123
Kavtaradze was arrested by the Gendarmes the next day. When they showed him a photo of Stalin, he laughed because he looked “so tousled.” “Do you know him?” asked the officer. “No, he looks crazy.” “Do you know Djugashvili?” “Yes I know Soso Djugashvili, I just saw him.” “Do you know he’s a state criminal who’s very dangerous and on the run?” “Well, you know we Georgians always know each other…” Kavtaradze was released.
124
The housemaid was an Estonian girl who later married Kalinin, becoming the first lady of the USSR before being arrested during Stalin’s Terror while her husband remained head of state. See
125
Now known as “Comrade Zelma,” Stasova was the granddaughter of the architect to the Emperors Alexander I and Nicholas I and daughter of a noble lawyer who worked in the Senate, a herald at Alexander II’s coronation: she had much in common with those cultured nobles Lenin and Krupskaya. She knew Stalin from Baku and was a specialist in secret work, often involved in keeping Party funds. Stasova was so humourless and prissy that Stalin laughed at her. She later became one of Lenin’s secretaries. After Lenin’s death, when Krupskaya opposed him, Stalin half jokingly threatened to appoint Stasova as his widow instead. She did not seek high office after Lenin’s death, almost disappearing, one of the very few Old Bolsheviks to survive the Terror. She emerged as a revered antique in Khrushchev’s reign, living on into Brezhnev’s, and dying in 1966.
126
The nine-year-old son of a Moscow Bolshevik remembered how a Caucasian came to visit his father. The father was out, so the Caucasian tenderly chatted to the child. As he was leaving, the Caucasian sharply slapped the boy’s face then said, “Don’t cry, little boy. Remember, today Stalin [or whichever name he was then using] talked to you!” When the boy told his parents, they were angry and baffled until they heard of this mountain custom in Georgia: when a prince visited a village family, the peasant would slap his son across the face and say, “Remember today this Prince visited our house.”
127
Stalin blasted the regime of “Nicholas the Last.” The Emperor and Empress were already placing their trust in a Siberian healer and dissolute hierophant named Grigory Rasputin. Once Rasputin’s intimacy with the monarchs was known, this created a growing scandal that alienated monarchists and Marxists alike. Few knew that the little heir, Tsarevich Alexei, suffered from haemophilia. Nicholas and Alexandra increasingly believed that Rasputin alone could staunch the bleeding and ease the child’s pain. The ever-changing Interior Ministers and Okhrana directors now started using their agents to tail Rasputin and chronicle his orgies to discredit him with the Emperor. Increasingly the Empress judged her ministers by their attitude to Rasputin. Stalin wrote about him when he called the Tsar and his courtiers “destroyers of liberties, worshippers of gallows and firing-squads, thieving quartermasters, robber police, murderous secret policemen and dissolute Rasputins!… To complete the picture: the brutal shooting of toilers in the Lena goldfields.”
128
Stalin told this story to Molotov on their way to the Teheran Conference in 1943 and to his son-in-law Yuri Zhdanov. Back in Narym, the district policeman found Stalin was missing the next day but waited to see if he would return from Tomsk. By the time the police reported his escape to the governor of Tomsk, who had issued an alert, it was 3 November and Stalin had been in Petersburg for weeks.
129
Krasin finally left active politics, but Lenin welcomed his return to the Bolsheviks after the Revolution, appointing him People’s Commissar for Trade, Industry and Transport, and later Ambassador to London. Krasin the engineer was one of the brains behind the refrigeration, embalming and displaying of the dead Lenin in 1924. He himself died in 1926.
130
Once again, Kamo cheated the noose, benefiting from the broad amnesty of Nicholas II on the three hundredth anniversary of the Romanov dynasty in 1913. Kamo remained in jail for five years but lived to meet up again with Stalin and play out the ultimate insane violence after the Revolution. See the Epilogue. Of the female gangsters, Anneta and Patsia died of TB, as did many of the others. By the end of the 1930s, only Alexandra Darakhvelidze and Bachua Kupriashvili survived to leave their memoirs.
131
His articles are revealing of his cynical view of diplomacy (he paraphrases Talleyrand) and his belief in doublespeak (long before Orwell coined the word): “When bourgeois diplomats prepare for war, they shout loudly about ‘peace.’ A diplomat’s words must contradict his deeds—otherwise what sort of diplomat is he? Fine words are a mask to conceal shady deeds. A sincere diplomat is like dry water. Or wooden iron.”
132
Her husband, journalist Alexander Lobov, was shot in 1918 as an Okhrana agent. She was cleared but died of TB in 1924. Shotman, who remained close to Lenin into the 1920s, was executed by Stalin in 1939.
