Far from Soso’s Tiflis atelier, at the court of the Romanovs, Grand Duke Nicholas told the Emperor he would rather shoot himself than become military dictator. Nicholas II had few choices remaining to him. On 17 October, he bitterly agreed to grant Russia’s first ever constitution, an elected parliament, the “Imperial Duma,” and a free press. Nicholas soon regretted this generosity: his manifesto accelerated a haemorrhage of ecstatic turbulence and savage violence across the Empire.
The next day on the Caspian, the paraffin-fuelled tinderbox of Baku burst into flames, figurative and real. The Armenians, led by their well-armed Dashnaks, avenged the pogroms of February, heading into the countryside to massacre Azeri villages. Soon the oilfields were burning. In Russia itself, 3,000 Jews were slaughtered in an orgy of pogroms that climaxed on the streets of Odessa.
Stalin was in the boulevards of Tiflis: “Crowds of demonstrators, brandishing the flags of revolution and free Georgia thronged the streets. A huge crowd assembled before the Opera House and, under an emerald-green shining sky, sang songs of freedom,” recalls Josef Iremashvili. The excitement was “so great,” remembers another participant, “that one richly dressed woman took off her red skirt… and made an impromptu red flag.” Iremashvili spotted his friend Stalin. “I saw him climbing on to the roof of a tram and gesticulating as he addressed the crowd.” But Stalin’s excitement was tempered by distrust of the Tsar’s concession: if it was shoved a little harder, the rotten throne would surely come crashing down.
The Duma was “a negation of the people’s revolution,” wrote Stalin. “Smash this trap and wage a ruthless struggle against liberal enemies of the people.” The Emperor had lost Russia—and to get it back, he would have to start again and “conquer boundless Russia for a second time.”{154}
Stalin and his friends the Svanidzes and the Alliluyevs were living in special times: the viceroy only controlled central Tiflis and his garrisons. In the rest of the city, “Armed workers patrolled the streets as popular militias,” says Anna Alliluyeva. “Their ranks were swollen by new friends who appeared on the outskirts of Tiflis on short lean little horses. We always stopped to admire these skilled horsemen in their cowls, enormous sheepskin coats and soft high leather boots… peasants and shepherds from the hills.”{155} Soso gloried in the drama. “The thunder of revolution is roaring!” he wrote. “We hear the call of the brave… Life is seething!”{156}
In the streets, Jibladze led the Menshevik militias. Stalin, Tskhakaya and Budu Mdivani formed the Bolshevik high command. The factions were allies, each controlling their own working neighbourhoods.{157} “The Tiflis suburbs,” wrote Trotsky, “were in the hands of armed workers.” Didube and Nadzaladevi were so free they were nicknamed “Switzerland.” Yet even a year after the
“I don’t intend to have a row about this. You do as you like!” answered Stalin calmly. Then he lit a cigarette and stared unblinkingly right into Kavtaradze’s eyes. It was probably then, after the meeting, that the two came to blows. Kavtaradze threw a lamp at Stalin.{158}[70]
The Svanidze sisters hosted a theatrical fund-raiser for radical causes and proudly introduced Stalin to Minadora Toroshelidze, who was impressed by his speech. “Comrades,” he said, “do you think we can defeat the Tsar with empty hands? Never! We need three things: one—guns, two—guns and three, again and again—guns!” He set about getting them. “One of his first coups—and the most insolent—was the pillage in broad daylight of three arms arsenals in Tiflis,” says Davrichewy. “In those times, everyone was arming themselves no matter how or what the price!”{159}
The massacres in Baku and the pogroms in Odessa raised the tension in Georgia. Stalin rushed between Baku and Tiflis as mobs in both cities tried to storm the jails. The Revolution seemed on the verge of triumph. In Petersburg, the Soviet, led by Trotsky, defied the Tsar, brazenly promoting itself as a parallel government.[71] In Moscow, the Bolshevik militia fortified the cavernous factories of Presnaya. But the worm was about to turn: the Tsar, planning vengeance, backed the anti-Semitic Black Hundred nationalists who set up their own death squads to kill Jews and socialists all over Russia. Hardline generals were in the ascendant, troops massed. In Georgia, the Emperor ordered Major-General Alikhanov-Avarsky to crush the Gurian peasants and Chanturian miners: the Cossacks were coming.
On 22 October, seven Georgian schoolboys at the smart Tiflis Gymnasium were killed by Russian Black Hundreds. In the ensuing fighting, forty-one died with sixty-five wounded. Stalin’s terrorists repeatedly retaliated against the Russian Cossacks and Black Hundreds.{160}
On 21 November, a firefight broke out in Tiflis’s Armenian Bazaar between Armenians and Azeris. Twenty- five Muslims were killed. Stalin and the Social-Democrats fielded their gangs to keep the sides apart, believing that the strife was being fomented by the Okhrana. Tiflis was like a “seething cauldron,” wrote Trotsky, on the edge of civil war. The desperate viceroy, acknowledging that he had lost control, offered Jibladze the Menshevik 500 rifles to keep the peace. The Battle Squads kept the two sides apart but refused to return the guns.
Davrichewy noticed that the Bolshevik gangsters did not take part because, without Stalin, Kamo could not decide what to do. “During the conflict, Stalin wasn’t in Tiflis.” Where was he?{161}
As Nicholas prepared to reconquer his turbulent Empire, as the tide of revolution reached its high-water mark, Stalin travelled to Finland to meet his “mountain eagle” for the first time: Lenin.
16. 1905: The Mountain Eagle—Stalin Meets Lenin
I was happy to meet the mountain eagle of our Party, a great man, not only politically but also physically too,” Stalin reflected, “because Lenin had taken shape in my imagination as a stately and imposing giant.” On 26 November 1905, a Party meeting elected Stalin and two others to represent the Caucasus at a Bolshevik conference in St. Petersburg. On about 3 December, using the alias “Ivanovich,” Stalin set off for the imperial capital—to meet Lenin.
As Soso and his fellow delegates travelled north by train, the Emperor unleashed his backlash: Trotsky and the Soviet were arrested. Stalin reported as instructed to the Petersburg offices of the SD newspaper,
Stalin and the other forty Bolshevik delegates, poorly disguised as teachers on a day trip, left Petersburg by train and arrived in Tammerfors (now Tampere) at 9:08 a.m. on 24 December, checking into the Hotel Bauer by the station: many of them shared rooms. “How enthusiastic everyone was!” remembers Krupskaya. “The Revolution was reaching its zenith and every comrade seized this with the utmost enthusiasm.”
The next morning, Christmas Day, Lenin opened the conference in the People’s Hall where the Finnish Red Guards—Bolshevik worker-militiamen—were headquartered.[72] Stalin waited to see his hero, expecting him to turn up late, having kept his followers in rapt anticipation: he believed this was the way a leader should behave. But instead he was amazed that Lenin was already there “early, chatting with the most ordinary delegates!” And was he a giant? “Imagine my disappointment when I saw the most ordinary man, below average height, in no way different from ordinary mortals.”
Unimpressive in person but exceptional in personality, Vladimir Illich Ulyanov, known as Lenin, was small and stocky, prematurely bald with a bulging, intense forehead and piercing, slanted eyes. He was genial, his laughter was infectious, but his life was ruled by his fanatical dedication to Marxist revolution, to which he devoted his
