Stalin himself, many sources claim, helped stow the cash in the observatory. If this sounds like a myth, it is plausible: it transpires that he often handled stolen funds, riding shotgun across the mountains with saddlebags full of cash from bank robberies and piracy.
Surprisingly, that night Stalin felt safe enough to go home to Kato and boast of his exploit to his family—his boys had done it.17 Well might he boast. The money was safe in the weatherman’s mattress and would soon be on its way to Lenin. No one suspected Stalin or even Kamo. The booty would be smuggled abroad, some of it even laundered through the Credit Lyonnais. The police of a dozen nations would pursue cash and gangsters for months, in vain.
For a couple of days after the heist, Stalin, it is said, unsuspected of any connection to the robbery, was secure enough to drink insouciantly in riverside taverns, but not for long. He suddenly told his wife that they were leaving at once to start a new life in Baku, the oil-boom city on the other side of the Caucasus.
“The devil knows,” reflected Novoye Vremya (the Tiflis New Times), “how this uniquely audacious robbery was carried out.” Stalin had pulled off the perfect crime.
The Tiflis bank robbery turned out to be far from perfect. Indeed it became a poisoned chalice. Afterwards, Stalin never lived in Tiflis or Georgia again. The fate of Kamo would be insanely bizarre. The quest for the cash—some of which, it turned out, was in marked notes—would be tangled, but even these astonishing twists were far from the end of the matter for Stalin. The heist’s success was almost a disaster for him. The robbery’s global notoriety became a powerful weapon against Lenin, and against Stalin personally.
The gangsters fell out over the spoils. Lenin and his comrades fought for possession of the cash like rats in a cage. His enemies spent the next three years launching three separate Party investigations hoping to ruin him. Stalin, persona non grata in Georgia, tainted by the brazen flouting of Party rules and this reckless carnage, was expelled from the Party by the Tiflis Committee. This was a blot that could have derailed his bid to succeed Lenin and spoiled his ambition to become a Russian statesman and a supreme pontiff of Marxism. It was so sensitive that even in 1918 Stalin launched an extraordinary libel case to suppress the story.* His career as gangster godfather, audacious bank robber, killer, pirate and arsonist, though whispered at home and much enjoyed by critics abroad, remained hidden until the twenty-first century.
In another sense, the Tiflis spectacular was the making of him. Stalin had now proved himself, not only as a gifted politician but also as a ruthless man of action, to the one patron who really counted. Lenin decided that Stalin was “exactly the kind of person I need.”
Stalin, his wife and baby vanished from Tiflis two days later—but it was far from his last heist. There were new worlds to conquer—Baku, the greatest oil city in the world, St. Petersburg the capital, and vast Russia herself. Indeed Stalin, the Georgian child raised rough on the violent, clannish streets of a turbulent town that was the bank-robbery capital of the Empire, now stepped, for the first time, onto the Russian stage. He never looked back.
Yet he was on the eve of a personal tragedy which helped transform this murderous egomaniac into the supreme politician for whom no prize, no challenge and no cost in human life would be too great to realize his personal ambitions and his utopian dreams.18
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* The popular cafés of the day.
* 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.
PART ONE
Morning
The rose’s bud had blossomed out
Reaching out to touch the violet
The lily was waking up
And bending its head in the breeze
High in the clouds the lark
Was singing a chirruping hymn
While the joyful nightingale
With a gentle voice was saying—
“Be full of blossom, oh lovely land
Rejoice Iverians’ country
And you oh Georgian, by studying
Bring joy to your motherland.”
—SOSELO (Josef Stalin)
1
Keke’s Miracle: Soso
On 17 May 1872, a handsome young cobbler, the very model of a chivalrous Georgian man, Vissarion “Beso” Djugashvili, aged twenty-two, married Ekaterina “Keke” Geladze, seventeen, an attractive freckled girl with auburn hair, at the Uspensky Church in the small Georgian town of Gori.1
A matchmaker had visited Keke’s house to tell her about the suit of Beso the cobbler: he was a respected artisan in Baramov’s small workshop, quite a catch. “Beso,” says Keke in newly discovered memoirs,* “was considered a very popular young man among my friends and they were all dreaming of marrying him. My friends nearly burst with jealousy. Beso was an enviable groom, a true karachogheli [Georgian knight], with beautiful moustaches, very well dressed—and with the special sophistication of a town-dweller.” Nor was Keke in any doubt that she herself was something of a catch too: “Among my female friends, I became the desired and beautiful girl.” Indeed, “slender, chestnut-haired with big eyes,” she was said to be “very pretty.”
The wedding, according to tradition, took place just after sunset; Georgian social life, writes one historian, was “as ritualised as English Victorian behaviour.” The marriage was celebrated with the rambunctious festivity of the wild town of Gori. “It was,” Keke remembers, “hugely glamorous.” The male guests were true karachogheli, “cheerful, daring and generous,” wearing their splendid black chokhas, “broad-shouldered with slim waists.” The chief of Beso’s two best men was Yakov “Koba” Egnatashvili, a strapping wrestler, wealthy merchant and local hero who, as Keke puts it, “always tried to assist us in the creation of our family.”
The groom and his friends gathered for toasts at his home, before parading through the streets to collect Keke and her family. The garlanded couple then rode to church together in a colourfully decorated wedding phaeton, bells tingling, ribbons fluttering. In the church, the choir gathered in the gallery; below them, men and women stood separately among the flickering candles. The singers burst into their elevating and harmonic Georgian melodies accompanied by a zurna, a Georgian wind i
nstrument like a Berber pipe.
The bride entered with her bridesmaids, who were careful not to tread on the train, a special augur of bad luck. Father Khakhanov, an Armenian, conducted the ceremony, Father Kasradze recorded the marriage, and Father Christopher Charkviani, a family friend, sang so finely that Yakov Egnatashvili “generously tipped him 10 roubles,” no mean sum. Afterwards, Beso’s friends headed the traditional singing and dancing procession through the streets, playing duduki, long pipes, to the supra, a Georgian feast presided over by a tamada, a joke-telling and wisdom-imparting toastmaster.
The service and singing had been in the unique Georgian language—not Russian because Georgia was only a recent addition to the Romanov Empire. For a thousand years, ruled by scions of the Bagrationi dynasty, the Kingdom of Sakartvelo (Georgia to Westerners, Gruzia to Russians) was an independent Christian bulwark of knightly valour against the Islamic Mongol, Timurid, Ottoman and Persian Empires. Its apogee was the twelfth-century empire of Queen Tamara, made timeless by the national epic, The Knight in the Panther Skin by Rustaveli. Over the centuries, the kingdom splintered into bickering principalities. In 1801 and 1810, the Tsars Paul and Alexander I annexed principalities to their empire. The Russians had only finished the military conquest of the Caucasus with the surrender of Imam Shamyl and his Chechen warriors in 1859 after a thirty-year war—and Adjaria, the last slice of Georgia, was gained in 1878. Even the most aristocratic Georgians, who served at the courts of the Emperor in St. Petersburg or of the viceroy in Tiflis, dreamed of independence. Hence Keke’s pride in following Georgian traditions of manhood and marriage.
Beso, mused Keke, “appeared to be a good family man . . . He believed in God and always went to church.” The parents of both bride and groom had been serfs of local princes, freed in the 1860s by the Tsar-Liberator, Alexander II. Beso’s grandfather Zaza was an Ossetian* from the village of Geri, north of Gori.2 Zaza, like Stalin, his great-grandson, became a Georgian rebel: in 1804, he joined the uprising of Prince Elizbar Eristavi against Russia. Afterwards, he was settled with other “baptized Ossetians” in the village of Didi-Lilo, nine miles from Tiflis, as a serf of Prince Badur Machabeli. Zaza’s son Vano tended the Prince’s vineyards and had two sons: Giorgi, who was murdered by bandits, and Beso, who got a job in Tiflis in the shoe factory of G. G. Adelkhanov but was headhunted by the Armenian Josef Baramov to make boots for the Russian garrison in Gori.3 There young Beso noticed the “fascinating, neatly dressed girl with chestnut hair and beautiful eyes.”
Keke was also new to Gori, daughter of Glakho Geladze, a peasant serf of the local grandee, Prince Amilakhvari. Her father worked as a potter nearby before becoming the gardener for a wealthy Armenian, Zakhar Gambarov, who owned fine gardens at Gambareuli, on Gori’s outskirts. As her father died young, Keke was raised by her mother’s family. She remembered the excitement of moving to unruly Gori: “What a happy journey it was! Gori was festively decorated, crowds of people swelled like the sea. A military parade dazzled our eyes. Music blared. Sazandari [a band of four percussion and wind instruments], and sweet duduki played, and everyone sang.”4
Her young husband was a thin dark figure with black eyebrows and moustaches, always sporting a black Circassian coat, tightly belted, a peaked cap and baggy trousers tucked into high boots. “Unusual, peculiar and morose,” but also “clever and proud,” Beso was able to speak four languages (Georgian, Russian, Turkish and Armenian) and quote the Knight in the Panther Skin.5
The Djugashvilis prospered. Many houses in Gori were so poor they were made of mud and dug out of the earth. But for the wife of the busy cobbler Beso there was no fear of such poverty. “Our family happiness,” declared Keke, “was limitless.”
Beso “left Baramov to open his own workshop,” backed by his friends, especially his patron Egnatashvili, who bought him the “machine-tools.” Keke was soon pregnant. “Many married couples would envy our family happiness.” Indeed, her marriage to the desired Beso still caused jealousy among her contemporaries: “Evil tongues didn’t stop even after the marriage.” It is interesting that Keke stresses this gossip: perhaps someone else had expected to marry Beso. Whether or not Keke stole him from another fiancée, “evil tongues,” later citing the best man Egnatashvili, the priest Charkviani, Gori’s police officer Damian Davrichewy and a host of celebrities and aristocrats, started wagging early in the marriage.
Just over nine months after the wedding, on 14 February 1875, “our happiness was marked by the birth of our son. Yakov Egnatashvili helped us so very much.” Egnatashvili stood godfather and “Beso laid on a grand christening. Beso was almost mad with happiness.” But two months later the little boy, named Mikheil, died. “Our happiness turned to sorrow. Beso started to drink from grief.” Keke fell pregnant again. A second son, Giorgi, was born on 24 December 1876. Again Egnatashvili stood godfather, again unluckily. The baby died of measles on 19 June 1877.
“Our happiness was shattered.” Beso was manic with grief and blamed “the icon of Geri,” the shrine of his home village. The couple had appealed to the icon for the life of their child. Keke’s mother, Melania, started visiting fortune-tellers. Beso kept drinking. The icon of St. George was brought into the house. They climbed the Gorijvari mountain, towering over the town, to pray in the church that stood beside the medieval fortress. Keke fell pregnant for the third time and swore that, if the child survived, she would go on pilgrimage to Geri to thank God for the miracle of St. George. On 6 December 1878, she gave birth to a third son.6 *
“We sped up the christening so he wouldn’t die unchristened.” Keke cared for him in the poky two-room one-storey cottage that contained little except a samovar, bed, divan, table and kerosene lamp. A small trunk held almost all the family’s belongings. Spiral stairs led down to the musky cellar with three niches, one for Beso’s tools, one for Keke’s sewing-kit and one for the fire. There Keke tended the baby’s cot. The family lived on the basic Georgian fare: lobio beans, badridjani aubergine and thick lavashi bread. Only rarely did they eat mtsvadi, Georgian shashlik.
On 17 December the baby was christened Josef, known as Soso—the boy who would become Stalin. Soso was “weak, fragile, thin,” said his mother. “If there was a bug, he was sure to catch it first.” The second and third toes of his left foot were webbed.
Beso decided not to ask the family’s benefactor Egnatashvili to be godfather. “Yakov’s hand was unlucky,” said Beso, but even if the merchant missed the church formalities, Stalin and his mother always called him “godfather Yakov.”
Keke’s mother reminded Beso that they had sworn to take a pilgrimage to the church at Geri if the baby lived. “Just let the child survive,” answered Beso, “and I’ll crawl to Geri on my knees with the child on my shoulders!” But he delayed it until the child caught another chill which shocked him into prayer: they travelled to Geri, “facing much hardship on the way, donated a sheep, and ordered a thanksgiving service there.” But the Geri priests were conducting an exorcism, holding a little girl over a precipice to drive out evil spirits. Keke’s baby “was horrified and screamed,” and they returned to Gori where little Stalin “shuddered and raved even in his sleep”—but he lived and became his mother’s beloved treasure.
“Keke didn’t have enough milk,” so her son also shared the breasts of the wives of Tsikhatatrishvili (his formal godfather) and Egnatashvili. “At first the baby didn’t accept my mother’s milk,” says Alexander Tsikhatatrishvili, “but gradually he liked it providing he covered his eyes so he couldn’t see my mother.” Sharing the milk of the Egnatashvili children made them “like milk brothers with Soso,” says Galina Djugashvili, Stalin’s granddaughter.
Soso started to speak early. He loved flowers and music, especially when Keke’s brothers Gio and Sandala played the duduki pipes. The Georgians love to sing and Stalin never lost his enjoyment of the haunting Georgian melodies.* In later life, he remembered hearing the “Georgian men singing on their way to market.”7
Beso�
��s little business was flourishing—he took on apprentices and as many as ten employees. One of the apprentices, Dato Gasitashvili, who loved Soso and helped bring him up, recalled Beso’s prosperity: “He lived better than anyone else of our profession. They always had butter in their house.” There were later whispers about this prosperity, embarrassing for a proletarian hero. “I’m not the son of a worker,” Stalin admitted. “My father had a shoe workshop, employing apprentices, an exploiter. We didn’t live badly.” It was during this happy time that Keke became friends with Maria and Arshak Ter-Petrossian, a wealthy Armenian military contractor, whose son Simon would become infamous as the bank robber Kamo.8
Keke adored her child and “in old age, I still can see his first steps, a vision that burns like a candle.” She and her mother taught him to walk by exploiting his love of flowers: Keke would hold out a camomile, and Soso ran to grasp it. When she took Soso to a wedding, he noticed a flower in the bride’s veil and grabbed it. Keke told him off but godfather Egnatashvili lovingly “kissed the child and caressed him, saying, ‘If even now you want to steal the bride, God knows what you’ll do when you’re older.’”
Soso’s survival seemed miraculous to the grateful mother. “How happy we were, how we laughed!” reminisces Keke. Her reverence must have instilled in Soso a sense of specialness: the Freudian dictum that the mother’s devotion made him feel like a conqueror was undoubtedly true. “Soselo,” as she lovingly called him, grew up super-sensitive but also displayed a masterful confidence from an early age.
Young Stalin Page 4