Young Stalin

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  “Osip” or “Pockmarked Oska,” as they called him, venturing out alone in a head-to-foot reindeer-fur outfit, became a skilled hunter and close companion of the tribesmen. Laletin did not permit him to own a rifle, so, one local remembers, “We took the rifle to the woods and left it on a pre-agreed tree so he’d find it.” He shot Arctic foxes, partridges and ducks on long expeditions.

  The villagers began to respect Pockmarked Oska, with his pipe and books. “The locals liked him,” says Merzliakov. “They visited him and sat all night with him. He visited them too and attended their merry parties.” They brought him fish and venison, which he purchased. He appreciated their laconic tranquillity and was amused by their respect for shamans and by their persistent belief, despite nominal Orthodoxy, in the masters and spirits who inhabited the spaces of Siberia. Above all, he studied and copied their fishing and hunting techniques.

  Fish and reindeer were their staples. The reindeer, who are able to live on blankets of lichen, were treated with sacred respect by the tribesmen, providing transport (pulling sleighs), clothing (furs), investment (the wealthiest chiefs owned herds of 10,000) and food (boiled reindeer meat), all in one. Peterin, probably an Ostyak creole, taught his friend the art of Yenisei fishing. Stalin made his own fishing-line and dug his own personal ice-hole, remembers Merzliakov, whose memoir, recorded in 1936, is the best account of his life in Kureika. According to Stalin’s own somewhat Gothic account, he learned to fish with such dexterity at his ice-hole that the Ostyak whispered awestruck: “Thou ist possessed by the Word.” Stalin enjoyed the fish diet: “There were lots of fish, but salt was as precious as gold, so they just threw the fish into their outhouse where in the—20° freeze they piled up like frozen pieces of wood. Then we’d break flakes off and let them melt in our mouths.” He started to catch huge sturgeons.

  “Once,” he recounted, “a tempest caught me on the river. It seemed I was done for, but I made it to the bank.” Another time, he was coming home with Ostyak friends with a good catch of sturgeon and sea-salmon when he got separated from the others. A purga, the blinding blizzard of the tundra, blew up suddenly. Kureika was far away, but he could not abandon his fish, sustenance for weeks, so he trudged on until he saw figures ahead. He called after them, but they disappeared: they were his companions but, seeing him embroidered from beard to feet in white ice, they believed him a demon spirit and fled. When he finally reached a hut and burst in, the Ostyaks cried out: “Is that you, Osip?”

  “Of course it’s me and I’m not a wood-spirit!” he retorted, before falling into a deep sleep for eighteen hours.

  He was not imagining that he was in danger—the tribesmen were accustomed to losing men on their fishing expeditions. “I remember in spring at high water, thirty men went out fishing and in the evening when we came back, one was missing,” Stalin recounted. They casually explained that their companion had “remained out there.” Stalin was puzzled until one said that “He drowned.” Their nonchalance perplexed Stalin, but they explained: “Why should we have pity for men? We can always make more of them, but a horse, try to make a horse!” Stalin used this in a 1935 speech to illustrate the value of human life, but actually it must have been another experience that taught him its cheapness.

  “I went on a hunt one winter,” Stalin told his magnates Khrushchev and Beria at one of his dinners after the Second World War, “took my gun, and crossed the Yenisei on skis for about 12 versts and saw some partridges on a tree. I had twelve rounds and there were twenty-four partridges. I killed twelve and the rest just sat there, so I thought I’d go back for twelve more rounds. When I came back they were still sitting there.”

  “Still sitting there?” prompted Khrushchev. Beria urged Stalin to continue.

  “That’s right,” boasted Stalin, “so I killed the remaining twelve, tied them to my belt and dragged them home with me.” By the time he told this to his son-in-law Yuri Zhdanov, he boasted he had shot thirty birds, the temperature was—40° and another wild storm forced him to abandon partridges and gun—and even hope. But luckily, the women (possibly Lidia) found him swooning in a snowdrift and rescued him—and he slept for thirty-six hours.*

  Stalin amassed a little medicine cabinet and became the closest thing Kureika had to a doctor: “J. V. helped people with medicine, dressed wounds with iodine and gave drugs.” He “taught the tribesmen to wash,” says Merzliakov, “and I remember how he washed one of them with soap.” He suffered from rheumatism, which he eased in the bathhouse, but the pain remained into old age, when he used to perch on the Kremlin’s heaters during long meetings. He was good at playing with the Tungus children, singing and romping with them, sometimes telling them about his own unhappy childhood. Little Dasha Taraseeva “used to ride on his back, pulling his thick dark hair and crying, ‘Neigh like a horse, uncle!’” When Fyodor Taraseev’s cow sickened with colic, Stalin impressed him with the skills he had learned as a boy in Georgia: he “slaughtered the cow and carved the meat like a real master.”

  Stalin still enjoyed partying. “At the Taraseevs’ place, the young gathered in a circle for a party—Stalin danced in the middle beating time, then he started singing,” recalls a visitor to Kureika, Daria Ponamareva, “‘I’m burying the gold, burying the gold,’” always that favourite song. “He was expert in dancing,” says Anfisa Taraseeva, “and taught the young.”

  Sometimes, the Georgian from the lush mountainous Caucasus peered out at the taiga. “In this damned land, nature is abominably barren—the river in summer, snow in winter, that’s all that nature provides here,” he wrote poignantly to Olga Alliluyeva on 25 November 1915, “and I’m driven mad with longing for scenes of nature . . .”

  He also spent much time alone, writing at night. “My dog Tishka was my companion,” Stalin reminisced. “In winter nights, if I had kerosene and could read and write, he’d come in, press close to my legs and whimper as if he was talking to me. I leaned down patting his head, saying, ‘Are you frozen, Tishka? Warm yourself up!’” He joked that he “liked to discuss international politics with the dog, Stepan Timofeevich,” clearly the world’s first canine pundit. For Stalin, pets had advantages over people: they provided selfless affection and passionate admiration yet never betrayed their masters (nor became pregnant by them), and yet they could be abandoned without guilt.

  The inactivity, isolation from the political game and lack of reading materials sometimes depressed him bitterly, especially when he brooded about Lenin and Zinoviev. Had they forgotten him? Where was his latest article? And why had he not been paid? In the winter of 1915, he sarcastically asked them: “How am I? What am I doing? I’m not all right. I’m doing almost nothing. And what can I do with a complete lack of serious books? . . . In all my exiles, I’ve never had such a miserable life as here.”

  Even this fanatical Marxist, convinced that the progress of history would bring about revolution and dictatorship of the proletariat, must have sometimes doubted if he would ever return. Even Lenin doubted the Revolution, asking Krupskaya, “Will we ever live to see it?” Yet Stalin never seems to have lost faith. “The Russian Revolution is as inevitable as the rising of the sun,” he had written back in 1905 and he had not changed his view. “Can you prevent the sun from rising?”

  When he could get his hands on newspapers, the future Supreme Commander-in-Chief eagerly discussed “the ulcers of war” with Merzliakov. During the Second World War, he sometimes quoted examples from the battles of the First that he had followed in Kureika.* As the Tsar tottered from one bungled defeat to another, Stalin must have anticipated that this war would, like that of 1904, finally bring Revolution. Perhaps he was not just misleading the Okhrana when he told Petrovsky in Petersburg: “Someone spread a rumour that I wouldn’t be staying for my whole sentence. What nonsense! I swear and I’ll be damned if I don’t keep my word, that this won’t happen. I’ll remain in exile until my sentence ends [in 1917]. At times I’ve considered escaping but now I’ve finally rejected the idea.” One
senses his weariness: if Lenin and Zinoviev would not help him, then he would not help them.

  Somewhere around December 1914, Lidia gave birth to a baby.1

  * The payments have attracted suspicion, but they are much too meagre for the wages of an Okhrana agent. They included some of his CC salary; and, as we have seen, Sverdlov received far more. Yet during the Great Terror in 1938 Stalin’s secret police chief, “poison dwarf” Nikolai Yezhov, who had become his closest henchman and was presiding over the slaughter of over a million innocent people, began to realize that he was dispensable. Yezhov, sinking into alcoholism and sexual debauchery under the terrible strain of killing and torturing, gathered materials to use as security or blackmail against his master and the rival magnates Beria, Georgi Malenkov and Khrushchev. He procured Stalin’s ten money orders and kept them in his personal safe, but there is no smoking gun here. Three of them were money from Gori, probably from his mother or Egnatashvili. The other seven, from Moscow and Petersburg, adding up to 100 roubles, delivered 10 roubles here, 10 roubles there, though two were a more considerable 25 roubles each. They did not save Yezhov, who was dismissed in late 1938 and shot in 1940. Interestingly Stalin did not deign to destroy the money orders, just filing them in Yezhov’s papers where they were found by Professor Arch Getty, who has generously shared them with me. For the full story of the rise and fall of Yezhov, see Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar.

  * Just before telling his henchmen this story, the ageing Stalin had suffered a similar accident to that of U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney in 2006: while showing off his shooting skills, he had misfired, closely missing Politburo grandee Anastas Mikoyan and peppering two of his guards. Already beginning to hate and scorn the ailing dictator in the postwar years, Beria and Khrushchev had heard this story of Stalin’s exploit repeatedly. They did not believe it. “After dinner,” writes Khrushchev, “we were spitting with scorn in the bathroom: ‘So Stalin claimed to have skied 12 versts in winter, shot twelve partridges, skied back 12 versts and returned, another 12 versts, shot another twelve partridges and skied another 12 versts home—48 versts on skis!’” (48 versts equals 32 miles.) “Listen,” exclaimed Beria, “how can a man from the Caucasus who never had the chance to ski, travel a distance like that? He’s lying.” Khrushchev agreed: “Of course, he was lying! I’d seen with my own eyes that Stalin couldn’t shoot at all!” In fact, in the 1920s and early 1930s, Stalin enjoyed hunting on holiday, though he regarded it as a waste of time.

  * After the débâcle of the 1942 Kharkov offensive, Stalin gave Khrushchev a dressing-down. “During the First World War,” he said, “when one of the armies was encircled in East Prussia, the commander of the neighbouring army fled to the rear. He was put on trial—and hanged.”

  36

  The Robinson Crusoe of Siberia

  The child died soon afterwards. Stalin made no comment about this, but he was definitely in Kureika at the time and the whole settlement must have been aware of it. Whether or not Lidia’s brothers forgave their libidinous tenant, the relationship with Lidia continued.

  Stalin’s new policeman, Merzliakov, made his life much more pleasant. He did not spy on his charge, follow him or search him, and he allowed him to meet friends, go on long hunting expeditions and even disappear for weeks on end. “In the summer we went by boat . . . pulled by dogs and on return we rowed back. In winter we went on horseback,” and the fur-clad, pipe-puffing Stalin would despatch the half-policeman, half-valet Merzliakov to collect his mail. Almost twenty years later, Stalin was still grateful to Merzliakov—and probably saved his life.*

  In February 1915, “during the months when it was always dark with no distinction between day and night,” he was visited by Spandarian and his mistress Vera Shveitzer. They had driven 125 miles up the frozen Yenisei on sledges, propelled by dog-power, harrassed by wolves. At last they had seen the tiny settlement from afar and Soso’s snow-covered izba, whence he emerged, smiling, to greet them. Most of the inhabitants and the Gendarme welcomed them too.

  “We stayed at Josef Vissarionovich’s place for two days.” Vera noticed that Soso, suffering from arthritis, was “wearing a jacket but he had only one ofhis arms through the sleeve. Later I realized he likes to dress in such a way so as to keep his right arm free.” Stalin, who was delighted to see them, went out to the river and proudly returned with an enormous three-pud sturgeon over his shoulder: “There are no small fish in my ice-hole.”

  Spandarian and Shveitzer came to discuss the trial in Petersburg of the five Bolshevik Duma deputies and Pravda editor Kamenev. Lenin had declared that he wished the Germans to defeat Russia, thereby accelerating the Revolution and a “European civil war.” The Mensheviks supported Russia’s patriotic war providing it was “defencist.” In November 1914, Kamenev and the deputies were arrested for treason; during his trial Kamenev refused to follow Lenin’s unpatriotic defeatism, but was still found guilty and exiled to Siberia.

  Stalin and Spandarian were disgusted by Kamenev’s behaviour. “That man’s not trustworthy,” declared Stalin, “he could betray the Revolution,” whereupon, wrapped in tarpaulins, dressed head to foot in reindeer furs and guided by Tungus tribesmen, Spandarian and Vera took Stalin back with them to Monastyrskoe, the Northern Lights gorgeously illuminating the tundra. “Suddenly Stalin started singing,” writes Shveitzer. “Suren joined in and it was so lovely to hear well-known melodies carrying me away” as the sleigh rushed for two days across the ice in that endless twilight.

  Spandarian and Stalin wrote to Lenin. Stalin, the Bolshevik hunter, no longer whining about owed money and unsent books, struck the very pose of militant virility that would be the Bolshevik style in power:

  My greetings to you, dear Vladimir Illich, the very warmest greetings. Greetings to Zinoviev, greetings to Nadezhda! How are things, how is your health? I live as before, I munch my bread and am getting through half my sentence. Boring—but what can you do? And how are things with you? You must be having a jollier time . . . I’ve read a little article by Plekhanov in Rech—what an incorrigible blabbing old woman! Eh! . . . And the Liquidators with their [Duma] deputy-agents . . .? There’s no one to give them a beating, the devil knows! Surely they won’t remain unpunished? Cheer us up and inform us there’ll soon be an organ to give them a right good punching straight in their gobs!

  Lenin remembered his “fiery Colchian” in exile. “Koba is well,” he informed his comrades; then a few months later, he asked: “Big request—find out last name of Koba (Josef Dj—? Have forgotten). It’s important.”

  When Stalin’s exeat was over, he returned to Kureika for the rest of the long winter. The ice thawed on the Yenisei. In May 1915, the steamboats brought interesting companions upriver from Krasnoyarsk. Kamenev arrived in Monastyrskoe with the Duma deputies. Sverdlov and Spandarian were nearby. During July 1915, Stalin was summoned to a meeting at the house shared by Kamenev and Petrovsky in Monastyrskoe.

  The Bolsheviks enjoyed an idyllic summer reunion. They even took group photographs.* But for the Bolsheviks even the picnics were political, involving denunciations and trials. Stalin and Spandarian supported Lenin and decided to put Kamenev on trial in Monastyrskoe.

  Kamenev gave Stalin The Prince by Machiavelli, perhaps an unwise gift for someone who was already Machiavellian enough. At a boozy dinner, Kamenev asked everyone round the table to declare their greatest pleasure in life. Some cited women, others earnestly replied that it was the progress of dialectical materialism towards the workers’ paradise. Then Stalin answered: “My greatest pleasure is to choose one’s victim, prepare one’s plans minutely, slake an implacable vengeance, and then go to bed. There’s nothing sweeter in the world.”†

  At Kamenev’s “trial,” Stalin had the casting vote. Slippery as ever and always building new alliances, he attacked Kamenev and then departed for Kureika before the final vote, thus saving the victim. Kamenev patronized the cruder Georgian, while Stalin found him congenial but disdained him as a man and politician:
“I saw Gradov [Kamenev] and company in the summer,” he wrote to Zinoviev. “They all rather resemble wet hens. So these are our ‘hawks’ are they!”

  Stalin returned to another long winter in Kureika. In early November, after the snows had descended, he got permission to see the doctor in Monastyrskoe. Arriving in full furs on a four-dog sleigh, he burst into Spandarian’s house and kissed his friend on the cheeks—and Vera twice on the lips.

  “Oh Koba!” she exclaimed, delighted to see him. “Oh Koba!”

  Spandarian, consumptive and suffering from nervous tension, was “sometimes so frantic that a gnat bite would drive him to tear his clothes to shreds. Suren was depressed,” but “Stalin was very cheerful,” recalls a fellow exile, Boris Ivanov, “and his arrival always reinvigorated him.”

  Stalin collected a letter from Zinoviev, to which he replied sarcastically:

  Dear friend!

  I’ve finally got your letter. I thought you’d completely forgotten me, a slave of God, and yet it turned out you did not. . . And what can I do with a complete lack of serious books? . . . I have lots of questions and subjects in my mind but no source-materials. I’m dying to write but I have nothing to study . . . You ask about my finances. And why do you ask about that? You probably have some money—aren’t you thinking of sharing it with me? Go on then! I swear it’ll come just in time!

  Yours Djugashvili

  On arrival, Stalin helped embitter a local feud, the sort that he always relished, both as mean-spirited sport and political stimulant. The Bolshevik exiles in Monastyrskoe, led by Spandarian, had found themselves so short of sugar and furs that winter that they robbed the local Revelion trading shop of its precious goodies. When the police investigated, an exile named Petukhov sneaked on the thieves. Isolated and paranoid in their Siberian time warp, exiles took sides with either the robbers or the informer. Spandarian wanted to punish Petukhov and try him at another Party trial. Sverdlov backed Petukhov and wanted to try Spandarian for the robbery itself. But Sverdlov himself had become too close to the local police, giving officers German lessons. Spandarian and his allies accused Sverdlov of being a “morally tainted” Okhrana spy.