Koba was uncomfortable in his mother’s house. He returned to Tiflis, in spite of the danger, at the first opportunity.
TWO
KOBA
4
ENIGMATIC KOBA
“LENIN’S LEFT LEG”
In Tiflis, Koba melted into the revolutionary underground. His life now was that of a professional revolutionary, an “illegal” in revolutionary terminology. Forged documents, endless “safe houses,” underground print shops concealed in cellars. A secret association of young people called the Tiflis Committee of the RSDRP. As Trotsky wrote in his book on Stalin, “Those were the days of the eighteen-to-thirty-year-olds. Revolutionaries older than that were few and far between. The words ‘committee’ and ‘party’ still had an aura of novelty. They charmed young ears like a seductive melody. Anyone who joined the organization knew that prison and exile awaited him in a few months’ time. It was a matter of honor to hold out as long as possible before being arrested, and to remain firm in the face of the gendarmes.” Those few months went by, and Koba was still at liberty.
Iremashvili remembered: “I visited Koba several times in his wretched little room. He would be wearing a black Russian blouse with the red tie so typical of Social Democrats. You never saw him in anything but that dirty blouse and unpolished shoes. He hated everything reminiscent of the bourgeois.” Trotsky wrote sarcastically that “a dirty blouse and unpolished footwear were the general recognition signs of revolutionaries, especially in the provinces.” Yes, a naive young Koba was trying hard to look like a real revolutionary. It was all just as it should be: wearing a dirty blouse, frequenting workers’ groups to explain the teaching of Karl Marx. There he developed that threadbare style of his, which was so easy for a semiliterate audience to understand. The style which would later bring him victory over the orator Trotsky.
The East cannot do without a cult. And the “Asiatic,” as the Bolshevik Krasin called him, found his god in Lenin. “He worshiped Lenin, he deified Lenin. He lived on Lenin’s thoughts, copied him so closely that we jokingly called him ‘Lenin’s left leg,’ ” remembered the revolutionary R. Arsenidze.
Koba’s god did not let him down. Lenin’s What Is To Be Done?, which came out in 1902, was a bombshell. Before that, Marxists had despondently told each other that until capitalism was fully developed in Russia not a single hair would fall from the head of the autocracy. Revolution was relegated to the dim and distant future, and revolutionaries had to work for future generations. In his book Lenin gave them fresh hope. He announced that a powerful conspiratorial organization of professional revolutionaries could accomplish the revolution by means of a coup. Theirs was a country of age-old submissiveness. In Russia it was necessary only to seize power—and society would submit. A secret organization of heroes would be able to overthrow the autocracy. How congenial all this was to Koba!
MORE BLOODSHED
Staying on in Tiflis would aggravate the danger of arrest. Being arrested, however, was, according to Trotsky, an obligatory item on the revolutionary’s agenda, since it offered him a chance of that greatest of thrills—the defendant’s address to the court. True revolutionaries were eager to be arrested so that they could convert the court into a platform for propaganda. But Koba was an ineffective speaker, with a muffled voice, slow speech, and a Georgian accent. He felt sure of himself only at liberty, and in the conspiratorial shadows. So Koba was dispatched by the committee to Batum.
A Southern port. Narrow streets, a wind from the sea, cool little courtyards where drying linen is forever flapping in the breeze like the sails of ships. A town made for love and for mirth. Here his clandestine work continues. His contemporaries fall in love, marry, take the first steps in a career. But Koba flits from one “illegal” apartment to another like a man possessed. A workers’ demonstration is planned, on such a scale that it is almost an uprising. Much blood will be spilled. He knows the awesome secret: in great bloodshed great revolutions are born.
The unknown youth now had a meticulous chronicler—the police. Seventeen years of his life in the new century would be written up in police records. Policemen would leave accurate portraits of him. Together with photographs, full face and profile. The police are my strange coauthors. I am looking through the files of the Tiflis Gendarme Administration. Reports by policemen on the activities of the Tiflis organization of the RSDRP, on workers’ meetings conducted by J. Dzhugashvili.
According to I. Iremashvili, Koba becomes more and more “the leader of a small group of Lenin’s supporters in Georgia.” Yes. Right from the start he was the leader. And a despot. In one police report we read that “the Batum organization is headed by Dzhugashvili. Dzhugashvili’s despotism has aroused the indignation of many members, and there is a schism within the organization.”
But look at the results of his despotism. Quiet Batum is shaken by a workers’ demonstration on an unprecedented scale. There are clashes with the police, in which fifteen or so are killed and many injured. Blood and fury … another success!
The police made arrests in the town, but he had disappeared yet again. He fled to the mountains. The revolutionary Kato Bachidze tells us that “when he was forced to go into hiding after the demonstration Koba passed through the mountain hamlet of Krom. A peasant woman sheltered him, let him wash and rest up.”
Mountains, sunlight, little white houses, old men lazily drinking wine in the shade of trees. Time stood still. This was where his forebears had lived for centuries. No, this was not the life for him. But it would be dangerous to return to Tiflis; he had been on the wanted list there for a long time, and going back to Gori was equally impossible—they would be looking for him there. He decided to take an unexpected step: return to the scene of his crime, to Batum. The police did not anticipate such impudence. He managed to remain at large for a whole month.
This was when he took another step up in the Party hierarchy: he was elected to the All-Caucasian Committee of the RSDRP.
FIRST ARREST
It was a Southern spring night, and the revolutionaries were meeting secretly. But there was a provocateur among them, and the building was surrounded by the police. The police now supplemented his biography with the “report of the Inspector-in-charge, Fourth Precinct, City of Batum, on the arrest at 12:00 P.M. on April 5, 1902, of J. Dzhugashvili at a workers’ meeting in the apartment of M. Darivelidze.” Koba was carried off to jail through the happy city at the hour when his carefree contemporaries were pouring out of the taverns. Locked up for the first time, and in the dreaded Batum jail. This was the beginning of his prison Odyssey: Batum to Kutaisi.
WE LEARN, BIT BY BIT, WE LEARN
An Asiatic jail. Physical abuse, beatings from the warders, filth, total deprivation of rights. Criminals beat up political prisoners. He was completely lost.
In desperation he tossed an unsigned letter out of a prison window, with a message for his mother: “If you are asked when your son left Gori, tell them he was in Gori all the time.” The warders of course intercepted his mail. His naive impulse was followed by helpless despair.
But it didn’t take him long to get used to prison. “ ‘We learn, bit by bit, we learn.’ Joseph Vissarionovich liked repeating those words. With his soft accent and his light laugh,” Peter Pavlenko narrated to my father.
“We learn, bit by bit, we learn.” One discovery was that in prison the power of the warders was paralleled by the invisible power of the criminals. It was not difficult for this pauper son of a drunkard to find a common language with them. He soon became “one of us.” He honored the commandment of the Revolutionary’s Catechism: “Ally yourself with the criminal world.” He realized their potential, the contribution that criminals could make to revolution.
Lenin always appreciated this ability of Koba’s to find a common language with criminals. When units comprising former jailbirds and drunken soldiers mutinied during the Civil War, Lenin’s immediate suggestion was “let’s send Comrade Stalin—he knows how to talk to people
like that.”
POWER
His new acquaintances respected physical strength. That was something he lacked. But inured as he was from childhood to beatings, he showed his fellow prisoners something different: contempt for physical force. The prison authorities had decided to teach the political prisoners a lesson. “The day after Easter the first company was lined up in two ranks. The political prisoners were made to run the gauntlet. Koba passed between the ranks book in hand, refusing to bow his head under the rain of blows from the rifle butts,” wrote the revolutionary N. Vereshchak in his reminiscences.
Before long Koba had seized power in the prison, just as he had at school, in the seminary, and in the committee. The criminals were subdued by the strange power emanating from this swarthy little man with the angry yellow eyes.
In prison he adopted a rigid routine: every morning began with physical exercises, followed by an attempt to learn some German (true revolutionaries had to read Marx in the original). He never learned the language properly. His achievements in prison were of a different kind. Anyone who refused to recognize his authority became the victim of cruel beatings, administered by his new criminal friends.
And now the small, pockmarked Georgian with a shock of black hair was about to go into exile for the first time. “Koba was handcuffed to a companion. When he caught sight of me he smiled. He had a strange smile which sometimes sent a shiver down your spine,” Vereshchak recalled.
HAPPY, HAPPY DAY!
He was transported by stages to the rim of the world—the Siberian village of Nizhnyaya Uda in the province of Irkutsk. The Southerner found himself in the Siberian cold wearing his one and only overcoat, the black demi-saison. In his own country, snow rested only on the mountain heights, but now he was surrounded by it on every side. A flat land of cruel frosts.
But there, in exile, he received a letter from the god Lenin. In his book Stalin, Trotsky laughingly explained that this was just an ordinary circular, that Krupskaya, Lenin’s wife, had distributed copies of a letter signed by Lenin to all his provincial supporters. But the naive Koba did not know that. His god had taken notice of him! He always remembered that day, and included it in all his biographies.
BORN IN A STABLE
In exile he learned the details of a great event which no newspaper reported. On July 30, 1903, in Brussels, Lenin’s dream became reality. Some forty revolutionaries gathered in a small barn. A scrap of paper pinned to the barn door bore the inscription “Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party.” That barn was to see the birth of the atheists’ Messiah—the Party which was meant to make all mankind happy.
The Congress in the barn was presided over by Plekhanov. From its very first sessions Lenin set about splitting the Party even before it came into being. With a group of young supporters he came out in opposition to Plekhanov and all the established authorities of Russian socialism. He insisted on a rigidly centralized organization resembling a religious order. Plekhanov and Martov stood out for some semblance of freedom of discussion, something more like European social democratic practice. But Lenin was immovable. He succeeded in splitting the Congress and uniting his supporters in a breakaway group. In the vote on one item under discussion his opponents found themselves in the minority, and Lenin adroitly labeled them Mensheviks (“minority men”), the name by which they have gone down in history. He assumed the proud name of Bolshevik (“majority man”). How Koba must have laughed when he learned that those fools (Mensheviks) had accepted such a demeaning name! How could such people hope to lead the Party? The Congress was followed by an unrelenting struggle between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, a struggle for power over the Party, in all the provincial committees. They would fight each other, raucously and ruthlessly, at every Congress, for the best part of two decades.
Koba would finally put an end to this struggle in the thirties by exterminating the last revolutionary Mensheviks in the prison camps.
ESCAPES: SO SUCCESSFUL, SO STRANGE
It was November and the Siberian winter had set in, with blizzards one day and cruel frost the next. In this pitilessly cold land he pined for the warmth and the mountains of home. According to Sergei Alliluyev, Stalin’s future father-in-law, Koba made his first attempt to escape in November 1903, but frostbite in his ears and nose forced him to return to Uda. Police records tell us, however, that “the political exile Dzhugashvili” was on the run again by January 5, 1904.
He traveled across Russia all the way to Tiflis, using forged documents in the name of a Russian peasant. A Russian peasant? With Georgian features and a Georgian accent! Right across Russia! And nobody stopped him.
Now he is living in Tiflis. And this is another strange thing. Trotsky wrote that “a prominent revolutionary rarely returned to his native place; he would be too conspicuous.” If he did return to his hometown, an illegal was at once caught in the net of police surveillance. Statistics show that he would be under arrest within six months at the latest. But Koba would remain at large as an illegal from January 1904 to March 1908—four years—without ever once being detained. The Tiflis Okhrana, which was responsible for security throughout the Caucasus, failed to locate him in four whole years. That is what we read in his official biography. But there are other sources of information: “In 1905 he was arrested and escaped from prison” (from a report on J. Dzhugashvili compiled in 1911 by the head of the Tiflis Department of State Security, I. Pastryulin). “28. 01. 1906 I. Dzhugashvili was arrested in Mikha Bocharidze’s apartment” (police records). He was, then, arrested, and more than once? And as before succeeded in escaping? And was not afraid to return to the dangerous Caucasus? Why?
In Tiflis Koba got to know Sergei Alliluyev.
“We first met in 1904—he had just escaped from exile,” wrote Alliluyev in his memoirs. Alliluyev had been in the Party from the day it was founded and had worked in the railroad workshops where Koba had preached Marxism to workers’ groups. Alliluyev’s wife was a madly romantic beauty. She was not yet fourteen when she tied her clothes up in a bundle, slung it over her shoulder, and eloped with him. She was now thirty—and as capable as ever of romantic infatuations. But every new romance ended in her returning to the good-natured Sergei. There is a horrid legend that this passionate woman was not unmoved by Koba’s arrival on the scene and that the birth of her younger daughter, Nadya, who was to be Koba’s second wife, may have been the result of this infatuation. It is only a legend. The infant Nadya had made her appearance before Koba met Alliluyev.
MORE RIDDLES, MORE QUESTIONS
Nineteen hundred five had arrived, and the hitherto unshakable empire was rocked by the first Russian Revolution, which took Bolsheviks and Mensheviks alike by surprise. They were still arguing about revolution when, suddenly, it began. Mass disorders, attacks on the police, mutinies in the army, barricades … revolution is always theater. Enter the jeunes premiers—the dazzling orators. In this time of the orators Koba was effaced, withdrew into the shadows. That, at least, is what Trotsky wrote about him later.
But there was something strange, something mysterious about those “shadows.” We know that he was editing a minuscule newspaper—the Caucasian Workers’ News Sheet—in Tiflis. And also writing a theoretical work paraphrasing Lenin’s ideas. But was this all that the ever-active Koba could find to do in the days of revolution?
No, of course not. There was something else. And that “something” the great conspirator has concealed from us. Most skillfully. It is significant that the mysterious arrests which he ignores in his biography occurred in those years. It is significant that this was when Lenin first took notice of Koba, and Koba made his way to Tammerfors for the first Bolshevik conference.
Using once again a passport belonging to someone with a Russian surname, this Georgian had no difficulty in crossing the frontier. And this in the days of revolution, when trains for Finland teemed with secret agents looking for revolutionaries in hiding there. But Koba escaped arrest. Yet again, his luck held.
At Tammerfors he saw Lenin for the first time. The naiveté, the primitive uncouthness of Koba as he then was shows clearly in his account of this meeting with his idol:
In my imagination I pictured Lenin as a giant. How disappointed I was to see a very ordinary human being.… It is generally accepted that a great man must arrive late at meetings … so that participants will await his appearance with reverent awe.… [But to his amazement Lenin arrived on time] … and chatted with rank-and-file delegates.
His surprise was genuine, because Koba himself—as a woman revolutionary, F. Knunyants, writes—“was always late for meetings—not very late, but regularly late.”
He did not address the Congress. Nor—as Trotsky quite fairly noted later—did he make his mark on this occasion outside the conference room. Yet Lenin again summoned him to take part in the Fourth Congress, in Stockholm, and, although he had still done nothing to distinguish himself, invited him to yet another Congress, this time in London.
Let us note in passing that these visits to foreign capitals made no impression on the ex-poet. He never subsequently mentioned them. What Trotsky tells us about his own first encounter with Paris will serve as an explanation for Koba too: “To take in Paris you have to expend too much of yourself. I had my own sphere of activity which brooked no rival: revolution.” In this respect they were all alike. The revolutionary Maria Essen describes a walk with Lenin in the Swiss mountains. Lenin and this young woman are standing on a mountaintop: “The view is boundless … the glare from the snow is intolerably bright.… I am in the mood for high poetry … about to recite Shakespeare and Byron … when I look at Vladimir Ilyich. He sits there deep in thought, and suddenly raps out ‘Say what you like, the Mensheviks are really shitting on us!’ ” Koba was just the same. He didn’t visit museums, didn’t wander the streets. To them, all these bourgeois cities were just bivouacs on the road to revolution.
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