38
In Russia, the mercantile and middle classes, who had no access to political power, often sympathized with the revolutionaries, but in Georgia they could also count on local patriotism—and a web of family clans reaching the highest nobility. The Shervashidzes managed to be top Petersburg courtiers while on their Abkhazian estates enjoying links to the revolutionaries. Prince Giorgi Shervashidze was Chancellor of the Court of the Dowager Empress Maria Fyodorovna, Alexander III’s widow and Nicholas II’s mother. After the Revolution and until the 1930s, the Shervashidzes who remained in the USSR were protected by the local Bolshevik leader and Stalin courtier Nestor Lakoba.
39
The most important Russian revolutionary in Georgia then was tall, stooped, balding Victor Kurnatovsky, who had shared Lenin’s Siberian exile and even met Plekhanov in Zurich. Many of the most active revolutionaries were not Caucasians but Russians. In the railway depot, Sergei Alliluyev was assisted by the affable, ginger-bearded Mikhail Kalinin, another railway worker of peasant origins whom Soso was to meet now: he would be Stalin’s long- serving head of state. The other leaders were Georgians—Jordania, Jibladze, Mikha Tskhakaya and Philip Makharadze, all founders of the Third Group back in 1892.
40
Going underground meant that Stalin also avoided conscription into the army in 1901. On his last arrest in 1913, he told the police he had been “exempted from conscription for family reasons in 1901.” The Gori police officer Davrichewy helped provide the paperwork enabling him to escape military service, according to his son’s memoirs, possibly by citing Stalin’s family problems and also moving his birthday a year later to 21 December 1879. Stalin was not bothered by conscription again until 1916.
41
When Interior Minister Plehve was assassinated in 1904, his police director, Lopukhin, found forty of his own private letters in the dead man’s safe: the Minister was perlustrating his own chief of police.
42
During the 1880s, Colonel G. P. Sudeikin of the Petersburg Okhrana cultivated a young People’s Will terrorist named Degaev, a success that allowed the policeman to become “the master of revolution in Russia.” But this had a price: the Colonel was even forced to order murders to conceal his double-agent. Then in 1883 Degaev lured him to a meeting and murdered him. Degaev ultimately disappeared. Years later, a mathematics professor in an obscure U.S. midwestern university was exposed as none other than Degaev, a story finely told in Richard Pipes’s
43
The Okhrana could not afford to ignore the ingenuity of the SR assassins. In a foreshadowing of al-Qaeda and 9/11, the success of aeroplane flight suggested these new machines as weapons. SR terrorists considered flying a dynamite-packed biplane into the Winter Palace, so the Okhrana in 1909 ordered the monitoring of all flights as well as people learning to fly and members of aero-clubs. It is a mark of the Okhrana’s excellence that in 1909 it was imaginative enough to envisage a crime that was beyond the scope of the FBI and CIA in the twenty-first century.
44
The dates of these memoirs are always important. In memoirs dictated in 1936, Vadachkoria implies that it was Stalin who ordered the murder, a naive thing to record that year; an unthinkable thing to record a year later during the Great Terror, or afterwards. The story of Stalin just
45
Kandelaki, in memoirs recorded in 1935, before the Terror, strongly implies that Stalin was the Rothschilds arsonist. The Stalinist histories, which quote Kandelaki, suppress any suggestion that the Leader had been an arsonist, killer, bank robber or seducer. Kandelaki’s record is published here for the first time. Historians have often mistaken him for David Kandelaki, a young trade official in the 1930s whom Stalin used as his secret emissary to open negotiations with Hitler, a probe three years before the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Stalin had David Kandelaki shot in 1937. But the latter was not Constantine—or Kotsia—Kandelaki of Batumi, later a Menshevik and Minister of Finance in the independent Georgian Democratic Republic of 1918–21.
46
This would have irritated Stalin—the sort of personal detail that more sophisticated interviewees in the 1930s left out of their memoirs. Natasha Kirtava recorded two sets of memoirs, one in 1934 and the other in 1937. Needless to say, the unpublished kissing episode appeared only in the first, before the Terror.
47
The Batumi demonstration and the Smirba story became seminal Stalinist legends. When the boss of
