Young Stalin

This new model of a revolutionary electrified young hotheads like Stalin, who no longer aspired to be the gentleman-amateur enthusing broad groups of workers but resolved to be the brutal professional, leader of a ruthless sect. Always happiest in vigorous campaigns against internal as well as external foes, Soso, still only aged twenty-two, was determined to break Jordania and Jibladze, and bend the Tiflis Party to his own will. “He spoke with cruelty,” reports Razhden Arsenidze, a moderate Marxist who admitted that Stalin “radiated energy, his words imbued with a raw power and singlemindedness. Frequently sarcastic, his cruel witticisms were often as extreme as the lash of a whip.” When his “outraged” listeners protested, he “apologized, explaining that it was the language of the proletariat,” who “talked bluntly but always told the truth.”

The secret police and the workers regarded this ex-seminarist as an “intellectual,” but to the bewildered moderates he was “a muddled young comrade” launching a “hostile and disruptive agitation against the leaderships of the SD organization in Tiflis.” They openly mocked Soso as “ignorant and obnoxious,” according to Davrichewy. Jibladze grumbled that “we gave him circles to agitate against the state and instead he agitated against us.”^{85}

Stalin, his mentors and followers still met “on the banks of the Kura sitting under scented acacias drinking cheap wine, served by the kioskkeeper.” But the success of Stalin’s strikes had concentrated police minds. The secret police decided to crush the movement before it could organize its 1901 May Day riot. The Gendarmes, analysing their intelligence on the revolutionary “leader” Stalin, immediately spotted his talent for conspiracy: “an intellectual who leads a group of railway workers. External observation revealed he behaves very cautiously, always keeps looking behind him when walking.” He was always hard to catch.^{86}

Overnight on 21–22 March 1901, the secret police, the Okhrana, swooped down on the leaders, Kurnatovsky and Makharadze.[39] They surrounded the weather observatory to catch Stalin, who was returning on the tram. He suddenly noticed through the tram window the studied nonchalance of plainclothes secret policemen—as easily recognizable as G-men in an American movie—in position around the observatory. He stayed on the tram, returning later to reconnoitre, but he could never live there again.

The raid changed his destiny: here ended any aspiration to a life of normality. He had played with the idea of becoming a teacher, earning extra cash by tutoring (though he normally tried to convert his pupils to Marxism), charging ten kopecks an hour. That was all over now. Henceforth he lived on others, expecting friends, sympathizers or the Party to fund his philanthropic revolutionary mission. He instantly entered what Trotsky called “that very serious game called revolutionary conspiracy”—a murky terrorist netherworld with its own special customs, fastidious etiquette and brutal rules.

As Soso entered this secret world, he pushed ahead with the plans for an aggressive May Day demonstration.

The governor-general of the Caucasus, Prince Golitsyn, marched Cossacks, Dragoons, artillery and infantry into Tiflis for a showdown. They bivouacked in the squares. On the morning of Sunday, 22 April 1901, some 3,000 workers and revolutionaries gathered outside the Soldiers Bazaar. The Cossacks had other ideas, but Soso was prepared. Sergei Alliluyev noticed that the activists were “unseasonably dressed in heavy overcoats and Caucasian sheepskin hats.” When he asked why, a comrade answered: “Soso’s orders.”

“What for?”

“We’ll be the first to receive the Cossack whips.”

Indeed the Cossacks waited in every courtyard down Golovinsky Prospect. At noon, “the garrison gun boomed;” the demonstrators started to march up Golovinsky to Yerevan Square, where the seminarists were to join them, singing “The Marseillaise” and “The Warsawianka.” The Cossacks galloped down on them, drawing sabres and brandishing their heavy nagaika whips that could kill a man. The pharaohs—the police—advanced, sabres drawn. A forty-five-minute pitched battle of “desperate encounters” broke out down the boulevard as the Cossacks charged any group larger than three people. The red banners—declaring DOWN WITH TYRANNY—were passed from hand to hand. Fourteen workers were seriously wounded and fifty arrested. Martial law was declared in Tiflis.^{87}

This was Stalin’s first success. While the genteel Jordania was arrested and imprisoned for a year, his Kvali closed, Stalin just fled to Gori for a few days. No wonder Jordania loathed this young hothead, but Stalin had just started. He and his allies were soon keen to intensify the “open struggle”—even if it cost “torrents of blood.”

These young radicals discussed the murder of Captain Lavrov, the deputy chief of the Gendarmes in Tiflis, but the real action was in the railway depots where the railways director, Vedenev, energetically resisted Stalin’s strikes.

Stalin now met another partner-in-crime, Stepan Shaumian, the well-off, highly educated son of an Armenian businessman. Shaumian, closely connected with the plutocracy of the Caucasus, was tutor to the children of the city’s richest oil baron, Mantashev, and he soon married the daughter of a top oil executive.

“Tall, well built and very handsome with a pale face and light-blue eyes,” Shaumian helped organize a solution to the problem of Vedenev: the railway boss was sitting in his office when a pistol, pointed through his window, shot him through the heart.

No one was caught.^{88} But this shot marked the start of a new era in which “all tender feeling for family, friendship, love, gratitude and even honour, must,” according to the much- read Revolutionary Catechism of the nihilist Nechaev, “be squashed by the sole passion for revolutionary work.” The amoral rules—or rather the lack of them—were described by both sides as konspiratsia, the “world apart” that is vividly drawn in Dostoevsky’s novel The Devils. Without understanding konspiratsia, it is impossible to understand the Soviet Union itself: Stalin never left this world. Konspiratsia became the ruling spirit of his Soviet state—and of his state of mind.

Henceforth, Stalin usually carried a pistol in his belt. Secret policemen and revolutionary terrorists now became professional secret fighters in the duel for the Russian Empire.[40]

9. Stalin Goes Underground: Konspiratsia

Just at this time, the Gori priest’s son Kote Charkviani was arguing with a street-cleaner on a Tiflis backstreet when a familiar voice said: “Smash him up, Kote. Don’t be afraid, he’s the tamed street hound of the Gendarmes!” It was Soso, who could divine a traitor or a spy almost by instinct. He could not hang around to chat. The secret police were after him.

Then “he disappeared into the narrow curved street…” But that conspiratorial instinct was an essential quality in this game of mist, mirrors and shadows. The antagonists were locked in an intimate, desperate and amoral embrace in which agents, double-agents and treble-agents promised, betrayed, switched sides and betrayed again their allegiances.

In the 1870s, the rebels were middle-class populists, narodniki, who hoped that the liberal future lay with the pure peasantry. A faction of narodniki developed into the terrorist groups Land and Freedom and later People’s Will, who believed that the murder of Emperor Alexander II would achieve revolution.

People’s Will embraced the ideas of the small-time philosopher Nechaev whose amoral Revolutionary Catechism begot Lenin and Stalin. “Regroup this world of brigands into an indivisible destructive force,” he suggested, killing police “in the most agonizing way.” The anarchist Bakunin shared that dream of harnessing the “swashbuckling robber-world” to the Revolution. Lenin borrowed the disciplined organization, total dedication and the gangsterish brutality of the People’s Will, qualities that Stalin personified.