Stalin: A Biography

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 Petr 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 Semen 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