Stalin, Volume 1

by Stephen Kotkin

  The nominal charge was that his father, Beso, owed back taxes in Didi Lilo, the village Beso had left more than three decades earlier without, however, formally exiting the village rolls. Jughashvili was incarcerated in the Metekhi Prison fortress—the one on the cliff that he had walked past at age eleven on his way to work with his father at the Adelkhanov Tannery. Mikho Davitashvili and other friends seem to have assembled the money and paid off Beso’s outstanding village debt, so Jughashvili was released. Keke arrived from Gori and, for a time, insisted on staying with him in his room at the observatory—this had to be embarrassing. She “lived in permanent anxiety over her son,” recalled a neighbor and distant relative (Maria Kitiashvili). “I remember well how she would come over to our place and cry about her dear Soso—Where is he now, did the gendarmes arrest him?”88 Soon, Keke herself would be monitored by the police and occasionally summoned for questioning. It remains unclear why the gendarmes did not arrest Beso, who was living in Tiflis (Iosif received handmade boots from his father on occasion).89 Nor is it clear why Jughashvili was not arrested for his own debt to the state from the seminary scholarship. Police incompetence cannot be ruled out. But the arrest for Beso’s debt does seem like a pretext, a warning to a young radical or perhaps a maneuver to mark him: Jughashvili was photographed for the police archive. He returned to his job at the observatory, but also continued his illegal political lectures and remained under surveillance. “According to agent information, Jughashvili is a Social Democrat and conducts meetings with workers,” the police noted. “Surveillance has established that he behaves in a highly cautious manner, always looking back while walking.”90

  UNDERGROUND

  Amid the cock fighting, banditry, and prostitution (political and sexual) in the Caucasus, illegal socialist agitation hardly stood out, at least initially. As late as 1900, the overwhelming preponderance of Tiflis inhabitants under police surveillance were Armenians, who were watched for fear they maintained links to their coethnics across the border in the Ottoman empire. But just a few years later, most of the police dossiers on “political” suspects were of Georgians and Social Democrats—238 of them, including Jughashvili’s.91 On March 21, 1901, the police raided the Tiflis Observatory premises. Although Jughashvili was absent when the search of his and other employees’ possessions took place, he may have been observing from not far away, been spotted and had his person searched, too.92 If so, the police did not arrest him, perhaps because they wanted to keep him under further surveillance, to uncover others. Be that as it may, the future Stalin’s meteorological career was over. He went underground, permanently.

  Jughashvili now had no means of support, other than being paid for some private tutoring and sponging off colleagues, girlfriends, and the proletarians he sought to lead. He threw himself into conspiratorial activities, like establishing safe houses and opening illegal presses to help strikes and May Day marches. May Day had been established as a holiday by socialists around the world in order to commemorate the Haymarket riots in Chicago in 1886, when police had fired on strikers who sought an eight-hour workday. In Tiflis, May Day marches with red flags had been initiated in 1898 by railway workers. Held outside the city proper, the first three marches drew 25 people (1898), 75 (1899), then 400 (1900). For May Day 1901, Jughashvili was involved in plans for a bold, risky march right down Golovin Prospect, in the heart of Tiflis. He agitated among the city’s largest concentration of workers, the Tiflis Main Railway Shops. The tsarist police made preemptive arrests and arrayed mounted Cossacks with sabers and long whips, but at least 2,000 workers and onlookers defied them, chanting “Down with autocracy!” After a forty-five-minute melee involving hand-to-hand combat, the streets of the Caucasus capital were soaked with blood.93

  Russian Social Democrats were exiled for revolutionary activity by the tsarist police to the Caucasus—where, of course, they helped foment revolutionary activity—and Jughashvili met Mikhail Kalinin, among others.94 But the twenty-six-year-old militant Ketskhoveli remained a key link to the imperial Russian Social Democrats and a role model for Jughashvili. Underground in Baku, Lado did start up a Georgian-language competitor to Kvali, christened Brdzola (the Struggle), a rowdy broadsheet that began appearing in September 1901. Referring to the bloody 1901 May Day clash in Tiflis, an (unsigned) essay in Brdzola (November-December 1901) defiantly rationalized that “the sacrifices we make today in street demonstration will be compensated a hundredfold,” adding that “every militant who falls in the struggle or is torn from our ranks [by arrest] rouses hundreds of new fighters.”95 The illegal printing press, which Ketskhoveli established along with Avel Yenukidze, Leonid Krasin, and other Social Democrats in Baku, was hidden in the city’s Muslim quarter and code-named “Nina”—Russian for Nino (the female patron saint of Georgia). It also published reprints of the recently founded Russian-language Marxist emigre newspaper Iskra, original copies of which were smuggled from Central Europe to Baku via Tabriz (Iran) on horseback.96 Nina very soon became the largest underground Social Democrat printing press in the entire Russian empire, and would confound the tsarist police (from 1901 to 1907).97 It was through the Nina printing press, as well as Lado’s Brdzola, that the young Jughashvili became acquainted with the ideas of Lenin, who wrote many of the blistering (unsigned) editorials in the thirteen issues of Iskra that had appeared by the end of 1901.98

  Ketskhoveli, obviating Jordania, afforded Jughashvili direct access to the pulse of Russian Social Democracy, helping him become an informed Marxist and militant street agitator. The latter persona was grafted onto Jughashvili’s already deep-set autodidact disposition and his heartfelt vocation to enlighten the masses. From personal experience, however, Jughashvili would lament that workers often did not appreciate the importance of studying and self-improvement. During a meeting on November 11, 1901, of the newly formed Tiflis Committee of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party, he championed not the worker members but the demi-intelligentsia members—that is, types like himself and Lado. He argued that inviting workers to join the party was incompatible with “conspiracy” and would expose members to arrest. Lenin had propagated this vision in the pages of Iskra. He also wrote a wide-ranging pamphlet What Is to Be Done? (March 1902), a self-defense against a slashing attack (in September 1901) by other Marxists in the Iskra group. Lenin’s advocacy for an intelligentsia-centric party would soon come to divide the Iskra group.99 At the November 1901 Tiflis Committee meeting, meanwhile, a majority of Caucasus Social Democrats voted to admit workers to the party, against Jughashvili’s Lenin-like urgings.100 At the same time, the Tiflis Committee decided to send Jughashvili to agitate among workers in the Black Sea port of Batum.101

  Batum was a high-profile assignment. Just twelve miles from the Ottoman border, the port had been seized from the Ottomans with the rest of Islamic Adjara (Ajaria) in the 1877–78 war and, after being joined to Russia’s Transcaucasus Railway, became the terminal for exporting Russia’s Caspian Sea oil. The world’s longest pipeline from Baku to Batum was under construction (it would open in 1907) and its sponsors—the Swedish Nobel brothers of dynamite fame, the French Rothschild brothers of banking fame, and the Armenian magnate Alexander Mantashyan (b. 1842), known in Russified form as Mantashov—endeavored to break U.S. Standard Oil’s near-monopoly in supplying kerosene to Europe.102 Jughashvili, too, sought to ride the oil boom, for leftist purposes. (Soon Iskra, along with other Russian Marxist literature, began arriving there by boat from Marseilles.) The port city already had “Sunday Schools” for workers, established by Nikoloz “Karlo” Chkheidze (b. 1864), one of the founders of the Third Group, and Isidor Ramishvili (b. 1859), both close comrades of Noe Jordania.

  The younger Jughashvili immersed himself in the workers’ milieu, where he “spoke without an orator’s refinement,” a hostile fellow Georgian later recalled. “His words were imbued with power, determination. He spoke with sarcasm, irony, hammering away with crude severities,” but then “apologize
d, explaining that he was speaking the language of the proletariat who were not taught subtle manners or aristocratic eloquence.”103 Jughashvili’s worker pose became real when an acquaintance got him hired at the Rothschild oil company. There, on February 25, 1902, amid slackening customer demand, 389 workers (of around 900) were let go with just two weeks’ notice, provoking a total walkout two days later.104 Mass arrests ensued. Secretly, the Caucasus military chief confided to the local governors that Social Democrat “propaganda” was finding “receptive soil” because of the workers’ dreadful living and laboring conditions.105 Moreover, the policy of deporting protesting workers to their native villages was only magnifying the rebellious waves in the Georgian countryside.106 On March 9, a crowd carrying cobblestones sought to free comrades at the transit prison awaiting deportation. “Brothers, don’t be afraid,” one imprisoned worker shouted, “they can’t shoot, for God’s sake free us.” The police opened fire, killing at least fourteen.107

  The “Batum massacre” reverberated around the Russian empire, but for Jughashvili—who had distributed incendiary leaflets—it brought arrest on April 5, 1901. A police report characterized him as “of no specific occupation and unknown residence,” but “a teacher of the workers.”108 Whether Jughashvili had any influence on worker militancy is unclear. But he was charged with “incitement to disorder and insubordination against higher authority.”109 Batum also set in motion the profound bad blood that would haunt Jughashvili in Caucasus Social Democrat circles. To replace him there, the Tiflis Committee sent David “Mokheve” Khartishvili. Back in Tiflis, Mokheve had argued that only workers ought to be full members of the Tiflis Committee, denying such status to intelligentsia (like Jughashvili). Once in Batum, Mokheve accused the imprisoned Jughashvili of having deliberately provoked the police massacre.110 While Jughashvili was in prison, however, his Batum loyalists resisted Mokheve’s authority. A police report—drawn from informants—observed that “Jughashvili’s despotism has enraged many people and the organization has split.”111 It was during this imprisonment that Jughashvili began regularly using the pseudonym Koba, “avenger of injustice.”112 Members of the Tiflis Committee got angry at him. They would likely have been even angrier had they known that while wallowing for a year in the Batum remand prison in 1902–3, the future Stalin twice begged the Caucasus governor-general for release, citing “a worsening, choking cough and the helpless position of my elderly mother, abandoned by her husband twelve years ago and seeing me as her sole support in life.”113 (Keke also petitioned the governor-general for her son in January 1903.) Such groveling, if it were to become known, could have tainted a revolutionary’s reputation. A prison doctor examined Jughashvili, but the gendarmerie opposed clemency.114 Fifteen months after his arrest, in July 1903, Koba Jughashvili was sentenced by administrative fiat to three years’ exile in the Mongol-speaking Buryat lands of Eastern Siberia.

  Outside the bars of his cattle car, in November 1903, the future Stalin likely saw real winter for the first time—snow-blanketed earth, completely iced rivers. As a Georgian in Siberia, Koba the avenger nearly froze to death on his first escape attempt. But already by January 1904 he had managed to elude the village police chief, make it forty miles to the railhead, and arrive illegally all the way back in Tiflis.115 He would tell three different stories about his escape, including one about hitching a ride with a deliveryman whom he plied with vodka. In fact, the future Stalin appears to have used a real or forged gendarmerie identity card—a trick that compounded the suspicions about his quick escape. (Was he a police collaborator?)116 During his absence from Tiflis, there had been a congress to unify the South Caucasus Social Democrats and create a “union committee” of nine members; Jughashvili would be added to it.117 Even so, his former Batum committee shunned him. He was associated with the police bloodbath and political split there, and after his quick return, he was distrusted as a possible agent provocateur.118 Wanted by the police, he roamed: back to Gori (where he got new false papers), then Batum and Tiflis. His sometime landlady and mistress in the Batum underground, Natasha Kirtava-Sikharulidze, then twenty-two, had refused to accompany him to Tiflis; he cursed her.119 Police surveillance in the Caucasus capital was intense and Jughashvili changed residences at least eight times in a month. He met up again with Lev Rozenfeld, better known as Kamenev, who helped him find a hideaway. One safe-house apartment belonged to Sergei Alliluyev, a skilled machinist who had been sent to Tiflis, hired on at the railway workshops, and married. The family home of the Alliluyevs (Stalin’s future second father-in-law) in the Tiflis outskirts became a Social Democrat meeting center, providing refuge for agitators who, for a time, escaped arrest and deportation.120

  Kamenev would also give Jughashvili a copy of the Russian translation of Machiavelli’s The Prince (1869), although Russia’s revolutionaries hardly needed the Italian political theorist.121 Sergei Nechayev (1847–82), the son of a serf and the founder of the secret society the People’s Retaliation, had observed in 1871, “Everything that allows the triumph of the revolution is moral, and everything that stands in its way is immoral.”122

  • • •

  SUCH WERE THE LADO-INSPIRED early revolutionary years (1898–1903) in the life of the future dictator—a vocation as an agitator and teacher of the workers; a bloody confrontational May Day strategy in Tiflis; an illegal Marxist press as a rival to a legal one; accusations of provoking a police massacre and splitting the party in Batum; a long, rough prison stint in western Georgia; privately groveling before the Caucasus governor-general; a brief, freezing Siberian exile; suspicions of police collaboration; a life on the run. Almost in the blink of an eye, a pious boy from Gori, Jughashvili had gone from smuggling Victor Hugo into the Tiflis seminary to becoming a participant—albeit a completely obscure one—in a global socialist movement. That was largely thanks not to some Caucasus outlaw culture, but to tsarist Russia’s profound injustices and repression. Open confrontation with the regime had been willfully pursued by young hotheads who imagined they were plumbing the depths of the autocracy’s intransigence. Soon, however, this combative, risky approach would be adopted even by those Marxist socialists who had long resisted it, men such as Jordania and Jibladze of Kvali. The tsarist political system and conditions in the empire promoted militancy. In the Caucasus, as in the empire as a whole, leftists essentially leaped the stage of agitating for trade unionism—which remained illegal in Russia far later than in Western Europe—and went straight to violent overthrow of the abusive order.123

  Even officialdom showed awareness (in internal correspondence) of the strong impetus to revolt: the factory regime was beyond brutal; landowners and their enforcers treated postemancipation peasants as chattel; any attempt to alleviate such conditions was treated as treason.124 “First one becomes convinced that existing conditions are wrong and unjust,” Stalin would later explain, persuasively. “Then one resolves to do the best one can to remedy them. Under the tsar’s regime, any attempt genuinely to help the people put one outside the pale of the law; one found oneself hunted and hounded as a revolutionist.”125 If living under tsarism made him, like many other young people, a street-fighting revolutionary, Jughashvili also styled himself an enlightener—so far, almost exclusively in oral form—as well as an outsider and an underdog, an up-and-comer who bucked not only the tsarist police but also the uncomprehending revolutionary establishment under Jordania.126 In seeking to lead protesting workers, Jughashvili had mixed success. Still, he did prove adept at cultivating a tight-knit group of young men like himself. “Koba distinguished himself from all other Bolsheviks,” one hostile Georgian emigre recalled, “by his unquestionably greater energy, indefatigable capacity for hard work, unconquerable lust for power, and above all his enormous, particularistic organizational talent” aimed at forging “disciples through whom he could . . . hold the whole organization in his grasp.”127

  Before Jughashvili was launched on his own, however, Lado Ketskhoveli exemplified f
or him the daring professional revolutionary—battling injustice, living underground off his wits, defying tsarist police.128 Leonid Krasin judged Lado an organizational genius. Sergei Alliluyev would deem Lado the most magnetic personality of the Caucasus socialist movement. But in spring 1902, Brdzola had ceased publication after just four issues, following extensive arrests of the Baku Social Democrats. (Its rival Kvali would soon be shuttered as well.) In September 1902, Ketskhoveli himself had been arrested and incarcerated in Tiflis’ Metekhi Prison fortress. Distraught over the arrests of his comrades, Lado may have precipitated his own arrest by giving his real name during a police search of someone else’s apartment. Standing by the extralarge cell embrasures and shouting out to fellow inmates and passersby, Lado, “a rebel [buntar],” “feared and hated” by the prison administration, appears to have baited the prison guards daily. A note he tried to smuggle out of Metekhi may have gotten Avel Yenukidze arrested. In August 1903, when Lado refused to stand down from the window, a prison guard, after a warning, shot and killed Lado, age twenty-seven, through the outside window of his locked cell.129 The story would be told that Lado had been defiantly shouting “Down with the autocracy!” He seems to have been willing, perhaps even eager, to die for the cause.