Young Stalin

of meetings. “At an agreed knock, we opened the door,” wrote one of the local workers, Porfiro Kuridze, who confronted “a slim young and energetic man, with black hair,” worn very long.

“Nobody knew his name,” records Domenti Vadachkoria, who held one of these meetings at his apartment. “It was just a young man in a black shirt, a long summer coat and a fedora.” Already something of a veteran in konspiratsia and a believer in his own instinctive eye for traitors, Stalin ordered Vadachkoria to “invite seven workers to a meeting” but “asked me to show him the invited workers.” He stood at the window while “I walked the invited workers one by one along the lane. Stalin asked me not to invite one of them. He was an amazing conspirator and knew human nature well. He could look at someone and see right through them. I told him a man wanted to work with us.” The man’s name was Karzkhiya.

“That guy’s a spook,” said Stalin. Shortly afterwards, continues Vadachkoria, “when Cossacks broke up a meeting, we saw that man in a policeman’s uniform. It was decided to wipe him out. He was killed.” Here is the first instance when Stalin sniffs out a traitor and has him killed, probably his first murder.[44] In any case, henceforth, he played rough in “the serious game of conspiracy.” There would be other Karzkhiyas. But even then he left what he called the “black work”—the killing—to his henchmen.

At the meetings, Stalin announced that he was bringing a newly aggressive spirit to the Revolution in Batumi. Then he asked everyone there to “gather another seven at your factory and repeat this conversation.”^{95} Setting up his headquarters at Ali the Persian’s Tavern in the bazaar, Comrade Soso moved around all the time in a frenzy of often nocturnal visits and lectures. He first lived with Simhovich, a Jewish watchmaker, then with an ex-brigand, now oil worker, Silvester Lomdzharia, who with his brother Porfiro became Stalin’s bodyguards.

One day, Stalin rose early and disappeared without a word. Kandelaki arrived soon afterwards and waited nervously until he returned.

“Guess why I got up so early this morning?” asked Stalin exuberantly. “Today I got a job with the Rothschilds at their refinery storehouse. I’ll be earning 6 abaz daily [1 rouble 20 kopecks].” The Franco-Jewish dynasty, who personified the power, glamour and cosmopolitanism of international capitalism, would not have been as amused as Stalin, but they never knew that they had employed the future supreme pontiff of international Marxism. Stalin started laughing, almost singing: “I’m working for the Rothschilds!”

“I hope,” joked Kandelaki, “the Rothschilds will start to prosper from this moment onwards!”

Stalin said nothing, but they understood one another: he would do what he could to ensure that the Rothschilds prospered.^{96}

On New Year’s Eve, Soso gathered together his top thirty rebels for a party-cum-meeting at Lomdzharia’s house, serving cheese, sausage and wine—but he banned excessive boozing. His bloodcurdling and melodramatic speech ended: “We mustn’t fear death! The sun is rising. Let’s sacrifice our lives!”

“God forbid we die in our beds!” shouted the toastmaster. The workers cheered, inspired by Stalin’s aggression—even if Batumi’s moderate Marxists, led by Karlo Chkheidze, the local hospital manager, and teacher Isidore Ramishvili, were not. They ran a Sunday school for workers, a soppy approach anathema to Stalin. The “legals” initially helped fund his work, but friendly relations did not last long. Stalin was about to “turn Batumi upside down.”

Batumi was a subtropical frontier-town on the Black Sea, dominated by the Empire’s great financial-oil dynasties, the Nobels and the Rothschilds. Even twenty years later, the poet Osip Mandelstam called Batumi “a Russian-style California Goldrush city.”

The Tsar had only gained this seaside nest of pirates from the Ottoman Padishah in 1878, but the oil boom in Baku, on the other side of the Caucasian isthmus, had presented the challenge of how to transport the black gold to the West. The Rothschilds and Nobels built a pipeline to Batumi, where they could refine the oil, then load it into the tankers moored in Naphtha Harbour. Suddenly Batumi, also the port of export for manganese, liquorice and tea, became a “door to Europe,” Georgia’s “only modern town.”

Batumi now boasted 16,000 Persian, Turkish, Greek, Georgian, Armenian and Russian workers, almost a thousand of them at the refinery, controlled by Baron Eduard de Rothschild’s Caspian and Black Sea Oil Company. The workers, often children, lived miserably in Oil City on reeking streets, with overflowing cesspools beside oozing refineries. Typhus killed many. But Batumi’s millionaires and foreign executives, especially the English, turned this backwater into a pleasure town with a seaside boulevard, white Cuban-style mansions, sumptuous brothels, a casino, a cricket pitch and an English Yacht Club.^{97}

On 4 January 1902, “As I was coming home,” says Kandelaki, “I saw the fire!” Then Stalin returned, cheerfully boasting: “You know, man, your words came true!” The Rothschilds would indeed “prosper” with Stalin as an employee. “My warehouse caught fire!”[45]

Crowds watched a black mushroom of smoke rise over the port. The workers helped put out the fire, which meant they were due a bonus. Stalin joined a deputation to meet the Rothschilds’ French manager, Francois Jeune, his first encounter with a European businessman. But there is evidence that Stalin was henceforth in secret contact with the Rothschilds management—the start of his murky but lucrative relationship with the oil barons. The Rothschilds surely knew that the fire was arson, and Jeune refused to pay the bonus. This was the provocation Stalin sought. He called a strike.

The authorities attempted to stop him; the Okhrana tried to hunt down Batumi’s new agitator; the pharaohs harassed the strikers; the police spies watched the Marxists; the Rothschilds worried about their oil shipments. But Stalin headed for Tiflis—eleven hours by train—to procure the printing-press, necessary to broaden the strike. Leaflets had to be published in both Georgian and Armenian, so the Committee put him in contact with Suren Spandarian, an affluent but ruthless Armenian who, despite a wife and children, was an unrestrained Lothario. Stalin printed his Armenian pamphlets on the presses of Spandarian’s father, a newspaper editor. Spandarian became Stalin’s best friend.^{98}

Stalin, assisted by Kamo and bearing his printing-press, returned to find Batumi in uproar. Kamo and Kandelaki quickly set up the press, which was soon broadcasting Stalin’s words to all the workers of Oil City.

On 17 February, the Rothschilds and Nobels capitulated and agreed to the workers’ demands, including a 30 percent pay rise—a triumph for the young revolutionary. In Tiflis, Captain Lavrov’s Gendarmes were breaking the Marxists with raids and arrests, but in Batumi, formerly so quiet, Gendarme captain Giorgi Jakeli admitted that he was worried by the “sudden increased restlessness.” He intensified surveillance of the enigmatic “Comrade Soso.”

Stalin had to move out of Lomdzharia’s apartment. After staying in different flats, he settled in the workers’ township of Barskhana in a little house belonging to Natasha Kirtava, aged twenty-two, a peasant beauty and SD sympathizer whose husband had disappeared. Judging by Batumi folklore, Kirtava’s own memoirs and his own later proposals, Stalin enjoyed a love affair with the young woman, the first but not the last with his many landladies and conspiratorial comrades. In her memoirs, she talks of his “tender attention and thoughtfulness” and even records a loving moment[46] amid the Marxist struggle: “He turned to me, stroked the hair off my forehead, and kissed me.”^{99}

The Rothschilds, under their managers Jeune and von Stein, were determined to avenge Stalin’s success. On 26 February, they dismissed 389 troublemaking workers. They went on strike, sending “a man to find Comrade Soso,” but he was in Tiflis, where he frequently visited his proteges Svanidze and Kamo.

Soso hurried back to Batumi next day, inviting his followers to a meeting at Lomdzharia’s place, where “he proposed a series of demands”—and an even more provocative strike to shut down the whole oil terminal. One of his helpers, Porfiro Kuridze, did not recognize him: he had shaved off his beard and moustaches. When Stalin was not in Ali the Persian’s Tavern, he used the Souk-suk Cemetery as his macabre headquarters, holding midnight meetings among the graves to elect delegates. Once when police surprised a meeting there, he hid within the wide skirts of a female comrade. At another gathering, surrounded by Cossacks, Stalin pulled on a dress and escaped in drag.

The workers were impressed with the “intellectual,” whom they dubbed “the Priest.” He gave them a reading list. “He once left us a book,” said Kuridze. “‘It’s Gogol,’ Stalin explained, teaching us about Gogol’s life.”

Comrade Soso, usually dressed in a dashing Circassian coat with his trademark black wide-brimmed fedora and a white Caucasian hood tossed over his shoulder, quickly gained an aggressive following, known as the “Sosoists,” an early version of Stalinists. Chkheidze and the “legals” of the Sunday school invited him over to receive