Young Stalin

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  Each morning, he hid the pamphlets in peasant fruit baskets which Smirba loaded onto his cart. Meeting Lomdzharia in town, the two bandits took the fruit baskets around the factories, distributing the leaflets. If anyone tried to buy fruit, Smirba demanded a steep price or claimed it was a special order. When the printer was broken, Stalin told Kandelaki, “Let’s go hunting.” Identifying the right spare parts in a local printingshop, he then said: “The bear’s shot, now skin it”—and sent in his henchmen, who stole them and delivered them to him at his HQ, Ali the Persian’s Tavern in the bazaar. Once some Cossacks galloped down the street just as little Hamdi was delivering a part. He tossed the bag into the house and leaped into a ditch. Afterwards, Stalin helped dry the boy, praising his courage.

  Smirba’s whole village now knew there was something afoot in the new wooden hut visited by so many burly and veiled women, whereupon Soso gathered twelve trusted peasants to explain his mission. “After that,” remembers Hamdi Smirba, “they respected the house.”

  “You’re a good man, Soso,” said Smirba, puffing on his pipe. “Shame you’re not Muslim. If you become Muslim, you’ll get seven beautiful virgins. Don’t you want to become Muslim?”

  “I certainly do!” laughed Soso.8*

  The dead workers were buried on 12 March, an opportunity for yet another demonstration, 7,000 strong, inspired by the fiery proclamation written and printed by Stalin. The procession was surrounded on every side by mounted Cossacks. Singing was banned. Comrade Soso quietly supervised the funerals. The Gendarmes prevented any speeches. As the crowd left, the Cossacks mocked them by singing the Death March.

  The secret police now knew Stalin was one of the leaders of the Batumi disturbances. The organization “achieved some big successes after the arrival of Josef Djugashvili in autumn 1901,” Captain Jakeli reported to the chief of the Kutaisi Gendarmerie. “I have ascertained that Josef Djugashvili was seen in the crowd during the 9 March disorders . . . All evidence points to the fact of his active role in the disorders.” They were determined to track him down.

  On 5 April, Despina Shapatova warned Stalin that he had been denounced. He moved that night’s meeting twice and finally it met at Darakhvelidze’s house. Suddenly Despina ran in: the Gendarmes were outside or, as the presiding officer, put it: “Yesterday at midnight, I surrounded the house where intelligence told us they were holding a meeting of the Mantashev Refinery workers . . .”

  Soso the Priest rushed to the back window, but it was hopeless. The house was surrounded by blue-uniformed Gendarmes. This time there was no escape.9*

  * The dates of these memoirs are always important. In memoirs dictated in 1936, Vadachkoria implies that it was Stalin who ordered the murder, a naïve thing to record that year; an unthinkable thing to record a year later during the Great Terror, or afterwards. The story of Stalin just suspecting the police spy and being right about it was published as part of the cult of personality. The story of the sleuth being killed appears only in the archival original and is published here for the first time.

  * Kandelaki, in memoirs recorded in 1935, before the Terror, strongly implies that Stalin was the Rothschilds arsonist. The Stalinist histories, which quote Kandelaki, suppress any suggestion that the Leader had been an arsonist, killer, bank robber or seducer. Kandelaki’s record is published here for the first time. Historians have often mistaken him for David Kandelaki, a young trade official in the 1930s whom Stalin used as his secret emissary to open negotiations with Hitler, a probe three years before the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Stalin had David Kandelaki shot in 1937. But the latter was not Constantine—or Kotsia—Kandelaki of Batumi, later a Menshevik and Minister of Finance in the independent Georgian Democratic Republic of 1918–21.

  * This would have irritated Stalin—the sort of personal detail that more sophisticated interviewees in the 1930s left out of their memoirs. Natasha Kirtava recorded two sets of memoirs, one in 1934 and the other in 1937. Needless to say, the unpublished kissing episode appeared only in the first, before the Terror.

  * The Batumi demonstration and the Smirba story became seminal Stalinist legends. When the boss of Abkhazia, one of Stalin’s favourite courtiers, Nestor Lakoba, wrote his Stalin i Hashimi (Stalin and Hashimi) in 1934, he reinforced the cult of personality which had begun in 1929. Stalin’s secretary Ivan Tovstukha worried about the text, writing to Stalin’s then deputy Lazar Kaganovich, “Had the Hashimi text . . . Still things to correct and rewrite . . . What to do? Should it be thrown out?” It was not. Its publication won Lakoba favour but not for long. A year later, his work was outstripped by the massive exaggeration of History of the Bolshevik Organization in the Caucasus by Beria. Stalin himself, according to Beria’s son, amended the manuscript, “striking out names and replacing them with his own.” A huge volume called The Batumi Demonstration 1902 followed in 1937. Beria swiftly moved to destroy his rival Lakoba, poisoning him and then murdering and personally torturing his wife and children. See Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar for the full story. As for Hashimi Smirba himself, he moved house in 1916, burying the printing-press in his garden. He died in 1922 aged eighty-one. In his seventies, Stalin chuckled about Smirba. He knew Lakoba’s book was widely regarded as propaganda. After all, it claimed that Stalin was “the greatest man of a whole epoch, such as history gives to humanity only once in one or two hundred years.” But Stalin insisted, “It’s true as it was told in that book—that’s really how it happened.”

  * In early 1939, the Moscow Arts Theatre commissioned the brilliant but under-employed writer Mikhail Bulgakov to write a romantic play about young Stalin in Batumi to celebrate the dictator’s sixtieth birthday that December. Stalin must have signed off on the commission. He admired Bulgakov—like Chekhov, a practising doctor-turned-writer—particularly for his novel The White Guard. Its dramatized version The Days of the Turbins was Stalin’s favourite play: he saw it fifteen times. Yet, as with Pasternak and Shostakovich, Stalin played a game of cat-and-mouse, personally phoning Bulgakov to assure him he would be given work, then tightening the screws on him again. Bulgakov, like Pasternak, was fascinated by his omnipotent persecutor and had toyed with the idea of this play since 1936, even though he knew “it’s dangerous for me.” Basing the play on the book The Batumi Demonstration 1902 and presumably on conversations with witnesses, Bulgakov finished a draft in June 1939, first calling it The Priest, Stalin’s nickname among the workers, then It Happened in Batumi, then just Batumi. The romantic play contains no love affairs but it implies Stalin’s relationship with Natalia Kirtava, for his companion in the play is a Natasha, who is jointly based on Kirtava and Lomdzharia’s sister. The cultural apparatchiks liked and approved the play. In August, Bulgakov, declaring that he wanted to interview witnesses and read the archives, set off by train for Batumi with his wife, Elena. But Stalin did not wish his status as statesman (he was just about to sign the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Hitler) undermined by any revelations contained in these archives, many of which have been used in this book. The Bulgakovs were recalled by telegram: “Journey no longer necessary. Return to Moscow.” Bulgakov fell ill. Stalin read the play. Visiting the Arts Theatre, he told the director that Batumi was a good piece but could not be staged, adding (hypocritically), “All young people are the same, so why write a play about the young Stalin?” The play was hackwork for Bulgakov, who secretly finished his anti-Stalin masterpiece The Master and Margarita before his death in 1940.

  PART TWO

  To the Moon

  Move tirelessly

  Do not hang your head

  Scatter the mist of the clouds

  The Lord’s Providence is great.

  Gently smile at the earth

  Stretched out beneath you;

  Sing a lullaby to the glacier

  Strung down from the heavens.

  Know for certain that once

  Struck down to the ground, an oppressed man

  Strives again to reach the pure mountain,

  W
hen exalted by hope.

  So, lovely moon, as before

  Glimmer through the clouds;

  Pleasantly in the azure vault

  Make your beams play.

  But I shall undo my vest

  And thrust out my chest to the moon,

  With outstretched arms, I shall revere

  The spreader of light upon the earth!

  —SOSELO (Josef Stalin)

  11

  The Prisoner

  Stalin was imprisoned in Batumi Prison, where he immediately distinguished himself by his surly swagger and arrogant audacity. Prison affected him deeply and remained with him. “I got used to loneliness in prison,” he said much later, though in fact he was rarely alone there.

  His fellow prisoners, whether enemies who later denounced him in exile or Stalinists who praised him in official books, agree that Stalin in prison was like a frigid sphinx: “scruffy, pockmarked, with a rough beard and long backcombed hair.” His fellows were most struck by “his complete calmness.” He “never laughed with an open mouth, only smiled coolly” and was “incapable of co-operating with anyone . . . He walked by himself. Always unruffled.”1 But initially he made a foolish mistake.

  On 6 April 1902, he faced his first interrogation at the hands of Gendarme captain Jakeli. He denied he had even been in Batumi at the time of the massacre, claiming he had been with his mother in Gori. Two days later, he ordered another prisoner to throw two notes into the prison yard where friends and families of the prisoners gathered to deliver food and messages. But the guards retrieved the notes in Stalin’s handwriting. The first sent a message “to tell the teacher . . . Josef Iremashvili that Soso Djugashvili’s been arrested and ask him to tell his mother that when Gendarmes ask her ‘When did your son leave Gori?,’ she must reply, ’He was here in Gori all summer and winter until 15 March.’”

  The other note summoned his former pupil Elisabedashvili to Batumi to take over his organization. Captain Jakeli had already consulted the Tiflis secret police, who revealed that Stalin had been a leading light on the Tiflis Committee. But now he also briefed Gori, who reported that two men had arrived there from Batumi and talked to Keke, her brother Giorgi Geladze (Stalin’s uncle) and Iremashvili. All three were arrested and interrogated: not a happy day for Keke.2

  The men from Batumi had come to collect Stalin’s mother, but the clumsy note-tossing also implicated Elisabedashvili, who was living in Tiflis with Kamo and Svanidze. The Gendarmes arrested Kamo, who reluctantly led them to the Sololaki bathhouse, where they seized a disrobed Elisabedashvili. He was taken to meet the “famous Captain Lavrov,” who handed him over to Captain Jakeli. As Elisabedashvili entered the Batumi prison yard, Stalin rushed past him, whispering: “You don’t know me.”

  “I know,” replied Elisabedashvili. “Hello from everyone!”

  The next day, Elisabedashvili was interrogated by Captain Jakeli.

  “Do you know Josef Djugashvili?”

  “No.”

  “Nonsense! He says he knows you!”

  “He might be insane.”

  “Insane?” laughed the captain. “How can such a person be mad? We had Marxists here before but they were quiet enough. This Djugashvili has turned the whole of Batumi upside down.”

  When Elisabedashvili was led past Stalin’s cell, he caught a glimpse, through the bars, of “an outraged Soso cursing his cellmate and punching him. Next day, I learned that they had placed a stool-pigeon in his cell.” Elisabedashvili was released—but soon returned, on Stalin’s orders, to direct Batumi’s Sosoists.3

  As for Keke, she obeyed Soso’s summons. Around 18 May, she set off from Gori and only returned on 16 June. She visited her son twice in Batumi Prison. On her way via Tiflis, she somehow bumped into Crazy Beso, drunk and angry.

  “Stop or I’ll kill you!” he shouted, denouncing his rebel son. “He wants to turn the world upside down. If you hadn’t taken him to school, he’d be a craftsman—now he’s in prison. I’ll kill such a son with my own hands—he’s disgraced me!” A crowd gathered. Keke slipped away, her last encounter with her husband.

  Soso’s rebellion was the ruin of Keke’s ambition. She must, in her way, have worried as much as Beso. She applied for his release and probably delivered messages from his comrades. In his egocentricity, old Stalin acknowledged her suffering: “Was she happy? Come on! What happiness for Keke if her son was arrested? We didn’t have much time for our mothers. Such was the fate of mothers!”*

  Stalin was soon the kingpin of Batumi Prison, dominating his friends, terrorizing the intellectuals, suborning the guards and befriending the criminals.4

  The Imperial prisons were a hidden civilization with their own customs and tricks, but Stalin, as ever, ignored the etiquette that did not suit him. The prisons, “like the country itself, combined barbarism with paternalism,” says Trotsky. There was no consistency: sometimes political prisoners were placed in one big cell known as “the Church,” where they would elect “Elders.”

  The revolutionaries lived by a set of chivalrous rules. Whenever comrades arrived or departed, it was traditional for the whole prison to sing “The Marseillaise” and wave a red flag. Revolutionaries, sacred intellectuals and self-appointed crusaders, were too elevated to socialize with mere criminals, but, “I preferred them [the criminals],” Stalin said, “because there were so many rats among the politicals.” He loathed the duplicitous chatter of the intellectuals. “Rats” were killed.

  If they were in solitary cells, the politicals communicated through a ponderous but simple code of knocks—“the prison alphabet.” Sergei Alliluyev was in prison in the Metekhi Fortress of Tiflis but the tapping on his stove-pipe informed him: “Bad news! Soso arrested!” Then there was the impoverished jailhouse system of communication known as the “prison telegraph” by which prisoners delivered packages to each other by swinging them on strings from their windows whence they were hooked by another string with a stone on the end.

  When the prisoners walked in the courtyards, discipline was lax: it was hard to keep any secrets there. Soso always seemed to know who was arriving, how prisoners were behaving. Like American Mafiosi running La Cosa Nostra from prison, Soso swiftly improved his communications with the outside world. “He continued to run things from prison.”†

  The authorities erred seriously when they allowed their revolutionaries to study in prison. These obsessive autodidacts studied hard there, none more so than Stalin, whose cellmate says, “He spent the whole day reading and writing . . . His prison day had a strict routine: he woke early in the morning, did morning exercises, then studied German and read economic literature. He never rested and he liked to recommend comrades what books to read . . .” Another prisoner said that Stalin made “prison into a university.” He called it his “second school.”

  The prison guards were lenient, either because the revolutionaries were socially superior “gentlemen,” or because they had been bribed or because they were sympathetic. One of Stalin’s friends was put in a cell near to his and asked him about the Communist Manifesto: “We couldn’t meet,” reminisced Stalin, “but I read it aloud and he could hear it. Once during my reading, I heard some steps outside and stopped. Suddenly I heard the guard say: ‘Please don’t stop. Comrade, please continue.’”5

  One article must have been doing the rounds of the “prison telegraph”: in March 1902, the Marxist now using the alias “Lenin” published an essay “What Is to Be Done?: Burning Questions of Our Movement,” which demanded a “new vanguard” of ruthless conspirators—a vision that immediately split the Party. “Give us an organization of revolutionaries,” promised Lenin, “and we shall overturn the whole of Russia!”6*

  Captain Jakeli rounded up Batumi’s Sosoists, including Stalin’s young landlady and girlfriend Natasha Kirtava. When she appeared in the jailyard, Natasha was swiftly approached by an unknown prisoner: “Comrade Soso asks you to look up at his window.”

  Natasha was alarmed in case this prisoner was
a stool-pigeon. “I don’t know a Comrade Soso,” she answered.

  But when she was locked in her cell, Stalin appeared at her window. “So, comrades, are you bored?” he inquired grandly. She saw that Comrade Soso was still very much in command of the struggle inside and outside the prison. “The prisoners loved him because he took such cordial care of them.” He certainly took good care of Natasha. Once she went to see him in his cell for a chat when one of the prison guards caught her and drove her away with the handle of his sabre. Stalin demanded the dismissal of the guard. His courage won him popularity among the prisoners but also respect from the authorities: he got his way.7 It was not only Sosoists who admired him: another prisoner, who shared his cell, admitted that, although Soso later became a monster, he was “a very pleasant and gallant cellmate.”8

  The Prosecutor in Tiflis ruled there was not enough evidence to charge Stalin with leading the Batumi riot. Probably witnesses were too afraid to testify. He was off that hook but remained in prison because Captain Lavrov was investigating another case—Stalin’s role on the Tiflis Committee. On 29 August, the Gendarmes indicted Stalin along with his old comrades on the Committee. Yet the bureaucracy muddled along slowly.9

  He fell ill with his old chest sickness, which he sometimes claimed was his heart, at other times a shadow on the lung. During October, Soso managed to get the prison doctor to assign him and his sidekick Kandelaki to hospital.10 Against revolutionary etiquette, he also appealed three times to Prince Golitsyn, the governor-general himself:

  My worsening cough and the pitiful condition of my aged mother, who was left by her husband twelve years ago and of whom I am the only support, force me to apply for the second time for a humble discharge, under police surveillance. I beg you to heed my request and respond to my petition.