Young Stalin

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  Afterwards, Lenin and the Bolsheviks went out to the theatre to celebrate the New Year, “but the play was very bad,” recalls Olga Veiland. “Vladimir Illich walked out with his wife.” Lenin, Stalin and the others saw in the New Year 1913 in a private room at a restaurant. When she was an old lady, Veiland confided that Stalin had started to become flirtatious. “Lenin seemed very cheerful, joking and laughing. He started singing and even joined in the games we were playing.”2

  Soon afterwards, Stalin arrived at the apartment of the Troyanovskys in a frozen Vienna, shrouded in snow. Lenin called them “good people . . . They have money!” Alexander Troyanovsky was a handsome young nobleman and army officer: his service in the Russo-Japanese War had converted him to Marxism and now he edited and funded Prosveshchenie (Enlightenment)—which was to publish Soso’s essay. Fluent in German and English, he lived with his beautiful noble-born wife, Elena Rozmirovich, in a large, comfortable apartment at 30 Schönbrunnerschloss Strasse, † the boulevard along which the old Emperor Franz-Josef travelled back and forth every day from his residence at the Schönbrunn Palace to his office at the Hofburg.

  The antique, bewhiskered Habsburg Kaiser, who had reigned since 1848, travelled in a gilded carriage drawn by eight white horses, manned by postilions decked out in black-and-white-trimmed uniforms and white perukes, escorted by Hungarian horsemen with yellow-and-black panther furs over their shoulders. Stalin would not have been able to miss this vision of obsolescent magnificence—and he was not the only future dictator to see it: the cast of twentieth-century titans in Vienna that January 1913 belongs in a Tom Stoppard play.* In a men’s dosshouse on Meldemannstrasse, in Brigettenau, another world from Stalin’s somewhat grander address, lived a young Austrian who was a failed artist: Adolf Hitler, aged twenty-three.

  Soso and Adolf shared one of the sights of Vienna: Hitler’s best friend Kubizek recalls, “We often saw the old Emperor when he rode in his carriage from Schönbrunn to the Hofburg.” But both future dictators were unmoved, even disdainful: Stalin never mentioned it and “Adolf did not make much ado of it for he wasn’t interested in the Emperor, just the state which he represented.”

  In Vienna, both Hitler and Stalin were obsessed, in different ways, with race. In this city of antiquated courtiers, Jewish intellectuals and racist rabble-rousers, cafés, beer halls and palaces, only 8.6 percent were actually Jews but their cultural influence, personified by Freud, Mahler, Wittgenstein, Buber and Schnitzler, was much greater. Hitler was formulating the anti-Semitic völkische theories of racial supremacy that, as Führer, he would impose on his European empire; while Stalin, researching his nationalities article, was shaping a new idea for an internationalist empire with a central authority behind an autonomous façade, the prototype of the Soviet Union. Almost thirty years later, their ideological and state structures were to clash in the most savage conflict of human history.

  The Jews did not fit into either of their visions. They repelled and titillated Hitler but irritated and confounded Stalin, who attacked their “mystical” nature. Too much of a race for Hitler, they were not enough of a nation for Stalin.

  But the two nascent dictators shared a Viennese pastime: both liked to walk in the park around Franz-Josef’s Schönbrunn Palace, close to where Stalin stayed. Even when they became allies in the 1939 Molotov—Ribbentrop Pact, they never met. Those walks were probably the closest they ever came.

  “Those few weeks that Comrade Stalin spent with us were devoted entirely to the national question,” says the Troyanovskys’ nanny, Olga Veiland. “He involved everyone around him. Some analysed Otto Bauer, others Karl Kautsky.” Despite intermittent study, Stalin could not read German, so the nanny helped—as did another young Bolshevik whom he met now for the first time: Nikolai Bukharin, an intellectual pixie with sparkling eyes and a goatee beard. “Bukharin came to our apartment every day,” says Olga Veiland, “as Stalin lived there too.” While Stalin flirted hopefully with the nanny, she preferred the witty, puckish Bukharin. Besides, it was her job to clean Stalin’s shirts and underwear, which, she complained after his death, was something of a challenge.

  Stalin and Bukharin got on well. Stalin would write to him from exile, the start of an alliance that culminated in a political partnership in the late 1920s. But Soso came, suffocatingly, to adore and, fatally, to envy Bukharin. The friendship that began in Vienna ended in the 1930s with a bullet in Bukharin’s head.

  “I was sitting at the table beside the samovar in the apartment of Skobelev. . . in the ancient capital of the Habsburgs,” reports Trotsky, also living in Vienna, “when suddenly the door opened with a knock and an unknown man entered. He was short . . . thin . . . his greyish-brown skin covered in pockmarks . . . I saw nothing in his eyes that resembled friendliness.” It was Stalin, who “stopped at the samovar and made himself a cup of tea. Then as silently as he had come, he left, leaving a very depressing but unusual impression on me. Or perhaps later events cast a shadow over our first meeting.”

  Stalin already despised Trotsky, whom he had called a “noisy phoney champion with fake muscles.” He never changed his view. Trotsky, for his part, was chilled by Stalin’s yellow eyes: they “glinted with malice.”

  Stalin’s stay with Troyanovsky was a revelation—it was his first and last experience ofcivilized European living, as he himself admitted. He lived in the room that overlooked the street and “worked there for entire days.” At dusk, he would stroll around Schönbrunn Park with the Troyanovskys. At dinner, he sometimes talked about his past, reminiscing about Lado Ketskhoveli and how he was shot in prison. He was characteristically morose. “Hello, my friend,” he wrote to Malinovsky, now back in Petersburg. “So far I’m living in Vienna and writing some rubbish. See you soon.” But he improved. “Shy and solitary at first,” says Olga Veiland, “he became more relaxed and fun.” He did not feel uneasy with Troyanovsky’s genteel style. On the contrary, he remained fond of him throughout his life.

  Little Galina Troyanovskaya was a spirited child who got on well with Stalin. “She loved being in adult company,” and Stalin played with her, promising to bring her “mountains of green chocolate from the Caucasus.” He “used to laugh very loudly” when she did not believe him. But she often teased him back: “You’re always talking about the nations!” she groused. Stalin bought the child sweets in Schönbrunn Park. Once he made a bet with her mother that if they both called to Galina, she would go to Stalin for the sweets. They tested his theory: Galina ran to Soso, confirming his cynical view of human nature.*

  Stalin now asked Malinovsky to return the first draft of his article so he could revise it, adding, “Tell me 1. How is Pravda? 2. How is your faction? 3. How is the group doing? . . . Yours Vasily.” He rewrote the article before he left Vienna forever.†

  Lenin awaited him in Cracow; betrayal lurked in Petersburg.3

  * Stalin told this story to Stanislaw Kot, the Polish Ambassador, at a Kremlin banquet in December 1941.

  * Stalin’s friend from Tiflis, Kalinin, was not promoted to the CC because he was temporarily suspected of being an Okhrana double-agent: the Bolsheviks, even while being betrayed by Malinovsky at the very heart of the Party, suspected an innocent comrade.

  † Now a boarding-house, the Pension Schönbrunn, which unusually still bears the blue plaque put up in 1949 that reads: J.V. STALIN RESIDED IN THIS HOUSE DURING JANUARY 1913. HE WROTE HIS IMPORTANT WORK “MARXISM AND THE NATIONAL QUESTION” HERE.

  * Josip Broz, the future Marshal Tito, was also working there as a mechanic.

  * In the incestuous world of Bolshevism, Elena later divorced Troyanovsky and then had an affair with Malinovsky the traitor (according to Malinovsky). She married the Bolshevik grandee Nikolai Krylenko, a member of Lenin’s first government, later Commander-in-Chief of the Red Army, then Procurator-General, finally a brutal People’s Commissar for Justice who was himself shot in the Great Terror. Fortunately Krylenko left Elena in the late 1920s, which probably saved her life, for she survi
ved the Terror, working quietly in the archives, dying naturally in 1953. The Troyanovskys’ daughter Galina married another Bolshevik magnate, Valerian Kuibyshev, Stalinist Politburo member, womanizer and drinker who ill treated her. Stalin said he would have intervened if he had known of Kuibyshev’s drunken promiscuity. Kuibyshev’s suspicious death from alcoholism in 1935 suited Stalin. The nanny Olga Veiland became a Party and Comintern apparatchik, retiring young and surviving into old age. The destiny of Troyanovsky—even though he turned against the Bolsheviks—was very different: see the Epilogue.

  † Marxism and the National Question was Stalin’s most famous work: he himself never stopped editing it during his long life. It was an answer to the Austrian socialists who proposed what Lenin called “an Austrian federation within the Party.” As ever, Lenin was being practical and farsighted, as well as ideological. He feared that the Jewish Bundists or Georgian Mensheviks, who advocated variations on cultural autonomy or even national separatism, would make the Party and ultimately the Russian Empire ungovernable under Bolshevism. He needed a theory that offered the ideal of autonomy and the right of secession without necessarily having to grant either. Lenin and Stalin agreed that nothing should stand in the way of a centralized state. Stalin defined the nation as a “historically formed, stable community of people, united by community of language, territory, economic life and psychological make-up.” On the Jews, Stalin asked: “What sort of nation is a Jewish nation which consists of Georgian, Dagestani, Russian and American Jews who don’t understand each other, inhabit different parts of the globe . . . and never act together in peace or war? They’re being assimilated” for they have “no stable and large stratum associated with the land . . .” He attacked “Austro-Marxism” and national autonomy, but in the Caucasus accepted “regional autonomy.” The right of secession was offered (in theory) but should not be taken. This paper was not beautifully written, but it had a sort of subtlety that turned into a reality when Stalin created the web of republics that became the USSR. It remains relevant because the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 allowed the full republics such as Ukraine, Estonia and Georgia to become independent but not the autonomous republics such as Chechnya.

  32

  The Secret Policeman’s Ball:

  Betrayal in Drag

  I returned to Cracow to show Lenin,” Stalin recounted. “Two days later, Lenin invited me over and I noticed the manuscript lying open on the desk. He asked me to sit next to him.”

  Lenin was impressed. “Is it you who really wrote this?” he asked Stalin, a little patronizingly.

  “Yes, Comrade Lenin, I wrote it. Did I get something wrong?” “No, on the contrary, it’s really splendid!”

  Lenin was determined to publish the piece as policy. “The article is very good!” he told Kamenev. “It’s a fighting issue and we won’t surrender one iota of our principled opposition to the Bundist trash!” In a letter to Gorky, he acclaimed Stalin as his “wonderful Georgian.”

  Soso published the article in March 1913 under his new byline “K. Stalin,” the second time he had used it. It had been evolving since 1910 when he started signing articles as “K.St.,” then “K. Safin” and “K. Solin.”

  The conspiratorial life required a roster of aliases, often chosen at random. Ulyanov may have taken “Lenin” from the Siberian river Lena, but he used 160 aliases altogether. He kept “Lenin” because it happened to be his byline on the article, “What Is to Be Done?,” made his name. Similarly Soso used “Stalin” when he published the article on nationalities that made his reputation, which was one reason that it stuck. If he had not been such a self-obsessed melodramatist, he might have been known to history as “Vasiliev” or “Ivanovich.”

  Its other attraction was the vague similarity to “Lenin” itself, but Stalin also fashioned aliases out of the names of his women: it is plausible that his girlfriend Ludmilla Stal helped inspire this one. He would never have admitted it. “My comrades gave me the name,” he smugly told an interviewer. “They thought it suited me.” Molotov knew this was not true, saying, “That’s what he called himself.” But this flint-hearted “industrial name,” meaning Man of Steel, did suit his character—and was a symbol of everthing a Bolshevik should be.*

  The name was Russian, though he never ceased to be Caucasian, combining the Georgian “Koba” with the Slavic “Stalin” (though his friends still called him “Soso”). Henceforth he adopted what the historian Robert Service calls a “bi-national persona.” After 1917, he became quadri-national: Georgian by nationality, Russian by loyalty, internationalist by ideology, Soviet by citizenship.

  It started as a byline—and ended as an empire and a religion. When he was dictator, Stalin shouted at his feckless son Vasily for exploiting their surname: “You’re not Stalin and I’m not Stalin! Stalin is Soviet power!”

  By mid-February 1913, the newly minted “Koba Stalin” was back in Petersburg, where the Bolsheviks, betrayed at every turn by Malinovsky, were on the run.1

  “It’s a total Bacchanalia of arrests, searches and raids,” Stalin reported to the Troyanovskys in a letter opened by the Okhrana. He added that he had not forgotten his promise to six-year-old Galina: “I’ll send the chocolate to Galochka.”

  Stalin, now empowered by Lenin, but beleaguered by vigorous Okhrana action, did not even try to hide. He stayed on Shpalernaya Street in the town centre at the apartment of Duma deputies Badaev and Samoilov, attending meetings at the home of their fellow deputy Petrovsky. Stalin sighs, in another letter, “There aren’t any competent people. I can hardly keep up with everything.”

  His first challenge was to defend his parliamentary star, Malinovsky, from a shocking accusation. An article identified Malinovsky as an Okhrana spy. Since the article was signed “Ts,” the Bolsheviks believed that the libeller was a Menshevik, Martov (real name Tsederbaum), or his brother-in-law Fyodor Dan. “The Bolshevik Vasiliev [Stalin] came to my apartment (he was known as ‘Ioska Koriavyi’ [Joe Pox]) trying to stop the rumours about Malinovsky,” said Fyodor Dan. Joe Pox warned Dan’s wife, Lidia, that she would regret it if the Mensheviks tried to smear Malinovsky.

  Yet, thanks to Malinovsky, Stalin’s every move was now monitored by the Imperial Police director himself. On 10 February, Sverdlov was arrested, betrayed by Malinovsky. Now Stalin decided to appoint his Baku comrade Shaumian as Pravda’s editor, but Malinovsky persuaded Lenin that the Armenian would be too conciliatory, like Stalin himself. Lenin backed Malinovsky’s candidate, Chernomazov, who, as Stalin had divined back in Baku, was another Okhrana double-agent.

  By February 1913, Malinovsky had betrayed the whole CC in Russia, except Stalin and the ineffectual Petrovsky. The Okhrana were determined to stop any SD reunion: Stalin the Conciliator was next.

  On Saturday night, 23 February, Bolshevik sympathizers held a fund-raising concert and masquerade ball at the Kalashnikov Exchange, hardly Stalin’s usual scene. But the Alliluyev girls were excited about it. Stalin and their maths tutor, Kavtaradze, talked about going.

  That afternoon, Stalin visited Malinovsky. The double-agent demanded he come to the ball. Stalin—as he later told Tatiana Slavatinskaya—refused, saying, “He wasn’t in the mood and didn’t have the right clothes. But Malinovsky kept insisting,” even reassuring him about security. The dapper traitor opened his dandyish wardrobe to Stalin, producing a stiff collar, dress shirt and silk cravat which he tied around Stalin’s neck.

  Malinovsky had come almost directly from a meeting with his Okhrana controller, Imperial Police director Beletsky, probably promising to deliver Stalin.

  “Vasily [Stalin] and I went to the party,” wrote his mistress, Tatiana Slavatinskaya, “and the party was nice.” Stalin, in his fancy cravat, sat at a table with the Bolshevik Duma deputies. “I was really surprised to see . . . our dear Georgian boy . . . at such a crowded party,” Demian Bedny, a proletarian bard, who in the 1920s became one of Stalin’s closest courtiers, informed Lenin afterwards. “It was really impudent
to go there—was it the devil’s work or some fool who invited him? I told him, ‘You won’t escape.’” Bedny hinted that there was a traitor in their midst.

  At about midnight, plainclothed Okhrana officers, backed by Gendarmes, took up positions at the back of the concert hall where the guests sat at tables. “Stalin was actually chatting to Malinovsky himself,” noticed Tatiana, when “he spotted that he was being followed.”

  The detectives approached Stalin’s table and asked his name. He denied he was Djugashvili. Comrades stood up around him and tried to smuggle him to safety behind the stage. “He went into the artists’ dressing-room,” says Slavatinskaya, “and asked them to get me.” Once again, Stalin resorted to dressing up in drag, but he managed to tell Tatiana that he had “visited Malinovsky before the party and been followed from there.” Stalin was made up and decked out in a long dress. As he was being led out through the dressing room, a secret policeman spotted his big shoes (and surely his moustache). The policeman “seized him with a yell.”

  “Djugashvili, we’ve finally got you!”

  “I’m not Djugashvili. My name is Ivanov,” replied Stalin.

  “Tell those stories to y’grandmother!”

  It was over.

  “Two plain-clothed agents asked him to go with them. All was done quietly. The ball went on.” Malinovsky hurried “after Comrade Stalin ‘protesting’ his arrest and promising to take measures to free him . . .”

  Lenin innocently wrote to the traitor to “discuss how to forestall more arrests.” Lenin and Krupskaya fretted that “Vasily” (Stalin) must be “well protected.” It was too late: “Why is there no news of Vasily? What has happened to him? We’re worried.”