A whole year went by! And he was transferred to a dark, damp, one-man cell in Kutaisi Jail. Here he began to despair. Life was going by, and instead of rising in the world, he was sinking even lower. The damp gave him a painful cough. And all this gave him even more reason to hate those professional loudmouths, fortune’s favorites, it seemed: Why did they get away with “Revolution” so lightly; why weren’t they kept inside as long?
Then one day a gendarme officer he knew from Batum arrived at Kutaisi Jail. “Well, Dzhugashvili, have you had time to think? This is only the beginning, Dzhugashvili. We shall keep you here until you either rot with consumption or correct your line of conduct. We want to save you and your soul. You were five minutes away from becoming a priest, Father Iosif! Why did you join that gang? You don’t belong with them. Tell me that you’re sorry.”
He was indeed sorry, so very sorry! His second spring in jail was ending, his second dreary summer of jail lay ahead. Why, oh why had he thrown away a modest position in the church? How rash he had been! The wildest imagination could not conceive of Revolution in Russia in less than fifty years’ time, when Iosif would be seventy-three. What good would Revolution be to him then?
But it wasn’t just that. By now Iosif had gotten to know himself, to realize that he was by nature deliberate and methodical, a lover of order and stability. But these were the very qualities—order, stability, solidity, consistency—that sustained the Russian Empire. What was the point of trying to destabilize it?
The officer with the corn-colored mustache paid visit after visit. (Iosif found his trim gendarme’s uniform with its handsome shoulder boards, neat buttons, piping, and buckles most attractive.) What I am offering you is after all an opportunity to serve the state. (Iosif was ready to transfer once and for all to the service of the state, but he had spoiled his chances at Tiflis and Batum.) You will receive an allowance from us. To begin with, you will help us by working among the Revolutionaries. Choose the most extreme faction. Start playing a leading role in it. We will always handle you carefully. You will communicate with us in such a way that no shadow of suspicion will fall on you. But first, so as not to compromise you, we will transport you under guard to a distant place of exile, and you will leave it immediately—that’s what everybody does.
Dzhugashvili was not long in deciding. The third wager of his young life was laid on the secret police!
He was exiled to Irkutsk Province in November. Among other exiles there he read a letter from a certain Lenin, well known for his newspaper Iskra. Lenin had isolated himself at the outermost limit of the movement and was now writing around in quest of supporters. He was obviously the man to join.
Iosif left the dreadful frosts of Irkutsk toward Christmas and was in the sunny Caucasus before the war with Japan broke out.
From then on he enjoyed a long period of immunity. He met underground activists, composed leaflets, convened meetings. . . . Others were arrested (especially those he didn’t like), but he escaped notice and was not on the wanted list. Nor was he called up for military service.
Then suddenly. . . ! Though nobody was expecting it so soon, no preparations had been made, nothing had been organized. It was upon them! Crowds marched through Petersburg bearing political petitions. Grand dukes and other bigwigs were assassinated, Ivanovo-Voznesensk was on strike, Lodz rebelled, the battleship Potemkin mutinied, a manifesto was squeezed out of the tsar, in spite of which machine guns were soon chattering in the Presnya district of Moscow, and the railways were brought to a standstill.
Koba was stunned, thunderstruck. Could he have made yet another mistake? Why was he so completely lacking in foresight?
The Okhranka* had misled him! He was a three-time loser! Give me back my uncompromised Revolutionary soul! Trapped in a vicious circle! Tumble Russia into a Revolution, and the day afterward your denunciations will come tumbling out of the Okhranka archives. But after all the shooting, the uproar, the hangings, they looked around and the Revolution had vanished!
This was when the Bolsheviks adopted the sound Revolutionary practice of “expropriation.” Some Armenian moneybags would be sent a letter telling him where to bring along ten, fifteen, or twenty-five thousand rubles. And the moneybags would bring the money, to persuade them not to blow up his shop or kill his children. This was the real thing! This was what genuine Revolutionaries should be doing! Not wasting time on scholastic argument, leaflets, demonstrations. . . . This was real Revolutionary activity! The goody-goody Mensheviks grumbled that robbery and terrorism were incompatible with Marxism. Oh, how mercilessly Koba ridiculed them, hunting them down like cockroaches—it was for this that Lenin called him “the marvelous Georgian.” The “ex-es” were robbery, but what else was Revolution? Wasn’t that robbery? How ridiculous they were, those sanctimonious humbugs! Where else would you get money for the Party? Where? From the Revolutionaries themselves? A bird in hand is worth two in the bush.
The “ex-es” were in fact the form of Revolutionary activity that Koba liked most of all. And no one was as clever as Koba at recruiting uniquely reliable people like Kamo, who would unquestioningly obey his orders, brandish a revolver, snatch a sack of gold, and take it to Koba. When they snatched 340,000 rubles from the couriers of a Tiflis bank, that could be seen as a proletarian Revolution in miniature, and only idiots lived in expectation of the big one. This was one of the things that the police did not know about Koba, and the dividing line between police and Revolution remained as before. He was never short of money.
The Revolution now carried him around on Continental trains and on ships, showed him islands, canals, and medieval castles. All rather different from a stinking Kutaisi cell! In Tammerfors, Stockholm, and London, Koba was able to take a close look at the Bolsheviks and the manic Lenin.
They took good care of him. The more prominent, the better known he became in the Party, the nearer to home his places of exile were. He would be banished now not to Baikal but to Solvychegodsk, and for two years, not three. Between spells of banishment, he was allowed to play at Revolution unhindered. Finally, after he had walked away three times from exile in Siberia and the Urals, the implacable and indefatigable rebel was shunted off to Vologda, of all places, where he lodged in the police chief’s apartment and could reach Petersburg by train overnight.
But one February evening in 1912, Ordzhonikidze, a junior colleague in the Baku days, arrived in Vologda from Prague, shook him by his shoulders, and shouted, “Soso! Soso! You’ve been co-opted to the C.C.”
The moon shone on wreathing frozen mist as the thirty-two-year-old Koba, wrapped up in his fur coat, paced the yard for hours. He was vacillating yet again. Member of the Central Committee! Ah, but Malinovsky was both a member of the Bolshevik Central Committee and a deputy in the state Duma. Lenin was particularly fond of Malinovsky. So what? That was under the tsar. After the Revolution anyone in the C.C. today was sure to be a minister. No Revolution could be expected, of course, in his lifetime. But even without Revolution a Central Committee member had some sort of power. Whereas his prospects in the employment of the secret police were . . . what? He would always be an insignificant snooper. Instead of a member of the Central Committee! No, he must part company with the security police. Azef’s hideous fate haunted him day and night.
The following morning they took the train to Petersburg. Where they were promptly arrested. The young and inexperienced Ordzhonikidze was given three years in the Schlüsselburg Fortress, with banishment to follow. Stalin, true to form, was merely banished for three years. True, it was to a rather distant place, the Narym region. This was meant as a warning. But communications in the Russian Empire were not too bad, and in late summer Stalin made his way safely back to Petersburg.
He now switched his efforts mainly to Party work. He visited Lenin in Krakow (no difficult matter even for an “exile”). He organized a printing press here, a May Day demonstration there, a leaflet campaign somewhere else, and suddenly, at an evening meeting in the Kalashnikov l
abor exchange, he was nabbed. The Okhranka had lost its temper, and this time he was sent packing to a real place of exile, Kureika, beyond the Arctic Circle. The tsar’s government could dish out ruthless sentences when it wanted to, and he got—horror of horrors!—four years, four whole years!
Stalin faltered yet again. For what and for whom had he renounced his comfortable, uneventful life under state patronage and gotten himself banished to this godforsaken hole? “Member of the C.C.” might tickle the ear of an idiot, but . . . Several hundred members of assorted parties shared Stalin’s exile, and when he looked at them, he was horrified. What a loathsome breed these professional Revolutionaries were—empty show-offs, loudmouths, incapable of independent action, mentally bankrupt. Stalin, the Caucasian, dreaded the Arctic Circle less than the company of these flimsy, unstable, irresponsible, unserious people. To cut himself off from them once and for all—he would sooner have lived with the bears!—he married a Cheldonian, a mammoth of a woman with a squeaky voice. Better her tittering and the evil-smelling fat she cooked in than all those assemblies, debates, altercations, comrades’ courts. . . . Stalin let it be known that he wanted nothing to do with these people, broke off relations with them—and with the Revolution, too. Enough was enough. At thirty-five he was not too old to start living honestly. There comes a time when you must stop drifting before the wind, with your empty pockets like billowing sails. He despised himself for wasting so many years with those pathetic hacks.
From then on he was a man apart, steering clear of Bolsheviks and anarchists alike. He had no thought now of escaping; his intention was to serve out his sentence like an honest exile. Besides, war had broken out, and only there in exile could he be sure of surviving. He stayed put with his Cheldonian woman, keeping his head down. A son was born to them. The war seemed never-ending. He would have fought tooth and nail for an extra year of exile! Russia had a tsar too feeble even to hand down a decent sentence!
The war went on and on. And the Police Department, with which he had once been on such good terms, handed his file card, and his soul with it, to a recruiting officer who didn’t know the first thing about Social Democrats and their Central Committees and who called up Iosif Dzugashvili, born 1879, no previous military service, to serve as a private in the Imperial Russian Army. That was the beginning of the future great marshal’s military career. He had tried three different careers one after another, and now he would be embarking on a fourth.
A sleepily gliding sled carried him along the Yenisei to Krasnoyarsk, and on to the barracks at Achinsk. He was in his thirty-eighth year, and he was . . . a nothing, a Georgian soldier, shivering in a skimpy greatcoat, cannon fodder for the front in transit across frozen Siberia. A great life was about to be cut short around some Belorussian farmstead or some Jewish shtetl.
But before he had learned to roll up a greatcoat or load a rifle (in later years, as a commissar and then a marshal, he still didn’t know how and would have been embarrassed to ask), ticker-tape messages from Petrograd caused people to hug one another in the streets and shout steamily into the frosty air, “Christ is Risen!” The tsar had abdicated! The empire was no more!
How had it happened? Who had brought it about? They had given up hope, stopped counting on it. “Unknowable, O Lord, are Thy ways!” How true were these words Iosif remembered from his childhood.
No one could remember when the Russian public had last rejoiced so unanimously. But, until another telegram arrived, Stalin could not join in the general jubilation. Till then the specter of Azef, hanged by the neck, dangled importunately over his head.
The news he needed came one day later. The Okhranka’s headquarters had been sacked and burned. All its documents had been destroyed!
They knew, those Revolutionaries, what to burn first! Stalin felt sure that there were others like himself in the files, quite a few of them.
(The Okhranka had gone up in flames, but for the rest of his life Stalin was watchful and suspicious. With his own hands he paged through tens of thousands of archival pages and pitched whole files into the flames without examining them. Still, he missed something, and in 1937 it very nearly saw the light of day. Whenever a member of his own Party was put on trial, Stalin invariably accused him of having been a police informer: He had learned how easy it is to fall and found it hard to imagine that others had failed to insure themselves as he had.)
Stalin later refused to speak of the “great” February Revolution, but he had forgotten how he himself had rejoiced and sung and winged his way from Achinsk (there was nothing now to stop him from deserting!) and done foolish things and handed in at a post office in the backwoods a telegram to Lenin in Switzerland.
Once in Petrograd, he had immediately agreed with Kamenev that this was it, all that they had dreamed of in their underground days. The Revolution was complete, and all they had to do was consolidate its achievement. This was a time for practical people (especially those who were already members of the C.C.). They must do all in their power to support the provisional government.
It was all so clear to them until that adventurer, who knew nothing about Russia, who lacked all-around practical experience, arrived and—spluttering, slurring, twitching—came out with his “April theses” and created total confusion! Yet somehow he cast a spell over the Party and dragged it into the July uprising! This desperate adventure failed, as Stalin had foretold, and the whole Party almost went under with it. And where did the strutting gamecock turn up next? He had saved his skin by fleeing to the Gulf of Finland, while the foulest abuse was heaped upon Bolsheviks back home. Was his liberty more valuable than the prestige of the Party? Stalin had posed the question candidly at the Sixth Congress but had not obtained a majority.
Altogether 1917 had been an unpleasant year: too many meetings, eloquent ranters were carried on the crowd’s shoulders, Trotsky was never off the stage in the Circus building. Where had they all come from, these nimble-tongued ninnies, swarming like flies onto honey? He had never seen them in exile, never seen them when he was carrying out “ex-es”; they had been idling abroad, and now they had come back to yap their heads off and sneak into the front row. Whatever the subject under discussion, they hopped onto it as quick as fleas. They always knew the answer before the question was asked, before the problem arose. They laughed at Stalin openly, insultingly. True, he steered clear of their debates, never sat on platforms. For the time being he was keeping his own counsel. He did not like bandying words, trying to shout an opponent down, and he was no good at it. This was not how he had imagined the Revolution. Occupying important posts, doing a serious job—that was what he had looked forward to.
They laughed at him, all those pointy-beards, but why was it on Stalin that they loaded all the heaviest and most thankless tasks? They laughed at him, but why did all the others in Kschessinskaya’s former palace suddenly develop stomachaches and send Stalin to Petropavlovka when the sailors had to be persuaded to surrender the fortress to Kerensky without a fight and themselves withdraw to Kronstadt? Why? Because the sailors would have stoned, say, Grishka Zinoviev. Because you had to know how to talk to the Russian people.
The October Revolution had been another reckless venture, but it had come off. Good. Full marks to Lenin there. Nobody knew what would follow, but for the time being, good. Commissariat of Nationalities? Very well, then, I don’t mind. Draw up a constitution? Why not? Stalin was sizing up the situation.
Surprisingly, for a year the Revolution looked like a complete success. Nobody would ever have expected it, but there it was. That clown Trotsky even believed in world Revolution and opposed the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty. In fact, Lenin, too, believed in it. Pedants! Fantasists! Only an ass would believe in a European Revolution. They had lived there for years and learned nothing. Whereas Stalin had traveled across Europe once and understood it completely. They should thank Heaven that their own Revolution had been a success. And sit quietly. Pause for thought.
Stalin looked around with a sober a
nd unprejudiced eye. Thought things over. And saw clearly that these phrasemongers would ruin this great Revolution. Only he, Stalin, could steer it in the right direction. In all honesty, in all conscience, he was the only real leader among them. He compared himself dispassionately with those poseurs, those mountebanks, and he saw clearly his own essential superiority, their instability, his own staying power. What set him apart from all the others was his understanding of people. He understood them at the point where they touched ground, at the base, understood that part of them without which they would not stand on their feet and remain standing: Everything higher than that—all the pretenses, all the boasts—was “superstructure” and of no importance.
Lenin, of course, could soar like an eagle. He could amaze you: turn right around overnight and say, “Let the peasants have the land!” (we can always change our minds later), think up the Brest-Litovsk treaty in a single day (even a Georgian, let alone a Russian, suffered when he saw half of Russia handed over to the Germans, but Lenin felt nothing!). As for the New Economic Policy, it went without saying, that was the neatest trick of the lot; nobody need be ashamed to learn from such maneuvers. Lenin’s greatest gift, the most remarkable thing about him, was his ability to hold the real power very tightly in his own two hands. Slogans changed, the subjects of debate changed, allies and opponents changed, but all power remained in his hands and his hands alone!
But the man could not really be relied on. He was storing up a lot of grief for himself with his economic policy; he was bound to trip himself up with it. Stalin accurately sensed Lenin’s volatility, his reckless impatience, and worst of all his poor understanding, or rather total lack of understanding, of people. (He had tested it on himself: Whichever side of himself he chose to show was the only one that Lenin saw.) The man was no good at infighting in the dark—in other words, real politics. Turukhan (66˚ latitude) was a tougher place than Shushenskoye (54˚), and Stalin felt himself that much tougher than Lenin. Anyway, what experience of life had this bookworm theoretician ever acquired? Lowly birth, humiliations, poverty, actual hunger, had not been his lot: He had been a landowner, though a pretty small one. He had been a model exile and never once run away! He had never seen the inside of a real prison; indeed, he had seen nothing of the real Russia. He had idled away fourteen years in emigration. Stalin had read less than half of his writings, not expecting to learn a great deal from him. (He did, of course, sometimes produce remarkably apt definitions: “What is dictatorship? Unlimited government, unrestrained by laws.” Stalin had written “Good!” in the margin.) If Lenin had had a sound, sober understanding, he would have made Stalin his closest associate from the start; he would have said, “Help me! I understand politics, I know about social classes, but real live people I don’t understand!” But the best thing he could think of was to pack Stalin off to some far corner of Russia, where he was put in charge of grain requisitioning. Stalin was the man he needed most in Moscow, so he sent him to Tsaritsyn.
In the First Circle Page 17
