“The train hesitantly set off in the direction of Kislovodsk, stopping at every signal,” Alliluyev wrote. The three of them assembled in the lounge car. This had previously belonged to the gypsy songstress Valtseva and was upholstered with a jolly, light blue silk.
In May 1918 the whole of the south was gripped by madness. The travelers can hardly have been sure that they would ever see Tsaritsyn. The Germans were keeping up their slow advance southward, and mutinous bands of General Krasnov’s Cossacks were active on the approaches to the city. There were also anarchist groups, showing the black flag under the walls of Tsaritsyn, fighting the Germans at one moment and turning against Soviet forces the next. The mountain tribes too were in a continual state of high excitement. There was no knowing how it would all end. The train might be seized by the Germans, by the Cossacks, by the anarchists, by almost anybody.
Stalin slept in the lounge car, the brother and sister in a separate compartment. “Only one track ran to the south, and that was jammed with convoys of troops,” Alliluyev noted. “Our train scarcely moved, and at every station we heard complaints that ‘the Cossacks took up the track yesterday.’ ”
Koba realized that he had to hurry. Every delay increased the time wasted in traveling, and also the likelihood of an attack. At night the train was blacked out and slipped through stations in a hurry or hid on sidetracks. Stations were dark and dirty. There were drunken shouts from soldiers on the platforms, and the sound of accordions, or more frequently of rifle fire. Old Russia on the spree. But the train could defend itself. Koba’s armed task force was four hundred strong. Among them the elite guard of the Revolution, the Latvian riflemen, battle-hardened in the execution squads.
Lenin had dispatched Koba to the south with the widest discretionary powers. “A telegram from Ordzhonikidze reached us en route: ‘the anarchist Petrenko has revolted in Tsaritsyn,’ ” Alliluyev recalled.
The authorities there had attempted to evacuate the gold reserves and valuables taken from the safes of the bourgeoisie, and Petrenko’s force had ambushed the train carrying this gold, launching empty wagons in its path. Men were killed in the collision. The groans of the wounded were deafening. The bandits lying beside the track forced their way onto the train, seized the money, and, obeying what was then the general rule, held a political meeting. Fiery speeches were delivered among the corpses and the burning railcars. The meeting ruled that the money belonged to the people, so they started sharing out gold coins, hiding them inside their dirty footcloths. For good measure they stripped the dead of their boots, and shot those still living. They were caught at it by Ordzhonikidze’s armored train, and immediately surrendered. But that night two surviving columns of bandits led by Petrenko and the famous woman Cossack Chieftain Marusya burst into the city. Marusya—Maria Nikiforovna—was an alumna of the Smolny Institute for Daughters of the Gentry. A cocaine addict, insanely lustful and cruel, she was surrounded not by her languid school friends but by drunken riffraff. Ataman Marusya was executed in the open street, wearing her white Cossack frock coat and her shaggy fur hat. A little later Koba received another telegram from Sergo: Petrenko had been caught and shot.
“This was the situation in Tsaritsyn on the eve of Koba’s arrival,” Alliluyev went on. “Toward morning on June 6 we found ourselves in the endless maze of tracks round Tsaritsyn, all of them jammed by trains.… Tsaritsyn’s dirty-white station building loomed before us. At dinner in the hotel I saw ample evidence that the city was well-off for food. It was only three days since Stalin had treated us to a Sovnarkom [i.e., government] dinner: vobla soup with a small piece of black bread. Here you could get a first-class meal for a ruble and a half.” The country round about was choking on its grain surplus. But how could it be brought from the back of beyond to Tsaritsyn? And sent on from there to Moscow?
Koba embarked on a revolutionary solution of the problem with a round of executions, just to inspire respect for his decisions. He shot everybody involved in black marketeering or counterrevolutionary activity. Or anybody who might become involved.
“Not a day passed without executions by shooting in the local Cheka HQ,” wrote Henri Barbusse, Stalin’s enthusiastic admirer. The city was a crazy quilt of all the political groupings produced by the Revolution. They had all congregated in this proving ground—Socialist Revolutionaries, anarchists, monarchists. So there was no shortage of people to shoot.
Trucks kept their engines running at night, to drown out the noise of shots and the screams. Bodies were stuffed into sacks and buried by moonlight. When day dawned, relatives of the dead swarmed round the communal graves, digging up the fresh earth to find their loved ones for reburial.
This was when Koba ordered the execution of the engineer Alexeyev, on suspicion of conspiring against the Bolsheviks. Alexeyev’s mother was a well-known Populist revolutionary. Lenin was told of his arrest and gave orders by telegraph that he should be brought to Moscow. Koba, however, was not one to change his decisions. His word must be law. Alexeyev’s two sons, boys of sixteen and fourteen, were shot with their father. N. Valentinov wrote that “Stalin informed the soldiers, who did not want to shoot them, that these were the children of the White Guard General Alexeyev,” and that sufficed.
Shortly afterward Koba sent a telegram to Lenin: “In spite of all the muddle in every area of the local economy it is possible to restore order … In a week’s time we shall be sending about a million poods [18,000 tons] to Moscow.” All this time he was living and working in a railcar. “For two and a half months the railcar was our operational HQ,” Alliluyev wrote. “The temperature was around 40 [104°F], and the rail-car got as hot as a brazier. The roof remained just as hot at night. Inside the car you forgot what it was like to be cool.”
That was where it all happened: after the shootings by night, in the overheated railcar. From then on Koba’s young secretary, Nadya Alliluyeva, was his wife. In time of revolution no formal ceremony was needed. They simply declared themselves man and wife.
THE RIDDLE OF FYODOR’S MADNESS
In that same year, 1918, Fyodor Alliluyev, the author of the notes from which I have been quoting, suddenly and mysteriously lost his mind. He suffered a shock of some sort, as a result of which for the rest of his life bouts of insanity alternated with rare intervals of lucidity, during which he could work and write. Svetlana Alliluyeva (Stalin’s daughter by Nadya) offers an explanation of his mental breakdown in her memoirs. Her story is that Kamo’s men decided to play a trick on Fyodor. The whole squad pretended that they had been killed, smearing themselves with bullock’s blood to make it more convincing. Fedya saw this spectacle and went mad. Svetlana evidently heard this account from relatives when she was adult. But it looks very odd indeed if we remember that this was a time when killing confronted you at every turn, when bodies were stacked out in the streets of Tsaritsyn, and bloody murder was part of everyday life.
I myself am reminded of a version without documentary support which is sometimes cited even in serious scholarly literature. According to this, Nadya was raped by Koba during the journey to Tsaritsyn. Her brother heard her screams and burst into the compartment. And Koba was forced at gunpoint to marry her.
This stupid and sordid fabrication perhaps preserves the distant echo of a true tragedy. Nadya was, of course, in love with the revolutionary hero. Perhaps what happened was what had to happen in that overheated railcar, when her morose idol returned from an insane orgy of executions. The cry in the night, which brought her unfortunate brother Fedya running to the rescue, was one of passion. He rushed into the unlocked carriage and saw his adored sister with the elderly Georgian—though only fortyish, this Georgian whom he idolized must have seemed an old man to Fedya. Violation of chastity seems a terrible thing to an adolescent. Idealistic Russian youths cannot always live with it. But all this is impermissible conjecture. All we know for sure is that it was night, that there was a railcar, and that these were three people—in the maddening heat under the stars of 1918.
UNDERMINING TROTSKY
Authority in a front-line town belongs in the first place to the military. Koba, who had never seen battle, tried now to take over from the military authorities. The North Caucasian Military District was under the command of A. Snesarev, a tsarist general who had changed sides. Several other former tsarist officers were working with him. They had all been assigned to Tsaritsyn by Trotsky. So Koba began playing a game which was sure to please Lenin: he wrote an endless string of complaints against Trotsky. Single combat with Trotsky was, however, dangerous. Koba needed a comrade-in-arms to act for him when risks had to be taken. Troops which had fought their way through from the Don were just then arriving in Tsaritsyn. They entered the city with Klim Voroshilov, originally a turner and fitter, then a professional revolutionary, and now a Red army commander, at their head. Koba knew how to win over such people, and Voroshilov, who was not very bright, became his devoted comrade. In any battle you need an ideological banner. So if Trotsky favored the employment of ex-tsarist officers as “military experts,” Voroshilov and Koba were naturally against it. They joined in attacking Trotsky’s people, accusing them of treason.
JULY FRENZY
On July 4, the Fifth Congress of Soviets opened in Moscow. Koba must have followed the surprising course of events there with great interest.
At first it was all straightforward: Trotsky arrived from the front to deliver a fiery speech threatening with execution all those who broke the agreements reached at Brest. This provoked the expected reaction from the Left Socialist Revolutionaries. Kamkov, the same Kamkov with the revolver at his side, waving his fists wildly, pitched into the German ambassador, Baron Mirbach, and “Bolshevik lackeys.” The SRs loved the village as a parent loves a favorite child. Kamkov varied his insults about Bolshevik toadying to the “German imperialists” with promises to “sling your requisitioning squads and your committees of the poor out of the village by the scruff of their necks.”
Delegates of the two parties sprang up from their seats shaking their fists at each other.
But Lenin was calm. And amused.
The Left SRs went into action on July 6. Two of them, Y. Blyumkin, who was in charge of the Cheka’s counterespionage section, and N. Andreev arrived at the German embassy. Blyumkin was a typical product of that ruthless period. Nadezhda Mandelstam described him sitting, drunk, in a café, swearing vilely and adding names at random to the list of those to be executed. The poet Mandelstam plucked the list from his hands and tore it up. Dzherzhinsky heard about this incident and promised to have Blyumkin shot immediately, but the following day Blyumkin was at liberty and painting the town as before. Bolsheviks had a weakness for the Socialist Revolutionary Blyumkin.
Once inside the embassy Blyumkin asked to see Mirbach. He and Andreev were taken to the ambassador’s study, where Blyumkin whipped out a revolver and fired. Mirbach rushed toward an adjoining room, but Blyumkin threw a grenade after him. Mirbach was killed. Andreev and Blyumkin then jumped from a window into the street, where a car was awaiting them. Blyumkin landed awkwardly, broke a leg, and had to crawl to the car. Nonetheless they succeeded in making their escape, thanks to the surprisingly slow reflexes of the Latvian riflemen on guard.
The Central Committee of the SR Party had decided to assassinate the German ambassador in order to nullify the Brest treaty. But what happened next was not easy to understand.
Members of the SR Central Committee gathered at the headquarters of a well-armed Cheka squad under the command of an SR called Popov. Blyumkin joined them. The mutinous squad was quite close to the Kremlin, but no attempt was made to seize it.
Dzherzhinsky turned up to demand Blyumkin’s arrest. The SRs arrested Dzherzhinsky instead. But still they made no move. They were waiting for something. Toward evening they seized the telegraph office, but only to tell Russia and the world that Mirbach’s assassination was not the signal for a rising against the Bolsheviks. It had been carried out only to wreck the treasonable peace agreement. The mutinous squad was not, it seemed, contemplating an attack on the regime. It meant only to demonstrate its disagreement with the Bolsheviks. It was difficult to imagine anything more stupid.
Lenin had been given the right to act ruthlessly. The headquarters of the eccentric mutineers were stormed and wrecked by Latvian riflemen, and the Left SR delegates to the Congress of Soviets were arrested. Lenin’s dearest wish had been granted. The Left SRs had ceased to exist as a political force. As had the man who knew too much—Ambassador Mirbach.
How could the SRs have followed such a stupidly suicidal course, one which so admirably suited and in no way threatened the Bolsheviks? It was a miracle, pure and simple!
Koba, though, did not believe in miracles. The great chess player inevitably sensed that there was some hidden factor at work: someone had induced the SRs to behave so irrationally.
The Bolsheviks and the tsar’s security service had fought each other for years. Planting provocateurs on each other was an old habit of theirs. Not surprisingly, the Cheka had from the moment it came into existence added this tried and proven method of the tsarist secret police, provocation, to its arsenal. The Cheka’s most brilliant operations in those early years—the arrest of the famous terrorist Savinkov, or the arrest of the British diplomat Lockhart—were the result of provocations, the planting of a double agent in the enemy camp. Koba was bound to see the fingerprints of a provocateur on the affair of the SR mutiny. Sure enough, something strange happened to Blyumkin, Mirbach’s assassin. When the Bolsheviks occupied the Cheka section’s headquarters, he was left there with his broken leg. He was one of the leaders of that division of the Cheka, the one whom Dzherzhinsky had come in person to arrest—but nobody recognized him. He was taken, unrecognized, to a city hospital, from which he escaped to present himself, a voluntary penitent, to the Cheka. Sentenced to three years’ imprisonment, he received amnesty soon after, and immediately joined the Bolsheviks. Blyumkin then worked in Trotsky’s secretariat, and after that in the Cheka and the GPU (State Political Administration).
Koba, then, was given a chance to appreciate the present power, and the potential, of this recently established but mighty Cheka. He did appreciate it. Nor did he forget Blyumkin.
After Trotsky’s fall and his banishment abroad, the GPU sent Blyumkin to Tibet, Damascus, and Constantinople in the guise of a pilgrim. He called on his former chief, Trotsky, en route. This was, beyond any doubt, his main assignment—to find out the exile’s plans—and at the same time feel out his former supporters.
On his return, Blyumkin delivered a letter from Trotsky to a former close associate of his, Karl Radek. But that cleverest of cynics knew only too well how things worked, and immediately told Koba.
Blyumkin had to be shot immediately.
After the engineered “Left SR mutiny,” Koba may well have reminded himself of Lenin’s rule: “If the end is important enough, the means by which it is attained are unimportant.” A banal aphorism, terrifying to the petit bourgeois, yet so obvious to the true revolutionary. Lenin wrote: “Let us suppose that Kalyaev [who assassinated Nicholas II’s uncle] in order to kill the tyrant gets hold of a revolver from the vilest of men promising him money and vodka. Can we condemn Kalyaev for doing a deal with a criminal? Any sensible person will say no.”
OUR HAND WILL NOT TREMBLE
Lenin’s objective had been achieved: the roundup of the Left SRs was under way, and it was legal. On July 7 Koba, in Tsaritsyn, received a telegram from Lenin: “Essential crush these wretched hysterical adventurers wherever. Show no mercy to Left SRs, and keep us informed regularly.” Koba replied: “Rest assured our hand will not tremble. Our enemies will learn what enemies are … the track south of Tsaritsyn has not yet been repaired. I am chasing them up and bawling them out.… You may be sure we shall spare nobody, neither ourselves nor anyone else, and will give you the grain whatever happens.”
He did indeed “spare no one.” And as early as July 18, five wagonloads of grain left
for Moscow. He was producing the grain. And other things besides.
BLACK GOLD
“Sent letter by special messenger to Baku,” he informed Lenin cryptically. As soon as he arrived in Tsaritsyn, Koba had made contact with the city of his youth, and with the remarkable man who would be his associate for the rest of his life. The Soviet regime had quickly asserted its authority in Baku. The Baku Soviet was controlled by one of Koba’s old enemies, Shaumyan. But the new regime collapsed just as quickly as it had been established, under pressure from Turkish and British troops, and the Baku commissars, with Shaumyan at their head, were shot. Only one of the twenty-six miraculously survived—the Armenian Anastas Mikoyan.
Mikoyan had joined the Party in 1915 at the age of twenty. He had been one of the most active members of the Baku commune. After its destruction Mikoyan remained in the Baku underground.
Baku meant oil, and without oil, war was impossible. So the cunning Mikoyan, the Bolshevik, under instructions from Koba in Tsaritsyn, made contact with the Baku capitalists. Mikoyan paid generously, in gold, and they shut their eyes to the fact that the oil was going to Lenin. Very, very soon the Bolsheviks would be in Baku, and oil would be the death of those who owned it.
For the time being Koba was busy reinforcing Mikoyan’s fleet with vessels of his own, while continuing to bombard Lenin with telegrams about the struggle with Trotsky: “Get it into his head that … there is plenty of grain in the south but that to seize it I NEED FULL MILITARY AUTHORITY. I have written about this before, but have received no answer. Very well. If that is the situation, I shall demote those commanders and commissars who are ruining the operation … and the absence of a scrap of paper from Trotsky will not stop me.”
Lenin chided him for this continual in-fighting, but Koba sensed that he had his Leader’s approval, and kept it up. Acting on Koba’s orders, Voroshilov forcibly took command of the Third and Fifth Armies. He and Koba jointly organized an offensive. Koba took part in it himself, from an armored train. The attack misfired, but this defeat had an unexpected result: Trotsky’s protégé Snesarev was recalled to Moscow. A military council for the northern Caucasus was set up, headed by … Koba! Lenin loved Koba. And appreciated his struggle with Trotsky.
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