southern landscapes, how beautiful were the gardens, how elegant the buildings. He’d often say to me, ‘I know you’d love it in the south. Come and see it for yourself… You’ll be treated as one of the family!’”
Glamourpuss was cheeky and intelligent. Stalin was attracted to strong women, but ultimately preferred submissive housekeepers or teenagers. He undoubtedly enjoyed adolescent and teenage girls, a taste that later was to get him into serious trouble with the police. Even though the rules in Tsarist Russia were much laxer than they are today, particularly far away from the capital, this must reveal, at least, a need to dominate and control on Stalin’s part. But it was not an obsession—some of his girlfriends were older than him.
Pelageya seemed to have understood the Caucasian better than most. She was probably the only person in his life to have teased him about his strangeness; he opened up to her. Even this most thin-skinned and touchy of men enjoyed Glamourpuss’s mischief. He nicknamed her “Polya;” she called him “Oddball Osip.”
“It was a long hot summer,” she reminisces, but when it was over she felt “she would never see him again.” One senses that Stalin had women in every town at this point. He told Glamourpuss that he was engaged to another girl in St. Petersburg, later writing to her: “You know I travelled to St. Petersburg to get married, but finally I ended up in prison…” If Oddball Osip had another woman, Polya the Glamourpuss, at the centre of a
Glamourpuss “always knew he was going to leave. I wanted to see him off but he wouldn’t let me, saying he was being followed.” But “just before he left, he came over that morning” for a tender parting.
“I want to give you this as a present,” he said, handing her a book, “to remember me by. It’ll interest you.”
“It certainly will,” said Glamourpuss.
“Give me something to remember you by,” asked Oddball Osip.
She gave him as a keepsake the cross that hung around her neck, but he would not take it. Instead he accepted the chain and “hung it on his watch.” She asked for a photograph of him, but Stalin, about to plunge again into his secret life, refused: “No one photographs me. Only in prison by force. One day, I’ll send you my photograph, but for now, it would just get you into trouble.”
The book he gave her was
To clever, fiery Polya
From Oddball Osip[120]
They never met again but he kept writing. His letters, reported Pelageya, “were always very witty—he knew how to be funny even in the difficult moments of life.” But when he was exiled in 1913, “I lost contact with him for ever.”
However delightful the Glamourpuss, Oddball Osip could linger no longer. At 3:45 p.m. on 6 September 1911, the Okhrana spies reported that, accompanied by Chizhikov, “the Caucasian arrived at the station with two pieces of luggage—a little trunk and a bundle, apparently of bedclothes, and boarded the train for Petersburg.” The spooks noticed that Stalin twice checked all the carriages, pretending to miss his tails.
“Djugashvili went by train Number Three under observation of agent Ilchykov,” the Vologda Okhrana telegraphed Petersburg. “I ask you to meet him. Captain Popel.” Yet Soso outwitted the reception party at the station: when he arrived at 8:40 p.m., he had shaken off the agents.
“The provincial,” sneers the snobbish Trotsky, “arrived in the territory of the capital.” Stalin first searched for Sergei Alliluyev, but he was not home. So he just strolled up and down Nevsky Prospect until he bumped into Silva Todria, his Georgian printing expert.
Just before Stalin’s arrival, Stolypin, the Russian Premier, was assassinated right in front of the Emperor’s box at the theatre in Kiev. The assassin was a rogue secret-police informer, who again personified the dangers of
“Dangerous times,” Todria warned Soso. “After Stolypin’s murder, the police are everywhere. Concierges check all papers.”
“Let’s find a boarding-house near by,” suggested Soso. The boarding-house “Russia” accepted his Chizhikov passport.
At the Alliluyev home, the doorbell rang. “I was very happy to see our friend Silva Todria,” writes Anna, “but he wasn’t alone. Behind him stood a thin man named Soso in a black coat and fedora.” They asked for Sergei Alliluyev, but he was not home—so they waited. Soso read the newspapers. When Alliluyev got home, they peered out of the window: the police spies had picked up his trail when he collected his luggage. Now they watched the street.
Alliluyev called in his daughters, Anna and Nadya: “Go outside into the courtyard and see if there are two spooks in bowler hats.” The excited girls spotted one agent in the courtyard, another in the street and two more at the corner.
Stalin returned for the night to the Russia guesthouse. At 7: 50 a.m. on 9 September, there was a banging on his door.
“Let me sleep!” shouted Soso, always the nocturnal creature. The police burst in and arrested him, finding maps, photographs, letters, a German phrasebook (suggesting he was hoping to travel to Lenin’s imminent Prague Conference) and the passport of Chizhikov, who had thus lent Stalin not just his girlfriend but his name too.{198}
Locking him up in the Petersburg House of Detention to await sentence, the Okhrana took charge of the Caucasian, keeping him for three weeks, neither informing the local police department nor handing him over to the Gendarmes. Probably they were making the usual attempt to turn him into a double-agent, but on 2 October they eventually informed the Petersburg Gendarmerie, whose Colonel Sobelev thereupon recommended exile “to eastern Siberia… for five years.”
The Interior Minister, A. A. Makarov, reduced the sentence to three years. Stalin was allowed to suggest Vologda as his place of residence and to travel by his own means, instead of in a cluster of convicts. The physical description on his file was so inconsistent it might have belonged to another man. Was this just another case of the Tsarist regime’s lenient muddle? Had palms been greased in 16 Fontanka or at the Interior Ministry? Did Stalin make some duplicitous deal or was the Okhrana hoping he would unconsciously lead them to his comrades? We do not know—but, the moment he was released with his travel-pass back to Vologdan exile, he slipped his Okhrana tails and disappeared for ten days into the streets of Petersburg, technically escaping again.
He met up with his friends Sergo and Spandarian. “In December 1911, Stalin was hiding from the police on Petersburgskaya Storona in the apartment of the Tsimakov family,” says Vera Shveitzer, Spandarian’s chief mistress, “and we went to see him. He lived in a cold room in a wooden glass-roofed house in a courtyard.” They got an exuberant reception: Stalin “ran up to us and took our hands and dragged us into the room, roaring with laughter; we laughed back.”
“You know how to enjoy yourselves,” he said.
“Yes, we’ll dance to celebrate your release!” answered Spandarian.
Sergo and Spandarian were about to travel to Lenin’s Prague Conference, which marked the formal birth of the Bolshevik Party—and the divorce from the Mensheviks. Stalin had been invited but, after his new sentence, he was unable to go. Sergo and Spandarian took his messages to Lenin. “There was a small meeting in my apartment,” recalls Shveitzer, attended by the three Caucasians. Sergo gave Stalin fifty roubles. On the run, “Stalin spent every night in a different place.”
On Christmas Day, he was back in Vologda. He walked the streets in black coat and fedora looking for lodgings. His new landlord was a retired Gendarme who “didn’t like Josef Vissarionovich”—for paternal as well as political reasons. The old Gendarme and his wife had a divorced daughter named Maria Bogoslovskaya with three young children and a sixteen-year-old maid named Sophia Kryukova. Soso lived on a little bed behind the curtain next to the stove in the kitchen, but he evidently entered into another affair with the divorcee Maria. Even though she wrote her memoirs in 1936, when nothing explicit could be recorded about the private foibles of the Leader, Sophia the maid implies that the exile and the divorcee had a relationship. “He and Maria often used to argue and she used to cry. They shouted and were almost at each other’s throats. During their rows, the names of other women could often be heard.”
