gun-toting bodyguards.
Yet the source of all this money, the derricks and the refineries, poisoned the city and corrupted the people. “The oil seeped everywhere,” says Anna Alliluyeva. “Trees couldn’t grow in this poisonous atmosphere.” Sometimes it bubbled out of the sea and ignited, creating extraordinary waves of fire.
The Black and White Cities and other oil townships were polluted slums. The 48,000 workers toiled in terrible conditions, living and fighting each other in grimy streets “littered with decaying rubbish, disembowelled dogs, rotten meat, faeces.” Their homes resembled “prehistoric dwellings.” Life expectancy was just thirty. The oilfields seethed with “lawlessness, organized crime and xenophobia. Physical violence, rapes and bloodfeuds dominated workers’ everyday lives.”
Baku, states Stalin, was “irrepressible,” its rootless proletariat ideal for the Bolsheviks. It was especially corrupt; its moral ambiguities and duplicitious opportunities suited Stalin’s conspiratorial cynicism. It was said that there were only ten honest men in the entire city (a Swede—Mr. Nobel, of course—an Armenian and eight Tartars).
“Equal parts Dodge City, medieval Baghdad, industrial Pittsburgh and nineteenth-century Paris,” Baku “was too Persian to be European but much too European to be Persian.” Its police chiefs were notoriously venal; its Armenians and Azeris armed and vigilant; its plentiful gunmen, the
In Baku, brashly taking on oil barons, and Menshevik and Bolshevik “rightists,” Stalin prospered to become the revolutionary and criminal kingpin of the Oil Kingdom. It was through Baku[95] that he, belatedly, found a national Russian role, graduating from “an apprentice to a craftsman of the Revolution.” Here he became the “second Lenin.”{183}
In August 1907, when poor Kato was suffering grievously from the stifling, polluted heat of Baku, Stalin returned to Germany to attend the Congress of the Second International in Stuttgart. He met up with Alyosha Svanidze, still studying at Leipzig. Soso and his brother-in-law, writes Monoselidze, “went sightseeing, visiting meetings of German workers in restaurants, and cafes.”
The Germans “are a queer people like sheep,” Stalin later told the Yugoslav leader Milovan Djilas (he told Churchill the same story). “Wherever the ram went, they just followed.” On the way to the conference, some German Communists felt unable to leave the station because there was no ticket-collector. They were so obedient to the rules that, Stalin said, “They actually missed the meeting for which they’d made the entire trip.” He joked that a Russian comrade had shown them a “simple solution: leave the platform without handing in the tickets!”{184}
Soso was back in Baku in time for another outbreak of ethnic turbulence. On 19 September, an Azeri worker named Khanlar was murdered by Russian nationalists. In protest the workers went on strike. Stalin spoke at the funeral demonstration.
At a meeting soon afterwards, he and the Bolsheviks routed the Mensheviks and took control of the local organization: Baku became a Bolshevik city. Soso concentrated on his work, but, Monoselidze notes, “when he was involved, he forgot everything”—including Kato.
“Soso loved her so much,” says Elisabedashvili, who joined him in Baku. “Wife, child, friend were only okay if they didn’t hinder his work and saw things his way. You had to know Soso to understand his love.”
“It was too hot in Baku” for Kato. “Soso would go early in the morning and return late at night while Kato sat at home with a tiny baby terrified that he would be arrested,” remembers Monoselidze. “Bad diet, little sleep, the heat and stress weakened her and she fell ill. Surrounded by strangers, she had no friends around her. Soso was so busy he forgot his family!”
Stalin knew he was being a neglectful husband and father, but, like many who have suffered broken families, he could not change his behaviour. He must have talked about it with Elisabedashvili: “Soso regretted it and was angry at himself for having married in such circumstances.”
Kato “prayed that Koba would turn away from his ideas and return to a peaceful homelife.” But he had chosen a mission that in many ways let him off the normal responsibilities of a family man. Bolshevik wives knew this. “Am I a martyr?” Spandarian’s much cuckolded wife, Olga, asked of her marriage to Stalin’s friend—but she might have been describing Stalin too. “I make as much as I can of my life. My path is not covered with roses but I chose it… He’s not for family life but that doesn’t diminish his character. He carries out his mission… It’s possible to love a man and forgive him everything for the sake of the good he has inside.” Kato knew that Stalin, like Spandarian, had “sworn to remain for ever a true Knight of the Grail” of Marxism. [96]
The Svanidzes in Tiflis heard first that Kato “was very thin,” recalls her sister Sashiko, who invited her to recuperate in their home village.
“How can I leave Soso?” replied Kato.
Soon the Svanidzes heard from Elisabedashvili that “she was sick and they wrote to ask Soso to bring her back.” Kato begged him. Now she was really ill, “but he kept postponing the trip until she became weak and suddenly he realized he had to act immediately.” In October, Stalin was sufficiently alarmed to escort her back to Tiflis. But the journey itself, more than thirteen hours, was debilitating: “It was too hot on the way and she drank bad water at a station.” Afterwards, Soso hastened back to Baku, leaving her with her family.
Back at home, she deteriorated. Already weak, exhausted and malnourished, she had contracted typhus, which is usually accompanied by a fever and diarrhoea. Its speckled rash showed first red and then darkened ominously. Historians usually diagnose her illness as tuberculosis, but if so it had infected her innards. Family and friends, whose memoirs were not available to previous historians, agree on a diagnosis of typhus along with haemorrhagic colitis. Kato haemorrhaged blood and fluid in miserable spasms of dysentery.
Stalin rushed back again from Baku to find the mother of his Laddie dying. He “nursed her desperately and tenderly, suffering himself,” but it was too late. She supposedly called for a priest to give her final sacraments and Stalin promised her an Orthodox burial. Two weeks after her return home, on 22 November 1907, Kato, aged just twenty-two, “died in his arms.”[97] Stalin was poleaxed.{185}
22. Boss of the Black City: Plutocrats, Protection-Rackets and Piracy
Soso closed Kato’s eyes himself. Stunned, he managed to stand beside his wife’s body with the family for a photograph but then collapsed. “Nobody could believe Soso was so wounded,” wrote Elisabedashvili. He sobbed that “he couldn’t manage to make her happy.”
Soso was in such despair that his friends were worried about leaving him with his Mauser. “I was so overcome with grief that my comrades took my gun away from me,” he later told a girlfriend. “I realized how many things in life I hadn’t appreciated. While my wife was alive, there were times I didn’t return home at night. I told her when I left not to worry about me but when I got home, she’d be sitting there. She’d wait up all night.”[98]
The death was announced in
At the burial, Soso’s habitual control cracked. He threw himself into the grave with the coffin. The men had to haul him out. Kato was buried—but, just then, revolutionary
