laden with saddlebags of smuggled guns and plundered banknotes over the baking hills to Chiatura.{150}
In Tiflis, the Cossacks and the terrorists fought for the streets. Thousands met in the City Hall on Yerevan Square every day, barracking the City Council and proposing ever more radical measures. On 29 August, a public meeting of students discussing Nicholas II’s proposal of a compromise parliament named after Interior Minister Bulygin was raided brutally by the Cossacks, who entered the hall shooting. Sixty students were killed,200 wounded.
Stalin rushed back to Tiflis to meet his ally Shaumian and plan a response, on paper and in dynamite. He wrote a leaflet, raced to Chiatura and back again in time to co-ordinate a spectacular vengeance, set for 25 September. “On Stalin’s return,” says Davrichewy, “the signal was given—a red lantern lit atop Holy Mountain. At about 8 p.m., the gangsters opened fire outside the main barracks… When the Cossacks galloped out, grenades were tossed among the child-slayers.” Stalin’s terrorists launched nine simultaneous attacks.
Bolshevik and Menshevik hit men and agitators were already cooperating on the streets. On 13 October, Stalin and the Bolsheviks met the Mensheviks and agreed to coordinate politics and terrorism to redouble the pressure on the Autocracy, which seemed on the verge of collapse. Across the Empire, workers and soldiers elected councils, or “soviets,” the most famous being in Petersburg. The peasants rampaged in the countryside, while on 6 October a strike on the Moscow—Kazan railway escalated into a general stoppage across the Empire. It seemed that Tsardom was finished.
“The coming storm,” wrote Soso, “will break over Russia any day in a mighty cleansing flood to sweep away all that is antiquated and rotten.”
In St. Petersburg, even Nicholas II, whose political antennae were as sensitive as a stone, was forced to understand that he was about to lose his realm. He was ready to make peace with the Japanese, but political concessions went against his deepest convictions of holy Autocracy. He envied and hated his most able ministers, but his mother and uncles forced him to consult the brilliant ex—Finance Minister Sergei Witte. Before leaving to make peace with Japan at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, under the aegis of U.S. President Teddy Roosevelt, Witte forcefully told the Tsar, whom he despised, to concede a constitution. Nicholas II wavered, then asked his tall, soldierly cousin, Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaievich, to become military dictator.
As Romanov Autocracy tottered, we have a rare glimpse of Stalin as gang leader dealing out death in the backstreets of Tiflis.{151}
15. 1905: Fighters, Urchins and Dressmakers
One night in Tiflis in late 1905, Josef Davrichewy, Stalin’s Goreli friend, who now headed the armed wing of the Georgian Socialist-Federalists, heard fighting in a backstreet at the foot of Holy Mountain. He found Kamo, Stalin’s enforcer, threatening an unknown Armenian with his pistol.
“If you don’t return the banknotes to the safebox you were meant to guard, you’re a dead man!” Kamo was saying. “Think! I’ll count to three. One… two… careful my friend… three!”
Davrichewy ran up and seized Kamo’s arms. “Not here, you idiot. Not in this area. You know
“At the third blast,” says Davrichewy, “both of us ran for it.” The dying victim slid bleeding to the pavement.
“In God’s name, why stick your nose in our business?” asked Kamo when they were safe. “Koba’ll be furious—you know he’s not always accommodating.” Davrichewy was not happy either: “his” neighbourhood was soon crawling with policemen. But this was not the end of the affair.
Stalin sent Kamo to invite him for a powwow. When they met, Davrichewy “told him off for killing the Armenian in the neighbourhood where we maintain security.”
“Listen,” Stalin replied calmly. “Don’t worry about us. Kamo did what was necessary and you should do the same. Now I have a proposal for you: come with us. Leave the Federalists. We’re old Gorelis, I admire and remember our games. Come while there’s still time? If not…”
“If not, what?” demanded Davrichewy.
Stalin “didn’t answer but his eyes shrank and his expression became hard.” {152}
Just at that time of world-shattering events, Stalin entered the life of the other family, apart from the Alliluyevs, whose fate would be intertwined with his. He asked his protege Svanidze to find him somewhere to live.[68] Svanidze, intelligent, blue-eyed and blond, knew just the place. The apartment at the townhouse of 3 Freilinskaya Street was right behind the military headquarters, in the centre of Tiflis, near Yerevan Square. It had many advantages: first it was populated by lovely Georgian girls. Svanidze’s three sisters, Alexandra (Sashiko), Maria (Mariko) and Ekaterina (Kato), ran Atelier Hervieu, a prosperous couture house named after its French couturier Madame Hervieu, making uniforms and dresses.
The girls were Rachvelians from Racha (in western Georgia), famous for its placid and loving beauties. Sashiko had recently married Mikheil Monoselidze, a Bolshevik who knew Stalin from the seminary, but the other two girls were single. The youngest was Kato, a curvaceous, “ravishingly pretty” brunette. Their atelier of young seamstresses made it a sunnily feminine place to be.
One day, Svanidze took Monoselidze aside and “said he wanted to bring Comrade Soso Djugashvili to stay at our place and told me not to say a word to his sisters. I agreed,” says Monoselidze.
“So, in 1905, Alyosha invited to stay in our place a fellow whom everyone considered the leader of the Bolshevik faction,” writes his wife, Sashiko. “He was poorly dressed, thin, with an olive complexion, his face slightly pockmarked, smaller than average: Soso Djugashvili.”
“Our place,” recalls Mikheil Monoselidze, “was above the suspicion of the police. While my fellows did illegal stuff in one room, my wife was fitting the dresses of generals’ wives next door.” The waiting-room was usually full of counts, generals and police officers—the ideal home and headquarters for an underworld boss. Indeed Stalin held many of his gangster and terrorist meetings at Madame Hervieu’s atelier. He hid his secret papers in the bodies of her fashion mannequins.
“Soso,” remembers Sashiko, “would sit and write for days preparing articles for
When Pimen Dvali, a Bolshevik cousin of the Svanidzes, was staying, he slept all day.
“What can one do with him?” grumbled Stalin, shaking him. Dvali woke up. “Is anything disturbing you?” asked Stalin ironically.
“No, Soso dear,” replied the sleepyhead, falling into another slumber. Stalin “went to him, rolled up cigarette-papers, stuck them between Pimen’s toes—and lit them. Pimen’s toes were burned and he leaped up. We laughed!”[69]
Stalin sat and read socialistic pamphlets or novels to the sisters and seamstresses, says Sashiko, “or he would tell jokes, play the fool or tease sleepy Pimen again.” Once when the girls’ parents were visiting from Kutaisi, “Stalin sang a romantic song with such powerful emotion that all were enchanted, even though they could see he was rough and devoted to revolution,” says one of Kato’s cousins. Being Stalin, he would play mischievous power games. One day, the seamstresses suddenly demanded higher salaries. “My wife and Kato were stunned,” explains Monoselidze, “because these women were working in good conditions. But then everything became clear: Soso had put them up to it. We were very amused and so was Soso…”
Kato, the youngest and prettiest, was especially charmed.{153}
