With the retreat from Ladysmith and Natal, the Boers thought the war was over, and the two Boer republics sought to formally end the conflict through negotiations. But the British entertained no such notions and determined to press on through the Orange Free State to the Transvaal and capture Pretoria, then dictate terms of their own. Churchill thought this a bad idea and said so in print, angering many in both South Africa and England. He was a conciliatory person by nature and persisted in the hope that “a generous and forgiving policy be followed.”
In any event, the British took their time making their way toward Pretoria, allowing the Boers to catch a second wind and reorganize to carry on the fight. This time it would be guerrilla style, with the Boers acting as peaceful farmers and then violating their neutrality oaths by sneaking out for night raids against British positions. The British retaliated, as they did in India, by burning Boer farms and herding the Boers’ wives and children into concentration camps where they could be fed and sheltered. Unfortunately, not enough attention was paid to the latter, and an inordinate number of women and children died of disease from unsanitary conditions and malnutrition.
Churchill, in the meantime, had secured a position on the staff of the army marching on Pretoria, which nearly cost him his life.
While on a cavalry patrol, Churchill and a troop of mounted infantry scouts encountered a wire fence and dismounted to cut it. Just then a large number of Boers appeared from behind a small hill and began firing at them. Everyone jumped to his horse, but when Churchill reached his mount the animal began rearing and plunging because of the gunfire. When he tried to spring into the saddle it slipped and wound up under the horse’s belly. The horse then galloped away, leaving Churchill alone to face the approaching enemy. The Boers had sighted him and were firing right at him, so he did the only thing he could think of, which was to run for his life. With bullets whizzing all around him, Churchill suddenly saw one of the scouts pass by ahead of him. “Give me a stirrup!” he shouted. The man reined in his horse and Churchill instantly swung up behind him. They galloped away to safety. As Churchill put it, he had “thrown double sixes again.”
The Boers had cleared out of Johannesburg ahead of the British army, and four days later out of Pretoria as well. Churchill rode into the city along with his cousin the Duke of Marlborough, who was on the staff of Churchill’s friend General Sir Ian Hamilton. The Boers were leaving town on a long train with rifles bristling from every window. Churchill went first to the officers’ prison camp, where the imprisoned men burst out in wild cheers at the sight of him. The Boer guards threw down their weapons, and the Union Jack was run up the flagpole. For Churchill, it was the culmination of his duties with the army. He secured his release and went to Cape Town, where he would take a steamship home. The Boer War would drag on for two more years, “shapeless and indefinite,” before the final British victory was declared.
* * *
BACK IN ENGLAND IN the fall of 1900, Churchill returned to the cotton mill town Oldham, where he’d been defeated for Parliament the previous year. This time he was greeted by great throngs of mill hands and mill girls, enthusiastically shouting his name. He gave a speech describing his escape, in which he mentioned the name of the engineer on the armored train where he was captured. Someone shouted, “His wife’s in the gallery!” to the general elation of the crowd. This was to be a “khaki election,” meaning that the issues turned on martial events—namely, the Boer War. The Conservatives were returned to office with a great majority, and Winston Churchill was swept along with the tide. He was twenty-six years old and at last in the House of Commons from which his father had attempted to guide the British Empire.
He also discovered there was money to be made giving speeches. The world still savored the details of his escape from Pretoria, and after his English tour was concluded he went to America and spoke to eager audiences in Boston, New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia. When he was done, Churchill had accumulated a £10,000 war chest with which to face his ever complicated world.
*1 Churchill had foolishly turned over the copyediting to an uncle who fancied himself a writer. Unfortunately the uncle left wholesale errors in spelling, grammar, and punctuation in the manuscript, and numerous reviewers seized on this to criticize the book, though it mostly received widespread praise.
*2 Roughly $2,500 in today’s dollars.
*3 Gordon was decapitated and his head taken to the Mahdi.
*4 Grenfell would be killed September 2 when the troop he was leading was nearly “cut to pieces” in the great cavalry charge at the Battle of Omdurman.
*5 Boer in the Dutch language means “farmer.” It also referred to any South African who was descended from Dutch colonists.
*6 About $30,000 in today’s dollars.
*7 From the time of emancipation, there had been constant friction between the British government in Cape Town and the Boers over the Boers’ treatment of the blacks in their employ, which was often little different from slavery.
*8 A decade later when he was home secretary, Churchill was able to fulfill his promise when he saw to it that Mr. Wagner received the Albert Medal, the highest civilian award for gallantry in the realm.
*9 As Churchill found out years later when Boer officials visited London, his captor was none other than the new prime minister of the Boer republic, the legendary Louis Botha.
*10 A term used for blacks in South Africa now considered highly derogatory.
*11 For obvious reasons, Churchill omitted the surreptitious aid he’d received from the miners when he wrote his contemporary account of his escape in the Morning Post, and in fact he went to great lengths to disguise what really happened in order to protect his abettors.
*12 Colonel Byng was a descendant of Admiral John Byng, who was infamously executed by firing squad on the deck of a ship, following his court-martial conviction for failing to follow the general orders of the British fleet.
CHAPTER THREE
Around the time that Winston Churchill was battling Pashtuns in India, Dervishes in the Sudan, and the Boers of South Africa, Joseph Stalin was engaged in planning a Russian bank robbery, one of many that he staged. The act was an effort to raise money for Stalin’s mentor and boss Vladimir Lenin, the father of Soviet communism.
The banned Russian Socialist Party had recently split into two distinctly different factions. Lenin’s branch, the Bolsheviks, wanted immediate action to overthrow the czar—violently if necessary. The opposing Mensheviks wanted a more peaceful revolution by working within the system. Lenin, who was then in self-exile in Finland, needed money to aid the Bolsheviks. So Stalin engineered the robbery of a stagecoach full of rubles that was being brought under armed guard from a Russian post office to the state bank in the Georgian capital Tiflis (now Tbilisi), in the Caucasus between the Black and Caspian Seas.
Stalin was then twenty-eight years old and the leader of a large gang of Communist-oriented criminals in Tiflis. This included young girls and boys who spied, ran errands, and performed other Faginesque duties for the innovative political system they hoped would lead them out of poverty into a brave new world.1
The robbery, which newspapers at the time described as a terrorist act, became a major story worldwide because as many as forty people were killed during its commission. The rubles, stacked in Russian bank notes worth today more than $3 million, were contained in a horse-drawn coach escorted by five Cossacks*1 on horseback, as well as another coach containing various bank officials and armed guards. Stalin had managed to penetrate the bank through a clerk he knew and was able to determine exactly when the shipment would arrive. As the caravan approached the crowded town square of Tiflis, a pretty young girl gave a signal to a man reading a newspaper on a bench, who put the paper down as a signal to the other gang members, armed with pistols and homemade bombs.
Stalin apparently did not participate in th
is robbery directly, preferring to be the mastermind rather than an actor. His deputy was a quasi-psychopath named Simon “Kamo” Ter-Petrosian, Stalin’s friend and protégé and an accomplished murderer and master of disguises. Today he had chosen to arrive at the scene on a horse, dressed in the red uniform of a Cossack captain (complete with a large curved saber and tall bearskin hat). When the caravan entered the square, Kamo rode past it and came up behind. At this, two of the girls and a number of the robbers drew out their bombs, pulled the fuses, and rolled them under the coaches.
What happened next became the subject of widespread discussion by Tifilinos until the day they died. An earthshaking roar shattered every window for half a mile around, toppled over chimneys on buildings and houses, and knocked people anywhere nearby to the ground. The last carriage containing the guards and bank officials exploded, hurling people and parts of people into the air. The bombs aimed at the first carriage, which contained the money, exploded instead beneath the horses, disemboweling most of them. Gunshots rang out and more bombs were thrown; people in the crowded square ran screaming into the streets, while others lay torn asunder by the bombs or bullets. Panic and utter confusion reigned. It had all happened precisely as Stalin had planned it.
A number of the robbers rushed at the first carriage to grab the money. But just as they reached it, one of the two lead horses somehow managed to scramble to its feet and bolted through the square and down the hill toward the river, dragging the carriage, the money, and the dead horses along with it. Some of the participants got cold feet at this point and ran off, but several others chased after the horse. One of them got close enough to hurl a bomb under its belly, blowing the animal apart. Unfortunately, the bomb thrower was too close to the explosion himself and was flung into the air, landing on his head on the cobblestone street.
Another robber reached the carriage and grabbed two large moneybags containing the rubles. They were so heavy, however, that he could barely stagger off with them as the authorities began arriving at the scene in alarming numbers. Just as the man was about to drop the loot and run, who should come riding into the smoky chaos but Cossack Kamo in his bearskin hat, driving a stolen phaeton.*2 He seized the money and cantered off past the palace of the viceroy to a location where female members of the gang sewed the money into a mattress. This mattress in particular had been stolen from the director of the Tiflis Meteorological Observatory, where Stalin had once worked checking thermometers and barometers. Thus disguised, the money mattress was returned to the director’s residence: an unlikely place for the authorities to look.
No one was ever arrested for the crime. Rumors circulated it had been the work of various Socialist or anarchist organizations, which had begun conducting terrorist-type activity with increasing frequency since Lenin came on the scene. Lenin’s brother had been executed by agents of the czar; the experience made Lenin recoil from achieving socialism by peaceful methods, declaring that, instead, “We shall take a different path.”
However, in order to maintain a quasi-legitimate image, the local Socialist Party had forbidden the kind of bloodthirsty mayhem featured in Stalin’s bank robbery, resulting in Stalin’s expulsion from its membership. He didn’t care. Two days later, he left Georgia forever, taking his wife and young son with him to Baku, the sprawling, violent oil boomtown on the Caspian Sea.2
The robbery money had to be laundered through banking systems in various countries before at last reaching Lenin in some marketable condition. But the feat was enough to make him conclude that Stalin was “exactly the kind of man I need”—which, a decade later, would place his loyal follower in the rarefied upper reaches of Soviet communism.3
* * *
JOSEPH STALIN WAS AS DIFFERENT from Winston Churchill as it was possible to be. Where Churchill was outgoing, straightforward, and enjoyed the limelight, Stalin was shadowy, secretive, and devious. In fact “Stalin” (in English, “man of steel”) wasn’t actually his name. He was born Josif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili in 1878—four years after Churchill’s birth. He used numerous aliases and physical disguises in his youth to throw the Russian czar’s secret police off his trail. And he certainly wasn’t descended, as Churchill was, from peers of the realm; his father was a violent, drunken, shoe cobbler who deserted his family in a remote town in Russia’s Caucasus Mountains. Stalin didn’t play polo or go to cocktail parties, nor was he on speaking terms with such notables as His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales. He was lucky as a youth to find an ass to ride along a mountain road, and the most important personage he likely knew growing up was his village priest in the Russian Orthodox Church.
While Churchill at an early age was publishing books and newspaper stories involving himself and would even go on to write his autobiography, Stalin spent nearly as much energy removing any mention of himself from published accounts (and the idea of an autobiography was out of the question). For nearly forty years after he came to power, there was only one official story of Stalin’s life; it was very thin, and often untruthful.
He ran the Soviet Union with an iron hand, and anyone who differed with him did so at his own peril. A saying was attributed to Stalin: “When one man dies it is a tragedy; when a million men die it’s a statistic.” Compared with Churchill and Roosevelt, Stalin probably had more in common with Adolf Hitler, who had once aspired to be an artist; Stalin in his youth sought to compose romantic poetry. But both instead became revolutionary dictators who murdered vast populations of their own countries—and of other countries as well.
After World War II broke out and Hitler stabbed Russia in the back, Stalin partnered up with the United States, Great Britain, and other Western Allies against Nazi Germany, which was defeated in no small measure by the mighty armed forces of the Soviet Union. But no sooner had the war ended than Stalin became the West’s most implacable and dangerous enemy.
* * *
JOSIF DZHUGASHVILI WAS BORN in the village of Gori, in a two-room cottage lit by an oil lamp in the shadow of the Caucasus Mountains. His mother, Ekaterina (known as “Keke”), was the daughter of serfs*3 (a legitimate social caste until Czar Alexander II abolished the institution a decade and a half earlier). Ekaterina had married a local cobbler Besarion “Beso” Dzhugashvili, a descendant of wild mountain tribesmen not dissimilar from the Pashtuns Churchill had battled in the Hindu Kush. Beso’s business prospered for a while, and he even took on apprentices. But when their first two children died of illness he sought consolation in wine. By the time Josif was born, Beso had become a full-fledged alcoholic whose violence—especially toward his son—was deplorable.
Unlike Winston Churchill’s father, who ignored him, Beso’s treatment of young Stalin was such that when the noise of his father’s drunken singing announced his impending arrival, Josif would ask if he could go to the house of a friend until his father went to sleep. Once Beso threw him across the room so viciously there was blood in the boy’s urine for a week. A childhood friend recalled that the father’s behavior taught the boy “how to hate people.”
Keke enrolled her son in a church school, hoping he would grow up to be a priest, while Beso slipped further into squalor and self-mortification on rumors of Keke’s infidelities. Stalin’s mother had a rather loose reputation around town (perhaps understandable, considering the degradation of her husband, whose business had gone sour along with the wine). To say that she was a prostitute would be inaccurate—although Stalin in later years once referred to her as a “whore.” But there is historical evidence that she sought favors from wealthy or powerful men in her village in exchange for sexual reciprocity.4 Eventually, Beso left Gori to work in a shoe factory in Tiflis; to observe that Stalin had a miserable childhood fraught with viciousness and chaos would be an understatement.5
This circumstance might have been made more bearable by the clannish violence that hung over Gori in those days. Brutal street fights between males of all ages were not only condoned, they were s
anctioned, making it seem as if the town were populated by maniacs. On important Georgian holidays—including Christmas—males beginning with young schoolboys would swarm through the streets setting on friends and enemies alike with fists, teeth, kicking feet, and gouging fingers, egged on by the older men. When this began to wear itself out, the teenagers would start fighting, then the young men, followed well into the night by the old men, all of it fueled by a river of wine of which even the youngest would partake. It was said that Stalin jumped right into the mayhem, which had been a ritual in Gori as far back as anyone could remember. Even in his youth, Stalin was evidently no stranger to the routine brutality he inflicted on the Russian people years later.
When he was fourteen, Stalin’s mother put him in a boarding school in Tiflis with the goal of turning him into a priest. It was no mean feat arranging for a child to be appointed to the Orthodox Theological Seminary, but it has been suggested by more than one historian that Keke accomplished this by having an affair with a local priest in Gori.
The school was a severe environment, ruled by monks who prohibited students from reading anything secular, including newspapers, magazines, and novels. Greek and Latin were the mainstays of the curriculum. Violators of the myriad rules were sentenced to a dark hold, or “hole,” for days at a time. It was this atmosphere of repression and harsh discipline that turned Stalin into a Socialist; at least, that’s what he declared to the interviewer Emil Ludwig in 1931: “I joined the revolutionary movement when fifteen years old,” he said, “in protest against the outrageous regime and Jesuitical methods prevalent at the seminary,” adding that the monks’ “principal method is spying, prying, worming their way into people’s souls, and outraging their feelings.” One of his biographers wondered whether it became Stalin’s desire to “outdo” these so-called Jesuits, rather than recoiling in revulsion at their methods, “which placed its peculiar stamp on Socialism as interpreted by Joseph Stalin.”6
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