10. Old Bolsheviks, Ordzhonikidze, Molotov, etc.: see Montefiore. Sergo versus Molo tov fight:
263
11. Stalin stops publication: RGASPI 45.1.803.1, 558.11.730, 558.11.787, 558.11.1496, 558.11.730, 558.11.787.2.
264
12. Dinners in old age: Charkviani, “Memoirs.” Megalomaniacs: “Provisional Revolutionary Government and Social Democracy,”
Notes
1
In 1903, the Russian Social-Democratic Workers Party, founded in 1898, split into two factions, the Bolsheviks under Lenin and the Mensheviks under Martov, who fought one another but remained part of the same party until 1912 when they formally divided, never to reunite. Lenin organized and led a secret three-man cabal called the Bolshevik Centre to raise money using bank robbery and organized crime rackets.
2
The distances in this urban village are tiny. The seminary, Stalin’s family home, the Viceroy’s Palace and the bank are all about two minutes’ walk from the site of the bank robbery. Most of the buildings in Yerevan (later Beria, then Lenin, now Freedom) Square that feature here remain standing: the Tilipuchuri Tavern (now empty of any princes or brigands), the seminary (now a museum), the City Hall, the HQ of the Caucasus Command, the State Bank and the Viceroy’s Palace (where Stalin’s mother lived for so long) are all unchanged. The Caravanserai, Pushkin Gardens, Adelkhanov Shoe Warehouse (where Stalin had worked) and the bazaars are gone.
3
Stalin would not have thanked the Svanidzes for their frankness. They were close family for thirty years. His sister-in-law Sashiko, who left this memoir in 1934, died of cancer in 1936—or she might have shared the fate of her sister Mariko, her brother Alyosha and his wife. Sashiko Svanidze’s memoirs are used here for the first time. Some of the bank robbers, such as Kamo, Bachua Kupriashvili and Alexandra Darakhvelidze, left unpublished, if incomplete, memoirs, also used here for the first time.
4
The popular cafes of the day.
5
In the 1920s, before he was dictator, Stalin went to remarkable lengths to conceal his role in the expropriations. In 1923–24, his chief gangster, Kote Tsintsadze, by then in opposition to Stalin, published his memoirs in a small Georgian journal. They were republished in 1927 but afterwards the pages involving Stalin’s part in assassinations and robberies were removed, a process continuing in the 1930s under Beria. Today, they are extremely hard to find.
6
The memoirs have lain in the Georgian Communist Party archive, forgotten for seventy years. They were never used in the Stalinist cult. It seems Stalin neither read them nor knew they existed because, as far as this author can learn, they were not sent to Stalin’s Moscow archives. He did not want his mother’s views published. When Keke was interviewed Hello! magazine style in 1935 in the Soviet press, Stalin furiously reprimanded the Politburo: “I ask you to forbid the Philistine riffraff that has penetrated our press from publishing any more ‘interviews’ with my mother and all other crass publicity. I ask you to spare me from the importunate sensationalism of these scoundrels!” Keke, always strong-willed and unimpressed with her son’s power, must have recorded them secretly and in defiance of him on 23–27 August 1935, shortly before her death.
7
The Ossetians were a semi-pagan mountain people who lived on the northern borders of Georgia proper, some becoming assimilated Georgians though most remain proudly separate: in 1991–93, South Ossetians fought the Georgians and are now autonomous. When Stalin’s dying father was admitted to hospital, significantly he was still registered as Ossetian. Stalin’s enemies, from Trotsky to the poet Mandelstam in his famous poem, relished calling him an “Ossete” because Georgians regarded Ossetians as barbarous, crude and, in the early nineteenth century, non-Christian. Djugashvili certainly sounds as if it has an Ossetian root: it means “son of Djuga” in Georgian. Stalin’s mother says Beso told her the name was based on the Georgian
