Stalin: A Biography

There was little doubt on the question of paternity. Those who saw Konstantin as an adult recorded how like Stalin he was in appearance and even in physical movement.⁴²

Dzhugashvili did not intend to stand by mother and child. He regarded women as a resource for sexual gratification and domestic comfort. He liked to relax with them socially only if they had the characteristics he found congenial. His partners had to be supportive and unchallenging. His requirement of a woman was that she should be devoted to him alone, and Kuzakova suited him for a while. Yet his liaison broke a code. Like other revolutionaries, Bolsheviks believed they had a mission to build a better world on principles of collective good. Dzhughashvili had selfishly used Kuzakova to gratify his lust, and neither then nor later did he think his attitude objectionable. This was the way he whiled away his sentence by the River Vychegda until 27 June 1911 when he was allowed to move to Vologda. He travelled to Kotlas and took the new railway westward. He never saw Solvychegodsk again.

8. AT THE CENTRE OF THE PARTY

Emigre leaders of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party had been slow to recognise Joseph Dzhughashvili as a leader of any talent. The elite’s composition was not fixed in stone, but without patronage from one of its members it was difficult for anyone to join it. Dzhughashvili did not help himself by staying in the south Caucasus and Russia. At gatherings in Tampere and Stockholm he had been forthright in his opinions. On each occasion he had made objection to Lenin,¹ who was the only leader who was ever likely to suggest including him in the Central Committee. Lenin’s focus remained on Russia; he was even willing to leave Georgia to the local Mensheviks if only they agreed to keep their noses out of Russian Marxist affairs.² Dzhughashvili dissented. For him, the industrial and commercial expansion in Baku, Tbilisi and Batumi gave the region an importance equal to the regions of central and northern Russia; and he did not change this attitude until the Bolshevik faction gave him jobs elsewhere. What was already clear was his willingness to stand up for his opinions at party gatherings outside the region. He had not joined the Marxist movement to bury his mind under the bushel of official policy.

Promotion, when it came, proceeded from the hands of Lenin. After years of uneasy and patchy co-operation with the Mensheviks Lenin had had enough. By 1911 the disadvantages of sharing a party with them as well as with the various non-Russian regional organisations outweighed the advantages. Essentially he was planning to turn the Bolshevik faction — or rather those Bolsheviks who stayed loyal to him — into the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party and to treat all other factions as if they had placed themselves outside the party’s ranks.

The Mensheviks had denounced Lenin’s sanctioning of bank robberies as a means of financing Bolshevism. They also wanted their share of the money owed to the party as a whole from the legacies inherited from two sisters called Schmidt. But Lenin aimed to hold all the funds in Bolshevik hands. This was not the only problem. The non-Russian Marxist parties — the Poles, Latvians and Lithuanians and the Jewish Bund — were causing trouble by criticising his policies. Even inside the Bolshevik faction there was dissent. Lenin had expelled Alexander Bogdanov from its midst only to find that many Bolsheviks continued to regard such schismatism as unnecessary and counter-productive. Never having been short of confidence and cunning, Lenin convoked a gathering in Prague. Despite ensuring that all but a couple of participants would be Leninist loyalists, he called it a Party Conference. Essentially he was abandoning even the semblance of collaboration within the same party as the Mensheviks. Proceedings started in January 1912. Lenin’s divisive tactics disconcerted delegates and some did not shirk from condemning his obsessive emigre polemics. But he got his way. A Party Central Committee was elected and Lenin set about acting as if the Mensheviks did not exist.

Dzhughashvili was stranded at the time in Vologda; but the town was on a direct rail route to St Petersburg and Lenin was far from having forgotten him. A ‘party school’ had been held by Lenin in 1911 at Longjumeau outside Paris, and Dzhughashvili was one of the individuals he had wanted to have with him. ‘People like him’, he said to the Georgian Menshevik Giorgi Uratadze, ‘are exactly what I need.’³ Longjumeau was a quiet village where Lenin had devised a programme of lectures and recruited several Marxist lecturers, in addition to himself, to train younger Bolsheviks in the niceties of party doctrines and history. The objective was to inculcate an unflinching loyalty to Bolshevism among the students; and Dzhughashvili, who had yet to make his mark as a Bolshevik writer at the faction’s higher levels, was a natural choice. Another Georgian Bolshevik in Lenin’s sights was Dzhughashvili’s future associate Sergo Ordzhonikidze, who studied at Longjumeau and impressed him. Somehow or other, though, Dzhughashvili did not receive an invitation. Perhaps Lenin simply failed to get anyone to go with the message to Vologda. Ordzhonikidze at any rate impressed Lenin in Longjumeau to such an extent that he entrusted him with the practical arrangements of convoking the Prague Conference.⁴

Had Dzhughashvili attended the Longjumeau course, he would perhaps have been given this task. He would almost certainly have gone to Prague and might even have been elected to the Central Committee. He had a broader range of skills, especially as a writer and editor, than his friend Ordzhonikidze. Yet such an election would not have done him a favour. The new Central Committee included a certain Roman Malinovski, who was a paid agent of the Okhrana. All those Central Committee members who returned to the Russian Empire, except for Malinovski, had been arrested within weeks. It was also in 1912 that Malinovski, a leading trade-unionist among the metalworkers of St Petersburg, stood as Bolshevik candidate for the Fourth State Duma and won a handsome victory. The Okhrana was able to stay informed about the most influential bodies of Bolshevism — the Central Committee and the Duma faction — and to influence their discussions.

The arrest of most returning members of the Central Committee, however, turned the fortunes of Joseph Stalin. Having missed the chance to attend the Longjumeau party school or the Prague Conference, he was available for activity at the highest level of the Bolshevik faction. Lenin saw him as a man who could act for him in several capacities. Dzhughashvili was an organiser of good repute. He never complained about assignments: already his capacity for hard work was well known. Although he had had disagreements with Lenin on policy, he was not unusual in this, and anyway they concurred in 1911–12 on most practical matters affecting the Bolsheviks. He had a basic understanding of Marxist theory. He was a fluent writer and an able editor. He had a forthright manner whenever someone had to pull an individual or committee into compliance with the faction’s official line. Lenin and Grigori Zinoviev, who were temporarily in Paris before moving the Central Committee’s foreign base to Krakow in the Polish lands of the Habsburg Monarchy, decided to co-opt Dzhughashvili (or Ivanovich, as they currently referred to him) to the Central Committee. Sergo Ordzhonikidze was sent in February 1912 to Vologda to tell him the news in person.⁵

Communication with the emigration was slow and Lenin fretted: ‘There’s no word of Ivanovich. What’s happened to him? Where is he now? How is he?’⁶ By then Dzhughashvili was classified as one of the rare useful comrades. But Lenin need not have worried. Ordzhonikidze easily found the co-opted comrade in Vologda and informed him that the Central Committee wanted him to flee the town and work as one of its main leaders in the Russian Empire. At last he had joined the elite of the Bolshevik faction.

Dzhughashvili left Vologda with false papers on 29 February 1912. His first stay was in the Caucasus. There he wrote material justifying the formation of the new Central Committee despite the fact that the Mensheviks and other factions of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party had been illegitimately excluded from membership. He concentrated his efforts in Baku and Tbilisi. But his fresh duties meant that he was no longer to confine himself to one region of the Russian Empire. On 1 April he left by arrangement with Lenin for Moscow, where he met up with Ordzhonikidze. Then he went on to St Petersburg. His duties were onerous and important. He wrote for and helped to edit the Bolshevik newspaper Zvezda (‘The Star’); his literary fluency was much appreciated by the hard-pressed metropolitan Bolsheviks. At the same time he liaised with Bolshevik deputies to the Third State Duma seeking to found a more popular daily, Pravda (‘The Truth’). Dzhughashvili became its editor. There were three working rooms at the newspaper’s headquarters and the printing press had two rooms elsewhere.⁷ He can hardly be said to have kept out of sight of the Okhrana. He had to hope that the police, for reasons of their own, would not want to arrest him.

Pravda appeared for the first time on 22 April 1912, and Dzhughashvili had contributed an article, ‘Our Aims’, to the issue. He had done as he was told from Krakow and inserted himself into the core of the St Petersburg Bolshevik leadership. Pravda was the faction’s legal daily newspaper. Its objective was to gather support among industrial workers for Bolshevism at a time of rising popular discontent with the Tsar and employers. Miners on strike in the Lena goldfields in Siberia had been shot by the