Even though he was ten years younger than Alliluyev, the haughty Soso presumed to command, giving orders on the transport of the press. They had already met as conspirators but now Alliluyev invited him into his home to meet his beautiful and notoriously promiscuous wife. Stalin later grumbled that the Alliluyev women “would never leave him alone,” always “wanting to go to bed with him.”
13. Bolshevik Temptress
The Alliluyevs would become family and travel with Stalin from this world of prisons, death and conspiracy to the peak of power—and then back to the world of prisons, death and conspiracy, at the hands of Stalin himself.
Sergei was a “fascinating adventuresome man like his Gypsy forefathers. He got into fights: if anyone ill treated the workers, he’d beat them up.” His wife, Olga,
Her parents, of German ancestry, were ambitious and hardworking with high hopes for Olga, but Sergei Alliluyev, then twenty-seven, was their lodger, a fitter of serf and Gypsy origins who had worked since he was twelve. Olga, just thirteen, was meant to marry a local sausage-maker but fell in love with the lodger. They eloped. Her father chased Sergei with a whip but it was too late. Sergei and Olga immersed themselves in revolutionary activism while raising a family of two daughters and two sons.
The youngest Alliluyev, Nadezhda, was still a baby, but the older children grew up with this unstable, nymphomaniac mother and a household devoted to the cause, abustle with an ever-changing cast of young conspirators—particularly those who were dark, mysterious and to their mother’s taste. Georgians were her type. “On occasion, she had affairs with a Pole, then a Hungarian, then a Bulgarian, and even a Turkish man,” says Svetlana. “She liked southern men and sometimes huffed ‘Russian men are bumpkins.’”
Olga Alliluyeva favoured Lenin’s brooding envoy Victor Kurnatovsky, now in Siberian exile—and Stalin. Her son Pavel Alliluyev supposedly complained that his mother “chased first Stalin then Kurnatovsky.” It is claimed that Nadya said her mother had admitted sleeping with both. Her granddaughter Svetlana certainly writes that Olga “always had a soft spot for Stalin,” but “the children came to terms with this, the affairs sooner or later ended, family life went on.”[58]
The affair sounds likely; if so, it was typical of its time.
In the underground, the revolutionaries were, under a facade of prudishness, sexually liberal. Married comrades constantly found themselves thrown together in the fever of their revolutionary work.{128}
When he was not with the Alliluyevs, Soso was again in command of Kamo and his young Sosoist acolytes. If he wanted an order obeyed fast, he would say, “I’ll spit now—and before it’s dry, I want you back here!”
Kamo was rapidly becoming one of the Party’s most useful thugs, expert in enforcement, setting up printing-presses and smuggling leaflets. He never wrote an article or gave a speech, but he was now teaching his craft to other young ruffians. In his tactless (and unpublished) memoirs, Kamo reveals much about how he and Stalin lived at this time. When distributing pamphlets, he worked out that the best place to hide was a brothel, “because there were no spooks there!” He was so short of cash that he virtually had to become a paid gigolo to survive: first there was the doctor’s wife, who let him stay. “I often wondered why my landlady looked after me so diligently. Then I had intimate intercourse with her. I was utterly disgusted—but as I had no other secret apartment, I had to submit and I had to borrow money from her too.”
Another woman, a Jewish nurse, also propositioned him. Kamo succumbed to her too: “Afterwards I went away and tried not to see her any more!” He may not have been the only one reduced to living off women. One unsourced but sometimes well-informed biographer claims that Stalin started an affair with a certain Marie Arensberg, wife of a German businessman in Tiflis, who helped him with tips for extorting money from merchants.
Kamo’s bosom pal was a young, dirt-poor nobleman named Grigory Ordzhonikidze, known as “Sergo.” Trained as a male nurse, Sergo was notoriously pugnacious, tempestuous, handsome and exuberant—a cartoon Georgian with big brown eyes, an aquiline profile and extravagant moustaches.
“Become my assistant!” Kamo urged Sergo.
“Assistant of the prince or the laundrywoman?” bantered Sergo, referring to Kamo’s disguises as a street pedlar with a basket on his head, a prince in Circassian uniform, a poor student or, his masterpiece, a laundrywoman with a bag of washing. Sergo became close to Stalin, an alliance that would take him to the Kremlin but ultimately destroy him.
The schoolboyish stunts of Stalin, Kamo and Sergo caught the town’s attention. Sergo’s cousin, Minadora Toroshelidze,[59] remembers seeing those three in the gallery of the Artistic Society Theatre, which was then presenting
Awaiting the Party’s forgiveness, Soso was drawn back to Batumi, where his reception by the Mensheviks Jibladze and Isidore Ramishvili was glacial.
“I heard a knock on the door,” says Natasha Kirtava. “Who is it?” she asked.
“Me! Soso!”
“Soso, man! I sent you a letter in Irkutsk—how did you manage to turn up here?”
“I escaped!” She welcomed her lover, who was dressed in the military uniform he used as disguise. The Prussianized uniformed hierarchy of the Romanov Empire was one big fancy-dress shop of disguises for the revolutionaries. When Natasha told her comrades of Soso’s return, “some were happy, some were sad.” The Menshevik Ramishvili denounced Stalin to Natasha.
“Throw him out,” he shouted, “or we’ll expel you from the Party.”
Stalin chivalrously left Natasha, but Ramishvili was spreading the rumour that there was something fishy about his escape: Stalin must be a police spy. After moving house eight times in his soldier’s uniform, Soso was forced to return to Natasha, who loyally raised cash for his return to Tiflis.
“Where are you going, Soso, what will we do if you fail again?” she asked him. As she remembered later, he stroked her hair and kissed her, saying, “Don’t be afraid!”
A railwayman lent him another uniform—“the peaked cap, tunic and torch of a train ticket-collector,” recalls the railway conductor, who regularly gave Soso lifts between Tiflis and Batumi. But Stalin did not forget Natasha. Once he was in Tiflis, he wrote using pseudo-medical code to invite her to join him. “Sister Natasha, your local doctors are ridiculous; if your disease is complicated, come here where there are good doctors.”
“I couldn’t go,” she says, “for family reasons.” Was her husband back? Stalin was outraged.{130}
He and Philip Makharadze, an older Bolshevik and founder of the Third Group, were busy at this time editing and contributing to the Party’s illegal Georgian newspaper,
At a May Day celebration at the seaside, Stalin apparently got into a row with some locals, presumably Mensheviks, which led to a Marxist wine-lubricated factional brawl in which he was beaten up.
He encountered Natasha Kirtava, who had turned down his proposal to live together. “I rushed up to greet him,” she writes. “But the angry Soso shouted at me: ‘Get away from me!’”{131} [60]
Bruised and rejected in Batumi, hunted by the Gendarmes in Tiflis, Soso retreated to Gori, where he hid out with his uncle Giorgi Geladze and presumably saw Keke. Davrichewy says that he got new papers in Gori in the name of “Petrov,” another of his many aliases.{132}
At the end of July, Tskhakaya despatched Stalin to western Georgia, the old principalities of Imeretia and
