Young Stalin

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  * Once again, Kamo cheated the noose, benefiting from the broad amnesty of Nicholas II on the three hundredth anniversary of the Romanov dynasty in 1913. Kamo remained in jail for five years but lived to meet up again with Stalin and play out the ultimate insane violence after the Revolution. See the Epilogue. Of the female gangsters, Anneta and Patsia died of TB, as did many of the others. By the end of the 1930s, only Alexandra Darakhvelidze and Bachua Kupriashvili survived to leave their memoirs.

  30

  Travels with the Mysterious Valentina

  Stalin was back in Petersburg, editing Pravda and staying with Molotov and Tatiana Slavatinskaya, within days of the failed robbery. He poured out articles,* drafted the Manifesto and presided over the nomination for the Duma elections. After supervising the selection of the Bolshevik candidates in Petersburg in mid-October, he oversaw Malinovsky’s nomination in Moscow.

  Soso’s life on the run was an exhausting series of “sleepless nights . . . He flitted from one place to another, crossing street after street to confuse the Okhrana, making his way through back alleys,” explains Anna Alliluyeva. “If happening to pass a workman’s café,” he “would sit there over a cup of tea until 2 a.m.,” or if noticed by a Gendarme, “he’d pretend to be tipsy and dive into a café, sitting it out until dawn with the cab-drivers amid the stench of cheap tobacco before coming to sleep in a friend’s place”—especially the Alliluyev apartment with the sensual Olga and her lively daughters. Stalin often “dropped in,” sitting on the sofa in their dining-room “looking very tired.”

  The girls were always delighted to see him; their mother, Olga, looked after him. “If you feel like taking a rest, Soso,” said Olga, “go and lie on the bed. It’s no good trying to catch a nap in this bedlam. . .” Reading between the lines of Anna’s accounts, Soso still had a special relationship with Olga, at least in their devotion to the cause. When leaving their place, he would say to Olga, “Come out with me.” Olga “didn’t ask any questions. She put on her coat and went out with Stalin. Having plotted their course of action, they hired a cab and drove off. Stalin made a sign and Mother got out. He was evidently shaking the police off his tracks. Stalin continued his journey alone.”

  Stalin invited Olga to the Mariinsky Theatre: “Please, Olga, let’s go to the Theatre immediately—you’ll just be in time for the opening performance.” But, just before the play, he added, “I did so want to see a play even just once, but I can’t.” Olga had to go on her own and deliver a message to a box at the Mariinsky.

  On 25 October 1912, six Bolsheviks and six Mensheviks were elected to the Imperial Duma—not a bad result. Karlo Chkheidze, the Menshevik whom Stalin had outraged in Batumi in 1901, was elected Chairman of the SD faction with Malinovsky as his deputy. Among the “Bolshevik Six,” the Okhrana had managed to get two agents elected to the Duma, quite an achievement of konspiratsia. They took the Okhrana right into Lenin’s inner circle.

  In Pravda, Stalin pushed for conciliation with the Mensheviks. When the Bolsheviks planned a demonstration outside the Duma, the Mensheviks persuaded them to abandon it. This alarmed Lenin, who bombarded Stalin with articles attacking his conciliatory policy. Remarkably, Stalin turned down forty-seven of Lenin’s articles. Lenin, now in Cracow, summoned Stalin and the Six. “Comrade Stalin,” remembered one of the Bolshevik Six, “immediatedly stated that the Bolshevik delegates had to visit Lenin abroad.”

  On 28 October, the spooks observed Stalin visiting his friend Kavtaradze. They followed them when they went to eat in Fedorov’s restaurant, a favourite haunt, but after dinner the police agents realized that he had disappeared. They searched for Soso, but he had vanished.1

  Lenin ordered Valentina Lobova, another of the liberated, capable girls of the Bolshevik generation, to accompany Stalin. She commissioned Lenin’s “foreign minister” and secret fixer Alexander Shotman to get Stalin to Cracow “with maximum speed and absolute security. This is a directive from Lenin.” Stalin “had arrived in Petersburg in the company of Valentina Lobova,” in Shotman’s tactful words, “staying in a hotel as a Persian citizen with a good Persian passport in his pocket.”

  Shotman explained the covert routes to Cracow—the riskier southerly route via Abo, or the longer, safer route by foot across the Swedish border at Haparanda. Stalin chose the Abo route. Then Stalin set off with Valentina Lobova, smuggled out of Petersburg in a covered cart. They caught the train to Finland from Levashovo Station, using Russian passports. In Finland, Eino Rakhia, later Lenin’s bodyguard, delivered a Finnish passport and accompanied the couple to the Abo steam-ferry. “Two policeman verified documents . . . Although Comrade Stalin . . . did not at all resemble a Finn, everything happily went off without a hitch.” Stalin and Valentina boarded the ferry across the Baltic to Germany.

  This was another of Soso’s mysterious relationships. Valentina, code-named “Comrade Vera,” was a beauty married to a Bolshevik who was yet another Okhrana mole: the Party had never been more riddled with traitors. We do not know if she was aware that her husband was a doubleagent, but she was totally trusted by Lenin. Shotman’s memoir shows that Soso (on Persian papers, name unknown) had been travelling with Valentina for some time. They first came to Helsinki, sharing a room in a guesthouse, in “late summer,” possibly September, right after his escape from Narym. Shotman implies that they were together. Travelling hundreds of miles after September 1912, they were apparently lovers, one of those little affairs between comrades thrown together on dangerous missions. When Valentina’s husband was later executed as a traitor, it must have contributed to Stalin’s growing distrust of perfidious wives.*

  The pair caught the train to Cracow in Galicia, a province of the Dual Monarchy of the Habsburg Emperor-King Franz-Josef.2

  Lenin adored Cracow. The Galician capital was an ancient Polish city. The sarcophagi of the Polish kings lay in the Royal Castle. And it was here that the Jagellonian University had been founded in 1364.

  Lenin, Krupskaya, and her mother shared an apartment at 49 Lubomirski Road with CC member Zinoviev, his wife and son, Stepan. Lenin and Zinoviev formed the Party’s Foreign Bureau with Krupskaya as Secretary. Cracow crackled with political intrigue, and reminded Lenin of home. “Unlike exile in Paris or Switzerland,” said Krupskaya, “there was a close connection with Russia”—4,000 of its 150,000 inhabitants were exiles from the Russian Empire, mainly Poles. “Illich liked Cracow very much. It was almost Russia.”

  Lenin enjoyed himself ice-skating, while Krupskaya did the shopping in the ancient Jewish Quarter, where prices were lower. “Illich praised the Polish sourmilk and corn whisky.” He played hide-and-seek with Zinoviev’s son under the furniture. “Stop interfering, we’re playing,” he would say, dismissing interruptions—but he was eagerly awaiting Stalin and the Six.

  Arriving in the first week of November, Stalin met up with the Lenins, sleeping on the sofa in their kitchen. Stalin, Malinovsky and another Duma deputy, Muranov, were charmed and berated by Lenin, who vigorously argued against any reunion or conciliation with the Mensheviks: his Bolsheviks had to remain a separate party.

  Lenin may have been a highly educated nobleman but, with simple joviality and iron will, he was adept at handling tough men of action. He welcomed Stalin and put him at his ease: food brought them closer. Krupskaya served sausagey “German” food, which Stalin suffered for two days but then could not resist saying to Lenin: “I’m hungry—I crave shashlik!” Lenin agreed, “Me too, I’m ravenous, but I’m afraid of offending Nadya. Have you got money? Come on, let’s go eat somewhere . . .” Yet they disagreed on tactics. It was one of the many occasions when Lenin was more hard-line than Stalin, who grumbled that “Illich recommends a hardline policy for the Six, a policy of threatening the majority of the faction [Mensheviks] but Illich will give way . . .”

  After ten days, Stalin returned to Petersburg, probably on apolupaska pass, that allowed families with relatives over the border to cross back and forth. He thought Lenin clumsily out of
touch and remained an obstinate Conciliator; Lenin considered removing Stalin from Pravda. 3 When the new Duma convened, Malinovsky read out a manifesto, probably written by Stalin, that was friendly to their estranged Menshevik brethren. In defiance of Lenin, Stalin even secretly met up with Jordania and Jibladze, those long-standing Menshevik enemies.*

  Lenin bombarded Stalin with demands for another trip to Cracow to discuss the national question—and the Pravda problem. First Krupskaya tried to lure Stalin to Cracow to save him from arrest: “Kick Vasiliev [Stalin] out as soon as possible, otherwise we won’t save him. We need him and he’s already done his main job.” Stalin wriggled out of the trip, citing his health.

  “To K.St. Dear friend,” Krupskaya wrote to Stalin, on 9/22 December, for the first time using an abbreviation of his new name, Koba Stalin. “It seems you aren’t planning to come here . . . If so, we protest against your decision . . . We absolutely insist on your visit here . . . regardless of your health. We demand your presence categorically. You have no right to act differently.” Stalin prepared his trip, again with Lobova. Lenin and Krupskaya were delighted: “We hope Vasia [Stalin] and Vera [Valentina] are coming soon with the children [the Duma Six].”

  On 15 December, the Duma broke for Christmas.4 Stalin and Valentina left for Cracow,* probably taking the most direct but riskier route. On the train westwards, two passengers were reading aloud from a nationalist newspaper. “Why do you read such rubbish!” Stalin shouted at them. He and Valentina disembarked at a Polish frontier-town on the Russian-Austrian border and prepared to cross on foot—like smugglers.

  This was to be Stalin’s longest ever trip abroad—and would bring him to Vienna, that crossroads of civilization, on the eve of the Great War.

  * His articles are revealing of his cynical view of diplomacy (he paraphrases Talleyrand) and his belief in doublespeak (long before Orwell coined the word): “When bourgeois diplomats prepare for war, they shout loudly about ‘peace.’ A diplomat’s words must contradict his deeds—otherwise what sort of diplomat is he? Fine words are a mask to conceal shady deeds. A sincere diplomat is like dry water. Or wooden iron.”

  * Her husband, journalist Alexander Lobov, was shot in 1918 as an Okhrana agent. She was cleared but died of TB in 1924. Shotman, who remained close to Lenin into the 1920s, was executed by Stalin in 1939.

  * This tryst with the arch-heretics would be concealed during the Soviet era.

  * There has been much debate about Stalin’s two journeys to Cracow: he himself told many stories about crossing the border. (The old tyrant told the story about the border-crossing and Lenin and the food to his favourite youngster, Yuri Zhdanov.) Was he just lying? In his personal anecdotes, he tended to exaggerate more than totally invent his stories, especially about such a well-known trip. When he lied outright, he did not tell the lie himself, simply inserting it into the information of his propagandists. Thus he probably used that route at least once. Shotman says he arranged the first trip; the other sources are mixed up about the two trips. So this author believes that the meetings with Shotman concerned the first trip for which there was plenty of time to plan. For the second trip, for which there was no such time, Stalin and Valentina probably took the risk of crossing the border by a smugglers’ path.

  31

  Vienna, 1913: The Wonderful Georgian, the Austrian Artist and the Old Emperor

  Stalin knew no one at the small frontier-town, but he was an expert at the art of riding the random. He walked the streets until a Polish cobbler asked him: “You’re a stranger?”

  “My father was a cobbler in Georgia,” replied Stalin, knowing that the Georgians and Poles shared the chains of Russia’s Prison of Nations. “I must cross the border.” The Pole offered to take him, accepting no payment. Telling this story after the Revolution, Stalin paused, “as if trying to peer into the past,” then added: “I’d like to know where that man is now and what happened to him. What a pity I forgot his name and can’t trace him.” Like many of those who helped Stalin in his youth, the cobbler may well have wished he had buried the Georgian in the forests between empires. Stalin never mentioned that he had a companion at the time, Valentina Lobova.

  Across the border in Polish Galicia, Stalin was desperate to get to Lenin, but “I was terribly hungry.” He went into the station restaurant in Trzebinia, where he soon made a mockery of himself. He summoned the Polish waiter in Russian. “The waiter carted around lots of food,” but Stalin was ignored until he lost his temper: “This is scandalous! Everyone else has been served except me!” The Pole did not serve his soup; Stalin had to fetch it himself. “In my fury, I threw the plate on the floor, flung a rouble at the waiter, and flew out!” He was ravenous by the time he reached the Lenins.

  We’d hardly greeted each other when I burst out,

  “Lenin, give me something to eat at once. I’m half-dead. I’ve had nothing to eat since yesterday evening.”

  “Why didn’t you eat at Trzebinia? There’s a good restaurant there.”

  “The Poles wouldn’t give me anything to eat,” said Stalin.

  “What a fool you are, Stalin!” laughed Lenin. “Didn’t you know Poles regard Russian as the language of oppression?”1

  Lenin must have wondered at this blindness—or “greater Russian chauvinism”—in his supposed “expert” on nationalities, but Stalin would adopt a deeply Russian hostility to any sort of Polish independence.*

  The two men bonded as never before. “They met me in such a hospitable manner,” Stalin reported in old age. “He [Lenin] wouldn’t let me go anywhere, he persuaded me to stay with his family; I had breakfast, lunch and supper there. I broke the established rule only twice: I warned Krupskaya that I’d be out for dinner and visited the old parts of Cracow where there were lots of cafés.” Stalin’s favourite restaurant was Hawelka, which still stands on the central Market Square. When Stalin dined out, Lenin was concerned.

  “Listen, old chap, that’s twice you’ve dined out—aren’t we treating you right?”

  “No, Comrade, I’m delighted with everything, but I feel uneasy that you provide everything.”

  “But you’re our guest,” insisted Lenin. “How was dinner in your restaurant?”

  “The food was fine but the beer was excellent.”

  “Ah, now I understand,” answered Lenin. “You miss your beer. Now you’ll have beer at home too,” and “he asked his mother-in-law to provide two or three bottles of beer for the guest every day.” Stalin was again touched by Lenin’s solicitude.

  “Illich was very nervous about Pravda,” recalls Krupskaya. Lenin was actually exasperated with Stalin’s conciliatory editorials. “Stalin was also nervous. They were planning how to adjust matters.” Lenin mulled over his dual problems of asserting control over Pravda, creating a nationalities policy and promoting his valued henchman. He needed a Bolshevik expert on nationalities who was not Russian—and certainly not Jewish. Three years earlier, he had hailed Stalin as more of an expert on nationality than Jordania. Here was a solution that would kill two birds with one stone.

  Lenin proposed that, instead of returning to Petersburg, Stalin stay on to write an essay laying out their new Bolshevik nationalities policy. Stalin accepted.

  Around 28 December 1912, Lenin, Stalin and Zinoviev were joined by Malinovsky and two other Duma deputies, Stalin’s friend Valentina Lobova and a wealthy Bolshevik couple who lived in Vienna, Alexander and Elena Troyanovsky, along with their child’s Latvian nanny. “Koba didn’t speak very loudly” but “in a deliberate measured manner . . . with indisputable logic,” recalls the nineteen-year-old nanny, Olga Veiland. “Sometimes he went through to the other room so he could pace up and down listening to the speeches.”

  Stalin still resisted Lenin, who was now vociferously backed by Malinovsky—for the most dubious reasons. Lenin and the Okhrana shared their opposition to any SD reunification. Thus the secret police ordered Malinovsky to push this hard line, while Stalin still argued he could convert a few Men
sheviks. He hoped Lenin would see that “it was better to co-operate and postpone hardline politics for a while.” Besides, the Duma Six needed a real leader: himself, no doubt.

  “There’s an insufferable atmosphere here,” Stalin grumbled in a letter to Petersburg. “Everyone’s impossibly busy, goddamned busy, [but] my situation isn’t actually too bad.” He then wrote an almost loving letter to his old friend Kamenev: “I give you an Eskimo kiss on the nose. The Devil take me! I miss you—I swear it like a dog! There’s no one, absolutely no one to have a heart-to-heart conversation with, damn you. Can’t you somehow make it over here to Cracow?”

  Yet Stalin did make a new friend in Cracow: Malinovsky. The convicted rapist and Okhrana traitor, two years older than Stalin, was now enjoying a lavish Okhrana salary of 8,000 roubles per annum—more than the director of Imperial Police, who got only 7,000.

  “He was lively, resourceful, handsome,” remembered Molotov, “and he looked a bit like Tito.” Henceforth Stalin wrote to him warmly, sending love to “Stefania and the kids.” Malinovsky slyly denounced other Bolsheviks as traitors to distract attention from himself, but the pressure of a double life was beginning to drive him to breakdown.

  At the last meeting on New Year’s Eve 1912, Stalin caved in to Lenin. “All decisions are being accepted unanimously,” enthused Lenin to Kamenev. “A huge success.” But Stalin’s retreat was far from bitter. The meeting, as Malinovsky reported to his Okhrana paymasters, reestablished the Bolshevik machine: a Foreign Bureau (Lenin and Zinoviev with Krupskaya as Secretary) alongside a Russian Bureau, dominated by Stalin and Sverdlov, now Pravda’s chief editor, with Valentina Lobova as secretary.* Stalin was moved from Pravda yet emerged as the senior Bolshevik in Russia (salary: sixty roubles a month), on a prestigious mission to play the theoretician. Stalin was writing hard on the nationalities question, Lenin making suggestions. Stalin sent off his first draft to Petersburg.