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Chavichvili’s two volumes of memoirs are invaluable but rarely used by historians: they were only published in tiny editions in French. Chavichvili was a hostile witness who wrote in exile, yet he is half impressed, half appalled by Stalin’s magnetism.
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He fought in print too. “Our Mensheviks are really too tiresome!” wrote Stalin in his pamphlet accusing them of Marxist phoniness. The article is interesting for its quaint phrases and parables: “One day a crow found a rose but that doesn’t prove a crow is a nightingale.” The Mensheviks “remind us of the thief who stole the money and shouted ‘Stop thief!’” But he concluded, “It is well known that the tongue always turns to the aching tooth.”
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In October 1940, the celebrated Georgian writer Shalva Nutsubidze was suddenly freed from jail and brought to meet Stalin, who admired, edited and contributed to his translation of Rustaveli. At dinner in Stalin’s mansion at Kuntsevo, Nutsubidze remembered the speech at Tsulukidze’s funeral and proceeded to recite it. “Extraordinary talent goes hand in hand with extraordinary memory,” exclaimed Stalin, who walked up to his guest and kissed him on the forehead. For the full story, see
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Father Kasiane Gachechiladze’s memoirs were written secretly during Stalin’s lifetime and inherited by his grandson, who saw this author talking about this project on Georgian television and made contact. The account of his leading horses cross-country, his movements and his conversation all chime with other sources.
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Stalin did not only know the Svanidzes via Alyosha. Simon Svanidze, father of Alyosha and his three sisters, was a teacher in Kutaisi; the mother, Sipora, one of the noble Dvali clan. In Kutaisi, Sipora’s cousin, a Dvali, was chief of police. Both the Svanidzes and Police Chief Dvali hid Stalin from the secret police, another example of how Georgian connections were more important than loyalty to the state.
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The memoirs of Sashiko Svanidze and her husband, Monoselidze, are invaluable. Both were recorded in the early to mid-1930s when Stalin was already dictator, but they are nonetheless astonishingly honest. Sashiko’s memoirs are unpublished; portions of Monoselidze’s memoirs were used in the cult literature, but most of their reminiscences were deemed unsuitable. At this time, 1905–6, Bolsheviks arriving from the provinces reported to Stalin at the hospital, but the leaders—Shaumian, Spandarian, Abel Yenukidze (another Rachvelian) and Budu “the Barrel” Mdivani—were regulars at the Svanidzes’ along with Soso’s hit men, Kamo and Tsintsadze.
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Stalin’s reaction to this insult was a surprising one, and he never forgot it. For Kavtaradze’s fate, see the Epilogue. The Union Committee united both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks.
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Stalin, writes Trotsky, “spent 1905 in an unpretentious office writing dull comments on brilliant events.” Most historians have followed Trotsky’s line.
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Still the Lenin Museum, one of the last shrines to Lenin in the Western world.
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There were embarrassments in his ancestry: his mother was the granddaughter of Moishe Blank, a Jewish merchant who married a Swede. The prominence of Jews among the Bolsheviks was always an issue in Soviet Russia. Indeed in 1932 Lenin’s sister Anna wrote to Stalin about Lenin’s Jewish background. “Absolutely not one word about this letter!” Stalin scrawled on it. It remained secret until the 1990s.
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The most important of these delegates was Leonid Krasin, brilliant engineer, ladies’ man and Lenin’s financial, terrorism and explosives expert, whom Stalin already knew from Baku. There, Krasin had invented the electrical generating system for oil on behalf of big business while creating an underground printing-press for the Bolsheviks. In 1905, he helped Lenin raise funds through his contacts with the plutocratic industrialists such as
