Young Stalin

mounted Cossacks. Singing was banned. Comrade Soso quietly supervised the funerals. The Gendarmes prevented any speeches. As the crowd left, the Cossacks mocked them by singing the Death March.

The secret police now knew Stalin was one of the leaders of the Batumi disturbances. The organization “achieved some big successes after the arrival of Josef Djugashvili in autumn 1901,” Captain Jakeli reported to the chief of the Kutaisi Gendarmerie. “I have ascertained that Josef Djugashvili was seen in the crowd during the 9 March disorders… All evidence points to the fact of his active role in the disorders.” They were determined to track him down.

On 5 April, Despina Shapatova warned Stalin that he had been denounced. He moved that night’s meeting twice and finally it met at Darakhvelidze’s house. Suddenly Despina ran in: the Gendarmes were outside or, as the presiding officer, put it: “Yesterday at midnight, I surrounded the house where intelligence told us they were holding a meeting of the Mantashev Refinery workers…”

Soso the Priest rushed to the back window, but it was hopeless. The house was surrounded by blue- uniformed Gendarmes. This time there was no escape.^{103}[48]

PART TWO

Gently smile at the earth
Stretched out beneath you;
Sing a lullaby to the glacier
Strung down from the heavens.

Know for certain that once
Struck down to the ground, an oppressed man
Strives again to reach the pure mountain,
When exalted by hope.

So, lovely moon, as before
Glimmer through the clouds;
Pleasantly in the azure vault
Make your beams play.

But I shall undo my vest
And thrust out my chest to the moon,
With outstretched arms, I shall revere
The spreader of light upon the earth!

—SOSELO (Josef Stalin)

11. The Prisoner

Stalin was imprisoned in Batumi Prison, where he immediately distinguished himself by his surly swagger and arrogant audacity. Prison affected him deeply and remained with him. “I got used to loneliness in prison,” he said much later, though in fact he was rarely alone there.

His fellow prisoners, whether enemies who later denounced him in exile or Stalinists who praised him in official books, agree that Stalin in prison was like a frigid sphinx: “scruffy, pockmarked, with a rough beard and long backcombed hair.” His fellows were most struck by “his complete calmness.” He “never laughed with an open mouth, only smiled coolly” and was “incapable of co-operating with anyone… He walked by himself. Always unruffled.”^{104} But initially he made a foolish mistake.

On 6 April 1902, he faced his first interrogation at the hands of Gendarme captain Jakeli. He denied he had even been in Batumi at the time of the massacre, claiming he had been with his mother in Gori. Two days later, he ordered another prisoner to throw two notes into the prison yard where friends and families of the prisoners gathered to deliver food and messages. But the guards retrieved the notes in Stalin’s handwriting. The first sent a message “to tell the teacher… Josef Iremashvili that Soso Djugashvili’s been arrested and ask him to tell his mother that when Gendarmes ask her ‘When did your son leave Gori?,’ she must reply, ’He was here in Gori all summer and winter until 15 March.’”

The other note summoned his former pupil Elisabedashvili to Batumi to take over his organization. Captain Jakeli had already consulted the Tiflis secret police, who revealed that Stalin had been a leading light on the Tiflis Committee. But now he also briefed Gori, who reported that two men had arrived there from Batumi and talked to Keke, her brother Giorgi Geladze (Stalin’s uncle) and Iremashvili. All three were arrested and interrogated: not a happy day for Keke.^{105}

The men from Batumi had come to collect Stalin’s mother, but the clumsy note-tossing also implicated Elisabedashvili, who was living in Tiflis with Kamo and Svanidze. The Gendarmes arrested Kamo, who reluctantly led them to the Sololaki bathhouse, where they seized a disrobed Elisabedashvili. He was taken to meet the “famous Captain Lavrov,” who handed him over to Captain Jakeli. As Elisabedashvili entered the Batumi prison yard, Stalin rushed past him, whispering: “You don’t know me.”

“I know,” replied Elisabedashvili. “Hello from everyone!”

The next day, Elisabedashvili was interrogated by Captain Jakeli.

“Do you know Josef Djugashvili?”

“No.”

“Nonsense! He says he knows you!”

“He might be insane.”

“Insane?” laughed the captain. “How can such a person be mad? We had Marxists here before but they were quiet enough. This Djugashvili has turned the whole of Batumi upside down.”

When Elisabedashvili was led past Stalin’s cell, he caught a glimpse, through the bars, of “an outraged Soso cursing his cellmate and punching him. Next day, I learned that they had placed a stool-pigeon in his cell.” Elisabedashvili was released—but soon returned, on Stalin’s orders, to direct Batumi’s Sosoists.^{106}