The Party Archive has preserved a story called “Into the Blizzard,” dictated by him to Alliluyev’s son Fyodor. Evidently, when he was courting Nadya Alliluyeva, Koba, like Shakespeare’s Othello, told stories about his “tormented past,” how he would go out into the Arctic night to catch the fish which were “his only food” and how on one occasion he had nearly perished: “The frost was getting harder all the time, the snow and the shadows from ice hummocks were bluish in the moonlight … the icy wilderness … a north wind sprang up, the snow whirled, the stars were hidden.… He had wandered into a blizzard.… The landmarks disappeared in the blizzard. At each gust of the icy wind his face grew number until it turned into an icy mask. The pain was excruciating. His steaming breath froze as it left his mouth. His head and breast were encrusted with ice, it was impossible to breathe, his eyelids were stuck together by hoarfrost. His body was losing heat fast. But … on and on he went. And he made it.”
While all this was happening Lenin more than once discussed ways of helping Koba to escape. But Koba’s “boots” (that was what they called the passports necessary for an escape) somehow never arrived. Why did he himself make no attempt to escape? He, who had escaped from places of banishment so often, would surely escape from the most dreadful of them all. But he suffered, and continued tamely living in this hell. Why? The answer to this question may be connected with the main enigma about Koba.
THE THIRTEENTH PROVOCATEUR
When I was a young student at the Historical-Archival Institute doing my practical work in the Central Party Archive in Moscow, I saw there the (top-secret) card index of the Moscow Security Police Department. It was a listing of revolutionaries: blue cards for Bolsheviks, white for Kadets, pink for Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs). On the backs of cards were the pseudonyms of provocateurs who had supplied information to the police. Recruiting a valuable provocateur could open the way to promotion for a Police Department official. They took good care of their protégés. The head of the Security Police, V. Zubatov, often said, “You must regard your collaborator as a married woman with whom you are having an affair. One careless step and you will ruin her.”
After the February Revolution the Provisional Government set up several commissions of inquiry, and many important provocateurs were exposed. But with the advent of the Bolsheviks to power, a remarkable change took place. The Special Commission attached to the Archive of Revolutionary History in Petrograd worked on exposing provocateurs for just one more year, then, in 1919, it was abolished. Its work resulted in the exposure of twelve provocateurs who had operated among the Bolsheviks. A thirteenth, whose pseudonym was “Vasili,” was never exposed.
KOBA: THE RIDDLE OF RIDDLES
Rumors that Koba was a provocateur began to appear at the very beginning of his career. When I started writing this book, Olga Shatunovskaya, a member of the Party since 1916 and at one time the personal secretary of Stepan Shaumyan, the chairman of the Baku Commune, was living on the Kutuzov Prospect. She had, of course, been imprisoned by Stalin in the thirties, but was rehabilitated in Khrushchev’s time, and afterward occupied an important post as a member of the Party Control Commission. Shatunovskaya stated publicly on a number of occasions that Shaumyan had been absolutely convinced that Stalin was a provocateur. He used to talk about his own arrest in 1905 at a safe house known to one person only—Koba. An underground print shop existed for three years in a Tiflis suburb, until in spring 1906 it was raided by the police. Once again, rumor insistently pointed to Koba.
We know of Shaumyan’s suspicions not only from Shatunovskaya’s account, but from documents recently published. The following document was preserved in the secret section of the Archive of the October Revolution:
To the Baku Division of the State Security Police. The Baku Committee of the RSDRP met yesterday. Those present—Dzhugashvili—Stalin, who had come from the Party center, committee member “Kuzma” [S. Shaumyan’s Party pseudonym], and others. Members confronted Dzhugashvili-Stalin with the accusation that he was a provocateur and an agent of the Security Police. And that he had embezzled Party funds. Dzhugashvili-Stalin reciprocated with charges of his own. Fikus [fig tree].
“Fikus” was the pseudonym by which Nikolai Erikov was known to the police. This revolutionary, who lived underground, was a secret collaborator of the Security Police from 1909 to 1917. He had been a Party member from the day it was founded.
The agent Fikus passed on another very curious piece of information: “The 150 rubles sent by the Central Committee to set up … [a printing press] are in Kuzma’s possession, and he at present refuses to hand them over to Koba.… Koba has asked him about it several times, but he stubbornly refuses, openly showing his distrust of Koba.”
It was at that moment of maximum tension that Koba was arrested by the police. His arrest and exile put a stop to the awful rumors for the time being. We now find Shaumyan writing sympathetically that “we were told the other day that Koba is being sent to the Far North, and he hasn’t a single kopeck, he has no overcoat, and nothing at all to wear.”
The first edition of Stalin’s Short Biography says that he was “arrested eight times, and escaped from exile seven times.” A text of the biography with Stalin’s emendations is preserved in the Party Archive. For the second edition in 1947, Stalin made a very interesting emendation. The old text reads, “between 1902 and 1913 Stalin was arrested eight times”; Stalin corrects this to “seven.” The old text says, “Stalin escaped from places of banishment six times”; he corrects this to “five.” One of his periods of detention evidently worried him, and he decided to remove it. In Shatunovskaya’s opinion, it was the one during which he became a provocateur.
When I heard Shatunovskaya’s stories, Khrushchev’s Thaw was coming to an end. She bombarded me with the names of old Bolsheviks who had known about Stalin’s role as a provocateur: V. Sheboldayev, Secretary of the Rostov obkom (regional chapter of the party); Politburo member S. Kosior; Marshal Yakir. A letter from L. G. Korin from Tomsk says: “The rumor that Stalin had been a provocateur was well known in the Communist International. My father, an old Bolshevik, told me that at some Comintern meeting Radek read out the Police Department’s secret instructions on the recruitment of provocateurs. This was done to teach Communist parties how to combat provocateurs and how to recruit agents of their own. And Radek read it out with Stalin’s unmistakable slight accent.”
Amusingly, I stumbled on these secret instructions when I was looking into the secret Comintern files. Here are a few extracts:
Secret agents are most useful to the Security Department if they are at the top of the Party.… If it is unable to recruit an agent of this sort, the Security Division tries to help its agent to rise from the lower levels to the summit of the party.…
The most suitable people to work on are those who return from exile without authorization, those detained when trying to cross the frontier, those arrested with incriminating objects intended for dispatch.… If a secret agent is in danger of exposure he is arrested together with other members of his party, including the one by whom they were told that he was a provocateur.
So we can easily imagine that, as Korin says, “Radek’s reading was a great success with the initiated among his listeners.”
Shatunovskaya told me that the materials on Stalin’s career as a provocateur were shown to Khrushchev, but when people asked for further investigation Khrushchev threw up his hands and said, “It’s impossible. It would mean that our country was ruled for thirty years by an agent of the tsarist Secret Police.”
WAS OUR COUNTRY RULED FOR THIRTY YEARS BY AN AGENT OF THE TSARIST SECRET POLICE?
Consider all his fantastic escapes, his trips abroad, the strange complaisance of the police, the endless list of futile coded telegrams asking for Koba to be intercepted, arrested, and never for some reason taking effect.
Consider one of those coded telegrams in the Archive, from the head of the Moscow Okhrana Division A. Martynov to the Petersburg Di
vision: “November 1, 1912 … Koba Dzhugashvili on his way to Petersburg should be detained before he leaves for abroad.” But Koba went on his way via Petersburg and across the frontier. Yet again. And would take part together with Lenin in the Bolsheviks’ Prague Conference. At which, incidentally, the provocateur Malinovsky would also be present. Can he really have been an Okhrana agent?
THE MIRROR
To understand it we must recall the strange story of his close acquaintance and correspondent Roman Malinovsky. Malinovsky was the head of the Metalworkers Trade Union. As early as 1911 some members of the Party harbored serious suspicions of him. He had been elected to the State Duma by a Moscow constituency and became leader of the Bolshevik group in that body. When the president of the Duma learned of his service in the police, Malinovsky was invited to leave without fuss. He disappeared from the capital.
The Bolsheviks were alarmed by his inexplicable disappearance. Rumors of his double-dealing were recalled, an investigation was ordered, and a commission set up. Malinovsky agreed to appear before the commission. It gave all his accusers a hearing. But Lenin stoutly defended Malinovsky, and the commission declared the accusations against him unproven. At the same time, the commission decided not to make public a personal matter which Malinovsky offered in explanation of his withdrawal from the Duma. Lenin continued defending his favorite with all his might. When the young Bukharin, already an influential member of the RSDRP, savagely attacked Malinovsky, Lenin wrote him a letter on Central Committee paper: if he went on slandering Malinovsky, he would be expelled from the Party himself. Rehabilitated, Malinovsky continued working for the Party. During the war he volunteered for army service, with secret instructions to surrender to the Germans and become a POW. In the Party Archive is a solicitous letter, dated 1915, from Lenin telling Malinovsky that warm clothes had been sent to the POW camp for him. After the February Revolution in 1917, Malinovsky’s role as provocateur was proved beyond doubt. But Lenin fought on to the end: he flatly informed the Provisional Government’s commission that he did not believe that Malinovsky was a provocateur. The documentary evidence mounted up, however, and in the end the Bolsheviks had to give in. Malinovsky’s name became a synonym for double-dealing, alongside those of Azef and Degaev. Yet shortly after the victory of the October Revolution Malinovsky came back from Germany to Petrograd. He was immediately arrested and sent on to Moscow, and stood trial on November 5. He made a curious statement in court, which is mentioned by Louis Fischer in his biography of Lenin: “Lenin must know about my connection with the police.” He asked for a confrontation, but the Investigating Commission of the Supreme Tribunal had him shot in a hurry. Those are the facts. The question which naturally arises is why did Malinovsky return?
In his testimony to the Provisional Government’s commission Lenin said, “I do not believe that Malinovsky was a provocateur, because … if Malinovsky had been a provocateur the Security Police would have gained less from it than our party did.” Lenin’s answer, perhaps, holds the key to a surprising situation. Malinovsky did indeed do the Party much more good than harm. The Security Police, under pressure to preserve Malinovsky’s cover, made the authorities tolerate his inflammatory speeches in the Duma and the existence of Pravda, the Bolshevik newspaper in which subversive articles were published. Vissarionov, one of the top men in the Security Police, says much the same: “When I started reading his speeches in the Duma I came to the conclusion that we could not go on working with him.” In this statement we hear the voice of a disappointed man.
Thinking over the Malinovsky story, I remembered something that happened when I was a young man studying at the Historical-Archival Institute. It was a year devoted to practical work on the card indexes, one of provocateurs and one of revolutionaries, referred to earlier. In those days this archive often received requests from old Bolsheviks applying for a pension in recognition of their services to the Revolution. These services were checked against the card index of revolutionaries and at the same time against the card index of provocateurs. Sometimes the same names occurred in both indexes. The meritorious revolutionary was found to be neither more nor less than a provocateur.
During my time in the archive I witnessed the following incident. One of these old Bolsheviks asked for evidence of his revolutionary activity. A woman archivist found his name on both indexes. He arrived at the archive, suspecting nothing, to collect his certificate. The woman in charge of our practical course had a soft spot for me and allowed me to sit in on the interview. I still remember him—a tall old man with exquisitely groomed snow-white hair. And I shall never forget how he laughed when they told him about their discovery. I reproduce from memory the extraordinary conversation that followed.
He: Yes, I was on the force as an agent, but never was one.
Archivist: I don’t understand you.
He: I was working with the Party’s consent. That was how we obtained information. Unfortunately, those who planted me on the police were shot long ago by Stalin. You’ll have to take my word for it.
Archivist: But you betrayed … [she named various revolutionaries].
He: That was done by agreement.
Archivist: With whom?
He: With those who planted me. But I can assure you that if those I betrayed had known about it they would have approved of my actions. Our lives belonged to the Party. For the good of the Party we were ready to sacrifice our freedom and our lives.
Archivist: But you didn’t ask your victims first?
He: That’s a pretty bourgeois way of thinking. Still, I suppose it’s difficult to understand nowadays. The revolutionaries are all dead, and the bourgeois are still with us. Thermidor has conquered.
I can see him now rising from his chair and walking out without saying goodbye.
Let us remember Bakunin’s Catechism: infiltrate all social groupings, including the police. The well-known socialist Angelica Balabanova recorded how surprised she was when Lenin expressed his readiness to make use of provocateurs for the good of the cause: “When will you begin to understand life? Provocateurs? If I could I would station them in Kornilov’s encampment [referring to the general who was the leader of the Russian Army].”
MY VERSION
First—my version of Malinovsky. When the police got to know about his dark past (which included rape and robbery, among other things) they began blackmailing him, and invited him to become an agent. He evidently decided to tell Lenin about it. He had studied Lenin closely, and as he expected the Leader made light of his past crimes. They had not been committed against the Party, and from the point of view of the Catechism, which called for collaboration with violent criminals, Malinovsky was blameless. The police, however, had him cornered. They could not be allowed to blacken him, since that would blacken the Party. Not surprisingly, Lenin had an idea absolutely in the spirit of the Catechism: Malinovsky must agree to become a provocateur, so that he could use the police for his own purposes. As the relationship between Malinovsky and the police developed, “a few comrades” had to be sacrificed. But only those least needed were turned in, while Malinovsky became incomparably more useful to the cause. It was thanks to the police that Malinovsky got into the Duma, where he fulminated against the autocracy unhindered. He was also very helpful to the Bolshevik newspaper Pravda. His activities as a provocateur were conducted in the strictest secrecy, as always, and it seems most likely that no one except the Leader knew about them. That was why Malinovsky returned to Russia once the Revolution was over. But he had forgotten the Catechism: the good of the cause was what mattered most. Lenin could not admit the existence of his Party’s criminal wing. So the tribunal had the forgetful Malinovsky shot.
This was hardly a unique case. In a party which had always acknowledged that “all things are permitted for the good of the revolutionary cause,” the practice of using double agents was not uncommon. The wily Koba was better suited than anyone to this role. It may be that Koba was given permission to establish contact with the
police so that he could carry on the “bomb business” more effectively. That would explain why escape was so easy for him, and why he showed so little concern for his own safety. And also why Lenin was untroubled by his strangely successful escape attempts and his suspiciously easy trips abroad. Here too, of course, others had to be sacrificed. But Koba, in all probability, did not give away only “unwanted” comrades. He could simultaneously use the police to settle accounts with his personal enemies. The money which the police paid him Koba would, of course, hand over to the Party.
“When parting company with a secret collaborator, be careful not to strain relations with him, but take care at the same time not to put him in a position in which he could subsequently exploit the person in charge of the investigation,” reads one of the Secret Police Department instructions. But, as happened with Malinovsky, the police began to suspect that Koba was playing a double game. When he lost their patronage he was compelled to behave more cautiously. He had to give up his part in the “exes” (expropriations) and concentrate on work with the Duma group. He was valuable to Lenin as an organizer capable of conducting an election campaign, but once the Duma elections were over he was much less useful to the Party. Others could oversee the routine work of the Bolshevik group in the Duma—in other words, carry out Lenin’s instructions from abroad. It seems possible that Malinovsky was allowed to turn Koba in. When he heard of Malinovsky’s flight, Koba would draw his own conclusions. He had been betrayed. They had sacrificed him.
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