As for Keke, she obeyed Soso’s summons. Around 18 May, she set off from Gori and only returned on 16 June. She visited her son twice in Batumi Prison. On her way via Tiflis, she somehow bumped into Crazy Beso, drunk and angry.
“Stop or I’ll kill you!” he shouted, denouncing his rebel son. “He wants to turn the world upside down. If you hadn’t taken him to school, he’d be a craftsman—now he’s in prison. I’ll kill such a son with my own hands—he’s disgraced me!” A crowd gathered. Keke slipped away, her last encounter with her husband.
Soso’s rebellion was the ruin of Keke’s ambition. She must, in her way, have worried as much as Beso. She applied for his release and probably delivered messages from his comrades. In his egocentricity, old Stalin acknowledged her suffering: “Was she happy? Come on! What happiness for Keke if her son was arrested? We didn’t have much time for our mothers. Such was the fate of mothers!”[49]
Stalin was soon the kingpin of Batumi Prison, dominating his friends, terrorizing the intellectuals, suborning the guards and befriending the criminals.{107}
The Imperial prisons were a hidden civilization with their own customs and tricks, but Stalin, as ever, ignored the etiquette that did not suit him. The prisons, “like the country itself, combined barbarism with paternalism,” says Trotsky. There was no consistency: sometimes political prisoners were placed in one big cell known as “the Church,” where they would elect “Elders.”
The revolutionaries lived by a set of chivalrous rules. Whenever comrades arrived or departed, it was traditional for the whole prison to sing “The Marseillaise” and wave a red flag. Revolutionaries, sacred intellectuals and self-appointed crusaders, were too elevated to socialize with mere criminals, but, “I preferred them [the criminals],” Stalin said, “because there were so many rats among the politicals.” He loathed the duplicitous chatter of the intellectuals. “Rats” were killed.
If they were in solitary cells, the politicals communicated through a ponderous but simple code of knocks —“the prison alphabet.” Sergei Alliluyev was in prison in the Metekhi Fortress of Tiflis but the tapping on his stove- pipe informed him:
When the prisoners walked in the courtyards, discipline was lax: it was hard to keep any secrets there. Soso always seemed to know who was arriving, how prisoners were behaving. Like American Mafiosi running La Cosa Nostra from prison, Soso swiftly improved his communications with the outside world. “He continued to run things from prison.”[50]
The authorities erred seriously when they allowed their revolutionaries to study in prison. These obsessive autodidacts studied hard there, none more so than Stalin, whose cellmate says, “He spent the whole day reading and writing… His prison day had a strict routine: he woke early in the morning, did morning exercises, then studied German and read economic literature. He never rested and he liked to recommend comrades what books to read…” Another prisoner said that Stalin made “prison into a university.” He called it his “second school.”
The prison guards were lenient, either because the revolutionaries were socially superior “gentlemen,” or because they had been bribed or because they were sympathetic. One of Stalin’s friends was put in a cell near to his and asked him about the
One article must have been doing the rounds of the “prison telegraph”: in March 1902, the Marxist now using the alias “Lenin” published an essay “What Is to Be Done?: Burning Questions of Our Movement,” which demanded a “new vanguard” of ruthless conspirators—a vision that immediately split the Party. “Give us an organization of revolutionaries,” promised Lenin, “and we shall overturn the whole of Russia!”{109} [51]
Captain Jakeli rounded up Batumi’s Sosoists, including Stalin’s young landlady and girlfriend Natasha Kirtava. When she appeared in the jailyard, Natasha was swiftly approached by an unknown prisoner: “Comrade Soso asks you to look up at his window.”
Natasha was alarmed in case this prisoner was a stool-pigeon. “I don’t know a Comrade Soso,” she answered.
But when she was locked in her cell, Stalin appeared at her window. “So, comrades, are you bored?” he inquired grandly. She saw that Comrade Soso was still very much in command of the struggle inside and outside the prison. “The prisoners loved him because he took such cordial care of them.” He certainly took good care of Natasha. Once she went to see him in his cell for a chat when one of the prison guards caught her and drove her away with the handle of his sabre. Stalin demanded the dismissal of the guard. His courage won him popularity among the prisoners but also respect from the authorities: he got his way.{110} It was not only Sosoists who admired him: another prisoner, who shared his cell, admitted that, although Soso later became a monster, he was “a very pleasant and gallant cellmate.” {111}
The Prosecutor in Tiflis ruled there was not enough evidence to charge Stalin with leading the Batumi riot. Probably witnesses were too afraid to testify. He was off that hook but remained in prison because Captain Lavrov was investigating another case—Stalin’s role on the Tiflis Committee. On 29 August, the Gendarmes indicted Stalin along with his old comrades on the Committee. Yet the bureaucracy muddled along slowly.{112}
He fell ill with his old chest sickness, which he sometimes claimed was his heart, at other times a shadow on the lung. During October, Soso managed to get the prison doctor to assign him and his sidekick Kandelaki to hospital.{113} Against revolutionary etiquette, he also appealed three times to Prince Golitsyn, the governor-general himself:
My worsening cough and the pitiful condition of my aged mother, who was left by her husband twelve years ago and of whom I am the only support, force me to apply for the second time for a humble discharge, under police surveillance. I beg you to heed my request and respond to my petition.
His sickness did not stop him making trouble. When the Exarch of the Georgian Church came to minister to his errant sons on 17 April 1903, the ex-seminarist led a violent protest that got him clapped in solitary confinement. The riot, not the first organized by Stalin, led to his transfer to the stricter Kutaisi Prison, in western Georgia.
Two days later, when the prisoners were mustered for their transfer, Stalin found that Natasha was being transferred with him. The warders started to handcuff him.
“We’re not thieves to be handcuffed!” snapped Stalin. The officer took off the cuffs. The story shows Stalin’s authority over prisoners and officers alike—the Tsarist police were biddable in a way unthinkable for the Soviet secret police. Then the prisoners were gathered for the march through Batumi. Stalin demanded a cart for their belongings and “a phaeton for me, the woman,” recalls Natasha proudly. Incredibly Stalin, that master of the prison system, got his way here too.[52] Only the best for Stalin’s girl: Natasha travelled to the station in a phaeton.
When their train arrived at nearby Kutaisi, Stalin held everyone back: “Let Natasha go in front so everyone can see that women also fight these dogs!”{115}
At Kutaisi, the authorities tried to force the prisoners to behave. The politicals were split up, but Stalin soon found a way to communicate and plan a counterattack. When Natasha Kirtava was moved out of the collective cell into solitary, “Emotion overcame me. I started crying.” Stalin heard about this on the prison telegraph and had a note delivered to her that read: “What do your tears signify, she-eagle? Is it possible prison has defeated you?”
