Stalin: A Biography Read online

  Dzhughashvili was infused with the current factional mood. He was still developing as a politician. His difficulties with fellow Georgian Bolsheviks in 1904 showed that he was not lacking in strategic flexibility (and he continued to suggest compromises in policy in the years ahead). But in 1905 he lived and breathed ideas of armed insurrection and revolutionary dictatorship. He genuinely thought that the Imperial monarchy could be replaced. He therefore refused to countenance a policy of settling for a political order prescribed by Nicholas II. In fact a growing number of Bolsheviks came to recognise their mistake in not following Lenin’s advice. Lenin himself decided to put further pressure on his faction by agreeing to reunification with the Mensheviks at a Party Congress — he could not stand so many Bolsheviks purporting to be more ‘Leninist’ than himself. Such a move was also precipitated by the fact that the two factions, despite maintaining a separate existence in emigration, often co-operated in the Russian Empire.

  The venue chosen for this Fourth Party Congress was Stockholm. Dzhughashvili was the only Bolshevik among sixteen delegates selected to represent Georgia. They made their way secretly via Moscow and St Petersburg to Helsinki. From there, disguised as teachers on an excursion, they took a steamer to the port of å bo. At that point they split into smaller groups.8 Dzhughashvili caught the steamship Wellamo and sailed to the Swedish capital. Arrangements had been made for him to stay at the Hotel Bristol with fellow Bolshevik Kliment Voroshilov. Bolshevik ‘conspiratorial’ schemes had been rumbled by the Stockholm police. Scores of alien-looking newcomers without obvious commercial or professional purposes were bound to attract attention. Dzhughashvili was apprehended and interrogated by Commissioner Mogren, a constable and an interpreter called Alexei. He gave his name as Ivan Ivanovich Vissarionovich and claimed he was a political refugee and a national democrat. He reassured the police that he was not being funded by Finns (which was a worry for the Swedish security agencies in those years). He also promised to report regularly to them during his stay. He indicated that he intended to go to Berlin before returning home. Dzhughashvili, like others, was released as a harmless visitor.9

  He then enjoyed himself with the rest of the Bolshevik factional delegation. His modest expenses were covered by the party. This was the first period he spent outside the Russian Empire. The party had fraternal relations with the Swedish social-democrats and with their help had obtained the use of the People’s House for the Congress proceedings. Little attempt was made to prevent the Okhrana from knowing about the event — and anyway the Okhrana had plenty of informers and received detailed reports on proceedings at the apex of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party regardless of precautions taken by the revolutionaries. Each faction discussed its internal affairs. There were also negotiations among the factions. The atmosphere was convivial even though there was no time for delegates to see much of the city beyond their hotels and the People’s House. For Dzhughashvili, though, this did not matter. He had read articles by the luminaries of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party — Plekhanov, Axelrod, Lenin, Martov, Bogdanov and Maslov — over many years. (Alexander Bogdanov, a philosopher and organiser, had become almost as influential among Bolsheviks as Lenin himself.) Now Dzhughashvili saw them gathered together in a single large hall. The agreed task was to sort out the problems between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks as well as to settle a common set of policies, and Dzhughashvili was able to play his part.

  While advocating reunification, Lenin did not disarm himself politically. He maintained a Bolshevik Centre separate from any party body involving the Mensheviks. He also continued to sanction armed robberies by Bolsheviks as a means of raising cash for political purposes. The Fourth Congress prohibited both these things. Lenin and his associates acceded in public while ignoring the ban in reality — and Dzhughashvili, as the main organiser of the Bolshevik campaign of robbery and extortion in Georgia, was an integral figure in this systematic deceit.

  It was at the Fourth Congress that Dzhughashvili — using Ivanovich as his pseudonym — advanced his claim to be taken seriously by the ascendant party leaders. He was elected to the commission which checked the mandates of delegates. He also challenged the reliability of Georgian Menshevik reports on the situation in Georgia. This stirred controversy. His own speech, though, was questioned by Mensheviks and he was asked to justify himself. He shouted back: ‘I’ll give you my answer in my own time!’10 He declared: ‘It’s no secret to anyone that two paths have been marked out in the development of Russia’s sociopolitical life: the path of qua si-reforms and the path of revolution.’ For Dzhughashvili, the Mensheviks had foolishly adopted ideas diverting them from a Marxist strategy:11

  On the contrary, if the class interests of the proletariat lead to its hegemony and if the proletariat must go not at the tail but at the head of the current revolution, it is self-evident that the proletariat cannot hold back either from active participation in the organisation of armed insurrection or from a seizure of power. Such is the ‘scheme’ of the Bolsheviks.

  With a zealot’s confidence he freely attacked veterans of the Russian Marxist movement, including Plekhanov and Axelrod.12

  He also participated robustly in the debate on the ‘agrarian question’, and his contributions were mentioned by other contributors.13 The Menshevik specialist Pëtr Maslov had proposed campaigning for the ‘municipalisation’ of the land as a means of appealing to the peasantry. Such a scheme would transfer arable soil to the property of district councils. Lenin by contrast had expanded his ideas by suggesting land nationalisation; he wanted the central government to own the land. Both Maslov and Lenin desired to expropriate the landed gentry without compensation and to put all fields cheaply at the disposal of the peasantry. They aimed to stipulate the terms of this tenure. But most Bolsheviks, following a certain S. A. Suvorov, regarded Lenin’s proposal as being as impractical as Maslov’s. Among them was Dzhughashvili. Stepping up to the platform, he made a case for simply letting the peasants take over the land without restrictions. This would enable the alliance of working class and peasantry to become a reality, and Marxists would succeed in competing with the Socialist-Revolutionaries for rural popular support.14 Suvorov and Dzhughashvili wanted the land to be declared ‘the common property of the entire people’. The internal Bolshevik dispute, however, did not get out of hand because the Mensheviks held a majority at the Congress and land municipalisation became official party policy.

  Yet again Dzhughashvili had spoken confidently for Bolshevism without automatically consenting to everything advocated by Lenin. He acknowledged him as his faction’s leader. But his obedience was not blind: Dzhughashvili thought his direct daily experience of the Russian Empire kept him in closer touch with revolutionary possibilities than the émigrés.

  There was anyway a reason outside politics for Dzhughashvili to feel cheery: he had found a woman he wanted to marry. He was in his late twenties and most of his friends were already in wedlock. The woman who caught his eye was Ketevan Svanidze. This was a sister of Alexander, a friend from the Spiritual Seminary. Alexander Svanidze, like Dzhughashvili, was a Bolshevik; Dzhughashvili would therefore be able to rely on her understanding of the demands of the life of a revolutionary. The courtship was a rapid one. Ketevan worked as a seamstress for the French dressmaker Mme Hervieu in Tbilisi’s Sololaki district. Wanted by the police, Dzhughashvili needed to be careful about his assignations with her; but luckily for him Ketevan’s employer was a kindly soul and let him meet his love in the back room of the shop. On one occasion, though, Mme Hervieu nearly regretted her indulgence when Lieutenant Pëtr Stroev strode into sight accompanied by two snarling German dogs bred for manhunts. She raced to warn him, and he escaped in the nick of time by the back entrance.15 Ketevan had a fine figure and was a sympathetic and kindly woman; and she was content with a life of hearth and home: she had no ambition to become active in the revolutionary movement. What she saw in him is not known. No one in the Svanidze family, which
became prominent in Soviet public life in the 1930s, mentioned the subject. Perhaps she thought him very dashing after the derring-do in the couturier’s. At any rate he was physically slim and mentally intense and, as he showed in the years after her death, his appearance and personality had appeal for many women.

  Ketevan and Joseph complied with religious propriety and on 16 July 1906 they took their marriage vows in a full Georgian Orthodox ceremony at the Zion Cathedral on the north bank of the Mtkvari. If the priest knew that several witnesses in the congregation were militant atheists (and failed seminarists), he kept quiet about it. After the wedding there was the conventional Georgian reception. Food and wine were plentiful, and the tamada (toastmaster) was the oldest Bolshevik in Georgia, Mikha Tskhakaya.16 Dzhughashvili’s expectations were conventional: Ketevan’s function was to cook for him, clean and sweep their rooms and supply him with offspring — and it would seem that Ketevan was entirely content with the arrangement. This was in character for Dzhughashvili. It was never to his liking that relatives or friends might have an intellectual edge over him. A son was duly born to the couple on 18 March 1907. They named him Yakob.17

  The role of husband did not tie him down and he remained busy writing and organising in Tbilisi. Among his written pieces was a lengthy series of articles on ‘Anarchism or Socialism’.18 Among the results of his organisational activity were the proceeds of crime, as Dzhughashvili, using Semën Ter-Petrosyan as Bolshevik robber-in-chief, presided over a series of armed thefts.19 At the beginning of 1907, still based in the Georgian capital, he helped to found the newspaper Mnatobi (‘The Torch’). Like Lenin, he welcomed German Marxist theoretician Karl Kautsky’s pamphlet on The Driving Forces and Prospects of the Russian Revolution, which inadvertently lent support to the Bolshevik case for a revolutionary alliance of workers and peasants; and Dzhughashvili wrote a preface for the Georgian edition. By then Dzhughashvili was Georgia’s leading Bolshevik. Doubts about his doctrinal orthodoxy were a thing of the past. Both in Georgia and Finland, where the Bolshevik Centre continued to function, his merits were acknowledged by fellow members of the faction. However, the political fortunes of Bolshevism in his homeland were dispiriting; and when he heard that the Fifth Party Congress was to be held in April 1907 in London, he knew the Menshevik participants would challenge his right to represent Tbilisi Marxist groups. He had worked intensively for little practical reward except a rise in esteem among Bolsheviks.

  Expecting a wrangle over his mandate as a delegate, Dzhughashvili travelled to London on the papers of ‘Mr Ivanovich’. Since he was not yet a prominent party figure outside Georgia, the Congress organisers had no reason to lodge him near the leaders — Plekhanov, Axelrod, Lenin and Martov — in middle-class Bloomsbury. Instead he joined the mass of delegates in the East End. Jewish immigrant families from the Russian Empire lived there in their thousands at the turn of the century (and, like the Irish, were a substantial minority).20 This was the best spot for delegates to avoid attention from the Special Branch. They could also get cheap lodgings and it would not much matter if they could speak no English.

  He never spoke of his London impressions. Perhaps his visit was too fleeting and busy for him to form much of an opinion. He had been allocated a room at 77 Jubilee Street in Stepney. The Congress was held at the Brotherhood Church three miles to the north on the corner of Southgate Road and Balmes Road.21 Thus the militant atheists in the Russian Empire debated the overthrow of the Romanovs in a place of Christian worship whose usual congregation consisted of pacifists and followers of the artist, writer and moderate socialist William Morris.22 Returning to his room each night, he occupied himself with writing and planning. His landlord was a Russian-speaking cobbler, probably Jewish, who had fled the Russian Empire. A witness of his brief stay has left us his account. This was a lad called Arthur Bacon, who earned halfpennies in the district for running errands and carrying out little tasks. He often came to the cobbler’s home to rake out the grate and fill it with coal and kindling, and Dzhughashvili used him to take messages to the various Bolshevik delegates staying in the vicinity. The cobbler’s wife addressed the envelopes since Dzhughashvili’s English did not stretch to writing out names.

  Although young Bacon voted Conservative on growing up, he remembered Mr Ivanovich with affection. Dzhughashvili liked the toffees the boy brought with him. The boy had financial reason for gratitude: instead of the usual halfpenny, he received a two-bob piece for conveying a message to a comrade.23 Since this was 4,700 per cent above the going rate, Dzhughashvili’s financial acumen was not all it might have been.

  Whereas he had made his mark at the Stockholm Congress by harrying the Menshevik leaders and distancing himself from Lenin’s agrarian policy, he did little to distinguish himself in London. As expected, a dispute broke out over his mandate. In the end he was allowed to attend the Congress without a vote.24 There were further procedural disputes. Three days were spent in arguing about the agenda. The situation was complicated by the inclusion of various organisations from the ‘national’ borderlands — the Poles, the Latvians, the Armenians and the Bundist Jews — in the proceedings. Consequently neither the Bolsheviks nor the Mensheviks held a firm majority and there was much discussion behind the scenes to secure agreement. Lenin offered Zhordania and the Georgian Mensheviks a deal whereby they could run party business in Georgia without interference in return for their not taking sides against the Bolsheviks in the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party as a whole. Zhordania refused.25 If Dzhughashvili had heard of the proposal, he would scarcely have been pleased. Lenin’s collusion with Zhordania would have ruined everything Dzhughashvili had fought for in the south Caucasus since becoming a Bolshevik. It would also have taught him that the region was not hugely important to Bolshevism’s leadership. A clash between Lenin and Dzhughashvili would have been inevitable.

  The Bolsheviks at the Congress anyway came under fire for maintaining their separate Centre, for carrying out armed robberies and for failing to share party funds with the Mensheviks. The Bolsheviks, though, were equally aggressive. Although they now thought it desirable to participate in Duma elections, they rejected the idea of co-operating with liberals in the chamber; they accused Mensheviks of selling out the revolutionary cause. The proceedings were intensely controversial. A Central Committee of fifteen members was formed. Five were Bolsheviks and there were four Mensheviks. The balance of power was held by the ‘national’ organisations in the party. A joint central newspaper, Sotsial-demokrat, was to be revived. But this fooled no one. The Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party was a house divided against itself.

  7. ON THE RUN

  Joseph Dzhughashvili returned from the London Congress to a revolution which was on the retreat. His career over the next few years reflected the situation. He fixed Baku as his base and for several months organised, wrote and edited on the faction’s behalf among the oilfield workers. It had become the opinion of leading Bolsheviks of the south Caucasus that Tbilisi, while being the administrative and cultural centre of the Caucasus, was inferior in the opportunities it offered for propaganda and organisation of the kind likely to advance the Bolshevik cause. He went there with Stepan Shaumyan.1 He mocked the Mensheviks of Georgia for their preoccupation with the more backward inhabitants and economy of his homeland: his own political development was continuing.2 But the Okhrana caught up with him. On 25 March 1908 he was arrested while operating under the alias of Gaioz Nizheradze and locked up in Bailov Prison on the outskirts of Baku.

  Years of imprisonment, exile, escape and rearrest followed. On 9 November he was escorted to Vologda in the Russian north. This was a small provincial capital, famous only for its lacemaking, 370 miles to the east of St Petersburg. On arrival he was ordered to move over four hundred miles east to Solvychegodsk, an old town fifteen miles from the nearest railway on the River Vychegda. Arriving on 27 February 1909, he immediately plotted an escape. On 24 June he succeeded and, after staying for a few days in St Peter
sburg, returned to the south Caucasus and worked again as a clandestine Bolshevik organiser in Baku and Tbilisi. But he was not long at liberty. On 23 March 1910 he was seized by the police and confined in Bailov Prison. This time his pseudonym was Zakhar Melikhyants. It took six months before the authorities decided on his sentence (and in the meantime he managed to write a ‘Letter from the Caucasus’ which he got published in the party’s central organ Sotsial-demokrat in Paris).3 On 23 September he was sent back to Solvychegodsk. On 27 June 1911 he was allowed to move to Vologda.4 On 6 September he made yet another escape disguised as a certain P. A. Chizhikov. He arrived in St Petersburg, where he contacted his old friend from Tbilisi, Sergei Alliluev.5 The Okhrana, however, had been informed. He was arrested on 9 September and, on 25 December, redispatched under guard to Vologda.

  The Imperial authorities were crushing the revolutionary movement. Peasant rebels were subjected to courts martial and executed. Industrial strikes were suppressed. Mutinies in the Imperial Army and Navy were savagely put down. Where provinces remained restless, emergency powers were granted to governors and military commanders. Revolutionary agitation was ruthlessly quelled, and the main leaders of the socialist parties — the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party and the Party of Socialist-Revolutionaries — returned to Switzerland and other European countries to regroup their forces until the next great political crisis.