Young Stalin

133

This tryst with the arch-heretics would be concealed during the Soviet era.

134

There has been much debate about Stalin’s two journeys to Cracow: he himself told many stories about crossing the border. (The old tyrant told the story about the border-crossing and Lenin and the food to his favourite youngster, Yuri Zhdanov.) Was he just lying? In his personal anecdotes, he tended to exaggerate more than totally invent his stories, especially about such a well-known trip. When he lied outright, he did not tell the lie himself, simply inserting it into the information of his propagandists. Thus he probably used that route at least once. Shotman says he arranged the first trip; the other sources are mixed up about the two trips. So this author believes that the meetings with Shotman concerned the first trip for which there was plenty of time to plan. For the second trip, for which there was no such time, Stalin and Valentina probably took the risk of crossing the border by a smugglers’ path.

135

Stalin told this story to Stanislaw Kot, the Polish Ambassador, at a Kremlin banquet in December 1941.

136

Stalin’s friend from Tiflis, Kalinin, was not promoted to the CC because he was temporarily suspected of being an Okhrana double-agent: the Bolsheviks, even while being betrayed by Malinovsky at the very heart of the Party, suspected an innocent comrade.

137

Now a boarding-house, the Pension Schonbrunn, which unusually still bears the blue plaque put up in 1949 that reads: J.V. STALIN RESIDED IN THIS HOUSE DURING JANUARY 1913. HE WROTE HIS IMPORTANT WORK “MARXISM AND THE NATIONAL QUESTION” HERE.

138

Josip Broz, the future Marshal Tito, was also working there as a mechanic.

139

In the incestuous world of Bolshevism, Elena later divorced Troyanovsky and then had an affair with Malinovsky the traitor (according to Malinovsky). She married the Bolshevik grandee Nikolai Krylenko, a member of Lenin’s first government, later Commander-in-Chief of the Red Army, then Procurator-General, finally a brutal People’s Commissar for Justice who was himself shot in the Great Terror. Fortunately Krylenko left Elena in the late 1920s, which probably saved her life, for she survived the Terror, working quietly in the archives, dying naturally in 1953. The Troyanovskys’ daughter Galina married another Bolshevik magnate, Valerian Kuibyshev, Stalinist Politburo member, womanizer and drinker who ill treated her. Stalin said he would have intervened if he had known of Kuibyshev’s drunken promiscuity. Kuibyshev’s suspicious death from alcoholism in 1935 suited Stalin. The nanny Olga Veiland became a Party and Comintern apparatchik, retiring young and surviving into old age. The destiny of Troyanovsky—even though he turned against the Bolsheviks—was very different: see the Epilogue.

140

Marxism and the National Question was Stalin’s most famous work: he himself never stopped editing it during his long life. It was an answer to the Austrian socialists who proposed what Lenin called “an Austrian federation within the Party.” As ever, Lenin was being practical and farsighted, as well as ideological. He feared that the Jewish Bundists or Georgian Mensheviks, who advocated variations on cultural autonomy or even national separatism, would make the Party and ultimately the Russian Empire ungovernable under Bolshevism. He needed a theory that offered the ideal of autonomy and the right of secession without necessarily having to grant either. Lenin and Stalin agreed that nothing should stand in the way of a centralized state. Stalin defined the nation as a “historically formed, stable community of people, united by community of language, territory, economic life and psychological make-up.” On the Jews, Stalin asked: “What sort of nation is a Jewish nation which consists of Georgian, Dagestani, Russian and American Jews who don’t understand each other, inhabit different parts of the globe… and never act together in peace or war? They’re being assimilated” for they have “no stable and large stratum associated with the land…” He attacked “Austro-Marxism” and national autonomy, but in the Caucasus accepted “regional autonomy.” The right of secession was offered (in theory) but should not be taken. This paper was not beautifully written, but it had a sort of subtlety that turned into a reality when Stalin created the web of republics that became the USSR. It remains relevant because the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 allowed the full republics such as Ukraine, Estonia and Georgia to become independent but not the autonomous republics such as Chechnya.

141

“Solin” and “Safin,” the earlier versions of his new name, may have been typos because sol means “salt” in Russian: “Man of Salt” does not quite have the metallic sheen of the final version. When they were typesetting Zvezda in April 1912, says Vera Shveitzer, “The editorial board once changed the signature arbitrarily. The next day when J. V. Stalin opened Zvezda and saw the signature ‘Solin,’ he smiled: ‘I don’t like meaningless borrowed bylines.’” He returned to “K.St.” until January 1913. Stalin was not the only “industrial name”: Rosenfeld became “Kamenev”—Man of Stone (though he remained much too fluffy for the moniker); and Scriabin became “Molotov”— Hammer Man. There was also a fashion for taking aliases from jailers: Bronstein borrowed the name “Trotsky” from one of his prison warders. Contrary to many claims in Western biographies, “Stalin” is not a Russianization of Djugashvili: Djuga does not mean “iron” or “steel” in either Georgian or Ossetian.