Dzhughashvili became ever more prominent in the politics of Bolshevism in the south Caucasus. He and Kamo remained friends and saw each other often during and after 1917. They justifiably felt they had carried out Lenin’s instructions with great diligence.
Dzhughashvili made it his task to harry Menshevism in the south Caucasus. This factional strife mattered as much to him as the organising of revolutionary activity among the Baku workers and the oversight of the expropriations. His zeal and intelligence had brought him to the forefront of Bolshevism in the region. In Georgia he was ‘famous as the second Lenin’.30 He regularly derided the pride taken by Mensheviks in their successes with the Georgian peasantry in 1905–6. Thus he declared that class struggle was better organised in Baku on the Caspian coast with its great concentration of working-class inhabitants. While Zhordania and the Mensheviks directed their energy at activity among Georgians in Georgia, Dzhughashvili moved among Russians, Armenians and Azeris as well as people of his own nationality. He had genuine chutzpah, even claiming that the Mensheviks in Tbilisi were reluctant to take on the Bolsheviks in debate. This was unfair: Zhordania was always willing to accept any such challenge. But Dzhughashvili was not trying to be fair. He wanted to discredit Menshevism and would use any material that lay to hand. Generally he accused Zhordania of an obsession with legal activity which was tantamount to a policy of closing down the clandestine party network.31
Zhordania retorted that the Mensheviks had overlooked neither Baku nor the working class but were actually stronger than the Bolsheviks there.32 The truth lay somewhere between Zhordania and Dzhughashvili. The Mensheviks regarded Georgia as their citadel. Yet they also worked in other places, including Baku, and at times were more effective than the Bolsheviks. But the differences in strategy held the factions apart. Whereas Bolsheviks operated almost exclusively among the workers, the Mensheviks took other classes such as the peasantry very seriously. The Mensheviks were much more willing than the Bolsheviks to use the State Duma as an instrument of political organisation and propaganda. The Bolsheviks, despite the failure of revolution in 1905–6, kept alive the dream of organising an armed uprising against the Imperial monarchy.
Dzhughashvili was a frontline attacker of Menshevism in one of the regions most important for the revolutionary cause in the Russian Empire. His intransigence was just what Lenin wanted in a follower. Dzhughashvili himself had acquired a broader perspective on politics since attending great party gatherings in Tampere, Stockholm and London, and his preference for working in Baku rather than in Tbilisi was a significant one. He no longer saw himself as primarily a Georgian Marxist; his role had become one of a Marxist who could work anywhere in the south Caucasus or in the empire as a whole. When reporting on the Fifth Party Congress, he commented:33
The national composition of the Congress was very interesting. According to the statistics, Jews constitute the majority in the Menshevik faction, followed by Georgians and Russians. In the Bolshevik faction, however, Russians are in the majority… followed by Jews, Georgians, etc. One of the Bolshevik delegates (I think it was comrade Alexinski) jokingly remarked that the Mensheviks are Jewish whereas the Bolsheviks are an authentic Russian faction; thus it would do no harm if we, the Bolsheviks, carried out a small pogrom in the party.
This is one of the first signs that Dzhughashvili recognised the importance of revolutionary propaganda, recruitment and organisation among the largest national group in the empire, the Russians.
Dzhughashvili’s comments were later used against him as proof of anti-semitism. They were certainly crude and insensitive. But they scarcely betokened hatred of all Jews — or indeed of all Georgians. He, a Georgian, was repeating something that a Russian Bolshevik had said about Russians and Jews. For many years into the future he would be the friend, associate or leader of countless individual Jews. What counted for Dzhughashvili was the march of history; he recognised that, if the Imperial monarchy was going to be overthrown, Russians as well as Jews and Georgians had to be encouraged to play an active part. What is more, he was publishing his comment three decades before Hitler’s extermination of eastern Europe’s Jews. Dzhughashvili before the Great War may not have had a special fondness for Jews as Jews, but he did not object to them either. Indeed this was his attitude to all humanity. He neither liked nor hated particular peoples; his guiding principle was to judge how they could be encouraged or compelled to abet the achievement of the kind of state and society he approved. Despite these reservations, the comment had an insensitive undertone. A pogrom was a pogrom. It signified popular mass violence against Jews. Dzhughashvili at the very least had made an unpleasant political jest. He was also implicitly suggesting that the Jewish influence in the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party should be counteracted. His internationalism was not an unambiguous commitment.
Nevertheless his own national assertiveness was on the decline and he began to write not in Georgian but in Russian. His first such article appeared, after his return from London, in the Baku Bolshevik newspaper
At any rate it was not suspicion of Dzhughashvili’s anti-semitism which most disturbed his acquaintances at the time. Semen Vereshchak knew him in Bailov Prison outside Baku and was struck by his personal nastiness. Dzhughashvili kept putting one prisoner against another. On two occasions this involved violence:36
A young Georgian was being beaten up in the corridor of the political block [of the prison]. Everyone who could joined in the beating with whatever came to hand. The word went round the block: provocateur!… Everyone thought it his duty to deliver the blows. Finally the soldiers came and halted the beating. The bloodied body was carried on a stretcher to the prison hospital. The administration locked up the corridors and cells. The assistant prosecutor arrived and an investigation was started. No one was found responsible. The corridor walls were covered in blood. When everything had calmed down, we began to ask each other who it was we had beaten. Who knows that he’s a provocateur? If he’s a provocateur, why hadn’t he been killed?… Nobody knew or understood anything. And only a long time afterwards did it become clear that the rumour had started with Dzhughashvili.
On another occasion a criminal known as Mitka Grek stabbed to death a young worker. Allegedly Dzhughashvili had told Grek that the man was a spy.37
Revolutionaries had no compunction about eliminating those who were informing on them or disrupting their activity. The point about Dzhughashvili, however, was that he did this sort of thing on the quiet. The customary examination of the accused was not made. Dzhughashvili simply made up his mind and instigated action.38 He put his fellow conspirators in the path of danger while keeping clear of the deed. He was decisive, ruthless and supremely confident. Yet he was also brave. This is usually overlooked by those who seek to ascribe every possible defect to him. Even his detractor Semen Vereshchak conceded that Dzhughashvili carried himself with courage and dignity in the face of the authorities. On Easter Day in 1909 a unit of soldiers burst into the political block to beat up all the inmates. Dzhughashvili showed no fear. He resolved to show the soldiers that their violence would never break him. Clutching a book in his hand, he held his head high as they laid into him.39
Such behaviour was extraordinary enough for Vereshchak to remember with awe. Other usual aspects of Dzhughashvili’s comportment were less endearing. He got over his wife’s death with unseemly haste and, whenever he was out of prison, chased skirt with enthusiasm. Slim, silent and confident, he had always been attractive to women. He acquired a girlfriend, Tatiana Sukhova, in Solvychegodsk in 1909. He had arrived there with southern clothing unsuitable for the bleak winter of the Russian north. Sukhova helped him out; she even gave him money and helped him to escape.40 On another of his stays in Solvychegodsk he went out with local schoolgirl Pelageya Onufrieva. She was only seventeen years old at the time. This was not the last of his sexual conquests of adolescents41 and not all his comrades approved then or later. Still less desirable was his handling of Maria Kuzakova. She owned one of the large wooden houses in Solvychegodsk where he found lodgings. Kuzakova was a young peasant widow. In due time she produced a baby whom she christened Konstantin.
