by Ian Grey
Koba, again using the name of Ivanovich, traveled to London to attend the Fifth Congress, which began on May 13, 1907. His mandate as a delegate was questioned. He was finally admitted, but with only a consultative vote, while Shaumyan was allowed a full vote. This discrimination probably aroused his resentment.
The congress was held in the Brotherhood Church in London’s Whitechapel, and even this cosmopolitan city can rarely have seen such a bizarre gathering. Some delegates, like Plekhanov, wore dark tail coats and looked like respectable bankers, while the Russian worker delegates were mostly bearded and wearing Russian blouses. Others from the Ukraine and the Caucasus were exotic and romantic in their tall sheepskin hats. But more remarkable than their dress was the verbose eloquence of the delegates. They were in a country where they could express themselves freely and, speaking in Russian, there was no danger of their most inflammatory utterances attracting the attention of the police.
Koba did not speak during the congress. Trotsky, doing his utmost to portray Stalin as a complete nonentity in this period, wrote that he was “still utterly unknown, not only to the party generally but even to the three hundred delegates at the Congress.” He claimed that he himself learned of Stalin’s presence only much later when he read Boris Souvarine’s biography. But Koba observed Trotsky and clearly took an instant dislike to him. He was always antagonistic toward the intellectuals, who spoke eloquently and interminably. On his return from the Congress, his only public reference to Trotsky was in the Baku Proletarian, in which he wrote that “Trotsky displayed a ‘beautiful irrelevance’”
At the congress, Martov moved for a resolution and supported it with severe criticism of Lenin for continuing expropriations in defiance of the party’s decisions. This resolution prohibiting all members from taking “any part whatever” in such activities was adopted by 170 votes to thirty-five, with fifty-two abstentions. Lenin made no reply to the Menshevik attack and he abstained from voting. But he had no hesitation in continuing expropriations.
Delegates had hardly returned from the London congress, when on June 25, 1907, a sensational bank raid took place on Erivan Square in the center of Tiflis. A cashier under escort of two policemen and five Cossacks was taking notes worth thousands of rubles to the State Bank when a gang attacked the carriage with bombs. Three of the escort were killed outright, and some fifty passers-by were wounded. News of this raid and of the large sum stolen spread quickly, and it was soon known that the Bolsheviks were responsible. Coming so quickly after the London congress, it caused a storm of anger in the party.
The leader of the raid was Kamo, who had been born in Gori, the son of a meat dealer. He had decided on a military career, and fluent Russian being an essential qualification, he had taken Russian lessons from his fellow-townsman Koba, who was three years older. Koba had enlisted him as a terrorist and Kamo was well equipped for the role. He was a giant of a man, simple-minded, absolutely loyal and trustworthy to his leaders, especially to Koba, generous to his comrades, but cruel and ruthless toward all others. Soviet and other Marxist writers have described him as a legendary hero.
Although shocked and angered by the Tiflis bank raid, the Mensheviks refrained from public attacks on Lenin and his henchmen. The Transcaucasian Party Committee was less amenable to Lenin’s influence, but it passed only a general resolution, condemning the Tiflis robbery.
At this time, Lenin was concerned about the elections to the Third Duma, which were to take place on September 14. He was now convinced of the importance of taking part. Koba had strongly advocated boycott in the past but now supported Lenin. “In the new Duma,” he wrote, “the Bolsheviks would be able to proclaim to the whole nation that there is no possibility in Russia to free the nation peacefully.”
The Third Duma met in November 1907 and was to continue for its full term of five years. The liberal-conservative Octobrists formed the dominant party. Its leader was Aleksandr Guchkov, a man of integrity, anxious to serve his country. His cooperation with Stolypin enabled this Duma to enact important reforms. The Social Democrats, led in the Duma by the fiery little Georgian Chkheidze, had only eighteen deputies of whom five were Bolsheviks, and they neither contributed to nor obstructed the sessions.
By 1907, the tide of revolution, which had threatened to engulf the country, had receded. Law and order had been restored, and while there was widespread apathy, there was also hope in many quarters that the government under Stolypin’s leadership and with the active support of the Duma would carry Russia into a new constitutional era.
In the period from 1907 to 1912, the Social Democratic party disintegrated. Krupskaya wrote that “we have no people at all,” and in retrospect, G. E. Zinoviev, who was then close to Lenin, stated that “at this unhappy period the party as a whole ceased to exist.” Arrests had taken some toll of the membership, but the decline in party strength was due mainly to desertion by those who lost interest or considered that the Revolution was now no more than a distant chimera.
Of those who remained in the party, the majority argued for giving up illegal activities inside Russia and devoting themselves to trade-union work and especially to the Duma, which gave promise of fundamental reforms. Lenin thundered against such members, denouncing them as “liquidators,” an epithet soon applied to all Mensheviks.
Struggling constantly to establish his absolute control over the remnants of the Bolshevik party, Lenin finally managed to convene a party conference to open in Prague on January 18, 1912. The conference was, in fact, unconstitutional and unrepresentative, but it acted with a show of authority. It established a distinct, independent Bolshevik party under Lenin’s leadership, and it elected a Central Committee. Its members were all close to Lenin. They included Sergo Ordzhonikidze, Suren Spandarian, the Armenian Bolshevik, and Roman Malinovsky, and there were five alternate members. The committee later co-opted two further full members, I. S. Belostotsky and Joseph V. Dzhugashvili.
Malinovsky was at once brought into prominence. Lenin had heard of his activities in St. Petersburg but met him for the first time at the Prague conference. He was already convinced that this new recruit was destined to be an outstanding party leader. Lenin was a poor judge of men, and his uncritical enthusiasm for Malinovsky strikingly illustrated his lack of judgment. It showed, too, how inept he was as a conspirator, for the tsarist police were able with ease to plant their agents so that Bolshevik plans and policies were always known to them in advance. At any time, Lenin’s most trusted lieutenants included one or more police spies, and of them, Malinovsky was the most remarkable. His treachery was uncovered after the Revolution, and he was shot.
In the months following the Tiflis bank raid, Koba was at work in the heat and oil-stench of Baku. He was in his late twenties, lean, disciplined. Although married with a child, he was living undercover with a forged identity card, and if not actually hunted, he was under the constant threat of arrest.
Within the revolutionary movement, too, conditions were extremely difficult. The spirit of party comradeship existed only in the struggle against the tsarist regime. Relations among members were often poisoned by bitter resentments and rivalries. Koba himself was caught up in this web of ferocious antagonisms.
An event which aroused Koba’s anger was his trial by a local party court early in 1908 on the charge of organizing an expropriation in Baku. The steamship Nicholas I was looted, and a worker maintained that the Bolsheviks were responsible. Koba was implicated, but while the party court was hearing the case, he was arrested by the police on the charge of leading a subversive revolutionary organization. The party court apparently abandoned the proceedings and passed no judgment. The hearing nevertheless gave rise to allegations that Koba had been tried for his part in the Tiflis expropriation, and that he had been expelled from the party.
Ten years later, Martov published an article in the Menshevik paper, Vpered (Forward), which had not yet been closed down. He stated that Stalin had been expelled from the party for being involved in e
xpropriations. Stalin, then the powerful kommissar for Nationalities, reacted sharply, swearing that “never in my life was I placed on trial before my party or expelled. This is a vicious libel. . . . One had no right to come out with accusations like Martov’s except with documents in one’s hand.” He insisted on taking the matter to the Supreme Court. Martov was granted time in which to collect evidence in the Caucasus. When the court resumed, however, it was found that the documents in the case had inexplicably vanished. Finally, the court administered a “social reprimand” to Martov for “insulting and damaging the reputation of a member of the government.”
The fever of unrest which had died away in most of Russia was burning still in Baku. Workers in the oil industry continued to agitate for better pay and conditions, and they won an important concession when the employers agreed to their electing representatives to negotiate on their behalf. Koba led the campaign among the 50,000 workers for this concession. And in this dispute, he took a more moderate and practical approach than he had taken in the past.
This new approach found expression in the nine articles which he wrote on these negotiations for Gudok (The Whistle), the news sheet of the oil workers’ union. The articles were the work of a writer who was learning to express his ideas forcefully. He explained that at the time when workers broke up machinery and set fire to factories, it was an anarcho-rebellious conflict; at another time, the conflict took the form of individual terrorist acts. But it was no longer sensible to destroy machines and factories, for the workers themselves suffered most from this sabotage. The need was to take control of the industries as soon as possible, as part of the struggle to eliminate poverty. The immediate purpose should be to negotiate with the employers, but only if the employers gave some firm guarantees that they would meet the workers’ demands. The Mensheviks argued in favor of negotiations without any guarantees or conditions. His proposals found support with the majority of the workers, who now rejected economic terrorism.
The authorities had granted immunity to the conference of workers’ delegates, and it met over several months, discussing in detail the collective agreements on wages and working conditions, and arguing about politics. “While all over Russia black reaction was raging, a genuine workers’ parliament was in session in Baku,” wrote Sergo Ordzhonikidze, one of Koba’s closest friends and later kommissar for Heavy Industry.
Away in Switzerland and depressed by reports of the death of the revolutionary movement in Russia, Lenin could only express admiration for the oil workers and their leaders, “our last Mohicans of the political mass strike,” as he called them, overlooking the fact that they were not striking but negotiating. At the same time, he could not but take note of the Bolshevik leaders in Baku, who worked indefatigably and did not succumb to the general apathy among revolutionaries. Foremost among them were Koba, whom as Ivanovich he had met in Tammerfors and London; Ordzhonikidze; and Klimenti Voroshilov, the secretary of the oil workers’ union and a close friend of Koba.
On March 25, 1908, Koba was arrested and held in Bailov prison. He was arrested not for the part he had played in various expropriations, about which the authorities appeared surprisingly to know nothing, but for being the leader of a secret subversive organization. Bailov prison, built to hold 400 inmates, contained some 1,500 at this time, and conditions were harsh. General callousness and outbreaks of savagery marked the lives of the prisoners. Koba and other political prisoners formed discussion groups, and there were the usual factional rivalries and hatreds. Always they had to be careful, for the police planted agents among them, a practice which intensified the deep suspicion among the revolutionaries. Prisoners suspected of being police agents were murdered.
Koba was accustomed to such conditions, and they had developed in him a stern self-control and a ruthless attitude toward his fellows. He took advantage of prison leisure to read widely and to write articles which were smuggled out and published in The Baku Proletarian and The Whistle.
On November 9, 1908, Koba was sentenced to two years’ exile in Solvychegodsk in the Vologda province. On February 8, 1909, when on the way to Solvychegodsk, he became ill with typhus, and he arrived only at the end of the month. Four months later, on June 24, he escaped to St. Petersburg. Sergei Alliluyev arranged accommodation during the few days he spent in the city. From the secret party headquarters, he obtained a new false passport under the name of Zakhar Gregorian Melikyants. But he made no attempt to stay in St. Petersburg. He was in a hurry to return to Baku, where there was work to be done among the oil workers and where he had ready access to two newspapers for articles and propaganda. At this time, however, he was already looking beyond local party activity and thinking of the national party.
In Baku, he found that party membership had dropped to 200 or 300 Bolsheviks and about 100 Mensheviks. All were infected with the general mood of hopelessness, and The Baku Proletarian had not appeared during his absence. He found quarters inside the Balakhlana oil field, and at once set about reviving the paper as a first step toward revitalizing the party not only in the Caucasus but also in Russia and in émigré circles.
The issue of The Baku Proletarian which appeared on August 27, 1909, just three weeks after his return, contained his editorial under the heading “The Crisis in the Party and Our Tasks.” It was a challenging statement of the causes of decline in the party and of the action needed. In his criticisms, he did not spare the émigré leaders, including Lenin. He sounded a call for positive action: “It is not secret that our party is passing through a severe crisis. . . . The first factor which bears heavily on the party is the isolation of its organizations from the broad masses. . . . It is enough to look at Petersburg where in 1907 there were about 8,000 members and now you will find 300 or 400. . . . But not only is the party suffering from isolation from the masses, but also from the fact that its organizations are in no way linked with each other. . . . Petersburg does not know what is happening in the Urals, and so forth. . . . The existing papers published abroad, The Proletarian and The Voice, and on the other side The Social Democrat, do not and can not join together the scattered party organizations. . . . And it would be strange to think that organs published abroad, remote from Russian reality, could unify the work of the party. . . .”
Turning to remedies, he rejected any suggestion of abandoning underground work, as this would kill, not save, the party. The proposals to transfer to the ordinary workers all party functions and in this way to free the party from unstable elements of the intelligentsia had much in its favor and would certainly help to revitalize the party. It was not the answer, however, while “the old methods of party and the ‘leadership’ from abroad” continued.
By placing the word “leadership” in quotation marks, he was emphasizing the failure of Lenin and other émigrés to give dynamic direction. The practical leader in direct contact with the workers, facing hardship and anger, Koba was scornful of the émigrés not only because they lived in comfort and security, “remote from Russian reality,” and failed in their task but also because all belonged to the intelligentsia, a class which he resented and mistrusted.
The immediate need was a party journal, published inside Russia, which would encourage, inform, and restore the sense of party unity among groups scattered over the vast empire. And there must be an active coordinating committee also inside Russia. At the same time, full use must be made of the Duma and trade unions and other legal avenues for carrying on the struggle against the regime.
At this time of crisis when the party was disintegrating, Koba abandoned his previous rigid partisan position and argued for the unity of all factions. He became a conciliationist. A resolution of the Baku Committee of the party, which he wrote and which was published in the same issue of The Baku Proletarian as his editorial, sternly reprimanded Lenin for his quarrel with Alexander Bogdanov, a surgeon who was at the same time a Marxist philosopher and a Bolshevik, and the split within the editorial board of The Proletarian. There had been a permissible di
fference of opinion, but this could not be allowed to lead to a split. It was a difference of opinion “of the kind that always has happened and will happen in such a rich and vital faction as the Bolsheviks.” The resolution revealed a new, almost magisterial approach, transcending local and factional limits, by the coming leader to whom the party was the all-important center of the movement.
Koba was not seeking any rift in his relations with Lenin, and he had no thought of challenging him for the leadership. He was a realist who recognized that Lenin was the only possible leader of the movement at this time. He had written honestly of the causes and had proposed cures for the existing crisis. His editorial had been unsigned, and the resolution was from the Baku Committee, but he could assume that Lenin would know the identity of the writer in each case. Now in a series of “Letters from the Caucasus,” written during November and December 1909 and published in The Social Democrat in Paris and Geneva, he demonstrated that in his basic attitude, he remained wholly in agreement with Lenin. The Letters reported briefly on relations between the nationalities in the oil fields, the unions, and in local government in the Caucasus. He castigated the local Mensheviks and their leader, Noi Zhordania, and these passages in the letters caused difficulties. The editorial board, The Social Democrat, comprised Lenin, Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, and the two Mensheviks, Martov and Fyodor Dan, for the party was not at this stage finally split. Strong objections were raised to the criticisms of the Mensheviks, but Lenin must have derived satisfaction from the staunch support of his Georgian correspondent.