Young Stalin

thrilled: “Darling dear Tatiana, I got your parcel. But I didn’t ask for new clothes, just the old ones, yet you’ve spent your money on new ones. Dear darling, it’s a shame because you’re short of money, but I don’t know how to thank you!” Even with his new clothes, Stalin begged Tatiana for money: “Darling, My need is more urgent with every passing hour. I’m in desperate straits: on top of every thing, I got ill, a cough on the lungs. I need milk, money. I have none. My dear, if you find money, send it immediately. It’s unbearable to wait any longer…”

He must have been sending out letters to all his friends, particularly Malinovsky, the very man who had put him in Siberia:

Hello, my friend

I feel a bit uncomfortable writing but needs must. I’ve never suffered such a terrible situation. All my money’s gone, I’ve got a sinister cough along with sinking temperatures (-37), a general deterioration in my health; and I’ve no supplies, no bread, sugar, meat, kerosene. All my money’s gone on living expenses and clothing and footwear… I need milk, I need firewood but… money, I’m out of money, friend. I don’t know how I’ll get through the winter… I have neither rich family nor friends, and I’ve no one to ask so I’m appealing to you….

Stalin suggested that Malinovsky appeal to the Menshevik Karlo Chkheidze, whom he had tormented in Batumi, “not only as my compatriot but as Chairman of the faction. I don’t want to die out here without even writing you a letter. The matter is urgent because waiting means starving when I am already weak and sick.” He had got “44 roubles from abroad,” from Berne, Switzerland—and nothing else. He tried to raise money another way. Zinoviev claimed they were publishing his nationalities essay as a pamphlet:

Then I hope (have a right to hope) for a fee (money is the breath of life in this ill-fated place, where they have nothing but fish). I hope if that happens, you’ll stand up for me and get me the fee… I embrace you, goddamn me… Do I really have to vegetate here for another four years?

Josef

Malinovsky replied in transparent code: “Dear brother, I’ll sell the horse: I’ve asked 100 roubles for it.”

Yet when the hundred-rouble escape fund arrived, it was sent to Sverdlov. Stalin took umbrage: did they only want Sverdlov and not him? But things looked up a little. Zinoviev replied that they were publishing Stalin’s pamphlet. He got twenty-five roubles from Badaev, the Duma deputy, but he needed more. He must have written to Georgia, to his mother and the Svanidzes, because he received a parcel from Tiflis, and he appealed to the Alliluyevs too.

The books and money demanded from Zinoviev did not arrive. Stalin again became desperate: “You wrote that you’d be sending the ‘debt’ in small bits. Send it as soon as possible however small the bits. I terribly need the money. It would be fine without my damn illness which requires money… I’m waiting.”

Stalin was writing another article entitled “Cultural-National Autonomy,” which he sent, via Sergei Alliluyev, to Troyanovsky for his journal Prosveshchenie. But he became ever more irritated with Zinoviev, writing on 11 January 1914, referring to himself in the third person: “Why are you keeping silent, my friend? I haven’t had a letter from you for three months. Stalin… hoped to get the relevant fee, and thus wouldn’t need to ask anyone for money any more. I think he has a right to think like that.” Stalin never forgot his treatment at the hands of Zinoviev, showy orator and supercilious Jewish emigre, things he despised.

In January 1914, after six months of anxiety and struggle, money started arriving: the policeman Kibirov reported to his superiors that Stalin had received 50 roubles from Petersburg, 10 roubles from Sashiko (Svanidze) Monoselidze in Tiflis, 25 from Badaev, plus another 55 from Petersburg, almost enough for an escapee’s “boots.”

The Imperial Police director, Beletsky, learned (probably from Malinovsky) that an escape was imminent. He telegraphed Turukhansk that Stalin and Sverdlov had each received another 50 roubles “to organize their escape.” A local Okhrana informer confirmed that “Djugashvili and Sverdlov are thinking of escaping… on the very first steamboat down the Yenisei this summer.” Beletsky ordered: “Take all measures to prevent this!” The Okhrana decided “to place Djugashvili and Sverdlov in a northern village where there are no other exiles and to attach two inspectors specially to watch them.”

This was dire news. “Djugashvili and I are being moved 180 versts northwards, 80 versts north of the Arctic Circle,” a downhearted Sverdlov told his sister Sara. “We’re torn away even from the post office. The mail only comes once a month by foot and really only eight or nine times a year… The name of the place is Kureika.”

Stalin was being moved to the very edge of the Arctic Circle.^{217} [143]

34. 1914: Arctic Sex Comedy

If Stalin called Kostino “an ill-fated place,” Kureika was a freezing hellhole, the sort of place where a man could believe himself utterly forgotten and even lose his sanity: its desolate solitude and obligatory self-containment were to remain with Stalin throughout his life. In March 1914, he and Sverdlov were transported northwards on a horse-drawn cart by their armed personal Gendarmes, Laletin and Popov.

They arrived to find that Kureika barely merited the name of hamlet, and it seemed that virtually all its inhabitants were related. Sixty-seven villagers, thirty-eight men and twenty-nine women, were packed into just eight ramshackle izbas, wooden peasant bungalows, more like huts than houses. Most of the citizens of this interbred settlement belonged to three families; these were the Taraseevs, the Saltykovs and the seven Pereprygin orphans.^{218}

“One Monday, I was just boiling water for the washing,” said Anfisa Taraseeva,[144] “when I saw a man—with thick dark beard and hair—come in with a small case and some knotted bedding. ‘Hello, khoziaika [housewife], I’m staying with you,’ he said. He put down his suitcase as if he’d always lived with us. He played with the children and… when the men came back, he said, ‘I’m from Petersburg. My name is Josef Djugashvili.’”

Stalin and Sverdlov moved into the izba of Alexei and Anfisa Taraseev. At first all went well. The exiles got on easily with Taraseev, who agreed to receive their money orders. It was still cold there, but the ice was thawing. Life in Kureika was governed by the weather: when the Yenisei River froze, locals travelled on the icy river in sleighs, pulled by teams of reindeer and dogs. Then there was the “bad roads season” when the roads were so muddy that they were impassable. In May, the steamships started to ply the Yenisei for a few months; then the locals would boat downriver, tugged from the banks by dog-teams—until the freeze came.

Only the reindeer, snow-foxes and Tungus indigenous tribesmen could really function in deep midwinter. Everyone had to wear reindeer fur. The thirteen-year-old Lidia Pereprygina, one of the family of orphans, noticed that Stalin was underdressed with only a light coat. Soon he sported a full outfit—from boots to hat—of reindeer fur.

“In the new place, it’s much harder to settle,” Sverdlov wrote on 22 March. “It was bad enough I didn’t have a room to myself.” The two Bolshevik roommates were friendly enough at first: “We’re two of us sharing. My old friend, the Georgian, Djugashvili, is here with me: we met before in earlier exiles. He’s a good fellow but”—even after barely ten days together, there was a big “but”—“he is too much of an individualist[145] in everyday life.”

Worse, the Taraseevs had a noisy brood of children. “Our room adjoins the hosts,” complained Sverdlov in a letter, “we’ve no separate entrance. The children hang around the whole day, disturbing us.” But Sverdlov was also infuriated by the silent Tungus tribesmen, who visited the exiles. Dressed from head to food in reindeer furs, the Tunguses would become part of Stalin’s life. They were tough, nomadic fishermen and herdsmen with Oriental features who lived in harmony with their reindeer, believing in a mixture of primitive Orthodoxy and ancient spiritualism, interpreted by shamans—indeed “shaman” is a Tungus word.

The Tunguses “sat down, and kept silent for half an hour before standing up and saying, ‘Goodbye, we’ve got to go.’ They come in the evening, the best time for studying,” sighed Sverdlov. But Stalin befriended these men, as