Stalin, Volume 1

by Stephen Kotkin

  The empire’s socialists did not shrink from confronting the rightist upsurge. The socialists often forced the Union of the Russian People to hold rallies indoors, under the threat of leftist counterdemonstrations, and then, to use ticket checkers to keep out leftist terrorists who would blow the rightists to smithereens. The left also drew considerable strength and cohesion of its own from Karl Marx and his “Song of Songs” Communist Manifesto (1848). Still, Russia’s rightists possessed real Biblical scripture and what should have been genuinely electrifying material—a Russian right-wing newspaper had introduced the world to the so-called Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This fabricated transcript of a purported Jewish organization’s meetings portrayed Jews as a global conspiracy—visible yet somehow invisible—preying on Christians while plotting to dominate the world.52 It was first published in Russian, serialized over nine days (August 28 through September 7, 1903), in Znamya (St. Petersburg), which was financed by Interior Minister Vyacheslav von Plehve and published by the anti-Semitic Moldavian Pavalаchii Cruseveanu (b. 1860). Known as Pavel Krushevan, he not only oversaw the text’s compilation in 1902–3 but instigated the major pogrom in Kishenëv (Chişinau) in 1903 and founded the Bessarabian branch of the Union of the Russian People in 1905.53 Anti-Semitism, whether in earnest or in cynicism, could serve as a political elixir: everything that went awry could be, and was, blamed on the Jews. In the Pale of Settlement and western borderlands (Volhynia, Bessarabia, Minsk), the rightists nearly took the entire peasant vote, and in the central agricultural heartland (Tula, Kursk, Oryol), site of major agrarian disturbances, rightists won around half the peasant vote.54 In fact, across the expanse of imperial Russian, sympathy for the political right was there to be galvanized.55

  Just as the autocracy had refused to use the word “constitution” (or even “parliament”), from the start, the “Union” of the Russian People had abjured the designation “political party” and presented itself as a spontaneous movement, an organic union of the people or folk (narod). Even so, senior government officials in St. Petersburg were unwilling to accept the movement on a permanent basis. Stolypin maintained the expedient of surreptitiously financing the rightist organizations and their anti-Semitic publications, among many newspapers that his government funded, but Stolypin’s deputy in the interior ministry from 1906 to 1911, Sergei Kryzhanovsky, who handled the disbursements to the Union of Russian People and similar organizations, saw no distinction between the political techniques and social program of the far right—redistribution of private property from plutocrats to the poor—and that of the leftist revolutionary parties.56 The government had not created these mass movements and remained wary of them. Thus, even if the far right’s calls for social leveling seemed mostly bluff, the policy of the okhranka was still to treat right-wing organizations as another revolutionary movement. Some factions inside the okhranka ignored or subverted this policy. But mostly, okhranka operatives deemed the far right’s leaders “uncultured” and “unreliable” and kept them under close surveillance, with good reason. Exactly like the radical left, the Union of the Russian People compiled lists of current and former government officials to be assassinated.57 Stolypin was one of their targets.58 His influential top domestic adviser, a former rabbi converted to Orthodoxy, was an anti-Semite, but the prime minister also tried to ease residence, occupational, and educational restrictions on Jews, for both principled and instrumentalist reasons, to diminish the perceived cause of Jewish radicalism and improve Russia’s image abroad.59 Stolypin succeeded in enraging the hard right.

  Many rightist movements, refraining from hyperinflammatory rhetoric or arming vigilante “brotherhoods” to combat leftists and Jews and assassinate public figures, were considerably less volatile than the Union of the Russian People. And yet, Nicholas II and others throughout the regime continued to look askance on large public gatherings by supporters. The tsar and most government officials, including Stolypin, frowned on the public “disorder” of political mobilization, and wanted politics to return from the street to the corridors of power. This rebuff of the street held even though the supportive conservative movements pushed not for a right-wing revolution but, mostly, for a restoration of the archaic autocracy that had existed prior to the advent of the Duma.60 No less fundamentally, many rightist organizations themselves would have refrained from mobilizing patriotic social constituencies on behalf of the regime even if they had been permitted, or encouraged, to do so: After all, what kind of autocracy needed help? The autocracy’s very existence in a sense handcuffed the Russian right, both moderate and radical.61

  Most rightists wanted an autocracy without asterisk—that is, a mystical unity of monarch and folk—and they rejected anything more than a consultative Duma, but the autocrat himself had created the Duma. This circumstance confused and divided the right. Almost all rightists believed that autocracy ipso facto ruled out opposition, which of course ruled out their own opposition. “In the West, where the government is elected, the concept of ‘opposition’ makes sense; there it refers to ‘opposition to the government’; this is both clear and logical,” explained the editor of the rightist Petersburg weekly Unification. “But here, the government is appointed by the monarch and invested with his confidence. . . . To be in opposition to the imperial government means to oppose the monarch.”62 Still, many rightists despised Stolypin merely for his willingness to engage with the Duma, even though that was the law and the prime minister’s manipulations of the Duma were government triumphs. For some, including Nicholas II, the mere existence of a prime minister was an affront to autocracy.63 In August 1906, assassins dressed in state uniforms nearly killed Stolypin by dynamiting his state dacha where he received petitioners. “Everywhere one could see shreds of human flesh and blood,” one witness recalled of the twenty-seven instant deaths. Another witness observed how Stolypin “came into his half-demolished study, with plaster stains on his coat and an ink spot on the back of his neck. The top of his writing desk had been lifted off by the explosion, which took place in the hall at a distance of about thirty feet from the study, and the inkstand had hit his neck.” A few months later, a time bomb was discovered in former Prime Minister Witte’s home, although it failed to detonate (the clock had stopped). Both acts against proautocratic, conservative prime ministers went unsolved; circumstantial evidence pointed to possible involvement of right-wing circles.64

  Stolypin gained in stature from the failed assassination, thanks to his display of composure and resolve, but he felt constrained to move his family into the Winter Palace (near his offices), which was considered more secure than the prime minister’s official residence on the Fontanka Canal. Even then, the police compelled the Russian prime minister to constantly alter the exits and entrances he used. Unsafe leaving or entering the Winter Palace! Many disgusted rightists, at a minimum, hoped Stolypin would be replaced by Durnovó or another hardliner who would emasculate or outright abolish the Duma. At the same time, other diehard monarchists—who in principle were no less against voting and political parties—found themselves organizing to compete in the elections they rejected if only to deny use of the Duma to the “opposition” (liberals and socialists, lumped together). But the rightists who accepted the Duma became anathema to the rest. Modern street politics fractured the Russian right.65 The gulf between the politics of parliament participation and of assassination was never bridged.66

  A PUNDIT

  When first subjected to Durnovó’s ferocious assault, the factionalized Social Democrats had tried to close ranks. In the two weeks before the first Duma opened, between April 10 and 25, 1906, the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party convoked its 4th Congress under the slogan of “unity.” Held across the border in the safety of Stockholm, which allowed emigres to attend, the gathering brought together, at least physically, the recently divided Mensheviks (62 delegates) and Bolsheviks (46 delegates), as well as the separate parties of Latvian and Polish Social Democrats and the B
und.67 Among Caucasus Social Democrats, the second most numerous contingent in the empire after the Russian Social Democrats, there was already near unity because Caucasus Bolsheviks were so few.68 Unity, however, proved elusive in policy. Jughashvili turned out to be the only Bolshevik among the eleven Caucasus delegates in Stockholm, but, taking the congress podium to speak on the vexing agrarian question, he boldly rejected the Bolshevik Lenin’s proposal for complete land nationalization as well as a Russian Menshevik call for land municipalization. Instead, the future collectivizer of agriculture recommended that the peasants get the land. Land redistribution, Jughashvili argued, would facilitate a worker-peasant alliance, an unacknowledged tip of his hat to his Georgian Menshevik adversaries. More than even that, Jughashvili argued, reiterating the comment of another speaker, offering the land to the peasants would rob the peasant Socialist Revolutionary Party—the Social Democrats’ competition on the left—of its platform.69 What impression these suggestions made at the 4th Congress remains unclear. 70 For the time being, among Russian Social Democrats, the decisive issue of a land redistribution to the peasants—in the overwhelmingly peasant Russian empire—would go unresolved.

  What could not be left unresolved was the survival of their party. In 1905, both Menshevik and Bolshevik factions had concurred on the need to form combat squads for self-defense: after all, the unjust tsarist system used terror. The factions also agreed, in order to obtain weapons and party funds, on conducting “expropriations,” often in concert with the criminal underworld.71 As a result, the Russian empire became even more of a cauldron of political terrorism after it had become a quasi-constitutional order.

  Until this time, imperial Russia’s regular police had been remarkably few and far between. In towns the police presence was often sparse, and outside the towns in 1900 Russia had fewer than 8,500 constables and sergeants (uriadniki) for the rural population of nearly 100 million. Many constables (assisted by a handful of sergeants) “oversaw” 50,000 to 100,000 subjects, over more than 1,000 square miles. In 1903, the state created the position of guardsmen (strazhniki), deploying some 40,000 in the countryside, which brought the ratio of state officers to rural inhabitants only to roughly 1 for every 2,600 inhabitants. Salaries rose but remained low, as did levels of education and training. Abusive, arbitrary behavior, and graft, rendered the police profoundly unpopular. The regular police routinely brought criminal cases or detained people without incidence of a crime, and resorted to physical abuse in what they called “the law of the fist.” Peasant-born sergeants acted like petty tyrants toward villagers, boasting of their power, under the theory that the more severe they were, the greater would be their authority.72

  The mass revolts beginning in 1905 precipitated a vast increase in police personnel. But between 1905 and 1910, more than 16,000 tsarist officials, from village policemen up to ministers, would be killed or wounded by terrorist-revolutionaries (including in many cases by Menshevik assassins).73 Countless carriage drivers and railway personnel—proletarians—perished as well. One top police official complained that the details of bombmaking “became so widespread that practically any child could produce one and blow up his nanny.”74

  This leftist political terror instilled fear throughout tsarist officialdom, but the regime fought back savagely.75 Stolypin “seized the revolution by the throat.” His government deported tens of thousands to forced labor or internal exile. It also introduced special field courts that used summary justice to send more than 3,000 accused political opponents to the gallows, strung up in demonstrative public executions, a deterrent that became known as the Stolypin necktie.76 No regime could let go unanswered the pervasive assassination of its officials, but the courts bore little resemblance to due process. Be that as it may, people got the point. Lenin, who named Stolypin Russia’s “hangman-in-chief,” and other prominent revolutionaries fled, having only just returned to Russia in 1905’s (briefly) freer circumstances.77 The would-be revolutionaries rejoined some 10,000 expatriates already resident in Russian colonies around Europe as of 1905. The emigre leftists fell under the surveillance of the 40 operatives and 25 informants in the okhranka’s foreign department, run out of Russia’s Paris embassy, which amassed dramatic documentation on the exiles’ often pathetic endeavors.78

  Koba Jughashvili was among those committed socialists who did not seek to flee abroad. In Stockholm, he had met not only Klimenty “Klim” Voroshilov, a lifelong acquaintance, but also the Polish nobleman and Bolshevik Felix Dzierzynski and the Russian Bolshevik Grigory Radomylsky (better known as Zinoviev). And Jughashvili had encountered his old Tiflis seminary nemesis Seid Devdariani, by now a Georgian Menshevik. From Stockholm Jughashvili returned to the Caucasus in spring 1906. He wore a suit with a real hat, and carried a pipe, like a European. Only the pipe would last.

  Back home, in a pamphlet in Georgian (1906) reporting on the Stockholm Congress, Jughashvili stridently dismissed Russia’s first-ever legislative body. “Who sits between two stools betrays the revolution,” he wrote. “Who is not with us is against us! The pitiful Duma and its pitiful Constitutional Democrats got stuck precisely between two stools. They want to reconcile the revolution with the counter-revolution, so that the wolves and the sheep can pasture together.”79

  Jughashvili also got married.80 Ketevan “Kato” Svanidze, then twenty-six, was the youngest of the three Svanidze sisters of Tiflis, whom Jughashvili had met either through the Svanidzes’ son, Alyosha, a Bolshevik (married to a Tiflis opera singer), or through Mikheil Monoselidze, an old seminary friend who had married another Svanidze sister, Sashiko.81 The Svanidzes’ apartment stood right behind the South Caucasus military district headquarters, in the heart of the city, and thus was considered an ultrasafe shelter for revolutionaries: no one would suspect. In the hideaway, the scruffy Jughashvili wrote articles, regaled the sisters with talk of books and revolution, and brazenly received members of his small revolutionary posse. Koba and Kato also evidently met for lovemaking in the Atelier Madame Hervieu, the private salon where the sisters, all expert seamstresses, worked. Sometime during that summer of 1906, Kato informed him she was pregnant. He agreed to marry her. But because Jughashvili had false papers and was wanted by the police, a legal marriage faced complications. They lucked upon a former seminary classmate, Kita Tkhinvaleli, who had become a priest and agreed to perform the ceremony, in the dead of night (2:00 a.m., on July 15–16, 1906). At the “banquet” for ten, where the bridegroom showed off his voice and charm, the honored role of toastmaster (tamada) was performed by Mikho Tskhakaya, the former Tiflis seminarian and Bolshevik elder statesmen (then aged thirty-nine). Jughashvili seems not to have invited his mother, Keke, though it could hardly escape notice that the old woman shared a given name—Ketevan (Ekaterina in Russian)—with the young bride.82 In fact, just like Keke, Kato was devout, and she, too, prayed for Jughashvili’s safety, but unlike Keke, Kato was demure.

  The beautiful and educated Kato—a world away from the Chiatura manganese dust—was a class above the future Stalin’s usual girlfriends, and she evidently pierced his heart.83 “I was amazed,” Mikheil Monoselidze observed, “how Soso, who was so severe in his work and to his comrades, could be so tender, affectionate and attentive to his wife.”84 That said, the shotgun marriage did not alter his obsession with revolution. Almost immediately after the conspiratorial summer 1906 wedding, he took off on underground business, abandoning his pregnant wife in Tiflis. As a precaution, she had not recorded the marriage in her internal passport as required by law. Still, the gendarmerie, somehow tipped off, arrested Kato on a charge of sheltering revolutionaries. She was four months pregnant. Her sister Sashiko, appealing to the wife of a top officer whose gowns the girls made, managed to get Kato released—after a month and a half in jail—into the custody of the police chief’s wife. (The Svanidze sisters made her gowns, too.) On March 18, 1907, some eight months after her wedding, Kato gave birth to a son. They christened the boy Yakov, perhaps in ho
nor of Yakov “Koba” Egnatashvili, Jughashvili’s surrogate father. The future Stalin was said to be over the moon. But if so, he continued to be rarely home. Like other revolutionaries—at least those still at large—he was constantly on the run, rotating living quarters and battling his leftist rivals. The Georgian Mensheviks controlled most of the revolutionary publications in the Caucasus, but he came to play an outsized role in the small-circulation Bolshevik press, becoming editor of Georgian Bolshevik periodicals one by one. On the eve of Yakov’s birth, Jughashvili, together with Suren Spandaryan (b. 1882) and others, established the newspaper Baku Proletarian. He had found a calling in punditry.