Young Stalin (26 page)

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On 5 May 1905, a new—and liberal—viceroy stepped off the train at Tiflis Station to “marching bands, plumed hats, golden epaulettes and bombastic speeches.” Count Illarion Vorontsov-Dashkov, aged sixty-eight, was a “horse-breeder, oil investor, scion of great aristocratic families,” married to a Princess Vorontsov who was descended from one of the famous nieces of Catherine the Great’s partner, Prince Potemkin. Family friend and ex—Court Minister to the Emperor, he was open-minded and fair: one of his first acts was to appoint a liberal to govern Guria. But Count Vorontsov-Dashkov was too late and too inconsistent. In the brutal Battle of Mukden, in Manchuria, the Tsar’s armies had lost tens of thousands of peasant-soldiers yet failed to defeat the Japanese. On 27 May, the Russian Baltic Fleet, after that quixotic round-the-world voyage during which it had succeeded only in sinking an English fishing-boat in the North Sea, was ignominiously routed by the Japanese at the Battle of Tsushima. Even its admiral was captured. These disasters rocked the Empire. Jews were slaughtered in pogroms. On 14 June, the crew of the battleship
Prince Potemkin of Taurida
, the showpiece of the Black Sea Fleet, mutinied.

Within days of his arrival, Count Vorontsov-Dashkov was faced by the collapse of his power, armed gangs in Tiflis, terrorism at the railway depot, and another bloodbath in Baku. The count could scarcely square his liberal instincts with the brutal reality as his generals and Cossacks launched murderous raids on radicals in Tiflis. He was soon faced with open warfare, wild terrorism and a rash of industrial action. “In 1905,” writes one historian, “everyone from palm-readers to prostitutes went on strike.”
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On 9 June, Sasha Tsulukidze, Stalin’s beloved Red Prince, died of tuberculosis. The funeral at Kutaisi attracted 50,000 people, who followed the open coffin to Khoni singing “The Marseillaise.” Even though he was a wanted man, Stalin delivered the funeral oration, a passionate speech that one spectator could still recite three decades later.
^*

The Famous Soso lived in a frenzy at this time—heading east to Tiflis, west to Batumi, thence to Kutaisi, commanding his Battle Squads.
“Terrorism assumed gigantic proportions,” said Baron Bibeneishvili, himself a Bolshevik terrorist. It seemed that every young revolutionary was tinkering with explosive devices, stealing guns and robbing banks. “Almost every day there was a ‘political killing’ or an attack on some representative of the old regime.” Landowners, Gendarmes, officials, Cossacks, police spies and traitors were regularly murdered in broad daylight. In Tiflis, the ex—governor-general, Golitsyn, had survived an Armenian Dashnak assassination attempt only because he wore a chain-mail vest. Between February 1905 and May 1906, the viceroy reported to the Emperor that 136 officials had been assassinated, 72 wounded. Across the Empire, 3,600 officials were killed or wounded—these official figures are probably massive understatements. In Baku, the governor, Prince Nakashidze, was killed by the Dashnaks, his police chief by a Bolshevik hit man.

“There was much competition between the parties in their terroristic antics,” explained Stalin’s Gori friend Davrichewy. In Kutaisi, Soso ordered his Battle Squad there to obtain arms by raiding the Kutaisi Arsenal. They rented a house nearby and mined under it—but the tunnel collapsed.

After Bloody Sunday and a series of massacres in Tiflis, the Cossacks were especially hated. Stalin ordered Kamo and his terrorists to attack them. Between 22 and 25 June, the Tsar’s horsemen were bombed five times.

In his white palace in Tiflis, the sexagenarian viceroy, his decent dreams in tatters, was on the edge of a nervous breakdown, while in the revolutionary bedlam far beneath him, Stalin flourished in a seething atmosphere of relentless struggle. Illiterate ruffians and cutthroats like Kamo always prosper in lawless times, but Stalin was unusual—as adept at debating, writing and organizing as he was at arranging hits and heists. The command, harnessing and provocation of turmoil were his gifts. The viceroy declared martial law and handed over power to his generals.
¹³

One day a young priest in the village of Tseva, between Chiatura and the station at Jirual, was at the bazaar when he was greeted by an unknown man. “I am Koba from Gori,” he said. “I’m not here to shop. I have private business with you.” Taking Father Kasiane Gachechiladze aside,
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Stalin
said he knew that the priest owned some donkeys and asked him how to get over the hills to Chiatura, adding, “No one knows this area better than you.”

The priest realized that the sinister stranger knew a lot about him and his young family. He also noticed that the local Red Battle Squad’s hit man and policemen-slayer was standing guard outside the bazaar. “There weren’t police in Tseva then—the Red Squad was in charge there.” “Koba of Gori,” clearly a Red chieftain, courteously requested the use of the priest’s donkeys and offered the considerable sum of fifty roubles to set up a route over the hills. The money eased the priest’s anxiety.

Stalin insisted on taking the priest for a drink in the local tavern.

“They’ll inform you in advance when I’m coming,” he said before disappearing. “Father, do not be late: I want to make the journey there and back in a day. We’re both young men.”

Soon the priest got the word. Stalin returned with two henchmen who helped him load the donkeys with saddlebags containing money, printing-presses and probably ammunition. Stalin knew the trains to Chiatura were often searched, and had concluded that this was the safest way to reach his “Bolshevik fortress.”

The priest and the ex-seminarist, precisely the same age, chatted as they trekked. Sometimes under a tree, Stalin rested his head on the priest’s knee for a nap. During Stalin’s dictatorship, Father Gachechiladze wished he had murdered his companion, but at the time “he impressed everyone. I even liked him—he was restrained, serious and decent. He even used to recite poetry to me,” adding that they were his own compositions. He was still proud to be a poet.

“Some of my poems were even published in the newspapers,” boasted Stalin, who rarely talked politics but claimed that “the police are after me because a friend of mine got into a fight in Chiatura over a girl—and I oversupported him.” He displayed his stiff arm as evidence of this fight (yet another of his versions). Stalin recited the blessing before meals. “You see, I still remember it,” he laughed. He sang as they walked. “Music has such power to relax the soul!” he reflected.

A peasant invited priest and revolutionary to a feast. The tipsy Stalin sang “with such velvet softness” that the peasants wanted to “marry him to their daughter.”

The priest complimented him: “You’d have made a great priest.”

“I the cobbler’s son competed with noble children and I was superior to all of them,” replied Stalin.

When they arrived in Chiatura, Stalin disappeared with the saddlebags into the bazaar and returned with them empty: “Now at least I can rest my head on them on the train home,” said Stalin.

This was Stalin’s secret life in the revolutionary summer of 1905—an armed chieftain leading packhorses laden with saddlebags of smuggled guns and plundered banknotes over the baking hills to Chiatura.
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In Tiflis, the Cossacks and the terrorists fought for the streets. Thousands met in the City Hall on Yerevan Square every day, barracking the City Council and proposing ever more radical measures. On 29 August, a public meeting of students discussing Nicholas II’s proposal of a compromise parliament named after Interior Minister Bulygin was raided brutally by the Cossacks, who entered the hall shooting. Sixty students were killed,200 wounded.

Stalin rushed back to Tiflis to meet his ally Shaumian and plan a response, on paper and in dynamite. He wrote a leaflet, raced to Chiatura and back again in time to co-ordinate a spectacular vengeance, set for 25 September. “On Stalin’s return,” says Davrichewy, “the signal was given—a red lantern lit atop Holy Mountain. At about 8 p.m., the gangsters opened fire outside the main barracks . . . When the Cossacks galloped out, grenades were tossed among the child-slayers.” Stalin’s terrorists launched nine simultaneous attacks.

Bolshevik and Menshevik hit men and agitators were already cooperating on the streets. On 13 October, Stalin and the Bolsheviks met the Mensheviks and agreed to coordinate politics and terrorism to redouble the pressure on the Autocracy, which seemed on the verge of collapse. Across the Empire, workers and soldiers elected councils, or “soviets,” the most famous being in Petersburg. The peasants rampaged in the countryside, while on 6 October a strike on the Moscow—Kazan railway escalated into a general stoppage across the Empire. It seemed that Tsardom was finished.

“The coming storm,” wrote Soso, “will break over Russia any day in a mighty cleansing flood to sweep away all that is antiquated and rotten.”

In St. Petersburg, even Nicholas II, whose political antennae were as sensitive as a stone, was forced to understand that he was about to lose his realm. He was ready to make peace with the Japanese, but political concessions went against his deepest convictions of holy Autocracy. He envied and hated his most able ministers, but his mother and uncles
forced him to consult the brilliant ex—Finance Minister Sergei Witte. Before leaving to make peace with Japan at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, under the aegis of U.S. President Teddy Roosevelt, Witte forcefully told the Tsar, whom he despised, to concede a constitution. Nicholas II wavered, then asked his tall, soldierly cousin, Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaievich, to become military dictator.

As Romanov Autocracy tottered, we have a rare glimpse of Stalin as gang leader dealing out death in the backstreets of Tiflis.
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*
Essad Bey was one of the pseudonyms of Lev Nussimbaum, the son of a Jewish Baku oil baron, who wrote
Stalin: Career of a Fanatic
. He also wrote the classic love story
Ali and Nino
under the name Kurban Said, whose identity was a mystery until a new biography—
The Orientalist
by Tom Reiss—revealed Nussimbaum’s bizarre life and ethnic transformation into a Muslim in Fascist Italy. A notorious fantasist is hardly an ideal historical source; his unsourced anecdotes were long regarded as myths yet they often turn out to be historically correct. Nussimbaum must have known exiles from Tiflis and Baku and recorded their stories, but his unreliable material has to be counter-checked.

*
Chavichvili’s two volumes of memoirs are invaluable but rarely used by historians: they were only published in tiny editions in French. Chavichvili was a hostile witness who wrote in exile, yet he is half impressed, half appalled by Stalin’s magnetism.

*
He fought in print too. “Our Mensheviks are really too tiresome!” wrote Stalin in his pamphlet accusing them of Marxist phoniness. The article is interesting for its quaint phrases and parables: “One day a crow found a rose but that doesn’t prove a crow is a nightingale.” The Mensheviks “remind us of the thief who stole the money and shouted ‘Stop thief!’” But he concluded, “It is well known that the tongue always turns to the aching tooth.”

*
In October 1940, the celebrated Georgian writer Shalva Nutsubidze was suddenly freed from jail and brought to meet Stalin, who admired, edited and contributed to his translation of Rustaveli. At dinner in Stalin’s mansion at Kuntsevo, Nutsubidze remembered the speech at Tsulukidze’s funeral and proceeded to recite it. “Extraordinary talent goes hand in hand with extraordinary memory,” exclaimed Stalin, who walked up to his guest and kissed him on the forehead. For the full story, see
Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar
.

*
Father Kasiane Gachechiladze’s memoirs were written secretly during Stalin’s lifetime and inherited by his grandson, who saw this author talking about this project on Georgian television and made contact. The account of his leading horses cross-country, his movements and his conversation all chime with other sources.

15

1905: Fighters, Urchins and Dressmakers

O
ne night in Tiflis in late 1905, Josef Davrichewy, Stalin’s Goreli friend, who now headed the armed wing of the Georgian Socialist-Federalists, heard fighting in a backstreet at the foot of Holy Mountain. He found Kamo, Stalin’s enforcer, threatening an unknown Armenian with his pistol.

“If you don’t return the banknotes to the safebox you were meant to guard, you’re a dead man!” Kamo was saying. “Think! I’ll count to three. One. . . two. . . careful my friend . . . three!”