Whatever his motivation, Stalin joined a Marxist group at the seminary when he was sixteen, but he soon broke off to form a rival group of his own: apparently, the beginning of his desire for political leadership. There was only a single copy of Marx’s Das Kapital in Tiflis, but members of Stalin’s group went to the library and took notes from it. Soon, Stalin was caught at the seminary with unauthorized reading material in his possession and sentenced to spend hours in the hole.7
There were many revolutionary movements in Russia’s history during this period. But in 1898, the empire was convulsed when the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party was formed, based on Marxist teachings. Like Christ, the party had been born in a stable, in Minsk, with Lenin presiding. But for these atheists, it was the party that would be their messiah: all powerful, giver of all things to all people, and the source of all goodness and righteousness in the world.
Still at the seminary but now twenty years old, Stalin had become a member of another Marxist circle in Georgia called Group Three. After reading an article by Lenin he declared that “I must meet him at all costs.” He would not meet his hero for another eight years. But a few months after encountering his writing, in May 1899, Stalin was expelled from the Tiflis Orthodox Theological Seminary. He was on his own.8
Shortly thereafter, Stalin obtained a position at the Tiflis Meteorological Observatory, where he recorded weather data. He spent his spare time running an underground printing press for the Social-Democratic Workers’ Party, organizing strikes and demonstrations by local factory workers. Following a wave of these strikes the government authorities began a serious crackdown, arresting many of the revolutionaries. At this point, Stalin quit the Meteorological Observatory and went “underground,” becoming a full-fledged Socialist revolutionary.
Stalin’s style of revolution was far more violent than that of many of his contemporaries, and not only because of his inclination to provide strikers with clubs and brickbats. His notion of Socialism ran to acts of violence against his fellow revolutionaries as well, in an effort to consolidate control of the local party for himself. In so doing, he employed the methods with which he was culturally familiar. The German historian Jörg Baberowski explains it this way: “Stalin and his comrades-in-arms brought into the party both at the center and edges of the empire the culture of violence of the Caucasian periphery, the blood feud and archaic conceptions of honor.”9
By now, Stalin had become a fanatic of the Socialist creed. He declared that Marxism was not just “some theory of socialism,” but instead that “the revolutionary proletariat alone is destined by History to liberate mankind and bring the world happiness.” He added, however, that this would not happen before “many storms, many torrents of blood. Blood, death, and conflict were essential,” during “the struggle to end oppression.”10 For him, it seemed, the path was clear. And he was more than right about the results being bloody and decisive.
In 1902 Stalin either was forced out of Tiflis after many party squabbles or left under his own steam. Whichever the case, he landed in Batumi, an important oil industry city on the Black Sea, using the alias Comrade Soso. In due time, Socialist worker strikes and demonstrations began to break out in Batumi. The Rothschilds’ oil refinery was set afire, employers were shot dead, and the city became awash with Marxist propaganda, from slogans painted on walls and fences to pamphlets and even newspapers.
At one point Stalin had an affair, his first recorded, with the married landlady of one of the many apartments he stayed in during this time. She later spoke of his “tender attention and thoughtfulness.”
A major incident occurred in March of that year, when workers led by Stalin stormed a prison containing many of their comrades who had been arrested during the demonstrations. Russian soldiers opened fire, killing thirteen workers and injuring many more. Stalin was at last arrested, dressed this time in the burka and veil of a Muslim woman.
In jail awaiting trial, he pleaded with his mother and others to swear that he was in Gori during this period and had had nothing to do with the disorders in Batumi. Keke duly produced a petition—obviously written by someone else—asserting that her son was “the breadwinner for himself and his mother, and had neither the time nor the occasion to participate in conspiracies or disturbances.” This did not impress the authorities, and a year after he was arrested Stalin was sentenced to exile in Siberia.
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THE TRIP FROM BATUMI TO SIBERIA took four months. Stalin and the other prisoners were placed in leg shackles and taken via steamship up the Black Sea and the Don River to Rostov-on-Don. Next, they boarded boxcars on the Trans-Siberian Railway for the three-thousand-mile trek across the Urals to Irkutsk in Siberia. From there it was fifty miles farther north by oxcart to the remote and forbidding Novaya Uda, a collection of ramshackle houses, stores, taverns, a church, and a wooden fort for protection against Mongol tribes. It was bitterly cold in November—but still, this was only southwestern Siberia, near Lake Baikal on the border with Mongol China, and nothing like the terrible Siberian gulags a thousand miles to the north, where Stalin later sent his exiles to toil and die in the salt and gold mines at the Arctic Circle.
In the czar’s Siberia, exiles were not required to work. In fact, the government gave them a monthly allowance for clothes, food, and rent for a room in one of the peasant hovels. As Stalin’s biographer Simon Sebag Montefiore puts it, there was “little to do in Novaya Uda except read, argue, drink, fornicate, and drink more—these were pastimes for locals and exiles alike.”
Stalin read when and what he could. Whenever he could scrape up the money, he caroused in the filthy taverns with exiled criminals, who were a class apart from the political exiles—or so many Socialists believed. Stalin preferred the criminals, because they were easier to get along with and also because they were, well, criminals. According to Montefiore, his behavior was among the worst of any of the political exiles. Immediately upon arrival, he began breaking rules and became, in turn, “a reckless seducer, procreator of illegitimate children, serial feuder, and compulsive troublemaker.”11 He wasn’t there long before he decided to escape, but he tried and failed three times in 1904 for want of proper clothes and poor planning.
Later on in Communist Russia, much was made of Stalin’s fabled escapes, during which he was said to have fallen into icy rivers, nearly perished in blizzards, been hunted down by the czar’s secret police, and set upon by wolves and bears. In truth, he got to the rail depot in Irkutsk by hopping a ride on a local peasant’s horse-drawn sled. Using a fake ID and money provided by his mother, he bought a ticket on the Trans-Siberian and found himself back in Tiflis within two weeks, having read a Russian translation of Carlyle’s history of the French Revolution in his spare time on the train.
Stalin’s timing could not have been better. Czar Nicholas II gave revolutionaries across Russia an opening when he foolishly picked an argument with the Japanese in order to expand his Eastern empire. The Japanese turned it into a fight by executing a sneak attack against the Russian Far East Fleet at Port Arthur in Manchuria before war was formally declared (eerily presaging their unannounced Pearl Harbor attack thirty-eight years later). The infuriated czar ordered his grand Baltic Fleet to sail halfway around the world to avenge the outrage, only to have it soundly defeated by superior Japanese naval tactics and gunnery. Moreover, in Manchuria the Japanese inflicted a series of humiliating defeats on the Russian army and were near to winning the war when U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt intervened to broker a settlement. The consequent Treaty of Portsmouth ended the war in 1905 but resulted in serious repercussions on the czar’s domestic front. Eighty thousand Russians were dead, much of the home fleet was at the bottom of the Sea of Japan, nothing had been gained, and Russian international prestige was at an all-time low. Even the czar’s royal friends and those in his peerage were turning against him.
But czars being czars, Nicholas II could not simply wai
t for some “next election” to exit the national stage, and his children weren’t old enough to succeed him should he abdicate. It was at just this moment that the Russian people, including the Social-Democratic Workers’ Party, chose to rise up and claim what they said was theirs.
It might have been a propitious moment but it wasn’t. Disunited, the fractious revolutionaries were at the height of their squabbles about ideology. A great march was held on a Sunday to the czar’s palace at St. Petersburg to protest all manner of inequities, including low wages, high taxes, national and religious persecution, land reform, fishing rights, and political repression everywhere. The marchers got too close to the palace, however, and the czar’s troops opened fire. Several hundred protesters were killed, touching off a widespread “revolution” that ultimately went nowhere (at least at that time) though it shook the regime to its core. “Bloody Sunday” set off a chain of strikes and stoppages through the country, prompting the historian Stephen F. Jones to quip, “Everyone from palm readers to prostitutes went on strike.” Socialist councils, or “soviets,” arose in nearly every city of the realm. Their committees were run by an equal number of “workers” and “intellectuals,” or educated Socialists. Within a few months, nearly a hundred and fifty political assassinations were committed in Georgia alone. Nationwide, the number exceeded three thousand.
In retaliation the czar’s Cossacks in Tiflis raided a student meeting, killing sixty children but no revolutionaries. No bank was safe, and bombers and arsonists plied their violent trade. In desperation, the czar promised the people a Duma, or Congress, as well as a constitution and rudimentary bill of rights. This seemed to satisfy most of the people, and the largest strikes and protests drifted to a close.
However, the Bolshevik branch of Socialists under Lenin not only continued their violence, they stepped it up, assassinating government officials and factory managers on an unprecedented scale and fomenting strikes and demonstrations throughout the country. Like all revolutionaries, the Bolsheviks were conspiratorial and secretive. They had to be: their party was banned, and if the local police or the Okhrana—the czar’s secret police—discovered them they would be arrested and exiled to Siberia (or worse). So they existed in shadow communes, preaching the mighty shibboleths of socialism, atheism, and free love. There were of course women involved; Stalin in fact had a gang of armed girl students under his control, as well as the band of Faginesque street urchins who acted as spies and informants. With all the unrest and the terrible humiliation of the war with Japan still cloaking the land, Russia seethed.
Because of his previous arrest, Stalin was well known to the Okhrana, which was actively looking for him. He managed to elude capture by moving from apartment to apartment, usually occupied by women he knew; tips from fellow party members kept him posted and on the run. But now Stalin decided he was too hot a property in Tiflis, and it was time to move on. In 1906 he went to Baku, the violent, booming oil city on the Caspian Sea, to find out what kind of trouble he could stir up there.
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AS IT WAS, THERE WAS PLENTY OF TROUBLE, as Stalin soon found out; Baku was in the midst of a murderous religious and sectional convulsion that left the streets reeking with thousands of corpses. Armenians killed the Muslim Turks, and vice versa. Caucasian Socialists (Stalin included) killed extortion victims who wouldn’t pay up, loyalists of the czar, traitors, and whoever else threatened them. And as usual it was everybody against the Jews. Even the mostly Jewish Mensheviks, who eschewed violence, began arming themselves. Stalin wound up for the first time presiding over a heavily armed gang of mostly Muslim thugs who engaged in robberies, extortion, and protection rackets to raise money for the party. By his side as the gang’s number one hit man was Stalin’s faithful friend Kamo, the erstwhile “Cossack captain” of the Tiflis bank robbery. They assassinated people when they deemed it necessary and were accomplished arsonists. These outfits were called battle squads, but they operated more or less as armed terrorist organizations—even though terrorism was forbidden by the party. There was no social morality to contend with here, only the expediency of laying groundwork for the revolution. Murdering rich people or government officials was a way of destabilizing the regime and was considered, basically, all in a day’s work.12
Stalin located a printing press and began distributing Socialist propaganda. He organized study sessions for the semiliterate workers to absorb the tenets of Socialism and, should they prove able and trustworthy, shape them into secret cells numbering three or five for further exploitation for the cause.
Strangely, contributions to the party came in from beyond the proceeds of extortion and robbery. Upper-class citizens (Marx’s “bourgeoisie”) often opened their wallets to the revolutionaries: doctors, lawyers, merchants, and factory owners who secretly hated the czar, as well as less well-off sympathizers including shopkeepers, academics, students, and the clergy. Lenin characterized these people as “useful idiots”; come the revolution, most of them would be killed or exiled to the slave mines of Siberia.
It was at around this time, in early 1905, that Stalin started a feud with the Mensheviks, whom he reviled. The Bolsheviks and Mensheviks now openly vied for power in the factories and the mines. Debates between the two factions were held before the wretched workers. After one of these Stalin declared, “Lenin’s outraged that God sent him such comrades as the Mensheviks! Who are these people anyway? Martov, Dan, Axelrod are circumcised Yids. You can’t go into a fight with them and you can’t have a feast with them.”13 It has come to light that Lenin’s grandfather was a Jew—but he himself professed to be an atheist.
In April of the same year, Stalin challenged a Menshevik leader, a man named Isidore Ramishvili, to a debate at the manganese ore mining town of Chiatura before a gathering of several thousand miners. He won the debate handily by letting the Menshevik speak first; the man droned on in a lengthy oratory. Then Stalin took the stage, employing a folksy style like the American firebrand Huey Long. He spoke in this populist tone for no more than fifteen minutes. Observers said it was a magnetic, stirring speech that had the miners on their feet in cheers.
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IN THE SUMMER OF 1906 Stalin got married. His new wife, the former Kato Svanidze, was a dressmaker in a Tiflis clothing salon; he had known her as a fellow traveler of the revolutionary set. Despite his seemingly endless string of girlfriends and mistresses, Stalin seemed genuinely taken with the beautiful Kato, and by all accounts he was gentle and kind to her. For her part, she was aware that his first allegiance was to the party, and that he was a notorious womanizer and gangster who specialized in bank robbery and extortion. But his ideas and style fascinated her. She was, of course, Orthodox, and Stalin had become an atheist per revolutionary dictum, so difficulties arose in finding a priest to marry them. At length, one was procured who agreed to perform the ceremony, but only at two o’clock in the morning. The reception and honeymoon were held in the bride’s apartment.
Eight months later, in March 1907, Stalin’s first child was born: a son named Yakov. Stalin, at that time disguising himself as a Turk by wearing a fez on his head, continued his subversive activities in Baku while Kato tried to make do at home: a rented room in a “squat adobe cottage on an oil field.” The robberies continued—banks, trains, stagecoaches—and enormous sums of rubles were taken in. But Stalin, if nothing else, was a conscientious thief; not one penny went to himself or his wife for luxuries, or even essentials. He began to style him self sanctimoniously as a sort of Russian Robin Hood, who stole from the rich to give to the poor, in this case, to Lenin, who was far from poor but who professed to stand for the masses who were in fact poor.14
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IN THE SAME SPRING that his son was born, Stalin at last fulfilled his wish to meet Lenin, whom he so adamantly admired. The noble-born estate holder and so-called Father of Communism had convened a Bolshevik conference in St. Petersburg, and Stalin was selected as a represent
ative from the Caucasus. On reaching the city, however, Stalin and other comrades from the far-flung reaches of the empire were startled to hear that the czar’s agents had gotten word of the meeting and arrested most of the important members of the soviet, including Leon Trotsky (formerly Lev Bronstein), the Jewish intellectual who had become one of the most prominent supporters of supposedly moderate socialism and had split from Lenin while writing for the newspaper Iskra.
Eventually, Stalin’s group was given money for a train ride to a village in the mountains of Finland where, disguised as teachers, they would see the great man preside over the conference. “Imagine my disappointment,” said Stalin afterward, “when I saw the most ordinary man, below average height, in no way different from ordinary mortals.”15
He remained in awe of Lenin, however, as he heard him speak. At one point Lenin invited him to give his opinion of how Socialist organization was going in the Caucasus. Later, the two clashed over whether the Bolsheviks should participate in the coming elections to the czar’s Duma, which had been formed to redress the people’s grievances. Lenin was for it but Stalin arose to disagree. In the end Lenin told him to draw up a resolution stating his position.
The conference was in its second day when a series of riots, uprisings, and other revolutionary acts spread from Moscow to other cities, including Tiflis and Baku. The workers in the cities and the peasant farmers in the countryside were in open revolt, an ongoing aftershock of the Bloody Sunday massacre two years prior.
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