“JUST AS HIS COMRADES PERSUADED HIM TO WRITE HIS MEMOIRS …”
But his past as Koba always worried Stalin. Many of Koba’s comrades-in-brigandage would end their days with a bullet in the head in Stalin’s camps.
Inevitably Koba’s main comrade-in-arms in reckless exploits, Kamo, would be the first to depart this life. This happened immediately after Stalin’s elevation to the post of General Secretary of the Party. On July 15, 1922, Kamo was riding a bicycle in Tiflis, when an automobile, one of the very few in the city at the time, bore down on him. There was a dreadful collision. According to a Tiflis newspaper, “Comrade Kamo was hit so hard that he was thrown off his cycle, his head struck the pavement, and he lost consciousness. He died in hospital without coming to.” At his funeral, Mamia Orkhelashvili lamented that “Comrade Kamo perished just as his comrades had persuaded him to work on his memoirs and provided him with a stenographer for this purpose. The irony of fate!” Was it Fate’s little joke? Or one of his erstwhile friend’s?
FATE TURNS ITS BACK ON KOBA
But in the distant days of 1907, as the Palestinian revolutionary Asad-Bey writes, “He was straight and honest and content with little. All the rest he sent to Lenin.”
Throughout those dark years he was living, or rather hiding, in Baku, in the oil fields. This was evidently Lenin’s decision. He would henceforward always take care of faithful Koba. “At the wish of the Party I was transferred to Baku. Two years of revolutionary work among the oil workers toughened me,” Koba wrote.
He did indeed carry on “revolutionary work in the oil fields.” Together with his fighting squad he exacted protection money from the oil magnates by threatening to fire their wells. Sometimes the revolutionaries carried out the threat, and an angry red glow, together with clouds of smoke, hung over the oil fields for weeks on end. They also organized strikes, though these were profitable rather than otherwise to the owners. They raised the price of oil and made an additional payment. Yet Koba himself lived more or less the life of a tramp. All the proceeds were sent in full and promptly to Lenin. This was not easy for him now that he was married, and his wife had borne him a son.
LOVE
He had met the revolutionary Alexander Svanidze (Party pseudonym “Alyosha”) in safe houses in Tiflis. Alyosha introduced Koba to his sister. Like Koba’s mother, she was called Ekaterina. Her forebears were from Didi Lilo, the hamlet where Koba’s father had been born. She was very handsome. And very gentle and docile. Not like those free and easy, garrulous women revolutionaries. But nonetheless—a revolutionary’s sister. David Suliashvili, another former seminarist who had become a revolutionary, regularly visited the Svanidze house at the time and considered himself engaged to her. The handsome Suliashvili versus Koba. The revolutionary Faina Knunyants paints a pitiless picture of Koba in those years. He was “small, weak, with some sort of deformity, wearing a Russian blouse too big for him, and a ridiculous Turkish fez on his head.” But Ekaterina saw him differently. He had the glamour of Georgia’s favorite romantic brigand who robs the rich for the sake of the poor. Then again, his awareness of his power over others was itself fascinating. Molotov recollected in his old age that Stalin had “always been attractive to women.”
It was love, of course! She was as religious as his mother. They married secretly, and in church. The wedding was not kept secret only from the police. A church wedding meant disgrace for a revolutionary.
“There was hardly a single case of a revolutionary intellectual marrying a believer,” Trotsky wrote contemptuously. Koba killed people. Koba lived a life of near destitution, but it was his dream to have a real family, the family of which he had been deprived in childhood. He could found such a family only with an innocent and pious girl. Freethinking women revolutionaries, forever on the move from one illegal apartment to the next and from one male comrade’s bed to another, were no good to him. Now he had found her. “Hunted by the tsarist Okhrana he could find love only on the humble hearth of his own family,” noted Iremashvili.
They rented a room on the oil field—a squat adobe cottage, with a Turk for a landlord. Ekaterina (Kato) worked as a seamstress. Everything in their beggarly dwelling was sparkling clean, everything was covered with embroideries and lace of her making. His home, his hearth—a traditional family. But in spite of all this he remained the same ferocious revolutionary as before. According to Iremashvili, “He was terrifying in political argument. If he had been able to, he would have exterminated his opponent with fire and sword.”
She tried hard to make a home of the house to which he so rarely came, for fear of arrest. When he did come it was only at dead of night, to vanish again at first light. She bore him a son, Yakov. With a babe in arms to look after, she had difficulty making ends meet. As always, they had no money. The enormous sums which he obtained went immediately to Lenin. And in any case this near pauper despised money. To him, it was part of the system which he had set out to destroy. When money came his way he unhesitatingly distributed it among his friends. Sergei Alliluyev writes that “I was supposed to go to Petersburg at the end of July 1907, and had no money, so on the advice of comrades I went to see Koba.” Koba immediately offered him money, but Alliluyev could see how poor he was and of course refused to take it. Koba was adamant. He kept trying to force the money on Alliluyev, saying “Take it, take it, you may need it,” until Alliluyev finally gave in and took it. The Alliluyevs owed him a lot. It was Koba who had saved Sergei’s little girl from drowning. That same little Nadya.
His wife sat at home with no money and a wailing infant, and Koba had vanished into the night. After a while she fell ill, and Koba had no money to pay for treatment. Nor could he show himself very often at the little house. It was too dangerous. She was near death. In the autumn he was forced to move her to Tiflis. Her family lived there. The Svanidzes could look after her. But it was too late. “Kato died in his arms,” wrote Iremashvili. A photograph preserved by the Svanidze family shows Koba, looking frightened and disheveled, standing over her coffin, unhappy and bewildered. That was how he killed his first wife.
ANOTHER RIDDLE
Yakov was born shortly before his mother’s death, and the year of his birth is given in all official documents as 1908. But I found in the Party Archive a photocopy of a newspaper report that “the death of Ekaterina Svanidze occurred on November 25, 1907.”
Was Yakov, then, born after his mother’s death? One explanation given for this discrepancy is that Yakov was indeed born in 1907, but to delay his call-up to the tsarist army for a year, the local priest agreed to record the date as 1908. This appears to be the truth of the matter. But the question remains: when Yakov was given his passport after the October Revolution, why did the all-powerful Stalin not correct the date?
He did not correct it because everything to do with the life of the mysterious Koba was later painstakingly complicated by Joseph Stalin.
The newborn child was left in the care of the dead woman’s sister. The Revolution found Yakov living in his aunt’s family home and he would not move out until 1922. Only then did Koba—now Stalin and in Moscow—send for his son.
“After his wife’s death Koba showed great zeal in organizing the assassination of princes, priests, and the bourgeois,” wrote Iremashvili. But this was the time when strange rumors also made their appearance—dreadful rumors since their subject was a revolutionary. Koba, fortune’s favorite, who managed to elude all his pursuers, Koba the fearless, was in reality a provocateur insinuated by the police into the revolutionary movement.
Koba’s arrest put a stop to these rumors for the time being.
MORE BIG SURPRISES
Koba was now in prison. Documents found in his possession when he was arrested proved his membership of the banned Baku Committee of the RSDRP: this gave the police the right to bring a further charge against him, which could result in a sentence to imprisonment with hard labor. But the Baku Gendarme Administration for some reason closed its eyes to these documents a
nd recommended only that Koba should be returned to exile, this time in Solvychegodsk, for a term of three years. There followed another surprising decision: the Special Conference of the Ministry of the Interior banished Koba for a mere two years.
The exiles’ route to the godforsaken little town of Solvychegodsk lay through Vyatka. In Vyatka jail Koba fell sick with typhus. He was transferred from his cell to the provincial hospital.
At Solvychegodsk he rented a room in the house of a certain Grigorov. At that time the tiny township was one of the centers of revolutionary life: a population of 2,000 was increased by 450 political exiles. All these socialists, living at the expense of the state which had banished them, spent their days arguing about the coming revolution.
Under Stalin, life in exile would be quite different.
He made a complete recovery in Solvychegodsk and by early summer he was on the run. According to police reports he escaped on June 24, 1909. As before, he was not afraid to make the Caucasus his refuge.
He was at large there for nine months, was arrested on March 22, 1910, and under investigation for three months. The deputy director of the Baku Gendarme Administration, N. Gelibatovsky, drafted the following recommendation: “In view of his persistent participation in the activities of revolutionary parties, in which he has occupied a very prominent position, and in view of his two escapes,… the highest penalty, banishment to the remotest regions of Siberia for five years, is appropriate.” And once again the improbable happened. The recommendation was ignored. The decision adopted instead was a mild one: the incorrigible Koba was deported all the way back to—Solvychegodsk! That was how his third period of banishment began.
A RIDDLE, THIS TIME A ROMANTIC ONE
On October 29, 1910, he took up residence again in the otherwise unknown Grigorov’s house. But this time it was not for long. It can hardly have been because conditions were bad there; if they had been bad, he would not have moved in again. Some other factor was possibly at work.
On January 10, 1911, Koba moved to the house of a young widow, Maria Prokopievna Kuzakova. She herself has described their first meeting:
In the winter of 1910 a middle-aged man called on me and asked, “Did my friend Asiatani lodge with you?” The visitor’s name was Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili. He wasn’t dressed for winter—he wore a thin black overcoat and a felt hat. He had come looking for a room to rent. “How old are you?” “How old would you say?” “Somewhere around forty.” He burst out laughing. “I’m only twenty-nine.”
Kuzakova described her house as follows: “There wasn’t much room in the house, the children slept on the floor, and sometimes they got very noisy, so it was no good trying to read.” It obviously cannot have been the domestic amenities that attracted Koba and made him change his address.
THE MYSTERIOUS KUZAKOV
In 1978 the seventieth birthday of one of the television bosses, Constantin Stepanovich Kuzakov, was marked by a special program. He was the son of that same Maria Kuzakova.
Everybody in television knew that he was also Stalin’s son. They were remarkably alike. Moreover, Constantin Stepanovich’s life story was full of mystery. Someone highly placed in television told me that “soon after Joseph Vissarionovich’s elevation the widow was summoned to the capital and given an apartment in a new government building. The young Kuzakov got a higher education and occupied high positions, on the vice-ministerial level. All his life he never saw Stalin. But during the cruel Stalinist repressions when people in important positions were being annihilated, Kuzakov’s turn came. He was expelled from the Party, and it looked as though his days were numbered. He immediately appealed to Stalin directly. I have seen his appeal myself, in his personal file, with the decision taken by Stalin in person: ‘Not to be touched.’ And Kuzakov was immediately left in peace.” In Kuzakov’s curriculum vitae the date of his birth is given as 1908. But according to the same document his father died in 1905. Work that one out! Of course, the year 1908 is given for reasons of tact. Just as in the widow’s story of her acquaintance with Stalin, published in Pravda, the date of their meeting is given as 1910.
Koba must, of course, have met her early in 1909, during his first period of banishment in Solvychegodsk, since his friend, the Georgian revolutionary Asatiani, was lodging with her at the time. Koba was feeling the loss of his wife acutely. The good widow evidently helped him to forget. That was why when Koba turned up in Solvychegodsk again he moved in with her noisy household. So Constantin Stepanovich was most probably born a year later. I saw him on a number of occasions. The resemblance became more and more marked as he aged. He knew it, and played on it to some extent: he grew a mustache like Stalin’s, was slow and deliberate in manner, laconic. Svetlana Alliluyeva wrote that according to her aunts Koba had lived with a peasant woman during one of his spells of Siberian exile, “and there must be a son somewhere.” Here, as elsewhere in Koba’s life story, the facts were successfully muddled by Stalin: a rumor would be put around that the son in question had been born in Turukhansk.
(At the very end of September 1995, when this book was about to be printed, I was pleased to be able to inform my publishers of the latest Moscow sensation: the newspaper Arguments and Facts printed an interview with Kuzakov himself, titled “Kuzakov: Son of Stalin.” The suppositions turned out to be true: approaching his ninetieth year Kuzakov decided to disclose that which he had kept silent about throughout his long life. “I was still a child when I learned that I was Stalin’s son,” he told the correspondent.)
ANOTHER ENIGMATIC STORY
Koba’s exile came to an end, and so did his life in Kuzakova’s boisterous quarters with its rambunctious children, all of them, so spiteful tongues asserted, greatly resembling exiles who had formerly lodged there.
Denied the right to leave for the capital, Koba chose to reside in Vologda. All this time Lenin had been thinking of the dark, audacious Georgian. He sent him impatient invitations. Koba himself writes about this in a letter intercepted by the police: “Ilyich & Co. keep urging me to go to one of the two centers [i.e., Moscow or Petersburg] before I finish my sentence. I should like to finish it so as to have more scope for my work on a legal footing, but if the need is urgent I will of course take off.”
Another oddity. Why was this great conspirator so strangely trusting? How could he forget that the police opened and read letters?
The Police Department shortly afterward received from its agent the news that, “as might be expected, the Caucasian [that was what the police called Koba] will leave shortly for Petersburg or Moscow to see representatives of the organization there, and will be under surveillance all the way. It might be better to carry out a search and arrest him right now in Vologda.”
But there was no arrest. Those in charge of the department seemed not to hear, and did not react at all. Shortly afterward, Lenin gave the order, and Koba took off for Petersburg. According to a detective’s report: “3.45: The Caucasian arrived at the station with his baggage and got into a third class carriage on the train for St. Petersburg.… The Caucasian left on the aforementioned train for St. Petersburg.” And no attempt was made to stop him. Why?
To aid an escape, revolutionaries used two kinds of documents. There were false documents made from expired passports, stolen from local government offices, chemically processed, and filled in with new particulars. There were also “iron” passports—genuine documents, sold by local residents, who then waited a while before reporting their “loss” to the police.
Sure enough, after Koba’s departure an “application from P. A. Chizhikov, domiciled in Vologda, in connection with loss of his passport” appears in the records of the Gendarme Administration. The passport had, however, already been found. A certain “Chizhikov” was arrested in a Petersburg guesthouse, and turned out to be the fugitive J. Dzhugashvili.
Another puzzle. It was clear from the start that flight to Petersburg was pointless. Prime Minister Stolypin had just been killed by a revolver shot in Ki
ev, and the whole police force was on the alert. Petersburg was flooded with police agents. How could anyone with the Russian name Chizhikov in his passport, and Georgian features, hope to survive? Especially someone who behaved as strangely as Koba now did in Petersburg?
He was cautious to begin with. In his memoirs, Sergei Alliluyev tells us that Koba “left the Nikolaevsky Station and decided to walk around the city for a while … in the hope of meeting somebody in the street. That was less risky than looking for people at addresses he knew. He spent the whole day walking round in the rain. The crowd on the Nevsky Prospect was thinning out, the lights of advertisements were going out, when he caught sight of Todria. The whole police force was out and about after Stolypin’s assassination. The two men decided to rent a furnished room. The doorman handled his passport dubiously—his name was given there as Pavel Chizhikov. Next morning Todria brought him to our place.”
At this point the story again becomes difficult to understand. Alliluyev looks through the window and sees plainclothes men. The apartment was obviously being watched. But Koba, suspicious Koba, makes a joke of it, and seems strangely unconcerned. Later, accompanied by the worker Zabelin, he eludes observation with remarkable ease and spends the night at Zabelin’s place, after which he returns to the very same furnished room, knowing that he is under surveillance.
“From what Stalin himself told us,” wrote Anna Alliluyeva, Sergei’s oldest daughter, “he was arrested on his return to the lodging house, late at night after he had gone to sleep.”
That he was arrested is not at all surprising. The surprising thing is that he behaved so carelessly.
And so his three days in Petersburg ended in mystery. Examination of his case went on until mid-December. Once again, Koba was given a light sentence: he was exiled for three years, and with the right to choose his place of residence. Yet again he chose Vologda.
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