Young Stalin

  Stalin claimed that he wrote immediately to his lame Goreli friend Davitashvili in Leipzig, who was in contact with Lenin—but this was one of his fibs. In fact he did not write for almost a year, but he was already a Leninist. Trotsky believed one could recognize a Bolshevik on sight. Stalin was, says Iremashvili, “an instant Bolshevik.” In 1904, there was a strong sense that something world-shattering was stirring: the movement was flourishing. As Nicholas II blundered closer to “a victorious little war” with Japan in his quest for a Far Eastern empire, the Revolution was suddenly closer than it had ever been. This was no time to be in Novaya Uda.6 Soso had no sooner arrived than he started to plan his escape—which was as much part of the revolutionary experience as arrest and exile itself.

  Escape was “not too difficult. Everyone tried to escape,” wrote Trotsky. “The exile system was a sieve.”

  The escapee needed money to buy his “boots”—the false papers. Usually the full escape kit—“boots,” food, clothes, train tickets, bribes—cost around one hundred roubles. Conspiracy-theorists ask naively how Stalin raised the cash: was he an agent for the Okhrana? Probably Egnatashvili, via Keke, and his Party comrades provided the money. But raising it was hardly unusual: between 1906 and 1909, over 18,000 obscure exiles out of a total of 32,000 somehow raised the money to escape.

  Stalin made his record more suspicious by changing the number of his escapes and arrests in his own propaganda. Yet it turns out that he was arrested and escaped more often than he officially claimed. When he personally edited his Short Course biography in the 1930s, he signed off on eight arrests, seven exiles and six escapes, but when he re-edited the book in 1947, using his blue crayon, he reduced the numbers to seven arrests, six exiles and five escapes. In conversation, he claimed, “I escaped five times.” Amazingly, Stalin was being modest or forgetful. There were in fact at least nine arrests, four short detentions and eight escapes.

  The last word belongs to Alexander Ostrovsky, expert on Stalin’s secret-police connections: “The fact of Stalin’s frequent escapes might be seen as surprising only to a person who is completely unfamiliar with the specifics of the pre-revolutionary exile system.”

  Soso made his first, amateurish attempt after reading Lenin’s pamphlet in December 1903: his landlady and children gave him some bread for the trip. “Initially,” he told Anna Alliluyeva, “I didn’t succeed because the police chief had an eye on me. The freeze set in and then I collected winter supplies and set off on foot. My face almost froze!” As he got older, these tales grew taller. “I fell into a frozen river, the ice gave way,” he told his Soviet henchman Lavrenti Beria. “I was chilled to the bone. I knocked at a door, nobody invited me in. At the end of my strength, I had finally the luck to be welcomed by some poor people who lived in a miserable hut. They fed me, warmed me by the stove and gave me clothes to reach the next village.”

  He managed to make it to Abram Gusinsky’s house in Balagansk, seventy versts away.

  One night, when there were terrible frosts of—30, we heard a knock.

  “Who’s there?”

  “Unlock the door, Abram, it’s me, Soso.”

  Then an ice-coated Soso entered, dressed very flippantly for Siberian winter in a felt cloak, a fedora and a dandyish Caucasian hood. My wife and daughter so admired the white hood that Comrade Stalin with Caucasian generosity took it off and gave it to them.

  He already had the “necessary documents.” But he could go no farther.

  “Suffering frostbite on his nose and ears,” according to Sergei Alliluyev, “he couldn’t get anywhere and returned to Novaya Uda.” No doubt, his convict friends warmed him up in the boozing stews of the frontier-town while he planned his second attempt.

  Soso wrote to Keke, and she “sewed the right clothes and sent them as soon as she could. Soso escaped wearing them.” He had moved into another house belonging to Mitrofan Kungarov, who, on 4 January 1904, gave Stalin a lift out of Novaya Uda. Arming himself with a sabre, Stalin tricked Kungarov, claiming that he just wanted to reach nearby Zharkovo to complain about the police chief. Kungarov was probably the drunken sledge-driver who demanded to be paid in vodka at every stop. “We travelled in—40 temperatures,” recalled Stalin. “I wrapped myself in furs. The coachman actually opened his coat while driving to let the bitter freezing wind blow against his almost naked belly. Apparently alcohol warmed his body: what healthy people!” But when the peasant realized that Stalin was escaping, he refused to help and stopped the sledge. “At that moment,” said Stalin, “I opened my fur coat and showed my sword and ordered him to drive on . . . The peasant sighed and made the horses gallop!”*

  Soso was on his way. Coming up to Orthodox Epiphany, he was hoping the police would be distracted by their celebrations. “Exiled Josef Djugashvili has escaped! Appropriate measures are taken to recapture him!” telegraphed the local police. He made it to Tyret Station and may have gone to Irkutsk before heading back along the Trans-Siberian Railway.

  The Siberian stations, even during holidays, were patrolled by uniformed Gendarmes and Okhrana spies, sometimes professionals, frequently informing freelancers, watching for escapees. But Stalin had procured not just the usual “boots” but the ID card of a police agent. In faraway Siberia (as in the Caucasus), any papers could be bought, but this was unusual. Stalin boasted that at one of the stations a real spook was on his tail, following him until the escapee approached a Gendarme, showed him his false ID and pointed out the police spy as an escaping exile. The policeman arrested the protesting spook while Stalin calmly boarded the train for the Caucasus. It is a story that demonstrates the layers of murkiness in which Stalin blossomed. If Soso really was a police spy, it is unlikely he would have told the story at all and, in any case, he might have invented it. But it certainly added to the mystique (and suspicion) of this ace of conspirators.7

  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, h
e 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

  The 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 lodge
r, 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