik Centre to raise money using bank robbery and organized crime rackets.

2

The distances in this urban village are tiny. The seminary, Stalin’s family home, the Viceroy’s Palace and the bank are all about two minutes’ walk from the site of the bank robbery. Most of the buildings in Yerevan (later Beria, then Lenin, now Freedom) Square that feature here remain standing: the Tilipuchuri Tavern (now empty of any princes or brigands), the seminary (now a museum), the City Hall, the HQ of the Caucasus Command, the State Bank and the Viceroy’s Palace (where Stalin’s mother lived for so long) are all unchanged. The Caravanserai, Pushkin Gardens, Adelkhanov Shoe Warehouse (where Stalin had worked) and the bazaars are gone.

3

Stalin would not have thanked the Svanidzes for their frankness. They were close family for thirty years. His sister-in-law Sashiko, who left this memoir in 1934, died of cancer in 1936—or she might have shared the fate of her sister Mariko, her brother Alyosha and his wife. Sashiko Svanidze’s memoirs are used here for the first time. Some of the bank robbers, such as Kamo, Bachua Kupriashvili and Alexandra Darakhvelidze, left unpublished, if incomplete, memoirs, also used here for the first time.

4

The popular cafés of the day.

5

In the 1920s, before he was dictator, Stalin went to remarkable lengths to conceal his role in the expropriations. In 1923–24, his chief gangster, Kote Tsintsadze, by then in opposition to Stalin, published his memoirs in a small Georgian journal. They were republished in 1927 but afterwards the pages involving Stalin’s part in assassinations and robberies were removed, a process continuing in the 1930s under Beria. Today, they are extremely hard to find.

6

The memoirs have lain in the Georgian Communist Party archive, forgotten for seventy years. They were never used in the Stalinist cult. It seems Stalin neither read them nor knew they existed because, as far as this author can learn, they were not sent to Stalin’s Moscow archives. He did not want his mother’s views published. When Keke was interviewed Hello! magazine style in 1935 in the Soviet press, Stalin furiously reprimanded the Politburo: “I ask you to forbid the Philistine riffraff that has penetrated our press from publishing any more ‘interviews’ with my mother and all other crass publicity. I ask you to spare me from the importunate sensationalism of these scoundrels!” Keke, always strong-willed and unimpressed with her son’s power, must have recorded them secretly and in defiance of him on 23–27 August 1935, shortly before her death.

7

The Ossetians were a semi-pagan mountain people who lived on the northern borders of Georgia proper, some becoming assimilated Georgians though most remain proudly separate: in 1991–93, South Ossetians fought the Georgians and are now autonomous. When Stalin’s dying father was admitted to hospital, significantly he was still registered as Ossetian. Stalin’s enemies, from Trotsky to the poet Mandelstam in his famous poem, relished calling him an “Ossete” because Georgians regarded Ossetians as barbarous, crude and, in the early nineteenth century, non-Christian. Djugashvili certainly sounds as if it has an Ossetian root: it means “son of Djuga” in Georgian. Stalin’s mother says Beso told her the name was based on the Georgian djogi, or “herd,” root because they were herdsmen and were driven out of Geri by marauding Ossetians. The real relevance is lost because, by the time of Stalin’s birth, the Djugashvilis were totally Georgianized. Stalin himself wrote about this: “What is to be done with the Ossetians… becoming assimilated by the Georgians?”

8

Stalin later invented much about his life: his official birthday was 21 December 1879, over a year later, an invented date. He generally stuck to 6 December 1878 until an interview in 1920 with a Swedish newspaper. In 1925, he ordered his secretary Tovstukha to formalize the 1879 date. There are several explanations, including his desire to re-create himself. Most likely, he moved the date later to avoid conscription. As for the house where he was born, this is the hovel that now stands alone on Gori’s Stalin Boulevard, surrounded by the Grecian temple built during the 1930s by Stalin’s Caucasian viceroy and later secret police chief, Lavrenti Beria, next to the cathedral-like Stalin Museum. The Djugashvilis did not live there long.

9

Stalin the dictator became a keen gardener, growing lemons, tomatoes and, above all, roses and mimosas. His favourite Georgian songs were “Fly Away Black Swallow” and “Suliko.”

10

These Georgian inns “provide nothing but unfurnished and dirty rooms, bread (with cheese), tea, wine and at best eggs and poultry,” warns German travel-book publisher Karl Baedeker. “Those who wish for meat must buy a whole sheep (4–5 roubles) or suckling pig (2–3 roubles).”

11

For what it is worth, Adolf Hitler was beaten by his drunken father, Alois. Stalin did not become a wife-or child-beater, although he was a destructive husband and father. He was at least partly to blame for the early deaths of both his wives. He abandoned his illegitimate children, ignored his son Yakov for almost fifteen years and then bullied him. Of the children of his second marriage, he both overpromoted and crushed his son Vasily. He sometimes smacked him but then the dictator’s son developed into a spoiled and unmanageable little tyrant himself. Vasily became a hopeless alcoholic, the condition perhaps inherited from Beso. Stalin was loving to his daughter, Svetlana, until she became independent: he once slapped her as a teenager—but only when she was having an affair with a married womanizer in his forties. For the story of his second marriage and the fate of his children, see this author’s Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar.

12

Dato was still a cobbler fifty years later, in 1940, when Stalin ordered one of the Egnatashvilis to invite him to Moscow for a reunion. See Epilogue.

13

The school still stands in Gori and was being renovated in 2006: until Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in 1956 it bore the inscription HERE IN THE FORMER CHURCH SCHOOL THE GREAT STALIN STUDIED FROM 1 SEPTEMBER 1888 TO JULY 1894.

14

This is one of the reminiscences of Peter Kapanadze, Stalin’s close friend with whom he maintained friendly contact. Kapanadze’s very complimentary memoirs were published in the 1930s but this was one of the details that were left out of the official version—it appears in the archival original.

15

This damaged left arm is variously blamed on a sledge accident, a birth defect, a childhood infection, a wrestling injury, a fight over a woman in Chiatura, a carriage accident and a beating from his father, all (except the birth defect) suggested by Stalin himself. There is much confusion about Stalin’s accident probably because there were in fact two accidents: there was this, less serious accident when he had just started school (according to Keke) or aged six (according to later health reports), which probably damaged the arm, an injury that became more noticeable in old age. Then, not long afterwards, there was a much graver accident in which he was seriously hurt and for which he needed treatment in Tiflis: this damaged his legs. In her memoirs Keke, aged eighty, seems to have merged them together.

16

Hence it was surrounded by the estates of semi-royals like the Princes Bagration-Mukhransky and grandees such as Prince Amilakhvari. The Georgian nobility was enormous—6 percent of the population—but impoverished and therefore much less isolated than in Russia proper. The viceroy of the Caucasus, Grand Duke Mikhail Nikolaievich, brother of Alexander II, built his Gothic Likani Palace nearby at Borzhomi, where these Romanovs summered until the Revolution. When Stalin rose to power, he showed little interest in returning to Gori, but spent the first holiday after the Civil War with his young pregnant wife, Nadya Alliluyeva, at the Likani Palace. It is significant too that, as his health deteriorated, he took his last Georgian holiday in 1951 at Likani. It was and is a beautiful sanctuary, but it must also have symbolized the success of a local boy made good. It is now the summer residence of the Georgian President.

17

Even the old Stalin prided himself as a macho wrestler: when he met Marshal Tito after the Second World War, the handsome Yugoslav somehow made Stalin feel older and weaker. He suddenly lifted Tito off the ground, boasting, “There’s still strength in me.” The Yugoslavs were appalled and bewildered, but here was his last display of Gori wrestling.

18

These stories by Giorgi Elisabedashvili and his cousin Sandro of the vicious little urchin abusing and almost ruining the livelihood of an industrious workingman or streetfighting are found in the archives, but naturally they never appeared in Stalin’s biographies and remain unpublished.

19

This foolish decree not only started Stalin on the road to rebellion but also ensured that his Russian, despite the strong Georgian accent which he never lost, was of a high enough standard that he could plausibly rule the Russian Imperium.

20

School Inspector Butyrsky was typical—a dwarfish, rotund martinet with red moustaches. When he heard Georgian spoken, he shouted: “Don’t speak that language!”

21

As a politician, Stalin was the consummate actor. Those magnates who knew him well in power felt he was often acting: Khrushchev called him a “man of faces;” Kaganovich remarked that there were four or five different versions of Stalin; Mikoyan and Molotov both sensed at various times that Stalin was just playacting. As for the drawing, the only relic of this was his habit of sketching wolves during long meetings.

22

All his life Stalin demanded that his subordinates be as prepared as he was: his deputy in the 1930s, Lazar Kaganovich, said he would prepare for meetings with Stalin like a schoolboy. In the archives there is a handwritten note from Stalin to his comrade Sergo Ordzhonikidze from the 1930s when they were the two most powerful Soviet leaders: “Sergo, tomorrow meeting on bank reform. Are you prepared? Necessary to be prepared.” During the Second World War, he tore to shreds anyone who was not fully prepared.

23

The singing teacher was not the only master who helped Stalin. Davitashvili’s older cousin Zakhary was another inspiring teacher of Russian literature, and years later Keke wrote, “I remember how you distinguished my son Soso and he told me many times that it was you who helped him grow fond of studying and it was thanks to you, he learned Russian so well.”

24

Even as a septuagenarian dictator and conqueror of Berlin, he kept studying. “Look at me,” he said in about 1950, “I’m old and I’m still studying.” His library books are all carefully marked with his notes and marginalia. It was the thoughtful and diligent autodidactic fervour, well concealed under the crude manners of a brutal peasant, that his opponents such as Trotsky ignored at their peril.

25

This was ironic given the number of beautiful and ancient churches that Stalin would later demolish and the number of priests he would execute.

26

Stalin never forgot his singing teacher. When he wrote to Keke from exile or the underground, he would often send his regards to Simon Gogchilidze. Keke would show Gogchilidze the message but keep her hand over the rest of the letter: “You can read the passage about you,” she said, “but there’s no need for you to read the rest and know where my son is now.”

27

The seminarists were mainly gentry, poorer nobility and priests’ sons, not the very richest—but much better off than Stalin. The Gori police chief’s son Davrichewy and other better-off boys like Stalin’s future comrade Kamenev attended the Tiflis Boys’ Gymnasium. The affluent Egnatashvili boys, Vaso and Sasha, were sent to a gymnasium in Moscow. During the Stalin years, the seminary bore the plaque: THE GREAT STALIN—LEADER OF THE VKP(B) AND PROLETARIAT OF THE WORLD—LIVED AND STUDIED IN THE EX-THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY FROM 1 SEPTEMBER 1894 TO 29 MAY 1899 LEADING ILLEGAL WORKERS’ CIRCLES IN TBILISI.

28

“To Archimandrite Serafim, Very Reverend Rector of the Tiflis Orthodox Seminary from 2nd Grade student Josef Djugashvili: Your Reverence knows all about the pitiful circumstances of my mother who takes care of me. My father has not provided for me in three years. This is his way of punishing me for continuing my studies against his wishes… It is for this reason I am applying to Your Reverence for the second time. I beg you on my knees to help me and accept me on full public expense. Josef Djugashvili 25 August 1895.”

29

Stalin was immersed in Georgian poetry: he loved Eristavi; Chavchavadze was “a great writer with a huge role in the freedom movement of Georgia;” and he enthused about Akaki Tsereteli: “My generation learned the poems of Tsereteli by heart and with joy… beautiful, emotional and musical, he’s rightly called the nightingale of Georgia.” But, looking back, Stalin also measured these poets politically, saying Tsereteli wrote “beautiful poems but ideologically primitive and parochial.” Stalin was not the only poetical future Bolshevik: at exactly the same time, at his school in Odessa, young Leon Bronstein, the future Trotsky and near contemporary, was also writing poems. Trotsky far outstripped Stalin as a writer but not as a poet. If any of Stalin’s colleagues had dedicated a poem to a prince, it would have been used against them in the Terror. In 1949, for Stalin’s official seventieth birthday, the Politburo magnate Beria secretly commissioned the best poetical translators, including Boris Pasternak and Arseni Tarkovsky, to create a Russian edition of the poems. They were not told the author of the poems but one of the poets thought “this work is worthy of the Stalin Prize first rank,” though perhaps they had guessed the identity of the young versifier. In the midst of the project, they received the stern order, clearly from Stalin himself, to stop the work.

30

“A hasty visit, especially if ladies are of the party,” suggests Baedeker, “is best made by carriage… Public safety is on a somewhat unstable footing; it is well to avoid travelling alone or the exhibition of much money (for permission to carry a revolver see earlier). It is advisable to keep a sharp lookout on one’s belongings as natives are not averse from picking up unconsidered trifles.” Baedeker adds that even a letter of introduction from the viceroy or to local princes are of limited use in “surmounting difficulties that arise: these can be successfully met only by a resolute bearing”—and probably with the help of the revolver mentioned earlier.

31

Hugo’s hero Cimourdain had “never been seen to weep… [he had an] inaccessible and frigid virtue. A just but awful man. There are no half-measures for a revolutionary-priest [who] must be infamous and sublime. Cimourdain was sublime… rugged, inhospitably repellent… pure but gloomy.”

32

These young Marxists would copy out Marx by hand and distribute the manuscripts. When his Gori friend Kote Khakhanashvili came home with some Marx volumes, Stalin borrowed them but then refused to return them: “Why do you need them? They’re being passed through many hands and people are learning from them.” He also purloined a German-language textbook. Yet his English and German studies never led to fluency: even in the early 1930s he was asking his wife, Nadya, to send him an English textbook to study on holiday.

33

Most historians repeat the assertion that Stalin never saw Beso much after 1890, but a reading of several sources in the archive, as well as Candide Charkviani’s memoirs, show he saw his alcoholic father much later.

34

In September 1931, his old history teacher, lingering in the dungeons of the Metekhi Fortress-Prison of Tiflis, managed to get an appeal to his old pupil, now the Soviet dictator. Stalin wrote thus to Beria, his Caucasian viceroy: “Nikolai Dmitrievich Makhatadze aged 73 finds himself in Metekhi Prison… I have known him since the Seminary and I do not think he can present a danger to Soviet power. I ask you to free the old man and let me know the result.”

35

George Gurdjieff, the spiritualist author of Meetings with Remarkable Men, charlatan to some, hierophant magus to others, claimed to have attended the seminary with Stalin, who, he said, stayed with his family in Tiflis. But Gurdjieff, of Armenian origins, was a fantasist: born in 1866, he was twelve years older than Stalin and there is no evidence he attended the seminary at all. Stalin boarded at the seminary during the term. Gurdjieff also claims a “Prince Nijeradze” as a companion: “Nizheradze” was an alias later used by Stalin in Baku. But there is no evidence that any of Gurdjieff’s claims are true. During his reign, Stalin persecuted spiritualists and specifically “Gurdjieffites,” who were often shot.

36

On 4 September 1943, the exiled Russian Patriarch Sergei and two Metropolitans were summoned for a bizarre nocturnal Kremlin chat at which Stalin revealed that he had decided to restore the Patriarchate, churches and seminaries. Sergei thought perhaps it was too early for seminaries. Stalin replied, “Seminaries are better,” but mused disingenuously, “Why don’t you have any cadres? Where have they disappeared to?” Instead of replying that his “cadres” had been systematically liquidated by Stalin, Sergei tactfully joked: “One of the reasons is that we train a person for priesthood and he becomes a Marshal of the Soviet Union.” Stalin then reminisced about the seminary until 3 a.m. “Your Grace,” he concluded, wishing the priests good night, “that’s all I can do for you now.”

37

The observatory still stands, though it is as rundown as every institution in Georgia. Stalin’s room remains, with a few of his supposed possessions and the old plaque: THE GREAT STALIN—LEADER OF VKPB AND WORLD PROLETARIAT—LIVED AND WORKED HERE, THE TIFLIS METEOROLOGICAL OBSERVATORY, FROM 28 DECEMBER 1899 TO 21 MARCH 1901, LEADING ILLEGAL SOCIAL-DEMOCRATIC WORKERS’ CIRCLES.

38

In Russia, the mercantile and middle classes, who had no access to political power, often sympathized with the revolutionaries, but in Georgia they could also count on local patriotism—and a web of family clans reaching the highest nobility. The Shervashidzes managed to be top Petersburg courtiers while on their Abkhazian estates enjoying links to the revolutionaries. Prince Giorgi Shervashidze was Chancellor of the Court of the Dowager Empress Maria Fyodorovna, Alexander III’s widow and Nicholas II’s mother. After the Revolution and until the 1930s, the Shervashidzes who remained in the USSR were protected by the local Bolshevik leader and Stalin courtier Nestor Lakoba.

39

The most important Russian revolutionary in Georgia then was tall, stooped, balding Victor Kurnatovsky, who had shared Lenin’s Siberian exile and even met Plekhanov in Zurich. Many of the most active revolutionaries were not Caucasians but Russians. In the railway depot, Sergei Alliluyev was assisted by the affable, ginger-bearded Mikhail Kalinin, another railway worker of peasant origins whom Soso was to meet now: he would be Stalin’s long-serving head of state. The other leaders were Georgians—Jordania, Jibladze, Mikha Tskhakaya and Philip Makharadze, all founders of the Third Group back in 1892.

40

Going underground meant that Stalin also avoided conscription into the army in 1901. On his last arrest in 1913, he told the police he had been “exempted from conscription for family reasons in 1901.” The Gori police officer Davrichewy helped provide the paperwork enabling him to escape military service, according to his son’s memoirs, possibly by citing Stalin’s family problems and also moving his birthday a year later to 21 December 1879. Stalin was not bothered by conscription again until 1916.

41

When Interior Minister Plehve was assassinated in 1904, his police director, Lopukhin, found forty of his own private letters in the dead man’s safe: the Minister was perlustrating his own chief of police.

42

During the 1880s, Colonel G. P. Sudeikin of the Petersburg Okhrana cultivated a young People’s Will terrorist named Degaev, a success that allowed the policeman to become “the master of revolution in Russia.” But this had a price: the Colonel was even forced to order murders to conceal his double-agent. Then in 1883 Degaev lured him to a meeting and murdered him. Degaev ultimately disappeared. Years later, a mathematics professor in an obscure U.S. midwestern university was exposed as none other than Degaev, a story finely told in Richard Pipes’s Degaev Affair. Such tactics are always a deadly gamble. In our times, the U.S. intelligence officers who set up the Afghan mujahideen to fight the Soviets and the Israeli intelligence officers who sponsored Islamic radicals on the West Bank to counteract the PLO learned similar lessons when their organizations developed into the Jihadist al-Qaeda and Hamas, respectively.

43

The Okhrana could not afford to ignore the ingenuity of the SR assassins. In a foreshadowing of al-Qaeda and 9/11, the success of aeroplane flight suggested these new machines as weapons. SR terrorists considered flying a dynamite-packed biplane into the Winter Palace, so the Okhrana in 1909 ordered the monitoring of all flights as well as people learning to fly and members of aero-clubs. It is a mark of the Okhrana’s excellence that in 1909 it was imaginative enough to envisage a crime that was beyond the scope of the FBI and CIA in the twenty-first century.

44

The dates of these memoirs are always important. In memoirs dictated in 1936, Vadachkoria implies that it was Stalin who ordered the murder, a naïve thing to record that year; an unthinkable thing to record a year later during the Great Terror, or afterwards. The story of Stalin just suspecting the police spy and being right about it was published as part of the cult of personality. The story of the sleuth being killed appears only in the archival original and is published here for the first time.

45

Kandelaki, in memoirs recorded in 1935, before the Terror, strongly implies that Stalin was the Rothschilds arsonist. The Stalinist histories, which quote Kandelaki, suppress any suggestion that the Leader had been an arsonist, killer, bank robber or seducer. Kandelaki’s record is published here for the first time. Historians have often mistaken him for David Kandelaki, a young trade official in the 1930s whom Stalin used as his secret emissary to open negotiations with Hitler, a probe three years before the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Stalin had David Kandelaki shot in 1937. But the latter was not Constantine—or Kotsia—Kandelaki of Batumi, later a Menshevik and Minister of Finance in the independent Georgian Democratic Republic of 1918–21.

46

This would have irritated Stalin—the sort of personal detail that more sophisticated interviewees in the 1930s left out of their memoirs. Natasha Kirtava recorded two sets of memoirs, one in 1934 and the other in 1937. Needless to say, the unpublished kissing episode appeared only in the first, before the Terror.

47

The Batumi demonstration and the Smirba story became seminal Stalinist legends. When the boss of Abkhazia, one of Stalin’s favourite courtiers, Nestor Lakoba, wrote his Stalin i Hashimi (Stalin and Hashimi) in 1934, he reinforced the cult of personality which had begun in 1929. Stalin’s secretary Ivan Tovstukha worried about the text, writing to Stalin’s then deputy Lazar Kaganovich, “Had the Hashimi text… Still things to correct and rewrite… What to do? Should it be thrown out?” It was not. Its publication won Lakoba favour but not for long. A year later, his work was outstripped by the massive exaggeration of History of the Bolshevik Organization in the Caucasus by Beria. Stalin himself, according to Beria’s son, amended the manuscript, “striking out names and replacing them with his own.” A huge volume called The Batumi Demonstration 1902 followed in 1937. Beria swiftly moved to destroy his rival Lakoba, poisoning him and then murdering and personally torturing his wife and children. See Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar for the full story. As for Hashimi Smirba himself, he moved house in 1916, burying the printing-press in his garden. He died in 1922 aged eighty-one. In his seventies, Stalin chuckled about Smirba. He knew Lakoba’s book was widely regarded as propaganda. After all, it claimed that Stalin was “the greatest man of a whole epoch, such as history gives to humanity only once in one or two hundred years.” But Stalin insisted, “It’s true as it was told in that book—that’s really how it happened.”

48

In early 1939, the Moscow Arts Theatre commissioned the brilliant but under-employed writer Mikhail Bulgakov to write a romantic play about young Stalin in Batumi to celebrate the dictator’s sixtieth birthday that December. Stalin must have signed off on the commission. He admired Bulgakov—like Chekhov, a practising doctor-turned-writer—particularly for his novel The White Guard. Its dramatized version The Days of the Turbins was Stalin’s favourite play: he saw it fifteen times. Yet, as with Pasternak and Shostakovich, Stalin played a game of cat-and-mouse, personally phoning Bulgakov to assure him he would be given work, then tightening the screws on him again. Bulgakov, like Pasternak, was fascinated by his omnipotent persecutor and had toyed with the idea of this play since 1936, even though he knew “it’s dangerous for me.” Basing the play on the book The Batumi Demonstration 1902 and presumably on conversations with witnesses, Bulgakov finished a draft in June 1939, first calling it The Priest, Stalin’s nickname among the workers, then It Happened in Batumi, then just Batumi. The romantic play contains no love affairs but it implies Stalin’s relationship with Natalia Kirtava, for his companion in the play is a Natasha, who is jointly based on Kirtava and Lomdzharia’s sister. The cultural apparatchiks liked and approved the play. In August, Bulgakov, declaring that he wanted to interview witnesses and read the archives, set off by train for Batumi with his wife, Elena. But Stalin did not wish his status as statesman (he was just about to sign the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Hitler) undermined by any revelations contained in these archives, many of which have been used in this book. The Bulgakovs were recalled by telegram: “Journey no longer necessary. Return to Moscow.” Bulgakov fell ill. Stalin read the play. Visiting the Arts Theatre, he told the director that Batumi was a good piece but could not be staged, adding (hypocritically), “All young people are the same, so why write a play about the young Stalin?” The play was hackwork for Bulgakov, who secretly finished his anti-Stalin masterpiece The Master and Margarita before his death in 1940.

49

“Happy?” Keke sardonically told an interviewer in 1935 when asked if she was happy to be Stalin’s mother. “You ask me what kind of happiness I felt? The whole world is happy looking at my son and our country. So what should I feel as a mother?”

50

Stalin swiftly developed his clandestine craft. A sympathetic worker in Batumi worked for the company that supplied wood to the prison. One day he was approached and told he was to help deliver the wood and must follow his instructions precisely. He delivered the logs, carried them into the courtyard and sure enough, at 3 p.m. sharp, the warders led out a single prisoner, Stalin, who gave him an urgent message to deliver in Batumi.

51

Lenin encapsulated Stalin’s dream of himself as a knight in a military-religious order. “Our Party is not a school of philosophers,” he asserted revealingly, but “a fighting Party. Until now it resembled a hospitable patriarchical family. Now it must become like a fortress—its gates only opened for the worthy.” Any other way was a “desecration of its Holy of Holies.”

52

As Soviet leader, Stalin disdained Tsarist leniency, determined to avoid it in his own repressions. “The prisons resemble nothing so much as rest-homes,” he wrote at the height of the Terror in 1937. “The prisoners are allowed to socialize, can write letters to each other at will, receive parcels…!”

53

The Tsarist authorities recognized, due to the special challenges of evidence and secrecy, that terrorists and revolutionaries could not be tried by jury or judge: the local Gendarme officer recommended a sentence to the local governor-general who forwarded it on to the Special Commission—five Justice and Interior officials who passed sentence. The Interior Minister confirmed it; the Emperor signed off. Stalin was habitually sentenced this way. Between 1881 and 1904, only 11,879 were sentenced like this, while during Stalin’s reign of the same approximate timespan, he presided over the deportation of an astonishing 28 million, several million of whom never returned. As for capital punishment under the Tsars, Catholic Poles and Jews in the western provinces were much more likely to be hanged than Orthodox Russians or Georgians.

54

When Lenin arrived, he reprimanded the stationmaster, availed himself of the local merchant’s library, brought out his wife, Nadya Krupskaya, and his mother-in-law to care for him, and even employed a maid to clean the house. The Lenins patronized the peasants who, noted Krupskaya, “were generally clean in their habits.” Lenin raved about the landscape of this “Siberian Italy,” a pleasant environment for writing. “Generally,” wrote Krupskaya, “exile didn’t pass by so badly.” The system favoured noblemen and Orthodox Russians and Georgians over Jews and Poles. Lenin and his friend Yuli Martov were arrested at the same time on the same charges but, while the noble Russian Lenin enjoyed his scenic reading-holiday, his fellow SD leader, the Jewish Martov, struggled to survive the desperate Arctic freeze of Turukhansk.

55

Even at this early date, Lenin and Stalin, soi-disant champions of the proletariat, were against the involvement of real workers. They believed in an oligarchy that would rule in the name of the workers, a concept that became the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Stalin was convinced that the election of workers to the Party committees would include too many amateur revolutionaries and more police agents. Leninists were also less sympathetic to the land aspirations of peasants. Most Georgian Social-Democrats believed in wide worker and peasant participation and land grants to peasants, so they became Mensheviks. The Georgian Mensheviks under firebrands like Jordania were very effective and increasingly popular; Georgian Mensheviks were much more violent than Russian Mensheviks. Jibladze and Noe Ramishvili were as enthusiastic about terror and expropriation as Stalin up to 1907. But ultimately Bolsheviks were much more disciplined, merciless and comfortable with terror and killing. To complicate matters, there were mild Bolsheviks such as Kamenev, just as there were extreme Mensheviks.

56

In 1934, the children who had provided the bread for the escape wrote to Stalin; he wrote back with a present for them—a radio and gramophone. In 1947, pensioner Kungarov wrote: “Generalissimo of the Soviet Union Comrade J. V. Stalin, I deeply apologize for bothering you but in 1903 you lived at my place and in 1904 I personally took you to Zharkovo on the way to the Tyret Station and when the police interrogated me I lied for you that I had taken you to Balagansk. For lying I was imprisoned and received ten lashes. I ask you to help me.” It is highly unlikely that Kungarov would make this up, but Stalin read the letter and said he did not recall this, asking Kungarov to give more details. Possibly Stalin’s memories of the first exile were less vivid, but more likely he nursed a grievance against Kungarov for refusing to help him escape.

57

The Credo was one of the important secrets of Stalin’s past. It seriously undermined Stalin’s Leninist credentials, putting him closer to the 1918 Mensheviks, who created an independent Georgia, and the Bolshevik “deviationalists” of 1921–22. In 1925, striving to succeed Lenin, Stalin started to seek out and destroy any copies. In 1934, he twice approached Shevardian (first via his boss in the Trade Commissariat, Stalinist magnate Anastas Mikoyan, then through an old Tiflis comrade, Malakia Toroshelidze, rector of Tiflis University). Shevardian buried his papers in his village. In the 1937 Terror, Mikoyan and Beria were despatched to Yerevan with a deathlist of 300 Armenian Bolsheviks. Mikoyan saved one of the 300, Shevardian, who was still arrested. His family destroyed the papers. Shevardian was shot by Beria on 24 October 1941, as the Germans advanced. Not all recipients of the Credo were shot: Tskhakaya remained a favourite.

58

The “affair” resurfaced when Stalin married Olga’s youngest daughter, Nadya. The rumour spread that Stalin was her father. Both apparently heard the rumour, but she was already three when Stalin met the family. Meanwhile, in 1904, Soso had also been courting more traditionally a Georgian girl of a good family, Nina Gurgenidze, asking her to marry him. When she forsook him and married a dishevelled lawyer, Soso cursed: “How could you have married that scruff.” The lawyer husband was shot in 1937.

59

Minadora, née Ordzhonikidze, was a Menshevik married to the Bolshevik Malakia Toroshelidze, who was also close to Stalin. Minadora was the only woman to sign the Menshevik declaration of independence for Georgia in 1918. After Stalin and Sergo reconquered Georgia in 1921, she stayed in Tiflis with Toroshelidze, rector of Tiflis University, one of those who received a copy of the Credo. In 1937, they were both arrested. In a typical random irony of Stalin’s Terror, she, the Menshevik, was released; he, the Bolshevik, was shot. But perhaps this was not coincidental: Stalin liked her. Minadora’s memoirs are unpublished.

60

Kirtava became a Party official and avid Stalinist in Batumi. Her memoirs are written in the rigid hieroglyphic Bolshevik language, but even in the 1930s she dared record how she turned down Stalin—and how that infuriated him. The story has not been published until now.

61

Noe Khomeriki later served as Minister of Land in the independent Georgia of 1918–21 before leading the Menshevik rebellion of 1924 when he was captured and shot. His letter was confiscated in a Gendarme raid and then long lost in the archives. It is unusual because it is so specifically damning in its analysis of Stalin’s methods and ambitions. In late 1950, Beria, then the Politburo grandee in charge of the nuclear project, was out of favour and feared his own destruction. We now know that he heard about this letter from Georgian circles and, gathering ammunition to use against Stalin if need be, he secretly and unofficially asked an archivist to trace it. But Beria did not find it. The letter resurfaced only in 1989.

62

Colchis, land of the Golden Fleece, was the ancient name of Georgia: hence Colchian.

63

Essad Bey was one of the pseudonyms of Lev Nussimbaum, the son of a Jewish Baku oil baron, who wrote Stalin: Career of a Fanatic. He also wrote the classic love story Ali and Nino under the name Kurban Said, whose identity was a mystery until a new biography—The Orientalist by Tom Reiss—revealed Nussimbaum’s bizarre life and ethnic transformation into a Muslim in Fascist Italy. A notorious fantasist is hardly an ideal historical source; his unsourced anecdotes were long regarded as myths yet they often turn out to be historically correct. Nussimbaum must have known exiles from Tiflis and Baku and recorded their stories, but his unreliable material has to be counter-checked.

64

Chavichvili’s two volumes of memoirs are invaluable but rarely used by historians: they were only published in tiny editions in French. Chavichvili was a hostile witness who wrote in exile, yet he is half impressed, half appalled by Stalin’s magnetism.

65

He fought in print too. “Our Mensheviks are really too tiresome!” wrote Stalin in his pamphlet accusing them of Marxist phoniness. The article is interesting for its quaint phrases and parables: “One day a crow found a rose but that doesn’t prove a crow is a nightingale.” The Mensheviks “remind us of the thief who stole the money and shouted ‘Stop thief!’” But he concluded, “It is well known that the tongue always turns to the aching tooth.”

66

In October 1940, the celebrated Georgian writer Shalva Nutsubidze was suddenly freed from jail and brought to meet Stalin, who admired, edited and contributed to his translation of Rustaveli. At dinner in Stalin’s mansion at Kuntsevo, Nutsubidze remembered the speech at Tsulukidze’s funeral and proceeded to recite it. “Extraordinary talent goes hand in hand with extraordinary memory,” exclaimed Stalin, who walked up to his guest and kissed him on the forehead. For the full story, see Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar.

67

Father Kasiane Gachechiladze’s memoirs were written secretly during Stalin’s lifetime and inherited by his grandson, who saw this author talking about this project on Georgian television and made contact. The account of his leading horses cross-country, his movements and his conversation all chime with other sources.

68

Stalin did not only know the Svanidzes via Alyosha. Simon Svanidze, father of Alyosha and his three sisters, was a teacher in Kutaisi; the mother, Sipora, one of the noble Dvali clan. In Kutaisi, Sipora’s cousin, a Dvali, was chief of police. Both the Svanidzes and Police Chief Dvali hid Stalin from the secret police, another example of how Georgian connections were more important than loyalty to the state.

69

The memoirs of Sashiko Svanidze and her husband, Monoselidze, are invaluable. Both were recorded in the early to mid-1930s when Stalin was already dictator, but they are nonetheless astonishingly honest. Sashiko’s memoirs are unpublished; portions of Monoselidze’s memoirs were used in the cult literature, but most of their reminiscences were deemed unsuitable. At this time, 1905–6, Bolsheviks arriving from the provinces reported to Stalin at the hospital, but the leaders—Shaumian, Spandarian, Abel Yenukidze (another Rachvelian) and Budu “the Barrel” Mdivani—were regulars at the Svanidzes’ along with Soso’s hit men, Kamo and Tsintsadze.

70

Stalin’s reaction to this insult was a surprising one, and he never forgot it. For Kavtaradze’s fate, see the Epilogue. The Union Committee united both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks.

71

Stalin, writes Trotsky, “spent 1905 in an unpretentious office writing dull comments on brilliant events.” Most historians have followed Trotsky’s line.

72

Still the Lenin Museum, one of the last shrines to Lenin in the Western world.

73

There were embarrassments in his ancestry: his mother was the granddaughter of Moishe Blank, a Jewish merchant who married a Swede. The prominence of Jews among the Bolsheviks was always an issue in Soviet Russia. Indeed in 1932 Lenin’s sister Anna wrote to Stalin about Lenin’s Jewish background. “Absolutely not one word about this letter!” Stalin scrawled on it. It remained secret until the 1990s.

74

The most important of these delegates was Leonid Krasin, brilliant engineer, ladies’ man and Lenin’s financial, terrorism and explosives expert, whom Stalin already knew from Baku. There, Krasin had invented the electrical generating system for oil on behalf of big business while creating an underground printing-press for the Bolsheviks. In 1905, he helped Lenin raise funds through his contacts with the plutocratic industrialists such as Savva Morozov and with the actress Kommissarzhevskaya, who had donated her boxoffice receipts, but his specialities were terror, bank robbery and bomb-making. At Tam-merfors, Stalin also met Emelian Yaroslavsky, who became his chief propagandist in power; Yakov Sverdlov, who shared his exile, became Lenin’s chief organizer and first Soviet head of state; and Solomon Lozovsky, Stalin’s future Deputy Foreign Commissar, whom he tried and shot in 1952 during his anti-Semitic terror. Lozovsky was the only one of Stalin’s victims who had the courage to defy the dictator openly in court: see Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar.

75

This management by competition was typical—it resembles the way Stalin would later order Marshals Zhukov and Konev to race each other to take Berlin in 1945.

76

Bachua Kupriashvili, one of the leading brigands in the Tiflis bank robbery, recorded his memoirs during the Stalin years. He confirms Stalin’s direct command of the Outfit but is careful not to link him directly to its heists. The memoirs have remained forgotten in the Georgian archives for sixty years.

77

The word “technical” was a Bolshevik euphemism for terrorism or killing—both Krasin and the Mensheviks called their bomb-making laboratories their “Technical Departments.”

78

This must be the scarf, resembling a Jewish prayer-shawl, that Stalin was wearing in the famous police mugshot (see this book’s cover) taken during this mysterious arrest.

79

Stalin here met for the first time the Polish socialist Felix Dzerzhinsky, who would become founder of the Soviet secret police, the Cheka, and his ally in the power struggles after Lenin’s death; Grigory Radomyslsky, the Jewish milkman’s son soon known as “Zinoviev,” his triumvir after Lenin’s death, whom Stalin liquidated with Kamenev in 1936; and Alexei Rykov, Lenin’s successor as Premier, with whom Stalin would share power for a while and then liquidate in 1938. At the Congress, Stalin also met up with old friends Said Devdariani, from the seminary; Kalinin, his future Head of State, whom he knew through the Alliluyevs; and his Tiflis comrade Stepan Shaumian.

80

According to Ketevan Gelovani, the granddaughter of Kato’s mother’s sister, whom this author interviewed in Tbilisi, Soso behaved gently towards her except for flashes of temper: “Soon after the wedding, he burned her hand with a cigarette in a fury, but she loved him and he was mostly so kind and tender to her.” There is a legend in Finland that he took her on honeymoon to Karelia; however, there is no evidence that she accompanied him to Sweden, and besides they were not yet married.

81

They were not meant to be in London at all: the original plan was to hold the Congress in Copenhagen, so Stalin travelled to St. Petersburg, then to Finland and on to Malmö in Sweden, whence he and his fellow delegates were ferried to Copenhagen. But the Danes expelled them to Sweden, which sent them back to Denmark, which despatched them to Esbjerg, where they caught a steamship to London.

82

The other big news during these weeks was a plot against the life of the Tsar and a photo-portrait of the three-year-old Tsarevich Alexei headlined: TSAREVICH WEARS HIS FIRST PAIR OF KNICKERS; the wedding of the Tsar’s cousin Grand Duke Nicholas to the daughter of the Prince of Montenegro; and the birth of a son to the English Queen of Spain, headlined AN ENGLISH BABE.

83

Now a furniture warehouse, a camera shop and a gentleman’s outfitters.

84

Later in life, Gorky would become the dictator’s friend, shameful apologist, pathetic trophy and possibly victim. See Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar.

85

Stalin slyly blamed this on Grigory Alexinsky in Notes of a Delegate, his account of the London Congress published under the name “Koba Ivanovich” in Bakinsky Proletary. He pointed out that the “majority of Mensheviks were Jews, then came Georgians and then Russians. On the other hand, the overwhelming majority of the Bolshevik group were Russians, then came Jews (not counting Poles and Letts of course), then Georgians…” Much has been made of the Jewish nature of the SDs, but Stalin’s figures show how Georgian the Party was too. Arsenidze asserts that Stalin was “neutral” on the Jews, merely interested in what was useful politically. In his articles, he was sympathetic to their plight: “Groaning under the yoke are the eternally persecuted and humiliated Jews who lack even the miserably few rights enjoyed by other Russian subjects.” On a related theme, he also attacked the Mensheviks for being “intellectuals” instead of workers and expressed amazement that the Mensheviks had attacked the Bolsheviks for containing too many intellectuals: “We explained the Menshevik shouts by the proverb: ‘The tongue ever turns to the aching tooth.’” As we have seen, this was a favourite phrase. As for the challenge to his credentials, most histories retell this to diminish his importance and standing, but never mention that the respected Tskhakaya and Shaumian were challenged simultaneously. There was another reason for Lenin’s insouciance. He had offered a merger deal to the Georgian Mensheviks: if Jordania did not interfere in Russian matters, he could become leader of a united Party in Georgia. Jordania never took up the offer.

86

Churchill, aged thirty-three, was living at his bachelor flat at Mount Street WI while Stalin, twenty-nine, was staying as Koba Ivanovich in Stepney. Already Under-Secretary for the Colonies in the Liberal government of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, he had just published his biography of his father, Lord Randolph. He was famous enough for a biography of himself to be published, the first. While Stalin was in England, Churchill travelled up to give a speech in Scotland which was reported in the papers.

87

“Stalin in Wales” persists: the Welsh writer John Summers “confirmed” it on a visit to the mining town founded by a Welshman, Hughesovska (now Donetsk) in the Soviet Union in the 1970s. A Welsh website still lists Stalin among “scary individuals who have spent quality-time in Wales,” alongside the serial-killer Fred West, the magician Aleister Crowley, the Nazi Rudolf Hess and the Ugandan tyrant Idi Amin: “Stalin briefly visited the South Wales valleys to garner support and raise funds for the Russian Revolution.” Of Stalin’s helpers, Fyodor Rothstein, the Bolshevik fixer in London, became Soviet Ambassador to Persia, dying before the Terror. His son Andrew Rothstein enjoyed a strange career between the English Establishment and the Stalinist nomenklatura, he studied at Oxford University, then worked in the Marxism-Leninism Institute during the Terror and was fortunate to survive, later returning to London to become the sage of British Marxism. In one of his more bizarre reminiscences, Stalin told a group of British MPs during the Second World War that he had seen Benito Mussolini, then a socialist, at a Marxist meeting when he was in London. It is possible he did see Mussolini at some socialist conference in Germany, but the future Duce was not then in London. Stalin’s English errand-boy Bacon became a hospital orderly at Beckenham Hospital. He gave an interview to the Daily Express in 1950 when he was fifty-six. “I wonder if Generalissimo Stalin, Father of all the Russias, remembers the tall boy who bought him toffee,” concluded Bacon. The house on Jubilee Street no longer exists.

88

The Bolshevik position in Georgia was undermined by the assassination of the hugely popular Prince Ilya Chavchavadze, who had published Soso’s poems, in August 1907. The Bolsheviks had attacked his patriarchical version of Georgian culture and, it was widely believed, had decided to kill him; there is some evidence that Stalin’s friend Sergo Ordzhonikidze organized or took part in the assassination. It may be that the SDs played no role in the murder at all. Stalin always praised Chavchavadze’s poetry in his old age and there is no evidence that he ordered the hit, but he was very close to Sergo and he was certainly more than capable of separating literary merit from cruel necessity: politics always came first.

89

Stalin himself later implied he was in the Tamamshev Caravanserai and saw Tsintsadze give the gangsters their pep talk, but Tsintsadze had just been arrested. Perhaps the old dictator was muddling this bank robbery with another, that of 1912 (see Chapter 29). In 1907 Kamo was presumably the pep talker.

90

The other gangsters, who had actually conducted many more heists, were jealous of Kamo’s fame. “Our Outfit was called the Kamo Group,” says Bachua Kupriashvili, “but it wasn’t true. We accepted Kamo into the group over a year after it had been set up. He played his role in this big action after which everything was ascribed to him… But Kote Tsintsadze, Intskirveli, Eliso Lominadze… were not inferior and probably superior to Kamo.”

91

Lenin published an epistemological polemic, “Materialism and Empiricism,” which attacked Alexander Bogdanov’s mystical philosophical relativism, which he believed threatened Marxist materialism.

92

After Lenin’s death in 1924, Stalin’s Bolshevik legitimacy became hugely important as he tried to prove himself worthy to become the heir. If Martov had proved Stalin’s expulsion, he might have saved Russia from Stalinism.

93

The Persian word for fire is azer—hence the name of the country, Azerbaijan.

94

They were soon joined by an Englishman, Sir Marcus Samuel, later Viscount Bearsted, founder of Shell. In 1912, Eduard de Rothschild, Alphonse’s son, sold most of the Rothschild interests in Baku to Royal Dutch Shell, then headed by Henri Deterding. The Rothschilds took most of their payment in Royal Dutch Shell shares. This proved a classically brilliant Rothschild deal. The Rothschilds eschewed oil investments in Russia for almost a century—making another fortune in the Russian oil boom of the twenty-first century. The ex-Rothschild palace is now Azerbaijan’s Justice Ministry.

95

Stalin had “great knowledge of the oil industry,” wrote his Georgian protégé Mgeladze. Baku became enormously important in 1942 when Hitler, in desperate need of oil, ordered his armies to push towards the oilfields. The result was the Battle of Stalingrad, which in effect was the battle for Baku. Stalin called in his Deputy Oil Commissar, Nikolai Baibakov: “Hitler wants the oil of the Caucasus. On pain of losing your head, you’re responsible for ensuring no oil is left behind… Do you know Hitler has declared that without oil he’ll lose the war?”

96

Trotsky too was neglectful: he abandoned his wife and two daughters in Siberia, blaming “Fate”—and later treated his children appallingly. Bolshevism and family were incompatible.

97

The family, who were there and know best, write that she suffered a stomach complaint, haemorrhagic colitis and typhus. Almost certainly Kato suffered intestinal or peritoneal TB (not always associated with pulmonary TB), which leads to weight loss, stomach pain, diarrhoea and bowel bleeding. Levan Shaumian, who grew up in Stalin’s home in the 1920s, says she died of TB and pneumonia. Typhus is spread by infected water and food, typhoid by bedbugs and reduced resistance, but both flourish among the poor and malnourished—and both can lead to bleeding bowels and darkening rashes. There was no treatment until the 1950s. Katevan Gelovani, a close Svanidze relative interviewed in Tbilisi by this author, calls it “stomach cancer,” which may be her explanation of the bleeding from the bowels. Mariam Svanidze, another cousin still alive in Tbilisi (aged 109) and interviewed by this author on 31 October 2005, remembers the death clearly. “I was then nine years old. Kato and my father got typhus at the same time. Books say Kato died of TB, but I can assure you it was typhus,” says this sturdy and lucid centenarian wearing a floral dressing-gown in a Tbilisi old people’s home. “Both got the red rash. We knew if the rash went black, they’d die. My father’s rash stayed red. He lived, but I remember that Kato’s turned black. Then all the family knew she’d die. And die she did.”

98

Stalin’s reaction to the death is very similar to his behaviour after the suicide of his second wife, Nadya Alliluyeva, in 1932, down to the suicide threat, self-pity and blaming himself for neglect.

99

The announcement of the death read: “We notify our comrades, friends and family of the death of Ekaterina Semyonovna Svanidze Djugashvili, expressing the deepest sorrow on behalf of Josef, husband, Simon and Sepora, parents, and Alexandra, Alexander and Mariko, siblings.” Mikheil Monoselidze adds, “In 1936, I buried my wife, Sashiko, next to Kato.” Sashiko died of cancer, but it might have been a mercy. By the early 1930s, the Svanidzes were among Stalin’s most intimate courtiers. But their fortunes would be suddenly and terribly reversed: their story is told in the Epilogue. The Tiflis grave, with photographs of Kato and Sashiko, is still there; so is an old fence at the back of the cemetery, perhaps the one Stalin vaulted to escape the police. Among the gravediggers, there is a story that because Kato died of typhus, the authorities first tried to bury her in a mass “plague grave” but that the family recovered the body and buried her themselves.

100

He met up again now with his comrades from Tiflis such as Sergo, Budu “the Barrel” Mdivani, Alliluyev, Kavtaradze, the gangster Tsintsadze, most of the Outfit—and the tall, blue-eyed Shaumian. Stalin’s new friend Voroshilov and his old friend Yenukidze were soon joined by Lenin’s special agent, the well-connected but severe noblewoman Elena Stasova (“Comrade Absolute”), Rozalia Zemliachka, Alexinsky and a girl named Ludmilla Stal. But there were also many Mensheviks from his past, such as Devdariani. It was a small world.

101

Stalin’s career in Baku is shadowy, but the memoirs of the Mauserists give us helpful clues. They could not be used in the Soviet era, especially during Stalin’s dictatorship, and are mostly unpublished, but they remain in the archives.

102

In his first kidnapping, Nageyev’s ransom was 10,000 gold roubles—or his kidnappers threatened to cut him into pieces. “I can pay only 950 roubles,” Nageyev replied. “Of course you can slice me up, but then you won’t get anything.” He paid only the 950. Then in December 1908, Nageyev was again kidnapped by gangsters led by “a Georgian with black hair and unusual pockmarks.” Nageyev supposedly paid 100,000 roubles. Stalin was at liberty in Baku for the first kidnapping, but in Baku Jail for the second. Had Stalin been at liberty on the latter occasion, he would still not have participated directly. In any case, he ran his criminal-terrorist organization from his cell: he could easily have ordered either or both kidnappings. On the other hand, the story does not appear in any of the Bolshevik memoirs, and in 1909 newspapers claimed the second gang of kidnappers were rogue policemen linked to deputy city governor Colonel Shubinsky. Nonetheless Nageyev probably contributed to Bolshevik funds like the other oil barons. Like them, too, he lost his fortune in the Revolution; he died in 1919.

103

The beating-up was a humiliation that may have contributed to his brutal deportation of the entire Chechen race during the Second World War at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives. Equally, he deported many other peoples during the war and victimized other races such as the Poles and Koreans with whom he had had no such experience. As for Mukhtarov, he refused to surrender his palace to the Bolsheviks when the Red Army took Baku in 1920. “As long as I am alive, no barbarian in army boots will enter my house!” In a shoot-out, he fired on the Bolsheviks until he was overcome, at which point he shot himself. His beautiful wife, Liza-Khanum, for whom his Baku château was built, lived on in the basement, then escaped to Turkey, where she lived until the 1950s. Mukhtarov’s château is now the Baku Wedding Palace.

104

When Marshal Voroshilov was out of Stalin’s favour in his last years, he used to plead: “But, Koba, we became friends in Baku in 1907.”

“I don’t remember,” Stalin replied. For his future life, see the Epilogue.

105

In power, he persecuted and arrested Esperanto speakers.

106

Stalin found many of his Mauserist gangsters in the Bailovka (such as his cellmates the Sakvarelidze brothers). His Menshevik opponents, Devdariani from the seminary and Isidore Ramishvili from Batumi, were also in his crowded cell, but now the two factions were again forced to work together, and they turned a blind eye to his banditry.

107

In July 1937, at the height of the Great Terror, the man from Gori who arranged this swap, I. P. Nadiradze, wrote to another of his cellmates, Andrei Vyshinsky, Stalin’s craven but dreaded Procurator-General, to ask him to confirm that he had served time for political murder and had helped arrange Stalin’s swap and escape. Vyshinsky confirmed the former, but on the swap that sinister survivor sat on the fence: “As for the fact of organizing the replacement for Comrade Stalin… I cannot attest to this because I do not remember.” Nadiradze was clearly under investigation in the Terror or he would not have appealed to the dangerous Vyshinsky on this sensitive subject at such a risky moment. But it is almost unthinkable that he would have written the letter were it not completely true as far as it goes.

108

The chief jailer there was named Serov, ironically the father of the future General Ivan Serov, one of Stalin’s top secret policemen, deporter of the Chechens and other peoples, and first KGB Chairman.

109

Soso befriended the post-office clerk who doubled as a jailer and whom he had met when he picked up his money orders. Soso liked to hunt alone in the forests during the summer and would meet the postman-jailer to pass him notes that he would deliver to the prisoners in the local prison. The local priest let Stalin use his library.

110

See the Epilogue.

111

The secret police adapted their own witty code names for their surveillance targets: a baker would be “Bun,” a banker “Moneybags,” the poet Sergei Esenin was “Typesetter,” while a pretty girl might be “Gorgeous” or “Glamourpuss.”

112

Just as he was to despise the happy marriages of his grandees in power, after the suicide of his second wife in 1932. See Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar.

113

Until recently, historians repeated that Beso had died about 1890, perhaps in a bar brawl, but the new archives disprove this. Once in power, Stalin’s henchmen and historians tried to find photographs of Beso and showed them to the dictator for identification: the Georgian Party archives contain piles of photographs of local cobblers and Beso candidates. One photograph probably is Beso for it was displayed in the cult museums, but Stalin himself refused to identify it. The local Party bosses also tried to find Beso’s grave but failed there too. In the 1940s, Elisabedashvili, who survived the Terror, presented Stalin with a clock that he claimed had belonged to Beso. Stalin refused to accept it, implying that someone else, probably Egnatashvili, was his real father. He preferred this gap in his life to any hint of the man himself.

114

Gio’s memoirs are remarkable because they were published in the Soviet Union in 1925, just after Lenin’s death but before Stalin had established his dictatorship—virtually the only moment in Soviet history when this could have happened. The book came out in Leningrad, then the fiefdom of Zinoviev, who presumably permitted this as a warning to Stalin, with whom he was competing for Lenin’s throne. Gio reveals that the Georgian police interpreter betrayed the Tsarist state not because he was a Marxist but because he was a Georgian “nationalist.” Gio also recounts how Stalin gave him code words to contact another comrade named Kornev, who turned out to be so suspicious that he was probably a police agent. Gio believed that this Kornev had tricked Stalin, but it is equally possible that Stalin was testing or sacrificing Gio, or that he was in the process of recruiting Kornev.

115

Sometimes the police set the price too high. “My dear,” wrote an unknown Bolshevik, “unfortunately I cannot help you. The official asks 800 roubles for cancellation abroad [this meant going abroad instead of into Siberian exile] for Yakov Mikhailovich [Sverdlov]. Where to get this sum?”

116

A major piece of evidence that Stalin was an Okhrana agent was a probable forgery, the so-called Eremin Letter, that appeared in the 1920s and was published by Life magazine in the 1950s, forming the backbone of the conspiracy-theory books by I. D. Levine and E. E. Smith. Colonel Eremin was indeed the head of the Tiflis Okhrana from February 1908. The letter was clearly drafted by someone who knew a lot about Stalin and the Okhrana, but it contained a series of mistakes of detail. While appreciating Stalin’s amorality, it also grasped his devotion to the cause, claiming that he was an unsatisfactory agent because in the end he was a fanatical Marxist. When the Eremin Letter was published in Life after Stalin’s death, his successor, First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, and the Politburo ordered the KGB Chairman, General Serov, to analyse its veracity. His investigations, recently found in the archives, also conclude that it was a forgery. As for the theory that the Great Terror was Stalin’s effort to suppress evidence of his Okhrana links, The Secret File of Joseph Stalin by Roman Brackman (2001) puts the argument robustly.

117

Stalin’s presence as an exile would return to haunt this region. In 1940, he ordered the construction of a giant steel-mill in Cherepovets because he remembered it from his Solvychegodsk exile, even though it was totally unsuitable: the nearest iron-ore and coal deposits were over 1,000 miles away. But his advisers were too frightened to tell him. The Second World War delayed construction, but building started in 1949. Due to its inconvenient location, it is still known as “Stalin’s Belch.”

118

In the early 1920s, Ivanian had the misfortune to literally bump into Stalin in Moscow and he apparently did ask for his help. On 7 June 1926, when he was already the dominant Soviet leader, Stalin was consulted on Ivanian, then an official with the Commissariat of Internal Trade. “In response to your inquiry, I notify you of the following facts that you need to know,” Stalin wrote in his characteristic numbered paragraphs. Point Six concluded: “Later after I went abroad, I received all the Central Committee documents proving that 70 roubles had been sent to me… [and] the money was not lost but received by the addressee in Vologda.” Ivanian was expelled from the Party but reinstated after Old Bolsheviks interceded for him. When Stalin unleashed the Terror, the Transcaucasian boss and secret policeman Beria pursued him. Ivanian wrote desperately to the dictator: “I still declare I had nothing to do with the 70 roubles… Please help clear my name.” He was ironically exiled back to Vologda, then transported to Tiflis and executed.

119

The son, Constantine, was born after Stalin’s departure. Kuzakova left memoirs during the dictatorship that naturally did not contain a confession of their affair., but on balance, it seems that the baby was Stalin’s son. The dates on the birth certificate do not tally, but, as with Yakov Djugashvili and indeed Stalin’s own movable birthday, such documents were often pre-dated or forward-dated. Such events were in any case registered very casually in those days, especially in tiny villages far from Petersburg. Soso made no attempt to meet the child, but, unusually, the boy was later brought to Moscow, given a favoured job in the Central Committee apparat, and protected. He had an interesting career. Given the mother’s insistence, Stalin’s acquiescence in the child’s later career, and his wife Nadya Alliluyeva’s knowledge of the affair, it seems probable the dictator knew Constantine was his son. See the Epilogue.

120

In 1944, the secret police confiscated her copy of this book along with postcards from Stalin. See the Epilogue.

121

His other, considerably less glamorous correspondent there was a stolid and bespectacled Bolshevik of just twenty-two who had been in exile in Solvychegodsk just before him. His name was Vyacheslav Scriabin, later “Molotov,” who became his longtime political henchman. Molotov heard that Stalin was known as the “Caucasian Lenin.” He was musical and could play the violin and mandolin. He earned one rouble a day by playing mandolin for rich merchants and their molls in the local restaurant and in the new cinema there. Stalin regarded this as beneath him as a Bolshevik. Later he taunted Molotov, “You performed for drunk merchants—they smeared your face in mustard!” Scriabin did not adopt his “industrial name” Molotov until 1914. At this time he was called Ryabin, Zvanov, Mikhailov and V.M., though the Okhrana called him “the Runner” because he walked so fast.

122

Stalin’s associates from Tiflis and Baku, Kalinin and Shaumian, were elected candidate CC members—substitutes if full members were arrested. Elena Stasova became Secretary of the Russian Bureau.

123

Kavtaradze was arrested by the Gendarmes the next day. When they showed him a photo of Stalin, he laughed because he looked “so tousled.” “Do you know him?” asked the officer. “No, he looks crazy.” “Do you know Djugashvili?” “Yes I know Soso Djugashvili, I just saw him.” “Do you know he’s a state criminal who’s very dangerous and on the run?” “Well, you know we Georgians always know each other…” Kavtaradze was released.

124

The housemaid was an Estonian girl who later married Kalinin, becoming the first lady of the USSR before being arrested during Stalin’s Terror while her husband remained head of state. See Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar.

125

Now known as “Comrade Zelma,” Stasova was the granddaughter of the architect to the Emperors Alexander I and Nicholas I and daughter of a noble lawyer who worked in the Senate, a herald at Alexander II’s coronation: she had much in common with those cultured nobles Lenin and Krupskaya. She knew Stalin from Baku and was a specialist in secret work, often involved in keeping Party funds. Stasova was so humourless and prissy that Stalin laughed at her. She later became one of Lenin’s secretaries. After Lenin’s death, when Krupskaya opposed him, Stalin half jokingly threatened to appoint Stasova as his widow instead. She did not seek high office after Lenin’s death, almost disappearing, one of the very few Old Bolsheviks to survive the Terror. She emerged as a revered antique in Khrushchev’s reign, living on into Brezhnev’s, and dying in 1966.

126

The nine-year-old son of a Moscow Bolshevik remembered how a Caucasian came to visit his father. The father was out, so the Caucasian tenderly chatted to the child. As he was leaving, the Caucasian sharply slapped the boy’s face then said, “Don’t cry, little boy. Remember, today Stalin [or whichever name he was then using] talked to you!” When the boy told his parents, they were angry and baffled until they heard of this mountain custom in Georgia: when a prince visited a village family, the peasant would slap his son across the face and say, “Remember today this Prince visited our house.”

127

Stalin blasted the regime of “Nicholas the Last.” The Emperor and Empress were already placing their trust in a Siberian healer and dissolute hierophant named Grigory Rasputin. Once Rasputin’s intimacy with the monarchs was known, this created a growing scandal that alienated monarchists and Marxists alike. Few knew that the little heir, Tsarevich Alexei, suffered from haemophilia. Nicholas and Alexandra increasingly believed that Rasputin alone could staunch the bleeding and ease the child’s pain. The ever-changing Interior Ministers and Okhrana directors now started using their agents to tail Rasputin and chronicle his orgies to discredit him with the Emperor. Increasingly the Empress judged her ministers by their attitude to Rasputin. Stalin wrote about him when he called the Tsar and his courtiers “destroyers of liberties, worshippers of gallows and firing-squads, thieving quartermasters, robber police, murderous secret policemen and dissolute Rasputins!… To complete the picture: the brutal shooting of toilers in the Lena goldfields.”

128

Stalin told this story to Molotov on their way to the Teheran Conference in 1943 and to his son-in-law Yuri Zhdanov. Back in Narym, the district policeman found Stalin was missing the next day but waited to see if he would return from Tomsk. By the time the police reported his escape to the governor of Tomsk, who had issued an alert, it was 3 November and Stalin had been in Petersburg for weeks.

129

Krasin finally left active politics, but Lenin welcomed his return to the Bolsheviks after the Revolution, appointing him People’s Commissar for Trade, Industry and Transport, and later Ambassador to London. Krasin the engineer was one of the brains behind the refrigeration, embalming and displaying of the dead Lenin in 1924. He himself died in 1926.

130

Once again, Kamo cheated the noose, benefiting from the broad amnesty of Nicholas II on the three hundredth anniversary of the Romanov dynasty in 1913. Kamo remained in jail for five years but lived to meet up again with Stalin and play out the ultimate insane violence after the Revolution. See the Epilogue. Of the female gangsters, Anneta and Patsia died of TB, as did many of the others. By the end of the 1930s, only Alexandra Darakhvelidze and Bachua Kupriashvili survived to leave their memoirs.

131

His articles are revealing of his cynical view of diplomacy (he paraphrases Talleyrand) and his belief in doublespeak (long before Orwell coined the word): “When bourgeois diplomats prepare for war, they shout loudly about ‘peace.’ A diplomat’s words must contradict his deeds—otherwise what sort of diplomat is he? Fine words are a mask to conceal shady deeds. A sincere diplomat is like dry water. Or wooden iron.”

132

Her husband, journalist Alexander Lobov, was shot in 1918 as an Okhrana agent. She was cleared but died of TB in 1924. Shotman, who remained close to Lenin into the 1920s, was executed by Stalin in 1939.

133

This tryst with the arch-heretics would be concealed during the Soviet era.

134

There has been much debate about Stalin’s two journeys to Cracow: he himself told many stories about crossing the border. (The old tyrant told the story about the border-crossing and Lenin and the food to his favourite youngster, Yuri Zhdanov.) Was he just lying? In his personal anecdotes, he tended to exaggerate more than totally invent his stories, especially about such a well-known trip. When he lied outright, he did not tell the lie himself, simply inserting it into the information of his propagandists. Thus he probably used that route at least once. Shotman says he arranged the first trip; the other sources are mixed up about the two trips. So this author believes that the meetings with Shotman concerned the first trip for which there was plenty of time to plan. For the second trip, for which there was no such time, Stalin and Valentina probably took the risk of crossing the border by a smugglers’ path.

135

Stalin told this story to Stanislaw Kot, the Polish Ambassador, at a Kremlin banquet in December 1941.

136

Stalin’s friend from Tiflis, Kalinin, was not promoted to the CC because he was temporarily suspected of being an Okhrana double-agent: the Bolsheviks, even while being betrayed by Malinovsky at the very heart of the Party, suspected an innocent comrade.

137

Now a boarding-house, the Pension Schönbrunn, which unusually still bears the blue plaque put up in 1949 that reads: J.V. STALIN RESIDED IN THIS HOUSE DURING JANUARY 1913. HE WROTE HIS IMPORTANT WORK “MARXISM AND THE NATIONAL QUESTION” HERE.

138

Josip Broz, the future Marshal Tito, was also working there as a mechanic.

139

In the incestuous world of Bolshevism, Elena later divorced Troyanovsky and then had an affair with Malinovsky the traitor (according to Malinovsky). She married the Bolshevik grandee Nikolai Krylenko, a member of Lenin’s first government, later Commander-in-Chief of the Red Army, then Procurator-General, finally a brutal People’s Commissar for Justice who was himself shot in the Great Terror. Fortunately Krylenko left Elena in the late 1920s, which probably saved her life, for she survived the Terror, working quietly in the archives, dying naturally in 1953. The Troyanovskys’ daughter Galina married another Bolshevik magnate, Valerian Kuibyshev, Stalinist Politburo member, womanizer and drinker who ill treated her. Stalin said he would have intervened if he had known of Kuibyshev’s drunken promiscuity. Kuibyshev’s suspicious death from alcoholism in 1935 suited Stalin. The nanny Olga Veiland became a Party and Comintern apparatchik, retiring young and surviving into old age. The destiny of Troyanovsky—even though he turned against the Bolsheviks—was very different: see the Epilogue.

140

Marxism and the National Question was Stalin’s most famous work: he himself never stopped editing it during his long life. It was an answer to the Austrian socialists who proposed what Lenin called “an Austrian federation within the Party.” As ever, Lenin was being practical and farsighted, as well as ideological. He feared that the Jewish Bundists or Georgian Mensheviks, who advocated variations on cultural autonomy or even national separatism, would make the Party and ultimately the Russian Empire ungovernable under Bolshevism. He needed a theory that offered the ideal of autonomy and the right of secession without necessarily having to grant either. Lenin and Stalin agreed that nothing should stand in the way of a centralized state. Stalin defined the nation as a “historically formed, stable community of people, united by community of language, territory, economic life and psychological make-up.” On the Jews, Stalin asked: “What sort of nation is a Jewish nation which consists of Georgian, Dagestani, Russian and American Jews who don’t understand each other, inhabit different parts of the globe… and never act together in peace or war? They’re being assimilated” for they have “no stable and large stratum associated with the land…” He attacked “Austro-Marxism” and national autonomy, but in the Caucasus accepted “regional autonomy.” The right of secession was offered (in theory) but should not be taken. This paper was not beautifully written, but it had a sort of subtlety that turned into a reality when Stalin created the web of republics that became the USSR. It remains relevant because the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 allowed the full republics such as Ukraine, Estonia and Georgia to become independent but not the autonomous republics such as Chechnya.

141

“Solin” and “Safin,” the earlier versions of his new name, may have been typos because sol means “salt” in Russian: “Man of Salt” does not quite have the metallic sheen of the final version. When they were typesetting Zvezda in April 1912, says Vera Shveitzer, “The editorial board once changed the signature arbitrarily. The next day when J. V. Stalin opened Zvezda and saw the signature ‘Solin,’ he smiled: ‘I don’t like meaningless borrowed bylines.’” He returned to “K.St.” until January 1913. Stalin was not the only “industrial name”: Rosenfeld became “Kamenev”—Man of Stone (though he remained much too fluffy for the moniker); and Scriabin became “Molotov”—Hammer Man. There was also a fashion for taking aliases from jailers: Bronstein borrowed the name “Trotsky” from one of his prison warders. Contrary to many claims in Western biographies, “Stalin” is not a Russianization of Djugashvili: Djuga does not mean “iron” or “steel” in either Georgian or Ossetian.

142

This trading centre boasted a large missionary monastery, which had baptized the local tribesmen and which was led by a Mikhail Suslov, the great-grandfather and namesake of the Soviet grandee who was favoured by Stalin after the Second World War and who became the éminence grise of the Brezhnev era.

143

Sverdlov was wrong: there were two Kureikas. But their destination was just south of the Arctic Circle.

144

In 1942, the First Secretary of Krasnoyarsk, Constantin Chernenko, who had risen in the Terror by denunciation and even participation in executions, commissioned the well-known historian M. A. Moskalev to interview Stalin’s Turukhansk acquaintances for a sycophantic book, Stalin in Siberian Exile. Chernenko printed the book and sent it to Moscow for approval. After all, Politburo member and secret-police chief Beria had built his career on overseeing a preposterously inflated history of Stalin’s Caucasian career. But this time it did not work. Stalin was incensed by Chernenko’s inquiries, though they are a blessing for us historians. The dictator was working long hours to win the war; he knew there was nothing glorious to reveal in Kureika, quite the contrary; he both craved his idolatrous cult and disdained it; and Moskalev was a Jew, a race Stalin increasingly distrusted. He phoned Chernenko and shouted at him. The book was withdrawn. Moskalev was arrested in the anti-Semitic, postwar Terror but survived as a top Soviet historian into the 1960s. Chernenko’s career was frozen. However, his sycophancy found him another patron: he became Leonid Brezhnev’s long-serving chef de cabinet, Politburo member and penultimate successor as Soviet leader in 1984: the short reign of this senile mediocrity symbolized the geriatic obsolescence of the Soviet Union. Chernenko died in 1985. His successor was the vigorous reformer Mikhail Gorbachev.

145

“Individualist” was a Marxist insult because Bolsheviks were meant to submit the individual to the collective.

146

Like the Azef case, the revelations about Malinovsky, aired in the Duma, shook the political establishment and helped to undermine the credibility and competence not just of the Okhrana but also of the Duma, the Emperor and the state itself. One of Malinovsky’s first accusers was Elena (Rozmirovich) Troyanovskaya, Stalin’s hostess in Vienna, who had become Secretary to the Bolshevik Duma deputies. Yet the traitor dismissed this as the sour grapes of his ex-mistress. When Malinovsky was captured by the Germans during the war, Lenin sent him clothes, but after the Revolution, faced with the evidence, he changed his view: “What a swine: shooting’s too good for him.” Malinovsky was tried in November 1918, prosecuted, ironically, by Elena Rozmirovich’s husband, Nikolai Krylenko, at a tribunal chaired by Elena herself. Malinovsky was shot.

147

For decades there were rumours of Stalin’s rape or seduction of a girl in Turukhansk and his fathering a child. This first appeared in Essad Bey’s biography of 1931. Svetlana Alliluyeva says her aunts told her Stalin had a son in exile. The stories were repeated in biographies and sensational newspaper articles but seemed outlandish, presumably just anti-Stalin myths. But it is confirmed by the KGB in General Serov’s 18 July 1956 memorandum to First Secretary Khrushchev and the Politburo. Serov, a brutal Stalinist secret policeman, had the sense to separate himself from Beria and attach himself to Khrushchev. After Stalin’s death, he assisted Khrushchev in the arrest and execution of Beria, becoming the first Chairman of the KGB, the new version of the secret police. His memo was read in secrecy at a Politburo meeting and signed by all Stalin’s old henchmen before being consigned to the top secret “Special File.”

148

Fourteen was technically the age of consent in the Russian and European regions of the Tsarist Empire, but this was Siberia. Besides, there was no precise legal concept of statutory rape in Tsarist law: for the police, it was as much a crime “against female honour” as a violation of her father’s chattels. The seducer’s agreement to marry and then the exchange of marriage vows were seen as rectifying an untoward situation.

149

The payments have attracted suspicion, but they are much too meagre for the wages of an Okhrana agent. They included some of his CC salary; and, as we have seen, Sverdlov received far more. Yet during the Great Terror in 1938 Stalin’s secret police chief, “poison dwarf” Nikolai Yezhov, who had become his closest henchman and was presiding over the slaughter of over a million innocent people, began to realize that he was dispensable. Yezhov, sinking into alcoholism and sexual debauchery under the terrible strain of killing and torturing, gathered materials to use as security or blackmail against his master and the rival magnates Beria, Georgi Malenkov and Khrushchev. He procured Stalin’s ten money orders and kept them in his personal safe, but there is no smoking gun here. Three of them were money from Gori, probably from his mother or Egnatashvili. The other seven, from Moscow and Petersburg, adding up to 100 roubles, delivered 10 roubles here, 10 roubles there, though two were a more considerable 25 roubles each. They did not save Yezhov, who was dismissed in late 1938 and shot in 1940. Interestingly Stalin did not deign to destroy the money orders, just filing them in Yezhov’s papers where they were found by Professor Arch Getty, who has generously shared them with me. For the full story of the rise and fall of Yezhov, see Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar.

150

Just before telling his henchmen this story, the ageing Stalin had suffered a similar accident to that of U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney in 2006: while showing off his shooting skills, he had misfired, closely missing Politburo grandee Anastas Mikoyan and peppering two of his guards. Already beginning to hate and scorn the ailing dictator in the postwar years, Beria and Khrushchev had heard this story of Stalin’s exploit repeatedly. They did not believe it. “After dinner,” writes Khrushchev, “we were spitting with scorn in the bathroom: ‘So Stalin claimed to have skied 12 versts in winter, shot twelve partridges, skied back 12 versts and returned, another 12 versts, shot another twelve partridges and skied another 12 versts home—48 versts on skis!’” (48 versts equals 32 miles.) “Listen,” exclaimed Beria, “how can a man from the Caucasus who never had the chance to ski, travel a distance like that? He’s lying.” Khrushchev agreed: “Of course, he was lying! I’d seen with my own eyes that Stalin couldn’t shoot at all!” In fact, in the 1920s and early 1930s, Stalin enjoyed hunting on holiday, though he regarded it as a waste of time.

151

After the débâcle of the 1942 Kharkov offensive, Stalin gave Khrushchev a dressing-down. “During the First World War,” he said, “when one of the armies was encircled in East Prussia, the commander of the neighbouring army fled to the rear. He was put on trial—and hanged.”

152

In 1930, Merzliakov was accused of being a kulak, one of the richer peasants, whom Stalin was determined to liquidate in his brutal war on the peasantry. He appealed to Stalin: “I think you won’t have forgotten how I was.” Stalin responded: “I knew Mikhail Merzliakov at the time of my exile in the village of Kureika where he was my guard 1914–16. He only had one order—to look after me (the only exile in Kureika at the time). It is clear I could not have ‘friendly’ relations with Merzliakov. But I have to testify that even if our relations were not ‘friendly,’ they were not hostile as usual between guard and exile. It seems to me this can be explained by Merzliakov’s lip-service to his duties without the usual police zeal, he didn’t spy on me, didn’t persecute me… colluded in my long absences and often criticized his officers for his ‘tedious’ orders… So in 1914–16, Merzliakov distinguished himself from other policemen. It is my duty to testify this before you.”

153

Stalin poses with his trademark black fedora at a rakish angle, in his usual position at the centre in the back, flanked by Spandarian and Kamenev. Sverdlov also stands in the back row, while at the front, sitting on the floor, is Sverdlov’s little son Andrei, who later became one of Stalin’s top NKVD investigators and torturers.

154

Stalin was to repeat this philosophy in the early 1920s. Kamenev called it “Stalin’s Theory of Sweet Revenge” after his defeat by the dictator in the mid-1920s. But he did not take it, or Stalin, seriously until it was too late.

155

Spandarian was allowed to move to Krasnoyarsk in August, but it was too late. Stalin inquired after his friend but the letters went astray.

156

Fyodor was apparently not the only person punished for Stalin’s absence. This author received a letter from Mrs. Eva Purins of Downham Market, Norfolk, who writes that her great-grandmother, an exile named Jefinia Nogornova, was imprisoned in Krasnoyarsk for “helping to hide Stalin.” If true, it must have been on this occasion.

157

There were so many meetings, day and night, on every street corner that the ever adaptable Russian language coined the verb miningovat—to make meetings—just as during another revolution, in 1991, Russian created the word khappening—a happening—to describe the bizarre events of the new freedom.

158

On 26 February, Shlyapnikov declared, “There is no and will be no revolution,” but once it developed, he and Molotov managed to relaunch Pravda. When Molotov joined the Soviet Executive Committee, he wrote, “I had to speak against Kerensky. Lenin was far away. We had to decide everything ourselves.”

159

She was the lissom Polish ballerina who became Nicholas II’s first and only real mistress while he was heir to the throne. He had been in love with her, but when he fell for Alix of Hesse, who became Empress Alexandra, he continued to back Kseshinskaya’s rise to become the dominant prima ballerina of the Mariinsky. Afterwards, she entered an imperial ménage à trôis with her two Romanov lovers, Grand Dukes Sergei and Andrei. Between the sheets with the Emperor and the Grand Dukes and on stage in a stellar career built on imperial favour, Kseshinskaya gathered a collection of diamonds and residences that culminated in her building of the mansion. Its modernist style boasted parquet floors, crystal chandeliers, huge mirrors. A white hall had marble consoles and sofas inlaid with ormolu; its walls were covered in damask silk; its curtains were velvet. There was a small Louis XVI drawing-room with yellow silk walls—and the ballerina’s bathroom, in white marble with walls of inlaid blue and silver mosaic, and a sunken bath, “resembled a Greek bathing pool.” As a popular verse bawdily put it, she had “without sparing her legs, danced her way to a palace.” The mansion is today the Museum of Modern Russian History.

160

On 17 March, in his article “The War,” Stalin merely called for “pressure on the Provisional Government” about ending the war, while Lenin was already demanding its “overthrow.” He did not attack the Mensheviks but only wanted alliance with those who backed his belief in a defensist war. He wanted the Soviet to keep mastery over the Provisional Government and he demanded the urgent calling of a Constituent Assembly. On one hand, he only proposed “pressure” on the government; on the other, when the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks held a joint debate on the Provisional Government, he damned it as the organ of “the elites” who simply substituted “one Tsar for another.” He was still a Conciliator, as he explained at a Party conference at the end of March, held in the mansion and then in the Taurida.

161

The seductive Bolshevik Alexandra Kollontai had just delivered Lenin’s furious Letters from Afar to the defiant Stalin and Kamenev. Even as the Old Man approached, Stalin had shortened or refused to publish Lenin’s articles, which he criticized as “unsatisfactory… a sketch with no facts.” Lenin called for immediate power seizure but did not deign to explain how he had decided to jump the first formal stage of Marxist development and jump straight to the second—“the transition to socialism.”

162

Lenin’s retreat from his extremism had brought him much closer to Stalin’s often-denounced policies. Stalin felt that Lenin’s insistence on “European civil war” was over the top, talk of “dictatorship” impolitic, and demands for “land nationalization” insensitive to peasant hopes. Lenin, attuning himself to the real demands of Russian politics, gradually altered these policies in public.

163

These “provincials” were the tough Committeemen who loathed Trotsky and would become the Stalinists of the future, many of them friends from the Caucasus. Such Bolshevik praktiki certainly knew Stalin’s faults but they had much more in common with him than with Zinoviev or Trotsky. There was the excitable Sergo, the handsome Shaumian, the blond playboy Yenukidze, the easygoing ex-butler Kalinin and Voroshilov. Yet many Caucasians, especially the Mensheviks, hated Stalin. And he also had his Bolshevik critics from the Caucasus. Makharadze and Japaridze, old comrades from Tiflis and Baku, attacked Stalin’s approach to the Caucasian peoples at the April Conference, as did the Pole Felix Dzerzhinsky. Yet Stalin befriended Dzerzhinsky, founder of the secret police, perhaps because Poles and Georgians identified with one another as proud peoples colonized by Russia. Both men studied for the priesthood, wrote poetry, were obsessed with loyalty and betrayal. Both were skilled practitioners of secret-police work. Both were dominated by powerful mothers and suffered from dour fathers. Both were terrible parents; both fanatical and solitary creatures. Surprisingly for two so similar, they became allies.

164

The Bolshevik Military Organization ignored Lenin’s caution, showing that the Bolsheviks were still far from a disciplined force under a single leader. On the contrary, they remained insubordinate and fractious. The slavish monolith of the Party of Stalin was still years in the future.

165

Some broke into the palace where the Soviet sat under siege, refusing to take power. The mob seized Chernov, the frail SR leader, and started to lynch him until, in a virtuoso performance, Trotsky intervened, leaped onto a limousine, addressed the sailors and rescued the terrified politician.

166

Stalin’s Menshevik henchman from Baku, Vyshinsky, was head of Moscow’s Arbat region militia under Kerensky and signed arrest warrants for top Bolsheviks, including Lenin. After October, he joined the Bolsheviks. His shameful obedience to Kerensky ensured canine submission to Stalin to whose whim he owed his very survival.

167

Just as the police were known as pharaohs so any military officers were nicknamed “Junkers” after the Prussian noble military class.

168

Emelianov was arrested in the Great Terror. Krupskaya supposedly interceded on his behalf and he, along with his entire family, was kept in confinement until Stalin’s death.

169

Thus Stalin designed his first semi-military tunic, a look probably copied from Kerensky, who now regarded himself as a Russian Napoleon: the vain Premier already lived in his own military uniform, boots and tunic despite having no military experience whatsoever. Stalin would wear this tunic for the rest of his life, often with a worker’s cap. Lenin had now ceased to wear his Homburg hat and favoured workers’ brimmed caps. In the Civil War, the so-called Party tunic, leather cap, coat, boots and Mauser became almost the Bolshevik uniform and symbolized the military nature of the Bolshevik.

170

That summer, the other intriguing Party scandal was that Kamenev was accused of having been an Okhrana agent: the Central Committee asked Stalin to inform the Soviet Executive Committee. There was an investigation. Kamenev was cleared on 30 August.

171

After its humiliation in the July Days, the Soviet was moved out of the Taurida Palace into another neo-classical edifice next door, the Smolny Institute, built by Catherine the Great as a boarding-school for noble girls, where all the parties, including the Bolsheviks, now set up their offices. It was from the Smolny that Zinoviev and then, after his downfall in 1926, Sergei Kirov, a young protégé of Stalin’s, ruled Leningrad. Here, in 1934, Kirov was assassinated, a crime which, whether or not it was organized by Stalin, provided the excuse for the Great Terror. During the Siege of Leningrad, the city was ruled from the Smolny. Today, it houses the office of the mayor of St. Petersburg.

172

Another conciliatory gesture to Kamenev that shows Stalin’s instinct for maintaining some balance between Lenin and Trotsky, on the one hand, and the moderates on the other, in the Party. This was to pay rich dividends in the struggle to succeed Lenin.

173

In this rarely quoted article of 20 October, biblically entitled “The Strong Bulls of Bashan Have Beset Me Round!,” Stalin warned how he and the Party would regard intellectuals and artistic celebrities in their new Russia. Maxim Gorky, despite being a longtime supporter and funder of the Bolsheviks, now had severe reservations, declaring, “I cannot keep silent.” Stalin mocked such “terrified neurasthenics… verily ‘strong bulls of Bashan have beset me round,’ threatening and imploring. Here’s our reply!” Stalin warned that “there is a general croaking in the marsh of our bewildered intellectuals. The Revolution has not cringed before celebrities but has taken them into our service or, if they refused to learn, has consigned them to oblivion.”

174

Trotsky preferred to use his own new recruits to the Bolshevik Party, such as Antonov-Ovseenko, as his top operatives on the MRC, which had existed since 9 October. Sverdlov, Molotov and Dzerzhinsky were members. Why not Stalin? It is possible Stalin’s confrontation with the Military Organization in August or just his general truculence inhibited Sverdlov from inviting him to join. But it is more likely Stalin was simply busy with his press responsibilities and communications with Lenin, both vital. As for the Centre, on which Stalin served, it never met, even though his propagandists claimed that it was the real centre of the Revolution.

175

“Within the Military-Revolutionary Committee, there are two points of view,” said Stalin. “The first is that we organize an uprising at once and the second is that we consolidate our forces. The CC has sided with the second view.”

176

Earlier John Reed witnessed Trotsky himself being refused entry.

“You know me. My name is Trotsky.”

“You can’t go in. Names mean nothing to me!”

“But I’m the Chairman of the Soviet!”

“If you’re as important a fellow as that, you must have at least one bit of paper!” retorted the guard, who summoned an equally bemused officer:

“Trotsky! I’ve heard the name somewhere. I guess it’s alright…”

177

The junior leaders such as Molotov and Dzerzhinsky were sent out on missions: Molotov, accompanied by a detachment of Red Guards, was ordered to arrest the editors of the SR newspaper and then a counter-revolutionary group of Mensheviks meeting at the Holy Synod.

178

The Soviet Union became an empire of acronyms: the People’s Commissars became “Narkoms;” the Council of People’s Commissars was known as Sovnarkom; and its President (the effective Premier, successively Lenin, Rykov, Molotov, then Stalin) was Predsovnarkom. These lasted until Stalin reintroduced ministers at the end of the Second World War.

179

Sagirashvili was not the only Menshevik whom Stalin was courting. A Bolshevik-turned-Menshevik, Alexander Troyanovsky, the noble officer with whom Stalin had stayed in Vienna, was walking in the streets when a pair of hands covered his eyes. “Are you with us or against us?” asked Stalin.

180

Surprisingly, Lenin chose Kamenev to be the effective first Bolshevik head of state as Chairman of the Soviet Executive Committee, though he lasted only a few days. Sverdlov succeeded him.

181

Pestkovsky’s first memoirs, when published in 1922, contained Stalin’s grunts and moodiness. Naturally, when these were republished in 1930 the grunts were gone.

182

It is still widely believed that Stalinism was a distortion of Leninism. But this is contradicted by the fact that in the months after October they were inseparable. Indeed for the next five years Lenin promoted Stalin wherever possible. Lenin single-handedly pushed the Bolsheviks to frenzied bloodletting on orders that have recently been revealed in the archives and published in Richard Pipes’s Unknown Lenin. He knew what he was doing with Stalin, even though he realized that “that chef will cook up some spicy dishes.” Stalinism was not a distortion but a development of Leninism.

183

Trotsky later claimed that Stalin amassed power as a bureaucratic mediocrity, but it was actually Yakov Sverdlov, assisted by Elena Stasova, who ran the Party machine. Stalin was not a born bureaucrat at all. He was a hard worker utterly dedicated to politics; indeed everything with Stalin was political, but he worked in an eccentric, structureless, unbureaucratic, almost bohemian, style that would not have succeeded in any other government, then or now. Lenin’s trust was won in the bank robberies and intrigues of the early years and, later, on the battlefields of the Civil War: Stalin was hardly in his office before 1920.

184

Alexandra Kollontai always treated Stalin with old-world courtesy: she served as his Swedish Ambassador and died naturally. Dybenko was shot in the Great Terror.

185

Since he used Vasily as his Party alias, he in some ways named his son after himself.

186

Sukhova’s later memoirs are unpublished. Natasha Kirtava and Alvasi Talakvadze became Party workers in Batumi and lived into old age, revered for their early association with Stalin. Stefania Petrovskaya, his fiancée in Baku, remained a Party member and was implicated in the Slepkov Case of 1932–33. Slepkov himself was spared in 1932, then shot in 1937, but her fate is unknown. Serafima Khoroshenina, Stalin’s partner in Vologda, was alive in the 1930s and recorded her memoirs, but her fate is likewise unknown.

187

Georgia caused Stalin’s schism with Lenin. Menshevik Georgia became independent in 1918. The Old Man was content to leave Georgia, but in 1921 Stalin and Sergo Ordzhonikidze arranged a successful invasion. The dashing, merciless Sergo rode triumphantly into Tiflis on a white horse, but he soon earned the nicknamed “Stalin’s Ass” for his brutal suppression of the country. When it came time to define the status of Georgia, Stalin insisted that it join a Transcaucasian Federation, but the local Bolsheviks, led by the flamboyant Mdivani and the ideologue Makharadze, both associates of Stalin’s for decades, demanded a separate Georgian republic. In the ensuing row between the Stalinists and the so-called deviationists, Sergo punched one of their opponents. This outraged Lenin, who now supported the Georgians against Stalin and Sergo. This led to Stalin’s insulting Lenin’s wife, Krupskaya. Lenin wrote his Testament, which demanded Stalin’s removal from the General Secretaryship. But it was too late. Lenin suffered another stroke. Stalin survived.

188

The Mensheviks enjoyed a strange trajectory: Karlo Chkheidze, as we saw, became the most powerful man in the early 1917 Revolution as Chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, while his fellow Georgian Menshevik Irakli Tsereteli became a powerful Russian minister during the summer of 1917. But when the Bolsheviks seized power, Chkheidze, Jordania, Tsereteli and Noe Ramishvili became the leaders of the independent Georgia. When the Bolsheviks invaded, they managed to flee into exile. Chkheidze committed suicide in 1926, Ramishvili was murdered in Paris in 1930. Jordania, Uratadze, Arsenidze, Sagirashvili and Nikolaevsky all survived in exile and wrote their memoirs. Sukhanov, who called Stalin a “grey blur,” was shot in the Great Terror.

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Tsintsadze joined the Georgian Cheka in 1921, and he too wrote his memoirs, at the same time as Kamo—but he was considerably more tactful. He joined the Georgian “deviationists” opposition to Stalin and was dismissed. Arrested as a Trotskyite, he died of TB in prison in 1930.

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The Egnatashvilis had known Beria since 1918 in Baku, where he was a Bolshevik double-agent in the Azeri Musavist Party—or vice-versa. When Beria fell ill, the Egnatashvilis nursed their fellow Georgian. When Beria became Caucasian viceroy, then NKVD boss, he tried to keep a monopoly of information and influence in the Caucasus. Yet the Egnatashvilis were independent of Beria. Furthermore Sasha Egnatashvili served in Stalin’s Guards Department under chief bodyguard General Vlasik, which was also outside Beria’s power, a situation that Beria constantly tried to remedy. After the Second World War, Beria accused Vlasik of corruption in selling the gigantic quantities of food for Stalin prepared at the Base. Vlasik counteraccused Beria of corruption and managed to survive, but Egnatashvili, who ran the Base, would probably have been implicated. The duel between Beria and Vlasik for control of the guards lasted until Stalin’s death. This is the first time that the story of General Egnatashvili and his wife has been told. It fits into a pattern. After the suicide of his wife, Nadya, Stalin distrusted the spouses of his courtiers. The pretty young wives of Alexander Poskrebyshev, his chef de cabinet, and Marshal Kulik, his military crony, were shot; the wives of the head of state, Kalinin, and Foreign Minister, Molotov, were arrested. Yet all these men continued to serve him devotedly without a word. See Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar.

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Mikha Tskhakaya, the greybeard who had promoted and protected Stalin in the early years before turning against Lenin and retiring to Genevan exile, survived to die in 1950 in his bed, an honoured Old Bolshevik. Inexplicably, Makharadze was allowed to survive the Terror. Stepan Shaumian, Stalin’s roommate in London and junior partner in the Tiflis bank robbery and then Baku, was the brutal master of the Baku Commune in 1918 when he oversaw the murder of around 15,000 Azeris. He was then overthrown and shot by the Whites and the British as one of the legendary Twenty-six Commissars. Stalin then adopted Shaumian’s son, Levan, and brought him up in his own household. Stalin’s Siberian roommate and Soviet head of state Yakov Sverdlov died of influenza in 1919.

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His Jewish wife, Polina, was equally devoted to Stalin and became a Deputy Commissar in her own right, but her strident feminism irritated Stalin, while her friendship with Nadya made him uneasy. He almost destroyed her in 1939, considered having her murdered in a car crash and finally forced Molotov to vote for her arrest in 1949. The full story is in Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar.