He’s a fine fellow but too big an individualist in daily life.’ ‘Individualist’ was a damning word among Marxists, who required the subordination of personal inclinations to collective needs. Driven to distraction, Sverdlov decided to move house; he wrote to a friend in May 1914:22
I have a comrade with me. But we know each other only too well. What is more, and this is the saddest thing, a person is stripped bare in front of you in conditions of exile and imprisonment and becomes exposed in every little detail. Worst of all, he is visible solely from the viewpoint of ‘the details of daily life’. There’s no room for the large features of character to reveal themselves. Now I live in a separate apartment from the com[rade], and we rarely see each other.
Sverdlov got himself transferred back to Selivanikha at the end of September on grounds of ill health.23
Stalin meanwhile got on with life in his own egocentric fashion. He had always had an eye for adolescent girls but when he moved in as a lodger with the Pereprygin family, he behaved quite scandalously by seducing the fourteen-year-old daughter. Not only that: he made her pregnant. Even in that lightly administered area it was impossible to keep things quiet. The police became involved. Stalin was interviewed, and had to agree in due course to marry the unfortunate girl. This saved him from prosecution in the courts.24 He subsequently abrogated the accord. For Stalin, the relationship was no more than a way of relieving the sexual frustrations of exile. He lived like a feudal knight among the impoverished Pereprygin family and took what he fancied whenever he liked. He acted as if he had rights without obligations. He had contempt for all human conduct but his own.
His political activity was weakened by the fact that his postal contact with the world outside Kureika was intermittent.25 This was intensely irritating because war had broken out in Europe. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria by a Serbian nationalist in July 1914 had provoked a general diplomatic crisis. The Austrian government had delivered a humiliating ultimatum to Serbia. Russia, which had stepped back from the brink in previous emergencies in the Balkans, decided to take the Serbian side. Austria’s expansion into the region was to be resisted at last. The complication was that Germany had opted to stand by Austria in the event of a Balkan crisis. The Russian Imperial Army mobilised and Nicholas II refused to stand it down when the Germans delivered an ultimatum to St Petersburg. Russian forces poured through East Prussia towards Berlin. Austria occupied Serbia. France and the United Kingdom honoured their treaty obligations and declared war on Russia’s side against Germany and Austria–Hungary. The German Imperial Army defended itself in the east and, violating the neutrality of Belgium, thrust across into northern France. Without anyone having intended it, a European war had broken out.
This was happening while Stalin and his fellow exiles could have no part in the campaign waged by Lenin and his supporters against Russian participation in the war against the Central Powers. Indeed Lenin from the safety of Switzerland urged all Marxists to work for the defeat of Nicholas II’s forces. Strikes were organised in factories, especially in the capital (which was renamed Petrograd because St Petersburg was thought to sound too Germanic). Bolsheviks sent antiwar propaganda to Russian POWs in German and Austrian camps. The leading Bolshevik writers debated the political and economic motivations of the belligerents in the Petrograd press. The Okhrana was active in retaliation, and the local Bolshevik groups were repeatedly broken up; and although Lenin was indefatigable, he lost many supporters to demoralisation as well as to the prison system.
Stalin, however, did not worry about such dangers; he wanted to get back into action in Russia and was intensely frustrated by his continued exile. He wrote to Malinovski appealing for help from the party:26
Greetings, friend!
I feel a bit uncomfortable writing, but needs must. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced so terrible a situation. All my money’s gone, I’ve got some sinister cough along with the worsening freezes (37 degree below), a general rundown in health; and I’ve no store of bread, sugar, meat, kerosene: all my money has gone on running expenses and clothing and footwear. Without such a store everything here is so dear: rye bread costs 4B kopeks a pound, kerosene 15 kopeks, meat 18 kopeks, sugar 25 kopeks. I need milk, I need firewood, but… money, I haven’t got money, friend. I don’t know how I’ll get through the winter in such a condition… I don’t have wealthy relatives or acquaintances and have absolutely no one to turn to, so I’m appealing to you, and not only to you but also to Petrovski and to Badaev.
He requested that these Bolshevik Duma deputies — Malinovski, Petrovski and Badaev — should send money from the ‘fund of the repressed’ which they and the Menshevik deputies maintained. Perhaps they could send him sixty rubles?
Stalin expressed his hope that Nikolai Chkheidze — leader of the Menshevik Duma deputies — might look kindly on him as a fellow Georgian.27 This was a message of despair: no one was more hated by the Georgian Mensheviks than Stalin. Meanwhile he was sorting out his thoughts in Siberia. He read voraciously; there was no time to feel sad about his fate.28 Co-opted to the Central Committee in 1912, he continued to receive financial assistance by bank transfers from Petrograd. Despite the Okhrana’s persecuting attentiveness, the Bolshevik faction did not cease to tend to Stalin, Sverdlov and others.29 The local police oversaw such transactions. The regularity of the transfers, being no secret to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, naturally gave rise to the suspicion that Stalin was secretly planning an escape. He would need to bribe policemen and pay for rail tickets if this was to be successful.
If ever he made it back to Petrograd, he knew he could count on help from Sergei and Olga Alliluev (whose youngest daughter Nadya was to become his second wife after the October Revolution). He wrote affectionately to Olga on 25 November 1915:30
I’m so very grateful to you, deeply respected Olga Yevgenevna, for your good and pure feelings towards me. I shall never forget your caring attitude to me! I look forward to the moment when I’m liberated from exile and can come to Petersburg [as the Bolsheviks continued to call the capital] and personally thank you and Sergei for everything. I’ve only got two years at most left.
I received the parcel. Thank you. I only ask one thing: don’t waste any more on me; you yourselves need the money. I’ll be happy if from time to time you send postcards with scenes of nature and the like. Nature in this accursed district is appallingly barren — the river in the summer and snow in winter are all nature provides here, and I’m driven mad with longing for scenes of nature even if they are only on paper.
Stalin did not often behave gracefully, but he could when he wanted.
He was not entirely removed from active politics. The trial of the Bolshevik Duma faction and its adviser Lev Kamenev in early 1915 in Petrograd had brought disruption to Bolshevism. The charges related to both politics and revolutionary etiquette. Instead of just denouncing the Imperial government, Kamenev had distanced himself from Lenin’s policy that the best result in the war for the European Marxist movement would be the defeat of the Russian armed forces by the Germans. Even so, Kamenev could not escape a sentence of Siberian exile. On arrival in Turukhansk District he was again put on ‘party trial’. The proceedings took place in Monastyrskoe, and Sverdlov and Stalin were present, as were the members of the Bolshevik Duma fraction. Most participants chose to support Lenin’s policy.31 Stalin was friends with Kamenev; they remained on these terms throughout their Siberian exile and for several years subsequently. Stalin, though, jibbed at Kamenev’s failure in open court in Petrograd to show solidarity with the faction’s official policy. Probably Stalin had reservations about Lenin’s calls for ‘European Civil War’ as a realistic policy both militarily and politically; but Kamenev needed to be pulled back into line. Discipline was discipline. Kamenev had committed an infringement and had to be punished.
Stalin started to enjoy life in Kureika. He took up fishing: this brought an enhancement of his diet as well as genuine pleasure. He had had lessons from the Ostyak men and soon, according to his own account, got better at it than the Ostyaks themselves. Supposedly they asked him what his secret was.32 In any case, he was locally accepted and became known as Osip (or, less pleasantly, as Pockmarked Oska).33
Fishing in Siberian exile could be dangerous, as he later recalled:34 ‘It happened that the tempest caught me on the river. At one time it seemed that I was done for. But I made it to the bank. I didn’t believe I’d get there: the river was in great tumult.’ On another occasion a snowstorm blew up. He had had a good
