Stalin, Volume 1
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89. Also around this time, Plekhanov’s 1894 sarcastic brochure Anarchism and Socialism appeared in a second, enlarged edition. Plekhanov’s pamphlet was originally written in French, and translated into German, English, and Russian (2nd ed. Moscow: V. O. Karchagin, 1906). Jughashvili’s essays did not invoke Plekhanov. Privately, in an ingratiating letter abroad to Lenin, after Plekhanov criticized What Is to Be Done?, Jughashvili wrote: “Either the man has gone off his nut or is showing hate and hostility.” Sochineniia, I: 56–7. Stalin had Plekhanov’s K voprosu o razvitii monisticheskogo vzgliada na istoriiu republished in 1938; a copy with the dictator’s markings has been preserved.
90. Sochineniia, I: 297 [modified], 375 [original].
91. Sochineniia, I: 314–6.
92. Sochineniia, I: 331, 344–5, 348, 368.
93. Souvarine, Stalin, 109. Trotsky claimed he learned of Stalin’s presence in London in 1935 only from Souvarine’s biography (French ed.). Trotsky, Stalin, 90.
94. Zhordania, Moia zhizn’, 53; Service, Stalin, 66.
95. On French initiative, between 1865 and 1871, plans were discussed for a single European central bank and a single currency, called “the Europe,” but the British and Germans resisted. Instead, in the 1870s the Germans joined the British on the gold standard, which others joined (Japan in 1897), assuring convertibility and stable exchange rates. Einaudi, Money and Politics.
96. Jablonowski, “Die Stellungnahme der russischen Parteien,” 5: 60–93.
97. From the British side, reconciliation with Russia was facilitated by a displacement of the “Victorians” (those born in the 1830s–40s), vexed over Russian penetration of Central Asia, in favor of the “Edwardians” (those born in the 1850s–60s), who came of age in the aftermath of Bismarck’s unification and Wilhelmine Germany’s rise. Neilson, Britain and the Last Tsar, 48–50, 267–88.
98. McDonald, United Government, 103–11.
99. Some issues that could not be settled, such as Tibet, were tabled. Churchill, Anglo-Russian Convention; Williams, “Great Britain and Russia,” 133–47; Ostal’tseva, Anglo-russkoe soglashenie 1907 goda.
100. Bernstein, Willy-Nicky Correspondence, 107–8.
101. McDonald, United Government, 77–81. Izvestiia (December 29, 1917) later published the dead-letter treaty. See also Nekliudov, “Souvenirs diplomatiques”; Bompard, “Le traite de Bjoerkoe”; Fay, “The Kaiser’s Secret Negotiations”; Feigina, B’orkskoe soglashenie; Vitte, Vospominaniia [1922], II: 476–81; Iswolsky, Recollections of a Foreign Minister, 40–3; and Astaf’ev, Russko-germanskie diplomaticheskie otnosheniia.
102. Bogdanovich, Tri poslednikh samoderzhavtsa [1924], 461.
103. Pashukanis, “K istorii anglo-russkogo soglasheniia,” 32; de Taube, La politique russe, 118. Perhaps the only other prominent rightist who fully shared Stolypin’s foreign policy circumspection was his high-profile conservative critic on domestic issues, Durnovó. But the latter did not fully appreciate that Stolypin—who was not even responsible for foreign or military affairs (prerogatives of the tsar)—had skillfully kept Russia out of repeating a foreign misadventure in 1908. McDonald, United Government, 151.
104. Nash, The Anglo-Japanese Alliance; O’Brien, The Anglo-Japanese Alliance; Daniels et al., “Studies in the Anglo-Japanese Alliance.”
105. Coox, Nomonhan, 1–16.
106. “Londonskii s”ezd Rossiiskoi sotsial-demokraticheskoi rabochei partii (Zapiski delegata),” in Sochineniia, II: 46–77 (at 50–1), from Bakinskii proletarii, June 20 and July 10, 1907.
107. Getzler, Martov, 124.
108. For Jughashvili, this was neither his first such exercise nor his last, according to Soso Dawrichewy, the former Tiflis seminarian and priest’s son from Gori (whom the okhranka long confused with Kamo). Dawrichewy, Ah: ce qu’on, 174–5, 177, 181, 213, 237–8.
109. Gerasimov, Na lezvii s terroristami, 92.
110. The Caucasus military governor also reported that locally, in 1905 and 1906, banditry and assassinations claimed 1,239 lives and an equal number of seriously wounded. Geifman, Revoliutsionnyi terror, 21, 34–5, 228.
111. Miklós Kun unearthed the internal party disciplinary file on Litvinov, which proved Stalin’s involvement. Kun, Unknown Portrait, 74–80. See also Montefiore, Young Stalin, 3–16 (citing, among many sources, the unpublished memoirs of Sashiko Svanidze, Stalin’s sister-in-law), 178–91. The surviving okhranka files on the Yerevan holdup have been purged. Bordiugov, Neizvestnyi Bogdanov, II: 120–42. Kamo had obtained mail coach insider information from another postal clerk, Gigo Kasradze.
112. GF IML, f. 8, op. 2, ch. 1, d. 7, l. 64–84 (G. F. Vardoyan); Perspektivy, 1991, no. 6: 51–7; Geifman, Revoliutsionnyi terror, 163–4; Ostrovskii, Kto stoial, 257; Avtorkhanov, Proiskhozhdenie, I: 183–6; RGASPI, f. 332, op. 1, d. 53. Kamo had three years of schooling. His adoration of Stalin is related in the subsequent recollections of Kamo’s younger sister, Javariya Khutulushvili: Kun, Unknown Portrait, 75; Perspektivy, 1991, no. 6: 51–7; Ostrovskii, Kto stoial, 257; Avtorkhanov, Proiskhozhdenie , I: 183–6; RGASPI, f. 332, op. 1, d. 53. See also Uratadze, Vospominaniia, 130–2, 163–7; Smith, Young Stalin, 193–211; van Ree, “The Stalinist Self,” 275–6; van Ree, “Reluctant Terrorists?”; and Montefiore, Young Stalin, 7 (citing Candide Charkviani, “Memoirs,” manuscript, 15).
113. As the folklore has it, for a moment, amid the bodies and chaos, the robbery seemed to have gone awry—until Kamo, dressed as an army officer, rode his own phaeton through the smoke, scooped up most of the sacks of banknotes, then misdirected an arriving policeman. Medvedeva Ter-Petrosyan, “Tovarishch Kamo,” 130. Twenty thousand rubles had been left behind in the stagecoach; one of its drivers tried to pocket another 9,500 rubles but was caught.
114. Wolfe, Three Who Made a Revolution, 393–4; Geifman, Revoliutsionnyi terror, 164; Krupskaya, Reminiscences of Lenin, 155.
115. Trotsky, Stalin, 109.
116. Martov, Spasiteli ili uprazdniteli?, 22–3.
117. Bibineishvili, Kamo, 30–1, 371. The daring Kamo would end up in and out of psychiatric prisons; in 1922, he would be run over by a Soviet official’s car while riding a bicycle in Tiflis. He had a damaged left eye (from one of his own bombs in May 1907), and this may have contributed to his accident.
118. Jughashvili may have gone abroad to see Lenin in August 1907 (Stuttgart) and January 1908 (Switzerland).
119. Reiss, The Orientalist, 11–3; Hone and Dickinson, Persia in Revolution, 158–68.
120. Ordzhonikidze, “Bor’ba s men’shevikami,” 42. Many of the Muslim workers were seasonal Azeri migrants, both legal and illegal, from the northern provinces of Iran. Alstadt, “Muslim Workers,” 83–91; and Chaqueri, Soviet Socialist Republic of Iran, 24–25, who estimates that from 20 to 50 percent of males in northern Iran between the ages of twenty and forty ended up working for some period of time across the border, mainly in the Russian Caucasus.
121. Vereshchak, “Stalin v tiur’me,” 1306; Vereshchak, “Okonchanie,” 1308.
122. The tsarist regime had turned the Dashnaks against Russian power, too, partly by confiscating Armenian Church properties in 1903 (which Nicholas II had to rescind in 1905). Suny, Transcaucasia, 166–7; Suny, Looking Toward Ararat, 48–9, 92.
123. “Otvet na privetstviia rabochikh glavnykh zheleznodorozhnykh masterskikh v Tiflise,” in Sochineniia, VIII: 174–5. Suny, “Journeyman for the Revolution.”
124. Trotskii, Stalin [1985], I: 158, 163.
125. Montefiore, Young Stalin, 190–3 (citing Svanidze family memoirs and an inerview with a Svanidze cousin).
126. Dawrichewy, Ah: ce qu’on, 35; GDMS, f. 87, d. 1955–46, l. 51–6 (Elisabedashvili). The main source on the marriage has long been the emigre Menshevik Iremashvili, who claimed to have attended Kato’s funeral, and who pinpointed her death as the brea
k that left Stalin “bereft of any moral restraint.” Joseph Iremashvili, Stalin und die Tragodie, 30–40.
127. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 4, d. 655, l. 18.
128. Arsenidze, “Iz vospominaniia o Staline,” 224; Deutscher, Stalin, 110.
129. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 4, d. 647 (Sukhova).
130. Dubinskii-Mukhadaze, Ordzhonikidze, 92.
131. RGASPI, f. 71, op. 1, d, 275, l. 23; Smith, Young Stalin, 28–9; McNeal, Stalin, 336, n15; Kun, Unknown Portrait, 18. Svetlana said that he died from a stabbing in a barroom brawl, but without any evidence to that effect. Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 153n. In 1939, Stalin ordered the Tiflis party organization not to collect historical information about Beso.
132. Among Social Democrats—his supposed comrades—Stalin was dismissed as “Lenin’s left foot.” Arsenidze, “Iz vospominaniia o Staline,” 223.
133. On the frailty of the revolutionary parties, despite working-class radicalism, see McKean, St. Petersburg.
134. Daly, Autocracy Under Siege, 117–23.
135. Azef had become chief of the Socialist Revolutionary Combat Organization. By some accounts, while in the pay of the okhranka, he oversaw twenty-eight successful terrorist attacks on government officials; the okhranka never divined his motives and loyalties. In 1909, he fled to Germany, leaving the SR party in disarray and feeling defeated. “Azef” became a metaphor for the entire tsarist system. Nicolaevsky, Aseff; Schleifman, Undercover Agents; Geifman, Entangled in Terror; Daly, Watchful State, 81–109.
136. Biggart, “Kirov Before the Revolution”; Mostiev, Revoliutsionnaia publitsistika Kirova; Kirilina, Neizvestnyi Kirov.
137. Daly, Watchful State, 110–1.
138. Shukman, Lenin and the Russian Revolution, 126.
139. Shchëgolëv, Padenie, VI: 176–7 (N. E. Markov).
140. Vitte, Vospominaniia [1960], III: 274–5; Hosking, Russia, 479.
141. Jones, “Non-Russian Nationalities,” 35–63; Thaden, Russification in the Baltic Provinces; Weeks, Nation and State; Woodworth, “Civil Society”; Staliunas, Making Russians; Kryzhanovskii, Vospominaniia, 128. On the incompatibility between Russian nationalism and the tsarist state, see Kappeler, Russian Empire, 238–42. Something very similar took place in Hungary’s deleterious Magyarization in its diverse half of the Habsburg empire after the 1867 “compromise” forming the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary.
142. Steinberg, Bismarck, 3 (citing Karl Heinz Borner, Wilhelm I, deutscher Kaiser und Konig von Preussen: eine Biographie [Berlin: Akadamie, 1984], 221).
143. Kokovtsov, Iz moego proshlogo, I: 282–3.
144. McDonald, United Government, 10, 209, 213.
145. Rieber, Politics of Autocracy.
146. Gurko, Features and Figures, 30. For similar remarks, thirty years earlier, see Stead, Truth About Russia, 199–200.
147. “K. Kuzakov—syn I. V. Stalina,” Argumenty i fakty, 1995, no. 39: 12. The story of the peasant Matryona and the bastard son reached the Alliluyevs, who passed it on to Svetlana. Alliluyeva, Only One Year, 330.
148. Gromov, Stalin, 34–9.
149. A photograph of Pelegeya Onufrieva and Pyotr Chizikov was kept in Stalin’s personal papers: Izvestiia TsK KPSS, 1998, no. 10: 190. Chizikov died not long after returning to his parents in 1912. He was in his early twenties. Pelegeya died in 1955; her husband, Fomin, was arrested.
150. Hugh O’Beirne, a longstanding British embassy official in St. Petersburg, reported to London in June 1911 that Stolypin was “depressed” and his position “insecure.” Neilson, Britain and the Last Tsar, 74. See also Chmielski, “Stolypin’s Last Crisis.”
151. Pipes, Russian Revolution, 183–91; Hosking, Russian Constitutional Experiment, 136; Shchëgolëv, Padenie, VI: 252 (Guchkov). Nicholas II, in January 1913, ended the trial of the police officials linked to the assassination, including A. I. Spiridovich.
152. Ostrovskii, Kto stoial, 321–47.
153. VI (Parizhskaia) Vserossiskaia konferentsiia RSDRP. On whether Prague in 1912 inaugurated a self-standing Bolshevik party, see Lars Lih, “1912.”
154. Those elected to the Central Committee at Prague included Lenin, Zinoviev, Malinowski (an okhranka spy), Filipp Goloshchyokin, D. Schwarzman, and Stalin’s two Caucasus colleagues, the Georgian Orjonikidze and Armenian Suren Spandaryan; those co-opted were Stalin and Ivan Belostotsky, and a bit later Grigory Petrovsky and Yakov Sverdlov.
155. Uratadze, Vospominaniia, 234.
156. This point, with many references, is developed by Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, 248–9.
157. De Felice, Mussolini, 35n; de Begnac, Palazzo Venezia, 360; Balabanoff, My Life as a Rebel, 44–52.
158. Gregor, Fascist Persuasion, 49.
159. Gregor, Young Mussolini, 35; Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle, 42–3.
160. PSS, XXI: 409. In November 1914, after war had broken out, Mussolini would reverse himself and declare support for the Italian government’s participation in war, leading to his expulsion from the Socialist Party. Nation, he argued, could not be ignored.
161. Stalin was paid honoraria for the occasional publication and received aid from the Political Red Cross, in addition to his allowance, from 1912, from Bolshevik party coffers. Still, he wrote to seemingly everyone he knew requesting parcels of food and clothing. “I have no choice but to mention this,” he wrote to his lover Tatyana Slovatinskaya in 1913. “I have no money and have even run out of food.” She sent a parcel, for which he wrote, “I don’t know how I can repay you, my darling sweetheart!” Soon, he was begging her again. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 4, d. 5392. In the 1920s, Stalin repaid her with a position in the secret department of the Central Committee—his innermost fief. In 1937, her daughter was imprisoned, her son-in-law executed, and she herself (along with two grandchildren) evicted from the elite residential compound House on the Embankment. Khlevniuk, Stalinskoe politburo, 307.
162. Kun, Unknown Portrait, 127–8; Trotskii, Stalin [1990], I: 192–3.
163. Pis’ma P. B. Akselroda-Iu. O. Martovu, I: 292–3.
164. Jones, Socialism, 221.
165. Melancon, The Lena Goldfields Massacre; Haimson, “Workers’ Movement After Lena.”
166. Montefiore, Young Stalin, 246 (from Zvezda, no citation).
167. Melancon, The Lena Goldfields Massacre, 155.
168. Mintslov, Petersburg, 111, 231; Rogger, Jewish Policies, 225; Bogdanovich, Tri poslednikh samoderzhtsa [1990], 493; Podbolotov, “Monarchists Against Their Monarch.” Back in 1903, officers of the Belgrade garrison had stormed the Serbian royal palace and assassinated their king—a fact noted by Russian right-wingers. “Let you in on a secret?” B. V. Nikolsky, the Russian Black Hundreds leader and confidant of Nicholas II, confided to his diary in 1905. “I think that it is naturally impossible to bring the Tsar to his senses. He is worse than inept! He is—God forgive me—a total nobody! . . . We need something Serbian.” Nikol’skii, “Iz dnevnikov,” 77. “I have no hope for the monarchist parties,” a rightist professor in Kiev wrote to a colleague in Moscow. “To have power they need a genuine Monarch, but we have instead a kind of miserable blancmange.” Y. A. Kulakovskii, in Shevtsov, Izdatel’skaia deiatel’nost’ russkikh nesotsialisticheskikh partii, 26.
169. Nazanskii, Krushenie velikoi Rossii, 76–7.
170. Suvorov, Trekhsotletie doma Romanovykh; Moskovskie vedomosti, February 23, 1913: 1; Wortman, Scenarios of Power, II: 439–80.
171. Syrtsov, Skazanie o Fedorovskoi Chudotvornoi. The St. Theodore (Fyodor) icon, also known as the Black Virgin, was taken over by the renovationist (obnovlentsy) sect, which had it restored in Moscow in 1928. In 1944, when the sect was dissolved, the Orthodox Church repossessed the icon; it remains in Kostroma, even though the Bolsheviks blew up its original home (Kostroma’s Assumption Cathedral).
173. Rossiiskaia Gosudarstvennia Biblioteka, otdel rukopisi (RGB OR), f. 126 (Kireevikh-Novikovikh), k. 13 (Dnevnik A. A. Kireeva, 1900–1904), l. 131. As the years passed, Kireev would continue this refrain: “The sovereign . . . is unstable to such a degree that it is impossible to depend on him.” RGB OR, f. 126, k. 14, 1. 343ob (December 22, 1908). See also Elpatevskii, Vospominaniia, 264.
174. Wortman, Scenarios of Power, II: 464, 466 (Ivan Tolstoy).
175. Anan’ich and Ganelin, “Nikolai II”; Lieven, Nicholas II; Mark D. Steinberg in Steinberg and Khrustalëv, Fall of the Romanovs, 1–37; Warth, Nicholas II.
176. Rogger, Russia in the Age of Modernization, 22–3.
177. Remnev, Samoderzhavnoe pravitel’stvo, 6, 471.
178. Witte’s champions would later claim, rightly, that he had anticipated Stolypin by proposing the emancipation of the peasants from the commune and their receiving private property and civil rights, but the champions often fail to note that after Stolypin introduced the legislation, Witte opposed it in the State Council. For a comparison of the two men, see Struve, “Witte und Stolypin,” III: 263–73.