not there for very long, but the relationship must have been intense because she hung around in godforsaken Solvychegodsk for no good reason—and then followed him back to the Caucasus.
Exiles were isolated from Party politics abroad, but they caught up on the latest schisms from battered back copies of journals that arrived from family and friends. Stalin was irritated by Lenin’s feud with Bogdanov. “How do you like Bogdanov’s new book?” Soso asked his friend Malakia Toroshelidze, in Geneva. “In my view, some of Illich’s [Lenin’s] individual blunders are significantly and correctly noted in it. He also notes that Illich’s materialism is… different from Plekhanov’s which… Illich tries to hide.”
Stalin respected Lenin, but never completely uncritically. The deification only came after Lenin’s death and with a clear political purpose. Now he regarded Lenin’s schisms as the self-indulgence of spoiled emigres. In Russia, where Bolshevism was in decay, the
He was sure the Party needed him and he had no intention of hanging around in Solvychegodsk: the more revolutionaries that Stolypin exiled, the more the system was overwhelmed. Escapes multiplied. Of 32,000 exiles in 1906–9, the authorities could never account for more than about 18,000 at any one time. Soso wrote to Alliluyev in St. Petersburg asking for his address and place of work, obviously planning on a trip to the capital. He started raising funds: some money orders arrived at the post office. The prisoners staged a fake gambling game in which Stalin “won the entire kitty of 70 roubles.”
In late June, after River Cock’s morning inspection, Sukhova helped Stalin don a
Then he caught the train to the Venice of the North.{191}
“Once, in the evening,” recounts Sergei Alliluyev, still married to the libidinous Olga, “I was strolling along Liteinyi Boulevard [in St. Petersburg] when I suddenly saw Comrade Stalin coming in the opposite direction.” The friends embraced.
Stalin had already visited the Alliluyev flat and workplace but had found no one home. Central Petersburg was a small world, however. Alliluyev recruited a concierge to hide Soso. These concierges were often Okhrana informers, so, if Bolshevik sympathizers, their places were ideal hideouts, never searched.
The concierge hid Stalin in the porters’ lodge of the Horse Guards barracks on Potemkin Street right next to the Taurida Palace, once the home of Catherine the Great’s political partner, Prince Potemkin, and now seat of the Duma. At the barracks, “Cabs would drop off court officials… while Stalin went into the city to visit friends,” says Anna Alliluyeva. He “would stroll serenely by the guard at the barrack gates, holding the regimental rollcall under his arm.”
Stalin, who was on a mission connected to “publishing a newspaper,” made the necessary contacts and swiftly departed for the Caucasus.
In early July 1909, he re-emerged in Baku with yet another name—Oganez Totomiants, Armenian merchant. But the Okhrana noticed his return nonetheless: “The Social-Democrat escapee from Siberia has arrived—he’s known as ‘Koba’ or ‘Soso.’” Two Okhrana agents inside the Bolshevik Party, “Fikus” and “Mikheil,” now informed regularly on Stalin, who gloried in the code name of “the Milkman,”[111] because he used a Baku milkbar as his base. He was intermittently watched, but the secret police took months to identify Soso and hunt him down. Why?
Here is one of the enduring mysteries of young Stalin: was the future Soviet dictator an agent of the Tsar’s secret police?{192}
25. “The Milkman”: Was Stalin a Tsarist Agent?
In the Oil Kingdom of Baku, the Milkman tried to reinvigorate the shattered Bolsheviks, joining up with Spandarian, Sergo and Budu Mdivani. He rallied the remnants of the Outfit and “started to plan an attack on a mail ship,” says the Mauserist Kupriashvili, to fund their newspaper
Yet it was a dark time. “The Party is ailing,” wrote Stalin. “There’s nothing good to write. We’ve no workers,” he complained to Tskhakaya, adding that he now believed in reuniting with the Mensheviks. Conciliation was anathema to Lenin, but dire circumstances had now forced Stalin to become a Conciliator. The tough
Soso’s ideas for the future of the Party reached the Central Committee in Paris, which, in January 1910, appointed him to the new Russian Bureau, a recognition of his energetic persistence and organizational talents. He had graduated from Caucasian activist to Russian Bolshevik leader—yet in Baku he was playing his own game against Shaumian.
“Stalin and Spandarian concentrated all the power in their hands,” grumbled Shaumian’s wife, Ekaterina, the oil executive’s daughter. Faced with Stalin’s dominance and Tsarist repression, Shaumian, like many others, took a regular job, even working for a sympathetic oil baron, Shibaev: he tried to withdraw from the underground. “Everyone has ‘seen sense’ and got private jobs,” Soso told Tskhakaya. “Everyone except me, that is—I haven’t ‘seen sense.’ The police are hunting me!” Stalin, that sea-green incorruptible, never “saw sense” and hated those that did, like Shaumian, “who gave up our work three months ago!” He tried to tempt Shaumian back into the fold. Alone after Kato, Stalin despised Shaumian’s happy home,[112] blaming his wife, Ekaterina: “Like a doe, she thinks only of nurturing and was often hostile to me because I involved her Stepan in secret business that smelt of prison.” Ekaterina Shaumian complained that Stalin “intrigued against Shaumian and behaved like a termagant.”
Stalin made quick visits to Tiflis “concerned with financial matters,” the euphemism for expropriations and protection-rackets. Unknown to him, his father died, probably while he was there. Beso, by now a dosshouse drunk, was admitted to Mikhailovsky Hospital. Medical records chart his decline from TB, colitis and chronic pneumonia. He died on 12 August, aged fifty-five. He had made no attempt to find Soso. Without relatives or money, he was buried in a pauper’s grave.{193} For the Bolshevik who signed himself “Son of Beso,” the father had died years before.[113]
Back on the Caspian, Stalin was now joined by his girlfriend from exile, Stefania Petrovskaya, soon described by the Okhrana as “mistress of well-known leader of local RSDWP.” She must have been devoted to him because, on her release from exile, she did not return to either Moscow or Odessa but followed Stalin to Baku.
He now gave her his ultimate compliment: he jettisoned the pen name “K. Kato” and became “K. Stefin,” based on Stefania—and a step nearer “Stalin.” The adoption of the names of lovers as pen names is a peculiarity in such a chauvinist. We have no letters between them. But the “K. Stefin” shows that Stefania was important to him. They moved in together—or, as the secret police noted, the Milkman “cohabited with his concubine.”
There now started a farrago of bewildering scandals that revealed that Stalin’s Party was riddled with Tsarist spies. Stalin reacted by unleashing a hysterical, murderous witch hunt for traitors which only succeeded in destroying the innocent—and drawing suspicion onto himself. It began in September 1909, when Stalin’s own secret-police contacts warned him that his valuable printing-press had been betrayed by an Okhrana doubleagent: it was about to be raided. The press had to be swiftly moved and secretly reassembled in new premises.
Stalin “rushed to me,” recalls his henchman Vatsek, “and asked me to get cash. I got him 600 roubles from Mancho,” the oil baron. But it was not enough. A little later, “Josef Vissarionovich Djugashvili came running with Budu Mdivani.” The tycoon then gave Stalin another 300 roubles.
