Young Stalin

death. This was no joke for a girl already four months pregnant.

Sashiko Svanidze sprang into action to help Stalin’s wife, calling in the favours of her clients, who included most of the Gendarme officers: “I went to see the wife of Gendarme Colonel Rechitsky (whose dress I was making at the time) and requested her to reduce Dvali’s death penalty and to release the innocent Kato.” The Colonel’s wife did get Dvali’s sentence reduced and helped the pregnant Kato even more by allowing her to await her release in a police station instead of prison. The sisters were also making the gowns for the wife of the police station chief, who immediately took Kato home with her and looked after her.

On Stalin’s return after his frantic shuttling around the Caucasus, “He was deeply despondent about what had happened,” notes Monoselidze. “He insisted on visiting Kato,” so Sashiko went to see the wife of the police station chief and “told her our cousin from our village had come to visit Kato. The police officer’s wife permitted it, so we took Soso to their apartment at night and they had a rendezvous there. Fortunately none of them knew Soso by sight. The police officer’s wife demanded that Kato be allowed home for two hours every evening. Soso and Kato met every evening like that” until her release two months later.

Soon after her release, on 18 March 1907, Kato was delivered of a son, Yakov.^* According to Kato’s cousin Ketevan Gelovani, Soso was present for the birth along with his mother. Keke and “the little woman” Kato got on very well. Stalin was over the moon at being a father. “After the birth of the baby,” Monoselidze observes, “his love for wife and child became ten times more.” He nicknamed the baby “Patsana” (Laddie). Writing day and night, however, Stalin became “irritated when the baby’s crying disturbed his work. But as soon as the mother fed it and the baby stopped crying, he kissed him, tickling his nose, fondling him.”

Soso had much on his mind. That March 1907, Stalin’s Outfit planned a heist on the Kutaisi stagecoach, but, just before the chosen day, its chieftain, Tsintsadze, was arrested. Stalin appointed Kamo as his successor. Stalin’s pet psychopath was more than capable of controlling the band of bandits, always tottering between simple enthusiasm and frenzied killing. When he heard a Bolshevik, probably Stalin, arguing theory with a Menshevik, he exclaimed: “What are you arguing with him for? Let me slit his throat.” Kamo, with Tsintsadze’s female gunslingers Anneta, Patsia and Alexandra, held up the Kutaisi stagecoach—but the Cossacks fired back. Kamo and the girls found themselves in the midst of a savage fire-fight, but when it was at its most intense the girls swooped in and grabbed the money-bags, which they then smuggled to Tiflis in their lingerie. “Anneta and I wrapped it around our bodies,” recalls Alexandra Darakhe-lidze. Kamo hid the cash in wine-sacks and sent it to Lenin in Finland.

Stalin’s inside men in the banking mail now informed the Outfit that a huge delivery was due in Tiflis—it might be as big as a million roubles, enough to fund Lenin’s expensive organization for years. Stalin and Kamo prepared for a spectacular heist.

Barely a month later, Stalin, elected as non-voting delegate to the Fifth Congress, left Laddie and Kato in Tiflis, setting off on a long journey via Baku, St. Petersburg, Stockholm and Copenhagen. Stalin, travelling under the name “Ivanovich,” was on his way to London.^{175}

Around 24 April, when he was in Denmark, he took the train down to Berlin to meet Lenin. We know they met secretly on this trip and that Stalin visited Berlin. They had one subject to discuss: the imminent Tiflis bank robbery. If Lenin went to Berlin, writes Trotsky, “then it was not for theoretical conversation but was undoubtedly devoted to the impending expropriations and the means of forwarding the money.” The secrecy was aimed as much at their comrades as at the Okhrana: the Party, now dominated by Mensheviks, had banned brigandage.

Lenin and Stalin then proceeded separately to London.^{176}

* This was true especially after the 1907 London Congress banned expropriations and ordered expulsion from the Party for those who disobeyed. But this was September 1906—the London Congress was in the future.

* This piracy was quite common among the revolutionary bandits: Stalin’s Gori alter ego, Davrichewy, chief of the military wing of the Socialist-Federalists, tells how he robbed a ship carrying funds at roughly the same time as the Tsarevich Giorgi heist. Meanwhile, off Odessa, revolutionaries seized a noble dinner-party on a pleasure ship, the Sofia, where they grabbed ?5,000 in gold.

† At this time Krasin loaned his most advanced infernal device to the Maximalist-SR terrorists, who used it to blow up the house of the Tsar’s brilliant Premier Stolypin. Many were killed in the inferno but Stolypin survived.

* Later Stalin’s People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs during the 1930s, Maxim Litvinov.

* Known as Yasha to the family, he was christened months later and registered years later—hence confusions about his birth. The name was probably a tribute to Stalin’s protector, Yakov “Koba” Egnatashvili.

19. Stalin in London

On 27 April/10 May 1907, after a tedious journey, Stalin and his companions Tskhakaya and Shaumian disembarked at Harwich, in England. Catching the train to London’s Liverpool Street Station,[81] they were greeted by sensational headlines in the English press, thrilled to have exotic “Anarchists” loose in the capital, which, then as now, was a notorious refuge for murderous extremists.[82]

The delegates were met by an incongruous crew of English reporters and photographers, twelve Special Branch detectives and two Okhrana agents, as well as by local sympathizers who were either English socialists or Russian exiles.

“History is being made in London!” declared the Daily Mirror, which seemed to be most fascinated by the fact that some of the revolutionaries were “women burning with zeal for the great cause”— and by their lack of luggage in that age of stately travel. “There is not a man over forty and many little over twenty”—Stalin was twenty-nine, Lenin was thirty-seven (but “we always called him the Old Man,” Stalin said later). “It was,” concluded the Daily Mirror, “a most picturesque crowd.”

As with the Soviet Union itself, the delegates were meant to be equal but some were more equal than others. Maxim Gorky, “the famous novelist,” said the Mirror, “is in London but where he is staying, only his intimate friends know.” Gorky resided with his actress-mistress in the comfort of the Hotel Imperial in Russell Square, where Lenin and Krupskaya joined them. It was wet and cold when they arrived. The domineering Lenin took charge, checked Gorky’s sheets for dampness and ordered the gasfire lit to warm their wet underwear.

“There’s going to be a right old scuffle here,” Lenin told Gorky as the Leninist socks dried. The delegates with private incomes stayed in small hotels in Bloomsbury, though Lenin and Krupskaya took rooms in Kensington Square, whence he headed out every morning to pick up his favourite takeaway, fish and chips, outside King’s Cross Station. However, money was extremely short for the poor delegates like Stalin.

Legend says he spent the first nights with Litvinov, whom he now met for the first time, in the Tower House hostel on Fieldgate Street, Stepney, which the novelist Jack London called the “monster dosshouse”: it cost sixpence for a fortnight. Its conditions were so dire that Stalin supposedly led a mutiny and got everyone rehoused. He was settled into a cramped first-floor backroom at 77 Jubilee Street in Stepney, which he rented from a Jewish- Russian cobbler and shared with Tskhakaya and Shaumian.

Foggy and wet, London was an intimidating city for a visitor from Georgia. “At the outset I found London swallowed and suffocated me,” wrote another Russian Communist visitor, Ivan Maisky, later Stalin’s Ambassador to London. “I felt lonely and lost in its giant stone ocean… with its grim rows of little houses swallowed up in a black fog.”

If London was foreign, Whitechapel, where Russian was commonly spoken, was more familiar. One hundred and twenty thousand Jewish refugees from the Russian pogroms, gangsters and socialists among them, lived in the East End. Lenin visited Rudolf Rocker’s Anarchist Club, near Stalin’s rooms in Stepney, where he ate Jewish gefilte fish. Stalin probably did so too. Soso also could hardly have missed the savage jungle of Slavic-Hebraic gang- warfare. The East End gangs, all from the Russian Empire, controlled so-called rookeries of “shootflyers” (gold- watch thieves) and “whizzers” (pickpockets). Three gangs vied for supremacy: the Bessarabian Tigers fought the Odessans, who fought the Aldgate Mob led by Darkie the Coon (a swarthy Jewish gangster named Bogard).

On arrival, Stalin and the others registered at the Polish Socialist Club on Fulbourne Street off the Whitechapel Road across from the London Hospital.[83] Observed by Special Branch detectives and excited journalists, they received their sparse allowance of two shillings a day, guidance on