He did not, however, realize it immediately. He wrote to Lenin from exile in Turukhan. He felt sure that they would save him, help him to escape. Now that he had no help from the police he could not manage it alone.
“Koba sends greetings, and reports that he is in good health,” Lenin wrote to V. Karpinsky in August 1915. But there were no letters for Koba. Lenin had other things on his mind. While Koba was rotting at Turukhansk, the First World War had broken out. And with it a great squabble among socialists. The majority supported their own governments. But Lenin proclaimed that “the defeat of tsarism” would now be the lesser evil. Defeat in war, soldiers’ blood—that was now the way to revolution. A few months later, when Lenin decided to revive the Russian Bureau of the Central Committee, he began showing an interest in Koba again. “Important request,” he wrote to Karpinsky. “Find out Koba’s surname (Joseph Dzh—? We’ve forgotten. Most important!!!).”
Yes—Lenin could no longer recall the faithful Koba’s surname. Then he changed his mind, and faithful Koba is not mentioned again. Koba himself kept trying to remind people of his existence. He wrote an article on the “national question”: Lenin had once much enjoyed seeing his own thoughts copied down by the non-Russian Koba. Koba sent the article to him. Lenin did not answer.
Reinforcements arrived in Siberia. Obeying Lenin’s wish, the Bolsheviks in the Duma had voted against war credits. The deputies toured Russia, agitating against the war. The whole Duma group was arrested.
5
THE NEW KOBA
SUMMING UP
His conversations with the deputies can have left Koba in no doubt about Malinovsky’s role. And the miserable role assigned to himself. For the second time in his life Koba suffered a terrible spiritual upheaval. The first time he had lost his belief in God. Now he lost his belief in the god Lenin. And in his comrades.
He started hating everybody.
He may have reviewed his career to date. He was thirty-seven. His life was more than half over. And what was he? A member of the Central Committee of a party of windbags, most of them in jail, the rest blackguarding each other in foreign parts. His life was a failure. He spent whole days lying with his face to the wall. He stopped tidying his room and washing the dishes after meals. Sverdlov, who shared his lodging, described how Koba thought it funny to put plates with scraps of food sticking to them on the floor and watch the dogs lick them. Sverdlov gave a sigh of relief when he moved to a different house.
Meanwhile, the authorities had begun calling up political exiles for military service. They didn’t trust Sverdlov enough to draft him, but they decided to take Koba, which tells us that he was still looked upon favorably.
Once more the Georgian was carried half-frozen over the tundra and down an icebound river. Six weeks later, at the end of 1916, exhausted by the journey, he was delivered at last to the medical examiner in Krasnoyarsk. But luck was with him: his withered left arm earned the future Supreme Commander exemption from military service.
His term of exile was due to end on June 7, 1917, but again the powers that be showed their goodwill: on February 20, three and a half months early, he was given permission to leave for the township of Achinsk. One of Lenin’s close associates, Lev Kamenev, was living in exile there at the time. Kamenev, editor of Pravda and a member of the State Duma, had been put on trial with the other Bolshevik deputies in 1915. But his behavior in court had been strange, or, to put it more precisely, cowardly: unlike the other Duma Bolsheviks, he had refused to condemn the war. In spite of this he was exiled to the Turukhan region.
As soon as he arrived Kamenev was called before a comrades’ court made up of other exiled Bolsheviks. Only members of the Central Committee took part in it. And Kamenev found it strangely easy to vindicate himself. He passed on some message which resulted in the adoption of a resolution approving the conduct of all the deputies tried by the tsarist court.
After the February Revolution some of the younger Bolshevik leaders in Petrograd attempted to put Kamenev on trial again. His august reply was that “for party-political reasons he could not offer explanations of his conduct in court pending prior discussion with Comrade Lenin.” In other words, he made it clear to the young Petrograd Bolsheviks that there were things which only the leaders of the Party were allowed to know. Sure enough, when Lenin arrived in Petrograd the “coward” Kamenev became a member of the Central Committee with Lenin’s approval. Evidently, this was another instance of the “double game” which Koba knew so well. Kamenev had been instructed by Lenin to belie his convictions in court. Lenin had tried to preserve the freedom of a Duma deputy devoted to him, but the police had seen through the maneuver, and Kamenev was exiled.
In Achinsk Koba visited Kamenev quite frequently. Kamenev, with his professorial beard, would hold forth, educating the uncouth Georgian, while Koba listened, said nothing, and puffed away at his pipe. He was learning. If Kamenev had only known what an inferno there was in the Georgian’s soul. How much he now understood. And how he had changed.
THE YEAR 17
“The year 17, whoever that may be,” the great, mad poet V. Khlebnikov called it in his visions of the future. Defeats in battle, the shortage of food, and a cold winter awakened the hopes of the revolutionaries.
“Something is happening in the world. I am afraid to open the newspaper in the morning,” wrote the poet Blok.
In a sketch written for the newspaper Russian Word, the poet Teffi listed the words most often heard in crowded places: “They’re selling the fatherland.… The cost of living goes up all the time.… The government isn’t doing a thing.” And the great producer Meyerhold put on a play called Masquerade, where, against a background of fantastically luxurious scenery, “someone” minced and flitted—this “someone” being Death.
And then—it happened. Suddenly. As always in Russia. That which no one could have thought possible a year earlier: revolution in Petrograd! “The whole edifice crumbled, without so much as a cloud of dust, and very quickly,” wrote A. Shchusev, the architect who was to build the Lenin Mausoleum. The writer Bunin recorded something a cabbie said to him: “We’re an ignorant people. Make one of us get up and the rest all follow.”
The jails were thrown open, local Security Police headquarters set on fire. Somebody had incited the crowd. And among other things destroyed in this revolutionary conflagration were lists of secret collaborators with the Security Police. The stupendous news soon reached Achinsk: the tsar had abdicated, and a Provisional Government formed by the Duma had assumed power. Koba’s fortunes were transformed in a split second. His former energy was reawakened. But this was a different Koba.
Kamenev and Koba hurried back to the revolutionary capital. A large group of Siberian exiles traveled in the same train. It was cold in the carriage. Koba was frozen, in agony, and Kamenev sacrificed his own warm socks. The exiles, including the unknown failure Koba, were given an enthusiastic welcome at stations along the line. They were now “victims of the accursed tsarist regime.” As always happens in Russia when rulers fall, society at large woke up to its hatred of everything connected with their reign.
On March 12 the Trans-Siberian express set him down in Petrograd. He was in good time—one of the first exiled Bolsheviks to arrive in the capital. Koba at once made his way to the home of Sergei Alliluyev. “He was still wearing the same suit, the same Russian blouse and felt boots, but his face looked considerably older. He amused us with his impersonations of the orators who had organized receptions at the stations,” wrote Anna Alliluyeva in her memoirs.
He had cheered up.
KOBA IN THE ATMOSPHERE OF THE “GENTLE REVOLUTION”
A March of sunny days. The soldiers who had carried out the revolution were still sitting peacefully in the cafés of Petrograd, whose proprietors fed them gratis. They belonged to units of the Petrograd garrison stationed in the city; those which on various excuses had managed to dodge service at the front and stay on in the capital. The army in the field contemptu
ously called the Petrograd garrison the “Sprinter Battalions” because those of them who were sent to the front ran away from their very first battle. They hated the war, and had quickly become an easy target for revolutionary propaganda. Now they felt like heroes, because they had refused to fire on the people.
The intelligentsia were happy: censorship had been abolished, there was freedom of speech for the first time ever. Political parties mushroomed. At the theater famous actresses came out front and sang the “Marseillaise” before the show began, rattling chains from the prop room, broken to symbolize Russia’s liberation. Freedom, freedom! In the streets of Petrograd there was red everywhere—red flags, the red ribbons of never-ending demonstrations. It was all uncannily reminiscent of blood. The only black in sight was that of burnt-out police stations. And the sun seemed to shine more brightly than ever that spring. Even the deposed empress said so in a letter she wrote to the tsar after his abdication—“such brilliant sunshine.” Yet the killings had already begun: officers were murdered by soldiers, policemen were beaten to death by all who felt like joining in. The press shortly reported the assassination of the governor general of Tver. The same newspapers, however, explained that he was “a well-known reactionary.”
Yesterday’s exile, of course, followed these events with great interest. He could understand the revolutionary mood of the capital, with its intelligentsia and a garrison unwilling to go to the front. But the rest of Russia, Holy Russia, all those millions of peasants who only yesterday were praying for the tsar, God’s anointed, what would they say? Well, they spoke.
“How easily the countryside renounced the tsar. It’s incredible—as if they were blowing a hair from their sleeve,” an astonished journalist wrote in Russian Word that March. So those who had said that revolution from above was a possibility had been right? It was true then: in a country of slaves people fear strength and will submit to it. “We learn, bit by bit, we learn.”
The Turukhan exiles went into action almost as soon as they alighted from the train. Lenin, Zinoviev, and other Bolshevik leaders were still abroad. As in 1905 they had neither planned the revolution nor taken part in it and they now found themselves cut off from Russia. As Russian subjects they did not have the right to travel across a Germany at war with their country. The exiles feverishly discussed what to do next. The Bolshevik organizations in Petrograd were controlled by youngsters: Vyacheslav Skryabin—Molotov, whom we met earlier—and two working-class comrades of his own age, Shlyapnikov and Zalutsky. In early March they had already made arrangements for the publication of Pravda, the official Bolshevik newspaper. Molotov and certain young Party functionaries of the second rank were the senior editors. Not so long ago they had met in garrets, but now the Bolsheviks had requisitioned the luxurious house of the ballerina Ksheshinskaya, once the mistress of the tsar and his brothers. There was a sort of cruel irony in it: this notorious “love nest” now housed the roughest of all radical parties.
Koba and Kamenev at once made their way to the ex-favorite’s house. Workers in black jackets and soldiers in gray greatcoats scurried up and down a once elegant staircase, littered now with cigarette butts. Underwood typewriters chattered away in the chamber which was now the workroom of the Party secretariat.
The young Petrograd comrades were less than delighted to see these influential new arrivals. But the comrades from Turukhan took a firm line. “In 1917 Stalin and Kamenev cleverly shoved me off the Pravda editorial team. Without unnecessary fuss, quite delicately,” Molotov recollected at the age of ninety.
The days of raging crowds, of street action and of oratory had returned. But our former poet spent the whole of this period in the editorial office of Pravda.
6
A GRAND MASTER’S GAMES
OPENING MOVE: ENCOUNTER WITH POWER
His Pravda articles, so strangely forgetful of his teacher Lenin’s views, would astound historians. Koba evidently liked this bourgeois revolution, which had so successfully transformed his life. While Shlyapnikov and the young Petrograd comrades invoked Leninist slogans—fraternization at the front and an immediate end to the war—Koba was writing in Pravda that “the slogan ‘Down with the War’ is completely useless for practical purposes at the present time.” Kamenev went further and called on the soldiers to answer the Germans bullet for bullet.
But Koba was not merely writing. Together with Kamenev he turned the policy of the Petrograd Bolsheviks upside down. He extolled the Russian Social Democratic Party and launched a campaign which, for a follower of Lenin, could only be called criminal: to unite the Bolsheviks with their foes, the left-wing Mensheviks.
Trotsky would later write of Koba losing his head, following Kamenev’s lead, and promoting Menshevik ideas. Trotsky was right. But he did not understand why this happened.
A second center of power had been established in Petrograd side by side with the Provisional Government at the very beginning of the Revolution: the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. The word “Soviet” itself was a felicitous creation of the 1905 Revolution. The word in its time-honored sense implied communal deliberation in an assembly of equals. It was deeply rooted in the peasant mentality and the Russian tradition of “conciliarity.”
While the Duma, swept along on a revolutionary tide, strove to prevent chaos, two revolutionary parties, the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks, quickly held “flying elections” (by a simple show of hands) in barracks and in factories. And as early as February 27 they announced the creation of a Petrograd Soviet. The Soviet comprised delegates from the workers and, most important, from military units. It was controlled, of course, by those who had so skillfully orchestrated the elections—the SRs and Menshevik revolutionary intellectuals. Thus, another claimant to power now existed in the Tavrida Palace, where the Duma held its sessions. One whose power relied on the support of the mob.
With the help of the soldiers’ deputies, the Soviet could control the garrison. It issued the famous “order number 1”: henceforward army units were to be governed by soldiers’ committees, and officers were to be supervised by rankers. This spelled an end to discipline. The persecution of officers began immediately. The president of the Soviet, the Socialist Revolutionary A. Kerensky, was immediately co-opted to the Provisional Government.
A new custom, suggested by the Soviet, was introduced: troops presented themselves at the Tavrida Palace while the Duma was in session, supposedly to show support for the Duma. But as early as March 3 the president of the Duma, M. Rodzyanko, narrowly escaped being shot by sailors who had come along. Koba could now observe the same scene from day to day: the approaches to the palace packed with crowds of gray-clad soldiers and black-clad workers. Trucks overloaded with soldiers and workers barged their way through the crowd. The streets bristled with bayonets and there was never a break in the yelling of the crowds, the red flags, the inflammatory oratory. People flooded out from the palace’s vestibule. If you wanted to move at all you had to join this human torrent. The might of the Soviet grew and grew. Koba knew that the soldiers searching the apartments of former tsarist dignitaries were acting on the orders from the Soviet. They were rather shy about it at first: after the search they would look embarrassed and ask the gentleman victim of the search for a tip. That’s Russia for you! But arrests were already being made. “Lickspittles of the old regime” were arrested and brought before the Soviet. One of those hauled in was old Shcheglovitov, a former minister in the tsar’s government. Kerensky narrowly saved him from summary execution by the soldiers. They were already tearing off the old man’s epaulettes when Kerensky confronted the mob, shouting, “Over my dead body!” On the eve of Koba’s arrival the Soviet had compelled the Provisional Government to arrest the tsar, in spite of his abdication, and to consign tsarist ministers to the cells of the Peter and Paul Fortress.
For the time being, the Soviet could not supplant the Provisional Government, since in Russia’s eyes the Duma and the government were the authors of the
Revolution. But the Soviet quite openly asserted its overriding authority. The ominous formula “so far and no farther” made its appearance. The government could rule insofar as the Soviet supported it. The Soviet was a mighty power, and now Koba, the chronic failure, was part of that mighty force. The Soviet was headed by old acquaintances from Koba’s Caucasian days—Georgian revolutionaries like the Menshevik Nikolai Chkheidze, its president. Another very influential figure, Irakli Tsereteli, was also a Georgian Menshevik. And they, of course, wanted to see their Georgian acquaintance Koba among the Bolshevik delegates to the Soviet. Yesterday’s forgotten man shortly became a member of the Executive Committee of the Soviet, the real ruler of Petrograd.
Koba knew what those in power required of him. He knew what he was doing when he suddenly forgot Lenin’s ideas, began echoing those of the Mensheviks, and gave his support to Kamenev. Intoxicated by the air of revolutionary Petrograd, like so many intellectuals, Kamenev was now preaching the “unification of democratic forces.”
It became more serious as time went by. In one of his articles Koba was in favor of the idea of preserving a unitary Russian state. “He seemed to have forgotten his previous ideas on the nationalities question, written down on Lenin’s instructions,” Trotsky said sarcastically.
Once again, Trotsky was right. And once again, he failed to see the reason.
These ideas of sovereignty, of the preservation of empire, naturally pleased people in the Provisional Government. And they naturally took notice of Koba, the influential radical who nonetheless held such comfortable views. The new Koba began attacking on several fronts at once in this first but dazzling game of chess.
“Koba Stalin” was the name with which he signed his articles. The old Koba, the pathetic loyal fool who had been so ruthlessly exploited and so easily forgotten, had been left behind in Turukhansk. He would no longer be pulling the chestnuts out of the fire for anyone. From now on he served only himself. Himself and the Revolution, insofar as the Revolution could be of service to him.
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