Young Stalin

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  Stalin’s outburst soon reached Lenin in exile: he was displeased. At the time, Lenin was holding a Party school at Longjumeau near Paris, and had invited Sergo to study there. Sergo talked up his ally Stalin. One day, Lenin and Sergo were strolling the boulevards.

  “Sergo, do you recognize the phrase ‘storm in a teacup’?”

  “Vladimir Illich,” replied Sergo, knowing that Lenin had somehow heard of Stalin’s letter, “Koba’s our friend. A lot of things connect us.”

  “I know,” said Lenin. “I also remember him well. But the Revolution’s not yet won. Its interests must come before personal likes and dislikes. You say Koba’s our comrade as if you mean he’s a Bolshevik and won’t let us down. But do you close your eyes to inconsistency? Such nihilistic jokes. . . reveal Koba’s immaturity as a Marxist.”

  Lenin fired a shot across Stalin’s bows, but soon forgave “Soso of the Caucasus.” Soon afterwards, the Menshevik Uratadze told Lenin about Stalin’s expulsion in Baku. “It’s not worth ascribing too much significance to such things,” answered Lenin, laughing it off. That prompted Uratadze to sneak to him about Stalin’s brutal outrages. “That,” said Lenin, “is exactly the sort of person I need.”

  The escape funds—seventy roubles—arrived in Solvychegodsk, but they were almost instantly stolen from Stalin. The money was telegraphed to an exiled student in Vologda named Ivanian. It was usual to despatch such funds to a third party because otherwise exiles lost their allowances. But there was always the risk of theft.

  In late January to mid-February, Stalin invented a medical appointment in order to get to the provincial capital, planning to drop by Ivanian’s place, collect the money and catch the train to Petersburg. But the student had other ideas. When Stalin reached Vologda, Ivanian moved him to the house of another exile, Count Alexei Dorrer. First, however, according to Stalin, “Ivanian didn’t pass me the money but just showed me the telegram about sending it (with various words obliterated . . .). He himself couldn’t explain either the ‘loss’ of the money or the missing words in the telegram.”

  Soso, according to some accounts, nonetheless took the train to Petersburg, undeterred by the lost money. After walking around all day exhausted, he noticed a pharmacy bearing the Georgian name Lordkipanidze, staggered inside and confessed he was an escapee. The Georgian took pity on his compatriot, hiding and feeding him. Stalin was always amazed how complete strangers helped him.

  But a fuming Stalin had to return to Solvychegodsk—and he never forgot Ivanian, “guffawing about the ‘bandit who stole the money and when I met the rascal after the Revolution, he had the nerve to ask me for help.’” If Ivanian really did steal Stalin’s money, it was an act of astonishing courage—and folly. Still protesting his innocence, he was shot in 1937.*

  “I also used to hit the bottle,” Serafima Khoroshenina writes laconically. Perhaps it was the drinking-bout to recover from this frustrating interlude that led Stalin to formalize his relations with her. Some time before 23 February, he and Serafima Khoroshenina registered as cohabiting partners, a sort of civil marriage (because only religious marriage existed in the Orthodox Empire). It is an alliance entirely lost or omitted from Stalin’s biography.

  The couple were not to enjoy their blissful honeymoon for long. “On 23 February, by order of the Governor of Vologda Province, Serafima Khoroshenina was despatched to serve her time in Nikolsk.” Such were the caprices of Tsarist Autocracy—she was not even given time to bid goodbye to her partner. But she left Stalin a farewell note. To paraphrase Wilde: to lose one fiancée almost on the day of the wedding may be regarded as a misfortune but to lose a new “wife” a week afterwards looks like carelessness. Merry word had spread of this sudden alliance, regarded as a semi-marriage, because a Bolshevik named A. P. Smirnov cheekily probed him in a letter that inquired: “I’ve heard you got married again.”

  No sooner was Serafima out of his bed than his landlady, Maria Kuzakova, took her place. “He was a very polite lodger,” she recalls. “Quiet and gentle. Always in his black fedora and autumn coat. He spent most of his time at home reading and writing, and I could hear the floor creaking at night because he liked to pace as he worked.” One day she asked him his age.

  “Guess,” he said.

  “Forty?”

  “No, I’m twenty-nine,” he laughed. Kuzakova, whose husband had been killed in the Russo-Japanese War, had three marauding children. “Sometimes they made such an unbearable rumpus that he’d open the door smiling and he’d sing with them.” It is hard to believe Soso was that good-tempered, but Maria became devoted to him, listening to his stories of the seminary.

  River Cock, perhaps discovering his near escape, intensified his searches of Stalin’s room, which infuriated Kuzakova. The police knocked on the windows in the middle of the night. This woke the children, who sobbed while Stalin watched with absolute calm. They confiscated some letters from Serafima, including her farewell note, but he continued to meet up for picnics and parties to discuss politics with the other exiles. This irked Zivilev, but Stalin got his revenge. “Once, among the promenading public,” remembers Golubev, “Stalin gave him such a dressing-down that he became terrified of bumping into Stalin, who used to joke that he hardly saw him.” Indeed Kuzakova says, “I’d never seen the police so afraid of one man.”

  Stalin was now so close to the end of his two-year sentence that there was no point in escaping, however much he was “suffocating.” He was bored enough to attend the local theatre, for which he was fined twenty-five kopecks. Presumably, Maria Kuzakova was another consolation. By the time he left, it seems she was pregnant with his child. According to her family, she told him she was expecting. He claimed he could not marry but promised to send money, which of course he never did.

  On 25 May, River Cock arrested Stalin for attending a meeting of other revolutionaries, sentencing him to three days in the local jail. But Soso had survived his full term. When he was released on 26 June, he never even returned to bid goodbye to his pregnant landlady. “She came home and found her tenant and his stuff gone and only the rent on the table under a napkin.” This was the reason that locals were discouraged from having affairs with exiles: they tended to leave suddenly.*

  On 6 July 1911, Soso travelled by steamer down the river to Kotlas and thence to Vologda, where he was ordered to reside for two months. He was under Okhrana surveillance from the moment he settled at various addresses in Vologda. Now the police spies gave him a new code name—“the Caucasian.”

  His prolific skirt-chasing was not over. Under the eyes of the Okhrana’s spooks, the Caucasian passed the time in the seduction of a saucy schoolgirl who was the mistress of one of his comrades. When it suited him, he borrowed both the man’s girlfriend and his passport.2

  * Stalin’s presence as an exile would return to haunt this region. In 1940, he ordered the construction of a giant steel-mill in Cherepovets because he remembered it from his Solvychegodsk exile, even though it was totally unsuitable: the nearest iron-ore and coal deposits were over 1,000 miles away. But his advisers were too frightened to tell him. The Second World War delayed construction, but building started in 1949. Due to its inconvenient location, it is still known as “Stalin’s Belch.”

  * In the early 1920s, Ivanian had the misfortune to literally bump into Stalin in Moscow and he apparently did ask for his help. On 7 June 1926, when he was already the dominant Soviet leader, Stalin was consulted on Ivanian, then an official with the Commissariat of Internal Trade. “In response to your inquiry, I notify you of the following facts that you need to know,” Stalin wrote in his characteristic numbered paragraphs. Point Six concluded: “Later after I went abroad, I received all the Central Committee documents proving that 70 roubles had been sent to me . . . [and] the money was not lost but received by the addressee in Vologda.” Ivanian was expelled from the Party but reinstated after Old Bolsheviks interceded for him. When Stalin unleashed the Terror, the Transcaucasian boss and secret policeman Beria pursue
d him. Ivanian wrote desperately to the dictator: “I still declare I had nothing to do with the 70 roubles . . . Please help clear my name.” He was ironically exiled back to Vologda, then transported to Tiflis and executed.

  * The son, Constantine, was born after Stalin’s departure. Kuzakova left memoirs during the dictatorship that naturally did not contain a confession of their affair., but on balance, it seems that the baby was Stalin’s son. The dates on the birth certificate do not tally, but, as with Yakov Djugashvili and indeed Stalin’s own movable birthday, such documents were often pre-dated or forward-dated. Such events were in any case registered very casually in those days, especially in tiny villages far from Petersburg. Soso made no attempt to meet the child, but, unusually, the boy was later brought to Moscow, given a favoured job in the Central Committee apparat, and protected. He had an interesting career. Given the mother’s insistence, Stalin’s acquiescence in the child’s later career, and his wife Nadya Alliluyeva’s knowledge of the affair, it seems probable the dictator knew Constantine was his son. See the Epilogue.

  27

  The Central Committee and

  “Glamourpuss” the Schoolgirl

  I am ready. The rest is up to you,” Stalin wrote to Lenin once he was settled in Vologda, but he wanted to make sure that henceforth he was assigned to the centre. “I want to work but I’d work only in Petersburg or Moscow. I’m free again!”

  Stalin treated his own feuds with lethal seriousness, but still sneered at Lenin’s émigré rows. “Koba wrote that he can’t be bothered to bark at the Liquidators or Vperod [the factions of Krasin and Gorky respectively, both opposed to Lenin], because he’ll only mock those who are barking,” wrote one Bolshevik to his comrades in Paris—where Lenin probably heard about Stalin’s latest “immaturity.” Nonetheless, in Paris at the end of May, the Central Committee (CC) appointed a Russian Organizational Committee, with Sergo as a member and Stalin as a special travelling envoy, a promotion soon known to the Okhrana.

  Sergo set off for Russia to brief the ragged Bolshevik organization on the new appointments. The Okhrana watched the Caucasian even more closely, but he was an expert dodger of police spies. In early August, he managed to slip out of Vologda and reach Petersburg on a flying visit to meet Sergo. “Sergo gave Stalin Lenin’s directive . . . and Lenin’s request that he come abroad to discuss Party activities.” Here was another minor escape, but Stalin managed to return to Vologda without the spooks even realizing he had gone.

  Vologda was a metropolis compared to Solvychegodsk, with 38,000 citizens, libraries, theatres, a cathedral dating from the 1580s, a house that had belonged to Peter the Great and a grand governor’s mansion. Stalin spent a month gathering funds for a longer excursion, and he read voraciously, visiting the library seventeen times. “I’d have thought you’d been strolling some other city’s streets,” his fellow exile from Solvychegodsk, Ivan Golubev, wrote teasingly, “but I . . . learn you’ve not budged, wallowing in semi-exile conditions. That’s sad if true. So what are you going to do now? Wait? You might go insane with idleness!”

  Yet Stalin seemed to be indulging the sybarite hidden within his steely ascetic for perhaps the only time in his life. His Okhrana surveillance soon divined the reason: a runaway schoolgirl who was the live-in mistress of Stalin’s fellow exile Peter Chizhikov. Aged just sixteen, she was Pelageya Onufrieva, a pupil at the Totma Gymnasium and daughter of a prosperous Solvychegodsk smallholder. She had embarked on an affair with Chizhikov when he was exiled to Totma and eloped with him to Vologda, where she met the Caucasian. Chizhikov, who had encountered Soso in prison a few years earlier, soon fell under his spell, running his errands and raising money for his next escape. He did not seem to mind when this friendship developed into a ménage à trois with Soso.

  Pelageya was just a frivolous and rebellious schoolgirl, but she somehow managed to impress the Okhrana agents with her fine clothes. They code-named her “Nariadnaya”—the Well-Dressed One, or Glamourpuss. No wonder even the obsessionally ambitious and committed Stalin was happy to waste a month in her company. “I always knew him as Josef,” she recalls. The serpent literally offered Eve the forbidden fruit: “In those days one wasn’t supposed to eat in the street but there was a shady avenue lined with trees. I went there with Stalin who often invited me . . . Once we sat on a bench and he offered me the fruit: ‘Eat some. No one will see you here . . .’”

  His friend Chizhikov worked during the day at the Colonial Goods Store. As soon as he left his home to go to work at 9 a.m., the spooks watched Stalin turn up and disappear inside. “We were quite happy when we were at home,” Glamourpuss recounts, “we’d read quietly. He knew I loved literature. We talked a lot about books. We used to have lunch together, walked around town for hours and visited the library and we joked a lot. I was silly but so young.” Soso, ever the teacher, lectured her on Shakespeare (including literary criticisms of The Tempest) and the paintings of the Louvre (which he must have visited during his week in Paris). Most touchingly he poured out his heart about Kato: how he had loved her, how he had wanted to shoot himself after her death, how his friends had taken away his gun and what beautiful dresses she made—and he mentioned his son Yakov. Stalin “had lots of friends. He had good taste—despite being a man,” jokes Glamourpuss. “He talked about southern landscapes, how beautiful were the gardens, how elegant the buildings. He’d often say to me, ‘I know you’d love it in the south. Come and see it for yourself . . . You’ll be treated as one of the family!’”

  Glamourpuss was cheeky and intelligent. Stalin was attracted to strong women, but ultimately preferred submissive housekeepers or teenagers. He undoubtedly enjoyed adolescent and teenage girls, a taste that later was to get him into serious trouble with the police. Even though the rules in Tsarist Russia were much laxer than they are today, particularly far away from the capital, this must reveal, at least, a need to dominate and control on Stalin’s part. But it was not an obsession—some of his girlfriends were older than him.

  Pelageya seemed to have understood the Caucasian better than most. She was probably the only person in his life to have teased him about his strangeness; he opened up to her. Even this most thin-skinned and touchy of men enjoyed Glamourpuss’s mischief. He nicknamed her “Polya;” she called him “Oddball Osip.”

  “It was a long hot summer,” she reminisces, but when it was over she felt “she would never see him again.” One senses that Stalin had women in every town at this point. He told Glamourpuss that he was engaged to another girl in St. Petersburg, later writing to her: “You know I travelled to St. Petersburg to get married, but finally I ended up in prison . . .” If Oddball Osip had another woman, Polya the Glamourpuss, at the centre of a ménage à trois, could hardly complain. But who was the woman in Petersburg?

  Glamourpuss “always knew he was going to leave. I wanted to see him off but he wouldn’t let me, saying he was being followed.” But “just before he left, he came over that morning” for a tender parting.

  “I want to give you this as a present,” he said, handing her a book, “to remember me by. It’ll interest you.”

  “It certainly will,” said Glamourpuss.

  “Give me something to remember you by,” asked Oddball Osip.

  She gave him as a keepsake the cross that hung around her neck, but he would not take it. Instead he accepted the chain and “hung it on his watch.” She asked for a photograph of him, but Stalin, about to plunge again into his secret life, refused: “No one photographs me. Only in prison by force. One day, I’ll send you my photograph, but for now, it would just get you into trouble.”

  The book he gave her was A Study of Western Literature by Kogan, a special present from an autodidactic bibliophile, dedicated:

  To clever, fiery Polya

  From Oddball Osip*

  They never met again but he kept writing. His letters, reported Pelageya, “were always very witty—he knew how to be funny even in the difficult moments of life.” But when he w
as exiled in 1913, “I lost contact with him for ever.”

  However delightful the Glamourpuss, Oddball Osip could linger no longer. At 3:45 p.m. on 6 September 1911, the Okhrana spies reported that, accompanied by Chizhikov, “the Caucasian arrived at the station with two pieces of luggage—a little trunk and a bundle, apparently of bedclothes, and boarded the train for Petersburg.” The spooks noticed that Stalin twice checked all the carriages, pretending to miss his tails.

  “Djugashvili went by train Number Three under observation of agent Ilchykov,” the Vologda Okhrana telegraphed Petersburg. “I ask you to meet him. Captain Popel.” Yet Soso outwitted the reception party at the station: when he arrived at 8:40 p.m., he had shaken off the agents.

  “The provincial,” sneers the snobbish Trotsky, “arrived in the territory of the capital.” Stalin first searched for Sergei Alliluyev, but he was not home. So he just strolled up and down Nevsky Prospect until he bumped into Silva Todria, his Georgian printing expert.

  Just before Stalin’s arrival, Stolypin, the Russian Premier, was assassinated right in front of the Emperor’s box at the theatre in Kiev. The assassin was a rogue secret-police informer, who again personified the dangers of konspiratsia. The victim was the last great statesman of the Russian Empire.

  “Dangerous times,” Todria warned Soso. “After Stolypin’s murder, the police are everywhere. Concierges check all papers.”

  “Let’s find a boarding-house near by,” suggested Soso. The boarding-house “Russia” accepted his Chizhikov passport.

  At the Alliluyev home, the doorbell rang. “I was very happy to see our friend Silva Todria,” writes Anna, “but he wasn’t alone. Behind him stood a thin man named Soso in a black coat and fedora.” They asked for Sergei Alliluyev, but he was not home—so they waited. Soso read the newspapers. When Alliluyev got home, they peered out of the window: the police spies had picked up his trail when he collected his luggage. Now they watched the street.