Stalin: A Biography

by Robert Service

  By and large, though, the dispute was conducted with intellectual rigour even though the language on both sides was intemperate. Stalin’s commentary on the Caucasus was taken seriously even by those who disagreed with him. He had said nothing offensive except to the ears of the most extreme nationalists. Indeed little attention was later drawn to his booklet when his enemies were searching for dirt on him.

  The exception was the passages in Marxism and the National Question on the Jews. According to his categories, the Jews could not be considered as a nation because they did not live in a discrete territory. They had a language — Yiddish — and a religion of their own; and they were conscious of their Jewishness. But the matter of territory was crucial for Stalin and he took Bolshevik ideas on nationhood to their logical conclusion. his attack on the Jewish Bund was direct:26

  But [national-cultural autonomy] becomes even more dangerous when it is imposed on a ‘nation’ whose existence and future is subject to doubt. In such circumstances the supporters of national autonomy need to guard and conserve all the peculiarities of ‘the nation’ including not only useful ones but also those which are harmful so long as ‘the nation might be saved’ from assimilation and ‘might be protected’.

  The Bund inevitably was obliged to start down this dangerous road. And down that road it actually has gone.

  Stalin noted that whereas other Marxist parties had called for the general right of nations to speak their own language, have their own schools and follow their own customs, the Bund mentioned only the Jews. It had therefore, in his opinion, become a nationalist organisation.27

  He excoriated the Bund’s preoccupation with Yiddish and with the Jewish Sabbath. He noted that some Bundists even wanted separate hospitals for Jews. All this flew in the face of the wish of Marxists to bring national and ethnic groups of workers together in a single political organisation. For Stalin it was going altogether too far to suggest that all Jewish workers should be allowed to take off the hours of work from twilight on Friday to twilight on Saturday.28

  All this threw petrol on to the flames of controversy: Mensheviks and Bundists were infuriated by his analysis. But Stalin stood his ground and published an explanatory self-defence in the same journal.29 Most of the Menshevik leaders happened to be Jews. Lenin’s attacks on them had invited the accusation that the Bolsheviks were anti-semitic.30 This overlooked the fact that several Bolshevik leaders too were Jews — Lenin himself had a Jewish grandfather.31 But appearances in politics mattered as much as reality, and Stalin’s repudiation of Jewish demands for recognition of nationhood and of entitlement to self-rule seemed another case of Bolshevik hostility to Jews. Stories also surfaced that Stalin made anti-semitic remarks in private. Against this is the incontrovertible fact that Jews were among Stalin’s friends and associates before and after the Great War. However, the Jewish Bund was on the other side from the Bolsheviks in most disputes in the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party before the Great War. Stalin and Lenin were eager to attack the Bundists and their aspirations. Factional considerations as well as ideology were involved in the Bolshevik–Menshevik controversy. It would be difficult to find Stalin guilty of anti-semitism simply for what he wrote in his Meisterwerk on the national question.

  10. OSIP OF SIBERIA

  The months of waiting ended when the St Petersburg police sentenced Joseph Stalin to four years of exile. Marched from prison on 2 July 1913, he was taken to an arrest wagon bound for Siberia. Convicts were usually accompanied by friends and relatives who shouted support from the platform through the barred slits in the sides of the wagon. Nobody in the capital, however, was willing to bid Stalin farewell. His wife Ketevan was dead and his mother far away in Gori; and the Alliluev family, known to be active Bolshevik supporters, would have been ill advised to come to the station. No sooner had he risen to the crest of the Bolshevik faction than his fortunes fell to the ground. From having been leader of Bolshevism in St Petersburg with responsibility for both the Duma faction’s activities and the editorial line of Pravda he was reduced to being one arrested revolutionary among hundreds. Stalin was put in manacles. He slept on a hard wooden bunk. He and his comrades were fed and watered like cattle as the train made its way eastwards across the Eurasian plain. They peered through the barred slits as the train pulled out. Within minutes of departure they lost sight of the last feature of the Russian capital, the cupola on St Isaac’s Cathedral. The tundra and taiga of Siberia awaited them.1

  The government was watching with concern as the slogans of Bolshevism attracted discontented factory workers, and Bolsheviks like Stalin were a threat to the Imperial order as the industrial strike movement expanded. Stalin’s convict record was also noted. The Minister of Internal Affairs had no reason to show indulgence to this leading revolutionary who had escaped several times from previous places of exile. He and his comrades were sent to Turukhansk District in Yenisei Province in Siberia’s far north-east. Turukhansk’s reputation was a dreadful one. It was the place of detention for those revolutionaries in previous decades who had broken their terms of punishment. Stalin’s periods in exile in Novaya Uda, Solvychegodsk, Vologda and Narym were going to seem pleasant in comparison. No place under Imperial administration was bleaker than Turukhansk.2

  At nearly six hundred thousand square miles, Yenisei Province was larger than Britain, France and Germany combined. It stretched from the town of Yeniseisk north down the River Yenisei to the Arctic Ocean. Population was sparse in Turukhansk District. Before the First World War there were fewer than fifteen thousand inhabitants and most of these belonged to tribes which had lived there for centuries. Monastyrskoe, the district capital, had fewer than fifty houses (although the New York and Montreal fur company Revillion had a branch there and graphite mining took place further north).3 The climate was harsh. Winter with its frequent snowstorms lasted nine months; the temperature sometimes fell to sixty degrees below zero and the daylight was of short duration. Summer brought its own discomforts because the sun hardly set and the mosquitoes bit through clothing. Agriculture was impossible since the ground remained frozen regardless of season. Flour and vegetables were imported from Russia’s gentler climes and livestock husbandry was unknown. The people of Turukhansk District hunted and fished for subsistence.4

  Escape from the far-flung villages was exceptionally difficult. The telegraph line, ending at Monastyrskoe, facilitated police surveillance.5 The tundra was so heavy that flight west to the River Ob or east to the River Lena was not a realistic option. Those trying to flee by river faced hazards of a different nature. The route to the north was arduous, especially in the vast stretch above the Arctic Circle. Authorities checked the identities of all passengers, boats were few and the water melted for only a few weeks annually. The southward alternative was little better. The steamship was under constant watch; and when anyone took a boat or dog-sleigh from village to village, peasants were under orders to report this to the police.6 It was over six hundred miles from Monastyrskoe to Yeniseisk and 170 miles from Yeniseisk to Krasnoyarsk. The chances of getting unnoticed all the way upriver to Krasnoyarsk were small. As a place of detention, Monastyrskoe was almost as effective as Devil’s Island or Alcatraz.7 Stalin and his fellow prisoners had plenty of time to ponder this on the journey along the Trans-Siberian Railway until they reached Krasnoyarsk.

  From there they travelled downriver by steamship. Stalin had been preceded to Monastyrskoe by Yakov Sverdlov, fellow member of the Russian Bureau of the Central Committee and an acquaintance from an earlier period of exile. Both were assigned by administrative order to villages around Monastyrskoe: Stalin went to Kostino, Sverdlov to Selivanikha.8 Kostino was ten miles and Selivanikha three miles from Monastyrskoe.

  A large colony of revolutionaries lived in the neighbouring villages. Most had recently arrived. Until the 1905 Revolution the Ministry of Internal Affairs had sent such convicts to Tobolsk, Narym or Yakutia. Such places had proved easy to flee from. Ill-paid policemen and impoverish
ed peasants were seldom difficult to suborn with a small bribe. Turukhansk District had been used fitfully in the 1890s — the future Menshevik leader Yuli Martov had served his sentence there. By the time Stalin arrived, the revolutionary colony had grown. Resident exiles belonged mainly to those parties regarded as the greatest threat to political and civil order; these included not only Bolsheviks and Mensheviks but also Anarchists and Socialist-Revolutionaries. Monastyrskoe was consequently a hive of ideological variety. Dispute usually took place without undue polemics. Exiles had made up their mind about party allegiance. Each party maintained shared books and facilities among its members. Messages from Russia were passed on; pleas were made on behalf of individuals who were in poor health or who ran out of money. The revolutionaries kept intellectually alert in anticipation of eventual return to political work upon release.

  Although the conditions of detention were bad under the Romanovs, they were nowhere near as oppressive as Stalin made out in the 1930s. The revolutionaries could keep up their spirits through social gatherings. Someone even composed a ‘Turukhansk March’. Its words were more stirring than poetic and the refrain went as follows:9

  Boldly, brothers, boldly

  Let’s meet the evil storm

  With our laughter

  And a song that’s brave!

  The ‘evil storm’ referred less to the local weather than to the oppressive tsarist regime. Every exiled militant, while yearning to leave Siberia and overthrow the Romanovs, easily found rooms to rent. Each had a stipend of fifteen rubles a month. This was enough to cover rent, which cost about two rubles, and basic food requirements.10 But game was plentiful and the revolutionaries bought the equipment to fish and trap. They could also work for local peasants.11 Many exiles had family members in Russia who sent money; others — one of whom was Stalin — relied predominantly on being subsidised by their party. Turukhansk did not have the harshest penal regime, but it was not an easy one either.

  Central Committee member Sverdlov welcomed Stalin. They knew and disliked each other from their shared exile in Narym District in 1912. Stalin was as self-absorbed as before and shut himself away from everyone. He ignored the custom of giving a detailed report on general politics and the prospects of revolution on the basis of recent direct experience in Russia. The other exiled Bolsheviks were deprived of up-to-date information which only he could supply.

  Within months of Stalin’s arrival, both Stalin and Sverdlov were ordered further north. The new governor of Yenisei Province in mid-March 1914 transferred his two Bolsheviks to a still more distant place. He had been alerted to their plans to escape.12 Stalin had tried to allay suspicion by writing to Malinovski on 10 April 1914:13

  Apparently someone or other is spreading the rumour that I won’t stay in exile till the end of my sentence. Rubbish! I inform you and swear like a dog that I’ll remain in exile till the end of the sentence (till 1917). Sometimes I’ve thought of leaving but now I’ve rejected the idea, rejected it definitively. There are many reasons and, if you like, I’ll write about them in detail some time.

  In the same letter he offered to supply articles to Pravda on ‘The Foundations of Marxism’ and ‘The Organisational Side of the National Question’.14 But the Okhrana was not fooled. Lenin wanted Stalin and Sverdlov to be helped to leave Siberia, and quantities of money had been arriving for them at Monastyrskoe from party comrades in Russia.15

  Stalin and Sverdlov would have been better served if the Central Committee had sent money not directly to them but to intermediaries. In any case the Central Committee was penetrated by spies. Okhrana agent Malinovski, with whom Stalin corresponded, told the Department of Police in St Petersburg in November 1913 about the intention to organise an escape. Stalin and Sverdlov were important detainees. By administrative order they were to be moved to the bleak hamlet of Kureika.16 There they would be the sole convicts and most of the residents would be Ostyaks.

  Both were depressed. Whatever chance they had of making it up-river to Krasnoyarsk would all but disappear in Kureika. Sverdlov had particular cause to feel downcast as he explained in a letter to his sister Sarra:17

  Joseph Dzhughashvili and I are being transferred a hundred kilometres to the north, eighty kilometres within the Arctic Circle. There will be only the two of us at the spot, and we’ll have two guards. They have reinforced the surveillance and cut us off from the post. The post comes once a month with a courier who is often late. In practice there are no more than eight or nine deliveries a year.

  Their geographical knowledge was faulty. There were two places called Kureika north of Monastyrskoe. The one which Sverdlov had in mind was by the river of the same name far beyond the Arctic Circle. The governor had specified another Kureika, which stood on the western bank of the River Yenisei just below the line. Even so, it was seventy-five miles downriver from Monastyrskoe, and that was quite far enough to lower their spirits.18

  Although the location was not as bad as they had feared, it was quite bad enough. Stalin made his own contribution to the unpleasantness. In Monastyrskoe he had taken possession of books bequeathed to resident Bolsheviks by fellow exile Innokenti Dubrovinski. When Stalin moved on to Kureika, he simply took the books off with him. Another Bolshevik, Filip Zakharov, went out to remonstrate with him and was treated ‘more or less as a tsarist general would receive a rank-and-file soldier who had dared to appear before him with a demand’.19

  Stalin and Sverdlov disliked the noisiness of the Kureika family they lodged with. They had no kerosene and had to use candles if they wanted to read during the long winter.20 But the worst thing was the relationship between them. Sverdlov wrote:21 ‘One thing is that I don’t have a room to myself. There are two of us. I’ve got the Georgian Dzhughashvili with me, an old acquaintance whom I met in a previous exile. He’s a fine fellow but too big an individualist in daily life.’ ‘Individualist’ was a damning word among Marxists, who required the subordination of personal inclinations to collective needs. Driven to distraction, Sverdlov decided to move house; he wrote to a friend in May 1914:22

  I have a comrade with me. But we know each other only too well. What is more, and this is the saddest thing, a person is stripped bare in front of you in conditions of exile and imprisonment and becomes exposed in every little detail. Worst of all, he is visible solely from the viewpoint of ‘the details of daily life’. There’s no room for the large features of character to reveal themselves. Now I live in a separate apartment from the com[rade], and we rarely see each other.

  Sverdlov got himself transferred back to Selivanikha at the end of September on grounds of ill health.23

  Stalin meanwhile got on with life in his own egocentric fashion. He had always had an eye for adolescent girls but when he moved in as a lodger with the Pereprygin family, he behaved quite scandalously by seducing the fourteen-year-old daughter. Not only that: he made her pregnant. Even in that lightly administered area it was impossible to keep things quiet. The police became involved. Stalin was interviewed, and had to agree in due course to marry the unfortunate girl. This saved him from prosecution in the courts.24 He subsequently abrogated the accord. For Stalin, the relationship was no more than a way of relieving the sexual frustrations of exile. He lived like a feudal knight among the impoverished Pereprygin family and took what he fancied whenever he liked. He acted as if he had rights without obligations. He had contempt for all human conduct but his own.

  His political activity was weakened by the fact that his postal contact with the world outside Kureika was intermittent.25 This was intensely irritating because war had broken out in Europe. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria by a Serbian nationalist in July 1914 had provoked a general diplomatic crisis. The Austrian government had delivered a humiliating ultimatum to Serbia. Russia, which had stepped back from the brink in previous emergencies in the Balkans, decided to take the Serbian side. Austria’s expansion into the region was to be resisted at last. The complication was that Germany had op
ted to stand by Austria in the event of a Balkan crisis. The Russian Imperial Army mobilised and Nicholas II refused to stand it down when the Germans delivered an ultimatum to St Petersburg. Russian forces poured through East Prussia towards Berlin. Austria occupied Serbia. France and the United Kingdom honoured their treaty obligations and declared war on Russia’s side against Germany and Austria–Hungary. The German Imperial Army defended itself in the east and, violating the neutrality of Belgium, thrust across into northern France. Without anyone having intended it, a European war had broken out.

  This was happening while Stalin and his fellow exiles could have no part in the campaign waged by Lenin and his supporters against Russian participation in the war against the Central Powers. Indeed Lenin from the safety of Switzerland urged all Marxists to work for the defeat of Nicholas II’s forces. Strikes were organised in factories, especially in the capital (which was renamed Petrograd because St Petersburg was thought to sound too Germanic). Bolsheviks sent antiwar propaganda to Russian POWs in German and Austrian camps. The leading Bolshevik writers debated the political and economic motivations of the belligerents in the Petrograd press. The Okhrana was active in retaliation, and the local Bolshevik groups were repeatedly broken up; and although Lenin was indefatigable, he lost many supporters to demoralisation as well as to the prison system.