Stalin and His Hangmen (8 page)

Within a year Jughashvili, an obscure clerk, was again a wanted man. Of twenty-nine Russian ‘social democratic revolutionary party’ members listed by the Tbilisi gendarmerie in early 1901, Viktor Kurnatovsky, Pilipe Makharadze and Ioseb Jughashvili were singled out as dangerous. Jughashvili was noted as ‘an intellectual who leads a group of railway workers… behaving very cautiously, always looks around when walking…’

In 1901 Stalin began sixteen formative years of life on the run, in prison or in exile. He had no address he could call home, and no serious expectations of settling down, let alone achieving power. He visited Gori only when the gendarmes made Tbilisi too hot for him. He organized demonstrations and set up an illegal printshop.

Even in his early twenties Stalin attached himself to two sorts of men. One sort, like Kalinin and Kurnatovsky – doctrinaire, self-educated Marxists – would constitute his inner circle. The other sort were killers. In 1901 Stalin took up with the first of the many criminals that he was to use and employ: a half-Georgian, half-Armenian youth, Simon (Kamo) Ter-Petrosiants. Stalin had known Kamo since childhood; the Ter-Petrosiants and Jughashvili families were neighbours. Kamo would soon be the Caucasus’s most notorious bandit: his bloody ‘expropriations’ of millions of roubles from mail coaches and post offices funded the Bolsheviks’ arms and propaganda and alienated ‘legal’ Marxists from their violent Bolshevik fellow-travellers. In 1901 Kamo was then only nineteen. Expelled from school for professing atheism, he now sought expertise in explosives and arms by applying to enter Tbilisi’s military academy.

At the end of 1901 Jughashvili took cover in Batumi from the gendarmes. Batumi was then, as today, Georgia’s second city, a lawless port influenced as much by Turkey and Islam as by Russia. Here the oil
terminals, the Rothschild factory and the port had built up a critical mass of disaffected proletarians. This was no provincial exile for Stalin but a chance to make his mark. For the first time he encountered an urban proletariat. That he, a stranger from Tbilisi, made an impact in an industrial area where many workers spoke little Georgian, says something for the force of his personality. Within two months he was making furtive trips to Tbilisi to fetch machinery for printing leaflets in Georgian and Armenian. He was helped by a twenty-year-old Armenian, Suren Spandaryan, the editor of
Nor Dar (New Century)
and son of a typesetter. Spandaryan was, until his death in 1916, one of the few people Stalin might have called a friend and whose death he, if perfunctorily, mourned.

In early 1902 Tbilisi’s social democrat revolutionaries were crushed by the police. In Batumi, however, the strikes that Stalin had helped foment were victorious. By April 1902, though, Jughashvili was arrested for ‘incitement to disorder and insubordination against higher authority’. He was cursorily examined by a doctor, Grigol Eliava, who gave the first objective description of Stalin: ‘height 1.64, long, swarthy, pock-marked face, second and third toes on left foot joined… missing one front, right lower molar tooth… mole on left ear’.
¹⁹

Stalin was no prison hero. In autumn he implored Prince Golitsyn, the viceroy of the Caucasus: ‘An increasingly choking cough and the helpless position of my elderly mother, abandoned by her husband twelve years ago and seeing me as her sole support in life, forces me to address the commander-in-chief’s chancellery for the second time and humbly request release under police supervision…’ A major of Tbilisi’s gendarmerie warned against clemency (making the young Stalin sound like an asset to the police force): ‘at the head of the Batumi organization is Ioseb Jughashvili, under special police supervision, Jughashvili’s despotism has enraged many people and the organization [in Batumi] has split…’

In spring 1903, Stalin roused prisoners to protest against a visit by the exarch of the Georgian Church. He was moved a hundred miles east, to Kutaisi, where he was described by the social democrat Grigol Urutadze: ‘a beard, long hair combed back. An insinuating gait, in little steps. He never laughed with an open mouth… He was absolutely imperturbable.’ The gendarmerie proposed exiling him to eastern Siberia for six years.

It took the bureaucracy until the winter of 1903-04 to send Jughashvili, with two dozen other social democrats, in summer clothing, across the
Black Sea and the Urals to Siberia, to a village forty miles from the railway. After two months Jughashvili persuaded a peasant (who was flogged for complicity) to drive him to the railhead from where he escaped back to the Caucasus. He was sheltered in Tbilisi by a fellow student of Suren Spandaryan, an engineer’s son who would become a key figure in Lenin’s entourage, Lev Kamenev (Rosenfeld). For some days, before he himself fled north to St Petersburg, Kamenev protected Jughashvili, a comradely gesture which he must have bitterly regretted twenty years later. Few people suffered such scorpion-like ingratitude as Kamenev had from Stalin.

Not for the last time Stalin was suspected of being a police collaborator, a provocateur. So fast a return from Siberia unsettled Jughashvili’s associates. How had he got the hundred roubles for the fare from Siberia? Jughashvili said that he had forged a certificate that he was a police agent. But where had he found forms and stamps in the Siberian swamps? He went to Baku but was ostracized. He flitted to Tbilisi and back again. On May Day 1904 he was beaten up. He hid with a maternal uncle in Gori for two months. Only in August was he rehabilitated by the party, which was too short of educated activists to persist with its suspicions.

Using the name Koba, Stalin climbed ranks thinned by arrests and soon came to dominate the Caucasian Social Democrats. After the split between moderate Mensheviks and intransigent Bolsheviks at the second Social Democrat Party congress in 1903, the Bolsheviks felt free to act violently. In Geneva, Lenin, his spouse Krupskaia, Rozalia Zemliachka and other extremists called for a new congress to endorse revolutionary action. At last Stalin had a policy he could impose on his Caucasian colleagues with enthusiasm. With Lado Ketskhoveli dead, nobody had more charisma and authority than Koba among the Georgian Bolsheviks. Intermittently, he received moral and financial support from the Russian Bolsheviks: Kamenev returned to Tbilisi in September 1904; Lenin’s emissary Tsetsilia Zelikson came from Switzerland; Kamo Ter-Petrosiants escaped from Batumi prison and joined him. That year Stalin was always on the move across Transcaucasia. His contacts among the railway workers served him well: he was hidden in sealed goods vans for his journeys.

From 1900 discontent swept the urban workers of the Russian empire. Whenever the Tsar’s government gave an inch, the workers (as the reactionaries rightly warned) tried to take a yard. In 1900 a tram workers’
depot was all that Stalin could shut down; in 1904, when the country was not only rapidly industrializing but also preparing for war with Japan, Koba’s Armenian and Azeri colleagues led a strike that paralysed the oilfields of Baku and, for the first time in Russian history, forced employers to yield to workers. The gendarmes and Okhranka (security service) arrested so many Bolsheviks that Tbilisi’s more law-abiding Mensheviks temporarily took over the Social Democrat Party.

Russia’s defeat by Japan, and the promised reforms wrung from the Tsar after unarmed workers were gunned down in St Peterburg’s notorious ‘Bloody Sunday’ of January 1905, gave revolutionaries a sense of power. In summer 1905 they roused the Baku workers to burn down half the oil wells of the city. Koba travelled thousands of miles, attending meetings, delegating work to new and old recruits. When nothing was demanded of him Koba was quarrelsome and surly, buried in books for months on end, and yet, in crises, he organized the feckless, persuaded the irresolute and conciliated the fractious, barely sleeping at all and rarely in the same place for more than a few days. Comrades overlooked his repellent personal manner, given his organizational genius.

At the age of twenty-five Stalin made the first of his few close attachments. He was hidden by his friend Mikhail Monaselidze, who had married into the Svanidze family. The three Svanidze sisters were dressmakers to the wives of army and gendarmerie officers; they lived close to the barracks and their house was the last place the police would search. Here Koba felt safe and here he courted Monaselidze’s sister-in-law Kato. Koba’s relationship with Kato Svanidze was as near as he came to commitment to another person.

In 1905 Stalin finally met the only man he ever recognized as his leader, Lenin. Koba went, under the name of Ivanovich, as one of three delegates from the Caucasus to a clandestine congress of the Russian Social Democrat Party, held at Tampere in Finland which, though in the Russian empire, offered some protection against arrest. In Tampere Koba met, most for the first time, forty other delegates of the Russian Social Democrat Party. He became known to some who would lead the Bolshevik uprising twelve years later: Lenin, Iakov Sverdlov, Leonid Krasin. Koba won praise from Lenin for his report on the Caucasus and for his hard-line stance. Back in Tbilisi early in 1906, Koba could proclaim himself as the ‘Lenin of the Caucasus’. He finally had authority.

The first murder in which Stalin was implicated occurred on 16 January 1906. General Griaznov, who had smashed down the the barricades erected during the workers’ insurrection in Tbilisi the previous month, was ‘sentenced to death’ by the party and killed. Koba had fallen off a tram and was lying up with head injuries when the police searched for him. Despite being a wanted escaped prisoner, Koba had had an extraordinarily easy journey to Finland and back. Understandably, other party members wondered if Koba was a police agent. He subsequently claimed to have been arrested early in April 1906 but his name is missing from Tbilisi’s Metekhi prison register.
²⁰
Soon Koba was again off north, under the name of Vissarionovich, this time to Stockholm to the fourth Social Democrat Party congress while the gendarmes, uncannily tipped off, were raiding the socialist printing presses in Tbilisi.

Stockholm attracted many more delegates than Tampere. Here Stalin saw the doyen of Russian Marxism, Giorgi Plekhanov, as well as familiar Tbilisi faces such as Mikhail Kalinin. He also first encountered two men who would be instrumental in his struggle for total power: the first head of the Soviet secret police, Feliks Dzierżyński, and Klim Voroshilov, future commissar for defence and eventual butcher of the Red Army. Koba shared a hotel room in Stockholm with Voroshilov (an uneducated metalworker endowed with the voice of an opera singer). Koba and Klim bonded, master and servant, for life. As for those who would be killed by Stalin after they attained power, Koba first met in Stockholm Andrei Bubnov, Aleksandr Smirnov and Aleksei Rykov. In Stockholm Koba briefly acquired a suit, a tie, a hat and a pipe (the latter the only one of these bourgeois accessories he retained).

Back in Tbilisi, when Kato Svanidze realized she was pregnant, Koba married her, at one in the morning. They enjoyed little conjugal life: Koba was off to Baku, and the gendarmes arrested Kato for sheltering revolutionaries on the run. It took six weeks to free Kato: her sister, Aleksandra Monaselidze-Svanidze, went to see the wife of a gendarme colonel whose dresses she made. The colonel secured for Kato visits from Koba (allegedly her cousin) and then release, and at the same time a reprieve for Kato’s real cousin, who was to be hanged.

Stalin took up writing again, not lyrical poetry but political prose. He compiled in Georgian treatises on socialism and anarchism which were published in the periodicals
Akhali droeba (New Times)
and
Chveni
Tskhovreba (Our Life).
The birth of a son, Iakov, on 18 March 1907 did not distract him. A month later, the sole Bolshevik at liberty to travel from Transcaucasia to the fifth Social Democrat congress, Koba was in Copenhagen. The Danish government succumbed to Russian protests and the congress moved to London. On his way Stalin apparently visited Lenin in Berlin, where they agreed to authorize a bank robbery by Kamo Ter-Petrosiants to fund their activities – against party policy, for the fifth congress was about to vote for the ballot box and against the gun.

Koba returned to Georgia via Paris on a dead Georgian’s passport where his first exploit was to organize a spectacular robbery, carried out by Kamo on 13 June 1907 in the middle of Tbilisi. Koba put Kamo in touch with an old school friend who worked in the posts and telegraph at Gori, and he provided information on the transportation of banknotes. The robbery netted a quarter of a million roubles, unfortunately in 500-rouble notes the numbers of which were circulated throughout Europe. Kamo’s hand grenades killed and maimed about fifty people, mostly bystanders, and Koba was expelled from the Caucasian Social Democrat Party for terrorism.

With his wife and infant son, Koba retreated east to Baku where he could rely on Bolshevik supporters among the oil workers. A new ally and eventual victim, Sergo Orjonikidze, joined Koba’s circle. Stalin’s authority derived from his unofficial mandate from Lenin; it is likely that he made two more journeys to see Lenin – in August 1907 to Stuttgart and to Switzerland in January 1908.

Koba was soon free of family ties. On 22 November 1907 Kato died, perhaps of TB. Koba handed his baby son Iakov over to his sister-in-law and did not ask after the child for fourteen years. On 25 March 1908 the Baku gendarmerie rounded up Baku’s Bolsheviks, including Koba, now known as Kaioz Nizheradze. Incompetence and perhaps corruption blinded them to the fact that Koba was a leading Bolshevik organizer on the run from Siberia. Besides, times had changed in Russia: the Tsar’s government had conceded a parliament and political prisoners were amnestied. Koba claimed he had been abroad all 1904 and 1905 and thus qualified for the 1905 amnesty. Even when the truth emerged, he was dealt with leniently: three years’ exile in northern Russia, in Vologda province.