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 Petersburg, 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
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.
Nicholas II did not revoke the Basic Law he had sanctioned in early 1906. But he regretted allowing an electoral system which returned a large socialist contingent in both the First and Second State Dumas. On 3 June 1907 Petr Stolypin, his Prime Minister, redrafted the system so as to produce a conservative majority in the Third State Duma which would convene in November. Stolypin, however, also saw that agrarian reform was essential. Having worked as a governor in Saratov Province, he saw the village land commune as a source of chronic social instability; he introduced legislation to allow peasants to set up by themselves as independent farmers. He financed schemes to encourage migration to virgin lands in Siberia. Stolypin with the Emperor’s consent strove for a working relationship with the Third State Duma, especially with the Octobrist party led by Alexander Guchkov. He also permitted the continued existence of local trade unions and a press which was no longer as hobbled as before 1905. Out-and-out revolutionary propaganda and organisation, however, continued to be quashed. Stolypin’s rule was a forceful, intelligent attempt to conserve the Imperial order. He was detested not only by the revolutionaries but also by those at court who suspected that his collaboration with the Duma derogated from the powers of the Emperor. But Stolypin survived. The Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party, which had 150,000 members in spring 1907, was quickly reduced to a handful of thousands as the state resumed control.6
Dzhughashvili’s was an existence populated by comrades, spies, policemen, girlfriends and peasant landlords. Everything was done on the assumption that an unwary word might result in arrest. Friendly acquaintances might turn out to be police informers. The Okhrana, despite being a small organisation, husbanded its resources well and infiltrated all the revolutionary parties. Dzhughashvili could trust only his oldest friends and his immediate family.
He had got used to fending for himself; and although he had a wife and baby son, his party duties continued to keep him away from home after his return from the Fifth Party Congress. Such domestic peace as he had was abruptly brought to an end on 22 November 1907 when Ketevan, after weeks of suffering, died. The probable cause was tuberculosis. Joseph and Ketevan had been married for less than two years. Her death shattered his poise. His schoolmate Joseph Iremashvili accompanied him at the church funeral, and recorded the scene in Tbilisi when the widower took him firmly by the arm: ‘Soso, this being softened my heart of stone; she’s passed away and with her have gone my last warm feelings for people!’ Then Dzhughashvili laid his right hand across his chest and declared: ‘In here everything is so empty, so unutterably hollow!’7 Iremashvili concluded:8
I expressed my condolences to Koba. It was as honestly and sincerely offered as I could do it, but I knew that thereafter Koba was bereft of any moral restraint and that he would from then onwards surrender himself entirely to his fantastic plans, which were dictated solely by ambition and vengeance.
Bereavement, according to Iremashvili, had the profound consequence of hardening his attitudes to the rest of humanity.9
Iremashvili wrote his memoir years after fleeing from Soviet Georgia; he can hardly have remembered Joseph’s exact words in the churchyard. He had also become Stalin’s personal and political enemy and wanted to sell as many copies of his book as he could. Did he perhaps embroider the truth? In other memoirs about the period before 1917 a different Joseph Dzhughashvili is depicted: introverted, secretive, taciturn and unemotional.10 Yet even if Iremashvili exaggerated or invented a little, he should not be dismissed. He had known Dzhughashvili since early childhood and knew all about the emotional side of his personality. They had been seminarists together when Dzhughashvili was writing poems in a romantic vein. Moreover, they were Georgians attending an Orthodox funeral and Joseph Dzhughashvili acted conventionally in showing family and friends how deeply he mourned his wife.
Dzhughashvili’s reported comment is anyway a cliched one which indicates a widower more concerned with himself than with Ketevan or his son. He had not even bothered to live with her throughout the last months of her illness. That Joseph was shaken by her death, though, is beyond dispute. What is less plausible is that this single event was the decisive one in turning him into a man seeking murderous revenge on humanity in general. There were many such events in his long life. His friends and associates noted how each event made him harsher in his dealings with the world. Iremashvili stated that even before Ketevan’s death it was obvious that Joseph acted with contempt towards everyone except his mother, wife and son.11 Her passing left him with his young son Yakob. Yet he did not let bereavement get in the way of political activity. Having chosen the life of a full-time revolutionary, he was not going to let parenthood burden him. Total personal freedom was required for this, and he asked his in-laws, the Svanidzes, to take Yakob off his hands. Ketevan had three sisters and a brother. To Joseph’s relief, these relatives were happy to foster the lad. They also stood by Joseph when he ran out of money.12
He must have compared himself ruefully with emigre Bolsheviks in their little colonies in Switzerland and France. Most leading emigrants could live off private incomes. They could visit libraries, write letters to each other and go on holidays without worrying whether the Okhrana was tailing them. (The police agents in their midst did not much alter the daily habits of the emigres even though everyone knew they existed.) They had time to write and opportunities to publish. They could meet foreign revolutionaries. They did not need to grub out a life while being constantly on the run. They were not threatened by prison or Siberian exile.
Apart from his comrades, Dzhughashvili was alone in the world. He saw nothing of his mother who was still in Gori. His father had long passed out of contact. Not that this stopped Joseph thinking about him. In one of his early articles he offered the following account:13
Let’s take a simple example. Just imagine a cobbler who had a tiny workshop but could not survive the competition with larger bosses and closed his workshop and perhaps went off to work in the shoe factory belonging to Adelkhanov in Tiflis. He entered employment with Adelkhanov not to become a permanent hired labourer but rather in order to save some money, put aside a little capital and reopen his workshop. As you see, that cobbler
These details are so near to the pattern of his father’s life that Joseph must surely have been describing him. Beso’s fate was an unhappy one. After splitting from Keke and Joseph he had gone on working and drinking in Tbilisi, and Joseph later claimed that he was stabbed to death in a tavern brawl in 1909.14
If Joseph mourned him, he left no sign of it; indeed it is not even known how quickly he learned of Beso’s death. Dzhughashvili’s focus in this period was on evading arrest. He was adept at the techniques. But his recurrent success at foiling the police again led to the rumour that he had a dubious association with the Imperial authorities. Was he an employee of the Okhrana? The Menshevik Isidore Ramishvili in 1905 had accused him of being ‘a government agent, spy and provocateur’.15 Such unsubstantiated tales were repeated down the years. There has even been an allegation that the Okhrana file on him was passed around the party in the 1920s and that Stalin instigated the Great Terror in the late 1930s mainly in order to eliminate those who had been
