initiated into knowledge of his employment.16 In fact the most exigent analysis of the evidence gives no serious grounds for thinking that Dzhughashvili was a police agent. This does not mean that he failed to exploit whatever links he had with the Okhrana. He was arrested and interrogated many times. It is easily credible that he let drop information which would incriminate the enemies of his faction or even his rivals inside the faction. There were recurrent queries in particular about Stepan Shaumyan’s arrest and apparently some fellow Bolsheviks sought to call Dzhughashvili before a party tribunal. Arrest and exile spared Dzhughashvili this fate.17 Shaumyan was the other towering figure of Bolshevism in the south Caucasus; it would have been in character for the ambitious Dzhughashvili to get him out of the way.
Yet the Okhrana preferred to keep its main informers out of prison; and Dzhughashvili, although he sometimes received light sentences, was incarcerated or exiled too frequently and lengthily to have been a police employee. He was to spend the Great War through to the February 1917 Revolution in Siberia even though the state authorities could have used him productively if he really had been working for them.
Clandestine political activity was complex and demanding, and Dzhughashvili’s leading position required that he kept a wide range of acquaintances and sources of information. Comrades were among these; they were indispensable if a solid revolutionary core was going to be maintained. But he also had to seek information on a wider plain. Inhabiting working-class areas where informers were many and where imprisonment was a constant danger, a revolutionary leader had to live on his wits — and Dzhughashvili was remarkable for his number of contacts. The Georgian Menshevik Artem Gio left an account of the rounding up of Marxist militants in Tbilisi. Bursting into a friend’s flat, Dzhughashvili was astonished to find Gio waiting for him there. ‘I just wasn’t expecting it,’ he exclaimed: ‘How has it happened? Haven’t you been arrested?’18 Gio was explaining how he had evaded the fate of others, when in walked a stranger. Dzhughashvili reassured Gio: ‘You can talk freely and boldly… He’s a comrade of mine.’ The newcomer turned out to be a Georgian who worked as a police interpreter. He had rushed over to tell Dzhughashvili the latest news: several close comrades (including Dzhughashvili’s future father-in-law Sergei Alliluev) had been taken into custody. In fact a detachment had already been assigned to arrest Dzhughashvili in the evening. The interpreter, however, was disconcerted by Gio’s presence and, once he had passed on his information, he ran off.19
This was an obscure but significant episode in Dzhughashvili’s career. It showed that he got up to pretty unorthodox business; for his interpreter was not a Marxist militant but — in Dzhughashvili’s words — ‘a great nationalist’.20 The interpreter so hated Russian Imperial rule that he willingly helped other opponents of tsarism: he deliberately mistranslated words so as to save Georgian militants from trouble. Gio’s memoir was an unusual one. Bolsheviks were conventionally depicted as having nothing to do with the police, and it cannot be discounted that his book was published in 1925 in Leningrad only because Stalin’s factional adversary Zinoviev controlled the press in that city and wanted to besmirch his reputation. Yet the making of revolution in the Russian Empire required multifarious talents and a flexible moral code. Dzhughashvili possessed the qualifications.
It was nevertheless a dangerous game. Another of Dzhughashvili’s contacts was a certain Kornev. Dzhughashvili gave the code words to be used by Gio when meeting Kornev. Yet Kornev seemed shifty to Gio, who thought to himself: ‘Either he’s an Okhrana agent or a great coward!’21 Although he was working in a tailor’s workshop, Kornev obviously had no experience of cutting and sewing. Everything about him was suspicious. From this it was a small step to conclude that ‘in his hands was the thread by which he [thought] to infiltrate our organisations’.22 Gio made his excuses and went into hiding; his instincts told him that Dzhughashvili’s trusted contact was a police spy and that Dzhughashvili himself had been fooled. This may have been the case. Another possibility is that Dzhughashvili was more willing than most revolutionaries to take risks with the lives of his comrades. Egotistical and calculating, he judged situations in terms of his self-interest. People mattered to him only in so far as he could use them for the good of the cause or for his own political advancement and private comfort and pleasure. His recklessness in clandestine revolutionary work was of a piece with the other manifestations of his personality.
If Dzhughashvili’s relationship with the police retains some mystery, there need no longer be any doubt about another murky aspect of his activities. Before the Great War the accusation was made that he was involved in organising armed robberies and that he continued this activity even after the Fifth Party Congress banned it. The evidence for this remained shaky for a long time. Dzhughashvili, though, never expressly denied having participated in this criminal activity. For years he simply discouraged public interest in the matter; and when he mounted to supreme power, he suppressed all mention of it.
His duties in Georgia on behalf of Bolshevism stretched far beyond purely political activity. He was also involved in the organisation of ‘exes’. This was the party abbreviation for expropriations or, more directly, robberies. During the 1905–6 Revolution there were many Marxist groups across the Russian Empire involved in attempts to fund the party by thefts from banks. The Bolsheviks were among them, and Georgia was a centre for their efforts. There were good reasons for this. Banditry was common in the mountains and popular opinion was very far from regarding it as contemptible. The tradition of the
Dzhughashvili was the man in charge of the Georgian Bolshevik operations and the practitioner was the Armenian Semen Ter-Petrosyan who masqueraded under the pseudonym Kamo.23 Dzhughashvili and his friend from school Joseph Davrishevi led rival groups of political robbers from houses on Mount David in Tbilisi. The police knew what was happening. One of the proteges of Joseph Davrishevi’s father Gori gendarme chief Damian Davrishevi, a certain Davydov, was in charge of policing the area. Wanting a peaceful life, Davydov asked Joseph Davrishevi to avoid making trouble on his pitch — and Davrishevi assumed that a similar approach had been made to Dzhughashvili. Davrishevi was able and daring and, although he belonged to the Social-Federalists (who were socialists but also anti-Marxists and overt nationalists), Dzhughashvili tried to get him to cross over to the Bolsheviks. Davrishevi refused. (Georgia’s Bolsheviks of course had suspected Dzhughashvili of being attracted to Georgian nationalism. Was his appeal to Davrishevi yet another piece of evidence for them?) Dzhughashvili and his fellow Bolsheviks at any rate took no notice of Davydov’s request. Incidents recurred on Mount David. The two groups went on raising their respective party finance by persuasion, fraud, extortion and armed robbery. Owners of businesses were easily intimidated. Even the entrepreneurial family of the Zubalovs, who had constructed the building that later became the Spiritual Seminary, made financial subventions to Davrishevi.24 Dzhughashvili kept quiet about the names of his providers. Yet it is not unlikely that the Zubalovs, one of whose dachas in the Moscow countryside he was to occupy with his second wife from 1919, yielded to Bolshevik demands in the period of revolutionary upsurge.
They pulled off their greatest coup on Erevan Square almost within sight of the Spiritual Seminary in Tbilisi on 12 June 1907. Kamo arrived in the disguise of an Imperial general in a comfortable horse-drawn carriage. They knew that a large quantity of banknotes was about to be delivered by stagecoach. Bombs were thrown at the guards. Kamo and his accomplices picked up linen bags with a quarter of a million rubles inside, and Kamo himself drove his coach away at full speed, taking advantage of the chaotic, bloody scene. He brought the proceeds of the robbery to the Bolshevik Centre base in Kuokkala in Finland. Lenin was delighted.
Dzhughashvili had taken a brief trip to Berlin shortly beforehand25 — probably this involved some consultation with the Bolshevik leadership abroad. Afterwards Lenin, Dzhughashvili and Kamo wished to keep everything about the robbery strictly secret. Dzhughashvili and Kamo felt especially vulnerable since several Marxists in Tbilisi knew who had been organising the robberies. The Mensheviks, still outweighing the Bolsheviks in Georgia, set about their enquiries in November 1907. Silva Dzhibladze was put in charge of the commission set up to try the suspected participants. Dzhibladze himself had a less than saintly past; he had been expelled from the Tiflis Spiritual Seminary for a physical assault on the Rector.26 But he drew the line at breaking party policy. Dzhughashvili was identified beyond all reasonable doubt as the
