HISTORICAL PERSONAGES GATHER
In the investigators’ files on Dzhugashvili we catch a glimpse of someone else who was to be famous: Vyacheslav Skryabin. The revolutionary Skryabin’s Party pseudonym was “Molotov.” That was the name under which the future Minister of Foreign Affairs would partition Europe and go down in history.
Looking through his meager files in the Party Archive I find the curriculum vitae which he wrote on being arrested at the age of nineteen. The future minister, I find, is another who did not complete his education. He had founded a secret revolutionary organization in the Kazan Modern School and, as a result, was expelled and sent to live under police surveillance in Solvychegodsk.
So the two of them had lived in the same place—though not at the same time. Fate had chosen to postpone their meeting. When Dzhugashvili fled to Petersburg, his future loyal henchman had only just turned up in Solvychegodsk. Living, to begin with, in the very same hospitable household, that of Kuzakova.
The romantic lives of young people in exile. How young they were, how full of hope, on the threshold of the second decade of a young century. Their century. One which would bring these unknown youths power and glory. Followed—for most of them—by their destruction.
PLACED ON THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE BY LENIN HIMSELF
He arrived in Vologda at the end of December 1911. It was Christmas, and the town was joyfully celebrating the great holiday.
“We,” wrote Koba’s old classmate I. Iremashvili in his memoirs, “felt like convicts, condemned to spend the years of our youth in this place although guilty of nothing.”
In the new year Koba’s fortunes took an immediate turn for the better. Sergo Ordzhonikidze, an old friend of his and an important Party functionary, came to Vologda to see him. Grigori Ordzhonikidze, whose Party alias was “Sergo,” was younger than Koba. He was born in 1886 in a Georgian gentry family. He joined the revolutionary movement at seventeen, was imprisoned, emigrated, and lived for some time in France. He was famous in the Party for his quick temper and his habit of arguing furiously and yelling at his opponents. It was because of this that delegates to one Congress were reluctant to elect him to the Central Committee. Lenin, however, greatly valued Sergo’s loyalty, and craftily claimed that he shouted so loudly at his opponents because he was deaf in one ear. Now, in 1912, Ordzhonikidze had been sent back to Russia by Lenin, to work underground.
It was Ordzhonikidze who told Koba about surprising happenings in the Party. The indefatigable Lenin had carried out a coup!
After the defeat of the 1905 Revolution, rank and file members of the Party, Mensheviks and Bolsheviks alike, had striven to repair the breach. This became a matter of urgency when the Mensheviks found themselves short of funds. They tried to arrange a discussion of the Shmit legacy: the money, willed to the RSDRP as a whole, had been seized by the Bolsheviks. The two sides agreed to hold an All-Russian Conference of the RSDRP, with a view to reuniting the warring factions once and for all. Few of them believed it possible.
“Needless to say at any such conference a bunch of brawlers living outside Russia would try to outshout each other … and it was the purest self-deception to expect anything sensible from these fighting-cocks,” the famous revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg sarcastically remarked.
She did not know her Lenin. All he wanted was to show the Party that “we have done everything we could to restore unity.” After which he accused the Mensheviks of unwillingness to cooperate and in January 1912 carried out a blatant coup. He convened a conference of Bolsheviks in Prague. They proclaimed themselves sole representatives of the RSDRP and elected a Central Committee consisting only of Bolsheviks. Lenin, Zinoviev, and Ordzhonikidze himself, who had taken a most active part in preparations for the Prague Conference, were among those elected to the Central Committee. Koba was not.
Koba was brought into the Central Committee later, by Lenin in person.
There were indignant letters from Plekhanov, from Trotsky, from the Menshevik leaders, from the German socialists—but Lenin simply ignored them.
This was when Koba began to master a crucial lesson in the art of leadership in the new century: complete disregard of public opinion.
Ordzhonikidze conveyed the leader’s will: Koba must escape. On February 28, 1912, a few days after his meeting with Ordzhonikidze, he ran away yet again.
Once he was clear of his place of exile, the new Central Committee member became frantically active. Pining for the sun in the vast Siberian wilderness, he began with a trip back to Tiflis. Then he made for Petersburg, inspecting provincial Party committees en route. The police painstakingly touched up his portrait: “face pockmarked, eyes hazel, mustache black, nose unremarkable. Special distinguishing marks: wart over right eyebrow, left arm does not bend at elbow.” The revolutionary Vera Shveitser adds to the portrait: “On the way back to Petersburg he called at Rostov. He left me instructions for the work of the Don Committee. Almost the whole Central Committee was imprisoned at the time. We walked all the way to the station, and to disguise the purpose of our meeting drank a cup of coffee and spent two hours there waiting for the train. He was wearing a black autumn overcoat … his hat was dark gray, almost black.” The same old overcoat, the same old hat. The man in black.
As Nadezhda Krupskaya told it, “Lenin was greatly exercised by the elections to the State Duma (parliament). For the sake of that institution he had already sacrificed some of those closest to him, dispatching Inessa Armand and Georgi Safarov to take part in the electoral campaign. [Armand was Lenin’s mistress—Krupskaya had to reconcile herself to her existence—while Safarov was then acting as secretary to the Leader.] Inessa and Safarov, whom Lenin pumped full of instructions, were immediately arrested in Petersburg.” That was when Lenin had made Koba escape. He arrived in Petersburg without incident.
After the Revolution Safarov would be one of the leaders in the Red Urals, and would sign the warrant for the execution of the imperial family. Only to be executed himself on Stalin’s orders some twenty years later.
ANOTHER FANTASTIC JOURNEY
In Petersburg Koba now took charge of the electoral campaign. This was when he met Skryabin (Molotov), who was also living illegally in the capital. They were joined by another revolutionary, Sverdlov. On this occasion Koba was uncharacteristically circumspect. Arrests were usually made at night, so this time Koba did not go home at night. After a get-together with workers to discuss electoral tactics, he would spend the whole night wandering from one cabman’s tearoom or tavern to another. Koba sat waiting for morning in a choking haze of tobacco smoke among cabbies and homeless drunks, dozing at their tables. Sleepless nights left him so weary that he could hardly stand on his feet.
In spite of all this, spring in Petersburg ended with his arrest. But whereas in September 1911 he had been at liberty for exactly three days, this time it was several weeks. He was arrested on April 22 and sent—instead of to Vologda—to the harsh Narym region. But he had no intention of staying around for the icy Narym winter, and in September he escaped with no difficulty whatsoever. For the fifth time. There is a telegram in the Police Department’s files which reads: “Dzhugashvili escaped Narym region … intends go to Lenin for consultation … in event of discovery request not arrest immediately … better as he attempts to cross frontier.”
But in spite of these orders, in spite of police surveillance, he manages in some mysterious manner to cross the frontier safely.
He travels first to Cracow, to see Lenin, and in November coolly returns to Petersburg. Then at the end of December he makes his way back, with no difficulty at all, to Lenin in Cracow to take part in the February conference of the Central Committee. And all this without an external passport. How was it possible?
What follows is his own explanation, as retold by Anna Alliluyeva. It seems that “Koba did not have the address of his dispatcher [the person who was to help him across the frontier] … but he met a Polish shoemaker in the market … and when the Pole learned t
hat Koba’s father had also been a shoemaker, in Georgia, which was also oppressed, like Poland … he immediately agreed to guide him over the frontier. The Pole wouldn’t take any money, and his parting words were … ‘We sons of oppressed nations must help each other.’ … I heard this story many years after the Revolution.… He laughed as he told it to us.”
It was indeed a story for naive little girls, to be told with a laugh. The question remains: how did he manage to get abroad twice, without an external passport, and when the police had been alerted?
BLOODY MARXISM
Once abroad, he was able to observe the free and easy life of the Bolshevik émigrés, debating in cafés over coffee. Some of them had their wives and children with them and lived a normal life, paid for with money earned by illegals like himself, working in inhuman conditions in Russia. Here, at last, was his opportunity to talk to Lenin. What did they talk about? Probably the same things that Lenin discussed with Valentinov and other congenial revolutionaries. Valentinov has reproduced these conversations for us.
The number one subject was “bloody Marxism”: “Being a Marxist [Lenin told Valentinov] doesn’t just mean learning Marxist formulas off by heart … a parrot can do that.… To be a Marxist you need the right psychology … what people call Jacobinism.… Jacobinism means fighting for your objective with no fear whatsoever of resolute actions, not fighting in white gloves … not fearing to resort to the guillotine.… A difference in attitudes to Jacobinism is precisely what divides the world socialist movement into two camps—the revolutionary and the reformist.” Valentinov added that “Lenin spoke so passionately that there were red spots over his cheekbones and his eyes became pinpoints.” Jacobinism and the guillotine were lessons which Koba would remember well.
Following Lenin, he moved on to Austria.
In his eternal black overcoat and dark hat he turns up next in Vienna.
Trotsky was in Vienna in 1913, staying with one Skobelev (the son of a rich citizen of Baku) who was a faithful disciple of his at the time, but later an opponent and a minister in the Provisional Government. “Suddenly,” wrote Trotsky, “the door opened without a knock and … a strange figure appeared on the threshold: a very thin man, rather short, his face swarthy with a grayish tinge and clearly visible pockmarks. He looked anything but friendly. This stranger emitted a guttural sound, which might have been taken for a greeting, silently poured himself a glass of tea, and just as silently left the room. ‘That’s the Caucasian, Dzhugashvili,’ Skobelev explained. ‘He’s just got into the Bolshevik Central Committee and is obviously beginning to play an important part there.’ The impression he made was difficult to describe, but no ordinary one … the a priori hostility, the grim concentration.”
Trotsky, then, had finally taken notice of him.
THE MARVELOUS GEORGIAN OF STEEL
Meanwhile, Stalin went back with his cup of tea to the work he had interrupted.
Lenin had invited the non-Russian Koba to come out against the “Bundist bastards,” Jewish socialists so incapable of forgetting their Jewishness that they were demanding national-cultural autonomy. Did Lenin perhaps want to take advantage of Koba’s anti-Semitism—much as he himself hated such sentiments—for the good of the cause?
Koba worked away diligently. He wrote about the world of the future, in which the great ideal of internationalism would triumph, and there would be no miserable little nations, but the one world of the victorious proletariat. Lenin painstakingly edited the work. “We have here a marvelous Georgian, who has sat down to write a big article”, he wrote to Gorky. (The eminent writer Maxim Gorky had enjoyed great popularity from the beginning of the twentieth century. To the Russian intelligentsia his name symbolized revolutionary ideas. The younger generation called him “The Stormy Petrel of the Coming Revolution.” He was a friend of Tolstoy, Chekhov … and also of Lenin.)
Koba signed this article “Stalin”—“Man of Steel.” He was following the fashion. Skryabin, for example, had become Molotov, the man who smites the enemy like a hammer (molot). There was a Bolshevik called Bronevoi—as hard as armor plating (bronya). And so on. But Koba did not become Stalinov, on the analogy of Molotov. He chose Stalin, to sound like Lenin. These naive sobriquets made the intellectual Trotsky smile.
From Vienna, Koba wrote a letter to Lenin’s favorite, Malinovsky, who led the Bolshevik group in the Duma. Malinovsky was a brilliant orator, and the organizer of a metalworkers’ union. As in Koba’s case, Lenin himself had procured Malinovsky’s election to the Central Committee of the Party. But in addition to his important Party responsibility Malinovsky carried out other duties as an informer on the payroll of the police department.
To judge from the letter, Koba and his addressee in Petersburg were close acquaintances. They were both illegals, both belonged to the category of Party leaders who worked inside Russia instead of sitting it out abroad. In his frank letter Koba complained to Malinovsky that the theoretical work he is engaged on is rubbish, poppycock. That was how he defined his own theoretical pursuits. He was bored. He could never be number one at this—he could only repeat Lenin’s thoughts. But Lenin was now sending him to Russia.
ARRESTED AGAIN
Koba, then, returned to Petersburg, to supervise the work of the Duma group. Once again he behaved with extreme caution. But to no avail. The writer Yuri Trifonov told this story:
My Bolshevik grandmother T. Slovatinskaya lived in a “safe house” with her daughter, my future mother. Hiding in one of the rooms was A. Solts, a Bolshevik with terms of exile and imprisonment behind him. He lived in a tiny room meant for a servant. One day Solts told my grandmother that he would be bringing along a comrade, the “Caucasian,” whom he wished to introduce to her. It turned out that this Caucasian had been sharing with Solts for some days, without ever leaving the room. I don’t know how they made room for the two of them on that narrow iron bed. Evidently, my grandmother said, the usual unwritten rules of conspiracy did not allow them to confide even in me.… That was how I met Stalin. At first I found him too serious, too reserved and shy. He seemed to be afraid above all of giving trouble or inconveniencing anybody. I had difficulty in persuading him to sleep in the large room, where he would be more comfortable. When I left for work I always asked him to have dinner with the children,… but he shut himself up in his room all day and lived on beer and bread.… He was arrested in the spring of 1913, at a charity concert. We often organized concerts jointly with some student “friends-from-home” society, ostensibly for charity, but in reality to collect money for the Party.… I remember it as if it were today.… He was sitting at a little table, chatting with Malinovsky, the deputy, when he noticed that he was being watched.… He went out to the artists’ dressing room for a minute and sent someone to fetch me.… He said that the police had turned up, that he could not get away, and would shortly be arrested. He asked me to let it be known that he had been with Malinovsky before the concert.… Sure enough, as soon as Stalin went back in, two plainclothes men approached his table and asked him to leave with them. Nobody knew as yet that Malinovsky was a provocateur.
OVER THE EDGE OF THE WORLD
This time the punishment was harsh. Koba was banished to the Turukhan region for four years.
It was a long journey in a barred rail truck, across the Urals and Siberia to Krasnoyarsk. And from there to the rim of the world—the Turukhan region. He was taken by boat up the turbulent Yenisei to the village of Monastyrskoe. And on from there beyond the end of the world to a settlement called Kostino. Then beyond the Arctic Circle to the settlement of Kureika. The scenes that awaited him were enough to fill any inhabitant of his sunny homeland with despair—endless icebound winter, a short, wet summer with clouds of midges and troubled white nights. A place where time stood still. A limitless icy sky, and under it a mere speck of humanity. This was where the Bolshevik Joseph Dubrovinsky, Lenin’s comrade-in-arms, had committed suicide; this was where another well-known Bolshevik, Spandaryan, would die of tu
berculosis.
It was 1913, and the country was celebrating the tricentenary of the Romanov dynasty, solemnly observing the holiday of its tsars. The regime looked unshakable, and Lenin sadly acknowledged that there would be no revolution in his lifetime.
Koba wrote pathetic, self-pitying letters right and left.
“I don’t think I’ve ever had to endure such a dreadful situation,” he wrote to the Bolshevik group in the Duma. “My money’s all gone, I’ve started getting a worrying cough of some sort now that the cold is intensifying (37 degrees below). I’ve got no provisions, neither bread nor sugar, everything here is dear, I must have milk, I must have firewood … but there’s no money. I have no well-off friends or acquaintances, I have absolutely no one to turn to. What I’m asking is that if the group still has its fund for the repressed let it allot me say sixty rubles.”
And this to the editors of Prosveshchenie: “I don’t have a single penny, and I’m right out of provisions.… I did have some money but it all went on warm clothing … couldn’t you stir up people you know and raise say twenty or thirty rubles. That would be a real life-saver.”
He wrote to the Alliluyev family as well. They sent him money as soon as they heard that he was destitute. He responded: “I ask only one thing: don’t waste money on me, you need it yourself, you have a large family.… I shall be quite happy if you just send me the occasional postcard with a view.… In this accursed land nature is hideously bare, and I have fretted myself stupid longing for a landscape to look at, if only on paper.” In later years he hated writing long letters. But in those days, and in that terrible place, letters were the only possible means of talking to friends and relatives, and this lonely man had no one nearer than a family whom he half-knew.
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