Savva Morozov and with the actress Kommissarzhevskaya, who had donated her boxoffice receipts, but his specialities were terror, bank robbery and bomb-making. At Tam-merfors, Stalin also met Emelian Yaroslavsky, who became his chief propagandist in power; Yakov Sverdlov, who shared his exile, became Lenin’s chief organizer and first Soviet head of state; and Solomon Lozovsky, Stalin’s future Deputy Foreign Commissar, whom he tried and shot in 1952 during his anti-Semitic terror. Lozovsky was the only one of Stalin’s victims who had the courage to defy the dictator openly in court: see
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This management by competition was typical—it resembles the way Stalin would later order Marshals Zhukov and Konev to race each other to take Berlin in 1945.
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Bachua Kupriashvili, one of the leading brigands in the Tiflis bank robbery, recorded his memoirs during the Stalin years. He confirms Stalin’s direct command of the Outfit but is careful not to link him directly to its heists. The memoirs have remained forgotten in the Georgian archives for sixty years.
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The word “technical” was a Bolshevik euphemism for terrorism or killing—both Krasin and the Mensheviks called their bomb-making laboratories their “Technical Departments.”
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This must be the scarf, resembling a Jewish prayer-shawl, that Stalin was wearing in the famous police mugshot (see this book’s cover) taken during this mysterious arrest.
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Stalin here met for the first time the Polish socialist Felix Dzerzhinsky, who would become founder of the Soviet secret police, the Cheka, and his ally in the power struggles after Lenin’s death; Grigory Radomyslsky, the Jewish milkman’s son soon known as “Zinoviev,” his triumvir after Lenin’s death, whom Stalin liquidated with Kamenev in 1936; and Alexei Rykov, Lenin’s successor as Premier, with whom Stalin would share power for a while and then liquidate in 1938. At the Congress, Stalin also met up with old friends Said Devdariani, from the seminary; Kalinin, his future Head of State, whom he knew through the Alliluyevs; and his Tiflis comrade Stepan Shaumian.
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According to Ketevan Gelovani, the granddaughter of Kato’s mother’s sister, whom this author interviewed in Tbilisi, Soso behaved gently towards her except for flashes of temper: “Soon after the wedding, he burned her hand with a cigarette in a fury, but she loved him and he was mostly so kind and tender to her.” There is a legend in Finland that he took her on honeymoon to Karelia; however, there is no evidence that she accompanied him to Sweden, and besides they were not yet married.
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They were not meant to be in London at all: the original plan was to hold the Congress in Copenhagen, so Stalin travelled to St. Petersburg, then to Finland and on to Malmo in Sweden, whence he and his fellow delegates were ferried to Copenhagen. But the Danes expelled them to Sweden, which sent them back to Denmark, which despatched them to Esbjerg, where they caught a steamship to London.
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The other big news during these weeks was a plot against the life of the Tsar and a photo-portrait of the three-year-old Tsarevich Alexei headlined: TSAREVICH WEARS HIS FIRST PAIR OF KNICKERS; the wedding of the Tsar’s cousin Grand Duke Nicholas to the daughter of the Prince of Montenegro; and the birth of a son to the English Queen of Spain, headlined AN ENGLISH BABE.
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Now a furniture warehouse, a camera shop and a gentleman’s outfitters.
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Later in life, Gorky would become the dictator’s friend, shameful apologist, pathetic trophy and possibly victim. See
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Stalin slyly blamed this on Grigory Alexinsky in
