Young Stalin

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  Alliluyev called in his daughters, Anna and Nadya: “Go outside into the courtyard and see if there are two spooks in bowler hats.” The excited girls spotted one agent in the courtyard, another in the street and two more at the corner.

  Stalin returned for the night to the Russia guesthouse. At 7: 50 a.m. on 9 September, there was a banging on his door.

  “Let me sleep!” shouted Soso, always the nocturnal creature. The police burst in and arrested him, finding maps, photographs, letters, a German phrasebook (suggesting he was hoping to travel to Lenin’s imminent Prague Conference) and the passport of Chizhikov, who had thus lent Stalin not just his girlfriend but his name too.1

  Locking him up in the Petersburg House of Detention to await sentence, the Okhrana took charge of the Caucasian, keeping him for three weeks, neither informing the local police department nor handing him over to the Gendarmes. Probably they were making the usual attempt to turn him into a double-agent, but on 2 October they eventually informed the Petersburg Gendarmerie, whose Colonel Sobelev thereupon recommended exile “to eastern Siberia . . . for five years.”

  The Interior Minister, A. A. Makarov, reduced the sentence to three years. Stalin was allowed to suggest Vologda as his place of residence and to travel by his own means, instead of in a cluster of convicts. The physical description on his file was so inconsistent it might have belonged to another man. Was this just another case of the Tsarist regime’s lenient muddle? Had palms been greased in 16 Fontanka or at the Interior Ministry? Did Stalin make some duplicitous deal or was the Okhrana hoping he would unconsciously lead them to his comrades? We do not know—but, the moment he was released with his travel-pass back to Vologdan exile, he slipped his Okhrana tails and disappeared for ten days into the streets of Petersburg, technically escaping again.

  He met up with his friends Sergo and Spandarian. “In December 1911, Stalin was hiding from the police on Petersburgskaya Storona in the apartment of the Tsimakov family,” says Vera Shveitzer, Spandarian’s chief mistress, “and we went to see him. He lived in a cold room in a wooden glass-roofed house in a courtyard.” They got an exuberant reception: Stalin “ran up to us and took our hands and dragged us into the room, roaring with laughter; we laughed back.”

  “You know how to enjoy yourselves,” he said.

  “Yes, we’ll dance to celebrate your release!” answered Spandarian.

  Sergo and Spandarian were about to travel to Lenin’s Prague Conference, which marked the formal birth of the Bolshevik Party—and the divorce from the Mensheviks. Stalin had been invited but, after his new sentence, he was unable to go. Sergo and Spandarian took his messages to Lenin. “There was a small meeting in my apartment,” recalls Shveitzer, attended by the three Caucasians. Sergo gave Stalin fifty roubles. On the run, “Stalin spent every night in a different place.”

  On Christmas Day, he was back in Vologda. He walked the streets in black coat and fedora looking for lodgings. His new landlord was a retired Gendarme who “didn’t like Josef Vissarionovich”—for paternal as well as political reasons. The old Gendarme and his wife had a divorced daughter named Maria Bogoslovskaya with three young children and a sixteen-year-old maid named Sophia Kryukova. Soso lived on a little bed behind the curtain next to the stove in the kitchen, but he evidently entered into another affair with the divorcee Maria. Even though she wrote her memoirs in 1936, when nothing explicit could be recorded about the private foibles of the Leader, Sophia the maid implies that the exile and the divorcee had a relationship. “He and Maria often used to argue and she used to cry. They shouted and were almost at each other’s throats. During their rows, the names of other women could often be heard.”

  Stalin flirted with the maid while fending off the jealous Gendarme’s daughter. “Once after a public holiday,” says Sophia the maid, “I noticed Josef Vissarionovich was watching me from behind the curtain. I had long black hair and wore an attractive dress with a long skirt of flowered Japanese cloth.”

  “That dress really suits you,” said Stalin. “In my homeland, Georgia, girls your age wear dresses like that.” Sophia was sensible in 1936 not to reveal how well she knew Stalin, but they obviously spent some time together because she introduced him to her boozy father, who embarrassed her.

  “Don’t worry,” Stalin comforted her, “my father was a drunkard too. Mother brought me up.” He clearly enjoyed showing off about his education and foreign languages. When he read Zvezda (the Bolshevik Star) and foreign newspapers, he impressed her by translating passages into Russian. “It really made me laugh,” she recalls.

  Stalin usually came home late at night and was visited only by a tall dark man, possibly Shaumian or Yakov Sverdlov, a rising young Bolshevik. He met up again with his cuckolded friend Chizhikov. Their ménage à trois was not resuscitated because Glamourpuss had gone back to school. But she was on his mind. On arrival, he sent an erotic postcard of Aphrodite to his teenage Venus in Totma: “Well, fiery Polya, I’m stuck in Vologda and hugging your ‘dear’ ‘nice’ Petenka [Chizhikov]. So drink the health of your famous Oddball Osip.”*

  Romancing the landlord’s daughter and her maid, Stalin was killing time while awaiting developments in Prague. There, the Conference of just eighteen delegates, a sign of how much the Party had shrunk, chose the first true Bolshevik Central Committee. Sergo and Spandarian were elected, but the rising star was a stirring, working-class orator named Roman Malinovsky. Lenin was thrilled by this genuine proletarian talent. “He makes an excellent impression,” he exulted; “the soil is rich!” Malinovsky looked the part: “tall, strongly built and dressed almost fashionably” with “thick reddish hair and yellow eyes,” his pockmarks gave him “a fierce expression as if he’d been through fire.” But he had one serious drawback: when arrested some time earlier and convicted of rape and burglary, he was recruited by the Okhrana and code-named “Portnoi” (the Tailor). He was their highest-paid agent.

  At the first Central Committee, Lenin and Zinoviev proposed the co-option of Stalin.* He had gained a new importance for Lenin as a nationalities expert. Lenin now recognized that Stalin was one of the few Bolsheviks who shared his keenness to formulate policies that would win followers amongst the non-Russian peoples of the Empire, but without promising them independence. The Tailor dutifully reported to his Okhrana paymasters that Stalin, Spandarian and Sergo “were elected to the Russian Bureau to be paid 50 roubles monthly wages.” Unlike the Okhrana, Stalin took some time to find out about Prague and wrote to Krupskaya to learn more. “I got a letter from Ivanovich [Stalin’s Party code name],” Krupskaya told Sergo, but “it’s immediately obvious he’s terribly cut off from everything, head in the clouds . . . What a pity he couldn’t attend the Conference.” In a coded letter, Stalin begged Shveitzer for news of Prague.

  The isolation was about to end. Sergo was already on his way to Vologda.

  On 18 February 1912, the Vologda police spies reported that the Caucasian met “an unknown man”—surely Sergo—who announced his promotion to the Central Committee, the highest organ of the Party, a status he would hold for the rest of his life, and handed over his salary, secret addresses and codes. It was probably now that Stalin agreed with Krupskaya, chief code maker as well as Lenin’s wife, to use Gorky’s poem “Oltenian Legend,” as their code. His handwritten copy of the poem survives.

  Meanwhile Lenin, back in Paris, panicked at the lack of news: “There’s no word of Ivanovich. What’s happened to him? Where is he now? How is he?” Sergo finally reported to Lenin that he had met Soso: “I made a final agreement with him. He is satisfied.”

  It was time to disappear again. Whenever he wanted to vanish from Vologda, Soso bribed the local police with five gold roubles and, according to Vera Shveitzer, escaped five times.

  His landlady, Gavrilova, found him packing. “Are you going away?”

  He hesitated: “Yes I am.”

  She said she would have to inform the police.

  “Could you do it tomorrow?” he asked.
She agreed.

  At 2 a.m. on 29 February, his tails reported him boarding the train for Moscow without permission. But first he received a last letter from his schoolgirl. He bought another sensual postcard, showing a sculpture of a couple wildly kissing and wrote this to Glamourpuss:

  Dear PG,

  I got your letter today . . . Don’t write to the old address since none of us are there any more . . . I owe you a kiss for the kiss, passed on to me by Peter. Let me kiss you now. I’m not simply sending a kiss but am kiiissssing you passionately (it’s not worth kissing any other way),

  Josef

  So, on the last night of February 1912, Stalin surreptitiously caught the train, via Moscow, to the capital. Lenin’s new CC member was on the road.2

  * In 1944, the secret police confiscated her copy of this book along with postcards from Stalin. See the Epilogue.

  * His other, considerably less glamorous correspondent there was a stolid and bespectacled Bolshevik of just twenty-two who had been in exile in Solvychegodsk just before him. His name was Vyacheslav Scriabin, later “Molotov,” who became his longtime political henchman. Molotov heard that Stalin was known as the “Caucasian Lenin.” He was musical and could play the violin and mandolin. He earned one rouble a day by playing mandolin for rich merchants and their molls in the local restaurant and in the new cinema there. Stalin regarded this as beneath him as a Bolshevik. Later he taunted Molotov, “You performed for drunk merchants—they smeared your face in mustard!” Scriabin did not adopt his “industrial name” Molotov until 1914. At this time he was called Ryabin, Zvanov, Mikhailov and V.M., though the Okhrana called him “the Runner” because he walked so fast.

  * Stalin’s associates from Tiflis and Baku, Kalinin and Shaumian, were elected candidate CC members—substitutes if full members were arrested. Elena Stasova became Secretary of the Russian Bureau.

  28

  “Don’t Forget That Name

  and Be Very Wary!”

  On one cold gloomy Petersburg winter day, I was studying when there was a knock at the door,” says Kavtaradze, who was attending Petersburg University while giving maths lessons to the Alliluyev sisters. “Suddenly in came Stalin. I knew he’d been exiled. He was as friendly and merry as usual, wearing a light overcoat despite the biting frost but . . . he wouldn’t take his coat off. ‘I’ll be here for a bit . . . I’ll just rest a while. I came straight from Moscow and I noticed I was being tailed in Moscow and when I got off the train, I spotted the same spook. . . he’s lurking right outside your place!”

  “This was serious,” notes Kavtaradze. The two Georgians waited until darkness. Kavtaradze decided that there was only one way to escape: Stalin would have to dress up in drag. Kavtaradze procured some dresses and Stalin modelled them—but the look just did not work. “I could get women’s dresses,” said Kavtaradze, “but it was impossible to make Stalin look like a woman.”

  The spook, reflected Stalin, “doesn’t want to arrest me—he wants to observe. So I’ll get some sleep.”

  “Yes, sleep: maybe he won’t be able to take the frost. Like Napoleon’s army,” joked Kavtaradze.

  “He will,” replied Soso, who slept all day. But when they emerged onto the streets, the agent was still there. “Let’s walk a little,” said Soso.

  He was hungry, so they ate at Fedorov’s restaurant, but the spy reappeared. “Damn!” swore Stalin. “He pops up from nowhere!”

  A cab clattered down the street. Stalin hailed the carriage and leaped on, but the spook hailed another. The galloping phaetons chased each other down Liteiny, but, realizing he was close to a safe house, Stalin jumped out of the moving cab into a snowdrift, which enveloped him completely. The spy’s galloped past, following the now empty carriage.*

  Stalin dressed up “in the uniform of the Army Medical College and went out.” This was his favoured disguise in Petersburg that year. He stayed about a week. His new assignment was to convert the Bolshevik weekly Zvezda into a daily, Pravda (Truth).

  Stalin was brought to the flat of Tatiana Slavatinskaya, aged thirty-three, a cultured and good-looking Bolshevik, an orphan who had educated herself and studied at the Conservatoire, becoming a fan of Chaliapin’s singing. One of Lenin’s covert operatives, Elena Stasova, trained her in code making. Married to a Jewish revolutionary named Lurye and mother of two children, Tatiana sheltered various Bolsheviks on the run, one of whom “brought a Caucasian with the codename ‘Vasily’ who lived with us for a while.”

  She did not much like “Vasily”—Stalin’s latest alias. “Initially, he seemed too serious, too closed and shy, and his only concern was not to bother us. It was very hard to make him sleep in a bigger, more comfortable room, but on going out to work I always ordered the housemaid† to cook him dinner along with the children. He stayed a week and I ran his errands as messenger.” Stalin appointed her his secretary for the Duma elections. Slavatinskaya seems to have been fairly liberated, in the style of these early feminists. He started an affair with his “dear darling Tatiana” that was “well known” among Soviet grandees during Stalin’s rule.

  Sometimes Stalin stayed with the Alliluyevs. The Venice of the North was a picture of “frosts, snowdrifts, icy sledge paths,” writes Anna Alliluyeva. “Its streets were filled with low Finnish sleighs decorated with ribbons and jingly bells” pulled by “stumpy little horses,” bearing “loads of laughing passengers.” Anna and her younger sister Nadya were glued to their windows longing for a ride—when Soso appeared: “Who’d like a sleigh-ride? Well, get dressed and hurry up, we’re leaving straight away!” The girls were delighted. “We all jumped up shouting with excitement,” recounts Anna. “Now we were invited”—and by none other than “Soso himself,” whose articles they loyally read. The girls knew him better now: “Usually uncommunicative, he can also laugh and joke boyishly and tell amusing stories. He sees the funny side of people and imitates them to such perfection that everyone roars with laughter.” But now he was in a hurry.

  “Come on! Fedya [their brother Fyodor], Nadya! Get dressed”—and he ordered their maid, Fenya: “Get the fur coats!”

  In the street, Soso called out to the driver: “How about giving us a ride!”

  Stalin was in good spirits: “Every word . . . makes us laugh. Soso laughs with us all as the sleigh glides down Sampsonevsky Prospect past the station” with its “small steam trains.” Suddenly, Soso jumped off the sleigh and back into his secret life: “Stop, I’ll get off here, you can ride home”—and, just like that, the Bolshevik Macavity vanished into the station. Was he really having fun with the girls, or was the whole outing a cover to shake off a spook?

  Soso disappeared again. The police spies lost him but guessed correctly that he would resurface in the Caucasus.1

  On 16 March 1912, the Okhrana’s double-agent “Fikus” reported that Stalin was back in Tiflis, where he was staying with a singing teacher who worked at the Teachers’ Society School, directed by the severe Elena Stasova.* His hostess was told “not to ask the name of her visitor,” but Stalin, perhaps missing home, sang Georgian songs with her.

  Soso met up with his playboy friend and CC member Spandarian, and with Stasova. He visited his son, Yakov, whom the Svanidzes were bringing up “as their own with our own children.” The Monoselidzes remained shocked by his callous neglect. “My nephew, having been left an orphan by his mother,” complains Sashiko, “was also almost orphaned by his father.” Soso did not stay long, rushing over to Batumi and then back to Baku.2

  There he found another witch hunt for traitors: the Mensheviks were investigating Spandarian, hoping to prove that he had either falsified a Party stamp or that he was an Okhrana spy. Stalin defended his friend. The Mensheviks refused to let him attend their investigation but agreed to send an envoy to hear Stalin’s side of the story. The envoy was Boris Nikolaevsky, the Menshevik who would, in sunny Californian exile, become the chronicler of the underground. Nikolaevsky consulted a Bolshevik, Abel Yenukidze, genial godfather to Nadya Allilu
yeva, Svanidze friend and sceptical acquaintance of Stalin, who ultimately destroyed him.

  “Have you ever heard the name ‘Koba’?” Yenukidze asked Nikolaevsky, in a Baku café.

  “No,” replied Nikolaevsky.

  “Koba,” explained Yenukidze, “is a dangerous fellow who’s capable of anything!” The Georgians were different from Russians: “We’re a vengeful people.”

  Nikolaevsky laughed and asked in a mock-Caucasian accent: “Will he cut me with his dagger just a little bit?”

  “Don’t laugh,” replied Yenukidze seriously. “He’ll cut your throat if he believes it necessary. It’s not Great Russia here: this is Old Asia. Don’t forget that name and be very wary.” Yenukidze would pay dearly for such outspokenness about his “dangerous” comrade.

  Stalin was “waiting when I arrived, sitting in the shadows so he could easily observe me,” recounts the wary Nikolaevsky. They may have cleared up the question of Spandarian, but while in Baku Stalin ordered his Mauserists to kill a former sailor of the battleship Potemkin whom he accused of being an Okhrana spy. “He was shot,” notes Nikolaevsky, “and left for dead, but he regained consciousness and claimed rehabilitation.”

  The Mensheviks ordered Nikolaevsky, who now became “very interested in old Koba’s deeds,” to investigate. But Nikolaevsky was arrested. Stalin vanished again.3

  · · ·

  “We need to send ‘Ivanovich’ [Stalin] to Petersburg immediately,” Krupskaya told Sergo, who was in Kiev. Stalin and Sergo, those two highhanded Georgians, who would later dominate the USSR together, revelled in their new CC eminence. Stasova grumbled that “Sergo and ‘Ivanovich’ keep giving orders but say nothing about what is happening around us.” Days later, Spandarian was arrested.

  Stalin rushed northwards, pausing for a quick chat with Spandarian’s girlfriend, Vera Shveitzer, in the station buffet at Rostov-on-Don, to meet Sergo in Moscow,* where they visited Malinovsky. He betrayed them. As the Georgians left Moscow, they noticed their Okhrana tails. The agents saw them onto the train, but Stalin then jumped off outside the station. In Petersburg, it took the Okhrana six days to realize that Soso had never arrived.