Young Stalin

Abkhazia, one of Stalin’s favourite courtiers, Nestor Lakoba, wrote his Stalin i Hashimi (Stalin and Hashimi) in 1934, he reinforced the cult of personality which had begun in 1929. Stalin’s secretary Ivan Tovstukha worried about the text, writing to Stalin’s then deputy Lazar Kaganovich, “Had the Hashimi text… Still things to correct and rewrite… What to do? Should it be thrown out?” It was not. Its publication won Lakoba favour but not for long. A year later, his work was outstripped by the massive exaggeration of History of the Bolshevik Organization in the Caucasus by Beria. Stalin himself, according to Beria’s son, amended the manuscript, “striking out names and replacing them with his own.” A huge volume called The Batumi Demonstration 1902 followed in 1937. Beria swiftly moved to destroy his rival Lakoba, poisoning him and then murdering and personally torturing his wife and children. See Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar for the full story. As for Hashimi Smirba himself, he moved house in 1916, burying the printing- press in his garden. He died in 1922 aged eighty-one. In his seventies, Stalin chuckled about Smirba. He knew Lakoba’s book was widely regarded as propaganda. After all, it claimed that Stalin was “the greatest man of a whole epoch, such as history gives to humanity only once in one or two hundred years.” But Stalin insisted, “It’s true as it was told in that book—that’s really how it happened.”

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In early 1939, the Moscow Arts Theatre commissioned the brilliant but under-employed writer Mikhail Bulgakov to write a romantic play about young Stalin in Batumi to celebrate the dictator’s sixtieth birthday that December. Stalin must have signed off on the commission. He admired Bulgakov—like Chekhov, a practising doctor-turned-writer—particularly for his novel The White Guard. Its dramatized version The Days of the Turbins was Stalin’s favourite play: he saw it fifteen times. Yet, as with Pasternak and Shostakovich, Stalin played a game of cat-and-mouse, personally phoning Bulgakov to assure him he would be given work, then tightening the screws on him again. Bulgakov, like Pasternak, was fascinated by his omnipotent persecutor and had toyed with the idea of this play since 1936, even though he knew “it’s dangerous for me.” Basing the play on the book The Batumi Demonstration 1902 and presumably on conversations with witnesses, Bulgakov finished a draft in June 1939, first calling it The Priest, Stalin’s nickname among the workers, then It Happened in Batumi, then just Batumi. The romantic play contains no love affairs but it implies Stalin’s relationship with Natalia Kirtava, for his companion in the play is a Natasha, who is jointly based on Kirtava and Lomdzharia’s sister. The cultural apparatchiks liked and approved the play. In August, Bulgakov, declaring that he wanted to interview witnesses and read the archives, set off by train for Batumi with his wife, Elena. But Stalin did not wish his status as statesman (he was just about to sign the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Hitler) undermined by any revelations contained in these archives, many of which have been used in this book. The Bulgakovs were recalled by telegram: “Journey no longer necessary. Return to Moscow.” Bulgakov fell ill. Stalin read the play. Visiting the Arts Theatre, he told the director that Batumi was a good piece but could not be staged, adding (hypocritically), “All young people are the same, so why write a play about the young Stalin?” The play was hackwork for Bulgakov, who secretly finished his anti-Stalin masterpiece The Master and Margarita before his death in 1940.

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“Happy?” Keke sardonically told an interviewer in 1935 when asked if she was happy to be Stalin’s mother. “You ask me what kind of happiness I felt? The whole world is happy looking at my son and our country. So what should I feel as a mother?”

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Stalin swiftly developed his clandestine craft. A sympathetic worker in Batumi worked for the company that supplied wood to the prison. One day he was approached and told he was to help deliver the wood and must follow his instructions precisely. He delivered the logs, carried them into the courtyard and sure enough, at 3 p.m. sharp, the warders led out a single prisoner, Stalin, who gave him an urgent message to deliver in Batumi.

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Lenin encapsulated Stalin’s dream of himself as a knight in a military-religious order. “Our Party is not a school of philosophers,” he asserted revealingly, but “a fighting Party. Until now it resembled a hospitable patriarchical family. Now it must become like a fortress—its gates only opened for the worthy.” Any other way was a “desecration of its Holy of Holies.”

52

As Soviet leader, Stalin disdained Tsarist leniency, determined to avoid it in his own repressions. “The prisons resemble nothing so much as rest-homes,” he wrote at the height of the Terror in 1937. “The prisoners are allowed to socialize, can write letters to each other at will, receive parcels…!”

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The Tsarist authorities recognized, due to the special challenges of evidence and secrecy, that terrorists and revolutionaries could not be tried by jury or judge: the local Gendarme officer recommended a sentence to the local governor-general who forwarded it on to the Special Commission—five Justice and Interior officials who passed sentence. The Interior Minister confirmed it; the Emperor signed off. Stalin was habitually sentenced this way. Between 1881 and 1904, only 11,879 were sentenced like this, while during Stalin’s reign of the same approximate timespan, he presided over the deportation of an astonishing 28 million, several million of whom never returned. As for capital punishment under the Tsars, Catholic Poles and Jews in the western provinces were much more likely to be hanged than Orthodox Russians or Georgians.

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When Lenin arrived, he reprimanded the stationmaster, availed himself of the local merchant’s library, brought out his wife, Nadya Krupskaya, and his mother-in-law to care for him, and even employed a maid to clean the house. The Lenins patronized the peasants who, noted Krupskaya, “were generally clean in their habits.” Lenin raved about the landscape of this “Siberian Italy,” a pleasant environment for writing. “Generally,” wrote Krupskaya, “exile didn’t pass by so badly.” The system favoured noblemen and Orthodox Russians and Georgians over Jews and Poles. Lenin and his friend Yuli Martov were arrested at the same time on the same charges but, while the noble