Stalin: A Biography

authorities on 4 April. A wave of protest demonstrations swept across the empire. St Petersburg was in tumult. The long period of quiescence in the labour movement since 1906 was at an end. Bolshevik militants started to outmatch the Mensheviks in political appeals. Consequently the Bolsheviks ceased to be of use to the Okhrana as a divisive force in the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party. It may have been no coincidence that orders were put out for Dzhug-hashvili’s arrest as soon as Pravda started to be sold. The truth has not yet been unearthed from the files of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Dzhughashvili was arrested on 22 April and confined in the House of Preliminary Detention in the capital. On 2 July he was sent under escort to Narym District near Tomsk in western Siberia, where he was sentenced to remain for three years. After the long journey by ‘arrest wagon’ on the Trans-Siberian Railway to Tomsk he was put on board the Kolpashevets steamer and taken down the great River Ob towards Narym.

Until his confinement Dzhughashvili had been writing more intensively than in any previous period of his life. It was also in this period that some of his adolescent verses were reprinted in the latest edition of Yakob Gogebashvili’s Georgian literary anthology Mother Tongue.⁸ But he told no one about this. (It is not even certain that he himself knew about the publication.) Just a few flashes of his poetic side still occurred. In a proclamation he wrote for May Day 1912 he declared:⁹ ‘Nature is waking from its winter’s sleep. The forests and mountains are turning green. Flowers adorn the meadows and pastures. The sun shines more warmly. We feel in the air new life, and the world is beginning to dance for joy.’ This was the last romantic outburst he made in print. For the rest of his life he never repeated such gushing verbosity. Indeed it had been a long time since he had indulged himself in this way.¹⁰

The same proclamation referred to none of the regions of the Russian Empire except Russia. It was aimed exclusively at Russian workers and called on them to ‘raise the banner of the Russian [russkoi] revolution’. Too much weight of interpretation cannot be placed on this. (Not that this has stopped some biographers from trying.) Dzhughashvili was working in the Russian capital, writing in Russian and appealing to Russian industrial workers. Naturally Russia was at the core of his message, as would not have been the case if he had still been in Tbilisi. Nevertheless there was a detectable shift in his political persona around this time. His main pseudonym from 1912 was Stalin. This was an unmistakably Russian name derived from the word for steel (stal). Although it was not the first time he had turned to the Russian tongue for a false identity, he had usually reverted to Georgian ones. Now, though, he was building up his image in the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party and no longer wanted to be known merely as a man from the Caucasus. He was laying ever greater emphasis on the need for a general solution to the problems of the Russian Empire; and he wanted to play an integrated part in that solution.

Stalin in person, of course, was not credible as a Russian. He knew he looked, sounded and behaved in a ‘southern’ manner. He revered Georgian literary classics. He would never be Russian. And, contrary to what is widely suggested, he did not really try.¹¹ If he had really desired to de-Georgianise his political profile among Bolsheviks he would have ceased to write on the ‘national question’. Jews like Zinoviev and Kamenev wanted to be known as internationalists and hardly ever drew attention to their ethnic ancestry. Stalin too wished to be regarded as an internationalist; he also aimed to be taken seriously in Russian socialist politics. But he continued to urge the party to promote the interests of the non-Russians under a future socialist administration. His 1913 booklet The National Question and Social-Democracy was to do much to raise his reputation in the party; it also solidified his relationship with Lenin, who described him in a letter to the writer Maxim Gorki as ‘the wonderful Georgian’.¹² What is clear is that Stalin had long ceased to make a special case for the Georgians in his statements on the national question. When he wrote or said anything, he treated them no better or worse than other non-Russian peoples. He offered his co-nationals no prospect of preferment, while himself remaining a Georgian in appearance, accent, demeanour and residual culture.

This meant little to Stalin as he made his way under guard to Narym. He stayed for a few days in Kolpashevo, a village where several leading Bolsheviks were living in exile. They included Mikhail Lashevich and Ivan Smirnov. Stalin also came across his Bolshevik friend Semen Surin as well as his Bailov Prison acquaintance Semen Vereshchak: he had supper with them, recuperated and then set out north-east along the River Ob to his assigned destination in Narym.¹³ It was not quite the worst place of exile in the Russian Empire. Narym, unlike towns at a more northerly latitude, lay just within the zone of agriculture. But conditions could have been better. The winter was bleak. Economic life largely revolved around hunting and fishing. Contact with St Petersburg was infrequent and subject to police surveillance.

Fellow Central Committee member Yakov Sverdlov greeted Stalin in Narym and offered him a room. They did not get on well. Even the agreement on housework broke down. Whereas Sverdlov aimed at a modicum of order, Stalin was slovenly and selfish. They had agreed to fetch the post, and whoever stayed behind was expected to tidy the house. Years later they compared memories about how Stalin got out of this arrangement:¹⁴

Stalin: I liked to creep out for the post on [Sverdlov’s day to do it]. Sverdlov had to look after the house whether he liked it or not — keep the stove alight and do the cleaning… How many times I tried to trick you and get out of the housework. I [also] used to wake up when it was my turn and lie still as if asleep.

Sverdlov: And do you think I didn’t notice? I noticed only too well.

Although Sverdlov laughed good-naturedly, he had not thought it pleasant at the time. Stalin’s behaviour was doubly selfish. Whoever walked to the post office would meet up with other comrades and gain a respite from the dreariness of exile. Everyone found the conditions depressing and Stalin’s egocentricity was widely resented.

The two of them planned to flee from Narym to resume clandestine political activity. They were encouraged in this by the Central Committee in Krakow. Two escape ‘bureaux’ existed, one in Kolpashevo, the other in Narym. Sverdlov made the first attempt but was caught near Tomsk. Then Lashevich made a dash, followed by Stalin and Sverdlov on 1 September.¹⁵ It was an eventful trip. They had devised a clever scheme requiring the diminutive Sverdlov to hide in a laundry basket. Stalin was accosted by a gendarme who made a move to examine the basket by pushing his bayonet into it. Stalin got him to desist by bribing him. This story, told by Stalin three decades later, cannot be verified.¹⁶ But it is not implausible. Fugitive revolutionaries regularly exploited inefficiency and venality among the Imperial agencies of law and order.

Stalin and Sverdlov stayed with the Alliluev family in St Petersburg.¹⁷ Quickly they restored links with party organisations in the empire and with the ‘foreign’ part of the Central Committee in Krakow. All this time they had to keep at least one step in front of the Okhrana. The electoral campaign for the Fourth State Duma was in full cry and Stalin stayed in the capital to help and direct Bolshevik activities. He also began writing again for Pravda. On 19 October he contributed the leading article on ‘The Will of the Voters’ Delegates’; and Lenin printed his piece ‘The Mandate of the St Petersburg Workers’ in the emigre newspaper Sotsial-demokrat. On election day, 25 October, the Bolsheviks did well by securing six seats. The need for co-ordination was paramount and Stalin made a last-minute trip to Bolsheviks in Moscow to confer with Roman Malinovski and other newly elected individuals. With the ending of the electoral campaign it was equally urgent to strengthen contact with Krakow. Stalin, after briefly returning to St Petersburg and assuring himself that arrangements for the Duma were in place, bought train tickets for Poland in early November. He was going to consult Lenin. For the first time they would meet as fellow members of the Central Committee.

The trip was memorable for Stalin. As the train approached the border with Austrian Poland, he found himself in a carriage with a passenger reading aloud from a Russian nationalist newspaper. He could not stop himself from shouting across at him: ‘Why are you reading that rubbish? You should read other newspapers!’¹⁸ Alighting from the train, he had to get help in crossing the border to Krakow. He wandered around the market till he bumped into a friendly cobbler. Stalin used his charm: ‘My father was also a cobbler, back in my homeland, Georgia.’ The cobbler, refusing any recompense, took Stalin to his home, fed him and at dusk escorted him by a winding route across the hills into Austrian Poland.¹⁹

He arrived in time for a meeting between the Central Committee members and three Bolshevik Duma deputies. Stalin did not enjoy the experience. In November there had been a Bolshevik plan to organise a one-day political strike and demonstration outside the Tauride Palace in St Petersburg. When the Mensheviks opposed this as being dangerous and unproductive, the Bolshevik faction had backed down. Lenin heard about this in Krakow and drafted an angry article.²⁰ His ill temper had not spent itself before the three Duma deputies arrived