organized the search for the ‘criminals’ but J. V. Stalin.” Some “thieves robbed the manager of a German manganese company and stole 11,000 roubles,” says N. Rukhadze. “Comrade Stalin commanded us to find the money and get it back. We did so.”
It is not surprising that the tycoons preferred to have Stalin on their side: Chiatura crackled with assassinations. “The capitalists,” wrote Tsintsadze, “were so afraid it didn’t take them long to cough up.” As for any policemen or spooks, “the Chiatura organization decided to get rid of them.” They were hit one by one. Stalin, with his brigands riding shotgun through the hills, his newspapers pumping out his own articles, and his surprisingly impressive performances at mass meetings, became the king of the mountain. “Comrade Koba and [Prince] Sasha Tsulukidze,” wrote a rich young Bolshevik lawyer, Baron Bibeneishvili, “were our big guns.” But the Mensheviks were winning in the rest of the Caucasus.{145}
“I’ve had to travel all around the Caucasus taking part in debates, encouraging comrades,” Soso recounted to Lenin, who was abroad. “The Mensheviks campaign everywhere and we’ve got to repel them. We’ve almost no people (and still too few, two or three times less than the Mensheviks)… Almost all of Tiflis has fallen into their hands. Half of Baku and Batumi. But the Bolsheviks have the other half of Baku, half of Batumi, some of Tiflis, and all of the Kutaisi Region with Chiatura (the manganese-mining district, 9,000–10,000 workers). Guria belongs to Conciliators who lean towards the Mensheviks.”{146}
Stalin, wrote one of his Menshevik enemies, “was working very energetically, travelling around Guria, Imeretia, Chiatura, Baku, Tiflis, throwing himself to and fro, but all his work was mainly factional, trying to stamp the Mensheviks into the filth.”[65] He fought the Mensheviks viciously —“Against them,” he said, “any methods are fine.”{147}
On 5 May 1905, a new—and liberal—viceroy stepped off the train at Tiflis Station to “marching bands, plumed hats, golden epaulettes and bombastic speeches.” Count Illarion Vorontsov-Dashkov, aged sixty-eight, was a “horse-breeder, oil investor, scion of great aristocratic families,” married to a Princess Vorontsov who was descended from one of the famous nieces of Catherine the Great’s partner, Prince Potemkin. Family friend and ex— Court Minister to the Emperor, he was open-minded and fair: one of his first acts was to appoint a liberal to govern Guria. But Count Vorontsov-Dashkov was too late and too inconsistent. In the brutal Battle of Mukden, in Manchuria, the Tsar’s armies had lost tens of thousands of peasant-soldiers yet failed to defeat the Japanese. On 27 May, the Russian Baltic Fleet, after that quixotic round-the-world voyage during which it had succeeded only in sinking an English fishing-boat in the North Sea, was ignominiously routed by the Japanese at the Battle of Tsushima. Even its admiral was captured. These disasters rocked the Empire. Jews were slaughtered in pogroms. On 14 June, the crew of the battleship
Within days of his arrival, Count Vorontsov-Dashkov was faced by the collapse of his power, armed gangs in Tiflis, terrorism at the railway depot, and another bloodbath in Baku. The count could scarcely square his liberal instincts with the brutal reality as his generals and Cossacks launched murderous raids on radicals in Tiflis. He was soon faced with open warfare, wild terrorism and a rash of industrial action. “In 1905,” writes one historian, “everyone from palm-readers to prostitutes went on strike.”{148}
On 9 June, Sasha Tsulukidze, Stalin’s beloved Red Prince, died of tuberculosis. The funeral at Kutaisi attracted 50,000 people, who followed the open coffin to Khoni singing “The Marseillaise.” Even though he was a wanted man, Stalin delivered the funeral oration, a passionate speech that one spectator could still recite three decades later.[66]
The Famous Soso lived in a frenzy at this time—heading east to Tiflis, west to Batumi, thence to Kutaisi, commanding his Battle Squads. “Terrorism assumed gigantic proportions,” said Baron Bibeneishvili, himself a Bolshevik terrorist. It seemed that every young revolutionary was tinkering with explosive devices, stealing guns and robbing banks. “Almost every day there was a ‘political killing’ or an attack on some representative of the old regime.” Landowners, Gendarmes, officials, Cossacks, police spies and traitors were regularly murdered in broad daylight. In Tiflis, the ex—governor-general, Golitsyn, had survived an Armenian Dashnak assassination attempt only because he wore a chain-mail vest. Between February 1905 and May 1906, the viceroy reported to the Emperor that 136 officials had been assassinated, 72 wounded. Across the Empire, 3,600 officials were killed or wounded— these official figures are probably massive understatements. In Baku, the governor, Prince Nakashidze, was killed by the Dashnaks, his police chief by a Bolshevik hit man.
“There was much competition between the parties in their terroristic antics,” explained Stalin’s Gori friend Davrichewy. In Kutaisi, Soso ordered his Battle Squad there to obtain arms by raiding the Kutaisi Arsenal. They rented a house nearby and mined under it—but the tunnel collapsed.
After Bloody Sunday and a series of massacres in Tiflis, the Cossacks were especially hated. Stalin ordered Kamo and his terrorists to attack them. Between 22 and 25 June, the Tsar’s horsemen were bombed five times.
In his white palace in Tiflis, the sexagenarian viceroy, his decent dreams in tatters, was on the edge of a nervous breakdown, while in the revolutionary bedlam far beneath him, Stalin flourished in a seething atmosphere of relentless struggle. Illiterate ruffians and cutthroats like Kamo always prosper in lawless times, but Stalin was unusual—as adept at debating, writing and organizing as he was at arranging hits and heists. The command, harnessing and provocation of turmoil were his gifts. The viceroy declared martial law and handed over power to his generals.{149}
One day a young priest in the village of Tseva, between Chiatura and the station at Jirual, was at the bazaar when he was greeted by an unknown man. “I am Koba from Gori,” he said. “I’m not here to shop. I have private business with you.” Taking Father Kasiane Gachechiladze aside,[67] Stalin said he knew that the priest owned some donkeys and asked him how to get over the hills to Chiatura, adding, “No one knows this area better than you.”
The priest realized that the sinister stranger knew a lot about him and his young family. He also noticed that the local Red Battle Squad’s hit man and policemen-slayer was standing guard outside the bazaar. “There weren’t police in Tseva then—the Red Squad was in charge there.” “Koba of Gori,” clearly a Red chieftain, courteously requested the use of the priest’s donkeys and offered the considerable sum of fifty roubles to set up a route over the hills. The money eased the priest’s anxiety.
Stalin insisted on taking the priest for a drink in the local tavern.
“They’ll inform you in advance when I’m coming,” he said before disappearing. “Father, do not be late: I want to make the journey there and back in a day. We’re both young men.”
Soon the priest got the word. Stalin returned with two henchmen who helped him load the donkeys with saddlebags containing money, printing-presses and probably ammunition. Stalin knew the trains to Chiatura were often searched, and had concluded that this was the safest way to reach his “Bolshevik fortress.”
The priest and the ex-seminarist, precisely the same age, chatted as they trekked. Sometimes under a tree, Stalin rested his head on the priest’s knee for a nap. During Stalin’s dictatorship, Father Gachechiladze wished he had murdered his companion, but at the time “he impressed everyone. I even liked him—he was restrained, serious and decent. He even used to recite poetry to me,” adding that they were his own compositions. He was still proud to be a poet.
“Some of my poems were even published in the newspapers,” boasted Stalin, who rarely talked politics but claimed that “the police are after me because a friend of mine got into a fight in Chiatura over a girl—and I oversupported him.” He displayed his stiff arm as evidence of this fight (yet another of his versions). Stalin recited the blessing before meals. “You see, I still remember it,” he laughed. He sang as they walked. “Music has such power to relax the soul!” he reflected.
A peasant invited priest and revolutionary to a feast. The tipsy Stalin sang “with such velvet softness” that the peasants wanted to “marry him to their daughter.”
The priest complimented him: “You’d have made a great priest.”
“I the cobbler’s son competed with noble children and I was superior to all of them,” replied Stalin.
When they arrived in Chiatura, Stalin disappeared with the saddlebags into the bazaar and returned with them empty: “Now at least I can rest my head on them on the train home,” said Stalin.
This was Stalin’s secret life in the revolutionary summer of 1905—an armed chieftain leading packhorses
