Svanidzes did not approve. They must have felt strongly, because even in the 1930s the family dared criticize Stalin for taking her on the thirteen-hour train ride “in such a hot summer” and with a baby. But it was to no avail: “Soso left for Baku and took Kato,” grabbing 15,000 roubles for his future plans.
Kamo lay low. Before leaving, he graciously offered Stalin’s “inside man” 10,000 roubles for his help. Voznesensky graciously accepted 5,000.
Now things again started to go wrong. The police announced that 100,000 roubles in 500 denomination notes were marked. Some gangsters wanted to burn the notes. Kamo refused. The rest of the cash was in smaller denominations.
All the hoodlums wanted to meet Lenin, but Kamo’s eye needed foreign treatment, so it was he, bearing most of the money, who took the train via Baku to Lenin in Finland. Prince Koki Dadiani, whose family had once ruled Mingrelia, again lent Kamo his passport. Adding a new layer to this favourite disguise, Kamo now posed as the Prince accompanied by his new young bride (one of the female gangsters, ironically, but usefully, a policeman’s daughter) on the day after his wedding. The Outfit’s girls were already experienced in hiding money and dynamite on their persons: the dynamite gave off a harsh acidic stench especially when strapped to a sweating body, so the ladies had to douse themselves in scent. Money was easier, the swag travelled in the bride’s lingerie and clothes. Venal policemen had probably been bribed to turn a blind eye.
Kamo delivered the equivalent of around ?1.7 million ($3.4 million) in today’s money to Lenin, enough to fund the faction for some time. Kamo spent the summer with his hero, planning a giant “spectacular.” But the reaction soon caught up with Lenin, who fled to Geneva, where “the Swiss burghers,” writes Krupskaya, “were frightened to death… and could talk of nothing except the Russian expropriations.” “Georgia” became a byword for gangsterism: when Tskhakaya visited them in a
This was far from the end of the story: the Tiflis bank robbery made Kamo a legend,[90] but its repercussions would help shatter the Party and were still threatening to damage Stalin as late as 1918.{179}
As in every successful criminal enterprise, the hoodlums were soon fighting over the spoils. The police had published the serial numbers of 100,000 roubles of the notes. They would be very hard to cash, but Krasin’s Technical Group forger, known as Fat Fanny, changed some of the numbers on the notes. Lenin and Krasin decided to proceed, particularly since the rest of the heist-money was clean. The money was instantly smuggled abroad. Some was laundered through the Credit Lyonnais Bank. Litvinov distributed the cash to his operatives to change the money in different cities.
Meanwhile the secret police frantically pulled out the stops to catch the culprits, but they could discover nothing concrete. Their Tiflis informers, particularly one code-named “the Fat Lady,” revealed that SR gunmen had participated but had been robbed of their share of the spoils.
Their first suspect was the
The Okhrana knew that “Kamo sent all the money to Krasin and Lenin,” but now the revolutionaries started to fall out. Lenin cashed at least 140,000 roubles from the proceeds of Kamo’s robbery. But in 1908 he embarked on a vicious if esoteric feud that would again tear the Party in half. He broke with Bogdanov and Krasin,[91] who purloined about 40,000 roubles of the Tiflis money for themselves. Litvinov sent “two Georgian terrorists” to tell them that if they did not return it fast, the Georgians would “bump off” one of the Central Committee.
Lenin was soon short of money again. Bank robberies were not his only dubious source of funding. He ordered a pair of roguish Bolshevik con men to seduce two unprepossessing sisters who had inherited the huge fortune of their uncle, Schmidt, the late industrialist. The double seductions were successful, though Lenin admitted that he would not have been able to do it himself. One of the seducers, Victor Taratuta, stole considerable sums of the inheritance to spend on high living before passing on the remainder to Lenin.
Kamo, now in Berlin, decided to help out by pulling off the biggest bank robbery of all, a 15-million-rouble heist “that would fund the Party for six years but cost at least 200 lives.” Hoarding stocks of dynamite and using a passport in the name of Mirsky, an insurance agent, he travelled in August to Berlin to procure explosives. But Lenin’s man in Berlin was Dr. Zhitomirsky, the double-agent who had informed the Okhrana about the London Congress. Zhitomirsky now betrayed Kamo.
On 27 October/9 November 1907, the German police raided Kamo’s hotel room and found numbered banknotes and 200 dynamite fuses, twelve fulminates of mercury and twenty electric batteries. The Okhrana were excited but they still did not know the identity of “Mirsky.” On 31 October/13 November, Garting, director of the Tsar’s Foreign Intelligence Service, announced triumphantly that “Mirsky” was planning a “vast heist” and that he had some of the Tiflis banknotes, but there was no proof of his participation in the actual outrage. The Okhrana still believed that Davrichewy was “Kamo.” So who was “Mirsky”?
Finally the Okhrana got lucky. On 1 March 1908, a former Bolshevik brigand in Kutaisi Prison, Arsen Karsidze, revealed that the chief bank robber was Simon Ter-Petrossian, known as Kamo, now held as “Mirsky” at Berlin’s Alt-Moabit Prison. Another report confirmed that Davrichewy was in exile in Switzerland and was not Kamo after all.
The Tsar’s government applied to extradite Kamo, who would face the death penalty. Krasin rushed to Berlin to orchestrate his defence and hired the German leftist attorney Oscar Kohn. Krasin advised Kamo to feign insanity, a role he was more qualified to play than most.
Kamo started to act like a madman in a way that only someone who had truly cracked could. He managed to maintain it for two whole years. First he started to bawl, cry, tear his clothes, beat the jailers. They moved him to a frozen dungeon where he was kept nude for nine days. He apparently did not sleep and spent the nights standing up for four months. Then he stopped eating; they force-fed him by tube. He pulled the hairs out of his head; tried to hang himself but was cut down; slit his wrists but was resuscitated. In May 1908, they moved him to Berlin’s Bukh psychiatric hospital for diagnosis. He copied other patients and adopted that great cliche of madness: he pretended to be Napoleon. The doctors were still sceptical and decided to put him through a series of torments that would have broken anyone else. He was burned by a red-hot iron and needles were driven under his nails, but he withstood it all. At last the Germans accepted that he was insane and, washing their hands of the troublesome loon, handed him over to the Russians, who, regardless, put him on trial for the Tiflis “outrage” and its fifty casualties. In court, the shambling, raving Kamo suddenly pulled a bird, Petka the greenfinch, out of his sleeve during the trial and talked crazily to his avian friend instead of the lawyers.
Premier Stolypin and the viceroy, Vorontsov-Dashkov, were determined to hang him. But his lawyer, Kohn, orchestrated such a successful European publicity campaign against the execution of a lunatic that Stolypin reluctantly decided that hanging would “unfavourably affect Russian interests.”
In tests, the Russian doctors found that Kamo’s skin did not register pain. They stuck more needles under his fingernails, then electrocuted him. “The burned flesh,” Kamo mused, “stung terribly.” Those doctors too were convinced.
In September 1910, Kamo was declared insane and locked up forever in the Metekhi Fortress’s unit for the criminally insane. The Bolsheviks acclaimed Kamo’s heroism, but one doctor explained that “only a terribly ill patient in a state of madness behaves this way.” Kamo, writes the historian Anna Geifman, was a creature of “unresolved passions and anxieties… unable to function normally… Feigning insanity, he actually was insane.”
Meanwhile the police tracked the marked banknotes which started turning up all over Europe. In Paris Litvinov found a detective under his hotel bed: he was arrested with twelve marked banknotes but was deported to London. Krasin was picked up in Finland. Other moneychangers were arrested in Munich, Zurich, Paris, Berlin and Stockholm.
“The Mensheviks did not get a penny [of the Tiflis heist cash],” reported the gleeful Okhrana, so “they demand on the basis of the resolutions of the London Congress to expel all these expropriators from the Party.”
Stalin was in trouble.{180}
The outraged Mensheviks commissioned three different committees, operating over two years, to investigate who had organized the Tiflis bank robbery, one headed by Jordania in Tiflis, a second by Jibladze in Baku, and a third abroad, under Chicherin. The murderous heists damaged their reputation, but they also wanted to destroy
