Young Stalin

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  Stalin was “cruel, outspoken and disrespectful to superiors,” according to the local policemen. River Cock had him locked up once for reading revolutionary literature aloud and fined him twenty-five kopecks for attending the theatre.* Yet there were covert if wild parties among the exiles and the inevitable flirtations. “We were singing—and I began to dance,” remembers a girl, Shura Dobronravova. “Koba clapped his hands and suddenly I heard his voice saying, ‘Shura is the joy of life!’ I saw Koba looking at me with his mysterious smile.” The sequel is not recorded.

  Once the exiles went boating together, waving red flags and singing. The River Cock ran along the bank screeching, “Stop singing!” But he could not punish all of them, so they got away with it.

  Stalin often organized these secret meetings of exiles, but he “watched every member of the group very carefully,” recalls Alexander Dubrovin, “and demanded a report of every action.” Dubrovin’s memoir implies that Stalin hunted traitors and ordered their killing. “There was an exile called Mustafa. This Mustafa turned out to be a traitor. According to a comrade, he was drowned under the high bank of the Vychegda river.”

  “I often visited [Stalin] in his room,” recalls Tatiana Sukhova, a woman of twenty-two, with light-brown hair and grey eyes. “He lived in poverty, sleeping on a wooden crate covered in planks and a bag of straw with a flannel blanket on top and a pink pillowcase.” He was depressed—it was only months since the death of Kato. “I often found him half lying there even in daytime,” but, as ever, books served as his comfort and castle: “Since he was very cold, he lay in his coat and surrounded himself with books.” But she says she cheered him up. They spent more and more time together, laughing at the others and even going on boating dates. It seems the friendship turned into some kind of affair and Stalin remained fond of Sukhova into the 1930s.* He later wrote to her, begging forgiveness for never having kept in contact: “Contrary to my promises, which I remember were many, I’ve not even sent you a card! What a beast I am but it’s a fact and if you want, I present my apologies . . . Keep in touch!” They did not meet again until 1912.

  In June, the local police recorded that Soso attended a meeting with all the other exiles, including a girl named Stefania Petrovskaya, who enjoyed a love affair with Stalin sufficiently serious that he decided to marry her.

  Stefania, a teacher aged twenty-three, was above Stalin on the social scale, an Odessan noblewoman whose Catholic father owned a house in the centre of the city. She had attended the elite gymnasium there before going into higher education. “Noblewoman Petrovskaya,” as she appears in police reports, had been arrested in Moscow and given two years in Vologda exile, but she had just finished her sentence when she met Osip Koba. Stalin was not there for very long, but the relationship must have been intense because she hung around in godforsaken Solvychegodsk for no good reason—and then followed him back to the Caucasus.

  Exiles were isolated from Party politics abroad, but they caught up on the latest schisms from battered back copies of journals that arrived from family and friends. Stalin was irritated by Lenin’s feud with Bogdanov. “How do you like Bogdanov’s new book?” Soso asked his friend Malakia Toroshelidze, in Geneva. “In my view, some of Illich’s [Lenin’s] individual blunders are significantly and correctly noted in it. He also notes that Illich’s materialism is . . . different from Plekhanov’s which . . . Illich tries to hide.”

  Stalin respected Lenin, but never completely uncritically. The deification only came after Lenin’s death and with a clear political purpose. Now he regarded Lenin’s schisms as the self-indulgence of spoiled émigrés. In Russia, where Bolshevism was in decay, the praktiki could not afford such nonsense. “The Party had as a whole ceased to exist,” admitted Zinoviev. It was so bad that some, the “Liquidators,” proposed winding up the Party. Stalin on the other hand agreed with the so-called Conciliators that the Bolsheviks had to work with the Mensheviks—or disappear altogether.

  He was sure the Party needed him and he had no intention of hanging around in Solvychegodsk: the more revolutionaries that Stolypin exiled, the more the system was overwhelmed. Escapes multiplied. Of 32,000 exiles in 1906–9, the authorities could never account for more than about 18,000 at any one time. Soso wrote to Alliluyev in St. Petersburg asking for his address and place of work, obviously planning on a trip to the capital. He started raising funds: some money orders arrived at the post office. The prisoners staged a fake gambling game in which Stalin “won the entire kitty of 70 roubles.”

  In late June, after River Cock’s morning inspection, Sukhova helped Stalin don a sarafan, a long, sleeveless Russian dress. We do not know if he shaved his beard, but in full drag, he travelled, accompanied by Sukhova, by steamboat to the local centre, Kotlas. On parting, he managed a romantic flourish, unabashed by his transvestite garb, telling Sukhova: “One day I’ll pay you back by giving you a silk handkerchief.”

  Then he caught the train to the Venice of the North.1

  “Once, in the evening,” recounts Sergei Alliluyev, still married to the libidinous Olga, “I was strolling along Liteinyi Boulevard [in St. Petersburg] when I suddenly saw Comrade Stalin coming in the opposite direction.” The friends embraced.

  Stalin had already visited the Alliluyev flat and workplace but had found no one home. Central Petersburg was a small world, however. Alliluyev recruited a concierge to hide Soso. These concierges were often Okhrana informers, so, if Bolshevik sympathizers, their places were ideal hideouts, never searched.

  The concierge hid Stalin in the porters’ lodge of the Horse Guards barracks on Potemkin Street right next to the Taurida Palace, once the home of Catherine the Great’s political partner, Prince Potemkin, and now seat of the Duma. At the barracks, “Cabs would drop off court officials . . . while Stalin went into the city to visit friends,” says Anna Alliluyeva. He “would stroll serenely by the guard at the barrack gates, holding the regimental rollcall under his arm.”

  Stalin, who was on a mission connected to “publishing a newspaper,” made the necessary contacts and swiftly departed for the Caucasus.

  In early July 1909, he re-emerged in Baku with yet another name—Oganez Totomiants, Armenian merchant. But the Okhrana noticed his return nonetheless: “The Social-Democrat escapee from Siberia has arrived—he’s known as ‘Koba’ or ‘Soso.’” Two Okhrana agents inside the Bolshevik Party, “Fikus” and “Mikheil,” now informed regularly on Stalin, who gloried in the code name of “the Milkman,”* because he used a Baku milkbar as his base. He was intermittently watched, but the secret police took months to identify Soso and hunt him down. Why?

  Here is one of the enduring mysteries of young Stalin: was the future Soviet dictator an agent of the Tsar’s secret police?2

  * The chief jailer there was named Serov, ironically the father of the future General Ivan Serov, one of Stalin’s top secret policemen, deporter of the Chechens and other peoples, and first KGB Chairman.

  * Soso befriended the post-office clerk who doubled as a jailer and whom he had met when he picked up his money orders. Soso liked to hunt alone in the forests during the summer and would meet the postman-jailer to pass him notes that he would deliver to the prisoners in the local prison. The local priest let Stalin use his library.

  * See the Epilogue.

  * The secret police adapted their own witty code names for their surveillance targets: a baker would be “Bun,” a banker “Moneybags,” the poet Sergei Esenin was “Typesetter,” while a pretty girl might be “Gorgeous” or “Glamourpuss.”

  25

  “The Milkman”:

  Was Stalin a Tsarist Agent?

  In the Oil Kingdom of Baku, the Milkman tried to reinvigorate the shattered Bolsheviks, joining up with Spandarian, Sergo and Budu Mdivani. He rallied the remnants of the Outfit and “started to plan an attack on a mail ship,” says the Mauserist Kupriashvili, to fund their newspaper Bakinsky Proletary.

  Yet it was a dark time. “The Party is ailing,” wrote Stalin.
“There’s nothing good to write. We’ve no workers,” he complained to Tskhakaya, adding that he now believed in reuniting with the Mensheviks. Conciliation was anathema to Lenin, but dire circumstances had now forced Stalin to become a Conciliator. The tough Komitetchiki, the Committeemen inside Russia, were increasingly frustrated with Lenin and the bickering émigrés: “Why must these damned ‘trends’ split us . . . what useless skirmishes—both sides deserve a thrashing!” Stalin demanded the appointment of a Russian Bureau to run the Party inside the Empire and the creation of a national paper based in Russia, not in exile. “The Central Committee,” Stalin complained in print, “is a fictitious centre.”

  Soso’s ideas for the future of the Party reached the Central Committee in Paris, which, in January 1910, appointed him to the new Russian Bureau, a recognition of his energetic persistence and organizational talents. He had graduated from Caucasian activist to Russian Bolshevik leader—yet in Baku he was playing his own game against Shaumian.

  “Stalin and Spandarian concentrated all the power in their hands,” grumbled Shaumian’s wife, Ekaterina, the oil executive’s daughter. Faced with Stalin’s dominance and Tsarist repression, Shaumian, like many others, took a regular job, even working for a sympathetic oil baron, Shibaev: he tried to withdraw from the underground. “Everyone has ‘seen sense’ and got private jobs,” Soso told Tskhakaya. “Everyone except me, that is—I haven’t ‘seen sense.’ The police are hunting me!” Stalin, that sea-green incorruptible, never “saw sense” and hated those that did, like Shaumian, “who gave up our work three months ago!” He tried to tempt Shaumian back into the fold. Alone after Kato, Stalin despised Shaumian’s happy home,* blaming his wife, Ekaterina: “Like a doe, she thinks only of nurturing and was often hostile to me because I involved her Stepan in secret business that smelt of prison.” Ekaterina Shaumian complained that Stalin “intrigued against Shaumian and behaved like a termagant.”

  Stalin made quick visits to Tiflis “concerned with financial matters,” the euphemism for expropriations and protection-rackets. Unknown to him, his father died, probably while he was there. Beso, by now a dosshouse drunk, was admitted to Mikhailovsky Hospital. Medical records chart his decline from TB, colitis and chronic pneumonia. He died on 12 August, aged fifty-five. He had made no attempt to find Soso. Without relatives or money, he was buried in a pauper’s grave.1 For the Bolshevik who signed himself “Son of Beso,” the father had died years before.†

  Back on the Caspian, Stalin was now joined by his girlfriend from exile, Stefania Petrovskaya, soon described by the Okhrana as “mistress of well-known leader of local RSDWP.” She must have been devoted to him because, on her release from exile, she did not return to either Moscow or Odessa but followed Stalin to Baku.

  He now gave her his ultimate compliment: he jettisoned the pen name “K. Kato” and became “K. Stefin,” based on Stefania—and a step nearer “Stalin.” The adoption of the names of lovers as pen names is a peculiarity in such a chauvinist. We have no letters between them. But the “K. Stefin” shows that Stefania was important to him. They moved in together—or, as the secret police noted, the Milkman “cohabited with his concubine.”

  There now started a farrago of bewildering scandals that revealed that Stalin’s Party was riddled with Tsarist spies. Stalin reacted by unleashing a hysterical, murderous witch hunt for traitors which only succeeded in destroying the innocent—and drawing suspicion onto himself. It began in September 1909, when Stalin’s own secret-police contacts warned him that his valuable printing-press had been betrayed by an Okhrana doubleagent: it was about to be raided. The press had to be swiftly moved and secretly reassembled in new premises.

  Stalin “rushed to me,” recalls his henchman Vatsek, “and asked me to get cash. I got him 600 roubles from Mancho,” the oil baron. But it was not enough. A little later, “Josef Vissarionovich Djugashvili came running with Budu Mdivani.” The tycoon then gave Stalin another 300 roubles.

  Stalin found the press a new secret location in the Baku old city, setting it up in the dark cellars and alleyways of the Persian Fortress. But he discovered that the married couple who actually ran the press had embezzled money. He sent his Mauserists after them. The husband got away. The wife was interrogated by Stalin’s gunmen, but she somehow escaped before she could be liquidated.

  In October 1909, the police raided a safe house to pick up Stalin’s fellow Baku Bolshevik, Prokofi “Alyosha” Japaridze. The policemen were surprised to find Stalin and Sergo with Japaridze. The ranking detective, as ever incapable of independent thought, left some policemen on guard and went to consult his superiors. Stalin and Sergo bribed the policemen with ten roubles. Japaridze had to stay and face arrest, but Stalin and Sergo were allowed to escape.

  Stalin, on a tip-off from another of his contacts in the Baku Okhrana, blamed these betrayals on the Secretary of the Bolshevik Oil Workers Union, Leontiev. Stalin decided that there were five Okhrana double-agents in the Party. He decided to kill Leontiev, but the latter called his bluff, reappearing and demanding a Party trial. Stalin refused to hold a trial since this would reveal his moles inside the Okhrana. Leontiev was let off, raising suspicions about Stalin’s own relationship with the secret police.

  “The betrayal of someone with whom you’ve shared everything,” said Stalin later, “is so horrible, no actor or writer can express it—it’s worse than the very bite of Death!” Stalin orchestrated a cannibalistic inquisition in Baku to find traitors, real and imagined, just as he would across the entire USSR in the 1930s. The difference is that in Baku the Party really was infested with police spies.

  Stalin printed the names of the five “traitors,” but secret-police archives reveal that only one was, in fact, a spy; all the others were innocent. The witch hunt gathered pace. When Baku was visited by a top Moscow Bolshevik named Chernomazov, “Comrade Koba stared disgustedly at him. ‘You’re a traitor!’ he shouted.” In this case, Stalin was right.

  The disarray was reported to the gleeful Baku Okhrana by their real spies code named “Fikus” and “Mikheil,” the traitors who really had infiltrated the Bolsheviks but were never identified by witchfinder-general Stalin. No doubt in Baku he ordered innocent people killed as traitors just as he would in the Terror.

  It was a mess. Soso liked to fix such messes with quiet killings, but that did not work this time. He and another comrade accused each other of being spooks. Indeed the Mensheviks, and some Bolsheviks, suspected that Stalin himself, with his secret-police contacts, was the biggest traitor of the lot. So was he betraying the Party to the police? Here is the case against Stalin.

  Stalin certainly cultivated shadowy Tsarist connections, receiving a stream of mysterious tip-offs from contacts in the secret police. Once Stalin was walking in Baku’s streets with a comrade when an Okhrana officer approached him. “I know you’re a revolutionary,” he said. “Here’s a list of all your comrades who will be arrested in the near future.” On another occasion, a comrade arrived to meet Stalin at a Party safe house and was startled to pass a senior Gendarme officer on his way out. He challenged Stalin, who said the Gendarme was aiding the Bolsheviks.

  In Tiflis, during a roundup of revolutionaries, Stalin was amazed to find a Menshevik, Artyom Gio, in a secret hideout. “I wasn’t expecting it!” Stalin blurted out. “Haven’t you been arrested?” Just then a stranger entered. “You can talk freely,” Stalin reassured Gio. “He’s a comrade of mine.” This “comrade” turned out to be a police interpreter who then recited the list of comrades, including Sergei Alliluyev, who had been arrested that day—and warned Stalin that the police would arrest him that very night.*

  The Okhrana’s agent “Fikus” reported that an unknown Gendarme officer visited Stalin and Mdivani to warn them about the Gendarme raid on the printing-press. As we saw, they saved the press.

  So what was Stalin’s relationship with the secret police?

  “Stalin was giving addresses of comrades disagreeable to him to the Gendarmes
to get rid of them,” insists Arsenidze. “His comrades decided to put him on Party trial . . . but, at the trial meeting, Gendarmes appeared and arrested the judges and Koba.” In 1909, adds Uratadze, “the Baku Bolsheviks accused him of denouncing Shaumian to the police.” Jordania claimed that Shaumian even told him, “Stalin denounced me—no one else knew the address of my safe house.” All three of these accusers were Menshevik exiles whose stories have been widely accepted.

  Then the secret police always seemed strangely confused about Stalin. The Gendarme chief in Baku, Colonel Martynov, only “discovered” that the Milkman was Soso Djugashvili in December 1909—almost six months after his escape. Was he being protected by his Tsarist controllers?

  If one throws into this poisonous cauldron the accusations of betrayal against him as early as 1902, his secret-police contacts and his escapes from exile and prison, it might look plausible that he was a Tsarist agent.2Was the future supreme pontiff of international Marxism an unprincipled megalomaniac traitor? If Stalin was a phoney, was not the entire Soviet experiment a fraud too? And was everything he did, particularly the Great Terror, an attempt to cover up his guilt? It was a tempting theory—especially during the Cold War.

  · · ·

  Yet the case against Stalin is actually a weak one. The Menshevik stories of Shaumian’s betrayal do not stand up. There was tension but no feud with Shaumian: the two towering Bolshevik figures in the Caucasus were “friendly but with a shadow.” During 1907–10, Shaumian was only arrested once, on 30 April 1909, when Stalin was still in Solvychegodsk. Shaumian was next arrested, on 30 September 1911, when Stalin was imprisoned in Petersburg. It is unlikely Stalin arranged either arrest.

  Stalin was flexible and amoral. His Messiah-complex led him to believe that anyone opposed to him was an enemy of the cause—thus any compact was justified, no matter how Mephistophelian. Yet there is no proof that he betrayed any comrades or that he was tried by a Party court.