In view of my diagnosed pulmonary tuberculosis… I humbly request Your Excellency to… examine my health, put me under less restraint and expedite the accomplishment of my case.
I ask Your Excellency to allow me to marry Stefania Leandrovna Petrovskaya, resident of Baku.
Stefania, now released, must have visited him in prison and received a proposal because the next day, Soso wrote again, this time calling her his “wife”: “I have learned from my wife who visited the Gendarmes Department that Your Excellency considers it necessary to deport me to Yakutsk. I do not understand such a severe measure and wonder if insufficient knowledge of my case might have led to some misunderstanding…”
These appeals were against revolutionary rules, but Stalin’s wheedling lies did not move Colonel Martynov, who still recommended five years. But the liberal viceroy’s office in Tiflis watered down the punishment. On 13 September, Stalin was sentenced to complete his exile in Solvychegodsk and banned for five years from the Caucasus. Though he would return again to Baku, the Tsar’s officials ironically forced Stalin to escape the periphery and concentrate on the greater stage of Russia itself.
On 31 August, the deputy prosecutor wrote to the Baku governor: “Jailed prisoner J. V. Djugashvili petitions to allow him to marry Baku resident Stefania Petrovskaya. Does Your Excellency have any objections to my allowing Djugashvili’s request?” Whether out of sloppy paperwork, bureaucratic mistake or deliberate malice, it was only on 23 September that Bailov Prison’s governor received this: “Prisoner Djugashvili is permitted to marry Stefania Petrovskaya: the prisoner is to be informed. The ceremony will be in the presence of the Governor in the Prison Church.”
When the warders brought this joyous news to Stalin’s cell, he was gone: on that very day, “23 September 1910, Josef Djugashvili was deported to Vologda Province.” By the end of October, he was back in Solvychegodsk. Not only did he not marry his fiancee and unofficial wife, he never saw her again.{196}
Solvychegodsk[117] had not improved in his absence. There were fewer exiles and the police regime under the ridiculous River Cock was tighter than ever. There was even less to do. We do not know if Stalin ever thought again about his fiancee in Baku, but he was to console himself for the dreariness of exile with another bout of skirt-chasing that led to a forgotten semi-official marriage, and an illegitimate son.
“It was bad living in Solvychegodsk,” recalls a fellow exile named Serafima Khoroshenina, then aged about twenty-two, a well-educated teacher’s daughter from Perm Province. “The police surveillance was bearable but the exiles aren’t alive—they’ve actually died. Everyone lives inside themselves… with nothing to say. There wasn’t even common entertainment so the exiles drowned their sorrows in drink.” She might have added that the other main pastime, after feuding with other exiles and hitting the bottle, was fornication. After the Second World War when the Soviet dictator was discussing a diplomatic sex scandal with the British Ambassador, Stalin laughed knowingly that “such questions arise from boredom.”
He first stayed with the Grigorov family. While he was there, he started an affair with the young teacher Serafima Khoroshenina. They moved in together, staying in a single room in the house of a young widow, Maria Kuzakova.
Stalin was not the only one who found sexual adventure as a consolation. He spent much time with a flamboyant Menshevik in a white suit named Lezhnev, “who had been deported to this backwater from Vologda Town because he had seduced the Town Prosecutor’s wife,” according to their fellow exile Ivan Golubev. “He used to tell us about his Vologda adventures and it was impossible not to fall about with laughter—Stalin almost died laughing!”
However much he was carousing in the Kuzakova household, Soso’s mind was elsewhere. Always green- fingered, he started to plant pine trees. And he read frantically, history books and more novels including those by Tolstoy, whose politics he loathed but whose literature he admired. But he was soon ready to escape, bored to tears and desperate to get news of developments from Lenin.
On 10 December, a letter arrived from the Bolshevik Centre. Stalin replied, sending “warm greetings to Lenin,” whom he backed as “the only correct” one against the “Liquidationist trash” and “Trotsky’s base lack of principle… Lenin’s a shrewd fellow who knows a thing or two.” But “the immediate task, which will stand no delay, is to organize a central [Russian] group which would command all illegal, semi-legal and legal work… Call it whatever you like. It doesn’t matter. Yet it’s as urgent as the bread of life itself. It would begin the Party’s revival.” As for himself, “I have six months left to serve. After that I’m at your service,” but “if the need is urgent, I can weigh my anchor immediately…” He was ready to escape—but needed the funds.
Faced with the SD meltdown inside Russia, Lenin tried one last time to reunite with the Mensheviks. Stalin, half-Conciliator, half-Leninist, approved. When the wooing came to naught, Lenin returned to his natural state of exuberant feuding.
“Dressed in a beaverskin hat,” Soso presided over secret meetings of the seven exiles in a dovecote. He was “often very cheerful, laughing and singing in his magical mountain voice,” recalled Ivan Golubev, “but he despised toadies.” Once, he revealed a truth about himself: “We must remain illegal until the Revolution because going legal would mean turning into a normal person.” Stalin had no wish to be a “normal person.” In normal life, his peculiarities would have been intolerable, but in the revolutionary underground (and later the idiosyncratic, paranoiac and conspiratorial Soviet leadership), they were virtues of a “Knight of the Grail.”
“I’m suffocating here without active work, literally suffocating,” he wrote on 24 January 1911, in another letter to a Moscow comrade, whom he hailed: “A Caucasian Soso is writing to you—remember me from Baku and Tiflis in 1904.” The tedium was tormenting him. He talked constantly about escape. Seething about the factional time-wasting of the feuding emigres, he vented his disdain for both sides, even Lenin: “Everybody heard about the storm in a teacup abroad: the bloc of Lenin-Plekhanov on one hand and the bloc of Trotsky-Martov-Bogdanov on the other. As far as I know, the workers favour the first bloc but generally they disdain those abroad…”
Stalin’s outburst soon reached Lenin in exile: he was displeased. At the time, Lenin was holding a Party school at Longjumeau near Paris, and had invited Sergo to study there. Sergo talked up his ally Stalin. One day, Lenin and Sergo were strolling the boulevards.
“Sergo, do you recognize the phrase ‘storm in a teacup’?”
“Vladimir Illich,” replied Sergo, knowing that Lenin had somehow heard of Stalin’s letter, “Koba’s our friend. A lot of things connect us.”
“I know,” said Lenin. “I also remember him well. But the Revolution’s not yet won. Its interests must come before personal likes and dislikes. You say Koba’s our comrade as if you mean he’s a Bolshevik and won’t let us down. But do you close your eyes to inconsistency? Such nihilistic jokes… reveal Koba’s immaturity as a Marxist.”
Lenin fired a shot across Stalin’s bows, but soon forgave “Soso of the Caucasus.” Soon afterwards, the Menshevik Uratadze told Lenin about Stalin’s expulsion in Baku. “It’s not worth ascribing too much significance to such things,” answered Lenin, laughing it off. That prompted Uratadze to sneak to him about Stalin’s brutal outrages. “That,” said Lenin, “is exactly the sort of person I need.”
The escape funds—seventy roubles—arrived in Solvychegodsk, but they were almost instantly stolen from Stalin. The money was telegraphed to an exiled student in Vologda named Ivanian. It was usual to despatch such funds to a third party because otherwise exiles lost their allowances. But there was always the risk of theft.
In late January to mid-February, Stalin invented a medical appointment in order to get to the provincial capital, planning to drop by Ivanian’s place, collect the money and catch the train to Petersburg. But the student had other ideas. When Stalin reached Vologda, Ivanian moved him to the house of another exile, Count Alexei Dorrer. First, however, according to Stalin, “Ivanian didn’t pass me the money but just showed me the telegram about sending it (with various words obliterated…). He himself couldn’t explain either the ‘loss’ of the money or the missing words in the telegram.”
Soso, according to some accounts, nonetheless took the train to Petersburg, undeterred by the lost money. After walking around all day exhausted, he noticed a pharmacy bearing the Georgian name Lordkipanidze, staggered inside and confessed he was an escapee. The Georgian took pity on his compatriot, hiding and feeding him. Stalin was always amazed how complete strangers helped him.
