Stalin flirted with the maid while fending off the jealous Gendarme’s daughter. “Once after a public holiday,” says Sophia the maid, “I noticed Josef Vissarionovich was watching me from behind the curtain. I had long black hair and wore an attractive dress with a long skirt of flowered Japanese cloth.”
“That dress really suits you,” said Stalin. “In my homeland, Georgia, girls your age wear dresses like that.” Sophia was sensible in 1936 not to reveal how well she knew Stalin, but they obviously spent some time together because she introduced him to her boozy father, who embarrassed her.
“Don’t worry,” Stalin comforted her, “my father was a drunkard too. Mother brought me up.” He clearly enjoyed showing off about his education and foreign languages. When he read
Stalin usually came home late at night and was visited only by a tall dark man, possibly Shaumian or Yakov Sverdlov, a rising young Bolshevik. He met up again with his cuckolded friend Chizhikov. Their
Romancing the landlord’s daughter and her maid, Stalin was killing time while awaiting developments in Prague. There, the Conference of just eighteen delegates, a sign of how much the Party had shrunk, chose the first true Bolshevik Central Committee. Sergo and Spandarian were elected, but the rising star was a stirring, working- class orator named Roman Malinovsky. Lenin was thrilled by this genuine proletarian talent. “He makes an excellent impression,” he exulted; “the soil is rich!” Malinovsky looked the part: “tall, strongly built and dressed almost fashionably” with “thick reddish hair and yellow eyes,” his pockmarks gave him “a fierce expression as if he’d been through fire.” But he had one serious drawback: when arrested some time earlier and convicted of rape and burglary, he was recruited by the Okhrana and code-named “Portnoi” (the Tailor). He was their highest-paid agent.
At the first Central Committee, Lenin and Zinoviev proposed the co-option of Stalin.[122] He had gained a new importance for Lenin as a nationalities expert. Lenin now recognized that Stalin was one of the few Bolsheviks who shared his keenness to formulate policies that would win followers amongst the non-Russian peoples of the Empire, but without promising them independence. The Tailor dutifully reported to his Okhrana paymasters that Stalin, Spandarian and Sergo “were elected to the Russian Bureau to be paid 50 roubles monthly wages.” Unlike the Okhrana, Stalin took some time to find out about Prague and wrote to Krupskaya to learn more. “I got a letter from Ivanovich [Stalin’s Party code name],” Krupskaya told Sergo, but “it’s immediately obvious he’s terribly cut off from everything, head in the clouds… What a pity he couldn’t attend the Conference.” In a coded letter, Stalin begged Shveitzer for news of Prague.
The isolation was about to end. Sergo was already on his way to Vologda.
On 18 February 1912, the Vologda police spies reported that the Caucasian met “an unknown man”—surely Sergo—who announced his promotion to the Central Committee, the highest organ of the Party, a status he would hold for the rest of his life, and handed over his salary, secret addresses and codes. It was probably now that Stalin agreed with Krupskaya, chief code maker as well as Lenin’s wife, to use Gorky’s poem “Oltenian Legend,” as their code. His handwritten copy of the poem survives.
Meanwhile Lenin, back in Paris, panicked at the lack of news: “There’s no word of Ivanovich. What’s happened to him? Where is he now? How is he?” Sergo finally reported to Lenin that he had met Soso: “I made a final agreement with him. He is satisfied.”
It was time to disappear again. Whenever he wanted to vanish from Vologda, Soso bribed the local police with five gold roubles and, according to Vera Shveitzer, escaped five times.
His landlady, Gavrilova, found him packing. “Are you going away?”
He hesitated: “Yes I am.”
She said she would have to inform the police.
“Could you do it tomorrow?” he asked. She agreed.
At 2 a.m. on 29 February, his tails reported him boarding the train for Moscow without permission. But first he received a last letter from his schoolgirl. He bought another sensual postcard, showing a sculpture of a couple wildly kissing and wrote this to Glamourpuss:
Dear PG,
I got your letter today… Don’t write to the old address since none of us are there any more… I owe you a kiss for the kiss, passed on to me by Peter. Let me kiss you now. I’m not simply sending a kiss but am kiiissssing you passionately (it’s not worth kissing any other way),
So, on the last night of February 1912, Stalin surreptitiously caught the train, via Moscow, to the capital. Lenin’s new CC member was on the road.{199}
28. “Don’t Forget That Name and Be Very Wary!”
On one cold gloomy Petersburg winter day, I was studying when there was a knock at the door,” says Kavtaradze, who was attending Petersburg University while giving maths lessons to the Alliluyev sisters. “Suddenly in came Stalin. I knew he’d been exiled. He was as friendly and merry as usual, wearing a light overcoat despite the biting frost but… he wouldn’t take his coat off. ‘I’ll be here for a bit… I’ll just rest a while. I came straight from Moscow and I noticed I was being tailed in Moscow and when I got off the train, I spotted the same spook… he’s lurking right outside your place!”
“This was serious,” notes Kavtaradze. The two Georgians waited until darkness. Kavtaradze decided that there was only one way to escape: Stalin would have to dress up in drag. Kavtaradze procured some dresses and Stalin modelled them—but the look just did not work. “I could get women’s dresses,” said Kavtaradze, “but it was impossible to make Stalin look like a woman.”
The spook, reflected Stalin, “doesn’t want to arrest me—he wants to observe. So I’ll get some sleep.”
“Yes, sleep: maybe he won’t be able to take the frost. Like Napoleon’s army,” joked Kavtaradze.
“He will,” replied Soso, who slept all day. But when they emerged onto the streets, the agent was still there. “Let’s walk a little,” said Soso.
He was hungry, so they ate at Fedorov’s restaurant, but the spy reappeared. “Damn!” swore Stalin. “He pops up from nowhere!”
A cab clattered down the street. Stalin hailed the carriage and leaped on, but the spook hailed another. The galloping phaetons chased each other down Liteiny, but, realizing he was close to a safe house, Stalin jumped out of the moving cab into a snowdrift, which enveloped him completely. The spy’s galloped past, following the now empty carriage.[123]
Stalin dressed up “in the uniform of the Army Medical College and went out.” This was his favoured disguise in Petersburg that year. He stayed about a week. His new assignment was to convert the Bolshevik weekly
Stalin was brought to the flat of Tatiana Slavatinskaya, aged thirty-three, a cultured and good-looking Bolshevik, an orphan who had educated herself and studied at the Conservatoire, becoming a fan of Chaliapin’s singing. One of Lenin’s covert operatives, Elena Stasova, trained her in code making. Married to a Jewish revolutionary named Lurye and mother of two children, Tatiana sheltered various Bolsheviks on the run, one of whom “brought a Caucasian with the codename ‘Vasily’ who lived with us for a while.”
She did not much like “Vasily”—Stalin’s latest alias. “Initially, he seemed too serious, too closed and shy, and his only concern was not to bother us. It was very hard to make him sleep in a bigger, more comfortable room, but on going out to work I always ordered the housemaid[124] to cook him dinner along with the children. He stayed a week and I ran his errands as messenger.” Stalin appointed her his secretary for the Duma elections. Slavatinskaya seems to have been fairly liberated, in the style of these early
