Stalin and His Hangmen (10 page)

If Koba collaborated with the Okhranka, this is a tribute to his equally Mephistophelean recognition of the common interests that bound the Tsar’s Ministry of the Interior with the Social Democrat movement.
Certain murders – of the Georgian Christian liberal writer and politician Prince (now Saint) Ilia Chavchavadze in 1907, of Russian Prime Minister Piotr Stolypin in 1911 – were the joint work of the establishment’s right wing and the revolution’s left wing, united against the parliamentary liberals who thwarted them both. Arrests and exiles of Social Democrats still took place, but only if the revolutionaries were no use to the police as informers or allies.

Koba stayed in Vologda until February 1912, cementing his relationship with Viacheslav Molotov in St Petersburg by an exchange of letters. He closeted himself studying German verbs. He missed the Prague party conference, but wrote a letter which showed, as Krupskaia expostulated, that, ‘He is terribly cut off from everything as if he has come from another planet.’ In February 1912 Koba left for Moscow, his every move reported to the police by agents, among them Roman Malinovsky whom Koba treated as a bosom friend. In Petersburg Koba learnt that the Prague conference had co-opted him onto the Central Committee and made him, with Elena Stasova, Orjonikidze and Malinovsky, a member of the Russian Bureau that would implement within the country decisions taken abroad.

In April 1912, Koba was instrumental in setting up the Bolsheviks’ legal newspaper,
Pravda,
in St Petersburg. In May Molotov took over as editor, so that even in Stalin’s absence the paper would remain Stalinist.

The authorities, informed about the Prague congress, rounded up all the Central Committee members on Russian territory, with the exception of their own spy Malinovsky and, for show, Grigori Petrovsky.
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The Bolshevik fraction suddenly became a party in exile. This time the security services worked professionally: Koba was properly described and a dossier of over 1,000 pages (the charge sheet amounted to sixty pages) was compiled.
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The sentence was not, however, harsh. Koba was exiled to Narym, a village of a few hundred persons on the river Ob in Siberia, north of the railhead in Tomsk. Ernest Ozolins, a Latvian socialist, accompanied Stalin and other political prisoners on the very uncomfortable train journey. To Ozolins, Stalin stood out with his mocking, ironical sense of superiority, his aggressiveness and self-confidence.
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In September 1912, after a few months languishing, Koba took a boat and, near Tomsk, found a friendly railwayman to smuggle him onto a passenger train back to Europe.

The authorities took two months to put him on the wanted list. By then, Koba was organizing the Bolshevik campaign for the fourth Duma elections. Koba made his way to the Caucasus, probably to help Kamo Ter-Petrosiants stage a mail robbery. By October he was back in Petersburg, where he helped ensure the Okhranka’s coup: their spy Roman Malinovsky was elected to the Duma to represent both Bolsheviks and the secret police. Soon Malinovsky had reported Koba’s arrival and both were on their way to Kraków to see Lenin. Here Koba met one more key associate: Grigori Zinoviev, a dairy farmer’s son who had spent most of the last decade in Switzerland, studying and lecturing in socialist politics.

No sooner had Malinovsky and Koba recrossed the Austrian-Russian frontier to get to St Petersburg for the opening of the Duma, than Lenin, Zinoviev and Krupskaia, sensing a trap, urgently called Koba back: ‘Rush him out as soon as possible, otherwise we can’t save him and he’s needed and has already done the essentials.’ Stalin nevertheless returned to Russia and there was no reason to panic. Malinovsky, now Bolshevik spokesman in the Duma, had taken such a soft line that many of his colleagues began to believe he was a police agent.

At the Duma’s Christmas break, Koba left for Kraków via Finland and Germany – his longest and his last journey abroad for thirty years. He stayed in apartments in Kraków and Vienna. His energy pleased Lenin – ‘the wondrous Georgian writing an article on the nationalities question’ wrote his first substantial treatise, ‘Marxism and the Nationality Question’, laboriously ploughing through German sources. Koba thus gained enough status as a Marxist theoretician to ensure that he would be minister for nationalities in the first Soviet government. On this journey he made two more acquaintances, Trotsky and Nikolai Bukharin.

By 1913 he had made an impression, positive or negative, on virtually everyone who would participate in the October 1917 revolution. Above all, like Dzierżyński, he had won Lenin’s trust: here was a comrade who could and would do anything the party asked and, unlike Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev or Bukharin, would not argue policy, tactics or morals but would stay contentedly in the background. The secret of Stalin’s charm was that the deeper their acquaintance with him, the more his admirers wondered at the mixture of ruthless activity and well-hidden intellect. He still struck them as a coarse, monoglot barbarian, but they
would at some point be stunned by his mastery of information, human character and his ability to orientate himself in any group.

Another ten years would pass before Stalin, as general secretary of the Communist Party, could exercise his own judgement in choosing, not whom to flatter or court, but whom to appoint, whom to dismiss. But long before the revolution, by 1913, he had met most of those who would play a part in his rise to power – whom he would follow, patronize or kill. Of those he would need most, he had got to know Mikhail Kalinin, his puppet head of state, in 1900 and Emelian Iaroslavsky, his most effective propagandist, in 1905. In 1906 Stalin met Dzierżyński, who would swing Lenin’s secret police behind him, and Klim Voroshilov, who would subordinate the army to Stalin’s will and then supervise the slaughter of every possible dissident senior officer. In 1907 he acquired a loyal ally in Sergo Orjonikidze, and in 1908 the unprincipled lawyer Vyshinsky, who would organize the parody of legal process by which terror could be instituted. In 1910 Stalin won over the most devoted of his subordinates, Viacheslav Molotov. Lazar Kaganovich was the only figure close to Stalin during the revolution whom he had not met in the revolutionary underground.

Likewise, by 1913 Stalin had met, and taken a dislike to, the party’s theoreticians, the rivals whom he would exterminate. He met Kamenev in 1904, Rykov in 1906, Trotsky and Zinoviev in 1912, and Bukharin in 1913. They would pay for their condescension to Koba decades later.

Trotsky disliked Stalin at first sight: ‘The door was flung open, without a preliminary knock, an unknown person appeared on the threshold – squat, with swarthy face and traces of smallpox.’ Koba poured himself tea and without a word walked out. Bukharin, a daily visitor to the apartment where Koba stayed, reacted to him with a mix of admiration, affection, fear and horror. To judge from Koba’s letters intercepted by the Russian secret service, he felt unhappy in the bourgeois luxury of Vienna and, despite Lenin’s admiration, Russian intellectuals in exile irritated him. ‘There’s nobody to let my hair down with. Nobody to have a heart-to-heart,’ he complained to an unknown girlfriend. Koba’s recent encounter with three persons in Lenin’s entourage – Zinoviev, Trotsky and Bukharin – was a blow to his self-esteem which gave him no peace until he had killed all three.

Nineteen thirteen, the year the Romanov dynasty celebrated its three
hundredth anniversary, seemed to doom Koba to ignominy and obscurity. He fell into a depression that lasted four years. First, Malinovsky was denounced as a police agent in a calculated blow to the left wing by Vladimir Dzhunkovsky the head of the gendarmerie. Lenin would not believe it. The Bolsheviks now looked like a farcical band of deluded intellectuals, its Central Committee a handful of Okhranka puppets. Second, the police rounded up virtually every important Bolshevik activist at large in Russia. Third, the Romanov tercentenary, Russia’s economic boom and liberal legislation had dulled the proletarian grievances which fuelled Bolshevik popularity. Fourth, as Europe headed for war, as in Germany so in Russia the Social Democrats collapsed as an internationalist party: its members put nation first and socialism second. The revolution was indefinitely postponed.

Koba wrote to the Bolsheviks in exile abroad to complain of the Bacchanalia of arrests and hinted to Lenin that Malinovsky was putting a spanner in the works and was a police spy. In February first Iakov Sverdlov (who would be first head of the Soviet state) then Koba was arrested. This time it was decided not just to make Koba finish his exile but to pack him off for four years to furthest Siberia, to Turukhansk on the river Enisei where it crosses the Arctic Circle.

Despondent despite money offered by the party, Koba made no escape attempt, although he now signed himself K. (for Koba) Stalin (man of steel).
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From Turukhansk, Koba was sent still further north to the tiny settlement of Miroedikha. Here Koba’s behaviour made him hated. The exile who had preceded him, Iosif Dubrovinsky, had drowned in the river Enisei that May. Stalin violated revolutionary etiquette by appropriating Dubrovinsky’s library. He was transferred ninety miles south to the village of Kostino, and then north again to a hamlet, Monastyrskoe. Koba was, one guesses, more miserable than ever before or afterwards. From here he wrote to Zinoviev asking for books. He asked a woman friend to send his underwear. He wrote to, of all people, Roman Malinovsky, asking for sixty roubles, complaining of poverty – no bread, meat or paraffin in an area where the only food an exile could have for free was fish – of emaciation and an ominous cough. Then, on 27 September 1913, he moved in with Iakov Sverdlov ten miles away. Money arrived, but it was meant only for Sverdlov’s escape. The gendarmerie, who read all letters, deducted the money from Stalin’s
and Sverdlov’s board allowances and deported them, with a gendarme, Laletin, a hundred miles further north to an even more desolate outpost, Kureika. Again Stalin begged Malinovsky for money, as if he did not know that Malinovsky had resigned after being exposed as a spy.

Sverdlov found Stalin bad company. He wrote to his wife: ‘…you know my dear what foul conditions I lived in at Kureika. The comrade [Stalin] we were with turned out on a personal level to be such that we didn’t speak or see each other.’ By Easter 1914, Stalin had forced Sverdlov out and moved in with a family of seven orphans, the Pereprygins. He scandalized both Sverdlov and Ivan Laletin by seducing the thirteen-year-old Lidia Pereprygina. Bolsheviks had tolerant sexual mores, but sleeping with a pubescent girl was for them typical of the hated feudal gentry. Koba was now beyond the pale. Laletin caught Stalin in flagrante and had to fight off Koba’s fists with his sabre. (Stalin then promised to marry Lidia Pereprygina when she came of age.) At Stalin’s insistence, the Turukhansk chief of police, the Osetian Ivan Kibirov, replaced the indignant Laletin – who nearly drowned on his return upriver – with a more compliant gendarme.
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Lidia became pregnant; in 1916, after the baby died, she conceived again.
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Cohabitation with an adolescent girl gave Stalin no joy. He read, he tried to master languages. He wrote very little – to Zinoviev to ask for English newspapers, to the Alliluevs to ask for postcards with pictures of pleasant scenery. He made one visit 120 miles upstream to Monastyrskoe, where his Armenian friend, Suren Spandaryan, now dying of TB, had been transferred. When the ice melted in spring 1915, five Bolshevik Duma deputies, all ‘anti-patriotic defeatists’, arrived, exiled to Monastyrskoe, and with them one familiar face from Tbilisi, Lev Kamenev. Here the exiles conferred, but Stalin could never endure more than a day or two of these gatherings, even though the news of Russia’s catastrophic defeats by the Germans must have rekindled hopes of revolution. Dispossessed radicals, cut off from their ideological leaders by war and by seven thousand miles of Asia and Europe, seemed to Koba ‘a little bit like wet chickens. Ha, there’s “eagles” for you.’
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The company soon dispersed: the Duma deputies and Kamenev were allowed south to the town of Eniseisk. The remaining exiles were demoralized and began to accuse each other of crimes: Sverdlov had been teaching a policeman German; Spandaryan had helped loot the
local stores. Stalin voted that Sverdlov be ostracized. Another exile was beaten up; after the brawl Spandaryan had a haemorrhage which led to his death in September, despite the Tsar freeing him on compassionate grounds. Nobody saw Stalin in his last months in Siberia; perhaps he fled to Eniseisk, from hostility towards him at Kureika when Lidia Pereprygina became pregnant again.

By autumn 1916 the Russian army’s losses in the war were so horrendous that the authorities began calling up political exiles: even Stalin, aged thirty-seven and with a withered arm, was summoned to the recruiting office in Krasnoyarsk. In February 1917 he was rejected as unfit for service. The Tsar’s regime was collapsing; political exiles were effectively released. Stalin was allowed to settle, with Kamenev, in the town of Achinsk on the Trans-Siberian railway. On 2 March the Tsar abdicated, a provisional parliamentary government took power in Petrograd, as St Petersburg had been renamed in 1915, and the old regime was dismantled. Peasants, burghers and officials celebrated. At a meeting Lev Kamenev proposed a congratulatory telegram to the Tsar’s brother for refusing the throne – a conciliatory message that Stalin would never let him forget. On 12 March Stalin, Kamenev and other exiles arrived in Petrograd to begin months of conspiratorial work to prepare for the return of Lenin and the seizure of power. First, Stalin and Kamenev took control of
Pravda
and typeset their own articles. All Koba’s rudeness, perversity and surliness were set aside by his colleagues in the interests of the struggle.