graveyard and vaulted over the fence, disappearing from his own wife’s funeral—an ironic comment on his marital negligence.
For two months, Stalin vanishes from the record. “Soso sank into deep grief,” says Monoselidze. “He barely spoke and nobody dared speak to him. All the time he blamed himself for not accepting our advice and for taking her to Baku in the heat.” Perhaps sensing the subdued anger in the Svanidze household, Soso went home to his mother in Gori to grieve. When he met one of his school friends, “He cried like a brat, hard as he was.”
“My personal life is shattered,” sobbed Stalin. “Nothing attaches me to life except socialism. I’m going to dedicate my existence to that!” This was the sort of rationalization that he would use to explain ever more unspeakable tragedies which he himself arranged for his family and friends. In old age, he talked wistfully and tenderly about his Kato. He paid her a characteristic compliment. He signed his first articles in tribute to his father (“Besoshvili”), but now he chose a new byline: “K. Kato” (Koba Kato).
Even though his son was in Tiflis, he had no intention of moving back to that parochial “marsh” where he was already a political outcast. So he abandoned his son for more than ten years.
“Kato died,” says Monoselidze, “leaving eight-month-old Laddie to us.” Kato’s mother, Sepora, and the Monoselidzes raised the baby, whom Stalin barely even visited. Perhaps Laddie reminded him of the entire disaster.
This was not the Georgian way. The family, while awed by his conspiratorial competence, were appalled. In their memoirs, the Svanidzes and Elisabedashvili, writing thirty years later during Stalin’s dictatorship, though before the Terror, courageously recorded their disapproval of his behaviour, making it clear they continued to blame his neglect for Kato’s death.
“After that,” Monoselidze concludes tellingly, “Soso went to Baku and I didn’t see him until 1912, though we got a letter from exile asking for some wine and jam.”{186}
When Stalin emerged from mourning at the end of 1907, he joined decadent Spandarian for a New Year’s Eve dinner in a Baku restaurant. He was among old friends in the revolutionary capital of the Empire. The Bolsheviks there formed a cast reunion of Stalin’s career so far: as the Bolsheviks dwindled in Russia itself, Russian and Caucasian revolutionaries flooded into Baku, often interfering with Stalin’s work. [100] It was probably quite a party because Spandarian, who was “very close to Stalin in moral character,” was also “an incredibly lazy and sybaritic ladies’ man and lover of money.” Spandarian’s womanizing did not worry his wife, Olga, who said, “Suren never swore to be faithful to me, only to remain for ever the Knight of the Idea” of Bolshevism. But the Bolshevik playboy certainly shocked his comrades. “All the children in Baku,” recalls Tatiana Vulikh, “who are up to three years old look like Spandarian!”
Soso threw himself into his work again, reassembling the Outfit. He and Spandarian immediately started to push for more radical strikes and agitation, calling on the often illiterate Azeri and Persian workers to support them. Most intellectuals were too snobbish to bother with these illiterates, but Soso packed meetings with the Muslims, who voted for him en masse. One of his important contributions was to promote and work with the radicals of Himmat (Energy), a Muslim Bolshevik group. The Muslims often hid Stalin in mosques when he was on the run. In a row with Mensheviks, one of Stalin’s Muslim allies drew a dagger on Devdariani.
Through these Muslim connections, Stalin helped arm the Persian Revolution. He sent fighters and arms under Sergo to overthrow the Shah of Persia, Mohammed Ali, whom his Bolsheviks tried to assassinate. Stalin even crossed the border to Persia himself to organize his partisans, visiting Resht: the 1943 Teheran Conference was not his first time in Iran.
Shaumian was rattled by the crushing success of the Tsar’s backlash. He and Yenukidze, who had just returned from exile, took a more “rightist” moderate approach than Stalin, but could not break his dominance. Shaumian urged restraint. Stalin mocked his privileged existence, intriguing against him with his “closest friend and right-hand man, Spandarian.” After Stalin’s death, it was said he feuded with Shaumian, but this tension has been exaggerated. They worked well together—with mutual suspicion.{187}
Soon after his return, Stalin left on a secret trip to visit Lenin, who had now settled in Geneva. We know they met sometime in 1908, we know Stalin went to Switzerland. Stalin himself mentioned such a meeting in his reminiscences. He also met Plekhanov, who “exasperated” him. Stalin “was convinced he was a congenital aristocrat.” What really turned him against the sage was the fact that “Plekhanov’s daughter had aristocratic manners, dressed in the latest fashions, and wore boots with high heels!” Stalin was already at least partly a sanctimonious ascetic.{188}
Stalin and Lenin would have discussed money. Lenin was duelling with the Mensheviks while pursuing the fissiparous feud against Bogdanov and Krasin, who had stolen much of his Tiflis-heist booty, which in turn was being vigorously pursued by the European police. Thus the organization, now battered within by Lenin’s schisms and without by Stolypin’s victorious repression, was, explains Vulikh, “desperate for money.”
Sure enough, says Kavtaradze, Stalin’s henchman in Baku, “It was decided once again to get cash for the Party.” When the “chief financier of the Bolshevik Centre” heard the word “money,” he reached for his Mauser.
“In Baku,” says Sagirashvili, who was there too, “Koba was on the lookout for the criminal types, the ‘hotheads’ as he called them, the cutthroats. In America, such men would be gangsters,” but Stalin surrounded them “with the aura of revolutionary fighters.” Stalin “suggested organizing the Bolshevik Battle Squad.” Tsintsadze, Kupriashvili and some new faces joined Stalin’s Outfit of so-called Mauserists.
Kavtaradze assisted Soso with the planning under the aegis of his portentously named Self-Defence Headquarters. Stalin’s other sidekick was a red-haired lawyer, born in Odessa, son of a well-off Baku family with noble Polish antecedents: Andrei Vyshinsky, now twenty-three, a Menshevik, had given up the law, organized terrorist gangs and become a hit man in 1905. But Stalin, perhaps recognizing a usefully ruthless young rogue, relaxed his anti-Menshevik rigour. He commissioned Vyshinsky to procure arms and bombs.
“Politics is a dirty business,” Stalin said later. “We all did dirty work for the Revolution.” Stalin became the effective godfather of a small but useful fund-raising operation that really resembled a moderately successful Mafia family, conducting shakedowns, currency counterfeiting, extortion, bank robberies, piracy and protection-rackets— as well as political agitation and journalism.
Stalin’s aim, says one of his Mauserists, Ivan Bokov,[101] was “to threaten the oil tycoons and Black Hundreds [the right-wing Russian nationalists who had their own armed groups].” He ordered the Mauserists to murder many of the Black Hundreds, according to Bokov. Then the Outfit planned to rob the Baku State Bank. Kavtaradze explains that “we learned that 4 million roubles for the Turkestan Region were being transported by ship via Baku and the Caspian Sea. Therefore at the start of 1908 we started to assemble in Baku.” They would take the captain hostage—echoes of the
An act of piracy took place on a ship named the
Next, “Stalin thought up the idea” to raid the Baku naval arsenal. As ever, “He took the initiative to make us the [inside] connections with naval people,” reminisced his gunman Bokov. “We organized a gang of comrades… and raided the arsenal,” killing some of the guards. But Soso was also raising money day to day through “contributions from industrialists.”
Many tycoons and middle-class professionals were sympathetic contributors to the Bolsheviks. Berta Nussimbaum, wife of an oil baron and mother of the writer Essad Bey, was a Bolshevik sympathizer. “My mother,” Essad Bey says, “financed Stalin’s illicit communist press with her diamonds.” It remains astonishing how the Rothschilds and other oil barons, among the richest tycoons in Europe, funded the Bolsheviks, who would ultimately destroy their interests. Alliluyev remembered these Rothschild contributions.
The Rothschild managing director, David Landau, regularly contributed to Bolshevik funds, as recorded by the Okhrana—whose agents noted how, when Stalin was running the Baku Party, a Bolshevik clerk in one of the oil companies “was not active in operations but concentrated on collecting donations and got money from Landau of
