Stalin: A Biography

In November 1901, after being withdrawn from propaganda work in Tbilisi by the City Committee, Dzhughashvili left for Batumi on the Black Sea coast seeking to spread his ideas in a more receptive milieu. But many Marxists in Batumi did not take to him. Dzhughashvili kept ranting about the sins of commission and omission of the Tiflis Committee. This was bad enough. But the comrades in Batumi could not stand his ‘personal capriciousness and his tendency to despotic behaviour’.²⁴ What is notable here is that objections were made less to policy than to attitude and comportment. Nastiness to acquaintances had been his hallmark since he had been a youngster. Ambition too had been a characteristic. But he wanted to rise to revolutionary eminence on his own terms; and whenever others baulked him, he told them they were wrong and stupid. He was a clever young man who thought he had the answers to the difficulties experienced by Marxist propagandists in the south Caucasus. Stressing the need for clandestine activity, illegal propaganda and control over the workers, Dzhughashvili was a Bolshevik in waiting.

He was not ineffective in Batumi. He worked with fellow Marxists and pipeline and port workers to stir up revolt against the employers. Contact was made with likely recruits to the party. The Rothschild and Mantashev enterprises were his favourite spots. At the same time he kept in contact with Ketskhoveli hundreds of miles east in Baku. Strikes broke out in Batumi and Dzhughashvili and his group were involved. He was doing what his ideology and policies induced him to do. He was involved, too, in the organisation of a protest demonstration by workers on 8 March 1902. They were demanding the release of strike leaders imprisoned a few days earlier. The demonstration had fatal consequences. The town authorities panicked at the sight of six thousand angry marching workers and troops fired on them. Fifteen demonstrators were killed. A massive Okhrana investigation followed. There were hundreds of arrests. Police spies had penetrated the Batumi Marxist organisation and it was only a matter of time before Dzhughashvili’s whereabouts were discovered. He was taken into custody on 5 April and detained in Batumi Prison.

One resident, Hashim Smyrba, regretted Dzhughashvili’s departure. Dzhughashvili had stayed for a while in hiding with him. Hashim, a peasant who was probably an Abkhazian, took to him and expressed regret that he wasn’t a Moslem: ‘Because if you adopted the Moslem faith, I’d find you seven beautiful women to marry.’²⁵ The scene was recounted to indicate that Dzhughashvili had always had the common touch. But Smyrba was an elderly peasant outside the revolutionary movement. The fact that few workers testified on Dzhughashvili’s behalf decades after his stay in Batumi was surely significant. He kept himself to himself. He was self-sufficient and did not want to rely on others when he did not need to. Already he was something of a loner.

Dzhughashvili in any case no longer depended on the goodwill of comrades in Batumi or Tbilisi. He kept in close contact with his friend Ketskhoveli in Baku. His article on ‘The Russian Social-Democratic Party and its Immediate Tasks’, covering many political and organisational questions of the day, was the main item in the second issue of Brdzola.²⁶ Ketskhoveli did not mind. Although he remained chief editor he recognised that he was better at organising than at writing or editing. They made a dynamic pair. Brdzola became a publishing success in the clandestine Marxist movement across the south Caucasus. According to Stalin’s own account, he became drawn to the writer’s life and seriously contemplated abandoning clandestine political activity and entering university — and not just as a student but as a professor.²⁷ (He never explained who would have paid his way for him.) Another aspect of his early literary career continued to exercise him in old age. This was the ‘peaceful’ content of several of his writings. Even in Brdzola, unworried about the censor’s office, he had avoided a direct summons to revolution.

Reportedly Ketskhoveli swore at him for being too moderate; but Dzhughashvili was to claim that until the shooting of workers in Batumi in March 1902 he had been justified in his measured tone. All then changed: ‘The tone was altered.’ Never again did Dzhughashvili hold back in contest with the opponents of Marxism in Georgia or the Russian Empire as a whole.²⁸ Ketskhoveli and Dzhughashvili were discovering for themselves that their basic inclinations were not peculiar to them or to Georgia. In December 1900 some Russian emigre Marxists, on the initiative of Lenin, had founded Iskra (‘The Spark’) in Munich. Its supporters advocated clandestine political activity as the key to future impact. One of Iskra’s contacts in the south Caucasus was Lev Galperin, who worked for Brdzola. Material started to arrive from Germany at Batumi in 1901–2.²⁹ Iskra was campaigning for control over the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party. Its ideas were more developed than those of Ketskhoveli. Lenin and his comrades wanted no compromise with the middle class. They urged the formation of militant, tightly organised groups. They stood for centralisation, discipline and doctrinal orthodoxy. Brdzola, however, was wrecked by the Okhrana even before Dzhughashvili’s arrest: on 14 March 1902 the entire editorial and supporting group except for Abel Enukidze and Bogdan Knunyants were taken into custody in Baku.³⁰

While the Brdzola group languished in the gaols of Batumi and Baku, Noe Zhordania continued to elaborate the strategy and tactics of Georgian Marxism. Both Zhordania and Lenin felt that the founding parents of Marxism in the Russian Empire — Georgi Plekhanov, Pavel Axelrod and Vera Zasulich — had failed to discern the advantages of appealing to the peasantry. Lenin was out to attract peasant sympathy by offering to restore the strips of land lost to the gentry landlords through the Emancipation Edict of 1861. Many Russian Marxists thought the proposal too indulgent to the peasantry; they preferred the orthodox emphasis on campaigning among the working class. But Zhordania criticised Lenin for insufficient audacity. Instead he urged that all agricultural lands should pass into the hands of peasants. Dynastic, ecclesiastical and noble estates should be expropriated. Most Georgian workers had ties with the countryside. Georgia was a predominantly agrarian society. Not only that: Zhordania urged Georgian Marxists to go out among the peasants and recruit them to the ranks of organised Marxism.³¹ Very quickly his comrades answered his call. The campaign paid off. Nowhere else in the Russian Empire were peasants so ready to hearken to Marxists. Marxists could boast of their hegemony over the Georgian political opposition to the Romanov monarchy.

Dzhughashvili did not approve of Zhordania’s strategy. He agreed that the peasants should be promised the transfer of all agricultural lands and that Lenin’s proposal was too timid. But he disliked the idea of diverting so much propaganda and organisation to the peasants. He insisted on the need to operate among the ‘workers’. He also made a point of the need for Marxists to report on and explain the vicissitudes of the labour movement outside the Russian Empire, especially in central and western Europe.³²

About a further point of dissent with Zhordania, however, he was always to show extraordinary reticence. Dzhughashvili was still far from abandoning all his Georgian patriotism. He wished a distinct Marxist party to be formed in Georgia. Whereas Zhordania aimed for a regional organisation covering the entire Caucasus regardless of its ancient national and ethnic boundaries, Dzhughashvili demanded a Georgian territorial demarcation in the party.³³ The difference between Zhordania and Dzhughashvili was large; it was even larger between Dzhughashvili and those other comrades such as Mikha Tskhakaya who were to become Bolsheviks. Tskhakaya agreed that the books, pamphlets and newspapers had to be written in the Georgian language — otherwise no Georgian workers would get acquainted with Marxism — but like other radical Marxists, he felt that Zhordania’s preoccupation with Georgia’s national and cultural development gave off a whiff of nationalism. Dzhughashvili’s idea for a territorially demarcated organisation in the south Caucasus seemed equally malodorous to radicals who espoused Marxism because it offered a path to modernity and away from nationalist strife.

Such an idea in fact had echoes more widely in the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party. The Jewish Bund — the Marxist organisation based in the western borderlands of the Russian Empire and dedicated exclusively to work among Jews — was criticized by the Iskra group for demanding territorial autonomy inside the party despite the fact that other ethnic groups lived in the same region. (Marxists in the south Caucasus avoided such requests on behalf of a single national or ethnic group.) This request was discussed at the Second Party Congress in August 1903. When Iskra’s representatives opposed any such nationalterritorial principle for organisation, the Bundists walked out. Wilful and independently minded, Dzhughashvili was risking being classified as a Marxist who could not accept the Russian Social-Democratic Party’s commitment to internationalism.

Dzhughashvili, though, was undeterred. He had begun to make a mark for himself. Having moved involuntarily from Tbilisi, he did not gain a reputation as a congenial comrade; but this did not prevent him from imposing himself. In Batumi he found a set of workers ripe for being influenced by his summons to revolutionary activity; and he helped to organise the strikes and demonstrations against the monarchy. From Batumi he kept in