Young Stalin

Soldiers raided the apartment and found “Giorgi Berdzenoshvili” (Stalin) in bed with one bandage round his head, another over his right eye and cuts and bruises across his face.

The Russian soldiers were confused because their orders did not specify what action to take on finding a bandaged man in bed. But, as he looked too ill to move, they left to consult their superiors, sending back a cart to convey the suspicious-looking patient to prison. By then, the patient had disappeared into the night. This was neither the first nor the last time he used the mystery-man-in-bandages trick to escape the police.

In the darkness, a comrade smuggled Stalin, “head and face damaged and hidden in a hood and a big cloak,” by phaeton to another safe house.

When Stalin turned up at home with the story of falling off the tram chased by pharaohs, the Svanidze girls were relieved, especially Kato. Sashiko and her husband realized something was happening between the two of them. “Gradually,” writes Monoselidze, “when Soso was living at our place, my wife and I noticed that Soso and Kato liked each other…”^{164}

17. The Man in Grey: Marriage, Mayhem (and Sweden)

On the initiative and orders of Stalin,” said one of his top gangsters, Bachua Kupriashvili,[76] a permanent gang of brigands was now assembled. “Our tasks were procuring arms, organizing prison escapes, holding up banks and arsenals, and killing traitors.” Stalin commissioned Tsintsadze to set up “the Technical Group or the Bolshevik Expropriators Club, it was soon known by another nickname— Druzhina, the Group, or just Outfit.”

The “leader of the heists,” said Stalin later, “was Kote Tsintsadze, together with Kamo.” Stalin’s boyhood friend, arrested in the storming of Didube, had been tortured horribly by the Cossacks, who almost sliced off his nose. But Kamo admitted nothing and was released. “He could bear any pain,” marvelled Stalin, “an astonishing person.”

Soso strained his ingenuity to raise cash for Lenin, travelling widely to Novorossiisk, on the Black Sea, and Vladikavkaz, in Ossetia. In Tiflis, he ordered schools and the seminary to deliver cash from their teachers while he discreetly prepared the Outfit for his gangster rackets.

Stalin would order the delivery of a letter to a businessman, illustrated with “bombs, a lacerated corpse and two crossed daggers,” then come calling with a Mauser in his belt to collect the money, according to several sources. But Stalin’s first biographer, Essad Bey, unreliable though often well informed, claims that “Soso obtained his information” about wealthy targets “through his mistress, Marie Arensberg, [a] German businessman’s wife in Tiflis.” But bank robbery was the fastest way to raise large sums.

“It was Stalin,” says Davrichewy, the other notorious bank robber from Gori, “who really opened the age of bank heists in Georgia.” The Outfit managed to pull off a spree of daring bank robberies in 1906 even though, as the Menshevik Tatiana Vulikh says, “Tiflis was at war; patrols day and night, cordoning off whole city-blocks.”

First, Tsintsadze hit the city pawnshop, bursting in with revolvers blazing, and bagged a few thousand. “One day Stalin’s gangsters hit, pistols firing, the Georgian Bank of Agriculture opposite the Viceroy’s Palace in broad daylight in Tiflis,” recalls Davrichewy. “Shouting ‘Hands up!’ they grabbed bundles of notes and disappeared firing into the air. Kamo was in command according to a plan devised by Stalin, a superb organizer.”

The competition between the bank robbers intensified, but there was a comradeship too. “All the main bank-robbers,” boasted Davrichewy, “were from Gori!” It was Davrichewy who pulled off the biggest heist so far, bagging over 100,000 roubles for the Socialist-Federalists in a robbery at Dusheti. Stalin, Tsintsadze and Kamo responded with robberies of ever increasing daring. They held up a train at Kars, though it went wrong and several of the gang were killed in the shootout. Then, in November 1906, Kote held up the Borzhomi stagecoach, but the Cossack outriders fought back. In the shootout, the stagecoach’s horses bolted with the money.

Next they held up the Chiatura gold train, bearing wages for the mines. Stopping the train, the gangsters and the Cossack guards fought a two-hour gun-battle, killing a soldier and a Gendarme before the Outfit got away with 21,000 roubles, “of which we sent 15,000 to the Bolshevik faction [Lenin in Finland] and kept the rest for our group to plan for future expropriations,” recalls Tsintsadze.

Presently, Stalin’s highwaymen held up the Kadzhorskoe stagecoach, bagging another 20,000 roubles. Some was kept to fund Stalin’s newspaper Brdzola, but most was sent to Lenin, hidden in bottles of Georgian wine.

·  ·  ·

“All of them were great friends and everyone loved them: sweet, kind, always cheerful… and ever ready to help anyone,” remembers Tatiana Vulikh, who knew the gangsters well. The Outfit was about ten strong, including the guntoting girls Patsia, Anneta and Alexandra. The gangsters lived in a couple of apartments, men in one room, women in another. None of them read much except two of the girls. Mostly consumptive, “They were so poor that they often had to stay in bed because there were not enough trousers to wear between them!”

Stalin socialized with Kamo and Tsintsadze, but he usually gave orders to the Outfit through a bodyguard whom he called his “Technical Assistant,”[77] though his comrades jokingly dubbed him “Soso’s Adjutant.” Thus that “great conspirator who rarely walked with other comrades” usually kept himself at least one remove from the ordinary gangsters. Behind the gunmen themselves, Stalin ran his own intelligence and courier network: the little boys at Tamamshev’s Caravanserai and at various printing-houses ran errands, delivered pamphlets, gathered intelligence.

The gangsters were not stealing for themselves. The gunmen of other gangs spent the cash on clothes, girls and wine, but Stalin never showed any interest in money, always sharing what he had with his comrades. “Stalin dressed poorly,” wrote Jordania, “was constantly in need of money and, in this way, he differed from other Bolshevik intellectuals who enjoyed the good life—such as Shaumian, Makharadze, Mdivani and Kavtaradze.” Soso’s gangsters shared his Marxist faith and ascetism. Their “gospel was Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? They would follow Lenin even against the Party,” says Vulikh. “Their simple-minded goal was to get 200,000–300,000 roubles and give them to Lenin saying, ‘You can do whatever you want with this money.’”

The gangster glamour concealed psychotic Mafia-style brutality: stealing any loot meant death. Stalin ordered Kamo, as Davrichewy witnessed, to execute a comrade suspected of pilfering. The bigger the success, the more dangerous the temptations. After Davrichewy’s 100,000-rouble heist at Dusheti, the Federalist gangsters fell out among themselves, killing to carve up the swag. One of their leaders stole a tranche of cash, trying to cover his tracks by blaming the peasants in whose garden it had been initially buried. Showing the fraternity between bank robbers, the Federalist embezzler asked Stalin’s gunman Eliso Lominadze to recover the proceeds. Lominadze tortured the peasants for an entire night before realizing they had not stolen the cash. “Afterwards he despaired that he’d been so cruel to innocents,” says Vulikh. So he murdered the real culprit who had commissioned him. If he had found the cash, he probably would have stolen it for the Bolsheviks. In any case, the money was lost to the Socialist-Federalists: the Okhrana observed their leaders spending the rest of the booty in the casinos of the Cote d’Azur.

The secret police struggled to pin down the culprits of these heists: once they found out about Josef Davrichewy, they blamed him for most of them. But first they muddled him up with Stalin because they were both Goreli gangsters who shared the diminutive “Soso”—and then confused them both with Kamo and Tsintsadze. “‘Kamo’ is Tsintsadze,” reported the secret police, “who escaped from Batumi Prison and arrived in Tiflis where he co-operated with Josef Djugashvhili (whose alias must be ‘Soso’).”

In this world of swashbuckling heroics and sordid murders, Stalin evolved his stoical views on the value of human life: “When he heard that a comrade had been killed in an expropriation, Soso would say, ‘What can we do? One can’t pick a rose without pricking oneself on a thorn. Leaves fall from the trees in autumn—but fresh ones grow in the spring.’”^{165}

Yet Soso’s heists were a means to an end: the seizure of power. Now the boy, who had studied Napoleon even in the midst of raucous drinking parties, kidded himself that he “could seize Tiflis and wanted to take it in armed rebellion—he found a map somewhere.” He liked to spread the map on the floor of his hideouts, deploying imaginary regiments in the shape of little tin soldiers. The son of one of his hosts ran to his father to tell him that