Stalin: A Biography

by Robert Service

  Until his confinement Dzhughashvili had been writing more intensively than in any previous period of his life. It was also in this period that some of his adolescent verses were reprinted in the latest edition of Yakob Gogebashvili’s Georgian literary anthology Mother Tongue.8 But he told no one about this. (It is not even certain that he himself knew about the publication.) Just a few flashes of his poetic side still occurred. In a proclamation he wrote for May Day 1912 he declared:9 ‘Nature is waking from its winter’s sleep. The forests and mountains are turning green. Flowers adorn the meadows and pastures. The sun shines more warmly. We feel in the air new life, and the world is beginning to dance for joy.’ This was the last romantic outburst he made in print. For the rest of his life he never repeated such gushing verbosity. Indeed it had been a long time since he had indulged himself in this way.10

  The same proclamation referred to none of the regions of the Russian Empire except Russia. It was aimed exclusively at Russian workers and called on them to ‘raise the banner of the Russian [russkoi] revolution’. Too much weight of interpretation cannot be placed on this. (Not that this has stopped some biographers from trying.) Dzhughashvili was working in the Russian capital, writing in Russian and appealing to Russian industrial workers. Naturally Russia was at the core of his message, as would not have been the case if he had still been in Tbilisi. Nevertheless there was a detectable shift in his political persona around this time. His main pseudonym from 1912 was Stalin. This was an unmistakably Russian name derived from the word for steel (stal). Although it was not the first time he had turned to the Russian tongue for a false identity, he had usually reverted to Georgian ones. Now, though, he was building up his image in the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party and no longer wanted to be known merely as a man from the Caucasus. He was laying ever greater emphasis on the need for a general solution to the problems of the Russian Empire; and he wanted to play an integrated part in that solution.

  Stalin in person, of course, was not credible as a Russian. He knew he looked, sounded and behaved in a ‘southern’ manner. He revered Georgian literary classics. He would never be Russian. And, contrary to what is widely suggested, he did not really try.11 If he had really desired to de-Georgianise his political profile among Bolsheviks he would have ceased to write on the ‘national question’. Jews like Zinoviev and Kamenev wanted to be known as internationalists and hardly ever drew attention to their ethnic ancestry. Stalin too wished to be regarded as an internationalist; he also aimed to be taken seriously in Russian socialist politics. But he continued to urge the party to promote the interests of the non-Russians under a future socialist administration. His 1913 booklet The National Question and Social-Democracy was to do much to raise his reputation in the party; it also solidified his relationship with Lenin, who described him in a letter to the writer Maxim Gorki as ‘the wonderful Georgian’.12 What is clear is that Stalin had long ceased to make a special case for the Georgians in his statements on the national question. When he wrote or said anything, he treated them no better or worse than other non-Russian peoples. He offered his co-nationals no prospect of preferment, while himself remaining a Georgian in appearance, accent, demeanour and residual culture.

  This meant little to Stalin as he made his way under guard to Narym. He stayed for a few days in Kolpashevo, a village where several leading Bolsheviks were living in exile. They included Mikhail Lashevich and Ivan Smirnov. Stalin also came across his Bolshevik friend Semën Surin as well as his Bailov Prison acquaintance Semën Vereshchak: he had supper with them, recuperated and then set out north-east along the River Ob to his assigned destination in Narym.13 It was not quite the worst place of exile in the Russian Empire. Narym, unlike towns at a more northerly latitude, lay just within the zone of agriculture. But conditions could have been better. The winter was bleak. Economic life largely revolved around hunting and fishing. Contact with St Petersburg was infrequent and subject to police surveillance.

  Fellow Central Committee member Yakov Sverdlov greeted Stalin in Narym and offered him a room. They did not get on well. Even the agreement on housework broke down. Whereas Sverdlov aimed at a modicum of order, Stalin was slovenly and selfish. They had agreed to fetch the post, and whoever stayed behind was expected to tidy the house. Years later they compared memories about how Stalin got out of this arrangement:14

  Stalin: I liked to creep out for the post on [Sverdlov’s day to do it]. Sverdlov had to look after the house whether he liked it or not — keep the stove alight and do the cleaning… How many times I tried to trick you and get out of the housework. I [also] used to wake up when it was my turn and lie still as if asleep.

  Sverdlov: And do you think I didn’t notice? I noticed only too well.

  Although Sverdlov laughed good-naturedly, he had not thought it pleasant at the time. Stalin’s behaviour was doubly selfish. Whoever walked to the post office would meet up with other comrades and gain a respite from the dreariness of exile. Everyone found the conditions depressing and Stalin’s egocentricity was widely resented.

  The two of them planned to flee from Narym to resume clandestine political activity. They were encouraged in this by the Central Committee in Kraków. Two escape ‘bureaux’ existed, one in Kolpashevo, the other in Narym. Sverdlov made the first attempt but was caught near Tomsk. Then Lashevich made a dash, followed by Stalin and Sverdlov on 1 September.15 It was an eventful trip. They had devised a clever scheme requiring the diminutive Sverdlov to hide in a laundry basket. Stalin was accosted by a gendarme who made a move to examine the basket by pushing his bayonet into it. Stalin got him to desist by bribing him. This story, told by Stalin three decades later, cannot be verified.16 But it is not implausible. Fugitive revolutionaries regularly exploited inefficiency and venality among the Imperial agencies of law and order.

  Stalin and Sverdlov stayed with the Alliluev family in St Petersburg.17 Quickly they restored links with party organisations in the empire and with the ‘foreign’ part of the Central Committee in Kraków. All this time they had to keep at least one step in front of the Okhrana. The electoral campaign for the Fourth State Duma was in full cry and Stalin stayed in the capital to help and direct Bolshevik activities. He also began writing again for Pravda. On 19 October he contributed the leading article on ‘The Will of the Voters’ Delegates’; and Lenin printed his piece ‘The Mandate of the St Petersburg Workers’ in the émigré newspaper Sotsial-demokrat. On election day, 25 October, the Bolsheviks did well by securing six seats. The need for co-ordination was paramount and Stalin made a last-minute trip to Bolsheviks in Moscow to confer with Roman Malinovski and other newly elected individuals. With the ending of the electoral campaign it was equally urgent to strengthen contact with Kraków. Stalin, after briefly returning to St Petersburg and assuring himself that arrangements for the Duma were in place, bought train tickets for Poland in early November. He was going to consult Lenin. For the first time they would meet as fellow members of the Central Committee.

  The trip was memorable for Stalin. As the train approached the border with Austrian Poland, he found himself in a carriage with a passenger reading aloud from a Russian nationalist newspaper. He could not stop himself from shouting across at him: ‘Why are you reading that rubbish? You should read other newspapers!’18 Alighting from the train, he had to get help in crossing the border to Kraków. He wandered around the market till he bumped into a friendly cobbler. Stalin used his charm: ‘My father was also a cobbler, back in my homeland, Georgia.’ The cobbler, refusing any recompense, took Stalin to his home, fed him and at dusk escorted him by a winding route across the hills into Austrian Poland.19

  He arrived in time for a meeting between the Central Committee members and three Bolshevik Duma deputies. Stalin did not enjoy the experience. In November there had been a Bolshevik plan to organise a one-day political strike and demonstration outside the Tauride Palace in St Petersburg. When the Mensheviks opposed this as being dangerous and unproductive, the Bolshevik faction
had backed down. Lenin heard about this in Kraków and drafted an angry article.20 His ill temper had not spent itself before the three Duma deputies arrived in Poland. Stalin agreed that the Bolshevik faction had made a mistake, but he doubted that the best way to bring them into line was to browbeat them:21

  Ilich recommends ‘a hard policy’ for the group of six [Bolshevik Duma deputies] inside the faction, a policy of threatening the majority of the faction, a policy of appealing to the rank and file against the faction’s majority; but Ilich will give way since it is self-evident that the [Bolshevik] six are not yet well enough developed for such a hard policy, that they are not prepared and that it’s necessary to start by strengthening the six and then use them to thrash the majority of the faction as Ilya [Muromets] used a Tatar to thrash the Tatars.

  Stalin believed that the Bolsheviks could win over the Mensheviks in the Duma faction. He had attended a faction meeting and could testify that this was feasible. Persuasion really could work. Stalin thought Lenin inept and ill informed to insist on tactical intransigence.22

  On much friendlier terms with Stalin was Lev Kamenev, an acquaintance from their Tbilisi days as well as a Central Committee member. Feeling lonely in Kraków, Stalin wrote him what can only be called a billet-doux:23 ‘I give you an Eskimo kiss on the nose. The Devil take me! I miss you — I swear to it like a dog. There’s no one, absolutely no one, to have a heart-to-heart conversation with, damn you. Can’t you somehow or other make it over here to Kraków?’ Still strengthening his position in the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party leadership, he was reaching out to potential friends who could help him.

  Having returned briefly to St Petersburg, Stalin worked with the six Bolshevik Duma deputies before travelling again to Kraków at the end of December for a further meeting of the Central Committee with the Bolshevik Duma group. He stayed abroad for the longest time in his life and got on to more amicable terms with Lenin. Yet despite being invited to eat with Lenin and his wife Nadezhda Krupskaya, he insisted on finding a restaurant. Puzzled by this reaction, Lenin went in search of him. He found him eating with a bottle of beer on the table. From then onwards Lenin ensured that alcohol was provided at his home and they resumed their political conversations in a social setting. Meanwhile Stalin’s behaviour became material for local ribaldry. Ordering a meal in Russian at a train station on the line between Kraków and Zakopane, he noticed that other customers entered the restaurant and got served while he was kept waiting. He received his soup after an inordinate wait. Offended, he turned the bowl upside down and walked out. Lenin had to explain to him, supposedly the party expert on the national question, that Poles disliked having to speak Russian.24

  Lenin had the knack of putting Bolsheviks at their social ease, and Stalin steadily settled down. The two of them conversed endlessly. Stalin fitted Lenin’s bill as a quintessential Bolshevik. He was tough and uncomplaining. (As yet Stalin had not displayed his self-pitying, ranting side.) He appeared to conform to a working-class stereotype. He was also a committed revolutionary and a Bolshevik factional loyalist. Stalin was obviously bright and Lenin, who was engaged in controversy with Zhordania and other Mensheviks on the national question, encouraged Stalin to take time out from his duties to write up a lengthy piece on the subject. Already in 1910 Lenin had cited Stalin (under the pseudonym K.S.) as a more authoritative commentator on the Caucasus than the more famous Zhordania.25 Now he encouraged him to deepen his researches and publish the result.

  With this in mind Stalin in the second half of January 1913 travelled on to Vienna, where he could use libraries with fuller holdings in Marxist literature than were available in Kraków. He stayed for a few weeks with fellow Bolsheviks on the southern edge of the city, not far from the palace of Schönbrunn, in a first-floor flat on the Schönbrunnerschlosss-trasse. Stalin’s comrades had got lots of books ready for him. He was given a desk and a divan.26 (Stalin never objected to sleeping on the simplest frames.)27 For several weeks he read in Viennese libraries and wrote up his work in the flat. He frequently consulted local comrades about the German-language texts of Bauer, Kautsky and the Marxist journal Die Neue Zeit.28 Stalin was a man on a mission. He lived the national question and expatiated about it even on social occasions. Six-year-old Galina, the daughter of his Bolshevik hosts, got thoroughly bored on their walks in Vienna’s well-kept parks: ‘You’re not talking about the nation again!’29 Stalin, cut off from his son Yakob in Georgia, took to Galina as he did to other lively children. She was his match: she did not believe him when, with his heavy accent, he teasingly promised to bring her some ‘green chocolate’ from the Caucasus.30

  He took extensive notes and wrote up most of the text of his booklet before returning to Russia. Initially he published ‘The National Question and Social-Democracy’ in the St Petersburg Marxist journal Prosveshchenie (‘Enlightenment’).31 Back in the capital in mid-February 1913, Stalin resumed his part in the complex game played between the revolutionary parties and the Okhrana. The police had long ago accepted that a policy of total suppression of the revolutionary movement would not work, and indeed they had acted on this awareness since the 1880s. (The problem was that the Okhrana could change the rules of the game at will, and the result could be prison or exile for individual revolutionaries.) Stalin had to take the usual risks. This time he stayed not in the less savoury districts of the capital but in the centre, at 44 Shpalernaya Street, in the rented apartment of the Bolshevik Duma deputies F. Samoilov and Alexander Badaev.32 The Okhrana was aware that Stalin was carrying out instructions of the émigré leadership in Kraków — or at least that he was doing so to the degree that he wished. Stalin realised that the Okhrana knew who he was and what he was up to. The Okhrana hoped to get clues about wider circles of Bolshevik activity; Stalin aimed to give no clues while continuing to guide the Duma faction towards the desired end.

  Evidently his presence in St Petersburg was no secret. At any time he could be arrested. With Lenin’s blessing, he was directing the faction’s activity in the capital. He could hardly, however, strut about. He had to be wary. The fact of his voluntary obscurity in 1912–13 led many to go on supposing that he was a nonentity among Bolsheviks before the Great War. Such an idea was seriously awry. He had risen to the summit of the Central Committee and saw his talents as lying in the work he could do in the Russian Empire.

  The inevitable happened on 23 February 1913. Stalin went to a ball for International Women’s Day at the Kalashnikov Exchange. It was a big occasion and many militants were heading for the same destination. The Okhrana, however, had decided that the time had come to arrest him. Apparently Malinovski had tipped off his controllers about Stalin’s whereabouts that day, and he was grabbed and handcuffed on arrival. He had finished his lengthy article on ‘The National Question and Social-Democracy’ (which was later republished as Marxism and the National Question) and delivered it to the offices of Prosveshchenie in the capital.33 This was a legally published Marxist journal that carried items of doctrinal theory and contemporary analysis. The fact that its editors welcomed his article was a signal of his rising importance among Marxists of the Russian Empire. The piece was thought sufficiently impressive to be turned out as a booklet. Stalin had also left behind an article, much briefer, for Pravda.34 This was a report on ‘The Situation in the Social-Democratic Group in the Duma’. Its contents justified the harsh line taken by the Bolsheviks in comparison with the Mensheviks. Stalin himself was out of action in the capital’s House of Preliminary Detention.

  He was not to know that he would not taste freedom’s delights again for exactly four years; for it was to be precisely on International Women’s Day in 1917 that female textile workers went on strike in the capital and forged the first link in a chain that pulled down the Imperial monarchy some days later. No further works by Stalin were printed between his arrest and Nicholas II’s abdication. Scarcely had he penetrated the central precincts of the Bolshevik faction when he was cast to the winds of tsarist ju
stice. He had known the risks. Recurrent arrest and exile were the norm for the revolutionaries who did not emigrate. He must have hoped that he would be sent again to somewhere like Solvychegodsk or Narym and that the Central Committee would enable him to escape and resume his important political functions. He would not be put on trial. His immediate future depended on the police. Stalin awaited the decision with his customary fortitude.

  9. KOBA AND BOLSHEVISM

  Dzhughashvili was by no means an outstanding thinker. This would not raise an eyebrow if his followers had not gone on to laud him as a figure of universal intellectual significance. He always had plenty of detractors. Most of the early ones were persons who — at least by implication — suggested that they themselves were thinkers of distinction. They deluded themselves. Scarcely any leading figure in the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party made an original intellectual contribution. Plekhanov, Lenin and Trotski were brilliant synthesisers of the ideas of others — and not all of those others were Marxists. Each took his personal synthesis to an idiosyncratic extreme. This was also true of Bukharin, who tried his hardest to effect a deepening of the Marxist perspective in the light of contemporary philosophy, sociology and economics. Only Bogdanov can be categorised as an original thinker. Bogdanov’s amalgam of Marx and Engels with the epistemology of Ernst Mach led him to reject economic determinism in favour of a dynamic interplay of objective and subjective factors in social ‘science’. He made a serious contribution through his work on the importance of ideas for the control of societies by their elites across the course of human history. Bogdanov’s Empiriomonism was a tour de force.1