Young Stalin

intermediaries made him especially hard to catch; his ruthlessness discouraged witnesses.

Finally, the evidence, in the many surviving secret-police archives, is overwhelming that Stalin was not a Tsarist agent—unless this is overturned by some decisive document[116] lurking undiscovered in provincial Okhrana archives, missed by Stalin himself, his own secret police, his many enemies and the armies of historians who have searched in vain for a smoking gun for almost a century.

Stalin was supremely well qualified for this moral no-man’s-land. On each of his nine or more arrests, the secret police would routinely have tried to turn him into their double-agent. Simultaneously, Stalin, that master of human frailty, would have been assiduously probing, seeking weak or venal policemen to become his agents.

When he did recruit an informer from the secret police, who was playing whom? It is likely that some of the secret policemen were double-crossing Stalin in the spirit of konspiratsia, passing him the names of innocent Bolsheviks as “traitors” in order to sow destructive paranoia within the Party—and protect their real agents. This explains why most of the Baku “traitors” named by Stalin were innocent, while the real Tsarist agents, “Fikus” and “Mikheil,” remained unsuspected.

Yet ultimately Stalin was a devout Marxist “of semi-Islamic fervour,” allowing no friend or family to stand between him and his mission. He regarded himself as an undiscovered but remarkable leader of the working class —a “Knight of the Grail,” in Spandarian’s phrase. As far as we know, he never wavered from this mission even in the worst of times—and in this he was almost unique.

Yet this cesspit of duplicity and espionage helps explain some of the craziness of Soviet history. Here is the origin of the paranoiac Soviet mind-set, the folly of Stalin’s mistrust of the warnings of Hitler’s invasion plans in 1941 and the bloody frenzy of his Terror.

The Okhrana may have failed to prevent the Russian Revolution, but they were so successful in poisoning revolutionary minds that, thirty years after the fall of the Tsars, the Bolsheviks were still killing each other in a witch hunt for nonexistent traitors.^{195}

In the spring of 1910, the Milkman was such a master of evasion that the secret police could no longer cope. “The impossibility of his continued surveillance,” reported the Baku Gendarme commander Colonel Martynov, “makes necessary his detention; all the agents have become known to him and even newly assigned agents failed, while the Milkman managed both to deceive the surveillance and to expose it to his comrades, thus spoiling the entire operation. The Milkman mainly lives with his concubine Stefania Petrovskaya.”

On 23 March 1910, Colonel Martynov arrested the Milkman, now using the alias “Zakhar Melikiants,” and “the noblewoman of Kherson Province, Stefania Petrovskaya.” The couple were interrogated separately in Bailov Prison. The Milkman first denied having a relationship with Stefania. But he then requested permission to marry her. Soon Stalin was calling her “my wife.”

PART THREE

When the luminary full moon
Drifts across the vault of the sky
And its light, shining out,
Begins to play on the azure horizon;

When the nightingale’s whistling song
Starts to twitter softly in the air
When the yearning of the panpipe
Glides over the mountain peak;

When the mountain spring, dammed up,
Once more sweeps the path away and gushes,
And the forest, woken by the breeze,
Begins to toss and rustle;

When the man driven out by his enemy
Again becomes worthy of his oppressed country
And when the sick man, deprived of light,
Again begins to see sun and moon;

Then I too, oppressed, find the mist of sadness
Breaks and lifts and instantly recedes;
And hopes for the good life
Unfold in my unhappy heart!

And, carried away by this hope,
I find my soul rejoicing, my heart beats peacefully;
But is this hope genuine
That has been sent to me at these times?

—SOSELO (Josef Stalin)

26. Two Lost Fiancees and a Pregnant Peasant

Stalin at first pretended he had never used the name Totomiants, and insisted that he could not have committed any crimes during the 1905 Revolution because he had been in London for a year—though he admitted his escape from exile. When Lieutenant Podolsky asked him about Stefania, Soso, now thirty, admitted meeting her in Solvychegodsk, but “I never cohabited with her,” he said. Whether this was clandestine craft, caddish abandonment or chivalrous care for her reputation, he was capable of all three. But she did not deny him. Four days earlier, Stefania, aged twenty-four, had told Podolsky, “Yes, I know Djugashvili. I’m living with him.”

Three months later, the Gendarmes decided to free her, but “in view of [Stalin’s] tenacious participation in the revolutionary parties and his high position, despite all previous administrative punishments, and his two escapes from exile, I propose the extreme penalty of five years’ Siberian exile.” That was the maximum. Unfortunately, the corrupt Captain Zaitsev had just been dismissed and the new ranking officer was less flexible.

With Soso stuck in prison, his comrades procured the phlegm of a prisoner with TB and bribed a doctor to get him transferred to the prison hospital, whence he appealed to the governor of Baku with a romantic request: