Stalin: A Biography

by Robert Service

  Joseph’s progress was disturbed on the night of 21–22 March 1901. The police raided several homes inhabited by Marxists, and the Observatory was on their list. Joseph had been under surveillance virtually since starting work there.15 Several of his friends across the city were arrested but he was untouched. It was not the last time that he was lucky (which later gave rise to the suspicion that he was an agent of the Imperial political police, the Okhrana).16 But obviously he could not return to the Observatory without the risk of being detained. He opted for an existence on the run. His mind was made up. He lived for revolution and knew that this would bring frequent uncomfortable episodes along with it. Prison and exile were eventually inevitable. For the next few weeks he moved from house to house of political associates.

  The Georgian Marxists took their nation’s development seriously. But Georgia posed problems. Most Georgians did not think of themselves first and foremost as Georgians. They saw themselves as belonging to one or other of the large ethnic groups in Georgia and some of them, especially the Mingrelians, spoke their own different language. But Georgian Marxists believed that encouragement of a national consciousness would enhance political development and, ultimately, the dissemination of socialist ideas. Another difficulty was geopolitical. The Marxists could see that Georgia’s independence would put the country at the mercy of the Ottoman Empire. Marxism in any case taught them to see salvation not by means of secession from Russia but through the advancement of the working classes in all countries. All of them wanted Marxism to become a united force regardless of national backgrounds across the entire Caucasus. Georgians, Armenians and Azeris should be encouraged to struggle together against the Romanov monarchy and its political and social order. The Marxists of the Caucasus should also adhere to the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party, founded in 1898, which covered the entire Russian Empire.

  Marxism had been growing in influence among dissenting intellectuals and workers from the mid-1880s. They were inspired by ideas developed by the political émigré Georgi Plekhanov, who suggested that capitalism was developing fast across the empire and that the working class was the group in society best able to bring about an end to the Romanov monarchy and to initiate changes which eventually would lead to the achievement of socialism. Other socialists stuck to an earlier Russian tradition which Plekhanov had abandoned. These were revolutionaries who looked mainly to the peasantry to bring down the oppressive order of state and society. Such revolutionaries, guided by Viktor Chernov, were to form the Party of Socialist-Revolutionaries in 1901. Chernov shared ideas with Marxists but claimed that the social structure of the Russian Empire had not yet changed as much as Plekhanov asserted; he also saw the industrial workers as being little different, socially and culturally, from the peasantry. Also active in the Russian Empire were liberal political groups. Initially they were headed by Pëtr Struve, who had started public life as a Marxist. In 1905 they were to establish the Constitutional-Democratic Party. The Constitutional-Democrats (or Kadets) advocated liberal democracy and capitalism as the solution to the problems of the country.

  The Marxists, though, dominated public debate in Georgia. They triumphed over the liberals and conservatives who already existed there. Socialist-Revolutionaries acquired no following in the south Caucasus. The main rivals to Marxism were the Social-Federalists, who were Georgian socialists with a strongly nationalist orientation which demanded the transformation of the Russian Empire into a federal state with Georgia as one of its constituent subjects. But the Social-Federalists failed to win over the majority of dissenting opinion. Noe Zhordania’s was the dominant voice among Georgia’s Marxists. He had a strong personality, moral force and flair with the pen.17 Marxism in Georgia was largely the product of his ideas and activity. Zhordania, too, understood that independence for the Georgians would expose them to invasion by the Ottoman Empire. He was not invulnerable to challenge to his authority. Pilipe Makharadze, Mikha Tskhakaya and other Marxists thought him too soft on Georgian liberals. But Zhordania saw Georgia’s Marxists as the leaders of a national movement against the political and economic system of tsarism. To this end he co-operated with all trends of anti-Romanov opinion in Georgia. It was this that had induced the liberal Giorgi Tsereteli to transfer possession of Kvali to him.

  Dzhughashvili’s friend Lado Ketskhoveli agreed with Zhordania’s critics and was keen to counteract the trend by practical action. Ketskhoveli argued for the establishment of a clandestine newspaper. Although Kvali had its uses, it could not propagate a full revolutionary message for fear of the Imperial censorship.18 Ketskhoveli and Dzhughashvili generally advocated tighter forms of ‘underground’ organisation than Zhordania approved. Whereas Zhordania hoped to broaden the opportunity for ordinary workers to join the Marxists and contribute actively to party life, his younger critics thought it risky to let authority slip from the hands of experienced organisers such as themselves. This dispute affected the whole Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party at the turn of the century. The beginnings of the split which occurred in 1903 between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks were already detectable. Agreement existed that the techniques of clandestine party activity had to be respected. Beyond this point there were the symptoms of a split which became a gaping wound in Georgian Marxism in the years ahead.

  Lado Ketskhoveli shrugged off Zhordania’s control by setting up an illegal Marxist newspaper, Brdzola (‘Struggle’), in Baku on the Caspian coast. Zhordania had obstructed any such venture in Georgia for fear of jeopardising the publication of Kvali. For Ketskhoveli, Zhordania’s reaction was a further indication that the Tbilisi Marxist leadership was making too many compromises. Baku’s population included Russians, Armenians and Georgians as well as an Azeri majority. He quickly found a press in Baku19 and by forging documents purporting to come from the governor of Yelizavetgrad he was able to get the owners to go ahead with the printing.20 Cunning and strong-minded, he set up the kind of Georgian-language newspaper he wanted. Copies were sent to Marxist groups throughout the Caucasus. Later in life Dzhughashvili pretended that he had co-founded Brdzola. In reality it was exclusively Ketskhoveli’s work. Dzhughashvili also overstated the degree of antagonism between the two of them and Zhordania. Tensions certainly existed and were increasing; but co-operation persisted, and Ketskhoveli eventually turned to Zhordania to write the editorial for one of Brdzola’s issues.21

  Meanwhile Dzhughashvili was making a nuisance of himself in the Georgian capital. The Tiflis Committee of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party was riddled with political and personal disputes. (Georgia’s Marxists, never aspiring to secession from the Russian Empire, referred to their capital by the Russian name Tiflis.) But Dzhughashvili made everything worse. One memoir, without directly naming him, identifies a ‘young, muddled comrade from the intelligentsia, “energetic” in all matters’. According to this account, the individual, ‘invoking conspiratorial considerations as well as the unpreparedness and lack of [political] consciousness among workers, came out against admitting workers to the committee’.22 The Marxists of Tbilisi took this to be an unpleasant opinion unpleasantly delivered — and the context makes it virtually certain that Dzhughashvili was the comrade in question. Another contemporary, Grigol Uratadze, wrote more directly that Dzhughashvili was arraigned before his comrades and found guilty as a ‘slanderer’.23

  In November 1901, after being withdrawn from propaganda work in Tbilisi by the City Committee, Dzhughashvili left for Batumi on the Black Sea coast seeking to spread his ideas in a more receptive milieu. But many Marxists in Batumi did not take to him. Dzhughashvili kept ranting about the sins of commission and omission of the Tiflis Committee. This was bad enough. But the comrades in Batumi could not stand his ‘personal capriciousness and his tendency to despotic behaviour’.24 What is notable here is that objections were made less to policy than to attitude and comportment. Nastiness to acquaintances had been his hallmark since he had been a youngster. Ambition too had been a characteris
tic. But he wanted to rise to revolutionary eminence on his own terms; and whenever others baulked him, he told them they were wrong and stupid. He was a clever young man who thought he had the answers to the difficulties experienced by Marxist propagandists in the south Caucasus. Stressing the need for clandestine activity, illegal propaganda and control over the workers, Dzhughashvili was a Bolshevik in waiting.

  He was not ineffective in Batumi. He worked with fellow Marxists and pipeline and port workers to stir up revolt against the employers. Contact was made with likely recruits to the party. The Rothschild and Mantashëv enterprises were his favourite spots. At the same time he kept in contact with Ketskhoveli hundreds of miles east in Baku. Strikes broke out in Batumi and Dzhughashvili and his group were involved. He was doing what his ideology and policies induced him to do. He was involved, too, in the organisation of a protest demonstration by workers on 8 March 1902. They were demanding the release of strike leaders imprisoned a few days earlier. The demonstration had fatal consequences. The town authorities panicked at the sight of six thousand angry marching workers and troops fired on them. Fifteen demonstrators were killed. A massive Okhrana investigation followed. There were hundreds of arrests. Police spies had penetrated the Batumi Marxist organisation and it was only a matter of time before Dzhughashvili’s whereabouts were discovered. He was taken into custody on 5 April and detained in Batumi Prison.

  One resident, Hashim Smyrba, regretted Dzhughashvili’s departure. Dzhughashvili had stayed for a while in hiding with him. Hashim, a peasant who was probably an Abkhazian, took to him and expressed regret that he wasn’t a Moslem: ‘Because if you adopted the Moslem faith, I’d find you seven beautiful women to marry.’25 The scene was recounted to indicate that Dzhughashvili had always had the common touch. But Smyrba was an elderly peasant outside the revolutionary movement. The fact that few workers testified on Dzhughashvili’s behalf decades after his stay in Batumi was surely significant. He kept himself to himself. He was self-sufficient and did not want to rely on others when he did not need to. Already he was something of a loner.

  Dzhughashvili in any case no longer depended on the goodwill of comrades in Batumi or Tbilisi. He kept in close contact with his friend Ketskhoveli in Baku. His article on ‘The Russian Social-Democratic Party and its Immediate Tasks’, covering many political and organisational questions of the day, was the main item in the second issue of Brdzola.26 Ketskhoveli did not mind. Although he remained chief editor he recognised that he was better at organising than at writing or editing. They made a dynamic pair. Brdzola became a publishing success in the clandestine Marxist movement across the south Caucasus. According to Stalin’s own account, he became drawn to the writer’s life and seriously contemplated abandoning clandestine political activity and entering university — and not just as a student but as a professor.27 (He never explained who would have paid his way for him.) Another aspect of his early literary career continued to exercise him in old age. This was the ‘peaceful’ content of several of his writings. Even in Brdzola, unworried about the censor’s office, he had avoided a direct summons to revolution.

  Reportedly Ketskhoveli swore at him for being too moderate; but Dzhughashvili was to claim that until the shooting of workers in Batumi in March 1902 he had been justified in his measured tone. All then changed: ‘The tone was altered.’ Never again did Dzhughashvili hold back in contest with the opponents of Marxism in Georgia or the Russian Empire as a whole.28 Ketskhoveli and Dzhughashvili were discovering for themselves that their basic inclinations were not peculiar to them or to Georgia. In December 1900 some Russian émigré Marxists, on the initiative of Lenin, had founded Iskra (‘The Spark’) in Munich. Its supporters advocated clandestine political activity as the key to future impact. One of Iskra’s contacts in the south Caucasus was Lev Galperin, who worked for Brdzola. Material started to arrive from Germany at Batumi in 1901–2.29 Iskra was campaigning for control over the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party. Its ideas were more developed than those of Ketskhoveli. Lenin and his comrades wanted no compromise with the middle class. They urged the formation of militant, tightly organised groups. They stood for centralisation, discipline and doctrinal orthodoxy. Brdzola, however, was wrecked by the Okhrana even before Dzhughashvili’s arrest: on 14 March 1902 the entire editorial and supporting group except for Abel Enukidze and Bogdan Knunyants were taken into custody in Baku.30

  While the Brdzola group languished in the gaols of Batumi and Baku, Noe Zhordania continued to elaborate the strategy and tactics of Georgian Marxism. Both Zhordania and Lenin felt that the founding parents of Marxism in the Russian Empire — Georgi Plekhanov, Pavel Axelrod and Vera Zasulich — had failed to discern the advantages of appealing to the peasantry. Lenin was out to attract peasant sympathy by offering to restore the strips of land lost to the gentry landlords through the Emancipation Edict of 1861. Many Russian Marxists thought the proposal too indulgent to the peasantry; they preferred the orthodox emphasis on campaigning among the working class. But Zhordania criticised Lenin for insufficient audacity. Instead he urged that all agricultural lands should pass into the hands of peasants. Dynastic, ecclesiastical and noble estates should be expropriated. Most Georgian workers had ties with the countryside. Georgia was a predominantly agrarian society. Not only that: Zhordania urged Georgian Marxists to go out among the peasants and recruit them to the ranks of organised Marxism.31 Very quickly his comrades answered his call. The campaign paid off. Nowhere else in the Russian Empire were peasants so ready to hearken to Marxists. Marxists could boast of their hegemony over the Georgian political opposition to the Romanov monarchy.

  Dzhughashvili did not approve of Zhordania’s strategy. He agreed that the peasants should be promised the transfer of all agricultural lands and that Lenin’s proposal was too timid. But he disliked the idea of diverting so much propaganda and organisation to the peasants. He insisted on the need to operate among the ‘workers’. He also made a point of the need for Marxists to report on and explain the vicissitudes of the labour movement outside the Russian Empire, especially in central and western Europe.32

  About a further point of dissent with Zhordania, however, he was always to show extraordinary reticence. Dzhughashvili was still far from abandoning all his Georgian patriotism. He wished a distinct Marxist party to be formed in Georgia. Whereas Zhordania aimed for a regional organisation covering the entire Caucasus regardless of its ancient national and ethnic boundaries, Dzhughashvili demanded a Georgian territorial demarcation in the party.33 The difference between Zhordania and Dzhughashvili was large; it was even larger between Dzhughashvili and those other comrades such as Mikha Tskhakaya who were to become Bolsheviks. Tskhakaya agreed that the books, pamphlets and newspapers had to be written in the Georgian language — otherwise no Georgian workers would get acquainted with Marxism — but like other radical Marxists, he felt that Zhordania’s preoccupation with Georgia’s national and cultural development gave off a whiff of nationalism. Dzhughashvili’s idea for a territorially demarcated organisation in the south Caucasus seemed equally malodorous to radicals who espoused Marxism because it offered a path to modernity and away from nationalist strife.

  Such an idea in fact had echoes more widely in the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party. The Jewish Bund — the Marxist organisation based in the western borderlands of the Russian Empire and dedicated exclusively to work among Jews — was criticized by the Iskra group for demanding territorial autonomy inside the party despite the fact that other ethnic groups lived in the same region. (Marxists in the south Caucasus avoided such requests on behalf of a single national or ethnic group.) This request was discussed at the Second Party Congress in August 1903. When Iskra’s representatives opposed any such nationalterritorial principle for organisation, the Bundists walked out. Wilful and independently minded, Dzhughashvili was risking being classified as a Marxist who could not accept the Russian Social-Democratic Party’s commitment to internationalism.

  Dz
hughashvili, though, was undeterred. He had begun to make a mark for himself. Having moved involuntarily from Tbilisi, he did not gain a reputation as a congenial comrade; but this did not prevent him from imposing himself. In Batumi he found a set of workers ripe for being influenced by his summons to revolutionary activity; and he helped to organise the strikes and demonstrations against the monarchy. From Batumi he kept in touch with Baku, and Dzhughashvili was developing his skills in Marxist propaganda. Detention in Batumi Prison cut short his literary career, but he went on discussing his controversial strategic inclinations and giving papers on them.34 He was held there for a year before being transferred to Kutaisi. Transferred back to Batumi, he was finally — in autumn 1903 — dispatched to the southern part of mid-Siberia. The destination was Novaya Uda in Irkutsk Province, where he arrived on 27 November. He escaped in early 1904 and made for Tbilisi. (This required two attempts. On the first occasion he foolishly failed to kit himself out with warm clothing for the Siberian winter and he was recaptured with badly frozen ears and face.)35 The second attempt succeeded. From Tbilisi he travelled the length and breadth of the south Caucasus.

  Grigol Uratadze, fellow prisoner in Kutaisi Prison, left a helpful memoir of Dzhughashvili in these years. He wrote long after Dzhughashvili had become Stalin and dictator of the USSR; and the two men were long-standing political opponents. Nevertheless the memoir has some credibility since Uratadze made no pretence that Dzhughashvili already seemed a potential dictator. Uratadze started by saying: ‘As an individual Stalin had no special distinguishing features.’ But then he contradicted himself:36