Young Stalin

how to find the main Congress, and secret passwords to avoid Okhrana infiltration.

Meeting upstairs in “modest premises with little furniture belonging to a socialist club with tables and chairs and foreign autographs on the walls,” the Bolsheviks started the political business with their own factional meeting at which they elected a secret committee, and like all good conferencers, “They studied the city map.” But the Daily Mirror had no time for such mundane details. “The women are said to be conspicuous for their unflinching courage and nerve,” the reporter revealed admiringly. “Revolver practise enters their daily exercise. They drill themselves constantly in front of the mirror by which they become adept in aiming and pulling the trigger… Most of these are young girls, one being eighteen wearing her long fair hair in a long coil down her back.”

The eagle-eyed Daily Express, however, noticed “a sturdy resolute-looking man who… stood at the corner of Fulbourne Street, obviously a foreigner and equally obviously a person of some importance. Apparently unconcerned, he was taking a lively interest… This was Monsieur Seveff, one of Russia’s secret police, and his duty is to keep watch on the Russian Socialists”—who, that paper added significantly, “had little luggage.”

The delegates then proceeded to the SD Fifth Congress, taking the bus or walking to Islington, where they were amazed to find they were meeting in a church, the Brotherhood Church on Southgate Road: “down the dim and dirty streets of working-class quarters, it was like dozens of buildings, soot-grimed walls, high narrow windows, grimy roof with a short steeple.” Inside, the delegates found “a simple bare room that could hold 300–400.” Gorky was unimpressed by the church decor, “unadorned to the point of absurdity.” The vicar, the Reverend F. R. Swan, whose flock included the future Labour Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, was a pacifist follower of William Morris.

On 30 April/13 May 1907, the father of Russian Marxism, Plekhanov, opened the Congress after delegates sang a funeral hymn for fallen comrades. Stalin watched how Lenin often sat with the tall, haunted and spectrethin Gorky, international celebrity and Bolshevik fund-raiser who had once watched a hanging in Gori.[84] The Bolsheviks sat on one side, the Mensheviks on the other; every vote was “ultra tense.”

There were 302 voting delegates representing 150,000 workers, but after the glory days of 1905 the Party was in dire straits, shattered by Nicholas II’s repressions. There were 92 Bolsheviks, most of whom were determined to continue the armed struggle of 1905 and avoid participation in the Duma. They were outnumbered by 85 Mensheviks, 54 Jewish Bundists, 45 Polish-Lithuanians and 26 Letts who supported participation in the Duma elections. Lenin also wanted to adopt the strategy of gun and ballot-box favoured in our time by terrorists from the IRA, Hamas and Hezbollah. So he used Menshevik help to win that battle before turning on them again.

The entire Party was shrinking, but the Bolsheviks had been so routed in Georgia that Stalin, Tskhakaya and Shaumian were only consultative delegates without votes.

“Who is that?” Stalin supposedly asked Shaumian as a new orator took the podium.

“Don’t you know him?” answered Shaumian. “It’s Comrade Trotsky”—real name Lev Bronstein, the undoubted star in London, who had just pulled off an escape from Siberia by dashing 400 miles through the tundra on a reindeer-propelled sleigh. Here Stalin first saw (and probably shook hands with) Trotsky, who for his part did not recall meeting his nemesis until 1913.

While Stalin had been commanding his militias in Chiatura, Trotsky had been Chairman of the Petersburg Soviet. Effortlessly brilliant in writing, dizzyingly eloquent in performance, unmistakably Jewish in accent, and shamelessly vain, Trotsky, with his dandyish suits and plumage of mane-like tresses carefully bouffed, possessed the shine of international radical celebrity, light-years ahead of Stalin. Despite being a rich Jewish farmer’s son from faraway Kherson Province, he was overweeningly arrogant, regarding Georgians as bumpkin “provincials.”

Lenin, who had nicknamed him “the Pen” for his virtuoso journalism, now complained that Trotsky was showing off. Stalin, whose gifts lurked in the shadows while Trotsky’s glittered in the spotlight, hated him on sight: Trotsky was “pretty but useless,” wrote Stalin on his return. Trotsky simply sneered that Stalin “never spoke.”

It was true that Stalin did not speak during the entire Congress. He knew that the Mensheviks, who hated him for his truculence and banditry, were gunning for him as part of their campaign to ban bank robberies and score points off Lenin. When Lenin proposed the vote on credentials, Martov, the Russian Menshevik leader, prompted by Jordania, challenged the three nonvoters, Stalin, Tskhakaya and Shaumian.

“One can’t vote without knowing who’s involved. Who are these people?” asked Martov.

“I really don’t know,” replied Lenin insouciantly, though he had just met Stalin in Berlin. Martov lost his challenge.

“We protest!” shouted Jordania, but to no avail. Stalin henceforth loathed Martov, real name Tsederbaum, who was, like Trotsky, Jewish.

The Jewish presence irked Stalin, who decided that the Bolsheviks were “the true Russian faction” while the Mensheviks were the “Jewish faction.” There must have been some grumbling about this in the pub after the sessions. “It wouldn’t be a bad idea for us Bolsheviks,” said the Bolshevik Alexinsky to Stalin “in jest,” “to organize a pogrom in the Party.” At a time when thousands of Jews had just been slaughtered in pogroms, it was a “jest” in poor taste.[85] Its resentment of Jewish intellectuals exposed Stalin’s burning inferiority complex. But here too is the emergence of Stalin the Russian (for there was no anti-Semitism in Georgia, where Babylonian Jews had lived for two millennia without a single pogrom). Weary of Georgia’s petty squabbles and Menshevik dominance, he was ready to concentrate on Baku and Russia herself. Henceforth he wrote in Russian, not Georgian.

Lenin got his way at the Congress. More Bolsheviks than Mensheviks were elected to the Central Committee, while he continued to keep his secret Bolshevik Centre. “Now,” reflected Stalin later, “I got to see Lenin in triumph.”

However the Mensheviks did achieve one resolution that affected Stalin: they passed a rigorous condemnation of bank robberies that decreed expulsion from the Party for anyone who broke the rules. They appointed the gay Menshevik aristocrat Georgi Chicherin (later the second Soviet People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs) to investigate all the bank robberies since the Stockholm Congress. “Stalin was very reserved during that meeting, mostly silent, keeping himself in the shadows,” noticed Devdariani, his Menshevik friend. Trotsky later understood that Stalin was preoccupied with his bank robberies in May 1907: “Why did he bother to come to London? He must have had other tasks.”

Outside, “Curious Englishmen gathered and just stared at us as if we were animals from faraway lands!” The press besieged the building while the early versions of paparazzi pushily photographed the shy revolutionaries, who begged them to desist. RUSSIAN REVOLUTIONISTS AFRAID OF CAMERA: headlined the Daily Express. “Do you realize that the reproduction of those portraits could mean death?” one Russian told the newspaper, not realizing that all the precautions were irrelevant.

The spooks were already inside the church. The Russian secret police—then as now—was irritated by the English tendency to grant asylum to Russian dissidents. “Because of London’s liberalism, it’ll be impossible to count on co-operation of local police forces,” complained A. M. Garting, the director of the Okhrana Foreign Agency, based in Paris. Two agents followed the revolutionaries to England. Special Branch and the Russian secret policemen lurked in the street to the delight of the press, but the Okhrana did not need outside help—their double-agent Yakov Zhitomirsky, who received 2,000 francs a month, was one of two traitors inside the Congress. In the Okhrana archives, we find the speeches reported as tediously as in the official protocols.

Lenin was at his best in London. Inside the church, the delegates ate during sessions, but funds were dwindling. Lenin worried that his Bolsheviks were not eating enough, so he arranged for Gorky’s mistress to distribute beer and sandwiches.

After sessions, Lenin chatted to delegates on the grass in the sunshine of Hyde Park, lectured them on English pronunciation, laughed with them unaffectedly, gave them tips on cheap accommodation and took them to his favourite pub, the Crown and Woolpack in Finsbury, where a Special Branch detective was said to have hidden in a cupboard to eavesdrop though he spoke no Russian. On 13 May, Stalin may have attended his only Chelsea soiree. In an early case of radical chic, the artist Felix Moscheles invited the Marxists to a reception filled with guests in evening dress at his house at 123 Old Church Street. There Ramsay MacDonald toasted the Russians; Plekhanov and Lenin responded. Their hosts expressed surprise that they were not kitted out in white tie.

Stalin was not in Chelsea most nights—he spent more of his time on the rough side of town. His experience was surely like that of Maisky: “I tramped along dreary streets, feebly lit by antiquated gas-lamps, crossed deserted