Stalin, Volume 1

by Stephen Kotkin

  Koba Jughashvili did not risk coming out onto the square himself. Nonetheless, he was instrumental in plotting the heist. The brigands (up to twenty) included many members of his squad from the bang-bang Chiatura days, and in some cases, before that. On the square that day the man who took the lead was Simon “Kamo” Ter-Petrosyan (b. 1882), a half-Armenian, half-Georgian gunrunner, then twenty-five, whom the future Stalin had known since Gori days.111 Kamo was said to be “completely enthralled” by “Koba.”112 That June 13, 1907, Kamo’s “apples” blew to pieces three of the five mounted Cossack guards, the two accompanying bank employees, and many bystanders. At least three dozen people died; flying shrapnel seriously wounded another two dozen or so.113 Amid the blinding smoke and confusion, Kamo himself seized the bloodstained loot. Traveling by train (first class) disguised as a Georgian prince with a new bride (one of the gang), Kamo delivered the money to Lenin, who was underground in tsarist Finland. (According to Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, Kamo also brought candied nuts and a watermelon.)114 The bravado and defiance of Social Democratic party policy notwithstanding, the robbery resembled an act of desperation, threatening to elide completely the Social Democrats’ cause with banditry. No less important, the Russian State Bank had been prepared: it had recorded the serial numbers of the 500-ruble notes and sent these to European financial institutions. How much—if any—of the Yerevan Square loot proved useful to the Bolshevik cause remains unclear. “The Tiflis booty,” Trotsky would write, “brought no good.”115

  Stool pigeons eager to ingratiate themselves with the tsarist authorities offered up a welter of conflicting theories about who had perpetrated the theft, but the okhranka, rightly, surmised that the plot went back to Lenin. Feeling the heat, Lenin would flee his sanctuary in tsarist Finland back into European exile in December 1907, seemingly for good. Several Bolsheviks, such as Maxim Litvinov, whom Lenin tasked with fencing the stolen rubles in Europe on the party’s behalf, were arrested.116 That arrest provoked three different Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party investigations, which lasted years. The inquisitions were sponsored by the Mensheviks, who saw an opportunity to strike at Lenin’s leadership. Jordania led one internal investigation. Silva Jibladze, the old Jughashvili nemesis from the Tiflis and Batum days, led another. The Mensheviks obtained the testimony of a bribed tsarist postal clerk who had provided inside information on the mail coach schedule and fingered Jughashvili. The future Stalin may have been expelled temporarily from the party. Into old age, he would smart from the rumors of having been a common criminal and suffered party expulsion.117 Whatever the outcome of the purported party disciplinary hearing, Jughashvili would never reside in Tiflis again. He decamped to Baku, with his wife, Kato Svanidze, and infant son, Yakov.118

  Baku was Chiatura all over again, only on a far grander scale. Situated on a peninsula jutting out into the Caspian, the oil port offered a combination of spectacular natural amphitheater, labyrinthine ancient Muslim settlement, violent boomtown of casinos, slums, vulgar mansions—one plutocrat’s villa resembled playing cards—and oil derricks.119 By the early 1900s, tsarist Russia was producing more than half the global oil output, much of it in Baku, and as the oil bubbled up, and the surrounding sea burned, staggering fortunes were made. East of Baku’s railway station lay the refineries built by the Swedish Nobel brothers, and farther east lay the Rothschilds’ petroleum and trading company. Workers toiled twelve-hour shifts, suffering deadly chemical exposure, rabbit-hutch living quarters, and miserly wages of 10 to 14 rubles per month, before the “deductions” for factory-supplied meals. By Caucasus standards, the oppressed proletariat in Baku was immense: at least 50,000 oil workers. That mass became the special focus of radical Bolshevik agitators like Jughashvili.120

  Jughashvili’s Baku exploits included not just propagandizing and political organizing, but also hostage taking for ransom, protection rackets, piracy, and, perhaps, ordering a few assassinations of suspected provocateurs and turncoats.121 How distinctive was he in this regard? Even by the wild standards of the 1905–8 Russian empire, political murder in the Caucasus was extraordinary. That said, the majority of Caucasus revolutionary killings were the work not of Bolsheviks but of the Armenian Dashnaks. The Dashnaks—the Armenian Revolutionary Federation—had been founded in Tiflis in the 1890s, initially to liberate their compatriots in the Ottoman empire, but soon enough they rocked the Russian empire as well.122 The okhranka also feared the anarchists. Still, even if the future Stalin’s mayhem was hardly the most impressive, he would recall his Baku bandit days with gusto. “Three years of revolutionary work among the workers of the oil industry forged me,” he would observe in 1926. “I received my second baptism in revolutionary combat.”123 The future dictator was fortunate not to be treated to a “Stolypin necktie.”

  “On the basis of the Tiflis expropriations,” Trotsky would write, Lenin “valued Koba as a person capable of going or conducting others to the end.” Trotsky added that “during the years of reaction, [the future Stalin] belonged not to those thousands who quit the party but to those few hundreds who, despite everything, remained loyal to it.”124

  Baku’s toxic environment, meanwhile, exacerbated his young wife Kato’s frailty and she died a frightful death in December 1907 from typhus or tuberculosis, hemorrhaging blood from her bowels.125 At her funeral, the future Stalin is said to have tried to throw himself into her grave. “My personal life is damned,” one friend recalled him exclaiming in self-pity.126 Belatedly, he is said to have reproached himself for neglecting his wife, even as he abandoned his toddler son, Yakov, to Kato’s mother and sisters for what turned out to be the next fourteen years.

  As for his exhilarating revolutionary banditry, it was over, quickly. Already by March 1908, Jughashvili was back in a tsarist jail, in Baku, where he studied Esperanto—one fellow inmate recalled him “always with a book”—but was again dogged by accusations of betraying comrades (other revolutionaries were arrested right after him).127 By November, he was on his way, once more, to internal exile, in Solvychegodsk, an old fur-trading post in northern Russia and “an open air prison without bars.”128 There, hundreds of miles northeast of St. Petersburg in the taiga forest, every tiresome argumentative political tendency, and every variety of criminal career, could be found among the 500-strong exile colony living in log houses. Nearly succumbing to a serious bout of typhus, Jughashvili romanced Tatyana Sukhova, another exile, who would recall his poverty and his penchant for reading in bed, in the daytime. “He would joke a lot, and we would laugh at some of the others,” she noted. “Comrade Koba liked to laugh at our weaknesses.”129 Comrade Koba’s life had indeed become a sad, even bitter affair following the failed 1905 experience of a socialist breakthrough. His beautiful, devoted wife was dead; his son, a stranger to him. And all the exploits of the heady years—Batum (1902), Chiatura (1905), Tiflis (1907), and Baku (1908), as well as the Party Congresses in Russian Finland (1905), Stockholm (1906), and London (1907)—had come to naught. Some, such as the mail coach robbery, had boomeranged.

  In summer 1909, Jughashvili found himself dependent on Tatyana Sukhova to escape woebegone Solvychegodsk by boat. He was always something of a brooder, like his father Beso, and increasingly took to nursing perceived slights. Grigol “Sergo” Orjonikidze, who would come to know his fellow Georgian as well as anyone, remarked upon Stalin’s “touchiness” (obidchivy kharakter) many years before he had become dictator.130 (The hothead Orjonikidze knew whereof he spoke—he was one of the touchiest of all.) Jughashvili seems to have been prone to outbursts of anger, and many contemporaries found him enigmatic, although none (at the time) deemed him a sociopath. But brooding, touchy, and enigmatic though the future Stalin might have been, his life was unenviable. Not long after his escape, on August 12, 1909, his father, Beso, died of cirrhosis of the liver. The funeral service was attended by a single fellow cobbler, who closed Beso’s eyes. The father of the future dictator was buried in an unmarked grave.131


  And what had the younger Jughashvili himself achieved?

  Soberly speaking, what did his life amount to? Nearly thirty-one years of age, he had no money, no permanent residence, and no profession other than punditry, which was illegal in the forms in which he practiced it. He had written some derivative Marxist journalism. He had learned the art of disguise and escape, whether in hackneyed fashion (female Muslim veil) or more inventive ways, and like an actor, he had tried on a number of personas and aliases—“Oddball Osip,” “Pockmarked Oska,” “the Priest,” “Koba.”132 Perhaps the best that could be said about Oddball, Pockmarked Oska, and Koba the Priest was that he was the quintessential autodidact, never ceasing to read, no doubt as solace, but also because he remained determined to improve and advance himself. He could also exude charm and inspire fervid loyalty in his small posse. The latter, however, were now dispersed, and none of them would ever amount to much.

  Just as the older vagrant Beso Jughashvili passed unnoticed from the world, his son, the fugitive vagrant Iosif Jughashvili made for St. Petersburg. He took refuge that fall of 1909 in the safe-house apartment of Sergei Alliluyev, the machinist who had been exiled to Tiflis but then returned to the capital where he would often shelter Jughashvili. (Sergei’s daughter, Nadya, would eventually become Stalin’s second wife.) From there, Jughashvili soon returned to Baku, where the okhranka tailed him for months—evidently to trace his underground network—before rearresting him in March 1910. Prison, exile, poverty: this had been his life since that day in March 1901 when he had had to flee the Tiflis Meteorological Observatory and go underground, and it would remain this way right through 1917. But Jughashvili’s marginal existence was not a personal failing. The empire’s many revolutionary parties all suffered from considerable frailty, despite the radicalism of Russia’s workers and the volatility of its peasants.133 But the okhranka had managed to put the revolutionary parties on a short leash, creating fake opposition groups to dilute them.134 The infiltrated Socialist Revolutionaries, especially their terrorist wing, had declined precipitously by 1909. (Their most accomplished terrorist, Evno Azef, a former embezzler nicknamed “Golden Hands,” was unmasked as a paid police agent.)135

  Later, the failures and despondency would be forgotten when, retrospectively, revolutionary party history would be rewritten, and long stints in prison or exile would become swashbuckling tales of heroism and triumph. “Those of us who belong to the older generation . . . are still influenced up to 90 percent by the . . . old underground years,” Sergei Kostrikov, aka Kirov, would later muse to the Leningrad party organization that he would oversee. “Not only books but each additional year in prison contributed a great deal: it was there that we thought, philosophized, and discussed everything twenty times over.” And yet, details of Kostrikov’s life demonstrate that the underground was at best bittersweet. Not only were party ranks riddled with police agents, but blood feuds often ruined personal relations, too. The biggest problem was usually boredom. After a series of arrests, Kostrikov settled in Vladikavkaz, in the North Caucasus (1909–17), which is where he adopted the sonorous alias Kirov—perhaps after the fabled ancient Persian King Cyrus (Kir, in Russian). He managed to get paid for permanent work at a legal Russian-language newspaper of liberal bent (Terek), whose proprietor proved willing to endure many police fines, and he mixed in professional and technical circles while reading some Hugo, Shakespeare, Russian classics, as well as Marxism. Kirov was arrested again in 1911, for connections to an illegal printing press discovered back in Tomsk (where he had originally joined the Social Democrats), but acquitted. He later confessed that prior to 1917 he felt remote from the intellectual life of the rest of the empire and suffered terrible ennui—and he was not even in some frozen waste but in a mild clime, and drawing a salary, luxuries of which the forlorn Jughashvili could only dream.136

  PARALLEL SELF-DEFEAT

  Thanks to the okhranka, the years between 1909 and 1913 would prove relatively peaceful, certainly compared with the madness of the preceding few years.137 Social Democratic party strength, which had peaked at perhaps 150,000 empirewide in 1907, had fallen below 10,000 by 1910. Members of the Bolshevik wing were scattered in European or Siberian exile. A mere five or six active Bolshevik committees existed on imperial Russian soil.138 At the same time, by 1909, the Union of the Russian People had splintered, and the entire far right had lost its dynamism.139 That year, Stolypin began to align himself overtly with Russian nationalists and to promote Orthodoxy as a kind of integrating national faith. He did so out of his own deep religious conviction as well as political calculation. Imperial Russia counted nearly 100 million Eastern Orthodox subjects, some 70 percent of the empire’s population. But Eastern Orthodoxy did not unite to a sufficient degree. “The mistake we have been making for many decades,” Sergei Witte recorded in his diary in 1910, “is that we have still not admitted to ourselves that since the time of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great there has been no such thing as Russia: there has only been the Russian empire.”140 To be sure, non-Russian nationalist and separatist movements remained relatively weak; armed rebellion had largely been confined to the Poles, who in retribution lost their separate constitution, and the Caucasus mountain tribes. Imperial loyalties remained strong, and Russia’s loyal ethnically diverse elites constituted an enormous asset, even in the global age of nationalism. But the very constituency to which Stolypin appealed, Russian nationalists, caused the greatest political disruption precisely for wanting to compel non-Russians to become a single Russian nation. In aiming for a single “Russian” nation defined in faith (Orthodoxy)—imagined to comprise Great Russians, Little Russians (Ukrainians), and White Russians (Belorussians)—the nationalists had imposed severe prohibitions against Ukrainian language and culture. Predictably, this only stoked Ukrainian national consciousness further—and in the guise of opposition, rather than loyalty. These were the same detrimental processes that we have seen at work in the Caucasus at the Tiflis seminary and elsewhere, whereby hard-line Russifiers infuriated an otherwise loyal, and largely cultural, nationalism. It was the Russian nationalists, more than non-Russian nationalisms, who helped destabilize the Russian empire.141

  Stolypin’s turn to Orthodoxy as nationalism, after his reform efforts had stalled, testified to weakness and reconfirmed the lack of an effective political base for the regime. Bismarck had managed for more than two decades to wield control over the legislative agenda, despite the growing power of Germany’s middle and working classes and the absence of his own political party. Stolypin’s herculean efforts at forging Bismarck-like parliamentary coalitions without his own political party failed. But if Stolypin’s ambitious (for Russia) modernization schemes were stymied by the Duma, they had ultimately depended abjectly on the whim of the autocrat. To be sure, notwithstanding Bismarck’s shrewdness vis-à-vis the Reichstag, the Iron Chancellor’s handiwork, too, had ultimately hung on his relationship with a single man, Wilhelm I. But Bismarck, a master psychologist, had managed to make the kaiser dependent on him for twenty-six years. (“It’s hard to be kaiser under Bismarck,” Wilhelm I once quipped.)142 Stolypin had to operate within a more absolute system and with a less-qualified absolutist, a figure more akin to Wilhelm II (who dismissed Bismarck) than Wilhelm I. Nicholas II and his German wife, Alexandra, were jealous of the most talented official who would ever serve them or imperial Russia. “Do you suppose I liked always reading in the papers that the chairman of the Council of Ministers had done this . . . the chairman had done that?” the tsar remarked pathetically to Stolypin’s successor. “Don’t I count? Am I nobody?”143 With Stolypin gone, “the autocrat” would reassert himself, appointing lesser prime ministers, and encouraging Russia’s ministers to obviate their own government. These actions flowed, in part, from Nicholas II’s personality. Whereas Alexander III would flatly state his faltering confidence to any given official, Nicholas II would say nothing but then secretly intrigue against the objects of his disp
leasure. He invariably sought escape from the incessant ministerial disputes even as he egged them on. Such behavior provoked officials’ quiet, and sometimes not so quiet, fury, and eroded their commitment not just to him personally but to the autocratic system.144 Nonetheless, the deeper patterns were systemic, not personal.

  Nicholas II could not act as his own prime minister in part because he was not even part of the executive branch—the autocrat, by design, stood above all branches—while the Russian government he named, oddly, was never an instrument of his autocratic power, only a limitation on it. Nor had Nicholas begun the practices of deliberately exacerbating institutional and personal rivalries, encouraging informal advisers (courtiers) to wield power like formal ministers, playing off courtiers against ministers and formal institutions, in loops of intrigues, and making sure jurisdictions overlapped.145 The upshot was that some Russian ministries would prohibit something, others would allow it, intentionally stymying or discrediting each other. Russian officials even at the very top chased the least little gossip, no matter how third hand or implausible; those trafficking in rumors allegedly from “on high” could access the most powerful ears. Everyone talked, yet ministers, even the nominal prime minister, would often not know for sure what was being decided, how, or by whom. Officials tried to read “signals”: Were they in the tsar’s confidence? Who was said to be meeting with the tsar? Might they soon obtain an audience? In the meantime, as one high-level Russian official noted, the ministries felt constantly impelled to enlarge their fields of sway at others’ expense in order to get anything done at all. “There was really a continually changing group of oligarchs at the head of the different branches of administration,” this high official explained, “and a total absence of a single state authority directing their activities toward a clearly defined and recognizable goal.”146