Young Stalin (23 page)

Within ten days, he was back in Tiflis. When he burst into a friend’s apartment, they barely knew who he was, as he had lost weight in Siberia.

“Don’t you recognize me, you cowards!” he laughed, whereupon they greeted him and rented him a room.

Stalin’s timing was impeccable. That January 1904, Russia stumbled into war. The Japanese attacked the Russian fleet at Port Arthur in the Far East. The Emperor and his ministers were convinced the primitive Japanese “monkeys” could not defeat civilized Russians. Yet Nicholas’s army was antiquated, his peasant soldiers ill armed, his commanders hapless cronies.

“I remember,” says Stalin’s roommate, “that he was reading
History of the French Revolution.”
He knew how war and revolution, those horses of the apocalypse, often gallop together.

·  ·  ·

Georgia was seething. “Georgians are such a political nation,” reflected Stalin later, “I don’t think there’s a Georgian alive who isn’t a member of some political party.” Young Armenians joined the Dashnaks, Georgians joined the Socialist-Federalists, and many others joined the Mensheviks, Bolsheviks, Anarchists or the SRs—the latter were conducting a vicious terrorist campaign against the Tsar and his ministers. As the war strained the sinews of the Empire, the Okhrana tried to suppress the restlessness by arresting droves of revolutionaries.

Not every comrade was delighted at the return of the truculent, aggressive Soso, and his enemies devised a way to rid themselves of him. There was a problem with Stalin’s Marxist orthodoxy: Lenin had defeated the Bundists because he believed in an internationalist party for all the peoples of the Empire. Even Jordania preached Marxism for the whole Caucasian region. Yet young Stalin, clinging to the romantic dreams of his poetry, insisted eccentrically on a Georgian SD Party. So his enemies accused him of Bundist tendencies, not a Marxist internationalist at all. At this time, Stalin adapted Marx to his own instincts. He quoted Marx, observed David Sagirashvili, “but always in his own peculiar way.” Challenged at one meeting, Soso “wasn’t in the least perturbed,” simply saying, “Marx is the son of an ass. What he wrote should be written as I say!” With this, he stormed out.

Fortunately Stalin was vigorously defended by Georgia’s first Bolshevik, Mikha Tskhakaya, one of the founders of Mesame Dasi, who now supported Lenin’s radical approach. Stalin respected the energetic, older Tskhakaya, with his goatee-beard and ideological gravity. He later mocked him, but he was as grateful as a man could be who regarded “gratitude as a dogs’ disease.”

Tskhakaya pleaded for Stalin, saving him from expulsion, but he made him undergo a new introduction to Marxism. “I can’t trust you with much,” he lectured Soso. “You’re still young and need a foundation of stable ideas—or you’ll encounter difficulties.”

Tskhakaya introduced him to a young Armenian intellectual named Danesh Shevardian to lecture him on the “new literature.” Tskhakaya, Stalin laughed later, “began our instruction on the creation of the planets, life on earth, protein and protoplasm and after three hours, we finally reached slave-owning society. We couldn’t stay awake and starting dozing off . . .”

Yet Stalin’s anecdotes concealed the humiliating truth: Tskhakaya
ordered him to write a
Credo
renouncing his heretical views. The Armenian read it and was satisfied. Seventy printed copies were distributed.
^*
Stalin was forgiven, but Tskhakaya said he had to “rest” before he could receive a redemptive mission.
⁸

Soso shamelessly sponged off his friends. “If he visited some guy’s family,” recalled Mikheil Monoselidze, ex-seminarist friend of Kamo and Svanidze, “he behaved as if he was a member of the family. If he noticed they had wine, fruit or sweets that he liked, he wasn’t embarrassed to say, ‘Well, someone said I was invited to drink wine and eat fruit,’ and he’d open the cupboard and help himself . . .” He believed they literally owed him a living out of gratitude for his sacred mission.

He spent time with his well-off friend Spandarian, who took him to a circle run by Lev Rosenfeld, the future “Kamenev,” Stalin’s co-ruler after Lenin’s death, and later his victim. Kamenev’s father, a rich engineer who built the Batumi—Baku railway, subsidized his Marxist son. Younger than Stalin, though he looked years older, he was red-bearded and schoolmasterly with myopic, watery-blue eyes. He befriended, but always patronized, Stalin—until it was too late. Kamenev was a Bolshevik but a very moderate one, already in conflict with Stalin’s hotheads.

“I often had fights with the intellectuals,” remembers Kamo,” and I had a quarrel with Kamenev who didn’t want to attend a demonstration.” At Kamenev’s, Soso met another old friend—Josef Davrichewy, who had attended the poshest school in Tiflis, the gymnasium on Golovinsky Prospect, with Kamenev and Spandarian.

Davrichewy, flirting with Socialist-Federalism, was “delighted to see Soso for the first time since Gori.” He resembled Stalin (and believed they were half brothers). “We talked for ages,” reminisces Davrichewy, snobbishly adding that Stalin “knew no one in Tiflis.”
⁹

·  ·  ·

This was not quite true, for he now met up with many of the young revolutionaries who would rule the USSR with him—or at least share his life. One day, Sergei Alliluyev returned from Baku with some printing-press type, and delivered it to Babe Bochoridze’s house, a favourite with the revolutionaries. “I looked round,” wrote Alliluyev.

A young man of twenty-three or-four entered the adjoining room.

“He’s one of us,” said Babe.

“One of us,” the young man repeated, inviting me in. He sat me at the table and asked: “Well what good news have you to tell me?”

Even though he was ten years younger than Alliluyev, the haughty Soso presumed to command, giving orders on the transport of the press. They had already met as conspirators but now Alliluyev invited him into his home to meet his beautiful and notoriously promiscuous wife. Stalin later grumbled that the Alliluyev women “would never leave him alone,” always “wanting to go to bed with him.”

*
When Lenin arrived, he reprimanded the stationmaster, availed himself of the local merchant’s library, brought out his wife, Nadya Krupskaya, and his mother-in-law to care for him, and even employed a maid to clean the house. The Lenins patronized the peasants who, noted Krupskaya, “were generally clean in their habits.” Lenin raved about the landscape of this “Siberian Italy,” a pleasant environment for writing. “Generally,” wrote Krupskaya, “exile didn’t pass by so badly.” The system favoured noblemen and Orthodox Russians and Georgians over Jews and Poles. Lenin and his friend Yuli Martov were arrested at the same time on the same charges but, while the noble Russian Lenin enjoyed his scenic reading-holiday, his fellow SD leader, the Jewish Martov, struggled to survive the desperate Arctic freeze of Turukhansk.

*
Even at this early date, Lenin and Stalin, soi-disant champions of the proletariat, were against the involvement of real workers. They believed in an oligarchy that would rule in the name of the workers, a concept that became the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Stalin was convinced that the election of workers to the Party committees would include too many amateur revolutionaries and more police agents. Leninists were also less sympathetic to the land aspirations of peasants. Most Georgian Social-Democrats believed in wide worker and peasant participation and land grants to peasants, so they became Mensheviks. The Georgian Mensheviks under firebrands like Jordania were very effective and increasingly popular; Georgian Mensheviks were much more violent than Russian Mensheviks. Jibladze and Noe Ramishvili were as enthusiastic about terror and expropriation as Stalin up to 1907. But ultimately Bolsheviks were much more disciplined, merciless and comfortable with terror and killing. To complicate matters, there were mild Bolsheviks such as Kamenev, just as there were extreme Mensheviks.

*
In 1934, the children who had provided the bread for the escape wrote to Stalin; he wrote back with a present for them—a radio and gramophone. In 1947, pensioner Kungarov wrote: “Generalissimo of the Soviet Union Comrade J. V. Stalin, I deeply apologize for bothering you but in 1903 you lived at my place and in 1904 I personally took you to Zharkovo on the way to the Tyret Station and when the police interrogated me I lied for you that I had taken you to Balagansk. For lying I was imprisoned and received ten lashes. I ask you to help me.” It is highly unlikely that Kungarov would make this up, but Stalin read the letter and said he did not recall this, asking Kungarov to give more details. Possibly Stalin’s memories of the first exile were less vivid, but more likely he nursed a grievance against Kungarov for refusing to help him escape.

*
The
Credo
was one of the important secrets of Stalin’s past. It seriously undermined Stalin’s Leninist credentials, putting him closer to the 1918 Mensheviks, who created an independent Georgia, and the Bolshevik “deviationalists” of 1921–22. In 1925, striving to succeed Lenin, Stalin started to seek out and destroy any copies. In 1934, he twice approached Shevardian (first via his boss in the Trade Commissariat, Stalinist magnate Anastas Mikoyan, then through an old Tiflis comrade, Malakia Toroshelidze, rector of Tiflis University). Shevardian buried his papers in his village. In the 1937 Terror, Mikoyan and Beria were despatched to Yerevan with a deathlist of 300 Armenian Bolsheviks. Mikoyan saved one of the 300, Shevardian, who was still arrested. His family destroyed the papers. Shevardian was shot by Beria on 24 October 1941, as the Germans advanced. Not all recipients of the
Credo
were shot: Tskhakaya remained a favourite.

13

Bolshevik Temptress

T
he Alliluyevs would become family and travel with Stalin from this world of prisons, death and conspiracy to the peak of power—and then back to the world of prisons, death and conspiracy, at the hands of Stalin himself.

Sergei was a “fascinating adventuresome man like his Gypsy forefathers. He got into fights: if anyone ill treated the workers, he’d beat them up.” His wife, Olga,
née
Fedorenko, “a real beauty with grey-green eyes and blonde hair,” was a highly sexed Marxist temptress. Olga “often fell in love with men,” wrote her granddaughter Svetlana.

Her parents, of German ancestry, were ambitious and hardworking with high hopes for Olga, but Sergei Alliluyev, then twenty-seven, was their lodger, a fitter of serf and Gypsy origins who had worked since he was twelve. Olga, just thirteen, was meant to marry a local sausage-maker but fell in love with the lodger. They eloped. Her father chased Sergei with a whip but it was too late. Sergei and Olga immersed themselves in revolutionary activism while raising a family of two daughters and two sons.

The youngest Alliluyev, Nadezhda, was still a baby, but the older children grew up with this unstable, nymphomaniac mother and a household devoted to the cause, abustle with an ever-changing cast of young conspirators—particularly those who were dark, mysterious and to their
mother’s taste. Georgians were her type. “On occasion, she had affairs with a Pole, then a Hungarian, then a Bulgarian, and even a Turkish man,” says Svetlana. “She liked southern men and sometimes huffed ‘Russian men are bumpkins.’”

Olga Alliluyeva favoured Lenin’s brooding envoy Victor Kurnatovsky, now in Siberian exile—and Stalin. Her son Pavel Alliluyev supposedly complained that his mother “chased first Stalin then Kurnatovsky.” It is claimed that Nadya said her mother had admitted sleeping with both. Her granddaughter Svetlana certainly writes that Olga “always had a soft spot for Stalin,” but “the children came to terms with this, the affairs sooner or later ended, family life went on.”
^*

The affair sounds likely; if so, it was typical of its time.

In the underground, the revolutionaries were, under a façade of prudishness, sexually liberal. Married comrades constantly found themselves thrown together in the fever of their revolutionary work.
¹

When he was not with the Alliluyevs, Soso was again in command of Kamo and his young Sosoist acolytes. If he wanted an order obeyed fast, he would say, “I’ll spit now—and before it’s dry, I want you back here!”

Kamo was rapidly becoming one of the Party’s most useful thugs, expert in enforcement, setting up printing-presses and smuggling leaflets. He never wrote an article or gave a speech, but he was now teaching his craft to other young ruffians. In his tactless (and unpublished) memoirs, Kamo reveals much about how he and Stalin lived at this time. When distributing pamphlets, he worked out that the best place to hide was a brothel, “because there were no spooks there!” He was so short of cash that he virtually had to become a paid gigolo to survive: first there was the doctor’s wife, who let him stay. “I often wondered why my landlady looked after me so diligently. Then I had intimate intercourse with her. I was utterly disgusted—but as I had no other secret apartment, I had to submit and I had to borrow money from her too.”