Young Stalin

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  The rustic idyll on the family estate ended in 1887 when his elder brother Alexander was executed—it changed everything. Lenin qualified as a lawyer at Kazan University, where he read Chernychevsky and Nechaev, imbibing the discipline of Russian revolutionary terrorists even before he embraced Marx. After arrest and Siberian exile, he moved to western Europe, where he wrote “What Is to Be Done?”

  “Cunts,” “bastards,” “filth,” “prostitutes,” “useful idiots,” “cretins” and “silly old maids” were just some of the insults Lenin heaped on his enemies. Revelling in the fight, he existed in an obsessional frenzy of political vibration, driven by an intense rage and a compulsion to dominate allies—and smash opposition.

  He cared little for the arts or personal romance. Stern, bug-eyed Krupskaya was more manager and amanuensis than wife, but he did engage in a passionate romance with the wealthy, liberated and married beauty Inessa Armand. Once in power, Lenin indulged in little affairs with his secretaries, according to Stalin, who claimed that Krupskaya complained about them to the Politburo. But politics was everything to him.

  Lenin was not a brilliant speaker. It was hard to hear his voice and he could not pronounce his r’s but “after a minute,” wrote Gorky on first seeing Lenin at this time, “I, like everyone else, was absorbed . . . as I heard complicated political questions treated so simply.” Stalin, watching Lenin speak, “was captivated by that irresistible force of logic which, though somewhat terse, thoroughly overpowered his audience, gradually electrified it and then carried it completely!”

  Yet Stalin was not ever so lovestruck that he was afraid to contradict Lenin. He was unformed as a politician, but he was already distinguished by a haughty and truculent individuality. Once he had observed the “mountain eagle,” he made himself known. Lenin invited him to report on the Caucasus, but when they discussed the elections to the Imperial Duma the two clashed. Lenin advocated participation in the elections, but young Stalin stood up and sharply attacked him. There was silence in the hall until Lenin unexpectedly gave way, proposing that Stalin draft the resolution.

  “In intervals of the conference,” writes Krupskaya, “we learned how to shoot” Mausers, Brownings and Winchesters. Indeed Stalin carried a pistol. After one debate, he supposedly stormed out and, in a fury, fired his gun into the air outside the hall, a Georgian hothead in the Finnish freeze. But the conference was already out of time: the Bolshevik militia in Moscow rose, too late, in open revolt. Now the delegates heard that the Tsar’s Semyonovsky Guards were brutally storming Presnaya, the workers’ redoubt. Blood flowed on the streets of Moscow.

  Simultaneously in Tiflis, the tough commander of the Caucasus, General Fyodor Griiazanov, and General Alikhanov-Avarsky prepared to retake the Caucasus and destroy the Battle Squads. “The Reaction,” said Trotsky, “was in full swing!” The conference broke up in disarray.

  Stalin considered himself superior to all the other delegates* except Lenin. “Among all these chatterboxes,” he boasted, “I was the only one who’d already organized and led men in combat.”

  Soso headed back to Tiflis in the midst of battle.1

  The generals massed their Cossacks, surrounded the workers’ districts, banned meetings, ordered shooting of rebels on sight and forbade anyone to wear Caucasian hoods or the cloaks that concealed weapons. On 18 January 1906, General Griiazanov began his assault. Jordania and Ramishvili ordered their partisans, who included Kamo and the Bolsheviks, to defend the Tiflis workers’ district.

  There was still fighting on the streets when Stalin reached the Svanidze apartment around four days later. Anna Alliluyeva now watched from her window as the Cossacks “moved forward, shooting into the night. By dawn, troops had broken into Didube and Cossacks’ horses flashed by our windows, the streets ringed by Cossacks.” Tiflis rocked from “uninterrupted shooting, the rattle of artillery fire and cavalry on the streets.” Sixty rebels were killed, 250 wounded, 280 arrested. The woody hillsides, she recalls, were thick with dead bodies. She saw “two prisoners, one had blood on his face,” and cried out as she recognized “the most courageous and beloved of Stalin’s young pupils.”

  “Kamo!”

  As Griiazanov crushed Tiflis, General Alikhanov-Avarsky savagely reconquered western Georgia. The Battle Squads tried to block the railway-tunnel to Kutaisi, but the Cossacks shot, looted, burned and hanged as they advanced. They took Kutaisi. Their “troops, killing anyone they recognized, set fire to the city, robbing the taverns and shops,” remembers Tsintsadze. The west was reduced to “ashes and charcoal.” Once all was lost, Stalin, travelling in the west, tried to persuade the peasants to disarm, rather than perish, but they would not listen to him: “I was impotent.” Then Alikhanov-Avarsky moved eastwards to reconquer the lawless, scorched hinterland of Baku and the Tsar’s burning oilfields.

  Tsintsadze and his pretty comrade Patsia Goldava arranged a killing-spree of all suspected traitors, who were murdered before they could escape to Tiflis. The gunmen, whom the Cossacks were seeking in the provinces, found refuge in the capital. But the days of Stalin’s Battle Squads were over. They returned to the underground where he re-formed them into a secret squad of assassins. He had a task for them already.2

  Back in Tiflis, under the whip of the Cossacks, Stalin and the Mensheviks met to pass a death sentence. General Fyodor Griiazanov—nicknamed General Shitheap, a pun on his name—the nemesis of the Georgian Revolution, was the most hated man in the Caucasus. Stalin summoned chief assassin Tsintsadze. Soso and the Mensheviks, “working together,” jointly ordered another of their hit men, Arsene Jorjiashvili, “who belonged to Stalin’s gangsters,” to kill the General with the assistance of Kamo. But Stalin also simultaneously commissioned Tsintsadze: “Prepare some good fellows, and if Jorjiashvili fails to do the job in a week, we entrust it to you.” Tsintsadze and two of Soso’s best hit men started to stalk the General while the other group raced to kill him first.*

  Within a few days, there were two abortive assassinations, each cancelled because the General was with his wife. Meanwhile, Griiazanov oversaw yet another massacre on the streets of Tiflis.

  On 16 February, the General, flanked by a formidable Cossack bodyguard, galloped out of the military headquarters, ignoring a few Georgian workmen painting the railings around Alexander Gardens opposite the Viceroy’s Palace. As his carriage passed, the workmen dropped their paints and threw “apples”—their homemade grenades—into his lap, tearing the Butcher of Tiflis to pieces. The Cossacks gave chase. The hit men scarpered, but the wounded Jorjiashvili was swiftly caught and executed, an instant hero in Tiflis.

  Who else was on the hit-team? Historians used to agree that the Mensheviks carried out the hit, but actually it was a joint effort. Tsintsadze explains that Stalin and the Mensheviks at that time worked together “in the same organization.” An Armenian terrorist said Stalin had commissioned the hit. Davrichewy specifies that the other hit man was Kamo. In the 1920s, two Bolshevik terrorists claimed a pension for killing Griiazanov, their notes recently surfacing in the Georgian archives. Stalin, it seems, commissioned both Menshevik and Bolshevik hit men.

  A workman later claimed that he saw Stalin watching nearby, and this rings true because it seems he was injured by bomb fragments or in the rush to escape the Cossacks.

  That night, says Sashiko, Stalin did not come home. The girls were worried: had he been arrested? Afterwards, he claimed he had run for a tram, pursued by police, but slipped, hurting himself so badly that Tskhakaya took him to Mikhailovsky Hospital and hid him at Babe Bochoridze’s place, then at another safe house, using an old friend’s passport. But after the assassination the city was under curfew, with checkpoints everywhere. Soldiers raided the apartment and found “Giorgi Berdzenoshvili” (Stalin) in bed with one bandage round his head, another over his right eye and cuts and bruises across his face.

  The Russian soldiers were confused because their orders did not specify what action to take on finding a bandaged man in bed. But, as
he looked too ill to move, they left to consult their superiors, sending back a cart to convey the suspicious-looking patient to prison. By then, the patient had disappeared into the night. This was neither the first nor the last time he used the mystery-man-in-bandages trick to escape the police.

  In the darkness, a comrade smuggled Stalin, “head and face damaged and hidden in a hood and a big cloak,” by phaeton to another safe house.

  When Stalin turned up at home with the story of falling off the tram chased by pharaohs, the Svanidze girls were relieved, especially Kato. Sashiko and her husband realized something was happening between the two of them. “Gradually,” writes Monoselidze, “when Soso was living at our place, my wife and I noticed that Soso and Kato liked each other . . .”3

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

  † 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.

  * 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.

  * 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.

  17

  The Man in Grey:

  Marriage, Mayhem (and Sweden)

  On the initiative and orders of Stalin,” said one of his top gangsters, Bachua Kupriashvili,* a permanent gang of brigands was now assembled. “Our tasks were procuring arms, organizing prison escapes, holding up banks and arsenals, and killing traitors.” Stalin commissioned Tsintsadze to set up “the Technical Group or the Bolshevik Expropriators Club, it was soon known by another nickname—Druzhina, the Group, or just Outfit.”

  The “leader of the heists,” said Stalin later, “was Kote Tsintsadze, together with Kamo.” Stalin’s boyhood friend, arrested in the storming of Didube, had been tortured horribly by the Cossacks, who almost sliced off his nose. But Kamo admitted nothing and was released. “He could bear any pain,” marvelled Stalin, “an astonishing person.”

  Soso strained his ingenuity to raise cash for Lenin, travelling widely to Novorossiisk, on the Black Sea, and Vladikavkaz, in Ossetia. In Tiflis, he ordered schools and the seminary to deliver cash from their teachers while he discreetly prepared the Outfit for his gangster rackets.

  Stalin would order the delivery of a letter to a businessman, illustrated with “bombs, a lacerated corpse and two crossed daggers,” then come calling with a Mauser in his belt to collect the money, according to several sources. But Stalin’s first biographer, Essad Bey, unreliable though often well informed, claims that “Soso obtained his information” about wealthy targets “through his mistress, Marie Arensberg, [a] German businessman’s wife in Tiflis.” But bank robbery was the fastest way to raise large sums.

  “It was Stalin,” says Davrichewy, the other notorious bank robber from Gori, “who really opened the age of bank heists in Georgia.” The Outfit managed to pull off a spree of daring bank robberies in 1906 even though, as the Menshevik Tatiana Vulikh says, “Tiflis was at war; patrols day and night, cordoning off whole city-blocks.”

  First, Tsintsadze hit the city pawnshop, bursting in with revolvers blazing, and bagged a few thousand. “One day Stalin’s gangsters hit, pistols firing, the Georgian Bank of Agriculture opposite the Viceroy’s Palace in broad daylight in Tiflis,” recalls Davrichewy. “Shouting ‘Hands up!’ they grabbed bundles of notes and disappeared firing into the air. Kamo was in command according to a plan devised by Stalin, a superb organizer.”

  The competition between the bank robbers intensified, but there was a comradeship too. “All the main bank-robbers,” boasted Davrichewy, “were from Gori!” It was Davrichewy who pulled off the biggest heist so far, bagging over 100,000 roubles for the Socialist-Federalists in a robbery at Dusheti. Stalin, Tsintsadze and Kamo responded with robberies of ever increasing daring. They held up a train at Kars, though it went wrong and several of the gang were killed in the shootout. Then, in November 1906, Kote held up the Borzhomi stagecoach, but the Cossack outriders fought back. In the shootout, the stagecoach’s horses bolted with the money.

  Next they held up the Chiatura gold train, bearing wages for the mines. Stopping the train, the gangsters and the Cossack guards fought a two-hour gun-battle, killing a soldier and a Gendarme before the Outfit got away with 21,000 roubles, “of which we sent 15,000 to the Bolshevik faction [Lenin in Finland] and kept the rest for our group to plan for future expropriations,” recalls Tsintsadze.

  Presently, Stalin’s highwaymen held up the Kadzhorskoe stagecoach, bagging another 20,000 roubles. Some was kept to fund Stalin’s newspaper Brdzola, but most was sent to Lenin, hidden in bottles of Georgian wine.

  · · ·

  “All of them were great friends and everyone loved them: sweet, kind, always cheerful . . . and ever ready to help anyone,” remembers Tatiana Vulikh, who knew the gangsters well. The Outfit was about ten strong, including the guntoting girls Patsia, Anneta and Alexandra. The gangsters lived in a couple of apartments, men in one room, women in another. None of them read much except two of the girls. Mostly consumptive, “They were so poor that they often had to stay in bed because there were not enough trousers to wear between them!”

  Stalin socialized with Kamo and Tsintsadze, but he usually gave orders to the Outfit through a bodyguard whom he called his “Technical Assistant,”* though his comrades jokingly dubbed him “Soso’s Adjutant.” Thus that “great conspirator who rarely walked with other comrades” usually kept himself at least one remove from the ordinary gangsters. Behind the gunmen themselves, Stalin ran his own intelligence and courier network: the little boys at Tamamshev’s Caravanserai and at various printing-houses ran errands, delivered pamphlets, gathered intelligence.

  The gangsters were not stealing for themselves. The gunmen of other gangs spent the cash on clothes, girls and wine, but Stalin never showed any interest in money, always sharing what he had with his comrades. “Stalin dressed poorly,” wrote Jordania, “was constantly in need of money and, in this way, he differed from other Bolshevik intellectuals who enjoyed the good life—such as Shaumian, Makharadze, Mdivani and Kavtaradze.” Soso’s gangsters shared his Marxist faith and ascetism. Their “gospel was Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? They would follow Lenin even against the Party,” says Vulikh. “Their simple-minded goal was to get 200,000–300,000 roubles and give them to Lenin saying, ‘You can do whatever you want with this money.’”

  The gangster glamour concealed psychotic Mafia-style brutality: stealing any loot meant death. Stalin ordered Kamo, as Davrichewy witnessed, to execute a comrade suspected of pilfering. The bigger the success, the more dangerous the temptations. After Davrichewy’s 100,000-rouble heist at Dusheti, the Federalist gangsters fell out among themselves, killing to carve up the swag. One of
their leaders stole a tranche of cash, trying to cover his tracks by blaming the peasants in whose garden it had been initially buried. Showing the fraternity between bank robbers, the Federalist embezzler asked Stalin’s gunman Eliso Lominadze to recover the proceeds. Lominadze tortured the peasants for an entire night before realizing they had not stolen the cash. “Afterwards he despaired that he’d been so cruel to innocents,” says Vulikh. So he murdered the real culprit who had commissioned him. If he had found the cash, he probably would have stolen it for the Bolsheviks. In any case, the money was lost to the Socialist-Federalists: the Okhrana observed their leaders spending the rest of the booty in the casinos of the Côte d’Azur.

  The secret police struggled to pin down the culprits of these heists: once they found out about Josef Davrichewy, they blamed him for most of them. But first they muddled him up with Stalin because they were both Goreli gangsters who shared the diminutive “Soso”—and then confused them both with Kamo and Tsintsadze. “‘Kamo’ is Tsintsadze,” reported the secret police, “who escaped from Batumi Prison and arrived in Tiflis where he co-operated with Josef Djugashvhili (whose alias must be ‘Soso’).”

  In this world of swashbuckling heroics and sordid murders, Stalin evolved his stoical views on the value of human life: “When he heard that a comrade had been killed in an expropriation, Soso would say, ‘What can we do? One can’t pick a rose without pricking oneself on a thorn. Leaves fall from the trees in autumn—but fresh ones grow in the spring.’”1