Lenin, using Stalin and Kamo.
The Mensheviks managed to interrogate virtually all the key culprits, including Stalin himself, interviewed as “Comrade Koba” in Baku. Astonishingly, this survives in the archives, the first direct evidence of his involvement. The “inside men,” Kasradze and Voznesensky, admitted everything, blaming Stalin. Lenin asserted his own innocence to Chicherin, since the heists “had been carried out by non-Party members.” The Committees in Tiflis and Baku, according to Arsenidze and Uratadze, voted to expel Stalin. But the Party was already split, hence it is questionable if the Mensheviks had the power to expel a Bolshevik.
They nonetheless collected the evidence against Stalin to confront Lenin. In August 1908, they met in Geneva, where Martov lambasted Lenin. Noe Ramishvili named names—including the usual suspects Kamo and Tsintsadze—then declared that “all of these acted under the direction of Comrade Koba.”
Lenin jumped up to interrupt. “Don’t give the family name of this last,” he snapped.
“I won’t,” smiled Ramishvili, “because we all know that he’s well known as the Caucasian Lenin.” Stalin would have been proud.
“You take responsibility that these names won’t be divulged to the police?” insisted Lenin. The secrecy of Stalin’s meetings with Lenin had paid off: the Mensheviks could nail Stalin but could not implicate Lenin. But if any proof were needed of their relationship as early as 1907–8, Lenin’s protection of Stalin provides it.
It seems that Stalin was expelled, though surely not by the Central Committee but locally, in Tiflis and Baku. If proven, even this would have been a real blot on his revolutionary legitimacy.
When the Bolsheviks came to power with Stalin as one of Lenin’s closest henchmen, the Mensheviks tried to undermine them by resuscitating the whole affair. Martov published an article in 1918 that listed three examples of Stalin’s banditry—the Tiflis heist, the murder of a Baku worker, and the piratical holdup of another ship called the
Stalin neither denied nor admitted his role in the heists, but insisted, “Never in my life was I tried before any Party organization and expelled,” which was probably literally true because the Committees in Tiflis and Baku were Menshevik, not Bolshevik, and any expulsion was informal. Witnesses were going to be summoned to Moscow, but it was hard to do so during the Civil War. The trial was cancelled, and Martov reprimanded, but Stalin had made his point.
“You’re a wretched individual,” he snarled at Martov, who went into exile. [92] When Stalin returned to Tiflis in 1921 as a conquering Bolshevik, he was booed at a meeting and openly called a “bandit” to his face: he stormed out. Stalin’s brigandage and expulsion were never mentioned again during his reign.
Most important, Lenin did not take Stalin’s local expulsions seriously: “Such expulsions are almost always based on errors, unverified reports or misunderstandings…” Of course he knew more about it than he let on, but he increasingly recognized that Stalin, terrorist, gangster and covert organizer, had the “right stuff.”{181}
The uproar about the Georgian job had been spectactular, but the heists were not over yet. The game of “bandits and Cossacks” was rougher still in Baku, where the stakes were much higher than in Tiflis. They proved too high for Kato.
21. The Tragedy of Kato: Stalin’s Stony Heart
Stalin settled Kato and Laddie, their baby, in the apartment of an oil worker and plunged himself into a life of banditry, espionage, extortion and agitation, the murkiest years of his entire career. Probably again on the Rothschild payroll, he soon moved his little family outside Baku city into a “Tartar house with a low ceiling on the Bailov Peninsula which he rented from its Turkish owner,” just above a cave, right on the seaside.
Kato, a born homemaker, made the shack cosy, with a wooden bed, curtains and her little sewing-machine in the corner. Visitors noticed the contrast between the sordid exterior and the tidiness inside—but Soso was not often there. Kato did not know many people, but Sergei Alliluyev visited them. He was now the manager of the local power plant and lived with Olga and the children in a villa by the sea. It was here in Baku that their youngest daughter, Nadezhda, wearing a pretty white dress, fell over the edge of their sunny yard into the Caspian Sea. Stalin jumped in and rescued her, a romantic tale, often retold as she grew up.
Always dressed in his trademark black fedora, Stalin gave a speech on 17 June 1907, the very day he arrived, and threw himself into his editing of the two Bolshevik newspapers,
Everywhere in Russia, “The reaction had triumphed, all liberties destroyed and revolutionary parties smashed,” recalls Tatiana Vulikh, but Baku, ruled as much by the oil companies and corrupt policemen as by the Tsar’s governors, followed its own rules. Stalin was on the run in Tiflis, but for a few months before Stolypin’s next crackdown he could stroll the Baku streets. Tiflis, said Stalin contemptuously, had been a parochial “marsh” but Baku “was one of the revolutionary centres of Russia,” its oil vital to the Tsar and the West, its workers a true proletariat, its streets violent and lawless. Baku, wrote Stalin, “would be my second baptism of fire.”{182}
Baku was a city of “debauchery, despotism and extravagance,” and a twilight zone of “smoke and gloom.” Its own governor called it “the most dangerous place in Russia.” For Stalin, it was the “Oil Kingdom.”
Baku was created by one dynasty. Swedish by origin, Russian by opportunity and international by instinct, the Nobels made their first fortune selling land mines to Tsar Nicholas I, but in 1879, the year of Baku’s first “fountain” of oil, the brothers Ludwig and Robert Nobel founded the Nobel Brothers Oil Company in the town known mainly for the ancient Zoroastrian temple where Magi priests tended their holy oil-fuelled flames.[93] The drilling had already started; entrepreneurs struck oil in spectacular gushers.
The Nobels started to buy up land particularly in what became the Black City. Another brother, Alfred, invented dynamite, but Ludwig’s invention of the oil tanker was almost as important. The French Rothschilds followed the Nobels into Baku. By the 1880s, Baron Alphonse de Rothschild’s Caspian Black Sea Oil Company was the second biggest producer—and its workers lived in the industrial township called the White City.[94] By 1901, Baku produced half the world’s oil—and the Nobel Prize, established that year, was funded on its profits.
Its oil boom, like the Kimberley Diamond Fever or the California Gold Rush, turned peasants into millionaires overnight. A dusty, windy ex-Persian town, built on the edge of the Caspian around the walls and winding streets of a medieval fortress, was transformed into one of the most famous cities in the world.
Its “barbaric luxury” filled the newspapers of Europe, scintillated by instant riches, remarkable philanthropy and preposterous vulgarity. Every oil baron had to have a palace, many as big as a city block. Even the Rothschilds built one. The Nobels’ palace was called Villa Petrolea, and was surrounded by a lush park. One oil baron insisted on building his palace out of gold but had to agree to cover it with goldplate because the gold would melt; another built his mansion like the body of a giant dragon with the entrance through its jaws; a third created his vast palace in the shape of a pack of cards emblazoned in golden letters: “Here live I, Isa-Bey of Gandji.” A popular singer made his fortune when a performance was rewarded by some land on which oil was struck: his neo-classical palace is now the headquarters of Azerbaijan’s state oil company.
Baku was a melting-pot of pitiful poverty and incredible wealth, its streets, observes Anna Alliluyeva, full of “red-bearded Muslims… street porters called
