Lenin, then, summons him to conferences, though, as before, he “does nothing in particular to distinguish himself.” It would be more accurate to say that he sometimes revealed a characteristic which Lenin, as a rule, found particularly odious. In the narrow revolutionary milieu, some of Koba’s shocking utterances must surely have reached Lenin’s ears. This one, for instance: “Lenin is indignant because God has given him comrades like the Mensheviks. What sort of people are they, in fact, these Martovs, Dans, and Axelrods? Circumcised Yids, the lot of them. Then there’s that old bag Vera Zasulich. You can neither march into battle with them nor make merry with them.” Or this: “They don’t like fighting, these treacherous shopkeepers. The Jewish people have produced only traitors, people useless in battle” (quoted from I. David’s History of the Jews in the Caucasus).
These are the very words spoken by the young, still wild Koba. If there were any doubt about it we could point to an article written by Koba himself and published in the underground newspaper Bakinsky Rabochii (Baku Worker) in 1907. This is Koba’s own account of his participation in the London Congress of the RSDRP, at which he expressed the same thoughts in the same lighthearted fashion, describing the Mensheviks as a “completely Jewish group” and concluding that “it would not be a bad idea for us Bolsheviks to organize a pogrom in the Party.”
Why, then, did Lenin, surrounded as he was by Jewish revolutionaries, and himself with Jewish blood in his family, excuse such a display of the anti-Semitism which all genuine intellectuals detested? It can be explained only by the requirement of the Revolutionary’s Catechism that “comrades are to be valued only in accordance with their usefulness to the cause.” If Lenin could overlook such utterances, Koba must have been needed by “the cause.” Very much needed. He must in fact have distinguished himself in some important way.
KOBA’S SECRET
Koba and Trotsky first met at the London Congress. Trotsky arrived at the Congress in a blaze of glory, eclipsing the god Lenin. In contrast to the émigré theorists, who spent all their time arguing about revolution, Trotsky had been in the thick of it back in Russia. In the last days of the legendary Petersburg Soviet he had been a leader, and crowds had listened to him with rapt attention. He had been arrested and had stood trial fearlessly. Sentenced to exile for life, he had escaped from Siberia, traveling more than four hundred miles on reindeer sledges. Trotsky simply failed to notice the tongue-tied provincial with a Georgian accent and—for some reason—the ridiculous Russian Party pseudonym Ivanovich. Trotsky did notice someone else, and later wrote about him. One brilliant young orator, hitherto unknown, made such an impression that he was immediately elected to the Central Committee of the RSDRP. The orator’s name was Zinoviev. This was the Party pseudonym under which the young Bolshevik Grigori Radomyslsky became overnight a Party notable.
Imagine the ambitious Koba’s feelings when he witnessed the sudden elevation of this blabbermouth—a Jew into the bargain—and the glorification of that other self-infatuated Jew Trotsky, realizing all the time that the Party would never hear of his own services to it. One person, though, did know of them—Lenin.
Immediately after the London Congress Lenin made for Berlin, and Koba went to meet him there. He mentioned this in the interview he gave many years later to the German writer Emil Ludwig. But on the content of Lenin’s discussions with him in Berlin he would say nothing.
After that he was on the train again, returning safely to Tiflis. Another fantastic piece of luck.
Shortly after Koba’s return to Tiflis the subject of his discussion with Lenin in Berlin would become clear.
GOLD
It happened on June 26, 1907—a hot summer’s day. Erevan Square in Tiflis was crowded as always. A colorful, cheerful crowd. Two carriages with a Cossack escort turned into the square. They were carrying a large sum of money for the state bank. Almost simultaneously two phaetons drove into the square. One of them held a man in officer’s uniform; the other carried two ladies. At a command from the “officer,” a band of something like fifty people seemed to rise out of the ground, barring the way to the carriages with the money. Bombs rained on the Cossacks and on bystanders. Amidst the smoke and the uproar the bandits threw themselves into the carriages. One policeman’s deposition reported that “the criminals seized a sack containing money under cover of the smoke and suffocating fumes.… They opened fire from revolvers at several points in the square and made their escape.”
Several people lay dead in the square—Cossacks, policemen, and soldiers, torn to pieces by bombs. Passersby lay mutilated among the wreckage of the shattered carriages. According to Trotsky, “There was no doubt in Party circles that Koba had personally participated in this bloody operation.” There was blood, always a great deal of blood, wherever the small, dark man turned up.
THE CRIMINAL WING OF THE PARTY
After Stalin’s death, Nikita Khrushchev, in his famous speech on the cult of Stalin’s person, expressed outrage that Stalin had downgraded the role of the Politburo by creating working parties within the Central Committee—the “fives” and “sixes,” vested with plenary powers—“card-players’ terminology,” Khrushchev indignantly called it. But Khrushchev belonged to the post-Lenin generation of the Party and did not know (or pretended not to know) that he was assailing one of the oldest traditions of the conspiratorial organization which called itself the Communist Party. “Threes,” “fives,” and other such “narrow formations” set up by the leader within the directorate, and known only to the participants and the Leader himself, first appeared in Lenin’s time. One of these Leninist “threes” was directly connected to the raid on Erevan Square.
“POISON, THE KNIFE, AND THE NOOSE”
At the end of the nineteenth century, the ideas of revolutionary terrorism held sway over the minds of many young people. Murder in the name of the revolution was considered “an act of revolutionary retribution.” Robbing banks or rich people’s homes to raise funds for the revolution was called “expropriation.” The militants and fighting squads who carried out these murders and expropriations were seen as so many romantic Robin Hoods. “We met with love and sympathy on every side … we had helpers in every stratum of society,” the terrorist Vera Figner wrote.
When he was planning a sequel to The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky thought of making the meek little monk Alyosha Karamazov a terrorist. Lenin’s brother Alexander was a terrorist. Under Stalin the official ideology stubbornly insisted that Bolshevism had eschewed terrorism from the very beginning. All the textbooks cited Lenin’s (apocryphal) words after his brother’s execution: “We shall take a different path.” This was just another official fiction. The revolutionary Nechaev, of whom the young Lenin thought so highly (and who became the hero of Dostoevsky’s Devils), said that “poison, the knife, and the noose are sanctified by the revolution.” And an admirer of Jacobinism like the young Lenin would never think of renouncing terrorism.
During the 1905 Revolution Lenin called for the “schooling of young fighters” by participation in “the murder of policemen and in arson” and in the development of a whole program of terrorism. But he knew that as soon as a revolutionary party engaged in direct action, the police too were activated and provocateurs were implanted in the Party.
THE WORLD OF THE PROVOCATEUR
The famous terrorist organization called the People’s Will was for a time headed by the provocateur Degaev, and the fighting squad of the Socialist Revolutionary Party by the provocateur Azef. Lenin, therefore, ran his own militant organization on rigidly conspiratorial lines right from the start. This was very helpful when he needed to conceal the militant groups not only from the police but from his own Party.
When the 1905 Revolution ended in defeat, more and more fighting squads turned into gangs of common thieves. There were many examples of “expropriated” money being spent on drink, women, and cocaine. The Mensheviks called for the disbandment of fighting squads.
Lenin and the revol
utionaries in emigration were in a difficult situation. As Trotsky wrote, “Before the 1905 Revolution the revolutionary movement was financed either by the bourgeoisie or by the radical intelligentsia.” But in the bloody year 1905 the Russian intelligentsia took its first look at the true face of revolution, at the ruthless face of a Russian popular rising. And was horrified by what it saw. The money stopped flowing.
But the comfortable lifestyle of the émigrés, the debates on revolution in Parisian cafés, the activities of revolutionaries underground in Russia—all these things required a very great deal of money. “In the circumstances, the seizure of money by force seemed to be the only means possible,” Trotsky wrote. At the Stockholm Congress of the Party, Lenin tried to defend the fighting squads. But there were too many instances of mere brigandage, and the Mensheviks were afraid that they would bring the movement into disrepute. The London Congress, therefore, categorically forbade expropriations and decreed the dissolution of the fighting squads.
By then, however, Lenin had already formed a secret group within the Party, of which the Party as a whole knew nothing. The police were better informed. “The main inspiration for and general direction of direct action was Lenin himself,” wrote the gendarme General Spiridovich. And the former Bolshevik Alexinsky, who was very close to Lenin in those days, tells us that “a ‘Threesome,’ the existence of which was concealed not only from the police but from Party members, was set up within the Central Committee.” Trotsky gives us the composition of this “threesome”: Bogdanov, Lenin, and Krasin.
A PARTY SECRET: THE GREAT TERRORISTS
In the notes to Lenin’s works there is an opaque reference to Krasin which reads: “Directed the technical bureau attached to the Central Committee.” Even after the Revolution Krupskaya would write evasively that “Party members now know of the work which Krasin carried out in arming the fighting squads.… All this was done conspiratorially. Vladimir Ilyich was more aware than anybody of this work of Krasin’s.”
The great terrorist Leonid Krasin, member of the Central Committee of the RSDRP, studied at the Petersburg Technological Institute, was expelled for revolutionary activity, and served a prison sentence. He was a brilliant engineer and a handsome man famous for his success with women. But bombs were his true passion. Bombs for the revolution. “His dream was to create a bomb the size of a walnut,” Trotsky declared. Bombs required a lot of money. And Krasin found a great variety of ways of obtaining it.
In May 1905, a certain Savva Morozov took up residence in a villa at Nice. Famous for his wealth and his generosity to needy causes, Morozov had been a great help to the revolutionaries. He was in a state of deep depression. After a visit from Krasin, he made a will leaving his insurance policy to the actress Maria Yurkovskaya Andreeva. She was not just an actress, she was also an agent of the Bolshevik Central Committee. Shortly afterward Morozov was found with a bullet in his heart. Had he shot himself? Or had he been shot by someone else? Only Krasin knew the answer.
The story of the Morozov money does not end there. Nikolai Shmit, Morozov’s nephew, was the owner of a large furniture factory—and secretly a member of the RSDRP. During the 1905 Revolution he had organized a workers’ rising in his own factory, and he had gone to prison for it. He had often announced for all to hear that the whole of his enormous estate was willed to his beloved Party. In 1907 he committed suicide, in prison, in strange circumstances. And no will was ever found. His heirs were his two sisters. But Krasin had his own way of dealing with the situation. To begin with, the Bolshevik Nikolai Andrikanis was deployed against the older sister, with instructions to marry her. He did so, but, alas, did not hand over the money to the Party. Next, the young Bolshevik Vasili Lozinski (Party nickname “Taratuta”) was dispatched to deal with the younger sister, Elizaveta. He made her his mistress and ensured that she would testify in court in favor of the Bolsheviks.
“Could you have done it?… Neither could I.… The good thing about Taratuta is that he stops at nothing.… He’s irreplaceable,” Lenin told Nikolai Rozhkov, a member of the Central Committee. The irreplaceable person is the one who stops at nothing—that was another lesson Koba would learn in the Leninist universities. “We learn, bit by bit, we learn.”
The Bolsheviks won the civil action over the Shmit inheritance and received an enormous sum. The Morozov and Shmit fortunes went toward the manufacture of Krasin’s bombs, and the organization of raids and robberies. And this outlay was returned with interest. Bomb factories, Krasin’s creation, were now set up in the provinces.
“Krasin’s alchemy was greatly democratized” was Trotsky’s joke. That was why there was much more bloodshed in those years, although the Revolution was waning. In 1905 the terrorists killed 233 people. In 1907 the toll rose to 1,231. The more money the revolutionary parties needed, the more murders and expropriations there were.
The taciturn Koba was one of those who operated with Krasin’s bombs at this time.
We can only guess when it first occurred to Lenin to use the devoted Georgian for “bomb work.” Lenin had given him full credit for the organizing talent he had shown in the bloody demonstrations in Georgia. And for his conspiratorial abilities. And his skill in making contact with dangerous criminal elements. Lenin now created a partnership between the wily Koba and the legendary Kamo.
BEWITCHED BY SOSO
Kamo was the Party pseudonym of the Armenian Simon Ter-Petrosyan. His daring and physical strength were legendary in the Party. He had to his credit the seizure of shipments in Batum, in Tiflis. Not many people knew that Kamo was no longer alone. He had a friend of long standing at his side—a friend who gave him orders. Because not many knew about their common past.
Simon, like Koba, was born in Gori. His father’s opulent home was not far from Koba’s hovel. From their childhood days little Simon was the masterful Soso’s obedient shadow. Kamo’s sister Dzhavaira remembers how “our father used to get furious: ‘What do you see in that ragamuffin Soso? Aren’t there any worthwhile people in Gori? He’ll get you into trouble.’ But it was no good. Soso had a magnetic influence on us. As for my brother—he was simply bewitched by him.”
Simon was a typical golem: diabolically cunning, strong, cruel, and with the brain of a child. The fearless and fantastically proud Simon, always flustered in Stalin’s presence, became strangely dependent. His Party pseudonym itself originated in one of Stalin’s sarcastic jokes. Stalin once asked him to deliver a parcel. “Kamo?” (for “Komu?”—“To whom?”) asked Simon in his usual mangled Russian. Stalin laughed and started calling him “Kamo” from then on. Making fun of Simon would have cost anyone else his life. But he tolerated this—and much more—from Koba. The master went further and made this joke-name Simon’s Party pseudonym, but the golem could not be angry with him. Simon was content to become Kamo. And so Koba, as Trotsky says, gave birth to a name which passed into history.
But the Erevan Square raid surpassed all Kamo’s other exploits. This magnificent theatrical event was, from start to finish, Koba’s composition. Kamo meticulously followed the score he was given. This was the first show Koba put on for all Europe to see.
“The Swiss burghers were frightened to death … they could talk of nothing except the Russian ‘exes,’ ” Krupskaya wrote ecstatically to Lenin from Switzerland. “The Devil alone knows how this uniquely audacious robbery was carried out,” wrote the Tiflis New Times. Koba evidently couldn’t contain himself. His previous terrorist feats had been performed anonymously, which was his preference, but the whole Party soon knew about his participation in the Erevan Square robbery.
Several Bolsheviks were jailed after this affair. Even the experienced Kamo was arrested as soon as he arrived in Berlin. But Koba, yet again, was strangely invulnerable. The robbery on Erevan Square was only one of his terrorist exploits. I. Iremashvili writes that “before this he had taken part in the assassination of General Gryaznov, the military dictator of Georgia in 1906. The general was to have been killed by Menshevik te
rrorists, but they were too slow about it. So Koba organized his assassination, and was greatly amused when the Mensheviks claimed responsibility.”
Pavlenko told my father that “Stalin injured his arm during one of the ‘exes.’ He was skillful and brave. When the money was snatched in Tiflis he was one of those who attacked the carriage.” But Koba never forgot that the Party had prohibited terrorist acts. It was not fitting for the Party and the country to have as their Leader a reckless bandit—even one who had robbed for the good of the cause. This was why, when he became Stalin, he would take pains to conceal Koba’s terrorist activity. It was, however, only too well known. In 1918 the Menshevik Martov declared that Stalin had no right to occupy leading positions in the Party, since he “had, in his time, been expelled for his involvement in expropriations.” Koba asked for a Party tribunal. “Never in my life,” he said, “was I either tried by a Party organization or expelled. This is a vile slander.” But in spite of his indignation Koba did not speak of not participating in terror. Martov insisted that witnesses should be called. He produced fresh evidence of Koba’s participation in the expropriation of the steamship Nikolai I. But he could not summon witnesses from the Caucasus, which was cut off by the war. The matter petered out.
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