bridges, seeing glimpses of dark shadowy canals beneath. I saw London’s belly and heard the calls of prostitutes and brazen laughter of their drunken escorts. I nearly fell over homeless creatures sleeping on the steps of closed shops.” At some point, in a pub, Stalin was almost beaten up by East End dockers. Litvinov supposedly rescued him. According to his daughter, Litvinov joked that this was the only reason Stalin later spared him, saying, “I haven’t forgotten that time in London.”
Back in Stepney, Mister Ivanovich (a.k.a. Stalin), who wore a tunic-style jacket, baggy trousers and high boots, spent much time in his room reading, but he also employed a youth named Arthur Bacon to run errands. “Stalin wrote a letter to someone a street or so away,” recalled Bacon in an interview after the Second World War, “and wanted it taken round by hand. He couldn’t write English so the cobbler’s wife addressed the envelope.” Bacon was usually paid a halfpenny per errand, but Stalin gave him two bob: “That was money then, you know,” said Bacon. Stalin, either generous or ignorant, had paid him 4,800 percent above the going rate. “His favourite treat was toffee,” added Bacon. “I bought him some every day.”
While Stalin was living in East End penury, he probably saw little of London. The Bolsheviks were so politically obsessed and culturally parochial, they scarcely noticed either natural or cultural landmarks. To admire a city, wrote Trotsky, “you have to expend too much of yourself. I had my own sphere of activity which brooked no rival: Revolution.” Soso was the same. He hardly had any money, but during the Second World War he confided in one of his young diplomats, Andrei Gromyko, later Soviet Foreign Minister and President, that he had spent his time “in churches listening to the sermons—the best way to learn English.” Despatching Gromyko as Ambassador to Washington, he suggested he do the same.
Meanwhile the Congress had run out of cash to pay the sixty-five roubles for each delegate to get home. Something had to be done. The Russian-Jewish socialist Fyodor Rothstein, who had helped organize the Congress, appealed to the leftist journalist H. N. Brailsford of the
“Before I decide,” replied the soap baron, “I want to see these people.” Brailsford and Lansbury took Fels to the Brotherhood Church to watch a session. “How young they all are, how absorbed!” exclaimed the Philadel-phian, who offered the Party ?1,700. Fels’s loan agreement stipulated, “We, the undersigned delegates” must repay him by 1 January 1908. Fels insisted it be signed by every delegate. Lenin agreed but then ordered the revolutionaries to use only aliases. They duly signed this extraordinary document in English, Russian or Georgian. Lenin probably just signed “Vladimir.” It is believed Stalin used a favoured alias: “Vasily from Baku.” Fels died before Lenin came to power, but his heirs were repaid in 1917.
When Churchill[86] met Stalin for the first time in 1942, they bonded, after a frosty start, in a nocturnal Kremlin drinking marathon at which the Prime Minister asked about this London visit.
“Lenin, Plekhanov, Gorky and others were there,” Stalin answered.
“Trotsky?” asked Churchill about the enemy whom Stalin had had assassinated two years earlier.
“Yes, he was there,” replied Stalin, “but went away a disappointed man not having been given any organization to represent such as the Battle Squads which Trotsky hoped for…” Even thirty years later and after murdering his great enemy, Stalin was still proud that he had commanded Battle Squads while the celebrated War Commissar Trotsky had not.
“The London Congress is over,” reported “Koba Ivanovich,” Stalin’s latest pseudonym, in the
However Stalin and Shaumian remained in London to nurse Tskhakaya, who had fallen sick. “I had a temperature of 39 or even more,” recounts Tskhakaya, so Stalin and Shaumian stayed on “to care for me because we all lived in one room.”
There is a legend among Welsh Communists that, after the Congress, Stalin forsook his nursing duties to visit the miners of the Valleys: after all, his 1905 stronghold, Chiatura, was a mining town. But despite a miraculous blossoming of sightings of “Stalin in Wales” among the Communists of the Rhondda during the Second World War, there is not the slightest evidence that he visited Wales.[87] Besides, he had not yet invented the name “Stalin.” But he was also supposedly spotted on the docks of Liverpool, a Scouse version of his encounter with the London dockers. Sadly, “Stalin in Liverpool” belongs with “Stalin in Wales” in that fabulous realm of urban mythology, regional aspirational fantasia and leftist personality cult. {177}
After about three weeks in London, Soso spent a week in Paris. Then, borrowing the papers of a just- deceased Georgian, Simon Jvelaya, he arrived home in Tiflis on the eve of the big bank robbery.{178}
20. Kamo Goes Insane: The Game of Bandits and Cossacks
On 10 May 1907, Kamo was setting the fuse on one of Krasin’s bombs when it exploded in his face. He almost lost an eye, but he managed to get secret treatment and recover sufficiently to lead the Outfit on the big day that was getting closer. The other gangsters missed their arrested chief, Tsintsadze, considering Kamo a self- promoting attention-seeker. “Kamo was very pleased with himself,” said Kupriashvili, “showing off his value to important comrades and bragging.”
Stalin got home by 4 June, just after Nicholas II’s energetic Premier, Peter Stolypin, launched his reactionary coup, resetting the Duma election rules to ensure a conservative majority and intensifying his harsh crackdown on the revolutionaries. Many were arrested, many deported to Siberia in prison-trains dubbed “Stolypin carriages,” and so many hanged that the noose was nicknamed “Stolypin’s necktie.” There had been 86,000 political prisoners in 1905; by 1909 there were 170,000.
Kamo gathered a large team of Georgia’s finest hoodlums and bank robbers, including the core of the Outfit and the five female shooters. They lived and waited in a small communal apartment while Kamo himself rented a grand residence, “living under cover as a prince.” The Okhrana believed there were about sixty brigands involved in the heist, so it is likely that the Bolsheviks recruited help from the SRs and other top triggermen: the terrorists often cooperated, most recently when Krasin provided the SRs with the bombs to dynamite Premier Stolypin’s home. If the SRs hoped for a cut of the booty, they were to be disappointed.
Stalin informed the Bolshevik Tiflis Committee of Lenin’s orders given to him in Berlin; they approved the operation. He must have expected local outrage and international scandal: Kamo and the gunmen resigned temporarily from the Party, on Lenin’s suggestion, thus technically liberating themselves from the London resolution. Stalin and Shaumian planned to move to Baku directly afterwards. The Bolsheviks were finished in Georgia, with as few as 500 supporters. Soso was consciously burning his Georgian bridges and starting afresh in a more ambitious enviroment.[88]
Early on 13 June, Kamo confirmed to Stalin and Shaumian that the heist would take place that day. The gangsters waited at the Tilipuchuri Tavern, where Stalin was supposedly seen early that morning.[89] Somewhere before 10 a.m., rigged up in his officer’s uniform, swashbuckling his Circassian sabre, Kamo rode out into Yerevan Square; the gangster boys and girls took up their positions. It was a warm summer’s day.
When the bombs shook the city, Kato Svanidze Djugashvili was cuddling Stalin’s three-month-old baby, Laddie, on the balcony beside her sister, Sashiko. “We rushed inside, absolutely terrified,” says Sashiko Svanidze. For the rest of the day, the wounded were treated in makeshift surgeries. Cossacks and Gendarmes galloped through the city, raiding houses, cordoning off boroughs and blocks in the hope of recovering the money before it left Tiflis.
“That night,” reports Sashiko, “Soso came home and told us that Kamo and his gang had done it, stealing 250,000 roubles for the Party.” He must have told the sisters about Kamo’s playacting because they realized why he had just borrowed their father’s sword. The Svanidze memoirs show that, far from being innocently oblivious of Stalin’s double life, Kato was perfectly aware that she was married to the godfather of bank robberies in the Caucasus. But Stalin suddenly informed the family that his wife and baby were to leave imminently for Baku. The
