Young Stalin (17 page)

Stalin, his mentors and followers still met “on the banks of the Kura sitting under scented acacias drinking cheap wine, served by the kioskkeeper.” But the success of Stalin’s strikes had concentrated police minds. The secret police decided to crush the movement before it could organize its 1901 May Day riot. The Gendarmes, analysing their intelligence on the revolutionary “leader” Stalin, immediately spotted his talent for conspiracy: “an intellectual who leads a group of railway workers. External observation revealed he behaves very cautiously, always keeps looking behind him when walking.” He was always hard to catch.
¹²

Overnight on 21–22 March 1901, the secret police, the Okhrana, swooped down on the leaders, Kurnatovsky and Makharadze.
^*
They surrounded the weather observatory to catch Stalin, who was returning on the tram.
He suddenly noticed through the tram window the studied nonchalance of plainclothes secret policemen—as easily recognizable as G-men in an American movie—in position around the observatory. He stayed on the tram, returning later to reconnoitre, but he could never live there again.

The raid changed his destiny: here ended any aspiration to a life of normality. He had played with the idea of becoming a teacher, earning extra cash by tutoring (though he normally tried to convert his pupils to Marxism), charging ten kopecks an hour. That was all over now. Henceforth he lived on others, expecting friends, sympathizers or the Party to fund his philanthropic revolutionary mission. He instantly entered what Trotsky called “that very serious game called revolutionary conspiracy”—a murky terrorist netherworld with its own special customs, fastidious etiquette and brutal rules.

As Soso entered this secret world, he pushed ahead with the plans for an aggressive May Day demonstration.

The governor-general of the Caucasus, Prince Golitsyn, marched Cossacks, Dragoons, artillery and infantry into Tiflis for a showdown. They bivouacked in the squares. On the morning of Sunday, 22 April 1901, some 3,000 workers and revolutionaries gathered outside the Soldiers Bazaar. The Cossacks had other ideas, but Soso was prepared. Sergei Alliluyev noticed that the activists were “unseasonably dressed in heavy overcoats and Caucasian sheepskin hats.” When he asked why, a comrade answered: “Soso’s orders.”

“What for?”

“We’ll be the first to receive the Cossack whips.”

Indeed the Cossacks waited in every courtyard down Golovinsky Prospect. At noon, “the garrison gun boomed;” the demonstrators started to march up Golovinsky to Yerevan Square, where the seminarists were to join them, singing “The Marseillaise” and “The Warsawianka.” The Cossacks galloped down on them, drawing sabres and brandishing their heavy
nagaika
whips that could kill a man. The
pharaohs
—the police—advanced, sabres drawn. A forty-five-minute pitched battle of “desperate encounters” broke out down the boulevard as the Cossacks charged any group larger than three people. The red banners—declaring
DOWN WITH TYRANNY
—were passed from hand to hand. Fourteen workers were seriously wounded and fifty arrested. Martial law was declared in Tiflis.
¹³

This was Stalin’s first success. While the genteel Jordania was arrested and imprisoned for a year, his
Kvali
closed, Stalin just fled to Gori for a
few days. No wonder Jordania loathed this young hothead, but Stalin had just started. He and his allies were soon keen to intensify the “open struggle”—even if it cost “torrents of blood.”

These young radicals discussed the murder of Captain Lavrov, the deputy chief of the Gendarmes in Tiflis, but the real action was in the railway depots where the railways director, Vedenev, energetically resisted Stalin’s strikes.

Stalin now met another partner-in-crime, Stepan Shaumian, the well-off, highly educated son of an Armenian businessman. Shaumian, closely connected with the plutocracy of the Caucasus, was tutor to the children of the city’s richest oil baron, Mantashev, and he soon married the daughter of a top oil executive.

“Tall, well built and very handsome with a pale face and light-blue eyes,” Shaumian helped organize a solution to the problem of Vedenev: the railway boss was sitting in his office when a pistol, pointed through his window, shot him through the heart.

No one was caught.
¹⁴
But this shot marked the start of a new era in which “all tender feeling for family, friendship, love, gratitude and even honour, must,” according to the much-read
Revolutionary Catechism
of the nihilist Nechaev, “be squashed by the sole passion for revolutionary work.” The amoral rules—or rather the lack of them—were described by both sides as
konspiratsia
, the “world apart” that is vividly drawn in Dostoevsky’s novel
The Devils
. Without understanding
konspiratsia
, it is impossible to understand the Soviet Union itself: Stalin never left this world.
Konspiratsia
became the ruling spirit of his Soviet state—and of his state of mind.

Henceforth, Stalin usually carried a pistol in his belt. Secret policemen and revolutionary terrorists now became professional secret fighters in the duel for the Russian Empire.
^*

*
The observatory still stands, though it is as rundown as every institution in Georgia. Stalin’s room remains, with a few of his supposed possessions and the old plaque: THE GREAT STALIN—LEADER OF VKPB AND WORLD PROLETARIAT—LIVED AND WORKED HERE, THE TIFLIS METEOROLOGICAL OBSERVATORY, FROM 28 DECEMBER 1899 TO 21 MARCH 1901, LEADING ILLEGAL SOCIAL-DEMOCRATIC WORKERS’ CIRCLES.

*
In Russia, the mercantile and middle classes, who had no access to political power, often sympathized with the revolutionaries, but in Georgia they could also count on local patriotism—and a web of family clans reaching the highest nobility. The Shervashidzes managed to be top Petersburg courtiers while on their Abkhazian estates enjoying links to the revolutionaries. Prince Giorgi Shervashidze was Chancellor of the Court of the Dowager Empress Maria Fyodorovna, Alexander III’s widow and Nicholas II’s mother. After the Revolution and until the 1930s, the Shervashidzes who remained in the USSR were protected by the local Bolshevik leader and Stalin courtier Nestor Lakoba.

*
The most important Russian revolutionary in Georgia then was tall, stooped, balding Victor Kurnatovsky, who had shared Lenin’s Siberian exile and even met Plekhanov in Zurich. Many of the most active revolutionaries were not Caucasians but Russians. In the railway depot, Sergei Alliluyev was assisted by the affable, ginger-bearded Mikhail Kalinin, another railway worker of peasant origins whom Soso was to meet now: he would be Stalin’s long-serving head of state. The other leaders were Georgians—Jordania, Jibladze, Mikha Tskhakaya and Philip Makharadze, all founders of the Third Group back in 1892.

*
Going underground meant that Stalin also avoided conscription into the army in 1901. On his last arrest in 1913, he told the police he had been “exempted from conscription for family reasons in 1901.” The Gori police officer Davrichewy helped provide the paperwork enabling him to escape military service, according to his son’s memoirs, possibly by citing Stalin’s family problems and also moving his birthday a year later to 21 December 1879. Stalin was not bothered by conscription again until 1916.

9

Stalin Goes Underground:
Konspiratsia

J
ust at this time, the Gori priest’s son Kote Charkviani was arguing with a street-cleaner on a Tiflis backstreet when a familiar voice said: “Smash him up, Kote. Don’t be afraid, he’s the tamed street hound of the Gendarmes!” It was Soso, who could divine a traitor or a spy almost by instinct. He could not hang around to chat. The secret police were after him.

Then “he disappeared into the narrow curved street . . .” But that conspiratorial instinct was an essential quality in this game of mist, mirrors and shadows. The antagonists were locked in an intimate, desperate and amoral embrace in which agents, double-agents and treble-agents promised, betrayed, switched sides and betrayed again their allegiances.

In the 1870s, the rebels were middle-class populists,
narodniki
, who hoped that the liberal future lay with the pure peasantry. A faction of
narodniki
developed into the terrorist groups Land and Freedom and later People’s Will, who believed that the murder of Emperor Alexander II would achieve revolution.

People’s Will embraced the ideas of the small-time philosopher Nechaev whose amoral
Revolutionary Catechism
begot Lenin and Stalin. “Regroup this world of brigands into an indivisible destructive force,” he suggested, killing police “in the most agonizing way.” The anarchist Bakunin shared that dream of harnessing the “swashbuckling robber-world”
to the Revolution. Lenin borrowed the disciplined organization, total dedication and the gangsterish brutality of the People’s Will, qualities that Stalin personified.

Alexander II, faced with a terroristic cat-and-mouse game, started to create a modern security service as sophisticated as the terrorists themselves. He reorganized his father’s Third Section into a plainclothed secret police, the Division for Protection of Order and Social Security, soon shortened to “Okhrana.” Yet, throughout the reforms, the People’s Will actually had an agent within the department. The police hunted down the terrorists, but it was too late. In 1881, they got their man, killing Alexander II on the streets of St. Petersburg.

His heir, Alexander III, created the double system that Stalin knew. Both the Okhrana and the prestigious semi-military Gendarmes, the “Tsar’s eyes and ears,” dressed in a fine blue white-trimmed uniform with boots and sabre, ran their own intelligence services.

At its elegant headquarters at 16 Fontanka by the Moika in Petersburg, the Okhrana Special Section meticulously collated labyrinthine charts and colour-coded files of terror groups. Their
bureaux noirs
practised
perlustratsia
(perlustration): 380,000 letters annually were being opened by 1882.
^*
They had a reputation in Europe as the sinister organ of Autocracy but never even approached the brutal competence of Lenin’s Cheka, let alone Stalin’s NKVD. They wielded three punishments. The rope was rarely used, being reserved for assassins of Romanovs and ministers, but it had one decisive effect: the execution of Alexander Ulyanov, a young man on the edge of a conspiracy against the Tsar, helped radicalize his younger brother, Lenin. Next was
katorga
, hard labour, again quite rare. The most common punishment was “administrative exile,” for periods of up to five years.

The mastermind of
konspiratsia
, Moscow Okhrana chief Zubatov, evolved a new system of surveillance. Detectives were employed, but their real tools were the
agentura
, the “external agent”—the
shpik
, or “spook,” in revolutionary vernacular—who followed characters like Stalin. The Okhrana’s most effective tactic was the
provokatsia
—the provocations of their “internal agents.” The secret policeman should treat his
agent provocateur
like “a beloved woman with whom you have entered illicit relations,”
explained Zubatov. “Look after her like the apple of your eye. One careless move and you dishonour her . . . Never reveal the name of your informer to anyone, even your director. Forget his name and remember only his pseudonym.” The stakes were high: one side’s
provokator
was the other’s
predatel
(traitor), who faced death.

In return for sometimes huge salaries, these double-agents not only penetrated the “internal life of the revolutionary organizations” but also sometimes directed them. The Okhrana even set up their own revolutionary groups and trade unions. And their very existence was designed to inspire a cannibalistic frenzy of suspicion and paranoia among the revolutionaries. The craziness of Stalinist terror in the USSR shows how successful they were. Yet
konspiratsia
could be as dangerous for the authorities as for the terrorists.
^*

Russia faced a blossoming of conspiracies in this war on terror: the Okhrana had to foil not only the Social-Democrats, the Armenian nationalist Dashnaks and the Georgian Socialist-Federalists but Russia’s most deadly terrorists, populist socialists called the Socialist-Revolutionaries, the SRs. In the best example of the danger of double-agents, the Okhrana recruited Evano Azef, head of the SR Fighting Brigade, which effectively used suicide bombers. During 1902–5, Azef received massive payments, but simultaneously he arranged the assassination of two Interior Ministers and a Grand Duke.